13870	----	Proofreading Team. [Illustration] A SUMMARY HISTORY OF THE PALAZZO DANDOLO NOW ROYAL HOTEL DANIELI * * * * * VENICE * * * * * 1896 [Illustration: VIEW OF THE EXTERIOR OF THE TWO PALACES WHICH FORM THE ROYAL HOTEL DANIELI] In 1805 the second floor of the Palazzo Dandolo, situated in the Calle delle Razze, and fronting on to the Riva degli Schiavoni, was bought by a certain Dal Niel, sur-named Danieli, from a member of the families of Michiel and Bernardo, into whose hands it had come, partly by inheritance and partly by marriages. The new proprietor converted it into an hotel, giving it his own name--_Hotel Danieli_. Although the use to which this Palace, which once occupied so large a place in the glories of the history of Venice, has been put during the present century is very different from that for which it was built, it has always been kept most worthily, first by Danieli, then by his daughter Alfonsina, the wife of Vespasiano Muzzarelli, then by his grand-daughter, Giuseppina Roux, and last by S.S. Genovesi and Campi; so that it had the honour, which it still possesses, of being chosen by Emperors, Kings, Princes, and Ambassadors, and by great men of all countries whose artistic travels bring them to this incomparable city, so justly called the «Pearl of the Adriatic». To the honour of the proprietors, who have succeeded one another in this hotel, be it said that although, from time to time, certain works have been executed in this historic Palace, to adapt it to its new use as an hotel, yet not only have the staircases, the saloons and the various apartments been preserved just as they were, but the artistic beauties, and the historical souvenirs, have been carefully respected; the stuccoes and frescoes of the XVIth and XVIIth century have been spared; and the portraits and heraldic shields of the Dandolos, the Bernardos, and the Mocenigos can still be admired today in their original positions. [Illustration: PANORAMAS FROM THE BALCONIES OF THE PALAZZO DANDOLO (NOW HOTEL ROYAL DANIELI)] [Illustration: PANORAMAS FROM THE BALCONIES OF THE PALAZZO DANDOLO (NOW HOTEL ROYAL DANIELI)] It will surely be agreeable to the travellers who come to lodge in this remarkable building to know its origin and its history. We propose to give them a rapid sketch of both; and we believe it will not be uninteresting to them to know that in the halls and chambers they inhabit, some of the most important acts of the great Venetian Republic have been discussed and decided upon; and that in this Palace besides Doges and Senators, Kings and Ambassadors, Alfred de Musset (then a fair and charming young man in delicate health) took up his abode, in 1833, and Balzac, mme George Sand (who here wrote her novel _Leone Leoni_), and Victor Feuillet, who, for his magnificent romance «L'Honnêteté», drew his inspiration from Venetian subjects. But to return to the ancient history of the Palace (now Hotel Royal Danieli) it was built in 1400, by one of the Dandolo families, but whether by that of the great Doge, Enrico Dandolo, is not quite certain. In the _Chronicles of Malipiero_ which date from 1457 to 1500 we find the following passage «Today, the 28th August 1498, have arrived the Ambassadors of Florence, Rucellai and Vespucci; who are lodged in the Palazzo Dandolo, in the Calle delle Razze». We should here remark that the beautiful Gothic door, in the Calle delle Razze was originally the principle entrance, and the one on the Riva degli Schiavoni has only been opened in recent years for the convenience of travellers. We find confirmation of what has been said as to the date of the Palace, and as to the family who built it, in the _Diary of Sanudo_, in which he tells us that «on the 7th April 1498 the Prince of Salerno came to Venice. A most brilliant reception was given him, great _festas_ were held in his honour, and he, and his suite of forty-four persons were lodged in the Dandolo Palace of the _Calle delle Razze_». Sanudo tells us again that «in 1499, this magnificent abode was prepared, by order of the Republic, to receive worthily the French Ambassadors». We could cite many other historical passages proving that this Palace had belonged to the Dandolo family, but one more, and a very interesting one, must suffice. In _Sanudo's Diary_ we read again «On the evening of the 21 February 1531 the orator Cesareo, in the Palace Dandolo, Calle delle Razze, on the quay, gave a very great feast, with fireworks concerts, and illuminated boats, Spanish fashion, on the Canal of St. Mark's, on the occasion of the elevation of the king of Hungary and Boemia, to the dignity of a King of the Romans». This historic Palace passed from the Dandolos to the Gritti family, in 1536, by a deed of sale; and it is not without interest to note that to distinguish it from others of the same name, it is called in the deed, «that Palazzo Dandolo in which generally abides the Ambassadors of France». [Illustration: ATRIUM AND DUCAL STAIRS IN THE PALAZZO DANDOLO] After the Dandolos and the Grittis, the Michiel, the Mocenigo and the Bernardo families became its possessors by marriage, and they retained it till the beginning of the present century, when, as we have said, its second floor was sold, by the noble Dame Helen Michiel, widow of Alvise Bernardo to Dal Niel. Dal Niel left it to his daughter Alfonsina Muzzarelli, who was able, in 1840 to buy the first floor from the noble Filippo Nani, the heir of the Mocenigos; and thus the whole building passed to her daughter Giuseppina Roux, and forms the present Hotel Royal Danieli. The interior of this beautiful Palace we have already described its architecture in Venetian Gothic, and Sansovino's hand is to be traced in many of its details. It well deserves the reputation that it enjoys of being one of the noblest hotels in the world--indeed its artistic beauties, and its historic associations, can only be equalled by its unique and romantic position. Mme Georges Sand, who lodged in the hotel in May 1834, as she watched from her balcony the sun setting over the enchanting scene spread out before her, writes in her Letters of a Traveller--«The sun had set behind the Euganean hills, great purple clouds hung in the sky over Venice. The tower of St Mark's, the domes of Sta. Maria, and the forest of spires and minarets that rise from all parts of Venice, were drawn in black outline against the burnished horizon. The sky passed, by an admirable gradation, from cherry red to enamelled blue; and the water, calm and limpid as a glass, gave back the exact reflection of this immense iridescence. Nearer the town the lagoon was like a vast mirror of bronze. Never had I seen Venice so lovely and so fairy-like». To the beauty of a panorama unequalled in the world, that is spread before the windows of the hotel to its historic associations to the purity and the grandeur of its architecture, to the Venetian sumptuousness of its halls and chambers (including the green saloon of the Doges) to the magnificence of its Atrium and staircase--preserved in its original XVth cent. condition, must now be added the important works of restoration and embellishment just completed by the present proprietors who by the aid of clever architects, artists and decorators, have studied the means of bringing into requisition all the modern appliances, in the way of Steam and Electricity, to produce luxury and comfort, without taking from this interesting Venetian monument its original character, which carries the traveller back to the epoch of the Dandolos, the Grittis, the Bernardos, the Michielis and the Mocenigos. [Illustration: SCALA D'ORO] THE NEW YORK HERALD (European Edition) of April 14th says: We have pleasure in offering to the readers of the NEW YORK HERALD a few details about this splendid hotel, which, because of its ancient history, its modern additions, its internal arrangements, its topografical position at Venice, is one of the most interesting hotels in Italy. We will begin by pointing out the frame is worthy of the picture. Among all the cities of the world, incontestably the most beautiful and the most unique is Venice--the «Queen of the Adriatic». Venice for the traveler, for the artist, for the poet, is far more interesting than Naples, and even than Rome. The shores of Naples, however enchanting, the monuments of Rome, however incomparable, can be pictured by the imagination even without visiting them, but Venice can be comprehended and realized only by seeing it with the eyes and by living its life, and the more this is done, the greater becomes the admiration excited. The enchanting mysteries of its canals and of its picturesque streets and calles, the grandeur of its monuments and of its palaces, which rise as by enchantment from the limpid water, the atmosphere of poetry and art which surrounds it, are not to be described, or if described present but a faint picture of the reality. This, then, being the romantic frame, the picture as spread out before the windows of the Palazzo Dandolo, now Royal Hotel Danieli, which stands in the finest part of the Riva degli Schiavoni, is worthy of it, making an unequalled panorama, which extends from the Piazzetta with the Molo, the Columns, St. Mark's Church and the Doge's Palace away round to the Public Gardens. The front, which is due south, faces the broad Basin of St. Mark, dotted with gondolas and boats of all kinds, and the broad lagoons, with their treasures and their mysteries. The red church of San Giorgio Maggiore and the great dome of the Salute, reflect themselves in the water to the right, backed, in the far distance, by the blue volcanic hills of Padua: while to the left is Byron's island of San Lazzaro, and the long low banks of the Lido that defend Venice from the waves of the Adriatic. [Illustration: SMOKING-ROOM AND AMERICAN BAR] [Illustration: PUBLIC DRAWING ROOM] But the palace itself, famous in the history of Venice, having been built in 1400 by the great family of Dandolo (and which is now the Royal Hotel Danieli), forms an integral part of the picture, for it is one of the most magnificent palaces of Venice; and we shall presently give our readers a historical sketch of it, which we trust will prove interesting. Meanwhile we must mention that to this ancient and sumptuous palace, with its Atrium and Loggia, with its grand ducal staircase, its ample reception halls, its «golden stairs», its rooms decorated with stucco and precious carvings, its Sansovino ceiling beams, its wooden mosaic floors, and its bifurcated windows and ogival balconies, which recall the history of Bianca Cappello, has been added a second palace, equally large and imposing, but one built on purpose for a hotel. This second building is modern--modern in all its details, as we shall see in due course. The exterior of these two palaces, of which the architecture presents a remarkable contrast, can be admired in the following engraving. The building to the right of the spectator is the modern Palace, that on the left the ancient Dandolo Palace--each splendid in its own style--and the one in the distance is the famous Palace of the Doges. To describe the interior of these two handsome edifices is very difficult, but the accompanying engraving, which represents the _Atrium_ of the Palazzo Dandolo, with its magnificent ducal staircase, will give some idea of their beauty. Around this Atrium are a number of fine halls and offices, with the water-gate opening on to a side canal with a marble landing-stage for the gondolas. Near to the water-gate is the _Railway Office_ (a convenience possessed by no other hotel in Venice), where tickets can be taken and luggage be registered without any trouble to the traveler. Next this is the luggage office. Opposite the land entrance is the _Porter's Lodge_, where one or more porters are always to be found at the disposition of travelers. On the left hand is a _Post Office_ with, for the greater security of all correspondence, a Government letter-box; and close by, the _Bureau of the Hotel_, with offices for the _cashier_, for _money changing_, and for _Bank business_. Opposite the grand stairs is a luxurious _Smoking Room_, its walls hung with rich material, and furnished in Oriental comfort and style, with an _American Bar_ leading out of it. Next it, are two spacious _Reading and Writing Rooms_, containing the principal newspapers and illustrated publications of the world. [Illustration: READING ROOM] On the right hand of the main door is a large _Public Drawing Room,_ style of 1700, with handsome stucco-work, and gilt furniture covered with rich stuffs, with the hangings and wall-coverings all _en suite_. This room alone would repay a visit to the hotel. Some idea can be formed of it from the following engravings, though, of course, the full effect of its richness and color is lost. In the two palaces there are a number of other such drawing-rooms, besides a concert hall, ballroom, music room and billiard room, &c. There are also bath rooms and douche baths on every floor. On the ground floor are the _kitchens_, the _wine cellars_, the _ice cellars_, the apparatus for _heating_ the whole buildings by steam, thus spreading a uniform temperature throughout the two Palaces. Here is also the machinery for the _lifts_, the centre for the distribution of the _electric light_ and the boilers and _syphons_ for giving _hot water_ direct into all the apartments. All this deserves being examined from the novelty of the systems employed and from the exquisite order and tidiness which everywhere reigns. We will not describe the _bedrooms_ and _sitting rooms_, except to say that they have all been recently done up and richly furnished with the utmost artistic taste and are all lit with electricity. Many of the apartments have been preserved in the original style, especially the _Saloon of the Doges_, No. 9, which with the adjoining rooms, Nos. 10, 11 and 12, all of which overlook the Riva degli Schiavoni and the magnificent panorama already described. The _wines_ and _the table_ are a great speciality of the Hotel Royal Danieli, all being of the very highest order, and its _dining rooms_ and _restaurant_ arranged with small and separate tables, have an unusual character all their own. The _dining rooms_ are decorated in an entirely novel style and one that is truly poetic. The great windows of ground glass are transformed into eight lovely winter gardens of rare plants, which are reproduced in the big mirrors which line the walls, and the electric light, which hangs in delicate Venetian glass lily pendants round the ceiling, produces a most charming and unusual effect. The two great _restaurant_ halls are furnished in pure style of the Empire, for all the stuffs and decorations are copied from the best works that treat of that period, and are among the richest and choicest of that famous epoch. Thus, by a series of ingenious combinations these two palaces, so different from each other in many ways, blend themselves in one harmonious and artistic whole, and in them are united the greatest luxury with the utmost comfort. [Illustration: SALON OF THE DOGES] To give an idea of the whole we will imagine that a traveler is staying in the apartment of the Doge--which recalls all the pomp and grandeur of old Venice--to go to the breakfast-room and restaurant we will pass through the great Sansovino ball-room, then through the Rose saloon, by the side of which is the music-room (style Empire), and the gallery of tapestry and majolica, and thus reaches the Empire decorated restaurants which we have already described. In the evening at dinner-time the traveler would, instead, descend by successive steps, through a Renaissance vestibule, to the beautiful winter garden dining-halls, which, especially when lit up by the soft radiance of the electric lilies, makes a perfect fairy scene. Round the ball-room on the first floor runs an uncovered _loggia_, from whence one can look down into the court of honor, or Venetian Atrium, in which of an evening characteristic concerts are frequently given. From the first floor the great «scala d'oro» conducts one to the second floor, where are the spacious concert-room and various handsome suites of ancient and modern apartments. To the honor of the proprietors who have succeeded one another, be it said, that although from time to time certain works have been executed in this historic palace to adapt it to its new use as a hotel, yet not only have the staircases, the saloons and the various apartments been preserved just as they were, but the artistic beauties and the historic souvenirs have been carefully respected, the stuccoes and frescoes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century have been spared, and the portraits and heraldic shields of the Dandolos, the Bernardos and the Mocenigos can still be admired to-day in their original positions. Although the use to which this Palace, which once occupied so large a place in the glories of the history of Venice, has been put during the present century is very different from that which it was built, it has always been kept most worthily, first by Danieli, then by his daughter Alfonsina, the wife of Vespasiano Muzzarelli; then by his granddaughter, Giuseppina Roux, and, last, by S.S. Genovesi and Campi, so that it had the honor, which it still possesses, of being chosen by Emperors, Kings, Princes and Ambassadors, and by great men of all countries whose artistic travels bring them to this incomparable city, so justly called the «Pearl of the Adriatic». The delightful impression made on those who inhabit the Hotel Royal Danieli has been expressed over and over again to their friends, and they have often said to the proprietors that they have rather felt as if visiting in the house of a friend, or in a princely mansion, than in an hotel, even though in the greatest hotel in the world. [Illustration: SANSOVINO HALL] In this lovely palace the traveler feels _at home_. All is artistic and poetical. No long passages, painted in imitation marble, cold and draughty, and dreary! No long endless tables and big red velvet divans, as in a cafe! No long rows of rooms in which the furniture is so much alike that you cannot tell if you are in your own room or someone else's! Here is nothing conventional, nothing that is to be seen everywhere--whether among the mountains of Switzerland or on the boulevards of Paris, and which makes the traveler's life monotonous wherever he may be. Here, on the contrary, he finds himself in an atmosphere of _home_, of comfort, and of suitability to his position, however exalted that may be, and one in keeping with his romantic surroundings. This has been the aim of those who have directed the decorations of the Hotel Royal Danieli, and they are happy in the thought that they have succeeded to the satisfaction of the visitors. _To sum up_. The Hotel Royal Danieli, now entirely restored and embellished from ground to roof and decorated by the best Venetian artists, arranged with all the most modern appliances for comfort, can offer the following conveniences for travelers:-- POST OFFICE. RAILWAY OFFICE. MONEY EXCHANGE AND BANKING OFFICE. TWO LIFTS. ELECTRIC LIGHT IN EVERY ROOM. STEAM HEATERS. BATHS AND DOUCHE BATHS ON EVERY FLOOR. STEAM BOILERS FOR HOT WATER. PRIVATE LAUNDRY. COURT OF HONOR, OR ATRIUM. READING-ROOMS. WRITING-ROOM. SMOKING-ROOM AND AMERICAN BAR. PUBLIC DRAWING-ROOM. LADIES' DRAWING-ROOM. CONCERT HALL. BALL ROOM. MUSIC ROOM. BILLIARD ROOM. RESTAURANT, AT EVERY HOUR. TABLE D'HOTE, AT SEPARATE TABLES, &c., &c. [Illustration: STEPS AND RENAISSANCE VESTIBULE] [Illustration: HALL OF THE WINTER GARDENS] Table d'hote at separate tables, &c., &c., and all conducted according to the most modern systems of comfort and elegance. Although the present proprietors, Messrs. Genovesi, Campi, Bozzi & Co., have spent a veritable fortune this year in restorations and embellishments, so as to render the Hotel Royal Danieli the most comfortable, the most artistic and the most aristocratic hotel in Europe, yet they have in nothing augmented the prices, but have retained those moderate rates which have helped to render the Hotel Danieli so famous. * * * * * Nota bene--The ancient Palazzo Dandolo, now Hotel Royal Danieli, and all its internal arrangements, deserves a special visit from travelers who are sojourning in Venice, and the proprietors will be most happy to show the palace to all interested in the sights of Venice, whether they are resident in the hotel or not. [Illustration] 
12561	----	This ebook was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset. VISIT TO THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT, AND ITALY [Illustration 1. Frontispiece:--JERUSALEM. ill1.jpg] By Madame Ida Pfeiffer. Translated from the German by H. W. Dulcken. [Illustration 2. Title-page:--NAZARETH. ill2.jpg] PREFACE BY THE VIENNA PUBLISHER For two centuries the princes and nations of the West were accustomed to wander towards the land of the morning. In vain was the noblest blood poured forth in streams in the effort to wrest the country of our heavenly Teacher from the grasp of the infidel; and though the Christian Europe of the present day forbears to renew a struggle which, considering the strength that has been gradually increasing for the last six hundred years, might prove an easy one, we cannot wonder that millions of the votaries of Christianity should cherish an earnest longing to wander in the paths the Redeemer has trod, and to view with their own eyes the traces of the Saviour's progress from the cradle to the grave. In the generality of cases, however, the hardships, dangers, and difficulties of such a journey were sufficient to overthrow the bravest resolution; and thus the wishes of the majority remained unfulfilled. Few _men_ were found to possess the degree of strength and endurance requisite for the carrying out of such an undertaking; but that a delicate lady of the higher classes, a native of Vienna, should have the heroism to do what thousands of men failed to achieve, seemed almost incredible. In her earliest youth she earnestly desired to perform this journey; descriptions of the Holy Land were perused by her with peculiar interest, and a book of Eastern travel had more charms for her than the most glowing accounts of Paris or London. It was not, however, until our Authoress had reached a riper age, and had finished the education of her sons, that she succeeded in carrying into effect the ardent aspiration of her youth. On the 2d of March, 1842, she commenced her journey alone, without companions, but fully prepared to bear every ill, to bid defiance to every danger, and to combat every difficulty. That this undertaking should have succeeded may almost be looked upon as a wonder. Far from desiring publicity, she merely kept a diary, in order to retain the recollections of her tour during her later life, and to impart to her nearest relatives the story of her fortunes. Every evening, though often greatly exhausted with heat, thirst, and the hardships of travel, she never failed to make notes in pencil of the occurrences of the day, frequently using a sand-mound or the back of a camel as a table, while the other members of the caravan lay stretched around her, completely tired out. It was in the house of my friend Halm that I first heard of this remarkable woman, at a time when she had not yet completed her journey; and every subsequent account of Madame Pfeiffer increased my desire to make her acquaintance. In manners and appearance I found her to resemble many other women who have distinguished themselves by fortitude, firmness of soul, and magnanimity; and who are in private life the most simple and unaffected, the most modest, and consequently also the most agreeable of beings. My request to read our Authoress's journal was granted with some timidity; and I am ready to assert that seldom has a book so irresistibly attracted me, or so completely fixed my attention from beginning to end, as this. The simple and unadorned relation of facts, the candour, combined with strong sound sense, which appear throughout, might put to shame the bombastic striving after originality of many a modern author. The scheme and execution of the work are complete and agreeable; strict truth shines forth from every page, and no one can doubt but that so pure and noble a mind must see things in a right point of view. This circumstance is sufficient in itself to raise the book above many descriptions of travel to the Holy Land, whose authors, trusting to the fact that their assertions could not easily be disproved, have indulged their fancy, seeking to impart interest to their works by the relation of imaginary dangers, and by exaggeration of every kind, for the sake of gaining praise and admiration. Many such men might blush with shame on reading this journal of a simple, truth-loving woman. After much trouble I succeeded in persuading the Authoress to allow her journal to appear in print. My efforts were called forth by the desire to furnish the reading public, and particularly the female portion, with a very interesting and attractive, and at the same time a strictly authentic picture of the Holy Land, and of Madame Pfeiffer's entire journey. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Departure from Vienna--Scene on board the steamer-- Hainburg--Presburg--The "Coronation-mount"--Pesth--Ofen--The steamer Galata--Mohacs--The fortress Peterwardein--Discomfort and bad management on board the steamer--Semlin--Belgrade--Pancsova-- Austrian soldiers--The rock Babakay--Drenkova--Falls of Danube--Alt- Orsova--The "Iron Gate"--Cattle-breeding--Callafat--Vexatious delay CHAPTER II. Giurgewo--Interior of the town--Braila--Sanitary precautions--Galatz--Scarcity of good water--Ridiculous fear of the plague--The steamer Ferdinand--Entrance into the Black Sea--Stormy weather and sea-sickness--Arrival at Constantinople--Picturesque appearance of the city--Mosques--The dancing Dervishes--The Sultan and his barge--Pera--The great and little Campo--Wild dogs--Dirty state of the streets--Preparations in case of fire CHAPTER III. Scutari--Kaiks--The howling Dervishes--The Achmaidon, or place of arrows--The tower in Galata--The bazaar at Constantinople--Mosques--Slave-market--The old Serail--The Hippodrome--Coffee-houses--Story-tellers--Excursion to Ejub--Houses, theatres, and carriages CHAPTER IV. Walks and drives of the townspeople--The "Sweet Waters"--Chalcedonia--Baluklid--The great and little Campo--Feasts in Constantinople--Anniversary of Mahomet's death--Easter holydays of the Greeks--Gladiators and wrestlers--Excursion to Brussa--Olive- trees--Mosques at Brussa--Stone bridge--Wild dogs--Baths and mineral springs--Return to Constantinople CHAPTER V. Contradictory reports--Departure from Constantinople on board the Archduke John--Scene on the steamer--Galipoli--The Dardanelles--Tschenekalesi and Kilidil Bahar--The field of Troy-- Tenedos--Smyrna--Halizar--The date-palm--Burnaba--The Acropolis-- Female beauty--Rhodes--Strong fortifications--Deserted appearance of the town--Cyprus CHAPTER VI. Arrival at Beyrout--Fellahs--Backsheesh-- Uncomfortable quarters--Saida--Tyre--St. Jean d'Acre--Caesarea-- Excursion among the ruins--Jaffa--An Eastern family--The Indian fig- tree--An Oriental dinner--Costume of the women of Jaffa--Oppressive heat--Gnats--Ramla--Syrian convents--Bedouins and Arabs--Kariet el Areb, or Emmaus--The scheikh--Arrival at Jerusalem CHAPTER VII. Residence at Jerusalem--Catholic church--The "Nuova Casa"--Via dolorosa--Pilate's house--The Mosque Omar--Herod's house-- Church of the Holy Sepulchre--Disturbances at the Greek Easter feasts--Knights of the Holy Sepulchre--Mount of Olives--Adventure among the ruins--Mount of Offence--Valley of Jehosaphat--Siloam-- Mount Sion--Jeremiah's Grotto--Graves CHAPTER VIII. Bethlehem--Rachel's grave--Convent at Bethlehem-- Beggars--Grotto of the Nativity--Solomon's cisterns--St. John's-- Franciscan church at Jerusalem--Mourning women--Eastern weddings-- Mish-mish--Excursion to the Jordan and the Dead Sea--Wilderness near Jerusalem--Convent of St. Saba CHAPTER IX. Ride through the wilderness to the Dead Sea--The Dead Sea--The river Jordan--Horde of Bedouins--Arab horses--The Sultan's well--Bivouac in the open air--Return to Jerusalem-- Bethany--Departure from Jerusalem--Jacob's grave--Nablus or Sichem-- Sebasta--Costume of Samaritan woman--Plain of Esdralon--Sagun CHAPTER X. Arrival at Nazareth--Franciscan convent--Tabarith-- Mount Tabor--Lake of Gennesareth--Baths--Mount Carmel--Grotto of the prophet Elijah--Acre--The pacha's harem--Oriental women--Their listlessness and ignorance--Sur or Tyre CHAPTER XI. River Mishmir--Saida--Arnauts--Desert-path-- Residence of Lady Hester Stanhope--Beyrout--The consul's-- Uncomfortable quarters--Sickness--The Bazaar--Vexatious delays-- Departure from Beyrout--Beautiful views--Syrian costumes--Damascus-- Aspect of the city--House of the consul CHAPTER XII. The bazaar at Damascus--The khan--Grotto of St. Paul--Fanaticism of the inhabitants--Departure from Damascus--The desert--Military escort--Heliopolis or Balbeck--Stupendous ruins-- Continuation of our voyage through the desert--The plague--The Lebanon range--Cedar-trees--Druses and Maronites--Importunate beggars--Thievish propensities of the Arabs CHAPTER XIII. The Lebanon--Druses and Maronites--Illness of Herr Sattler--Djebel or Byblus--Rocky passes--Dog's-river--Return to Beyrout--Sickness--Departure for Alexandria--Roguery of the captain-- Disagreeables on board--Limasol--Alarm of pirates--Cowardice of the crew--Arrival at Alexandria CHAPTER XIV. Alexandria--Keeping quarantine--Want of arrangement in the quarantine-house--Bad water--Fumigating of the rooms-- Release--Aspect of the city--Departure by boat for Atfe--Mehemet Ali--Arrival at Atfe--Excellence of the Nile water--Good-nature of the Arab women--The Delta of the Nile--The Libyan desert--The pyramids--Arrival at Cairo CHAPTER XV. Cairo--Quarrel with the captain--Rapacity of the beggars--The custom-house--The consulate--Aspect of Cairo--Narrow and crowded streets--Costumes--The mad-house--Disgusting exhibition-- Joseph's well--Palace of Mehemet Ali--Dates--Mosques at Cairo-- Excursion to the pyramids of Gizeh--Gizeh--Eggs hatched by artificial heat--Ascent of the pyramids--The sphynx--Return to Cairo CHAPTER XVI. Christian churches at Cairo--The Esbekie-square-- Theatre--Howling dervishes--Mashdalansher, the birthday of Mahomet-- Procession and religious ceremony--Shubra--Excursion through the desert to Suez--Hardships of the journey--Scenes in the desert--The camel--Caravans--Mirage--The Red Sea--Suez--Bedouin Camp--Quarrel with the camel-driver--Departure for Alexandria CHAPTER XVII. Return to Alexandria--Egyptian burials--Catacombs of Alexandria--Viceroy's palace--Departure from Alexandria--The steamer Eurotas--Candia--Syra--Paros and Antiparos--The Morea--Fire on board--Malta--Quarantine--St. Augustine's church--Clergymen-- Beggars--Costumes--Soldiers--Civita Vecchia CHAPTER XVIII. The steamer Hercules--Syracuse--Neapolis--Ruins-- Catanea--Convent of St. Nicholas--Messina--The Duke of Calabria-- Palermo--The royal palace--Church of St. Theresa--St. Ignazio-- Catacombs of the Augustine convent--Skeletons--Olivuzza--Royal villa "Favorite"--St. Rosalia--Brutality of the Italian mob--Luxuriant vegetation--Arrival at Naples CHAPTER XIX. Sojourn at Naples--Sickness--Laziness of the people-- Royal palace--Rotunda--Strada Chiaga and Toledo--St. Carlo Theatre-- Largo del Castello--Medina Square--Marionettes--St. Jesu Nuovo--St. Jesu Maggiore--St. Maria di Piedigrotta--Public gardens--Academy "degli Studii"--Cathedral of St. Januarius--St. Jeronimi--St. Paula Maggiore--St. Chiara--Baths of Nero--Solfatara--Grotto "del Cane"-- Resina--Ascent of Vesuvius--Caserta CHAPTER XX. Caserta--Costume of the peasants--Rome--Piazza del Popolo--Dogana--St. Peter's--Palaces--Borghese, Barberini, Colonna, etc.--Churches--Ancient Rome--The Colliseum--Departure for Florence- Bad weather--Picturesque scenery--Siena--Florence--Cathedral and palaces--Departure from Florence--Bologna--Ferrara--Conclusion LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. JERUSALEM 2. NAZARETH 3. CHURCHYARD AT SCUTARI 4. THE DEAD SEA 5. MOUNT CARMEL 6. LEBANON 7. BALBECK 8. ISTHMUS OF SUEZ CHAPTER I. Departure from Vienna--Scene on board the steamer--Hainburg-- Presburg--The "Coronation-mount"--Pesth--Ofen--The steamer Galata-- Mohacs--The fortress Peterwardein--Discomfort and bad management on board the steamer--Semlin--Belgrade--Pancsova--Austrian soldiers-- The rock Babakay--Drenkova--Falls of the Danube--Alt-Orsova--The "Iron Gate"--Cattle-breeding--Callafat--Vexatious delay. I had for years cherished the wish to undertake a journey to the Holy Land; years are, indeed, required to familiarise one with the idea of so hazardous an enterprise. When, therefore, my domestic arrangements at length admitted of my absence for at least a year, my chief employment was to prepare myself for this journey. I read many works bearing on the subject, and was moreover fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a gentleman who had travelled in the Holy Land some years before. I was thus enabled to gain much oral information and advice respecting the means of prosecuting my dangerous pilgrimage. My friends and relations attempted in vain to turn me from my purpose by painting, in the most glowing colours, all the dangers and difficulties which await the traveller in those regions. "Men," they said, "were obliged gravely to consider if they had physical strength to endure the fatigues of such a journey, and strength of mind bravely to face the dangers of the plague, the climate, the attacks of insects, bad diet, etc. And to think of a woman's venturing alone, without protection of any kind, into the wide world, across sea and mountain and plain,--it was quite preposterous." This was the opinion of my friends. I had nothing to advance in opposition to all this but my firm unchanging determination. My trust in Providence gave me calmness and strength to set my house in every respect in order. I made my will, and arranged all my worldly affairs in such a manner that, in the case of my death (an event which I considered more probable than my safe return), my family should find every thing perfectly arranged. And thus, on the 22d of March 1842, I commenced my journey from Vienna. At one o'clock in the afternoon I drove to the Kaisermuhlen (Emperor's Mills), from which place the steamboats start for Pesth. I was joyfully surprised by the presence of several of my relations and friends, who wished to say farewell once more. The parting was certainly most bitter, for the thought involuntarily obtruded itself, "Should we ever meet again in this world?" Our mournful meditations were in some degree disturbed by a loud dispute on board the vessel. At the request of a gentleman present, one of the passengers was compelled, instead of flying, as he had intended, with bag and baggage to Hungary, to return to Vienna in company of the police. It appeared he owed the gentleman 1300 florins, and had wished to abscond, but was luckily overtaken before the departure of the boat. This affair was hardly concluded when the bell rang, the wheels began to revolve, and too soon, alas, my dear ones were out of sight! I had but few fellow-passengers. The weather was indeed fine and mild; but the season was not far enough advanced to lure travellers into the wide world, excepting men of business, and those who had cosmopolitan ideas, like myself. Most of those on board were going only to Presburg, or at farthest to Pesth. The captain having mentioned that a woman was on board who intended travelling to Constantinople, I was immediately surrounded by curious gazers. A gentleman who was bound to the same port stepped forward, and offered his services in case I should ever stand in need of them; he afterwards frequently took me under his protection. The fine mild weather changed to cold and wind as we got fairly out into the great Danube. I wrapped myself in my cloak, and remained on deck, in order to see the scenery between Vienna and Presburg, which, no doubt, appears lovely enough when nature is clad in the garment of spring; but now I only saw leafless trees and fallow ground--a dreary picture of winter. Hainburg with its old castle on a rock, Theben with its remarkable fortress, and farther on the large free city of Presburg, have all a striking appearance. In three hours' time we reached Presburg, and landed in the neighbourhood of the Coronation-hill, an artificial mound, on which the king must stand in his royal robes, and brandish his sword towards the four quarters of the heavens, as a token that he is ready to defend his kingdom against all enemies, from whatever direction they may approach. Not far from this hill is situate the handsome inn called the "Two Green Trees," where the charges are as high, if not higher, than in Vienna. Until we have passed Pesth, passengers going down the river are not allowed to remain on board through the night. March 23d. This morning we continued our journey at six o'clock. Immediately below Presburg the Danube divides into two arms, forming the fertile island of Schutt, which is about forty-six miles long and twenty- eight in breadth. Till we reach Gran the scenery is monotonous enough, but here it improves. Beautiful hills and several mountains surround the place, imparting a charm of variety to the landscape. In the evening, at about seven o'clock, we arrived at Pesth. Unfortunately it was already quite dark. The magnificent houses, or rather palaces, skirting the left bank of the Danube, and the celebrated ancient fortress and town of Ofen on the right, form a splendid spectacle, and invite the traveller to a longer sojourn. As I had passed some days at Pesth several years before, I now only stayed there for one night. As the traveller must change steamers here, it behoves him to keep a careful eye upon the luggage he has not delivered up at the office in Vienna. I put up at the "Hunting-horn," a fine hotel, but ridiculously expensive. A little back room cost me 45 kreutzers (about one shilling and eightpence) for one night. The whole day I had felt exceedingly unwell. A violent headache, accompanied by nausea and fever, made me fear the approach of a fit of illness which would interrupt my journey. These symptoms were probably a consequence of the painful excitement of parting with my friends, added to the change of air. With some difficulty I gained my modest chamber, and immediately went to bed. My good constitution was luckily proof against the attacks of all enemies, and waking the next morning, on March 24th, in tolerable health, I betook myself on board our new steamboat the Galata, of sixty-horse power: this boat did not, however, appear to me so tidy and neat as the Marianna, in which we had proceeded from Vienna to Pesth. Our journey was a rapid one; at ten o'clock in the morning we were already at Feldvar, a place which seems at a distance to be of some magnitude, but which melts away like a soap- bubble on a nearer approach. By two o'clock we had reached Paks; here, as at all other places of note, we stopped for a quarter of an hour. A boat rows off from the shore, bringing and fetching back passengers with such marvellous speed, that you have scarcely finished the sentence you are saying to your neighbour before he has vanished. There is no time even to say farewell. At about eight o'clock in the evening we reached the market-town of Mohacs, celebrated as the scene of two battles. The fortress here is used as a prison for criminals. We could distinguish nothing either of the fortress or the town. It was already night when we arrived, and at two o'clock in the morning of March 25th we weighed anchor. I was assured, however, that I had lost nothing by this haste. Some hours afterwards, our ship suddenly struck with so severe a shock, that all hastened on deck to see what was the matter. Our steersman, who had most probably been more asleep than awake, had given the ship an unskilful turn, in consequence of which, one of the paddles was entangled with some trunks of trees projecting above the surface of the water. The sailors hurried into the boats, the engine was backed, and after much difficulty we were once more afloat. Stopping for a few moments at Dalina and Berkara, we passed the beautiful ruin of Count Palffy's castle at about two o'clock. The castle of Illok, situate on a hill, and belonging to Prince Odescalchi, presents a still more picturesque appearance. At about four o'clock we landed near the little free town of Neusatz, opposite the celebrated fortress of Peterwardein, the outworks of which extend over a tongue of land stretching far out into the Danube. Of the little free town of Neusatz we could not see much, hidden as it is by hills which at this point confine the bed of the river. The Danube is here crossed by a bridge of boats, and this place also forms the military boundary of Austria. The surrounding landscape appeared sufficiently picturesque; the little town of Karlowitz, lying at a short distance from the shore, among hills covered with vineyards, has a peculiarly good effect. Farther on, however, as far as Semlin, the scenery is rather monotonous. Here the Danube already spreads itself out to a vast breadth, resembling rather a lake than a river. At nine o'clock at night we reached the city of Semlin, in the vicinity of which we halted. Semlin is a fortified place, situated at the junction of the Save with the Danube; it contains 13,000 inhabitants, and is the last Austrian town on the right bank of the Danube. On approaching Semlin, a few small cannons were fired off on board our boat. Unfortunately the steward did not receive notice of this event early enough to allow of his opening the windows, consequently one was shattered: this was a serious misfortune for us, as the temperature had sunk to zero, and all the landscape around was covered with snow. Before leaving Vienna, the cabin stove had been banished from its place, as the sun had sent forth its mild beams for a few days, and a continuance of the warm weather was rashly relied on. On the whole, I would not advise any traveller to take a second-class berth on board a steamer belonging to the Viennese company. A greater want of order than we find in these vessels could scarcely be met with. The traveller whose funds will not permit of his paying first-class fare will do better to content himself with a third-class, i.e. a deck-passage, particularly if he purposes journeying no farther than Mohacs. If the weather is fine, it is more agreeable to remain on deck, watching the panorama of the Danube as it glides past. Should the day be unfavourable, the traveller can go, without ceremony, into the second-class cabin, for no one makes a distinction between the second and third-class places. During the daytime, at any rate, it is quite as agreeable to remain on deck as to venture below. Travelling down the river from Pesth, the women are compelled to pass the night in the same cabin with the men; an arrangement as uncomfortable as it is indecorous. I afterwards had some experience of steamers belonging to the Austrian Lloyds, on whose vessels I always found a proper separation of the two sexes, and a due regard for the comfort of second-class passengers. The cold was so severe, that we would gladly have closed every window, but for the close atmosphere engendered by the number of poor people, mostly Jews, who form the larger portion of passengers on board a Hungarian steamer. When the weather is unfavourable, these men are accustomed to hasten from their third-class places to those of the second class, where their presence renders it immediately desirable to open every outlet for purposes of ventilation. What the traveller has to endure on board these vessels would scarcely be believed. Uncushioned benches serve for seats by day and for beds by night. A separation of the two sexes is nowhere attempted, not even on board the Ferdinand, in which you enter the Black Sea, and are exposed to the merciless attacks of sea-sickness. Considering the high rate of passage-money demanded on this journey, I really think the traveller might expect better accommodation. The first-class to Constantinople costs 120 florins, {23} the second 85 florins, exclusive of provisions, and without reckoning the hotel expenses at Presburg. March 26th. Last night was not a period of rest, but of noise for us travellers. Not one of us could close his eyes. Semlin is a place of considerable importance as a commercial town: above 180 cwt. of goods were unloaded here from our vessel; and in exchange we took on board coals, wood, and wares of various descriptions. The damaged wheel, too, had to be repaired; and every thing was done with so much crashing and noise, that we almost imagined the whole steamer was coming to pieces. Added to this, the cold wind drove in continually through the broken pane, and made the place a real purgatory to us. At length, at six o'clock in the morning, we got afloat once more. One advantage, however, resulted from this fortuitous stoppage: we had a very good view of Belgrade, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, situate opposite to Semlin. It is the first Turkish fortified city in Servia. The aspect of Belgrade is exceedingly beautiful. The fortifications extend upwards on a rock from the Danube in the form of steps. The city itself, with its graceful minarets, lies half a mile farther inland. Here I saw the first mosques and minarets. The mosques, as far as I could observe from the steamer, are built in a circular form, not very high, and surmounted by a cupola flanked by one or two minarets, a kind of high round pillar. The loftiest among these buildings is the palace of Prince Milosch. From this point our voyage becomes very interesting, presenting a rich and varied succession of delightful landscape-views. The river is hemmed in on either side by mountains, until it spreads itself forth free and unrestrained, in the neighbourhood of Pancsova, to a breadth of 800 fathoms. Pancsova, on the left bank of the Danube, in the territory of Banata, is a military station. As the stoppages are only for a few moments, little opportunity is afforded of seeing the interior of the towns, or of visiting most of the places at which we touch. At such times all is hurry and confusion; suddenly the bell rings, the planks are withdrawn, and the unlucky stranger who has loitered on board for a few moments is obliged to proceed with us to the next station. At Neusatz this happened to a servant, in consequence of his carrying his master's luggage into the cabin instead of merely throwing it down on the deck. The poor man was conveyed on to Semlin, and had to travel on foot for a day and a half to regain his home. A very pleasant journey of two hours from Pancsova brought us to the Turkish fortress Semendria, the situation of which is truly beautiful. The numerous angles of its walls and towers, built in the Moorish style, impart to this place a peculiar charm. As a rule, the Turkish fortresses are remarkable for picturesque effect. But the villages, particularly those on the Servian shore, had the same poverty-stricken look I had frequently noticed in Galicia. Wretched clay huts, thatched with straw, lay scattered around; and far and wide not a tree or a shrub appeared to rejoice the eye of the traveller or of the sojourner in these parts, under the shade of which the poor peasant might recruit his weary frame, while it would conceal from the eye of the traveller, in some degree, the poverty and nakedness of habitations on which no feeling mind can gaze without emotions of pity. The left bank of the river belongs to Hungary, and is called the "Banat;" it presents an appearance somewhat less desolate. Much, however, remains to be desired; and the poverty that reigns around is here more to be wondered at, from the fact that this strip of land is so rich in the productions of nature as to have obtained the name of the "Garner of Hungary." On the Austrian side of the Danube sentries are posted at every two or three hundred paces--an arrangement which has been imitated by the governments on the left bank, and is carried out to the point where the river empties itself into the Black Sea. It would, however, be erroneous to suppose that these soldiers mount guard in their uniforms. They take up their positions, for a week at a time, in their wretched tattered garments; frequently they are barefoot, and their huts look like stables. I entered some of these huts to view the internal arrangements. They could scarcely have been more simple. In one corner I found a hearth; in another, an apology for a stove, clumsily fashioned out of clay. An unsightly hole in the wall, stopped with paper instead of glass, forms the window; the furniture is comprised in a single wooden bench. Whatever the inhabitant requires in the way of provisions he must bring with him; for this he is allowed by the government to cultivate the land. Throughout the Russian territory the soldiers at least wear uniform. Our journey becomes more and more charming. Frequently the mighty river rushes foaming and roaring past the rocks, which seem scarcely to allow it a passage; at other times it glides serenely onwards. At every turn we behold new beauties, and scarcely know on which side to turn our eager eyes. Meanwhile the ship sails swiftly on, gliding majestically through wildly romantic scenery. At one o'clock in the afternoon we reached Pasiest, where there is nothing to be seen but a large store of coals for the steamers and a few huts. Of the town itself nothing can be distinguished. A couple of miles below Pasiest we enjoy an imposing spectacle. It is the solitary rock Babakay, rising from the midst of the waters. Together with the beautiful ruin Golumbacz, on the Servian shore, it forms a magnificent view. March 27th. How unfortunate it is that all advantages are so seldom found combined! We are now travelling amid glorious scenery, which we hoped should recompense us for the manifold discomforts we have hitherto endured; but the weather is unpropitious. The driving snow sends us all into the cabin. The Danube is so fiercely agitated by the stormy wind, that it rises into waves like a sea. We are suffering lamentably from cold; unable to warm ourselves, we stand gazing ruefully at the place where the stove stood--once upon a time. At four o'clock we reached Drenkova without accident, but completely benumbed: we hurried into the inn built by the steamboat company, where we found capital fare, a warm room, and tolerably comfortable beds. This was the first place we had reached since leaving Pesth at which we could thoroughly warm and refresh ourselves. At Drenkova itself there is nothing to be seen but the inn just mentioned and a barrack for soldiers. We were here shewn the vessel which was wrecked, with passengers on board, in 1839, in a journey up the Danube. Eight persons who happened to be in the cabin lost their lives, and those only who were on deck were saved. March 28th. Early in the morning we embarked on board the Tunte, a vessel furnished with a cabin. The bed of the Danube is here more and more hemmed in by mountains and rocks, so that in some places it is not above eighty fathoms broad, and glides with redoubled swiftness towards its goal, the Pontus Euxinus or Black Sea. On account of the falls which it is necessary to pass, between Drenkova and Fetislav, the steamer must be changed for a small sailing vessel. The voyage down the stream could indeed be accomplished without danger, but the return would be attended with many difficulties. The steamers, therefore, remain behind at Drenkova, and passengers are conveyed down the river in barks, and _upwards_ (since the accident of 1839) in good commodious carriages. To-day the cold was quite as severe as it had been yesterday so that but for the politeness of a fellow-passenger, who lent me his bunda (great Hungarian fur), I should have been compelled to remain in the little cabin, and should thus have missed the most interesting points of the Danube. As it was, however, I wrapped myself from head to foot in the fur cloak, took my seat on a bench outside the cabin, and had full leisure to store my memory with a succession of lovely scenery, presenting almost the appearance of a series of lake views, which continued equally picturesque until we had almost reached Alt-Orsova. A couple of miles below Drenkova, near Islas, the sailors suddenly cried, "The first fall!" I looked up in a fever of expectation. The water was rising in small waves, the stream ran somewhat faster, and a slight rushing sound was to be heard. If I had not been told that the Danube forms a waterfall here, I should certainly never have suspected it to be the case. Between Lenz and Krems I did not find either the rocks or the power of the stream much more formidable. We had, however, a high tide, a circumstance which diminishes both the danger of the journey and the sublimity of the view. The numerous rocky points, peering threateningly forth at low tide, among which the steersman must pick his way with great care, were all hidden from our sight. We glided safely over them, and in about twenty minutes had left the first fall behind us. The two succeeding falls are less considerable. On the Austro-Wallachian side a road extends over a distance of fourteen to sixteen miles, frequently strengthened with masonry, and at some points hewn out of the solid rock. In the midst of this road, on a high wall of rock, we see the celebrated "Veteran Cave," one of the most impregnable points on the banks of the Danube. It is surrounded by redoubts, and is admirably calculated to command the passage of the river. This cave is said to be sufficiently spacious to contain 500 men. So far back as the time of the Romans it was already used as a point of defence for the Danube. Some five miles below it we notice the "Trajan's Tablet," hewn out of a protruding rock. On the Turco-Servian side the masses of rock jut out so far into the stream, that no room is left for a footway. Here the famous Trajan's Road once existed. No traces of this work remain, save that the traveller notices, for fifteen or twenty miles, holes cut here and there in the rock. In these holes strong trunks of trees were fastened; these supported the planks of which the road is said to have been formed. At eleven in the forenoon we reached Alt-Orsova, the last Austrian town on the military frontier of Banata or Wallachia. We were obliged to remain here for half a day. The town has rather a pretty effect, being composed mostly of new houses. The house belonging to the steamboat company is particularly remarkable. It is not, however, devoted to the accommodation of travellers, as at Drenkova. Here, as at Presburg and Pesth, each passenger is required to pay for his night's expenses,--an arrangement which I could not help finding somewhat strange, inasmuch as every passenger is made to pay twice; namely, for his place on the steamer and for his room in the inn. It was Sunday when we arrived, and I saw many people proceeding to church. The peasants are dressed tolerably neatly and well. Both men and women wear long garments of blue cloth. The women have on their heads large handkerchiefs of white linen, which hang down their backs, and on their feet stout boots; the men wear round felt hats, and sandals made of the bark of trees. March 29th. After having completely refreshed ourselves at the good inn called the "Golden Stag," we this morning embarked on a new craft, the Saturnus, which is only covered in overhead, and is open on all sides. So soon as a traveller has stepped upon this vessel he is looked upon as unclean, and may not go on shore without keeping quarantine: an officer accompanied us as far as Galatz. Immediately below Alt-Orsova we entirely quit the Austrian territory. We are now brought nearer every moment to the most dangerous part of the river, the "Iron Gate," called by the Turks Demir kaju. Half an hour before we reached the spot, the rushing sound of the water announced the perilous proximity. Numerous reefs of rocks here traverse the stream, and the current runs eddying among them. We passed this dangerous place in about fifteen minutes. Here, at the Iron Gate, the high tide befriended us, as it did at the former falls. I found these falls, and indeed almost every thing we passed, far below the anticipations I had formed from reading descriptions, frequently of great poetic beauty. I wish to represent every thing as I found it, as it appeared before my eyes; without adornment indeed, but truly. After passing the Iron Gate we come to a village, in the neighbourhood of which some fragments of the Trajan's Bridge can be discerned at low water. The country now becomes flatter, particularly on the left bank, where extend the immense plains of Wallachia, and the eye finds no object on which it can rest. On the right hand rise terrace-like rows of hills and mountains, and the background is bounded by the sharply-defined lines of the Balkan range, rendered celebrated by the passage of the Russians in 1829. The villages, scattered thinly along the banks, become more and more miserable; they rather resemble stables for cattle than human dwellings. The beasts remain in the open fields, though the climate does not appear to be much milder than with us in Austria; for to-day, nearly at the beginning of April, the thermometer stood one degree below zero, and yesterday we had only five degrees of warmth (reckoning by Reaumur). {30} The expeditious and easy manner in which cattle are here declared to be free from the plague also struck me as remarkable. When the creatures are brought from an infected place to one pronounced healthy, the ship is brought to some forty or fifty paces from the shore, and each animal is thrown into the water and driven towards the bank, where people are waiting to receive it. After this simple operation the beasts are considered free from infectious matter. Cattle-rearing seems to be here carried on to a considerable extent. Everywhere I noticed large herds of horned beasts and many buffaloes. Numerous flocks of goats and sheep also appear. On the Saturnus we travelled at the most for two hours, after which we embarked, opposite the fortress of Fetislav, on board the steamer Zriny. At five o'clock in the evening we passed the fortress of Widdin, opposite which we stopped, in the neighbourhood of the town of Callafat. It was intended merely to land goods here, and then to proceed immediately on our voyage; but the agent was nowhere to be found, and so we poor travellers were made the victims of this carelessness, and compelled to remain here at anchor all night. March 30th. As the agent had not yet made his appearance, the captain had no choice but to leave the steward behind to watch over the goods. At half-past six in the morning the engines were at length set in motion, and after a very agreeable passage of six hours we reached Nicopolis. All the Turkish fortresses on the Danube are situated on the right bank, mostly amid beautiful scenery. The larger towns and villages are surrounded by gardens and trees, which give them a very pleasant appearance. The interior of these towns, however, is said not to be quite so inviting as one would suppose from a distant view, for it is asserted that dirty narrow streets, dilapidated houses, etc., offend the stranger's sight at every step. We did not land at any of these fortresses or towns; for us the right bank of the river was a forbidden paradise; so we only saw what was beautiful, and escaped being disenchanted. Rather late in the evening we cast anchor opposite a village of no note. CHAPTER II. Giurgewo--Interior of the town--Braila--Sanitary precautions-- Galatz--Scarcity of good water--Ridiculous fear of the plague--The steamer Ferdinand--Entrance into the Black Sea--Stormy weather and sea-sickness--Arrival at Constantinople--Picturesque appearance of the city--Mosques--The dancing Dervishes--The Sultan and his barge-- Pera--The great and little Campo--Wild dogs--Dirty state of the streets--Preparations in case of fire. March 31st. We started early this morning, and at eight o'clock had already reached Giurgewo. This town is situate on the left bank of the Danube, opposite the fortress of Rustschuk. It contains 16,000 inhabitants, and is one of the chief trading towns of Wallachia. We were detained here until four o'clock in the afternoon; for we had to unload above 600 cwt. of goods and eight carriages, and to take coals on board in exchange. Thus we had time to view the interior of this Wallachian city. With what disappointed surprise did my fellow-passengers view the ugliness of this town, which from a distance promises so much! On me it made but little impression, for I had seen towns precisely similar in Galicia. The streets and squares are full of pits and holes; the houses are built without the slightest regard to taste or symmetry, one perhaps projecting halfway across the street, while its neighbour falls quite into the background. In some places wooden booths were erected along each side of the street for the sale of the commonest necessaries of life and articles of food, and these places were dignified by the name of "bazaars." Curiosity led us into a wine-shop and into a coffee-house. In both of these we found only wooden tables and benches; there were hardly any guests; and the few persons present belonged to the humblest classes. Glasses and cups are handed to the company without undergoing the ceremony of rinsing. We purchased some eggs and butter, and went into the house of one of the townspeople to prepare ourselves a dish after the German fashion. I had thus an opportunity of noticing the internal arrangements of a house of this description. The floor of the room was not boarded, and the window was only half glazed, the remaining portion being filled up with paper or thin bladder. For the rest, every thing was neat and simple enough. Even a good comfortable divan was not wanting. At four o'clock we quitted the town. The Danube is now only broad for short distances at a time. It is, as it were, sown with islands, and its waters are therefore more frequently parted into several streams than united into one. In the villages we already notice Greek and Turkish costumes, but the women and girls do not yet wear veils. Unfortunately it was so late when we reached the fortress of Silistria that I could see nothing of it. A little lower down we cast anchor for the night. At an early hour on April 1st we sailed past Hirsova, and at two o'clock stopped at Braila, a fortress occupied by the Russians since the year 1828. Here passengers were not allowed to land, as they were considered infected with the plague; but our officer stepped forward, and vouched for the fact that we had neither landed nor taken up any one on the right bank of the river; thereupon the strangers were allowed to set foot on terra firma. By four o'clock we were opposite Galatz, one of the most considerable commercial towns, with 8000 inhabitants,--the only harbour the Russians possess on the Danube. Here we saw the first merchant-ships and barques of all kinds coming from the Black Sea. Some sea-gulls also, heralds of the neighbouring ocean, soared above our heads. The scene here is one of traffic and bustle; Galatz being the place of rendezvous for merchants and travellers from two quarters of the globe, Europe and Asia. It is the point of junction of three great empires--Austria, Russia, and Turkey. After the officer had repeated his assurances as at Braila, we were permitted to leave the ship. I had a letter of recommendation to the Austrian consul, who accidentally came on board; after reading my letter he received me very kindly, and most obligingly procured quarters for me. The town promises much, but proves to be just such a miserable dirty place as Giurgewo. The houses are generally built of wood or clay, thatched with straw; those alone belonging to the consul and the rich merchants are of stone. The finest buildings are the Christian church and the Moldavian hotel. Though Galatz lies on the Danube, water for drinking is a dear article among the inhabitants. Wells are to be found neither in the houses nor in the squares. The townspeople are compelled to bring all the water they require from the Danube, which is a great hardship for the poor people, and a considerable expense for the rich; in winter a small tub of water costs from 10 to 12 kreutzers (about 4d. or 5d.) in the more distant quarters of the town. At every corner you meet water-carriers, and little wagons loaded with tubs of water. Attempts have frequently been made to procure this indispensable element by digging; water has, indeed, in some instances gushed forth, but it always had a brackish taste. In Galatz we made a halt of twenty-four hours: the delay was not of the most agreeable kind, as neither the town itself nor its environs offer any thing worthy of remark. Still I always think of these days with pleasure. Herr Consul Huber is a polite and obliging man; himself a traveller, he gave me many a hint and many a piece of advice for my journey. The air of quiet comfort which reigned throughout his house was also not to be despised by one who had just endured many days of privation; at Herr Huber's I found relief both for body and mind. April 2d. The scenery round the town is so far from being inviting, that I did not feel the least inclination to explore it. I therefore remained in the town, and went up hill and down dale through the ill-paved streets. Coffee-houses appear in great abundance; but if it were not for the people sitting in front of them drinking coffee and smoking tobacco, no one would do these dirty rooms the honour of taking them for places of entertainment. In the market and the squares we notice a great preponderance of the male sex over the female. The former are seen bustling about every where, and, like the Italians, perform some duties which usually fall to the lot of the softer sex. We notice a mixture of the most different nations, and among them a particularly large number of Jews. The bazaar is overloaded with southern fruits of all kinds. Oranges and lemons are seen here in great numbers, like the commonest of our fruits. The prices are of course very trifling. The cauliflowers brought from Asia Minor are particularly fine. I noticed many as large as a man's head. In the evening I was required to repair to the harbour and re- embark. It is almost impossible to form an idea of the confusion which reigns here. A wooden railing forms the barrier between the healthy people and those who come from or intend travelling to a country infected with the plague. Whoever passes this line of demarcation is not allowed to return. Soldiers, officers, government officials, and superintendents, the latter of whom are armed with sticks and pairs of tongs, stand at the entrance to drive those forcibly back who will not be content with fair words. Provisions and other articles are either thrown over the barrier or left in front of it. In the latter case, however, they may not be touched until the bearers have departed. A gentleman on the "plague" side wished to give a letter to one on the other; it was immediately snatched from his hand and handed across by means of a pair of tongs. And all this time such a noise and hubbub is going on, that you can scarcely hear the sound of your own voice. "Pray hand me over my luggage!" cries one. "Keep farther away! don't come near me, and mind you don't touch me!" anxiously exclaims another. And then the superintendents keep shouting--"Stand back, stand back!" etc. I was highly entertained by this spectacle; the scene was entirely new to me. But on my return, when I shall be one of the prisoners, I fear I may find it rather tedious. For this time I was not at all hindered in the prosecution of my journey. On the whole, these timid precautions seemed to me exceedingly uncalled for, particularly at a time when neither the plague nor any kind of contagious disease prevailed in Turkey. One of my fellow- passengers had been banished to our ship on the previous day because he had had the misfortune to brush against an official on going to see after his luggage. At seven o'clock the tattoo is beaten, the grating is shut, and the farce ends. We now repaired to the fourth and last steamer, the Ferdinand. From first to last we changed vessels six times during a journey from Vienna to Constantinople; we travelled by four steamers and twice in boats; a circumstance which cannot be reckoned among the pleasures of a trip down the Danube. Though not a large boat, the Ferdinand is comfortable and well built. Even the second-class cabin is neatly arranged, and a pretty stove diffused a warmth which was peculiarly grateful to us all, as the thermometer showed only six to eight degrees above zero. Unfortunately even here the men and women are not separated in the second-class cabin; but care is at least taken that third-class passengers do not intrude. Twelve berths are arranged round the walls, and in front of these are placed broad benches well cushioned. April 3d. At five o'clock in the morning we steamed out of the harbour of Galatz. Shortly afterwards basins and towels were handed to us; a custom totally unknown upon former vessels. For provisions, which are tolerably good, we are charged 1 fl. 40 kr. per diem. Towards ten o'clock we reached Tehussa, a Bessarabian village of most miserable appearance, where we stopped for a quarter of an hour; after which we proceeded without further delay towards the Black Sea. I had long rejoiced in the expectation of reaching the Black Sea, and imagined that near its mouth the Danube itself would appear like a sea. But as it generally happens in life, "great expectations, small realisations," so it was the case here also. At Galatz the Danube is very broad; but some distance from its mouth it divides itself into so many branches that not one of them can be termed majestic. Towards three o'clock in the afternoon we at length entered the Black Sea. Here the arms of the Danube rush forward from every quarter, driving the sea tumultuously back, so that we can only distinguish in the far distance a stripe of green. For above an hour we glide on over the yellow, clayey, strongly agitated fresh water, until at length the boundary is passed, and we are careering over the salt waves of the sea. Unfortunately for us, equinoctial gales and heavy weather still so powerfully maintained their sway, that the deck was completely flooded with the salt brine. We could hardly stand upon our feet, and could not manage to reach the cabin-door, where the bell was ringing for dinner, without the assistance of some sailors. Several of the passengers, myself among the number, did little honour to the cook's skill. We had scarcely begun to eat our soup, before we were so powerfully attacked by sea-sickness, that we were obliged to quit the table precipitately. I laid myself down at once, feeling unable to move about, or even to drag myself on deck to admire the magnificent spectacle of nature. The waves frequently ran so high as to overtop the flue of our stove, and from time to time whole streams of water poured into the cabin. April 4th. Since yesterday the storm has increased considerably, so that we are obliged to hold fast by our cribs to avoid being thrown out. This misfortune really happened to one of the passengers, who was too ill to hold sufficiently tight. As I already felt somewhat better, I attempted to rise, but was thrown in the same instant with such force against a table which stood opposite, that for a long time I felt no inclination to try again. There was not the slightest chance of obtaining any sleep all night. The dreadful howling of the wind among the masts and cordage, the fearful straining of the ship, which seemed as though its timbers were starting, the continual pitching and rolling, the rattling of the heavy cables above us, the cries, orders, and shouting of the captain and his sailors, all combined to form a din which did not allow us to enjoy a moment's rest. In the morning, ill as I felt myself, I managed to gain the deck with the help of the steward, and sat down near the steersman to enjoy the aspect of that grandest of nature's phenomena--a storm at sea. Holding tightly on, I bade defiance to the waves, which broke over the ship and wetted me all over, as though to cool my feverish heat. I could now form a clear and vivid conception of a storm at sea. I saw the waves rush foaming on, and the ship now diving into an abyss, and anon rising with the speed of lightning to the peak of the highest wave. It was a thrilling, fearful sight;--absorbed in its contemplation, I soon ceased to think of my sickness. Late at night the violence of the storm abated in some degree; we could now run in and cast anchor in the harbour of Varna, which under ordinary circumstances we should have reached twelve hours sooner. April 5th. This morning I had leisure to admire this fine fortress-town, which was besieged and taken by the Russians in 1828. We remained here several hours. The upper portion of the ship was here loaded with fowl of all descriptions, to such a degree that the space left for us travellers was exceedingly circumscribed. This article of consumption seems to be in great demand in Constantinople both among Turks and Franks; for our captain assured me that his vessel was laden with this kind of ware every time he quitted Varna, and that he carried it to Stamboul. April 6th. The shades of night prevented my seeing one of the finest sights in the world, in anticipation of which I had rejoiced ever since my departure from Vienna--the passage through the Bosphorus. A few days afterwards, however, I made the excursion in a kaik (a very small and light boat), and enjoyed to my heart's content views and scenes which it is totally beyond my descriptive power to portray. At three o'clock in the morning, when we entered the harbour of Constantinople, every one, with the exception of the sailors, lay wrapped in sleep. I stood watching on deck, and saw the sun rise in its full glory over the imperial city, so justly and universally admired. We had cast anchor in the neighbourhood of Topona; the city of cities lay spread out before my eyes, built on several hills, each bearing a separate town, and all blending into a grand and harmonious whole. The town of Constantinople, properly speaking, is separated from Galata and Pera by the so-called "Golden Horn;" the means of communication is by a long and broad wooden bridge. Scutari and Bulgurlu rise in the form of terraces on the Asiatic shore. Scutari is surrounded, within and without, by a splendid wood of magnificent cypresses. In the foreground, on the top of the mountain, lie the spacious and handsome barracks, which can contain 10,000 men. The beautiful mosques, with their graceful minarets--the palaces and harems, kiosks and great barracks--the gardens, shrubberies, and cypress-woods--the gaily painted houses, among which single cypresses often rear their slender heads,--these, together with the immense forest of masts, combine to form an indescribably striking spectacle. When the bustle of life began, on the shore and on the sea, my eyes scarcely sufficed to take in all I saw. The "Golden Horn" became gradually covered as far as the eye could reach with a countless multitude of kaiks. The restless turmoil of life on shore, the passing to and fro of men of all nations and colours, from the pale inhabitant of Europe to the blackest Ethiopian, the combination of varied and characteristic costumes, this, and much more which I cannot describe, held me spell-bound to the deck. The hours flew past like minutes, and even the time of debarcation came much too early for me, though I had stood on deck and gazed from three o'clock until eight. I found myself richly repaid for all the toils of my journey, and rejoiced in the sight of these wonderful Eastern pictures; I could only wish I were a poet, that I might fitly portray the magnificent gorgeousness of the sight. To land at Topona, and to be immediately surrounded by hired servants and hamaks (porters), is the fate of every traveller. The stranger is no longer master either of his will or his luggage. One man praises this inn, the other that. {40} The porters hustle and beat each other for your effects, so that the custom-house officers frequently come forward with their sticks to restore order. The boxes are then searched,--a ceremony which can, however, be considerably accelerated by a fee of from ten to twenty kreutzers. It is very advisable to fix on an hotel before leaving the boat. There are always passengers on board who are resident at Constantinople, or at least know the town well, and who are polite enough to give advice on the subject to strangers. By this means you rid yourself at once of the greedy servants, and need only tell a porter the name of your inn. The inns for the Franks (a term used in the East to designate all Europeans) are in Pera. I stayed at the hotel of Madame Balbiani, a widow lady, in whose house the guests are made comfortable in every respect. Clean rooms, with a beautiful view towards the sea, healthy, well-selected, and palatable fare, and good prompt attendance, are advantages which every one values; and all these are found at Madame Balbiani's, besides constant readiness to oblige on the part of the hostess and her family. The good lady took quite a warm interest in me; and I can say, without hesitation, that had not my good fortune led me under her roof, I should have been badly off. I had several letters of introduction; but not being fortunate enough to travel in great pomp or with a great name, my countrymen did not consider it worth while to trouble themselves about me. I am ashamed, for their sakes, to be obliged to make this confession; but as I have resolved to narrate circumstantially not only all I saw, but all that happened to me on this journey, I must note down this circumstance with the rest. I felt the more deeply the kindness of these strangers, who, without recommendation or the tie of country, took so hearty an interest in the well-being of a lonely woman. I am truly rejoiced when an opportunity occurs of expressing my sincere gratitude for the agreeable hours I spent among them. The distance from Vienna to Constantinople is about 1000 sea miles. RESIDENCE AT CONSTANTINOPLE.--THE DANCING DERVISHES. I arrived at Constantinople on a Tuesday, and immediately inquired what was worth seeing. I was advised to go and see the dancing dervishes, as this was the day on which they held their religious exercises in Pera. As I reached the mosque an hour too soon, I betook myself in the meantime to the adjoining garden, which is set apart as the place of meeting of the Turkish women. Here several hundred ladies reclined on the grass in varied groups, surrounded by their children and their nurses, the latter of whom are all negresses. Many of these Turkish women were smoking pipes of tobacco with an appearance of extreme enjoyment, and drinking small cups of coffee without milk. Two or three friends often made use of the same pipe, which was passed round from mouth to mouth. These ladies seemed also to be partial to dainties: most of them were well provided with raisins, figs, sugared nuts, cakes, etc., and ate as much as the little ones. They seemed to treat their slaves very kindly; the black servants sat among their mistresses, and munched away bravely: the slaves are well dressed, and could scarcely be distinguished from their owners, were it not for their sable hue. During my whole journey I remarked with pleasure that the lot of a slave in the house of a Mussulman is not nearly so hard as we believe. The Turkish women are no great admirers of animated conversations; still there was more talking in their societies than in the assemblies of the men, who sit silent and half asleep in the coffee-houses, languidly listening to the narrations of a story- teller. The ladies' garden resembles a churchyard. Funeral monuments peer forth at intervals between the cypresses, beneath which the visitors sit talking and joking cheerfully. Every now and then one would suddenly start up, spread a carpet beside her companions, and kneel down to perform her devotions. As no one of the male sex was allowed to be present, all were unveiled. I noticed many pretty faces among them, but not a single instance of rare or striking beauty. Fancy large brilliant eyes, pale cheeks, broad faces, and an occasional tendency to corpulence, and you have the ladies' portrait. Small-pox must still be rather prevalent in these parts, for I saw marks of it on many faces. The Turkish ladies' costume is not very tasteful. When they go abroad, they are completely swathed in an upper garment, generally made of dark merino. In the harem, or in any place where men are not admitted, they doff this garment, and also the white cloth in which they wrap their heads and faces. Their costume consists, properly speaking, of very wide trousers drawn together below the ancle, a petticoat with large wide sleeves, and a broad sash round the waist. Over this sash some wear a caftan, others only a spencer, generally of silk. On their feet they wear delicate boots, and over these slippers of yellow morocco; on their heads a small fez-cap, from beneath which their hair falls on their shoulders in a number of thin plaits. Those Turks, male and female, who are descended from Mahomet, have either a green caftan or a green turban. This colour is here held so sacred, that scarcely any one may wear it. I would even advise the Franks to avoid green in their dresses, as they may expose themselves to annoyance by using it. After I had had more than an hour's leisure to notice all these circumstances, a noise suddenly arose in the courtyard, which produced a stir among the women. I considered from these appearances that it was time to go to the temple, and hastened to join my party. A great crowd was waiting in the courtyard, for the Sultan was expected. I was glad to have the good fortune to behold him on the very day of my arrival. As a stranger, I was allowed, without opposition, a place in the front ranks,--a trait of good breeding on the part of the Turks which many a Frank would do well to imitate. In a Turk, moreover, this politeness is doubly praiseworthy, from the fact that he looks upon my poor sex with great disrespect; indeed, according to his creed, we have not even a soul. I had only stood a few moments, when the Sultan appeared on horseback, surrounded by his train. He alone rode into the courtyard; the others all dismounted at the gate, and entered on foot. The horse on which the Sultan rode was of rare beauty, and, as they told me, of the true Arabian breed; the saddle-cloth was richly embroidered with gold, and the stirrups, of the same precious metal, were in the form of shoes, covered with the finest chased work. The Sultan is a slender slim-looking youth of nineteen years of age, and looks pale, languid, and blase. His features are agreeable, and his eyes fine. If he had not abandoned himself at so early an age to all the pleasures of the senses, he would, no doubt, have grown up a stalwart man. He wore a long cape of dark-blue cloth; and a high fez-cap, with a heron's plume and a diamond clasp, decked his head. The greeting of the people, and the Sultan's mode of acknowledging it, is exactly as at Vienna, except that here the people at intervals raise a low cry of welcome. As soon as the Sultan had entered the temple, all flocked in. The men and the Franks (the latter without distinction of sex) sit or stand in the body of the temple. The Turkish women sit in galleries, behind such close wire gratings that they are completely hidden. The temple, or more properly the hall, is of inconsiderable size, and the spectators are only separated from the priests by a low railing. At two o'clock the dervishes appeared, clad in long petticoats with innumerable folds, which reached to their heels. Their heads were covered with high pointed hats of white felt. They spread out carpets and skins of beasts, and began their ceremonies with a great bowing and kissing of the ground. At length the music struck up; but I do not remember ever to have heard a performance so utterly horrible. The instruments were a child's drum, a shepherd's pipe, and a miserable fiddle. Several voices set up a squeaking and whining accompaniment, with an utter disregard of time and tune. Twelve dervishes now began their dance,--if indeed a turning round in a circle, while their full dresses spread round them like a large wheel, can be called by such a name. They display much address in avoiding each other, and never come in contact, though their stage is very small. I did not notice any "convulsions," of which I had read in many descriptions. The ceremony ended at three o'clock. The Sultan once more mounted his horse, and departed with his train and the eunuchs. In the course of the day I saw him again, as he was returning from visiting the medical faculty. It is not difficult to get a sight of the Sultan; he generally appears in public on Tuesdays, and always on Fridays, the holiday of the Turks. The train of the young autocrat presents a more imposing appearance when he goes by water to visit a mosque, which he generally does on every Friday. Only two hours before he starts it is announced in which mosque he intends to appear. At twelve, at noon, the procession moves forward. For this purpose two beautiful barges are in readiness, painted white, and covered with gilded carvings. Each barge is surmounted by a splendid canopy of dark-red velvet, richly bordered with gold fringe and tassels. The floor is spread with beautiful carpets. The rowers are strong handsome youths, clad in short trousers and jacket of white silk, with fez-caps on their heads. On each side of the ship there are fourteen of these rowers, under whose vigorous exertions the barge flies forward over wave and billow like a dolphin. The beautifully regular movements of the sailors have a fine effect. The oars all dip into the water with one stroke, the rowers rise as one man, and fall back into their places in the same perfect time. A number of elegant barges and kaiks follow the procession. The flags of the Turkish fleet and merchant-ships are hoisted, and twenty-one cannons thunder forth a salutation to the Sultan. He does not stay long in the mosque, and usually proceeds to visit a barrack or some other public building. When the monarch goes by water to the mosque, he generally returns also in his barge; if he goes by land, he returns in the same manner. The most popular walks in Pera are "the great and little Campo," which may be termed "burying-places in cypress-groves." It is a peculiar custom of the Turks, which we hardly find among any other nation, that all their feasts, walks, business-transactions, and even their dwellings, are in the midst of graves. Every where, in Constantinople, Pera, Galata, etc., one can scarcely walk a few paces without passing several graves surrounded by cypresses. We wander continually between the living and the dead; but within four and twenty hours I was quite reconciled to the circumstance. During the night-time I could pass the graves with as little dread as if I were walking among the houses of the living. Seen from a distance, these numerous cypress-woods give to the town a peculiar fairy-like appearance; I can think of nothing with which I could compare it. Every where the tall trees appear, but the tombs are mostly hidden from view. It took a longer time before I could accustom myself to the multitude of ownerless dogs, which the stranger encounters at all corners, in every square and every street. They are of a peculiarly hideous breed, closely resembling the jackal. During the daytime they are not obnoxious, being generally contented enough if they are allowed to sleep undisturbed in the sun, and to devour their prey in peace. But at night they are not so quiet. They bark and howl incessantly at each other, as well as at the passers-by, but do not venture an attack, particularly if you are accompanied by a servant carrying a lantern and a stick. Among themselves they frequently have quarrels and fights, in which they sometimes lose their lives. They are extremely jealous if a strange dog approaches their territory, namely the street or square of which they have possession. On such an intruder they all fall tooth and nail, and worry him until he either seeks safety in flight or remains dead on the spot. It is therefore a rare circumstance for any person to have a house-dog with him in the streets. It would be necessary to carry the creature continually, and even then a number of these unbidden guests would follow, barking and howling incessantly. Neither distemper nor madness is to be feared from these dogs, though no one cares for their wants. They live on carrion and offal, which is to be found in abundance in every street, as every description of filth is thrown out of the houses into the road. A few years ago it was considered expedient to banish these dogs from Constantinople. They were transported to two uninhabited islands in the Sea of Marmora, the males to one and the females to another. But dirt and filth increased in the city to such a degree, that people were glad to have them back again. The town is not lighted. Every person who goes abroad at night must take a lantern with him. If he is caught wandering without a lantern by the guard, he is taken off without mercy to the nearest watch-house, where he must pass the night. The gates of the city are shut after sunset. In proportion as I was charmed with the beautiful situation of Constantinople, so I was disgusted with the dirt and the offensive atmosphere which prevail every where; the ugly narrow streets, the continual necessity to climb up and down steep places in the badly- paved roads, soon render the stranger weary of a residence in this city. Worse than all is the continual dread of conflagration in which we live. Large chests and baskets are kept in readiness in every house; if a fire breaks out in the neighbourhood, all valuable articles are rapidly thrown into these and conveyed away. It is customary to make a kind of contract with two or three Turks, who are pledged, in consideration of a trifling monthly stipend, to appear in the hour of danger, for the purpose of carrying the boxes and lending a helping hand wherever they can. It is safer by far to reckon on the honesty of the Turks than on that of the Christians and Greeks. Instances in which a Turk has appropriated any portion of the goods entrusted to his care are said to be of very rare occurrence. During the first nights of my stay I was alarmed at every noise, particularly when the watchman, who paraded the streets, happened to strike with his stick upon the stones. In the event of a conflagration, he must knock at every house-door and cry, "Fire, fire!" Heaven be praised, my fears were never realised. CHAPTER III. Scutari--Kaiks--The howling Dervishes--The Achmaidon, or place of arrows--The tower in Galata--The Bazaar at Constantinople--Mosques-- Slave-market--The old Serail--The Hippodrome--Coffee-houses--Story- tellers--Excursion to Ejub--Houses, theatres, and carriages. I chose a Friday for an excursion to Scutari, the celebrated burying-place of the Turks, in order that I might have an opportunity of seeing the "howling dervishes." In company with a French physician, I traversed the Bosphorus in a kaik. {48} We passed by the "Leander's Tower," which stands in the sea, a few hundred paces from the Asiatic coast, and has been so frequently celebrated in song by the poets. We soon arrived at our destination. It was with a peculiar feeling of emotion that for the first time in my life I set foot on a new quarter of the globe. Now, and not till now, I seemed separated by an immeasurable distance from my home. Afterwards, when I landed on the coast of Africa, the circumstance did not produce the same impression on my mind. Now at length I was standing in the quarter of the earth which had been the cradle of the human race; where man had risen high, and had again sunk so low that the Almighty had almost annihilated him in his righteous anger. And here in Asia it was that the Son of God came on earth to bring the boon of redemption to fallen man. My long and warmly-cherished wish to tread this most wonderful of the four quarters of the earth was at length fulfilled, and with God's help I might confidently hope to reach the sacred region whence the true light of the world had shone forth. [Illustration 3. Burial Place at Scutari. ill3.jpg] Scutari is the place towards which the Mussulman looks with the hope of one day reposing beneath its shade. No disciple of any other creed is allowed to be buried here; and here, therefore, the Mahometan feels himself at home, and worthy of his Prophet. The cemetery is the grandest in the world. One may wander for hours through this grove of cypresses, without reaching the end. On the gravestones of the men turbans are sculptured; on those of the women fruits and flowers: the execution is in most cases very indifferent. Though neither the chief nor the tributary streets in Scutari are even, they are neither so badly paved nor quite so narrow as those at Pera. The great barracks, on a height in the foreground, present a splendid appearance, and also afford a delicious view towards the Sea of Marmora and the inimitably beautiful Bosphorus. The barracks are said to contain accommodation for 10,000 men. THE HOWLING DERVISHES. At two o'clock we entered the temple, a miserable wooden building. Every Mussulman may take part in this religious ceremony; it is not requisite that he should have attained to the rank and dignity of a dervish. Even children of eight or nine stand up in a row outside the circle of men, to gain an early proficiency in these holy exercises. The commencement of the ceremony is the same as with the dancing dervishes; they have spread out carpets and skins of beasts, and are bowing and kissing the ground. Now they stand up and form a circle together with the laymen, when the chief begins in a yelling voice to recite prayers from the Koran; by degrees those forming the circle join in, and scream in concert. For the first hour some degree of order is still preserved; the performers rest frequently to husband their strength, which will be exerted to the utmost at the close of the ceremony. But then the sight becomes as horrible as one can well imagine any thing. They vie with one another in yelling and howling, and torture their faces, heads, and bodies into an infinite variety of fantastic attitudes. The roaring, which resembles that of wild beasts, and the dreadful spasmodic contortions of the actors' countenances, render this religious ceremony a horrible and revolting spectacle. The men stamp with their feet on the ground, jerk their heads backwards and forwards, and certainly throw themselves into worse contortions than those who are described as having been in old times "vexed with a devil." During the exercise they snatch the covering from their heads, and gradually take off all their clothes, with the exception of shirt and trousers. The two high priests who stand within the circle receive the garments one after another, kiss them, and lay them on a heap together. The priests beat time with their hands, and after the garments have been laid aside the dance becomes faster and faster. Heavy drops of perspiration stand on every brow; some are even foaming at the mouth. The howling and roaring at length reach such a dreadful pitch, that the spectator feels stunned and bewildered. Suddenly one of these maniacs fell lifeless to the ground. The priests and a few from the circle hurried towards him, stretched him out flat, crossed his hands and feet, and covered him with a cloth. The doctor and I were both considerably alarmed, for we thought the poor man had been seized with apoplexy. To our surprise and joy, however, we saw him about six or eight minutes afterwards suddenly throw off the cloth, jump up, and once more take his place in the circle to howl like a maniac. At three o'clock the ceremony concluded. I would not advise any person afflicted with weak nerves to witness it, for he certainly could not endure the sight. I could have fancied myself among raving lunatics and men possessed, rather than amidst reasonable beings. It was long before I could recover my composure, and realise the idea that the infatuation of man could attain such a pitch. I was informed that before the ceremony they swallow opium, to increase the wildness of their excitement! The Achmaidon (place of arrows) deserves a visit, on account of the beautiful view obtained thence; the traveller should see it, if he be not too much pressed for time. This is the place which the Sultan sometimes honours by his presence when he wishes to practise archery. On an open space stands a kind of pulpit of masonry, from which the Sultan shoots arrows into the air without mark or aim. Where the arrow falls, a pillar or pyramid is erected to commemorate the remarkable event. The whole space is thus covered with a number of these monuments, most of them broken and weather-stained, and all scattered in the greatest confusion. Not far from this place is an imperial kiosk, with a garden. Both promise much when viewed from a distance, but realise nothing when seen from within. THE TOWER IN GALATA. Whoever wishes to appreciate in its fullest extent the charm of the views round Constantinople should ascend the tower in Galata near Pera, or the Serasker in Constantinople. According to my notion, the former course is preferable. In this tower there is a room with twelve windows placed in a circle, from which we see pictures such as the most vivid imagination could hardly create. Two quarters of the globe, on the shores of two seas united by the Bosphorus, lie spread before us. The glorious hills with their towns and villages, the number of palaces, gardens, kiosks, and mosques, Chalcedon, the Prince's Islands, the Golden Horn, the continual bustle on the sea, the immense fleet, besides the numerous ships of other nations, the crowds of people in Pera, Galata, and Topana--all unite to form a panorama of singular beauty. The richest fancy would fail in the attempt to portray such a scene; the most practised pen would be unequal to the task of adequately describing it. But the gorgeous picture will be ever present to my memory, though I lack the power of presenting it to the minds of others. Frequently, and each time with renewed pleasure, I ascended this tower, and would sit there for hours, in admiration of the works of the created and of the Creator. Exhausted and weary with gazing was I each time I returned to my home. I think I may affirm that no spot in the world can present such a view, or any thing that can be compared with it. I found how right I had been in undertaking this journey in preference to any other. Here another world lies unfolded before my view. Every thing here is new--nature, art, men, manners, customs, and mode of life. He who would see something totally different from the every-day routine of European life in European towns should come here. THE BAZAAR. In the town of Constantinople we come upon a wooden bridge, large, long, and broad, stretching across the Golden Horn. The streets of the town are rather better paved than those of Pera. In the bazaars and on the sea-coast alone do we find an appearance of bustle; the remaining streets are quiet enough. The Bazaar is of vast extent, comprehending many covered streets, which cross each other in every direction and receive light from above. Every article of merchandise has its peculiar alley. In one all the goldsmiths have their shops, in another the shoemakers; in this street you see nothing but silks, in another real Cashmere shawls, etc. Every dealer has a little open shop, before which he sits, and unceasingly invites the passers-by to purchase. Whoever wishes to buy or to look at any thing sits down also in front of the booth. The merchants are very good-natured and obliging; they always willingly unfold and display their treasures, even when they notice that the person to whom they are shewing them does not intend to become a purchaser. I had, however, imagined the display of goods to be much more varied and magnificent than I found it; but the reason of this apparent poverty is that the true treasures of art and nature, such as shawls, precious stones, pearls, valuable arms, gold brocades, etc., must not be sought in the bazaars; they are kept securely under lock and key in the dwellings or warehouses of the proprietors, whither the stranger must go if he wishes to see the richest merchandise. The greatest number of streets occupied by the followers of any one trade are those inhabited by the makers of shoes and slippers. A degree of magnificence is displayed in their shops such as a stranger would scarcely expect to see. There are slippers which are worth 1000 piastres {53} a pair and more. They are embroidered with gold, and ornamented with pearls and precious stones. The Bazaar is generally so much crowded, that it is a work of no slight difficulty to get through it; yet the space in the middle is very broad, and one has rarely to step aside to allow a carriage or a horseman to pass. But the bazaars and baths are the lounges and gossiping places of the Turkish women. Under the pretence of bathing or of wishing to purchase something, they walk about here for half a day together, amusing themselves with small-talk, love- affairs, and with looking at the wares. THE MOSQUES. Without spending a great deal of money, it is very difficult to obtain admittance into the mosques. You are compelled to take out a firmann, which costs from 1000 to 1200 piastres. A guide of an enterprising spirit is frequently sufficiently acute to inquire in the different hotels if there are any guests who wish to visit the mosques. Each person who is desirous of doing so gives four or five colonati {54} to the guide, who thereupon procures the firmann, and frequently clears forty or fifty guilders by the transaction. An opportunity of this description to visit the mosques generally offers itself several times in the course of a month. I had made up my mind that it would be impossible to quit Constantinople without first seeing the four wonder-mosques, the Aja Sofia, Sultan Achmed, Osmanije, and Soleimanije. I had the good fortune to obtain admittance on paying a very trifling sum; I think I should regret it to this day if I had paid five colonati for such a purpose. To an architect these mosques are no doubt highly interesting; to a profane person like myself they offer little attraction. Their principal beauty generally consists in the bold arches of the cupolas. The interior is always empty, with the exception of a few large chandeliers placed at intervals, and furnished with a large number of perfectly plain glass lamps. The marble floors are covered with straw mats. In the Sofia mosque we find a few pillars which have been brought hither from Ephesus and Baalbec, and in a compartment on one side several sarcophagi are deposited. Before entering the mosque, you must either take off your shoes or put on slippers over them. The outer courts, which are open to all, are very spacious, paved with slabs of marble, and kept scrupulously clean. In the midst stands a fountain, at which the Mussulman washes his hands, his face, and his feet, before entering the mosque. An open colonnade resting on pillars usually runs round the mosques, and splendid plantains and other trees throw a delicious shade around. The mosque of Sultan Achmed, on the Hippodrome, is surrounded by six minarets. Most of the others have only two, and some few four. The kitchens for the poor, situated in the immediate neighbourhood of the mosques, are a very praiseworthy institution. Here the poor Mussulman is regaled on simple dishes, such as rice, beans, cucumbers, etc., at the public expense. I marvelled greatly to find no crowding at these places. Another and an equally useful measure is the erection of numerous fountains of clear good water. This is the more welcome when we remember that the Turkish religion forbids the use of all spirituous liquors. At many of these fountains servants are stationed, whose only duty is to keep ten or twelve goblets of shining brass constantly filled with this refreshing nectar, and to offer them to every passer-by, be he Turk or Frank. Beer-houses and wine-shops are not to be found here. Would to Heaven this were every where the case! How many a poor wretch would never have been poor, and how many a madman would never have lost his senses! Not far from the Osmanije mosque is the SLAVE-MARKET. I entered it with a beating heart, and already before I had even seen them, pitied the poor slaves. How glad, therefore, was I when I found them not half so forlorn and neglected as we Europeans are accustomed to imagine! I saw around me friendly smiling faces, from the grimaces and contortions of which I could easily discover that their owners were making quizzical remarks on every passing stranger. The market is a great yard, surrounded by rooms, in which the slaves live. By day they may walk about in the yard, pay one another visits, and chatter as much as they please. In a market of this kind we, of course, see every gradation of colour, from light brown to the deepest black. The white slaves, and the most beautiful of the blacks, are not however to be seen by every stranger, but are shut up in the dwellings of the traffickers in human flesh. The dress of these people is simple in the extreme. They either wear only a large linen sheet, which is wrapped round them, or some light garment. Even this they are obliged to take off when a purchaser appears. So long as they are in the hands of the dealers, they are certainly not kept in very good style; so they all look forward with great joy to the prospect of getting a master. When they are once purchased, their fate is generally far from hard. They always adopt the religion of their master, are not overburdened with work, are well clothed and fed, and kindly treated. Europeans also purchase slaves, but may not look upon them and treat them as such; from the moment when a slave is purchased by a Frank he becomes free. Slaves bought in this way, however, generally stay with their masters. THE OLD SERAIL is, of course, an object of paramount attraction to us Europeans. I betook myself thither with my expectations at full stretch, and once more found the reality to be far below my anticipations. The effect of the whole is certainly grand; many a little town would not cover so much ground as this place, which consists of a number of houses and buildings, kiosks, and summer-houses, surrounded with plantains and cypress-trees, the latter half hidden amid gardens and arbours. Everywhere there is a total want of symmetry and taste. I saw something of the garden, walked through the first and second courtyard, and even peeped into the third. In the last two yards the buildings are remarkable for the number of cupolas they exhibit. I saw a few rooms and large halls quite full of a number of European things, such as furniture, clocks, vases, etc. My expectations were sadly damped. The place where the heads of pashas who had fallen into disfavour were exhibited is in the third yard. Heaven be praised, no severed heads are now seen stuck on the palings. I was not fortunate enough to be admitted into the imperial harem; I did not possess sufficient interest to obtain a view of it. At a later period of my journey, however, I succeeded in viewing several harems. THE HIPPODROME is the largest and finest open place in Constantinople. After those of Cairo and Padua, it is the most spacious I have seen any where. Two obelisks of red granite, covered with hieroglyphics, are the only ornaments of this place. The houses surrounding it are built, according to the general fashion, of wood, and painted with oil- colours of different tints. I here noticed a great number of pretty children's carriages, drawn by servants. Many parents assembled here to let their children be driven about. Not far from the Hippodrome are the great cisterns with the thousand and one pillars. Once on a time this gigantic fabric must have presented a magnificent appearance. Now a miserable wooden staircase, lamentably out of repair, leads you down a flight of thirty or forty steps into the depths of one of these cisterns, the roof of which is supported by three hundred pillars. This cistern is no longer filled with water, but serves as a workshop for silk- spinners. The place seems almost as if it had been expressly built for such a purpose, as it receives light from above, and is cool in summer, and warm during the winter. It is now impossible to penetrate into the lower stories, as they are either filled with earth or with water. The aqueducts of Justinian and Valentinian are stupendous works. They extend from Belgrade to the "Sweet Waters," a distance of about fourteen miles, and supply the whole of Constantinople with a sufficiency of water. COFFEE-HOUSES--STORY-TELLERS. Before I bade farewell to Constantinople for the present and betook me to Pera, I requested my guide to conduct me to a few coffee- houses, that I might have a new opportunity of observing the peculiar customs and mode of life of the Turks. I had already obtained some notion of the appearance of these places in Giurgewo and Galatz; but in this imperial town I had fancied I should find them somewhat neater and more ornamental. But this delusion vanished as soon as I entered the first coffee-house. A wretchedly dirty room, in which Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and others sat cross- legged on divans, smoking and drinking coffee, was all I could discover. In the second house I visited I saw, with great disgust, that the coffee-room was also used as a barber's shop; on one side they were serving coffee, and on the other a Turk was having his head shaved. They say that bleeding is sometimes even carried on in these booths. In a coffee-house of a rather superior class we found one of the so- called "story-tellers." The audience sit round in a half-circle, and the narrator stands in the foreground, and quietly begins a tale from the Thousand and One Nights; but as he continues he becomes inspired, and at length roars and gesticulates like the veriest ranter among a company of strolling players. Sherbet is not drunk in all the coffee-houses; but every where we find stalls and booths where this cooling and delicious beverage is to be had. It is made from the juice of fruits, mixed with that of lemons and pomegranates. In Pera ice is only to be had in the coffee-houses of the Franks, or of Christian confectioners. All coffee-house keepers are obliged to buy their coffee ready burnt and ground from the government, the monopoly of this article being an imperial privilege. A building has been expressly constructed for its preparation, where the coffee is ground to powder by machinery. The coffee is made very strong, and poured out without being strained, a custom which I could not bring myself to like. It is well worth the traveller's while to make an EXCURSION TO EJUB, the greatest suburb of Constantinople, and also the place where the richest and most noble of the Turks are buried. Ejub, the standard-bearer of Mahomet, rests here in a magnificent mosque, built entirely of white marble. None but a Mussulman may tread this hallowed shrine. A tolerably good view of the interior can, however, be obtained from without, as the windows are lofty and broad, and reach nearly to the ground. The sarcophagus stands in a hall; it is covered with a richly embroidered pall, over which are spread five or six "real" shawls. The part beneath which the head rests is surmounted by a turban, also of real shawls. The chief sarcophagus is surrounded by several smaller coffins, in which repose the wives, children, and nearest relations of Ejub. Hard by the mosque we find a beautiful fountain of white marble, surrounded by a railing of gilded iron, and furnished with twelve bright drinking-cups of polished brass. A Turk here is appointed expressly to hand these to the passers-by. A little crooked garden occupies the space behind the mosque. The mosques in which the dead sultans are deposited are all built in the same manner as that of Ejub. Instead of the turban, handsome fez-caps, with the heron's feather, lie on the coffins. Among the finest mosques is that in which repose the remains of the late emperor. In Ejub many very costly monuments are to be seen. They are generally surrounded by richly- gilt iron railings, their peaks surmounted by the shining crescent, and forming an arch above a sarcophagus, round which are planted rose-bushes and dwarf cypresses, with ivy and myrtle clinging to their stems. It would, however, be very erroneous to suppose that the rich alone lie buried here. The poor man also finds his nook; and frequently we see close by a splendid monument the modest stone which marks the resting-place of the humble Mussulman. On my return I met the funeral of a poor Turk. If my attention had not been attracted to the circumstance, I should have passed by without heeding it. The corpse was rolled in a cloth, fastened at the head and at the feet, and laid on a board which a man carried on his shoulder. At the grave the dead man is once more washed, wrapped in clean linen cloths, and thus lowered into the earth. And this is as it should be. Why should the pomp and extravagance of man accompany him to his last resting-place? Were it not well if in this matter we abated something of our conventionality and ostentation? I do not mean to say that interments need be stripped of every thing like ornament; in all things the middle way is the safest. A simple funeral has surely in it more that awakes true religious feeling than the pomp and splendour which are too frequently made the order of the day in these proceedings. In this case are not men sometimes led away to canvass and to criticise the splendour of the show, while they should be deducing a wholesome moral lesson for themselves, or offering up a fervent prayer to the Almighty for the peace of the departed spirit? HOUSES--THEATRES--CARRIAGES. The houses in the whole of Constantinople, in which we may include Pera, Topana, etc., are very slightly and carelessly put together. No door, no window, closes and fits well; the floorings frequently exhibit gaps an inch in breadth; and yet rents are very high. The reason of this is to be found in the continual danger of fire to which all towns built of wood are exposed. Every proprietor of a house calculates that he may be burnt out in the course of five or six years, and therefore endeavours to gain back his capital with interest within this period. Thus we do not find the houses so well built or so comfortably furnished as in the generality of European towns. There is a theatre in Pera, which will hold from six to seven hundred spectators. At the time of my sojourn there, a company of Italian singers were giving four representations every week. Operas of the most celebrated masters were here to be heard; but I attended one representation, and had quite enough. The wonder is that such an undertaking answers at all, as the Turks have no taste for music, and the Franks are too fastidious to be easily satisfied. The carriages--which are, generally speaking, only used by women-- are of two kinds. The first is in the shape of a balloon, finely painted and gilt, and furnished with high wheels. On each side is an opening, to enter which the passenger mounts on a wooden stool, placed there by the coachman every time he ascends or descends. The windows or openings can be closed with Venetian blinds. These carriages contain neither seats nor cushion. Every one who drives out takes carpets or bolsters with him, spreads them out inside the coach, and sits down cross-legged. A carriage of this description will hold four persons. The second species of carriage only differs from that already described in having still higher wheels, and consisting of a kind of square box, covered in at the top, but open on all sides. The passengers enter at the back, and there is generally room for eight persons. The former kind of vehicle is drawn by one horse in shafts, and sometimes by two; the latter by one or two oxen, also harnessed in shafts, which are, however, furnished in addition with a wooden arch decorated with flowers, coloured paper, and ribbons. The coachman walks on foot beside his cattle, to guide them with greater security through the uneven ill- paved streets, in which you are continually either ascending or descending a hill. Wagons there are none; every thing is carried either by men, horses, or asses. This circumstance explains the fact that more porters are found here than in any other city. These men are agile and very strong; a porter often bears a load of from one hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds through the rugged hilly streets. Wood, coals, provisions, and building-materials are carried by horses and asses. This may be one reason why every thing is so dear in Constantinople. CHAPTER IV. Walks and drives of the townspeople--The "Sweet Waters"-- Chalcedonia--Baluklid--The great and little Campo--Feasts in Constantinople--Anniversary of Mahomet's death--Easter holidays of the Greeks--Gladiators and wrestlers--Excursion to Brussa--Olive- trees--Mosques at Brussa--Stone bridge--Wild dogs--Baths and mineral springs--Return to Constantinople. On Sundays and holydays the "Sweet Waters" of Europe are much frequented. One generally crosses the Golden Horn, into which the sweet water runs, in a kaik. There is, however, another way thither across the mountains. A large grass-plat, surrounded by trees, is the goal towards which the heaving multitude pours. Here are to be seen people from all quarters of the globe, and of all shades of colour, reclining in perfect harmony on carpets, mats, and pillows, and solacing themselves, pipe in mouth, with coffee and sweetmeats. Many pretty Jewesses, mostly unveiled, are to be seen among the crowd. On Friday, the holiday of the Turks, the scene in the Asiatic Sweet Waters is just as animated; and here there is much more to interest us Europeans, as the company consists chiefly of Turks, male and female. The latter have, as usual, their faces covered: the most beautiful feature, the flaming eye, is, however, visible. The trip across the sea to the Asiatic Sweet Waters is incomparably more beautiful and interesting than the journey to the European. We travel up the Bosphorus, in the direction of the Black Sea, past the splendid new palace of the Sultan. Though this palace is chiefly of wood, the pillars, staircases, and the ground-floor, built of marble of dazzling whiteness, are strikingly beautiful. The great gates, of gilded cast-iron, may be called masterpieces; they were purchased in England for the sum of 8000 pounds. The roof of the palace is in the form of a terrace, and round this terrace runs a magnificent gallery, built only of wood, but artistically carved. We also pass the two ancient castles which command the approach to Constantinople, and then turn to the right towards the Sweet Waters. The situation of this place is most lovely; it lies in a beautiful valley surrounded by green hills. Very interesting is also an excursion to Chalcedonia, a peninsula in the Sea of Marmora, on the Asiatic side, adjoining Scutari. We were rowed thither in a two-oared kaik in an hour and a quarter. The finest possible weather favoured our trip. A number of dolphins gambolled around our boat; we saw these tame fishes darting to and fro in all directions, and leaping into the air. It is a peculiar circumstance with regard to these creatures, that they never swim separately, but always either in pairs or larger companies. The views which we enjoy during these trips are peculiarly lovely. Scutari lies close on our left; the foreground is occupied by mountains of moderate elevation; and above them, in the far distance, gleams the snow-clad summit of Olympus. The uninhabited Prince's Island and the two Dog Islands are not the most picturesque objects to be introduced in such a landscape. To make up for the disadvantage of their presence we have, however, a good view of the Sea of Marmora, and can also distinguish the greater portion of the city of Constantinople. On Chalcedonia itself there is nothing to be seen but a lighthouse. Beautiful grass-plats, with a few trees and a coffee-house, are the chief points of attraction with the townspeople. An excursion by sea to Baluklid is also to be recommended. You pass the entire Turkish fleet, which is very considerable, and see the largest ship in the world, the "Mahmud," of 140 guns, built during the reign of the late Sultan Mahmud. Several three-deckers of 120 guns, some of them unrigged, and many men-of-war mounting from forty to sixty cannons, lie in the harbour. For an hour and a half we are riding through the Sea of Marmora, to the left of the great quay which surrounds the walls of Constantinople. Here, for the first time, we see the giant city in all its magnificent proportions. We also passed the "Seven Towers," of which, however, only five remain standing; the other two, I was told, had fallen in. If these towers really answer no other purpose than that of prisons for the European ambassadors during tumults or in the event of hostilities, I think the sooner the remaining five tumble down the better; for the European powers will certainly not brook such an insult from the Turks, now in the day of their decline. We disembarked immediately beyond the "Seven Towers," and walked for half an hour through long empty streets, then out at the town-gate, where the cypress-grove for a time conceals from our view a large open space on which is built a pretty Greek church. I was told that during the holidays at Easter such riotous scenes were here enacted that broken heads were far from being phenomena of rare occurrence. In the church there is a cold spring containing little fishes. A legend goes, that on the high days at Easter these poor little creatures swim about half fried and yet alive, because once upon a time, when Constantinople was besieged, a general said that it was no more likely that the city could be taken than that fishes could swim about half fried. Ever since that period the wonderful miracle of the fried fish is said to occur annually at Easter. On our return to our kaik, we saw near the shore an enormous cuttle- fish, more than fourteen feet in length, which had just been taken and killed. A number of fishermen were trying with ropes and poles to drag the monster ashore. The walks in the immediate neighbourhood of Pera are the great and little Campo, and somewhat farther distant the great bridge which unites Topana with Constantinople; the latter is a most amusing walk, during which we can view the life and bustle on both shores at the same time. In the little Campo are two Frankish coffee-houses, before which we sit quite in European fashion on handsome chairs and benches, listening to pleasant music, and regaling ourselves with ices. FEASTS IN CONSTANTINOPLE. During my residence in Constantinople I had the good fortune to be present at some very entertaining festivities. The most magnificent of these took place on the 23d of April, the anniversary of Mahomet's death. On the eve of this feast we enjoyed a fairy-like spectacle. The tops of all the minarets were illuminated with hundreds of little lamps; and as there are a great many of these slender spires, it can be readily imagined that this sea of light must have a beautiful effect. The Turkish ships in the harbour presented a similar appearance. At every loop-hole a large lamp occupied the place of the muzzle of the cannon. At nine o'clock in the evening, salvoes were fired from the ships; and at the moment that the cannons were fired, the lamps vanished, flashes of light and gunpowder-smoke filled the air; a few seconds afterwards, as if by magic, the lamps had reappeared. This salute was repeated three times. The morning of the 23d was ushered in by the booming of the cannon. All the Turkish ships had hoisted their flags, and garlands of coloured paper were twined round the masts to their very tops. At nine o'clock I proceeded in the company of several friends to Constantinople, to see the grand progress of the Sultan to the mosque. As with us, it is here the custom to post soldiers on either side of the way. The procession was headed by the officers and government officials; but after every couple of officers or statesmen followed their servants, generally to the number of twelve or fifteen persons, in very variegated costumes, partly Turkish, partly European, and withal somewhat military; in fact, a perfect motley. Then came the Emperor's state-horses, splendid creatures, the majority of them of the true Arabian breed, decorated with saddle-cloths richly embroidered with gold, pearls, and precious stones, and proudly moving their plumed heads. Their spirited appearance and beautiful paces excited the admiration of all the learned in such matters. They were followed by a number of pages on foot; these pages are not, however, youths, as in other countries, but men of tried fidelity. In their midst rode the youthful Emperor, wrapped in his cape, and wearing in his fez-cap a fine heron's plume, buckled with the largest diamond in Europe. As the Sultan passed by, he was greeted by the acclamations of the military, but not of the people. The soldiers closed the procession; but their bearing is not nearly so haughty as that of the horses. The reason of this is simple enough--no one dares look upon the Arabians with an evil eye, but the soldiers are entirely subject to the caprice of their officers. I would certainly rather be the Sultan's horse than his soldier. The uniforms of the officers, in their profusion of gold embroidery, resemble those of our hussars. The privates have very comfortable jackets and trousers of blue cloth with red trimmings; some have jackets entirely of a red colour. The artillerymen wear red facings. Their chaussure is pitiable in the extreme: some have boots, not unfrequently decorated with spurs; others have shoes, trodden down at heel and terribly tattered; and some even appear in slippers. All are without stockings, and thus naked feet peer forth every where. The position of the men with regard to each other is just as irregular; a little dwarf may frequently be seen posted next to a giant, a boy of twelve or fourteen years near a grey-headed veteran, and a negro standing next to a white man. At this feast a great concourse of people was assembled, and every window was crowded with muffled female heads. We had been advised not to be present at this ceremony, as it was stated to be of a purely religious nature, and it was feared we should be exposed to annoyance from the fanaticism of the Mussulmen. I am glad to say, however, that the curiosity of my party was stronger than their apprehensions. We pushed through every where, and I had again occasion to feel assured that grievous wrong is frequently done the good Turks. Not only was there no appearance of a disposition to annoy us, but we even obtained very good places without much trouble. On their Easter days the Greeks have a feast in the great Campo. On all the three holidays, the hamaks (water-carriers and porters), after the service is over, march in large numbers to the Campo with songs and music, with noise and shouting, waving their handkerchiefs in the air. Arrived at their destination, they divide into different groups, and proceed to amuse themselves much after the manner of other nations. A number of tents are erected, where a great deal of cooking and baking is carried on. Large companies are sitting on the ground or on the tombstones, eating and drinking in quiet enjoyment. We see a number of swings laden with men and children; on this side we hear the squeaking of a bagpipe, on that the sound of a pipe and drum, uttering such dismal music that the hearer instinctively puts a finger into each ear. To this music a real bear's dance is going on. Six or eight fellows stand in a half circle round the musician, and two leaders of these light-toed clodhoppers continually wave their handkerchiefs in the air as they stamp slowly and heavily round in a circle. The women are allowed to appear at this feast, but may neither take part in the swinging nor in the dancing. They therefore keep up a brave skirmishing with the sweetmeats, coffee, and delicacies of all kinds. The more wealthy portion of the community employ these days in riding to Baluklid, to gaze and wonder at the miracle of the half-baked and yet living fishes. As the Greeks are not so good-natured as the Turks, the latter seldom take part in their festivities. Turkish women never appear on these occasions. On the 8th of May I saw a truly Turkish fete in the neighbourhood of the Achmaidon (place of arrows). In a plain surrounded on all sides by hills, men of all nations formed a large but closely-packed circle. Kavasses (gens d'arme) were there to keep order among the people, and several officers sat among the circle to keep order among the kavasses. The spectacle began. Two wrestlers or gladiators made their appearance, completely undressed, with the exception of trousers of strong leather. They had rubbed themselves all over with oil, so that their joints might be soft and supple, and also that their adversary should not be able to obtain a firm hold when they grappled together. They made several obeisances to the spectators, began with minor feats of wrestling, and frequently stopped for a few moments in order to husband their strength. Then the battle began afresh, and became hotter and hotter, till at length one of the combatants was hailed as victor by the shouting mob. He is declared the conqueror who succeeds in throwing his opponent in such a manner that he can sit down upon him as on a horse. A combat of this kind usually lasts a quarter of an hour. The victor walks triumphantly round the circle to collect his reward. The unfortunate vanquished conceals himself among the spectators, scarcely daring to lift his eyes. These games last for several hours; as one pair of gladiators retire, they are replaced by another. Greek, Turkish, and Armenian women may only be spectators of these games from a distance; they therefore occupy the adjoining heights. For the rest, the arrangements are the same as at the Greek Easter feast. People eat, drink, and dance. No signs of beer, wine, or liqueur are to be discovered, and consequently there is no drunkenness. The Turkish officers were here polite enough to surrender the best places to us strangers. I had many opportunities of noticing the character of the Mussulman, and found, to my great delight, that he is much better and more honest than prejudices generally allow us to believe. Even in matters of commerce and business it is better to have to do with a Turk than with a votary of any other creed, not even excepting my own. During my stay at Constantinople (from the 5th of April until May 17th) I found the weather just as changeable as in my own country; so much so, in fact, that the temperature frequently varied twelve or fourteen degrees within four-and-twenty hours. EXCURSION TO BRUSSA. The two brothers, Baron Charles and Frederick von Buseck, and Herr Sattler, the talented artist, resolved to make an excursion to Brussa; and as I had expressed a similar wish, they were obliging enough to invite me to make a fourth in their party. But when it came to the point, I had almost become irresolute. I was asked by some one if I was a good rider; "for if you are not," said my questioner, "it would be far better for you not to accompany them, as Brussa is four German miles distant from Gemlek, and the road is bad, so that the gentlemen must ride briskly if they wish to reach the town before sundown, starting as they would at half-past two in the afternoon, the general hour of landing at Gemlek. In the event of your being unable to keep up with the rest, you would put them to great inconvenience, or they will be compelled to leave you behind on the road." I had never mounted a horse, and felt almost inclined to confess the fact; but my curiosity to see Brussa, the beautiful town at the foot of Olympus, gained the day, and I boldly declared that I had no doubt I should be able to keep pace with my companions. On the 13th of May we left Constantinople at half-past six in the morning, on board a little steamer of forty-horse power. Passing the Prince's and Dog Islands, we swept across the Sea of Marmora towards the snow-crowned Olympus, until, after a voyage of seven hours, we reached Gemlek. Gemlek, distant thirty sea miles from Constantinople, is a miserable place, but nevertheless does some trade as the harbour of Bithynia. The agent of the Danube Navigation Company was civil enough to procure us good horses, and a genuine, stalwart, and fierce-looking Turkoman for a guide. This man wore in his girdle several pistols and a dagger; a long crooked scimitar hung at his side; and instead of shoes and slippers, large boots decked his feet, bordered at the top by a wide stripe of white cloth, on which were depicted blue flowers and other ornaments. His head was graced by a handsome turban. At half-past two o'clock the horses arrived. I swung myself boldly upon my Rosinante, called on my good angel to defend me, and away we started, slowly at first, over stock and stone. My joy was boundless when I found that I could sit steadily upon my horse; but shortly afterwards, when we broke into a trot, I began to feel particularly uncomfortable, as I could not get on at all with the stirrup, which was continually slipping to my heel, while sometimes my foot slid out of it altogether, and I ran the risk of losing my balance. Oh, what would I not have given to have asked advice of any one! But unfortunately I could not do so without at once betraying my ignorance of horsemanship. I therefore took care to bring up the rear, under the pretence that my horse was shy, and would not go well unless it saw the others before it. My real reason was that I wished to hide my manoeuvres from the gentlemen, for every moment I expected to fall. Frequently I clutched the saddle with both hands, as I swayed from side to side. I looked forward in terror to the gallop, but to my surprise found that I could manage this pace better than the trot. My courage brought its reward, for I reached the goal of our journey thoroughly shaken, but without mishap. During the time that we travelled at a foot-pace, I had found leisure to contemplate the scenery around us. For half the entire distance we ride from one valley into another; as often as a hill is reached, there is a limited prospect before the traveller, who has, however, only to turn his head, and he enjoys a beautiful view over the Sea of Marmora. After a ride of two hours and a half we arrived at a little khan, {71a} where we rested for half an hour. Proceeding thence a short distance, we reached the last hills; and the great valley, at the end of which Brussa is seen leaning against Olympus, lay stretched before our eager eyes, while behind us we could still distinguish, far beyond hill and dale, the distant sea skirting the horizon. Yet, beautiful as this landscape undoubtedly is, I had seen it surpassed in Switzerland. The immense valley which lies spread out before Brussa is uncultivated, deserted, and unwatered; no carpet of luxuriant verdure, no rushing river, no pretty village, gives an air of life to this magnificent and yet monotonous region; and no giant mountains covered with eternal snow look down upon the plain beneath. Pictures like these I had frequently found in Switzerland, in the Tyrol, and also near Salzburg. Here I saw, indeed, separate beauties, but no harmonious whole. Olympus is a fine majestic mountain, forming an extended barrier; but its height can scarcely exceed 6000 feet; {71b} and during the present month it is totally despoiled of its surface of glittering snow. Brussa, with its innumerable minarets, is the only point of relief to which the eye continually recurs, because there is nothing beyond to attract it. A little brook, crossed by a very high stone bridge, but so shallow already in the middle of May as hardly to cover our horses' hoofs; and towards Brussa, a miserable village, with a few plantations of olives and mulberry-trees,--are the only objects to be discovered throughout the whole wide expanse. Wherever I found the olive-tree--here, near Trieste, and in Sicily,-- it was alike ugly. The stem is gnarled, and the leaves are narrow and of a dingy green colour. The mulberry-tree, with its luxuriant bright green foliage, forms an agreeable contrast to the olive. The silk produced in this neighbourhood is peculiarly fine in quality, and the stuffs from Brussa are renowned far and wide. We reached the town in safety before sunset. It is one of the most disagreeable circumstances that can happen to the traveller to arrive at an Oriental town after evening has closed in. He finds the gates locked, and may clamour for admittance in vain. In order to gain our inn, we were obliged to ride through the greater part of the town. I had here an opportunity of observing that it is just as unsightly as the interior of Constantinople. The streets are narrow, and the houses built of wood, plaster, and some even of stone; but all wear an aspect of poverty, and at the same time of singularity;--the gables projecting so much that they occupy half the width of the street, and render it completely dark, while they increase its narrowness. The inn, too, at which we put up, looked far from inviting when viewed from the outside, so that we had some dark misgivings respecting the quality of the accommodation that awaited us. But in proportion as the outside had looked unpropitious, were we agreeably surprised on entering. A neat and roomy courtyard, with a basin of pure sparkling water in the midst, surrounded by mulberry-trees, was the first thing we beheld. Round this courtyard were two stories of clean but simply-furnished rooms. The fare was good, and we were even regaled with a bottle of excellent wine from the lower regions of Olympus. May 14th. Next morning we visited the town and its environs, under the guidance and protection of a kavasse. The town itself is of great extent, and is reported to contain above 10,000 houses, inhabited exclusively by Turks. The population of the suburbs, which comprise nearly 4000 houses, is a mixed one of Christians, Jews, Greeks, etc. The town numbers three hundred and sixty mosques; but the greater portion of them are so insignificant and in such a dilapidated condition, that we scarcely observed them. Strangers are here permitted to enter the mosques in company of a kavasse. We visited some of the principal, among which the Ulla Drchamy may decidedly be reckoned. The cupola of this mosque is considered a masterpiece, and rests upon graceful columns. It is open at the top, thus diffusing a chastened light and a clear atmosphere throughout the building. Immediately beneath this cupola stands a large marble basin, in which small fishes swim merrily about. The mosque of Sultan Mahomed I. and of Sultan Ildirim Bojasid must also be noticed on account of their splendid architecture; the latter, too, for the fine view which is thence obtained. In the mosque of Murad I. visitors are still shewn weapons and garments which once belonged to that sultan. I saw none of the magnificent regal buildings mentioned by some writers. The imperial kiosk is so simple in its appearance, that if we had not climbed the hill on which it stands for the sake of the view, it would not have been worth the trouble of the walk. A stone bridge, roofed throughout its entire length, crosses the bed of the river, which has very steep banks, but contains very little water. A double row of small cottages, in which silk-weavers live and ply their trade, lines this bridge, which I was surprised to see here, as its architecture seemed rather to appertain to my own country than to the East. During my whole journey I did not see a second bridge of this kind, either in Syria or Egypt. The streets are all very dull and deserted, a fact which is rather remarkable in a town of 100,000 inhabitants. In most of the streets more dogs than men are to be seen. Not only in Constantinople, but almost in every Oriental town, vast numbers of these creatures run about in a wild state. Here, as every where, some degree of bustle is to be found in the bazaars, particularly in those which are covered in. Beautiful and durable silk stuffs, the most valuable of which are kept in warehouses under lock and key, form the chief article of traffic. In the public bazaar we found nothing exposed for sale except provisions. Among these I remarked some small, very unpalatable cherries. Asia Minor is the fatherland of this fruit, but I did not find it in any degree of perfection either here or at Smyrna. Brussa is peculiarly rich in cold springs, clear as crystal, which burst forth from Mount Olympus. The town is intersected in all directions by subterranean canals; in many streets, the ripple of the waters below can be distinctly heard, and every house is provided with wells and stone basins of the limpid element; in some of the bazaars we find a similar arrangement. On a nearer approach, the appearance of Mount Olympus is not nearly so grand as when viewed from a distance. The mountain is surrounded by several small hills, which detract from the general effect. The baths, distant about a mile from the town, are prettily and healthfully situated, and, moreover, abundantly supplied with mineral water. Many strangers resort thither to recruit their weakened frames. The finest among these baths is called Jeni Caplidche. A lofty circular hall contains a great swimming bath of marble, above which rises a splendid cupola. A number of refracting glasses (six hundred, they told me) diffuse a magic light around. Our journey back to Constantinople was not accomplished entirely without mishap. One of the gentlemen fell from his horse and broke his watch. The saddles and bridles of hired horses are here generally in such bad condition that there is every moment something to buckle or to cobble up. We were riding at a pretty round pace, when suddenly the girths burst, and the saddle and rider tumbled off together. I arrived without accident at my destination, although I had frequently been in danger of falling from my horse without its being necessary that the girth should break. The gentlemen were satisfied with my performance, for I had never lagged behind, nor had they once been detained on my account. It was not until we were safely on board the ship that I told them how venturesome I had been, and what terror I had undergone. CHAPTER V. Contradictory reports--Departure from Constantinople on board the Archduke John--Scene on the steamer--Galipoli--The Dardanelles-- Tschenekalesi and Kilidil Bahar--The field of Troy--Tenedos--Smyrna-- Halizar--The date-palm--Burnaba--The Acropolis--Female beauty-- Rhodes--Strong fortifications--Deserted appearance of the town-- Cyprus. The extremely unfavourable reports I heard from Beyrout and Palestine caused me to defer my departure from day to day. When I applied to my consul for a "firmann" (Turkish passport), I was strongly advised not to travel to the Holy Land. The disturbances on Mount Lebanon and the plague were, they assured me, enemies too powerful to be encountered except in cases of the most urgent necessity. A priest who had arrived from Beyrout about two months previously affirmed positively that, in consequence of the serious disturbances, even he, known though he was far and wide as a physician, had not dared to venture more than a mile from the town without exposing himself to the greatest danger. He advised me to stay in Constantinople until the end of September, and then to travel to Jerusalem with the Greek caravan. This, he said, was the only method to reach that city in safety. One day I met a pilgrim in a church who came from Palestine. On my asking his advice, he not only confirmed the priest's report, but even added that one of his companions had been murdered whilst journeying homeward, and that he himself had been despoiled of his goods, and had only escaped death through the special interposition of Providence. I did not at all believe the asseverations of this man; he related all his adventures with such a Baron Munchausen air, assumed probably to excite admiration. I continued my investigations on this subject until I was at length fortunate enough to find some one who told an entirely different tale. From this I felt assured at least of the fact, that it would be almost impossible to learn the true state of the case here in Constantinople, and at length made up my mind to avail myself of the earliest opportunity of proceeding as far as Beyrout, where there was a chance of my getting at the truth. I was advised to perform this journey in male attire; but I did not think it advisable to do so, as my short, spare figure would have seemed to belong to a youth, and my face to an old man. Moreover, as I had no beard, my disguise would instantly have been seen through, and I should have been exposed to much annoyance. I therefore preferred retaining the simple costume, consisting of a kind of blouse and wide Turkish trousers, which I then wore. The further I travelled, the more I became persuaded how rightly I had acted in not concealing my sex. Every where I was treated with respect, and kindness and consideration were frequently shewn me merely because I was a woman. On May 17th I embarked on board a steamboat belonging to the Austrian Lloyd. It was called the Archduke John. It was with a feeling of painful emotion that I stood on the deck, gazing with an air of abstraction at the preparations for the long voyage which were actively going on around me. Once more I was alone among a crowd of people, with nothing to depend on but my trust in Providence. No friendly sympathetic being accompanied me on board. All was strange. The people, the climate, country, language, the manners and customs--all strange. But a glance upward at the unchanging stars, and the thought came into my soul, "Trust in God, and thou art not alone." And the feeling of despondency passed away, and soon I could once more contemplate with pleasure and interest all that was going on around me. Near me stood a poor mother who could not bear to part with her son. Time after time she folded him in her arms, and kissed and blessed him. Poor mother! wilt thou see him again, or will the cold ground be a barrier between you till this life is past? Peace be with you both! A whole tribe of people came noisily towards us;--they were friends of the crew, who bounced about the ship from stem to stern, canvassing its merits in comparison with French and English vessels. Suddenly there was a great crowding on the swinging ladder, of chests, boxes, and baskets. Men were pushing and crushing backwards and forwards. Turks, Greeks, and others quarrelled and jostled each other for the best places on the upper deck, and in a few moments the whole large expanse wore the appearance of a bivouac. Mats and mattresses were every where spread forth, provisions were piled up in heaps, and culinary utensils placed in order beside them; and before these preparations had been half completed the Turks began washing their faces, hands, and feet, and unfolding their carpets, to perform their devotions. In one corner of the ship I even noticed that a little low tent had been erected; it was so closely locked, that for a long time I could not discern whether human beings or merchandise lay concealed within. No movement of the interior was to be perceived, and it was not until some days afterwards that I was informed by a Turk what the tent really contained. A scheick from the Syrian coast had purchased two girls at Constantinople, and was endeavouring to conceal them from the gaze of the curious. I was for nine days on the same vessel with these poor creatures, and during the whole time had not an opportunity of seeing either of them. At the debarcation, too, they were so closely muffled that it was impossible to discover whether they were white or black. At six o'clock the bell was rung to warn all strangers to go ashore; and now I could discover who were really to be the companions of my journey. I had flattered myself that I should find several Franks on board, who might be bound to the same destination as myself; but this hope waxed fainter and fainter every moment, as one European after another left the ship, until at length I found myself alone among the strange Oriental nations. The anchor was now weighed, and we moved slowly out of the harbour. I offered up a short but fervent prayer for protection on my long and dangerous voyage, and with a calmed and strengthened spirit I could once more turn my attention towards my fellow-passengers, who having concluded their devotions were sitting at their frugal meal. During the whole time they remained on the steamer these people subsisted on cold provisions, such as cheese, bread, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, olives, walnuts, a great number of onions, and dried "mishmish," a kind of small apricot, which instead of being boiled is soaked in water for a few hours. In a sailing vessel it is usual to bring a small stove and some wood, in order to cook pilau, beans, fowls, and to boil coffee, etc. This, of course, is not allowed on board a steamboat. The beauty of the evening kept me on deck, and I looked with a regretful feeling towards the imperial city, until the increasing distance and the soft veil of evening combined to hide it from my view, though at intervals the graceful minarets were still dimly discernible through the mist. But who shall describe my feelings of joy when I discovered a European among the passengers? Now I was no longer alone; in the first moments we even seemed fellow-countrymen, for the barriers that divide Europeans into different nations fall as they enter a new quarter of the globe. We did not ask each other, Are you from England, France, Italy; we inquired, Whither are you going? and on its appearing that this gentleman intended proceeding, like myself, to Jerusalem, we at once found so much to talk about concerning the journey, that neither of us thought for a moment of inquiring to what country the other belonged. We conversed in the universal French language, and were perfectly satisfied when we found we could understand each other. It was not until the following day that I discovered the gentleman to be an Englishman, and learned that his name was Bartlett. {79} In Constantinople we had both met with the same fate. He had been, like myself, unable to obtain any certain intelligence, either at his consul's or from the inhabitants, as to the feasibility of a journey to Jerusalem, and so he was going to seek further information at Beyrout. We arranged that we would perform the journey from Beyrout to Jerusalem in company,--if, indeed, we found it possible to penetrate among the savage tribes of Druses and Maronites. So now I no longer stood unprotected in the wide world. I had found a companion as far as Jerusalem, the goal of my journey, which I could now hope to reach. I was well satisfied with the arrangements on board. I had made up my mind, though not without sundry misgivings, to take a second- class berth; and on entering the steamer of the Austrian Lloyd, I discovered to my surprise how much may be effected by order and good management. Here the men and the women were separately lodged, wash-hand basins were not wanting, we fared well, and could not be cheated when we paid for our board, as the accounts were managed by the first mate: on the remaining steamers belonging to this company I found the arrangements equally good. Crossing the Sea of Marmora, we passed the "Seven Towers," leaving the Prince's Islands behind us on the left. Early on the following day, May 18th, we reached the little town of Galipoli, situate on an eminence near the Hellespont. A few fragments of ruins in the last stage of dilapidation cause us to think of the ages that have fled, as we speed rapidly on. We waited here a quarter of an hour to increase the motley assemblage on deck by some new arrivals. For the next 20 miles, as far as Sed Bahe, the sea is confined within such narrow bounds, that one could almost fancy it was a channel dug to unite the Sea of Marmora with the Archipelago. It is very appropriately called the STRAIT of the Dardanelles. On the left we have always the mainland of Asia, and on the right a tongue of land belonging to Europe, and terminating at Sed Bahe. The shores on both sides are desert and bare. It is a great contrast to former times, a contrast which every educated traveller must feel as he travels hither from the Bosphorus. What stirring scenes were once enacted here! Of what deeds of daring, chronicled in history, were not these regions the scene! Every moment brought us nearer to the classic ground. Alas, that we were not permitted to land on any of the Greek Islands, past which we flew so closely! I was obliged, perforce, to content myself with thinking of the past, of the history of ancient Greece, without viewing the sites where the great deeds had been done. The two castles of the Dardanelles, Tschenekalesi and Kilidil Bahar, that on the Asiatic shore looking like a ruin, while its European neighbour wore the appearance of a fortress, let us steam past unchallenged. And how shall I describe the emotions I felt as we approached the plains of Troy? I was constantly on deck, lest I should lose any portion of the view, and scarcely dared to breathe when at length the long-wished- for plain came in sight. Here it is, then, that this famous city is supposed to have stood. Yonder mounds, perchance, cover the resting-places of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax, Hector, and many other heroes who may have served their country as faithfully as these, though their names do not live in the page of history. How gladly would I have trodden the plain, there to muse on the legends which in my youth had already awakened in me such deep and awe-struck interest, and had first aroused the wish to visit these lands--a desire now partially fulfilled! But we flew by with relentless rapidity. The whole region is deserted and bare. It seems as if nature and mankind were mourning together for the days gone by. The inhabitants may indeed weep, for they will never again be what they once were. In the course of the day we passed several islands. In the foreground towered the peak of the Hydrae, shortly afterwards Samothrace rose from the waves, and we sailed close by the island of Tenedos. At first this island does not present a striking appearance, but after rounding a small promontory we obtained a view of the fine fortress skirting the sea; it seems to have been built for the protection of the town beyond. After passing Tenedos we lost sight of the Greek islands for a short time (the mainland of Asia can always be distinguished on our left), but soon afterwards we reached the most beautiful of them all-- Mytelene, which has justly been sung by many poets as the Island of the Fairies. For seven hours we glided by its coast. It resembles a garden of olives, orange-trees, pomegranates, etc. The view is bounded at the back by a double row of peaked mountains, and the town lies nearly in the midst. It is built in a circular form, round a hill, strengthened with fortifications. In front the town is girded by a strong wall, and in the rear extends a deep bay. A few masts peered forth and shewed us where the bay ended. From this point we saw numerous villages prettily situated among the luxuriant shade of large trees. It must be a delightful thing to spend the spring-time on this island. I remained on deck till late in the night, so charming, so rich in varied pictures of verdant isles is this voyage on the AEgaean Sea. Had I been a magician, I would have fixed the sun in the heavens until we had arrived at Smyrna. Unfortunately many a beauteous island which we next morning contemplated ruefully on the map was hidden from us by the shades of night. May 19th. Long before the sun was up, I had resumed my post on deck, to welcome Smyrna from afar. A double chain of mountains, rising higher and higher, warned us of our approach to the rich commercial city. At first we can only distinguish the ancient dilapidated castle on a rock, then the city itself, built at the foot of the rock, on the sea-shore; at the back the view is closed by the "Brother Mountains." The harbour is very spacious, but has rather the appearance of a wharf, with room for whole fleets to anchor. Many ships were lying here, and there was evidently plenty of business going on. The "Franks' town," which can be distinctly viewed from the steamer, extends along the harbour, and has a decidedly European air. Herr von Cramer had been previously apprised of my arrival, and was obliging enough to come on board to fetch me. We at once rode to Halizar, the summer residence of many of the citizens, where I was introduced to my host's family. Halizar is distant about five English miles from Smyrna. The road thither is beautiful beyond description, so that one has no time to think about the distance. Immediately outside the town we pass a large open place near a river, where the camels rest, and where they are loaded and unloaded; I saw a whole herd of these animals. Their Arab or Bedouin drivers were reclining on mats, resting after their labours, while others were still fully employed about their camels. It was a truly Arabian picture, and moreover so new to me, that I involuntarily stopped my long-eared Bucephalus to contemplate it at my leisure. Not far from this resting-place is the chief place of rendezvous and pastime of the citizens. It consists of a coffee-booth and a few rows of trees, surrounded by numerous gardens, all rich in beautiful fruit-trees. Charming beyond all the rest, the flower of the pomegranate-tree shines with the deepest crimson among the green leaves. Wild oleanders bloomed every where by the roadside. We wandered through beautiful shrubberies of cypress-trees and olives, and never yet had I beheld so rich a luxuriance of vegetation. This valley, with its one side flanked by wild and rugged rocks, in remarkable contrast to the fruitful landscape around, has a peculiar effect when viewed from the hill across which we ride. I was also much amazed by the numerous little troops of from six to ten, or even twenty camels, which sometimes came towards us with their grave majestic pace, and were sometimes overtaken by our fleet donkeys. Surrounded on all sides by objects at once novel and interesting, it will not be wondered at that I found the time passing far too rapidly. The heat is said not to be more oppressive at Smyrna during the summer than at Constantinople. Spring, however, commences here earlier, and the autumn is longer. This fact, I thought, accounted for the lovely vegetation, which was here so much more forward than at Constantinople. Herr von Cramer's country-house stands in the midst of a smiling garden; it is spacious and built of stone. The large and lofty apartments are flagged with marble or tiles. In the garden I found the first date-palm, a beautiful tree with a tall slender stem, from the extremity of which depend leaves five or six feet in length, forming a magnificent crown. In these regions and also in Syria, whither my journey afterwards led me, the date-palm does not attain so great a height as in Egypt, nor does it bear any fruit, but only stands as a noble ornament beside the pomegranate and orange trees. My attention was also attracted to numerous kinds of splendid acacias; some of these grew to an immense size, as high as the walnut-trees of my own country. The villas of the townspeople all strongly resemble each other. The house stands in the midst of the garden, and the whole is surrounded by a wall. In the evening I visited some of the peasants, in company with Herr von C. This gentleman informed me that these people were very poor, but still I found them decently clad and comfortably lodged in large roomy dwellings built of stone. Altogether, the condition of affairs seems here vastly superior to that in Galicia and in Hungary near the Carpathian mountains. I reckoned the day I spent with this amiable family among the most pleasant I had yet passed. How gladly would I have accepted their hearty invitation to remain several weeks with them! But I had lost so much time in Constantinople, that on the morning of May 20th I was compelled to bid adieu to Frau von C. and her dear children. Herr von C. escorted me back to Smyrna. We took the opportunity of roaming through many streets of the Franks' quarter, which I found, generally speaking, pretty and cheerful enough, and moreover level and well paved. The handsomest street is that in which the consuls reside. The houses are finely built of stone, and the halls are tastefully paved with little coloured pebbles, arranged in the form of wreaths, stars, and squares. The inhabitants generally take up their quarters in these entrance-halls during the day, as it is cooler there than in the rooms. To nearly every house a pretty garden is attached. The Turkish town is certainly quite different; it is built of wood, and is angular and narrow; dogs lie about in the streets, just as at Brussa and Constantinople. And why should it be otherwise here? Turks live in all this quarter, and they do not feel the necessity of clean and airy dwellings like the fastidious Franks. The bazaars are not roofed; and here also the costlier portion of the wares is kept under lock and key. It is well worth the traveller's while to make an excursion to Burnaba, a place lying on the sea-coast not far from the town, and serving, like Halizar, as a retreat for the townspeople during the summer. The views in this direction are various, and the road is good. The whole appearance of the place is that of a very extended village, with all its houses standing in the midst of gardens and surrounded by walls. From the Acropolis we have a fine view in every direction, and find, in fact, a union of advantages only met with separately elsewhere. In Smyrna I found the most beautiful women I had yet seen; and even during my further journey I met with few who equalled, and none who surpassed them. These fairy forms are, however, only to be sought among the Greeks. The natural charms of these Graces are heightened by the rich costume they wear. They have a peculiarly tasteful manner of fastening their little round fez-caps, beneath which their rich hair falls in heavy plaits upon their shoulders, or is wound with a richly embroidered handkerchief round the head and brow. Smyrna is, however, not only celebrated as possessing the loveliest women, but also as the birthplace of one of the greatest men. {85} O Homer, in the Greece of to-day thou wouldst find no materials for thine immortal Iliad! At five o'clock in the afternoon we quitted the harbour of Smyrna. In this direction the town is seen to much greater advantage after we have advanced a mile than when we approach it from Constantinople; for now the Turks' town lies spread in all its magnitude before us, whereas on the other side it is half hidden by the Franks' quarter. The sea ran high, and adverse winds checked the speed of our good ship; but I am thankful to say that, except when the gale is very strong, it does not affect my health. I felt perfectly well, and stood enjoying the aspect of the waves as they came dancing towards our vessel. In Smyrna our company had been augmented by the arrival of a few more Franks. May 21st. Yesterday evening and all this day we have been sailing among islands. The principal of these were Scio, Samos, and Cos, and even these form a desolate picture of bare, inhospitable mountains and desert regions. On the island of Cos alone we saw a neat town, with strong fortifications. May 22d. This morning, shortly after five o'clock, we ran into the superb harbour of Rhodes. Here, for the first time, I obtained a correct notion of a harbour. That of Rhodes is shut in on all sides by walls and masses of rock, leaving only a gap of a hundred and fifty to two hundred paces in width for the ships to enter. Here every vessel can lie in perfect safety, be the sea outside the bar as stormy as it may; the only drawback is, that the entering of this harbour, a task of some difficulty in calm weather, becomes totally impracticable during a storm. A round tower stands as a protection on either side of the entrance to the harbour. The venerable church of St. John and the palace of the Komthur can be distinguished towering high above the houses and fortifications. Our captain imparted to us the pleasant intelligence that we might spend the hours between this and three o'clock in the afternoon on shore. Our ship had for some time lain surrounded by little boats, and so we lost no time in being conveyed to the land. The first thing we did on reaching it was to ask questions concerning the ancient site of the celebrated Colossus. But we could gain no information, as neither our books nor the people here could point out the place to us with certainty; so we left the coast, to make up for the disappointment by exploring the ancient city. Rhodes is surrounded with three rows of strong fortifications. We passed over three drawbridges before entering the town. We were quite surprised to see the beautiful streets, the well-kept houses, and the excellent pavement. The principal street, containing the houses of the ancient Knights of St. John, is very broad, with buildings so massively constructed of stone as almost to resemble fortresses. Heraldic bearings, with dates carved in stone, grace many of the Gothic gateways. The French shield, with the three lilies and the date 1402, occurs most frequently. On the highest point in the city are built the church of St. John and the house of the governor. All the exteriors seem in such good preservation, that one could almost fancy the knights had only departed to plant their victorious banner on the Holy Sepulchre. They have in truth departed--departed to a better home. Centuries have breathed upon their ashes, scattered in all the regions of the earth. But their deeds have been chronicled both in heaven and among men, and the heroes still live in the admiration of posterity. The churches, the house of the governor, and many other buildings, are not nearly so well preserved inside as a first glance would lead us to imagine. The reason of this is that the upper part of the town is but thinly inhabited. A gloomy air of silence and vacancy reigns around. We could wander about every where without being stared at or annoyed by the vulgar and envious. Mr. Bartlett, the Englishman, made a few sketches in his drawing-book of some of the chief beauties, such as the Gothic gateways, the windows, balconies, etc., and no inhabitant came to disturb him. The pavement in the city, and even in the streets around the fortifications, consists wholly of handsome slabs of stone, often of different colours, like mosaic, and in such good preservation that we could fancy the work had been but recently concluded. This is certainly partly owing to the fact that no loaded wagon ever crushes over these stones, for the use of vehicles is entirely unknown in these parts; every thing is carried by horses, asses, or camels. Cannons dating from the time of the Genoese still stand upon the ramparts. The carriages of these guns are very clumsy, the wheels consisting of round discs without spokes. From our tower of observation we can form a perfect estimate of the extent and strength of the fortifications. The city is completely surrounded by three lofty walls, which seem to have been calculated to last an eternity, for they still stand almost uninjured in all their glory. In some places images of the Virgin, of the size of life, are hewn out of the walls. The neighbourhood of Rhodes is most charming, and almost resembles a park. Many country houses lie scattered throughout this natural garden. The vegetation is here no less luxuriant than in Smyrna. The architecture of the houses already begins to assume a new character. Many dwellings have towers attached, and the roofs are flat, forming numerous terraces, which are all built of stone. Some streets in the lower part of the town, inhabited chiefly by Jews, are bordered with cannon-balls, and present a most peculiar appearance. I was also much struck with the costumes worn by the country-people, who were dressed quite in the Swabian fashion. It was in vain that I inquired the reason of this circumstance. The books we had with us gave no information on the subject, and I could not ask the natives through my ignorance of their language. By three o'clock in the afternoon we were once more on board, and an hour afterwards we sailed out into the open sea. To-day we saw nothing further, except a high and lengthened mountain-range on the Asiatic mainland. It was a branch of the Taurus. The highest peaks glistened like silver in the evening light, enveloped in a garment of snow. May 23d. To-day our organs of vision had a rest, for we were sailing on the high seas. Late in the evening, however, the sailors descried the mountains of Cyprus looming in the far distance like a misty cloud. With my less practised eyes I could see nothing but the sunset at sea--a phenomenon of which I had had a more exalted conception. The rising and setting of the sun at sea is not nearly so striking a spectacle as the same phenomenon in a rocky landscape. At sea the sky is generally cloudless in the evening, and the sun gradually sinks, without refraction of rays or prismatic play of colours, into its ocean-bed, to pursue its unchanging course the next day. How infinitely more grand is this spectacle when seen from the "Rigi Kulm" in Switzerland! There it is really a spectacle, in contemplating which we feel impelled to fall on our knees in speechless adoration, and admire the wisdom of the Almighty in his wondrous works. May 24th. On mounting to the deck this morning at five o'clock I could distinguish the island of Cyprus, which looks uglier the nearer we approach. Both the foreground and the mountain-peaks have an uncomfortable barren air. At ten o'clock we entered the harbour of Larnaka. The situation of this town is any thing but fine; the country looks like an Arabian desert, and a few unfruitful date- palms rise beside the roofless stone houses. I should not have gone on shore at all, if Doctor Faaslanc, whose acquaintance I had made at Constantinople, and who had been appointed quarantine physician here four weeks before my departure, had not come to fetch me. The streets of Larnaka are unpaved, so that we were obliged literally to wade more than ankle-deep in sand and dust. The houses are small, with irregular windows, sometimes high and sometimes low, furnished with wooden grated shutters; and the roofs are in the form of terraces. This style of building I found to be universal throughout Syria. Of a garden or a green place not a trace was to be seen. The sandy expanse reaches to the foot of the mountains, which viewed from this direction form an equally barren picture. Behind these mountains the appearance of the landscape is said to be very fruitful; but I did not penetrate into the interior, nor did I go to Nikosia, the capital of the island, distant some twelve miles from Larnaka. Doctor Faaslanc took me to his house, which had an appearance of greater comfort than I had expected to find, for it consisted of two spacious rooms which might almost have been termed halls. An agreeable coolness reigned every where. Neither stoves nor chimneys were to be seen, as winter is here replaced by a very mild rainy season. The heat in summer is often said to be insupportable, the temperature rising to more than 36 degrees Reaumur. To-day it reached 30 degrees in the sun. We drank to my safe return to my country, in real old Cyprian wine. Shall I ever see it again? I hope so, if my journey progresses as favourably as it has begun. But Syria is a bad country, and the climate is difficult to bear; yet with courage and perseverance for my companions, I may look forward to the accomplishment of my task. The good doctor seemed much annoyed that he had nothing to offer me but Cyprian wine and a few German biscuits. At this early season fruit is not to be had, and cherries do not flourish here because the climate is too hot for them. In Smyrna I ate the last for this year. When I re-embarked in the afternoon, Mr. Bartlett came with the English consul, who wished, he said, to make the acquaintance of a lady possessing sufficient courage to undertake so long and perilous a journey by herself. His astonishment increased when he was informed that I was an unpretending native of Vienna. The consul was kind enough to offer me the use of his house if I returned by way of Cyprus; he also inquired if he could give me some letters of recommendation to the Syrian consuls. I was touched by this hearty politeness on the part of a perfect stranger--an Englishman moreover, a race on whom we are accustomed to look as cold and exclusive! CHAPTER VI. Arrival at Beyrout--Fellahs--Backsheesh--Uncomfortable quarters-- Saida--Tyre--St. Jean d'Acre--Caesarea--Excursion among the ruins-- Jaffa--An eastern family--The Indian fig-tree--An Oriental dinner-- Costume of the women of Jaffa--Oppressive heat--Gnats--Ramla--Syrian convents--Bedouins and Arabs--Kariet el Areb, or Emmaus--The Scheikh--Arrival at Jerusalem. May 25th. This morning I could discern the Syrian coast, which becomes more glorious the nearer we approach. Beyrout, the goal of our voyage, was jealously hidden from our eyes to the very last moment. We had still to round a promontory, and then this Eden of the earth lay before us in all its glory. How gladly would I have retarded the course of our vessel, as we passed from the last rocky point into the harbour, to have enjoyed this sight a little longer! One pair of eyes does not suffice to take in this view; the objects are too numerous, and the spectator is at a loss whither he should first direct his gaze,--upon the town, with its many ancient towers attached to the houses, giving them the air of knights' castles-- upon the numerous country-houses in the shade of luxurious mulberry plantations--upon the beautiful valley between Beyrout and Mount Lebanon--or on the distant mountain-range itself. The towering masses of this magnificent chain, the peculiar colour of its rocks, and its snowclad summits, riveted my attention longer than any thing else. Scarcely had the anchor descended from the bows, before our ship was besieged by a number of small boats, with more noise and bustle than even at Constantinople. The half-naked and excitable Arabs or Fellahs are so ready with offers of service, that it is difficult to keep them off. It almost becomes necessary to threaten these poor people with a stick, as they obstinately refuse to take a gentler hint. As the water is here very shallow, so that even the little boats cannot come quite close to shore, some others of these brown forms immediately approached, seized us by the arms, took us upon their backs amidst continual shouting and quarrelling, and carried us triumphantly to land. Before the stranger puts himself into the hands of men of this kind, such as captains of small craft, donkey-drivers, porters, etc., he will find it a very wise precaution to settle the price he is to pay for their services. I generally spoke to the captain, or to some old stager among the passengers, on this subject. Even when I gave these people double their usual price, they were not contented, but demanded an additional backsheesh (gratuity). It is therefore advisable to make the first offer very small, and to retain something for the backsheesh. At length I safely reached the house of Herr Battista (the only inn in the place), and was rejoicing in the prospect of rest and refreshment, when the dismal cry of "no room" was raised. I was thus placed in a deplorable position. There was no second inn, no convent, no place of any kind, where I, poor desolate creature that I was, could find shelter. This circumstance worked so much on the host's feelings, that he introduced me to his wife, and promised to procure me a private lodging. I had now certainly a roof above my head, but yet I could get no rest, nor even command a corner where I might change my dress. I sat with my hostess from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon, and a miserably long time it appeared. I could not read, write, or even talk, for neither my hostess nor her children knew any language but Arabic. I had, however, time to notice what was going on around me, and observed that these children were much more lively than those in Constantinople, for here they were continually chattering and running about. According to the custom of the country, the wife does nothing but play with the children or gossip with the neighbours, while her husband attends to kitchen and cellar, makes all the requisite purchases, and besides attending to the guests, even lays the tablecloth for his wife and children. He told me that in a week at furthest, his wife would go with the children to a convent on the Lebanon, to remain there during the hot season of the year. What a difference between an Oriental and a European woman! I still found the heat at sea far from unendurable; a soft wind continually wafted its cooling influence towards us, and an awning had been spread out to shelter us from the rays of the sun. But what a contrast when we come to land! As I sat in the room here the perspiration dropped continually from my brow, and now I began to understand what is meant by being in the tropics. I could scarcely await the hour when I should be shewn to a room to change my clothes; but to-day I was not to have an opportunity of doing so, for at five o'clock a messenger came from Mr. Bartlett with the welcome intelligence that we could continue our journey, as nothing was to be feared from the Druses and Maronites, and the plague only reigned in isolated places through which it was not necessary that we should pass. He had already engaged a servant who would act as cook and dragoman (interpreter); provisions and cooking utensils had also been bought, and places were engaged on an Arab craft. Nothing, therefore, remained for me to do but to be on the sea-shore by six o'clock, where his servant would be waiting for me. I was much rejoiced on hearing this good news: I forgot that I required rest and a change of clothes, packed up my bundle, and hurried to the beach. Of the town I only saw a few streets, where there was a great bustle. I also noticed many swarthy Arabs and Bedouins, who wore nothing but a shirt. I did not feel particularly anxious to see Beyrout and its vicinity, as I intended to return soon and visit any part I could not examine now. Before sunset we had already embarked on board the craft that was to carry us to the long-wished-for, the sacred coast of Joppa. Every thing was in readiness, and we lacked only the one thing indispensable--a breeze. No steamers sail between Joppa and Beyrout; travellers must be content with sailing vessels, deficient alike as regards cleanliness and convenience; they are not provided with a cabin, or even with an awning, so that the passengers remain day and night under the open sky. Our vessel carried a cargo of pottery, besides rice and corn in sacks. Midnight approached, and still we were in harbour, with not a breath of wind to fill our sails. Wrapping my cloak tightly round me, I lay down on the sacks, in the absence of a mattress; but I was not yet sufficiently tired out to be able to find rest on such an unusual couch. So I rose again in rather a bad humour, and looked with an evil eye on the Arabs lying on the sacks around me, who were not "slumbering softly," but snoring lustily. By way of forcing myself, if possible, into a poetical train of thought, I endeavoured to concentrate my attention on the contemplation of the beautiful landscape by moonlight; but even this would not keep me from yawning. My companion seemed much in the same mood; for he had also risen from his _soft_ couch, and was staring gloomingly straight before him. At length, towards three o'clock in the morning of May 26th, a slight breath of wind arose, we hoisted two or three sails, and glided slowly and noiselessly towards the sea. Mr. B. had bargained with the captain to keep as close to the shore as possible, in order that we might see the towns as we passed. Excepting in Caesarea, it was forbidden to cast anchor any where, for the plague was raging at Sur (Tyre) and in several other places. Bargains of this kind must be taken down in writing at the consulates, and only one-half of the sum agreed should be paid in advance; the other half must be kept in hand, to operate as a check on the crew. After every precaution has been taken, one can seldom escape without some bickering and quarrelling. On these occasions it is always advisable at once to take high ground, and not to give way in the most trifling particular, for this is the only method of gaining peace and quietness. Towards seven o'clock in the morning we sailed by the town and fortress of Saida. The town looks respectable enough, and contains some spacious houses. The fortress is separated from the town by a small bay, across which a wooden bridge has been built. The fortress seems in a very dilapidated condition; many breaches are still in the same state in which they were left after the taking of the town by the English in 1840, and part of the wall has fallen into the sea. In the background we could descry some ruins on a rock, apparently the remains of an ancient castle. The next place we saw was Sarepta, where Elijah the prophet was fed by the poor widow during the famine. The Lebanon range becomes lower and lower, while its namesake, the Anti-Lebanon, begins to rise. It is quite as lofty as the first- named range, which it closely resembles in form. Both are traversed by fields of snow, and between them stands a third colossus, Mount Hermon. Next came the town of Tyre or Sur, now barren and deserted; for that mighty scourge of humanity, the plague, was raging there to a fearful extent. A few scattered fragments of fortifications and numerous fallen pillars lie strewed on the shore. And now at length I was about to see places which many have longed to behold, but which few have reached. With a beating heart I gazed unceasingly towards St. Jean d'Acre, which I at length saw rising from the waves, with Mount Carmel in the background. Here, then, was the holy ground on which the Redeemer walked for us fallen creatures! Both St. Jean d'Acre and Mount Carmel can be distinguished a long distance off. For a second time did a mild and calm night sink gently on the earth without bringing me repose. How unlucky it is that we find it so much harder to miss comforts we have been used to enjoy, than to acquire the habit of using comforts to which we have been unaccustomed! Were this not the case, how much easier would travelling be! As it is, it costs us many an effort ere we can look hardships boldly in the face. "But patience!" thought I to myself; "I shall have more to endure yet; and if I return safely, I shall be as thoroughly case-hardened as any native." Our meals and our beverage were very simple. In the morning we had pilau, and in the evening we had pilau; our drink was lukewarm water, qualified with a little rum. From Beyrout to the neighbourhood of St. Jean d'Acre, the coast and a considerable belt of land adjoining it are sandy and barren. Near Acre every thing changed; we once more beheld pretty country-houses surrounded by pomegranate and orange plantations, and a noble aqueduct intersects the plain. Mount Carmel, alone barren and unfruitful, stands in striking contrast to the beauteous landscape around; jutting boldly out towards the sea, it forms the site of a handsome and spacious convent. The town of St. Jean d'Acre and its fortifications were completely destroyed during the last war (in 1840), and appear to sigh in vain for repairs. The houses and mosques are full of cannon-balls and shot-holes. Every thing stands and lies about as though the enemy had departed but yesterday. Six cannons peer threateningly from the wall. The town and fortifications are both built on a tongue of land washed by the sea. May 27th. During the night we reached Caesarea. With the eloquence of a Demosthenes, our captain endeavoured to dissuade us from our project of landing here; he pointed out to us the dangers to which we were exposing ourselves, and the risks we should run from Bedouins and snakes. The former, he averred, were accustomed to conceal themselves in hordes among the ruins, in order to ease travellers of their effects and money; being well aware that such spots were only visited by curious tourists with well-filled purses, they were continually on the watch, like the robber-knights of the good old German empire. "An enemy no less formidable," said the captain, "was to be encountered in the persons of numerous snakes lurking in the old walls and on the weed-covered ground, which endangered the life of the traveller at every step." We were perfectly well aware of these facts, having gleaned them partly from descriptions of voyages, partly from oral traditions; and so they were not powerful enough to arrest our curiosity. The captain himself was really less actuated by the sense of our danger, in advising us to abandon our undertaking, than by the reflection of the time it lost him; but he exerted himself in vain. He was obliged to cast anchor, and at daybreak to send a boat ashore with us. Our arms consisted of parasols and sticks (the latter we carried in order to beat the bushes); we were escorted by the captain, his servant, and a couple of sailors. In the ruins we certainly met with a few suspicious-looking characters in the shape of wandering Bedouins. As it was too late to beat a retreat, we advanced bravely towards them with trusting and friendly looks. The Bedouins did the same, and so there was an end of this dangerous affair. We climbed from one fragment to another, and certainly spent more than two hours among the ruins, without sustaining the slightest injury at the hands of these people. Of the threatened snakes we saw not a single one. Ruins, indeed, we found every where in plenty. Whole side-walls, which appeared to have belonged to private houses, but not to splendid palaces or temples, stood erect and almost unscathed. Fragments of pillars lay scattered about in great abundance, but without capitals, pedestals, or friezes. It was with a feeling of awe hitherto unknown to me that I trod the ground where my Redeemer had walked. Every spot, every building became invested with a double interest. "Perchance," I thought, "I may be lingering within the very house where Jesus once sojourned." More than satisfied with my excursion, I returned to our bark. By three o'clock in the afternoon we were close under the walls of Joppa. To enter this harbour, partially choked up as it is with sand, is described as a difficult feat. We were assured that we should see many wrecks of stranded ships and boats; accordingly I strained my eyes to the utmost, and could discover nothing. We ran safely in; and thus ended a little journey in the course of which I had seen many new and interesting objects, besides gaining some insight into the mode of life among the sailors. Frequently, when it fell calm, our Arabs would recline on the ground in a circle, singing songs of an inconceivably inharmonious and lugubrious character, while they clapped their hands in cadence, and burst at intervals into a barking laugh. I could not find any thing very amusing in this entertainment; on the contrary, it had the effect of making me feel very melancholy, as displaying these good people in a very idiotic and degrading light. The costume of the sailors was simple in the extreme. A shirt covered them in rather an imperfect manner, and a handkerchief bound round their heads protected them from a coup de soleil. The captain was distinguished from the rest only by his turban, which looked ridiculous enough, surmounting his half-clad form. Their diet consisted of a single warm meal of pilau or beans, eaten in the evening. During the day they stayed their appetites with bread. Their drink was water. The town of Joppa, extending from the sea-shore to the summit of a rather considerable and completely isolated hill, has a most peculiar appearance. The lower street is surrounded by a wall, and appears sufficiently broad; the remaining streets run up the face of the hills, and seem at a distance to be resting on the houses below. Viewing the town from our boat, I could have sworn that people were walking about on flat house-tops. As Joppa boasts neither an inn nor a convent which might shelter a traveller, I waited upon the Consul of the Austrian Empire, Herr D---, who received me very kindly and introduced me to his family, which comprised his lady, three sons, and three daughters. They wore the Turkish costume. The daughters, two of whom were exceedingly beautiful, wore wide trousers, a caftan, and a sash round the waist. On their heads they had little fez-caps, and their hair was divided into fifteen or twenty narrow plaits, interwoven with little gold coins, and a larger one at the end of each plait. A necklace of gold coins encircled their necks. The mother was dressed in exactly the same way. When elderly women have little or no hair left, they make up with artificial silk plaits for the deficiencies of nature. The custom of wearing coins as ornaments is so prevalent throughout Syria, that the very poorest women, girls, and children strive to display as many as possible. Where they cannot sport gold, they content themselves with silver money; and where even this metal is not attainable, with little coins of copper and other baser metals. The Consul and his son were also clothed in the Turkish garb; but instead of a turban the father wore an old cocked hat, which gave him an indescribably ludicrous appearance. A son and a daughter of this worthy patron of the semi-Turkish, semi-European garb, had but one eye, a defect frequently met with in Syria. It is generally supposed to be caused by the dry heat, the fine particles of sand, and the intense glare of the chalky hills. As I reached Joppa early in the afternoon, I proceeded in company of the Consul to view the town and its environs. In dirt, bad paving, etc., I found it equal to any of the towns I had yet seen. The lower street, near the sea, alone is broad and bustling, with loaded and unloaded camels passing continually to and fro. The bazaar is composed of some miserable booths containing common provisions and a few cheap wares. The neighbourhood of Joppa is exceedingly fertile. Numerous large gardens, with trees laden with all kinds of tropical fruits, and guarded by impenetrable hedges of the Indian fig-tree, form a half- circle round the lower portion of the town. The Indian fig-tree, which I here saw for the first time, has an odd appearance. From its stem, which is very dwarfish, leaves a foot in length, six inches in breadth, and half an inch in thickness, shoot forth. This tree seldom sends forth branches; the leaves grow one out of another, and at the extremity the fruit is formed. Its length is about two or three inches. Ten or twenty such figs are frequently found adhering to a single leaf. I could not conceive how it happened that in these hot countries, without rain to refresh them, the trees all looked so healthy and beautiful. This fact, I found, was owing to the numerous channels cut through the gardens, which are thus artificially irrigated. The heavy dews and cool nights also tend to restore the drooping vegetation. One great ornament of our gardens was, however, totally wanting--a lawn with wild flowers. Trees and vegetables here grow out of the sandy or stony earth, a circumstance hardly noticed at a distance, but which produces a disagreeable effect on a near view. Flowers I found none. The whole region round Joppa is so covered with sand, that one sinks ankle-deep at every step. Consul D--- fulfils the duties of two consulates, the Austrian and the French. From both these offices he derives no benefit but the honour. By some people this honour would be highly valued, but many would rate it at nothing at all. This family, however, seems to have a great idea of honour; for the consul's office is hereditary, and I found the son of the present dignitary already looking forward to filling his place. In the evening I was present at a real Oriental entertainment in the house of this friendly family. Mats, carpets, and pillows were spread out on the terrace of the house, and a very low table placed in the centre. Round this the family sat, or rather reclined, cross-legged. I was accommodated with a chair somewhat higher than the table. Beside my plate and that of the Consul were laid a knife and fork, that appeared to have been hunted out from some lumber closet; the rest ate with a species of natural knife and fork, namely--fingers. The dishes were not at all to my taste. I had still too much of the European about me, and too little appetite, to be able to endure what these good people seemed to consider immense delicacies. The first dish appeared in the form of a delicate pilau, composed of mutton, cucumbers, and a quantity of spice, which rendered it more unpalatable to me than common pilau. Then followed sliced cucumbers sprinkled with salt; but as the chief ingredients, vinegar and oil, were entirely wanting, I was obliged to force down the cucumber as best I could. Next came rice-milk, so strongly flavoured with attar of roses, that the smell alone was more than enough for me; and now at length the last course was put on the table--stale cheese made of ewe's milk, little unpeeled girkins, which my entertainers coolly discussed rind and all, and burnt hazel-nuts. The bread, which is flat like pancakes, is not baked in ovens, but laid on metal plates or hot stones, and turned when one side is sufficiently done. It tastes better than I should have expected. {101} Our conversation during dinner was most interesting. Some of the family spoke a little Italian, but this little was pronounced with such a strong Greek accent, that I was obliged to guess at the greater portion of what was said. No doubt they had to do the same with me. The worthy Consul, indeed, affirmed that he knew French very well; but for this evening at least, his memory seemed to have given him the slip. Much was spoken, and little understood. The same thing is said often to be the case in learned societies; so it was not of much consequence. There are many different kinds of cucumber in Syria, where they are a favourite dish with rich and poor. I found numerous varieties, but none that I found superior to our German one. Another favourite fruit is the water-melon, here called "bastek." These also I found neither larger in size nor better flavoured than the melons I had eaten in southern Hungary. The Consul's house seems sufficiently large; but the architectural arrangement is so irregular that the extended area contains but few rooms and very little comfort. The apartments are lofty and large, extremely ill-furnished, and not kept in the best possible order. I slept in the apartment of the married daughter; but had it not been for the beds standing round, I should rather have looked upon it as an old store-closet than a lady's sleeping-room. May 28th. At five o'clock in the morning Mr. Bartlett's servant came to fetch me away, as we were at once to continue our journey. I betook myself to the house of the English Consul, where I found neither a horse nor any thing else prepared for our departure. It is necessary to look calmly upon these irregularities here in the East, where it is esteemed a fortunate occurrence if the horses and mukers (as the drivers of horses and donkeys are called) are only a few hours behind their time. Thus our horses made their appearance at half-past five instead of at four, the hour for which they had been ordered. Our baggage was soon securely fixed, for we left the greater portion of our effects at Joppa, and took with us only what was indispensably necessary. As the clock struck six we rode out of the gate of Joppa, and immediately afterwards reached a large well with a marble basin. Near places of this description a great number of people are always congregated, and more women and girls are seen than appear elsewhere. The dress of females belonging to the lower orders consists of a long blue garment fastened round the throat, and reaching below the ankle. They completely cover the head and face, frequently without even leaving openings for the eyes. Some females, on the other hand, go abroad with their faces totally uncovered. These are, however, exceptional cases. The women carry their water-pitchers on their head or shoulder, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years, in the manner we find represented in the oldest pictures. But unfortunately I could discover neither the grace in their gait, the dignity in their movements, nor the physical beauty in their appearance, that I had been led to expect. On the contrary, I found squalor and poverty more prevalent than I had thought possible. We rode on amid the gardens, every moment meeting a little caravan of camels. Immediately beyond the gardens we descry the fruitful valley of Sharon, extending more than eight miles in length, and to a still greater distance in breadth. Here and there we find villages built on hills, and the whole presents the appearance of an extremely fertile and well-populated region. In all directions we saw large herds of sheep and goats; the latter generally of a black or brown colour, with long pendent ears. The foreground of the picture is formed by the Judaean mountains, a range apparently composed of a number of barren rocks. A ride of two hours through this plain, which is less sandy than the immediate neighbourhood of Joppa, brought us to a mosque, where we made halt for a quarter of an hour and ate our breakfast, consisting of some hard-boiled eggs, a piece of bread, and a draught of lukewarm water from the cistern. Our poor beasts fared even worse than ourselves--they received nothing but water. On leaving this place to resume our journey across the plain, we not only suffered dreadfully from the heat, which had reached 30 degrees Reaumur, but were further persecuted by a species of minute gnats, which hovered round us in large swarms, crept into our noses and ears, and annoyed us in such a manner that it required the utmost of our patience and determination to prevent us from turning back at once. Fortunately we only met with these tormentors in those parts where the corn had been cut and was still in the fields. They are not much larger than a pin's head, and look more like flies than gnats. They are always met with in great swarms, and sting so sharply that they frequently raise large boils. The vegetation was at this season already in so forward a state that we frequently passed stubble-fields, and found that the wheat had in several cases been already garnered up. Throughout the whole of Syria, and in that part of Egypt whither my journey afterwards led me, I never once saw corn or vegetables, wood or stores, carried in wagons; they were invariably borne by horses or asses. In Syria I could understand the reason of this proceeding. With the exception, perhaps, of the eight or ten miles across the valley of Sharon, the road is too stony and uneven to admit the passage of the lightest and smallest carts. In Egypt, however, this is not the case, and yet wagons have not been introduced. A most comical effect was produced when we met long processions of small donkeys, so completely laden with corn, that neither their heads nor their feet remained visible. The sheaves seemed to be moving spontaneously, or to be propelled by the power of steam. Frequently after a train of this kind has passed, lofty grey heads appear, surrounded by a load piled up to so great a height, that one would suppose large corn-wagons were approaching rather than the "ship of the desert," the camel. The traveller's attention is continually attracted to some novel and curious object totally dissimilar to any thing he has seen at home. Towards ten o'clock we arrived at Ramla, a place situate on a little hill, and discernible from a great distance. Before reaching the town, we had to pass through an olive-wood. Leaving our horses beneath a shady tree, we entered the coppice on the right: a walk of about a quarter of a mile brought us to the "Tower of the Forty Martyrs," which was converted into a church during the time of the Knights Templars, and now serves as a dwelling for dervishes. It is a complete ruin, and I could scarcely believe that it was still habitable. We made no stay at Ramda, a place only remarkable for a convent built, it is said, on the site of Joseph of Arimathea's house. The Syrian convents are built more like fortresses than like peaceful dwellings. They are usually surrounded by strong and lofty walls, furnished with loopholes for cannon. The great gate is kept continually closed, and barred and bolted from within for greater security; a little postern is opened to admit visitors, but even this is only done in time of peace, and when there is no fear of the plague. At length, towards noon, we approached the mountains of Judaea. Here we must bid farewell to the beautiful fruitful valley and to the charming road, and pursue our journey through a stony region, which we do not pass without difficulty. At the entrance of the mountain-chain lies a miserable village; near this village is a well, and here we halted to refresh ourselves and water our poor horses. It was not without a great deal of trouble and some expense that we managed to obtain a little water; for all the camels, asses, goats, and sheep from far and wide were collected here, eagerly licking up every drop of the refreshing element they could secure. Little did I think that I should ever be glad to quench my thirst with so disgusting a beverage as the muddy, turbid, and lukewarm water they gave me from this well. We once more filled our leathern bottles, and proceeded with fresh courage up the stony path, which quickly became so narrow, that without great difficulty and danger we could not pass the camels which we frequently met. Fortunately a few camels out of every herd are generally provided with bells, so that their approach is heard at some distance, and one can prepare for them accordingly. The Bedouins and Arabs generally wear no garment but a shirt barely reaching to the knee. Their head is protected by a linen cloth, to which a thick rope wound twice round the head gives a very good effect. A few have a striped jacket over their shirt, and the rich men or chiefs frequently wear turbans. Our road now continues to wind upwards, through ravines between rocks and mountains, and over heaps of stones. Here and there single olive-trees are seen sprouting from the rocky clefts. Ugly as this tree is, it still forms a cheerful feature in the desert places where it grows. Now and then we climbed hills whence we had a distant view of the sea. These glimpses increase the awe which inspires the traveller when he considers on what ground he is wandering, and whither he is bending his steps. Every step we now take leads us past places of religious importance; every ruin, every fragment of a fortress or tower, above which the rocky walls rise like terraces, speaks of eventful times long gone by. An uninterrupted ride of five hours over very bad roads, from the entrance of the mountain-range, added to the extreme heat and total want of proper refreshment, suddenly brought on such a violent giddiness that I could scarcely keep myself from falling off my horse. Although we had been on horseback for eleven hours since leaving Joppa, I was so much afraid that Mr. B. would consider me weak and ailing, and perhaps change his intention of accompanying me from Jerusalem back to Joppa, that I refrained from acquainting him with the condition in which I felt myself. I therefore dismounted (had I not done so, I should soon have fallen down), and walked with tottering steps beside my horse, until I felt so far recovered that I could mount once more. Mr. B. had determined to perform the distance from Joppa to Jerusalem (a sixteen hours' ride) at one stretch. He indeed asked me if I could bear so much fatigue; but I was unwilling to abuse his kindness, and therefore assured him that I could manage to ride on for five or six hours longer. Fortunately for my reputation, my companion was soon afterwards attacked with the same symptoms that troubled me so much; he now began to think that it might, after all, be advisable to rest for a few hours in the next village, especially as we could not hope in any case to reach the gates of Jerusalem before sundown. I felt silently thankful for this opportune occurrence, and left the question of going on or stopping altogether to the decision of my fellow- traveller, particularly as I knew the course he would choose. Thus I accomplished my object without being obliged to confess my weakness. In pursuance of this resolve, we stayed in the neighbouring village of "Kariet el Areb," the ancient Emmaus, where the risen Saviour met the disciples, and where we find a ruin of a Christian church in a tolerable state of preservation. The building is now used as a stable. Some years ago this was the haunt of a famous robber, who was scheikh of the place, and let no Frank pass before he had paid whatever tribute he chose to demand. Since the accession of Mehemet Ali these exactions have ceased both here and in Jerusalem, where money was demanded of the stranger for admission into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred places. Even highway robberies, which were once on a time of daily occurrence among these mountains, are now rarely heard of. We took possession of the entrance-hall of a mosque, near which a delicious spring sparkled forth from a grotto. Seldom has any thing strengthened and refreshed me so much as the water of this spring. I recovered completely from my indisposition, and was able to enjoy the beautiful evening. As soon as the scheikh of the village heard that a party of Franks had arrived, he despatched four or five dishes of provisions to us. Of all these preparations we could only eat one--the butter-milk. The other dishes, a mixture of honey, cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, onions, oil, olives, etc., we generously bestowed upon the dragoman and the muker, who caused them quickly to disappear. An hour afterwards the scheikh came in person to pay his respects. We reclined on the steps of the hall; and while the men smoked and drank coffee, a conversation of a very uninteresting kind was kept up, the dragoman acting as interpreter. At length the scheikh seemed seized with the idea that we might possibly be tired with our journey. He took his leave, and offered unasked to send us two men as sentries, which he did. Thus we could go to rest in perfect safety under the open sky in the midst of a Turkish village. But before we retired to rest, my companion was seized with the rather original idea that we should pursue our journey at midnight. He asked me, indeed, if I was afraid, but at the same time observed, that it would be much safer for us to act upon his suggestion, as no one would suspect our departure by such a dangerous road at midnight. I certainly felt a little afraid, but my pride would not allow me to confess the truth; so our people received the order to be prepared to set out at midnight. Thus we four persons, alone and totally unarmed, travelled at midnight through the wildest and most dangerous regions. Fortunately the bright moon looked smilingly down upon us, and illuminated our path so brightly, that the horses carried us with firm step over every obstruction. I was, I must confess, grievously frightened by the shadows! I saw living things moving to and fro-- forms gigantic and forms dwarfish seemed sometimes approaching us, sometimes hiding behind masses of rock, or sinking back into nothingness. Lights and shadows, fears and anxiety, thus took alternate possession of my imagination. A couple of miles from our starting-place we came upon a brook crossed by a narrow stone bridge. This brook is remarkable only as having been that from which David collected the five stones wherewith he slew the Philistine giant. At the season of my visit there was no water to be seen; the bed of the stream was completely dry. About an hour's journey from Jerusalem the valley opens, and little orchards give indication of a more fertile country, as well as of the proximity of the Holy City. Silently and thoughtfully we approached our destination, straining our eyes to the utmost to pierce the jealous twilight that shrouded the distance from our gaze. From the next hill we hoped to behold our sacred goal; but "hope deferred" is often the lot of mortals. We had to ascend another height, and another; at length the Mount of Olives lay spread before us, and lastly JERUSALEM. CHAPTER VII. Residence at Jerusalem--Catholic church--The "Nuova Casa"--Via Dolorosa--Pilate's house--The Mosque Omar--Herod's house--Church of the Holy Sepulchre--Disturbances at the Greek Easter feasts--Knights of the Holy Sepulchre--Mount of Olives--Adventure among the ruin-- Mount of Offence--Valley of Jehosaphat--Siloam--Mount Sion-- Jeremiah's grotto--Graves. The red morning dawn had began to tinge the sky as we stood before the walls of Jerusalem, and with it the most beauteous morning of my life dawned upon me! I was so lost in reflection and in thankful emotion, that I saw and heard nothing of what was passing around me. And yet I should find it impossible to describe what I thought, what I felt. My emotion was deep and powerful; my expression of it would be poor and cold. At half past four o'clock in the morning of the 29th May we arrived at the "Bethlehem Gate." We were obliged to wait half an hour before this gate was opened; then we rode through the still silent and deserted streets of the Nuova Casa (Pilgrim-house), a building devoted by the Franciscan friars to the reception of rich and poor Roman Catholics and Protestants. I left my baggage in the room allotted to me, and hastened into the church, to lighten the weight on my heart by fervent prayer. The entrance into the church looks like the door of a private house; the building is small, but still sufficiently large for the Roman Catholic congregation. The altar is richly furnished, and the organ is a very bad one. The male and female portions of the congregation are separated from each other, the young as well as the old, and all sit or kneel on the ground. Chairs there are none in this church. The costume of the Christians is precisely the same as that of the Syrians. The women wear boots of yellow morocco, and over these slippers, which they take off on entering the church. In the street their faces are completely, in the church only partially, muffled, and the faces of the girls not at all. Their dress consists of a white linen gown, and a large shawl of the same material, which completely envelops them. They were all cleanly and neatly dressed. The amount of devotion manifested by these people is very small; the most trifling circumstance suffices to distract their attention. For instance, my appearance seemed to create quite a sensation among them, and they made their remarks upon me to one another so openly both by words and gestures, that I found it quite impossible to give my mind to seriousness and devotion. Some of them pushed purposely against me, and put out their hands to grasp my bonnet, etc. They conversed together a good deal, and prayed very little. The children behaved no better; these little people ate their breakfast while the service was going on, and occasionally jostled each other, probably to keep themselves awake. The good people here must fancy they are doing a meritorious work by passing two or three hours in the church; no one seems to care _how_ this time is spent, or they would assuredly have been taught better. I had been in the church rather more than an hour when a clergyman stepped up to me and accosted me in my native language. He was a German, and, in fact, an Austrian. He promised to visit me in the course of a few hours. I returned to the Nuova Casa, and now, for the first time, had leisure to examine my apartment. The arrangement was simple in the extreme. An iron bedstead, with a mattress, coverlet, and bolster, a very dingy table, with two chairs, a small bench, and a cupboard, all of deal, composed the whole furniture. These chattels, and also the windows, some panes of which were broken, may once, in very ancient times, have been clean. The walls were of plaster, and the floor was paved with large slabs of stone. Chimneys are no more to be found in this country. I did not see any until my return to Sicily. I now laid myself down for a couple of hours to get a little rest; for during my journey hither from Constantinople I had scarcely slept at all. At eleven o'clock the German priest, Father Paul, visited me, in order to explain the domestic arrangements to me. Dinner is eaten at twelve o'clock, and supper at seven. At breakfast we get coffee without sugar or milk; for dinner, mutton-broth, a piece of roast kid, pastry prepared with oil or a dish of cucumbers, and, as a concluding course, roast or spiced mutton. Twice in the week, namely on Fridays and Saturdays, we have fast-day fare; but if the feast of a particular saint falls during the week, a thing that frequently occurs, we hold three fast-days, the one of the saint's day being kept as a time of abstinence. The fare on fast-days consists of a dish of lentils, an omelette, and two dishes of salt fish, one hot and the other cold. Bread and wine, as also these provisions, are doled out in sufficient quantities. But every thing is very indifferently cooked, and it takes a long time for a stranger to accustom himself to the ever-recurring dishes of mutton. In Syria oxen and calves are not killed during the summer season; so that from the 19th of May until my journey to Egypt in the beginning of September, I could get neither beef-soup nor beef. In this convent no charge is made either for board or lodging, and every visitor may stay there for a whole month. At most it is customary to give a voluntary subscription towards the masses; but no one asks if a traveller has given much, little, or nothing at all, or whether he is a Roman Catholic, a Protestant, or a votary of any other religion. In this respect the Franciscan order is much to be commended. The priests are mostly Spaniards and Italians; very few of them belong to other nations. Father Paul was kind enough to offer his services as my guide, and to-day I visited several of the holy places in company with him. We began with the Via Dolorosa, the road which our Lord is said to have trodden when for the last time he wandered as God-man on earth, bowed down by the weight of the cross, on his way to Golgotha. The spots where Christ sank exhausted are marked by fragments of the pillars which St. Helena caused to be attached to the houses on either side of the way. Further on we reach the "Zwerchgasse," the place whither the Virgin Mary is said to have come in haste to see her beloved Son for the last time. Next we visited Pilate's house, which is partly a ruin, the remaining portion serving as a barrack for Turkish soldiers. I was shewn the spot where the "holy stairs" stood, up which our Lord is said to have walked. On my return, I saw these stairs in the church of S. Giovanni di Laterani. They also pretend to show the place where the Saviour was brought out before the multitude by Pilate. A little distance off, in the midst of a dark vault, they shew the traveller the stone to which Jesus was bound when "they scourged Him." We ascended the highest terrace of this house, as this spot affords the best view of the magnificent mosque of Omar, standing in a large courtyard. With this exterior view the traveller is fain to be content; for the Turks are here much more fanatical than those in Constantinople and many other towns, so that an attempt to penetrate even into the courtyard would be unsuccessful; the intruder would run the risk of being assailed with a shower of stones. But in proportion as the Turks are strict in the observance of their own ceremonies and customs, so they respect those Christians who are religious and devotional. Every Christian can go with perfect impunity to pray at all the places which are sacred in his eyes, without fear of being taunted or annoyed by the Turkish passers-by. On the contrary, the Mussulman steps respectfully aside; for even he venerates the Saviour as a great prophet, and the Virgin as his mother. Not far from Pilate's house stands the building designated as that of Herod; it is, however, a complete ruin. The house of the rich man, at whose gate the beggar Lazarus lay, has shared the same fate; but from the ruins one may conclude how magnificent the building must originally have been. In the house of Saint Veronica a stone is pointed out on which they shew you a footprint of the Saviour. In another house two footprints of the Virgin Mary are exhibited. Father Paul also drew my attention to the houses which stood on the spot where Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were born. These houses are all inhabited by Turks, but any one may obtain admittance upon payment of a small fee. The following day I visited the church of the Holy Sepulchre. The way lies through several narrow and dirty streets. In the lanes near the church are booths like those at Maria Zell in Steiermark, and many other places of pilgrimage, where they sell wreaths of roses, shells of mother-of-pearl, crucifixes, etc. The open space before the church is neat enough. Opposite lies the finest house in Jerusalem, its terraces gay with flowers. Visitors to this church will do wisely to provide themselves with a sufficient number of para, as they may expect to be surrounded by a goodly tribe of beggars. The church is always locked; the key is in the custody of some Turks, who open the sacred edifice when asked to do so. It is customary to give them three or four piastres for their pains, with which sum they are satisfied, and remain at the entrance during the whole time the stranger is in the church, reclining on divans, drinking coffee and smoking tobacco. At the entrance of the church we noticed a long square stone on the ground; this is the "stone of anointing." In the centre of the nave a little chapel has been built; it is divided into two parts. In the first of these compartments is a stone slab encased in marble. This is vehemently asserted to be the identical stone on which the angel sat when he announced our Lord's resurrection to the women who came to embalm his body. In the second compartment, which is of the same size as the first, stands the sarcophagus or tomb of the Saviour, of white marble. The approach is by such a low door that one has to stoop exceedingly in order to enter. The tomb occupies the whole length of the chapel, and answers the purpose of an altar. We could not look into the sarcophagus. The illumination of this chapel is very grand both by night and day; forty-seven lamps are kept continually burning above the grave. The portion of the chapel containing the tomb is so small, that when the priest reads mass only two or three people have room to stand and listen. The chapel is entirely built of marble, and belongs to the Roman Catholics; but the Greeks have the right of celebrating mass alternately with them. At the farther end of the chapel the Copts have a little mean- looking altar of wood, surrounded by walls of lath. All round the chapel are niches belonging to the different religious sects. In this church I was also shewn the subterranean niche in which Jesus is said to have been a prisoner; also the niche where the soldiers cast lots for our Saviour's garments, and the chapel containing the grave of St. Nicodemus. Not far from this chapel is the little Roman Catholic church. A flight of twenty-seven steps leads downwards to the chapel of St. Helena, where the holy woman sat continually and prayed, while she caused search to be made for the true cross. A few steps more lead us down to the spot where the cross was found. A marble slab points out the place. Mounting the steps once more, we come to the niche containing the pillar to which Jesus was bound when they crowned him with thorns. It is called the pillar of scorn. The pillar at which Jesus was scourged, a piece of which is preserved in Rome, is also shown. The chapel belonging to the Greeks is very spacious, and may almost be termed a church within a church. It is beautifully decorated. It is very difficult to find the way in this church, which resembles a labyrinth. Now we are obliged to ascend a flight of stairs, now again to descend. The architect certainly deserves great praise for having managed so cleverly to unite all these holy places under one roof; and St. Helena has performed a most meritorious action in thus rescuing from oblivion the sacred sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. I was told, that when the Greeks celebrate their Easter here, the ceremonies seldom conclude without much quarrelling and confusion. These irregularities are considerably increased when the Greek Easter happens to fall at the same time as that of the Roman Catholics. On these occasions, there are not only numerous broken heads, but some of the combatants are even frequently carried away dead. The Turks generally find it necessary to interfere, to restore peace and order among the Christians. What opinion can these nations, whom we call Infidels, have of us Christians, when they see with what hatred and virulence each sect of Christians pursues the other? When will this dishonourable bigotry cease? On the third day after my arrival at Jerusalem, a small caravan of six or seven travellers, two gentlemen namely, and their attendants, applied for admittance at our convent. An arrival of this kind, particularly if the new-comers are Franks, is far too important to admit of our delaying the inquiry from what country the wanderers have arrived. How agreeably was I surprised, when Father Paul came to me with the intelligence that these gentlemen were both Austrian subjects. What a singular coincidence! So far from my native country, I was thus suddenly placed in the midst of my own people. Father Paul was a native of Vienna, and the two counts, Berchtold and Salm Reifferscheit, were Bohemian cavaliers. As soon as I had completely recovered from the fatigues of my journey, and had collected my thoughts, I passed a whole night in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. I confessed in the afternoon, and afterwards joined the procession, which at four o'clock visits all the places rendered sacred by our Saviour's passion; I carried a wax taper, the remains of which I afterwards took back with me into my native country, as a lasting memorial. This ceremony ended, the priests retired to their cells, and the few people who were present left the church. I alone stayed behind, as I intended to remain there all night. A solemn stillness reigned throughout the church; and now I was enabled to visit, uninterrupted and alone, all the sacred places, and to give myself wholly up to my meditations. Truly these were the most blissful hours of my life; and he who has lived to enjoy such hours has lived long enough. A place near the organ was pointed out to me where I might enjoy a few hours of repose. An old Spanish woman, who lives like a nun, acts as guide to those who pass a night in the church. At midnight the different services begin. The Greeks and Armenians beat and hammer upon pendent plates or rods of metal; the Roman Catholics play on the organ, and sing and pray aloud; while the priests of other religions likewise sing and shout. A great and inharmonious din is thus caused. I must confess that this midnight mass did not produce upon me the effect I had anticipated. The constant noise and multifarious ceremonies are calculated rather to disconcert than to inspire the stranger. I much preferred the peace and repose that reigned around, after the service had concluded, to all the pomp and circumstance attending it. Accompanied by my Spanish guide, I ascended to the Roman Catholics' choir, where prayers were said aloud from midnight until one o'clock. At four o'clock in the morning I heard several masses, and received the Eucharist. At eight o'clock the Turks opened the door at my request, and I went home. The few Roman Catholic priests who live in the church of the Holy Sepulchre stay there for three months at a time, to perform the services. During this time they are not allowed to quit the church or the convent for a single instant. After the three months have elapsed, they are relieved by other priests. On the 10th of June I was present at the ceremony of admission into the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. Counts Zichy, Wratislaw, and Salm Reifferscheit were, at their own request, installed as knights of the Sepulchre. The inauguration took place in the chapel. The chief priest having taken his seat on a chair of state, the candidate for knighthood knelt before him, and took the customary oaths to defend the holy church, to protect widows and orphans, etc. During this time the priests who stood round said prayers. Now one of the spurs of Godfrey de Bouillon was fastened on the heel of the knight; the sword of this hero was put into his hands, the sheath fastened to his side, and a cross with a heavy gold chain, that had also belonged to Godfrey de Bouillon, was put round his neck. Then the kneeling man received the stroke of knighthood on his head and shoulders, the priests embraced the newly-elected knight, and the ceremony was over. A plentiful feast, given by the new-chosen knights, concluded the solemnity. Distant somewhat less than a mile from Jerusalem is the Mount of Olives. Emerging from St. Stephen's Gate, we pass the Turkish burial-ground, and reach the spot where St. Stephen was stoned. Not far off we see the bed of the brook Cedron, which is at this season of the year completely dried up. A stone bridge leads across the brook; adjoining it is a stone slab where they shew traces of the footsteps of the Saviour, as He was brought across this bridge from Gethsemane, and stumbled and fell. Crossing this bridge, we arrive at the grotto where Jesus sweat blood. This grotto still retains its original form. A plain wooden altar has been erected there, a few years since, by a Bavarian prince, and the entrance is closed by an iron gate. Not far off is Gethsemane. Eight olive-trees are here to be seen that have attained a great age; nowhere else had I seen these trees with such massive trunks, though I had frequently passed through whole plantations of olives. Those who are learned in natural history assert that the olive-tree cannot live to so great an age as to render it possible that these venerable trunks existed at the time when Jesus passed his last night at Gethsemane in prayer and supplication. As this tree, however, propagates itself, these trees may be sprouts from the ancient stems. The space around the roots has been strengthened with masonry, to afford a support to these patriarchal trunks, and the eight trees are surrounded by a wall three or four feet in height. No layman may enter this spot unaccompanied by a priest, on pain of excommunication; it is also forbidden to pluck a single leaf. The Turks also hold these trees in reverence, and would not injure one of them. Close by is the spot where the three disciples are said to have slept during the night of their Master's agony. We were shown marks on two rocks, said to have been footsteps of these apostles! The footsteps of the third disciple we could not discover. A little to one side is the place where Judas betrayed his Master. The little church containing the grave of the Virgin Mary stands near the "Grotto of Anguish." We descend by a broad marble flight of fifty steps to the tomb, which is also used as an altar. About the middle of the staircase are two niches with altars; within these are deposited the bones of the Virgin Mary's parents and of St. Joseph. This chapel belongs to the Greeks. From the foot of the Mount of Olives to its summit is a walk of three quarters of an hour. The whole mountain is desert and sterile; nothing is found growing upon it but olives; and from the summit of this mountain our Saviour ascended into heaven. The spot was once marked by a church, which was afterwards replaced by a mosque: even this building is now in ruins. Only twelve years ago a little chapel, of very humble appearance, was erected here; it now stands in the midst of old walls; but here again a footprint of our Lord is shown and reverenced. On this stone it is asserted that He stood before He was taken up into heaven. Not far off, we are shown the place where the fig-tree grew that Jesus cursed, and the field where Judas hanged himself. One afternoon I visited many of these sites, in company with Count Berchtold. As we were climbing about the ruins near the mosque, a sturdy goatherd, armed with a formidable bludgeon, came before us, and demanded "backsheesh" (a gift, or an alms) in a very peremptory tone. Neither of us liked to take out our purse, for, fear the insolent beggar should snatch it from our hands; so we gave him nothing. Upon this he seized the Count by the arm, and shouted out something in Arabic which we could not understand, though we could guess pretty accurately what he meant. The Count disengaged his arm, and we proceeded almost to push and wrestle our way into the open field, which was luckily only a few paces off. By good fortune, also, several people appeared near us, upon seeing whom the fellow retired. This incident convinced us of the fact that Franks should not leave the city unattended. As the Mount of Olives is the highest point in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, it commands the best view of the town and its environs. The city is large, and lies spread over a considerable area. The number of inhabitants is estimated at 25,000. As in the remaining cities of Syria, the houses here are built of stone, and frequently adorned with round cupolas. Jerusalem is surrounded by a very lofty and well-preserved wall, the lower portion composed of such massive blocks of stone, that one might imagine these huge fragments date from the period of the city's capture by Titus. Of the mosques, that of Omar, with its lead-covered roof, has the best appearance; it lies in an immense courtyard, which is neatly kept. This mosque is said to occupy the site of Solomon's temple. From the Mount of Olives we can plainly distinguish all the convents, and the different quarters of the Catholics, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, etc. The "Mount of Offence" (so called on account of Solomon's idolatry) rises at the side of the Mount of Olives, and is of no great elevation. Of the temple, and the buildings which Solomon caused to be erected for his wives, but few fragments of walls remain. I had also been told, that the Jordan and the Dead Sea might be seen from this mountain; but I could distinguish neither, probably on account of a mist which obscured the horizon. At the foot of the Mount of Olives lies the valley of Jehosaphat. The length of this valley does not certainly exceed three miles; neither is it remarkable for its breadth. The brook Cedron intersects this valley; but it only contains water during the rainy season; at other times all trace of it is lost. The town of Jerusalem is rather bustling, particularly the poor- looking bazaar and the Jews' quarter; the latter portion of the city is very densely populated, and exhales an odour offensive beyond description; and here the plague always seizes its first victims. The Greek convent is not only very handsome, but of great extent. Hither most of the pilgrims flock, at Easter-time to the number of five or six thousand. Then they are all herded together, and every place is crowded with occupants; even the courtyard and terraces are full. This convent is the richest of all, because every pilgrim received here has to pay an exorbitant price for the very worst accommodation. It is said that the poorest seldom escape for less than four hundred piastres. Handsomest of all is the Armenian convent; standing in the midst of gardens, it has a most cheerful appearance. It is asserted to be built on the site where St. James was decapitated, an event commemorated by numerous pictures in the church; but most of the pictures, both here and in the remaining churches, are bad beyond conception. Like the Greeks, the Armenian priests enjoy the reputation of thoroughly understanding how to make a harvest out of their visitors, whom they are said generally to send away with empty pockets. As an amends, however, they offer them a great quantity of _spiritual_ food. In the valley of Jehosaphat we find many tombs of ancient and modern date. The most ancient among these tombs is that of Absolom; a little temple of pieces of rock, but without an entrance. The second is the tomb of Zacharias, also hewn out of the rock, and divided within into two compartments. The third belongs to King Jehosaphat, and is small and unimportant; one might almost call it a mere block of stone. There are many more tombs cut out of the rock. From this place we reach the Jewish burial-ground. The little village of Sila also lies in this valley. It is so humble, and all its houses (which are constructed of stone) are so small, that wandering continually among tombs, the traveller would rather take them to be ruined resting-places of the dead than habitations of the living. Opposite this village lies "Mary's Well," so called because the Virgin Mary fetched water here every day. The inhabitants of Siloam follow her example to this day. A little farther on is the pool of Siloam, where our Lord healed the man who was born blind. This pool is said to possess the remarkable property, that the water disappears and returns several times in the course of twenty-four hours. At the extremity of the valley of Jehosaphat a small hill rises like a keystone; in this hill are several grottoes, formed either by nature or art, which also once served as sepulchres. They are called the "rock-graves." At present the greater portion of them are converted into stables, and are in so filthy a state that it is impossible to enter them. I peeped into one or two, and saw nothing but a cavern divided into two parts. At the summit of these rock- graves lies the "Field of Blood," bought by the priests for the thirty pieces of silver which Judas cast down in the temple. In the neighbourhood of the Field of Blood rises the hill of Sion. Here, it is said, stood the house of Caiaphas the high-priest, whither our Lord was brought a prisoner. A little Armenian church now occupies the supposed site. The tomb of David, also situated on this hill, has been converted into a mosque, in which we are shewn the place where the Son of Man ate the last Passover with His disciples. The burial-grounds of the Roman Catholics, Armenians, and Greeks surround this hill. The "Hill of Bad Counsel," so called because it is said that here the judges determined to crucify Christ, rises in the immediate vicinity of Mount Sion. A few traces of the ruins of Caiaphas' house are yet visible. The "Grotto of Jeremiah" lies beyond the "Gate of Damascus," in front of which we found, near a cistern, an elaborately-sculptured sarcophagus, which is used as a water-trough. This grotto is larger than any I have yet mentioned. At the entrance stands a great stone, called Jeremiah's bed, because the prophet is said generally to have slept upon it. Two miles farther on we come to the graves of the judges and the kings. We descend an open pit, three or four fathoms deep, forming the courtyard. This pit is a square about seventy feet long and as many wide. On one side of this open space we enter a large hall, its broad portal ornamented with beautiful sculpture, in the form of flowers, fruit, and arabesques. This hall leads to the graves, which run round it, and consist of niches hewn in the rock, just sufficiently large to contain a sarcophagus. Most of these niches were choked up with rubbish, but into some we could still see; they were all exactly alike. These long, narrow, rock- hewn graves reminded me exactly of those I had seen in a vault at Gran, in Hungary. I could almost have supposed the architect at Gran had taken the graves of the valley of Jehosaphat for his model. CHAPTER VIII. Bethlehem--Rachel's grave--Convent at Bethlehem--Beggars--Grotto of the Nativity--Solomon's cisterns--St. John's--Franciscan church at Jerusalem--Mourning women--Eastern weddings--Mish-mish--Excursion to the Jordan and the Dead Sea--Wilderness near Jerusalem--Convent of St. Saba. On the 2d of June I rode, in the company of Counts Berchtold and Salm Reifferscheit and Pater Paul, to Bethlehem. Although, on account of the bad roads, we are obliged to ride nearly the whole distance at a foot-pace, it does not take more than an hour and a half to accomplish the journey. The view we enjoy during this excursion is as grand as it is peculiar. So far as the eye can reach, it rests upon stone; the ground is entirely composed of stones; and yet between the rocky interstices grow fruit-trees of all kinds, and grape-vines trail along, besides fields whose productions force their way upwards from the shingly soil. I had already wondered when I saw the "Karst," near Trieste, and the desert region of Gorz; but these sink into insignificance when compared to the scenery of the Judean mountains. It is difficult to conceive how these regions can ever have been smiling and fertile. Doubtless they have appeared to better advantage than at the present period, when the poor inhabitants are ground to the bone by their pachas and officers; but I do not think that meadows and woods can ever have existed here to any extent. On the way we pass a well, surrounded by blocks of stone. At this well the wise men from the East rested, and here the guiding star appeared to them. Midway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem lies the Greek convent dedicated to the prophet Elijah. From hence we can see both towns; on the one hand, the spacious Jerusalem, and on the other, the humble Bethlehem, with some small villages scattered round it. On the right hand we pass "Rachel's grave," a ruined building with a small cupola. Bethlehem lies on a hill, surrounded by several others; with the exception of the convent, it contains not a single handsome building. The inhabitants, half of whom are Catholics, muster about 2500 strong; many live in grottoes and semi-subterranean domiciles, cutting out garlands and other devices in mother-of pearl, etc. The number of houses does not exceed a hundred at the most, and the poverty here seems excessive, for nowhere have I been so much pestered with beggar children as in this town. Hardly has the stranger reached the convent-gates before these urchins are seen rapidly approaching from all quarters. One rushes forward to hold the horse, while a second grasps the stirrup; a third and a fourth present their arm to help you to dismount; and in the end the whole swarm unanimously stretch forth their hands for "backsheesh." In cases like these it is quite necessary to come furnished either with a multiplicity of small coins or with a riding-whip, in order to be delivered in one way or another from the horrible importunity of the diminutive mob. It is very fortunate that the horses here are perfectly accustomed to such scenes; were this not the case, they would take fright and gallop headlong away. The little convent and church are both situated near the town, and are built on the spot where the Saviour was born. The whole is surrounded by a strong fortress-wall, a very low, narrow gate forming the entrance. In front of this fortress extends a handsome well-paved area. So soon as we have passed through the little gate, we find ourselves in the courtyard, or rather in the nave of the church, which is unfortunately more than half destroyed, but must once have been eminent both for its size and beauty. Some traces of mosaic can still be detected on the walls. Two rows of high handsome pillars, forty-eight in number, intersect the interior; and the beam-work, said to be of cedar-wood from Lebanon, looks almost new. Beneath the high altar of this great church is the grotto in which Christ was born. Two staircases lead downwards to it. One of the staircases belongs to the Armenians, the other to the Greeks; the Catholics have none at all. Both the walls and the floor are covered with marble slabs. A marble tablet, with the inscription, "HIC DE VIRGINE MARIA JESUS CHRISTUS NATUS EST," marks the spot whence the true Light shone abroad over the world. A figure of a beaming sun, which receives its light from numerous lamps kept continually burning, is placed in the back-ground of this tablet. The spot where our Saviour was shewn to the worshipping Magi is but few paces distant. An altar is erected opposite, on the place where the manger stood in which the shepherds found our Lord. The manger itself is deposited in the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome. This altar belongs to the Roman Catholics. A little door, quite in the background of the grotto, leads to a subterranean passage communicating with the convent and the Catholic chapel. In this passage another altar has been erected to the memory of the innocents slaughtered and buried here. Proceeding along the passage we come upon the grave of St. Paula and her daughter Eustachia on one side, and that of St. Hieronymus on the other. The body of the latter is, however, deposited at Rome. Like the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, this great church at Bethlehem belongs at once to the Catholics, the Armenians, and the Greeks. Each of these sects has built for itself a little convent adjoining the church. After spending at least a couple of hours here, we rode two miles farther, towards Mount Hebron. At the foot of this mountain we turned off to the left towards the three cisterns of Solomon. These reservoirs are very wide and deep, hewn out of the rock, and still partially covered with a kind of cement resembling marble in its consistency and polish. We descended into the third of these cisterns; it was about five hundred paces long, four hundred broad, and a hundred deep. Not one of these cisterns now contains water; the aqueducts which once communicated with them have entirely vanished. A single rivulet, across which one may easily step, flows beside these giant reservoirs. The region around is barren in the extreme. On returning to our convent at about two o'clock to partake of our frugal but welcome meal, we were surprised to find that another party of travellers, Franks like ourselves, had arrived. The new- comers proved to be Count Zichy and Count Wratislaw, who had travelled from Vienna to Cairo in company with Counts Berchtold and Salm Reifferscheit. At the last-mentioned place the voyagers parted company, one party proceeding to Jerusalem by way of Alexandria, Damietta, and Joppa, while the other bent their course across the burning sands of Africa towards Mount Sinai, and thence continued their journey to Jerusalem by land. Here at length they had the pleasure of meeting once more. A great and general rejoicing, in which we all joined, was the consequence of this event. After dinner we once more visited all the holy places in company of the new-comers; we afterwards went to the so-called "Milk Grotto," distant about half a mile from our convent. In this grotto there is nothing to be seen but a simple altar, before which lights are continually burning. It is not locked, and every passer-by is at liberty to enter. This place is held sacred not only by the Christians, but also by the Turks, who bring many a cruise of oil to fill the lamps after they have cleaned them. In this grotto the Holy Family concealed themselves before the flight into Egypt, and the Virgin for a long time nourished the infant Jesus with her milk, from which circumstance the grotto derives its name. The women in the neighbourhood believe that if they feel unwell during the time they are nursing their children, they have merely to scrape some of the sand from the rocks in this grotto, and to take it as a powder, to regain their health. Half a mile from this grotto we were shown the field in which the angel appeared to announce the birth of the Redeemer to the shepherds. But our newly-arrived friends were not able to visit this spot. They were fain to content themselves with a distant view, as it was high time to think of our return. ST. JOHN'S. On the 4th of June I rode out, accompanied by a guide, to the birth- place of St. John the Baptist, distant about four miles from Jerusalem. The way to this convent lies through the Bethlehem Gate, opposite the convent of the "Holy Cross," a building supposed to stand on the site where the wood was felled for our Saviour's cross! Not far off, the place was pointed out to me where a battle was fought between the Israelites and the Philistines, and where David slew Goliath. Situated in a rocky valley, the convent of St. John is, like all the monasteries in these lands, surrounded by very strong walls. The church of the convent is erected on the spot where the house of Zacharias once stood, and a chapel commemorates the place where St. John first beheld the light. The ascent to this chapel is by a staircase, where a round tablet of stone bears the inscription, "HIC PRAECURSOR DOMINI CHRISTI NATUS EST." Many events of the prophet's life are here portrayed by sculptures in white marble. About a mile from the convent we find the "Grotto of Visitation," where St. Mary met St. Elizabeth. The remains of the latter are interred here. On the very first day of my arrival at Jerusalem I had made some observations, during a visit to the church of St. Francis, which gave me any thing but a high opinion of the behaviour of the Catholics here. This unfavourable impression was confirmed by subsequent visits to the church, so that at length I felt obliged to tell Father Paul that I would rather pray at home than among people who seemed to attend to any thing rather than their devotions. My Frankish costume seemed to be such a stumbling-block in the eyes of these people, that at length a priest came to me, and requested that I would make an alteration in my dress, or at any rate exchange my straw hat for a veil, in which I could muffle my head and face. I promised to discard the obnoxious hat and to wear a handkerchief round my head when I attended church, but refused to muffle my face, and begged the reverend gentleman to inform my fellow-worshippers that this was the first time such a thing had been required of a Frankish woman, and that I thought they would be more profitably employed in looking at their prayer-books than at me, for that He whom we go to church to adore is not a respecter of outward things. In spite of this remonstrance, their behaviour remained the same, so that I was compelled almost to discontinue attending public worship. On great festival-days the high altar of the church of St. Francis is very profusely decorated. It is, in fact, almost overloaded with ornament, and sparkles and glitters with a most dazzling brilliancy. Innumerable candles display the lustre of gold and precious stones. Foremost among the costly ornaments appear a huge gold monstrance presented by the king of Naples, and two splendid candelabra, a gift of the imperial house of Austria. I happened one day to pass a house, from within which a great screaming was to be heard. On inquiring of my companion what was the matter, I was informed that some person had died in that house the day before, and that the sound I heard was the wail of the "mourning women." I requested admission to the room where the deceased lay. Had it not been for the circumstance that a few pictures of saints and a crucifix decorated the walls, I could never have imagined that the dead man was a Catholic. Several "mourning women" sat near the corpse, uttering every now and then such frantic yells, that the neighbourhood rang with their din. In the intervals between these demonstrations they sat comfortably regaling themselves with coffee; after a little time they would again raise their horrible cry. I had seen enough to feel excessively disgusted, and so went away. I was also fortunate enough to visit a newly-married pair. The bride was gorgeously dressed in a silk under-garment, wide trousers of peach-blossom satin, and a caftan of the same material; a rich shawl encircled her waist, and on her feet she wore boots of yellow morocco leather; the slippers had been left, according to the Turkish fashion, at the entrance of the chamber. An ornamental head-dress of rich gold brocade and fresh flowers completed the bride's attire; her hair, arranged in a number of thin plaits and decorated with coins, fell down upon her shoulders, and on her neck glittered several rows of ducats and larger gold pieces. Costumes of this kind are only seen in the family circle, and on the occasion of some great event. Seldom or never are strange men allowed to behold the ladies in their gorgeous apparel; so that it is fruitless to expect to see picturesque female costumes in the public places of the East. After the marriage ceremony, which is always performed during the forenoon, the young wife is compelled to sit for the remainder of the day in a corner of the room with her face turned towards the wall. She is not allowed to answer any question put by her husband, her parents, or by any one whatever; still less is she permitted to offer a remark herself. This silence is intended to typify the bride's sorrow at changing her condition. During my visit, the bridegroom sat next to his bride, vainly endeavouring to lure a few words from her. On my rising to depart, the young wife inclined her head towards me, but without raising her eyes from the ground. In Jerusalem, almost all the women and girls wear veils when they go abroad. It was only in church, and in their own houses, that I had an opportunity of fairly seeing these houris. Among the girls I found many an interesting head; but the women who have attained the age of twenty-six or twenty-eight years already look worn and ugly; so that here, as in all tropical countries, we behold a great number of very plain faces, among which handsome ones shine forth at long intervals, like meteors. Thin people are rarely met with in Syria; on the contrary, even the young girls are frequently decidedly stout. Not far from the bazaar is a great hall, wherein the Turks hold their judicial sittings, decide disputes, and pass sentence on criminals. Some ordinary-looking divans are placed round the interior of this hall, and in one corner a wooden cell, about ten feet long, six wide, and eight feet high, has been erected. This cell, furnished with a little door, and a grated hole by way of window, is intended for the reception of the criminal during his period of punishment. Throughout the thirteen days I passed at Jerusalem, I did not find the heat excessive. The thermometer generally stood in the shade at from 20 to 22 degrees, and in the sun at 28 degrees (Reaum.), very seldom reaching 30 degrees. Fruit I saw none, with the exception of the little apricots called mish-mish, which are not larger than a walnut, but nevertheless have a very fine flavour. It is a pity that the inhabitants of these countries contribute absolutely nothing towards the cultivation and improvement of their natural productions; if they would but exert themselves, many a plant would doubtless flourish luxuriantly. But here the people do not even know how to turn those gifts to advantage which nature has bestowed upon them in rich profusion, and of superior quality; for instance, olives. Worse oil can hardly be procured than that which they give you in Syria. The Syrian oil and olives can scarcely be used by Europeans. The oil is of a perfectly green colour, thick, and disgusting alike to the smell and taste; the olives are generally black, a consequence of the negligent manner in which they are prepared. The same remark holds good with regard to the wine, which would be of excellent quality if the people did but understand the proper method of preparing it, and of cultivating the vineyards. At present, however, they adulterate their wine with a kind of herb, which gives it a very sharp and disagreeable taste. On the whole, the neighbourhood of Jerusalem is very desolate, barren, and sterile. I found the town itself neither more nor less animated than most Syrian cities. I should depart from truth if I were to say, with many travellers, that it appeared as though a peculiar curse rested upon this city. The whole of Judea is a stony country, and this region contains many places with environs as rugged and barren as those of Jerusalem. Birds and butterflies are rarely seen at the present season of the year, not only in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, but throughout the whole of Syria. Where, indeed, could a butterfly or a bee find nourishment, while not a flower nor a blade of grass shoots up from the stony earth? And a bird cannot live where there are neither seeds nor insects, but must soar away across the seas to cooler and more fertile climes. Not only here, but throughout the whole of Syria, I missed the delightful minstrels of the air. The sparrow alone can find sustenance every where, for he lives in towns and villages, wherever man is seen. A whole flock of these little twittering birds woke me every morning. I was as yet much less troubled by insects than I had anticipated. With the exception of the small flies on the plain of Sharon, and of certain little sable jumpers which seem naturalised throughout the whole world, I could not complain of having been annoyed by any creature. Our common house-flies I saw every where; but they were not more numerous or more troublesome than in Germany. EXCURSION TO THE RIVER JORDAN AND TO THE DEAD SEA. To travel with any degree of security in Palestine, Phoenicia, etc., it is necessary to go in large companies, and in some places it even becomes advisable to have an escort. The stranger should further be provided with cooking utensils, provisions, tents, and servants. To provide all these things would have been a hopeless task for me; I had therefore resolved to return from Jerusalem as I had come, namely, via Joppa, and so to proceed to Alexandria or Beyrout, when, luckily for me, the gentlemen whom I have already mentioned arrived at Jerusalem. They intended making several excursions by land, and the first of these was to be a trip to the banks of the Jordan and to the Dead Sea. I ardently wished to visit these places, and therefore begged the gentlemen, through Father Paul, to permit my accompanying them on their arduous journey. The gentlemen were of opinion that their proposed tour would be too fatiguing for one of my sex, and seemed disinclined to accede to my request. But then Count Wratislaw took my part, and said that he had watched me during our ride from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and had noticed that I wanted neither courage, skill, nor endurance, so that they might safely take me with them. Father Paul immediately came to me with the joyful intelligence that I was to go, and that I had nothing to do but to provide myself with a horse. He particularly mentioned how kindly Count Wratislaw, to whom I still feel obliged, had interested himself in my behalf. The journey to the Jordan and the Dead Sea should never be undertaken by a small party. The best and safest course is to send for some Arab or Bedouin chiefs, either at Jerusalem or Bethlehem, and to make a contract with them for protection. In consideration of a certain tribute, these chiefs accompany you in person, with some of their tribe, to your place of destination and back again. The Counts paid the two chiefs three hundred piastres, with the travelling expenses for themselves and their twelve men. At three o'clock in the afternoon of the 7th of June our cavalcade started. The caravan consisted of the four counts, Mr. Bartlett, a certain Baron Wrede, two doctors, and myself, besides five or six servants, and the two chiefs with the body-guard of twelve Arabs. All were strongly armed with guns, pistols, swords, and lances, and we really looked as though we sallied forth with the intention of having a sharp skirmish. Our way lay through the Via Dolorosa, and through St. Stephen's Gate, past the Mount of Olives, over hill and dale. Every where the scene was alike barren. At first we still saw many fruit-trees and olive-trees in bloom, and even vines, but of flowers or grass there was not a trace; the trees, however, stood green and fresh, in spite of the heat of the atmosphere and the total lack of rain. This luxuriance may partly be owing to the coolness and dampness which reigns during the night in tropical countries, quickening and renewing the whole face of nature. The goal of our journey for to-day lay about eight miles distant from Jerusalem. It was the Greek convent of "St. Saba in the Waste." The appellation already indicates that the region around becomes more and more sterile, until at length not a single tree or shrub can be detected. Throughout the whole expanse not the lowliest human habitation was to be seen. We only passed a horde of Bedouins, who had erected their sooty-black tents in the dry bed of a river. A few goats, horses, and asses climbed about the declivities, laboriously searching for herbs or roots. About half an hour before we reach the convent we enter upon the wilderness in which our Saviour fasted forty days, and was afterwards "tempted of the devil." Vegetation here entirely ceases; not a shrub nor a root appears; and the bed of the brook Cedron is completely dry. This river only flows during the rainy season, at which period it runs through a deep ravine. Majestic rocky terraces, piled one above the other by nature with such exquisite symmetry that the beholder gazes in silent wonder, overhang both banks of the stream in the form of galleries. A silence of death brooded over the whole landscape, broken only by the footfalls of our horses echoing sullenly from the rocks, among which the poor animals struggled heavily forward. At intervals some little birds fluttered above our heads, silently and fearfully, as though they had lost their way. At length we turn sharply round an angle of the road,--and what a surprise awaits us! A large handsome building, surrounded by a very strong fortified wall, pierced for cannon in several places, lies spread before us near the bed of the river, and rises in the form of terraces towards the brow of the hill. From the position we occupied, we could see over the whole extent of wall from without and from within. Fortified as it was, it lay open before our gaze. Several buildings, and in front of all a church with a small cupola, told us plainly that St. Saba lay stretched below. On the farther bank, seven or eight hundred paces from the convent, rose a single square tower, apparently of great strength. I little thought that I should soon become much better acquainted with this isolated building. The priests had observed our procession winding down the hill, and at the first knocking the gate was opened. Masters, servants, Arabs, and Bedouins, all passed through; but when my turn came, the cry was, "Shut the gate!" and I was shut out, with the prospect of passing the night in the open air,--a thing which would have been rather disagreeable, considering how unsafe the neighbourhood was. At length, however, a lay brother appeared, and, pointing to the tower, gave me to understand that I should be lodged there. He procured a ladder from the convent, and went with me to the tower, where we mounted by its aid to a little low doorway of iron. My conductor pushed this open, and we crept in. The interior of the tower seemed spacious enough. A wooden staircase led us farther upwards to two tiny rooms, situated about the centre of the tower. One of these apartments, dimly lighted by the rays of a lamp, contained a small altar, and served as a chapel, while the second was used as a sleeping-room for female pilgrims. A wooden divan was the only piece of furniture this room contained. My conductor now took his leave, promising to return in a short time with some provisions, a bolster, and a coverlet for me. So now I was at least sheltered for the night, and guarded like a captive princess by bolt and bar. I could not even have fled had I wished to do so, for my leader had locked the creaking door behind him, and taken away the ladder. After carefully examining the chapel and my neatly-furnished apartment in this dreary prison- house, I mounted the staircase, and gained the summit of the tower. Here I had a splendid view of the country round about, my elevated position enabling me distinctly to trace the greater part of the desert, with its several rows of hills and mountains skirting the horizon. All these hills were alike barren and naked; not a tree nor a shrub, not a human habitation, could I discover. Silence lay heavily on every thing around, and it seemed to me almost as though no earth might here nourish a green tree, but that the place was ordained to remain a desert, as a lasting memorial of our Saviour's fasting. Unheeded by human eye, the sun sank beneath the mountains; I was, perhaps, the only mortal here who was watching its beautiful declining tints. Deeply moved by the scene around me, I fell on my knees, to offer up my prayers and praise to the Almighty, here in the rugged grandeur of the desert. But I had only to turn away from the death-like silence, and to cast my eye towards the convent as it lay spread out before me, to view once more the bustle and turmoil of life. In the courtyard the Bedouins and Arabs were employed in ministering to the wants of their horses, bringing them water and food; beyond these a group of men was seen spreading mats on the ground, while others, with their faces bowed to the earth, were adoring, with other forms of prayer, the Omnipotent Spirit whose protection I had so lately invoked; others, again, were washing their hands and feet as a preparation for offering up their worship; priests and lay brethren passed hastily across the courtyard, busied in preparations for entertaining and lodging the numerous guests; while some of my fellow-travellers stood apart, in earnest conversation, and Mr. B. and Count Salm Reifferscheit reclined in a quiet spot and made sketches of the convent. Had a painter been standing on my tower, what a picture of the building might he not have drawn as the wild Arab and the thievish Bedouin leant quietly beside the peaceful priest and the curious European! Many a pleasant recollection of this evening have I borne away with me. I was very unwilling to leave the battlements of the tower; but the increasing darkness at length drove me back into my chamber. Shortly afterwards a priest and a lay brother appeared, and with them Mr. Bartlett. The priest's errand was to bring me my supper and bedding, and my English fellow-traveller had kindly come to inquire if I would have a few servants as a guard, as it must be rather a dreary thing to pass a night quite alone in that solitary tower. I was much flattered by Mr. Bartlett's politeness to a total stranger, but, summoning all my courage, replied that I was not in the least afraid. Thereupon they all took their leave; I heard the door creak, the bolt was drawn, and the ladder removed, and I was left to my meditations for the night. After a good night's rest, I rose with the sun, and had been waiting some time before my warder appeared with the coffee for my breakfast. He afterwards accompanied me to the convent gate, where my companions greeted me with high praises; some of them even confessed that they would not like to pass a solitary night as I had done. CHAPTER IX. Ride through the wilderness to the Dead Sea--The Dead Sea--The river Jordan--Horde of Bedouins--Arab horses--The Sultan's well--Bivouac in the open air--Return to Jerusalem--Bethany--Departure from Jerusalem--Jacob's grave--Nablus or Sichem--Sebasta--Costume of Samaritan women--Plain of Esdralon--Sagun. June 8th. At five o'clock in the morning we departed, and bent our course towards the Dead Sea. After a ride of two hours we could see it, apparently at such a short distance, that we thought half an hour at the most would bring us there. But the road wound betwixt the mountains, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, so that it took us another two hours to reach the shore of the lake. All around us was sand. The rocks seem pulverised; we ride through a labyrinth of monotonous sand-heaps and sand-hills, behind which the robber-tribes of Arabs and Bedouins frequently lurk, making this part of the journey exceedingly unsafe. Before we reach the shore, we ride across a plain consisting, like the rest, of deep sand, so that the horses sink to the fetlocks at every step. On the whole of our way we had not met with a single human being, with the exception of the horde of Bedouins whom we had found encamped in the river-bed: this was a fortunate circumstance for us, for the people whom the traveller meets during these journeys are generally unable to resist the temptation of seizing upon his goods, so that broken bones are frequently the result of such meetings. [Illustration 4. The Dead Sea. ill4.jpg] The day was very hot (33 degrees Reaum). We encamped in the hot sand on the shore, under the shelter of our parasols, and made our breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, a piece of bad bread, and some lukewarm water. I tasted the sea-water, and found it much more bitter, salt, and pungent than any I have met with elsewhere. We all dipped our hands into the lake, and afterwards suffered the heat of the air to dry them without having first rinsed them with fresh water; not one of us had to complain that this brought forth an itching or an eruption on our hands, as many travellers have asserted. The temperature of the water was 33 degrees Reaum.; in colour it is a pale green. Near the shore the water is to a certain extent transparent; but as it deepens it seems turbid, and the eye can no longer pierce the surface. We could not even see far across the water, for a light mist seemed to rest upon it, thus preventing us from forming a good estimate of its breadth. To judge from what we could distinguish, however, the Dead Sea does not appear to be very broad; it may rather be termed an oblong lake, shut in by mountains, than a sea. Not the slightest sign of life can be detected in the water; not a ripple disturbs its sleeping surface. A boat of any kind is of course quite out of the question. Some years since, however, an Englishman made an attempt to navigate this lake; for this purpose he caused a boat to be built, but did not progress far in his undertaking,--a sickness came upon him, he was carried to Jerusalem, and died soon after he had made the experiment. It is rather a remarkable fact that, up to the present moment, no Englishman has been found who was sufficiently weary of his life to imitate his countryman's attempt. Stunted fragments of drift-wood, most probably driven to shore by tempests, lay scattered every where around. We could, however, discover no fields of salt; neither did we see smoke rising, or find the exhalations from the sea unpleasant. These phenomena are perhaps observed at a different season of the year to that in which I visited the Dead Sea. On the other hand, I saw not only separate birds, but sometimes even flights of twelve or fifteen. Vegetation also existed here to a certain extent. Not far from the shore, I noticed, in a little ravine, a group of eight acicular-leaved trees. On this plain there were also some wild shrubs bearing capers, and a description of tall shrub, not unlike our bramble, bearing a plentiful crop of red berries, very juicy and sweet. We all ate largely of them; and I was the more surprised at finding these plants here, as I had found it uniformly stated that animal and vegetable life was wholly extinct on the shores of the Dead Sea. Five cities, of which not a trace now remains, once lay in the plain now filled by this sea--their names were Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Zeboin, and Zona. A feeling of painful emotion, mingled with awe, took possession of my soul as I thought of the past, and saw how the works of proud and mighty nations had vanished away, leaving behind them only a name and a memory. It was a relief to me when we prepared, after an hour's rest, to quit this scene of dreary desolation. For about an hour and a half we rode through an enormous waste covered with trailing weeds, towards the verdant banks of the Jordan, which are known from a distance by the beautiful blooming green of the meadows that surround it. We halted in the so-called "Jordan-vale," where our Saviour was baptised by St. John. The water of the Jordan is of a dingy clay-colour; its course is very rapid. The breadth of this stream can scarcely exceed twenty- five feet, but its depth is said to be considerable. The moment our Arab companions reached the bank, they flung themselves, heated as they were, into the river. Most of the gentlemen followed their example, but less precipitately. I was fain to be content with washing my face, hands, and feet. We all drank to our hearts' content, for it was long since we had obtained water so cool and fresh. I filled several tin bottles, which I had brought with me for this purpose from Jerusalem, with water from the Jordan, and had them soldered down on my return to the Holy City. This is the only method with which I am acquainted for conveying water to the farthest countries without its turning putrid. We halted for a few hours beneath the shady trees, and then pursued our journey across the plain. Suddenly a disturbance arose among our Arab protectors; they spoke very anxiously with one another, and continually pointed to some distant object. On inquiring the reason why they were so disturbed, we were told that they saw robbers. We strained our eyes in vain; even with the help of good spy-glasses we could discover nothing, and already began to suspect our escort of having cried "wolf" without reason, or merely to convince us that we had not taken them with us for nothing. But in about a quarter of an hour we could dimly discern figures emerging, one by one, from the far, far distance. Our Bedouins prepared for the combat, and advised us to take the opposite road while they advanced to encounter the enemy. But all the gentlemen wished to take part in the expedition, and joined the Bedouins, lusting for battle. The whole cavalcade rode off at a rapid pace, leaving Count Berchtold and myself behind. But when our steeds saw their companions galloping off in such fiery style, they scorned to remain idly behind, and without consulting our inclinations in the least, they ran of at a pace which fairly took away our breath. The more we attempted to restrain their headlong course, the more rapidly did they pursue their career, so that there appeared every prospect of our becoming the first, instead of the last, among the company. But when the enemy saw such a determined troop advancing to oppose them, they hurried off without awaiting our onset, and left us masters of the field. So we returned in triumph to our old course; when suddenly a wild boar, with its hopeful family, rushed across our path. Away we all went in chase of the poor animals. Count Wratislaw succeeded in cutting down one of the young ones with his sabre, and it was solemnly delivered up to the cook. No further obstacles opposed themselves to our march, and we reached our resting-place for the night without adventure of any kind. On this occasion I had an opportunity of seeing how the Arabs can manage their horses, and how they can throw their spears and lances in full career, and pick up the lances as they fly by. The horses, too, appear quite different to when they are travelling at their usual sleepy pace. At first sight these horses look any thing but handsome. They are thin, and generally walk at a slow pace, with their heads hanging down. But when skilful riders mount these creatures, they appear as if transformed. Lifting their small graceful heads with the fiery eyes, they throw out their slender feet with matchless swiftness, and bound away over stock and stone with a step so light and yet so secure that accidents very rarely occur. It is quite a treat to see the Arabs exercise. Those who escorted us good-naturedly went through several of their manoeuvres for our amusement. From the valley of the Jordan to the "Sultan's Well," in the vale of Jericho, is a distance of about six miles. The road winds, from the commencement of the valley, through a beautiful natural park of fig- trees and other fruit-trees. Here, too, was the first spot where the eye was gladdened by the sight of a piece of grass, instead of sand and shingle. Such a change is doubly grateful to one who has been travelling so long through the barren, sandy desert. The village lying beside the Sultan's Well looks most deplorable. The inhabitants seem rather to live under than above the ground. I went into a few of these _hollows_. I do not know how else to designate these little stoneheap-houses. Many of them are entirely destitute of windows, the light finding its way through the hole left for an entrance. The interiors contained only straw-mats and a few dirty mattresses, not stuffed with feathers, but with leaves of trees. All the domestic utensils are comprised in a few trenchers and water-jugs: the poor people were clothed in rags. In one corner some grain and a number of cucumbers were stored up. A few sheep and goats were roaming about in the open air. A field of cucumbers lies in front of every house. Our Bedouins were in high glee at finding this valuable vegetable in such abundance. We encamped beside the well, under the vault of heaven. From the appearance of the valley in its present state, it is easy to conclude, in spite of the poverty of the inhabitants and the air of desolation spread over the farther landscape, that it must once have been very blooming and fertile. On the right, the naked mountains extend in the direction of the Dead Sea; on the left rises the hill on which Moses completed his earthly career, and from which his great spirit fled to a better world. On the face of the mountain three caves are visible, and in the centre one we were told the Saviour had dwelt during his preparation in the wilderness before undertaking his mission of a teacher. High above these caves towers the summit of the rock from which Satan promised to give our Lord the sovereignty of all the earth if He would fall down and worship him. Baron Wrede, Mr. Bartlett, and myself were desirous of seeing the interior of one of these caves, and started with this intention; but no sooner did one of our Bedouins perceive what we were about, than he came running up in hot haste to assure us that the whole neighbourhood was unsafe. We therefore turned back, the more willingly as the twilight, or rather sunset, was already approaching. Twilight in these latitudes is of very short duration. At sunrise the shades of night are changed into the blaze of day as suddenly as the daylight vanishes into night. Our supper consisted of rather a smoky pilau, which we nevertheless relished exceedingly; for people who have eaten nothing throughout the day but a couple of hard-boiled eggs are seldom fastidious about their fare at night. Besides, we had now beautiful fresh water from the spring, and cucumbers in abundance, though without vinegar or oil. But to what purpose would the unnatural mixture have been? Whoever wishes to travel should first strive to disencumber himself of what is artificial, and then he will get on capitally. The ground was our bed, and the dark blue ether, with its myriads of stars, our canopy. On this journey we had not taken a tent with us. The aspect of the heavens is most beautiful here in Syria. By day the whole firmament is of a clear azure--not a cloud sullies its perfect brightness; and at night it seems spangled with a far greater number of stars than in our northern climes. Count Zichy ordered the servants to call us betimes in the morning, in order that we might set out before sunrise. For once the servants obeyed; in fact they more than obeyed, for they roused us before midnight, and we began our march. So long as we kept to the plain, all went well; but whenever we were obliged to climb a mountain, one horse after another began to stumble and to stagger, so that we were in continual danger of falling. Under these circumstances it was unanimously resolved that we should halt beneath the next declivity, and there await the coming daylight. June 9th. At four o'clock the reveille was beaten for the second time. We had now slept for three hours in the immediate neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, a circumstance of which we were not aware until daybreak: not one of our party had noticed any noxious exhalation arising from the water; still less had we been seized with headache or nausea, an effect stated by several travellers to be produced by the smell of the Dead Sea. Our journey homewards now progressed rapidly, though for three or four hours we were obliged to travel over most formidable mountain- roads and through crooked ravines. In one of the valleys we again came upon a Bedouin's camp. We rode up to the tents and asked for a draught of water, instead of which these people very kindly gave us some dishes of excellent buttermilk. In all my life I never partook of any thing with so keen a relish as that with which I drank this cooling beverage after my fatiguing ride in the burning heat. Count Zichy offered our entertainers some money, but they would not take it. The chief stepped forward and shook several of us by the hand in token of friendship; for from the moment when a stranger has broken bread with Bedouins or Arabs, or has applied to them for protection, he is not only safe among their tribe, but they would defend him with life and limb from the attacks of his enemies. Still it is not advisable to meet them on the open plain; so contradictory are their manners and customs. We were now advancing with great strides towards a more animated, if not a more picturesque landscape, and frequently met and overtook small caravans. One of these had been attacked the previous evening; the poor Arabs had offered a brave resistance, and had beaten off the foe; but one of them was lying half dead upon his camel, with a ghastly shot-wound in his head. Nimble long-eared goats were diligently searching among the rocks for their scanty food, and a few grottoes or huts of stone announced to us the proximity of a little town or village. Right thankful were we to emerge safely from these fearful deserts into a less sterile and more populous region. We passed through Bethany, and I visited the cave in which it is said that Lazarus slumbered before he came forth alive at the voice of the Redeemer. Then we journeyed on to Jerusalem by the same road on which the Saviour travelled when the Jewish people shewed their attachment and respect, for the last time, by strewing olive and palm branches in his way. How soon was this scene of holy rejoicing changed to the ghastly spectacle of the Redeemer's torture and death! Towards two o'clock in the afternoon we arrived safely at Jerusalem, and were greeted with a hearty welcome by our kind hosts. A few days after my return from the foregoing excursion, I left Jerusalem for ever. A calm and peaceful feeling of happiness filled my breast; and ever shall I be thankful to the Almighty that He has vouchsafed me to behold these realms. Is this happiness dearly purchased by the dangers, fatigues, and privations attendant upon it? Surely not. And what, indeed, are all the ills that chequer our existence here below to the woes endured by the blessed Founder of our religion! The remembrance of these holy places, and of Him who lived and suffered here, shall surely strengthen and console me wherever I may be and whatever I may be called upon to endure. FROM JERUSALEM TO BEYROUT. My gentleman-protectors wished to journey from Jerusalem to Beyrout by land, and intended taking a circuitous route, by way of Nazareth, Galilee, Canaan, etc., in order to visit as many of these places as possible, which are fraught with such interest to us Christians. They were once more kind enough to admit me into their party, and the 11th of June was fixed for our departure. June 11th. Quitting Jerusalem at three o'clock in the afternoon, we emerged from the Damascus Gate, and entered a large elevated plateau. Though this region is essentially a stony one, I saw several stubble-fields, and even a few scanty blades of grass. The view is very extended; at a distance of four miles the walls of Jerusalem were still in view, till at length the road curved round a hill, and the Holy City was for ever hidden from our sight. On the left of the road, an old church, said to have been erected in the days of Samuel, stands upon a hill. At six in the evening we reached the little village of Bir, and fixed our halting-place for the night in a neighbouring stubble- field. During my first journey by land (I mean my ride from Joppa to Jerusalem), I had already had a slight foretaste of what is to be endured by the traveller in these regions. Whoever is not very hardy and courageous, and insensible to hunger, thirst, heat, and cold; whoever cannot sleep on the hard ground, or even on stones, passing the cold nights under the open sky, should not pursue his journey farther than from Joppa to Jerusalem: for, as we proceed, the fatigues become greater and less endurable, and the roads are more formidable to encounter; besides this, the food is so bad that we only eat from fear of starvation; and the only water we can get to drink is lukewarm, and offensive from the leathern jars in which it is kept. We usually rode for six or seven hours at a time without alighting even for a moment, though the thermometer frequently stood at from 30 to 34 degrees Reaumur. Afterwards we rested for an hour at the most; and this halt was often made in the open plain, where not a tree was in sight. Refreshment was out of the question, either for the riders or the poor beasts, and frequently we had not even water to quench our burning thirst. The horses were compelled to labour unceasingly from sunrise until evening, without even receiving a feed during the day's journey. The Arabian horse is the only one capable of enduring so much hardship. In the evening these poor creatures are relieved of their burdens, but very seldom of the saddle; for the Arabs assert that it is less dangerous for the horse to bear the saddle day and night, than that it should be exposed when heated by the day's toil to the cold night-air. Bridles, saddles, and stirrups were all in such bad condition that we were in continual danger of falling to the ground, saddle and all. In fact, this misfortune happened to many of our party, but luckily it was never attended with serious results. June 12th. The night was very chilly; although we slept in a tent, our thick cloaks scarcely sufficed to shield us from the night-air. In the morning the fog was so dense that we could not see thirty paces before us. Towards eight o'clock it rolled away, and a few hours later the heat of the sun began to distress us greatly. It is scarcely possible to guard too carefully against the effects of the heat; the head should in particular be kept always covered, as carelessness in this respect may bring on coup de soleil. I always wore two pocket handkerchiefs round my head, under my straw hat, and continually used a parasol. From Bir to Jabrud, where we rested for a few hours, we travelled for six hours through a monotonous and sterile country. We had still a good four hours' ride before us to Nablus, our resting-place for the night. The roads here are bad beyond conception, so that at first the stranger despairs of passing them either on foot or on horseback. Frequently the way leads up hill and down dale, over great masses of rock; and I was truly surprised at the strength and agility of our poor horses, which displayed extraordinary sagacity in picking out the little ledges on which they could place their feet safely in climbing from rock to rock. Sometimes we crossed smooth slabs of stone, where the horses were in imminent danger of slipping; at others, the road led us past frightful chasms, the sight of which was sufficient to make me dizzy. I had read many accounts of these roads, and was prepared to find them bad enough; but my expectations were far surpassed by the reality. All that the traveller can do is to trust in Providence, and abandon himself to fate and to the sagacity of his horse. An hour and a half before we reached the goal of this day's journey, we passed the grave of the patriarch Jacob. Had our attention not been particularly drawn to this monument, we should have ridden by without noticing it, for a few scattered blocks of stone are all that remain. A little farther on we enter the Samaritan territory, and here is "Jacob's well," where our Saviour held converse with the woman of Samaria. The masonry of the well has altogether vanished, but the spring still gushes forth from a rock. Nablus, the ancient Sichem, the chief town of Samaria, contains four thousand inhabitants, and is reputed to be one of the most ancient towns in Palestine. It is surrounded by a strong wall, and consists of a long and very dirty street. We rode through the town from one end to the other, and past the poor-looking bazaar, where nothing struck me but the sight of some fresh figs, which were at this early season already exposed for sale. Of course we bought the fruit at once; but it had a very bad flavour. A number of soldiers are seen in all the towns. They are Arnauts, a wild, savage race of men, who appear to be regarded with more dread by the inhabitants than the wandering tribes whose incursions they are intended to repress. We pitched our tents on a little hill immediately outside the town. Few things are more disagreeable to the traveller than being compelled to bivouac near a town or village in the East. All the inhabitants, both young and old, flock round in order to examine the European caravan, which is a most unusual sight for them, as closely as possible. They frequently even crowd into the tents, and it becomes necessary to expel the intruders almost by main force. Not only are strangers excessively annoyed at being thus made a gazing- stock, but they also run a risk of being plundered. Our cook had the good fortune to obtain a kid only three or four days old, which was immediately killed and at once boiled with rice. We made a most sumptuous meal, for it was seldom we could get such good fare. June 13th. The morning sun found us already on horseback; we rode through the whole of the beautiful valley at the entrance of which Nablus lies. The situation of this town is very charming. The valley is not broad, and does not exceed a mile and a half in length; it is completely surrounded with low hills. The mountain on the right is called Ebal, and that on the left Grissim. The latter is celebrated as being the meeting-place of the twelve tribes of Israel under Joshua; they there consulted upon the means of conquering the land of Canaan. The whole valley is sufficiently fertile; even the hills are in some instances covered to their summits with olive, fig, lemon, and orange trees. Some little brooks, clear as crystal, bubble through the beautiful plain. We were frequently compelled to ride through the water; but all the streams are at this season of the year so shallow, that our horses' hoofs were scarcely covered. After gaining the summit of the neighbouring hill, we turned round with regret to look our last on this valley; seldom has it been my lot to behold a more charming picture of blooming vegetation. Two hours more brought us to Sebasta, the ancient Samaria, which also lies on a lovely hill, though for beauty of situation it is not to be compared with Nablus. Sebasta is a wretched village. The ruins of the convent built on the place where St. John the Baptist was beheaded were here pointed out to us; but even of the ruins there are few traces left. Two hours later we reached Djenin, and had now entered the confines of Galilee. Though this province, perhaps, no longer smiles with the rich produce it displayed in the days of old, it still affords a strong contrast to Judaea. Here we again find hedges of the Indian fig-tree, besides palms and large expanses of field; but for flowers and meadows we still search in vain. The costume of the Samaritan and Galilean women appears as monotonous as it is poor and dirty. They wear only a long dark-blue gown, and the only difference to be observed in their dress is that some muffle their faces and others do not. It would be no loss if all wore veils; for so few pretty women and girls are to be discovered, that they might be searched for, like the honest man of Diogenes, with a lantern. The women have all an ugly brown complexion, their hair is matted, and their busts lack the rounded fullness of the Turkish women. They have a custom of ornamenting both sides of the head, from the crown to the chin, with a row of silver coins; and those women who do not muffle their faces usually wear as head-dress a handkerchief of blue linen. Djenin is a dirty little town, which we only entered in consequence of having been told that we should behold the place where Queen Jezebel fell from the window and was devoured by dogs. Both window and palace have almost vanished; but dogs, who look even now as though they could relish such royal prey, are seen prowling about the streets. Not only in Constantinople, but in every city of Syria we found these wild dogs; they were, however, nowhere so numerous as in the imperial city. We halted for an hour or two outside the town, beside a coffee- house, and threw ourselves on the ground beneath the open sky. A kind of hearth made of masonry, on which hot water was continually in readiness, stood close by, and near it some mounds of earth had been thrown up to serve as divans. A ragged boy was busy pounding coffee, while his father, the proprietor of the concern, concocted the cheering beverage, and handed it round to the guests. Straw- mats were spread for our accommodation on the earthen divans, and without being questioned we were immediately served with coffee and argile. In the background stood a large and lofty stable of brickwork, which might have belonged to a great European inn. After recruiting ourselves here a little, we once more set forth to finish our day's journey. Immediately after leaving the town, a remarkably fine view opens before us over the great elevated plain Esdralon, to the magnificent range of mountains enclosing this immense plateau. In the far distance they shewed us Mount Carmel, and, somewhat nearer, Mount Tabor. Here, too, the mountains are mostly barren, without, however, being entirely composed of naked masses of rock. Mount Tabor, standing entirely alone and richly clothed with vegetation, has a very fine appearance. For nearly two hours we rode across the plain of Esdralon, and had thus ample leisure to meditate upon the great events that have occurred here. It is difficult to imagine a grander battlefield, and we can readily believe that in such a plain whole nations may have struggled for victory. From the time of Nabucodonosor to the period of the Crusades, and from the days of the Crusades to those of Napoleon, armies of men from all nations have assembled here to fight for their real or imaginary rights, or for the glory of conquest. The great and continuous heat had cracked and burst the ground on this plain to such a degree, that we were in continual apprehension lest our horses should catch their feet in one or other of the fissures, and strain or even break them. The soil of the plain seems very good, and is free from stones; it appears, however, generally to lie fallow, being thickly covered with weeds and wild artichokes. The villages are seen in the far distance near the mountains. This plain forms part of Canaan. We pitched our camp for the night beside a little cistern, near the wretched village of Lagun; and thus slept, for the third night consecutively, on the hard earth. June 14th. To-day we rode for an hour across the plain of Esdralon, and once more suffered dreadfully from the stings of the minute gnats which had annoyed us so much on our journey from Joppa to Ramla. These plagues did not leave us until we had partly ascended the mountains skirting the plain, from the summit of which we could see Nazareth, prettily built on a hill at the entrance of a fruitful valley. In the background rises the beautiful Mount Tabor. From the time we first see Nazareth until we reach the town is a ride of an hour and a half; thus the journey from Lagun to Nazareth occupies four hours and a half, and the entire distance from Jerusalem twenty-six or twenty-seven hours. CHAPTER X. Arrival at Nazareth--Franciscan convent--Tabarith--Mount Tabor--Lake of Gennesareth--Baths--Mount Carmel--Grotto of the prophet Elijah-- Acre--The pacha's harem--Oriental women--Their listlessness and ignorance--Sur or Tyre. It was only nine o'clock when we reached Nazareth, and repaired to the house for strangers in the Franciscan convent, where the priests welcomed us very kindly. As soon as we had made a short survey of our rooms (which resulted in our finding them very like those at Jerusalem, both as regards appearance and arrangement), we set forth once more to visit all the remarkable places, and above all the church which contains the Grotto of Annunciation. This church, to which we were accompanied by a clergyman, was built by St. Helena, and is of no great size. In the background a staircase leads down into the grotto, where it is asserted that the Virgin Mary received the Lord's message from the angel. Three little pillars of granite are still to be seen in this grotto. The lower part of one of these pillars was broken away by the Turks, so that it is only fastened from above. On the strength of this circumstance many have averred that the pillar hangs suspended in air! Had these men but looked beyond their noses, had they only cast their eyes upwards, they could not have had the face to preach a miracle where it is so palpable that none exists. A picture on the wall, not badly executed, represents the Annunciation. The house of the Virgin is not shewn here, because, according to the legend, an angel carried it away to Loretto in Italy. A few steps lead to another grotto, affirmed to be the residence of a neighbour of the Virgin, during whose absence she presided over the house and attended to the duties of the absent Mary. Another grotto in the town is shewn as "the workshop of Joseph;" it has been left in its primitive state, except that a plain wooden altar has been added. Not far off we find the synagogue where our Lord taught the people, thereby exasperating the Pharisees to such a degree, that they wished to cast Him down from a rock outside the city. In conclusion we were shewn an immense block of stone on which the Saviour is said to have eaten the Passover with His disciples(!). In the afternoon we went to see "Mary's Well," on the road to Tabarith, at a short distance from Nazareth. This well is fenced round with masonry, and affords pure clear water. Hither, it is said, the Virgin came every day to draw water, and here the women and girls of Nazareth may still be daily seen walking to and fro with pitchers on their shoulders. Those whom we saw were all poorly clad, and looked dirty. Many wore no covering on their head, and, what was far worse, their hair hung down in a most untidy manner. Their bright eyes were the only handsome feature these people possessed. The custom of wearing silver coins round the head also prevailed here. To-day was a day of misfortunes for me; in the morning, when we departed from Lagun, I had already felt unwell. On the road I was seized with violent headache, nausea, and feverish shiverings, so that I hardly thought I should be able to reach Nazareth. The worst of all this was, that I felt obliged to hide my illness, as I had done on our journey to Jerusalem, for fear I should be left behind. The wish to view all the holy places in Nazareth was also so powerful within me, that I made a great effort, and accompanied the rest of my party for the whole day, though I was obliged every moment to retire into the background that my condition might not be observed. But when we went to table, the smell of the viands produced such an effect upon me, that I hastily held my handkerchief before my face as though my nose were bleeding, and hurried out. Thanks to my sunburnt skin, through which no paleness could penetrate, no one noticed that I was ill. The whole day long I could eat nothing; but towards evening I recovered a little. My appetite now also returned, but unfortunately nothing was to be had but some bad mutton-broth and an omelette made with rancid oil. It is bad enough to be obliged to subsist on such fare when we are in health, but the hardship increases tenfold when we are ill. However, I sent for some bread and wine, and strengthened myself therewith as best I might. June 15th. Thanks be to Heaven, I was to-day once more pretty well. In the morning I could already mount my horse and take part in the excursion we desired to make to TABARITH. Passing Mary's Well and a mountain crowned by some ruins, the remains of ancient Canaan, we ride for about three miles towards the foot of Mount Tabor, the highest summit of which we do not reach for more than an hour. There were no signs of a beaten road, and we were obliged to ride over all obstacles; a course of proceeding which so tired our horses, that in half an hour's time they were quite knocked up, so that we had to proceed on foot. After much toil and hardship, with a great deal of climbing and much suffering from the heat, we gained the summit, and were repaid for the toil of the ascent, not only by the reflection that we stood on classic ground, but also by the beautiful view which lay spread before our eyes. This prospect is indeed magnificent. We overlook the entire plain of Saphed, as far as the shores of the Galilean Sea. Mount Tabor is also known by the name of the "Mountain of Bliss"--here it was that our Lord preached His exquisite "Sermon on the Mount." Of all the hills I have seen in Syria, Mount Tabor is the only one covered to the summit with oaks and carob-trees. The valleys too are filled with the richest earth, instead of barren sand; but in spite of all this the population is thin, and the few villages are wretched and puny. The poor inhabitants of Syria are woefully ground down; the taxes are too high in proportion to the productions of the soil, so that the peasants cannot possibly grow more produce than they require for their own consumption. Thus, for instance, orchards are not taxed in the aggregate, but according to each separate tree. For every olive-tree the owner must pay a piastre, or a piastre and a half; and the same sum for an orange or lemon tree. And heavily taxed as he is, the poor peasant is never safe in saying, "Such and such a thing belongs to me." The pacha may shift him to another piece of land, or drive him away altogether, if he thinks it advisable to do so; for a pacha's power in his province is as great as that of the Sultan himself in Constantinople. Porcupines are to be met with on Mount Tabor; we found several of their fine horny quills. From the farther side of the mountain we descended into the beautiful and spacious valley of Saphed, the scene of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and rode on for some hours until we reached Tabarith. A very striking scene opens before the eyes of the traveller on the last mountain before Tabarith. A lovely landscape lies suddenly unrolled before him. The valley sinks deeply down to the Galilean Sea, round the shores of which a glorious chain of mountains rises in varied and picturesque terrace-like forms. More beautiful than all the rest, towers in snowy grandeur the mighty chain of the Anti- Lebanon, its white surface glittering in the rays of the sun, and distinctly mirrored in the clear bosom of the lake. Deep down lies the little town of Tabarith, shadowed by palm-trees, and guarded by a castle raised a little above it. The unexpected beauty of this scene surprised us so much that we alighted from our horses, and passed more than half an hour on the summit of the mountain, to gaze at our leisure upon the wondrous picture. Count S. drew a hurried but very successful sketch of the landscape which we all admired so much, though its mountains were naked and bare. But such is the peculiar character of Eastern scenery; in Europe, meadows, alps, and woods exhibit quite a distinct class of natural beauty. In a mountain region of Europe, a sight like the one we were now admiring would scarcely have charmed us so much. But in these regions, poor alike in inhabitants and in scenery, the traveller is contented with little, and a little thing charms him. For instance, would not a plain piece of beef have been a greater luxury to us on our journey than the most costly delicacies at home? Thus we felt also with regard to scenery. On entering the town we experienced a feeling of painful emotion. Tabarith lay still half in ruins; for the dreadful earthquake of 1839 had made this place one of the chief victims of its fury. How must the town have looked immediately after the calamity, when even now, in spite of the extensive repairs, it appears almost like a heap of ruins! We saw some houses that had completely fallen in; others were very much damaged, with large cracks in the walls, and shattered terraces and towers: every where, in short, we wandered among ruins. Above 4000 persons, more than half of the entire population, are said to have perished by this earthquake. We alighted at the house of a Jewish doctor, who entertains strangers, as there is no inn at Tabarith. I was quite surprised to find every thing so clean and neat in this man's house. The little rooms were simply but comfortably furnished, the small courtyard was flagged with large stones, and round the walls of the hall were ranged narrow benches with soft cushions. We were greatly astonished at this appearance of neatness and order; but our wonder rose when we made the discovery that the Jews, who are very numerous at Tabarith, are not clothed in the Turkish or Greek fashion, but quite like their brethren in Poland and Galicia. Most of them also spoke German. I immediately inquired the reason of this peculiarity, and was informed that all the Jewish families resident in this town originally came from Poland or Russia, with the intention of dying in the Promised Land. As a rule, all Jews seem to cherish a warm desire to pass their last days in the country of their forefathers, and to be buried there. We requested our young hostess, whose husband was absent, to prepare for us without delay a good quantity of pilau and fowls; adding, that we would in the mean time look at the town and the neighbouring baths at the Sea of Gennesareth, but that we should return in an hour and a half at the most. We then proceeded to the Sea of Gennesareth, which is a fresh-water lake. We entered a fisherman's boat, in order that we might sail on the waters where our Lord had once bid the winds "be still." We were rowed to the warm springs, which rise near the shore, a few hundred paces from the town. On the lake all was calm; but no sooner had we landed than a storm arose--between the fishermen and ourselves. In this country, if strangers neglect to bargain beforehand for every stage with guides, porters, and people of this description, they are nearly sure of being charged an exorbitant sum in the end. This happened to us on our present little trip, which certainly did not occupy more than half an hour. We took our seats in the boat without arranging for the fares; and on disembarking offered the fishermen a very handsome reward. But these worthies threw down the money, and demanded thirty piastres; whereas, if we had bargained with them at first, they would certainly not have asked ten. We gave them fifteen piastres, to get rid of them; but this did not satisfy their greediness; on the contrary, they yelled and shouted, until the Count's servants threatened to restore peace and quietness with their sticks. At length the fishermen were so far brought to their senses that they walked away, scolding and muttering as they went. Adjoining the warm springs we found a bathing-house, built in a round form and covered with a cupola. Here we also met a considerable number of pilgrims, mostly Greeks and Armenians from the neighbourhood, who were journeying to Jerusalem. They had encamped beside the bathing-house. Half of these people were in the water, where a most animated conversation was going on. We also wished to enter the building, not for the purpose of bathing, but to view the beauty and arrangements of the interior, which have been the subject of many laudatory descriptions; but at the entrance such a cloud of vapour came rolling towards us that we were unable to penetrate far. I saw enough, however, to feel convinced, that in the description of these baths poetry or exaggeration had led many a pen far beyond the bounds of fact. Neither the exterior of this building, nor the cursory glance I was enabled to throw into the interior, excited either my curiosity or my astonishment. Seen from without, these baths resemble a small-sized house built in a very mediocre style, and with very slender claims to beauty. The interior displayed a large quantity of marble,--for instance, in the floor, the sides of the bath, etc. But marble is not such a rarity in this country that it can raise this bathing-kiosk into a wonder- building, or render it worthy of more than a passing glance. I endeavour to see every thing exactly as it stands before me, and to describe it in my simple diary without addition or ornament. At eight o'clock in the evening we returned tired and hungry to our comfortable quarters, flattering ourselves that we should find the plain supper we had ordered a few hours before smoking on the covered table, ready for our arrival. But neither in the hall nor in the chamber could we find even a table, much less a covered one. Half dead with exhaustion, we threw ourselves on chairs and benches, looking forward with impatience to the supper and the welcome rest that was to follow it. Messenger after messenger was despatched to the culinary regions, to inquire if the boiled fowls were not yet in an eatable condition. Each time we were promised that supper would be ready "in a quarter of an hour," and each time nothing came of it. At length, at ten o'clock, a table was brought into the room; after some time a single chair, appeared, and then one more; then came another interval of waiting, until at length a clean table- cloth was laid. These arrivals occupied the time until eleven o'clock, when the master of the house, who had been absent on an excursion, made his appearance, and with him came a puny roast fowl. No miracle, alas, took place at our table like that of the plain of Saphed; we were but seven persons, and so the fowl need only have been increased seven times to satisfy us all; but as it was, each person received one rib and no more. Our supper certainly consisted of several courses brought in one after the other. Had we known this, we certainly should soon have arranged the matter, for then each person would have appropriated the whole of a dish to himself. In the space of an hour and a quarter nine or ten little dishes made their appearance; but the portion of food contained in each was so small, that our supper may be said to have consisted of a variety of "tastes." We would greatly have preferred two good-sized dishes to all these kickshaws. The dishes were, a roast, a boiled, and a baked chicken, a little plate of prepared cucumbers, an equally small portion of this vegetable in a raw state, a little pilau, and a few small pieces of mutton. Our host kindly provided food for the mind during supper by describing to us a series of horrible scenes which had occurred at the time of the earthquake. He, too, had lost his wife and children by this calamity, and only owed his own life to the circumstance that he was absent at a sick-bed when the earthquake took place. Half an hour after midnight we at length sought our resting-places. The doctor very kindly gave up his three little bedrooms to us, but the heat was so oppressive that we preferred quartering ourselves on the stones in the yard. They made a very hard bed, but we none of us felt symptoms of indigestion after our sumptuous meal. June 16th. At five o'clock in the morning we took leave of our host, and returned in six hours to Nazareth by the same road on which we had already travelled. We did not, however, ascend Mount Tabor a second time, but rode along beside its base. To-day I once more visited all the spots I had seen when I was so ill two days before; in this pursuit I passed some very agreeable hours. June 17th. In the morning, at half-past four, we once more bade farewell to the worthy priests of Nazareth, and rode without stopping for nine hours and a half, until at two o'clock we reached MOUNT CARMEL. It was long since we had travelled on such a good road as that on which we journeyed to-day. Now and then, however, a piece truly Syrian in character had to be encountered, probably lest we should lose the habit of facing hardship and danger. Another comfort was that we were not obliged to-day to endure thirst, as we frequently passed springs of good clear water. At one time our way even led through a small oak-wood, a phenomenon almost unprecedented in Syria. There was certainly not a single tree in all the wood which a painter might have chosen for a study, for they were all small and crippled. Large leafy trees, like those in my own land, are very seldom seen in this country. The carob, which grows here in abundance, is almost the only handsome tree; it has a beautiful leaf, scarcely larger than that of a rose-tree, of an oval form, as thick as the back of a knife, and of a beautiful bright green colour. Mount Carmel lies on the sea-shore. It is not high, and half an hour suffices the traveller to reach its summit, which is crowned by a spacious and beautiful convent, probably the handsomest in all Palestine, not even excepting the monasteries at Nazareth and Jerusalem. The main front of the building contains a suite of six or seven large rooms, with folding-doors and lofty regular windows. These rooms, together with several in the wings, are devoted to the reception of strangers. They are arranged in European style, with very substantial pieces of furniture, among which neither sofas nor useful chests of drawers are wanting. [Illustration 5. Mount Carmel. ill5.jpg] About an hour after we arrived our reverend hosts regaled us with a more sumptuous meal than any of which I had partaken since my departure from Constantinople. In proportion as our fare had been meagre and our accommodation indifferent at Nazareth and Jerusalem, did we find every thing here excellent. In an elegant dining-room stood a large table covered with a fine white cloth, on which cut glass and clean knives, forks, and china plates gleamed invitingly. A servant in European garb placed some capital fast-day fare on the table (it was Friday), and a polite priest kept us company; but not in eating, for he rightly considered that such a hungry company would not require any example to fall to. During the whole remainder of our journey through Syria this convent occupied a green spot in our memory. How capitally would a few days' rest here have recruited our strength! But the gentlemen had a distant goal before their eyes, and "Forward!" was still the cry. After dinner we went down to the sea-shore, to visit the large grotto called the "Prophets' school." This grotto has really the appearance of a lofty and spacious hall, where a number of disciples could have sat and listened to the words of the prophet. The grotto in which Elijah is said to have lived is situated in a church at the top of the mountain. Mount Carmel is quite barren, being only covered here and there with brambles; but the view is magnificent. In the foreground the eye can roam over the boundless expanse of ocean, while at the foot of the mountain it fords a resting-place in the considerable town of Haifa, lying in a fertile plain, which extends to the base of the high mountains, bounded in the distance by the Anti-Libanus, and farther still by the Lebanon itself. Along the line of coast we can distinguish Acre (or Ptolemais), Sur (Tyre), and Soida (Sidon). June 18th. This morning we sent our poor over-tired horses on before us to Hese, and walked on foot at midday under a temperature of 33 degrees to Haifas, a distance of more than two miles. Heated and exhausted to the last degree we reached the house of the Consul, who is a Catholic, but seems nevertheless to live quite in Oriental fashion. This gentleman is consul both for France and Austria. Although he was not at home when we arrived, we were immediately shewn into the room of state, where we reclined on soft divans, and were regaled with sherbet of all colours, green, yellow, red, etc., and with coffee flavoured with roses, which we did not like. Hookahs (or tchibuks) were also handed round. At length the Consul's wife appeared, a young and beautiful lady of an imposing figure, dressed in the Oriental garb. She smoked her tchibuk with as much ease as the gentlemen. Luckily a brother of this lady who understood something of Italian was present, and kindly acted as interpreter. I have never found an Oriental woman who knew any language but that of her own country. After we had rested ourselves, we pursued our journey in a boat to Acre. On my road to Jerusalem I had only seen the outside of this monument of the last war, now I could view its interior; but saw nothing to repay me for my trouble. Considering how ugly the Turkish towns are even when they are in good preservation, it may easily be imagined that the appearance of one of these cities is not improved when it is full of shot-holes, and the streets and interiors of the houses are choked up with rubbish. The entrance to the convent lies through the courtyard of the Turkish barracks, where there seemed to be a great deal of bustle, and where we had an opportunity of noticing how wretchedly clad, and still more miserably shod, the Turkish soldiers are. These blemishes are not so much observed when the men are seen singly at their posts. The convent here is very small, being in fact only a dwelling-house to which a chapel is attached. Two monks and a lay brother form the whole household. Scarcely had I established myself in my room, before a very polite lady entered, who introduced herself to me as the wife of a surgeon in the service of the pacha here. She stated that her husband was at present absent at Constantinople, and added that she was in the habit of spending several hours in the convent every evening to do the honours of the house! This assertion struck me as so strange, that I should certainly have remained dumb had not my visitor been a very agreeable, polite French lady. As it was, however, we chatted away the evening pleasantly together, until the supper-bell summoned us to the refectory. All that I saw in this convent was in direct contrast to the arrangement of the comfortable establishment of the Carmelites. The refectory here is astonishingly dirty; the whole furniture consists of two dingy tables and some benches; the table- cloth, plates, etc. wore the prevailing livery; and the fare was quite in keeping with every thing else. We supped at two tables; the gentlemen and the reverend fathers sitting at one, while the French lady and myself occupied the other. June 19th. As we were not to travel far to-day, we did not set out until ten o'clock, when we started in company of several Franks who were in the pacha's service. They led us into a park by the roadside belonging to the mother of the Sultan. Here the pacha usually resides during the summer. In half an hour's time we reached this park. The garden is rather handsome, but does not display many plants except lemon, orange, pomegranate, and cypress trees. The display of flowers was not very remarkable; for not only could we discover no rare or foreign plants, but we also missed many flowers which grow plentifully in our gardens at home. A few kiosks are here to be seen, but every thing seemed miserably out of repair. The residence of the pacha, situated outside the gardens, has a more inviting appearance. We paid our respects to his highness, who received us very graciously, and caused us to be regaled with the usual beverages. No sooner had the high ladies in the harem learnt that a Frankish woman was in their territory, than they sent to invite me to visit them. I gladly accepted this invitation, the more so as it offered an opportunity of gratifying my curiosity. I was conducted to another part of the house, where I stepped into a chamber of middle size, the floor of which was covered with mats and carpets, while on cushions ranged round the walls reclined beauties of various complexions, who seemed to have been collected from every quarter of the globe. One of these women, who was rather elderly, appeared to be the pacha's chief wife, for all the rest pointed to her. The youngest lady seemed about eighteen or nineteen years of age, and was the mother of a child eight months old, with which they were all playing as with a doll; the poor little thing was handed about from hand to hand. These ladies were dressed exactly like the daughters of the consul at Joppa, whose costume I have described. I did not see any signs of particular beauty, unless the stoutness of figure so prevalent here is considered in that light. I saw, however, a woman with one eye, a defect frequently observed in the East. Female slaves were there of all shades of colour. One wore a ring through her nose, and another had tastefully painted her lips blue. Both mistresses and slaves had their eyebrows and eyelashes painted black, and their nails and the palm of the hand stained a light-brown with the juice of the henna. The Oriental women are ignorant and inquisitive in the highest degree; they can neither read nor write, and the knowledge of a foreign language is quite out of the question. It is very rarely that one of them understands embroidering in gold. Whenever I happened to be writing in my journal, men, women, and children would gather round me, and gaze upon me and my book with many signs and gestures expressive of astonishment. The ladies of the harem seemed to look with contempt upon employment and work of every kind; for neither here nor elsewhere did I see them do any thing but sit cross-legged on carpets and cushions, drinking coffee, smoking nargile, and gossiping with one another. They pressed me to sit down on a cushion, and then immediately surrounded me, endeavouring, by signs, to ask many questions. First they took my straw hat and put it upon their heads; then they felt the stuff of my travelling robe; but they seemed most of all astonished at my short hair, {165} the sight of which seemed to impress these poor ignorant women with the idea that nature had denied long hair to the Europeans. They asked me by signs how this came to pass, and every lady came up and felt my hair. They seemed also very much surprised that I was so thin, and offered me their nargile, besides sherbet and cakes. On the whole, our conversation was not very animated, for we had no dragoman to act as interpreter, so that we were obliged to guess at what was meant, and at length I sat silently among these Orientals, and was heartily glad when, at the expiration of an hour, my friends sent to fetch me away. At a later period of my journey I frequently visited harems, and sometimes considerable ones; but I found them all alike. The only difference lay in the fact that some harems contained more beautiful women and slaves, and that in others the inmates were more richly clad; but every where I found the same idle curiosity, ignorance, and apathy. Perhaps they may be more happy than European women; I should suppose they were, to judge from their comfortable figures and their contented features. Corpulence is said frequently to proceed from a good-natured and quiet disposition; and their features are so entirely without any fixed character and expression, that I do not think these women capable of deep passions or feeling either for good or evil. Exceptions are of course to be found even among the Turkish women; I only report what I observed on the average. This day we rode altogether for seven hours. We passed a beautiful orange-grove; for the greater part of the way our road led through deep sand, close by the sea-shore; but once we had to pass a dreadfully dangerous place called the "White Mount," one extremity of which rises out of the sea. This once passed, we soon come upon the beautiful far-stretching aqueduct which I noticed on my journey from Joppa to Jerusalem. It traverses a portion of this fruitful plain. We could not enter the little town of Sur, the goal of this day's journey, as it was closed on account of the plague. We therefore passed by, and pitched our tents beside a village, in the neighbourhood of which large and splendid cisterns of water, hewn in the rock, are to be seen. The superfluous water from these cisterns falls from a height of twenty or thirty feet, and after turning a mill-wheel, flows through the vale in the form of a brook. CHAPTER XI. River Mishmir--Saida--Arnauts--Desert-path--Residence of Lady Hester Stanhope--Beyrout--The consul's--Uncomfortable quarters--Sickness-- The Bazaar--Vexatious delays--Departure from Beyrout--Beautiful views--Syrian costumes--Damascus--Aspect of the city--House of the consul. June 20th. Shortly after five this morning we were in our saddles, and a few hours afterwards arrived at the beautiful river Mishmir, which is as broad as the Jordan, though it does not contain nearly so much water. Next to the Jordan, however, this river is the largest we find on our journey, besides being a most agreeable object in a region so destitute of streams. Its water is pure as crystal. In ten hours we reached the town, and at once repaired to the convent, as not one of these cities contains an inn. The little convent, with its tiny church, is situate at the end of a large courtyard, which is so thronged with horses and men, particularly with soldiers, that we had great difficulty in forcing our way through. When we had at length cleared a passage for ourselves to the entrance, we were received with the agreeable intelligence that there was no room for us. What was to be done? We thought ourselves lucky in obtaining a little room where we could pass the night in a house belonging to a Greek family; beds were, however, out of the question; we had to lie on the hard stones. In the courtyard a kind of camp had been pitched, in which twelve state- horses of the Emir {167} of Lebanon (creatures of the true Arab breed) were bivouacking among a quantity of Arnauts. The Arnaut soldiers are universally feared, but more by friend than foe. They are very turbulent, and behave in an overbearing manner towards the people. The Count, my fellow-traveller, was even insulted in the street, not by a peasant, but by one of these military fellows. These ill-disciplined troops are assembled every where, in order that they may be ready to attack whenever a disturbance occurs between the Druses and Maronites. I consider, however, that the Arnauts are much more to be feared than either the Druses or the Maronites, through whose territories we afterwards journeyed without experiencing, in a single instance, either insult or injury. I hardly think we should have escaped so well had we encountered a troop of these wild horsemen. Among all the Turkish soldiers the Arnauts are the best dressed; with their short and full white skirts of linen or lawn, and tight trousers of white linen, a scarf round the middle, and a white or a red spencer, they closely resemble the Albanians. June 21st. This was a most fatiguing day, although we did not ride for more than ten hours; but this ten hours' journey was performed without even a quarter of an hour's rest, though the thermometer stood at 33 degrees Reaumur. Our path lay through a sandy desert, about two miles in breadth, running parallel with the mountain-range from Saida to Beyrout. The monotony of the steppe is only broken at intervals by heaps of sand. The surface of the sand presents the appearance of a series of waves; the particles of which it is composed are very minute, and of a fine yellowish-brown colour. A beautiful fertile valley adjoins this desert, and stretches towards Mount Lebanon, on whose brown rocky surface several villages can be descried. This mountain-range has a most imposing appearance. White rocks and strata of white sand shine forth from its broad and generally barren expanse like fields of snow. The residence of the late Lady Hester Stanhope can be seen in the distance on the declivity of the mountain. During our long ride of ten hours we did not pass a single tank, spring, or even pool, and all the river-beds on our way were completely dried up by the heat. Not a tree could we see that could shelter us for a moment from the glaring heat of the sun. It was a day of torment for us and for our poor beasts. Two of our brave horses sank from exhaustion, and could go no farther, though relieved of their burdens; we were obliged to leave the poor creatures to perish by the wayside. At three in the afternoon we at length arrived at Beyrout, after having bravely encountered, during ten consecutive days, the toil and hardship inseparable from a journey through Syria. The distance from Jerusalem to Beyrout is about 200 miles, allowing for the circuitous route by way of Tabarith, which travellers are not, however, compelled to take. From Jerusalem to Nazareth is 54 miles; from Nazareth across Mount Tabor to Tabarith and back again 31 miles; from Nazareth to Mount Carmel, Haifas, and Acre, 46 miles; and from Acre to Beyrout 69 miles; making the total 200 miles. Our poor horses suffered dreadfully during this journey; for they were continually obliged either to climb over rocks, stones, and mountains, or to wade through hot sand, in which they sank above the fetlocks at every step. It would have been a better plan had we only engaged our horses from Jerusalem to Nazareth, where we could have procured fresh ones to carry us on to Beyrout. We had been told at Jerusalem that it was sometimes impossible to obtain horses at Nazareth, and so preferred engaging our beasts at once for the whole journey. On arriving at Nazareth we certainly discovered that we had been deceived, for horses are always to be had there in plenty; but as the contract was once made, we were obliged to abide by it. During the ten days of our journey the temperature varied exceedingly. By day the heat fluctuated between 18 and 39 degrees Reaumur; the nights too were very changeable, being sometimes sultry, and sometimes bitterly cold. BEYROUT lies in a sandy plain; but the mulberry-trees by which it is surrounded impart to this city an air of picturesque beauty. Still we wade every where, in the streets, gardens, and alleys, through deep sand. Viewed from a distance, Beyrout has a striking effect, a circumstance I had remarked on my first arrival there from Constantinople; but it loses considerably on a nearer approach. I did not enjoy walking through the town and its environs; but it was a great pleasure to me to sit on a high terrace in the evening, and look down upon the landscape. The dark-blue sky rose above the distant mountains, the fruitful valley, and the glittering expanse of ocean. The golden sun was still illumining the peaks of the mountains with its farewell rays, until at length it sunk from view, shrouding every thing in a soft twilight. Then I saw the innumerable stars shine forth, and the moon shed its magic light over the nocturnal landscape; and that mind can scarcely be called human which does not feel the stirring of better feelings within it at such a spectacle. Truly the temple of the Lord is every where; and throughout all nature there is a mysterious something that tells even the infidel of the omnipresence of the Great Spirit. How many beautiful evenings did I not enjoy at Beyrout! they were, in fact, the only compensation for the grievous hardships I was obliged to endure during my stay in this town. In the inn I could again not find a single room, and was this time much more at a loss to find a place of shelter than I had been before; for our host's wife had gone out of town with her children, and had let her private house; so I sat, in the fullest sense of the word, "in the street." A clergyman, whose acquaintance I had made in Constantinople, and who happened just then to be at Beyrout, took compassion upon me, and procured me a lodging in the house of a worthy Arab family just outside the town. Now I certainly had a roof above my head, but I could not make myself understood; for not a soul spoke Italian, and my whole knowledge of Arabic was comprised in the four words: taib, moi, sut, mafish--beautiful, water, milk, and nothing. With so limited a stock of expressions at my command, I naturally could not make much way, and the next day I was placed in a very disagreeable dilemma. I had hired a boy to show me the way to a church, and explained to him by signs that he was to wait to conduct me home again. On emerging from the church I could see nothing of my guide. After waiting for some time in vain, I was at length compelled to try and find my way alone. The house in which I lived stood in a garden of mulberry-trees, but all the houses in the neighbourhood were built in the same style, each having a tower attached, in which there is a habitable room; all these dwellings stand in gardens planted with mulberry-trees, some of them not separated from each other at all, and the rest merely by little sand-hills. Flowers and vegetables are nowhere to be seen, nor is the suburb divided into regular streets; so that I wandered in an endless labyrinth of trees and houses. I met none but Arabs, whose language I did not understand, and who could, therefore, give me no information. So I rushed to and fro, until at length, after a long and fatiguing pilgrimage, I was lucky enough to stumble on the house I wanted. Unwilling to expose myself to such a disagreeable adventure a second time, I thought it would be preferable to dwell within the town; and therefore hired the young guide before mentioned to conduct me to the house of the Austrian Consul-General Herr von A. Unfortunately this gentleman was not visible to such an insignificant personage as myself, and sent me word that I might come again in a few hours. This was a true "Job's message" for me, as far as consolation went. The heat was most oppressive; I had now entered the town for the second time, to be sent once more back to the glowing sands, with permission to "come again in a few hours." Had I not been uncommonly hardy, I should have succumbed. But luckily I knew a method to help myself. I ordered my little guide to lead me to the house in which the wife of Battista the innkeeper had lived. During my previous residence at Beyrout I had accidentally heard that a French lady lodged in the same house, and occupied herself with the education of the children. I went to call on this French lady, and was lucky enough to find her; so I had, at any rate, so far succeeded that I had found a being with whom I could converse, and of whom I might request advice and assistance. My new acquaintance was an extremely cordial maiden lady about forty years of age. Her name was Pauline Kandis. My unfortunate position awakened her compassion so much, that she placed her own room at my disposal for the time being. I certainly saw that my present quarters left much to be desired, for my kind entertainer's lodging consisted of a single room, divided into two parts by several tall chests; the foremost division contained a large table, at which four girls sat and stood at their lessons. The second division formed a kind of lumber-room, redolent of boxes, baskets, and pots, and furnished with a board, laid on an old tub, to answer the purposes of a table. My condition was, however, so forlorn, that I took joyful possession of the lumber-room assigned to me. I immediately departed with my boy-guide, and by noon I was already installed, with bag and baggage, in the dwelling of my kind hostess. But there was no more walking for me that day. What with the journey and my morning's peregrinations I was so exhausted that I requested nothing but a resting-place, which I found among the old chests and baskets on the floor. I was right glad to lie down, and court the rest that I needed so much. At seven o'clock in the evening the school closed. Miss K. then took her leave, and I remained sole occupant of her two rooms, which she only uses as school-rooms, for she sleeps at her brother's house. My lodging at Miss K.'s was, however, the most uncomfortable of any I had yet occupied during my entire journey. From eight o'clock in the morning until seven at night four or five girls, who did any thing rather than study, were continually in the room. The whole day long there was such a noise of shouting, screaming, and jumping about, that I could not hear the sound of my own voice. Moreover, the higher regions of this hall of audience contained eight pigeons' nests; and the old birds, which were so tame that they not only took the food from our plates, but stole it out of our very mouths, fluttered continually about the room, so that we were obliged to look very attentively at every chair on which we intended to sit down. On the floor a cock was continually fighting with his three wives; and a motherly hen, with a brood of eleven hopeful ducks, cackled merrily between. I wonder that I did not contract a squint, for I was obliged continually to look upwards and downwards lest I should cause mischief, and lest mischief should befall me. During the night the heat and the stench were almost insupportable; and immediately after midnight the cock always began to crow, as if he earned his living by the noise he made. I used to open the window every night to make a passage of escape for the heat and the foul air, while I lay down before the door, like Napoleon's Mameluke, to guard the treasures entrusted to my care. But on the second night two wandering cats had already discovered my whereabouts--without the least compunction they stepped quietly over me into the chamber, and began to raise a murderous chase. I instantly jumped up and drove away the robbers; and from that time forward I was obliged to remain in the interior of my fortress, carefully to barricade all the windows, and bear my torments with what fortitude I might. Our diet was also of a very light description. A sister-in-law of the good Pauline was accustomed to send in our dinner, which consisted one day of a thimbleful of saffron-coloured pilau, while the next would perhaps bring half the shoulder of a small fish. Had I boarded with my hostess, I should have kept fast-day five days in the week, and have had nothing to eat on the remaining two. I therefore at once left off dining with them, and used to cook a good German dish for myself every day. In the morning I asked for some milk, in order to make my coffee after the German fashion. Yet I think that some of our adulterators of milk must have penetrated even to Syria, for I found it as difficult to obtain pure goats' milk here as to get good milk from the cow in my own country. My bedstead was formed out of an old chest, and my sole employment and amusement was idling. I had not a book to read, no table to write on; and if I once really succeeded in getting something to read or made an attempt at writing, the whole tribe of youngsters would come clustering round, staring at my book or at my paper. It would certainly have been useless to complain, but yet I could not always entirely conceal the annoyance I felt. My friends must pardon me for describing my cares so minutely, but I only do so to warn all those who would wish to undertake a journey like mine, without being either very rich, very high-born, or very hardy, that they had much better remain at home. As I happened to be neither rich nor high-born, the Consul would not receive me at all the first time I called upon him, although the captain of a steamer had been admitted to an audience just before I applied. A few days afterwards I once more waited upon the Consul, told him of my troubles, and stated plainly how thankful I should feel if any one would assist me so far as to procure me a respectable lodging, for which I would gladly pay, and where I could remain until an opportunity offered to go to Alexandria; the worthy Consul was kind enough to reply to my request with a shake of the head, and with the comforting admission that "he was very sorry for me--it was really extremely unfortunate." I think the good gentleman must have left all his feeling at home before settling in Syria, otherwise he would never have dismissed me with a few frivolous speeches, particularly as I assured him that I was perfectly well provided with money, and would bear any expense, but added that it was possible to be placed in positions where want of advice was more keenly felt than want of means. During the whole of my residence at Beyrout, my countryman never troubled himself any more about me. During my stay here I made an excursion to the grotto, said to be the scene of St. George's combat with the dragon; this grotto is situate to the right of the road, near the quarantine-house. The ride thither offers many fine views, but the grotto itself is not worth seeing. Frequently in the evening I went to visit an Arab family, when I would sit upon the top of the tower and enjoy the sight of the beautiful sunset. A very strong military force was posted at Beyrout, consisting entirely of Arnauts. They had pitched their tents outside the town, which thus wore the appearance of a camp. Many of these towns do not contain barracks; and as the soldiers are not here quartered in private houses, they are compelled to bivouack in the open field. The bazaar is very large and straggling. On one occasion I had the misfortune to lose myself among its numerous lanes, from which it took me some time to extricate myself; I had an opportunity of seeing many of the articles of merchandise, and an immense number of shops, but none which contained any thing very remarkable. Once more I found how prone people are to exaggerate. I had been warned to abstain from walking in the streets, and, above all, to avoid venturing into the bazaar. I neglected both pieces of advice, and walked out once or twice every day during my stay, without once meeting with an adventure of any kind. I had already been at Beyrout ten long, long days, and still no opportunity offered of getting to Alexandria. But at the end of June the worthy artist Sattler, whose acquaintance I had made at Constantinople, arrived here. He found me out, and proposed that I should travel to Damascus with Count Berchtold, a French gentleman of the name of De Rousseau, and himself, instead of wasting my time here. This proposition was a welcome one to me, for I ardently desired to be released from my fowls' nest. My arrangements were soon completed, for I took nothing with me except some linen and a mattress, which were packed on my horse's back. JOURNEY FROM BEYROUT TO DAMASCUS, BALBECK, AND MOUNT LEBANON. July 1st. At one o'clock in the afternoon we were all assembled before the door of M. Battista's inn, and an hour later we were in our saddles hastening towards the town-gate. At first we rode through a deep sea of sand surrounding the town; but soon we reached the beautiful valley which lies stretched at the foot of the Anti-Libanus, and afterwards proceeded towards the range by pleasant paths, shaded by pine-woods and mulberry-plantations. But now the ascent of the magnificent Anti-Libanus became steeper and more dangerous, as we advanced on rocky paths, often scarcely a foot in breadth, and frequently crossed by fissures and brooklets. Some time elapsed before I could quite subdue my fear, and could deliver myself wholly up to the delight of contemplating these grand scenes, so completely new to us Europeans, leaving my horse, which planted its feet firmly and without once stumbling among the blocks of stone lying loosely on each other, to carry me as its instinct directed; for these horses are exceedingly careful, being well used to these dangerous roads. We could not help laughing heartily at our French companion, who could not screw up his courage sufficiently to remain on his horse at the very dangerous points. At first he always dismounted when we came to such a spot; but at length he grew weary of eternally mounting and dismounting, and conquered his fear, particularly when he observed that we depended so entirely on the sagacity of our steeds, and gave ourselves completely up to the contemplation of the mountains around us. It is impossible adequately to describe the incomparable forms of this mountain-range. The giant rocks, piled one above the other, glow with the richest colours; lovely green valleys lie scattered between; while numerous villages are seen, sometimes standing isolated on the rocks, and at others peering forth from among the deep shade of the olive and mulberry trees. [Illustration 6. Lebanon. ill6.jpg] The sun sinking into the sea shot its last rays through the clear pure air towards the highest peaks of the mighty rocks. Every thing united to form a picture which when once seen can never be forgotten. The tints of the rocky masses are peculiarly remarkable; exhibiting not only the primary colours, but many gradations, such as bluish- green, violet, etc. Many rocks were covered with a red coating resembling cinnabar, in several places we found small veins of pure sulphur, and each moment something new and wonderful met our gaze. The five hours which we occupied in riding from Beyrout to the village of Elhemsin passed like five minutes. The khan of Elhemsin was already occupied by a caravan bringing wares and fruit from Damascus, so that we had nothing for it but to raise our tent and encamp beneath it. July 2d. The rising sun found us prepared for departure, and soon we had reached an acclivity from whence we enjoyed a magnificent view. Before us rose the lofty peaks of Lebanon and Anti-Libanus, partly covered with snow; while behind us the mountains, rich in vineyards, olive-plantations, and pine-woods, stretched downward to the sea- shore. We had mounted to such a height, that the clouds soaring above the sea and the town of Beyrout lay far beneath us, shrouding the city from our gaze. Vineyards are very common on these mountains. The vines do not, however, cling round trees for support, nor are they trained up poles as in Austria; they grow almost wild, the stem shooting upwards to a short distance from the ground, towards which the vine then bends. The wine made on these mountains is of excellent quality, rather sweet in flavour, of a golden-yellow colour, and exceedingly fiery. We still continued to climb, without experiencing much inconvenience from the heat, up a fearful dizzy path, over rocks and stones, and past frightful chasms. Our leathern bottles were here useless to us, for we had no lack of water; from every crevice in the rocks a clear crystal flood gushed forth, in which the gorgeously-coloured masses of stone were beautifully mirrored. After a very fatiguing ride of five hours we at length reached the ridge of the Anti-Libanus, where we found a khan, and allowed ourselves an hour's rest. The view from this point is very splendid. The two loftiest mountain-ridges of Lebanon and Anti- Libanus enclose between them a valley which may be about six miles long, and ten or twelve broad. Our way led across the mountain's brow and down into this picturesque valley, through which we journeyed for some miles to the village of Maschdalanscher, in the neighbourhood of which place we pitched our tents. It is, of course, seldom that a European woman is seen in these regions, and thus I seemed to be quite a spectacle to the inhabitants; at every place where we halted many women and children would gather round me, busily feeling my dress, putting on my straw hat, and looking at me from all sides, while they endeavoured to converse with me by signs. If they happened to have any thing eatable at hand, such as cucumbers, fruits, or articles of that description, they never failed to offer them with the greatest good- nature, and seemed highly rejoiced when I accepted some. On the present evening several of these people were assembled round me, and I had an opportunity of noticing the costume of this mountain tribe. Excepting the head-dress, it is the same as that worn throughout all Palestine, and indeed in the whole of Syria; the women have blue gowns, and the men, white blouses, wide trousers, and a sash: sometimes the women wear spencers, and the more wealthy among them even display caftans and turbans. The head-dress of the women is very original, but does not look remarkably becoming. They wear on their foreheads a tin horn more than a foot in length, and over this a white handkerchief, fastened at the back and hanging down in folds. This rule, however, only applies to the wealthier portion of the community, which is here limited enough. The poorer women wear a much smaller horn, over which they display an exceedingly dingy handkerchief. During working hours they ordinarily divest themselves of these ornaments, as they would render it impossible to carry loads on the head. The rich inhabitants of the mountains, both male and female, dress in the Oriental fashion; but the women still retain the horn, which is then made of silver. The village of Maschdalanscher is built of clay huts thatched with straw. I saw many goats and horned cattle, and a good store of corn lay piled up before the doors. We were assured that the roads through the mountains inhabited by the Druses and Maronites were very unsafe, and we were strongly urged to take an escort with us; but as we met caravans almost every hour, we considered this an unnecessary precaution, and arrived safely without adventure of any kind at Damascus. July 3d. This morning we rode at first over a very good road, till at length we came upon a ravine, which seemed hardly to afford us room to pass. Closer and more closely yet did the rocky masses approach each other, as we passed amongst the loose shingle over the dry bed of a river. Frequently the space hardly admitted of our stepping aside to allow the caravans we met to pass us. Sometimes we thought, after having painfully laboured through a ravine of this kind, that we should emerge into the open field; but each time it was only to enter a wilder and more desert pass. So we proceeded for some hours, till the rocky masses changed to heaps of sand, and every trace of vegetation disappeared. At length we had climbed the last hill, and Damascus, "the vaunted city of the East," lay before us. It is certainly a striking sight when, escaping from the inhospitable domains of the mountain and the sandhill, we see stretched at our feet a great and luxuriant valley, forming in the freshness of its vegetation a singular contrast to the desert region around. In this valley, amid gardens and trees innumerable, extends the town, with its pretty mosques and slender lofty minarets; but I was far from finding the scene so charming that I could have exclaimed with other travellers, "This is the most beauteous spot on earth!" The plain in which Damascus lies runs on at the foot of the Anti- Libanus as far as the mountain of Scheik, and is shut in on three sides by sandhills of an incomparably dreary appearance. On the fourth side the plain loses itself in the sandy desert. This valley is exceedingly well watered by springs descending from all the mountains, which we could not, however, see on our approach; but no river exists here. The water rushes forth but to disappear beneath the sand, and displays its richness only in the town and its immediate neighbourhood. From the hill whence we had obtained the first view of Damascus, we have still a good two miles to ride before we reach the plantations. These are large gardens of mish-mish, walnut, pomegranate, orange, and lemon trees, fenced in with clay walls, traversed by long broad streets, and watered by bubbling brooks. For a long time we journeyed on in the shade of these fruitful woods, till at length we entered the town through a large gate. Our enthusiastic conceptions of this renowned city were more and more toned down as we continued to advance. The houses in Damascus are almost all built of clay and earth, and many ugly wooden gables and heavy window-frames give a disagreeable ponderous air to the whole. Damascus is divided into several parts by gates, which are closed soon after sunset. We passed through a number of these gates, and also through the greater portion of the bazaar, on our road to the Franciscan convent. We had this day accomplished a journey of more than twenty-four miles, in a temperature of 35 to 36 degrees Reaum., and had suffered much from the scorching wind, which came laden with particles of dust. Our faces were so browned, that we might easily have been taken for descendants of the Bedouins. This was the only day that I felt my eyes affected by the glare. Although we were much fatigued on arriving at the convent, the first thing we did, after cleansing ourselves from dust and washing our burning eyes, was to hasten to the French and English consuls, so eager were we to see the interior of some of these clay huts. A low door brought us into a passage leading to a large yard. We could have fancied ourselves transported by magic to the scene of one of the fantastic "Arabian Nights," for all the glory of the East seemed spread before our delighted gaze. In the midst of the courtyard, which was paved with large stones, a large reservoir, with a sparkling fountain, spread a delightful coolness around. Orange and lemon trees dipped their golden fruit into the crystal flood; while at the sides flower-beds, filled with fragrant roses, balsams, oleanders, etc., extended to the stairs leading to the reception-room. Every thing seemed to have been done that could contribute to ornament this large and lofty apartment, which opened into the courtyard. Swelling divans, covered with the richest stuffs, lined the walls, which, tastefully ornamented with mirrors and painted and sculptured arabesques, and further decked with mosaic and gilding, displayed a magnificence of which I could not have formed a conception. In the foreground of this fairy apartment a jet of water shot upwards from a marble basin. The floor was also of marble, forming beautiful pictures in the most varied colours; and over the whole scene was spread that charm so peculiar to the Orientals, a charm combining the tasteful with the rich and gorgeous. The apartment in which the women dwell, and where they receive their more confidential visitors, are similar to the one I have just described, except that they are smaller, less richly furnished, and completely open in front. The remaining apartments also look into the courtyard; they are simply, but comfortably and prettily arranged. All the houses of the Orientals are similar to this one, except that the apartments of the women open into another courtyard than those of the men. After examining and admiring every thing to our heart's content, we returned to our hospitable convent. This evening the clerical gentlemen entertained us. A tolerably nice meal, with wine and good bread, restored our exhausted energies to a certain extent. At Beyrout we were quite alarmed at the warnings we received concerning the numbers of certain creeping things we should find here in the bedsteads. I therefore betook myself to bed with many qualms and misgivings; but I slept undisturbed, both on this night and on the following one. CHAPTER XII. The bazaar at Damascus--The khan--Grotto of St. Paul--Fanaticism of the inhabitants--Departure from Damascus--The desert--Military escort--Heliopolis or Balbeck--Stupendous ruins--Continuation of our voyage through the desert--The plague--The Lebanon range--Cedar- trees--Druses and Maronites--Importunate beggars--Thievish propensities of the Arabs. July 4th. Damascus is one of the most ancient cities of the East, but yet we see no ruins; a proof that no grand buildings ever existed here, and that therefore the houses, as they became old and useless, were replaced by new ones. To-day we visited the seat of all the riches--the great bazaar. It is mostly covered in, but only with beams and straw mats. On both sides are rows of wooden booths, containing all kinds of articles, but a great preponderance of eatables, which are sold at an extraordinarily cheap rate. We found the "mish-mish" particularly good. As in Constantinople, the rarest and most costly of the wares are not exposed for sale, but must be sought for in closed store-houses. The booths look like inferior hucksters' shops, and each merchant is seen sitting in the midst of his goods. We passed hastily through the bazaar, in order soon to reach the great mosque, situate in the midst of it. As we were forbidden, however, not only to enter the mosque, but even the courtyard, we were obliged to content ourselves with wondering at the immense portals, and stealing furtive glances at the interior of the open space beyond. This mosque was originally a Christian church; and a legend tells that St. George was decapitated here. The khan, also situate in the midst of the bazaar, is peculiarly fine, and is said to be the best in all the East. The high and boldly-arched portal is covered with marble, and enriched with beautiful sculptures. The interior forms a vast rotunda, surrounded by galleries, divided from each other, and furnished with writing- tables for the use of the merchants. Below in the hall the bales and chests are piled up, and at the side are apartments for travelling dealers. The greater portion of the floor and the walls is covered with marble. Altogether, marble seems to be much sought after at Damascus. Every thing that passes for beautiful or valuable is either entirely composed of this stone, or at least is inlaid with it. Thus a pretty fountain in a little square near the bazaar is of marble; and a coffee-house opposite the fountain, the largest and most frequented of any in Damascus, is ornamented with a few small marble pillars. But all these buildings, not even excepting the great bathing-house, would be far less praised and looked at if they stood in a better neighbourhood. As the case is, however, they shine forth nobly from among the clay houses of Damascus. In the afternoon we visited the Grotto of St. Paul, lying immediately outside the town. On the ramparts we were shewn the place where the apostle is said to have leaped from the wall on horseback, reaching the ground in safety, and taking refuge from his enemies in the neighbouring grotto, which is said to have closed behind him by miracle, and not to have opened again until his persecutors had ceased their pursuit. At present, nothing is to be seen of this grotto excepting a small stone archway, like that of a bridge. Tombs of modern date, consisting of vaults covered with large blocks of stone, are very numerous near this grotto. We paid several more visits, and every where found great pomp of inner arrangement and decoration, varying of course in different houses. We were always served with coffee, sherbet, and argile; and in the houses of the Turks a dreary conversation was carried on through the medium of an interpreter. Walks and places of amusement there are none. The number of Franks resident here is too small to call for a place of general recreation, and the Turk never feels a want of this kind. The most he does is to saunter slowly from the bath to the coffee-house, and there to kill his time with the help of a pipe and a cup of coffee, staring vacantly on the ground before him. Although the coffee- houses are more frequented than any other buildings in the East, they are often miserable sheds, being all small, and generally built only of wood. The inhabitants of Damascus wear the usual Oriental garb, but as a rule I thought them better dressed than in any Eastern town. Some of the women are veiled, but others go abroad with their faces uncovered. I saw here some very attractive countenances; and an unusual number of lovely children's heads looked at me from all sides with an inquisitive smile. In reference to religious matters, these people seem very fanatical; they particularly dislike strangers. For instance, the painter S. wished to make sketches of the khan, the fountain, and a few other interesting objects or views. For this purpose he sat down before the great coffee-house to begin with the fountain; but scarcely had he opened his portfolio before a crowd of curious idlers had gathered around him, who, as soon as they saw his intention, began to annoy him in every possible way. They pushed the children who stood near against him, so that he received a shock every moment, and was hindered in his drawing. As he continued to work in spite of their rudeness, several Turks came and stood directly before the painter, to prevent him from seeing the fountain. On his still continuing to persevere, they began to spit upon him. It was now high time to be gone, and so Mr. S. hastily gathered his materials together and turned to depart. Then the rage of the rabble broke noisily forth. They followed the artist yelling and screaming, and a few even threw stones at him. Luckily he succeeded in reaching our convent unharmed. Mr. S. had been allowed to draw without opposition at Constantinople, Brussa, Ephesus, and several other cities of the East, but here he was obliged to flee. Such is the disposition of these people, whom many describe as being so friendly. The following morning at sunrise Mr. S. betook himself to the terrace of the convent, to make a sketch of the town. Here too he was discovered, but luckily not until he had been at work some hours, and had almost completed his task; so that as soon as the first stone came flying towards him, he was able quietly to evacuate the field. July 5th. In Damascus we met Count Zichy, who had arrived there with his servants a few days before ourselves, and intended continuing his journey to Balbeck to-day. Count Zichy's original intention had been to make an excursion from this place to the celebrated town of Palmyra, an undertaking which would have occupied ten days. He therefore applied to the pacha for a sufficient escort for his excursion. This request was, however, refused; the pacha observing, that he had ceased for some time to allow travellers to undertake this dangerous journey, as until now all strangers had been plundered by the wandering Arabs, and in some instances men had even been murdered. The pacha added, that it was not in his power to furnish so large an escort as would be required to render this journey safe, by enabling the travellers to resist all aggressions. After receiving this answer, Count Zichy communicated with some Bedouin chiefs, who could not guarantee a safe journey, but nevertheless required 6000 piastres for accompanying him. Thus it became necessary to give up the idea altogether, and to proceed instead to Balbeck and to the heights of Lebanon. At the hour of noon we rode out of the gate of Damascus in company with Count Zichy. The thermometer stood at 40 degrees Reaumur. Our procession presented quite a splendid appearance; for the pacha had sent a guard of honour to escort the Count to Balbeck, to testify his respect for a relation of Prince M---. At first our way led through a portion of the bazaar; afterwards we reached a large and splendid street which traverses the entire city, and is said to be more than four miles in length. It is so broad, that three carriages can pass each other with ease, without annoyance to the pedestrians. It is a pity that this street, which is probably the finest in the whole kingdom, should be so little used, for carriages are not seen here any more than in the remaining portion of Syria. Scarcely have we quitted this road, before we are riding through gardens and meadows, among which the country-houses of the citizens lie scattered here and there. On this side of the city springs also gush forth and water the fresh groves and the grassy sward. A stone bridge, of very simple construction, led us across the largest stream in the neighbourhood, the Barada, which is, however, neither so broad nor so full of water as the Jordan. But soon we had left these smiling scenes behind us, and were wending our way towards the lonely desert. We passed several sepulchres, a number of which lie scattered over the sandy hills and plains round us. On the summit of one of these hills a little monument was pointed out to us, with the assertion that it was the grave of Abraham. We now rode for hours over flats, hills, and ridges of sand and loose stones; and this day's journey was as fatiguing as that of our arrival at Damascus. From twelve o'clock at noon until about five in the evening we continued our journey through this wilderness, suffering lamentably from the heat. But now the wilderness was passed; and suddenly a picture so lovely and grand unfolded itself before our gaze, that we could have fancied ourselves transported to the romantic vales of Switzerland. A valley enriched with every charm of nature, and shut in by gigantic rocks of marvellous and fantastic forms, opened at our feet. A mountain torrent gushed from rock to rock, foaming and chafing among mighty blocks of stone, which, hurled from above, had here found their resting-place. A natural rocky bridge led across the roaring flood. Many a friendly hut, the inhabitants of which looked forth with stealthy curiosity upon the strange visitors, lay half hidden between the lofty walls. And so our way continued; valley lay bordered on valley, and the little river which ran bubbling by the roadside led us past gardens and villages, through a region of surpassing loveliness, to the great village of Zabdeni, where we at length halted, after an uninterrupted ride of ten hours and a half. The escort which accompanied us consisted of twelve men, with a superior and a petty officer. These troopers looked very picturesque when, as we travelled along the level road, they went through some small manoeuvres for our amusement, rushing along on their swift steeds and attacking each other, one party flying across the plain, and the other pursuing them as victors. The character of these children of nature is, on the whole, a very amiable one. They behaved towards us in an exceedingly friendly and courteous manner, bringing us fruit and water whenever they could procure them, leading us carefully by the safest roads, and shewing us as much attention as any European could have done. But their idea of _mine_ and _thine_ does not always appear to be very clearly defined. Once, for instance, we passed through fields in which grew a plant resembling our pea, on a reduced scale. Each plant contained several pods, and each pod two peas. Our escort picked a large quantity, ate the fruit with an appearance of great relish, and very politely gave us a share of their prize. I found these peas less tender and eatable than those of my own country, and returned them to the soldier who had offered them to me, observing at the same time that I would rather have had mish-mish. On hearing this he immediately galloped off, and shortly afterwards returned with a whole cargo of mish-mish and little apples, which had probably been borrowed for an indefinite period from one of the neighbouring gardens. I mention these little circumstances, as they appeared to me to be characteristic. On the one hand, Mr. S. had been threatened with the fate of St. Stephen for wishing to make a few sketches; and yet, on the other, these people were so kind and so ready to oblige. This region produces abundance of fruit, and is particularly rich in mish-mish, or apricots. The finest of these are dried; while those which are over-ripe, or half decayed, are boiled to a pulp in large pots, and afterwards spread to dry on long smooth boards, in the form of cakes, about half an inch in thickness. These cakes, which look like coarse brown leather, are afterwards folded up, and form, together with the dried mish-mish, a staple article of commerce, which is exported far and wide. In Constantinople, and even in Servia, I saw cakes of this description which came from these parts. The Turks are particularly fond of taking this dried pulp with them on their journeys. They cut it into little pieces, which they afterwards leave for several hours in a cup of water to dissolve; it then forms a really aromatic and refreshing drink, which they partake of with bread. From Damascus to Balbeck is a ride of eighteen hours. Count Zichy wished to be in Balbeck by the next day at noon; we therefore had but a short night's rest. The night was so mild and beautiful, that we did not want the tents at all, but lay down on the bank of a streamlet, beneath the shade of a large tree. For a long time sleep refused to visit us, for our encampment was opposite to a coffee-house, where a great hubbub was kept up until a very late hour. Small caravans were continually arriving or departing, and so there was no chance of rest. At length we dropped quietly asleep from very weariness, to be awakened a few hours afterwards to start once more on our arduous journey. July 6th. We rode without halting for eight hours, sometimes through pleasant valleys, at others over barren unvarying regions, upon and between the heights of the Anti-Libanus. At the hour of noon we reached the last hill, and HELIOPOLIS OR BALBECK, the "city of the sun," lay stretched before us. We entered a valley shut in by the highest snow-covered peaks of Lebanon and Anti-Libanus, more than six miles in breadth and fourteen or sixteen miles long, belonging to Caelosyria. Many travellers praise this vale as one of the most beautiful in all Syria. It certainly deserves the title of the 'most remarkable' valley, for excepting at Thebes and Palmyra we may search in vain for the grand antique ruins which are here met with; the title of the 'most beautiful' does not, according to my idea, appertain to it. The mountains around are desert and bare. The immeasurable plain is sparingly cultivated, and still more thinly peopled. With the exception of the town of Balbeck, which has arisen from the ruins of the ancient city, not a village nor a hut is to be seen. The corn, which still partly covered the fields, looked stunted and poor; the beds of the streams were dry, and the grass was burnt up. The majestic ruins, which become visible directly the brow of the last hill is gained, atone in a measure for these drawbacks; but we were not satisfied, for we had expected to see much more than met our gaze. We wended our way along stony paths, past several quarries, towards the ruins. On reaching these quarries we dismounted, to obtain a closer view of them. In the right hand one lies a colossal block of stone, cut and shaped on all sides; it is sixty feet in length, eighteen in breadth, and thirteen in diameter. This giant block was probably intended to form part of the Cyclops wall surrounding the Temple of the Sun, for we afterwards noticed several stones of equal length and breadth among the ruins. Another to the left side of the road was remarkable for several grottoes and fragments of rock picturesquely grouped. We had sent our horses on to the convent, and now hastened towards the ruined temples. At the foot of a little acclivity a wall rose lofty and majestic; it was constructed of colossal blocks of rock, which seemed to rest firmly upon each other by their own weight, without requiring the aid of mortar. Three of these stones were exactly the size of one we had seen in the quarry. Many appeared to be sixty feet in length, and broad and thick in proportion. This is the Cyclops wall surrounding the hill on which the temples stand. A difficult path, over piled-up fragments of marble and pieces of rock and rubbish, serves as a natural rampart against the intrusion of camels and horses; and this circumstance alone has prevented these sanctuaries of the heathen deities from being converted into dirty stables. When we had once passed this obstruction, delight and wonder arrested our footsteps. For some moments our glances wandered irresolutely from point to point; we could fix our attention on nothing, so great was the number of beauties surrounding us: splendid architecture--arches rising boldly into the air, supported on lofty pillars--every thing wore an air so severely classic, and yet all was gorgeously elegant, and at the same time perfectly tasteful. At first we reviewed every thing in a very hasty manner, for our impulse hurried us along, and we wished to take in every thing at one glance. Afterwards we began a new and a more deliberate survey. As we enter a large open courtyard, our eye is caught by numerous pieces of marble and fragments of columns, some of the latter resting on tastefully sculptured plinths. Almost every thing here is prostrate, covered with rubbish and broken fragments, but yet all looks grand and majestic in its ruin. We next enter a second and a larger courtyard, above two hundred paces in length and about a hundred in breadth. Round the walls are niches cut in marble, and ornamented with the prettiest arabesques. These niches were probably occupied in former times by statues of the numerous heathen gods. Behind these are little cells, the dwellings of the priests; and in the foreground rise six Corinthian pillars, the only trace left of the great Temple of the Sun. These six pillars, which have hitherto bid defiance to time, devastation, and earthquakes, are supposed to be the loftiest and most magnificent in the world. Nearly seventy feet in height, each pillar a rocky colossus, resting on a basement twenty-seven feet high, covered with excellent workmanship, a masterpiece of ancient architecture, they tower above the Cyclops wall, and look far away into the distance--giant monuments of the hoary past. [Illustration 7. Balbeck. ill7.jpg] How vast thus temple must originally have been is shewn by the remaining pedestals, from which the pillars have fallen, and lay strewed around in weather-stained fragments. I counted twenty such pedestals along the length of the temple, and ten across its breadth. The lesser temple, separated from the greater merely by a wall, lies deeper and more sheltered from the wind and weather; consequently it is in better preservation. A covered hall, resting on pillars fifty feet in height, leads round this temple. Statues of gods and heroes, beautifully sculptured in marble, and surrounded by arabesques, deck the lofty arches of this corridor. The pillars consist of three pieces fastened together with such amazing strength, that when the last earthquake threw down a column it did not break, but fell with its top buried in the earth, where it is seen leaning its majestic height against a hill. From this hall we pass through a splendid portal into the interior of the little sanctuary. An eagle with outspread wings overshadows the upper part of the gate, which is thirty feet in height by twenty in breadth. The two sides are enriched with small figures prettily executed, in a tastefully-carved border of flowers, fruit, ears of corn, and arabesques. This portal is in very good preservation, excepting that the keystone has slipped from its place, and hangs threateningly over the entrance, to the terror of all who pass beneath. But we entered and afterwards returned unhurt, and many will yet pass unharmed like ourselves beneath the loose stone. We shall have returned to dust, while the pendent mass will still see generation after generation roll on. This lesser temple would not look small by any means, were it not for its colossal neighbour. On one side nine, and on the other six pillars are still erect, besides several pedestals from which the pillars have fallen. Walls, niches, every thing around us, in fact, is of marble, enriched with sculptured work of every kind. The sanctuary of the Sun is separated from the nave of the temple by a row of pillars, most of them prostrate. To judge from what remains of both these temples, they must originally have been decorated with profuse splendour. The costliest statues and bas-reliefs, sculptured in a stone resembling marble, once filled the niches and halls, and the remains of tasteful ornaments and arabesques bear witness to the luxury which once existed here. The only fault seems to have been a redundancy of decoration. A subterranean vaulted passage, two hundred and fifty paces in length and thirty in breadth, traverses this temple. In the midst of this walk a colossal head is hewn out of the rocky ceiling representing probably some hero of antiquity. This place is now converted into a stable for horses and camels! The little brook Litany winds round the foot of the hill on which these ruins stand. We had been cautioned at Damascus to abstain from wandering alone among these temples; but our interest in all we saw was so great that we forgot the warning and our fears, and hastened to and fro without the least protection. We spent several hours here, exploring every corner, and meeting no one but a few curious inhabitants, who wished to see the newly-arrived Franks. Herr S. even wandered through the ruins at night quite alone, without meeting with an adventure of any kind. I am almost inclined to think that travellers sometimes detail attacks by robbers, and dangers which they have not experienced, in order to render their narrative more interesting. My journey was a very long one through very dangerous regions; on some occasions I travelled alone with only one Arab servant, and yet nothing serious ever happened to me. Heliopolis is in such a ruined state, that no estimate can be formed of the pristine size and splendour of this celebrated town. Excepting the two temples of the Sun, and a very small building in their vicinity, built in a circular form and richly covered with sculpture and arabesques, and a few broken pillars, not a trace of the ancient city remains. The present town of Balbeck is partly built on the site occupied by its predecessor; it lies to the right of the temples, and consists of a heap of small wretched-looking houses and huts. The largest buildings in the place are the convent and the barracks; the latter of these presents an exceedingly ridiculous appearance; fragments of ancient pillars, statues, friezes, etc. having been collected from all sides, and put together to form a modern building according to Turkish notions of taste. We were received into the convent, but could command no further accommodation than an empty room and a few straw mats. Our attendant brought us pilau, the every-day dish of the East; but to- day he surprised us with a boiled fowl, buried beneath a heap of the Turkish fare. Count Zichy added a few bottles of excellent wine from Lebanon to the feast; and so we sat down to dinner without tables or chairs, as merry as mortals need desire to be. Here, as in most other Eastern towns, I had only to step out on the terrace-roof of the house to cause a crowd of old and young to collect, eager to see a Frankish woman in the costume of her country. Whoever wishes to create a sensation, without possessing either genius or talent, has only to betake himself, without loss of time, to the East, and he will have his ambition gratified to the fullest extent. But whoever has as great an objection to being stared at as I have, will easily understand that I reckoned this among the greatest inconveniences of my journey. July 7th. At five o'clock in the morning we again mounted our horses, and rode for three hours through an immense plain, where nothing was to be seen but scattered columns, towards the foremost promontories of the Lebanon range. The road towards the heights was sufficiently good and easy; we were little disturbed by the heat, and brooks caused by the thawing of snow-fields afforded us most grateful refreshment. In the middle of the day we took an hour's nap under the shady trees beside a gushing stream; then we proceeded to climb the heights. As we journeyed onwards the trees became fewer and farther between, until at length no soil was left in which they could grow. The way was so confined by chasms and abysses on the one side, and walls of rock on the other, that there was scarcely room for a horse to pass. Suddenly a loud voice before us cried, "Halt!" Startled by the sound, we looked up to find that the call came from a soldier, who was escorting a woman afflicted with the plague from a village where she had been the first victim of the terrible disease to another where it was raging fearfully. It was impossible to turn aside; so the soldier had no resource but to drag the sick person some paces up the steep rocky wall, and then we had to pass close by her. The soldier called out to us to cover our mouths and noses. He himself had anointed the lower part of his face with tar, as a preventive against contagion. This was the first plague-stricken person I had seen; and as we were compelled to pass close by her, I had an opportunity of observing the unfortunate creature closely. She was bound on an ass, appeared resigned to her fate, and turned her sunken eyes upon us with an aspect of indifference. I could see no trace of the terrible disease, except a yellow appearance of the face. The soldier who accompanied her seemed as cool and indifferent as though he were walking beside a person in perfect health. As the plague prevailed to a considerable extent throughout the valleys of the Lebanon, we were frequently obliged to go some distance out of our way to avoid the villages afflicted with the scourge; we usually encamped for the night in the open fields, far from any habitation. On the whole long distance from Balbeck to the cedars of Lebanon we found not a human habitation, excepting a little shepherd's hut near the mountains. Not more than a mile and a half from the heights we came upon small fields of snow. Several of our attendants dismounted and began a snow-balling match,--a wintry scene which reminded me of my fatherland. Although we were travelling on snow, the temperature was so mild that not one of our party put on a cloak. We could not imagine how it was possible for snow to exist in such a high temperature. The thermometer stood at 9 degrees Reaumur. A fatiguing and dangerous ride of five hours at length brought us from the foot to the highest point of Mount Lebanon. Here, for the first time, we can see the magnitude and the peculiar construction of the range. Steep walls of rock, with isolated villages scattered here and there like beehives, and built on natural rocky terraces, rise on all sides; deep valleys lie between, contrasting beautifully in their verdant freshness with the bare rocky barriers. Farther on lie stretched elevated plateaux, with cows and goats feeding at intervals; and in the remote distance glitters a mighty stripe of bluish-green, encircling the landscape like a broad girdle--this is the Mediterranean. On the flat extended coast several places can be distinguished, among which the most remarkable is Tripoli. On the right the "Grove of Cedars" lay at our feet. For a long time we stood on this spot, and turned and turned again, for fear of losing any part of this gigantic panorama. On one side the mountain-range, with its valleys, rocks, and gorges; on the other the immense plain of Caelosyria, on the verge of which the ruins of the Sun-temple were visible, glittering in the noontide rays. Then we climbed downwards and upwards, then downwards once more, through ravines and over rocks, along a frightful path, to a little grove of the far-famed cedars of Lebanon. In this direction the peculiar pointed formation which constitutes the principal charm of these mountains once more predominates. The celebrated Grove of Cedars is distant about two miles and a half from the summit of Lebanon; it consists of between five and six hundred trees: about twenty of these are very aged, and five peculiarly large and fine specimens are said to have existed in the days of Solomon. One tree is more than twenty-five feet in circumference; at about five feet from the ground it divides into four portions, and forms as many good-sized trunks. For more than an hour we rested beneath these ancient monuments of the vegetable world. The setting sun warned us to depart speedily; for our destination for the night was above three miles away, and it was not prudent to travel on these fearful paths in the darkness. Our party here separated. Count Zichy proceeded with his attendants to Huma, while the rest of us bent our course towards Tripoli. After a hearty leave-taking, one company turned to the right and the other to the left. We had hardly held on our way for half an hour, before one of the loveliest valleys I have ever beheld opened at our feet; immense and lofty walls of rock, of the most varied and fantastic shapes, surrounded this fairy vale on all sides: in the foreground rose a gigantic table-rock, on which was built a beautiful village, with a church smiling in the midst. Suddenly the sound of chimes was borne upwards towards us on the still clear air; they were the first I had heard in Syria. I cannot describe the feeling of delicious emotion this familiar sound caused in me. The Turkish government every where prohibits the ringing of bells; but here on the mountains, among the free Maronites, every thing is free. The sound of church- bells is a simple earnest music for Christian ears, too intimately associated with the usages of our religion to be heard with indifference. Here, so far from my native country, they appeared like links in the mysterious chain which binds the Christians of all countries in one unity. I felt, as it were, nearer to my hearth and to my dear ones, who were, perhaps, at the same moment listening to similar sounds, and thinking of the distant wanderer. The road leading into this valley was fearfully steep. We were obliged to make a considerable detour round the lovely village of Bscharai; for the plague was raging there, which made it forbidden ground for us. Some distance beyond the village we pitched our camp beside a small stream. This night we suffered much from cold and damp. The inhabitants of Bscharai paid us a visit for the purpose of demanding backsheesh. We had considerable difficulty in getting rid of them, and were obliged almost to beat them off with sticks to escape from their contagious touch. The practice of begging is universal in the East. So soon as an inhabitant comes in sight, he is sure to be holding out his hand. In those parts where poverty is every where apparent, we cannot wonder at this importunity; but we are justly surprised when we find it in these fruitful valleys, which offer every thing that man can require; where the inhabitants are well clothed, and where their stone dwellings look cheerful and commodious; where corn, the grape- vine, the fig and mulberry tree, and even the valuable potato-plant, which cannot flourish throughout the greater part of Syria on account of the heat and the stony soil, are found in abundance. Every spot of earth is carefully cultivated and turned to the best account, so that I could have fancied myself among the industrious German peasantry; and yet these free people beg and steal quite as much as the Bedouins and Arabs. We were obliged to keep a sharp watch on every thing. My riding-whip was stolen almost before my very eyes, and one of the gentlemen had his pocket picked of his handkerchief. Our march to-day had been very fatiguing; we had ridden for eleven hours, and the greater part of the road had been very bad. The night brought us but little relaxation, for our cloaks did not sufficiently protect us from the cold. CHAPTER XIII. The Lebanon--Druses and Maronites--Illness of Herr Sattler--Djebel or Byblus--Rocky passes--Dog's-river--Return to Beyrout--Sickness-- Departure for Alexandria--Roguery of the captain--Disagreeables on board--Limasol--Alarm of pirates--Cowardice of the crew--Arrival at Alexandria. July 8th. To-day we quitted our cold hard couch at six o'clock in the morning, and travelled agreeably for two hours through this romantic valley, which appeared almost at every step in a new aspect of increased beauty. Above the village a foaming stream bursts from the mighty rocks in a beautiful waterfall, irrigates the valley, and then vanishes imperceptibly among the windings of the ravine. Brooks similar to this one, but smaller, leapt from the mountains round about. On the rocky peaks we seem to behold ruined castles and towers, but discover with astonishment, as we approach nearer, that what we supposed to be ruins are delusive pictures, formed by the wonderful masses of rock, grouped one above the other in the most fantastic forms. In the depths on the one side, grottoes upon grottoes are seen, some with their entrances half concealed, others with gigantic portals, above which the wild rocks tower high; on the other a rich soil is spread in the form of terraces on the rocky cliffs, forming a lovely picture of refreshing vegetation. Had I been a painter, it would have been difficult to tear me away from the contemplation of these regions. Below the greater waterfall a narrow stone bridge, without balustrades or railing, leads across a deep ravine, through which the stream rushes foaming, to the opposite shore. After having once crossed, we enter upon a more inhabited tract of country, and travel on between rows of houses and gardens. But many of the houses stood empty, the inhabitants having fled into the fields, and there erected huts of branches of trees, to escape the plague. The Maronites, the real inhabitants of these mountains, are strong people, gifted with a determined will; they cannot be easily brought under a foreign yoke, but are ready to defend their liberty to the death among the natural strongholds of their rocky passes. Their religion resembles that of the Christians, and their priests are permitted to marry. The women do not wear veils, but I saw few such handsome countenances among them as I have frequently observed in the Tyrol. On the first mountain-range of Lebanon, in the direction of Caelosyria, many Druses are found, besides a few tribes of "Mutualis." The former incline to the Christian faith, while the latter are generally termed "calf-worshippers." They practise their religion so secretly, that nothing certain is known concerning it; the general supposition is, however, that they worship their deity under the form of a calf. Our way led onwards, for about six miles from Bscharai, through the beautiful valleys of the Lebanon. Then the smiling nature changed, and we were again wandering through sterile regions. The heat, too, became very oppressive; but every thing would have been borne cheerfully had there not been an invalid among us. Herr Sattler had felt rather unwell on the previous day; to-day he grew so much worse that he could not keep his seat in his saddle, and fell to the ground half insensible. Luckily we found a cistern not far off, and near it some trees, beneath which we made a bed of cloaks for our sick friend. A little water mixed with a few drops of strong vinegar restored him to consciousness. After the lapse of an hour, the patient was indeed able to resume his journey; but lassitude, headache, and feverish shiverings still remained, and we had a ride of many hours before us ere we could reach our resting- place for the night. From every hill we climbed the ocean could be seen at so short a distance that we thought an hour's journeying must bring us there. But each time another mountain thrust itself between, which it was necessary to climb. So it went on for many hours, till at length we reached a small valley with a lofty isolated mass of rock in the midst, crowned by a ruined castle. The approach to this stronghold was by a flight of stairs cut in the rock. From this point our journey lay at least over a better road, between meadows and fruit-trees, to the little town which we reached at night-fall. We had a long and weary search before we could obtain for our sick comrade even a room, destitute of every appearance of comfort. Poor Herr Sattler, more dead than alive, was compelled, after a ride of thirteen hours, to take up his lodging on the hard ground. The room was perfectly bare, the windows were broken, and the door would not lock. We were fain to search for a few boards, with which we closed up the windows, that the sick man might at least be sheltered from the current of air. I then prepared him a dish of rice with vinegar; this was the only refreshment we were able to procure. The rest of us lay down in the yard; but the anxiety we felt concerning our sick friend prevented us from sleeping much. He exhibited every symptom of the plague; in this short time his countenance was quite changed; violent headache and exhaustion prevented him from moving, and the burning heat added the pangs of thirst to his other ills. As we had been travelling for the last day and a half through regions where the pestilence prevailed, it appeared but too probable that Herr Sattler had been attacked by it. Luckily the patient himself had not any idea of the kind, and we took especial care that he should not read our anxiety in our countenances. July 9th. Heaven be praised, Herr Sattler was better to-day, though too weak to continue his journey. As we had thus some time on our hands, the French gentleman and I resolved to embark in a boat to witness the operation of fishing for sponges, by which a number of the poorer inhabitants of the Syrian coast gain their livelihood. A fisherman rowed us about half a mile out to sea, till he came to a place where he hoped to find something. Here he immersed a plummet in the sea to sound its depth, and on finding that some thing was to be gained here, he dived downwards armed with a knife to cut the sponge he expected to find from the rocks; and after remaining below the surface for two or three minutes, reappeared with his booty, When first loosened from the rocks, these sponges are usually full of shells and small stones, which give them a very strong and disagreeable smell. They require to be thoroughly cleansed from dirt and well washed with sea-water before being put into fresh. After our little water-party, we sallied forth to see the town, which is very prettily situated among plantations of mulberry-trees in the vicinity of the sea-coast. The women here are not only unveiled, but frequently wear their necks bare; we saw some of them working in their gardens and washing linen; they were half undressed. We visited the bazaar, intending to purchase a few eggs and cucumbers for our dinner, and some oranges for our convalescent friend. But we could not obtain any; and moderate as our wishes were, it was out of our power to gratify them. By the afternoon Herr Sattler had so far regained his strength, that he could venture to undertake a short journey of ten miles to the little town of Djaebbehl. This stage was the less difficult for our worthy invalid from the fact that the road lay pleasantly across a fruitful plain skirting the sea, while a cool sea-breeze took away the oppressiveness of the heat. The majestic Lebanon bounded the distant view on the left, and several convents on the foremost chain of mountains looked down upon the broad vale. We seemed to have but just mounted our horses when we already descried the castle of the town to which we were bound rising above its walls, and soon after halted at a large khan in its immediate neighbourhood. There were large rooms here in plenty, but all were empty, and the unglazed windows could not even be closed by shutters. Houses of entertainment of this description barely shield the traveller from the weather. We took possession of a large entrance- hall for our night's quarters, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Count Berchtold and I walked into the town of Djaebbehl (Byblus). This place is, as I have already mentioned, surrounded by a wall; it contains also a small bazaar, where we did not find much to buy. The majority of dwellings are built in gardens of mulberry-trees. The castle lies rather high, and is still in the condition to which it was reduced after the siege by the English in 1840; the side fronting the ocean has sustained most damage. This castle is now uninhabited, but some of the lower rooms are converted into stables. Not far off we found some fragments of ancient pillars; an amphitheatre is said to have once stood here. July 10th. To-day Herr Sattler had quite recovered his health, so that we could again commence our journey, according to custom, early in the morning. Our road lay continually by the sea-shore. The views were always picturesque and beautiful, as on the way from Batrun to Djaebbehl; but to-day we had the additional luxury of frequently coming upon brooks which flowed from the neighbouring Lebanon, and of passing springs bursting forth near the seashore; one indeed so close to the sea, that the waves continually dashed over it. After riding forward for four hours, we reached the so-called "Dog's-river," the greatest and deepest on the whole journey. This stream also has its origin in the heights of the Lebanon, and after a short course falls into the neighbouring sea. At the entrance of the valley where the Dog's-river flowed lay a simple khan. Here we made halt to rest for an hour. Generally we got nothing to eat during the day, as we seldom or never passed a village; even when we came upon a house, there was rarely any thing to be had but coffee: we were therefore the more astonished to find here fresh figs, cucumbers, butter-milk, and wine,--things which in Syria make a feast for the gods. We revelled in this unwonted profusion, and afterwards rode into the valley, which smiled upon us in verdant luxuriance. This vale cannot be more than five or six hundred feet in breadth. On either side high walls rise towering up; and on the left we see the ruins of an aqueduct quite overgrown with ivy. This aqueduct is seven or eight hundred paces in length, and extends as far as the spot where the Dog's-river rushes over rocks and stones, forming not a lofty, but yet a fine waterfall. Just below this fall a bridge of Roman architecture, supported boldly on rocky buttresses, unites the two shores. The road to this bridge is by a broad flight of stone stairs, upon which our good Syrian horses carried us in perfect safety both upwards and downwards; it was a fearful, dizzy road. The river derives its name from a stone lying near it, which is said to resemble a dog in form. Stones and pieces of rock, against which the stream rushed foaming, we saw in plenty, but none in which we could discover any resemblance to a dog. Perhaps the contour has been destroyed by the action of wind and weather. Scarcely had we crossed this dangerous bridge when the road wound sharply round a rock in the small but blooming valley, and we journeyed towards the heights up almost perpendicular rocks, and past abysses that overhung the sea. The rocky mountain we were now climbing juts far out into the sea, and forms a pass towards the territory of Beyrout which a handful of men might easily hold against an army. Such a pass may that of Thermopylae have been; and had these mountaineers but a Leonidas, they would certainly not be far behind the ancient Spartans. A Latin inscription on a massive stone slab, and higher up four niches, two of which contain statues, while the others display similar inscriptions, seemed to indicate that the Romans had already known and appreciated the importance of this pass. Unfortunately both statues and writing were so much injured by the all-destroying hand of time, that only a man learned in these matters could have deciphered their meaning. In our party there was no one equal to such a task. We rode on for another half-hour, after which the path led downwards into the territory of Beyrout; and we rode quietly and comfortably by the sea-side towards this city. Mulberry trees and vineyards bloomed around us, country-houses and villages lay half hidden between, and convents crowned the lower peaks of the Lebanon, which on this side displays only naked rocks, the majority of a bluish- grey colour. At a little distance from Beyrout we came upon a second giant bridge, similar to that over the Dog's-river. Broad staircases, on which four or five horsemen could conveniently ride abreast, led upwards and downwards. The steps are so steep, and lie so far apart, that it seems almost incredible that the poor horses should be able to ascend and descend upon them. We looked down from a dizzy height, not upon a river, but upon a dry river-bed. At five o'clock in the evening we arrived safely at Beyrout; and thus ended our excursion to the "lovely and incomparable city of the East," to the world-renowned ruin, and to the venerable Grove of Cedars. Our tour had occupied ten days; the distance was about 180 miles; namely, from Beyrout to Damascus about 60, from Damascus to Balbeck 40, and from Balbeck across the Lebanon to Beyrout about 80 miles. Of four-footed beasts, amphibious creatures, birds, or insects, we had seen nothing. Count Berchtold caught a chameleon, which unfortunately effected its escape from its prison a few days afterwards. At night we frequently heard the howling of jackals, but never experienced any annoyance from them. We had not to complain of the attacks of insects; but suffered much from the dreadful heat, besides being frequently obliged to endure hunger and thirst: the thermometer one day rose to 40 degrees. In Beyrout I once more put up at the house of the kind French lady. The first piece of news I heard was that I had arrived twenty-four hours too late, and had thus missed the English packet-boat; this was a most annoying circumstance, for the boat in question only starts for Alexandria once a month (on the 8th or 9th), and at other times it is a great chance if an opportunity of journeying thither can be found. On the very next day I hastened to the Austrian consulate, and begged the Vice-consul, Herr C., to let me know when a ship was about to start for Egypt, and also to engage a place for me. I was told that a Greek vessel would start for that country in two or three days; but these two or three days grew into nineteen. Never shall I forget what I had to endure in Beyrout. When I could no longer bear the state of things at night in the Noah's ark of my good Pauline, I used to creep through the window on to a terrace, and sleep there; but was obliged each time to retire to my room before daybreak lest I should be discovered. It is said that misfortunes seldom happen singly, and my case was not an exception to the rule. One night I must have caught cold; for in the morning when I hastened back to my prison, and lay down on the bed to recover from the effects of my stone couch, I experienced such an acute pain in my back and hips that I was unable to rise. It happened to be a Sunday morning, a day on which my kind Pauline did not come to the house, as there was no school to keep; and so I lay for twenty-four hours in the greatest pain, without help, unable even to obtain a drop of water. I was totally unable to drag myself to the door, or to the place where the water-jug stood. The next day, I am thankful to say, I felt somewhat better; my Pauline also came, and prepared me some mutton-broth. By the fourth day I was once more up, and had almost recovered from the attack. JOURNEY FROM BEYROUT TO CAIRO AND ALEXANDRIA. It was not until the 28th of July that a Greek brig set sail for Alexandria. At ten o'clock in the evening I betook myself on board, and the next morning at two we weighed anchor. Never have I bid adieu to any place with so much joy as I felt on leaving the town of Beyrout; my only regret was the parting from my kind Pauline. I had met many good people during my journey, but she was certainly one of the best. Unhappily, my cruel fate was not yet weary of pursuing me; and in my experience I fully realised the old proverb of, "out of the frying- pan into the fire." On this vessel, and during the time we had to keep quarantine in Alexandria, I was almost worse off than during my stay in Beyrout. It is necessary, in dealing with the captain of a vessel of this description, to have a written contract for every thing--stating, for instance, where he is to land, how long he may stay at each place, etc. I mentioned this fact at the consulate, and begged the gentlemen to do what was necessary; but they assured me the captain was known to be a man of honour, and that the precaution I wished to take would be quite superfluous. Upon this assumption, I placed myself fearlessly in the hands of the man; but scarcely had we lost sight of land, when he frankly declared that there were not sufficient provisions and water on board to allow of our proceeding to Alexandria, but that he must make for the harbour of Limasol in Cyprus. I was exceedingly angry at this barefaced fraud, and at the loss of time it would occasion me, and offered all the opposition I could. But nothing would avail me; I had no written contract, and the rest of the company offered no active resistance--so to Cyprus we went. A voyage in an ordinary sailing-vessel, which is not a packet-boat, is as wearisome a thing as can be well conceived. The lower portion of the ship is generally so crammed with merchandise, that the deck alone remains for the passengers. This was the case on the present occasion. I was obliged to remain continually on deck: during the daytime, when I had only my umbrella to shield me from the piercing rays of the sun; at night, when the dews fell so heavily, that after an hour my cloak would be quite wet through, in cold and in stormy weather. They did not even spread a piece of sailcloth by way of awning. This state of things continued for ten days and eleven nights, during which time I had not even an opportunity to change my clothes. This was a double hardship; for if there is a place above all others where cleanliness becomes imperative to comfort, it is certainly on board a Greek ship, the generality of which are exceedingly dirty and disgusting. The company I found did not make amends for the accommodation. The only Europeans on board were two young men, who had received some unimportant situation in a quarantine office from the Turkish government. The behaviour of both was conceited, stupid, and withal terribly vulgar. Then there were four students from Alexandria, who boarded at Beyrout, and were going home to spend the vacation--good-natured but much-neglected lads of fourteen or fifteen years, who seemed particularly partial to the society of the sailors, and were always talking, playing, or quarrelling with them. The remainder of the company consisted of a rich Arab family, with several male and female negro slaves, and a few very poor people. And in such society I was to pass a weary time. Many will say that this was a good opportunity for obtaining an insight into the customs and behaviour of these people; but I would gladly have declined the opportunity, for it requires an almost angelic patience to bear such a complication of evils with equanimity. Among the Arabs and the lower class of Greeks, moreover, every thing possessed by one member of the community is looked upon as public property. A knife, a pair of scissors, a drinking-glass, or any other small article, is taken from its owner without permission, and is given back after use without being cleaned. On the mat, the carpet, or the mattress, which you have brought on board as bedding, a negro and his master will lie down; and wherever a vacant space is left, some one is sure to stand or lie down. Take what precautions you may, it is impossible to avoid having your person and garments infested by certain very disgusting parasitical creatures. One day I cleaned my teeth with a toothbrush; one of the Greek sailors, noticing what I was about, came towards me, and when I laid the brush down for an instant, took it up. I thought he only wished to examine it; but no, he did exactly as I had done, and after cleaning his teeth returned me my brush, expressing himself entirely satisfied with it. The diet on board a vessel of this kind is also exceedingly bad. For dinner we have pilau, stale cheese, and onions; in the evening, we get anchovies, olives, stale cheese again, and ship-biscuit instead of bread. These appetising dishes are placed in a tray on the ground, round which the captains (of whom there are frequently two or three), the mate, and those passengers who have not come furnished with provisions of their own, take their places. I did not take part in these entertainments; for I had brought a few live fowls, besides some rice, butter, dried bread, and coffee, and prepared my own meals. The voyage in one of these agreeable ships is certainly not very dear, if we do not take the discomforts and privations into account; but these I can really not estimate at too high a price. For the voyage to Alexandria (a distance of 2000 sea- miles) I paid sixty piastres; the provisions I took with me cost thirty more; and thus the entire journey came only to ninety piastres. In general the wind was very unfavourable, so that we frequently cruised about for whole nights, and awoke in the morning to find ourselves in almost the same position we had occupied the previous evening. This is one of the most disagreeable impressions, and one which can scarcely be described, to be continually driving and driving without approaching the conclusion of your journey. To my shame I must confess that I sometimes shed tears of regret and annoyance. My fellow-passengers could not at all understand why I was so impatient; for, with their constitutional indolence, they were quite indifferent as to whether they spent their time for a week or a fortnight longer in smoking, sleeping, and idling on board or on shore--whether they were carried to Cyprus or Alexandria. It was not until the fourth day that we landed at LIMASOL. This place contains pretty houses, some of which are even provided with slated roofs, and resemble European habitations. Here, for the first time since my departure from Constantinople, I saw a vehicle; it was not, however, a coach, but simply a wooden two-wheeled cart, and is used to transport stones, earth, and merchandise. The region around Limasol is barren in the extreme, almost like that of Larnaca, except that the mountains are here much nearer. We stayed in this port the whole of the day; and now I learnt for the first time that the captain had not put in here so much on account of scarcity of provisions, as because he wanted to take in wine and endeavour to take in passengers. Of the latter, however, none presented themselves. The wine is very cheap; I bought a bottle containing about three pints for a piastre. As soon as we were again at sea, our worthy captain gave out that he wished to call at Damietta. My patience was at length exhausted. I called him a cheat, and insisted that he should bend his course to no other port than to Alexandria, otherwise I should have him brought before a judge if it cost me a hundred piastres. This remonstrance produced so much effect upon the captain, that he promised me not to cast anchor any where else; and, marvellous to relate, he kept his word. One other circumstance occurred during this journey which is interesting as furnishing a sample of the heroism of the modern Greeks. On the 5th of August, about noon, our sailors discovered a two- masted ship in the distance, which altered her course immediately on perceiving our vessel, and came sailing towards us. It was at once concluded by all that this ship must be a pirate, else why did she alter her course and give chase to us? The circumstance was indeed singular; yet these maritime heroes ought to have been used to all kinds of adventures, and not at once to have feared the worst, particularly as, so far as I am aware, the pirate's trade is very nearly broken up, and attempts of this kind are unprecedented--at least in these regions. A painter like Hogarth should have been on board our ship, to mark the expression of fear and cowardice depicted on the several countenances. It was wonderful to behold how the poor captains ran from one end of the ship to the other, and huddled us travellers together into a heap, recommending us to sit still and keep silence; how they then hurried away and ran to and fro, making signs and gestures, while the pale sailors tumbled after them with scared faces, wringing their hands. Any one who had not witnessed the scene would think this description exaggerated. What would the Grecian heroes of antiquity say if they could throw a glance upon their gallant descendants! Instead of arming themselves and making preparations, the men ran about in the greatest confusion. We were in this enviable state when the dreaded pirate came within gunshot; and the reason of her approach turned out to be that her compass was broken. The whole scene at once changed, as though a beneficent fairy had waved her wand. The captains instantly recovered their dignity, the sailors embraced and jumped about like children, and we poor travellers were released from durance and permitted to take part in the friendly interview between the two heroic crews. The captain who had spoken us asked our gallant leader in what latitude we were, and hearing that we were sailing to Alexandria, requested that a lantern should be hung at the mainmast-head, at which he might look as at a guiding-star. With the exception of Cyprus, we had seen no land during all our weary journey. We could only judge when we arrived in the neighbourhood of Damietta by the altered colour of the sea; as far as the eye could reach, the beautiful dark-blue wave had turned to the colour of the yellow Nile. From these tokens I could judge of the magnitude and volume of that river, which at this season of the year increases greatly, and had already been rising for two months. August 7th. At eight o'clock in the morning we safely reached the quay of Alexandria. CHAPTER XIV. Alexandria--Keeping quarantine--Want of arrangement in the quarantine house--Bad water--Fumigating of the rooms--Release-- Aspect of the city--Departure by boat for Atfe--Mehemet Ali--Arrival at Atfe--Excellence of the Nile water--Good-nature of the Arab women--The Delta of the Nile--The Libyan desert--The pyramids-- Arrival at Cairo. At first we could only perceive the tops of masts, behind which low objects seemed to be hiding as they rose from the sea. In a little time a whole forest of masts appeared, while the objects before mentioned took the shape of houses peering forth amongst them. At length the land itself could be distinguished from the surrounding ocean, and we discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness to the whole scene. We cast anchor between the lighthouse and the new hospital. No friendly boat was permitted to approach and carry us to the wished- for shore; we came from the land of the plague to enter another region afflicted with the same scourge, and yet we were compelled to keep quarantine, for the Egyptians asserted that the Syrian plague was more malignant than the variety of the disease raging among them. Thus a compulsory quarantine is always enforced in these regions, a circumstance alike prejudicial to visitors, commerce, and shipping. We waited with fear and trembling to hear how long a period of banishment in the hospital should be awarded us. At length came a little skiff, bringing two guardians (servants of the hospital), and with them the news that we must remain in the hospital ten days from the period of our entrance, but that we could not disembark to-day, as it was Sunday. Excepting at the arrival of the English packet- boats, the officials have no time to examine vessels on Sundays or holidays,--a truly Egyptian arrangement. Why could not an officer be appointed for these days to take care of the poor travellers? Why should fifty persons suffer for the convenience of one, and be deprived of their liberty for an extra day? We came from Beyrout furnished with a Teshkeret (certificate of health) by the government, besides the voucher of our personal appearance, and yet we were condemned to a lengthened imprisonment. But Mehemet Ali is far more mighty and despotic in Egypt than the Sultan in Constantinople; he commands, and what can we do but obey, and submit to his superior power? From the deck of our ship I obtained a view of the city and the desert region around. The town seems tolerably spacious, and is built quite in European style. Of the Turkish town, which lies in the background, we can distinguish nothing; the proper harbour, situate at the opposite side of the city, is also invisible, and its situation can only be discerned from the forest of masts that towers upwards. The eye is principally caught by two high sand-hills, on one of which stands Fort Napoleon, while the other is only surmounted by several cannon; the foreground is occupied by rocky ridges of moderate elevation, flanked on one side by the lighthouse, and on the other by the new quarantine buildings. The old quarantine-house lies opposite to the new one. In several places we notice little plantations of date- palms, which make a very agreeable impression on the European, as their appearance is quite new to him. August 8th. At seven o'clock this morning we disembarked, and were delivered with bag and baggage at the quarantine-house. I now trod a new quarter of the globe, Africa. When I sit calmly down to think of the past, I frequently wonder how it was that my courage and perseverance never once left me while I followed out my project step by step. This only serves to convince me that, if the resolution be firm, things can be achieved which would appear almost impossible. I had expected to find neither comfort nor pleasure in the quarantine-house, and unfortunately I had judged but too well. The courtyard into which we were shewn was closely locked, and furnished on all sides with wooden bars; the rooms displayed only four bare walls, with windows guarded in the same manner. It is customary to quarter several persons in the same room, and then each pays a share of the expense. I requested a separate apartment, which one can also have, but of course at a higher charge. Such a thing as a chair, a table, or a piece of furniture, was quite out of the question; whoever wishes to enjoy such a luxury must apply by letter to an innkeeper of the town, who lends any thing of the kind, but at an enormously high rate. Diet must be obtained in the same way. In the quarantine establishment there is no host, every thing must be procured from without. An innkeeper generally demands between thirty and forty piastres per diem for dinner and supper. This I considered a little too exorbitant, and therefore ordered a few articles of food through one of the keepers. He promised to provide every thing punctually; but I fear he cannot have understood me, for I waited in vain, and during the whole of the first day had nothing to eat. On the second day my appetite was quite ravenous, and I did not know what to do. I betook myself to the room of the Arab family who had come in the same ship with me, and were therefore also in quarantine; I asked for a piece of bread, for which I offered to pay but the kind woman not only gave me bread, but pressed upon me a share of all the provisions she was preparing for her family, and would not be prevailed upon to accept any remuneration; on the contrary, she explained to me by signs that I was to come to her whenever I wanted any thing. It was not until the evening of the second day that, perceiving it was hopeless to expect any thing from my stupid messenger, I applied to the chief superintendent of the hospital, who came every evening at sunset to examine us and to lock us in our rooms. I ordered my provisions of him, and from this time forward always received them in proper time. The keepers were all Arabs, and not one of them could understand or speak any language but their own; this is also a truly Egyptian arrangement. I think that in an establishment of this kind, where travellers from all parts of the world are assembled, it would at least be advisable to have a person who understands Italian, even if he cannot speak it. An individual of this kind could easily be obtained; for Italian, as I afterwards found, is such a well-known language throughout the East, but particularly at Alexandria and Cairo, that many people are to be met with, even among the lowest classes, who understand and can speak it. The supply of water is also very badly managed. Every morning, immediately after sunrise, a few skins of water are brought for the purpose of cleaning the cooking utensils; at nine o'clock in the morning and five in the afternoon a few camels come laden with skins of fresh water, which are emptied into two stone tanks in the courtyard. Then all fill their cooking and drinking vessels, but in such an untidy way that I felt not the slightest inclination to drink. One man was ladling out the water with a dirty pot, while another dabbled in the tank with his filthy hands; and some even put their dirty feet on the run and washed them, so that some of the water ran back into the tank. This receptacle is moreover never cleaned, so that dirt accumulates upon dirt, and the only way to obtain clear water is by filtering it. On the second day of my residence here I was exceedingly surprised to observe that the courtyard, the staircases, the rooms, etc. were being cleaned and swept with particular care. The mystery was soon solved; the commissioner appeared with a great stick, and paused at the threshold of the door to see that the linen, clothes, etc. were hung up to air, the books opened, and the letters or papers suspended by strings. No idea can be formed of the stupid nervous fear of this commissioner. For instance, on passing through the first room on his way to my apartment, he saw the stalk of a bunch of grapes lying on the ground. With fearful haste he thrust this trifling object aside with his stick, for fear his foot should strike against it in passing; and as he went he continually held his stick in rest, to keep us plague-struck people at a respectful distance. On the seventh day of our incarceration we were all sent to our rooms at nine o'clock in the morning. Doors and windows were then locked, and great chafing-dishes were brought, and a dreadful odour of brimstone, herbs, burnt feathers, and other ingredients filled the air. After we had been compelled to endure this stifling atmosphere for four or five minutes, the windows and doors were once more opened. A person of a consumptive habit could scarcely have survived this inhuman ordeal. On the ninth day the men were drawn up in a row, to undergo an examination by the doctor. The old gentleman entered the room, with a spy-glass in one hand and a stick in the other, to review the troop. Every man had to strike himself a blow on the chest and another in the side; if he could do this without feeling pain, it was considered a sign of health, because the plague-spots appear first on these parts of the body. On the same day, the women were led into a large room, where a great female dragoon was waiting for us to put us through a similar ceremony. Neither men nor women are, however, required to undress. A few hours later we were summoned to the iron grating which separated us from the disinfected people. On the farther side were seated several officers, to whom we paid the fee for our rooms and the keepers--the charge was very trifling. My room, with attendance, only cost me three piastres per diem. But how gladly would every traveller pay a higher price if he could only have a table and a few chairs in his apartment, and an attendant who understood what was said to him! So far as cleanliness is concerned, there is nothing to complain of; the rooms, the staircases and the courtyard were kept very neatly, and the latter was even profusely watered twice a day. We were not at all annoyed by insects, and we were but little incommoded by the heat. In the sun the temperature never exceeded 33 degress; and in the shade the greatest heat was 22 degrees Reaumur. August 17th. At seven o'clock this morning our cage was at length opened. Now all the world rushed in; friends and relations of the voyagers, ambassadors from innkeepers, porters, and donkey-drivers, all were merry and joyous, for every one found a friend or an acquaintance, and I only stood friendless and alone, for nobody hastened towards me or took an interest in me; but the envoys of the innkeepers, the porters, and donkey-drivers, cruel generation that they were, quarrelled and hustled each other for the possession of the solitary one. I collected my baggage, mounted a donkey, and rode to "Colombier," one of the best inns in Alexandria. Swerving a little from the direct road, I passed "Cleopatra's Needles," two obelisks of granite, one of which is still erect, while the other lies prostrate in the sand at a short distance. We rode through a miserable poverty-stricken village; the huts were built of stones, but were so small and low that we can hardly understand how a man can stand upright in them. The doors were so low that we had to stoop considerably in entering. I could not discover any signs of windows. And this wretched village lay within the bounds of the city, and even within the walls, which inclose such an immense space, that they not only comprise Alexandria itself, but several small villages, besides numerous country-houses and a few shrubberies and cemeteries. In this village I saw many women with yellowish-brown countenances. They looked wretched and dirty, and were all clothed in long blue garments, sitting before their doors at work, or nursing children. These women were employed in basket-making and in picking corn. I did not notice any men; they were probably employed in the fields. I now rode forward across the sandy plain on which the whole of Alexandria is built, and suddenly, without having passed through any street, found myself in the great square. I can scarcely describe the astonishment I felt at the scene before me. Every where I saw large beautiful houses, with lofty gates, regular windows, and balconies, like European dwellings; equipages, as graceful and beautiful as any that can be found in the great cities of Europe, rolled to and fro amid a busy crowd of men of various nations. Franks, in the costume of their country, were distinguished among the turbans and fez-caps of the Orientals; and tall women, in their blue gowns, wandered amidst the half-naked forms of the Arabs and Bedouins. Here a negro was running with argile behind his master, who trotted along on his noble horse; there Frankish or Egyptian ladies were to be seen mounted on asses. Coming from the dreary monotony of the quarantine-house, this sight made a peculiar impression upon me. Scarcely had I arrived at the hotel before I hastened to the Austrian consulate, where Herr von L., the government councillor, received me very kindly. I begged this gentleman to let me know what would be the first opportunity for me to continue my journey to Cairo; I did not wish to take passage on board an English steamboat, as the charge on this vessel for the short distance of about 400 sea miles is five pounds. The councillor was polite enough to procure me a berth on board an Arabian barque, which was to start from Atfe the same evening. I also learnt at the consulate, that Herr Sattler, the painter, had arrived by the packet-boat a few days previously, and was now at the old quarantine-house. I rode out in company with a gentleman to visit him, and was glad to find him looking very well. He was just returning from his journey to Palestine. I found the arrangements in the old quarantine-building rather more comfortable than those in the new; the establishment is moreover nearer the town, so that it is easier to obtain the necessaries of life. On my return, my companion was so kind as to conduct me through the greater portion of the Turkish town, which appeared to be better built and more neatly kept than any city of the Turks I had yet seen. The bazaar is not handsome; it consists of wooden booths, displaying only the most ordinary articles of merchandise. On the same day that I quitted the quarantine-house, I rode in the evening to the Nile Canal, which is twenty-four feet broad and about twenty-six miles long. A number of vessels lay there, on one of which a place had been taken for me (the smaller division of the cabin) as far as Atfe, for the sum of fifteen piastres. I at once took possession of my berth, made my arrangements for the night and for the following day, and waited hour after hour till we should depart. Late in the night I was at length told that we could not set out to-night at all. To pack up my things again, and to set off to walk to the inn, a distance of two miles, and to return next morning, would have been a rather laborious proceeding; I therefore resolved to remain on board, and sat down among the Arabs and Bedouins to eat my frugal supper, which consisted of cold provisions. Next day I was told every half-hour that we should depart immediately, and each time I was again disappointed. Herr von L. had wished to supply me with wine and provisions for the passage; but as I had calculated upon being in Atfe to-day at noon, I had declined his offer with many thanks. But now I had no provisions; I could not venture into the town on account of the distance, and found it quite impossible to make the sailors understand that they were to bring me some bread and baked fish from the neighbouring bazaar. At length hunger compelled me to venture out alone: I pushed through the crowd, who looked at me curiously, but suffered me to pass unmolested, and bought some provisions. In Alexandria I procured beef and beef-soup, for the first time since my departure from Smyrna. In Alexandria and throughout the whole of Egypt the white bread is very delicious. At four in the afternoon we at length set sail. The time had passed rapidly enough with me, for there was a great deal of bustle around this canal. Barques came and departed, took in or discharged cargo; long processions of camels moved to and fro with their drivers to fetch and carry goods; the soldiers passed by, to the sound of military music, to exercise in the neighbouring square; there was continually something new to see, so that when four o'clock arrived, I could not imagine what had become of the time. With the exception of the crew, I was the only person on board. These vessels are long and narrow, and are fitted up with a cabin and an awning. The cabin is divided into two little rooms; the first and larger of these contains two little windows on each side. The second and smaller one is often only six feet long by five broad. The space under the awning is appropriated to the poorer class of passengers and to the servants. It is necessary to take on board, besides provisions, a little stove, wood for fuel, kitchen- utensils and articles of this kind, a supply of water. The water of the Nile is, indeed, very good and thoroughly tasteless, so that it is universally drunk in Alexandria, Cairo, and elsewhere; but it is very turbid and of a yellowish colour, so that it must be filtered to render it clear and pure. Thus it happens that even on the river we are obliged to take water with us. Handsome country-houses with gardens skirt the sides of the canal; the finest of these belongs to a pacha, the son-in-law of Mehemet Ali. As we passed this palace I saw the Egyptian Napoleon for the first time; he is a very little old man, with a long snow-white beard; his eyes and his gestures are very animated. Several Europeans stood around him, and a number of servants, some of them clothed in Greek, others in Turkish costume. In the avenue his carriage was waiting, a splendid double-seated vehicle, with four beautiful horses, harnessed in the English style. The Franks are favourably disposed towards this despot, whose subjects cherish a very opposite feeling. His government is very lenient to Christians, while the Mussulmen are obliged to bend their necks beneath a yoke of iron slavery. This view of villas and gardens only lasts for two hours at the most. Afterwards we continue our journey to Atfe through a very uniform and unsatisfactory region of sandy hills and plains. On the right we pass the Mariotic Sea; and on both sides lie villages of a very wretched appearance. August 19th. At eleven in the forenoon we reached Atfe, and had therefore travelled about 180 sea-miles in sixteen hours. Atfe is a very small town, or rather a mere heap of stones. The landing-places were always the scenes of my chief troubles. It was seldom that I could find a Frank, and was generally obliged to address several of the bystanders before I succeeded in finding one who could speak Italian and give me the information I required. I requested to be taken at once to the Austrian consulate, where this difficulty was usually removed. This was also the case here. The consul immediately sent to inquire how I could best get to Cairo, and offered me a room in his house in the mean time. A ship was soon found, for Atfe is a harbour of some importance. The canal joins the Nile at this place; and as larger vessels are used on the stream itself, all goods are transhipped here, so that barques are continually starting for Alexandria and Cairo. In a few hours I was obliged to re-embark, and had only time to provide myself with provisions and a supply of water, and to partake of a sumptuous dinner at the consul's, whose hospitality was doubly grateful to me as I had fasted the previous day. The chief compartment of the cabin had been engaged for me, at an expense of 100 piastres. On embarking, however, I found that this place had been so filled with goods, that hardly a vacant space remained for the poor occupant. I at once hastened back to the consulate and complained of the captain, whereupon the consul sent for that worthy and desired him to clear my cabin, and to refrain from annoying me during the voyage, if he wished to be paid on our arrival at Cairo. This command was strictly obeyed, and until we reached our destination I was left in undisturbed possession of my berth. At two in the afternoon I once more set sail alone in the company of Arabs and Bedouins. I would counsel any one who can only make this journey to Cairo once in his lifetime to do it at the end of August or the beginning of September. A more lovely picture, and one more peculiar in its character, can scarcely be imagined. In many places the plain is covered as far as the eye can trace by the Nile-sea (it can scarcely be called river in its immense expanse), and every where little islands are seen rising from the waters, covered with villages surrounded by date-palms, and other trees, while in the background the high-masted boats, with their pyramidal sails, are gliding to and fro. Numbers of sheep, goats, and poultry cover the hills, and near the shore the heads of the dark-grey buffaloes, which are here found in large herds, peer forth from the water. These creatures are fond of immersing their bodies in the cool flood, where they stand gazing at the passing ships. Here and there little plantations of twenty to thirty trees are seen, which appear, as the ground is completely overflowed, to be growing out of the Nile. The water here is much more muddy and of a darker colour than in the canal between Atfe and Alexandria. The sailors pour this water into great iron vessels, and leave it to settle and become clearer; this is, however, of little use, for it remains almost as muddy as the river. Notwithstanding this circumstance, however, this Nile-water is not at all prejudicial to health; on the contrary, the inhabitants of the valley assert that they possess the best and wholesomest water in the world. The Franks are accustomed, as I have already stated, to take filtered water with them. When the supply becomes exhausted, they have only to put a few kernels of apricots or almonds chopped small into a vessel of Nile-water to render it tolerably clear within the space of five or six hours. I learnt this art from an Arab woman during my voyage on the Nile. The population of the region around the Nile must be very considerable, for the villages almost adjoin each other. The ground consists every where of sand, and only becomes fruitful through the mud which the Nile leaves behind after its inundation. Thus the luxuriant vegetation here only commences after the waters of the Nile have retired. The villages cannot be called handsome, as the houses are mostly built of earth and clay, or of bricks made of the Nile mud. Man, the "crown of creation," does not appear to advantage here; the poverty, the want of cleanliness, and rude savage state of the people, cannot be witnessed without a feeling of painful emotion. The dress of the women consists of the usual long blue garment, and the men wear nothing but a shirt reaching to the knee. Some of the women veil their faces, but others do not. I was astonished at the difference between the fine strongly-built men and the ugly disgusting women and neglected children. In general the latter present a most lamentable appearance, with faces covered with scabs and sores, on which a quantity of flies are continually settling. Frequently also they have inflamed eyes. In spite of the oppressive heat, I remained nearly the whole day seated on the roof of my cabin, enjoying the landscape, and gazing at the moving panorama to my heart's content. The company on board could be called good or bad; bad, because there was not a soul present to whom I could impart my feelings and sentiments on the marvels of nature around me; good, because all, but particularly the Arab women who occupied the little cabin in the forepart of the vessel, were very good-natured and attentive to me. They wished me to accept a share of every thing they possessed, and gave me a portion of each of their dishes, which generally consisted either of pilau, beans, or cucumbers, and which I did not find palatable; when they drank coffee in the morning, the first cup was always handed to me. In return I gave them some of my provisions, all of which they liked, excepting the coffee, which had milk in it. When we landed at a village, the inhabitants would inquire by signs if I wished for any thing. I wanted some milk, eggs, and bread, but did not know how to ask for them in Arabic. I therefore had recourse to drawing; for instance, I made a portrait of a cow, gave an Arab woman a bottle and some money, and made signs to her to milk her cow and to fill my bottle. In the same way I drew a hen, and some eggs beside her; pointed to the hen with a shake of my head, and then to the eggs with a nod, counting on the woman's fingers how many she was to bring me. In this way I could always manage to get on, by limiting my wants to such objects as I could represent by drawings. When they brought me the milk, and I explained to the Arab woman by signs that, after she had finished cooking, I wished to have the use of the fire to prepare my milk and eggs, she immediately took off her pot from the fire and compelled me, in spite of all remonstrances, to cook my dinner first. If I walked forward towards the prow to obtain a better view of the landscape, the best place was immediately vacated on my behalf; and, in short, they all behaved in such a courteous and obliging way, that these uncultivated people might have put to shame many a civilised European. They certainly, however, requested a few favours of me, which, I am ashamed to say, it cost me a great effort to grant. For instance, the oldest among them begged permission to sleep in my apartment, as they only possessed a small cabin, while I had the larger one all to myself. Then they performed their devotions, even to the preliminary washing of face and feet, in my cabin: this I permitted, as I was more on deck than below. At first these women called me Mary, imagining, probably, that every Christian lady must bear the name of the Virgin. I told them my baptismal name, which they accurately remembered; they told me theirs in return, which I very soon forgot. I mention this trifling circumstance, because I afterwards was frequently surprised at the retentive memory of these people during my journey through the desert towards the Red Sea. August 21st. Although I felt solitary among all the voyagers on the barque, these two days passed swiftly and agreeably away. The flatter the land grew, the broader did the lordly river become. The villages increased in size; and the huts, mostly resembling a sugar-loaf, with a number of doves roosting on its apex, wore an appearance of greater comfort. Mosques and large country-houses presently appeared; and, in short, the nearer we approached towards Cairo, the more distinct became these indications of affluence. The sand-hills appeared less frequently, though on the route between Atfe and Cairo I still saw five or six large barren places which had quite the look of deserts. Once the wind blew directly towards us from one of these burning wastes with such an oppressive influence, that I could easily imagine how dreadful the hot winds (chamsir) must be, and I no longer wondered at the continual instances of blindness among the poor inhabitants of these regions. The heat is unendurable, and the fine dust and heated particles of sand which are carried into the air by these winds cannot fail to cause inflammation of the eyes. Little towers of masonry, on the tops of which telegraphs have been fixed, are seen at intervals along the road between Alexandria and Cairo. Our vessel was unfortunate enough to strike several times on sand- banks, besides getting entangled among the shallows--a circumstance of frequent occurrence during the time that the Nile is rising. On these occasions I could not sufficiently admire the strength, agility, and hard-working perseverance of our sailors, who were obliged to jump overboard and push off the ship with poles, and afterwards were repeatedly compelled to drag it for half an hour together through shallow places. These people are also very expert at climbing. They could ascend _without_ ratlines to the very tops of the slanting masts, and take in or unloose the sails. I could not repress a shudder on seeing these poor creatures hanging betwixt earth and heaven, so far above me that they appeared like dwarfs. They work with one hand, while they cling to the mast with the other. I do not think that a better, or a more active, agile, and temperate race of sailors exists than these. Their fare consists of bread or ship-biscuit in the morning, with sometimes a raw cucumber, a piece of cheese, or a handful of dates in addition. For dinner they have the same diet, and for supper they have a dish of warm beans, or a kind of broth or pilau. Roast mutton is a rare delicacy with them, and their drink is nothing but the Nile water. During the period of the inundation, the river is twice as full of vessels as at other times. When the river is swollen, the only method of communication is by boats. On the last day of this expedition a most beauteous spectacle awaited me--the Delta! Here the mighty Nile, which irrigates the whole country with the hundreds of canals cut from its banks through every region, divides itself into two principal branches, one of which falls into the sea at Rosetta, and the other at Damietta. If the separate aims of the river could be compared to seas, how much more does its united vastness merit the appellation! When I was thus carried away by the beauty and grandeur of nature, when I thus saw myself placed in the midst of new and interesting scenes, it would appear to me incredible how people can exist, possessing in abundance the gifts of riches, health, and leisure time, and yet without a taste for travelling. The petty comforts of life and enjoyments of luxury are indeed worth more in the eyes of some than the opportunity of contemplating the exalted beauties of nature or the monuments of history, and of gaining information concerning the manners and customs of foreign nations. Although I was at times very badly situated, and had to encounter more hardships and disagreeables than fall to the lot of many a man, I would be thankful that I had had resolution given me to continue my wanderings whenever one of these grand spectacles opened itself before me. What, indeed, are the entertainments of a large town compared to the Delta of the Nile, and many similar scenes? The pure and perfect enjoyment afforded by the contemplation of the beauty of nature is not for a moment to be found in the ball-room or the theatre; and all the ease and luxury in the world should not buy from me my recollections of this journey. Not far from the Delta we can behold the Libyan Desert, of which we afterwards never entirely lose sight, though we sometimes approach and sometimes recede from it. I became conscious of certain dark objects in the far distance; they developed themselves more and more, and at length I recognised in them the wonder-buildings of ancient times, the Pyramids; far behind them rises the chain of mountains, or rather hills, of Mokattam. Evening was closing in when we at length arrived at Bulak, the harbour of Cairo. If we could have landed at once, I might, perhaps, have reached the town itself this evening; as the harbour is, however, always over-crowded with vessels, the captain is often compelled to wait for an hour before he can find a place to moor his craft. By the time I could disembark it had already grown quite dark, and the town-gates were shut. I was thus obliged to pass the night on board. The journey from Atfe to Cairo had occupied two days and a half. This passage had been one of the most interesting, although the heat became more and more oppressive, and the burning winds of the desert were sometimes wafted over to us. The highest temperature at midday was 36 degrees, and in the shade from 24 to 25 degrees Reaumur. The sky was far less beautiful and clear than in Syria; it was here frequently overcast with white clouds. CHAPTER XV. Cairo--Quarrel with the captain--Rapacity of the beggars--The custom-house--The consulate--Aspect of Cairo--Narrow and crowded streets--Costumes--The mad-house--Disgusting exhibition--Joseph's well--Palace of Mehemet Ali--Dates--Mosques at Cairo--Excursion to the pyramids of Gizeh--Gizeh--Eggs hatched by artificial heat-- Ascent of the pyramids--The sphynx--Return to Cairo. August 22d. The aspect of this great Egyptian metropolis is not nearly so imposing as I had fancied it to be; its situation is too flat, and from on board we can only discern scattered portions of its extended area. The gardens skirting the shore are luxuriant and lovely. At my debarcation, and on the road to the consulate, I met with several adventures, which I relate circumstantially, trifling as they may appear, in order to give a hint as to the best method of dealing with the people here. At the very commencement I became involved in a dispute with the captain of the vessel. I had still to pay him three dollars and a half, and gave him four dollars, in the expectation that he would return me my change. This, however, he refused to do, and persisted in keeping the half-dollar. He said it should be divided as backsheesh among the crew; but I am sure they would have seen nothing of it. Luckily, however, he was stupid enough not to put the money in his pocket, but kept it open in his hand. I quickly snatched a coin from him, and put it into my pocket, explaining to him at the same time that he should not have it back until he had given me my change, adding that I would give the men a gratuity myself. He shouted and stormed, and kept on asking for the money. I took no heed of him, but continued quietly packing up my things. Seeing, at length, that nothing was to be done with me, he gave me back my half-dollar; whereupon we parted good friends. This affair concluded, I had to look about for a couple of asses; one for myself, and another for my luggage. If I had stepped ashore I should have been almost torn in pieces by contending donkey-drivers, each of whom would have lugged me in a different direction. I therefore remained quietly for a time in my cabin, until the drivers ceased to suspect that any one was there. In the meantime I had been looking upon the shore from the cabin-window, and speculating upon which animal I should take; then I quickly rushed out, and before the proprietors of the long-eared steeds were aware of my intention, I had seized one by the bridle and pointed to another. This concluded the matter at once; for the proprietors of the chosen animals defended me from the rest, and returned with me to the boat to carry my baggage. A fellow came up and arranged my little trunk on the back of the ass. For this trifling service I gave him a piastre; but observing that I was alone, he probably thought he could soon intimidate me into giving whatever he demanded. So he returned me my piastre, and demanded four. I took the money, and told him (for fortunately he understood a little Italian) that if he felt dissatisfied with this reward he might accompany me to the consulate, where his four piastres would be paid so soon as it appeared that he had earned them. He shouted and blustered, just as the captain had done; but I remained deaf, and rode forward towards the custom-house. Then he came down to three piastres, then to two, and finally said he would be content with one, which I threw to him. When I reached the custom-house, hands were stretched out towards me from all sides; I gave something to the chief person, and let the remaining ones clamour on. When, after experiencing these various annoyances, I rode on towards the town, a new obstacle arose. My Arab guide inquired whither he should conduct me. I endeavoured in vain to explain to him where I wanted to go; he could not be made to understand me. Nothing now remained for me but to accost every well-dressed Oriental whom I met, until I should find one who could understand either French or Italian. The third person I addressed fortunately knew something of the latter language, and I begged him to tell my guide to take me to the Austrian consulate. This was done, and my troubles concluded. A ride of three quarters of an hour in a very broad handsome street, planted with a double row of a kind of acacia altogether strange to me, among a crowd of men, camels, asses, etc., brought me to the town, the streets of which are in general narrow. There is so much noise and crowding every where, that one would suppose a tumult had broken out. But as I approached, the immense mass always opened as if by magic, and I pursued my way without hindrance to the consulate, which lies hidden in a little narrow blind alley. I went immediately to the office, and presented myself to the consul, with the request that he would recommend me a respectable inn of the second class. Herr Chamgion, the consul, interested himself for me with heartfelt kindness; he immediately despatched a kavasse to an innkeeper whom he knew, paid my guide, and recommended the host strongly to take good care of me; in short, he behaved towards me with true Christian kindliness. His house was ever open to me, and I could go to him with any petition I wished to make. It is a real pleasure to me to be able publicly once more to thank this worthy man. I had been furnished with a letter of recommendation to a certain Herr Palm. The consul kindly sent at once for this gentleman, who soon appeared, and accompanied me to the inn. I requested Herr P. to recommend me a servant who could either speak Italian or French, and afterwards to tell me the best method to set about seeing the lions of the town. Herr P. very willingly undertook to do so; and after the lapse of an hour, the dragoman had already been found, and two asses stood before the door to carry me and my servant through the whole town. The animated bustle and hum of business in the streets of Cairo is very great. I can even say that in the most populous cities of Italy I never saw any thing I could compare to it; and certainly this is a bold assertion. Many of the streets are so narrow, that when loaded camels meet, one party must always be led into a by-street until the other has passed. In these narrow lanes I continually encountered crowds of passengers, so that I really felt quite anxious, and wondered how I should find my way through. People mounted on horses and donkeys tower above the moving mass; but the asses themselves appear like pigmies beside the high, lofty-looking camels, which do not lose their proud demeanour even under their heavy burdens. Men often slip by under the heads of the camels. The riders keep as close as possible to the houses, and the mass of pedestrians winds dexterously between. There are water-carriers, vendors of goods, numerous blind men groping their way with sticks, and bearing baskets with fruit, bread, and other provisions for sale; numerous children, some of them running about the streets, and others playing before the house-doors; and lastly, the Egyptian ladies, who ride on asses to pay their visits, and come in long processions with their children and negro servants. Let the reader further imagine the cries of the vendors, the shouting of the drivers and passengers, the terrified screams of flying women and children, the quarrels which frequently arise, and the peculiar noisiness and talkativeness of these people, and he can fancy what an effect this must have on the nerves of a stranger. I was in mortal fear at every step, and on reaching home in the evening felt quite unwell; but as I never once saw an accident occur, I at length accustomed myself to the hubbub, and could follow my guide where the crowd was thickest without feeling uneasy. The streets, or, as they may be more properly called, the lanes of Cairo, are sprinkled with water several times in the day; fountains and large vessels of water are also placed every where for the convenience of the passers-by. In the broad streets straw-mats are hung up to keep off the sun's rays. The richer class of people wear the Oriental garb, with the exception that the women merely have their heads and faces wrapped in a light muslin veil; they wear also a kind of mantilla of black silk, which gives them a peculiar appearance. When they came riding along, and the wind caught this garment and spread it out, they looked exactly like bats with outstretched wings. Many of the Franks also dress in the Oriental style; the Fellahs go almost naked, and their women only wear a single blue garment. Here, as throughout all the East, the rich people are always seen on horseback. I was not so much pleased with the Egyptian as with the Syrian horses, for the former appeared to me less slim and gracefully built. The population of Cairo is estimated at 200,000, and is a mixed one, consisting of Arabs, Mamelukes, Turks, Berbers, Negroes, Bedouins, Christians, Greeks, Jews, etc. Thanks to the powerful arm of Mehemet Ali, they all live peacefully together. Cairo contains 25,000 houses, which are as unsightly and irregular as the streets. They are built of clay, unburnt bricks, and stones, and have little narrow entrances; the unsymmetrical windows are furnished with wooden shutters impenetrable to the eye. The interiors are decorated like the houses in Damascus, but in a less costly style; neither is there such an abundance of fresh water at Cairo. The Jews' quarter is the most hideous of all; the houses are dirty, and the streets so narrow that two persons can only just push by each other. The entire town is surrounded by walls and towers, guarded by a castle, and divided into several quarters, separated from each other by gates, which are closed after sunset. On the heights around Cairo are to be seen some castles from the time of the Saracens. As I rode to and fro in the town, my guide suddenly stopped, bought a quantity of bread, and motioned me to follow him. I thought he was going to take me to a menagerie, and that this bread was intended for the wild animals. We entered a courtyard with windows all round reaching to the ground, and strengthened with iron bars. Stopping before the first window, my servant threw in a piece of bread; what was my horror when I saw, instead of a lion or tiger, a naked emaciated old man rush forth, seize the bread, and devour it ravenously. I was in the mad-house. In the midst of each dark and filthy dungeon is fixed a stone, with two iron chains, to which one or two of these wretched creatures are attached by an iron ring fastened round the neck. There they sit staring with fearfully distorted faces, their hair and beard unkempt, their bodies emaciated, and the marrow of life drying up within them. In these foul and loathsome dens they must pine until the Almighty in his mercy loosens the chains which bind them to their miserable existence by a welcome death. There is not _one_ instance of a cure, and truly the treatment to which they are subjected is calculated to drive a half-witted person quite mad. And yet the Europeans can praise Mehemet Ali! Ye wretched madmen, ye poor fellahs, are ye too ready to join in this praise? Quitting this abode of misery, my dragoman led me to "Joseph's well," which is deeply hewn out of the rock. I descended more than two hundred and seventy steps, and had got half-way to the bottom of the gigantic structure. On looking downward into its depths a feeling of giddiness came over me. The new palace of Mehemet Ali is rather a handsome building, arranged chiefly in the European style. The rooms, or rather the halls, are very lofty, and are either tastefully painted or hung with silk, tapestry, etc. Large pier-glasses multiply the objects around, rich divans are attached to the walls, and costly tables, some of marble, others of inlaid work, enriched with beautiful paintings, stand in the rooms, in one of which I even noticed a billiard-table. The dining-hall is quite European in its character. In the centre stands a large table; two sideboards are placed against one side of the wall, and handsome chairs stand opposite. In one of the rooms hangs an oil-painting representing Ibrahim Pasha, {236} Mehemet Ali's son. This palace stands in the midst of a little garden, neither remarkable for the rarity of the plants it contains, nor for the beauty of their arrangement. The views from some of the apartments, as well as that from the garden, are very lovely. Opposite the palace a great mosque is being built as a mausoleum for Mehemet Ali. The despot probably reckons on having some years yet to live, for much remains to be done before the beautiful structure is completed. The pillars and the walls of the mosque are covered with the most splendid marble, of a yellowish-white colour. The before-mentioned buildings, namely, Joseph's well, the palace and gardens, and the mosque, are all situate on a high rock, to which a single broad road leads from Cairo. Here we behold a threefold sea, namely, of houses, of the Nile, and a sea of sand, on which the lofty Pyramids rise in the distance like isolated rocks. The mountains of Mokattam close the background, and a number of lovely gardens and plantations of date-palms surround the town. With one glance we can behold the most striking contrasts. A wreath of the most luxurious vegetation runs round the town, and beyond lies the dreary monotony of the desert. The colour of the Nile is so exactly similar to that of the sand forming its shores, that at a distance the line of demarcation cannot be traced. On my way homewards I met several fellahs carrying large baskets full of dates, and stopped one of them, in order to purchase some of this celebrated fruit. Unfortunately for me, the dates were still unripe, hard, of a brick-red colour, and so unpalatable that I could not eat one of them. A week or ten days afterwards I was able to procure some ripe ones; they were of a brown colour like the dried fruit, the tender skin could easily be peeled off, and I liked them better than dried dates, because they were more pulpy and not so sweet. A much more precious fruit, the finest production of Egypt and Syria, almost superior to the pine-apple in taste, is the banana, which is so delicate that it almost melts in the mouth. This fruit cannot be dried, and is therefore never exported. Sugar melons and peaches are to be had in abundance, but their flavour is not very good. I also preferred the Alexandrian grape to that of Cairo. The bazaars, through which we rode in all directions, displayed nothing very remarkable in manufactures or in productions of nature and art. From first to last I spent a week at Cairo, and occupied the whole of my time from morning till night in viewing the curiosities of the town. I only saw two mosques, that of Sultan Hassan and of Sultan Amru. Before I was permitted to enter the first of these edifices, they compelled me to take off my shoes, and walk in my stockings over a courtyard paved with great stones. The stones had become so heated by the solar rays, that I was obliged to run fast, to avoid scorching the soles of my feet. I cannot give an opinion touching the architectural beauty of this building, which is built in such a simple style that none but a connoisseur would discover its merits. I was better pleased with the mosque of Sultan Amru, which contains several halls, and is supported on numerous columns. The mosques in Cairo struck me as having a more ancient and venerable appearance than those of Constantinople, while the latter, on the other hand, were larger and more elegant. I also visited the island of Rodda, which is worthy the name of a beautiful garden. It lies opposite to old Cairo, on the Nile, and is said to be a favourite walk of the townspeople, though I was there twice without meeting any one. The garden is spacious, and contains all kinds of tropical productions: here I saw the sugar- cane, which greatly resembles the stem of the Indian maize; the cotton-tree, growing to a height of five or six feet; the banana- tree, the short-stemmed date-palm, the coffee-tree, and many others. Flowers were also there in quantities which must be cultivated with great care in the hot-houses of my native country. The whole of this collection of plants is very tastefully arranged, and shines forth in the height of luxuriant beauty. It is customary to lay the entire island under water every evening by means of artificial canals. This system is universally carried out throughout the Egyptian plantations, and is, in fact, the only method by which vegetation can be preserved in its freshest green in spite of the burning heat. The care of this fairy grove is entrusted to a German ornamental gardener; unfortunately I was informed of this fact too late, otherwise I should have visited my countryman and requested an explanation of many things which appeared strange to me. In the midst of the garden is a beautiful grotto, ornamented within and without by a great variety of shells from the Red Sea, which give it a most striking appearance. At this spot, towards which many paths lead, all strewed with minute shells instead of gravel, Moses is said to have been found in his cradle of bulrushes(?). Immediately adjoining the garden we find a summer residence belonging to Mehemet Ali. The well shewn as that into which Joseph was thrust by his brethren lies about two miles distant from the town, in a village on the road to Suez. Half a mile off a very large and venerable sycamore-tree was pointed out to me as the one in the shade of which the holy family rested on their way to Egypt; and a walk of another quarter of a mile brings us to the garden of Boghos Bey, in the midst of which stands one of the finest and largest obelisks of Upper Egypt: it is still in good condition, and completely covered with hieroglyphics. The garden, however, offers nothing remarkable. The ancient city of Heliopolis is said to have been built not far off; but at the present day not a vestige of it remains. The road to this garden already lies partly in the desert. At first the way winds through avenues of trees and past gardens; but soon the vast desert extends to the right, while beautiful orange and citron groves still skirt the left side of the path. Here we continually meet herds of camels, but a dromedary is a rare sight. EXCURSION TO THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH. August 25th, 1842. At four in the afternoon I quitted Cairo, crossed two arms of the Nile, and a couple of hours afterwards arrived safely at Gizeh. As the Nile had overflowed several parts of the country, we were compelled frequently to turn out of our way, and sometimes to cross canals and ride through water; now and then, where it was too deep for our asses, we were obliged to be carried across. As there is no inn at Gizeh I betook myself to Herr Klinger, to whom I brought a letter of recommendation from Cairo. Herr K. is a Bohemian by birth, and stands in the service of the viceroy of Egypt, as musical instructor to the young military band. I was made very welcome here, and Herr Klinger seemed quite rejoiced at seeing a visitor with whom he could talk in German. Our conversation was of Beethoven and Mozart, of Strauss and Lanne. The fame of the bravura composers of the present day, Liszt and Thalberg, had not yet penetrated to these regions. I requested my kind host to shew me the establishment for hatching eggs that exists at Gizeh. He immediately sent for the superintendent, who happened however to be absent, and to have locked up the keys. In this place about 8000 eggs are hatched by artificial warmth during the months of March and April. The eggs are laid on large flat plates, which are continually kept at an equal temperature by heat applied below the surface: they are turned several times during the day. As the thousands of little chickens burst their shells, they are sold, not by number or weight, but by the measure. This egg-hatching house has the effect of rendering poultry plentiful and cheap. After chatting away the evening very pleasantly I sought my couch, tired with my ride and with the heat, and rejoicing at the sight of the soft divan, which seemed to smile upon me, and promise rest and strength for the following day. But as I was about to take possession of my couch, I noticed on the wall a great number of black spots. I took the candle to examine what it could be, and nearly dropped the light with horror on discovering that the wall was covered with bugs. I had never seen such a disgusting sight. All hopes of rest on the divan were now effectually put to flight. I sat down on a chair, and waited until every thing was perfectly still; then I slipped into the entrance-hall, and lay down on the stones, wrapped in my cloak. Though I had escaped from one description of vermin, I became a prey to innumerable gnats. I had passed many uncomfortable nights during my journey, but this was worse than any thing I had yet endured. However, this was only an additional inducement for rising early, and long before sunrise I was ready to continue my journey. Before daybreak I took leave of my kind host, and rode with my servant towards the gigantic structures. To-day we were again obliged frequently to go out of our route on account of the rising of the Nile; owing to this delay, two hours elapsed before we reached the broad arm of the Nile, dividing us from the Libyan desert, on which the Pyramids stand, and over which two Arabs carried me. This was one of the most disagreeable things that can be imagined. Two large powerful men stood side by side; I mounted on their shoulders, and held fast by their heads, while they supported my feet in a horizontal position above the waters, which at some places reached almost to their armpits, so that I feared every moment that I should sit in the water. Besides this, my supporters continually swayed to and fro, because they could only withstand the force of the current by a great exertion of strength, and I was apprehensive of falling off. This disagreeable passage lasted above a quarter of an hour. After wading for another fifteen minutes through deep sand, we arrived at the goal of our little journey. The two colossal pyramids are of course visible directly we quit the town, and we keep them almost continually in sight. But here the expectations I had cherished were again disappointed, for the aspect of these giant structures did not astonish me greatly. Their height appears less remarkable than it otherwise would, from the circumstance that their base is buried in sand, and thus hidden from view. There is also neither a tree nor a hut, nor any other object which could serve to display their huge proportions by the force of contrast. As it was still early in the day and not very hot, I preferred ascending the pyramid before venturing into its interior. My servant took off my rings and concealed them carefully, telling me that this was a very necessary precaution, as the fellows who take the travellers by the hands to assist them in mounting the pyramids have such a dexterous knack of drawing the rings from their fingers, that they seldom perceive their loss until too late. I took two Arabs with me, who gave me their hands, and pulled me up the very large stones. Any one who is at all subject to dizziness would do very wrong in attempting this feat, for he might be lost without remedy. Let the reader picture to himself a height of 500 feet, without a railing or a regular staircase by which to make the ascent. At one angle only the immense blocks of stone have been hewn in such a manner that they form a flight of steps, but a very inconvenient one, as many of these stone blocks are above four feet in height, and offer no projection on which you can place your foot in mounting. The two Arabs ascended first, and then stretched out their hands to pull me from one block to another. I preferred climbing over the smaller blocks without assistance. In three quarters of an hour's time I had gained the summit of the pyramid. For a long time I stood lost in thought, and could hardly realise the fact that I was really one of the favoured few who are happy enough to be able to contemplate the most stupendous and imperishable monument ever erected by human hands. At the first moment I was scarcely able to gaze down from the dizzy height into the deep distance; I could only examine the pyramid itself, and seek to familiarise myself with the idea that I was not dreaming. Gradually, however, I came to myself, and contemplated the landscape which lay extended beneath me. From my elevated position I could form a better estimate of the gigantic structure, for here the fact that the base was buried in sand did not prejudice the general effect. I saw the Nile flowing far beneath me, and a few Bedouins, whom curiosity had attracted to the spot, looked like very pigmies. In ascending I had seen the immense blocks of stone singly, and ceased to marvel that these monuments are reckoned among the seven wonders of the world. On the castle the view had been fine, but here, where the prospect was bounded only by the horizon and by the Mokattam mountains, it is grander by far. I could follow the windings of the river, with its innumerable arms and canals, until it melted into the far horizon, which closed the picture on this side. Many blooming gardens, and the large extensive town with its environs; the immense desert, with its plains and hills of sand, and the lengthened mountain-range of Mokattam,--all lay spread before me; and for a long time I sat gazing around me, and wishing that the dear ones at home had been with me, to share in my wonder and delight. But now the time came not only to look down, but to descend. Most people find this even more difficult than the ascent; but with me the contrary was the case. I never grow giddy, and so I advanced in the following manner, without the aid of the Arabs. On the smaller blocks I sprang from one to the other; when a stone of three or four feet in height was to be encountered, I let myself glide gently down; and I accomplished my descent with so much grace and agility, that I reached the base of the pyramid long before my servant. Even the Arabs expressed their pleasure at my fearlessness on this dangerous passage. After eating my breakfast and resting for a short time, I proceeded to explore the interior. At first I was obliged to cross a heap of sand and rubbish; for we have to go downwards towards the entrance, which is so low and narrow that we cannot always stand upright. I could not have passed along the passage leading into the interior if the Arabs had not helped me, for it is so steep and so smoothly paved that, in spite of my conductor's assistance, I slid rather than walked. The apartment of the king is more spacious, and resembles a small hall. On one side stands a little empty sarcophagus without a lid. The walls of the chambers and of the passages are covered with large and beautifully polished slabs of granite and marble. The remaining passages, or rather dens, which are shown here, I did not see. It may be very interesting for learned men and antiquarians thus to search every corner; but for a woman like myself, brought hither only by an insatiable desire to travel, and capable of judging of the beauties of nature and art only by her own simple feelings, it was enough to have ascended the pyramid of Cheops, and to have seen something of its interior. This pyramid is said to be the loftiest of all. It stands on a rock 150 feet in height, which is invisible, being altogether buried in sand. The height of the vast structure is above 500 feet. It was erected by Cheops more than 3000 years ago, and 100,000 men are said to have been employed in its construction for twenty-six years. It is a most interesting structure, built of immense masses of rock, fixed together with a great deal of art, and seemingly calculated to last an eternity. They look so strong and so well preserved, that many travellers will no doubt repair hither in coming generations, and continue the researches commenced long ago. The Sphynx, a statue of most colossal dimensions, situate at no great distance from the great pyramid, is so covered with sand that only the head and a small portion of the bust remain visible. The head alone is twenty-two feet in height. After walking about and inspecting every thing, I commenced my journey back. On the way I once more visited Herr Klinger, strengthened myself with a hearty meal, and arrived safely at Cairo late in the evening. Here I wished to take my little purse out of my pocket, and found that it was gone. Luckily I had only taken one collonato (Spanish dollar) with me. No one can imagine what dexterity the Bedouins and Arabs possess in the art of stealing. I always kept a sharp eye upon my effects, and notwithstanding my vigilance several articles were pilfered from me, and my purse must also have been stolen during this excursion. The loss was very disagreeable to me because it involved that of my box-key. I was, however, fortunate in finding an expert Arabian locksmith, who opened my chest and made me a new key, on which occasion I had another opportunity of seeing how careful it is necessary to be in all our dealings with these people to avoid being cheated. The key locked and unlocked my box well, and I paid for it; but immediately afterwards observed that it was very slightly joined in the middle, and would presently break. The Arab's tools still lay on the ground; I immediately seized one of them, and told the man I would not give it up until he had made me a new key. It was in vain that he assured me he could not work without his tools; he would not give my money back, and I kept the implement: by this means I obtained from him a new and a good key. CHAPTER XVI. Christian churches at Cairo--The Esbekie-square--Theatre--Howling dervishes--Mashdalansher, the birthday of Mahomet--Procession and religious ceremony--Shubra--Excursion through the desert to Suez-- Hardships of the journey--Scenes in the desert--The camel--Caravans-- Mirage--The Red Sea--Suez--Bedouin camp--Quarrel with the camel- driver--Departure for Alexandria. I visited many Christian churches, the finest among which was the Greek one. On my way thither I saw many streets where there can hardly have been room for a horseman to pass. The road to the Armenian church leads through such narrow lanes and gates, that we were compelled to leave our asses behind; there was hardly room for two people to pass each other. On the other hand, I had nowhere seen a more spacious square than the Esbekie-place in Cairo. The square in Padua is perhaps the only one that can compare with it in point of size; but this place looks like a complete chaos. Miserable houses and ruined huts surround it; and here and there we sometimes come upon a part of an alley or an unfinished canal. The centre is very uneven, and is filled with building materials, such as stones, wood, bricks, and beams. The largest and handsomest house in this square is remarkable as having been inhabited by Napoleon during his residence at Cairo: it is now converted into a splendid hotel. Herr Chamgion, the consul, was kind enough to send me a card of invitation for the theatre. The building looks like a private house, and contains a gallery capable of accommodating three or four hundred people; this gallery is devoted to the use of the ladies. The performers were all amateurs; they acted an Italian comedy in a very creditable manner. The orchestra comprised only four musicians. At the conclusion of the second act the consul's son, a boy of twelve years, played some variations on the violin very prettily. The women, all natives of the Levant, were very elegantly dressed; they wore the European garb, white muslin dresses with their hair beautifully braided and ornamented with flowers. Nearly all the women and girls were handsome, with complexions of a dazzling whiteness, which we rarely see equalled in Europe. The reason of this is, perhaps, that they always stay in their houses, and avoid exposing themselves to the sun and wind. The following day I visited the abode of the howling dervishes, in whom I took a lively interest since I had seen their brethren at Constantinople. The hall, or rather the mosque, in which they perform their devotions is very splendid. I was not allowed here to stand among the men as I had done at Constantinople, but was conducted to a raised gallery, from which I could look down through a grated window. The style of devotion and excitement of these dervishes is like that I had witnessed at Constantinople, without being quite so wild in its character. Not one of them sank exhausted, and the screeching and howling were not so loud. Towards the end of their performance many of the dervishes seized a small tambourine, on which they beat and produced a most diabolical music. In the slave-market there was but a meagre selection; all the wares had been bought, and a new cargo of these unfortunates was daily expected. I pretended that I wished to purchase a boy and a girl, in order to gain admittance into the private department. Here I saw a couple of negro girls of most uncommon beauty. I had not deemed it possible to find any thing so perfect. Their skin was of a velvety black, and shone with a peculiar lustre. Their teeth were beautifully formed and of dazzling whiteness, their eyes large and lustrous, and their lips thinner than we usually find them among these people. They wore their hair neatly parted, and arranged in pretty curls round the head. Poor creatures, who knows into what hands they might fall! They bowed their heads in anguish, without uttering a syllable. The sight of the slave-market here inspired me with a feeling of deep melancholy. The poor creatures did not seem so careless and merry as those whom I had seen on the market-place at Constantinople. In Cairo the slaves seemed badly kept; they lay in little tents, and were driven out, when a purchaser appeared, very much in the manner of cattle. They were only partially clothed in some old rags, and looked exhausted and unhappy. During my short stay at Cairo one of the chief feasts of the Mahommedans--namely, the Mashdalansher, or birthday of the Prophet-- occurred. This feast is celebrated on a great open space outside the town. A number of large tents are erected; they are open in front, and beneath their shelter all kinds of things are carried on. In one tent, Mahommedans are praying; in another, a party of dervishes throw themselves with their faces to the ground and call upon Allah; while in a third, a juggler or storyteller may be driving his trade. In the midst of all stood a large tent, the entrance to which was concealed by curtains. Here the "bayaderes" were dancing; any one can obtain admission by paying a trifling sum. Of course I went in to see these celebrated dancers. There were, however, only two pairs; two boys were elegantly clothed in a female garb, richly decorated with gold coins. They looked very pretty and delicate, so that I really thought they were girls. The dance itself is very monotonous, slow, and wearisome; it consists only of some steps to and fro, accompanied by some rather indecorous movements of the upper part of the body. These gestures are said to be very difficult, as the dancer must stand perfectly still, and only move the upper part of his person. The music consisted of a tambourine, a flageolet, and a bagpipe. Much has been written concerning the indecency of these dances; but I am of opinion that many of our ballets afford much greater cause of complaint. It may, however, be that other dances are performed of which the general public are not allowed to be spectators; but I only speak of what is done openly. I would also by far prefer a popular festival in the East to a fair in our highly-civilised states. The Oriental feasts were to me a source of much enjoyment, for the people always behaved most decorously. They certainly shouted, and pushed, and elbowed each other like an European mob; but no drunken men were to be seen, and it was very seldom that a serious quarrel occurred. The commonest man, too, would never think of offering an insult to one of the opposite sex. I should feel no compunction in sending a young girl to this festival, though I should never think of letting her go to the fair held at Vienna on St. Bridget's day. The people were assembled in vast numbers, and the crowd was very great, yet we could pass every where on our donkeys. At about three o'clock my servant sought out an elevated place for me, for the great spectacle was soon to come, and the crushing and bustle had already reached their highest pitch. At length a portly priest could be descried riding along on a splendid horse; before him marched eight or ten dervishes with flags flying, and behind him a number of men, among whom were also many dervishes. In the midst of the square the procession halted; a few soldiers pushed their way among the people, whom they forced to stand back and leave a road. Whenever the spectators did not obey quickly, a stick was brought into action, which soon established order in a most satisfactory manner. The procession now moved on once more, the standard-bearers and dervishes making all kinds of frantic gestures, as though they had just escaped from a madhouse. On reaching the place where the spectators formed a lane, the dervishes and several other men threw themselves down with their faces to the ground in a long row, with their heads side by side. And then--oh horror!--the priest rode over the backs of these miserable men as upon a bridge. Then they all sprang up again as though nothing had happened, and rejoined the advancing train with their former antics and grimaces. One man stayed behind, writhing to and fro as if his back had been broken, but in a few moments' time he went away as unconcernedly as his comrades. Each of the actors in this scene considers himself extremely fortunate in having attained to such a distinction, and this feeling even extends to his relations and friends. SHUBRA. One afternoon I paid a visit to the beautiful garden and country- house of the Viceroy of Egypt. A broad handsome street leads between alleys of sycamores, and the journey occupies about an hour and a half. Immediately upon my arrival I was conducted to an out- building, in the yard belonging to which a fine large elephant was to be shewn. I had already seen several of these creatures, but never such a fine specimen as this. Its bulk was truly marvellous; its body clean and smooth, and of a dark-brown colour. The park is most lovely; and the rarest plants are here seen flourishing in the open air, in the fulness of bloom and beauty, beside those we are accustomed to see every day. On the whole, however, I was better pleased with the garden at Rodda. The palace, too, is very fine. The ceilings of the rooms are lofty, and richly ornamented with gilding, paintings, and marble. The rooms appropriated to the viceroy's consort are no less magnificent; the ascent to them is by a broad staircase on each side. On the ground- floor is situate the favourite apartment of the autocrat of Cairo, furnished in the style of the reception-halls at Damascus. A fountain of excellent water diffuses a delicious coolness around. In the palace itself we find several large cages for parrots and other beautiful birds. What pleased me most of all was, however, the incomparable kiosk, lying in the garden at some distance from the palace. It is 130 paces long and 100 broad, surrounded by arcades of glorious pillars. This kiosk contains in its interior a large and beautiful fountain; and at the four corners of the building are terraces, from which the water falls in the form of little cataracts, afterwards uniting with the fountain, and shooting upwards in the shape of a mighty pillar. All things around us, the pavilion and the pillars, the walls and the fountain, are alike covered with beautiful marble of a white or light-brown colour; the pavilion is even arranged so that it can be lighted with gas. From this paradise of the living I rode to the abode of the dead, the celebrated "world of graves," which is to be seen in the desert. Here are to be found a number of ancient sepulchres, but most of them resemble ruins, and to find out their boasted beauty is a thing left to the imagination of every traveller. I only admired the sepulchre of Mehemet Ali's two sons, in which the bones of his wife also rest: this is a beautiful building of stone; five cupolas rise above the magnificent chambers where the sarcophagi are deposited. The petrified date-wood lies about eight miles distant from Cairo; I rode out there, but did not find much to see, excepting here and there some fragments of stems and a few petrifactions lying about. It is said that the finest part of this "petrified wood" begins some miles away; but I did not penetrate so far. During my residence in Cairo the heat once reached 36 degrees Reaumur, and yet I found it much more endurable than I had expected. I was not annoyed at all by insects or vermin; but I was obliged to be careful not to leave any provisions in my room throughout the night. An immense swarm of minute ants would seize upon every kind of eatable, particularly bread. One evening I left a roll upon the table, and the next morning found it half eaten away, and covered with ants within and without. It is here an universal custom to place the feet of the tables in little dishes filled with water, to keep off these insects. EXCURSION TO SUEZ. It had originally been my intention to stay at Cairo a week at the furthest, and afterwards to return to Alexandria. But the more I saw, the more my curiosity became excited, and I felt irresistibly impelled to proceed. I had now travelled in almost every way, but I had not yet tried an excursion on a camel. I therefore made inquiry as to the distance, danger, and expense of a journey to Suez on the Red Sea. The distance was a thirty-six hours' journey, the danger was said to be nil, and the expense they estimated at about 250 piastres. I therefore hired two strong camels, one for me, the other for my servant and the camel-driver, and took nothing with me in the way of provisions but bread, dates, a piece of roast meat, and hardboiled eggs. Skins of water were hung at each side of the camels, for we had to take a supply which would last us the journey and during our return. If we ride every day for twelve hours, this journey occupies six days, there and back. But as I was unable to depart until the afternoon of the 26th, and was obliged to be in Alexandria at latest by the 30th, in order not to miss the steamer, I had only four days and a half to accomplish it in. Thus this excursion was the most fatiguing I had ever undertaken. At four in the afternoon I rode through the town-gate, where the camels were waiting for us; we mounted them and commenced our journey. The desert begins at the town-gates, but for the first few miles we have a sight of some very fruitful country on the left, until at length we leave town and trees behind us, and with them all the verdure, and find ourselves surrounded on all sides by a sea of sand. For the first four or five hours I was not ill-pleased with this mode of travelling. I had plenty of room on my camel, and could sit farther back or forward as I chose, and had provisions and a bottle of water at my side. Besides this, the heat was not oppressive; I felt very comfortable, and could look down from my high throne almost with a feeling of pride upon the passing caravans. Even the swaying motion of the camel, which causes in some travellers a feeling of sickness and nausea like that produced by a sea-voyage, did not affect me. But after a few hours I began to feel the fatigues and discomforts of a journey of this kind. The swinging motion pained and fatigued me, as I had no support against which I could lean. The desire to sleep also arose within me, and it can be imagined how uncomfortable I felt. But I was resolved to go to Suez; and if all my hardships had been far worse, I would not have turned back. I summoned all my fortitude, and rode without halting for fifteen hours, from four in the afternoon until seven the next morning. During the night we passed several trains of camels, some in motion, some at rest, often consisting of more than a hundred. We were not exposed to the least annoyance, although we had attached ourselves to no caravan, but were pursuing our way alone. From Cairo to Suez posts are established at every five or six hours' journey, and at each of these posts there stands a little house of two rooms for the convenience of travellers. These huts were built by an English innkeeper established at Cairo; but they can only be used by very rich people, as the prices charged are most exorbitant. Thus, for instance, a bed for one night costs a hundred piastres, a little chicken twenty, and a bottle of water two piastres. The generality of travellers encamp before the house, and I followed the same plan, lying down for an hour in the sand while the camels ate their scanty meal. My health and bodily strength are, I am happy to say, so excellent, that I am ready after a very short rest to encounter new fatigues. After this hour of repose I once more mounted my camel to continue my journey. August 27th. It may easily be imagined that the whole scene by which we are here surrounded has over it an air of profound and deathlike stillness. The sea, where we behold nothing but water around us, presents more of life to divert the mind. The very rushing and splash of the wheels, the bounding waves, the bustle of bending or reefing sails, and the crowding of people on the steamer, brings varied pictures to temper the monotony around. Even the ride through the stony deserts which I had traversed in Syria has not so much sameness, for there we at least hear the tramp of the horse and the sound of many a rolling stone; the traveller's attention is, besides, kept continually on the stretch in guiding each step that his horse takes, to avoid the risk of a fall. But all this is wanting in a journey through a sandy desert. No bird hovers in the air, not a butterfly is here to gladden the eye, not even an insect or a worm crawls on the ground; not a living creature is, in fact, to be seen, but the little vultures preying on the carcasses of fallen camels. Even the tread of the heavy-footed camel is muffled by the deep sand, and nothing is ever heard but the moaning of these poor animals when their driver forces them to lie down to take off their burden; most probably the exertion of stooping hurts them. The driver beats the camel on the knee with a stick, and pulls its head towards him by a rope fastened to it like a halter. During this operation the rider must hold very fast in order not to fall off, for suddenly the creature drops on its fore-knees, then on its hind legs, and at length sits completely down on the ground. When you mount the animal again, it becomes necessary to keep a vigilant eye upon him, for as soon as he feels your foot on his neck he wishes to rise. As I have already said, we see nothing on this journey but many and large companies of camels, which march one behind the other, while their drivers shorten the way with dreary inharmonious songs. Half- devoured carcasses of these "ships of the desert" lie every where, with jackals and vultures gnawing at them. Even living camels are sometimes seen staggering about, which have been left to starve by their masters as unfit for further service. I shall never forget the piteous look of one of these poor creatures which I saw dragging itself to and fro in the desert, anxiously seeking for food and drink. What a cruel being is man! Why could he not put an end to the poor camel's pain by a blow with a knife? One would imagine that the air in the vicinity of these fallen animals was poisoned; but here this is less the case than it would be in more temperate regions, for the pure air and the great heat of the desert rather dry up than decompose corpses. From the same cause our piece of roast beef was still good on the fifth day. The hard-boiled eggs, which my servant packed so clumsily that they got smashed in the very first hour, did not become foul. Both meat and eggs were shrunk and dried up. On the third day the white bread had become as hard as ship-biscuit, so that we had to break it up and soak it in water. Our drinking water became worse day by day, and smelt abominably of the leathern receptacles in which we were compelled to keep it. Until we reached Suez our poor camels got not a drop to drink, and their food consisted of a scanty meal of bad provender once a day. At eight in the morning we set off once more, and rode until about five in the afternoon. At about four I suddenly descried the Red Sea and its shores. This circumstance delighted me, for I felt assured that we should reach the coast in the course of another hour, and then our laborious journey to Suez would be accomplished. I called to my servant, pointed out the sea to him, and expressed my surprise that we had sighted it so soon. He maintained, however, that what I beheld was not the sea, but a fata morgana. At first I refused to believe him, because the thing seemed so real. But after an hour had elapsed we were as far from the sea as ever, and at length the mirage vanished; and I did not behold the real sea until six o'clock on the following morning, when it appeared in exactly the same way as the phantom of the previous evening. At five in the afternoon we at length halted. I lay down on the earth completely exhausted, and enjoyed a refreshing sleep for more than three hours, when I was awakened by my servant, who informed me that a caravan was just before us, which we should do well to join, as the remainder of our road was far less safe than the portion we had already traversed. I was at once ready to mount my camel, and at eight o'clock we were again in motion. In a short time we had overtaken the caravan, and our camels were placed in the procession, each beast being tethered to the preceding one by a rope. It was already quite dark, and I could barely distinguish that the people sitting on the camels before me were an Arab family. They travelled in boxes resembling hen-coops, about a foot and a half in height, four feet in length, and as many broad. In a box of this kind two or three men sat cross-legged; many had even spread a light tent over their heads. Suddenly I heard my name called by a female voice. I started, and thought I must be mistaken, for whom in the world could I meet here who knew my Christian name? But once more a voice cried very distinctly, "Ida! Ida!" and a servant came up, and told me that some Arab women, who had made the voyage from Atfe to Cairo in company with me, were seated on the first camel. They sent to tell me that they were on their way to Mecca, and rejoiced to meet me once more. I was indeed surprised that I should have made such an impression on these good people that they had not forgotten my name. To-night I saw a glorious natural phenomenon, which so surprised me that I could not refrain from uttering a slight scream. It may have been about eleven o'clock, when suddenly the sky on my left was lighted up, as though every thing were in flames; a great fiery ball shot through the air with lightning speed, and disappeared on the horizon, while at the same moment the gleam in the atmosphere vanished, and darkness descended once more on all around. We travelled on throughout the whole of this night. August 28th. At six o'clock this morning we came in sight of the Red Sea. The mountain-chain of Mokattam can be discerned some time previously. Some way from Suez we came upon a well of bad, brackish water. Notwithstanding all drawbacks, the supply was eagerly hailed. Our people shouted, scolded, and pushed each other to get the best places; camels, horses, asses, and men rushed pell-mell towards the well, and happy was he who could seize upon a little water. There are barracks near this well, and soldiers are posted here to promote peace--by means of the stick. The little town of Suez lies spread out on the sea-shore, and can be very distinctly seen from here. The unhappy inhabitants are compelled to draw their supplies either from this well, or from one on the sea-coast four miles below Suez. In the first case the water is brought on camels, horses, or asses; in the second it is transported by sea in boats or small ships. The Red Sea is here rather narrow, and surrounded by sand of a yellowish-brown hue; immediately beyond the isthmus is the continuation of the great Libyan Desert. The mountain-range of Mokattam skirts the plain on the right, from Cairo to the Red Sea. We quite lose sight of this range until within the last ten or twelve hours before reaching Suez. The mountains are of moderate elevation and perfectly bare; but still the eye rests with pleasure on the varied forms of the rocks. [Illustration 8. Isthmus of Suez. ill8.jpg] After an hour's rest beside the well, we were still unable to procure water for our poor beasts, and hastened, therefore, to reach the town. At nine in the morning we were already within its walls. Of the town and its environs I can say nothing, excepting that they both present a very melancholy appearance, as there is nowhere a garden or a cluster of trees to be seen. I paid my respects to the consul, and introduced myself to him as an Austrian subject. He was kind enough to assign me a room in his own house, and would on no account permit me to take up my quarters in an inn. It was a pity that I could only converse with this gentleman by means of a dragoman; he was a Greek by birth, and only knew the Arabic language and his own. He is the richest merchant in Suez (his wealth is estimated at 150,000 collonati), and only discharges the functions of French and Austrian consul as an honorary duty. In the little town itself there is nothing remarkable to be seen. On the sea-coast they shewed me the place where Moses led the children of Israel through the Red Sea. The sinking of the tide at its ebb is here so remarkable that whole islands are left bare, and large caravans are able to march through the sea, as the water only reaches to the girths of the camels, and the Arabs and Bedouins even walk through. As it happened to be ebb-tide when I arrived, I rode through also, for the glory of the thing. On these shores I found several pretty shells; but the real treasures of this kind are fished out of the deep at Ton, a few days' journey higher up. I saw whole cargoes of mother-of-pearl shells carried away. I remained at Suez until four in the afternoon, and recruited my energies perfectly with an excellent dinner, at which tolerably good water was not wanting. The consul kindly gave me a bottle, as provision for my journey. He has it fetched from a distance of twelve miles, as all the water that can be procured in the neighbourhood tastes brackish and salt. In the inn a bottle of water costs two piastres. The first night of my homeward journey was passed partly in a Bedouin encampment and partly on the road, in the company of different caravans. I found the Bedouins to be very good, obliging people, among whom I might wander as I pleased, without being exposed to injury. On the contrary, while I was in their encampment they brought me a straw-mat and a chest, in order that I might have a comfortable seat. The homeward journey was just as monotonous and wearisome as that to Suez, with the additional fact that I had a quarrel with my people the day before its termination. Feeling exceedingly fatigued by a lengthened ride, I ordered my servant to stop the camels, as I wished to sleep for a few hours. The rascals refused to obey, alleging that the road was not safe, and that we should endeavour to overtake a caravan. This was, however, nothing but an excuse to get home as quickly as possible. But I was not to be frightened, and insisted that my desire should be complied with, telling them moreover that I had inquired of the consul at Suez concerning the safety of the roads, and had once more heard that there was nothing to fear. Notwithstanding all this they would not obey, but continued to advance. I now became angry, and desired the servant once more to stop my camel, as I was fully determined not to proceed another step. I told him I had hired both camels and men, and had therefore a right to be mistress; if he did not choose to obey me, he might go his way with the camel-driver, and I would join the first caravan I met, and bring him to justice, let it cost me what it would. The fellow now stopped my camel, and went away with the other and the camel-driver. He probably expected to frighten me by this demonstration, and to compel me to follow; but he was vastly mistaken. I remained standing where I was, and as often as he turned to look at me, made signs that he might go his way, but that I should stay. When he saw how fearless and determined I was, he turned back, came to me, made my camel kneel down, and after helping me to alight, prepared me a resting-place on a heap of sand, where I slept delightfully for five hours; then I ordered my things to be packed up, mounted my camel, and continued my journey. My conduct astonished my followers to such a degree, that they afterwards asked me every few hours if I wished to rest. On our arrival at Cairo the camel-driver had not even the heart to make the customary demand for backsheesh, and my servant begged pardon for his conduct, and hoped that I would not mention the difference we had had to the consul. The maximum temperature during this journey was 43 degrees Reaumur, and when it was perfectly calm I really felt as if I should be stifled. This journey from Cairo to Suez can, however, be accomplished in a carriage in the space of twenty hours. The English innkeeper established at Cairo has had a very light carriage, with seats for four, built expressly for this purpose; but a place in this vehicle costs five pounds for the journey there, and the same sum for the return. On the following day I once more embarked on board an Arabian vessel for Alexandria. Before my departure I had a terrible quarrel with the donkey-driver whom I usually employed. These men, as in fact all fellahs, are accustomed to cheat strangers in every possible way, but particularly with coins. They usually carry bad money about with them, which they can substitute for the good at the moment when they are paid, with the dexterity of jugglers. My donkey-driver endeavoured to play me this trick when I rode to the ship; he saw that I should not require his services any more, and therefore wished to cheat me as a parting mark of attention. This attempt disgusted me so much that I could not refrain from brandishing my whip at him in a very threatening manner, although I was alone among a number of his class. My gesture had the desired effect; the driver instantly retreated, and I remained victor. My reader would do me a great wrong by the supposition that I mention these circumstances to make a vaunt of my courage; I am sure that the fact of my having undertaken this journey alone will be sufficient to clear me from the imputation of cowardice. I wish merely to give future travellers a hint as to the best method of dealing with these people. Their respect can only be secured by the display of a firm will; and I am sure that in my case they were the more intimidated as they had never expected to find so much determination in a woman. CHAPTER XVII. Return to Alexandria--Egyptian burials--Catacombs of Alexandria-- Viceroy's palace--Departure from Alexandria--The steamer Eurotas-- Candia--Syra--Paros and Antiparos--The Morea--Fire on board--Malta-- Quarantine--St. Augustine's church--Clergymen--Beggars--Costumes-- Soldiers--Civita Vecchia. September 5th. At five o'clock in the evening of the 2d of September I commenced my journey back to Alexandria. During the fortnight I remained at Cairo the Nile had continued to rise considerably, and the interest of the region had increased in proportion. In three days' time I arrived safely at Alexandria, and again put up at Colombier's. Two days had still to elapse before the departure of the French steam- vessel, and I made use of this time to take a closer survey of the town and its environs. On my arrival at Alexandria I met two Egyptian funerals. The first was that of a poor man, and not a soul followed the coffin. The corpse lay in a wooden box without a lid, a coarse blanket had been spread over it, and four men carried the coffin. The second funeral had a more respectable air. The coffin, indeed, was not less rude, but the dead man was covered with a handsome shawl, and four "mourning women" followed the body, raising a most dolorous howl from time to time. A motley crowd of people closed the procession. The corpse was laid in the grave without the coffin. The catacombs of Alexandria are very extensive, and well worth a visit. A couple of miles from them we see the celebrated plain on which the army of Julius Caesar was once posted. The cistern and bath of Cleopatra were both under water. I could, therefore, only see the place where they stood. The viceroy's palace, a spacious building inclining to the European style, has a pleasing effect. Its interior arrangement is also almost wholly European. The bazaar contains nothing worthy of remark. The arsenal looks very magnificent when viewed from without. It is difficult to obtain admission into this building, and you run the risk of being insulted by the workmen. The hospital has the appearance of a private house. I was astonished at the high commission which is here demanded on changing small sums of money. In changing a collonato, a coin very much used in this country, and worth about two guilders, the applicant must lose from half a piastre to two piastres, according to the description of coin he requires. If beshliks {261} are taken, the commission charged is half a piastre; but if piastres are wanted, two must be paid. The government value of a collonato is twenty piastres; in general exchange it is reckoned at twenty-two, and at the consulate's at twenty-one piastres. DEPARTURE FROM ALEXANDRIA. September 7th. At eight o'clock in the morning I betook myself on board the French steam-packet Eurotas, a beautiful large vessel of 160-horse power. At nine o'clock we weighed anchor. The weather was very unfavourable. Though it did not rain, we continually had contrary winds, and the sea generally ran high. In consequence we did not sight the island of Candia until the evening of the third day, four-and-twenty hours later than we should have done under ordinary circumstances. Two women, who came on board as passengers to Syra, were so violently attacked by sea-sickness, that they left the deck a few hours after we got under way, and did not reappear until they landed at Syra. A very useful arrangement on board the French vessel is the engagement of a female attendant, whose assistance sometimes becomes very necessary. Heaven be praised, I had not much to fear from the attacks of sea-sickness. The weather must be very bad--as, for instance, during our passage through the Black Sea--before my health is affected, and even then I recover rapidly. During our whole voyage, even when the weather was wretched, I remained continually on deck, so that during the day-time I could not miss seeing even the smallest islet. On September 10th, late in the evening, we discovered the island of Candia or Crete, and the next morning we were pretty close to it. We could, however, distinguish nothing but bare unfruitful mountains, the tallest among which, my namesake Mount Ida, does not look more fertile than the rest. On the right loomed the island of Scarpanto. We soon left it in our wake, and also passed the Brothers' Islands, and many others, some of them small and uninhabited, besides separate colossal rocks, towering majestically into the sea. Soon afterwards we passed the islands Santorin and Anaph. The latter of these islands is peculiarly beautiful. In the foreground a village lies at the foot of a high mountain, with its peak surmounted by a little church. On the side towards the sea this rock shoots downwards so perpendicularly, that we might fancy it had been cut off with a saw. Since we had come in sight of Candia, we had not been sailing on the high seas. Scarcely did one island vanish from our view, before it was replaced by another. On September 11th, between three and four in the morning, we reached Syra. The terrible contrary winds with which we had been obliged to contend during almost the whole of our passage had caused us to arrive a day behind our time, to make up for which delay we only stayed half a day here, instead of a day and a half. This was a matter of indifference to those of us who were travelling further, for as we came from Egypt, we should not have been allowed in any case to disembark. Those who landed here proceeded at once to the quarantine-house. Syra possesses a fine harbour. From our vessel we had a view over the whole town and its environs. An isolated mountain, crowned by a convent and church, the seat of the bishop, rises boldly from the very verge of the shore. The town winds round this mountain in the form of several wreaths, until it almost reaches the episcopal buildings. The background closes with the melancholy picture of a barren mountain-chain. A lighthouse stands on a little neighbouring island. The quarantine establishment looks cheerful enough, and is situate at a little distance from the town on the sea-shore. It was Sunday when we arrived here; and as Syra belongs to Greece, I here heard the sound of bells like those of Mount Lebanon, and once more their strain filled me with deep and indescribable emotion. Never do we think so warmly of our home as when we are solitary and alone among strange people in a far-distant land! I would gladly have turned aside from my route to visit Athens, which I might have reached in a few hours; but then I should once more have been compelled to keep quarantine, and perhaps on leaving Greece the infliction would have to be borne a third time, a risk which I did not wish to run. I therefore preferred keeping quarantine at Malta, and having done with it at once. On the same day at two o'clock we once more set sail. This day and the following I remained on deck as much as possible, bidding defiance to wind and rain, and gazing at the islands as we glided past one after another. As one island disappeared, another rose in its place. Groups of isolated rocks also rose at intervals, like giants from the main, to form a feature in the changing panorama. On the right, in the far distance, we could distinguish Paros and Antiparos, on the left the larger Chermian Isles; and at length we passed close to Cervo (Stag's Island), which is particularly distinguished by the beauty of its mountain-range. Here, as at Syra, we find an isolated mountain, round which a town winds almost to its summit. September 12th. As I came on deck to-day with the sun, the mainland of the Morea was in sight on our right,--a great plain, with many villages scattered over its surface, and a background of bare hills. After losing sight of the Morea we sailed once more on the high seas. This day might have had a tragical termination for us. I was sitting as usual on deck, when I noticed an unusual stir among the sailors and officers, and even the commander ran hastily towards me. Nevertheless I did not dare to ask what had happened; for in proportion as the French are generally polite, they are proud and overbearing on board their steamers. I therefore remained quietly seated, and contented myself with watching every movement of the officers and men. Several descended to the coal-magazine, returning heated, blackened by the coals, and dripping with water. At length a cabin-boy came hurrying by me; and upon my asking him what was the matter, he replied in a whisper, that fire had broken out in the coal-room. Now I knew the whole extent of our danger, and yet could do nothing but keep my seat, and await whatever fate should bring us. It was most fortunate for us that the fire occurred during the daytime, and had been immediately discovered by the engine-man. Double chain-pumps were rigged, and the whole magazine was laid under water,--a proceeding which had the effect of extinguishing the flames. The other passengers knew nothing of our danger; they were all asleep or sitting quietly in the cabins; the sailors were forbidden to tell them what had happened, and even my informant the cabin-boy begged me not to betray him. We had three hundredweight of gunpowder on board. September 14th. We did not come in sight of land until this evening, when the goal of our journey appeared. MALTA. We cast anchor in the harbour of Lavalette at seven o'clock. During the whole of our journey from Alexandria the wind had been very unfavourable; the sea was frequently so agitated, that we could not walk across the deck without the assistance of a sailor. The distance from Alexandria via Syra to Malta is 950 sea-miles. We took eight days to accomplish this distance, landing only at Syra. The heat was moderate enough, seldom reaching 28 or 29 degrees Reaumur. The appearance of Malta is picturesque; it contains no mountains, and consists entirely of hills and rocks. The town of Lavalette is surrounded by three lines of fortifications, winding like steps up the hill on which the town lies; the latter contains large fine houses, all built of stone. September 15th. This morning at eight o'clock we disembarked, and were marched off to keep quarantine in the magnificent castle of the Knights of St. John. This building stands on a hill, affording a view over the whole island in the direction of Civita Vecchia. We found here a number of clean rooms, and were immediately supplied with furniture, bedding, etc. by the establishment at a very reasonable charge. Our host at once despatched to every guest a bill of fare for breakfast and dinner, so that each one can choose what he wishes, without being cheated as to the prices. The keepers here are very obliging and attentive; they almost all know something of Italian, and execute any commission with which they are entrusted punctually and well. The building for the incarcerated ones is situate on an elevated plateau. It has two large wings, one on each side, one story high, containing apartments each with a separate entrance. Adjoining the courtyard is the inn, and not far from it the church; neither, however, may be visited by the new-comers. The requisite provisions are procured for them by a keeper, who takes them to the purchasers. The church is always kept locked. A broad handsome terrace, with a prospect over the sea, the town of Lavalette, and the whole island, forms the foreground of the picture. This terrace and the ramparts behind the houses form very agreeable walks. The courtyard of our prison is very spacious, and we are allowed to walk about in it as far as a statue which stands in the middle. Until ten o'clock at night we enjoy our liberty; but when this hour arrives, we are sent to our respective rooms and locked up. The apartments of the keepers are quite separate from ours. The arrangements of the whole establishment are so good and comfortable, that we almost forget that we are prisoners. What a contrast to the quarantine-house at Alexandria! If a traveller receives a visitor, he is not separated from his guest by ditches and bars, but stands only two steps from him in the courtyard. The windows here are not grated; and though our clothes were hung on horses to air, neither we nor our effects were smoked out. If it had not been for the delay it caused, I should really have spent the eighteen days of my detention here very pleasantly. But I wished to ascend Mount Etna, and was a fixture here until the 2d of October. October 1st. The quarantine doctor examined us in a very superficial manner, and pronounced that we should be free to-morrow. Upon this a boisterous hilarity prevailed. The prisoners rejoiced at the prospect of speedy release, and shouted, sang, and danced in the courtyard. The keepers caught the infection, and all was mirth and good-humour until late in the night. October 2d. At seven o'clock this morning we were released from thraldom. A scene similar to that at Alexandria then took place; every one rushed to seize upon the strangers. It is here necessary that the traveller should be as much upon his guard as in Egypt among the Arabs, in the matters of boat-fares, porterage, etc. If a bargain is not struck beforehand, the people are most exorbitant in their demands. A few days before our release, I had made an arrangement with an innkeeper for board, lodging, and transport. Today he came to fetch me and my luggage, and we crossed the arm of the sea which divides Fort Manuel from the town of Lavalette. A flight of steps leads from the shore into the town, past the three rows of fortifications rising in tiers above each other. In each of these divisions we find streets and houses. The town, properly speaking, lies quite at the top; it is therefore necessary to mount and descend frequently, though not nearly so often as at Constantinople. The streets are broad and well paved, the houses spacious and finely built; the place of roofs is supplied by terraces, frequently parcelled out into little flower-beds, which present a very agreeable appearance. My host gave me a tiny room, and meals on the same principle--coffee with milk morning and evening, and three dishes at dinner-time; but for all this I did not pay more than forty-five kreutzers, or about one shilling and sixpence. The first thing I did after taking up my quarters here was to hasten to a church to return thanks to the Almighty for the protection He had so manifestly extended to me upon my long and dangerous journey. The first church which I entered at Lavalette was dedicated to St. Augustine. I was particularly pleased with it, for since my departure from Vienna I had not seen one so neatly or so well built. Afterwards I visited the church of St. John, and was much struck with its splendour. This building is very spacious, and the floor is completely covered with monumental slabs of marble, covering the graves of the knights. The ceiling is ornamented with beautiful frescoes, and the walls are sculptured from ceiling to floor with arabesques, leaves, and flowers, in sandstone. All these ornaments are richly gilt, and present a peculiarly imposing appearance. The side-chapels contain numerous monuments, mostly of white marble, and one single one of black, in memory of celebrated Maltese knights. At the right-hand corner of the church is the so-called "rose-coloured" chapel. It is hung round with a heavy silk stuff of a red colour, which diffuses a roseate halo over all the objects around. The altar is surrounded by a high massive railing. Two only of the paintings are well executed--namely, that over the high altar, and a piece representing Christ on the cross. The pillars round the altar are of marble; and at each side of the grand altar rise lofty canopies of red velvet fringed with gold, reaching almost to the vaulted cupola. The uncomfortable custom of carrying chairs to and fro during church-time, which is so universal throughout Italy, begins already at Malta. The predilection for the clerical profession seems to prevail here, as it does throughout Italy; I could almost say that every fifteenth person we meet either is a clergyman or intends to become one. Children of ten or twelve years already run about in the black gown and three-cornered hat. The streets are handsome and cleanly kept, particularly the one which intersects the town; some of them are even watered. The counters of the dealers' shops contain the most exquisite wares; in fact, every where we find indications that we are once more on European ground. When we see the Fachini here, with their dark worked caps or round straw hats, their short jackets and comfortable trousers, with jaunty red sashes round their waists, and their bold free glance,-- when we contrast them with the wretched fellahs of Egypt, and consider that these men both belong to the same class in society, and that the fellahs even inhabit the more fruitful country, we begin to have our doubts of Mehemet Ali's benignant rule. The governor's palace, a great square building, stands on a magnificent open space; next to it is the library; and opposite, the chief guard-house rears its splendid front, graced with pillars. The coffee-houses here are very large; they are kept comfortably and clean, particularly that on the great square, which is brilliantly illuminated every evening. Women and girls appear dressed in black; they are usually accustomed to throw a wide cloak over their other garments, and wear a mantilla which conceals arms, chest, and head. The face is left uncovered, and I saw some very lovely ones smiling forth from the black drapery. Rich people wear these upper garments of silk; the cloaks of the poorer classes are made of merino or cheap woollen stuffs. It was Sunday when I entered Lavalette for the first time. Every street and church was thronged with people, all of whom were neatly and decently dressed. I saw but few beggars, and those whom I met were less ragged than the generality of their class. The military, the finest I had ever seen, consisted entirely of tall handsome men, mostly Scotchmen. Their uniforms were very tasteful. One regiment wore scarlet jackets and white linen trousers; another, black jackets and shoulder-knots,--in fact, the whole uniform is black, with the exception of the trousers, which are of white linen. It seemed much more the fashion to drive than to ride here. The coaches are of a very peculiar kind, which I hardly think can be found elsewhere. They consist of a venerable old rattling double- seated box, swinging upon two immense wheels, and drawn by a single horse in shafts. The coachman generally runs beside his vehicle. October 3d. To-day I drove in a carriage (for the first time since my departure from Vienna, a period of six months and a half) to Civita Vecchia, to view this ancient town of Malta, and particularly the celebrated church of St. Peter and St. Paul. On this occasion I traversed the whole length of the island, and had an opportunity of viewing the interior. Malta consists of a number of little elevations, and is intersected in all directions by excellent roads. I also continually passed handsome villages, some of them so large that they looked like thriving little towns. The heights are frequently crowned by churches of considerable extent and beauty; although the whole island consists of rock and sandstone, vegetation is sufficiently luxurious. Fig, lemon, and orange trees grow every where, and plantations of the cotton-shrub are as common as potato-fields in my own country. The stems of these shrubs are not higher than potato- plants, and are here cultivated exactly in the same way. I was told that they had been stunted this year by the excessive drought, but that in general they grew a foot higher. The peasants were every where neatly dressed, and live in commodious well-built houses, universally constructed of stone, and furnished with terraces in lieu of roofs. CIVITA VECCHIA is a town of splendid houses and very elegant country-seats. Many inhabitants of Lavalette spend the summer here, in the highest portion of the island. The church of St. Peter and St. Paul is a spacious building, with a simple interior. The floor is covered merely with stone slabs; the walls are white-washed to the ceiling, but the upper portion is richly ornamented with arabesques. A beautiful picture hanging behind the high altar represents a storm at sea. The view from the hall of the convent is magnificent; we can overlook almost the entire island, and beyond our gaze loses itself in the boundless expanse of ocean. Near the church stands a chapel, beneath which is St. Paul's grotto, divided into two parts: in the first of these divisions we find a splendid statue of St. Paul in white marble; the second was the dungeon of the apostle. Not far from this chapel, at the extremity of the town, are the catacombs, which resemble those at Rome, Naples, and other towns. During our drive back we made a little detour to see the gorgeous summer-palace and garden of the governor. The whole excursion occupied about seven hours. During my residence in Malta the heat varied from 20 to 25 degrees Reaumur in the sun. CHAPTER XVIII. The steamer Hercules--Syracuse--Neapolis--Ruins--Catanea--Convent of St. Nicholas--Messina--The Duke of Calabria--Palermo--The royal palace--Church of St. Theresa--St. Ignazio--Catacombs of the Augustine convent--Skeletons--Olivuzza --Royal villa "Favorite"--St. Rosalia--Brutality of the Italian mob--Luxuriant vegetation--Arrival at Naples. October 4th. At eight o'clock in the evening I embarked on board the Sicilian steamer Hercules, of 260-horse power, the largest and finest vessel I had yet seen. The officers here were not nearly so haughty and disobliging as those on board the Eurotas. Even now I cannot think without a smile of the airs the captain of the latter vessel gave himself. He appeared to consider that he had as good a right to be an admiral as Bruys. At ten o'clock we steamed out of the harbour of Lavalette. As it was already dark night, I went below and retired to rest. October 5th. When I hurried on deck this morning I found we were already in sight of the Sicilian coast, and--oh happiness!--I could distinguish green hills, wooded mountains, glorious dells, and smiling meadows,--a spectacle I had enjoyed neither in Syria, in Egypt, nor even at Malta. Now I thought at length to behold Europe, for Malta resembles the Syrian regions too closely to favour the idea that we are really in Europe. Towards eleven o'clock we reached SYRACUSE. Unfortunately we could only get four hours' leave of absence. As several gentlemen among the passengers wished to devote these few hours to seeing all the lions of this once rich and famous town, I joined their party and went ashore with them. Scarcely had we landed before we were surrounded by a number of servants and a mob of curious people, so that we were almost obliged to make our way forcibly through the crowd. The gentlemen hired a guide, and desired to be at once conducted to a restaurateur, who promised to prepare them a modest luncheon within half an hour. The prospect of a good meal seemed of more importance in the eyes of my fellow- passengers than any thing else. They resolved to have luncheon first, and afterwards to take a little walk through the city. On hearing this I immediately made a bargain with a cicerone to shew me what he could in four hours, and went with him, leaving the company seated at table. Though I got nothing to eat to-day but a piece of bread and a few figs, which I despatched on the road, I saw some sights which I would not have missed for the most sumptuous entertainment. Of the once spacious town nothing remains but a very small portion, inhabited by 10,000 persons at most. The dirty streets were every where crowded with people, as though they dwelt out of doors, while the houses stood empty. Accompanied by my guide, I passed hastily through the new town, and over three or four wooden bridges to Neapolis, the part of ancient Syracuse in which monuments of the past are seen in the best state of preservation. First we came to the theatre. This building is tolerably well preserved, and several of the stone seats are still seen rising in terrace form one above the other. From this place we betook ourselves into the amphitheatre, which is finer by far, and where we find passages leading to the wild beasts' dens, and above them rows of seats for spectators; all is in such good condition that it might, at a trifling expense, be so far repaired as to be made again available for its original purpose. Now we proceeded to the "Ear of Dionysius," with which I was particularly struck. It consists of a number of chambers, partly hewn out of the rock by art, partly formed by nature, and all opening into an immensely lofty hall, which becomes narrower and narrower towards the top, until it at length terminates in an aperture so minute as to be invisible from below. To this aperture Dionysius is said to have applied his ear, in order to overhear what the captives spoke. (This place is stated to have been used as a prison for slaves and malefactors.) It is usual to fire a pistol here, that the stranger may hear the reverberating echoes. A lofty opening, resembling a great gate, forms the entrance to these rocky passages. Overgrown with ivy, it has rather the appearance of a bower than of a place of terror and anguish. Several of these side halls are now used as workshops by rope-makers, while in others the manufacture of saltpetre is carried on. The region around is rocky, but without displaying any high mountains. I saw numerous grottoes, some of them with magnificent entrances, which looked as though they had been cut in the rocks by art. In one of these grottoes water fell from above, forming a very pretty cataract. During this excursion the time had passed so rapidly that I was soon compelled to think, not of a visit to the catacombs, but of my return on board. I proceeded to the sea-shore, where the Syracusans have built a very pretty promenade, and was rowed back to the steamer. Of all the passengers I was the only one who had seen any thing of Syracuse; all the rest had spent the greater part of the time allowed them in the inn, and at most had been for a short walk in the town. But they had obtained an exceedingly good dinner; and thus we had each enjoyed ourselves in our own way. At three o'clock we quitted the beautiful harbour of Syracuse, and three hours brought us to CATANEA. This voyage was one of the most beautiful and interesting that can be imagined. The traveller continually sees the most charming landscapes of blooming Sicily; and at Syracuse we can already descry on a clear day the giant Etna rearing its head 10,000 feet above the level of the sea. At six in the evening we disembarked; but those going farther had to be on board again by midnight. I had intended to remain at Catanea and ascend Mount Etna; but on making inquiries I was assured that the season was too far advanced for such an undertaking, and therefore resolved to set sail again at midnight. I went on shore in company with a Neapolitan and his wife, for the purpose of visiting some of the churches, a few public buildings, and the town itself. The buildings, however, were already closed, though the exteriors promised much. We could only deplore that we had arrived an hour too late, and take a walk round the town. I could scarcely wonder enough at the bustle in the crowded squares and chief streets, and at the shouting and screaming of the people. The number of inhabitants is about 50,000. The two chief streets, leading in different directions from the great square, are long, broad, and particularly well paved with large stone slabs: they contain many magnificent houses. The only circumstance which displeased me was, that every where, even in the chief streets, the people dry clothes on large poles at balconies and windows. This makes the town look as though it were inhabited by a race of washerwomen. I should not even mind so much if they were clean clothes; but I frequently saw the most disgusting rags fluttering in front of splendid houses. Unfortunately this barbarous custom prevails throughout the whole of Sicily; and even in Naples the hanging out of clothes is only forbidden in the principal street, the Toledo: all the other streets are full of linen. Among the equipages, which were rolling to and fro in great numbers, I noticed some very handsome ones. Some were standing still in the great square, while their occupants amused themselves by looking at the bustle around them, and chatted with friends and acquaintances who crowded round the carriages. I found a greater appearance of life here than either at Naples or Palermo. The convent of St. Nicholas was unfortunately closed, so that we could only view its exterior. It is a spacious magnificent building, the largest, in fact, in the whole town. We also looked at the walks on the sea-shore, which at our first arrival we had traversed in haste in order to reach the town quickly. Beautiful avenues extend along each side of the harbour; they are, however, less frequented than the streets and squares. We had a beautiful moonlight night; the promontory of Etna, with its luxurious vegetation, as well as the giant mountain itself, were distinctly visible in all their glory. The summit rose cloudless and free; no smoke came from the crater, nor could we discover a trace of snow as we returned to our ship. We noticed several heaps of lava piled upon the sea-shore, of a perfectly black colour. Late in the evening we adjourned to an inn to refresh ourselves with some good dishes, and afterwards returned to the steamer, which weighed anchor at midnight. October 6th. We awoke in the harbour of Messina. The situation of this town is lovely beyond description. I was so charmed with it that I stood for a long time on deck without thinking of landing. A chain of beautiful hills and huge masses of rock in the background surround the harbour and town. Every where the greatest fertility reigns, and all things are in the most thriving and flourishing condition. In the direction of Palermo the boundless ocean is visible. I now bade farewell to the splendid steamer Hercules, because I did not intend to proceed direct to Naples, but to make a detour by way of Palermo. As soon as I had landed, I proceeded to the office of the merchant M., to whom I had a letter of recommendation. I requested Herr M. to procure me a cicerone as soon as possible, as I wished to see the sights of Messina, and afterwards to continue my journey to Palermo. Herr M. was kind enough to send one of his clerks with me. I rested for half an hour, and then commenced my peregrination. From the steamer Messina had appeared to me a very narrow place, but on entering the town I found that I had made quite a false estimate of its dimensions. Messina is certainly built in a very straggling oblong form, but still its breadth is not inconsiderable. I saw many very beautiful squares; for instance, the chief square, with its splendid fountain ornamented with figures, and a bas-relief of carved work in bronze. Every square contains a fountain, but we seldom find any thing particularly tasteful. The churches are not remarkable for the beauty of their facades, nor do they present any thing in the way of marble statues or finely executed pictures. The houses are generally well built, with flat roofs; the streets, with few exceptions, are narrow, small, and very dirty. An uncommonly broad street runs parallel with the harbour, and contains, on one side at least, some very handsome houses. This is a favourite place for a walk, for we can here see all the bustle and activity of the port. Several of the palaces also are pretty; that appropriated to the senate is the only one which can be called fine, the staircase being constructed entirely of white marble, in a splendid style of architecture: the halls and apartments are lofty, and generally arched. The regal palace is also a handsome pile. In the midst of the town I found an agreeable public garden. The Italians appear, however, to choose the streets as places of rendezvous, in preference to enclosures of this kind; for every where I noticed that the garden-walks were empty, and the streets full. But on the whole there is not nearly so much life here as at Catanea. In order to obtain a view of the whole of Messina and its environs I ascended a hill near the town, surmounted by a Capuchin convent; here I enjoyed a prospect which I have seldom seen equalled. As I gazed upon it I could easily imagine that an inhabitant of Messina can find no place in the world so beautiful as his native town. The promontory against which the town leans is clothed with a carpet of the brightest green, planted with fruit-trees of all kinds, and enlivened with scattered towns, villages, and country seats. Beautiful roads, appearing like white bands, intersect the mountains on every side in the direction of the town. The background is closed by high mountains, sometimes wooded, sometimes bare, now rising in the form of alps, now in the shape of rocky masses. At the foot of the hills we see the long-drawn town, the harbour with its numerous ships, and beyond it groups of alps and rocks. The boundless sea flows on the spectator's right and left towards Palermo and Naples, while in the direction of Catanea the eye is caught by mountains, with Etna towering among them. The same evening I embarked on board the Duke of Calabria, for the short trip of twelve or fourteen hours to Palermo. This steamer has only engines of 80 horse-power, and every thing connected with it is small and confined. The first-class accommodation is indeed pretty good, but the second-class places are only calculated to contain very few passengers. Though completely exhausted by my long and fatiguing walk through Messina, I remained on deck, for I could not be happy without seeing Stromboli. Unfortunately I could distinguish very little of it. We had started from Messina at about six o'clock in the evening, and did not come in sight of the mountain until two hours later, when the shades of night were already descending; we were, besides, at such a distance from it that I could descry nothing but a colossal mass rising from the sea and towering towards heaven. I stayed on deck until past ten o'clock in the hope of obtaining a nearer view of Stromboli; but we had soon left it behind us in the far distance, with other islands which lay on the surface like misty clouds. October 7th. To-day I hastened on deck before sunrise, to see as much as possible of the Sicilian coast, and to obtain an early view of Palermo. At ten o'clock we ran into the harbour of this town. I had been so charmed with the situation of Messina that I did not expect ever to behold any thing more lovely; and yet the remembrance of this town faded from my mind when PALERMO rose before me, surrounded by magnificent mountains, among which the colossal rock of St. Rosalia, a huge slab of porphyry and granite, towered high in the blue air. The combination of various colours unites with its immense height and its peculiar construction to render this mountain one of the most remarkable in existence. Its summit is crowned by a temple; and a good road, partly cut out of the rock, partly supported on lofty pillars of masonry, which we can see from on board our vessel, leads to the convent of St. Rosalia, and to a chapel hidden among the hills and dedicated to the same saint. At the foot of this mountain lies a gorgeous castle, inhabited, as my captain told me, by an English family, who pay a yearly rent of 30,000 florins for the use of it. To the left of Palermo the mountains open and shew the entrance into a broad and transcendently beautiful valley, in which the town of Monreal lies with magical effect. Several of these gaps occur along the coast, affording glimpses of the most lovely vales, with scattered villages and pretty country-seats. The harbour of Palermo is picturesque and eminently safe. The town numbers about 130,000 inhabitants. Here, too, our deck was crowded with Fachini, innkeepers, and guides, before the anchor was fairly lowered. I inquired of the captain respecting the price of board and lodging, and afterwards made a bargain with a host before leaving the ship. By following this plan I generally escaped overcharge and inconvenience. Arrived at the inn, I sent to Herr Schmidt, to whom I had been recommended, with the request that he would despatch a trustworthy cicerone to me, and make me a kind of daily scheme of what I was to see. This was soon done, and after hurrying over my dinner I commenced my wanderings. I entered almost every church I passed on my way, and found them all neat and pretty. Every where I came upon picturesque villas and handsome houses, with glass doors instead of windows, their lower portion guarded by iron railings and forming little balconies. Here the women and girls sit of an evening working and talking to their heart's content. The streets of Palermo are far handsomer and cleaner than those of Messina. The principal among them, Toledo and Casaro, divide the town into four parts, and join in the chief square. The streets, as we pass from one into another, present a peculiar appearance, filled with bustling crowds of people moving noisily to and fro. In the Toledo Street all the tailors seem congregated together, for the shops on each side of the way are uniformly occupied by the votaries of this trade, who sit at work half in their houses and half in the street. The coffee-houses and shops are all open, so that the passers-by can obtain a full view of the wares and of the buyers and sellers. The regal palace is the handsomest in the town. It contains a gothic chapel, richly decorated; the walls are entirely covered with paintings in mosaic, of which the drawings do not display remarkable taste, and the ceiling is over-crowded with decorations and arabesques. An ancient chandelier, in the form of a pillar, made of beautiful marble and also covered with arabesques, stands beside the pulpit. On holydays an immense candle is put in this candlestick and lighted. I wished to enter this chapel, but was refused admittance until I had taken off my hat, like the men, and carried it in my hand. This custom prevails in several churches of Palermo. The space in front of the palace resembles a garden, from the number of avenues and beds of flowers with which it is ornamented. Second in beauty is the palace of the senate, but it cannot be compared with that at Messina. The town contains several very handsome squares, in all of which we find several statues and fountains. Foremost among the churches the Cathedral must be mentioned; its gothic facade occupies one entire side of a square. A spacious entrance-hall, with two monuments, not executed in a very fine style of art, leads into the interior of the church, which is of considerable extent, but built in a very simple style. The pillars, two of which always stand together, and the four royal monuments at the entrance, are all of Egyptian granite. The finest part of the church is the chapel of St. Rosalia on the right, not far from the high altar; both its walls are decorated with large bas-reliefs in marble, beautifully executed: one of these represents the banishment of the plague, and the finding of St. Rosalia's bones. A splendid pillar of lapis-lazuli, said to be the largest and finest specimen of this stone in existence, stands beside the high altar. The two basins with raised figures at the entrance of the church also deserve notice. The left side of the square is occupied by the episcopal palace, a building of no pretensions. Santa Theresia is a small church, containing nothing remarkable except a splendid bas-relief in marble, representing the Holy Family, which an Englishman once offered to purchase for an immense sum. The neighbouring church of St. Pieta, on the contrary, can be called large and grand. The facades are ornamented with pillars of marble, the altar is richly gilt, and handsome frescoes deck the ceiling. St. Domenigo, another fine church, possesses, my cicerone assured me, the largest organ in the world. If he had said the greatest _he had seen_, I could readily have believed him. In St. Ignazio, or Olivazo, near a minor altar at one side, we find a painting representing the Virgin and the infant Jesus. The sacristan persisted that this was a work of Raphael's. The colouring appeared to me not quite to resemble that of the great master, but I understand too little of these things to be able to judge on such a subject. At any rate it is a fine piece. A few steps below the church lies the oratory, which nearly equals it in size, and also contains a handsome painting over the altar. "St. Augustine" also repays the trouble of a visit; it displays great wealth in marble, sculptures, frescoes, and arabesques. "St. Joseph" is also rich in various kinds of marble. Several of its large columns have been made from a single block. A clear cold stream issues from this church. I have still to notice the lovely public gardens, which I visited after dining with the consul-general, Herr Wallenburg. I cannot omit this opportunity of gratefully mentioning the friendly sympathy and kindness I experienced on the part of this gentleman and his lady. To return to the gardens,--the most interesting to me was the botanical, where a number of rare trees and plants flourish famously in the open air. The catacombs of the Augustine convent are most peculiar; they are situate immediately outside the town. From the church, which offers nothing of remarkable interest, a broad flight of stairs leads downwards into long and lofty passages cut in the rock, and receiving light from above. The skeletons of the dead line the walls, in little niches close beside each other; they are clothed in a kind of monkish robe, and each man's hands are crossed on his chest, with a ticket bearing his name, age, and the date of his death depending therefrom. A more horrible sight can scarcely be imagined than these dressed-up skeletons and death's-heads. Many have still hair on the scalp, and some even beard. The niches in which they stand are surmounted by planks displaying skulls and bones, and the corridors are crowded with whole rows of coffins, their inmates waiting for a vacant place. If the relations of one of the favoured skeletons neglect to supply a certain number of wax- tapers on All-Saints' day, the poor man is banished from his position, and one of the candidates steps in and occupies his niche. The corpses of women and girls are deposited in another compartment, and look as though they were lying in state in their glass coffins, dressed in handsome silks, with ornamental coifs on their heads, ruffs and lace collars round their necks, and silk shoes and stockings, which however soon burst, on their feet. A wreath of flowers decks the brow of each girl, and beneath all this ornament the skull appears with its hollow eyes--a parody upon life and death. Whenever any one wishes to be immortalised in this way, his friends and relations must pay a certain sum for a place on the day of his burial, and afterwards bring wax-tapers every year. The body is then laid in a chamber of lime, which remains for eight months hermetically closed, until the flesh has been entirely eaten away; then the bones are fastened together, dressed, and placed in a niche. On All-Saints' day these corridors of death are crowded with gazers; friends and relations of the deceased resort thither to light candles and perform their devotions. I was glad to have had an opportunity of seeing these audience-halls of the dead, but still I rejoiced when I hastened upwards to sojourn once more among the living. From here I drove to Olivuzza, to view the Moorish castle of Ziza, celebrated for the beauty of its situation and of the region around. Not far from the old castle stands a new one, with a garden of much beauty, containing also a number of fantastic toys, such as little grottoes and huts, hollow trees in which secret doors fly suddenly open, disclosing to view a nun, a monk, or some figure of the kind, etc. Here I still found a species of date-tree growing in the open air; but the fruit it bears is very small, and never becomes completely ripe: this was the last date-tree I saw. The royal villa "Favourite," about a mile from the town, is situated in a lovely spot. It is built in the Chinese style, with a quantity of points, gables, and little bells; its interior is, however, arranged according to European design, in a rich, tasteful, and artistic manner. We linger with pleasure in the rooms, each of which offers some attractive feature. Thus, for instance, one apartment contains beautiful fresco paintings; another, life-size portraits of the royal family in Chinese costume; in a third, the effects of damp on walls and ceiling are so accurately portrayed that at first I was deceived by the resemblance, and regretted to find a room in such a condition among all the pomp and splendour around. One small cabinet is entirely inlaid with little pieces of all the various kinds of marble that are to be found in Sicily. The large tables are made of petrified and polished woods, etc. Besides these minor attractions, a much greater one exists in the splendid view which we obtain from the terraces and from the summit of the Chinese tower. I found it difficult to tear myself from contemplating this charming prospect; a painter would become embarrassed by the very richness of the materials around him. Every thing I had seen from on board here appeared before my eyes with increased loveliness, because I here saw it from a higher position, and obtained a more extended view. An ornamental garden lies close to the palace. It is flagged with large blocks of stone, between which spaces are left for earth. These beds are parcelled out according to plans, bordered with box a foot in height, and arranged so as to form immense leaves, flowers, and arabesques; while in the midst stand vases of natural flowers. The park fills up the background; it consists merely of a few avenues and meadows, extending to the foot of Mount Rosalia. This mountain I also ascended. The finest paved street, which is sufficiently broad for three carriages to pass each other, winds in a serpentine manner round the rocky heights, so that we can mount upwards without the slightest difficulty. The convent is small and very simply constructed; the courtyard behind it, on the contrary, is exceedingly imposing. It is shut in on all sides by steep walls of rock, covered with clinging ivy in a most picturesque manner. On the left we find a little grotto containing an altar. In the foreground, on the right, a lofty gate, formed by nature and beautified by art, leads into a chapel wonderfully formed of pieces of rock and stalactites. A feeling of astonishment and admiration almost amounting to awe came upon me as I entered. The walls near the chief altar are overgrown with a kind of delicate moss of an emerald-green colour, with the white rock shining through here and there; and in the midst rises a natural cupola, terminating in a point. The extreme summit of this dome cannot be distinguished; it is lost in obscurity. Here and there natural niches occur, in which statues of saints have been placed. To the left of the high altar I saw the monument of St. Rosalia, beautifully executed in white marble. She is represented in a recumbent posture, the size of life; the statue rests on a pedestal two feet in height. In the most highly-decorated or the most gorgeous church I could not have felt myself more irresistibly impelled to devotion than in this grand temple of nature. From the 15th to the 18th of July in every year a great feast is held in honour of St. Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, in the town and on the mountain. On these days a number of people make a pilgrimage to the grotto above described, where the bones of the saint were found at a time when the plague was raging at Palermo. They were carried with great pomp into the town, and from that moment the plague ceased. The road from the convent to the temple, built on the summit of a rock, and visible to the sailors from a great distance, leads us for about half a mile over loose stones. Its construction is extremely simple, and not remarkable in any way. In former times its summit was decked by a colossal statue of the saint. This fell down, and the head alone remained unmutilated. Like the statue, the fane is now in ruins, and its site is only visited for the sake of the beautiful view. On our way back to the convent, my guide drew my attention to a spot where a large tree had stood. Some years before, a family was sitting quietly beneath its shade, partaking of a frugal meal, when the tree suddenly came crashing down, and caused the death of four persons. The excursion to St. Rosalia's Hill can easily be made in four or five hours. It is usual to ride up the mountain on donkeys; these animals are, however, so sluggish, compared with those of Egypt, that I often preferred dismounting and proceeding on foot. The Neapolitan donkeys are just as lazy. I wished still to visit Bagaria, the summer residence of many of the townspeople. One morning I drove to this lovely spot in the company of an amiable Swiss family. The distance from Palermo is about two miles and a half, and the road frequently winding close to the sea, presents a rich variety of beautiful pictures. We went to view the palace of Prince Fascello: the proprietor appears, however, seldom to reside here, for every thing wears an air of neglect. Two halls in this building are worthy of notice; the walls of the smaller one are covered with figures and ornaments, beautifully carved in wood, with pieces of mirror glass placed between them. The vaulted ceiling is also decorated with mirrors, some of which are unfortunately already broken. The walls of the larger hall are completely lined with the finest Sicilian marble. Above the cornices the marble has been covered with thin glass, which gives it a peculiar appearance of polish. The immense ceiling of the great hall is vaulted like that of the smaller one, and completely covered with mirrors, all of them in good preservation. Both apartments, but particularly the large one, are said to have a magical effect when lighted up with tapers. I spent a Sunday in Palermo, and was much pleased at seeing the peasants in their festive garb, in which, however, I could discover nothing handsome; nor, indeed, any thing peculiar, save the long pendent nightcaps. The men wear jackets and breeches, and have the before-mentioned caps on their heads; the dress of the women is a spencer, a petticoat, and a kerchief of white or coloured linen round the head and neck. The common people appeared to be neither cleanly nor wealthy. The rich are dressed according to the fashions of London, Paris, and Vienna. In all the Sicilian towns I found the mob more boisterous and impudent than in the East, and frequently it was my lot to witness most diabolical quarrels and fights. It is necessary to be much more on one's guard against theft and roguery among these people than among the Arabs and Bedouins. Now I acknowledge how falsely I had judged the poor denizens of the East when I took them for the most thievish of tribes. The people here and at Naples were far worse than they. I was doubly pained on making this discovery, from the fact that I saw more fasting and praying, and more clergymen in these countries than any where else. To judge from appearances, I should have taken the Sicilians and Neapolitans for the most pious people in the world. But their behaviour towards strangers is rude in the extreme. Never had I been so impudently stared out of countenance as in these Sicilian towns: fingers were pointed at me amidst roars of laughter; the boys even ran after me and jeered at me--and all because I wore a round straw hat. In Messina I threw this article away, and dressed according to the fashion which prevails here and in my own country; but still the gaping did not cease. In Palermo it was not only the street boys who stood still to gaze at me, the grandees also did me the same honour, whether I drove or walked. I once asked a lady the reason of this, and requested to know if my appearance was calculated either to give offence or to excite ridicule; she replied that neither was the case, but that the only thing the citizens remarked in me was that I went about alone with a servant. In Sicily this was quite an uncommon circumstance, for there I always saw two ladies walking together, or a lady and gentleman. Now the grand mystery was solved; but notwithstanding this, I did not alter my mode of action, but continued to walk quietly about the town with my servant, for I preferred being laughed at a little to giving any one the trouble of accompanying me about every where. At first this staring made me very uncomfortable; but man can adapt himself to every thing, and I am no exception to the rule. The vegetation in Sicily is eminent for its luxuriant loveliness. Flowers, plants, and shrubs attain a greater height and magnitude than we find elsewhere. I saw here numerous species of aloes, which we cultivate laboriously in hot-houses, growing wild, or planted as hedges around gardens. The stems, from which blossoms burst forth, often attain a height of from twenty to thirty feet. Their flowering season was already past. October 10th. After a sojourn of five days I bade farewell to Palermo, and took my departure in wet weather. This was the first rain I had seen fall since the 20th of April. The temperature remained very warm; on fine days the thermometer still stood at 20 or 22 degrees Reaumur in the sun at noon. The vessel on which I now embarked was a royal mail-steamer. We left Palermo at noon; towards evening the sea became rather rough, so that the spray dashed over me once or twice, although I continually kept near the steersman. At the commencement of our journey nothing was to be seen but sky and water. But the next day, as we approached the Neapolitan coast, island after island rose from the sea, and at length the mainland itself could be discerned. Capri was the first island we approached closely. Soon afterwards my attention was drawn to a great cloud rising towards the sky; it was a smoky column from the glowing hearth of Vesuvius. At length a white line glittered on the verge of the horizon, like a band through the clear air. There was a joyful cry of "Napoli! Napoli!" and Naples lay spread before me. CHAPTER XIX. Sojourn at Naples--Sickness--Laziness of the people--Royal palace-- Rotunda--Strada Chiaga and Toledo--St. Carlo Theatre--Largo del Castello--Medina square--Marionettes--St. Jesu Nuovo--St. Jesu Maggiore--St. Maria di Piedigrotta--Public gardens--Academy "degli Studii"--Cathedral of St. Januarius--St. Jeronimo--St. Paula Maggiore--St. Chiara--Baths of Nero--Solfatara--Grotto "del Cane"-- Resina--Ascent of Vesuvius--Caserta. My imagination was so powerfully excited, I may say over-excited, by the accounts I had heard and read concerning this fairy city, that here once more my expectations were far from being realised. This was, perhaps, partly owing to the circumstance that I had already seen Constantinople and had just quitted Palermo, the situation of which latter town had so enchanted me that my enthusiasm was here confined within very narrow bounds, and I felt inclined to prefer Palermo to Naples. At two o'clock in the afternoon I landed, and the kind assistance of Herr Brettschneider at once procured me an excellent room in Santa Lucia, with a prospect of the harbour and the bay, besides a view of Vesuvius and the region surrounding it. As usual, I wished to commence my researches at once; but already in Palermo I had felt an unceasing pain in my side, so that my last walks there had been attended with considerable difficulty. Here I became really ill, and was unable to quit my room. I had a boil on my back, which required the care of the surgeon, and kept me in my room for a fortnight, until the fever had abated. If this misfortune had happened to me in the East, or even while I was in quarantine at Malta, who knows whether I should not have been looked upon as having a "plague-boil," and shut up for forty days? During my imprisonment here, my only relaxation during the hours when I was free from fever and it did not rain, was to sit on the balcony, contemplating the beautiful prospect, and looking on the bustling, lively populace. The Neapolitans appeared to me very ill- behaved, boisterous, and quarrelsome, and seemed to entertain a great horror of work. The latter circumstance seems natural enough, for they require little for their daily support, and we hardly find that the common people any where work more than is necessary to shield them from immediate want; this is particularly the case in Italy, where the heat is oppressive during the day, and the temperature of the evening so agreeable, every one wishes to enjoy himself rather than to work. I sometimes saw men employ themselves for half a day together in pushing bullets with a little stick through a ring fastened to the ground: this is one of the most popular games. The women are always sitting or standing in front of the houses, chattering or quarrelling; and the children lie about in the streets all day long. The veriest trifle suffices to breed a quarrel among old or young, and then they kick one another with their feet--a very graceful practice for women or girls! Even with their knives they are ready on all occasions. For making observations on the Neapolitans no better post can be chosen than a lodging in the quarter St. Lucia. The fishermen, lazzaroni, and sailors live in the little side lanes, and spend the greater part of the day in the large street of St. Lucia, the chief resort both for pedestrians and people on horse-back and in carriages. In and about the harbour we find numerous vendors of oysters and crabs, which they bring fresh from the sea. The lazzaroni no longer go about half naked, and the common people are dressed in a decent though not in a picturesque manner. Here a number of handsome equipages rolled by; their lady occupants were very fashionably attired. Even among the better classes it is usual for the men to purchase all the household necessaries, such as fish, bread, poultry, etc. Poultry is very much eaten in Italy, particularly turkeys, which are sometimes sold ready cut up, according to weight. On Sundays and holydays the shops containing wares and provisions, and the meat and poultry stalls, are opened in the same way as on a week-day. Throughout all Italy we do not see them closed for the observance of a Sunday or holyday. On the fifteenth day I had so far recovered that I could begin my tour of observation, using, however, certain precautions. At first I confined my researches to churches, palaces, and the museum, particularly as the weather was unprecedentedly bad. It rained, or rather poured, almost every day, and in these cases the water rushes in streams out of the by-lanes towards the sea. The greater part of Naples is built on an acclivity, and there are no gutters, so that the water must force its way along the streets: this has its peculiar advantages; for the side-lanes, which are filthy beyond description, thus get a partial cleansing by the stream. As I am not a connoisseur, it would be foolish in me to attempt a criticism upon the splendid productions of art which I beheld here, in Rome, and at Florence and other places. I can only recount what I saw. During my excursions I generally regulated my movements according to the divisions and instructions contained in August Lewald's hand- book, a work which every traveller will find very serviceable and correct. I began with the royal palace, which was situate near my lodging at St. Lucia, with one front facing the sea, and the other turned towards the fine large square. This building contains forty-two windows in a row. I could see nothing of its interior excepting the richly decorated chapel, as the royal family resided there during the whole time of my stay, and thus the apartments were not accessible to strangers. Opposite the castle stands the magnificent Rotunda, called also the church of San Francesco de Paula. Adjoining this church on either side were arcades in the form of a half circle, supported by handsome pillars, beneath which several shops are established. The roof of the Rotunda is formed by a splendid cupola resting on thirty-four marble pillars. The altars, with the niches between, occupied by colossal statues, are ranged round the walls, and in some instances decorated by splendid modern paintings. A great quantity of lapis lazuli has been used in the construction of the grand altar. In the higher regions of the cupola two galleries, with tasteful iron railings, are to be seen. The entire church, and even the confessionals, are covered with a species of grey marble. The peculiar appearance of this place of worship is exceedingly calculated to excite the visitor's wonder, for to judge from its exterior he would scarcely take the splendid building before him for a church. It was built on the model of the famous rotunda at Rome; but the idea of the porticoes is taken from St. Peter's. Two large equestrian statues of bronze form the ornaments of the square before this church. Quitting this square, we emerge into the two finest and most frequented streets in the town, namely, the Chiaga and Toledo. Not far off is the imposing theatre of St. Carlo, said to be not only the largest in Italy, but in all Europe. Its exterior aspect is very splendid. A large and broad entrance extends in front, with pillars, beneath the shelter of which the carriages drive up, so that the spectators can arrive and depart without the chance of getting wet. This evening there was to be a "particularly grand performance." I entered the theatre, and was much struck with its appearance. It contains six tiers, all parcelled off into boxes, of which I counted four-and-twenty on the grand circle. Each box is almost the size of a small room, and can easily accommodate from twelve to fifteen people. A fairy-like spectacle is said to be produced when, on occasions of peculiar festivity, the whole exterior is lighted up. Here, as in nearly all the Italian theatres, a clock, shewing not only the hours but the minutes, is fixed over the front of the stage. A "particular performance" commences at six o'clock, and usually terminates an hour or two before midnight. This evening I saw a little ballet, then two acts of an opera, and afterwards a comedy, the whole concluding with a grand ballet. It is usual on benefit-nights to give a great variety of entertainments in order to attract the public; on these occasions the prices are also reduced one-fifth. The greatest square, Largo del Castello, almost adjoins the theatre; it is of an oblong form, and contains many palace-like buildings, including the finance and police offices. A pretty spring, the water of which falls down some rocks and forms a cascade, is also worthy of mention. A little to the left we come upon the Medina-square, boasting the finest fountain in Naples. Between these two squares, beside the sea-shore, lies Castel Nuovo, said to be built quite in the form of the Bastille. It is strongly fortified, and serves as a defence for the harbour. This is a very lively neighbourhood. Many an hour's amusement have I had, watching the motley crowd, particularly on Sundays and holydays, when it is frequented by improvisators, singers, musicians, and mountebanks of every description. Not far from the harbour is a long street in which numerous kitchens and many provision-stalls are established. Here I walked in the evenings to see the people assembled round the macaroni-pots: it is advisable, however, to leave watch and purse at home, and even one's pocket-handkerchief is not safe. Of the shouting and crowding here no conception can be formed. Large kettles are placed in front of the shops, and the proprietors sit beside them, plunging a great wooden fork and spoon into the cauldron to fill the plates of expectant customers. Some eat their favourite dish with fat and cheese, others without, according to the state of their exchequer for the time being; but one and all eat with their fingers. The army of hungry mortals seems innumerable; and during feeding-time the stranger finds no little difficulty in forcing a passage, notwithstanding the breadth of the street. Not far from this thoroughfare of the people two "Punchinellos" are erected. In one of these the Marionettes are a foot and a half, and in the other no less than three feet high. There is, besides, a theatre for the people, where pieces of tragic and comic character are performed, in all of which the clown plays a prominent part. The remaining theatres, the Nuovo, the Carlini, and others, are about the size of those in the Leopold- and Josephstadt at Vienna, and can accommodate about 800 spectators. Their exteriors and interiors are alike undistinguished; but in some of them the singing and playing are very creditable. In one of these theatres we are obliged to descend instead of to ascend to reach the pit and the first tier of boxes. Naples contains more than three hundred churches and chapels. I visited a number of them, for I entered every church that came in my way. St. Fernando, a church of no great size, but of very pleasing appearance, struck me particularly. The ceiling of this edifice is covered with frescoes, and the walls enriched with marble. At the two side altars we find a pair of very fine half-length pictures of saints. St. Jesu Nuovo, another exceedingly handsome church, stands on the borders of the Lago Maggiore, and is full of magnificent frescoes, surrounded by arabesque borders. The latter appear as though they were gilded, and the effect thus produced is remarkably fine. This spacious building contains a number of small chapels, partitioned off by massive gratings. The great cupola is exceedingly handsome, and every chapel boasts a separate one. St. Jesu Maggiore does not carry out its appellation, for it is a small unpretending church, though some splendid gothic ornaments beautify the exterior. St. Maria di Piedigrotta, another little church, is much frequented, from the fact that the common people place great confidence in the picture of the Virgin there displayed. The church contains nothing worthy of notice. The grotto of Pausilipp, a cavern of immense length, now called Puzzoli, is not far distant. This grotto, hewn out of a rock, is about 1200 paces long, between 50 and 60 feet in height, and of such breadth that two carriages can easily pass each other. A little chapel cut out of the rock occupies the middle of the cavern, and both grotto and chapel are illuminated night and day. As in the whole of Naples, the pavement here is formed of lava from Mount Vesuvius. Immediately above the grotto, in the direction of the town, we come upon a simple gravestone of white marble--the monument of the poet Virgil. A long flight of steps leads to the garden containing this monument: the poet's ashes do not, however, rest here; the spot where he sleeps cannot be accurately determined, and this monument is only raised to his memory. The prospect from these heights as well repays a visit as the grotto of Pausilipp, where we wander for a long time in deep darkness, until we suddenly emerge into the broad light of day, to find ourselves surrounded by a most lovely landscape. The public garden of Naples is also situate in this quarter of the town. It extends to the lower portion of the Strada Chiaga, is of great length without being broad, and displays a vast number of beautiful statues, prospects, and rare plants; a large and handsome street, containing many fine houses, adjoins it on one side. I also rode to the Vomero, on which are erected the king's pleasure-palace and a small convent. A glorious prospect here unfolds itself: Naples with its bay, Puzzoli, and a number of beautiful islands, the lake Agnaro, the extinct craters of Solfatara, Baiae, Vesuvius with its chain of mountains, and the stupendous ocean, lie grouped, in varied forms and gorgeously blending colours, before the gaze of the astonished spectator. This is the place of which the Neapolitans say, with some justice, "Hither should men come, and gaze, and die!" Still the prospects from St. Rosalia's Mount, and from the royal palace Favorita at Palermo, had pleased me better; for there the beauties of nature are more crowded together, are nearer to the spectator: he can obtain a more complete view of them, while in varied gorgeousness they do not yield the palm even to the fairy pictures of Naples. I more than once spent half a day in the Academy "degli Studii," for in this place much was to be seen. The entrance to the building is indescribably beautiful; both the portico and the handsome staircases are ornamented with statues and busts executed in most artistic style. A door on the right leads us to a hall in which the paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum are displayed; several of these relics have no small pretensions to beauty, and the colours of almost all are still wonderfully bright and fresh. In the great hall at the end of the courtyard we find on one side the Farnese Hercules, and on the other the Bull, both works of the Athenian Glycon. These two antiques, particularly the latter, have been in a great measure restored. The gallery of great bronzes is considered the first in the world, for here we find united the finest works of ancient times. So many beautiful creations of art were here brought together, that if I attempted a description of them I should not know where to begin. Opposite the gallery of bronzes is that allotted to the marbles, among which a beautiful Venus stands prominently forth. In the gallery of Flora, a statue of the same goddess, called the Farnese, is also the principal attraction. A statue of Apollo playing on the lyre, of porphyry, is the greatest masterpiece in the hall of coloured marbles; while in the gallery of the Muses a basin of Athenian porphyry occupies the first place. In the Adonis room the beautiful Venus Anadyomene engrossed my chief attention; and in the cabinet of Venus the Venus Callipygos forms an exquisite sidepiece to the Venus de Medicis. The upper regions of this splendid building contain an extensive library and a picture-gallery. I also paid a visit to the catacombs of St. Januarius, which extend three stories high on a mountain, and are full of little niches, five or six of which are often found one above the other. In the chapel Santa Maria della Pieta, in the palace St. Severino, I admired three of the finest and most valuable marble statues that can be found any where; I mean, "Veiled Innocence," "Malice in a Net," and a veiled recumbent figure of Christ. All three are by the sculptor Bernini. The largest church in the town is the cathedral dedicated to St. Januarius. This structure rests on a hundred and ten columns of Egyptian and African granite, standing three by three, embedded in the walls. The church has not a very imposing appearance. The chief altar, beneath which the body of St. Januarius is deposited, is ornamented with many kinds of valuable marble. Here I saw a great number of pictures, most of them of considerable merit. The chapel of St. Januarius, also called the "chapel of the treasure," is one of the most gorgeous shrines that can be conceived. The Neapolitans built it as a thank-offering at the cessation of a plague. The cost was above a million of ducats, and the wealth of this chapel is greater than that of any church in Christendom. It is built in a circular form, and all the resources of art have been lavished on the decoration of the chief altar. Every spot is covered with treasures and works of art, and the roof is supported by forty-two Corinthian pillars of dark-red stone. All the decorations of the high altar, the immense candelabra and massive flower-vases, are of silver. At a grand festival, when every thing is richly illuminated, the appearance of this chapel must be gorgeous in the extreme. The head and two bottles of the blood of St. Januarius are preserved here; the people assert that this blood liquefies every year. The frescoes on the ceiling are splendidly painted; and on the square before the church is to be seen an obelisk surmounted by a statue of St. Januarius. St. Jeronimo has an imposing appearance when one first enters. The whole roof of this church as far downwards as the pillars is covered with beautiful arabesques and figures. It also contains some fine paintings, and is, besides, renowned for its architecture. St. Paula Maggiore, another spacious church, is well worth seeing on account of its magnificent arabesques and fresco-paintings; besides these it also contains some handsome monuments and statues of marble. Two very ancient pillars stand in front of this church. St. Chiara, a fine large church, offers some fine monuments and oil- paintings. Among the excursions in the neighbourhood of Naples, that to Puzzoli is certainly the most interesting. After passing through the great grotto, we reach the ancient and rather important town of Puzzoli, with 8000 inhabitants. Cicero called this place a little Rome. In the centre of the town stands the church of St. Proculus, which was converted from a heathen into a Christian temple, and is surrounded by fine-looking Corinthian pillars. Remarkable beyond all else is the ruined temple of Seropis. Almost the entire magnitude and arrangement of this magnificent building can yet be discerned. A few of the pillars that once supported the cupola are still erect, and several of the cells, which surrounded the temple and were once used as baths, can still be seen. Every thing here is of fine white marble. The greater portion of the ruin was dismantled, to be used in the construction of the royal villa of Caserta. The harbour of Puzzoli is related to have been the finest in Italy. From this place Caligula had a bridge erected to Baiae, about 4000 paces in length. He undertook this gigantic work in consequence of a prophecy that was made to him, that he would no more become emperor than he could ride to Baiae on horseback. This prophecy he confuted, and became emperor. Of the amphitheatre and the colosseum not a trace remains. A little chapel now occupies the site on which they stood; tradition asserts that it is built on the very spot where St. Januarius was thrown to the bears. Not far from this chapel we are shewn the labyrinth of Daedalus; several of its winding walks still exist, through which it would be difficult to find the way without a cicerone. We ascended the hill immediately beyond the city, on which some remains of Cicero's villa are yet to be seen: here we enjoyed a splendid prospect. In this region we continually wander among ruins, and see every where around us the relics of the past. Thus a short walk brought us from Cicero's villa to the ruins of three temples--those of Diana, Venus, and Mercury. Of the first, one side and a few little cells, called the "baths of Venus," alone remain. Part of Venus's temple stands in the rotunda. It was built on acoustic principles, so that any one who puts his ear to a certain part of the wall can hear what is whispered at the opposite extremity. A few fragments of the rotunda were the only trace left of the temple of Diana. The vapour baths of Nero, hewn out of the rock, consist of several passages, into which it is impossible to penetrate far on account of the heat. A boy ran to the spring and brought us some boiling water; he returned from his expedition fiery red in the face, and covered with perspiration. These poor lads are accustomed to remain at the spring until they have succeeded in boiling some eggs; but I would not allow any such cruelty, and did not even wish them to fetch me the water, but Herr Brettschneider would have it so in spite of me. From this place we crossed by sea to Baiae, where at one time many of the rich people had their villas. Their proceedings here are said, however, to have been of so immoral a character, that at length it was considered wrong to have resided here any time. Every visitor must be enchanted with the fertility of this region, and with its lovely aspect. A castle, now used as a barrack for veterans, crowns the summit of a rock which stands prominently forth. A few unimportant traces can still be here discovered of an ancient temple of Hercules. Some masonry, in the form of a monument, marks the alleged spot where Agrippina was murdered and buried by order of her son. The immense reservoir built by order of the emperor Augustus for the purpose of supplying the fleet with fresh water, is situate in the neighbourhood of Baiae; it is called Piscina. This giant structure contains several large chambers, their roofs supported by numerous columns. To view this reservoir we are compelled to descend a flight of steps. Not far from the before-mentioned building we come upon the "Cento Camarelle," a prison consisting of a multitude of small cells. On our way back we visited Solfatara, the celebrated crater plain, about 1000 feet in length by 800 in breadth, skirted by hills. Its volcanic power is not yet wholly extinct; in several places brimstone-fumes (whence the plain derives its name,) are still seen rising into the air, which they impregnate with a most noxious odour. On striking the ground with a stick a sound is produced, from which we can judge that the whole space beneath us is hollow. This excursion is a very disagreeable one; we are continually marching across a mere crust of earth, which may give way any moment. I found here a manufactory of brimstone and alum. A little church belonging to the Capuchins, where we are shewn a stone on which St. Januarius was decapitated after the bears had refused to tear him to pieces, stands on a hill near the Solfatara. Towards evening we reached the "Dog's Grotto." A huntsman from the royal preserve Astroni accompanied us, and fetched the man who keeps the keys of the grotto. This functionary soon appeared with a couple of dogs, to furnish us with a practical illustration of the convulsions caused by the foul air of the cavern. But I declined the experiment, and contented myself with viewing the grotto. It is of small extent, about eight or ten feet long, not more than five in breadth, and six or eight high. I entered the cave, and so long as I remained erect felt no inconvenience. So soon as I bent towards the ground, however, and the lower stratum of air blew upon my face, I experienced a most horrible choking sensation. After we had satisfied our curiosity the huntsman led us to the neighbouring hunting-lodge, and to a little lake where a number of ducks are fattened. This man spoke of another and a much more remarkable grotto, of which he possessed the keys, and which he should have great pleasure in shewing us. Though twilight was rapidly approaching we determined to go, as the place was not far off. The man opened the door, and invited us to enter the cavern, advising us at the same time to bend down open-mouthed, as we had done in the Dog's Grotto, and at the same time to fan the air upwards with our hands, that we might the better inhale it,--a proceeding which he asserted to be peculiarly good for the digestive organs. His eloquence was so powerful, that we could not help suspecting the man; and it struck us as very strange that he was so particularly anxious we should enter the cavern together. This, therefore, we refused to do; and Herr Brettschneider remained outside with our guide, while I entered alone and did as he had directed. Though the lower stratum of air in the Dog's Grotto had been highly mephitic, the atmosphere here was more stifling still. I rushed forth with the speed of lightning; and now we clearly saw through the fellow's intention. If Herr Brettschneider and myself had entered together, he would undoubtedly have shut the door, and we should have been stifled in a few moments. We did not allow him to notice our suspicions, but merely said that we could not spend any more time here to-day on account of the lateness of the hour. Our worthy friend accompanied us through a wild and gloomy region, with his gun on his shoulder; and I was not a little afraid of him, for he kept talking about his honesty and the good intentions he had towards us. We kept, however, close beside him, and watched him narrowly, without betraying any symptom of apprehension; and at length, to our great relief, we gained the open road. The royal villa of Portici lies about four "miglia" from Naples, and we made an excursion thither by railway. Both the palace and the gardens are handsome, and of considerable size. Thence we proceeded to Resina. Portici and Resina are so closely connected together by villas and houses, that a stranger would take them for one place. Beneath Resina lies Herculaneum, a city destroyed seventy-nine years after the birth of our Saviour. In the year 1689 a marquis caused a well to be dug in his garden, when, at a depth of sixty-five feet, the labourers came upon fragments of marble with divers inscriptions. It was not until 1720 that systematic excavations were made. Even then great caution was necessary, as Resina is unfortunately built upon Herculaneum, and the safety of the houses became endangered. At Resina we procured torches and a guide, and descended to view the subterranean city. We saw the theatre, a number of houses, several temples, and the forum. Some fine frescoes are still to be distinguished on the walls of the apartments. The floors are covered with mosaic; but still this place does not offer nearly so many objects of interest as another which was overwhelmed at the same time--Pompeii. Pompeii is without doubt the most remarkable city of its kind that exists. A great portion of the town is surrounded by walls, and entire rows of houses, several temples, the theatre, the forum, in short a vast number of buildings, streets, and squares lay open before us. The more I wandered through the streets and open places, the more I involuntarily wondered not to find the inhabitants and labourers employed in repairing the houses; I could hardly realise the idea that so many beautiful houses and well preserved apartments should be untenanted. The deserted aspect of this town had a very melancholy effect in my eyes. Though a great portion of the town has already been dug out, only three hundred skeletons have been found,--a proof that the greater portion of the inhabitants effected their escape. In many houses I found splendid tesselated pavements, representing flowers, wreaths, animals, and arabesques; even the halls and courtyards were decorated with a larger kind of mosaic work. The walls of the rooms are plastered over with a description of firm polished enamel, frequently looking like marble, and covered with beautiful frescoes. In Sallust's house a whole row of wine jugs still stands in the cellar. In the houses the division of the rooms, and the purposes to which the different apartments were devoted, can still be distinctly traced. In general they are very small, and the windows seldom look out upon the street. Deep ruts of carriages can be seen in the streets. All the treasures of art which could be removed, such as statues, pictures, etc., were carried off to Naples, and placed in the museum there. VESUVIUS. In the agreeable society of Herr M. and Madame Brettschneider, I rode away from Resina at eleven in the forenoon. A pleasant road, winding among vineyards, brought us in an hour's time to the neighbourhood of the great lava-field, Torre del Greco. It is a fearful sight to behold these grand mounds of lava towering in the most various forms around us. All traces of vegetation have vanished; far and wide we can descry nothing but hardened masses, which once rushed in molten streams down the mountain. A capitally- constructed road leads us, without the slightest fatigue, through the midst of this scene of devastation to the usual resting-place of travellers, the "Hermitage." At this dwelling we made halt, ascended to the upper story, and called for a bottle of Lacrimae Christi. The view here, and at several other points of our ascent, is most charming. The hermit seems, however, to lead any thing but a solitary life, for a day seldom passes on which strangers do not call in to claim his attention in proportion as they run up a score. The clerical gentleman is, in fact, no more and no less than a very common innkeeper, and partakes of the goodly obesity frequently noticed among persons of his class. We stayed three quarters of an hour in the domicile of this hermit-host, and afterwards rode on towards the heights, along a beautiful road among fields of lava. In half an hour's time, however, we were completely shut in by lava-fields, and here the beaten track ended. We now dismounted, and continued our ascent on foot. It is difficult for one who has not seen it to picture to himself the scene that lay around us. Devastation every where; lava covering the whole region in heaps upon heaps, fantastically piled one on the other. Here a huge isolated mound rises, seemingly cut off on all sides from the lava around; there we see how a mighty stream once rushed down the mountain-side, and cooled gradually into stone. Immense chasms are filled with lava masses, which have lain here for many years cold and motionless, and will probably remain for as many more, for their fury has spent itself. The lava is of different colours, according as it has been exposed to the atmosphere for a longer or a shorter period. The oldest lava has the hue of granite, and almost its hardness, for which reasons it is largely used for building houses and paving streets. From the place where we left our donkeys we had to climb upwards for nearly an hour over the lava before reaching the crater. The ascent is somewhat fatiguing, as we are obliged to be very careful at every step to avoid entangling our feet among the blocks of lava; still the difficulty is not nearly so great as people make out. It is merely necessary to wear good thick boots, and then all goes extremely well. The higher we mount, the more numerous do the fissures become from which smoke bursts forth. In one of these clefts we placed some eggs, which were completely boiled in four minutes' time. Near these places the ground is so hot that we could not have stood still for many minutes; still we did not get burnt feet or any thing of the kind. On reaching the crater we found ourselves enveloped in so thick a fog that we could not see ten paces in advance. There was nothing for it but to sit down and wait patiently until the sun could penetrate the mist and spread light and cheerfulness among us. Then we descended into the crater, and approached as closely as possible to the place from which the smoky column whirls into the air. The road was a gloomy one, for we were shut in as in a bowl, and could discern around us nothing but mountains of lava, while before us rose the huge smoky column, threatening each moment to shroud us in darkness as the wind blew it in clouds in our direction. When the ground was struck with a stick, it gave forth a hollow rumbling sound like at Solfatara. In the neighbourhood of the column of smoke we could see nothing more than at the edge from which we had climbed downwards--a peculiar picture of unparalleled devastation. The circumference of the crater seems not to have changed since the visit of Herr Lewald, who a few years ago estimated its dimensions at 5000 feet. After once more mounting to the brim, we walked round a great part of the edge of the basin. At the particular desire of Herr M., who was well acquainted with all the remarkable points about the volcano, our guide now led the way to the so-called "hell," a little crater which formed itself it in the year 1834. To reach it we had to climb about over fields of lava for half an hour. The aspect of this hell did not strike me as particularly grand. An uneven wall of lava suddenly rose fifteen paces in advance of us, with whole strata of pure sulphur and other beautifully-coloured substances depending from its projecting angles. One of these substances was of a snowy-white colour, light, and very porous. I took a piece with me, but the next day on proceeding to pack it carefully, I found that above half had melted and become quite soft and damp, so that I was compelled to throw the whole away. The same thing happened to a mass of a red colour that I had brought away with me, and which had a beautiful effect, like glowing lava, clinging to the fissures and sides of the rocks. We held pieces of paper to the fissures in this wall, and they immediately became ignited. Herr M. then threw in a cigar, which also burst into a flame. The heat proceeding from these clefts was so great, that we could not bear to hold our hands there for an instant. At one place, near a fissure, we laid our ears to the ground, and could hear a rushing bubbling sound as though water was boiling beneath us. There was really much to see in this hell, without the discomfort of being enveloped in the offensive sulphurous smoke of the chief crater. After staying for several hours in and about the crater we left it, and returned by the steep way over the cone of cinders. The descent here is almost perpendicular, and we could hardly escape with whole skins if it were not for the fact that we sink ankle-deep into sand and cinders at every step. To avoid falling, it is requisite to bend the body backwards and step upon the heel. By observing this precaution, the worst that can happen to one is to sit down involuntarily once or twice, without danger to life or limb. In twelve minutes we had reached the spot where our donkeys stood. We reached Resina during the darkness of night, having spent eight hours in our excursion. My last trip was to the Castle of Caserta, distant sixteen miglia from Naples, in the direction of Capua. It is considered one of the finest pleasure-palaces in Europe, and I was exceedingly pleased with its appearance. The building is of a square form, with a portico 507 feet long, supported by ninety-eight columns of the finest marble. The staircase and halls in the upper story alone must have cost enormous sums, as well as the chapel on the first floor, which is very rich and gorgeous. The saloons and apartments are decorated in a peculiarly splendid manner with a multiplicity of frescoes, oil-paintings, sculptures, gildings, costly silk-hangings, marbles, etc. A pretty little theatre, with well-painted scenery, is to be found in the palace. The garden is extensive, particularly as regards length. A hill, from which a considerable stream rushes foaming over artificial rockwork into the deeper recesses of the garden, rises at its extremity. Scarcely has this river sunk to rest, flowing slowly and majestically through a bed formed of large square stones, before it is compelled to form another cascade, and another, and one more, until it almost reaches the castle, near which a large basin has been constructed, from whence the water is led into the town. Seen from the portico, these waterfalls have a lovely appearance. From Caserta we drove ten miles farther on to the celebrated aqueduct which supplies the whole of Naples with water. It is truly a marvellous work. Over three stupendous arched ways, one above the other, the necessary quantity of water flows into the city. This was my last excursion; on the following day, the 7th of November, at three in the morning, I left Naples. Apart from the delightful reminiscences of lovely natural scenes, I shall always think with pleasure on my sojourn in Naples in connexion with Herr Brettschneider and his lady. I was a complete stranger to them when I delivered my note of introduction, and yet they at once welcomed me as kindly and heartily as though I had belonged to their family. How many hours, and even days, did they not devote to me, to accompany me sometimes to one place, sometimes to another; how eagerly did they seek to shew me all the riches of nature and art displayed in this favoured city! I was truly proud and delighted at having found such friends; and once more do I offer them my sincere thanks. CHAPTER XX. Caserta--Costume of the peasants--Rome--Piazza del Popolo--Dogana-- St. Peter's--Palaces--Borghese, Barberini, Colonna, etc.--Churches-- Ancient Rome--The Colliseum--Departure for Florence--Bad weather-- Picturesque scenery--Siena--Florence--Cathedral and palaces-- Departure from Florence--Bologna--Ferrara--Conclusion. November 7th. I travelled by the mail-carriage. By seven in the morning we were at Caserta, and an hour later at Capua, a pretty bustling town on the banks of a river. Our road was most picturesque; we drove among vineyards and gardens through the midst of a lovely plain. On the right were mountains, increasing in number as we proceeded, and imparting a rich variety to the landscape. At noon we halted before a lovely inn. From this point the country increases in beauty at every step. The heights are strikingly fertile, and in the valley an excellent road winds amid pleasant gardens. The mountains frequently seem to approach as though about to form an impenetrable pass; while ruins crown the summits of the rocks, and give a romantic appearance to the whole. At about three o'clock we reached the little town of Jeromania, lying in the midst of vegetable- gardens. Above this town the handsome convent of Monte Cassino stands on a rock, and in its neighbourhood we notice the ruins of an amphitheatre. To-day the weather was not in the least Italian, being, on the contrary, gloomy and rough, as we generally find it in Austria at the same season of the year. Yesterday it was so cold at Naples that Mount Vesuvius was covered with snow during several hours. The dress of the peasants in these regions is of a more national character than I had yet found it. The women wear short and scanty petticoats of blue or red cloth, tight-fitting bodices, and gaily- striped aprons. Their head-dress consists of a white handkerchief, with a second above it folded in a square form. The men look like robbers; with their long dark-blue or brown cloaks, in which they wrap themselves so closely that it is difficult to get a glimpse of their faces, and their steeple-crowned black hats, they quite resemble the pictures of the bandits in the Abruzzi. They glide about in so spectral a manner, and eye travellers with such a sinister look, that I almost became uncomfortable. From Jeromania we had still a few miles to travel until we entered the Roman territory near Ceprano. In Naples, and in fact throughout the whole of Italy, the passports are continually called for,--a great annoyance to the traveller. In the course of to-day my passport was "vise" five times, making once in every little town through which we had passed. It was our fortune at Ceprano to lodge with a very cheating host. In the evening, when I inquired the price of a bedroom and breakfast, they told me a bed would cost two pauls, and breakfast half a paul; but when I came to pay, the host asked three pauls for my bed-room, and another for a cup of the worst coffee I have ever drunk; and the whole company was subjected to the same extortion. We expostulated and complained, but were at length compelled to comply with the demand. November 8th. The landscape remains the same, but the appearance of the towns and villages is not nearly so neat and pretty as in the Neapolitan domain. The costume of the peasants is like that worn by the people whom we met yesterday, excepting that the women have a stiff stomacher, fastened with a red lace, instead of the spencer. The dress of the men consists of short knee-breeches, brown stockings, heavy shoes, and a jacket of some dark colour. Some wear, in addition to this, a red waistcoat, and a green sash round the waist. All wear the conical hat. In cold weather the dark bandit's cloak is also seen. ROME. As we approach Rome the country becomes more and more barren; the mountains recede, and the extended plains have a desert, uncultivated look. Towns and villages become so thinly scattered, that it seems as though the whole region were depopulated. The road is rather narrow, and as the country is in many places exceedingly marshy, a great portion of it has been paved. For many miles before we enter Rome we do not pass a single town or village. At length, some three hours before we reach the city, the dome of St. Peter's is seen looming in the distance; one church after another appears, and at length the whole city lies spread before us. Many ruins of aqueducts and buildings of every kind shewed at every step what treasures of the past here awaited us. I was particularly pleased with the old town-gate Lateran, by which we entered. It was already quite dark when we reached the Dogana. I at once betook myself to my room and retired to rest. I remained a fortnight at Rome, and walked about the streets from morning till night. I visited St. Peter's almost every day, and went to the Vatican several times. All the squares in Rome (and there are a great many) are decorated with fountains, and still more frequently with obelisks. The finest is the Piazza del Popolo. To the right rises the terrace-hill Picino, rich in pillars, statues, fountains, and other ornaments,--a favourite walk of the citizens. On this hill, which is arranged after the manner of a beautiful garden, we have a splendid view. The city of Rome here appears to much greater advantage than when we approach it from the direction of Naples. We can see the whole town at one glance, with the yellow Tiber flowing through the midst, and a vast plain all around. The background is closed by beautiful mountain-ranges, with villas, little towns, and cottages on the declivities. But I missed one feature, to which I had become so accustomed that the most beautiful view appeared incomplete without it--the sea. To make up for this drawback, we here encounter wherever we walk such a number of ruins, that we soon become forgetful of all around us, and live only in the past. The Piazza del Popolo forms the termination of the three principal streets in Rome; on the largest and finest of these, the Corso, many palaces are to be seen. The splendid post-office, of white marble, rises on the Colonna square. Two clocks are erected on this building; one with our dial, one with the Italian. At night both are illuminated,--a very useful as well as an ornamental arrangement. The ancient column of Antoninus also stands in this square. The facade of the Dogana boasts some pillars from the temple of Antonius Pius. The objects I have just enumerated struck me particularly as I wended my way to St. Peter's. I cannot describe how deeply I was impressed by the sight of this colossal structure. I need only state the fact, that on the first day I entered the cathedral at nine in the morning, and did not emerge from its gates until three in the afternoon. I sat down before the pictures in mosaic, underneath the huge dome and the canopy; then I stood before the statues and monuments, and could only gaze in wonder at every thing. The expense of building and decorating this church is said to have amounted to 45,852,000 dollars. It occupies the site of Nero's circus. Two arcades, with four rows of pillars and ninety-six statues, surround the square leading to the church. The facade of St. Peter's is decorated with Corinthian pillars, and on its parapet stand statues fifty-two feet in height. The entrance is so crowded with statues, carved work, and gilding, that several hours may be spent in examining its wonders. The traveller's attention is particularly attracted by the gigantic gates of bronze. I cannot adequately describe the splendour of the interior, nor have I seen any thing with which I could compare it. The most beautiful mosaics, monuments, statues, carvings in bronze, gilded ornaments, in short every thing that art can produce, are here to be found in the highest perfection. Oil-paintings alone are excluded. Every thing here is in mosaic; even the cupola displays mosaic work instead of the usual fresco-paintings. Immense statues of white marble occupy the niches. Beneath the cupola, the finest portion of the building, stands the great altar, at which none but the Pope may read mass. Over this altar extends a giant canopy of bronze, with spiral pillars richly decorated with arabesques. The weight of metal used in its construction was 186,392 pounds, and the cost of the gold for gilding was 40,000 dollars; the entire canopy is worth above 150,000 dollars. The cupola was executed by Michael Angelo; it rests on four massive pillars, each of them furnished with a balcony. In the interior of these pillars chapels are constructed, where the chief relics are kept, and only displayed to the people from the balcony at particular times. I was in the church at the time when the handkerchief which wiped the drops of agony from our Lord's brow, and a piece of the true cross, were shewn. The pulpit stands in a very elevated position, and was executed in bronze by Bernini; 219,161 pounds of metal, and 172,000 dollars, were spent upon its construction. In the interior is concealed the wooden pulpit from which St. Peter preached; and immediately beside this we find a pillar of white marble, said to have belonged to Solomon's temple at Jerusalem. The lions on the monument of Clement XIII., by Canova, are considered the finest that were ever sculptured. I was fortunate enough to penetrate into the catacombs of St. Peter's, a favour which women rarely obtain, and which I only owed to my having been a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These catacombs consist of handsome passages and pillars of masonry, which do not, however, exceed eight or nine feet in height. A number of sarcophagi, containing the remains of emperors and popes, are here deposited. The roof of St. Peter's covers an immense area, and is divided into a number of cupolas, chambers, and buildings. A fountain of running water is even found here. From this roof we have a splendid view as far as the sea and the Apennines; we can descry the entire Vatican, which adjoins the church, as well as the Pope's gardens. I ascended to the ball in the great cupola, where there is nothing to be seen, as there is not the slightest opening, much less a window, left in it. Nothing is to be gained by mounting into this dark narrow receptacle but the glory of being able to say, "I have been there!" It is far more interesting to look down from the windows and galleries of the great cupola into the body of the church itself; for then we can estimate the grandeur of the colossal building, and the people who walk about beneath appear like dwarfs. Two noble fountains deck the square in front of St. Peter's, and in the midst towers a magnificent obelisk from Heliopolis, said to weigh 992,789 pounds. Near this obelisk are two slabs, by standing on either of which we can see all the rows of columns melted as it were into one. My journey to Jerusalem also obtained for me an audience of the Pope. His Holiness received me in a great hall adjoining the Sixtine Chapel. Considering his great age of seventy-eight years, the Pope has still a noble presence and most amiable manners. He asked me some questions, gave me his blessing, and permitted me at parting to kiss the embroidered slipper. My second walk was to the Vatican. Here I saw the immense halls of Raphael, the staircases of Bramante and Bernini, and the Sixtine Chapel, containing Michael Angelo's masterpieces, the world-renowned frescoes. The immense wall behind the high altar represents the last judgment, while the ceilings are covered with prophets and sybils. The picture-gallery contains many works of the great masters, as does also the gallery of vases and candelabra. The Biga chamber. The biga is an antique carriage of white marble, drawn by two horses. In the gallery of statues the figure representing Nero as Apollo playing on the lyre is the finest. In the gallery of busts those of Menelaus and Jupiter pre-eminently attract attention. The name of the Laocoon cabinet indicates the masterpiece it contains, as also the cabinet of the Apollo Belvidere. The latter statue was found in Nero's baths at Porto d'Anzio. The celebrated torso of the Belvidere, a fragment of Greek art, which Michael partly used as his model, is placed in the square vestibule. Never was flesh so pliably counterfeited in stone as in this masterpiece. A long gallery contains a series of tapestries, the designs for which were drawn by Raphael. The Vatican contains ten thousand rooms, twenty large halls, eight large and about two hundred small staircases. The Quirinal palace, the summer residence of the Pope, lies on the hill of the same name (Monte Cavallo), which is quite covered with villas and beautiful houses, on account of the salubrity of the air. I visited most of the private palaces and picture-galleries. The principal are, the Colonna palace, on the Quirinal hill; and the Barberini palace, where we find a portrait of Raphael's mistress, Fornarina, painted by himself, and an original picture of Beatrice Cenci by Guidosteri. The finest of all the Roman palaces is that of Borghese; from its form, which resembles a piano, this building has obtained the name of "il Cembalo di Borghese." The gallery contains sixteen hundred paintings, most of them masterpieces by celebrated artists. The Farnese palace is remarkable for its architecture, and the Stoppani for its architect, Raphael. Besides these there are many other palaces. I saw but few villas, for the weather was generally bad, and it rained almost every day. I visited the Villa Borghese on a Sunday, when there is a great bustle here; for a stream of people on foot, on horseback, and in carriages, sets in towards its beautiful park, situate just beyond the Piazza del Popolo, in the same way that the crowds flock to our beloved "Prater" on a fine day in spring. I also saw the Villa Medicis and the Villa Pamfili. The latter boasts a very extensive park. I took care to visit most of the churches. My plan was to go out early in the morning, and to inspect several churches until about eleven o'clock, when it was time to repair to the galleries. When I went to the principal churches,--for instance, those of St. John of Lateran, St. Paul, St. Maria Maggiore, St. Lawrence, and St. Sebastian,--I was always accompanied by a guide specially appointed to conduct strangers to the churches. I could fill volumes with the description of the riches and magnificence they display. The church of St. John of Lateran possesses the wooden altar at which St. Peter is said to have read mass, the wooden table at which Jesus sat to eat the last supper, and the heads of the disciples Peter and Paul. Near this church, in a building specially constructed for it, is the Scala Santa (holy staircase), which was brought from Jerusalem and deposited here. This is a flight of twenty-eight steps of white marble, covered with boards, which no one is allowed to ascend or descend in the regular way, every man being required to shuffle up and down on his knees. Near this holy stair a common one is built, which it is lawful to ascend in the regular way. The basilica of St. Paul lies beyond the gate of the same name, in a very insalubrious neighbourhood. It is only just rebuilt, after having been destroyed by fire. The basilica Maria Maggiore, in which is deposited the "holy gate," has the highest belfry in Rome, and above its portico we see a beautiful chamber where the new Pope stands to dispense the first blessing among the people. In the chapel of the Crucifix five pieces of the wood of the Saviour's manger are preserved in a silver urn. St. Lorenzo, a mile from the town, is a very plain-looking edifice. Here we find the Campo Santo, or cemetery. The graves are covered with large blocks of stone. St. Bessoriana is also called the church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, from the fact that a piece of the cross is preserved here, besides the letters I.N.R.I., some thorns, and a nail. St. Sebastian in the suburbs, one of the most ancient Roman churches, is built over the great catacombs, in which 174,000 Christians were buried. The catacombs are some stories deep, and extend over a large area. All the above-named basilicas are so empty, and stand on such lonely spots, that I was almost afraid to visit them alone. The handsome church of Sta. Maria in Trastavare contrasts strangely with the quarter of the town in which it lies. This part of Rome is inhabited by people calling themselves descendants of the ancient Trojans. Sta. Maria ad Martyres, or the Rotunda, once the Pantheon of Agrippa, is in better preservation than any other monument of ancient Rome. The interior is almost in its pristine condition; it contains no less than fifteen altars. In this church Raphael is buried. The Rotunda has no windows, but receives air and light through a circular opening in the cupola. The best view of ancient Rome is to be obtained from the tower of the Senate-house. From this place we see stretched out beneath us, Mount Palatine, the site of ancient Rome; the Capitol, in the midst of the city; the Quirinal hill (Monte Cavallo), with the summer residence of the Pope; the Esquiline mount, the loftiest of the hills; Mount Aventine; the Vatican; and lastly, Monte Testaccio, consisting entirely of broken pottery which the Romans throw down here. I also paid a visit to the Ponte Publicius, the most ancient bridge in Rome, in the neighbourhood of which Horatius Cocles achieved his heroic action; and the Tullian prison, beneath the church of St. Joseph of Falignani, where Jugurtha was starved to death. The staircase leading up to the building is called "the steps of sighs." The Capitol has unfortunately fallen into decay; we can barely distinguish a few remains of temples and other buildings. Of the graves of the Scipios I could also discover little more than the site; the subterranean passages are nearly all destroyed. The Marsfield is partly covered with buildings, and partly used as a promenade. Cestius' grave is uncommonly well preserved, and a pyramid of large square stones surrounds the sarcophagus. The aqueducts are built of large blocks of stone fastened together without mortar. They are now no longer used, as they have partly fallen into decay, and some of the springs have dried up. The hot baths of Titus are well worthy a visit, though in a ruined condition. Here the celebrated Laocoon group was found. Near these baths is the great reservoir called the "Seven Halls of Titus." One of the greatest and best-preserved buildings of ancient Rome is the amphitheatre of Flavius, or the Colliseum, once the scene of the combats with wild beasts. It was capable of holding 87,000 spectators. Four stories yet remain. This building is seen to the greatest advantage by torchlight. I was fortunate enough to find an opportunity of joining a large party, and we were thus enabled to divide the expense. The triumphal arch of Titus, of white marble, covered with glorious sculptures; the arches of Septimus Severus, that of Janus, and several other antique monuments, are to be seen near the Colliseum. The beautiful bridge of St. Angelo, constructed entirely of square blocks of stone, leads across the Tiber to the castle of the same name, the tomb of Hadrian. The emperor caused this large round building to be erected for his future mausoleum. It is built of immense stone blocks, and now serves as a fortress and state-prison. The temple of Marcus Aurelius is converted into the Dogana. That of Minerva Medica lies in the midst of a vineyard, and is built in the form of a rotunda. The upper part has sunk in. There are twelve obelisks in the different public squares of Rome, all brought from Egypt. I have still to mention the 108 fountains, from which fresh water continually spouts into the air. Foremost among them in size and beauty is the Fontana Trevi. I was prevented by the bad weather from making trips to any distance, but one afternoon I drove to Tivoli. The road leading thither is called the Tiburtinian. After travelling for about six miles we become conscious of a dreadfully offensive sulphurous smell, and soon find that it proceeds from a little river running through the Solfatara. A ride of eighteen Italian miles brought us to the town of Tivoli, lying amidst olive-woods on the declivity of the Apennines, and numbering about 7000 inhabitants. Towards evening I took a short walk in the town, beneath the protection of an umbrella, and was not much pleased. Next morning I left the house early, and proceeded first to the temple of Sybilla, built on a rock opposite to the waterfall. Afterwards I went to view the grotto of Neptune, and that through which the Arno flows, rushing out of the cavern to fall headlong over a ledge of lofty rocks, and form the cascade of Tivoli. The best view of this fall is obtained from the bridge. Besides many pretty minor cascades, I saw a number of ruins; the most remarkable among these was the villa of Mecaenas. November 23d. At six o'clock this morning I commenced my journey to Florence with a Veturino. Almost the whole distance the weather was in the highest degree unfavourable--it was foggy, rainy, and very cold. A journey through Italy during autumn or winter is far from agreeable; for there are generally cold and rain to be encountered, and no warm rooms to be found in the inns, where fires are never kindled until after the guests have arrived. And the fires they light in the grates are, after all, quite inadequate to warm the damp, unaired rooms, and the traveller feels scorched and cold almost at the same moment. The floors are all of stone, but a few straw-mats are sometimes spread beneath the dining-tables. The landscape through which we travelled to-day did not possess many attractions. For about forty miles, as far as Ronciglione, we saw neither town nor village. The aspect of Ronciglione is rather melancholy, though it boasts a broad street and many houses of two stories. But the latter all have a gloomy look, and the town itself appears to be thinly populated. We passed the night here. According to Italian custom, I had made a bargain with the proprietor of our vehicle for the journey, including lodging and board. I was well satisfied, for he strictly kept his contract. But whoever expects more than one meal a day under an arrangement of this sort will find himself grievously mistaken; the traveller who wishes to take any thing in the morning or in the middle of the day must pay out of his own pocket. I found every thing here exceedingly expensive and very bad. November 24th. To-day we passed through some very pretty, though not populous districts. In the afternoon we at length reached two towns,-- namely, Viterbo, with 13,000 inhabitants, lying in a fruitful plain; and Montefiascone, built on a high hill, and backed by lofty mountains, on which a celebrated vine is cultivated. At the foot of the hill, near Montefiascone, lies a small lake, and farther on one of considerable size, the Lago de Balsana, with a little town of the same name, once the capital of the Volsci. An ancient fortress rises in the midst of this town, surrounded by tall and venerable houses as with a wreath. We had now to cross a considerable mountain, an undertaking of some difficulty when we consider how heavily the rain had fallen. By the aid of an extra pair of horses we passed safely over the miserable roads, and took up our quarters for the night in the little village of Lorenzo. We had already reached the domain of the Apennines. November 25th. We had now only a few more hours to travel through the papal dominions. The river Centino forms the boundary between the States of the Church and Tuscany. The greater portion of the region around us gave tokens of its volcanic origin. We saw several grottoes and caverns of broken stone resembling lava, basaltic columns, etc. The Dogana of Tuscany, a handsome building, stands in the neighbourhood of Ponte Centino. The country here wears a wild aspect; as far as the eye can stretch, it rests upon mountains of different elevations. The little town of Radicofani lies on the plateau of a considerable hill, surrounded by rocks and huge blocks of stone. A citadel or ancient fortress towers romantically above the little town, and old towers look down from the summit of many a hill and cliff. The character of the lower mountain-range is exceedingly peculiar; it is split into gaps and fissures in all directions, as though it had but recently emerged from the main. For many hours we almost rode through a flood. The water streamed down the streets, and the wind howled round our carriage with such violence that we seriously anticipated being blown over. Luckily the streets in the Tuscan are better than those in the Roman territory, and the rivers are crossed by firm stone bridges. November 26th. To-day our poor horses had a hard time of it. Up hill and down hill, and past yawning chasms, our way lay for a long time through a desert and barren district, until, at a little distance from the village of Buonconvento, the scene suddenly changed, and a widely- extended, hilly country, with beautiful plains, the lovely town of Siena, numerous villages great and small, with homesteads and handsome farms, and solitary churches built on hills, lay spread before us. Every thing shewed traces of cultivation and opulence. Most of the women and girls we met were employed in plaiting straw. Here all wear straw hats--men, women, and children. At five in the evening we at length reached SIENA. Our poor horses were so exhausted by the bad roads of the Apennines, that the driver requested leave to make a day's halt here. This interruption to our journey was far from being unwelcome to me, for Siena is well worthy to be explored. November 27th. The town numbers 16,000 inhabitants, and is divided almost into two halves by a long handsome street. The remaining streets are small, irregular, and dirty. The Piazza del Campo is very large, and derives a certain splendour of appearance from some palaces built in the gothic style. In the midst stands a granite pillar, bearing a representation in bronze of Romulus and Remus suckled by the she- wolf. I saw several other pillars of equal beauty in different parts of the town, while in Rome, where they would certainly have been more appropriate, I did not find a single one. All the houses in the streets of Siena have a gloomy appearance; many of them are built like castles, of great square blocks of stone, and furnished with loopholes. The finest building is undoubtedly the cathedral. Though I came from the "city of churches," the beauty of this edifice struck me so forcibly, that for a long time I stood silently regarding it. It is, in truth, considered one of the handsomest churches in Italy. It stands on a little elevation in the midst of a large square, and is covered outside and inside with white marble. The lofty arches of the windows, supported by columns, have a peculiarly fine effect; and the frescoes in the sacristy are remarkable alike for the correctness of outline and brilliancy of colour. The drawings are said to be by Raphael; and the freshness of colour observed in these frescoes is ascribed to the good qualities of the Siena earth. The mass-books preserved in the sacristy contain some very delicate miniatures on parchment. Some of the wards in the neighbouring hospital are also decorated with beautiful frescoes, which appear to date from the time of Raphael. The grace and beauty of the women of Siena have been extolled by many writers. As to-day was Sunday, I attended high mass for the purpose of meeting some of these graceful beauties. I found that they were present in the usual average, and no more; beauty and grace are no common gifts. In the afternoon I visited the promenade, the Prato di Lizza, where I found but little company. A fine prospect is obtained from the walls of the town. November 28th. The country now becomes very beautiful. The mountains are less high, the valleys widen, and at length hills only appear at intervals, clothed with trees, meadows, and fields. In the Tuscan dominions I noticed many cypresses, a tree I had not seen since my departure from Constantinople and Smyrna. The country seems well populated, and villages frequently appear. At five in the evening we reached FLORENCE, but I did not arrive at Madame Mocalli's hotel until an hour and a half later; for the examination of luggage and passes, and other business of this kind, always occupies a long time. The country round Florence is exceedingly lovely, without being grand. The charming Arno flows through the town: it is crossed by four stone bridges, one of them roofed and lined with booths on either side. Florence contains 8000 houses and 90,000 inhabitants. The exterior of the palaces here is very peculiar. Constructed chiefly of huge blocks of stone, they almost resemble fortresses, and look massive and venerable. The cathedral is said to be the finest church in Christendom; I thought it too simple, particularly the interior. The walls are only whitewashed, and the painted windows render the church extremely dark. I was best pleased with the doors of the sacristy, with the celebrated works of Luca del Robbin, and the richly decorated high altar. The Battisterio, once a temple of Mars, with eight very fine doors of bronze, which Michael Angelo pronounced worthy to be the gates of Paradise, stands beside the cathedral. The other principal churches are:--St. Lorenzo, also with a white interior and grey pillars, containing some fine oil paintings, and the chapel of the Medici, a splendid structure, decorated with costly stones, and monuments of several members of the royal family. St. Croce, a handsome church, full of monuments of eminent men, is also called the Italian Pantheon; the sculptures are beautiful, and the paintings good. The remains of Michael Angelo rest here, and the Buonaparte family possess a vault beneath a side chapel. Another chapel of considerable size contains some exquisite statues of white marble. St. Annunciate is rich in splendid frescoes; those placed round the walls in the courtyard of the church, and surrounded by a glass gallery, are particularly handsome. On the left as we enter we find the costly chapel of our Lady "dell' Annunciata," in which the altar, the immense candelabra, the angels and draperies, in short every thing is of silver. This wealthy church contains in addition some good pictures and a quantity of marble. St. Michele is outwardly beautified by some excellent statues. The interior displays several valuable paintings and an altar of great beauty, beneath a white marble canopy in the Gothic style. St. Spirito contains many sculptures, among which a statue of the Saviour in white marble claims particular attention. All these churches are rather dark from having stained windows. Foremost among the palaces we may reckon the Palais Pitti, built on a little hill. This structure has a noble appearance; constructed entirely of pieces of granite, it seems calculated to last an eternity. Of all the palaces I had seen, this one pleased me most; it would be difficult to find a building in the same style which should surpass it. As a rule, indeed, I particularly admired the Florentine buildings, which seemed to me to possess a much more decided _national_ appearance than the palaces of modern Rome. The picture-gallery of this palace numbers five hundred paintings, most of them masterpieces, among which we find Raphael's Madonna della Sedia. Besides the pictures, each apartment contains gorgeous tables of valuable stone. Behind the palace the Boboli garden rises, somewhat in the form of a terrace. Here I found numerous statues distributed with much taste throughout charming alleys, groves, and open places. From the higher points a splendid view is obtained. The palace degli Ufizzi, on the Arno, has an imposing effect, from its magnificent proportions and peculiar style of architecture. Some of the greatest artistic treasures of the world are united in the twenty halls and cabinets and three immense galleries of this building. The Tribuna contains the Venus de Medicis, found at Tivoli, and executed by Cleomenes, a son of Apollodorus of Athens. Opposite to it stands a statue of Apollino. In the centre of the hall of the artists' portrait-gallery we find the celebrated Medician vase. The cabinet of jewels boasts the largest and finest onyx in existence. The Palazzo Vecchio resembles a fortified castle. The large courtyard, surrounded by lofty arcades, is crowded with paintings and sculptures. A beautiful fountain stands in the midst; and two splendid statues, one representing Hercules and the other David, adorn the entrance. The glorious fountain of Ammanato, drawn by sea-horses and surrounded by Tritons, is not far off. In the Gherardeska palace we find a fresco representing the horrible story of Ugolino. The Palazzo Strozzi should not be left out of the catalogue; it has already stood for 360 years, and looks as though it had been completed but yesterday. In the Speccola we are shewn the human body and its diseases, modelled in wax by the same artist who established a similar cabinet at Vienna (in the Josephinum). In the museum of natural history stuffed animals and their skeletons are preserved. The traveller should not depart without visiting the "workshops for hard stones," where beautiful pictures, table-slabs, etc. are put together of Florentine marble. Splendid works are produced here; I saw flowers and fruits constructed of stone which would not have dishonoured the finest pencil. The enormous table in the palace degli Ufizzi is said to have cost 40,000 ducats. Twenty-five men were employed for twenty years in its construction; it is composed of Florentine mosaic. This table did not strike me particularly; it appeared overloaded with ornament. Of the environs of Florence I only saw the Grand Duke's milk-farm, a pleasant place near the Arno, amid beautiful avenues and meadows. DEPARTURE FROM FLORENCE. December 3d. At seven in the evening I quitted Florence, and proceeded in the mail-carriage to Bologna, distant about eighty miles. When the day broke, we found ourselves on an acclivity commanding a really splendid view. Numerous valleys, extending between low hills, opened before our eyes, the snow-clad Apennines formed the background, and in the far distance shone a gleaming stripe--the Adriatic sea. At five in the evening of December 4th we reached Bologna. This town is of considerable extent, numbers 50,000 inhabitants, and has many fine houses and streets; all of these, however, are dull, with the exception of a few principal streets. Beggars swarm at every corner--an unmistakable token that we are once more in the States of the Church. December 5th. This was a day of rest. I proceeded at once to visit the cathedral, which is rich in frescoes, gilding, and arabesques. A few oil- paintings are also not to be overlooked. In the church of St. Dominic I viewed with most interest the monument of King Enzio. The picture-gallery contains a St. Cecilia, one of the earlier productions of Raphael. A fine fountain, with a figure of Neptune, graces the principal square. In the Palazzo Publico I saw a staircase up which it is possible to ride. The most remarkable edifices at Bologna are the two square leaning towers at the Porta Romagna. One of these towers is five, and the other seven feet out of the perpendicular. Their aspect inspired me with a kind of nervous dread; on standing close to the wall to look up at them it really appeared as though they were toppling down. In themselves these towers are not interesting, being simply constructed of masonry, and not very lofty. The finest spot in Bologna is the Campo Santo, the immense cemetery, with its long covered ways and neat chapels, displaying a number of costly monuments, the works of the first modern sculptors. Three large and pleasant spots near these buildings serve as burial-places for the poorer classes. In one the men are interred, in the second the women, and in the third the children. A hall three miglia in length, resting on 640 columns, leads from this cemetery to a little hill, surmounted by the church of the Madonna di St. Luca, and from thence almost back into the town. The church just mentioned contains a miraculous picture, namely, a true likeness of the Virgin, painted by St. Luke after a vision. The complexion of this picture is much darker than that of the commonest women I have seen in Syria. But faith is every thing, and so I will not doubt the authenticity of the picture. The prospect from the mountains is exceedingly fine. I returned in the evening completely exhausted, and half an hour afterwards was already seated in the post-carriage to pursue my journey to Ferrara. On the whole the weather was unfavourable; it rained frequently, and the roads were mostly very bad, particularly in the domains of the Pope, where we stuck fast four or five times during the night. On one occasion of this kind we were detained more than an hour, until horses and oxen could be collected to drag us onwards. We were twelve hours getting over these fifty-four miles, from six in the evening till the same hour in the morning. December 6th. This morning I awoke at Ferrara, where the carriage was to be changed once more. I availed myself of a few spare hours to view the town, which, on the whole, rather resembles a German than an Italian place. It has fine broad streets, nice houses, and few arched ways in front of them. In the centre of the town stands a strong castle, surrounded by fortifications; this was once the residence of the bishop. At nine o'clock we quitted this pretty town, and reached the Po an hour afterwards. We were ferried across the stream; and now, after a long absence, I once more stood on Austrian ground. We continued our journey through a lovely plain to Rovigo, a place possessing no object of interest. Here we stayed to dine, and afterwards passed the Adige, a stream considerably smaller than the Po. The country between Rovigo and Padua was hidden from us by an impenetrable fog, which prevented our seeing fifty paces in advance. At six o'clock in the evening we reached Padua, our resting-place for the night. Early next morning I hastened onwards, for I had already seen Padua, Venice, Trieste, etc. in the year 1840. I reached my native town safely and in perfect health, and had the happiness of finding that my beloved ones were all well and cheerful. During my journey I had seen much and endured many hardships; I had found very few things as I had imagined them to be. Friends and relations have expressed a wish to read a description of my lonely wanderings. I could not send my diary to each one; so I have dared, upon the representations of my friends, and at the particular request of the publisher of this book, to tell my adventures in a plain unvarnished way. I am no authoress; I have never written anything but letters; and my diary must not, therefore, be judged as a literary production. It is a simple narration, in which I have described every circumstance as it occurred; a collection of notes which I wrote down for private reference, without dreaming that they would ever find their way into the great world. Therefore I would entreat the indulgence of my kind readers; for--I repeat it--nothing can be farther from my thoughts than any idea of thrusting myself forward into the ranks of those gifted women who have received in their cradle the Muses' initiatory kiss. NOTES. {23} A florin is worth about 2s. 1d. {30} TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: "Use of the Reaumur scale was once widespread, but by the late 19th century it had been supplanted by other systems." (Encyc. Brit.) Some conversions to currently-used scales (rounded down) are given here:-- Reaumur Fahrenheit Celsius 16 68 20 18 72 22 20 77 25 22 81 27 24 86 30 26 90 32 28 95 35 30 99 37 32 104 40 34 108 42 36 113 45 38 117 47 40 122 50 43 128 53 {40} They receive a dollar from the landlord for every guest whom they bring to his house. {48} Boats built very slenderly, and which have a great knack of upsetting,--a circumstance which renders it necessary for the occupant to sit like a statue; the slightest movement of the body, or even of the head or arm, draws upon you a reproof from the boatman. {53} A piastre is worth about one and three-quarters pence. {54} About one pound sterling. {71a} A khan is a stone building containing a few perfectly empty rooms, to receive the traveller in the absence of inns, or shelter against the night air and against storm. Generally in these khans a Turk is found, who dispenses coffee without milk to the visitors. {71b} Its height is 9100 feet.--ED. {79} The well-known artist and author.--ED. {85} Smyrna is _one_ of the cities that claim the honour of being the birthplace of Homer.--ED. {101} Cakes or "scones" in Scotland are baked in the same way.--ED. {165} I had cut my hair quite close, because I was seldom sure of having time and opportunity during my long journey to dress and plait it properly. {167} This Emir could not maintain his position on Mount Lebanon, and was summoned to Constantinople. At the time of our visit they were still awaiting his return, though he had been absent more than six months. {236} This is a work of the young Viennese artist, Leander Russ, who visited Egypt in the year 1832. {261} A beshlik is worth five piastres in Turkey, and only four in Egypt. 
14276	----	Proofreading Team ITALIAN JOURNEYS By W.D. Howells 1867 and 1895 PAGE CONTENTS. The Road to Rome from Venice: I. Leaving Venice 9 II. From Padua to Ferrara 10 III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic in Ferrara 14 IV. Through Bologna to Genoa 43 V. Up and Down Genoa 52 VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples 65 VII. Certain Things in Naples 75 VIII. A Day in Pompeii 89 IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum 106 X. Capri and Capriotes 116 XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples 136 XII. Between Rome and Naples 147 XIII. Roman Pearls 151 Forza Maggiore 178 At Padua 196 A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arquà 216 A Visit to the Cimbri 235 Minor Travels: I. Pisa 251 II. The Ferrara Road 259 III. Trieste 264 IV. Bassano 274 V. Possagno, Canova's Birthplace 280 VI. Como 285 Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma 293 Ducal Mantua 321 THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE. I. LEAVING VENICE. We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily, "The moving accident is not my trade," for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking any road to Rome. Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it? II. FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet, and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane. The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed; "you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide--the world is wide!" The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear. Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton. We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup. But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to Ferrara. III. THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA. I. It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The _portier_ at the Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read. The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in them or not. On the other hand, my _portier_, an ex-_valet de place_, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest. One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian: "I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them, that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation." I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's own language, in a clever guide-book called _Il Servitore di Piazza_, which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says, before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the poet's time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our _valet de place_ who knows how to read and write, "visit the prison of Tasso, certain that _in the hospital of St. Anna_ that great man was confined for many years;" and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to his emotions. I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy, credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a cherished dream. II. But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them. It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived, when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge; and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into his heart. The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of Venetian red. III. It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men, could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows. Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle, snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress. However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their midst. IV. I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino, and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated, beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us well as agony. We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues for the four languages,--Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop on the corner from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and ruins. V. The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to the Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous relics treasured there. We found that the dead _literati_ of Ferrara had the place wholly to themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands. The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness, and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in order to see the fragment of the _Furioso_ in Ariosto's hand, and the manuscript copy of the _Gerusalemma_, with the corrections by Tasso. There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a letter of Tasso's, written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be mixed with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that more costly fragment of the _Furioso_, and placed it in my hands, the other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making each traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: "Vittorio Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the many memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be remembered. When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic. As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be left to him. _Parva sed apta mihi_, he has contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear of the building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision. It was probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: "It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his "_Furioso_," subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors. The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly French-windowed. Our _portier_ said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul, who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said: "Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of the noble families of Ferrara." VI. The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolò d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolò, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors; and all that bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral. Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If you could have believed them,--and the poor people told as many lies as they could to make you,--you would believe that nothing had ever happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and comfortable; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four successive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart: that of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat. When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of lattices. Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and my _Servitore di Piazza_ (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which Renée had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were insinuating themselves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renée began to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Huppeville, visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess." We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel; but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a little dinner (_pranzetto_) in that part of the castle. We were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but our _servitore di piazza_ (the unlettered one) was almost moved to _lesa maestà_ with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism the whole morning; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian representative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little dinner. Presence of the Devil! VII. In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions. Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old town; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly abundant in Italy,--men who dig out of archives and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print it, unstudied and unphilosophized. Their books are material, not literature, and it is marvelous how many of them are published. A writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its dead local value. It remains to be seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many literary capitals. What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that book,--and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those familiar notes,--_Amore, dolore, crudele_, and _miele_. Poor little poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great singers? I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of their ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel, they are ready to render any little kindness. The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were dining. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by those brave men. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread, and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none; but as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable. Three officers, who dined with us at the _table d'hôte_ of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It appeared that we were Germans; for one of these officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognized the word _bitter_ in our remarks on the _beccafichi_. As I did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to add that _bitter_ was also an English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one of them admitted; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in Italian. "I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said. "Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not our dialects, together." My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to ask what was the origin of the English colors. "I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans." Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected? I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said. Ah! this was the election day, then. _Cospetto_! At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic relative, as I think, but failed. I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table. There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars, they were smoking--the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once remark, "why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking? It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that they do not always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty _fumatrice_. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged woman. IV. THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. I. We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, where not actually laid under water. On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries: _Ci vuol pazienza_! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the _Capo-Stazione_ advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before his face:-- _The Well-dressed Man_.--Dunque, non si parte più? (No departures, then?) The _Capo-Stazione_ (waving _his_ forefinger in like manner.)--Non si parte più. (Like a mournful echo.) We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence, responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But"--and vanished. It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent, that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile. For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of the Stella d'Oro. There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and mean, though the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch,--a caffè much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed caffè and a breezy,--and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How loud they were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted the newspapers of the caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so innocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never shall. The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house was kept for a show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but quite different from the conventional face of Christ. II. At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a rain it is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellarway; your view of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches; the arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by steamer. It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks, associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story, we had been as well entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money was gone, of having been cheated of so much; and in him we saw that there was at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud Englishman--namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name after a while, as something too precious to be kept from the company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may mention my name, if you like--Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas, conscious of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal, surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels, and routes of travel, and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as possible. We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians, and the exchange of "_La Perseveranza_" of Milan for "_Il Popolo_" of Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and acquaintance. (_En passant_: I know of no journal in the United States whose articles are better than those of the "_Perseveranza_," and it was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of Italy nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped for lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly married,"--which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. "I have a week's leave from my place," he went on, "and this is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city." He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us Americans, who had outgrown distances. "So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh, have you ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent palaces! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun!" and she continued to describe vividly a city of which she had only heard from her husband; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he led her. They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy people not to believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to keep from "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master a language so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be prized first among the virtues. As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any picturesque view is impossible. Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of undeniable splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on. V. UP AND DOWN GENOA. I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind, though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here, after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life of "Frederick the Great." "_Genoa, November 13_.--Breakfast _à la fourchette_ excellently and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps. We leave for Naples at twelve midnight." As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook. The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves-- "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied, And water from the spring." Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our search for the Consul. A former Consul at ----, whom I know, has told me a good many stories about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery; and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consulship at ----, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this effect:-- "There was once a consul at ----, who indicated his office-hours by the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one you're out!'" My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality in ----, where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as in my search for that Consul's house. In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total darkness. Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend,--each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than the other. At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and I spent what little breath I had left--it was dry and hot as the simoom--in blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart, in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth." Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble through its toils. A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all parts of the world,--tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness; blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less affected by strong waters like the rest. What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world, and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked him how he liked the city. Well, he had not been ashore yet. He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was worth seeing. Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he wouldn't go ashore. Why not, now he was here? Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice. And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on that enchanted ground. I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they thought of Genoa. It must have been in the little streets--impassable for horses--that the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness. The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar; and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining surface. We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was-- "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;" the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reëntered Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise. After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned and went down for a stroll through the city. My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured façades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city. It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours! Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy. Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty,--touched by the heavenly harmonies from within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of those who have no will but to mock aspiration. The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest, blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport, and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges,--a classic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise. There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we were to take the steamer for Naples. It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, "_Piove! piove! piove_!"--"It rains! it rains! it rains!"--and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom. I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but, after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of _buonamano_ with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than those he now navigated. On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the deep. We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over and behind all hung the darkness on the heights,--a sable cloud dotted with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses. "Merrily did we drop" down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea. The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why _will_ the ship roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud. In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to himself. VI. BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. I. Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the _Messina_, in whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they added the crime of being commercial travellers,--a class of fellow-men of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool "Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat women with a savage rudeness, to which an American vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers of all nations, and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of producing the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his corner, defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and eat it with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endurance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our steamer: one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and an incredulous grin; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing in the agonies of sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades, lecturing them upon various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away, after soup, deadly pale. II. In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen were the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander's post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian government, but much under its control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that State during its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of this sort. He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to turn out so red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough application. In Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, "_Quando finirà mai questa guerra_?" and I had responded as usual, "_Ah, ci vuol pazienza_!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in silence. Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war to slavery. The cause is not sufficient." I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a war like this." I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting about tariffs. The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:-- "In this world there is but one cause of mischief--the Jesuits." III. The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the happy people who went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply through the waves to be stirred by their restless tumult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large--no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of lengthwise with the boat,--an ingenious arrangement to heighten sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to boots with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged the steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin. I found many of my agonized species already laid out there; and the misery of the three French commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sickness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for having attributed a kind of consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of a young American who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded with amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked him lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which men use at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and failing in this, return more deliberately to the stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and chairs, which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how they found themselves. Arrived again at the point of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low company of a French hat, which, being itself a French book, I suppose it liked. In these travels they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards and were replaced by an immense _tour de force_ on the table, from which the book eloped again,--this time in company with an overcoat; but it seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it stretched itself at full length on the floor, and suffered the book to dance over it, back and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the actions of the book were becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering myself up, bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly asleep. IV. It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were got no further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel, the storm left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a white little town was settled, like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and pleasant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, stood gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and harmlessly, that I think General ---- himself would not have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to attack them. Our port was full of frightened shipping--steamers, brigs, and schooners--of all sizes and nations; and since it was our misfortune that Napoleon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves with looking at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills, instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks. Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward, and the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English engineer (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean steamers) planted a camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read the "Birmingham Express." Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives and families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings during the night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in their divine language, and with that ineffable _tonic_ accent which no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the profanities Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance in Italy:-- "Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with gentle brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. "I broke two basins!" "There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister. "Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and "Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar. "And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in civil dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?" "Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty well, mighty well!" "Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?" "I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy." At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it, though why they should have been I don't know to this day. "I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a serious tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought, "that it might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I might know how it feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our English, he made out to let us know that he had been at New York, and could spik our language, which he proceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms of English speech to which he gave utterance. V. We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters and clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe led her disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven and broken clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far round its bay. VII. CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. I. Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder of things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so quiet and peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and calm sea, and, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps, I could only think of Tennyson's description:-- "And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against the rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came." The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain, whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer to the shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to it. The Neapolitans are good people, (_buona gente_,) and only needed justice to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found this to be true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem to be rather the involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you must be a very timid _signorin_, indeed, if you buy his content with any thing more. I fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which he was the victim, at New York--in which the robbery had none of the neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people in the two countries, there is no comparison that holds in favor of us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel, and the servants of companies are required to be courteous to the public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from such people at home. II. The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other public edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly classic or frantically baroque. You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high, many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age and sex; and there is nothing so full of local color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never enters them; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome peasant--all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by-standers in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume, these _pifferari_, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple, harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood. Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have heard much finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in Venice than I heard in this altercation. The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about as large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good to the uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and sold at the little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god much worshiped during the long Neapolitan summers; and it was the profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that, after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed Garibaldi. The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on perfect terms with every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a, house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good-natured passers seem to think these goats a great nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way for them as if they were there by perfect right, and were no inconvenience. On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which one, after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of Naples, with which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as hard to find there now as the _lazzaroni_, who have gone out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse, distributed, two on each thill, four on the top seats, one at each side, and two behind; but in the Toledo it has given place to much finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions; they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them. This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt, from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers are fierce and long. As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around. III. Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this you have come to see. To reach it, you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a market-garden. In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew abundantly on the roof of the tomb. There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, and, drawing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and remembered tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from his father's farm at Mantua, and banish him to mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne pietose!" I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters, took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto l'altro anno si mostra bella." If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene which it could not spare. IV. There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various ills,--waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the crutches of those cured of lameness; but we were most amused with the waxen effigies of several entire babies hung up about the altar, which the poor souls who had been near losing the originals had brought there in gratitude to the saint. Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting, and one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret. The pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much there which reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy; and all Italian writers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Naples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known how the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly felt than in Italy, where the people were least able to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking through the quarter of the city where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the viceroy; but I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which has overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence of other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the chief saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the statuette of a Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous on one of the tables. V. There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in the grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions of grove, tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who strolled through the beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bourbon time was closed, except for a single day in the year, to all but the nobles; and that on this occasion it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it a condition of their marriage bargains that their husbands should bring them to the Villa Reale on St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every Saturday. I liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made friends in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to overlook even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered through these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants, which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown gamekeeper for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game but the king, under penalty of the galleys. VI. We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three theatres--San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of Venice--on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly very large and imposing. The interior has a _bel colpo d'occhio_, which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the red velvet border of the box which the people see from the pit is not supported in style by the seats within, which are merely covered with red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the splendor of the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was full of people, but the dress of the audience was not so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening dress is not _de rigueur_ at Italian theatres, and people seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of costume. VII. The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all their show of conventionality with little things, and as easy and unconscious as children in their ways. There happened to be a new caffè opened in Naples while we were there, and we had the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people affected by its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however, before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight, would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled. VIII. A DAY IN POMPEII. I. On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters, where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat, reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the sunrise. We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers. Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their exertions. They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed; and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always found. The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas. II. Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I thought. But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction, and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a _valet de place_ of the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top, through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of ashes; those stately _amphoræ_ behind are full of wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat. "This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?" "It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it." You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time, and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we do. (The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all the speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha! my Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.) III. It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest witness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered, through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and man. But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the cotton-field were certain small "Phantoms of delight," with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies; and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave these poor children in return. There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the excavated quarters of the city alone. The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre! For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so blest. For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii. The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts--which must have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow space. Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our "_dolce duca_" gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led us back into Pompeii. IV. The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then the _impluvium_, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the _impluvium_, and, at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the master's grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic, which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped regularly into it. Of course there were many picturesque and fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the Museum in Naples; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found. But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses is in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography which now copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try. I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain; of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty centimes a copy--I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of _Katzenjämmer_ (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts and sciences but one long _Katzenjämmer_! Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos, but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern--threw on expanses of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,--not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence. Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful," as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious. "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes." Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes--still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols." The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming. The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be preserved by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the Government does not take this slight trouble to save them. Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people ("Pansa, and Roman gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and he had left his _placens uxor_ at home alone with the children, and now within this door that _placens uxor_ awaited him! V. You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more. There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another's arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity adorned them. The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her despair. What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death. Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden _buonamano_ is paid. A dog may die many deaths besides choking with butter. We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day, from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of being in Pompeii. At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times while in Naples, and never go again. Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness. IX. A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. I. The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen's boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's wives making nets, while the fishermen's children play and clamber everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell at various booths; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she offers; and equally, of course, murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands, shall proceed to clean out, _more Americano_, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless! II. Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life, it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops, that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared, the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet. III. In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road: "This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House of Argo. This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre, bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence. As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.) But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos. The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and lava bestow! Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary, he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni, signori! ma----." At the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the _partito d'azione_, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace (signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we nevertheless feel that he loves us the same. IV. The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now. There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort of the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol. I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here--where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals all abroad--was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas and alas! V. The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there--as we did not--we could not have suffered more than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see. "Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian. "Signori, this is all." "It is mighty little." "Perdoni, signori! ma----." "Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing." X. CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. I. I have no doubt "Calm Capri waits," where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed, disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste to prove their impermanence. We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture,--winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather, and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange-groves on one hand, and down to the terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of Antonino before, and indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels; but when this corsair offered us his services, there was that guile in his handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart could not resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once. He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff under Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such small craft as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I bargained with him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri. In Italy it is customary for a public carrier when engaged to give his employer as a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is returned with the amount due him, at the end, if the service has been satisfactory; and I demanded of Antonino this _caparra_, as it is called. "What _caparra_?" said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with his forefinger, "this is the best _caparra_," meaning a face as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I took his boat without further parley, declining even to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he exposed to my touch in evidence that they were strong enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number, but they tossed the boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed to the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in. The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised our sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri--an oblong height rising ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way thither there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the bold, picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on one mighty rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below which the receding waves rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a thunderous cataract. Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly upon his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and good policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity became intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then, if you never tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all," answered Antonino compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the lie doesn't go ahead" (_non va avanti_), added this Machiavelli of boatmen; yet I think he was mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and admirable success. All along, he had pretended that we could see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return that day; but as we drew near the island, painful doubts began to trouble him, and he feared the sea would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. "But there will be an old man," he said, with a subtile air of prophecy, "waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one of the Government guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen to-day." And certainly there was the old man on the beach--a short patriarch, with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock--a blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back his head a little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and said, "No; to-day, no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously ashore, and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon the land. He had reason to be contented, for this artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave Capri for the main-land after five o'clock in the evening. When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we contracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit of body; her daughter, a mere child; and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal, the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri, clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets bordered by dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas. On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our patriarch gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I remember that they said most of the land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were their country-houses; though they pointed out one of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English physician who had come to visit Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the island twenty years, having married (said the muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town, from this romance--something like which the muletress seemed to think might well happen concerning herself--we passed lightly to speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German harshness and heaviness: they say _non bosso_ instead of _non posso_, and _monto_ instead of _mondo_, and interchange the _t_ and _d_ a good deal; and they use for father the Latin _pater_, instead of _padre_. But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island's accent was sweet upon her tongue. _I_.--What is your name? _She_.--Caterina, little sir (signorin). _I_.--And how old are you, Caterina? _She_.--Eighteen, little sir. _I_.--And you are betrothed? She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped behind to listen to our discourse, explains,--"He asks if you are in love." _She_.--Ah, no! little sir, not yet. _I_.--No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some good-looking youngster who pleases you--no? _She_.--Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have only the _buonamano_ from hiring these mules, and we must spin and cook. _The Patriarch_.--Don't believe her; she has two lovers. _She._--Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib--he! But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,--such is the guile of the female heart in Capri,--and laughed over the patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern Italians always talk of _polenta._ She was a true daughter of the isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. "Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more _buonamano_. "Have patience with her, sir," said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do not understand certain matters here, poor little things!" As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and to Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for example: formerly travellers paid the guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a ruinous condition. By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord--a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humored peasant--gallantly ran forward and presented the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the ladies with flowers,--yet he equally gave me his benediction when I refused to pay for his politeness. "Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs." The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their places _vis-à-vis_, while the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled away;--snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements, and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule. The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them. These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine poetic contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also, when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy palled upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that terrible letter: "What to write to you, or how to write, I know not; and what not to write at this time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me wore than I daily feel that I suffer if I do know." The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he presently turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse, "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below there that you have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has daughters and friends to dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say, lest he should take on (_pigliarsi_) with me about it: 'Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was the last place in Italy where we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people are improvident in lying, as in every thing else. The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us--why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, "Her husband ought to be here; but this is a _festa_, and he is drinking and gaming in the village," while the woman protested that he was sick at home. There was also a hermit living in great publicity among the ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering comment. [This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profession of anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own confession abandoned his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic habit in the character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for Tiberius, and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff, though I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and fugitives. As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war. The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history. We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the darkness of the village,--dropped here and there with the vivid red of a lamp,--and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp's extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him his property. We thought that something like this might have happened to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him in abusing the Italians--the purpose for which foreigners chiefly visit Italy. II. Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the patriarch had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest weather that had ever been known in that region; but in spite of this prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height, and just large enough to admit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is carried through the mouth of the cavern, and rescued from it in like manner by some receding billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impossible to enter the grot at all; and we waited till nine o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentlemen, who--after assisting his companion to compel the boatmen to justice the night before--had stayed at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it, and we besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he had seen it; that he was glad he _had_ seen it. As to its blueness, Messieurs--yes, it is blue. _C'est i dire_.... The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the different sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English people found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of the former nation, "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, we read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our account of its marvels. On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us. We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, "You had better take these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to complain of you." At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home, we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law. We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch--for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew--when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths--baths of Augustus, says Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, had we been upset and washed against them--and we began to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,--especially of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived, gentlemen!" said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast--sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, however, and the water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint--and I saw the grotto so represented in the windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form: there was the customary clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull and stupid solitude,--a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius's pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories; but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about. We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight there. We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household to present the account,--each one full of visible longing, yet restrained from asking _buonamano_ by a strong sense of previous contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,--in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,--a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fishermen's boats, and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment. Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a prodigious _buonamano_; yet I cannot escape the conviction that he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be bought in America for money. At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,--a man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor's convenience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung himself in. XI. THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me, because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the Italians of the south were making in avenues so long closed to them. I believe I have no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought it a good joke; but I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Naples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography. It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it. The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices of the Evangelical Aid Committee,--composed of members of the English Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President of this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are men who have themselves found out their work and appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was permitted to visit the schools was one of these men,--the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland. He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first, their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them. They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands, to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They were principally people of the lower classes,--laborers, hackmen, fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally among them were parents able to send their children to other schools, yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality--and who can tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy--a maxim that few Italians believe. And here lies the trouble,--in the unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness. The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children under her. The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared. Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young Neapolitans that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with _ophthalmia_; but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves. There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be well up in their studies;--indeed they furnished some recondite information about Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution which are natural to the Italians. Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their original condition! In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked the latter, especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history best." "But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the Italians of the present day,--whatever that meant. But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their studies. We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those wonderful little side streets already mentioned, which are forever tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life--with men quarreling themselves purple over small quantities of fish--with asses braying loud and clear above their discord--with women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires--with children in the agonies of having their hair combed--with degraded poultry and homeless dogs--with fruit-stands and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of lemonade--with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of nonchalant goats--with horses, and grooms currying them--and over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reëntering the stream of the Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were under the immediate superintendence of Mr. Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this: up to a certain point, the Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their zeal flags; they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn, and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four months. They rose up with "_Buon giorno, signori_," as we entered, and could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage has the best influence on them; and one boy was pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being possible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school; when quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened. The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian, with the gentlest face and manner,--one of the most efficient teachers under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered, and one after another read passages to us. There were children of seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and correctness; of course, before coming to school they had not known one letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. He was consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fingers among those who longed to answer some hesitator's question--just as you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and then in Bible history--particularly Joseph's story. They responded in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could be heard he piped out: "_Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni_!" (Because Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction when permitted. In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a sum which they performed in a miraculously short time; and their copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese,--a naturalized Swiss,--who had been a soldier, and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without, however, any perceptible terrorism. The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible: the boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four, with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great, being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the children of the most ignorant and degraded of all the Italians; that they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set about cleansing them morally; and having cleared away as much of the inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the children are constantly examined in it; and the result is at least not superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children are honestly and thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives. Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting them from all interruption and persecution; but after all, the great praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked unostentatiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices, but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed. The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and the result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do. Their discouragements are great. The day's teaching is often undone at home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn; and from the fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to build in treacherous places without foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embarrassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no one can study their operations without feeling that success must attend their efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy. XII. BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay in Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome. The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders; all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he had written. The reader who has received at parting from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his "Ode on the Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim. Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,--which in themselves were bad,--and we took our places almost contentedly. The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna. The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it seemed that they should be priests and Croats! They told us all about the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to doubt at last if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the literary centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car office in Harvard Square. Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls, and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on their heads. Brave black eyes they had, such as love to look and to be looked at; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped. They all wore their beautiful peasant costume,--the square white linen head-dress falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant skirt; and how they contrived to keep themselves so clean at their work, and to look so spectacular in it all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries. Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at Isoletta. He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and motionless during our pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers hung in shreds and points; his long hair grew through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. Nobody could resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk of being left behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held languidly out to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he would stand there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, and then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely given him. But after all, though his future seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a solution of the Neapolitan puzzle. XIII. ROMAN PEARLS. I. The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some affectionate solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of Art from the destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze; and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged by the façade of a hideous Renaissance church; then a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls--mere phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better express a certain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at Verona; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed to impress me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to return to it again and again, and to be more and more affected by it. Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly--especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. I confess that I was glad to get altogether away from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry and ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk, who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he had fought against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turning Protestant. Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we were admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the general quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was perceptibly preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that stood in the centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet through which our wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, so far, as conventual as we had imagined it; but as the gentleman of the party was strongly guarded by female friends, and asked at once to see the Superior, he concluded that there was, perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet old Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it appeared that, the signori were Americani and Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and importance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, the Superior and her assistant looked at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage. Accompanying us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her small friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to the assistant. It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw the neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the kitchen with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory with the smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they were young, and that the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual character of the place was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And when we can get the poor things well married, we are glad to do so." "But how does any one ever see them?" "Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the marriageable girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the street. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he can, and demands to see her. She is called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is arranged. You see it is a very simple affair." And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it. Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgotten what her name was. Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and far below us,--on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,--the Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays. In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother also--an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she said. "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half old (_mezzo-vecchia_). I am done with these things. But for youth, always kept down, something lively is wanted." When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time. II. Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable little states of the Peninsula,--halted every other mile to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,--the present railroad period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could,--musical, picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving, Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is _de rigueur_. After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chapels,--I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which the catacombs were dug. III. Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the altars, two pilgrims,--a man and a woman. The latter was habited in a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a species of spiritual _valet de place_, whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in them. It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith and wonder. I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate. The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents, who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes. IV. In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at by the foreign residents,--who, nevertheless, go out of the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I think this very likely. Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by a _fossé_ of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont Blanc.... V. It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the roof of the church below. The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us. I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression. The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without or within. VI. In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification and surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation. They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's "Aurora." Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed us to the top of the Casino. There they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the spectacle appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow mounted on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before. In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landscape. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public: _The Young Girl_.--I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St. Petuh's! _The Artist_.--O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so mennee powints. I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts, and to approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing at a fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could find. VII. The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor of marble and costly stone--porphyry, malachite, alabaster--and luxury of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got to do almost any thing there for money. However, I do not think a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It was the new burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder the Roman would have felt could he have known into what unnamable richness and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the poor poet, where it was mixed with so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen like Caius Cestius was a leading member of the temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended sacrifice: it would have been but decent; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might have learned with surprise the inner and more fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in our day such a thing is impossible. The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never be done, even though the original stone should also be left there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged this shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and respect. A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals. Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little example of wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned English, namely, why the stone should say "_writ_ on water," and not _written_, he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perchè mi schianti?" VIII. It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little before condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there is great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity any more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue representing life; the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and there is no other particularization of color; a fillet binding the hair may be gilded,--the hem of a robe traced in blue. I, who had just come from seeing the fragments of antique statuary in Naples Museum, tinted in the same way, could not feel that there was any thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure. As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,--a visit of Psyche to the Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological,--and received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with that self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly. IX. One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he treats the themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men ever lived in. Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go and see--if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the Roman fever--the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to go again--that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired. We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna. They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which--fringed and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye--the evening sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes lying down and chewing their cuds,--holding their heads horizontally in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent night had fallen upon the scene. In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the Campagna. X. Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he has ever been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor. The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone, but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination. XI. Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the same boundless and unscrupulous ambition. XII. When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded--the sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of every thing" (_Ci hanno levato tutto_); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation. What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy faces! XIII. Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being, and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not permitted to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, however, he renewed his expressions of desolation at being deprived of their company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden! Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes on, and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer than that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his acquaintance and untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Armenians at Venice, equally beloved of us; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through the crowd of English people crushing one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect and obedience for our Archbishop. The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up together. All talked--several priests as loudly as the rest. But the rudest among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss with a fierce "_Giù, signore, giù_!" Otherwise the guard kept good order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on guard at the door of the Vatican--tall, straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder--and then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minié on his arm. Except for the singing of the Pope's choir--which was angelically sweet, and heavenly far above all praise--the religious ceremonies affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and was received standing by his brother prelates--a grotesque company of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of hate and guile. From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was gentle and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile on it almost degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and his _recitative_, though full, was not smooth. He was all priest when, in the midst of the service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it! FORZA MAGGIORE. I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished of the poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's way, and turns tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are so fond,-- "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Höh'." Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the caffè and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens sat at the principal caffè and drank black coffee. This was lively enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week's news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for Florence or Milan or Turin. Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very beautiful,--built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety of their public appearance in that state. There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it? The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there. From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?" Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the streets,-- "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!" The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu de la Drôme,--the only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the diligence at Civita Vecchia. The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port, where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast, heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace. We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs' worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal _visa_ at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we go? three times, would we go? "Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;" and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor. From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man could to give us a round of applause. We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also there attendant on it,--and so tried to console ourselves. At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica,--a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland, though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with one another's faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road, without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added nothing to our sense of solitude. The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia, within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice it with you,--who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned men at their keels tugged them against the tide. "_S' accommodino, Signori_!" cries the cheerful voice of the conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as before. Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds. The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been spirited away, the driver has vanished. The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of _forza maggiore_ to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore. He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come. Patience and malediction! Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we reach them we find the _coupé_ appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the _forza maggiore_ of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins. What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian period,--a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid,--and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little, that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our company all but hissed him. When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant desperation. Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him to delay,--_ma, in somma_!--the rest was confided to the conductor's eloquent shoulders and eyebrows. Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent, brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into swimming depths. The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of desolation. Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation. It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for getting out. The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy, and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning. Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,-- "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,-- It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down." The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore. Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses. We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could. We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so. * * * * * On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica. We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck, and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours previously; but I suppose it was not _en règle_ to touch it without orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its ultimate ruin: "Disfecemi Maremma." We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the road, and we had suffered as aforementioned. But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our English discourse, asked us,-- "Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage." AT PADUA I. Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers, and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been there?" asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey thither. Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very vivid for all that. I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city. I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality! The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni. Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant? On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it. The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds. But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us. "But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your brougham an hour?" So and so. "Show me the tariff of fares." "There is no tariff." "There is. Show it to me." "It is lost, signor." "I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out." The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee. The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage. From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina. Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence. As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some _soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan. If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P----. It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time,--fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,--men and women deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew--more demoniacal, if possible, than himself--was driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines. II. Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had collected into earthen _amphoræ_ the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality. We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our sepulchral shelter. Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went before. We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin inscriptions. In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists. "This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was very fond." A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I demanded. Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the custodian replied, "_Appunto_." It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine--an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade--which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P----. Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it--found as we saw it--was entire and perfect. In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton--found as we saw it--with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose skeleton had been hanging for ages--as we saw it--head downwards from the ceiling. Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the original food. At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P----, the supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread,--the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the mutilation,--his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away. In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments of torture,--all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,--and then they passed from that place of fear. III. In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of Padua. Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons of the caffè,--somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua,--and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our abbate. Our friend's great passion was the English language, which he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinguished American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always know at least four, in this succession,--Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe's _Capanna di Zio Tom_ is, of course universally read; and my friend had also read _Il Fiore di Maggio_,--"The May-flower." Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians, through a translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's works, and one of the other professors present that evening had made such faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his _brochure_, printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of "The Golden Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the "Evangeline" is now engaged. At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives. "Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you." "We mean those under the Villa P----." "Exactly." There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's voice; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You don't mean that those are _not_ the veritable Ecelino prisons?" "Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory." "But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?" "Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside of the old city walls." "And those tortures and the prisons are all"-- "Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P---- cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons." "But the custodian--how could he lie so?" Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even believed what he said." The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be. A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ. I. We said, during summer days at Venice, when every _campo_ was a furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà." Remembering the ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky. We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually began. The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There was not yet enough of it to stir the "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;" but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch. The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine. Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arquà, and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could not give that attention either to the elegant language of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost. The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins. At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arquà) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed commercially. When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only three miles from Arquà. II. Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness. When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills? I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of--looking, in a word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures. Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant. I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder that one stone of them rests upon another. We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the following effect:-- SE TI AGITA SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA, T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA OVE SPIRÒ LA GRAND' ANIMA, IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI E DI LAURA. Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of Laura." Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took us for _Tedeschi_. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know about two varieties of foreigners--the Englishman and the German. If, therefore, you have not _rosbif_ expressed in every lineament of your countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and maddening tone of the English tweed,--you must resign yourself to be a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, "_Mi no so miga_" (I don't know at all). Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died,--on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to the other,-- "When did Petrarch live here?" "Ah! I don't remember him." "Who was he?" "A poet, signor." Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated--and he a lout in the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had lived there,--a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries,--but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance. A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which, presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below. The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him--the custodian said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down, to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch's house. The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set in lead--like the floors and window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn prattled less eloquently. From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know; but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been "second only to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in the haughty and disdainful manner of cats. In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew. On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both _manu propriâ_. Over and above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of "Pétrarque" when young. Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and "made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering. Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the United Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of the 'America Libera,'" and thus finished that poem? After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book, the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's inkstand of bronze--a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the inside of it himself. As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he came to rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins; wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him--only true, certain, immutable Good." I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:-- "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae; Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce." A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh his "good end" at Arquà), was made for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arquà "any important thing of Petrarch's" that he could; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to "move his bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arquà give any account. The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid. I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place, if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arquà in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making sure of absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins. Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà, I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest of Arquà by the former's courtesy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted to see--no other than Leoni's "Life of Petrarch," to which I have already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà, seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see him then. I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their foreheads the hair was cut short, and their "back hair" was gathered into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins. The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort. In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an urchin's cheek. Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of Arquà. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows:-- Soldi. Chicken 70 Bread 8 Wine 20 -- Total 98 It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it where raised,-- ..."On misty mountain ground, Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"-- but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door. III. Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a surly and humorous _custode_, whose pride in life was that castle and its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around him, demanded: "Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us, "Your driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at Arquà? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would not," said this disdainful _custode_, "go to Arquà if you gave me a lemonade." A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome, broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy, by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make conquest of whatever was curious in the life and traditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called the people of the Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take literary possession of our conquest. From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and turrets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to learn any thing about it. The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the _caffetiere_ at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language, which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian! _Corpo_! At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of Bassano--a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted. At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi, but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and found our friend in waiting; he mounted beside our driver, and we rode up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels ended, and where we were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well give him his title, though at this stage of our progress we did not know into what patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them. The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the departure of our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn-keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our return, held up her baby to wish us _boun viaggio_, and waved us adieu with the infant as with a handkerchief; the chickens and children scattered to right and left before our advance; and with Count Giovanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad rocky valley between the heights, and presently began the ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet; and I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, freshness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley; the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around us; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded height where the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in the hills for such travellers as are belated in their ways, or are overtaken there by storms. The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,--walled in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up with vast monoliths,--and is paved with limestone. It is, of course, merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line of conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer traveller behind me was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but was envious of my beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider; while half-suppressed wails of terror from the second lady in the train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts. Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the other in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less regularly, we made Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought, like a Cornishman, and the contrast between him and the _viso sciolto, pensieri stretti_ expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough. Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza could tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were believed among them; Brick himself held to one that they had first come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in correspondence with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be given to the words:-- _English. Cimbrian. German._ I go, I gehe, Ich gehe. Thou goest, Du gehst, Du gehst. He goes, Ar geht, Er geht. We go, Hamish gehen, Wir gehen. You go, Hamish setender gehnt, Ihr geht. They go, Dandern gehnt, Sie gehen. I went, I bin gegehnt, Ich bin gegangen. Thou wentest, Du bist gegehnt, Du bist gegangen. He went, Der iganget, Er ist gegangen Good day, Uter tag, Guten Tag. Good night, Uter nast, Gute Nacht. How do you do? Bie estater? Wie steht's? How goes it? Bie gehts? Wie geht's? I, I, Ich. Thou, Du, Du. He, she, Di, Er, sie. We, Borandern, Wir. You, Ihrt, Ihr. They, Dandern, Sie. The head, Da kof, Der Kopf. Breast, Petten, Brust (_Italian_ petto) Face, Denne, Gesicht. Arm, Arm, Arm. Foot, Vuss, Fuss. Finger, Vinger, Finger. Hand, Hant, Hand. Tree, Pom, Baum. Hat, Hoit, Hut. God, Got, Gott. Heaven, Debelt, Himmel. Earth, Erda, Erde. Mountain, Perk, Berg. Valley, Tal, Thal. Man, Mann, Mann. Woman, Beip, Weib. Lady, Vrau, Frau. Child, Hint, Kind. Brother, Pruder, Bruder. Father, Vada, Vater. Mother, Muter, Mutter. Sister, Schwester, Schwester, Stone, Stone, Stein. A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as quite foreign to either. There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza. As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of rock. Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,--"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was also pure. We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente. The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent. Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came in. He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us. After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were performed in Cimbrian. I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two,--one a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Wörterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855." Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of _waking_ the dead. "If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their pleasure. The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots. He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life. For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, "_Iddio vi benedica, padre mio_." So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that _permesso_ which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. "Always be contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni. "It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you will not be content with what I give you." "If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass in the world!" And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much. He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, _Un conte che non conta, non conta niente_, yet I confess that it was with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in Valstagna with "_Sior conte, servitor suo_!" I looked narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage as he responded, "_Buona sera, caro_." Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices. MINOR TRAVELS. I. PISA. I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art, its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them. Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus becoming a contribution to statistics. We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo. Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of decay. I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_, that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good world,--_e pur si muove_. The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolò Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled. We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence. "Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, "hear such music as that?" "The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice. The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went on: "Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an hour without ceasing." II. THE FERRARA ROAD. The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman _cameriere_ out of place, who got into the diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who thought it particularly Italian to say "Sì" three times for every assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman _cameriere_. The last was worth all the rest--being a man of vast general information acquired in the course of service with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with "_Sì_!" "_Vabene_!" "_Ecco_!" He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. "St. Peter's, Signori,--have you ever seen it?--is the first church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. _Sì, Signori, la mia seconda patria_." After a pause, "_Va bene_." We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, "Ecco!" Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of living. "Wonderfully well they eat--the English. Four times a day. With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. _Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico_." After a pause, "_Sì_!" "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: '_Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi_.' ('On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice," concludes the cameriere. He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all smile, and the little man very gladly with us. "An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed." At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere? * * * * * As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of Spring. At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city. I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and _buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road. III. TRIESTE. If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter." The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron. Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan provinces,--a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining. It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian Lloyds,--which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste,--and where the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. "In regard to language," says Cantù, "though the country is peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the _employés_ of the civil courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard." And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria. The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince,--the Miramare, where the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:-- "And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored wave below; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow." I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought so many woes. It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different lights--blue lights, yellow lights, green lights--to be seen at different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for the _Fatti Diversi_ of the _Osservatore Triestino_, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a _triste evvenimento_--the driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared. _Was_ this the steamer for Venice? _Sicuro_! All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way. "The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room. He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other state-rooms. They were empty. "Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety. "Precisely," he answered. I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew--it seemed too fearfully probable that he did. I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner--I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle! Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "_Servitor suo_!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold. "This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table. No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return ticket, and would go. Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at expectoration. We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another. Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly, bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was. IV. BASSANO. I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact for himself. Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco. We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another. The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot, let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children. This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitué_ of the caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years. V. POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with, "Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn. It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to some of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L---- had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years. Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about him,--how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the historic Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family was intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier, and first won his notice. Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does resemble Julius Cæsar. The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor,--pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with _scherzi_ in miniature panels representing the jocose classic usualities: Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces. Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian, one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and beautiful "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. The church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes. VI. COMO. My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,--a vision that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I counsel the reader to turn to _I Promessi Sposi_, if he would know how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the descriptive Muse. After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,--and some one mouths that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy--like the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape. The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eight o'clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour. There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,--like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives, peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,--out of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake,--and on the snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at the landing. The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among its virtues. It had an accessible country about it; that is, its woods and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot; and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its compatriots abroad. From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across the lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and purple ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's oils." It was indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there; and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times, and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer blistering in the sun. Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and, with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company on board was such as might be expected. There was a German landscape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him; there were some German ladies; there were the unfailing Americans and the unfailing Englishman; there were some French people; there were Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic, with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech; there were Milanese with their families, out for a holiday,--round-bodied men, with blunt square features, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short, there was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe. Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher on the hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels that hummed through the open windows of the factories on the shore; and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the landing of a stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and the Germans loudly debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest; for the flag was that insolent banner which in 1862 proclaimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant contrast. STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. I. It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio, which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of rich citizens "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he afterwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our stay would have served us so well for a first general impression of Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric founded the great Basilica of the city; and as we stood before the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of virtuous poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture in Vicenza; and we walked through one street of palaces in which Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window at the hotel, we found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from which rose a Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio. They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all their circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls founded the city (as I learn from "The Chronicles of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vicenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and were driven out by the Romans some centuries later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin; after which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and "wrapped her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who "held her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese seventeen years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is "Of kindred that have greatly expiated And greatly wept," and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the imperial interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past errors. To us of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should remain so doggishly faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part in that demonstration against the Austrians which endured from 1859 till 1866. Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza. "Nabucodonosor" was the piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible histories,--the vague, unfigured oriental splendor--the desert--the captive people by the waters of the river of Babylon--the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toiling on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,--at the point when, according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt descends upon the head of the king,"--so but a moment after some new absurdity marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the audience. We then beheld that act of _dimostrazioni_ which I have mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant movement. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave, with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent of offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied consciousness was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of good-natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls--it must be insufferably dull. _Ebbene, pazienza_! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet. A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes. Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing "The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen talking--as they pass along the neighboring corridor--of wine, in dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court, in which there is a stable and--exposed to the weather--a diligence, and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers,--or as if its only guests were centaurs on their travels. From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands and uplifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait statue of the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not to our whole mortal race,--"Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty years old." After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the "Oedipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now empty seats of the theatre,--lord, and lady, and abbé--who affected to be entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes of their enjoyment here! I suppose they have something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so perfect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is--like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the auditorium--Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous thing Palladio's theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets--one in the centre and serving as entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens--present unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet, the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns. II. It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona, which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus, or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona? Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which, unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling. But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money (_mangiava molti soldi_), his sons discontinued the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, "_Qual' opera_!" However, as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him. We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed, but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the elder ruin; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside. I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered to us the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated toward it by operation of well-known natural principles which bring travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its former greatness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us; while her mother caressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment. There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both in a small way. Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets, than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my "Viaggio in Italia," "for the basest uses,"--just as the sacred prison of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under a shed in one corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked like a horse-trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot "to breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world? It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble. Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility. Within the city's walls, what store of art and history! Her market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and caffès; or the grim old feudal towers; or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture, and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints--with the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with absolute literalness--with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed--with its minute windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre and fantastic device--is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, with a breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica. I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan, "of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most illustrious Family Della-Scala," and from these I think it no dereliction to quote _verbatim_. First is the tomb of San Francesco, who was "surnamed the Great by reason of his valor." "With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses the Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful because it stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other columns support the vault that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as large as life." Of "Can Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the "Notices" say: "He spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues.... The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolò Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder (_scala_) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils; and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the "Notices" particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala: "He was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle--wherefore Dante said, _In sulla Scala porta il santo Uccello_." I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for us to sit upon--nay, even placed chairs for us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian race! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then triumphantly took us into the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works they executed in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful _intagli_ of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of the _intagli_, and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible affliction; and we rejoiced for his sake that it should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand; and as the whole was vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive. III. Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and "exquisite coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the church of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the Chief thing to be seen in Parma" at that day. The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the façade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a _guazzetto di rane_. But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci's praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work--every thing so well conceived--so well seen from below--with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century. What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it! This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public for more than two centuries. All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city. The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence. Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod. The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This _Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand spectators; at a later _fête_ it held only ten thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium. DUCAL MANTUA. In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge:-- Manto was she: through many lands she went Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last. Therefore I choose thou be on me intent A little. When from life her father passed, And they of Bacchus' city became slaves, Long time about the world the daughter cast. Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves The feet of Alps that lock in Germany: Benaco called.... And Peschiera in strong harness sits To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques, Where one down-curving shore the other meets. There all the gathered waters outward flow That may not in Benaco's bosom rest, And down through, pastures green a river go. * * * * * As far as to Governo, where, its quest Ended at last, it falls into me Po. But far it has not sought before a plain It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow To be the steaming summer's offense and bane. Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid Saw land in the middle of the sullen main, Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid Of human neighborhood, she made her lair, Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade, And lived, and left her empty body there. Then the sparse people that were scattered near Gathered upon that island, everywhere Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear. They built their city above the witch's grave, And for her sake that first made dwelling there The name of Mantua to their city gave. To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied." But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape. The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without understanding as to price. But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against possibility of change in the political condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position; and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before him. I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city. But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of _mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader? For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here. I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni. Per Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our race from pictorial history-books generally. The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua. This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua, "Which was an image of the mighty world," and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with something like exultation. As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders. But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffès, where there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion. If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering, and sin. Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair. In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle the city. Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that day. When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus. Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them. At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda. Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine. Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will. Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it. An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized bees. After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion. She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution. The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up. Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery. Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League. It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua, Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege. But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the siege and look to his dominion of other cities. After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years, and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of thine own land!" Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders; he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true, tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and Sordello was early called to this nobleman's court, having already given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them. The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir più per questa vile strada ad opere ancor più vili."--"Let this suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler deeds." It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of Sordello's Provençal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose "History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provençal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284. The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom. He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena. Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga. According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770 where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual, believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible, that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was liberated. In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans, who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328. I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic, virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life;--to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul. When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home. In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow, and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God. In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another, each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever upbraided a godless generation for its sins,--in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile's heart, "come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale." It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people by laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces, and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable passion. For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city, which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love. They were liberal--in spending the revenues of the state for the glory of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never understood. The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407; four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708. The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years after his election to the captaincy. Him his son Guido succeeded,--a prince already old at the time of his father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These, indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home, and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him, and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence. In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died. And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola, suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. "I am a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter. "Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by fourteen well-armed cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second." The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444. Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been "vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate, to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course. The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree, it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars, wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a nickname that he never lost. Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the "Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth. The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua. It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground, course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly state and splendid pride. It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the _employé_ (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the _Custode_ by the dignified title to which his presence did so little honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a _si crede_ in attributing to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua. In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings; but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder); and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they stood. After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of his Grace. A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: _Storia di Mantova_.], from which I take it: "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's) first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her, Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him; but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated. Federico departed with six attendants [The _Fioretto delle Cronache_ says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore, wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness. His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house where they all dwelt. "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything, either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he should make search in his territory for a company of seven men, giving the name and description of each. The king caused this search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how the men had been found and in what great misery. The Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the _Fedeli_ of Mantua. "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the greatest love between father and son." The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded of him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief: for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her husband's mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city. Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike, restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of prey. Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service), and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at the head of the league against the French. A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona. This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan) to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs; and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor. This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre. Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V., to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter, Charles's influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in Italy. Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve Cæsars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630. But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione. Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the "Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and there finished his famous book of "The Courtier," and succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal services there,--he procured him to be named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529. The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio began to think out the famous Palazzo del T. This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise. Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died, but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures in all the pictures painted there;--so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immortality. Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of Mantua,--from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs. Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali di Mantova," says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his "gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino." His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè, as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern Mantuans call it Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giulio. I say nothing to control the reader's choice between T and Tè, and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past. It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long, villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held it faithfully till we returned. In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners; and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed, general associations with them, rather than particular recollections of them. One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness. The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints. If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus. There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea of the whole.] Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but is not otherwise interesting. We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is, in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms. Many of the women were young,--though they were of all ages,--and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls. "They are drawing the prettiest," he said, at which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing, and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away. In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler. Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle, the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,--probably from Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renée. The good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors: "He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit, but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination for letters." His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in 1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù, writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the relic. Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death. Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush to give even in Italian. Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed his "Discorso" to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the "Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his "Pastor Fido." When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587; and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told; and maintained as his guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria, Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks, banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the matrons, go in magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride. Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies; and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance. The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure." The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.) Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other boys and girls, and being required to kiss--not one of the little maidens--but her _shadow_ on the wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this. San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate; but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family did everything possible to dissuade him--his father with harshness, and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness--from his vocation. The latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian. From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality of _chronique scandaleuse_, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo; for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her; indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his _mésalliance_ with an inferior, that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children, but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs, and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions commanded by her confessor. So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices. And one Christmas morning _he_ died childless; and three years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of Italian history. Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua. Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married Maria, Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended, and claimed the remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered him of his spoil. The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors. The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the streets. The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and, after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought, of poison. Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II. early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of the Duke's archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daughter's recovery from the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach. Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making them even the poor return of national glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an Italian author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs." "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it; and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid theatre,--the cheerful Duke. But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua,--it was said by poison, but more probably of sin and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua. The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years; after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral--thanks to the Prussian needle-gun. 
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14634	----	Proofreading Team SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY" "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS," ETC SECOND SERIES LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1914 _All rights reserved_ FIRST EDITION (_Smith, Elder & Co._) _October, 1898_ _Reprinted_ _May, 1900_ _Reprinted_ _June, 1902_ _Reprinted_ _November, 1905_ _Reprinted_ _December, 1907_ _Reprinted_ _February, 1914_ _Taken over by John Murray_ _January, 1917_ _Printed in Great Britain at_ THE BALLANTYNE PRESS _by_ SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co. LTD. _Colchester, London & Eton_ CONTENTS PAGE RAVENNA 1 RIMINI 14 MAY IN UMBRIA 32 THE PALACE OF URBINO 50 VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI 88 AUTUMN WANDERINGS 127 PARMA 147 CANOSSA 163 FORNOVO 180 FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI 201 THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE 258 POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY 276 POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE 305 THE 'ORFEO' OF POLIZIANO 345 EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH 365 SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE _RAVENNA_ The Emperor Augustus chose Ravenna for one of his two naval stations, and in course of time a new city arose by the sea-shore, which received the name of Portus Classis. Between this harbour and the mother city a third town sprang up, and was called Cæsarea. Time and neglect, the ravages of war, and the encroaching powers of Nature have destroyed these settlements, and nothing now remains of the three cities but Ravenna. It would seem that in classical times Ravenna stood, like modern Venice, in the centre of a huge lagune, the fresh waters of the Ronco and the Po mixing with the salt waves of the Adriatic round its very walls. The houses of the city were built on piles; canals instead of streets formed the means of communication, and these were always filled with water artificially conducted from the southern estuary of the Po. Round Ravenna extended a vast morass, for the most part under shallow water, but rising at intervals into low islands like the Lido or Murano or Torcello which surround Venice. These islands were celebrated for their fertility: the vines and fig-trees and pomegranates, springing from a fat and fruitful soil, watered with constant moisture, and fostered by a mild sea-wind and liberal sunshine, yielded crops that for luxuriance and quality surpassed the harvests of any orchards on the mainland. All the conditions of life in old Ravenna seem to have resembled those of modern Venice; the people went about in gondolas, and in the early morning barges laden with fresh fruit or meat and vegetables flocked from all quarters to the city of the sea.[1] Water also had to be procured from the neighbouring shore, for, as Martial says, a well at Ravenna was more valuable than a vineyard. Again, between the city and the mainland ran a long low causeway all across the lagune like that on which the trains now glide into Venice. Strange to say, the air of Ravenna was remarkably salubrious: this fact, and the ease of life that prevailed there, and the security afforded by the situation of the town, rendered it a most desirable retreat for the monarchs of Italy during those troublous times in which the empire nodded to its fall. Honorius retired to its lagunes for safety; Odoacer, who dethroned the last Cæsar of the West, succeeded him; and was in turn, supplanted by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Ravenna, as we see it now, recalls the peaceful and half-Roman rule of the great Gothic king. His palace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter Amalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of Belisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels of Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediæval wars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous with marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around them. As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated to such a distance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens were cultivated on the spot where once the galleys of the Cæsars rode at anchor. Groves of pines sprang up along the shore, and in their lofty tops the music of the wind moved like the ghost of waves and breakers plunging upon distant sands. This Pinetum stretches along the shore of the Adriatic for about forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between the great marsh and the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems and velvet crowns of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover an oasis on Arabian sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detach themselves from an inferior forest-growth of juniper and thorn and ash and oak, the tall roofs of the stately firs shooting their breadth of sheltering greenery above the lower and less sturdy brushwood. It is hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful and impressive scene than that presented by these long alleys of imperial pines. They grow so thickly one behind another, that we might compare them to the pipes of a great organ, or the pillars of a Gothic church, or the basaltic columns of the Giant's Causeway. Their tops are evergreen and laden with the heavy cones, from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth. Scores of peasants are quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whose business it is to scale the pines and rob them of their fruit at certain seasons of the year. Afterwards they dry the fir-cones in the sun, until the nuts which they contain fall out. The empty husks are sold for firewood, and the kernels in their stony shells reserved for exportation. You may see the peasants, men, women, and boys, sorting them by millions, drying and sifting them upon the open spaces of the wood, and packing them in sacks to send abroad through Italy. The _pinocchi_ or kernels of the stone-pine are largely used in cookery, and those of Ravenna are prized for their good quality and aromatic flavour. When roasted or pounded, they taste like a softer and more mealy kind of almonds. The task of gathering this harvest is not a little dangerous. Men have to cut notches in the straight shafts, and having climbed, often to the height of eighty feet, to lean upon the branches, and detach the fir-cones with a pole--and this for every tree. Some lives, they say, are yearly lost in the business. As may be imagined, the spaces of this great forest form the haunt of innumerable living creatures. Lizards run about by myriads in the grass. Doves coo among the branches of the pines, and nightingales pour their full-throated music all day and night from thickets of white-thorn and acacia. The air is sweet with aromatic scents: the resin of the pine and juniper, the mayflowers and acacia-blossoms, the violets that spring by thousands in the moss, the wild roses and faint honeysuckles which throw fragrant arms from bough to bough of ash or maple, join to make one most delicious perfume. And though the air upon the neighbouring marsh is poisonous, here it is dry, and spreads a genial health. The sea-wind murmuring through these thickets at nightfall or misty sunrise, conveys no fever to the peasants stretched among their flowers. They watch the red rays of sunset flaming through the columns of the leafy hall, and flaring on its fretted rafters of entangled boughs; they see the stars come out, and Hesper gleam, an eye of brightness, among dewy branches; the moon walks silver-footed on the velvet tree-tops, while they sleep beside the camp-fires; fresh morning wakes them to the sound of birds and scent of thyme and twinkling of dewdrops on the grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, and death have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a few yards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached the charmed precincts of the forest. You may ride or drive for miles along green aisles between the pines in perfect solitude; and yet the creatures of the wood, the sunlight and the birds, the flowers and tall majestic columns at your side, prevent all sense of loneliness or fear. Huge oxen haunt the wilderness--grey creatures, with mild eyes and spreading horns and stealthy tread. Some are patriarchs of the forest, the fathers and the mothers of many generations who have been carried from their sides to serve in ploughs or waggons on the Lombard plain. Others are yearling calves, intractable and ignorant of labour. In order to subdue them to the yoke, it is requisite to take them very early from their native glades, or else they chafe and pine away with weariness. Then there is a sullen canal, which flows through the forest from the marshes to the sea; it is alive with frogs and newts and snakes. You may see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of the flowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers--lithe monsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen. It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil wars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences of the pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse. The charm of its summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when he describes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughs of his terrestrial paradise, he says:-- Non però dal lor esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime Lasciasser d' operare ogni lor arte: Ma con piena letizia l' aure prime, Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie, Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie. With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassy aisles, beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet that lady singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, 'like Proserpine when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring.' There, too, the vision of the griffin and the car, of singing maidens, and of Beatrice descending to the sound of Benedictus and of falling flowers, her flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veil of white, and olive crown, all flashed upon the poet's inner eye, and he remembered how he bowed before her when a boy. There is yet another passage in which it is difficult to believe that Dante had not the pine-forest in his mind. When Virgil and the poet were waiting in anxiety before the gates of Dis, when the Furies on the wall were tearing their breasts and crying, 'Venga Medusa, e si 'l farem di smalto,' suddenly across the hideous river came a sound like that which whirlwinds make among the shattered branches and bruised stems of forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam and spray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flying before the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs,' he says, 'they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight of their foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close to the ground.' The picture of the storm among the trees might well have occurred to Dante's mind beneath the roof of pine-boughs. Nor is there any place in which the simile of the frogs and water-snake attains such dignity and grandeur. I must confess that till I saw the ponds and marshes of Ravenna, I used to fancy that the comparison was somewhat below the greatness of the subject; but there so grave a note of solemnity and desolation is struck, the scale of Nature is so large, and the serpents coiling in and out among the lily leaves and flowers are so much in their right place, that they suggest a scene by no means unworthy of Dante's conception. Nor is Dante the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of 'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades. This story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea, or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the pines begin to rock and surge beneath the stress of labouring winds. Then runs the sudden flash of lightning like a rapier through the boughs, the rain streams hissing down, and the thunder 'breaks like a whole sea overhead.' With the Pinetum the name of Byron will be for ever associated. During his two years' residence in Ravenna he used to haunt its wilderness, riding alone or in the company of friends. The inscription placed above the entrance to the house he occupied alludes to it as one of the objects which principally attracted the poet to the neighbourhood of Ravenna: 'Impaziente di visitare l' antica selva, che inspirò già il Divino e Giovanni Boccaccio.' We know, however, that a more powerful attraction, in the person of the Countess Guiccioli, maintained his fidelity to 'that place of old renown, once in the Adrian Sea, Ravenna.' Between the Bosco, as the people of Ravenna call this pine-wood, and the city, the marsh stretches for a distance of about three miles. It is a plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out into innumerable rice-fields. For more than half a year it lies under water, and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour, which renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet in springtime this dreary flat is even beautiful. The young blades of the rice shoot up above the water, delicately green and tender. The ditches are lined with flowering rush and golden flags, while white and yellow lilies sleep in myriads upon the silent pools. Tamarisks wave their pink and silver tresses by the road, and wherever a plot of mossy earth emerges from the marsh, it gleams with purple orchises and flaming marigolds; but the soil beneath is so treacherous and spongy, that these splendid blossoms grow like flowers in dreams or fairy stories. You try in vain to pick them; they elude your grasp, and flourish in security beyond the reach of arm or stick. Such is the sight of the old town of Classis. Not a vestige of the Roman city remains, not a dwelling or a ruined tower, nothing but the ancient church of S. Apollinare in Classe. Of all desolate buildings this is the most desolate. Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolo beyond the walls of Rome can equal it. Its bare round campanile gazes at the sky, which here vaults only sea and plain--a perfect dome, star-spangled like the roof of Galla Placidia's tomb. Ravenna lies low to west, the pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east. There is nothing else to be seen except the spreading marsh, bounded by dim snowy Alps and purple Apennines, so very far away that the level rack of summer clouds seem more attainable and real. What sunsets and sunrises that tower must see; what glaring lurid afterglows in August, when the red light scowls upon the pestilential fen; what sheets of sullen vapour rolling over it in autumn; what breathless heats, and rainclouds big with thunder; what silences; what unimpeded blasts of winter winds! One old monk tends this deserted spot. He has the huge church, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddy bell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself. At rare intervals, priests from Ravenna come to sing some special mass at these cold altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldy steps and kiss the relics which are shown on great occasions. But no one stays; they hurry, after muttering their prayers, from the fever-stricken spot, reserving their domestic pieties and customary devotions for the brighter and newer chapels of the fashionable churches in Ravenna. So the old monk is left alone to sweep the marsh water from his church floor, and to keep the green moss from growing too thickly on its monuments. A clammy conferva covers everything except the mosaics upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy the course of age. Christ on His throne _sedet aternumque sedebit_: the saints around him glitter with their pitiless uncompromising eyes and wooden gestures, as if twelve centuries had not passed over them, and they were nightmares only dreamed last night, and rooted in a sick man's memory. For those gaunt and solemn forms there is no change of life or end of days. No fever touches them; no dampness of the wind and rain loosens their firm cement. They stare with senseless faces in bitter mockery of men who live and die and moulder away beneath. Their poor old guardian told us it was a weary life. He has had the fever three times, and does not hope to survive many more Septembers. The very water that he drinks is brought him from Ravenna; for the vast fen, though it pours its overflow upon the church floor, and spreads like a lake around, is death to drink. The monk had a gentle woman's voice and mild brown eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him to this living tomb? For what past sorrow is he weary of his life? What anguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude? Yet he looked simple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life were over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with a friend's greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across the fen-lands in a cloud of soft destructive fever-mist. Another monument upon the plain is worthy of a visit. It is the so-called Colonna dei Francesi, a _cinquecento_ pillar of Ionic design, erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victorious after one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The Ronco, a straight sluggish stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered with laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments, confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A few cypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of a neighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous. Those mason bees are like posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or a Luxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenic or Egyptian temples with clay hovels. Nothing differs but the scale; and while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering, man destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates. In Ravenna itself, perhaps what strikes us most is the abrupt transition everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity to buildings of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval between the marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and the insignificant frippery of the last century. The churches of Ravenna--S. Vitale, S. Apollinare, and the rest--are too well known, and have been too often described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to need a detailed notice in this place. Every one is aware that the ecclesiastical customs and architecture of the early Church can be studied in greater perfection here than elsewhere. Not even the basilicas and mosaics of Rome, nor those of Palermo and Monreale, are equal for historical interest to those of Ravenna. Yet there is not one single church which remains entirely unaltered and unspoiled. The imagination has to supply the atrium or outer portico from one building, the vaulted baptistery with its marble font from another, the pulpits and ambones from a third the tribune from a fourth, the round brick bell-tower from a fifth, and then to cover all the concave roofs and chapel walls with grave and glittering mosaics. There is nothing more beautiful in decorative art than the mosaics of such tiny buildings as the tomb of Galla Placidia or the chapel of the Bishop's Palace. They are like jewelled and enamelled cases; not an inch of wall can be seen which is not covered with elaborate patterns of the brightest colours. Tall date-palms spring from the floor with fruit and birds among their branches, and between them stand the pillars and apostles of the Church. In the spandrels and lunettes above the arches and the windows angels fly with white extended wings. On every vacant place are scrolls and arabesques of foliage,--birds and beasts, doves drinking from the vase, and peacocks spreading gorgeous plumes--a maze of green and gold and blue. Overhead, the vault is powdered with stars gleaming upon the deepest azure, and in the midst is set an aureole embracing the majestic head of Christ, or else the symbol of the sacred fish, or the hand of the Creator pointing from a cloud. In Galla Placidia's tomb these storied vaults spring above the sarcophagi of empresses and emperors, each lying in the place where he was laid more than twelve centuries ago. The light which struggles through the narrow windows serves to harmonise the brilliant hues and make a gorgeous gloom. Besides these more general and decorative subjects, many of the churches are adorned with historical mosaics, setting forth the Bible narrative or incidents from the life of Christian emperors and kings. In S. Apollinare Nuovo there is a most interesting treble series of such mosaics extending over both walls of the nave. On the left hand, as we enter, we see the town of Classis; on the right the palace of Theodoric, its doors and loggie rich with curtains, and its friezes blazing with coloured ornaments. From the city gate of Classis virgins issue, and proceed in a long line until they reach Madonna seated on a throne, with Christ upon her knees, and the three kings in adoration at her feet. From Theodoric's palace door a similar procession of saints and martyrs carry us to Christ surrounded by archangels. Above this double row of saints and virgins stand the fathers and prophets of the Church, and highest underneath the roof are pictures from the life of our Lord. It will be remembered in connection with these subjects that the women sat upon the left and the men upon the right side of the church. Above the tribune, at the east end of the church, it was customary to represent the Creative Hand, or the monogram of the Saviour, or the head of Christ with the letters A and [Greek Ô]. Moses and Elijah frequently stand on either side to symbolise the transfiguration, while the saints and bishops specially connected with the church appeared upon a lower row. Then on the side walls were depicted such subjects as Justinian and Theodora among their courtiers, or the grant of the privileges of the church to its first founder from imperial patrons, with symbols of the old Hebraic ritual--Abel's lamb, the sacrifice of Isaac, Melchisedec's offering of bread and wine,--which were regarded as the types of Christian ceremonies. The baptistery was adorned with appropriate mosaics representing Christ's baptism in Jordan. Generally speaking, one is struck with the dignity of these designs, and especially with the combined majesty and sweetness of the face of Christ. The sense for harmony of hue displayed in their composition is marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of classical treatment which may be discerned--Jordan, for instance, pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge--or to show what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these ancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of the three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists as we now recognise them, and many of the rites and vestments which Ritualists of all denominations regard with superstitious reverence. There are two sepulchral monuments in Ravenna which cannot be passed over unnoticed. The one is that of Theodoric the Goth, crowned by its semisphere of solid stone, a mighty tomb, well worthy of the conqueror and king. It stands in a green field, surrounded by acacias, where the nightingales sing ceaselessly in May. The mason bees have covered it, and the water has invaded its sepulchral vaults. In spite of many trials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the pond and clear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great Goth was laid by Amalasuntha. The other is Dante's temple, with its basrelief and withered garlands. The story of his burial, and of the discovery of his real tomb, is fresh in the memory of every one. But the 'little cupola, more neat than solemn,' of which Lord Byron speaks, will continue to be the goal of many a pilgrimage. For myself--though I remember Chateaubriand's bareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri's passionate prostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron's offering of poems on the poet's shrine--I confess that a single canto of the 'Inferno,' a single passage of the 'Vita Nuova,' seems more full of soul-stirring associations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust was laid. It is the spirit that lives and makes alive. And Dante's spirit seems more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco than beside his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen,'--'Lo, I am with you alway'--these are the words that ought to haunt us in a burying-ground. There is something affected and self-conscious in overpowering grief or enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb. * * * * * _RIMINI_ SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI Rimini is a city of about 18,000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de' Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, a little to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon. It is our duty to mention the baths first among its claims to distinction, since the prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend on them in a great measure. But visitors from the north will fly from these, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius completed, and which still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic arches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne the tramplings of at least three conquests. The triumphal arch, too, erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Roman architecture. Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona. Yet these remains of the imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista Alberti in 1450. This strange church, one of the earliest extant buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional age which gave them birth. No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame at least of the great Malatesta family--the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in Lombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth cantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of E il mastin vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio Che fecer di Montagna il mal governo, while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to the hunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover Paolo, is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of Byron and Leigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Doré--to all, in fact, who have of art and letters any love. The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment under Otho III. as lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, down to their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of the Renaissance, is made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall a mediaeval Italian despotism. Acquiring an unlawful right over the towns of Rimini, Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their petty principalities like tyrants by the help of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, inclining to the one or the other as it suited their humour or their interest, wrangling among themselves, transmitting the succession of their dynasty through bastards and by deeds of force, quarrelling with their neighbours the Counts of Urbino, alternately defying and submitting to the Papal legates in Romagna, serving as condottieri in the wars of the Visconti and the state of Venice, and by their restlessness and genius for military intrigues contributing in no slight measure to the general disturbance of Italy. The Malatesti were a race of strongly marked character: more, perhaps, than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for generations those qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thought indispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother with brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all transactions that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family. Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the moment clutched what he could of the domains that owned his house for masters. Partitions among sons or brothers, mutually hostile and suspicious, weakened the whole stock. Yet they were great enough to hold their own for centuries among the many tyrants who infested Lombardy. That the other princely families of Romagna, Emilia, and the March were in the same state of internal discord and dismemberment, was probably one reason why the Malatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did. So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, the perfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate the crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family, mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci credible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughly bestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities must be passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murdered three wives in succession,[2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera d'Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, and carved horns upon his own tomb with this fantastic legend underneath:-- Porto le corna ch' ognuno le vede, E tal le porta che non se lo crede. He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti, who had for some time been his mistress. But, like most of the Malatesti, he left no legitimate offspring. Throughout his life he was distinguished for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue and rapidity of action, for an almost fretful rashness in the execution of his schemes, and for a character terrible in its violence. He was acknowledged as a great general; yet nothing succeeded with him. The long warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended in his discomfiture. Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was impeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and sacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to the bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almost all his territories, in 1463. The occasion on which this fierce and turbulent despiser of laws human and divine was forced to kneel as a penitent before the Papal legate in the gorgeous temple dedicated to his own pride, in order that the ban of excommunication might be removed from Rimini, was one of those petty triumphs, interesting chiefly for their picturesqueness, by which the Popes confirmed their questionable rights over the cities of Romagna. Sigismondo, shorn of his sovereignty, took the command of the Venetian troops against the Turks in the Morea, and returned in 1465, crowned with laurels, to die at Rimini in the scene of his old splendour. A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life. Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini had always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of artists. He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to him in matters of taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feet of Latinists like Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio. Valturio, the engineer, and Alberti, the architect, were his familiar friends; and the best hours of his life were spent in conversation with these men. Now that he found himself upon the sacred soil of Greece, he was determined not to return to Italy empty-handed. Should he bring manuscripts or marbles, precious vases or inscriptions in half-legible Greek character? These relics were greedily sought for by the potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched his library with some such treasures. But he obtained a nobler prize--nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, the authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho.[3] These he exhumed from their Greek grave and caused them to be deposited in a stone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his building in Rimini. The Venetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark from Alexandria, were scarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo with the acquisition of this Father of the Neopagan faith. Upon the tomb we still may read this legend: 'Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua temp principis reliquum Sig. Pan. Mal. Pan. F. belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp ob ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introque mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI.' Of the Latinity of the inscription much cannot be said; but it means that 'Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced by the great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought and placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of the philosophers of his day.' Sigismondo's portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon every frieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotes the man. His face is seen in profile. The head, which is low and flat above the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries a thick bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italians call a _zazzera_. The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flat eyelids, like those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces. The nose is long and crooked, curved like a vulture's over a petulant mouth, with lips deliberately pressed together, as though it were necessary to control some nervous twitching. The cheek is broad, and its bone is strongly marked. Looking at these features in repose, we cannot but picture to our fancy what expression they might assume under a sudden fit of fury, when the sinews of the face were contracted with quivering spasms, and the lips writhed in sympathy with knit forehead and wrinkled eyelids. Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, as the great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo's fame. It is here that all the Malatesti lie. Here too is the chapel consecrated to Isotta, 'Divæ Isottæ Sacrum;' and the tombs of the Malatesta ladies, 'Malatestorum domûs heroidum sepulchrum;' and Sigismondo's own grave with the cuckold's horns and scornful epitaph. Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis, and that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothic edifice, remains to remind us that it is a Christian place of worship.[4] It has no sanctity, no spirit of piety. The pride of the tyrant whose legend--'Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. F. Fecit Anno Gratiæ MCCCCL'--occupies every arch and stringcourse of the architecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with his cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in every piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to fill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God. Yet the Cathedral of Rimini remains a monument of first-rate importance for all students who seek to penetrate the revived Paganism of the fifteenth century. It serves also to bring a far more interesting Italian of that period than the tyrant of Rimini himself, before our notice. In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance of one of the most remarkable men of this or any other age. Leo Battista Alberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, born during the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetian territory, was endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, and sensibilities so varied, as to deserve the name of universal genius. Italy in the Renaissance period was rich in natures of this sort, to whom nothing that is strange or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who, gifted with a kind of divination, penetrated the secrets of the world by sympathy. To Pico della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and Michel Agnolo Buonarroti may be added Leo Battista Alberti. That he achieved less than his great compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow of a mighty name, was the effect of circumstances. He came half a century too early into the world, and worked as a pioneer rather than a settler of the realm which Lionardo ruled as his demesne. Very early in his boyhood Alberti showed the versatility of his talents. The use of arms, the management of horses, music, painting, modelling for sculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physical science as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper to the estate of a young nobleman, were at his command. His biographer asserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue. He used to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure as brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers: hunger and sleep could not keep him from them then. At other times the letters on the page appeared to him like twining and contorted scorpions, so that he preferred to gaze on anything but written scrolls. He would then turn to music or painting, or to the physical sports in which he excelled. The language in which this alternation of passion and disgust for study is expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti's peculiar temperament, his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies and strange repugnances. Flying from his study, he would then betake himself to the open air. No one surpassed him in running, in wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or discharged his arrows. So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he could fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ring against a church roof far above. When he chose to jump, he put his feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect upon the ground. On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and seemed incapable of fatigue. The most restive and vicious animals trembled under him and became like lambs. There was a kind of magnetism in the man. We read, besides these feats of strength and skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other purpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature. In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his age. To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of the Renaissance. Humanity occupied the attention of poets and painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams around him. Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood, upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini delighted in wild places for no mere pleasure of the chase, but for the joy he took in communing with nature. How S. Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, we know by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante's acute observation, every canto of the 'Divine Comedy' is witness. Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a stranger pathos than any of these men: 'In the early spring, when he beheld the meadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plants of all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceeding sorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvest and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him weep for the sadness of his soul.' It would seem that he scarcely understood the source of this sweet trouble: for at such times he compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and fertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy. A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and has striven to account for it:-- Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the _mal du pays_ of the human soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnian earth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss. It is the waste of human energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches the modern poet. Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their own spirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret? Man is a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings of the secular breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now must hang, have potent influences over his emotions. Of Alberti's extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions many curious tales are told. The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and of fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by music. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'On old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed again and again, and said that he revered in them the delights of nature (_naturæ delitias_).' Beasts and birds and all living creatures moved him to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted, each in his own kind. It is even said that he composed a funeral oration for a dog which he had loved and which died. To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added the charm of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation. The activity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of grave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of commonplace society. He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult of access: his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was noted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit. Collections were made of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by his anonymous biographer.[5] Their finer perfume, as almost always happens with good sayings which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, but owe their force, in part at least, to the personality of their author, and to the happy moment of their production, has evanesced. Here, however, is one which seems still to bear the impress of Alberti's genius: 'Gold is the soul of labour, and labour the slave of pleasure.' Of women he used to say that their inconstancy was an antidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but persevere in what she undertook, all the fair works of men would be ruined. One of his strongest moral sentences is aimed at envy, from which he suffered much in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curious amount of caution. His own family grudged the distinction which his talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attempt made by them to assassinate him through his servants. Alberti met these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity of demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seeking to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrious house. In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter into wordy warfare with detractors and calumniators, sparing the reputation even of his worst enemy when chance had placed him in his power. This moderation both of speech and conduct was especially distinguished in an age which tolerated the fierce invectives of Filelfo, and applauded the vindictive courage of Cellini. To money Alberti showed a calm indifference. He committed his property to his friends and shared with them in common. Nor was he less careless about vulgar fame, spending far more pains in the invention of machinery and the discovery of laws, than in their publication to the world. His service was to knowledge, not to glory. Self-control was another of his eminent qualities. With the natural impetuosity of a large heart, and the vivacity of a trained athlete, he yet never allowed himself to be subdued by anger or by sensual impulses, but took pains to preserve his character unstained and dignified before the eyes of men. A story is told of him which may remind us of Goethe's determination to overcome his giddiness. In his youth his head was singularly sensitive to changes of temperature; but by gradual habituation he brought himself at last to endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded. In like manner he had a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; so powerful, that the very sight of these things made him sick. Yet by constantly viewing and touching what was disagreeable, he conquered these dislikes; and proved that men have a complete mastery over what is merely instinctive in their nature. His courage corresponded to his splendid physical development. When a boy of fifteen, he severely wounded himself in the foot. The gash had to be probed and then sewn up. Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan, but helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of the fever which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern. For music he had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is said to have achieved success. Nothing, however, remains of his work and from what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave less care to the execution of finished pictures, than to drawings subsidiary to architectural and mechanical designs. His biographer relates that when he had completed a painting, he called children and asked them what it meant. If they did not know, he reckoned it a failure. He was also in the habit of painting from memory. While at Venice, he put on canvas the faces of friends at Florence whom he had not seen for months. That the art of painting was subservient in his estimation to mechanics, is indicated by what we hear about the camera, in which he showed landscapes by day and the revolutions of the stars by night, so lively drawn that the spectators were affected with amazement. The semi-scientific impulse to extend man's mastery over nature, the magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which so powerfully influenced the development of Lionardo's genius, seems to have overcome the purely æsthetic instincts of Alberti, so that he became in the end neither a great artist like Raphael, nor a great discoverer like Galileo, but rather a clairvoyant to whom the miracles of nature and of art lie open. After the first period of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devoted his great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of the law--then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures. The industry with which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codes broke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called 'Philodoxeos,' which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and was ascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet. Feeling stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was still uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want. It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even his Herculean strength gave way. Emaciated and exhausted, he lost the clearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterial disturbances, which filled his ears with painful sounds. This nervous illness is not dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in the confessions of his youth. In vain, however, his physicians warned Alberti of impending peril. A man of so much stanchness, accustomed to control his nature with an iron will, is not ready to accept advice. Alberti persevered in his studies, until at last the very seat of intellect was invaded. His memory began to fail him for names, while he still retained with wonderful accuracy whatever he had seen with his eyes. It was now impossible to think of law as a profession. Yet since he could not live without severe mental exercise, he had recourse to studies which tax the verbal memory less than the intuitive faculties of the reason. Physics and mathematics became his chief resource; and he devoted his energies to literature. His 'Treatise on the Family' may be numbered among the best of those compositions on social and speculative subjects in which the Italians of the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero. His essays on the arts are mentioned by Vasari with sincere approbation. Comedies, interludes, orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with abundance from his facile pen. Some were written in Latin, which he commanded more than fairly; some in the Tuscan tongue, of which owing to the long exile of his family in Lombardy, he is said to have been less a master. It was owing to this youthful illness, from which apparently his constitution never wholly recovered, that Alberti's genius was directed to architecture. Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman antiquary, Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. at the time when this, the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in rebuilding the palaces and fortifications of Rome. Nicholas discerned the genius of the man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all matters of architecture. When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting his long Latin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the Holy See to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour worthy of the seat of Christendom. The accomplishment of the second part of his work he owed to the genius of Alberti. After doing thus much for Rome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautify Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered the service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and side chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointed architecture never developed its true character of complexity and richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S. Petronio of Bologna. He left it a strange medley of mediæval and Renaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world's pantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but little comprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian taste. Perhaps the mixture of styles so startling in S. Francesco ought not to be laid to the charge of Alberti, who had to execute the task of turning a Gothic into a classic building. All that he could do was to alter the whole exterior of the church, by affixing a screen-work of Roman arches and Corinthian pilasters, so as to hide the old design and yet to leave the main features of the fabric, the windows and doors especially, _in statu quo_. With the interior he dealt upon the same general principle, by not disturbing its structure, while he covered every available square inch of surface with decorations alien to the Gothic manner. Externally, S. Francesco is perhaps the most original and graceful of the many attempts made by Italian builders to fuse the mediæval and the classic styles. For Alberti attempted nothing less. A century elapsed before Palladio, approaching the problem from a different point of view, restored the antique in its purity, and erected in the Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza an almost unique specimen of resuscitated Roman art. Internally, the beauty of the church is wholly due to its exquisite wall-ornaments. These consist for the most part of low reliefs in a soft white stone, many of them thrown out upon a blue ground in the style of Della Robbia. Allegorical figures designed with the purity of outline we admire in Botticelli, draperies that Burne-Jones might copy, troops of singing boys in the manner of Donatello, great angels traced upon the stone so delicately that they seem to be rather drawn than sculptured, statuettes in niches, personifications of all arts and sciences alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs and sea-children:--such are the forms which fill the spaces of the chapel walls, and climb the pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundance that had the whole church been finished as it was designed, it would have presented one splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation. Heavy screens of Verona marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with the ciphers of Sigismondo and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, and medallion portraits, shut the chapels from the nave. Who produced all this sculpture it is difficult to say. Some of it is very good: much is indifferent. We may hazard the opinion that, besides Bernardo Ciuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some pupils of Donatello and Benedetto da Majano worked at it. The influence of the sculptors of Florence is everywhere perceptible. Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that they fairly represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of modern art. Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style of the Pisani had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, and the abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality. The sculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are represented in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high relief, and relief in general to detached figures. Their style, like the style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific to Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. Mediæval standards of taste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet the imitation of the antique had not been carried so far as to efface the spontaneity of the artist, and enough remained of Christian feeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance. The sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with an inbreathed spirit of life. It was a happy moment, when art had reached consciousness, and the artist had not yet become self-conscious. The hand and the brain then really worked together for the procreation of new forms of grace, not for the repetition of old models, or for the invention of the strange and startling. 'Delicate, sweet, and captivating,' are good adjectives to express the effect produced upon the mind by the contemplation even of the average work of this period. To study the flowing lines of the great angels traced upon the walls of the Chapel of S. Sigismund in the Cathedral of Rimini, to follow the undulations of their drapery that seems to float, to feel the dignified urbanity of all their gestures, is like listening to one of those clear early Italian compositions for the voice, which surpasses in suavity of tone and grace of movement all that Music in her full-grown vigour has produced. There is indeed something infinitely charming in the crepuscular moments of the human mind. Whether it be the rathe loveliness of an art still immature, or the beauty of art upon the wane--whether, in fact, the twilight be of morning or of evening, we find in the masterpieces of such periods a placid calm and chastened pathos, as of a spirit self-withdrawn from vulgar cares, which in the full light of meridian splendour is lacking. In the Church of S. Francesco at Rimini the tempered clearness of the dawn is just about to broaden into day. * * * * * _MAY IN UMBRIA_ FROM ROME TO TERNI We left Rome in clear sunset light. The Alban Hills defined themselves like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the Sabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster thunderclouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the slopes of Tivoli. To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams. The Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers. Just now poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns infinite and intricate beyond the power of art. They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered _fioriture_. These are like praying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque whose roof is heaven. In the level light the scythes of the mowers flash as we move past. From their bronzed foreheads the men toss masses of dark curls. Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway sideways from firm yet pliant reins. On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising their heads to look at us, with just a flush of crimson on their horns and dewlaps. This is the scale of Mason's and of Costa's colouring. This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome. Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber and S. Peter's, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flames where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill, and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating. Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves. The orange deepens into dying red. The green divides into daffodil and beryl. The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars shine stronger. Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water. The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene. No painting could convey their influences. Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river. Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere. And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West. The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods, all floating in aërial twilight. There is no definition of outline now. The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow. We have passed Stimigliano. Through the mystery of darkness we hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni. THE CASCADES OF TERNI The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the highest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven hundred feet in height into the Nera. The water is densely charged with particles of lime. This calcareous matter not only tends continually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which the torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround the falls with fine white dust. These famous cascades are undoubtedly the most sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation is worthy of so great a natural wonder. We reach them through a noble mid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldly modelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has something of the South-Italian richness. The hillsides are a labyrinth of box and arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom. The turf is starred with cyclamens and orchises. Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous lyric. The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion than any words could be. MONTEFALCO The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparent watercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds. Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend one of those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the cities of the Umbrians perch. The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi, Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of the Tiber valley. Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severe hill-country above Gubbio in part disclosed itself. Over Spoleto the fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding. This is the kind of panorama that dilates the soul. It is so large, so dignified, so beautiful in tranquil form. The opulent abundance of the plain contrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and the name of each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories. The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its many excellent frescoes; painted histories of S. Francis and S. Jerome, by Benozzo Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentle Tiberio d'Assisi. Full justice had been done to these, when a little boy, seeing us lingering outside the church of S. Chiara, asked whether we should not like to view the body of the saint. This privilege could be purchased at the price of a small fee. It was only necessary to call the guardian of her shrine at the high altar. Indolent, and in compliant mood, with languid curiosity and half an hour to spare, we assented. A handsome young man appeared, who conducted us with decent gravity into a little darkened chamber behind the altar. There he lighted wax tapers, opened sliding doors in what looked like a long coffin, and drew curtains. Before us in the dim light there lay a woman covered with a black nun's dress. Only her hands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale contour of her face (forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in purest outline, as though the injury of death had never touched her) were visible. Her closed eyes seemed to sleep. She had the perfect peace of Luini's S. Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai. I have rarely seen anything which surprised and touched me more. The religious earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl. Could Julia, daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the Lombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be worshipped on the Capitol? S. Chiara's shrine was hung round with her relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was suspended. Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the scourge, and the five stigmata. The guardian's faith in this miraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and women who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity. We abandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask what Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not unpleasing melancholy. The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sister of S. Francis, lies in Assisi. I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this nun? What history had she? And I think now of this girl as of a damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded from intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of her own simple worshippers. Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many rustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage![6] FOLIGNO In the landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna di Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as to details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. The place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the same as in the days of ancient Rome. Foligno forms a station of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way. At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto. An army advancing from the north by the Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and exercises of a garrison. In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno's importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna. We might hazard a conjecture that the Lombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, following their usual policy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Roman municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours. But of this there is no certainty to build upon. All that can be affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria. It was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil strife. Some of the bloodiest pages in mediæval Italian history are those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, the exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission to the Papal power. Since railways have been carried from Rome through Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained considerably in commercial and military status. It is the point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry depôt, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediæval period, it is difficult to say. Yet the impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness in their inhabitants. My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to Spoleto, with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on its mountain-bracket to the left. From the topmost peaks of the Sabine Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in the valley of Clitumnus. The space between me and that distance is infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there with towers and relics of baronial houses. The little town is in commotion; for the working men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have resolved to spend their earnings on a splendid festa--horse-races, and two nights of fireworks. The acacias and paulownias on the ramparts are in full bloom of creamy white and lilac. In the glare of Bengal lights these trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the most fantastic of artificial decorations. The rockets sent aloft into the sky amid that solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony with nature. I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but a sense of satisfaction. It is sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place to meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the _genius loci_ as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity will assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness. Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge. On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept changing. My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens. As the procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readily fell into conversation. He was very tall, with enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's favourite models. His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair. Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright fierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a statue of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther. He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait, how grandly he would go. This young man, of whom I heard nothing more after our half-hour's conversation among the crackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of dangerousness--of 'something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.' Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century. Gattamelata, who began life as a baker's boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers. Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being 'perfettamente tristo.' Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the Italians learn to use these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinci used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of my own reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life and blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewell to Cavallucci, and returned to my bedroom on the city wall. The last rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fell asleep. SPELLO Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities--the remains of a Roman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a woman leaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scattered through its buildings. The churches, especially those of S.M. Maggiore and S. Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio. Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master's work in fresco be better studied than here. The satisfaction with which he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testified by his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the Virgin's chamber. The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs, window seats, &c., which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio's study of S. Benedict at Venice. It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and carefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth of Perugino's feeling. In S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same meticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile Baglioni. It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints. Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch detail-painting, prettiness of composition, and cheerfulness of colouring, are noticeable throughout his work here rather than either thought or sentiment. S. Maria Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonna between a young episcopal saint and Catherine of Alexandria from the hand of Perugino. The rich yellow harmony of its tones, and the graceful dignity of its emotion, conveyed no less by a certain Raphaelesque pose and outline than by suavity of facial expression, enable us to measure the distance between this painter and his quasi-pupil Pinturicchio. We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.' Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, and were greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a mark waist-high upon the wall, where Orlando's knee is reported to have reached. But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been identified with the Roland myth at Spello. Such a column either never existed here, or had been removed before the memory of the present generation. EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles are lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From the low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles. Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches. There is no moving from point to point. Where we have taken our station, at the north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over. The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth's wings, or like a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress. Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces--ineffably pure--adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom the world was not worthy--at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole scene--in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through the music--broods one spirit: the spirit of him who was 'the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;' the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful in soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over self and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings of ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensual and life beyond the grave. Far down below the feet of those who worship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his soul, the incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in the spaces round us. This is his temple. He fills it like an unseen god. Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men. Let, therefore, choir and congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers and praises; for this is Easter morning--Christ is risen! Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S. Francis thanked God in his hymn, is reconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us to the gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of a multitude of saints. Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray. If all be but a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed! PERUSIA AUGUSTA The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these nights of full moon. The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona. The hills are capped with snow, although the season is so forward. Below our parapets the bulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and the finer group of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy 'Pennacchio di Perugia,' jut out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber. As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching. Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population--women in veils, men winter-mantled--pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks. Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs. Far, far away upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamed castelli smoulder. As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gas vies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls; Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburban world-old dwellings plastered like martins' nests against the masonry. Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene. To the right of Subasio, where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy masses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain and hill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness. First comes Assisi, with S.M. degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi; and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the village height of Montefalco--the 'ringhiera dell' Umbria,' as they call it in this country. By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia. The lower ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with villages and farms. Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of red brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers. The mills beneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and the feeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, of some Umbrian picture. Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and honeysuckle. The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels. Wayside shrines are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from the copse-woods, where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the thin, fine grass. The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. A fine race of _contadini_, with large, heroically graceful forms, and beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil. LA MAGIONE On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La Magione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian champaign to the lake of Thrasymene. It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately castle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio. Here took place that famous diet of Cesare Borgia's enemies, when the son of Alexander VI. was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair to make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502. It was the policy of Cesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to submission, and by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired a sort of tyranny in Papal cities. The Varani of Camerino and the Manfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated. There was only too good reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Città di Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bologna would come next. Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sides by Cesare's conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification of Piombino, felt himself in danger. The great house of the Orsini, who swayed a large part of the Patrimony of S. Peter's, and were closely allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety. But such was the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble families lived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay of Cesare. When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they were plotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they had hitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation. The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of Alexander VI.; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan; Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni, made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin Grifonetto's treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March of Fermo by the murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; Ermes Bentivoglio, the heir of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, the secretary of Pandolfo Petrueci. These men vowed hostility on the basis of common injuries and common fear against the Borgia. But they were for the most part stained themselves with crime, and dared not trust each other, and could not gain the confidence of any respectable power in Italy except the exiled Duke of Urbino. Procrastination was the first weapon used by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sow among his rebel captains suspicion and dissension. He next made overtures to the leaders separately, and so far succeeded in his perfidious policy as to draw Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets at Sinigaglia. Under pretext of fair conference and equitable settlement of disputed claims, he possessed himself of their persons, and had them strangled--two upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503. Of all Cesare's actions, this was the most splendid for its successful combination of sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasive diplomacy, and of ruthless decision when the time to strike his blow arrived. CORTONA After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the lake of Thrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales. The lake lay basking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty, rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky. At Passignano, close beside its shore, we stopped for mid-day. This is a little fishing village of very poor people, who live entirely by labour on the waters. They showed us huge eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of the silver carp--Reina del Lago. It was off one of the eels that we made our lunch; and taken, as he was, alive from his cool lodging, he furnished a series of dishes fit for a king. Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business. It poured a deluge. Our horses were tired, and one lean donkey, who, after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in front of them, rendered but little assistance. Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the Fra Angelicos, and all the Signorellis. One cannot help thinking that too much fuss is made nowadays about works of art--running after them for their own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them as objects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy and carelessness as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life. Artists, historians of art, and critics are forced to isolate pictures; and it is of profit to their souls to do so. But simple folk, who have no aesthetic vocation, whether creative or critical, suffer more than is good for them by compliance with mere fashion. Sooner or later we shall return to the spirit of the ages which produced these pictures, and which regarded them with less of an industrious bewilderment than they evoke at present. I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or the benefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment. I only mean to suggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter. Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of art from life. Our methods of studying art, making a beginning of art-study while traveling, tend to perpetuate this separation. It is only on reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceive that the most fruitful moments in our art education have been casual and unsought, in quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature, art, and life are happily blent. The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is interesting because of the shields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone, and inserted in its outer walls--Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati, among the more ancient--de' Medici at a later epoch. The revolutions in the Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from these coats-of-arms and the dates beneath them. The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more with sense of breadth and beauty. From S. Margherita above the town the prospect is immense and wonderful and wild--up into those brown, forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the cities of Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano. The jewel of the view is Trasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set upon one corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant for separate contemplation. There is something in the singularity and circumscribed completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished by distance, which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci's pencil, had he seen it. Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable. One little blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and ragged urchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining 'Signore Padrone!' It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured to give them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficence would raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us. Sitting later in the day upon the piazza of S. Domenico, I saw the same blind boy taken by his brother to play. The game consists, in the little creature throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, and running round and round it, clasping it. This seemed to make him quite inexpressibly happy. His face lit up and beamed with that inner beatitude blind people show--a kind of rapture shining over it, as though nothing could be more altogether delightful. This little boy had the smallpox at eight months, and has never been able to see since. He looks sturdy, and may live to be of any age--doomed always, is that possible, to beg? CHIUSI What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in the inn of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is setting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded hills of Città della Pieve to the left. The deep green dimpled valley goes stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain mass, distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte! The near country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine olives and oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its crowning villages, is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture. The breadth and depth and quiet which those painters loved, the space of lucid sky, the suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all are here. The evening is beautiful--golden light streaming softly from behind us on this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue with stars above. At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and black scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault of stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped out of the living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in walking and driving through the country. Chiusi means for me the mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens and cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo and Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways winding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so full of flowers. It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology. GUBBIO Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns. With its back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked and rolling ridges. This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealth and independence, is admirably protected by a chain of natural defences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity and isolation. Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks; and the brown mediæval walls with square towers which protected them upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are still a marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets and staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct with age, but beautiful. Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages. But poor people are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants. These new inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without materially changing the architectural masses. In that witching hour when the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the glowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming by oneself alone, to picture the old noble life--the ladies moving along those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations. The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in a situation of unprecedented boldness. Rising from enormous substructures mortised into the solid hillside, it rears its vast rectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggias imposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft into a light aërial tower. The empty halls inside are of fair proportions and a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in all directions fascinate. But the final impression made by the building is one of square, tranquil, massive strength--perpetuity embodied in masonry--force suggesting facility by daring and successful addition of elegance to hugeness. Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be. The fine quality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of the windows give it an Italian grace. These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline. The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture. Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy. S. Ubaldo, who gave his name to this duke's son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is dedicated--one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches. This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressed on the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than most buildings in Gubbio. The latter, in particular, helps one to understand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how the mere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to its primitive appearance. The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yet been given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate. At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in the primitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent, rushing downward from the Apennines. The Gubbio wine is very fragrant, and of a rich ruby colour. Those to whom the tints of wine and jewels give a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in its specific blending of tawny hues with rose. They serve the table still, at Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with a cream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace--the creases of the press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still upon it--and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, white earthenware, basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which contain little separate messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits. The wine stands in strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers; and the amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth. Dining thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in some picture of Gian Bellini or of Masolino. The very bareness of the room--its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and red-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone--enhances the impression of artistic delicacy in the table. FROM GUBBIO TO FANO The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks, and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds. The carriage in which we travelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which our driver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen. Slowly and toilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills--gaunt masses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with short turf and scanty pasture. The pass leads first to the little town of Scheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain. At Scheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Roman armies. At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills that dominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo and the Foligno line of railway to Ancona. Range rises over range, crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, and stretching out long, exquisitely modelled outlines, as only Apennines can do, in silvery sobriety of colours toned by clearest air. Every square piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture, whereof the composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines always delicate; and these lines seem somehow to have been determined in their beauty by the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as though they all had taken time to choose their place and wear down into harmony. The effect of tempered sadness was heightened for us by stormy lights and dun clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flying shadows, over all the prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille. After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees. This is the sacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane-- Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes Apenninigenis cultae pastoribus arae --once rose behind us on the bald Iguvian summits. A second little pass leads from this region to the Adriatic side of the Italian watershed, and the road now follows the Barano downward toward the sea. The valley is fairly green with woods, where mistletoe may here and there be seen on boughs of oak, and rich with cornfields. Cagli is the chief town of the district, and here they show one of the best pictures left to us by Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi. It is a Madonna, attended by S. Peter, S. Francis, S. Dominic, S. John, and two angels. One of the angels is traditionally supposed to have been painted from the boy Raphael, and the face has something which reminds us of his portraits. The whole composition, excellent in modelling, harmonious in grouping, soberly but strongly coloured, with a peculiar blending of dignity and sweetness, grace and vigour, makes one wonder why Santi thought it necessary to send his son from his own workshop to study under Perugino. He was himself a master of his art, and this, perhaps the most agreeable of his paintings, has a masculine sincerity which is absent from at least the later works of Perugino. Some miles beyond Cagli, the real pass of the Furlo begins. It owes its name to a narrow tunnel bored by Vespasian in the solid rock, where limestone crags descend on the Barano. The Romans called this gallery Petra Pertusa, or Intercisa, or more familiarly Forulus, whence comes the modern name. Indeed, the stations on the old Flaminian Way are still well marked by Latin designations; for Cagli is the ancient Calles, and Fossombrone is Forum Sempronii, and Fano the Fanum Fortunæ. Vespasian commemorated this early achievement in engineering by an inscription carved on the living stone, which still remains; and Claudian, when he sang the journey of his Emperor Honorius from Rimini to Rome, speaks thus of what was even then an object of astonishment to travellers:-- Laetior hinc fano recipit fortuna vetusto, Despiciturque vagus praerupta valle Metaurus, Qua mons arte patens vivo se perforat arcu Admittitque viam sectae per viscera rupis. The Forulus itself may now be matched, on any Alpine pass, by several tunnels of far mightier dimensions; for it is narrow, and does not extend more than 126 feet in length. But it occupies a fine position at the end of a really imposing ravine. The whole Furlo Pass might, without too much exaggeration, be described as a kind of Cheddar on the scale of the Via Mala. The limestone rocks, which rise on either hand above the gorge to an enormous height, are noble in form and solemn, like a succession of gigantic portals, with stupendous flanking obelisks and pyramids. Some of these crag-masses rival the fantastic cliffs of Capri, and all consist of that southern mountain limestone which changes from pale yellow to blue grey and dusky orange. A river roars precipitately through the pass, and the roadsides wave with many sorts of campanulas--a profusion of azure and purple bells upon the hard white stone. Of Roman remains there is still enough (in the way of Roman bridges and bits of broken masonry) to please an antiquary's eye. But the lover of nature will dwell chiefly on the picturesque qualities of this historic gorge, so alien to the general character of Italian scenery, and yet so remote from anything to which Swiss travelling accustoms one. The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and waving cornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail, with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running water, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of faraway Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. It is so rare, in spite of immemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild flowers, that I feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our carriage windows as we rolled down lazily along the road to Fossombrone. Broom, and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses, gladiolus, and sainfoin. There were orchises, and clematis, and privet, and wild-vine, vetches of all hues, red poppies, sky-blue cornflowers, and lilac pimpernel. In the rougher hedges, dogwood, honeysuckle, pyracanth, and acacia made a network of white bloom and blushes. Milk-worts of all bright and tender tints combined with borage, iris, hawkweeds, harebells, crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden asters, and dreamy love-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as the looms of Shiraz or of Cashmere never spread. Rarely have I gazed on Flora in such riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy. The air was filled with fragrances. Songs of cuckoos and nightingales echoed from the copses on the hillsides. The sun was out, and dancing over all the landscape. After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset. It has a sandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the Adriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over Pesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carries an English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast. In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel. The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has many churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities. Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and of Perugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece--lunette, great centre panel, and predella--dusty in its present condition, but splendidly painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned. It is worth journeying to Fano to see this. Still better would the journey be worth the traveller's while if he could be sure to witness such a game of _Pallone_ as we chanced upon in the Via dell' Arco di Augusto--lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving the great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation of projecting house-eaves. I do not understand the game; but it was clearly played something after the manner of our football, that is to say; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to cover the greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall. Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune. On the fountain in the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering her veil to catch the wind. May she long shower health and prosperity upon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint! * * * * * _THE PALACE OF URBINO_ I At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make our way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, called apocryphally after Julius Cæsar, I found a proper _vetturino_, with a good carriage and two indefatigable horses. He was a splendid fellow, and bore a great historic name, as I discovered when our bargain was completed. 'What are you called?' I asked him. '_Filippo Visconti, per servirla!_' was the prompt reply. Brimming over with the darkest memories of the Italian Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard this answer. The associations seemed too ominous. And yet the man himself was so attractive--tall, stalwart, and well looking--no feature of his face or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who concealed worse than Caligula's ugliness from sight in secret chambers--that I shook this preconception from my mind. As it turned out, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous namesake but the name. On a long and trying journey, he showed neither sullen nor yet ferocious tempers; nor, at the end of it, did he attempt by any master-stroke of craft to wheedle from me more than his fair pay; but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him for a keepsake, with the frank goodwill of an accomplished gentleman. The only exhibition of his hot Italian blood which I remember did his humanity credit. While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box to thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy. He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerous quarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to the mercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when he came back, hot and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only applaud his zeal. An Italian of this type, handsome as an antique statue, with the refinement of a modern gentleman and that intelligence which is innate in a race of immemorial culture, is a fascinating being. He may be absolutely ignorant in all book-learning. He may be as ignorant as a Bersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini, who gravely said that he could walk in three months to North America, and thought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished. But he will display, as this young soldier did, a grace and ease of address which are rare in London drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks upon the cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine natural taste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from the common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. For the first stage of the journey out of Rimini, Filippo's two horses sufficed. The road led almost straight across the level between quickset hedges in white bloom. But when we reached the long steep hill which ascends to San Marino, the inevitable oxen were called out, and we toiled upwards leisurely through cornfields bright with red anemones and sweet narcissus. At this point pomegranate hedges replaced the May-thorns of the plain. In course of time our _bovi_ brought us to the Borgo, or lower town, whence there is a further ascent of seven hundred feet to the topmost hawk's-nest or acropolis of the republic. These we climbed on foot, watching the view expand around us and beneath. Crags of limestone here break down abruptly to the rolling hills, which go to lose themselves in field and shore. Misty reaches of the Adriatic close the world to eastward. Cesena, Rimini, Verucchio, and countless hill-set villages, each isolated on its tract of verdure conquered from the stern grey soil, define the points where Montefeltri wrestled with Malatestas in long bygone years. Around are marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarled convolutions like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers crawling through dry wasteful beds of shingle. Interminable ranges of gaunt Apennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond; and over all this landscape, a grey-green mist of rising crops and new-fledged oak-trees lies like a veil upon the nakedness of Nature's ruins. Nothing in Europe conveys a more striking sense of geological antiquity than such a prospect. The denudation and abrasion of innumerable ages, wrought by slow persistent action of weather and water on an upheaved mountain mass, are here made visible. Every wave in that vast sea of hills, every furrow in their worn flanks, tells its tale of a continuous corrosion still in progress. The dominant impression is one of melancholy. We forget how Romans, countermarching Carthaginians, trod the land beneath us. The marvel of San Marino, retaining independence through the drums and tramplings of the last seven centuries, is swallowed in a deeper sense of wonder. We turn instinctively in thought to Leopardi's musings on man's destiny at war with unknown nature-forces and malignant rulers of the universe. Omai disprezza Te, la natura, il brutto Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera, E l' infinita vanità del tutto. And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue distance for Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair and discouragement was reared in even such a scene as this. The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great, new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous saint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque hill-cities with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue of S. Marino in the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the stone bed and pillow on which he took austere repose. One narrow window near the saint's abode commands a proud but melancholy landscape of distant hills and seaboard. To this, the great absorbing charm of San Marino, our eyes instinctively, recurrently, take flight. It is a landscape which by variety and beauty thralls attention, but which by its interminable sameness might grow almost overpowering. There is no relief. The gladness shed upon far humbler Northern lands in May is ever absent here. The German word _Gemüthlichkeit_, the English phrase 'a home of ancient peace,' are here alike by art and nature untranslated into visibilities. And yet (as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if peradventure the intolerable _ennui_ of this panorama should drive a citizen of San Marino into out-lands, the same view would haunt him whithersoever he went--the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill through his sleep--he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in winter, and to watch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in spring;--like Virgil's hero, dying, he would think of San Marino: _Aspicit, et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos_. Even a passing stranger may feel the mingled fascination and oppression of this prospect--the monotony which maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the mind, environing it with memories. Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered a luncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with the best red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hills deceived my appetite. An Italian history of San Marino, including its statutes, in three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confess to having learned from these pages little else than this: first, that the survival of the Commonwealth through all phases of European politics had been semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San Marinesi had been lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction from these two propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing to commit myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of the former. From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now in the true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issued in the twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the key of entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundred years ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortress looks as though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leo was taken and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro, Borgia, Malatesta, Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys. Yonder is Sta. Agata, the village to which Guidobaldo fled by night when Valentino drove him from his dukedom. A little farther towers Carpegna, where one branch of the Montefeltro house maintained a countship through seven centuries, and only sold their fief to Rome in 1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind, Pietra Rubia in front: two other eagles' nests of the same brood. What a road it is! It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by _détour_ and zigzag. But here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far worse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc and nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that only Dante's words describe the journey:-- Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli, Montasi su Bismantova in cacume Con esso i piè; ma qui convien ch' uom voli. Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and down these rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with the brave spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's help of hand and voice at need. We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and the Adriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine; winding round ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line high above their grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaign girdling their bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for the blue lights across the distance, and the ever-present sea, these earthy Apennines would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil of spring-tide greenery on field and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had to be forded. Through one of these, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led the way. The horses waded to their bellies in the tawny water. Then more hills and vales; green nooks with rippling corn-crops; secular oaks attired in golden leafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the voices of a thousand larks overhead. The whole world seemed quivering with light and delicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind turned irresistibly to thoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often has this intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni, by Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its _contadini_ are robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. No wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and Milan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud. Yet they are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose habits of life, for the rest, much resemble theirs. The villages, there as here, are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the folk descend to till the ground and reap the harvest. But the southern _brusquerie_ and brutality are absent from this district. The men have something of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own huge oxen. As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves to southward. The Monte d'Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria hove into sight. At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above the neighbouring ridge, a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line. Urbino stood before us. Our long day's march was at an end. The sunset was almost spent, and a four days' moon hung above the western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is a fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some castle reared by Atlante's magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or palace sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn. Where shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed battlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies, suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses? This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or more exactly with Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within a few years Charles VIII.'s holiday excursion would reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a century to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting for her cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de' Medici was still alive. The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were settling into dynasties. It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino. One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself the qualities which mark that period of transition. And these he impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediæval fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the just embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of the 'Orlando Innamorato.' By comparing it with the castle of the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place it in its right position between mediæval and Renaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain. The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give the building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed _loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess's apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria. A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his 'Cortegiano.' To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them exclaimed, 'The day has broken!' 'He pointed to the light which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the borderlands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds.' II The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfth century. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in 1160. Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise an undefined authority over the district, which they afterwards converted into a duchy. But, though Ghibelline for several generations, the Montefeltri were too near neighbours of the Papal power to free themselves from ecclesiastical vassalage. Therefore in 1216 they sought and obtained the title of Vicars of the Church. Urbino acknowledged them as semi-despots in their double capacity of Imperial and Papal deputies. Cagli and Gubbio followed in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth, Castel Durante was acquired from the Brancaleoni by warfare, and Fossombrone from the Malatestas by purchase. Numerous fiefs and villages fell into their hands upon the borders of Rimini in the course of a continued struggle with the House of Malatesta: and when Fano and Pesaro were added at the opening of the sixteenth century, the domain over which they ruled was a compact territory, some forty miles square, between the Adriatic and the Apennines. From the close of the thirteenth century they bore the title of Counts of Urbino. The famous Conte Guido, whom Dante placed among the fraudulent in hell, supported the honours of the house and increased its power by his political action, at this epoch. But it was not until the year 1443 that the Montefeltri acquired their ducal title. This was conferred by Eugenius IV. upon Oddantonio, over whose alleged crimes and indubitable assassination a veil of mystery still hangs. He was the son of Count Guidantonio, and at his death the Montefeltri of Urbino were extinct in the legitimate line. A natural son of Guidantonio had been, however, recognised in his father's lifetime, and married to Gentile, heiress of Mercatello. This was Federigo, a youth of great promise, who succeeded his half-brother in 1444 as Count of Urbino. It was not until 1474 that the ducal title was revived for him. Duke Frederick was a prince remarkable among Italian despots for private virtues and sober use of his hereditary power. He spent his youth at Mantua, in that famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, where the sons and daughters of the first Italian nobility received a model education in humanities, good manners, and gentle physical accomplishments. More than any of his fellow-students Frederick profited by this rare scholar's discipline. On leaving school he adopted the profession of arms, as it was then practised, and joined the troop of the Condottiere Niccolò Piccinino. Young men of his own rank, especially the younger sons and bastards of ruling families, sought military service under captains of adventure. If they succeeded they were sure to make money. The coffers of the Church and the republics lay open to their not too scrupulous hands; the wealth of Milan and Naples was squandered on them in retaining-fees and salaries for active service. There was always the further possibility of placing a coronet upon their brows before they died, if haply they should wrest a town from their employers, or obtain the cession of a province from a needy Pope. The neighbours of the Montefeltri in Umbria, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona were all of them Condottieri. Malatestas of Rimini and Pesaro, Vitelli of Città di Castello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of Perugia, to mention only a few of the most eminent nobles, enrolled themselves under the banners of plebeian adventurers like Piccinino and Sforza Attendolo. Though their family connections gave them a certain advantage, the system was essentially democratic. Gattamelata and Carmagnola sprang from obscurity by personal address and courage to the command of armies. Colleoni fought his way up from the grooms to princely station and the _bâton_ of S. Mark. Francesco Sforza, whose father had begun life as a tiller of the soil, seized the ducal crown of Milan, and founded a house which ranked among the first in Europe. It is not needful to follow Duke Frederick in his military career. We may briefly remark that when he succeeded to Urbino by his brother's death in 1444, he undertook generalship on a grand scale. His own dominions supplied him with some of the best troops in Italy. He was careful to secure the goodwill of his subjects by attending personally to their interests, relieving them of imposts, and executing equal justice. He gained the then unique reputation of an honest prince, paternally disposed toward his dependents. Men flocked to his standards willingly, and he was able to bring an important contingent into any army. These advantages secured for him alliances with Francesco Sforza, and brought him successively into connection with Milan, Venice, Florence, the Church of Naples. As a tactician in the field he held high rank among the generals of the age, and so considerable were his engagements that he acquired great wealth in the exercise of his profession. We find him at one time receiving 8000 ducats a month as war-pay from Naples, with a peace pension of 6000. While Captain-General of the League, he drew for his own use in war 45,000 ducats of annual pay. Retaining-fees and pensions in the name of past services swelled his income, the exact extent of which has not, so far as I am aware, been estimated, but which must have made him one of the richest of Italian princes. All this wealth he spent upon his duchy, fortifying and beautifying its cities, drawing youths of promise to his court, maintaining a great train of life, and keeping his vassals in good-humour by the lightness of a rule which contrasted favourably with the exactions of needier despots. While fighting for the masters who offered him _condotta_ in the complicated wars of Italy, Duke Frederick used his arms, when occasion served, in his own quarrels. Many years of his life were spent in a prolonged struggle with his neighbour Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatal error of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church, and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist. Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of this long desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradual aggrandisement and consolidation for the Montefeltrian duchy. In 1459 Duke Frederick married his second wife, Battista, daughter of Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Their portraits, painted by Piero della Francesca, are to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Some years earlier, Frederick lost his right eye and had the bridge of his nose broken in a jousting match outside the town-gate of Urbino. After this accident, he preferred to be represented in profile--the profile so well known to students of Italian art on medals and basreliefs. It was not without medical aid and vows fulfilled by a mother's self-sacrifice to death, if we may trust the diarists of Urbino, that the ducal couple got an heir. In 1472, however, a son was born to them, whom they christened Guido Paolo Ubaldo. He proved a youth of excellent parts and noble nature--apt at study, perfect in all chivalrous accomplishments. But he inherited some fatal physical debility, and his life was marred with a constitutional disease, which then received the name of gout, and which deprived him of the free use of his limbs. After his father's death in 1482, Naples, Florence, and Milan continued Frederick's war engagements to Guidobaldo. The prince was but a boy of ten. Therefore these important _condotte_ must be regarded as compliments and pledges for the future. They prove to what a pitch Duke Frederick had raised the credit of his state and war establishment. Seven years later, Guidobaldo married Elisabetta, daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. This union, though a happy one, was never blessed with children; and in the certainty of barrenness, the young Duke thought it prudent to adopt a nephew as heir to his dominions. He had several sisters, one of whom, Giovanna, had been married to a nephew of Sixtus IV., Giovanni della Rovere, Lord of Sinigaglia and Prefect of Rome. They had a son, Francesco Maria, who, after his adoption by Guidobaldo, spent his boyhood at Urbino. The last years of the fifteenth century were marked by the sudden rise of Cesare Borgia to a power which threatened the liberties of Italy. Acting as General for the Church, he carried his arms against the petty tyrants of Romagna, whom he dispossessed and extirpated. His next move was upon Camerino and Urbino. He first acquired Camerino, having lulled Guidobaldo into false security by treacherous professions of goodwill. Suddenly the Duke received intelligence that the Borgia was marching on him over Cagli. This was in the middle of June 1502. It is difficult to comprehend the state of weakness in which Guidobaldo was surprised, or the panic which then seized him. He made no efforts to rouse his subjects to resistance, but fled by night with his nephew through rough mountain roads, leaving his capital and palace to the marauder. Cesare Borgia took possession without striking a blow, and removed the treasures of Urbino to the Vatican. His occupation of the duchy was not undisturbed, however; for the people rose in several places against him, proving that Guidobaldo had yielded too hastily to alarm. By this time the fugitive was safe in Mantua, whence he returned, and for a short time succeeded in establishing himself again at Urbino. But he could not hold his own against the Borgias, and in December, by a treaty, he resigned his claims and retired to Venice, where he lived upon the bounty of S. Mark. It must be said, in justice to the Duke, that his constitutional debility rendered him unfit for active operations in the field. Perhaps he could not have done better than thus to bend beneath the storm. The sudden death of Alexander VI. and the election of a Della Rovere to the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo's prospects. Julius II. was the sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino's heir. It was therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace on the hill, and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had so recently been ousted. The rest of his life was spent in the retirement of his court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy. The ill-health which debarred him from the active pleasures and employments of his station, was borne with uniform sweetness of temper and philosophy. When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino the resort of men-at-arms and captains. He was a prince of very violent temper: of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkable examples. He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in the streets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino; and in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a blow of his fist. When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted Francesco Maria's character and conduct in dark colours. At the same time this Duke of Urbino passed for one of the first generals of the age. The greatest stain upon his memory is his behaviour in the year 1527, when, by dilatory conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, he suffered the passage of Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve Rome from the horrors of the sack. He was the last Italian Condottiere of the antique type; and the vices which Machiavelli exposed in that bad system of mercenary warfare were illustrated on these occasions. During his lifetime, the conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles V.'s imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased to have any meaning. Strozzi and Farnesi, who afterwards followed this profession, enlisted in the ranks of France or Spain, and won their laurels in Northern Europe. While Leo X. held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a while wrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo de' Medici. Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage than Guidobaldo had done. Yet he could not successfully resist the power of Rome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517 the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by inheritance. The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Maria reinstated in Urbino after Leo's death in 1522. This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the House of Mantua. Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of the Uffizzi. Of their son, Guidobaldo II., little need be said. He was twice married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance of Camerino; secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma. Guidobaldo spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with his subjects, whom he treated badly, attempting to draw from their pockets the wealth which his father and the Montefeltri had won in military service. He intervened at an awkward period of Italian politics. The old Italy of despots, commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which his predecessors played substantial parts, was at an end. The new Italy of Popes and Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape. Between these epochs, Guidobaldo II., of whom we have a dim and hazy presentation on the page of history, seems somehow to have fallen flat. As a sign of altered circumstances, he removed his court to Pesaro, and built the great palace of the Della Roveres upon the public square. Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son, Francesco Maria II., whose life and character illustrate the new age which had begun for Italy. He was educated in Spain at the court of Philip II., where he spent more than two years. When he returned, his Spanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, and superstitious piety attracted observation. The violent temper of the Della Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. displayed in acts of homicide, and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio, took the form of sullenness in the last Duke. The finest episode in his life was the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under his old comrade, Don John of Austria. His father forced him to an uncongenial marriage with Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. She left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure with philosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as something to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of his impoverished dominions. He became that curious creature, a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult of self, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy circumstances. He married, for the second time, a lady, Livia della Rovere, who belonged to his own family, but had been born in private station. She brought him one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo. This youth might have sustained the ducal honours of Urbino, but for his sage-saint father's want of wisdom. The boy was a spoiled child in infancy. Inflated with Spanish vanity from the cradle, taught to regard his subjects as dependents on a despot's will, abandoned to the caprices of his own ungovernable temper, without substantial aid from the paternal piety or stoicism, he rapidly became a most intolerable princeling. His father married him, while yet a boy, to Claudia de' Medici, and virtually abdicated in his favour. Left to his own devices, Federigo chose companions from the troupes of players whom he drew from Venice. He filled his palaces with harlots, and degraded himself upon the stage in parts of mean buffoonery. The resources of the duchy were racked to support these parasites. Spanish rules of etiquette and ceremony were outraged by their orgies. His bride brought him one daughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Then in the midst of his low dissipation and offences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at the early age of eighteen--the victim, in the severe judgment of history, of his father's selfishness and want of practical ability. This happened in 1623. Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow. His withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A powerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this juncture pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino devolved his lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formal act of abdication seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his duchy to the Papal States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to the bounds of Venice on the Po. III Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian; and the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like the Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserves each cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness and the sharpness of a crystal. When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither the waxiness of Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and it resists weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This may be observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been long exposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, no less than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it to decoration in low relief. The most attractive details in the palace at Urbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of early Renaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli Angeli deserves especial comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with gilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground of ultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engraved with children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnations on the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at each end, hold lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is carved with two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of the Montefeltri on a raised medallion. Throughout the palace we notice emblems appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere: their arms, three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperial eagle, granted when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: the Garter of England, worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: the ermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or cupping-glass, adopted for a private badge by Frederick: the golden oak-tree on an azure field of Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent beneath a block of stone, with its accompanying motto, _Inclinata Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profile medallions of Federigo and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible relief, adorn the staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a frieze of military engines and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements of war, alluding to Duke Frederick's profession of Condottiere. The doorways are enriched with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus foliage, honeysuckles, ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in all the riot of Renaissance fancy. This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains to show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that 'in the opinion of many it is the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace than a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use, vessels of silver, and trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk, and suchlike furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze and marble statues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of all sorts. There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent quality to be seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast cost a large number of the best and rarest books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them the chiefest treasure of his spacious palace.' When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino as conqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off loot to the value of 150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a million sterling. Vespasiano, the Florentine bookseller, has left us a minute account of the formation of the famous library of manuscripts, which he valued at considerably over 30,000 ducats. Yet wandering now through these deserted halls, we seek in vain for furniture or tapestry or works of art. The books have been removed to Rome. The pictures are gone, no man knows whither. The plate has long been melted down. The instruments of music are broken. If frescoes adorned the corridors, they have been whitewashed; the ladies' chambers have been stripped of their rich arras. Only here and there we find a raftered ceiling, painted in fading colours, which, taken with the stonework of the chimney, and some fragments of inlaid panel-work on door or window, enables us to reconstruct the former richness of these princely rooms. Exception must be made in favour of two apartments between the towers upon the southern facade. These were apparently the private rooms of the Duke and Duchess, and they are still approached by a great winding staircase in one of the _torricini_. Adorned in indestructible or irremovable materials, they retain some traces of their ancient splendour. On the first floor, opening on the vaulted loggia, we find a little chapel encrusted with lovely work in stucco and marble; friezes of bulls, sphinxes, sea-horses, and foliage; with a low relief of Madonna and Child in the manner of Mino da Fiesole. Close by is a small study with inscriptions to the Muses and Apollo. The cabinet connecting these two cells has a Latin legend, to say that Religion here dwells near the temple of the liberal arts: Bina vides parvo discrimine juncta sacella, Altera pars Musis altera sacra Deo est. On the floor above, corresponding in position to this apartment, is a second, of even greater interest, since it was arranged by the Duke Frederick for his own retreat. The study is panelled in tarsia of beautiful design and execution. Three of the larger compartments show Faith, Hope, and Charity; figures not unworthy of a Botticelli or a Filippino Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on a smaller scale by armour, _bâtons_ of command, scientific instruments, lutes, viols, and books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently to indicate his favourite authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his state robes, occupies a fourth great panel; and the whole of this elaborate composition is harmonised by emblems, badges, and occasional devices of birds, articles of furniture, and so forth. The tarsia, or inlaid wood of different kinds and colours, is among the best in this kind of art to be found in Italy, though perhaps it hardly deserves to rank with the celebrated choir-stalls of Bergamo and Monte Oliveto. Hard by is a chapel, adorned, like the lower one, with excellent reliefs. The loggia to which these rooms have access looks across the Apennines, and down on what was once a private garden. It is now enclosed and paved for the exercise of prisoners who are confined in one part of the desecrated palace! A portion of the pile is devoted to more worthy purposes; for the Academy of Raphael here holds its sittings, and preserves a collection of curiosities and books illustrative of the great painter's life and works. They have recently placed in a tiny oratory, scooped by Guidobaldo II. from the thickness of the wall, a cast of Raphael's skull, which will be studied with interest and veneration. It has the fineness of modelling combined with shapeliness of form and smallness of scale which is said to have characterised Mozart and Shelley. The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here? It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards with their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where Bibbiena's witticisms and Fra Serafino's pranks raised smiles on courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, 'the Unique,' declaimed his verses to applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from the dais tore the Montefeltri's throne, and from the arras stripped their ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria's wedding-feast, and read 'Aminta' to Lucrezia d'Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena's 'Calandria' and Caetiglione's 'Tirsi,' with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not where, Giuliano de' Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor's poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III., self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms. Death takes a stronger hold on us than bygone life. Therefore, returning to the vast Throne-room, we animate it with one scene it witnessed on an April night in 1508. Duke Guidobaldo had died at Fossombrone, repeating to his friends around his bed these lines of Virgil: Me circum limus niger et deformis arundo Cocyti tardaque palus inamabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styx interfusa coercet. His body had been carried on the shoulders of servants through those mountain ways at night, amid the lamentations of gathering multitudes and the baying of dogs from hill-set farms alarmed by flaring flambeaux. Now it is laid in state in the great hall. The dais and the throne are draped in black. The arms and _bâtons_ of his father hang about the doorways. His own ensigns are displayed in groups and trophies, with the banners of S. Mark, the Montefeltrian eagle, and the cross keys of S. Peter. The hall itself is vacant, save for the high-reared catafalque of sable velvet and gold damask, surrounded with wax candles burning steadily. Round it passes a ceaseless stream of people, coming and going, gazing at their Duke. He is attired in crimson hose and doublet of black damask. Black velvet slippers are on his feet, and his ducal cap is of black velvet. The mantle of the Garter, made of dark-blue Alexandrine velvet, hooded with crimson, lined with white silk damask, and embroidered with the badge, drapes the stiff sleeping form. It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling round it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and the life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior into harmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted balconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye, and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Once more imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware upon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement paced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--that pavement where Monsignor Bombo courted 'dear dead women' with Platonic phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuce culled from Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnest converse. They lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble of the balustrade, he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is Giannandrea, broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo's favourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome's Prefect, widow of Venanzio Varano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse a tale will hang of woman's frailty and man's boldness--Camerino's Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor's stalwart charms. And more will follow, when that lady's brother, furious Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten palace rooms with twenty poignard strokes 'twixt waist and throat, and their Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet's _coltellata_ through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that same loggia Rome's warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all Urbino's chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in Raphael's picture. His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber, and to watch the line of lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror, to Rome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bald man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved in purest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant's round of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean-brained superstition. He drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of the Church reverts Urbino's lordship, and even now he meditates the terms of devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See. A farewell to these memories of Urbino's dukedom should be taken in the crypt of the cathedral, where Francesco Maria II., the last Duke, buried his only son and all his temporal hopes. The place is scarcely solemn. Its dreary _barocco_ emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky _Pietà_ by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up and crowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this late Renaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni's hectic piety yet overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct race here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from the sepulchral vault into the air of day. Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us at the inn. His horses, sleek, well fed, and rested, toss their heads impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and are halfway on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whirr of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There is just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand bareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement. From the shadowy past we drive into the world of human things, for ever changefully unchanged, unrestfully the same. This interchange between dead memories and present life is the delight of travel. * * * * * _VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI_ AND THE TRAGEDY OF WEBSTER I During the pontificate of Gregory XIII. (1572-85), Papal authority in Rome reached its lowest point of weakness, and the ancient splendour of the Papal court was well-nigh eclipsed. Art and learning had died out. The traditions of the days of Leo, Julius, and Paul III. were forgotten. It seemed as though the genius of the Renaissance had migrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed to the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment of spiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in Rome returned to mediæval barbarism. The veneer of classical refinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden the natural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City became a den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-ground for senseless party strife, which the weak old man who wore the triple crown was quite unable to control. It is related how a robber chieftain, Marianazzo, refused the offer of a general pardon from the Pope, alleging that the profession of brigand was far more lucrative, and offered greater security of life, than any trade within the walls of Rome. The Campagna, the ruined citadels about the basements of the Sabine and Ciminian hills, the quarters of the aristocracy within the city, swarmed with bravos, who were protected by great nobles and fed by decent citizens for the advantages to be derived from the assistance of abandoned and courageous ruffians. Life, indeed, had become impossible without fixed compact with the powers of lawlessness. There was hardly a family in Rome which did not number some notorious criminal among the outlaws. Murder, sacrilege, the love of adventure, thirst for plunder, poverty, hostility to the ascendant faction of the moment, were common causes of voluntary or involuntary outlawry; nor did public opinion regard a bandit's calling as other than honourable. It may readily be imagined that in such a state of society the grisliest tragedies were common enough in Rome. The history of some of these has been preserved to us in documents digested from public trials and personal observation by contemporary writers. That of the Cenci, in which a notorious act of parricide furnished the plot of a popular novella, is well known. And such a tragedy, even more rife in characteristic incidents, and more distinguished by the quality of its _dramatis personæ_, is that of Vittoria Accoramboni. Vittoria was born in 1557, of a noble but impoverished family, at Gubbio, among the hills of Umbria. Her biographers are rapturous in their praises of her beauty, grace, and exceeding charm of manner. Not only was her person most lovely, but her mind shone at first with all the amiable lustre of a modest, innocent, and winning youth. Her father, Claudio Accoramboni, removed to Rome, where his numerous children were brought up under the care of their mother, Tarquinia, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, bent on rehabilitating the decayed honours of their house. Here Vittoria in early girlhood soon became the fashion. She exercised an irresistible influence over all who saw her, and many were the offers of marriage she refused. At length a suitor appeared whose condition and connection with the Roman ecclesiastical nobility rendered him acceptable in the eyes of the Accoramboni. Francesco Peretti was welcomed as the successful candidate for Vittoria's hand. His mother, Camilla, was sister to Felice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her son, Francesco Mignucci, had changed his surname in compliment to this illustrious relative. The Peretti were of humble origin. The cardinal himself had tended swine in his native village; but, supported by an invincible belief in his own destinies, and gifted with a powerful intellect and determined character, he passed through all grades of the Franciscan Order to its generalship, received the bishoprics of Fermo and S. Agata, and lastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the title of Cardinal Montalto. He was now upon the high way to the Papacy, amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of surrounding factions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but little in the intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent, inoffensive old man. These were his tactics for securing the Papal throne; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he was chosen Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing to accept him as a compromise. When Sixtus V. was once firmly seated on S. Peter's chair, he showed himself in his true colours. An implacable administrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, an iconoclastic foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was to declare a war of extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Rome in his predecessor's rule to anarchy. It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged the greatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni married on the 28th of June 1573. For a short while the young couple lived happily together. According to some accounts of their married life, the bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, who indulged her costly fancies to the full. It is, however, more probable that the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging parsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved in debt. Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the score of a certain levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured that even during the brief space of their union she had proved a faithless wife. Yet she contrived to keep Francesco's confidence, and it is certain that her family profited by their connection with the Peretti. Of her six brothers, Mario, the eldest, was a favourite courtier of the great Cardinal d'Este. Ottavio was in orders, and through Montalto's influence obtained the See of Fossombrone. The same eminent protector placed Scipione in the service of the Cardinal Sforza. Camillo, famous for his beauty and his courage, followed the fortunes of Filibert of Savoy, and died in France. Flaminio was still a boy, dependent, as the sequel of this story shows, upon his sister's destiny. Of Marcello, the second in age and most important in the action of this tragedy, it is needful to speak with more particularity. He was young, and, like the rest of his breed, singularly handsome--so handsome, indeed, that he is said to have gained an infamous ascendency over the great Duke of Bracciano, whose privy chamberlain he had become. Marcello was an outlaw for the murder of Matteo Pallavicino, the brother of the Cardinal of that name. This did not, however, prevent the chief of the Orsini house from making him his favourite and confidential friend. Marcello, who seems to have realised in actual life the worst vices of those Roman courtiers described for us by Aretino, very soon conceived the plan of exalting his own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon the Duke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughty prince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; and meanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and her mother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimes in expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Not only had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the inequality of birth and wealth and station between Vittoria and the Duke of Bracciano rendered a marriage almost impossible. It was also an affair of delicacy to stimulate without satisfying the Duke's passion. Yet Marcello did not despair. The stakes were high enough to justify great risks; and all he put in peril was his sister's honour, the fame of the Accoramboni, and the favour of Montalto. Vittoria, for her part, trusted in her power to ensnare and secure the noble prey both had in view. Paolo Giordano Orsini, born about the year 1537, was reigning Duke of Bracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par with the Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was more illustrious than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of gigantic stature, prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeable in manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, and incapable of self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Upon the habit of his body it is needful to insist, in order that the part he played in this tragedy of intrigue, crime, and passion may be well defined. He found it difficult to procure a charger equal to his weight, and he was so fat that a special dispensation relieved him from the duty of genuflexion in the Papal presence. Though lord of a large territory, yielding princely revenues, he laboured under heavy debts; for no great noble of the period lived more splendidly, with less regard for his finances. In the politics of that age and country, Paolo Giordano leaned toward France. Yet he was a grandee of Spain, and had played a distinguished part in the battle of Lepanto. Now the Duke of Bracciano was a widower. He had been married in 1553 to Isabella de' Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo, sister of Francesco, Bianca Capello's lover, and of the Cardinal Ferdinando. Suspicion of adultery with Troilo Orsini had fallen on Isabella, and her husband, with the full concurrence of her brothers, removed her in 1576 from this world.[7] No one thought the worse of Bracciano for this murder of his wife. In those days of abandoned vice and intricate villany, certain points of honour were maintained with scrupulous fidelity. A wife's adultery was enough to justify the most savage and licentious husband in an act of semi-judicial vengeance; and the shame she brought upon his head was shared by the members of her own house, so that they stood by, consenting to her death. Isabella, it may be said, left one son, Virginio, who became in due time Duke of Bracciano. It appears that in the year 1581, four years after Vittoria's marriage, the Duke of Bracciano had satisfied Marcello of his intention to make her his wife, and of his willingness to countenance Francesco Peretti's murder. Marcello, feeling sure of his game, introduced the Duke in private to his sister, and induced her to overcome any natural repugnance she may have felt for the unwieldy and gross lover. Having reached this point, it was imperative to push matters quickly on toward matrimony. But how should the unfortunate Francesco be entrapped? They caught him in a snare of peculiar atrocity, by working on the kindly feelings which his love for Vittoria had caused him to extend to all the Acooramboni. Marcello, the outlaw, was her favourite brother, and Marcello at that time lay in hiding, under the suspicion of more than ordinary crime, beyond the walls of Rome. Late in the evening of the 18th of April, while the Peretti family were retiring to bed, a messenger from Marcello arrived, entreating Francesco to repair at once to Monte Cavallo. Marcello had affairs of the utmost importance to communicate, and begged his brother-in-law not to fail him at a grievous pinch. The letter containing this request was borne by one Dominico d'Aquaviva, _alias_ Il Mancino, a confederate of Vittoria's waiting-maid. This fellow, like Marcello, was an outlaw; but when he ventured into Rome he frequented Peretti's house, and had made himself familiar with its master as a trusty bravo. Neither in the message, therefore, nor in the messenger was there much to rouse suspicion. The time, indeed, was oddly chosen, and Marcello had never made a similar appeal on any previous occasion. Yet his necessities might surely have obliged him to demand some more than ordinary favour from a brother. Francesco immediately made himself ready to set out, armed only with his sword and attended by a single servant. It was in vain that his wife and his mother reminded him of the dangers of the night, the loneliness of Monte Cavallo, its ruinous palaces and robber-haunted caves. He was resolved to undertake the adventure, and went forth, never to return. As he ascended the hill, he fell to earth, shot with three harquebuses. His body was afterwards found on Monte Cavallo, stabbed through and through, without a trace that could identify the murderers. Only, in the course of subsequent investigations, Il Mancino (on the 24th of February 1582) made the following statements:--That Vittoria's mother, assisted by the waiting woman, had planned the trap; that Marchionne of Gubbio and Paolo Barca of Bracciano, two of the Duke's men, had despatched the victim. Marcello himself, it seems, had come from Bracciano to conduct the whole affair. Suspicion fell immediately upon Vittoria and her kindred, together with the Duke of Bracciano; nor was this diminished when the Accoramboni, fearing the pursuit of justice, took refuge in a villa of the Duke's at Magnanapoli a few days after the murder. A cardinal's nephew, even in those troublous times, was not killed without some noise being made about the matter. Accordingly Pope Gregory XIII. began to take measures for discovering the authors of the crime. Strange to say, however, the Cardinal Montalto, notwithstanding the great love he was known to bear his nephew, begged that the investigation might be dropped. The coolness with which he first received the news of Francesco Peretti's death, the dissimulation with which he met the Pope's expression of sympathy in a full consistory, his reserve in greeting friends on ceremonial visits of condolence, and, more than all, the self-restraint he showed in the presence of the Duke of Bracciano, impressed the society of Rome with the belief that he was of a singularly moderate and patient temper. It was thought that the man who could so tamely submit to his nephew's murder, and suspend the arm of justice when already raised for vengeance, must prove a mild and indulgent ruler. When, therefore, in the fifth year after this event, Montalto was elected Pope, men ascribed his elevation in no small measure to his conduct at the present crisis. Some, indeed, attributed his extraordinary moderation and self-control to the right cause. _'Veramente costui è un gran frate!_' was Gregory's remark at the close of the consistory when Montalto begged him to let the matter of Peretti's murder rest. '_Of a truth, that fellow is a consummate hypocrite!_' How accurate this judgment was, appeared when Sixtus V. assumed the reins of power. The same man who, as monk and cardinal, had smiled on Bracciano, though he knew him to be his nephew's assassin, now, as Pontiff and sovereign, bade the chief of the Orsini purge his palace and dominions of the scoundrels he was wont to harbour, adding significantly, that if Felice Peretti forgave what had been done against him in a private station, he would exact uttermost vengeance for disobedience to the will of Sixtus. The Duke of Bracciano judged it best, after that warning, to withdraw from Rome. Francesco Peretti had been murdered on the 16th of April 1581. Sixtus V. was proclaimed on the 24th of April 1585. In this interval Vittoria underwent a series of extraordinary perils and adventures. First of all, she had been secretly married to the Duke in his gardens of Magnanapoli at the end of April 1581. That is to say, Marcello and she secured their prize, as well as they were able, the moment after Francesco had been removed by murder. But no sooner had the marriage become known, than the Pope, moved by the scandal it created, no less than by the urgent instance of the Orsini and Medici, declared it void. After some while spent in vain resistance, Bracciano submitted, and sent Vittoria back to her father's house. By an order issued under Gregory's own hand, she was next removed to the prison of Corte Savella, thence to the monastery of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, and finally to the Castle of S. Angelo. Here, at the end of December 1581, she was put on trial for the murder of her first husband. In prison she seems to have borne herself bravely, arraying her beautiful person in delicate attire, entertaining visitors, exacting from her friends the honours due to a duchess, and sustaining the frequent examinations to which she was submitted with a bold, proud front. In the middle of the month of July her constancy was sorely tried by the receipt of a letter in the Duke's own handwriting, formally renouncing his marriage. It was only by a lucky accident that she was prevented on this occasion from committing suicide. The Papal court meanwhile kept urging her either to retire to a monastery or to accept another husband. She firmly refused to embrace the religious life, and declared that she was already lawfully united to a living husband, the Duke of Bracciano. It seemed impossible to deal with her; and at last, on the 8th of November, she was released from prison under the condition of retirement to Gubbio. The Duke had lulled his enemies to rest by the pretence of yielding to their wishes. But Marcello was continually beside him at Bracciano, where we read of a mysterious Greek enchantress whom he hired to brew love-philters for the furtherance of his ambitious plots. Whether Bracciano was stimulated by the brother's arguments or by the witch's potions need not be too curiously questioned. But it seems in any case certain that absence inflamed his passion instead of cooling it. Accordingly, in September 1583, under the excuse of a pilgrimage to Loreto, he contrived to meet Vittoria at Trevi, whence he carried her in triumph to Bracciano. Here he openly acknowledged her as his wife, installing her with all the splendour due to a sovereign duchess. On the 10th of October following, he once more performed the marriage ceremony in the principal church of his fief; and in the January of 1584 he brought her openly to Rome. This act of contumacy to the Pope, both as feudal superior and as supreme Pontiff, roused all the former opposition to his marriage. Once more it was declared invalid. Once more the Duke pretended to give way. But at this juncture Gregory died; and while the conclave was sitting for the election of the new Pope, he resolved to take the law into his own hands, and to ratify his union with Vittoria by a third and public marriage in Rome. On the morning of the 24th of April 1585, their nuptials were accordingly once more solemnised in the Orsini palace. Just one hour after the ceremony, as appears from the marriage register, the news arrived of Cardinal Montalto's election to the Papacy, Vittoria lost no time in paying her respects to Camilla, sister of the new Pope, her former mother-in-law. The Duke visited Sixtus V. in state to compliment him on his elevation. But the reception which both received proved that Rome was no safe place for them to live in. They consequently made up their minds for flight. A chronic illness from which Bracciano had lately suffered furnished a sufficient pretext. This seems to have been something of the nature of a cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of raw meat to open sores. Such details are only excusable in the present narrative on the ground that Bracciano's disease considerably affects our moral judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physically tainted, and with her husband's blood upon his hands. At any rate, the Duke's _lupa_ justified his trying what change of air, together with the sulphur waters of Abano, would do for him. The Duke and Duchess arrived in safety at Venice, where they had engaged the Dandolo palace on the Zuecca. There they only stayed a few days, removing to Padua, where they had hired palaces of the Foscari in the Arena and a house called De' Cavalli. At Salò, also, on the Lake of Garda, they provided themselves with fit dwellings for their princely state and their large retinues, intending to divide their time between the pleasures which the capital of luxury afforded and the simpler enjoyments of the most beautiful of the Italian lakes. But _la gioia dei profani è un fumo passaggier_. Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, died suddenly at Salò on the 10th of November 1585, leaving the young and beautiful Vittoria helpless among enemies. What was the cause of his death? It is not possible to give a clear and certain answer. We have seen that he suffered from a horrible and voracious disease, which after his removal from Rome seems to have made progress. Yet though this malady may well have cut his life short, suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quite unreasonable. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsini family were all interested in his death. Anyhow, he had time to make a will in Vittoria's favour, leaving her large sums of money, jewels, goods, and houses--enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity with splendour. His hereditary fiefs and honours passed by right to his only son, Virginio. Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court of Bracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joined by Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini. Lodovico Orsini assumed the duty of settling Vittoria's affairs under her dead husband's will. In life he had been the Duke's ally as well as relative. His family pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him an ignoble, as it was certainly an unequal, marriage. He now showed himself the relentless enemy of the Duchess. Disputes arose between them as to certain details, which seem to have been legally decided in the widow's favour. On the night of the 22nd of December, however, forty men disguised in black and fantastically tricked out to elude detection, surrounded her palace. Through the long galleries and chambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing torches, in search of Vittoria and her brothers. Marcello escaped, having fled the house under suspicion of the murder of one of his own followers. Flaminio, the innocent and young, was playing on his lute and singing _Miserere_ in the great hall of the palace. The murderers surprised him with a shot from one of their harquebuses. He ran, wounded in the shoulder, to his sister's room. She, it is said, was telling her beads before retiring for the night. When three of the assassins entered, she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed her in the left breast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking her with savage insults if her heart was pierced. Her last words were, 'Jesus, I pardon you.' Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him pierced with seventy-four stiletto wounds. The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria and Flaminio, and sent at once for further instructions to Venice. Meanwhile it appears that both corpses were laid out in one open coffin for the people to contemplate. The palace and the church of the Eremitani, to which they had been removed, were crowded all through the following day with a vast concourse of the Paduans. Vittoria's wonderful dead body, pale yet sweet to look upon, the golden hair flowing around her marble shoulders, the red wound in her breast uncovered, the stately limbs arrayed in satin as she died, maddened the populace with its surpassing loveliness. '_Dentibus fremebant_,' says the chronicler, when they beheld that gracious lady stiff in death. And of a truth, if her corpse was actually exposed in the chapel of the Eremitani, as we have some right to assume, the spectacle must have been impressive. Those grim gaunt frescoes of Mantegna looked down on her as she lay stretched upon her bier, solemn and calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful as though in life. No wonder that the folk forgot her first husband's murder, her less than comely marriage to the second. It was enough for them that this flower of surpassing loveliness had been cropped by villains in its bloom. Gathering in knots around the torches placed beside the corpse, they vowed vengeance against the Orsini; for suspicion, not unnaturally, fell on Prince Lodovico. The Prince was arrested and interrogated before the court of Padua. He entered their hall attended by forty armed men, responded haughtily to their questions, and demanded free passage for his courier to Virginio Orsini, then at Florence. To this demand the court acceded; but the precaution of way-laying the courier and searching his person was very wisely taken. Besides some formal dispatches which announced Vittoria's assassination, they found in this man's boot a compromising letter, declaring Virginio a party to the crime, and asserting that Lodovico had with his own poignard killed their victim. Padua placed itself in a state of defence, and prepared to besiege the palace of Prince Lodovico, who also got himself in readiness for battle. Engines, culverins, and firebrands were directed against the barricades which he had raised. The militia was called out and the Brenta was strongly guarded. Meanwhile the Senate of S. Mark had dispatched the Avogadore, Aloisio Bragadin, with full power to the scene of action. Lodovico Orsini, it may be mentioned, was in their service; and had not this affair intervened, he would in a few weeks have entered on his duties as Governor for Venice of Corfu. The bombardment of Orsini's palace began on Christmas Day. Three of the Prince's men were killed in the first assault; and since the artillery brought to bear upon him threatened speedy ruin to the house and its inhabitants, he made up his mind to surrender. 'The Prince Luigi,' writes one-chronicler of these events, 'walked attired in brown, his poignard at his side, and his cloak slung elegantly under his arm. The weapon being taken from him, he leaned upon a balustrade, and began to trim his nails with a little pair of scissors he happened to find there.' On the 27th he was strangled in prison by order of the Venetian Republic. His body was carried to be buried, according to his own will, in the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice. Two of his followers were hung next day. Fifteen were executed on the following Monday; two of these were quartered alive; one of them, the Conte Paganello, who confessed to having slain Vittoria, had his left side probed with his own cruel dagger. Eight were condemned to the galleys, six to prison, and eleven were acquitted. Thus ended this terrible affair, which brought, it is said, good credit and renown to the lords of Venice through all nations of the civilised world. It only remains to be added that Marcello Accoramboni was surrendered to the Pope's vengeance and beheaded at Ancona, where also his mysterious accomplice, the Greek sorceress, perished. II This story of Vittoria Accoramboni's life and tragic ending is drawn, in its main details, from a narrative published by Henri Beyle in his 'Chroniques et Novelles.'[8] He professes to have translated it literally from a manuscript communicated to him by a nobleman of Mantua; and there are strong internal evidences of the truth of this assertion. Such compositions are frequent in Italian libraries, nor is it rare for one of them to pass into the common market--as Mr. Browning's famous purchase of the tale on which he based his 'Ring and the Book' sufficiently proves. These pamphlets were produced, in the first instance, to gratify the curiosity of the educated public in an age which had no newspapers, and also to preserve the memory of famous trials. How far the strict truth was represented, or whether, as in the case of Beatrice Cenci, the pathetic aspect of the tragedy was unduly dwelt on, depended, of course, upon the mental bias of the scribe, upon his opportunities of obtaining exact information, and upon the taste of the audience for whom he wrote. Therefore, in treating such documents as historical data, we must be upon our guard. Professor Gnoli, who has recently investigated the whole of Vittoria's eventful story by the light of contemporary documents, informs us that several narratives exist in manuscript, all dealing more or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of these was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset, printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our own dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which he gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we do not know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted with the history. He has changed some of the names and redistributed some of the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for example, becomes Camillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of Tarquinia, is so far from abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing her daughter's shame, that she acts the _rôle_ of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and not Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the Moorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, and the Greek sorceress who so mysteriously dogged Marcello's footsteps to the death. The suspicion of Bracciano's murder is used to introduce a quaint episode of Italian poisoning. Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess Isabella, sister to Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, should be murdered at the same time as her own husband, Camillo. Brachiano is struck by this plan, and with the help of Vittoria's brother, Flamineo, he puts it at once into execution. Flamineo hires a doctor who poisons Brachiano's portrait, so that Isabella dies after kissing it. He also with his own hands twists Camillo's neck during a vaulting-match, making it appear that he came by his death accidentally. Suspicion of the murder attaches, however, to Vittoria. She is tried for her life before Monticelso and De' Medici; acquitted, and relegated to a house of Convertites or female reformatory. Brachiano, on the accession of Monticelso to the Papal throne, resolves to leave Rome with Vittoria. They escape, together with her mother Cornelia, and her brothers Flamineo and Marcello, to Padua; and it is here that the last scenes of the tragedy are laid. The use Webster made of Lodovico Orsini deserves particular attention. He introduces this personage in the very first scene as a spendthrift, who, having run through his fortune, has been outlawed. Count Lodovico, as he is always called, has no relationship with the Orsini, but is attached to the service of Francesco de' Medici, and is an old lover of the Duchess Isabella. When, therefore, the Grand Duke meditates vengeance on Brachiano, he finds a fitting instrument in the desperate Lodovico. Together, in disguise, they repair to Padua. Lodovico poisons the Duke of Brachiano's helmet, and has the satisfaction of ending his last struggles by the halter. Afterwards, with companions, habited as a masquer, he enters Vittoria's palace and puts her to death together with her brother Flamineo. Just when the deed of vengeance has been completed, young Giovanni Orsini, heir of Brachiano, enters and orders the summary execution of Lodovico for this deed of violence. Webster's invention in this plot is confined to the fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo, and Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo, with the further consequence of Cornelia's madness and death. He has heightened our interest in Isabella, at the expense of Brachiano's character, by making her an innocent and loving wife instead of an adulteress. He has ascribed different motives from the real ones to Lodovico in order to bring this personage into rank with the chief actors, though this has been achieved with only moderate success. Vittoria is abandoned to the darkest interpretation. She is a woman who rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess of her husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother, Flamineo, becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst human infamies--a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by turns. Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder his own brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, it should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother of the Accoramboni, is a dignified character, pathetic in her suffering. Webster, it may be added, treats the Cardinal Monticelso as allied in some special way to the Medici. Yet certain traits in his character, especially his avoidance of bloodshed and the tameness of his temper after Camillo has been murdered, seem to have been studied from the historical Sixtus. III The character of the 'White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' is perhaps the most masterly creation of Webster's genius. Though her history is a true one in its leading incidents, the poet, while portraying a real personage, has conceived an original individuality. It is impossible to know for certain how far the actual Vittoria was guilty of her first husband's murder. Her personality fails to detach itself from the romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster, with true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and delineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible nature. Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows ambition as the loadstar of her life. It is the ambition to reign as Duchess, far more than any passion for a paramour, which makes her plot Camillo's and Isabella's murders, and throws her before marriage into Brachiano's arms. Added to this ambition, she is possessed with the cold demon of her own imperial and victorious beauty. She has the courage of her criminality in the fullest sense; and much of the fascination with which Webster has invested her, depends upon her dreadful daring. Her portrait is drawn with full and firm touches. Although she appears but five times on the scene, she fills it from the first line of the drama to the last. Each appearance adds effectively to the total impression. We see her first during a criminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her brother Flamineo. The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene; Vittoria suggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover should compass the deaths of his duchess and her husband. The dream is told with deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness. The cruel sneer at its conclusion, murmured by a voluptuous woman in the ears of an impassioned paramour, chills us with the sense of concentrated vice. Her next appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband's murder. The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed by critics. Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on the protection of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to plead innocence or to rebut charges. She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant, on guard; flinging the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick to seize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting her guiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strength of lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout with the intolerable lustre of some baleful planet. When she enters for the third time, it is to quarrel with her paramour. He has been stung to jealousy by a feigned love-letter. She knows that she has given him no cause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage. Therefore she resolves to make his mistake the instrument of her exaltation. Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling reproaches at him for her own dishonour and the murder of his wife, working herself by studied degrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage, she flings herself upon the bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and tramples on him, till she has brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled, fascinated, to her feet. Then she gradually relents beneath his passionate protestations and repeated promises of marriage. At this point she speaks but little. We only feel her melting humour in the air, and long to see the scene played by such an actress as Madame Bernhardt. When Vittoria next appears, it is as Duchess by the deathbed of the Duke, her husband. Her attendance here is necessary, but it contributes little to the development of her character. We have learned to know her, and expect neither womanish tears nor signs of affection at a crisis which touches her heart less than her self-love. Webster, among his other excellent qualities, knew how to support character by reticence. Vittoria's silence in this act is significant; and when she retires exclaiming, 'O me! this place is hell!' we know that it is the outcry, not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one who sees the fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident. The last scene of the play is devoted to Vittoria. It begins with a notable altercation between her and Flamineo. She calls him 'ruffian' and 'villain,' refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel emerges in one of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignant situation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols. He affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide. She humours him, but manages to get the first shot. Flamineo falls, wounded apparently to death. Then Vittoria turns and tramples on him with her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with the enumeration of his crimes. Her malice and her energy are equally infernal. Soon, however, it appears that the whole device was but a trick of Flamineo's to test his sister. The pistol was not loaded. He now produces a pair which are properly charged, and proceeds in good earnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a trenchant truth to nature: _You_ my death's-man! Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough, Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman: If thou be, do thy office in right form; Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness! * * * * * I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me. * * * * * Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors: I'll meet thy weapon half-way. * * * * * 'Twas a manly blow! The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant; And then thou wilt be famous. So firmly has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, that we seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as the leprosy, dazzling as the lightning,' to use a phrase of her enthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in some portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into snakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, bright cheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been chafed by jewelled chains, a flush of rose. She is luxurious, but not so abandoned to the pleasures of the sense as to forget the purpose of her will and brain. Crime and peril add zest to her enjoyment. When arraigned in open court before the judgment-seat of deadly and unscrupulous foes, she conceals the consciousness of guilt, and stands erect, with fierce front, unabashed, relying on the splendour of her irresistible beauty and the subtlety of her piercing wit. Chafing with rage, the blood mounts and adds a lustre to her cheek. It is no flush of modesty, but of rebellious indignation. The Cardinal, who hates her, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him, hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spiteful eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satins that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts: Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have bespoke my mourning. She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with a stinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convertites: _V.C_. A house of Convertites! what's that? _M_. A house of penitent whores. _V.C_. Do the noblemen of Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent To lodge there? Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent vixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacity of impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of guilt. Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims whom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. Of Camillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano: And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base shallow grave that was their due. IV It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria's life to a consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents, have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom. Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time. He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a deep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-play of 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with conscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his fame is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward mannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up of these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. The characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct of a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a _tableau vivant_; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of interpenetrative passions. That this mannerism was deliberately chosen, we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model. He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation they now lack for chamber-students. When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when we have disentangled the main characters and circumstances from their adjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendous situations with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that he has studied each word and trait of character, and that he has prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of his tragedies. The sentences which seem at first sight copied from a commonplace book, are found to be appropriate. Brief lightning flashes of acute perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all but unimaginably depraved characters. Sharp unexpected touches evoke humanity in the _fantoccini_ of his wayward art. No dramatist has shown more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain, combined to make men miserable. It has been said of Webster that, feeling himself deficient in the first poetic qualities, he concentrated his powers upon one point, and achieved success by sheer force of self-cultivation. There is perhaps some truth in this. At any rate, his genius was of a narrow and peculiar order, and he knew well how to make the most of its limitations. Yet we must not forget that he felt a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals. The mystery of iniquity had an irresistible attraction for his mind. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds his tragedies are sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorseful death, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home to us. He makes too free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, and so forth. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature saves him, even at his wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists of the _drame sanglant_--Marston, for example--blundered. With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that _Mater Tenebrarum_, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his characters draws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use language of the churchyard: You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat Afore you cut it open. Hideous similes are heaped together in illustration of the commonest circumstances: Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower. When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders. I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting. A soldier is twitted with serving his master: As witches do their serviceable spirits, Even with thy prodigal blood. An adulterous couple get this curse: Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot together. A bravo is asked: Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves, And yet to prosper? It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may fairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according to the grimness of his melancholy, are: Only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruined, yield no echo. O this gloomy world! In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness Doth womanish and fearful mankind live! * * * * * We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way please them. * * * * * Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague. A Duchess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the executioner, in this high fantastical oration: Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c. Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in these lyric verses: Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their birth weeping, Their life a general mist of error, Their death a hideous storm of terror. The greatness of the world passes by with all its glory: Vain the ambition of kings, Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind. It would be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; where Webster is writing in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberately terror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination shows itself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work of any other artist, it would inevitably mar the harmony of the picture. A lady, to select one instance, encourages her lover to embrace her at the moment of his happiness. She cries: Sir, be confident! What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir; 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster, Kneels at my husband's tomb. Yet so sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do not feel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to use one of his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like a presentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its conclusion, gather and darken on the wretched victims of his bloody plot. It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct, that Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, 'The White Devil' and 'The Duchess of Malfi,' in Italian annals. Whether he had visited Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing is known about Webster's life. But that he had gazed long and earnestly into the mirror held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age, is certain. Aghast and fascinated by the sins he saw there flaunting in the light of day--sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene, and Howell have insisted with impressive vehemence--Webster discerned in them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing from that contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speak of horrors.' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of the Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He found there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in them. The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty, adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical scepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in the midst of her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star' before the nations; these were the very elements in which the genius of Webster--salamander-like in flame--could live and flourish. Only the incidents of Italian history, or of French history in its Italianated epoch, were capable of supplying him with the proper type of plot. It was in Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such as England for a brief space in the reign of the first Stuart threatened to become, that the well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his characters might have been realised. An audience familiar with Italian novels through Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the Reformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See, outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes of Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgias and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which had conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated by that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such an audience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertook to lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramatic action. But, as the old proverb puts it, 'Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato.' 'An Englishman assuming the Italian habit is a devil in the flesh.' The Italians were depraved, but spiritually feeble. The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage, arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. To the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy, meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened the complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian character of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a Florentine or a Neapolitan. He had not grasped the meaning of the Machiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement from the dread of moral consequence. Not only are his villains stealthy, frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they brood upon their crimes and analyse their motives. In the midst of their audacity they are dogged by dread of coming retribution. At the crisis of their destiny they look back upon their better days with intellectual remorse. In the execution of their bloodiest schemes they groan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and quake before the phantoms of their haunted brains. Thus passion and reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberate atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic genius into one living whole. One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, upon whose part the action of the 'White Devil' depends. He has been bred in arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and of luxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for his advancement. A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts the pander to this great man's lust. He contrives the death of his brother-in-law, suborns a doctor to poison the Duke's wife, and arranges secret meetings between his sister and the paramour who is to make her fortune and his own. His mother appears like a warning Até to prevent her daughter's crime. In his rage he cries: What fury raised _thee_ up? Away, away! And when she pleads the honour of their house he answers: Shall I, Having a path so open and so free To my preferment, still retain your milk In my pale forehead? Later on, when it is necessary to remove another victim, he runs his own brother through the body and drives his mother to madness. Yet, in the midst of these crimes, we are unable to regard him as a simple cut-throat. His irony and reckless courting of damnation open-eyed to get his gust of life in this world, make him no common villain. He can be brave as well as fierce. When the Duke insults him he bandies taunt for taunt: _Brach_. No, you pander? _Flam_. What, me, my lord? Am I your dog? _B_. A bloodhound; do you brave, do you stand me? _F_. Stand you! let those that have diseases run; I need no plasters. _B_. Would you be kicked? _F_. Would you have your neck broke? I tell you, duke, I am not in Russia; My shins must be kept whole. _B_. Do you know me? _F_. Oh, my lord, methodically: As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils. You're a great duke, I your poor secretary. When the Duke dies and his prey escapes him, the rage of disappointment breaks into this fierce apostrophe: I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths. Will get the speech of him, though forty devils Wait on him in his livery of flames, I'll speak to him and shake him by the hand, Though I be blasted. As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward for which he sold himself, conscience awakes: I have lived Riotously ill, like some that live in court, And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast. The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity, finds utterance in this meditation upon death: Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory! to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius Cæsar making hair-buttons! Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care. At the last moment he yet can say: We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease to die, by dying. And again, with the very yielding of his spirit: My life was a black charnel. It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad. Bosola, in the 'Duchess of Malfi,' is of the same stamp. He too has been a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder,' and on his release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke of Calabria and the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as their intelligencer at the court of their sister. _Bos_. It seems you would create me One of your familiars. _Ferd_. Familiar! what's that? _Bos_. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh, An intelligencer. _Ferd_. Such a kind of thriving thing I would wish thee; and ere long thou may'st arrive At a higher place by it. Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy, tormentor, and at last of executioner. For: Discontent and want Is the best clay to mould a villain of. But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the devil's quilted anvil,' on which 'all sins are fashioned and the blows never heard,' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared with Flamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is more fantastic, his despair more noble. Throughout the course of craft and cruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless taskmaster, his nature, hardened as it is, revolts. At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered Duchess to her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that surpasses almost any other that the English stage can show. The sight, of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipse of reason gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenzied hatred on the accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the price of guilt. Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence of despair and the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderer taunts his master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life is wrecked, who has waded through blood to his reward, and who at the last moment discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculine freedom to be fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst for vengeance convert Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument of retribution. The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to bloody deaths by the hand which they had used to assassinate their sister. It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conception of the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of Flamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. They override the law by violence, or pervert its action to their own advantage: The law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those shall feed him. They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures of their crimes: He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them. In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness: Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But looked to near, have neither heat nor light. Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them: There's but three furies found in spacious hell; But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell. Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts of their own raising: For these many years None of our family dies, but there is seen The shape of an old woman; which is given By tradition to us to have been murdered By her nephews for her riches. Apparitions haunt them: How tedious is a guilty conscience! When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake That seems to strike at me. Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred, preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; the headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry: On pain of death, let no man name death to me; It is a word infinitely horrible. And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes: O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse, Whilst horror waits on princes. After their death, this is their epitaph: These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind'em than should one Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow. Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in execution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avarice take possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash of repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of insanity. He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic, and to be run through the body by his paid assassin. In the Cardinal of Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous, blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of Calabria. It seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of his Italian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In the lawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the godless ecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian society was actually suffering. It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of Webster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch no finer chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he is even more powerful than in that of horror. His mastery in this region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful woman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude, amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the victim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says: Farewell, Cariola! I pray thee look thou givest my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep. In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of madness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comes when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of the flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch of thrilling pathos. The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body of his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back to life again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, already overstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of the grave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of the injured Duchess. Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess. He had to paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in her widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this unequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salient qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy with her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a Duchess; and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low gate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the lines already quoted, that the woman still survives. The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in 'Vittoria Corombona.' But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly to enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty under which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and contorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in the passages I have already quoted--a dialogue which bandies 'O you screech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'--in which a sister's admonition to her brother to think twice of suicide assumes a form so weird as this: I prithee, yet remember, Millions are now in graves, which at last day Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.-- such a dialogue could not be rendered save by actors strung up to a pitch of almost frenzied tension. To do full justice to what in Webster's style would be spasmodic were it not so weighty, and at the same time to maintain the purity of outline and melodious rhythm of such characters as Isabella, demands no common histrionic power. In attempting to define Webster's touch upon Italian tragic story, I have been led perforce to concentrate attention on what is painful and shocking to our sense of harmony in art. He was a vigorous and profoundly imaginative playwright. But his most enthusiastic admirers will hardly contend that good taste or moderation determined the movement of his genius. Nor, though his insight into the essential dreadfulness of Italian tragedy was so deep, is it possible to maintain that his portraiture of Italian life was true to its more superficial aspects. What place would there be for a Correggio or a Raphael in such a world as Webster's? Yet we know that the art of Raphael and Correggio is in exact harmony with the Italian temperament of the same epoch which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and Bianca Gapello. The comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in 'Cymbeline' represents the Italian as he felt and lived, better than the laboured portrait of Flamineo. Webster's Italian tragedies are consequently true, not so much to the actual conditions of Italy, as to the moral impression made by those conditions on a Northern imagination. * * * * * _AUTUMN WANDERINGS_ I.--ITALIAM PETIMUS _Italiam Petimus!_ We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear October morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows with rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them. Men and women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine scythes; and as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost tinkling sound. Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses plunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's Walk, opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up above, shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams had dripped. There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in the high Alps, defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting imperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the crimson of the bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aërial ranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear above their forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges. Then came the row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the deep ravine of Albula--all seen across wide undulating golden swards, close-shaven and awaiting winter. Carnations hung from cottage windows in full bloom, casting sharp angular black shadows on white walls. _Italiam petimus!_ We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following its green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Mühlen. The stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which may literally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden, brown, and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to its lines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that it possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss landscape; but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snow on the heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests of dark pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks beside the lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept repeating to myself _Italiam petimus!_ A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling the lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came in sight of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of them were such nobly built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the landscape faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to their singing, like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with the free grace of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet, with all their beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these Italians of the northern valleys serve the sterner people of the Grisons like negroes, doing their roughest work at scanty wages. So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab, and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down through sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan and autumnal underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--those sharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the Alps exhibit their full stature, their commanding puissance, with such majesty as in the gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there is none to compare with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in abruptness of initiation into the Italian secret. Below Vico Soprano we pass already into the violets and blues of Titian's landscape. Then come the purple boulders among chestnut trees; then the double dolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and Promontogno. It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring this window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just frames it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously planted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow cast upon the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down between black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings of a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape soars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There is a sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is dulled or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep by or slacken. _Italiam petimus!_ _Tangimus Italiam!_ Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian. We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral cloister--white, smoothly curving, well-proportioned loggie, enclosing a green space, whence soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had sunk, but her light still silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna; and the castle rock was flat and black against that dreamy background. Jupiter, who walked so lately for us on the long ridge of the Jacobshorn above our pines, had now an ample space of sky over Lombardy to light his lamp in. Why is it, we asked each other, as we smoked our pipes and strolled, my friend and I;--why is it that Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so untroubled as an Alpine scene? Why do we here desire the flower of some emergent feeling to grow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity to greet us? This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the antique mythop�ic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new, unrealised, unreal, insatiable. II.--OVER THE APENNINES At Parma we slept in the Albergo della Croce Bianca, which is more a bric-à-brac shop than an inn; and slept but badly, for the good folk of Parma twanged guitars and exercised their hoarse male voices all night in the street below. We were glad when Christian called us, at 5 A.M., for an early start across the Apennines. This was the day of a right Roman journey. In thirteen and a half hours, leaving Parma at 6, and arriving in Sarzana at 7.30, we flung ourselves across the spine of Italy, from the plains of Eridanus to the seashore of Etruscan Luna. I had secured a carriage and extra post-horses the night before; therefore we found no obstacles upon the road, but eager drivers, quick relays, obsequious postmasters, change, speed, perpetual movement. The road itself is a noble one, and nobly entertained in all things but accommodation for travellers. At Berceto, near the summit of the pass, we stopped just half an hour, to lunch off a mouldy hen and six eggs; but that was all the halt we made. As we drove out of Parma, striking across the plain to the _ghiara_ of the Taro, the sun rose over the austere autumnal landscape, with its withered vines and crimson haws. Christian, the mountaineer, who at home had never seen the sun rise from a flat horizon, stooped from the box to call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on the plain of Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From the village of Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaiting Charles VIII. upon that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikes suddenly aside, gains a spur of the descending Apennines, and keeps this vantage till the pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings are occasioned by thus adhering to arêtes, but the total result is a gradual ascent with free prospect over plain and mountain. The Apennines, built up upon a smaller scale than the Alps, perplexed in detail and entangled with cross sections and convergent systems, lend themselves to this plan of carrying highroads along their ridges instead of following the valley. What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern watershed is the subtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines. There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vast expanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. And over the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like an ethereal raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimonious green--in the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry and monotonous; for these so finely moulded hills are made up of washed earth, the immemorial wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brown villages, not unlike those of Midland England, low houses built of stone and tiled with stone, and square-towered churches, occur at rare intervals in cultivated hollows, where there are fields and fruit trees. Water is nowhere visible except in the wasteful river-beds. As we rise, we break into a wilder country, forested with oak, where oxen and goats are browsing. The turf is starred with lilac gentian and crocus bells, but sparely. Then comes the highest village, Berceto, with keen Alpine air. After that, broad rolling downs of yellowing grass and russet beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa. The sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect of majesty proportionately greater. From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpment of the Apennine, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steeper angle than the northern. Yet there is no view of the sea. That is excluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley is beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hillsides breaking down into thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of thunder-rain, break down upon the sod. At the foot of this rich forest, wedged in between huge buttresses, we found Pontremoli, and changed our horses here for the last time. It was Sunday, and the little town was alive with country-folk; tall stalwart fellows wearing peacock's feathers in their black slouched hats, and nut-brown maids. From this point the valley of the Magra is exceeding rich with fruit trees, vines, and olives. The tendrils of the vine are yellow now, and in some places hued like generous wine; through their thick leaves the sun shot crimson. In one cool garden, as the day grew dusk, I noticed quince trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates--green spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were many berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber of the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumn even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnuts carpeted with pale pinkling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range, an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble, crystalline in shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from which they were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley to south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and more celestial region. Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges. There was a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance of beauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day. III.--FOSDINOVO The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still in the possession of the Marquis of that name. The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a great ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are still quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main road, we pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may you see just such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is neglected now; the semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green mosses, the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and the rose trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have gone wandering a-riot into country hedges. There is no demarcation between the great man's villa and the neighbouring farms. From this point the path rises, and the barren hillside is a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did the Greeks consecrate these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra complained that her father's tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch; and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory of Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines of Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtle wands: (Greek:) kai prospesôn eklaus' erêmias tuchôn spondas te lusas askon hon pherô xenois espeisa tumbô d'amphethêka mursinas. As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening bay of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina--a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic irony. Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the 'Inferno.' There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies--for this was the Marchesa's pleasaunce; or may have watched through a short summer's night, until he saw that _tremolar della marina_, portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the 'Purgatory.' From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not into the plain where once the _candentia moenia Lunae_ flashed sunrise from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back the southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the Benedictine convent of S. Croce; and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, that Dante, before his projected journey into France, appeared and left the first part of his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the good father's name, received commission to transmit the 'Inferno' to Uguccione della Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact of Dante's visit in a letter which, though its genuineness has been called in question, is far too interesting to be left without allusion. The writer says that on occasion of a journey into lands beyond the Riviera, Dante visited this convent, appearing silent and unknown among the monks. To the Prior's question what he wanted, he gazed upon the brotherhood, and only answered, 'Peace!' Afterwards, in private conversation, he communicated his name and spoke about his poem. A portion of the 'Divine Comedy' composed in the Italian tongue aroused Ilario's wonder, and led him to inquire why his guest had not followed the usual course of learned poets by committing his thoughts to Latin. Dante replied that he had first intended to write in that language, and that he had gone so far as to begin the poem in Virgilian hexameters. Reflection upon the altered conditions of society in that age led him, however, to reconsider the matter; and he was resolved to tune another lyre, 'suited to the sense of modern men.' 'For,' said he, 'it is idle to set solid food before the lips of sucklings.' If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which is unhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet's apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but also an interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first great work of literary art in a distinctly modern language. IV.--LA SPEZZIA While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a halo round the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we had reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to be descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful charms were drawing down the moon with influence malign upon those still resisting billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to its depth, and not as yet the breakers dashed in foam against the moonlight-smitten promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring of wave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissed along the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; a momentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers, subsiding into silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchion and longed for the sea's message. But nothing came to me, and the drowned secret of Shelley's death those waves which were his grave revealed not. Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shudders deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note of time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic influence, how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with each other complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrest within them. A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and saw a boy beside me in a coastguard's uniform. Francesco was on patrol that night; but my English accent soon assured him that I was no _contrabbandiere_, and he too leaned against the stanchion and told me his short story. He was in his nineteenth year, and came from Florence, where his people live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had all the brightness of the Tuscan folk, a sort of innocent malice mixed with _espieglerie_. It was diverting to see the airs he gave himself on the strength of his new military dignity, his gun, and uniform, and night duty on the shore. I could not help humming to myself _Non più andrai_; for Francesco was a sort of Tuscan Cherubino. We talked about picture galleries and libraries in Florence, and I had to hear his favourite passages from the Italian poets. And then there came the plots of Jules Verne's stories and marvellous narrations about _l' uomo cavallo, l' uomo volante, l' uomo pesce_. The last of these personages turned out to be Paolo Boÿnton (so pronounced), who had swam the Arno in his diving dress, passing the several bridges, and when he came to the great weir 'allora tutti stare con bocca aperta.' Meanwhile the storm grew serious, and our conversation changed. Francesco told me about the terrible sun-stricken sand shores of the Riviera, burning in summer noon, over which the coast-guard has to tramp, their perils from falling stones in storm, and the trains that come rushing from those narrow tunnels on the midnight line of march. It is a hard life; and the thirst for adventure which drove this boy--'il più matto di tutta la famiglia'--to adopt it, seems well-nigh quenched. And still, with a return to Giulio Verne, he talked enthusiastically of deserting, of getting on board a merchant ship, and working his way to southern islands where wonders are. A furious blast swept the whole sky for a moment almost clear. The moonlight fell, with racing cloud-shadows, upon sea and hills, the lights of Lerici, the great _fanali_ at the entrance of the gulf, and Francesco's upturned handsome face. Then all again was whirled in mist and foam; one breaker smote the sea wall in a surge of froth, another plunged upon its heels; with inconceivable swiftness came rain; lightning deluged the expanse of surf, and showed the windy trees bent landward by the squall. It was long past midnight now, and the storm was on us for the space of three days. V.--PORTO VENERE For the next three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surf leapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all around were inky black and weary. At night the wild libeccio still rose, with floods of rain and lightning poured upon the waste. I thought of the Florentine patrol. Is he out in it, and where? At last there came a lull. When we rose on the fourth morning, the sky was sulky, spent and sleepy after storm--the air as soft and tepid as boiled milk or steaming flannel. We drove along the shore to Porto Venere, passing the arsenals and dockyards, which have changed the face of Spezzia since Shelley knew it. This side of the gulf is not so rich in vegetation as the other, probably because it lies open to the winds from the Carrara mountains. The chestnuts come down to the shore in many places, bringing with them the wild mountain-side. To make up for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a succession of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There are many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands naval stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the _Smilax Sarsaparilla_) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy thorned leaves. A turn of the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its grey walls flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of one long narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer above the sea. Their doors at the back open on to cliffs which drop about fifty feet upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with mediaeval battlements and shells of chambers suspended midway between earth and sky, runs up the rock behind the town; and this wall is pierced with a deep gateway above which the inn is piled. We had our lunch in a room opening upon the town-gate, adorned with a deep-cut Pisan arch enclosing images and frescoes--a curious episode in a place devoted to the jollity of smugglers and seafaring folk. The whole house was such as Tintoretto loved to paint--huge wooden rafters; open chimneys with pent-house canopies of stone, where the cauldrons hung above logs of chestnut; rude low tables spread with coarse linen embroidered at the edges, and laden with plates of fishes, fruit, quaint glass, big-bellied jugs of earthenware, and flasks of yellow wine. The people of the place were lounging round in lazy attitudes. There were odd nooks and corners everywhere; unexpected staircases with windows slanting through the thickness of the town-wall; pictures of saints; high-zoned serving women, on whose broad shoulders lay big coral beads; smoke-blackened roofs, and balconies that opened on the sea. The house was inexhaustible in motives for pictures. We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys--_diavoli scatenati_--clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly shouting, 'Soldo, soldo!' I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus in Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere annoyance. I shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, with that shrill obligate, 'Soldo, soldo, soldo!' rattling like a dropping fire from lungs of brass. At the end of Porto Venere is a withered and abandoned city, climbing the cliffs of S. Pietro; and on the headland stands the ruined church, built by Pisans with alternate rows of white and black marble, upon the site of an old temple of Venus. This is a modest and pure piece of Gothic architecture, fair in desolation, refined and dignified, and not unworthy in its grace of the dead Cyprian goddess. Through its broken lancets the sea-wind whistles and the vast reaches of the Tyrrhene gulf are seen. Samphire sprouts between the blocks of marble, and in sheltered nooks the caper hangs her beautiful purpureal snowy bloom. The headland is a bold block of white limestone stained with red. It has the pitch of Exmoor stooping to the sea near Lynton. To north, as one looks along the coast, the line is broken by Porto Fino's amethystine promontory; and in the vaporous distance we could trace the Riviera mountains, shadowy and blue. The sea came roaring, rolling in with tawny breakers; but, far out, it sparkled in pure azure, and the cloud-shadows over it were violet. Where Corsica should have been seen, soared banks of fleecy, broad-domed alabaster clouds. This point, once dedicated to Venus, now to Peter--both, be it remembered, fishers of men--is one of the most singular in Europe. The island of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so that outside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrow strait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that our Lady of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she has long been dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For Porto Venere remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx. There is a grotto here, where an inscription tells us that Byron once 'tempted the Ligurian waves.' It is just such a natural sea-cave as might have inspired Euripides when he described the refuge of Orestes in 'Iphigenia.' VI.--LERICI Libeccio at last had swept the sky clear. The gulf was ridged with foam-fleeced breakers, and the water churned into green, tawny wastes. But overhead there flew the softest clouds, all silvery, dispersed in flocks. It is the day for pilgrimage to what was Shelley's home. After following the shore a little way, the road to Lerici breaks into the low hills which part La Spezzia from Sarzana. The soil is red, and overgrown with arbutus and pinaster, like the country around Cannes. Through the scattered trees it winds gently upwards, with frequent views across the gulf, and then descends into a land rich with olives--a genuine Riviera landscape, where the mountain-slopes are hoary, and spikelets of innumerable light-flashing leaves twinkle against a blue sea, misty-deep. The walls here are not unfrequently adorned with basreliefs of Carrara marble--saints and madonnas very delicately wrought, as though they were love-labours of sculptors who had passed a summer on this shore. San Terenzio is soon discovered low upon the sands to the right, nestling under little cliffs; and then the high-built castle of Lerici comes in sight, looking across, the bay to Porto Venere--one Aphrodite calling to the other, with the foam between. The village is piled around its cove with tall and picturesquely coloured houses; the molo and the fishing-boats lie just beneath the castle. There is one point of the descending carriage road where all this gracefulness is seen, framed by the boughs of olive branches, swaying, wind-ruffled, laughing the many-twinkling smiles of ocean back from their grey leaves. Here _Erycina ridens_ is at home. And, as we stayed to dwell upon the beauty of the scene, came women from the bay below--barefooted, straight as willow wands, with burnished copper bowls upon their heads. These women have the port of goddesses, deep-bosomed, with the length of thigh and springing ankles that betoken strength no less than elasticity and grace. The hair of some of them was golden, rippling in little curls around brown brows and glowing eyes. Pale lilac blent with orange on their dress, and coral beads hung from their ears. At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers. Christian now felt the movement of the sea for the first time. This was rather a rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as it seemed, at will with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves to reach the shore. Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the Casa Magni. It is not at Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the south side of the village. Looking across the bay from the molo, one could clearly see its square white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built on rude arcades with a broad orange awning. Trelawny's description hardly prepares one for so considerable a place. I think the English exiles of that period must have been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed to them no better than a bathing-house. We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to the villa. There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers, who, when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a great annoyance, gently but feelingly replied: 'It is not so bad now as it used to be.' The English gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has known it uninterruptedly since Shelley's death, and has used it for _villeggiatura_ during the last thirty years. We found him in the central sitting-room, which readers of Trelawny's 'Recollections' have so often pictured to themselves. The large oval table, the settees round the walls, and some of the pictures are still unchanged. As we sat talking, I laughed to think of that luncheon party, when Shelley lost his clothes, and came naked, dripping with sea-water, into the room, protected by the skirts of the sympathising waiting-maid. And then I wondered where they found him on the night when he stood screaming in his sleep, after the vision of his veiled self, with its question, '_Siete soddisfatto_?' There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley's time, which have been cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the 'Triumph of Life.' Some new houses, too, have been built between the villa and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered. Only an awning has been added to protect the terrace from the sun. I walked out on this terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane's singing. The sea was fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when the Don Juan disappeared. From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods, attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of the place to sadness. VII.--VIAREGGIO The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where Shelley's body was burned. Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionable watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher air and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new inns and improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts of a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands. There is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of waves, foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines faded into the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. There is a feeling of 'immensity, liberty, action' here, which is not common in Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had the rough force of a tidal sea. Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one who expects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch for miles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrara hills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to the headlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was all painted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of the dwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and then the many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs. It is a wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the Roman Costa has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made this landscape of the Carrarese his own. The space between sand and pine-wood was covered with faint, yellow, evening primroses. They flickered like little harmless flames in sun and shadow, and the spires of the Carrara range were giant flames transformed to marble. The memory of that day described by Trelawny in a passage of immortal English prose, when he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside the funeral pyre, and libations were poured, and the 'Cor Cordium' was found inviolate among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flame beneath the gentle autumn sky. Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last days. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines--aisles and avenues; undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their velvet roof and stationary domes of verdure. * * * * * _PARMA_ Parma is perhaps the brightest _Residenzstadt_ of the second class in Italy. Built on a sunny and fertile tract of the Lombard plain, within view of the Alps, and close beneath the shelter of the Apennines, it shines like a well-set gem with stately towers and cheerful squares in the midst of verdure. The cities of Lombardy are all like large country houses: walking out of their gates, you seem to be stepping from a door or window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, where mulberry-tree is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and where the maize and sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flax and hemp. But it is not in order to survey the union of well-ordered husbandry with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break the journey at Parma between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather by the fame of one great painter, whose work, though it may be studied piecemeal in many galleries of Europe, in Parma has a fulness, largeness, and mastery that can nowhere else be found. In Parma alone Correggio challenges comparison with Raphael, with Tintoret, with all the supreme decorative painters who have deigned to make their art the handmaid of architecture. Yet even in the cathedral and the church of S. Giovanni, where Correggio's frescoes cover cupola and chapel wall, we could scarcely comprehend his greatness now--so cruelly have time and neglect dealt with those delicate dream-shadows of celestial fairyland--were it not for an interpreter, who consecrated a lifetime to the task of translating his master's poetry of fresco into the prose of engraving. That man was Paolo Toschi--a name to be ever venerated by all lovers of the arts; since without his guidance we should hardly know what to seek for in the ruined splendours of the domes of Parma, or even seeking, how to find the object of our search. Toschi's labour was more effectual than that of a restorer however skilful, more loving than that of a follower however faithful. He respected Correggio's handiwork with religious scrupulousness, adding not a line or tone or touch of colour to the fading frescoes; but he lived among them, aloft on scaffoldings, and face to face with the originals which he designed to reproduce. By long and close familiarity, by obstinate and patient interrogation, he divined Correggio's secret, and was able at last to see clearly through the mist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and through the still more cruel travesty of so-called restoration. What he discovered, he faithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and then to copperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of seeing Correggio's masterpieces as Toschi saw them, with the eyes of genius and of love and of long scientific study. It is not too much to say that some of Correggio's most charming compositions--for example, the dispute of S. Augustine and S. John--have been resuscitated from the grave by Toschi's skill. The original offers nothing but a mouldering surface from which the painter's work has dropped in scales. The engraving presents a design which we doubt not was Correggio's, for it corresponds in all particulars to the style and spirit of the master. To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement of restoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted once and for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original. Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of prettiness and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the same Diana in Toschi's engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy. In a word, the engraver was a man of a more common stamp--more timid and more conventional than the painter. But this is after all a trifling deduction from the value of his work. Our debt to Paolo Toschi is such that it would be ungrateful not to seek some details of his life. The few that can be gathered even at Parma are brief and bald enough. The newspaper articles and funeral panegyrics which refer to him are as barren as all such occasional notices in Italy have always been; the panegyrist seeming more anxious about his own style than eager to communicate information. Yet a bare outline of Toschi's biography may be supplied. He was born at Parma in 1788. His father was cashier of the post-office, and his mother's name was Anna Maria Brest. Early in his youth he studied painting at Parma under Biagio Martini; and in 1809 he went to Paris, where he learned the art of engraving from Bervic and of etching from Oortman. In Paris he contracted an intimate friendship with the painter Gérard. But after ten years he returned to Parma, where he established a company and school of engravers in concert with his friend Antonio Isac. Maria Louisa, the then Duchess, under whose patronage the arts flourished at Parma (witness Bodoni's exquisite typography), soon recognised his merit, and appointed him Director of the Ducal Academy. He then formed the project of engraving a series of the whole of Correggio's frescoes. The undertaking was a vast one. Both the cupolas of S. John and the cathedral, together with the vault of the apse of S. Giovanni[10] and various portions of the side aisles, and the so-called Camera di S. Paolo, are covered by frescoes of Correggio and his pupil Parmegiano. These frescoes have suffered so much from neglect and time, and from unintelligent restoration, that it is difficult in many cases to determine their true character. Yet Toschi did not content himself with selections, or shrink from the task of deciphering and engraving the whole. He formed a school of disciples, among whom were Carlo Raimondi of Milan, Antonio Costa of Venice, Edward Eichens of Berlin, Aloisio Juvara of Naples, Antonio Dalcò, Giuseppe Magnani, and Lodovico Bisola of Parma, and employed them as assistants in his work. Death overtook him in 1854, before it was finished, and now the water-colour drawings which are exhibited in the Gallery of Parma prove to what extent the achievement fell short of his design. Enough, however, was accomplished to place the chief masterpieces of Correggio beyond the possibility of utter oblivion. To the piety of his pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a name illustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait of Toschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in the dizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its expression of contemplative intelligence, is like that of an astronomer accustomed to commerce with things above the sphere of common life, and ready to give account of all that he has gathered from his observation of a world not ours. In truth the world created by Correggio and interpreted by Toschi is very far removed from that of actual existence. No painter has infused a more distinct individuality into his work, realising by imaginative force and powerful projection an order of beauty peculiar to himself, before which it is impossible to remain quite indifferent. We must either admire the manner of Correggio, or else shrink from it with the distaste which sensual art is apt to stir in natures of a severe or simple type. What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio? In other words, what is the characteristic which, proceeding from the personality of the artist, is impressed on all his work? The answer to this question, though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradual analysis. The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is, that he has aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities. His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth. Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes the superhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniform beauty of a merely sensuous type. They are all created for pleasure, not for thought or passion or activity or heroism. The uses of their brains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent and radiant wantonness is the condition of their whole existence. Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy: his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who are bending over the dead body of a Christ extended in the attitude of languid repose. In like manner he could not deal with subjects which demand a pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates like young and joyous Bacchantes, places rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii. In this respect Correggio might be termed the Rossini of painting. The melodies of the 'Stabat Mater'--_Fac ut portem_ or _Quis est homo_--are the exact analogues in music of Correggio's voluptuous renderings of grave or mysterious motives. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which subordinates the fancy to the reason, and which seeks for the highest intellectual beauty in a kind of architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. The Florentines and those who shared their spirit--Michelangelo and Lionardo and Raphael--deriving this principle of design from the geometrical art of the Middle Ages, converted it to the noblest uses in their vast well-ordered compositions. But Correggio ignored the laws of scientific construction. It was enough for him to produce a splendid and brilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His type of beauty, too, is by no means elevated. Lionardo painted souls whereof the features and the limbs are but an index. The charm of Michelangelo's ideal is like a flower upon a tree of rugged strength. Raphael aims at the loveliness which cannot be disjoined from goodness. But Correggio is contented with bodies 'delicate and desirable.' His angels are genii disimprisoned from the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic paradise, elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime. To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what is stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs, and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonna in Titian's 'Assumption.' But in their boyhood and their prime of youth, they acquire a fulness of sensuous vitality and a radiance that are peculiar to Correggio. The lily-bearer who helps to support S. Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at Parma, the groups of seraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the two wild-eyed open-mouthed S. Johns stationed at each side of the celestial throne, are among the most splendid instances of the adolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio. Where the painter found their models may be questioned but not answered; for he has made them of a different fashion from the race of mortals: no court of Roman emperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers of Bithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like. Mozart's Cherubino seems to have sat for all of them. At any rate they incarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings. As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuous forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely. Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublime mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a 'fricassee of frogs,' according to the old epigram. His apostles, gazing after the Virgin who has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violent and so dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon the pavement of the cathedral, little of their form is distinguishable except legs and arms in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian's conception of this scene. To express the spiritual meaning, the emotion of Madonna's transit, with all the pomp which colour and splendid composition can convey, is Titian's sole care; whereas Correggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the tumult of heaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining upwards to ascend to heaven in violent commotion--a very orgasm of frenetic rapture. The essence of the event is forgotten: its external manifestation alone is presented to the eye; and only the accessories of beardless angels and cloud-encumbered cherubs are really beautiful amid a surge of limbs in restless movement. More dignified, because designed with more repose, is the Apocalypse of S. John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni. The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze upward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean intolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here all the weakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken to realise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of architectural grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, by corporeal form in subjection to the laws of perspective and foreshortening, things which in their very essence admit of only a figurative revelation. Therefore his Christ, the centre of all those earnest eyes, is contracted to a shape in which humanity itself is mean, a sprawling figure which irresistibly reminds one of a frog. The clouds on which the saints repose are opaque and solid; cherubs in countless multitudes, a swarm of merry children, crawl about upon these feather-beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the apostles, and play at bopeep behind their shoulders. There is no propriety in their appearance there. They take no interest in the beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable of more than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, and translating phrase after phrase as they passed through his fancy into laughing faces, breezy tresses, and rolling mists. Sometimes a grander cadence reached his ear; and then S. Peter with the keys, or S. Augustine of the mighty brow, or the inspired eyes of S. John, took form beneath his pencil. But the light airs returned, and rose and lily faces bloomed again for him among the clouds. It is not therefore in dignity or sublimity that Correggio excels, but in artless grace and melodious tenderness. The Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the little child returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture of ecstatic love to wed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of almost boyish beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the painter was adequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous tenderness we find in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io. Could these saints and martyrs descend from Correggio's canvas, and take flesh, and breathe, and begin to live; of what high action, of what grave passion, of what exemplary conduct in any walk of life would they be capable? That is the question which they irresistibly suggest; and we are forced to answer, None! The moral and religious world did not exist for Correggio. His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dream that had no true relation to reality. Correggio's sensibility to light and colour was exactly on a par with his feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and the poets of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individuality so strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty. Tintoretto makes use of light and shade for investing his great compositions with dramatic intensity. Rembrandt interprets sombre and fantastic moods of the mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation, translating thought into the language of penumbral mystery. Lionardo studies the laws of light scientifically, so that the proper roundness and effect of distance should be accurately rendered, and all the subtleties of nature's smiles be mimicked. Correggio is content with fixing on his canvas the [Greek: anêrithmon gelasma], the many-twinkling laughter of light in motion, rained down through fleecy clouds or trembling foliage, melting into half-shadows, bathing and illuminating every object with a soft caress. There are no tragic contrasts of splendour sharply defined on blackness, no mysteries of half-felt and pervasive twilight, no studied accuracies of noonday clearness in his work. Light and shadow are woven together on his figures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aërial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. His colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane pomp which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat the fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. There is nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the yearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted. But that chord of jocund colour which may fitly be married to the smiles of light, the blues which are found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle as in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures. Both chiaroscuro and colouring have this supreme purpose in art, to effect the sense like music, and like music to create a mood in the soul of the spectator. Now the mood which Correggio stimulates is one of natural and thoughtless pleasure. To feel his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, or heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible. Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral because incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality which prevails in all that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedan paradise might be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this least spiritual of painters. It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of Correggio, that which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, was the faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beings in perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in a world of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from the fairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with the masters of sublime thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness. But within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist having blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro,and faunlike loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm. Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon affectations of expression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of composition, exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes. There is what Goethe called a demonic influence in the art of Correggio: 'In poetry,' said Goethe to Eckermann, 'especially in that which is unconscious, before which reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always something demonic.' It is not to be wondered that Correggio, possessed of this demonic power in the highest degree, and working to a purely sensuous end, should have exercised a fatal influence over art. His successors, attracted by an intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse, which had nothing in common with the reason or the understanding, but was like a glamour cast upon the soul in its most secret sensibilities, threw themselves blindly into the imitation of Correggio's faults. His affectation, his want of earnest thought, his neglect of composition, his sensuous realism, his all-pervading sweetness, his infantine prettiness, his substitution of thaumaturgical effects for conscientious labour, admitted only too easy imitation, and were but too congenial with the spirit of the late Renaissance. Cupolas through the length and breadth of Italy began to be covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the convulsions of artificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano, the attitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a general sacrifice of what is solid and enduring to sentimental gewgaws on the part of all painters who had submitted to the magic of Correggio, proved how easy it was to go astray with the great master. Meanwhile no one could approach him in that which was truly his own--the delineation of a transient moment in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of a smile on Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony with the movement of joyous living creatures. Another demonic nature of a far more powerful type contributed his share to the ruin of art in Italy. Michelangelo's constrained attitudes and muscular anatomy were imitated by painters and sculptors, who thought that the grand style lay in the presentation of theatrical athletes, but who could not seize the secret whereby the great master made even the bodies of men and women--colossal trunks and writhen limbs--interpret the meanings of his deep and melancholy soul. It is a sad law of progress in art, that when the æsthetic impulse is on the wane, artists should perforce select to follow the weakness rather than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was in the ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces them causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certain point, and then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting line of regular declension. There is no real break of continuity. The end is the result of simple exhaustion. Thus the last of our Elizabethan dramatists, Shirley and Crowne and Killigrew, pushed to its ultimate conclusion the principle inherent in Marlowe, not attempting to break new ground, nor imitating the excellences so much as the defects of their forerunners. Thus too the Pointed style of architecture in England gave birth first to what is called the Decorated, next to the Perpendicular, and finally expired in the Tudor. Each step was a step of progress--at first for the better--at last for the worse--but logical, continuous, necessitated.[11] It is difficult to leave Correggio without at least posing the question of the difference between moralised and merely sensual art. Is all art excellent in itself and good in its effect that is beautiful and earnest? There is no doubt that Correggio's work is in a way most beautiful; and it bears unmistakable signs of the master having given himself with single-hearted devotion to the expression of that phase of loveliness which he could apprehend. In so far we must admit that his art is both excellent and solid. Yet we are unable to conceive that any human being could be made better--stronger for endurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive to what is noble in nature--by its contemplation. At the best Correggio does but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel that the pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obvious morality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist's province to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yet the mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes rank not merely with the ministers to refined pleasure, but also with the educators of the world. He may, for example, be penetrated with a just sense of humanity like Shakspere, or with a sublime temperance like Sophocles, instinct with prophetic intuition like Michelangelo, or with passionate experience like Beethoven. The mere sight of the work of Pheidias is like breathing pure health-giving air. Milton and Dante were steeped in religious patriotism; Goethe was pervaded with philosophy, and Balzac with scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes, and even Boccaccio are masters in the mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way--neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation of youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; and his sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid of affectation. We have then only to ask ourselves whether the defect in him of all thought and feeling which is not at once capable of graceful fleshly incarnation, be sufficient to lower him in the scale of artists. This question must of course be answered according to our definition of the purposes of art. There is no doubt that the most highly organised art--that which absorbs the most numerous human qualities and effects a harmony between the most complex elements--is the noblest. Therefore the artist who combines moral elevation and power of thought with a due appreciation of sensual beauty, is more elevated and more beneficial than one whose domain is simply that of carnal loveliness. Correggio, if this be so, must take a comparatively low rank. Just as we welcome the beautiful athlete for the radiant life that is in him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles, whose perfect form enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so we gratefully accept Correggio for his grace, while we approach the consummate art of Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary in æsthetics as elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, the grades of which are determined by the greater or less comprehensiveness of the artist's nature expressed in his work. At the same time, the calibre of the artist's genius must be estimated; for eminent greatness even of a narrow kind will always command our admiration: and the amount of his originality has also to be taken into account. What is unique has, for that reason alone, a claim on our consideration. Judged in this way, Correggio deserves a place, say, in the sweet planet Venus, above the moon and above Mercury, among the artists who have not advanced beyond the contemplations which find their proper outcome in love. Yet, even thus, he aids the culture of humanity. 'We should take care,' said Goethe, apropos of Byron, to Eckermann, 'not to be always looking for culture in the decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great promotes cultivation as soon as we are aware of it.' * * * * * _CANOSSA_ Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of beauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age. This is due partly to her history and art and literature, partly to the temper of the races who have made her what she is, and partly to her natural advantages. Her oldest architectural remains, the temples of Paestum and Girgenti, or the gates of Perugia and Volterra, are so adapted to Italian landscape and so graceful in their massive strength, that we forget the centuries which have passed over them. We leap as by a single bound from the times of Roman greatness to the new birth of humanity in the fourteenth century, forgetting the many years during which Italy, like the rest of Europe, was buried in what our ancestors called Gothic barbarism. The illumination cast upon the classic period by the literature of Rome and by the memory of her great men is so vivid, that we feel the days of the Republic and the Empire to be near us; while the Italian Renaissance is so truly a revival of that former splendour, a resumption of the music interrupted for a season, that it is extremely difficult to form any conception of the five long centuries which elapsed between the Lombard invasion in 568 and the accession of Hildebrand to the Pontificate in 1073. So true is it that nothing lives and has reality for us but what is spiritual, intellectual, self-possessed in personality and consciousness. When the Egyptian priest said to Solon, 'You Greeks are always children,' he intended a gentle sarcasm, but he implied a compliment; for the quality of imperishable youth belonged to the Hellenic spirit, and has become the heritage of every race which partook of it. And this spirit in no common degree has been shared by the Italians of the earlier and the later classic epoch. The land is full of monuments pertaining to those two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spoken or the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguished from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression. Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries above mentioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans. Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of the classic world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country. The Latin element remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an important transformation. It was in the course of those five hundred years that the Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors, were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history, their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and the source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the vigour and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian genius presented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability, the Papacy. At its close again the series of supreme artistic achievements, starting with the architecture of churches and public palaces, passing on to sculpture and painting, and culminating in music, which only ended with the temporary extinction of national vitality in the seventeenth century, was simultaneously begun in all the provinces of the peninsula. So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and so little is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student, dazzled as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty. There, in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlorn abandonment of what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure but mighty spirit of the middle ages. There, if anywhere, the men of those iron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctness for his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in the drama enacted on the summit of Canossa's rock in the bitter winter of 1077. Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d'Emilia, upon the slopes of the Apennines. Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to the plain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends away towards the mountains. As we approach their spurs, the ground begins to rise. The rich Lombard tilth of maize and vine gives place to English-looking hedgerows, lined with oaks, and studded with handsome dark tufts of green hellebore. The hills descend in melancholy earth-heaps on the plain, crowned here and there with ruined castles. Four of these mediaeval strongholds, called Bianello, Montevetro, Monteluzzo, and Montezano, give the name of Quattro Castelli to the commune. The most important of them, Bianello, which, next to Canossa, was the strongest fortress possessed by the Countess Matilda and her ancestors, still presents a considerable mass of masonry, roofed and habitable. The group formed a kind of advance-guard for Canossa against attack from Lombardy. After passing Quattro Castelli we enter the hills, climbing gently upwards between barren slopes of ashy grey earth--the _débris_ of most ancient Apennines--crested at favourable points with lonely towers. In truth the whole country bristles with ruined forts, making it clear that during the middle ages Canossa was but the centre of a great military system, the core and kernel of a fortified position which covered an area to be measured by scores of square miles, reaching far into the mountains, and buttressed on the plain. As yet, however, after nearly two hours' driving, Canossa has not come in sight. At last a turn in the road discloses an opening in the valley of the Enza to the left: up this lateral gorge we see first the Castle of Rossena on its knoll of solid red rock, flaming in the sunlight; and then, further withdrawn, detached from all surrounding objects, and reared aloft as though to sweep the sea of waved and broken hills around it, a sharp horn of hard white stone. That is Canossa--the _alba Canossa_, the _candida petra_ of its rhyming chronicler. There is no mistaking the commanding value of its situation. At the same time the brilliant whiteness of Canossa's rocky hill, contrasted with the red gleam of Rossena, and outlined against the prevailing dulness of these earthy Apennines, secures a picturesque individuality concordant with its unique history and unrivalled strength. There is still a journey of two hours before the castle can be reached: and this may be performed on foot or horseback. The path winds upward over broken ground; following the _arête_ of curiously jumbled and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements of Rossena, whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order to escape the savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting those horrid earthen _balze_ which are so common and so unattractive a feature of Apennine scenery. The most hideous _balze_ to be found in the length and breadth of Italy are probably those of Volterra, from which the citizens themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and which lure melancholy men by intolerable fascination on to suicide. For ever crumbling, altering with frost and rain, discharging gloomy glaciers of slow-crawling mud, and scarring the hillside with tracts of barrenness, these earth-precipices are among the most ruinous and discomfortable failures of nature. They have not even so much of wildness or grandeur as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wasteful things in the world, and can only be classed with the desolate _ghiare_ of Italian river-beds. Such as they are, these _balze_ form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet. Scarcely a vestige of any building can be traced either upon the platform or the summit, with the exception of a broken wall and windows supposed to belong to the end of the sixteenth century. The ancient castle, with its triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracks for the garrison, lodgings for the lord and his retainers, a stately church, a sumptuous monastery, storehouses, stables, workshops, and all the various buildings of a fortified stronghold, have utterly disappeared. The very passage of approach cannot be ascertained; for it is doubtful whether the present irregular path that scales the western face of the rock be really the remains of some old staircase, corresponding to that by which Mont S. Michel in Normandy is ascended. One thing is tolerably certain--that the three walls of which we hear so much from the chroniclers, and which played so picturesque a part in the drama of Henry IV.'s penance, surrounded the cliff at its base, and embraced a large acreage of ground. The citadel itself must have been but the acropolis or keep of an extensive fortress. There has been plenty of time since the year 1255, when the people of Reggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume her undisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at present Nature forms the chief charm of Canossa. Lying one afternoon of May on the crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris in full blossom, I surveyed, from what were once the battlements of Matilda's castle, a prospect than which there is none more spirit-stirring by reason of its beauty and its manifold associations in Europe. The lower castle-crowded hills have sunk. Reggio lies at our feet, shut in between the crests of Monte Carboniano and Monte delle Celle. Beyond Reggio stretches Lombardy--the fairest and most memorable battlefield of nations, the richest and most highly cultivated garden of civilised industry. Nearly all the Lombard cities may be seen, some of them faint like bluish films of vapour, some clear with dome and spire. There is Modena and her Ghirlandina. Carpi, Parma, Mirandola, Verona, Mantua, lie well defined and russet on the flat green map; and there flashes a bend of lordly Po; and there the Euganeans rise like islands, telling us where Padua and Ferrara nestle in the amethystine haze Beyond and above all to the northward sweep the Alps, tossing their silvery crests up into the cloudless sky from the violet mist that girds their flanks and drowns their basements. Monte Adamello and the Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharp peaks of the Venetian Alps are all distinctly visible. An eagle flying straight from our eyrie might traverse Lombardy and light among the snow-fields of the Valtelline between sunrise and sundown. Nor is the prospect tame to southward. Here the Apennines roll, billow above billow, in majestic desolation, soaring to snow summits in the Pellegrino region. As our eye attempts to thread that labyrinth of hill and vale, we tell ourselves that those roads wind to Tuscany, and yonder stretches Garfagnana, where Ariosto lived and mused in honourable exile from the world he loved. It was by one of the mountain passes that lead from Lucca northward that the first founder of Canossa is said to have travelled early in the tenth century. Sigifredo, if the tradition may be trusted, was very wealthy; and with his money he bought lands and signorial rights at Reggio, bequeathing to his children, when he died about 945, a patrimony which they developed into a petty kingdom. Azzo, his second son, fortified Canossa, and made it his principal place of residence. When Lothair, King of Italy, died in 950, leaving his beautiful widow to the ill-treatment of his successor, Berenger, Adelaide found a protector in this Azzo. She had been imprisoned on the Lake of Garda; but managing to escape in man's clothes to Mantua, she thence sent news of her misfortunes to Canossa. Azzo lost no time in riding with his knights to her relief, and brought her back in safety to his mountain fastness. It is related that Azzo was afterwards instrumental in calling Otho into Italy and procuring his marriage with Adelaide, in consequence of which events Italy became a fief of the Empire. Owing to the part he played at this time, the Lord of Canossa was recognised as one of the most powerful vassals of the German Emperor in Lombardy. Honours were heaped upon him; and he grew so rich and formidable that Berenger, the titular King of Italy, laid siege to his fortress of Canossa. The memory of this siege, which lasted for three years and a half, is said still to linger in the popular traditions of the place. When Azzo died at the end of the tenth century, he left to his son Tedaldo the title of Count of Reggio and Modena; and this title was soon after raised to that of Marquis. The Marches governed as Vicar of the Empire by Tedaldo included Reggio, Modena, Ferrara, Brescia, and probably Mantua. They stretched, in fact, across the north of Italy, forming a quadrilateral between the Alps and Apennines. Like his father, Tedaldo adhered consistently to the Imperial party; and when he died and was buried at Canossa, he in his turn bequeathed to his son Bonifazio a power and jurisdiction increased by his own abilities. Bonifazio held the state of a sovereign at Canossa, adding the duchy of Tuscany to his father's fiefs, and meeting the allied forces of the Lombard barons in the field of Coviolo like an independent potentate. His power and splendour were great enough to rouse the jealousy of the Emperor; but Henry III. seems to have thought it more prudent to propitiate this proud vassal, and to secure his kindness, than to attempt his humiliation. Bonifazio married Beatrice, daughter of Frederick, Duke of Lorraine--her whose marble sarcophagus in the Campo Santo at Pisa is said to have inspired Niccola Pisano with his new style of sculpture. Their only child, Matilda, was born, probably at Lucca, in 1046; and six years after her birth, Bonifazio, who had swayed his subjects like an iron-handed tyrant, was murdered. To the great House of Canossa, the rulers of one-third of Italy, there now remained only two women, Bonifazio's widow Beatrice, and his daughter Matilda. Beatrice married Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who was recognised by Henry IV. as her husband and as feudatory of the Empire in the full place of Boniface. He died about 1070; and in this year Matilda was married by proxy to his son, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom, however, she did not see till the year 1072. The marriage was not a happy one; and the question has even been disputed among Matilda's biographers whether it was ever consummated. At any rate it did not last long; for Godfrey was killed at Antwerp in 1076. In this year Matilda also lost her mother, Beatrice, who died at Pisa, and was buried in the cathedral. By this rapid enumeration of events it will be seen how the power and honours of the House of Canossa, including Tuscany, Spoleto, and the fairest portions of Lombardy, had devolved upon a single woman of the age of thirty at the moment when the fierce quarrel between Pope and Emperor began in the year 1076. Matilda was destined to play a great, a striking, and a tragic part in the opening drama of Italian history. Her decided character and uncompromising course of action have won for her the name of 'la gran donna d'Italia,' and have caused her memory to be blessed or execrated, according as the temporal pretensions and spiritual tyranny of the Papacy may have found supporters or opponents in posterity. She was reared from childhood in habits of austerity and unquestioning piety. Submission to the Church became for her not merely a rule of conduct, but a passionate enthusiasm. She identified herself with the cause of four successive Popes, protected her idol, the terrible and iron-hearted Hildebrand, in the time of his adversity; remained faithful to his principles after his death; and having served the Holy See with all her force and all that she possessed through all her lifetime, she bequeathed her vast dominions to it on her deathbed. Like some of the greatest mediaeval characters--like Hildebrand himself--Matilda was so thoroughly of one piece, that she towers above the mists of ages with the massive grandeur of an incarnated idea. She is for us the living statue of a single thought, an undivided impulse, the more than woman born to represent her age. Nor was it without reason that Dante symbolised in her the love of Holy Church; though students of the 'Purgatory' will hardly recognise the lovely maiden, singing and plucking flowers beside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yet she headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoiding neither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to the year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at Quattro Castelli, which were said to have been worn by her in battle, and which were afterwards sold on the market-place at Reggio. This habit of donning armour does not, however, prove that Matilda was exceptionally vigorous; for in those savage times she could hardly have played the part of heroine without participating personally in the dangers of warfare. No less monumental in the plastic unity of his character was the monk Hildebrand, who for twenty years before his elevation to the Papacy had been the maker of Popes and the creator of the policy of Rome. When he was himself elected in the year 1073, and had assumed the name of Gregory VII., he immediately began to put in practice the plans for Church aggrandisement he had slowly matured during the previous quarter of a century. To free the Church from its subservience to the Empire, to assert the Pope's right to ratify the election of the Emperor and to exercise the right of jurisdiction over him, to place ecclesiastical appointments in the sole power of the Roman See, and to render the celibacy of the clergy obligatory, were the points he had resolved to carry. Taken singly and together, these chief aims of Hildebrand's policy had but one object--the magnification of the Church at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities, and the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathies of common life that bound it to humanity. To accuse Hildebrand of personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear that his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish pleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with his own. Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which moved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their bastards. Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of a great idea. These two potent personalities completely understood each other, and worked towards a single end. Tho mythopoeic fancy might conceive of them as the male and female manifestations of one dominant faculty, the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man and woman of almost super-human mould. Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in unavailing passion. Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated in his excommunication. The German nobles abandoned his cause; and Henry found it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the settlement of matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy. Gregory expressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth from Rome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076. He did not, however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him that Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army. Matilda hereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety among her strongholds of Canossa. Thither accordingly Gregory retired before the ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by the imperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a fair countess to the monk who had been made a Pope. The foul calumnies of that bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice, if we did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynical insinuation--a tendency which has involved the history of the Renaissance Popes in an almost impenetrable mist of lies and exaggerations. Henry was in truth upon his road to Italy, but with a very different attendance from that which Gregory expected. Accompanied by Bertha, his wife, and his boy son Conrad, the Emperor elect left Spires in the condition of a fugitive, crossed Burgundy, spent Christmas at Besançon, and journeyed to the foot of Mont Cenis. It is said that he was followed by a single male servant of mean birth; and if the tale of his adventures during the passage of the Alps can be credited, history presents fewer spectacles more picturesque than the straits to which this representative of the Cæsars, this supreme chief of feudal civility, this ruler destined still to be the leader of mighty armies and the father of a line of monarchs, was exposed. Concealing his real name and state, he induced some shepherds to lead him and his escort through the thick snows to the summit of Mont Cenis; and by the help of these men the imperial party were afterwards let down the snow-slopes on the further side by means of ropes. Bertha and her women were sewn up in hides and dragged across the frozen surface of the winter drifts. It was a year memorable for its severity. Heavy snow had fallen in October, which continued ice-bound and unyielding till the following April. No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in the direction of Canossa. The fame of his arrival had preceded him, and he found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had ventured to expect. Proximity to the Church of Rome divests its fulminations of half their terrors. The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitious than the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineering graspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor's cause. Henry gathered a formidable force as he marched onward across Lombardy; and some of the most illustrious prelates and nobles of the South were in his suite. A more determined leader than Henry proved himself to be, might possibly have forced Gregory to some accommodation, in spite of the strength of Canossa and the Pope's invincible obstinacy, by proper use of these supporters. Meanwhile the adherents of the Church were mustered in Matilda's fortress; among whom may be mentioned Azzo, the progenitor of Este and Brunswick; Hugh, Abbot of Clugny; and the princely family of Piedmont. 'I am become a second Rome,' exclaims Canossa, in the language of Matilda's rhyming chronicler; 'all honours are mine; I hold at once both Pope and King, the princes of Italy and those of Gaul, those of Rome, and those from far beyond the Alps.' The stage was ready; the audience had assembled; and now the three great actors were about to meet. Immediately upon his arrival at Canossa, Henry sent for his cousin, the Countess Matilda, and besought her to intercede for him with Gregory. He was prepared to make any concessions or to undergo any humiliations, if only the ban of excommunication might be removed; nor, cowed as he was by his own superstitious conscience, and by the memory of the opposition he had met with from his German vassals, does he seem to have once thought of meeting force with force, and of returning to his northern kingdom triumphant in the overthrow of Gregory's pride. Matilda undertook to plead his cause before the Pontiff. But Gregory was not to be moved so soon to mercy. 'If Henry has in truth repented,' he replied, 'let him lay down crown and sceptre, and declare himself unworthy of the name of king.' The only point conceded to the suppliant was that he should be admitted in the garb of a penitent within the precincts of the castle. Leaving his retinue outside the walls, Henry entered the first series of outworks, and was thence conducted to the second, so that between him and the citadel itself there still remained the third of the surrounding bastions. Here he was bidden to wait the Pope's pleasure; and here, in the midst of that bitter winter weather, while the fierce winds of the Apennines were sweeping sleet upon him in their passage from Monte Pellegrino to the plain, he knelt barefoot, clothed in sackcloth, fasting from dawn till eve, for three whole days. On the morning of the fourth day, judging that Gregory was inexorable, and that his suit would not be granted, Henry retired to the Chapel of S. Nicholas, which stood within this second precinct. There he called to his aid the Abbot of Clugny and the Countess, both of whom were his relations, and who, much as they might sympathise with Gregory, could hardly be supposed to look with satisfaction on their royal kinsman's outrage. The Abbot told Henry that nothing in the world could move the Pope; but Matilda, when in turn he fell before her knees and wept, engaged to do for him the utmost. She probably knew that the moment for unbending had arrived, and that her imperious guest could not with either decency or prudence prolong the outrage offered to the civil chief of Christendom. It was the 25th of January when the Emperor elect was brought, half dead with cold and misery, into the Pope's presence. There he prostrated himself in the dust, crying aloud for pardon. It is said that Gregory first placed his foot upon Henry's neck, uttering these words of Scripture: 'Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem,' and that then he raised him from the earth and formally pronounced his pardon. The prelates and nobles who took part in this scene were compelled to guarantee with their own oaths the vows of obedience pronounced by Henry; so that in the very act of reconciliation a new insult was offered to him. After this Gregory said mass, and permitted Henry to communicate; and at the close of the day a banquet was served, at which the King sat down to meat with the Pope and the Countess. It is probable that, while Henry's penance was performed in the castle courts beneath the rock, his reception by the Pope, and all that subsequently happened, took place in the citadel itself. But of this we have no positive information. Indeed the silence of the chronicles as to the topography of Canossa is peculiarly unfortunate for lovers of the picturesque in historic detail, now that there is no possibility of tracing the outlines of the ancient building. Had the author of the 'Vita Mathildis' (Muratori, vol. v.) foreseen that his beloved Canossa would one day be nothing but a mass of native rock, he would undoubtedly have been more explicit on these points; and much that is vague about an event only paralleled by our Henry II.'s penance before Becket's shrine at Canterbury, might now be clear. Very little remains to be told about Canossa. During the same year, 1077, Matilda made the celebrated donation of her fiefs to Holy Church. This was accepted by Gregory in the name of S. Peter, and it was confirmed by a second deed during the pontificate of Urban IV. in 1102. Though Matilda subsequently married Guelfo d'Este, son of the Duke of Bavaria, she was speedily divorced from him; nor was there any heir to a marriage ridiculous by reason of disparity of age, the bridegroom being but eighteen, while the bride was forty-three in the year of her second nuptials. During one of Henry's descents into Italy, he made an unsuccessful attack upon Canossa, assailing it at the head of a considerable force one October morning in 1092. Matilda's biographer informs us that the mists of autumn veiled his beloved fortress from the eyes of the beleaguerers. They had not even the satisfaction of beholding the unvanquished citadel; and, what was more, the banner of the Emperor was seized and dedicated as a trophy in the Church of S. Apollonio. In the following year the Countess opened her gates of Canossa to an illustrious fugitive, Adelaide, the wife of her old foeman, Henry, who had escaped with difficulty from the insults and the cruelty of her husband. After Henry's death, his son, the Emperor Henry V., paid Matilda a visit in her castle of Bianello, addressed her by the name of mother, and conferred upon her the vice-regency of Liguria. At the age of sixty-nine she died, in 1115, at Bondeno de' Roncori, and was buried, not among her kinsmen at Canossa, but in an abbey of S. Benedict near Mantua. With her expired the main line of the noble house she represented; though Canossa, now made a fief of the Empire in spite of Matilda's donation, was given to a family which claimed descent from Bonifazio's brother Conrad--a young man killed in the battle of Coviolo. This family, in its turn, was extinguished in the year 1570; but a junior branch still exists at Verona. It will be remembered that Michelangelo Buonarroti claimed kinship with the Count of Canossa; and a letter from the Count is extant acknowledging the validity of his pretension. As far back as 1255 the people of Reggio destroyed the castle; nor did the nobles of Canossa distinguish themselves in subsequent history among those families who based their despotisms on the _débris_ of the Imperial power in Lombardy. It seemed destined that Canossa and all belonging to it should remain as a mere name and memory of the outgrown middle ages. Estensi, Carraresi, Visconti, Bentivogli, and Gonzaghi belong to a later period of Lombard history, and mark the dawn of the Renaissance. As I lay and mused that afternoon of May upon the short grass, cropped by two grey goats, whom a little boy was tending, it occurred to me to ask the woman who had served me as guide, whether any legend remained in the country concerning the Countess Matilda. She had often, probably, been asked this question by other travellers. Therefore she was more than usually ready with an answer, which, as far as I could understand her dialect, was this. Matilda was a great and potent witch, whose summons the devil was bound to obey. One day she aspired, alone of all her sex, to say mass; but when the moment came for sacring the elements, a thunderbolt fell from the clear sky, and reduced her to ashes.[12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of the Holy Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances, should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire upon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravagance is a fanciful distortion of the truth. * * * * * _FORNOVO_ In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely _sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendour of their purfled silks and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has yielded to sullen cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin and unreverend age. All that was satisfying to the senses and distracting to the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away, leaving a sinister and naked shell. Remembrance can but summon up the crimes, the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders. An atmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though the tainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, on which his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of their misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of which I spoke. It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in the year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Austria. Giambattista Aleotti, a native of pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders of the galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof, marked out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into the whole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic neo-Latin style. Vast, built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats of arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings all in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and mildew and discoloured gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now that ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare,--like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi._ So clinging is the sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day on Italy. In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a symbol of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen through then; and now it stands unmasked: and yet, strange to say, so perfect is its form that we respect the sham and yield our spirits to the incantation of its music. The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the trumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the _réveil_ of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged and sentenced as a nation. The armies who met that morning represented Italy and France,--Italy, the Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl of Revolution. At the fall of evening Europe was already looking northward; and the last years of the fifteenth century were opening an act which closed in blood at Paris on the ending of the eighteenth. If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take the trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village of Fornovo--a score of bare grey hovels on the margin of a pebbly river-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far as eye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with flax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there with clover red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like flamelets of bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn is bending all one way beneath a western breeze. But not less beautiful than this is the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here than in the acacia trees around Pavia. As we drive, the fields become less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again with gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheatre filled up from flank to flank with the _ghiara_ or pebbly bottom of the Taro. The Taro is not less wasteful than any other of the brotherhood of streams that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell the Po. It wanders, an impatient rivulet, through a wilderness of boulders, uncertain of its aim, shifting its course with the season of the year, unless the jaws of some deep-cloven gully hold it tight and show how insignificant it is. As we advance, the hills approach again; between their skirts there is nothing but the river-bed; and now on rising ground above the stream, at the point of juncture between the Ceno and the Taro, we find Fornovo. Beyond the village the valley broadens out once more, disclosing Apennines capped with winter snow. To the right descends the Ceno. To the left foams the Taro, following whose rocky channel we should come at last to Pontremoli and the Tyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana. On a May-day of sunshine like the present, the Taro is a gentle stream. A waggon drawn by two white oxen has just entered its channel, guided by a contadino with goat-skin leggings, wielding a long goad. The patient creatures stem the water, which rises to the peasant's thighs and ripples round the creaking wheels. Swaying to and fro, as the shingles shift upon the river-bed, they make their way across; and now they have emerged upon the stones; and now we lose them in a flood of sunlight. It was by this pass that Charles VIII. in 1495 returned from Tuscany, when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept and crush him in the mousetrap of Fornovo. No road remained for Charles and his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running, as I have described it, between the spurs of steep hills. It is true that the valley of the Baganza leads, from a little higher up among the mountains, into Lombardy. But this pass runs straight to Parma; and to follow it would have brought the French upon the walls of a strong city. Charles could not do otherwise than descend upon the village of Fornovo, and cut his way thence in the teeth of the Italian army over stream and boulder between the gorges of throttling mountain. The failure of the Italians to achieve what here upon the ground appears so simple, delivered Italy hand-bound to strangers. Had they but succeeded in arresting Charles and destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then--even then, at the eleventh hour--Italy might have gained the sense of national coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice. After Fornovo, her sons scarcely dared to hold their heads up in the field against invaders; and the battles fought upon her soil were duels among aliens for the prize of Italy. In order to comprehend the battle of Fornovo in its bearings on Italian history, we must go back to the year 1492, and understand the conditions of the various States of Italy at that date. On April 8 in that year, Lorenzo de' Medici, who had succeeded in maintaining a political equilibrium in the peninsula, expired, and was succeeded by his son Piero, a vain and foolhardy young man, from whom no guidance could be expected. On July 25, Innocent VIII. died, and was succeeded by the very worst Pope who has ever occupied S. Peter's chair, Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old order of things had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies of which as yet remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chief Italian powers, hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzo de' Medici, were these--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Florence, the Papacy, and the kingdom of Naples. Minor States, such as the Republics of Genoa and Siena, the Duchies of Urbino and Ferrara, the Marquisate of Mantua, the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and the wealthy city of Bologna, were sufficiently important to affect the balance of power, and to produce new combinations. For the present purpose it is, however, enough to consider the five great Powers. After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes from Imperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographical position, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Without narrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, it is enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passed into the hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convert this flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into their private property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, using its municipal institutions as the machinery of administration, and employing the taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purely selfish ends. When the line of the Visconti ended in the year 1447, their tyranny was continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poor soldier of adventure, who had raised himself by his military genius, and had married Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of the last Visconti. On the death of Francesco Sforza in 1466, he left two sons, Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were destined to play a prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria, dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core, was murdered by his injured subjects in the year 1476. His son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight, would in course of time have succeeded to the Duchy, had it not been for the ambition of his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to name himself as Regent for his nephew, whom he kept, long after he had come of age, in a kind of honourable prison. Virtual master in Milan, but without a legal title to the throne, unrecognised in his authority by the Italian powers, and holding it from day to day by craft and fraud, Lodovico at last found his situation untenable; and it was this difficulty of an usurper to maintain himself in his despotism which, as we shall see, brought the French into Italy. Venice, the neighbour and constant foe of Milan, had become a close oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was practically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever since the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, the Venetians had been more and more straitened in their Oriental commerce, and were thrown back upon the policy of territorial aggrandisement in Italy, from which they had hitherto refrained as alien to the temperament of the Republic. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice therefore became an object of envy and terror to the Italian States. They envied her because she alone was tranquil, wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared her because they had good reason to suspect her of encroachment; and it was foreseen that if she got the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be the property of the families inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus alone that the Italians comprehended government. The principle of representation being utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in each city being regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and of everything belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic implied the political extinction of that town and the disfranchisement of its inhabitants in favour of the conquerors. Florence at this epoch still called itself a Republic; and of all Italian commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history, unlike that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusque changes, resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in the equalisation of the burghers, and in the formation of a new aristocracy of wealth. Prom this class of _bourgeois_ nobles sprang the Medici, who, by careful manipulation of the State machinery, by the creation of a powerful party devoted to their interests, by flattery of the people, by corruption, by taxation, and by constant scheming, raised themselves to the first place in the commonwealth, and became its virtual masters. In the year 1492 Lorenzo de' Medici, the most remarkable chief of this despotic family, died, bequeathing his supremacy in the Republic to a son of marked incompetence. Since the Pontificate of Nicholas V. the See of Rome had entered upon a new period of existence. The Popes no longer dreaded to reside in Rome, but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom both splendid as a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capital of a secular kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March were still held but loosely, though their provinces swarmed with petty despots who defied the Papal authority, and though the princely Roman houses of Colonna and Orsini were still strong enough to terrorise the Holy Father in the Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See must in the end get the better of its adversaries, and consolidate itself into a first-rate Power. The internal spirit of the Papacy at this time corresponded to its external policy. It was thoroughly secularised by a series of worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had clean forgotten what their title, Vicar of Christ, implied. They consistently used their religious prestige to enforce their secular authority, while by their temporal power they caused their religious claims to be respected. Corrupt and shameless, they indulged themselves in every vice, openly acknowledged their children, and turned Italy upside down in order to establish favourites and bastards in the principalities they seized as spoils of war. The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subject continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire, governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the House of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence, or the free institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it been Italianised in the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism, which assumed so many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of a noble house, nor the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the forceful sway of a condottiere. It had a dynastic character, resembling the monarchy of one of the great European nations, but modified by the peculiar conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing to this dynastic and monarchical complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom, semi-feudal customs flourished in the south far more than in the north of Italy. The barons were more powerful; and the destinies of the Regno often turned upon their feuds and quarrels with the Crown. At the same time the Neapolitan despots shared the uneasy circumstances of all Italian potentates, owing to the uncertainty of their tenure, both as conquerors and aliens, and also as the nominal vassals of the Holy See. The rights of suzerainty which the Normans had yielded to the Papacy over their southern conquests, and which the Popes had arbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine princes, proved a constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by rendering the succession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the extinction of the Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a prince who had no valid title but that of the sword to its possession. Alfonso of Aragon conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his hereditary dominion, settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the enthusiasm for literature which was then the ruling passion of the Italians, and very liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself the surname of Magnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his Spanish kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and left the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. This Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the reigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombre temperament, traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his subjects as much as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, to a remarkable degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a consummate statesman; and though the history of his reign is the history of plots and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible assassinations, of famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and of every kind of diabolical tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own, in the teeth of a rebellious baronage or a maddened population. His political sagacity amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the last years of his life, when he became aware that the old order was breaking up in Italy, and had cause to dread that Charles VIII. of France would prove his title to the kingdom of Naples by force of arms.[13] Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with the addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or less consistently to one or other of the greater States. The whole complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest, animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority. Even such community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was lacking. And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe, not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectually and spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producing this national self-consciousness. Every State and every city was absorbed in the recovery of culture and in the development of art and literature. Far in advance of the other European nations, the Italians regarded the rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves the while, in spite of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italic civilisation. They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the Papal treasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches of the Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France or Germany possessed of value. The single Duchy of Milan yielded to its masters 700,000 golden florins of revenue, according to the computation of De Comines. In default of a confederative system, the several States were held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the most important people, next to the despots and the captains of adventure, were ambassadors and orators. War itself had become a matter of arrangement, bargain, and diplomacy. The game of stratagem was played by generals who had been friends yesterday and might be friends again to-morrow, with troops who felt no loyalty whatever for the standards under which they listed. To avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends of warfare by parade and demonstration was the interest of every one concerned. Looking back upon Italy of the fifteenth century, taking account of her religious deadness and moral corruption, estimating the absence of political vigour in the republics and the noxious tyranny of the despots, analysing her lack of national spirit, and comparing her splendid life of cultivated ease with the want of martial energy, we can see but too plainly that contact with a simpler and stronger people could not but produce a terrible catastrophe. The Italians themselves, however, were far from comprehending this. Centuries of undisturbed internal intrigue had accustomed them to play the game of forfeits with each other, and nothing warned them that the time was come at which diplomacy, finesse, and craft would stand them in ill stead against rapacious conquerors. The storm which began to gather over Italy in the year 1492 had its first beginning in the North. Lodovico Sforza's position in the Duchy of Milan was becoming every day more difficult, when a slight and to all appearances insignificant incident converted his apprehension of danger into panic. It was customary for the States of Italy to congratulate a new Pope on his election by their ambassadors; and this ceremony had now to be performed for Roderigo Borgia. Lodovico proposed that his envoys should go to Rome together with those of Venice, Naples, and Florence; but Piero de' Medici, whose vanity made him wish to send an embassy in his own name, contrived that Lodovico's proposal should be rejected both by Florence and the King of Naples. So strained was the situation of Italian affairs that Lodovico saw in this repulse a menace to his own usurped authority. Feeling himself isolated among the princes of his country, rebuffed by the Medici, and coldly treated by the King of Naples, he turned in his anxiety to France, and advised the young king, Charles VIII., to make good his claim upon the Regno. It was a bold move to bring the foreigner thus into Italy; and even Lodovico, who prided himself upon his sagacity, could not see how things would end. He thought his situation so hazardous, however, that any change must be for the better. Moreover, a French invasion of Naples would tie the hands of his natural foe, King Ferdinand, whose granddaughter, Isabella of Aragon, had married Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza, and was now the rightful Duchess of Milan. When the Florentine ambassador at Milan asked him how he had the courage to expose Italy to such peril, his reply betrayed the egotism of his policy: 'You talk to me of Italy; but when have I looked Italy in the face? No one ever gave a thought to my affairs. I have, therefore, had to give them such security as I could.' Charles VIII. was young, light-brained, romantic, and ruled by _parvenus_, who had an interest in disturbing the old order of the monarchy. He lent a willing ear to Lodovico's invitation, backed as this was by the eloquence and passion of numerous Italian refugees and exiles. Against the advice of his more prudent counsellors, he taxed all the resources of his kingdom, and concluded treaties on disadvantageous terms with England, Germany, and Spain, in order that he might be able to concentrate all his attention upon the Italian expedition. At the end of the year 1493, it was known that the invasion was resolved upon. Gentile Becchi, the Florentine envoy at the Court of France, wrote to Piero de' Medici: 'If the King succeeds, it is all over with Italy--_tutta a bordello._' The extraordinary selfishness of the several Italian States at this critical moment deserves to be noticed. The Venetians, as Paolo Antonio Soderini described them to Piero de' Medici, 'are of opinion that to keep quiet, and to see other potentates of Italy spending and suffering, cannot but be to their advantage. They trust no one, and feel sure they have enough money to be able at any moment to raise sufficient troops, and so to guide events according to their inclinations.' As the invasion was directed against Naples, Ferdinand of Aragon displayed the acutest sense of the situation. 'Frenchmen,' he exclaimed, in what appears like a prophetic passion when contrasted with the cold indifference of others no less really menaced, 'have never come into Italy without inflicting ruin; and this invasion, if rightly considered, cannot but bring universal ruin, although it seems to menace us alone.' In his agony Ferdinand applied to Alexander VI. But the Pope looked coldly upon him, because the King of Naples, with rare perspicacity, had predicted that his elevation to the Papacy would prove disastrous to Christendom. Alexander preferred to ally himself with Venice and Milan. Upon this Ferdinand wrote as follows: 'It seems fated that the Popes should leave no peace in Italy. We are compelled to fight; but the Duke of Bari (_i.e._ Lodovico Sforza) should think what may ensue from the tumult he is stirring up. He who raises this wind will not be able to lay the tempest when he likes. Let him look to the past, and he will see how every time that our internal quarrels have brought Powers from beyond the Alps into Italy, these have oppressed and lorded over her.' Terribly verified as these words were destined to be,--and they were no less prophetic in their political sagacity than Savonarola's prediction of the Sword and bloody Scourge,--it was now too late to avert the coming ruin. On March 1, 1494, Charles was with his army at Lyons. Early in September he had crossed the pass of Mont Genêvre and taken up his quarters in the town of Asti. There is no need to describe in detail the holiday march of the French troops through Lombardy, Tuscany, and Rome, until, without having struck a blow of consequence, the gates of Naples opened to receive the conqueror upon February 22, 1495. Philippe de Comines, who parted from the King at Asti and passed the winter as his envoy at Venice, has more than once recorded his belief that nothing but the direct interposition of Providence could have brought so mad an expedition to so successful a conclusion. 'Dieu monstroit conduire l'entreprise,' No sooner, however, was Charles installed in Naples than the States of Italy began to combine against him. Lodovico Sforza had availed himself of the general confusion consequent upon the first appearance of the French, to poison his nephew. He was, therefore, now the titular, as well as virtual, Lord of Milan. So far, he had achieved what he desired, and had no further need of Charles. The overtures he now made to the Venetians and the Pope terminated in a League between these Powers for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Germany and Spain entered into the same alliance; and De Comines, finding himself treated with marked coldness by the Signory of Venice, despatched a courier to warn Charles in Naples of the coming danger. After a stay of only fifty days in his new capital, the French King hurried northward. Moving quickly through the Papal States and Tuscany, he engaged his troops in the passes of the Apennines near Pontremoli, and on July 5, 1495, took up his quarters in the village of Fornovo. De Comines reckons that his whole fighting force at this time did not exceed 9,000 men, with fourteen pieces of artillery. Against him at the opening of the valley was the army of the League, numbering some 35,000 men, of whom three-fourths were supplied by Venice, the rest by Lodovico Sforza and the German Emperor. Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, was the general of the Venetian forces; and on him, therefore, fell the real responsibility of the battle. De Comines remarks on the imprudence of the allies, who allowed Charles to advance as far as Fornovo, when it was their obvious policy to have established themselves in the village and so have caught the French troops in a trap. It was a Sunday when the French marched down upon Fornovo. Before them spread the plain of Lombardy, and beyond it the white crests of the Alps. 'We were,' says De Comines, 'in a valley between two little mountain flanks, and in that valley ran a river which could easily be forded on foot, except when it is swelled with sudden rains. The whole valley was a bed of gravel and big stones, very difficult for horses, about a quarter of a league in breadth, and on the right bank lodged our enemies.' Any one who has visited Fornovo can understand the situation of the two armies. Charles occupied the village on the right bank of the Taro. On the same bank, extending downward toward the plain, lay the host of the allies; and in order that Charles should escape them, it was necessary that he should cross the Taro, just below its junction with the Ceno, and reach Lombardy by marching in a parallel line with his foes. All through the night of Sunday it thundered and rained incessantly; so that on the Monday morning the Taro was considerably swollen. At seven o'clock the King sent for De Comines, who found him already armed and mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name of this charger was _Savoy_. He was black, one-eyed, and of middling height; and to his great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed life upon that day. The French army, ready for the march, now took to the gravelly bed of the Taro, passing the river at a distance of about a quarter of a league from the allies. As the French left Fornovo, the light cavalry of their enemies entered the village and began to attack the baggage. At the same time the Marquis of Mantua, with the flower of his men-at-arms, crossed the Taro and harassed the rear of the French host; while raids from the right bank to the left were constantly being made by sharpshooters and flying squadrons. 'At this moment,' says De Comines, 'not a single man of us could have escaped if our ranks had once been broken.' The French army was divided into three main bodies. The vanguard consisted of some 350 men-at-arms, 3000 Switzers, 300 archers of the Guard, a few mounted crossbow-men, and the artillery. Next came the Battle, and after this the rearguard. At the time when the Marquis of Mantua made his attack, the French rearguard had not yet crossed the river. Charles quitted the van, put himself at the head of his chivalry, and charged the Italian horsemen, driving them back, some to the village and others to their camp. De Comines observes, that had the Italian knights been supported in this passage of arms by the light cavalry of the Venetian force, called Stradiots, the French must have been outnumbered, thrown into confusion, and defeated. As it was, these Stradiots were engaged in plundering the baggage of the French; and the Italians, accustomed to bloodless encounters, did not venture, in spite of their immense superiority of numbers, to renew the charge. In the pursuit of Gonzaga's horsemen Charles outstripped his staff, and was left almost alone to grapple with a little band of mounted foemen. It was here that his noble horse, Savoy, saved his person by plunging and charging till assistance came up from the French, and enabled the King to regain his van. It is incredible, considering the nature of the ground and the number of the troops engaged, that the allies should not have returned to the attack and have made the passage of the French into the plain impossible. De Comines, however, assures us that the actual engagement only lasted a quarter of an hour, and the pursuit of the Italians three quarters of an hour. After they had once resolved to fly, they threw away their lances and betook themselves to Reggio and Parma. So complete was their discomfiture, that De Comines gravely blames the want of military genius and adventure in the French host. If, instead of advancing along the left bank of the Taro and there taking up his quarters for the night, Charles had recrossed the stream and pursued the army of the allies, he would have had the whole of Lombardy at his discretion. As it was, the French army encamped not far from the scene of the action in great discomfort and anxiety. De Comines had to bivouac in a vineyard, without even a mantle to wrap round him, having lent his cloak to the King in the morning; and as it had been pouring all day, the ground could not have afforded very luxurious quarters. The same extraordinary luck which had attended the French in their whole expedition, now favoured their retreat; and the same pusillanimity which the allies had shown at Fornovo, prevented them from re-forming and engaging with the army of Charles upon the plain. One hour before daybreak on Tuesday morning, the French broke up their camp and succeeded in clearing the valley. That night they lodged at Fiorenzuola, the next at Piacenza, and so on; till on the eighth day they arrived at Asti without having been so much as incommoded by the army of the allies in their rear. Although the field of Fornovo was in reality so disgraceful to the Italians, they reckoned it a victory upon the technical pretence that the camp and baggage of the French had been seized. Illuminations and rejoicings made the piazza of S. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco da Gonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him by Mantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been remembered with shame. A fitting conclusion to this sketch, connecting its close with the commencement, may be found in some remarks upon the manner of warfare to which the Italians of the Renaissance had become accustomed, and which proved so futile on the field of Fornovo. During the middle ages, and in the days of the Communes, the whole male population of Italy had fought light-armed on foot. Merchant and artisan left the counting-house and the workshop, took shield and pike, and sallied forth to attack the barons in their castles, or to meet the Emperor's troops upon the field. It was with this national militia that the citizens of Florence freed their _Contado_ of the nobles, and the burghers of Lombardy gained the battle of Legnano. In course of time, by a process of change which it is not very easy to trace, heavily armed cavalry began to take the place of infantry in mediæval warfare. Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased from head to foot in iron, and mounted upon chargers no less solidly caparisoned, drove the foot-soldiers before them at the points of their long lances. Nowhere in Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce resistance which the bears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri offered to the knights of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried clasped a dozen lances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus be broken at the cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian burghers to meet the charge of the horsemen with squares protected by bristling spears. They seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned military service with the readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed in the affairs of peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-arms required long training and a life's devotion. So much time the burghers of the free towns could not spare to military service, while the petty nobles were only too glad to devote themselves to so honourable a calling. Thus it came to pass that a class of professional fighting-men was gradually formed in Italy, whose services the burghers and the princes bought, and by whom the wars of the peninsula were regularly farmed by contract. Wealth and luxury in the great cities continued to increase; and as the burghers grew more comfortable, they were less inclined to take the field in their own persons, and more disposed to vote large sums of money for the purchase of necessary aid. At the same time this system suited the despots, since it spared them the peril of arming their own subjects, while they taxed them to pay the services of foreign captains. War thus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and other parts of the Papal dominions, supplied a number of petty nobles whose whole business in life it was to form companies of trained horsemen, and with these bands to hire themselves out to the republics and the despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains. They sold their service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of principle or patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from the camp of one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. A species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of ransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general of the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own ranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance, warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual subtlety; and like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of warfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket were already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn the sham-fight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure into something terribly more real. To men like the Marquis of Mantua war had been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like the Maréchal de Gié it was a murderous horseplay; and this difference the Italians were not slow to perceive. When they cast away their lances at Fornovo, and fled--in spite of their superior numbers--never to return, one fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a vision of the past. * * * * * _FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI_ Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i nobili e il popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e molte volte occorse che una di queste parti rimasa superiore, si divise in due.--MACHIAVELLI. I Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duel of the Papacy and Empire. The transference of the imperial authority beyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany to establish a form of self-government. This government was based upon the old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Roman system. The proof of this was, that while vindicating their rights as towns, the free cities never questioned the validity of the imperial title. Even after the peace of Constance in 1183, when Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged their autonomy, they received within their walls a supreme magistrate, with power of life and death and ultimate appeal in all decisive questions, whose title of Potestà indicated that he represented the imperial power--Potestas. It was not by the assertion of any right, so much as by the growth of custom, and by the weakness of the Emperors, that in course of time each city became a sovereign State. The theoretical supremacy of the Empire prevented any other authority from taking the first place in Italy. On the other hand, the practical inefficiency of the Emperors to play their part encouraged the establishment of numerous minor powers amenable to no controlling discipline. The free cities derived their strength from industry, and had nothing in common with the nobles of the surrounding country. Broadly speaking, the population of the towns included what remained in Italy of the old Roman people. This Roman stock was nowhere stronger than in Florence and Venice--Florence defended from barbarian incursions by her mountains and marshes, Venice by the isolation of her lagoons. The nobles, on the contrary, were mostly of foreign origin--Germans, Franks, and Lombards, who had established themselves as feudal lords in castles apart from the cities. The force which the burghs acquired as industrial communities was soon turned against these nobles. The larger cities, like Milan and Florence, began to make war upon the lords of castles, and to absorb into their own territory the small towns and villages around them. Thus in the social economy of the Italians there were two antagonistic elements ready to range themselves beneath any banners that should give the form of legitimate warfare to their mutual hostility. It was the policy of the Church in the twelfth century to support the cause of the cities, using them as a weapon against the Empire, and stimulating the growing ambition of the burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the two world-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The struggle between Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for the depression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face to face with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed in cities with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When the Church had finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House of Hohenstaufen, this conflict of Guelf and Ghibelline was really ended. Until the reign of Charles V. no Emperor interfered to any purpose in Italian affairs. At the same time the Popes ceased to wield a formidable power. Having won the battle by calling in the French, they suffered the consequences of this policy by losing their hold on Italy during the long period of their exile at Avignon. The Italians, left without either Pope or Emperor, were free to pursue their course of internal development, and to prosecute their quarrels among themselves. But though the names of Guelf and Ghibelline lost their old significance after the year 1266 (the date of King Manfred's death), these two factions had so divided Italy that they continued to play a prominent part in her annals. Guelf still meant constitutional autonomy, meant the burgher as against the noble, meant industry as opposed to feudal lordship. Ghibelline meant the rule of the few over the many, meant tyranny, meant the interest of the noble as against the merchant and the citizen. These broad distinctions must be borne in mind, if we seek to understand how it was that a city like Florence continued to be governed by parties, the European force of which had passed away. II Florence first rose into importance during the papacy of Innocent III. Up to this date she had been a town of second-rate distinction even in Tuscany. Pisa was more powerful by arms and commerce. Lucca was the old seat of the dukes and marquises of Tuscany. But between the years 1200 and 1250 Florence assumed the place she was to hold thenceforward, by heading the league of Tuscan cities formed to support the Guelf party against the Ghibellines. Formally adopting the Guelf cause, the Florentines made themselves the champions of municipal liberty in Central Italy; and while they declared war against the Ghibelline cities, they endeavoured to stamp out the very name of noble in their State. It is not needful to describe the varying fortunes of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the burghers and the nobles, during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries. Suffice it to say that through all the vicissitudes of that stormy period the name Guelf became more and more associated with republican freedom in Florence. At last, after the final triumph of that party in 1253, the Guelfs remained victors in the city. Associating the glory of their independence with Guelf principles, the citizens of Florence perpetuated within their State a faction that, in its turn, was destined to prove perilous to liberty. When it became clear that the republic was to rule itself henceforth untrammelled by imperial interference, the people divided themselves into six districts, and chose for each district two Ancients, who administered the government in concert with the Potestà and the Captain of the People. The Ancients were a relic of the old Roman municipal organisation. The Potestà who was invariably a noble foreigner selected by the people, represented the extinct imperial right, and exercised the power of life and death within the city. The Captain of the People, who was also a foreigner, headed the burghers in their military capacity, for at that period the troops were levied from the citizens themselves in twenty companies. The body of the citizens, or the _popolo_, were ultimately sovereigns in the State. Assembled under the banners of their several companies, they formed a _parlamento_ for delegating their own power to each successive government. Their representatives, again, arranged in two councils, called the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, under the presidency of the Captain of the People and the Potestà, ratified the measures which had previously been proposed and carried by the executive authority or Signoria. Under this simple State system the Florentines placed themselves at the head of the Tuscan League, fought the battles of the Church, asserted their sovereignty by issuing the golden florin of the republic, and flourished until 1266. III In that year an important change was effected in the Constitution. The whole population of Florence consisted, on the one hand, of nobles or Grandi, as they were called in Tuscany, and on the other hand of working people. The latter, divided into traders and handicraftsmen, were distributed in guilds called Arti; and at that time there were seven Greater and five Lesser Arti, the most influential of all being the Guild of the Wool Merchants. These guilds had their halls for meeting, their colleges of chief officers, their heads, called Consoli or Priors, and their flags. In 1266 it was decided that the administration of the commonwealth should be placed simply and wholly in the hands of the Arti, and the Priors of these industrial companies became the lords or Signory of Florence. No inhabitant of the city who had not enrolled himself as a craftsman in one of the guilds could exercise any function of burghership. To be _scioperato_, or without industry, was to be without power, without rank or place of honour in the State. The revolution which placed the Arts at the head of the republic had the practical effect of excluding the Grandi altogether from the government. Violent efforts were made by these noble families, potent through their territorial possessions and foreign connections, and trained from boyhood in the use of arms, to recover the place from which the new laws thrust them: but their menacing attitude, instead of intimidating the burghers, roused their anger and drove them to the passing of still more stringent laws. In 1293, after the Ghibellines had been defeated in the great battle of Campaldino, a series of severe enactments, called the Ordinances of Justice, were decreed against the unruly Grandi. All civic rights were taken from them; the severest penalties were attached to their slightest infringement of municipal law; their titles to land were limited; the privilege of living within the city walls was allowed them only under galling restrictions; and, last not least, a supreme magistrate, named the Gonfalonier of Justice, was created for the special purpose of watching them and carrying out the penal code against them. Henceforward Florence was governed exclusively by merchants and artisans. The Grandi hastened to enrol themselves in the guilds, exchanging their former titles and dignities for the solid privilege of burghership. The exact parallel to this industrial constitution for a commonwealth, carrying on wars with emperors and princes, holding haughty captains in its pay, and dictating laws to subject cities, cannot, I think, be elsewhere found in history. It is as unique as the Florence of Dante and Giotto is unique. While the people was guarding itself thus stringently against the Grandi, a separate body was created for the special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. A permanent committee of vigilance, called the College or the Captains of the Guelf Party, was established. It was their function to administer the forfeited possessions of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt out suspected citizens, to prosecute them for Ghibellinism, to judge them, and to punish them as traitors to the commonwealth. This body, like a little State within the State, proved formidable to the republic itself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised over burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time it became the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, and threatened to change the free constitution of the city into a government conducted by a few powerful families. There is no need to dwell in detail on the internal difficulties of Florence during the first half of the fourteenth century. Two main circumstances, however, require to be briefly noticed. These are (i) the contest of the Blacks and Whites, so famous through the part played in it by Dante; and (ii) the tyranny of the Duke[1] of Athens, Walter de Brienne. The feuds of the Blacks and Whites broke up the city into factions, and produced such anarchy that at last it was found necessary to place the republic under the protection of foreign potentates. Charles of Valois was first chosen, and after him the Duke of Athens, who took up his residence in the city. Entrusted with dictatorial authority, he used his power to form a military despotism. Though his reign of violence lasted rather less than a year, it bore important fruits; for the tyrant, seeking to support himself upon the favour of the common people, gave political power to the Lesser Arts at the expense of the Greater, and confused the old State-system by enlarging the democracy. The net result of these events for Florence was, first, that the city became habituated to rancorous party-strife, involving exiles and proscriptions; and, secondly, that it lost its primitive social hierarchy of classes. IV After the Guelfs had conquered the Ghibellines, and the people had absorbed the Grandi in their guilds, the next chapter in the troubled history of Florence was the division of the Popolo against itself. Civil strife now declared itself as a conflict between labour and capital. The members of the Lesser Arts, craftsmen who plied trades subordinate to those of the Greater Arts, rose up against their social and political superiors, demanding a larger share in the government, a more equal distribution of profits, higher wages, and privileges that should place them on an absolute equality with the wealthy merchants. It was in the year 1378 that the proletariate broke out into rebellion. Previous events had prepared the way for this revolt. First of all, the republic had been democratised through the destruction of the Grandi and through the popular policy pursued to gain his own ends by the Duke of Athens. Secondly, society had been shaken to its very foundation by the great plague of 1348. Both Boccaccio and Matteo Villani draw lively pictures of the relaxed morality and loss of order consequent upon this terrible disaster; nor had thirty years sufficed to restore their relative position to grades and ranks confounded by an overwhelming calamity. We may therefore reckon the great plague of 1348 among the causes which produced the anarchy of 1378. Rising in a mass to claim their privileges, the artisans ejected the Signory from the Public Palace, and for awhile Florence was at the mercy of the mob. It is worthy of notice that the Medici, whose name is scarcely known before this epoch, now came for one moment to the front. Salvestro de' Medici was Gonfalonier of Justice at the time when the tumult first broke out. He followed the faction of the handicraftsmen, and became the hero of the day. I cannot discover that he did more than extend a sort of passive protection to their cause. Yet there is no doubt that the attachment of the working classes to the House of Medici dates from this period. The rebellion of 1378 is known in Florentine history as the Tumult of the Ciompi. The name Ciompi strictly means the Wool-Carders. One set of operatives in the city, and that the largest, gave its title to the whole body of the labourers. For some months these craftsmen governed the republic, appointing their own Signory and passing laws in their own interest; but, as is usual, the proletariate found itself incapable of sustained government. The ambition and discontent of the Ciompi foamed themselves away, and industrious working men began to see that trade was languishing and credit on the wane. By their own act at last they restored the government to the Priors of the Greater Arti. Still the movement had not been without grave consequences. It completed the levelling of classes, which had been steadily advancing from the first in Florence. After the Ciompi riot there was no longer not only any distinction between noble and burgher, but the distinction between greater and lesser guilds was practically swept away. The classes, parties, and degrees in the republic were so broken up, ground down, and mingled, that thenceforth the true source of power in the State was wealth combined with personal ability. In other words, the proper political conditions had been formed for unscrupulous adventurers. Florence had become a democracy without social organisation, which might fall a prey to oligarchs or despots. What remained of deeply rooted feuds or factions--animosities against the Grandi, hatred for the Ghibellines, jealousy of labour and capital--offered so many points of leverage for stirring the passions of the people and for covering personal ambition with a cloak of public zeal. The time was come for the Albizzi to attempt an oligarchy, and for the Medici to begin the enslavement of the State. V The Constitution of Florence offered many points of weakness to the attacks of such intriguers. In the first place it was in its origin not a political but an industrial organisation--a simple group of guilds invested with the sovereign authority. Its two most powerful engines, the Gonfalonier of Justice and the Guelf College, had been formed, not with a view to the preservation of the government, but with the purpose of quelling the nobles and excluding a detested faction. It had no permanent head, like the Doge of Venice; no fixed senate like the Venetian Grand Council; its chief magistrates, the Signory, were elected for short periods of two months, and their mode of election was open to the gravest criticism. Supposed to be chosen by lot, they were really selected from lists drawn up by the factions in power from time to time. These factions contrived to exclude the names of all but their adherents from the bags, or _borse_, in which the burghers eligible for election had to be inscribed. Furthermore, it was not possible for this shifting Signory to conduct affairs requiring sustained effort and secret deliberation; therefore recourse was being continually had to dictatorial Commissions. The people, summoned in parliament upon the Great Square, were asked to confer plenipotentiary authority upon a committee called _Balia_, who proceeded to do what they chose in the State, and who retained power after the emergency for which they were created passed away. The same instability in the supreme magistracy led to the appointment of special commissioners for war, and special councils, or _Pratiche_, for the management of each department. Such supplementary commissions not only proved the weakness of the central authority, but they were always liable to be made the instruments of party warfare. The Guelf College was another and a different source of danger to the State. Not acting under the control of the Signory, but using its own initiative, this powerful body could proscribe and punish burghers on the mere suspicion of Ghibellinism. Though the Ghibelline faction had become an empty name, the Guelf College excluded from the franchise all and every whom they chose on any pretext to admonish. Under this mild phrase, _to admonish_, was concealed a cruel exercise of tyranny--it meant to warn a man that he was suspected of treason, and that he had better relinquish the exercise of his burghership. By free use of this engine of Admonition, the Guelf College rendered their enemies voiceless in the State, and were able to pack the Signory and the councils with their own creatures. Another important defect in the Florentine Constitution was the method of imposing taxes. This was done by no regular system. The party in power made what estimate it chose of a man's capacity to bear taxation, and called upon him for extraordinary loans. In this way citizens were frequently driven into bankruptcy and exile; and since to be a debtor to the State deprived a burgher of his civic rights, severe taxation was one of the best ways of silencing and neutralising a dissentient. I have enumerated these several causes of weakness in the Florentine State-system, partly because they show how irregularly the Constitution had been formed by the patching and extension of a simple industrial machine to suit the needs of a great commonwealth; partly because it was through these defects that the democracy merged gradually into a despotism. The art of the Medici consisted in a scientific comprehension of these very imperfections, a methodic use of them for their own purposes, and a steady opposition to any attempts made to substitute a stricter system. The Florentines had determined to be an industrial community, governing themselves on the co-operative principle, dividing profits, sharing losses, and exposing their magistrates to rigid scrutiny. All this in theory was excellent. Had they remained an unambitious and peaceful commonwealth, engaged in the wool and silk trade, it might have answered. Modern Europe might have admired the model of a communistic and commercial democracy. But when they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslave sister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simple trading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out with subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a _point d'appui_ for insidious and self-seeking party leaders. Florence, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was a vast beehive of industry. Distinctions of rank among burghers, qualified to vote and hold office, were theoretically unknown. Highly educated men, of more than princely wealth, spent their time in shops and counting-houses, and trained their sons to follow trades. Military service at this period was abandoned by the citizens; they preferred to pay mercenary troops for the conduct of their wars. Nor was there, as in Venice, any outlet for their energies upon the seas. Florence had no navy, no great port--she only kept a small fleet for the protection of her commerce. Thus the vigour of the commonwealth was concentrated on itself; while the influence of the citizens, through their affiliated trading-houses, correspondents, and agents, extended like a network over Europe. In a community of this kind it was natural that wealth--rank and titles being absent--should alone confer distinction. Accordingly we find that out of the very bosom of the people a new plutocratic aristocracy begins to rise. The Grandi are no more; but certain families achieve distinction by their riches, their numbers, their high spirit, and their ancient place of honour in the State. These nobles of the purse obtained the name of _Popolani Nobili_; and it was they who now began to play at high stakes for the supreme power. In all the subsequent vicissitudes of Florence every change takes place by intrigue and by clever manipulation of the political machine. Recourse is rarely had to violence of any kind, and the leaders of revolutions are men of the yard-measure, never of the sword. The despotism to which the republic eventually succumbed was no less commercial than the democracy had been. Florence in the days of her slavery remained a _Popolo_. VI The opening of the second half of the fourteenth century had been signalised by the feuds of two great houses, both risen from the people. These were the Albizzi and the Ricci. At this epoch there had been a formal closing of the lists of burghers;--henceforth no new families who might settle in the city could claim the franchise, vote in the assemblies, or hold magistracies. The Guelf College used their old engine of admonition to persecute _novi homines_, whom they dreaded as opponents. At the head of this formidable organisation the Albizzi placed themselves, and worked it with such skill that they succeeded in driving the Ricci out of all participation in the government. The tumult of the Ciompi formed but an episode in their career toward oligarchy; indeed, that revolution only rendered the political material of the Florentine republic more plastic in the hands of intriguers, by removing the last vestiges of class distinctions and by confusing the old parties of the State. When the Florentines in 1387 engaged in their long duel with Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the difficulty of conducting this war without some permanent central authority still further confirmed the power of the rising oligarchs. The Albizzi became daily more autocratic, until in 1393 their chief, Maso degli Albizzi, a man of strong will and prudent policy, was chosen Gonfalonier of Justice. Assuming the sway of a dictator he revised the list of burghers capable of holding office, struck out the private opponents of his house, and excluded all names but those of powerful families who were well affected towards an aristocratic government. The great house of the Alberti were exiled in a body, declared rebels, and deprived of their possessions, for no reason except that they seemed dangerous to the Albizzi. It was in vain that the people murmured against these arbitrary acts. The new rulers were omnipotent in the Signory, which they packed with their own men, in the great guilds, and in the Guelf College. All the machinery invented by the industrial community for its self-management and self-defence was controlled and manipulated by a close body of aristocrats, with the Albizzi at their head. It seemed as though Florence, without any visible alteration in her forms of government, was rapidly becoming an oligarchy even less open than the Venetian republic. Meanwhile the affairs of the State were most flourishing. The strong-handed masters of the city not only held the Duke of Milan in check, and prevented him from turning Italy into a kingdom; they furthermore acquired the cities of Pisa, Livorno, Arezzo, Montepulciano, and Cortona, for Florence, making her the mistress of all Tuscany, with the exception of Siena, Lucca, and Volterra. Maso degli Albizzi was the ruling spirit of the commonwealth, spending the enormous sum of 11,500,000 golden florins on war, raising sumptuous edifices, protecting the arts, and acting in general like a powerful and irresponsible prince. In spite of public prosperity there were signs, however, that this rule of a few families could not last. Their government was only maintained by continual revision of the lists of burghers, by elimination of the disaffected, and by unremitting personal industry. They introduced no new machinery into the Constitution whereby the people might be deprived of its titular sovereignty, or their own dictatorship might be continued with a semblance of legality. Again, they neglected to win over the new nobles (_nobili popolani_) in a body to their cause; and thus they were surrounded by rivals ready to spring upon them when a false step should be made. The Albizzi oligarchy was a masterpiece of art, without any force to sustain it but the craft and energy of its constructors. It had not grown up, like the Venetian oligarchy, by the gradual assimilation to itself of all the vigour in the State. It was bound, sooner or later, to yield to the renascent impulse of democracy inherent in Florentine institutions. VII Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417. He was succeeded in the government by his old friend, Niccolo da Uzzano, a man of great eloquence and wisdom, whose single word swayed the councils of the people as he listed. Together with him acted Maso's son, Rinaldo, a youth of even more brilliant talents than his father, frank, noble, and high-spirited, but far less cautious. The oligarchy, which these two men undertook to manage, had accumulated against itself the discontent of overtaxed, disfranchised, jealous burghers. The times, too, were bad. Pursuing the policy of Maso, the Albizzi engaged the city in a tedious and unsuccessful war with Filippo Maria Visconti, which cost 350,000 golden florins, and brought no credit. In order to meet extraordinary expenses they raised new public loans, thereby depreciating the value of the old Florentine funds. "What was worse, they imposed forced subsidies with grievous inequality upon the burghers, passing over their friends and adherents, and burdening their opponents with more than could be borne. This imprudent financial policy began the ruin of the Albizzi. It caused a clamour in the city for a new system of more just taxation, which was too powerful to be resisted. The voice of the people made itself loudly heard; and with the people on this occasion sided Giovanni de' Medici. This was in 1427. It is here that the Medici appear upon that memorable scene where in the future they are to play the first part. Giovanni de' Medici did not belong to the same branch of his family as the Salvestro who favoured the people at the time of the Ciompi Tumult. But he adopted the same popular policy. To his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo he bequeathed on his deathbed the rule that they should invariably adhere to the cause of the multitude, found their influence on that, and avoid the arts of factious and ambitious leaders. In his own life he had pursued this course of conduct, acquiring a reputation for civic moderation and impartiality that endeared him to the people and stood his children in good stead. Early in his youth Giovanni found himself almost destitute by reason of the imposts charged upon him by the oligarchs. He possessed, however, the genius for money-making to a rare degree, and passed his manhood as a banker, amassing the largest fortune of any private citizen in Italy. In his old age he devoted himself to the organisation of his colossal trading business, and abstained, as far as possible, from political intrigues. Men observed that they rarely met him in the Public Palace or on the Great Square. Cosimo de' Medici was thirty years old when his father Giovanni died, in 1429. During his youth he had devoted all his time and energy to business, mastering the complicated affairs of Giovanni's banking-house, and travelling far and wide through Europe to extend its connections. This education made him a consummate financier; and those who knew him best were convinced that his ambition was set on great things. However quietly he might begin, it was clear that he intended to match himself, as a leader of the plebeians, against the Albizzi. The foundations he prepared for future action were equally characteristic of the man, of Florence, and of the age. Commanding the enormous capital of the Medicean bank he contrived, at any sacrifice of temporary convenience, to lend money to the State for war expenses, engrossing in his own hands a large portion of the public debt of Florence. At the same time his agencies in various European capitals enabled him to keep his own wealth floating far beyond the reach of foes within the city. A few years of this system ended in so complete a confusion between Cosimo's trade and the finances of Florence that the bankruptcy of the Medici, however caused, would have compromised the credit of the State and the fortunes of the fund-holders. Cosimo, in a word, made himself necessary to Florence by the wise use of his riches. Furthermore, he kept his eye upon the list of burghers, lending money to needy citizens, putting good things in the way of struggling traders, building up the fortunes of men who were disposed to favour his party in the State, ruining his opponents by the legitimate process of commercial competition, and, when occasion offered, introducing new voters into the Florentine Council by paying off the debts of those who were disqualified by poverty from using the franchise. While his capital was continually increasing he lived frugally, and employed his wealth solely for the consolidation of his political influence. By these arts Cosimo became formidable to the oligarchs and beloved by the people. His supporters were numerous, and held together by the bonds of immediate necessity or personal cupidity. The plebeians and the merchants were all on his side. The Grandi and the Ammoniti, excluded from the State by the practices of the Albizzi, had more to hope from the Medicean party than from the few families who still contrived to hold the reins of government. It was clear that a conflict to the death must soon commence between the oligarchy and this new faction. VIII At last, in 1433, war was declared. The first blow was struck by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, who put himself in the wrong by attacking a citizen indispensable to the people at large, and guilty of no unconstitutional act. On September 7th of that year, a year decisive for the future destinies of Florence, he summoned Cosimo to the Public Palace, which he had previously occupied with troops at his command. There he declared him a rebel to the State, and had him imprisoned in a little square room in the central tower. The tocsin was sounded; the people were assembled in parliament upon the piazza. The Albizzi held the main streets with armed men, and forced the Florentines to place plenipotentiary power for the administration of the commonwealth at this crisis in the hands of a Balia, or committee selected by themselves. It was always thus that acts of high tyranny were effected in Florence. A show of legality was secured by gaining the compulsory sanction of the people, driven by soldiery into the public square, and hastily ordered to recognise the authority of their oppressors. The bill of indictment against the Medici accused them of sedition in the year 1378--that is, in the year of the Ciompi Tumult--and of treasonable practice during the whole course of the Albizzi administration. It also strove to fix upon them the odium of the unsuccessful war against the town of Lucca. As soon as the Albizzi had unmasked their batteries, Lorenzo de' Medici managed to escape from the city, and took with him his brother Cosimo's children to Venice. Cosimo remained shut up within the little room called Barberia in Arnolfo's tower. From that high eagle's nest the sight can range Valdarno far and wide. Florence with her towers and domes lies below; and the blue peaks of Carrara close a prospect westward than which, with its villa-jewelled slopes and fertile gardens, there is nought more beautiful upon the face of earth. The prisoner can have paid but little heed to this fair landscape. He heard the frequent ringing of the great bell that called the Florentines to council, the tramp of armed men on the piazza, the coming and going of the burghers in the palace halls beneath. On all sides lurked anxiety and fear of death. Each mouthful he tasted might be poisoned. For many days he partook of only bread and water, till his gaoler restored his confidence by sharing all his meals. In this peril he abode twenty-four days. The Albizzi, in concert with the Balia they had formed, were consulting what they might venture to do with him. Some voted for his execution. Others feared the popular favour, and thought that if they killed Cosimo this act would ruin their own power. The nobler natures among them determined to proceed by constitutional measures. At last, upon September 29th, it was settled that Cosimo should be exiled to Padua for ten years. The Medici were declared Grandi, by way of excluding them from political rights. But their property remained untouched; and on October 3rd, Cosimo was released. On the same day Cosimo took his departure. His journey northward resembled a triumphant progress. He left Florence a simple burgher; he entered Venice a powerful prince. Though the Albizzi seemed to have gained the day, they had really cut away the ground beneath their feet. They committed the fatal mistake of doing both too much and too little--too much because they declared war against an innocent man, and roused the sympathies of the whole people in his behalf; too little, because they had not the nerve to complete their act by killing him outright and extirpating his party. Machiavelli, in one of his profoundest and most cynical critiques, remarks that few men know how to be thoroughly bad with honour to themselves. Their will is evil; but the grain of good in them--some fear of public opinion, some repugnance to committing a signal crime--paralyses their arm at the moment when it ought to have been raised to strike. He instances Gian Paolo Baglioni's omission to murder Julius II., when that Pope placed himself within his clutches at Perugia. He might also have instanced Rinaldo degli Albizzi's refusal to push things to extremities by murdering Cosimo. It was the combination of despotic violence in the exile of Cosimo with constitutional moderation in the preservation of his life, that betrayed the weakness of the oligarchs and restored confidence to the Medicean party. IX In the course of the year 1434 this party began to hold up its head. Powerful as the Albizzi were, they only retained the government by artifice; and now they had done a deed which put at nought their former arts and intrigues. A Signory favourable to the Medici came into office, and on September 26th, 1434, Rinaldo in his turn was summoned to the palace and declared a rebel. He strove to raise the forces of his party, and entered the piazza at the head of eight hundred men. The menacing attitude of the people, however, made resistance perilous. Rinaldo disbanded his troops, and placed himself under the protection of Pope Eugenius IV., who was then resident in Florence. This act of submission proved that Rinaldo had not the courage or the cruelty to try the chance of civil war. Whatever his motives may have been, he lost his hold upon the State beyond recovery. On September 29th, a new parliament was summoned; on October 2nd, Cosimo was recalled from exile and the Albizzi were banished. The intercession of the Pope procured for them nothing but the liberty to leave Florence unmolested. Einaldo turned his back upon the city he had governed, never to set foot in it again. On October 6th, Cosimo, having passed through Padua, Ferrara, and Modena like a conqueror, reentered the town amid the plaudits of the people, and took up his dwelling as an honoured guest in the Palace of the Republic. The subsequent history of Florence is the history of his family. In after years the Medici loved to remember this return of Cosimo. His triumphal reception was painted in fresco on the walls of their villa at Cajano under the transparent allegory of Cicero's entrance into Rome. X By their brief exile the Medici had gained the credit of injured innocence, the fame of martyrdom in the popular cause. Their foes had struck the first blow, and in striking at them had seemed to aim against the liberties of the republic. The mere failure of their adversaries to hold the power they had acquired, handed over this power to the Medici; and the reprisals which the Medici began to take had the show of justice, not of personal hatred, or petty vengeance. Cosimo was a true Florentine. He disliked violence, because he knew that blood spilt cries for blood. His passions, too, were cool and temperate. No gust of anger, no intoxication of success, destroyed his balance. His one object, the consolidation of power for his family on the basis of popular favour, was kept steadily in view; and he would do nothing that might compromise that end. Yet he was neither generous nor merciful. We therefore find that from the first moment of his return to Florence he instituted a system of pitiless and unforgiving persecution against his old opponents. The Albizzi were banished, root and branch, with all their followers, consigned to lonely and often to unwholesome stations through the length and breadth of Italy. If they broke the bonds assigned them, they were forthwith declared traitors and their property was confiscated. After a long series of years, by merely keeping in force the first sentence pronounced upon them, Cosimo had the cruel satisfaction of seeing the whole of that proud oligarchy die out by slow degrees in the insufferable tedium of solitude and exile. Even the high-souled Palla degli Strozzi, who had striven to remain neutral, and whose wealth and talents were devoted to the revival of classical studies, was proscribed because to Cosimo he seemed too powerful. Separated from his children, he died in banishment at Padua. In this way the return of the Medici involved the loss to Florence of some noble citizens, who might perchance have checked the Medicean tyranny if they had stayed to guide the State. The plebeians, raised to wealth and influence by Cosimo before his exile, now took the lead in the republic. He used these men as catspaws, rarely putting himself forward or allowing his own name to appear, but pulling the wires of government in privacy by means of intermediate agents. The Medicean party was called at first _Puccini_ from a certain Puccio, whose name was better known in caucus or committee than that of his real master. To rule through these creatures of his own making taxed all the ingenuity of Cosimo; but his profound and subtle intellect was suited to the task, and he found unlimited pleasure in the exercise of his consummate craft. We have already seen to what extent he used his riches for the acquisition of political influence. Now that he had come to power, he continued the same method, packing the Signory and the Councils with men whom he could hold by debt between his thumb and finger. His command of the public moneys enabled him to wink at peculation in State offices; it was part of his system to bind magistrates and secretaries to his interest by their consciousness of guilt condoned but not forgotten. Not a few, moreover, owed their living to the appointments he procured for them. While he thus controlled the wheel-work of the commonwealth by means of organised corruption, he borrowed the arts of his old enemies to oppress dissentient citizens. If a man took an independent line in voting, and refused allegiance to the Medicean party, he was marked out for persecution. No violence was used; but he found himself hampered in his commerce--money, plentiful for others, became scarce for him; his competitors in trade were subsidised to undersell him. And while the avenues of industry were closed, his fortune was taxed above its value, until he had to sell at a loss in order to discharge his public obligations. In the first twenty years of the Medicean rule, seventy families had to pay 4,875,000 golden florins of extraordinary imposts, fixed by arbitrary assessment. The more patriotic members of his party looked with dread and loathing on this system of corruption and exclusion. To their remonstrances Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiled than the State not ours.' 'Governments cannot be carried on with paternosters.' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.' 'I aim at finite ends.' These maxims represent the whole man,--first, in his egotism, eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin; secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends; thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine clothes suffice for a citizen; fourthly, in his worldly ambition bent on positive success. It was, in fact, his policy to reduce Florence to the condition of a rotten borough: nor did this policy fail. One notable sign of the influence he exercised was the change which now came over the foreign relations of the republic. Up to the date of his dictatorship Florence had uniformly fought the battle of freedom in Italy. It was the chief merit of the Albizzi oligarchy that they continued the traditions of the mediæval State, and by their vigorous action checked the growth of the Visconti. Though they engrossed the government they never forgot that they were first of all things Florentines, and only in the second place men who owed their power and influence to office. In a word, they acted like patriotic Tories, like republican patricians. Therefore they would not ally themselves with tyrants or countenance the enslavement of free cities by armed despots. Their subjugation of the Tuscan burghs to Florence was itself part of a grand republican policy. Cosimo changed all this. When the Visconti dynasty ended by the death of Filippo Maria in 1447, there was a chance of restoring the independence of Lombardy. Milan in effect declared herself a republic, and by the aid of Florence she might at this moment have maintained her liberty. Cosimo, however, entered into treaty with Francesco Sforza, supplied him with money, guaranteed him against Florentine interference, and saw with satisfaction how he reduced the duchy to his military tyranny. The Medici were conscious that they, selfishly, had most to gain by supporting despots who in time of need might help them to confirm their own authority. With the same end in view, when the legitimate line of the Bentivogli was extinguished, Cosimo hunted out a bastard pretender of that family, presented him to the chiefs of the Bentivogli faction, and had him placed upon the seat of his supposed ancestors at Bologna. This young man, a certain Santi da Cascese, presumed to be the son of Ercole de' Bentivogli, was an artisan in a wool factory when Cosimo set eyes upon him. At first Santi refused the dangerous honour of governing a proud republic; but the intrigues of Cosimo prevailed, and the obscure craftsman ended his days a powerful prince. By the arts I have attempted to describe, Cosimo in the course of his long life absorbed the forces of the republic into himself. While he shunned the external signs of despotic power he made himself the master of the State. His complexion was of a pale olive; his stature short; abstemious and simple in his habits, affable in conversation, sparing of speech, he knew how to combine that burgher-like civility for which the Romans praised Augustus, with the reality of a despotism all the more difficult to combat because it seemed nowhere and was everywhere. When he died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1464, the people whom he had enslaved, but whom he had neither injured nor insulted, honoured him with the title of _Pater Patriæ_. This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of homespun for the habit of the Court, he found himself an honoured equal? XI Cosimo had shown consummate skill by governing Florence through a party created and raised to influence by himself. The jealousy of these adherents formed the chief difficulty with which his son Piero had to contend. Unless the Medici could manage to kick down the ladder whereby they had risen, they ran the risk of losing all. As on a former occasion, so now they profited by the mistakes of their antagonists. Three chief men of their own party, Diotisalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and Luca Pitti, determined to shake off the yoke of their masters, and to repay the Medici for what they owed by leading them to ruin. Niccolo Soderini, a patriot, indignant at the slow enslavement of his country, joined them. At first they strove to undermine the credit of the Medici with the Florentines by inducing Piero to call in the moneys placed at interest by his father in the hands of private citizens. This act was unpopular; but it did not suffice to move a revolution. To proceed by constitutional measures against the Medici was judged impolitic. Therefore the conspirators decided to take, if possible, Piero's life. The plot failed, chiefly owing to the coolness and the cunning of the young Lorenzo, Piero's eldest son. Public sympathy was strongly excited against the aggressors. Neroni, Acciaiuoli, and Soderini were exiled. Pitti was allowed to stay, dishonoured, powerless, and penniless, in Florence. Meanwhile, the failure of their foes had only served to strengthen the position of the Medici. The ladder had saved them the trouble of kicking it down. The congratulations addressed on this occasion to Piero and Lorenzo by the ruling powers of Italy show that the Medici were already regarded as princes outside Florence. Lorenzo and Giuliano, the two sons of Piero, travelled abroad to the Courts of Milan and Ferrara with the style and state of more than simple citizens. At home they occupied the first place on all occasions of public ceremony, receiving royal visitors on terms of equality, and performing the hospitalities of the republic like men who had been born to represent its dignities. Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini, of the noble Roman house, was another sign that the Medici were advancing on the way toward despotism. Cosimo had avoided foreign alliances for his children. His descendants now judged themselves firmly planted enough to risk the odium of a princely match for the sake of the support outside the city they might win. XII Piero de' Medici died in December 1469. His son Lorenzo was then barely twenty-two years of age. The chiefs of the Medicean party, all-powerful in the State, held a council, in which they resolved to place him in the same position as his father and grandfather. This resolve seems to have been formed after mature deliberation, on the ground that the existing conditions of Italian politics rendered it impossible to conduct the government without a presidential head. Florence, though still a democracy, required a permanent chief to treat on an equality with the princes of the leading cities. Here we may note the prudence of Cosimo's foreign policy. When he helped to establish despots in Milan and Bologna he was rendering the presidency of his own family in Florence necessary. Lorenzo, having received this invitation, called attention to his youth and inexperience. Yet he did not refuse it; and, after a graceful display of diffidence, he accepted the charge, entering thus upon that famous political career, in the course of which he not only established and maintained a balance of power in Italy, with Florence for the central city, but also contrived to remodel the government of the republic in the interest of his own family and to strengthen the Medici by relations with the Papal See. The extraordinary versatility of this man's intellectual and social gifts, his participation in all the literary and philosophical interests of his century, his large and liberal patronage of art, and the gaiety with which he joined the people of Florence in their pastimes--Mayday games and Carnival festivities--strengthened his hold upon the city in an age devoted to culture and refined pleasure. Whatever was most brilliant in the spirit of the Italian Benaissance seemed to be incarnate in Lorenzo. Not merely as a patron and a dilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, he proved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of his country. Penetrated with the passion for erudition which distinguished Florence in the fifteenth century, familiar with her painters and her sculptors, deeply read in the works of her great poets, he conceived the ideal of infusing the spirit of antique civility into modern life, and of effecting for society what the artists were performing in their own sphere. To preserve the native character of the Florentine genius, while he added the grace of classic form, was the aim to which his tastes and instincts led him. At the same time, while he made himself the master of Florentine revels and the Augustus of Renaissance literature, he took care that beneath his carnival masks and ball-dress should be concealed the chains which he was forging for the republic. What he lacked, with so much mental brilliancy, was moral greatness. The age he lived in was an age of selfish despots, treacherous generals, godless priests. It was an age of intellectual vigour and artistic creativeness; but it was also an age of mean ambition, sordid policy, and vitiated principles. Lorenzo remained true in all respects to the genius of this age: true to its enthusiasm for antique culture, true to its passion for art, true to its refined love of pleasure; but true also to its petty political intrigues, to its cynical selfishness, to its lack of heroism. For Florence he looked no higher and saw no further than Cosimo had done. If culture was his pastime, the enslavement of the city by bribery and corruption was the hard work of his manhood. As is the case with much Renaissance art, his life was worth more for its decorative detail than for its constructive design. In richness, versatility, variety, and exquisiteness of execution, it left little to be desired; yet, viewed at a distance, and as a whole, it does not inspire us with a sense of architectonic majesty. XIII Lorenzo's chief difficulties arose from the necessity under which, like Cosimo, he laboured of governing the city through its old institutions by means of a party. To keep the members of this party in good temper, and to gain their approval for the alterations he effected in the State machinery of Florence, was the problem of his life. The successful solution of this problem was easier now, after two generations of the Medicean ascendency, than it had been at first. Meanwhile the people were maintained in good humour by public shows, ease, plenty, and a general laxity of discipline. The splendour of Lorenzo's foreign alliances and the consideration he received from all the Courts of Italy contributed in no small measure to his popularity and security at home. By using his authority over Florence to inspire respect abroad, and by using his foreign credit to impose upon the burghers, Lorenzo displayed the tact of a true Italian diplomatist. His genius for statecraft, as then understood, was indeed of a rare order, equally adapted to the conduct of a complicated foreign policy and to the control of a suspicious and variable Commonwealth. In one point alone he was inferior to his grandfather. He neglected commerce, and allowed his banking business to fall into disorder so hopeless that in course of time he ceased to be solvent. Meanwhile his personal expenses, both as a prince in his own palace, and as the representative of majesty in Florence, continually increased. The bankruptcy of the Medici, it had long been foreseen, would involve the public finances in serious confusion. And now, in order to retrieve his fortunes, Lorenzo was not only obliged to repudiate his debts to the exchequer, but had also to gain complete disposal of the State purse. It was this necessity that drove him to effect the constitutional revolution of 1480, by which he substituted a Privy Council of seventy members for the old Councils of the State, absorbing the chief functions of the commonwealth into this single body, whom he practically nominated at pleasure. The same want of money led to the great scandal of his reign--the plundering of the Monte delle Doti, or State Insurance Office Fund for securing dowers to the children of its creditors. XIV While tracing the salient points of Lorenzo de' Medici's administration I have omitted to mention the important events which followed shortly after his accession to power in 1469. What happened between that date and 1480 was not only decisive for the future fortunes of the Casa Medici, but it was also eminently characteristic of the perils and the difficulties which beset Italian despots. The year 1471 was signalised by a visit by the Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, and his wife Bona of Savoy, to the Medici in Florence. They came attended by their whole Court--body guards on horse and foot, ushers, pages, falconers, grooms, kennel-varlets, and huntsmen. Omitting the mere baggage service, their train counted two thousand horses. To mention this incident would be superfluous, had not so acute an observer as Machiavelli marked it out as a turning-point in Florentine history. Now, for the first time, the democratic commonwealth saw its streets filled with a mob of courtiers. Masques, balls, and tournaments succeeded each other with magnificent variety; and all the arts of Florence were pressed into the service of these festivals. Machiavelli says that the burghers lost the last remnant of their old austerity of manners, and became, like the degenerate Romans, ready to obey the masters who provided them with brilliant spectacles. They gazed with admiration on the pomp of Italian princes, their dissolute and godless living, their luxury and prodigal expenditure; and when the Medici affected similar habits in the next generation, the people had no courage to resist the invasion of their pleasant vices. In the same year, 1471, Volterra was reconquered for the Florentines by Frederick of Urbino. The honours of this victory, disgraced by a brutal sack of the conquered city, in violation of its articles of capitulation, were reserved for Lorenzo, who returned in triumph to Florence. More than ever he assumed the prince, and in his person undertook to represent the State. In the same year, 1471, Francesco della Rovere was raised to the Papacy with the memorable name of Sixtus IV. Sixtus was a man of violent temper and fierce passions, restless and impatiently ambitious, bent on the aggrandisement of the beautiful and wanton youths, his nephews. Of these the most aspiring was Girolamo Riario, for whom Sixtus bought the town of Imola from Taddeo Manfredi, in order that he might possess the title of count and the nucleus of a tyranny in the Romagna. This purchase thwarted the plans of Lorenzo, who wished to secure the same advantages for Florence. Smarting with the sense of disappointment, he forbade the Roman banker, Francesco Pazzi, to guarantee the purchase-money. By this act Lorenzo made two mortal foes--the Pope and Francesco Pazzi. Francesco was a thin, pale, atrabilious fanatic, all nerve and passion, with a monomaniac intensity of purpose, and a will inflamed and guided by imagination--a man formed by nature for conspiracy, such a man, in fact, as Shakspere drew in Cassius. Maddened by Lorenzo's prohibition, he conceived the notion of overthrowing the Medici in Florence by a violent blow. Girolamo Riario entered into his views. So did Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, who had private reasons for hostility. These men found no difficulty in winning over Sixtus to their plot; nor is it possible to purge the Pope of participation in what followed. I need not describe by what means Francesco drew the other members of his family into the scheme, and how he secured the assistance of armed cut-throats. Suffice it to say that the chief conspirators, with the exception of the Count Girolamo, betook themselves to Florence, and there, after the failure of other attempts, decided to murder Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano in the cathedral on Sunday, April 26th, 1478. The moment when the priest at the high altar finished the mass, was fixed for the assassination. Everything was ready. The conspirators, by Judas kisses and embracements, had discovered that the young men wore no protective armour under their silken doublets. Pacing the aisle behind the choir, they feared no treason. And now the lives of both might easily have been secured, if at the last moment the courage of the hired assassins had not failed them. Murder, they said, was well enough; but they could not bring themselves to stab men before the newly consecrated body of Christ. In this extremity a priest was found who, 'being accustomed to churches,' had no scruples. He and another reprobate were told off to Lorenzo. Francesco de' Pazzi himself undertook Giuliano. The moment for attack arrived. Francesco plunged his dagger into the heart of Giuliano. Then, not satisfied with this death-blow, he struck again, and in his heat of passion wounded his own thigh. Lorenzo escaped with a flesh-wound from the poniard of the priest, and rushed into the sacristy, where his friend Poliziano shut and held the brazen door. The plot had failed; for Giuliano, of the two brothers, was the one whom the conspirators would the more willingly have spared. The whole church was in an uproar. The city rose in tumult. Rage and horror took possession of the people. They flew to the Palazzo Pubblico and to the houses of the Pazzi, hunted the conspirators from place to place, hung the archbishop by the neck from the palace windows, and, as they found fresh victims for their fury, strung them one by one in a ghastly row at his side above the Square. About one hundred in all were killed. None who had joined in the plot escaped; for Lorenzo had long arms, and one man, who fled to Constantinople, was delivered over to his agents by the Sultan. Out of the whole Pazzi family only Guglielmo, the husband of Bianca de' Medici, was spared. When the tumult was over, Andrea del Castagno painted the portraits of the traitors head-downwards upon the walls of the Bargello Palace, in order that all men might know what fate awaited the foes of the Medici and of the State of Florence.[15] Meanwhile a bastard son of Giuliano's was received into the Medicean household, to perpetuate his lineage. This child, named Giulio, was destined to be famous in the annals of Italy and Florence under the title of Pope Clement VII. XV As is usual when such plots miss their mark, the passions excited redounded to the profit of the injured party. The commonwealth felt that the blow struck at Lorenzo had been aimed at their majesty. Sixtus, on the other hand, could not contain his rage at the failure of so ably planned a _coup de main_. Ignoring that he had sanctioned the treason, that a priest had put his hand to the dagger, that the impious deed had been attempted in a church before the very Sacrament of Christ, whose vicar on earth he was, the Pope now excommunicated the republic. The reason he alleged was, that the Florentines had dared to hang an archbishop. Thus began a war to the death between Sixtus and Florence. The Pope inflamed the whole of Italy, and carried on a ruinous campaign in Tuscany. It seemed as though the republic might lose her subject cities, always ready to revolt when danger threatened the sovereign State. Lorenzo's position became critical. Sixtus made no secret of the hatred he bore him personally, declaring that he fought less with Florence than with the Medici. To support the odium of this long war and this heavy interdict alone, was more than he could do. His allies forsook him. Naples was enlisted on the Pope's side. Milan and the other States of Lombardy were occupied with their own affairs, and held aloof. In this extremity he saw that nothing but a bold step could save him. The league formed by Sixtus must be broken up at any risk, and, if possible, by his own ability. On December 6th, 1479, Lorenzo left Florence, unarmed and unattended, took ship at Leghorn, and proceeded to the court of the enemy, King Ferdinand, at Naples. Ferdinand was a cruel and treacherous sovereign, who had murdered his guest, Jacopo Piccinino, at a banquet given in his honour. But Ferdinand was the son of Alfonso, who, by address and eloquence, had gained a kingdom from his foe and jailor, Filippo Maria Visconti. Lorenzo calculated that he too, following Alfonso's policy, might prove to Ferdinand how little there was to gain from an alliance with Rome, how much Naples and Florence, firmly united together for offence and defence, might effect in Italy. Only a student of those perilous times can appreciate the courage and the genius, the audacity combined with diplomatic penetration, displayed by Lorenzo at this crisis. He calmly walked into the lion's den, trusting he could tame the lion and teach it, and all in a few days. Nor did his expectation fail. Though Lorenzo was rather ugly than handsome, with a dark skin, heavy brows, powerful jaws, and nose sharp in the bridge and broad at the nostrils, without grace of carriage or melody of voice, he possessed what makes up for personal defects--the winning charm of eloquence in conversation, a subtle wit, profound knowledge of men, and tact allied to sympathy, which placed him always at the centre of the situation. Ferdinand received him kindly. The Neapolitan nobles admired his courage and were fascinated by his social talents. On March 1st, 1480, he left Naples again, having won over the King by his arguments. When he reached Florence he was able to declare that he brought home a treaty of peace and alliance signed by the most powerful foe of the republic. The success of this bold enterprise endeared Lorenzo more than ever to his countrymen. In the same year they concluded a treaty with Sixtus, who was forced against his will to lay down arms by the capture of Otranto and the extreme peril of Turkish invasion. After the year 1480 Lorenzo remained sole master in Florence, the arbiter and peacemaker of the rest of Italy. XVI The conjuration of the Pazzi was only one in a long series of similar conspiracies. Italian despots gained their power by violence and wielded it with craft. Violence and craft were therefore used against them. When the study of the classics had penetrated the nation with antique ideas of heroism, tyrannicide became a virtue. Princes were murdered with frightful frequency. Thus Gian Maria Visconti was put to death at Milan in 1412; Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1484; the Chiarelli of Fabriano were massacred in 1435; the Baglioni of Perugia in 1500; Girolamo Gentile planned the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza at Genoa in 1476; Niccolo d'Este conspired against his uncle Ercole in 1476; Stefano Porcari attempted the life of Nicholas V. at Rome in 1453; Lodovico Sforza narrowly escaped a violent death in 1453. I might multiply these instances beyond satiety. As it is, I have selected but a few examples falling, all but one, within the second half of the fifteenth century. Nearly all these attempts upon the lives of princes were made in church during the celebration of sacred offices. There was no superfluity of naughtiness, no wilful sacrilege, in this choice of an occasion. It only testified to the continual suspicion and guarded watchfulness maintained by tyrants. To strike at them except in church was almost impossible. Meanwhile the fate of the tyrannicides was uniform. Successful or not, they perished. Yet so grievous was the pressure of Italian despotism, so glorious was the ideal of Greek and Roman heroism, so passionate the temper of the people, that to kill a prince at any cost to self appeared the crown of manliness. This bloodshed exercised a delirious fascination: pure and base, personal and patriotic motives combined to add intensity of fixed and fiery purpose to the murderous impulse. Those then who, like the Medici, aspired to tyranny and sought to found a dynasty of princes, entered the arena against a host of unknown and unseen gladiators. XVII On his deathbed, in 1492, Lorenzo lay between two men--Angelo Poliziano and Girolamo Savonarola. Poliziano incarnated the genial, radiant, godless spirit of fifteenth-century humanism. Savonarola represented the conscience of Italy, self-convicted, amid all her greatness, of crimes that called for punishment. It is said that when Lorenzo asked the monk for absolution, Savonarola bade him first restore freedom to Florence. Lorenzo, turned his face to the wall and was silent. How indeed could he make this city in a moment free, after sixty years of slow and systematic corruption? Savonarola left him, and he died unshriven. This legend is doubtful, though it rests on excellent if somewhat partial authority. It has, at any rate, the value of a mythus, since it epitomises the attitude assumed by the great preacher to the prince. Florence enslaved, the soul of Lorenzo cannot lay its burden down, but must go with all its sins upon it to the throne of God. The year 1492 was a memorable year for Italy. In this year Lorenzo's death removed the keystone of the arch that had sustained the fabric of Italian federation. In this year Roderigo Borgia was elected Pope. In this year Columbus discovered America; Vasco de Gama soon after opened a new way to the Indies, and thus the commerce of the world passed from Italy to other nations. In this year the conquest of Granada gave unity to the Spanish nation. In this year France, through the lifelong craft of Louis XI., was for the first time united under a young hot-headed sovereign. On every side of the political horizon storms threatened. It was clear that a new chapter of European history had been opened. Then Savonarola raised his voice, and cried that the crimes of Italy, the abominations of the Church, would speedily be punished. Events led rapidly to the fulfilment of this prophecy. Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici, was a vain, irresolute, and hasty princeling, fond of display, proud of his skill in fencing and football-playing, with too much of the Orsini blood in his hot veins, with too little of the Medicean craft in his weak head. The Italian despots felt they could not trust Piero, and this want of confidence was probably the first motive that impelled Lodovico Sforza to call Charles VIII. into Italy in 1494. It will not be necessary to dwell upon this invasion of the French, except in so far as it affected Florence. Charles passed rapidly through Lombardy, engaged his army in the passes of the Apennines, and debouched upon the coast where the Magra divided Tuscany from Liguria. Here the fortresses of Sarzana and Pietra Santa, between the marble bulwark of Carrara and the Tuscan sea, stopped his further progress. The keys were held by the Florentines. To force these strong positions and to pass beyond them seemed impossible. It might have been impossible if Piero de' Medici had possessed a firmer will. As it was, he rode off to the French camp, delivered up the forts to Charles, bound the King by no engagements, and returned not otherwise than proud of his folly to Florence. A terrible reception awaited him. The Florentines, in their fury, had risen and sacked the Medicean palace. It was as much as Piero, with his brothers, could do to escape beyond the hills to Venice. The despotism of the Medici, so carefully built up, so artfully sustained and strengthened, was overthrown in a single day. XVIII Before considering what happened in Florence after the expulsion of the Medici, it will be well to pause a moment and review the state in which Lorenzo had left his family. Piero, his eldest son, recognised as chief of the republic after his father's death, was married to Alfonsina Orsini, and was in his twenty-second year. Giovanni, his second son, a youth of seventeen, had just been made cardinal. This honour, of vast importance for the Casa Medici in the future, he owed to his sister Maddalena's marriage to Franceschetto Cybo, son of Innocent VIII. The third of Lorenzo's sons, named Giuliano, was a boy of thirteen. Giulio, the bastard son of the elder Giuliano, was fourteen. These four princes formed the efficient strength of the Medici, the hope of the house; and for each of them, with the exception of Piero, who died in exile, and of whom no more notice need be taken, a brilliant destiny was still in store. In the year 1495, however, they now wandered, homeless and helpless, through the cities of Italy, each of which was shaken to its foundations by the French invasion. XIX Florence, left without the Medici, deprived of Pisa and other subject cities by the passage of the French army, with no leader but the monk Savonarola, now sought to reconstitute her liberties. During the domination of the Albizzi and the Medici the old order of the commonwealth had been completely broken up. The Arti had lost their primitive importance. The distinctions between the Grandi and the Popolani had practically passed away. In a democracy that has submitted to a lengthened course of tyranny, such extinction of its old life is inevitable. Yet the passion for liberty was still powerful; and the busy brains of the Florentines were stored with experience gained from their previous vicissitudes, from \ the study of antique history, and from the observation of existing constitutions in the towns of Italy. They now determined to reorganise the State upon the model of the Venetian republic. The Signory was to remain, with its old institution of Priors, Gonfalonier, and College, elected for brief periods. These magistrates were to take the initiative in debate, to propose measures, and to consider plans of action. The real power of the State, for voting supplies and ratifying the measures of the Signory, was vested in a senate of one thousand members, called the Grand Council, from whom a smaller body of forty, acting as intermediates between the Council and the Signory, were elected. It is said that the plan of this constitution originated with Savonarola; nor is there any doubt that he used all his influence in the pulpit of the Duomo to render it acceptable to the people. Whoever may have been responsible for its formation, the new government was carried in 1495, and a large hall for the assembly of the Grand Council was opened in the Public Palace. Savonarola, meanwhile, had become the ruling spirit of Florence. He gained his great power as a preacher: he used it like a monk. The motive principle of his action was the passion for reform. To bring the Church back to its pristine state of purity, without altering its doctrine or suggesting any new form of creed; to purge Italy of ungodly customs; to overthrow the tyrants who encouraged evil living, and to place the power of the State in the hands of sober citizens: these were his objects. Though he set himself in bold opposition to the reigning Pope, he had no desire to destroy the spiritual supremacy of S. Peter's see. Though he burned with an enthusiastic zeal for liberty, and displayed rare genius for administration, he had no ambition to rule Florence like a dictator. Savonarola was neither a reformer in the northern sense of the word, nor yet a political demagogue. His sole wish was to see purity of manners and freedom of self-government re-established. With this end in view he bade the Florentines elect Christ as their supreme chief; and they did so. For the same end he abstained from appearing in the State Councils, and left the Constitution to work by its own laws. His personal influence he reserved for the pulpit; and here he was omnipotent. The people believed in him as a prophet. They turned to him as the man who knew what he wanted--as the voice of liberty, the soul of the new régime, the genius who could breathe into the commonwealth a breath of fresh vitality. When, therefore, Savonarola preached a reform of manners, he was at once obeyed. Strict laws were passed enforcing sobriety, condemning trades of pleasure, reducing the gay customs of Florence to puritanical austerity. Great stress has been laid upon this reaction of the monk-led populace against the vices of the past. Yet the historian is bound to pronounce that the reform effected by Savonarola was rather picturesque than vital. Like all violent revivals of pietism, it produced a no less violent reaction. The parties within the city who resented the interference of a preaching friar, joined with the Pope in Rome, who hated a contumacious schismatic in Savonarola. Assailed by these two forces at the same moment, and driven upon perilous ground by his own febrile enthusiasm, Savonarola succumbed. He was imprisoned, tortured, and burned upon the public square in 1498. What Savonarola really achieved for Florence was not a permanent reform of morality, but a resuscitation of the spirit of freedom. His followers, called in contempt _I Piagnoni_, or the Weepers, formed the path of the commonwealth in future; and the memory of their martyr served as a common bond of sympathy to unite them in times of trial. It was a necessary consequence of the peculiar part he played that the city was henceforth divided into factions representing mutually antagonistic principles. These factions were not created by Savonarola; but his extraordinary influence accentuated, as it were, the humours that lay dormant in the State. Families favourable to the Medici took the name of _Palleschi_. Men who chafed against puritanical reform, and who were eager for any government that should secure them their old licence, were known as _Compagnacci_. Meanwhile the oligarchs, who disliked a democratic Constitution, and thought it possible to found an aristocracy without the intervention of the Medici, came to be known as _Gli Ottimati_. Florence held within itself, from this epoch forward to the final extinction of liberty, four great parties: the _Piagnoni_, passionate for political freedom and austerity of life; the _Palleschi_, favourable to the Medicean cause, and regretful of Lorenzo's pleasant rule; the _Compagnacci_, intolerant of the reformed republic, neither hostile nor loyal to the Medici, but desirous of personal licence; the _Ottimati_, astute and selfish, watching their own advantage, ever-mindful to form a narrow government of privileged families, disinclined to the Medici, except when they thought the Medici might be employed as instruments in their intrigues. XX During the short period of Savonarola's ascendency, Florence was in form at least a Theocracy, without any titular head but Christ; and as long as the enthusiasm inspired by the monk lasted, as long as his personal influence endured, the Constitution of the Grand Council worked well. After his death it was found that the machinery was too cumbrous. While adopting the Venetian form of government, the Florentines had omitted one essential element--the Doge. By referring measures of immediate necessity to the Grand Council, the republic lost precious time. Dangerous publicity, moreover, was incurred; and so large a body often came to no firm resolution. There was no permanent authority in the State; no security that what had been deliberated would be carried out with energy; no titular chief, who could transact affairs with foreign potentates and their ambassadors. Accordingly, in 1502, it was decreed that the Gonfalonier should hold office for life--should be in fact a Doge. To this important post of permanent president Piero Soderini was appointed; and in his hands were placed the chief affairs of the republic. At this point Florence, after all her vicissitudes, had won her way to something really similar to the Venetian Constitution. Yet the similarity existed more in form than in fact. The government of burghers in a Grand Council, with a Senate of forty, and a Gonfalonier for life, had not grown up gradually and absorbed into itself the vital forces of the commonwealth. It was a creation of inventive intelligence, not of national development, in Florence. It had against it the jealousy of the Ottimati, who felt themselves overshadowed by the Gonfalonier; the hatred of the Palleschi, who yearned for the Medici; the discontent of the working classes, who thought the presence of a Court in Florence would improve trade; last, but not least, the disaffection of the Compagnacci, who felt they could not flourish to their heart's content in a free commonwealth. Moreover, though the name of liberty was on every lip, though the Florentines talked, wrote, and speculated more about constitutional independence than they had ever done, the true energy of free institutions had passed from the city. The corrupt government of Cosimo and Lorenzo bore its natural fruit now. Egotistic ambition and avarice supplanted patriotism and industry. It is necessary to comprehend these circumstances, in order that the next revolution may be clearly understood. XXI During the ten years which elapsed between 1502 and 1512, Piero Soderini administered Florence with an outward show of great prosperity. He regained Pisa, and maintained an honourable foreign policy in the midst of the wars stirred up by the League of Cambray. Meanwhile the young princes of the House of Medici had grown to manhood in exile. The Cardinal Giovanni was thirty-seven in 1512. His brother Giuliano was thirty-three. Both of these men were better fitted than their brother Piero to fight the battles of the family. Giovanni, in particular, had inherited no small portion of the Medicean craft. During the troubled reign of Julius II. he kept very quiet, cementing his connections with powerful men in Rome, but making no effort to regain his hold on Florence. Now the moment for striking a decisive blow had come. After the battle of Ravenna in 1512, the French were driven out of Italy, and the Sforzas returned to Milan; the Spanish troops, under the Viceroy Cardona, remained masters of the country. Following the camp of these Spaniards, Giovanni de' Medici entered Tuscany in August, and caused the restoration of the Medici to be announced in Florence. The people, assembled by Soderini, resolved to resist to the uttermost. No foreign army should force them to receive the masters whom they had expelled. Yet their courage failed on August 29th, when news reached them of the capture and the sack of Prato. Prato is a sunny little city a few miles distant from the walls of Florence, famous for the beauty of its women, the richness of its gardens, and the grace of its buildings. Into this gem of cities the savage soldiery of Spain marched in the bright autumnal weather, and turned the paradise into a hell. It is even now impossible to read of what they did in Prato without shuddering.[16] Cruelty and lust, sordid greed for gold, and cold delight in bloodshed, could go no further. Giovanni de' Medici, by nature mild and voluptuous, averse to violence of all kinds, had to smile approval, while the Spanish Viceroy knocked thus with mailed hand for him at the door of Florence. The Florentines were paralysed with terror. They deposed Soderini and received the Medici. Giovanni and Giuliano entered their devastated palace in the Via Larga, abolished the Grand Council, and dealt with the republic as they listed. XXII There was no longer any medium in Florence possible between either tyranny or some such government as the Medici had now destroyed. The State was too rotten to recover even the modified despotism of Lorenzo's days. Each transformation had impaired some portion of its framework, broken down some of its traditions, and sowed new seeds of egotism in citizens who saw all things round them change but self-advantage. Therefore Giovanni and Giuliano felt themselves secure in flattering the popular vanity by an empty parade of the old institutions. They restored the Signory and the Gonfalonier, elected for intervals of two months by officers appointed for this purpose by the Medici. Florence had the show of a free government. But the Medici managed all things; and soldiers, commanded by their creature, Paolo Vettori, held the Palace and the Public Square. The tyranny thus established was less secure, inasmuch as it openly rested upon violence, than Lorenzo's power had been; nor were there signs wanting that the burghers could ill brook their servitude. The conspiracy of Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi proved that the Medicean brothers ran daily risk of life. Indeed, it is not likely that they would have succeeded in maintaining their authority--for they were poor and ill-supported by friends outside the city--except for one most lucky circumstance: that was the election of Giovanni de' Medici to the Papacy in 1513. The creation of Leo X. spread satisfaction throughout Italy. Politicians trusted that he would display some portion of his father's ability, and restore peace to the nation. Men of arts and letters expected everything from a Medicean Pope, who had already acquired the reputation of polite culture and open-handed generosity. They at any rate were not deceived. Leo's first words on taking his place in the Vatican were addressed to his brother Giuliano: 'Let us enjoy the Papacy, now that God has given it to us;' and his notion of enjoyment was to surround himself with court-poets, jesters, and musicians, to adorn his Roman palaces with frescoes, to collect statues and inscriptions, to listen to Latin speeches, and to pass judgment upon scholarly compositions. Any one and every one who gave him sensual or intellectual pleasure, found his purse always open. He lived in the utmost magnificence, and made Rome the Paris of the Renaissance for brilliance, immorality, and self-indulgent ease. The politicians had less reason to be satisfied. Instead of uniting the Italians and keeping the great Powers of Europe in check, Leo carried on a series of disastrous petty wars, chiefly with the purpose of establishing the Medici as princes. He squandered the revenues of the Church, and left enormous debts behind him--an exchequer ruined and a foreign policy so confused that peace for Italy could only be obtained by servitude. Florence shared in the general rejoicing which greeted Leo's accession to the Papacy. He was the first Florentine citizen who had received the tiara, and the popular vanity was flattered by this honour to the republic. Political theorists, meanwhile, began to speculate what greatness Florence, in combination with Rome, might rise to. The Pope was young; he ruled a large territory, reduced to order by his warlike predecessors. It seemed as though the republic, swayed by him, might make herself the first city in Italy, and restore the glories of her Guelf ascendency upon the platform of Renaissance statecraft. There was now no overt opposition to the Medici in Florence. How to govern the city from Rome, and how to advance the fortunes of his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo (Piero's son, a young man of twenty-one), occupied the Pope's most serious attention. For Lorenzo Leo obtained the Duchy of Urbino and the hand of a French princess. Giuliano was named Gonfalonier of the Church. He also received the French title of Duke of Nemours and the hand of Filiberta, Princess of Savoy. Leo entertained a further project of acquiring the crown of Southern Italy for his brother, and thus of uniting Rome, Florence, and Naples under the headship of his house. Nor were the Medicean interests neglected in the Church. Giulio, the Pope's bastard cousin, was made cardinal. He remained in Rome, acting as vice-chancellor and doing the hard work of the Papal Government for the pleasure-loving pontiff. To Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the titular head of the family, was committed the government of Florence. During their exile, wandering from court to court in Italy, the Medici had forgotten what it was to be burghers, and had acquired the manners of princes. Leo alone retained enough of caution to warn his nephew that the Florentines must still be treated as free people. He confirmed the constitution of the Signory and the Privy Council of seventy established by his father, bidding Lorenzo, while he ruled this sham republic, to avoid the outer signs of tyranny. The young duke at first behaved with moderation, but he could not cast aside his habits of a great lord. Florence now for the first time saw a regular court established in her midst, with a prince, who, though he bore a foreign title, was in fact her master. The joyous days of Lorenzo the Magnificent returned. Masquerades and triumphs filled the public squares. Two clubs of pleasure, called the Diamond and the Branch--badges adopted by the Medici to signify their firmness in disaster and their power of self-recovery--were formed to lead the revels. The best sculptors and painters devoted their genius to the invention of costumes and cars. The city affected to believe that the age of gold had come again. XXIII Fortune had been very favourable to the Medici. They had returned as princes to Florence. Giovanni was Pope. Giuliano was Gonfalonier of the Church. Giulio was Cardinal and Archbishop of Florence. Lorenzo ruled the city like a sovereign. But this prosperity was no less brief than it was brilliant. A few years sufficed to sweep off all the chiefs of the great house. Giuliano died in 1516, leaving only a bastard son Ippolito. Lorenzo died in 1519, leaving a bastard son Alessandro, and a daughter, six days old, who lived to be the Queen of France. Leo died in 1521. There remained now no legitimate male descendants from the stock of Cosimo. The honours and pretensions of the Medici devolved upon three bastards--on the Cardinal Giulio, and the two boys, Alessandro and Ippolito. Of these, Alessandro was a mulatto, his mother having been a Moorish slave in the Palace of Urbino; and whether his father was Giulio, or Giuliano, or a base groom, was not known for certain. To such extremities were the Medici reduced. In order to keep their house alive, they were obliged to adopt this foundling. It is true that the younger branch of the family, descended from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo, still flourished. At this epoch it was represented by Giovanni, the great general known as the Invincible, whose bust so strikingly resembles that of Napoleon. But between this line of the Medici and the elder branch there had never been true cordiality. The Cardinal mistrusted Giovanni. It may, moreover, be added, that Giovanni was himself doomed to death in the year 1526. Giulio de' Medici was left in 1521 to administer the State of Florence single-handed. He was archbishop, and he resided in the city, holding it with the grasp of an absolute ruler. Yet he felt his position insecure. The republic had no longer any forms of self-government; nor was there a magistracy to whom the despot could delegate his power in his absence. Giulio's ambition was fixed upon the Papal crown. The bastards he was rearing were but children. Florence had therefore to be furnished with some political machinery that should work of itself. The Cardinal did not wish to give freedom to the city, but clockwork. He was in the perilous situation of having to rule a commonwealth without life, without elasticity, without capacity of self-movement, yet full of such material as, left alone, might ferment, and breed a revolution. In this perplexity, he had recourse to advisers. The most experienced politicians, philosophical theorists, practical diplomatists, and students of antique history were requested to furnish him with plans for a new constitution, just as you ask an architect to give you the plan of a new house. This was the field-day of the doctrinaires. Now was seen how much political sagacity the Florentines had gained while they were losing liberty. We possess these several drafts of constitutions. Some recommend tyranny; some incline to aristocracy, or what Italians called _Governo Stretto_; some to democracy, or _Governo Largo_; some to an eclectic compound of the other forms, or _Governo Misto_. More consummate masterpieces of constructive ingenuity can hardly be imagined. What is omitted in all, is just what no doctrinaire, no nostrum can communicate--the breath of life, the principle of organic growth. Things had come, indeed, to a melancholy pass for Florence when her tyrant, in order to confirm his hold upon her, had to devise these springs and irons to support her tottering limbs. XXIV While the archbishop and the doctors were debating, a plot was hatching in the Rucellai Gardens. It was here that the Florentine Academy now held their meetings. For this society Machiavelli wrote his 'Treatise on the Art of War,' and his 'Discourses upon Livy.' The former was an exposition of Machiavelli's scheme for creating a national militia, as the only safeguard for Italy, exposed at this period to the invasions of great foreign armies. The latter is one of the three or four masterpieces produced by the Florentine school of critical historians. Stimulated by the daring speculations of Machiavelli, and fired to enthusiasm by their study of antiquity, the younger academicians formed a conspiracy for murdering Giulio de' Medici, and restoring the republic on a Roman model. An intercepted letter betrayed their plans. Two of the conspirators were taken and beheaded. Others escaped. But the discovery of this conjuration put a stop to Giulio's scheme of reforming the State. Henceforth he ruled Florence like a despot, mild in manners, cautious in the exercise of arbitrary power, but firm in his autocracy. The Condottiere. Alessandro Vitelli, with a company of soldiers, was taken into service for the protection of his person and the intimidation of the citizens. In 1523, the Pope, Adrian VI., expired after a short papacy, from which he gained no honour and Italy no profit. Giulio hurried to Rome, and, by the clever use of his large influence, caused himself to be elected with the title of Clement VII. In Florence he left Silvio Passerini, Cardinal of Cortona, as his vicegerent and the guardian of the two boys Alessandro and Ippolito. The discipline of many years had accustomed the Florentines to a government of priests. Still the burghers, mindful of their ancient liberties, were galled by the yoke of a Cortonese, sprung up from one of their subject cities; nor could they bear the bastards who were being reared to rule them. Foreigners threw it in their teeth that Florence, the city glorious of art and freedom, was become a stable for mules--_stalla da muli_, in the expressive language of popular sarcasm. Bastardy, it may be said in passing, carried with it small dishonour among the Italians. The Estensi were all illegitimate; the Aragonese house in Naples sprang from Alfonso's natural son; and children of Popes ranked among the princes. Yet the uncertainty of Alessandro's birth and the base condition of his mother made the prospect of this tyrant peculiarly odious; while the primacy of a foreign cardinal in the midst of citizens whose spirit was still unbroken, embittered the cup of humiliation. The Casa Medici held its authority by a slender thread, and depended more upon the disunion of the burghers than on any power of its own. It could always reckon on the favour of the lower populace, who gained profit and amusement from the presence of a court. The Ottimati again hoped more from a weak despotism than from a commonwealth, where their privileges would have been merged in the mass of the Grand Council. Thus the sympathies of the plebeians and the selfishness of the rich patricians prevented the republic from asserting itself. On this meagre basis of personal cupidity the Medici sustained themselves. What made the situation still more delicate, and at the same time protracted the feeble rule of Clement, was that neither the Florentines nor the Medici had any army. Face to face with a potentate so considerable as the Pope, a free State could not be established without military force. On the other hand, the Medici, supported by a mere handful of mercenaries, had no power to resist a popular rising if any external event should inspire the middle classes with a hope of liberty. XXV Clement assumed the tiara at a moment of great difficulty. Leo had ruined the finance of Rome. France and Spain were still contending for the possession of Italy. While acting as Vice-Chancellor, Giulio de' Medici had seemed to hold the reins with a firm grasp, and men expected that he would prove a powerful Pope; but in those days he had Leo to help him; and Leo, though indolent, was an abler man than his cousin. He planned, and Giulio executed. Obliged to act now for himself, Clement revealed the weakness of his nature. That weakness was irresolution, craft without wisdom, diplomacy without knowledge of men. He raised the storm, and showed himself incapable of guiding it. This is not the place to tell by what a series of crooked schemes and cross purposes he brought upon himself the ruin of the Church and Rome, to relate his disagreement with the Emperor, or to describe again the sack of the Eternal City by the rabble of the Constable de Bourbon's army. That wreck of Rome in 1527 was the closing scene of the Italian Renaissance--the last of the Apocalyptic tragedies foretold by Savonarola--the death of the old age. When the Florentines knew what was happening in Rome, they rose and forced the Cardinal Passerini to depart with the Medicean bastards from the city. The youth demanded arms for the defence of the town, and they received them. The whole male population was enrolled in a militia. The Grand Council was reformed, and the republic was restored upon the basis of 1495. Niccolo Capponi was elected Gonfalonier. The name of Christ was again registered as chief of the commonwealth--to such an extent did the memory of Savonarola still sway the popular imagination. The new State hastened to form an alliance with France, and Malatesta Baglioni was chosen as military Commander-in-Chief. Meanwhile the city armed itself for siege--Michel Angelo Buonarroti and Francesco da San Gallo undertaking the construction of new forts and ramparts. These measures were adopted with sudden decision, because it was soon known that Clement had made peace with the Emperor, and that the army which had sacked Rome was going to be marched on Florence. XXVI In the month of August 1529 the Prince of Orange assembled his forces at Terni, and thence advanced by easy stages into Tuscany. As he approached, the Florentines laid waste their suburbs, and threw down their wreath of towers, in order that the enemy might have no harbourage or points of vantage for attack. Their troops were concentrated within the city, where a new Gonfalonier, Francesco Carducci, furiously opposed to the Medici, and attached to the Piagnoni party, now ruled. On September 4th the Prince of Orange appeared before the walls, and opened the memorable siege. It lasted eight months, at the end of which time, betrayed by their generals, divided among themselves, and worn out with delays, the Florentines capitulated. Florence was paid as compensation for the insult offered to the pontiff in the sack of Rome. The long yoke of the Medici had undermined the character of the Florentines. This, their last glorious struggle for liberty, was but a flash in the pan--a final flare-up of the dying lamp. The city was not satisfied with slavery; but it had no capacity for united action. The Ottimati were egotistic and jealous of the people. The Palleschi desired to restore the Medici at any price--some of them frankly wishing for a principality, others trusting that the old quasi-republican government might still be reinstated. The Red Republicans, styled Libertini and Arrabbiati, clung together in blind hatred of the Medicean party; but they had no further policy to guide them. The Piagnoni, or Frateschi, stuck to the memory of Savonarola, and believed that angels would descend to guard the battlements when human help had failed. These enthusiasts still formed the true nerve of the nation--the class that might have saved the State, if salvation had been possible. Even as it was, the energy of their fanaticism prolonged the siege until resistance seemed no longer physically possible. The hero developed by the crisis was Francesco Ferrucci, a plebeian who had passed his youth in manual labour, and who now displayed rare military genius. He fell fighting outside the walls of Florence. Had he commanded the troops from the beginning, and remained inside the city, it is just possible that the fate of the war might have been less disastrous. As it was, Malatesta Baglioni, the Commander-in-Chief, turned out an arrant scoundrel. He held secret correspondence with Clement and the Prince of Orange. It was he who finally sold Florence to her foes, 'putting on his head,' as the Doge of Venice said before the Senate, 'the cap of the biggest traitor upon record.' XXVII What remains of Florentine history may be briefly told. Clement, now the undisputed arbiter of power and honour in the city, chose Alessandro de' Medici to be prince. Alessandro was created Duke of Cività di Penna, and married to a natural daughter of Charles V. Ippolito was made a cardinal. Ippolito would have preferred a secular to a priestly kingdom; nor did he conceal his jealousy for his cousin. Therefore Alessandro had him poisoned. Alessandro in his turn was murdered by his kinsman, Lorenzino de' Medici. Lorenzino paid the usual penalty of tyrannicide some years later. When Alessandro was killed in 1539, Clement had himself been dead five years. Thus the whole posterity of Cosimo de' Medici, with the exception of Catherine, Queen of France, was utterly extinguished. But the Medici had struck root so firmly in the State, and had so remodelled it upon the type of tyranny, that the Florentines were no longer able to do without them. The chiefs of the Ottimati selected Cosimo, the representative of Giovanni the Invincible, for their prince, and thus the line of the elder Lorenzo came at last to power. This Cosimo was a boy of eighteen, fond of field-sports, and unused to party intrigues. When Francesco Guicciardini offered him a privy purse of one hundred and twenty thousand ducats annually, together with the presidency of Florence, this wily politician hoped that he would rule the State through Cosimo, and realise at last that dream of the Ottimati, a _Governo Stretto_ or _di Pochi_. He was notably mistaken in his calculations. The first days of Cosimo's administration showed that he possessed the craft of his family and the vigour of his immediate progenitors, and that he meant to be sole master in Florence. He it was who obtained the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany from the Pope--a title confirmed by the Emperor, fortified by Austrian alliances, and transmitted through his heirs to the present century. XXVIII In this sketch of Florentine history, I have purposely omitted all details that did not bear upon the constitutional history of the republic, or on the growth of the Medici as despots; because I wanted to present a picture of the process whereby that family contrived to fasten itself upon the freest and most cultivated State in Italy. This success the Medici owed mainly to their own obstinacy, and to the weakness of republican institutions in Florence. Their power was founded upon wealth in the first instance, and upon the ingenuity with which they turned the favour of the proletariate to use. It was confirmed by the mistakes and failures of their enemies, by Rinaldo degli Albizzi's attack on Cosimo, by the conspiracy of Neroni and Pitti against Piero, and by Francesco de' Pazzi's attempt to assassinate Lorenzo. It was still further strengthened by the Medicean sympathy for arts and letters--a sympathy which placed both Cosimo and Lorenzo at the head of the Renaissance movement, and made them worthy to represent Florence, the city of genius, in the fifteenth century. While thus founding and cementing their dynastic influence upon the basis of a widespread popularity, the Medici employed persistent cunning in the enfeeblement of the Republic. It was their policy not to plant themselves by force or acts of overt tyranny, but to corrupt ambitious citizens, to secure the patronage of public officers, and to render the spontaneous working of the State machinery impossible. By pursuing this policy over a long series of years they made the revival of liberty in 1494, and again in 1527, ineffectual. While exiled from Florence, they never lost the hope of returning as masters, so long as the passions they had excited, and they alone could gratify, remained in full activity. These passions were avarice and egotism, the greed of the grasping Ottimati, the jealousy of the nobles, the self-indulgence of the proletariate. Yet it is probable they might have failed to recover Florence, on one or other of these two occasions, but for the accident which placed Giovanni de' Medici on the Papal chair, and enabled him to put Giulio in the way of the same dignity. From the accession of Leo in 1513 to the year 1527 the Medici ruled Florence from Rome, and brought the power of the Church into the service of their despotism. After that date they were still further aided by the imperial policy of Charles V., who chose to govern Italy through subject princes, bound to himself by domestic alliances and powerful interests. One of these was Cosimo, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. * * * * * _THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE_ To an Englishman one of the chief interests of the study of Italian literature is derived from the fact that, between England and Italy, an almost uninterrupted current of intellectual intercourse has been maintained throughout the last five centuries. The English have never, indeed, at any time been slavish imitators of the Italians; but Italy has formed the dreamland of the English fancy, inspiring poets with their most delightful thoughts, supplying them with subjects, and implanting in their minds that sentiment of Southern beauty which, engrafted on our more passionately imaginative Northern nature, has borne rich fruit in the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakspere, Milton, and the poets of this century. It is not strange that Italy should thus in matters of culture have been the guide and mistress of England. Italy, of all the European nations, was the first to produce high art and literature in the dawn of modern civilisation. Italy was the first to display refinement in domestic life, polish of manners, civilities of intercourse. In Italy the commerce of courts first developed a society of men and women, educated by the same traditions of humanistic culture. In Italy the principles of government were first discussed and reduced to theory. In Italy the zeal for the classics took its origin; and scholarship, to which we owe our mental training, was at first the possession of none almost but Italians. It therefore followed that during the age of the Renaissance any man of taste or genius, who desired to share the newly discovered privileges of learning, had to seek Italy. Every one who wished to be initiated into the secrets of science or philosophy, had to converse with Italians in person or through books. Every one who was eager to polish his native language, and to render it the proper vehicle of poetic thought, had to consult the masterpieces of Italian literature. To Italians the courtier, the diplomatist, the artist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, the political theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms, and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations of the North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, needed the magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectual life. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessed the English mind, Italy had appropriated and assimilated all that Latin literature contained of strong or splendid to arouse the thought and fancy of the modern world; Greek, too, was rapidly becoming the possession of the scholars of Florence and Rome; so that English men of letters found the spirit of the ancients infused into a modern literature; models of correct and elegant composition existed for them in a language easy, harmonious, and not dissimilar in usage to their own. The importance of this service, rendered by Italians to the rest of Europe, cannot be exaggerated. By exploring, digesting, and reproducing the classics, Italy made the labour of scholarship comparatively light for the Northern nations, and extended to us the privilege of culture without the peril of losing originality in the enthusiasm for erudition. Our great poets could handle lightly, and yet profitably, those masterpieces of Greece and Rome, beneath the weight of which, when first discovered, the genius of the Italians had wavered. To the originality of Shakspere an accession of wealth without weakness was brought by the perusal of Italian works, in which the spirit of the antique was seen as in a modern mirror. Then, in addition to this benefit of instruction, Italy gave to England a gift of pure beauty, the influence of which, in refining our national taste, harmonising the roughness of our manners and our language, and stimulating our imagination, has been incalculable. It was a not unfrequent custom for young men of ability to study at the Italian universities, or at least to undertake a journey to the principal Italian cities. From their sojourn in that land of loveliness and intellectual life they returned with their Northern brains most powerfully stimulated. To produce, by masterpieces of the imagination, some work of style that should remain as a memento of that glorious country, and should vie on English soil with the art of Italy, was their generous ambition. Consequently the substance of the stories versified by our poets, the forms of our metres, and the cadences of our prose periods reveal a close attention to Italian originals. This debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature began with Chaucer. Truly original and national as was the framework of the 'Canterbury Tales,' we can hardly doubt but that Chaucer was determined in the form adopted for his poem by the example of Boccaccio. The subject-matter, also, of many of his tales was taken from Boccaccio's prose or verse. For example, the story of Patient Grizzel is founded upon one of the legends of the 'Decameron,' while the Knight's Tale is almost translated from the 'Teseide' of Boccaccio, and Troilus and Creseide is derived from the 'Filostrato' of the same author. The Franklin's Tale and the Reeve's Tale are also based either on stories of Boccaccio or else on French 'Fabliaux,' to which Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, had access. I do not wish to lay too much stress upon Chaucer's direct obligations to Boccaccio, because it is incontestable that the French 'Fabliaux,' which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property of the mediæval nations. But his indirect debt in all that concerns elegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic with the classic spirit, which forms the chief charm of such tales as the Palamon and Arcite, can hardly be exaggerated. Lastly, the seven-lined stanza, called _rime royal_, which Chaucer used with so much effect in narrative poetry, was probably borrowed from the earlier Florentine 'Ballata,' the last line rhyming with its predecessor being substituted for the recurrent refrain. Indeed, the stanza itself, as used by our earliest poets, may be found in Guido Cavalcanti's 'Ballatetta,' beginning, _Posso degli occhi miei_. Between Chaucer and Surrey the Muse of England fell asleep; but when in the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII. she awoke again, it was as a conscious pupil of the Italian that she attempted new strains and essayed fresh metres. 'In the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign,' says Puttenham, 'sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir T. Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.' The chief point in which Surrey imitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha,' was in the use of the sonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our literature; and how it has thriven with us, the masterpieces of Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti attest. As practised by Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, divided into two quatrains and two triplets, so arranged that the two quatrains repeat one pair of rhymes, while the two triplets repeat another pair. Thus an Italian sonnet of the strictest form is composed upon four rhymes, interlaced with great art. But much divergence from this rigid scheme of rhyming was admitted even by Petrarch, who not unfrequently divided the six final lines of the sonnet into three couplets, interwoven in such a way that the two last lines never rhymed.[17] It has been necessary to say thus much about the structure of the Italian sonnet, in order to make clear the task which lay before Surrey and Wyatt, when they sought to transplant it into English. Surrey did not adhere to the strict fashion of Petrarch: his sonnets consist either of three regular quatrains concluded with a couplet, or else of twelve lines rhyming alternately and concluded with a couplet. Wyatt attempted to follow the order and interlacement of the Italian rhymes more closely, but he too concluded his sonnet with a couplet. This introduction of the final couplet was a violation of the Italian rule, which may be fairly considered as prejudicial to the harmony of the whole structure, and which has insensibly caused the English sonnet to terminate in an epigram. The famous sonnet of Surrey on his love, Geraldine, is an excellent example of the metrical structure as adapted to the supposed necessities of English rhyming, and as afterwards adhered to by Shakspere in his long series of love-poems. Surrey, while adopting the form of the sonnet, kept quite clear of the Petrarchist's mannerism. His language is simple and direct: there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, no wire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates in this, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to have entertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into England blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian _versi sciolti_, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm for English versification in which our greatest poetical triumphs have been achieved. Before quitting the subject of the sonnet it would, however, be well to mention the changes which were wrought in its structure by early poets desirous of emulating the Italians. Shakspere, as already hinted, adhered to the simple form introduced by Surrey: his stanzas invariably consist of three separate quatrains followed by a couplet. But Sir Philip Sidney, whose familiarity with Italian literature was intimate, and who had resided long in Italy, perceived that without a greater complexity and interweaving of rhymes the beauty of the poem was considerably impaired. He therefore combined the rhymes of the two quatrains, as the Italians had done, leaving himself free to follow the Italian fashion in the conclusion, or else to wind up after English usage with a couplet. Spenser and Drummond follow the rule of Sidney; Drayton and Daniel, that of Surrey and Shakspere. It was not until Milton that an English poet preserved the form of the Italian sonnet in its strictness; but, after Milton, the greatest sonnet-writers--Wordsworth, Keats, and Rossetti--have aimed at producing stanzas as regular as those of Petrarch. The great age of our literature--the age of Elizabeth--was essentially one of Italian influence. In Italy the Renaissance had reached its height: England, feeling the new life which had been infused into arts and letters, turned instinctively to Italy, and adopted her canons of taste. 'Euphues' has a distinct connection with the Italian discourses of polite culture. Sidney's 'Arcadia' is a copy of what Boccaccio had attempted in his classical romances, and Sanazzaro in his pastorals.[18] Spenser approached the subject of the 'Faery Queen' with his head full of Ariosto and the romantic poets of Italy. His sonnets are Italian; his odes embody the Platonic philosophy of the Italians.[19] The extent of Spenser's deference to the Italians in matters of poetic art may be gathered from this passage in the dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh of the 'Faery Queen:' I have followed all the antique poets historical: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas; after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando; and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, namely, that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or virtues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo, the other named Politico in his Goffredo. From this it is clear that, to the mind of Spenser, both Ariosto and Tasso were authorities of hardly less gravity than Homer and Virgil. Raleigh, in the splendid sonnet with which he responds to this dedication, enhances the fame of Spenser by affecting to believe that the great Italian, Petrarch, will be jealous of him in the grave. To such an extent were the thoughts of the English poets occupied with their Italian masters in the art of song. It was at this time, again, that English literature was enriched by translations of Ariosto and Tasso--the one from the pen of Sir John Harrington, the other from that of Fairfax. Both were produced in the metre of the original--the octave stanza, which, however, did not at that period take root in England. At the same period the works of many of the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio and Boccaccio, were translated into English; Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction. Thomas Hoby translated Castiglione's 'Courtier' in 1561. As a proof of the extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:--'Even Guicciardine's silver histories and Ariosto's golden cantos grow out of request: and the Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia" is not green enough for queasy stomachs; but they must have seen Greene's "Arcadia," and I believe most eagerly longed for Greene's "Faery Queen."' Still more may be gathered on the same topic from the indignant protest uttered by Roger Ascham in his 'Schoolmaster' (pp. 78-91, date 1570) against the prevalence of Italian customs, the habit of Italian travel, and the reading of Italian books translated into English. Selections of Italian stories rendered into English were extremely popular; and Greene's tales, which had such vogue that Nash says of them, 'glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit,' were all modelled on the Italian. The education of a young man of good family was not thought complete unless he had spent some time in Italy, studied its literature, admired its arts, and caught at least some tincture of its manners. Our rude ancestors brought back with them from these journeys many Southern vices, together with the culture they had gone to seek. The contrast between the plain dealing of the North and the refined Machiavellism of the South, between Protestant earnestness in religion and Popish scepticism, between the homely virtues of England and the courtly libertinism of Venice or Florence, blunted the moral sense, while it stimulated the intellectual activity of the English travellers, and too often communicated a fatal shock to their principles. _Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato_ passed into a proverb: we find it on the lips of Parker, of Howell, of Sidney, of Greene, and of Ascham; while Italy itself was styled by severe moralists the court of Circe. In James Howell's 'Instructions for forreine travell' we find this pregnant sentence: 'And being now in Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe, and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonesse.' Italy, in truth, had already become corrupt, and the fruit of her contact with the nations of the North was seen in the lives of such scholars as Robert Greene, who confessed that he returned from his travels instructed 'in all the villanies under the sun.' Many of the scandals of the Court of James might be ascribed to this aping of Southern manners. Yet, together with the evil of depraved morality, the advantage of improved culture was imported from Italy into England; and the constitution of the English genius was young and healthy enough to purge off the mischief, while it assimilated what was beneficial. This is very manifest in the history of our drama, which, taking it altogether, is at the same time the purest and the most varied that exists in literature; while it may be affirmed without exaggeration that one of the main impulses to free dramatic composition in England was communicated by the attraction everything Italian possessed for the English fancy. It was in the drama that the English displayed the richness and the splendour of the Renaissance, which had blazed so gorgeously and at times so balefully below the Alps. The Italy of the Renaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour--the contrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations of radiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, and heroism emergent from ghastly crimes. Our drama began with a translation of Ariosto's 'Suppositi' and ended with Davenant's 'Just Italian.' In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified a portion of the 'Orlando Furioso,' and Marlowe devoted one of his most brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew. Of Shakspere's plays five are incontestably Italian: several of the rest are furnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste. Ben Jonson laid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, 'Volpone,' in Venice, and sketched the first cast of 'Every Man in his Humour' for Italian characters. Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas, without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychological analyses of great Italian tales of crime. The same, in a less degree, is true of Middleton and Dekker. Massinger makes a story of the Sforza family the subject of one of his best plays. Beaumont and Fletcher draw the subjects of comedies and tragedies alike from the Italian novelists. Fletcher in his 'Faithful Shepherdess' transfers the pastoral style of Tasso and Guarini to the North. So close is the connection between our tragedy and Italian novels that Marston and Ford think fit to introduce passages of Italian dialogue into the plays of 'Giovanni and Annabella' and 'Antonio and Mellida.' But the best proof of the extent to which Italian life and literature had influenced our dramatists, may be easily obtained by taking down Halliwell's 'Dictionary of Old Plays,' and noticing that about every third drama has an Italian title. Meanwhile the poems composed by the chief dramatists--Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis,' Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander,' Marston's 'Pygmalion,' and Beaumont's 'Hermaphrodite'--are all of them conceived in the Italian style, by men who had either studied Southern literature, or had submitted to its powerful æsthetic influences. The Masques, moreover, of Jonson, of Lyly, of Fletcher, and of Chapman are exact reproductions upon the English court theatres of such festival pageants as were presented to the Medici at Florence or to the Este family at Ferrara.[20] Throughout our drama the influence of Italy, direct or indirect, either as supplying our playwrights with subjects or as stimulating their imagination, may thus be traced. Yet the Elizabethan drama is in the highest sense original. As a work of art pregnant with deepest wisdom, and splendidly illustrative of the age which gave it birth, it far transcends anything that Italy produced in the same department. Our poets have a more masculine judgment, more fiery fancy, nobler sentiment, than the Italians of any age but that of Dante. What Italy gave, was the impulse toward creation, not patterns to be imitated--the excitement of the imagination by a spectacle of so much grandeur, not rules and precepts for production--the keen sense of tragic beauty, not any tradition of accomplished art. The Elizabethan period of our literature was, in fact, the period during which we derived most from the Italian nation. The study of the Italian language went hand in hand with the study of Greek and Latin, so that the three together contributed to form the English taste. Between us and the ancient world stood the genius of Italy as an interpreter. Nor was this connection broken until far on into the reign of Charles II. What Milton owed to Italy is clear not only from his Italian sonnets, but also from the frequent mention of Dante and Petrarch in his prose works, from his allusions to Boiardo and Ariosto in the 'Paradise Lost,' and from the hints which he probably derived from Pulci, Tasso and Andreini. It would, indeed, be easy throughout his works to trace a continuous vein of Italian influence in detail. But, more than this, Milton's poetical taste in general seems to have been formed and ripened by familiarity with the harmonies of the Italian language. In his Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give sonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication supplies us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton in his blank verse. Those who have carefully studied the harmonies of the 'Paradise Lost,' know how all-important are the assonances of the vowel sounds of _o_ and _a_ in its most musical passages. It is just this attention to the liquid and sonorous recurrences of open vowels that we should expect from a poet who proposed to assimilate his diction to that of the Italians. After the age of Milton the connection between Italy and England is interrupted. In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk into comparative stupor, and her literature was trivial. France not only swayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead in intellectual culture. Consequently, our poets turned from Italy to France, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughout the period of the Restoration and the reigns of William and Queen Anne. Yet during this prolonged reaction against the earlier movement of English literature, as manifested in Elizabethanism, the influence of Italy was not wholly extinct. Dryden's 'Tales from Boccaccio' are no insignificant contribution to our poetry, and his 'Palamon and Arcite,' through Chaucer, returns to the same source. But when, at the beginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, then the Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever. The metre of 'Don Juan,' first practised by Frere and then adopted by Lord Byron, is Pulci's octave stanza; the manner is that of Berni, Folengo, and the Abbé Casti, fused and heightened by the brilliance of Byron's genius into a new form. The subject of Shelley's strongest work of art is Beatrice Cenci. Rogers's poem is styled 'Italy.' Byron's dramas are chiefly Italian. Leigh Hunt repeats the tale of Francesca da Rimini. Keats versifies Boccaccio's 'Isabella.' Passing to contemporary poets, Rossetti has acclimatised in English the metres and the manner of the earliest Italian lyrists. Swinburne dedicates his noblest song to the spirit of liberty in Italy. Even George Eliot and Tennyson have each of them turned stories of Boccaccio into verse. The best of Mrs. Browning's poems, 'Casa Guidi Windows' and 'Aurora Leigh,' are steeped in Italian thought and Italian imagery. Browning's longest poem is a tale of Italian crime; his finest studies in the 'Men and Women' are portraits of Italian character of the Renaissance period. But there is more than any mere enumeration of poets and their work can set forth, in the connection between Italy and England. That connection, so far as the poetical imagination is concerned, is vital. As poets in the truest sense of the word, we English live and breathe through sympathy with the Italians. The magnetic touch which is required to inflame the imagination of the North, is derived from Italy. The nightingales of English song who make our oak and beech copses resonant in spring with purest melody, are migratory birds, who have charged their souls in the South with the spirit of beauty, and who return to warble native wood-notes in a tongue which is their own. What has hitherto been said about the debt of the English poets to Italy, may seem to imply that our literature can be regarded as to some extent a parasite on that of the Italians. Against such a conclusion no protest too energetic could be uttered. What we have derived directly from the Italian poets are, first, some metres--especially the sonnet and the octave stanza, though the latter has never taken firm root in England. 'Terza rima,' attempted by Shelley, Byron, Morris, and Mrs. Browning, has not yet become acclimatised. Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surrey upon the _versi sciolti_ of the Italians, has departed widely from Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its greater force, plasticity, and freedom. The Spenserian stanza, again, is a new and original metre peculiar to our literature; though it is possible that but for the complex structures of Italian lyric verse, it might not have been fashioned for the 'Faery Queen.' Lastly, the so-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is in no way related to Italian metre. Therefore the only true Italian exotic adopted without modification into our literature is the sonnet. In the next place, we owe to the Italians the subject-matter of many of our most famous dramas and our most delightful tales in verse. But the English treatment of these histories and fables has been uniformly independent and original. Comparing Shakspere's 'Romeo and Juliet' with Bandello's tale, Webster's 'Duchess of Malfy' with the version given from the Italian in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' and Chaucer's Knight's Tale with the 'Teseide' of Boccaccio, we perceive at once that the English poets have used their Italian models merely as outlines to be filled in with freedom, as the canvas to be embroidered with a tapestry of vivid groups. Nothing is more manifest than the superiority of the English genius over the Italian in all dramatic qualities of intense passion, profound analysis, and living portrayal of character in action. The mere rough detail of Shakspere's 'Othello' is to be found in Cinthio's Collection of Novelle; but let an unprejudiced reader peruse the original, and he will be no more deeply affected by it than by any touching story of treachery, jealousy, and hapless innocence. The wily subtleties of Iago, the soldierly frankness of Cassio, the turbulent and volcanic passions of Othello, the charm of Desdemona, and the whole tissue of vivid incidents which make 'Othello' one of the most tremendous extant tragedies of characters in combat, are Shakspere's, and only Shakspere's. This instance, indeed, enables us exactly to indicate what the English owed to Italy and what was essentially their own. From that Southern land of Circe about which they dreamed, and which now and then they visited, came to their imaginations a spirit-stirring breath of inspiration. It was to them the country of marvels, of mysterious crimes, of luxurious gardens and splendid skies, where love was more passionate and life more picturesque, and hate more bloody and treachery more black, than in our Northern climes. Italy was a spacious grove of wizardry, which mighty poets, on the quest of fanciful adventure, trod with fascinated senses and quickened pulses. But the strong brain which converted what they heard and read and saw of that charmed land into the stuff of golden romance or sable tragedy, was their own. English literature has been defined a literature of genius. Our greatest work in art has been achieved not so much by inspiration, subordinate to sentiments of exquisite good taste or guided by observance of classical models, as by audacious sallies of pure inventive power. This is true as a judgment of that constellation which we call our drama, of the meteor Byron, of Milton and Dryden, who are the Jupiter and Mars of our poetic system, and of the stars which stud our literary firmament under the names of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Chatterton, Scott, Coleridge, Clough, Blake, Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson. There are only a very few of the English poets, Pope and Gray, for example, in whom the free instincts of genius are kept systematically in check by the laws of the reflective understanding. Now Italian literature is in this respect all unlike our own. It began, indeed, with Dante, as a literature pre-eminently of genius; but the spirit of scholarship assumed the sway as early as the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and after them Italian has been consistently a literature of taste. By this I mean that even the greatest Italian poets have sought to render their style correct, have endeavoured to subordinate their inspiration to what they considered the rules of sound criticism, and have paid serious attention to their manner as independent of the matter they wished to express. The passion for antiquity, so early developed in Italy, delivered the later Italian poets bound hand and foot into the hands of Horace. Poliziano was content to reproduce the classic authors in a mosaic work of exquisite translations. Tasso was essentially a man of talent, producing work of chastened beauty by diligent attention to the rule and method of his art. Even Ariosto submitted the liberty of his swift spirit to canons of prescribed elegance. While our English poets have conceived and executed without regard for the opinion of the learned and without obedience to the usages of language--Shakspere, for example, producing tragedies which set Aristotle at defiance, and Milton engrafting Latinisms on the native idiom--the Italian poets thought and wrote with the fear of Academies before their eyes, and studied before all things to maintain the purity of the Tuscan tongue. The consequence is that the Italian and English literatures are eminent for very different excellences. All that is forcible in the dramatic presentation of life and character and action, all that is audacious in imagination and capricious in fancy, whatever strength style can gain from the sallies of original and untrammelled eloquence, whatever beauty is derived from spontaneity and native grace, belong in abundant richness to the English. On the other hand, the Italian poets present us with masterpieces of correct and studied diction, with carefully elaborated machinery, and with a style maintained at a uniform level of dignified correctness. The weakness of the English proceeds from inequality and extravagance; it is the weakness of self-confident vigour, intolerant of rule, rejoicing in its own exuberant resources. The weakness of the Italian is due to timidity and moderation; it is the weakness that springs not so much from a lack of native strength as from the over-anxious expenditure of strength upon the attainment of finish, polish, and correctness. Hence the two nations have everything to learn from one another. Modern Italian poets may seek by contact with Shakspere and Milton to gain a freedom from the trammels imposed upon them by the slavish followers of Petrarch; while the attentive perusal of Tasso should be recommended to all English people who have no ready access to the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature. Another point of view may be gained by noticing the pre-dominant tone of the two literatures. Whenever English poetry is really great, it approximates to the tragic and the stately; whereas the Italians are peculiarly felicitous in the smooth and pleasant style, which combines pathos with amusement, and which does not trespass beyond the region of beauty into the domain of sublimity or terror. Italian poetry is analogous to Italian painting and Italian music: it bathes the soul in a plenitude of charms, investing even the most solemn subjects with loveliness. Rembrandt and Albert Dürer depict the tragedies of the Sacred History with a serious and awful reality: Italian painters, with a few rare but illustrious exceptions, shrink from approaching them from any point of view but that of harmonious melancholy. Even so the English poets stir the soul to its very depths by their profound and earnest delineations of the stern and bitter truths of the world: Italian poets environ all things with the golden haze of an artistic harmony; so that the soul is agitated by no pain at strife with the persuasions of pure beauty. * * * * * _POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY_ It is a noticeable fact about the popular songs of Tuscany that they are almost exclusively devoted to love. The Italians in general have no ballad literature resembling that of our Border or that of Spain. The tragic histories of their noble families, the great deeds of their national heroes, and the sufferings of their country during centuries of warfare, have left but few traces in their rustic poetry. It is true that some districts are less utterly barren than others in these records of the past. The Sicilian people's poetry, for example, preserves a memory of the famous Vespers; and one or two terrible stories of domestic tragedy, like the tale of Rosmunda in 'La Donna Lombarda,' the romance of the Baronessa di Carini, and the so-called Caso di Sciacca, may still be heard upon the lips of the people. But these exceptions are insignificant in comparison with the vast mass of songs which deal with love; and I cannot find that Tuscany, where the language of this minstrelsy is purest, and where the artistic instincts of the race are strongest, has anything at all approaching to our ballads.[21] Though the Tuscan contadini are always singing, it rarely happens that The plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago. On the contrary, we may be sure, when we hear their voices ringing through the olive-groves or macchi, that they are chanting Some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day,-- Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again; or else, since their melodies are by no means uniformly sad, some ditty of the joyousness of springtime or the ecstasy of love. This defect of anything corresponding to our ballads of 'Chevy Chase,' or 'Sir Patrick Spens,' or 'Gil Morrice,' in a poetry which is still so vital with the life of past centuries, is all the more remarkable because Italian history is distinguished above that of other nations by tragic episodes peculiarly suited to poetic treatment. Many of these received commemoration in the fourteenth century from Dante; others were embodied in the _novelle_ of Boccaccio and Cinthio and Bandello, whence they passed into the dramas of Shakspere, Webster, Ford, and their contemporaries. But scarcely an echo can be traced through all the volumes of the recently collected popular songs. We must seek for an explanation of this fact partly in the conditions of Italian life, and partly in the nature of the Italian imagination. Nowhere in Italy do we observe that intimate connection between the people at large and the great nobles which generates the sympathy of clanship. Politics in most parts of the peninsula fell at a very early period into the hands either of irresponsible princes, who ruled like despots, or else of burghers, who administered the state within the walls of their Palazzo Pubblico. The people remained passive spectators of contemporary history. The loyalty of subjects to their sovereign which animates the Spanish ballads, the loyalty of retainers to their chief which gives life to the tragic ballads of the Border, did not exist in Italy. Country-folk felt no interest in the doings of Visconti or Medici or Malatesti sufficient to arouse the enthusiasm of local bards or to call forth the celebration of their princely tragedies in verse. Amid the miseries of foreign wars and home oppression, it seemed better to demand from verse and song some mitigation of the woes of life, some expression of personal emotion, than to record the disasters which to us at a distance appear poetic in their grandeur. These conditions of popular life, although unfavourable to the production of ballad poetry, would not, however, have been sufficient by themselves to check its growth, if the Italians had been strongly impelled to literature of this type by their nature. The real reason why their _Volkslieder_ are amorous and personal is to be found in the quality of their imagination. The Italian genius is not creatively imaginative in the highest sense. The Italians have never, either in the ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a national epic, the 'Æneid' and the 'Divine Comedy' being obviously of different species from the 'Iliad' or the 'Nibelungen Lied.' Modern Italians, again, are distinguished from the French, the Germans, and the English in being the conscious inheritors of an older, august, and strictly classical civilisation. The great memories of Rome weigh down their faculties of invention. It would also seem as though they shrank in their poetry from the representation of what is tragic and spirit-stirring. They incline to what is cheerful, brilliant, or pathetic. The dramatic element in human life, external to the personality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination over our ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for the Italian. When he sings, he seeks to express his own individual emotions--his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair. The language which he uses is at the same time direct in its intensity, and hyperbolical in its display of fancy; but it lacks those imaginative touches which exalt the poetry of personal passion into a sublimer region. Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of the supernatural. The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is still unsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, the water-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, the presentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, which fill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italian songs. In the whole of Tigri's collection I only remember one mention of a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitions of all kinds. Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, for instance. But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with their poetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante, have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginative effect of their creations by an appeal to the instinct of mysterious awe. The truth is that the Italians as a race are distinguished as much by a firm grasp upon the practical realities of existence as by powerful emotions. They have but little of that dreamy _Schwärmerei_ with which the people of the North are largely gifted. The true sphere of their genius is painting. What appeals to the imagination through the eyes, they have expressed far better than any other modern nation. But their poetry, like their music, is deficient in tragic sublimity and in the higher qualities of imaginative creation. It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced Dante. But we must remember not to judge races by single and exceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly, Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April on his lips, and Tasso, excellent alone when he confines himself to pathos or the picturesque, are no exceptions to what I have just said. Yet these poets pursued their art with conscious purpose. The tragic splendour of Greece, the majesty of Rome, were not unknown to them. Far more is it true that popular poetry in Italy, proceeding from the hearts of uncultivated peasants and expressing the national character in its simplicity, displays none of the stuff from which the greatest works of art in verse, epics and dramas, can be wrought. But within its own sphere of personal emotion, this popular poetry is exquisitely melodious, inexhaustibly rich, unique in modern literature for the direct expression which it has given to every shade of passion. Signor Tigri's collection,[22] to which I shall confine my attention in this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five _rispetti_, with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one _stornelli_. Rispetto, it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italy to short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on the principle of the octave stanza. That is to say, the first part of the rispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, while one or more couplets, called the _ripresa_, complete the poem.[23] The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owes its name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line to the rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first. Browning, in his poem of 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' has accustomed English ears to one common species of the stornello,[24] which sets out with the name of a flower, and rhymes with it, as thus: Fior di narciso. Prigionero d'amore mi son reso, Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso. The divisions of those two sorts of songs, to which Tigri gives names like The Beauty of Women, The Beauty of Men, Falling in Love, Serenades, Happy Love, Unhappy Love, Parting, Absence, Letters, Return to Home, Anger and Jealousy, Promises, Entreaties and Reproaches, Indifference, Treachery and Abandonment, prove with what fulness the various phases of the tender passion are treated. Through the whole fifteen hundred the one theme of Love is never relinquished. Only two persons, 'I' and 'thou,' appear upon the scene; yet so fresh and so various are the moods of feeling, that one can read them from first to last without too much satiety. To seek for the authors of these ditties would be useless. Some of them may be as old as the fourteenth century; others may have been made yesterday. Some are the native product of the Tuscan mountain villages, especially of the regions round Pistoja and Siena, where on the spurs of the Apennines the purest Italian is vernacular. Some, again, are importations from other provinces, especially from Sicily and Naples, caught up by the peasants of Tuscany and adapted to their taste and style; for nothing travels faster than a _Volkslied_. Born some morning in a noisy street of Naples, or on the solitary slopes of Radicofani, before the week is out, a hundred voices are repeating it. Waggoners and pedlars carry it across the hills to distant towns. It floats with the fishermen from bay to bay, and marches with the conscript to his barrack in a far-off province. Who was the first to give it shape and form? No one asks, and no one cares. A student well acquainted with the habits of the people in these matters says, 'If they knew the author of a ditty, they would not learn it, far less if they discovered that it was a scholar's.' If the cadence takes their ear, they consecrate the song at once by placing it upon the honoured list of 'ancient lays.' Passing from lip to lip and from district to district, it receives additions and alterations, and becomes the property of a score of provinces. Meanwhile the poet from whose soul it blossomed that first morning like a flower, remains contented with obscurity. The wind has carried from his lips the thistledown of song, and sown it on a hundred hills and meadows, far and wide. After such wise is the birth of all truly popular compositions. Who knows, for instance, the veritable author of many of those mighty German chorals which sprang into being at the period of the Reformation? The first inspiration was given, probably, to a single mind; but the melody, as it has reached us, is the product of a thousand. This accounts for the variations which in different dialects and districts the same song presents. Meanwhile, it is sometimes possible to trace the authorship of a ballad with marked local character to an improvisatore famous in his village, or to one of those professional rhymesters whom the country-folk employ in the composition of love-letters to their sweethearts at a distance.[25] Tommaseo, in the preface to his 'Canti Popolari,' mentions in particular a Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani, whose poetry was famous through the mountains of Pistoja; and Tigri records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made rispetti by the dozen as she watched her sheep upon the hills. One of the songs in his collection (p. 181) contains a direct reference to the village letter-writer:-- Salutatemi, bella, lo scrivano; Non lo conosco e non so chi si sia. A me mi pare un poeta sovrano, Tanto gli è sperto nella poesia.[26] While I am writing thus about the production and dissemination of these love-songs, I cannot help remembering three days and nights which I once spent at sea between Genoa and Palermo, in the company of some conscripts who were going to join their regiment in Sicily. They were lads from the Milanese and Liguria, and they spent a great portion of their time in composing and singing poetry. One of them had a fine baritone voice; and when the sun had set, his comrades gathered round him and begged him to sing to them 'Con quella patetica tua voce.' Then followed hours of singing, the low monotonous melodies of his ditties harmonising wonderfully with the tranquillity of night, so clear and calm that the sky and all its stars were mirrored on the sea, through which we moved as if in a dream. Sometimes the songs provoked conversation, which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon 'le bellezze delle donne.' I remember that once an animated discussion about the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in a quarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of about seventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyes and arms to heaven and crying, 'Tu sei innamorato d' una grande Diana cacciatrice nera, ed io d' una bella Venere bionda.' Though they were but village lads, they supported their several opinions with arguments not unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in the treatment of a subject which could scarcely have failed to reveal any latent coarseness. The purity of all the Italian love-songs collected by Tigri is very remarkable.[27] Although the passion expressed in them is Oriental in its vehemence, not a word falls which could offend a virgin's ear. The one desire of lovers is lifelong union in marriage. The _damo_--for so a sweetheart is termed in Tuscany--trembles until he has gained the approval of his future mother-in-law, and forbids the girl he is courting to leave her house to talk to him at night:-- Dice che tu tì affacci alia finestra; Ma non tì dice che tu vada fuora, Perchè, la notte, è cosa disonesta. All the language of his love is respectful. _Signore_, or master of my soul, _madonna, anima mia, dolce mio ben, nobil persona,_ are the terms of adoration with which he approaches his mistress. The elevation of feeling and perfect breeding which Manzoni has so well delineated in the loves of Renzo and Lucia are traditional among Italian country-folk. They are conscious that true gentleness is no matter of birth or fortune:-- E tu non mi lasciar per poverezza, Chè povertà non guasta gentilezza.[28] This in itself constitutes an important element of culture, and explains to some extent the high romantic qualities of their impassioned poetry. The beauty of their land reveals still more. 'O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!' Virgil's exclamation is as true now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten fields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights and warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make rich pasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and rye alternate with patches of flax in full flower, with meadows yellow with buttercups or pink with ragged robin; the young vines, running from bough to bough of elm and mulberry, are just coming into leaf. The poplars are fresh with bright green foliage. On the verge of this blooming plain stand ancient cities ringed with hills, some rising to snowy Apennines, some covered with white convents and sparkling with villas. Cypresses shoot, black and spirelike, amid grey clouds of olive-boughs upon the slopes; and above, where vegetation borders on the barren rock, are masses of ilex and arbutus interspersed with chestnut-trees not yet in leaf. Men and women are everywhere at work, ploughing with great white oxen, or tilling the soil with spades six feet in length--Sabellian ligones. The songs of nightingales among acacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, mingle with the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people at their toil. Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopes sink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-like campanili. It is there that the veglia, or evening rendezvous of lovers, the serenades and balls and feste, of which one hears so much in the popular minstrelsy, take place. Of course it would not be difficult to paint the darker shades of this picture. Autumn comes, when the contadini of Lucca and Siena and Pistoja go forth to work in the unwholesome marshes of the Maremma, or of Corsica and Sardinia. Dismal superstitions and hereditary hatreds cast their blight over a life externally so fair. The bad government of centuries has perverted in many ways the instincts of a people naturally mild and cheerful and peace-loving. But as far as nature can make men happy, these husbandmen are surely to be reckoned fortunate, and in their songs we find little to remind us of what is otherwise than sunny in their lot. A translator of these _Volkslieder_ has to contend with difficulties of no ordinary kind. The freshness of their phrases, the spontaneity of their sentiments, and the melody of their unstudied cadences, are inimitable. So again is the peculiar effect of their frequent transitions from the most fanciful imagery to the language of prose. No mere student can hope to rival, far less to reproduce, in a foreign tongue, the charm of verse which sprang untaught from the hearts of simple folk, which lives unwritten on the lips of lovers, and which should never be dissociated from singing.[29] There are, besides, peculiarities in the very structure of the popular rispetto. The constant repetition of the same phrase with slight variations, especially in the closing lines of the _ripresa_ of the Tuscan rispetto, gives an antique force and flavour to these ditties, like that which we appreciate in our own ballads, but which may easily, in the translation, degenerate into weakness and insipidity. The Tuscan rhymester, again, allows himself the utmost licence. It is usual to find mere assonances like _bene_ and _piacere, oro_ and _volo, ala_ and _alata_, in the place of rhymes; while such remote resemblances of sound as _colli_ and _poggi_, _lascia_ and _piazza_, are far from uncommon. To match these rhymes by joining 'home' and 'alone,' 'time' and 'shine,' &c, would of course be a matter of no difficulty; but it has seemed to me on the whole best to preserve, with some exceptions, such accuracy as the English ear requires. I fear, however, that, after all, these wild-flowers of song, transplanted to another climate and placed in a hothouse, will appear but pale and hectic by the side of their robuster brethren of the Tuscan hills. In the following serenade many of the peculiarities which I have just noticed occur. I have also adhered to the irregularity of rhyme which may be usually observed about the middle of the poem (p. 103):-- Sleeping or waking, thou sweet face, Lift up thy fair and tender brow: List to thy love in this still place; He calls thee to thy window now: But bids thee not the house to quit, Since in the night this were not meet. Come to thy window, stay within; I stand without, and sing and sing: Come to thy window, stay at home; I stand without, and make my moan. Here is a serenade of a more impassioned character (p. 99):-- I come to visit thee, my beauteous queen, Thee and the house where thou art harboured: All the long way upon my knees, my queen, I kiss the earth where'er thy footsteps tread. I kiss the earth, and gaze upon the wall, Whereby thou goest, maid imperial! I kiss the earth, and gaze upon the house, Whereby thou farest, queen most beauteous! In the next the lover, who has passed the whole night beneath his sweetheart's window, takes leave at the break of day. The feeling of the half-hour before dawn, when the sound of bells rises to meet the growing light, and both form a prelude to the glare and noise of day, is expressed with much unconscious poetry (p. 105):-- I see the dawn e'en now begin to peer: Therefore I take my leave, and cease to sing, See how the windows open far and near, And hear the bells of morning, how they ring! Through heaven and earth the sounds of ringing swell; Therefore, bright jasmine flower, sweet maid, farewell! Through heaven and Rome the sound of ringing goes; Farewell, bright jasmine flower, sweet maiden rose! The next is more quaint (p. 99):-- I come by night, I come, my soul aflame; I come in this fair hour of your sweet sleep; And should I wake you up, it were a shame. I cannot sleep, and lo! I break your sleep. To wake you were a shame from your deep rest; Love never sleeps, nor they whom Love hath blest. A very great many rispetti are simple panegyrics of the beloved, to find similitude for whose beauty heaven and earth are ransacked. The compliment of the first line in the following song is perfect (p. 23):-- Beauty was born with you, fair maid: The sun and moon inclined to you; On you the snow her whiteness laid The rose her rich and radiant hue: Saint Magdalen her hair unbound, And Cupid taught you how to wound-- How to wound hearts Dan Cupid taught: Your beauty drives me love-distraught. The lady in the next was December's child (p. 25):-- O beauty, born in winter's night, Born in the month of spotless snow: Your face is like a rose so bright; Your mother may be proud of you! She may be proud, lady of love, Such sunlight shines her house above: She may be proud, lady of heaven, Such sunlight to her home is given. The sea wind is the source of beauty to another (p. 16):-- Nay, marvel not you are so fair; For you beside the sea were born: The sea-waves keep you fresh and fair, Like roses on their leafy thorn. If roses grow on the rose-bush, Your roses through midwinter blush; If roses bloom on the rose-bed, Your face can show both white and red. The eyes of a fourth are compared, after quite a new and original fashion, to stars (p. 210):-- The moon hath risen her plaint to lay Before the face of Love Divine. Saying in heaven she will not stay, Since you have stolen what made her shine: Aloud she wails with sorrow wan,-- She told her stars and two are gone: They are not there; you have them now; They are the eyes in your bright brow. Nor are girls less ready to praise their lovers, but that they do not dwell so much on physical perfection. Here is a pleasant greeting (p. 124):-- O welcome, welcome, lily white, Thou fairest youth of all the valley! When I'm with you, my soul is light; I chase away dull melancholy. I chase all sadness from my heart: Then welcome, dearest that thou art! I chase all sadness from my side: Then welcome, O my love, my pride! I chase all sadness far away: Then welcome, welcome, love, to-day! The image of a lily is very prettily treated in the next (p 79):-- I planted a lily yestreen at my window; I set it yestreen, and to-day it sprang up: When I opened the latch and leaned out of my window, It shadowed my face with its beautiful cup. O lily, my lily, how tall you are grown! Remember how dearly I loved you, my own. O lily, my lily, you'll grow to the sky! Remember I love you for ever and aye. The same thought of love growing like a flower receives another turn (p. 69):-- On yonder hill I saw a flower; And, could it thence be hither borne, I'd plant it here within my bower, And water it both eve and morn. Small water wants the stem so straight; 'Tis a love-lily stout as fate. Small water wants the root so strong: 'Tis a love-lily lasting long. Small water wants the flower so sheen: 'Tis a love-lily ever green. Envious tongues have told a girl that her complexion is not good. She replies, with imagery like that of Virgil's 'Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur' (p. 31):-- Think it no grief that I am brown, For all brunettes are born to reign: White is the snow, yet trodden down; Black pepper kings need not disdain: White snow lies mounded on the vales Black pepper's weighed in brazen scales. Another song runs on the same subject (p. 38):-- The whole world tells me that I'm brown, The brown earth gives us goodly corn: The clove-pink too, however brown, Yet proudly in the hand 'tis borne. They say my love is black, but he Shines like an angel-form to me: They say my love is dark as night; To me he seems a shape of light. The freshness of the following spring song recalls the ballads of the Val de Vire in Normandy (p. 85):-- It was the morning of the first of May, Into the close I went to pluck a flower; And there I found a bird of woodland gay, Who whiled with songs of love the silent hour. O bird, who fliest from fair Florence, how Dear love begins, I prithee teach me now!-- Love it begins with music and with song, And ends with sorrow and with sighs ere long. Love at first sight is described (p. 79):-- The very moment that we met, That moment love began to beat: One glance of love we gave, and swore Never to part for evermore; We swore together, sighing deep, Never to part till Death's long sleep. Here too is a memory of the first days of love (p. 79):-- If I remember, it was May When love began between us two: The roses in the close were gay, The cherries blackened on the bough. O cherries black and pears so green! Of maidens fair you are the queen. Fruit of black cherry and sweet pear! Of sweethearts you're the queen, I swear. The troth is plighted with such promises as these (p. 230):-- Or ere I leave you, love divine, Dead tongues shall stir and utter speech, And running rivers flow with wine, And fishes swim upon the beach; Or ere I leave or shun you, these Lemons shall grow on orange-trees. The girl confesses her love after this fashion (p. 86):-- Passing across the billowy sea, I let, alas, my poor heart fall; I bade the sailors bring it me; They said they had not seen it fall. I asked the sailors, one and two; They said that I had given it you. I asked the sailors, two and three; They said that I had given it thee. It is not uncommon to speak of love as a sea. Here is a curious play upon this image (p. 227):-- Ho, Cupid! Sailor Cupid, ho! Lend me awhile that bark of thine; For on the billows I will go, To find my love who once was mine: And if I find her, she shall wear A chain around her neck so fair, Around her neck a glittering bond, Four stars, a lily, a diamond. It is also possible that the same thought may occur in the second line of the next ditty (p. 120):-- Beneath the earth I'll make a way To pass the sea and come to you. People will think I'm gone away; But, dear, I shall be seeing you. People will say that I am dead; But we'll pluck roses white and red: People will think I'm lost for aye; But we'll pluck roses, you and I. All the little daily incidents are beautified by love. Here is a lover who thanks the mason for making his window so close upon the road that he can see his sweetheart as she passes (p. 118):-- Blest be the mason's hand who built This house of mine by the roadside, And made my window low and wide For me to watch my love go by. And if I knew when she went by, My window should be fairly gilt; And if I knew what time she went, My window should be flower-besprent. Here is a conceit which reminds one of the pretty epistle of Philostratus, in which the footsteps of the beloved are called _[Greek: erêreismena philêmpta]_ (p. 117):-- What time I see you passing by; I sit and count the steps you take: You take the steps; I sit and sigh: Step after step, my sighs awake. Tell me, dear love, which more abound, My sighs or your steps on the ground? Tell me, dear love, which are the most, Your light steps or the sighs they cost? A girl complains that she cannot see her lover's house (p. 117):- I lean upon the lattice, and look forth To see the house where my lover dwells. There grows an envious tree that spoils my mirth: Cursed be the man who set it on these hills! But when those jealous boughs are all unclad, I then shall see the cottage of my lad: When once that tree is rooted from the hills, I'll see the house wherein my lover dwells. In the same mood a girl who has just parted from her sweetheart is angry with the hill beyond which he is travelling (p. 167):-- I see and see, yet see not what I would: I see the leaves atremble on the tree: I saw my love where on the hill he stood, Yet see him not drop downward to the lea. O traitor hill, what will you do? I ask him, live or dead, from you. O traitor hill, what shall it be? I ask him, live or dead, from thee. All the songs of love in absence are very quaint. Here is one which calls our nursery rhymes to mind (p. 119):-- I would I were a bird so free, That I had wings to fly away: Unto that window I would flee, Where stands my love and grinds all day. Grind, miller, grind; the water's deep! I cannot grind; love makes me weep. Grind, miller, grind; the waters flow! I cannot grind; love wastes me so. The next begins after the same fashion, but breaks into a very shower of benedictions (p. 118):-- Would God I were a swallow free, That I had wings to fly away: Upon the miller's door I'd be, Where stands my love and grinds all day: Upon the door, upon the sill, Where stays my love;--God bless him still! God bless my love, and blessed be His house, and bless my house for me; Yea, blest be both, and ever blest My lover's house, and all the rest! The girl alone at home in her garden sees a wood-dove flying by and calls to it (p. 179):-- O dove, who fliest far to yonder hill, Dear dove, who in the rock hast made thy nest, Let me a feather from thy pinion pull, For I will write to him who loves me best. And when I've written it and made it clear, I'll give thee back thy feather, dove so dear: And when I've written it and sealed it, then I'll give thee back thy feather love-laden. A swallow is asked to lend the same kind service (p. 179):-- O swallow, swallow, flying through the air, Turn, turn, I prithee, from thy flight above! Give me one feather from thy wing so fair, For I will write a letter to my love. When I have written it and made it clear, I'll give thee back thy feather, swallow dear; When I have written it on paper white, I'll make, I swear, thy missing feather right; When once 'tis written on fair leaves of gold, I'll give thee back thy wing and flight so bold. Long before Tennyson's song in the 'Princess,' it would seem that swallows were favourite messengers of love. In the next song which I translate, the repetition of one thought with delicate variation is full of character (p. 178):-- O swallow, flying over hill and plain, If thou shouldst find my love, oh bid him come! And tell him, on these mountains I remain Even as a lamb who cannot find her home: And tell him, I am left all, all alone, Even as a tree whose flowers are overblown: And tell him, I am left without a mate Even as a tree whose boughs are desolate: And tell him, I am left uncomforted Even as the grass upon the meadows dead. The following is spoken by a girl who has been watching the lads of the village returning from their autumn service in the plain, and whose damo comes the last of all (p. 240):-- O dear my love, you come too late! What found you by the way to do? I saw your comrades pass the gate, But yet not you, dear heart, not you! If but a little more you'd stayed, With sighs you would have found me dead; If but a while you'd keep me crying, With sighs you would have found me dying. The _amantium irae_ find a place too in these rustic ditties. A girl explains to her sweetheart (p. 240):-- 'Twas told me and vouchsafed for true, Your kin are wroth as wroth can be; For loving me they swear at you, They swear at you because of me; Your father, mother, all your folk, Because you love me, chafe and choke! Then set your kith and kin at ease; Set them at ease and let me die: Set the whole clan of them at ease; Set them at ease and see me die! Another suspects that her damo has paid his suit to a rival (p. 200):-- On Sunday morning well I knew Where gaily dressed you turned your feet; And there were many saw it too, And came to tell me through the street: And when they spoke, I smiled, ah me! But in my room wept privately; And when they spoke, I sang for pride, But in my room alone I sighed. Then come reconciliations (p. 223):-- Let us make peace, my love, my bliss! For cruel strife can last no more. If you say nay, yet I say yes: 'Twixt me and you there is no war. Princes and mighty lords make peace; And so may lovers twain, I wis: Princes and soldiers sign a truce; And so may two sweethearts like us: Princes and potentates agree; And so may friends like you and me. There is much character about the following, which is spoken by the damo (p. 223):-- As yonder mountain height I trod, I chanced to think of your dear name; I knelt with clasped hands on the sod, And thought of my neglect with shame: I knelt upon the stone, and swore Our love should bloom as heretofore. Sometimes the language of affection takes a more imaginative tone, as in the following (p. 232):-- Dearest, what time you mount to heaven above, I'll meet you holding in my hand my heart: You to your breast shall clasp me full of love, And I will lead you to our Lord apart. Our Lord, when he our love so true hath known, Shall make of our two hearts one heart alone; One heart shall make of our two hearts, to rest In heaven amid the splendours of the blest. This was the woman's. Here is the man's (p. 113):-- If I were master of all loveliness, I'd make thee still more lovely than thou art: If I were master of all wealthiness, Much gold and silver should be thine, sweetheart: If I were master of the house of hell, I'd bar the brazen gates in thy sweet face; Or ruled the place where purging spirits dwell, I'd free thee from that punishment apace. Were I in paradise and thou shouldst come, I'd stand aside, my love, to make thee room; Were I in paradise, well seated there, I'd quit my place to give it thee, my fair! Sometimes, but very rarely, weird images are sought to clothe passion, as in the following (p. 136):-- Down into hell I went and thence returned: Ah me! alas! the people that were there! I found a room where many candles burned, And saw within my love that languished there. When as she saw me, she was glad of cheer, And at the last she said: Sweet soul of mine; Dost thou recall the time long past, so dear, When thou didst say to me, Sweet soul of mine? Now kiss me on the mouth, my dearest, here; Kiss me that I for once may cease to pine! So sweet, ah me, is thy dear mouth, so dear, That of thy mercy prithee sweeten mine! Now, love, that thou hast kissed me, now, I say, Look not to leave this place again for aye. Or again in this (p. 232):-- Methinks I hear, I hear a voice that cries: Beyond the hill it floats upon the air. It is my lover come to bid me rise, If I am fain forthwith toward heaven to fare. But I have answered him, and said him No! I've given my paradise, my heaven, for you: Till we together go to paradise, I'll stay on earth and love your beauteous eyes. But it is not with such remote and eerie thoughts that the rustic muse of Italy can deal successfully. Far better is the following half-playful description of love-sadness (p. 71):-- Ah me, alas! who know not how to sigh! Of sighs I now full well have learned the art: Sighing at table when to eat I try, Sighing within my little room apart, Sighing when jests and laughter round me fly, Sighing with her and her who know my heart: I sigh at first, and then I go on sighing; 'Tis for your eyes that I am ever sighing: I sigh at first, and sigh the whole year through; And 'tis your eyes that keep me sighing so. The next two rispetti, delicious in their naïveté, might seem to have been extracted from the libretto of an opera, but that they lack the sympathising chorus, who should have stood at hand, ready to chime in with 'he,' 'she,' and 'they,' to the 'I,' 'you,' and 'we' of the lovers (p. 123):-- Ah, when will dawn that glorious day When you will softly mount my stair? My kin shall bring you on the way; I shall be first to greet you there. Ah, when will dawn that day of bliss When we before the priest say Yes? Ah, when will dawn that blissful day When I shall softly mount your stair, Your brothers meet me on the way, And one by one I greet them there? When comes the day, my staff, my strength, To call your mother mine at length? When will the day come, love of mine, I shall be yours and you be mine? Hitherto the songs have told only of happy love, or of love returned. Some of the best, however, are unhappy. Here is one, for instance, steeped in gloom (p. 142):-- They have this custom in fair Naples town; They never mourn a man when he is dead: The mother weeps when she has reared a son To be a serf and slave by love misled; The mother weeps when she a son hath born To be the serf and slave of galley scorn; The mother weeps when she a son gives suck To be the serf and slave of city luck. The following contains a fine wild image, wrought out with strange passion in detail (p. 300):-- I'll spread a table brave for revelry, And to the feast will bid sad lovers all. For meat I'll give them my heart's misery; For drink I'll give these briny tears that fall. Sorrows and sighs shall be the varletry, To serve the lovers at this festival: The table shall be death, black death profound; Weep, stones, and utter sighs, ye walls around! The table shall be death, yea, sacred death; Weep, stones, and sigh as one that sorroweth! Nor is the next a whit less in the vein of mad Jeronimo (p. 304):-- High up, high up, a house I'll rear, High up, high up, on yonder height; At every window set a snare, With treason, to betray the night; With treason, to betray the stars, Since I'm betrayed by my false feres; With treason, to betray the day, Since Love betrayed me, well away! The vengeance of an Italian reveals itself in the energetic song which I quote next (p. 303):-- I have a sword; 'twould cut a brazen bell, Tough steel 'twould cut, if there were any need: I've had it tempered in the streams of hell By masters mighty in the mystic rede: I've had it tempered by the light of stars; Then let him come whose skin is stout as Mars; I've had it tempered to a trenchant blade; Then let him come who stole from me my maid. More mild, but brimful of the bitterness of a soul to whom the whole world has become but ashes in the death of love, is the following lament (p. 143):-- Call me the lovely Golden Locks no more, But call me Sad Maid of the golden hair. If there be wretched women, sure I think I too may rank among the most forlorn. I fling a palm into the sea; 'twill sink: Others throw lead, and it is lightly borne. What have I done, dear Lord, the world to cross? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to dross. How have I made, dear Lord, dame Fortune wroth? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to froth. What have I done, dear Lord, to fret the folk? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to smoke. Here is pathos (p. 172):-- The wood-dove who hath lost her mate, She lives a dolorous life, I ween; She seeks a stream and bathes in it, And drinks that water foul and green: With other birds she will not mate, Nor haunt, I wis, the flowery treen; She bathes her wings and strikes her breast; Her mate is lost: oh, sore unrest! And here is fanciful despair (p. 168):-- I'll build a house of sobs and sighs, With tears the lime I'll slack; And there I'll dwell with weeping eyes Until my love come back: And there I'll stay with eyes that burn Until I see my love return. The house of love has been deserted, and the lover comes to moan beneath its silent eaves (p. 171):-- Dark house and window desolate! Where is the sun which shone so fair? 'Twas here we danced and laughed at fate: Now the stones weep; I see them there. They weep, and feel a grievous chill: Dark house and widowed window-sill! And what can be more piteous than this prayer? (p. 809):-- Love, if you love me, delve a tomb, And lay me there the earth beneath; After a year, come see my bones, And make them dice to play therewith. But when you're tired of that game, Then throw those dice into the flame; But when you're tired of gaming free, Then throw those dice into the sea. The simpler expression of sorrow to the death is, as usual, more impressive. A girl speaks thus within sight of the grave (p. 808):-- Yes, I shall die: what wilt thou gain? The cross before my bier will go; And thou wilt hear the bells complain, The _Misereres_ loud and low. Midmost the church thou'lt see me lie With folded hands and frozen eye; Then say at last, I do repent!-- Nought else remains when fires are spent. Here is a rustic Oenone (p. 307):-- Fell death, that fliest fraught with woe! Thy gloomy snares the world ensphere: Where no man calls, thou lov'st to go; But when we call, thou wilt not hear. Fell death, false death of treachery, Thou makest all content but me. Another is less reproachful, but scarcely less sad (p. 308):-- Strew me with blossoms when I die, Nor lay me 'neath the earth below; Beyond those walls, there let me lie, Where oftentimes we used to go. There lay me to the wind and rain; Dying for you, I feel no pain: There lay me to the sun above; Dying for you, I die of love. Yet another of these pitiful love-wailings displays much poetry of expression (p. 271):-- I dug the sea, and delved the barren sand: I wrote with dust and gave it to the wind: Of melting snow, false Love, was made thy band, Which suddenly the day's bright beams unbind. Now am I ware, and know my own mistake-- How false are all the promises you make; Now am I ware, and know the fact, ah me! That who confides in you, deceived will be. It would scarcely be well to pause upon these very doleful ditties. Take, then, the following little serenade, in which the lover on his way to visit his mistress has unconsciously fallen on the same thought as Bion (p. 85):-- Yestreen I went my love to greet, By yonder village path below: Night in a coppice found my feet; I called the moon her light to show-- O moon, who needs no flame to fire thy face, Look forth and lend me light a little space! Enough has been quoted to illustrate the character of the Tuscan popular poetry. These village rispetti bear the same relation to the canzoniere of Petrarch as the 'savage drupe' to the 'suave plum.' They are, as it were, the wild stock of that highly artificial flower of art. Herein lies, perhaps, their chief importance. As in our ballad literature we may discern the stuff of the Elizabethan drama undeveloped, so in the Tuscan people's songs we can trace the crude form of that poetic instinct which produced the sonnets to Laura. It is also very probable that some such rustic minstrelsy preceded the Idylls of Theocritus and the Bucolics of Virgil; for coincidences of thought and imagery, which can scarcely be referred to any conscious study of the ancients, are not a few. Popular poetry has this great value for the student of literature: it enables him to trace those forms of fancy and of feeling which are native to the people, and which must ultimately determine the character of national art, however much that may be modified by culture. * * * * * _POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE_ The semi-popular poetry of the Italians in the fifteenth century formed an important branch of their national literature, and flourished independently of the courtly and scholastic studies which gave a special character to the golden age of the revival. While the latter tended to separate the people from the cultivated classes, the former established a new link of connection between them, different indeed from that which existed when smiths and carters repeated the Canzoni of Dante by heart in the fourteenth century, but still sufficiently real to exercise a weighty influence over the national development. Scholars like Angelo Poliziano, princes like Lorenzo de' Medici, men of letters like Feo Belcari and Benivieni, borrowed from the people forms of poetry, which they handled with refined taste, and appropriated to the uses of polite literature. The most important of these forms, native to the people but assimilated by the learned classes, were the Miracle Play or 'Sacra Rappresentazione;' the 'Ballata' or lyric to be sung while dancing; the 'Canto Carnascialesco' or Carnival Chorus; the 'Rispetto' or short love-ditty; the 'Lauda' or hymn; the 'Maggio' or May-song; and the 'Madrigale' or little part-song. At Florence, where even under the despotism of the Medici a show of republican life still lingered, all classes joined in the amusements of carnival and spring time; and this poetry of the dance, the pageant, and the villa flourished side by side with the more serious efforts of the humanistic muse. It is not my purpose in this place to inquire into the origins of each lyrical type, to discuss the alterations they may have undergone at the hands of educated versifiers, or to define their several characteristics; but only to offer translations of such as seem to me best suited to represent the genius of the people and the age. In the composition of the poetry in question, Angelo Poliziano was indubitably the most successful. This giant of learning, who filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with students of all nations, and whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people. Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor's mantle, and to improvise 'Ballate' for the girls to sing as they danced their 'Carola' upon the Piazza di Santa Trinità in summer evenings. The peculiarity of this lyric is that it starts with a couplet, which also serves as refrain, supplying the rhyme to each successive stanza. The stanza itself is identical with our rime royal, if we count the couplet in the place of the seventh line. The form is in itself so graceful and is so beautifully treated by Poliziano that I cannot content myself with fewer than four of his _Ballate_.[30] The first is written on the world-old theme of 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. Violets and lilies grew on every side Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful, Golden and white and red and azure-eyed; Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful, To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay. I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. But when my lap was full of flowers I spied Roses at last, roses of every hue; Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride, Because their perfume was so sweet and true That all my soul went forth with pleasure new, With yearning and desire too soft to say. I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell How lovely were the roses in that hour: One was but peeping from her verdant shell, And some were faded, some were scarce in flower: Then Love said: Go, pluck from the blooming bower Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray. I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. For when the full rose quits her tender sheath, When she is sweetest and most fair to see, Then is the time to place her in thy wreath, Before her beauty and her freshness flee. Gather ye therefore roses with great glee, Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away. I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. The next Ballata is less simple, but is composed with the same intention. It may here be parenthetically mentioned that the courtly poet, when he applied himself to this species of composition, invented a certain rusticity of incident, scarcely in keeping with the spirit of his art. It was in fact a conventional feature of this species of verse that the scene should be laid in the country, where the burgher, on a visit to his villa, is supposed to meet with a rustic beauty who captivates his eyes and heart. Guido Cavalcanti, in his celebrated Ballata, 'In un boschetto trovai pastorella,' struck the keynote of this music, which, it may be reasonably conjectured, was imported into Italy through Provençal literature from the pastorals of Northern France. The lady so quaintly imaged by a bird in the following Ballata of Poliziano is supposed to have been Monna Ippolita Leoncina of Prato, white-throated, golden-haired, and dressed in crimson silk. I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. I do not think the world a field could show With herbs of perfume so surpassing rare; But when I passed beyond the green hedge-row, A thousand flowers around me flourished fair, White, pied and crimson, in the summer air; Among the which I heard a sweet bird's tone. I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. Her song it was so tender and so clear That all the world listened with love; then I With stealthy feet a-tiptoe drawing near, Her golden head and golden wings could spy, Her plumes that flashed like rubies 'neath the sky, Her crystal beak and throat and bosom's zone. I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. Fain would I snare her, smit with mighty love; But arrow-like she soared, and through the air Fled to her nest upon the boughs above; Wherefore to follow her is all my care, For haply I might lure her by some snare Forth from the woodland wild where she is flown. I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. Yea, I might spread some net or woven wile; But since of singing she doth take such pleasure, Without or other art or other guile I seek to win her with a tuneful measure; Therefore in singing spend I all my leisure, To make by singing this sweet bird my own. I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. The same lady is more directly celebrated in the next Ballata, where Poliziano calls her by her name, Ippolita. I have taken the liberty of substituting Myrrha for this somewhat unmanageable word. He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. From Myrrha's eyes there flieth, girt with fire, An angel of our lord, a laughing boy, Who lights in frozen hearts a flaming pyre, And with such sweetness doth the soul destroy, That while it dies, it murmurs forth its joy; Oh blessed am I to dwell in Paradise! He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. From Myrrha's eyes a virtue still doth move, So swift and with so fierce and strong a flight, That it is like the lightning of high Jove, Riving of iron and adamant the might; Nathless the wound doth carry such delight That he who suffers dwells in Paradise. He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. From Myrrha's eyes a lovely messenger Of joy so grave, so virtuous, doth flee, That all proud souls are bound to bend to her; So sweet her countenance, it turns the key Of hard hearts locked in cold security: Forth flies the prisoned soul to Paradise. He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. In Myrrha's eyes beauty doth make her throne, And sweetly smile and sweetly speak her mind: Such grace in her fair eyes a man hath known As in the whole wide world he scarce may find: Yet if she slay him with a glance too kind, He lives again beneath her gazing eyes. He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. The fourth Ballata sets forth the fifteenth-century Italian code of love, the code of the Novelle, very different in its avowed laxity from the high ideal of the trecentisti poets. I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. From those who feel the fire I feel, what use Is there in asking pardon? These are so Gentle, kind-hearted, tender, piteous, That they will have compassion, well I know. From such as never felt that honeyed woe, I seek no pardon: nought they know of Love. I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. Honour, pure love, and perfect gentleness, Weighed in the scales of equity refined, Are but one thing: beauty is nought or less, Placed in a dame of proud and scornful mind. Who can rebuke me then if I am kind So far as honesty comports and Love? I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. Let him rebuke me whose hard heart of stone Ne'er felt of Love the summer in his vein! I pray to Love that who hath never known Love's power, may ne'er be blessed with Love's great gain; But he who serves our lord with might and main, May dwell for ever in the fire of Love! I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. Let him rebuke me without cause who will; For if he be not gentle, I fear nought: My heart obedient to the same love still Hath little heed of light words envy-fraught: So long as life remains, it is my thought To keep the laws of this so gentle Love. I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. This Ballata is put into a woman's mouth. Another, ascribed to Lorenzo de' Medici, expresses the sadness of a man who has lost the favour of his lady. It illustrates the well-known use of the word _Signore_ for mistress in Florentine poetry. How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me? Dances and songs and merry wakes I leave To lovers fair, more fortunate and gay; Since to my heart so many sorrows cleave That only doleful tears are mine for aye: Who hath heart's ease, may carol, dance, and play While I am fain to weep continually. How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me? I too had heart's ease once, for so Love willed, When my lord loved me with love strong and great: But envious fortune my life's music stilled, And turned to sadness all my gleeful state. Ah me! Death surely were less desolate Than thus to live and love-neglected be! How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me? One only comfort soothes my heart's despair, And mid this sorrow lends my soul some cheer; Unto my lord I ever yielded fair Service of faith untainted pure and clear; If then I die thus guiltless, on my bier It may be she will shed one tear for me. How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me? The Florentine _Rispetto_ was written for the most part in octave stanzas, detached or continuous. The octave stanza in Italian literature was an emphatically popular form; and it is still largely used in many parts of the peninsula for the lyrical expression of emotion.[31] Poliziano did no more than treat it with his own facility, sacrificing the unstudied raciness of his popular models to literary elegance. Here are a few of these detached stanzas or _Rispetti Spicciolati_:-- Upon that day when first I saw thy face, I vowed with loyal love to worship thee. Move, and I move; stay, and I keep my place: Whate'er thou dost, will I do equally. In joy of thine I find most perfect grace, And in thy sadness dwells my misery: Laugh, and I laugh; weep, and I too will weep. Thus Love commands, whose laws I loving keep. Nay, be not over-proud of thy great grace, Lady! for brief time is thy thief and mine. White will he turn those golden curls, that lace Thy forehead and thy neck so marble-fine. Lo! while the flower still flourisheth apace, Pluck it: for beauty but awhile doth shine. Fair is the rose at dawn; but long ere night Her freshness fades, her pride hath vanished quite. Fire, fire! Ho, water! for my heart's afire! Ho, neighbours! help me, or by God I die! See, with his standard, that great lord, Desire! He sets my heart aflame: in vain I cry. Too late, alas! The flames mount high and higher. Alack, good friends! I faint, I fail, I die. Ho! water, neighbours mine! no more delay I My heart's a cinder if you do but stay. Lo, may I prove to Christ a renegade, And, dog-like, die in pagan Barbary; Nor may God's mercy on my soul be laid, If ere for aught I shall abandon thee: Before all-seeing God this prayer be made-- When I desert thee, may death feed on me: Now if thy hard heart scorn these vows, be sure That without faith none may abide secure. I ask not, Love, for any other pain To make thy cruel foe and mine repent, Only that thou shouldst yield her to the strain Of these my arms, alone, for chastisement; Then would I clasp her so with might and main, That she should learn to pity and relent, And, in revenge for scorn and proud despite, A thousand times I'd kiss her forehead white. Not always do fierce tempests vex the sea, Nor always clinging clouds offend the sky; Cold snows before the sunbeams haste to flee, Disclosing flowers that 'neath their whiteness lie; The saints each one doth wait his day to see, And time makes all things change; so, therefore, I Ween that 'tis wise to wait my turn, and say, That who subdues himself, deserves to sway. It will be observed that the tone of these poems is not passionate nor elevated. Love, as understood in Florence of the fifteenth century, was neither; nor was Poliziano the man to have revived Platonic mysteries or chivalrous enthusiasms. When the octave stanzas, written with this amorous intention, were strung together into a continuous poem, this form of verse took the title of _Rispetto Gontinuato_. In the collection of Poliziano's poems there are several examples of the long Rispetto, carelessly enough composed, as may be gathered from the recurrence of the same stanzas in several poems. All repeat the old arguments, the old enticements to a less than lawful love. The one which I have chosen for translation, styled _Serenata ovvero Lettera in Istrambotti_, might be selected as an epitome of Florentine convention in the matter of love-making. O thou of fairest fairs the first and queen, Most courteous, kind, and honourable dame, Thine ear unto thy servant's singing lean, Who loves thee more than health, or wealth, or fame; For thou his shining planet still hast been, And day and night he calls on thy fair name: First wishing thee all good the world can give, Next praying in thy gentle thoughts to live. He humbly prayeth that thou shouldst be kind To think upon his pure and perfect faith, And that such mercy in thy heart and mind Should reign, as so much beauty argueth: A thousand, thousand hints, or he were blind, Of thy great courtesy he reckoneth: Wherefore thy loyal subject now doth sue Such guerdon only as shall prove them true. He knows himself unmeet for love from thee, Unmeet for merely gazing on thine eyes; Seeing thy comely squires so plenteous be, That there is none but 'neath thy beauty sighs: Yet since thou seekest fame and bravery, Nor carest aught for gauds that others prize, And since he strives to honour thee alway, He still hath hope to gain thy heart one day. Virtue that dwells untold, unknown, unseen, Still findeth none to love or value it; Wherefore his faith, that hath so perfect been, Not being known, can profit him no whit: He would find pity in thine eyes, I ween, If thou shouldst deign to make some proof of it; The rest may flatter, gape, and stand agaze; Him only faith above the crowd doth raise. Suppose that he might meet thee once alone, Face unto face, without or jealousy, Or doubt or fear from false misgiving grown, And tell his tale of grievous pain to thee, Sure from thy breast he'd draw full many a moan. And make thy fair eyes weep right plenteously: Yea, if he had but skill his heart to show, He scarce could fail to win thee by its woe. Now art thou in thy beauty's blooming hour; Thy youth is yet in pure perfection's prime: Make it thy pride to yield thy fragile flower, Or look to find it paled by envious time: For none to stay the flight of years hath power, And who culls roses caught by frosty rime? Give therefore to thy lover, give, for they Too late repent who act not while they may. Time flies: and lo! thou let'st it idly fly: There is not in the world a thing more dear; And if thou wait to see sweet May pass by, Where find'st thou roses in the later year? He never can, who lets occasion die: Now that thou canst, stay not for doubt or fear; But by the forelock take the flying hour, Ere change begins, and clouds above thee lower. Too long 'twixt yea and nay he hath been wrung; Whether he sleep or wake he little knows, Or free or in the bands of bondage strung: Nay, lady, strike, and let thy lover loose! What joy hast thou to keep a captive hung? Kill him at once, or cut the cruel noose: No more, I prithee, stay; but take thy part: Either relax the bow, or speed the dart. Thou feedest him on words and windiness, On smiles, and signs, and bladders light as air; Saying, thou fain wouldst comfort his distress, But dar'st not, canst not: nay, dear lady fair, All things are possible beneath the stress Of will, that flames above the soul's despair! Dally no longer: up, set to thy hand; Or see his love unclothed and naked stand. For he hath sworn, and by this oath will bide, E'en though his life be lost in the endeavour, To leave no way, nor art, nor wile untried, Until he pluck the fruit he sighs for ever: And, though he still would spare thy honest pride, The knot that binds him he must loose or sever; Thou too, O lady, shouldst make sharp thy knife, If thou art fain to end this amorous strife. Lo! if thou lingerest still in dubious dread, Lest thou shouldst lose fair fame of honesty, Here hast thou need of wile and warihead, To test thy lover's strength in screening thee; Indulge him, if thou find him well bestead, Knowing that smothered love flames outwardly: Therefore, seek means, search out some privy way; Keep not the steed too long at idle play. Or if thou heedest what those friars teach, I cannot fail, lady, to call thee fool: Well may they blame our private sins and preach; But ill their acts match with their spoken rule; The same pitch clings to all men, one and each. There, I have spoken: set the world to school With this true proverb, too, be well acquainted The devil's ne'er so black as he is painted. Nor did our good Lord give such grace to thee That thou shouldst keep it buried in thy breast, But to reward thy servant's constancy, Whose love and loyal faith thou hast repressed: Think it no sin to be some trifle free, Because thou livest at a lord's behest; For if he take enough to feed his fill, To cast the rest away were surely ill. They find most favour in the sight of heaven Who to the poor and hungry are most kind; A hundred-fold shall thus to thee be given By God, who loves the free and generous mind; Thrice strike thy breast, with pure contrition riven, Crying: I sinned; my sin hath made me blind!-- He wants not much: enough if he be able To pick up crumbs that fall beneath thy table. Wherefore, O lady, break the ice at length; Make thou, too, trial of love's fruits and flowers: When in thine arms thou feel'st thy lover's strength, Thou wilt repent of all these wasted hours; Husbands, they know not love, its breadth and length, Seeing their hearts are not on fire like ours: Things longed for give most pleasure; this I tell thee: If still thou doubtest let the proof compel thee. What I have spoken is pure gospel sooth; I have told all my mind, withholding nought: And well, I ween, thou canst unhusk the truth, And through the riddle read the hidden thought: Perchance if heaven still smile upon my youth, Some good effect for me may yet be wrought: Then fare thee well; too many words offend: She who is wise is quick to comprehend. The levity of these love-declarations and the fluency of their vows show them to be 'false as dicers' oaths,' mere verses of the moment, made to please a facile mistress. One long poem, which cannot be styled a Rispetto, but is rather a Canzone of the legitimate type, stands out with distinctness from the rest of Poliziano's love-verses. It was written by him for Giuliano de' Medici, in praise of the fair Simonetta. The following version attempts to repeat its metrical effects in some measure:-- My task it is, since thus Love wills, who strains And forces all the world beneath his sway, In lowly verse to say The great delight that in my bosom reigns. For if perchance I took but little pains To tell some part of all the joy I find, I might be deem'd unkind By one who knew my heart's deep happiness. He feels but little bliss who hides his bliss; Small joy hath he whose joy is never sung; And he who curbs his tongue Through cowardice, knows but of love the name. Wherefore to succour and augment the fame Of that pure, virtuous, wise, and lovely may, Who like the star of day Shines mid the stars, or like the rising sun, Forth from my burning heart the words shall run. Far, far be envy, far be jealous fear, With discord dark and drear, And all the choir that is of love the foe.-- The season had returned when soft winds blow, The season friendly to young lovers coy, Which bids them clothe their joy In divers garbs and many a masked disguise. Then I to track the game 'neath April skies Went forth in raiment strange apparellèd, And by kind fate was led Unto the spot where stayed my soul's desire. The beauteous nymph who feeds my soul with fire, I found in gentle, pure, and prudent mood, In graceful attitude, Loving and courteous, holy, wise, benign. So sweet, so tender was her face divine, So gladsome, that in those celestial eyes Shone perfect paradise, Yea, all the good that we poor mortals crave. Around her was a band so nobly brave Of beauteous dames, that as I gazed at these Methought heaven's goddesses That day for once had deigned to visit earth. But she who gives my soul sorrow and mirth, Seemed Pallas in her gait, and in her face Venus; for every grace And beauty of the world in her combined. Merely to think, far more to tell my mind Of that most wondrous sight, confoundeth me, For mid the maidens she Who most resembled her was found most rare. Call ye another first among the fair; Not first, but sole before my lady set: Lily and violet And all the flowers below the rose must bow. Down from her royal head and lustrous brow The golden curls fell sportively unpent, While through the choir she went With feet well lessoned to the rhythmic sound. Her eyes, though scarcely raised above the ground, Sent me by stealth a ray divinely fair; But still her jealous hair Broke the bright beam, and veiled her from my gaze. She, born and nursed in heaven for angels' praise, No sooner saw this wrong, than back she drew, With hand of purest hue, Her truant curls with kind and gentle mien. Then from her eyes a soul so fiery keen, So sweet a soul of love she cast on mine, That scarce can I divine How then I 'scaped from burning utterly. These are the first fair signs of love to be, That bound my heart with adamant, and these The matchless courtesies Which, dreamlike, still before mine eyes must hover. This is the honeyed food she gave her lover, To make him, so it pleased her, half-divine; Nectar is not so fine, Nor ambrosy, the fabled feast of Jove. Then, yielding proofs more clear and strong of love, As though to show the faith within her heart, She moved, with subtle art, Her feet accordant to the amorous air. But while I gaze and pray to God that ne'er Might cease that happy dance angelical, O harsh, unkind recall! Back to the banquet was she beckonèd. She, with her face at first with pallor spread, Then tinted with a blush of coral dye, 'The ball is best!' did cry, Gentle in tone and smiling as she spake. But from her eyes celestial forth did break Favour at parting; and I well could see Young love confusedly Enclosed within the furtive fervent gaze, Heating his arrows at their beauteous rays, For war with Pallas and with Dian cold. Fairer than mortal mould, She moved majestic with celestial gait; And with her hand her robe in royal state Raised, as she went with pride ineffable. Of me I cannot tell, Whether alive or dead I there was left. Nay, dead, methinks! since I of thee was reft, Light of my life! and yet, perchance, alive-- Such virtue to revive My lingering soul possessed thy beauteous face, But if that powerful charm of thy great grace Could then thy loyal lover so sustain, Why comes there not again More often or more soon the sweet delight? Twice hath the wandering moon with borrowed light Stored from her brother's rays her crescent horn, Nor yet hath fortune borne Me on the way to so much bliss again. Earth smiles anew; fair spring renews her reign: The grass and every shrub once more is green; The amorous birds begin, From winter loosed, to fill the field with song. See how in loving pairs the cattle throng; The bull, the ram, their amorous jousts enjoy: Thou maiden, I a boy, Shall we prove traitors to love's law for aye? Shall we these years that are so fair let fly? Wilt thou not put thy flower of youth to use? Or with thy beauty choose To make him blest who loves thee best of all? Haply I am some hind who guards the stall, Or of vile lineage, or with years outworn, Poor, or a cripple born, Or faint of spirit that you spurn me so? Nay, but my race is noble and doth grow With honour to our land, with pomp and power; My youth is yet in flower, And it may chance some maiden sighs for me. My lot it is to deal right royally With all the goods that fortune spreads around, For still they more abound, Shaken from her full lap, the more I waste. My strength is such as whoso tries shall taste; Circled with friends, with favours crowned am I: Yet though I rank so high Among the blest, as men may reckon bliss, Still without thee, my hope, my happiness, It seems a sad, and bitter thing to live! Then stint me not, but give That joy which holds all joys enclosed in one. Let me pluck fruits at last, not flowers alone! With much that is frigid, artificial, and tedious in this old-fashioned love-song, there is a curious monotony of sweetness which commends it to our ears; and he who reads it may remember the profile portrait of Simonetta from the hand of Piero della Francesca in the Pitti Palace at Florence. It is worth comparing Poliziano's treatment of popular or semi-popular verse-forms with his imitations of Petrarch's manner. For this purpose I have chosen a _Canzone_, clearly written in competition with the celebrated 'Chiare, fresche e dolci acque,' of Laura's lover. While closely modelled upon Petrarch's form and similar in motive, this Canzone preserves Poliziano's special qualities of fluency and emptiness of content. Hills, valleys, caves and fells, With flowers and leaves and herbage spread; Green meadows; shadowy groves where light is low; Lawns watered with the rills That cruel Love hath made me shed, Cast from these cloudy eyes so dark with woe; Thou stream that still dost know What fell pangs pierce my heart, So dost thou murmur back my moan; Lone bird that chauntest tone for tone, While in our descant drear Love sings his part: Nymphs, woodland wanderers, wind and air; List to the sound out-poured from my despair! Seven times and once more seven The roseate dawn her beauteous brow Enwreathed with orient jewels hath displayed; Cynthia once more in heaven Hath orbed her horns with silver now; While in sea waves her brother's light was laid; Since this high mountain glade Felt the white footsteps fall Of that proud lady, who to spring Converts whatever woodland thing She may o'ershadow, touch, or heed at all. Here bloom the flowers, the grasses spring From her bright eyes, and drink what mine must bring. Yea, nourished with my tears Is every little leaf I see, And the stream rolls therewith a prouder wave. Ah me! through what long years Will she withhold her face from me, Which stills the stormy skies howe'er they rave? Speak! or in grove or cave If one hath seen her stray, Plucking amid those grasses green Wreaths for her royal brows serene, Flowers white and blue and red and golden gay! Nay, prithee, speak, if pity dwell Among these woods, within this leafy dell! O Love! 'twas here we saw, Beneath the new-fledged leaves that spring From this old beech, her fair form lowly laid:-- The thought renews my awe! How sweetly did her tresses fling Waves of wreathed gold unto the winds that strayed Fire, frost within me played, While I beheld the bloom Of laughing flowers--O day of bliss!-- Around those tresses meet and kiss, And roses in her lap of Love the home! Her grace, her port divinely fair, Describe it, Love! myself I do not dare. In mute intent surprise I gazed, as when a hind is seen To dote upon its image in a rill; Drinking those love-lit eyes, Those hands, that face, those words serene, That song which with delight the heaven did fill, That smile which thralls me still, Which melteth stones unkind, Which in this woodland wilderness Tames every beast and stills the stress Of hurrying waters. Would that I could find Her footprints upon field or grove! I should not then be envious of Jove. Thou cool stream rippling by, Where oft it pleased her to dip Her naked foot, how blest art thou! Ye branching trees on high, That spread your gnarled roots on the lip Of yonder hanging rock to drink heaven's dew! She often leaned on you, She who is my life's bliss! Thou ancient beech with moss o'ergrown, How do I envy thee thy throne, Found worthy to receive such happiness! Ye winds, how blissful must ye be, Since ye have borne to heaven her harmony! The winds that music bore, And wafted it to God on high, That Paradise might have the joy thereof. Flowers here she plucked, and wore Wild roses from the thorn hard by: This air she lightened with her look of love: This running stream above, She bent her face!--Ah me! Where am I? What sweet makes me swoon? What calm is in the kiss of noon? Who brought me here? Who speaks? What melody? Whence came pure peace into my soul? What joy hath rapt me from my own control? Poliziano's refrain is always: 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. It is spring-time now and youth. Winter and old age are coming!' A _Maggio_, or May-day song, describing the games, dances, and jousting matches of the Florentine lads upon the morning of the first of May, expresses this facile philosophy of life with a quaintness that recalls Herrick. It will be noticed that the Maggio is built, so far as rhymes go, on the same system as Poliziano's Ballata. It has considerable historical interest, for the opening couplet is said to be Guido Cavalcanti's, while the whole poem is claimed by Roscoe for Lorenzo de' Medici, and by Carducci with better reason for Poliziano. Welcome in the May And the woodland garland gay! Welcome in the jocund spring Which bids all men lovers be! Maidens, up with carolling, With your sweethearts stout and free, With roses and with blossoms ye Who deck yourselves this first of May! Up, and forth into the pure Meadows, mid the trees and flowers! Every beauty is secure With so many bachelors: Beasts and birds amid the bowers Burn with love this first of May. Maidens, who are young and fair, Be not harsh, I counsel you; For your youth cannot repair Her prime of spring, as meadows do: None be proud, but all be true To men who love, this first of May. Dance and carol every one Of our band so bright and gay! See your sweethearts how they run Through the jousts for you to-day! She who saith her lover nay, Will deflower the sweets of May, Lads in love take sword and shield To make pretty girls their prize: Yield ye, merry maidens, yield To your lovers' vows and sighs: Give his heart back ere it dies: Wage not war this first of May. He who steals another's heart, Let him give his own heart too: Who's the robber? 'Tis the smart Little cherub Cupid, who Homage comes to pay with you, Damsels, to the first of May. Love comes smiling; round his head Lilies white and roses meet: 'Tis for you his flight is sped. Fair one, haste our king to greet: Who will fling him blossoms sweet Soonest on this first of May? Welcome, stranger! welcome, king! Love, what hast thou to command? That each girl with wreaths should ring Her lover's hair with loving hand, That girls small and great should band In Love's ranks this first of May. The _Canto Carnascialesco_, for the final development if not for the invention of which all credit must be given to Lorenzo de' Medici, does not greatly differ from the Maggio in structure. It admitted, however, of great varieties, and was generally more complex in its interweaving of rhymes. Yet the essential principle of an exordium which should also serve for a refrain, was rarely, if ever, departed from. Two specimens of the Carnival Song will serve to bring into close contrast two very different aspects of Florentine history. The earlier was composed by Lorenzo de' Medici at the height of his power and in the summer of Italian independence. It was sung by masquers attired in classical costume, to represent Bacchus and his crew. Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. This is Bacchus and the bright Ariadne, lovers true! They, in flying time's despite, Each with each find pleasure new; These their Nymphs, and all their crew Keep perpetual holiday.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed, Of the Nymphs are paramours: Through the caves and forests wide They have snared them mid the flowers; Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers, Now they dance and leap alway.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. These fair Nymphs, they are not loth To entice their lovers' wiles. None but thankless folk and rough Can resist when Love beguiles. Now enlaced, with wreathèd smiles, All together dance and play.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. See this load behind them plodding On the ass! Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. Midas treads a wearier measure: All he touches turns to gold: If there be no taste of pleasure, What's the use of wealth untold? What's the joy his fingers hold, When he's forced to thirst for aye?-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. Listen well to what we're saying; Of to-morrow have no care! Young and old together playing, Boys and girls, be blithe as air! Every sorry thought forswear! Keep perpetual holiday.--- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. Ladies and gay lovers young! Long live Bacchus, live Desire! Dance and play; let songs be sung; Let sweet love your bosoms fire; In the future come what may!--- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day! Nought ye know about to-morrow. Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away. The next, composed by Antonio Alamanni, after Lorenzo's death and the ominous passage of Charles VIII., was sung by masquers habited as skeletons. The car they rode on, was a Car of Death designed by Piero di Cosimo, and their music was purposely gloomy. If in the jovial days of the Medici the streets of Florence had rung to the thoughtless refrain, 'Nought ye know about to-morrow,' they now re-echoed with a cry of 'Penitence;' for times had strangely altered, and the heedless past had brought forth a doleful present. The last stanza of Alamanni's chorus is a somewhat clumsy attempt to adapt the too real moral of his subject to the customary mood of the Carnival. Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye; This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but penitence! E'en as you are, once were we: You shall be as now we are: We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Nought avails to take great care, After sins, of penitence. We too in the Carnival Sang our love-songs through the town; Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down:-- Now we cry, the world around, Penitence! oh, Penitence! Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools! Time steals all things as he rides: Honours, glories, states, and schools, Pass away, and nought abides; Till the tomb our carcase hides, And compels this penitence. This sharp scythe you see us bear, Brings the world at length to woe: But from life to life we fare; And that life is joy or woe: All heaven's bliss on him doth flow Who on earth does penitence. Living here, we all must die; Dying, every soul shall live: For the King of kings on high This fixed ordinance doth give: Lo, you all are fugitive! Penitence! Cry Penitence! Torment great and grievous dole Hath the thankless heart mid you; But the man of piteous soul Finds much honour in our crew: Love for loving is the due That prevents this penitence. Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye: This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but Penitence! One song for dancing, composed less upon the type of the Ballata than on that of the Carnival Song, may here be introduced, not only in illustration of the varied forms assumed by this style of poetry, but also because it is highly characteristic of Tuscan town-life. This poem in the vulgar style has been ascribed to Lorenzo de' Medici, but probably without due reason. It describes the manners and customs of female street gossips. Since you beg with such a grace, How can I refuse a song, Wholesome, honest, void of wrong, On the follies of the place? Courteously on you I call; Listen well to what I sing: For my roundelay to all May perchance instruction bring, And of life good lessoning.-- When in company you meet, Or sit spinning, all the street Clamours like a market-place. Thirty of you there may be; Twenty-nine are sure to buzz, And the single silent she Racks her brains about her coz:-- Mrs. Buzz and Mrs. Huzz, Mind your work, my ditty saith; Do not gossip till your breath Fails and leaves you black of face! Governments go out and in:-- You the truth must needs discover. Is a girl about to win A brave husband in her lover?-- Straight you set to talk him over: 'Is he wealthy?' 'Does his coat Fit?' 'And has he got a vote?' 'Who's his father?' 'What's his race?' Out of window one head pokes; Twenty others do the same:-- Chatter, clatter!--creaks and croaks All the year the same old game!-- 'See my spinning!' cries one dame, 'Five long ells of cloth, I trow!' Cries another, 'Mine must go, Drat it, to the bleaching base!' 'Devil take the fowl!' says one: 'Mine are all bewitched, I guess; Cocks and hens with vermin run, Mangy, filthy, featherless.' Says another: 'I confess Every hair I drop, I keep-- Plague upon it, in a heap Falling off to my disgrace!' If you see a fellow walk Up or down the street and back, How you nod and wink and talk, Hurry-skurry, cluck and clack!-- 'What, I wonder, does he lack Here about?'--'There's something wrong!' Till the poor man's made a song For the female populace. It were well you gave no thought To such idle company; Shun these gossips, care for nought But the business that you ply. You who chatter, you who cry, Heed my words; be wise, I pray: Fewer, shorter stories say: Bide at home, and mind your place. Since you beg with such a grace, How can I refuse a song, Wholesome, honest, void of wrong, On the follies of the place? The _Madrigale_, intended to be sung in parts, was another species of popular poetry cultivated by the greatest of Italian writers. Without seeking examples from such men as Petrarch, Michelangelo, or Tasso, who used it as a purely literary form, I will content myself with a few Madrigals by anonymous composers, more truly popular in style, and more immediately intended for music.[32] The similarity both of manner and matter, between these little poems and the Ballate, is obvious. There is the same affectation of rusticity in both. _Cogliendo per un prato._ Plucking white lilies in a field I saw Fair women, laden with young Love's delight: Some sang, some danced; but all were fresh and bright. Then by the margin of a fount they leaned, And of those flowers made garlands for their hair-- Wreaths for their golden tresses quaint and rare. Forth from the field I passed, and gazed upon Their loveliness, and lost my heart to one. _Togliendo l' una all' altra._ One from the other borrowing leaves and flowers, I saw fair maidens 'neath the summer trees, Weaving bright garlands with low love-ditties. Mid that sweet sisterhood the loveliest Turned her soft eyes to me, and whispered, 'Take!' Love-lost I stood, and not a word I spake. My heart she read, and her fair garland gave: Therefore I am her servant to the grave. _Appress' un fiume chiaro_. Hard by a crystal stream Girls and maids were dancing round A lilac with fair blossoms crowned. Mid these I spied out one So tender-sweet, so love-laden, She stole my heart with singing then: Love in her face so lovely-kind And eyes and hands my soul did bind. _Di riva in riva_. From lawn to lea Love led me down the valley, Seeking my hawk, where 'neath a pleasant hill I spied fair maidens bathing in a rill. Lina was there all loveliness excelling; The pleasure of her beauty made me sad, And yet at sight of her my soul was glad. Downward I cast mine eyes with modest seeming, And all a tremble from the fountain fled: For each was naked as her maidenhead. Thence singing fared I through a flowery plain, Where bye and bye I found my hawk again! _Nel chiaro fiume_. Down a fair streamlet crystal-clear and pleasant I went a fishing all alone one day, And spied three maidens bathing there at play. Of love they told each other honeyed stories, While with white hands they smote the stream, to wet Their sunbright hair in the pure rivulet. Gazing I crouched among thick flowering leafage, Till one who spied a rustling branch on high, Turned to her comrades with a sudden cry, And 'Go! Nay, prithee go!' she called to me: 'To stay were surely but scant courtesy.' _Quel sole che nutrica._ The sun which makes a lily bloom, Leans down at times on her to gaze-- Fairer, he deems, than his fair rays: Then, having looked a little while, He turns and tells the saints in bliss How marvellous her beauty is. Thus up in heaven with flute and string Thy loveliness the angels sing. _Di novo è giunt'._ Lo: here hath come an errant knight On a barbed charger clothed in mail: His archers scatter iron hail. At brow and breast his mace he aims; Who therefore hath not arms of proof, Let him live locked by door and roof; Until Dame Summer on a day That grisly knight return to slay. Poliziano's treatment of the octave stanza for Rispetti was comparatively popular. But in his poem of 'La Giostra,' written to commemorate the victory of Giuliano de' Medici in a tournament and to celebrate his mistress, he gave a new and richer form to the metre which Boccaccio had already used for epic verse. The slight and uninteresting framework of this poem, which opened a new sphere for Italian literature, and prepared the way for Ariosto's golden cantos, might be compared to one of those wire baskets which children steep in alum water, and incrust with crystals, sparkling, artificial, beautiful with colours not their own. The mind of Poliziano held, as it were, in solution all the images and thoughts of antiquity, all the riches of his native literature. In that vast reservoir of poems and mythologies and phrases, so patiently accumulated, so tenaciously preserved, so thoroughly assimilated, he plunged the trivial subject he had chosen, and triumphantly presented to the world the _spolia opima_ of scholarship and taste. What mattered it that the theme was slight? The art was perfect, the result splendid. One canto of 125 stanzas describes the youth of Giuliano, who sought to pass his life among the woods, a hunter dead to love, but who was doomed to be ensnared by Cupid. The chase, the beauty of Simonetta, the palace of Venus, these are the three subjects of a book as long as the first Iliad. The second canto begins with dreams and prophecies of glory to be won by Giuliano in the tournament. But it stops abruptly. The tragic catastrophe of the Pazzi Conjuration cut short Poliziano's panegyric by the murder of his hero. Meanwhile the poet had achieved his purpose. His torso presented to Italy a model of style, a piece of written art adequate to the great painting of the Renaissance period, a double star of poetry which blent the splendours of the ancient and the modern world. To render into worthy English the harmonies of Poliziano is a difficult task. Yet this must be attempted if an English reader is to gain any notion of the scope and substance of the Italian poet's art. In the first part of the poem we are placed, as it were, at the mid point between the 'Hippolytus' of Euripides and Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis.' The cold hunter Giuliano is to see Simonetta, and seeing, is to love her. This is how he first discovers the triumphant beauty:[33] White is the maid, and white the robe around her, With buds and roses and thin grasses pied; Enwreathèd folds of golden tresses crowned her, Shadowing her forehead fair with modest pride: The wild wood smiled; the thicket where he found her, To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side: Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild, And with her brow tempers the tempests wild. After three stanzas of this sort, in which the poet's style is more apparent than the object he describes, occurs this charming picture:-- Reclined he found her on the swarded grass In jocund mood; and garlands she had made Of every flower that in the meadow was, Or on her robe of many hues displayed; But when she saw the youth before her pass, Raising her timid head awhile she stayed; Then with her white hand gathered up her dress, And stood, lap-full of flowers, in loveliness. Then through the dewy field with footstep slow The lingering maid began to take her way, Leaving her lover in great fear and woe, For now he longs for nought but her alway: The wretch, who cannot bear that she should go, Strives with a whispered prayer her feet to stay; And thus at last, all trembling, all afire, In humble wise he breathes his soul's desire: 'Whoe'er thou art, maid among maidens queen, Goddess, or nymph--nay, goddess seems most clear-- If goddess, sure my Dian I have seen; If mortal, let thy proper self appear! Beyond terrestrial beauty is thy mien; I have no merit that I should be here! What grace of heaven, what lucky star benign Yields me the sight of beauty so divine?' A conversation ensues, after which Giuliano departs utterly lovesick, and Cupid takes wing exultingly for Cyprus, where his mother's palace stands. In the following picture of the house of Venus, who shall say how much of Ariosto's Alcina and Tasso's Armida is contained? Cupid arrives, and the family of Love is filled with joy at Giuliano's conquest. From the plan of the poem it is clear that its beauties are chiefly those of detail. They are, however, very great. How perfect, for example, is the richness combined with delicacy of the following description of a country life:-- BOOK I. STANZAS 17-21. How far more safe it is, how far more fair, To chase the flying deer along the lea; Through ancient woods to track their hidden lair, Far from the town, with long-drawn subtlety: To scan the vales, the hills, the limpid air, The grass and flowers, clear ice, and streams so free; To hear the birds wake from their winter trance, The wind-stirred leaves and murmuring waters dance. How sweet it were to watch the young goats hung From toppling crags, cropping the tender shoot, While in thick pleachèd shade the shepherd sung His uncouth rural lay and woke his flute; To mark, mid dewy grass, red apples flung, And every bough thick set with ripening fruit, The butting rams, kine lowing o'er the lea, And cornfields waving like the windy sea. Lo! how the rugged master of the herd Before his flock unbars the wattled cote; Then with his rod and many a rustic word He rules their going: or 'tis sweet to note The delver, when his toothèd rake hath stirred The stubborn clod, his hoe the glebe hath smote; Barefoot the country girl, with loosened zone, Spins, while she keeps her geese 'neath yonder stone. After such happy wise, in ancient years, Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold; Nor had the fount been stirred of mothers' tears For sons in war's fell labour stark and cold; Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers, Nor yet had oxen groaning ploughed the wold; Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore. Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursèd thirst Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth: Joyous in liberty they lived at first; Unploughed the fields sent forth their teeming birth; Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst The bond of law, and pity banned and worth; Within their breasts sprang luxury and that rage Which men call love in our degenerate age. We need not be reminded that these stanzas are almost a cento from Virgil, Hesiod, and Ovid. The merits of the translator, adapter, and combiner, who knew so well how to cull their beauties and adorn them with a perfect dress of modern diction, are so eminent that we cannot deny him the title of a great poet. It is always in picture-painting more than in dramatic presentation that Poliziano excels. Here is a basrelief of Venus rising from the Ocean foam:-- STANZAS 99-107. In Thetis' lap, upon the vexed Egean, The seed deific from Olympus sown, Beneath dim stars and cycling empyrean Drifts like white foam across the salt waves blown; Thence, born at last by movements hymenean, Rises a maid more fair than man hath known; Upon her shell the wanton breezes waft her; She nears the shore, while heaven looks down with laughter Seeing the carved work you would cry that real Were shell and sea, and real the winds that blow; The lightning of the goddess' eyes you feel, The smiling heavens, the elemental glow: White-vested Hours across the smooth sands steal, With loosened curls that to the breezes flow; Like, yet unlike, are all their beauteous faces, E'en as befits a choir of sister Graces. Well might you swear that on those waves were riding The goddess with her right hand on her hair, And with the other the sweet apple hiding; And that beneath her feet, divinely fair, Fresh flowers sprang forth, the barren sands dividing; Then that, with glad smiles and enticements rare, The three nymphs round their queen, embosoming her, Threw the starred mantle soft as gossamer. The one, with hands above her head upraised, Upon her dewy tresses fits a wreath, With ruddy gold and orient gems emblazed; The second hangs pure pearls her ears beneath; The third round shoulders white and breast hath placed Such wealth of gleaming carcanets as sheathe Their own fair bosoms, when the Graces sing Among the gods with dance and carolling. Thence might you see them rising toward the spheres, Seated upon a cloud of silvery white; The trembling of the cloven air appears Wrought in the stone, and heaven serenely bright; The gods drink in with open eyes and ears Her beauty, and desire her bed's delight; Each seems to marvel with a mute amaze-- Their brows and foreheads wrinkle as they gaze. The next quotation shows Venus in the lap of Mars, and Visited by Cupid:-- STANZAS 122--124. Stretched on a couch, outside the coverlid, Love found her, scarce unloosed from Mars' embrace; He, lying back within her bosom, fed His eager eyes on nought but her fair face; Roses above them like a cloud were shed, To reinforce them in the amorous chace; While Venus, quick with longings unsuppressed, A thousand times his eyes and forehead kissed. Above, around, young Loves on every side Played naked, darting birdlike to and fro; And one, whose plumes a thousand colours dyed, Fanned the shed roses as they lay arow; One filled his quiver with fresh flowers, and hied To pour them on the couch that lay below; Another, poised upon his pinions, through The falling shower soared shaking rosy dew: For, as he quivered with his tremulous wing, The wandering roses in their drift were stayed;-- Thus none was weary of glad gambolling; Till Cupid came, with dazzling plumes displayed, Breathless; and round his mother's neck did fling His languid arms, and with his winnowing made Her heart burn:--very glad and bright of face, But, with his flight, too tired to speak apace. These pictures have in them the very glow of Italian painting. Sometimes we seem to see a quaint design of Piero di Cosimo, with bright tints and multitudinous small figures in a spacious landscape. Sometimes it is the languid grace of Botticelli, whose soul became possessed of classic inspiration as it were in dreams, and who has painted the birth of Venus almost exactly as Poliziano imagined it. Again, we seize the broader beauties of the Venetian masters, or the vehemence of Giulio Romano's pencil. To the last class belong the two next extracts:-- STANZAS 104--107. In the last square the great artificer Had wrought himself crowned with Love's perfect palm; Black from his forge and rough, he runs to her, Leaving all labour for her bosom's calm: Lips joined to lips with deep love-longing stir, Fire in his heart, and in his spirit balm; Far fiercer flames through breast and marrow fly Than those which heat his forge in Sicily. Jove, on the other side, becomes a bull, Goodly and white, at Love's behest, and rears His neck beneath his rich freight beautiful: She turns toward the shore that disappears, With frightened gesture; and the wonderful Gold curls about her bosom and her ears Float in the wind; her veil waves, backward borne; This hand still clasps his back, and that his horn. With naked feet close-tucked beneath her dress, She seems to fear the sea that dares not rise: So, imaged in a shape of drear distress, In vain unto her comrades sweet she cries; They left amid the meadow-flowers, no less For lost Europa wail with weeping eyes: Europa, sounds the shore, bring back our bliss But the bull swims and turns her feet to kiss. Here Jove is made a swan, a golden shower, Or seems a serpent, or a shepherd-swain, To work his amorous will in secret hour; Here, like an eagle, soars he o'er the plain, Love-led, and bears his Ganymede, the flower Of beauty, mid celestial peers to reign; The boy with cypress hath his fair locks crowned, Naked, with ivy wreathed his waist around. STANZAS 110--112. Lo! here again fair Ariadne lies, And to the deaf winds of false Theseus plains. And of the air and slumber's treacheries; Trembling with fear even as a reed that strain. And quivers by the mere 'neath breezy skies: Her very speechless attitude complains-- No beast there is so cruel as thou art, No beast less loyal to my broken heart. Throned on a car, with ivy crowned and vine, Rides Bacchus, by two champing tigers driven: Around him on the sand deep-soaked with brine Satyrs and Bacchantes rush; the skies are riven With shouts and laughter; Fauns quaff bubbling wine From horns and cymbals; Nymphs, to madness driven, Trip, skip, and stumble; mixed in wild enlacements, Laughing they roll or meet for glad embracements. Upon his ass Silenus, never sated, With thick, black veins, wherethrough the must is soaking, Nods his dull forehead with deep sleep belated; His eyes are wine-inflamed, and red, and smoking: Bold Mænads goad the ass so sorely weighted, With stinging thyrsi; he sways feebly poking The mane with bloated fingers; Fauns behind him, E'en as he falls, upon the crupper bind him. We almost seem to be looking at the frescoes in some Trasteverine palace, or at the canvas of one of the sensual Genoese painters. The description of the garden of Venus has the charm of somewhat artificial elegance, the exotic grace of style, which attracts us in the earlier Renaissance work:-- The leafy tresses of that timeless garden Nor fragile brine nor fresh snow dares to whiten; Frore winter never comes the rills to harden, Nor winds the tender shrubs and herbs to frighten; Glad Spring is always here, a laughing warden; Nor do the seasons wane, but ever brighten; Here to the breeze young May, her curls unbinding, With thousand flowers her wreath is ever winding. Indeed it may be said with truth that Poliziano's most eminent faculty as a descriptive poet corresponded exactly to the genius of the painters of his day. To produce pictures radiant with Renaissance colouring, and vigorous with Renaissance passion, was the function of his art, not to express profound thought or dramatic situations. This remark might be extended with justice to Ariosto, and Tasso, and Boiardo. The great narrative poets of the Renaissance in Italy were not dramatists; nor were their poems epics: their forte lay in the inexhaustible variety and beauty of their pictures. Of Poliziano's plagiarism--if this be the right word to apply to the process of assimilation and selection, by means of which the poet-scholar of Florence taught the Italians how to use the riches of the ancient languages and their own literature--here are some specimens. In stanza 42 of the 'Giostra' he says of Simonetta:-- E 'n lei discerne un non so che divino. Dante has the line:-- Vostri risplende un non so che divino. In the 44th he speaks about the birds:-- E canta ogni augelletto in suo latino. This comes from Cavalcanti's:-- E cantinne gli augelli. Ciascuno in suo latino. Stanza 45 is taken bodily from Claudian, Dante, and Cavalcanti. It would seem as though Poliziano wished to show that the classic and medieval literature of Italy was all one, and that a poet of the Renaissance could carry on the continuous tradition in his own style. A, line in stanza 54 seems perfectly original:-- E già dall'alte ville il fumo esala. It comes straight from Virgil:-- Et jam summa pocul villarum culmina fumant. In the next stanza the line-- Tal che 'l ciel tutto rasserenò d'intorno, is Petrarch's. So in the 56th, is the phrase 'il dolce andar celeste.' In stanza 57-- Par che 'l cor del petto se gli schianti, belongs to Boccaccio. In stanza 60 the first line:-- La notte che le cose ci nasconde, together with its rhyme, 'sotto le amate fronde,' is borrowed from the 23rd canto of the 'Paradiso.' In the second line, 'Stellato ammanto' is Claudian's 'stellantes sinus' applied to the heaven. When we reach the garden of Venus we find whole passages translated from Claudian's 'Marriage of Honorius,' and from the 'Metamorphoses' of Ovid. Poliziano's second poem of importance, which indeed may historically be said to take precedence of 'La Giostra,' was the so-called tragedy of 'Orfeo.' The English version of this lyrical drama must be reserved for a separate study: yet it belongs to the subject of this, inasmuch as the 'Orfeo' is a classical legend treated in a form already familiar to the Italian people. Nearly all the popular kinds of poetry of which specimens have been translated in this chapter, will be found combined in its six short scenes. * * * * * _ORFEO_ The 'Orfeo' of Messer Angelo Poliziano ranks amongst the most important poems of the fifteenth century. It was composed at Mantua in the short space of two days, on the occasion of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga's visit to his native town in 1472. But, though so hastily put together, the 'Orfeo' marks an epoch in the evolution of Italian poetry. It is the earliest example of a secular drama, containing within the compass of its brief scenes the germ of the opera, the tragedy, and the pastoral play. In form it does not greatly differ from the 'Sacre Rappresentazioni' of the fifteenth century, as those miracle plays were handled by popular poets of the earlier Renaissance. But while the traditional octave stanza is used for the main movement of the piece, Poliziano has introduced episodes of _terza rima_, madrigals, a carnival song, a _ballata_, and, above all, choral passages which have in them the future melodrama of the musical Italian stage. The lyrical treatment of the fable, its capacity for brilliant and varied scenic effects, its combination of singing with action, and the whole artistic keeping of the piece, which never passes into genuine tragedy, but stays within the limits of romantic pathos, distinguish the 'Orfeo' as a typical production of Italian genius. Thus, though little better than an improvisation, it combines the many forms of verse developed by the Tuscans at the close of the Middle Ages, and fixes the limits beyond which their dramatic poets, with a few exceptions, were not destined to advance. Nor was the choice of the fable without significance. Quitting the Bible stories and the Legends of Saints, which supplied the mediaeval playwright with material, Poliziano selects a classic story: and this story might pass for an allegory of Italy, whose intellectual development the scholar-poet ruled. Orpheus is the power of poetry and art, softening stubborn nature, civilising men, and prevailing over Hades for a season. He is the right hero of humanism, the genius of the Renaissance, the tutelary god of Italy, who thought she could resist the laws of fate by verse and elegant accomplishments. To press this kind of allegory is unwise; for at a certain moment it breaks in our hands. And yet in Eurydice the fancy might discover Freedom, the true spouse of poetry and art; Orfeo's last resolve too vividly depicts the vice of the Renaissance; and the Mænads are those barbarous armies destined to lay waste the plains of Italy, inebriate with wine and blood, obeying a new lord of life on whom the poet's harp exerts no charm. But a truce to this spinning of pedantic cobwebs. Let Mercury appear, and let the play begin. _THE FABLE OF ORPHEUS_ MERCURY _announces the show_. Ho, silence! Listen! There was once a hind, Son of Apollo, Aristaeus hight, Who loved with so untamed and fierce a mind Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus wight, That chasing her one day with will unkind He wrought her cruel death in love's despite; For, as she fled toward the mere hard by, A serpent stung her, and she had to die. Now Orpheus, singing, brought her back from hell, But could not keep the law the fates ordain: Poor wretch, he backward turned and broke the spell; So that once more from him his love was ta'en. Therefore he would no more with women dwell, And in the end by women he was slain. _Enter_ A SHEPHERD, _who says_-- Nay, listen, friends! Fair auspices are given, Since Mercury to earth hath come from heaven. SCENE I MOPSUS, _an old shepherd_. Say, hast thou seen a calf of mine, all white Save for a spot of black upon her front, Two feet, one flank, and one knee ruddy-bright? ARISTAEUS, _a young shepherd_. Friend Mopsus, to the margin of this fount No herds have come to drink since break of day; Yet may'st thou hear them low on yonder mount. Go, Thyrsis, search the upland lawn, I pray! Thou Mopsus shalt with me the while abide; For I would have thee listen to my lay. _[Exit_ THYRSIS. 'Twas yester morn where trees yon cavern hide, I saw a nymph more fair than Dian, who Had a young lusty lover at her side: But when that more than woman met my view, The heart within my bosom leapt outright, And straight the madness of wild Love I knew. Since then, dear Mopsus, I have no delight; But weep and weep: of food and drink I tire, And without slumber pass the weary night. MOPSUS. Friend Aristaeus, if this amorous fire Thou dost not seek to quench as best may be, Thy peace of soul will vanish in desire. Thou know'st that love is no new thing to me: I've proved how love grown old brings bitter pain: Cure it at once, or hope no remedy; For if thou find thee in Love's cruel chain, Thy bees, thy blossoms will be out of mind, Thy fields, thy vines, thy flocks, thy cotes, thy grain ARISTAEUS. Mopsus, thou speakest to the deaf and blind: Waste not on me these wingèd words, I pray, Lest they be scattered to the inconstant wind, I love, and cannot wish to say love nay; Nor seek to cure so charming a disease: They praise Love best who most against him say. Yet if thou fain wouldst give my heart some ease, Forth from thy wallet take thy pipe, and we Will sing awhile beneath the leafy trees; For well my nymph is pleased with melody. THE SONG. Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. The lovely nymph is deaf to my lament, Nor heeds the music of this rustic reed; Wherefore my flocks and herds are ill content, Nor bathe their hoof where grows the water weed, Nor touch the tender herbage on the mead; So sad, because their shepherd grieves, are they. Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. The herds are sorry for their master's moan; The nymph heeds not her lover though he die, The lovely nymph, whose heart is made of stone-- Nay steel, nay adamant! She still doth fly Far, far before me, when she sees me nigh, Even as a lamb flies fern the wolf away. Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. Nay, tell her, pipe of mine, how swift doth flee Beauty together with our years amain; Tell her how time destroys all rarity, Nor youth once lost can be renewed again; Tell her to use the gifts that yet remain: Roses and violets blossom not alway. Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. Carry, ye winds, these sweet words to her ears, Unto the ears of my loved nymph, and tell How many tears I shed, what bitter tears! Beg her to pity one who loves so well: Say that my life is frail and mutable, And melts like rime before the rising day. Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. MOPSUS. Less sweet, methinks the voice of waters falling From cliffs that echo back their murmurous song; Less sweet the summer sound of breezes calling Through pine-tree tops sonorous all day long; Than are thy rhymes, the soul of grief enthralling, Thy rhymes o'er field and forest borne along: If she but hear them, at thy feet she'll fawn.-- Lo, Thyrsis, hurrying homeward from the lawn! [_Re-enters_ THYRSIS. ARISTAEUS. What of the calf? Say, hast thou seen her now? THYRSIS, _the cowherd_. I have, and I'd as lief her throat were cut! She almost ripped my bowels up, I vow, Running amuck with horns well set to butt: Nathless I've locked her in the stall below: She's blown with grass, I tell you, saucy slut! ARISTAEUS. Now, prithee, let me hear what made you stay So long upon the upland lawns away? THYRSIS. Walking, I spied a gentle maiden there, Who plucked wild flowers upon the mountain side: I scarcely think that Venus is more fair, Of sweeter grace, most modest in her pride: She speaks, she sings, with voice so soft and rare, That listening streams would backward roll their tide: Her face is snow and roses; gold her head; All, all alone she goes, white-raimented, ARISTAEUS. Stay, Mopsus! I must follow: for 'tis she Of whom I lately spoke. So, friend, farewell! MOPSUS. Hold, Aristaeus, lest for her or thee Thy boldness be the cause of mischief fell! ARISTAEUS. Nay, death this day must be my destiny, Unless I try my fate and break the spell. Stay therefore, Mopsus, by the fountain stay! I'll follow her, meanwhile, yon mountain way. [_Exit_ ARISTAEUS. MOPSUS. Thyrsis, what thinkest thou of thy loved lord? See'st thou that all his senses are distraught? Couldst thou not speak some seasonable word, Tell him what shame this idle love hath wrought? THYRSIS. Free speech and servitude but ill accord, Friend Mopsus, and the hind is folly-fraught Who rates his lord! He's wiser far than I. To tend these kine is all my mastery. SCENE II ARISTAEUS, _in pursuit of_ EURYDICE. Flee not from me, maiden! Lo, I am thy friend! Dearer far than life I hold thee. List, thou beauty-laden, To these prayers attend: Flee not, let my arms enfold thee! Neither wolf nor bear will grasp thee: That I am thy friend I've told thee: Stay thy course then; let me clasp thee!-- Since thou'rt deaf and wilt not heed me, Since thou'rt still before me flying, While I follow panting, dying, Lend me wings, Love, wings to speed me! [_Exit_ ARISTAEUS, _pursuing_ EURYDICE. SCENE III A DRYAD. Sad news of lamentation and of pain, Dear sisters, hath my voice to bear to you: I scarcely dare to raise the dolorous strain. Eurydice by yonder stream lies low; The flowers are fading round her stricken head, And the complaining waters weep their woe. The stranger soul from that fair house hath fled; And she, like privet pale, or white May-bloom Untimely plucked, lies on the meadow, dead. Hear then the cause of her disastrous doom! A snake stole forth and stung her suddenly. I am so burdened with this weight of gloom That, lo, I bid you all come weep with me! CHORUS OF DRYADS. Let the wide air with our complaint resound! For all heaven's light is spent. Let rivers break their bound, Swollen with tears outpoured from our lament! Fell death hath ta'en their splendour from the skies: The stars are sunk in gloom. Stern death hath plucked the bloom Of nymphs:--Eurydice down-trodden lies. Weep, Love! The woodland cries. Weep, groves and founts; Ye craggy mounts; you leafy dell, Beneath whose boughs she fell, Bend every branch in time with this sad sound. Let the wide air with our complaint resound! Ah, fortune pitiless! Ah, cruel snake! Ah, luckless doom of woes! Like a cropped summer rose, Or lily cut, she withers on the brake. Her face, which once did make Our age so bright With beauty's light, is faint and pale; And the clear lamp doth fail, Which shed pure splendour all the world around Let the wide air with our complaint resound! Who e'er will sing so sweetly, now she's gone? Her gentle voice to hear, The wild winds dared not stir; And now they breathe but sorrow, moan for moan: So many joys are flown, Such jocund days Doth Death erase with her sweet eyes! Bid earth's lament arise, And make our dirge through heaven and sea rebound! Let the wide air with our complaint resound! A DRYAD. 'Tis surely Orpheus, who hath reached the hill, With harp in hand, glad-eyed and light of heart! He thinks that his dear love is living still. My news will stab him with a sudden smart: An unforeseen and unexpected blow Wounds worst and stings the bosom's tenderest part. Death hath disjoined the truest love, I know, That nature yet to this low world revealed, And quenched the flame in its most charming glow. Go, sisters, hasten ye to yonder field, Where on the sward lies slain Eurydice; Strew her with flowers and grasses! I must yield This man the measure of his misery. [_Exeunt_ DRYADS. _Enter_ ORPHEUS, _singing_. ORPHEUS. _Musa, triumphales titulos et gesta canamus Herculis, et forti monstra subacta manu; Ut timidae malri pressos ostenderit angues, Intrepidusque fero riserit ore puer._ A DRYAD. Orpheus, I bring thee bitter news. Alas! Thy nymph who was so beautiful, is slain! flying from Aristaeus o'er the grass, What time she reached yon stream that threads the plain, A snake which lurked mid flowers where she did pass, Pierced her fair foot with his envenomed bane: So fierce, so potent was the sting, that she Died in mid course. Ah, woe that this should be! [ORPHEUS _turns to go in silence._ MNESILLUS, _the satyr_. Mark ye how sunk in woe The poor wretch forth doth pass, And may not answer, for his grief, one word? On some lone shore, unheard, Far, far away, he'll go, And pour his heart forth to the winds, alas! I'll follow and observe if he Moves with his moan the hills to sympathy. [_Follows_ ORPHEUS. ORPHEUS. Let us lament, O lyre disconsolate! Our wonted music is in tune no more. Lament we while the heavens revolve, and let The nightingale be conquered on Love's shore! O heaven, O earth, O sea, O cruel fate! How shall I bear a pang so passing sore? Eurydice, my love! O life of mine! On earth I will no more without thee pine! I will go down unto the doors of Hell, And see if mercy may be found below: Perchance we shall reverse fate's spoken spell With tearful songs and words of honeyed woe: Perchance will Death be pitiful; for well With singing have we turned the streams that flow; Moved stones, together hind and tiger drawn, And made trees dance upon the forest lawn. [_Passes from sight on his way to Hades._ MNESILLUS. The staff of Fate is strong And will not lightly bend, Nor yet the stubborn gates of steely Hell. Nay, I can see full well His life will not be long: Those downward feet no more will earthward wend. What marvel if they lose the light, Who make blind Love their guide by day and night! SCENE IV ORPHEUS, _at the gate of Hell._ Pity, nay pity for a lover's moan! Ye Powers of Hell, let pity reign in you! To your dark regions led me Love alone: Downward upon his wings of light I flew. Hush, Cerberus! Howl not by Pluto's throne! For when you hear my tale of misery, you, Nor you alone, but all who here abide In this blind world, will weep by Lethe's tide. There is no need, ye Furies, thus to rage; To dart those snakes that in your tresses twine: Knew ye the cause of this my pilgrimage, Ye would lie down and join your moans with mine. Let this poor wretch but pass, who war doth wage With heaven, the elements, the powers divine! I beg for pity or for death. No more! But open, ope Hell's adamantine door! [ORPHEUS _enters Hell._ PLUTO. What man is he who with his golden lyre Hath moved the gates that never move, While the dead folk repeat his dirge of love? The rolling stone no more doth tire Swart Sisyphus on yonder hill; And Tantalus with water slakes his fire; The groans of mangled Tityos are still; Ixion's wheel forgets to fly; The Danaids their urns can fill: I hear no more the tortured spirits cry; But all find rest in that sweet harmony. PROSERPINE. Dear consort, since, compelled by love of thee, I left the light of heaven serene, And came to reign in hell, a sombre queen; The charm of tenderest sympathy Hath never yet had power to turn My stubborn heart, or draw forth tears from me. Now with desire for yon sweet voice I yearn; Nor is there aught so dear As that delight. Nay, be not stern To this one prayer! Relax thy brows severe, And rest awhile with me that song to hear! [ORPHEUS _stands before the throne._ ORPHEUS. Ye rulers of the people lost in gloom, Who see no more the jocund light of day! Ye who inherit all things that the womb Of Nature and the elements display! Hear ye the grief that draws me to the tomb! Love, cruel Love, hath led me on this way: Not to chain Cerberus I hither come, But to bring back my mistress to her home. A serpent hidden among flowers and leaves Stole my fair mistress--nay, my heart--from me: Wherefore my wounded life for ever grieves, Nor can I stand against this agony. Still, if some fragrance lingers yet and cleaves Of your famed love unto your memory, If of that ancient rape you think at all, Give back Eurydice!--On you I call. All things ere long unto this bourne descend: All mortal lives to you return at last: Whate'er the moon hath circled, in the end Must fade and perish in your empire vast: Some sooner and some later hither wend; Yet all upon this pathway shall have passed: This of our footsteps is the final goal; And then we dwell for aye in your control. Therefore the nymph I love is left for you When nature leads her deathward in due time: But now you've cropped the tendrils as they grew, The grapes unripe, while yet the sap did climb: Who reaps the young blades wet with April dew, Nor waits till summer hath o'erpassed her prime? Give back, give back my hope one little day!-- Not for a gift, but for a loan I pray. I pray not to you by the waves forlorn Of marshy Styx or dismal Acheron, By Chaos where the mighty world was born, Or by the sounding flames of Phlegethon; But by the fruit which charmed thee on that morn When thou didst leave our world for this dread throne! O queen! if thou reject this pleading breath, I will no more return, but ask for death! PROSERPINE. Husband, I never guessed That in our realm oppressed Pity could find a home to dwell: But now I know that mercy teems in Hell. I see Death weep; her breast Is shaken by those tears that faultless fell. Let then thy laws severe for him be swayed By love, by song, by the just prayers he prayed! PLUTO. She's thine, but at this price: Bend not on her thine eyes, Till mid the souls that live she stay. See that thou turn not back upon the way! Check all fond thoughts that rise! Else will thy love be torn from thee away. I am well pleased that song so rare as thine The might of my dread sceptre should incline. SCENE V ORPHEUS, _sings._ _Ite tritumphales circum mea tempora lauri. Vicimus Eurydicen: reddita vita mihi est, Haec mea praecipue victoria digna coronâ. Oredimus? an lateri juncta puella meo?_ EURYDICE. All me! Thy love too great Hath lost not thee alone! I am torn from thee by strong Fate. No more I am thine own. In vain I stretch these arms. Back, back to Hell I'm drawn, I'm drawn. My Orpheus, fare thee well! [EURYDICE _disappears._ ORPHEUS. Who hath laid laws on Love? Will pity not be given For one short look so full thereof? Since I am robbed of heaven, Since all my joy so great is turned to pain, I will go back and plead with Death again! [TISIPHONE _blocks his way._ TISIPHONE. Nay, seek not back to turn! Vain is thy weeping, all thy words are vain. Eurydice may not complain Of aught but thee--albeit her grief is great. Vain are thy verses 'gainst the voice of Fate! How vain thy song! For Death is stern! Try not the backward path: thy feet refrain! The laws of the abyss are fixed and firm remain. SCENE VI ORPHEUS. What sorrow-laden song shall e'er be found To match the burden of my matchless woe? How shall I make the fount of tears abound, To weep apace with grief's unmeasured flow? Salt tears I'll waste upon the barren ground, So long as life delays me here below; And since my fate hath wrought me wrong so sore, I swear I'll never love a woman more! Henceforth I'll pluck the buds of opening spring, The bloom of youth when life is loveliest, Ere years have spoiled the beauty which they bring: This love, I swear, is sweetest, softest, best! Of female charms let no one speak or sing; Since she is slain who ruled within my breast. He who would seek my converse, let him see That ne'er he talk of woman's love to me! How pitiful is he who changes mind For woman! for her love laments or grieves! Who suffers her in chains his will to bind, Or trusts her words lighter than withered leaves, Her loving looks more treacherous than the wind! A thousand times she veers; to nothing cleaves: Follows who flies; from him who follows, flees; And comes and goes like waves on stormy seas! High Jove confirms the truth of what I said, Who, caught and bound in love's delightful snare, Enjoys in heaven his own bright Ganymed: Phoebus on earth had Hyacinth the fair: Hercules, conqueror of the world, was led Captive to Hylas by this love so rare.-- Advice for husbands! Seek divorce, and fly Far, far away from female company! [_Enter a_ MAENAD _leading a train of_ BACCHANTES. A MAENAD. Ho! Sisters! Up! Alive! See him who doth our sex deride! Hunt him to death, the slave! Thou snatch the thyrsus! Thou this oak-tree rive! Cast down this doeskin and that hide! We'll wreak our fury on the knave! Yea, he shall feel our wrath, the knave! He shall yield up his hide Riven as woodmen fir-trees rive! No power his life can save; Since women he hath dared deride! Ho! To him, sisters! Ho! Alive! [ORPHEUS _is chased off the scene and slain: the_ MAENADS _then return._ A MAENAD. Ho! Bacchus! Ho! I yield thee thanks for this! Through all the woodland we the wretch have borne: So that each root is slaked with blood of his: Yea, limb from limb his body have we torn Through the wild forest with a fearful bliss: His gore hath bathed the earth by ash and thorn!-- Go then! thy blame on lawful wedlock fling! Ho! Bacchus! take the victim that we bring! CHORUS OF MAENADS. Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! With ivy coronals, bunch and berry, Crown we our heads to worship thee! Thou hast bidden us to make merry Day and night with jollity! Drink then! Bacchus is here! Drink free, And hand ye the drinking-cup to me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! See, I have emptied my horn already: Stretch hither your beaker to me, I pray: Are the hills and the lawns where we roam unsteady? Or is it my brain that reels away? Let every one run to and fro through the hay, As ye see me run! Ho! after me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! Methinks I am dropping in swoon or slumber: Am I drunken or sober, yes or no? What are these weights my feet encumber? You too are tipsy, well I know! Let every one do as ye see me do, Let every one drink and quaff like me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! Cry Bacchus! Cry Bacchus! Be blithe and merry, Tossing wine down your throats away! Let sleep then come and our gladness bury: Drink you, and you, and you, while ye may! Dancing is over for me to-day. Let every one cry aloud Evohé! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! Though an English translation can do little toward rendering the facile graces of Poliziano's style, that 'roseate fluency' for which it has been praised by his Italian admirers, the main qualities of the 'Orfeo' as a composition may be traced in this rough copy. Of dramatic power, of that mastery over the deeper springs of human nature which distinguished the first effort of the English muse in Marlowe's plays, there is but little. A certain adaptation of the language to the characters, as in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristæus, a touch of simple feeling in Eurydice's lyrical outcry of farewell, a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting, a spirited presentation of the Bacchanalian _furore_ in the Mænads, an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet sympathetic to its anguish, these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part rises to its height precisely in that passage where the lyrist has to be displayed. Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine he sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a poet's soul; each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza with a swell of utterance, a crescendo of intonation that recalls the passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone. To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading. That the violin melody of his incomparable song is lost, must be reckoned a great misfortune. We have good reason to believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol. Here too it may be mentioned that a _tondo_ in monochrome, painted by Signorelli among the arabesques at Orvieto, shows Orpheus at the throne of Plato, habited as a poet with the laurel crown and playing on a violin of antique form. It would be interesting to know whether a rumour of the Mantuan pageant had reached the ears of the Cortonese painter. If the whole of the 'Orfeo' had been conceived and executed with the same artistic feeling as the chief act, it would have been a really fine poem independently of its historical interest. But we have only to turn the page and read the lament uttered for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive Poliziano's incapacity for dealing with his hero in a situation of greater difficulty. The pathos which might have made us sympathise with Orpheus in his misery, the passion, approaching to madness, which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. It is difficult not to feel that in this climax of his anguish he was a poor creature, and that the Mænads served him right. Nothing illustrates the defect of real dramatic imagination better than this failure to dignify the catastrophe. Gifted with a fine lyrical inspiration, Poliziano seems to have already felt the Bacchic chorus which forms so brilliant a termination to his play, and to have forgotten his duty to the unfortunate Orpheus, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve. It may indeed be said in general that the 'Orfeo' is a good poem only where the situation is not so much dramatic as lyrical, and that its finest passage--the scene in Hades--was fortunately for its author one in which the dramatic motive had to be lyrically expressed. In this respect, as in many others, the 'Orfeo' combines the faults and merits of the Italian attempts at melo-tragedy. To break a butterfly upon the wheel is, however, no fit function of criticism: and probably no one would have smiled more than the author of this improvisation, at the thought of its being gravely dissected just four hundred years after the occasion it was meant to serve had long been given over to oblivion. _NOTE_ Poliziano's 'Orfeo' was dedicated to Messer Carlo Canale, the husband of that famous Vannozza who bore Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia to Alexander VI. As first published in 1494, and as republished from time to time up to the year 1776, it carried the title of 'La Favola di Orfeo,' and was not divided into acts. Frequent stage-directions sufficed, as in the case of Florentine 'Sacre Rappresentazioni,' for the indication of the scenes. In this earliest redaction of the 'Orfeo' the chorus of the Dryads, the part of Mnesillus, the lyrical speeches of Proserpine and Pluto, and the first lyric of the Mænads are either omitted or represented by passages in _ottava rima_. In the year 1776 the Padre Ireneo Affò printed at Venice a new version of 'Orfeo, Tragedia di Messer Angelo Poliziano,' collated by him from two MSS. This play is divided into five acts, severally entitled 'Pastoricus,' 'Nymphas Habet,' 'Heroïcus,' 'Necromanticus,' and 'Bacchanalis.' The stage-directions are given partly in Latin, partly in Italian; and instead of the 'Announcement of the Feast' by Mercury, a prologue consisting of two octave stanzas is appended. A Latin Sapphic ode in praise of the Cardinal Gonzaga, which was interpolated in the first version, is omitted, and certain changes are made in the last soliloquy of Orpheus. There is little doubt, I think, that the second version, first given to the press by the Padre Affò, was Poliziano's own recension of his earlier composition. I have therefore followed it in the main, except that I have not thought it necessary to observe the somewhat pedantic division into acts, and have preferred to use the original 'Announcement of the Feast,' which proves the integral connection between this ancient secular play and the Florentine Mystery or 'Sacra Rappresentazione.' The last soliloquy of Orpheus, again, has been freely translated by me from both versions for reasons which will be obvious to students of the original. I have yet to make a remark upon one detail of my translation. In line 390 (part of the first lyric of the Mænads) the Italian gives us:-- Spezzata come il fabbro il cribro spezza. This means literally: 'Riven as a blacksmith rives a sieve or boulter.' Now sieves are made in Tuscany of a plate of iron, pierced with holes; and the image would therefore be familiar to an Italian. I have, however, preferred to translate thus:-- Riven as woodmen fir-trees rive, instead of giving:-- Riven as blacksmiths boulters rive, because I thought that the second and faithful version would be unintelligible as well as unpoetical for English readers. * * * * * _EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH_ ON THE PAPAL COURT AT AVIGNON Fountain of woe! Harbour of endless ire! Thou school of errors, haunt of heresies! Once Rome, now Babylon, the world's disease, That maddenest men with fears and fell desire! O forge of fraud! O prison dark and dire, Where dies the good, where evil breeds increase! Thou living Hell! Wonders will never cease If Christ rise not to purge thy sins with fire. Founded in chaste and humble poverty, Against thy founders thou dost raise thy horn, Thou shameless harlot! And whence flows this pride? Even from foul and loathed adultery, The wage of lewdness. Constantine, return! Not so: the felon world its fate must bide. * * * * * TO STEFANO COLONNA WRITTEN FROM VAUCLUSE Glorius Colonna, thou on whose high head Rest all our hopes and the great Latin name, Whom from the narrow path of truth and fame The wrath of Jove turned not with stormful dread: Here are no palace-courts, no stage to tread; But pines and oaks the shadowy valleys fill Between the green fields and the neighbouring hill, Where musing oft I climb by fancy led. These lift from earth to heaven our soaring soul, While the sweet nightingale, that in thick bowers Through darkness pours her wail of tuneful woe, Doth bend our charmed breast to love's control; But thou alone hast marred this bliss of ours, Since from our side, dear lord, thou needs must go. IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. XI ON LEAVING AVIGNON Backward at every weary step and slow These limbs I turn which with great pain I bear; Then take I comfort from the fragrant air That breathes from thee, and sighing onward go. But when I think how joy is turned to woe, Remembering my short life and whence I fare, I stay my feet for anguish and despair, And cast my tearful eyes on earth below. At times amid the storm of misery This doubt assails me: how frail limbs and poor Can severed from their spirit hope to live. Then answers Love: Hast thou no memory How I to lovers this great guerdon give, Free from all human bondage to endure? * * * * * IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. XII THOUGHTS IN ABSENCE The wrinkled sire with hair like winter snow Leaves the beloved spot where he hath passed his years, Leaves wife and children, dumb with bitter tears, To see their father's tottering steps and slow. Dragging his aged limbs with weary woe, In these last days of life he nothing fears, But with stout heart his fainting spirit cheers, And spent and wayworn forward still doth go; Then comes to Rome, following his heart's desire, To gaze upon the portraiture of Him Whom yet he hopes in heaven above to see: Thus I, alas! my seeking spirit tire, Lady, to find in other features dim The longed for, loved, true lineaments of thee. IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. LII OH THAT I HAD WINGS LIKE A DOVE! I am so tired beneath the ancient load Of my misdeeds and custom's tyranny, That much I fear to fail upon the road And yield my soul unto mine enemy. 'Tis true a friend from whom all splendour flowed, To save me came with matchless courtesy: Then flew far up from sight to heaven's abode, So that I strive in vain his face to see. Yet still his voice reverberates here below: Oh ye who labour, lo! the path is here; Come unto me if none your going stay! What grace, what love, what fate surpassing fear Shall give me wings like dove's wings soft as snow, That I may rest and raise me from the clay? * * * * * IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. XXIV The eyes whereof I sang my fervid song, The arms, the hands, the feet, the face benign, Which severed me from what was rightly mine, And made me sole and strange amid the throng, The crispèd curls of pure gold beautiful, And those angelic smiles which once did shine Imparadising earth with joy divine, Are now a little dust--dumb, deaf, and dull. And yet I live! wherefore I weep and wail, Left alone without the light I loved so long, Storm-tossed upon a bark that hath no sail. Then let me here give o'er my amorous song; The fountains of old inspiration fail, And nought but woe my dolorous chords prolong. IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. XXXIV In thought I raised me to the place where she Whom still on earth I seek and find not, shines; There 'mid the souls whom the third sphere confines, More fair I found her and less proud to me. She took my hand and said: Here shalt thou be With me ensphered, unless desires mislead; Lo! I am she who made thy bosom bleed, Whose day ere eve was ended utterly: My bliss no mortal heart can understand; Thee only do I lack, and that which thou So loved, now left on earth, my beauteous veil. Ah! wherefore did she cease and loose my hand? For at the sound of that celestial tale I all but stayed in paradise till now. * * * * * IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. LXXIV The flower of angels and the spirits blest, Burghers of heaven, on that first day when she Who is my lady died, around her pressed Fulfilled with wonder and with piety. What light is this? What beauty manifest? Marvelling they cried: for such supremacy Of splendour in this age to our high rest Hath never soared from earth's obscurity. She, glad to have exchanged her spirit's place, Consorts with those whose virtues most exceed; At times the while she backward turns her face To see me follow--seems to wait and plead: Therefore toward heaven my will and soul I raise, Because I hear her praying me to speed. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: We may compare with Venice what is known about the ancient Hellenic city of Sybaris. Sybaris and Ravenna were the Greek and Roman Venice of antiquity.] [Footnote 2: His first wife was a daughter of the great general of the Venetians against Francesco Sforza. Whether Sigismondo murdered her, as Sansovino seems to imply in his _Famiglie Illustri_, or whether he only repudiated her after her father's execution on the Piazza di San Marco, admits of doubt. About the question of Sigismondo's marriage with Isotta there is also some uncertainty. At any rate she had been some time his mistress before she became his wife.] [Footnote 3: For the place occupied in the evolution of Italian scholarship by this Greek sage, see my 'Revival of Learning,' _Renaissance in Italy_, part 2.] [Footnote 4: The account of this church given by Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pii Secondi, Comment., ii. 92) deserves quotation: 'Ædificavit tamen nobile templum Arimini in honorem divi Francisci, verum ita gentilibus operibus implevit, ut non tam Christianorum quam infidelium dæmones adorantium templum esse videatur.'] [Footnote 5: Almost all the facts of Alberti's life are to be found in the Latin biography included in Muratori. It has been conjectured, and not without plausibility, by the last editor of Alberti's complete works, Bonucci, that this Latin life was penned by Alberti himself.] [Footnote 6: There is in reality no doubt or problem about this Saint Clair. She was born in 1275, and joined the Augustinian Sisterhood, dying young, in 1308, as Abbess of her convent. Continual and impassioned meditation on the Passion of our Lord impressed her heart with the signs of His suffering which have been described above. I owe this note to the kindness of an anonymous correspondent, whom I here thank.] [Footnote 7: The balance of probability leans against Isabella in this affair. At the licentious court of the Medici she lived with unpardonable freedom. Troilo Orsini was himself assassinated in Paris by Bracciano's orders a few years afterwards.] [Footnote 8: I have amplified and corrected this chronicle by the light of Professor Gnoli's monograph, _Vittoria Accoramboni_, published by Le Monnier at Florence in 1870.] [Footnote 9: In dealing with Webster's tragedy, I have adhered to his use and spelling of names.] [Footnote 10: The fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin upon the semi-dome of S. Giovanni is the work of a copyist, Cesare Aretusi. But part of the original fresco, which was removed in 1684, exists in a good state of preservation at the end of the long gallery of the library.] [Footnote 11: See the chapter on Euripides in my _Studies of Greek Poets_, First Series, for a further development of this view of artistic evolution.] [Footnote 12: I find that this story is common in the country round Canossa. It is mentioned by Professor A. Ferretti in his monograph entitled _Canossa, Studi e Ricerche_, Reggio, 1876, a work to which I am indebted, and which will repay careful study.] [Footnote 13: Charles claimed under the will of René of Anjou, who in turn claimed under the will of Joan II.] [Footnote 14: For an estimate of Cosimo's services to art and literature, his collection of libraries, his great buildings, his generosity to scholars, and his promotion of Greek studies, I may refer to my _Renaissance in Italy_: 'The Revival of Learning,' chap. iv.] [Footnote 15: Giottino had painted the Duke of Athens, in like manner, on the same walls.] [Footnote 16: See _Archivio Storico_.] [Footnote 17: The order of rhymes runs thus: _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d, c, d_; or in the terzets, _c, d, e, c, d, e_, or _c, d, e, d, c, e_, and so forth.] [Footnote 18: It has extraordinary interest for the student of our literary development, inasmuch as it is full of experiments in metres, which have never thriven on English soil. Not to mention the attempt to write in asclepiads and other classical rhythms, we might point to Sidney's _terza rima_, poems with _sdrucciolo_ or treble rhymes. This peculiar and painful form he borrowed from Ariosto and Sanazzaro; but even in Italian it cannot be handled without sacrifice of variety, without impeding the metrical movement and marring the sense.] [Footnote 19: The stately structure of the _Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_ is a rebuilding of the Italian Canzone. His Eclogues, with their allegories, repeat the manner of Petrarch's minor Latin poems.] [Footnote 20: Marlowe makes Gaveston talk of 'Italian masques.' At the same time, in the prologue to _Tamburlaine_, he shows that he was conscious of the new and nobler direction followed by the drama in England.] [Footnote 21: This sentence requires some qualification. In his _Poesia Popolare Italiana_, 1878, Professor d'Ancona prints a Pisan, a Venetian, and two Lombard versions of our Border ballad 'Where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son,' so close in general type and minor details to the English, German, Swedish, and Finnish versions of this Volkslied as to suggest a very ancient community of origin. It remains as yet, however, an isolated fact in the history of Italian popular poetry.] [Footnote 22: _Canti Popolari Toscani_, raccolti e annotati da Giuseppe Tigri. Volume unico. Firenze: G. Barbèra, 1869.] [Footnote 23: This is a description of the Tuscan rispetto. In Sicily the stanza generally consists of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout, while in the North of Italy it is normally a simple quatrain. The same poetical material assumes in Northern, Central, and Southern Italy these diverge but associated forms.] [Footnote 24: This song, called Ciure (Sicilian for _fiore_) in Sicily, is said by Signor Pitré to be in disrepute there. He once asked an old dame of Palermo to repeat him some of these ditties. Her answer was, 'You must get them from light women; I do not know any. They sing them in bad houses and prisons, where, God be praised, I have never been.' In Tuscany there does not appear to be so marked a distinction between the flower song and the rispetto.] [Footnote 25: Much light has lately been thrown on the popular poetry of Italy; and it appears that contemporary improvisatori trust more to their richly stocked memories and to their power of recombination than to original or novel inspiration. It is in Sicily that the vein of truly creative lyric utterance is said to flow most freely and most copiously at the present time.] [Footnote 26: 'Remember me, fair one, to the scrivener. I do not know him or who he is, but he seems to me a sovereign poet, so cunning is he in his use of verse.'] [Footnote 27: It must be remarked that Tigri draws a strong contrast in this respect between the songs of the mountain districts which he has printed and those of the towns, and that Pitrè, in his edition of Sicilian _Volkslieder_, expressly alludes to the coarseness of a whole class which he had omitted. The MSS. of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions. Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct. When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness. At home, among the fields and on the mountains, she remains chaste and romantic.] [Footnote 28: In a rispetto, of which I subjoin a translation, sung by a poor lad to a mistress of higher rank, love itself is pleaded as the sign of a gentle soul:-- My state is poor: I am not meet To court so nobly born a love; For poverty hath tied my feet, Trying to climb too far above. Yet am I gentle, loving thee; Nor need thou shun my poverty. [Footnote 29: When the Cherubina, of whom mention has been made above, was asked by Signor Tigri to dictate some of her rispetti, she answered, 'O signore! ne dico tanti quando li canto! . . . ma ora . . . bisognerebbe averli tutti in visione; se no, proprio non vengono.'] [Footnote 30: I need hardly guard myself against being supposed to mean that the form of _Ballata_ in question was the only one of its kind in Italy.] [Footnote 31: See my _Sketches in Italy and Greece_, p. 114.] [Footnote 32: The originals will be found in Carducci's _Studi Letterari_, p. 273 _et seq._ I have preserved their rhyming structure.] [Footnote 33: Stanza XLIII. All references are made to Carducci's excellent edition, _Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano._ Firenze: G. Barbéra. 1863.] 
10769	----	A WANDERER IN FLORENCE By E.V. Lucas Preface A sentence from a "Synthetical Guidebook" which is circulated in the Florentine hotels will express what I want to say, at the threshold of this volume, much better than could unaided words of mine. It runs thus: "The natural kindness, the high spirit, of the Florentine people, the wonderful masterpieces of art created by her great men, who in every age have stood in the front of art and science, rivalize with the gentle smile of her splendid sky to render Florence one of the finest towns of beautiful Italy". These words, written, I feel sure, by a Florentine, and therefore "inspirated" (as he says elsewhere) by a patriotic feeling, are true; and it is my hope that the pages that follow will at once fortify their truth and lead others to test it. Like the synthetical author, I too have not thought it necessary to provide "too many informations concerning art and history," but there will be found a few, practically unavoidable, in the gathering together of which I have been indebted to many authors: notably Vasari, Symonds, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Ruskin, Pater, and Baedeker. Among more recent books I would mention Herr Bode's "Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance," Mr. F.M. Hyett's "Florence," Mr. E.L.S. Horsburgh's "Lorenzo the Magnificent" and "Savonarola," Mr. Gerald S. Davies' "Michelangelo," Mr. W.G. Waters' "Italian Sculptors," and Col. Young's "The Medici". I have to thank very heartily a good English Florentine for the construction of the historical chart at the end of the volume. E.V.L. May, 1912 Contents Preface Chapter I The Duomo I: Its Construction Chapter II The Duomo II: Its Associations Chapter III The Duomo III: A Ceremony and a Museum Chapter IV The Campanile and the Baptistery Chapter V The Riccardi Palace and the Medici Chapter VI S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo Chapter VII Or San Michele and the Palazzo Vecchio Chapter VIII The Uffizi I: The Building and the Collectors Chapter IX The Uffizi II: The First Six Rooms Chapter X The Uffizi III: Botticelli Chapter XI The Uffizi IV: Remaining Rooms Chapter XII "Aèrial Fiesole" Chapter XIII The Badia and Dante Chapter XIV The Bargello Chapter XV S. Croce Chapter XVI The Accademia Chapter XVII Two Monasteries and a Procession Chapter XVIII S. Marco Chapter XIX The SS. Annunziata and the Spedale Degli Innocenti Chapter XX The Cascine and the Arno Chapter XXI S. Maria Novella Chapter XXII The Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele to S. Trinità Chapter XXIII The Pitti Chapter XXIV English Poets in Florence Chapter XXV The Carmine and San Miniato Historical Chart of Florence and Europe, 1296-1564 List of Illustrations In Colour The Duomo and Campanile, From the Via Pecori The Cloisters of San Lorenzo, Showing the Windows of the Biblioteca Laurenziana The Via Calzaioli, from the Baptistery, Showing the Bigallo and the Top of Or San Michele The Palazzo Vecchio The Loggia of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Via de' Leoni The Loggia de' Lanzi, the Duomo, and the Palazzo Vecchio, from the Portico of the Uffizi Fiesole, from the Hill under the Monastery The Badia and the Bargello, from the Piazza S. Firenze Interior of S. Croce The Ponte S. Trinità The Ponte Vecchio and Back of the Via de' Bardi S. Maria Novella and the Corner of the Loggia di S. Paolo The Via de' Vagellai, from the Piazza S. Jacopo Trafossi The Piazza Della Signoria on a Wet Friday Afternoon View of Florence at Evening, from the Piazzale Michelangelo Evening at the Piazzale Michelangelo, Looking West In Monotone A Cantoria. By Donatello, in the Museum of the Cathedral Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac. By Ghiberti, from his second Baptistery Doors The Procession of the Magi. By Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Palazzo Riccardi Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. By Michelangelo, in the New Sacristy of S. Lorenzo Christ and S. Thomas. By Verrocchio, in a niche by Donatello and Michelozzo in the wall of Or San Michele Putto with Dolphin. By Verrocchio, in the Palazzo Vecchio Madonna Adoring. Ascribed to Filippino Lippi, in the Uffizi The Adoration of the Magi. By Leonardo da Vinci, in the Uffizi Madonna and Child. By Luca Signorelli, in the Uffizi �The Birth of Venus. By Botticelli, in the Uffizi The Annunciation. By Botticelli, in the Uffizi San Giacomo. By Andrea del Sarto, in the Uffizi The Madonna del Cardellino. By Raphael, in the Uffizi The Madonna del Pozzo. By Franciabigio, in the Uffizi Monument to Count Ugo. By Mino da Fiesole, in the Badia David. By Donatello, in the Bargello By Verrocchio, in the Bargello St. George. By Donatello, in the Bargello Madonna and Child. By Verrocchio, in the Bargello Madonna and Child. By Luca della Robbia, in the Bargello Bust of a Boy. By Luca or Andrea della Robbia, in the Bargello *Monument to Carlo Marzuppini. By Desiderio da Settignano, in S. Croce David. By Michelangelo, in the Accademia The Flight into Egypt. By Fra Angelico, in the Accademia The Adoration of the Shepherds. By Ghirlandaio, in the Accademia The Vision of S. Bernard. By Fra Bartolommeo, in the Accademia Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Saints. By Botticelli, in the Accademia Primavera. By Botticelli, in the Accademia The Coronation of the Virgin. By Fra Angelico, in the Convent of S. Marco The Annunciation. By Luca della Robbia, in the Spedale degli Innocenti The Birth of the Virgin. By Ghirlandaio, in S. Maria Novella The Madonna del Granduca. By Raphael, in the Pitti The Madonna della Sedia. By Raphael, in the Pitti The Concert. By Giorgione, in the Pitti Madonna Adoring. By Botticini, in the Pitti The Madonna and Children. By Perugino, in the Pitti *A Gipsy. By Boccaccio Boccaccini, in the Pitti All the illustrations are from photographs by G. Brogi, except those marked �, which are by Fratelli Alinari, and that marked *, which is by R. Anderson. A WANDERER IN FLORENCE CHAPTER I The Duomo I: Its Construction The City of the Miracle--The Marble Companions--Twilight and Immensity--Arnolfo di Cambio--Dante's seat--Ruskin's "Shepherd"--Giotto the various--Giotto's fun--The indomitable Brunelleschi--Makers of Florence--The present façade. All visitors to Florence make first for the Duomo. Let us do the same. The real name of the Duomo is the Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, or St. Mary of the Flowers, the flower being the Florentine lily. Florence herself is called the City of Flowers, and that, in the spring and summer, is a happy enough description. But in the winter it fails. A name appropriate to all the seasons would be the City of the Miracle, the miracle being the Renaissance. For though all over Italy traces of the miracle are apparent, Florence was its very home and still can point to the greatest number of its achievements. Giotto (at the beginning of this quickening movement) may at Assisi have been more inspired as a painter; but here is his campanile and here are his S. Maria Novella and S. Croce frescoes. Fra Angelico and Donatello (in the midst of it) were never more inspired than here, where they worked and died. Michelangelo (at the end of it) may be more surprising in the Vatican; but here are his wonderful Medici tombs. How it came about that between the years 1300 and 1500 Italian soil--and chiefly Tuscan soil--threw up such masters, not only with the will and spirit to do what they did but with the power too, no one will ever be able to explain. But there it is. In the history of the world two centuries were suddenly given mysteriously to the activities of Italian men of humane genius and as suddenly the Divine gift was withdrawn. And to see the very flower of these two centuries it is to Florence we must go. It is best to enter the Piazza del Duomo from the Via de' Martelli, the Via de' Cerretani, the Via Calzaioli, or the Via Pecori, because then one comes instantly upon the campanile too. The upper windows--so very lovely--may have been visible at the end of the streets, with Brunelleschi's warm dome high in the sky beside them, but that was not to diminish the effect of the first sight of the whole. Duomo and campanile make as fair a couple as ever builders brought together: the immense comfortable church so solidly set upon the earth, and at its side this delicate, slender marble creature, all gaiety and lightness, which as surely springs from roots within the earth. For one cannot be long in Florence, looking at this tower every day and many times a day, both from near and far, without being perfectly certain that it grows--and from a bulb, I think--and was never really built at all, whatever the records may aver. The interior of the Duomo is so unexpected that one has the feeling of having entered, by some extraordinary chance, the wrong building. Outside it was so garish with its coloured marbles, under the southern sky; outside, too, one's ears were filled with all the shattering noises in which Florence is an adept; and then, one step, and behold nothing but vast and silent gloom. This surprise is the more emphatic if one happens already to have been in the Baptistery. For the Baptistery is also coloured marble without, yet within it is coloured marble and mosaic too: there is no disparity; whereas in the Duomo the walls have a Northern grey and the columns are brown. Austerity and immensity join forces. When all is said the chief merit of the Duomo is this immensity. Such works of art as it has are not very noticeable, or at any rate do not insist upon being seen; but in its vastness it overpowers. Great as are some of the churches of Florence, I suppose three or four of them could be packed within this one. And mere size with a dim light and a savour of incense is enough: it carries religion. No need for masses and chants or any ceremony whatever: the world is shut out, one is on terms with the infinite. A forest exercises the same spell; among mountains one feels it; but in such a cathedral as the Duomo one feels it perhaps most of all, for it is the work of man, yet touched with mystery and wonder, and the knowledge that man is the author of such a marvel adds to its greatness. The interior is so dim and strange as to be for a time sheer terra incognita, and to see a bat flitting from side to side, as I have often done even in the morning, is to receive no shock. In such a twilight land there must naturally be bats, one thinks. The darkness is due not to lack of windows but to time. The windows are there, but they have become opaque. None of the coloured ones in the aisle allows more than a filtration of light through it; there are only the plain, circular ones high up and those rich, coloured, circular ones under the dome to do the work. In a little while, however, one's eyes not only become accustomed to the twilight but are very grateful for it; and beginning to look inquiringly about, as they ever do in this city of beauty, they observe, just inside, an instant reminder of the antiseptic qualities of Italy. For by the first great pillar stands a receptacle for holy water, with a pretty and charming angelic figure upon it, which from its air of newness you would think was a recent gift to the cathedral by a grateful Florentine. It is six hundred years old and perhaps was designed by Giotto himself. The emptiness of the Duomo is another of its charms. Nothing is allowed to impair the vista as you stand by the western entrance: the floor has no chairs; the great columns rise from it in the gloom as if they, too, were rooted. The walls, too, are bare, save for a few tablets. The history of the building is briefly this. The first cathedral of Florence was the Baptistery, and S. John the Baptist is still the patron saint of the city. Then in 1182 the cathedral was transferred to S. Reparata, which stood on part of the site of the Duomo, and in 1294 the decision to rebuild S. Reparata magnificently was arrived at, and Arnolfo di Cambio was instructed to draw up plans. Arnolfo, whom we see not only on a tablet in the left aisle, in relief, with his plan, but also more than life size, seated beside Brunelleschi on the Palazzo de' Canonici on the south side of the cathedral, facing the door, was then sixty-two and an architect of great reputation. Born in 1232, he had studied under Niccolo Pisano, the sculptor of the famous pulpit at Pisa (now in the museum there), of that in the cathedral in Siena, and of the fountain at Perugia (in all of which Arnolfo probably helped), and the designer of many buildings all over Italy. Arnolfo's own unaided sculpture may be seen at its best in the ciborium in S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome; but it is chiefly as an architect that he is now known. He had already given Florence her extended walls and some of her most beautiful buildings--the Or San Michele and the Badia--and simultaneously he designed S. Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari has it that Arnolfo was assisted on the Duomo by Cimabue; but that is doubtful. The foundations were consecrated in 1296 and the first stone laid on September 8th, 1298, and no one was more interested in its early progress than a young, grave lawyer who used to sit on a stone seat on the south side and watch the builders, little thinking how soon he was to be driven from Florence for ever. This seat--the Sasso di Dante--was still to be seen when Wordsworth visited Florence in 1837, for he wrote a sonnet in which he tells us that he in reverence sate there too, "and, for a moment, filled that empty Throne". But one can do so no longer, for the place which it occupied has been built over and only a slab in the wall with an inscription (on the house next the Palazzo de' Canonici) marks the site. Arnolfo died in 1310, and thereupon there seems to have been a cessation or slackening of work, due no doubt to the disturbed state of the city, which was in the throes of costly wars and embroilments. Not until 1332 is there definite news of its progress, by which time the work had passed into the control of the Arte della Lana; but in that year, although Florentine affairs were by no means as flourishing as they should be, and a flood in the Arno had just destroyed three or four of the bridges, a new architect was appointed, in the person of the most various and creative man in the history of the Renaissance--none other than Giotto himself, who had already received the commission to design the campanile which should stand at the cathedral's side. Giotto was the son of a small farmer at Vespignano, near Florence. He was instructed in art by Cimabue, who discovered him drawing a lamb on a stone while herding sheep, and took him as his pupil. Cimabue, of whom more is said, together with more of Giotto as a painter, in the chapter on the Accademia, had died in 1302, leaving Giotto far beyond all living artists, and Giotto, between the age of fifty and sixty, was now residing in Cimabue's house. He had already painted frescoes in the Bargello (introducing his friend Dante), in S. Maria Novella, S. Croce, and elsewhere in Italy, particularly in the upper and lower churches at Assisi, and at the Madonna dell' Arena chapel at Padua when Dante was staying there during his exile. In those days no man was painter only or architect only; an all-round knowledge of both arts and crafts was desired by every ambitious youth who was attracted by the wish to make beautiful things, and Giotto was a universal master. It was not then surprising that on his settling finally in Florence he should be invited to design a campanile to stand for ever beside the cathedral, or that he should be appointed superintendent of the cathedral works. Giotto did not live to see even his tower completed--it is the unhappy destiny of architects to die too soon--but he was able during the four years left him to find time for certain accessory decorations, of which more will be said later, and also to paint for S. Trinità the picture which we shall see in the Accademia, together with a few other works, since perished, for the Badia and S. Giorgio. He died in 1336 and was buried in the cathedral, as the tablet, with Benedetto da Maiano's bust of him, tells. He is also to be seen full length, in stone, in a niche at the Uffizi; but the figure is misleading, for if Vasari is to be trusted (and for my part I find it amusing to trust him as much as possible) the master was insignificant in size. Giotto has suffered, I think, in reputation, from Ruskin, who took him peculiarly under his wing, persistently called him "the Shepherd," and made him appear as something between a Sunday-school superintendent and the Creator. The "Mornings in Florence" and "Giotto and his Works in Padua" so insist upon the artist's holiness and conscious purpose in all he did that his genial worldliness, shrewdness, and humour, as brought out by Dante, Vasari, Sacchetti, and Boccaccio, are utterly excluded. What we see is an intense saint where really was a very robust man. Sacchetti's story of Giotto one day stumbling over a pig that ran between his legs and remarking, "And serve me right; for I've made thousands with the help of pigs' bristles and never once given them even a cup of broth," helps to adjust the balance; while to his friend Dante he made a reply, so witty that the poet could not forget his admiration, in answer to his question how was it that Giotto's pictures were so beautiful and his six children so ugly; but I must leave the reader to hunt it for himself, as these are modest pages. Better still, for its dry humour, was his answer to King Robert of Naples, who had commanded him to that city to paint some Scriptural scenes, and, visiting the artist while he worked, on a very hot day, remarked, "Giotto, if I were you I should leave off painting for a while". "Yes," replied Giotto, "if I were you I should." To Giotto happily we come again and again in this book. Enough at present to say that upon his death in 1336 he was buried, like Arnolfo, in the cathedral, where the tablet to his memory may be studied, and was succeeded as architect, both of the church and the tower, by his friend and assistant, Andrea Pisano, whose chief title to fame is his Baptistery doors and the carving, which we are soon to examine, of the scenes round the base of the campanile. He, too, died--in 1348--before the tower was finished. Francesco Talenti was next called in, again to superintend both buildings, and not only to superintend but to extend the plans of the cathedral. Arnolfo and Giotto had both worked upon a smaller scale; Talenti determined the present floor dimensions. The revised façade was the work of a committee of artists, among them Giotto's godson and disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, then busy with the Ponte Vecchio, and Andrea Orcagna, whose tabernacle we shall see at Or San Michele. And so the work went on until the main structure was complete in the thirteen-seventies. Another longish interval then came, in which nothing of note in the construction occurred, and the next interesting date is 1418, when a competition for the design for the dome was announced, the work to be given eventually to one Filippo Brunelleschi, then an ambitious and nervously determined man, well known in Florence as an architect, of forty-one. Brunelleschi, who, again according to Vasari, was small, and therefore as different as may be from the figure which is seated on the clergy house opposite the south door of the cathedral, watching his handiwork, was born in 1377, the son of a well-to-do Florentine of good family who wished to make him a notary. The boy, however, wanted to be an artist, and was therefore placed with a goldsmith, which was in those days the natural course. As a youth he attempted everything, being of a pertinacious and inquiring mind, and he was also a great debater and student of Dante; and, taking to sculpture, he was one of those who, as we shall see in a later chapter, competed for the commission for the Baptistery gates. It was indeed his failure in that competition which decided him to concentrate on architecture. That he was a fine sculptor his competitive design, now preserved in the Bargello, and his Christ crucified in S. Maria Novella, prove; but in leading him to architecture the stars undoubtedly did rightly. It was in 1403 that the decision giving Ghiberti the Baptistery commission was made, when Brunelleschi was twenty-six and Donatello, destined to be his life-long friend, was seventeen; and when Brunelleschi decided to go to Rome for the study of his new branch of industry, architecture, Donatello went too. There they worked together, copying and measuring everything of beauty, Brunelleschi having always before his mind the problem of how to place a dome upon the cathedral of his native city. But, having a shrewd knowledge of human nature and immense patience, he did not hasten to urge upon the authorities his claims as the heaven-born architect, but contented himself with smaller works, and even assisted his rival Ghiberti with his gates, joining at that task Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and giving lessons in perspective to a youth who was to do more than any man after Giotto to assure the great days of painting and become the exemplar of the finest masters--Masaccio. It was not until 1419 that Brunelleschi's persistence and belief in his own powers satisfied the controllers of the cathedral works that he might perhaps be as good as his word and was the right man to build the dome; but at last he was able to begin. [1] For the story of his difficulties, told minutely and probably with sufficient accuracy, one must go to Vasari: it is well worth reading, and is a lurid commentary on the suspicions and jealousies of the world. The building of the dome, without scaffolding, occupied fourteen years, Brunelleschi's device embracing two domes, one within the other, tied together with stone for material support and strength. It is because of this inner dome that the impression of its size, from within the cathedral, can disappoint. Meanwhile, in spite of all the wear and tear of the work, the satisfying of incredulous busy-bodies, and the removal of such an incubus as Ghiberti, who because he was a superb modeller of bronze reliefs was made for a while joint architect with a salary that Brunelleschi felt should either be his own or no one's, the little man found time also to build beautiful churches and cloisters all over Florence. He lived to see his dome finished and the cathedral consecrated by Pope Eugenius IV in 1436, dying ten years later. He was buried in the cathedral, and his adopted son and pupil, Buggiano, made the head of him on the tablet to his memory. Brunelleschi's lantern, the model of which from his own hand we shall see in the museum of the cathedral, was not placed on the dome until 1462. The copper ball above it was the work of Verrocchio. In 1912 there are still wanting many yards of stone border to the dome. Of the man himself we know little, except that he was of iron tenacity and lived for his work. Vasari calls him witty, but gives a not good example of his wit; he seems to have been philanthropic and a patron of poor artists, and he grieved deeply at the untimely death of Masaccio, who painted him in one of the Carmine frescoes, together with Donatello and other Florentines. As one walks about Florence, visiting this church and that, and peering into cool cloisters, one's mind is always intent upon the sculpture or paintings that may be preserved there for the delectation of the eye. The tendency is to think little of the architect who made the buildings where they are treasured. Asked to name the greatest makers of this beautiful Florence, the ordinary visitor would say Michelangelo, Giotto, Raphael, Donatello, the della Robbias, Ghirlandaio, and Andrea del Sarto: all before Brunelleschi, even if he named him at all. But this is wrong. Not even Michelangelo did so much for Florence as he. Michelangelo was no doubt the greatest individualist in the whole history of art, and everything that he did grips the memory in a vice; but Florence without Michelangelo would still be very nearly Florence, whereas Florence without Brunelleschi is unthinkable. No dome to the cathedral, first of all; no S. Lorenzo church or cloisters; no S. Croce cloisters or Pazzi chapel; no Badia of Fiesole. Honour where honour is due. We should be singing the praises of Filippo Brunelleschi in every quarter of the city. After Brunelleschi the chief architect of the cathedral was Giuliano da Maiano, the artist of the beautiful intarsia woodwork in the sacristy, and the uncle of Benedetto da Maiano who made the S. Croce pulpit. The present façade is the work of the architect Emilio de Fabris, whose tablet is to be seen on the left wall. It was finished in 1887, five hundred and more years after the abandonment of Arnolfo's original design and three hundred and more years after the destruction of the second one, begun in 1357 and demolished in 1587. Of Arnolfo's façade the primitive seated statue of Boniface VIII (or John XXII) just inside the cathedral is, with a bishop in one of the sacristies, the only remnant; while of the second façade, for which Donatello and other early Renaissance sculptors worked, the giant S. John the Evangelist, in the left aisle, is perhaps the most important relic. Other statues in the cathedral were also there, while the central figure--the Madonna with enamel eyes--may be seen in the cathedral museum. Although not great, the group of the Madonna and Child now over the central door of the Duomo has much charm and benignancy. The present façade, although attractive as a mass of light, is not really good. Its patterns are trivial, its paintings and statues commonplace; and I personally have the feeling that it would have been more fitting had Giotto's marble been supplied rather with a contrast than an imitation. As it is, it is not till Giotto's tower soars above the façade that one can rightly (from the front) appreciate its roseate delicacy, so strong is this rival. CHAPTER II The Duomo II: Its Associations Dante's picture--Sir John Hawkwood--Ancestor and Descendant--The Pazzi Conspiracy--Squeamish Montesecco--Giuliano de' Medici dies--Lorenzo's escape--Vengeance on the Pazzi--Botticelli's cartoon--High Mass--Luca della Robbia--Michelangelo nearing the end--The Miracles of Zenobius--East and West meet in splendour--Marsilio Ficino and the New Learning--Beautiful glass. Of the four men most concerned in the structure of the Duomo I have already spoken. There are other men held in memory there, and certain paintings and statues, of which I wish to speak now. The picture of Dante in the left aisle was painted by command of the Republic in 1465, one hundred and sixty-three years after his banishment from the city. Lectures on Dante were frequently delivered in the churches of Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was interesting for those attending them to have a portrait on the wall. This picture was painted by Domenico di Michelino, the portrait of Dante being prepared for him by Alessio Baldovinetti, who probably took it from Giotto's fresco in the chapel of the Podestá at the Bargello. In this picture Dante stands between the Inferno and a concentrated Florence in which portions of the Duomo, the Signoria, the Badia, the Bargello, and Or San Michele are visible. Behind him is Paradise. In his hand is the "Divine Comedy". I say no more of the poet here, because a large part of the chapter on the Badia is given to him. Near the Dante picture in the left aisle are two Donatellos--the massive S. John the Evangelist, seated, who might have given ideas to Michelangelo for his Moses a century and more later; and, nearer the door, between the tablets to De Fabris and Squarciaparello, the so-called Poggio Bracciolini, a witty Italian statesman and Humanist and friend of the Medici, who, however, since he was much younger than this figure at the time of its exhibition, and is not known to have visited Florence till later, probably did not sit for it. But it is a powerful and very natural work, although its author never intended it to stand on any floor, even of so dim a cathedral as this. The S. John, I may say, was brought from the old façade--not Arnolfo's, but the committee's façade--where it had a niche about ten feet from the ground. The Poggio was also on this façade, but higher. It was Poggio's son, Jacopo, who took part in the Pazzi Conspiracy, of which we are about to read, and was very properly hanged for it. Of the two pictures on the entrance wall, so high as to be imperfectly seen, that on the right as you face it has peculiar interest to English visitors, for (painted by Paolo Uccello, whose great battle piece enriches our National Gallery) it represents Sir John Hawkwood, an English free-lance and head of the famous White Company, who after some successful raids on Papal territory in Provence, put his sword, his military genius, and his bravoes at the service of the highest bidder among the warlike cities and provinces of Italy, and, eventually passing wholly into the employment of Florence (after harrying her for other pay-masters for some years), delivered her very signally from her enemies in 1392. Hawkwood was an Essex man, the son of a tanner at Hinckford, and was born there early in the fourteenth century. He seems to have reached France as an archer under Edward III, and to have remained a free-booter, passing on to Italy, about 1362, to engage joyously in as much fighting as any English commander can ever have had, for some thirty years, with very good pay for it. Although, by all accounts, a very Salomon Brazenhead, Hawkwood had enough dignity to be appointed English Ambassador to Rome, and later to Florence, which he made his home, and where he died in 1394. He was buried in the Duomo, on the north side of the choir, and was to have reposed beneath a sumptuous monument made under his own instructions, with frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi and Giuliano d'Arrigo; but something intervened, and Uccello's fresco was used instead, and this, some sixty years ago, was transferred to canvas and moved to the position in which it now is seen. Hawkwood's life, briskly told by a full-blooded hand, would make a fine book. One pleasant story at least is related of him, that on being beset by some begging friars who prefaced their mendicancy with the words, "God give you peace," he answered, "God take away your alms"; and, on their protesting, reminded them that such peace was the last thing he required, since should their pious wish come true he would die of hunger. One of the daughters of this fire-eater married John Shelley, and thus became an ancestress of Shelley the poet, who, as it chances, also found a home for a while in this city, almost within hailing distance of his ancestor's tomb and portrait, and here wrote not only his "Ode to the West Wind," but his caustic satire, "Peter Bell the Third". Hawkwood's name is steeped sufficiently in carnage; but we get to the scene of bloodshed in reality as we approach the choir, for it was here that Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated, as he attended High Mass, on April 26th, 1478, with the connivance, if not actually at the instigation, of Christ's Vicar himself, Pope Sixtus IV. Florentine history is so eventful and so tortuous that beyond the bare outline given in chapter V, I shall make in these pages but little effort to follow it, assuming a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the reader; but it must be stated here that periodical revolts against the power and prestige of the Medici often occurred, and none was more desperate than that of the Pazzi family in 1478, acting with the support of the Pope behind all and with the co-operation of Girolamo Riario, nephew of the Pope, and Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa. The Pazzi, who were not only opposed to the temporal power of the Medici, but were their rivals in business--both families being bankers--wished to rid Florence of Lorenzo and Giuliano in order to be greater both civically and financially. Girolamo wished the removal of Lorenzo and Giuliano in order that hostility to his plans for adding Forli and Faenza to the territory of Imola, which the Pope had successfully won for him against Lorenzo's opposition, might disappear. The Pope had various political reasons for wishing Lorenzo's and Giuliano's death and bringing Florence, always headstrong and dangerous, to heel. While as for Salviati, it was sufficient that he was Archbishop of Pisa, Florence's ancient rival and foe; but he was a thoroughly bad lot anyway. Assassination also was in the air, for Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan had been stabbed in church in 1476, thus to some extent paving the way for this murder, since Lorenzo and Sforza, when acting together, had been practically unassailable. In 1478 Lorenzo was twenty-nine, Giuliano twenty-five. Lorenzo had been at the head of Florentine affairs for nine years and he was steadily growing in strength and popularity. Hence it was now or never. The conspirators' first idea was to kill the brothers at a banquet which Lorenzo was to give to the great-nephew of the Pope, the youthful Cardinal Raffaello Riario, who promised to be an amenable catspaw. Giuliano, however, having hurt his leg, was not well enough to be present, but as he would attend High Mass, the conspirators decided to act then. That is to say, it was then, in the cathedral, that the death of the Medici brothers was to be effected; meanwhile another detachment of conspirators under Salviati was to rise simultaneously to capture the Signoria, while the armed men of the party who were outside and inside the walls would begin their attacks on the populace. Thus, at the same moment Medici and city would fall. Such was the plan. The actual assassins were Francesco de' Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini, who were nominally friends of the Medici (Francesco's brother Guglielmo having married Bianca de' Medici, Lorenzo's sister), and two priests named Maffeo da Volterra and Stefano da Bagnone. A professional bravo named Montesecco was to have killed Lorenzo, but refused on learning that the scene of the murder was to be a church. At that, he said, he drew the line: murder anywhere else he could perform cheerfully, but in a sacred building it was too much to ask. He therefore did nothing, but, subsequently confessing, made the guilt of all his associates doubly certain. When High Mass began it was found that Giuliano was not present, and Francesco de' Pazzi and Bandini were sent to persuade him to come--a Judas-like errand indeed. On the way back, it is said, one of them affectionately placed his arm round Giuliano--to see if he wore a shirt of mail--remarking, to cover the action, that he was getting fat. On his arrival, Giuliano took his place at the north side of the circular choir, near the door which leads to the Via de' Servi, while Lorenzo stood at the opposite side. At the given signal Bandini and Pazzi were to stab Giuliano and the two priests were to stab Lorenzo. The signal was the breaking of the Eucharistic wafer, and at this solemn moment Giuliano was instantly killed, with one stab in the heart and nineteen elsewhere, Francesco so overdoing his attack that he severely wounded himself too; but Lorenzo was in time to see the beginning of the assault, and, making a movement to escape, he prevented the priest from doing aught but inflict a gash in his neck, and, springing away, dashed behind the altar to the old sacristy, where certain of his friends who followed him banged the heavy bronze doors on the pursuing foe. Those in the cathedral, mean-while, were in a state of hysterical alarm; the youthful cardinal was hurried into the new sacristy; Guglielmo de' Pazzi bellowed forth his innocence in loud tones; and his murderous brother and Bandini got off. Order being restored, Lorenzo was led by a strong bodyguard to the Palazzo Medici, where he appeared at a window to convince the momentarily increasing crowd that he was still living. Meanwhile things were going not much more satisfactorily for the Pazzi at the Palazzo Vecchio, where, according to the plan, the gonfalonier, Cesare Petrucci, was to be either killed or secured. The Archbishop Salviati, who was to effect this, managed his interview so clumsily that Petrucci suspected something, those being suspicious times, and, instead of submitting to capture, himself turned the key on his visitors. The Pazzi faction in the city, meanwhile, hoping that all had gone well in the Palazzo Vecchio, as well as in the cathedral (as they thought), were running through the streets calling "Viva la Libertà!" to be met with counter cries of "Palle! palle!"--the palle being the balls on the Medici escutcheon, still to be seen all over Florence and its vicinity and on every curtain in the Uffizi. The truth gradually spreading, the city then rose for the Medici and justice began to be done. The Archbishop was handed at once, just as he was, from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio. Francesco de' Pazzi, who had got home to bed, was dragged to the Palazzo and hanged too. The mob meanwhile were not idle, and most of the Pazzi were accounted for, together with many followers--although Lorenzo publicly implored them to be merciful. Poliziano, the scholar-poet and friend of Lorenzo, has left a vivid account of the day. With his own eyes he saw the hanging Salviati, in his last throes, bite the hanging Francesco de Pazzi. Old Jacopo succeeded in escaping, but not for long, and a day or so later he too was hanged. Bandini got as far as Constantinople, but was brought back in chains and hanged. The two priests hid in the Benedictine abbey in the city and for a while evaded search, but being found they were torn to pieces by the crowd. Montesecco, having confessed, was beheaded in the courtyard of the Bargello. The hanging of the chief conspirators was kept in the minds of the short-memoried Florentines by a representation outside the Palazzo Vecchio, by none other than the wistful, spiritual Botticelli; while three effigies, life size, of Lorenzo--one of them with his bandaged neck--were made by Verrocchio in coloured wax and set up in places where prayers might be offered. Commemorative medals which may be seen in the Bargello, were also struck, and the family of Pazzi was banished and its name removed by decree from the city's archives. Poor Giuliano, who was generally beloved for his charm and youthful spirits, was buried at S. Lorenzo in great state. I have often attended High Mass in this Duomo choir--the theatre of the Pazzi tragedy--but never without thinking of that scene. Luca della Robbia's doors to the new sacristy, which gave the young cardinal his safety, had been finished only eleven years. Donatello was to have designed them, but his work at Padua was too pressing. The commission was then given to Michelozzo, Donatello's partner, and to Luca della Robbia, but it seems likely that Luca did nearly all. The doors are in very high relief, thus differing absolutely from Donatello's at S. Lorenzo, which are in very low. Luca's work here is sweet and mild rather than strong, and the panels derive their principal charm from the angels, who, in pairs, attend the saints. Above the door was placed, at the time of Lorenzo's escape, the beautiful cantoria, also by Luca, which is now in the museum of the cathedral, while above the door of the old sacristy was Donatello's cantoria. Commonplace new ones now take their place. In the semicircle over each door is a coloured relief by Luca: that over the bronze doors being the "Resurrection," and the other the "Ascension"; and they are interesting not only for their beauty but as being the earliest-known examples in Luca's newly-discovered glazed terra-cotta medium, which was to do so much in the hands of himself, his nephew Andrea, and his followers, to make Florence still lovelier and the legend of the Virgin Mary still sweeter. But of the della Robbias and their exquisite genius I shall say more later, when we come to the Bargello. As different as would be possible to imagine is the genius of that younger sculptor, the author of the Pietà at the back of the altar, near where we now stand, who, when Luca finished these bronze doors, in 1467, was not yet born--Michelangelo Buonarroti. This group, which is unfinished, is the last the old and weary Titan ever worked at, and it was meant to be part of his own tomb. Vasari, to whose "Lives of the Painters" we shall be indebted, as this book proceeds, for so much good human nature, and who speaks of Michelangelo with peculiar authority, since he was his friend, pupil, and correspondent, tells us that once when he went to see the sculptor in Rome, near the end, he found him at work upon this Pietà, but the sculptor was so dissatisfied with one portion that he let his lantern fall in order that Vasari might not see it, saying: "I am so old that death frequently drags at my mantle to take me, and one day my person will fall like this lantern". The Pietà is still in deep gloom, as the master would have liked, but enough is revealed to prove its pathos and its power. In the east end of the nave is the chapel of S. Zenobius, containing a bronze reliquary by Ghiberti, with scenes upon it from the life of this saint, so important in Florentine religious history. It is, however, very hard to see, and should be illuminated. Zenobius was born at Florence in the reign of Constantine the Great, when Christianity was by no means the prevailing religion of the city, although the way had been paved by various martyrs. After studying philosophy and preaching with much acceptance, Zenobius was summoned to Rome by Pope Damasus. On the Pope's death he became Bishop of Florence, and did much, says Butler, to "extirpate the kingdom of Satan". The saint lived in the ancient tower which still stands--one of the few survivors of Florence's hundreds of towers--at the corner of the Via Por S. Maria (which leads from the Mercato Nuovo to the Ponte Vecchio) and the Via Lambertesca. It is called the Torre de' Girolami, and on S. Zenobius' day--May 25th--is decorated with flowers; and since never are so many flowers in the city of flowers as at that time, it is a sight to see. The remains of the saint were moved to the Duomo, although it had not then its dome, from S. Lorenzo, in 1330, and the simple column in the centre of the road opposite Ghiberti's first Baptistery doors was erected to mark the event, since on that very spot, it is said, stood a dead elm tree which, when the bier of the saint chanced to touch it, immediately sprang to life again and burst into leaf; even, the enthusiastic chronicler adds, into flower. The result was that the tree was cut completely to pieces by relic hunters, but the column by the Baptistery, the work of Brunelleschi (erected on the site of an earlier one), fortunately remains as evidence of the miracle. Ghiberti, however, did not choose this miracle but another for representation; for not only did Zenobius dead restore animation, but while he was himself living he resuscitated two boys. The one was a ward of his own; the second was an ordinary Florentine, for whom the same modest boon was craved by his sorrowing parents. It is one of these scenes of resuscitation which Ghiberti has designed in bronze, while Ridolfo Ghirlandaio painted it in a picture in the Uffizi. We shall see S. Zenobius again in the fresco by Ridolfo's father, the great Ghirlandaio, in the Palazzo Vecchio; while the portrait on the first pillar of the left aisle, as one enters the cathedral is of Zenobius too. The date of the Pazzi Conspiracy was 1478. A few years later the same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola's oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of unregenerate sinners that his listeners' hair was said actually to rise with fright. Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance, to give it its death-blow. By contrast there is a tablet on the right wall of the cathedral in honour of one who did much to bring about the paganism and sophistication against which the impassioned reformer uttered his fiercest denunciations: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1491), the neo-Platonist protegé of Cosimo de' Medici, and friend both of Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo. To explain Marsilio's influence it is necessary to recede a little into history. In 1439 Cosimo de' Medici succeeded in transferring the scene of the Great Council of the Church to Florence. At this conference representatives of the Western Church, centred in Rome, met those of the Eastern Church, centred in Constantinople, which was still Christian, for the purpose of discussing various matters, not the least of which was the protection of the Eastern Church against the Infidel. Not only was Constantinople continually threatened by the Turks, and in need of arms as well as sympathy, but the two branches of the Church were at enmity over a number of points. It was as much to heal these differences as to seek temporal aid that the Emperor John Palaeologus, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and a vast concourse of nobles, priests, and Greek scholars, arrived in Italy, and, after sojourning at Venice and Ferrara, moved on to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo. The Emperor resided in the Peruzzi palace, now no more, near S. Croce; the Patriarch of Constantinople lodged (and as it chanced, died, for he was very old) at the Ferrantini palace, now the Casa Vernaccia, in the Borgo Pinti; while Pope Eugenius was at the convent attached to S. Maria Novella. The meetings of the Council were held where we now stand--in the cathedral, whose dome had just been placed upon it all ready for them. The Council failed in its purpose, and, as we know, Constantinople was lost some years later, and the great empire of which John Palaeologus was the last ruler ceased to be. That, however, at the moment is beside the mark. The interesting thing to us is that among the scholars who came from Constantinople, bringing with them numbers of manuscripts and systems of thought wholly new to the Florentines, was one Georgius Gemisthos, a Greek philosopher of much personal charm and comeliness, who talked a bland and beautiful Platonism that was extremely alluring not only to his youthful listeners but also to Cosimo himself. Gemisthos was, however, a Greek, and Cosimo was too busy a man in a city of enemies, or at any rate of the envious, to be able to do much more than extend his patronage to the old man and despatch emissaries to the East for more and more manuscripts; but discerning the allurements of the new gospel, Cosimo directed a Florentine enthusiast who knew Greek to spread the serene creed among his friends, who were all ripe for it, and this enthusiast was none other than a youthful scholar by name Marsilio Ficino, connected with S. Lorenzo, Cosimo's family church, and the son of Cosimo's own physician. To the young and ardent Marsilio, Plato became a god and Gemisthos not less than divine for bringing the tidings. He kept a lamp always burning before Plato's bust, and later founded the Platonic Academy, at which Plato's works were discussed, orations delivered, and new dialogues exchanged, between such keen minds as Marsilio, Pulci, Landini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Leon Battista Alberti, the architect and scholar, Pico dell a Mirandola, the precocious disputant and aristocratic mystic, Poliziano, the tutor of Lorenzo's sons, and Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. It was thus from the Greek invasion of Florence that proceeded the stream of culture which is known as Humanism, and which, no doubt, in time, was so largely concerned in bringing about that indifference to spiritual things which, leading to general laxity and indulgence, filled Savonarola with despair. I am not concerned to enter deeply into the subject of the Renaissance. But this must be said--that the new painting and sculpture, particularly the painting of Masaccio and the sculpture of Donatello, had shown the world that the human being could be made the measure of the Divine. The Madonna and Christ had been related to life. The new learning, by leading these keen Tuscan intellects, so eager for reasonableness, to the Greek philosophers who were so wise and so calm without any of the consolations of Christianity, naturally set them wondering if there were not a religion of Humanity that was perhaps a finer thing than the religion that required all the machinery and intrigue of Rome. And when, as the knowledge of Greek spread and the minute examination of documents ensued, it was found that Rome had not disdained forgery to gain her ends, a blow was struck against the Church from which it never recovered;--and how much of this was due to this Florentine Marsilio, sitting at the feet of the Greek Gemisthos, who came to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo de' Medici! The cathedral glass, as I say, is mostly overladen with grime; but the circular windows in the dome seem to be magnificent in design. They are attributed to Ghiberti and Donatello, and are lovely in colour. The greens in particular are very striking. But the jewel of these circular windows of Florence is that by Ghiberti on the west wall of S. Croce. And here I leave the Duomo, with the counsel to visitors to Florence to make a point of entering it every day--not, as so many Florentines do, in order to make a short cut from the Via Calzaioli to the Via de' Servi, and vice versâ, but to gather its spirit. It is different every hour in the day, and every hour the light enters it with new beauty. CHAPTER III The Duomo III: A Ceremony and a Museum The Scoppio del Carro--The Pazzi beneficent--Holy Saturday's programme--April 6th, 1912--The flying palle--The nervous pyrotechnist--The influence of noon--A little sister of the Duomo--Donatello's cantoria--Luca della Robbia's cantoria. In the last chapter we saw the Pazzi family as very black sheep, although there are plenty of students of Florentine history who hold that any attempt to rid Florence of the Medici was laudable. In this chapter we see them in a kindlier situation as benefactors to the city. For it happened that when Pazzo de' Pazzi, a founder of the house, was in the Holy Land during the First Crusade, it was his proud lot to set the Christian banner on the walls of Jerusalem, and, as a reward, Godfrey of Boulogne gave him some flints from the Holy Sepulchre. These he brought to Florence, and they are now preserved at SS. Apostoli, the little church in the Piazza del Limbo, off the Borgo SS. Apostoli, and every year the flints are used to kindle the fire needed for the right preservation of Easter Day. Gradually the ceremony enlarged until it became a spectacle indeed, which the Pazzi family for centuries controlled. After the Pazzi conspiracy they lost it and the Signoria took it over; but, on being pardoned, the Pazzi again resumed. The Carro is a car containing explosives, and the Scoppio is its explosion. This car, after being drawn in procession through the streets by white oxen, is ignited by the sacred fire borne to it by a mechanical dove liberated at the high altar of the Duomo, and with its explosion Easter begins. There is still a Pazzi fund towards the expenses, but a few years ago the city became responsible for the whole proceedings, and the ceremony as it is now given, under civic management, known as the Scoppio del Cairo, is that which I saw on Holy Saturday last and am about to describe. First, however, let me state what had happened before the proceedings opened in the Piazza del Duomo. At six o'clock mass began at SS. Apostoli, lasting for more than two hours. At its close the celebrant was handed a plate on which were the sacred flints, and these he struck with a steel in view of the congregation, thus igniting a taper. The candle, in an ancient copper porta fuoco surmounted by a dove, was then lighted, and the procession of priests started off for the cathedral with their precious flame, escorted by a civic guard and various standard bearers. Their route was the Piazza del Limbo, along the Borgo SS. Apostoli to the Via Por S. Maria and through the Vacchereccia to the Piazza della Signoria, the Via Condotta, the Via del Proconsolo, to the Duomo, through whose central doors they passed, depositing the sacred burden at the high altar. I should add that anyone on the route in charge of a street shrine had the right to stop the procession in order to take a light from it; while at SS. Apostoli women congregated with tapers and lanterns in the hope of getting these kindled from the sacred flame, in order to wash their babies or cook their food in water heated with the fire. Meanwhile at seven o'clock the four oxen, which are kept in the Cascine all the year round and do no other work, had been harnessed to the car and had drawn it to the Piazza del Duomo, which was reached about nine. The oxen were then tethered by the Pisano doors of the Baptistery until needed again. After some haggling on the night before, I had secured a seat on a balcony facing Ghiberti's first Baptistery doors, for eleven lire, and to this place I went at half-past ten. The piazza was then filling up, and at a quarter to eleven the trams running between the Cathedral and the Baptistery were stopped. In this space was the car. The present one, which dates from 1622, is more like a catafalque, and unless one sees it in motion, with the massive white oxen pulling it, one cannot believe in it as a vehicle at all. It is some thirty feet high, all black, with trumpery coloured-paper festoons (concealing fireworks) upon it: trumpery as only the Roman Catholic Church can contrive. It stood in front of the Duomo some four yards from the Baptistery gates in a line with the Duomo's central doors and the high altar. The doors were open, seats being placed on each side of the aisle the whole distance, and people making a solid avenue. Down this avenue were to come the clergy, and above it was to be stretched the line on which the dove was to travel from the altar, with the Pazzi fire, to ignite the car. The space in front of the cathedral was cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, for it is a fateful day and every one wants to know the issue: because, you see, if the dove runs true, lights the car, and returns, as a good dove should, to the altar ark, there will be a prosperous vintage and the pyrotechnist who controls the sacred bird's movements will receive his wages. But if the dove runs defectively and there is any hitch, every one is dismayed, for the harvest will be bad and the pyrotechnist will receive nothing. Once he was imprisoned when things went astray--and quite right too--but the Florentines have grown more lenient. At about a quarter past eleven a procession of clergy emerged from the Duomo and crossed the space to the Baptistery. First, boys and youths in surplices. Then some scarlet hoods, waddling. Then purple hoods, and other colours, a little paunchier, waddling more, and lastly the archbishop, very sumptuous. All having disappeared into the Baptistery, through Ghiberti's second gates, which I never saw opened before, the dove's wire was stretched and fastened, a matter needing much care; and the crowds began to surge. The cocked hats and officers had the space all to themselves, with the car, the firemen, the pyrotechnist and the few privileged and very self-conscious civilians who were allowed inside. A curious incident, which many years ago might have been magnified into a portent, occurred while the ecclesiastics were in the Artistry. Some one either bought and liberated several air balloons, or the string holding them was surreptitiously cut; but however it happened, the balls escaped and suddenly the crowd sent up a triumphant yell. At first I could see no reason for it, the Baptistery intervening, but then the balls swam into our ken and steadily floated over the cathedral out of sight amid tremendous satisfaction. And the portent? Well, as they moved against the blue sky they formed themselves into precisely the pattern of the palle on the Medici escutcheon. That is all. But think what that would have meant in the fifteenth century; the nods and frowns it would have occasioned; the dispersal of the Medici, the loss of power, and all the rest of it, that it would have presaged! At about twenty to twelve the ecclesiastics returned and were swallowed up by the Duomo, and then excitement began to be acute. The pyrotechnist was not free from it; he fussed about nervously; he tested everything again and again; he crawled under the car and out of it; he talked to officials; he inspected and re-inspected. Photographers began to adjust their distances; the detached men in bowlers looked at their watches; the cocked hats drew nearer to the Duomo door. And then we heard a tearing noise. All eyes were turned to the great door, and out rushed the dove emitting a wake of sparks, entered the car and was out again on its homeward journey before one realized what had happened. And then the explosions began, and the bells--silent since Thursday--broke out. How many explosions there were I do not know; but they seemed to go on for ten minutes. This is a great moment not only for the spectator but for all Florence, for in myriad rooms mothers have been waiting, with their babies on their knees, for the first clang of the belfries, because if a child's eyes are washed then it is unlikely ever to have weak sight, while if a baby takes its first steps to this accompaniment its legs will not be bowed. At the last explosion the pyrotechnist, now a calm man once more and a proud one, approached the car, the firemen poured water on smouldering parts, and the work of clearing up began. Then came the patient oxen, their horns and hooves gilt, and great masses of flowers on their heads, and red cloths with the lily of Florence on it over their backs--much to be regretted since they obliterated their beautiful white skins--and slowly the car lumbered off, and, the cocked hats relenting, the crowd poured after it and the Scoppio del Carro was over. The Duomo has a little sister in the shape of the Museo di Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, situated in the Piazza opposite the apse; and we should go there now. This museum, which is at once the smallest and, with the exception of the Natural History Museum, the cheapest of the Florentine museums, for it costs but half a lira, is notable for containing the two cantorie, or singing galleries, made for the cathedral, one by Donatello and one by Luca della Robbia. A cantoria by Donatello we shall soon see in its place in S. Lorenzo; but that, beautiful as it is, cannot compare with this one, with its procession of merry, dancing children, its massiveness and grace, its joyous ebullitions of gold mosaic and blue enamel. Both the cantorie--Donatello's, begun in 1433 and finished in 1439, and Luca's, begun in 1431 and finished in 1438--fulfilled their melodious functions in the Duomo until 1688, when they were ruthlessly cleared away to make room for large wooden balconies to be used in connexion with the nuptials of Ferdinand de' Medici and the Princess Violante of Bavaria. In the year 1688 taste was at a low ebb, and no one thought the deposed cantorie even worth preservation, so that they were broken up and occasionally levied upon for cornices and so forth. The fragments were collected and taken to the Bargello in the middle of the last century, and in 1883 Signer del Moro, the then architect of the Duomo (whose bust is in the courtyard of this museum), reconstructed them to the best of his ability in their present situation. It has to be remembered not only that, with the exception of the figures, the galleries are not as their artists made them, lacking many beautiful accessories, but that, as Vasari tells us, Donatello deliberately designed his for a dim light. None the less, they remain two of the most delightful works of the Renaissance and two of the rarest treasures of Florence. The dancing boys behind the small pillars with their gold chequering, the brackets, and the urn of the cornice over the second pair of pillars from the right, are all that remain of Donatello's own handiwork. All else is new and conjectural. It is supposed that bronze heads of lions filled the two circular spaces between the brackets in the middle. But although the loss of the work as a whole is to be regretted, the dancing boys remain, to be for ever an inspiration and a pleasure. The Luca della Robbia cantoria opposite is not quite so triumphant a masterpiece, but from the point of view of suitability it is perhaps better. We can believe that Luca's children hymn the glory of the Lord, as indeed the inscription makes them, whereas Donatello's romp with a gladness that might easily be purely pagan. Luca's design is more formal, more conventional; Donatello's is rich and free and fluid with personality. The two end panels of Luca's are supplied in the cantoria by casts; the originals are on the wall below and may be carefully studied. The animation and fervour of these choristers are unforgettable. It is well, while enjoying Donatello's work, to remember that Prato is only half an hour from Florence, and that there may be seen the open-air pulpit, built on the corner of the cathedral, which Donatello, with Michelozzo, his friend and colleague, made at the same time that the cantoria was in progress, and which in its relief of happy children is very similar, although not, I think, quite so remarkable. It lacks also the peculiarly naturalistic effect gained in the cantoria by setting the dancing boys behind the pillars, which undoubtedly, as comparison with the Luca shows, assists realism. The row of pillars attracts the eye first and the boys are thus thrown into a background which almost moves. Although the cantorie dominate the museum they must not be allowed to overshadow all else. A marble relief of the Madonna and Children by Agostino di Duccio (1418-1481) must be sought for: it is No. 77 and the children are the merriest in Florence. Another memorable Madonna and Child is No. 94, by Pagno di Lapo Portigiani (1406-1470), who has interest for us in this place as being one of Donatello's assistants, very possibly on this very cantoria, and almost certainly on the Prato pulpit. Everything here, it must be remembered, has some association with the Duomo and was brought here for careful preservation and that whoever has fifty centimes might take pleasure in seeing it; but the great silver altar is from the Baptistery, and being made for that temple is naturally dedicated to the life of John the Baptist. Although much of it was the work of not the greatest modellers in the second half of the fourteenth century, three masters at least contributed later: Michelozzo adding the statue of the Baptist, Pollaiuolo the side relief depicting his birth, and Verrocchio that of his death, which is considered one of the most remarkable works of this sculptor, whom we are to find so richly represented at the Bargello. Before leaving this room, look for 100^3, an unknown terra-cotta of the Birth of Eve, which is both masterly and amusing, and 110^4, a very lovely intaglio in wood. I might add that among the few paintings, all very early, is a S. Sebastian in whose sacred body I counted no fewer than thirty arrows; which within my knowledge of pictures of this saint--not inconsiderable--is the highest number. The next room is given to models and architectural plans and drawings connected with the cathedral, the most interesting thing being Brunelleschi's own model for the lantern. On the stairs are a series of fine bas-reliefs by Bandinelli and Giovanni dell' Opera from the old choir screen of the Duomo, and downstairs, among many other pieces of sculpture, is a bust of Brunelleschi from a death-mask and several beautiful della Robbia designs for lunettes over doors. CHAPTER IV The Campanile and the Baptistery A short way with Veronese critics--Giotto's missing spire--Donatello's holy men--Giotto as encyclopaedist--The seven and twenty reliefs--Ruskin in American--At the top of the tower--A sea of red roofs--The restful Baptistery--Historic stones--An ex-Pope's tomb--Andrea Pisano's doors--Ghiberti's first doors--Ghiberti's second doors--Michelangelo's praise--A gentleman artist. It was in 1332, as I have said, that Giotto was made capo-maestro, and on July 18th, 1334, the first stone of his campanile was laid, the understanding being that the structure was to exceed "in magnificence, height, and excellence of workmanship" anything in the world. As some further indication of the glorious feeling of patriotism then animating the Florentines, it may be remarked that when a Veronese who happened to be in Florence ventured to suggest that the city was aiming rather too high, he was at once thrown into gaol, and, on being set free when his time was done, was shown the treasury as an object lesson. Of the wealth and purposefulness of Florence at that time, in spite of the disastrous bellicose period she had been passing through, Villani the historian, who wrote history as it was being made, gives an excellent account, which Macaulay summarizes in his vivid way. Thus: "The revenue of the Republic amounted to three hundred thousand florins; a sum which, allowing for the depreciation of the precious metals, was at least equivalent to six hundred thousand pounds sterling; a larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries ago, yielded to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed two hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand florins; a sum fully equal in exchangeable value to two millions and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only but of all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward III of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of the present day, and when the value of silver was more than quadruple of what it now is. The city and its environs contained a hundred and seventy thousand children inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand children were taught to read; twelve hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received a learned education." Giotto died in 1386, and after his death, as I have said, Andrea Pisano came in for a while; to be followed by Talenti, who is said to have made considerable alterations in Giotto's design and to be responsible for the happy idea of increasing the height of the windows with the height of the tower and thus adding to the illusion of springing lightness. The topmost ones, so bold in size and so lovely with their spiral columns, almost seem to lift it. The campanile to-day is 276 feet in height, and Giotto proposed to add to that a spire of 105 feet. The Florentines completed the façade of the cathedral in 1887 and are now spending enormous sums on the Medici chapel at S. Lorenzo; why should they not one day carry out their greatest artist's intention? The campanile as a structure had been finished in 1387, but not for many years did it receive its statues, of which something must be said, although it is impossible to get more than a vague idea of them, so high are they. A captive balloon should be arranged for the use of visitors. Those by Donatello, on the Baptistery side, are the most remarkable. The first of these--that nearest to the cathedral and the most striking as seen from the distant earth--is called John the Baptist, always a favourite subject with this sculptor, who, since he more than any at that thoughtful time endeavoured to discover and disclose the secret of character, is curiously unfortunate in the accident that has fastened names to these figures. This John, for example, bears no relation to his other Baptists; nor does the next figure represent David, as is generally supposed, but owes that error to the circumstance that when the David that originally stood here was moved to the north side, the old plinth bearing his name was left behind. This famous figure is stated by Vasari to be a portrait of a Florentine merchant named Barduccio Cherichini, and for centuries it has been known as Il Zuccone (or pumpkin) from its baldness. Donatello, according to Vasari, had a particular liking for the work, so much that he used to swear by it; while, when engaged upon it, he is said to have so believed in its reality as to exclaim, "Speak, speak! or may a dysentery seize thee!" It is now generally considered to represent Job, and we cannot too much regret the impossibility of getting near enough to study it. Next is the Jeremiah, which, according to Vasari, was a portrait of another Florentine, but which, since he bears his name on a scroll, may none the less be taken to realize the sculptor's idea of Jeremiah. It is (according to the photographs) a fine piece of rugged vivacity, and the head is absolutely that of a real man. On the opposite side of the tower is the magnificent Abraham's sacrifice from the same strong hand, and by it Habakkuk, who is no less near life than the Jeremiah and Job, but a very different type. At both Or San Michele and the Bargello we are to find Donatello perhaps in a finer mood than here, and comfortably visible. For most visitors to Florence and all disciples of Ruskin, the chief interest of the campanile ("The Shepherd's Tower" as he calls it) is the series of twenty-seven reliefs illustrating the history of the world and the progress of mankind, which are to be seen round the base, the design, it is supposed, of Giotto, executed by Andrea Pisano and Luca della Robbia. To Andrea are given all those on the west (7), south (7), east (5), and the two eastern ones on the north; to Luca the remaining five on the north. Ruskin's fascinating analysis of these reliefs should most certainly be read (without a total forgetfulness of the shepherd's other activities as a painter, architect, humorist, and friend of princes and poets), but equally certainly not in the American pirated edition which the Florentine booksellers are so ready (to their shame) to sell you. Only Ruskin in his best mood of fury could begin to do justice to the misspellings and mispunctuations of this terrible production. Ruskin, I may say, believes several of the carvings to be from Giotto's own chisel as well as design, but other and more modern authorities disagree, although opinion now inclines to the belief that the designs for Pisano's Baptistery doors are also his. Such thoroughness and ingenuity were all in Giotto's way, and they certainly suggest his active mind. The campanile series begins at the west side with the creation of man. Among the most attractive are, I think, those devoted to agriculture, with the spirited oxen, to astronomy, to architecture, to weaving, and to pottery. Giotto was even so thorough as to give one relief to the conquest of the air; and he makes Noah most satisfactorily drunk. Note also the Florentine fleur-de-lis round the base of the tower. Every fleur-de-lis in Florence is beautiful--even those on advertisements and fire-plugs--but few are more beautiful than these. I climbed the campanile one fine morning--417 steps from the ground--and was well repaid; but I think it is wiser to ascend the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, because one is higher there and, since the bulk of the dome, which intrudes from the campanile, is avoided, one has a better all-round view. Florence seen from this eminence is very red--so uniformly so that many towers rise against it almost indistinguishably, particularly the Bargello's and the Badia's. One sees at once how few straight streets there are--the Ricasoli standing out among them as the exception; and one realizes how the city has developed outside, with its boulevards where the walls once were, leaving the gates isolated, and its cincture of factories. The occasional glimpses of cloisters and verdure among the red are very pleasant. One of the objects cut off by the cathedral dome is the English cemetery, but the modern Jewish temple stands out as noticeably almost as any of the ancient buildings. The Pitti looks like nothing but a barracks and the Porta Ferdinando has prominence which it gets from no other point. The roof of the Mercato Centrale is the ugliest thing in the view. While I was there the midday gun from the Boboli fortress was fired, instantly having its punctual double effect of sending all the pigeons up in a grey cloud of simulated alarm and starting every bell in the city. Those wishing to make either the campanile or Duomo ascents must remember to do it early. The closing hour for the day being twelve, no one is allowed to start up after about a quarter past eleven: a very foolish arrangement, since Florence and the surrounding Apennines under a slanting sun are more beautiful than in the morning glare, and the ascent would be less fatiguing. As it was, on descending, after being so long at the top, I was severely reprimanded by the custodian, who had previously marked me down as a barbarian for refusing his offer of field-glasses. But the Palazzo Vecchio tower is open till five. The Baptistery is the beautiful octagonal building opposite the cathedral, and once the cathedral itself. It dates from the seventh or eighth century, but as we see it now is a product chiefly of the thirteenth. The bronze doors opposite the Via Calzaioli are open every day, a circumstance which visitors, baffled by the two sets of Ghiberti doors always so firmly closed, are apt to overlook. All children born in Florence are still baptized here, and I watched one afternoon an old priest at the task, a tiny Florentine being brought in to receive the name of Tosca, which she did with less distaste than most, considering how thorough was his sprinkling. The Baptistery is rich in colour both without and within. The floor alone is a marvel of intricate inlaying, including the signs of the zodiac and a gnomic sentence which reads the same backwards and forwards--"En gire torte sol ciclos et roterigne". On this very pavement Dante, who called the church his "beautiful San Giovanni," has walked. Over the altar is a gigantic and primitive Christ in mosaic, more splendid than spiritual. The mosaics in the recesses of the clerestory--grey and white--are the most soft and lovely of all. I believe the Baptistery is the most restful place in Florence; and this is rather odd considering that it is all marble and mosaic patterns. But its shape is very soothing, and age has given it a quality of its own, and there is just that touch of barbarism about it such as one gets in Byzantine buildings to lend it a peculiar character here. The most notable sculpture in the Baptistery is the tomb of the ex-Pope John XXIII, whose licentiousness was such that there was nothing for it but to depose and imprison him. He had, however, much money, and on his liberation he settled in Florence, presented a true finger of John the Baptist to the Baptistery, and arranged in return for his bones to repose in that sanctuary. One of his executors was that Niccolò da Uzzano, the head of the noble faction in the city, whose coloured bust by Donatello is in the Bargello. The tomb is exceedingly fine, the work of Donatello and his partner Michelozzo, who were engaged to make it by Giovanni de' Medici, the ex-pontiff's friend, and the father of the great Cosimo. The design is all Donatello's, and his the recumbent cleric, lying very naturally, hardly as if dead at all, a little on one side, so that his face is seen nearly full; the three figures beneath are Michelozzo's; but Donatello probably carved the seated angels who display the scroll which bears the dead Pope's name. The Madonna and Child above are by Donatello's assistant, Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, a pretty relief by whom we saw in the Museum of the Cathedral. Being in red stone, and very dusty, like Ghiberti's doors (which want the hose regularly), the lines of the tomb are much impaired. Donatello is also represented here by a Mary Magdalene in wood, on an altar at the left of the entrance door, very powerful and poignant. In the ordinary way, when visitors to Florence speak of the Baptistery doors they mean those opposite the Duomo, and when they go to the Bargello and look at the designs made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi in competition, they think that the competition was for those. But that is wrong. Ghiberti won his spurs with the doors on the north side, at which comparatively few persons look. The famous doors opposite the Duomo were commissioned many years later, when his genius was acknowledged and when he had become so accomplished as to do what he liked with his medium. Before, however, coming to Ghiberti, we ought to look at the work of an early predecessor but for whom there might have been no Ghiberti at all; for while Ghiberti was at work with his assistants on these north doors, between 1403 and 1424, the place which they occupy was filled by those executed seventy years earlier by Andrea Pisano (1270-1348), possibly from Giotto's designs, which are now at the south entrance, opposite the charming little loggia at the corner of the Via Calzaioli, called the Bigallo. These represent twenty scenes in the life of S. John the Baptist, and below them are eight figures of cardinal and Christian virtues, and they employed their sculptor from 1330 to 1336. They have three claims to notice: as being admirably simple and vigorous in themselves; as having influenced all later workers in this medium, and particularly Ghiberti and Donatello; and as being the bronze work of the sculptor of certain of the stone scenes round the base of Giotto's campanile. The panel in which the Baptist is seen up to his waist in the water is surely the very last word in audacity in bronze. Ghiberti was charged with making bronze do things that it was ill fitted for; but I do not know that even he moulded water--and transparent water--from it. The year 1399 is one of the most notable in the history of modern art, since it was then that the competition for the Baptistery gates was made public, this announcement being the spring from which many rivers flowed. In that year Lorenzo Ghiberti, a young goldsmith assisting his father, was twenty-one, and Filippo Brunelleschi, another goldsmith, was twenty-two, while Giotto had been dead sixty-three years and the impulse he had given to painting had almost worked itself out. The new doors were to be of the same shape and size as those by Andrea Pisano, which were already getting on for seventy years old, and candidates were invited to make a specimen relief to scale, representing the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, although the subject-matter of the doors was to be the Life of S. John the Baptist. Among the judges was that Florentine banker whose name was beginning to be known in the city as a synonym for philanthropy, enlightenment, and sagacity, Giovanni de' Medici. In 1401 the specimens were ready, and after much deliberation as to which was the better, Ghiberti's or Brunelleschi's--assisted, some say, by Brunelleschi's own advice in favour of his rival--the award was given to Ghiberti, and he was instructed to proceed with his task; while Brunelleschi, as we have seen, being a man of determined ambition, left for Rome to study architecture, having made up his mind to be second to no one in whichever of the arts and crafts he decided to pursue. Here then was the first result of the competition--that it turned Brunelleschi to architecture. Ghiberti began seriously in 1408 and continued till 1424, when the doors were finished; but, in order to carry out the work, he required assistance in casting and so forth, and for that purpose engaged among others a sculptor named Donatello (born in 1386), a younger sculptor named Luca della Robbia (born in 1400), and a gigantic young painter called Masaccio (born in 1401), each of whom was destined, taking fire no doubt from Ghiberti and his fine free way, to be a powerful innovator--Donatello (apart from other and rarer achievements) being the first sculptor since antiquity to place a statue on a pedestal around which observers could walk; Masaccio being the first painter to make pictures in the modern use of the term, with men and women of flesh and blood in them, as distinguished from decorative saints, and to be by example the instructor of all the greatest masters, from his pupil Lippo Lippi to Leonardo and Michelangelo; and Luca della Robbia being the inspired discoverer of an inexpensive means of glazing terra-cotta so that his beautiful and radiant Madonnas could be brought within the purchasing means of the poorest congregation in Italy. These alone are remarkable enough results, but when we recollect also that Brunelleschi's defeat led to the building of the cathedral dome, the significance of the event becomes the more extraordinary. The doors, as I say, were finished in 1424, after twenty-one years' labour, and the Signoria left the Palazzo Vecchio in procession to see their installation. In the number and shape of the panels Pisano set the standard, but Ghiberti's work resembled that of his predecessor very little in other ways, for he had a mind of domestic sweetness without austerity and he was interested in making everything as easy and fluid and beautiful as might be. His thoroughness recalls Giotto in certain of his frescoes. The impression left by Pisano's doors is akin to that left by reading the New Testament; but Ghiberti makes everything happier than that. Two scenes--both on the level of the eye--I particularly like: the "Annunciation," with its little, lithe, reluctant Virgin, and the "Adoration". The border of the Pisano doors is, I think, finer than that of Ghiberti's; but it is a later work. Looking at them even now, with eyes that remember so much of the best art that followed them and took inspiration from them, we can understand the better how delighted Florence must have been with this new picture gallery and how the doors were besieged by sightseers. But greater still was to come. Ghiberti at once received the commission to make two more doors on his own scale for the south side of the Baptistery, and in 1425 he had begun on them. These were not finished until 1452, so that Ghiberti, then a man of seventy-four, had given practically his whole life to the making of four bronze doors. It is true that he did a few other things besides, such as the casket of S. Zenobius in the Duomo, and the Baptist and S. Matthew for Or San Michele; but he may be said justly to live by his doors, and particularly by the second pair, although it was the first pair that had the greater effect on his contemporaries and followers. Among his assistants on these were Antonio Pollaiuolo (born in 1429), who designed the quail in the left border, and Paolo Uccello (born in 1397), both destined to be men of influence. The bald head on the right door is a portrait of Ghiberti; that of the old man on the left is his father, who helped him to polish the original competition plaque. Although commissioned for the south side they were placed where they now are, on the east, as being most worthy of the position of honour, and Pisano's doors, which used to be here, were moved to the south, where they now are. On Ghiberti's workshop opposite S. Maria Nuova, in the Via Bufalini, the memorial tablet mentions Michelangelo's praise--that these doors were beautiful enough to be the Gates of Paradise. After that what is an ordinary person to say? That they are lovely is a commonplace. But they are more. They are so sensitive; bronze, the medium which Horace has called, by implication, the most durable of all, has become in Ghiberti's hands almost as soft as wax and tender as flesh. It does all he asks; it almost moves; every trace of sternness has vanished from it. Nothing in plastic art that we have ever seen or shall see is more easy and ingratiating than these almost living pictures. Before them there is steadily a little knot of admirers, and on Sundays you may always see country people explaining the panels to each other. Every one has his favourite among these fascinating Biblical scenes, and mine are Cain and Abel, with the ploughing, and Abraham and Isaac, with its row of fir trees. It has been explained by the purists that the sculptor stretched the bounds of plastic art too far and made bronze paint pictures; but most persons will agree to ignore that. Of the charm of Ghiberti's mind the border gives further evidence, with its fruits and foliage, birds and woodland creatures, so true to life, and here fixed for all time, so naturally, that if these animals should ever (as is not unlikely in Italy where every one has a gun and shoots at his pleasure) become extinct, they could be created again from these designs. Ghiberti, who enjoyed great honour in his life and a considerable salary as joint architect of the dome with Brunelleschi, died three years after the completion of the second doors and was buried in S. Croce. His place in Florentine art is unique and glorious. The broken porphyry pillars by these second doors were a gift from Pisa to Florence in recognition of Florence's watchfulness over Pisa while the Pisans were away subduing the Balearic islanders. The bronze group over Ghiberti's first doors, representing John the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci) of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in being what we should call an amateur, having a competence of his own and the manners of a patron. Placing himself under Verrocchio, he became closely attached to Leonardo, a fellow-pupil, and made him his model rather than the older man. He took his art lightly, and lived, in Vasari's phrase, "free from care," having such beguilements as a tame menagerie (Leonardo, it will be remembered, loved animals too and had a habit of buying small caged birds in order to set them free), and two or three dining clubs, the members of which vied with each other in devising curious and exotic dishes. Andrea del Sarto, for example, once brought as his contribution to the feast a model of this very church we are studying, the Baptistery, of which the floor was constructed of jelly, the pillars of sausages, and the choir desk of cold veal, while the choristers were roast thrushes. Rustici further paved the way to a life free from care by appointing a steward of his estate whose duty it was to see that his money-box, to which he went whenever he wanted anything, always had money in it. This box he never locked, having learned that he need fear no robbery by once leaving his cloak for two days under a bush and then finding it again. "This world," he exclaimed, "is too good: it will not last." Among his pets were a porcupine trained to prick the legs of his guests under the table "so that they drew them in quickly"; a raven that spoke like a human being; an eagle, and many snakes. He also studied necromancy, the better to frighten his apprentices. He left Florence in 1528, after the Medici expulsion, and, like Leonardo, took service with Francis the First. He died at the age of eighty. I had an hour and more exactly opposite the Rustici group, on the same level, while waiting for the Scoppio del Carro, and I find it easy to believe that Leonardo himself had a hand in the work. The figure of the Baptist is superb, the attitude of his listeners masterly. CHAPTER V The Riccardi Palace and the Medici An evasion of history--"Il Caparra"--The Gozzoli frescoes--Giovanni de' Medici (di Bicci)--Cosimo de' Medici--The first banishment--Piero de' Medici--Lorenzo de' Medici--Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici--The second banishment--Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici--Leo X--Lorenzo di Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici--Clement VII--Third banishment of the Medici--The siege of Florence--Alessandro de' Medici--Ippolito de' Medici--Lorenzino de' Medici--Giovanni delle Bande Nere--Cosimo I--The Grand Dukes. The natural step from the Baptistery would be to the Uffizi. But for us not yet; because in order to understand Florence, and particularly the Florence that existed between the extreme dates that I have chosen as containing the fascinating period--namely 1296, when the Duomo was begun, and 1564, when Michelangelo died--one must understand who and what the Medici were. While I have been enjoying the pleasant task of writing this book--which has been more agreeable than any literary work I have ever done--I have continually been conscious of a plaintive voice at my shoulder, proceeding from one of the vigilant and embarrassing imps who sit there and do duty as conscience, inquiring if the time is not about ripe for introducing that historical sketch of Florence without which no account such as this can be rightly understood. And ever I have replied with words of a soothing and procrastinating nature. But now that we are face to face with the Medici family, in their very house, I am conscious that the occasion for that historical sketch is here indeed, and equally I am conscious of being quite incapable of supplying it. For the history of Florence between, say the birth of Giotto or Dante and the return of Cosimo de' Medici from exile, when the absolute Medici rule began, is so turbulent, crowded, and complex that it would require the whole of this volume to describe it. The changes in the government of the city would alone occupy a good third, so constant and complicated were they. I should have to explain the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the Neri and the Bianchi, the Guilds and the Priors, the gonfalonieri and the podesta, the secondo popolo and the buonuomini. Rather than do this imperfectly I have chosen to do it not at all; and the curious must resort to historians proper. But there is at the end of the volume a table of the chief dates in Florentine and European history in the period chosen, together with births and deaths of artists and poets and other important persons, so that a bird's-eye view of the progress of affairs can be quickly gained, while in this chapter I offer an outline of the great family of rulers of Florence who made the little city an aesthetic lawgiver to the world and with whom her later fame, good or ill, is indissolubly united. For the rest, is there not the library? The Medici, once so powerful and stimulating, are still ever in the background of Florence as one wanders hither and thither. They are behind many of the best pictures and most of the best statues. Their escutcheon is everywhere. I ought, I believe, to have made them the subject of my first chapter. But since I did not, let us without further delay turn to the Via Cavour, which runs away to the north from the Baptistery, being a continuation of the Via de' Martelli, and pause at the massive and dignified palace at the first corner on the left. For that is the Medici's home; and afterwards we will step into S. Lorenzo and see the church which Brunelleschi and Donatello made beautiful and Michelangelo wonderful that the Medici might lie there. Visitors go to the Riccardi palace rather to see Gozzoli's frescoes than anything else; and indeed apart from the noble solid Renaissance architecture of Michelozzo there is not much else to see. In the courtyard are certain fragments of antique sculpture arranged against the walls, and a sarcophagus is shown in which an early member of the family, Guccio de' Medici, who was gonfalonier in 1299, once reposed. There too are Donatello's eight medallions, but they are not very interesting, being only enlarged copies of old medals and cameos and not notable for his own characteristics. Hence it is that, after Gozzoli, by far the most interesting part of this building is its associations. For here lived Cosimo de' Medici, whose building of the palace was interrupted by his banishment as a citizen of dangerous ambition; here lived Piero de' Medici, for whom Gozzoli worked; here was born and here lived Lorenzo the Magnificent. To this palace came the Pazzi conspirators to lure Giuliano to the Duomo and his doom. Here did Charles VIII--Savonarola's "Flagellum Dei"--lodge and loot, and it was here that Capponi frightened him with the threat of the Florentine bells; hither came in 1494 the fickle and terrible Florentine mob, always passionate in its pursuit of change and excitement, and now inflamed by the sermons of Savonarola, to destroy the priceless manuscripts and works of art; here was brought up for a year or so the little Catherine de' Medici, and next door was the house in which Alessandro de' Medici was murdered. It was in the seventeenth century that the palace passed to the Riccardi family, who made many additions. A century later Florence acquired it, and to-day it is the seat of the Prefect of the city. Cosimo's original building was smaller; but much of it remains untouched. The exquisite cornice is Michelozzo's original, and the courtyard has merely lost its statues, among which are Donatello's Judith, now in the Loggia de' Lanzi, and his bronze David, now in the Bargello, while Verrocchio's David was probably on the stairs. The escutcheon on the corner of the house gives us the period of its erection. The seven plain balls proclaim it Cosimo's. Each of the Medici sported these palle, although each had also his private crest. Under Giovanni, Cosimo's father, the balls were eight in number; under Cosimo, seven; under Piero, seven, with the fleur-de-lis of France on the uppermost, given him by Louis XI; under Lorenzo, six; and as one walks about Florence one can approximately fix the date of a building by remembering these changes. How many times they occur on the façades of Florence and its vicinity, probably no one could say; but they are everywhere. The French wits, who were amused to derive Catherine de' Medici from a family of apothecaries, called them pills. The beautiful lantern at the corner was added by Lorenzo and was the work of an odd ironsmith in Florence for whom he had a great liking--Niccolò Grosso. For Lorenzo had all that delight in character which belongs so often to the born patron and usually to the born connoisseur. This Grosso was a man of humorous independence and bluntness. He had the admirable custom of carrying out his commissions in the order in which they arrived, so that if he was at work upon a set of fire-irons for a poor client, not even Lorenzo himself (who as a matter of fact often tried) could induce him to turn to something more lucrative. The rich who cannot wait he forced to wait. Grosso also always insisted upon something in advance and payment on delivery, and pleasantly described his workshop as being the Sign of the Burning Books,--since if his books were burnt how could he enter a debt? This rule earned for him from Lorenzo the nickname of "Il Caparra" (earnest money). Another of Grosso's eccentricities was to refuse to work for Jews. Within the palace, up stairs, is the little chapel which Gozzoli made so gay and fascinating that it is probably the very gem among the private chapels of the world. Here not only did the Medici perform their devotions--Lorenzo's corner seat is still shown, and anyone may sit in it--but their splendour and taste are reflected on the walls. Cosimo, as we shall see when we reach S. Marco, invited Fra Angelico to paint upon the walls of that convent sweet and simple frescoes to the glory of God. Piero employed Fra Angelico's pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli to decorate this chapel. In the year 1439, as chapter II related, through the instrumentality of Cosimo a great episcopal Council was held at Florence, at which John Palaeologus, Emperor of the East, met Pope Eugenius IV. In that year Cosimo's son Piero was twenty-three, and Gozzoli nineteen, and probably upon both, but certainly on the young artist, such pomp and splendour and gorgeousness of costume as then were visible in Florence made a deep impression. When therefore Piero, after becoming head of the family, decided to decorate the chapel with a procession of Magi, it is not surprising that the painter should recall this historic occasion. We thus get the pageantry of the East with more than common realism, while the portraits, or at any rate representations, of the Patriarch of Constantinople (the first king) and the Emperor (the second king) are here, together with those of certain Medici, for the youthful third king is none other than Piero's eldest son Lorenzo. Among their followers are (the third on the left) Cosimo de' Medici, who is included as among the living, although, like the Patriarch of Constantinople, he was dead, and his brother Lorenzo (the middle one of the three), whose existence is forgotten so completely until the accession of Cosimo I, in 1537, brings his branch of the family into power; while on the right is Piero de' Medici himself. Piero's second son Giuliano is on the white horse, preceded by a negro carrying his bow. The head immediately above Giuliano I do not know, but that one a little to the left above it is Gozzoli's own. Among the throng are men of learning who either came to Florence from the East or Florentines who assimilated their philosophy--such as Georgius Gemisthos, Marsilio Ficino, and perhaps certain painters among them, all protégés of Cosimo and Piero, and all makers of the Renaissance. The assemblage alone, apart altogether from any beauty and charm that the painting possesses, makes these frescoes valuable. But the painting is a delight. We have a pretty Gozzoli in our National Gallery--No. 283--but it gives no indication of the ripeness and richness and incident of this work; while the famous Biblical series in the Campo Santo of Pisa has so largely perished as to be scarcely evidence to his colour. The first impression made by the Medici frescoes is their sumptuousness. When Gozzoli painted--if the story be true--he had only candle light: the window over the altar is new. But think of candle light being all the illumination of these walls as the painter worked! A new door and window have also been cut in the wall opposite the altar close to the three daughters of Piero, by vandal hands; and "Bruta, bruta!" says the guardian, very rightly. The landscape behind the procession is hardly less interesting than the procession itself; but it is when we come to the meadows of paradise, with the angels and roses, the cypresses and birds, in the two chancel scenes, that this side of Gozzoli's art is most fascinating. He has travelled a long way from his master Fra Angelico here: the heaven is of the visible rather than the invisible eye; sense is present as well as the rapturous spirit. The little Medici who endured the tedium of the services here are to be felicitated with upon such an adorable presentment of glory. With plenty of altar candles the sight of these gardens of the blest must have beguiled many a mass. Thinking here in England upon the Medici chapel, I find that the impression it has left upon me is chiefly cypresses--cypresses black and comely, disposed by a master hand, with a glint of gold among them. The picture that was over the altar has gone. It was a Lippo Lippi and is now in Berlin. The first of the Medici family to rise to the highest power was Giovanni d'Averardo de' Medici (known as Giovanni di Bicci), 1360-1429, who, a wealthy banker living in what is now the Piazza del Duomo, was well known for his philanthropy and interest in the welfare of the Florentines, but does not come much into public notice until 1401, when he was appointed one of the judges in the Baptistery door competition. He was a retiring, watchful man. Whether he was personally ambitious is not too evident, but he was opposed to tyranny and was the steady foe of the Albizzi faction, who at that time were endeavouring to obtain supreme power in Florentine affairs. In 1419 Giovanni increased his popularity by founding the Spedale degli Innocenti, and in 1421 he was elected gonfalonier, or, as we might now say, President of the Republic. In this capacity he made his position secure and reduced the nobles (chief of whom was Niccolò da Uzzano) to political weakness. Giovanni died in 1429, leaving one son, Cosimo, aged forty, a second, Lorenzo, aged thirtyfour, a fragrant memory and an immense fortune. To Lorenzo, who remained a private citizen, we shall return in time; it is Cosimo (1389-1464) with whom we are now concerned. Cosimo de' Medici was a man of great mental and practical ability: he had been educated as well as possible; he had a passion both for art and letters; he inherited his father's financial ability and generosity, while he added to these gifts a certain genius for the management of men. One of the first things that Cosimo did after his father's death was to begin the palace where we now are, rejecting a plan by Brunelleschi as too splendid, and choosing instead one by Michelozzo, the partner of Donatello, two artists who remained his personal friends through life. Cosimo selected this site, in what was then the Via Larga but is now the Via Cavour, partly because his father had once lived there, and partly because it was close to S. Lorenzo, which his father, with six other families, had begun to rebuild, a work he intended himself to carry on. The palace was begun in 1430 abd was still in progress in 1433 when the Albizzi, who had always viewed the rise of the Medici family with apprehension and misgiving, and were now strengthened by the death of Niccolò da Uzzano, who, though powerful, had been a very cautious and temperate adviser, succeeded in getting a majority in the Signoria and passing a sentence of banishment on the whole Medici tribe as being too rich and ambitious to be good citizens of a simple and frugal Republic. Cosimo therefore, after some days of imprisonment in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, during which he expected execution at any moment, left Florence for Venice, taking his architect with him. In 1434, however, the Florentines, realizing that under the Albizzi they were losing their independence, and what was to be a democracy was become an oligarchy, revolted, and Cosimo was recalled, and, like his father, was elected gonfalonier. With this recall began his long supremacy; for he returned like a king and like a king remained, quickly establishing himself as the leading man in the city, the power behind the Signoria. Not only did he never lose that position, but he made it so naturally his own that when he died he was able to transmit it to his son. Cosimo de' Medici was, I think, the wisest and best ruler that Florence ever had and ranks high among the rulers that any state ever had. But he changed the Florentines from an independent people to a dependent one. In his capacity of Father of his Country he saw to it that his children lost their proud spirit. He had to be absolute; and this end he achieved in many ways, but chiefly by his wealth, which made it possible to break the rich rebel and to enslave the poor. His greatest asset--next his wealth--was his knowledge of the Florentine character. To know anything of this capricious, fickle, turbulent folk even after the event was in itself a task of such magnitude that almost no one else had compassed it; but Cosimo did more, he knew what they were likely to do. By this knowledge, together with his riches, his craft, his tact, his business ramifications as an international banker, his open-handedness and air of personal simplicity, Cosimo made himself a power. For Florence could he not do enough. By inviting the Pope and the Greek Emperor to meet there he gave it great political importance, and incidentally brought about the New Learning. He established the Platonic Academy and formed the first public library in the west. He rebuilt and endowed the monastery of S. Marco. He built and rebuilt other churches. He gave Donatello a free hand in sculpture and Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico in painting. He distributed altogether in charity and churches four hundred thousand of those golden coins which were invented by Florence and named florins after her--a sum equal to a million pounds of to-day. In every direction one comes upon traces of his generosity and thoroughness. After his death it was decided that as Pater Patriae, or Father of his Country, he should be for ever known. Cosimo died in 1464, leaving an invalid son, Piero, aged forty-eight, known for his almost continuous gout as Il Gottoso. Giovanni and Cosimo had had to work for their power; Piero stepped naturally into it, although almost immediately he had to deal with a plot--the first for thirty years--to ruin the Medici prestige, the leader of which was that Luca Pitti who began the Pitti palace in order to have a better house than the Medici. The plot failed, not a little owing to young Lorenzo de' Medici's address, and the remaining few years of Piero's life were tranquil. He was a quiet, kindly man with the traditional family love of the arts, and it was for him that Gozzoli worked. He died in 1469, leaving two sons, Lorenzo (1449-1492) and Giuliano (1453-1478). Lorenzo had been brought up as the future leading citizen of Florence: he had every advantage of education and environment, and was rich in the aristocratic spirit which often blossoms most richly in the second or third generation of wealthy business families. Giovanni had been a banker before everything, Cosimo an administrator, Piero a faithful inheritor of his father's wishes; it was left for Lorenzo to be the first poet and natural prince of the Medici blood. Lorenzo continued to bank but mismanaged the work and lost heavily; while his poetical tendencies no doubt distracted his attention generally from affairs. Yet such was his sympathetic understanding and his native splendour and gift of leadership that he could not but be at the head of everything, the first to be consulted and ingratiated. Not only was he the first Medici poet but the first of the family to marry not for love but for policy, and that too was a sign of decadence. Lorenzo came into power when only twenty, and at the age of forty-two he was dead, but in the interval, by his interest in every kind of intellectual and artistic activity, by his passion for the greatness and glory of Florence, he made for himself a name that must always connote liberality, splendour, and enlightenment. But it is beyond question that under Lorenzo the Florentines changed deeply and for the worse. The old thrift and simplicity gave way to extravagance and ostentation; the old faith gave way too, but that was not wholly the effect of Lorenzo's natural inclination towards Platonic philosophy, fostered by his tutor Marsilio Ficino and his friends Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, but was due in no small measure also to the hostility of Pope Sixtus, which culminated in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 and the murder of Giuliano. Looking at the history of Florence from our present vantage-point we can see that although under Lorenzo the Magnificent she was the centre of the world's culture and distinction, there was behind this dazzling front no seriousness of purpose. She was in short enjoying the fruits of her labours as though the time of rest had come; and this when strenuousness was more than ever important. Lorenzo carried on every good work of his father and grandfather (he spent £65,000 a year in books alone) and was as jealous of Florentine interests; but he was also "The Magnificent," and in that lay the peril. Florence could do with wealth and power, but magnificence went to her head. Lorenzo died in 1492, leaving three sons, of whom the eldest, Piero (1471-1503), succeeded him. Never was such a decadence. In a moment the Medici prestige, which had been steadily growing under Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo until it was world famous, crumbled to dust. Piero was a coarse-minded, pleasure-loving youth--"The Headstrong" his father had called him--whose one idea of power was to be sensual and tyrannical; and the enemies of Florence and of Italy took advantage of this fact. Savonarola's sermons had paved the way from within too. In 1494 Charles VIII of France marched into Italy; Piero pulled himself together and visited the king to make terms for Florence, but made such terms that on returning to the city he found an order of banishment and obeyed it. On November 9th, 1494, he and his family were expelled, and the mob, forgetting so quickly all that they owed to the Medici who had gone before, rushed to this beautiful palace and looted it. The losses that art and learning sustained in a few hours can never be estimated. A certain number of treasures were subsequently collected again, such as Donatello's David and Verrocchio's David, while Donatello's Judith was removed to the Palazzo Vecchio, where an inscription was placed upon it saying that her short way with Holofernes was a warning to all traitors; but priceless pictures, sculpture, and MSS. were ruthlessly demolished. In the chapter on S. Marco we shall read of what experiments in government the Florentines substituted for that of the Medici, Savonarola for a while being at the head of the government, although only for a brief period which ended amid an orgy of lawlessness; and then, after a restless period of eighteen years, in which Florence had every claw cut and was weakened also by dissension, the Medici returned--the change being the work of Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni de' Medici, who on the eve of becoming Pope Leo X procured their reinstatement, thus justifying the wisdom of his father in placing him in the Church. Piero having been drowned long since, his admirable but ill-starred brother Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, now thirty-three, assumed the control, always under Leo X; while their cousin, Giulio, also a Churchman, and the natural son of the murdered Giuliano, was busy, behind the scenes, with the family fortunes. Giuliano lived only till 1516 and was succeeded by his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, a son of Peiro, a young man of no more political use than his father, and one who quickly became almost equally unpopular. Things indeed were going so badly that Leo X sent Giulio de' Medici (now a cardinal) from Rome to straighten them out, and by some sensible repeals he succeeded in allaying a little of the bitterness in the city. Lorenzo had one daughter, born in this palace, who was destined to make history--Catherine de' Medici--and no son. When therefore he died in 1519, at the age of twenty-seven, after a life of vicious selfishness (which, however, was no bar to his having the noblest tomb in the world, at S. Lorenzo), the succession should have passed to the other branch of the Medici family, the descendants of old Giovanni's second son Lorenzo, brother of Cosimo. But Giulio, at Rome, always at the ear of the indolent, pleasure-loving Leo X, had other projects. Born in 1478, the illegitimate son of a charming father, Giulio had none of the great Medici traditions, and the Medici name never stood so low as during his period of power. Himself illegitimate, he was the father of an illegitimate son, Alessandro, for whose advancement he toiled much as Alexander VI had toiled for that of Caesar Borgia. He had not the black, bold wickedness of Alexander VI, but as Pope Clement VII, which he became in 1523, he was little less admirable. He was cunning, ambitious, and tyrannical, and during his pontificate he contrived not only to make many powerful enemies and to see both Rome and Florence under siege, but to lose England for the Church. We move, however, too fast. The year is 1519 and Lorenzo is dead, and the rightful heir to the Medici wealth and power was to be kept out. To do this Giulio himself moved to Florence and settled in the Medici palace, and on his return to Rome Cardinal Passerini was installed in the Medici palace in his stead, nominally as the custodian of little Catherine de' Medici and Ippolito, a boy of ten, the illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours. That Florence should have put up with this Roman control shows us how enfeebled was her once proud spirit. In 1521 Leo X died, to be succeeded, in spite of all Giulio's efforts, by Adrian of Utrecht, as Adrian VI, a good, sincere man who, had he lived, might have enormously changed the course not only of Italian but of English history. He survived, however, for less than two years, and then came Giulio's chance, and he was elected Pope Clement VII. Clement's first duty was to make Florence secure, and he therefore sent his son Alessandro, then about thirteen, to join the others at the Medici palace, which thus now contained a resident cardinal, watchful of Medici interests; a legitimate daughter of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino (but owing to quarrels she was removed to a convent); an illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, the nominal heir and already a member of the Government; and the Pope's illegitimate son, of whose origin, however, nothing was said, although it was implied that Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours, was his father. This was the state of affairs during Clement's war with the Emperor Charles V, [2] which ended with the siege of Rome and the imprisonment of the Pope in the Castle of S. Angelo for some months until he contrived to escape to Orvieto; and meanwhile Florence, realizing his powerlessness, uttered a decree again banishing the Medici family, and in 1527 they were sent forth from the city for the third time. But even now, when the move was so safe, Florence lacked courage to carry it out until a member of the Medici family, furious at the presence of the base-born Medici in the palace, and a professed hater of her base-born uncle Clement VII and all his ways--Clarice Strozzi, née Clarice de' Medici, granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent--came herself to this house and drove the usurpers from it with her extremely capable tongue. To explain clearly the position of the Florentine Republic at this time would be too deeply to delve into history, but it may briefly be said that by means of humiliating surrenders and much crafty diplomacy, Clement VII was able to bring about in 1529 peace between the Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France, by which Charles was left master of Italy, while his partner and ally in these transactions, Clement, expected for his own share certain benefits in which the humiliation of Florence and the exaltation of Alessandro came first. Florence, having taken sides with Francis, found herself in any case very badly left, with the result that at the end of 1529 Charles V's army, with the papal forces to assist, laid siege to her. The siege lasted for ten months, in which the city was most ably defended by Ferrucci, that gallant soldier whose portrait by Piero di Cosimo is in our National Gallery--No. 895--and then came a decisive battle in which the Emperor and Pope were conquerors, a thousand brave Florentines were put to death and others were imprisoned. Alessandro de' Medici arrived at the Medici palace in 1531, and in 1532 the glorious Florentine Republic of so many years' growth, for the establishment of which so much good blood had been spilt, was declared to be at an end. Alessandro being proclaimed Duke, his first act was to order the demolition of the great bell of the Signoria which had so often called the citizens to arms or meetings of independence. Meanwhile Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and therefore the rightful heir, after having been sent on various missions by Clement VII, to keep him out of the way, settled at Bologna and took to poetry. He was a kindly, melancholy man with a deep sense of human injustice; and in 1535, when, after Clement VII's very welcome demise, the Florentine exiles who either had been banished from Florence by Alessandro or had left of their own volition rather than live in the city under such a contemptible ruler, sent an embassy to the Emperor Charles V to help them against this new tyrant, Ippolito headed it; but Alessandro prudently arranged for his assassination en route. It is unlikely, however, that the Emperor would have done anything, for in the following year he allowed his daughter Margaret to become Alessandro's wife. That was in 1536. In January, 1537, Lorenzino de' Medici, a cousin, one of the younger branch of the family, assuming the mantle of Brutus, or liberator, stabbed Alessandro to death while he was keeping an assignation in the house that then adjoined this palace. Thus died, at the age of twenty-six, one of the most worthless of men, and, although illegitimate, the last of the direct line of Cosimo de' Medici, the Father of his Country, to govern Florence. The next ruler came from the younger branch, to which we now turn. Old Giovanni di Bicci had two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo. Lorenzo's son, Pier Francesco de' Medici, had a son Giovanni de' Medici. This Giovanni, who married Caterina Sforza of Milan, had also a son named Giovanni, born in 1498, and it was he who was the rightful heir when Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, died in 1519. He was connected with both sides of the family, for his father, as I have said, was the great grandson of the first Medici on our list, and his wife was Maria Salviati, daughter of Lucrezia de' Medici--herself a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent--and Jacopo Salviati, a wealthy Florentine. When, however, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, died in 1519, Giovanni was a young man of twenty-one with an absorbing passion for fighting, which Clement VII (then Giulio) was only too keen to foster, since he wished him out of the way in order that his own projects for the ultimate advancement of the base-born Alessandro, and meanwhile of the catspaw, the base-born Ippolito, might be furthered. Giovanni had already done some good service in the field, was becoming famous as the head of his company of Black Bands, and was known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere; and his marriage to his cousin Maria Salviati and the birth of his only son Cosimo in 1519 made no difference to his delight in warfare. He was happy only when in the field of battle, and the struggle between Francis and Charles gave him ample opportunities, fighting on the side of Charles and the Pope and doing many brave and dashing things. He died at an early age, only twenty-eight, in 1526, the idol of his men, leaving a widow and child in poverty. Almost immediately afterwards came the third banishment of the Medici family from Florence. Giovanni's widow and their son Cosimo got along as best they could until the murder of Alessandro in 1537, when Cosimo was nearly eighteen. He was a quiet, reserved youth, who had apparently taken but little interest in public affairs, and had spent his time in the country with his mother, chiefly in field sports. But no sooner was Alessandro dead, and his slayer Lorenzino had escaped, than Cosimo approached the Florentine council and claimed to be appointed to his rightful place as head of the State, and this claim he put, or suggested, with so much humility that his wish was granted. Instantly one of the most remarkable transitions in history occurred: the youth grew up almost in a day and at once began to exert unsuspected reserves of power and authority. In despair a number of the chief Florentines made an effort to depose him, and a battle was fought at Montemurlo, a few miles from Florence, between Cosimo's troops, fortified by some French allies, and the insurgents. That was in 1537; the victory fell to Cosimo; and his long and remarkable reign began with the imprisonment and execution of the chief rebels. Although Cosimo made so bloody a beginning he was the first imaginative and thoughtful administrator that Florence had had since Lorenzo the Magnificent. He set himself grimly to build upon the ruins which the past forty and more years had produced; and by the end of his reign he had worked wonders. As first he lived in the Medici palace, but after marrying a wealthy wife, Eleanora of Toledo, he transferred his home to the Signoria, now called the Palazzo Vecchio, as a safer spot, and established a bodyguard of Swiss lancers in Orcagna's loggia, close by. [3] Later he bought the unfinished Pitti palace with his wife's money, finished it, and moved there. Meanwhile he was strengthening his position in every way by alliances and treaties, and also by the convenient murder of Lorenzino, the Brutus who had rid Florence of Alessandro ten years earlier, and whose presence in the flesh could not but be a cause of anxiety since Lorenzino derived from an elder son of the Medici, and Cosimo from a younger. In 1555 the ancient republic of Siena fell to Cosimo's troops after a cruel and barbarous siege and was thereafter merged in Tuscany, and in 1570 Cosimo assumed the title of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and was crowned at Rome. Whether or not the common accusation against the Medici as a family, that they had but one motive--mercenary ambition and self-aggrandisement--is true, the fact remains that the crown did not reach their brows until one hundred and seventy years from the first appearance of old Giovanni di Bicci in Florentine affairs. The statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria has a bas-relief of his coronation. He was then fifty-one; he lived but four more years, and when he died he left a dukedom flourishing in every way: rich, powerful, busy, and enlightened. He had developed and encouraged the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti. The arts, however, were not what they had been, for the great period had passed and Florence was in the trough of the wave. Yet Cosimo found the best men he could--Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari--and kept them busy. But his greatest achievement as a connoisseur was his interest in Etruscan remains and the excavations at Arezzo and elsewhere which yielded the priceless relics now at the Archaeological Museum. With Cosimo I this swift review of the Medici family ends. The rest have little interest for the visitor to Florence to-day, for whom Cellini's Perseus, made to Cosimo I's order, is the last great artistic achievement in the city in point of time. But I may say that Cosimo I's direct descendants occupied the throne (as it had now become) until the death of Gian Gastone, son of Cosimo III, who died in 1737. Tuscany passed to Austria until 1801. In 1807 it became French, and in 1814 Austrian again. In 1860 it was merged in the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of the monarch who has given his name to the great new Piazza--Vittorio Emmanuele. After Gian Gastone's death one other Medici remained alive: Anna Maria Ludovica, daughter of Cosimo III. Born in 1667, she married the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and survived until 1743. It was she who left to the city the priceless Medici collections, as I have stated in chapter VIII. The earlier and greatest of the Medici are buried in the church of S. Lorenzo or in Michelangelo's sacristy; the later Medici, beginning with Giovanni delle Bande Nere and his wife, and their son Cosimo I, are in the gorgeous mausoleum that adjoins S. Lorenzo and is still being enriched with precious marbles. Such is an outline of the history of this wonderful family, and we leave their ancient home, built by the greatest and wisest of them, with mixed feelings of admiration and pity. They were seldom lovable; they were often despicable; but where they were great they were very great indeed. A Latin inscription in the courtyard reminds the traveller of the distinction which the house possesses, calling it the home not only of princes but of knowledge herself and a treasury of the arts. But Florence, although it bought the palace from the Riccardi family a century and more ago, has never cared to give it back its rightful name. CHAPTER VI S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo A forlorn façade--The church of the Medici--Cosimo's parents' tomb--Donatello's cantoria and pulpits--Brunelleschi's sacristy--Donatello again--The palace of the dead Grand Dukes--Costly intarsia--Michelangelo's sacristy--A weary Titan's life--The victim of capricious pontiffs--The Medici tombs--Mementi mori--The Casa Buonarroti--Brunelleschi's cloisters--A model library. Architecturally S. Lorenzo does not attract as S. Croce and S. Maria Novella do; but certain treasures of sculpture make it unique. Yet it is a cool scene of noble grey arches, and the ceiling is very happily picked out with gold and colour. Savonarola preached some of his most important sermons here; here Lorenzo the Magnificent was married. The façade has never yet been finished: it is just ragged brickwork waiting for its marble, and likely to wait, although such expenditure on marble is going on within a few yards of it as makes one gasp. Not very far away, in the Via Ghibellina, is a house which contains some rough plans by a master hand for this façade, drawn some four hundred years ago--the hand of none other than Michelangelo, whose scheme was to make it not only a wonder of architecture but a wonder also of statuary, the façade having many niches, each to be filled with a sacred figure. But Michelangelo always dreamed on a scale utterly disproportionate to the foolish little span of life allotted to us and the S. Lorenzo façade was never even begun. The piazza which these untidy bricks overlook is now given up to stalls and is the centre of the cheap clothing district. Looking diagonally across it from the church one sees the great walls of the courtyard of what is now the Riccardi palace, but was in the great days the Medici palace; and at the corner, facing the Borgo S. Lorenzo, is Giovanni delle Bande Nere, in stone, by the impossible Bandinelli, looking at least twenty years older than he ever lived to be. S. Lorenzo was a very old church in the time of Giovanni de' Medici, the first great man of the family, and had already been restored once, in the eleventh century, but it was his favourite church, chosen by him for his own resting-place, and he spent great sums in improving it. All this with the assistance of Brunelleschi, who is responsible for the interior as we now see it, and would, had he lived, have completed the façade. After Giovanni came Cosimo, who also devoted great sums to the glory of this church, not only assisting Brunelleschi with his work but inducing Donatello to lavish his genius upon it; and the church was thus established as the family vault of the Medici race. Giovanni lies here; Cosimo lies here; and Piero; while Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano and certain descendants were buried in the Michelangelo sacristy, and all the Grand Dukes in the ostentatious chapel behind the altar. Cosimo is buried beneath the floor in front of the high altar, in obedience to his wish, and by the special permission of the Roman Church; and in the same vault lies Donatello. Cosimo, who was buried with all simplicity on August 22nd, 1464, in his last illness recommended Donatello, who was then seventy-eight, to his son Piero. The old sculptor survived his illustrious patron and friend only two and a half years, declining gently into the grave, and his body was brought here in December, 1466. A monument to his memory was erected in the church in 1896. Piero (the Gouty), who survived until 1469, lies close by, his bronze monument, with that of his brother, being that between the sacristy and the adjoining chapel, in an imposing porphyry and bronze casket, the work of Verrocchio, one of the richest and most impressive of all the memorial sculptures of the Renaissance. The marble pediment is supported by four tortoises, such as support the monoliths in the Piazza S. Maria Novella. The iron rope work that divides the sacristy from the chapel is a marvel of workmanship. But we go too fast: the church before the sacristy, and the glories of the church are Donatello's. We have seen his cantoria in the Museum of the Cathedral. Here is another, not so riotous and jocund in spirit, but in its own way hardly less satisfying. The Museum cantoria has the wonderful frieze of dancing figures; this is an exercise in marble intarsia. It has the same row of pillars with little specks of mosaic gold; but its beauty is that of delicate proportions and soft tones. The cantoria is in the left aisle, in its original place; the two bronze pulpits are in the nave. These have a double interest as being not only Donatello's work but his latest work. They were incomplete at his death, and were finished by his pupil Bertoldo (1410-1491), and since, as we shall see, Bertoldo became the master of Michelangelo, when he was a lad of fifteen and Bertoldo an old man of eighty, these pulpits may be said to form a link between the two great S. Lorenzo sculptors. How fine and free and spirited Bertoldo could be, alone, we shall see at the Bargello. The S. Lorenzo pulpits are very difficult to study: nothing wants a stronger light than a bronze relief, and in Florence students of bronze reliefs are accustomed to it, since the most famous of all--the Ghiberti doors--are in the open air. Only in course of time can one discern the scenes here. The left pulpit is the finer, for it contains the "Crucifixion" and the "Deposition," which to me form the most striking of the panels. The other piece of sculpture in the church itself is a ciborium by Desiderio da Settignano, in the chapel at the end of the right transept--an exquisite work by this rare and playful and distinguished hand. It is fitting that Desiderio should be here, for he was Donatello's favourite pupil. The S. Lorenzo ciborium is wholly charming, although there is a "Deposition" upon it; the little Boy is adorable; but one sees it with the greatest difficulty owing to the crowded state of the altar and the dim light. The altar picture in the Martelli chapel, where the sympathetic Donatello monument (in the same medium as his "Annunciation" at S. Croce) is found--on the way to the Library--is by Lippo Lippi, and is notable for the pretty Virgin receiving the angel's news. There is nice colour in the predella. As I have said in the first chapter, we are too prone to ignore the architect. We look at the jewels and forget the casket. Brunelleschi is a far greater maker of Florence than either Donatello or Michelangelo; but one thinks of him rather as an abstraction than a man or forgets him altogether. Yet the S. Lorenzo sacristy is one of the few perfect things in the world. What most people, however, remember is its tombs, its doors, and its reliefs; the proportions escape them. I think its shallow easy dome beyond description beautiful. Brunelleschi, who had an investigating genius, himself painted the quaint constellations in the ceiling over the altar. At the Pazzi chapel we shall find similar architecture; but there extraneous colour was allowed to come in. Here such reliefs as were admitted are white too. The tomb under the great marble and porphyry table in the centre is that of Giovanni di Bicci, the father, and Piccarda, the mother, of Cosimo Pater, and is usually attributed to Buggiano, the adopted son of Brunelleschi, but other authorities give it either to Donatello alone or to Donatello with Michelozzo: both from the evidence of the design and because it is unlikely that Cosimo would ask any one else than one of these two friends of his to carry out a commission so near his heart. The table is part of the scheme and not a chance covering. I think the porphyry centre ought to be movable, so that the beautiful flying figures on the sarcophagus could be seen. But Donatello's most striking achievement here is the bronze doors, which are at once so simple and so strong and so surprising by the activity of the virile and spirited holy men, all converting each other, thereon depicted. These doors could not well be more different from Ghiberti's, in the casting of which Donatello assisted; those in such high relief, these so low; those so fluid and placid, and these so vigorous. Donatello presides over this room (under Brunelleschi). The vivacious, speaking terra-cotta bust of the young S. Lorenzo on the altar is his; the altar railing is probably his; the frieze of terra-cotta cherubs may be his; the four low reliefs in the spandrels, which it is so difficult to discern but which photographs prove to be wonderful scenes in the life of S. John the Evangelist--so like, as one peers up at them, plastic Piranesis, with their fine masonry--are his. The other reliefs are Donatello's too; but the lavabo in the inner sacristy is Verrocchio's, and Verrocchio's tomb of Piero can never be overlooked even amid such a wealth of the greater master's work. From this fascinating room--fascinating both in itself and in its possessions--we pass, after distributing the necessary largesse to the sacristan, to a turnstile which admits, on payment of a lira, to the Chapel of the Princes and to Michelangelo's sacristy. Here is contrast, indeed: the sacristy, austere and classic, and the chapel a very exhibition building of floridity and coloured ornateness, dating from the seventeenth century and not finished yet. In paying the necessary fee to see these buildings one thinks again what the feelings of Giovanni and Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and even of Cosimo I, all such generous patrons of Florence, would be, if they could see the present feverish collection of lire in their beautiful city. Of the Chapel of the Princes I have little to say. To pass from Michelangelo's sacristy to this is an error; see it, if see it you must, first. While the façade of S. Lorenzo is still neglected and the cornice of Brunelleschi's dome is still unfinished, this lapidary's show-room is being completed at a cost of millions of lire. Ever since 1888 has the floor been in progress, and there are many years' work yet. An enthusiastic custodian gave me a list of the stones which were used in the designs of the coats of arms of Tuscan cities, of which that of Fiesole is the most attractive:--Sicily jasper, French jasper, Tuscany jasper, petrified wood, white and yellow, Corsican granite, Corsican jasper, Oriental alabaster, French marble, lapis lazuli, verde antico, African marble, Siena marble, Carrara marble, rose agate, mother of pearl, and coral. The names of the Medici are in porphyry and ivory. It is all very marvellous and occasionally beautiful; but... This pretentious building was designed by a natural son of Cosimo I in 1604, and was begun as the state mausoleum of the Grand Dukes; and all lie here. All the Grand Duchesses too, save Bianca Capella, wife of Francis I, who was buried none knows where. It is strange to realize as one stands here that this pavement covers all those ladies, buried in their wonderful clothes. We shall see Eleanor of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, in Bronzino's famous picture at the Uffizi, in an amazing brocaded dress: it is that dress in which she reposes beneath us! They had their jewels too, and each Grand Duke his crown and sceptre; but these, with one or two exceptions, were stolen during the French occupation of Tuscany, 1801-1814. Only two of the Grand Dukes have their statues--Ferdinand I and Cosimo II--and the Medici no longer exist in the Florentine memory; and yet the quiet brick floor is having all this money squandered on it to superimpose costly marbles which cannot matter to anybody. Michelangelo's chapel, called the New Sacristy, was begun for Leo X and finished for Giulio de' Medici, illegitimate son of the murdered Giuliano and afterwards Pope Clement VII. Brunelleschi's design for the Old Sacristy was followed but made more severe. This, one would feel to be the very home of dead princes even if there were no statues. The only colours are the white of the walls and the brown of the pillars and windows; the dome was to have been painted, but it fortunately escaped. The contrast between Michelangelo's dome and Brunelleschi's is complete--Brunelleschi's so suave and gentle in its rise, with its grey lines to help the eye, and this soaring so boldly to its lantern, with its rigid device of dwindling squares. The odd thing is that with these two domes to teach him better the designer of the Chapel of the Princes should have indulged in such floridity. Such is the force of the architecture in the sacristy that one is profoundly conscious of being in melancholy's most perfect home; and the building is so much a part of Michelangelo's life and it contains such marvels from his hand that I choose it as a place to tell his story. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6th, 1475, at Caprese, of which town his father was Podestà. At that time Brunelleschi had been dead twenty-nine years, Fra Angelico twenty years, Donatello nine years, Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-three years old, and Raphael was not yet born. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been on what was virtually the throne of Florence since 1469 and was a young man of twenty-six. For foster-mother the child had the wife of a stone-mason at Settignano, whither the family soon moved, and Michelangelo used to say that it was with her milk that he imbibed the stone-cutting art. It was from the air too, for Settignano's principal industry was sculpture. The village being only three miles from Florence, from it the boy could see the city very much as we see it now--its Duomo, its campanile, with the same attendant spires. He was sent to Florence to school and intended for either the wool or silk trade, as so many Florentines were; but displaying artistic ability, he induced his father to apprentice him, at the age of thirteen, to a famous goldsmith and painter of Florence who had a busy atelier--no other than Domenico Ghirlandaio, who was then a man of thirty-nine. Michelangelo remained with him for three years, and although his power and imagination were already greater than his master's, he learned much, and would never have made his Sixtine Chapel frescoes with the ease he did but for this early grounding. For Ghirlandaio, although not of the first rank of painters in genius, was pre-eminently there in thoroughness, while he was good for the boy too in spirit, having a large way with him. The first work of Ghirlandaio which the boy saw in the making was the beautiful "Adoration of the Magi," in the Church of the Spedale degli Innocenti, completed in 1488, and the S. Maria Novella frescoes, and it is reasonable to suppose that he helped with the frescoes in colour grinding, even if he did not, as some have said, paint with his own hand the beggar sitting on the steps in the scene representing the "Presentation of the Virgin". That he was already clever with his pencil, we know, for he had made some caricatures and corrected a drawing or two. The three years with Ghirlandaio were reduced eventually to one, the boy having the good fortune to be chosen as one of enough promise to be worth instruction, both by precept and example, in the famous Medici garden. Here he was more at home than in a painting room, for plastic art was his passion, and not only had Lorenzo the Magnificent gathered together there many of those masterpieces of ancient sculpture which we shall see at the Uffizi, but Bertoldo, the aged head of this informal school, was the possessor of a private collection of Donatellos and other Renaissance work of extraordinary beauty and worth. Donatello's influence on the boy held long enough for him to make the low relief of the Madonna, much in his style, which is now preserved in the Casa Buonarroti, while the plaque of the battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae which is also there shows Bertoldo's influence. The boy's first encounter with Lorenzo occurred while he was modelling the head of an aged faun. His magnificent patron stopped to watch him, pointing out that so old a creature would probably not have such a fine set of teeth, and Michelangelo, taking the hint, in a moment had not only knocked out a tooth or two but--and here his observation told--hollowed the gums and cheeks a little in sympathy. Lorenzo was so pleased with his quickness and skill that he received him into his house as the companion of his three sons: of Piero, who was so soon and so disastrously to succeed his father, but was now a high-spirited youth; of Giovanni, who, as Pope Leo X many years after, was to give Michelangelo the commission for this very sacristy; and of Giuliano, who lies beneath one of the tombs. As their companion he enjoyed the advantage of sharing their lessons under Poliziano, the poet, and of hearing the conversation of Pico della Mirandola, who was usually with Lorenzo; and to these early fastidious and intellectual surroundings the artist owed much. That he read much, we know, the Bible and Dante being constant companions; and we know also that in addition to modelling and copying under Bertoldo, he was assiduous in studying Masaccio's frescoes at the church of the Carmine across the river, which had become a school of painting. It was there that his fellow-pupil, Pietro Torrigiano, who was always his enemy and a bully, broke his nose with one blow and flew to Rome from the rage of Lorenzo. It was when Michelangelo was seventeen that Lorenzo died, at the early age of forty-two, and although the garden still existed and the Medici palace was still open to the youth, the spirit had passed. Piero, who succeeded his father, had none of his ability or sagacity, and in two years was a refugee from the city, while the treasures of the garden were disposed by auction, and Michelangelo, too conspicuous as a Medici protégé to be safe, hurried away to Bologna. He was now nineteen. Of his travels I say nothing here, for we must keep to Florence, whither he thought it safe to return in 1495. The city was now governed by the Great Council and the Medici banished. Michelangelo remained only a brief time and then went to Rome, where he made his first Pietà, at which he was working during the trial and execution of Savonarola, whom he admired and reverenced, and where he remained until 1501, when, aged twenty-six, he returned to Florence to do some of his most famous work. The Medici were still in exile. It was in August, 1501, that the authorities of the cathedral asked Michelangelo to do what he could with a great block of marble on their hands, from which he carved that statue of David of which I tell the story in chapter XVI. This established his pre-eminence as a sculptor. Other commissions for statues poured in, and in 1504 he was invited to design a cartoon for the Palazzo Vecchio, to accompany one by Leonardo, and a studio was given him in the Via Guelfa for the purpose. This cartoon, when finished, so far established him also as the greatest of painters that the Masaccios in the Carmine were deserted by young artists in order that this might be studied instead. The cartoon, as I relate in the chapter on the Palazzo Vecchio, no longer exists. The next year, 1505, Michelangelo, nearing his thirtieth birthday, returned to Rome and entered upon the second and tragic period of his life, for he arrived there only to receive the order for the Julius tomb which poisoned his remaining years, and of which more is said in the chapter on the Accademia, where we see so many vestiges of it both in marble and plaster. But I might remark here that this vain and capricious pontiff, whose pride and indecision robbed the world of no one can ever say what glorious work from Michelangelo's hand, is the benevolent-looking old man whose portrait by Raphael is in the Pitti and Uffizi in colour, in the Corsini Palace in charcoal, and again in our own National Gallery in colour. Of Michelangelo at Rome and Carrara, whither he went to superintend in person the quarrying of the marble that was to be transferred to life and where he had endless vexations and mortifications, I say nothing. Enough that the election of his boy friend Giovanni de' Medici as Pope Leo X in 1513 brought him again to Florence, the Pope having a strong wish that Michelangelo should complete the façade of the Medici family church, S. Lorenzo, where we now are. As we know, the scheme was not carried out, but in 1520 the Pope substituted another and more attractive one: namely, a chapel to contain the tombs not only of his father the Magnificent, and his uncle, who had been murdered in the Duomo many years before, but also his nephew Piero de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, who had just died, in 1519, and his younger brother (and Michelangelo's early playmate) Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, who had died in 1516. These were not Medici of the highest class, but family pride was strong. It is, however, odd that no memorial of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, who had been drowned at the age of twenty-two in 1503, was required; perhaps it may have been that since it was Piero's folly that had brought the Medici into such disgrace in 1494, the less thought of him the better. Michelangelo took fire at once, and again hastened to Carrara to arrange for marble to be sent to his studio in the Via Mozzi, now the Via S. Zenobi; while the building stone was brought from Fiesole. Leo X lived only to know that the great man had begun, the new patron being Giulio de' Medici, natural son of the murdered Giuliano, now a cardinal, and soon, in 1523, to become Pope Clement VII. This Pope showed deep interest in the project, but wished not only to add tombs of himself and Pope Leo X, but also to build a library for the Laurentian collection, which Michelangelo must design. A little later he had decided that he would prefer to lie in the choir of the church, and Leo X with him, and instead therefore of tombs Michelangelo might merely make a colossal statue of him to stand in the piazza before the church. The sculptor's temper had not been improved by his many years' experience of papal caprice, and he replied to this suggestion with a letter unique even in the annals of infuriated artists. Let the statue be made, of course, he said, but let it be useful as well as ornamental: the lower portion to be also a barber's shop, and the head, since it would be empty, a greengrocer's. The Pope allowed himself to be rebuked, and abandoned the statue, writing a mild and even pathetic reply. Until 1527 Michelangelo worked away at the building and the tombs, always secretly, behind impenetrable barriers; and then came the troubles which led to the siege of Florence, following upon the banishment of Alessandro, Duke of Urbino, natural son of the very Lorenzo whom the sculptor was to dignify for all time. By the Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII the city was attacked, and Michelangelo was called away from Clement's sacristy to fortify Florence against Clement's soldiers. Part of his ramparts at S. Miniato still remain, and he strengthened all the gates; but, feeling himself slighted and hating the whole affair, he suddenly disappeared. One story is that he hid in the church tower of S. Niccolò, below what is now the Piazzale dedicated to his memory. Wherever he was, he was proclaimed an outlaw, and then, on Florence finding that she could not do without him, was pardoned, and so returned, the city meanwhile having surrendered and the Medici again being restored to power. The Pope showed either fine magnanimity or compounded with facts in the interest of the sacristy; for he encouraged Michelangelo to proceed, and the pacific work was taken up once more after the martial interregnum, and in a desultory way he was busy at it, always secretly and moodily, until 1533, when he tired completely and never touched it again. A year later Clement VII died, having seen only drawings of the tombs, if those. But though left unfinished, the sacristy is wholly satisfying--more indeed than satisfying, conquering. Whatever help Michelangelo may have had from his assistants, it is known that the symbolical figures on the tombs and the two seated Medici are from his hand. Of the two finished or practically finished tombs--to my mind as finished as they should be--that of Lorenzo is the finer. The presentment of Lorenzo in armour brooding and planning is more splendid than that of Giuliano; while the old man, whose head anticipates everything that is considered most original in Rodin's work, is among the best of Michelangelo's statuary. Much speculation has been indulged in as to the meaning of the symbolism of these tombs, and having no theory of my own to offer, I am glad to borrow Mr. Gerald S. Davies' summary from his monograph on Michelangelo. The figure of Giuliano typifies energy and leadership in repose; while the man on his tomb typifies Day and the woman Night, or the man Action and the woman the sleep and rest that produce Action. The figure of Lorenzo typifies Contemplation, the woman Dawn, and the man Twilight, the states which lie between light and darkness, action and rest. What Michelangelo--who owed nothing to any Medici save only Lorenzo the Magnificent and had seen the best years of his life frittered away in the service of them and other proud princes--may also have intended we shall never know; but he was a saturnine man with a long memory, and he might easily have made the tombs a vehicle for criticism. One would not have another touch of the chisel on either of the symbolical male figures. Although a tomb to Lorenzo the Magnificent by Michelangelo would surely have been a wonderful thing, there is something startling and arresting in the circumstance that he has none at all from any hand, but lies here unrecorded. His grandfather, in the church itself, rests beneath a plain slab, which aimed so consciously at modesty as thereby to achieve special distinction: Lorenzo, leaving no such directions, has nothing, while in the same room are monuments to two common-place descendants to thrill the soul. The disparity is in itself monumental. That Michelangelo's Madonna and Child are on the slab which covers the dust of Lorenzo and his brother is a chance. The saints on either side are S. Cosimo and S. Damian, the patron saints of old Cosimo de' Medici, and are by Michelangelo's assistants. The Madonna was intended for the altar of the sacristy. Into this work the sculptor put much of his melancholy and, one feels, disappointment. The face of the Madonna is already sad and hopeless; but the Child is perhaps the most splendid and determined of any in all Renaissance sculpture. He may, if we like, symbolize the new generation that is always deriving sustenance from the old, without care or thought of what the old has to suffer; he crushes his head against his mother's breast in a very passion of vigorous dependence. [4] Whatever was originally intended, it is certain that in Michelangelo's sacristy disillusionment reigns as well as death. But how beautiful it is! In a little room leading from the sacristy I was shown by a smiling custodian Lorenzo the Magnificent's coffin, crumbling away, and photographs of the skulls of the two brothers: Giuliano's with one of Francesco de' Pazzi's dagger wounds in it, and Lorenzo's, ghastly in its decay. I gave the man half a lira. While he was working on the tombs Michelangelo had undertaken now and then a small commission, and to this period belongs the David which we shall see in the little room on the ground floor of the Bargello. In 1534, when he finally abandoned the sacristy, and, leaving Florence for ever, settled in Rome, the Laurentian library was only begun, and he had little interest in it. He never saw it again. At Rome his time was fully occupied in painting the "Last Judgment" in the Sixtine Chapel, and in various architectural works. But Florence at any rate has two marble masterpieces that belong to the later period--the Brutus in the Bargello and the Pietà in the Duomo, which we have seen--that poignantly impressive rendering of the entombment upon which the old man was at work when he died, and which he meant for his own grave. His death came in 1564, on February 23rd, when he was nearly eighty-nine, and his body was brought to Florence and buried amid universal grief in S. Croce, where it has a florid monument. Since we are considering the life of Michelangelo, I might perhaps say here a few words about his house, which is only a few minutes' distant--at No. 64 Via Ghibellina--where certain early works and personal relics are preserved. Michelangelo gave the house to his nephew Leonardo; it was decorated early in the seventeenth century with scenes in the life of the master, and finally bequeathed to the city as a heritage in 1858. It is perhaps the best example of the rapacity of the Florentines; for notwithstanding that it was left freely in this way a lira is charged for admission. The house contains more collateral curiosities, as they might be called, than those in the direct line; but there are architectural drawings from the wonderful hand, colour drawings of a Madonna, a few studies, and two early pieces of sculpture--the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs, a relief marked by tremendous vigour and full of movement, and a Madonna and Child, also in relief, with many marks of greatness upon it. In a recess in Room IV are some personal relics of the artist, which his great nephew, the poet, who was named after him, began to collect early in the seventeenth century. As a whole the house is disappointing. Upstairs have been arranged a quantity of prints and drawings illustrating the history of Florence. The S. Lorenzo cloisters may be entered either from a side door in the church close to the Old Sacristy or from the piazza. Although an official in uniform keeps the piazza door, they are free. Brunelleschi is again the architect, and from the loggia at the entrance to the library you see most acceptably the whole of his cathedral dome and half of Giotto's tower. It is impossible for Florentine cloisters--or indeed any cloisters--not to have a certain beauty, and these are unusually charming and light, seen both from the loggia and the ground. Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana, which leads from them, is one of the most perfect of sombre buildings, the very home of well-ordered scholarship. The staircase is impressive, although perhaps a little too severe; the long room could not be more satisfying to the eye. Michelangelo died before it was finished, but it is his in design, even to the ceiling and cases for MSS. in which the library is so rich, and the rich red wood ceiling. Vasari, Michelangelo's pupil and friend and the biographer to whom we are so much indebted, carried on the work. His scheme of windows has been upset on the side opposite the cloisters by the recent addition of a rotunda leading from the main room. If ever rectangular windows were more exquisitely and nobly proportioned I should like to see them. The library is free for students, and the attendants are very good in calling stray visitors' attention to illuminated missals, old MSS., early books and so forth. One of Galileo's fingers, stolen from his body, used to be kept here, in a glass case, and may be here still; but I did not see it. I saw, however, the portraits, in an old volume, of Petrarch and his Laura. This wonderful collection was begun by Cosimo de' Medici; others added to it until it became one of the most valuable in the world, not, however, without various vicissitudes incident to any Florentine institution: while one of its most cherished treasures, the Virgil of the fourth or fifth century, was even carried to Paris by Napoleon and not returned until the great year of restoration, 1816. Among the holograph MSS. is Cellini's "Autobiography". The library, in time, after being confiscated by the Republic and sold to the monks of S. Marco, again passed into the possession of a Medici, Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and then of Clement VII, and he it was who commissioned Michelangelo to house it with dignity. An old daily custom in the cloisters of S. Lorenzo was the feeding of cats; but it has long since been dropped. If you look at Mr. Hewlett's "Earthwork out of Tuscany" you will find an entertaining description of what it used to be like. CHAPTER VII Or San Michele and the Palazzo Vecchio The little Bigallo--The Misericordia--Or San Michele--Andrea Orcagna--The Tabernacle--Old Glass--A company of stone saints--Donatello's S. George--Dante conferences--The Guilds of Florence--The Palazzo Vecchio--Two Towers--Bandinelli's group--The Marzocco--The Piazza della Signoria--Orcagna's Loggia--Cellini and Cosimo--The Perseus--Verrocchio's dolphin--The Great Council Hall--Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo's cartoons--Bandinelli's malice--The Palazzo Vecchio as a home--Two cells and the bell of independence. Let us now proceed along the Via Calzaioli (which means street of the stocking-makers), running away from the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria. The fascinatingly pretty building at the corner, opposite Pisano's Baptistery doors, is the Bigallo, in the loggia of which foundling children used to be displayed in the hope that passers-by might pity them sufficiently to make them presents or even adopt them; but this custom continues no longer. The Bigallo was designed, it is thought, by Orcagna, and it is worth the minutest study. The Company of the Bigallo, which is no longer an active force, was one of the benevolent societies of old Florence. But the greatest of these societies, still busy and merciful, is the Misericordia, whose head-quarters are just across the Via Calzaioli, in the piazza, facing the campanile, a company of Florentines pledged at a moment's notice, no matter on what they may be engaged, to assist in any charitable work of necessity. For the most part they carry ambulances to the scenes of accident and perform the last offices for the dead in the poorer districts. When on duty they wear black robes and hoods. Their headquarters comprise a chapel, with an altar by Andrea della Robbia, and a statue of the patron saint of the Misericordia, S. Sebastian. But their real patron saint is their founder, a common porter named Pietro Borsi. In the thirteenth century it was the custom for the porters and loafers connected with the old market to meet in a shelter here and pass the time away as best they could. Borsi, joining them, was distressed to find how unprofitable were the hours, and he suggested the formation of a society to be of some real use, the money to support it to be obtained by fines in payment for oaths and blasphemies. A litter or two were soon bought and the machinery started. The name was the Company of the Brothers of Mercy. That was in 1240 to 1250. To-day no Florentine is too grand to take his part, and at the head of the porter's band of brethren is the King. Passing along the Via Calzaioli we come on the right to a noble square building with statues in its niches--Or San Michele, which stands on the site of the chapel of San Michele in Orto. San Michele in Orto, or more probably in Horreo (meaning either in the garden or in the granary), was once part of a loggia used as a corn market, in which was preserved a picture by Ugolino da Siena representing the Virgin, and this picture had the power of working miracles. Early in the fourteenth century the loggia was burned down but the picture was saved (or quickly replaced), and a new building on a much larger and more splendid scale was made for it, none other than Or San Michele, the chief architect being Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto's pupil and later the constructor of the Ponte Vecchio. Where the picture then was, I cannot say--whether inside the building or out--but the principal use of the building was to serve as a granary. After 1348, when Florence was visited by that ravaging plague which Boccaccio describes in such gruesome detail at the beginning of the "Decameron" and which sent his gay company of ladies and gentlemen to the Villa Palmieri to take refuge in story telling, and when this sacred picture was more than commonly busy and efficacious, it was decided to apply the enormous sums of money given to the shrine from gratitude in beautifying the church still more, and chiefly in providing a casket worthy of holding such a pictorial treasure. Hence came about the noble edifice of to-day. A man of universal genius was called in to execute the tabernacle: Andrea Orcagna, a pupil probably of Andrea Pisano, and also much influenced by Giotto, whom though he had not known he idolized, and one who, like Michelangelo later, was not only a painter and sculptor but an architect and a poet. Orcagna, or, to give him his right name, Andrea di Cione, for Orcagna was an abbreviation of Arcagnolo, flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century. Among his best-known works in painting are the Dantesque frescoes in the Strozzi chapel at S. Maria Novella, and that terrible allegory of Death and Judgment in the Campo Santo at Pisa, in which the gay riding party come upon the three open graves. Orcagna put all his strength into the tabernacle of Or San Michele, which is a most sumptuous, beautiful and thoughtful shrine, yet owing to the darkness of the church is almost invisible. Guides, it is true, will emerge from the gloom and hold lighted tapers to it, but a right conception of it is impossible. The famous miraculous picture over the altar is notable rather for its properties than for its intrinsic beauty; it is the panels of the altar, which contain Orcagna's most exquisite work, representing scenes in the life of the Virgin, with emblematical figures interspersed, that one wishes to see. Only the back, however, can be seen really well, and this only when a door opposite to it--in the Via Calzaioli--is opened. It should always be open, with a grille across it, that passers-by might have constant sight of this almost unknown Florentine treasure. It is in the relief of the death of the Virgin on the back that--on the extreme right--Orcagna introduced his own portrait. The marble employed is of a delicate softness, and Orcagna had enough of Giotto's tradition to make the Virgin a reality and to interest Her, for example, as a mother in the washing of Her Baby, as few painters have done, and in particular, as, according to Ruskin, poor Ghirlandaio could not do in his fresco of the birth of the Virgin Herself. It was Orcagna's habit to sign his sculpture "Andrea di Cione, painter," and his paintings "Andrea di Cione, sculptor," and thus point his versatility. By this tabernacle, by his Pisan fresco, and by the designs of the Loggia de' Lanzi and the Bigallo (which are usually given to him), he takes his place among the most interesting and various of the forerunners of the Renaissance. Within Or San Michele you learn the secret of the stoned-up windows which one sees with regret from without. Each, or nearly each, has an altar against it. What the old glass was like one can divine from the lovely and sombre top lights in exquisite patterns that are left; that on the centre of the right wall of the church, as one enters, having jewels of green glass as lovely as any I ever saw. But blues, purples, and reds predominate. The tabernacle apart, the main appeal of Or San Michele is the statuary and stone-work of the exterior; for here we find the early masters at their best. The building being the head-quarters of the twelve Florentine guilds, the statues and decorations were commissioned by them. It is as though our City companies should unite in beautifying the Guildhall. Donatello is the greatest artist here, and it was for the Armourers that he made his S. George, which stands now, as he carved it in marble, in the Bargello, but has a bronze substitute in its original niche, below which is a relief of the slaying of the dragon from Donatello's chisel. Of this glorious S. George more will be said later. But I may remark now that in its place here it instantly proves the modernity and realistic vigour of its sculptor. Fine though they be, all the other statues of this building are conventional; they carry on a tradition of religious sculpture such as Niccolò Pisano respected, many years earlier, when he worked at the Pisan pulpit. But Donatello's S. George is new and is as beautiful as a Greek god, with something of real human life added. Donatello (with Michelozzo) also made the exquisite border of the niche in the Via Calzaioli façade, in which Christ and S. Thomas now stand. He was also to have made the figures (for the Merchants' Guild) but was busy elsewhere, and they fell to Verrocchio, of whom also we shall have much to see and say at the Bargello, and to my mind they are the most beautiful of all. The John the Baptist (made for the Cloth-dealers), also on this façade, is by Ghiberti of the Baptistery gates. On the façade of the Via de' Lamberti is Donatello's superb S. Mark (for the Joiners), which led to Michelangelo's criticism that he had never seen a man who looked more virtuous, and if S. Mark were really like that he would believe all his words. "Why don't you speak to me?" he also said to this statue, as Donatello had said to the Zuccone. Higher on this façade is Luca della Robbia's famous arms of the Silk-weavers, one of the perfect things. Luca also made the arms of the Guild of Merchants, with its Florentine fleur-de-lis in the midst. For the rest, Ghiberti's S. Stephen, and Ghiberti and Michelozzo's S. Matthew, on the entrance wall, are the most remarkable. The blacksmith relief is very lively and the blacksmith's saint a noble figure. The little square reliefs let into the wall at intervals are often charming, and the stone-work of the windows is very lovely. In fact, the four walls of this fortress church are almost inexhaustible. Within, its vaulted roof is so noble, its proportions so satisfying. One should often sit quietly here, in the gloom, and do nothing. The little building just across the way was the Guild House of the Arte della Lana, or Wool-combers, and is now the head-quarters of the Italian Dante Society, who hold a conference every Thursday in the large room over Or San Michele, gained by the flying buttress-bridge. The dark picture on the outer wall is the very Madonna to which, when its position was at the Mercato Vecchio, condemned criminals used to pray on their way to execution. Before we leave Or San Michele and the Arte della Lana, a word on the guilds of Florence is necessary, for at a period in Florentine history between, say, the middle of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, they were the very powerful controllers of the domestic affairs of the city; and it is possible that it would have been better for the Florentines had they continued to be so. For Florence was essentially mercantile and the guilds were composed of business men; and it is natural that business men should know better than noblemen what a business city needed. They were divided into major guilds, chief of which were the woollen merchants--the Arte della Lana--and the silk merchants--the Calimala--and it was their pride to put their riches at the city's service. Thus, the Arte della Lana had charge of the building of the cathedral. Each of the major guilds provided a Prior, and the Priors elected the Signoria, who governed the city. It is one of the principal charges that is brought against Cosimo de' Medici that he broke the power of the guilds. Returning to the Via Calzaioli, and turning to the right, we come very quickly to the Piazza della Signoria, and see before us, diagonally across it, the Loggia de' Lanzi and the Palazzo Vecchio, with the gleaming, gigantic figure of Michelangelo's David against the dark gateway. This, more than the Piazza del Duomo, is the centre of Florence. The Palazzo Vecchio was for centuries called the Signoria, being the home of the Gonfalonier of Florence and the Signoria who assisted his councils. It was begun by Arnolfo, the architect of the Duomo and S. Croce, at the end of the thirteenth century, that being, as we have seen, a period of great prosperity and ambition in Florence, but many alterations and additions were made--by Michelozzo, Cronaca, Vasari, and others--to bring it to what it now is. After being the scene of many riots, executions, and much political strife and dubiety, it became a ducal palace in 1532, and is now a civic building and show-place. In the old days the Palazzo had a ringhiera, or platform, in front of it, from which proclamations were made. To know what this was like one has but to go to S. Trinità on a very fine morning and look at Ghirlandaio's fresco of the granting of the charter to S. Francis. The scene, painted in 1485, includes not only the Signoria but the Loggia de' Lanzi (then the Loggia dell' Orcagna)--both before any statues were set up. Every façade of the Palazzo Vecchio is splendid. I cannot say which I admire more--that which one sees from the Loggia de' Lanzi, with its beautiful coping of corbels, at once so heavy and so light, with coloured escutcheons between them, or that in the Via de' Gondi, with its fine jumble of old brickwork among the stones. The Palazzo Vecchio is one of the most resolute and independent buildings in the world; and it had need to be strong, for the waves of Florentine revolt were always breaking against it. The tower rising from this square fortress has at once grace and strength and presents a complete contrast to Giotto's campanile; for Giotto's campanile is so light and delicate and reasonable and this tower of the Signoria so stern and noble. There is a difference as between a beautiful woman and a powerful man. In the functions of the two towers--the dominating towers of Florence--is a wide difference also, for the campanile calls to prayer, while for years the sombre notes of the great Signoria bell--the Vacca--rang out only to bid the citizens to conclave or battle or to sound an alarm. It was this Vacca wich (with others) the brave Piero Capponi threatened to ring when Charles VIII wished, in 1494, to force a disgraceful treaty on the city. The scene was the Medici Palace in the Via Larga. The paper was ready for signature and Capponi would not sign. "Then I must bid my trumpets blow," said Charles. "If you sound your trumpets," Capponi replied, "we will ring our bells;" and the King gave way, for he knew that his men had no chance in this city if it rose suddenly against them. But the glory of the Palazzo Vecchio tower--afer its proportions--is that brilliant inspiration of the architect which led him, so to speak, to begin again by setting the four columns on the top of the solid portion. These pillars are indescribably right: so solid and yet so light, so powerful and yet so comely. Their duty was to support the bells, and particularly the Vacca, when he rocked his gigantic weight of green bronze to and fro to warn the city. Seen from a distance the columns are always beautiful; seen close by they are each a tower of comfortable strength. And how the wind blows through them from the Apennines! The David on the left of the Palazzo Vecchio main door is only a copy. The original stood there until 1873, when, after three hundred and sixty-nine years, it was moved to a covered spot in the Accademia, as we shall there see and learn its history. If we want to know what the Palazzo Vecchio looked like at the time David was placed there, a picture by Piero di Cosimo in our National Gallery tells us, for he makes it the background of his portrait of Ferrucci, No. 895. The group on the right represents Hercules and Cacus, [5] and is by Baccio Bandinelli (1485-1560), a coarse and offensive man, jealous of most people and particularly of Michelangelo, to whom, but for his displeasing Pope Clement VII, the block of marble from which the Hercules was carved would have been given. Bandinelli in his delight at obtaining it vowed to surpass that master's David, and those who want to know what Florence thought of his effort should consult the amusing and malicious pages of Cellini's Autobiography. On its way to Bandinelli's studio the block fell into the Arrio, and it was a joke of the time that it had drowned itself to avoid its fate at the sculptor's hands. Even after he had half done it, there was a moment when Michelangelo had an opportunity of taking over the stone and turning it into a Samson, but the siege of Florence intervened, and eventually Bandinelli had his way and the hideous thing now on view was evolved. The lion at the left end of the façade is also a copy, the original by Donatello being in the Bargello, close by; but the pedestal is Donatello's original. This lion is the Marzocco, the legendary guardian of the Florentine republic, and it stood here for four centuries and more, superseding one which was kissed as a sign of submission by thousands of Pisan prisoners in 1364. The Florentine fleur-de-lis on the pediment is very beautiful. The same lion may be seen in iron on his staff at the top of the Palazzo Vecchio tower, and again on the Bargello, bravely flourishing his lily against the sky. The great fountain with its bronze figures at this corner is by Bartolommeo Ammanati, a pupil of Bandinelli, and the statue of Cosimo I is by Gian Bologna, who was the best of the post-Michelangelo sculptors and did much good work in Florence, as we shall see at the Bargello and in the Boboli Gardens. He studied under Michelangelo in Rome. Though born a Fleming and called a Florentine, his great fountain at Bologna, which is really a fine thing, has identified his fame with that city. Had not Ammanati's design better pleased Cosimo I, the Bologna fountain would be here, for it was designed for this piazza. Gian's best-known work is the Flying Mercury in the Bargello, which we have seen, on mantelpieces and in shop windows, everywhere; but what is considered his masterpiece is over there, in the Loggia de' Lanzi, the very beautiful building on the right of the Palazzo, the "Rape of the Sabines," a group which, to me, gives no pleasure. The bronze reliefs under the Cosimo statue--this Cosimo being, of course, far other than Cosimo de' Medici, Father of his Country: Cosimo I of Tuscany, who insisted upon a crown and reigned from 1537 to 1575--represents his assumption of rule on the death of Alessandro in 1537; his triumphant entry into Siena when he conquered it and absorbed it; and his reception of the rank of Grand Duke. Of Cosimo (whom we met in Chapter V) more will be said when we enter the Palazzo Vecchio. Between this statue and the Loggia de' Lanzi is a bronze tablet let into the paving which tells us that it was on this very spot, in 1498, that Savonarola and two of his companions were put to death. The ancient palace on the Duomo side of the piazza is attributed in design to Raphael, who, like most of the great artists of his time, was also an architect and was the designer of the Palazzo Pandolfini in the Via San Gallo, No. 74. The Palazzo we are now admiring for its blend of massiveness and beauty is the Uguccione, and anybody who wishes may probably have a whole floor of it to-day for a few shillings a week. The building which completes the piazza on the right of us, with coats of arms on its façade, is now given to the Board of Agriculture and has been recently restored. It was once a Court of Justice. The great building at the opposite side of the piazza, where the trams start, is a good example of modern Florentine architecture based on the old: the Palazzo Landi, built in 1871 and now chiefly an insurance office. In London we have a more attractive though smaller derivative of the great days of Florentine building, in Standen's wool shop in Jermyn Street. The Piazza della Signoria has such riches that one is in danger of neglecting some. The Palazzo Vecchio, for example, so overpowers the Loggia de' Lanzi in size as to draw the eye from that perfect structure. One should not allow this to happen; one should let the Palazzo Vecchio's solid nobility wait awhile and concentrate on the beauty of Orcagna's three arches. Coming so freshly from his tabernacle in Or San Michele we are again reminded of the versatility of the early artists. This structure, originally called the Loggia de' Priori or Loggia d'Orcagna, was built in the fourteenth century as an open place for the delivery of proclamations and for other ceremonies, and also as a shelter from the rain, the last being a purpose it still serves. It was here that Savonarola's ordeal by fire would have had place had it not been frustrated. Vasari also gives Orcagna the four symbolical figures in the recesses in the spandrels of the arches. The Loggia, which took its new name from the Swiss lancers, or lanzi, that Cosimo I kept there--he being a fearful ruler and never comfortable without a bodyguard--is now a recognized place of siesta; and hither many people carry their poste-restante correspondence from the neighbouring post office in the Uffizi to read in comfort. A barometer and thermometer are almost the only novelties that a visitor from the sixteenth century would notice. The statuary is both old and new; for here are genuine antiques once in Ferdinand I's Villa Medici at Rome, and such modern masterpieces as Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, Cellini's Perseus, and Gian Bologna's two muscular and restless groups. The best of the antiques is the Woman Mourning, the fourth from the end on the left, which is a superb creation. Donatello's Judith, which gives me less pleasure than any of his work, both in the statue and in the relief, was commissioned for Cosimo de' Medici, who placed it in the courtyard or garden of the Medici palace--Judith, like David, by her brave action against a tyrant, being a champion of the Florentine republic. In 1495, after Cosimo's worthless grandson Piero de' Medici had been expelled from Florence and the Medici palace sacked, the statue was moved to the front of the Palazzo Vecchio, where the David now is, and an inscription placed on it describing it as a warning to all enemies of liberty. This position being needed for Michelangelo's David, in 1506, Judith was moved to the Loggia to the place where the Sabine group now is. In 1560 it took up its present position. Cellini's Perseus will not quite do, I think, after Donatello and Verrocchio; but few bronzes are more famous, and certainly of none has so vivacious and exciting a story been written as Cellini's own, setting forth his disappointments, mortifications, and pride in connexion with this statue. Cellini, whatever one may think of his veracity, is a diverting and valuable writer, and the picture of Cosimo I which he draws for us is probably very near the truth. We see him haughty, familiar, capricious, vain, impulsive, clear-sighted, and easily flattered; intensely pleased to be in a position to command the services of artists and very unwilling to pay. Cellini was a blend of lackey, child, and genius. He left Francis I in order to serve Cosimo and never ceased to regret the change. The Perseus was his greatest accomplishment for Cosimo, and the narrative of its casting is terrific and not a little like Dumas. When it was uncovered in its present position all Florence flocked to the Loggia to praise it; the poets placed commendatory sonnets on the pillars, and the sculptor peacocked up and down in an ecstasy of triumph. Then, however, his troubles once more began, for Cosimo had the craft to force Cellini to name the price, and we see Cellini in an agony between desire for enough and fear lest if he named enough he would offend his patron. The whole book is a comedy of vanity and jealousy and Florentine vigour, with Courts as a background. It is good to read it; it is good, having read it, to study once again the unfevered resolute features of Donatello's S. George. Cellini himself we may see among the statues under the Uffizi and again in the place of honour (as a goldsmith) in the centre of the Ponte Vecchio. Looking at the Perseus and remembering Donatello, one realizes that what Cellini wanted was character. He had temperament enough but no character. Perseus is superb, commanding, distinguished, and one doesn't care a fig for it. On entering the Palazzo Vecchio we come instantly to one of the most charming things in Florence--Verrocchio's fountain--which stands in the midst of the courtyard. This adorable work--a little bronze Cupid struggling with a spouting dolphin--was made for Lorenzo de' Medici's country villa at Careggi and was brought here when the palazzo was refurnished for Francis I, Cosimo I's son and successor, and his bride, Joanna of Austria, in 1565. Nothing could better illustrate the accomplishment and imaginative adaptability of the great craftsmen of the day than the two works of Verrocchio that we have now seen: the Christ and S. Thomas at Or San Michele, in Donatello and Michelozzo's niche, and this exquisite fountain splashing water so musically. Notice the rich decorations of the pillars of this courtyard and the rich colour and power of the pillars themselves. The half-obliterated frescoes of Austrian towns on the walls were made to prevent Joanna from being homesick, but were more likely, one would guess, to stimulate that malady. In the left corner is the entrance to the old armoury, now empty, with openings in the walls through which pieces might be discharged at various angles on any advancing host. The groined ceiling could support a pyramid. The Palazzo Vecchio's ground floor is a series of thoroughfares in which people are passing continually amid huge pillars and along dark passages; but our way is up the stone steps immediately to the left on leaving the courtyard where Verrocchio's child eternally smiles, for the steps take us to that vast hall designed by Cronaca for Savonarola's Great Council, which was called into being for the government of Florence after the luckless Piero de' Medici had been banished in 1494. Here much history was made. As to its structure and its architect, Vasari, who later was called in to restore it, has a deal to say, but it is too technical for us. It was built by Simone di Pollaiuolo, who was known as Cronaca (the Chronicler) from his vivid way of telling his adventures. Cronaca (1454-1508), who was a personal friend and devotee of Savonarola, drew up his plan in consultation with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo (although then so young: only nineteen or twenty) and others. Its peculiarity is that it is one of the largest rooms in existence without pillars. From the foot of the steps to the further wall I make it fifty-eight paces, and thirty wide; and the proportions strike the eye as perfect. The wall behind the steps is not at right angles with the other--and this must be as peculiar as the absence of pillars. Once there were to be paintings here by the greatest of all, for masters no less than Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to decorate it, each with a great historical painting: a high honour for the youthful Michelangelo. The loss of these works is one of the tragedies of art. Leonardo chose for his subject the battle of Anghiari, an incident of 1440 when the Florentines defeated Piccinino and saved their Republic from the Milanese and Visconti. But both the cartoon and the fresco have gone for ever, and our sense of loss is not diminished by reading in Leonardo's Thoughts on Painting the directions which he wrote for the use of artists who proposed to paint battles: one of the most interesting and exciting pieces of writing in the literature of art. Michelangelo's work, which never reached the wall of the room, as Leonardo's had done, was completed as a cartoon in 1504 to 1506 in his studio in the hospital of the dyers in Sant' Onofrio, which is now the Via Guelfa. The subject was also military: an incident in the long and bitter struggle between Florence and Pisa, when Sir John Hawkwood (then in the pay of the Pisans, before he came over finally to the Florentines) attacked a body of Florentines who were bathing in the river. The scene gave the young artist scope both for his power of delineating a spirited incident and for his drawing of the nude, and those who saw it said of this work that it was finer than anything the painter ever did. While it was in progress all the young artists came to Sant' Onofrio to study it, as they and its creator had before flocked to the Carmine, where Masaccio's frescoes had for three-quarters of a century been object-lessons to students. What became of the cartoon is not definitely known, but Vasari's story is that Bandinelli, the sculptor of the Hercules and Cacus outside the Palazzo, who was one of the most diligent copyists of the cartoon after it was placed in a room in this building, had the key of the door counterfeited, and, obtaining entrance during a moment of tumult, destroyed the picture. The reasons given are: (1, and a very poor one) that he desired to own the pieces; (2) that he wished to deprive other and rival students of the advantage of copying it; (3) that he wanted Leonardo to be the only painter of the Palazzo to be considered; and (4, and sufficient) that he hated Michelangelo. At this time Bandinelli could not have been more than eighteen. Vasari's story is uncorroborated. Leonardo's battle merely perished, being done in some fugitive medium; and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue of Savonarola, who was in person the dominating influence here for the years between 1494 and 1497; who is to many the central figure in the history of this building; and whose last night on earth was spent with his companions in this very room. But to him we come in the chapter on S. Marco. Many rooms in the Palazzo are to be seen only on special occasions, but the great hall is always accessible. Certain rooms upstairs, mostly with rich red and yellow floors, are also visible daily, all interesting; but most notable is the Salle de Lys, with its lovely blue walls of lilies, its glorious ceiling of gold and roses, Ghirlandaio's fresco of S. Zenobius, and the perfect marble doorway containing the wooden doors of Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano, with the heads of Dante and Petrarch in intarsia. Note the figures of Charity and Temperance in the doorway and the charming youthful Baptist. In Eleanor of Toledo's dining-room there are some rich and elaborate green jugs which I remember very clearly and also the ceiling of her workroom with its choice of Penelope as the presiding genius. Both Eleanor's chapel and that in which Savonarola prayed before his execution are shown. But the most popular room of all with visitors--and quite naturally--is the little boudoiresque study of Francis I, with its voluptuous ladies on the ceiling and the secret treasure-room leading from it, while on the way, just outside the door, is a convenient oubliette into which to push any inconvenient visitor. The loggia, which Mr. Morley has painted from the Via Castellani, is also always accessible, and from it one has one of those pleasant views of warm roofs in which Florence abounds. One of the most attractive of the smaller rooms usually on view is that one which leads from the lily-room and contains nothing but maps of the world: the most decorative things conceivable, next to Chinese paintings. Looking naturally for Sussex on the English map, I found Winchelsey, Battel, Rye, Lewes, Sorham, Arônde, and Cicestra. From the map-room a little room is gained where the debates in the Great Council Hall might be secretly overheard by interested eavesdroppers, but in particular by Cosimo I. A part of the cornice has holes in it for this purppse, but on regaining the hall itself I found that the disparity in the pattern was perfectly evident even to my eye, so that every one in those suspicious days must have been aware of the listener. The tower should certainly be ascended--not only for the view and to be so near the bells and the pillars, but also for historic associations. After a little way we come to the cell where Cosimo de' Medici, later to be the Father of his Country, was imprisoned, before that exile which ended in recall and triumph in 1433. This cell, although not exactly "a home from home," is possible. What is to be said of that other, some thousands of steps (as it seems) higher, where Savonarola was kept for forty days, varied only by intervals of torture? For Savonarola's cell, which is very near the top, is nothing but a recess in the wall with a door to it. It cannot be more than five feet wide and eight feet long, with an open loophole to the wind. If a man were here for forty days and then pardoned his life would be worth very little. A bitter eyrie from which to watch the city one had risked all to reform. What thoughts must have been his in that trap! What reviews of policy! What illuminations as to Florentine character! CHAPTER VIII The Uffizi I: The Building and the Collectors The growth of a gallery--Vasari's Passaggio--Cosimo I--Francis I--Ferdinand I--Ferdinand II--Cosimo III--Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici--Pietro-Leopoldo--The statues of the façade--Art, literature, arms, science, and learning--The omissions--Florentine rapacity--An antique custom--Window views--The Uffizi drawings--The best picture. The foreigner should understand at once that any inquiries into the history of the Uffizi family--such as for example yield interesting results in the case of the Pazzi and the Albizzi--are doomed to failure; because Uffizi merely means offices. The Palazzo degli Uffizi, or palace of offices, was built by Vasari, the biographer of the artists, for Cosimo I, who having taken the Signoria, or Palazzo Vecchio, for his own home, wished to provide another building for the municipal government. It was begun in 1560 and still so far fulfils its original purpose as to contain the general post office, while it also houses certain Tuscan archives and the national library. A glance at Piero di Cosimo's portrait of Ferrucci in our National Gallery will show that an ordinary Florentine street preceded the erection of the Uffizi. At that time the top storey of the building, as it now exists, was an open terrace affording a pleasant promenade from the Palazzo Vecchio down to the river and back to the Loggia de' Lanzi. Beneath this were studios and workrooms where Cosimo's army of artists and craftsmen (with Bronzino and Cellini as the most famous) were kept busy; while the public offices were on the ground floor. Then, as his family increased, Cosimo decided to move, and the incomplete and abandoned Pitti Palace was bought and finished. In 1565, as we have seen, Francis, Cosimo's son, married and was installed in the Palazzo Vecchio, and it was then that Vasari was called upon to construct the Passaggio which unites the Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti, crossing the river by the Ponte Vecchio--Cosimo's idea (borrowed it is said from Homer's description of the passage uniting the palaces of Priam and Hector) being not only that he and his son might have access to each other, but that in the event of danger on the other side of the river a body of soldiers could be swiftly and secretly mobilized there. Cosimo I died in 1574, and Francis I (1574-1587) succeeded him not only in rule but in that patronage of the arts which was one of the finest Medicean traditions; and it was he who first thought of making the Uffizi a picture gallery. To do this was simple: it merely meant the loss of part of the terrace by walling and roofing it in. Ferdinand I (1587-1609) added the pretty Tribuna and other rooms, and brought hither a number of the treasures from the Villa Medici at Rome. Cosimo II (1609-1621) did little, but Ferdinand II (1621-1670) completed the roofing in of the terraces, placed there his own collection of drawings and a valuable collection of Venetian pictures which he had bought, together with those that his wife Vittoria della Rovere had brought him from Urbino, while his brothers, Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de' Medici and Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici (the extremely ugly man with the curling chin, at the head of the Uffizi stairs), added theirs. Giovanni Carlo's pictures, which mostly went to the Pitti were varied; but Leopold's were chiefly portraits of artists, wherever possible painted by themselves, a collection which is steadily being added to at the present time and is to be seen in several rooms of the Uffizi, and those miniature portraits of men of eminence which we shall see in the corridor between the Poccetti Gallery and Salon of Justice at the Pitti. Cosimo III (1670-1723) added the Dutch pictures and the famous Venus de' Medici and other Tribuna statuary. The galleries remained the private property of the Medici family until the Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici, daughter of Cosimo III and great niece of the Cardinal Leopold, bequeathed all these treasures, to which she had greatly added, together with bronzes now in the Bargello, Etruscan antiquities now in the Archaeological Museum, tapestries also there, and books in the Laurentian library, to Florence for ever, on condition that they should never be removed from Florence and should exist for the benefit of the public. Her death was in 1743, and with her passed away the last descendant of that Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1429) whom we saw giving commissions to Donatello, building the children's hospital, and helping Florence to the best of his power: so that the first Medici and the last were akin in love of art and in generosity to their beautiful city. The new Austrian Grand Dukes continued to add to the Uffizi, particularly Pietro-Leopoldo (1765-1790), who also founded the Accademia. To him was due the assembling, under the Uffizi roof, of all the outlying pictures then belonging to the State, including those in the gallery of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which owned, among others, the famous Hugo van der Goes. It was he also who brought together from Rome the Niobe statues and constructed a room for them. Leopold II added the Iscrizioni. It was as recently as 1842 to 1856 that the statues of the great Florentines were placed in the portico. These, beginning at the Palazzo Vecchio, are, first, against the inner wall, Cosimo Pater (1389-1464) and Lorenzo the Magnificent (1450-1492); then, outside: Orcagna; Andrea Pisano, of the first Baptistery doors; Giotto and Donatello; Alberti, who could do everything and who designed the façade of S. Maria Novella; Leonardo and Michelangelo. Next, three poets, Dante (1265-1321), Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Then Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the statesman, and Francesco Guicciardini (1482-1540), the historian. That completes the first side. At the end are Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1516), the explorer, who gave his name to America, and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the astronomer; and above is Cosimo I, the first Grand Duke. On the Uffizi's river façade are four figures only--and hundreds of swallows' nests. The figures are Francesco Ferrucci, who died in 1530, the general painted by Piero di Cosimo in our National Gallery, who recaptured Volterra from Pope Clement VII in 1529; Giovanni delle Bande Nere (1500-1527), father of Cosimo I, and a great fighting man; Piero Capponi, who died in 1496, and delivered Florence from Charles VIII in 1494, by threatening to ring the city bells; and Farinata degli Uberti, an earlier soldier, who died in 1264 and is in the "Divina Commedia" as a hero. It was he who repulsed the Ghibelline suggestion that Florence should be destroyed and the inhabitants emigrate to Empoli. Working back towards the Loggia de' Lanzi we find less-known names: Pietro Antonio Michele (1679-1737), the botanist; Francesco Redi (1626-1697), a poet and a man of science; Paolo Mascagni (1732-1815), the anatomist; Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603), the philosopher; S. Antonio (died 1461), Prior of the Convent of S. Marco and Archbishop of Florence; Francesco Accorso (1182-1229), the jurist; Guido Aretino (eleventh century), musician; and Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1572), the goldsmith and sculptor. The most notable omissions are Arnolfo and Brunelleschi (but these are, as we have seen, on the façade of the Palazzo de' Canonici, opposite the south side of the cathedral), Ghiberti, Fra Angelico, and Savonarola. Personally I should like to have still others here, among them Giorgio Vasari, in recognition of his enthusiastic and entertaining biographies of the Florentine artists, to say nothing of the circumstance that he designed this building. Before we enter any Florentine gallery let me say that there is only one free day and that the crowded Sabbath. Admittance to nearly all is a lira. Moreover, there is no re-admission. The charge strikes English visitors, accustomed to the open portals of their own museums and galleries, as an outrage, and it explains also the little interest in their treasures which most Florentines display, for being essentially a frugal people they have seldom seen them. Visitors who can satisfy the authorities that they are desirous of studying the works of art with a serious purpose can obtain free passes; but only after certain preliminaries, which include a seance with a photographer to satisfy the doorkeeper, by comparing the real and counterfeit physiognomies, that no illicit transference of the precious privilege has been made. Italy is, one knows, not a rich country; but the revenue which the gallery entrance-fees represent cannot reach any great volume, and such as it is it had much better, I should say, be raised by other means. Meanwhile, the foreigner chiefly pays it. What Giovanni de' Medici and Lorenzo de' Medici, and--even more--what Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici, who bequeathed to the State these possessions, would think could they see this feverish and implacable pursuit of pence, I have not imagination, or scorn, enough to set down. Infirm and languid visitors should get it clearly into their heads (1) that the tour of the Uffizi means a long walk and (2) that there is a lift. You find it in the umbrella room--at every Florentine gallery and museum is an official whose one object in life is to take away your umbrella--and it costs twopence-halfpenny and is worth far more. But walking downstairs is imperative, because otherwise one would miss Silenus and Bacchus, and a beautiful urgent Mars, in bronze, together with other fine sculptured things. One of the quaintest symbols of conservatism in Florence is the scissors of the officials who supply tickets of entrance. Apparently the perforated line is unknown in Italy; hence the ticket is divided from its counterfoil (which I assume goes to the authorities in order that they may check their horrid takings) by a huge pair of shears. These things are snip-snapping all over Italy, all day long. Having obtained your ticket you hand it to another official at a turn-stile, and at last you are free of cupidity and red tape and may breathe easily again and examine the products of the light-hearted, generous Renaissance in the right spirit. One should never forget, in any gallery of Florence, to look out of the windows. There is always a courtyard, a street, or a spire against the sky; and at the Uffizi there are the river and bridges and mountains. From the loggia of the Palazzo Vecchio I once saw a woman with some twenty or thirty city pigeons on the table of her little room, feeding them with maize. Except for glimpses of the river and the Via Guicciardini which it gives, I advise no one to walk through the passage uniting the Pitti and the Uffizi--unless of course bent on catching some of the ancient thrill when armed men ran swiftly from one palace to the other to quell a disturbance or repulse an assault. Particularly does this counsel apply to wet days, when all the windows are closed and there is no air. A certain interest attaches to the myriad portraits which line the walls, chiefly of the Medici and comparatively recent worthies; but one must have a glutton's passion either for paint or history to wish to examine these. As a matter of fact, only a lightning-speed tourist could possibly think of seeing both the Uffizi and the Pitti on the same day, and therefore the need of the passage disappears. It is hard worked only on Sundays. The drawings in the cases in the first long corridor are worth close study--covering as they do the whole range of great Italian art: from, say, Uccello to Carlo Dolci. But as they are from time to time changed it is useless to say more of them. There is also on the first landing of the staircase a room in which exhibitions of drawings of the Old Masters are held, and this is worth knowing about, not only because of the riches of the portfolios in the collection, but also because once you have passed the doors you are inside the only picture gallery in Florence for which no entrance fee is asked. How the authorities have come to overlook this additional source of revenue, I have no notion; but they have, and visitors should hasten to make the most of it for fear that a translation of these words of mine may wander into bad hands. To name the most wonderful picture in the Uffizi would be a very difficult task. At the Accademia, if a plebiscite were taken, there is little doubt but that Botticelli's "Primavera" would win. At the Pitti I personally would name Giorgione's "Concert" without any hesitation at all; but probably the public vote would go to Raphael's "Madonna della Sedia". But the Uffizi? Here we are amid such wealth of masterpieces, and yet when one comes to pass them in review in memory none stands out as those other two I have named. Perhaps Botticelli would win again, with his "Birth of Venus". Were the Leonardo finished ... but it is only a sketch. Luca Signorelli's wild flowers in No. 74 seem to abide with me as vividly and graciously as anything; but they are but a detail and it is a very personal predilection. Perhaps the great exotic work painted far away in Belgium--the Van der Goes triptych--is the most memorable; but to choose an alien canvas is to break the rules of the game. Is it perhaps the unfinished Leonardo after all? If not, and not the Botticelli, it is beyond question that lovely adoring Madonna, so gentle and sweet, against the purest and bluest of Tuscan skies, which is attributed to Filippino Lippi: No. 1354. CHAPTER IX The Uffizi II: The First Six Rooms Lorenzo Monaco--Fra Angelico--Mariotto Albertinelli turns innkeeper--The Venetian rooms--Giorgione's death--Titian--Mantegna uniting north and south--Giovanni Bellini--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Michelangelo--Luca Signorelli--Wild flowers--Leonardo da Vinci--Paolo Uccello. The first and second rooms are Venetian; but I am inclined to think that it is better to take the second door on the left--the first Tuscan salon--and walking straight across it come at once to the Salon of Lorenzo Monaco and the primitives. For the earliest good pictures are here. Here especially one should remember that the pictures were painted never for a gallery but for churches. Lorenzo Monaco (Lawrence the Monk, 1370-c. 1425), who gives his name to this room, was a monk of the Camaldolese order in the Monastery of the Angeli, and was a little earlier than Fra Angelico (the Angelic Brother), the more famous painting monk, whose dates are 1387-1455. Lorenzo was influenced by Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto's godson, friend, pupil, and assistant. His greatest work is this large Uffizi altar-piece--he painted nothing but altar-pieces--depicting the Coronation of the Virgin: a great gay scene of splendour, containing pretty angels who must have been the delight of children in church. The predella--and here let me advise the visitor never to overlook the predellas, where the artist often throws off formality and allows his more natural feelings to have play, almost as though he painted the picture for others and the predella for himself--is peculiarly interesting. Look, at the left, at the death of an old Saint attended by monks and nuns, whose grief is profound. One other good Lorenzo is here, an "Adoration of the Magi," No. 39, a little out of drawing but full of life. But for most people the glory of the room is not Lorenzo the Monk, but Brother Giovanni of Fiesole, known ever more as Beato, or Fra, Angelico. Of that most adoring and most adorable of painters I say much in the chapter on the Accademia, where he is very fully represented, and it might perhaps be well to turn to those pages (227-230) and read here, on our first sight of his genius, what is said. Two Angelicos are in this room--the great triptych, opposite the chief Lorenzo, and the "Crowning of the Virgin," on an easel. The triptych is as much copied as any picture in the gallery, not, however, for its principal figures, but for the border of twelve angels round the centre panel. Angelico's benignancy and sweetness are here, but it is not the equal of the "Coronation," which is a blaze of pious fervour and glory. The group of saints on the right is very charming; but we are to be more pleased by this radiant hand when we reach the Accademia. Already, however, we have learned his love of blue. Another altar-piece with a subtle quality of its own is the early Annunciation by Simone Martini of Siena (1285-1344) and Lippo Memmi, his brother (d. 1357), in which the angel speaks his golden words across the picture through a vase of lilies, and the Virgin receives them shrinkingly. It is all very primitive, but it has great attraction, and it is interesting to think that the picture must be getting on for six hundred years of age. This Simone was a pupil of Giotto and the painter of a portrait of Petrarch's Laura, now preserved in the Laurentian library, which earned him two sonnets of eulogy. It is also two Sienese painters who have made the gayest thing in this room, the predella, No. 1304, by Neroccio di Siena (1447-1500) and Francesco di Giorgio di Siena (1439-1502), containing scenes in the life of S. Benedetto. Neroccio did the landscape and figures; the other the architecture, and very fine it is. Another delightful predella is that by Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1498), Fra Angelico's pupil, whom we have seen at the Riccardi palace. Gozzoli's predella is No. 1302. Finally, look at No. 64, which shows how prettily certain imitators of Fra Angelico could paint. After the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco let us enter the first Tuscan room. The draughtsmanship of the great Last Judgment fresco by Fra Bartolommeo (1475-1517) and Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515) is very fine. It is now a ruin, but enough remains to show that it must have been impressive. These collaborators, although intimate friends, ultimately went different ways, for Fra Bartolommeo came under the influence of Savonarola, burned his nude drawings, and entered the Convent of S. Marco; whereas Albertinelli, who was a convivial follower of Venus, tiring of art and even more of art jargon, took an inn outside the S. Gallo gate and a tavern on the Ponte Vecchio, remarking that he had found a way of life that needed no knowledge of muscles, foreshortening, or perspective, and better still, was without critics. Among his pupils was Franciabigio, whose lovely Madonna of the Well we are coming to in the Tribuna. Chief among the other pictures are two by the delightful Alessio Baldovinetti, the master of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Nos. 60 and 56; and a large early altar-piece by the brothers Orcagna, painted in 1367 for S. Maria Nuova, now the principal hospital of Florence and once the home of many beautiful pictures. This work is rather dingy now, but it is interesting as coming in part from the hand that designed the tabernacle in Or San Michele and the Loggia de' Lanzi. Another less-known painter represented here is Francesco Granacci (1469-1543), the author of Nos. 1541 and 1280, both rich and warm and pleasing. Granacci was a fellow-pupil of Michelangelo both in Lorenzo de' Medici's garden and in Ghirlandaio's workshop, and the bosom friend of that great man all his life. Like Piero di Cosimo, Granacci was a great hand at pageantry, and Lorenzo de' Medici kept him busy. He was not dependent upon art for his living, but painted for love of it, and Vasari makes him a very agreeable man. Here too is Gio. Antonio Sogliani (1492-1544), also a rare painter, with a finely coloured and finely drawn "Disputa," No. 63. This painter seems to have had the same devotion to his master, Lorenzo di Credi, that di Credi had for his master, Verrocchio. Vasari calls Sogliani a worthy religious man who minded his own affairs--a good epitaph. His work is rarely met with in Florence, but he has a large fresco at S. Marco. Lorenzo di Credi (1459-1537) himself has two pretty circular paintings here, of which No. 1528 is particularly sweet: "The Virgin and Child with St. John and Angels," all comfortable and happy in a Tuscan meadow; while on an easel is another circular picture, by Pacchiarotto (1477-1535). This has good colour and twilight beauty, but it does not touch one and is not too felicitously composed. Over the door to the Venetian room is a Cosimo Rosselli with a prettily affectionate Madonna and Child. From this miscellaneous Tuscan room we pass to the two rooms which contain the Venetian pictures, of which I shall say less than might perhaps be expected, not because I do not intensely admire them but because I feel that the chief space in a Florentine book should be given to Florentine or Tuscan things. As a matter of fact, I find myself when in the Uffizi continually drawn to revisit these walls. The chief treasures are the Titians, the Giorgiones, the Mantegnas, the Carpaccio, and the Bellini allegory. These alone would make the Uffizi a Mecca of connoisseurs. Giorgione is to be found in his richest perfection at the Pitti, in his one unforgettable work that is preserved there, but here he is wonderful too, with his Cavalier of Malta, black and golden, and the two rich scenes, Nos. 621 and 630, nominally from Scripture, but really from romantic Italy. To me these three pictures are the jewels of the Venetian collection. To describe them is impossible: enough to say that some glowing genius produced them; and whatever the experts admit, personally I prefer to consider that genius Giorgione. Giorgione, who was born in 1477 and died young--at thirty-three--was, like Titian, the pupil of Bellini, but was greatly influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Later he became Titian's master. He was passionately devoted to music and to ladies, and it was indeed from a lady that he had his early death, for he continued to kiss her after she had taken the plague. (No bad way to die, either; for to be in the power of an emotion that sways one to such foolishness is surely better than to live the lukewarm calculating lives of most of us.) Giorgione's claim to distinction is that not only was he a glorious colourist and master of light and shade, but may be said to have invented small genre pictures that could be earned about and hung in this or that room at pleasure--such pictures as many of the best Dutch painters were to bend their genius to almost exclusively--his favourite subjects being music parties and picnics. These Moses and Solomon pictures in the Uffizi are of course only a pretext for gloriously coloured arrangements of people with rich scenic backgrounds. No.621 is the finer. The way in which the baby is being held in the other indicates how little Giorgione thought of verisimilitude. The colour was the thing. After the Giorgiones the Titians, chief of which is No.633, "The Madonna and Child with S. John and S. Anthony," sometimes called the "Madonna of the Roses," a work which throws a pallor over all Tuscan pictures; No.626, the golden Flora, who glows more gloriously every moment (whom we shall see again, at the Pitti, as the Magdalen); the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Nos.605 and 599, the Duchess set at a window with what looks so curiously like a deep blue Surrey landscape through it and a village spire in the midst; and 618, an unfinished Madonna and Child in which the Master's methods can be followed. The Child, completed save for the final bath of light, is a miracle of draughtsmanship. The triptych by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) is of inexhaustible interest, for here, as ever, Mantegna is full of thought and purpose. The left panel represents the Ascension, Christ being borne upwards by eleven cherubim in a solid cloud; the right panel--by far the best, I think--shows the Circumcision, where the painter has set himself various difficulties of architecture and goldsmith's work for the pleasure of overcoming them, every detail being painted with Dutch minuteness and yet leaving the picture big; while the middle panel, which is concave, depicts an Adoration of the Magi that will bear much study. The whole effect is very northern: not much less so than our own new National Gallery Mabuse. Mantegna also has a charming Madonna and Child, No. 1025, with pleasing pastoral and stone-quarrying activities in the distance. On the right of the triptych is the so-called Carpaccio (1450-1519), a confused but glorious melee of youths and halberds, reds and yellows and browns, very modern and splendid and totally unlike anything else in the whole gallery. Uccello may possibly be recalled, but only for subject. Finally there is Giovanni Bellini (1426-1516), master of Titian and Giorgione, with his "Sacra Conversazione," No. 631, which means I know not what but has a haunting quality. Later we shall see a picture by Michelangelo which has been accused of blending Christianity and paganism; but Bellini's sole purpose was to do this. We have children from a Bacchic vase and the crowned Virgin; two naked saints and a Venetian lady; and a centaur watching a hermit. The foreground is a mosaic terrace; the background is rocks and water. It is all bizarre and very curious and memorable and quite unique. For the rest, I should mention two charming Guardis; a rich little Canaletto; a nice scene of sheep by Jacopo Bassano; the portrait of an unknown young man by an unknown painter, No. 1157; and Tintoretto's daring "Abraham and Isaac". The other Venetian room is almost wholly devoted to portraits, chief among them being a red-headed Tintoretto burning furiously, No. 613, and Titian's sly and sinister Caterina Cornaro in her gorgeous dress, No. 648; Piombo's "L'Uomo Ammalato"; Tintoretto's Jacopo Sansovino, the sculptor, the grave old man holding his calipers who made that wonderful Greek Bacchus at the Bargello; Schiavone's ripe, bearded "Ignoto," No. 649, and, perhaps above all, the Moroni, No. 386, black against grey. There is also Paolo Veronese's "Holy Family with S. Catherine," superbly masterly and golden but suggesting the Rialto rather than Nazareth. One picture gives the next room, the Sala di Michelangelo, its name; but entering from the Venetian room we come first on the right to a very well-known Lippo Lippi, copied in every picture shop in Florence: No. 1307, a Madonna and two Children. Few pictures are so beset by delighted observers, but apart from the perfection of it as an early painting, leaving nothing to later dexterity, its appeal to me is weak. The Madonna (whose head-dress, as so often in Lippo Lippi, foreshadows Botticelli) and the landscape equally delight; the children almost repel, and the decorative furniture in the corner quite repels. The picture is interesting also for its colour, which is unlike anything else in the gallery, the green of the Madonna's dress being especially lovely and distinguished, and vulgarizing the Ghirlandaio--No. 1297--which hangs next. This picture is far too hot throughout, and would indeed be almost displeasing but for the irradiation of the Virgin's face. The other Ghirlandaio--No. 1295--in this room is far finer and sweeter; but at the Accademia and the Badia we are to see him at his best in this class of work. None the less, No. 1295 is a charming thing, and the little Mother and her happy Child, whose big toe is being so reverently adored by the ancient mage, are very near real simple life. This artist, we shall see, always paints healthy, honest babies. The seaport in the distance is charming too. Ghirlandaio's place in this room is interesting on account of his relation to Michelangelo as first instructor; but by the time that the great master's "Holy Family," hanging here, was painted all traces of Ghirlandaio's influence had disappeared, and if any forerunner is noticeable it is Luca Signorelli. But we must first glance at the pretty little Lorenzo di Credi, No. 1160, the Annunciation, an artificial work full of nice thoughts and touches, with the prettiest little blue Virgin imaginable, a heavenly landscape, and a predella in monochrome, in one scene of which Eve rises from the side of the sleeping Adam with extraordinary realism. The announcing Gabriel is deferential but positive; Mary is questioning but not wholly surprised. In any collection of Annunciations this picture would find a prominent place. The "Holy Family" of Michelangelo--No. 1139--is remarkable for more than one reason. It is, to begin with, the only finished easel picture that exists from his brush. It is also his one work in oils, for he afterwards despised that medium as being fit "only for children". The frame is contemporary and was made for it, the whole being commissioned by Angelo Doni, a wealthy connoisseur whose portrait by Raphael we shall see in the Pitti, and who, according to Vasari, did his best to get it cheaper than his bargain, and had in the end to pay dearer. The period of the picture is about 1503, while the great David was in progress, when the painter was twenty-eight. That it is masterly and superb there can be no doubt, but, like so much of Michelangelo's work, it suffers from its author's greatness. There is an austerity of power here that ill consorts with the tender domesticity of the scene, and the Child is a young Hercules. The nude figures in the background introduce an alien element and suggest the conflict between Christianity and paganism, the new religion and the old: in short, the Twilight of the Gods. Whether Michelangelo intended this we shall not know; but there it is. The prevailing impression left by the picture is immense power and virtuosity and no religion. In the beautiful Luca Signorelli--No.74--next it, we find at once a curious similarity and difference. The Madonna and Child only are in the foreground, a not too radiant but very tender couple; in the background are male figures nearly nude: not quite, as Michelangelo made them, and suggesting no discord as in his picture. Luca was born in 1441, and was thus thirty-four years older than Michelangelo. This picture is perhaps that one presented by Luca to Lorenzo de' Medici, of which Vasari tells, and if so it was probably on a wall in the Medici palace when Michelangelo as a boy was taught with Lorenzo's sons. Luca's sweetness was alien to Michelangelo, but not his melancholy or his sense of composition; while Luca's devotion to the human form as the unit of expression was in Michelangelo carried out to its highest power. Vasari, who was a relative of Luca's and a pupil of Michelangelo's, says that his master had the greatest admiration for Luca's genius. Luca Signorelli was born at Cortona, and was instructed by Piero della Francesca, whose one Uffizi painting is in a later room. His chief work is at Cortona, at Rome (in the Sixtine Chapel), and at Orvieto. His fame was sufficient in Florence in 1491 for him to be made one of the judges of the designs for the façade of the Duomo. Luca lived to a great age, not dying till 1524, and was much beloved. He was magnificent in his habits and loved fine clothes, was very kindly and helpful in disposition, and the influence of his naturalness and sincerity upon art was great. One very pretty sad story is told of him, to the effect that when his son, whom he had dearly loved, was killed at Cortona, he caused the body to be stripped, and painted it with the utmost exactitude, that through his own handiwork he might be able to contemplate that treasure of which fate had robbed him. Perhaps the most beautiful or at any rate the most idiosyncratic thing in the picture before us is its lovely profusion of wayside flowers. These come out but poorly in the photograph, but in the painting they are exquisite both in form and in detail. Luca painted them as if he loved them. (There is a hint of the same thoughtful care in the flowers in No. 1133, by Luca, in our National Gallery; but these at Florence are the best.) No. 74 is in tempera: the next, also by Luca, No.1291, is in oil, a "Holy Family," a work at once powerful, rich, and sweet. Here, again, we may trace an influence on Michelangelo, for the child is shown deprecating a book which his mother is displaying, while in the beautiful marble tondo of the "Madonna and Child" by Michelangelo, which we are soon to see in the Bargello, a reading lesson is in progress, and the child wearying of it. We find Luca again in the next large picture--No.1547--a Crucifixion, with various Saints, done in collaboration with Perugino. The design suggests Luca rather than his companion, and the woman at the foot of the cross is surely the type of which he was so fond. The drawing of Christ is masterly and all too sombre for Perugino. Finally, there is a Luca predella, No. 1298, representing the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ (in which Joseph is older almost than in any version), and the Adoration of the Magi, all notable for freedom and richness. Note the realism and charm and the costume of the two pages of the Magi. And now we come to what is perhaps the most lovely picture in the whole gallery, judged purely as colour and sweetness and design--No.1549--a "Madonna Adoring," with Filippino Lippi's name and an interrogation mark beneath it. Who painted it if not Filippino? That is the question; but into such problems, which confront one at every turn in Florence, I am neither qualified nor anxious to enter. When doctors disagree any one may decide before me. The thought, moreover, that always occurs in the presence of these good debatable pictures, is that any doubt as to their origin merely enriches this already over-rich period, since some one had to paint them. Simon not pure becomes hardly less remarkable than Simon pure. If only the Baby were more pleasing, this would be perhaps the most delightful picture in the world: as it is, its blues alone lift it to the heavens of delectableness. By an unusual stroke of fortune a crack in the paint where the panels join has made a star in the tender blue sky. The Tuscan landscape is very still and beautiful; the flowers, although conventional and not accurate like Luca's, are as pretty as can be; the one unsatisfying element is the Baby, who is a little clumsy and a little in pain, but diffuses radiance none the less. And the Mother--the Mother is all perfection and winsomeness. Her face and hands are exquisite, and the Tuscan twilight behind her is so lovely. I have given a reproduction, but colour is essential. The remaining three pictures in the room are a Bastiano and a Pollaiolo, which are rather for the student than for the wanderer, and a charming Ignoto, No. 75, which I like immensely. But Ignoto nearly always paints well. In the Sala di Leonardo are two pictures which bear the name of this most fascinating of all the painters of the world. One is the Annunciation, No. 1288, upon the authenticity of which much has been said and written, and the other an unfinished Adoration of the Magi which cannot be questioned by anyone. The probabilities are that the Annunciation is an early work and that the ascription is accurate: at Oxford is a drawing known to be Leonardo's that is almost certainly a study for a detail of this work, while among the Leonardo drawings in the His de la Salle collection at the Louvre is something very like a first sketch of the whole. Certainly one can think of no one else who could have given the picture its quality, which increases in richness with every visit to the gallery; but the workshop of Verrocchio, where Leonardo worked, together with Lorenzo di Credi and Perugino, with Andrea of the True Eye over all, no doubt put forth wonderful things. The Annunciation is unique in the collection, both in colour and character: nothing in the Uffizi so deepens. There are no cypresses like these in any other picture, no finer drawing than that of Mary's hands. Luca's flowers are better, in the adjoining room; one is not too happy about the pedestal of the reading-desk; and there are Virgins whom we can like more; but as a whole it is perhaps the most fascinating picture of all, for it has the Leonardo darkness as well as light. Of Leonardo I could write for ever, but this book is not the place; for though he was a Florentine, Florence has very little of his work: these pictures only, and one of these only for certain, together with an angel in a work by Verrocchio at the Accademia which we shall see, and possibly a sculptured figure over the north door of the Baptistery. Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and Francis I of France, lured him away, to the eternal loss of his own city. It is Milan and Paris that are richest in his work, and after that London, which has at South Kensington a sculptured relief by him as well as a painting at the National Gallery, a cartoon at Burlington House, and the British Museum drawings. His other work here--No. 1252--in the grave brown frame, was to have been Leonardo's greatest picture in oil, so Vasari says: larger, in fact, than any known picture at that time. Being very indistinct, it is, curiously enough, best as the light begins to fail and the beautiful wistful faces emerge from the gloom. In their presence one recalls Leonardo's remark in one of his notebooks that faces are most interesting beneath a troubled sky. "You should make your portrait," he adds, "at the hour of the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light then is perfect." In the background one can discern the prancing horses of the Magi's suite; a staircase with figures ascending and descending; the rocks and trees of Tuscany; and looking at it one cannot but ponder upon the fatality which seems to have pursued this divine and magical genius, ordaining that almost everything that he put forth should be either destroyed or unfinished: his work in the Castello at Milan, which might otherwise be an eighth wonder of the world, perished; his "Last Supper" at Milan perishing; his colossal equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza broken to pieces; his sculpture lost; his Palazzo Vecchio battle cartoon perished; this picture only a sketch. Even after long years the evil fate still persists, for in 1911 his "Gioconda" was stolen from the Louvre by madman or knave. Among the other pictures in this room is the rather hot "Adoration of the Magi," by Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507), over the Leonardo "Annunciation," a glowing scene of colour and animation: this Cosimo being the Cosimo from whom Piero di Cosimo took his name, and an associate of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Luca Signorelli on the Sixtine Chapel frescoes. On the left wall is Uccello's battle piece, No. 52, very like that in our National Gallery: rich and glorious as decoration, but quite bearing out Vasari's statement that Uccello could not draw horses. Uccello was a most laborious student of animal life and so absorbed in the mysteries of perspective that he preferred them to bed; but he does not seem to have been able to unite them. He was a perpetual butt of Donatello. It is told of him that having a commission to paint a fresco for the Mercato Vecchio he kept the progress of the work a secret and allowed no one to see it. At last, when it was finished, he drew aside the sheet for Donatello, who was buying fruit, to admire. "Ah, Paolo," said the sculptor reproachfully, "now that you ought to be covering it up, you uncover it." There remain a superb nude study of Venus by Lorenzo di Credi, No. 3452--one of the pictures which escaped Savonarola's bonfire of vanities, and No. 1305, a Virgin and Child with various Saints by Domenico Veneziano (1400-1461), who taught Gentile da Fabriano, the teacher of Jacopo Bellini. This picture is a complete contrast to the Uccello: for that is all tapestry, richness, and belligerence, and this is so pale and gentle, with its lovely light green, a rare colour in this gallery. CHAPTER X The Uffizi III: Botticelli A painter apart--Sandro Filipepi--Artists' names--Piero de' Medici--The "Adoration of the Magi"--The "Judith" pictures--Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo and Giuliano's mother--The Tournaments--The "Birth of Venus" and the "Primavera"--Simonetta--A new star--Sacred pictures--Savonarola and "The Calumny"--The National Gallery--Botticelli's old age and death. We come next to the Sala di Botticelli, and such is the position held by this painter in the affection of visitors to Florence, and such the wealth of works from his hand that the Uffizi possesses, that I feel that a single chapter may well be devoted to his genius, more particularly as many of his pictures were so closely associated with Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo de' Medici. We see Botticelli here at his most varied. The Accademia also is very rich in his work, having above all the "Primavera," and in this chapter I shall glance at the Accademia pictures too, returning to them when we reach that gallery in due course. Among the great Florentine masters Botticelli stands apart by reason not only of the sensitive wistful delicacy of his work, but for the profound interest of his personality. He is not essentially more beautiful than his friend Filippino Lippi or--occasionally--than Fra Lippo Lippi his master; but he is always deeper. One feels that he too felt the emotion that his characters display; he did not merely paint, he thought and suffered. Hence his work is dramatic. Again Botticelli had far wider sympathies than most of his contemporaries. He was a friend of the Medici, a neo-Platonist, a student of theology with the poet Palmieri, an illustrator of Dante, and a devoted follower of Savonarola. Of the part that women played in his life we know nothing: in fact we know less of him intimately than of almost any of the great painters; but this we may guess, that he was never a happy man. His work falls naturally into divisions corresponding to his early devotion to Piero de' Medici and his wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni, in whose house for a while he lived; to his interest in their sons Lorenzo and Giuliano; and finally to his belief in Savonarola. Sublime he never is; comforting he never is; but he is everything else. One can never forget in his presence the tragedy that attends the too earnest seeker after beauty: not "all is vanity" does Botticelli say, but "all is transitory". Botticelli, as we now call him, was the son of Mariano Filipepi and was born in Florence in 1447. According to one account he was called Sandro di Botticelli because he was apprenticed to a goldsmith of that name; according to another his brother Antonio, a goldsmith, was known as Botticello (which means a little barrel), and Sandro being with him was called Sandro di Botticello. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that the name of Filipepi is rarely used. And here a word as to the capriciousness of the nomenclature of artists. We know some by their Christian names; some by their surnames; some by their nicknames; some by the names of their towns, and some by the names of their masters. Tommaso Bigordi, a goldsmith, was so clever in designing a pretty garland for women's hair that he was called Ghirlandaio, the garland-maker, and his painter son Domenico is therefore known for ever as Uomenico Ghirlandaio. Paolo Doni, a painter of battle scenes, was so fond of birds that he was known as Uccello (a bird) and now has no other name; Pietro Vannucci coming from Perugia was called Perugino; Agnolo di Francesco di Migliore happened to be a tailor with a genius of a son, Andrea; that genius is therefore Andrea of the Tailor--del Sarto--for all time. And so forth. To return to Botticelli. In 1447, when he was born, Fra Angelico was sixty; and Masaccio had been dead for some years. At the age of twelve the boy was placed with Fra Lippo Lippi, then a man of a little more than fifty, to learn painting. That Lippo was his master one may see continually, but particularly by comparison of his headdresses with almost any of Botticelli's. Both were minutely careful in this detail. But where Lippo was beautifully obvious, Sandro was beautifully analytical: he was also, as I have said, much more interesting and dramatic. Botticelli's best patron was Piero de' Medici, who took him into his house, much as his son Lorenzo was to take Michelangelo into his, and made him one of the family. For Piero, Botticelli always had affection and respect, and when he painted his "Fortitude" as one of the Pollaiuoli's series of the Virtues for the Mercatanzia (of which several are in this gallery), he made the figure symbolize Piero's life and character--or so it is possible, if one wishes to believe. But it should be understood that almost nothing is known about Botticelli and the origin of his pictures. At Piero's request Botticelli painted the "Adoration of the Magi" (No. 1286) which was to hang in S. Maria Novella as an offering of gratitude for Piero's escape from the conspiracy of Luca Pitti in 1466. Piero had but just succeeded to Cosimo when Pitti, considering him merely an invalid, struck his blow. By virtue largely of the young Lorenzo's address the attack miscarried: hence the presence of Lorenzo in the picture, on the extreme left, with a sword. Piero himself in scarlet kneels in the middle; Giuliano, his second son, doomed to an early death by assassination, is kneeling on his right. The picture is not only a sacred painting but (like the Gozzoli fresco at the Riccardi palace) an exaltation of the Medici family. The dead Cosimo is at the Child's feet; the dead Giovanni, Piero's brother, stands close to the kneeling Giuliano. Among the other persons represented are collateral Medici and certain of their friends. It is by some accepted that the figure in yellow, on the extreme right, looking out of this picture, is Botticelli himself. But for a portrait of the painter of more authenticity we must go to the Carmine, where, in the Brancacci chapel, we shall see a fresco by Botticelli's friend Filippino Lippi representing the Crucifixion of S. Peter, in which our painter is depicted on the right, looking on at the scene--a rather coarse heavy face, with a large mouth and long hair. He wears a purple cap and red cloak. Vasari tells us that Botticelli, although so profoundly thoughtful and melancholy in his work, was extravagant, pleasure loving, and given to practical jokes. Part at least of this might be gathered from observation of Filippino Lippi's portrait of him. According to Vasari it was No. 1286 which brought Botticelli his invitation to Rome from Sixtus IV to decorate the Sixtine Chapel. But that was several years later and much was to happen in the interval. The two little "Judith" pictures (Nos. 1156 and 1158) were painted for Piero de' Medici and had their place in the Medici palace. In 1494, when Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici was banished from Florence and the palace looted, they were stolen and lost sight of; but during the reign of Francis I they reappeared and were presented to his wife Bianca Capella and once more placed with the Medici treasures. No. 1156, the Judith walking springily along, sword in hand, having slain the tyrant, is one of the masterpieces of paint. Everything about it is radiant, superb, and unforgettable. One other picture which the young painter made for his patron--or in this case his patroness, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Piero's wife--is the "Madonna of the Magnificat," No. 1267, with its beautiful children and sweet Madonna, its lovely landscape but not too attractive Child. The two boys are Lorenzo, on the left, and Giuliano, in yellow. One of their sisters leans over them. Here the boys are perhaps, in Botticelli's way, typified rather than portrayed. Although this picture came so early in his career Botticelli never excelled its richness, beauty, and depth of feeling, nor its liquid delicacy of treatment. Lucrezia Tornabuoni, for whom he painted it, was a very remarkable woman, not only a good mother to her children and a good wife to Piero, but a poet and exemplar. She survived Piero by thirteen years and her son Giuliano by five. Botticelli painted her portrait, which is now in Berlin. These pictures are the principal work of Botticelli's first period, which coincides with the five years of Piero's rule and the period of mourning for him. He next appears in what many of his admirers find his most fascinating mood, as a joyous allegorist, the picture of Venus rising from the sea in this room, the "Primavera" which we shall see at the Accademia, and the "Mars and Venus" in our National Gallery, belonging to this epoch. But in order to understand them we must again go to history. Piero was succeeded in 1469 by his son Lorenzo the Magnificent, who continued his father's friendship for the young painter, now twenty-two years of age. In 1474 Lorenzo devised for his brother Giuliano a tournament in the Piazza of S. Croce very like that which Piero had given for Lorenzo on the occasion of his betrothal in 1469; and Botticelli was commissioned by Lorenzo to make pictures commemorating the event. Verrocchio again helped with the costumes; Lucrezia Donati again was Queen of the Tournament; but the Queen of Beauty was the sixteen-year-old bride of Marco Vespucci--the lovely Simonetta Cattaneo, a lady greatly beloved by all and a close friend both of Giuliano and Lorenzo. The praises of Lorenzo's tournament had been sung by Luca Pulci: Giuliano's were sung by Poliziano, under the title "La Giostra di Giuliano de' Medici," and it is this poem which Botticelli may be said to have illustrated, for both poet and artist employ the same imagery. Thus Poliziano, or Politian (of whom we shall hear more in the chapter on S. Marco) compares Simonetta to Venus, and in stanzas 100 and 101 speaks of her birth, describing her blown to earth over the sea by the breath of the Zephyrs, and welcomed there by the Hours, one of whom offers her a robe. This, Botticelli translates into exquisite tempera with a wealth of pretty thoughts. The cornflowers and daisies on the Hour's dress are alone a perennial joy. Simonetta as Venus has some of the wistfulness of the Madonnas; and not without reason does Botticelli give her this expression, for her days were very short. In the "Primavera," which we are to see at the Accademia, but which must be described here, we find Simonetta again but we do not see her first. We see first that slender upright commanding figure, all flowers and youth and conquest, in her lovely floral dress, advancing over the grass like thistle-down. Never before in painting had anything been done at once so distinguished and joyous and pagan as this. For a kindred emotion one had to go to Greek sculpture, but Botticelli, while his grace and joy are Hellenic, was intensely modern too: the problems of the Renaissance, the tragedy of Christianity, equally cloud his brow. The symbolism of the "Primavera" is interesting. Glorious Spring is returning to earth--in the presence of Venus--once more to make all glad, and with her her attendants to dance and sing, and the Zephyrs to bring the soft breezes; and by Spring Botticelli meant the reign of Lorenzo, whose tournament motto was "Le temps revient". Simonetta is again the central figure, and never did Botticelli paint more exquisitely than here. Her bosom is the prettiest in Florence; the lining of her robe over her right arm has such green and blue and gold as never were seen elsewhere; her golden sandals are delicate as gossamer. Over her head a little cupid hovers, directing his arrow at Mercury, on the extreme left, beside the three Graces. In Mercury, who is touching the trees with his caduceus and bidding them burgeon, some see Giuliano de' Medici, who was not yet betrothed. But when the picture was painted both Giuliano and Simonetta were dead: Simonetta first, of consumption, in 1476, and Giuliano, by stabbing in 1478. Lorenzo, who was at Pisa during Simonetta's illness, detailed his own physician for her care. On hearing of her death he walked out into the night and noticed for the first time a brilliant star. "See," he said, "either the soul of that most gentle lady hath been transferred into that new star or else hath it been joined together thereunto." Of Giuliano's end we have read in Chapter II, and it was Botticelli, whose destinies were so closely bound up with the Medici, who was commissioned to paint portraits of the murderous Pazzi to be displayed outside the Palazzo Vecchio. A third picture in what may be called the tournament period is found by some in the "Venus and Mars," No. 915, in our National Gallery. Here Giuliano would be Mars, and Venus either one woman in particular whom Florence wished him to marry, or all women, typified by one, trying to lure him from other pre-occupations, such as hunting. To make her Simonetta is to go too far; for she is not like the Simonetta of the other pictures, and Simonetta was but recently married and a very model of fair repute. In No. 916 in the National Gallery is a "Venus with Cupids" (which might be by Botticelli and might be by that interesting painter of whom Mr. Berenson has written so attractively as Amico di Sandro), in which Politian's description of Venus, in his poem, is again closely followed. After the tournament pictures we come in Botticelli's career to the Sixtine Chapel frescoes, and on his return to Florence to other frescoes, including that lovely one at the Villa Lemmi (then the Villa Tornabuoni) which is now on the staircase of the Louvre. These are followed by at least two more Medici pictures--the portrait of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, in this room, No. 1154, the sad-faced youth with the medal; and the "Pallas and the Centaur" at the Pitti, an historical record of Lorenzo's success as a diplomatist when he went to Naples in 1480. The latter part of Botticelli's life was spent under the influence of Savonarola and in despair at the wickedness of the world and its treatment of that prophet. His pictures became wholly religious, but it was religion without joy. Never capable of disguising the sorrow that underlies all human happiness--or, as I think of it in looking at his work, the sense of transience--Botticelli, as age came upon him, was more than ever depressed. One has the feeling that he was persuaded that only through devotion and self-negation could peace of mind be gained, and yet for himself could find none. The sceptic was too strong in him. Savonarola's eloquence could not make him serene, however much he may have come beneath its spell. It but served to increase his melancholy. Hence these wistful despondent Madonnas, all so conscious of the tragedy before their Child; hence these troubled angels and shadowed saints. Savonarola was hanged and burned in 1498, and Botticelli paid a last tribute to his friend in the picture in this room called "The Calumny". Under the pretence of merely illustrating a passage in Lucian, who was one of his favourite authors, Botticelli has represented the campaign against the great reformer. The hall represents Florence; the judge (with the ears of an ass) the Signoria and the Pope. Into these ears Ignorance and Suspicion are whispering. Calumny, with Envy at her side and tended by Fraud and Deception, holds a torch in one hand and with the other drags her victim, who personifies (but with no attempt at a likeness) Savonarola. Behind are the figures of Remorse, cloaked and miserable, and Truth, naked and unafraid. The statues in the niches ironically represent abstract virtues. Everything in the decoration of the palace points to enlightenment and content; and beyond is the calmest and greenest of seas. One more picture was Botticelli to paint, and this also was to the glory of Savonarola. By good fortune it belongs to the English people and is No. 1034 in the National Gallery. It has upon it a Greek inscription in the painter's own hand which runs in English as follows: "This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half-time after the time during the fulfilment of the eleventh of St. John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the devil for three years and a half. Afterwards he shall be confined, and we shall see him trodden down, as in this picture." The loosing of the devil was the three years and a half after Savonarola's execution on May 23rd, 1498, when Florence was mad with reaction from the severity of his discipline. S. John says, "I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy"; the painter makes three, Savonarola having had two comrades with him. The picture was intended to give heart to the followers of Savonarola and bring promise of ultimate triumph. After the death of Savonarola, Botticelli became both poor and infirm. He had saved no money and all his friends were dead--Piero de' Medici, Lorenzo, Giuliano, Lucrezia, Simonetta, Filippino Lippi, and Savonarola. He hobbled about on crutches for a while, a pensioner of the Medici family, and dying at the age of seventy-eight was buried in Ognissanti, but without a tombstone for fear of desecration by the enemies of Savonarola's adherents. Such is the outline of Botticelli's life. We will now look at such of the pictures in this room as have not been mentioned. Entering from the Sala di Leonardo, the first picture on the right is the "Birth of Venus". Then the very typical circular picture--a shape which has come to be intimately associated with this painter--No. 1289, "The Madonna of the Pomegranate," one of his most beautiful works, and possibly yet another designed for Lucrezia Tornabuoni, for the curl on the forehead of the boy to the left of the Madonna--who is more than usually troubled--is very like that for which Giuliano de' Medici was famous. This is a very lovely work, although its colour is a little depressed. Next is the most remarkable of the Piero de' Medici pictures, which I have already touched upon--No. 1286, "The Adoration of the Magi," as different from the Venus as could be: the Venus so cool and transparent, and this so hot and rich, with its haughty Florentines and sumptuous cloaks. Above it is No. 23, a less subtle group--the Madonna, the Child and angels--difficult to see. And then comes the beautiful "Magnificat," which we know to have been painted for Lucrezia Tornabuoni and which shall here introduce a passage from Pater: "For with Botticelli she too, although she holds in her hands the 'Desire of all nations,' is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the 'Ave,' and the 'Magnificat,' and the 'Gaude Maria,' and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her devotion, are eager to hold the ink-horn and to support the book. But the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled animals--gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats." The picture's frame is that which was made for it four hundred and fifty years ago: by whom, I cannot say, but it was the custom at that time for the painter himself to be responsible also for the frame. The glory of the end wall is the "Annunciation," reproduced in this book. The picture is a work that may perhaps not wholly please at first, the cause largely of the vermilion on the floor, but in the end conquers. The hands are among the most beautiful in existence, and the landscape, with its one tree and its fairy architecture, is a continual delight. Among "Annunciations," as among pictures, it stands very high. It has more of sophistication than most: the Virgin not only recognizes the honour, but the doom, which the painter himself foreshadows in the predella, where Christ is seen rising from the grave. None of Fra Angelico's simple radiance here, and none of Fra Lippo Lippi's glorified matter-of-fact. Here is tragedy. The painting of the Virgin's head-dress is again marvellous. Next the "Annunciation" on the left is, to my eyes, one of Botticelli's most attractive works: No. 1303, just the Madonna and Child again, in a niche, with roses climbing behind them: the Madonna one of his youngest, and more placid and simple than most, with more than a hint of the Verrocchio type in her face. To the "School of Botticelli" this is sometimes attributed: it may be rightly. Its pendant is another "Madonna and Child," No. 76, more like Lippo Lippi and very beautiful in its darker graver way. The other wall has the "Fortitude," the "Calumny," and the two little "Judith and Holofernes" pictures. Upon the "Fortitude," to which I have already alluded, it is well to look at Ruskin, who, however, was not aware that the artist intended any symbolic reference to the character and career of Piero de' Medici. The criticism is in "Mornings in Florence" and it is followed by some fine pages on the "Judith". The "Justice," "Prudence," and "Charity" of the Pollaiuolo brothers, belonging to the same series as the "Fortitude," are also here; but after the "Fortitude" one does not look at them. CHAPTER XI the Uffizi IV: Remaining Rooms S. Zenobius--Piero della Francesca--Federigo da Montefeltro--Melozzo da Forli--The Tribuna--Raphael--Re-arrangement--The gems--The self-painted portraits--A northern room--Hugo van der Goes-- Tommaso Portinari--The sympathetic Memling--Rubens riotous--Vittoria della Rovere--Baroccio--Honthorst--Giovanni the indiscreet--The Medusa--Medici miniatures--Hercules Seghers--The Sala di Niobe-- Beautiful antiques. Passing from the Sala di Botticelli through the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco and the first Tuscan rooms to the corridor, we come to the second Tuscan room, which is dominated by Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531), whose "Madonna and Child," with "S. Francis and S. John the Evangelist"--No. 112--is certainly the favourite picture here, as it is, in reproduction, in so many homes; but, apart from the Child, I like far better the "S. Giacomo"--No. 1254--so sympathetic and rich in colour, which is reproduced in this volume. Another good Andrea is No. 93--a soft and misty apparition of Christ to the Magdalen. The Sodoma (1477-1549) on the easel--"S. Sebastian," No. 1279--is very beautiful in its Leonardesque hues and romantic landscape, and the two Ridolfo Ghirlandaios (1483-1561) near it are interesting as representing, with much hard force, scenes in the story of S. Zenobius, of Florence, of whom we read in chapter II. In one he restores life to the dead child in the midst of a Florentine crowd; in the other his bier, passing the Baptistery, reanimates the dead tree. Giotto's tower and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio are to be seen on the left. A very different picture is the Cosimo Rosselli, No. 1280 his, a comely "Madonna and Saints," with a motherly thought in the treatment of the bodice. Among the other pictures is a naked sprawling scene of bodies and limbs by Cosimo I's favourite painter, Bronzino (1502-1572), called "The Saviour in Hell," and two nice Medici children from the same brush, which was kept busy both on the living and ancestral lineaments of that family; two Filippino Lippis, both fine if with a little too much colour for this painter: one--No. 1257--approaching the hotness of a Ghirlandaio carpet piece, but a great feat of crowded activity; the other, No. 1268, having a beautiful blue Madonna and a pretty little cherub with a red book. Piero di Cosimo is here, religious and not mythological; and here are a very straightforward and satisfying Mariotto Albertinelli--the "Virgin and S. Elizabeth," very like a Fra Bartolommeo; a very rich and beautiful "Deposition" by Botticini, one of Verrocchio's pupils, with a gay little predella underneath it, and a pretty "Holy Family" by Franciabigio. But Andrea remains the king of the walls. From this Sala a little room is gained which I advise all tired visitors to the Uffizi to make their harbour of refuge and recuperation; for it has only three or four pictures in it and three or four pieces of sculpture and some pleasant maps and tapestry on the walls, and from its windows you look across the brown-red tiles to S. Miniato. The pictures, although so few, are peculiarly attractive, being the work of two very rare hands, Piero della Francesca (? 1398-1492) and Melozzo da Forli (1438-1494). Melozzo has here a very charming Annunciation in two panels, the fascination of which I cannot describe. That they are fascinating there is, however, no doubt. We have symbolical figures by him in our National Gallery--again hanging next to Piero della Francesca--but they are not the equal of these in charm, although very charming. These grow more attractive with every visit: the eager advancing angel with his lily, and the timid little Virgin in her green dress, with folded hands. The two Pieros are, of course, superb. Piero never painted anything that was not distinguished and liquid, and here he gives us of his best: portraits of Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and Battista, his second Duchess, with classical scenes behind them. Piero della Francesca has ever been one of my favourite painters, and here he is wholly a joy. Of his works Florence has but few, since he was not a Florentine, nor did he work here, being engaged chiefly at Urbino, Ferrara, Arezzo, and Rome. His life ended sadly, for he became totally blind. In addition to his painting he was a mathematician of much repute. The Duke of Urbino here depicted is Federigo da Montefeltro, who ruled from 1444 to 1482, and in 1459 married as his second wife a daughter of Alessandro Sforza, of Pesaro, the wedding being the occasion of Piero's pictures. The duke stands out among the many Italian lords of that time as a humane and beneficent ruler and collector, and eager to administer well. He was a born fighter, and it was owing to the loss of his right eye and the fracture of his noble old nose that he is seen here in such a determined profile against the lovely light over the Umbrian hills. The symbolical chariots in the landscape at the back represent respectively the Triumph of Fame (the Duke's) and the Triumph of Chastity (that of the Duchess). The Duke's companions are Victory, Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance; the little Duchess's are Love, Hope, Faith, Charity, and Innocence; and if these are not exquisite pictures I never saw any. The statues in the room should not be missed, particularly the little Genius of Love, the Bacchus and Ampelos, and the spoilt little comely boy supposed to represent--and quite conceivably--the infant Nero. Crossing the large Tuscan room again, we come to a little narrow room filled with what are now called cabinet pictures: far too many to study properly, but comprising a benignant old man's head, No. 1167, which is sometimes called a Filippino Lippi and sometimes a Masaccio, a fragment of a fresco; a boy from the serene perfect hand of Perugino, No. 1217; two little panels by Fra Bartolommeo--No. 1161--painted for a tabernacle to hold a Donatello relief and representing the Circumcision and Nativity, in colours, and at the back a pretty Annunciation in monochrome; No. 1235, on the opposite wall, a very sweet Mother and Child by the same artist; a Perseus liberating Andromeda, by Piero di Cosimo, No. 1312; two or three Lorenzo di Credis; two or three Alloris; a portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, by Antonio Pollaiuolo; and three charming little scenes from the lives of S. John the Baptist and the Virgin, by Fra Angelico, which belong properly to the predella of an altar-piece that we saw in the first room we entered--No. 1290, "The Coronation of the Virgin". No. 1162 has the gayest green dress in it imaginable. And here we enter the Tribuna, which is to the Uffizi what the Salon Carré is to the Louvre: the special treasure-room of the gallery, holding its most valuable pictures. But to-day there are as good works outside it as in; for the Michelangelo has been moved to another room, and Botticelli (to name no other) is not represented here at all. Probably the statue famous as the Venus de' Medici would be considered the Tribuna's chief possession; but not by me. Nor should I vote either for Titian's Venus. In sculpture I should choose rather the "Knife-sharpener," and among the pictures Raphael's "Madonna del Cardellino," No. 1129. But this is not to suggest that everything is not a masterpiece, for it is. Beginning at the door leading from the room of the little pictures, we find, on our left, Raphael's "Ignota," No. 1120, so rich and unfeeling, and then Francia's portrait of Evangelista Scappi, so rich and real and a picture that one never forgets. Raphael's Julius II comes next, not so powerful as the version in the Pitti, and above that Titian's famous Venus. In Perugino's portrait of Francesco delle Opere, No. 287, we find an evening sky and landscape still more lovely than Francia's. This Francesco was brother of Giovanni delle Corniole, a protégé of Lorenzo de' Medici, famous as a carver of intaglios, whose portrait of Savonarola in this medium, now preserved in the Uffizi, in the Gem Room, was said by Michelangelo to carry art to its farthest possible point. A placid and typical Perugino--the Virgin and two saints--comes next, and then a northern air sweeps in with Van Dyck's Giovanni di Montfort, now darkening into gloom but very fine and commanding. Titian's second Venus is above, for which his daughter Lavinia acted as model (the Venus of the other version being possibly the Marchesa della Rovere), and under it is the only Luini in the Uffizi, unmistakably from the sweet hand and full of Leonardesque influence. Beneath this is a rich and decorative work of the Veronese school, a portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga, with another evening sky. Then we go north again, to Dürer's Adoration of the Magi, a picture full of pleasant detail--a little mountain town here, a knight in difficulties with his horse there, two butterflies close to the Madonna--and interesting also for the treatment of the main theme in Dürer's masterly careful way; and then to Spain to Spagnoletto's "S. Jerome" in sombre chiaroscuro; then north again to a painfully real Christ crowned with thorns, by Lucas van Leyden, and the mousy, Reynoldsy, first wife of Peter Paul Rubens, while a Van Dyck portrait under a superb Domenichino and an "Adam and Eve" by Lucas Cranach complete the northern group. And so we come to the two Correggios--so accomplished and rich and untouching--all delightful virtuosity without feeling. The favourite is, of course, No. 1134, for its adorable Baby, whose natural charm atones for its theatrical Mother. On the other side of the door is No. 1129, the perfect "Madonna del Cardellino" of Raphael, so called from the goldfinch that the little boys are caressing. This, one is forced to consider one of the perfect pictures of the world, even though others may communicate more pleasure. The landscape is so exquisite and the mild sweetness of the whole work so complete; and yet, although the technical mastery is almost thrilling, the "Madonna del Pozzo" by Andrea del Sarto's friend Franciabigio, close by--No. 1125--arouses infinitely livelier feelings in the observer, so much movement and happiness has it. Raphael is perfect but cold; Franciabigio is less perfect (although exceedingly accomplished) but warm with life. The charm of this picture is as notable as the skill of Raphael's: it is wholly joyous, and the little Madonna really once lived. Both are reproduced in this volume. Raphael's neighbouring youthful "John the Baptist" is almost a Giorgione for richness, but is as truly Raphael as the Sebastian del Piombo, once (like the Franciabigio also) called a Raphael, is not. How it came to be considered Raphael, except that there may be a faint likeness to the Fornarina, is a mystery. The rooms next the Tribuna have for some time been under reconstruction, and of these I say little, nor of what pictures are to be placed there. But with the Tribuna, in any case, the collection suddenly declines, begins to crumble. The first of these rooms, in the spring of this year, 1912, was opened with a number of small Italian paintings; but they are probably only temporarily there. Chief among them was a Parmigianino, a Boltraffio, a pretty little Guido Reni, a Cosimo Tura, a Lorenzo Costa, but nothing really important. In the tiny Gem Room at the end of the corridor are wonders of the lapidary's art--and here is the famous intaglio portrait of Savonarola--but they want better treatment. The vases and other ornaments should have the light all round them, as in the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre. These are packed together in wall cases and are hard to see. Passing through the end corridor, where the beautiful Matrona reclines so placidly on her couch against the light, and where we have such pleasant views of the Ponte Vecchio, the Trinita bridge, the Arno, and the Apennines, so fresh and real and soothing after so much paint, we come to the rooms containing the famous collection of self-painted portraits, which, moved hither from Rome, has been accumulating in the Uffizi for many years and is still growing, to be invited to contribute to it being one of the highest honours a painter can receive. The portraits occupy eight rooms and a passage. Though the collection is historically and biographically valuable, it contains for every interesting portrait three or four dull ones, and thus becomes something of a weariness. Among the best are Lucas Cranach, Anton More, Van Dyck, Rembrandt (three), Rubens, Seybold, Jordaens, Reynolds, and Romney, all of which remind us of Michelangelo's dry comment, "Every painter draws himself well". Among the most interesting to us, wandering in Florence, are the two Andreas, one youthful and the other grown fatter than one likes and very different from the melancholy romantic figure in the Pitti; Verrocchio, by Lorenzo di Credi; Carlo Dolci, surprising by its good sense and humour; Raphael, angelic, wistful, and weak; Tintoretto, old and powerful; and Jacopo Bassano, old and simple. Among the moderns, Corot's portrait of himself is one of the most memorable, but Fantin Latour, Flandrin, Leon Bonnat, and Lenbach are all strong and modest; which one cannot say of our own Leighton. Among the later English heads Orchardson's is notable, but Mr. Sargent's is disappointing. We now come to one of the most remarkable rooms in the gallery, where every picture is a gem; but since all are northern pictures, imported, I give no reproductions. This is the Sala di Van der Goes, so called from the great work here, the triptych, painted in 1474 to 1477 by Hugo van der Goes, who died in 1482, and was born at Ghent or Leyden about 1405. This painter, of whose genius there can be no question, is supposed to have been a pupil of the Van Eycks. Not much is known of him save that he painted at Bruges and Ghent and in 1476 entered a convent at Brussels where he was allowed to dine with distinguished strangers who came to see him and where he drank so much wine that his natural excitability turned to insanity. He seems, however, to have recovered, and if ever a picture showed few signs of a deranged or inflamed mind it is this, which was painted for the agent of the Medici bank at Bruges, Tommaso Portinari, who presented it to the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova in his native city of Florence, which had been founded by his ancestor Folco, the father of Dante's Beatrice. The left panel shows Tommaso praying with his two sons Antonio and Pigallo, the right his wife Maria Portinari and their adorably quaint little daughter with her charming head-dress and costume. The flowers in the centre panel are among the most beautiful things in any Florentine picture: not wild and wayward like Luca Signorelli's, but most exquisitely done: irises, red lilies, columbines and dark red clove pinks--all unexpected and all very unlikely to be in such a wintry landscape at all. On the ground are violets. The whole work is grave, austere, cool, and as different as can be from the Tuscan spirit; yet it is said to have had a deep influence on the painters of the time and must have drawn throngs to the Hospital to see it. The other Flemish and German pictures in the room are all remarkable and all warmer in tone. No. 906, an unknown work, is perhaps the finest: a Crucifixion, which might have borrowed its richness from the Carpaccio, we saw in the Venetian room. There is a fine Adoration of the Magi, by Gerard David (1460-1523); an unknown portrait of Pierantonio Baroncelli and his wife, with a lovely landscape; a jewel of paint by Hans Memling (1425-1492)--No. 703--the Madonna Enthroned; a masterpiece of drawing by Dürer, "Calvary"; an austere and poignant Transportation of Christ to the Sepulchre, by Roger van der Weyden (1400-1464); and several very beautiful portraits by Memling, notably Nos. 769 and 780 with their lovely evening light. Memling, indeed, I never liked better than here. Other fine pictures are a Spanish prince by Lucas van Leyden; an old Dutch scholar by an artist unknown, No. 784; and a young husband and wife by Joost van Cleef the Elder, and a Breughel the Elder, like an old Crome--a beauty--No. 928. The room is interesting both for itself and also as showing how the Flemish brushes were working at the time that so many of the great Italians were engaged on similar themes. After the cool, self-contained, scientific work of these northerners it is a change to enter the Sala di Rubens and find that luxuriant giant--their compatriot, but how different!--once more. In the Uffizi, Rubens seems more foreign, far, than any one, so fleshly pagan is he. In Antwerp Cathedral his "Descent from the Cross," although its bravura is, as always with him, more noticeable than its piety, might be called a religious picture, but I doubt if even that would seem so here. At any rate his Uffizi works are all secular, while his "Holy Family" in the Pitti is merely domestic and robust. His Florentine masterpieces are the two Henri IV pictures in this room, "Henri IV at Ivry," magnificent if not war, and "Henri's entry into Paris after Ivry," with its confusing muddle of naked warriors and spears. Only Rubens could have painted these spirited, impossible, glorious things, which for all their greatness send one's thoughts back longingly to the portrait of his wife, in the Tribuna, while No. 216--the Bacchanale--is so coarse as almost to send one's feet there too. Looking round the room, after Rubens has been dismissed, it is too evident that the best of the Uffizi collection is behind us. There are interesting portraits here, but biographically rather than artistically. Here are one or two fine Sustermans' (1597-1681), that imported painter whom we shall find in such rare form at the Pitti. Here, for example, is Ferdinand II, who did so much for the Uffizi and so little for Galileo; and his cousin and wife Vittoria della Rovere, daughter of Claudia de' Medici (whose portrait, No. 763, is on the easel), and Federigo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. This silly, plump lady had been married at the age of fourteen, and she brought her husband a little money and many pictures from Urbino, notably those delightful portraits of an earlier Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, and also the two Titian "Venuses" in the Tribuna. Ferdinand II and his Grand Duchess were on bad terms for most of their lives, and she behaved foolishly, and brought up her son Cosimo III foolishly, and altogether was a misfortune to Florence. Sustermans the painter she held in the highest esteem, and in return he painted her not only as herself but in various unlikely characters, among them a Vestal Virgin and even the Madonna. Here also is No. 196, Van Dyck's portrait of Margherita of Lorraine, whose daughter became Cosimo III's wife--a mischievous, weak face but magnificently painted; and No. 1536, a vividly-painted elderly widow by Jordaens (1593-1678); and on each side of the outrageous Rubens a distinguished Dutch gentleman and lady by the placid, refined Mierevelt. The two priceless rooms devoted to Iscrizioni come next, but we will finish the pictures first and therefore pass on to the Sala di Baroccio. Federigo Baroccio (1528-1612) is one of the later painters for whom I, at any rate, cannot feel any enthusiasm. His position in the Uffizi is due rather to the circumstance that he was a protégé of the Cardinal della Rovere at Rome, whose collection came here, than to his genius. This room again is of interest rather historically than artistically. Here, for example, are some good Medici portraits by Bronzino, among them the famous Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, in a rich brocade (in which she was buried), with the little staring Ferdinand I beside her. Eleanora, as we saw in chapter V. was the first mistress of the Pitti palace, and the lady who so disliked Cellini and got him into such trouble through his lying tongue. Bronzino's little Maria de' Medici--No. 1164--is more pleasing, for the other picture has a sinister air. This child, the first-born of Cosimo I and Eleanora, died when only sixteen. Baroccio has a fine portrait--Francesco Maria II, last Duke of Urbino, and the grandfather of the Vittoria della Rovere whom we saw in the Sala di Rubens. Here also is a portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent by Vasari, but it is of small value since Vasari was not born till after Lorenzo's death. The Galileo by Sustermans--No. 163--on the contrary would be from life; and after the Tribuna portrait of Rubens' first wife it is interesting to find here his pleasant portrait of Helen Fourment, his second. To my eyes two of the most attractive pictures in the room are the Young Sculptor--No. 1266--by Bronzino, and the version of Leonardo's S. Anne at the Louvre by Andrea Salaino of Milan (1483?-1520?). I like also the hints of tenderness of Bernardino Luini which break through the hardness of the Aurelio Luini picture--No. 204. For the rest there are some sickly Guido Renis and Carlo Dolcis and a sentimental Guercino. But the most popular works--on Sundays--are the two Gerard Honthorsts, and not without reason, for they are dramatic and bold and vivid, and there is a Baby in each that goes straight to the maternal heart. No. 157 is perhaps the more satisfying, but I have more reason to remember the larger one--the Adoration of the Shepherds--for I watched a copyist produce a most remarkable replica of it in something under a week, on the same scale. He was a short, swarthy man with a neck like a bull's, and he carried the task off with astonishing brio, never drawing a line, finishing each part as he came to it, and talking to a friend or an official the whole time. Somehow one felt him to be precisely the type of copyist that Gherardo della Notte ought to have. This painter was born at Utrecht in 1590 but went early to Italy, and settling in Rome devoted himself to mastering the methods of Amerighi, better known as Caravaggio (1569-1609), who specialized in strong contrasts of light and shade. After learning all he could in Rome, Honthorst returned to Holland and made much money and fame, for his hand was swift and sure. Charles I engaged him to decorate Whitehall. He died in 1656. These two Honthorsts are, as I say, the most popular of the pictures on Sunday, when the Uffizi is free; but their supremacy is challenged by the five inlaid tables, one of which, chiefly in lapis lazuli, must be the bluest thing on earth. Passing for the present the Sala di Niobe, we come to the Sala di Giovanni di San Giovanni, which is given to a second-rate painter who was born in 1599 and died in 1636. His best work is a fresco at the Badia of Fiesole. Here he has some theatrical things, including one picture which sends English ladies out blushing. Here also are some Lelys, including "Nelly Gwynn". Next are two rooms, one leading from the other, given to German and Flemish pictures and to miniatures, both of which are interesting. In the first are more Dürers, and that alone would make it a desirable resort. Here is a "Virgin and Child"--No. 851--very naive and homely, and the beautiful portrait of his father--No. 766---a symphony of brown and green. Less attractive works from the same hand are the "Apostle Philip"--No. 777--and "S. Giacomo Maggiore," an old man very coarsely painted by comparison with the artist's father. Here also is a very beautiful portrait of Richard Southwell, by Holbein, with the peacock-green background that we know so well and always rejoice to see; a typical candle-light Schalcken, No. 800; several golden Poelenburghs; an anonymous portrait of Virgilius von Hytta of Zuicham, No. 784; a clever smiling lady by Sustermans, No. 709; the Signora Puliciani and her husband, No. 699; a rather crudely coloured Rubens--"Venus and Adonis"--No. 812; the same artist's "Three Graces," in monochrome, very naked; and some quaint portraits by Lucas Cranach. But no doubt to many persons the most enchaining picture here is the Medusa's head, which used to be called a Leonardo and quite satisfied Ruskin of its genuineness, but is now attributed to the Flemish school. The head, at any rate, would seem to be very similar to that of which Vasari speaks, painted by Leonardo for a peasant, but retained by his father. Time has dealt hardly with the paint, and one has to study minutely before Medusa's horrors are visible. Whether Leonardo's or not, it is not uninteresting to read how the picture affected Shelley when he saw it here in 1819:-- ... Its Horror and its Beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. The little room leading from this one should be neglected by no one interested in Medicean history, for most of the family is here, in miniature, by Bronzino's hand. Here also are miniatures by other great painters, such as Pourbus, Guido Reni, Bassano, Clouet, Holbein. Look particularly at No. 3382, a woman with brown hair, in purple--a most fascinating little picture. The Ignota in No. 3348 might easily be Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England. The other exhibits are copies in miniature of famous pictures, notable among them a Raphael--No. 3386--and a Breughel--No. 3445--while No. 3341, the robing of a monk, is worth attention. We come now to the last pictures of the collection--in three little rooms at the end, near the bronze sleeping Cupid. Those in the first room were being rearranged when I was last here; the others contain Dutch works notable for a few masterpieces. There are too many Poelenburghs, but the taste shown as a whole is good. Perhaps to the English enthusiast for painting the fine landscape by Hercules Seghers will, in view of the recent agitation over Lord Lansdowne's Rembrandt, "The Mill,"--ascribed in some quarters to Seghers--be the most interesting picture of all. It is a sombre, powerful scene of rugged coast which any artist would have been proud to sign; but it in no way recalls "The Mill's" serene strength. Among the best of its companions are a very good Terburg, a very good Metsu, and an extremely beautiful Ruysdael. And so we are at the end of the pictures--but only to return again and again--and are not unwilling to fall into the trap of the official who sits here, and allow him to unlock the door behind the Laocöon group and enjoy what he recommends as a "bella vista" from the open space, which turns out to be the roof of the Loggia de' Lanzi. From this high point one may see much of Florence and its mountains, while, on looking down, over the coping, one finds the busy Piazza della Signoria below, with all its cabs and wayfarers. Returning to the gallery, we come quickly on the right to the first of the neglected statuary rooms, the beautiful Sala di Niobe, which contains some interesting Medicean and other tapestries, and the sixteen statues of Niobe and her children from the Temple of Apollo, which the Cardinal Ferdinand de' Medici acquired, and which were for many years at the Villa Medici at Rome. A suggested reconstruction of the group will be found by the door. I cannot pretend to a deep interest in the figures, but I like to be in the room. The famous Medicean vase is in the middle of it. Sculpture more ingratiating is close by, in the two rooms given to Iscrizioni: a collection of priceless antiques which are not only beautiful but peculiarly interesting in that they can be compared with the work of Donatello, Verrocchio, and other of the Renaissance sculptors. For in such a case comparisons are anything but odious and become fascinating. In the first room there is, for example, a Mercury, isolated on the left, in marble, who is a blood relation of Donatello's bronze David in the Bargello; and certain reliefs of merry children, on the right, low down, as one approaches the second room, are cousins of the same sculptor's cantoria romps. Not that Donatello ever reproduced the antique spirit as Michelangelo nearly did in his Bacchus, and Sansovino absolutely did in his Bacchus, both at the Bargello: Donatello was of his time, and the spirit of his time animates his creations, but he had studied the Greek art in Rome and profited by his lessons, and his evenly-balanced humane mind had a warm corner for pagan joyfulness. Among other statues in this first room is a Sacerdotessa, wearing a marble robe with long folds, whose hands can be seen through the drapery. Opposite the door are Bacchus and Ampelos, superbly pagan, while a sleeping Cupid is most lovely. Among the various fine heads is one of Cicero, of an Unknown--No. 377--and of Homer in bronze (called by the photographers Aristophanes). But each thing in turn is almost the best. The trouble is that the Uffizi is so vast, and the Renaissance seems to be so eminently the only proper study of mankind when one is here, that to attune oneself to the enjoyment of antique sculpture needs a special effort which not all are ready to make. In the centre of the next room is the punctual Hermaphrodite without which no large Continental gallery is complete. But more worthy of attention is the torso of a faun on the left, on a revolving pedestal which (unlike those in the Bargello, as we shall discover) really does revolve and enables you to admire the perfect back. There is also a torso in basalt or porphyry which one should study from all points, and on the walls some wonderful portions of a frieze from the Ara Pacis, erected in Rome, B.C. 139, with wonderful figures of men, women, and children on it. Among the heads is a colossal Alexander, very fine indeed, a beautiful Antoninus, a benign and silly Roman lady in whose existence one can quite believe, and a melancholy Seneca. Look also at Nos. 330 and 332, on the wall: 330, a charming genius, carrying one of Jove's thunderbolts; and 332, a boy who is sheer Luca della Robbia centuries before his birth. I ought to add that, in addition to the various salons in the Uffizi, the long corridors are hung with pictures too, in chronological order, the earliest of all being to the right of the entrance door, and in the corridors there is also some admirable statuary. But the pictures here, although not the equals of those in the rooms, receive far too little attention, while the sculpture receives even less, whether the beutiful full-length athletes or the reliefs on the cisterns, several of which have riotous Dionysian processions. On the stairs, too, are some very beautiful works; while at the top, in the turnstile room, is the original of the boar which Tacca copied in bronze for the Mercato Nuovo, and just outside it are the Medici who were chiefly concerned with the formation of the collection. On the first landing, nearest the ground, is a very beautiful and youthful Bacchus. The ceilings of the Uffizi rooms and corridors also are painted, thoughtfully and dexterously, in the Pompeian manner; but there are limits to the receptive capacity of travellers' eyes, and I must plead guilty to consistently neglecting them. CHAPTER XII "Aërial Fiesole" Andrea del Sarto--Fiesole sights--The Villa Palmieri and the "Decameron"--Botticini's picture in the National Gallery--S. Francesco--The Roman amphitheatre--The Etruscan museum--A sculptor's walk--The Badia di Fiesole--Brunelleschi again--Giovanni di San Giovanni. After all these pictures, how about a little climbing? From so many windows in Florence, along so many streets, from so many loggias and towers, and perhaps, above all, from the Piazzale di Michelangelo, Fiesole is to be seen on her hill, with the beautiful campanile of her church in the dip between the two eminences, that very soon one comes to feel that this surely is the promised land. Florence lies so low, and the delectable mountain is so near and so alluring. But I am not sure that to dream of Fiesole as desirable, and to murmur its beautiful syllables, is not best. Let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine, And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole --that was Andrea's way and not an unwise one. For Fiesole at nearer view can easily disappoint. It is beautifully set on its hill and it has a fascinating past; but the journey thither on foot is very wearisome, by the electric tram vexatious and noisy, and in a horse-drawn carriage expensive and cruel; and when you are there you become once more a tourist without alleviation and are pestered by beggars, and by nice little girls who ought to know better, whose peculiar importunacy it is to thrust flowers into the hand or buttonhole without any denial. What should have been a mountain retreat from the city has become a kind of Devil's Dyke. But if one is resolute, and, defying all, walks up to the little monastery of S. Francesco at the very top of the hill, one may rest almost undisturbed, with Florence in the valley below, and gardens and vineyards undulating beneath, and a monk or two ascending or descending the steps, and three or four picture-postcard hawkers gambling in a corner, and lizards on the wall. Here it is good to be in the late afternoon, when the light is mellowing; and if you want tea there is a little loggia a few yards down this narrow steep path where it may be found. How many beautiful villas in which one could be happy sunning oneself among the lizards lie between this point and Florence! Who, sitting here, can fail to think that? In walking to Fiesole one follows the high walls of the Villa Palmieri, which is now very private American property, but is famous for ever as the first refuge of Boccaccio's seven young women and three young men when they fled from plague-stricken Florence in 1348 and told tales for ten halcyon days. It is now generally agreed that if Boccaccio had any particular house in his mind it was this. It used to be thought that the Villa Poggio Gherardo, Mrs. Ross's beautiful home on the way to Settignano, was the first refuge, and the Villa Palmieri the second, but the latest researches have it that the Palmieri was the first and the Podere della Fonte, or Villa di Boccaccio, as it is called, near Camerata, a little village below S. Domenico, the other. The Villa Palmieri has another and somewhat different historical association, for it was there that Queen Victoria resided for a while in 1888. But the most interesting thing of all about it is the circumstance that it was the home of Matteo Palmieri, the poet, and Botticelli's friend and fellow-speculator on the riddle of life. Palmieri was the author of a remarkable poem called "La Citta della Vita" (The City of Life) which developed a scheme of theology that had many attractions to Botticelli's curious mind. The poem was banned by Rome, although not until after its author's death. In our National Gallery is a picture which used to be considered Botticelli's--No. 1126, "The Assumption of the Virgin"--especially as it is mentioned with some particularity by Vasari, together with the circumstance that the poet and painter devised it in collaboration, in which the poem is translated into pigment. As to the theology, I say nothing, nor as to its new ascription to Botticini; but the picture has a greater interest for us in that it contains a view of Florence with its wall of towers around it in about 1475. The exact spot where the painter sat has been identified by Miss Stokes in "Six Months in the Apennines". On the left immediately below the painter's vantage-ground is the Mugnone, with a bridge over it. On the bank in front is the Villa Palmieri, and on the picture's extreme left is the Badia of Fiesole. On leaving S. Domenico, if still bent on walking, one should keep straight on and not follow the tram lines to the right. This is the old and terribly steep road which Lorenzo the Magnificent and his friends Politian and Pico della Mirandola had to travel whenever they visited the Medici villa, just under Fiesole, with its drive lined with cypresses. Here must have been great talk and much conviviality. It is now called the Villa McCalmont. Once at Fiesole, by whatever means you reach it, do not neglect to climb the monastery steps to the very top. It is a day of climbing, and a hundred or more steps either way mean nothing now. For here is a gentle little church with swift, silent monks in it, and a few flowers in bowls, and a religious picture by that strange Piero di Cosimo whose heart was with the gods in exile; and the view of Monte Ceceri, on the other side of Fiesole, seen through the cypresses here, which could not be better in disposition had Benozzo Gozzoli himself arranged them, is very striking and memorable. Fiesole's darling son is Mino the sculptor--the "Raphael of the chisel"--whose radiant Madonnas and children and delicate tombs may be seen here and there all over Florence. The piazza is named after him; he is celebrated on a marble slab outside the museum, where all the famous names of the vicinity may be read too; and in the church is one of his most charming groups and finest heads. They are in a little chapel on the right of the choir. The head is that of Bishop Salutati, humorous, wise, and benign, and the group represents the adoration of a merry little Christ by a merry little S. John and others. As for the church itself, it is severe and cool, with such stone columns in it as must last for ever. But the main interest of Fiesole to most people is not the cypress-covered hill of S. Francesco; not the view from the summit; not the straw mementoes; not the Mino relief in the church; but the Roman arena. The excavators have made of this a very complete place. One can stand at the top of the steps and reconstruct it all--the audience, the performance, the performers. A very little time spent on building would be needed to restore the amphitheatre to its original form. Beyond it are baths, and in a hollow the remains of a temple with the altar where it ever was; and then one walks a little farther and is on the ancient Etruscan wall, built when Fiesole was an Etruscan fortified hill city. So do the centuries fall away here! But everywhere, among the ancient Roman stones so massive and exact, and the Etruscan stones, are the wild flowers which Luca Signorelli painted in that picture in the Uffizi which I love so much. After the amphitheatre one visits the Museum--with the same ticket--a little building filled with trophies of the spade. There is nothing very wonderful--nothing to compare with the treasures of the Archaeological Museum in Florence--but it is well worth a visit. On leaving the Museum on the last occasion that I was there--in April--I walked to Settignano. The road for a while is between houses, for Fiesole stretches a long way farther than one suspects, very high, looking over the valley of the Mugnone; and then after a period between pine trees and grape-hyacinths one turns to the right and begins to descend. Until Poggio del Castello, a noble villa, on an isolated eminence, the descent is very gradual, with views of Florence round the shoulder of Monte Ceceri; but afterwards the road winds, to ease the fall, and the wayfarer turns off into the woods and tumbles down the hill by a dry water-course, amid crags and stones, to the beginnings of civilization again, at the Via di Desiderio da Settignano, a sculptor who stands to his native town in precisely the same relation as Mino to his. Settignano is a mere village, with villas all about it, and the thing to remember there is not only that Desiderio was born there but that Michelangelo's foster-mother was the wife of a local stone-cutter--stone-cutting at that time being the staple industry. On the way back to Florence in the tram, one passes on the right a gateway surmounted by statues of the poets, the Villa Poggio Gherardo, of which I have spoken earlier in the chapter. There is no villa with a nobler mien than this. That is one walk from Fiesole. Another is even more a sculptors' way: for it would include Maiano too, where Benedetto was born. The road is by way of the tram lines to that acute angle just below Fiesole when they turn back to S. Domenico, and so straight on down the hill. But if one is returning to Florence direct after leaving Fiesole it is well to walk down the precipitous paths to S. Domenico, and before again taking the tram visit the Badia overlooking the valley of the Mugnone. This is done by turning to the right just opposite the church of S. Domenico, which has little interest structurally but is famous as being the chapel of the monastery where Fra Angelico was once a monk. The Badia (Abbey) di Fiesole, as it now is, was built on the site of an older monastery, by Cosimo Pater. Here Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Academy used to meet, in the loggia and in the little temple which one gains from the cloisters, and here Pico della Mirandola composed his curious gloss on Genesis. The dilapidated marble façade of the church and its rugged stone-work are exceedingly ancient--dating in fact from the eleventh century; the new building is by Brunelleschi and to my mind is one of his most beautiful works, its lovely proportions and cool, unfretted white spaces communicating even more pleasure than the Pazzi chapel itself. The decoration has been kept simple and severe, and the colour is just the grey pietra serena of Fiesole, of which the lovely arches are made, all most exquisitely chiselled, and the pure white of the walls and ceilings. This church was a favourite with the Medici, and the youthful Giovanni, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, received his cardinal's hat here in 1492, at the age of sixteen. He afterwards became Pope Leo X. How many of the boys, now in the school--for the monastery has become a Jesuit school--will, one wonders, rise to similar eminence. In the beautiful cloisters we have the same colour scheme as in the church, and here again Brunelleschi's miraculous genius for proportion is to be found. Here and there are foliations and other exquisite tracery by pupils of Desiderio da Settignano. The refectory has a high-spirited fresco by that artist whose room in the Uffizi is so carefully avoided by discreet chaperons--Giovanni di San Giovanni--representing Christ eating at a table, his ministrants being a crowd of little roguish angels and cherubim, one of whom (on the right) is in despair at having broken a plate. In the entrance lobby is a lavabo by Mino da Fiesole, with two little boys of the whitest and softest marble on it, which is worth study. And now we will return to the heart of Florence once more. CHAPTER XIII The Badia and Dante Filippino Lippi--Buffalmacco--Mino da Fiesole--The Dante quarter--Dante and Beatrice--Monna Tessa--Gemma Donati--Dante in exile--Dante memorials in Florence--The Torre della Castagna--The Borgo degli Albizzi and the old palaces--S. Ambrogio--Mino's tabernacle--Wayside masterpieces--S. Egidio. Opposite the Bargello is a church with a very beautiful doorway designed by Benedetto da Rovezzano. This church is known as the Badia, and its delicate spire is a joy in the landscape from every point of vantage. The Badia is very ancient, but the restorers have been busy and little of Arnolfo's thirteenth-century work is left. It is chiefly famous now for its Filippino Lippi and two tombs by Mino da Fiesole, but historically it is interesting as being the burial-place of the chief Florentine families in the Middle Ages and as being the scene of Boccaccio's lectures on Dante in 1373. The Filippino altar-piece, which represents S. Bernard's Vision of the Virgin (a subject we shall see treated very beautifully by Fra Bartolommeo at the Accademia) is one of the most perfect and charming pictures by this artist: very grave and real and sweet, and the saint's hands exquisitely painted. The figure praying in the right-hand corner is the patron, Piero di Francesco del Pugliese, who commissioned this picture for the church of La Campora, outside the Porta Romana, where it was honoured until 1529, when Clement VII's troops advancing, it was brought here for safety and has here remained. Close by--in the same chapel--is a little door which the sacristan will open, disclosing a portion of Arnolfo's building with perishing frescoes which are attributed to Buffalmacco, an artist as to whose reality much scepticism prevails. They are not in themselves of much interest, although the sacristan's eagerness should not be discouraged; but Buffalmacco being Boccaccio's, Sacchetti's, Vasari's (and, later, Anatole France's) amusing hero, it is pleasant to look at his work and think of his freakishness. Buffalmacco (if he ever existed) was one of the earlier painters, flourishing between 1311 and 1350, and was a pupil of Andrea Tafi. This simple man he plagued very divertingly, once frightening him clean out of his house by fixing little lighted candles to the backs of beetles and steering them into Tafi's bedroom at night. Tafi was terrified, but on being told by Buffalmacco (who was a lazy rascal) that these devils were merely showing their objection to early rising, he became calm again, and agreed to lie in bed to a reasonable hour. Cupidity, however, conquering, he again ordered his pupil to be up betimes, when the beetles again re-appeared and continued to do so until the order was revoked. The sculptor Mino da Fiesole, whom we shall shortly see again, at the Bargello, in portrait busts and Madonna reliefs, is at his best here, in the superb monument to Count Ugo, who founded, with his mother, the Benedictine Abbey of which the Badia is the relic. Here all Mino's sweet thoughts, gaiety and charm are apparent, together with the perfection of radiant workmanship. The quiet dignity of the recumbent figure is no less masterly than the group above it. Note the impulsive urgency of the splendid Charity, with her two babies, and the quiet beauty of the Madonna and Child above all, while the proportions and delicate patterns of the tomb as a whole still remain to excite one's pleasure and admiration. We shall see many tombs in Florence--few not beautiful--but none more joyously accomplished than this. The tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce by Desiderio da Settignano, which awaits us, was undoubtedly the parent of the Ugo, Mino following his master very closely; but his charm was his own. According to Vasari, the Ugo tomb was considered to be Mino's finest achievement, and he deliberately made the Madonna and Child as like the types of his beloved Desiderio as he could. It was finished in 1481, and Mino died in 1484, from a chill following over-exertion in moving heavy stones. Mino also has here a monument to Bernardo Giugni, a famous gonfalonier in the time of Cosimo de' Medici, marked by the same distinction, but not quite so memorable. The Ugo is his masterpiece. The carved wooden ceiling, which is a very wonderful piece of work and of the deepest and most glorious hue, should not be forgotten; but nothing is easier than to overlook ceilings. The cloisters are small, but they atone for that--if it is a fault--by having a loggia. From the loggia the top of the noble tower of the Palazzo Vecchio is seen to perfection. Upon the upper walls is a series of frescoes illustrating the life of S. Benedict which must have been very gay and spirited once but are now faded. The Badia may be said to be the heart of the Dante quarter. Dante must often have been in the church before it was restored as we now see it, and a quotation from the "Divine Comedy" is on its façade. The Via Dante and the Piazza Donati are close by, and in the Via Dante are many reminders of the poet besides his alleged birthplace. Elsewhere in the city we find incised quotations from his poem; but the Baptistery--his "beautiful San Giovanni"--is the only building in the city proper now remaining which Dante would feel at home in could he return to it, and where we can feel assured of sharing his presence. The same pavement is there on which his feet once stood, and on the same mosaic of Christ above the altar would his eyes have fallen. When Dante was exiled in 1302 the cathedral had been in progress only for six or eight years; but it is known that he took the deepest interest in its construction, and we have seen the stone marking the place where he sat, watching the builders. The façade of the Badia of Fiesole and the church of S. Miniato can also remember Dante; no others. Here, however, we are on that ground which is richest in personal associations with him and his, for in spite of re-building and certain modern changes the air is heavy with antiquity in these narrow streets and passages where the poet had his childhood and youth. The son of a lawyer named Alighieri, Dante was born in 1265, but whether or not in this Casa Dante is an open question, and it was in the Baptistery that he received the name of Durante, afterwards abbreviated to Dante--Durante meaning enduring, and Dante giving. Those who have read the "Vita Nuova," either in the original or in Rossetti's translation, may be surprised to learn that the boy was only nine when he first met his Beatrice, who was seven, and for ever passed into bondage to her. Who Beatrice was is again a mystery, but it has been agreed to consider her in real life a daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine and the founder of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, one of whose descendants commissioned Hugo van der Goes to paint the great triptych in the Uffizi. Folco's tomb is in S. Egidio, the hospital church, while in the passage to the cloisters is a stone figure of Monna Tessa (of whom we are about to see a coloured bust in the Bargello), who was not only Beatrice's nurse (if Beatrice were truly of the Portinari) but the instigator, it is said, of Folco's deed of charity. Of Dante's rapt adoration of his lady, the "Vita Nuova" tells. According to that strangest monument of devotion it was not until another nine years had passed that he had speech of her; and then Beatrice, meeting him in the street, saluted him as she passed him with such ineffable courtesy and grace that he was lifted into a seventh heaven of devotion and set upon the writing of his book. The two seem to have had no closer intercourse: Beatrice shone distantly like a star and her lover worshipped her with increasing loyalty and fervour, overlaying the idea of her, as one might say, with gold and radiance, very much as we shall see Fra Angelico adding glory to the Madonna and Saints in his pictures, and with a similar intensity of ecstasy. Then one day Beatrice married, and not long afterwards, being always very fragile, she died, at the age of twenty-three. The fact that she was no longer on earth hardly affected her poet, whose worship of her had always so little of a physical character; and she continued to dominate his thoughts. In 1293, however, Dante married, one Gemma Donati of the powerful Guelph family of that name, of which Corso Donati was the turbulent head; and by her he had many children. For Gemma, however, he seems to have had no affection; and when in 1301 he left Florence, never to return, he left his wife for ever too. In 1289 Dante had been present at the battle of Campaldino, fighting with the Guelphs against the Ghibellines, and on settling down in Florence and taking to politics it was as a Guelph, or rather as one of that branch of the Guelph party which had become White--the Bianchi--as opposed to the other party which was Black--the Neri. The feuds between these divisions took the place of those between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, since Florence was never happy without internal strife, and it cannot have added to Dante's home comfort that his wife was related to Corso Donati, who led the Neri and swaggered in his bullying way about the city with proprietary, intolerant airs that must have been infuriating to a man with Dante's stern sense of right and justice. It was Corso who brought about Dante's exile; but he himself survived only six years, and was then killed, by his own wish, on his way to execution, rather than be humiliated in the city in which he had swayed. Dante, whose genius devised a more lasting form of reprisal than any personal encounter could be, has depicted him in the "Purgatorio" as on the road to Hell. But this is going too fast. In 1300, when Dante was thirty-five, he was sufficiently important to be made one of the six priors of the city, and in that capacity was called upon to quell a Neri and Bianchi disturbance. It is characteristic of him that he was a party to the banishment of the leaders of both factions, among whom was his closest friend, Guido Cavalcanti the poet, who was one of the Bianchi. Whether it was because of Guide's illness in his exile, or from what motive, we shall not know; but the sentence was lightened in the case of this Bianco, a circumstance which did not add to Dante's chances when the Neri, having plotted successfully with Charles of Valois, captured supreme power in Florence. This was in the year 1301, Dante being absent from that city on an embassy to Rome to obtain help for the Bianchi. He never came back; for the Neri plans succeeded; the Neri assumed control; and in January, 1302, he was formally fined and banished. The nominal charge against him was of misappropriating funds while a prior; but that was merely a matter of form. His real offence was in being one of the Bianchi, an enemy of the Neri, and a man of parts. In the rest of Dante's life Florence had no part, except in his thoughts. How he viewed her the "Divine Comedy" tells us, and that he longed to return we also know. The chance was indeed once offered, but under the impossible condition that he should do public penance in the Baptistery for his offence. This he refused. He wandered here and there, and settled finally in Ravenna, where he died in 1321. The "Divine Comedy" anticipating printing by so many years--the invention did not reach Florence until 1471--Dante could not make much popular way as a poet before that time; but to his genius certain Florentines were earlier no strangers, not only by perusing MS. copies of his great work, which by its richness in Florentine allusions excited an interest apart altogether from that created by its beauty, but by public lectures on the poem, delivered in the churches by order of the Signoria. The first Dante professor to be appointed was Giovanni Boccaccio, the author of the "Decameron," who was born in 1313, eight years before Dante's death, and became an enthusiast upon the poet. The picture in the Duomo was placed there in 1465. Then came printing to Florence and Dante passed quickly into his countrymen's thoughts and language. Michelangelo, who was born in time--1475--to enjoy in Lorenzo the Magnificent's house the new and precious advantage of printed books, became as a boy a profound student of the poet, and when later an appeal was made from Florence to the Pope to sanction the removal of Dante's bones to Florence, Michelangelo was among the signatories. But it was not done. His death-mask from Ravenna is in the Bargello: a few of his bones and their coffin are still in Ravenna, in the monastery of Classe, piously preserved in a room filled with Dante relics and literature; his tomb is elsewhere at Ravenna, a shrine visited by thousands every year. Ever since has Dante's fame been growing, so that only the Bible has led to more literature; and to-day Florence is more proud of him than any of her sons, except perhaps Michelangelo. We have seen one or two reminders of him already; more are here where we stand. We have seen the picture in honour of him which the Republic set up in the cathedral; his head on a beautiful inlaid door in the Palazzo Vecchio, the building where his sentence of banishment was devised and carried, to be followed by death sentence thrice repeated (burning alive, to be exact); and we have seen the head-quarters of the Florentine Dante society in the guild house at Or San Michele. We have still to see his statue opposite S. Croce, another fresco head in S. Maria Novella, certain holograph relics at the library at S. Lorenzo, and his head again by his friend Giotto, in the Bargello, where he would have been confined while waiting for death had he been captured. Dante's house has been rebuilt, very recently, and next to it is a newer building still, with a long inscription in Italian upon it, to the effect that the residence of Bella and Bellincione Alighieri stood hereabouts, and in that abode was Dante born. The Commune of Florence, it goes on to say, having secured possession of the site, "built this edifice on the remains of the ancestral house as fresh evidence of the public veneration of the divine poet". The Torre della Castagna, across the way, has an inscription in Italian, which may be translated thus: "This Tower, the so-called Tower of the Chestnut, is the solitary remnant of the head-quarters from which the Priors of the Arts governed Florence, before the power and glory of the Florentine Commune procured the erection of the Palace of the Signoria". Few persons in the real city of Florence, it may be said confidently, live in a house built for them; but hereabouts none at all. In fact, it is the exception anywhere near the centre of the city to live in a house built less than three centuries ago. Palaces abound, cut up into offices, flats, rooms, and even cinema theatres. The telegraph office in the Via del Proconsolo is a palace commissioned by the Strozzi but never completed: hence its name, Nonfinito; next it is the superb Palazzo Quaratesi, which Brunelleschi designed, now the head-quarters of a score of firms and an Ecclesiastical School whence sounds of sacred song continually emerge. Since we have Mino da Fiesole in our minds and are on the subject of old palaces let us walk from the Dante quarter in a straight line from the Corso, that very busy street of small shops, across the Via del Proconsolo and down the Borgo degli Albizzi to S. Ambrogio, where Mino was buried. This Borgo is a street of palaces and an excellent one in which to reflect upon the strange habit which wealthy Florentines then indulged of setting their mansions within a few feet of those opposite. Houses--or rather fortresses--that must have cost fortunes and have been occupied by families of wealth and splendour were erected so close to their vis-à-vis that two carts could not pass abreast between them. Side by side contiguity one can understand, but not this other adjacence. Every ground floor window is barred like a gaol. Those bars tell us something of the perils of life in Florence in the great days of faction ambition; while the thickness of the walls and solidity of construction tell us something too of the integrity of the Florentine builders. These ancient palaces, one feels, whatever may happen to them, can never fall to ruin. Such stones as are placed one upon the other in the Pitti and the Strozzi and the Riccardi nothing can displace. It is an odd thought that several Florentine palaces and villas built before Columbus sailed for America are now occupied by rich Americans, some of them draw possibly much of their income from the manufacture of steel girders for sky-scrapers. These ancient streets with their stern and sombre palaces specially touched the imagination of Dickens when he was in Florence in 1844, but in his "Pictures from Italy" he gave the city only fugitive mention. The old prison, which then adjoined the Palazzo Vecchio, and in which the prisoners could be seen, also moved him. The Borgo degli Albizzi, as I have said, is crowded with Palazzi. No. 24--and there is something very incongruous in palaces having numbers at all--is memorable in history as being one of the homes of the Pazzi family who organized the conspiracy against the Medici in 1478, as I have related in the second chapter, and failed so completely. Donatello designed the coat of arms here. The palace at No. 18 belonged to the Altoviti. No. 12 is the Palazzo Albizzi, the residence of one of the most powerful of the Florentine families, whose allies were all about them in this quarter, as it was wise to be. As a change from picture galleries, I can think of nothing more delightful than to wander about these ancient streets, and, wherever a courtyard or garden shines, penetrate to it; stopping now and again to enjoy the vista, the red Duomo, or Giotto's tower, so often mounting into the sky at one end, or an indigo Apennine at the other. Standing in the middle of the Via Ricasoli, for example, one has sight of both. At the Piazza S. Pietro we see one of the old towers of Florence, of which there were once so many, into which the women and children might retreat in times of great danger, and here too is a series of arches which fruit and vegetable shops make gay. The next Piazza is that of S. Ambrogio. This church is interesting not only for doing its work in a poor quarter--one has the feeling at once that it is a right church in the right place--but as containing, as I have said, the grave of Mino da Fiesole: Mino de' Poppi detto da Fiesole, as the floor tablet has it. Over the altar of Mino's little chapel is a large tabernacle from his hand, in which the gayest little Boy gives the benediction, own brother to that one by Desiderio at S. Lorenzo. The tabernacle must be one of the master's finest works, and beneath it is a relief in which a priest pours something--perhaps the very blood of Christ which is kept here--from one chalice to another held by a kneeling woman, surrounded by other kneeling women, which is a marvel of flowing beauty and life. The lines of it are peculiarly lovely. On the wall of the same little chapel is a fresco by Cosimo Rosselli which must once have been a delight, representing a procession of Corpus Christi--this chapel being dedicated to the miracle of the Sacrament--and it contains, according to Vasari, a speaking likeness of Pico della Mirandola. Other graves in the church are those of Cronaca, the architect of the Palazzo Vecchio's great Council Room, a friend of Savonarola and Rosselli's nephew by marriage; and Verrocchio, the sculptor, whose beautiful work we are now to see in the Bargello. It is said that Lorenzo di Credi also lies here, and Albertinelli, who gave up the brush for innkeeping. Opposite the church, on a house at the corner of the Borgo S. Croce and the Via de' Macci, is a della Robbia saint--one of many such mural works of art in Florence. Thus, at the corner of the Via Cavour and the Via de' Pucci, opposite the Riccardi palace, is a beautiful Madonna and Child by Donatello. In the Via Zannetti, which leads out of the Via Cerretani, is a very pretty example by Mino, a few houses on the right. These are sculpture. And everywhere in the older streets you may see shrines built into the wall: there is even one in the prison, in the Via dell' Agnolo, once the convent of the Murate, where Catherine de' Medici was imprisoned as a girl; but many of them are covered with glass which has been allowed to become black. A word or two on S. Egidio, the church of the great hospital of S. Maria Nuova, might round off this chapter, since it was Folco Portinari, Beatrice's father, who founded it. The hospital stands in a rather forlorn square a few steps from the Duomo, down the Via dell' Orivolo and then the first to the left; and it extends right through to the Via degli Alfani in cloisters and ramifications. The façade is in a state of decay, old frescoes peeling off it, but one picture has been enclosed for protection--a gay and busy scene of the consecration of the church by Pope Martin V. Within, it is a church of the poor, notable for its general florid comfort (comparatively) and Folco's gothic tomb. In the chancel is a pretty little tabernacle by Mino, which used to have a bronze door by Ghiberti, but has it no longer, and a very fine della Robbia Madonna and Child, probably by Andrea. Behind a grille, upstairs, sit the hospital nurses. In the adjoining cloisters--one of the high roads to the hospital proper--is the ancient statue of old Monna Tessa, Beatrice's nurse, and, in a niche, a pretty symbolical painting of Charity by that curious painter Giovanni di San Giovanni. It was in the hospital that the famous Van der Goes triptych used to hang. A tablet on a house opposite S. Egidio, a little to the right, states that it was there that Ghiberti made the Baptistery gates which Michelangelo considered fit to be the portals of Paradise. CHAPTER XIV The Bargello Plastic art--Blood-soaked stones--The faithful artists--Michelangelo--Italian custodians--The famous Davids--Michelangelo's tondo--Brutus--Benedetto da Rovezzano--Donatello's life-work--The S. George--Verrocchio--Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and the Baptistery doors--Benvenuto Cellini--John of Bologna--Antonio Pollaiuolo--Verrocchio again--Mino da Fiesole--The Florentine wealth of sculpture--Beautiful ladies--The della Robbias--South Kensington and the Louvre. Before my last visit but one to Florence, plastic art was less attractive to me than pictorial art. But now I am not sure. At any rate when, here in England, I think of Florence, as so often I do, I find myself visiting in imagination the Bargello before the Uffizi. Pictures in any number can bewilder and dazzle as much as they delight. The eye tires. And so, it is true, can a multiplicity of antique statuary such as one finds at the Vatican or at the Louvre; but a small collection of Renaissance work, so soft and human, as at the Bargello, is not only joy-giving but refreshing too. The soft contours soothe as well as enrapture the eye: the tenderness of the Madonnas, the gentleness of the Florentine ladies and youths, as Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole, Donatello, and Pollaiuolo moulded them, calm one where the perfection of Phidias and Praxiteles excites. Hence the very special charm of the Bargello, whose plastic treasures are comparatively few and picked, as against the heaped profusion of paint in the Uffizi and the Pitti. It pairs off rather with the Accademia, and has this further point in common with that choicest of galleries, that Michelangelo's chisel is represented in both. The Bargello is at the corner of the Via Ghibellina in the narrow Via del Proconsolo--so narrow that if you take one step off the pavement a tram may easily sweep you into eternity; so narrow also that the real dignity of the Bargello is never to be properly seen, and one thinks of it rather for its inner court and staircase and its strong tower than for its massive façades. Its history is soaked in blood. It was built in the middle of the thirteenth century as the residence of the chief magistrate of the city, the Capitano del popolo, or Podestà, first appointed soon after the return of the Guelphs in 1251, and it so remained, with such natural Florentine vicissitudes as destruction by mobs and fire, for four hundred years, when, in 1574, it was converted into a prison and place of execution and the head-quarters of the police, and changed its name from the Palazzo del Podestà to that by which it is now known, so called after the Bargello, or chief of the police. It is indeed fortunate that no rioters succeeded in obliterating Giotto's fresco in the Bargello chapel, which he painted probably in 1300, when his friend Dante was a Prior of the city. Giotto introduced the portrait of Dante which has drawn so many people to this little room, together with portraits of Corso Donati, and Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor. Whitewash covered it for two centuries. Dante's head has been restored. It was in 1857 that the Bargello was again converted, this time to its present gracious office of preserving the very flower of Renaissance plastic art. Passing through the entrance hall, which has a remarkable collection of Medicean armour and weapons, and in which (I have read but not seen) is an oubliette under one of the great pillars, the famous court is gained and the famous staircase. Of this court what can I say? Its quality is not to be communicated in words; and even the photographs of it that are sold have to be made from pictures, which the assiduous Signor Giuliani, among others, is always so faithfully painting, stone for stone. One forgets all the horrors that once were enacted here--the execution of honourable Florentine patriots whose only offence was that in their service of this proud and beautiful city they differed from those in power; one thinks only of the soft light on the immemorial walls, the sturdy graceful columns, the carved escutcheons, the resolute steps, the spaciousness and stern calm of it all. In the colonnade are a number of statues, the most famous of which is perhaps the "Dying Adonis" which Baedeker gives to Michelangelo but the curator to Vincenzo di Rossi; an ascription that would annoy Michelangelo exceedingly, if it were a mistake, since Rossi was a pupil of his enemy, the absurd Bandinelli. Mr. W.G. Waters, in his "Italian Sculptors," considers not only that Michelangelo was the sculptor, but that the work was intended to form part of the tomb of Pope Julius. In the second room opposite the main entrance across the courtyard, we come however to Michelangelo authentic and supreme, for here are his small David, his Brutus, his Bacchus, and a tondo of the Madonna and Child. According to Baedeker the Bacchus and the David revolve. Certainly they are on revolving stands, but to say that they revolve is to disregard utterly the character of the Italian official. A catch holds each in its place, and any effort to release this or to induce the custodian to release it is equally futile. "Chiuso" (closed), he replies, and that is final. Useless to explain that the backs of statues can be beautiful as the front; that one of the triumphs of great statuary is its equal perfection from every point; that the revolving stand was not made for a joke but for a serious purpose. "Chiuso," he replies. The museum custodians of Italy are either like this--jaded figures of apathy--or they are enthusiasts. To each enthusiast there are ninety-nine of the other, who either sit in a kind of stupor and watch you with sullen suspicion, or clear their throats as no gentleman should. The result is that when one meets the enthusiasts one remembers them. There is a little dark fellow in the Brera at Milan whose zeal in displaying the merits of Mantegna's foreshortened Christ is as unforgettable as a striking piece of character-acting in a theatre. There is a more reserved but hardly less appreciative official in the Accademia at Bologna with a genuine if incommunicable passion for Guido Reni. And, lastly, there is Alfred Branconi, at S. Croce, with his continual and rapturous "It is faine! It is faine!" but he is a private guide. The Bargello custodians belong to the other camp. The fondness of sculptors for David as a subject is due to the fact that the Florentines, who had spent so much of their time under tyrants and so much of their blood in resisting them, were captivated by the idea of this stripling freeing his compatriots from Goliath and the Philistines. David, as I have said in my remarks on the Piazza della Signoria, stood to them, with Judith, as a champion of liberty. He was alluring also on account of his youth, so attractive to Renaissance sculptors and poets, and the Florentines' admiration was not diminished by the circumstance that his task was a singularly light one, since he never came to close quarters with his antagonist at all and had the Lord of Hosts on his side. A David of mythology, Perseus, another Florentine hero, a stripling with what looked like a formidable enemy, also enjoyed supernatural assistance. David appealed to the greatest sculptors of all--to Michelangelo, to Donatello, and to Verrocchio; and Michelangelo made two figures, one of which is here and the other at the Accademia, and Donatello two figures, both of which are here, so that, Verrocchio's example being also here, very interesting comparisons are possible. Personally I put Michelangelo's small David first; it is the one in which, apart from its beauty, you can best believe. His colossal David seems to me one of the most glorious things in the world; but it is not David; not the simple, ruddy shepherd lad of the Bible. This David could obviously defeat anybody. Donatello's more famous David, in the hat, upstairs, is the most charming creature you ever saw, but it had been far better to call him something else. Both he and Verrocchio's David, also upstairs, are young tournament nobles rather than shepherd lads who have slung a stone at a Philistine bully. I see them both--but particularly perhaps Verrocchio's--in the intervals of strife most acceptably holding up a lady's train, or lying at her feet reading one of Boccaccio's stories; neither could ever have watched a flock. Donatello's second David, behind the more famous one, has more reality; but I would put Michelangelo's smaller one first. And what beautiful marble it is--so rich and warm! One point which both Donatello's and Verrocchio's David emphasizes is the gulf that was fixed between the Biblical and religious conception of the youthful psalmist and that of these sculptors of the Renaissance. One can, indeed, never think of Donatello as a religious artist. Serious, yes; but not religious, or at any rate not religious in the too common sense of the word, in the sense of appertaining to a special reverential mood distinguished from ordinary moods of dailiness. His David, as I have said, is a comely, cultured boy, who belongs to the very flower of chivalry and romance. Verrocchio's is akin to him, but he has less radiant mastery. Donatello's David might be the young lord; Verrocchio's, his page. Here we see the new spirit, the Renaissance, at work, for though religion called it into being and the Church continued to be its patron, it rapidly divided into two halves, and while the painters were bringing all their genius to glorify sacred history, the scholars were endeavouring to humanize it. In this task they had no such allies as the sculptors, and particularly Donatello, who, always thinking independently and vigorously, was their best friend. Donatello's David fought also more powerfully for the modern spirit (had he known it) than ever he could have done in real life with such a large sword in such delicate hands; for by being the first nude statue of a Biblical character, he made simpler the way to all humanists in whatever medium they worked. Michelangelo was not often tender. Profoundly sad he could be: indeed his own head, in bronze, at the Accademia, might stand for melancholy and bitter world-knowledge; but seldom tender; yet the Madonna and Child in the circular bas-relief in this ground-floor room have something very nigh tenderness, and a greatness that none of the other Italian sculptors, however often they attempted this subject, ever reached. The head of Mary in this relief is, I think, one of the most beautiful things in Florence, none the less so for the charming head-dress which the great austere artist has given her. The Child is older than is usual in such groups, and differs in another way, for tiring of a reading lesson, He has laid His arm upon the book: a pretty touch. Michelangelo's Bacchus, an early work, is opposite. It is a remarkable proof of his extraordinary range that the same little room should contain the David, the Madonna, the Brutus, and the Bacchus. In David one can believe, as I have said, as the young serious stalwart of the Book of Kings. The Madonna, although perhaps a shade too intellectual--or at any rate more intellectual and commanding than the other great artists have accustomed us to think of her--has a sweet gravity and power and almost domestic tenderness. The Brutus is powerful and modern and realistic; while Bacchus is steeped in the Greek spirit, and the little faun hiding behind him is the very essence of mischief. Add to these the fluid vigour of the unfinished relief of the Martyrdom of S. Andrew, No. 126, and you have five examples of human accomplishment that would be enough without the other Florentine evidences at all--the Medici chapel tombs and the Duomo Pieta. The inscription under the Brutus says: "While the sculptor was carving the statue of Brutus in marble, he thought of the crime and held his hand"; and the theory is that Michelangelo was at work upon this head at Rome when, in 1537, Lorenzino de' Medici, who claimed to be a modern Brutus, murdered Alessandro de' Medici. But it might easily have been that the sculptor was concerned only with Brutus the friend of Cæsar and revolted at his crime. The circumstance that the head is unfinished matters nothing. Once seen it can never be forgotten. Although Michelangelo is, as always, the dominator, this room has other possessions to make it a resort of visitors. At the end is a fireplace from the Casa Borgherini, by Benedetto da Rovezzano, which probably has not an equal, although the pietra serena of which it is made is a horrid hue; and on the walls are fragments of the tomb of S. Giovanni Gualberto at Vallombrosa, designed by the same artist but never finished. Benedetto (1474-1556) has a peculiar interest to the English in having come to England in 1524 at the bidding of Cardinal Wolsey to design a tomb for that proud prelate. On Wolsey's disgrace, Henry VIII decided that the tomb should be continued for his own bones; but the sculptor died first and it was unfinished. Later Charles I cast envious eyes upon it and wished to lie within it; but circumstances deprived him too of the honour. Finally, after having been despoiled of certain bronze additions, the sarcophagus was used for the remains of Nelson, which it now holds, in St. Paul's crypt. The Borgherini fireplace is a miracle of exquisite work, everything having received thought, the delicate traceries on the pillars not less than the frieze. The fireplace is in perfect condition, not one head having been knocked off, but the Gualberto reliefs are badly damaged, yet full of life. The angel under the saint's bier in No. 104 almost moves. In this room look also at the beautiful blades of barley on the pillars in the corner close to Brutus, and the lovely frieze by an unknown hand above Michelangelo's Martyrdom of S. Andrew, and the carving upon the two niches for statues on either side of the door. The little room through which one passes to the Michelangelos may well be lingered in. There is a gravely fine floor-tomb of a nun to the left of the door--No. 20--which one would like to see in its proper position instead of upright against the wall; and a stone font in the middle which is very fine. There is also a beautiful tomb by Giusti da Settignano, and the iron gates are worth attention. From Michelangelo let us ascend the stairs, past the splendid gates, to Donatello; and here a word about that sculptor, for though we meet him again and again in Florence (yet never often enough) it is in the upper room in the Bargello that he is enthroned. Of Donatello there is nothing known but good, and good of the most captivating variety. Not only was he a great creative genius, equally the first modern sculptor and the sanest, but he was himself tall and comely, open-handed, a warm friend, humorous and of vigorous intellect. A hint of the affection in which he was held is obtained from his name Donatello, which is a pet diminutive of Donato--his full style being Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. Born in 1386, four years before Fra Angelico and nearly a century after Giotto, he was the son of a well-to-do wool-comber who was no stranger to the perils of political energy in these times. Of Donatello's youth little is known, but it is almost certain that he helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors, being thirteen when that sculptor began upon them. At sixteen he was himself enrolled as a sculptor. It was soon after this that, as I have said in the first chapter, he accompanied his friend Brunelleschi, who was thirteen years his senior, to Rome; and returning alone he began work in Florence in earnest, both for the cathedral and campanile and for Or San Michele. In 1425 he took into partnership Michelozzo, and became, with him, a protégé of Cosimo de' Medici, with whom both continued on friendly terms for the rest of their lives. In 1433 he was in Rome again, probably not sorry to be there since Cosimo had been banished and had taken Michelozzo with him. On the triumphant return of Cosimo in 1434 Donatello's most prosperous period began; for he was intimate with the most powerful man in Florence, was honoured by him, and was himself at the useful age of forty-four. Of Donatello as an innovator I have said something above, in considering the Florentine Davids, but he was also the inventor of that low relief in which his school worked, called rilievo stiacciato, of which there are some excellent examples at South Kensington. In Ghiberti's high relief, breaking out often into completely detached figures, he was also a master, as we shall see at S. Lorenzo. But his greatest claim to distinction is his psychological insight allied to perfect mastery of form. His statues were not only the first really great statues since the Greeks, but are still (always leaving Michelangelo on one side as abnormal) the greatest modern examples judged upon a realistic basis. Here in the Bargello, in originals and in casts, he may be adequately appreciated; but to Padua his admirers must certainly go, for the bronze equestrian statue of Gattamelata is there. Donatello was painted by his friend Masaccio at the Carmine, but the fresco has perished. He is to be seen in the Uffizi portico, although that is probably a fancy representation; and again on a tablet in the wall opposite the apse of the Duomo. The only contemporary portrait (and this is very doubtful) is in a picture in the Louvre given to Uccello--a serious, thoughtful, bearded face with steady, observant eyes: one of five heads, the others being Giotto, Manetti, Brunelleschi, and Uccello himself. Donatello, who never married, but lived for much of his life with his mother and sister, died at a great age, cared for both by Cosimo de' Medici and his son and successor Piero. He was buried with Cosimo in S. Lorenzo. Vasari tells us that he was free, affectionate, and courteous, but of a high spirit and capable of sudden anger, as when he destroyed with a blow a head he had made for a mean patron who objected to its very reasonable price. "He thought," says Vasari, "nothing of money, keeping it in a basket suspended from the ceiling, so that all his workmen and friends took what they wanted without saying anything." He was as careless of dress as great artists have ever been, and of a handsome robe which Cosimo gave him he complained that it spoiled his work. When he was dying his relations affected great concern in the hope of inheriting a farm at Prato, but he told them that he had left it to the peasant who had always toiled there, and he would not alter his will. The Donatello collection in the Bargello has been made representative by the addition of casts. The originals number ten: there is also a cast of the equestrian statue of Gattemalata at Padua, which is, I suppose, next to Verrocchio's Bartolommeo Colleoni at Venice, the finest equestrian statue that exists; heads from various collections, including M. Dreyfus' in Paris, although Dr. Bode now gives that charming example to Donatello's pupil Desiderio; and various other masterpieces elsewhere. But it is the originals that chiefly interest us, and first of these in bronze is the David, of which I have already spoken, and first of these in marble the S. George. This George is just such a resolute, clean, warlike idealist as one dreams him. He would kill a dragon, it is true; but he would eat and sleep after it and tell the story modestly and not without humour. By a happy chance the marble upon which Donatello worked had light veins running through it just where the head is, with the result that the face seems to possess a radiance of its own. This statue was made for Or San Michele, where it used to stand until 1891, when the present bronze replica that takes its place was made. The spirited marble frieze underneath it at Or San Michele is the original and has been there for centuries. It was this S. George whom Ruskin took as the head and inspiration of his Saint George's Guild. The David is interesting not only in itself but as being the first isolated statue of modern times. It was made for Cosimo de' Medici, to stand in the courtyard of the Medici palace (now the Riccardi), and until that time, since antiquity, no one had made a statue to stand on a pedestal and be observable from all points. Hitherto modern sculptors had either made reliefs or statues for niches. It was also the first nude statue of modern times; and once again one has the satisfaction of recognizing that the first was the best. At any rate, no later sculptor has made anything more charming than this figure, or more masterly within its limits. After the S. George and the bronze David, the two most memorable things are the adorable bronze Amorino in its quaint little trousers--or perhaps not Amorino at all, since it is trampling on a snake, which such little sprites did not do--and the coloured terra-cotta bust called Niccolò da Uzzano, so like life as to be after a while disconcerting. The sensitiveness of the mouth can never have been excelled. The other originals include the gaunt John the Baptist with its curious little moustache, so far removed from the Amorino and so admirable a proof of the sculptor's vigilant thoughtfulness in all he did; the relief of the infant John, one of the most animated of the heads (the Baptist at all periods of his life being a favourite with this sculptor); three bronze heads, of which those of the Young Gentleman and the Roman Emperor remain most clearly in my mind. But the authorship of the Roman Emperor is very doubtful. And lastly the glorious Marzocco--the lion from the front of the Palazzo Vecchio, firmly holding the Florentine escutcheon against the world. Florence has other Donatellos--the Judith in the Loggia de' Lanzi, the figures on Giotto's campanile, the Annunciation in S. Croce, and above all the cantoria in the Museum of the Cathedral; but this room holds most of his strong sweet genius. Here (for there are seldom more than two or three persons in it) you can be on terms with him. After the Donatellos we should see the other Renaissance sculpture. But first the Carrand collection of ivories, pictures, jewels, carvings, vestments, plaquettes, and objets d'art, bequeathed to Florence in 1888. Everything here is good and worth examination. Among the outstanding things is a plaquette, No. 393, a Satyr and a Bacchante, attributed to Donatello, under the title "Allegory of Spring," which is the work of a master and a very riot of mythological imagery. The neighbouring plaquettes, many of them of the school of Donatello, are all beautiful. We now find the sixth salon, to see Verrocchio's David, of which I have already spoken. This wholly charming boy, a little nearer life perhaps than Donatello's, although not quite so radiantly distinguished, illustrates the association of Verrocchio and Leonardo as clearly as any of the paintings do; for the head is sheer Leonardo. At the Palazzo Vecchio we saw Verrocchio's boy with the dolphin--that happy bronze lyric--and outside Or San Michele his Christ and S. Thomas, in Donatello and Michelozzo's niche, with the flying cherubim beneath. But as with Donatello, so with Verrocchio, one must visit the Bargello to see him, in Florence, most intimately. For here are not only his David, which once known can never be forgotten and is as full of the Renaissance spirit as anything ever fashioned, whether in bronze, marble, or paint, but--upstairs--certain other wonderfully beautiful things to which we shall come, and, that being so, I would like here to say a little about their author. Verrocchio is a nickname, signifying the true eye. Andrea's real name was de' Cioni; he is known to fame as Andrea of the true eye, and since he had acquired this style at a time when every eye was true enough, his must have been true indeed. It is probable that he was a pupil of Donatello, who in 1435, when Andrea was born, was forty-nine, and in time he was to become the master of Leonardo: thus are the great artists related. The history of Florentine art is practically the history of a family; one artist leads to the other--the genealogy of genius. The story goes that it was the excellence of the angel contributed by Leonardo to his master's picture of the Baptism of Christ (at the Accademia) which decided Verrocchio to paint no more, just as Ghiberti's superiority in the relief of Abraham and Isaac drove Brunelleschi from sculpture. If this be so, it accounts for the extraordinarily small number of pictures by him. Like many artists of his day Verrocchio was also a goldsmith, but he was versatile above most, even when versatility was a habit, and excelled also as a musician. Both Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo employed him to design their tournament costumes; and it was for Lorenzo that he made this charming David and the boy and the dolphin. His greatest work of all is the bronze equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni in Venice, the finest thing of its kind in the world, and so glorious and exciting indeed that every city should have a cast of it in a conspicuous position just for the good of the people. It was while at work upon this that Verrocchio died, at the age of fifty-three. His body was brought from Venice by his pupil Lorenzo di Credi, who adored him, and was buried in S. Ambrogio in Florence. Lorenzo di Credi painted his portrait, which is now in the Uffizi--a plump, undistinguished-looking little man. In the David room are also the extremely interesting rival bronze reliefs of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, which were made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi as trials of skill to see which would win the commission to design the new gates of the Baptistery, as I have told earlier in this book. Six competitors entered for the contest; but Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's efforts were alone considered seriously. A comparison of these two reliefs proves that Ghiberti, at any rate, had a finer sense of grouping. He filled the space at his disposal more easily and his hand was more fluent; but there is a very engaging vivacity in the other work, the realistic details of which are so arresting as to make one regret that Brunelleschi had for sculpture so little time. In S. Maria Novella is that crucifix in wood which he carved for his friend Donatello, but his only other sculptured work in Florence is the door of his beautiful Pazzi chapel in the cloisters of S. Croce. Of Ghiberti's Baptistery gates I have said more elsewhere. Enough here to add that the episode of Abraham and Isaac does not occur in them. This little room also has a Cassa Reliquiaria by Ghiberti, below a fine relief by Bertoldo, Michelangelo's master in sculpture, representing a battle between the Romans and the Barbarians; cases of exquisite bronzes; the head, in bronze (No. 25), of an old placid, shrewd woman, executed from a death-mask, which the photographers call Contessina de' Bardi, wife of Cosimo de' Medici, by Donatello, but which cannot be so, since the sculptor died first; heads of Apollo and two babies, over the Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competition reliefs; a crucifixion by Bertoldo; a row of babies representing the triumph of Bacchus; and below these a case of medals and plaquettes, every one a masterpiece. The next room, Sala VII, is apportioned chiefly between Cellini and Gian or Giovanni da Bologna, the two sculptors who dominate the Loggia de' Lanzi. Here we may see models for Cellini's Perseus in bronze and wax and also for the relief of the rescue of Andromeda, under the statue; his Cosimo I, with the wart (omitted by Bandinelli in the head downstairs, which pairs with Michelangelo's Brutus); and various smaller works. But personally I find that Cellini will not do in such near proximity to Donatello, Verrocchio, and their gentle followers. He was, of course, far later. He was not born (in 1500) until Donatello had been dead thirty-four years, Mino da Fiesole sixteen years, Desiderio da Settignano thirty-six years, and Verrocchio twelve years. He thus did not begin to work until the finer impulses of the Renaissance were exhausted. Giovanni da Bologna, although he, it is true, was even later (1524-1608), I find more sympathetic; while Landor boldly proclaimed him superior to Michelangelo. His "Mercury," in the middle of the room, which one sees counterfeited in all the statuary shops of Florence, is truly very nearly light as air. If ever bronze floated, this figure does. His cherubs and dolphins are very skilful and merry; his turkey and eagle and other animals indicate that he had humility. John of Bologna is best known at Florence by his Rape of the Sabines and Hercules and Nessus in the Loggia de' Lanzi; but the Boboli gardens have a fine group of Oceanus and river gods by him in the midst of a lake. Before leaving this room look at the relief of Christ in glory (No. 35), to the left of the door, by Jacopo Sansovino, a rival of Michelangelo, which is most admirable, and at the case of bronze animals by Pietro Tacca, John of Bologna's pupil, who made the famous boar (a copy of an ancient marble) at the Mercato Nuovo and the reliefs for the pediment of the statue of Cosimo I (by his master) in the Piazza della Signoria. But I believe that the most beautiful thing in this room is the bronze figure for the tomb of Mariano Sozzino by Lorenzo di Pietro. Before we look at the della Robbias, which are in the two large rooms upstairs, let us finish with the marble and terra-cotta statuary in the two smaller rooms to the left as one passes through the first della Robbia room. In the first of them, corresponding to the room with Verrocchio's David downstairs, we find Verrocchio again, with a bust of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici (whom Botticelli painted in the Uffizi holding a medal in his hand) and a most exquisite Madonna and Child in terra-cotta from S. Maria Nuova. (This is on a hinge, for better light, but the official skies will fall if you touch it.) Here also is the bust of a young warrior by Antonio Pollaiuolo (1429-1498) who was Verrocchio's closest rival and one of Ghiberti's assistants for the second Baptistery doors. His greatest work is at Rome, but this bust is indescribably charming, and the softness of the boy's contours is almost of life. It is sometimes called Giuliano de' Medici. Other beautiful objects in the room are the terra-cotta Madonna and Child by Andrea Sansovino (1460-1529), Pollaiuolo's pupil, which is as radiant although not so domestically lovely as Verrocchio's; the bust by Benedetto da Maiano (1442-1497) of Pietro Mellini, that shrewd and wrinkled patron of the Church who presented to S. Croce the famous pulpit by this sculptor; an ancient lady, by the door, in coloured terra-cotta, who is thought to represent Monna Tessa, the nurse of Dante's Beatrice; and certain other works by that delightful and prolific person Ignoto Fiorentino, who here, and in the next room, which we now enter, is at his best. This next priceless room is chiefly memorable for Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole. We come to Verrocchio at once, on the left, where his relief of the death of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni (on a tiny bed only half as long as herself) may be seen. This poor lady, who died in childbirth, was the wife of Giovanni Tornabuoni, and he it was who employed Ghirlandaio to make the frescoes in the choir of S. Maria Novella. (I ought, however, to state that Miss Cruttwell, in her monograph on Verrocchio, questions both the subject and the artist.) Close by we have two more works by Verrocchio--No. 180, a marble relief of the Madonna and Child, the Madonna's dress fastened by the prettiest of brooches, and She herself possessing a dainty sad head and the long fingers that Verrocchio so favoured, which we find again in the famous "Gentildonna" (No. 181) next it--that Florentine lady with flowers in her bosom, whose contours are so exquisite and who has such pretty shoulders. Near by is the little eager S. John the Baptist as a boy by Antonio Rossellino (1427-1478), and on the next wall the same sculptor's circular relief of the Madonna adoring, in a border of cherubs. In the middle is the masterpiece of Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570): a Bacchus, so strangely like a genuine antique, full of Greek lightness and grace. And then we come back to the wall in which the door is, and find more works from the delicate hand of Mino da Fiesole, whom we in London are fortunate in being able to study as near home as at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Of Mino I have said more both at the Badia and at Fiesole. But here I might remark again that he was born in 1431 and died in 1484, and was the favourite pupil of Desiderio da Settignano, who was in his turn the favourite pupil of Donatello. In the little church of S. Ambrogio we have seen a tablet to the memory of Mino, who lies there, not far from the grave of Verrocchio, whom he most nearly approached in feeling, although their ideal type of woman differed in everything save the slenderness of the fingers. The Bargello has both busts and reliefs by him, all distinguished and sensitive and marked by Mino's profound refinement. The Madonna and Child in No. 232 are peculiarly beautiful and notable both for high relief and shallow relief, and the Child in No. 193 is even more charming. For delicacy and vivacity in marble portraiture it would be impossible to surpass the head of Rinaldo della Luna; and the two Medicis are wonderfully real. Everything in Mino's work is thoughtful and exquisite, while the unusual type of face which so attracted him gives him freshness too. This room and that next it illustrate the wealth of fine sculptors which Florence had in the fifteenth century, for the works by the unknown hands are in some cases hardly less beautiful and masterly than those by the known. Look, for example, at the fleur-de-lis over the door; at the Madonna and Child next it, on the right; at the girl's head next to that; at the baby girl at the other end of the room; and at the older boy and his pendant. But one does not need to come here to form an idea of the wealth of good sculpture. The streets alone are full of it. Every palace has beautiful stone-work and an escutcheon which often only a master could execute--as Donatello devised that for the Palazzo Pazzi in the Borgo degli Albizzi. On the great staircase of the Bargello, for example, are numbers of coats of arms that could not be more beautifully designed and incised. In the room leading from that which is memorable for Pollaiuolo's youth in armour is a collection of medals by all the best medallists, beginning, in the first case, with Pisanello. Here are his Sigismondo Malatesta, the tyrant of Rimini, and Isotta his wife; here also is a portrait of Leon Battista Alberti, who designed and worked on the cathedral of Rimini as well as upon S. Maria Novella in Florence. On the other side of this case is the medal commemorating the Pazzi conspiracy. In other cases are pretty Italian ladies, such as Julia Astalla, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, with her hair in curls just as in Ghirlandaio's frescoes, Costanza Rucellai, Leonora Altoviti, Maria Poliziano, and Maria de' Mucini. And so we come to the della Robbias, without whose joyous, radiant art Florence would be only half as beautiful as she is. Of these exquisite artists Luca, the uncle, born in 1400, was by far the greatest. Andrea, his nephew, born in 1435, came next, and then Giovanni. Luca seems to have been a serious, quiet man who would probably have made sculpture not much below his friend Donatello's had not he chanced on the discovery of a means of colouring and glazing terra-cotta. Examples of this craft are seen all over Florence both within doors and out, as the pages of this book indicate, but at the Bargello is the greatest number of small pieces gathered together. I do not say there is anything here more notable than the Annunciation attributed to Andrea at the Spedale degli Innocenti, while of course, for most people, his putti on the façade of that building are the della Robbia symbol; nor is there anything finer than Luca's work at Impruneta; but as a collection of sweetness and gentle domestic beauty these Bargello reliefs are unequalled, both in character and in volume. Here you see what one might call Roman Catholic art--that is, the art which at once gives pleasure to simple souls and symbolizes benevolence and safety--carried out to its highest power. Tenderness, happiness, and purity are equally suggested by every relief here. Had Luca and Andrea been entrusted with the creation of the world it would be a paradise. And, as it is, it seems to me impossible but that they left the world sweeter than they found it. Such examples of affection and solicitude as they were continually bringing to the popular vision must have engendered kindness. I have noted as especially beautiful in the first room Nos. 4, 6, 12, 23, by Andrea; and 10 and 21, by Luca. These, by the way, are the Bargello ascriptions, but the experts do not always agree. Herr Bode, for example, who has studied the della Robbias with passionate thoroughness, gives the famous head of the boy, which is in reproduction one of the best-known works of plastic art, to Luca; but the Bargello director says Andrea. In Herr Bode's fascinating monograph, "Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance," he goes very carefully into the differences between the uncle and the nephew, master and pupil. In all the groups, for example, he says that Luca places the Child on the Madonna's left arm, Andrea on the right. In the second room I have marked particularly Nos. 21, 28, and 31, by Luca, 28 being a deeper relief than usual, and the Madonna not adoring but holding and delighting in one of the most adorable of Babies. Observe in the reproduction of this relief in this volume-- how the Mother's fingers sink into the child's flesh. Luca was the first sculptor to notice that. No. 31 is the lovely Madonna of the Rose Bower. But nothing gives me more pleasure than the boy's head of which I have just spoken, attributed to Andrea and also reproduced here. The "Giovane Donna" which pairs with it has extraordinary charm and delicacy too. I have marked also, by Andrea, Nos. 71 and 76. Giovanni della Robbia's best is perhaps No. 15, in the other room. One curious thing that one notes about della Robbia pottery is its inability to travel. It was made for the church and it should remain there. Even in the Bargello, where there is an ancient environment, it loses half its charm; while in an English museum it becomes hard and cold. But in a church to which the poor carry their troubles, with a dim light and a little incense, it is perfect, far beyond painting in its tenderness and symbolic value. I speak of course of the Madonnas and altar-pieces. When the della Robbias worked for the open air--as in the façade of the Children's Hospital, or at the Certosa, or in the Loggia di San Paolo, opposite S. Maria Novella, where one may see the beautiful meeting of S. Francis and S. Dominic, by Andrea--they seem, in Italy, to have fitness enough; but it would not do to transplant any of these reliefs to an English façade. There was once, I might add, in Florence a Via della Robbia, but it is now the Via Nazionale. I suppose this injustice to the great potters came about in the eighteen-sixties, when popular political enthusiasm led to every kind of similar re-naming. In the room leading out of the second della Robbia room is a collection of vestments and brocades bequeathed by Baron Giulio Franchetti, where you may see, dating from as far back as the sixth century, designs that for beauty and splendour and durability put to shame most of the stuffs now woven; but the top floor of the Museo Archeologico in the Via della Colonna is the chief home in Florence of such treasures. There are other beautiful things in the Bargello of which I have said nothing--a gallery of mediaeval bells most exquisitely designed, from famous steeples; cases of carved ivory; and many of such treasures as one sees at the Cluny in Paris. But it is for its courtyard and for the Renaissance sculpture that one goes to the Bargello, and returns again and again to the Bargello, and it is for these that one remembers it. On returning to London the first duty of every one who has drunk deep of delight in the Bargello is to visit that too much neglected treasure-house of our own, the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington. There may be nothing at South Kensington as fine as the Bargello's finest, but it is a priceless collection and is superior to the Bargello in one respect at any rate, for it has a relief attributed to Leonardo. Here also is an adorable Madonna and laughing Child, beyond anything in Florence for sheer gaiety if not mischief, which the South Kensington authorities call a Rossellino but Herr Bode a Desiderio da Settignano. The room is rich too in Donatello and in Verrocchio, and altogether it makes a perfect footnote to the Bargello. It also has within call learned gentlemen who can give intimate information about the exhibits, which the Bargello badly lacks. The Louvre and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin--but particularly the Kaiser Friedrich since Herr Bode, who has such a passion for this period, became its director--have priceless treasures, and in Paris I have had the privilege of seeing the little but exquisite collection formed by M. Gustave Dreyfus, dominated by that mirthful Italian child which the Bargello authorities consider to be by Donatello, but Herr Bode gives to Desiderio. At the Louvre, in galleries on the ground floor gained through the Egyptian sculpture section and opened very capriciously, may be seen the finest of the prisoners from Michelangelo's tomb for Pope Julius; Donatello's youthful Baptist; a Madonna and Children by Agostino di Duccio, whom we saw at the Museum of the Cathedral; an early coloured terra-cotta by Luca della Robbia, and No. 316, a terra-cotta Madonna and Child without ascription, which looks very like Rossellino. In addition to originals there are at South Kensington casts of many of the Bargello's most valuable possessions, such as Donatello's and Verrocchio's Davids, Donatello's Baptist and many heads, Mino da Fiesole's best Madonna, Pollaiuolo's Young Warrior, and so forth; so that to loiter there is most attractively to recapture something of the Florentine feeling. CHAPTER XV S. Croce An historic piazza--Marble façades--Florence's Westminster Abbey--Galileo's ancestor and Ruskin--Benedetto's pulpit--Michelangelo's tomb--A fond lady--Donatello's Annunciation--Giotto's frescoes--S. Francis--Donatello magnanimous--The gifted Alberti--Desiderio's great tomb--The sacristy--The Medici chapel--The Pazzi chapel--Old Jacopo desecrated--A Restoration. The piazza S. Croce now belongs to children. The church is at one end, bizarre buildings are on either side, the Dante statue is in the middle, and harsh gravel covers the ground. Everywhere are children, all dirty, and all rather squalid and mostly bow-legged, showing that they were of the wrong age to take their first steps on Holy Saturday at noon. The long brown building on the right, as we face S. Croce, is a seventeenth-century palazzo. For the rest, the architecture is chiefly notable for green shutters. The frigid and florid Dante memorial, which was unveiled in 1865 on the six hundredth anniversary of the poet's birthday, looks gloomily upon what once was a scene of splendour and animation, for in 1469 Piero de' Medici devised here a tournament in honour of the betrothal of Lorenzo to Clarice Orsini. The Queen of the tournament was Lucrezia Donati, and she awarded the first prize to Lorenzo. The tournament cost 10,000 gold florins and was very splendid, Verrocchio and other artists being called in to design costumes, and it is thought that Pollaiuolo's terra-cotta of the Young Warrior in the Bargello represents the comely Giuliano de' Medici as he appeared in his armour in the lists. The piazza was the scene also of that famous tournament given by Lorenzo de' Medici for Giuliano in 1474, of which the beautiful Simonetta was the Queen of Beauty, and to which, as I have said elsewhere, we owe Botticelli's two most famous pictures. Difficult to reconstruct in the Piazza any of those glories to-day. The new façade of S. Croce, endowed not long since by an Englishman, has been much abused, but it is not so bad. As the front of so beautiful and wonderful a church it may be inadequate, but as a structure of black and white marble it will do. To my mind nothing satisfactory can now be done in this medium, which, unless it is centuries old, is always harsh and cuts the sky like a knife, instead of resting against it as architecture should. But when it is old, as at S. Miniato, it is right. S. Croce is the Westminster Abbey of Florence. Michelangelo lies here, Machiavelli lies here, Galileo lies here; and here Giotto painted, Donatello carved, and Brunelleschi planned. Although outside the church is disappointing, within it is the most beautiful in Florence. It has the boldest arches, the best light at all seasons, the most attractive floor--of gentle red--and an apse almost wholly made of coloured glass. Not a little of its charm comes from the delicate passage-way that runs the whole course of the church high up on the yellow walls. It also has the finest circular window in Florence, over the main entrance, a "Deposition" by Ghiberti. The lightness was indeed once so intense that no fewer than twenty-two windows had to be closed. The circular window over the altar upon which a new roof seems to be intruding is in reality the interloper: the roof is the original one, and the window was cut later, in defiance of good architecture, by Vasari, who, since he was a pupil of Michelangelo, should have known better. To him was entrusted the restoration of the church in the middle of the sixteenth century. The original architect of the modern S. Croce was the same Arnolfo di Cambio, or Lapo, who began the Duomo. He had some right to be chosen since his father, Jacopo, or Lapo, a German, was the builder of the most famous of all the Franciscan churches--that at Assisi, which was begun while S. Francis was still living. And Giotto, who painted in that church his most famous frescoes, depicting scenes in the life of S. Francis, succeeded Arnolfo here, as at the Duomo, with equal fitness. Arnolfo began S. Croce in 1294, the year that the building of the Duomo was decided upon, as a reply to the new Dominican Church of S. Maria Novella, and to his German origin is probably due the Northern impression which the interiors both of S. Croce and the Duomo convey. The first thing to examine in S. Croce is the floor-tomb, close to the centre door, upon which Ruskin wrote one of his most characteristic passages. The tomb is of an ancestor of Galileo (who lies close by, but beneath a florid monument), and it represents a mediaeval scholarly figure with folded hands. Ruskin writes: "That worn face is still a perfect portrait of the old man, though like one struck out at a venture, with a few rough touches of a master's chisel. And that falling drapery of his cap is, in its few lines, faultless, and subtle beyond description. And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the softness and ease of them is complete,--though only sketched with a few dark touches,--then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and Botticelli's; Donatello's carving and Luca's. But if you see nothing in this sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, of theirs. Where they choose to imitate flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar modern trick with marble--(and they often do)--whatever, in a word, is French, or American, or Cockney, in their work, you can see; but what is Florentine, and for ever great--unless you can see also the beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,--you will see never." The passage is in "Mornings in Florence," which begins with S. Croce and should be read by every one visiting the city. And here let me advise another companion for this church: a little dark enthusiast, in a black skull cap, named Alfred Branconi, who is usually to be found just inside the doors, but may be secured as a guide by a postcard to the church. Signor Branconi knows S. Croce and he loves it, and he has the further qualifications of knowing all Florence too and speaking excellent English, which he taught himself. The S. Croce pulpit, which is by Benedetto da Maiano, is a satisfying thing, accomplished both in proportions and workmanship, with panels illustrating scenes in the life of S. Francis. These are all most gently and persuasively done, influenced, of course, by the Baptistery doors, but individual too, and full of a kindred sweetness and liveliness. The scenes are the "Confirmation of the Franciscan Order" (the best, I think); the "Burning of the Books"; the "Stigmata," which we shall see again in the church, in fresco, for here we are all dedicated to the saint of Assisi, not yet having come upon the stern S. Dominic, the ruler at S. Marco and S. Maria Novella; the "Death of S. Francis," very real and touching, which we shall also see again; and the execution of certain Franciscans. Benedetto, who was also an architect and made the plan of the Strozzi palace, was so unwilling that anything should mar the scheme of his pulpit, that after strengthening this pillar with the greatest care and thoroughness, he hollowed it and placed the stairs inside. The first tomb on the right, close to this pulpit, is Michelangelo's, a mass of allegory, designed by his friend Vasari, the author of the "Lives of the Artists," the reading of which is perhaps the best preparation for the understanding of Florence. "If life pleases us," Michelangelo once said, "we ought not to be grieved by death, which comes from the same Giver." Michelangelo had intended the Pietà, now in the Duomo, to stand above his grave; but Vasari, who had a little of the Pepys in his nature, thought to do him greater honour by this ornateness. The artist was laid to his rest in 1564, but not before his body was exhumed, by his nephew, at Rome, where the great man had died, and a series of elaborate ceremonies had been performed, which Vasari, who is here trustworthy enough, describes minutely. All the artists in Florence vied in celebrating the dead master in memorial paintings for his catafalque and its surroundings, which have now perished; but probably the loss is not great, except as an example of homage, for that was a bad period. How bad it was may be a little gauged by Vasari's tributory tomb and his window over the high altar. Opposite Michelangelo's tomb, on the pillar, is the pretty but rather Victorian "Madonna del Latte," surrounded by angels, by Bernardo Rossellino (1409-1464), brother of the author of the great tomb at S. Miniato. This pretty relief was commissioned as a family memorial by that Francesco Nori, the close friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, who was killed in the Duomo during the Pazzi conspiracy in his effort to save Lorenzo from the assassins. The tomb of Alfieri, the dramatist, to which we now come, was erected at the cost of his mistress, the Countess of Albany, who herself sat to Canova for the figure of bereaved Italy. This curious and unfortunate woman became, at the age of nineteen, the wife of the Young Pretender, twenty-seven years after the '45, and led a miserable existence with him (due chiefly to his depravity, but a little, she always held, to the circumstance that they chose Good Friday for their wedding day) until Alfieri fell in love with her and offered his protection. Together she and the poet remained, apparently contented with each other and received by society, even by the English Royal family, until Alfieri died, in 1803, when after exclaiming that she had lost all--"consolations, support, society, all, all!"--and establishing this handsome memorial, she selected the French artist Fabre to fill the aching void in her fifty-years-old heart; and Fabre not only filled it until her death in 1824, but became the heir of all that had been bequeathed to her by both the Stuart and Alfieri. Such was the Countess of Albany, to whom human affection was so necessary. She herself is buried close by, in the chapel of the Castellani. Mrs. Piozzi, in her "Glimpses of Italian Society," mentions seeing in Florence in 1785 the unhappy Pretender. Though old and sickly, he went much into society, sported the English arms and livery, and wore the garter. Other tombs in the right aisle are those of Machiavelli, the statesman and author of "The Prince," and Rossini, the composer of "William Tell," who died in Paris in 1868, but was brought here for burial. These tombs are modern and of no artistic value, but there is near them a fine fifteenth-century example in the monument by Bernardo Rossellino to another statesman and author, Leonardo Bruni, known as Aretino, who wrote the lives of Dante and Petrarch and a Latin history of Florence, a copy of which was placed on his heart at his funeral. This tomb is considered to be Rossellino's masterpiece; but there is one opposite by another hand which dwarfs it. There is also a work of sculpture near it, in the same wall, which draws away the eyes--Donatello's "Annunciation". The experts now think this to belong to the sculptor's middle period, but Vasari thought it earlier, and makes it the work which had most influence in establishing his reputation; while according to the archives it was placed in the church before Donatello was living. Vasari ought to be better informed upon this point than usual, since it was he who was employed in the sixteenth century to renovate S. Croce, at which time the chapel for whose altar the relief was made--that of the Cavalcanti family--was removed. The relief now stands unrelated to anything. Every detail of it should be examined; but Alfred Branconi will see to that. The stone is the grey pietra serena of Fiesole, and Donatello has plentifully, but not too plentifully, lightened it with gold, which is exactly what all artists who used this medium for sculpture should have done. By a pleasant tactful touch the designer of the modern Donatello monument in S. Lorenzo has followed the master's lead. Almost everything of Donatello's that one sees is in turn the best; but standing before this lovely work one is more than commonly conscious of being in the presence of a wonderful creator. The Virgin is wholly unlike any other woman, and She is surprising and modern even for Donatello with his vast range. The charming terra-cotta boys above are almost without doubt from the same hand, but they cannot have been made for this monument. To the della Robbias we come in the Castellani chapel in the right transept, which has two full-length statues by either Luca or Andrea, in the gentle glazed medium, of S. Francis and S. Bernard, quite different from anything we have seen or shall see, because isolated. The other full-size figures by these masters--such as those at Impruneta--are placed against the wall. The S. Bernard, on the left as one enters the chapel, is far the finer. It surely must be one of the most beautiful male draped figures in the world. The next chapel, at the end of the transept, was once enriched by Giotto frescoes, but they no longer exist. There are, however, an interesting but restored series of scenes in the life of the Virgin by Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto's godson; a Madonna ascending to heaven, by Mainardi, who was Ghirlandaio's pupil, and so satisfactory a one that he was rewarded by the hand of his master's sister; and a pretty piece of Gothic sculpture with the Christ Child upon it. Hereabouts, I may remark, we have continually to be walking over floor-tombs, now ruined beyond hope, their ruin being perhaps the cause of a protecting rail being placed round the others; although a floor-tomb should have, I think, a little wearing from the feet of worshippers, just to soften the lines. Those at the Certosa are, for example, far too sharp and clean. Let us complete the round of the church before we examine the sacristy, and go now to the two chapels, where Giotto may be found at his best, although restored too, on this side of the high altar. The Peruzzi chapel has scenes from the lives of the two S. Johns, the Baptist, and the Evangelist: all rather too thoroughly re-painted, although following Giotto's groundwork closely enough to retain much of their interest and value. And here once again one should consult the "Mornings in Florence," where the wilful discerning enthusiast is, like his revered subject, also at his best. Giotto's thoughtfulness could not be better illustrated than in S. Croce. One sees him, as ever, thinking of everything: not a very remarkable attribute of the fresco painter since then, but very remarkable then, when any kind of facile saintliness sufficed. Signor Bianchi, who found these paintings under the whitewash in 1853, and restored them, overdid his part, there is no doubt; but as I have said, their interest is unharmed, and it is that which one so delights in. Look, for instance, at the attitude of Drusiana, suddenly twitched by S. John back again into this vale of tears, while her bier is on its way to the cemetery outside the pretty city. "Am I really to live again?" she so plainly says to the inexorable miracle-worker. The dancing of Herodias' daughter, which offered Giotto less scope, is original too--original not because it came so early, but because Giotto's mind was original and innovating and creative. The musician is charming. The last scene of all is a delightful blend of religious fervour and reality: the miraculous ascent from the tomb, through an elegant Florentine loggia, to everlasting glory, in a blaze of gold, and Christ and an apostle leaning out of heaven with outstretched hands to pull the saint in, as into a boat. Such a Christ as that could not but be believed in. In the next chapel, the Bardi, we find Giotto at work on a life of S. Francis, and here again Ruskin is essential. It was a task which, since this church was the great effort of the Florentine Franciscans, would put an artist upon his mettle, and Giotto set the chosen incidents before the observers with the discretion and skill of the great biographer that he was, and not only that, but the great Assisi decorator that he was. No choice could have been better at any time in the history of art. Giotto chose the following scenes, one or two of which coincide with those on Benedetto da Maiano's pulpit, which came of course many years later: the "Confirmation of the Rules of the Franciscans," "S. Francis before the Sultan and the Magi," "S. Francis Sick and Appearing to the Bishop of Assisi," "S. Francis Fleeing from His Father's House and His Reception by the Bishop of Assisi," and the "Death of S. Francis". Giotto's Assisi frescoes, which preceded these, anticipate them; but in some cases these are considered to be better, although in others not so good. It is generally agreed that the death scene is the best. Note the characteristic touch by which Giotto makes one of the monks at the head of the bed look up at the precise moment when the saint dies, seeing him being received into heaven. According to Vasari, one of the two monks (on the extreme left, as I suppose) is Giotto's portrait of the architect of the church, Amolfo. The altar picture, consisting of many more scenes in the life of S. Francis, is often attributed to Cimabue, Giotto's master, but probably is by another hand. In one of these scenes the saint is found preaching to what must be the most attentive birds on record. The figures on the ceiling represent Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, which all Franciscans are pledged to observe. The glass is coeval with the building, which has been described as the most perfect Gothic chapel in existence. The founder of this chapel was Ridolfo de' Bardi, whose family early in the fourteenth century bade fair to become as powerful as the Medici, and by the same means, their business being banking and money-lending, in association with the founders of the adjoining chapel, the Peruzzi. Ridolfo's father died in 1310, and his son, who had become a Franciscan, in 1327; and the chapel was built, and Giotto probably painted the frescoes, soon after the father's death. Both the Bardi and Peruzzi were brought low by our King Edward III, who borrowed from them money with which to fight the French, at Crecy and Poitiers, and omitted to repay it. The chapels in the left transept are less interesting, except perhaps to students of painting in its early days. In the chapel at the end we find Donatello's wooden crucifix which led to that friendly rivalry on the part of Brunelleschi, the story of which is one of the best in all Vasari. Donatello, having finished this wooden crucifix, and being unusually satisfied with it, asked Brunelleschi's opinion, confidently expecting praise. But Brunelleschi, who was sufficiently close a friend to say what he thought, replied that the type was too rough and common: it was not Christ but a peasant. Christ, of course, was a peasant; but by peasant Brunelleschi meant a stupid, dull man. Donatello, chagrined, had recourse to what has always been a popular retort to critics, and challenged him to make a better. Brunelleschi took it very quietly: he said nothing in reply, but secretly for many months, in the intervals of his architecture, worked at his own version, and then one day, when it was finished, invited Donatello to dinner, stopping at the Mercato Vecchio to get some eggs and other things. These he gave Donatello to carry, and sent him on before him to the studio, where the crucifix was standing unveiled. When Brunelleschi arrived he found the eggs scattered and broken on the floor and Donatello before his carving in an ecstasy of admiration. "But what are we going to have for dinner?" the host inquired. "Dinner!" said Donatello; "I've had all the dinner I require. To thee it is given to carve Christs: to me only peasants." No one should forget this pretty story, either here or at S. Maria Novella, where Brunelleschi's crucifix now is. The flexible Siena iron grille of this end chapel dates from 1335. Note its ivy border. On entering the left aisle we find the tombs of Cherubini, the composer, Raphael Morghen, the engraver, and that curious example of the Florentine universalist, whose figure we saw under the Uffizi, Leon Battista Alberti (1405-1472), architect, painter, author, mathematician, scholar, conversationalist, aristocrat, and friend of princes. His chief work in Florence is the Rucellai palace and the façade of S. Maria Novella, but he was greater as an influence than creator, and his manuals on architecture, painting, and the study of perspective helped to bring the arts to perfection. It is at Rimini that he was perhaps most wonderful. Lorenzo de' Medici greatly valued his society, and he was a leader in the Platonic Academy. But the most human achievement to his credit is his powerful plea for using the vernacular in literature, rather than concealing one's best thoughts, as was fashionable before his protest, in Latin. So much for Alberti's intellectual side. Physically he was remarkable too, and one of his accomplishments was to jump over a man standing upright, while he was also able to throw a coin on to the highest tower, even, I suppose, the Campanile, and ride any horse, however wild. At the Bargello may be seen Alberti's portrait, on a medal designed by Pisanello. The old medals are indeed the best authority for the lineaments of the great men of the Renaissance, better far than paint. At South Kensington thousands may be seen, either in the original or in reproduction. In the right aisle we saw Bernardo Rossellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni; in the left is that of Bruni's successor as Secretary of State, Carlo Marsuppini, by Desiderio da Settignano, which is high among the most beautiful monuments that exist. "Faine, faine!" says Alfred Branconi, with his black eyes dimmed; and this though he has seen it every day for years and explained its beauties in the same words. Everything about it is beautiful, as the photograph which I give in this volume will help the reader to believe: proportions, figures, and tracery; but I still consider Mino's monument to Ugo in the Badia the finest Florentine example of the gentler memorial style, as contrasted with the severe Michelangelesque manner. Mino, it must be remembered, was Desiderio's pupil, as Desiderio was Donatello's. Note how Desiderio, by an inspiration, opened the leaf-work at each side of the sarcophagus and instantly the great solid mass of marble became light, almost buoyant. Never can a few strokes of the chisel have had so transforming an effect. There is some doubt as to whether the boys are just where the sculptor set them, and the upper ones with their garlands are thought to be a later addition; but we are never likely to know. The returned visitor from Florence will like to be reminded that, as of so many others of the best Florentine sculptures, there is a cast of this at South Kensington. The last tomb of the highest importance in the church is that of Galileo, the astronomer, who died in 1642; but it is not interesting as a work of art. In the centre of the church is a floor-tomb by Ghiberti, with a bronze figure of a famous Franciscan, Francesco Sansoni da Brescia. Next the sacristy. Italian priests apparently have no resentment against inquisitive foreigners who are led into their dressing-rooms while sumptuous and significant vestments are being donned; but I must confess to feeling it for them, and if my impressions of the S. Croce sacristy are meagre and confused it is because of a certain delicacy that I experienced in intruding upon their rites. For on both occasions when I visited the sacristy there were several priests either robing or disrobing. Apart from a natural disinclination to invade privacy, I am so poor a Roman Catholic as to be in some doubt as to whether one has a right to be so near such a mystery at all. But I recollect that in this sacristy are treasures of wood and iron--the most beautiful intarsia wainscotting I ever saw, by Giovanni di Michele, with a frieze of wolves and foliage, and fourteenth-century iron gates to the little chapel, pure Gothic in design, with a little rose window at the top, delicate beyond words: all which things once again turn the thoughts to this wonderful Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when not even the best was good enough for those who built churches, but something miraculous was demanded from every craftsman. At the end of the passage in which the sacristy is situated is the exquisite little Cappella Medici, which Michelozzo, the architect of S. Marco and the Palazzo Medici, and for a while Donatello's partner, built for his friend Cosimo de' Medici, who though a Dominican in his cell at S. Marco was a Franciscan here, but by being equally a patron dissociated himself from partisanship. Three treasures in particular does this little temple hold: Giotto's "Coronation of the Virgin"; the della Robbia altar relief, and Mino da Fiesole's tabernacle. Giotto's picture, which is signed, once stood as altar-piece in the Baroncelli chapel of the church proper. In addition to the beautiful della Robbia altar-piece, so happy and holy--which Alfred Branconi boldly calls Luca--there is over the door Christ between two angels, a lovely example of the same art. For a subtler, more modern and less religious mind, we have but to turn to the tabernacle by Mino, every inch of which is exquisite. On the same wall is a curious thing. In the eighteen-sixties died a Signor Lombardi, who owned certain reliefs which he believed to be Donatello's. When his monument was made these ancient works were built into them and here and there gilded (for it is a wicked world and there was no taste at that time). One's impulse is not to look at this encroaching piece of novelty at all; but one should resist that feeling, because, on examination, the Madonna and Children above Signor Lombardi's head become exceedingly interesting. Her hands are the work of a great artist, and they are really holding the Child. Why this should not be an early Donatello I do not see. The cloisters of S. Croce are entered from the piazza, just to the right of the church: the first, a little ornate, by Arnolfo, and the second, until recently used as a barracks but now being restored to a more pacific end, by Brunelleschi, and among the most perfect of his works. Brunelleschi is also the designer of the Pazzi chapel in the first cloisters. The severity of the façade is delightfully softened and enlivened by a frieze of mischievous cherubs' heads, the joint work of Donatello and Desiderio. Donatello's are on the right, and one sees at once that his was the bolder, stronger hand. Look particularly at the laughing head fourth from the right. But that one of Desiderio's over the middle columns has much charm and power. The doors, from Brunelleschi's own hand, in a doorway perfect in scale, are noble and worthy. The chapel itself I find too severe and a little fretted by its della Robbias and the multiplicity of circles. It is called Brunelleschi's masterpiece, but I prefer both the Badia of Fiesole and the Old Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, and I remember with more pleasure the beautiful doorway leading from the Arnolfo cloisters to the Brunelleschi cloisters, which probably is his too. The della Robbia reliefs, once one can forgive them for being here, are worth study. Nothing could be more charming (or less conducive to a methodical literary morning) than the angel who holds S. Matthew's ink-pot. But I think my favourite of all is the pensive apostle who leans his cheek on his hand and his elbow on his book. This figure alone proves what a sculptor Luca was, apart altogether from the charm of his mind and the fascination of his chosen medium. This chapel was once the scene of a gruesome ceremony. Old Jacopo Pazzi, the head of the family at the time of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici, after being hanged from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, was buried here. Some short while afterwards Florence was inundated by rain to such an extent that the vengeance of God was inferred, and, casting about for a reason, the Florentines decided that it was because Jacopo had been allowed to rest in sacred soil. A mob therefore rushed to S. Croce, broke open his tomb and dragged his body through the streets, stopping on their way at the Pazzi palace to knock on the door with his skull. He was then thrown into the swollen Arno and borne away by the tide. In the old refectory of the convent are now a number of pictures and fragments of sculpture. The "Last Supper," by Taddeo Gaddi, on the wall, is notable for depicting Judas, who had no shrift at the hands of the painters, without a halo. Castagno and Ghirlandaio, as we shall see, under similar circumstances, placed him on the wrong side of the table. In either case, but particularly perhaps in Taddeo's picture, the answer to Christ's question, which Leonardo at Milan makes so dramatic, is a foregone conclusion. The "Crucifixion" on the end wall, at the left, is interesting as having been painted for the Porta S. Gallo (in the Piazza Cavour) and removed here. All the gates of Florence had religious frescoes in them, some of which still remain. The great bronze bishop is said to be by Donatello and to have been meant for Or San Michele; but one does not much mind. One finds occasion to say so many hard things of the Florentine disregard of ancient art that it is peculiarly a pleasure to see the progress that is being made in restoring Brunelleschi's perfect cloisters at S. Croce to their original form. When they were turned into barracks the Loggia was walled in all round and made into a series of rooms. These walls are now gradually coming away, the lovely pillars being again isolated, the chimneys removed, and everything lightly washed. Grass has also been sown in the great central square. The crumbling of the decorative medals in the spandrels of the cloisters cannot of course be restored; but one does not complain of such natural decay as that. CHAPTER XVI The Accademia Michelangelo--The David--The tomb of Julius--A contrast--Fra Angelico--The beatific painter--Cimabue and Giotto--Masaccio--Gentile da Fabriano--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Fra Angelico again--Fra Bartolommeo--Perugino--Botticelli--The "Primavera"--Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio--Botticelli's sacred pictures--Botticini--Tapestries of Eden. The Accademia delle Belle Arti is in the Via Ricasoli, that street which seen from the top of the Campanile is the straightest thing in Florence, running like a ruled line from the Duomo to the valley of the Mugnone. Upstairs are modern painters: but upstairs I have never been. It is the ground-floor rooms that are so memorable, containing as they do a small but very choice collection of pictures illustrating the growth of Italian art, with particular emphasis on Florentine art; the best assemblage of the work of Fra Angelico that exists; and a large gallery given up to Michelangelo's sculpture: originals and casts. The principal magnets that draw people here, no doubt, are the Fra Angelicos and Botticelli's "Primavera"; but in five at least of the rooms there is not an uninteresting picture, while the collection is so small that one can study it without fatigue--no little matter after the crowded Uffizi and Pitti. It is a simple matter to choose in such a book as this the best place in which to tell something of the life-story of, say, Giotto and Brunelleschi and the della Robbias; for at a certain point their genius is found concentrated--Donatello's and the della Robbias' in the Bargello and those others at the Duomo and Campanile. But with Michelangelo it is different, he is so distributed over the city--his gigantic David here, the Medici tombs at S. Lorenzo, his fortifications at S. Miniato, his tomb at S. Croce, while there remains his house as a natural focus of all his activities. I have, however, chosen the Medici chapel as the spot best suited for his biography, and therefore will here dwell only on the originals that are preserved about the David. The David himself, superb and confident, is the first thing you see in entering the doors of the gallery. He stands at the end, white and glorious, with his eyes steadfastly measuring his antagonist and calculating upon what will be his next move if the sling misdirects the stone. Of the objection to the statue as being not representative of the Biblical figure I have said something in the chapter on the Bargello, where several Davids come under review. Yet, after all that can be said against its dramatic fitness, the statue remains an impressive and majestic yet strangely human thing. There it is--a sign of what a little Italian sculptor with a broken nose could fashion with his mallet and chisel from a mass of marble four hundred and more years ago. Its history is curious. In 1501, when Michelangelo was twenty-six and had just returned to Florence from Rome with a great reputation as a sculptor, the joint authorities of the cathedral and the Arte della Lana offered him a huge block of marble that had been in their possession for thirty-five years, having been worked upon clumsily by a sculptor named Baccellino and then set aside. Michelangelo was told that if he accepted it he must carve from it a David and have it done in two years. He began in September, 1501, and finished in January, 1504, and a committee was appointed to decide upon its position, among them being Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Andrea della Robbia, There were three suggested sites: the Loggia de' Lanzi; the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Verrocchio's little boudoir David then stood (now in the Bargello) and where his Cupid and dolphin now are; and the place where it now stands, then occupied by Donatello's Judith and Holofernes. This last was finally selected, not by the committee but by the determination of Michelangelo himself, and Judith and Holofernes were moved to the Loggia de' Lanzi to their present position. The David was set up in May, 1504, and remained there for three hundred and sixty-nine years, suffering no harm from the weather but having an arm broken in the Medici riots in 1527. In 1878, however, it was decided that further exposure might be injurious, and so the statue was moved here to its frigid niche and a replica in marble afterwards set up in its place. Since this glorious figure is to be seen thrice in Florence, he may be said to have become the second symbol of the city, next the fleur-de-lis. The Tribuna del David, as the Michelangelo salon is called, has among other originals several figures intended for that tomb of Pope Julius II (whose portrait by Raphael we have seen at the Uffizi) which was to be the eighth wonder of the world, and by which the last years of the sculptor's life were rendered so unhappy. The story is a miserable one. Of the various component parts of the tomb, finished or unfinished, the best known is the Moses at S. Pietro in Vincoli at Rome, reproduced in plaster here, in the Accademia, beneath the bronze head of its author. Various other parts are in Rome too; others here; one or two may be at the Bargello (although some authorities give these supposed Michelangelos to Vincenzo Danti); others are in the grotto of the Boboli Gardens; and the Louvre has what is in some respects the finest of the "Prisoners". The first statue on the right of the entrance of the Tribuna del David is a group called "Genio Vittorioso". Here in the old man we see rock actually turned to life; in the various "Prisoners" near we see life emerging from rock; in the David we forget the rock altogether. One wonders how Michelangelo went to work. Did the shape of the block of marble influence him, or did he with his mind's eye, the Röntgen rays of genius, see the figure within it, embedded in the midst, and hew and chip until it disclosed? On the back of the fourth statue on the left a monkish face has been incised: probably some visitor to the studio. After looking at these originals and casts, and remembering those other Michelangelo sculptures elsewhere in Florence--the tombs of the Medici, the Brutus and the smaller David--turn to the bronze head over the cast of Moses and reflect upon the author of it all: the profoundly sorrowful eyes behind which so much power and ambition and disappointment dwelt. It is peculiarly interesting to walk out of the Michelangelo gallery into the little room containing the Fra Angelicos: to pass from a great melancholy saturnine sculptor, the victim of the caprice of princes temporal and spiritual, his eyes troubled with world knowledge and world weariness, to the child-like celebrant of the joy of simple faith who painted these gay and happy pictures. Fra Angelico--the sweetest of all the Florentine painters--was a monk of Fiesole, whose real name was Guido Petri da Mugello, but becoming a Dominican he called himself Giovanni, and now through the sanctity and happiness of his brush is for all time Beato Angelico. He was born in 1390, nearly sixty years after Giotto's death, when Chaucer was fifty, and Richard II on the English throne. His early years were spent in exile from Fiesole, the brothers having come into difficulties with the Archbishop, but by 1418 he was again at Fiesole, and when in 1436 Cosimo de' Medici, returned from exile at Venice, set his friend Michelozzo upon building the convent of S. Marco, Fra Angelico was fetched from Fiesole to decorate the walls. There, and here, in the Accademia, are his chief works assembled; but he worked also at Fiesole, at Cortona, and at Rome, where he painted frescoes in the chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican and where he died, aged sixty-eight, and was buried. It was while at Rome that the Pope offered him the priorship of S. Marco, which he declined as being unworthy, but recommended Antonio, "the good archbishop".--That practically is his whole life. As to his character, let Vasari tell us. "He would often say that whosoever practised art needed a quiet life and freedom from care, and he who occupies himself with the things of Christ ought always to be with Christ. . . . Some say that Fra Giovanni never took up his brush without first making a prayer. . . . He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks." The one curious thing--to me--about Fra Angelico is that he has not been canonized. If ever a son of the Church toiled for her honour and for the happiness of mankind it was he. There are examples of Fra Angelico's work elsewhere in Florence; the large picture in Room I of this gallery; the large altar-piece at the Uffizi, with certain others; the series of mural paintings in the cells of S. Marco; and his pictures will be found not only elsewhere in Florence and Italy but in the chief galleries of the world; for he was very assiduous. We have an excellent example at the National Gallery, No. 663; but this little room gives us the artist and rhapsodist most completely. In looking at his pictures, three things in particular strike the mind: the skill with which he composed them; his mastery of light; and--and here he is unique--the pleasure he must have had in painting them. All seem to have been play; he enjoyed the toil exactly as a child enjoys the labour of building a house with toy bricks. Nor, one feels, could he be depressed. Even in his Crucifixions there is a certain underlying happiness, due to his knowledge that the Crucified was to rise again and ascend to Heaven and enjoy eternal felicity. Knowing this (as he did know it) how could he be wholly cast down? You see it again in the Flagellation of Christ, in the series of six scenes (No. 237). The scourging is almost a festival. But best of all I like the Flight into Egypt, in No. 235. Everything here is joyous and (in spite of the terrible cause of the journey) bathed in the sunny light of the age of innocence: the landscape; Joseph, younger than usual, brave and resolute and undismayed by the curious turn in his fortunes; and Mary with the child in her arms, happy and pretty, seated securely on an amiable donkey that has neither bit nor bridle. It is when one looks at Fra Angelico that one understands how wise were the Old Masters to seek their inspiration in the life of Christ. One cannot imagine Fra Angelico's existence in a pagan country. Look, in No. 236, at the six radiant and rapturous angels clustering above the manger. Was there ever anything prettier? But I am not sure that I do not most covet No. 250, Christ crucified and two saints, and No. 251, the Coronation of the Virgin, for their beauty of light. In the photographs No. 246--a Deposition--is unusually striking, but in the original, although beautiful, it is far less radiant than usual with this painter. It has, however, such feeling as to make it especially memorable among the many treatments of this subject. What is generally considered the most important work in this room is the Last Judgment, which is certainly extraordinarily interesting, and in the hierarchy of heaven and the company of the blest Fra Angelico is in a very acceptable mood. The benignant Christ Who divides the sheep and the goats; the healthy ripe-lipped Saints and Fathers who assist at the tribunal and have never a line of age or experience on their blooming cheeks; the monks and nuns, just risen from their graves, who embrace each other in the meads of paradise with such fervour--these have much of the charm of little flowers. But in delineating the damned the painter is in strange country. It was a subject of which he knew nothing, and the introduction among them of monks of the rival order of S. Francis is mere party politics and a blot. There are two other rooms here, but Fra Angelico spoils us for them. Four panels by another Frate, but less radiant, Lippo Lippi, are remarkable, particularly the figure of the Virgin in the Annunciation; and there is a curious series of scenes entitled "L'Albero della Croce," by an Ignoto of the fourteenth century, with a Christ crucified in the midst and all Scripture in medallions around him, the tragedy of Adam and Eve at the foot (mutilated by some chaste pedant) being very quaint. And in Angelico's rooms there is a little, modest Annunciation by one of his school--No. 256--which shows what a good influence he was, and to which the eye returns and returns. Here also, on easels, are two portraits of Vallombrosan monks by Fra Bartolommeo, serene, and very sympathetically painted, which cause one to regret the deterioration in Italian ecclesiastic physiognomy; and Andrea del Sarto's two pretty angels, which one so often finds in reproduction, are here too. Let us now enter the first room of the collection proper and begin at the very beginning of Tuscan art, for this collection is historical and not fortuitous like that of the Pitti. The student may here trace the progress of Tuscan painting from the level to the highest peaks and downwards again. The Accademia was established with this purpose by that enlightened prince, Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1784. Other pictures not wholly within his scheme have been added since, together with the Michelangelo statues and casts; but they do not impair the original idea. For the serious student the first room is of far the most importance, for there he may begin with Cimabue (? 1240-? 1302), and Giotto (1267-? 1337), and pass steadily to Luca Signorelli (? 1450-1523). For the most part the pictures in this room appeal to the inquirer rather than the sightseer; but there is not one that is without interest, while three works of extraordinary charm have thoughtfully been enisled, on screens, for special attention--a Fra Angelico, a Fabriano, and a Ghirlandaio. Before reaching these, let us look at the walls. The first large picture, on the left, the Cimabue, marks the transition from Byzantine art to Italian art. Giovanni Cimabue, who was to be the forerunner of the new art, was born about 1240. At that time there was plenty of painting in Italy, but it was Greek, the work of artists at Constantinople (Byzantium), the centre of Christianity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the fount of ecclesiastical energy, and it was crude workmanship, existing purely as an accessory of worship. Cimabue, of whom, I may say, almost nothing definite is known, and upon whom the delightful but casual old Vasari is the earliest authority, as Dante was his first eulogist, carried on the Byzantine tradition, but breathed a little life into it. In his picture here we see him feeling his way from the unemotional painted symbols of the Faith to humanity itself. One can understand this large panel being carried (as we know the similar one at S. Maria Novella was) in procession and worshipped, but it is nearer to the icon of the Russian peasant of today than to a Raphael. The Madonna is above life; the Child is a little man. This was painted, say, in 1280, as an altar-piece for the Badia of S. Trinità at Florence. Next came Giotto, Cimabue's pupil, born about 1267, whom we have met already as an architect, philosopher, and innovator; and in the second picture in this room, from Giotto's brush, we see life really awakening. The Madonna is vivifying; the Child is nearer childhood; we can believe that here are veins with blood in them. Moreover, whereas Cimabue's angels brought masonry, these bring flowers. It is crude, no doubt, but it is enough; the new art, which was to counterfeit and even extend nature, has really begun; the mystery and glory of painting are assured and the door opened for Botticelli. But much had to happen first, particularly the mastery of the laws of perspective, and it was not (as we have seen) until Ghiberti had got to work on his first doors, and Brunelleschi was studying architecture and Uccello sitting up all night at his desk, that painting as we know it--painting of men and women "in the round"--could be done, and it was left for a youth who was not born until Giotto had been dead sixty-four years to do this first as a master--one Tommaso di Ser Giovanni Guido da Castel San Giovanni, known as Masaccio, or Big Tom. The three great names then in the evolution of Italian painting, a subject to which I return in chapter XXV, on the Carmine, are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio. We pass on at the Accademia from Cimabue's pupil Giotto, to Giotto's followers, Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, and Daddi's follower Spinello Aretino, and the long dependent and interdependent line of painters. For the most part they painted altar-pieces, these early craftsmen, the Church being the principal patron of art. These works are many of them faded and so elementary as to have but an antiquarian interest; but think of the excitement in those days when the picture was at last ready, and, gay in its gold, was erected in the chapel! Among the purely ecclesiastical works No. 137, an Annunciation by Giovanni del Biondo (second half of the fourteenth century), is light and cheerful, and No. 142, the Crowning of the Virgin, by Rosello di Jacopo Franchi (1376-1456), has some delightful details and is everywhere joyous, with a charming green pattern in it. The wedding scenes in No. 147 give us Florentine life on the mundane side with some valuable thoroughness, and the Pietro Lorenzetti above--scenes in the life of S. Umilita--is very quaint and cheery and was painted as early as 1316. The little Virgin adoring, No. 160, in the corner, by the fertile Ignoto, is charmingly pretty. And now for the three screens, notable among the screens of the galleries of Europe as holding three of the happiest pictures ever painted. The first is the Adoration of the Magi, by Gentile da Fabriano, an artist of whom one sees too little. His full name was Gentile di Niccolò di Giovanni Massi, and he was born at Fabriano between 1360 and 1370, some twenty years before Fra Angelico. According to Vasari he was Fra Angelico's master, but that is now considered doubtful, and yet the three little scenes from the life of Christ in the predella of this picture are nearer Fra Angelico in spirit and charm than any, not by a follower, that I have seen. Gentile did much work at Venice before he came to Florence, in 1422, and this picture, which is considered his masterpiece, was painted in 1423 for S. Trinita. He died four years later. Gentile was charming rather than great, and to this work might be applied Ruskin's sarcastic description of poor Ghirlandaio's frescoes, that they are mere goldsmith's work; and yet it is much more, for it has gaiety and sweetness and the nice thoughtfulness that made the Child a real child, interested like a child in the bald head of the kneeling mage; while the predella is not to be excelled in its modest, tender beauty by any in Florence; and predellas, I may remark again, should never be overlooked, strong as the tendency is to miss them. Many a painter has failed in the large space or made only a perfunctory success, but in the small has achieved real feeling. Gentile's Holy Family on its way to Egypt is never to be forgotten. Not so radiant as Fra Angelico's, in the room we have visited out of due course, but as charming in its own manner--both in personages and landscape; while the city to which Joseph leads the donkey (again without reins) is the most perfect thing out of fairyland. Ghirlandaio's picture, which is the neighbour of Gentile's, is as a whole nearer life and one of his most attractive works. It is, I think, excelled only by his very similar Adoration of the Magi at the Spedale degli Innocenti, which, however, it is difficult to see; and it is far beyond the examples at the Uffizi, which are too hot. Of the life of this artist, who was Michelangelo's master, I shall speak in the chapter on S. Maria Novella. This picture, which represents the Adoration of the Shepherds, was painted in 1485, when the artist was thirty-six. It is essentially pleasant: a religious picture on the sunny side. The Child is the soul of babyish content, equally amused with its thumb and the homage it is receiving. Close by is a goldfinch unafraid; in the distance is a citied valley, with a river winding in it; and down a neighbouring hill, on the top of which the shepherds feed their flocks, comes the imposing procession of the Magi. Joseph is more than commonly perplexed, and the disparity between his own and his wife's age, which the old masters agreed to make considerable, is more considerable than usual. Both Gentile and Ghirlandaio chose a happy subject and made it happier; Fra Angelico (for the third screen picture) chose a melancholy subject and made it happy, not because that was his intention, but because he could not help it. He had only one set of colours and one set of countenances, and since the colours were of the gayest and the countenances of the serenest, the result was bound to be peaceful and glad. This picture is a large "Deposizione della Croce," an altar-piece for S. Trinità. There is such joy in the painting and light in the sky that a child would clap his hands at it all, and not least at the vermilion of the Redeemer's blood. Fra Angelico gave thought to every touch: and his beatific holiness floods the work. Each of these three great pictures, I may add, has its original frame. The room which leads from this one is much less valuable; but Fra Bartolommeo's Vision of S. Bernard has lately been brought to an easel here to give it character. I find this the Frate's most beautiful work. It may have details that are a little crude, and the pointed nose of the Virgin is not perhaps in accordance with the best tradition, while she is too real for an apparition; but the figure of the kneeling saint is masterly and the landscape lovely in subject and feeling. Here too is Fra Bartolommeo's portrait of Savonarola, in which the reformer is shown as personating S. Peter Martyr. The picture was not painted from life, but from an earlier portrait. Fra Bartolommeo had some reason to know what Savonarola was like, for he was his personal friend and a brother in the same convent of S. Marco, a few yards from the Accademia, across the square. He was born in 1475 and was apprenticed to the painter Cosimo Rosselli; but he learned more from studying Masaccio's frescoes at the Carmine and the work of Leonardo da Vinci. It was in 1495 that he came under the influence of Savonarola, and he was the first artist to run home and burn his studies from the nude in response to the preacher's denunciations. Three years later, when Savonarola was an object of hatred and the convent of S. Marco was besieged, the artist was with him, and he then made a vow that if he lived he would join the order; and this promise he kept, although not until Savonarola had been executed. For a while, as a monk, he laid aside the brush, but in 1506 he resumed it and painted until his death, in 1517. He was buried at S. Marco. In his less regenerate days Fra Bartolommeo's greatest friend was the jovial Mariotto Albertinelli, whose rather theatrical Annunciation hangs between a number of the monk's other portraits, all very interesting. Of Albertinelli I have spoken earlier. Before leaving, look at the tiny Ignoto next the door--a Madonna and Child, the child eating a pomegranate. It is a little picture to steal. In the next room are a number of the later and showy painters, such as Carlo Dolci, Lorenzo Lippi, and Francesco Furini, all bold, dashing, self-satisfied hands, in whom (so near the real thing) one can take no interest. Nothing to steal here. Returning through Sala Prima we come to the Sala del Perugino and are among the masters once more--riper and richer than most of those we have already seen, for Tuscan art here reaches its finest flower. Perugino is here and Botticelli, Fra Bartolommeo and Leonardo, Luca Signorelli, Fra Lippo Lippi and Filippino Lippi. And here is a Masaccio. The great Perugino Assumption has all his mellow sunset calm, and never was a landscape more tenderly sympathetic. The same painter's Deposition hangs next, and the custodian brings a magnifying glass that the tears on the Magdalen's cheek may be more closely observed; but the third, No. 53, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, is finer, and here again the landscape and light are perfect. For the rest, there is a Royal Academy Andrea and a formal Ghirlandaio. And now we come to Botticelli, who although less richly represented in numbers than at the Uffizi, is for the majority of his admirers more to be sought here, by reason of the "Primavera" allegory, which is the Accademia's most powerful magnet. The Botticellis are divided between two rooms, the "Primavera" being in the first. The first feeling one has is how much cooler it is here than among the Peruginos, and how much gayer; for not only is there the "Primavera," but Fra Lippo Lippi is here too, with a company of angels helping to crown the Virgin, and a very sweet, almost transparent, little Madonna adoring--No. 79--which one cannot forget. The "Primavera" is not wearing too well: one sees that at once. Being in tempera it cannot be cleaned, and a dulness is overlaying it; but nothing can deprive the figure of Spring of her joy and movement, a floating type of conquering beauty and youth. The most wonderful thing about this wonderful picture is that it should have been painted when it was: that, suddenly, out of a solid phalanx of Madonnas should have stepped these radiant creatures of the joyous earth, earthy and joyful. And not only that they should have so surprisingly and suddenly emerged, but that after all these years this figure of Spring should still be the finest of her kind. That is the miracle! Luca Signorelli's flowers at the Uffizi remain the best, but Botticelli's are very thoughtful and before the grass turned black they must have been very lovely; the exquisite drawing of the irises in the right-hand corner can still be traced, although the colour has gone. The effect now is rather like a Chinese painting. For the history of the "Primavera" and its signification, one must turn back to Chapter X. I spoke just now of Luca's flowers. There are others in his picture in this room--botanist's flowers as distinguished from painter's flowers: the wild strawberry beautifully straggling. This picture is one of the most remarkable in all Florence to me: a Crucifixion to which the perishing of the colour has given an effect of extreme delicacy, while the group round the cross on the distant mound has a quality for which one usually goes to Spanish art. The Magdalen is curiously sulky and human. Into the skull at the foot of the cross creeps a lizard. This room has three Lippo Lippis, which is an interesting circumstance when we remember that that dissolute brother was the greatest influence on Botticelli. The largest is the Coronation of the Virgin with its many lilies--a picture which one must delight in, so happy and crowded is it, but which never seems to me quite what it should be. The most fascinating part of it is the figures in the two little medallions: two perfect pieces of colour and design. The kneeling monk on the right is Lippo Lippi himself. Near it is the Madonna adoring, No. 79, of which I have spoken, with herself so luminous and the background so dark; the other--No. 82--is less remarkable. No. 81, above it, is by Browning's Pacchiorotto (who worked in distemper); close by is the Masaccio, which has a deep, quiet beauty; and beneath it is a richly coloured predella by Andrea del Sarto, the work of a few hours, I should guess, and full of spirit and vigour. It consists of four scriptural scenes which might be called the direct forerunners of Sir John Gilbert and the modern illustrators. Lastly we have what is in many ways the most interesting picture in Florence--No. 71, the Baptism of Christ--for it is held by some authorities to be the only known painting by Verrocchio, whose sculptures we saw in the Bargello and at Or San Michele, while in one of the angels--that surely on the left--we are to see the hand of his pupil Leonardo da Vinci. Their faces are singularly sweet. Other authorities consider not only that Verrocchio painted the whole picture himself but that he painted also the Annunciation at the Uffizi to which Leonardo's name is given. Be that as it may--and we shall never know--this is a beautiful thing. According to Vasari it was the excellence of Leonardo's contribution which decided Verrocchio to give up the brush. Among the thoughts of Leonardo is one which comes to mind with peculiar force before this work when we know its story: "Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master". The second Sala di Botticelli has not the value of the first. It has magnificent examples of Botticelli's sacred work, but the other pictures are not the equal of those in the other rooms. Chief of the Botticellis is No. 85, "The Virgin and Child with divers Saints," in which there are certain annoying and restless elements. One feels that in the accessories--the flooring, the curtains, and gilt--the painter was wasting his time, while the Child is too big. Botticelli was seldom too happy with his babies. But the face of the Saint in green and blue on the left is most exquisitely painted, and the Virgin has rather less troubled beauty than usual. The whole effect is not quite spiritual, and the symbolism of the nails and the crown of thorns held up for the Child to see is rather too cruel and obvious. I like better the smaller picture with the same title--No. 88--in which the Saints at each side are wholly beautiful in Botticelli's wistful way, and the painting of their heads and head-dresses is so perfect as to fill one with a kind of despair. But taken altogether one must consider Botticelli's triumph in the Accademia to be pagan rather than sacred. No. 8, called officially School of Verrocchio, and by one firm of photographers Botticini, and by another Botticelli, is a fine free thing, low in colour, with a quiet landscape, and is altogether a delight. It represents Tobias and the three angels, and Raphael moves nobly, although not with quite such a step as the radiant figure in a somewhat similar picture in our own National Gallery--No. 781--which, once confidently given to Verrocchio, is now attributed to Botticini; while our No. 296, which the visitor from Florence on returning to London should hasten to examine, is no longer Verrocchio but School of Verrocchio. When we think of these attributions and then look at No. 154 in the Accademia--another Tobias and the Angel, here given to Botticini--we have a concrete object lesson in the perilous career that awaits the art expert, The other pictures here are two sunny panels by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, high up, with nice easy colouring; No. 92, an Adoration of the Shepherds by Lorenzo di Credi, with a good landscape and all very sweet and quiet; No. 98, a Deposition by Filippino Lippi and Perugino, in collaboration, with very few signs of Filippino; and No. 90, a Resurrection by Raffaellino del Garbo, an uncommon painter in Florence; the whole thing a tour de force, but not important. And now let us look at the Angelicos again. Before leaving the Accademia for the last time, one should glance at the tapestries near the main entrance, just for fun. That one in which Adam names the animals is so delightfully naive that it ought to be reproduced as a nursery wall-paper. The creatures pass in review in four processions, and Adam must have had to be uncommonly quick to make up his mind first and then rattle out their resultant names in the time. The main procession is that of the larger quadrupeds, headed by the unicorn in single glory; and the moment chosen by the artist is that in which the elephant, having just heard his name (for the first time) and not altogether liking it, is turning towards Adam in surprised remonstrance. The second procession is of reptiles, led by the snail; the third, the smaller quadrupeds, led by four rats, followed desperately close (but of course under the white flag) by two cats; while the fourth--all sorts and conditions of birds--streams through the air. The others in this series are all delightful, not the least being that in which God, having finished His work, takes Adam's arm and flies with him over the earth to point out its merits. CHAPTER XVII Two Monasteries and a Procession The Certosa--A Company of Uncles--The Cells--Machiavelli--Impruneta--The della Robbias--Pontassieve--Pelago--Milton's simile--Vallombrosa--S. Gualberto--Prato and the Lippis--The Grassina Albergo--An American invasion--The Procession of the Dead Christ--My loss. Everyone who merely visits Florence holds it a duty to bring home at least one flask of the Val d'Ema liqueur from the Carthusian monastery four or five miles distant from the city, not because that fiery distillation is peculiarly attractive but because the vessels which contain it are at once pretty decorations and evidences of travel and culture. They can be bought in Florence itself, it is true (at a shop at the corner of the Via de' Cerretani, close to the Baptistery), but the Certosa is far too interesting to miss, if one has time to spare from the city's own treasures. The trams start from the Mercato Nuovo and come along the Via dell' Arcivescovado to the Baptistery, and so to the Porta Romana and out into the hilly country. The ride is dull and rather tiresome, for there is much waiting at sidings, but the expedition becomes attractive immediately the tram is left. There is then a short walk, principally up the long narrow approach to the monastery gates, outside which, when I was there, was sitting a beggar at a stone table, waiting for the bowl of soup to which all who ask are entitled. Passing within the courtyard you ring the bell on the right and enter the waiting hall, from which, in the course of time, when a sufficient party has been gathered, an elderly monk in a white robe leads you away. How many monks there may be, I cannot say; but of the few of whom I caught a glimpse, all were alike in the possession of white beards, and all suggested uncles in fancy dress. Ours spoke good French and was clearly a man of parts. Lulled by his soothing descriptions I passed in a kind of dream through this ancient abode of peace. The Certosa dates from 1341 and was built and endowed by a wealthy merchant named Niccolo Acciaioli, after whom the Lungarno Acciaioli is named. The members of the family are still buried here, certain of the tombstones bearing dates of the present century. To-day it is little but a show place, the cells of the monks being mostly empty and the sale of the liqueur its principal reason for existence. But the monks who are left take a pride in their church, which is attributed to Orcagna, and its possessions, among which come first the relief monuments of early Acciaioli in the floor of one of the chapels--the founder's being perhaps also the work of Orcagna, while that of his son Lorenzo, who died in 1353, is attributed by our cicerone to Donatello, but by others to an unknown hand. It is certainly very beautiful. These tombs are the very reverse of those which we saw in S. Croce; for those bear the obliterating traces of centuries of footsteps, so that some are nearly flat with the stones, whereas these have been railed off for ever and have lost nothing. The other famous Certosa tomb is that of Cardinal Angelo Acciaioli, which, once given to Donatello, is now sometimes attributed to Giuliano di Sangallo and sometimes to his son Francesco. The Certosa has a few good pictures, but it is as a monastery that it is most interesting: as one of the myriad lonely convents of Italy, which one sees so constantly from the train, perched among the Apennines, and did not expect ever to enter. The cloisters which surround the garden, in the centre of which is a well, and beneath which is the distillery, are very memorable, not only for their beauty but for the sixty and more medallions of saints and evangelists all round it by Giovanni della Robbia. Here the monks have sunned themselves, and here been buried, these five and a half centuries. One suite of rooms is shown, with its own little private garden and no striking discomfort except the hole in the wall by the bed, through which the sleeper is awakened. From its balcony one sees the Etna far below and hears the roar of a weir, and away in the distance is Florence with the Duomo and a third of Giotto's Campanile visible above the intervening hills. Having shown you all the sights the monk leads you again to the entrance hall and bids you good-bye, with murmurs of surprise and a hint of reproach on discovering a coin in his hand, for which, however, none the less, he manages in the recesses of his robe to find a place; and you are then directed to the room where the liqueur, together with sweets and picture post-cards, is sold by another monk, assisted by a lay attendant, and the visit to the Certosa is over. The tram that passes the Certosa continues to S. Casciano in the Chianti district (but much wine is called Chianti that never came from here), where there is a point of interest in the house to which Machiavelli retired in 1512, to give himself to literature and to live that wonderful double life--a peasant loafer by day in the fields and the village inn, and at night, dressed in his noblest clothes, the cold, sagacious mentor of the rulers of mankind. But at S. Casciano I did not stop. And farther still one comes to the village of Impruneta, after climbing higher and higher, with lovely calm valleys on either side coloured by silver olive groves and vivid wheat and maize, and studded with white villas and villages and church towers. On the road every woman in every doorway plaits straw with rapid fingers just as if we were in Bedfordshire. Impruneta is famous for its new terra-cotta vessels and its ancient della Robbias. For in the church is some of Luca's most exquisite work--an altarpiece with a frieze of aerial angels under it, and a stately white saint on either side, and the loveliest decorated columns imaginable; while in an adjoining chapel is a Christ crucified mourned by the most dignified and melancholy of Magdalens. Andrea della Robbia is here too, and here also is a richly designed cantoria by Mino da Fiesole. The village is not in the regular programme of visitors, and Baedeker ignores it; hence perhaps the excitement which an arrival from Florence causes, for the children turn out in battalions. The church is very dirty, and so indeed is everything else; but no amount of grime can disguise the charm of the cloisters. The Certosa is a mere half-hour from Florence, Impruneta an hour and a half; but Vallombrosa asks a long day. One can go by rail, changing at Sant' Ellero into the expensive rack-and-pinion car which climbs through the vineyards to a point near the summit, and has, since it was opened, brought to the mountain so many new residents, whose little villas cling to the western slopes among the lizards, and, in summer, are smitten unbearably by the sun. But the best way to visit the monastery and the groves is by road. A motor-car no doubt makes little of the journey; but a carriage and pair such as I chartered at Florence for forty-five lire has to be away before seven, and, allowing three hours on the top, is not back again until the same hour in the evening; and this, the ancient way, with the beat of eight hoofs in one's ears, is the right way. For several miles the road and the river--the Arno--run side by side--and the railway close by too--through venerable villages whose inhabitants derive their living either from the soil or the water, and amid vineyards all the time. Here and there a white villa is seen, but for the most part this is peasants' district: one such villa on the left, before Pontassieve, having about it, and on each side of its drive, such cypresses as one seldom sees and only Gozzoli or Mr. Sargent could rightly paint, each in his own style. Not far beyond, in a scrap of meadow by the road, sat a girl knitting in the morning sun--with a placid glance at us as we rattled by; and ten hours later, when we rattled past again, there she still was, still knitting, in the evening sun, and again her quiet eyes were just raised and dropped. At Pontassieve we stopped a while for coffee at an inn at the corner of the square of pollarded limes, and while it was preparing watched the little crumbling town at work, particularly the cooper opposite, who was finishing a massive cask within whose recesses good Chianti is doubtless now maturing; and then on the white road again, to the turning, a mile farther on, to the left, where one bids the Arno farewell till the late afternoon. Steady climbing now, and then a turn to the right and we see Pelago before us, perched on its crags, and by and by come to it--a tiny town, with a clean and alluring inn, very different from the squalor of Pontassieve: famous in art and particularly Florentine art as being the birthplace of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the Baptistery doors. From Pelago the road descends with extreme steepness to a brook in a rocky valley, at a bridge over which the real climb begins, to go steadily on (save for another swift drop before Tosi) until Vallombrosa is reached, winding through woods all the way, chiefly chestnut--those woods which gave Milton, who was here in 1638, his famous simile. [6] The heat was now becoming intense (it was mid-September) and the horses were suffering, and most of this last stage was done at walking pace; but such was the exhilaration of the air, such the delight of the aromas which the breeze continually wafted from the woods, now sweet, now pungent, and always refreshing, that one felt no fatigue even though walking too. And so at last the monastery, and what was at that moment better than anything, lunch. The beauty and joy of Vallombrosa, I may say at once, are Nature's, not man's. The monastery, which is now a Government school of forestry, is ugly and unkempt; the hotel is unattractive; the few people one meets want to sell something or take you for a drive. But in an instant in any direction one can be in the woods--and at this level they are pine woods, soft underfoot and richly perfumed--and a quarter of an hour's walking brings the view. It is then that you realize you are on a mountain indeed. Florence is to the north-west in the long Arno valley, which is here precipitous and narrow. The river is far below--if you slipped you would slide into it--fed by tumbling Apennine streams from both walls. The top of the mountain is heathery like Scotland, and open; but not long will it be so, for everywhere are the fenced parallelograms which indicate that a villa is to be erected. Nothing, however, can change the mountain air or the glory of the surrounding heights. Another view, unbroken by villas but including the monastery and the Foresters' Hotel in the immediate foreground, and extending as far as Florence itself (on suitable days), is obtained from Il Paradisino, a white building on a ledge which one sees from the hotel above the monastery. But that is not by any means the top. The view covers much of the way by which we came hither. Of the monastery of Vallombrosa we have had foreshadowings in Florence. We saw at the Accademia two exquisite portraits by Fra Bartolommeo of Vallombrosan monks. We saw at the Bargello the remains of a wonderful frieze by Benedetto da Rovezzano for the tomb of the founder of the order, S. Giovanni Gualberto; we shall see at S. Miniato scenes in the saint's life on the site of the ancient chapel where the crucifix bent and blessed him. As the head of the monastery Gualberto was famous for the severity and thoroughness of his discipline. But though a martinet as an abbot, personally he was humble and mild. His advice on all kinds of matters is said to have been invited even by kings and popes. He invented the system of lay brothers to help with the domestic work of the convent; and after a life of holiness, which comprised several miracles, he died in 1073 and was subsequently canonized. The monastery, as I have said, is now secularized, save for the chapel, where three resident monks perform service. One may wander through its rooms and see in the refectory, beneath portraits of famous brothers, the tables now laid for young foresters. The museum of forestry is interesting to those interested in museums of forestry. It was to the monastery at Vallombrosa that the Brownings travelled in 1848 when Mrs. Browning was ill. But the abbot could not break the rules in regard to women, and after five days they had to return to Florence. Browning used to play the organ in the chapel, as, it is said, Milton had done two centuries earlier. At such a height and with only a short season the hotel proprietors must do what they can, and prices do not rule low. A departing American was eyeing his bill with a rueful glance as we were leaving. "Milton had it wrong," he said to me (with the freemasonry of the plucked, for I knew him not), "what he meant was, 'thick as thieves'." We returned by way of Sant' Ellero, the gallant horses trotting steadily down the hill, and then beside the Arno once more all the way to Florence. It chanced to be a great day in the city--September 20th, the anniversary of the final defeat of papal temporal power, in 1870--which we were not sorry to have missed, the first tidings coming to us from the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio which in honour of the occasion had been picked out with fairy lamps. Among the excursions which I think ought to be made if one is in Florence for a justifying length of time is a visit to Prato. This ancient town one should see for several things: for its age and for its walls; for its great piazza (with a pile of vividly dyed yarn in the midst) surrounded by arches under which coppersmiths hammer all day at shining rotund vessels, while their wives plait straw; for Filippino Lippi's exquisite Madonna in a little mural shrine at the narrow end of the piazza, which a woman (fetched by a crowd of ragged boys) will unlock for threepence; and for the cathedral, with Filippino's dissolute father's frescoes in it, the Salome being one of the most interesting pre-Botticelli scenes in Italian art. If only it had its colour what a wonder of lightness and beauty this still would be! But probably most people are attracted to Prato chiefly by Donatello and Michelozzo's outdoor pulpit, the frieze of which is a kind of prentice work for the famous cantoria in the museum of the cathedral at Florence, with just such wanton boys dancing round it. On Good Friday evening in the lovely dying April light I paid thirty centimes to be taken by tram to Grassina to see the famous procession of the Gesù Morto. The number of people on the same errand having thrown out the tram service, we had very long waits, while the road was thronged with other vehicles; and the result was I was tired enough--having been standing all the way--when Grassina was reached, for festivals six miles out of Florence at seven in the evening disarrange good habits. But a few pence spent in the albergo on bread and cheese and wine soon restored me. A queer cavern of a place, this inn, with rough tables, rows and rows of wine flasks, and an open fire behind the bar, tended by an old woman, from which everything good to eat proceeded rapidly without dismay--roast chicken and fish in particular. A strapping girl with high cheek bones and a broad dark comely face washed plates and glasses assiduously, and two waiters, with eyes as near together as monkeys', served the customers with bewildering intelligence. It was the sort of inn that in England would throw up its hands if you asked even for cold beef. The piazza of Grassina, which, although merely a village, is enterprising enough to have a cinematoscope hall, was full of stalls given chiefly to the preparation and sale of cake like the Dutch wafelen, and among the stalls were conjurors, cheap-jacks, singers, and dice throwers; while every moment brought its fresh motor-car or carriage load, nearly all speaking English with a nasal twang. Meanwhile every one shouted, the naphtha flared, the drums beat, the horses champed. The street was full too, chiefly of peasants, but among them myriad resolute American virgins, in motor veils, whom nothing can ever surprise; a few American men, sceptical, as ever, of anything ever happening; here and there a diffident Englishwoman and Englishman, more in the background, but destined in the end to see all. But what I chiefly noticed was the native girls, with their proud bosoms carried high and nothing on their heads. They at any rate know their own future. No rushing over the globe for them, but the simple natural home life and children. In the gloom the younger girls in white muslin were like pretty ghosts, each followed by a solicitous mother giving a touch here and a touch there--mothers who once wore muslin too, will wear it no more, and are now happy in pride in their daughters. And very little girls too--mere tots--wearing wings, who very soon were to join the procession as angels. And all the while the darkness was growing, and on the hill where the church stands lights were beginning to move about, in that mysterious way which torches have when a procession is being mobilized, while all the villas on the hills around had their rows of candles. And then the shifting flames came gradually into a mass and took a steady upward progress, and the melancholy strains of an ancient ecclesiastical lamentation reached our listening ears. As the lights drew nearer I left the bank where all the Mamies and Sadies with their Mommas were stationed and walked down into the river valley to meet the vanguard. On the bridge I found a little band of Roman soldiers on horseback, without stirrups, and had a few words with one of them as to his anachronistic cigarette, and then the first torches arrived, carried by proud little boys in red; and after the torches the little girls in muslin veils, which were, however, for the most part disarranged for the better recognition of relations and even more perhaps for recognition by relations: and very pretty this recognition was on both sides. And then the village priests in full canonicals, looking a little self-conscious; and after them the dead Christ on a litter carried by a dozen contadini who had a good deal to say to each other as they bore Him. This was the same dead Christ which had been lying in state in the church, for the past few days, to be worshipped and kissed by the peasantry. I had seen a similar image at Settignano the day before and had watched how the men took it. They began by standing in groups in the piazza, gossipping. Then two or three would break away and make for the church. There, all among the women and children, half-shyly, half-defiantly, they pecked at the plaster flesh and returned to resume the conversation in the piazza with a new serenity and confidence in their hearts. After the dead Christ came a triumphal car of the very little girls with wings, signifying I know not what, but intensely satisfying to the onlookers. One little wet-nosed cherub I patted, so chubby and innocent she was; and Heaven send that the impulse profited me! This car was drawn by an ancient white horse, amiable and tractable as a saint, but as bewildered as I as to the meaning of the whole strange business. After the car of angels a stalwart body of white-vestmented singers, sturdy fellows with black moustaches who had been all day among the vines, or steering placid white oxen through the furrows, and were now lifting their voices in a miserere. And after them the painted plaster Virgin, carried as upright as possible, and then more torches and the wailing band; and after the band another guard of Roman soldiers. Such was the Grassina procession. It passed slowly and solemnly through the town from the hill and up the hill again; and not soon shall I forget the mournfulness of the music, which nothing of tawdriness in the constituents of the procession itself could rid of impressiveness and beauty. One thing is certain--all processions, by day or night, should first descend a hill and then ascend one. All should walk to melancholy strains. Indeed, a joyful procession becomes an impossible thought after this. And then I sank luxuriously into a corner seat in the waiting tram, and, seeking for the return journey's thirty centimes, found that during the proceedings my purse had been stolen. CHAPTER XVIII S. Marco Andrea del Castagno--"The Last Supper"--The stolen Madonna--Fra Angelico's frescoes--"Little Antony"--The good archbishop--The Buonuomini--Savonarola--The death of Lorenzo the Magnificent--Pope Alexander VI--The Ordeal by Fire--The execution--The S. Marco cells--The cloister frescoes--Ghirlandaio's "Last Supper"--Relics of old Florence--Pico and Politian--Piero di Cosimo--Andrea del Sarto. From the Accademia it is but a step to S. Marco, across the Piazza, but it is well first to go a little beyond that in order to see a certain painting which both chronologically and as an influence comes before a painting that we shall find in the Museo S. Marco. We therefore cross the Piazza S. Marco to the Via d'Arrazzieri, which leads into the Via 27 Aprile, [7] where at a door on the left, marked A, is an ancient refectory, preserved as a picture gallery: the Cenacolo di S. Apollonia, all that is kept sacred of the monastery of S. Apollonia, now a military establishment. This room is important to students of art in containing so much work of Andrea del Castagno (1390-1457), to whom Vasari gives so black a character. The portrait frescoes are from the Villa Pandolfini (previously Carducci), and among them are Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante--who is here rather less ascetic than usual--none of whom the painter could have seen. There is also a very charming little cupid carrying a huge peacock plume. But "The Last Supper" is the glory of the room. This work, which belongs to the middle of the fifteenth century, is interesting as a real effort at psychology. Leonardo makes Judas leave his seat to ask if it is he that is meant--that being the dramatic moment chosen by this prince of painters: Castagno calls attention to Judas as an undesirable member of the little band of disciples by placing him apart, the only one on his side of the table; which was avoiding the real task, since naturally when one of the company was forced into so sinister a position the question would be already answered. Castagno indeed renders Judas so obviously untrustworthy as to make it a surprise that he ever was admitted among the disciples (or wished to be one) at all; while Vasari blandly suggests that he is the very image of the painter himself. Other positions which later artists converted into a convention may also be noted: John, for example, is reclining on the table in an ecstasy of affection and fidelity; while the Florentine loggia as the scene of the meal was often reproduced later. Andrea del Castagno began life as a farm lad, but was educated as an artist at the cost of one of the less notable Medici. He had a vigorous way with his brush, as we see here and have seen elsewhere. In the Duomo, for example, we saw his equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino, a companion to Uccello's Hawkwood. When the Albizzi and Peruzzi intrigues which had led to the banishment of Cosimo de' Medici came to their final frustration with the triumphant return of Cosimo, it was Andrea who was commissioned by the Signoria to paint for the outside of the Bargello a picture of the leaders of the insurrection, upside down. Vasari is less to be trusted in his dates and facts in his memoir of Andrea del Castagno than anywhere else; for he states that he commemorated the failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy (which occurred twenty years after his death), and accuses him not only of murdering his fellow-painter Domenico Veneziano but confessing to the crime; the best answer to which allegation is that Domenico survived Andrea by four years. We may now return to S. Marco. The convent as we now see it was built by Michelozzo, Donatello's friend and partner and the friend also of Cosimo de' Medici, at whose cost he worked here. Antonino, the saintly head of the monastery, having suggested to Cosimo that he should apply some of his wealth, not always too nicely obtained, to the Lord, Cosimo began literally to squander money on S. Marco, dividing his affection between S. Lorenzo, which he completed upon the lines laid down by his father, and this Dominican monastery, where he even had a cell reserved for his own use, with a bedroom in addition, whither he might now and again retire for spiritual refreshment and quiet. It was at S. Marco that Cosimo kept the MSS. which he was constantly collecting, and which now, after curious vicissitudes, are lodged in Michelangelo's library at S. Lorenzo; and on his death he left them to the monks. Cosimo's librarian was Tommaso Parenticelli, a little busy man, who, to the general astonishment, on the death of Eugenius IV became Pope and took the name of Nicholas V. His energies as Pontiff went rather towards learning and art than anything else: he laid the foundations of the Vatican library, on the model of Cosimo's, and persuaded Fra Angelico to Rome to paint Vatican frescoes. The magnets which draw every one who visits Florence to S. Marco are first Fra Angelico, and secondly Savonarola, or first Savonarola, and secondly Fra Angelico, according as one is constituted. Fra Angelico, at Cosimo's desire and cost, came from Fiesole to paint here; while Girolamo Savonarola, forced to leave Ferrara during the war, entered these walls in 1482. Fra Angelico in his single crucifixion picture in the first cloisters and in his great scene of the Mount of Olives in the chapter house shows himself less incapable of depicting unhappiness than we have yet seen him; but the most memorable of the ground-floor frescoes is the symbol of hospitality over the door of the wayfarers' room, where Christ is being welcomed by two Dominicans in the way that Dominicans (as contrasted with scoundrelly Franciscans) would of course welcome Him. In this Ospizio are three reliquaries which Fra Angelico painted for S. Maria Novella, now preserved here in a glass case. They represent the Madonna della Stella, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Adoration of the Magi. All are in Angelico's happiest manner, with plenty of gold; and the predella of the Coronation is the prettiest thing possible, with its blue saints gathered about a blue Mary and Joseph, who bend over the Baby. The Madonna della Stella is the picture which was stolen in 1911, but quickly recovered. It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery: nominally custodians of the museum. To repeat one of Vasari's sentences: "Some say that he never took up his brush without first making a prayer".... The "Peter" with his finger to his lips, over the sacristy, is reminding the monks that that room is vowed to silence. In the chapter house is the large Crucifixion by the same gentle hand, his greatest work in Florence, and very fine and true in character. Beneath it are portraits of seventeen famous Dominicans with S. Dominic in the midst. Note the girl with the scroll in the right--how gay and light the colouring. Upstairs, in the cells, and pre-eminently in the passage, where his best known Annunciation is to be seen, Angelico is at his best. In each cell is a little fresco reminding the brother of the life of Christ--and of those by Angelico it may be said that each is as simple as it can be and as sweet: easy lines, easy colours, with the very spirit of holiness shining out. I think perhaps that the Coronation of the Virgin in the ninth cell, reproduced in this volume, is my favourite, as it is of many persons; but the Annunciation in the third, the two Maries at the Sepulchre in the eighth, and the Child in the Stable in the fifth, are ever memorable too. In the cell set apart for Cosimo de' Medici, No. 38, which the officials point out, is an Adoration of the Magi, painted there at Cosimo's express wish, that he might be reminded of the humility proper to rulers; and here we get one of the infrequent glimpses of this best and wisest of the Medici, for a portrait of him adorns it, with a wrong death-date on it. Here also is a sensitive terra-cotta bust of S. Antonio, Cosimo's friend and another pride of the monastery: the monk who was also Archbishop of Florence until his death, and whom we saw, in stone, in a niche under the Uffizi. His cell was the thirty-first cell, opposite the entrance. This benign old man, who has one of the kindest faces of his time, which was often introduced into pictures, was appointed to the see at the suggestion of Fra Angelico, to whom Pope Eugenius (who consecrated the new S. Marco in 1442 and occupied Cosimo de' Medici's cell on his visit) had offered it; but the painter declined and put forward Antonio in his stead. Antonio Pierozzi, whose destiny it was to occupy this high post, to be a confidant of Cosimo de' Medici, and ultimately, in 1523, to be enrolled among the saints, was born at Florence in 1389. According to Butler, from the cradle "Antonino" or "Little Antony," as the Florentines affectionately called him, had "no inclination but to piety," and was an enemy even as an infant "both to sloth and to the amusements of children". As a schoolboy his only pleasure was to read the lives of the saints, converse with pious persons or to pray. When not at home or at school he was in church, either kneeling or lying prostrate before a crucifix, "with a perseverance that astonished everybody". S. Dominic himself, preaching at Fiesole, made him a Dominican, his answers to an examination of the whole decree of Gratian being the deciding cause, although Little Antony was then but sixteen. As a priest he was "never seen at the altar but bathed in tears". After being prior of a number of convents and a counsellor of much weight in convocation, he was made Archbishop of Florence: but was so anxious to avoid the honour and responsibility that he hid in the island of Sardinia. On being discovered he wrote a letter praying to be excused and watered it with his tears; but at last he consented and was consecrated in 1446. As archbishop his life was a model of simplicity and solicitude. He thought only of his duties and the well-being of the poor. His purse was open to all in need, and he "often sold" his single mule in order to relieve some necessitous person. He gave up his garden to the growth of vegetables for the poor, and kept an ungrateful leper whose sores he dressed with his own hands. He died in 1459 and was canonized in 1523. His body was still free from corruption in 1559, when it was translated to the chapel in S. Marco prepared for it by the Salviati. But perhaps the good Antonino's finest work was the foundation of a philanthropic society of Florentines which still carries on its good work. Antonino's sympathy lay in particular with the reduced families of Florence, and it was to bring help secretly to them--too proud to beg--that he called for volunteers. The society was known in the city as the Buonuomini (good men) of S. Martino, the little church close to Dante's house, behind the Badia: S. Martin being famous among saints for his impulsive yet wise generosity with his cloak. The other and most famous prior of S. Marco was Savonarola. Girolamo Savonarola was born of noble family at Ferrara in 1452, and after a profound education, in which he concentrated chiefly upon religion and philosophy, he entered the Dominican order at the age of twenty-two. He first came to S. Marco at the age of thirty and preached there in Lent in 1482, but without attracting much notice. When, however, he returned to S. Marco seven years later it was to be instantly hailed both as a powerful preacher and reformer. His eloquent and burning declarations were hurled both at Florence and Rome: at the apathy and greed of the Church as a whole, and at the sinfulness and luxury of this city, while Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was then at the height of his influence, surrounded by accomplished and witty hedonists, and happiest when adding to his collection of pictures, jewels, and sculpture, in particular did the priest rebuke. Savonarola stood for the spiritual ideals and asceticism of the Baptist, Christ, and S. Paul; Lorenzo, in his eyes, made only for sensuality and decadence. The two men, however, recognized each other's genius, and Lorenzo, with the tolerance which was as much a mark of the first three Medici rulers as its absence was notable in most of the later ones, rather encouraged Savonarola in his crusade than not. He visited him in the monastery and did not resent being kept waiting; and he went to hear him preach. In 1492 Lorenzo died, sending for Savonarola on his death-bed, which was watched by the two closest of his scholarly friends, Pico della Mirandola and Politian. The story of what happened has been variously told. According to the account of Politian, Lorenzo met his end with fortitude, and Savonarola prayed with the dying man and gave him his blessing; according to another account, Lorenzo was called upon by Savonarola to make three undertakings before he died, and, Lorenzo declining, Savonarola left him unabsolved. These promises were (1) to repent of all his sins, and in particular of the sack of Volterra, of the alleged theft of public dowry funds and of the implacable punishment of the Pazzi conspirators; (2) to restore all property of which he had become possessed by unjust means; and (3) to give back to Florence her liberty. But the probabilities are in favour of Politian's account being the true one, and the later story a political invention. Lorenzo dead and Piero his son so incapable, Savonarola came to his own. He had long foreseen a revolution following on the death of Lorenzo, and in one of his most powerful sermons he had suggested that the "Flagellum Dei" to punish the wicked Florentines might be a foreign invader. When therefore in 1493 the French king Charles VIII arrived in Italy with his army, Savonarola was recognized not only as a teacher but as a prophet; and when the Medici had been again banished and Charles, having asked too much, had retreated from Florence, the Republic was remodelled with Savonarola virtually controlling its Great Council. For a year or two his power was supreme. This was the period of the Piagnoni, or Weepers. The citizens adopted sober attire; a spirit as of England under the Puritans prevailed; and Savonarola's eloquence so far carried away not only the populace but many persons of genius that a bonfire was lighted in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria in which costly dresses, jewels, false hair and studies from the nude were destroyed. Savonarola, meanwhile, was not only chastising and reforming Florence, but with fatal audacity was attacking with even less mincing of words the licentiousness of the Pope. As to the character of Lorenzo de' Medici there can be two opinions, and indeed the historians of Florence are widely divided in their estimates; but of Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) there is but one, and Savonarola held it. Savonarola was excommunicated, but refused to obey the edict. Popes, however, although Florence had to a large extent put itself out of reach, have long arms, and gradually--taking advantage of the city's growing discontent with piety and tears and recurring unquiet, there being still a strong pro-Medici party, and building not a little on his knowledge of the Florentine love of change--the Pope gathered together sufficient supporters of his determination to crush this too outspoken critic and humiliate his fellow-citizens. Events helped the pontiff. A pro-Medici conspiracy excited the populace; a second bonfire of vanities led to rioting, for the Florentines were beginning to tire of virtue; and the preaching of a Franciscan monk against Savonarola (and the gentle Fra Angelico has shown us, in the Accademia, how Franciscans and Dominicans could hate each other) brought matters to a head, for he challenged Savaronola to an ordeal by fire in the Loggia de' Lanzi, to test which of them spoke with the real voice of God. A Dominican volunteered to make the essay with a Franciscan. This ceremony, anticipated with the liveliest eagerness by the Florentines, was at the last moment forbidden, and Savonarola, who had to bear the responsibility of such a bitter disappointment to a pleasure-loving people, became an unpopular figure. Everything just then was against him, for Charles VIII, with whom he had an understanding and of whom the Pope was afraid, chose that moment to die. The Pope drove home his advantage, and getting more power among individuals on the Council forced them to indict their firebrand. No means were spared, however base; forgery and false witness were as nothing. The summons arrived on April 8th, 1497, when Savonarola was at S. Marco. The monks, who adored him, refused to let him go, and for a whole day the convent was under siege. But might, of course, prevailed, and Savonarola was dragged from the church to the Palazzo Vecchio and prosecuted for the offence of claiming to have supernatural power and fomenting political disturbance. He was imprisoned in a tiny cell in the tower for many days, and under constant torture he no doubt uttered words which would never have passed his lips had he been in control of himself; but we may dismiss, as false, the evidence which makes them into confessions. Evidence there had to be, and evidence naturally was forthcoming; and sentence of death was passed. In that cell, when not under torture, he managed to write meditations on the thirteenth psalm, "In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped," and a little work entitled "A Rule for Living a Christian Life". Before the last day he administered the Sacrament to his two companions, who were to die with him, with perfect composure, and the night preceding they spent together in prayer in the Great Hall which he had once dominated. The execution was on May 23rd, 1498. A gallows was erected in the Piazza della Signoria on the spot now marked by the bronze tablet. Beneath the gallows was a bonfire. All those members of the Government who could endure the scene were present, either on the platform of the Palazzo Vecchio or in the Loggia de' Lanzi. The crowd filled the Piazza. The three monks went to their death unafraid. When his friar's gown was taken from him, Savonarola said: "Holy gown, thou wert granted to me by God's grace and I have ever kept thee unstained. Now I forsake thee not but am bereft of thee." (This very garment is in the glass case in Savonarola's cell at S. Marco.) The Bishop replied hastily: "I separate thee from the Church militant and triumphant". "Militant," replied Savonarola, "not triumphant, for that rests not with you." The monks were first hanged and then burned. The larger picture of the execution which hangs in Savonarola's cell, although interesting and up to a point credible, is of course not right. The square must have been crowded: in fact we know it was. The picture has still other claims on the attention, for it shows the Judith and Holofernes as the only statue before the Palazzo Vecchio, standing where David now is; it shows the old ringhiera, the Marzocco (very inaccurately drawn), and the Loggia de' Lanzi empty of statuary. We have in the National Gallery a little portrait of Savonarola--No. 1301--with another representation of the execution on the back of it. So far as I can understand Savonarola, his failure was due to two causes: firstly, his fatal blending of religion and politics, and secondly, the conviction which his temporary success with the susceptible Florentines bred in his heated mind that he was destined to carry all before him, totally failing to appreciate the Florentine character with all its swift and deadly changes and love of change. As I see it, Savonarola's special mission at that time was to be a wandering preacher, spreading the light and exciting his listeners to spiritual revival in this city and that, but never to be in a position of political power and never to become rooted. The peculiar tragedy of his career is that he left Florence no better than he found it: indeed, very likely worse; for in a reaction from a spiritual revival a lower depth can be reached than if there had been no revival at all; while the visit of the French army to Italy, for which Savonarola took such credit to himself, merely ended in disaster for Italy, disease for Europe, and the spreading of the very Renaissance spirit which he had toiled to destroy. But, when all is said as to his tragedy, personal and political, there remains this magnificent isolated figure, single-minded, austere and self-sacrificing, in an age of indulgence. For most people "Romola" is the medium through which Savonarola is visualized; but there he is probably made too theatrical. Yet he must have had something of the theatre in him even to consent to the ordeal by fire. That he was an intense visionary is beyond doubt, but a very real man too we must believe when we read of the devotion of his monks to his person, and of his success for a while with the shrewd, worldly Great Council. Savonarola had many staunch friends among the artists. We have seen Lorenzo di Credi and Fra Bartolommeo under his influence. After his death Fra Bartolommeo entered S. Marco (his cell was No. 34), and di Credi, who was noted for his clean living, entered S. Maria Nuova. Two of Luca della Robbia's nephews were also monks under Savonarola. We have seen Fra Bartolommeo's portrait of Savonarola in the Accademia, and there is another of him here. Cronaca, who built the Great Council's hall, survived Savonarola only ten years, and during that time all his stories were of him. Michelangelo, who was a young man when he heard him preach, read his sermons to the end of his long life. But upon Botticelli his influence was most powerful, for he turned that master's hand from such pagan allegories as the "Primavera" and the "Birth of Venus" wholly to religious subjects. Savonarola had three adjoining cells. In the first is a monument to him, his portrait by Fra Bartolommeo and three frescoes by the same hand. In the next room is the glass case containing his robe, his hair shirt, and rosary; and here also are his desk and some books. In the bedroom is a crucifixion by Fra Angelico on linen. No one knowing Savonarola's story can remain here unmoved. We find Fra Bartolommeo again with a pencil drawing of S. Antonio in that saint's cell. Here also is Antonino's death-mask. The terra-cotta bust of him in Cosimo's cell is the most like life, but there is an excellent and vivacious bronze in the right transept of S. Maria Novella. Before passing downstairs again the library should be visited, that delightful assemblage of grey pillars and arches. Without its desks and cases it would be one of the most beautiful rooms in Florence. All the books have gone, save the illuminated music. In the first cloisters, which are more liveable-in than the ordinary Florentine cloisters, having a great shady tree in the midst with a seat round it, and flowers, are the Fra Angelicos I have mentioned. The other painting is rather theatrical and poor. In the refectory is a large scene of the miracle of the Providenza, when S. Dominic and his companions, during a famine, were fed by two angels with bread; while at the back S. Antonio watches the crucified Christ. The artist is Sogliano. In addition to Fra Angelico's great crucifixion fresco in the chapter house, is a single Christ crucified, with a monk mourning, by Antonio Pollaiuolo, very like the Fra Angelico in the cloisters; but the colour has left it, and what must have been some noble cypresses are now ghosts dimly visible. The frame is superb. One other painting we must see--the "Last Supper" of Domenico Ghirlandaio. Florence has two "Last Suppers" by this artist--one at the Ognissanti and this. The two works are very similar and have much entertaining interest, but the debt which this owes to Castagno is very obvious: it is indeed Castagno sweetened. Although psychologically this picture is weak, or at any rate not strong, it is full of pleasant touches: the supper really is a supper, as it too often is not, with fruit and dishes and a generous number of flasks; the tablecloth would delight a good housekeeper; a cat sits close to Judas, his only companion; a peacock perches in a niche; there are flowers on the wall, and at the back of the charming loggia where the feast is held are luxuriant trees, and fruits, and flying birds. The monks at food in this small refectory had compensation for their silence in so engaging a scene. This room also contains a beautiful della Robbia "Deposition". The little refectory, which is at the foot of the stairs leading to the cells, opens on the second cloisters, and these few visitors ever enter. But they are of deep interest to any one with a passion for the Florence of the great days, for it is here that the municipality preserves the most remarkable relics of buildings that have had to be destroyed. It is in fact the museum of the ancient city. Here, for example, is that famous figure of Abundance, in grey stone, which Donatello made for the old market, where the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele now is, in the midst of which she poured forth her fruits from a cornucopia high on a column for all to see. Opposite is a magnificent doorway designed by Donatello for the Pazzi garden. Old windows, chimney-pieces, fragments of cornice, carved pillars, painted beams, coats of arms, are everywhere. In cell No. 3 is a pretty little coloured relief of the Virgin adoring, which I covet, from a tabernacle in the old Piazza di Brunelleschi. Here too are relics of the guild houses of some of the smaller Arti, while perhaps the most humanly interesting thing of all is the great mournful bell of S. Marco in Savonarola's time, known as La Piagnone. In the church of S. Marco lie two of the learned men, friends of Lorenzo de' Medici, whose talk at the Medici table was one of the youthful Michelangelo's educative influences, what time he was studying in the Medici garden, close by: Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), the poet and the tutor of the three Medici boys, and the marvellous Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the enchanted scholar. Pico was one of the most fascinating and comely figures of his time. He was born in 1463, the son of the Count of Mirandola, and took early to scholarship, spending his time among philosophies as other boys among games or S. Antonio at his devotions, but by no means neglecting polished life too, for we know him to have been handsome, accomplished, and a knight in the court of Venus. In 1486 he challenged the whole world to meet him in Rome and dispute publicly upon nine hundred theses; but so many of them seemed likely to be paradoxes against the true faith, too brilliantly defended, that the Pope forbade the contest. Pico dabbled in the black arts, wrote learnedly (in his room at the Badia of Fiesole) on the Mosaic law, was an amorous poet in Italian as well as a serious poet in Latin, and in everything he did was interesting and curious, steeped in Renaissance culture, and inspired by the wish to reconcile the past and the present and humanize Christ and the Fathers. He found time also to travel much, and he gave most of his fortune to establish a fund to provide penniless girls with marriage portions. He had enough imagination to be the close friend both of Lorenzo de' Medici and Savonarola. Savonarola clothed his dead body in Dominican robes and made him posthumously one of the order which for some time before his death he had desired to join. He died in 1494 at the early age of thirty-one, two years after Lorenzo. Angelo Poliziano, known as Politian, was also a Renaissance scholar and also a friend of Lorenzo, and his companion, with Pico, at his death-bed; but although in precocity, brilliancy of gifts, and literary charm he may be classed with Pico, the comparison there ends, for he was a gross sensualist of mean exterior and capable of much pettiness. He was tutor to Lorenzo's sons until their mother interfered, holding that his views were far too loose, but while in that capacity he taught also Michelangelo and put him upon the designing of his relief of the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs. At the time of Lorenzo and Giuliano's famous tournament in the Piazza of S. Croce, Poliziano wrote, as I have said, the descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He lives chiefly by his Latin poems; but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue. His elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to have esteemed that friend and patron. Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes. Perhaps the finest feat of Poliziano's life was his action in slamming the sacristy doors in the face of Lorenzo's pursuers on that fatal day in the Duomo when Giuliano de' Medici was stabbed. Ghirlandaio's fresco in S. Trinità of the granting of the charter to S. Francis gives portraits both of Poliziano and Lorenzo in the year 1485. Lorenzo stands in a little group of four in the right-hand corner, holding out his hand towards Poliziano, who, with Lorenzo's son Giuliano on his right and followed by two other boys, is advancing up the steps. Poliziano is seen again in a Ghirlandaio fresco at S. Maria Novella. From S. Marco we are going to SS. Annunziata, but first let us just take a few steps down the Via Cavour, in order to pass the Casino Medici, since it is built on the site of the old Medici garden where Lorenzo de' Medici established Bertoldo, the sculptor, as head of a school of instruction, amid those beautiful antiques which we have seen in the Uffizi, and where the boy Michelangelo was a student. A few steps farther on the left, towards the Fiesole heights, which we can see rising at the end of the street, we come, at No. 69, to a little doorway which leads to a little courtyard--the Chiostro dello Scalzo--decorated with frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio and containing the earliest work of both artists. The frescoes are in monochrome, which is very unusual, but their interest is not impaired thereby: one does not miss other colours. No. 7, the Baptism of Christ, is the first fresco these two associates ever did; and several years elapsed between that and the best that are here, such as the group representing Charity and the figure of Faith, for the work was long interrupted. The boys on the staircase in the fresco which shows S. John leaving his father's house are very much alive. This is by Franciabigio, as is also S. John meeting with Christ, a very charming scene. Andrea's best and latest is the Birth of the Baptist, which has the fine figure of Zacharias writing in it. But what he should be writing at that time and place one cannot imagine: more reasonably might he be called a physician preparing a prescription. On the wall is a terra-cotta bust of S. Antonio, making him much younger than is usual. Andrea's suave brush we find all over Florence, both in fresco and picture, and this is an excellent place to say something of the man of whom English people have perhaps a more intimate impression than of any other of the old masters, by reason largely of Browning's poem and not a little by that beautiful portrait which for so long was erroneously considered to represent the painter himself, in our National Gallery. Andrea's life was not very happy. No painter had more honour in his own day, and none had a greater number of pupils, but these stopped with him only a short time, owing to the demeanour towards them of Andrea's wife, who developed into a flirt and shrew, dowered with a thousand jealousies. Andrea, the son of a tailor, was born in 1486 and apprenticed to a goldsmith. Showing, however, more drawing than designing ability, he was transferred to a painter named Barile and then passed to that curious man of genius who painted the fascinating picture "The Death of Procris" which hangs near Andrea's portrait in our National Gallery--Piero di Cosimo. Piero carried oddity to strange lengths. He lived alone in indescribable dirt, and lived wholly on hard-boiled eggs, which he cooked, with his glue, by the fifty, and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises them to look hard at spotty walls for inspiration, I cannot say. He was also the first, to my knowledge, to don ear-caps in tedious society--as Herbert Spencer later used to do. He had many pupils, but latterly could not bear them in his presence and was therefore but an indifferent instructor. As a deviser of pageants he was more in demand than as a painter; but his brush was not idle. Both London and Paris have, I think, better examples of his genius than the Uffizi; but he is well represented at S. Spirito. Piero sent Andrea to the Palazzo Vecchio to study the Leonardo and Michelangelo cartoons, and there he met Franciabigio, with whom he struck up one of his close friendships, and together they took a studio and began to paint for a living. Their first work together was the Baptism of Christ at which we are now looking. The next commission after the Scalzo was to decorate the courtyard of the Convent of the Servi, now known as the Church of the Annunciation; and moving into adjacent lodgings, Andrea met Jacopo Sansovino, the Venetian sculptor, whose portrait by Bassano is in the Uffizi, a capable all-round man who had studied in Rome and was in the way of helping the young Andrea at all points. It was then too that he met the agreeable and convivial Rustici, of whom I have said something in the chapter on the Baptistery, and quickly became something of a blood--for by this time, the second decade of the sixteenth century, the simplicity of the early artists had given place to dashing sophistication and the great period was nearly over. For this change the brilliant complex inquiring mind of Leonardo da Vinci was largely responsible, together with the encouragement and example of Lorenzo de' Medici and such of his cultured sceptical friends as Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, and Poliziano. But that is a subject too large for this book. Enough that a worldly splendour and vivacity had come into artistic life and Andrea was an impressionable young man in the midst of it. It does not seem to have affected the power and dexterity of his hand, but it made him a religious court-painter instead of a religious painter. His sweetness and an underlying note of pathos give his work a peculiar and genuine character; but he is just not of the greatest. Not so great really as Luca Signorelli, for example, whom few visitors to the galleries rush at with gurgling cries of rapture as they rush at Andrea. When Andrea was twenty-six he married. The lady was the widow of a hatter. Andrea had long loved her, but the hatter clung outrageously to life. In 1513, however, she was free, and, giving her hand to the painter, his freedom passed for ever. Vasari being among Andrea's pupils may be trusted here, and Vasari gives her a bad character, which Browning completes. Andrea painted her often, notably in the fresco of the "Nativity of the Virgin," to which we shall soon come at the Annunziata: a fine statuesque woman by no means unwilling to have the most popular artist in Florence as her slave. Of the rest of Andrea's life I need say little. He grew steadily in favour and was always busy; he met Michelangelo and admired him, and Michelangelo warned Raphael in Rome of a little fellow in Florence who would "make him sweat". Browning, in his monologue, makes this remark of Michelangelo's, and the comparison between Andrea and Raphael that follows, the kernel of the poem. Like Leonardo and Rustici, Andrea accepted, in 1518, an invitation from Francis I to visit Paris and once there began to paint for that royal patron. But although his wife did not love him, she wanted him back, and in the midst of his success he returned, taking with him a large sum of money from Francis with which to buy for the king works of art in Italy. That money he misapplied to his own extravagant ends, and although Francis took no punitive steps, the event cannot have improved either Andrea's position or his peace of mind; while it caused Francis to vow that he had done with Florentines. Andrea died in 1531, of fever, nursed by no one, for his wife, fearing it might be the dreaded plague, kept away. CHAPTER XIX The SS. Annunziata and the Spedale degli Innocenti Andrea del Sarto again--Franciabigio outraged--Alessio Baldovinetti--Piero de' Medici's church--An Easter Sunday congregation--Andrea's "Madonna del Sacco"--"The Statue and the Bust"--Henri IV--The Spedale degli Innocenti--Andrea della Robbia--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Cosimo I and the Etruscans--Bronzes and tapestries--Perugino's triptych--S. Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi--"Very sacred human dust". From S. Marco it is an easy step, along the Via Sapienza, to the Piazza dell' Annunziata, where one finds the church of that name, the Palazzo Riccardi-Mannelli, and opposite it, gay with the famous della Robbia reliefs of swaddled children, the Spedale degli Innocenti. First the church, which is notable for possessing in its courtyard Andrea del Sarto's finest frescoes. This series, of which he was the chief painter, with his friend Franciabigio again as his principal ally, depict scenes in the life of the Virgin and S. Filippo. The scene of the Birth of the Virgin has been called the triumph of fresco painting, and certainly it is very gay and life-like in that medium. The whole picture very charming and easy, with the pleasantest colouring imaginable and pretty details, such as the washing of the baby and the boy warming his hands, while of the two women in the foreground, that on the left, facing the spectator, is a portrait of Andrea's wife, Lucrezia. In the Arrival of the Magi we find Andrea himself, the figure second from the right-hand side, pointing; while next to him, on the left, is his friend Jacopo Sansovino. The "Dead Man Restored to Life by S. Filippo" is Andrea's next best. Franciabigio did the scene of the Marriage of the Virgin, which contains another of his well-drawn boys on the steps. The injury to this fresco--the disfigurement of Mary's face--was the work of the painter himself, in a rage that the monks should have inspected it before it was ready. Vasari is interesting on this work. He draws attention to it as illustrating "Joseph's great faith in taking her, his face expressing as much fear as joy". He also says that the blow which the man is giving Joseph was part of the marriage ceremony at that time in Florence. Franciabigio, in spite of his action in the matter of this fresco, seems to have been a very sweet-natured man, who painted rather to be able to provide for his poor relations than from any stronger inner impulse, and when he saw some works by Raphael gave up altogether, as Verrocchio gave up after Leonardo matured. Franciabigio was a few years older than Andrea, but died at the same age. Possibly it was through watching his friend's domestic troubles that he remained single, remarking that he who takes a wife endures strife. His most charming work is that "Madonna of the Well" in the Uffizi, which is reproduced in this volume. Franciabigio's master was Mariotto Albertinelli, who had learned from Cosimo Rosselli, the teacher of Piero di Cosimo, Andrea's master--another illustration of the interdependence of Florentine artists. One of the most attractive works in the courtyard must once have been the "Adoration of the Shepherds" by Alessio Baldovinetti, at the left of the entrance to the church. It is badly damaged and the colour has gone, but one can see that the valley landscape, when it was painted, was a dream of gaiety and happiness. The particular treasure of the church is the extremely ornate chapel of the Virgin, containing a picture of the Virgin displayed once a year on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, in the painting of which the Virgin herself took part, descending from heaven for that purpose. The artist thus divinely assisted was Pietro Cavallini, a pupil of Giotto. The silver shrine for the picture was designed by Michelozzo and was a beautiful thing before the canopy and all the distressing accessories were added. It was made at the order of Piero de' Medici, who was as fond of this church as his father Cosimo was of S. Lorenzo. Michelozzo only designed it; the sculpture was done by Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, whose Madonna is over the tomb of Pope John by Donatello and Michelozzo in the Baptistery. Among the altar-pieces are two by Perugino; but of Florentine altar-pieces one can say little or nothing in a book of reasonable dimensions. There are so many and they are for the most part so difficult to see. Now and then one arrests the eye and holds it; but for the most part they go unstudied. The rotunda of the choir is interesting, for here we meet again Alberti, who completed it from designs by Michelozzo. It does not seem to fit the church from within, and even less so from without, but it is a fine structure. The seventeenth-century painting of the dome is almost impressive. But one can forget and forgive all the church's gaudiness and floridity when the choir is in good voice and the strings play Palestrina as they did last Easter Sunday. The Annunziata is famous for its music, and on the great occasions people crowd there as nowhere else. At High Mass the singing was fine but the instrumental music finer. One is accustomed to seeing vicarious worship in Italy; but never was there so vicarious a congregation as ours, and indeed if it had not been for the sight of the busy celibates at the altar one would not have known that one was worshipping at all. The culmination of detachment came when a family of Siamese or Burmese children, in native dress, entered. A positive hum went round, and not an eye but was fixed on the little Orientals. When, however, the organ was for a while superseded and the violas and violins quivered under the plangent melody of Palestrina, our roving attention was fixed and held. I am not sure that the Andrea in the cloisters is not the best of all his work. It is very simple and wholly beautiful, and in spite of years of ravage the colouring is still wonderful, perhaps indeed better for the hand of Time. It is called the "Madonna del Sacco" (grain sack), and fills the lunette over the door leading from the church. The Madonna--Andrea's favourite type, with the eyes set widely in the flat brow over the little trustful nose--has her Son, older than usual, sprawling on her knee. Her robes are ample and rich; a cloak of green is over her pretty head. By her sits S. Joseph, on the sack, reading with very long sight. That is all; but one does not forget it. For the rest the cloisters are a huddle of memorial slabs and indifferent frescoes. In the middle is a well with nice iron work. No grass at all. The second cloisters, into which it is not easy to get, have a gaunt John the Baptist in terra-cotta by Michelozzo. On leaving the church, our natural destination is the Spedale, on the left, but one should pause a moment in the doorway of the courtyard (if the beggars who are always there do not make it too difficult) to look down the Via de' Servi running straight away to the cathedral, which, with its great red warm dome, closes the street. The statue in the middle of the piazza is that of the Grand Duke Ferdinand by Giovanni da Bologna, cast from metal taken from the Italians' ancient enemies the Turks, while the fountains are by Tacca, Giovanni's pupil, who made the bronze boar at the Mercato Nuovo. "The Synthetical Guide Book," from which I have already quoted, warns its readers not to overlook "the puzzling bees" at the back of Ferdinand's statue. "Try to count them," it adds. (I accepted the challenge and found one hundred and one.) The bees have reference to Ferdinand's emblem--a swarm of these insects, with the words "Majestate tantum". The statue, by the way, is interesting for two other reasons than its subject. First, it is that to which Browning's poem, "The Statue and the Bust," refers, and which, according to the poet, was set here at Ferdinand's command to gaze adoringly for ever at the della Robbia bust of the lady whom he loved in vain. But the bust no longer is visible, if ever it was. John of Douay (as Gian Bologna was also called)-- John of Douay shall effect my plan, Set me on horseback here aloft, Alive, as the crafty sculptor can, In the very square I have crossed so oft: That men may admire, when future suns Shall touch the eyes to a purpose soft, While the mouth and the brow stay brave in bronze-- Admire and say, "when he was alive How he would take his pleasure once!" The other point of interest is that when Maria de' Medici, Ferdinand's niece, wished to erect a statue of Henri IV (her late husband) at the Pont Neuf in Paris she asked to borrow Gian Bologna. But the sculptor was too old to go and therefore only a bronze cast of this same horse was offered. In the end Tacca completed both statues, and Henri IV was set up in 1614 (after having fallen overboard on the voyage from Leghorn to Havre). The present statue at the Pont Neuf is, however, a modern substitute. The façade of the Spedale degli Innocenti, or children's hospital, when first seen by the visitor evokes perhaps the quickest and happiest cry of recognition in all Florence by reason of its row of della Robbia babies, each in its blue circle, reproductions of which have gone all over the world. These are thought to be by Andrea, Luca's nephew, and were added long after the building was completed. Luca probably helped him. The hospital was begun by Brunelleschi at the cost of old Giovanni de' Medici, Cosimo's father, but the Guild of the Silk Weavers, for whom Luca made the exquisite coat of arms on Or San Michele, took it over and finished it. Andrea not only modelled the babies outside but the beautiful Annunciation (of which I give a reproduction in this volume) in the court: one of his best works. The photograph will show how full of pretty thoughts it is, but in colour it is more charming still and the green of the lily stalks is not the least delightful circumstance. Not only among works of sculpture but among Annunciations this relief holds a very high place. Few of the artists devised a scene in which the great news was brought more engagingly, in sweeter surroundings, or received more simply. The door of the chapel close by leads to another work of art equally adapted to its situation--Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Magi: one of the perfect pictures for children. We have seen Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds at the Accademia: this is its own brother. It has the sweetest, mildest little Mother, and in addition to the elderly Magi two tiny little saintlings adore too. In the distance is an enchanted landscape about a fairy estuary. This hospital is a very busy one, and the authorities are glad to show it to visitors who really take an interest in such work. Rich Italians carry on a fine rivalry in generosity to such institutions. Bologna, for instance, could probably give lessons in thoughtful charity to the whole world. The building opposite the hospital has a loggia which is notable for a series of four arches, like those of the Mercato Nuovo, and in summer for the flowers that hang down from the little balconies. A pretty building. Before turning to the right under the last of the arches of the hospital loggia, which opens on the Via della Colonna and from the piazza always frames such a charming picture of houses and mountains, it is well, with so much of Andrea del Sarto's work warm in one's memory, to take a few steps up the Via Gino Capponi (which also always frames an Apennine vista under its arch) to No. 24, and see Andrea's house, on the right, marked with a tablet. In the Via della Colonna we find, at No. 26 on the left, the Palazzo Crocetta, which is now a Museum of Antiquities, and for its Etruscan exhibits is of the greatest historical value and interest to visitors to Tuscany, such as ourselves. For here you may see what civilization was like centuries before Christ and Rome. The beginnings of the Etruscan people are indistinct, but about 1000 B.C. has been agreed to as the dawn of their era. Etruria comprised Tuscany, Perugia, and Rome itself. Florence has no remains, but Fiesole was a fortified Etruscan town, and many traces of its original builders may be seen there, together with Etruscan relics in the little museum. For the best reconstructions of an Etruscan city one must go to Volterra, where so many of the treasures in the present building were found. The Etruscans in their heyday were the most powerful people in the world, but after the fifth century their supremacy gradually disappeared, the Gauls on the one side and the Romans on the other wearing them down. All our knowledge of them comes through the spade. Excavations at Volterra and elsewhere have revealed some thousands of inscriptions which have been in part deciphered; but nothing has thrown so much light on this accomplished people as their habit of providing the ashes of their dead with everything likely to be needed for the next world, whose requirements fortunately so exactly tallied with those of this that a complete system of domestic civilization can be deduced. In arts and sciences they were most enviably advanced, as a visit to the British Museum will show in a moment. But it is to this Florentine Museum of Antiquities that all students of Etruria must go. The garden contains a number of the tombs themselves, rebuilt and refurnished exactly as they were found; while on the ground floor is the amazing collection of articles which the tombs yielded. The grave has preserved them for us, not quite so perfectly as the volcanic dust of Vesuvius preserved the domestic appliances of Pompeii, but very nearly so. Jewels, vessels, weapons, ornaments--many of them of a beauty never since reproduced--are to be seen in profusion, now gathered together for study only a short distance from the districts in which centuries ago they were made and used for actual life. Upstairs we find relics of an older civilization still, the Egyptian, and a few rooms of works of art, all found in Etruscan soil, the property of the Pierpont Morgans and George Saltings of that ancient day, who had collected them exactly as we do now. Certain of the statues are world-famous. Here, for example, in Sala IX, is the bronze Minerva which was found near Arezzo in 1554 by Cosimo's workmen. Here is the Chimæra, also from Arezzo in 1554, which Cellini restored for Cosimo and tells us about in his Autobiography. Here is the superb Orator from Lake Trasimene, another of Cosimo's discoveries. In Sala X look at the bronze situla in an isolated glass case, of such a peacock blue as only centuries could give it. Upstairs in Sala XVI are many more Greek and Roman bronzes, among which I noticed a faun with two pipes as being especially good; while the little room leading from it has some fine life-size heads, including a noble one of a horse, and the famous Idolino on its elaborate pedestal--a full-length Greek bronze from the earth of Pesaro, where it was found in 1530. The top floor is given to tapestries and embroideries. The collection is vast and comprises much foreign work; but Cosimo I introducing tapestry weaving into Florence, many of the examples come from the city's looms. The finest, or at any rate most interesting, series is that depicting the court of France under Catherine de' Medici, with portraits: very sumptuous and gay examples of Flemish work. The trouble at Florence is that one wants the days to be ten times as long in order that one may see its wonderful possessions properly. Here is this dry-looking archaeological museum, with antipathetic custodians at the door who refuse to get change for twenty-lira pieces: nothing could be more unpromising than they or their building; and yet you find yourself instantly among countless vestiges of a past people who had risen to power and crumbled again before Christ was born--but at a time when man was so vastly more sensitive to beauty than he now is that every appliance for daily life was the work of an artist. Well, a collection like this demands days and days of patient examination, and one has only a few hours. Were I Joshua--had I his curious gift--it is to Florence I would straightway fare. The sun should stand still there: no rock more motionless. Continuing along the Via della Colonna, we come, on the right, at No. 8, to the convent of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, which is now a barracks but keeps sacred one room in which Perugino painted a crucifixion, his masterpiece in fresco. The work is in three panels, of which that on the left, representing the Virgin and S. Bernard, is the most beautiful. Indeed, there is no more beautiful light in any picture we shall see, and the Virgin's melancholy face is inexpressibly sweet. Perugino is best represented at the Accademia, and there are works of his at the Uffizi and Pitti and in various Florentine churches; but here he is at his best. Vasari tells us that he made much money and was very fond of it; also that he liked his young wife to wear light head-dresses both out of doors and in the house, and often dressed her himself. His master was Verrocchio and his best pupil Raphael. S. Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi, a member of the same family that plotted against the Medici and owned the sacred flints, was born in 1566, and, says Miss Dunbar, [8] "showed extraordinary piety from a very tender age". When only a child herself she used to teach small children, and she daily carried lunch to the prisoners. Her real name was Catherine, but becoming a nun she called herself Mary Magdalene. In an illness in which she was given up for dead, she lay on her bed for forty days, during which she saw continual visions, and then recovered. Like S. Catherine of Bologna she embroidered well and painted miraculously, and she once healed a leprosy by licking it. She died in 1607. The old English Cemetery, as it is usually called--the Protestant Cemetery, as it should be called--is an oval garden of death in the Piazza Donatello, at the end of the Via di Pinti and the Via Alfieri, rising up from the boulevard that surrounds the northern half of Florence. (The new Protestant Cemetery is outside the city on the road to the Certosa.) I noticed, as I walked beneath the cypresses, the grave of Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet of "Dipsychus," who died here in Florence on November 13th, 1861; of Walter Savage Landor, that old lion (born January 30th, 1775; died September 17th, 1864), of whom I shall say much more in a later chapter; of his son Arnold, who was born in 1818 and died in 1871; and of Mrs. Holman Hunt, who died in 1866. But the most famous grave is that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lies beneath a massive tomb that bears only the initials E.B.B. and the date 1861. "Italy," wrote James Thomson, the poet of "The City of Dreadful Night," on hearing of Mrs. Browning's death, "Italy, you hold in trust Very sacred human dust." CHAPTER XX The Cascine and the Arno Florence's Bois de Boulogne--Shelley--The races--The game of Pallone--SS. Ognissanti--Botticelli and Ghirlandaio--Amerigo Vespucci--The Platonic Academy's garden--Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai--Melancholy decay--Two smiling boys--The Corsini palace--The Trinità bridge--The Borgo San Jacopo from the back--Home fishing--SS. Apostoli--A sensitive river--The Ponte Vecchio--The goldsmiths--S. Stefano. The Cascine is the "Bois" of Florence; but it does not compare with the Parisian expanse either in size or attraction. Here the wealthy Florentines drive, the middle classes saunter and ride bicycles, the poor enjoy picnics, and the English take country walks. The further one goes the better it is, and the better also the river, which at the very end of the woods becomes such a stream as the pleinairistes love, with pollarded trees on either side. Among the trees of one of these woods nearly a hundred years ago, a walking Englishman named Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his "Ode to the West Wind". The Cascine is a Bois also in having a race-course in it--a small course with everything about it on a little scale, grandstand, betting boxes, and all. And why not?--for after all Florence is quite small in size, however remarkable in character. Here funny little race-meetings are held, beginning on Easter Monday and continuing at intervals until the weather gets too hot. The Florentines pour out in their hundreds and lie about in the long grass among the wild flowers, and in their fives and tens back their fancies. The system is the pari-mutuel, and here one seems to be more at its mercy even than in France. The odds keep distressingly low; but no one seems to be either elated or depressed, whatever happens. To be at the races is the thing--to walk about and watch the people and enjoy the air. It is the most orderly frugal scene, and the baleful and mysterious power of the racehorse to poison life and landscape, as in England, does not exist here. To the Cascine also in the spring and autumn several hundred Florentine men come every afternoon to see the game of pallone and risk a few lire on their favourite players. Mr. Ruskin, whose "Mornings in Florence" is still the textbook of the devout, is severe enough upon those visitors who even find it in their hearts to shop and gossip in the city of Giotto. What then would he have said of one who has spent not a few afternoon hours, between five and six, in watching the game of pallone? I would not call pallone a good game. Compared with tennis, it is nothing; compared with lawn tennis, it is poor; compared with football, it is anaemic; yet in an Italian city, after the galleries have closed, on a warm afternoon, it will do, and it will more than do as affording an opportunity of seeing muscular Italian athletes in the pink of condition. The game is played by six, three each side: a battitore, who smites the ball, which is served to him very much as in rounders; the spalla, who plays back; and the terzino, who plays forward. The court is sixty or more yards long, on one side being a very high wall and on the other and at each end netting. The implements are the ball, which is hollow and of leather, about half the size of a football, and a cylinder studded with spikes, rather like a huge fir-cone or pine-apple, which is placed over the wrist and forearm to hit the ball with; and the game is much as in tennis, only there is no central net: merely a line. Each man's ambition, however, is less to defeat the returning power of the foe than to paralyse it by hitting the ball out of reach. It is as though a batsman were out if he failed to hit three wides. A good battitore, for instance, can smite the ball right down the sixty yards into the net, above the head of the opposing spalla who stands awaiting it at the far end. Such a stroke is to the English mind a blot, and it is no uncommon thing, after each side has had a good rally, to see the battitore put every ball into the net in this way and so win the game without his opponents having one return; which is the very negation of sport. Each innings lasts until one side has gained eight points, the points going to whichever player makes the successful stroke. This means that the betting--and of course there is betting--is upon individuals and not upon sides. The pari-mutuel system is that which is adopted at both the pallone courts in Florence (there is another at the Piazza Beccaria), and the unit is two lire. Bets are invited on the winner and the second, and place-money is paid on both. No wonder then that as the game draws to a close the excitement becomes intense; while during its progress feeling runs high too. For how can a young Florentine who has his money on, say, Gabri the battitore, withhold criticism when Gabri's arm fails and the ball drops comfortably for the terzino Ugo to smash it into Gabri's net? Such a lapse should not pass unnoticed; nor does it. From the Cascine we may either return to Florence along the banks of the river, or cross the river by the vile iron Ponte Sospeso and enter the city again, on the Pitti side, by the imposing Porta S. Frediano. Supposing that we return by the Lungarno Amerigo Vespucci there is little to notice, beyond costly modern houses of a Portland Place type and the inevitable Garibaldi statue, until, just past the oblique pescaja (or weir), we see across the Piazza Manin the church of All Saints--S. Salvadore d'Ognissanti, which must be visited since it is the burial-place of Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci, the chapel of the Vespucci family being painted by Ghirlandaio; and since here too lies Botticelli's beautiful Simonetta, who so untimely died. According to Vasari the frescoes of S. Jerome by Ghirlandaio and S. Augustine by Botticelli were done in competition. They were painted, as it happens, elsewhere, but moved here without injury. I think the S. Jerome is the more satisfying, a benevolent old scientific author--a Lord Avebury of the canon--with his implements about him on a tapestry tablecloth, a brass candlestick, his cardinal's hat, and a pair of tortoise-shell eyeglasses handy. S. Augustine is also scientific; astronomical books and instruments surround him too. His tablecloth is linen. Amerigo Vespucci, whose statue we saw in the Uffizi portico colonnade, was a Florentine by birth who settled in Spain and took to exploration. His discoveries were important, but America is not really among them, for Columbus, whom he knew and supported financially, got there first. By a mistake in the date in his account of his travels, Vespucci's name came to be given to the new continent, and it was then too late to alter it. He became a naturalized Spaniard and died in 1512. Columbus indeed suffers in Florence; for had it not been for Vespucci, America would no doubt be called Columbia; while Brunelleschi anticipated him in the egg trick. The church is very proud of possessing the robe of S. Francis, which is displayed once a year on October 4th. In the refectory is a "Last Supper" by Ghirlandaio, not quite so good as that which we saw at S. Marco, but very similar, and, like that, deriving from Castagno's at the Cenacolo di Sant' Apollonia. The predestined Judas is once more on the wrong side of the table. Returning to the river bank again, we are at once among the hotels and pensions, which continue cheek by jowl right away to the Ponte Vecchio and beyond. In the Piazza Goldoni, where the Ponte Carraia springs off, several streets meet, best of them and busiest of them being that Via della Vigna Nuova which one should miss few opportunities of walking along, for here is the palazzo--at No. 20--which Leon Battista Alberti designed for the Rucellai. The Rucellai family's present palace, I may say here, is in the Via della Scala, and by good fortune I found at the door sunning himself a complacent major-domo who, the house being empty of its august owners, allowed me to walk through into the famous garden--the Orti Oricellari--where the Platonic Academy met for a while in Bernardo Rucellai's day. A monument inscribed with their names has been erected among the evergreens. Afterwards the garden was given by Francis I to his beloved Bianca Capella. Its natural beauties are impaired by a gigantic statue of Polyphemus, bigger than any other statue in Florence. The new Rucellai palace does not compare with the old, which is, I think, the most beautiful of all the private houses of the great day, and is more easily seen too, for there is a little piazza in front of it. The palace, with its lovely design and its pilastered windows, is now a rookery, while various industries thrive beneath it. Part of the right side has been knocked away; but even still the proportions are noble. This is a bad quarter for vandalism; for in the piazza opposite is a most exquisite little loggia, built in 1468, the three lovely arches of which have been filled in and now form the windows of an English establishment known as "The Artistic White House". An absurd name, for if it were really artistic it would open up the arches again. The Rucellai chapel, behind the palace, is in the Via della Spada, and the key must be asked for in the palace stables. It is in a shocking state, and quite in keeping with the traditions of the neighbourhood, while the old church of S. Pancrazio, its neighbour, is now a Government tobacco factory. The Rucellai chapel contains a model of the Holy Sepulchre, at Jerusalem, in marble and intarsia, by the great Alberti--one of the most jewel-like little buildings imaginable. Within it are the faint vestiges of a fresco which the stable-boy calls a Botticelli, and indeed the hands and faces of the angels, such as one can see of them with a farthing dip, do not render the suggestion impossible. On the altar is a terra-cotta Christ which he calls a Donatello, and again he may be right; but fury at a condition of things that can permit such a beautiful place to be so desecrated renders it impossible to be properly appreciative. Since we are here, instead of returning direct to the river let us go a few yards along this Via della Spada to the left, cross the Via de' Fossi, and so come to the busy Via di Pallazzuolo, on the left of which, past the piazza of S. Paolino, is the little church of S. Francesco de' Vanchetoni. This church is usually locked, but the key is next door, on the right, and it has to be obtained because over the right sacristy door is a boy's head by Rossellino, and over the left a boy's head by Desiderio da Settignano, and each is joyful and perfect. The Via de' Fossi will bring us again to the Piazza Goldoni and the Arno, and a few yards farther along there is a palace to be seen, the Corsini, the only palazzo still inhabited by its family to which strangers are admitted--the long low white façade with statues on the top and a large courtyard, on the Lungarno Corsini, just after the Piazza Goldoni. It is not very interesting and belongs to the wrong period, the seventeenth century. It is open on fixed days, and free save that one manservant receives the visitor and another conducts him from room to room. There are many pictures, but few of outstanding merit, and the authorship of some of these has been challenged. Thus, the cartoon of Julius II, which is called a Raphael and seems to be the sketch for one of the well-known portraits at the Pitti, Uffizi, or our National Gallery, is held to be not by Raphael at all. Among the pleasantest pictures are a Lippo Lippi Madonna and Child, a Filippino Lippi Madonna and Child with Angels, and a similar group by Botticelli; but one has a feeling that Carlo Dolci and Guido Reni are the true heroes of the house. Guido Reni's Lucrezia Romana, with a dagger which she has already thrust two inches into her bosom, as though it were cheese, is one of the most foolish pictures I ever saw. The Corsini family having given the world a pope, a case of papal vestments is here. It was this Pope when Cardinal Corsini who said to Dr. Johnson's friend, Mrs. Piozzi, meeting him in Florence in 1785, "Well, Madam, you never saw one of us red-legged partridges before, I believe". There may be more beautiful bridges in the world than the Trinità, but I have seen none. Its curve is so gentle and soft, and its three arches so light and graceful, that I wonder that whenever new bridges are necessary the authorities do not insist upon the Trinità being copied. The Ponte Vecchio, of course, has a separate interest of its own, and stands apart, like the Rialto. It is a bridge by chance, one might almost say. But the Trinità is a bridge in intent and supreme at that, the most perfect union of two river banks imaginable. It shows to what depths modern Florence can fall--how little she esteems her past--that the iron bridge by the Cascine should ever have been built. The various yellows of Florence--the prevailing colours--are spread out nowhere so favourably as on the Pitti side of the river between the Trinità and the Ponte Vecchio on the backs of the houses of the Borgo San Jacopo, and just so must this row have looked for four hundred years. Certain of the occupants of these tenements, even on the upper floors, have fishing nets, on pulleys, which they let down at intervals during the day for the minute fish which seem to be as precious to Italian fishermen as sparrows and wrens to Italian gunners. The great palace at the Trinità end of this stretch of yellow buildings--the Frescobaldi--must have been very striking when the loggia was open: the three rows of double arches that are now walled in. From this point, as well as from similar points on the other side of the Ponte Vecchio, one realizes the mischief done by Cosimo I's secret passage across it; for not only does the passage impose a straight line on a bridge that was never intended to have one, but it cuts Florence in two. If it were not for its large central arches one would, from the other bridges or the embankment, see nothing whatever of the further side of the city; but as it is, through these arches one has heavenly vignettes. We leave the river again for a few minutes about fifty yards along the Lungarno Acciaioli beyond the Trinità and turn up a narrow passage to see the little church of SS. Apostoli, where there is a delightful gay ciborium, all bright colours and happiness, attributed to Andrea della Robbia, with pretty cherubs and pretty angels, and a benignant Christ and flowers and fruit which cannot but chase away gloom and dubiety. Here also is a fine tomb by the sculptor of the elaborate chimney-piece which we saw in the Bargello, Benedetto da Rovezzano, who also designed the church's very beautiful door. Whether or not it is true that SS. Apostoli was built by Charlemagne, it is certainly very old and architecturally of great interest. Vasari says that Brunelleschi acquired from it his inspiration for S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito. To many Florentines its principal importance is its custody of the Pazzi flints for the igniting of the sacred fire which in turn ignites the famous Carro. Returning again to the embankment, we are quickly at the Ponte Vecchio, where it is pleasant at all times to loiter and observe both the river and the people; while from its central arches one sees the mountains. From no point are the hill of S. Miniato and its stately cypresses more beautiful; but one cannot see the church itself--only the church of S. Niccolò below it, and of course the bronze "David". In dry weather the Arno is green; in rainy weather yellow. It is so sensitive that one can almost see it respond to the most distant shower; but directly the rain falls and it is fed by a thousand Apennine torrents it foams past this bridge in fury. The Ponte Vecchio was the work, upon a Roman foundation, of Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto's godson, in the middle of the fourteenth century, but the shops are, of course, more recent. The passage between the Pitti and Uffizi was added in 1564. Gaddi, who was a fresco painter first and architect afterwards, was employed because Giotto was absent in Milan, Giotto being the first thought of every one in difficulties at that time. The need, however, was pressing, for a flood in 1333 had destroyed a large part of the Roman bridge. Gaddi builded so well that when, two hundred and more years later, another flood severely damaged three other bridges, the Ponte Vecchio was unharmed. None the less it is not Gaddi's bust but Cellini's that has the post of honour in the centre; but this is, of course, because Cellini was a goldsmith, and it is to goldsmiths that the shops belong. Once it was the butchers' quarter! I never cross the Ponte Vecchio and see these artificers in their blouses through the windows, without wondering if in any of their boy assistants is the Michelangelo, or Orcagna, or Ghirlandaio, or even Cellini, of the future, since all of those, and countless others of the Renaissance masters, began in precisely this way. The odd thing is that one is on the Ponte Vecchio, from either end, before one knows it to be a bridge at all. A street of sudden steepness is what it seems to be. Not the least charming thing upon it is the masses of groundsel which have established themselves on the pent roof over the goldsmiths' shops. Every visitor to Florence must have longed to occupy one of these little bridge houses; but I am not aware that any has done so. One of the oldest streets in Florence must be the Via Girolami, from the Ponte Vecchio to the Uffizi, under an arch. A turning to the left brings one to the Piazza S. Stefano, where the barn-like church of S. Stefano is entered; and close by is the Torre de' Girolami, where S. Zenobius lived. S. Stefano, although it is now so easily overlooked, was of importance in its day, and it was here that Niccolò da Uzzano, the leader of the nobles, held a meeting to devise means of checking the growing power of the people early in the fifteenth century and was thwarted by old Giovanni de' Medici. From that thwarting proceeded the power of the Medici family and the gloriously endowed Florence that we travel to see. CHAPTER XXI S. Maria Novella The great churches of Florence--A Dominican cathedral--The "Decameron" begins--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Alessio Baldovinetti--The Louvre--The S. Maria Novella frescoes--Giovanni and Lorenzo Tornabuoni--Ruskin implacable--Cimabue's Madonna--Filippino Lippi--Orcagna's "Last Judgment"--The Cloisters of Florence--The Spanish Chapel--S. Dominic triumphant--Giotto at his sweetest--The "Wanderer's" doom--The Piazza, as an arena. S. Maria Novella is usually bracketed with S. Croce as the most interesting Florentine church after the Duomo, but S. Lorenzo has of course to be reckoned with very seriously. I think that for interest I should place S. Maria Novella fifth, including also the Baptistery before it, but architecturally second. Its interior is second in beauty only to S. Croce. S. Croce is its immediate religious rival, for it was because the Dominicans had S. Maria Novella, begun in 1278, that several years later the Franciscans determined to have an equally important church and built S. Croce. The S. Maria Novella architects were brothers of the order, but Talenti, whom we saw at work both on Giotto's tower and on San Michele, built the campanile, and Leon Battista Alberti the marble façade, many years later. The richest patrons of S. Maria Novella--corresponding to the Medici at S. Lorenzo and the Bardi at S. Croce--were the Rucellai, whose palace, designed also by the wonderful versatile Alberti, we have seen. The interior of S. Maria Novella is very fine and spacious, and it gathers and preserves an exquisite light at all times of the day. Nowhere in Florence is there a finer aisle, with the roof springing so nobly and masterfully from the eight columns on either side. The whole effect, like that of S. Croce, is rather northern, the result of the yellow and brown hues; but whereas S. Croce has a crushing flat roof, this one is all soaring gladness. The finest view of the interior is from the altar steps looking back to the beautiful circular window over the entrance, a mass of happy colour. In the afternoon the little plain circular windows high up in the aisle shoot shafts of golden light upon the yellow walls. The high altar of inlaid marble is, I think, too bright and too large. The church is more impressive on Good Friday, when over this altar is built a Calvary with the crucifix on the summit and life-size mourners at its foot; while a choir and string orchestra make superbly mournful music. I like to think that it was within the older S. Maria Novella that those seven mirthful young ladies of Florence remained one morning in 1348, after Mass, to discuss plans of escape from the city during the plague. As here they chatted and plotted, there entered the church three young men; and what simpler than to engage them as companions in their retreat, especially as all three, like all seven of the young women, were accomplished tellers of stories with no fear whatever of Mrs. Grundy? And thus the "Decameron" of Giovanni Boccaccio came about. S. Maria Novella also resembles S. Croce in its moving groups of sight-seers each in the hands of a guide. These one sees always and hears always: so much so that a reminder has been printed and set up here and there in this church, to the effect that it is primarily the house of God and for worshippers. But S. Maria Novella has not a tithe of S. Croce's treasures. Having almost no tombs of first importance, it has to rely upon its interior beauty and upon its frescoes, and its chief glory, whatever Mr. Ruskin, who hated them, might say, is, for most people, Ghirlandaio's series of scenes in the life of the Virgin and S. John the Baptist. These cover the walls of the choir and for more than four centuries have given delight to Florentines and foreigners. Such was the thoroughness of their painter in his colour mixing (in which the boy Michelangelo assisted him) that, although they have sadly dimmed and require the best morning light, they should endure for centuries longer, a reminder not only of the thoughtful sincere interesting art of Ghirlandaio and of the pious generosity of the Tornabuoni family, who gave them, but also of the costumes and carriage of the Florentine ladies at the end of the fifteenth century when Lorenzo the Magnificent was in his zenith. Domenico Ghirlandaio may not be quite of the highest rank among the makers of Florence; but he comes very near it, and indeed, by reason of being Michelangelo's first instructor, perhaps should stand amid them. But one thing is certain--that without him Florence would be the poorer by many beautiful works. He was born in 1449, twenty-one years after the death of Masaccio and three before Leonardo, twenty-six before Michelangelo, and thirty-four before Raphael. His full name was Domenico or Tommaso di Currado di Doffo Bigordi, but his father Tommaso Bigordi, a goldsmith, having hit upon a peculiarly attractive way of making garlands for the hair, was known as Ghirlandaio, the garland maker; and time has effaced the Bigordi completely. The portraits of both Tommaso and Domenico, side by side, occur in the fresco representing Joachim driven from the Temple: Domenico, who is to be seen second from the extreme right, a little resembles our Charles II. Like his father, and, as we have seen, like most of the artists of Florence, he too became a goldsmith, and his love of the jewels that goldsmiths made may be traced in his pictures; but at an early age he was sent to Alessio Baldovinetti to learn to be a painter. Alessio's work we find all over Florence: a Last Judgment in the Accademia, for example, but that is not a very pleasing thing; a Madonna Enthroned, in the Uffizi; the S. Miniato frescoes; the S. Trinità frescoes; and that extremely charming although faded work in the outer court of SS. Annunziata. For the most delightful picture from his hand, however, one has to go to the Louvre, where there is a Madonna and Child (1300 a), in the early Tuscan room, which has a charm not excelled by any such group that I know. The photographers still call it a Piero della Francesca, and the Louvre authorities omit to name it at all; but it is Alessio beyond question. Next it hangs the best Ghirlandaio that I know--the very beautiful Visitation, and, to add to the interest of this room to the returning Florentine wanderer, on the same wall are two far more attractive works by Bastiano Mainardi (Ghirlandaio's brother-in-law and assistant at S. Maria Novella) than any in Florence. Alessio, who was born in 1427, was an open-handed ingenious man who could not only paint and do mosaic but once made a wonderful clock for Lorenzo. His experiments with colour were disastrous: hence most of his frescoes have perished; but possibly it was through Alessio's mistakes that Ghirlandaio acquired the use of such a lasting medium. Alessio was an independent man who painted from taste and not necessity. Ghirlandaio's chief influences, however, were Masaccio, at the Carmine, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Verrocchio, who is thought also to have been Baldovinetti's pupil and whose Baptism of Christ, in the Accademia, painted when Ghirlandaio was seventeen, must have given Ghirlandaio the lines for his own treatment of the incident in this church. One has also only to compare Verrocchio's sculptured Madonnas in the Bargello with many of Ghirlandaio's to see the influence again; both were attracted by a similar type of sweet, easy-natured girl. When he was twenty-six Ghirlandaio went to Rome to paint the Sixtine library, and then to San Gimignano, where he was assisted by Mainardi, who was to remain his most valuable ally in executing the large commissions which were to come to his workshop. His earliest Florentine frescoes are those which we shall see at Ognissanti; the Madonna della Misericordia and the Deposition painted for the Vespucci family and only recently discovered, together with the S. Jerome, in the church, and the Last Supper, in the refectory. By this time Ghirlandaio and Botticelli were in some sort of rivalry, although, so far as I know, friendly enough, and both went to Rome in 1481, together with Perugino, Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli and others, at the command of Pope Sixtus IV to decorate the Sixtine chapel, the excommunication of all Florentines which the Pope had decreed after the failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy to destroy the Medici (as we saw in chapter II) having been removed in order to get these excellent workmen to the Holy City. Painting very rapidly the little band had finished their work in six months, and Ghirlandaio was at home again with such an ambition and industry in him that he once expressed the wish that every inch of the walls of Florence might be covered by his brush--and in those days Florence had walls all round it, with twenty-odd towers in addition to the gates. His next great frescoes were those in the Palazzo Vecchio and S. Trinita. It was in 1485 that he painted his delightful Adoration, at the Accademia, and in 1486 he began his great series at S. Maria Novella, finishing them in 1490, his assistants being his brother David, Benedetto Mainardi, who married Ghirlandaio's sister, and certain apprentices, among them the youthful Michelangelo, who came to the studio in 1488. The story of the frescoes is this. Ghirlandaio when in Rome had met Giovanni Tornabuoni, a wealthy merchant whose wife had died in childbirth. Her death we have already seen treated in relief by Verrocchio in the Bargello. Ghirlandaio was first asked to beautify in her honour the Minerva at Rome, where she was buried, and this he did. Later when Giovanni Tornabuoni wished to present S. Maria Novella with a handsome benefaction, he induced the Ricci family, who owned this chapel, to allow him to re-decorate it, and engaged Ghirlandaio for the task. This meant first covering the fast fading frescoes by Orcagna, which were already there, and then painting over them. What the Orcagnas were like we cannot know; but the substitute, although probably it had less of curious genius in it was undoubtedly more attractive to the ordinary observer. The right wall, as one faces the window (whose richness of coloured glass, although so fine in the church as a whole, is here such a privation), is occupied by scenes in the story of the Baptist; the left by the life of the Virgin. The left of the lowest pair on the right wall represents S. Mary and S. Elizabeth, and in it a party of Ghirlandaio's stately Florentine ladies watch the greeting of the two saints outside Florence itself, symbolized rather than portrayed, very near the church in which we stand. The girl in yellow, on the right of the picture, with her handkerchief in her hand and wearing a rich dress, is Giovanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo Tornabuoni at the Villa Lemmi near Florence, that villa from which Botticelli's exquisite fresco, now in the Louvre at the top of the main staircase, in which she again is to be seen, was taken. Her life was a sad one, for her husband was one of those who conspired with Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici for his return some ten years later, and was beheaded. S. Elizabeth is of course the older woman. The companion to this picture represents the angel appearing to S. Zacharias, and here again Ghirlandaio gives us contemporary Florentines, portraits of distinguished Tornabuoni men and certain friends of eminence among them. In the little group low down on the left, for example, are Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist. Above--but seeing is beginning to be difficult--the pair of frescoes represent, on the right, the birth of the Baptist, and on the left, his naming. The birth scene has much beauty, and is as well composed as any, and there is a girl in it of superb grace and nobility; but the birth scene of the Virgin, on the opposite wall, is perhaps the finer and certainly more easily seen. In the naming of the child we find Medici portraits once more, that family being related to the Tornabuoni; and Mr. Davies, in his book on Ghirlandaio, offers the interesting suggestion, which he supports very reasonably, that the painter has made the incident refer to the naming of Lorenzo de' Medici's third son, Giovanni (or John), who afterwards became Pope Leo X. In that case the man on the left, in green, with his hand on his hip, would be Lorenzo himself, whom he certainly resembles. Who the sponsor is is not known. The landscape and architecture are alike charming. Above these we faintly see that strange Baptism of Christ, so curiously like the Verrocchio in the Accademia, and the Baptist preaching. The left wall is perhaps the favourite. We begin with Joachim being driven from the Temple, one of the lowest pair; and this has a peculiar interest in giving us a portrait of the painter and his associates--the figure on the extreme right being Benedetto Mainardi; then Domenico Ghirlandaio; then his father; and lastly his brother David. On the opposite side of the picture is the fated Lorenzo Tornabuoni, of whom I have spoken above, the figure farthest from the edge, with his hand on his hip. The companion picture is the most popular of all--the Birth of the Virgin--certainly one of the most charming interiors in Florence. Here again we have portraits--no doubt Tornabuoni ladies--and much pleasant fancy on the part of the painter, who made everything as beautiful as he could, totally unmindful of the probabilities. Ruskin is angry with him for neglecting to show the splashing of the water in the vessel, but it would be quite possible for no splashing to be visible, especially if the pouring had only just begun; but for Ruskin's strictures you must go to "Mornings in Florence," where poor Ghirlandaio gets a lash for every virtue of Giotto. Next--above, on the left--we have the Presentation of the Virgin and on the right her Marriage. The Presentation is considered by Mr. Davies to be almost wholly the work of Ghirlandaio's assistants, while the youthful Michelangelo himself has been credited with the half-naked figure on the steps, although Mr. Davies gives it to Mainardi. Mainardi again is probably the author of the companion scene. The remaining frescoes are of less interest and much damaged; but in the window wall one should notice the portraits of Giovanni Tornabuoni and Francesca di Luca Pitti, his wife, kneeling, because this Giovanni was the donor of the frescoes, and his sister Lucrezia was the wife of Piero de' Medici and therefore the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, while Francesca Tornabuoni, the poor lady who died in childbirth, was the daughter of that proud Florentine who began the Pitti palace but ended his life in disgrace. And so we leave this beautiful recess, where pure religious feeling may perhaps be wanting but where the best spirit of the Renaissance is to be found: everything making for harmony and pleasure; and on returning to London the visitor should make a point of seeing the Florentine girl by the same hand in our National Gallery, No. 1230, for she is very typical of his genius. On the entrance wall of the church is what must once have been a fine Masaccio--"The Trinity"--but it is in very bad condition; while in the Cappella Rucellai in the right transept is what purports to be a Cimabue, very like the one in the Accademia, but with a rather more matured Child in it. Vasari tells us that on its completion this picture was carried in stately procession from the painter's studio to the church, in great rejoicing and blowing of trumpets, the populace being moved not only by religious ecstasy but by pride in an artist who could make such a beautiful and spacious painting, the largest then known. Vasari adds that when Cimabue was at work upon it, Charles of Anjou, visiting Florence, was taken to his studio, to see the wonderful painter, and a number of Florentines entering too, they broke out into such rejoicings that the locality was known ever after as Borgo Allegro, or Joyful Quarter. This would be about 1290. There was a certain fitness in Cimabue painting this Madonna, for it is said that he had his education in the convent which stood here before the present church was begun. But I should add that of Cimabue we know practically nothing, and that most of Vasari's statements have been confuted, while the painter of the S. Maria Novella Madonna is held by some authorities to be Duccio of Siena. So where are we? The little chapel next the choir on the right is that of Filippo Strozzi the elder who was one of the witnesses of the Pazzi outrage in the Duomo in 1478. This was the Filippo Strozzi who began the Strozzi palace in 1489, father of the Filippo Strozzi who married Lorenzo de' Medici's noble grand-daughter Clarice and came to a tragic end under Cosimo I. Old Filippo's tomb here was designed by Benedetto da Maiano, who made the famous Franciscan pulpit in S. Croce, and was Ghirlandaio's friend and the Strozzi palace's first architect. The beautiful circular relief of the Virgin and Child, with a border of roses and flying worshipping angels all about it, behind the altar, is Benedetto's too, and very lovely and human are both Mother and Child. The frescoes in this chapel, by Filippino Lippi, are interesting, particularly that one on the left, depicting the Resuscitation of Drusiana by S. John the Evangelist, at Rome, in which the group of women and children on the right, with the little dog, is full of life and most naturally done. Above (but almost impossible to see) is S. John in his cauldron of boiling oil between Roman soldiers and the denouncing Emperor, under the banner S.P.Q.R.--a work in which Roman local colour completely excludes religious feeling. Opposite, below, we see S. Philip exorcising a dragon, a very florid scene, and, above, a painfully spirited and realistic representation of the Crucifixion. The sweetness of the figures of Charity and Faith in monochrome and gold helps, with Benedetto's tondo, to engentle the air. We then come again to the Choir, with Ghirlandaio's urbane Florentine pageant in the guise of sacred history, and pass on to the next chapel, the Cappella Gondi, where that crucifix in wood is to be seen which Brunelleschi carved as a lesson to Donatello, who received it like the gentleman he was. I have told the story in Chapter XV. The left transept ends in the chapel of the Strozzi family, of which Filippo was the head in his day, and here we find Andrea Orcagna and his brother's fresco of Heaven, the Last Judgment and Hell. It was the two Orcagnas who, according to Vasari, had covered the Choir with those scenes in the life of the Virgin which Ghirlandaio was allowed to paint over, and Vasari adds that the later artist availed himself of many of the ideas of his predecessors. This, however, is not very likely, I think, except perhaps in choice of subject. Orcagna, like Giotto, and later, Michelangelo, was a student of Dante, and the Strozzi chapel frescoes follow the poet's descriptions. In the Last Judgment, Dante himself is to be seen, among the elect, in the attitude of prayer. Petrarch is with him. The sacristy is by Talenti (of the Campanile) and was added in 1350. Among its treasures once were the three reliquaries painted by Fra Angelico, but they are now at S. Marco. It has still rich vestments, fine woodwork, and a gay and elaborate lavabo by one of the della Robbias, with its wealth of ornament and colour and its charming Madonna and Child with angels. A little doorway close by used to lead to the cloisters, and a mercenary sacristan was never far distant, only too ready to unlock for a fee what should never have been locked, and black with fury if he got nothing. But all this has now been done away with, and the entrance to the cloisters is from the Piazza, just to the left of the church, and there is a turnstile and a fee of fifty centimes. At S. Lorenzo the cloisters are free. At the Carmine and the Annunziata the cloisters are free. At S. Croce the charge is a lira and at S. Maria Novella half a lira. To make a charge for the cloisters alone seems to me utterly wicked. Let the Pazzi Chapel at S. Croce and the Spanish Chapel here have fees, if you like; but the cloisters should be open to all. Children should be encouraged to play there. Since, however, S. Maria Novella imposes a fee we must pay it, and the new arrangement at any rate carries this advantage with it, that one knows what one is expected to pay and can count on entrance. The cloisters are everywhere interesting to loiter in, but their chief fame is derived from the Spanish Chapel, which gained that name when in 1566 it was put at the disposal of Eleanor of Toledo's suite on the occasion of her marriage to Cosimo I. Nothing Spanish about it otherwise. Both structure and frescoes belong to the fourteenth century. Of these frescoes, which are of historical and human interest rather than artistically beautiful, that one on the right wall as we enter is the most famous. It is a pictorial glorification of the Dominican order triumphant; with a vivid reminder of the origin of the word Dominican in the episode of the wolves (or heretics) being attacked by black and white dogs, the Canes Domini, or hounds of the Lord. The "Mornings in Florence" should here be consulted again, for Ruskin made a very thorough and characteristically decisive analysis of these paintings, which, whether one agrees with it or not, is profoundly interesting. Poor old Vasari, who so patiently described them too and named a number of the originals of the portraits, is now shelved, and from both his artists, Simone Martini and Taddeo Gaddi, has the authorship been taken by modern experts. Some one, however, must have done the work. The Duomo as represented here is not the Duomo of fact, which had not then its dome, but of anticipation. Opposite, we see a representation of the triumph of the greatest of the Dominicans, after its founder, S. Thomas Aquinas, the author of the "Summa Theologiae," who died in 1274. The painter shows the Angelic Doctor enthroned amid saints and patriarchs and heavenly attendants, while three powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician. In real life Aquinas was so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted post from the Church, but remained closeted with his books and scholars; and we can conceive what his horror would be could he view this apotheosis. On the ceiling is a quaint rendering of the walking on the water, S. Peter's failure being watched from the ship with the utmost closeness by the other disciples, but attracting no notice whatever from an angler, close by, on the shore. The chapel is desolate and unkempt, and those of us who are not Dominicans are not sorry to leave it and look for the simple sweetness of the Giottos. These are to be found, with some difficulty, on the walls of the niche where the tomb of the Marchese Ridolfo stands. They are certainly very simple and telling, and I advise every one to open the "Mornings in Florence" and learn how the wilful magical pen deals with them; but it would be a pity to give up Ghirlandaio because Giotto was so different, as Ruskin wished. Room for both. One scene represents the meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna outside a mediaeval city's walls, and it has some pretty Giottesque touches, such as the man carrying doves to the Temple and the angel uniting the two saints in friendliness; and the other is the Birth of the Virgin, which Ruskin was so pleased to pit against Ghirlandaio's treatment of the same incident. Well, it is given to some of us to see only what we want to see and be blind to the rest; and Ruskin was of these the very king. I agree with him that Ghirlandaio in both his Nativity frescoes thought little of the exhaustion of the mothers; but it is arguable that two such accouchements might with propriety be treated as abnormal--as indeed every painter has treated the birth of Christ, where the Virgin, fully dressed, is receiving the Magi a few moments after. Ruskin, after making his deadly comparisons, concludes thus genially of the Giotto version--"If you can be pleased with this, you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you can find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it." The S. Maria Novella habit is one to be quickly contracted by the visitor to Florence: nearly as important as the S. Croce habit. Both churches are hospitable and, apart from the cloisters, free and eminently suited for dallying in; thus differing from the Duomo, which is dark, and S. Lorenzo, where there are payments to be made and attendants to discourage. An effort should be made at S. Maria Novella to get into the old cloisters, which are very large and indicate what a vast convent it once was. But there is no certainty. The way is to go through to the Palaestra and hope for the best. Here, as I have said in the second chapter, were lodged Pope Eugenius and his suite, when they came to the Council of Florence in 1439. These large and beautiful green cloisters are now deserted. Through certain windows on the left one may see chemists at work compounding drugs and perfumes after old Dominican recipes, to be sold at the Farmacia in the Via della Scala close by. The great refectory has been turned into a gymnasium. The two obelisks, supported by tortoises and surmounted by beautiful lilies, in the Piazza of S. Maria Novella were used as boundaries in the chariot races held here under Cosimo I, and in the collection of old Florentine prints on the top floor of Michelangelo's house you may see representations of these races. The charming loggia opposite S. Maria Novella, with della Robbia decorations, is the Loggia di S. Paolo, a school designed, it is thought, by Brunelleschi, and here, at the right hand end, we see S. Dominic himself in a friendly embrace with S. Francis, a very beautiful group by either Luca or Andrea della Robbia. In the loggia cabmen now wrangle all day and all night. From it S. Maria Novella is seen under the best conditions, always cheerful and serene; while far behind the church is the huge Apennine where most of the weather of Florence seems to be manufactured. In mid April this year (1912) it still had its cap of snow. CHAPTER XXII The Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele to S. Trinità A city of trams--The old market--Donatello's figure of Abundance--An evening resort--A hall of variety--Florentines of to-day--The war with Turkey--Homecoming heroes--Restaurants--The new market--The bronze boar--A fifteenth century palace--Old Florentine life reconstructed--Where changes are few--S. Trinità--Ghirlandaio again--S. Francis--The Strozzi palace--Clarice de' Medici. Florence is not simple to the stranger. Like all very old cities built fortuitously it is difficult to learn: the points of the compass are elusive; the streets are so narrow that the sky is no constant guide; the names of the streets are often not there; the policemen have no high standard of helpfulness. There are trams, it is true--too many and too noisy, and too near the pavement--but the names of their outward destinations, from the centre, too rarely correspond to any point of interest that one is desiring. Hence one has many embarrassments and even annoyances. Yet I daresay this is best: an orderly Florence is unthinkable. Since, however, the trams that are returning to the centre nearly all go to the Duomo, either passing it or stopping there, the tram becomes one's best friend and the Duomo one's starting point for most excursions. Supposing ourselves to be there once more, let us quickly get through the horrid necessity, which confronts one in all ancient Italian cities, of seeing the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. In an earlier chapter we left the Baptistery and walked along the Via Calzaioli. Again starting from the Baptistery let us take the Via dell' Arcivescovado, which is parallel with the Via Calzaioli, on the right of it, and again walk straight forward. We shall come almost at once to the great modern square. No Italian city or town is complete without a Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele and a statue of that monarch. In Florence the sturdy king bestrides his horse here. Italy being so old and Vittorio Emmanuele so new, it follows in most cases that the square or street named after him supplants an older one, and if the Italians had any memory or imaginative interest in history they would see to it that the old name was not wholly obliterated. In Florence, in order to honour the first king of United Italy, much grave violence was done to antiquity, for a very picturesque quarter had to be cleared away for the huge brasseries, stores and hotels which make up the west side; which in their turn marked the site of the old market where Donatello and Brunelleschi and all the later artists of the great days did their shopping and met to exchange ideals and banter; and that market in its turn marked the site of the Roman forum. One of the features of the old market was the charming Loggia di Pesce; another, Donatello's figure of Abundance, surmounting a column. This figure is now in the museum of ancient city relics in the monastery of S. Marco, where one confronts her on a level instead of looking up at her in mid sky. But she is very good, none the less. In talking to elderly persons who can remember Florence forty and fifty years ago I find that nothing so distresses them as the loss of the old quarter for the making of this new spacious piazza; and probably nothing can so delight the younger Florentines as its possession, for, having nothing to do in the evenings, they do it chiefly in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. Chairs and tables spring up like mushrooms in the roadway, among which too few waiters distribute those very inexpensive refreshments which seem to be purchased rather for the right to the seat that they confer than for any stimulation. It is extraordinary to the eyes of the thriftless English, who are never so happy as when they are overpaying Italian and other caterers in their own country, to notice how long these wiser folk will occupy a table on an expenditure of fourpence. I do not mean that there are no theatres in Florence. There are many, but they are not very good; and the young men can do without them. Curious old theatres, faded and artificial, all apparently built for the comedies of Goldoni. There are cinema theatres too, at prices which would delight the English public addicted to those insidious entertainments, but horrify English managers; and the Teatro Salvini at the back of the Palazzo Vecchio is occasionally transformed into a Folies Bergères (as it is called) where one after another comediennes sing each two or three songs rapidly to an audience who regard them with apathy and converse without ceasing. The only sign of interest which one observes is the murmur which follows anything a little off the beaten track--a sound that might equally be encouragement or disapproval. But a really pretty woman entering a box moves them. Then they employ every note in the gamut; and curiously enough the pretty woman in the box is usually as cool under the fusillade as a professional and hardened sister would be. A strange music hall this to the English eye, where the orchestra smokes, and no numbers are put up, and every one talks, and the intervals seem to be hours long. But the Florentines do not mind, for they have not the English thirst for entertainment and escape; they carry their entertainment with them and do not wish to escape--going to such places only because they are warmer than out of doors. Sitting here and watching their ironical negligence of the stage and their interest in each other's company; their animated talk and rapid decisions as to the merits and charms of a performer; the comfort of their attitudes and carelessness (although never quite slovenliness) in dress; one seems to realize the nation better than anywhere. The old fighting passion may have gone; but much of the quickness, the shrewdness and the humour remains, together with the determination of each man to have if possible his own way and, whether possible or not, his own say. Seeing them in great numbers one quickly learns and steadily corroborates the fact that the Florentines are not beautiful. A pretty woman or a handsome man is a rarity; but a dull-looking man or woman is equally rare. They are shrewd, philosophic, cynical, and very ready for laughter. They look contented also: Florence clearly is the best place to be born in, to live in, and to die in. Let all the world come to Florence, by all means, and spend its money there; but don't ask Florence to go to the world. Don't in fact ask Florence to do anything very much. Civilization and modern conditions have done the Florentines no good. Their destiny was to live in a walled city in turbulent days, when the foe came against it, or tyranny threatened from within and had to be resisted. They were then Florentines and everything mattered. To-day they are Italians and nothing matters very much. Moreover, it must be galling to have somewhere in the recesses of their consciousness the knowledge that their famous city, built and cemented with their ancestors' blood, is now only a museum. When it is fine and warm the music hall does not exist, and it is in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele that the Florentines sit and talk, or walk and talk, or listen to the band which periodically inhabits a stand near the centre; and it was here that I watched the reception of the news that Italy had declared war on Turkey, a decision which while it rejoiced the national warlike spirit of the populace could not but carry with it a reminder that wars have to be paid for. Six or seven months later I saw the return to Florence of the first troops from the war, and their reception was terrific. In the mass they were welcome enough; but as soon as units could be separated from the mass the fun began, for they were carried shoulder high to whatever destination they wanted, their knapsacks and rifles falling to proud bearers too; while the women clapped from the upper windows, the shrewd shopkeepers cheered from their doorways, and the crowd which followed and surrounded the hero every moment increased. As for the heroes, they looked for the most part a good deal less foolish than Englishmen would have done; but here and there was one whose expression suggested that the Turks were nothing to this. One poor fellow had his coat dragged from his back and torn into a thousand souvenirs. The restaurants of Florence are those of a city where the natives are thrifty and the visitors dine in hotels. There is one expensive high-class house, in the Via Tornabuoni--Doney e Nipoti or Doney et Neveux--where the cooking is Franco-Italian, and the Chianti and wines are dear beyond belief, and the venerable waiters move with a deliberation which can drive a hungry man--and one is always hungry in this fine Tuscan air--to despair. I like better the excellent old-fashioned purely Italian food and Chianti and speed at Bonciani's in the Via de Panzani, close to the station. These twain are the best. But it is more interesting to go to the huge Gambrinus in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, because so much is going on all the time. One curious Florentine habit is quickly discovered and resented by the stranger who frequents a restaurant, and that is the system of changing waiters from one set of tables to another; so that whereas in London and Paris the wise diner is true to a corner because it carries the same service with it, in Florence he must follow the service. But if the restaurants have odd ways, and a limited range of dishes and those not very interesting, they make up for it by being astonishingly quick. Things are cooked almost miraculously. The Florentines eat little. But greediness is not an Italian fault. No greedy people would have a five-syllabled word for waiter. Continuing along the Via dell' Arcivescovado, which after the Piazza becomes the Via Celimana, we come to that very beautiful structure the Mercato Nuovo, which, however, is not so wonderfully new, having been built as long ago as 1547-1551. Its columns and arched roof are exquisitely proportioned. As a market it seems to be a poor affair, the chief commodity being straw hats. For the principal food market one has to go to the Via d'Ariento, near S. Lorenzo, and this is, I think, well worth doing early in the morning. Lovers of Hans Andersen go to the Mercato Nuovo to see the famous bronze boar (or "metal pig," as it was called in the translation on which I was brought up) that stands here, on whose back the little street boy had such adventures. The boar himself was the work of Pietro Tacca (1586-1650), a copy from an ancient marble original, now in the Uffizi, at the top of the entrance stairs; but the pedestal with its collection of creeping things is modern. The Florentines who stand in the market niches are Bernardo Cennini, a goldsmith and one of Ghiberti's assistants, who introduced printing into Florence in 1471 and began with an edition of Virgil; Giovanni Villani, who was the city's first serious historian, beginning in 1300 and continuing till his death in 1348; and Michele Lando, the wool-carder, who on July 22nd, 1378, at the head of a mob, overturned the power of the Signory. By continuing straight on we should come to that crowded and fussy little street which crosses the river by the Ponte Vecchio and eventually becomes the Roman way; but let us instead turn to the right this side of the market, down the Via Porta Rossa, because here is the Palazzo Davanzati, which has a profound interest to lovers of the Florentine past in that it has been restored exactly to its ancient state when Pope Eugenius IV lodged here, and has been filled with fourteenth and fifteenth century furniture. In those days it was the home of the Davizza family. The Davanzati bought it late in the sixteenth century and retained it until 1838. In 1904 it was bought by Professor Elia Volpi, who restored its ancient conditions and presented it to the city as a permanent monument of the past. Here we see a mediaeval Florentine palace precisely as it was when its Florentine owner lived his uncomfortable life there. For say what one may, there is no question that life must have been uncomfortable. In early and late summer, when the weather was fine and warm, these stone floors and continuous draughts may have been solacing; but in winter and early spring, when Florentine weather can be so bitterly hostile, what then? That there was a big fire we know by the smoky condition of Michelozzo's charming frieze on the chimney piece; but the room--I refer to that on the first floor--is so vast that this fire can have done little for any one but an immediate vis-à-vis; and the room, moreover, was between the open world on the one side, and the open court (now roofed in with glass) on the other, with such additional opportunities for draughts as the four trap-doors in the floor offered. It was through these traps that the stone cannon-balls still stacked in the window seats were dropped, or a few gallons of boiling oil poured, whenever the city or a faction of it turned against the householder. Not comfortable, you see, at least not in our northern sense of the word, although to the hardy frugal Florentine it may have seemed a haven of luxury. The furniture of the salon is simple and sparse and very hard. A bust here, a picture there, a coloured plate, a crucifix, and a Madonna and Child in a niche: that was all the decoration save tapestry. An hour glass, a pepper mill, a compass, an inkstand, stand for utility, and quaint and twisted musical instruments and a backgammon board for beguilement. In the salle-à-manger adjoining is less light, and here also is a symbol of Florentine unrest in the shape of a hole in the wall (beneath the niche which holds the Madonna and Child) through which the advancing foe, who had successfully avoided the cannon balls and the oil, might be prodded with lances, or even fired at. The next room is the kitchen, curiously far from the well, the opening to which is in the salon, and then a bedroom (with some guns in it) and smaller rooms gained from the central court. The rest of the building is the same--a series of self-contained flats, but all dipping for water from the same shaft and all depending anxiously upon the success of the first floor with invaders. At the top is a beautiful loggia with Florence beneath it. The odd thing to remember is that for the poor of Florence, who now inhabit houses of the same age as the Davanzati palace, the conditions are almost as they were in the fifteenth century. A few changes have come in, but hardly any. Myriads of the tenements have no water laid on: it must still be pulled up in buckets exactly as here. Indeed you may often see the top floor at work in this way; and there is a row of houses on the left of the road to the Certosa, a little way out of Florence, with a most elaborate network of bucket ropes over many gardens to one well. Similarly one sees the occupants of the higher floors drawing vegetables and bread in baskets from the street and lowering the money for them. The postman delivers letters in this way, too. Again, one of the survivals of the Davanzati to which the custodian draws attention is the rain-water pipe, like a long bamboo, down the wall of the court; but one has but to walk along the Via Lambertesca, between the Uffizi and the Via Por S. Maria, and peer into the alleys, to see that these pipes are common enough yet. In fact, directly one leaves the big streets Florence is still fifteenth century. Less colour in the costumes, and a few anachronisms, such as gas or electric light, posters, newspapers, cigarettes, and bicycles, which dart like dragon flies (every Florentine cyclist being a trick cyclist); but for the rest there is no change. The business of life has not altered; the same food is eaten, the same vessels contain it, the same fire cooks it, the same red wine is made from the same grapes in the same vineyards, the same language (almost) is spoken. The babies are christened at the same font, the parents visit the same churches. Similarly the handicrafts can have altered little. The coppersmith, the blacksmith, the cobbler, the woodcarver, the goldsmiths in their yellow smocks, must be just as they were, and certainly the cellars and caverns under the big houses in which they work have not changed. Where the change is, is among the better-to-do, the rich, and in the government. For no longer is a man afraid to talk freely of politics; no longer does he shudder as he passes the Bargello; no longer is the name of Medici on his lips. Everything else is practically as it was. The Via Porta Rossa runs to the Piazza S. Trinità, the church of S. Trinità being our destination. For here are some interesting frescoes. First, however, let us look at the sculpture: a very beautiful altar by Benedetto da Rovezzano in the fifth chapel of the right aisle; a monument by Luca della Robbia to one of the archbishops of Fiesole, once in S. Pancrazio (which is now a tobacco factory) in the Via della Spada and brought here for safe keeping--a beautiful example of Luca's genius, not only as a modeller but also as a very treasury of pretty thoughts, for the border of flowers and leaves is beyond praise delightful. The best green in Florence (after Nature's, which is seen through so many doorways and which splashes over so many white walls and mingles with gay fruits in so many shops) is here. In the fifth chapel of the left aisle is a Magdalen carved in wood by Desiderio da Settignano and finished by Benedetto da Maiano; while S. Trinità now possesses, but shows only on Good Friday, the very crucifix from S. Miniato which bowed down and blessed S. Gualberto. The porphyry tombs of the Sassetti, in the chapel of that family, by Giuliano di Sangallo, are magnificent. It is in the Sassetti chapel that we find the Ghirlandaio frescoes of scenes in the life of S. Francis which bring so many strangers to this church. The painting which depicts S. Francis receiving the charter from the Emperor Honorius is interesting both for its history and its painting; for it contains a valuable record of what the Palazzo Vecchio and Loggia de' Lanzi were like in 1485, and also many portraits: among them Lorenzo the Magnificent, on the extreme right holding out his hand: Poliziano, tutor of the Medici boys, coming first up the stairs; and on the extreme left very probably Verrocchio, one of Ghirlandaio's favourite painters. We find old Florence again in the very attractive picture of the resuscitation of the nice little girl in violet, a daughter of the Spini family, who fell from a window of the Spini palace (as we see in the distance on the left, this being one of the old synchronized scenes) and was brought to life by S. Francis, who chanced to be flying by. The scene is intensely local: just outside the church, looking along what is now the Piazza S. Trinità and the old Trinità bridge. The Spini palace is still there, but is now called the Ferroni, and it accommodates no longer Florentine aristocrats but consuls and bank clerks. Among the portraits in the fresco are noble friends of the Spini family--Albrizzi, Acciaioli, Strozzi and so forth. The little girl is very quaint and perfectly ready to take up once more the threads of her life. How long she lived this second time and what became of her I have not been able to discover. Her tiny sister, behind the bier, is even quainter. On the left is a little group of the comely Florentine ladies in whom Ghirlandaio so delighted, tall and serene, with a few youths among them. It is interesting to note that Ghirlandaio in his S. Trinità frescoes and Benedetto da Maiano in his S. Croce pulpit reliefs chose exactly the same scenes in the life of S. Francis: interesting because when Ghirlandaio was painting frescoes at San Gimignano in 1475, Benedetto was at work on the altar for the same church of S. Fina, and they were friends. Where Ghirlandaio and Giotto, also in S. Croce, also coincide in choice of subject some interesting comparisons may be made, all to the advantage of Giotto in spiritual feeling and unsophisticated charm, but by no means to Ghirlandaio's detriment as a fascinating historian in colour. In the scene of the death of S. Francis we find Ghirlandaio and Giotto again on the same ground, and here it is probable that the later painter went to the earlier for inspiration; for he has followed Giotto in the fine thought that makes one of the attendant brothers glance up as though at the saint's ascending spirit. It is remarkable how, with every picture that one sees, Giotto's completeness of equipment as a religious painter becomes more marked. His hand may have been ignorant of many masterly devices for which the time was not ripe; but his head and heart knew all. The patriarchs in the spandrels of the choir are by Ghirlandaio's master, Alessio Baldovinetti, of whom I said something in the chapter on S. Maria Novella. They once more testify to this painter's charm and brilliance. Almost more than that of any other does one regret the scarcity of his work. It was fitting that he should have painted the choir, for his name-saint, S. Alessio, guards the façade of the church. The column opposite the church came from the baths of Caracalla and was set up by Cosimo I, upon the attainment of his life-long ambition of a grand-dukeship and a crown. The figure at the top is Justice. S. Trinità is a good starting-point for the leisurely examination of the older and narrower streets, an occupation which so many visitors to Florence prefer to the study of picture galleries and churches. And perhaps rightly. In no city can they carry on their researches with such ease, for Florence is incurious about them. Either the Florentines are too much engrossed in their own affairs or the peering foreigner has become too familiar an object to merit notice, but one may drift about even in the narrowest alleys beside the Arno, east and west, and attract few eyes. And the city here is at its most romantic: between the Piazza S. Trinità and the Via Por S. Maria, all about the Borgo SS. Apostoli. We have just been discussing Benedetto da Maiano the sculptor. If we turn to the left on leaving S. Trinità, instead of losing ourselves in the little streets, we are in the Via Tornabuoni, where the best shops are and American is the prevailing language. We shall soon come, on the right, to an example of Benedetto's work as an architect, for the first draft of the famous Palazzo Strozzi, the four-square fortress-home which Filippo Strozzi began for himself in 1489, was his. Benedetto continued the work until his death in 1507, when Cronaca, who built the great hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, took it over and added the famous cornice. The iron lantern and other smithwork were by Lorenzo the Magnificent's sardonic friend, "Il Caparro," of the Sign of the Burning Books, of whom I wrote in the chapter on the Medici palace. The first mistress of the Strozzi palace was Clarice Strozzi, née Clarice de' Medici, the daughter of Piero, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. She was born in 1493 and married Filippo Strozzi the younger in 1508, during the family's second period of exile. They then lived at Rome, but were allowed to return to Florence in 1510. Clarice's chief title to fame is her proud outburst when she turned Ippolito and Alessandro out of the Medici palace. She died in 1528 and was buried in S. Maria Novella. The unfortunate Filippo met his end nine years later in the Boboli fortezza, which his money had helped to build and in which he was imprisoned for his share in a conspiracy against Cosimo I. Cosimo confiscated the palace and all Strozzi's other possessions, but later made some restitution. To-day the family occupy the upper part of their famous imperishable home, and beneath there is an exhibition of pictures and antiquities for sale. No private individual, whatever his wealth or ambition, will probably ever again succeed in building a house half so strong or noble as this. CHAPTER XXIII The Pitti Luca Pitti's pride--Preliminary caution--A terrace view--A collection but not a gallery--The personally-conducted--Giorgione the superb--Sustermans--The "Madonna del Granduca"--The "Madonna della Sedia"--From Cimabue to Raphael--Andrea del Sarto--Two Popes and a bastard--The ill-fated Ippolito--The National Gallery--Royal apartments--"Pallas Subduing the Centaur"--The Boboli Gardens. The Pitti approached from the Via Guicciardini is far liker a prison than a palace. It was commissioned by Luca Pitti, one of the proudest and richest of the rivals of the Medici, in 1441. Cosimo de' Medici, as we have seen, had rejected Brunelleschi's plans for a palazzo as being too pretentious and gone instead to his friend Michelozzo for something that externally at any rate was more modest; Pitti, whose one ambition was to exceed Cosimo in power, popularity, and visible wealth, deliberately chose Brunelleschi, and gave him carte blanche to make the most magnificent mansion possible. Pitti, however, plotting against Cosimo's son Piero, was frustrated and condemned to death; and although Piero obtained his pardon he lost all his friends and passed into utter disrespect in the city. Meanwhile his palace remained unfinished and neglected, and continued so for a century, when it was acquired by the Grand Duchess Eleanor of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I, who though she saw only the beginnings of its splendours lived there awhile and there brought up her doomed brood. Eleanor's architect--or rather Cosimo's, for though the Grand Duchess paid, the Grand Duke controlled--was Ammanati, the designer of the Neptune fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. Other important additions were made later. The last Medicean Grand Duke to occupy the Pitti was Gian Gastone, a bizarre detrimental, whose head, in a monstrous wig, may be seen at the top of the stairs leading to the Uffizi gallery. He died in 1737. As I have said in chapter VIII, it was by the will of Gian Gastone's sister, widow of the Elector Palatine, who died in 1743, that the Medicean collections became the property of the Florentines. This bequest did not, however, prevent the migration of many of the best pictures to Paris under Napoleon, but after Waterloo they came back. The Pitti continued to be the home of princes after Gian Gastone quitted a world which he found strange and made more so; but they were not of the Medici blood. It is now a residence of the royal family. The first thing to do if by evil chance one enters the Pitti by the covered way from the Uffizi is, just before emerging into the palace, to avoid the room where copies of pictures are sold, for not only is it a very catacomb of headache, from the fresh paint, but the copies are in themselves horrible and lead to disquieting reflections on the subject of sweated labour. The next thing to do, on at last emerging, is to walk out on the roof from the little room at the top of the stairs, and get a supply of fresh air for the gallery, and see Florence, which is very beautiful from here. Looking over the city one notices that the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio is almost more dominating than the Duomo, the work of the same architect who began this palace. Between the two is Fiesole. The Signoria tower is, as I say, the highest. Then the Duomo. Then Giotto's Campanile. The Bargello is hidden, but the graceful Badia tower is seen; also the little white Baptistery roof with its lantern just showing. From the fortezza come the sounds of drums and bugles. Returning from this terrace we skirt a vast porphyry basin and reach the top landing of the stairs (which was, I presume, once a loggia) where there is a very charming marble fountain; and from this we enter the first room of the gallery. The Pitti walls are so congested and so many of the pictures so difficult to see, that I propose to refer only to those which, after a series of visits, seem to me the absolute best. Let me hasten to say that to visit the Pitti gallery on any but a really bright day is folly. The great windows (which were to be larger than Cosimo de' Medici's doors) are excellent to look out of, but the rooms are so crowded with paintings on walls and ceilings, and the curtains are so absorbent of light, that unless there is sunshine one gropes in gloom. The only pictures in short that are properly visible are those on screens or hinges; and these are, fortunately almost without exception, the best. The Pitti rooms were never made for pictures at all, and it is really absurd that so many beautiful things should be massed here without reasonable lighting. The Pitti also is always crowded. The Uffizi is never crowded; the Accademia is always comfortable; the Bargello is sparsely attended. But the Pitti is normally congested, not only by individuals but by flocks, whose guides, speaking broken English, and sometimes broken American, lead from room to room. I need hardly say that they form the tightest knots before the works of Raphael. All this is proper enough, of course, but it serves to render the Pitti a difficult gallery rightly to study pictures in. In the first chapter on the Uffizi I have said how simple it is, in the Pitti, to name the best picture of all, and how difficult in most galleries. But the Pitti has one particular jewel which throws everything into the background: the work not of a Florentine but of a Venetian: "The Concert" of Giorgione, which stands on an easel in the Sala di Marte. [9] It is true that modern criticism has doubted the lightness of the ascription, and many critics, whose one idea seems to be to deprive Giorgione of any pictures at all, leaving him but a glorious name without anything to account for it, call it an early Titian; but this need not trouble us. There the picture is, and never do I think to see anything more satisfying. Piece by piece, it is not more than fine rich painting, but as a whole it is impressive and mysterious and enchanting. Pater compares the effect of it to music; and he is right. The Sala dell' Iliade (the name of each room refers always to the ceiling painting, which, however, one quite easily forgets to look at) is chiefly notable for the Raphael just inside the door: "La Donna Gravida," No. 229, one of his more realistic works, with bolder colour than usual and harder treatment; rather like the picture that has been made its pendant, No. 224, an "Incognita" by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, very firmly painted, but harder still. Between them is the first of the many Pitti Andrea del Sartos: No. 225, an "Assumption of the Madonna," opposite a similar work from the same brush, neither containing quite the finest traits of this artist. But the youth with outstretched hand at the tomb is nobly done. No. 265, "Principe Mathias de' Medici," is a good bold Sustermans, but No. 190, on the opposite wall, is a far better--a most charming work representing the Crown Prince of Denmark, son of Frederick III. Justus Sustermans, who has so many portraits here and elsewhere in Florence, was a Belgian, born in 1597, who settled in Florence as a portrait painter to Cosimo III. Van Dyck greatly admired his work and painted him. He died at Florence in 1681. No. 208, a "Virgin Enthroned," by Fra Bartolommeo, is from S. Marco, and it had better have been painted on the wall there, like the Fra Angelicos, and then the convent would have it still. The Child is very attractive, as almost always in this artist's work, but the picture as a whole has grown rather dingy. By the window is a Velasquez, the first we have seen in Florence, a little Philip IV on his prancing steed, rather too small for its subject, but very interesting here among the Italians. In the next large room--the Sala di Saturno--we come again to Raphael, who is indeed the chief master of the Pitti, his exquisite "Madonna del Granduca" being just to the left of the door. Here we have the simplest colouring and perfect sweetness, and such serenity of mastery as must be the despair of the copyists, who, however, never cease attempting it. The only defect is a little clumsiness in the Madonna's hand. The picture was lost for two centuries and it then changed owners for twelve crowns, the seller being a poor woman and the buyer a bookseller. The bookseller found a ready purchaser in the director of the Grand Duke Ferdinand III's gallery, and the Grand Duke so esteemed it that he carried it with him on all his journeys, just as Sir George Beaumont, the English connoisseur, never travelled without a favourite Claude. Hence its name. Another Andrea del Sarto, the "Disputa sulla Trinita," No. 172, is close by, nobly drawn but again not of his absolute best, and then five more Raphaels or putative Raphaels--No. 171, Tommaso Inghirami; No. 61, Angelo Doni, the collector and the friend of artists, for whom Michelangelo painted his "Holy Family" in the Uffizi; No. 59, Maddalena Doni; and above all No. 174, "The Vision of Ezekiel," that little great picture, so strong and spirited, and--to coin a word--Sixtinish. All these, I may say, are questioned by experts; but some very fine hand is to be seen in them any way. Over the "Ezekiel" is still another, No. 165, the "Madonna detta del Baldacchino," which is so much better in the photographs. Next this group--No. 164--we find Raphael's friend Perugino with an Entombment, but it lacks his divine glow; and above it a soft and mellow and easy Andrea del Sarto, No. 163, which ought to be in a church rather than here. A better Perugino is No. 42, which has all his sweetness, but to call it the Magdalen is surely wrong; and close by it a rather formal Fra Bartolommeo, No. 159, "Gesu Resuscitato," from the church of SS. Annunziata, in which once again the babies who hold the circular landscape are the best part. After another doubtful Raphael--the sly Cardinal Divizio da Bibbiena, No. 158--let us look at an unquestioned one, No. 151, the most popular picture in Florence, if not the whole world, Raphael's "Madonna della Sedia," that beautiful rich scene of maternal tenderness and infantine peace. Personally I do not find myself often under Raphael's spell; but here he conquers. The Madonna again is without enough expression, but her arms are right, and the Child is right, and the colour is so rich, almost Venetian in that odd way in which Raphael now and then could suggest Venice. It is interesting to compare Raphael's two famous Madonnas in this room: this one belonging to his Roman period and the other, opposite it, to Florence, with the differences so marked. For by the time he painted this he knew more of life and human affection. This picture, I suppose, might be called the consummation of Renaissance painting in fullest bloom: the latest triumph of that impulse. I do not say it is the best; but it may be called a crown on the whole movement both in subject and treatment. Think of the gulf between the Cimabue Madonna and the Giotto Madonna, side by side, which we saw in the Accademia, and this. With so many vivid sympathies Giotto must have wanted with all his soul to make the mother motherly and the child childlike; but the time was not yet; his hand was neither free nor fit. Between Giotto and Raphael had to come many things before such treatment as this was possible; most of all, I think, Luca della Robbia had to come between, for he was the most valuable reconciler of God and man of them all. He was the first to bring a tender humanity into the Church, the first to know that a mother's fingers, holding a baby, sink into its soft little body. Without Luca I doubt if the "Madonna della Sedia" could be the idyll of protective solicitude and loving pride that it is. The Sala di Giove brings us to Venetian painting indeed, and glorious painting too, for next the door is Titian's "Bella," No. 18, the lady in the peacock-blue dress with purple sleeves, all richly embroidered in gold, whom to see once is to remember for ever. On the other side of the door is Andrea's brilliant "S. John the Baptist as a Boy," No. 272, and then the noblest Fra Bartolommeo here, a Deposition, No. 64, not good in colour, but superbly drawn and pitiful. In this room also is the monk's great spirited figure of S. Marco, for the convent of that name. Between them is a Tintoretto, No. 131, Vincenzo Zeino, one of his ruddy old men, with a glimpse of Venice, under an angry sky, through the window. Over the door, No. 124, is an Annunciation by Andrea, with a slight variation in it, for two angels accompany that one who brings the news, and the announcement is made from the right instead of the left, while the incident is being watched by some people on the terrace over a classical portico. A greater Andrea hangs next: No. 123, the Madonna in Glory, fine but rather formal, and, like all Andrea's work, hall-marked by its woman type. The other notable pictures are Raphael's Fornarina, No. 245, which is far more Venetian than the "Madonna della Sedia," and has been given to Sebastian del Piombo; and the Venetian group on the right of the door, which is not only interesting for its own charm but as being a foretaste of the superb and glorious Giorgione in the Sala di Marte, which we now enter. Here we find a Rembrandt, No. 16, an old man: age and dignity emerging golden from the gloom; and as a pendant a portrait, with somewhat similar characteristics, but softer, by Tintoretto, No. 83. Between them is a prosperous, ruddy group of scholars by Rubens, who has placed a vase of tulips before the bust of Seneca. And we find Rubens again with a sprawling, brilliant feat entitled "The Consequences of War," but what those consequences are, beyond nakedness, one has difficulty in discerning. Raphael's Holy Family, No. 94 (also known as the "Madonna dell' Impannata"), next it might be called the perfection of drawing without feeling. The authorities consider it a school piece: that is to say, chiefly the work of his imitators. The vivacity of the Child's face is very remarkable. The best Andrea is in this room--a Holy Family, No. 81, which gets sweeter and simpler and richer with every glance. Other Andreas are here too, notably on the right of the further door a sweet mother and sprawling, vigorous Child. But every Andrea that I see makes me think more highly of the "Madonna della Sacco," in the cloisters of SS. Annunziata. Van Dyck, who painted much in Italy before settling down at the English court, we find in this room with a masterly full-length seated portrait of an astute cardinal. But the room's greatest glory, as I have said, is the Giorgione on the easel. In the Sala di Apollo, at the right of the door as we enter, is Andrea's portrait of himself, a serious and mysterious face shining out of darkness, and below it is Titian's golden Magdalen, No. 67, the same ripe creature that we saw at the Uffizi posing as Flora, again diffusing Venetian light. On the other side of the door we find, for the first time in Florence, Murillo, who has two groups of the Madonna and Child on this wall, the better being No. 63, which is both sweet and masterly. In No. 56 the Child becomes a pretty Spanish boy playing with a rosary, and in both He has a faint nimbus instead of the halo to which we are accustomed. On the same wall is another fine Andrea, who is most lavishly represented in this gallery, No. 58, a Deposition, all gentle melancholy rather than grief. The kneeling girl is very beautiful. Finally there are Van Dyck's very charming portrait of Charles I of England and Henrietta, a most deft and distinguished work, and Raphael's famous portrait of Leo X with two companions: rather dingy, and too like three persons set for the camera, but powerful and deeply interesting to us, because here we see the first Medici pope, Leo X, Lorenzo de' Medici's son Giovanni, who gave Michelangelo the commission for the Medici tombs and the new Sacristy of S. Lorenzo; and in the young man on the Pope's right hand we see none other than Giulio, natural son of Giuliano de' Medici, Lorenzo's brother, who afterwards became Pope as Clement VII. It was he who laid siege to Florence when Michelangelo was called upon to fortify it; and it was during his pontificate that Henry VIII threw off the shackles of Rome and became the Defender of the Faith. Himself a bastard, Giulio became the father of the base-born Alessandro of Urbino, first Duke of Florence, who, after procuring the death of Ippolito and living a life of horrible excess, was himself murdered by his cousin Lorenzino in order to rid Florence of her worst tyrant. In his portrait Leo X has an illuminated missal and a magnifying glass, as indication of his scholarly tastes. That he was also a good liver his form and features testify. Of this picture an interesting story is told. After the battle of Pavia, in 1525, Clement VII wishing to be friendly with the Marquis of Gonzaga, a powerful ally of the Emperor Charles V, asked him what he could do for him, and Gonzaga expressed a wish for the portrait of Leo X, then in the Medici palace. Clement complied, but wishing to retain at any rate a semblance of the original, directed that the picture should be copied, and Andrea del Sarto was chosen for that task. The copy turned out to be so close that Gonzaga never obtained the original at all. In the next room--the Sala di Venere, and the last room in the long suite--we find another Raphael portrait, and another Pope, this time Julius II, that Pontiff whose caprice and pride together rendered null and void and unhappy so many years of Michelangelo's life, since it was for him that the great Julian tomb, never completed, was designed. A replica of this picture is in our National Gallery. Here also are a wistful and poignant John the Baptist by Dossi, No. 380; two Dürers--an Adam and an Eve, very naked and primitive, facing each other from opposite walls; and two Rubens landscapes not equal to ours at Trafalgar Square, but spacious and lively. The gem of the room is a lovely Titian, No. 92, on an easel, a golden work of supreme quietude and disguised power. The portrait is called sometimes the Duke of Norfolk, sometimes the "Young Englishman". Returning to the first room--the Sala of the Iliad--we enter the Sala dell' Educazione di Giove, and find on the left a little gipsy portrait by Boccaccio Boccaccino (1497-1518) which has extraordinary charm: a grave, wistful, childish face in a blue handkerchief: quite a new kind of picture here. I reproduce it in this volume, but it wants its colour. For the rest, the room belongs to less-known and later men, in particular to Cristofano Allori (1577-1621), with his famous Judith, reproduced in all the picture shops of Florence. This work is no favourite of mine, but one cannot deny it power and richness. The Guido Reni opposite, in which an affected fat actress poses as Cleopatra with the asp, is not, however, even tolerable. We next pass, after a glance perhaps at the adjoining tapestry room on the left (where the bronze Cain and Abel are), the most elegant bathroom imaginable, fit for anything rather than soap and splashes, and come to the Sala di Ulisse and some good Venetian portraits: a bearded senator in a sable robe by Paolo Veronese, No. 216, and, No. 201, Titian's fine portrait of the ill-fated Ippolito de' Medici, son of that Giuliano de' Medici, Duc de Nemours, whose tomb by Michelangelo is at S. Lorenzo. This amiable young man was brought up by Leo X until the age of twelve, when the Pope died, and the boy was sent to Florence to live at the Medici palace, with the base-born Alessandro, under the care of Cardinal Passerini, where he remained until Clarice de' Strozzi ordered both the boys to quit. In 1527 came the third expulsion of the Medici from Florence, and Ippolito wandered about until Clement VII, the second Medici Pope, was in Rome, after the sack, and, joining him there, he was, against his will, made a cardinal, and sent to Hungary: Clement's idea being to establish Alessandro (his natural son) as Duke of Florence, and squeeze Ippolito, the rightful heir, out. This, Clement succeeded in doing, and the repulsive and squalid-minded Alessandro--known as the Mule--was installed. Ippolito, in whom this proceeding caused deep grief, settled in Bologna and took to scholarship, among other tasks translating part of the Aeneid into Italian blank verse; but when Clement died and thus liberated Rome from a vile tyranny, he was with him and protected his corpse from the angry mob. That was in 1534, when Ippolito was twenty-seven. In the following year a number of exiles from Florence who could not endure Alessandro's offensive ways, or had been forced by him to fly, decided to appeal to the Emperor Charles V for assistance against such a contemptible ruler; and Ippolito headed the mission; but before he could reach the Emperor an emissary of Alessandro's succeeded in poisoning him. Such was Ippolito de' Medici, grandson of the great Lorenzo, whom Titian painted, probably when he was in Bologna, in 1533 or 1534. This room also contains a nice little open decorative scene--like a sketch for a fresco--of the Death of Lucrezia, No. 388, attributed to the School of Botticelli, and above it a good Royal Academy Andrea del Sarto. The next is the best of these small rooms--the Sala of Prometheus--where on Sundays most people spend their time in astonishment over the inlaid tables, but where Tuscan art also is very beautiful. The most famous picture is, I suppose, the circular Filippino Lippi, No. 343, but although the lively background is very entertaining and the Virgin most wonderfully painted, the Child is a serious blemish. The next favourite, if not the first, is the Perugino on the easel--No. 219--one of his loveliest small pictures, with an evening glow among the Apennines such as no other painter could capture. Other fine works here are the Fra Bartolommeo, No. 256, over the door, a Holy Family, very pretty and characteristic, and his "Ecce Homo," next it; the adorable circular Botticini (as the catalogue calls it, although the photographers waver between Botticelli and Filippino Lippi), No. 347, with its myriad roses and children with their little folded hands and the Mother and Child diffusing happy sweetness, which, if only it were a little less painty, would be one of the chief magnets of the gallery. Hereabout are many Botticelli school pictures, chief of these the curious girl, called foolishly "La Bella Simonetta," which Mr. Berenson attributes to that unknown disciple of Botticelli to whom he has given the charming name of Amico di Sandro. This study in browns, yellow, and grey always has its public. Other popular Botticelli derivatives are Nos. 348 and 357. Look also at the sly and curious woman (No. 102), near the window, by Ubertini, a new artist here; and the pretty Jacopo del Sellaio, No. 364; a finely drawn S. Sebastian by Pollaiuolo; the Holy Family by Jacopo di Boateri, No. 362, with very pleasant colouring; No. 140, the "Incognita," which people used to think was by Leonardo--for some reason difficult to understand except on the principle of making the wish father to the thought--and is now given to Bugiardini; and lastly a rich and comely example of Lombardy art, No. 299. From this room we will enter first the Corridio delle Colonne where Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici's miniature portraits are hung, all remarkable and some superb, but unfortunately not named, together with a few larger works, all very interesting. That Young Goldsmith, No. 207, which used to be given to Leonardo but is now Ridolfo Ghirlandaio's, is here; a Franciabigio, No. 43; a questioned Raphael, No. 44; a fine and sensitive head of one of the Gonzaga family by Mantegna, No. 375; the coarse head of Giovanni Bentivoglio by da Costa, No. 376; and a Pollaiuolo, No. 370, S. Jerome, whose fine rapt countenance is beautifully drawn. In the Sala della Giustizia we come again to the Venetians: a noble Piombo, No. 409; the fine Aretino and Tommaso Mosti by Titian; Tintoretto's portrait of a man, No. 410; and two good Moronis. But I am not sure that Dosso Dossi's "Nymph and Satyr" on the easel is not the most remarkable achievement here. I do not, however, care greatly for it. In the Sala di Flora we find some interesting Andreas; a beautiful portrait by Puligo, No. 184; and Giulio Romano's famous frieze of dancers. Also a fine portrait by Allori, No. 72. The end room of all is notable for a Ruysdael. Finally there is the Sala del Poccetti, out of the Sala di Prometeo, which, together with the preceding two rooms that I have described, has lately been rearranged. Here now is the hard but masterly Holy Family of Bronzino, who has an enormous amount of work in Florence, chiefly Medicean portraits, but nowhere, I think, reaches the level of his "Allegory" in our National Gallery, or the portrait in the Taylor collection sold at Christie's in 1912. Here also are four rich Poussins; two typical Salvator Rosa landscapes and a battle piece from the same hand; and, by some strange chance, a portrait of Oliver Cromwell by Sir Peter Lely. But the stone table again wins most attention. And here, as we leave the last of the great picture collections of Florence, I would say how interesting it is to the returned visitor to London to go quickly to the National Gallery and see how we compare with them. Florence is naturally far richer than we, but although only now and then have we the advantage, we can valuably supplement in a great many cases. And the National Gallery keeps up its quality throughout--it does not suddenly fall to pieces as the Uffizi does. Thus, I doubt if Florence with all her Andreas has so exquisite a thing from his hand as our portrait of a "Young Sculptor," so long called a portrait of the painter himself; and we have two Michelangelo paintings to the Uffizi's one. In Leonardo the Louvre is of course far richer, even without the Gioconda, but we have at Burlington House the cartoon for the Louvre's S. Anne which may pair off with the Uffizi's unfinished Madonna, and we have also at the National Gallery his finished "Virgin of the Rocks," while to Burlington House one must go too for Michelangelo's beautiful tondo. In Piero di Cosimo we are more fortunate than the Uffizi; and we have Raphaels as important as those of the Pitti. We are strong too in Perugino, Filippino Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, while when it comes to Piero della Francesca we lead absolutely. Our Verrocchio, or School of Verrocchio, is a superb thing, while our Cimabue (from S. Croce) has a quality of richness not excelled by any that I have seen elsewhere. But in Botticelli Florence wins. The Pitti palace contains also the apartments in which the King and Queen of Italy reside when they visit Florence, which is not often. Florence became the capital of Italy in 1865, on the day of the sixth anniversary of the birth of Dante. It remained the capital until 1870, when Rome was chosen. The rooms are shown thrice a week, and are not, I think, worth the time that one must give to the perambulation. Beyond this there is nothing to say, except that they would delight children. Visitors are hurried through in small bands, and dallying is discouraged. Hence one is merely tantalized by the presence of their greatest treasure, Botticelli's "Pallas subduing the Centaur," painted to commemorate Lorenzo de' Medici's successful diplomatic mission to the King of Naples in 1480, to bring about the end of the war with Sixtus IV, the prime instigator of the Pazzi Conspiracy and the bitter enemy of Lorenzo in particular--whose only fault, as he drily expressed it, had been to "escape being murdered in the Cathedral"--and of all Tuscany in general. Botticelli, whom we have already seen as a Medicean allegorist, always ready with his glancing genius to extol and commend the virtues of that family, here makes the centaur typify war and oppression while the beautiful figure which is taming and subduing him by reason represents Pallas, or the arts of peace, here identifiable with Lorenzo by the laurel wreath and the pattern of her robe, which is composed of his private crest of diamond rings intertwined. This exquisite picture--so rich in colour and of such power and impressiveness--ought to be removed to an easel in the Pitti Gallery proper. The "Madonna della Rosa," by Botticelli or his School, is also here, and I had a moment before a very alluring Holbein. But my memory of this part of the palace is made up of gilt and tinsel and plush and candelabra, with two pieces of furniture outstanding--a blue and silver bed, and a dining table rather larger than a lawn-tennis court. The Boboli gardens, which climb the hill from the Pitti, are also opened only on three afternoons a week. The panorama of Florence and the surrounding Apennines which one has from the Belvedere makes a visit worth while; but the gardens themselves are, from the English point of view, poor, save in extent and in the groves on the way to the stables (scuderie). Like all gardens where clipped walks are the principal feature, they want people. They were made for people to enjoy them, rather than for flowers to grow in, and at every turn there is a new and charming vista in a green frame. It was from the Boboli hill-side before it was a garden that much of the stone of Florence was quarried. With such stones so near it is less to be wondered at that the buildings are what they are. And yet it is wonderful too--that these little inland Italian citizens should so have built their houses for all time. It proves them to have had great gifts of character. There is no such building any more. The Grotto close to the Pitti entrance, which contains some of Michelangelo's less remarkable "Prisoners," intended for the great Julian tomb, is so "grottesque" that the statues are almost lost, and altogether it is rather an Old Rye House affair; and though Giovanni da Bologna's fountain in the midst of a lake is very fine, I doubt if the walk is quite worth it. My advice rather is to climb at once to the top, at the back of the Pitti, by way of the amphitheatre where the gentlemen and ladies used to watch court pageants, and past that ingenious fountain above it, in which Neptune's trident itself spouts water, and rest in the pretty flower garden on the very summit of the hill, among the lizards. There, seated on the wall, you may watch the peasants at work in the vineyards, and the white oxen ploughing in the olive groves, in the valley between this hill and S. Miniato. In spring the contrast between the greens of the crops and the silver grey of the olives is vivid and gladsome; in September, one may see the grapes being picked and piled into the barrels, immediately below, and hear the squdge as the wooden pestle is driven into the purple mass and the juice gushes out. CHAPTER XXIV English Poets in Florence Casa Guidi--The Brownings--Giotto's missing spire--James Russell Lowell--Lander's early life--Fra Bartolommeo before Raphael--The Tuscan gardener--The "Villa Landor" to-day--Storms on the hillside--Pastoral poetry--Italian memories in England--The final outburst--Last days in Florence--The old lion's beguilements--The famous epitaph. On a house in the Piazza S. Felice, obliquely facing the Pitti, with windows both in the Via Maggio and Via Mazzetta, is a tablet, placed there by grateful Florence, stating that it was the home of Robert and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and that her verse made a golden ring to link England to Italy. In other words, this is Casa Guidi. A third member of the family, Flush the spaniel, was also with them, and they moved here in 1848, and it was here that Mrs. Browning died, in 1861. But it was not their first Florentine home, for in 1847 they had gone into rooms in the Via delle Belle Donne--the Street of Beautiful Ladies--whose name so fascinated Ruskin, near S. Maria Novella. At Casa Guidi Browning wrote, among other poems, "Christinas Eve and Easter Day," "The Statue and the Bust" of which I have said something in chapter XIX, and the "Old Pictures in Florence," that philosophic commentary on Vasari, which ends with the spirited appeal for the crowning of Giotto's Campanile with the addition of the golden spire that its builder intended-- Fine as the beak of a young beccaccia The campanile, the Duomo's fit ally, Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia, Completing Florence, as Florence Italy. But I suppose that the monologues "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi" would be considered the finest fruit of Browning's Florentine sojourn, as "Casa Guidi Windows" is of Mrs. Browning's. Her great poem is indeed as passionate a plea for Italian liberty as anything by an Italian poet. Here also she wrote much if not all of "Aurora Leigh," "The Poems before Congress," and those other Italian political pieces which when her husband collected them as "Last Poems" he dedicated "to 'grateful Florence'". In these Casa Guidi rooms the happiest days of both lives were spent, and many a time have the walls resounded to the great voice, laughing, praising or condemning, of Walter Savage Landor; while the shy Hawthorne has talked here too. Casa Guidi lodged not only the Brownings, but, at one time, Lowell, who was not, however, a very good Florentine. "As for pictures," I find him writing, in 1874, on a later visit, "I am tired to death of 'em,... and then most of them are so bad. I like best the earlier ones, that say so much in their half-unconscious prattle, and talk nature to me instead of high art." But "the older streets," he says, "have a noble mediaeval distance and reserve for me--a frown I was going to call it, not of hostility, but of haughty doubt. These grim palace fronts meet you with an aristocratic start that puts you to the proof of your credentials. There is to me something wholesome in that that makes you feel your place." The Brownings are the two English poets who first spring to mind in connexion with Florence; but they had had very illustrious predecessors. In August and September, 1638, during the reign of Ferdinand II, John Milton was here, and again in the spring of 1639. He read Latin poems to fellow-scholars in the city and received complimentary sonnets in reply. Here he met Galileo, and from here he made the excursion to Vallombrosa which gave him some of his most famous lines. He also learned enough of the language to write love poetry to a lady in Bologna, although he is said to have offended Italians generally by his strict morality. Skipping a hundred and eighty years we find Shelley in Florence, in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his "Ode to the West Wind" and that grimly comic work "Peter Bell the Third". But next the Brownings it is Walter Savage Landor of whom I always think as the greatest English Florentine. Florence became his second home when he was middle-aged and strong; and then again, when he was a very old man, shipwrecked by his impulsive and impossible temper, it became his last haven. It was Browning who found him his final resting-place--a floor of rooms not far from where we now stand, in the Via Nunziatina. Florence is so intimately associated with Landor, and Landor was so happy in Florence, that a brief outline of his life seems to be imperative. Born in 1775, the heir to considerable estates, the boy soon developed that whirlwind headstrong impatience which was to make him as notorious as his exquisite genius has made him famous. He was sent to Rugby, but disapproving of the headmaster's judgment of his Latin verses, he produced such a lampoon upon him, also in Latin, as made removal or expulsion a necessity. At Oxford his Latin and Greek verses were still his delight, but he took also to politics, was called a mad Jacobin, and, in order to prove his sanity and show his disapproval of a person obnoxious to him, fired a gun at his shutters and was sent down for a year. He never returned. After a period of strained relations with his father and hot repudiations of all the plans for his future which were made for him--such as entering the militia, reading law, and so forth--he retired to Wales on a small allowance and wrote "Gebir" which came out in 1798, when its author was twenty-three. In 1808 Landor threw in his lot with the Spaniards against the French, saw some fighting and opened his purse for the victims of the war; but the usual personal quarrel intervened. Returning to England he bought Llanthony Abbey, stocked it with Spanish sheep, planted extensively, and was to be the squire of squires; and at the same time seeing a pretty penniless girl at a ball in Bath, he made a bet he would marry her, and won it. As a squire he became quickly involved with neighbours (an inevitable proceeding with him) and also with a Bishop concerning the restoration of the church. Lawsuits followed, and such expenses and vexations occurred that Landor decided to leave England--always a popular resource with his kind. His mother took over the estate and allowed him an income upon which he travelled from place to place for a few years, quarrelling with his wife and making it up, writing Latin verses everywhere and on everything, and coming into collision not only with individuals but with municipalities. He settled in Florence in 1821, finding rooms in the Palazzo Medici, or, rather, Riccardi. There he remained for five years, which no doubt would have been a longer period had he not accused his landlord, the Marquis, who was then the head of the family, of seducing away his coachman. Landor wrote stating the charge; the Marquis, calling in reply, entered the room with his hat on, and Landor first knocked it off and then gave notice. It was at the Palazzo Medici that Landor was visited by Hazlitt in 1825, and here also he began the "Imaginary Conversations," his best-known work, although it is of course such brief and faultless lyrics as "Rose Aylmer" and "To Ianthe" that have given him his widest public. On leaving the Palazzo, Landor acquired the Villa Gherardesca, on the hill-side below Fiesole, and a very beautiful little estate in which the stream Affrico rises. Crabb Robinson, the friend of so many men of genius, who was in Florence in 1880, in rooms at 1341 Via della Nuova Vigna, met Landor frequently at his villa and has left his impressions. Landor had made up his mind to live and die in Italy, but hated the Italians. He would rather, he said, follow his daughter to the grave than to her wedding with an Italian husband. Talking on art, he said he preferred John of Bologna to Michelangelo, a statement he repeated to Emerson, but afterwards, I believe, recanted. He said also to Robinson that he would not give 1000 Pounds for Raphael's "Transfiguration," but ten times that sum for Fra Bartolommeo's picture of S. Mark in the Pitti. Next to Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo he loved Perugino. Landor soon became quite the husbandman. Writing to his sisters in 1831, he says: "I have planted 200 cypresses, 600 vines, 400 roses, 200 arbutuses, and 70 bays, besides laurustinas, etc., etc., and 60 fruit trees of the best qualities from France. I have not had a moment's illness since I resided here, nor have the children. My wife runs after colds; it would be strange if she did not take them; but she has taken none here; hers are all from Florence. I have the best water, the best air, and the best oil in the world. They speak highly of the wine too; but here I doubt. In fact, I hate wine, unless hock or claret.... "Italy is a fine climate, but Swansea better. That however is the only spot in Great Britain where we have warmth without wet. Still, Italy is the country I would live in.... In two [years] I hope to have a hundred good peaches every day at table during two months: at present I have had as many bad ones. My land is said to produce the best figs in Tuscany; I have usually six or seven bushels of them." I have walked through Lander's little paradise--now called the Villa Landor and reached by the narrow rugged road to the right just below the village of S. Domenico. Its cypresses, planted, as I imagine, by Lander's own hand, are stately as minarets and its lawn is as green and soft as that of an Oxford college. The orchard, in April, was a mass of blossom. Thrushes sang in the evergreens and the first swallow of the year darted through the cypresses just as we reached the gates. It is truly a poet's house and garden. In 1833 a French neighbour accused Landor of robbing him of water by stopping an underground stream, and Landor naturally challenged him to a duel. The meeting was avoided through the tact of Lander's second, the English consul at Florence, and the two men became friends. At his villa Landor wrote much of his best prose--the "Pentameron," "Pericles and Aspasia" and the "Trial of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing "--and he was in the main happy, having so much planting and harvesting to do, his children to play with, and now and then a visitor. In the main too he managed very well with the country people, but one day was amused to overhear a conversation over the hedge between two passing contadini. "All the English are mad," said one, "but as for this one...!" There was a story of Landor current in Florence in those days which depicted him, furious with a spoiled dish, throwing his cook out of the window, and then, realizing where he would fall, exclaiming in an agony, "Good God, I forgot the violets!" Such was Landor's impossible way on occasion that he succeeded in getting himself exiled from Tuscany; but the Grand Duke was called in as pacificator, and, though the order of expulsion was not rescinded, it was not carried out. In 1835 Landor wrote some verses to his friend Ablett, who had lent him the money to buy the villa, professing himself wholly happy-- Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me My citron groves of Fiesole, My chirping Affrico, my beechwood nook, My Naiads, with feet only in the brook, Which runs away and giggles in their faces; Yet there they sit, nor sigh for other places-- but later in the year came a serious break. Landor's relations with Mrs. Landor, never of such a nature as to give any sense of security, had grown steadily worse as he became more explosive, and they now reached such a point that he flung out of the house one day and did not return for many years, completing the action by a poem in which he took a final (as he thought) farewell of Italy:-- I leave thee, beauteous Italy! No more From the high terraces, at even-tide, To look supine into thy depths of sky, The golden moon between the cliff and me, Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses Bordering the channel of the milky way. Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams, Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico Murmur to me but the poet's song. Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife for the other children's maintenance, and himself returned to Bath, where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, right to the end. Landor's love of his villa and estate finds expression again and again in his verse written at this time. The most charming of all these charming poems--the perfection of the light verse of a serious poet--is the letter from England to his youngest boy, speculating on his Italian pursuits. I begin at the passage describing the villa's cat:-- Does Cincirillo follow thee about, Inverting one swart foot suspensively, And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp Of bird above him on the olive-branch? Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed, That feared not you and me--alas, nor him! I flattened his striped sides along my knee, And reasoned with him on his bloody mind, Till he looked blandly, and half-closed his eyes To ponder on my lecture in the shade. I doubt his memory much, his heart a little, And in some minor matters (may I say it?) Could wish him rather sager. But from thee God hold back wisdom yet for many years! Whether in early season or in late It always comes high-priced. For thy pure breast I have no lesson; it for me has many. Come throw it open then! What sports, what cares (Since there are none too young for these) engage Thy busy thoughts? Are you again at work, Walter and you, with those sly labourers, Geppo, Giovanni, Cecco, and Poeta, To build more solidly your broken dam Among the poplars, whence the nightingale Inquisitively watch'd you all day long? I was not of your council in the scheme, Or might have saved you silver without end, And sighs too without number. Art thou gone Below the mulberry, where that cold pool Urged to devise a warmer, and more fit For mighty swimmers, swimming three abreast? Or art though panting in this summer noon Upon the lowest step before the hall, Drawing a slice of watermelon, long As Cupid's bow, athwart thy wetted lips (Like one who plays Pan's pipe), and letting drop The sable seeds from all their separate cells, And leaving bays profound and rocks abrupt, Redder than coral round Calypso's cave? In 1853 Landor put forth what he thought his last book, under the title "Last Fruit off an Old Tree". Unhappily it was not his last, for in 1858 he issued yet one more, "Dry Sticks faggotted by W. S. Landor," in which was a malicious copy of verses reflecting upon a lady. He was sued for libel, lost the case with heavy damages, and once more and for the last time left England for Florence. He was now eighty-three. At first he went to the Villa Gherardesco, then the home of his son Arnold, but his outbursts were unbearable, and three times he broke away, to be three times brought back. In July, 1859, he made a fourth escape, and then escaped altogether, for Browning took the matter in hand and established him, after a period in Siena, in lodgings in the Via Nunziatina. From this time till his death in 1864 Landor may be said at last to have been at rest. He had found safe anchorage and never left it. Many friends came to see him, chief among them Browning, who was at once his adviser, his admirer and his shrewd observer. Landor, always devoted to pictures, but without much judgment, now added to his collection; Browning in one of his letters to Forster tells how he has found him "particularly delighted by the acquisition of three execrable daubs by Domenichino and Gaspar Poussin most benevolently battered by time". Another friend says that he had a habit of attributing all his doubtful pictures to Corregoio. "He cannot," Browning continues, "in the least understand that he is at all wrong, or injudicious, or unfortunate in anything.... Whatever he may profess, the thing he really loves is a pretty girl to talk nonsense with." Of the old man in the company of fair listeners we have glimpses in the reminiscences of Mrs. Fields in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1866. She also describes him as in a cloud of pictures. There with his Pomeranian Giallo within fondling distance, the poet, seated in his arm-chair, fired comments upon everything. Giallo's opinion was asked on all subjects, and Landor said of him that an approving wag of his tail was worth all the praise of all the "Quarterlies ". It was Giallo who led to the profound couplet-- He is foolish who supposes Dogs are ill that have hot noses. Mrs. Fields tells how, after some classical or fashionable music had been played, Landor would come closer to the piano and ask for an old English ballad, and when "Auld Robin Gray," his favourite of all, was sung, the tears would stream down his face. "Ah, you don't know what thoughts you are recalling to the troublesome old man." But we have Browning's word that he did not spend much time in remorse or regret, while there was the composition of the pretty little tender epigrams of this last period to amuse him and Italian politics to enchain his sympathy. His impulsive generosity led him to give his old and trusted watch to the funds for Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition; but Browning persuaded him to take it again. For Garibaldi's wounded prisoners he wrote an Italian dialogue between Savonarola and the Prior of S. Marco. The death of Mrs. Browning in 1861 sent Browning back to England, and Landor after that was less cheerful and rarely left the house. His chief solace was the novels of Anthony Trollope and G.P.R. James. In his last year he received a visit from a young English poet and enthusiast for poetry, one Algernon Charles Swinburne, who arrived in time to have a little glowing talk with the old lion and thus obtain inspiration for some fine memorial stanzas. On September 17th, 1864, Death found Landor ready--as nine years earlier he had promised it should-- To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready. Landor was buried, as we saw, in the English cemetery within the city, whither his son Arnold was borne less than seven years later. Here is his own epitaph, one of the most perfect things in form and substance in the English language:-- I strove with none, for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart. It should be cut on his tombstone. CHAPTER XXV The Carmine and San Miniato The human form divine and waxen--Galileo--Bianca Capella--A faithful Grand Duke--S. Spirito--The Carmine--Masaccio's place in art--Leonardo's summary--The S. Peter frescoes--The Pitti side--Romola--A little country walk--The ancient wall--The Piazzale Michelangelo--An evening prospect--S. Miniato--Antonio Rossellino's masterpiece--The story of S. Gualberto--A city of the dead--The reluctant departure. The Via Maggio is now our way, but first there is a museum which I think should be visited, if only because it gave Dickens so much pleasure when he was here--the Museo di Storia Naturale, which is open three days a week only and is always free. Many visitors to Florence never even hear of it and one quickly finds that its chief frequenters are the poor. All the better for that. Here not only is the whole animal kingdom spread out before the eye in crowded cases, but the most wonderful collection of wax reproductions of the human form is to be seen. These anatomical models are so numerous and so exact that, since the human body does not change with the times, a medical student could learn everything from them in the most gentlemanly way possible. But they need a strong stomach. Mine, I confess, quailed before the end. The hero of the Museum is Galileo, whose tomb at S. Croce we have seen: here are preserved certain of his instruments in a modern, floridly decorated Tribuna named after him. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) belongs rather to Pisa, where he was born and where he found the Leaning Tower useful for experiments, and to Rome, where in 1611 he demonstrated his discovery of the telescope; but Florence is proud of him and it was here that he died, under circumstances tragic for an astronomer, for he had become totally blind. The frescoes in the Tribuna celebrate other Italian scientific triumphs, and in the cases are historic telescopes, astrolabes, binoculars, and other mysteries. The Via Maggio, which runs from Casa Guidi to the Ponte Trinita, and at noon is always full of school-girls, brings us by way of the Via Michelozzo to S. Spirito, but by continuing in it we pass a house of great interest, now No. 26, where once lived the famous Bianca Capella, that beautiful and magnetic Venetian whom some hold to have been so vile and others so much the victim of fate. Bianca Capella was born in 1543, when Francis I, Cosimo I's eldest son, afterwards to play such a part in her life, was two years of age. While he was being brought up in Florence, Bianca was gaining loveliness in her father's palace. When she was seventeen she fell in love with a young Florentine engaged in a bank in Venice, and they were secretly married. Her family were outraged by the mésalliance and the young couple had to flee to Florence, where they lived in poverty and hiding, a prize of 2000 ducats being offered by the Capella family to anyone who would kill the husband; while, by way of showing how much in earnest they were, they had his uncle thrown into prison, where he died. One day the unhappy Bianca was sitting at her window when the young prince Francis was passing: he looked up, saw her, and was enslaved on the spot. (The portraits of Bianca do not, I must admit, lay emphasis on this story. Titian's I have not seen; but there is one by Bronzino in our National Gallery--No. 650--and many in Florence.) There was, however, something in Bianca's face to which Francis fell a victim, and he brought about a speedy meeting. At first Bianca repulsed him; but when she found that her husband was unworthy of her, she returned the Prince's affection. (I am telling her story from the pro-Bianca point of view: there are plenty of narrators on the other side.) Meanwhile, Francis's official life going on, he married that archduchess Joanna of Austria for whom the Austrian frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio were painted; but his heart remained Bianca's and he was more at her house than in his own. At last, Bianca's husband being killed in some fray, she was free from the persecution of her family and ready to occupy the palace which Francis hastened to build for her, here, in the Via Maggio, now cut up into tenements at a few lire a week. The attachment continued unabated when Francis came to the throne, and upon the death of his archduchess in 1578 Bianca and he were almost immediately, but privately, married, she being then thirty-five; and in the next year they were publicly married in the church of S. Lorenzo with every circumstance of pomp; while later in the same year Bianca was crowned. Francis remained her lover till his death, which was both dramatic and suspicious, husband and wife dying within a few hours of each other at the Medici villa of Poggia a Caiano in 1587. Historians have not hesitated to suggest that Francis was poisoned by his wife; but there is no proof. It is indeed quite possible that her life was more free of intrigue, ambition and falsehood, than that of any one about the court at that time; but the Florentines, encouraged by Francis's brother Ferdinand I, who succeeded him, made up their minds that she was a witch, and few things in the way of disaster happened that were not laid to her charge. Call a woman a witch and everything is possible. Ferdinand not only detested Bianca in life and deplored her fascination for his brother, but when she died he refused to allow her to be buried with the others of the family; hence the Chapel of the Princes at S. Lorenzo lacks one archduchess. Her grave is unknown. The whole truth we shall never know; but it is as easy to think of Bianca as a harmless woman who both lost and gained through love as to picture her as sinister and scheming. At any rate we know that Francis was devoted to her with a fidelity and persistence for which Grand Dukes have not always been conspicuous. S. Spirito is one of Brunelleschi's solidest works. Within it resembles the city of Bologna in its vistas of brown and white arches. The effect is severe and splendid; but the church is to be taken rather as architecture than a treasury of art, for although each of its eight and thirty chapels has an altar picture and several have fine pieces of sculpture--one a copy of Michelangelo's famous Pieta in Rome--there is nothing of the highest value. It was in this church that I was asked alms by one of the best-dressed men in Florence; but the Florentine beggars are not importunate: they ask, receive or are denied, and that is the end of it. The other great church in the Pitti quarter is the Carmine, and here we are on very sacred ground in art--for it was here, as I have had occasion to say more than once in this book, that Masaccio painted those early frescoes which by their innovating boldness turned the Brancacci chapel into an Academy. For all the artists came to study and copy them: among others Michelangelo, whose nose was broken by the turbulent Torrigiano, a fellow-student, under this very roof. Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, or Masaccio, the son of a notary, was born in 1402. His master is not known, but Tommaso Fini or Masolino, born in 1383, is often named. Vasari states that as a youth Masaccio helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors; and if so, the fact is significant. But all that is really known of his early life is that he went to Rome to paint a chapel in S. Clemente. He returned, apparently on hearing that his patron Giovanni de' Medici was in power again. Another friend, Brunelleschi, having built the church of S. Spirito in 1422, Masaccio began to work there in 1423, when he was only twenty-one. Masaccio's peculiar value in the history of painting is his early combined power of applying the laws of perspective and representing human beings "in the round". Giotto was the first and greatest innovator in painting--the father of real painting; Masaccio was the second. If from Giotto's influence a stream of vigour had flowed such as flowed from Masaccio's, there would have been nothing special to note about Masaccio at all. But the impulse which Giotto gave to art died down; some one had to reinvigorate it, and that some one was Masaccio. In his remarks on painting, Leonardo da Vinci sums up the achievements of the two. They stood out, he says, from the others of their time, by reason of their wish to go to life rather than to pictures. Giotto went to life, his followers went to pictures; and the result was a decline in art until Masaccio, who again went to life. From the Carmine frescoes came the new painting. It is not that walls henceforth were covered more beautifully or suitably than they had been by Giotto's followers; probably less suitably very often; but that religious symbolism without much relation to actual life gave way to scenes which might credibly have occurred, where men, women and saints walked and talked much as we do, in similar surroundings, with backgrounds of cities that could be lived in and windows that could open. It was this revolution that Masaccio performed. No doubt if he had not, another would, for it had to come: the new demand was that religion should be reconciled with life. It is generally supposed that Masaccio had Masolino as his ally in this wonderful series; and a vast amount of ink has been spilt over Masolino's contributions. Indeed the literature of expert art criticism on Florentine pictures alone is of alarming bulk and astonishing in its affirmations and denials. The untutored visitor in the presence of so much scientific variance will be wise to enact the part of the lawyer in the old caricature of the litigants and the cow, who, while they pull, one at the head and the other at the tail, fills his bucket with milk. In other words, the plain duty of the ordinary person is to enjoy the picture. Without any special knowledge of art one can, by remembering the early date of these frescoes, realize what excitement they must have caused in the studios and how tongues must have clacked in the Old Market. We have but to send our thoughts to the Spanish chapel at S. Maria Novella to realize the technical advance. Masaccio, we see, was peopling a visible world; the Spanish chapel painters were merely allegorizing, as agents of holiness. The Ghirlandaio choir in the same church would yield a similar comparison; but what we have to remember is that Ghirlandaio painted these frescoes in 1490, sixty-two years after Masaccio's death, and Masaccio showed him how. It is a pity that the light is so poor and that the frescoes have not worn better; but their force and dramatic vigour remain beyond doubt. The upper scene on the left of the altar is very powerful: the Roman tax collector has asked Christ for a tribute and Christ bids Peter find the money in the mouth of a fish. Figures, architecture, landscape, all are in right relation; and the drama is moving, without restlessness. This and the S. Peter preaching and distributing alms are perhaps the best, but the most popular undoubtedly is that below it, finished many years after by Filippino Lippi (although there are experts to question this and even substitute his amorous father), in which S. Peter, challenged by Simon Magus, resuscitates a dead boy, just as S. Zenobius used to do in the streets of this city. Certain more modern touches, such as the exquisite Filippino would naturally have thought of, may be seen here: the little girl behind the boy, for instance, who recalls the children in that fresco by the same hand at S. Maria Novella in which S. John resuscitates Drusiana. In this Carmine fresco are many portraits of Filippino's contemporaries, including Botticelli, just as in the scene of the consecration of the Carmine which Masaccio painted in the cloisters, but which has almost perished, he introduced Brancacci, his employer, Brunelleschi, Donatello, some of whose innovating work in stone he was doing in paint, Giovanni de' Medici and Masolino. The scanty remains of this fresco tell us that it must have been fine indeed. Masaccio died at the early age of twenty-six, having suddenly disappeared from Florence, leaving certain work unfinished. A strange portentous meteor in art. The Pitti side of the river is less interesting than the other, but it has some very fascinating old and narrow streets, although they are less comfortable for foreigners to wander in than those, for example, about the Borgo SS. Apostoli. They are far dirtier. From the Pitti end of the Ponte Vecchio one can obtain a most charming walk. Turn to the left as you leave the bridge, under the arch made by Cosimo's passage, and you are in the Via de' Bardi, the backs of whose houses on the river-side are so beautiful from the Uffizi's central arches, as Mr. Morley's picture shows. At the end of the street is an archway under a large house. Go through this, and you are at the foot of a steep, stone hill. It is really steep, but never mind. Take it easily, and rest half-way where the houses on the left break and give a wonderful view of the city. Still climbing, you come to the best gate of all that is left--a true gate in being an inlet into a fortified city--that of S. Giorgio, high on the Boboli hill by the fort. The S. Giorgio gate has a S. George killing a dragon, in stone, on its outside, and the saint painted within, Donatello's conception of him being followed by the artist. Parsing through, you are in the country. The fort and gardens are on one side and villas on the other; and a great hill-side is in front, covered with crops. Do not go on, but turn sharp to the left and follow the splendid city wall, behind which for a long way is the garden of the Villa Karolath, one of the choicest spots in Florence, occasionally tossing its branches over the top. This wall is immense all the way down to the Porta S. Miniato, and two of the old towers are still standing in their places upon it. Botticini's National Gallery picture tells exactly how they looked in their heyday. Ivy hangs over, grass and flowers spring from the ancient stones, and lizards run about. Underneath are olive-trees. It was, by the way, in the Via de' Bardi that George Eliot's Romola lived, for she was of the Bardi family. The story, it may be remembered, begins on the morning of Lorenzo the Magnificent's death, and ends after the execution of Savonarola. It is not an inspired romance, and is remarkable almost equally for its psychological omissions and the convenience of its coincidences, but it is an excellent preparation for a first visit in youth to S. Marco and the Palazzo Vecchio, while the presence in its somewhat naive pages of certain Florentine characters makes it agreeable to those who know something of the city and its history. The painter Piero di Cosimo, for example, is here, straight from Vasari; so also are Cronaca, the architect, Savonarola, Capparo, the ironsmith, and even Machiavelli; while Bernardo del Nero, the gonfalonier, whose death sentence Savonarola refused to revise, was Romola's godfather. The Via Guicciardini, which runs from the foot of the Via de' Bardi to the Pitti, is one of the narrowest and busiest Florentine streets, with an undue proportion of fruit shops overflowing to the pavement to give it gay colouring. At No. 24 is a stable with pillars and arches that would hold up a pyramid. But this is no better than most of the old stables of Florence, which are all solid vaulted caverns of immense size and strength. From the Porta Romana one may do many things--take the tram, for example, for the Certosa of the Val d'Ema, which is only some twenty minutes distant, or make a longer journey to Impruneta, where the della Robbias are. But just now let us walk or ride up the long winding Viale Macchiavelli, which curves among the villas behind the Boboli Gardens, to the Piazzale Michelangelo and S. Miniato. The Piazzale Michelangelo is one of the few modern tributes of Florence to her illustrious makers. The Dante memorial opposite S. Croce is another, together with the preservation of certain buildings with Dante associations in the heart of the city; but, as I have said more than once, there is no piazza in Florence, and only one new street, named after a Medici. From the Piazzale Michelangelo you not only have a fine panoramic view of the city of this great man--in its principal features not so vastly different from the Florence of his day, although of course larger and with certain modern additions, such as factory chimneys, railway lines, and so forth--but you can see the remains of the fortifications which he constructed in 1529, and which kept the Imperial troops at bay for nearly a year. Just across the river rises S. Croce, where the great man is buried, and beyond, over the red roofs, the dome of the Medici chapel at S. Lorenzo shows us the position of the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the New Sacristy, both built by him. Immediately below us is the church of S. Niccolo, where he is said to have hidden in 1529, when there was a hue and cry for him. In the middle of this spacious plateau is a bronze reproduction of his David, and it is good to see it, from the cafe behind it, rising head and shoulders above the highest Apennines. S. Miniato, the church on the hill-top above the Piazzale Michelangelo, deserves many visits. One may not be too greatly attached to marble façades, but this little temple defeats all prejudices by its radiance and perfection, and to its extraordinary charm its situation adds. It crowns the hill, and in the late afternoon--the ideal time to visit it--is full in the eye of the sun, bathed in whose light the green and white façade, with miracles of delicate intarsia, is balm to the eyes instead of being, as marble so often is, dazzling and cold. On the way up we pass the fine church of S. Salvatore, which Cronaca of the Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Strozzi built and Michelangelo admired, and which is now secularized, and pass through the gateway of Michelangelo's upper fortifications. S. Miniato is one of the oldest churches of Florence, some of it eleventh century. It has its name from Minias, a Roman soldier who suffered martyrdom at Florence under Decius. Within, one does not feel quite to be in a Christian church, the effect partly of the unusual colouring, all grey, green, and gold and soft light tints as of birds' bosoms; partly of the ceiling, which has the bright hues of a Russian toy; partly of the forest of great gay columns; partly of the lovely and so richly decorated marble screen; and partly of the absence of a transept. The prevailing feeling indeed is gentle gaiety; and in the crypt this is intensified, for it is just a joyful assemblage of dancing arches. The church as a whole is beautiful and memorable enough; but its details are wonderful too, from the niello pavement, and the translucent marble windows of the apse, to the famous tomb of Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal, and the Luca della Robbia reliefs of the Virtues. This tomb is by Antonio Rossellino. It is not quite of the rank of Mino's in the Badia; but it is a noble and beautiful thing marked in every inch of it by modest and exquisite thought. Vasari says of Antonio that he "practised his art with such grace that he was valued as something more than a man by those who knew him, who well-nigh adored him as a saint". Facing it is a delightful Annunciation by Alessio Baldovinetti, in which the angel declares the news from a far greater distance than we are accustomed to; and the ceiling is made an abode of gladness by the blue and white figures (designed by Luca della Robbia) of Prudence and Chastity, Moderation and Fortitude, for all of which qualities, it seems, the Cardinal was famous. In short, one cannot be too glad that, since he had to die, death's dart struck down this Portuguese prelate while he was in Rossellino's and Luca's city. No longer is preserved here the miraculous crucifix which, standing in a little chapel in the wood on this spot, bestowed blessing and pardon--by bending towards him--upon S. Giovanni Gualberto, the founder of the Vallombrosan order. The crucifix is now in S. Trinita. The saint was born in 985 of noble stock and assumed naturally the splendour and arrogance of his kind. His brother Hugo being murdered in some affray, Giovanni took upon himself the duty of avenging the crime. One Good Friday he chanced to meet, near this place, the assassin, in so narrow a passage as to preclude any chance of escape; and he was about to kill him when the man fell on his knees and implored mercy by the passion of Christ Who suffered on that very day, adding that Christ had prayed on the cross for His own murderers. Giovanni was so much impressed that he not only forgave the man but offered him his friendship. Entering then the chapel to pray and ask forgiveness of all his sins, he was amazed to see the crucifix bend down as though acquiescing and blessing, and this special mark of favour so wrought upon him that he became a monk, himself shaving his head for that purpose and defying his father's rage, and subsequently founded the Vallombrosan order. He died in 1073. I have said something of the S. Croce habit and the S. Maria Novella habit; but I think that when all is said the S. Miniato habit is the most important to acquire. There is nothing else like it; and the sense of height is so invigorating too. At all times of the year it is beautiful; but perhaps best in early spring, when the highest mountains still have snow upon them and the neighbouring slopes are covered with tender green and white fruit blossom, and here the violet wistaria blooms and there the sombre crimson of the Judas-tree. Behind and beside the church is a crowded city of the Florentine dead, reproducing to some extent the city of the Florentine living, in its closely packed habitations--the detached palaces for the rich and the great congeries of cells for the poor--more of which are being built all the time. There is a certain melancholy interest in wandering through these silent streets, peering through the windows and recognizing over the vaults names famous in Florence. One learns quickly how bad modern mortuary architecture and sculpture can be, but I noticed one monument with some sincerity and unaffected grace: that to a charitable Marchesa, a friend of the poor, at the foot of whose pedestal are a girl and baby done simply and well. Better perhaps to remain on the highest point and look at the city beneath. One should try to be there before sunset and watch the Apennines turning to a deeper and deeper indigo and the city growing dimmer and dimmer in the dusk. Florence is beautiful from every point of vantage, but from none more beautiful than from this eminence. As one reluctantly leaves the church and passes again through Michelangelo's fortification gateway to descend, one has, framed in its portal, a final lovely Apennine scene. Historical Chart of Florence and Europe, 1296-1564 Artists' Dates. 1300 (c.) Taddeo Gaddi born (d. 1366) 1302 (c.) Cimabue died (b. c. 1240) 1308 (c.) Andrea Orcagna born (d. 1368) 1310 Arnolfo di Cambio died (b. 1232 ?) 1333 Spinello Aretino born (d. 1410) 1336 Giotto died (b. 1276 ?) 1344 Simone Martini died (b. 1283) 1348 Andrea Pisano died (b. 1270) 1356 Lippo Memmi died 1366 Taddeo Gaddi died (b. c. 1300) 1368 Andrea Orcagna died 1370 (c.) Lorenzo Monaco born (d. 1425) Gentile da Fabriano born (d. 1450) 1371 Jacopo della Quercia born (d. 1438) 1377 Filippo Brunelleschi born (d. 1446) 1378 Lorenzo Ghiberti born (d. 1455) 1386 (?) Donatello born (d. 1466) 1387 Fra Angelico born (d. 1455) 1391 Michelozzo born (d. 1472) 1396 (?) Andrea del Castagno born (d. 1457) 1397 Paolo Uccello born (d. 1475) 1399 or 1400 Luca della Robbia born (d. 1482) 1401 or 1402 Masaccio born (d. 1428?) 1405 Leon Battista Alberti born (d. 1472) 1406 Lippo Lippi born (d. 1469) 1409 Bernardo Rossellino born (d. 1464) 1410 Spinello Aretino died 1415 Piero della Francesca born (d. 1492) 1420 Benozzo Gozzoli born (d. 1498) 1425 Il Monaco died Alessio Baldovinetti born (d. 1499) 1427 Antonio Rossellino born (d. 1478) 1428 (?) Masaccio died 1428 Desiderio da Settignano born (d. 1464) 1429 (?) Giovanni Bellini born (d. 1516) Antonio Pollaiuolo born (d. 1498) 1430 Cosimo Tura died 1431 Andrea Mantegna born (d. 1506) 1432 (?) Mina da Fiesole born (d. 1484) 1435 Andrea Verrocchio born (d. 1488) Andrea della Robbia born (d. 1525) 1438 Melozzo da Forli born (d. 1494) 1439 Cosimo Rosselli born (d. 1507) 1441 Luca Signorelli born (d. 1523) 1442 Benedetto da Maiano born (d. 1497) 1444 Sandro Botticelli born (d. 1510) 1446 Brunelleschi died Perugino born (d. 1523 or 24) Francesco Botticini born (d. 1498) 1449 Domenico Ghirlandaio born (d. 1494) 1450 Gentile da Fabriano died 1452 Leonardi da Vinci born (d. 1519) 1455 Ghiberti died Fra Angelico died 1456 Lorenzo di Credi born (d. 1537) 1457 Cronaca born (d. 1508 or 9) Filippino Lippi born (d. 1504) Andrea del Castagno died 1462 Piero di Cosimo born (d. 1521) 1463 or 4 Desiderio da Settignano died 1464 Bernardo Rossellino died 1466 Donatello died 1469 Giovanni della Robbia born (d. 1529) Lippo Lippi died 1472 Michelozzo died Alberti died 1474 Benedetto da Rovezzano born (d. 1556) Rustici born (d. 1554) Mariotto Albertinelli born (d. 1515) 1475 Fra Bartolommeo born (d. 1517) Michelangelo Buonarroti born (d. 1564) 1477 Titian born (d. 1576) Giorgione born (d. 1510) 1478 Antonio Rossellino died 1482 Francia Bigio born (d. 1523) Guicciardini born (d. 1540) 1483 Raphael born (d. 1520) Ridolfo Ghirlandaio born (d. 1561) 1484 Mino da Fiesole died 1485 Sebastiano del Piombo born (d. 1547) 1486 Jacopo Sansovino born (d. 1570) 1486 or 7 Andrea del Sarto born (d. 1531) 1488 Verrocchio died Baccio Bandinelli born (d. 1560) 1492 Piero della Francesco died 1494 Jacopo da Pontormo born (d. 1556) Correggio born (d. 1534) Domenico Ghirlandaio died Melozzo da Forli died 1497 Benedetto da Maiano died Benozzo Gozzoli died 1498 Antonio Pollaiuolo died Francesco Botticini died 1499 Alessio Baldovinetti died 1500 Benvenuto Cellini born (d. 1572) 1502 Angelo Bronzino born (d. 1572) 1504 Filippino Lippi died 1506 Mantegna died 1507 Cosimo Rosselli died 1508 Cronaca died 1510 Botticelli died Giorgione died 1511 Vasari born (d. 1574) 1515 Albertinelli died 1516 Giovanni Bellini died 1517 Fra Bartolommeo died 1518 Tintoretto born (d. 1594) 1519 Leonardo da Vinci died 1520 Raphael died 1521 Piero di Cosimo died 1523 Signorelli died Perugino died 1524 Giovanni da Bologna born (d. 1608) 1525 Andrea della Robbia died Francia Bigio died 1528 Paolo Veronese born (d. 1588) Federigo Baroccio born (d. 1612) 1529 Giovanni della Robbia died 1531 Andrea del Sarto died 1534 Correggio died 1537 Credi died 1547 Sebastiano del Piombo died 1554 Rustici died 1556 Pontormo died Benedetto da Rovezzano died 1560 Baccio Bandinelli died 1561 Ridolfo Ghirlandaio died 1564 Michael Angelo died Some Important Florentine Dates 1296 Foundations of the Duomo consecrated 1298 Palazzo Vecchio commenced by Arnolfo di Cambio 1300 Beginning of the feuds of the Bianchi and Xeri Guido Cavalcanti died 1302 Dante exiled, Jan. 27 1304 Petrarch born (d. 1374) 1308 Death of Corso Donati 1312 Siege of Florence by Henry VII 1313 Boccaccio born (d. 1375) 1321 Dante died Sept. 14 (b. 1265) 1333 Destructive floods 1334 Foundations of the Campanile laid 1337 Or San Michele begun 1339 Andrea Pisano's gates finished 1348 Black Death of the Decameron Giovanni Villani died (b. 1275 c.) 1360 Giovanni de' Medici (di Bicci) born 1365 (c) Ponte Vecchio rebuilt by Taddeo Gaddi 1374 Petrarch died 1375 Boccaccio died 1376 Loggia de' Lanzi commenced 1378 Salvestro de' Medici elected Gonfaloniere 1389 Cosimo de' Medici (Pater Patrise) born 1390 War with Milan 1394 Sir John Hawkwood died 1399 Competition for Baptistery Gates 1416 Piero de' Medici (il Gottoso) born 1421 Purchase of Leghorn by Florence Giovanni de' Medici elected Gonfaloniere Spedale degli Innocenti commenced 1424 Ghiberti's first gate set up 1429 Giovanni de' Medici died 1432 Niccolo da Uzzano died 1433 Marsilio Ficino born Cosimo de' Medici banished, Oct. 3 1434 Cosimo returned to power, Sept. 29 Banishment of Albizzi and Strozzi 1435 Francesco Sforza visited Florence 1436 Brunelleschi's dome completed The Duomo consecrated 1439 Council of Florence Gemisthos Plethon in Florence 1440 Cosimo occupied the Medici Palace 1449 Lorenzo de' Medici (the Magnificent born) 1452 Ghiberti's second gates set up Savonarola born 1454 Politian born 1463 Pico della Mirandola born 1464 Cosimo de' Medici died and was succeeded by Piero 1466 Luca Pitti's Conspiracy 1469 Lorenzo's Tournament, Feb. Lorenzo's Marriage to Clarice Orsini, June Death of Piero, Dec. Niccolò Machiavelli born 1471 Piero de' Medici, son of Lorenzo, born Visit of Galeazzo Sforza to Florence Cennini's Press established in Florence 1474 Ariosto born 1475 Giuliano's Tournament 1478 Pazzi Conspiracy Giuliano murdered 1479 Lorenzo's Mission to Naples 1492 Lorenzo the Magnificent died Piero succeeded 1494 Charles VIII invaded Italy Piero banished Charles VIII in Florence. Sack of Medici Palace Florence governed by General Council Savonarola in power Politian died Pico della Mirandola died 1497 Francesco Valori elected Gonfaloniere Piero attempted to return to Florence 1498 Savonarola burnt 1499 Marsilio Ficino died Amerigo Vespucci reached America 1503 Death of Piero di Medici 1512 Cardinal Giovanni and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, reinstated in Florence Great Council abolished 1519 Cardinal Giulio de' Medici in power Catherine de' Medici born 1524 Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici in power 1526 Death of Giovanni delle Bande Nere 1527 Ippolito and Alessandro left Florence 1528 Machiavelli died 1529-30 Siege of Florence 1530 Capitulation of Florence 1531 Alessandro de' Medici declared Head of Republic 1537 Cosimo de' Medici made Ruler of Florence Battle of Montemurlo Lorenzino assassinated in Venice 1539 Cosimo married Eleanor di Toledo and moved to Palazzo Vecchio 1553 Cosimo occupied the Pitti Palace 1564 Galileo Galilei born Popes. Boniface VIII 1303 Benedict XI 1305 Clement V 1316 John XXII 1334 Benedict XII 1337 Boniface VIII 1342 Clement VI 1352 Innocent VI 1362 Urban V 1370 Gregory XI 1378 Urban VI 1389 Boniface IX 1404 Innocent VII 1406 Gregory XII 1409 Alex. V 1410 John XXIII 1417 Martin V 1431 Eugenius IV 1447 Nicolas V 1455 Calixtus III 1458 Pius II 1464 Paul II 1471 Sixtus IV 1484 Innocent VIII 1492 Alex. VI 1503 Pius III Julius II 1513 Leo X 1522 Hadrian VI 1523 Clement VII 1534 Paul III 1550 Julius III 1555 Marcellus II Paul IV 1559 Pius IV French Kings. Philip IV 1314 Louis X 1316 John I Philip V 1322 Charles IV 1328 Philip VI Philip 1350 John II 1364 Charles V 1380 Charles VI 1422 Charles VII 1461 Louis XI 1483 Charles VIII 1498 Louis XII 1515 Francis I 1547 Henry II 1559 Francis II 1560 Charles IX English Kings. Edward I 1307 Edward II 1327 Edward III 1377 Richard II 1422 Charles VII 1461 Edward IV 1483 Edward V Richard III 1485 Henry VII 1509 Henry VIII 1547 Edward VI 1553 Mary 1558 Elizabeth Milan. 1310 Matteo Visconti 1322 Galeazzo Visconti 1328 1329 Azzo Visconti 1339 Luchino and Giovanni Visconti 1349 Giovanni Visconti 1354 Matteó Bernabò Galeazzo 1378 Gian Galeazzo Visconti 1402 Gian Maria Visconti 1412 Filippo Maria Visconti 1447...1450 Francesco Sforza 1466 Galeazzo Sforza 1476 Gian Galeazzo Sforza (Ludovico Sforza Regent) 1495 Ludovico Sforza 1499 Ludovico exiled Some Important General Dates 1298 Battle of Falkirk 1306 Coronation of Bruce 1314 Battle of Bannockburn 1324 (?) John Wyclif born 1337 Froissart born (d. 1410?) 1339 Beginning of the Hundred Years' War 1346 Battle of Crécy 1347 Rienzi made Tribune of Rome Edward III took Calais 1348-9 Black Death in England 1348 S. Catherine of Siena born 1356 Battle of Poictiers 1362 First draft of Piers Plowman 1379 Thomas à Kempis born 1381 Wat Tyler's Rebellion 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer died 1414 Council of Constance 1428 Siege of Orléans 1431 Joan of Arc burnt 1435 (c.) Hans Meinling born 1450 John Gutenburg printed at Mainz Jack Cade's Insurrection 1453 Fall of Constantinople 1455 Beginning of the Wars of the Roses 1467 Erasmus born (d. 1528) 1470 (c.) Mabuse born (d. 1555) 1471 Albert Dürer born (d. 1528) Caxton's Press established in Westminster 1476 Chevalier Bayard born 1482 Hugo van der Goes died 1483 Rabelais born (d. 1553) Martin Luther born Murder of the Princes in the Tower 1491 Ignatius Loyola born 1492 America discovered by Christopher Columbus 1494 Lucas van Leyden born (d. 1533) 1505 John Knox born (d. 1582) 1509 Calvin born 1516 More's Utopia published 1519 First Voyage round the world (Ferd. Magellan) 1519-21 Conquest of Mexico 1520 Field of the Cloth of Gold 1527 Brantôme born (d. 1614) 1528 Albert Dürer died 1531-2 Conquest of Peru 1533 Montaigne born (d. 1592) 1535 Henry VIII became Supreme Head of the Church 1537 Sack of Rome 1544 Torquato Tasso born 1553 Edmund Spenser born 1554 Execution of Lady Jane Grey Sir Philip Sidney born 1555-6 Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer burnt 1558 Calais recaptured by the French 1564 Shakespeare born NOTES [1] One of Brunelleschi's devices to bring before the authorities an idea of the dome he projected, was of standing an egg on end, as Columbus is famed for doing, fully twenty years before Columbus was born. [2] It was Charles V who said of Giotto's Campanile that it ought to be kept in a glass case. [3] Hence its new name: Loggia de' Lanzi. [4] In the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington are casts of the two Medici on the tombs and also the Madonna and Child. They are in the great gallery of the casts, together with the great David, two of the Julian tomb prisoners, the Bargello tondo and the Brutus. [5] Cacus, the son of Vulcan and Medusa, was a famous robber who breathed fire and smoke and laid waste Italy. He made the mistake, however, of robbing Hercules of some cows, and for this Hercules strangled him. [6] "Thick as leaves in Vallombrosa" has come to be the form of words as most people quote them. But Milton wrote ("Paradise Lost," Book I. 300-304):-- "He called His legions, angel-forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa where the Etrurian shades, High over-arched, embower." Wordsworth, by the way, when he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of Milton's association with it. [7] 27 April, 1859, the day that the war with Austria was proclaimed. [8] In "A Dictionary of Saintly Women". [9] The position of easel pictures in the Florentine galleries often changes. 
16445	----	Produced from images generously made available by gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) at http://gallica.bnf.fr. OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS MADE IN THE COURSE OF A JOURNEY THROUGH _FRANCE, ITALY, AND GERMANY_. By HESTER LYNCH PIOZZI. IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. I. LONDON: Printed for A. STRAHAN; and T. CADELL in the Strand, MDCCLXXXIX. PREFACE. I was made to observe at Rome some vestiges of an ancient custom very proper in those days--it was the parading of the streets by a set of people called _Preciæ_, who went some minutes before the _Flamen Dialis_ to bid the inhabitants leave work or play, and attend wholly to the procession; but if ill omens prevented the pageants from passing, or if the occasion of the show was deemed scarcely worthy its celebration, these _Preciæ_ stood a chance of being ill-treated by the spectators. A Prefatory introduction to a work like this, can hope little better usage from the Public than they had; it proclaims the approach of what has often passed by before, adorned most certainly with greater splendour, perhaps conducted too with greater regularity and skill: Yet will I not despair of giving at least a momentary amusement to my countrymen in general, while their entertainment shall serve as a vehicle for conveying expressions of particular kindness to those foreign individuals, whose tenderness softened the sorrows of absence, and who eagerly endeavoured by unmerited attentions to supply the loss of their company on whom nature and habit had given me stronger claims. That I should make some reflections, or write down some observations, in the course of a long journey, is not strange; that I should present them before the Public is I hope not too daring: the presumption grew up out of their acknowledged favour, and if too kind culture has encouraged a coarse plant till it runs to seed, a little coldness from the same quarter will soon prove sufficient to kill it. The flattering partiality of private partisans sometimes induces authors to venture forth, and stand a public decision; but it is often found to betray them too; not to be tossed by waves of perpetual contention, but rather to sink in the silence of total neglect. What wonder! He who swims in oil must be buoyant indeed, if he escapes falling certainly, though gently, to the bottom; while he who commits his safety to the bosom of the wide-embracing ocean, is sure to be strongly supported, or at worst thrown upon the shore. On this principle it has been still my study to obtain from a humane and generous Public that shelter their protection best affords from the poisoned arrows of private malignity; for though it is not difficult to despise the attempts of petty malice, I will not say with the Philosopher, that I mean to build a monument to my fame with the stones thrown at me to break my bones; nor yet pretend to the art of Swift's German Wonder-doer, who promised to make them fall about his head like so many pillows. Ink, as it resembles Styx in its colour, should resemble it a little in its operation too; whoever has been once _dipt_ should become _invulnerable_: But it is not so; the irritability of authors has long been enrolled among the comforts of ill-nature, and the triumphs of stupidity; such let it long remain! Let me at least take care in the worst storms that may arise in public or in private life, to say with Lear, --I'm one More sinn'd against, than sinning. For the book--I have not thrown my thoughts into the form of private letters; because a work of which truth is the best recommendation, should not above all others begin with a lie. My old acquaintance rather chose to amuse themselves with conjectures, than to flatter me with tender inquiries during my absence; our correspondence then would not have been any amusement to the Public, whose treatment of me deserves every possible acknowledgment; and more than those acknowledgments will I not add--to a work, which, such as it is, I submit to their candour, resolving to think as little of the event as I can help; for the labours of the press resemble those of the toilette, both should be attended to, and finished with care; but once complete, should take up no more of our attention; unless we are disposed at evening to destroy all effect of our morning's study. OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS MADE IN A JOURNEY THROUGH France, Italy, and Germany. * * * * * FRANCE. CALAIS. September 7, 1784. Of all pleasure, I see much may be destroyed by eagerness of anticipation: I had told my female companion, to whom travelling was new, how she would be surprized and astonished, at the difference found in crossing the narrow sea from England to France, and now she is not astonished at all; why should she? We have lingered and loitered six and twenty hours from port to port, while sickness and fatigue made her feel as if much more time still had elapsed since she quitted the opposite shore. The truth is, we wanted wind exceedingly; and the flights of shaggs, and shoals of maycril, both beautiful enough, and both uncommon too at this season, made us very little amends for the tediousness of a night passed on ship-board. Seeing the sun rise and set, however, upon an unobstructed horizon, was a new idea gained to me, who never till now had the opportunity. It confirmed the truth of that maxim which tells us, that the human mind must have something left to supply for itself on the sight of all sublunary objects. When my eyes have watched the rising or setting sun through a thick crowd of intervening trees, or seen it sink gradually behind a hill which obstructed my closer observation, fancy has always painted the full view finer than at last I found it; and if the sun itself cannot satisfy the cravings of a thirsty imagination, let it at least convince us that nothing on this side Heaven can satisfy them, and _set our affections_ accordingly. Pious reflections remind one of monks and nuns; I enquired of the Franciscan friar who attended us at the inn, what was become of Father Felix, who did the duties of the quête; as it is called, about a dozen years ago, when I recollect minding that his manners and story struck Dr. Johnson exceedingly, who said that so complete a character could scarcely be found in romance. He had been a soldier, it seems, and was no incompetent or mean scholar: the books we found open in his cell, shewed he had not neglected modern or colloquial knowledge; there was a translation of Addison's Spectators, and Rapin's Dissertation on the contending Parties of England called Whig and Tory. He had likewise a violin, and some printed music, for his entertainment. I was glad to hear he was well, and travelling to Barcelona on foot by orders of the superior. After dinner we set out to see Miss Grey, at her convent of Dominican Nuns; who, I hoped, would have remembered me, as many of the ladies there had seized much of my attention when last abroad; they had however all forgotten me, nor could call to mind how much they had once admired the beauty of my eldest daughter, then a child, which I thought impossible to forget: one is always more important in one's own eyes than in those of others; but no one is of importance to a Nun, who is and ought to be employed in other speculations. When the Great Mogul showed his splendour to a travelling dervise, who expressed his little admiration of it--"Shall you not often be thinking of me in future?" said the monarch. "Perhaps I might," replied the religieux, "if I were not always thinking upon God." The women spinning at their doors here, or making lace, or employing themselves in some manner, is particularly consolatory to a British eye; yet I do not recollect it struck me last time I was over: industry without bustle, and some appearance of gain without fraud, comfort one's heart; while all the profits of commerce scarcely can be said to make immediate compensation to a delicate mind, for the noise and brutality observed in an English port. I looked again for the chapel, where the model of a ship, elegantly constructed, hung from the top, and found it in good preservation: some scrupulous man had made the ship, it seems, and thought, perhaps justly too, that he had spent a greater portion of time and care on the workmanship than he ought to have done; so resolving no longer to indulge his vanity or fondness, fairly hung it up in the convent chapel, and made a solemn vow to look on it no more. I remember a much stronger instance of self-denial practised by a pretty young lady of Paris once, who was enjoined by her confessor to wring off the neck of her favourite bullfinch, as a penance for having passed too much time in teaching him to pipe tunes, peck from her hand, &c.--She obeyed; but never could be prevailed on to see the priest again. We are going now to leave Calais, where the women in long white camblet clokes, soldiers with whiskers, girls in neat slippers, and short petticoats contrived to show them, who wait upon you at the inn;--postillions with greasy night-caps, and vast jack-boots, driving your carriage harnessed with ropes, and adorned with sheep-skins, can never fail to strike an Englishman at his first going abroad:--But what is our difference of manners, compared to that prodigious effect produced by the much shorter passage from Spain to Africa; where an hour's time, and sixteen miles space only, carries you from Europe, from civilization, from Christianity. A gentleman's description of his feelings on that occasion rushes now on my mind, and makes me half ashamed to sit here, in Dessein's parlour, writing remarks, in good time!--upon places as well known as Westminster-bridge to almost all those who cross it at this moment; while the custom-house officers intrusion puts me the less out of humour, from the consciousness that, if I am disturbed, I am disturbed from doing _nothing_. CHANTILLY. Our way to this place lay through Boulogne; the situation of which is pleasing, and the fish there excellent. I was glad to see Boulogne, though I can scarcely tell why; but one is always glad to see something new, and talk of something old: for example, the story I once heard of Miss Ashe, speaking of poor Dr. James, who loved profligate conversation dearly,--"That man should set up his quarters across the water," said she; "why Boulogne would be a seraglio to him." The country, as far as Montreuil, is a coarse one; _thin herbage in the plains and fruitless fields_. The cattle too are miserably poor and lean; but where there is no grass, we can scarcely expect them to be fat: they must not feed on wheat, I suppose, and cannot digest tobacco. Herds of swine, not flocks of sheep, meet one's eye upon the hills; and the very few gentlemen's feats that we have passed by, seem out of repair, and deserted. The French do not reside much in private houses, as the English do; but while those of narrower fortunes flock to the country towns within their reach, those of ampler purses repair to Paris, where the rent of their estate supplies them with pleasures at no very enormous expence. The road is magnificent, like our old-fashioned avenue in a nobleman's park, but wider, and paved in the middle: this convenience continued on for many hundred miles, and all at the king's expence. Every man you meet, politely pulls off his hat _en passant_; and the gentlemen have commonly a good horse under them, but certainly a dressed one. Sporting season is not come in yet, but, I believe the idea of sporting seldom enters any head except an English one: here is prodigious plenty of game, but the familiarity with which they walk about and sit by our road-side, shews they feel no apprehensions. Harvest, even in France, is extremely backward this year, I see; no crops are yet got in, nor will reaping be likely to pay its own charges. But though summer is come too late for profit, the pleasure it brings is perhaps enhanced by delay: like a life, the early part of which has been wasted in sickness, the possessor finds too little time remaining for work, when health _does_ come; and spends all that he has left, naturally enough, in enjoyment. The pert vivacity of _La Fille_ at Montreuil was all we could find there worth remarking: it filled up my notions of French flippancy agreeably enough; as no English wench would so have answered one to be sure. She had complained of our avant-coureur's behaviour. "_Il parle sur le bant ton, mademoiselle_" (said I), "_mais il à le coeur bon_[A]:" "_Ouydà_" (replied she, smartly), "_mais c'est le ton qui fait le chanson_[B]." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote A: He sets his talk to a sounding tune, my dear, but he is an honest fellow.] [Footnote B: But I always thought it was the tune which made the musick.] The cathedral at Amiens made ample amends for the country we passed through to see it; the _Nef d'Amiens_ deserves the fame of a first-rate structure: and the ornaments of its high altar seem particularly well chosen, of an excellent taste, and very capital execution. The vineyards from thence hither shew, that either the climate, or season, or both, improve upon one: the grapes climbing up some not very tall golden-pippin trees, and mingling their fruits at the top, have a mighty pleasing effect; and I observe the rage for Lombardy poplars is in equal force here as about London: no tolerable house have I passed without seeing long rows of them; all young plantations, as one may perceive by their size. Refined countries always are panting for speedy enjoyment: the maxim of _carpe diem_[Footnote: Seize the present moment.] came into Rome when luxury triumphed there; and poets and philosophers lent their assistance to decorate and dignify her gaudy car. Till then we read of no such haste to be happy; and on the same principle, while Americans contentedly wait the slow growth of their columnal chesnut, our hot-bed inhabitants measure the slender poplar with canes, anxiously admiring its quick growth and early elegance; yet are often cut down themselves, before their youthful favourite can afford them either pleasure or advantage. This charming palace and gardens were new to neither of us, yet lovely to both: the tame fish, I remember so well to have fed from my hand eleven or twelve years ago, are turned almost all white; can it be with age I wonder? the naturalists must tell. I once saw a carp which weighed six pounds and an half taken out of a pond in Hertfordshire, where the owners knew it had resided forty years at least; and it was not white, but of the common colour: Quere, how long will they live? and when will they begin to change? The stables struck me as more magnificent this time than the last I saw them; the hounds were always dirtily and ill kept; but hunting is not the taste of any nation now but ours; none but a young English heir says to his estate as Goliah did to David, _Come to me, and I will give thee to the beasts of the field, and to the fowls of the air_; as some of our old books of piety reproach us. Every trick that money can play with the most lavish abundance of water is here exhibited; nor is the sight of a _jet d'eau_, or the murmur of an artificial cascade, undelightful in a hot day, let the Nature-mongers say what they please. The prince's cabinet, for a private collection, is not a mean one; but I was sorry to see his quadrant rusted to the globe almost, and the poor planetarium out of all repair. The great stuffed dog is a curiosity however; I never saw any of the canine species so large, and withal so beautiful, living or dead. The theatre belonging to the house is a lovely one; and the truly princely possessor, when he heard once that an English gentleman, travelling for amusement, had called at Chantilly too late to enjoy the diversion, instantly, though past twelve o'clock at night, ordered a new representation, that his curiosity might be gratified. This is the same Prince of Condè, who going from Paris to his country-seat here for a month or two, when his eldest son was nine years old, left him fifty louis d'ors as an allowance during his absence. At his return to town, the boy produced his purse, crying "_Papa! here's all the money safe, I have never touched it once_"--The Prince, in reply, took him gravely to the window, and opening it, very quietly poured all the louis d'ors into the street; saying, "Now, if you have neither virtue enough to give away your money, nor spirit enough to spend it, always _do this_ for the future, do you hear; that the poor may at least have a _chance for it_." PARIS. The fine paved road to this town has many inconveniencies, and jars the nerves terribly with its perpetual rattle; the approach however always strikes one as very fine, I think, and the boulevards and guingettes look always pretty too: as wine, beer, and spirits are not permitted to be sold there, one sees what England does not even pretend to exhibit, which is gaiety without noise, and a crowd without a riot. I was pleased to go over the churches again too, and re-experience that particular sensation which the disposition of St. Rocque's altars and ornaments alone can give. In the evening we looked at the new square called the Palais Royal, whence the Due de Chartres has removed a vast number of noble trees, which it was a sin and shame to profane with an axe, after they had adorned that spot for so many centuries.--The people were accordingly as angry, I believe, as Frenchmen can be, when the folly was first committed: the court, however, had wit enough to convert the place into a sort of Vauxhall, with tents, fountains, shops, full of frippery, brilliant at once and worthless, to attract them; with coffeehouses surrounding it on every side; and now they are all again _merry_ and _happy_, synonymous terms at Paris, though often disunited in London; and _Vive le Duc de Chartres_! The French are really a contented race of mortals;--precluded almost from possibility of adventure, the low Parisian leads a gentle humble life, nor envies that greatness he never can obtain; but either wonders delightedly, or diverts himself philosophically with the sight of splendours which seldom fail to excite serious envy in an Englishman, and sometimes occasion even suicide, from disappointed hopes, which never could take root in the heart of these unaspiring people. Reflections of this cast are suggested to one here in every shop, where the behaviour of the matter at first sight contradicts all that our satirists tell us of the _supple Gaul_, &c. A mercer in this town shews you a few silks, and those he scarcely opens; _vous devez choisir_[Footnote: Chuse what you like.], is all he thinks of saying, to invite your custom; then takes out his snuff-box, and yawns in your face, fatigued by your inquiries. For my own part, I find my natural disgust of such behaviour greatly repelled, by the recollection that the man I am speaking to is no inhabitant of A happy land, where circulating pow'r Flows thro' each member of th'embodied state-- S. JOHNSON. and I feel well-inclined to respect the peaceful tenor of a life, which likes not to be broken in upon, for the sake of obtaining riches, which when gotten must end only in the pleasure of counting them. A Frenchman who should make his fortune by trade tomorrow, would be no nearer advancement in society or situation: why then should he solicit, by arts he is too lazy to delight in the practice of, that opulence which would afford so slight an improvement to his comforts? He lives as well as he wishes already; he goes to the Boulevards every night, treats his wife with a glass of lemonade or ice, and holds up his babies by turns, to hear the jokes of _Jean Pottage_. Were he to recommend his goods, like the Londoner, with studied eloquence and attentive flattery, he could not hope like him that the eloquence he now bestows on the decorations of a hat, or the varnish of an equipage, may one day serve to torment a minister, and obtain a post of honour for his son; he could not hope that on some future day his flattery might be listened to by some lady of more birth than beauty, or riches perhaps, when happily employed upon a very different subject, and be the means of lifting himself into a state of distinction, his children too into public notoriety. Emulation, ambition, avarice, however, must in all arbitrary governments be confined to the great; the _other_ set of mortals, for there are none there of _middling_ rank, live, as it should seem, like eunuchs in a seraglio; feel themselves irrevocably doomed to promote the pleasure of their superiors, nor ever dream of sighing for enjoyments from which an irremeable boundary divides them. They see at the beginning of their lives how that life must necessarily end, and trot with a quiet, contented, and unaltered pace down their long, straight, and shaded avenue; while we, with anxious solicitude, and restless hurry, watch the quick turnings of our serpentine walk; which still presents, either to sight or expectation, some changes of variety in the ever-shifting prospect, till the unthought-of, unexpected end comes suddenly upon us, and finishes at once the fluctuating scene. Reflections must now give way to facts for a moment, though few English people want to be told that every hotel here, belonging to people of condition, is shut out from the street like our Burlington-house, which gives a general gloom to the look of this city so famed for its gaiety: the streets are narrow too, and ill-paved; and very noisy, from the echo made by stone buildings drawn up to a prodigious height, many of the houses having seven, and some of them even eight stories from the bottom. The contradictions one meets with every moment likewise strike even a cursory observer--a countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, a dirty black handkerchief about her neck, and a flat silver ring on her finger, like our ale-wives; a _femme publique_, dressed avowedly for the purposes of alluring the men, with not a very small crucifix hanging at her bosom;--and the Virgin Mary's sign at an alehouse door, with these words, Je suis la mere de mon Dieu, Et la gardienne de ce lieu[C]. [Footnote C: The mother of my God am I, And keep this house right carefully. ] I have, however, borrowed Bocage's Remarks upon the English nation, which serve to damp my spirit of criticism exceedingly: She had more opportunities than I for observation, not less quickness of discernment surely; and her stay in London was longer than mine in Paris.--Yet, how was she deceived in many points! I will tell nothing that I did not _see_; and among the objects one would certainly avoid seeing if it were possible, is the deformity of the poor.--Such various modes of warping the human figure could hardly be observed in England by a surgeon in high practice, as meet me about this country incessantly.--I have seen them in the galleries and outer-courts even of the palace itself, and am glad to turn my eyes for relief on the Duke of Orleans's pictures; a glorious collection! The Italian noblemen, in whose company we saw it, acknowledged with candour the good taste of the selection; and I was glad to see again what had delighted me so many years before: particularly, the three Marys, by Annibale Caracci; and Rubens's odd conceit of making Juno's Peacock peck Paris's leg, for having refused the apple to his mistress. The manufacture at the Gobelins seems exceedingly improved; the colouring less inharmonious, the drawing more correct; but our Parisians are not just now thinking about such matters; they are all wild for love of a new comedy, written by Mons. de Beaumarchais, and called, "Le Mariage de Figaro," full of such wit as we were fond of in the reign of Charles the Second, indecent merriment, and gross immorality; mixed, however, with much acrimonious satire, as if Sir George Etherege and Johnny Gay had clubbed their powers of ingenuity at once to divert and to corrupt their auditors; who now carry the verses of this favourite piece upon their fans, pocket-handkerchiefs, &c. as our women once did those of the Beggar's Opera. We have enjoyed some very agreeable society here in the company of Comte Turconi, a Milanese Nobleman who, desirous to escape all the frivolous, and petty distinction which birth alone bestows, has long fixed his residence in Paris, where talents find their influence, and where a great city affords that unobserved freedom of thought and action which can scarcely be expected by a man of high rank in a smaller circle; but which, when once tasted, will not seldom be preferred to the attentive watchfulness of more confined society. The famous Venetian too, who has written so many successful comedies, and is now employed upon his own Memoirs, at the age of eighty-four, was a delightful addition to our Coterie, _Goldoni_. He is garrulous, good-humoured, and gay; resembling the late James Harris of Salisbury in person not manner, and seems justly esteemed, and highly, by his countrymen. The conversation of the Marquis Trotti and the Abate Bucchetti is likewise particularly pleasing; especially to me, who am naturally desirous to live as much as possible among Italians of general knowledge, good taste, and polished manners, before I enter their country, where the language will be so very indispensable. Mean time I have stolen a day to visit my old acquaintance the English Austin Nuns at the Fossée, and found the whole community alive and cheerful; they are many of them agreeable women, and having seen Dr. Johnson with me when I was last abroad, enquired much for him: Mrs. Fermor, the Prioress, niece to Belinda in the Rape of the Lock, taking occasion to tell me, comically enough, "That she believed there was but little comfort to be found in a house that harboured _poets_; for that she remembered Mr. Pope's praise made her aunt very troublesome and conceited, while his numberless caprices would have employed ten servants to wait on him; and he gave one" (said she) "no amends by his talk neither, for he only sate dozing all day, when the sweet wine was out, and made his verses chiefly in the night; during which season he kept himself awake by drinking coffee, which it was one of the maids business to make for him, and they took it by turns." These ladies really live here as comfortably for aught I see as peace, quietness, and the certainty of a good dinner every day can make them. Just so much happier than as many old maids who inhabit Milman Street and Chapel Row, as they are sure not to be robbed by a treacherous, or insulted by a favoured, servant in the decline of life, when protection is grown hopeless and resistance vain; and as they enjoy at least a moral certainty of never living worse than they do to-day: while the little knot of unmarried females turned fifty round Red Lion Square _may_ always be ruined by a runaway agent, a bankrupted banker, or a roguish steward; and even the petty pleasures of six-penny quadrille may become by that misfortune too costly for their income.--_Aureste_, as the French say, the difference is small: both coteries sit separate in the morning, go to prayers at noon, and read the chapters for the day: change their neat dress, eat their little dinner, and play at small games for small sums in the evening; when recollection tires, and chat runs low. But more adventurous characters claim my present attention. All Paris I think, myself among the rest, assembled to see the valiant brothers, Robert and Charles, mount yesterday into the air, in company with a certain Pilâtre de Rosier, who conducted them in the new-invented flying chariot fastened to an air-balloon. It was from the middle of the Tuilleries that they set out, a place very favourable and well-contrived for such public purposes. But all was so nicely managed, so cleverly carried on somehow, that the order and decorum of us who remained on firm ground, struck me more than even the very strange sight of human creatures floating in the wind: but I have really been witness to ten times as much bustle and confusion at a crowded theatre in London, than what these peaceable Parisians made when the whole city was gathered together. Nobody was hurt, nobody was frighted, nobody could even pretend to feel themselves incommoded. Such are among the few comforts that result from a despotic government. My republican spirit, however, boiled up a little last Monday, when I had to petition Mons. de Calonne for the restoration of some trifles detained in the custom-house at Calais. His politeness, indeed, and the sight of others performing like acts of humiliation, reconciled me in some measure to the drudgery of running from subaltern to subaltern, intreating, in pathetic terms, the remission of a law which is at last either just or unjust; if just, no felicitation should, methinks, be permitted to change it; if unjust, what can be so grating as the obligation to solicit? We mean to quit Paris to-morrow; I therefore enquired this evening, what was become of our aërial travellers. A very grave man replied, "_Je crois, Madame, qu'ils sont dejá arrivès ces Messieurs là, au lieu ou les vents se forment_[D]." [Footnote D: I fancy, Ma'am, the gentlemen are gone to see the place where all the winds blow from.] LYONS. Sept. 25, 1784. We left the capital at our intended time, and put into the carriage, for amusement, a book seriously recommended by Mr. Goldoni; but which diverted me only by the fanfaronades that it contained. The author has, however, got the premium by this performance, which the Academy of Berlin promised to whoever wrote best this year on any Belles Lettres subject. This gentleman judiciously chose to give reasons for the universality of the French language, and has been so gaily insolent to every other European nation in his flimsy pamphlet, that some will probably praise, many reply to, all read, and all forget it. I will confess myself so seized on by his sprightly impertinence, that I wished for leisure to translate, and wit to answer him at first, but the want of one solid thought by which to recollect his existence has cured me; and I now find that he was deliciously cool and sharp, like the ordinary wine of the country we are passing through, which having _no body_, can neither keep its little power long, nor even use it while fresh to any sensible effect. The country is really beautiful; but descriptions are _so_ fallacious, one half despairs of communicating one's ideas as they are: for either well-chosen words do not present themselves, or being well-chosen they detain the reader, and fix his mind on _them_, instead of the things described. Certain it is that I had formed no adequate notion of the fine river called the Yonne, with cattle grazing on its fertile banks: those banks not clothed indeed with our soft verdure, but with royal purple, proceeding from an autumnal daisy of that colour that enamels every meadow at this season. Here small enclosures seem unknown to the inhabitants, who are strewed up and down expansive views of a most productive country; where vineyards swell upon the rising grounds, and young wheat ornaments the valleys below: while clusters of aspiring poplars, or a single walnut-tree of greater size and dignity unite in attracting attention, and inspiring poetical ideas. Here is no tedious uniformity to fatigue the eye, nor rugged asperities to disgust it; but ceaseless variety of colouring among the plants, while the cærulean willow, the yellow walnut, the gloomy beech, and silver theophrastus, seem scattered by the open hand of lavish Nature over a landscape of respectable extent, uniting that sublimity which a wide expanse always conveys to the mind, with that distinctness so desired by the eye; which cultivation alone can offer and fertility bestow. Every town that should adorn these lovely plains, however, exhibits, upon a nearer approach, misery; the more mortifying, as it is less expected by a spectator, who requires at least some days experience to convince him that the squallid scenes of wretchedness and dirt in which he is obliged to pass the night, will prove more than equivalent to the pleasures he has enjoyed in the day-time, derived from an appearance of elegance and wealth--elegance, the work of Nature, not of man; and opulence, the immediate gift of God, and not the result of commerce. He who should fix his residence in France, lives like Sir Gawaine in our old romance, whose wife was bound by an enchantment, that obliged her at evening to lay down the various beauties which had charmed admiring multitudes all day, and become an object of odium and disgust. The French do seem indeed an idle race; and poverty, perhaps for that reason, forces her way among them, through a climate that might tempt other mortals to improve its blessings; but, as the motto to the arms they are so proud of expresses it--"they _toil not, neither do they spin_." Content, the bane of industry, as Mandeville calls it, renders them happy with what Heaven has unsolicited shaken into their lap; and who knows but the spirit of blaming such behaviour may be less pleasing to God that gives, than is the behaviour itself? Let us not, mean time, be forward to suppose, that whatever one sees done, is done upon principle, as such fancies will for ever mislead one: much must be left to chance, when we are judging the conduct either of nations or individuals. And surely I never knew till now, that so little religion could exist in any Christian country as in this, where they drive their carts, and keep their little shops open on a Sunday, forbearing neither pleasure nor business, as I see, on account of observing that day upon which their Redeemer rose again. They have a tradition among the meaner people, that when Christ was crucified, he turned his head towards France, over which he pronounced his last blessing; but we must accuse them, if so, of being very ungrateful favourites. This stately city, Lyons, is very happily and finely situated; the Rhone, which flows by its side, inviting mills, manufactures, &c. seems resolved to contradict and wash away all I have been saying; but we must remember, it is five days journey from Paris hither, and I have been speaking only of the little places we passed through in coming along. The avenue here, which leads to one of the greatest objects in the nation, is most worthy of that object's dignity indeed: the marriage of two rivers, which having their sources at a prodigious distance from each other, meet here, and together roll their beneficial tribute to the sea. Howell's remark, "That the Saone resembles a Spaniard in the slowness of its current, and that the Rhone is emblematic of French rapidity," cannot be kept a moment out of one's head: it is equally observable, that the junction adds little in appearance to their strength and grandeur, and that each makes a better figure _separate_ than _united_. La Montagne d'Or is a lovely hill above the town, and I am told that many English families reside upon it, but we have no time to make minute enquiries. L'Hotel de la Croix de Malthe affords excellent accommodations within, and a delightful prospect without. The Baths too have attracted my notice much, and will, I hope, repair my strength, so as to make me no troublesome fellow-traveller. How little do those ladies consult their own interest, who make impatience of petty inconveniences their best supplement for conversation!--fancy themselves more important as less contented; and imagine all delicacy to consist in the difficulty of being pleased! Surely a dip in this delightful river will restore my health, and enable me to pass the mountains, of which our present companions give me a very formidable account. The manufacturers here, at Lyons, deserve a volume, and I shall scarcely give them a page; though nothing I ever saw at London or Paris can compare with the beauty of these velvets, or with the art necessary to produce such an effect, while the wrong side is smooth, not struck through. The hangings for the Empress of Russia's bed-chamber are wonderfully executed; the design elegant, the colouring brilliant: A screen too for the Grand Signor is finely finished here; he would, I trust, have been contented with magnificence in the choice of his furniture, but Mr. Pernon has added taste to it, and contrived in appearance to sink an urn or vase of crimson velvet in a back ground of gold tissue with surprising ingenuity. It is observable, that the further people advance in elegance, the less they value splendour; distinction being at last the positive thing which mortals elevated above competency naturally pant after. Necessity must first be supplied we know, convenience then requires to be contented; but as soon as men can find means after that period to make themselves eminent for taste, they learn to despise those paltry distinctions which riches alone can bestow. Talking of Taste leads one to speak of gardening; and having passed yesterday between two villas belonging to some of the most opulent merchants of Lyons, I gained an opportunity of observing the disposal of those grounds that are appropriated to pleasure; where the shade of straight long-drawn alleys, formed by a close junction of ancient elm trees, kept a dazzling sun from incommoding our sight, and rendering the turf so mossy and comfortable to one's tread, that my heart never felt one longing wish for the beauties of a lawn and shrubbery--though I should certainly think such a manner of laying out a Lancashire gentleman's seat in the north of England a mad one, where the heat of the sun ought to be invited in, not shut out; and where a large lake of water is wanted for his beams to sparkle upon, instead of a fountain to trickle and to murmur, and to refresh one with the idea of coolness which it excites. Here, however, where the Rhone is navigable up to the very house, I see not but it is rational enough to form jet d'eaux of the superfluous water, and to content one's self with a Bird Cage Walk, when we are sure at the end of it to find ourselves surrounded by an horizon, of extent enough to give the eye full employment, and of a bright colouring which affords it but little relief. That among the gems of Europe our island holds the rank of an _emerald_, was once suggested to me, and I could never part with the idea; surely France must in the same scale be rated as the _ruby_; for here is no grass, no verdure to repose the sight upon, except that of high forest trees, the vineyards being short cut, and supported by white sticks, the size of those which in our flower gardens support a favourite carnation; and these placed close together by thousands on a hill rather perplex than please a spectator of the country, who must wait till he recollects the superiority of their produce, before he prefers them to a Herefordshire orchard or a Kentish hop-ground. Well! well! it is better to waste no more words on places however, where the people have done so much to engage and to deserve our attention. Such was the hospitality I have here been witness to, and such the luxuries of the Lyonnois at table, that I counted six and thirty dishes where we dined, and twenty-four where we supped. Every thing was served up in silver at both places, and all was uniformly magnificent, except the linen, which might have been finer. We were not a very numerous company--from eighteen to twenty-two, as I remember, morning and evening; but the ladies played upon the pedal harp, the gentlemen sung gaily, if not sweetly after supper: I never received more kindness for my own part in any fortnight of my life, nor ever heard that kindness more pleasingly or less coarsely expressed. These are merchants, I am told, with whom I have been living; and perhaps my heart more readily receives and repays their caresses for having heard so. Let princes dispute, and soldiers reciprocally support their quarrels; but let the wealthy traders of every nation unite to pour the oil of commerce over the too agitated ocean of human life, and smooth down those asperities which obstruct fraternal concord. The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland lodge here at our hotel; I saw them treated with distinguished respect to-night at the theatre, where _a force de danser_[Footnote: By dint of dancing alone], I actually was moved to shed many tears over the distresses of _Sophie de Brabant_. Surely these pantomimes will very soon supplant all poetry, when, as Gratiano says, "Our words will suddenly become superfluous, and discourse grow commendable in none but parrots." Some conversation here, however, struck me as curious; the more so as I had heard the subject slightly touched upon at Paris; but faintly there, as the last sounds of an echo, while here they are all loud, all in earnest, and all their heads seemed turned, I think, about something, or nothing, which they call _animal magnetism_. I cannot imagine how it has seized them so: a man who undertakes to cure disorders by the touch, is no new thing; our Philosophical Transactions make mention of Gretrex the stroaker, in Charles the Second's reign. The present mountebank, it is true, seems more hardy in his experiments, and boasts of being able to cause disorders in the human frame, as well as to remove them. A gentleman at yesterday's dinner-party mentioned, that he took pupils; and, before I had expressed the astonishment I felt, professed himself a disciple; and was happy to assure us, he said, that though he had not yet attained the desirable power of putting a person into a catalepsy at pleasure, he could throw a woman into a deep swoon, from which no arts but his own could recover her. How difficult is it to restrain one's contempt and indignation from a buffoonery so mean, or a practice so diabolical!--This folly may possibly find its way into England--I should be very sorry. To-morrow we leave Lyons. I should have liked to pass through Switzerland, the Derbyshire of Europe; but I am told the season is too far advanced, as we mean to spend Christmas at Milan. ITALY TURIN. October 17, 1784. We have at length passed the Alps, and are safely arrived at this lovely little city, whence I look back on the majestic boundaries of Italy, with amazement at his courage who first profaned them: surely the immediate sensation conveyed to the mind by the sight of such tremendous appearances must be in every traveller the same, a sensation of fulness never experienced before, a satisfaction that there is something great to be seen on earth--some object capable of contenting even fancy. Who he was who first of all people pervaded these fortifications, raised by nature for the defence of her European Paradise, is not ascertained; but the great Duke of Savoy has wisely left his name engraved on a monument upon the first considerable ascent from Pont Bonvoisin, as being author of a beautiful road cut through the solid stone for a great length of way, and having by this means encouraged others to assist in facilitating a passage so truly desirable, till one of the great wonders now to be observed among the Alps, is the ease with which even a delicate traveller may cross them. In these prospects, colouring is carried to its utmost point of perfection, particularly at the time I found it, variegated with golden touches of autumnal tints; immense cascades mean time bursting from naked mountains on the one side; cultivated fields, rich with vineyards, on the other, and tufted with elegant shrubs that invite one to pluck and carry them away to where they would be treated with much more respect. Little towns flicking in the clefts, where one would imagine it was impossible to clamber; light clouds often sailing under the feet of the high-perched inhabitants, while the sound of a deep and rapid though narrow river, dashing with violence among the insolently impeding rocks at the bottom, and bells in thickly-scattered spires calling the quiet Savoyards to church upon the steep sides of every hill--fill one's mind with such mutable, such various ideas, as no other place can ever possibly afford. I had the satisfaction of seeing a chamois at a distance, and spoke with a fellow who had killed five hungry bears that made depredation on his pastures: we looked on him with reverence as a monster-tamer of antiquity, Hercules or Cadmus; he had the skin of a beast wrapt round his middle, which confirmed the fancy--but our servants, who borrowed from no fictitious records the few ideas that adorned their talk, told us he reminded _them_ of _John the Baptist_. I had scarce recovered the shock of this too sublime comparison, when we approached his cottage, and found the felons nailed against the wall, like foxes heads or spread kites in England. Here are many goats, but neither white nor large, like those which browze upon the steeps of Snowdon, or clamber among the cliffs of Plinlimmon. I chatted with a peasant in the Haute Morienne, concerning the endemial swelling of the throat, which is found in seven out of every ten persons here: he told me what I had always heard, but do not yet believe, that it was produced by drinking the snow water. Certain it is, these places are not wholesome to live in; most of the inhabitants are troubled with weak and sore eyes: and I recollect Sir Richard Jebb telling me, more than seven years ago, that when he passed through Savoy, the various applications made to him, either for the cure or prevention of blindness by numberless unfortunate wretches that crowded round him, hastened his quitting a province where such horrible complaints prevailed. One has heard it related that the goîstre or gozzo of the throat is reckoned a beauty by those who possess it; but I spoke with many, and all agreed to lament it as a misfortune. That it does really proceed merely from living in a snowy country, would be well confirmed by accounts of a similar sickness being endemial in Canada; but of an American goîstre I have never yet heard--and Wales, methinks, is snowy enough, and mountainous enough, God knows; yet were such an excrescence to be seen _there_, the people would never have done wondering, and blessing themselves. The mines of Derbyshire, however, do not very unfrequently exhibit something of the same appearance among those who work in _them_; and as Savoy is impregnated with many minerals, I should be apter to attribute this extension of the gland to their influence over the constitution, than to that of snow water, which can scarcely be efficacious in a degree of power equal to the producing so very violent an effect. The wolves do certainly come down from these mountains in large troops, just as Thomson describes them: Burning for blood; boney, and gaunt, and grim.-- But it is now the fashionable philosophy every where to consider this creature as the original of our domestic friend, the dog. It was a long time before my heart assented to its truth, yet surely their hunting thus in packs confirms it; and the Jackall's willingness to connect with either race, shews one that the species cannot be far removed, and that he makes the shade between the wolf and rough haired shepherd's cur. Of the longevity of man this district affords us no pleasing examples. The peasants here are apparently unhealthy, and they say--short-lived. We are told by travellers of former days, that there is a region of the air so subtle as to extinguish the two powers of taste and smell; and those who have crossed the Cordilleras of the Andes say, that situations have been explored among their points in South America, where those senses have been found to suffer a temporary suspension. Our _voyageurs aeriens_[Footnote: Our aerostatic travellers] may now be useful to settle that question among others, and Pambamarca's heights may remain untrodden. As for Mount Cenis, I never felt myself more hungry, or better enjoyed a good dinner, than I did upon it's top: but the trout in the lake there have been over praised; their pale colour allured me but little in the first place, nor is their flavour equal to that of trout found in running water. Going down the Italian side of the Alps is, after all, an astonishing journey; and affords the most magnificent scenery in nature, which varying at every step, gives new impression to the mind each moment of one's passage; while the portion of terror excited either by real or fancied dangers on the way, is just sufficient to mingle with the pleasure, and make one feel the full effect of sublimity. To the chairmen who carry one though, nothing can be new; it is observable that the glories of these objects have never faded--I heard them speak to each other of their beauties, and the change of light since they had passed by last time, while a fellow who spoke English as well as a native told us, that having lived in a gentleman's service twenty years between London and Dublin, he at length begged his discharge, chusing to retire and finish his days a peasant upon these mountains, where he first opened his eyes upon scenes that made all other views of nature insipid to his taste. If impressions of beauty remain, however, those of danger die away by frequent reiteration; the men who carried me seemed amazed that I should feel any emotions of fear. _Qu'est ce donc, madame_?[Footnote: What's the matter, my lady?] was the coldly-asked question to my repeated injunction of _prenez garde_[Footnote: Take care.]: not very apparently unnecessary neither, where the least slip must have been fatal both to them and me. Novalesa is the town we stopped at, upon entering Piedmont; where the hollow sound of a heavy dashing torrent that has accompanied us hitherto, first grows faint, and the ideas of common life catch hold of one again; as the noise of it is heard from a greater distance, its stream grows wider, and its course more tranquil. For compensation of danger, ease should be administered; but one's quiet is here so disturbed by insects, and polluted by dirt, that one recollects the conduct of the Lapland rein-deer, who seeks the summit of the hill at the hazard of his life, to avoid those gnats which sting him to madness in the valley. Suza shewed nothing that I took much interest in, except its name; and nobody tells me why it is honoured with that old Asiatick appellation. At the next town, called St. Andrè, or St. Ambroise, I forget which, we got an admirable dinner; and saw our room decorated with a large map of London, which I looked on with sensations different from those ever before excited by the same object, Amsterdam and Constantinople covered the other sides of the wall; and over the door of the chamber itself was written, as our people write the Lamb or the Lion, "_Les trois Villes Heretiques_[Footnote: The three Heretical Cities]." The avenue to Turin, most magnificently planted, and drawn in a wide straight line, shaded like the Bird-cage walk in St. James's Park, for twelve miles in length, is a dull work, but very useful and convenient in so hot a country; it has been completed by the taste, and at the sole expence, of his Sardinian majesty, that he may enjoy a cool shady drive from one of his palaces to the other. The town to which this long approach conveys one does not disgrace its entrance. It is built in form of a star, with a large stone in its centre, on which you are desired to stand, and see the streets all branch regularly from it, each street terminating with a beautiful view of the surrounding country, like spots of ground seen in many of the old-fashioned parks in England, when the etoile and vista were the mode. I think there is[5] still one subsisting even now, if I remember right, in Kensington Gardens. Such symmetry is really a soft repose for the eye, wearied with following a soaring falcon through the half-sightless regions of the air, or darting down immeasurable precipices, to examine if the human figure could be discerned at such a depth below one. Model of elegance, exact Turin! where Italian hospitality first consoled, and Italian arts first repaid, the fatigues of my journey: how shall I bear to leave my new-obtained acquaintance? how shall I consent to quit this lovely city? where, from the box put into my possession by the Prince de la Cisterna, I first saw an Italian opera acted in an Italian theatre; where the wonders of Porporati's hand shewed me that our Bartolozzi was not without a competitor; and where every pleasure which politeness can invent, and kindness can bestow, was held out for my acceptance. Should we be seduced, however, to waste time here, we should have reason in a future day to repent our choice; like one who, enamoured of Lord Pembroke's great hall at Wilton, should fail to afford himself leisure for looking over the better-furnished apartments. This charming town is the _salon_ of Italy; but it is a finely-proportioned and well-ornamented _salon_ happily constructed to call in the fresh air at the end of every street, through which a rapid stream is directed, that _ought_ to carry off all nuisances, which here have no apology from want of any convenience purchasable by money; and which must for that reason be the choice of inhabitants, who would perhaps be too happy, had they a natural taste for that neatness which might here be enjoyed in its purity. The arches formed to defend passengers from the rain and sun, which here might have even serious effects from their violence, deserve much praise; while their architecture, uniting our ideas of comfort and beauty together, form a traveller's taste, and teach him to admire that perfection, of which a miniature may certainly be found at Turin, when once a police shall be established there to prevent such places being used for the very grossest purposes, and polluted with smells that poison all one's pleasure. It is said, that few European palaces exceed in splendour that of Sardinia's king; I found it very fine indeed, and the pictures dazzling. The death of a dropsical woman well known among all our connoisseurs detained my attention longest: the value set on it here is ten thousand pounds. The horse cut out of a block of marble at the stairs-foot attracted me not a little; but we are told that the impression it makes will soon be effaced by the sight of greater wonders. Mean time I go about like Stephano and his ignorant companions, who longed for all the glittering furniture of Prospero's cell in the Tempest, while those who know the place better are vindicated in crying, "_Let it alone, thou fool, it is but trash_." Some letters from home directed me to enquire in this town for Doctor Charles Allioni, who kindly received, and permitted me to examine the rarities, of which he has a very capital collection. His fossil fish in slate--blue slate, are surprisingly well preserved; but there is in the world, it seems, a chrystalized trout, not flat, nor the flesh eaten away, as I understand, but round; and, as it were, cased in chrystal like our _aspiques_, or _fruit in jelly_: the colour still so perfect that you may plainly perceive the spots upon it, he says. To my enquiries after this wonderful petrefaction, he replied, "That it might be bought for a thousand pounds;" and added, "that if he were a _Ricco Inglese_[Footnote: Rich Englishman], he would not hesitate for the price:" "Where may I see it, Sir?" said I; but to that question no intreaties could produce an answer, after he once found I had no mind to buy. That fresh-water fish have been known to remain locked in the flinty bosom of Monte Uda in Carnia, the Academical Discourse of Cyrillo de Cremona, pronounced there in the year 1749, might have informed us; and we are all familiar, I suppose, with the anchor named in the fifteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Strabo mentions pieces of a galley found three thousand stadii from any sea; and Dr. Allioni tells me, that Monte Bolca has been long acknowledged to contain the fossils, now diligently digging out under the patronage of some learned naturalists at Verona.--The trout, however, is of value much beyond these productions certainly, as it is closed round as if in a transparent case we find, hermetically sealed by the soft hand of Nature, who spoiled none of her own ornaments in preserving them for the inspection of her favourite students. The amiable old professor from whom these particulars were obtained, and who endured my teizing him in bad Italian for intelligence he cared not to communicate, with infinite sweetness and patience grew kinder to me as I became more troublesome to him: and shewing me the book upon botany to which he had just then put the last line; turned his dim eyes from me, and said, as they filled with tears, "You, Madam, are the last visitor I shall ever more admit to talk upon earthly subjects; my work is done; I finished it as you were entering:--my business now is but to wait the will of God, and die; do you, who I hope will live long and happily, seek out your own salvation, and pray for mine." Poor dear Doctor Allioni! My enquiries concerning this truly venerable mortal ended in being told that his relations and heirs teized him cruelly to sell his manuscripts, insects, &c. and divide the money amongst _them_ before he died. An English scholar of the same abilities would be apt enough to despise such admonitions, and dispose at his own liking and leisure of what his industry alone had gained, his learning only collected; but there seems to be much more family fondness on the Continent than in our island; more attention to parents, more care for uncles, and nephews, and sisters, and aunts, than in a commercial country like ours, where, for the most part, each one makes his own way separate; and having received little assistance at the beginning of life, considers himself as little indebted at the close of it. Whoever takes a long journey, however he may at his first commencement be tempted to accumulate schemes of convenience and combinations of travelling niceties, will cast them off in the course of his travels as incumbrances; and whoever sets out in life, I believe, with a crowd of relations round him, will, on the same principle, feel disposed to drop one or two of them at every turn, as they hang about and impede his progress, and make his own game single-handed. I speak of _Englishmen_, whose religion and government inspire rather a spirit of public benevolence, than contract the social affections to a point; and co-operate, besides, to prompt that genius for adventure, and taste of general knowledge, which has small chance to spring up in the inhabitants of a feudal state; where each considers his family as himself, and having derived all the comfort he has ever enjoyed from his relations, resolves to return their favours at the end of a life, which they make happy, in proportion as it _is_ so: and this accounts for the equality required in continental marriages, which are avowedly made here without regard to inclination, as the keeping up a family, not the choice of a companion, is considered as important; while the lady bred up in the same notions, complies with her _first_ duties, and considers the _second_ as infinitely more dispensable. GENOA. Nov. 1, 1784. It was on the twenty-first of last month that we passed from Turin to Monte Casale; and I wondered, as I do still, to see the face of Nature yet without a wrinkle, though the season is so far advanced. Like a Parisian female of forty years old, dressed for court, and stored with such variety of well-arranged allurements, that the men say to each other as she passes.--"Des qu'elle à cessée d'estre jolie, elle n'en devient que plus belle, ce me semble[E]." [Footnote E: She's grown handsomer, I think, since she has left off being pretty.] The prospect from St. Salvadore's hill derives new beauties from the yellow autumn; and exhibits such glowing proofs of opulence and fertility, as words can with difficulty communicate. The animals, however, do not seem benefited in proportion to the apparent riches of the country: asses, indeed, grow to a considerable size, but the oxen are very small, among pastures that might suffice for Bakewell's bulls; and these are all little, and almost all _white_; a colour which gives unfavourable ideas either of strength or duration. The blanche rose among vegetables scatters a less powerful perfume than the red one; whilst in the mineral kingdom silver holds but the second place to gold, which imbibing the bright hues of its parent-sun, becomes the first and greatest of all metallic productions. One may observe too, that yellow is the earliest colour to salute the rising year, the last to leave it: crocuses, primroses, and cowslips give the first earnest of resuscitating summer; while the lemon-coloured butterfly, whose name I have forgotten, ventures out, before any others of her kind can brave the parting breath of winter's last storms; stoutest to resist cold, and steadiest in her manner of flying. The present season is yellow indeed, and nothing is to be seen now but sun-flowers and African marygolds around us; _one_ bough besides, on every tree we pass--_one_ bough at least is tinged with the golden hue; and if it does put one in mind of that presented to Proserpine, we may add the original line too, and say, Uno avulfo, non deficit alter[F]. [Footnote F: Pluck one away, another still remains. ] The sure-footed and docile mule, with which in England I was but little acquainted, here claims no small attention, from his superior size and beauty: the disagreeable noise they make so frequently, however, hinders one from wishing to ride them--it is not braying somehow, but worse; it is neighing out of tune. I have put nothing down about eating since we arrived in Italy, where no wretched hut have I yet entered that does not afford soup, better than one often tastes in England even at magnificent tables. Game of all sorts--woodcocks in particular. Porporati, the so justly-famed engraver, produced upon his hospitable board, one of the pleasant days we passed with him, a couple so exceedingly large, that I hesitated, and looked again, to see whether they were really woodcocks, till the long bill convinced me. One reads of the luxurious emperors that made fine dishes of the little birds brains, phenicopter's tongues, &c. and of the actor who regaled his guests with nightingale-pie, with just detestation of such curiosity and expence: but thrushes, larks, and blackbirds, are so _very_ frequent between Turin and Novi, I think they might serve to feed all the fantastical appetites to which Vitellius himself could give encouragement and example. The Italians retain their tastes for small birds in full force; and consider beccafichi, ortolani, &c. as the most agreeable dainties: it must be confessed that they dress them incomparably. The sheep here are all lean and dirty-looking, few in number too; but the better the soil the worse the mutton we know, and here is no land to throw away, where every inch turns to profit in the olive-yards, vines, or something of much higher value than letting out to feed sheep. Population seems much as in France, I think: but the families are not, in either nation, disposed according to British notions of propriety; all stuffed together into little towns and large houses, _entessées_, as the French call it; one upon another, in such a strange way, that were it not for the quantity of grapes on which the poor people live, with other acescent food enjoined by the church, and doubtless suggested by the climate, I think putrid fevers must necessarily carry off crowds of them at once. The head-dress of the women in this drive through some of the northern states of Italy varied at every post; from the velvet cap, commonly a crimson one, worn by the girls in Savoia, to the Piedmontese plait round the bodkin at Turin, and the odd kind of white wrapper used in the exterior provinces of the Genoese dominions. Uniformity of almost any sort gives a certain pleasure to the eye, and it seems an invariable rule in these countries that all the women of every district should dress just alike. It is the best way of making the men's task easy in judging which is handsomest; for taste so varies the human figure in France and England, that it is impossible to have an idea how many pretty faces and agreeable forms would lose and how many gain admirers in those nations, were a sudden edict to be published that all should dress exactly alike for a year. Mean time, since we left Deffeins, no such delightful place by way of inn have we yet seen as here at Novi. My chief amusement at Alexandria was to look out upon the _huddled_ marketplace, as a great dramatic writer of our day has called it; and who could help longing there for Zoffani's pencil to paint the lively scene? Passing the Po by moon-light near Casale exhibited an entertainment of a very different nature, not unmixed with ill-concealed fear indeed; though the contrivance of crossing it is not worse managed than a ferry at Kew or Richmond used to be before our bridges were built. Bridges over the rapid Po would, however, be truly ridiculous; when swelled by the mountain snows it tears down all before it in its fury, and inundates the country round. The drive from Novi on to Genoa is so beautiful, so grand, so replete with imagery, that fancy itself can add little to its charms: yet, after every elegance and every ornament have been justly admired, from the cloud which veils the hill, to the wild shrubs which perfume the valley; from the precipices which alarm the imagination, to the tufts of wood which flatter and sooth it; the sea suddenly appearing at the end of the Bocchetta terminates our view, and takes from one even the hope of expressing our delight in words adequate to the things described. Genoa la Superba stands proudly on the margin of a gulph crowded with ships, and resounding with voices, which never fail to animate a British hearer--the Tailor's shout, the mariner's call, swelled by successful commerce, or strengthened by newly-acquired fame. After a long journey by land, such scenes are peculiarly delightful; but description tangles, not communicates, the sensations imbibed upon the spot. Here are so many things to describe! such churches! such palaces! such pictures! one would imagine the Genoese possessed the empire of the ocean, were it not well known that they call but fix galleys their own, and seventy years ago suffered all the horrors of a bombardment. The Dorian palace is exceedingly fine; the Durazzo palace, for ought I know, is finer; and marble here seems like what one reads of silver in King Solomon's time, which, says the Scripture, "_was nothing counted on in the days of Solomon_" Casa Brignoli too is splendid and commodious; the terraces and gardens on the house-tops, and the fresco paintings outside, give one new ideas of human life; and exhibits a degree of luxury unthought-on in colder climates. But here we live on green pease and figs the first day of November, while orange and lemon trees flaunt over the walls more common than pears in England. The Balbi mansion, filled with pictures, detained us from the churches filled with more. I have heard some of the Italians confess that Genoa even pretends to vie with Rome herself in ecclesiastical splendour. In devotion I should think she would be with difficulty outdone: the people drop down on their knees in the street, and crowd to the church doors while the benediction is pronouncing, with a zeal which one might hope would draw down stores of grace upon their heads. Yet I hear from the inhabitants of other provinces, that they have a bad character among their neighbours, who love not the _base Ligurian_ and accuse them of many immoralities. They tell one too of a disreputable saying here, how there are at Genoa men without honesty, women without modesty, a sea with no fish, and a wood with no birds. Birds, however, here certainly are by the million, and we have eaten fish since we came every day; but I am informed they are neither cheap nor plentiful, nor considered as excellent in their kinds. Here is macaroni enough however!--the people bring in such a vast dish of it at a time, it disgusts one. The streets of the town are much too narrow for beauty or convenience--impracticable to coaches, and so beset with beggars that it is dreadful. A chair is therefore, above all things, necessary to be carried in, even a dozen steps, if you are likely to feel shocked at having your knees suddenly clasped by a figure hardly human; who perhaps holding you forcibly for a minute, conjures you loudly, by the sacred wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, to have compassion upon _his_; shewing you at the same time such undeniable and horrid proofs of the anguish he is suffering, that one must be a monster to quit him unrelieved. Such pathetic misery, such disgusting distress, did I never see before, as I have been witness to in this gaudy city--and that not occasionally or by accident, but all day long, and in such numbers that humanity shrinks from the description. Sure, charity is not the virtue that they pray for, when begging a blessing at the church-door. One should not however speak unkindly of a people whose affectionate regard for our country shewed itself so clearly during the late war: a few days residence with the English consul here at his country seat gave me an opportunity of hearing many instances of the Republic's generous attachment to Great Britain, whose triumphs at Gibraltar over the united forces of France and Spain were honestly enjoyed by the friendly Genoese, who gave many proofs of their sincerity, more solid than those clamorous ones of huzzaing our minister about wherever he went, and crying _Viva il General_ ELIOTT; while many young gentlemen of high station offered themselves to go volunteers aboard our fleet, and were with difficulty restrained. We have been shewed some beautiful villas belonging to the noblemen of this city, among which Lomellino's pleased me best; as the water there was so particularly beautiful, that he had generously left it at full liberty to roll unconducted, and murmur through his tasteful pleasure grounds, much in the manner of our lovely Leasowes; happily uniting with English simplicity, the glowing charms that result from an Italian sky. My eyes were so wearied with square edged basons of marble, and jets d'eaux, surrounded by water nymphs and dolphins, that I felt vast relief from Lomellino's garden, who, like me, Tir'd with the joys parterres and fountains yield, Finds out at last he better likes a field. Such felicity of situation I never saw till now, when one looks upon the painted front of this gay mansion, commanding from its fine balcony a rich and extensive view at once of the sea, the city, and the snow-topt mountains; while from the windows on the other side the house, one's eye sinks into groves of cedar, ilex, and orange trees, not apparently cultivated with incessant care, or placed in pots, artfully sunk under ground to conceal them from one's sight, but rising into height truly respectable. The sea air, except in particular places where the land lies in some direction that counteracts its influence, is naturally inimical to timber; though the green coasts of Devonshire are finely fringed with wood; and here, at Lomellino's villa, in the Genoese state, I found two plane trees, of a size and serious dignity, that recalled to my mind the solemn oak before our duke of Dorset's seat at Knowle--and chesnuts, which would not disgrace the forests of America. A rural theatre, cut in turf, with a concealed orchestra and sod seats for the audience, with a mossy stage, not incommodious neither, and an admirable contrivance for shifting the scenes, and savouring the exits, entrances, &c. of the performers, gave me a perfect idea of that refined luxury which hot countries alone inspire--while another elegantly constructed spot, meant and often used for the entertainment of tenants and dependants who come to rejoice on the birth or wedding day of a kind landlord, make one suppress one's sighs after a free country--at least suspend them; and fill one's heart with tenderness towards men, who have skill to soften authority with indulgence, and virtue to reward obedience with protection. A family coming last night to visit at a house where I had the honour of being admitted as an intimate, gave me another proof of my present state of remoteness from English manners. The party consisted of an old nobleman, who could trace his genealogy unblemished up to one of the old Roman emperors, but whose fortune is now in a hopeless state of decay:--his lady, not inferior to himself in birth or haughtiness of air and carriage, but much impaired by age, ill health, and pecuniary distress; these had however no way lessened her ideas of her own dignity, or the respect of her cavalier servente and her son, who waited on her with an unremitted attention; presenting her their little dirty tin snuff-boxes upon one knee by turns; which ceremony the less surprised me, as having seen her train made of a dyed and watered lutestring, borne gravely after her up stairs by a footman, the express image of Edgar in the storm-scene of king Lear--who, as the fool says, "_wisely reserv'd a blanket, else had we all been 'shamed_." Our conversation was meagre, but serious. There was music; and the door being left at jar, as we call it, I watched the wretched servant who staid in the antichamber, and found that he was listening in spight of sorrow and starving. With this slight sketch of national manners I finish my chapter, and proceed to the description of, or rather observations and reflections made during a winter's residence at MILAN. For we did not stay at Pavia to see any thing: it rained so, that no pleasure could have been obtained by the sight of a botanical garden; and as to the university, I have the promise of seeing it upon a future day, in company of some literary friends. Truth to tell, our weather is suddenly become so wet, the roads so heavy with incessant rain, that king William's departure from his own foggy country, or his welcome to our gloomy one, where this month is melancholy even, to a proverb, could not have been clouded with a thicker atmosphere surely, than was mine to Milan upon the fourth day of dismal November, 1784. Italians, by what I can observe, suffer their minds to be much under the dominion of the sky; and attribute every change in their health, or even humour, as seriously to its influence, as if there were no nearer causes of alteration than the state of the air, and as if no doubt remained of its immediate power, though they are willing enough here to poison it with the scent of wood-ashes within doors, while fires in the grate seem to run rather low, and a brazier full of that pernicious stuff is substituted in its place, and driven under the table during dinner. It is surprising how very elegant, not to say magnificent, those dinners are in gentlemen's or noblemen's houses; such numbers of dishes at once; not large joints, but infinite variety: and I think their cooking excellent. Fashion keeps most of the fine people out of town yet; we have therefore had leisure to establish our own household for the winter, and have done so as commodiously as if our habitation was fixed here for life. This I am delighted with, as one may chance to gain that insight into every day behaviour, and common occurrences, which can alone be called knowing something of a country: counting churches, pictures, palaces, may be done by those who run from town to town, with no impression made but on their bones. I ought to learn that which before us lies in daily life, if proper use were made of my demi-naturalization; yet impediments to knowledge spring up round the very tree itself--for surely if there was much wrong, I would not tell it of those who seem inclined to find all right in me; nor can I think that a fame for minute observation, and skill to discern folly with a microscopic eye, is in any wise able to compensate for the corrosions of conscience, where such discoveries have been attained by breach of confidence, and treachery towards unguarded, because unsuspecting innocence of conduct. We are always laughing at one another for running over none but the visible objects in every city, and for avoiding the conversation of the natives, except on general subjects of literature--returning home only to tell again what has already been told. By the candid inhabitants of Italian states, however, much honour is given to our British travellers, who, as they say, _viaggiono con profitto_[Footnote: Travel for improvement], and scarce ever fail to carry home with them from other nations, every thing which can benefit or adorn their own. Candour, and a good humoured willingness to receive and reciprocate pleasure, seems indeed one of the standing virtues of Italy; I have as yet seen no fastidious contempt, or affected rejection of any thing for being what we call _low_; and I have a notion there is much less of those distinctions at Milan than at London, where birth does so little for a man, that if he depends on _that_, and forbears other methods of distinguishing himself from his footman, he will stand a chance of being treated no better than him by the world. _Here_ a person's rank is ascertained, and his society settled, at his immediate entrance into life; a gentleman and lady will always be regarded as such, let what will be their behaviour.--It is therefore highly commendable when they seek to adorn their minds by culture, or pluck out those weeds, which in hot countries will spring up among the riches of the harvest, and afford a sure, but no immediately pleasing proof of the soil's natural fertility. But my country-women would rather hear a little of our _interieur_, or, as we call it, family management; which appears arranged in a manner totally new to me; who find the lady of every house as unacquainted with her own, and her husband's affairs, as I who apply to her for information.--No house account, no weekly bills perplex _her_ peace; if eight servants are kept, we will say, six of these are men, and two of those men out of livery. The pay of these principal figures in the family, when at the highest rate, is fifteen pence English a day, out of which they find clothes and eating--for fifteen pence includes board-wages; and most of these fellows are married too, and have four or five children each. The dinners drest at home are, for this reason, more exactly contrived than in England to suit the number of guests, and there are always half a dozen; for dining _alone_ or the master and mistress _tête-à-tête_ as _we_ do, is unknown to them, who make society very easy, and resolve to live much together. No odd sensation then, something like shame, such as _we_ feel when too many dishes are taken empty from table, touches them at all; the common courses are eleven, and eleven small plates, and it is their sport and pleasure, if possible, to clear all away. A footman's wages is a shilling a day, like our common labourers, and paid him, as they are paid, every Saturday night. His livery, mean time, changed at least _twice a year_, makes him as rich a man as the butler and valet--but when evening comes, it is the comicallest sight in the world to see them all go gravely home, and you may die in the night for want of help, though surrounded by showy attendants all day. Till the hour of departure, however, it is expected that two or three of them at least sit in the antichamber, as it is called, to answer the bell, which, if we confess the truth, is no light service or hardship; for the stairs, high and wide as those of Windsor palace, all stone too, run up from the door immediately to that apartment, which is very large, and very cold, with bricks to set their feet on only, and a brazier filled with warm wood ashes, to keep their fingers from freezing, which in summer they employ with cards, and seem but little inclined to lay them down when ladies pass through to the receiving room. The strange familiarity this class of people think proper to assume, half joining in the conversation, and crying _oibò_[Footnote: Oh dear!], when the master affirms something they do not quite assent to, is apt to shock one at beginning, the more when one reflects upon the equally offensive humility they show on being first accepted into the family; when it is exposed that they receive the new master, or lady's hand, in a half kneeling posture, and kiss it, as women under the rank of Countess do the Queen of England's when presented at our court.--This obsequiousness, however, vanishes completely upon acquaintance, and the footman, if not very seriously admonished indeed, yawns, spits, and displays what one of our travel-writers emphatically terms his flag of abomination behind the chair of a woman of quality, without the slightest sensation of its impropriety. There is, however, a sort of odd farcical drollery mingled with this grossness, which tends greatly to disarm one's wrath; and I felt more inclined to laugh than be angry one day, when, from the head of my own table, I saw the servant of a nobleman who dined with us cramming some chicken pattés down his throat behind the door; our own folks humorously trying to choak him, by pretending that his lord called him, while his mouth was full. Of a thousand comical things in the same way, I will relate one:--Mr. Piozzi's valet was dressing my hair at Paris one morning, while some man sate at an opposite window of the same inn, singing and playing upon the violoncello: I had not observed the circumstance, but my perrucchiere's distress was evident; he writhed and twisted about like a man pinched with the cholic, and pulled a hundred queer faces: at last--What is the matter, Ercolani, said I, are you not well? Mistress, replies the fellow, if that beast don't leave off soon, I shall run mad with rage, or else die; and so you'll see an honest Venetian lad killed by a French dog's howling. The phrase of _mistress_ is here not confined to servants at all; gentlemen, when they address one, cry, _mia padrona_[Footnote: My mistress], mighty sweetly, and in a peculiarly pleasing tone. Nothing, to speak truth, can exceed the agreeableness of a well-bred Italian's address when speaking to a lady, whom they alone know how to flatter, so as to retain her dignity, and not lose their own; respectful, yet tender; attentive, not officious; the politeness of a man of fashion _here_ is _true_ politeness, free from all affectation, and honestly expressive of what he really feels, a true value for the person spoken to, without the smallest desire of shining himself; equally removed from foppery on one side, or indifference on the other. The manners of the men here are certainly pleasing to a very eminent degree, and in their conversation there is a mixture, not unfrequent too, of classical allusions, which strike one with a sort of literary pleasure I cannot easily describe. Yet is there no pedantry in their use of expressions, which with us would be laughable or liable to censure: but Roman notions here are not quite extinct; and even the house-maid, or _donna di gros_, as they call her, swears by _Diana_ so comically, there is no telling. They christen their boys _Fabius_, their daughters _Claudia_, very commonly. When they mention a thing known, as we say, to _Tom o'Styles and John o'Nokes_, they use the words, _Tizio and Sempronio_. A lady tells me, she was at a loss about the dance yesterday evening, because she had not been instructed in the _programma_; and a gentleman, talking of the pleasures he enjoyed supping last night at a friend's house, exclaims, _Eramo pur jeri sera in Appolline[G]!_ alluding to Lucullus's entertainment given to Pompey and Cicero, as I remember, in the chamber of Apollo. But here is enough of this--more of it, in their own pretty phrase, _seccarebbe pur Nettunno_[H]. It was long ago that Ausonius said of them more than I can say, and Mr. Addison has translated the lines in their praise better than I could have done. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote G: We passed yester evening as if we had been in the Apollo.] [Footnote H: Would dry up old Neptune himself.] "Et Mediolani mira omnia copia rerum: Innumeræ cultæque domus facunda virorum Ingenia et mores læti." Milan with plenty and with wealth overflows, And numerous streets and cleanly dwellings shows; The people, bless'd by Nature's happy force, Are eloquent and cheerful in discourse. What I have said this moment will, however, account in some measure for a thing which he treats with infinite contempt, not unjustly perhaps; yet does it not deserve the ridicule handed down from his time by all who have touched the subject. It is about the author, who before his theatrical representation prefixes an odd declaration, that though he names Pluto, and Neptune, and I know not who, upon the stage, yet he believes none of those fables, but considers himself as a Christian, a Catholick, &c. All this _does_ appear very absurdly superfluous to _us_; but as I observed, _they_ live nearer the original feats of paganism; many old customs are yet retained, and the names not lost among them, or laid up merely for literary purposes as in England. They swear _per Bacco_ perpetually in common discourse; and once I saw a gentleman in the heat of conversation blush at the recollection that he had said _barba Fove_, where he meant God Almighty. It is likewise unkind enough in Mr. Addison, perhaps unjust too, to speak with scorn of the libraries, or state of literature, at Milan. The collection of books at Brera is prodigious, and has been lately much increased by the Pertusanian and Firmian libraries falling into it: a more magnificent repository for learning, a more comfortable situation for students, so complete and perfect a disposition of the books, will scarcely be found in any other city not professedly a university, I believe; and here are professors worthy of the highest literary stations, that do honour to learning herself. I will not indulge myself by naming any one, where all deserve the highest praise; and it is so difficult to restrain one's pen upon so favourite a subject, that I shall only name some rarities which particularly struck me, and avoid further temptations, where the sense of obligation, and the recollection of partial kindness, inspire an inclination to praises which appear tedious to those readers who could not enter into my feelings, and of course would scarcely excuse them. Thirteen volumes of MS. Psalms, written with wonderful elegance and manual nicety, struck me as very curious: they were done by the Certosini monks lately eradicated, and with beautiful illuminations to almost every page. A Livy, printed here in 1418, fresh and perfect; and a Pliny, of the Parma press, dated 1472; are extremely valuable. But the pleasure I received from observing that the learned librarian had not denied a place to Tillotson's works, was counteracted by finding Bolingbroke's philosophy upon the same shelf, and enjoying exactly the same reputation as to the truth of the doctrine contained in either; for both were English, and of course _heretical_. But I must not live longer at Milan without mentioning the Duomo, first in all Europe of the Gothic race; whose solemn sadness and gloomy dignity make it a most magnificent cathedral; while the rich treasures it conceals below exceeded my belief or expectation. We came here just before the season of commemorating the virtues of the immortal Carlo Borromeo, to whose excellence all Italy bears testimony, and Milan _most_; while the Lazaretto erected by him remains a standing monument of his piety, charity, and peculiar regard to this city, which he made his residence during the dreadful plague that so devasted it; tenderly giving to its helpless inhabitants the consolation of seeing their priest, provider, and protector, all united under one incomparable character, who fearless of death remained among them, and comforted their sorrows with his constant presence. It would be endless to enumerate the schools, hospitals, infirmaries, erected by this surprising man. The peculiar excellence of his lazaretto, however, depends on each habitation being nicely separated from every other, so as to keep infection aloof; while uniformity of architecture is still preserved, being built in a regular quadrangle, with a chapel in the middle, and a fresh stream flowing round, so as to benefit every particular house, and keep out all necessity of connection between the sick. I am become better acquainted with these matters, as this is the precise time when the immortal Carlo Borromeo's actions are rehearsed, and his praises celebrated, by people appointed in every church to preach his example and record his excellence. A statue of solid silver, large as life, and resembling, as they hope, his person, decorated with rings, &c. of immense value, is now exposed in church for people to venerate; and the subterranean chapel, where his body lies, is all wainscoted, as I may say, with silver; every separate compartment chased, like our old-fashioned watch-cases, with some story out of his life, which lasted but forty-seven years, after having done more good than any other person in ninety-four; as a capuchin friar said this morning, who mounted the pulpit to praise him, and seemed to be well thought on by his auditors. The chanting tone in which he spoke displeased me, however, who can be at last no competent judge of eloquence in any language but my own. There is a national rhetoric in every country, dependant on national manners; and those gesticulations of body, or depressions of voice, which produce pity and commiseration in one place, may, without censure of the orator or of his hearers, excite contempt and oscitancy in another. The sentiments of the preacher I heard were just and vigorous; and if that suffices not to content a foreign ear, woe be to me, who now live among those to whom I am myself a foreigner; and who at best can but be expected to forgive, for the sake of the things said, that accent and manner with which I am obliged to express them. By the indulgence of private friendship, I have now enjoyed the uncommon amusement of seeing a theatrical exhibition performed by friars in a convent for their own diversion, and that of some select friends. The monks of St. Victor had, it seems, obtained permission, this carnival, to represent a little odd sort of play, written by one of their community chiefly in the Milanese dialect, though the upper characters spoke Tuscan. The subject of this drama was taken, naturally enough, from some events, real or fictitious, which were supposed to have happened in, the environs of Milan, about a hundred years ago, when the Torriani and Visconti families disputed for superiority. Its construction was compounded of comic and distressful scenes, of which the last gave me most delight; and much was I amazed, indeed, to feel my cheeks wet with tears at a friar's play, founded on ideas of parental tenderness. The comic part, however, was intolerably gross; the jokes coarse, and incapable of diverting any but babies, or men who, by a kind of intellectual privation, contrive to perpetuate babyhood, in the vain hope of preferring innocence: nor could I shelter myself by saying how little I understood of the dialect it was written in, as the action was nothing less than equivocal; and in the burletta which was tacked to it by way of farce, I saw the soprano fingers who played the women's parts, and who see more of the world than these friars, blush for shame, two or three times, while the company, most of them grave ecclesiastics, applauded with rapturous delight. The wearisome length of the whole would, however, have surfeited me, had the amusement been more eligible; but these dear monks do not get a holiday often, I trust; so in the manner of school-boys, or rather school-girls in England (for our boys are soon above such stuff), they were never tired of this dull buffoonery, and kept us listening to it till one o'clock in the morning. Pleasure, when it does come, always bursts up in an unexpected place; I derived much from observing in the faces of these cheerful friars, that intelligent shrewdness and arch penetration so visible in the countenances of our Welch farmers, and curates of country villages in Flintshire, Caernarvonshire, &c. which Howel (best judge in such a case) observes in his Letters, and learnedly accounts for; but which I had wholly forgotten till the monks of St. Victor brought it back to my remembrance. The brothers who remained unemployed, and clear from stage occupations, formed the orchestra; those that were left _then_ without any immediate business upon their hands, chatted gaily with the company, producing plenty of refreshments; and I was really very angry with myself for feeling so cynically disposed, when every thing possible was done to please me. Can one help however sighing, to think that the monastic life, so capable of being used for the noblest purposes, and originally suggested by the purest motives, should, from the vast diversity of orders, the increase of wealth and general corruption of mankind, degenerate into a state either of mental apathy, as among the sequestered monks, or of vicious luxury, as among the more free and open societies? Yet must one still behold both with regret and indignation, that rage for innovation which delights to throw down places once the retreats of Piety and Learning--Piety, who fought in vain to wall and fortify herself against those seductions which since have sapped the venerable fabric that they feared to batter; and Learning, who first opened the eyes of men, that now ungratefully begin to turn them only on the defeats of their benefactress. The Christmas functions here were showy, and I thought well-contrived; the public ones are what I speak of: but I was present lately at a private merrymaking, where all distinctions seemed pleasingly thrown down by a spirit of innocent gaiety. The Marquis's daughter mingled in country-dances with the apothecary's prentice, while her truly noble parents looked on with generous pleasure, and encouraged the mirth of the moment. Priests, ladies, gentlemen of the very first quality, romped with the girls of the house in high good-humour, and tripped it away without the incumbrance of petty pride, or the mean vanity of giving what they expressively call _foggezzione_, to those who were proud of their company and protection. A new-married wench, whose little fortune of a hundred crowns had been given her by the subscription of many in the room, seemed as free with them all, as the most equal distribution of birth or riches could have made her: she laughed aloud, and rattled in the ears of the gentlemen; replied with sarcastic coarseness when they joked her, and apparently delighted to promote such conversation as they would not otherwise have tried at. The ladies shouted for joy, encouraged the girl with less delicacy than desire of merriment, and promoted a general banishment of decorum; though I do believe with full as much or more purity of intention, than may be often met with in a polished circle at Paris itself. Such society, however, can please a stranger only as it is odd and as it is new; when ceremony ceases, hilarity is left in a state too natural not to offend people accustomed to scenes of high civilization; and I suppose few of us could return, after twenty-five years old, to the coarse comforts of _a roll and treacle._ Another style of amusement, very different from this last, called us out, two or three days ago, to hear the famous Passione de Metastasio sung in St. Celso's church. The building is spacious, the architecture elegant, and the ornaments rich. A custom too was on this occasion omitted, which I dislike exceedingly; that of deforming the beautiful edifices dedicated to God's service with damask hangings and gold lace on the capitals of all the pillars upon days of gala, so very perversely, that the effect of proportion is lost to the eye, while the church conveys no idea to the mind but of a tattered theatre; and when the frippery decorations fade, nothing can exclude the recollection of an old clothes shop. St. Celso was however left clear from these disgraceful ornaments: there assembled together a numerous and brilliant, if not an attentive audience; and St. Peter's part in the oratorio was sung by a soprano voice, with no appearance of peculiar propriety to be sure; but a satirical nobleman near me said, that "Nothing could possibly be more happily imagined, as the mutilation of poor St. Peter was continuing daily, and in full force;" alluding to the Emperor's rough reformations: and he does not certainly spare the coat any more than Jack in our Tale of a Tub, when he is rending away the embroidery. Here, however, the parallel must end; for Jack, though zealous, was never accused of burning the lace, if I remember right, and putting the gold in his pocket. It happened oddly, that chatting freely one day before dinner with some literary friends on the subject of coat armour, we had talked about the Visconti serpent, which is the arms of Milan; and the spread eagle of Austria, which we laughingly agreed ought to _eat double _ because it had _two necks_: when the conversation insensibly turned on the oppressions of the present hour; and I, to put all away with a joke, proposed the _fortes Homericæ_ to decide on their future destiny. Somebody in company insisted that _I_ should open the book--I did so, at the omen in the twelfth book of the Iliad, and read these words: Jove's bird on sounding pinions beat the skies; A bleeding serpent of enormous size His talons trussed; alive and curling round She stung the bird, whose throat receiv'd the wound. Mad with the smart he drops the fatal prey, In airy circles wings his painful way, Floats on the winds, and rends the heavens with cries: Amid the hosts the fallen serpent lies; They, pale with terror, mark its spires unroll'd, And Jove's portent with beating hearts behold. It is now time to talk a little of the theatre; and surely a receptacle so capacious to contain four thousand people, a place of entrance so commodious to receive them, a show so princely, so very magnificent to entertain them, must be sought in vain out of Italy. The centre front box, richly adorned with gilding, arms, and trophies, is appropriated to the court, whose canopy is carried up to what we call the first gallery in England; the crescent of boxes ending with the stage, consist of nineteen on a side, _small boudoirs_, for such they seem; and are as such fitted up with silk hangings, girandoles, &c. and placed so judiciously as to catch every sound of the fingers, if they do but whisper: I will not say it is equally advantageous to the figure, as to the voice; no performers looking adequate to the place they recite upon, so very stately is the building itself, being all of stone, with an immense portico, and stairs which for width you might without hyperbole drive your chariot up. An immense sideboard at the first lobby, lighted and furnished with luxurious and elegant plenty, as many people send for suppers to their box, and entertain a knot of friends there with infinite convenience and splendour. A silk curtain, the colour of your hangings, defends the closet from intrusive eyes, if you think proper to drop it; and when drawn up, gives gaiety and show to the general appearance of the whole: while across the corridor leading to these boxes, another small chamber, numbered like _that_ it belongs to, is appropriated to the use of your servants, and furnished with every conveniency to make chocolate, serve lemonade, &c. Can one wonder at the contempt shewn by foreigners when they see English women of fashion squeezed into holes lined with dirty torn red paper, and the walls of it covered with a wretched crimson fluff? Well! but this theatre is built in place of a church founded by the famous Beatrice de Scala, in consequence of a vow she made to erect one if God would be pleased to send her a son. The church was pulled down and the playhouse erected. The Arch-duke lost a son that year; and the pious folks cried, "A judgment!" but nobody minded them, I believe; many, however, that are scrupulous will not go. Meantime it is a beautiful theatre to be sure; the finest fabric raised in modern days, I do believe, for the purposes of entertainment; but we must not be partial. While London has twelve capital rooms for the professed amusement of the Public, Milan has but one; there is in it, however, a ridotto chamber for cards, of a noble size, where some little gaming goes on in carnival time; but though the inhabitants complain of the enormities committed there, I suppose more money is lost and won at one club in St. James's street during a week, than here at Milan in the whole winter. Every nation complains of the wickedness of its own inhabitants, and considers them as the worst people in the world, till they have seen others no better; and then, like individuals with their private sorrows, they find change produces no alleviation. The Mount of Miseries, in the Spectator, where all the people change with their neighbours, lay down an undutiful son, and carry away with them a hump-back, or whatever had been the source of disquiet to another, whom he had blamed for bearing so ill a misfortune thought trifling till he took it on himself, is an admirably well constructed fable, and is applicable to public as well as private complaints. A gentleman who had long practised as a solicitor, and was retired from business, stored with a perfect knowledge of mankind so far as his experience could inform him, told me once, that whoever died before sixty years old, if he had made his own fortune, was likely to leave it according as friendship, gratitude, and public spirit dictated: either to those who had served, or those who had pleased him; or, not unfrequently, to benefit some charity, set up some school, or the like: "but let a man once turn sixty," said he, "and his natural heirs _are sure of him_:" for having seen many people, he has likewise been disgusted by many; and though he does not love his relations better than he did, the discovery that others are but little superior to them in those excellencies he has sought about the world in vain for, he begins to enquire for his nephew's little boy, whom as he never saw, never could have offended him; and if he does not break the chain of a favourite watch, or any other such boyish trick, the estate is his for ever, upon no principle but this in the testator. So it is by those who travel a good deal; by what I have seen, every country has so much in it to be justly complained of, that most men finish by preferring their own. That neither complaints nor rejoicings here at Milan, however, proceed from affectation, is a choice comfort: the Lombards possess the skill to please you without feigning; and so artless are their manners, you cannot even suspect them of insincerity. They have, perhaps for that very reason, few comedies, and fewer novels among them: for the worst of every man's character is already well known to the rest; but be his conduct what it will, the heart is commonly right enough--_il luon cuor Lombardo_ is famed throughout all Italy, and nothing can become proverbial without an excellent reason. Little opportunity is therefore given to writers who carry the dark lanthorn of life into its deepest recesses--unwind the hidden wickedness of a Maskwell or a Monkton, develope the folds of vice, and spy out the internal worthlessness of apparent virtue; which from these discerning eyes cannot be cloked even by that early-taught affectation which renders it a real ingenuity to discover, if in a highly polished capital a man or woman has or has not good parts or principles--so completely are the first overlaid with literature, and the last perverted by refinement. * * * * * April 2, 1785. The cold weather continues still, and we have heavy snows; but so admirable is the police of this well-regulated town, that when over-night it has fallen to the height of four feet, no very uncommon occurrence, no one can see in the morning that even a flake has been there, so completely do the poor and the prisoners rid us of it all, by throwing immense loads of it into a navigable canal that runs quite round the city, and carries every nuisance with it clearly away--so that no inconveniencies can arise. Italians seem to me to have no feeling of cold; they open the casements--for windows we have none (now in winter), and cry, _che bel freschetto_![Footnote: What a fresh breeze!] while I am starving outright. If there is a flash of a few faggots in the chimney that just scorches one a little, no lady goes near it, but sits at the other end of a high-roofed room, the wind whistling round her ears, and her feet upon a perforated brass box, filled with wood embers, which the _cavalier fervente_ pulls out from time to time, and replenishes with hotter ashes raked out from between the andirons. How sitting with these fumes under their petticoats improves their beauty of complexion I know not; certain it is, they pity _us_ exceedingly for our manner of managing ourselves, and enquire of their countrymen who have lived here a-while, how their health endured the burning _fossils_ in the chambers at London. I have heard two or three Italians say, _vorrei anch' io veder quell' Inghilterra, ma questo carbone fossile_![Footnote: I would go see this same England myself I think, but that fuel made of minerals frights me!] To church, however, and to the theatre, ladies have a great green velvet bag carried for them, adorned with gold tassels, and lined with fur, to keep their feet from freezing, as carpets are not in use here. Poor women run about the streets with a little earthen pipkin hanging on their arm, filled with fire, even if they are sent on an errand; while men of all ranks walk wrapped up in an odd sort of white riding coat, not buttoned together, but folded round their body after the fashion of the old Roman dress that one has seen in statues, and this they call _Gaban_, retaining many Spanish words since the time that they were under Spanish government. _Buscar_, to seek, is quite familiar here as at Madrid, and instead of Ragazzo, I have heard the Milanese say _Mozzo_ di Stalla, which is originally a Castilian word I believe, and spelt by them with the _c con cedilla_, Moço. They have likewise Latin phrases oddly mingled among their own: a gentleman said yesterday, that he was going to Casa _Sororis_, to his sister's; and the strange word _Minga_, which meets one at every turn, is corrupted, I believe, from _Mica_, a crumb. _Piaz minga_, I have not a crumb of pleasure in it, &c. The uniformity of dress here pleases the eye, and their custom of going veiled to church, and always without a hat, which they consider as profanation of the _temple_ as they call it, delights me much; it has an air of decency in the individuals, of general respect for the place, and of a resolution not to let external images intrude on devout thoughts. The hanging churches, and even public pillars, set up in the streets or squares for purposes of adoration, with black, when any person of consequence dies, displeases me more; it is so very dismal, so paltry a piece of pride and expiring vanity, and so dirty a custom, calling bugs and spiders, and all manner of vermin about one so in those black trappings, it is terrible; but if they remind us of our end, and set us about preparing for it, the benefit is greater than the evil. The equipages on the Corso here are very numerous, in proportion to the size of the city, and excessively showy: the horses are long-tailed, heavy, and for the most part black, with high rising forehands, while the sinking of the back is artfully concealed by the harness of red Morocco leather richly ornamented, and white reins. To this magnificence much is added by large leopard, panther, or tyger skins, beautifully striped or spotted by Nature's hand, and held fast on the horses by heavy shining tassels of gold, coloured lace, &c. wonderfully handsome; while the driver, clothed in a bright scarlet dress, adorned and trimmed with bear's skin, makes a noble figure on the box at this season upon days of gala. The carnival, however, exhibits a variety unspeakable; boats and barges painted of a thousand colours, drawn upon wheels, and filled with masks and merry-makers, who throw sugar-plums at each other, to the infinite delight of the town, whose populousness that show evinces to perfection, for every window and balcony is crowded to excess; the streets are fuller than one can express of gazers, and general mirth and gaiety prevail. When the flashing season is over, and you are no longer to be dazzled with finery or stunned with noise, the nobility of Milan--for gentry there are none--fairly slip a check case over the hammock, as we do to our best chairs in England, clap a coarse leather cover on the carriage top, the coachman wearing a vast brown great coat, which he spreads on each side him over the corners of his coach-box, and looks as somebody was saying--like a sitting hen. The paving of our streets here at Milan is worth mentioning, only because it is directly contrary to the London method of performing the same operation. They lay the large flag stones at this place in two rows, for the coach wheels to roll smoothly over, leaving walkers to accommodate themselves, and bear the sharp pebbles to their tread as they may. In every thing great, and every thing little, the diversity of government must perpetually occur; where that is despotic, small care will be taken of the common people; where that is popular, little attention will be paid to the great ones. I never in my whole life heard so much of birth and family as since I came to this town; where blood enjoys a thousand exclusive privileges, where Cavalier and Dama are words of the first, nay of the only importance; where wit and beauty are considered as useless without a long pedigree; and virtue, talents, wealth, and wisdom, are thought on only as medals to hang upon the branch of a genealogical tree, as we tie trinkets to a watch in England. I went to church, twenty yards from our own door, with a servant to wait on me, three or four mornings ago; there was a lady particularly well dressed, very handsome, two footmen attending on her at a distance, took my attention. Peter, said I, to my own man, as we came out, _chi è quella dama? who is that lady? Non è dama_, replies the fellow, contemptuously smiling at my simplicity--_she is no lady_. I thought she might be somebody's kept mistress, and asked him whose? _Dio ne liberi_, returns Peter, in a kinder accent--for there _heart_ came in, and he would not injure her character--God forbid: _è moglie d'un ricco banchiere_--she is a rich banker's wife. You may see, added he, that she is no lady if you look--the servants carry no velvet stool for her to kneel upon, and they have no coat armour in the lace to their liveries: _she_ a lady! repeated he again with infinite contempt. I am told that the Arch-duke is very desirous to close this breach of distinction, and to draw merchants and traders with their wives up into higher notice than they were wont to remain in. I do not _think_ he will by that means conciliate the affection of any rank. The prejudices in favour of nobility are too strong to be shaken here, much less rooted out so: the very servants would rather starve in the house of a man of family, than eat after a person of inferior quality, whom they consider as their equal, and almost treat him as such to his face. Shall we then be able to refuse our particular veneration to those characters of high rank here, who add the charm of a cultivated mind to that situation which, united even with ignorance, would ensure them respect? When scholarship is found among the great in Italy, it has the additional merit of having grown up in their own bosoms, without encouragement from emulation, or the least interested motive. His companions do not think much the more of him--for _that_ kind of superiority. I suppose, says a friend of his, he must be fond of study; for _chi pensa di una maniera, chi pensa d' un altra, per me sono stato sempre ignorantissimo_[I]. [Footnote I: One man is of one mind, another of another: I was always a sheer dunce for my own part.] These voluntary confessions of many a quality, which, whether possessed or not by English people, would certainly never be avowed, spring from that native sincerity I have been praising--for though family connections are prized so highly here, no man seems ashamed that he has no family to boast: all feigning would indeed be useless and impracticable; yet it struck me with astonishment too, to hear a well-bred clergyman who visits at many genteel houses, say gravely to his friend, no longer ago than yesterday--that friend a man too eminent both for talents and fortune--"Yes, there is a grand invitation at such a place to-night, but I don't go, because _I am not a gentleman--perche non sono cavaliere_; and the master desired I would let you know that _it was for no other reason_ that you had not a card too, my good friend; for it is an invitation of none but _people of fashion you see_." At all this nobody stares, nobody laughs, and nobody's throat is cut in consequence of their sincere declarations. The women are not behind-hand in openness of confidence and comical sincerity. We have all heard much of Italian cicisbeism; I had a mind to know how matters really stood; and took the nearest way to information by asking a mighty beautiful and apparently artless young creature, _not noble_, how that affair was managed, for there is no harm done _I am sure_, said I: "Why no," replied she, "no great _harm_ to be sure: except wearisome attentions from a man one cares little about: for my own part," continued she, "I detest the custom, as I happen to love my husband excessively, and desire nobody's company in the world but his. We are not _people of fashion_ though you know, nor at all rich; so how should we set fashions for our betters? They would only say, see how jealous he is! if _Mr. Such-a-one_ sat much with me at home, or went with me to the Corso; and I _must_ go with some gentleman you know: and the men are such ungenerous creatures, and have such ways with them: I want money often, and this _cavaliere servente_ pays the bills, and so the connection draws closer--_that's all_." And your husband! said I--"Oh, why he likes to see me well dressed; he is very good natured, and very charming; I love him to my heart." And your confessor! cried I.--"Oh, why he is _used to it_"--in the Milanese dialect--_è assuefaà_. Well! we will not send people to Milan to study delicacy or very refined morality to be sure; but were the crust of British affectation lifted off many a character at home, I know not whether better, that is _honester_, hearts would be found under it than that of this pretty girl, God forbid that I should prove an advocate for vice; but let us remember, that the banishment of all hypocrisy and deceit is a vast compensation for the want of _one great virtue_.--The certainty that the worst, whatever that worst may be, meets your immediate inspection, gives great repose to the mind: you know there is no latent poison lurking out of sight; no colours to come out stronger by throwing water suddenly against them, as you do to old fresco paintings: and talking freely with women in this country, though you may have a chance to light on ignorance, you are never teized by folly. The mind of an Italian, whether man or woman, seldom fails, for ought I see, to make up in _extent_ what is wanted in _cultivation_; and that they possess the art of pleasing in an eminent degree, the constancy with which they are mutually beloved by each other is the best proof. Ladies of distinction bring with them when they marry, besides fortune, as many clothes as will last them seven years; for fashions do not change here as often as at London or Paris; yet is pin-money allowed, and an attention paid to the wife that no Englishwoman can form an idea of: in every family her duties are few; for, as I have observed, household management falls to the master's share of course, when all the servants are men almost, and those all paid by the week or day. Children are very seldom seen by those who visit great houses: if they _do_ come down for five minutes after dinner, the parents are talked of as _doting_ on them, and nothing can equal the pious and tender return made to fathers and mothers in this country, for even an apparently moderate share of fondness shewn to them in a state of infancy. I saw an old Marchioness the other day, who had I believe been exquisitely beautiful, lying in bed in a spacious apartment, just like ours in the old palaces, with the tester touching the top almost: she had her three grown-up sons standing round her, with an affectionate desire of pleasing, and shewing her whatever could sooth or amuse her--so that it charmed me; and I was told, and observed indeed, that when they quitted her presence a half kneeling bow, and a kind kiss of her still white hand, was the ceremony used. I knew myself brought thither only that she might be entertained with the sight of the foreigner--and was equally struck at her appearance--more so I should imagine than she could be at mine; when these dear men assisted in moving her pillows with emulative attention, and rejoiced with each other apart, that their mother looked so well to-day. Two or three servants out of livery brought us refreshments I remember; but her maid attended in the antichamber, and answered the bell at her bed's head, which was exceedingly magnificent in the old style of grandeur--crimson damask, if I recollect right, with family arms at the back; and she lay on nine or eleven pillows, laced with ribbon, and two large bows to each, very elegant and expensive in any country:--with all this, to prove that the Italians have little sensation of cold, here was no fire, but a suffocating brazier, which stood near the door that opened, and was kept open, into the maid's apartment. A woman here in every stage of life has really a degree of attention shewn her that is surprising:--if conjugal disputes arise in a family, so as to make them become what we call town-talk, the public voice is sure to run against the husband; if separation ensues, all possible countenance is given to the wife, while the gentleman is somewhat less willingly received; and all the stories of past disgusts are related to _his_ prejudice: nor will the lady whom he wishes to serve look very kindly on a man who treats his own wife with unpoliteness. _Che cuore deve avere!_ says she: What a heart he must have! _Io non mene fido sicuro_: I shall take care not to trust him sure. National character is a great matter: I did not know there had been such a difference in the ways of thinking, merely from custom and climate, as I see there is; though one has always read of it: it was however entertaining enough to hear a travelled gentleman haranguing away three nights ago at our house in praise of English cleanliness, and telling his auditors how all the men in London, _that were noble_, put on a clean shirt every day, and the women washed the street before his house-door every morning. "_Che schiavitù mai!_" exclaimed a lady of quality, who was listening: "_ma natural mente farà per commando del principe_."--"_What a land of slavery!_" says Donna Louisa, I heard her; "_but it is all done by command of the sovereign, I suppose_." Their ideas of justice are no less singular than of delicacy: but those are more easily accounted for; so is their amiable carriage towards inferiors, calling their own and their friends servants by tender names, and speaking to all below themselves with a graciousness not often used by English men or women even to their equals. The pleasure too which the high people here express when the low ones are diverted, is charming.--We think it vulgar to be merry when the mob is so; but if rolling down a hill, like Greenwich, was the custom here, as with us, all Milan would run to see the sport, and rejoice in the felicity of their fellow-creatures. When I express my admiration of such condescending sweetness, they reply--_è un uomo come un altro;--è battezzato come noi_; and the like--Why he is a man of the same nature as we: he has been christened as well as ourselves, they reply. Yet do I not for this reason condemn the English as naturally haughty above their continental neighbours. Our government has left so narrow a space between the upper and under ranks of people in Great Britain--while our charitable and truly Christian religion is still so constantly employed in raising the depressed, by giving them means of changing their situation, that if our persons of condition fail even for a moment to watch their post, maintaining by dignity what they or their fathers have acquired by merit, they are instantly and suddenly broken in upon by the well-employed talents, or swiftly-acquired riches, of men born on the other side the thin partition; whilst in Italy the gulph is totally impassable, and birth alone can entitle man or woman to the society of gentlemen and ladies. This firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which I once heard a Venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one angel to another) accounts immediately for a little conversation which I am now going to relate. Here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this town in the manner of the streets at Paris. "I hope," said I, "that they will hang the murderer." "I rather hope," replied a very sensible lady who sate near me, "that they will hang the person who broke the lamps: for," added she, "the first committed his crime only out of revenge, poor fellow! because the other had got his mistress from him by treachery; but this creature has had the impudence to break our fine new lamps, all for the sake of spiting _the Arch-duke_." The Arch-duke meantime hangs nobody at all; but sets his prisoners to work upon the roads, public buildings, &c. where they labour in their chains; and where, strange to tell! they often insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as they go by; and, stranger still! they are not punished for it when they do. Here is certainly much despotic power in Italy, but, I fancy, very little oppression; perhaps authority, once acknowledged, does not delight itself always by the fatigue of exertion. _Sat est prostrasse leoni_ is an old adage, with which perhaps I may be the better acquainted, as it is the motto to my own coat of arms; and unless sovereignty is hungry, for ought I see, he does not certainly _devour_. The certainty of their irrevocable doom, softened by kind usage from their superiors, makes, in the mean time, an odd sort of humorous drollery spring up among the common people, who are much happier here at Milan than I expected to find them: every great house giving meat, broth, &c. to poor dependents with liberal good-nature enough, so that mighty little wandering misery is seen in the streets; unlike those of Genoa, who seem mocked with the word _liberty_, while sorrow, sickness, and the most pinching want, pine at the doors of marble palaces, whose owners are unfeeling as their walls. Our ordinary people here in Lombardy are well clothed, fat, stout, and merry; and desirous to divert themselves, and their protectors, whom they love at their hearts. There is however a degree of effrontery among the women that amazes me, and of which I had no idea, till a friend shewed me one evening from my own box at the opera, fifty or a hundred low shop-keepers wives, dispersed about the pit at the theatre, dressed in men's clothes, _per disimpegno_ as they call it; that they might be more _at liberty_ forsooth to clap and hiss, and quarrel and jostle, &c. I felt shocked. "_One who comes from a free government need not wonder so_," said he: "On the contrary, Sir," replied I, "where every body has hopes, at least possibility, of bettering his station, and advancing nearer to the limits of upper life, none except the most abandoned of their species will wholly lose sight of such decorous conduct as alone can grace them when they have reached their wish: whereas your people know their destiny, future as well as present, and think no more of deserving a higher post, than they think of obtaining it." Let me add, however, that if these women _were_ a little riotous during the Easter holidays, they are _dilletantes_ only. In this city no female _professors_ of immorality and open libertinage, disgraceful at once, and pernicious to society, are permitted to range the streets in quest of prey; to the horror of all thinking people, and the ruin of all heedless ones. With which observation, to continue the tour of Italy, we this day leave, for a twelvemonth at least, Milano il grande, after having spent, though not quite finished the winter in it; as there fell a very heavy snow last Saturday, which hindered our setting out a week ago, though this is the sixth of April; and exactly five months have now since last November been passed among those who have I hope approved our conduct and esteemed our manners. That they should trouble themselves to examine our income, report our phrases, and listen, perhaps with some little mixture of envy, after every instance of unshakable attachment shewn to each other, would be less pleasing; but that I verily believe they have at last dismissed us with general good wishes, proceeding from innate goodness of heart, and the hope of seeing again, in a year's time or so, two people who have supplied so many tables here with materials for conversation, when the fountain of talk was stopt by deficiencies, and the little stream of prattle ceased to murmur for want of a few pebbles to break its course. We are going to Venice by the way of Cremona, and hope for amusement from external objects: let us at least not deserve or invite disappointment by seeking for pleasure beyond the limits of innocence. FROM MILAN TO PADUA. The first evening's drive carried us no farther than Lodi, a place renowned through all Europe for its excellent cheese, as out well-known ballad bears testimony: Let Lodi or Parmesan bring up the rear. Those verses were imitated, I fancy, from a French song written by Monsieur des Yveteaux, of whose extraordinary life and death much has been said by his cotemporary wits, particularly how some of them found him playing at shepherd and shepherdess in his own garden with a pretty Savoyard wench, at seventy-eight years old, _en habit de berger, avec un chapeau couleur de rose_[Footnote: In a pastoral habit, and a hat turned up with pink], &c. when he shewed them the famous lines, _Avoir peu de parens, moins de train que de rente_, &c. which do certainly bear a very near affinity to our Old Man's Wish, published in Dryden's Miscellanies; who, among other luxuries, resolves to eat Lodi cheese, I remember. The town, however, bringing no other ideas either new or old to our minds, we went to the opera, and heard Morichelli sing: after which they gave us a new dramatic dance, made upon the story of Don John, or the Libertine; a tale which, whether true or false, fact or fable, has furnished every Christian country in the world, I believe, with some subject of representation. It makes me no sport, however; the idea of an impenitent sinner going to hell is too seriously terrifying to make amusement out of. Let mythology, which is now grown good for little else, be danced upon the stage; where Mr. Vestris may bounce and struggle in the character of Alcides on his funeral pile, with no very glaring impropriety; and such baubles serve beside to keep old classical stories in the heads of our young people; who, if they _must_ have torches to blaze in their eyes, may divert themselves with Pluto catching up Ceres's daughter, and driving her away to Tartarus; but let Don John alone. I have at least _half a notion_ that the horrible history is _half true_; if so, it is surely very gross to represent it by dancing. Should such false foolish taste prevail in England (but I hope it will not), we might perhaps go happily through the whole book of God's Revenge against Murder, or the Annals of Newgate, on the stage, as a variety of pretty stories may be found there of the same cast; while statues of Hercules and Minerva, with their insignia as heathen deities, might be placed, with equal attention to religion, costume, and general fitness, as decorations for the monuments of _Westminster Abbey_. The country we came through to Cremona is rich and fertile, the roads deep and miry of course; very few of the Lombardy poplars, of which I expected to see so many: but Phaeton's sisters seem to have danced all away from the odoriferous banks of the Po, to the green sides of the Thames, I think; meantime here is no other timber in the country but a few straggling ash, and willows without end. The old Eridanus, however, makes a majestic figure at Cremona, and frights the inhabitants when it overflows. There are not many to be frighted though, for the town is thinly peopled; but exquisitely clean, perhaps for that very reason; and the cathedral, of a mixed Grecian and Gothic architecture, has a respectable appearance; while two enormous lions, of red marble, frown at its door, and the crucifixion, painted by Pordenone, with a rough but powerful pencil, strikes one at the entrance: I have seen nothing finer than the figure of the Centurion upon the fore-ground, who seems to cry out, with soldier-like courage and apostolic fervour, Truly this is the Son of God. The great clock here too is very curious: having, besides the twenty-four hours, a minute and second finger, like a stop watch, and shews the phases of the moon, with her triple rotation clearly to all who walk across the piazza. Yet I trust the dwellers at Cremona are no better astronomers than those who live in other places; to what purpose then all these representations with which Italy is crowded; processions, paintings, &c. besides the moral dances, as they call them now? One word of solid instruction to the ear, conveys more knowledge to the mind at last, than all these marionettes presented to the eye. The tower of Cremona is of a surprising height and elegant form; we climbed, not without some difficulty, to its top, and saw the flat plains of Lombardy stretched out all round us. Prospects, however, and high towers have I seen; that in Mr. Hoare's grounds, dedicated to King Alfred, is a much finer structure than this, and the view from it much more variegated certainly; I think of greater extent; though there is more dignity in these objects, while the Po twists through them, and distant mountains mingle with the sky at the end of a lengthened horizon. What I have never seen till now, we were made to observe in the octagon gallery which crowns this pretty structure, where in every compartment there are channels cut in the stone to guide the eye or rest the telescope, that so a spectator need not be fruitlessly teized, as one almost always is, by those who shew one a prospect, with _Look there! See there!_ &c. At this place nothing needs be done but lay the glass or put the eye even with the lines which point to Bergamo, Mantua, or where you please; and _look there_ becomes superfluous as offensive. The bells in the tower amused us in another way: an old man who has the care of them, delighted much in telling us how he rung tunes upon them before the Duke of Parma, who presented him with money, and bid him ring again: and not a little was the good man amazed, when one of our company sate down and played on them himself: a thing he had never before been witness to, he said, except once, when a surprising musician arrived from England, and performed the like seat: by his description of the person, and the time of his passing through Cremona, we conjectured he meant Dr. Burney. The most dreadful of all roads carried us next morning to Mantua, where we had letters for an agreeable friend, who neglected nothing that could entertain or instruct us. He shewed me the field where it is supposed the house stood in which Virgil was born, and told me what he knew of the evidence that he was born there: certain it is that much care is taken to keep the place fenced, from an idea of its being the identical spot, and I hope it is so. The theatres here are beautiful beyond all telling: it is a shame not to take the model of the small one, and build a place of entertainment on the plan. There cannot surely be any plan more elegant. We had a concert of admirable music at the house of our new acquaintance, in the evening, and were introduced by his means to many people of fashion; the ladies were pretty, and dressed with much taste; no caps at all, but flowers in their heads, and earrings of silver fillagree finely worked; long, light, and thin: I never saw such before, but it would be an exceeding pretty fashion. They hung down quite low upon the neck and shoulders, and had a pleasing effect. Mantua stands in the middle of a deep swampy marsh, that sends up a thick foggy vapour all winter, a stench intolerable during the summer months. Its inhabitants lament the want of population; and indeed I counted but five carriages in the streets while we remained in the town. Seven thousand Jews occupy a third part of the city, founded by old Tiresias's daughter, where they have a synagogue, and live after their own fashion. The dialect here is closer to that Italian which foreigners learn, and the ladies speak more Tuscan, I think, than at Milan, but it is a _lady's_ town as I told them. "Ille etiam patriis agmen ciet Ocnus ab oris Fatidicæ _Mantûs_ et Tusci filius amnis, Qui muros matrisque dedit tibi. _Mantua_ nomen." Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain, The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the _Mantuan_ town derives its name. DRYDEN. The annual fair is what contributes most to keeping their folks alive though, for such are the roads it is scarce possible any strangers should come near them, and our people complain that the inns are very extortionate: here is one building, however, that promises wonders from its prodigious size and magnificence; I only wonder such accommodation should be thought necessary. The gentleman who shewed us the Ducal palace, seemed himself much struck with its convenience and splendour; but I had seen Versailles, Turin, and Genoa. What can be seen here, and here alone, are the numerous and incomparable works of Giulio Romano; of which no words that I can use would give my readers any adequate idea.--For such excellence language has no praise, and of such performances taste will admit no criticism. The giants could scarcely have been more amazed at Jupiter's thunder, than I was at their painted fall. If Rome is to exhibit any thing beyond this, I shall really be more dazzled than delighted; for imagination will stretch no further, and admiration will endure no more. * * * * * Sunday, April 10. Here is no appearance of spring yet, though so late in the year; what must it be in England? One almond and one plum tree have I seen in blossom; but no green leaf out of the bud: so cheerless has been the road between Mantua and Verona, which, however, makes amends for all on our arrival. How beautiful the entrance is of this charming city, how grand the gate, how handsome the drive forward, may all be read here in a printed book called _Verona illustrata_: but my felicity in finding the amphitheatre so well preserved, can only be found in my own heart, which began sensibly to dilate at the seeing an old Roman colisseum kept so nicely, and repaired so well. It is said that the arena here is absolutely perfect; and if the galleries are a little deficient, there can be no dispute concerning the _podium_, or lower seats, which remain exactly as they were in old times: while I have heard that the building of the same kind now existing at Nismes, shews the manner of entering exceeding well; and the great one built by Vespasian has every thing else: so that an exact idea of the old Circus may be obtained among them all. That something should always be left to conjecture, is however not unpleasing; various opinions animate the arguments on both sides, and bring out fire by collision with the understanding of others engaged in the same researches. A bull-feast given here to divert the Emperor as he passed through, must have excited many pleasing sensations, while the inhabitants sate on seats once occupied by the masters of the world; and what is more worth wonder, fate at the feet of a Transalpine _Cæsar_, for so the sovereign of Germany is even now called by his Milanese subjects in common discourse; and when one looks upon the arms of Austria, a spread eagle, and recollects that when the Roman empire was divided, the old eagle was split, one face looking toward the East, the other toward the West, in token of shared possession, it affects one; and calls up classic imagery to the mind. The collection of antiquities belonging to the Philharmonic society is very respectable; they reminded me of the Arundel marbles at Oxford, and I said so. "_Oh!_" replied the man who shewed these, "_that collection was very valuable to be sure, but the bad air, and the smoke of coal fires in England, have ruined them long ago_." I suspected that my gentleman talked by rote, and examining the book called _Verona illustrata_, found the remark there; but that is _malasede_, and a very ridiculous prejudice. I will confess however, if they please, that our original treaty between Mardonius and the Persian army, at the end of which the Greek general Aristides, although himself a Sabian, attested the fun as witness, in compliance with their religion who worshipped that luminary, at least held it in the highest veneration, as the residence of Oromasdes the good Principle, who was considered by the Magians as for ever clothed with light: I will consider _that_, I say, if they insist upon it, as a marble of less consequence than the last will and testament of an old inhabitant of Sparta which is shewn at Verona, and which _they say_ disposes of the iron money used during the first of many years that the laws of Lycurgus lasted. Here is a very fine palace belonging to the Bevi-l'acqua family, besides the Casa Verzi, as famous for its elegant Doric architecture, as the charming mistress of it for her Attic wit. St. Zeno is the church which struck me most: the eternal and all-seeing eye placed over the door; Fortune's wheel too, composed of six figures curiously disposed, and not unlike our man alphabet, two mounting, two sitting, and two tumbling, over against it: on the outside of the wheel this distich, En ego Fortuna moderor mortalibus usum, Elevo, depono, bona cunctis vel mala dono[J]-- this other on the inside of the wheel, less plainly to be read: Induo nudatos, denudo veste paratos, In me confidit, si quis derisus abibit[K]. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote J: Here I Madam Fortune my favours bestow, Some good and some ill to the high and the low. ] [Footnote K: The naked I clothe, and the pompous I strip; If in me you confide, I may give you the slip. ] This is a town full of beauties, wits, and rarities: numberless persons of the first eminence have always adorned it, and the present inhabitants have no mind to degenerate; while the Nobleman that is immediately descended from that house which Giambattista della Torre made famous for his skill in astronomy, employs himself in a much more useful, if not a nobler study; and is completing for the press a new system of education. It was very petulantly, and very spitefully said by Voltaire, that Italy was now no more than _la boutique_[Footnote: The old clothes shop.], and the Italians, _les merchands fripiers de l'Europe_[Footnote: The slop-sellers of Europe]. The Greek remains here have still an air of youthful elegance about them, which strikes one very forcibly where so good opportunity offers of comparing them with the fabrics formed by their destructive successors, the Goths; who have left some fine old black-looking monuments (which look as if they had stood in our _coal smoke_ for centuries) to the memory of the Scaligers; and surely the great critic of that name could not have taken a more certain method of proving his descent from these his barbarous ancestors, than that which his relationship to them naturally, I suppose, inspired him with--the avowed preference of birth to talents, of long-drawn genealogy to hardly-acquired literature. We will however grow less prejudiced ourselves; and since there are still whole nations of people existing, who consider the counting up many generations back as a felicity not to be exchanged for any other without manifest loss, we may possibly reconcile the opinion to common sense, by reflecting that one preconception of the sovereign good is, that it should certainly be _indeprivable_ and except birth, what is there earthly after all that may not drop, or else be torn from its possessor by accident, folly, force, or malice? James Harris says, that virtue answers to the character of indeprivability, but one is left only to wish that his position were true; the continuance of virtue depends on the continuance of reason, from which a blow on the head, a sudden fit of terror, or twenty other accidents may separate us in a moment. Nothing can make us not one's father's child however, and the advantages of _blood_, such as they are, may surely be deemed _indeprivable_. Gothic and Grecian architecture resembles Gothic and Grecian manners, which naturally do give their colour to such arts as are naturally the result of them. Tyranny and gloomy suspicion are the characteristics of the one, openness and sociability strongly mark the other--when to the gay portico succeeded the sullen drawbridge, and to the lively corridor, a secret passage and a winding staircase. It is difficult, if not impossible however, to withhold one's respect from those barbarians who could thus change the face of art, almost of nature; who could overwhelm courage and counteract learning; who not only devoured the works of wisdom and the labours of strength, but left behind them too a settled system of feudatorial life and aristocratic power, still undestroyed in Europe, though hourly attacked, battered by commerce, and sapped by civilization. When Smeathman told us about twelve years ago, how an immense body of African ants, which appeared, as they moved forwards, like the whole earth in agitation--covered and suddenly arrested a solemn elephant, as he grazed unsuspiciously on the plain; he told us too that in eight hours time no trace was left either of the devasters or devasted, excepting the skeleton of the noble creature neatly picked; a standing proof of the power of numbers against single force. These northern emigrants the Goths, however, have done more; they have fixed a mode of carrying on human affairs, that I think will never be so far exterminated as to leave no vestiges behind: and even while one contemplates the mischief they have made--even while one's pen engraves one's indignation at their success; the old baron in his castle, preceded and surrounded by loyal dependants, who desired only to live under his protection and die in his defence, inspires a notion of dignity unattainable by those who, seeking the beautiful, are by so far removed from the sublime of life, and affords to the mind momentary images of surly magnificence, ill exchanged perhaps by _fancy_, though _truth_ has happily substituted a succession of soft ideas and social comforts: knowledge, virtue, riches, happiness. Let it be remembered however, that if the theme is superior to the song, we always find those poets who live in the second class, celebrating the days past by those who had their existence in the first. These reflections are forced upon me by the view of Lombard manners, and the accounts I daily pick up concerning the Brescian and Bergamase nobility; who still exert the Gothic power of protecting murderers who profess themselves their vassals; and who still exercise those virtues and vices natural to man in his semi-barbarous state: fervent devotion, constant love, heroic friendship, on the one part; gross superstition, indulgence of brutal appetite, and diabolical revenge, on the other. In all hot countries, however, flowers and weeds shoot up to enormous growth: in colder climes, where poison can scarce be feared, perfumes can seldom be boasted. Verona is the gayest looking town I ever lived in; beautifully situated, the hills around it elegant, the mountains at a distance venerable: the silver Adige rolling through the Valley, while such a glow of blossoms now ornament the rising grounds, and such cheerfulness smiles in the sweet countenances of its inhabitants, that one is tempted to think it the birth-place of Euphrosyne, where Zephyr with Aurora playing, As he met her once a maying, &c. Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair, So buxom, blythe, and debonair-- as Milton says. Here are vines, mulberries, olives; of course, wine, silk, and oil: every thing that can seduce, every thing that ought to satisfy desiring man. Here then in consequence do actually delight to reside mirth and good-humour in their holiday dress. _A verona mezzi matti_[Footnote: The people at Verona are half out of their wits], say the Italians themselves of them, and I see nothing seemingly go forward here but Improvisatori, reciting stories or verses to entertain the populace; boys flying kites, cut square like a diamond on the cards, and called Stelle; men amusing themselves at a game called Pallamajo, something like our cricket, only that they throw the ball with a hollow stick, not with the hand, but it requires no small corporal strength; and I know not why our English people have such a notion of Italian effeminacy: games of very strong exertion are in use among them; and I have not yet felt one hot day since I left France. They shewed us an agreeable garden here belonging to some man of fashion, whose name I know not; it was cut in a rock, yet the grotto disappointed me: they had not taken such advantages of the situation as Lomellino would have done, and I recollected the tasteful creations in my own country, _Pains Hill_ and _Stour Head_. The Veronese nobleman shewed however the spirit of _his_ country, if we let loose the genius of _ours_. The emperor had visited his improvements it seems, and on the spot where he kissed the children of the house, their father set up a stone to record the honour. Our attendant related a tender story to _me_ more interesting, which happened in this garden, of an English gentleman, who having hired the house, &c. one season, found his favourite servant ill there, and like to die: the poor creature expressed his concern at the intolerant cruelty of that fact which denies Christians of any other denomination but their own a place in consecrated ground, and lamented his distance from home with an anxious earnestness that hastened his end: when the humanity of his master sent him to the landlord, who kindly gave permission that he might lie undisturbed under his turf, as one places one's lap-dog in England; and _there_, as our Laquais de place observed, _he did no harm_, though _he was a heretic_; and the English gentleman wept over his grave. I never saw cypress trees of such a growth as in this spot--but then there are no other trees; _inter viburna cypressi_ came of course into one's head: and this noble plant, rich in foliage, and bright, not dusky in colour, looked from its manner of growing like a vast evergreen poplar. Our equipages here are strangely inferior to those we left behind at Milan. Oil is burned in the conversation rooms too, and smells very offensively--but they _lament our suffocation in England, and black smoke_, while what proceeds from these lamps would ruin the finest furniture in the world before five weeks were expired; I saw no such used at Turin, Genoa, or Milan. The horses here are not equal to those I have admired on the Corso at other great towns; but it is pleasing to observe the contrast between the high bred, airy, elegant English hunter, and the majestic, docile, and well-broken war horse of Lombardy. Shall we fancy there is Gothic and Grecian to be found even among the animals? or is not that _too_ fanciful? That every thing useful, and every thing ornamental, first revived in Italy, is well known; but I was never aware till now, though we talk of Italian book-keeping, that the little cant words employed in compting-houses, took their original from the Lombard language, unless perhaps that of Ditto, which every moment recurs, meaning Detto or Sudetto, as that which was already said before: but this place has afforded me an opportunity of discovering what the people meant, who called a large portion of ground in Southwark some years ago a _plant_, above all things. The ground was destined to the purposes of extensive commerce, but the appellation of a _plant_ gave me much disturbance, from my inability to fathom the meaning of it. I have here found out, that the Lombards call many things a _plant_; and say of their cities, palaces, &c. in familiar discourse--_che la pianta è buona, la pianta è cattiva_[Footnote: The _plant_ is a good or a bad one], &c. Thus do words which carry a forcible expression in one language, appear ridiculous enough in another, till the true derivation is known. Another reflection too occurs as curious; that after the overthrow of all business, all knowledge, and all pleasure resulting from either, by the Goths, Italy should be the first to cherish and revive those money-getting occupations, which now thrive better in more Northern climates: but the chymists say justly, that fermentation acts with a sort of creative power, and that while the mass of matter is fermenting, no certain judgment can be made what spirit it will at last throw up: so perhaps we ought not to wonder at all, that the first idea of banking came originally from this now uncommercial country; that the very name of _bankrupt_ was brought over from their money-changers, who sat in the market-place with a bench or _banca_ before them, receiving and paying; till, unable sometimes to make the due returns, the enraged creditors broke their little board, which was called making _bancarotta_, a phrase but too well known in the purlieus, which because they first settled there in London was called _Lombard Street_, where the word is still in full force I believe. --oh word of fear! Unpleasing to commercial ear. A visit to the collection of Signor Vincenzo Bozza best assisted me in changing, or at least turning the course of my ideas. Nothing in natural history appears more worthy the consideration of the learned world, than does this repository of petrefactions, so uncommon that scarcely any thing except the testimony of one's own eyes could convince one that flying fish, natives, and intending to remain inhabitants, of the Pacific Ocean, are daily dug out of the bowels of Monte Bolca near Verona, where they must doubtless have been driven by the deluge, as no less than omnipotent power and general concussion could have sufficed to seize and fix them for centuries in the hollow cavities of a rock at least seventy-two miles from the nearest sea. Their learned proprietor, however, who was obligingly desirous to shew me every attention, answering a hundred troublesome questions with much civility, told us, that few of his numerous visitants gave that plain account of the phenomenon, shewing greater disposition to conjure up more difficult causes, and attribute the whole to the world's eternity: a notion not less contrary to found philosophy and common sense, than it is repugnant to faith, and the doctrines of Revelation; which prophesied long ago, that in the last days should come _scoffers, walking after their own lusts_, and saying, _Where is now the promise of his coming? for since the time that our fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation._ Well! these are unpleasant reflections: I would rather, before leaving the plains of Lombardy, give my country-women one reason for detaining them so long there: it cannot be an uninteresting reason to us, when we ref left that our first head-dresses were made by _Milaners_; that a court gown was early known in England by the name of a _mantua_, from _Manto,_ the daughter of Teresias, who founded the city so called; and that some of the best materials for making these mantuas is still named from the town it is manufactured in--a _Padua_ soy. We are going thither immediately through Vicenza; where the works of Palladio's immortal hand appear in full perfection; and nothing sure can add to the elegancies of architecture displayed in its environs. I fatigued myself to death almost by walking three miles out of town, to see the famous villa from whence Merriworth Castle in Kent was modelled; and drew incessant censures on his taste who built at the bottom of a deep valley the imitation of a house calculated for a hill. Here I pleased my eyes by glancing them over an extensive prospect, bounded by mountains on the one side, on another by the sea, at so prodigious a distance however as to be wholly undiscoverable by the naked eye; nor could I, or any other unaccustomed spectator, have seen, as my Italian companions did, the effect produced by marine vapours upon the intermediate atmosphere, which they made me remark from the windows of the palace, inferior in every thing _but_ situation to Merriworth, and with that patriotic consolation I leave Vincenza. Padua la dotta afforded me much pleasure, from the politeness of the Countess Ferres, born a German; of the House of Starenberg: she thought proper to shew me a thousand civilities, in consequence of a kind letter which we carried her from Count Wiltseck, the Austrian minister at Milan; called the literati of the town about us, and gave me the pleasure of conversing with the Abate Cefarotti, who translated Offian; and the Professor Statico, whose attentions I ought never to forget. I was surprised at length to hear kind inquiries after English acquaintance made in my native language by the botanical professor, who spoke much of Doctor Johnson, and with great regard: he had, it seems, spent much time in our island about thirty years before. When we were shewn the physic garden, nicely kept and excellently furnished, the Countess took occasion to observe, that transplanted trees never throve, and strongly expressed her unfaded attachment to her native soil: though she had more good sense than to neglect every opportunity of cultivating that in which fortune had placed her. The tomb of Antenor, supposed to be preserved in this town, has, I find, but slight evidence to boast with regard to its authenticity: whosever tomb it is, the antiquity of the monument, and dignity of the remains, are scarcely questionable; and I see not but it _may_ be Antenor's. There is no place assigned for it but the open street, because it could not (say they) have contained a baptized body, as there are proofs innumerable of its being fabricated many and many years before the birth of Jesus Christ: yet I never pass by without being hurt that it should have no better situation assigned it, till I recollect that the old Romans always buried people by the highway, which made the _siste viator_[Footnote: Stop traveller] proper for their tomb-stones, as Mr. Addison somewhere remarks; which are foolishly enough engraven upon ours: and till I consider too that the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Patriarch of Antioch, where Christians were first called such, would lie no nearer a Christian Church than old Antenor does, were they unfortunate enough to die, and be put under ground at Padua. The shrine of St. Antonio is however sufficiently venerated; and the riches of his church really amazed me: such silver lamps! such votive offerings! such glorious sculpture! the bas relievos, representing his life and miracles, are beyond any thing we have yet seen; one compartment particularly, the workmanship, I think, of Sansovino, where an old woman is represented to a degree of finished nicety and curiosity of perfection which I knew not that marble could express. The hall of justice, which they oppose to our Westminster-hall, but between which there is no resemblance, is two hundred and fifty-six feet long, and eighty-six broad; the form, of it a _rhomboid_: the walls richly ornamented by Pietro d'Abano, who originally designed, and began to paint the figures round the sides: they have however been retouched by Giotto, who added the signs of the Zodiac to Peter's mysterious performances, which meant to explain the planetary influences, as he was a man deeply dipped in judicial astrology; and there is his own portrait among them, dressed like a Zoroastrian priest, with a planet in the corner. At the bottom of the hall hangs the famous crucifixion, for the purpose of doing which completely well, it is told that Giotto fastened up a real man, and justly incurred the Pope's displeasure, who coming one day unawares to see his painter work, caught the unhappy wretch struggling in the closet, and threatened immediately to sign the artist's death; who with Italian promptness ran to the picture, and daubed it over with his brush and colours;--by this method obliging his sovereign to delay execution till the work was repaired, which no one but himself could finish; mean time the man recovers of his wounds, and the tale ends, whether true or false, according to the hearer's wish. The debtor's stone at the opposite end of the hall has likewise many entertaining stories annexed to it: the bankrupt is obliged to sit there in presence of his creditors and judges, in a very disgraceful state; and many accounts are told one, of the various effects such distresses have had on the mind: but suicide is a crime rarely committed out of England, and the Italians look with just horror on our people for being so easily incited to a sin, which takes from him that commits it all power and possibility of repentance. A Frenchman whom I sent for once at Bath to dress my hair, gave me an excellent trait of his own national character, speaking upon that subject, when he meant to satirise ours. "You have lived some years in England, friend, said I, do you like it?"--"Mais non, madame, pas parfaitement bien[L]"--"You have travelled much in Italy, do you like that better?"--"Ah, Dieu ne plaise, madame, je n'aime guères messieurs les Italiens[M]." "What do they do to make you hate them so?"--"Mais c'est que les Italiens se tuent l'un l'autre (replied the fellow), et les Anglois se font un plaisir de se tuer eux mesmes: pardi je ne me sens rien moins qu'un vrai gout pour ces gentillesses la, et j'aimerois mieux me trouver a _Paris, pour rire un peu_."[N] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote L: Why no truly ma'am, not much.] [Footnote M: Oh, God forbid--no, I cannot endure those Italians.] [Footnote N: Why, really, the Italians have such a passion for murdering each other, ma'am, and the English such an odd delight in killing themselves, that I, who have acquired no taste for such agreeable amusements, grow somewhat impatient to return to Paris, and get a good laugh among my old acquaintance.] The Lucrezia Padovana, who has a monument erected here in this justice hall to her memory, is the only instance of self-murder I have been told yet; and her's was a very glorious one, and necessary to the preservation of her honour, which was endangered by the magistrate, who made that the barter for her husband's life, in defence of which she was pleading; much like the story of Isabella, Angelo, and Claudio, in Shakespear's Measure for Measure. This lady, whole family name I have forgotten, stabbed herself in presence of the monster who reduced her to such necessity, and by that means preserved her husband's life, by suddenly converting the heart of her hateful lover, who from that dreadful day devoted himself to penitence and prayer. The chastity of the Patavian ladies is celebrated by some old Latin poet, but I cannot recollect which. Lucrezia, however, was a Christian. I could not much regard the monument of Livy though, for looking at her's, which attracted and detained my attention more particularly. The University of Padua is a noble institution; and those who have excelled among the students, are recorded on tablets, for the most part brass, hung round the walls, made venerable by their arms and characters. It was pleasing to see so many British names among them--Scotchmen for the most part; though I enquired in vain for the admirable Crichton. Sir Richard Blackmore was there, but not one native of France. We were spiteful enough to fancy, that was the reason that Abbè Richard says nothing of the establishment. Besides the civilities shewn us here by Mr. Bonaldi and his agreeable lady, Signora Annetta, we were recommended by letters from the Venetian resident at Milan, to Abate Toaldo, professor of astronomy; who wished to do all in his power to oblige and entertain us. His observatory is a good one; but the learned amiable scholar, who resides in the first floor of it, complained to us that he was sickly, old, and poor; three bad qualifications, as he observed, for the amusement of travellers, who commonly arrive hungry for novelty, and thirsty for information. His quadrant was very fine, the planetarium or orrery quite out of repair; and his references of course were obliged to be made to a sort of map or chart of the heavenly bodies (a solar system at least with comets) that hung up in his room as a substitute. He had little reverence for the petrefactions of Monte Bolca I perceived, which he considered as mere _lufus naturæ_. He shewed me poor Petrarch's tomb from his observatory, bid me look on Sir Isaac's full-length picture in the room, and said, the world would see no more such men. Of our Maskelyne, however, no man could speak with more esteem, or expressions of generous friendship. His sitting chamber was a pleasant one; and I should not have left it so soon, but in compassion to his health, which our company was more likely to injure than assist. He asked me, if I did not find _Padua la dotta_ a very stinking nasty town? but added, that literature and dirt had long been intimately acquainted, and that this city was commonly called among the Italians, _"Porcil de Padua," Padua the pig-stye._ Fire is supposed to be the greatest purifier, and Padua has gone through that operation twice completely, being burned the first time by Attila; after which, Narses the famous eunuch rebuilt and settled it in the year 558, if my information is good: but after her protector's death, the Longobards burned her again, and she lay in ashes till Charlemagne restored her to more than original beauty. Under Otho she, like many other cities of Italy, was governed by her own laws, and remained a republic till the year 1237, when she received the German yoke, afterwards broken by the Scaligers; nor was their treacherous assassination followed by less than the loss both of Verona and this city, which was found in possession of the Emperor Maximilian some years after: but when the State of Venice recovered their dominion over it in 1409, they fortified it so strongly that the confederate princes united in the league of Cambray assaulted it in vain. Santa Giustina's church is the most beautiful place of worship I have ever yet seen; so regularly, so uniformly noble, uncrowded with figures too: the entrance strikes you with its simple grandeur, while the small chapels to the right and left hand are kept back behind a colonade of pillars, and do not distract attention and create confusion of ideas, as do the numerous cupolas of St. Anthony's more magnificent but less pleasing structure. The high altar here at Santa Giustina's church stands at the end, and greatly increases the effect on entering, which always suffers when the length is broken. Nothing, however, is to be perfect in this world, and Paul Veronese's fine view of the suffering martyr has not size enough for the place; and is beside crowded with small unconsequential figures, which cannot be distinguished at a distance. Some carvings round the altar, representing, in wooden bas-reliefs, the history of the Old and New Testament, are admirable in their kind; and I am told that the organ on which Bertoni, a blind nephew of Ferdinand, our well-known composer, played to entertain us, is one of the first in Italy: but an ordinary instrument would have charmed us had he touched it. I must not leave the Terra Firma, as they call it, without mentioning once more some of the animals it produces; among which the asses are so justly renowned for their size and beauty, that _come un afino di Padua_ is proverbial when speaking of strength among the Italians: how should it be otherwise indeed, where every herb and every shrub breathes fragrance; and where the quantity as well as quality of their food naturally so increases their milk, that I should think some of them. might yield as much as an ordinary cow? When I was at Genoa, I remember remarking something like this to Doctor Batt, an English physician settled there; and expressed my surprise that our consumptive country-folks, with whom the Italians never cease to reproach us, do not, when they come here for health, rely much on the beneficial produce of these asses for a cure; which, if it is hastened by their assistance in our island, must surely be performed much quicker in this. The answer would have been better recollected, I fancy, had it appeared to me more satisfactory; but he knew what he was talking of, and I did not; so conclude he despised me accordingly. The Carinthian bulls too, that do all the heavy work in this rich and heavy land, how wonderfully handsome they are! Such symmetry and beauty have I never seen in any cattle, scarcely in those of Derbyshire, where so much attention has been bestowed upon their breeding. The colour here is so elegant; they are almost all blue roans, like Lord Grosvenor's horses in London, or those of the Duke of Cestos at Milan: the horns longer, and much more finely shaped, than those of our bulls, and white as polished ivory, tapering off to a point, with a bright black tip at the end, resembling an ermine's tail. As this creature is not a native, but only a neighbour of Italy, we will say no more about him. A transplanted Hollander, carried thither originally from China, seems to thrive particularly well in this part of the world; the little pug dog, or Dutch mastiff, which our English ladies were once so fond of, that poor Garrick thought it worth his while to ridicule them for it in the famous dramatic satire called Lethe, has quitted London for Padua, I perceive; where he is restored happily to his former honours, and every carriage I meet here has a _pug_ in it. That breed of dogs is now so near extirpated among us, that I recoiled: only Lord Penryn who possesses such an animal; and I doubt not but many of the under-classes among brutes do in the same manner extinguish and revive by chance, caprice, or accident perpetually, through many tracts of the inhabited world, so as to remain out of sight in certain districts for centuries together. This town, as Abbé Toaldo observed, is old, and dirty, and melancholy-looking, _in itself_; but Terence told us long ago, and truly, "that it was not the walls, but the company, made every place delightful:" and these inhabitants, though few in number, are so exceedingly cheerful, so charming, their language is so mellifluous, their manners so soothing, I can scarcely bear to leave them without tears. Verona was the first place I felt reluctance to quit; but the Venetian state certainly possesses uncommon, and to me almost unaccountable, attractions. Be that as it will, we leave these sweet Paduans to-morrow; the coach is disposed of, and we are to set out upon our watry journey to their wonderfully-situated metropolis, or as they call it prettily, _La Bella Dominante_. VENICE. We went down the Brenta in a barge that brought us in eight hours to Venice, the first appearance of which revived all the ideas inspired by Canaletti, whose views of this town are most scrupulously exact; those especially which one sees at the Queen of England's house in St. James's Park; to such a degree indeed, that we knew all the famous towers, steeples, &c. before we reached them. It was wonderfully entertaining to find thus realized all the pleasures that excellent painter had given us so many times reason to expect; and I do believe that Venice, like other Italian beauties, will be observed to possess features so striking, so prominent, and so discriminated, that her portrait, like theirs, will not be found difficult to take, nor the impression she has once made easy to erase. British charms captivate less powerfully, less certainly, less suddenly: but being of a softer sort increase upon acquaintance; and after the connexion has continued for some years, will be relinquished with pain, perhaps even in exchange for warmer colouring and stronger expression. St. Mark's Place, after all I had read and all I had heard of it, exceeded expectation: such a cluster of excellence, such a constellation of artificial beauties, my mind had never ventured to excite the idea of within herself; though assisted with all the powers of doing so which painters can bestow, and with all the advantages derived from verbal and written description. It was half an hour before I could think of looking for the bronze horses, of which one has heard so much; and from which when one has once begun to look, there is no possibility of withdrawing one's attention. The general effect produced by such architecture, such painting, such pillars; illuminated as I saw them last night by the moon at full, rising out of the sea, produced an effect like enchantment; and indeed the more than magical sweetness of Venetian planners, dialect, and address, confirms one's notion, and realizes the scenes laid by Fenelon in their once tributary island of Cyprus. The pole set up as commemorative of their past dominion over it, grieves one the more, when every hour shews how congenial that place must have been to them, if every thing one reads of it has any foundation in truth. The Ducal palace is so beautiful, it were worth while almost to cross the Alps to see that, and return home again: and St. Mark's church, whose Mosaic paintings on the outside are surpassed by no work of art, delights one no less on entering, with its numberless rarities; the flooring first, which is all paved with precious stones of the second rank, in small squares, not bigger than a playing card, and sometimes less. By the second rank in gems I mean, carnelion, agate, jasper, serpentine, and verd antique; on which you place your feet without remorse, but not without a very odd sensation, when you find the ground undulated beneath them, to represent the waves of the sea, and perpetuate marine ideas, which prevail in every thing at Venice. We were not shewn the treasury, and it was impossible to get a sight of the manuscript in St. Mark's own hand-writing, carefully preserved here, and justly esteemed even beyond the jewels given as votive offerings to his shrine, which are of immense value. The pictures in the Doge's house are a magnificent collection; and the Noah's Ark by Bassano would doubtless afford an actual study for natural historians as well as painters, and is considered as a model of perfection from which succeeding artists may learn to draw animal life: scarcely a creature can be recollected which has not its proper place in the picture; but the pensive cat upon the fore-ground took most of my attention, and held it away from the meeting of the Pope and Doge by the other brother Bassano, who here proves that his pencil is not divested of dignity, as the connoisseurs sometimes tell us that he is. But it is not one picture, or two, or twenty, that seizes one's mind here; it is the accumulation of various objects, each worthy to detain it. Wonderful indeed, and sweetly-satisfying to the intellectual appetite, is the variety, the plenty of pleasures which serve to enchain the imagination, and fascinate the traveller's eye, keeping it ever on this _little spot_; for though I have heard some of the inhabitants talk of its vastness, it is scarcely bigger than our Portman Square, I think, not larger at the very most than Lincoln's-Inn-Fields. It is indeed observable that few people know how to commend a thing so as to make their praises enhance its value. One hears a pretty woman not unfrequently admired for her wit, a woman of talents wondered at for her beauty; while I can think on no reason for such perversion of language, unless it is that a small share of elegance will content those whose delight is to hear declamation; and that the most hackeyed sentiments will seem new, when uttered by a pair of rosy lips, and seconded by the expression of eyes from which every thing may be expected. To return to St. Mark's Place, whence _we have never strayed_: I must mention those pictures which represent his miracles, and the carrying his body away from Alexandria: events attested so as to bring them credit from many wise men, and which have more authenticity of their truth, than many stories told one up and down here. So great is the devotion of the common people here to their tutelar saint, that when they cry out, as we do _Old England for ever_! they do not say, _Viva Venezia_! but _Viva San Marco_! And I doubt much if that was not once the way with _us_; in one of Shakespear's plays an expiring prince being near to give all up for gone, is animated by his son in these words, "_Courage father_, cry _St. George_!" We had an opportunity of seeing _his_ day celebrated with a very grand procession the other morning, April 23, when a live boy personated the hero of the show; but fate so still upon his painted courser, that it was long before I perceived him to breathe. The streets were vastly crowded with spectators, that in every place make the principal part of the _spectacle_. It is odd that a custom which in contemplation seems so unlikely to please, should when put in practice appear highly necessary, and productive of an effect which can be obtained no other way. Were the houses in Parliament Street to hang damask curtains, worked carpets, pieces of various coloured silks, with fringe or lace round them, out of every window when the King of England goes to the House, with numberless well-dressed ladies leaning out to see him pass, it would give one an idea of the continental towns upon a gala day. But our people would be apt to cry out, _Monmouth Street!_ and look ashamed if their neighbours saw the same deckerwork counterpane or crimson curtain produced at Easter, which made a figure at Christmas the December before; so that no end would be put to expence in our country, were such a fancy to take place. The rainy weather beside would spoil all our finery at once; and _here_, though it is still cold enough to be sure, and the women wear sattins, yet still one shivers over a bad fire only because there is no place to walk and warm one's self; for I have not seen a drop of rain. The truth is, this town cannot be a wholesome one, for there is scarcely a possibility of taking exercise; nor have I been once able to circulate my blood by motion since our arrival, except perhaps by climbing the beautiful tower which stands (as every thing else does) in St. Mark's Place. And you may drive a garden-chair up _that_, so easy is the ascent, so broad and luminous the way. From the top is presented to one's sight the most striking of all prospects, water bounded by land--not land by water.--The curious and elegant islets upon which, and into which, the piles of Venice are driven, exhibiting clusters of houses, churches, palaces, every thing--started up in the midst of the sea, so as to excite amazement. But the horses have not been spoken of, though one pair drew Apollo's car at Delphos. The other, which we call modern, and laugh while we call them so, were made however before the days of Constantine the Great. They are of bright yellow brass, not black bronze, as I expected to find them, and grace the glorious church I am never weary of admiring; where I went one day on purpose to find out the red marble on which Pope Alexander III. sate, and placed his foot upon the neck of the Emperor: the stone has this inscription half legible round it, _Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis_[Footnote: Thou shalt tread on the asp and the basilisk]. How does this lovely Piazza di San Marco render a newly-arrived spectator breathless with delight! while not a span of it is unoccupied by actual beauty; though the whole appears uncrowded, as in the works of nature, not of art. It was upon the day appointed for making a new chancellor, however, that one ought to have looked at this lovely city; when every shop, adorned with its own peculiar produce, was disposed to hail the passage of its favourite, in a manner so lively, so luxuriant, and at the same time so tasteful--there's no telling. Milliners crowned the new dignitary's picture with flowers, while columns of gauze, twisted round with ribband, in the most elegant style, supported the figure on each side, and made the prettiest appearance possible. The furrier formed his skins into representations of the animal they had once belonged to; so the lion was seen dandling the kid at one door, while the fox stood courting a badger out of his hole at the other. The poulterers and fruiterers were by many thought the most beautiful shops in town, from the variety of fancies displayed in the disposal of their goods; and I admired at the truly Italian ingenuity of a gunsmith, who had found the art of turning his instruments of terror into objects of delight, by his judicious manner of placing and arranging them. Every shop was illuminated with a large glass chandelier before it, besides the wax candles and coloured lamps interspersed among the ornaments within. The senators have much the appearance of our lawyers going robed to Westminster Hall, but the _gentiluomini_, as they are called, wear red dresses, and remind me of the Doctors of the ecclesiastical courts in Doctors Commons. It is observable that all long robes denote peaceful occupations, and that the short cut coat is the emblem of a military profession, once the disgrace of humanity, now unfortunately become its false and cruel pride. When the enemies of King David meant to declare war against him, they cut the skirts of his ambassador's clothes off, to shew him he must prepare for battle; and the Orientals still consider short dresses as a disgraceful preparation for hostile proceedings; nor could any thing have reconciled Europe to the custom, except our horror of Turkish manners, and desire of being distinguished from the Saracens at the time of the Holy War. I have said nothing yet about the gondolas, which every body knows are black, and give an air of melancholy at first sight, yet are nothing less than sorrowful; it is like painting the lively Mrs. Cholmondeley in the character of Milton's Pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure-- As I once saw her drawn by a famous hand, to shew a Venetian lady in her gondola and zendaletto, which is black like the gondola, but wholly calculated like that for the purposes of refined gallantry. So is the nightly rendezvous, the coffee-house, and casino; for whilst Palladio's palaces serve to adorn the grand canal, and strike those who enter Venice with surprise at its magnificence; those snug retreats are intended for the relaxation of those who inhabit the more splendid apartments, and are fatigued with exertions of dignity, and necessity of no small expence. They breathe the true spirit of our luxurious Lady Mary, who probably learned it here, or of the still more dissolute Turks, our present neighbours; who would have thought not unworthy a Testa Veneziana, her famous stanza, beginning, But when the long hours of public are past, And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last; Surely she had then present to her warm imagination a favourite Casino in the Piazza St. Marco. That her learned and highly-accomplished son imbibed her taste and talents for sensual delights, has been long known in England; it is not so perhaps that there is a showy monument erected to his memory at Padua, setting forth his variety and compass of knowledge in a long Latin inscription. The good old monk who shewed it me seemed generously and reasonably shocked, that such a man should at last expire with somewhat more firm persuasions of the truth of the Mahometan religion than any other; but that he doubted greatly of all, and had not for many years professed himself a Christian of any sect or denomination whatever. So have I seen some youth set out, Half Protestant, half Papist; And wand'ring long the world about, Some new religion to find out, Turn Infidel or Atheist. We have been told much of the suspicious temper of Venetian laws; and have heard often that every discourse is suffered, except such as tends to political conversation, in this city; and that whatever nobleman, native of Venice, is seen speaking familiarly with a foreign minister, runs a risque of punishments too terrible to be thought on. How far that manner of proceeding may be wise or just, I know not; certain it is that they have preserved their laws inviolate, their city unattempted, and their republic respectable, through all the concussions that have shaken the rest of Europe. Surrounded by envious powers, it becomes them to be vigilant; conscious of the value of their unconquered state, it is no wonder that they love her; and surely the true _Amor Patriæ_ never glowed more warmly in old Roman bosoms than in theirs, who draw, as many families here do, their pedigree from the consuls of the Commonwealth. Love without jealousy is seldom to be met with, especially in these warm climates--let us then permit them to be jealous of a constitution which all the other states of Italy look on with envy not unmixed with malice, and propagate strange stories to its disadvantage. That suspicion should be concealed under the mask of gaiety is neither very new nor very strange: the reign of our Charles the Second was equally famous for plots, perjuries, and cruel chastisements, as for wanton levity and indecent frolics: but here at Venice there are no unpermitted frolics; her rulers love to see her gay and cheerful; they are the fathers of their country, and if they _indulge_, take care not to _spoil_ her. With regard to common chat, I have heard many a liberal and eloquent disquisition upon the state of Europe in general, and of Venice in particular, from several agreeable friends at their own Casino, who did not appear to have more fears upon them than myself, and I know not why they should. Chevalier Emo is deservedly a favourite with them, and we used to talk whole evenings of him and of General Elliott; the bombarding of Tunis, and defence of Gibraltar. The news-papers spoke of some fireworks exhibited in England in honour of their hero; they were "vrayment _feux de joye_" said an agreeable Venetian, they were not _feux d'artifice._ The deep secrecy of their councils, however, and unrelenting steadiness of their resolutions, cannot be better explained than by telling a little story, which will illustrate the private virtue as well as the public authority of these extraordinary people; for though the tale is now in abler hands (intending as I am told, to form a tragedy upon its basis), the summary may serve to adorn my little work; as a landscape painter refuses not to throw the story of Phaeton's petition for Apollo's car into his picture, for the purpose of illuminating the back ground, though Ovid has written the story and Titian has painted it. Some years ago then, perhaps a hundred, one of the many spies who ply this town by night, ran to the state inquisitor, with information that such a nobleman (naming him) had connections with the French ambassador, and went privately to his house every night at a certain hour. The _messergrando_, as they call him, could not believe, nor would proceed, without better and stronger proof, against a man for whom he had an intimate personal friendship, and on whose virtue he counted with very particular reliance. Another spy was therefore set, and brought back the same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise; on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for _Foscarini_ in the morning, whom the populace attended all weeping to his door. Nothing but resolute denial of the crime alleged could however be forced from the firm-minded citizen, who, sensible of the discovery, prepared for that punishment he knew to be inevitable, and submitted to the fate his friend was obliged to inflict: no less than a dungeon for life, that dungeon so horrible that I have heard Mr. Howard was not permitted to see it. The people lamented, but their lamentations were vain. The magistrate who condemned him never recovered the shock: but Foscarini was heard of no more, till an old lady died forty years after in Paris, whose last confession declared she was visited with amorous intentions by a nobleman of Venice whose name she never knew, while she resided there as companion to the ambassadress. So was Foscarini lost! so died he a martyr to love, and tenderness for female reputation! Is it not therefore a story fit to be celebrated by that lady's pen, who has chosen it as the basis of her future tragedy?--But I will anticipate no further. Well! this is the first place I have seen which has been capable in any degree of obliterating the idea of Genoa la superba, which has till now pursued me, nor could the gloomy dignity of the cathedral at Milan, or the striking view of the arena at Verona, nor the Sala de Giustizia at lettered Padua, banish her beautiful image from my mind: nor can I now acknowledge without shame, that I have ceased to regret the mountains, the chesnut groves, and slanting orange trees, which climbed my chamber window _there_, and at _this_ time too! when Young-ey'd Spring profusely throws From her green lap the pink and rose. But whoever sees St. Mark's Place lighted up of an evening, adorned with every excellence of human art, and pregnant with pleasure, expressed by intelligent countenances sparkling with every grace of nature; the sea washing its walls, the moon-beams dancing on its subjugated waves, sport and laughter resounding from the coffee-houses, girls with guitars skipping about the square, masks and merry-makers singing as they pass you, unless a barge with a band of music is heard at some distance upon the water, and calls attention to sounds made sweeter by the element over which they are brought--whoever is led suddenly I say to this scene of seemingly perennial gaiety, will be apt to cry out of Venice, as Eve says to Adam in Milton, With thee conversing I _forget all time_, All _seasons_, and their _change_--all please _alike_. For it is sure there are in this town many astonishing privations of all that are used to make other places delightful: and as poor Omai the savage said, when about to return to Otaheite--_No horse there! no ass! no cow, no golden pippins, no dish of tea!--Ah, missey! I go without every thing--I always so content there though_. It is really just so one lives at this lovely Venice: one has heard of a horse being exhibited for a show there, and yesterday I watched the poor people paying a penny a piece for the sight of a _stuffed one_, and am more than persuaded of the truth of what I am told here, That numberless inhabitants live and die in this great capital, nor ever find out or think of enquiring how the milk brought from Terra Firma is originally produced. When such fancies cross me I wish to exclaim, Ah, happy England! whence ignorance is banished by the diffusion of literature, and narrowness of notions is ridiculed even in the lowest class of life. Candour must however confess, that while the possessor of a Northern coal-mine riots in that variety of adulation which talents deserve and riches contrive to obtain, those who labour in it are often natives of the dismal region; where many have been known to be born, and work, and die, without having ever seen the sun, or other light than such as a candle can bestow. Let such dark recollections give place to more cheerful imagery. We have just now been carried to see the so justly-renowned arsenal, and unluckily missed the ship-launch we went thither chiefly to see. It is no great matter though! one comes to Italy to look at buildings, statues, pictures, people! The ships and guns of England have been such as supported her greatness, established her dominion, and extended her commerce in such a manner as to excite the admiration and terror of Europe, whose kingdoms vainly as perfidiously combined with her own colonies against that power which _they_ maintained, in spite of the united efforts of half the globe. I shall hardly see finer ships and guns till I go home again, though the keeping all together on one island so--that island walled in too completely with only a single door to come in and out at--is a construction of peculiar happiness and convenience; while dock, armoury, rope-walk, all is contained in this space, exactly two miles round I think. What pleased me best, besides the _whole_, which is best worth being pleased with, was the small arms: there are so many Turkish instruments of destruction among them quite new to me, and the picture commemorating the cruel death of their noble gallant leader Bragadin, so inhumanly treated by the Saracens in 1571. With infinite gratitude to his amiable descendant, who shewed me unmerited civility, dining with us often, and inviting us to his house, &c. I leave this repository of the Republic's stores with one observation, That however suspicious the Venetians are said to be, I found it much more easy for Englishmen to look over _their_ docks, than for a foreigner to find his way into ours. Another reflection occurs on examination of this spot; it is, that the renown attached to it in general conversation, is a proof that the world prefers convenience to splendour; for here are no superfluous ornaments, and I am apt to think many go away from it praising beauties by which they have been but little struck, and utilities they have but little understood. From this show you are commonly carried to the glass manufactory at Murano; once the retreat of piety and freedom, when the Altinati fled the fury of the Huns: a beautiful spot it is, and delightfully as oddly situated; but these are _gems which inlay the bosom of the deep_, as Milton says--and this perhaps, the prettiest among them, is walked over by travellers with that curiosity which is naturally excited, in one person by the veneration of religious antiquity; in another, by the attention justly claimed by human industry and art. Here may be seen a valuable library of books, and here may be seen glasses of all colours, all sorts, and all prices, I believe: but whoever has looked much upon the London work in this way, will not be easily dazzled by the lustre of Venetian crystal; and whoever has seen the Paris mirrors, will not he astonished at any breadth into which glass can be spread. We will return to Venice, the view of which from the Zueca, a word contracted from Giudecca, as I am told, would invite one never more to stray from it--farther at least than to St. George's church, on another little opposite island, whence the prospect is surely wonderful; and one sits longing for a pencil to repeat what has been so often exquisitely painted by Canaletti, just as foolishly as one snatches up a pen to tell what has been so much better told already by Doctor Moore. It was to this church I was sent, however, for the purpose of seeing a famous picture painted by Paul Veronese, of the marriage at Cana in Galilee--where our Saviour's first miracle was performed; in which immense work the artist is well known to have commemorated his own likeness, and that of many of his family, which adds value to the piece, when we consider it as a collection of portraits, besides the history it represents. When we arrived, the picture was kept in a refectory belonging to friars (of what order I have forgotten), and no woman could be admitted. My disappointment was so great that I was deprived even of the powers of solicitation by the extreme ill-humour it occasioned; and my few intreaties for admission were completely disregarded by the good old monk, who remained outside with me, while the gentlemen visited the convent without molestation. At my return to Venice I met little comfort, as every body told me it was my own fault, for I might put on men's clothes and see it whenever I pleased, as nobody then would stop, though perhaps all of them would know me. If such slight gratifications however as seeing a favourite picture, can be purchased no cheaper than by violating truth in one's own person, and encouraging the violation of it in others, it were better surely die without having ever procured to one's self such frivolous enjoyments; and I hope always to reject the temptation of deceiving mistaken piety, or insulting harmless error. But it is almost time to talk of the Rialto, said to be the finest single arch in Europe, and I suppose it is so; very beautiful too when looked on from the water, but so dirtily kept, and deformed with mean shops, that passing over it, disgust gets the better of every other sensation. The truth is, our dear Venetians are nothing less than cleanly; St. Mark's Place is all covered over in a morning with chicken-coops, which stink one to death; as nobody I believe thinks of changing their baskets: and all about the Ducal palace is made so very offensive by the resort of human creatures for every purpose most unworthy of so charming a place, that all enjoyment of its beauties is rendered difficult to a person of any delicacy; and poisoned so provokingly, that I do never cease to wonder that so little police and proper regulation are established in a city so particularly lovely, to render her sweet and wholesome. It was at the Rialto that the first stone of this fair town was laid, upon the twenty-fifth of March, as I am told here, with ideal reference to the vernal equinox, the moment when philosophers have supposed that the sun first shone upon our earth, and when Christians believe that the redemption of it was first announced to _her_ within whose womb it was conceived. The name of _Venice_ has been variously accounted for; but I believe our ordinary people in England are nearest to the right, who call it _Venus_ in their common discourse; as that goddess was, like her best beloved seat of residence, born of the sea's light froth, according to old fables, and partook of her native element, the gay and gentle, not rough and boisterous qualities. It is said too, and I fear with too much truth, that there are in this town some permitted professors of the inveigling arts, who still continue to cry _Veni etiam_, as their ancestors did when flying from the Goths they sought these sands for refuge, and gave their lion wings. Till once well fixed, they kindly called their continental neighbours round to share their liberty, and to accept that happiness they were willing to bestow and to diffuse; and from this call--this _Veni etiam_ it is, that the learned men among them derive the word _Venetia_. I have asked several friends about the truth of what one has been always hearing of in England, that the Venetian gondoliers sing Tasso and Ariosto's verses in the streets at night; sometimes quarrelling with each other concerning the merit of their favourite poets; but what I have been told since I came here, of their attachment to their respective masters, and secrecy when trusted by them in love affairs, seems far more probable; as they are proud to excess when they serve a nobleman of high birth, and will tell you with an air of importance, that the house of Memmo, Monsenigo, or Gratterola, has been served by their ancestors for these eighty or perhaps a hundred years; transmitting family pride thus from generation to generation; even when that pride is but reflected only like the mock rainbow of a summer sky.--But hark! while I am writing this peevish reflection in my room, I hear some voices under my window answering each other upon the Grand Canal. It is, it _is_ the gondolieri sure enough; they are at this moment singing to an odd sort of tune, but in no unmusical manner, the flight of Erminia from Tasso's Jerusalem. Oh, how pretty! how pleasing! This wonderful city realizes the most romantic ideas ever formed of it, and defies imagination to escape her various powers of enslaving it. Apropos to singing;--we were this evening carried to a well-known conservatory called the Mendicanti; who performed an oratorio in the church with great, and I dare say deserved applause. It was difficult for me to persuade myself that all the performers were women, till, watching carefully, our eyes convinced us, as they were but slightly grated. The sight of girls, however, handling the double bass, and blowing into the bassoon, did not much please _me_; and the deep-toned voice of her who sung the part of Saul, seemed an odd unnatural thing enough. What I found most curious and pretty, was to hear Latin verses, of the old Leonine race broken into eight and six, and sung in rhyme by these women, as if they were airs of Metastasio; all in their dulcified pronunciation too, for the _patois_ runs equally through every language when spoken by a Venetian. Well! these pretty syrens were delighted to seize upon us, and pressed our visit to their parlour with a sweetness that I know not who would have resisted. We had no such intent; and amply did their performance repay my curiosity, for visiting Venetian beauties, so justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. They accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which their country is renowned. The school, however is running to ruin apace; and perhaps the conduct of the married women here may contribute to make such _conservatorios_ useless and neglected. When the Duchess of Montespan asked the famous Louison D'Arquien, by way of insult, as she pressed too near her, "_Comment alloit le metier_[O]?" "_Depuis que les dames sen mélent_" (replied the courtesan with no improper spirit,) "_il ne vaut plus rien_[P]." It may be these syrens have suffered in the same cause; I thought the ardency of their manners an additional proof of their hunger for fresh prey. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote O: How goes the profession?] [Footnote P: Why since the _quality_ has taken to it ma'am, it brings _us_ in very little indeed.] Will Naples, the original seat of Ulysses's seducers, shew us any thing stronger than this? I hardly expect or wish it. The state of music in Italy, if one may believe those who ought to know it best, is not what it was. The _manner of singing_ is much changed, I am told; and some affectations have been suffered to encroach upon their natural graces. Among the persons who exhibited their talents at the Countess of Rosenberg's last week, our country-woman's performance was most applauded; but when I name Lady Clarges, no one will wonder. It is said that painting is now but little cultivated among them; Rome will however be the place for such enquiries. Angelica Kauffman being settled there, seems a proof of their taste for living merit; and if one thing more than another evinces Italian candour and true good-nature, it is perhaps their generous willingness to be ever happy in acknowledging foreign excellence, and their delight in bringing forward the eminent qualities of every other nation; never insolently vaunting or bragging of their own. Unlike to this is the national spirit and confined ideas of perfection inherent in a Gallic mind, whose sole politeness is an _appliquè_ stuck _upon_ the coat, but never _embroidered into it_. The observation made here last night by a Parisian lady, gave me a proof of this I little wanted. We met at the Casino of the Senator Angelo Quirini, where a sort of literary coterïe assemble every evening, and form a society so instructive and amusing, so sure to be filled with the first company in Venice, and so hospitably open to all travellers of character, that nothing can _now_ be to me a higher intellectual gratification than my admittance among them; as _in future_ no place will ever be recollected with more pleasure, no hours with more gratitude, than those passed most delightfully by me in that most agreeable apartment. I expressed to the French lady my admiration of St. Mark's Place. "_C'est que vous n'avez jamais vue la foire St. Ovide_," said she; "_je vous assure que cela surpasse beaucoup ces trifles palais qu'on vantetant_[Q]." And _this could_ only have been arrogance, for she was a very sensible and a very accomplished woman; and when talked to about the literary merits of her own countrymen, spoke with great acuteness and judgment. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote Q: You admire it, says she, only because you never saw the fair at St. Ovid's in Paris; I assure you there is no comparison between those gay illuminations and these dismal palaces the Venetians are so fond of.] General knowledge, however, it must be confessed (meaning that general stock that every one recurs to for the common intercourse of conversation), will be found more frequently in France, than even in England; where, though all cultivate the arts of table eloquence and assembly-room rhetoric, few, from mere shyness, venture to gather in the profits of their plentiful harvest; but rather cloud their countenances with mock importance, while their hearts feel no hope beat higher in them, than the humble one of escaping without being ridiculed; or than in Italy, where nobody dreams of cultivating conversation at all--_as an art_; or studies for any other than the natural reason, of informing or diverting themselves, without the most distant idea of gaining admiration, or shining in company, by the quantity of science they have accumulated in solitude. _Here_ no man lies awake in the night for vexation that he missed recollecting the last line of a Latin epigram till the moment of application was lost; nor any lady changes colour with trepidation at the severity visible in her husband's countenance when the chickens are over-roasted, or the ice-creams melt with the room's excessive heat. Among the noble Senators of Venice, meantime, many good scholars, many Belles Lettres conversers, and what is more valuable, many thinking men, may be found, and found hourly, who employ their powers wholly in care for the state; and make their pleasure, like true patriots, out of _her felicity_. The ladies indeed appear to study but _one_ science; And where the lesson taught Is but to please, can pleasure seem a fault? Like all sensualists, however, they fail of the end proposed, from hurry to obtain it; and consume those charms which alone can procure them continuance or change of admirers; they injure their health too irreparably, and _that_ in their earliest youth; for few remain unmarried till fifteen, and at thirty have a wan and faded look. _On ne goute pas ses plaisirs icy, on les avale_[Footnote: They do not taste their pleasures here, they swallow them whole.], said Madame la Presidente yesterday, very judiciously; yet it is only speaking popularly that one can be supposed to mean, what however no one much refuses to assert, that the Venetian ladies are amorously inclined: the truth is, no check being put upon inclination, each acts according to immediate impulse; and there are more devotees, perhaps, and more doating mothers at Venice than any where else, for the same reason as there are more females who practise gallantry, only because there are more women there who _do their own way_, and follow unrestrained where passion, appetite, or imagination lead them. To try Venetian dames by English rules, would be worse than all the tyranny complained of when some East Indian was condemned upon the Coventry act for slitting his wife's nose; a common practice in _his_ country, and perfectly agreeable to custom and the _usage du pays_. Here is no struggle for female education as with us, no resources in study, no duties of family-management; no bill of fare to be looked over in the morning, no account-book to be settled at noon; no necessity of reading, to supply without disgrace the evening's chat; no laughing at the card-table, or tittering in the corner if a _lapsus linguæ_ has produced a mistake, which malice never fails to record. A lady in Italy is _sure_ of applause, so she takes little pains to obtain it. A Venetian lady has in particular so sweet a manner naturally, that she really charms without any settled intent to do so, merely from that irresistible good-humour and mellifluous tone of voice which seize the soul, and detain it in despite of Juno-like majesty, or Minerva-like wit. Nor ever was there prince or shepherd, Paris I think was both, who would not have bestowed his apple _here_. Mean while my countryman Howel laments that the women at Venice are so little. But why so? the diminutive progeny of _Vulcan_, the _Cabirs_, mysteriously adored of old, were of a size below that of the least living woman, if we believe Herodotus; and they were worshipped with more constant as well as more fervent devotion, than the symmetrical goddess of Beauty herself. A custom which prevails here, of wearing little or no rouge, and increasing the native paleness of their skins, by scarce lightly wiping the very white powder from their faces, is a method no Frenchwoman of quality would like to adopt; yet surely the Venetians are not behind-hand in the art of gaining admirers; and they do not, like their painters, depend upon _colouring_ to ensure it. Nothing can be a greater proof of the little consequence which dress gives to a woman, than the reflection one must make on a Venetian lady's mode of appearance in her zendalet, without which nobody stirs out of their house in a morning. It consists of a full black silk petticoat, sloped just to train, a very little on the ground, and flounced with gauze of the same colour. A skeleton wire upon the head, such as we use to make up hats, throwing loosely over it a large piece of black mode or persian, so as to shade the face like a curtain, the front being trimmed with a very deep black lace, or souflet gauze infinitely becoming. The thin silk that remains to be disposed of, they roll back so as to discover the bosom; fasten it with a puff before at the top of their stomacher, and once more rolling it back from the shape, tie it gracefully behind, and let it hang in two long ends. The evening ornament is a silk hat, shaped like a man's, and of the same colour, with a white or worked lining at most, and sometimes _one feather_; a great black silk cloak, lined with white, and perhaps a narrow border down before, with a vast heavy round handkerchief of black lace, which lies over neck and shoulders, and conceals shape and all completely. Here is surely little appearance of art, no craping or frizzing the hair, which is flat at the top, and all of one length, hanging in long curls about the back or sides as it happens. No brown powder, and no rouge at all. Thus without variety does a Venetian lady contrive to delight the eye, and without much instruction too to charm, the ear. A source of thought fairly cut off beside, in giving her no room to shew taste in dress, or invent new fancies and disposition of ornaments for to-morrow. The government takes all that trouble off her hands, knows every pin she wears, and where to find her at any moment of the day or night. Mean time nothing conveys to a British observer a stronger notion of loose living and licentious dissoluteness, than the sight of one's servants, gondoliers, and other attendants, on the scenes and circles of pleasure, where you find them, though never drunk, dead with sleep upon the stairs, or in their boats, or in the open street, for that matter, like over-swilled voters at an election in England. One may trample on them if one will, they hardly _can_ be awakened; and their companions, who have more life left, set the others literally on their feet, to make them capable of obeying their master or lady's call. With all this appearance of levity, however, there is an unremitted attention to the affairs of state; nor is any senator seen to come late or negligently to council next day, however he may have amused himself all night. The sight of the Bucentoro prepared for Gala, and the glories of Venice upon Ascention-day, must now put an end to other observations. We had the honour and comfort of seeing all from a galley belonging to a noble Venetian Bragadin, whose civilities to us were singularly kind as well as extremely polite. His attentions did not cease with the morning show, which we shared in common with numbers of fashionable people that filled his ship, and partook of his profuse elegant refreshments; but he followed us after dinner to the house of our English friends, and took six of us together in a gay bark, adorned with his arms, and rowed by eight gondoliers in superb liveries, made up for the occasion to match the boat, which was like them white, blue and silver, a flag of the same colours flying from the stern, till we arrived at the Corso; so they call the place of contention where the rowers exert their skill and ingenuity; and numberless oars dashing the waves at once, make the only agitation of which the sea seems capable; while ladies, now no longer dressed in black, but ornamented with all their jewels, flowers, &c. display their beauties unveiled upon the water; and covering the lagoons with gaiety and splendour, bring to one's mind the games in Virgil, and the galley of Cleopatra, by turns. Never was locality so subservient to the purposes of pleasure as in this city; where pleasure has set up her airy standard, and which on this occasion looked like what one reads in poetry of Amphitrite's court; and I ventured to tell a nobleman who was kindly attentive in shewing us every possible politeness, that had Venus risen from the Adriatic sea, she would scarcely have been tempted to quit it for Olympus. I was upon the whole more struck with the evening's gaiety, than with the magnificence in which the morning began to shine. The truth is, we had been long prepared for seeing the Bucentoro; had heard and read every thing I fancy that could have been thought or said upon the subject, from the sullen Englishmen who rank it with a company's barge floating up the Thames upon my Lord Mayor's day, to the old writers who compare it with Theseus's ship; in imitation of which, it is said, this calls itself the very identical vessel wherein Pope Alexander performed the original ceremony in the year 1171; and though, perhaps, not a whole plank of that old galley can be now remaining in this, so often careened, repaired, and adorned since that time, I see nothing ridiculous in declaring that it is the same ship; any more than in saying the oak I planted an acorn thirty years ago, is the same tree I saw spring up then a little twig, which not even a moderate sceptic will deny; though he takes so much pains to persuade plain folks out of their own existence, by laughing us out of the dull notion that he who dies a withered old fellow at fourscore, should ever be considered as the same person whom his mother brought forth a pretty little plump baby eighty years before--when, says he cunningly, you are forced yourself to confess, that his mother, who died four months afterwards, would not know him again now; though while she lived, he was never out of her arms. Vain wisdom all! and false Philosophy, Which finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. And better is it to travel, as Dr. Johnson says Browne did, from one place where he saw little, to another where he saw no more--than write books to confound common sense, and make men raise up doubts of a Being to whom they must one day give an account. We will return to the Bucentoro, which, as its name imports, holds two hundred people, and is heavy besides with statues, columns, &c. The top covered with crimson velvet, and the sides enlivened by twenty-one oars on each hand. Musical performers attend in another barge, while foreigners in gilded pajots increase the general show. Mean time, the vessel that contains the doge, &c. carries him slowly out to sea, where in presence of his senators he drops a plain gold ring into the water, with these words, _Desponfamus te mare, in fignum veri perpetuique dominii_.[Footnote: We espouse thee, O sea! in sign of true and perpetual dominion.] Our weather was favourable, and the people all seemed happy: when the ceremony is put off from day to day, it naturally damps their spirits, and produces superstitious presages of an unlucky year: nor is that strange, for the season of storms ought surely to be past in a climate so celebrated for mildness and equanimity. The praises of Italian weather, though wearisomely frequent among us, seem however much confined to this island for aught I see; who am often tired with hearing their complaints of their own sky, now that they are under it: always too cold or too hot, or a seiroc wind, or a rainy day, or a hard frost, _che gela fin ai pensieri_[Footnote: Which freezes even one's fancy.]; or something to murmur about, while their only great nuisances pass unnoticed, the heaps of dirt, and crowds of beggars, who infest the streets, and poison the pleasures of society. While ladies are eating ice at a coffee-house door, while decent people are hearing mass at the altar, while strangers are surveying the beauties of the place--no peace, no enjoyment can one obtain for the beggars; numerous beyond credibility, fancy and airy, and odd in their manners; and exhibiting such various lamenesses and horrible deformities in their figure, that I can sometimes hardly believe my eyes--but am willing to be told, what is not very improbable, that many of them come from a great distance to pass the season of ascension here at Venice. I never indeed saw any thing so gently endured, which it appeared so little difficult to remedy; but though I hope it would be hard to find a place where more alms are asked, or less are given, than in Venice; yet I never saw refusals so pleasingly softened, as by the manners of the high Italians towards the low. Ladies in particular are so soft-mouthed, so tender in replying to those who have their lot cast far below them, that one feels one's own harsher disposition corrected by their sweetness; and when they called my maid _sister_, in good time--pressing her hand with affectionate kindness, it melted me; though I feared from time to time there must be hypocrisy at bottom of such sugared words, till I caught a lady of condition yesterday turning to the window, and praying fervently for the girl's conversion to christianity, all from a tender and pious emotion of her gentle heart: as notwithstanding their caresses, no man is more firmly persuaded of a mathematical truth than they are of mine, and my maid's living in a state of certain and eternal reprobation--_ma fanno veramente vergogna a noi altri_[Footnote: But they really shame _even us_.], say they, quite in the spirit of the old Romans, who thought all nations _barbarous_ except their own. A woman of quality, near whom I sate at the fine ball Bragadin made two nights ago in honour of this gay season, enquired how I had passed the morning. I named several churches I had looked into, particularly that which they esteem beyond the rest as a favourite work of Palladio, and called the Redentore. "You do very right," says she, "to look at our churches, as you have none in England, I know--but then you have so many other fine things--such charming _steel buttons_ for example;" pressing my hand to shew that she meant no offence; for, added she, _chi pensa d'una maniera, chi pensa d'un altra_[Footnote: One person is of one mind you know, another of another.]. Here are many theatres, the worst infinitely superior to ours; the best, as far below those of Milan and Turin: but then here are other diversions, and every one's dependance for pleasure is not placed upon the opera. They have now thrown up a sort of temporary wall of painted canvass, in an oval form, within St. Mark's Place, profusely illuminated round the new-formed walk, which is covered in at top, and adorned with shops round the right hand side, with pillars to support the canopy; the lamps, &c. on the left hand. This open Ranelagh, so suited to the climate, is exceedingly pleasing:--here is room to sit, to chat, to saunter up and down, from two o'clock in the morning, when the opera ends, till a hot sun sends us all home to rest--for late hours must be complied with at Venice, or you can have no diversion at all, as the earliest Casino belonging to your soberest friends has not a candle lighted in it till past midnight. But I am called from my book to see the public library; not a large one I find, but ornamented with pieces of sculpture, whose eminence has not, I am sure, waited for my description: the Jupiter and Leda particularly, said to be the work of Phidias, whose Ganymede in the same collection they tell us is equally excellent. Having heard that Guarini's manuscript of the Pastor Fido, written in his own hand, was safely kept at this place, I asked for it, and was entertained to see his numberless corrections and variations from the original thought, like those of Pope's Homer preserved in the British Museum; some of which I copied over for Doctor Johnson to print, at the time he published his Lives of the English Poets. My curiosity led me to look in the Pastor Fido for the famous passage of _Legge humana_, _inhumana_, _&c._ and it was observable enough that he had written it three different ways before he pitched on that peculiar expression which caused his book to be prohibited. Seeing the manuscript I took notice, however, of the beautiful penmanship with which it was written: our English hand-writing cotemporary to his was coarse, if I recollect, and very angular;--but _Italian hand_ was the first to become elegant, and still retains some privileges amongst us. Once more, every thing small, and every thing great, revived after the dark ages--in Italy. Looking at the Mint was an hour's time spent with less amusement. The depuration of gold may be performed many ways, and the proofs of its purity given by various methods: I was gratified well enough upon the whole however, in watching the neatness of their process, in weighing the gold, &c. and keeping it more free from alloy than any other coin of any other state:--a zecchine will bend between your fingers from the malleability of the metal--we may try in vain at a guinea, or louis d'or. The operation of separating silver ore from gold by the powers of aqua fortis, precipitating the first-named metal by suspension of a copper plate in the liquid, and called _quartation_; was I believe wholly unknown to the ancients, who got much earlier at the art of weighing gold in water, testified by the old story of _King Hiero's crown_. Talking of kings, and crowns, and gold, reminds me of my regret for not seeing the treasure kept in St. Mark's church here, with the motto engraven on the chest which contains it: Quando questo scrinio s'aprirà, Tutto il mondo tremerà[R]. [Footnote R: When this scrutoire shall open'd be, The world shall all with wonder flee. ] Of this it was said in our Charles the First's time, that there was enough in it to pay six kings' ransoms: when Pacheco, the Spanish ambassador, hearing so much of it, asked in derision, If the chest had any _bottom_? and being answered in the affirmative, made reply, That _there_ was the difference between his master's treasures and those of the Venetian Republic, for the mines of Mexico and Potosi had _no_ bottom.--Strange! if all these precious stones, metals, &c. have been all spent since then, and nothing left except a few relics of no intrinsic value. It is well enough known, that in the year 1450, one of the natives of the island of Candia, who have never been men of much character, made a sort of mine, or airshaft, or rather perhaps a burrow, like those constructed by rabbits, down which he went and got quite under the church, stealing out gems, money, &c. to a vast amount; but being discovered by the treachery of his companion, was caught and hanged between the two columns that face the sea on the Piazzetta. It strikes a person who has lived some months in other parts of Italy, to see so very few clergymen at Venice, and none hardly who have much the look or air of a man of fashion. Milan, though such heavy complaints are daily made there of encroachments on church power and depredations on church opulence, still swarms with ecclesiastics; and in an assembly of thirty people, there are never fewer than ten or twelve at the very least. But here it should seem as if the political cry of _fuori i preti_[Footnote: Out with the clergy.], which is said loudly in the council-chamber before any vote is suffered to pass into a law, were carried in the conversation rooms too, for a priest is here less frequent than a clergyman at London; and those one sees about, are almost all ordinary men, decent and humble in their appearance, of a bashful distant carriage, like the parson of the parish in North Wales, or _le curé du village_ in the South of France; and seems no way related to an _Abate of Milan or Turin_ still less to _Monsieur l' Abbé at Paris_. Though this Republic has long maintained a sort of independency from the court of Rome, having shewn themselves weary of the Jesuits two hundred years before any other potentate dismissed them; while many of the Venetian populace followed them about, crying _Andate, andate, niente pigliate, emai ritornate_[Footnote: Begone, begone; nothing take, nor turn anon.]; and although there is a patriarch here who takes care of church matters, and is attentive to keep his clergy from ever meddling with or even mentioning affairs of state, as in such a case the Republic would not scruple punishing them as laymen; yet has Venice kept, as they call it, St. Peter's boat from sinking more than once, when she saw the Pope's territories endangered, or his sovereignty insulted: nor is there any city more eminent for the decency with which divine service is administered, or for the devout and decorous behaviour of individuals at the time any sacred office is performing. She has ever behaved like a true Christian potentate, keeping her faith firm, and her honour scrupulously clear, in all treaties and conventions with other states--fewer instances being given of Venetian falsehood or treachery towards neighbouring nations, than of any other European power, excepting only Britain, her truly-beloved ally; with whom she never had a difference, and whose cause was so warmly espoused last war by the inhabitants of this friendly state, that numbers of young nobility were willing to run a-volunteering in her defence, but that the laws of Venice forbid her nobles ranging from home without leave given from the state. It was therefore not an ill saying, though an old one perhaps, that the government of Venice was rich and consolatory like its treacle, being compounded nicely of all the other forms: a grain of monarchy, a scruple of democracy, a dram of oligarchy, and an ounce of aristocracy; as the _teriaca_ so much esteemed, is said to be a composition of the four principal drugs--but can never be got genuine except _here_, at the original _Dispensary_. Indeed the longevity of this incomparable commonwealth is a certain proof of its temperance, exercise, and cheerfulness, the great preservatives in every body, _politic_ as well _natural_. Nor should the love of peace be left out of her eulogium, who has so often reconciled contending princes, that Thuanus gave her, some centuries ago, due praise for her pacific disposition, so necessary to the health of a commercial state, and called her city _civilis prudentiæ officina_. Another reason may be found for the long-continued prosperity of Venice, in her constant adherence to a precept, the neglect of which must at length shake, or rather loosen the foundations of every state; for it is a maxim here, handed down from generation to generation, that change breeds more mischief from its novelty, than advantage from its utility:--quoting the axiom in Latin, it runs thus: _Ipsa mutatio consuetudinis magis perturbat novitate, quam adjuvat utilitate_. And when Henry the Fourth of France solicited the abrogation of one of the Senate's decrees, her ambassador replied, That _li decreti di Venezia rassomigli avano poca i Gridi di Parigi_[Footnote: The decrees of Venice little resemble the _edicts_ of Paris.], meaning the declaratory publications of the Grand Monarque,--proclaimed to-day perhaps, repealed to-morrow--"for Sire," added he, "our senate deliberates long before it decrees, but what is once decreed there is seldom or ever recalled." The patriotism inherent in the breads of individuals makes another strong cause of this state's exemption from decay: they say themselves, that the soul of old Rome has transmigrated to Venice, and that every galley which goes into action considers itself as charged with the fate of the commonwealth. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_, seems a sentence grown obsolete in other Italian states, but is still in full force here; and I doubt not but the high-born and high-fouled ladies of this day, would willingly, as did their generous ancestors in 1600, part with their rings, bracelets, every ornament, to make ropes for those ships which defend their dearer country. The perpetual state of warfare maintained by this nation against the Turks, has never lessened nor cooled: yet have their Mahometan neighbours and natural enemies no perfidy to charge them with in the time of peace or of hostility: nor can Venice be charged with the mean vice of sheltering a desire of depredation, under the hypocritical cant of protecting that religion which teaches universal benevolence and charity to all mankind. Their vicinity to Turkey has, however, made them contract some similarity of manners; for what, except being imbued with Turkish notions, can account for the people's rage here, young and old, rich and poor, to pour down such quantities of coffee? I have already had seven cups to-day, and feel frighted lest we should some of us be killed with so strange an abuse of it. On the opposite shore, across the Adriatic, opium is taken to counteract its effects; but these dear Venetians have no notion of sleep being necessary to their existence I believe, as some or other of them seem constantly in motion; and there is really no hour of the four and twenty in which the town seems perfectly still and quiet; no moment in which it can be said, that Night! fable goddess! from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty here stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world. Accordingly I never did meet with any description of Night in the Venetian poets, so common with other authors; and I am persuaded if one were to live here (which could not be _long_ I think) he should forget the use of sleep; for what with the market folks bringing up the boats from Terra Firma loaded with every produce of nature, neatly arranged in these flat-bottomed conveyances, the coming up of which begins about three o'clock in a morning and ends about six;--the Gondoliers rowing home their masters and ladies about that hour, and so on till eight;--the common business of the town, which it is then time to begin;--the state affairs and _pregai_, which often like our House of Commons sit late, and detain many gentlemen from the circles of morning amusements--that I find very entertaining;--particularly the street orators and mountebanks in Piazza St. Marco;--the shops and stalls where chickens, ducks, &c. are sold by auction, comically enough, to the highest bidder;--a flourishing fellow, with a hammer in his hand, shining away in character of auctioneer;--the crowds which fill the courts of judicature, when any cause of consequence is to be tried;--the clamorous voices, keen observations, poignant sarcasms, and acute contentions carried on by the advocates, who seem more awake, or in their own phrase _svelti_ than all the rest:--all these things take up so much time, that twenty-four hours do not suffice for the business and diversions of Venice; where dinner must be eaten as in other places, though I can scarcely find a minute to spare for it, while such fish wait one's knife and fork as I most certainly did never see before, and as I suppose are not to be seen in any sea but this, in such perfection. Fresh sturgeon, _ton_ as they call it, and fresh anchovies, large as herrings, and dressed like sprats in London, incomparable; turbots, like those of Torbay exactly, and plentiful as there, with enormous pipers, are what one principally eats here. The fried liver, without which an Italian can hardly go on from day to day, is so charmingly dressed at Milan, that I grew to like it as well as they; but at Venice it is sad stuff, and they call it _fegao_. Well! the ladies, who never hardly dine at all, rise about seven in the evening, when the gentlemen are just got ready to attend them; and sit sipping their chocolate on a chair at the coffee-house door with great tranquillity, chatting over the common topics of the times: nor do they appear half so shy of each other as the Milanese ladies, who seldom seem to have any pleasure in the soft converse of a female friend. But though certainly no women can be more charming than these Venetian dames, they have forgotten the old mythological fable, _that the youngest of the Graces was married to Sleep._ By which it was intended we should consider that state as necessary to the reparation not only of beauty but of youth, and every power of pleasing. There are men here however who, because they are not quite in the gay world, keep themselves awake whole nights at study; and much has been told me, of a collection of books belonging to a private scholar, Pinelli, who goes very little out, as worthy attentive examination. All literary topics are pleasingly discussed at Quirini's Casino, where every thing may be learned by the conversation of the company, as Doctor Johnson said of his literary Club; but more agreeably, because women are always half the number of persons admitted here. One evening our society was amused by the entrance of a foreign nobleman, exactly what we should in London emphatically call a _Character_,--learned, loud, and overbearing; though of a carriage that impressed great esteem. I have not often listened to so well-furnished a talker; nor one more capable of giving great information. He had seen the Pyramids of Egypt, he told us; had climbed Mount Horeb, and visited Damascus; but possessed the art of detaining our attention more on himself, than on the things or places he harangued about; for conversation that can scarcely be called, where one man holds the company suspended on his account of matters pompously though instructively related. He staid here a very little while among us; is a native of France, a grandee of Spain, a man of uncommon talents, and a traveller. I should be sorry never to meet him more. The Abate Arteaga, a Spanish ecclesiastic of the same agreeable coterie, seemed of a very different and far more pleasing character;--full of general knowledge, eminent in particular scholarship, elegant in his sentiments, and sound in his learning. I liked his company exceedingly, and respected his opinions. Zingarelli, the great musical composer, was another occasional member of this charming society: his wit and repartie are famous, and his bons mots are repeated wherever one runs to. I cannot translate any of them, but will write one down, which will make such of my readers laugh as understand Italian.--The Emperor was at Milan, and asked Zingarelli his opinion of a favourite singer? "_Io penso maestà che non è cattivo suddito del principi,_" replied the master, "_quantunque farà gran nemico di giove._" "How so?" enquired the King.--"_Maestà,_" answered our lively Neapolitan, "_ella sà naturalmente che Giove_ tuona, _ma questo_ stuona." This we see at once was _humour_ not _wit_; and sallies of humour are scarcely ever capable of translation. An odd thing to which I was this morning witness, has called my thoughts away to a curious train of reflections upon the animal race; and how far they may be made companionable and intelligent. The famous Ferdinand Bertoni, so well known in London by his long residence among us, and from the undisputed merit of his compositions, now inhabits this his native city, and being fond of _dumb creatures_, as we call them, took to petting a pigeon, one of the few animals which can live at Venice, where, as I observed, scarcely any quadrupeds can be admitted, or would exist with any degree of comfort to themselves. This creature has, however, by keeping his master company, I trust, obtained so perfect an ear and taste for music, that no one who sees his behaviour, can doubt for a moment of the pleasure he takes in hearing Mr. Bertoni play and sing: for as soon as he sits down to the instrument, Columbo begins shaking his wings, perches on the piano-forte, and expresses the most indubitable emotions of delight. If however he or any one else strike a note false, or make any kind of discord upon the keys, the dove never fails to shew evident tokens of anger and distress; and if teized too long, grows quite enraged; pecking the offender's legs and fingers in such a manner, as to leave nothing less doubtful than the sincerity of his resentment. Signora Cecilia Giuliani, a scholar of Bertoni's, who has received some overtures from the London theatre lately, will, if she ever arrives there, bear testimony to the truth of an assertion very difficult to believe, and to which I should hardly myself give credit, were I not witness to it every morning that I chuse to call and confirm my own belief. A friend present protested he should feel afraid to touch the harpsichord before so nice a critic; and though we all laughed at the assertion, Bertoni declared he never knew the bird's judgment fail; and that he often kept him out of the room, for fear of his affronting of tormenting those who came to take musical instructions. With regard to other actions of life, I saw nothing particular in the pigeon, but his tameness, and strong attachment to his master: for though never winged, and only clipped a very little, he never seeks to range away from the house or quit his master's service, any more than the dove of Anacreon: While his better lot bestows Sweet repast and soft repose; And when feast and frolic tire, Drops asleep upon his lyre. All the difficulty will be indeed for us _other_ two-legged creatures to leave the sweet societies of charming Venice; but they begin to grow fatiguing now, as the weather increases in warmth. I do think the Turkish sailor gave an admirable account of a carnival, when he told his Mahometan friends at his return, That those poor Christians were all disordered in their senses, and nearly in a state of actual madness, while he remained among them, till one day, on a sudden, they luckily found out a certain grey powder that cured such symptoms; and laying it on their heads one Wednesday morning, the wits of all the inhabitants were happily restored at _a stroke_: the people grew sober, quiet, and composed; and went about their business just like other folks. He meant the ashes strewed on the heads of all one meets in the streets through many a Catholic country; when all masquerading, money-making, &c. subside for forty days, and give, from the force of the contrast, a greater appearance of devotion and decorous behaviour in Venice, than almost any where else during Lent. I do not for my own part think well of all that violence, that strong light and shadow in matters of religion; which requires rather an even tenour of good works, proceeding from sound faith, than any of these staring testimonials of repentance, as if it were a work to be done _once a year only_. But neither do I think any Christian has a right to condemn another for his opinions or practice; when St. Paul expressly says, that "_One man esteemeth one day above another, another man esteemeth every day alike; let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. But who art thou, that judgest another man's servant[Footnote: Romans, chap. xiv.]?_" The Venetians, to confess the truth, are not quite so strenuously bent on the unattainable felicity of finding every man in the same mind, as others of the Italians are; and one great reason why they are more gay and less malignant, have fewer strong prejudices than others of their countrymen, is merely because they are happier. Most of the second rank, and I believe _all_ of the first rank among them, have some share in governing the rest; it is therefore necessary to exclude ignorance, and natural to encourage social pleasures. Each individual feels his own importance, and scorns to contribute to the degradation of the whole, by indulging a gross depravity of manners, or at least of principles. Every person listed one degree from the lowest, finds it his interest as well as duty to love his country, and lend his little support to the general fabric of a state they all know how to respect; while the very vulgar willingly perform the condition exacted, and punctually pay obedience for protection. They have an unlimited confidence in their rulers, who live amongst them; and can desire only their utmost good. _How_ they are governed, comes seldom into their heads to enquire; "_Che ne pensa lù_[Footnote: Let _him_ look to that.]," says a low Venetian, if you ask him, and humourously points at a Clarissimo passing by while you talk. They have indeed all the reason to be certain, that where the power is divided among such numbers, one will be sure to counteract another if mischief towards the whole be intended. Of all aristocracies surely this is the most rationally and happily, as well as most respectably founded; for though one's heart revolts against the names of Baron and Vassal, while the petty tyrants live scattered far from each other, as in Poland, Russia, and many parts of Germany, like lions in the desert, or eagles in the rock, secure in their distance from equals or superiors; yet _here_ at Venice, where every nobleman is a baron, and all together inhabit one city, no subject can suffer from the tyranny of the rest, though all may benefit from the general protection: as each is separately in awe of his neighbour, and desires to secure his client's tenderness by indulgence, instead of wishing to disgust him by oppression: unlike the state so powerfully delineated by our incomparable poet in his Paulina, Where dwelt in haughty wretchedness a lord, Whose rage was justice, and whose law his word: Who saw unmov'd the vassal perish near, The widow's anguish, and the orphan's tear; Insensible to pity--stern he stood, Like some rude rock amid the Caspian flood, Where shipwreck'd sailors unassisted lie, And as they curse its barren bosom, die. And it is, I trust, for no deeper reason that the subjects of this republic resident in the capital, are less savage and more happy than those who live upon the Terra Firma; where many outrages are still committed, disgraceful to the state, from the mere facility offenders find, either in escaping to the dominion of other princes, or of finding shelter at home from the madly-bestowed protection these old barons on the Continent cease not yet to give, to ruffians who profess their service, and acknowledge dependence upon _them_. In the _town_, however, little is known of these enormities, and less is talked on; and what information has come to my ears of the murders done at Brescia and Bergamo, was given me at _Milan_; where Blainville's accounts of that country, though written so long ago, did not fail to receive confirmation from the lips of those who knew perfectly well what they were talking about. And I am told that _Labbia_, Giovanni Labbia, the new Podestà sent to Brescia, has worked wonderful reformation among the inhabitants of that territory; where I am ashamed to relate the computation of subjects lost to the state, by being killed in cold blood during the years 1780 and 1781. The following sonnet, addressed to the new Magistrate, by the elegant and learned Abbé Bettolini, will entertain such of my readers as understand Italian: No, Brenne, il popol tuo non è spietato, Colpa non è di clima, o fuol nemico: Ma gli inulti delitti, e'l vezzo antico D'impune andar coi ferro e fuoco a lato, Ira noi finor nudriro un branco irato D'Orsi e di lupi, il malaccorto amico Ti svenava un fellon sgherro mendico, E per cauto timor n'era onorato. Al primiero spuntar d'un fausto lume Tutto cangiò: curvansi in falci i teh, Mille Pluto perdè vittime usate. Viva l'Eroe, il comun padre, il nume Gridan le gentè a si bei dì ferbate. E sia ché ardisca dir che siam crudelé. _Imitation_. No, Brennus, no longer thy sons shall retain Of their founder ferocious, th'original stain; It cannot be natural cruelty sure, The reproaches for which from all men we endure; Nor climate nor soil shall henceforth bear the blame, 'Tis custom alone, and that custom our shame: While arm'd at all points men were suffer'd to rove, And brandish the steel in defence of their love; What wonder that conduct or caution should fail, And horrid Lycanthropy's terrors prevail? Now justice resumes her insignia, we find New light breaking in on each nebulous mind; While commission'd from Heaven, a parent, a friend Sees our swords at his nod into reaping-hooks bend, And souls snatch'd from death round the hero attend. From these verses, written by a native of Brescia, one may see how matters stood there very, _very_ little while ago: but here at Venice the people are of a particularly sweet and gentle disposition, good-humoured with each other, and kind to strangers; little disposed to public affrays (which would indeed be punished and put a sudden end to in an instant), nor yet to any secret or hidden treachery. They watch the hour of a Regatta with impatience, to make some merit with the woman of their choice, and boast of their families who have won in the manly contest forty or fifty years ago, perhaps when honoured with the badge and livery of some noble house; for here almost every thing is hereditary, as in England almost every thing is elective; nor had I an idea how much state affairs influence the private life of individuals in a country, till I left trusting to books, and looked a little about me. The low Venetian, however, knows that he works for the commonwealth, and is happy; for things go round, says he, _Il Turco magna St. Marco; St. Marco magna mi, mi magna ti, e ti tu magna un'altro_[S]. [Footnote S: The Turk feeds on St. Mark, St. Mark devours me; I eat thee, neighbour, and thou subsistest on somebody else.] Apropos to this custom of calling Venice (when they speak of it) San Marco; I heard so comical a story yesterday that I cannot refuse the pleasure of inserting it; and if my readers do not find it as pleasant as I did, they may certainly leave it out, without the smallest prejudice either to the book, the author, or themselves. The procurator Tron was at Padua, it seems, and had a fancy to drive forward to Vicenza that afternoon, but being particularly fond of a favourite pair of horses which drew his chariot that day, would by no means venture if it happened to rain; and took the trouble to enquire of Abate Toaldo, "Whether he thought such a thing likely to happen, from the appearance of the sky?" The professor, not knowing why the question was asked, said, "he rather thought it would _not_ rain for four hours at most." In consequence of this information our senator ordered his equipage directly, got into it, and bid the driver make haste to Vicenza: but before he was half-way on his journey, such torrents came down from a black cloud that burst directly over their heads, that his horses were drenched in wet, and their mortified master turned immediately back to Padua, that they might suffer no further inconvenience. To pass away the evening, which he did not mean to have spent there, and to quiet his agitated spirits by thinking on something else, he walked under the Portico to a neighbouring coffee-house, where fate the Abate Toaldo in company of a few friends; wholly unconscious that he had been the cause of vexing the Procuratore; who, after a short pause, cried out, in a true Venetian spirit of anger and humour oddly blended together, "_Mi dica Signor Professore Toaldo, chi è il più gran minchion di tutti i fanti in Paradiso?_" Pray tell me Doctor (we should say), who is the greatest blockhead among all the saints of Heaven? The Abbé looked astonished, but hearing the question repeated in a more peevish accent still, replied gravely, "_Eccelenza non fon fatto io per rispondere a tale dimande_"--My lord, I have no answer ready for such extraordinary questions. Why then, replies the Procuratore Tron, I will answer this question myself.--_St. Marco ved'ella--"e'l vero minchion: mentre mantiene tanti professori per studiare (che so to mi) delle stelle; roba astronomica che non vale un fico; è loro non sanno dirli nemmeno s'hà da piovere o nò._"--"Why it is St. Mark, do you see, that is the true blockhead and dupe, in keeping so many professors to study the stars and stuff; when with all their astronomy they cannot tell him whether it will rain or no." Well, _pax tibi, Marce!_ I see that I have said more about Venice, where I have lived five weeks, than about Milan, where I stayed five months; but Si placeat varios hominum cognoscere vultus, Area longa patet, sancto contermina Marco, Celsus ubi Adriacas, Venetus Leo despicit undas, Hic circum gentes cunctis e partibus orbis, Æthiopes, Turcos, Slavos, Arabésque, Syrósque, Inveniésque Cypri, Cretæ, Macedumque colonos, Innumerósque alios varia regione profectos: Sæpe etiam nec visa prius, nec cognita cernes, Quæ si cuncta velim tenui describere versu, Heic omnes citiùs nautas celeresque Phaselos, Et simul Adriaci pisces numerabo profundi. _Imitated loosely_. If change of faces please your roving sight, Or various characters your mind delight, To gay St. Mark's with eagerness repair; For curiosity may pasture there. Venetia's lion bending o'er the waves, There sees reflected--tyrants, freemen, slaves. The swarthy Moor, the soft Circassian dame, The British sailor not unknown to fame; Innumerous nations crowd the lofty door, Innumerous footsteps print the sandy shore; While verse might easier name the scaly tribe, } That in her seas their nourishment imbibe, } Than Venice and her various charms describe. } It is really pity ever to quit the sweet seducements of a place so pleasing; which attracts the inclination and flatters the vanity of one, who, like myself, has received the most polite attentions, and been diverted with every amusement that could be devised. Kind, friendly, lovely Venetians! who appear to feel real fondness for the inhabitants of Great Britain, while Cavalier Pindemonte writes such verses in its praise. Yet _must_ the journey go forward, no staying to pick every flower upon the road. On Saturday next then am I to forsake--but I hope not for ever--this gay, this gallant city, so often described, so certainly admired; seen with rapture, quitted with regret: seat of enchantment! head-quarters of pleasure, farewell! Leave us as we ought to be, Leave the Britons rough and free. It was on the twenty-first of May then that we returned up the Brenta in a barge to _Padua_, stopping from time to time to give refreshment to our conductors and their horse, which draws on the side, as one sees them at Richmond; where the banks are scarcely more beautifully adorned by art, than here by nature; though the Brenta is a much narrower river than the Thames at Richmond, and its villas, so justly celebrated, far less frequent. The sublimity of their architecture however, the magnificence of their orangeries, the happy construction of the cool arcades, and general air of festivity which breathes upon the banks of this truly _wizard stream_, planted with _dancing_, not _weeping_ willows, to which on a bright evening the lads and lasses run for shelter from the sun beams, Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri[T]; [Footnote T: While tripping to the wood my wanton hies, She wishes to be seen before she flies. ] are I suppose peculiar to itself, and best described by Monsieur de Voltaire, whose Pococurante the Venetian senator in Candide that possesses all delights in his villa upon the banks of the Brenta, is a very lively portrait, and would be natural too; but that Voltaire, as a Frenchman, could not forbear making his character speak in a very unItalian manner, boasting of his felicity in a style they never use, for they are really no puffers, no vaunters of that which they possess; make no disgraceful comparisons between their own rarities and the want of them in other countries, nor offend you as the French do, with false pity and hateful consolations. If any thing in England seem to excite their wonder and ill-placed compassion, it is our coal fires, which they persist in thinking strangely unwholesome--and a melancholy proof that we are grievously devoid of wood, before we can prevail upon ourselves to dig the bowels of old earth for fewel, at the hazard of our precious health, if not of its certain loss; nor could I convince the wisest man I tried at, that wood burned to chark is a real poison, while it would be difficult by any process of chemistry to force much evil out of coal. They are steadily of opinion, that consumptions are occasioned by these fires, and that all the subjects of Great Britain are consumptively disposed, merely because those who are so, go into Italy for change of air: though I never heard that the wood smoke helped their breath, or a brazierfull of ashes under the table their appetite. Mean time, whoever seeks to convince instead of persuade an Italian, will find he has been employed in a Sisyphean labour; the stone may roll to the top, but is sure to return, and rest at his feet who had courage to try the experiment. Logic is a science they love not, and I think steadily refuse to cultivate; nor is argument a style of conversation they naturally affect--as Lady Macbeth says, "_Question enrageth him_;" and the dialogues of Socrates would to them be as disgusting as the violence of Xantippe. Well, here we are at Padua again! where I will run, and see once more the places I was before so pleased with. The beautiful church of Santa Giustina, the ancient church adorned by Cimabue, Giotto, &c. where you fancy yourself on a sudden transported to Dante's Paradiso, and with for Barry the painter, to point your admiration of its sublime and extraordinary merits; but not the shrine of St. Anthony, or the tomb of Antenor, one rich with gold, the other venerable with rust, can keep my attention fixed on _them_, while an Italian _May_ offers to every sense, the sweets of nature in elegant perfection. One view of a smiling landschape, lively in verdure, enamelled with flowers, and exhilarating with the sound of music under every tree, Where many a youth and many a maid Dances in the chequer'd shade; And young and old come forth to play, On a sun-shine holiday; drives Palladio and Sansovino from one's head; and leaves nothing very strongly impressed upon one's heart but the recollection of kindness received and esteem reciprocated. Those pleasures have indeed pursued me hither; the amiable Countess Ferris has not forgotten us; her attentions are numerous, tender, and polite. I went to the play with her, where I was unlucky enough to miss the representation of Romeo and Juliet, which was acted the night before with great applause, under the name of _Tragedia Veronese_. Monsieur de Voltaire was then premature in his declarations, that Shakespear was unknown, or known only to be censured, except in his native country. Count Kinigl at Milan took occasion to tell me that they acted Hamlet and Lear when he was last at Vienna; and I know not how it is, but to an English traveller each place presents ideas originally suggested by Shakespear, of whom nature and truth are the perpetual mirrors: other authors remind one of things which one has seen in life--but the scenes of life itself remind one of Shakespear. When I first looked on the Rialto, with what immediate images did it supply me? Oh, the old long-cherished images of the pensive merchant, the generous friend, the gay companion, and their final triumph over the practices of a cruel Jew. Anthonio, Gratiano, met me at every turn; and when I confessed some of these feelings before the professor of natural history here, who had spent some time in London; he observed, that no native of our island could sit three hours, and not speak of Shakespear: he added many kind expressions of partial liking to our nation, and our poets: and l'Abate Cesarotti good-humouredly confessed his little skill in the English language when he translated their so much-admired Ossian; but he had studied it pretty hard since, he said, and his version of Gray's Elegy is charming. Gray and Young are the favourite writers among us, as far as I have yet heard them talked over upon the continent; the first has secured them by his residence at Florence, and his Latin verses I believe; the second, by his piety and brilliant thoughts. Even Romanists are disposed to think dear Dr. Young very _near_ to Christianity--an idea which must either make one laugh or cry, while Sweet peace, and heavenly hope, and humble joy, Divinely beam on _his_ exalted soul. But I must tell what I have been seeing at the theatre, and should tell it much better had not the charms of Countess Ferris's conversation engaged my mind, which would otherwise perhaps have been more seized on than it _was_, by the sight of an old pantomime, or wretched farce (for there was speaking in it, I remember), exploded long since from our very lowest places of diversion, and now exhibited here at Padua before a very polite and a very literary audience; and in a better theatre by far than our newly-adorned opera-house in the Hay-market. Its subject was no other than the birth of Harlequin; but the place and circumstances combined to make me look on it in a light which shewed it to uncommon advantage. The storm, for example, the thunder, darkness, &c. which is so solemnly made to precede an incantation, apparently not meant to be ridiculous, after which, a huge egg is somehow miraculously produced upon the stage, put me in mind of the very old mythologists, who thus desired to represent the chaotic state of things, when Night, Ocean, and Tartarus disputed in perpetual confusion; till _Love_ and _Music_ separated the elements, and as Dryden says, Then hot and cold, and moist and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music's power obey. For _Cupid_, advancing to a slow tune, steadies with his wand the rolling mass upon the stage, that then begins to teem with its _motley inhabitant_, and just representative of the _created world_, active, wicked, gay, amusing, which gains your heart, but never your esteem: tricking, shifting, and worthless as it is--but after all its _frisks_, all its _escapes_, is condemned at last to burn in _fire, and pass entirely away_. Such was, I trust, the idea of the person, whoever he was, that had the honour first to compose this curious exhibition, and model this mythological device into a pantomime! for the _mundane_, or as Proclus calls it, the _orphick_ egg, is possibly the earliest of all methods taken to explain the rise, progress, and final conclusion of our earth and atmosphere; and was the original _theory_ brought from Egypt into Greece by Orpheus. Nor has that prodigious genius, Dr. Thomas Burnet, scorned to adopt it seriously in his _Telluris Theoria sacra_, written less than a century ago, adapting it with wonderful ingenuity to the Christian system and Mosaical account of things; to which it certainly does accommodate itself the better, as the form of an egg well resembles that of our habitable globe; and the internal divisions, our four elements, leaving the central fire for the yolk. I therefore regarded our pantomime here at Padua with a degree of reverence I should have found difficult to excite in myself at Sadler's Wells; where ideas of antiquity would have been little likely to cross my fancy. Sure I am, however, that the original inventor of this old pantomime had his head very full at the time of some very ancient learning. Now then I must leave this lovely state of Venice, where if the paupers in every town of it did not crowd about one, tormenting passengers with unextinguishable clamour, and surrounding them with sights of horror unfit to be surveyed by any eyes except those of the surgeon, who should alleviate their anguish, or at least conceal their truly unspeakable distresses--one should break one's heart almost at the thoughts of quitting people who show such tenderness towards their friends, that less than ocular conviction would scarce persuade me to believe such wandering misery could remain disregarded among the most amiable and pleasing people in the world. His excellency Bragadin half promised me that some steps should be taken at Venice at least, to remove a nuisance so disgraceful; and said, that when I came again, I should walk about the town in white sattin slippers, and never see a beggar from one end of it to the other. On the twenty-sixth of May then, with the senator Quirini's letters to Corilla, with the Countess of Starenberg's letters to some Tuscan friends of her's; and with the light of a full moon, if we should want it, we set out again in quest of new adventures, and mean to sleep this night under the pope's protection:--may God but grant us his! FERRERA. We have crossed the Po, which I expected to have found more magnificent, considering the respectable state I left it in at Cremona; but scarcely any thing answers that expectation which fancy has long been fermenting in one's mind. I took a young woman once with me to the coast of Sussex, who, at twenty-seven years old and a native of England, had never seen the sea; nor any thing else indeed ten miles out of London:--And well, child! said I, are not you much surprised?--"It is a fine sight, to be sure," replied she coldly, "but,"--but what? you are not disappointed are you?--"No, not disappointed, but it is not quite what I expected when I saw the ocean." Tell me then, pray good girl, and tell me quickly, what did you expect to see? "_Why I expected_," with a hesitating accent, "_I expected to see a great deal of water_." This answer set me _then_ into a fit of laughter, but I have _now_ found out that I am not a whit wiser than Peggy: for what did I figure to myself that I should find the Po? only a great deal of water to be sure; and a very great deal of water it certainly is, and much more, God knows, than I ever saw before, except between the shores of Calais and Dover; yet I did feel something like disappointment too; when my imagination wandering over all that the poets had said about it, and finding earth too little to contain their fables, recollected that they had thought Eridanus worthy of a place among the constellations, I wished to see such a river as was worthy all these praises, and even then, says I, O'er golden sands let rich Pactolus flow. And trees weep amber on the banks of Po. But are we sure after all it was upon the _banks_ these trees, not now existing, were ever to be found? they grew in the Electrides if I remember right, and even there Lucian laughingly said, that he spread his garments in vain to catch the valuable distillation which poetry had taught him to expect; and Strabo (worse news still!) said that there were no Electrides neither; so as we knew before--fiction is false: and had I not discovered it by any other means, I might have recollected a comical contest enough between a literary lady once, and Doctor Johnson, to which I was myself a witness;--when she, maintaining the happiness and purity of a country life and rural manners, with her best eloquence, and she had a great deal; added as corroborative and almost incontestable authority, that the _Poets_ said so: "and didst thou not know then," replied he, my darling dear, that the _Poets lye_? When they tell us, however, that great rivers have horns, which twisted off become cornua copiæ, dispensing pleasure and plenty, they entertain us it must be confessed; and never was allegory more nearly allied with truth, than in the lines of Virgil; Gemina auratus taurino cornua vultu, Eridanus, quo non alius per pinguia culta, In mare purpureuin violentior influit amnis[U]; [Footnote U: Whence bull-fac'd, so adorn'd with gilded horns, Than whom no river through such level meads, Down to the sea in swifter torrents speeds. ] so accurately translated by Doctor Warton, who would not reject the epithet _bull-faced_, because he knew it was given in imitation of the Thessalian river Achelous, that fought for Dejanira; and Servius, who makes him father to the Syrens, says that many streams, in compliment to this original one, were represented with horns, because of their winding course. Whether Monsieur Varillas, or our immortal Addison, mention their being so perpetuated on medals now existing, I know not; but in this land of rarities we shall soon hear or see. Mean time let us leave looking for these weeping Heliades, and enquire what became of the Swan, that poor Phaeton's friend and cousin turned into, for very grief and fear at seeing him tumble in the water. For my part I believe that not only now he Eligit contraria flumina flammis, but that the whole country is grown disagreeably hot to him, and the sight of the sun's chariot so near frightens him still; for he certainly lives more to his taste, and sings sweeter I believe on the banks of the Thames, than in Italy, where we have never yet seen but _one_; and that was kept in a small marble bason of water at the Durazzo palace at Genoa, and seemed miserably out of condition. I enquired why they gave him no companion? and received for answer, "That it would be wholly useless, as they were creatures who never bred _out if their own country_." But any reply serves any common Italian, who is little disposed to investigate matters; and if you tease him with too much ratiocination, is apt to cry out, "_Cosa serve sosistieare cosi? ci farà andare tutti matti_[V]." They have indeed so many external amusements in the mere face of the country, that one is better inclined to pardon _them_, than one would be to forgive inhabitants of less happy climates, should they suffer _their_ intellectual powers to pine for want of exercise, not food: for here is enough to think upon, God knows, were they disposed so to employ their time; where one may justly affirm that, [Footnote V: What signifies all this minuteness of inquiry?--it will drive us mad.] On every thorn delightful wisdom grows, And in each rill, some sweet instruction flows; But some untaught o'erhear the murmuring rill, In spite of sacred leisure--blockheads still. The road from Padua hither is not a good one; but so adorned, one cares not much whether it is good or no: so sweetly are the mulberry-trees planted on each side, with vines richly festooning up and down them, as if for the decoration of a dance at the opera. One really expects the flower-girls with baskets, or garlands, and scarcely can persuade one's self that all is real. Never sure was any thing more rejoicing to the heart, than this lovely season in this lovely country. The city of Ferrara too is a fine one; Ferrara _la civile_, the Italians call it, but it seems rather to merit the epithet _solenne_; so stately are its buildings, so wide and uniform its streets. My pen was just upon the point of praising its cleanliness too, till I reflected there was nobody to dirty it. I looked half an hour before I could find one beggar, a bad account of poor Ferrara; but it brought to my mind how unreasonably my daughter and myself had laughed seven years ago, at reading in an extract from some of the foreign gazettes, how the famous Improvisatore Talassi, who was in England about the year 1770, and entertained with his justly-admired talents the literati at London; had published an account of his visit to Mr. Thrale, at a villa eight miles from Westminster-bridge, during that time, when he had the good fortune, he said, to meet many celebrated characters at his country-seat; and the mortification which nearly overbalanced it, to miss seeing the immortal Garrick then confined by illness. In all this, however, there was nothing ridiculous; but we fancied his description of Streatham village truly so; when we read that he called it _Luogo assai popolato ed ameno_[Footnote: A populous and delightful place.], an expression apparently pompous, and inadequate to the subject: but the jest disappeared when I got into _his_ town; a place which perhaps may be said to possess every other excellence but that of being _popolato ed ameno_; and I sincerely believe that no Ferrara-man could have missed making the same or a like observation; as in this finely-constructed city, the grass literally grows in the street; nor do I hear that the state of the air and water is such as is likely to tempt new inhabitants. How much then, and how reasonably must he have wondered, and how easily must he have been led to express his wonder, at seeing a village no bigger than that of Streatham, contain a number of people equal, as I doubt not but it does, to all the dwellers in Ferrara! Mr. Talassi is reckoned in his own country a man of great genius; in ours he was, as I recollect, received with much attention, as a person able and willing to give us demonstration that improviso verses might be made, and sung extemporaneously to some well-known tune, generally one which admits of and requires very long lines; that so alternate rhymes may not be improper, as they give more time to think forward, and gain a moment for composition. Of this power, many, till they saw it done, did not believe the existence; and many, after they had seen it done, persisted in _saying_, perhaps in _thinking_, that it could be done only in Italian. I cannot however believe that they possess any exclusive privileges or supernatural gifts; though it will be hard to find one who thinks better of them than I do: but Spaniards can sing sequedillas under their mistresses window well enough; and our Welch people can make the harper sit down in the church-yard after service is over, and placing themselves round him, command the instrument to go over some old song-tune: when having listened a while, one of the company forms a stanza of verses, which run to it in well-adapted measure; and as he ends, another begins: continuing the tale, or retorting the satire, according to the style in which the first began it. All this too in a language less perhaps than any other melodious to the ear, though Howell found out a resemblance between their prosody and that of the Italian writer in early days, when they held agnominations, or the inforcement of consonant words and syllables one upon the other, to be elegant in a more eminent degree than they do now. For example, in Welch, _Tewgris, todykris, ty'r derrin, gwillt_, &c. in Italian, _Donne, O danno che selo affronto affronta: in selva salvo a me_, with a thousand more. The whole secret of improvisation, however, seems to consist in this; that extempore verses are never written down, and one may easily conceive that much may go off well with a good voice in singing, which no one would read if they were once registered by the pen. I have already asserted that the Italians are not a laughing nation: were ridicule to step in among them, many innocent pleasures would soon be lost; and this among the first. For who would risque the making impromptu poems at Paris? _pour s'attirer persiflage_ in every _Coterie comme il faut_[Footnote: To draw upon one's self the ridicule of every polite assembly.]? Or in London, at the hazard of being _taken off, and held up for a laughing-stock at every print-seller's window_? A man must have good courage in England, before he ventures at diverting a little company by such devices: while one would yawn, and one would whisper, a third would walk gravely out of the room, and say to his friend upon the stairs, "Why sure we had better read our old poets at home, than be called together, like fools, to hear what comes uppermost in such-a-one's head, about his _Daphne_! In good time! Why I have been tired of _Daphne_ since I was fourteen years old." But the best jest of all would be, to see an ordinary fellow, a strolling player for example, set seriously to make or repeat verses in our streets or squares concerning his sweetheart's _cruelty_; when he would be in more danger from that of the mob and the magistrates; who, if the first did not throw dirt at him, and drive him home quickly, would come themselves, and examine into his sanity, and if they found him not _statutably mad_, commit him for a vagrant. Different amusements, like different sorts of food, suit different countries; and this is among the efforts of those who have learned to refine their _pleasures_ without so refining their _ideas_ as to be able no longer to hit on any pleasure subtle enough to escape their own power of ridiculing it. This city of Ferrara has produced some curious and opposite characters in times past, however empty it may now be thought: one painter too, and one singer, both super-eminent in their professions, have dropped their own names, and are best known to fame by that of _Il_ and _La Ferrarese_. Nor can I leave it without some reflections on the extraordinary life of Renée de France, daughter of Louis XII surnamed the Just, and Anne de Bretagne, his first wife. This lady having married the famous Hercules D'Este, one of the handsomest men in Europe, lived with him here in much apparent felicity as Duchess of Ferrara; but took such an aversion to the church and court of Rome, from the superstitions she saw practised in Italy, that though she resolved to dissemble her opinions during the life of her husband, whom she wished not to disgust, at the instant of his death she quitted all her dignities; and retiring to France, was protected by her father in the open profession of Calvinism, living a life of privacy and purity among the Huguenots in the southern provinces. This _Louis le Juste_ was he who gave the French what little pretensions they have ever obtained on which to fix the foundations of future liberty: he first established a parliament at Rouen, another at Aix; but while thus gentle to his subjects, he was a scourge to Italy, made his public entry into Genoa as Sovereign, and tore the Milanese from the Sforza family, somewhat before the year 1550. The well-known Franciscus Ferrariensis, whose name was Silvester, is a character very opposite to that of fair Renée: he wrote the best apology for the Romanists against Luther, and gained applause from both sides for his controversial powers; while the strictness of his life gave weight to his doctrine, and ornamented the sect which he delighted to defend. By a native of Ferrara too were first collected the books that were earliest placed in the Ambrosian library at Milan, Barnardine Ferrarius, whose deep erudition and simple manners gained him the favour of Frederick Borromeo, who sent him to Spain to pick up literary rarities, which he bestowed with pleasure on the place where he had received his education. His treatise on the rites of sepulture used by the ancients is in good estimation; and Sir Thomas Brown, in his _Urn Burial_, owes him much obligation. The custom of wearing swords here seems to proceed from some connection they have had with the Spaniards; and Dr. Moore has given us an admirable account of why the Highland broad-sword is still called an _Andrew Ferrara_. The Venetians, not often or easily intimidated by Papal power, having taken this city in the year 1303, were obliged to restore it, for fear of the consequences of Pope Boniface the Eighth's excommunications; his displeasure having before then produced dreadful effects in the conspiracy of Bajamonti Tiepulo; which was suppressed, and he killed, by a woman, out of a flaming zeal for the honour and tranquillity of her country: and so disinterested too was her spirit of patriotism, that the only reward she required for a service so essential, was that a constant memorial of it might be preserved in the dress of the Doge; who from that moment obliged himself to wear a woman's cap under the state diadem, and so his successors still continue to do. But Ferrara has other distinctions.--Bonarelli here, at the academy of gl'Intrepidi, read his able defence of that pastoral comedy so much applauded and censured, called _Filli di Sciro_; and here the great Ariosto lived and died. Nothing leads however to a less gloomy train of thought, than the tomb of a celebrated man; where virtue, wit, or valour triumph over death, and wait the consummation of all sublunary things, before the remembrance of such superiority shall be lost. Italy must be shaken from her deepest foundation, and England made a scene of general ruin, when Shakespear and Ariosto shall be forgotten, and their names confounded among deedless nobility, and worthless wasters of treasure, long ago passed from hand to hand, perhaps from the dwellers in one continent to the inhabitants of another. It has been equally the fate of these two heroes of modern literature, that they have pleased their countrymen more than foreigners; but is that any diminution of their merit? or should it serve as a reason for making disgraceful comparisons between Ariosto and Virgil, whom he scorned to imitate? A dead language is like common ground;--all have a right to pasture, and all a claim to give or to withhold admiration. Virgil is the old original trough at the corner of the road, where every passer-by pays, drinks, and goes on his journey well refreshed. But the clear spring in the meadow sure, though private property, and lately dug, deserves attention: and confers delight not only on the actual master of the ground, but on all his visitants who can climb the style, and lift the silver cup to their lips which hangs by the fountain-side. I am glad, however, to be gone from a place where they are thinking less of all these worthies just at present, than of a circumstance which cannot redound to their honour, as it might have happened to any other town, and could do great good to none: no less than the happy arrival of Joseph, and Leopold, and Maximilian of Austria, on the thirtieth of May 1775; and this wonderful event have they recorded in a pompous inscription upon a stone set at the inn door. But princes can make poets, and scatter felicity with little exertion on their own parts. At Tuillemont, an English gentleman once told me he had the misfortune to sleep one night where all the people's heads were full of the Emperor, who had dined there the day before; and some _wise_ fellow of the place wrote these lines under his picture: Ingreditur magnus magno de Cæsare Cæsar, Thenas, sub signo Cervi, sua prandia sumit. He immediately set down this distich under them: Our poor little town has no little to brag, The Emperor was here, and he dined at the Stag. The people of the inn concluding that this must be a high-strained compliment, it produced him many thanks from all, and a better breakfast than he would otherwise have obtained at Tuillemont. To-morrow we go forward to Bologna. BOLOGNA SEEMS at first sight a very sorrowful town, and has a general air of melancholy that surprises one, as it is very handsomely and regularly built; and set in a country so particularly beautiful, that it is not easy to express the nature of its beauty, and to express it so that those who inhabit other countries can understand me. The territory belonging to Bologna la Grassa concenters all its charms in a happy _embonpoint_, which leaves no wrinkle unfilled up, no bone to be discerned; like the fat figure of Gunhilda at Fonthill, painted by Chevalier Cafali, with a face full of woe, but with a sleekness of skin that denotes nothing less than affliction. From the top of the only eminence, one looks down here upon a country which to me has a new and singular appearance; the whole horizon appearing one thick carpet of the softest and most vivid green, from the vicinity of the broad-leaved mulberry trees, I trust, drawn still closer and closer together by their amicable and pacific companions the vines, which keep cluttering round, and connect them so intimately that no object can be separately or distinctly viewed, any more than the habitations formed by animals who live in moss, when a large portion of it is presented to the philosopher for speculation. One would not therefore, on a flight and cursory inspection, suspect this of being a painter's country, where no prominence of features arrests the sight, no expression of latent meaning employs the mind, and no abruptness of transition tempts fancy to follow, or imagination to supply, the sudden loss of what it contemplated before. Here however the great Caraccis kept their school; here then was every idea of dignity and majestic beauty to be met with; and if _I_ meet with nothing in nature near this place to excite such ideas, it is _my_ fault, not Bologna's. If vain the toil, We ought to blame the culture,--not the soil. Wonderful indeed! yet not at all distracting is the variety of excellence that one contemplates here; such matters! and such scholars! The sweetly playful pencil of Albano, I would compare to Waller among our English poets; Domenichino to Otway, and Guido Rheni to Rowe; if such liberties might be permitted on the old notion of _ut pictura poesis_. But there is an idea about the world, that one ought in delicacy to declare one's utter incapacity of understanding pictures, unless immediately of the profession.--And why so? No man protests, that he cannot read poetry, he can make no pleasure out of Milton or Shakespear, or shudder at the ingratitude of Lear's daughters on the stage. Why then should people pretend insensibility, when divine Guercino exerts his unrivalled powers of the pathetic in the fine picture at Zampieri palace, of Hagar's dismission into the desert with her son? While none else could have touched with such truth of expression the countenances of each; leaving him most to be pitied, perhaps, who issues the command against his will; accompanying it however with innumerable benedictions, and alleviating its severity with the softest tenderness. He only among our poets could have planned such a picture, who penned the Eloisa, and knew the agonies of a soul struggling against unpermitted passions, and conquering from the noblest motives of faith and of obedience. Glorious exertion of excellence! This is the first time my heart has been made really alive to the powers of this magical art. Candid Italians! let me again exclaim; they shewed us a Vandyke in the same palace, surrounded by the works of their own incomparable countrymen; and _there_ say they, "_Quasi quasi si può circondarla_[Footnote: You may almost run round her.]." You may almost run round it, was the expression. The picture was a very fine one; a single figure of the Madona, highly painted, and happily placed among those who knew, because they possessed his perfections who drew it. Were Homer alive, and acquainted with our language, he would admire that Shakespear whom Voltaire condemns. Twice in this town has Guido shewed those powers which critics have denied him: the power of grouping his figures with propriety, and distributing his light and shadow to advantage: as he has shewn it _but twice_, however, it is certain the connoisseurs are not very wrong, and even in those very performances one may read their justification: for Job, though surrounded by a crowd of people, has a strangely insulated look, and the sweet sufferer on the fore-ground of his Herodian cruelty seems wholly uninterested in the general distress, and occupies herself and every spectator completely and solely with her own particular grief. The boasted Raphael here does not in my eyes triumph over the wonders of this Caracci school. At Rome, I am told, his superiority is more visible. _Nous verrons_[Footnote: We shall see.]. The reserved picture of St. Peter and St. Paul, kept in the last chamber of the Zampieri palace, and covered with a silk curtain, is valued beyond any specimen of the painting art which can be moved from Italy to England. We are taught to hope it will soon come among us; and many say the sale cannot be now long delayed. Why Guido should never draw another picture like that, or at all in the same style, who can tell? it certainly does unite every perfection, and every possible excellence, except choice of subject, which cannot be happy I think, when the subject itself is left disputable. I will mention only one other picture: it is in an obscure church, not an unfrequented one by these pious Bolognese, who are the most devout people I ever lived amongst, but I think not much visited by travellers. It is painted by Albano, and represents the Redeemer of mankind as a boy scarce thirteen years old: ingenuous modesty, and meek resignation, beaming from each intelligent feature of a face divinely beautiful, and throwing out luminous rays round his sacred head, while the blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, placed on each side him, adore his goodness with transport not unmixed with wonder: the instruments of his future passion cast at his feet, directing us to consider him as in that awful moment voluntarily devoting himself for the sins of the whole world. This picture, from the sublimity of the subject, the lively colouring, and clear expression, has few equals; the pyramidal group drops in as of itself, unsought for, from the raised ground on which our Saviour stands; and among numberless wild conceits and extravagant fancies of painters, not only permitted but encouraged in this country, to deviate into what _we_ justly think profane representations of the deity:--this is the most pleasing and inoffensive device I have seen. The august Creator too is likewise more wisely concealed by Albano than by other artists, who daringly presume to exhibit that of which no mortal man can give or receive a just idea. But we will have done for a while with connoisseurship. This fat Bologna has a tristful look, from the numberless priests, friars, and women all dressed in black, who fill the streets, and stop on a sudden to pray, when I see nothing done to call forth immediate addresses to Heaven. Extremes do certainly meet however, and my Lord Peter in this place is so like his fanatical brother Jack, that I know not what is come to him. To-morrow is the day of _corpus domini_; why it should be preceded by such dismal ceremonies I know not; there is nothing melancholy in the idea, but we shall be sure of a magnificent procession. So it was too, and wonderfully well attended: noblemen and ladies, with tapers in their hands, and their trains borne by well-dressed pages, had a fine effect. All still in black. Black, but such as in esteem Prince Memnon's sister might beseem; With sable stole of cypress lawn, O'er their decent shoulders drawn. I never saw a spectacle so stately, so solemn a show in my life before, and was much less tired of the long continued march, than were my Roman Catholic companions. Our inn is not a good one; the Pellegrino is engaged for the King of Naples and his train: the place we are housed in, is full of bugs, and every odious vermin: no wonder, surely, where such oven-like porticoes catch and retain the heat as if constructed on set purpose so to do. The Montagnola at night was something of relief, but contrary to every other resort of company: the less it is frequented the gayer it appears; for Nature there has been lavish of her bounties, which seem disregarded by the Bolognese, who unluckily find out that there is a burying-ground within view, though at no small distance really; and planting themselves over against that, they stand or kneel for many minutes together in whole rows, praying, as I understand, for the souls which once animated the bodies of the people whom they believe to lie interred there; all this too even at the hours dedicated to amusement. Cardinal Buon Compagni, the legate, sent from Rome here, is gone home; and the vice-legate officiated in his place, much to the consolation of the inhabitants, who observed with little delight or gratitude his endeavours to improve their trade, or his care to maintain their privileges; while his natural disinclination to hypocritical manners, or what we so emphatically call _cant_, gave them an aversion to his person and dislike of his government, which he might have prevented by formality of look, and very trifling compliances. But every thing helps to prove, that if you would please people, it must be done _their_ way, not your own. Here are some charming manufactures in this town, and I fear it requires much self-denial in an Englishwoman not to long at least for the fine crapes, tiffanies, &c. which might here be bought I know not how cheap, and would make one _so_ happy in London or at Bath. But these Customhouse officers! these _rats de cave_, as the French comically call them, will not let a ribbon pass. Such is the restless jealousy of little states, and such their unremitted attention to keep the goods made in one place out of the gates of another. Few things upon a journey contribute to torment and disgust one more than the teasing enquiries at the door of every city, who one is, what one's name is? what one's rank in life or employment is; that so all may be written down and carried to the chief magistrate for his information, who immediately dispatches a proper person to examine whether you gave in a true report; where you lodge, why you came, how long you mean to stay; with twenty more inquisitive speeches, which to a subject of more liberal governments must necessarily appear impertinent as frivolous, and make all my hopes of bringing home the most trifling presents for a friend abortive. So there is an end of that felicity, and we must sit like the girl at the fair, described by Gay, Where the coy nymph knives, combs, and scissars spies, And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes. The Specola, so they call their museum here, of natural and artificial rarities, is very fine indeed; the inscription too denoting its universality, is sublimely generous: I thought of our Bath hospital in England; more usefully, if not more magnificently so; but durst not tell the professor, who shewed the place. At our going in he was apparently much out of humour, and unwilling to talk, but grew gradually kinder, and more communicative; and I had at last a thousand thanks to pay for an attention that rendered the sight of all more valuable. Nothing can surpass the neatness and precision with which this elegant repository is kept, and the curiosities contained in it have specimens very uncommon. The native gold shewed here is supposed to be the largest and most perfect lump in Europe; wonderfully beautiful it certainly is, and the coral here is such as can be seen nowhere else; they shewed me some which looked like an actual tree. It might reasonably lower the spirits of philosophy, and tend to restraining the genius of remote enquiry, did we reflect that the very first substance given into our hand as an amusement, or subject of speculation, as soon as we arrive in this great world of wonders, never gets fully understood by those who study hardest, or live longest in it. Coral is a substance, concerning which the natural historians have had many disputes, and settled nothing yet; knowing, as it should seem, but little more of its original, than they did when they sucked it first. Of gold we have found perhaps but too many uses; but when the professor told us here at Bologna, that silver in the mine was commonly found mixed with _arsenick_, a corroding poison, or _lead_, a narcotic one; who could help being led forward to a train of thought on the nature and use and abuse of money and minerals in general. _Suivez_ (as Rousseau says), _la chaine de tout cela_[Footnote: Follow this clue, and see where it will lead you to.]. The astronomical apparatus at this place is a splendid one; but the models of architecture, fortifications, &c. are only more numerous; not so exact or elegant I think as those the King of England has for his own private use at the Queen's house in St. James's Park. The specimens of a human figure in wax are the work of a woman, whose picture is accordingly set up in the school: they are reckoned incomparable of their kind, and bring to one's fancy Milton's fine description of our first parents: Two of far nobler kind--erect and tall. This University has been particularly civil to women; many very learned ladies of France and Germany have been and are still members of it;--and la Dottoressa Laura Bassi gave lectures not many years ago in this very spot, upon the mathematics and natural philosophy, till she grew very old and infirm; but her pupils always handed her very respectfully to and from the Doctor's chair, _Che brava donnetta ch'era!_[Footnote: Ah, what a fine woman was that!] says the gentleman who shewed me the academy, as we came out at the door; over which a marble tablet, with an inscription more pious than pompous, is placed to her memory; but turning away his eyes--while they filled with tears--_tutli muosono_[Footnote: All must die.], added he, and I followed; as nothing either of energy or pathos could be added to a reflection so just, so tender, and so true: we parted sadly therefore with our agreeable companion and instructor just where her cenotaph (for the body lies buried in a neighbouring church) was erected; and shall probably meet no more; for as he said and sighed--_tutti muosono_[Footnote: All must die.]. The great Cassini too, who though of an Italian family, was born at Nice I think, and died at Paris, drew his meridian line through the church of St. Petronius in this city, across the pavement, where it still remains a monument to his memory, who discovered the third and fifth satellites of Jupiter. Such was in his time the reputation of a mineral spring near Bologna, that Pope Alexander the Seventh set him to analyse the waters of it; and so satisfactory were his proofs of its very slight importance to health, that the same pope called him to Rome to examine the waters round that capital; but dying soon after his arrival, he had no time to recompence Cassini's labours, though a very elegantly-minded man, and a great encourager of learning in all its branches. The successor to this sovereign, Rospigliosi, had different employment found for _him_, in helping the Venetians to regain Candia from the Turks, his disappointment in not being able to accomplish which design broke his heart; and Cassini, returning to Bologna, found it less pleasing than it was before he left it, so went to Paris, and died there at ninety or ninety-one years old, as I remember, early in this present century, but not till after he had enjoyed the pleasure of hearing that Count Marsigli had founded an academy at the place where he had studied whilst his faculties were strong. Another church, situated on the only hill one can observe for miles, is dedicated to the Madonna St. Luc, as it is called; and a very beautiful and curiously covered way is made to it up the hill, for three miles in length, and at a prodigious expence, to guard the figure from the rain as it is carried in procession. The ascent is so gentle that one hardly feels it. Pillars support the roof, which defends you from a sun-stroke, while the air and prospect are let in between them on the right hand as you go. The left side is closed up by a wall, adorned from time to time with fresco paintings, representing the birth and most distinguished passages in the life of the blessed Virgin. Round these paintings a little chapel is railed in, open, airy, and elegantly, not very pompously, adorned; there are either seven or twelve of them, I forget which, that serve to rest the procession as it passes, on days particularly dedicated to her service. When you arrive at the top, a church of a most beautiful construction recompenses your long but not tedious walk, and there are some admirable pictures in it, particularly one of St. William laying down his armour, and taking up the habit of a Carthusian, very fine--but the figure of the Madonna is the prize they value, and before this I did see some men kneel with a truly idolatrous devotion. That it was painted by St. Luke is believed by them all. But if it _was_ painted by St. Luke, said I, what then? do you think _he_, or the still more excellent person it was done for, would approve of your worshipping any thing but God? To this no answer was made; and I thought one man looked as if he had grace enough to be ashamed of himself. The girls, who sit in clusters at the chapel doors as one goes up, singing hymns in praise of the Virgin Mary, pleased me much, as it was a mode of veneration inoffensive to religion, and agreeable to the fancy; but seeing them bow down to that black figure, in open defiance of the Decalogue, shocked me. Why all the _very very_ early pictures of the Virgin, and many of our blessed Saviour himself, done in the first ages of Christianity should be _black_, or at least tawny, is to me wholly incomprehensible, nor could I ever yet obtain an explanation of its cause from men of learning or from connoisseurs. We have in England a black Madonna, very ancient of course, and of immense value, in the cathedral of Wells in Somersetshire; it is painted on glass, and stands in the middle pane of the upper window I think, is a profile face, and eminently handsome. My mind tells me that I have seen another somewhere in Great Britain, but cannot recollect the spot, unless it were Arundel Castle in Sussex, but I am not sure: none was ever painted so since the days of Pietro Perugino I believe, so their antiquity is unquestionable: he and his few contemporaries drew her white, as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Pompeio Battoni. Whilst I perambulated the palaces of the Bolognese nobility, gloomy though spacious, and melancholy though splendid, I could not but admire at Richardson's judgment when he makes his beautiful Bigot, his interesting Clementina, an inhabitant of superstitious Bologna. The unconquerable attachment she shews to original prejudices, and the horror of what she has been taught to consider as heresy, could scarcely have been attributed so happily to the dweller in any town but this: where I hear nothing but the sound of people saying their rosaries, and see nothing in the street but people telling their beads. The Porretta palace is hourly presenting itself to my imagination, which delights in the assurance that genius cannot be confined by place. Dear Richardson at Salisbury Court Fleet Street, and Parson's Green Fulham, felt all within him that travelling can tell, or experience confirm: he had seen little, and Johnson has often told me that he had read little; but what he did read never forsook a memory that was not contented with retaining, but fermented all that fell into it, and made a new creation from the fertility of his own rich mind.--These are the men for whom monuments need not be erected. They in our pleasure and astonishment, Do build themselves a live long monument; as Milton says of a much greater writer still. But the King of Naples is arrived, and that attention which wits and scholars can retain for centuries, may not be unjustly paid to princes while they last. Our Bolognese have hit upon an odd method of entertaining him however: no other than making a representation of Mount Vesuvius on the Montagnuola, or place of evening resort, hoping at least to treat him with something new I trow. Were the King of England to visit these _cari Bolognese_, surely they would shew him Westminster Bridge, with a view of the Archbishop's palace at Lambeth on one side the river, and Somerset-house on the other. A pretty throne, or state-box, was soon got in order, _that it was_; and the motion excited by carrying the fire-works to have them prepared for the evening's show, gave life to the morning, which hung less heavily than usual; nor did the people recollect the church-yard at a distance, while the merry King of Naples was near them. His Majesty appeared perfectly contented and good-humoured, and happy with whatever was done for his amusement. I remember his behaviour at Milan though, too well to be surprised at his pleasantness of disposition, when my maid was delighted to see him dance among the girls at a Festa di Ballo, from whence I retired early myself, and sent her back to enjoy it all in my domino. He played at cards too when at Milan I recollect, in the common Ridotto Chamber at the Theatre, and played for common sums, so as to charm every one with his kindness and affability. I am glad however that we shall now be soon released from this upon the whole disagreeable town, where there is the best possible food too for body and mind; but where the inhabitants seem to think only of the next world, and do little to amuse those who have not yet quite done with this. If they are sincere mean time, God will bless them with a long continuance of the appellation they so justly deserve; and those travellers who pass through will find some amends in the rich cream and incomparable dinners every day, for the insects that devour them every night; and will, if they are wise, seek compensation from the company of the half animated pictures that crowd the palaces and churches, for the half dead inhabitants who kneel in the streets of Bologna. FLORENCE. We slept no-where, except perhaps in the carriage, between our last residence at Bologna and this delightful city, to which we passed apparently through a new region of the earth, or even air; clambering up mountains covered with snow, and viewing with amazement the little vallies between, where, after quitting the summer season, all glowing with heat and spread into verdure, we found cherry-trees in blossom, oaks and walnuts scarcely beginning to bud. These mountains are however much below those of Savoy for dignity and beauty of appearance, though high enough to be troublesome, and barren enough to be desolate. These Appenines have been called by some the Back Bone of Italy, as Varenius and others style the Mountains of the Moon in Africa, Back Bone of the World; and these, as they do, run in a long chain down the middle of the Peninsula they are placed in; but being rounded at top are supposed to be aquatick, while the Alps, Andes, &c. are of late acknowledged by philosophers to be volcanic, as the most lofty of _them_ terminate in points of granite, wholly devoid of horizontal strata, and without petrifactions contained in them, _Here_ the tracts around display How impetuous ocean's sway Once with wasteful fury spread The wild waves o'er each mountain's head. PARSONS. But the offspring of fire somehow _should_ be more striking than that of water, however violent might have been the concussion that produced them; and there is no comparison between the sensations felt in passing the Roche Melon, and these more neatly-moulded Appenines; upon whose tops I am told too no lakes have been formed, as on Mount Cenis, or even on Snowdon in North Wales, where a very beautiful lake adorns the summit of the rock; which affords trout precisely such as you eat before you go down to Novalesa, but not so large. Sir William Hamilton, however, is the man to be referred to in all these matters; no man has examined the peculiar properties and general nature of mountains, those which vomit fire in particular, with half as much application, inspired by half as much genius, as he has done. We arrived late at our inn, an English one they say it is; and many of the last miles were passed very pleasantly by my maid and myself, in anticipating the comforts we should receive by finding ourselves among our own country folks. In good time! and by once more eating, sleeping, &c. _all in the English way_, as her phrase is. Accordingly, here are small low beds again, soft and clean, and down pillows; here are currant tarts, which the Italians scorn to touch, but which we are happy and delighted to pay not ten but twenty times their value for, because a currant tart is so much _in the English way_: and here are beans and bacon in a climate where it is impossible that bacon should be either wholesome or agreeable; and one eats infinitely worse than one did at Milan, Venice, or Bologna: and infinitely dearer too; but that makes it still more completely _in the English way_. Mean time here we are however in Arno's Vale; the full moon shining over Fiesole, which I see from my windows. Milton's verses every moment in one's mouth, and Galileo's house twenty yards from one's door, Whence her bright orb the Tuscan artist view'd, At evening from the top of Fesole; Or in Val d'Arno to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains on her spotty globe. Our apartments here are better than we hoped for, situated most sweetly on the banks of this classical stream; a noble terrace underneath our window, broad as the south parade at Bath I think, and the fine Ponte della Santa Trinità within sight. Many people have asserted that this is the first among all bridges in the world; but architecture triumphs in the art of building bridges, and, though this is a most exquisitely beautiful fabric, I can scarcely venture to call it an unrivalled one: it shall, if the fine statues at the corners can assist its power over the fancy, and if cleanliness can compensate for stately magnificence, or for the fire of original and unassisted genius, it shall obliterate from my mind the Rialto at Venice, and the fine arch thrown over the Conway at Llanwrst in our North Wales. I wrote to a lady at Venice this morning though, to say, however I might be charmed by the sweets of Arno's side, I could not forbear regretting the Grand Canal. Count Manucci, a nobleman of this city, formerly intimate with Mr. Thrale in London and Mr. Piozzi at Paris, came early to our apartments, and politely introduced us to the desirable society of his sisters and his friends. We have in his company and that of Cavalier d'Elci, a learned and accomplished man, of high birth, deep erudition, and polished manners, seen much, and with every possible advantage. This morning they shewed us La Capella St. Lorenzo, where I could but think how surprisingly Mr. Addison's prediction was verified, that these slow Florentines would not perhaps be able to finish the burial-place of their favourite family, before the family itself should be extinct. This reflection felt like one naturally suggested to me by the place; Doctor Moore however has the original merit of it, as I afterwards found it in his book: but it is the peculiar property of natural thoughts well expressed, to sink into one's mind and incorporate themselves with it, so as to make one forget they were not all one's own. _Poets, as well as jesters, do oft prove prophets:_ Prior's happy prediction for the female wits in one of his epilogues is come true already, when he says, Your time, poor souls! we'll take your very money, Female _third nights_ shall come so thick upon ye, &c. and every hour gives one reason to hope that Mr. Pope's glorious prophecy in favour of the Negroes will not now remain long unaccomplished, but that liberty will extend her happy influence over the world; Till the _freed Indians_, in their native groves, Reap their own fruits, and woo their sable loves. I will not extend myself in describing the heaps of splendid ruin in which the rich chapel of St. Lorenzo now lies: since the elegant Lord Corke's letters were written, little can be said about Florence not better said by him; who has been particularly copious in describing a city which every body wishes to see copiously described. The libraries here are exceedingly magnificent; and we were called just now to that which goes under Magliabechi's name, to hear an eulogium finely pronounced upon our circumnavigator Captain Cook; whose character has attracted the attention, and extorted the esteem of every European nation: far less was the wonder that it forced my tears; they flowed from a thousand causes: my distance from England! my pleasure in hearing an Englishman thus lamented in a language with which he had no acquaintance! By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourn'd! Every thing contributed to soften my heart, though not to lower my spirits. For when a Florentine asked me, how I came to cry so? I answered, in the words of their divine Mestastasio: "Che questo pianto mio Tutto non è dolor; E meraviglia, e amore, E riverenza, e speme, Son mille affetti assieme Tutti raccolti al cor." 'Tis not grief alone, or fear, Swells the heart, or prompts the tear; Reverence, wonder, hope, and joy, Thousand thoughts my soul employ, Struggling images, which less Than falling tears can ne'er express. Giannetti, who pronounced the panegyric, is the justly-celebrated improvisatore so famous for making Latin verses _impromptu_, as others do Italian ones: the speech has been translated into English by Mr. Merry, with whom I had the honour here first to make acquaintance, having met him at Mr. Greatheed's, who is our fellow-lodger, and with whom and his amiable family the time passes in reciprocations of confidential friendship and mutual esteem. Lord and Lady Cowper too contribute to make the society at this place more pleasing than can be imagined; while English hospitality softens down the stateliness of Tuscan manners. Sir Horace Mann is sick and old; but there are conversations at his house of a Saturday evening, and sometimes a dinner, to which we have been almost always asked. The fruits in this place begin to astonish me; such cherries did I never yet see, or even hear tell of, as when I caught the Laquais de Place weighing two of them in a scale to see if they came to an ounce. These are, in the London street phrase, _cherries like plums_, in size at least, but in flavour they far exceed them, being exactly of the kind that we call bleeding-hearts, hard to the bite, and parting easily from the stone, which is proportionately small. Figs too are here in such perfection, that it is not easy for an English gardener to guess at their excellence; for it is not by superior size, but taste and colour, that _they_ are distinguished; small, and green on the outside, a bright full crimson within, and we eat them with raw ham, and truly delicious is the dainty. By raw ham, I mean ham cured, not boiled or roasted. It is no wonder though that fruits should mature in such a sun as this is; which, to give a just notion of its penetrating fire, I will take leave to tell my countrywomen is so violent, that I use no other method of heating the pinching-irons to curl my hair, than that of poking them out at a south window, with the handles shut in, and the glasses darkened to keep us from being actually fired in his beams. Before I leave off speaking about the fruit, I must add, that both fig and cherry are produced by standards; that the strawberries here are small and high-flavoured, like our _woods_, and that there are no other. England affords greater variety in _that_ kind of fruit than any nation; and as to peaches, nectarines, or green-gage plums, I have seen none yet. Lady Cowper has made us a present of a small pine-apple, but the Italians have no taste to it. Here is sun enough to ripen them without hot-houses I am sure, though they repeatedly told us at Milan and Venice, that _this_ was the coolest place to pass the summer in, because of the Appenine mountains shading us from the heat, which they confessed to be intolerable with _them_. _Here_ however, they inform us, that it is madness to retire into the country as English people do during the hot season; for as there is no shade from high timber trees, one is bit to death by animals, gnats in particular, which here are excessively troublesome, even in the town, notwithstanding we scatter vinegar, and use all the arts in our power; but the ground-floor is coolest, and every body struggles to get themselves a _terreno_ as they call it. Florence is full just now, and Mr. Jean Figliazzi, an intelligent gentleman who lives here, and is well acquainted with both nations, says, that all the genteel people come to take refuge _from_ the country to Florence in July and August, as the subjects of Great Britain run _to_ the country from the heats of London or Bath. The flowers too! how rich they are in scent here! how brilliant in colour! how magnificent in size! Wall-flowers perfuming every street, and even every passage; while pinks and single carnations grow beside them, with no more soil than they require themselves; and from the tops of houses, where you least expect it, an aromatic flavour highly gratifying is diffused. The jessamine is large, broad-leaved, and beautiful as an orange-flower; but I have seen no roses equal to those at Lichfield, where on one tree I recollect counting eighty-four within my own reach; it grew against the house of Doctor Darwin. Such a profusion of sweets made me enquire yesterday morning for some scented pomatum, and they brought me accordingly one pot impelling strong of garden mint, the other of rue and tansy. Thus do the inhabitants of every place forfeit or fling away those pleasures, which the inhabitants of another place think _they_ would use in a much wiser manner, had Providence bestowed the blessing upon _them_. A young Milanese once, whom I met in London, saw me treat a hatter that lives in Pallmall with the respect due to his merit: when the man was gone, "Pray, madam," says the Italian, "is this a _gran riccone[Footnote: Heavy-pursed fellow.]?"_ "He is perhaps," replied I, "worth twenty or thirty thousand pounds; I do not know what ideas you annex to a _gran riccone_" "_Oh santissima vergine!_" exclaims the youth, "_s'avessi io mai settanta mila zecchini! non so pur troppo cosa nesarei; ma questo é chiaro--non venderei mai cappelli_"--"Oh dear me! had I once seventy thousand sequins in my pocket, I would--dear--I cannot think myself _what_ I should do with them all: but this at least is certain, I would not _sell hats_" I have been carried to the Laurentian library, where the librarian Bandi shewed me all possible, and many unmerited civilities; which, for want of deeper erudition, I could not make the use I wished of. We asked however to see some famous manuscripts. The Virgil has had a _fac simile_ made of it, and a printed copy besides; so that it cannot now escape being known all over Europe. The Bible in Chaldaic characters, spoken of by Langius as inestimable, and brought hither, with many other valuable treasures of the same nature, by Lascaris, after the death of Lorenzo de Medici, who had sent him for the second time to Constantinople for the purpose of collecting Greek and Oriental books, but died before his return, is in admirable preservation. The old geographical maps, made out in a very early age, afforded me much amusement; and the Latin letters of Petrarch, with the portrait of his Laura, were interesting to me perhaps more than many other things rated much higher by the learned, among those rarities which adorn a library so comprehensive. Every great nation except ours, which was immersed in barbarism, and engaged in civil broils, seems to have courted the residence of Lascaris, but the university of Paris fixed his regard: and though Leo X. treated with favour, and even friendship, the man whom he had encouraged to intimacy when Cardinal John of Medicis; though he made him superintendant of a Greek college at Rome; it is said he always wished to die in France, whither he returned in the reign of Francis the First; and wrote his Latin epigrams, which I have heard Doctor Johnson prefer even to the Greek ones preserved in Anthologia; and of which our Queen Elizabeth, inspired by Roger Ascham, desired to see the author; but he was then upon a visit to Rome, where he died of the gout at ninety-three years old. * * * * * June 24, 1785. St. John the Baptist is the tutelary Saint of this city, and upon this day of course all possible rejoicings are made. After attending divine service in the morning, we were carried to a house whence we could conveniently see the procession pass by. It was not solemn and stately as that I saw at Bologna, neither was it gaudy and jocund like the show made at Venice upon St. George's day; but consisted chiefly in vast heavy pageants, or a sort of temporary building set on wheels, and drawn by oxen some, and some by horses; others carried upon things made not unlike a chairman's horse in London, and supported by men, while priests, in various coloured dresses, according to their several stations in the church, and to distinguish the parishes, &c. to which they belong, follow singing in praise of the saint. Here is much emulation shewed too, I am told, in these countries, where religion makes the great and almost the sole amusement of men's lives, who shall make most figure on St. John the Baptist's day, produce most music, and go to most expence. For all these purposes subscriptions are set on foot, for ornamenting and venerating such a picture, statue, &c. which are then added to the procession by the managers, and called a Confraternity, in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Angel Raphael, or who comes in their heads. The lady of the house where we went to partake the diversion, was not wanting in her part; there could not be fewer than a hundred and fifty people assembled in her rooms, but not crowded as we should have been in England; for the apartments in Italy are all high and large, and run in suits like Wanstead house in Essex, or Devonshire house in London exactly, but larger still: and with immense balconies and windows, not sashes, which move all away, and give good room and air. The ices, refreshments, &c. were all excellent in their kinds, and liberally dispensed. The lady seemed to do the honours of her house with perfect good-humour; and every body being full-dressed, though so early in a morning, added much to the general effect of the whole. Here I had the honour of being introduced to Cardinal Corsini, who put me a little out of countenance by saying suddenly, "_Well, madam! you never saw one of us red-legged partridges before I believe; but you are going to Rome I hear, where you will find such fellows as me no rarities_" The truth is, I had seen the amiable Prince d'Orini at Milan, who was a Cardinal; and who had taken delight in showing me prodigious civilities: nothing ever struck me more than his abrupt entrance one night at our house, when we had a little music, and every body stood up the moment he appeared: the Prince however walked forward to the harpsichord, and blessed my husband in a manner the most graceful and affecting: then sate the amusement out, and returned the next morning to breakfast with us, when he indulged us with two hours conversation at least; adding the kindest and most pressing invitations to his country-seat among the mountains of Brianza, when we should return from our tour of Italy in spring 1786. Florence therefore was not the first place that shewed me a Cardinal. In the afternoon we all looked out of our windows which faced the street,--not mine, as they happily command a view of the river, the Caseine woods, &c. and from them enjoyed a complete sight of an Italian horse-race. For after the coaches have paraded up and down some time to shew the equipages, liveries, &c. all have on a sudden notice to quit the scene of action; and all _do_ quit it, in such a manner as is surprising. The street is now covered with sawdust, and made fast at both ends: the starting-post is adorned with elegant booths, lined with red velvet, for the court and first nobility: at the other end a piece of tapestry is hung, to prevent the creatures from dashing their brains out when they reach the goal. Thousands and ten thousands of people on foot fill the course, that it is standing wonder to me still that numbers are not killed. The prizes are now exhibited to view, quite in the old classical style; a piece of crimson damask for the winner perhaps; a small silver bason and ewer for the second; and so on, leaving no performer unrewarded. At last come out the _concurrenti_ without riders, but with a narrow leathern strap hung across their backs, which has a lump of ivory fastened to the end of it, all set full of sharp spikes like a hedge-hog, and this goads them along while galloping, worse than any spurs could do; because the faster they run, the more this odd machine keeps jumping up and down, and pricking their sides ridiculously enough; and it makes one laugh to see that some of them are not provoked by it not to run at all, but set about plunging, in order to rid themselves of the inconvenience, instead of driving forward to divert the mob; who leap and shout and caper with delight, and lash the laggers along with great indignation indeed, and with the most comical gestures. I never saw horses in so droll a state of degradation before, for they are all striped or spotted, or painted of some colour to distinguish them each from other; and nine or ten often start at a time, to the great danger of lookers-on I think, but exceedingly to my entertainment, who have the comfort of Mrs. Greatheed's company, and the advantage of seeing all safely from her well-situated _terreno_, or ground-floor. The chariot-race was more splendid, but less diverting: this was performed in the Piazza, or Square, an unpaved open place not bigger than Covent Garden I believe, and the ground strangely uneven. The cars were light and elegant; one driver and two horses to each: the first very much upon the principle of the antique chariots described by old poets, and the last trapped showily in various colours, adapted to the carriages, that people might make their betts accordingly upon the pink, the blue, the green, &c. I was exceedingly amused with seeing what so completely revived all classic images, and seemed so little altered from the classic times. Cavalier D'Elci, in reply to my expressions of delight, told me that the same spirit still subsisted exactly; but that in order to prevent accidents arising from the disputants' endeavours to overturn or circumvent each other, it was now sunk into a mere appearance of contest; for that all the chariots belonged to one man, who would doubtless be careful enough that his coachmen should not go to sparring at the hazard of their horses. The farce was carried on to the end however, and the winner spread his velvet in triumph, and drove round the course to enjoy the acclamations and caresses of the crowd. That St. John the Baptist's birth-day should be celebrated by a horse or chariot race, appears to have little claim to the praise of propriety; but mankind seems agreed that there must be some excuse for merriment; and surely if any saint is to be venerated, he stands foremost whom Christ himself declared to be the greatest man ever born of a woman. The old Romans had an institution in this month of games to Neptune Equester, as they called their Sea God, with no great appearance of good sense neither; but the horse he produced at the naming of Athens was the cause assigned--these games are perhaps half transmitted ones from those in the ancient mythology. The evening concluded, and the night began with fire-works; the church, or duomo, as a cathedral is always called in Italy, was illuminated on the outside, and very beautiful, and very very magnificent was the appearance. The reflection of the cupola's lights in the river gave us back a faint image of what we had been admiring; and when I looked at them from my window, as we were retiring to rest; such, thought I, and fainter still are the images which can be given of a show in written or verbal description; yet my English friends shall not want an account of what I have seen; for Italy, at last, is only a fine well-known academy figure, from which we all sit down to make drawings according as the light falls; and our seat affords opportunity. Every man sees that, and indeed most things, with the eyes of his then present humour, and begins describing away so as to convey a dignified or despicable idea of the object in question, just as his disposition led him to interpret its appearance. Readers now are grown wiser, however, than very much to mind us: they want no further telling that one traveller was in pain, and one in love when the tour of Italy was made by them; and so they pick out their intelligence accordingly, from various books, written like two letters in the Tatler, giving an account of a rejoicing night; one endeavouring to excite majestic ideas, the other ludicrous ones of the very same thing. Well 'tis true enough, however, and has been often enough laughed at, that the Italian horses run without riders, and scamper down a long street with untrimmed heels, hundreds of people hooking them along, as naughty boys do a poor dog, that has a bone tied to his tail in England. This diversion was too good to end with the day. Dulness, dear Queen, repeats the jest again. We had another, and another just such a race for three or four evenings together, and they got an English _cock-tailed nag_, and set _him_ to the business, as they said _he was trained to it_; but I don't recollect his making a more brilliant figure than his painted and chalked neighbours of the Continent. We will not be prejudiced, however; that the Florentines know how to manage horses is certain, if they would take the trouble. Last night's theatre exhibited a proof of skill, which might shame Astley and all his rivals. Count Pazzi having been prevailed on to lend his four beautiful chesnut favourites from his own carriage to draw a pageant upon the stage, I saw them yesterday evening harnessed all abreast, their own master in a dancer's habit I was told, guiding them himself, and personating the Cid, which was the name of the ballet, if I remember right, making his horses go clear round the stage, and turning at the lamps of the orchestra with such dexterity, docility, and grace, that they seemed rather to enjoy than feel disturbance at the deafening noise of instruments, the repeated bursts of applause, and hollow sound of their own hoofs upon the boards of a theatre. I had no notion of such discipline, and thought the praises, though very loud, not ill bestowed: as it is surely one of man's earliest privileges to replenish the earth with animal life, and to subdue it. I have, for my own part, generally speaking, little delight in the obstreperous clamours of these heroic pantomimes;--their battles are so noisy, and the acclamations of the spectators so distressing to weak nerves, I dread an Italian theatre--it distracts me.--And always the same thing so, every and every night! how tedious it is! This want of variety in the common pleasures of Italy though, and that surprising content with which a nation so sprightly looks on the same stuff, and laughs at the same joke for months and months together, is perhaps less despicable to a thinking mind, than the affectation of weariness and disgust, where probably it is not felt at all; and where a gay heart often lurks under a clouded countenance, put on to deceive spectators into a notion of his philosophy who wears it; and what is worse, who wears it chiefly as a mark of distinction cheaply obtained; for neither science, wit, nor courage are _now_ found necessary to form a man of fashion, or the _ton_, to which may be said as justly as ever Mr. Pope affirmed it of silence, That routed reason finds her sure retreat in thee. Affectation is certainly that faint and sickly weed which is the curse of cultivated,--not naturally fertile and extensive countries; an insect that infests our forcing stoves and hot-house plants: and as the naturalists tell us all animals may be bred _down_ to a state very different from that in which they were originally placed; that _carriers_, and _fantails_, and _croppers_, are produced by early caging, and minutely attending to the common blue pigeon, flights of which cover the ploughed fields in distant provinces of England, and shew the rich and changeable plumage of their fine neck to the summer sun; so from the warm and generous Briton of ancient days may be produced, and happily bred _down_, the clay-cold coxcomb of St. James's-street. In Italy, so far at least as I have gone, there is no impertinent desire of appearing what one is _not_: no searching for talk, and torturing expression to vary its phrases with something new and something fine; or else sinking into silence from despair of diverting the company, and taking up the opposite method, contriving to impress them with an idea of bright intelligence, concealed by modest doubts of our own powers, and stifled by deep thought upon abstruse and difficult topics. To get quit of all these deep-laid systems of enjoyment, where To take our breakfast we project a scheme, Nor drink our tea without a stratagem, like the lady in Doctor Young; the surest method is to drop into Italy; where a conversazione at Venice or Florence, after the society of London, or _les petit soupers de Paris_, where, in their own phrase, _un tableau n'attend pas l'autre_[Footnote: One picture don't wait for another.], is like taking a walk in Ham Gardens, or the Leasowes, after _les parterres de Versailles ed i Terrazzi di Genoa_. We are affected in the house, but natural in the gardens. Italians are natural in society, affected and constrained in the disposition of their grounds. No one, however, is good or bad, or wise or foolish without a reason why. Restraint is made for man, and where religious and political liberty is enjoyed to its full extent, as in Great Britain, the people will forge shackles for themselves, and lay the yoke heavy on society, to which, on the contrary, Italians give a loose, as compensation for their want of freedom in affairs of church or state. It is, I think, observable of uncontradicted, homebred, and, as we say, spoiled children, that when a dozen of them get together for the purpose of passing a day in mutual amusement, they will make to themselves the strictest laws for their game, and rigidly punish whatever breach of rule has been made while the time allotted for diversion lasts: but in a school of girls, strictly kept, at _their_ hours of permitted recreation no distinct sounds can be heard through the general clamour of joy and confusion; nor does any thing come less into their heads than the notion of imposing regulations on themselves, or making sport out of the harsh sounds of _rule and government_. Ridicule too points her arrows only among highly-polished societies--_Paris_ and _London_, in the first of which all wit is comprised in the power of ridiculing one's neighbours, and in the other every artifice is put in practice to escape it. In Italy no such terrors restrain conversation; no public censure pursues that fantastical behaviour which leads to no public offence; and as it is only fear which can beget falsehood, these people seek such behavior as naturally suits them; and in our theatrical phrase, they let the character come to them, they do not go to the character. Let us not fail to remember after all, that such severity as we use, quickens the desire of pleasing, and deadens the diffusion of immoral sentiments, or indelicate language, in England; where, I must add, for the honour of my country, that if such liberties were taken upon the stage as are frequent in the first ranks of Italian society, they would be hissed by those who paid only a shilling for their entrance: so that affectation and a forced refinement may be considered as the bad leaden statues still left in our delicately-neat and highly-ornamented gardens; of which elegance and science are the white and red roses: but to be possessed of their _sweets_, one must venture a little through the _thorns_.--_Thorns_, though figurative, remind one of the _cicala_, a creature which leaves nothing else untouched here. Surely their clamours and depredations have no equal. I used to walk in the Boboli Gardens, defying the heat, till they had eaten up the little shade some hedges there afforded me; and till, by their incessant noise, all thought is disturbed, and no line presented itself to my memory but Sole sob ardenti resonant arbusta Cicadis[W]; [Footnote W: While in the scorching sun I trace in vain Thy flying footsteps o'er the burning plain, The creaking locusts with my voice conspire, They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire. DRYDEN. ] till Mr. Merry's sweet ode to summer here at Florence made one less discontented, To hear the light cicala's ceaseless din, That vibrates shrill; or the near-weeping brook That feebly winds along, And mourns his channel shrunk. MERRY. This animal has four wings, four eyes, and two membranes like parchment under the hard scales he is covered with; and these, it is said, create the uncommon noise he makes, by blowing them somewhat like bellows, to sharpen the sound; which, whatever it proceeds from, is louder than can be guessed at by those who have not heard it in Tuscany. He is of the locust kind, an inch and a half long, and wonderfully light in proportion; though no small feeder, I should imagine, by the total destruction his noisy tribe make amongst the leaves, which are now wholly stript by them of all their verdure, the fibres only being left; and I observed yesterday evening, as we returned from airing, another strange deprivation practised on the mulberry leaves round the city, which being all forcibly torn away for the use of the silk-worms, make an odd fort of artificial winter near the town walls; and remind one of the wretched geese in Lincolnshire, plucked once a year for their feathers by their truly unfeeling proprietors. I am told indeed, that both revegetate, though I trust neither tree nor bird can fail to experience fatal effects one day or other in consequence of so unnatural an operation. Here is some ivy of uncommon growth, but I have seen larger both at Beaumaris castle in North Wales, and at the abbey of Glastonbury in Somersetshire: but the great pines in the Caseine woods have, I suppose, no rival nearer than the Castagno a Cento Cavalli, mentioned by Mr. Brydone. They afford little shade or shelter from heat however, as their umbrella-like covering is strangely small in proportion to their height and size; some of them being ten, and some twelve feet in diameter. These venerable, these glorious productions of nature are all now marked for destruction however; all going to be put in wicker baskets, and feed the Grand Duke's fires. I saw a fellow hewing one down to-day, and the rest are all to follow;--the feeble Florentines had much ado to master it; Seemed the harmful hatchet to fear, And to wound holy Eld would forbear, as Spenser says: I did half hope they could not get it down; but the loyal Tuscans (evermore awed by the name _principe_) told us it was right to get rid of them, as one of the cones, of which they bore vast quantities, might chance to drop upon the head of a _Principettino_, or little Prince, as he passed along. I was observing that restraint was necessary to man; I have now learned a notion that noise is necessary too. The clatter made here in the Piazza del Duomo, where you sit in your carriage at a coffee-house door, and chat with your friends according to Italian custom, while _one_ eats ice, and _another_ calls for lemonade, to while away the time after dinner, the noise made then and there, I say, is beyond endurance. Our Florentines have nothing on earth to do; yet a dozen fellows crying _ciambelli_, little cakes, about the square, assisted by beggars, who lie upon the church steps, and pray or rather promise to pray as loud as their lungs will let them, for the _anime sante di purgatorio_[Footnote: Holy souls in purgatory.]; ballad-singers meantime endeavouring to drown these clamours in their own, and gentlemen's servants disputing at the doors, whose master shall be first served; ripping up the pedigrees of each to prove superior claims for a biscuit or macaroon; do make such an intolerable clatter among them, that one cannot, for one's life, hear one another speak: and I did say just now, that it were as good live at Brest or Portsmouth when the rival fleets were fitting out, as here; where real tranquillity subsists under a bustle merely imaginary. Our Grand Duke lives with little state for aught I can observe here; but where there is least pomp, there is commonly most power; for a man must have _something pour se de dommages_[Footnote: To make himself amends.], as the French express it; and this gentleman possessing the _solide_ has no care for the _clinquant_, I trow. He tells his subjects when to go to bed, and who to dance with, till the hour he chuses they should retire to rest, with exactly that sort of old-fashioned paternal authority that fathers used to exercise over their families in England before commerce had run her levelling plough over all ranks, and annihilated even the name of subordination. If he hear of any person living long in Florence without being able to give a good account of his business there, the Duke warns him to go away; and if he loiter after such warning given, sends him out. Does any nobleman shine in pompous equipage or splendid table; the Grand Duke enquires soon into his pretensions, and scruples not to give personal advice, and add grave reproofs with regard to the management of each individual's private affairs, the establishment of their sons, marriage of their sisters, &c. When they appeared to complain of this behaviour to _me_, I know not, replied I, what to answer: one has always read and heard that the Sovereigns ought to behave in despotic governments like the _fathers of their family_: and the Archbishop of Cambray inculcates no other conduct than this, when advising his pupil, heir to the crown of France. "Yes, Madam," replied one of my auditors, with an acuteness truly Italian; "but this Prince is _our father-in-law_." The truth is, much of an English traveller's pleasure is taken off at Florence by the incessant complaints of a government he does not understand, and of oppressions he cannot remedy. Tis so dull to hear people lament the want of liberty, to which I question whether they have any pretensions; and without ever knowing whether it is the tyranny or the tyrant they complain of. Tedious however and most uninteresting are their accounts of grievances, which a subject of Great Britain has much ado to comprehend, and more to pity; as they are now all heart-broken, because they must say their prayers in their own language and not in Latin, which, how it can be construed into misfortune, a Tuscan alone can tell. Lord Corke has given us many pleasing anecdotes of those who were formerly Princes in this land. Had they a sovereign of the old Medici family, they would go to bed when _he_ bid them quietly enough I believe, and say their prayers in what language _he_ would have them: 'tis in our parliamentary phrase, the _men_, not the _measures_ that offend them; and while they pretend to whine as if despotism displeased them, they detest every republican state, feel envy towards Venice, and contempt for Lucca. I would rather talk of their gallery than their government: and surely nothing made by man ever so completely answered a raised expectation, as the apparent contest between Titian's recumbent beauty, glowing with colour and animated by the warmest expression, and the Greek statue of symmetrical perfection and fineness of form inimitable, where sculpture supplies all that fancy can desire, and all that imagination can suggest. These two models of excellence seem placed near each other, at once to mock all human praise, and defy all future imitation. The listening slave appears disturbed by the blows of the wrestlers in the same room, and hearkens with an attentive impatience, such as one has often felt when unable to distinguish the words one wishes to repeat. You really then do not seem as if you were alone in this tribune, so animated is every figure, so full of life and soul: yet I commend not the representing of St Catharine with leering eyes, as she is here painted by Titian; that it is meant for a portrait, I find no excuse; some character more suited to the expression should have been chosen; and if it were only the picture of a saint, that expression was strangely out of character. An anachronism may be found in the Tobit over the door too, by acute observers, who will deem it ill-managed to paint the cross in the clouds, where it is an old testament story, and that story apocryphal beside; might I add, that Guido's meek Madonna, so divinely contrasted to the other women in the room, loses something of dignity by the affected position of the thumbs. I think I might leave the tribune without a word said of the St. John by Raphael, which no words are worthy to extol: 'tis all sublimity; and when I look on it I feel nothing but veneration pushed to astonishment. Unlike the elegant figure of the Baptist at Padua, covered with glass, and belonging to a convent of friars, who told me, and truly, That it had no equal; it is painted by Guido with every perfection of form and every grace of expression. I agree with them it has no equal; but in the tribune at Florence maybe found its superior. We were next conducted to the Niobe, who has an apartment to herself: and now, thought I, dear Mrs. Siddons has never seen this figure: but those who can see it or her, without emotions equally impossible to contain or to suppress, deserve the fate of Niobe, and have already half-suffered it. Their hearts and eyes are stone. Nothing is worth speaking of after this Niobe! Her beauty! her maternal anguish! her closely-clasped Chloris! her half-raised head, scarcely daring to deprecate that vengeance of which she already feels such dreadful effects! What can one do But drop the shady curtain on the scene, and run to see the portraits of those artists who have exalted one's ideas of human nature, and shewn what man can perform. Among these worthies a British eye soon distinguishes Sir Joshua Reynolds; a citizen of the world fastens his to Leonardo da Vinci. I have been out to dinner in the country near Prato, and what a charming, what a delightful thing is a nobleman's seat near Florence! How cheerful the society! how splendid the climate! how wonderful the prospects in this glorious country! The Arno rolling before his house, the Appenines rising behind it! a sight of fertility enjoyed by its inhabitants, and a view of such defences to their property as nature alone can bestow. A peasantry so rich too, that the wives and daughters of the farmer go dressed in jewels; and those of no small value. A pair of one-drop ear-rings, a broadish necklace, with a long piece hanging down the bosom, and terminated with a cross, all of set garnets clear and perfect, is a common, a _very_ common treasure to the females about this country; and on every Sunday or holiday, when they dress and mean to look pretty, their elegantly-disposed ornaments attract attention strongly; though I do not think them as handsome as the Lombard lasses, and our Venetian friends protest that the farmers at Crema in _their_ state are still richer. La Contadinella Toscana however, in a very rich white silk petticoat, exceedingly full and short, to shew her neat pink slipper and pretty ancle, her pink _corps de robe_ and straps, with white silk lacing down the stomacher, puffed shirt sleeves, with heavy lace robbins ending at the elbow, and fastened at the shoulders with at least eight or nine bows of narrow pink ribbon, a lawn handkerchief trimmed with broad lace, put on somewhat coquettishly, and finishing in front with a nosegay, must make a lovely figure at any rate: though the hair is drawn away from the face in a way rather too tight to be becoming, under a red velvet cushion edged with gold, which helps to wear it off I think, but gives the small Leghorn hat, lined with green, a pretty perking air, which is infinitely nymphish and smart. A tolerably pretty girl so dressed may surely more than vie with a _fille d' opera_ upon the Paris stage, even were she not set off as these are with a very rich suit of pearls or set garnets, that in France or England would not be purchased for less than forty or fifty pounds: and I am now speaking of the women perpetually under one's eye; not one or two picked from the crowd, like Mrs. Vanini, an inn-keeper's wife in Florence, who, when she was dressed for the masquerade two nights ago, submitted her finery to Mrs. Greatheed's inspection and my own; who agreed she could not be so adorned in England for less than a thousand pounds. It is true the nobility are proud of letting you see how comfortably their dependants live in Tuscany; but can any pride be more rational or generous, or any desire more patriotick? Oh may they never look with less delight on the happiness of their inferiors! and then they will not murmur at their prince, whose protection of _this_ rank among his subjects is eminently tender and attentive. Returning home from our splendid dinner and agreeable day passed at Conte Mannucci's country-seat, while our noble friends amused me with various chat, I thought some unaccountable sparks of fire seemed to strike up and down the hedges as if in perpetual motion, but checked the fancy concluding it a trick of the imagination only; till the evening, which shuts in strangely quick here in Tuscany, grew dark, and exhibited an appearance wholly new to me; whose surprise that no flame followed these wandering fires was not small, when I recollected the state of desiccation that nature suffered, and had done for some months. My dislike of interrupting an agreeable conversation kept me long from enquiring into the cause of this appearance, which however I doubted not was electrick, till they told me it was the _lucciola_, or fire-fly; of which a very good account is given in twenty books, but I had forgotten them all. As the Florence Miscellany has never been published, I will copy out what is said of it _there_, because the Abate Fontana was consulted when that description was given. "This insect then differs from every other of the luminous tribe, because its light is by no means continual, but emitted by flashes, suddenly striking out as it flies; when crushed it leaves a lustre on the spot for a considerable time, from whence one may conclude its nature is phosphorick." Oh vagrant insect, type of our short life, 'Tis thus we shine, and vanish from the view; For the cold season comes, And all our lustre's o'er. MERRY's Ode to Summer. It is said I think, that no animal affords an acid except ants, which are therefore most quickly destroyed by lime, pot-ash, &c. or any strong alkali of course; yet acid must the lucciola be proved, or she can never be phosphorick surely; as upon its analysis that strangest of all compositions appears to be a union of violent acid with inflammable matter, whence it may be termed an animal sulphur, and is actually found to burn successfully under a common glass-bell; and to afford flowers too, which, by attracting the humidity of the air, become a liquor like _oleum sulphuris per campanam_[Footnote: Oil of sulphur by the bell.]. The colour of the sky viewed, when one dares to look at it, through this pure atmosphere is particularly beautiful; of a much more brilliant and celestial blue I think, than it appeared from the tower of St. Mark's Place, Venice. Were I to affirm that the sea is of a more peculiar transparent brightness upon the coast of North Wales than elsewhere, it would seem prejudice perhaps, and yet is strictly true: I am not less persuaded that the sky appears of a finer tint in Tuscany than any other country I have visited:--Naples is however the vaunted climate, and that yet remains to be examined. I have been shewed, at the horse-race, the theatre, &c. the unfortunate grandson of King James the Second. He goes much into publick still, though old and sickly; gives the English arms and livery, and wears the garter, which he has likewise bestowed upon his natural daughter. The Princess of Stoldberg, his consort, whom he always called Queen, has left him to end a life of disappointment and sorrow by _himself_, with the sad reflection, that even conjugal attachment, and of course domestic comfort, was denied to _him_, and fled--in defiance of poetry and fiction--fled with the crown, to its powerful and triumphant possessors. The Duomo, or Cathedral, has engaged my attention all to-day: its prodigious size, perfect proportions, and exquisite taste, ought to have detained me longer. Though the outside does not please me as well as if it had been less rich and less magnificent. Superfluity always defeats its own purpose, of striking you with awe at its superior greatness; while simplicity looks on, and laughs at its vain attempts. This wonderful church, built of striped marbles, white, black, and red alternately, has scarcely the air of being so composed, but looks like painted ivory to _me_, who am obliged to think, and think again, before I can be sure it is of so ponderous and massy, as well as so inestimable a substance: nor can I, without more than equal difficulty, persuade myself to give its sudden view the decided preference over St. Paul's in London, which never, never misses its immediate effect on a spectator, But stands sublime in simplest majesty. The Battisterio is another structure close to the church, and of surprising beauty; Michael Angelo said the gates of it deserved to be those which open Paradise: and that speech was more the speech of a good workman, than of a man whose mind was exalted by his profession. The gates are of brass, divided into ninety-six compartments each, and carved with such variety of invention, such elaboration of art and ingenuity, that no praise except that which he gave them could have been too high. The font has not been used since the days when immersion in baptism was deemed necessary to salvation; a ceremony still considered by the Greek church as indispensable. Why the disputes concerning _this_ sacrament were carried on with more decency and less lasting rancour among Christians, than those which related to the other great pledge of our pardon, the communicating with our Saviour Christ in his last Supper, I know not, nor can imagine. Every page of ecclesiastical history exhibits the tenaciousness with which the smallest attendant circumstance on this last-mentioned sacrament has been held fast by the Romanists, who dropped the immersion at baptism of themselves; and in so warm a climate too! it moves my wonder; when nothing is more obvious to the meanest understanding, than that if the first sacrament is not rightly and duly administered, we never shall arrive at receiving the other at all. I hope it is impossible for any one less than myself to wish the continuance or revival of contentions so disgraceful to humanity in general; so peculiarly repugnant to the true spirit of Christianity, which consists chiefly in charity, and that brotherly love we know to have been cemented by the blood of our blessed Lord: yet very strange it is to think, that while other innovations have been resisted even to death, scarcely any among the many sects we have divided into, retain the original form in that ceremony so emphatically called _christening_. These observations suggested by the sight of the old font at Florence shall now be succeeded by lighter subjects of reflection; among which the first that presents itself is the superior elegance of the language; for till we arrive _here_, all is dialect; though by this word I would not have any one mistake me, or understand it as meant in the limited sense of a provincial jargon, such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, or Cornwall, present us with; where every sound is corruption, barbarism, and vulgarity. The States of Italy being all under different rulers, are kept separate from each other, and speak a different dialect; that of Milan full of consonants and harsh to the ear, but abounding with classical expressions that rejoice one's heart, and fill one with the oddest but most pleasing sensations imaginable. I heard a lady there call a runaway nobleman _Profugo_ mighty prettily; and added, that his conduct had put all the town into _orgasmo grande_. All this, however, the Tuscans may possibly have in common with them. My knowledge of the language must remain ever too imperfect for me to depend on my own skill in it; all I can assert is, that the Florentines _appear_, as far as I have been competent to observe, to depend more on their own copious and beautiful language for expression, than the Milanese do; who run to Spanish, Greek, or Latin for assistance, while half their tongue is avowedly borrowed from the French, whose pronunciation, in the letter _u_, they even profess to retain. At Venice, the sweetness of the patois is irresistible; their lips, incapable of uttering any but the sweetest sounds, reject all consonants they can get quit of; and make their mouths drop honey more completely than it can be said by any eloquence less mellifluous than their own. The Bolognese dialect is detested by the other Italians, as gross and disagreeable in its sounds: but every nation has the good word of its own inhabitants; and the language which Abbate Bianconi praises as nervous and expressive, I would advise no person, less learned than himself, to censure as disgusting, or condemn as dull. I staid very little at Bologna; saw nothing but their pictures, and heard nothing but their prayers: those were superior, I fancy, to all rivals. Language can be never spoken of by a foreigner to any effect of conviction. I have heard our countryman. Mr. Greatheed himself, who perhaps possesses more Italian than almost any Englishman, and studies it more closely, refuse to decide in critical disputations among his literary friends here, though the sonnets he writes in the Tuscan language are praised by the natives, who best understand it, and have been by some of them preferred to those written by Milton himself. Mean time this is acknowledged to be the prime city for purity of phrase and delicacy of expression, which, at last, is so disguised to me by the guttural manner in which many sounds are pronounced, that I feel half weary of running about from town to town so, and never arriving at any, where I can understand the conversation without putting all the attention possible to their discourse. I am now told that less efforts will be necessary at Rome. Nothing can be prettier, however, than the slow and tranquil manners of a Florentine; nothing more polished than his general address and behaviour: ever in the third person, though to a blackguard in the street, if he has not the honour of his particular acquaintance, while intimacy produces _voi_ in those of the highest rank, who call one another Carlo and Angelo very sweetly; the ladies taking up the same notion, and saying Louisa, or Maddalena, without any addition at all. The Don and Donna of Milan were offensive to me somehow, as they conveyed an idea of Spain, not Italy. Here Signora is the term, which better pleases one's ear, and Signora Contessa, Signora Principessa, if the person is of higher quality, resembles our manners more when we say my Lady Dutchess, &c. What strikes me as most observable, is the uniformity of style in all the great towns. At Venice the men of literature and fashion speak with the same accent, and I believe the same quick turns of expression as their Gondolier; and the coachman at Milan talks no broader than the Countess; who, if she does not speak always in French to a foreigner, as she would willingly do, tries in vain to talk Italian; and having asked you thus, _alla capi?_ which means _ha ella capita?_ laughs at herself for trying to _toscaneggiare_, as she calls it, and gives the point up with _no cor altr._ that comes in at the end of every sentence, and means _non occorre altro_; there is no more occurs upon the subject. The Laquais de Place who attended us at Bologna was one of the few persons I had met then, who spoke a language perfectly intelligible to me. "Are you a Florentine, pray friend, said I?" "No, madam, but the _combinations_ of this world having led me to talk much with strangers, I contrive to _tuscanize_ it all I can for _their_ advantage, and doubt not but it will tend to my own at last." Such a sentiment, so expressed by a footman, would set a plain man in London a laughing, and make a fanciful Lady imagine he was a nobleman disguised. Here nobody laughs, nor nobody stares, nor wonders that their valet speaks just as good language, or utters as well-turned sentences as themselves. Their cold answer to my amazement is as comical as the fellow's fine style--_è battizzato_[Footnote: He has been baptized.], say they, _come noi altri_[Footnote: As well as we.]. But we are called away to hear the fair Fantastici, a young woman who makes improviso verses, and sings them, as they tell me, with infinite learning and taste. She is successor to the celebrated Corilla, who no longer exhibits the power she once held without a rival: yet to _her_ conversations every one still strives for admittance, though she is now ill, and old, and hoarse with repeated colds. She spares, however, now by no labour or fatigue to obtain and keep that superiority and admiration which one day perhaps gave her almost equal trouble to receive and to repay. But who can bear to lay their laurels by? Corilla is gay by nature, and witty, if I may say so, by habit; replete with fancy, and powerful to combine images apparently distant. Mankind is at last more just to people of talents than is universally allowed, I think. Corilla, without pretensions either to immaculate character (in the English sense), deep erudition, or high birth, which an Italian esteems above all earthly things, has so made her way in the world, that all the nobility of both sexes crowd to her house; that no Prince passes through Florence without waiting on Corilla; that the Capitol will long recollect her being crowned there, and that many sovereigns have not only sought her company, but have been obliged to put up with slights from her independent spirit, and from her airy, rather than haughty behaviour. She is, however, (I cannot guess why) not rich, and keeps no carriage; but enjoying all the effect of money, convenience, company, and general attention, is probably very happy; as she does not much suffer her thoughts of the next world to disturb her felicity in _this_, I believe, while willing to turn every thing into mirth, and make all admire _her wit_, even at the expence of _their own virtue_. The following Epigram, made by her, will explain my meaning, and give a specimen of her present powers of improvisation, undecayed by ill health; and I might add, _undismayed_ by it. An old gentleman here, one Gaetano Testa Grossa had a young wife, whose name was Mary, and who brought him a son when he was more than seventy years old. Corilla led him gaily into the circle of company with these words: "Miei Signori Io vi presento Il buon Uomo Gaetano; Che non sà che cosa sia Il misterio sovr'umano Del Figliuolo di Maria." Let not the infidels triumph however, or rank among them the truly-illustrious Corilla! 'Twas but the rage, I hope, of keeping at any rate the fame she has gained, when the sweet voice is gone, which once enchanted all who heard it--like the daughters of Pierius in Ovid. And though I was exceedingly entertained by the present improvisatrice, the charming Fantastici, whose youth, beauty, erudition, and fidelity to her husband, give her every claim upon one's heart, and every just pretension to applause, I could not, in the midst of that delight, which classick learning and musical excellence combined to produce, forbear a grateful recollection of the civilities I had received from Corilla, and half-regretting that her rival should be so successful; For tho' the treacherous tapster, Thomas, Hangs a new angel ten doors from us, We hold it both a shame and sin To quit the true old Angel Inn. Well! if some people have too little appearance of respect for religion, there are others who offend one by having too much, and so the balance is kept even. We were a walking last night in the gardens of Porto St. Gallo, and met two or three well-looking women of the second rank, with a baby, four or five years old at most, dressed in the habit of a Dominican Friar, bestowing the benediction as he walked along like an officiating Priest. I felt a shock given to all my nerves at once, and asked Cavalier D'Elci the meaning of so strange a device. His reply to me was, "_E divozione mal intesa, Signora_[Footnote: 'Tis ill-understood devotion, madam.];" and turning round to the other gentlemen, "Now this folly," said he, "a hundred years ago would have been the object of profound veneration and prodigious applause. Fifty years hence it would be censured as hypocritical; it is now passed by wholly unnoticed, except by this foreign Lady, who, I believe, thought it was done for a joke. I have had a little fever since I came hither from the intense heat I trust; but my maid has a worse still. Doctor Bicchierei, with that liberality which ever is found to attend real learning, prescribed James's powders to _her_, and bid me attend to Buchan's Domestick Medicine, and I should do well enough he said. Mr. Greatheed, Mr. Parsons, Mr. Biddulph, and Mr. Piozzi, have been together on a party of pleasure to see the renowned Vallombrosa, and came home contradicting Milton, who says the devils lay bestrewn Thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa: Whereas, say they, the trees are all evergreen in those woods. Milton, it seems, was right notwithstanding: for the botanists tell me, that nothing makes more litter than the shedding of leaves, which, replace themselves by others, as on the plants stiled ever-green, which change like every tree, but only do not change all at once, and remain stript till spring. They spoke highly of their very kind and hospitable reception at the convent, where Safe from pangs the worldling knows, Here secure in calm repose, Far from life's perplexing maze, The pious fathers pass their days; While the bell's shrill-tinkling sound Regulates their constant round. And Here the traveller elate Finds an ever-open gate: All his wants find quick supply, While welcome beams from every eye. PARSONS. This pious foundation of retired Benedictines, situated in the Appenines, about eighteen miles from Florence, owes its original to Giovanni Gualberto, a Tuscan nobleman, whose brother Hugo having been killed by a relation in the year 1015, he resolved to avenge his death; but happening to meet the assassin alone and in a solitary place, whither he appeared to have been driven by a sense of guilt, and seeing him suddenly drop down at his feet, and without uttering a word produce from his bosom a crucifix, holding it up in a supplicating gesture, with look submissively imploring, he felt the force of this silent rhetoric, and generously gave his enemy free pardon. On further reflection upon the striking scene, Gualberto felt still more affected; and from seeing the dangers and temptations which surround a bustling life, resolved to quit the too much mixed society of mankind, and settle in a state of perpetual retirement. For this purpose he chose Vallombrosa, and there founded the famous convent so justly admired by all who visit it. Such stories lead one forward to the tombs of Michael Angelo and the great Galileo, which last I looked on to-day with reverence, pity, and wonder; to think that a change so surprising should be made in worldly affairs since his time; that the man who no longer ago than the year 1636, was by the torments and terrors of the Inquisition obliged formally to renounce, as heretical, accursed, and contrary to religion, the revived doctrines of Copernicus, should now have a monument erected to his memory, in the very city where he was born, whence he was cruelly torn away to answer at Rome for the supposed offence; to which he returned; and strange to tell, in which he lived on, by his own desire, with the wife who, by her discovery of his sentiments, and information given to the priests accordingly, had caused his ruin; and who, after his death, in a fit of mad mistaken zeal, flung into the fire, in company with her confessor, all the papers she could find in his study. How wonderful are these events! and how sweet must the science of astronomy have been to that poor man, who suffered all but actual martyrdom in its cause! How odd too, that ever Galileo's son, by such a mother as we have just described, should apply himself to the same studies, and be the inventor of the simple pendulum so necessary to every kind of clock-work! Religious prejudices however, and their effects--and thanks be to God their almost final conclusion too--may be found nearer home than Galileo's tomb; while Milton has a monument in the same cathedral with Dr. South, who perhaps would have given credit to no _human_ information, which should have told him that event would take place. We are now going soon to leave Florence, seat of the arts and residence of literature! I shall be sincerely sorry to quit a city where not a step can be taken without a new or a revived idea being added to our store;--where such statues as would in England have colleges founded, or palaces built for their reception, stand in the open street; the Centaur, the Sabine woman, and the Justice: Where the Madonna della Seggiola reigns triumphant over all pictures for brilliancy of colouring and vigour of pencil. It was the portrait of Raphaelle's favourite mistress, and his own child by her sate for the Bambino:--is it then wonderful that it should want that heavenly expression of dignity divine, and grace unutterable, which breathes through the school of Caracci? Connoisseurs will have all excellence united in one picture, and quarrel unkindly if merit of any kind be wanting: Surely the Madonna della Seggiola has nature to recommend it, and much more need not be desired. If the young and tender and playful innocence of early infancy is what chiefly delights and detains one's attention, it may be found to its utmost possible perfection in a painter far inferior to Raphael, Carlo Marratt. If softness in the female character, and meek humility of countenance, be all that are wanted for the head of a Madonna, we must go to Elisabetta Sirani and Sassoferrata I think; but it is ever so. The Cordelia of Mrs. Cibber was beyond all comparison softer and sweeter than that of her powerful successor Siddons; yet who will say that the actresses were equal? But I must bid adieu to beautiful Florence, where the streets are kept so clean one is afraid to dirty _them_, and not _one's self_, by walking in them: where the public walks are all nicely weeded, as in England, and the gardens have a homeish and Bath-like look, that is excessively cheering to an English eye:--where, when I dined at Prince Corsini's table, I heard the Cardinal say grace, and thought of the ceremonies at Queen's College, Oxford; where I had the honour of entertaining, at my own dinner on the 25th of July, many of the Tuscan, and many of the English nobility; and Nardini kindly played a solo in the evening at a concert we gave in Meghitt's great room:--where we have compiled the little book amongst us, known by the name of the Florence Miscellany; as a memorial of that friendship which does me so much honour, and which I earnestly hope may long subsist among us:--where in short we have lived exceeding comfortably, but where dear Mrs. Greatheed and myself have encouraged each other, in saying it would be particularly sad to _die_, not of the gnats, or more properly musquitoes, for they do not sting one quite to death, though their venom has swelled my arm so as to oblige me to carry it for this last week in a sling; but of the _mal di petto_, which is endemial in this country, and much resembling our pleurisy in its effects. Blindness too seems no uncommon misfortune at Florence, from the strong reverberation of the sun's rays on houses of the cleanest and most brilliant whiteness; kept so elegantly nice too, that I should despair of seeing more delicacy at Amsterdam. Apoplexies are likewise frequent enough: I saw a man carried out stone dead from St. Pancrazio's church one morning about noon-day; but nobody seemed disturbed at the event I think, except myself. Though this is no good town to take one's last leave of life in neither; as the body one has been so long taking care of, would in twenty-four hours be hoisted up upon a common cart, with those of all the people who died the same day, and being fairly carried out of Porto San Gallo towards the dusk of evening, would be shot into a hole dug away from the city, properly enough, to protect Florence, and keep it clear of putrid disorders and disagreeable smells. All this with little ceremony to be sure, and less distinction; for the Grand Duke suffers the pride of birth to last no longer than life however, and demolishes every hope of the woman of quality lying in a separate grave from the distressed object who begged at her carriage door when she was last on an airing. Let me add, that his liberality of sentiment extends to virtue on the one hand, if hardness of heart may be complained of on the other. He suffers no difference of opinions to operate on his philosophy, and I believe we heretics here should sleep among the best of his Tuscan nobles. But there is no comfort in the possibility of being buried alive by the excessive haste with which people are catched up and hurried away, before it can be known almost whether all sparks of life are extinct or no. Such management, and the lamentations one hears made by the great, that they should thus be forced to keep _bad company_ after death, remind me for ever of an old French epigram, the sentiment of which I perfectly recollect, but have forgotten the verses, of which however these lines are no unfaithful translation; I dreamt that in my house of clay, A beggar buried by me lay; Rascal! go stink apart, I cry'd, Nor thus disgrace my noble side. Heyday! cries he, what's here to do? I'm on my dunghill sure, as well as you. Of elegant Florence then, so ornamented and so lovely, so neat that it is said she should be seen only on holidays; dedicated of old to Flora, and still the residence of sweetness, grace, and the fine arts particularly; of these kind friends too, so amiable, so hospitable, where I had the choice of four boxes every night at the theatre, and a certainty of charming society in each, we must at last unwillingly take leave; and on to-morrow, the twelfth day of September 1785, once more commit ourselves to our coach, which has hitherto met with no accident that could affect us, and in which, with God's protection, I fear not my journey through what is left of Italy; though such tremendous tales are told in many of our travelling books, of terrible roads and wicked postillions, and ladies labouring through the mire on foot, to arrive at bad inns where nothing eatable could be found. All which however is less despicable than Tournefort, the great French botanist; who, while his works swell with learning, and sparkle with general knowledge; while he enlarges _your_ stock of ideas, and displays _his own_; laments pathetically that he could not get down the partridges caught for him in one of the Archipelagon islands, because they were not larded--_à la mode de Paris_. LUCCA. From the head-quarters of painting, sculpture, and architecture then, where art is at her acme, and from a people polished into brilliancy, perhaps a little into weakness, we drove through the celebrated vale of Arno; thick hedges on each side us, which in spring must have been covered with blossoms and fragrant with perfume; now loaded with uncultivated fruits; the wild grape, raspberry, and azaroli, inviting to every sense, and promising every joy. This beautiful and fertile, this highly-adorned and truly delicious country carried us forward to Lucca, where the panther sits at the gate, and liberty is written up on every wall and door. It is so long since I have seen the word, that even the letters of it rejoice my heart; but how the panther came to be its emblem, who can tell? Unless the philosophy we learn from old Lilly in our childhood were true, _nec vult panthera domari_[Footnote: That the panther will never be tamed.]. That this fairy commonwealth should so long have maintained its independency is strange; but Howel attributes her freedom to the active and industrious spirit of the inhabitants, who, he says, resemble a hive of bees, for order and for diligence. I never did see a place so populous for the size of it: one is actually thronged running up and down the streets of Lucca, though it is a little town enough for a capital city to be sure; larger than Salisbury though, and prettier than Nottingham, the beauties of both which places it unites with all the charms peculiar to itself. The territory they claim, and of which no power dares attempt to dispossess them, is much about the size of _Rutlandshire_ I fancy; surrounded and apparently fenced in on every side, by the Appenines as by a wall, that wall a hot one, on the southern side, and wholly planted over with vines, while the soft shadows which fall upon the declivity of the mountains make it inexpressibly pretty; and form, by the particular disposition of their light and shadow, a variety which no other prospect so confined can possibly enjoy. This is the Ilam gardens of Europe; and whoever has seen that singular spot in Derbyshire belonging to Mr. Port, has seen little Lucca in a convex mirror. Some writer calls it a ring upon the finger of the Emperor, under whose protection it has been hitherto preserved safe from the Grand Duke of Tuscany till these days, in which the interests of those two sovereigns, united by intimacy as by blood and resemblance of character, are become almost exactly the same. A Doge, whom they call the _Principe_, is elected every two months; and is assisted by ten senators in the administration of justice. Their armoury is the prettiest plaything I ever yet saw, neatly kept, and capable of furnishing twenty-five thousand men with arms. Their revenues are about equal to the Duke of Bedford's I believe, eighty or eighty-five thousand pounds sterling a year; every spot of ground belonging to these people being cultivated to the highest pitch of perfection that agriculture, or rather gardening (for one cannot call these enclosures fields), will admit: and though it is holiday time just now, I see no neglect of necessary duty. They were watering away this morning at seven o'clock, just as we do in a nursery-ground about London, a hundred men at once, or more, before they came home to make themselves smart, and go to hear music in their best church, in honour of some saint, I have forgotten who; but he is the patron of Lucca, and cannot be accused of neglecting his charge, that is certain. This city seems really under admirable regulations; here are fewer beggars than even at Florence, where however one for fifty in the states of Genoa or Venice do not meet your eyes: And either the word liberty has bewitched me, or I see an air of plenty without insolence, and business without noise, that greatly delight me. Here is much cheerfulness too, and gay good-humour; but this is the season of devotion at Lucca, and in these countries the ideas of devotion and diversion are so blended, that all religious worship seems connected with, and to me now regularly implies, _a festive show_. Well, as the Italians say, "_Il mondo è bello perche è variabile_[Footnote: The world is pleasant because it is various.]." We English dress our clergymen in black, and go ourselves to the theatre in colours. Here matters are reversed, the church at noon looked like a flower-garden, so gaily adorned were the priests, confrairies, &c. while the Opera-house at night had more the air of a funeral, as every body was dressed in black: a circumstance I had forgotten the meaning of, till reminded that such was once the emulation of finery among the persons of fashion in this city, that it was found convenient to restrain the spirit of expence, by obliging them to wear constant mourning: a very rational and well-devised rule in a town so small, where every body is known to every body; and where, when this silly excitement to envy is wisely removed, I know not what should hinder the inhabitants from living like those one reads of in the Golden Age; which, above all others, this climate most resembles, where pleasure contributes to sooth life, commerce to quicken it, and faith extends its prospects to eternity. Such is, or such at least appears to me this lovely territory of Lucca: where cheap living, free government, and genteel society, may be enjoyed with a tranquillity unknown to larger states: where there are delicious and salutary baths a few miles out of town, for the nobility to make _villeggiatura_ at; and where, if those nobility were at all disposed to cultivate and communicate learning, every opportunity for study is afforded. Some drawbacks will however always be found from human felicity. I once mentioned this place with warm expectations of delight, to a Milanese lady of extensive knowledge, and every elegant accomplishment worthy her high birth, _the Contessa Melzi Resla_. "Why yes," said she, "if you would find out the place where common sense stagnates, and every topic of conversation dwindles and perishes away by too frequent or too unskilful touching and handling, you must go to Lucca. My ill-health sent me to their beautiful baths one summer; where all the faculties of my body were restored, thank God, but those of my soul were stupified to such a degree, that at last I was fit to keep no other company but _Dame Lucchesi_ I think; and _our_ talk was soon ended, heaven knows, for when they had once asked me of an evening, what I had for dinner? and told me how many pair of stockings their neighbours sent to the wash, we had done." This was a young, a charming, a lively lady of quality; full of curiosity to know the world, and of spirits to bustle through it; but had she been battered through the various societies of London and Paris for eighteen or twenty years together, she would have loved Lucca better, and despised it less. "We must not look for whales in the Euxine Sea," says an old writer; and we must not look for great men or great things in little nations to be sure, but let us respect the innocence of childhood, and regard with tenderness the territory of Lucca: where no man has been murdered during the life or memory of any of its peaceful inhabitants; where one robbery alone has been committed for sixteen years; and the thief hanged by a Florentine executioner borrowed for the purpose, no Lucchese being able or willing to undertake so horrible an office, with terrifying circumstances of penitence and public reprehension: where the governed are so few in proportion to the governors; all power being circulated among four hundred and fifty nobles, and the whole country producing scarcely ninety thousand souls. A great boarding-school in England is really an infinitely more licentious place; and grosser immoralities are every day connived at in it, than are known to pollute this delicate and curious commonwealth; which keeps a council always subsisting, called the _Discoli_, to examine the lives and conduct, professions, and even _health_ of their subjects: and once o'year they sweep the town of vagabonds, which till then are caught up and detained in a house of correction, and made to work, if hot disabled by lameness, till the hour of their release and dismission. I wondered there were so few beggars about, but the reason is now apparent: these we see are neighbours, come hither only for the three days gala. I was wonderfully solicitous to obtain some of their coin, which carries on it the image of no _earthly_ prince; but his head only who came to redeem us from general slavery on the one side, _Jesus Christ_; on the other, the word _Libertas_. Our peasant-girls here are in a new dress to me; no more jewels to be seen, no more pearls; the finery of which so dazzled me in Tuscany: these wenches are prohibited such ornaments it seems. A muslin handkerchief, folded in a most becoming manner, and starched exactly enough to make it wear clean four days, is the head-dress of Lucchese lasses; it is put on turban-wise, and they button their gowns close, with long sleeves _à la Savoyarde_; but it is made often of a stiff brocaded silk, and green lapels, with cuffs of the same colour; nor do they wear any hats at all, to defend them from a sun which does undoubtedly mature the fig and ripen the vine, but which, by the same excess of power, exalts the venom of the viper, and gives the scorpion means to keep me in perpetual torture for fear of his poison, of which, though they assure us death is seldom the consequence among _them_, I know his sting would finish me at once, because the gnats at Florence were sufficient to lame me for a considerable time. The dialect has lost much of the guttural sound that hurt one's ear at the last place of residence; but here is an odd squeaking accent, that distinguishes the Tuscan of Lucca. The place appropriated for airing, showing fine equipages, &c. is beautiful beyond all telling; from the peculiar shadows on the mountains. They make the bastions of the town their Corso, but none except the nobles can go and drive upon one part of it. I know not how many yards of ground is thus let apart, sacred to sovereignty; but it makes one laugh. Our inn here is an excellent one, as far as I am concerned; and the sallad-oil green, like Irish usquebaugh, nothing was ever so excellent. I asked the French valet who dresses our hair, "_Si ce n'etait pas une republique mignonne?_[X]"--"_Ma foy, madame, je la trouve plus tôt la republique des rats et des souris[Y];_" replies the fellow, who had not slept all night, I afterwards understood, for the noise those troublesome animals made in his room. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote X: If it were not a dear little pretty commonwealth--this?] [Footnote Y: Faith, madam, I call it the republic of the rats and mice.] PISA. This town has been so often described that it is as well known in England as in Italy almost; where I, like others, have seen the magnificent cathedral; have examined the two pillars which support its entrance, and which once adorned Diana's temple at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the world. Their carving is indeed beyond all idea of workmanship; and the possession of them is inestimable. I have seen the old stones with inscriptions on them, bearing date the reign of Antoninus Pius, stuck casually, some with the letters reversed, some sloping, according to accident merely, as it appears to me, in the body of the great church: and I have seen the leaning tower that Lord Chesterfield so comically describes our English travellers eagerness to see. It is a beautiful building though after all, and a strange thing that it should lean so. The cylindrical form, and marble pillars that support each story, may rationally enough attract a stranger's notice, and one is sorry the lower stories have sunk from their foundations, originally defective ones I trust they were, though, God knows, if the Italians do not build towers well, it is not for want either of skill or of experience; for there is a tower to every town I think, and commonly fabricated with elaborate nicety and well-fixed bases. But as earthquakes and subterranean fires here are scarcely a wonder, one need not marvel much at seeing the ground retreat just _here_. It is nearer our hand, and quite as well worth our while to enquire, why the tower at _Bridgnorth_ in Shropshire leans exactly in the same direction, and is full as much out of the perpendicular as this at Pisa. The brazen gates here, carved by John of Bologna, at least begun by him, are a wonderful work; and the marbles in the baptistery beat those of Florence for value and for variety. A good lapidary might find perpetual amusement in adjusting the claims of superiority to these precious columns of jasper, granite, alabaster, &c. The different animals which support the font being equally admirable for their composition as for their workmanship. The Campo Santo is an extraordinary place, and, for aught I know, unparalleled for its power over the mind in exciting serious contemplations upon the body's decay, and suggesting consolatory thoughts concerning the soul's immortality. Here in three days, owing to quick-lime mixed among the earth, vanishes every vestige, every trace of the human being carried thither seventy hours before, and here round the walls Giotto and Cimabue have exhausted their invention to impress the passers-by with deep and pensive melancholy. The four stages of man's short life, infancy, childhood, maturity, and decrepit age, not ill represented by one of the ancient artists, shew the sad but not slow progress we make to this dark abode; while the last judgment, hell, and paradise inform us what events of the utmost consequence are to follow our journey. All this a modern traveller finds out to be _vastly ridiculous!_ though Doctor Smollet _(whose book I think he has read)_ confesses, that the spacious Corridor round the Campo Santo di Pisa would make the noblest walk in the world perhaps for a contemplative philosopher. The tomb of Algarotti produces softer ideas when one looks at the sepulchre of a man who, having deserved and obtained such solid and extensive praise, modestly contented himself with desiring that his epitaph might be so worded, as to record, upon a simple but lasting monument, that he had the honour of being disciple to the immortal _Newton_. The battle of the bridge here at Pisa drew a great many spectators this year, as it has not been performed for a considerable time before: the waiters at our inn here give a better account of it than one should have got perhaps from Cavalier or Dama, who would have felt less interested in the business, and seen it from a greater distance. The armies of Sant' Antonio, and I think San Giovanni Battista, but I will not be positive as to the last, disputed the possession of the bridge, and fought gallantly I fancy; but the first remained conqueror, as our very conversible _Camerieres_ took care to inform us, as it was on that side it seems that they had exerted their valour. Calling theatres, and ships, and running horses, and mock fights, and almost every thing so by the names of Saints, whom we venerate in silence, and they themselves publicly worship, has a most profane and offensive sound with it to be sure; and shocks delicate ears very dreadfully: and I used to reprimand my maids at Milan for bringing up the blessed Virgin Mary's name on every trivial, almost on every ludicrous occasion, with a degree of sharpness they were not accustomed to, because it kept me in a constant shivering. Yet let us reflect a moment on our own conduct in England, and we shall be forced candidly to confess that the Puritans alone keep their lips unpolluted by breach of the third commandment, while the common exclamation of _good God!_ scrupled by few people on the slightest occurrences, and apparently without any temptation in the world, is no less than gross irreverence of his sacred name, whom we acknowledge to be Father of all, in _every_ age In _every_ clime ador'd; By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord. Nor have the ladies at a London card-table Italian ignorance to plead in their excuse; as not instruction but docility is wanted among almost all ranks of people in Great Britain, where, if the Christian religion were practised as it is understood, little could be wished for its eternal, as little is left out among the blessings of its temporal welfare. I have been this morning to look at the Grand Duke's camels, which he keeps in his park as we do deer in England. There were a hundred and sixteen of them, pretty creatures! and they breed very well here, and live quite at their ease, only housing them the winter months: they are perfectly docile and gentle the man told me, apparently less tender of their young than mares, but more approachable by human creatures than even such horses as have been long at grass. That dun hue one sees them of, is, it seems, not totally and invariably the same, though I doubt not but it is so in their native deserts. Let it once become a fashion for sovereigns and other great men to keep and to caress them, we shall see camels as variegated as cats, which in the woods are all of the uniformly-streaked tabby--the males inclining to the brown shade--the females to blue among them;--but being bred _down_, become tortoise-shell, and red, and every variety of colour, which domestication alone can bestow. The misery of Tuscany is, that _all animals_ thrive so happily under this productive sun; so that if you scorn the Zanzariere, you are half-devoured before morning, and so disfigured, that I defy one's nearest friends to recollect one's countenance; while the spiders sting as much as any of their insects; and one of them bit me this very day till the blood came. With all this not ill-founded complaint of these our active companions, my constant wonder is, that the grapes hang untouched this 20th of September, in vast heavy clusters covered with bloom; and unmolested by insects, which, with a quarter of this heat in England, are encouraged to destroy all our fruit in spite of the gardener's diligence to blow up nests, cover the walls with netting, and hang them about with bottles of syrup, to court the creatures in, who otherwise so damage every fig and grape and plum of ours, that nothing but the skins are left remaining _by now. Here_ no such contrivances are either wanted or thought on; and while our islanders are sedulously bent to guard, and studious to invent new devices to protect their half dozen peaches from their half dozen wasps, the standard trees of Italy are loaded with high-flavoured and delicious fruits. Here figs sky-dy'd a purple hue disclose, Green looks the olive, the pomegranate glows; Here dangling pears exalted scents unfold, And yellow apples ripen into gold. The roadside is indeed hedged with festoons of vines, crawling from olive to olive, which they plant in the ditches of Tuscany as we do willows in Britain: mulberry trees too by the thousand, and some pollarded poplars serve for support to the glorious grapes that will now soon be gathered. What least contributes to the beauty of the country however, is perhaps most subservient to its profits. I am ashamed to write down the returns of money gained by the oil alone in this territory and that of Lucca, where I was much struck with the colour as well as the excellence of this useful commodity. Nor can I tell why none of that green cast comes over to England, unless it is, that, like essential oil of chamomile, it loses the tint by exposure to the air. An olive tree, however, is no elegantly-growing or happily-coloured plant: straggling and dusky, one is forced to think of its produce, before one can be pleased with its merits, as in a deformed and ugly friend or companion. The fogs now begin to fall pretty heavily in a morning, and rising about the middle of the day, leave the sun at liberty to exert his violence very powerfully. At night come forth the inhabitants, like dor-beetles at sunset on the coast of Sussex; then is their season to walk and chat, and sing and make love, and run about the street with a girl and a guittar; to eat ice and drink lemonade; but never to be seen drunk or quarrelsome, or riotous. Though night is the true season of Italian felicity, they place not their happiness in brutal frolics, any more than in malicious titterings; they are idle and they are merry: it is, I think, the worst we can say of them; they are idle because there is little for them to do, and merry because they have little given them to think about. To the busy Englishman they might well apply these verses of his own Milton in the Masque of Comus: What have we with day to do? Sons of Care! 'twas made for you. LEGHORN. Here we are by the sea-side once more, in a trading town too; and I should think myself in England almost, but for the difference of dresses that pass under my balcony: for here we were immediately addressed by a young English gentleman, who politely put us in possession of his apartments, the best situated in the town; and with him we talked of the dear coast of Devonshire, agreed upon the resemblance between that and these environs, but gave the preference to home, on account of its undulated shore, finely fringed with woodlands, which here are wanting: nor is this verdure equal to ours in vivid colouring, or variegated with so much taste as those lovely hills which are adorned by the antiquities of Powderham Castle, and the fine disposition of Lord Lisburne's park. But here is an English consul at Leghorn. Yes indeed! an English chapel too; our own King's arms over the door, and in the desk and pulpit an English clergyman; high in character, eminent for learning, genteel in his address, and charitable in every sense of the word: as such, truly loved and honoured by those of his own persuasion, exceedingly respected by those of every other, which fill this extraordinary city: a place so populous, that Cheapside alone can surpass it. It is not a large place however; one very long straight street, and one very large wide square, not less than Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, but I think bigger, form the whole of Leghorn; which I can compare to nothing but a _camera obscura,_ or magic lanthron, exhibiting prodigious variety of different, and not uninteresting figures, that pass and re-pass to my incessant delight, and give that sort of empty amusement which is _à la portée de chacun_[Footnote: Within every one's reach.] so completely, that for the present it really serves to drive every thing else from my head, and makes me little desirous to quit for any other diversion the windows or balcony, whence I look down now upon a Levantine Jew, dressed in long robes, a sort of odd turban, and immense beard: now upon a Tuscan contadinella, with the little straw hat, nosegay and jewels, I have been so often struck with. Here an Armenian Christian, with long hair, long gown, long beard, all black as a raven; who calls upon an old grey Franciscan friar for a walk; while a Greek woman, obliged to cross the street on some occasion, throws a vast white veil all over her person, lest she should undergo the disgrace of being seen at all. Sometimes a group goes by, composed of a broad Dutch sailor, a dry-starched puritan, and an old French officer; whose knowledge of the world and habitual politeness contrive to conceal the contempt he has of his companions. The geometricians tell us that the figure which has most angles bears the nearest resemblance to that which has no angles at all; so here at Leghorn, where you can hardly find forty men of a mind, dispute and contention grow vain, a comfortable though temporary union takes place, while nature and opinion bend to interest and necessity. The _Contorni_ of Leghorn are really very pretty; the Appenine mountains degenerate into hills as they run round the bay, but gain in beauty what in sublimity they lose. To enjoy an open sea view, one must drive further; and it really affords a noble prospect from that rising ground where I understand that the rich Jews hold their summer habitations. They have a synagogue in the town, where I went one evening, and heard the Hebrew service, and thought of what Dr. Burney says of their singing. It is however no credit to the Tuscans to tell, that of all the people gathered together here, they are the worst-looking--I speak of the _men_--but it is so. When compared with the German soldiery, the English sailors, the Venetian traders, the Neapolitan peasants, for I have seen some of _them_ here, how feeble a fellow is a genuine Florentine! And when one recollects the cottagers of Lombardy, that handsome hardy race; bright in their expression, and muscular in their strength; it is still stranger, what can have weakened these too delicate Tuscans so. As they are very rich, and might be very happy under the protection of a prince who lets slip no opportunity of preferring his plebeian to his patrician subjects; yet here at Leghorn they have a tender frame and an unhealthy look, occasioned possibly by the stagnant waters, which tender the environs unwholesome enough I believe; and the millions of live creatures they produce are enough to distract a person not accustomed to such buzzing company. We went out for air yesterday morning three or four miles beyond the town-walls, where I looked steadily at the sea, till I half thought myself at home. The ocean being peculiarly British property favoured the idea, and for a moment I felt as if on our southern coast; we walked forward towards the shore, and I stepped upon some rocks that broke the waves as they rolled in, and was wishing for a good bathing house that one might enjoy the benefit of salt-water so long withheld; till I saw our _laquais de place_ crossing himself at the carriage door, and wondering, as I afterwards found out, at my matchless intrepidity. The mind however took another train of thought, and we returned to the coach, which when we arrived at I refused to enter; not without screaming I fear, as a vast hornet had taken possession in our absence, and the very notion of such a companion threw me into an agony. Our attendant's speech to the coachman however, made me more than amends: "_Ora si vede amico_" (says he), "_cos'è la Donna; del mare istesso non hà paura è pur và in convulsioni per via d'una mosca_[Z]." This truly Tuscan and highly contemptuous harangue, uttered with the utmost deliberation, and added to the absence of the hornet, sent me laughing into the carriage, with great esteem of our philosophical _Rosso_, for so the fellow was called, because he had red hair. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote Z: Now, my friend, do but observe what a thing is a woman! she is not afraid even of the roaring ocean, and yet goes into fits almost at the sight of a fly.] In a very clear day, it is said, one may see Corsica from hence, though not less than forty or fifty miles off: the pretty island Gorgona however, whence our best anchovies are brought to England, lies constantly in view, Assurgit ponti medio circumflua Gorgon. RUTELIUS's Itinerary. How she came by that extraordinary name though, is not I believe well known; perhaps her likeness to one of the Cape Verd islands, the original Hesperides, might be the cause; for it was _there_ the daughters of Phorcus fixed their habitation: or may be, as Medusa was called _Gorgon par eminence_, because she applied herself to the enriching of ground, this fertile islet owes its appellation from being particularly manured and fructified. Here is an extraordinary good opera-house; admirable dancers, who performed a mighty pretty pantomime Comedie _larmoyante_ without words; I liked it vastly. The famous Soprano singer Bedini was at Lucca; but here is our old London favourite Signora Giorgi, improved into a degree of perfection seldom found, and from her little expected. Mr. Udney the British Consul is alone now; his lady has been obliged to leave him, and take her children home for health's sake; but we saw his fine collection of pictures, among which is a Danae that once belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden, and fell from her possession into that of some nobleman, who being tormented by scruples of morality upon his death-bed, resolved to part with all his undraped figures, but not liking to lose the face of this Danae, put the picture into a painter's hands to cut and clothe her: the man, instead of obeying orders he considered as barbarous, copied the whole, and dressed the copy decently, sending it to his sick friend, who never discerned the trick; and kept the original to dispose of, where fewer scruples impeded an advantageous sale. The gentleman who bought it then, died; when Mr. Udney purchased Danae, and highly values her; though some connoisseurs say she is too young and ungrown a female for the character. There is a Titian too in the same collection, of Cupid riding on a lion's back, to which some very remarkable story is annexed; but one's belief is so assailed by such various tales, told of all the striking pictures in Italy, that one grows more tenacious of it every day I think; so that at last the danger will be of believing too little, instead of too much perhaps. Happy for travellers would it be, were that disposition of mind confined to _painting_ only: but if it should prove extended to more serious subjects, we can only hope that the violent excess of the temptation may prove some excuse, or at least in a slight degree extenuate the offence: A wise man cannot believe half he hears in Italy to be sure, but a pious man will be cautious not to discredit it all. Our evening's walk was directed towards the burying-ground appointed here to receive the bodies of our countrymen, and consecrated according to the rites of the Anglican church: for _here_, under protection of a factory, we enjoy that which is vainly sought for under the auspices of a king's ambassador.--_Here_ we have a churchyard of our own, and are not condemned as at other towns in Italy, to be stuffed into a hole like dogs, after having spent our money among them like princes. Prejudice however is not banished from Leghorn, though convenience keeps all in good-humour with each other. The Italians fail not to class the subjects of Great Britain among the Pagan inhabitants of the town, and to distinguish themselves, say, "_Noi altri Christiani_[Footnote: We that are Christians.]:" their aversion to a Protestant, conceal it as they may, is ever implacable; and the last day only will convince them that it is criminal. _Coelum non animum mutant_[Footnote: One changes one's sky but not one's soul.], is an old observation; I passed this afternoon in confirming the truth of it among the English traders settled here: whose conversation, manners, ideas, and language, were so truly _Londonish_, so little changed by transmigration, that I thought some enchantment had suddenly operated, and carried me to drink tea in the regions of _Bucklersbury_. Well! it is a great delight to see such a society subsisting in Italy after all; established where distress may run for refuge, and sickness retire to prepare for lasting repose; whence narrowness of mind is banished by principles of universal benevolence, and prejudice precluded by Christian charity: where the purse of the British merchant, ever open to the poor, is certain to succour and to soothe affliction; and where it is agreed that more alms are given by the natives of our island alone, than by all the rest of Leghorn, and the palaces of Pisa put together. I have here finished that work which chiefly brought me hither; the Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson's Life. It is from this port they take their flight for England, while we retire for refreshment to the BAGNI DI PISA. But not only the waters here are admirable, every look from every window gives images unentertained before; sublimity happily wedded with elegance, and majestick greatness enlivened, yet softened by taste. The haughty mountain St. Juliano lifting its brown head over our house on one side, the extensive plain stretched out before us on the other; a gravel walk neatly planted by the side of a peaceful river, which winds through a valley richly cultivated with olive yards and vines; and sprinkled, though rarely, with dwellings, either magnificent or pleasing: this lovely prospect, bounded only by the sea, makes a variety incessant as the changes of the sky; exhibiting early tranquillity, and evening splendour by turns. It was perhaps particularly delightful to me, to obtain once more a cottage in the country, after running so from one great city to another; and for the first week I did nothing but rejoice in a solitude so new, so salutiferous, so total. I therefore begged my husband not to hurry us to Rome, but take the house we lived in for a longer term, as I would now play the English housewife in Italy I said; and accordingly began calling the chickens and ducks under my window, tasted the new wine as it ran purple from the cask, caressed the meek oxen that drew it to our door; and felt sensations so unaffectedly pastoral, that nothing in romance ever exceeded my felicity. The cold bath here is the most delicate imaginable; of a moderate degree of coldness though, not three degrees below Matlock surely; but omitting, simply enough, to carry a thermometer, one can measure the heat of nothing. Our hot water here seems about the temperature of the Queen's bath in Somersetshire; it is purgative, not corroborant, they tell me; and its taste resembles Cheltenham water exactly. These springs are much frequented by the court I find, and here are very tolerable accommodations; but it is not the season now, and our solitude is perfect in a place which beggars all description, where the mountains are mountains of marble, and the bushes on them bushes of myrtle; large as our hawthorns, and white with blossoms, as _they_ are at the same time of year in Devonshire; where the waters are salubrious, the herbage odoriferous, every trodden step breathing immediate fragrance from the crushed sweets of thyme, and marjoram, and winter savoury: while the birds and the butterflies frolick around, and flutter among the loaded lemon, and orange, and olive trees, till imagination is fatigued with following the charms that surround one. I am come home this moment from a long but not tedious walk, among the crags of this glorious mountain; the base of which nearly reaches, within half a mile perhaps, to the territories of Lucca. Some country girls passed me with baskets of fruit, chickens, &c. on their heads. I addressed them as natives of the last-named place, saying I knew them to be such by their dress and air; one of them instantly replied, "_Oh si, siamo Lucchesi, noi altri; già si può vedere subito una Reppubblicana, e credo bene ch'ella fe n' é accorta benissimo che siamo del paese della libertà_[AA]." [Footnote AA: Oh yes, we are Lucca people sure enough, and I am persuaded that you soon saw in our faces that we come from a land of liberty.] I will add that these females wear no ornaments at all; are always proud and gay, and sometimes a little fancy too. The Tuscan damsels, loaded with gold and pearls, have a less assured look, and appear disconcerted when in company with their freer neighbours--Let them tell why. Mean time my fairy dream of fantastic delight seems fading away apace. Mr. Piozzi has been ill, and of a putrid complaint in his throat, which above all things I should dread in this hot climate. This accident, assisted by other concurring circumstances, has convinced me that we are not shut up in measureless content as Shakespeare calls it, even under St. Julian's Hill: for here was no help to be got in the first place, except the useless conversation of a medical gentleman whose accent and language might have pleased a disengaged mind, but had little chance to tranquilize an affrighted one. What is worse, here was no rest to be had, for the multitudes of vermin up stairs and below. When we first hired the house, I remember my maid jumping up on one of the kitchen chairs while a ragged lad cleared _that_ apartment for her of scorpions to the number of seventeen. But now the biters and stingers drive me _quite wild_, because one must keep the windows open for air, and a sick man can enjoy none of that, being closed up in the Zanzariere, and obliged to respire the same breath over and over again; which, with a sore throat and fever, is most melancholy: but I keep it wet with vinegar, and defy the hornets how I can. What is more surprising than all, however, is to hear that no lemons can be procured for less than two pence English a-piece; and now I am almost ready to join myself in the general cry against Italian imposition, and recollect the proverb which teaches us Chi hà da far con Tosco, Non bisogna esser losco[AB]; [Footnote AB: Who has to do with Tuscan wight, Of both his eyes will need the light. ] as I am confident they cannot be worth even two pence a hundred here, where they hang like apples in our cyder countries; but the rogues know that my husband is sick, and upon poor me they have no mercy. I have sent our folks out to gather fruit at a venture: and now this misery will soon be ended with his illness; driven away by deluges of lemonade, I think, made in defiance of wasps, flies, and a kind of volant beetle, wonderfully beautiful and very pertinacious in his attacks; and who makes dreadful depredations on my sugar and currant-jelly, so necessary on this occasion of illness, and so attractive to all these detestable inhabitants of a place so lovely. My patient, however, complaining that although I kept these harpies at a distance, no sleep could yet be obtained;--I resolved when he was risen, and had changed his room, to examine into the true cause: and with my maid's assistance, unript the mattress, which was without exaggeration or hyperbole _all alive_ with creatures wholly unknown to me. Non-descripts in nastiness I believe they are, like maggots with horns and tails; such a race as I never saw or heard of, and as would have disgusted Mr. Leeuenhoeck himself. My willingness to quit this place and its hundred-footed inhabitants was quickened three nights after by a thunder storm, such as no dweller in more northern latitudes can form an idea of; which, afflicted by some few slight shocks of an earthquake, frighted us all from our beds, sick and well, and gave me an opportunity of viewing such flashes of lightning as I had never contemplated till now, and such as it appeared impossible to escape from with life. The tremendous claps of thunder re-echoing among these Appenines, which double every sound, were truly dreadful. I really and sincerely thought St. Julian's mountain was rent by one violent stroke, accompanied with a rough concussion, and that the rock would fall upon our heads by morning; while the agonies of my English maid and the French valet, became equally insupportable to themselves and me; who could only repeat the same unheeded consolations, and protest our resolution of releasing them from this theatre of distraction the moment our departure should become practicable. Mean time the rain fell, and such a torrent came tumbling down the sides of St. Juliano, as I am persuaded no female courage could have calmly looked on. I therefore waited its abatement in a darkened room, packed up our coach without waiting to copy over the verses my admiration of the place had prompted, and drove forward to Sienna, through Pisa again, where our friends told us of the damages done by the tempest; and shewed us a pretty little church just out of town, where the officiating priest at the altar was saved almost by miracle, as the lightning melted one of the chalices completely, and twisted the brazen-gilt crucifix quite round in a very astonishing manner. Here, however, is the proper place, if any, to introduce the poem of seventy-three short lines, calling itself an Ode to Society written in a state of perfect solitude, secluded from all mortal tread, as was our habitation at the Bagni di Pisa. ODE TO SOCIETY. I. SOCIETY! gregarious dame! Who knows thy favour'd haunts to name? Whether at Paris you prepare The supper and the chat to share, While fix'd in artificial row, Laughter displays its teeth of snow: Grimace with raillery rejoices, And song of many mingled voices, Till young coquetry's artful wile Some foreign novice shall beguile, Who home return'd, still prates of thee, Light, flippant, French SOCIETY. II. Or whether, with your zone unbound, You ramble gaudy Venice round, Resolv'd the inviting sweets to prove, Of friendship warm, and willing love; Where softly roll th' obedient seas, Sacred to luxury and ease, In coffee-house or casino gay Till the too quick return of day, Th' enchanted votary who sighs For sentiments without disguise, Clear, unaffected, fond, and free, In Venice finds SOCIETY. III. Or if to wiser Britain led, Your vagrant feet desire to tread With measur'd step and anxious care, The precincts pure of Portman square; While wit with elegance combin'd, And polish'd manners there you'll find; The taste correct--and fertile mind: Remember vigilance lurks near, And silence with unnotic'd sneer, Who watches but to tell again Your foibles with to-morrow's pen; Till titt'ring malice smiles to see Your wonder--grave SOCIETY. IV. Far from your busy crowded court, Tranquillity makes her report; Where 'mid cold Staffa's columns rude, Resides majestic solitude; Or where in some sad Brachman's cell, Meek innocence delights to dwell, Weeping with unexperienc'd eye, The death of a departed fly: Or in _Hetruria_'s heights sublime, Where science self might fear to climb, But that she seeks a smile from thee, And wooes thy praise, SOCIETY. V. Thence let me view the plains below, From rough St. Julian's rugged brow; Hear the loud torrents swift descending, Or mark the beauteous rainbow bending, Till Heaven regains its favourite hue, Æther divine! celestial blue! Then bosom'd high in myrtle bower, View letter'd Pisa's pendent tower; The sea's wide scene, the port's loud throng, Of rude and gentle, right and wrong; A motley groupe which yet agree To call themselves SOCIETY. VI. Oh! thou still sought by wealth and fame, Dispenser of applause and blame: While flatt'ry ever at thy side, With slander can thy smiles divide; Far from thy haunts, oh! let me stray, But grant one friend to cheer my way, Whose converse bland, whose music's art, May cheer my soul, and heal my heart; Let soft content our steps pursue, And bliss eternal bound our view: Pow'r I'll resign, and pomp, and glee, Thy best-lov'd sweets--SOCIETY. SIENNA. 20th October 1786. We arrived here last night, having driven through the sweetest country in the world; and here are a few timber trees at last, such as I have not seen for a long time, the Tuscan spirit of mutilation being so great, that every thing till now has been pollarded that would have passed twenty feet in height: this is done to support the vines, and not suffer their rambling produce to run out of the way, and escape the gripe of the gatherers. I have eaten too many of these delicious grapes however, and it is now my turn to be sick--No wonder, I know few who would resist a like temptation, especially as the inn afforded but a sorry dinner, whilst every hedge provided so noble a dessert. _Paffera pur la malattia_[Footnote: The disorder will die away though.], as these soft-mouthed people tell me; the sooner perhaps, as we are not here annoyed by insects, which poison the pleasure of other places in Italy; here are only _lizards_, lovely creatures! who being of a beautiful light green colour upon the back and legs, reside in whole families at the foot of every tree, and turn their scarlet bosoms to the sun, as if to display the glories of colouring which his beams alone can bestow. The pleasing tales told of this pretty animal's amical disposition towards man are strictly true, I hear; and it is no longer ago than yesterday I was told an odd anecdote of a young farmer, who, carrying a basket of figs to his mistress, lay down in the field as he crossed it, quite overcome with the weather, and fell fast asleep. A serpent, attracted by the scent, twined round the basket, and would have bit the fellow as well as robbed him, had not a friendly lizard waked, and given him warning of the danger. Swift says, that in the course of life he meets many asses, but they have not _lucky names_. I have met many _vipers, and so few lizards_, it is surprising! but they will not live in London. All the stories one has ever heard of sweetness in language and delicacy in pronunciation, fall short of Siennese converse. The girls who wait on us at the inn here, would be treasures in England, could one get them thither; and they need move nothing but their tongues to make their fortunes. I told Rosetta so, and said I would steal from them a poor girl of eight years old, whom they kept out of charity, and called Olympia, to be my language mistress, "_Battezata com' è, la lascieremo Christiana_[AC]," was the answer. It is impossible, without their manners, to express their elegance, their superior delicacy, graceful without diffusion, and terse without laconicism. You ask the way to the town of a peasant girl, and she replies, "_Passato'l Ponte, o pur barcato'l Fiume, eccola a Sienna_[AD]." And as we drove towards the city in the evening, our postillion sung improviso verses on his sweetheart, a widow who lived down at Pistoja, they told me. I was ashamed to think that no desk or study was likely to have produced better on so trite a subject. Candour must confess, however, that no thought was new, though the language made them for a moment seem so. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote AC: Being baptized as she is, we will leave her a Christian.] [Footnote AD: The bridge once passed, or the river crossed, Sienna lies before you.] This town is neat and cleanly, and comfortable and airy. The prospect from the public walks wants no beauty but water; and here is a suppressed convent on the neighbouring hill, where we half-longed to build a pretty cottage, as the ground is now to be disposed of vastly cheap; and half one's work is already done in the apartments once occupied by friars. With half a word's persuasion I should fix for life here. The air is so pure, the language so pleasing, the place so inviting;--_but we drive on_. There is, mean time, resident in the neighbourhood an English gentleman, his name Greenfield, who has formed to himself a mighty sweet habitation in the English taste, but not extensive, as his property don't reach far: he is however a sort of little oracle in the country I am told; gives money, and dispenses James's powders to the poor, is happy in the esteem of numberless people of fashion, and the comfort of his country people's lives beside; who, travelling to Sienna, as many do for the advantage of studying Italian to perfection, find a friend and companion where perhaps it is least expected. The cathedral here at Sienna deserves a volume, and I shall scarcely give it a page. The pavement of it is the just pride of Italy, and may challenge the world to produce its equal. St. Mark's at Venice floored with precious stones dies away upon the comparison; this being all inlaid with dove-coloured and white marbles representing historical subjects not ill told. Were this operation performed in mosaic work, others of rival excellence might be found. The pavement of Sienna's dome is so disposed by an effort of art one never saw but here, that it produces an effect most resembling that of a very fine and beautiful damask table-cloth, where the large patterns are correctly drawn. _Rome_ however is to be our next stage, and many of our English gentlemen now here, are with ourselves impatiently waiting for the numberless pleasures it is expected to afford us. I will here close this chapter upon our various desires; one wishing to see St. Peters; one setting his heart upon entering the Capitol: to-morrow's sun will light us all upon our search. ROME. The first sleeping place between Sienna and this capital shall not escape mentioning; its name is Radicosani, its title an inn, and its situation the summit of an exhausted volcano. Such a place did I never see. The violence of the mountain, when living, has split it in a variety of places, and driven it to a breadth of base beyond credibility, its height being no longer formidable. Whichever way you turn your eyes, nothing but portions of this black rock appear therefore; so here is extent without sublimity, and here is terror mingled with disgust. The inside of the house is worthy of the prospect seen from its windows; wild, spacious, and scantily provided. Never had place so much the appearance of a haunted hall, where Sir Rowland or Sir Bertrand might feel proud of their courage when The knight advancing strikes the fatal door, And hollow chambers send a sullen roar. MERRY To this truly dismal reposing place is however kindly added a little chapel; and few persons can imagine what a comfortable feel it gave me on entering it in the morning after hearing the winds howl all night in the black mountain. Here too we first made acquaintance with Signor Giovanni Ricci, a mighty agreeable gentleman, who was kindly assistant to us in a hundred little difficulties, afterwards occasioned by horses, postillions, &c. which at last brought us through a bad country enough to Viterbo, where we slept. The melancholy appearance of the Campagna has been remarked and described by every traveller with displeasure, by all with truth. The ill look of the very few and very unhealthy inhabitants confirms their descriptions; and beside the pale and swelled faces which shock one's sight, here is a brassy scent in the air as of verdigris, which offends one's smell; the running water is of an odd colour too, like that in which copper has been steeped. These are sad desolated scenes indeed, though this is not the season for _mal' aria_ neither, which, it is said, begins in May, and ends with September. The present sovereign is mending matters as fast as he can, we hear; and the road now cutting, will greatly facilitate access to his capital, but cannot be done without a prodigious expence. The first view of Rome is wonderfully striking. Ye awful wrecks of ancient times! Proud monuments of ages past Now mould'ring in decay. MERRY. But mingled with every crowding, every classical idea, comes to one's recollection an old picture painted by R. Wilson about thirty years ago, which I am now sure must have been a very excellent representation. Well, then! here we are, admirably lodged at Strofani's in the Piazza di Spagna, and have only to chuse what we will see and talk on first among this galaxy of rarities which dazzles, diverts, confounds, and nearly fatigues one. I will speak of the oldest things first, as I was earnest to see something of Rome in its very early days, if possible; for example the Sublician Bridge, defended by Cocles when the infant republic, like their favourite Hercules in his cradle, strangled the serpent despotism: and of this bridge some portion may yet be seen when the water is very low. The prison is more ancient still however; it was built by the kings; and by the solidity of its walls, and depth of its dungeon, seems built for eternity. Was it not this place to which Juvenal alludes, when he says, Felicia dicas Tempora quæ quondam sub regibus atque tribunis Viderunt uno contentam carcere Romam. And it is in this horrible spot they shew you the miraculous mark of St. Peter's head struck against the wall in going down, with the fountain which burst out of the ground for his refreshment. Antiquaries, however, assure us, that he could not have ever been confined there, as it was a place for state prisoners only, and those of the highest rank: they likewise tell us that Jugurtha passed seven months there, which is as difficult to believe as any miracle ever wrought; for the world was at least somewhat civilized in those days, and how it should be contented with looking quietly on whilst a Prince of Jugurtha's consequence should be so kept, appears incredible at the distance of 1900 years. That Christians should be treated still worse, if worse could be found for them, is less strange, when every step one treads is upon the bones of martyrs; and who dares say that the surrounding campagna, so often drenched in innocent blood, may not have been cursed with pestilence and sterility to all succeeding ages? I have examined the place where Sylla massacred 8000 fellow-citizens at once, and find that it produces no herb but thistles, a weed almost unknown in any other part of Italy; and one of the first punishments bestowed on sinful man. Marcellus's Theatre, an old fountain erected by Camillus when Dictator, and the Tarpeian rock, attract attention powerfully: the last particularly, Where brave Manlius stood, And hurl'd indignant decads down, And redden'd Tyber's flood. GREATHEED. People have never done contradicting Burnet, who says, in his travels, that a man might jump down it now and not do himself much harm: the truth is, its present appearance is not formidable; but I believe it is not less than forty feet high at this moment, though the ground is greatly raised. Of all things at Rome the Cloaca is acknowledged most ancient; a very great and a very useful work it is, of Ancus Martius, fourth king of Rome. The just and zealous detestation of Christians towards Pontius Pilate, is here comically expressed by their placing his palace just at its exit into the Tyber; and one who pretended to doubt of its being his residence, would be thought the worse of among them. I recollect nothing else built before the days of the Emperors, who, for the most part, were such disgracers of human nature and human reason, that one would almost wish their names expunged, and all their deeds obliterated from the face of the globe, which could ever tamely submit to such truly wretched rulers. The Capitol, built by Tarquin, stood till the days of Marius and Sylla it seems; that last-named Dictator erected a new one, which was overthrown in the contests about Vitellius; Vespasian set it up again, but his performance was burned soon after its author's death; and this we contemplate now, is one of the works of Domitian, and celebrated by Martial of course. Adrian however added one room to it, dedicated to Egyptian deities alone: as a matter of mere taste I fancy, like our introducing Chinese temples into the garden; but many hold that it was very serious and superstitious regard, inspired by the victory Canopus won over the Persian divinity of fire, by the subtlety of the Egyptian priests, who, to defend their idol from that all-subduing element, wisely set upon his head a vessel filled with water, and having previously made the figure of Terra Cotta hollow, and full of water, with holes bored at the bottom stopped only by wax to keep it in, a seeming miracle extinguished the flames, as soon as approached by Canopus; whose triumph was of course proclaimed, and he respected accordingly. The figure was a monkey, whose sitting attitude favoured the imposture: our antiquaries tell us the story after _Suidas_. As cruelty is more detestable than fraud, one feels greater disgust at the sight of captive monarchs without hands and arms, than even these idolatrous brutalities inspire; and no greater proof can be obtained of Roman barbarity, than the statues one is shewn here of kings and generals over whom they triumphed; being made on purpose for them without hands and arms, of which they were deprived immediately on their arrival at Rome. Enormous heads and feet, to which the other parts are wanting, let one see, or at least guess; what colossal figures were once belonging to them; yet somehow these celebrated artists seem to me to have a little confounded the ideas of _big_ and _great_ like my countryman Fluellyn in Shakespear's play: while the two famous demi-gods Castor and Pollux, each his horse in his hand, stand one on each side the stairs which lead to the Capitol, and are of a prodigious size--fifteen feet, as I remember. The knowing people tell us they are portraits, and bid us observe that one has pupils to his eyes, the other _not_; but our _laquais de place_, who was a very sensible fellow too, as he saw me stand looking at them, cried out, "Why now to be sure here are a vast many miracles in this holy city--that there are:" and I heard one of our own folks telling an Englishman the other day, how these two monstrous statues, horses and all I believe, _came out of an egg_: a very extraordinary thing certainly; but it is our business to believe, not to enquire. He saw my countenance express something he did not like, and continued, "_Eh basta! sarà stato un uovo strepitoso, è cosi sinisce l'istoria_[AE]." [Footnote AE: Well, well! it was a famous egg we'll say, and there's an end.] In this repository of wonders, this glorious _campidoglio_, one is first shewn as the most valuable curiosity, the two pigeons mentioned by Pliny in old mosaic; and of prodigious nicety is the workmanship, though done at such a distant period: and here is the very wolf which bears the very mark of the lightning mentioned by Cicero:--and here is the beautiful Antinous again; _he_ meets one at every turn, I think, and always hangs his head as if ashamed: here too is the dying gladiator; wonderfully fine! savage valour! mean extraction! horrible anguish! all marking, all strongly characteristical expressions--_all there_; yet all swallowed up, in that which does inevitably and certainly swallow up all things--approaching death. The collection of pictures here would put any thing but these statues out of one's head: Guido's Fortune flying over the globe, scattering her gifts; of which she gave him _one_, the most precious, the most desirable. How elegantly gay and airy is this picture! But St. Sebastian stands opposite, to shew that he could likewise excel in the pathetic. Titian's famous Magdalen, of which the King of France boasts one copy, a noble family at Venice another, is protested by the Roman connoisseurs to reside here only; but why should not the artist be fond of repeating so fine an idea? Guercino's Sybil however, intelligently pensive, and sweetly sensible, is the single figure I should prefer to them all. Before we quit the Capitol, it is pity not to name Marforio; broken, old, and now almost forgotten: though once companion, or rather respondent to Pasquin, and once, a thousand years before those days, a statue of the river _Nar_, as his recumbent posture testifies; not _Mars in the forum_, as has been by some supposed. The late Pope moved him from the street, and shut him up with his betters in the Capitol. Of Trajan and Antonine's Pillars what can one say? That St. Peter and St. Paul stand on the tops of each, setting forth that uncertainty of human affairs which they preached in their life-time, and shewing that _they_, who were once the objects of contempt and abhorrence, are now become literally _the head stones of the corner_; being but too profoundly venerated in that very city, which once cruelly persecuted, and unjustly put them to death. Let us then who look on them recollect their advice, and set our affections on a place of greater stability. The columns are of very unequal excellence, that of Trajan's confessedly the best; one grieves to think he never saw it himself, as few princes were less puffed up by well-deserved praise than he; but dying at Seleucia of a dysenteric fever, his ashes were brought home, and kept on the top of his own pillar in a gilt vase; which Sextus Quintus with more zeal than taste took down, I fear destroyed, and placed St. Peter there. Apollodorus was the architect of the elegant structure, on which, says Ammianus Marcellinus, the Gods themselves gazed with wonder, seeing that nothing but heaven itself was finer. "_Singularem sub omni cælo structuram etiam numinum ascensione mirabilem_." I know not whether this is the proper place to mention that the good Pope Gregory, who added to the possession of every cardinal virtue the exertion of every Christian one, having looked one day with peculiar stedfastness at this column, and being naturally led to reflect on his character to whose honour it was erected, felt just admiration of a mind so noble; and retiring to his devotions in a church not far off, began praying earnestly for Trajan's soul: till a preternatural voice, accompanied with rays of light round the altar he knelt at, commanded his forbearance of further solicitation; assuring him that Trajan's soul was secure in the care of his Creator. Strange! that those who record, and give credit to such a story, can yet continue as a duty their intercessions for the dead! But I have seen the Coliseo, which would swallow that of pretty Verona; it is four times as large I am told, and would hold fourscore thousand spectators. After all the depredations of all the Goths, and afterwards of the Farnese family, the ruin is gloriously beautiful; possibly more beautiful than when it was quite whole; there is enough left now for Truth to repose upon, and a perch for Fancy beside, to fly out from, and fetch in more. The orders of its architecture are easily discerned, though the height of the upper story is truly tremendous; I climbed it once, not to the top indeed, but till I was afraid to look down from the place I was in, and penetrated many of its recesses. The modern Italians have not lost their taste of a prodigious theatre; were they once more a single nation, they would rebuild _this_ I fancy; for here are all the conveniencies in _grande_, as they call it, that amaze one even in _piccolo_ at Milan and Turin: Here were supper-rooms, and taverns, and shops, and I believe baths; certainly long galleries big enough to drive a coach round, and places where slaves waited to receive the commands of masters and ladies, who perhaps if they did not wait to please them, would scarcely scruple to detain them in the cage of offenders, and keep them to make sport upon a future day. The cruelties then exercised on servants at Rome were truly dreadful; and we all remember reading that in Augustus's time, when he did a private friend the honour to dine with him, one of the waiters broke a glass he was about to present full of liquor to the King; at which offence the master being enraged, suddenly caused him to be seized by the rest, and thrown instantly out of the window to feed his lampreys, which lived in a pond on which the apartment looked. Augustus said nothing at the moment; to punish the nobleman's inhumanity however, he sent his officers next morning to break every glass in the house: A curious chastisement enough, and worthy of a nation who, being powerful to erect, populous to fill, and elegantly-skilful to adorn such a fabric as this Coliseum which I have just been contemplating, were yet contented and even happy to view from its well-arranged seats, exhibitions capable of giving nothing but disgust and horror;--lions rending unarmed wretches in pieces; or, to the still deeper disgrace of poor Humanity, those wretches armed unwillingly against each other, and dying to divert a brutal populace. These reflections upon Pagan days and classical cruelties do not disturb however the peace of an old hermit, who has chosen one of these close-concealed recesses for his habitation, and accordingly dwells, dismally enough, in a hole seldom visited by travellers, and certainly never enquired about by the natives. I stumbled on his strange apartment by mere chance, and asked him why he had chosen it? He had been led in early youth, he said, to reflect upon the miseries suffered by the original professors of Christianity; the tortures inflicted on them in this horrible amphitheatre, and the various vicissitudes of Rome since: that he had dedicated himself to these meditations: that he had left the world seventeen years, never stirring from his cell but to buy food, which he eat alone and sparingly, and to pay his devotions in the _Via Crucis_, for so the old Arena is now called; a simple plain wooden cross occupying the middle of it, and round the Circus twelve neat, not splendid chapels; a picture to each, representing the various stages of our Saviour's passion. Such are the meek triumphs of our meek religion! And that such substitutes should have replaced the African savages, tigers, hyænas, &c. and Roman gladiators, not less ferocious than their four-legged antagonists, I am quite as willing to rejoice at as the hermit: They must be better antiquarians too than I am, who regret that a nunnery now covers the spot where ambitious Tullia drove over the bleeding body of her murdered parent, Pressit et inductis membra paterna rotis: That nunnery, supported by the arch of Nerva, which is all that is now left standing of that Emperor's Forum. I must not however quit the Coliseum, without repeating what passed between the King of Sweden and his Roman _laquais de place_ when he was here; and the fellow, in the true cant of his Ciceroneship, exclaimed as they looked up, "_Ah Maesta!_ what cursed Goths those were that tore away so many fine things here, and pulled down such magnificent pillars, &c." "Hold, hold friend," replies the King of Sweden; "I am one of those cursed Goths myself you know: but what were your Roman nobles a-doing, I would ask, when they laboured to destroy an edifice like this, and build their palaces with its materials?" The baths of Livia are still elegantly designed round her small apartments; and one has copies sold of them upon fans; the curiosity of the original is to see how well the gilding stands; in many places it appears just finished. These baths are difficult of access somehow; I never could quite understand how we got in or out of them, but they did belong to the Imperial palace, which covered this whole Palatine hill, and here was Nero's golden house, by what I could gather, but of that I thank Heaven there is no trace left, except some little portion of the wall, which was 120 feet high, and some marbles in shades, like women's worsted work upon canvass, very curious, and very wonderful; as all are natural marbles, and no dye used: the expence must have surpassed credibility. The Temple of Vesta, supposed to be the _very_ temple to which Horace alludes in his second Ode, is a pretty rotunda, and has twenty pillars fluted of Parian marble: it is now a church, as are most of the heathen temples. Such adaptations do not please one, but then it must be allowed and recollected that one is very hard to please: finding fault is so easy, and doing right so difficult! The good Pope Gregory, who feared (by sacred inspiration one would think) all which should come to pass, broke many beautiful antique statues, "lest," said he, "induced by change of dress or name perhaps our Christians may be tempted to adore them:" and we say he was a blockhead, and burned Livy's decads, and so he did; but he refused all titles of earthly dignity; he censured the Oriental Patriarchs for substituting temporal splendours in the place of primitive simplicity; which he said ought _alone_ to distinguish the followers of Jesus Christ. He required a strict attention to morality from all his inferior clergy; observed that those who strove to be first, would end in being last; and took himself the title of servant to the servants of God. Well! Sabinian, his successor, once his favourite Nuncio, flung his books in the fire as soon as he was dead; so his injunctions were obeyed but while he lived to enforce them; and every day now shews us how necessary they were: when, even in these enlightened times, there stands an old figure that every Abate in the town knows to have been originally made for the fabulous God of Physic, Esculapius, is prayed to by many old women and devotees of all ages indeed, just at the Via Sacra's entrance, and called St. Bartolomeo. A beautiful Diana too, with her trussed-up robes, the crescent alone wanting, stands on the high altar to receive homage in the character of St. Agnes, in a pretty church dedicated to her _fuor delle Porte_, where it is supposed she suffered martyrdom; and why? Why for not venerating that _very Goddess Diana_, and for refusing to walk in her procession at the _New Moon_, like a good Christian girl. "_Such contradictions put one from one's self_" as Shakespear says. We are this moment returned home from Tivoli; have walked round Adrian's Villa, and viewed his Hippodrome, which would yet make an admirable open Manège. I have seen the Cascatelle, so sweetly elegant, so rural, so romantic; and I have looked with due respect on the places once inhabited, and ever justly celebrated by genius, wit, and learning; have shuddered at revisiting the spot I hastened down to examine, while curiosity was yet keen enough to make me venture a very dangerous and scarcely-trodden path to Neptune's Grotto; where, as you descend, the Cicerone shews you a wheel of some coarse carriage visibly stuck fast in the rock till it is become a part of it; distinguished from every other stone only by its shape, its projecting forward, and its shewing the hollow places in its fellies, where nails were originally driven. This truly-curious, though little venerable piece of antiquity, serves to assist the wise men in puzzling out the world's age, by computing how many centuries go to the petrifying a cart wheel. A violent roar of dashing waters at the bottom, and a fall of the river at this place from the height of 150 feet, were however by no means favourable to my arithmetical studies; and I returned perfectly disposed to think the world's age a less profitable, a less diverting contemplation, than its folly. We looked at the temple of the old goddess that cured coughs, now a Christian church, dedicated to _la Madonna della Tosse_; it is exactly all it ever was, I believe; and we dined in the temple of Sibylla Tiburtina, a beautiful edifice, of which Mr. Jenkins has sent the model to London in cork, which gives a more exact representation after all than the best-chosen words in the world. I would rather make use of _them_ to praise Mr. Jenkins's general kindness and hospitality to all his country-folks, who find a certain friend in him; and if they please, a very competent instructor. In order however to understand the meaning of some spherical _pots_ observed in the Circus of Caracalla, I chose above all men to consult Mr. Greatheed, whose correct taste, deep research, and knowledge of architecture, led me to prefer his account to every other, of their use and necessity: it shall be given in his own words, which I am proud of his permission to copy. "Of those _pots_ you mention, there are not any remaining in the Circus Maxiouis, as the walls, seats and apodium of that have entirely disappeared. They are to be seen in the Circus of Caracalla, on the Appian way; of this, and of this alone, enough still exists to ascertain the form, structure, and parts of a Roman course. It was surrounded by two parallel walls which supported the seats of the spectators. The exterior wall rose to the summit of the gallery; the interior one was much lower, terminated with the lowest rows, and formed the apodium. This rough section may serve to elucidate my description. From wall to wall an arch was turned which formed a quadrant, and on this the seats immediately rested: but as the upper rows were considerably distant from the crown of the arch, it was necessary to fill the intermediate space with materials sufficiently strong to support the upper stone benches and the multitude. Had these been of solid substance, they would have pressed prodigious and disproportionate weight on the summit of the arch, a place least able to endure it from its horizontal position. To remedy this defect, the architect caused _spherical pots_ to be baked; of these each formed of itself an arch sufficiently powerful to sustain its share of the incumbent weight, and the whole was rendered much less ponderous by the innumerable vacuities. [Illustration] "A similiar expedient was likewise used to diminish the pressure of their domes, by employing the scoriæ of lava brought for that purpose from the Lipari Islands. The numberless bubbles of this volcanic substance give it the appearance of a honeycomb, and answer the same purpose as the pots in Caracalla's Circus, so much so, that though very hard, it is of less specific gravity than wood, and consequently floats in water." Before I quit the Circus of Caracalla, I must not forbear mentioning his bust, which so perfectly resembles Hogarth's idle 'Prentice; but why should they not be alike? For black-guards are black-guards in every degree, I suppose, and the people here who shew one things, always take delight to souce an Englishman's hat upon his head, as if they thought so too. This morning's ramble let us to see the old grotto, sacred to Numa's famous nymph, Ægeria, not far from Rome even now. I wonder that it should escape being built round when Rome was so extensive as to contain the crowds which we are told were lodged in it. That the city spread chiefly the other way, is scarce an answer. London spreads chiefly the Marybone way perhaps, yet is much nearer to Rumford than it was fifty or sixty years ago. The same remark may be made of the Temple of Mars without the walls, near the Porta Capena: a rotunda it was on the road side _then_: it is on the road side _now_, and a very little way from the gate. Caius Cestius's sepulchre however, without the walls, on the other side, is one of the most perfect remains of antiquity we have here. Aurelian made use of that as a boundary we know: it stands at present half without and half within the limit that Emperor set to the city; and is a very beautiful pyramid a hundred and ten feet high, admirably represented in Piranesi's prints, with an inscription on the white marble of which it is composed, importing the name and office and condition of its wealthy proprietor: _C. Cestius, septem vir epulonum_. He must have lived therefore since Julius Caesar's time it is plain, as he first increased the number of epulones to seven, from three their original institution. It was probably a very lucrative office for a man to be Jupiter's caterer; who, as he never troubled himself with looking over the bills, they were such commonly, I doubt not, as made ample profits result to him who went to market; and Caius Cestius was one of the rich contractors of those days, who neglected no opportunity of acquiring wealth for himself, while he consulted the honour of Jupiter in providing for his master's table very plentiful and elegant banquets. That such officers were in use too among the Persians during the time their monarchy lasted, is plain from the apocryphal story of Bel and the Dragon in our Bibles, where, to the joy of every child that reads it, Daniel detects the fraud of the priests by scattering ashes or saw-dust in the temple. But I fear the critics will reprove me for saying that Julius Caesar only increased the number to seven, while many are of opinion he added three more, and made them a decemvirate: mean time Livy tells us the institution began in the year of Rome 553, during the consulate of Fulvius Purpurio and Marcellus, upon a motion of Romuleius if I remember. They had the privilege granted afterwards of edging the gown with purple like the pontiffs, when increased to seven in number; and they were always known by the name _Septemviratus,_ or _Septemviri Epulonum_, to the latest hours of Paganism. The tomb of Caius Cestius is supposed to have cost twelve thousand pounds sterling of our money in those days; and little did he dream that it should be made in the course of time a repository for the bones of _divisos orbe Britannos_: for such it is now appointed to be by government. All of us who die at Rome, sleep with this purveyor of the gods; and from his monument shall at the last day rise the re-animated body of our learned and incomparable Sir James Macdonald: whose numerous and splendid acquirements, though by the time he had reached twenty-four years old astonished all who knew him, never overwhelmed one little domestic virtue. His filial piety however; his hereditary courage, his extensive knowledge, his complicated excellencies, have now, I fear, no other register to record their worth, than a low stone near the stately pyramid of Jupiter's caterer. The tomb of Cæcilia Metella, wife of the rich and famous Crassus, claims our next attention; it is a beautiful structure, and still called _Capo di Bove_ by the Italians, on account of its being ornamented with the _oxhead and flowers_ which now flourish over every door in the new-built streets of London; but the original of which, as Livy tells us, and I believe Plutarch too, was this. That Coratius, a Sabine farmer, who possessed a particularly fine cow, was advised by a soothsayer to sacrifice her to Diana upon the Aventine Hill; telling him, that the city where _she_ now presided--_Diana_--should become mistress of the world, and he who presented her with that cow should become master over that city. The poor Sabine went away to wash in the Tyber, and purify himself for these approaching honours[AF]; but in the mean time, a boy having heard the discourse, and reported it to _Servius Tullius_, he hastened to the spot, killed Coratius's cow for him, sacrificed her to Diana, and hung her head with the horns on, and the garland just as she died, upon the temple door as an ornament. From that time, it seems, the ornament called _Caput Bovis_ was in a manner consecrated to Diana, and her particular votaries used it on their tombs. Nor could one easily account for the decorations of many Roman sarcophagi, till one recollects that they were probably adapted to that divinity in whose temple they were to be placed, rather than to the particular person occupying the tomb, or than to our general ideas of death, time, and eternity. It is probably for this reason that the immense sarcophagus lately dug up from under the temple of Bacchus without the walls, cut out of one solid piece of red porphyry, has such gay ornaments round it, relative to the sacrifices of Bacchus, &c.; and I fancy these stone coffins, if we may call them so, were often made ready and sold to any person who wished to bury their friend, and who chose some story representing the triumph of whatever deity they devoted themselves to. Were the modern inhabitants of Rome who venerate St. Lorenzo, St. Sebastiano, &c. to place, not uncharacteristically at all--a gridiron, or an arrow on their tombstone, it might puzzle succeeding antiquarians, and yet be nothing out of the way in the least. [Footnote AF: A circumstance alluded to and parodied by Ben Johnson in his Alchemist. See the conduct of Dapper, &c.] Of the Egyptian obelisks at Rome I will not strive to give any account, or even any idea. They are too numerous, too wonderful, too learned for me to talk about; but I must not forbear to mention the broken thing which lies down somewhere in a heap of rubbish, and is said to be the greatest rarity in Rome, column, or _obelisk_ and the greatest antiquity surely, if 1630 years before the birth of Christ be its date; as that was but two centuries after the invention of letters by _Memnon_, and just about the time that Joseph the favourite of Pharaoh died. There is a sphinx upon it, however, mighty clearly expressed; and some one said, how strange it was, if the world was no older than we think it, that they should, in so early a stage of existence, represent, or even imagine to themselves a compound animal[AG]: though the chimæra came in play when the world was pretty young too, and the Prophet Isaiah speaks of centaurs; but that was long after even Hesiod's time. [Footnote AG: The ornaments of the ark and tabernacle exhibit much improvement in the arts of engraving, carving, &c. Nor did it seem to cost Aaron any trouble to make a cast of Apis in the Wilderness for the Israelites' amusement, 1491 years before Christ; while the dog Anubis was probably another figure with which Moses was not unacquainted, and that was certainly composite: a cynopephalus I believe.] A modern traveller has however, with much ingenuity of conjecture, given us an excellent reason why the Sphinx was peculiar to Egypt, as the Nile was observed to overflow when the sun was in those signs of the Zodiack: The lion virgin Sphinx, which shows What time the rich Nile overflows. And sure I think, as people lived longer then than they do now; as Moses was contemporary with Cecrops, so that monarchy and a settled form of government had begun to obtain footing in Greece, and apparently migrated a little westward even then; that this column might have employed the artists of those days, without any such exceeding stretch of probability as our modern Aristotelians study to make out, from their zeal to establish his doctrine of the world's eternity. While, if conjecture were once as liberally permitted to believers as it is generously afforded to scepticks, I know not whether a hint concerning Sphinx's original might not be deduced from old Israel's last blessing to his sons; _The lion of Judah_, with the _head of a virgin_, in whose offspring that lion was one day to sink and be lost, except his hinder parts; might naturally enough grow into a favourite emblem among the inhabitants of a nation who owed their existence to one of the family; and who would be still more inclined to commemorate the mystical blessing, if they observed the fructifying inundation to happen regularly, as Mr. Savary says, when the Sun left Leo for Virgo. The broken pillar has however carried me too far perhaps, though every day passed in the Pope's Musæum confirms my belief, nay certainty, that they did mingle the veneration of Joseph with that of their own gods: The bushel or measure of corn on the Egyptian Jupiter's head is a proof of it, and the name _Serapis_, a further corroboration: the dream which he explained for Pharaoh relative to the event that fixed his favour in that country, was expressed by _cattle_; and _for apis_, the _ox's head_, was perfectly applicable to him for every reason. But we will quit mythology for the Corso. This is the first town in Italy I have arrived at yet, where the ladies fairly drive up and down a long street by way of shewing their dress, equipages, &c. without even a pretence of taking fresh air. At Turin the view from the place destined to this amusement, would tempt one out merely for its own sake; and at Milan they drive along a planted walk, at least a stone's throw beyond the gates. Bologna calls its serious inhabitants to a little rising ground, whence the prospect is luxuriantly verdant and smiling. The Lucca bastions are beyond all in a peculiar style of miniature beauty; and even the Florentines, though lazy enough, creep out to Porto St. Gallo. But here at Roma la Santa, the street is all our Corso; a fine one doubtless, and called the _Strada del Popolo_, with infinite propriety, for except in that strada there is little populousness enough God knows. Twelve men to a woman even there, and as many ecclesiastics to a lay-man: all this however is fair, when celibacy is once enjoined as a duty in one profession, encouraged as a virtue in all. Where females are superfluous, and half prohibited, it were as foolish to complain of the decay of population, as it was comical in Omai the South American savage, when he lamented that no cattle bred upon their island; and one of our people replying, That they left some beasts on purpose to furnish them; he answered, "Yes, but the idol worshipped at Bola-bola, another of the islands, insisted on the males and females living separate: so they had sent _him_ the cows, and kept only the bulls at home." _Au reste_, as the French say, we must not be too sure that all who dress like Abates are such. Many gentlemen wear black as the court garb; many because it is not costly, and many for reasons of mere convenience and dislike of change. I see not here the attractive beauty which caught my eye at Venice; but the women at Rome have a most Juno-like carriage, and fill up one's idea of Livia and Agrippina well enough. The men have rounder faces than one sees in other towns I think; bright, black, and somewhat prominent eyes, with the finest teeth in Europe. A story told me this morning struck my fancy much; of an herb-woman, who kept a stall here in the market, and who, when the people ran out flocking to see the Queen of Naples as she passed, began exclaiming to her neighbours--"_Ah, povera Roma! tempo fù quando passò qui prigioniera la regina Zenobia; altra cosa amica, robba tutta diversa di questa_ reginuccia[AH]!" [Footnote AH: "Ah, poor degraded Rome! time was, my dear, when the great Zenobia passed through these streets in chains; anotherguess figure from this little Queeney, in good time!"] A characteristic speech enough; but in this town, unlike to every other, the _things_ take my attention all away from the _people_; while, in every other, the people have had much more of my mind employed upon them, than the things. The arch of Constantine, however, must be spoken of; the sooner, because there is a contrivance at the top of it to conceal musicians, which added, as it passed, to the noise and gaiety of the triumph. Lord Scarsdale's back front at Keddlestone exhibits an imitation of this structure; a motto, expressive of hospitality, filling up the part which, in the original, is adorned with the siege of Verona, that to me seems well done; but Michael Angelo carried off Trajan's head they tell us, which had before been carried thither from the arch of Trajan himself. The arch of Titus Vespasian struck me more than all the others we have named though; less for its being the first building in which the Composite order of architecture is made use of, among the numberless fabrics that surround one, than for the evident completion of the prophecies which it exhibits. Nothing can appear less injured by time than the bas-reliefs, on one side representing the ark, and golden candlesticks; on the other, Titus himself, delight of human kind, drawn by four horses, his look at once serene and sublime. The Jews cannot endure, I am told, to pass under this arch, so lively is the _annihilation_ of their government, and utter _extinction_ of their religion, carved upon it. When reflecting on the continued captivity they have suffered ever since this arch was erected here at Rome, and which they still suffer, being strictly confined to their own miserable Ghetto, which they dare not leave without a mark upon their hat to distinguish them, and are never permitted to stir without the walls, except in custody of some one whose business it is to bring them back; when reflecting, I say, on their sorrows and punishments, one's heart half inclines to pity their wretchedness; the dreadful recollection immediately crosses one, that these are the direct and lineal progeny of those very Jews who cried out aloud--"_Let his blood be upon us, and upon our children!_"--Unhappy race! how sweetly does St. Austin say of them--"_Librarii nostri facti sunt, quemadmodum solent libros post dominos ferre_." The _arca degli orefici_ is a curious thing too, and worth observing: the goldsmiths set it up in honour of Caracalla and Geta; but one plainly discerns where poor Geta's head has been carried off in one place, his figure broken in another, apparently by Caracalla's order. The building is of itself of little consequence, but as a confirmation of historical truth. The fountains of Rome should have been spoken of long ago; the number of them is known to all though, and of their magnificence words can give no idea. One print of the Trevi is worth all the words of all the describers together. Moses striking the rock, at another fountain, where water in torrents tumble forth at the touch of the rod, has a glorious effect, from the happiness of the thought, and an expression so suitable to the subject. When I was told the story of Queen Christina admiring the two prodigious fountains before St. Peter's church, and begging that they might leave off playing, because she thought them occasional, and in honour of her arrival, not constant and perpetual; who could help recollecting a similar tale told about the Prince of Monaco, who was said to have expressed his concern, when he saw the roads lighted up round London, that our king should put himself to so great an expence on his account--in good time!--thinking it a temporary illumination made to receive him with distinguished splendour. These anecdotes are very pretty now, if they are strictly true; because they shew the mind's petty but natural disposition, of reducing and attributing all _to self_: but if they are only inventions, to raise the reputation of London lamps, or Roman cascades, one scorns them;--I really do hope, and half believe, that they are true. But I have been to see the two Auroras of Guido and Guercino. Villa Ludovisi contains the last, of which I will speak first for forty reasons--the true one because I like it best. It is so sensible, so poetical, so beautiful. The light increases, and the figure advances to the fancy: one expects Night to be waked before one looks at her again, if ever one can be prevailed upon to take one's eyes away. The bat and owl are going soon to rest, and the lamp burns more faintly as when day begins to approach. The personification of Night is wonderfully hit off. But Guercino is _such_ a painter! We were driving last night to look at the Colisseo by moon-light--there were a few clouds just to break the expanse of azure and shew the gilding. I thought how like a sky of Guercino's it was; other painters remind one of nature, but nature when most lovely makes one think of Guercino and his works. The Ruspigliosi palace boasts the Aurora of Guido--both are ceilings, but this is not rightly named sure. We should call it the Phoebus, for Aurora holds only the second place at best: the fun is driving over her almost; it is a more luminous, a more graceful, a more showy picture than the other, more universal too, exciting louder and oftener repeated praises; yet the other is so discriminated, so tasteful, so classical! We must go see what Domenichino has done with the same subject. I forget the name of the palace where it is to be admired: but had we not seen the others, one should have said this was divine. It is a Phoebus again, _this_ is; not a bit of an Aurora: and Truth is springing up from the arms of Time to rejoice in the sun's broad light. Her expression of transport at being set free from obscurity, is happy in an eminent degree; but there are faults in her form, and the Apollo has scarcely dignity enough in _his_. The horses are best in Guide's picture: Aurora at the Villa Ludovisi has but two; they are very spirited, but it is the spirit of three, not six o'clock in a summer morning. Surely Thomson had been living under these two roofs when he wrote such descriptions as seem to have been made on purpose for them; could any one give a more perfect account of Guercino's performance than these words afford? The meek-ey'd morn appears, mother of dews, At first faint-gleaming in the dappled East Till far o'er æther spreads the widening glow, And from before the lustre of her face White break the clouds away: with quicken'd step Brown Night retires, young Day pours in apace And opens all the lawny prospect wide. As for the Ruspigliosi palace I left these lines in the room, written by the same author, and think them more capable than any description I could make, of giving some idea of Guido's Phoebus. While yonder comes the powerful King of Day Rejoicing in the East; the lessening cloud, The kindling azure, and the mountains brow Illum'd with fluid gold, his near approach Betoken glad; lo, now apparent all He looks in boundless majesty abroad, And sheds the shining day. So charming Thomson wrote from his lodgings at a milliner's in Bond-street, whence he seldom rose early enough to see the sun do more than glisten on the opposing windows of the street: but genius, like truth, cannot be kept down. So he wrote, and so they painted! _Ut pictura poesis_. The music is not in a state so capital as we left it in the north of Italy; we regret Nardini of Florence, Alessandri of Venice, and Ronzi of Milan; and who that has heard Signior Marchesi sing, could ever hear a successor (for rival he has none), without feeling total indifference to all their best endeavours? The conversations of Cardinal de Bernis and Madame de Boccapaduli are what my countrywomen talk most of; but the Roman ladies cannot endure perfumes, and faint away even at an artificial rose. I went but once among them, when Memmo the Venetian ambassador did me the honour to introduce me _somewhere_, but the conversation was soon over, not so my shame; when I perceived all the company shrink from me very oddly, and stop their noses with rue, which a servant brought to their assistance on open salvers. I was by this time more like to faint away than they--from confusion and distress; my kind protector informed me of the cause; said I had some grains of marechale powder in my hair perhaps, and led me out of the assembly; to which no intreaties could prevail on me ever to return, or make further attempts to associate with a delicacy so very susceptible of offence. Mean time the weather is exceedingly bad, heavy, thick, and foggy as our own, for aught I see; but so it was at Milan too I well remember: one's eye would not reach many mornings across the Naviglio that ran directly under our windows. For fine bright Novembers we must go to Constantinople I fancy; certain it is that Rome will not supply them. What however can make these Roman ladies fly from _odori_ so, that a drop of lavenderwater in one's handkerchief, or a carnation in one's stomacher, is to throw them all into, convulsions thus? Sure this is the only instance in which they forbear to _fabbricare fu l'antico_[Footnote: Build upon the old foundations.], in their own phrase: the dames, of whom Juvenal delights to tell, liked perfumes well enough if I remember; and Horace and Martial cry "_Carpe rosas_" perpetually. Are the modern inhabitants still more refined than _they_ in their researches after pleasure? and are the present race of ladies capable of increasing, beyond that of their ancestors, the keenness of any corporeal sense? I should think not. Here are however amusements enough at Rome without trying for their conversations. The Barberini palace, whither I carried a distracting tooth-ach, amused even that torture by the variety of its wonders. The sleeping faun, praised on from century to century, and never yet praised enough; so drunk, so fast asleep, so like a human body! Modesty reproving Vanity, by Leonardo da Vinci, so totally beyond my expectation or comprehension, great! wise! and fine! Raphael's Mistress, painted by himself, and copied by Julio Romano; this picture gives little satisfaction though except from curiosity gratified, the woman is too coarse. Guido's Magdalen up stairs, the famous Magdalen, effacing every beauty, of softness mingled with distress. A St. John too, by dear Guercino, transcendent! but such was my anguish the very rooms turned round: I must come again when less ill I believe. Nothing can equal the nastiness at one's entrance to this magazine of perfection: but the Roman nobles are not disgusted with _all sorts_ of scents it is plain; these are not what we should call perfumes indeed, but certainly _odori_: of the same nature as those one is obliged to wade through before Trajan's Pillar can be climbed. That the general appearance of a city which contains such treasures should be mean and disgusting, while one literally often walks upon granite, and tramples red porphyry under one's feet, is one of the greatest wonders to me, in a town of which the wonders seem innumerable: that it should be nasty beyond all telling, all endurance, with such perennial streams of the purest water liberally dispersed, and triumphantly scattered all over it, is another unfathomable wonder: that so many poor should be suffered to beg in the streets, when not a hand can be got to work in the fields, and that those poor should be permitted to exhibit sights of deformity and degradations of our species to me unseen till now, at the most solemn moments, and in churches where silver and gold, and richly-arrayed priests, scarcely suffice to call off attention from their squallid miseries, I do not try to comprehend. That the palaces which taste and expence combine to decorate should look quietly on, while common passengers use their noble vestibules, nay flairs, for every nauseous purpose; that princes whose incomes equal those of our Dukes of Bedford and Marlborough, should suffer their servants to dress other men's dinners for hire, or lend out their equipages for a day's pleasuring, and hang wet rags out of their palace windows to dry, as at the mean habitation of a pauper; while looking in at those very windows, nothing is to be seen but proofs of opulence, and scenes of splendour, I will not undertake to explain; sure I am, that whoever knows Rome, will not condemn this _ebauche_ of it. When I spoke of their beggars, many not unlike Salvator Rosa's Job at the Santa Croce palace, I ought not to have omitted their eloquence, and various talents. We talked to a lame man one day at our own door, whose account of his illness would not have disgraced a medical professor; so judicious were his sentiments, so scientific was his discourse. The accent here too is perfectly pleasing, intelligible, and expressive; and I like their _cantilena_ vastly. The excessive lenity of all Italian states makes it dangerous to live among them; a seeming paradox, yet certainly most true; and whatever is evil in this way at any other town, is worst at Rome; where those who deserve hanging, enjoy almost a moral certainty of never being hanged; so unwilling is everybody to detect the offender, and so numerous the churches to afford him protection if found out. A man asked importunately in our antichamber this morning for the _padrone,_ naming no names, and our servants turned him out. He went however only five doors, further, found a sick old gentleman sitting in his lodging attended by a feeble servant, whom he bound, stuck a knife in the master, rifled the apartments, and walked coolly out again at noon-day: nor should we have ever heard of _such a trifle_, but that it happened just by so; for here are no newspapers to tell who is murdered, and nobody's pity is excited, unless for the malefactor when they hear he is caught. But the Palazzo Farnese is a more pleasing speculation; the Hercules faces us entering; Guglielmo della Porta made his legs I hear, and when the real ones were found, _his were better:_ and Michael Angelo said, it was not worth risquing the statue to try at restoring the old ones. There is another Hercules stands near, as a foil to Glycon's, I suppose; and the Italians tell you of our Mr. Sharp's acuteness in finding some fault till then undiscovered, a very slight one though, with some of the neck muscles: they tell it approvingly however, and make one admire their candour, even beyond their Flora, who carries that in her countenance which they possess in their hearts. Under a shed on the right hand you find the famous groupe called Toro Farnese. It has been touched and repaired, they tell you, till much of the spirit is lost; but I did not miss it. The Bull and the Brothers are greatness itself; but Dirce draws no compassion by her looks somehow, and the lady who comes to her relief, seems too cold a spectatress of the scene. There were several broken statues in the place, and while my companions were examining the groupe after I had done, the wench's conversation who shewed it made my amusement: as we looked together at an Egyptian _Isis_, or, as many call her, _the Ephesian Diana_, with a hundred breasts, very hideous, and swathed about the legs like a mummy at Cairo, or a baby at Rome, I said to the girl, "_They worshipped these filthy things formerly before Jesus Christ came; but he taught us better_," added I, "_and we are wiser now: how foolish was not it to pray to this ugly stone_?"--"The people were _wickeder_ then, very likely;" replied my friend the wench, "but I do not see that it _was foolish at all."_ Who says the modern Romans are degenerated? I swear I think them so like their ancestors, that it is my delight to contemplate the resemblance. A statue of a peasant carrying game at this very palace, is habited precisely in the modern dress, and shews how very little change has yet been made. The shoes of the low fellows too particularly attract my notice: they exactly resemble the ancient ones, and when Persius mentions his ploughman _peronatus arator_, one sees he would say so to-day. The Dorian palace calls however, and people must give way to things where the miraculous powers of Benvenuto Garofani are concerned; where Lodovico Caracci exhibits a _testa del redentore_ beyond all praise, uniting every excellence, and expressing every perfection; where, in the deluge represented by Bonati, one sees the eagle drooping from a weight of rain, majestic in his distress, and looking up to the luminous part of the picture as if hoping to discover some ray of that sun he never shall see again. How characteristic! how tasteful is the expression! The famous Virgin and Child too, so often engraved and copied. I will run away from this Doria; it is too full of beauty--it dazzles: and I will let them shew the pale green Gaspar Pouffins, so valuable, so curious, to whom they please, while Nature and Claude content my fancy and fill up every idea. At the Colonna palace what have I remarked? That it possesses the gayest gallery belonging to any subject upon earth: one hundred and thirty-nine feet long, thirty-four broad, and seventy high: profusely ornamented with pillars, pictures, statues, to a degree of magnificence difficult to express. The Herodias here by Guido, is the perfection of dancing grace. No Frenchman enters the room that does not bear testimony to its peculiar excellence. But here's Guercino's sweet returning Prodigal, and here is a _Madonna disperata_ bursting as from a cavern to embrace the body of her dead son and saviour.--Such a sky too! But it is treating too theatrically a subject which impresses one more at last in the simple _Pietà_[AI] d'Annibale Caracci at Palazzo Doria. [Footnote AI: The Christ in his mother's lap, after crucifixion, is always called in Italy a _Pietà_.] One wonderfully-imagined picture by Andrea Sacchi, of Cain flying from the sight of his murdered brother, shall alone detain me from mentioning here at Rome what certainly would never have been thought on by Englishmen had it remained at Windsor; no other than our old King Charles's cabinet, sold to the Colonna family by Cromwell, and set about in the old-fashioned way with gems, cameos, &c. one of which has been stolen. And now to the Borghese, which I am told is for a time to finish my fatigues, as after three days more we go to Naples. News perfectly agreeable to me, who never have been well here for two hours together. All the great churches remain yet unvisited: they are to be taken at our return in spring; mean while I will go see Mons Sacer in spite of connoisseurship, though the place it seems is nothing, and the prospect from it dull; but it produces thoughts, or what is next to thought,--recollection of books read, and events related in one's early youth, when names and stories make impression on a mind not yet hardened by age, or contracted by necessary duty, so as no longer to receive with equal relish the _tales of other times._ The lake too, with the floating islands, should be mentioned; the colour of which is even blue with venom, and left a brassy taste in my mouth for a whole day, after only observing how it boiled with rage on dropping in a stone, and incrusted a stick with its tartar in two minutes. One of our companions indeed leaped upon the little spots of ground which float in it, and deserved to feel some effect of his rashness; but it is sufficient to stand near, I think; one scarcely can escape contagion. The sudden and violent powers observable in this lake should at least check the computists from thinking they can gather the world's age from its petrefactions. But we are called to the Vatican, where the Apollo, Laocoon, Antinous, and Meleager, with others of less distinguished merit, suffer one to think on nothing but themselves, and of the artists who framed such models of perfection. Laocoon's agonies torment one. I was forced to recollect the observation Dr. Moore says was first made by Mr. Locke, in order to harden my heart against him who appears to feel only for himself, when two such youths are expiring close beside him. But though painting can do much, and sculpture perhaps more, at least one learns to think so here at Rome, the comfort is, that poetry beats them both. Virgil knew, and Shakespeare would have known, how to heighten even this distress, by adding paternal anguish:--here is distress enough however. Let us once more acknowledge the modesty and candour of Italians, when we repeat what has been so often recorded, that Michael Angelo refused adding the arm that was wanting to this chef d'oeuvre; and when Bernini undertook the task, he begged it might remain always a different colour, that he might not be suspected of hoping that his work could ever lie confounded with that of the Greek artist. Such is not the spirit of the French: they have been always adding to Don Quixote! a personage whose adventures were little likely to cross one's fancy in the Vatican; but perfection is perfection. Here stands the Apollo though, in whom alone no fault has yet been found. They tell you, he has just killed the serpent Python. "Let us beg of him," says one of the company, "just to turn round and demolish those cursed snakes which are devouring the poor old man and his boys yonder." This was like the speech of _Marchez donc_ to the fine bronze horse under the heavenly statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitol, and made me hope that story might be true. It is the fashion for every body to go see Apollo by torch light: he looks like _Phoebus_ then, the Sun's bright deity, and seems to say to his admirers, as that Divinity does to the presumptuous hero in Homer, Oh son of Tydeus, cease! be wise, and see How vast the difference 'twixt the gods and thee. Indeed every body finds the remark obvious, that this statue is of beauty and dignity beyond what human nature now can boast; and the Meleager just at hand, with the Antinous, confirm it; for all elegance and all expression, unpossessed by the Apollo, _they have_, while none can miss the inferiority of their general appearance to his. The Musæum Clementinum is altogether such though, that these singularly excellent productions of art are only proper and well-adapted ornaments of a gallery, so stately as, on the other hand, that noble edifice seems but the due repository of such inhabitants. Never were place and decorations so adapted: never perhaps was so refined a taste engaged on subjects so worthy its exertion. The statues are disposed with a propriety that charms one; the situation of the pillars so contrived, the colours of them so chosen to carry the eye forward--not fatigue it; the rooms so illuminated: Hagley park is not laid out with more judicious attention to diversify, and relieve with various objects a mind delighting in the contemplation of ornamented nature; than is the Pope's Musæum calculated to enchain admiration, and fix it in those apartments where sublimity and beauty have established their residence; and those would be worse than Goths, who could think of moving even an old torso from the place where Pius Sextus has commanded it to remain. The other parts of this prodigious structure would take up one's life almost to see completely, to remember distinctly, and to describe accurately. When the reader recollects that St. Peter's, with all its appurtenances, palace, library, musæum, every thing that we include in the word _Vatican_, is said by the Romans to occupy an equal quantity of space, to that covered by the city of Turin: the assertion need not any longer be thought hyperbolical. I will say no more about it till at our return from Naples we visit all the churches. Vopiscus said, that the statues in his time at Rome out-numbered the people; and I trust the remark is now almost doubly true, as every day and hour digs up dead worthies, and the unwholesome weather must surely send many of the living ones to their ancestors: upon the whole, the men and women of Porphyry, &c. please me best, as they do not handle long knives to so good an effect as the others do, "_qui aime bien a s'ègorger encore[Footnote: Who have still a taste to be cut-throats.],"_ says a French gentleman of them the other day. There is however an air of cheerfulness in the streets at a night among the poor, who fry fish, and eat roots, sausages, &c. as they walk about gaily enough, and though they quarrel too often, never get drunk at least. The two houses belonging to the Borghese family shall conclude my first journey to Rome, and with that the first volume of my observations and reflexions. Their town palace is a suite of rooms constructed like those at Wanstead exactly; and where you turn at the end to come back by another suite, you find two alabaster fountains of superior beauty, and two glass lustres made in London, but never wiped since they left Fleet-street certainly. They do not however _want_ cleaning as the fountains do; which, by the extraordinary use made of them, give the whole palace an offensive smell. Among the pictures here, the entombing our blessed Saviour by Rafaelle is most praised: It is supposed indeed wholly inestimable, and I believe is so, while Venus, binding Cupid's eyes, by Titian, engraved by Strange, is possibly one of the pleasantest pictures in Rome. The Christ disputing with the Doctors is inimitable, one of the wonderful works of Leonardo da Vinci: but here is Domenichino's Diana among her nymphs, very laboured, and very learned. Why did it put me in mind of Hogarth's strolling actresses dressing in a barn? Villa Borghese presents more to one's mind at once than it will bear, from the bas relief of Curtius over the door that faces you going in, to the last gate of the garden you drive out at;--large as the saloon is however, the figure of Curtius seems too near you; and the horse's hind quarters are heavy, and ill-suited to the forehand; but here are men and women enough, and odd things that are neither, at this house; so we may let the horse of Curtius alone. Nothing can be gayer or more happily expressed in its way than the Centaur, which Dr. Moore, like Dr. Young, finds _not_ fabulous; while the brute runs away with the man, and Cupid keeps urging him forward. The fawn nursing Bacchus when a baby, is another semi-human figure of just and high estimation; and that very famous composition for which Cavalier Bernini has executed a mattress infinitely softer to the eye than any real one I ever found in _his_ country, has here an apartment appropriated to itself. From monsters the eye turns of its own accord towards Nero, and here is an incomparable one of about ten years old, in whose face I vainly looked for the seeds of parricide, and murderous tyranny; but saw only a sturdy boy, who might have been made an honest man perhaps, had not the rod been spared by his old tutor, whose lenity is repaid by death here in the next room. It is a relief to look upon the smiling Zingara; her lively character is exquisitely touched, her face the only one perhaps where Bernini could not go beyond the proper idea of arch waggery and roguish cunning, adorned with beauty that must have rendered its possessor, while living, irresistible. His David is scarcely young enough for a ruddy shepherd swain; he seems too muscular, and confident of his own strength; _this_ fellow could have worn Saul's armour well enough. Æneas carrying his father, I understand, is by the other Bernini; but the famous groupe of Apollo and Daphne is the work of our Chevalier himself. There is a Miss Hillisberg, a dancer on the stage, who reminds every body of this graceful statue, when theatrical distress drives her to force expression: I mean the stage in Germany, not Rome, whence females are excluded. But the vases in this Borghese villa! the tables! the walls! the cameos stuck in the walls! the frames of the doors, all agate, porphyry, onyx, or verd antique! the enormous riches contained in every chamber, actually takes away my breath and leaves me stunned. Nor are the gardens unbecoming or inadequate to the house, where on the outside appear such bas-reliefs as would be treasured up by the sovereigns of France or England, and shewn as valuable rarities. The rape of Europa first; it is a beautiful antique. Up stairs you see the rooms constantly inhabited; in the princess's apartment, her chimney-piece is one elegant but solid amethyst: over the prince's bed, which changes with the seasons, hangs a Ganymede painted by Titian, to which the connoisseurs tell you no rival has yet been found. The furniture is suitably magnificent in every part of the house, and our English friends assured me, that they met the lady of it last night, when one gentleman observing how pretty she was, another replied he could not see her face for the dazzling lustre of her innumerable diamonds, that actually by their sparkling confounded his sight, and surrounded her countenance so that he could not find it. Among all the curiosities however belonging to this wealthy and illustrious family, the single one most prized is a well-known statue, called in Catalogues by the name of the Fighting Gladiator, but considered here at Rome as deserving of a higher appellation. They now dispute only what hero it can be, as every limb and feature is expressive of a loftier character than the ancients ever bestowed in sculpture upon those degraded mortals whom Pliny contemptuously calls _Hordiarij_, and says they were kept on barley bread, with ashes given in their drink to strengthen them. Indeed the statue of the expiring Gladiator at the Capitol, his rope about his neck, and his unpitied fate, marked strongly in his vulgar features, exhibits quite a separate class in the variety of human beings; and though Faustina's favourite found in the same collection was probably the showiest fellow then among them, we see no marks of intelligent beauty or heroic courage in his form or face, where an undaunted steadiness and rustic strength make up the little merit of the figure. This charming statue of the prince Borghese is on the other hand the first in Rome perhaps, for the distinguished excellencies of animated grace and active manliness: his head raised, the body's attitude, not studied surely, but the apparent and seemingly sudden effect of patriotic daring. Such one's fancy forms young Isadas the Spartan; who, hearing the enemy's approach while at the baths, starts off unmindful of his own defenceless state, snatches a spear and shield from one he meets, flies at the foe, performs prodigies of valour, is looked on by both armies as a descended God, and returns home at last unhurt, to be fined by the Ephori for breach of discipline, at the same time that a statue was ordered to commemorate his exploits, and erected at the state's expence. Monsignor Ennio Visconti, who saw that the figure reminded me of this story, half persuaded himself for a moment that this was the very Isadas; and that Jason, for whom he had long thought it intended, was not young enough, and less likely to fight undefended by armour against bulls, of whose fury he had been well apprised. Mr. Jenkins recollected an antique ring which confirmed our new hypothesis, and I remained flattered, whether they were convinced or no. END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
18845	----	[Illustration: Courtesy International Mercantile Marine Co. THE COLISEUM AND ARCH OF TITUS] SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS SELECTED AND EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS, ETC. BY FRANCIS W. HALSEY _Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The Worlds Famous Orations" and of "The Best of the World's Classics," etc._ IN TEN VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED Vol. VII ITALY, SICILY, AND GREECE Part One FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK AND LONDON COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY [_Printed in the United States of America_] INTRODUCTION TO VOLUMES VII AND VIII Italy, Sicily and Greece Tourists in great numbers now go to Italy by steamers that have Naples and Genoa for ports. By the fast Channel steamers, however, touching at Cherbourg and Havre, one may make the trip in less time (rail journey included). In going to Rome, four days could thus be saved; but the expense will be greater--perhaps forty per cent. ... "and now, fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee? Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste More rich than other climes' fertility; Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which can not be defaced." At least four civilizations, and probably five, have dominated Italy; together they cover a period of more than 3,000 years--Pelasgian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Italian. Of these the Pelasgian is, in the main, legendary. Next came the Etruscan. How old that civilization is no man knows, but its beginnings date from at least 1000 B.C.--that is, earlier than Homer's writings, and earlier by nearly three centuries than the wall built by Romulus around Rome. The Etruscan state was a federation of twelve cities, embracing a large part of central and northern Italy--from near Naples as far north perhaps as Milan and the great Lombard plain. Etruscans thus dominated the largest, and certainly the fairest, parts of Italy. Before Rome was founded, the Etruscan cities were populous and opulent commonwealths. Together they formed one of the great naval powers of the Mediterranean. Of their civilization, we have abundant knowledge from architectural remains, and, from thousands of inscriptions still extant. Cortona was one of their oldest towns. "Ere Troy itself arose, Cortona was." After the Etruscans, came Greeks, who made flourishing settlements in southern Italy, the chief of which was Paestum, founded not later than 600 B.C. Stupendous ruins survive at Paestum; few more interesting ones have come down to us from the world of ancient Hellas. The oldest dates from about 570 B.C. Here was once the most fertile and beautiful part of Italy, celebrated for its flowers so that Virgil praised them. It is now a lonely and forsaken land, forbidding and malarious. Once thickly populated, it has become scarcely more than a haunt of buffalos and peasants, who wander indifferent among these colossal remains of a vanished race. These, however, are not the civilizations that do most attract tourists to Italy, but the remains found there of ancient Rome. Of that empire all modern men are heirs--heirs of her marvelous political structure, of her social and industrial laws. Last of these five civilizations is the Italian, the beginnings of which date from Theodoric the Goth, who in the fifth century set up a kingdom independent of Rome; but Gothic rule was of short life, and then came the Lombards, who for two hundred years were dominant in northern and central parts, or until Charlemagne grasped their tottering kingdom and put on their famous Iron Crown. In the south Charlemagne's empire never flourished. That part of Italy was for centuries the prey of Saracens, Magyars and Scandinavians. From these events emerged modern Italy--the rise of her vigorous republics, Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice; the dawn, meridian splendor and decline of her great schools of sculpture, painting and architecture, the power and beauty of which have held the world in subjection; her literature, to which also the world has become a willing captive; her splendid municipal spirit; a Church, whose influence has circled the globe, and in which historians, in a spiritual sense, have seen a survival of Imperial Rome. But here are tales that every schoolboy hears. Sicily is reached in a night by steamer from Naples to Palermo, or the tourist may go by train from Naples to Reggio, and thence by ferry across the strait to Messina. Its earliest people were contemporaries of the Etruscans. Phoenicians also made settlements there, as they did in many parts of the Mediterranean, but these were purely commercial enterprises. Real civilization in Sicily dates from neither of those races, but from Dorian and Ionic Greeks, who came perhaps as early as the founding of Rome--that is, in the seventh or eighth century B.C. The great cities of the Sicilian Greeks were Syracuse, Segesta and Girgenti, where still survive colossal remains of their genius. In military and political senses, the island for 3,000 years has been overrun, plundered and torn asunder by every race known to Mediterranean waters. Beside those already named, are Carthaginians under Hannibal, Vandals under Genseric, Goths under Theodoric, Byzantines under Belisarius, Saracens from Asia Minor, Normans under Robert Guiscard, German emperors of the thirteenth century, French Angevine princes (in whose time came the Sicilian Vespers), Spaniards of the house of Aragon, French under Napoleon, Austrians of the nineteenth century, and then--that glorious day when Garibaldi transferred it to the victorious Sardinian king. The tourist who seeks Greece from northern Europe may go from Trieste by steamer along the Dalmatian coast (in itself a trip of fine surprizes), to Cattaro and Corfu, transferring to another steamer for the Piræus, the port of Athens; or from Italy by steamer direct from Brindisi, the ancient Brundusium, whence sailed all Roman expeditions to the East, and where in retirement once dwelt Cicero. No writer has known where to date the beginnings of civilization in Greece, but with Mycenæ, Tiryns, and the Minoan palace of Crete laid bare, antiquarians have pointed the way to dates far older than anything before recorded. The palace of Minos is ancient enough to make the Homeric age seem modern. With the Dorian invasion of Greece about 1000 B.C., begins that Greek civilization of which we have so much authentic knowledge. Dorian influence was confined largely to Sparta, but it spread to many Greek colonies in the central Mediterranean and in the Levant. It became a powerful influence, alike in art, in domestic life, and in political supremacy. One of its noblest achievements was its help in keeping out the Persian, and another in supplanting in the Mediterranean the commercial rule of Phoenicians. Attica and Sparta became world-famous cities, with stupendous achievements in every domain of human art and human efficiency. The colossal debt all Europe and all America owe them, is known to everyone who has ever been to school. F. W. H. CONTENTS OF VOLUME VII Italy, Sicily, and Greece--Part One INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. VII AND VIII--By the Editor. I--ROME PAGE FIRST DAYS IN THE ETERNAL CITY--By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1 THE ANTIQUITIES--By Joseph Addison 10 THE PALACE OF THE CÆSARS--By Rodolfo Lanciani 17 THE COLISEUM--By George S. Hillard 24 THE PANTHEON--By George S. Hillard 29 HADRIAN'S TOMB--By Rodolfo Lanciani 32 TRAJAN'S FORUM--By Francis Wey 35 THE BATHS OF CARACALLA--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 37 THE AQUEDUCT BUILDERS--By Rodolfo Lanciani 41 THE QUARRIES AND BRICKS OF THE ANCIENT CITY--By Rodolfo Lanciani 45 PALM SUNDAY IN ST. PETER--By Grace Greenwood (Mrs. Lippincott) 53 THE ELECTION OF A POPE--By Cardinal Wiseman 55 AN AUDIENCE WITH PIUS X.--By Mary Emogene Hazeltine 59 THE ASCENT OF THE DOME OF ST. PETER'S--By George S. Hillard 64 SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 67 CATACOMBS AND CRYPTS--By Charles Dickens 69 THE CEMETERY OF THE CAPUCHINS--By Nathaniel Hawthorne 73 THE BURIAL PLACE OF KEATS AND SHELLEY--By Nathaniel Parker Willis 75 EXCURSIONS NEAR ROME--By Charles Dickens 78 II--FLORENCE THE APPROACH BY CARRIAGE ROAD--By Nathaniel Hawthorne 83 THE OLD PALACE AND THE LOGGIA--By Theophile Gautier 86 THE ORIGINS OF THE CITY--By Grant Allen 92 THE CATHEDRAL--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 96 THE ASCENT OF THE DOME OF BRUNELLESCHI--By Mr. and Mrs. Edwin H. Blashfield 102 ARNOLFO, GIOTTO AND BRUNELLESCHI--By Mrs. Oliphant 106 GHIBERTI'S GATES--By Charles Yriarte 116 THE PONTE VECCHIO--By Charles Yriarte 119 SANTA CROCE--By Charles Yriarte 121 THE UFFIZI GALLERY--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 125 FLORENCE EIGHTY YEARS AGO--By William Cullen Bryant 131 III--VENICE THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA--By Charles Yriarte 138 THE APPROACH BY TRAIN--By the Editor 140 A TOUR OF THE GRAND CANAL--By Theophile Gautier 143 ST. MARK'S CHURCH--By John Ruskin 148 HOW THE OLD CAMPANILE WAS BUILT--By Horatio F. Brown 155 HOW THE CAMPANILE FELL--By Horatio F. Brown 161 THE PALACE OF THE DOGES--By John Ruskin 163 THE LAGOONS--By Horatio F. Brown 174 THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 177 THE DOVES OF ST. MARK'S--By Horatio F. Brown 183 TORCELLO, THE MOTHER CITY--By John Ruskin 186 CADORE, TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE--By Amelia B. Edwards 189 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME VII FRONTISPIECE THE COLISEUM AND THE ARCH OF TITUS PRECEDING PAGE 1 THE PANTHEON, ROME ROME: THE TIBER, CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO, AND DOME OF ST. PETER'S ROME: RUINS OF THE PALACE OF THE CÆSARS ROME: THE SAN SEBASTIAN GATE THE TOMB OF METELLA ON THE APPIAN WAY THE TARPIAN ROCK IN ROME INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM THE COLISEUM, ROME ST. PETER'S, ROME ROME: INTERIOR OF ST. PETER'S ROME: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE THE CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE FOLLOWING PAGE 96 FLORENCE: BRIDGE ACROSS THE ARNO FLORENCE: THE OLD PALACE FLORENCE: THE LOGGIA DI LANZI FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO FLORENCE: THE PITTI PALACE FLORENCE: HOUSE OF DANTE FRONT OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE INTERIOR OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE VENICE: PIAZZA OF ST. MARK'S, DUCAL PALACE ON THE LEFT VIEW OF VENICE FROM THE CAMPANILE [Illustration: THE PANTHEON OF ROME Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [Illustration: THE TIBER, CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO, AND DOME OF ST. PETER'S RUINS OF THE PALACE OF THE CÆSARS] [Illustration: THE SAN SEBASTIAN GATE OF ROME] [Illustration: THE TOMB OF METELLA ON THE APPIAN WAY Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [Illustration: THE TARPEIAN ROCK IN ROME] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM] [Illustration: THE COLISEUM] [ST. PETER'S, ROME Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [Illustration: ROME: INTERIOR OF ST. PETER'S] [Illustration: ROME: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE] [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF FLORENCE] I ROME FIRST DAYS IN THE ETERNAL CITY[1] BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE At last I am arrived in this great capital of the world. If fifteen years ago I could have seen it in good company, with a well-informed guide, I should have thought myself very fortunate. But as it was to be that I should thus see it alone, and with my own eyes, it is well that this joy has fallen to my lot so late in life. Over the mountains of the Tyrol I have as good as flown. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Venice I have carefully looked at; hastily glanced at Ferrara, Cento, Bologna, and scarcely seen Florence at all. My anxiety to reach Rome was so great, and it so grew with me every moment, that to think of stopping anywhere was quite out of the question; even in Florence, I only stayed three hours. Now I am here at my ease, and as it would seem, shall be tranquilized for my whole life; for we may almost say that a new life begins when a man once sees with his own eyes all that before he has but partially heard or read of. All the dreams of my youth I now behold realized before me; the subjects of the first engravings I ever remembered seeing (several views of Rome were hung up in an anteroom of my father's house) stand bodily before my sight, and all that I had long been acquainted with, through paintings or drawings, engravings, or wood-cuts, plaster-casts, and cork models are here collectively presented to my eye. Wherever I go I find some old acquaintance in this new world; it is all just as I had thought it, and yet all is new; and just the same might I remark of my own observations and my own ideas. I have not gained any new thoughts, but the older ones have become so defined, so vivid, and so coherent, that they may almost pass for new ones.... I have now been here seven days, and by degrees have formed in my mind a general idea of the city. We go diligently backward and forward. While I am thus making myself acquainted with the plan of old and new Rome, viewing the ruins and the buildings, visiting this and that villa, the grandest and most remarkable objects are slowly and leisurely contemplated. I do but keep my eyes open and see, and then go and come again, for it is only in Rome one can duly prepare oneself for Rome. It must, in truth, be confessed, that it is a sad and melancholy business to prick and track out ancient Rome in new Rome; however, it must be done, and we may hope at least for an incalculable gratification. We meet with traces both of majesty and of ruin, which alike surpass all conception; what the barbarians spared, the builders of new Rome made havoc of.... When one thus beholds an object two thousand years old and more, but so manifoldly and thoroughly altered by the changes of time, but, sees nevertheless, the same soil, the same mountains, and often indeed the same walls and columns, one becomes, as it were, a contemporary of the great counsels of Fortune, and thus it becomes difficult for the observer to trace from the beginning Rome following Rome, and not only new Rome succeeding to the old, but also the several epochs of both old and new in succession. I endeavor, first of all, to grope my way alone through the obscurer parts, for this is the only plan by which one can hope fully and completely to perfect by the excellent introductory works which have been written from the fifteenth century to the present day. The first artists and scholars have occupied their whole lives with these objects. And this vastness has a strangely tranquilizing effect upon you in Rome, while you pass from place to place, in order to visit the most remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is important; here one is opprest, and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape--forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins, gardens and statuary, distant views of villas, cottages and stables, triumphal arches and columns, often crowding so close together, that they might all be sketched on a single sheet of paper. He ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can a single pen do here; and, besides, by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring. My strange, and perhaps whimsical, incognito proves useful to me in many ways that I never should have thought of. As every one thinks himself in duty bound to ignore who I am, and consequently never ventures to speak to me of myself and my works,[2] they have no alternative left them but to speak of themselves, or of the matters in which they are most interested, and in this way I become circumstantially informed of the occupations of each, and of everything remarkable that is either taken in hand or produced. Hofrath Reiffenstein good-naturedly humors this whim of mine; as, however, for special reasons, he could not bear the name which I had assumed, he immediately made a Baron of me, and I am now called the "Baron gegen Rondanini über" (the Baron who lives opposite to the Palace Rondanini). This designation is sufficiently precise, especially as the Italians are accustomed to speak of people either by their Christian names, or else by some nickname. Enough; I have gained my object; and I escape the dreadful annoyance of having to give to everybody an account of myself and my works.... In Rome, the Rotunda,[3] both by its exterior and interior, has moved me to offer a willing homage to its magnificence. In St. Peter's I learned to understand how art, no less than nature, annihilates the artificial measures and dimensions of man. And in the same way the Apollo Belvidere also has again drawn me out of reality. For as even the most correct engravings furnish no adequate idea of these buildings, so the case is the same with respect to the marble original of this statue, as compared with the plaster models of it, which, however, I formerly used to look upon as beautiful. Here I am now living with a calmness and tranquility to which I have for a long while been a stranger. My practise to see and take all things as they are, my fidelity in letting the eye be my light, my perfect renunciation of all pretension, have again come to my aid, and make me calmly, but most intensely, happy. Every day has its fresh remarkable object--every day its new grand unequaled paintings, and a whole which a man may long think of, and dream of, but which with all his power of imagination he can never reach. Yesterday I was at the Pyramid of Cestius, and in the evening on the Palatine, on the top of which are the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars, which stand there like walls of rock. Of all this, however, no idea can be conveyed! In truth, there is nothing little here; altho, indeed, occasionally something to find fault with--something more or less absurd in taste, and yet even this partakes of the universal grandeur of all around.... Yesterday I visited the nymph Egeria, and then the Hippodrome of Caracalla, the ruined tombs along the Via Appia, and the tomb of Metella, which is the first to give one a true idea of what solid masonry really is. These men worked for eternity--all causes of decay were calculated, except the rage of the spoiler, which nothing can resist. The remains of the principal aqueduct are highly venerable. How beautiful and grand a design, to supply a whole people with water by so vast a structure! In the evening we came upon the Coliseum, when it was already twilight. When one looks at it, all else seems little; the edifice is so vast, that one can not hold the image of it in one's soul--in memory we think it smaller, and then return to it again to find it every time greater than before. We entered the Sistine Chapel, which we found bright and cheerful, and with a good light for the pictures. "The Last Judgment" divided our admiration with the paintings on the roof by Michael Angelo. I could only see and wonder. The mental confidence and boldness of the master, and his grandeur of conception, are beyond all expression. After we had looked at all of them over and over again, we left this sacred building, and went to St. Peter's, which received from the bright heavens the loveliest light possible, and every part of it was clearly lit up. As men willing to be pleased, we were delighted with its vastness and splendor, and did not allow an over-nice or hypercritical taste to mar our pleasure. We supprest every harsher judgment; we enjoyed the enjoyable. Lastly we ascended the roof of the church, where one finds in little the plan, of a well-built city. Houses and magazines, springs (in appearance at least), churches, and a great temple all in the air, and beautiful walks between. We mounted the dome, and saw glistening before us the regions of the Apennines, Soracte, and toward Tivoli the volcanic hills. Frascati, Castelgandolfo, and the plains, and beyond all the sea. Close at our feet lay the whole city of Rome in its length and breadth, with its mountain palaces, domes, etc. Not a breath of air was moving, and in the upper dome it was (as they say) like being in a hot-house. When we had looked enough at these things, we went down, and they opened for us the doors in the cornices of the dome, the tympanum, and the nave. There is a passage all round, and from above you can take a view of the whole church, and of its several parts. As we stood on the cornices of the tympanum, we saw beneath us the pope passing to his mid-day devotions. Nothing, therefore, was wanting to make our view of St. Peter's perfect. We at last descended to the piazza, and took in a neighboring hotel a cheerful but frugal meal, and then set off for St. Cecilia's. It would take many words to describe the decorations of this church, which was crammed full of people; not a stone of the edifice was to be seen. The pillars were covered with red velvet wound round with gold lace; the capitals were overlaid with embroidered velvet, so as to retain somewhat of the appearance of capitals, and all the cornices and pillars were in like manner covered with hangings. All the entablatures of the walls were also covered with life-like paintings, so that the whole church seemed to be laid out in mosaic. Around the church, and on the high altar more than two hundred wax tapers were burning. It looked like a wall of lights, and the whole nave was perfectly lit up. The aisles and side altars were equally adorned and illuminated. Right opposite the high altar, and under the organ, two scaffolds were erected, which also were covered with velvet, on one of which were placed the singers, and on the other the instruments, which kept up one unbroken strain of music.... And yet these glorious objects are even still like new acquaintances to me. One has not yet lived with them, nor got familiar with their peculiarities. Some of them attract us with irresistible power, so that for a time one feels indifferent, if not unjust, toward all others. Thus, for instance, the Pantheon, the Apollo Belvedere, some colossal heads, and very recently the Sistine Chapel, have by turns so won my whole heart, that I scarcely saw any thing besides them. But, in truth, can man, little as man always is, and accustomed to littleness, ever make himself equal to all that here surrounds him of the noble, the vast, and the refined? Even tho he should in any degree adapt himself to it, then how vast is the multitude of objects that immediately press upon him from all sides, and meet him at every turn, of which each demands for itself the tribute of his whole attention. How is one to get out of the difficulty? No other way assuredly than by patiently allowing it to work, becoming industrious, and attending the while to all that others have accomplished for our benefit. Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is impossible to form a conception, without having witnessed it. All single objects are swallowed up by the great masses of light and shade, and nothing but grand and general outlines present themselves to the eye. For three several days we have enjoyed to the full the brightest and most glorious of nights. Peculiarly beautiful at such a time is the Coliseum. At night it is always closed; a hermit dwells in a little shrine within its range, and beggars of all kinds nestle beneath its crumbling arches; the latter had lit a fire on the arena, and a gentle wind bore down the smoke to the ground, so that the lower portion of the ruins was quite hid by it, while above the vast walls stood out in deeper darkness before the eye. As we stopt at the gate to contemplate the scene through the iron gratings, the moon shone brightly in the heavens above. Presently the smoke found its way up the sides, and through every chink and opening, while the moon lit it up like a cloud. The sight was exceedingly glorious. In such a light one ought also to see the Pantheon, the Capitol, the Portico of St. Peter's, and the other grand streets and squares--and thus sun and moon, like the human mind, have quite a different work to do here from elsewhere, where the vastest and yet the most elegant of masses present themselves to their rays. THE ANTIQUITIES OF THE CITY[4] BY JOSEPH ADDISON There are in Rome two sets of antiquities, the Christian, and the heathen. The former, tho of a fresher date, are so embroiled with fable and legend, that one receives but little satisfaction from searching into them. The other give a great deal of pleasure to such as have met with them before in ancient authors; for a man who is in Rome can scarce see an object that does not call to mind a piece of a Latin poet or historian. Among the remains of old Rome, the grandeur of the commonwealth shows itself chiefly in works that were either necessary or convenient, such as temples, highways, aqueducts, walls, and bridges of the city. On the contrary, the magnificence of Rome under the emperors is seen principally in such works as were rather for ostentation or luxury, than any real usefulness or necessity, as in baths, amphitheaters, circuses, obelisks, triumphal pillars, arches, and mausoleums; for what they added to the aqueducts was rather to supply their baths and naumachias, and to embellish the city with fountains, than out of any real necessity there was for them.... No part of the antiquities of Rome pleased me so much as the ancient statues, of which there is still an incredible variety. The workmanship is often the most exquisite of anything in its kind. A man would wonder how it were possible for so much life to enter into marble, as may be discovered in some of the best of them; and even in the meanest, one has the satisfaction of seeing the faces, postures, airs, and dress of those that have lived so many ages before us. There is a strange resemblance between the figures of the several heathen deities, and the descriptions that the Latin poets have given us of them; but as the first may be looked upon as the ancienter of the two, I question not but the Roman poets were the copiers of the Greek statuaries. Tho on other occasions we often find the statuaries took their subjects from the poets. The Laocöon is too known an instance among many others that are to be met with at Rome. I could not forbear taking particular notice of the several musical instruments that are to be seen in the hands of the Apollos, muses, fauns, satyrs, bacchanals, and shepherds, which might certainly give a great light to the dispute for preference between the ancient and modern music. It would, perhaps, be no impertinent design to take off all their models in wood, which might not only give us some notion of the ancient music, but help us to pleasanter instruments than are now in use. By the appearance they make in marble, there is not one string-instrument that seems comparable to our violins, for they are all played on either by the bare fingers, or the plectrum, so that they were incapable of adding any length to their notes, or of varying them by those insensible swellings, and wearings away of sound upon the same string, which give so wonderful a sweetness to our modern music. Besides that, the string-instruments must have had very low and feeble voices, as may be guessed from the small proportion of wood about them, which could not contain air enough to render the strokes, in any considerable measure, full and sonorous. There is a great deal of difference in the make, not only of the several kinds of instruments, but even among those of the same name. The syringa, for example, has sometimes four, and sometimes more pipes, as high as the twelve. The same variety of strings may be observed on their harps, and of stops on their tibiæ, which shows the little foundation that such writers have gone upon, who, from a verse perhaps in Virgil's Eclogues, or a short passage in a classic author, have been so very nice in determining the precise shape of the ancient musical instruments, with the exact number of their pipes, strings, and stops.... Tho the statues that have been found among the ruins of old Rome are already very numerous, there is no question but posterity will have the pleasure of seeing many noble pieces of sculpture which are still undiscovered; for, doubtless, there are greater treasures of this nature under ground, than what are yet brought to light.[5] They have often dug into lands that are described in old authors, as the places where such particular statues or obelisks stood, and have seldom failed of success in their pursuits. There are still many such promising spots of ground that have never been searched into. A great part of the Palatine mountain, for example, lies untouched, which was formerly the seat of the imperial palace, and may be presumed to abound with more treasures of this nature than any other part of Rome. But whether it be that the richest of these discoveries fall into the Pope's hands, or for some other reason, it is said that the Prince Farnese, who is the present owner of this seat, will keep his own family in the chair. There are undertakers in Rome who often purchase the digging of fields, gardens, or vineyards, where they find any likelihood of succeeding, and some have been known to arrive at great estates by it. They pay according to the dimensions of the surface they are to break up; and after having made essays into it, as they do for coal in England, they rake into the most promising parts of it, tho they often find, to their disappointment, that others have been beforehand with them. However, they generally gain enough by the rubbish and bricks, which the present architects value much beyond those of a modern make, to defray the charges of their search. I was shown two spaces of ground, where part of Nero's golden house stood, for which the owner has been offered an extraordinary sum of money. What encouraged the undertakers, are several very ancient trees, which grow upon the spot, from whence they conclude that these particular tracts of ground must have lain untouched for some ages. It is pity there is not something like a public register, to preserve the memory of such statues as have been found from time to time, and to mark the particular places where they have been taken up, which would not only prevent many fruitless searches for the future, but might often give a considerable light into the quality of the place, or the design of the statue. But the great magazine for all kinds of treasure, is supposed to be the bed of the Tiber. We may be sure, when the Romans lay under the apprehensions of seeing their city sacked by a barbarous enemy, as they have done more than once, that they would take care to bestow such of their riches this way as could best bear the water, besides what the insolence of a brutish conqueror may be supposed to have contributed, who had an ambition to waste and destroy all the beauties of so celebrated a city. I need not mention the old common-shore of Rome, which ran from all parts of the town with the current and violence of an ordinary river, nor the frequent inundations of the Tiber, which may have swept away many of the ornaments of its banks, nor the several statues that the Romans themselves flung into it, when they would revenge themselves on the memory of an ill citizen, a dead tyrant, or a discarded favorite. At Rome they have so general an opinion of the riches of this river, that the Jews have formerly proffered the Pope to cleanse it, so they might have for their pains what they found in the bosom of it. I have seen the valley near Ponte Molle, which they proposed to fashion into a new channel for it, until they had cleared the old for its reception. The Pope, however, would not comply with the proposal, as fearing the heats might advance too far before they had finished their work, and produce a pestilence among his people; tho I do not see why such a design might not be executed now with as little danger as in Augustus's time, were there as many hands employed upon it. The city of Rome would receive a great advantage from the undertaking, as it would raise the banks and deepen the bed of the Tiber, and by consequence free them from those frequent inundations to which they are so subject at present; for the channel of the river is observed to be narrower within the walls than either below or above them. Next to the statues, there is nothing in Rome more surprizing than that amazing variety of ancient pillars of so many kinds of marble. As most of the old statues may be well supposed to have been cheaper to their first owners than they are to a modern purchaser, several of the pillars are certainly rated at a much lower price at present than they were of old. For not to mention what a huge column of granite, serpentine, or porphyry must have cost in the quarry, or in its carriage from Egypt to Rome, we may only consider the great difficulty of hewing it into any form, and of giving it the due turn, proportion, and polish. The most valuable pillars about Rome, for the marble of which they are made, are the four columns of oriental jasper in St. Paulina's chapel at St. Maria Maggiore; two of oriental granite in St. Pudenziana; one of transparent oriental jasper in the Vatican library; four of Nero-Bianco, in St. Cecilia Transtevere; two of Brocatello, and two of oriental agate in Don Livio's palace; two of Giallo Antico in St. John Lateran, and two of Verdi Antique in the Villa Pamphilia. These are all entire and solid pillars, and made of such kinds of marble as are nowhere to be found but among antiquities, whether it be that the veins of it are undiscovered, or that they were quite exhausted upon the ancient buildings. Among these old pillars, I can not forbear reckoning a great part of an alabaster column, which was found in the ruins of Livia's portico. It is of the color of fire, and may be seen over the high altar of St. Maria in Campitello; for they have cut it into two pieces, and fixt it in the shape of a cross in a hole of the wall that was made on purpose to receive it; so that the light passing through it from without, makes it look, to those who are in the church, like a huge transparent cross of amber. THE PALACE OF THE CÆSARS[6] BY RODOLFO LANCIANI The Palatine hill became the residence of the Roman emperors, and the center of the Roman Empire, not on account of its historical and traditional associations with the foundation and first growth of the city, nor because of its central and commanding position, but by a mere accident. At daybreak on September 21st, of the year 63 B.C., Augustus was born in this region, in a modest house, opening on the lane called "ad capita bubula," which led from the valley, where now the Coliseum stands, up the slopes of the hill toward the modern church and convent of St. Bonaventura. This man, sent by God to change the condition of mankind and the state of the world, this founder of an empire which is still practically in existence,[7] never deserted the Palatine hill all through his eventful career. From the lane "ad capita bubula" he moved to the house of Calvus, the orator, at the northeast corner of the hill overlooking the forum; and in process of time, having become absolute master of the Roman Commonwealth, he settled finally on the top of the hill, having purchased for his residence the house of Hortensius, a simple and modest house, indeed, with columns of the commonest kind of stone, pavements of rubble-work, and simple whitewashed walls. Whether this selection of a site was made because the Palatine had long before been the Faubourg St. Honoré, the Belgravia of ancient Rome, is difficult to determine. We know that the house of Hortensius, chosen by Augustus, was surrounded by those of Clodius, Scaurus, Crassus, Caecina, Sisenna, Flaccus, Catiline, and other members of the aristocracy. I am persuaded, however, that the secret of the selection is to be found in the simplicity, I will even say in the poverty, of the dwelling; in fact, such extreme modesty is worthy of the good sense and the spirit of moderation shown by Augustus throughout his career. He could very well sacrifice appearances to the reality of an unbounded power. It is just, at any rate, to recognize that even in his remotest resorts for temporary rest and retirement from the cares of government, he led the same kind of plain, modest life, spending all his leisure hours in arranging his collections of natural history, more especially the palaeo-ethnological or prehistoric, for which the ossiferous caverns of the Island of Capri supplied him with abundant materials. It was only after the victory of Actium that, finding himself master of the world, he thought it expedient to give up, in a certain measure, his former habits, and live in better style. Having bought through his agents some of the aristocratic palaces adjoining the old house of Hortensius, among them the historical palace of Catiline, he built a new and very handsome residence, but declared at the same time that he considered it as public property, not as his own. The solemn dedication of the palace took place on January 14th, of the year 26 before Christ. Here he lived, sleeping always in the same small cubiculum, for twenty-eight years; that is to say, until the third year after Christ, when the palace was almost destroyed by fire. As soon as the news of the disaster spread throughout the empire, an almost incredible amount of money was subscribed at once, by all orders of citizens, to provide him with a new residence; and altho, with his usual moderation, he would consent to accept only one denarius from each individual subscribed, it is easy to imagine how many millions he must have realized in spite of his modesty. A new, magnificent palace rose from the ruins of the old one, but it does not appear that the plan and arrangement were changed; otherwise Augustus could not have continued to sleep in the same room during the last ten years of his life, as we are told positively that he did. The work of Augustus was continued by his successor and kinsman, Tiberius, who built a new wing near the northwest corner of the hill, overlooking the Velabrum. Caligula filled with new structures the whole space between the "domus Tiberiana" and the Roman forum. Nero, likewise, occupied with a new palace the south-east corner of the hill, overlooking the valley, where the Coliseum was afterward built. Domitian rebuilt the "domus Augustana," injured by fire, adding to its accommodations a stadium for gymnastic sports. The same emperor raised an altogether new palace, in the space between the house of Augustus, on one side, and those of Caligula and Tiberius on the other. Septimius Severus and his son restored the whole group of imperial buildings, adding a new wing at the southwest corner, known under the name of Septizonium. The latest additions, of no special importance, took place under Julia Mamaea and Heliogabalus. Every emperor, to a certain extent, enlarged, altered, destroyed, and reconstructed the work of his predecessors; cutting new openings, walling up old ones, subdividing large rooms into smaller apartments, and changing their destination. One section alone of the imperial Palatine buildings remained unaltered, and kept the former simplicity of its plans down to the fall of the Empire--the section built by Augustus across the center of the hill, which comprised the main entrance, the portico surrounding the temple of Apollo, the temple itself, the Greek and Latin libraries, the shrine of Vesta, and the imperial residence. The architectural group raised by Augustus on the Palatine, formed, as it were, the vestibule to his own imperial residence. We know with absolute certainty that it contained at least one hundred and twenty columns of the rarest kinds of marbles and breccias, fifty-two of which were of Numidian marble, with capitals of gilt bronze; a group of Lysias, comprising one chariot, four horses and two drivers, all cut in a single block of marble; the Hercules of Lysippus; the Apollo of Scopas; the Latona of Cephisodotos, the Diana of Timotheos; the bas-reliefs of the pediment by Bupalos and Anthermos; the quadriga of the sun in gilt bronze; exquisite ivory carvings; a bronze colossus fifty feet high; hundreds of medallions in gold, silver, and bronze; gold and silver plate; a collection of gems and cameos; and, lastly, candelabras which had been the property of Alexander the Great, and the admiration of the East. Has the world ever seen a collection of greater artistic and material value exhibited in a single building? And we must recollect that the group built by Augustus comprises only a very modest section of the Palatine; that to his palace we must join the palaces of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Serverus, Julia Mamaea, and Heliogabalus; that each one of these imperial residences equalled the residence of Augustus, if not in pure taste, certainly in wealth, in luxury, in magnificence, in the number and value of works of art collected and stolen from Greece and the East, from Egypt and Persia. By multiplying eight or ten times the list I have given above, the reader will get an approximate idea of the "home" of the Roman emperors in its full pride and glory. I have deliberately excluded from my description the residence or private house of Augustus, because he himself had deliberately excluded from it any trace of that grandeur he had so lavishly bestowed on the buildings which constituted the approach to it.... During the rule of Claudius, the successor of Caligula, little or nothing was done toward the enlargement or the embellishment of the palace of the Cæsars. Nero, however, the successor of Claudius, conceived the gigantic plan of renewing and of rebuilding from the very foundations, not only the imperial residence, but the whole metropolis. In the rebuilding of the city the emperor secured for himself the lion's share; and his Golden House, of which we possess such beautiful remains, occupied the whole extent from the Palatine to the Quirinal, where now the central railway station has been erected. Its area amounted to nearly a square mile, and this enormous district was appropriated, or rather usurped, by the emperor, right in the center of a city numbering about two million inhabitants. Of the wonders of the Golden House it is enough to say that there were comprised within the precincts of the enchanting residence waterfalls supplied by an aqueduct fifty miles long, lakes and rivers shaded by dense masses of foliage, with harbors and docks for the imperial galleys; a vestibule containing a bronze colossus one hundred and twenty feet high; porticos three thousand feet long; farms and vineyards, pasture grounds and woods teeming with the rarest and costliest kind of game, zoological and botanical gardens; sulfur baths supplied from springs twelve miles distant; sea baths supplied from the waters of the Mediterranean, sixteen miles distant at the nearest point; thousands of columns crowned with capitals of Corinthian gilt metal; thousands of statues stolen from Greece and Asia Minor; walls encrusted with gems and mother-of-pearl; banqueting-halls with ivory ceilings, from which rare flowers and precious perfumes could fall gently on the recumbent guests. More marvelous still was the ceiling of the state dining-room. It was spherical in shape, and cut in ivory, to represent the constellated skies, and kept in constant motion by machinery in imitation of the movements of the stars and planets. All these details sound like fairy-tales, like the dream of a fertile imagination; still they are described minutely by contemporary and serious writers, by Suetonius, by Martial and by Tacitus. Suetonius adds that the day Nero took possession of his Golden House, he was heard to exclaim, "At last I am lodged like a man." The wonders created by him, however, did not last very long. Otho, his successor, on the very day of his election to the throne, signed an order of fifty millions of sesterces (two million dollars) to bring the Golden House to perfection; but after his murder Vespasian and Titus gave back to the people the greater portion of the ground usurped by Nero. They built the Coliseum on the very site of Nero's artificial lake, and the thermæ of Titus on the foundation of his private palace; they respected only that portion of Nero's insane construction which was comprised within the boundaries of the Palatine hill. THE COLISEUM[8] BY GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD The Venerable Bede, who lived in the eighth century, is the first person who is known to have given to the Flavian amphitheater its comparatively modern and now universal designation of the Coliseum; tho the name, derived from a colossal statue of the emperor Nero which stood near it, was probably then familiar to men's ears, as we may infer from his so calling it without explanation or remark. When in its perfect state, the exterior, with its costly ornaments in marble, and its forest of columns, lost the merit of simplicity without gaining that of grandeur. The eye was teased with a multitude of details, not in themselves good; the same defects were repeated in each story, and the real height was diminished by the projecting and ungraceful cornices. The interior arrangements were admirable; and modern architects can not sufficiently commend the skill with which eighty thousand spectators were accommodated with seats; or the ingenious contrivances, by which, through the help of spacious corridors, multiplied passages, and staircases, every person went directly to his place, and immense audiences were dispersed in less time than is required for a thousand persons to squeeze through the entries of a modern concert-room. We know that this interior of the Coliseum was decorated with great splendor. The principal seats were of marble, and covered with cushions. Gilded gratings, ornaments of gold, ivory, and amber, and mosaics of precious stones, displayed the generosity of the emperors, and gratified the taste of the people. How, or at what period, the work of ruin first began does not distinctly appear. An earthquake may have first shattered its ponderous arches, and thus made an opening for the destroying hand of time. There can be no doubt that it suffered violence from the hands of civil and foreign war. But more destructive agencies than those of earthquake, conflagration or war, were let loose upon it. Its massive stones, fitted to each other with such nice adaptation, presented a strong temptation to the cupidity of wealthy nobles and cardinals, with whom building was a ruling passion; and for many ages the Coliseum became a quarry. The Palazzo della Cancelleria, the Palazzo Barberini, the Palazzo Farnese, and the Palazzo Veneziano were all built mainly from the plunder of the Coliseum; and meaner robbers emulated the rapacity of their betters, by burning into lime the fragments not available for architectural purposes. The material of which the Coliseum was built is exactly fitted to the purposes of a great ruin. It is travertine, of a rich, dark, warm color, deepened and mellowed by time. There is nothing glaring, harsh, or abrupt in the harmony of tints. The blue sky above, and the green earth beneath, are in unison with a tone of coloring not unlike the brown of one of our own early winter landscapes. The travertine is also of a coarse grain and porous texture, not splintering into points and edges, but gradually corroding by natural decay. Stone of such a texture everywhere opens laps and nooks for the reception and formation of soil. Every grain of dust that is borne through the air by the lazy breeze of summer, instead of sliding from a glassy surface, is held where it falls. The rocks themselves crumble and decompose, and turn into a fertile mold. Thus, the Coliseum is throughout crowned and draped with a covering of earth, in many places of considerable depth. Trailing plants clasp the stones with arms of verdure; wild flowers bloom in their seasons; and long grass nods and waves on the airy battlements. Life has everywhere sprouted from the trunk of death. Insects hum and sport in the sunshine; the burnished lizard darts like a tongue of green flame along the walls; and birds make the hollow quarry overflow with their songs. There is something beautiful and impressive in the contrast between luxuriant life and the rigid skeleton upon which it rests. As a matter of course, everybody goes to see the Coliseum by moonlight. The great charm of the ruin under this condition is, that the imagination is substituted for sight; and the mind for the eye. The essential character of moonlight is hard rather than soft. The line between light and shadow is sharply defined, and there is no gradation of color. Blocks and walls of silver are bordered by, and spring out of, chasms of blackness. But moonlight shrouds the Coliseum in mystery. It opens deep vaults of gloom where the eye meets only an ebon wall, upon which the fancy paints innumerable pictures in solemn, splendid, and tragic colors. Shadowy forms of emperor and lictor and vestal virgin and gladiator and martyr come out of the darkness, and pass before us in long and silent procession. The breezes which blow through the broken arches are changed into voices, and recall the shouts and cries of a vast audience. By day, the Coliseum is an impressive fact; by night, it is a stately vision. By day, it is a lifeless form; by night, a vital thought. The Coliseum should by all means be seen by a bright starlight, or under the growing sickle of a young moon. The fainter ray and deeper gloom bring out more strongly its visionary and ideal character. When the full moon has blotted out the stars, it fills the vast gulf of the building with a flood of spectral light, which falls with a chilling touch upon the spirit; for then the ruin is like a "corpse in its shroud of snow," and the moon is a pale watcher by its side. But when the walls, veiled in deep shadow, seem a part of the darkness in which they are lost--when the stars are seen through their chasms and breaks, and sparkle along the broken line of the battlements--the scene becomes another, tho the same; more indistinct, yet not so mournful; contracting the sphere of sight, but enlarging that of thought; less burdening, but more suggestive. But under all aspects, in the blaze of noon, at sunset, by the light of the moon or stars--the Coliseum stands alone and unapproached. It is the monarch of ruins. It is a great tragedy in stone, and it softens and subdues the mind like a drama of Aeschylus or Shakespeare. It is a colossal type of those struggles of humanity against an irresistible destiny, in which the tragic poet finds the elements of his art. The calamities which crusht the house of Atreus are symbolized in its broken arches and shattered walls. Built of the most durable materials, and seemingly for eternity--of a size, material, and form to defy the "strong hours" which conquer all, it has bowed its head to their touch, and passed into the inevitable cycle of decay. "And this too shall pass away"--which the Eastern monarch engraved upon his signet ring--is carved upon these Cyclopean blocks. The stones of the Coliseum were once water; and they are now turning into dust. Such is ever the circle of nature. The solid is changing into the fluid, and the fluid into the solid; and that which is unseen is alone indestructible. He does not see the Coliseum aright who carries away from it no other impressions than those of form, size, and hue. It speaks an intelligible language to the wiser mind. It rebukes the peevish and consoles the patient. It teaches us that there are misfortunes which are clothed with dignity, and sorrows that are crowned with grandeur. As the same blue sky smiles upon the ruin which smiled upon the perfect structure, so the same beneficent Providence bends over our shattered hopes and our answered prayers. THE PANTHEON[9] BY GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD The best preserved monument of ancient Rome, and one of the most beautiful buildings of the modern city, is unhappily placed. The Pantheon stands in a narrow and dirty piazza, and is shouldered and elbowed by a mob of vulgar houses. There is no breathing-space around, which it might penetrate with the light of its own serene beauty. Its harmonious proportions can be seen only in front; and it has there the disadvantage of being approached from a point higher than that on which it stands. On one side is a market; and the space before the matchless portico is strewn with fish-bones, decayed vegetables, and offal.[10] Forsyth, the sternest and most fastidious of architectural critics, has only "large draughts of unqualified praise" for the Pantheon; and, where he finds nothing to censure, who will venture to do any thing but commend? The character of the architecture, and the sense of satisfaction which it leaves upon the mind, are proofs of the enduring charm of simplicity. The portico is perfectly beautiful. It is one hundred and ten feet long and forty-four deep, and rests upon sixteen columns of the Corinthian order, the shafts being of granite and the capitals of marble. Eight of these are in front, and of these eight, there are four (including the two on the extreme right and left) which have two others behind them; the portico being thus divided into three portions, like the nave and side aisles of a cathedral; the middle space, leading to the door, being wider than the others. The granite of the shafts is partly gray and partly rose-colored, but, in the shadow in which they stand, the difference of hue is hardly perceptible. The proportions of these columns are faultless; and their massive shafts and richly-carved capitals produce the effect, at once, of beauty and sublimity. The pediment above is now a bald front of ragged stone, but it was once adorned with bas-reliefs in bronze; and the holes, made by the rivets with which they were fastened, are still to be seen. The aisles of the portico were once vaulted with bronze, and massive beams or slabs of the same metal stretched across the whole structure; but this was removed by Urban VIII., and melted into a baldachino to deface St. Peter's, and cannon to defend the castle of St. Angelo; and, not content with this, he has added insult to injury, and commemorated his robbery in a Latin inscription, in which he claims to be commended as for a praiseworthy act. But even this is not the heaviest weight resting on the memory of that vandal pope. He shares with Bernini the reproach of having added those hideous belfries which now rise above each end of the vestibule--as wanton and unprovoked an offense against good taste as ever was committed. A cocked hat upon the statue of Demosthenes in the Vatican would not be a more discordant addition. The artist should have gone to the stake, before giving his hand to such a piece of disfigurement. The cell, or main portion of the building to which the portico is attached, is a simple structure, circular in form, and built of brick. It was formerly encrusted with marble. The cell and the portico stand to each other in the most harmonious relation, altho it seems to be admitted that the latter was an addition, not contemplated when the cell was built. But in the combination there is nothing forced or unnatural, and they seem as necessary and as preordained complements, one to the other, as a fine face and a fine head. The cell is a type of masculine dignity, and the portico, of feminine grace; and the result is a perfect architectural union. The interior--a rotunda, surmounted by a dome--is converted into a Christian church, a purpose to which its form and structure are not well adapted; and the altars and their accessories are not improvements in an architectural point of view. But in spite of this--in spite of all that it has suffered at the hands of rapacity and bad taste--tho the panels of the majestic dome have been stript of their bronze, and the whole has been daubed over with a glaring coat of whitewash--the interior still remains, with all its rare beauty essentially unimpaired. And the reason of this is that this charm is the result of form and proportion, and can not be lost except by entire destruction. The only light which the temple receives is from a circular opening of twenty-eight feet in diameter at the top; and falling, as it does, directly from the sky, it fills the whole space with the purity of the heavens themselves. The magical effect of this kind of illumination it is impossible to describe.... The pavement of the Pantheon, composed of porphyry, pavonazzetto, and giallo antico, tho constantly overflowed by the Tiber, and drenched by the rains which fall upon it from the roof, is the finest in Rome. There is an opening in the center, through which the water entering by the dome is carried off into a reservoir. The Pantheon has a peculiar interest in the history of art, as the burial place of Raphael. His grave was opened in 1833, and the remains found to be lying in the spot which Vasari had pointed out. HADRIAN'S TOMB[11] BY RODOLFO LANCIANI Nerva was the last Emperor buried in the mausoleum of Augustus.[12] Trajan's ashes were laid to rest in an urn of gold under his monumental column. Hadrian determined to raise a new tomb for himself and his successors, and, like Augustus, selected a site on the green and shady banks of the Tiber, not on the city side, however, but in the gardens of Domitia, which, with those of Agrippina, formed a crown property called by Tacitus "Nero's Gardens." The mausoleum and the bridge which gave access to it were substantially finished in A.D. 136. Antoninus Pius, after completing the ornamental part in 139, transferred to it Hadrian's ashes from their temporary burial-place in the former villa of Cicero at Puteoli, and was himself afterward interred there.... Beside the passages of the "Hadrian's Life," and of Dion Cassius, two descriptions of the monument have come down to us, one by Procopius, the other by Leo I. From these we learn that it was composed of a square basement of moderate height, each side of which measured 247 feet. It was faced with blocks of Parian marble, with pilasters at the corners, crowned by a capital. Above the pilasters were groups of men and horses in bronze, of admirable workmanship. The basement was protected around by a sidewalk and a railing of gilt bronze, supported by marble pillars crowned with gilded peacocks, two of which are in the Giardino della Pigna, in the Vatican. A grand circular mole, nearly a thousand feet in circumference, and also faced with blocks of Parian marble, stood on the square basement and supported in its turn a cone of earth covered with evergreens, like the mausoleum of Augustus. Of this magnificent decoration nothing now remains except a few blocks of the coating of marble, on the east side of the quadrangle, near the Bastione di S. Giovanni. All that is visible of the ancient work from the outside are the blocks of peperino of the mole which once supported the outer casing. The rest, both above and below, is covered by the works of fortification constructed at various periods, from the time of Honorius (393-403) to our own days. In no other monument of ancient and medieval Rome is our history written, molded, as it were, so vividly, as upon the battered remains of this castle-tomb. Within and around it took place all the fights for dominion with which popes, emperors, barons, barbarians, Romans, have distracted the city for fifteen hundred years. Of the internal arrangement of the monument nothing was known until 1825, when the principal door was discovered in the middle of the square basement facing the bridge. It opens upon a corridor leading to a large niche, which, it is conjectured, contained a statue of Hadrian. The walls of this vestibule, by which modern visitors generally begin their inspection, are built of travertine, and bear evidence of having been paneled with Numidian marble. The pavement is of white mosaic. On the right side of this vestibule, near the niche, begins an inclined spiral way, 30 feet high and 11 feet wide, leading up to the central chamber, which is in the form of a Greek cross. There is no doubt that the tomb was adorned with statues. Procopius distinctly says that, during the siege laid by the Goths to the castle in 537, many of them were hurled down from the battlements upon the assailants. On the strength of this passage topographers have been in the habit of attributing to the mausoleum all the works of statuary discovered in the neighborhood; like the Barberini Faun now in Munich, the exquisite statue of a River God described by Cassiano dal Pozzo, etc., as if such subjects were becoming a house of death. The mausoleum of Hadrian formed part of one of the largest and noblest cemeteries of ancient Rome, crossed by the Via Triumphalis. The tomb next in importance to it was the so-called "Meta," or "sepulcrum Romuli," or "sepulcrum Neronis," a pyramid of great size, which stood on the site of the church of St. Maria Transpontina, and was destroyed by Alexander VI. in 1499. TRAJAN'S FORUM[13] BY FRANCIS WEY In the midst of the busy quarters lying at the base of the Quirinal, you come out upon a great piazza which you name at once without ever having seen it before; Trajan's Column serves as ensign for a forum, of which Apollodorus of Damascus erected the porticoes. The lines described by the bases of a plantation of pillars will help you to identify the pesimeter of the temple which Hadrian consecrated, and the site of the Ulpian Library which was divided into two chambers--one for Greek books, and the other for Latin; and finally the situation of the basilica, opening on to the forum and with its apse in the north-northwest direction.... It was in the Ulpian Basilica that, in 312, Constantine, having assembled the notables of the empire seated himself in the presbyterium, to proclaim his abjuration of polytheism in favor of the religion of Christ; on that day and spot the prince closed the cycle of antiquity, opened the catacombs, and inaugurated the modern world. The Acts of St. Sylvester describe many passages of the discourse in which, "invoking truth against mischievous divisions," and declaring that he "put away superstitions born of ignorance and reared on unreason," the emperor ordains that "churches be opened to Christians, and that the priests of the temples and those of Christ enjoy the same privileges." He himself undertakes to build a church in his Lateran palace. I do not think there exists any monument in the world more precious or more exquisite in its proportions than Trajan's Column, nor one that has rendered more capital service. This has been set forth with more authority than I can pretend to, by Viollet-le-Duc, the architect who has written best on his own art; his description sums up the subject and makes everything clear. A set of pictures of the campaigns of Trajan against the Decians--the bas-reliefs--reproduces the arms, the accouterments, the engines of war, the dwellings of the barbarians; we discern the breed of the warriors and their horses; we look upon the ships of the time, canoes and quinqueremes; women of all ranks, priests of all theogonies, sieges, and assaults. Such are the merits of this sculptured host, that Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, Michael Angelo, and all the artists of the Renaissance have drawn thence models of style and picturesque grouping. Trajan's Column is of pure Carrara marble. The shaft measures about ninety-four English feet, by twelve in diameter at the base, and ten below the capital, which is Doric and carved out of a single block; the column is composed of thirty-four blocks, hollowed out internally and cut into a winding stair. A series of bas-reliefs, divided from one another by a narrow band, run spirally around the shaft parallel to the inner staircase of a hundred and eighty-two steps, and describes twenty-three circuits to reach the platform on which the statue is placed. The foot and the pedestal are seventeen feet high; the torus, of enormous diameter, is a monolith; the whole construction rises a hundred and thirty-five feet from the ground. These thirty-four blocks, measuring eleven meters in circumference by one in height, had--a task of considerable precision--to have holes drilled in them for the screws of the staircase, it being necessary to determine from the inside precisely where these borings must be made in order not to break the continuity of the bas-reliefs, executed by several different hands, and which are more deeply worked in proportion as they gain in height, so as to appear of an equal projection. THE BATHS OF CARACALLA[14] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE You reach the Baths of Caracalla, the most imposing object after the Coliseum that one sees in Rome. These colossal structures are so many signs of their times. Imperial Rome plundered the entire Mediterranean basin, Spain, Gaul, and two-thirds of England, for the benefit of a hundred thousand idlers. She amused them in the Coliseum with massacres of beasts and of men; in the Circus Maximus with combats of athletes and with chariot races; in the theater of Marcellus with pantomimes, plays, and the pageantry of arms and costume; she provided them with baths, to which they resorted to gossip, to contemplate statues, to listen to declaimers, to keep themselves cool in the heats of summer. All that had been invented of the convenient, agreeable, and beautiful, all that could be collected in the world that was curious and magnificent, was for them; the Cæsars fed them and diverted them, seeking only to afford them gratification, and to obtain their acclamations. A Roman of the middle classes might well regard his emperors as so many public purveyors, administering his property, relieving him from troublesome cares, furnishing him at fair rates, or for nothing, with corn, wine, and oil, giving him sumptuous meals and well-got-up fêtes, providing him with pictures, statues, pantomimists, gladiators, and lions, resuscitating his "blasé" taste every morning with some surprising novelty, and even occasionally converting themselves into actors, charioteers, singers, and gladiators for his especial delight. In order to lodge this group of amateurs in a very suitable to its regal pretensions, architecture invented original and grand forms. Vast structures always indicate some corresponding excess, some immoderate concentration and accumulation of the labor of humanity. Look at the Gothic cathedrals, the pyramids of Egypt, Paris of the present day, and the docks of London! On reaching the end of a long line of narrow streets, white walls, and deserted gardens, the great ruin appears. There is nothing with which to compare its form, while the line it describes on the sky is unique. No mountains, no hills, no edifices, give any idea of it. It resembles all these; it is a human structure, which time and events have so deformed and transformed, as to render a natural production. Rising upward in the air, its moss-stained embossed summit and indented crest with its wide crevices, a red, mournful, decayed mass, silently reposes in a shroud of clouds. You enter, and it seems as if you had never seen anything in the world so grand. The Coliseum itself is no approach to it, so much do a multiplicity and irregularity of ruins add to the vastness of the vast enclosure. Before these heaps of red corroded masonry, these round vaults spanning the air like the arches of a mighty bridge before these crumbling walls, you wonder whether an entire city did not once exist there. Frequently an arch has fallen, and the monstrous mass that sustained it still stands erect, exposing remnants of staircases and fragments of arcades, like so many shapeless, deformed houses. Sometimes it is cleft in the center, and a portion appears about to fall and roll away, like a huge rock. Sections of wall and pieces of tottering arches cling to it and dart their projections threateningly upward in the air. The courts are strewed with various fragments, and blocks of brick welded together by the action of time, like stones incrusted with the deposits of the sea. Elsewhere are arcades quite intact, piled up story upon story, the bright sky appearing behind them, and above, along the dull red brickwork is a verdant head-dress of plants, waving and rustling in the midst of the ethereal blue. Here are mystic depths, wherein the bedewed shade prolongs itself among mysterious shadows. Into these the ivy descends, and anemones, fennel, and mallows fringe their brinks. Shafts of columns lie half-buried under climbing vines and heaps of rubbish, while luxuriant clover carpets the surrounding slopes. Small green oaks, with round tops, innumerable green shrubs, and myriads of gillyflowers cling to the various projections, nestle in the hollows, and deck its crest with their yellow clusters. All these murmur in the breeze, and the birds are singing in the midst of the imposing silence.... You ascend, I know not how many stories, and, on the summit, find the pavement of the upper chambers to consist of checkered squares of marble; owing to the shrubs and plants that have taken root among them, these are disjoined in places, a fresh bit of mosaic sometimes appearing intact on removing a layer of earth. Here were sixteen hundred seats of polished marble. In the Baths of Diocletian there were places for three thousand two hundred bathers. From this elevation, on casting your eyes around, you see, on the plain, lines of ancient aqueducts radiating in all directions and losing themselves in the distance, and, on the side of Albano, three other vast ruins, masses of red and black arcades, shattered and disintegrated brick by brick, and corroded by time. You descend and take another glance. The hall of the "piscine" is a hundred and twenty paces long; that in which the bathers disrobed is eighty feet in height; the whole is covered with marble, and with such beautiful marble that mantel ornaments are now made of its fragments. In the sixteenth century the Farnese Hercules was discovered here, and the Torso and Venus Callipygis, and I know not how many other masterpieces; and in the seventeenth century hundreds of statues. No people, probably, will ever again display the same luxurious conveniences, the same diversions, and especially the same order of beauty, as that which the Romans displayed in Rome. Here only can you comprehend this assertion--a civilization other than our own, other and different, but in its kind as complete and as elegant. It is another animal, but equally perfect, like the mastodon, previous to the modern elephant. THE AQUEDUCT BUILDERS[15] BY RODOLFO LANCIANI One of the praises bestowed by Cicero on the founder of the city is that "he selected a district very rich in springs." A glance at the plan will at once prove the accuracy of the statement. Twenty-three springs have been described within the walls, several of which are still in existence; others have disappeared owing to the increase of modern soil. "For four hundred and forty-one years," says Frontinus, "the Romans contented themselves with such water as they could get from the Tiber, from wells, and from springs. Some of these springs are still held in great veneration on account of their health-restoring qualities, like the spring of the Camoenae, that of Apollo, and that of Juturna." The first aqueduct, that of the "Aqua Appia," is the joint work of Appius Claudius Cæcus and C. Plautius Venox, censors in 312 B.C. The first built the channel, the second discovered the springs 1,153 meters northeast of the sixth and seventh milestones of the Via Collatina. They are still to be seen, much reduced in volume, at the bottom of some stone quarries near the farmhouse of La Rustica. The second aqueduct was begun in 272 B.C. by Manius Curius Dentatus, censor, and finished three years later by Fulvius Flaccus. The water was taken from the river Anio 850 meters above St. Cosimato, on the road from Tivoli to Arsoli (Valeria). The course of the channel can be traced as far as Gallicano; from Gallicano to Rome it is uncertain.... In 144 B.C. the Senate, considering that the increase of the population had diminished the rate of distribution of water (from 530 to 430 liters per head), determined that the old aqueducts of the Appia and the Anio should be repaired, and a new one built, the appropriation for both works being 8,000,000 sesterces, or 1,760,000 lire. The execution of the scheme was entrusted to Q. Marcius Rex. He selected a group of springs at the foot of the Monte della Prugna, in the territory of Arsoli, 4,437 meters to the right of the thirty-sixth milestone of the Via Valeria; and after many years of untiring efforts he succeeded in making a display of the water on the highest platform of the Capitol. Agrippa restored the aqueduct in 33 B.C.; Augustus doubled the volume of the water in 5 B.C. by the addition of the Aqua Augusta. In 196 Septimius Severus brought in a new supply for the use of his Thermae Severianae; in 212-213 Caracalla built a branch aqueduct, four miles long, for the use of his baths; in 305-306 Diocletian did the same thing for his great thermæ; and, finally, Arcadius and Honorius devoted to the restoration of the aqueduct the money seized from Count Gildo, the African rebel. None of the Roman aqueducts are eulogized by Frontinus like the Claudian. He calls it "a work most magnificently done," and after demonstrating in more than one way that the volume of the springs collected by Claudius amounted to 4,607 quinariae, he says that there was a reserve of 1,600 always ready. The works, began by Caligula in A.D. 38, lasted fourteen years, the water having reached Rome only on August 1, 52 (the birthday of Claudius). The course of the aqueduct was first around the slopes of the Monte Ripoli, like that of the Marcia and of the Anio Vetus. Domitian shortened it by several miles by boring a tunnel 4,950 meters long through the Monte Affiano. Length of channel, 68,750 meters, of which 15,000 was on arches; volume per day, 209,252 cubic meters. The Claudia was used for the Imperial table; a branch aqueduct, 2,000 meters long, left the main channel at Spem Veterem (Porta Maggiore), and following the line of the Via Caelimontana (Villa Wolkonsky), of the Campus Caelimontan (Lateran), and of the street now called di S. Stefano Rotondo, reached the temple of Claudius by the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and the Imperial palace by the church of St. Bonaventura. The Anio Novus, like the Vetus, was at first derived from the river of the same name at the forty-second milestone of the road to Subiaco, great precautions being taken for purifying the water. The works were begun by Caligula in A.D. 38, and completed by Claudius on August 1, 52, on a most magnificent scale, some of the arches reaching the height of thirty-two meters above ground; and there were eight miles of them. Yet, in spite of the purifying reservoir, and of the clear springs of the Rivus Herculaneus (Fosso di Fioggio), which had been mixed with the water from the river, the Anio Novus was hardly ever drinkable. Whenever a shower fell on the Simbruine mountains, the water would get troubled and saturated with mud and carbonate of lime. Trajan improved its condition by carrying the head of the aqueduct higher up the valley, where Nero had created three artificial lakes for the adornment of his Villa Sublacensis. These lakes served more efficiently as "purgatories," than the artificial basin of Caligula, nine miles below. The Anio Novus reached Rome in its own channel after a course of 86,964 meters, but for the last seven miles it ran on the same arches with the Aqua Claudia. The Anio Novus was the largest of all Roman aqueducts, discharging nearly three hundred thousand cubic meters per day. There are two places in the suburbs of Rome where these marvelous arches of the Claudia and Anio Novus can be seen to advantage; one is the Torre Fiscale, three miles outside the Porta S. Giovanni on the Albano road (to be reached also from the Tavolato station, on the upper Albano railway); the other is the Vicolo del Mandrione, which leaves the Labicana one mile outside the Porta Maggiore and falls into the Tusculana at the place called Porta Furba. THE QUARRIES AND BRICKS OF THE ANCIENT CITY[16] BY RODOLFO LANCIANI The materials used in Roman constructions are the "lapis ruber" (tufa); the "lapis Albanus" (peperino); the "lapis Gabinus" (sperone); the "lapis Tiburtinus" (travertino); the silex ("selce"); and bricks and tiles of various kinds. The cement was composed of pozzolana and lime. Imported marbles came into fashion toward the end of the republic, and became soon after the pride and glory of Rome.... The only material which the first builders of Rome found at hand was the volcanic conglomerate called tufa. The quality of the stone used in those early days was far from perfect. The walls of the Palatine hill and of the Capitoline citadel were built of material quarried on the spot--a mixture of charred pumice-stones and reddish volcanic sand. The quarries used for the fortification of the Capitol were located at the foot of the hill toward the Argiletum, and were so important as to give their name, Lautumiae, to the neighboring district. It is probable that the prison called Tullianum, from a jet of water, "tullus," which sprang from the rock, was originally a portion of this quarry. The tufa blocks employed by Servius Tullius for the building of the city walls, and of the agger, appear to be of three qualities--yellowish, reddish, and gray; the first, soft and easily broken up, seems to have been quarried from the Little Aventine, near the church of St. Saba. The galleries of this quarry, much disfigured by medieval and modern use, can be followed to a considerable distance, altho the collapsing of the vaults makes it dangerous to visit them.... The quarries of the third quality were, or rather one of them was, discovered on February 7, 1872, in the Vigna Querini, outside the Porta St. Lorenzo, near the first milestone of the Vicolo di Valle Cupa. It was a surface quarry, comprising five trenches 16 feet wide, 9 feet deep. Some of the blocks, already squared, were lying on the floor of the trenches, others were detached on two or three sides only, the size of others was simply traced on the rock by vertical or horizontal lines. This tufa, better known by the name of cappellaccio, is very bad. The only buildings in which it was used, besides the inner wall of the Servian agger, are the platform of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, in the gardens of the German Embassy, and the "puticuli" in the burial-grounds of the Esquiline. Its use must have been given up before the end of the period of the Kings, in consequence of the discovery of better quarries on the right bank of the Tiber, at the foot of the hills now called Monte Verde.... They cover a space one mile in length and a quarter of a mile wide on each side of the valley of Pozzo Pantaléo. In fact, this valley, which runs from the Via Portuensis toward the lake of the Villa Pamphili, seems to be artificial; I mean, produced by the extraction of the rock of millions of cubic meters in the course of twenty-four centuries. If the work of the ancient quarrymen could be freed from the loose material which conceals it from view, we should possess within a few minutes' drive from the Porta Portese a reproduction of the famous mines of El Masarah, with beds of rock cut into steps and terraces, with roads and lanes, shafts, inclines, underground passages, and outlets for the discharge of rain-water. When a quarry had given out, its galleries were filled up with the refuse of the neighboring ones--chips left over after the squaring of the blocks; so that, in many cases, the color and texture of the chips do not correspond with those of the quarry in which they are found. This layer of refuse, transformed by time into humus, and worked upon by human and atmospheric forces, has given the valley a different aspect, so that it looks as if it were the work not of quarrymen, but of nature. Tufa may be found used in many existing monuments of ancient Rome, such as the drains of the middle and southern basin of the left bank, the channels and arches of the Marcia and Anio Vetus, the Servian walls, the temples of Fortuna Virilis, of Hercules Magnus Custos, the Rostra, the embankment of the Tiber, etc. The largest and most magnificent quarries in the suburban district are the so-called Grotte della Cervara. No words can convey an idea of their size and of the regularity of their plan. They seem to be the work of a fanciful architect who has hewn out of the rock halls and galleries, courts and vestibules, and imitated the forms of an Assyrian palace. For the study of the peperino mines, which contain a stone special to the Alban district, formed by the action of hot water on gray volcanic cinders, the reader should follow on foot the line of the new Albano railway, from the place called Il Sassone to the town of Marino. Many of the valleys in this district, now made beautiful by vineyards and oliveyards, owe their existence to the pickax of the Roman stonecutter, like the valley of Pozzo Pantaléo. The most curious sight is a dolmen or isolated rock 10 meters high, left in the center of one of the quarries to certify the thickness of the bed of rock excavated. In fact, the whole district is very interesting both to the archeologist and to the paysagiste. The mines of Marino, still worked in the neighborhood of the railway station, would count, like the Grotte della Cervara, among the wonders of the Campagna, were they known to the student as they deserve to be. The principal Roman buildings in which the lapis Albanus has been used are: the Claudian aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima, the temples of Antonius and Faustina, of Cybele, of the Eventus Bonus, of Neptune, the inclosure wall of the Forum Augustum, Forum Transitorium, and Forum Pacis, the Porticus Argonautarum, Porticus Pompeii, the Ustrinum of the Appian Way, etc. The sarcophagus of Cornelius Scipio Barbatus in the Vatican museum, and the tomb of the Tibicines in the Museo Municipale al Celio are also of this stone. Travertine stone was quarried in the plains of Tivoli at places now called Le Caprine, Casal Bernini, and Il Barco. This last was reopened after an interval of many centuries by Count G. Brazza, brother of the African explorer. Lost in the wilderness and overgrown with shrubs, it had not been examined, I believe, since the visit of Brocchi. It can be reached by stopping at the station of the Aquae Albulae, on the Tivoli line, and following the ancient road which led to the works. This road, twice as wide as the Appian Way, is flanked by substructures, and is not paved, but macadamized. Parallel with it runs an aqueduct which supplied the works with motive power, derived probably from the sulfur springs. There are also remains of tombs, one of which, octagonal in shape, serves as a foundation to the farmhouse del Barco. The most remarkable monument of the whole group is the Roman quarry from which five and a half million cubic meters of travertine have been extracted, as proved by the measurement of the hollow space between the two opposite vertical sides. That this is the most important ancient quarry of travertine, and the largest one used by the Romans, is proved, in the first place, by its immense size. The sides show a frontage of more than two and a half kilometers; the surface amounts to 500,000 square meters. The sides are quite perpendicular, and have the peculiarity of projecting buttresses, at an angle of 90 degrees. Some of these buttresses are isolated on three sides, and still preserve the grooves, by means of which they could be separated from the solid mass.... In order to keep the bottom of the works clean and free from the movement of the carts, for the action of the cranes, and for the maneuvres of the workmen, the chips, or useless product of the squaring of the blocks, were transported to a great distance, as far as the banks of the Anio, and there piled up to a great height. This is the origin of that chain of hills which runs parallel to the river, and of whose artificial formation no one, as far as I know, had the least suspicion. One of these hills, visible from every point of the neighboring district, from Hadrian's villa as well as from the Sulfur Baths, is elliptical in shape, 22 meters high, 90 meters long, and 65 meters wide. It can with reason be compared with our Testaccio. It is easy to imagine how immense must have been the number of blocks cut from the Cava del Barco during the period of the formation of this hill alone. Another proof of the antiquity of the quarry, and of its abandonment from imperial times down to our own day, is given by this fact.... There are three collections of brick-stamps in Rome; one, of little value, in the Kircherian museum; the second in the last room of the Vatican library, past the "Nozze aldobrandine;" the third and best in the Museo Municipale al Celio. This last contains over a thousand specimens, and a unique set of the products of Roman kilns. In fact, the first hall of the Museo is set apart exclusively for the study of ancient building and decorative materials. Roman bricks were square, oblong, triangular, or round, the latter being used only to build columns in the Pompeiian style. The largest bricks that have been discovered in my time measure 1.05 meters in length. They were set into an arch of one of the great stairs leading to the avenue or boulevard established in Imperial times on the top of the agger of Servius. Roman bricks are very often stamped with a seal, the legend of which contains the names of the owner and the manager of the kilns, of the maker of the tile, of the merchant entrusted with the sale of the products, and of the consuls under whose term of office the bricks were made. These indications are not necessarily found all in one seal. The most important of them is the consular date, because it helps the student to determine, within certain limits, the date of the building itself. The rule, however, is far from being absolute, and before fixing the date of a Roman structure from that of its brick stamps one must take into consideration many other points of circumstantial evidence. When we examine, for instance, the grain warehouses at Ostia, or Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, and find that their walls have never undergone repairs, that their masonry is characteristic of the first quarter of the second century, that their bricks bear the dates of Hadrian's age and no others, we may rest assured that the stamps speak the truth. Their evidence is, in such a case, conclusive. But if the bricks are variously dated, or bear the names of various kilns, and not of one or two only, then their value as an evidence of the date of a building is diminished, if not lost altogether.... The bricks, again, occasionally bear curious signs, such as footmarks of chickens, dogs, or pigs, which stept over them while still fresh, impressions of coins and medals, words or sentences scratched with a nail, etc. A bricklayer, who had perhaps seen better times in his youth, wrote on a tile the first verse of the Aeneid. The great manufacturing center of Roman bricks was the district between the viae Triumphalis, Cornelia, and the two Aureliae, now called the Monti della Creta, which includes the southern slopes of the Vatican ridge and the northern of the Janiculum. Here also, as at Pozzo Pantaléo, the traces of the work of man are simply gigantic. The valleys del Gelsomino, delle Fornaci, del Vicolo delle Cave, della Balduina, and a section of the Val d'Inferno, are not the work of nature, but the result of excavations for "creta figulina," which began 2,300 years ago, and have never been interrupted since. A walk through the Monti della Creta will teach the student many interesting things. The best point of observation is a bluff between the Vicolo della Cave and the Vicolo del Gelsomino, marked with the word "Ruderi" and with the altitude of 75 meters, in the military map of the suburbs. The bluff rises 37 meters above the floor of the brick-kilns of the Gelsomino.... Roman bricks were exported to all the shores of the Mediterranean; they have been found in the Riviera, on the coasts of Benetia, of Narbonensis, of Spain and Africa, and in the island of Sardinia. The brick-making business must have been very remunerative, if we judge from the rank and wealth of many personages who had an interest in it. Many names of emperors appear in brick-stamps, and even more of empresses and princesses of the imperial family. PALM SUNDAY IN ST. PETER'S[17] BY GRACE GREENWOOD (Mrs. Lippincott) Yesterday began Holy Week with the imposing but tedious ceremonies of Palm Sunday at St. Peter's. At nine o'clock in the morning we were in our places--seats erected for the occasion near the high altar, drest in the costume prescribed by church etiquette--black throughout, with black veils on our heads. At about ten the Pope entered, and the rites, ordinary and extraordinary, the masses and processions, continued until one. The entrance of the Pope into this his grandest basilica was, as usual, a beautiful and brilliant sight. He came splendidly vested, wearing his miter, and borne in his chair of state under a gorgeous canopy, between the flabelli--two enormous fans of white peacock feathers. He was preceded and followed by cardinals, bishops, arch-bishops, monsignori, abbots, the apostolic prothonotaries, generals of the religious orders, officers of the state, of the army, of his household, and the Guardia Nobile. He took his seat on the throne, and received the homage of the cardinals, who, kneeling, kissed his right hand. This is a ceremony which is always gone through with in the most formal, mechanical, business-like manner possible. Some palms, not in natural branches, but cut and wreathed in various strange, fantastic forms, lay on the altar. The Pope's chief sacristan took one of these, a deacon another, a sub-deacon a third, and knelt at the foot of the throne. His Holiness read prayers over them, sprinkled them with holy water, and incensed them three times. One of these is held beside the throne by the prince assistant during the service; another is borne by the Pope when in procession. After this, multitudes of palms were brought up for the Papal benediction. First came the cardinals, each, as he received his palm from the Pope, kissing it, the right hand and knee of His Holiness; then the bishops, who only kissed the palm and his right knee; then the abbots, who were only entitled to kiss the palm and his foot; then the governor of Rome, the prince assistant, the auditor, the treasurer, the maggiordomo, the secretaries, the chamberlains, the mace bearers, the deacons and sub-deacons, generals of the religious orders and priests in general, masters of the ceremonies, singers, clerks of the Papal chapel, students of Roman colleges, foreign ministers and their attachés, Italian, French, Spanish, Austrian, Russian, Prussian officers, noblemen and gentlemen, all came up in turn, knelt, received blest palms, and kissed the foot of the Sovereign Pontiff. During the distribution of the palms, anthems were sung by the choir, who were caged up in a sort of trellice workbox at the right of the altar. This long but brilliantly picturesque ceremony through, the Pope, after washing his hands, again mounted into his "sedia gestatoria," and bearing his palm, preceded and followed by all those to whom he had given palms, passed slowly down the nave of the church, blessing the kneeling and bending multitude right and left. This procession of palms was very striking and gorgeous from the beauty and variety of military arms and uniforms, and more than royal richness of the priestly vestments, the gleam of miters and maces, and of innumerable sacred symbols and insignia. THE ELECTION OF A POPE[18] BY CARDINAL WISEMAN The interval between the close of one pontificate and the commencement of another is a period of some excitement, and necessarily of much anxiety. Time is required for the electors to assemble, from distant provinces, or even foreign countries; and this is occupied in paying the last tribute of respect and affection to the departed Pontiff. His body is embalmed, clothed in the robes of his office, of the penitential color, and laid on a couch of state within one of the chapels in St. Peter's, so that the faithful may not only see it, but kiss its feet. This last act of reverence to the mortal remains of the immortal Pius VIII., the writer well recollects performing. These preliminaries occupy three days; during which rises, as if by magic, or from the crypts below, an immense catafalque, a colossal architectural structure, which fills the nave of that basilica illustrated by inscriptions, and adorned by statuary. Before this huge monument, for nine days funeral rites are performed, closed by a funeral oration. For the body of the last Pope there is a uniform resting-place in St. Peter's--a plain sarcophagus, of marbled stucco, hardly noticed by the traveler, over a door beside the choir, on which is simply painted the title of the latest Pontiff. On the death of his successor it is broken down at the top, the coffin is removed to the under-church, and that of the new claimant for repose is substituted. This change takes place late in the evening, and is considered private. I can not recollect whether it was on this or on a subsequent occasion that I witnessed it with my college companions.... In the afternoon of the last day of the novendiali, as they are called, the cardinals assemble in a church near the Quirinal palace, and walk thence in procession, accompanied by their conclavisiti, a secretary, a chaplain, and a servant or two, to the great gate of the royal residence, in which one will remain as master and supreme lord. Of course the hill is crowded by persons lining the avenue kept open for the procession. Cardinals never before seen by them, or not for many years, pass before them; eager eyes scan and measure them, and try to conjecture, from fancied omens in eye, or figure, or expression, who will shortly be the sovereign of their fair city, and, what is more, the Head of the Catholic Church from the rising to the setting sun. Equal they pass the threshold of that gate; they share together the supreme rule, temporal and spiritual; there is still embosomed in them all the voice yet silent, that soon will sound, from one tongue, over all the world, and the dormant germ of that authority which will soon again be concentrated in one man alone. To-day they are all equal; perhaps to-morrow one will sit enthroned, and all the rest will kiss his feet; one will be sovereign, the others his subjects; one the shepherd, and the others his flock.... While we have been thus sketching, hastily and imperfectly, one of many who passed almost unnoticed in the solemn procession to conclave, on the 2d of September, 1823, we may suppose the doors to have been inexorably closed on those who composed it. The conclave, which formerly used to take place in the Vatican, was on this occasion, and has been subsequently, held in the Quirinal palace. This noble building, known equally by the name of Monte Cavallo, consists of a large quadrangle, round which run the papal apartments. From this stretches out, along a whole street, an immense wing, its two upper floors divided into a great number of small but complete suites of apartments, occupied permanently, or occasionally, by persons attached to the Court. During conclave these are allotted, literally so, to the cardinals, each of whom lives apart, with his attendants. His food is brought daily from his own house, and is examined, and delivered to him in the shape of "broken victuals," by the watchful guardians of the turns and lattices, through which alone anything, even conversation, can penetrate into the seclusion of that sacred retreat. For a few hours, the first evening, the doors are left open, and the nobility, the diplomatic body, and in fact all presentable persons, may roam from cell to cell, paying a brief compliment to their occupants, perhaps speaking the same good wishes to fifty, which they know can be accomplished in only one. After that all is closed; a wicket is left accessible for the entrance of any cardinal who is not yet arrived; but every aperture is jealously guarded by faithful janitors, judges and prelates of various tribunals, who relieve one another. Every letter even is opened and read, that no communications may be held with the outer world. The very street on which the wing of the conclave looks is barricaded and guarded by a picket at each end; and as, fortunately, there are no private residences opposite, and all the buildings have access from the back, no inconvenience is thereby created. While conclave lasts, the administrative power rests in the hands of the Cardinal Chamberlain, who strikes his own coins during its continuance; and he is assisted by three cardinals, called the "Heads of Orders," because they represent the three orders in the sacred college, of bishops, priests and deacons. The ambassadors of the great powers receive fresh credentials to the conclave, and proceed in state, to present them to this delegation, at the grille. An address, carefully prepared, is delivered by the envoy, and receives a well-pondered reply from the presiding cardinal. Twice a day the cardinals meet in the chapel contained within the palace, and there, on tickets so arranged that the voter's name can not be seen, write the name of him for whom they give their suffrage. These papers are examined in their presence, and if the number of votes given to any one do not constitute the majority, they are burned, in such a manner that the smoke, issuing through a flue, is visible to the crowd usually assembled in the square outside. Some day, instead of this usual signal to disperse, the sound of pick and hammer is heard, and a small opening is seen in the wall which had temporarily blocked up the great window over the palace gateway. At last the masons of the conclave have opened a rude door, through which steps out on the balcony the first Cardinal Deacon, and proclaims to the many, or to the few, who may happen to be waiting, that they again possess a sovereign and a Pontiff. AN AUDIENCE WITH PIUS X[19] BY MARY EMOGENE HAZELTINE We arrived in Rome at three in the afternoon, with letters which ensured us an audience with the Pope. A friend, long resident in Rome, who advised us to present them at once, accompanied us to the Vatican. Passing through an interesting part of the city, including the St. Angelo Bridge across the Tiber, we soon found ourselves in the world-famous Colonnade of St. Peter's. Ascending the steps leading to the Vatican, we passed the Swiss Guard in their famous uniforms designed by Michelangelo, and climbed what seemed like endless stairs, passing guards at almost every turn, who pointed out the way indicated by the address on our credentials. Arriving at an anteroom, a priestly secretary, speaking excellent English, read our letter with what seemed to us, from the expression of his face, great interest and evident approval. Why should this not have been? Our letter was from the Apostolic Delegate then in Washington--the Pope's own representative in America. It was in Italian, in the highest official form, and conveyed the intelligence that we were traveling in Italy for a brief vacation, mentioned all four of us by name, and said that, while we were not Catholics, we respected the faith and would carefully observe all the forms prescribed for an audience. The monseigneur whom we were to see was at that time engaged with several bishops. Because of this, we were asked to present ourselves at the same hour on Saturday, meanwhile leaving our letter. Promptly at the hour I was again at the door of the major domo, Monseigneur Bisleti, to be received again by the priestly secretary, by whom I was taken into the palatial rooms of the monseigneur. A moment here was sufficient to explain my errand and receive from the monseigneur the long-coveted permission, which I found had already been made out in due form for four persons. Our cards entitled us to admission on the following day, which made necessary unexpected haste in arranging for the official costume of black. Fortunately we had all brought black veils and some of us either gowns or skirts. With help from others, we secured one or two necessary waists, and from our hostess obtained the rosaries I wished to have blest by the Pope. Our hostess then gave us a dress rehearsal, in order that we might fully understand what to us would be an imposing ceremony. An audience is a great function and the procedure accordingly is rigid. On reaching the Vatican next day, we were directed by the Swiss Guard, not to the major domo's apartments as before, but through a court and thence up the grandest of staircases in three long flights, the walls lined with beautiful marbles more wonderful than many pictures, the light coming through magnificent stained-glass windows. In every sense here was a palatial, an imperial, entrance. At the head of the stairway we were met by gorgeous chamberlains, the body servants of the Pope, clad in superb magenta brocaded velvet, with knee breeches, magenta silk stockings, and great silver buckles on their shoes. Streamers hanging from their arms at the back, added to the official appearance of these men in their gorgeous uniforms. We were shown through a magnificent antechamber, and then into a series of reception rooms, through which we were motioned on, until we came to the fourth, where were just four chairs which seemed to be waiting for us four. Swiss guards patrolled the rooms, and others--chamberlains, I suppose. We had a full half hour in which to wait here, but we could use it to advantage, in watching the gathering company, and viewing the magnificent room, hung as it was with rich red moire silk, as were all others of the suite. The ladies in black garb became very effective figures in this brilliant setting. There were many beautiful tapestries in the rooms, one room having a tapestried frieze. The furniture was massive, either of inlaid wood or heavy gilt, and the floors of beautiful inlaid marble. It is not possible to give any adequate idea of these stately rooms, nor of their exquisite appointments; nor yet of the gathering company, for many high officials of the church passed before us and through to rooms beyond, which added to the interest of the occasion and the splendor of the scene. We learned soon that this was to be no ordinary audience, but a special one granted to alumni of the American College in Rome. A few days before we left New York, a large company of American priests, graduates of the American College, had sailed on a chartered steamer to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the college, from which they had received holy orders. This audience had been specially arranged for them. We were therefore more than favored in having an audience at the same time, a fact due probably to the credentials with which we had come provided. We now understood that the officials of the church who had entered this room were our own American bishops. With them had however come others of high rank. Over their priestly robes of black they wore rich purple silk capes, falling to the floor, and purple sashes. (There are, of course, technical terms for these garments, but I do not know them.) The special body guard of the Pope, three men chosen from the Palatine guard, and in soldier's uniform, now passed through the room with a noble guard of the Knights of Malta and Count Moroni, also in uniform, with chapeau, feathered with plumes of black and white. At exactly half after eleven, Monseigneur Bisleti, watch in hand, bustled through, followed by bishops and priests. We were at once on our knees, for His Holiness was seen to be approaching from rooms beyond. As he advanced we could see his small figure, clad in white, surrounded by court attendants, American bishops, an archbishop, the Palatine guard, Monseigneur Bisleti, and the Knight of Malta. Between us and the doorway through which he approached, stood a girl of twelve, in white garments and veil. She had come from her first communion. Near her was a Franciscan monk, who evidently had just returned from some mission field, for he was bronzed, and haggard, and worn as to his garments. As the Pope passed he gave a special word of blessing to the monk, and a smile to the child. The ceremony of the audience itself was simple. The Pope walked past the kneeling people, giving to each his hand. This each one took, kissing his ring. Filling the center of the room, as we were kneeling around the sides, were the priestly courtiers, the Papal delegate, in gray robes, a prominent figure among them. The Pope passed on through several rooms filled with waiting priests. We were then all bidden to follow to the throne room, for a special ceremony. An audience generally ends when the Pope leaves the room in which he receives you, giving his blessing to all as he leaves. In the throne room now the American alumni were to present their addresses to the Pope. As we entered, undergraduates of the college were discovered already there singing. Until the addresses were read, the singing was continued. It was all a magnificent sight, the little white father on his splendid throne, his court about him, his special body servant holding his red cape (to be used in case of drafts), and, as a background for all the colors of the court scene, several hundred black-robed priests. Monseigneur Kennedy, rector of the college, read an address, as did Rev. Father Wall of Baltimore, president of the association. To these the Pope replied, reading from a manuscript. After this, he rose, mingled with his entourage, and chatted pleasantly with bishops and others. A picture was then taken of the court, the priests and students. These American priests and undergraduates were a fine company of men. The Pope finally gave his blessing to all who were assembled in the room, and the great function was over. THE ASCENT OF THE DOME OF ST. PETER'S[20] BY GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD The visitor to St. Peter's should not fail to ascend to the dome; a long journey, but involving no danger and not a great amount of fatigue. From the church to the roof the passage is by an inclined plane of pavement, with so gradual an ascent that loaded mules pass up without difficulty. In stepping out upon the roof, it is difficult to believe that we are more than one hundred and fifty feet from the ground, or that so extensive an architectural surface could have been reared in air by the patient labor of men's hands. It rather seems as if a little village had been lifted up by some geological convulsion. Here are wide spaces to walk about in, houses for human habitation, a fountain playing, and all the signs of life. The views are everywhere fine, and one can fancy that the air is purer and the sky more blue than to those left below. The dome soars high above the eye, and a new sense of its magnitude seizes upon the mind. The two cupolas which flank the façade are upward of one hundred feet high, and the five smaller ones which crown the chapels are of great size; but here they seem like dwarfs clinging about a giant's knee. The dome of St. Peter's, as is well known, is double; and between the outer and inner wall is a series of winding passages and staircases, by which the ascent is made to the top. The length of these passages and staircases, their number, and the time it takes to traverse them, are a new revelation of the size of this stupendous structure. We begin to comprehend the genius and courage which planned and executed a work so novel and so bold. From the galleries inside, the view of the interior below is most striking. It looks as the earth may look from a balloon. The men moving upon the pavement appear like that "small infantry warred on by cranes"; and even the baldacchino hardly swells beyond the dimensions of a candelabrum. At the base of the ball, a railing, unseen from below, enables the visitor whose nerves are tolerably good to enjoy an extensive and beautiful prospect, embracing a region interesting not merely to the eye but to the mind: the cradle of that mighty Roman race which here began its ever-widening circle of conquest and annexation. It comprises the Campagna, the Tiber, the distant Mediterranean, the Apennines, the Alban and Sabine hills, and the isolated bulk of Soracte. From no point on earth can the eye rest upon so many spots on which the undying light of human interest lingers. From this place the ascent is made to the interior of the ball itself, into which most travelers climb, probably more for the sake of saying that they have been there than anything else. Tho the ball looks like a mere point from below, it is nearly eight feet in diameter; and the interior will hold a dozen persons without inconvenience. Altho I visited it on a winter's day, the atmosphere was extremely hot and uncomfortable, from the effect of the sun's rays upon the gilded bronze. By means of an exterior ladder, it is possible to climb to the foot of the cross; a feat which few landsmen would have the nerve to undertake. SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE[21] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE We followed the street which ascends and descends, bordered with palaces and old hedges of thorn, as far as Santa Maria Maggiore. This basilica, standing upon a large eminence, surmounted with its domes, rises nobly upward, at once simple and complete, and when you enter it, it affords still greater pleasure. It belongs to the fifth century; on being rebuilt at a later period, the general plan, its antique idea, was preserved. An ample nave, with a horizontal roof, is sustained by two rows of white Ionic columns. You are rejoiced to see so fine an effect obtained by such simple means; you might almost imagine yourself in a Greek temple. It is said that a temple of Juno was robbed of these columns. Each of them bare and polished, with no other ornament than the delicate curves of its small capital, is of healthful and charming beauty. You appreciate here the good sense, and all that is agreeable in genuine natural construction, the file of trunks of trees which bear the beams, resting flat and providing a long walk. All that has since been added is barbarous, and first, the two chapels of Sixtus V. and Paul V., with their paintings by Guido, Josepin, and Cigoli, and the sculptures of Bernini, and the architecture of Fontana and Flaminio. These are celebrated names, and money has been prodigally spent, but instead of the slight means with which the ancients produced a great effect, the moderns produce a petty effect with great means. When the bewildered eye is satiated with the elaborate sweep of these arches and domes, with the splendors of polychromatic marbles, with friezes and pedestals of agate, with columns of oriental jasper, with angels hanging by their feet, and with all these bas-reliefs of bronze and gold, the visitor hastens to get away from it as he would to escape from a confectioner's shop. It seems as if this grand, glittering box, gilded and labored from pavement to lantern, caught up and tore at every point of its finery the delicate web of poetic reverie; the slender profile of the least of the columns impresses one far more than any of this display of the art of upholsterers and parvenus. Similarly to this the façade, loaded with balustrades, and round and angular pediments, and statues roosting on its stones, is a "hôtel-de-ville" frontage. The campanile, belonging to the fourteenth century, alone presents an agreeable object; at that time it was one of the towers of the city, a distinctive sign which marked it on the old plans so black and sharp, and stamped it forever on the still corporeal imaginations of monks and wayfarers. There are traces of every age in these old basilicas; you see the diverse states of Christianity, at first enshrined in pagan forms, and then traversing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to muffle itself up finally, and bedeck itself with modern finery. The Byzantine epoch has left its imprint in the mosaics of the great nave and the apsis, and in its bloodless and lifeless Christs and Virgins, so many staring specters motionless on their gold backgrounds and red panels, the fantoms of an extinct art and a vanished society. CATACOMBS AND CRYPTS[22] BY CHARLES DICKENS There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prison, over what is said to have been--and very possibly may have been--the dungeon of St. Peter. This chamber is now fitted up as an oratory, dedicated to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate place, in my recollection, too. It is very small and low-roofed; and the dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor. Hanging on the walls, among the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at once strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the place--rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers instruments of violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use, and hung up to propitiate offended Heaven; as if the blood upon them would drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry with. It is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the dungeons below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked; that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream; and in the vision of great churches which come rolling past me like a sea, it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and does not flow on with the rest. It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city. Many churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which, in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples, and what not; but I do not speak of them. Beneath the church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have another outlet underneath the Coliseum--tremendous darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth and unexplorable, where the dull torches, flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of distant vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a city of the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls, drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and there, and never saw, and never will see, one ray of sun. Some accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the amphitheater; some, the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some, both. But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the early Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum shows, heard the wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon and life of the vast theater crowded to the parapet, and of these, their dreaded neighbors, bounding in! Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs of Rome--quarries in the old time, but afterward the hiding-places of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been explored for twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference. A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild, bright eye, was our only guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we had come; and I could not help thinking: "Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of madness he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!" On we wandered, among martyrs' graves; passing great subterranean vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge there, and form a population under Rome even worse than that which lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; graves of men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the persecutors, "We are Christians! We are Christians!" that they might be murdered with their parents; graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs' blood; graves of some who lived down here, for years together, ministering to the rest, and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude altars, that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprized, were hemmed in and walled up; buried before death, and killed by slow starvation. Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain apart and keep their separate identity. I have a fainter recollection, sometimes, of the relics; of the fragment of the pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the portion of the table that was spread for the Last Supper; of the well at which the woman of Samaria gave water to our Savior; of two columns from the house of Pontius Pilate; of the stone to which the sacred hands were bound, when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ; of Madonne, with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold; their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets of crusht flowers; sometimes, of people gathered round the pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and preaching fiercely; the sun just streaming down through some high window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of the roof. Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and strolls away, among the rags and smells, and palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street. THE CEMETERY OF THE CAPUCHINS[23] BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and lighted by a row of iron-grated windows without glass. A corridor runs along besides these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted recesses, or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of which consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem. It is smoothed decorously over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept quite free from grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy recesses, if pains were not bestowed to root them up. But, as the cemetery is small, and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are immemorially accustomed, when one of their number dies, to take the longest-buried skeleton out of the oldest grave, and lay the new slumberer there instead. Thus, each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for another lodger. The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and the more delicate tracery by the smaller bones of the human frame. The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many hundred years, must have contributed their bony framework to build up these great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular head-piece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are piled up indistinguishably into the architectural design like the many deaths that make up the one glory of a victory. In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labeled with their names and the dates of their decease. Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning, hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity. As a general thing, however, these frocked and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of their position, and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But the cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes; the soul sinks forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty death; the holy earth from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality, has grown as barren of the flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds and grass. Thank Heaven for its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze to give us back our faith. Not here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars in these chapels of horrible consecration are heaps of human bones. THE BURIAL PLACE OF KEATS AND SHELLEY[24] BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS A beautiful pyramid, a hundred and thirteen feet high, built into the ancient wall of Rome, is the proud "Sepulcher of Caius Cestius." It is the most imperishable of the antiquities, standing as perfect after eighteen hundred years as if it were built but yesterday. Just beyond it, on the declivity of a hill, over the ridge of which the wall passes, crowning it with two moldering towers, lies the Protestant burying-ground. It looks toward Rome, which appears in the distance, between Mount Aventine and a small hill called Mont Testaccio, and leaning to the south-east, the sun lies warm and soft upon its banks, and the grass and wild flowers are there the earliest and tallest of the Campagna. I have been here to-day, to see the graves of Keats and Shelley. With a cloudless sky and the most delicious air ever breathed, we sat down upon the marble slab laid over the ashes of poor Shelley, and read his own lament over Keats, who sleeps just below, at the foot of the hill. The cemetery is rudely formed into three terraces, with walks between, and Shelley's grave and one other, without a name, occupy a small nook above, made by the projections of a moldering wall-tower, and crowded with ivy and shrubs, and a peculiarly fragrant yellow flower, which perfumes the air around for several feet. The avenue by which you ascend from the gate is lined with high bushes of the marsh-rose in the most luxuriant bloom, and all over the cemetery the grass is thickly mingled with flowers of every dye. In his preface to his lament over Keats, Shelley says: "He was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now moldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." If Shelley had chosen his own grave at the time, he would have selected the very spot where he has since been laid--the most sequestered and flowery nook of the place he describes so feelingly. On the second terrace of the declivity are ten or twelve graves, two of which bear the names of Americans who have died in Rome. A portrait carved in bas-relief, upon one of the slabs, told me, without the inscription, that one whom I had known was buried beneath. The slightly rising mound was covered with small violets, half hidden by the grass. It takes away from the pain with which one stands over the grave of an acquaintance or a friend, to see the sun lying so warm upon it, and the flowers springing so profusely and cheerfully. Nature seems to have cared for those who have died so far from home, binding the earth gently over them with grass, and decking it with the most delicate flowers. We descended to the lower enclosure at the foot of the slight declivity. The first grave here is that of Keats. The inscription runs thus: "This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb: 'Here lies one whose name was written in water.'" He died at Rome in 1821. Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface to his elegy: "The savage criticism on his poems, which appeared in the "Quarterly Review," produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted." Keats was, no doubt, a poet of very uncommon promise. He had all the wealth of genius within him, but he had not learned, before he was killed by criticism, the received, and, therefore, the best manner of producing it for the eye of the world. Had he lived longer, the strength and richness which break continually through the affected style of "Endymion" and "Lamia" and his other poems, must have formed themselves into some noble monuments of his powers. As it is, there is not a poet living who could surpass the material of his "Endymion"--a poem, with all its faults, far more full of beauties. But this is not the place for criticism. He is buried fitly for a poet, and sleeps beyond criticism now. Peace to his ashes! EXCURSIONS NEAR ROME[25] BY CHARLES DICKENS The excursions in the neighborhood of Rome are charming, and would be full of interest were it only for the changing views they afford of the wild Campagna. But every inch of ground in every direction is rich in associations, and in natural beauties. There is Albano, with its lovely lake and wooded shore, and with its wine, that certainly has not improved since the days of Horace, and in these times hardly justifies his panegyric. There is squalid Tivoli, with the river Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of it, with its picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots on, low down under beetling rocks. There, too, is the Villa d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and cypress-trees, where it seems to lie in state. Then, there is Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his favorite house (some fragments of it may yet be seen there), and where Cato was born. We saw its ruined amphitheater on a gray, dull day, when a shrill March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as the ashes of a long-extinguished fire. One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen miles distant; possest by a great desire to go there by the ancient Appian Way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; moldering arches grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes loose walls, built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our path; sometimes a ditch, between two mounds of broken stones, obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the old road above the ground; now traced it underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept toward us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their dead have fallen like their dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust! Returning by the road at sunset, and looking, from the distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost felt (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world. To come again to Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a fitting close to such a day. The narrow streets, devoid of footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dung-hill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness, with the broad square before some haughty church; in the center of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honored statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint; Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter. Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from the spoliation of the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like mountains; while here and there are broken arches and rent walls, through which it gushes freely, as the life comes pouring from a wound. The little town of miserable houses, walled, and shut in by barred gates, is the quarter where the Jews are locked up nightly, when the clock strikes eight--a miserable place, densely populated, and reeking with bad odors, but where the people are industrious and money-getting. In the daytime, as you make your way along the narrow streets, you see them all at work--upon the pavement, oftener than in their dark and frowsy shops; furbishing old clothes, and driving bargains. Crossing from these patches of thick darkness out into the moon once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear. In the narrow little throat of street beyond, a booth drest out with flaring lamps, and boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky Romans around its smoky coppers of hot broth, and cauliflower stew; its trays of fried fish, and its flasks of wine. As you rattle around the sharply twisting corner, a lumbering sound is heard. The coachman stops abruptly, and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by, preceded by a man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer, and a priest; the latter chanting as he goes. It is the dead-cart, with the bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the Sacred Field outside the walls, where they will be thrown into the pit that will be covered with a stone to-night, and sealed up for a year. But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns, ancient temples, theaters, houses, porticoes or forums, it is strange to see how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended into some modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose--a wall, a dwelling-place, a granary, a stable--some use for which it never was designed, and associated with which it can not otherwise than lamely assort. II FLORENCE THE APPROACH BY CARRIAGE ROAD[26] BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Immediately after leaving Incisa, we saw the Arno, already a considerable river, rushing between deep banks, with the greenish hue of a duck-pond diffused through its water. Nevertheless, tho the first impression was not altogether agreeable, we soon became reconciled to this hue, and ceased to think it an indication of impurity; for, in spite of it, the river is still, to a certain degree, transparent, and is, at any rate, a mountain stream, and comes uncontaminated from its source. The pure, transparent brown of the New England rivers is the most beautiful color; but I am content that it should be peculiar to them. Our afternoon's drive was through scenery less striking than some which we had traversed, but still picturesque and beautiful. We saw deep valleys and ravines, with streams at the bottom; long, wooded hillsides, rising far and high, and dotted with white dwellings, well toward the summits. By and by, we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a sidelong valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills; while, far beyond, rose in the distance the blue peaks of three or four of the Apennines, just on the remote horizon. There being a haziness in the atmosphere, however, Florence was little more distinct to us than the Celestial City was to Christian and Hopeful, when they spied at it from the Delectable Mountains. Keeping steadfastly onward, we ascended a winding road, and passed a grand villa, standing very high, and surrounded with extensive grounds. It must be the residence of some great noble; and it has an avenue of poplars or aspens, very light and gay, and fit for the passage of the bridal procession, when the proprietor or his heir brings home his bride; while in another direction from the same front of the palace stretches an avenue or grove of cypresses, very long and exceedingly black and dismal, like a train of gigantic mourners. I have seen few things more striking, in the way of trees, than this grove of cypresses. From this point we descended, and drove along an ugly, dusty avenue, with a high brick wall on one side or both, till we reached the gate of Florence, into which we were admitted with as little trouble as custom-house officers, soldiers, and policemen can possibly give. They did not examine our luggage, and even declined a fee, as we had already paid one at the frontier custom-house. Thank heaven, and the Grand Duke! As we hoped that the Casa del Bello had been taken for us, we drove thither in the first place, but found that the bargain had not been concluded. As the house and studio of Mr. Powers[27] were just on the opposite side of the street, I went to it, but found him too much engrossed to see me at the moment; so I returned to the "vettura," and we told Gaetano to carry us to a hotel. He established us at the Albergo della Fontana, a good and comfortable house. Mr. Powers called in the evening--a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes, which kindle as he speaks. He is gray, and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly, nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment. Through his good offices, the next day we engaged the Casa del Bello. This journey from Rome has been one of the brightest and most uncareful interludes of my life; we have all enjoyed it exceedingly, and I am happy that our children have it to look back upon. THE OLD PALACE AND THE LOGGIA[28] BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER Every great capital has its eye; at Rome it is the Campo Vaccino; at Paris, the Boulevard des Italiens; at Venice, the Place St. Mark; at Madrid, the Prado; at London, the Strand; at Naples, the Via di Toledo. Rome is more Roman, Paris more Parisian, Venice more Venetian, Madrid more Spanish, London more English, Naples more Neapolitan, in that privileged locality than anywhere else. The eye of Florence is the Place of the Grand Duke--a beautiful eye. In fact, suppress that Place and Florence has no more meaning--it might be another city. It is at that Place, therefore, that every traveler ought to begin, and, moreover, had he not that intention, the tide of pedestrians would carry him and the streets themselves would conduct him thither. The first aspect of the Place of the Grand Duke has an effect so charming, so picturesque, so complete, that you comprehend all at once into what an error the modern capitals like London, Paris, St. Petersburg, fall in forming, under the pretext of squares, in their compact masses, immense empty spaces upon which they run aground all possible and impossible modes of decoration. One can touch with his finger the reason which makes of the Carrousel and Place de la Concorde, great empty fields which absorb fountains, statues, arches of triumph, obelisks, candelabra, and little gardens. All these embellishments, very pretty on paper, very agreeable also, without doubt, viewed from a balloon, are almost lost for the spectator who can not grasp the whole, his height only rising five feet above the ground. A square, in order to produce a beautiful effect, ought not to be too big; it is also necessary that it should be bordered by varied monuments of diverse elevations. The Place of the Grand Duke at Florence unites all these conditions; bordered by monuments regular in themselves, but different from one another, it is pleasing to the eye without wearying by a cold symmetry. The Palace of the Seigneurie, or Old Palace, which by its imposing mass and severe elegance at first attracts the attention, occupies a corner of the Place, instead of the middle. This idea, a happy one, in our opinion, regrettable for those who only see architectural beauty in geometrical regularity, is not fortuitous; it has a reason wholly Florentine. In order to obtain perfect symmetry, it would have been necessary to build upon the detested soil of the Ghibelline house, rebellious and proscribed by the Uberti; something that the Guelph faction, then all-powerful, were not willing to allow the architect, Arnolfo di Lapo, to do. Learned men contest the truth of this tradition; we will not discuss here the value of their objections. It is certain, however, that the Old Palace gains greatly by the singularity of this location and also leaves space for the great Fountain of Neptune and the equestrian statue of Cosmo the First. The name of fortress would be more appropriate than any other, for the Old Palace; it is a great mass of stone, without columns, without frontal, without order of architecture. Time has gilded the walls with beautiful vermilion tints which the pure blue of the sky sets off marvelously, and the whole structure has that haughty and romantic aspect which accords well with the idea that one forms for oneself of that old Palace of the Seigneurie, the witness, since the date of its erection in the thirteenth century, of so many intrigues, tumults, violent acts, and crimes. The battlements of the palace, cut square, show that it was built to that height by the Guelph faction; the trifurcated battlements of the belfry indicate a sudden change on the accession to power of the Ghibelline faction. Guelphs and Ghibellines detested each other so violently that they exprest their opinions in their garments, in the cut of their hair, in their arms, in their manner of fortifying themselves. They feared nothing so much as to be captured by one another, and differed as much as they possibly could. They had a special salutation after the manner of the Freemasons and the Companions of Duty. The opinions of the ancient owners of the Old Palace at Florence can be recognized by this characteristic; the walls of the city are crenelated squarely in the Guelph fashion, and the tower on the ramparts has the Ghibelline battlements of swallow-tail shape. The Vecchio Palace has for its basement several steps which were used in former times as a species of tribune, from the top of which the magistrates and demagogs harangued the people. Two colossal statues of marble--Hercules slaying Cacus, by Bandinelli, and David the Conqueror of Goliath, by Michael Angelo--mount near the door their age-long watch, like two gigantic sentinels whom someone has forgotten to relieve. The statue of David by Michael Angelo besides the inconvenience there is in representing under a gigantic form a Biblical hero of notoriously small size, seemed to us a trifle common and heavy, a rare defect with this master; his David is a great big boy, fleshy, broad-backed, with monstrous biceps, a market porter waiting to put a sack upon his back. The working of the marble is remarkable and, after all, is a fine piece of study which would do honor to any other sculptor except Michael Angelo; but there is lacking that Olympian mastership which characterizes the works of that superhuman sculptor. One of the most curious features of the Old Palace is the grand salon, a hall of enormous dimensions, which has its legend. When the Medici were driven from Florence, in 1494, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who directed the popular movement, proposed the idea of constructing an immense hall where a council of a thousand citizens would elect the magistrates and regulate the affairs of the republic. The architect Cronaca had charge of this task and acquitted himself of it with a celerity so marvelous that Brother Savonarola caused the rumor to spread that angels descended from heaven to help the masons and continued at night the interrupted work. The invention of these angels tempering the mortar and carrying the hod is all done in the legendary style of the Middle Ages and would furnish a charming subject for a picture to some ingenuous painter of the school of Overbeck or of Hauser. In this rapid construction Cronaca displayed, if not all his genius, at least all his agility. The work has been justly admired and often consulted by architects. When the Medici returned to power and transferred their residence from the Palace of the Via Larga, which they had occupied, to the Palace of the Seigneurie, Cosmo wished to change the Council Hall into an audience chamber, and charged the presumptuous Bacchio Bandinelli, whose designs had attracted him, with various alterations of an important character; but the sculptor had undoubtedly presumed too much on his talent as an architect, and in spite of the assistance of Giuliano Baccio d'Agnolo, whom he called to his aid, he worked for ten years without being able to conquer the difficulties which he had created for himself. It was Vasari who raised the ceiling several feet, finished the work and decorated the walls with a succession of frescoes which may still be seen, and which represent different episodes in the history of Florence--combats, and captures of cities, the whole being a travesty of antiquity, an intermingling of allegories. These frescos, painted with an intrepid and learned mediocrity, display the commonplace tones, swelling muscles and anatomical tricks in use at that epoch among artists. We have already called attention to the fact that colossal dimensions are not at all necessary to produce effect in architecture. The Loggia de Lanzi, that gem of the Place of the Grand Duke, consists of a portico composed of four arcades, three on the façade, one in return on the gallery of the offices. It is a miniature of a monument; but the harmony of its proportions is so perfect that the eye in contemplating it experiences a sense of satisfaction. The nearness of the Palace of the Seigneurie, with its compact mass, admirably sets off the elegant slenderness of its arches and columns. The Loggia is a species of Museum in the open air. The "Perseus" of Benvenuto Cellini, the "Judith" of Donatello, the "Rape of the Sabines" of John of Bologna, are framed in the arcades. Six antique statues--the cardinal and monastic virtues--by Jacques, called Pietro, a Madonna by Orgagna adorn the interior wall. Two lions, one antique, the other modern, by Vacca, almost as good as the Greek lions of the arsenal at Venice, complete the decoration. The Perseus may be regarded as the masterpiece of Benvenuto Cellini, an artist so highly spoken of in France, without scarcely anything being known about him. This statue, a little affected in its pose, like all the works of the Florentine school, has a juvenile grace which is very attractive. THE ORIGINS OF THE CITY[29] BY GRANT ALLEN Only two considerable rivers flow from the Apennines westward into the Mediterranean. The Tiber makes Rome; the Arno makes Florence. In prehistoric and early historic times, the mountainous region which forms the basin of these two rivers was occupied by a gifted military race, the Etruscans, who possest a singular assimilative power for Oriental and Hellenic culture. Intellectually and artistically, they were the pick of Italy. Their blood still runs in the veins of the people of Tuscany. Almost every great thing done in the Peninsula, in ancient or modern times, has been done by Etruscan hands or brains. The poets and painters, in particular, with few exceptions, have been, in the wide ethnical sense, Tuscans. The towns of ancient Etruria were hill-top strongholds. Florence was not one of these; even its neighbor, Fiesole (Faesulue), did not rank among the twelve great cities of the Etruscan league. But with the Roman conquest and the Roman peace, the towns began to descend from their mountain peaks into the river valleys; roads grew important, through internal trade; and bridges over rivers assumed a fresh commercial value. Florence (Florentia), probably founded under Sulla as a Roman municipium, upon a Roman road, guarded the bridge across the Arno, and gradually absorbed the population of Fiesole. Under the later empire, it was the official residence of the "Corrector" of Tuscany and Umbria. During the Middle Ages, it became, for all practical purposes, the intellectual and artistic capital of Tuscany, inheriting in full the remarkable mental and esthetic excellences of the Etruscan race. The valley of the Arno is rich and fertile, bordered by cultivable hills, which produce the famous Chianti wine. It was thus predestined by nature as the seat of the second city on the west slope of Italy. Florence, however, was not always that city. The seaport of Pisa (now silted up and superseded by Leghorn) first rose into importance; possest a powerful fleet; made foreign conquests; and erected the magnificent group of buildings just outside the town which still form its chief claim upon the attention of tourists. But Florence with its bridge commanded the inland trade, and the road to Rome from Germany. After the destruction of Fiesole in 1125, it grew rapidly in importance; and, Pisa having sustained severe defeats from Genoa, the inland town soon rose to supremacy in the Arno basin. Nominally subject to the Emperor, it became practically an independent republic, much agitated by internal quarrels, but capable of holding its own against neighboring cities. Its chief buildings are thus an age or two later than those of Pisa; it did not begin to produce splendid churches and palaces, in emulation of those of Pisa and Siena, till about the close of the 13th century. To the same period belongs the rise of its literature under Dante, and its painting under Giotto. This epoch of rapid commercial, military, and artistic development forms the main glory of early Florence. The 14th century is chiefly interesting at Florence as the period of Giottesque art, finding its final crown in Fra Angelico. With the beginning of the 15th, we get the dawn of the Renaissance--the age when art set out once more to recover the lost perfection of antique workmanship. In literature, this movement took the form of humanism; in architecture and sculpture, it exhibited itself in the persons of Alberti, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, and Donatello; in painting, it showed itself in Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Verrocchio.... We start, then, with the fact that up to nearly the close of the 13th century (1278), Florence was a comparatively small and uninteresting town, without any buildings of importance, save the relatively insignificant Baptistery; without any great cathedral, like Pisa and Siena; without any splendid artistic achievement of any kind. It consisted at that period of a labyrinth of narrow streets, enclosing huddled houses and tall towers of the nobles, like the two to be seen to this day at Bologna. In general aspect, it could not greatly have differed from Albenga or San Gimignano in our own time. But commerce was active; wealth was increasing; and the population was seething with the intellectual and artistic spirit of its Etruscan ancestry. During the lifetime of Dante, the town began to transform itself and to prepare for becoming the glorious Florence of the Renaissance artists. It then set about building two immense and beautiful churches--Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella--while, shortly after, it grew to be ashamed of its tiny San Giovanni (the existing Baptistery), and girded itself up to raise a superb cathedral, which should cast into the shade both the one long since finished at maritime Pisa and the one then still rising to completion on the height of Siena. Florence at that time extended no further than the area known as Old Florence, which means from the Ponte Vecchio to the Cathedral in one direction, and from the Ponte alla Carraja to the Grazie in the other. Outside the wall lay a belt of fields and gardens, in which one or two monasteries had already sprung up. But Italy at that moment was filled with religious enthusiasm by the advent of the Friars both great orders of whom, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had already established themselves in the rising commercial city of Florence. Both orders had acquired sites for monastic buildings in the space outside the walls and soon began to erect enormous churches. The Dominicans came first, with Santa Maria Novella, the commencement of which dates from 1278; the Franciscans were a little later in the field, with Santa Croce, the first stone not being placed till 1294. THE CATHEDRAL[30] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE Desirous of seeing the beginnings of this Renaissance we go from the Palazzo-Vecchio to the Duomo. Both form the double heart of Florence, such as it beat in the Middle Ages, the former for politics, and the latter for religion, and the two so well united that they formed but one. Nothing can be nobler than the public edict passed in 1294 for the construction of the national cathedral. "Whereas, it being of sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high origin to proceed in its affairs in such a manner that the wisdom no less than the magnanimity of its proceedings can be recognized in its outward works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our commune, prepare models or designs for the restoration of Santa Maria Reparata, with the most exalted and most prodigal magnificence, in order that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with that which our wisest citizens have declared and counselled in public session and in secret conclave, to wit, that no hand be laid upon the works of the commune without the intent of making them to correspond to the noble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united in one will." [FLORENCE: BRIDGE ACROSS THE ARNO Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: THE OLD PALACE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: THE LOGGIA DI LANZI Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: THE PITTI PALACE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FLORENCE: THE HOUSE OF DANTE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [FRONT OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [INTERIOR OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [VENICE: PIAZZA OF ST. MARK'S, DUCAL PALACE ON THE LEFT Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [VIEW OF VENICE FROM THE CAMPANILE Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] In this ample period breathes the grandiose pride and intense patriotism of the ancient republics. Athens under Pericles, and Rome under the first Scipio cherished no prouder sentiments. At each step, here as elsewhere, in texts and in monuments, is found, in Italy, the traces, the renewal and the spirit of classic antiquity. Let us, accordingly, look at the celebrated Duomo--but, the difficulty is to see it. It stands upon flat ground, and, in order that the eye might embrace its mass it would be necessary to level three hundred buildings. Herein appears the defect of the great medieval structure; even to-day, after so many openings, effected by modern demolishers, most of the cathedrals are visible only on paper. The spectator catches sight of a fragment, some section of a wall, or the façade; but the whole escapes him; man's work is no longer proportioned to his organs. It was not thus in antiquity; temples were small or of mediocre dimensions, and were almost always erected on an eminence; their general form and complete profile could be enjoyed from twenty different points of view. After the advent of Christianity, men's conceptions transcended their forces, and the ambition of the spirit no longer took into account the limitations of the body. The human machine lost its equilibrium. With forgetfulness of the moderate there was established a love of the odd. Without either reason or symmetry campaniles or bell-towers were planted, like isolated posts, in front or alongside of cathedrals; there is one of these alongside of the Duomo, and this change of human equipoise must have been potent, since even here, among so many Latin traditions and classic aptitudes, it declares itself. In other respects, save the ogive arcades, the monument is not Gothic, but Byzantine, or, rather, original; it is a creature of a new and mixed form like the new and mixed civilization of which it is the offspring. You feel power and invention in it with a touch of quaintness and fancy. Walls of enormous grandeur are developed or expanded without the few windows in them happening to impair their massiveness or diminish their strength. There are no flying buttresses; they are self-sustaining. Marble panels, alternately yellow and black, cover them with a glittering marquetry, and curves of arches let into their masses seem to be the bones of a robust skeleton beneath the skin. The Latin cross, which the edifice figures, contracts at the top, and the chancel and transepts bubble out into rotundities and projections, in petty domes behind the church in order to accompany the grand dome which ascends above the choir, and which, the work of Brunnelleschi, newer and yet more antique than that of St. Peter, lifts in the air to an astonishing height its elongated form, its octagonal sides and its pointed lantern. But how can the physiognomy of a church be conveyed by words? It has one nevertheless; all its portions appearing together are combined in one chord and in one effect. If you examine the plans and old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; of this assemblage of all forms, pointed, swelling, angular, oblong, circular and octagonal. Greek and Latin antiquity, the Byzantine and Saracenic Orient, the Germanic and Italian middle-age, the entire past, shattered, amalgamated and transformed, seems to have been melted over anew in the human furnace in order to flow out in fresh forms in the hands of the new genius of Giotto, Arnolfo, Brunnelleschi and Dante. Here the work is unfinished, and the success is not complete. The façade has not been constructed; all that we see of it is a great naked, scarified wall similar to a leper's plaster.[31] There is no light within. A line of small round bays and a few windows fill the immensity of the edifice with a gray illumination; it is bare, and the argillaceous tone in which it is painted depresses the eye with its wan monotony. A "Pieta" by Michael Angelo and a few statues seem like spectres; the bas-reliefs are only vague confusion. The architect, hesitating between medieval and antique taste, fell only upon a lifeless light, that between a pure light and a colored light. The more we contemplate architectural works the more do we find them adapted to express the prevailing spirit of an epoch. Here, on the flank of the Duomo, stands the Campanile by Giotto, erect, isolated, like St. Michael's tower at Bordeaux, or the tower of St. Jacques at Paris; the medieval man, in fact, loves to build high; he aspires to heaven, his elevations all tapering off into pointed pinnacles; if this one had been finished a spire of thirty feet would have surmounted the tower, itself two hundred and fifty feet high. Hitherto the northern architect and the Italian architect are governed by the same instinct, and gratify the same penchant; but while the northern artist, frankly Gothic, embroiders his tower with delicate moldings, and complex flower-work, and a stone lacework infinitely multiplied and intersected, the southern artist, half-Latin through his tendencies and his reminiscences, erects a square, strong and full pile, in which a skilful ornamentation does not efface the general structure, which is not frail sculptured bijou, but a solid durable monument, its coating of red, black and white marble covering it with royal luxuriance, and which, through its healthy and animated statues, its bas-reliefs framed in medallions, recalls the friezes and pediments of an antique temple. In these medallions Giotto has symbolized the principal epochs of human civilization; the traditions of Greece near those of Judea; Adam, Tubal-Cain, and Noah, Daedalus, Hercules, and Antaeus, the invention of plowing, the mastery of the horse, and the discovery of the arts and the sciences; laic and philosophic sentiment live freely in him side by side with a theological and religious sentiment. Do we not already see in this renaissance of the fourteenth century that of the sixteenth? In order to pass from one to another, it will suffice for the spirit of the first to become ascendant over the spirit of the second; at the end of a century we are to see in the adornment of the edifice, in these statues of Donatello, in their baldness so expressive, in the sentiment of the real and natural life displayed among the goldsmiths and sculptors, evidence of the transformation begun under Giotto having been already accomplished. Every step we take we encounter some sign of this persistency or precocity of a Latin and classic spirit. Facing the Duomo is the baptistery, which at first served as a church, a sort of octagonal temple surmounted by a cupola, built, doubtless, after the model of the Pantheon of Rome, and which, according to the testimony of a contemporary bishop, already in the eighth century projected upward the pompous rotundities of its imperial forms. Here, then, in the most barbarous epoch of the Middle Ages, is a prolongation, a renewal, or, at least, an imitation of Roman architecture. You enter, and find that the decoration is not all Gothic; a circle of Corinthian columns of precious marbles with, above these, a circle of smaller columns surmounted by loftier arcades, and, on the vault, a legion of saints, and angels peopling the entire space, gathering in four rows around a grand, dull, meager, melancholy Byzantine Christ. On these three superposed stories the three gradual distortions of antique art appear; but, distorted or intact, it is always antique art. A significant feature, this, throughout the history of Italy; she did not become Germanic. In the tenth century the degraded Roman still subsisted distinct and intact side by side with the proud barbarian.... Sculpture, which, once before under Nicholas of Pisa, had anticipated painting, again anticipated it in the fifteenth century; these very doors of the baptistery enable one to see with what sudden perfection and brilliancy. Three men then appeared, Brunelleschi, the architect of the Duomo, Donatello, who decorated the Campanile with statues, and Ghiberti, who cast the two gates of the baptistery, all three friends and rivals, all three having commenced with the goldsmith's art and a study of the living model, and all three passionately devoted to the antique; Brunelleschi drawing and measuring Roman monuments, Donatello at Rome copying statues and bas-reliefs and Ghiberti importing from Greece torsos, vases and heads which he restored, imitated and worshiped. AN ASCENT OF THE GREAT DOME[32] BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD The traveler who, turning his back to the gates of Ghiberti, passes, for the first time, under the glittering new mosaics and through the main doors of Santa Maria Del Fiore experiences a sensation. He leaves behind him the façade, dazzling in its patterns of black and white marble, all laced with sculpture, he enters to dim, bare vastness--surely, never was bleaker lining to a splendid exterior. Across a floor that seems unending, he makes long journeys, from monument to monument; to gigantic condottieri, riding ghost-like in the semi-darkness against the upper walls; to Luca's saints and angels in the sacristies; to Donatellos's Saint John, grand and tranquil in his niche, and to Michelangelo's group, grand and troubled in its rough-hewn marble. At length, in the north transept, he comes to a small door, and entering there, he may, if legs and wind hold out, climb five hundred and fifteen steps to the top of the mightiest dome in the world, the widest in span, and the highest from spring to summit. For the first one hundred and fifty steps or so, there are square turnings, and the stone looks sharp, and new, and solid; a space vaulted by a domical roof follows, and is apparently above one of the apsidal domes to the church; then a narrow spiral staircase leads to where a second door opens upon a very narrow, balustraded walk that runs around the inner side of the dome. He is at an altitude of sixty-seven meters, exactly at the spring of the cupola and the beginning of the Vasari frescoes; the feet are at an elevation of one meter less than is that of the lower tops of Notre Dame de Paris, and yet the dome follows away overhead, huge enough, high enough to contain a second church piled, Pelion-like upon the first. Before, in the dimness, is the vastest roof-covered void in the world; it is terrific, and if the visitor is susceptible, his knees shake, and his diaphragm seems to sink to meet them. The impression is tremendous; no wonder that the Tuscans felt Brunelleschi to be the central figure of the Renaissance. Again and again, whether in the gallery or between the walls of the dome, the thought comes; men built this, and one man dared it and planned it. Not even the Pyramids impress more strongly; for if Brunelleschi built a lesser pyramid, he hollowed his and hung it in the air. On the other side of the space, a small black spot becomes a door when the traveler has giddily circled half the dome; it opens upon another staircase, up which he climbs between the two skins of the cupola, or rather between two of the three, like a parasite upon a monster. Sometimes the place suggests a ship, with the oculi as gunports, piercing to the outer day, or else, his mind fresh from that red inferno of Vasari's frescoes, the traveler is tunneling up through a volcanic crater with a whole Typhonic Enceladus buried below. To right and left, the smooth, cemented surface curves away and upward, brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet, then gradually falls away into the surrounding blackness. The famous "oaken chain" of Vasari's life of Brunelleschi is there, bolted together in successive beams. Last of all, a long, straight staircase, straight because without turn to right or left, curves upward like an unradiant, bowed Valhalla-bridge to a great burst of daylight, and the climber is upon the top of the dome. He is as completely cut off from the immediately surrounding earth as upon a cloud girdled mountain, for the dome swells so vastly below that the piazza can not be seen about transept or choir, and not one of the apsidal domes shows a tile of its covering, while the nave, that huge and tremendous nave of Santa Maria, looks but a narrow, and a distant roof. At one's back, the marble of the lantern is handsome and creamy in color, but battered and broken; its interior is curious--a narrow funnel of marble, little wider than a man's body, set with irons on either side, is the only ladder, so that the climb up is a close squeeze. There is a familiar something gone from the surroundings, and that something is soon remembered to be Dante's baptistery, which does not exist from Brunelleschi's dome, being blotted out by the façade of Santa Maria. One hundred feet below, showing its upper and richer portion gloriously from this novel point of view, is what from the piazza is the soaring bell tower, the Campanile of Giotto. ARNOLFO, GIOTTO, BRUNELLESCHI[33] BY MRS. OLIPHANT Arnolfo, sometimes called di Cambio and sometimes di Lapi, was the first of the group of Cathedral builders in Florence. Who Arnolfo was seems to be scarcely known, tho few architects after him have left greater works or more evidence of power. His first authentic appearance in history is among the band of workmen engaged upon the pulpit in the Duomo at Siena, as pupil or journeyman of Niccolo Pisano, the great reviver of the art of sculpture--when he becomes visible in company with a certain Lapo, who is sometimes called his father (as by Vasari) and sometimes his instructor, but who appears actually to have been nothing more than his fellow-workman and associate.... The Cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico, the two great churches of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, all leaped into being within a few years, almost simultaneously. The Duomo was founded, as some say, in 1294, the same year in which Santa Croce was begun, or, according to others, in 1298; and between these two dates, in 1296, the Palace of the Signoria, the seat of the Commonwealth, the center of all public life, had its commencement. All these great buildings, Arnolfo designed and began, and his genius requires no other evidence. The stern strength of the Palazzo, upright and strong like a knight in mail, and the large and noble lines of the Cathedral, ample and liberal and majestic in ornate robes and wealthy ornaments, show how well he knew to vary and adapt his art to the different requirements of municipal and religious life and to the necessities of the age. We are not informed who they were who carried out the design of the Duomo. Arnolfo only lived to see a portion of this, his greatest work, completed--"the three principal tribunes which were under the cupola," and which Vasari tells us were so solid and strongly built as to be able to bear the full weight of Brunelleschi's dome, which was much larger and heavier than the one the original architect had himself designed. Arnolfo died when he had built his Palazzo in rugged strength, as it still stands, with walls like living rock and heavy Tuscan cornices--tho it was reserved to the other masters to put upon it the wonderful crown of its appropriate tower--and just as the round apse of the cathedral approached completion; a hard fate for a great builder to leave such noble work behind him half done, yet the most common of all fates. He died, so far as there is any certainty in dates, in 1300, during the brief period of Dante's power in Florence, when the poet was one of the priors and much engaged in public business; and the same eventful year concluded the existence of Cimabue, the first of the great school of Florentine painters--he whose picture was carried home to the church in which it was to dwell for all the intervening centuries with such pride and acclamation that the Borgo Allegri is said to have taken its name from this wonderful rejoicing.... No more notable or distinct figure than Giotto is in all the history of Florence. He was born a peasant, in the village of Vespignano in the Mugello, the same district which afterward gave birth to Fra Angelico. Giotto had at least part of his professional training in the great cathedral at Assisi built over the bones of St. Francis, was one of those homely, vigorous souls, "a natural person," like his father, whom neither the lapse of centuries nor the neighborhood of much greater and more striking persons about them, can deprive of their naive and genuine individuality. Burly, homely, characteristic, he carries our attentions always with him, alike on the silent road, or in the king's palace, or his own simple shop. Wherever he is, he is always the same, shrewd, humorous, plain-spoken, seeing through all pretenses, yet never ill-natured in doing so--a character not very lofty or elevated, and to which the racy ugliness of a strong, uncultivated race seems natural--but who under that homely nature carried appreciations and conceptions of beauty such as few fine minds possess. Of all the beautiful things with which Giotto adorned his city, not one speaks so powerfully to the foreign visitor--the forestiere whom he and his fellows never took into account, tho who occupy so large a space among the admirers of his genius nowadays--as the lovely Campanile which stands by the great cathedral like the white royal lily beside the Mary of the Annunciation, slender and strong and everlasting in its delicate grace. It is not often that a man takes up a new trade when he is approaching sixty, or even goes into a new path out of his familiar routine. But Giotto seems to have turned without a moment's hesitation from his paints and panels to the less easily-wrought materials of the builder and sculptor, without either faltering from the great enterprise or doubting his own power to do it. His frescoes and altarpieces and crucifixes, the work he had been so long accustomed to, and which he could execute pleasantly in his own workshop or on the cool new walls of church or convent, with his trained school of younger artists round to aid him, were as different as possible from the elaborate calculations and measurements by which alone the lofty tower, straight, and lightsome as a lily, could have sprung so high and stood so lightly against that Italian sky. Like the poet or the romancist when he turns from the flowery ways of fiction and invention, where he is unencumbered by any restrictions save those of artistic keeping and personal will, to the grave and beaten path of history--the painter must have felt when he too turned from the freedom and poetry of art to this first scientific undertaking. The Cathedral was so far finished by this time, its front not scarred and bare as afterward, but adorned with statues according to old Arnolfo's plan, who was dead more than thirty years before; but there was no belfry, no companion peal of peace and sweetness to balance the hoarse old vacca with its voice of iron. Giotto seems to have thrown himself into work not only without reluctance but with enthusiasm. The foundation-stone of the building was laid in July of that year, with all the greatness of Florence looking on; and the painter entered upon his work at once, working out the most poetic effort of his life in marble and stone, among the masons' chippings and the dust and blaze of the public street. At the same time he designed, tho it does not seem sure whether he lived long enough to execute, a new façade for the Cathedral, replacing Arnolfo's old statues by something better. Of the Campanile itself it is difficult to speak in ordinary words. The enrichments of the surface, which is covered by beautiful groups set in a graceful framework of marble, with scarcely a flat or unadorned spot from top to bottom, have been ever since the admiration of artists and of the world. But we confess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before which the mind stops short, silenced and filled with the completeness of beauty unbroken, which Art so seldom gives, tho Nature often attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a flower or a stretch of summer sky. Just as we have looked at a sunset we look at Giotto's tower, poised far above in the blue air, in all the wonderful dawns and moonlights of Italy, swift darkness shadowing its white glory at the tinkle of the Ave Maria, and a golden glow of sunbeams accompanying the mid-day angelus. Between the solemn antiquity of the old baptistery and the historical gloom of the great cathedral, it stands like the lily--if not, rather, like the great angel himself hailing her who was blest among women, and keeping up that lovely salutation, musical and sweet as its own beauty, for century after century, day after day. Giotto made not only the design, but even, Vasari assures us, worked at the groups and "bassi-relievi" of these "stories in marble, in which are depicted the beginning of all the arts." ... Filippo of Ser Brunellescho of the Lapi, which is, according to Florentine use, his somewhat cumbrous name, or Brunelleschi for short, as custom permitted him to be called, was the son of a notary, who as notaries do, hoped and expected his boy to follow in his steps and succeed to his practise. But, like other sons doomed their fathers' soul to cross, Filippo took to those "figuretti" in bronze which were so captivating to the taste of the time, and preferred rather to be a goldsmith, to hang upon the skirts of art, than to work in the paternal office. He was, as Vasari insinuates, small, puny, and ugly, but full of dauntless and daring energy as well as genius. From his gold and silver work, the "carvings" which old Bartoluccio had been so glad to escape, and from his "figuretti," the ambitious lad took to architectural drawing, of which, according to Vasari, he was one of the first amateurs, making "portraits" of the Cathedral and baptistery, of the Palazzo Pubblico, and the other chief buildings of the city. He was so eloquent a talker that a worthy citizen declared of him that he seemed "a new St. Paul;" and in his thoughts he was continually busy planning or imagining something skilful and difficult. The idea of completing the Cathedral by adding to it a cupola worthy of its magnificent size and proportions seems to have been in the young man's head before the Signoria or the city took any action in the matter. Arnolfo's designs are said to have been lost, and all the young Filippo could do was to study the picture in the Spanish chapel of Santa Maria Novella, where the cathedral was depicted according to Arnolfo's intention; and this proof to the usefulness of architectural backgrounds, no doubt, moved him to those pictures of building which he was fond of making. After his failure in the competition with Ghiberti for the baptistery gates, Filippo went to Rome, accompanied by Donato. Here the two friends lived and studied together for some time, one giving himself to sculpture, the other to architecture. Brunelleschi, according to Vasari, made this a period of very severe study. He examined all the remains of ancient buildings with the keenest care; studying the foundations and the strength of the walls, and the way in which such a prodigious load as the great dome, which already he saw in his mind's eye, could best be supported. So profound were his researches that he was called the treasure-hunter by those who saw him coming and going through the streets of Rome, a title so far justified that he is said in one instance to have actually found an ancient earthenware jar full of old coins. While engaged in these studies, his money failing him, he worked for a jeweller according to the robust practise of the time, and after making ornaments and setting gems all day, set to work on his buildings, round and square, octagons, basilicas, arches, colosseums, and amphitheaters, perfecting himself in the principles of his art. In 1407 he returned to Florence, and then there began a series of negotiations between the artist and the city, to which there seemed at first as if no end could come. They met, and met again, assemblies of architects, of city authorities, of competitors less hopeful and less eager than himself. His whole heart, it is evident, was set upon the business. Hearing Donatello at one of these assemblies mention the cathedral at Orvieto, which he had visited on his way from Rome, Filippo, having his mantle and his hood on, without saying a word to anyone, set straight off from the Piazza on foot, and got as far as Cortona, from whence he returned with various pen-and-ink drawings before Donato or any one else had found out that he was away. Thus the small, keen, determined, ugly artist, swift and sudden as lightning, struck through all the hesitations, the consultations, the maunderings, the doubts, and the delays of the two authorities who had the matter in hand, the Signoria and the Operai, as who should say the working committee, and who made a hundred difficulties and shook their wise heads, and considered one foolish and futile plan after another with true burgher hesitation and wariness. At last, in 1420, an assembly of competitors was held in Florence, and a great many plans put forth, one of which was to support the proposed vault by a great central pillar, while another advised that the space to be covered should be filled with soil mixed with money, upon which the dome might be built, and which the people would gladly remove without expense afterward for the sake of the farthings! An expedient most droll in its simplicity. Brunelleschi, impatient of so much folly, went off to Rome, it is said, in the middle of these discussions, disgusted by the absurd ignorance which was thus put in competition with his careful study and long labor. Finally the appointment was conceded to him. The greatest difficulty with which he had to contend was a strike of his workmen, of whom, however, there being no trades' unions in those days, the imperious master made short work. And thus, day by day, the great dome swelled out over the shining marble walls and rose against the beautiful Italian sky. Nothing like it had been seen before by living eyes. The solemn grandeur of the Pantheon at Rome was indeed known to many, and San Giovanni[34] was in some sort an imitation of that; but the immense structure of the cupola, so justly poised, springing with such majestic grace from the familiar walls to which it gave new dignity, flattered the pride of the Florentines as something unique, besides delighting the eyes and imagination of so beauty-loving a race. With that veiled and subtle pride which takes the shape of pious fear, some even pretended to tremble, lest it should be supposed to be too near an emulation of the blue vault above, and that Florence was competing with heaven; others, with the delightful magniloquence of the time, declared that the hills around the city were scarcely higher than the beautiful Duomo; and Vasari himself has a doubt that the heavens were envious, so persistent were the storms amid which the cupola arose. Yet there it stands to this day, firm and splendid, uninjured by celestial envy, more harmonious than St. Peter's, the crown of the beautiful city. Its measurements and size and the secrets of its formation we do not pretend to set forth; the reader will find them in every guide-book. But the keen, impetuous, rapid figure of the architect, impatient, and justly impatient, of all rivalry, the murmurs and comments of the workmen; the troubled minds of the city authorities, not knowing how to hold their ground between that gnome of majestic genius who had fathomed all the secrets of construction and built a hundred Duomos in his mind, while they were pottering over the preliminaries of one; have all the interest of life for us. Through the calm fields of art he goes like a whirlwind, keen, certain, unfailing in his aim, unsparing in means, carried forward by such an impulse of will and self-confidence that nothing can withstand him. Sure of his own powers, as he was when he carved in secret the crucifix which was to cover poor Donatello with confusion, he saw before him, over his carvings, as he worked for the Roman goldsmith, the floating vision of the great dome he was to build--and so built it, all opposition notwithstanding, clearing out of his way with the almost contemptuous impatience of that knowledge which has no doubt of itself, the competing architects. GHIBERTI'S GATES[35] BY CHARLES YRIARTE The Baptistery is the most ancient building in Florence. If not of pagan origin it dates from the earliest ages of Christianity. It was coated with marble of different colors by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1293, while in the sixteenth century Agnolo Gaddi designed the lantern; but long before Arnolfo's time it had been employed as a Christian place of worship, being used as a cathedral up to 1128, when it was converted into a baptistery. This building contains three gates, which have no parallel in the world. The oldest is that on the southern side, upon which Pisano spent twenty-two years of his life, a most beautiful work representing, in twenty compartments, the life of St. John the Baptist. The frieze which runs round it was commenced nearly a century afterward by Ghiberti, and Pollaiuolo had much to do with its completion. The northern gates are by Ghiberti, and, like those of Pisano, are divided into twenty compartments, the subject being the life of Christ. The bronze door-posts are delicately carved with flowers, fruit, and animals. These gates were first placed on the eastern side, but in 1452 were removed to make room for Ghiberti's still finer work. On the third façade, that which faces the Duomo, is the Porta del Paradiso, so named by Michael Angelo, who declared that this gate was worthy to be the entrance into Paradise. Ghiberti divided each panel into five parts, taking the following as his subjects, after suggestions made by Leonardo Bruni Aretino: (1) Creation of Adam and Eve; (2) Cain and Abel; (3) Noah; (4) Abraham and Isaac; (5) Jacob and Esau; (6) Joseph in Egypt; (7) Moses on Mount Sinai; (8) The Capture of Jericho; (9) David Slaying Goliath; (10) The Queen of Sheba and Soloman. The frieze contains statuettes of the prophets and prophetesses and portrait-busts of men and women still alive, including Ghiberti himself, and his father; while the frame-posts, with their masses of vegetation and flora wrought in bronze, are admirable for their truth to nature. Bronze groups representing the "Decapitation of St. John the Baptist," by Danti, and the "Baptism of our Lord," by Andrea Sansovino, surmount two of the gates, which were at one time heavily gilded, tho few traces of this are now visible. The Baptistery, empty as it appears to the eye upon first entering it, is replete with beautiful monuments, a description of which would fill a good-sized volume. It is built, as I have already said, upon an octagonal plan. The altar, which formerly stood beneath the cupola, has been removed. On the 24th of June every year the magnificent retablo in massive silver, which is preserved among the treasures in the Opera del Duomo, is displayed in the Baptistery. The silver alone weighs 325 pounds, including two center-pieces, two side-pieces, and a silver crucifix with two statuettes seven feet high, and weighing 141 pounds, the group being completed by two statues of Peace in engine-turned silver. Many artists were employed upon the making of it. Finiguerra, Pollaiuolo, Cione, Michelozzi, Verrocchio, and Cennini made the lower parts and the bas-reliefs of the front, while the cross, executed in 1456, is by Betto di Francesco, and the base of it by Milano di Domenico dei and Antonio Pollaiuolo. The interior of the cupola of San Giovanni is ornamented with some of the oldest specimens of mosaic decoration in Florence, these Byzantine artists being the first, after Murano and Altino, to exercise their craft in Italy, and being succeeded by Jacopo da Turita, Andrea Tafi, and Gaddo Gaddi. The handsome tomb of Baldassare Cossa (Pope John XXIII., deposed at the time of the Council of Constance), was reared in the Baptistery by Donatello. The Holy of Holies is relatively modern, having been erected at the expense of the Guild of the "Calimala," as the men who gave the finishing touch to the woolen stuffs manufactured abroad were called. The baptismal font, in a building specially used for christening, would, as a matter of course, be intrusted to artists of great repute, and that at San Giovanni is attributed to Andrea Pisano. Upon each face is represented one of the baptisms most famous in the history of the Catholic religion, an inscription beneath explaining each episode; but this font is, unfortunately, so much in the background that it escapes the notice of many visitors. Donatello carved the wooden statue of the Magdalen which occupies one of the niches, the thin emaciated face being typical of the artist's partiality for reproducing in their smallest details the physical defects of his subject. The exterior aspect of the Baptistery does not give one the idea of a building restored in the thirteenth, but rather in the fifteenth century. THE PONTE VECCHIO[36] BY CHARLES YRIARTE Until the close of 1080 the Ponte Vecchio was built of wood, the heavy masses of timber, tho offering no steady resistance to the stream, dividing the muddy course of the waters into a thousand small currents, and breaking its force. But in 1177 occurred one of those inundations which were so frequent that traces of them may still be seen on the walls of the quays. These inundations were one of the curses of Florence, and tho the evil has been, to a certain extent, cured by the construction of massive quays, they still occur in the direction of the Cascine. An attempt was accordingly made in the twelfth century to obviate this inconvenience by the construction of a stone bridge. This, in turn, was carried away in 1333, and Taddeo Gaddi, who had already made a name for himself by his architectural skill, was employed to build a bridge capable of resisting the highest floods. The present bridge was therefore erected in 1345, being 330 feet long by 44 wide. With the double object of obtaining an income for the city and of introducing a novel feature, shops were built on the two pathways, which were 16 feet wide, and these were let to the butchers of Florence, thus realizing the Eastern plan of concentrating the meat trade of a town in one place. This arrangement lasted from 1422 until 1593, but in the latter year, under Cosimo I., the "Capitani di Parte," who had the supervision of the streets and highways, ordered that all the goldsmiths and jewelers should take the place of the butchers, and in a few months, the Ponte Vecchio became the wealthiest and most crowded thoroughfare of Florence. In order to avoid shutting out a view of the stream and interfering with the perspective, an open space had been reserved in the center, and when the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi were connected with the Pitti Palace by means of the large covered way carried over the bridge, this space was left intact so as to afford a view of the eminence of San Miniato upon one side, of the windings of the stream on the other, and of the Cascine shrubberies and the mountains upon the horizon. SANTA CROCE[37] BY CHARLES YRIARTE Built by Arnolfo, then fifty-four years of age, by order of the Friars of St. Francis, this venerable temple was raised upon the piazza called Santa Croce, where formerly stood a small church belonging to the order of the Franciscan monks. They had resolved to embellish and enlarge their church, and Cardinal Matteo D'Acquasparta, general of the Franciscan Order, proclaimed an indulgence to all contributors toward the undertaking. The church was far enough advanced in 1320 for services to be held in it, tho the façade was then, as until a very recent period it remained, a plain brick wall, without facing or any other ornament. Santa Croce was not singular in this respect, for San Lorenzo and many other Florentine churches have never been decorated externally. In 1442 Cardinal Bessarion, the founder of St. Mark's Library at Venice, was delegated to perform the ceremony of consecration. Donatello and Ghiberti, incomplete as was the façade, executed some statues and a stained-glass window for it, but it is only within the last few years that the city of Florence completed the work, leaving untouched the grand piazza which had been the scene of so many fêtes and intestine quarrels, and upon which is now erected a statue to Dante. The façade of Santa Croce was completed in 1863. The expense was principally borne by Mr. Francis Sloane, an Englishman. The interior is striking from its vast size, the church being built in the shape of a Latin cross with nave, aisles, and transepts, each of the seven pointed arches being supported on the octagonal column. Opposite the front entrance is the high altar, while all around the walls and between the side altars--erected in 1557 by Vasari by order of Cosimo I.--are the monuments of the illustrious dead. First of all on the left there is Domenico Sestini, a celebrated numismatist, whose bust was carved by Pozzetti. While in the first chapel on the right is the tomb of Michael Angelo, who died at Rome on the 17th of February, 1564; the monument was designed by Vasari, the bust was executed by Battista Lorenzo. Two contemporary sculptors, Valerio Cioli and Giovanni Dell'Opera, did the allegories of Sculpture and Architecture, the frescoes around the monument being by Battista Naldini. A nobler tomb might well have been raised to the memory of Michael Angelo. The body was deposited in the church on the 12th of March, 1564, and lay in state, for the people of Florence to come and pay him the last tribute of respect. The next tomb is only commemorative, for it does not contain the ashes of Dante, in whose honor it was erected in 1829 by Ricci, as a tardy homage on the part of Florence to one who suffered so much for her sake in life.[38] After Dante comes Victor Alfieri, whose name has been borne with distinction by his descendants. This monument was erected by Canova in 1807. Compared with the monuments of the fifteenth century and of the Renaissance, which are to be seen in such splendid profusion in Florence, these tombs seem so inferior that it is impossible not to wonder how the decadence was brought about. It is not at Florence alone that this feeling manifests itself; for at Venice, in the splendid temple of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, beside the tombs of doges and condottieri of the fifteenth century there stands that wretched monument upon which the great name of Titian has been traced. This is evidently the result of an inevitable law to which humanity is subject. Genius comes into the world, grows, spreads, and covers the earth with its shadow; then slowly the sap runs back from the verdant trunk, the tree yields less luscious fruit and flowers not so fair, until at last the branches wither and the tree dies. Close beside Alfieri is buried Machiavelli, his tomb, like so many of the others, being of modern erection, and consequently less beautiful than if it had been the work of a sculptor who had studied in the school of Ghiberti or Donatello. By the side of Machiavelli rests Luigi Lanzi, a name less generally known, tho celebrated in his time as an historiographer of painting, or an art critic as we should now call him. His friend, Chevalier Ornofrio Boni, prepared the design for his tomb, which was executed at public cost. The pulpit--a fine specimen of fifteenth-century sculpture, carved by Benedetto da Maiano at the cost of Pietro Mellini, who presented it to the church--is well worth close inspection; and close by, between the tombs of Lanzi and Leonardo Bruni, is a group in freestone, representing the Annunciation. This was one of the first of Donatello's works, and gave an earnest of his future genius. The tomb of Leonardo Bruni Aretino is one of the five or six greatest works of this nature which ever left the sculptor's hands; it has been used as a model by the sculptors of all the tombs in Santa Maria del Popolo at Rome. The monument to Leonardo Bruni is the highest expression of sculptural art, combining all the taste of ancient Greece with the grace, the power, the calm, the supreme harmony, and the perfection which genius alone confers, its tranquil and subdued beauty comparing favorably with the theatrical effect and garish splendor of the monuments in St. John Lateran and St. Peter's at Rome. The superb mausoleums of Leopardi and of the Lombardi at Venice are, perhaps, equally beautiful; but I am inclined to give the preference to the work of Bernardo Rossellini. He became acquainted with Leonardo Bruni at the Papal Court, where he, as well as Leo Battista Alberti, was a director of the pontifical works. The Madonna let into the upper part of the monument is by Andrea Verocchio.... In visiting Santa Croce it is impossible not to feel how erroneous are the views often held as to the exact place which will be allotted in the roll of history to the men of the day. Many of the names in this Pantheon are almost unknown, the tomb next to that of Galileo containing the dust of Mulazzi-Signorini, who has never been heard of out of Italy. Another unavoidable reflection is that the talent of the sculptor is rarely in proportion to that of the man whose memory he is about to perpetuate. Machiavelli was commemorated by two obscure sculptors like Foggini and Ticcati, and Michael Angelo by Battista Lorenzi. What has the world not lost by the refusal of Michael Angelo's offer to erect a tomb to Dante when the city of Florence was about to ask Ravenna to restore his remains to her! The convent annexed to Santa Croce was also built by Arnolfo. It was originally occupied by the Franciscan monks, and it was here that, from 1284 to 1782, the Inquisition held its sittings. The notorious Frenchman, Gaulthier de Brienne, Duke of Athens, who for a brief period ruled Florence as Captain of the People, selected this monastery as his residence in June, 1342, but having in September of the same year succeeded in getting himself elected ruler of Florence for life, he removed to the Palazzo Vecchio. His reign, however, was of only brief duration, for the year following he was expelled by the people. THE UFFIZI GALLERY[39] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE What can be said of a gallery containing thirteen hundred pictures? For my own part I abstain. Examine catalogs and collections of engravings, or rather come here yourself. The impressions borne away from these grand store-houses are too diverse and too numerous to be transmitted by the pen. Observe this, that the Uffizi is a universal depot, a sort of Louvre containing paintings of all times and schools, bronzes, statues, sculptures, antique and modern terracottas, cabinets of gems, an Etruscan museum, artists' portraits painted by themselves, twenty-eight thousand original drawings, four thousand cameos and ivories and eighty thousand medals. One resorts to it as to a library; it is an abridgment and a specimen of everything.... We ascend the great marble staircase, pass the famous antique boar and enter the long horseshoe corridor filled with busts and tapestried with paintings. Visitors, about ten o'clock in the morning, are few; the mute custodians remain in their corners; you seem to be really at home. It all belongs to you, and what convenient possessions! Keepers and majordomos are here to keep things in order, well dusted and intact; it is not even necessary to give orders; matters go on of themselves without jar or confusion, nobody giving himself the slightest concern; it is an ideal world such as it ought to be. The light is excellent; bright gleams from the windows fall on some distant white statues on the rosy torso of a woman which comes out living from the shadowy obscurity. Beyond, as far as the eye can see, marble gods and emperors extend away in files up to the windows through which flickers the light ripple of the Arno with the silvery swell on its crests and eddies. You enter into the freedom and sweet repose of abstract life; the will relaxes, the inner tumult subsides; one feels himself becoming a monk, a modern monk. Here, as formerly in the cloisters, the tender inward spirit, chafed by the necessities of action, insensibly revives in order to commune with beings emancipated from life's obligations. It is so sweet no longer to be! Not to be is so natural! And how peaceful the realm of human forms withdrawn from human conflict! The pure thought which follows them is so conscious that its illusion is transient; it participates in their incorporeal serenity, and reverie, lingering in turn over their voluptuousness and violence, brings back to it plenitude without satiety. On the left of the corridors open the cabinets of precious things--the Niobe hall, that of portraits, that of modern bronzes, each with its special group of treasures. You feel that you have a right to enter, that great men are awaiting you. A selection is made among them; you reenter the Tribune; five antique statues form a circle here--a slave sharpening his knife; two interlocked wrestlers whose muscles are strained and expanded; a charming Apollo of sixteen years whose compact form has all the suppleness of the freshest adolescence; an admirable Faun instinct with the animality of his species, unconsciously joyous and dancing with all his might; and finally, the "Venus de Medici," a slender young girl with a small delicate head, not a goddess like her sister of Milo, but a perfect mortal and the work of some Praxiteles fond of "hetairae," at ease in a nude state and free from that somewhat mawkish delicacy and bashful coquetry which its copies, and the restored arms with their thin fingers by Bernini, seem to impose on her. She is, perhaps, a copy of that Venus of Cnidus of which Lucian relates an interesting story; you imagine while looking at her, the youths' kisses prest on the marble lips, and the exclamations of Charicles who, on seeing it, declared Mars to be the most fortunate of gods. Around the statues, on the eight sides of the wall, hang the masterpieces of the leading painters. There is the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" by Raphael, pure and candid, like an angel whose soul is a bud not yet in bloom; his "St. John," nude, a fine youthful form of fourteen, healthy and vigorous, in which the purest paganism lives over again; and especially a superb head of a crowned female, radiant as a summer noonday, with fixt and earnest gaze, her complexion of that powerful southern carnation which the emotions do not change, where the blood does not pulsate convulsively and to which passion only adds a warmer glow, a sort of Roman muse in whom will still prevails over intellect, and whose vivacious energy reveals itself in repose as well as in action. In one corner a tall cavalier by Van Dyck, in black and with a broad frill, seems as grandly and gloriously proud in character as in proportions, primarily through a well-fed body and next through the undisputed possession of authority and command. Three steps more and we come to the "Flight into Egypt," by Correggio, the Virgin with a charming spirited face wholly suffused with inward light in which the purity, archness, gentleness and wildness of a young girl combine to shed the tenderest grace and impart the most fascinating allurements. Alongside of this a "Sibyl" by Guercino, with her carefully adjusted coiffure and drapery, is the most spiritual and refined of sentimental poetesses. I pass twenty others in order to reserve the last look for Titian's two Venuses. One, facing the door, reclines on a red velvet mantle, an ample vigorous torso as powerful as one of Rubens' Bacchantes, but firmer--an energetic and vulgar figure, a simple, strong unintellectual courtezan. She lies extended on her back, caressing a little cupid naked like herself, with the vacant seriousness and passivity of soul of an animal in repose and expectant. The other, called "Venus with the Dog," is a patrician's mistress, couched, adorned and ready. We recognize a palace of the day, the alcove fitted up and colors tastefully and magnificently contrasted for the pleasure of the eye; in the background are servants arranging clothes; through a window a section of blue landscape is visible; the master is about to arrive. Nowadays we devour pleasure secretly like stolen fruit; then it was served up on golden salvers and people sat down to it at a table. It is because pleasure was not vile or bestial. This woman holding a bouquet in her hand in this grand columnar saloon has not the vapid smile or the wanton and malicious air of an adventuress about to commit a bad action. The calm of evening enters the palace through noble architectural openings. Under the pale green of the curtains lies the figure on a white sheet, slightly flushed with the regular pulsation of life, and developing the harmony of her undulating forms. The head is small and placid; the soul does not rise above the corporal instincts; hence she can resign herself to them without shame, while the poesy of art, luxury and security on all sides comes to decorate and embellish them. She is a courtezan but also a lady; in those days the former did not efface the latter; one was as much a title as the other and, probably, in demeanor, affection and intellect one was as good as the other. The celebrated Imperia had her tomb in the church of San Gregorio, at Rome, with this inscription: "Imperia, a Roman courtezan worthy of so great a name, furnished an example to men of perfect beauty, lived twenty-six years and twelve days, and died in 1511, August 25." ... On passing from the Italian into the Flemish galleries one is completely turned around; here are paintings executed for merchants content to remain quietly at home eating good dinners and speculating over the profits of their business; moreover in rainy and muddy countries dress has to be cared for, and by the women more than the men. The mind feels itself contracted on entering the circle of this well-to-do domestic life; such is the impression of Corinne when from liberal Italy she passes to rigid and dreary Scotland. And yet there is a certain picture, a large landscape by Rembrandt, which equals and surpasses all; a dark sky bursting with showers among flocks of screaming crows; beneath, is an infinite stretch of country as desolate as a cemetery; on the right a mass of barren rocks of so mournful and lugubrious a tint as to attain to the sublime in effect. So is it with an andante of Beethoven after an Italian Opera. FLORENCE EIGHTY YEARS AGO[40] BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT There is a great deal of prattle about Italian skies; the skies and clouds of Italy, so far as I have had an opportunity of judging, do not present so great a variety of beautiful appearances as our own; but the Italian atmosphere is far more uniformly fine than ours. Not to speak of its astonishing clearness, it is pervaded by a certain warmth of color which enriches every object. This is more remarkable about the time of sunset, when the mountains put on an aerial aspect, as if they belonged to another and fairer world; and a little after the sun has gone down, the air is flushed with a glory which seems to transfigure all that it encloses. Many of the fine old palaces of Florence, you know, are built in a gloomy tho grand style of architecture, of a dark-colored stone, massive and lofty, and overlooking narrow streets that lie in almost perpetual shade. But at the hour of which I am speaking, the bright warm radiance reflected from the sky to the earth, fills the darkest lanes, streams into the most shadowy nooks, and makes the prison-like structures glitter as with a brightness of their own. It is now nearly the middle of October, and we have had no frost. The strong summer heats which prevailed when I came hither, have by the slowest gradations subsided into an agreeable autumnal temperature. The trees keep their verdure, but I perceive their foliage growing thinner, and when I walk in the Cascine on the other side of the Arno, the rustling of the lizards, as they run among the heaps of crisp leaves, reminds me that autumn is wearing away, tho the ivy which clothes the old elms has put forth a profuse array of blossoms, and the walks murmur with bees like our orchards in spring. As I look along the declivities of the Appenines, I see the raw earth every day more visible between the ranks of olive-trees and the well-pruned maples which support the vines. If I have found my expectations of Italian scenery, in some respects, below the reality; in other respects, they have been disappointed. The forms of the mountains are wonderfully picturesque, and their effect is heightened by the rich atmosphere through which they are seen, and by the buildings, imposing from their architecture or venerable from time, which crown the eminences. But if the hand of man has done something to embellish this region, it has done more to deform it. Not a tree is suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural channel. An exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage of the soil. The country is without woods and green fields; and to him who views the vale of the Arno "from the top of Fiesole," or any of the neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it appears, at any time after mid-summer, a huge valley of dust, planted with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple on which vines are trained. The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees clustered about the villas, no rows of natural shrubbery following the course of the brooks and rivers. The streams, which are often but the beds of torrents dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil. The grander features of the landscape, however, are fortunately beyond the power of man to injure; the lofty mountain-summits, bare precipices cleft with chasms, and pinnacles of rock piercing the sky, betokening, far more than any thing I have seen elsewhere, a breaking up of the crust of the globe in some early period of its existence. I am told that in May and June the country is much more beautiful than at present, and that owing to a drought it now appears under disadvantage.... Florence, from being the residence of the Court,[41] and from the vast number of foreigners who throng to it, presents during several months of the year an appearance of great bustle and animation. Four thousand English, an American friend tells me, visit Florence every winter, to say nothing of the occasional residents from France, Germany, and Russia. The number of visitors from the latter country is every year increasing, and the echoes of the Florence gallery have been taught to repeat the strange accents of the Slavonic. Let me give you the history of a fine day in October, passed at the window of my lodgings on the Lung Arno, close to the bridge. Waked by the jangling of all the bells in Florence and by the noise of carriages departing loaded with travelers, for Rome and other places in the south of Italy, I rise, dress myself, and take my place at the window. I see crowds of men and women from the country, the former in brown velvet jackets, and the latter in broad-brimmed straw hats, driving donkeys loaded with panniers or trundling hand-carts before them, heaped with grapes, figs, and all the fruits of the orchard, the garden, and the field. They have hardly passed, when large flocks of sheep and goats make their appearance, attended by shepherds and their families, driven by the approach of winter from the Appenines, and seeking the pastures of the Maremma, a rich, but, in the summer, an unhealthy tract on the coast. The men and the boys are drest in knee-breeches, the women in bodices, and both sexes wear capotes with pointed hoods, and felt hats with conical crowns; they carry long staves in their hands, and their arms are loaded with kids and lambs too young to keep pace with their mothers. After the long procession of sheep and goats and dogs and men and women and children, come horses loaded with cloths and poles for tents, kitchen utensils, and the rest of the younglings of the flock. A little after sunrise I see well-fed donkeys, in coverings of red cloth, driven over the bridge to be milked for invalids. Maid-servants, bare-headed, with huge high carved combs in their hair, waiters of coffee-houses carrying the morning cup of coffee or chocolate to their customers, baker's boys with a dozen loaves on a board balanced on their heads, milkmen with rush baskets filled with flasks of milk, are crossing the streets in all directions. A little later the bell of the small chapel opposite to my window rings furiously for a quarter of an hour, and then I hear mass chanted in a deep strong nasal tone. As the day advances, the English, in white hats and white pantaloons, come out of their lodgings, accompanied sometimes by their hale and square-built spouses, and saunter stiffly along the Arno, or take their way to the public galleries and museums. Their massive, clean, and brightly-polished carriages also begin to rattle through the streets, setting out on excursions to some part of the environs of Florence--to Fiesole, to the Pratolino, to the Bello Sguardo, to the Poggio Imperiale. Sights of a different kind now present themselves. Sometimes it is a troop of stout Franciscan friars, in sandals and brown robes, each carrying his staff and wearing a brown broad-brimmed hat with a hemispherical crown. Sometimes it is a band of young theological students, in purple cassocks with red collars and cuffs, let out on a holiday, attended by their clerical instructors, to ramble in the Cascine. There is a priest coming over the bridge, a man of venerable age and great reputation for sanctity--the common people crowd around him to kiss his hand, and obtain a kind word from him as he passes. But what is that procession of men in black gowns, black gaiters, and black masks, moving swiftly along, and bearing on their shoulders a litter covered with black cloth? These are the Brethren of Mercy, who have assembled at the sound of the cathedral bell, and are conveying some sick or wounded person to the hospital. As the day begins to decline, the numbers of carriages in the streets, filled with gaily-drest people attended by servants in livery, increases. The Grand Duke's equipage, an elegant carriage drawn by six horses, with coachmen, footmen, and out-riders in drab-colored livery, comes from the Pitti Palace, and crosses the Arno, either by the bridge close to my lodgings, or by that called Alla Santa Trinità, which is in full sight from the windows. The Florentine nobility, with their families, and the English residents, now throng to the Cascine, to drive at a slow pace through its thickly-planted walks of elms, oaks, and ilexes. As the sun is sinking I perceive the Quay, on the other side of the Arno, filled with a moving crowd of well-drest people, walking to and fro, and enjoying the beauty of the evening. Travelers now arrive from all quarters, in cabriolets, in calashers, in the shabby "vettura," and in the elegant private carriage drawn by post-horses, and driven by postillions in the tightest possible deer-skin breeches, the smallest red coats, and the hugest jack-boots. The streets about the doors of the hotels resound with the cracking of whips and the stamping of horses, and are encumbered with carriages, heaps of baggage, porters, postillions, couriers, and travelers. Night at length arrives--the time of spectacles and funerals. The carriages rattle toward the opera-houses. Trains of people, sometimes in white robes and sometimes in black, carrying blazing torches and a cross elevated on a high pole before a coffin, pass through the streets chanting the service for the dead. The Brethren of Mercy may also be seen engaged in their office. The rapidity of their pace, the flare of their torches, the gleam of their eyes through their masks, and their sable garb, give them a kind of supernatural appearance. I return to bed, and fall asleep amid the shouts of people returning from the opera, singing as they go snatches of the music with which they had been entertained during the evening. III VENICE THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA[42] BY CHARLES YRIARTE To taste in all their fulness his first impressions of Venice, the traveler should arrive there by sea, at mid-day, when the sun is high. By degrees, as the ship which carries him enters the channels, he will see the unparalleled city emerging from the lap of the lagoon, with its proud campaniles, its golden spires, its gray or silvery domes and cupolas. Advancing along the narrow channels of navigation, posts and piles dot here and there with black that sheet of steel, and give substance to the dream, making solid and tangible the foreground of the illusive distance. Just now, all that enchanted world and fairy architecture floated in the air; little by little all has become distinct; those points of dark green turn into gardens; that mass of deep red is the line of the ship-building yards, with their leprous-looking houses and with the dark-colored stocks on which are erected the skeletons of polaccas and feluccas in course of construction; the white line showing so bright in the sun is the Riva dei Schiavoni, all alive with its world of gondoliers, fruit-sellers, Greek sailors, and Chioggiotes in their many-colored costumes. The rose-colored palace with the stunted colonnade is the Ducal Palace. The vessel, on its way to cast anchor off the Piazzetta, coasts round the white and rose-colored island which carries Palladio's church of Santa Maria Maggiore, whose firm campanile stands out against the sky with Grecian clearness and grace. Looking over the bow, the traveler has facing him the Grand Canal, with the Custom House where the figure of Fortune veers with the wind above her golden ball; beyond rise the double domes of the Salute with their great reversed consoles, forming the most majestic entrance to this watery avenue bordered by palaces. He who comes for the first time to Venice by this route realizes a dream--his only dream perhaps ever destined to be surpassed by the reality; and if he knows how to enjoy the beauty of nature, if he can take delight in silver-gray and rose-colored reflections in water, if he loves light and color, the picturesque life of Italian squares and streets, the good humor of the people and their gentle speech which seems like the twittering of birds, let him only allow himself to live for a little time under the sky of Venice, and he has before him a season of happiness without alloy. THE APPROACH BY TRAIN[43] BY THE EDITOR After leaving Padua the land for several miles is flat sand. No grass or tree grows here. Lagoons and canals intersect the land. At the right are marshes bordering the Adriatic. Along the horizon, light smoky clouds blend imperceptibly with the water. Other clouds, floating overhead, are reflected in the brown and waveless water. Far across this expanse glides here and there a small boat, propelled by a man standing erect. Through dim mists, settled over the bay, we sight flying birds that call loudly as they increase their flight. Absolutely without motion is this water. The sole objects that move are boats and birds. The water shimmers and sparkles wherever the sun, passing in and out of clouds, lights it up. The shallow bay broadens until our view includes no land. Everywhere extends a realm of waveless waters, in which fishing stakes stand erect, and tall plants grow. How strangely all this differs from the blue Mediterranean we saw a fortnight ago when riding from Genoa to Leghorn, under that cloudless sky of blue; in that stirring breeze, and an almost tropical temperature, tho it was late in December; along that rocky, tunnel-pierced coast, with deep olive groves bordering the way; the sea a boundless vision of water moving and resounding against the shore; whitecaps everywhere visible on its broad expanse. Here on this road to Venice is complete repose, lifeless, sleepy repose--as of the dead--not without poetry, but of the Orient and of mystics, rather than of Provence, or the Ligurian shore and active, stalwart men. We sight in the distance over the lagoon, the white walls and roof line of Venice. The railway starts on its long course over one of the noblest bridges in the world. It is more than two miles long. Some 80,000 piles were used in its foundations, the superstructure entirely of stone, with arches of 33 feet span each, and 222 in number. Along the roadway, on either side is a stone balustrade. At each pier a balcony curves outward. For four years a thousand men were engaged in building this viaduct, and the total cost was $10,000,000. Having crossed, we reach an island; then cross another, but shorter, bridge and pass to another island. Our train thereafter comes to a stop for we have reached Venice and enter a magnificent station, built of stone, with high semi-circular roof, lofty waiting rooms, mosaic floors. We pass out through a spacious doorway, and directly below, and in front, see the Grand Canal, bordered on its farther shore by palaces and other noble structures of white marble. A wide and broad plaza here fronts the water, and a stairway at its edge leads downward to where are waiting a score of gondolas. We step into one of these boats, and begin our first gondola ride in Adriatic waters. It is late afternoon. The western sun lies dying in a mass of yellow and soft brown clouds. On the high walls of the great white station its rays fall with startling brightness and cast long shadows of waiting gondoliers upon the plaza floor. The white palaces opposite are shrouded in somber hues. A warm mist seems to rise from the water. All is still as in the mid-Atlantic. When a sound is made, echoes sharp and clear come from shore to shore. Our boat glides away from this scene. Adjusting ourselves to its motion, we roll from side to side in our little house of glass on a downy seat and could pass the whole night here contentedly. Such rest, such appalling silence, we never knew before. Those gondoliers do their work with consummate skill. They have all the ease that comes of practise in any calling however difficult. The sharp cut of an oar as it enters the water is for a moment heard, but never a splash. The boat rolls constantly, but we feel no strain. It moves as if it were a toy swan drawn by a magnet in a child's hand. From the Grand Canal we enter a narrow street. Sharp corners are turned quickly, swift-moving boats are passed, narrow passages entered, and we glide into deep shadows under bridges, but never a collision, or danger of one, occurs. The gondolier at crossings cries out his warning. We hear, but do not see, another who calls aloud in similar tones. The two voices are heard again, each in an echo. Far away in this watery but populous solitude, a church bell tolls. We have had a quarter-hour's ride when the gondola comes to rest before broad stone steps leading upward to a wide doorway. Here is our hotel, an ancient palace, rich in marble and granite, with broad corridor, a noble stairway, and mosaic floors. It is Sunday on St. Mark's Place--a bright, warm Sunday it has been, such as winter can not give in our own country. Here, indeed, is a foreign land, its life and spirit more foreign than Rome. No scene in the wide world can rival this St. Mark's scene, with the islands across the way in the broad lagoon--a magnificent piazza, bordered by the façades of splendid palaces, by statues, columns, and ornate capitals, another piazza near it surrounded on three sides by noble arcaded structures and on the fourth by the half Gothic, half Byzantine Church of St. Mark's, the most resplendent Christian edifice in Europe. In one corner rises the stupendous Campanile, high above palace roofs, arcades and church domes, its bells sounding their notes upon an otherwise silent world. A TOUR OF THE GRAND CANAL[44] BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER The Grand Canal of Venice is the most wonderful thing in the world. No other city affords a spectacle so fine, so bizarre, so fairy-like. As remarkable bits of architecture, perhaps, can be found elsewhere, but nowhere located under such picturesque conditions. There each palace has a mirror in which to gaze at its beauty, like a coquettish woman. The superb reality is doubled by a charming reflection. The water lovingly caresses the feet of these beautiful façades, which a white light kisses on the forehead, and cradles them in a double sky. The small boats and big ships which are able to ascend it seem to be made fast for the express purpose of serving as set-offs or ground-plans for the convenience of the decorators.... Each bit of wall narrates a story; every house is a palace; at each stroke of the oars the gondolier mentions a name which was as well known in the times of the Crusades as it is to-day; and this continues both to left and right for a distance of more than half a league. We have made a list of these palaces, not of all, but the most remarkable, and we do not dare to transcribe it here on account of its length. It covers five or six pages: Pierre Lombard, Scamozzi, Sansovino, Sebastiano Mazzoni, Sammichelli, the great architect of Verona; Selva, Domenico Rossi, Visentini, have drawn the plans and directed the construction of these princely dwellings, without reckoning the unknown artists of the Middle Ages who built the most picturesque and most romantic of them--those which give Venice its stamp and its originality. On both banks, façades altogether charming and beautifully diversified succeed one another without interruption. After an architecture of the Renaissance with its columns comes a palace of the Middle Ages in Gothic Arab style, of which the Ducal Palace is the prototype, with its balconies, lancet windows, trefoils, and acroteria. Further along is a façade adorned with marble placques of various colors, garnished with medallions and consoles; then a great rose-colored wall in which is cut a large window with columnets; all styles are found there--the Byzantine, the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Roman, the Greek, and even the Rococo; the column and the columnet; the lancet and the semicircle; the fanciful capital, full of birds and of flowers, brought from Acre or from Jaffa; the Greek capital found in Athenian ruins; the mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity and elegant fantasy of the Renaissance. It is an immense gallery open to the sky, where one can study from the bottom of his gondola the art of seven or eight centuries. What treasures of genius, talent, and money have been expended on this space which may be traversed in less than a quarter of an hour! What tremendous artists, but also what intelligent and munificent patrons! What a pity that the patricians who knew how to achieve such beautiful things no longer exist save on the canvases of Titian, of Tintoretto, and du Moro! Even before reaching the Rialto, you have, on the left, in ascending the Canal, the Palace Dario, in Gothic style; the Palace Venier, which presents itself by an angle, with its ornamentation, its precious marbles and medallions, in the Lombard style; the Fine Arts, a classic façade joined to the old Ecole de la Charité and surmounted by a figure riding upon a lion; the Contarini Palace, in architectural style of Scamozzi; the Rezzonico Palace with three superimposed orders; the triple Giustiniani Palace, in the style of the Middle Ages, in which resides M. Natale Schiavoni, a descendant of the celebrated painter Schiavoni, who possesses a gallery of pictures and a beautiful daughter, the living reproduction of a canvas painted by her ancestor; The Foscari Palace, recognizable by its low door, by its two stories of columnets supporting lancets and trefoils, where in other days were lodged the sovereigns who visited Venice, but now abandoned; the Balbi Palace, from the balcony of which the princes leaned to watch the regattas which took place upon the Grand Canal with so much pomp and splendor, in the palmy days of the Republic; the Pisani Palace, in the German style of the beginning of the fifteenth century; and the Tiepolo Palace, very smart and relatively modern. On the right, there nestles between two big buildings, a delicious little palace which is composed of a window and a balcony; but such a window and balcony! A guipure of stone, of scrolls, of guillochages, and of open-work, which would seem possible of execution only with a punching machine upon one of those sheets of paper which cover baptismal sugar-plums, or are placed upon globes of lamps. We greatly regretted not having twenty-five thousand francs about us to buy it, since that was all that was demanded for it.... The Rialto, which is the most beautiful bridge in Venice, with a very grandiose and monumental air, bestrides the canal by a single span with a powerful and graceful curve. It was built in 1691, under the Dogeship of Pasquale Cigogna, by Antonio da Ponte, and replaced the ancient wooden drawbridge. Two rows of shops, separated in the middle by a portico in the form of an arcade and permitting a glimpse of the sky, burden the sides of the bridge, which can be crossed by three paths; that in the center and the exterior passageways furnished with balustrades of marble. Around the Bridge of the Rialto, one of the most picturesque spots of the Grand Canal, are gathered the oldest houses in Venice, with platformed roofs, on which poles are planted to hang banners; their long chimneys, their bulging balconies, their stairways with disjointed steps, and their plaques of red coating, the fallen flakes of which lay bare the brick walls and the foundations made green by contact with the water. There is always near the Rialto a tumult of boats and gondolas and of stagnant islets of tied-up craft drying their tawny sails, which are sometimes traversed by a large cross.... Below and beyond the Rialto are grouped on both banks the ancient Fondaco dei Tedeschi, upon the colored walls of which, in uncertain tints, may be devined some frescoes of Titian and Tintoretto, like dreams which come only to vanish; the fish-market, the vegetable market, and the old and new buildings of Scarpagnino and of Sansovino, almost fallen in ruins, in which are installed various courts.... On the right rises the Palace della Cà d'Oro, one of the most charming on the Grand Canal. It belongs to Mademoiselle Taglioni,[45] who has restored it with most intelligent care. It is all embroidered, fringed, carved in a Greek, Gothic, barbaric style, so fantastic, so light, so aerial, that it might be fancied to have been built expressly for the nest of a sylph. Mlle. Taglioni has pity for these poor, abandoned palaces. She has several of them en pension, which she maintains out of pure commiseration for their beauty; we were told of three or four upon which she has bestowed this charity of repair.... In going to a distance from the heart of the city, life is extinct. Many windows are closed or barred with boards; but this sadness has its beauty; it is more perceptible to the soul than to the eyes, regaled without cessation by the most unforeseen accidents of light and shade, by buildings so varied that even their dilapidation only renders them more picturesque, by the perpetual movement of the waters, and that blue and rose tint which composes the atmosphere of Venice. ST. MARK'S CHURCH[46] BY JOHN RUSKIN Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away--a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory--sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptered and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss"--the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life--angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers--a confusion of delight, amid which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst. Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years. And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats--not "of them that sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the venders of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafés, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its center the Austrian bands[47] play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes--the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them--a crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing--gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it continually.... Let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to which the eye must be accustomed for some moments before the form of the building can be traced; and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn out into the form of a cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray or two from some far away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a thousand colors along the floor. What else there is of light is from torches, or silver lamps burning ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels; the roof sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered with alabaster, give back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always at last to the cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every stone; sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of the apse. And altho in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription above her, "Mother of God," she is not here the presiding deity. It is the cross that is first seen, and always, burning in the center of the temple; and every dome and hollow of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in power, or returning in judgment. Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people. At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the various shrines, and solitary worshipers scattered through the darker places of the church, evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and, for the most part, profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater number of the renowned shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their appointed prayers with wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the step of the stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark's; and hardly a moment passes from early morning to sunset in which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long abasement on the floor of the temple, and then rising slowly with more confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always in the northern aisle, leave the church, as if comforted.... It must therefore be altogether without reference to its present usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and meaning of the architecture of this marvelous building; and it can only be after we have terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on abstract grounds, that we can pronounce with any certainty how far the present neglect of St. Mark's is significative of the decline of the Venetian character, or how far this church is to be considered as the relic of a barbarous age, incapable of attracting the admiration, or influencing the feelings of a civilized community. Now the first broad characteristic of the building, and the root nearly of every other important peculiarity in it, is its confessed incrustation. It is the purest example in Italy of the great school of architecture in which the ruling principle is the incrustation of brick with more precious materials. Consider the natural circumstances which give rise to such a style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any quarries of available stone, and having precarious access to the mainland where they exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely with brick, or to import whatever stone they use from great distances, in ships of small tonnage, and for the most part dependent for speed on the oar rather than the sail. The labor and cost of carriage are just as great, whether they import common or precious stone, and therefore the natural tendency would always be to make each shipload as valuable as possible. But in proportion to the preciousness of the stone, is the limitation of its possible supply; limitation not determined merely by cost, but by the physical conditions of the material, for of many marbles pieces above a certain size are not to be had for money. There would also be a tendency in such circumstances to import as much stone as possible ready sculptured, in order to save weight; and therefore, if the traffic of their merchants led them to places where there were ruins of ancient edifices, to ship the available fragments of them home. Out of this supply of marble, partly composed of pieces of so precious a quality that only a few tons of them could be on any terms obtained, and partly of shafts, capitals, and other portions of foreign buildings, the island architect has to fashion, as best he may, the anatomy of his edifice. HOW THE OLD CAMPANILE WAS BUILT[48] BY HORATIO F. BROWN The wide discrepancy of the dates, 888 to 1148, may perhaps be accounted for by the conjecture that the work of the building [the Campanile] proceeded slowly, either with a view to allowing the foundations to consolidate, or owing to lack of funds, and that the chroniclers recorded each resumption of work as the beginning of the work. One point may, perhaps, be fixt. The Campanile must have been some way above ground by the year 997, for the hospital founded by the sainted Doge, Pietro Orseolo, which is said to have been attached to the base of the tower, was consecrated in that year. The Campanile was finished, as far as the bell-chamber at least, in 1148, under the Doge Domenico Moresini, whose sarcophagus and bust surmount the portal of the San Nicoll del Lido. The chroniclers are at variance among themselves as to the date of the foundation, nor has an examination of the foundations themselves led to any discovery which enables us to determine that date; but one or two considerations would induce us to discard the earlier epochs. The foundations must have been designed to carry a tower of the same breadth, tho possibly not of the same height, as that which has recently fallen. But in the year of 888 had the Venetians such a conception of their greatness as to project a tower far more massive than any which had been hitherto constructed in Italy? Did they possess the wealth to justify them in such an enterprise? Would they have designed such a tower to match St. Mark's, which was at that time a small church with walls of wood? It is more probable that the construction of the Campanile belongs to the period of the second church of St. Mark, which was begun after the fire of 976 and consecrated in 1094. The height of the Campanile at the time of its fall was 98.60 meters (322 ft.), from the base to the head of the angel, tho a considerable portion of this height was not added till 1510; its width at the base of the shaft 12.80 meters (35 ft. 2 in.), and one meter (3 ft. 3 in.) less at the top of the shaft. The weight has been calculated at about 18,000 tons. Thanks to excavations at the base of the tower made by Com. Giacomo Boni, at the request of Mr. C. H. Blackall, of Boston, U. S. A., in the year 1885, a report of which was printed in the Archivio Veneto, we possess some accurate knowledge about a portion of the foundation upon which this enormous mass rested. The subsoil of Venice is composed of layers of clay, sometimes traversed by layers of peat, overlying profound strata of watery sand. This clay is, in places, of a remarkably firm consistency; for example, in the quarter of the town known as Dorsoduro or "hard-back," and at the spot where the Campanile stood. A bore made at that point brought up a greenish, compact clay mixed with fine shells. This clay, when dried, offered the resisting power of half-baked brick. It is the remarkable firmness of this clay which enabled the Venetians to raise so ponderous a structure upon so narrow a foundation. The builders of the Campanile proceeded as follows: Into this bed of compact clay they first drove piles of about 9 1/2 in. in diameter with a view to consolidate still further, by pressure, the area selected. That area only extends 1.25 meter, or about 4 ft. beyond the spring of the brickwork shaft of the tower. How deep these piles reach Boni's report does not state. The piles, at the point where he laid the foundation bare, were found to be of white poplar, in remarkably sound condition, retaining their color, and presenting closely twisted fiber. The clay in which they were embedded has preserved them almost intact. The piles extended for one row only beyond the superimposed structure. On the top of these piles the builders laid a platform consisting of two layers of oak beams, crosswise. The lower layer runs in the line of the Piazza, east to west, the upper in the line of the Piazzetta, north to south. Each beam is square and a little over 4 in. thick. This oak platform appears to be in bad condition; the timbers are blackened and friable. While the excavation was in progress sea-water burst through the interstices, which had to be plugged. Upon this platform was laid the foundation proper. This consisted of seven courses of stone of various sizes and of various kinds--sandstone of two qualities, limestone from Istria and Verona, probably taken from older buildings on the mainland, certainly not fresh-hewn from the quarry. The seventh or lowest course was the deepest, and was the only one which escaped, and that but slightly; the remaining six courses were intended to be perpendicular. These courses varied widely from each other in thickness--from 0.31 to 0.90 meters. They were composed of different and ill-assorted stone, and were held together in places by shallow-biting clamps of iron, and by a mortar of white Istrian lime, which, not being hydraulic, and having little affinity for sand, had become disintegrated. Boni calls attention to the careless structure of this foundation proper, and maintains that it was designed to carry a tower of about two-thirds of the actual height imposed upon it, but not more. Above the foundation proper came the base. This consisted of five courses of stone set in stepwise. These courses of the base were all the same kind of stone, in fairly regular blocks, and of fairly uniform thickness. They were all intended to be seen, and originally rose from the old brick pavement of the Piazza; but the gradual subsidence of the soil--which is calculated as proceeding at the rate of nearly a meter per 1,000 years--caused two and a half of these stepped courses to disappear, and only two and a half emerged from the present pavement. Thus the structure upon which the brick shaft of the Campanile rested was composed of (1) the base of five stepped courses, (2) the foundations of seven courses almost perpendicular, (3) the platform of oak beams, and (4) the piles. The height of the foundation, including the base, was 5.02 meters, about 16 ft., or one-twentieth of the height they carried. Not only is this a very small proportion, but it will be further observed that the tradition of star-shaped supports to the foundations is destroyed, and that they covered a very restricted area. In fact, the foundations of the Campanile belonged to the primitive or narrow kind. The foundations of the Ducal Palace, on the other hand, belonged to the more recent or extended kind. Those foundations do not rest on piles, but on a very broad platform of larch beams--much thicker than the oak beams of the Campanile platform--reposing directly on the clay. Upon this platform, foundations with a distended escarpment were built to carry the walls, the weight of which was thus distributed equally over a wide area. Little of the old foundations of the Campanile will remain when the work on the new foundations is completed. The primitive piles and platform are to stand; but new piles have been driven in all round the original nucleus, and on them are being laid large blocks of Istrian stone, which will be so deeply bonded into the old foundations that hardly more than a central core of the early work will be left ... In a peculiar fashion the Campanile of San Marco summed up the whole life of the city--civil, religious, commercial, and military--and became the central point of Venetian sentiment. For the tower served the double needs of the ecclesiastic and the civic sides of the Republic. Its bells marked the canonical hours; rang the workman to his work, the merchant to his desk, the statesman to the Senate; they pealed for victory or tolled for the demise of a Doge. The tower, moreover, during the long course of its construction, roughly speaking, from the middle of the tenth to the opening of the sixteenth centuries, was contemporary with all that was greatest in Venetian history; for the close of the tenth century saw the conquest of Dalmatia, and the foundations of Venetian supremacy in the Adriatic--that water-avenue to the Levant and the Orient--while by the opening of the sixteenth the Cape route had been discovered, the League of Cambray was in sight, and the end at hand. The tower, too, was a landmark to those at sea, and when the mariner had the Campanile of San Nicolo on the Lido covering the Campanile of St. Marks, he knew he had the route home and could make the Lido port. The tower was the center of popular festivals, such as that of the Svolo on Giovedi grasso, when an acrobat descended by a rope from the summit of the Campanile to the feet of the Doge, who was a spectator from the loggia of the Ducal Palace. HOW THE CAMPANILE FELL[49] BY HORATIO T. BROWN We come now to the dolorous moment of the fall in July, 1902. Infiltration of water had been observed in the roof of Sansovino's Loggetta where that roof joined the shaft of the Campanile. At this point a thin ledge of stone, let into the wall of the Campanile, projected over the junction between the leaden roof of the Loggetta and the shaft of the tower. In order to remedy the mischief of infiltration it was resolved to remove and replace this projecting ledge. To do this a chase was made in the wall of the Campanile, which, at this point, consisted of a comparatively modern surface of masonry, placed there to repair the damage caused by lightning strokes. This chase was cut, not piecemeal, but continuously. The work was carried out on Monday, July 7th. During the process the architect in charge became alarmed at the condition of the inner part of the wall laid bare by the cut. He exprest his fears to his superiors, but apparently no examination of the tower was made till the Thursday following. Even then the imminence of the danger does not seem to have been grasped. On Saturday, the 12th, a crack was observed spreading upward in a sloping direction from the cut above the roof of the Loggetta toward the northeast angle of the shaft, then crossing the angle and running up almost perpendicularly in the line of the little windows that gave light to the internal passage from the base to the bell-chamber. This crack assumed such a threatening aspect, and was making such visible progress, that the authorities in charge of the tower felt bound to inform the Prefect, tho the danger was represented as not immediate, and the worst they expected was the fall of the angle where the crack had appeared. A complete collapse of the whole tower was absolutely excluded. As a precautionary measure the music in the Piazza was suspended on Saturday evening. On Sunday orders were issued to endeavor to bind the threatened angle. But by Monday morning early (July 14th) it was evident that the catastrophe could not be averted. Dust began to pour out of the widening crack, and bricks to fall. A block of Istrian stone crashed down from the bell-chamber, then a column from the same site. At 9.47 the ominous fissure opened, the face of the Campanile toward the church and the Ducal Palace bulged out, the angle on the top and the pyramid below it swayed once or twice, and threatened to crush either the Sansovino's Library or the Basilica of San Marco in their fall, then the whole colossus subsided gently, almost noiselessly, upon itself, as it were in a curtsey, the ruined brick and mortar spread out in a pyramidal heap, a dense column of white powder rose from the Piazza, and the Campanile was no more. It is certainly remarkable, and by the people of Venice it is reckoned as a miracle, that the tower in its fall did so little harm. Not a single life was lost, tho the crowd in the Piazza was unaware of its danger till about ten minutes before the catastrophe. THE PALACE OF THE DOGES[50] BY JOHN RUSKIN The Ducal Palace, which was the great work of Venice, was built successively in the three styles. There was a Byzantine Ducal Palace, a Gothic Ducal Palace, and a Renaissance Ducal Palace. The second superseded the first totally; a few stones of it (if indeed so much) are all that is left. But the third superseded the second in part only, and the existing building is formed by the union of the two. We shall review the history of each in succession. 1st. The Byzantine Palace. In the year of the death of Charlemagne, 813, the Venetians determined to make the island of Rialto the seat of the government and capital of their state. Their Doge, Angelo or Agnello Participazio, instantly took vigorous means for the enlargement of the small group of buildings which were to be the nucleus of the future Venice. He appointed persons to superintend the raising of the banks of sand, so as to form more secure foundations, and to build wooden bridges over the canals. For the offices of religion, he built the Church of St. Mark; and on, or near, the spot where the Ducal Palace now stands, he built a palace for the administration of the government. The history of the Ducal Palace therefore begins with the birth of Venice, and to what remains of it, at this day, is entrusted the last representation of her power.... In the year 1106, it was for the second time injured by fire, but repaired before 1116, when it received another emperor, Henry V. (of Germany), and was again honored by imperial praise. Between 1173 and the close of the century, it seems to have been again repaired and much enlarged by the Doge Sebastian Ziani. Sansovino says that this Doge not only repaired it, but "enlarged it in every direction;" and, after this enlargement, the palace seems to have remained untouched for a hundred years, until, in the commencement of the fourteenth century, the works of the Gothic Palace were begun. Venice was in the zenith of her strength, and the heroism of her citizens was displaying itself in every quarter of the world. The acquiescence in the secure establishment of the aristocratic power was an expression, by the people, of respect for the families which had been chiefly instrumental in raising the commonwealth to such a height of prosperity.... In the first year of the fourteenth century, the Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice was begun; and as the Byzantine Palace was, in its foundation, coeval with that of the state, so the Gothic Palace was, in its foundation, coeval with that of the aristocratic power. Considered as the principal representation of the Venetian school of architecture, the Ducal Palace is the Parthenon of Venice, and Gradenigo its Pericles. Before it was finished, occasion had been discovered for farther improvements. The Senate found their new Council Chamber inconveniently small, and, about thirty years after its completion, began to consider where a larger and more magnificent one might be built. The government was now thoroughly established, and it was probably felt that there was some meanness in the retired position, as well as insufficiency in the size, of the Council Chamber on the Rio. It appears from the entry still preserved in the Archivio, and quoted by Cadorin, that it was on the 28th of December, 1340, that the commissioners appointed to decide on this important matter gave in their report to the Grand Council, and that the decree passed thereupon for the commencement of a new Council Chamber on the Grand Canal. The room then begun is the one now in existence, and its building involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio. In saying that it is the same now in existence, I do not mean that it has undergone no alterations; it has been refitted again and again, and some portions of its walls rebuilt; but in the place and form in which it first stood, it still stands; and by a glance at the position which its windows occupy, the spectator will see at once that whatever can be known respecting the design of the Sea Façade, must be gleaned out of the entries which refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber. Cadorin quotes two of great importance, made during the progress of the work in 1342 and 1344; then one of 1349, resolving that the works at the Ducal Palace, which had been discontinued during the plague, should be resumed; and finally one in 1362, which speaks of the Great Council Chamber as having been neglected and suffered to fall into "great desolation," and resolves that it shall be forthwith completed. The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder. The work was resumed in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at least so far as that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the walls, so that the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this time. Its decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion; the paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400.... The works of addition or renovation had now been proceeding, at intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three years. Three generations at least had been accustomed to witness the gradual advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately symmetry, and to contrast the works of sculpture and painting with which it was decorated--full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the fourteenth century--with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of the Doge Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the "Palazzo Vecchio." That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side of it toward the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the Riva dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Façade as important as that to the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the nobles daily met. Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered the discrepancy between it and the companion building more painful; and then began to arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity of destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta with the same splendor as the Sea Façade. But no such sweeping measure of renovation had been contemplated by the Senate when they first formed the plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room, then a gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as necessary additions to the palace, not as involving the entire reconstruction of the ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury, and the shadows upon the political horizon, rendered it more imprudent to incur the vast additional expense which such a project involved; and the Senate, fearful of itself, and desirous to guard against the weakness of its own enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a man fearful of some strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from the point of danger. It was a decree, not merely that the old palace should not be rebuilt, but that no one should propose rebuilding it. The feeling of the desirableness of doing so was too strong to permit fair discussion, and the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was to carry it. The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own weakness, forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace, under the penalty of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own enthusiasm too low; there was a man among them whom the loss of a thousand ducats could not deter from proposing what he believed to be for the good of the state. Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire which occurred in 1419, and which injured both the Church of St. Mark's, and part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I shall relate in the words of Sanuto. "Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care to repair and adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's house things went on more slowly, for it did not please the Doge to restore it in the form in which it was before; and they could not rebuild it altogether in a better manner, so great was the parsimony of these old fathers; because it was forbidden by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a thousand ducats any one who should propose to throw down the old palace, and to rebuild it more richly and with greater expense. "But the Doge, who was magnanimous, and who desired above all things what was honorable to the city, had the thousand ducats carried into the Senate Chamber, and then proposed that the palace should be rebuilt; saying: that, since the late fire had ruined in great part the Ducal habitation (not only his own private palace, but all the places used for public business), this occasion was to be taken for an admonishment sent from God, that they ought to rebuild the palace more nobly, and in a way more befitting the greatness to which, by God's grace, their dominions had reached; and that his motive in proposing this was neither ambition, nor selfish interest; that, as for ambition, they might have seen in the whole course of his life, through so many years, that he had never done anything for ambition, either in the city, or in foreign business; but in all his actions had kept justice first in his thoughts, and then the advantage of the state, and the honor of the Venetian name; and that, as far as regarded his private interest, if it had not been for this accident of the fire, he would never have thought of changing anything in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more honorable form; and that during the many years in which he had lived in it, he had never endeavored to make any change, but had always been content with it as his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well that, if they took in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them, being now very old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to another life before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that therefore they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this building for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and its Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by his successors." ... Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to observe the laws, he had brought with him the thousand ducats which had been appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that he might prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that he sought, but the dignity of the state.' There was no one (Sanuto goes on to tell us) who ventured, or desired to oppose the wishes of the Doge; and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses of the work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work; and the palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at present seen; but, as Mocenigo[51] had prophesied, not long after, he ended his life, and not only did not see the work brought to a close, but hardly even begun." There are one or two expressions in the above extracts which, if they stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the whole palace had been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember, that, at this time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred years in building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat in it; and it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to destroy and rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should propose in our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of Parliament, under the title of the "old palace," and rebuild them.... It was in the year 1422 that the decree passed to rebuild the palace; Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected in his room. The great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge--the 3rd of April, 1423, according to the "Caroldo Chronicle;" the 23d, which is probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum; and the following year, on the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the "Renaissance." It was the knell of the architecture of Venice--and of Venice herself. The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun; I date its commencement from the death of Mocenigo. A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been called to his account; his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this instance mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces might be built upon her burdened islands, but none of them could taken the place, or recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her unfrequented shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of fortune, the city never flourished again. I have no intention of following out, in their intricate details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued under succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the architecture of the fifteenth century; but the main facts are the following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge Foscari; the interior buildings connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro (the Othello of Shakespeare) in 1462. Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left between the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or, as is more probable, the last stones of it may have been swept away after the fire of 1419, and replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever buildings, old or new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so much of the palace on the Rio that, tho the saloon of Gradenigo, then known as the Sala de Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to reconstruct the entire façades of the portion of the palace behind the Bridge of Sighs, both toward the court and canal. The palace was not long permitted to remain in finished form. Another terrific fire, commonly called the great fire, burst out in 1574, and destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious pictures of the Great Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the Sea Façade, and most of those on the Rio Façade, leaving the building a mere shell, shaken and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the Great Council whether the ruin should not be thrown down, and an entirely new palace built in its stead. The opinions of all the leading architects of Venice were taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or the possibility of repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given in writing, have been preserved, and published by the Abbé Cadorin, and they form one of the most important series of documents connected with the Ducal Palace. I can not help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental resemblance to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was first given in favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others, especially Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute designs of their own; but the best architects in Venice, and, to his immortal honor, chiefly Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for the Gothic pile, and prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and Tintoret painted his noblest picture on the wall from which the Paradise of Guariento had withered before the flames. The repairs necessarily undertaken at this time were however extensive, and interfere in many directions with the earlier work of the palace; still the only serious alteration in its form was the transposition of the prisons, formerly at the top of the palace, to the other side of the Rio del Palazzo; and the building of the Bridge of Sighs, to connect them with the palace, by Antonio da Ponte. The completion of this work brought the whole edifice into its present form; with the exception of alterations in doors, partitions, and staircases among the inner apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and defacements as have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I suppose, nearly every building of importance in Italy. THE LAGOONS[52] BY HORATIO F. BROWN The colonization of the Venetian estuary is usually dated from the year 452, the period of the Hunnish invasion under Attila, when the Scourge of God, as he was named by his terror-stricken opponents, sacked the rich Roman cities of Aquileia, Concordia, Opitergium, and Padua. In one sense the date is correct. The Hunnish invasion certainly gave an enormous increase to the lagoon population, and called the attention of the mainlanders, to the admirable asylum which the estuary offered in times of danger. When Alcuin, the great scholar from Yorkshire, was teaching Charlemagne's son and heir, Pepin, he drew up for his pupil's use a curious catechism of questions and answers. Among others this occurs: "What is the sea." "A refuge in time of danger." Surely a strange answer, and one which can hardly be reckoned as true except in the particular case of the Venetian lagoons. For the mainlanders were caught between the devil of Attila and the deep sea of the Adriatic, and had they not found the lagoons ready at hand to offer them an asylum and to prove a refuge in time of danger, it must have fared hard with them. But this date of 452 is not to be taken as the date of the very earliest occupation of the lagoon. Long before Attila and his Huns swept down upon Italy, we know that there was a sparse population occupying the estuary, engaged in fishing and in the salt trade. Cassiodorus, the secretary of the Gothic King Theodoric the Great, has left us a picture of this people, hardy, independent, toughened by their life on the salt water; their means of living; the fish of the lagoons; their source of wealth; the salt which they extracted from its waters; their houses, wattled cabins built upon piles driven into the mud; their means of locomotion light boats which were tied to the door posts like horses on mainland. "Thus you live in your sea-birds' home," he exclaims, "rich and poor under equal laws; a common food supports you; house is like unto house; and envy, that curse of all the world, hath no place there." No doubt this early population of the lagoons, already intimately associated with its dwelling-place, modified by it and adapted to it, helped to form the basis upon which the latter strata of population, the result of the Hunnish invasion, could rest; and in all probability some of the characteristics of this early population, its independence and its hardihood, passed into the composition of the full-grown Venetian race. But beyond the brief words of Cassiodorus we know little about these early lagoon-dwellers. It is really with the Hunnish invasion that the history of Venice begins its first period of growth. The population which flocked from the mainland to seek refuge in the estuary of Venice came from many different cities--from Aquileia, from Concordia, from Padua; and tho the inhabitants of all these, no doubt, bore the external stamp which Rome never failed to impose, yet, equally doubtless, they brought with them their own particular customs, their mutual hates and rivalries. While living on the mainland these animosities had wider space in which to play, and were therefore less dangerous, less explosive. But in the lagoons, under stress of suffering, and owing to confinement and juxtaposition, they became intensified, exaggerated, and perilous. There was a double problem before the growing Venetian population which required to be solved before Venice and the Venetians could, with any justice, be considered a place and a people. First, the various and largely hostile populations who had taken refuge in the lagoon had to be reconciled to each other; and secondly, they had to be reconciled to their new home, to be identified with it and made one with it. The lagoon achieved both reconciliations; the isolation of its waters, their strangeness, gradually created the feeling of unity, of family connection, among the diverse and hostile components of the population, till a fusion took place between the original and the immigrant inhabitants, and between the people and their home, and Venice and the Venetians emerge upon the history of the world as an individual and full-grown race. But this reconciliation and identification were not accomplished at once. They cost many years of struggle and of danger. The unification of Venice is the history of a series of compromises, an historical example of the great law of selection and survival. THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR[53] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE Venice the beautiful city ended, pagan-like, as did its sisters the Greek republics, through nonchalance and voluptuousness. We find, indeed, from time to time, a Francis Morosini, who like Aratus and Philopoemen, renews the heroism and victories of ancient days; but, after the seventeenth century, its bright career is over. The city, municipal and circumscribed, is found to be weak, like Athens and Corinth, against powerful military neighbors who either neglect or tolerate it; the French and the Germans violate its neutrality with impunity; it subsists and that is all, and it pretends to do no more. Its nobles care only to amuse themselves; war and politics with them recede in the background; she becomes gallant and worldly.... But the evening of this fallen city is as mellow and as brilliant as a Venetian sunset. With the absence of care gaiety prevails. One encounters nothing but public and private fêtes in the memoirs of their writers and in the pictures of their painters. At one time it is a pompous banquet in a superb saloon festooned with gold, with tall lustrous windows and pale crimson curtains, the doge in his simarre dining with the magistrates in purple robes, and masked guests gliding over the floor; nothing is more elegant than the exquisite aristocracy of their small feet, their slender necks and their jaunty little three-cornered hats among skirts flounced with yellow or pearly gray silks. At another it is a regatta of gondolas and we see on the sea between San-Marco and San-Giorgio, around the huge Bucentaur[54] like a leviathan cuirassed with scales of gold, flotillas of boats parting the water with their steel becks. A crowd of pretty dominos, male and female, flutter over the pavements; the sea seems to be of polished slate under a tender azure sky spotted with cloud-flocks while all around, as in a precious frame, like a fantastic border carved and embroidered, the Procuraties, the domes, the palaces and the quays thronged with a joyous multitude, encircle the great maritime Venetian sheet.... In truth they never concern themselves with religion except to repress the Pope; in theory and in practise, in ideas and in instincts, they inherit the manners, customs and spirit of antiquity, and their Christianity is only a name. Like the ancients, they were at first heroes and artists, and then voluptuaries and dilettanti; in one as in the other case they, like the ancients, confined life to the present. In the eighteenth century they might be compared to the Thebans of the decadence who, leagued together to consume their property in common, bequeathed what remained of their fortunes on dying to the survivors at their banquets. The carnival lasts six months; everybody, even the priests, the guardian of the capucins, the nuncio, little children, all who frequent the markets, wear masks. People pass by in processions disguised in the costumes of Frenchmen, lawyers, gondoliers, Calabrians and Spanish soldiery, dancing and with musical instruments; the crowd follows jeering or applauding them. There is entire liberty; prince or artizan, all are equal; each may apostrophize a mask. Pyramids of men form "pictures of strength" on the public squares; harlequins in the open air perform parades. Seven theaters are open. Improvizators declaim and comedians improvize amusing scenes. "There is no city where license has such sovereign rule." ... The Chiogga campaign is the last act of the old heroic drama; there, as in the best days of the ancient republics, a besieged people is seen to save itself against all hope, artizans equipping vessels, a Pisani conqueror undergoing imprisonment and only released to renew the victory, a Carlo Zeno, surviving forty wounds, and a doge of seventy years of age; a Contarini, who makes a vow not to leave his vessel so long as the enemy's fleet is uncaptured, thirty families, apothecaries, grocers, vintners, tanners admitted among the nobles, a bravery, a public spirit like that of Athens under Themistocles and of Rome under Fabius Cunctator. If, from this time forth, the inward fire abates we still feel its warmth for many long years, longer kept up than in the rest of Italy, and sometimes demonstrating its power by sudden outbursts. The nobles, on their side, are always ready to fight. During the whole of the sixteenth century, even up to the seventeenth and beyond, we see them in Dalmatia, in the Morea, over the entire Mediterranean, defending the soil inch by inch against the infidels. The garrison of Famagouste yields only to famine, and its governor, Bragadino, burned alive, is a hero of ancient days. At the battle of Lepanto the Venetians alone furnish one half of the Christian fleet. Thus on all sides, and notwithstanding their gradual decline, peril, energy, love of country, all, in brief, which constitutes or sustains the grand life of the soul here subsists, while throughout the peninsula foreign dominion, clerical oppression and voluptuous or academical inertia reduces man to the system of the antechamber, the subtleties of dilettantism and the babble of sonnets. But if the human spring is not broken at Venice, it is seen insensibly losing its elasticity. The government, changed into a suspicious despotism, elects a Mocenigo doge, a shameless speculator profiting on the public distress, instead of that Charles Zeno who had saved the country; it holds Zeno prisoner two years and entrusts the armies on the mainland to condottieri; it is tied up in the hands of three inquisitors, provokes accusations, practises secret executions and commands the people to confine themselves to indulgences of pleasure. On the other hand luxury arises. About the year 1400 the houses "were quite small;" but a thousand nobles were enumerated in Venice possessing from four to seventy thousand ducats rental, while three thousand ducats were sufficient to purchase a palace. Henceforth this great wealth is no longer to be employed in enterprises and in self-devotion, but in pomp and magnificence. In 1495, Commine admires "the grand canal, the most beautiful street, I think, in the world, and with the best houses; the houses are very grand, high and of excellent stone--and these have been built within a century. All have fronts of white marble, which comes from Istria, a hundred miles away, and yet many more great pieces of porphyry and of serpentine on them; inside they have, most of them, at least two chambers with gilded ceilings, rich screens of chimneys with carved marble, the bedsteads gilded and the 'ostevents' painted and gilded and well furnished within." On his arrival twenty-five gentlemen attired in silk and scarlet come to meet him; they conduct him to a boat decked with crimson silk; "it is this most triumphant city I ever saw." Finally, while the necessity of pleasure grows the spirit of enterprise diminishes; the passage of the Cape in the beginning of the sixteenth century places the commerce of Asia in the hands of the Portuguese; on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the financial measures of Charles V., joined to bad usage by the Turks, render abortive the great maritime caravans which the state dispatches yearly between Alexandria and Bruges. In respect to industrial matters, the hampered artizans, watched and cloistered in their country, cease to perfect their arts and allow foreign competitors to surpass them in processes and in furnishing supplies to the world. Thus, on all sides, the capacity for activity becomes lessened and the desire for enjoyment greater without one entirely effacing the other, but in a way that, both commingling, they produce that ambiguous state of mind similar to a mixed temperature which is never too severe and in which the arts are generated. Indeed, it is from 1454 to 1572, between the institution of state inquisitors and the battle of Lepanto, between the accomplishment of internal despotism and the last of the great outward victories, that the brilliant productions of Venetian art appear. John Bellini was born in 1426, Giorgone died in 1511, Titian in 1578, Veronese in 1572 and Tintoretto in 1594. In this interval of one hundred and fifty years this warrior city, this mistress of the Mediterranean, this queen of commerce and of industry became a casino for masqueraders and a den of courtezans. THE DOVES OF ST. MARK'S[55] BY HORATIO F. BROWN In Venice the pigeons do not allow you to forget them, even if one desired to forget a bird that is so intimately connected with the city and with a great ceremony of that ancient republic which has passed away. They belong so entirely to the place, and especially to the great square; they have made their homes for so many generations among the carvings of the Basilica, at the feet of the bronze horses, and under the massive cornices of the New Procuratie, that the great Campanile itself is hardly more essential to the character of the piazza than are these delicate denizens of Saint Mark's. In the structure of the ducal palace, the wants of the pigeons have been taken into account, and near the two great wells which stand in the inner courtyard little cups of Istrian stone have been let into the pavement for the pigeons to drink from. On cold, frosty mornings you may see them tapping disconsolately at the ice which covers their drinking troughs, and may win their thanks by breaking it for them. Or if the wind blows hard from the east, the pigeons sit in long rows under the eaves of the Procuratie; their necks drawn into their shoulders, and the neck feathers ruffled round their heads, till they have lost all shape, and look like a row of slate-colored cannon-balls. From Saint Mark's the pigeons have sent out colonies to the other churches and campi of Venice. They have crossed the Grand Canal, and roost and croon among the volutes of the Salute, or, in wild weather, wheel high and airly above its domes. They have even found their way to Malamocco and Mazzorbo; so that all Venice in the sea owns and protects its sacred bird. But it is in Saint Mark's that the pigeons "most do congregate;" and one can not enter the piazza, and stand for a moment at the corner, without hearing the sudden rush of wings upon the air, and seeing the white under-feathers of their pinions, as the doves strike backward to check their flight, and flutter down at one's feet in expectation of peas or grain. They are boundlessly greedy, and will stuff themselves till they can hardly walk, and the little red feet stagger under the loaded crop. They are not virtuous, but they are very beautiful. There is a certain fitness in the fact that the dove should be the sacred bird of the sea city. Both English "dove" and Latin "columba" mean the diver; and the dove uses the air much as the fish uses the sea, it glides, it dives, it shoots through its airy ocean; it hovers against the breeze, or presses its breast against the sirocco storm, as you may see fish poised in their course against the stream; then with a sudden turn it relaxes the strain and sweeps away down the wind. The dove is an airy emblem of the sea upon which Venice and the Venetians live, but more than that--the most permanent quality in the color of the lagoons, where the lights are always shifting, is the dove-tone of sea and sky; a tone which holds all colors in solution, and out of which they emerge as the water-ripples or the cloud-flakes pass--just as the colors are shot and varied on a young dove's neck. There is some doubts as to the origin of these flocks of pigeons which shelter in Saint Mark's. According to one story, Henry Dandolo, the Crusader, was besieging Candia; he received valuable information from the interior of the island by means of carrier-pigeons, and, later on, sent news of his successes home to Venice by the same messengers. In recognition of these services the government resolved to maintain the carriers at the public cost; and the flocks of to-day are the descendants of the fourteenth-century pigeons. The more probable tradition, however, is that which connects these pigeons with the antique ceremonies of Palm Sunday. On that festival the Doge made the tour of the piazza, accompanied by all the officers of State, the Patriarch, the foreign ambassadors, the silver trumpets, all the pomp of the ducal dignity. Among other largess of that day, a number of pigeons, weighted by pieces of paper tied to their legs, used to be let loose from the gallery where the bronze horses stand, above the western door of the church. Most of the birds were easily caught by the crowd, and kept for their Easter dinner; but some escaped, and took refuge in the upper parts of the palace and among the domes of Saint Mark's. The superstition of the people was easily touched, and the birds that had sought the protection of the saint were thenceforth dedicated to the patron of Venice. The charge of supporting them was committed to the superintendents of the corn stores, and the usual hour for feeding the pigeons was nine o'clock in the morning. During the revolution of 1797, the birds fared as badly as the aristocracy, and were left to take care of themselves; but when matters settled down again the feeding of the pigeons was resumed by the municipality, and takes place at two in the afternoon, tho the incessant largess of strangers can leave the birds but little appetite for their regular meal. In spite of the multitudes of pigeons that haunt the squares of the city, a dead pigeon is as rare to see as a dead donkey on the mainland. It is a pious opinion that no Venetian ever kills a pigeon, and apparently they never die; but the fact that they do not increase so rapidly as to become a nuisance instead of a pleasure, lends some color to the suspicion that pigeon pies are not unknown at certain tables during the proper season. TORCELLO, THE MOTHER CITY[56] BY JOHN RUSKIN Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and hoist themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and interrupted by narrow creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburned weeds whitened with webs of fucas, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground-ivy and violets. On this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which if we ascend toward evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen-gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom. To the very horizon, on the northeast; but to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it, and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bar of sand; to the south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same field which sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them little larger than cottages (tho built of stone, and one adorned by a quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing mass from the green field beneath and gray moor beyond. There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie like a little company of ships becalmed on a faraway sea. Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of clustered palaces, a long irregular line fretting the southern sky. Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood--Torcello and Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the sea. The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the temple of their ancient worship. CADORE, TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE[57] BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS We reached Pieve di Cadore about half-past eleven A.M., delays included. The quaint old piazza with its gloomy arcades, its antique houses with Venetian windows, its cafés, its fountain, and its loungers, is just like the piazzas of Serravalle, Longarone, and other provincial towns of the same epoch. With its picturesque Prefettura and belfry-tower one is already familiar in the pages of Gilbert's "Cadore." There, too, is the fine old double flight of steps leading up to the principal entrance on the first floor, as in the town-hall at Heilbronn--a feature by no means Italian; and there, about midway up the shaft of the campanile, is the great, gaudy, well-remembered fresco, better meant than painted, wherein Titian, some twelve feet in height, robed and bearded, stands out against an ultramarine background, looking very like the portrait of a caravan giant at a fair.... Turning aside from the glowing piazza and following the downward slope of a hill to the left of the Prefettura, we come, at the distance of only a few yards, upon another open space, grassy and solitary, surrounded on three sides by rambling, dilapidated-looking houses, and opening on the fourth to a vista of woods and mountains. In this little piazza stands a massive stone fountain, time-worn and water-worn, surmounted by a statue of Saint Tiziano in the robes and square cap of an ecclesiastic. The water trickling through two metal pipes in the pedestal beneath Saint Tiziano's feet, makes a pleasant murmuring in the old stone basin; while, half hidden behind this fountain, and leaning up as if for shelter against a larger house adjoining, stands-a small whitewashed cottage upon the side-wall of which an incised tablet bears the following record: "Nel MCCCCLXXVII Fra Queste Vmili Mura Tiziano Vecellio Vene a celebre Vita Donde vsciva gia presso a cento Anni In Venezia Addi XXVII Agosto MDLXXVI." A poor, mean-looking, low-roofed dwelling, disfigured by external chimney-shafts and a built-out oven; lit with tiny, blinking, medieval windows; altogether unlovely; altogether unnoticeable; but--the birthplace of Titian! It looked different, no doubt, when he was a boy and played outside here on the grass. It had probably a high, steep roof, like the homesteads in his own landscape drawings; but the present old brown tiles have been over it long enough to get mottled with yellow lichens. One would like to know if the fountain and the statue were there in his time; and if the water trickled ever to the same low tune; and if the women came there to wash their linen and fill their brazen water jars, as they do now. This lovely green hill, at all events, sheltered the home from the east winds; and Monte Duranno lifted his strange crest yonder against the southern horizon; and the woods dipt down to the valley, then as now, where the bridle-path slopes away to join the road to Venice. We went up to the house, and knocked. The door was opened by a sickly, hunchbacked lad who begged us to walk in, and who seemed to be quite alone there. The house was very dark, and looked much older inside than from without. A long, low, gloomy upstairs chamber with a huge penthouse fire-place jutting into the room, was evidently as old as the days of Titian's grandfather, to whom the house originally belonged; while a very small and very dark adjoining closet, with a porthole of window sunk in a slope of massive wall, was pointed out as the room in which the great painter was born. "But how do you know that he was born here?" I asked. The hunchback lifted his wasted hand with a deprecating gesture. "They have always said so, Signora," he replied. "They have said so for more than four hundred years." "They?" I repeated, doubtfully. "The Vecelli, Signora." "I had understood that the Vecellio family was extinct." "Scusate, Signora," said the hunchback. "The last direct descendant of 'Il Tiziano' died not long ago--a few years before I was born; and the collateral Vecelli are citizens of Cadore to this day. If the Signora will be pleased to look for it, she will see the name of Vecellio over a shop on the right-hand side, as she returns to the Piazza." I did look for it; and there, sure enough, over a small shop-window I found it. It gave one an odd sort of shock, as if time were for the moment annihilated; and I remember how, with something of the same feeling, I once saw the name of Rubens over a shop-front in the market-place at Cologne. I left the house less incredulous than I entered it. Of the identity of the building there has never been any kind of doubt; and I am inclined to accept with the house the identity of the room. Titian, it should be remembered, lived long enough to become, long before he died, the glory of his family. He became rich; he became noble; his fame filled Italy. Hence the room in which he was born may well have acquired, half a century before his death--perhaps even during the lifetime of his mother--that sort of sacredness which is generally of post-mortem growth. The legend, handed down from Vecellio to Vecellio in uninterrupted succession, lays claim, therefore, to a more reliable pedigree than most traditions of a similar character. FOOTNOTES: [1] From "Travels in Italy." Translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet. Goethe's visit to Italy was made in 1786. He was then only thirty-seven years of age. The visit had important influence on his subsequent career. The greatest of his works were still to be written. It was not until after 1794 that Goethe devoted himself entirely to literature. [2] Goethe at this time had published several short plays besides "The Sorrows of Werthé," "Wilhelm Meister," and a few other works less important. [3] By that name Italians know the Pantheon. [4] From "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the years 1701, 1702, 1703." At the time of his departure for Italy, Addison was twenty-nine years old. None of his important works had then been written. [5] Addison's belief has been amply justified by the extensive excavations made since his time. [6] From "Ancient Rome, In the Light of Recent Discoveries." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1888. [7] Lanciani here has referred to the Catholic Church, in which historians have seen, in the spiritual sense, a survival of imperial Rome. [8] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin CO. [9] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co. [10] Mr. Hillard was writing in 1853. [11] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897. [12] This mausoleum, built by Augustus on the bank of the Tiber for himself and his family, had long been used as the imperial sepulcher. [13] From "Rome." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897. [14] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868. Translated by John Durand. [15] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897. [16] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897. [17] From "Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe." Mrs. Lippincott's visit was made in 1852. [18] From "Recollections of the Last Four Popes, and of Rome in their Times." Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (1802-1865), an English cardinal, was famous during his lifetime for intellectual vigor and scholarly attainments. In presenting an intimate view of a papal election it was his unusual privilege to describe not only "the things he saw," but also, as his later destiny revealed, to tell of the things of which he formed a part. The election pictured is that of Leo XII. [19] From "Six Novices on the Grand Tour, by One of Them." Privately printed. (1911.) By permission of the author. [20] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co. [21] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868. Translated by John Durand. [22] From "Pictures from Italy." [23] From "The Marble Faun." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co. [24] From "Pencillings by the Way." [25] From "Pictures from Italy." [26] From "French and Italian Note-Books." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers of Hawthorne's works, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1871, 1883, 1899. [27] Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, who lived long in Florence, and is best known for his "Greek Slave." [28] From "Journeys in Italy." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902. [29] From "Florence." [30] From Taine's "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Translated by John Durand. Copyright, 1869. [31] Since Taine wrote, the façade has been added. [32] From "Italian Cities." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1900. [33] From "The Makers of Florence." Published by the Macmillan Co. [34] That is, the Baptistery at Florence. [35] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1837. [36] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897. [37] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897. [38] Dante was buried at Ravenna. The reader will recall Byron's lines: "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore." [39] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. Translated by John Durand. [40] From "Letters of a Traveller." Bryant's letter is dated in May, 1834. [41] The court of the Austrian Grand Duke Leopold III. In 1859 Leopold was expelled, and Florence, with Tuscany, was annexed to the Sardinian kingdom. [42] From "Venice: Its History, Art, Industries and Modern Life." Published by John C. Winston Co. [43] From "Two Months Abroad." Privately printed. (1878.) [44] From "Journeys In Italy." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902. [45] Marie Taglioni, the ballet dancer, who was born in Stockholm of Italian parents in 1804 and married to Count Gilbert de Voisons in 1847, when she retired from the stage. She died in 1884. [46] From "The Stones of Venice." St. Mark's is merely a church. It is not a cathedral; that is, it is not the "cathedra" of a bishop. Originally it was the private chapel of the Doge. Likewise, St. Peter's at Rome is a church only--the church of the Pope. The cathedral of the Pope (who is the Bishop of Rome), is St. John Lateran. [47] Venice and territory adjacent to it were long in subjection to Austria. Having put an end to the republic in 1797 (the republic had then had an unbroken existence for about thirteen hundred years), Napoleon, by the treaty of Campo Formio, ceded this territory to Austria. In 1805, however, Venetia was added by Napoleon to his Kingdom of Italy. In 1814, after the first fall of Napoleon, it was ceded back to Austria and in 1815 became part of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. Under the leadership of Manin, in 1848, a republic was proclaimed in Venice, but Austria laid siege to the city and captured it. It was not until 1866, at the conclusion of the war against Austria, that Venice was annexed to the new Italian kingdom of Victor Emmanuel. [48] From "In and Around Venice." Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. [49] From "In and Around Venice." Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. After its fall, the Venetians set about raising funds for rebuilding the Campanile. In the course of several years, the new structure was finished and the event duly commemorated. [50] From "The Stones of Venice." [51] Several men of this name are famous in Venetian annals, as soldiers, statesmen and doges. The one here referred to is Tommaso, who defeated the Turks, added Dalmatia to the Venetian domain, greatly encouraged commerce and founded the Venetian library. [52] From "Life on the Lagoons." Published by the Macmillan Co. [53] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. [54] The state ship of Venice. [55] From "Life on the Lagoons." Published by the Macmillan Co. [56] From "The Stones of Venice." [57] From "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites." Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. 
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16477	----	FLORENCE AND NORTHERN TUSCANY WITH GENOA BY EDWARD HUTTON * * * * * O rosa delle rose, O rosa bella, Per te non dormo nè notte nè giorno, E sempre penso alla tua faccia bella, Alle grazie che hai, faccio ritorno. Faccio ritorno alle grazie che hai: Ch'io ti lasci, amor mio, non creder mai. WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY WILLIAM PARKINSON AND SIXTEEN OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS SECOND EDITION LONDON, 1907, 1908 * * * * * TO MY FRIEND WILLIAM HEYWOOD BY THE SAME AUTHOR FREDERIC UVEDALE: A ROMANCE STUDIES IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS ITALY AND THE ITALIANS THE CITIES OF UMBRIA THE CITIES OF SPAIN SIGISMONDO MALATESTA COUNTRY WALKS ROUND FLORENCE. (_In the Press_). ROME. (_In preparation_) * * * * * [Illustration: FROM THE UFFIZI] * * * * * CONTENTS I. GENOA II. ON THE WAY III. PORTO VENERE IV. SARZANA AND LUNA V. CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO VI. PISA VII. LIVORNO VIII. TO SAN MINIATO AL TEDESCO IX. EMPOLI, MONTELUPO, LASTRA, SIGNA X. FLORENCE XI. PIAZZA DELLA SIGNORIA AND PALAZZO VECCHIO XII. THE BAPTISTERY--THE DUOMO--THE CAMPANILE--THE OPERA DEL DUOMO XIII. OR SAN MICHELE XIV. PALAZZO RICCARDI, AND THE RISE OF THE MEDICI XV. SAN MARCO AND SAVONAROLA XVI. SANTA MARIA NOVELLA XVII. SANTA CROCE XVIII. SAN LORENZO XIX. CHURCHES NORTH OF ARNO XX. OLTR'ARNO XXI. THE BARGELLO XXII. THE ACCADEMIA XXIII. THE UFFIZI XXIV. THE PITTI GALLERY XXV. FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO XXVI. VALLOMBROSA AND THE CASENTINO XXVII. PRATO XXVIII. PISTOJA XXIX. LUCCA XXX. OVER THE GARFAGNANA LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR VIEW FROM THE UFFIZI ON THE ROAD BADIA A SETTIMO PONTE VECCHIO LOGGIA DE' LANZI PIAZZA DEL DUOMO OR SAN MICHELE THE FLOWER MARKET, FLORENCE CHIOSTRO DI S. MARCO S. MARIA NOVELLA OGNISSANTI VIA GUICCIARDINI PONTE VECCHIO THE BOBOLI GARDENS COSTA DI S. GIORGIO OUTSIDE THE GATE IN MONOTONE PORTO VENERE PISA WAX MODEL FOR THE PERSEUS IN THE BARGELLO, BENVENUTO CELLINI THE MADONNA DELLA CINTOLA, BY NANNI DI BANCO, DUOMO, FLORENCE SINGING BOYS FROM THE CANTORIA OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA, OPERA DEL DUOMO, FLORENCE THE CRUCIFIXION, BY FRA ANGELICO, S. MARCO, FLORENCE ST. JOHN THE DIVINE, BY DONATELLO, DUOMO, FLORENCE THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI), IN THE BARGELLO, BY ANDREA VERROCCHIO "LA NOTTE," FROM TOMB OF GIULIANO DE' MEDICI, BY MICHELANGELO THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS, BY DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO, ACCADEMIA THE THREE GRACES, FROM THE PRIMAVERA, BY SANDRO BOTTICELLI, ACCADEMIA THE BIRTH OF VENUS, BY SANDRO BOTTICELLI, UFFIZI GALLERY THE ANNUNCIATION, BY ANDREA VERROCCHIO, UFFIZI GALLERY PIETÀ, BY FRA BARTOLOMMEO, PITTI GALLERY THE TOMB OF ILARIA DEL CARETTO, BY JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA, DUOMO, LUCCA THE TOMB OF THE MARTYR S. ROMANO IN S. ROMANO, LUCCA, BY MATTEO CIVITALI [Illustration: A MAP OF THE CITIES OF NORTHERN TUSCANY] * * * * * I. GENOA I The traveller who on his way to Italy passes along the Riviera di Ponente, through Marseilles, Nice, and Mentone to Ventimiglia, or crossing the Alps touches Italian soil, though scarcely Italy indeed, at Turin, on coming to Genoa finds himself really at last in the South, the true South, of which Genoa la Superba is the gate, her narrow streets, the various life of her port, her picturesque colour and dirt, her immense palaces of precious marbles, her oranges and pomegranates and lemons, her armsful of children, and above all the sun, which lends an eternal gladness to all these characteristic or delightful things, telling him at once that the North is far behind, that even Cisalpine Gaul is crossed and done with, and that here at last by the waves of that old and great sea is the true Italy, that beloved and ancient land to which we owe almost everything that is precious and valuable in our lives, and in which still, if we be young, we may find all our dreams. What to us are the weary miles of Eastern France if we come by road, the dreadful tunnels full of despair and filth if we come by rail, now that we have at last returned to her, or best of all, perhaps, found her for the first time in the spring at twenty-one or so, like a fair woman forlorn upon the mountains, the Ariadne of our race who placed in our hand the golden thread that led us out of the cavern of the savage to the sunlight and to her. But though, indeed, I think all this may be clearer to those who come to her in their first youth by the long white roads with a song on their lips and a dream in their hearts--for the song is drowned by the iron wheels that doubtless have their own music, and the dream is apt to escape in the horror of the night imprisoned with your fellows; still, as we are so quick to assure ourselves, there are other ways of coming to Italy than on foot: in a motor-car, for instance, our own modern way, ah! so much better than the train, and truly almost as good as walking. For there is the start in the early morning, the sweet fresh air of the fields and the hills, the long halt at midday at the old inn, or best of all by the roadside, the afternoon full of serenity, that gradually passes into excitement and eager expectancy as you approach some unknown town; and every night you sleep in a new place, and every morning the joy of the wanderer is yours. You never "find yourself" in any city, having won to it through many adventures, nor ever are you too far away from the place you lay at on the night before. And so, as you pass on and on and on, till the road which at first had entranced you, wearies you, terrifies you, relentlessly opening before you in a monstrous white vista, and you who began by thinking little of distance find, as I have done, that only the roads are endless, even for you too the endless way must stop when it comes to the sea; and there you have won at last to Italy, at Genoa. If you come by Ventimiglia, starting early, all the afternoon that white vision will rise before you like some heavenly city, very pure and full of light, beckoning you even from a long way off across innumerable and lovely bays, splendid upon the sea. While if you come from Turin, it is only at sunset you will see her, suddenly in a cleft of the mountains, the sun just gilding the Pharos before night comes over the sea, opening like some great flower full of coolness and fragrance. It was by sea that John Evelyn came to Genoa after many adventures; and though we must be content to forego much of the surprise and romance of an advent such as that, yet for us too there remain many wonderful things which we may share with him. The waking at dawn, for instance, for the first time in the South, with the noise in our ears of the bells of the mules carrying merchandise to and from the ships in the _Porto_; the sudden delight that we had not felt or realised, weary as we were on the night before, at finding ourselves really at last in the way of such things, the shouting of the muleteers, the songs of the sailors getting their ships in gear for the seas, the blaze of sunlight, the pleasant heat, the sense of everlasting summer. These things, and so much more than these, abide for ever; the splendour of that ancient sea, the gesture of the everlasting mountains, the calmness, joy, and serenity of the soft sky. Something like this is what I always feel on coming to that proud city of palaces, a sort of assurance, a spirit of delight. And in spite of all Tennyson may have thought to say, for me it is not the North but the South that is bright "and true and tender." For in the North the sky is seldom seen and is full of clouds, while here it stretches up to God. And then, the South has been true to all her ancient faiths and works, to the Catholic religion, for instance, and to agriculture, the old labour of the corn and the wine and the oil, while we are gone after Luther and what he leads to, and, forsaking the fields, have taken to minding machines. And so, in some dim way I cannot explain, to come to Italy is like coming home, as though after a long journey one were to come suddenly upon one's mistress at a corner of the lane in a shady place. It is perhaps with some such joy in the heart as this that the fortunate traveller will come to Genoa the Proud, by the sea, lying on the bosom of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, the beautiful gate of Italy. II The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of the Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great Saint. This spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in check and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so that Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an after-thought, though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed laughed at; and Genoa, splendid in adventure but working only for gain, unable on this account to establish any permanent colony, losing gradually all her possessions, threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the New World, just because she was not worthy of it. Men have called her Genoa the Proud, and indeed who, looking on her from the sea or the sea-shore, will ever question her title?--but the truth is, that she was not proud enough. She trusted in riches; for her, glory was of no account if gold were not added to it. If she entered the first Crusade as a Christian, it was really her one disinterested action; and all the world acknowledged her valour and her contrivance which won Jerusalem. But in the second Crusade, as in the next, she no longer thought of glory or of the Tomb of Jesus, she was intent on money; and since in that stony place but little booty could be hoped for, she set herself to spoil the Christian, to provide him at a price with ships, with provender, with the means of realising his dream, a dream at which she could afford to laugh, secure as she was in the possession of this world's goods. Then, when in the thirteenth century those vast multitudes of soldiers, monks, dreamers, beggars, and adventurers came to her, the port for Palestine, clamouring for transports, she was sceptical and even scornful of them, but willing to give them what they demanded, not for the love of God but for a price. Even that beautiful and mysterious army of children which came to her from France and Germany in 1212 seeking Jesus, she could hold in contempt till, weary at last of feeding them, she found the galleys they demanded, and in the loneliness of the sea betrayed them and sold them for gold as slaves to the Arabs, so that of the seven thousand boys and girls led by a lad of thirteen who came at the bidding of a voice to Genoa, not one ever returned, nor do we hear anything further concerning them but the rumour of their fate. Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants. She crushed Pisa lest Pisa should become richer than herself; she went out against the Moors for Castile because of a whisper of the booty; she sought to overthrow Venice because she competed with her trade in the East; and to-day if she could she would fill up the harbour of Savona with stones, as she did in the sixteenth century, because Savona takes part of her trade from her. What Philip of Spain did for God's sake, what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa has done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the Bank of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of Italy, she is, almost alone in that home of humanism, without a school of art or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals, and adventurers--Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names linger in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy with piracy. Even to-day a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his ancestors did of old. One saint certainly of her own stock she may claim, St. Catherine Adorni, born in 1447. But the Renaissance passed her by, giving her, it is true, by the hands of an alien, the streets of splendid palaces we know, but neither churches nor pictures; such paintings as she possesses being the sixteenth century work of foreigners, Rubens, Vandyck, Ribera, Sanchez Coello, and maybe Velasquez. Yet barren though she is in art, at least Genoa has ever been fulfilled with life. If her aim was riches she attained it, and produced much that was worth having by the way. Without the appeal of Florence or Siena or Venice or Rome, she is to-day, when they are passed away into dreams or have become little more than museums, what she has ever been, a city of business, the greatest port in the Mediterranean, a city full of various life,--here a touch of the East, there a whisper of the West, a busy, brutal, picturesque city, beauty growing up as it does in London, suddenly for a moment out of the life of the place, not made or contrived as in Paris or Florence, but naturally, a living thing, shy and evanescent. Here poverty and riches jostle one another side by side as they do in life, and are antagonistic and hate one another. Yet Genoa, alone of all the cities of Italy proper is living to-day, living the life of to-day, and with all her glorious past she is as much a city of the twentieth century as of any other period of history. For, while others have gone after dreams and attained them and passed away, she has clung to life, and the god of this world was ever hers. She has made to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and they have remained faithful to her. Her ports grow and multiply, her trade increases, still she heaps up riches, and if she cannot tell who shall gather them, at least she is true to herself and is not dependent on the stranger or the tourist. The artist, it is said, is something of a daughter of joy, and in thinking of Florence or Venice, which live on the pleasure of the stranger, we may find the truth of a saying so obvious. Well, Genoa was never an artist. She was a leader, a merchant, with fleets, with argosies, with far-flung companies of adventure. Through her gates passed the silks and porcelains of the East, the gold of Africa, the slaves and fair women, the booty and loot of life, the trade of the world. This is her secret. She is living among the dead, who may or may not awaken. If you are surprised in her streets by the greatness of old things, it is only to find yourself face to face with the new. People, tourists do not linger in her ways--they pass on to Pisa. Genoa has too little to show them, and too much. She is not a museum, she is a city, a city of life and death and the business of the world. You will never love her as you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to look. She is like a symphony of modern music, full of immense gradual crescendos, gradual diminuendos, unknown to the old masters. Only Rome, and that but seldom, breathes with her life. But through the music of her life, so modern, so full of a sort of whining and despair in which no great resolution or heroic notes ever come, there winds an old-world melody, softly, softly, full of the sun, full of the sea, that is always the same, mysterious, ambiguous, full of promises, at her feet. III The gate of Italy, I said in speaking of her, and indeed it is one of the derivations of her name Genoa,--Janua the gate, founded, as the fourteenth-century inscription in the Duomo asserts, by Janus, a Trojan prince skilled in astrology, who, while seeking a healthy and safe place for his dwelling, sailed by chance into this bay, where was a little city founded by Janus, King of Italy, a great-grandson of Noah, and finding the place such as he wished, he gave it his name and his power. Now, whether the great-grandson of Noah was truly the original founder of the city, or Janus the Trojan, or another, it is certainly older than the Christian religion, so that some have thought that Janus, that old god who once presided at the beginning of all noble things, was the divine originator of this city also. And remembering the sun that continually makes Genoa to seem all of precious stone, of moonstone or alabaster, it seems indeed likely enough, for Janus was worshipped of old as the sun, he opened the year too, and the first month bears his name; and while on earth he was the guardian deity of gates, in heaven he was porter, and his sign was a ship; therefore he may well have taken to himself the city of ships, the gateway of Italy, Genoa. And through that gate what beautiful, terrible, and mysterious things have passed into oblivion; Saints who have perhaps seen the very face of Jesus; legions strong in the everlasting name of Caesar, that have lost themselves in the fastnesses of the North; sailors mad with the song of the sirens. On her quays burned the futile enthusiasm of the Middle Age, that coveted the Holy City and was overwhelmed in the desert. Through her streets surged Crusade after Crusade, companies of adventure, lonely hermits drunken with silence, immense armies of dreamers, the chivalry of Europe, a host of little children. On her ramparts Columbus dreamed, and in her seas he fought with the Tunisian galleys before he set sail westward for El Dorado. And here Andrea Doria beat the Turks and blockaded his own city and set her free; and S. Catherine Adorni, weary of the ways of the world, watched the galleons come out of the west, and prayed to God, and saw the wind over the sea. O beautiful and mysterious armies, O little children from afar, and thou whose adventurous name married our world, what cities have you taken, what new love have you found, what seas have your ships furrowed; whither have you fled away when Genoa was so fair? * * * * * It was about the year 50 when St. Nazarus and St. Celsus, fleeing from the terror of Nero, landed not far away to the east at Albaro, bringing with them the new religion. A lane leading down to the sea still bears the name of one of them, and, strangely as we may think, a ruined church marks the spot crowning the rock above the place, where a Temple of Venus once stood. Yet perhaps the earliest remnant of old Genoa is to be found in the Church of S. Sisto in the Via di Prè, standing as it does on the very stones of a church raised to the Pope and martyr of that name in 260. In the journey which Pope Sixtus made to Genoa he is said to have been accompanied by St. Laurence, and it is probable that a church was built not much later to him also on the site of the Duomo. However this may be, Genoa appears to have been passionately Christian, for the first authority we hear of is that of the Bishops, to whom she seems to have submitted herself enthusiastically, installing them in the old castello in that the most ancient part of the city around Piazza Sarzano and S. Maria di Castello. This castello, destroyed in the quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, as some have thought, may be found in the hall-mark of the silver vessels made here under the Republic. Very few are the remnants that have come down to us from the time of the Bishops. An inscription, however, on a house in Via S. Luca close to S. Siro remains, telling how in the year 580 S. Siro destroyed the serpent Basilisk. In the church itself a seventeenth-century fresco commemorates this monstrous deed. Of the Lombard dominion something more is left to us; the story at least of the passing of the dust of St. Augustine. It seems that at the beginning of the sixth century these sacred ashes had been brought from Africa to Cagliari to save them from the Vandals. For more than two hundred years they remained at Cagliari, when, the Saracens taking the place, Luitprand, the Lombard king, remembering S. Ambrogio and Milan, ransomed them for a great price and had them brought in 725 to Genoa, where they were shown to the people for many days. Luitprand himself came to Genoa to meet them and placed them in a silver urn, discovered at Pavia in 1695, and carried them in state across the Apennines. Some of the beautiful Lombard towers, such as S. Stefano and S. Agostino, where the ashes are said to have been exposed, remind us perhaps more nearly of the Lombard dominion. Then came Charlemagne and his knights and the great quarrel. But though Genoa now belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, she was not strong enough to defend herself from the raids of the Saracens, who in the earlier part of the tenth century burnt the city and led half the population into captivity. Perhaps it is to Otho that Genoa owes her first impulse towards greatness: he gave her a sort of freedom at any rate. And immediately after his day the Genoese began to make way against the Saracens on the seas. You may see a relic of some passing victory in the carved Turk's head on a house at the corner of Via di Prè and Vico dei Macellai. Nor was this all, for about this time Genoa seized Corsica, that fatal island which not only never gave her peace, but bred the immortal soldier who was finally to crush her and to end her life as a free power. There follow the Crusades. These splendid follies have much to do with the wealth and greatness of Genoa. It was from her port that Godfrey de Bouillon set sail in the _Pomella_ as a pilgrim in 1095. He appears to have been insulted at the very gate of Jerusalem, or, as some say, at the door of the Holy Sepulchre. At any rate he returned to Europe, where Urban II, urged by Peter the Hermit, was already half inclined to proclaim the First Crusade. Godfrey's story seems to have decided him; and, indeed, so moving was his tale, that the crowd who heard him cried out urging the Pope to act, _Dieu le veult_, the famous and fatal cry that was to lead uncounted thousands to death, and almost to widow Europe. In Genoa the war was preached furiously and with success by the Bishops of Gratz and Arles in S. Siro. An army of enthusiasts, monks, beggars, soldiers, adventurers, and thieves, moved partly by the love of Christ, partly by love of gain, gathered in Genoa. With them was Godfrey. They sailed in 1097: they besieged Antioch and took it. Content it might seem with this success, or fearful in that stony place of venturing too far from the sea, the Genoese returned, not empty. For on the way back, storm-bound perhaps in Myra, they sacked a Greek monastery there, carrying off for their city the dust of St. John Baptist, which to-day is still in their keeping. Was it the hope of loot that caused Genoa in 1099 to send even a larger company to Judaea under the great Guglielmo Embriaco, whose tower to-day is all that is left of what must once have been a city of towers? Who knows? He landed with his Genoese at Joppa, burnt his ships as Caesar did, though doubtless he thought not of it, and marching on Jerusalem found the Christians still unsuccessful and the Tomb of Christ, as now, ringed by pagan spears. But the Genoese were not to be denied. If the valour of Europe was of no avail, the contrivance of the sea, the cunning of Genoa must bring down Saladin. So they set to work and made a tower of scaffolding with ropes, with timbers, with spars saved from their ships. When this was ready, slowly, not without difficulty, surely not without joy, they hauled and heaved and drove it over the burning dust, the immense wilderness of stones and refuse that surrounded Jerusalem. Then they swarmed up with songs, with shouting, and leapt on to the walls, and over the ramparts into the Holy City, covered with blood, filled with the fury of battle, wounded, dying, mad with hatred, to the Tomb of Jesus, the empty sepulchre of God. Then eight days after came that strange election, when we offered the throne of Palestine to Godfrey of Bouillon; but he refused to wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn one of thorns, so we proclaimed him Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. But the Genoese under Embriaco as before returned home, again not without spoil. And their captain for his portion claimed the _Catino_, the famous vessel, fashioned as was thought of a single emerald, truly, as was believed, the vessel of the Holy Grail, the cup of the Last Supper, the basin of the Precious Blood. To-day, if you are fortunate, as you look at it in the Treasury of S. Lorenzo, they tell you it is only green glass, and was broken by the French who carried it to Paris. But, indeed, what crime would be too great in order to possess oneself of such a thing? It was an emerald once, and into it the Prince of Life had dipped His fingers; Nicodemus had held it in his trembling hands to catch the very life of God; who knows what saint or angry angel in the heathen days of Napoleon, foreseeing the future, snatched it away into heaven, giving us in exchange what we deserved. Surely it was an emerald once? Is it possible that a Genoese gave up all his spoil for a green glass, a cracked pipkin, a heathen wash pot, empty, valueless, a fraud?--I'll not believe it. Embriaco, however, returned once more to Palestine with his men, fighting under Godfrey at Cesarea; and again he came home in triumph, his galleys low with spoil. And indeed, though we hear no more of Embriaco, by the end of the first Crusade, Genoa had won possessions in the East,--streets in Jaffa, streets in Jerusalem, whole quarters in Antioch, Cesarea, Tyre, and Acre, not to speak of an inscription in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "Prepotens Genuensium Presidium," which Godfrey had carved there, while the Pope gave them their cross of St. George as arms, which, as some say, we got from them. Strangely as we may think, in the second Crusade, and even in the third, so disastrous for the Christian arms, Genoa bore no part; no part, that is, in the fighting, though in the matter of commissariat and shipping she was not slow to come forward and make a fortune. And indeed, she had enough to do at home; for Pisa, no less slow to join the Crusades, became her enemy, jealous of her growing power and of her possession of Corsica, so that in 1120 war broke out between them, which scarcely ceased till Pisa was finally beaten on the sea, and the chains of Porto Pisano were hanging on the Palazzo di S. Giorgio. Soon, however, Genoa was engaged in a more profitable business, an affair after her own heart, in which valour was not its own reward,--I mean, in the expedition in 1147 against the Moors in Spain. Certainly the Pope, Eugenius III it was, urged them to it, but so they had been urged to fight against Saladin without arousing enthusiasm. Yet in this new cause all Genoa was at fever heat. Wherefore? Well, Granada was a great and wealthy city, whereas Jerusalem was a ruined village. So they sent thirty thousand men with sixty galleys and one hundred and sixty transports to Almeria, which after some hard fighting, for your Moor was never a coward, they took, with a huge booty. In the next year they took Tortosa, and returned home laden with spoil, silver lamps for the shrine of St. John Baptist, for instance, and women and slaves. Still, Genoa had no peace, for we find her making a stout and successful defence shortly after against Frederic I, the whole city, men, women, and children, on his approach from Lombardy, building a great wall about the city in fifty-three days, of which feat Porta S. Andrea remains the monument. Then followed that pestilence of Guelph and Ghibelline; out of which rose the names of the great families, robbers, oppressors, tyrants,--Avvocato, Spinola, Doria, the Ghibellines, with the Guelphs, Castelli, Fieschi, Grimaldi. Nor was Genoa free of them till the great Admiral Andrea Doria crushed them for ever. Yet peace of a sort there was, now and again, in 1189 for instance, when Saladin won back Jerusalem, and the Guelph nobles volunteered in a body to serve against him, leaving Genoa to the Ghibellines, who established the foreign Podestà for the first time to rule the city. But this gave them no peace, for still the nobles fought together, and if one family became too powerful, confusion became worse confounded, for Guelph and Ghibelline joined together to bring it low. Thus in the thirteenth century you find Ghibelline Doria linked with the Guelph Grimaldi and Fieschi to break Ghibelline Spinola. The aspect of the city at that time was certainly very different from the city of to-day, which is mainly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where it is not quite modern. Then each family had its tower, from which it fought or out of which it issued, making the streets a shambles as it followed the enemy home or sought him out. The ordinary citizen must have had an anxious time of it with these bands of idle cut-throats at large. But by the close of the twelfth century the towers, at any rate, had been destroyed by order of the Consuls, the only one left being that which we see to-day, Torre degli Embriachi, left as a monument to a cunning valour. The thirteenth century saw the domination of the Spinola family, or rather of one branch of it, the Luccoli Spinola, which as opposed to the old S. Luca branch seems to have lived nearer the country and the woods, and was apparently most disastrous for the internal peace of the city; and indeed, until the Luccoli were beaten and exiled, as happened in the beginning of the fourteenth century, there could be no peace; truly the only peace Genoa knew in those days was that of a foreign war, when the great lords went out against Pisa or Venice. The Venetian war, unlike that against Pisa, ended disastrously. Its origin was a question of trade in the East, where the Comneni had given certain rights to Genoa which on their fall the Venetians refused to respect. The quarrel came to a head in that cause of so many quarrels, the island of Crete, for the Marquis of Monferrat had sold it to the Venetians while he offered it to the Genoese, he himself having received it as spoil in the fourth Crusade. In this quarrel with Venice, Genoa certainly at first had the best of it. In 1261, or thereabout, she founded two colonies at Pera and Caffa, on the Bosphorus and in the Euxine, thus adding to her empire, which was rather a matter of business than of dominion. This is illustrated very effectually by the history of the Bank of St. George, which from this time till its dissolution at the end of the eighteenth century was, as it were, the heart of Genoa. It was Guglielmo Boccanegra, the grandfather of a more famous son, who built the palace which, as we now see it on the quay, is so sad and ruinous a monument to the independent greatness of the city. And since its stones were, as it is said, brought from Constantinople, where Michael Paleologus had given the Genoese the Venetian fortress of Pancratone, it is really a monument of the hatred of Genoa for Venice that we see there, the principal door being adorned with three lions' heads, part of the spoil of that Venetian fortress. This palace, on the death of Boccanegra, Captain of the People, was used by the city as an office for the registration of the _compere_ or public loans, which dated from 1147 and the Moorish expedition. From the time of the foundation of the Bank the shares were, like our consols, to be bought and sold and were guaranteed by the city herself, though it was not till 1407 that the loans were consolidated and the Palazzo delle Compere, as it was called, became the Banco di S. Giorgio. Indeed, though its real power may be doubted, it administered, in name at any rate, the colonies of Genoa after the fall of Constantinople. Of the building itself I speak elsewhere; it is rather to its place in the story of Genoa that I have wished here to draw attention. And it was now, indeed, that Genoa reached, perhaps, the zenith of her power. For in 1284 comes the great victory of Meloria, which laid Pisa low. Enraged partly at the success of Genoa in the East, partly at her growing power and general wealth, Pisa, with that extraordinary flaming and ruthless energy so characteristic of her, determined to dispose of Genoa once and for all. Nor were the Genoese unwilling to meet her. Indeed, they urged her to it. The two fleets, bearing some sixty thousand men, that of Pisa commanded by a Venetian, Andrea Morosini, that of Genoa by Oberto Doria, met at Meloria, not far from Bocca d'Arno, when the Pisans were utterly defeated, partly owing to the treachery of the immortal Count Ugolino, who sailed away without striking a blow.[1] Yet in spite of her defeat Pisa carried on the war for four years, when she sued for peace, which, however, she could not keep, so that in 1290 we find Corrado Doria sailing into the Porto Pisano, breaking the chain which guarded it, and carrying it back to Genoa, where part of it hung as a trophy till our own time on the façade of the Palazzo di S. Giorgio. Nor were the Genoese content, for soon after this victory we find them, led by Lamba Doria, utterly beating the Venetians at Curzola, in the Adriatic, where they took a famous prisoner, Messer Marco Polo, just returned from Asia. They brought him back to Genoa, where he remained in prison for nearly two years, and wrote his masterpiece. Whether it was the influence of so illustrious a captive, or merely the natural expression of their own splendid and adventurous spirit, about this time the Doria fitted out two galleys to explore the western seas, and to try to reach India by way of the sunset. Tedisio Doria and the brothers Vivaldi with some Franciscans set out on this adventure, and never returned. With the fourteenth century Genoa for a time threw off the yoke of her great nobles, Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi. The wave of revolt that passed over Europe at this time certainly left Genoa freer than she had ever been. The people had claimed to name their own "Abbate," in opposition to the Captain of the People. They chose by acclamation Simone Boccanegra, who, however, seeing that he was to have no power, refused the office. "If he will not be Abbate," cried a voice in the crowd, "let him be Doge"; and seeing the enthusiasm of the people, this great man allowed himself to be borne to S. Siro, where he was crowned first Doge of Genoa for life. The nobles seem to have been afraid to interfere, so great was the eagerness of the people. And it was about this time that the Grimaldi, driven out of Genoa, seized Monaco, which by the sufferance of Europe they hold to-day. It is true, that for a time in 1344 the nobles gathered an army and returned to Genoa, Boccanegra resigning and exiling himself in Pisa; but twelve years later he was back again, ruling with temperance and wisdom that great city, which was now queen of the Mediterranean sea. To follow the fortunes of the Republic one would need to write a book. It must be sufficient to say here that by the middle of the century war broke out with Venice, and was at first disastrous for Genoa. Then once more a Doria, Pagano it was, led her to victory at Sapienza, off the coast of Greece, where thirty-one Genoese galleys fought thirty-six of Venice and took them captive. But the nobles were never quiet, always they plotted the death of the Doge Giovanni da Morta, or Boccanegra. It was with the latter they were successful in 1363, when they poisoned him at a banquet in honour of the King of Cyprus--for they had possessed themselves of a city in that island. Thus the nobles came back into Genoa, Adorni, Fregosi, Guarchi, Montaldi, this time; lesser men, but not less disastrous for the liberty of Genoa than the older families. So they fought among themselves for mastery, till the Adorni, fearing to be beaten, sold the city to Charles VI of France, who made them his representative and gave them the government. And all this time the war with Venice continued. At first it promised success,--at Pola, for instance, where Luciano Doria was victorious, but at last beaten at Chioggia, and not knowing where to turn to make terms, the supremacy of the seas passed from Genoa to Venice, peace coming at last in 1381. Then the Genoese turned their attention to the affairs of their city. In the first year of the fifteenth century they rose to throw off the French yoke. But France was not so easily disposed of. She sent Marshal Boucicault to rule in Genoa; and he built the Castelletto, which was destroyed only a few years ago in our father's time. In 1409, however, Boucicault thought to gain Milan, for Gian Galeazzo Visconti was dead. In his absence the Genoese rose and threw out the French, preferring their own tyrants. These, Adorni, Montaldi, Fregosi, fought together till Tommaso Fregosi, fearing that the others might prove too strong for him, sold the city to Filippo Maria Visconti, tyrant of Milan. So the Visconti came to rule in Genoa. This period, full of the confusion of the petty wars of Italy, while Sforza was plotting for his dukedom and Malatesta was building his Rocca in Rimini; while the Pope was a fugitive, and the kingdom of Naples in a state of anarchy, is famous, so far as Genoa is concerned, for her victory at sea over King Alfonso of Aragon, pretender against René of Anjou to the throne of Naples. The Visconti sided with the House of Anjou, and Genoa, in their power for the moment, fought with them; so that Biagio Assereto, in command of the Genoese fleet, not only defeated the Aragonese, but took Alfonso prisoner, together with the King of Navarre and many nobles. That victory, strangely enough, made an end of the rule of the Visconti in Genoa. For, seeing his policy led that way, Filippo Maria Visconti ordered the Genoese to send their illustrious prisoners to Milan, where he made much of them, fearing now rather the French than the Spaniards, since the Genoese had disposed of the latter and so made the French all-powerful. This spoliation, however, enraged the Genoese, who joined the league of Florence and Venice, deserting Milan. At the word of Francesco Spinola they rose, in 1436, killed the Milanese governor outside the Church of S. Siro, and once more declared a Republic. To little purpose, as it proved, for the feuds betwixt the great families continued, so that by 1458 we find Pietro Fregosi, fearing the growing power of the Adorni, and hard pressed by King Alfonso, who never forgave an injury, handing over Genoa to Charles VIII of France. Meantime, in 1453, Constantinople had fallen before Mahomet, and the colony of Galata was thus lost to Genoa. And though in this sorry business the Genoese seem to be less blameworthy than the rest of Christendom--for they with but four galleys defeated the whole Turkish fleet--Genoa suffered in the loss of Galata more than the rest, a fact certainly not lost upon Venice and Naples, who refused to move against the Turk, though the honour of Europe was pledged in that cause. But all Italy was in a state of confusion. Sforza, that fox who had possessed himself of the March of Ancona, and had never fought in any cause but his own, on the death of Visconti had with almost incredible guile seized Milan. He it was who helped the Genoese to throw out the French, only to take Genoa for himself. A man of splendid force and confidence, he ruled wisely, and alone of her rulers up to this time seems to have been regretted when, in 1466, he died, and was succeeded in the Duchy of Milan by his son Galeazzo. This man was a tyrant, and ruled like a barbarian, till his assassination in 1476. There followed a brief space of liberty in Genoa, liberty endangered every moment by the quarrels of the nobles, who at last proposed to divide the city among them, and would have thus destroyed their fatherland, had not Il Moro, Ludovico Sforza of Milan, intervened and possessed himself of Genoa, which he held till 1499, when Louis XII of France defeated him, Genoa placing herself under his protection. Meanwhile Columbus, that mystical dreamer who might have restored to Genoa all and more than all she had lost in colonial dominion, was born and grew up in those narrow streets, and played on the lofty ramparts and learned the ways of ships. Genoa in her proud confusion heard him not, so he passed to Salamanca and the Dominicans, and set sail from Cadiz. Yet he never forgot Genoa, and indeed it is characteristic of those great men who are without honour in their own country, that they are ever mindful of her who has rejected them. The beautiful letter written to the Bank of St. George in 1498 from Seville, as he was about to set out on what proved to be his last voyage, is witness to this. "Although my body," he writes, "is here, my heart is always with you. God has been more bountiful to me than to any one since David's time. The success of my enterprise is already clear, and would be still more clear if the Government did not cover it with a veil. I sail again for the Indies in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, and I return at once; but as I know I am but mortal, I charge my son Don Diego to pay you yearly and for ever the tenth part of all my revenue, in order to lighten the toll on wine and corn. If this tenth part is large you are welcome to it; if small, believe in my good wish. May the Most Holy Trinity guard your noble persons and increase the lustre of your distinguished office." Such were the last words of Columbus to his native city. You may see his birthplace, the very house in which he was born, on your left in the Borgo dei Lanajoli, as you go down from the Porta S. Andrea. It was in 1499 that Louis of France got possession of Genoa. He held the city, cowed as it was, till 1507, when, goaded into rebellion by insufferable wrongs, the people rose and threw out his Frenchmen with their own nobles, choosing as their Doge Paolo da Novi, a dyer of silk, one of themselves. Not for long, however, was Paolo to rule in Genoa, for Louis retook the city, and Paolo, who had fled to Pisa, was captured as he sailed for Rome, and put to death. It was now that it came into the mind of Louis, who had learned nothing from experience, to build another fort like to the Castelletto, to wit the Briglia, to bridle the city. This he did, yet there lay the bridle on which he was to be ridden back to France. For the Genoese never forgave him his threat, which stood before them day by day, so that at the first opportunity, Julius II, Pope and warrior, helping them, they rose again, and again the French departed. And in 1515 Louis died, and Francis I ruled in his stead. Then, the nobles of Genoa quarrelling as ever among themselves, Fregoso agreed with the French king, who made him governor of the city. The Adorni, angry at this, made overtures to the Emperor, Charles V it was, who sent General Pescara and twenty thousand men to take the city. There followed that most bloody sack, to the cry of Spain and Adorni, which lives in history and in the hearts of the Genoese to this day. This happened in 1522, and thereafter Antoniotto Adorni became Doge as a reward for his treachery. But already the deliverer was at hand, scarcely to be distinguished at first from an enemy. Five years were the length of Adorni's rule, and all that time the French attacked and strove for the city, and in their ranks fought he who was the deliverer, Andrea Doria, Lord Admiral of Genoa, the saviour of his country. Then in 1527 the French got possession of Genoa. Now Filippino Doria, nephew to the Admiral, had won a victory in the Gulf of Palermo over the Spanish fleet. But Francis, that brilliant fool, thought nothing of this service, though he claimed the prisoners for himself, for he liked the ransom well. Then the Admiral, touched in his pride, threw over the French cause and joined the Emperor. In 1528 a common action between the fleet under Doria and the populace within the city once more threw out the French, and Doria entered Genoa amid the acclamation of the multitude, knight of the Golden Fleece and Prince of Melfi. This extraordinary and heroic sailor, born at Oneglia in 1466 or 1468 of one of the princely houses of Genoa, before 1503 had served under many Italian lords. It was in 1513 that he first had the command of the fleet of Genoa, while three years later he defeated the Turks at Pianosa. He helped Francis into Genoa and he threw him out; while he lived he ruled the city he had twice subdued, and his glory was hers. Yet truly it might seem that all Doria did was but to transfer Genoa from the Spaniard to the Frenchman and back again. In reality, he won her for himself. He drove the French not only out of Genoa, but out of her dominion. He filled up the port of Savona with stones, because she had under French influence sought to rival Genoa. With him Genoa ruled the sea, and with his death her greatness departed. And he was as liberal as he was powerful. Charles V knew him, and let him alone. He himself as Lord of Genoa gave her back her liberties, set up the Senate again, opened the Golden Book, Il Libro d'Oro, and wrote in it the names of those who should rule; then he set up a parliament, the Grand Council of Four Hundred, and the old quarrels were forgotten, and there was peace. But who could rule the Genoese, greedy as their sea, treacherous as their winds, proud as their sun, deep as their sky, cruel as their rocks! If the Admiral had brought the Adorni and the Fregosi low, there yet remained the Fieschi, old as the Doria, Guelph too, while they had been Ghibelline. It is true that the old quarrels were done with, yet strangely enough it was on the Pope's behalf that the Fieschi plotted against the Doria. Now, Pope Paul III had been Doria's friend. In 1535 he had for a remembrance of his love given the Admiral that great sword which still hangs in S. Matteo. But now, when Andrea's brother, Abbate di San Fruttuoso came to die, and it was known that he had left the Admiral much property close to Naples, the Pope, swearing that the estates of an ecclesiastic necessarily returned to the Church, claimed Andrea's inheritance. But the Admiral thought differently. Ordering Giannettino, his nephew, to take the fleet to Civitavecchia, he seized the Pope's galleys and had them brought to Genoa. Now, when the Genoese saw this strange capture convoyed into Genoa--so the tale goes--they were afraid, and crowded round the old Admiral, demanding wherefore he made war on the Church, and some shouted sacrilege and others profanation, while others again besought him with tears what it meant. And he answered, so that all might hear, that it meant that his galleys were stronger than those of His Holiness. Then the Pope, knowing his man, gave way, but forgot it not. So that he called Gian Luigi Fieschi to him, the head of that family, a Guelph of a Guelph stock, and put it into his mind to rise against the Admiral, and to hold Genoa himself under the protection of Francis I. The blow fell on 1st January 1547. Now, on the day before, the Admiral was unwell and lay a bed, so that Fieschi waited on him in the most friendly way, and, as it is said, kissed many times the two lads, grand-nephews of the Admiral, who played about the room. Not many hours later, the Fieschi were in the streets rousing the city. Giannettino, nephew to the Admiral, hearing the tumult, ran to the Porta S. Tommaso to hold it and enter the city, but that gate was already lost, and he himself soon dead. Truly, all seemed lost when Fieschi, going to seize the galleys, slipped from a plank into the water, and his armour drowned him. Then the House of Doria rallied, and their cry rang through the city; little by little they thrust back their enemies, they hemmed them in, they trod them under foot; before dawn all that were left of the Fieschi were flying to Montobbio, their castle in the mountains. Thus the Admiral gave peace to Genoa, nor was he content with the exile or death of his foes, for he destroyed also all their palaces, villas, and castles, spoiling thus half the city, and making way for the palaces which have named Genoa the City of Palaces, and which we know to-day. For thirteen years longer Andrea Doria reigned in Genoa, dying at last in 1560. And at his death all that might make Genoa so proud departed with him. In 1565 she lost Chios, the last of her possessions in the East, and before long she lay once more in the hands of foreigners, not to regain her liberty till in 1860 Italy rose up out of chaos and her sea bore the Thousand of Garibaldi to Sicily, to Marsala, to free the Kingdom. IV As you stand under those strange arcades that run under the houses facing the port, all that most ancient story of Genoa seems actual, possible; it is as though in some extraordinarily vivid dream you had gone back to less uniform days, when the beauty and the ugliness of the world struggled for mastery, before the overwhelming victory of the machine had enthroned ugliness and threatened the dominion of the soul of man. In that shadowy place, where little shops like caverns open on either side, with here a woman grinding coffee, there a shoe-maker at his last, yonder a smith making copper pipkins, a sailor buying ropes, an old woman cheapening apples, everything seems to have stood still from century to century. There you will surely see the _mantilla_ worn as in Spain, while the smell of ships, whose masts every now and then you may see, a whole forest of them, in the harbour, the bells of the mules, the splendour of the most ancient sun, remind you only of old things, the long ways of the great sea, the roads and the deserts and the mountains, the joy that cometh with the morning, so that there at any rate Genoa is as she ever was, a city of noisy shadowy ways, cool in the heat, full of life, movement, merchandise, and women. And as it happens, this shadowy arcade, so close to the hotels (under which, indeed, you must make your way to reach one of the oldest of these hostelries, the Hôtel de la Ville), is a place to which the traveller returns again and again, weary of the garish modernity that has spoiled so much of the city, far at least from the tram lines that have made of so many Italian cities a pandemonium. It is from this characteristic pathway between the little shops that one should set out to explore Genoa. Passing along this passage eastward, you soon come to the Bank of St. George, that black Dogana, built with Venetian stones from Constantinople, a monument of hatred and perhaps of love,--hatred of the Venetians, of the Pisans too, for here till our own time hung the iron chains of Porto Pisano that Corrado Doria took in 1290; and of love, since it was to preserve Genoa and her dominion that the Banca was founded. Over the door you may still see remnants of the device the Guelph Fieschi Pope, Innocent VII, gave to his native city when he came to see her, the griffin of Genoa strangling the imperial eagle and the fox of Pisa; while under is the motto, _Griphus ut has agit, sic hostes Genua frangit_. It was Guglielmo Boccanegra who built the place, as the inscription reminds you,--it was his palace. But only the façade landward remains from his time, with the lions' heads, the great hall and the façade seaward dating from 1571, eleven years after Doria's death. In the tower is the old bell which used to summon the Grand Council; it is of seventeenth-century work, and was presented to the Bank by the Republic of Holland.[2] Within, the palace is a ruin, only the Hall of Grand Council being in any way worth a visit. Here you may see statues of the chief benefactors of the city from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. And by a curious device worthy of this city of merchants, each citizen got a statue according to his gifts. Those who save 100,000 lire were carved sitting there, while those who gave but half this were carved standing; less rich and less liberal benefactors got a bust or a mere commemorative stone, each according to his liberality, and this (strangely we may think), in a city so religious that it is dedicated to Madonna, might seem to leave nothing for the widow with her mite who gave more than they all. One comes out of that dirty and ruined place, that was once so splendid, with a regret that modern Italy, which is so eager to build grandiose banks and every sort of public building, is yet so regardless of old things that one might fancy her history only began in 1860. Mr. Le Mesurier, in the interesting book already referred to, has suggested that this old palace, so full of memories of Genoa's greatness, should be used by the municipality as a museum for Genoese antiquities. I should like to raise my voice with his in this cause so worthy of the city we have loved. Is it still true of her, that though she is proud she is not proud enough? Is it to be said of her who sped Garibaldi on his first adventure, that all her old glory is forgotten, that she is content with mere wealth, a thing after all that she is compelled to share with the latest American encampment, in which competition she cannot hope to excel? But she who holds in her hands the dust of St. John Baptist, who has seen the cup of the Holy Grail, whose sons stormed Jerusalem and wept beside the Tomb of Jesus, through whose streets the bitter ashes of Augustine have passed, and in whose heart Columbus was conceived, and a great Admiral and a great Saint, is worthy of remembrance. Let her gather the beautiful or curious remnants of her great days about her now in the day of small things, that out of past splendour new glory may rise, for she also has ancestors, and, like the sun, which shall rise to-morrow, has known splendour of old. As you leave the Banca di S. Giorgio, if you continue on your way you will come on to the great ramparts, where you may see the sea, and so you will leave Genoa behind you; but if, returning a little on your way, you turn into the Piazza Banchi, you will be really in the heart of the old city, in front of the sixteenth-century Exchange, Loggia dei Banchi, where Luca Pinelli was crucified for opposing a Fregoso Doge who wished to sell Livorno to Florence. Passing thence into the street of the jewellers, Strada degli Orefici, where every sort of silver filigree work may be found, with coral and amber, you come to Madonna of the Street Corner, a Virgin and Child, with S. Lo, the patron of all sorts of smiths, a seventeenth-century work of Piola. These narrow shadowy ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think,--little enough but just life. For Genoa is not a museum: she lives, and the laughter of her children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the only one that is immortal. With this thought in your heart (as it is sure to be everywhere in Italy) you return (as one continually does) to the Arcades, and turning to the left you follow them till you come to Via S. Lorenzo, in which is the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its heart, hidden away among the houses of life. It was built on the site of a church which commemorated the passing of S. Lorenzo through Genoa. Much of the present church is work of the twelfth century, such as the side doors and the walls, but the façade was built early in the fourteenth century, while the tower and the choir were not finished till 1617. The dome was made by Galeazzo Alessi, the Perugian who built so much in Genoa, as we shall see later. Possibly the bas-reliefs strewn on the north wall are work of the Roman period, but they are not of much interest save to an archeologist. Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is it very rich or lovely. Some work of Matteo Civitali is still to be seen in a side chapel on the left, but the only remarkable thing in the church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III, our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa, Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St. Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of France, Don John of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows, Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the wilderness. Other curious, strange, and wonderful things, too, S. Lorenzo holds for us in her treasury: a piece of the True Cross set in a cruciform casket of gold crusted with precious stones, stolen, as most relics have been, this one from the Venetians in the fourth Crusade, when the Emperor Baldwin, whom Venice had crowned, sent it as gift to Pope Innocent III by a Venetian galley, which, caught in a storm, took shelter in Modone in Hellas, where two Genoese galleys found her and, having looted her, sent the relic to S. Lorenzo in Genoa magnanimously, as Giustiniani says. Here also beside this wonder you may see the cup of the Holy Grail, stolen by the French, who, forced to return it, sent this broken green glass in place of the perfect emerald they carried away; or maybe, who knows, it was but glass in the beginning. Yet, indeed, the Genoese paid a great price for it, thinking it truly the emerald of the Precious Blood, but they may have deceived themselves in the joy that followed the winning of the Holy City: though that is not like Genoa. However this may be, and with relics you are as like to be right as wrong whatever your opinion, there is but little else worth seeing in S. Lorenzo. As you follow the Via S. Lorenzo upwards, you come presently on your left to the Piazza Umberto Primo, in which is the Palazzo Ducale, the ancient palace of the Doges, rebuilt finally in 1777; and at last, still ascending, you find yourself in the great shapeless Piazza Deferrari, with its statue to Garibaldi, while at the top of the Via S. Lorenzo on your right is the Church of S. Ambrogio, built by Pallavicini, with three pictures, a Guido Reni, the Assumption of the Virgin, and two Rubens, the Circumcision and S. Ignatius healing a madman. Not far away (for you turn into Piazza Deferrari and take the second street to the left, Strada S. Matteo) is the great Doria Church of S. Matteo, in black and white marble, a sort of mausoleum of the Doria family. Now, the family of Doria, one of the most ancient in Genoa, the Spinola clan alone being older, emerges really about 1100, and takes its rise, we are told, from Arduin, a knight of Narbonne, who, resting in Genoa on his way to Jerusalem, married Oria, a daughter of the Genoese house of della Volta. However this may be, in 1125 a certain Martino Doria founded the Church of S. Matteo, which has since remained the burial-place and monument of his race. Martino Doria is said to have become a monk, and to have died in the monastery of S. Fruttuoso at Portofino, where, too, lie many of the Doria family; but certainly as early as 1298 S. Matteo became the monument of the Doria greatness, for Lamba Doria, the victor of Curzola, where he beat the Venetian fleet, was laid here, as you may see from the inscription on the old sarcophagus at the foot of the façade of the church to the right. The façade itself is covered with inscriptions in honour of various members of the family: first, to Lamba, with an account of the battle. It reads as follows: "To the glory of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the year 1298, on Sunday 7 September, this angel was taken in Venetian waters in the city of Curzola, and in that place was the battle of 76 Genoese galleys with 86 Venetian galleys, of which 84 were taken by the noble Lord Lamba Doria, then Captain and Admiral of the Commune and of the People of Genoa, with the men on them, of which he brought back to Genoa alive as prisoners 7400, along with 18 galleys, and the other 66 he caused to be burnt in the said Venetian waters,--he died at Savona in 1323."[3] It was in this engagement that Marco Polo was taken prisoner and brought to Genoa. The second inscription on this façade refers to the battle of Sapienza, when in 1354 Pagano Doria beat the Venetians off the coast of Greece. It reads as follows:[4] "In honour of God and the Blessed Mary. In the fourth day of November 1354, the noble Lord Pagano Doria with 31 Genoese galleys, at the Island of Sapienza, fought and took 36 Venetian galleys and four ships, and led to Genoa 1400 men alive as captives with their captain." The third inscription deals again with a defeat of the Venetian fleet, by Luciano Doria in 1379. It reads as follows:[5] "To the glory of God and the Blessed Mary. In the year 1379, on the 5th day of May, in the Gulf of the Venetians near Pola, there was a battle of 22 Genoese galleys with 22 galleys of the Venetians, in which were 4075 men-at-arms and many other men from Pola; of which galleys 16 were taken with all that was in them by the noble Lord Luciano Doria, Captain General of the Commune of Genoa, who in the said battle while fighting valiantly met his death. The sixteen galleys of the Venetians were conducted into Genoa with 2407 captive men." The fourth inscription refers to the earlier victory of Oberto Doria over the Pisans. It is as follows:[6] "In the name of the Holy Trinity, in the year of Our Lord 1284, on the 6th day of August, the high and mighty Lord Oberto Doria, at that time Captain and Admiral of the Commune and of the Genoese people, triumphed in the Pisan waters over the Pisans, taking from them 33 galleys with 7 sunk and all the rest put to flight, and with many dead men left in the waters; and he returned to Genoa with a great multitude of captives, so that 7272 were placed in the prisons. There was taken Andrea Morosini of Venice, then Podestà and Captain General in war of the Commune of Pisa, with the standard of the Commune, captured by the galleys of Doria and brought to this church with the seal of the Commune, and there was also taken Loto, the son of Count Ugolino, and a great part of the Pisan nobility." The fifth inscription refers to the victory of Filippino Doria, nephew to the great Admiral over the Spanish galleys in the Gulf of Salerno, which led Andrea, to the consternation of Genoa, to attack the Pope's galleys at Civitavecchia. Within, the church was altered in 1530 by Montorsoli, the Florentine who was brought from Florence by the Admiral. And there above the high altar hangs his sword, given him by Pope Paul III, his friend and enemy. There, too, in the left aisle is the Doria chapel, with a picture of Andrea and his wife kneeling before our Lord. In the crypt, which was decorated in stucco by Montorsoli, you may see his tomb. Questo è quel Doria, che fa dai Pirati Sicuro il vostro mar per tutti i lati. The beautiful cloister contains the statues of Andrea and Giovandrea, broken by the people in 1797. Close by is the Doria Palace, given by the Republic to Andrea when he refused the office of Doge. It is decorated with the privileged black and white marble, and bears the inscription, _Senat. Cons. Andreae de Oria Patriae Liberatori Munus Publicium_. If you return from S. Matteo to the Piazza Deferrari and then follow the Via Carlo Felice (and without some sort of guidance such as this you are like to be lost in the maze of the city) on your way to the beautiful Piazza Fontane Marose, you pass on your left the Palazzo Pallavicini, empty now of all its treasures. On your right as you enter this square of palaces is the Palazzo della Casa, once the Palazzo Spinola, decorated with the black and white marble, built in the early part of the fifteenth century, in the place where the old tower of that great family once stood. It is the palace of the oldest Genoese family, and the statues in the façade represent the most famous members of the clan, as Oberto, the son of the founder of this branch of the race, the Luccoli Spinola, Conrado, who ruled the city in 1206, and Opizino, who married his daughter to Theodore Paleologus, Emperor of Constantinople, and lived like a king and was banished in 1309. The palace itself is said to have been built with the remains of the Fieschi palace which the Senate destroyed in 1336. Beyond it rise the Palazzo Negrone and the Palazzo Pallavicini, while opposite the Negrone Palace the Via Nuova, now called Via Garibaldi (for the Italians have a bad habit of renaming their old streets), opens, a vista of palaces, where all the greatness and splendour of Genoa rise up before you in houses of marble, and courtyards musical with fountains, walls splendid with frescoes, and rooms full of pictures. Before passing into this street of palaces, however, the traveller should follow the difficult Salita di S. Caterina, which climbs between Palazzo della Casa and Palazzo Negrone towards the Acqua Sola, that lovely garden, passing on his way the old Palazzo Spinola, where many an old and precious canvas still hangs on the walls, and the spoiled frescoes of the beautiful portico are fading in the sun. It is perhaps in the Via Garibaldi, Via Cairoli, and Via Balbi, avenues of palaces narrow because of the summer sun, bordered on either side by triumphant slums, that the real Genoa splendid and living may best be surprised. Here, amid all the grave and yet homely magnificence of the princes of the State, life, with a brilliance and a misery all its own, ebbs and flows, and is not to be denied. Between two palaces of marble, silent, and full maybe of the masterpieces of dead painters, you may catch sight of the city of the people, a "truogolo" perhaps with a great fountain in the midst, where the girls and women are washing clothes, and the children, whole companies of them, play about the doorways, while above, the houses, and indeed the court itself, are bright with coloured cloths and linen drying in the wind and the sun. It is a city like London that you discover, living fiercely and with all its might, but without the brutality of our more terrible life, where as here wealth rises up in the midst of poverty, only here wealth is noble and without the blatancy and self-satisfaction you find in our squares, and poverty has not lost all its joyfulness, its air of simplicity and romance, as it has with us. It is these palaces, so noble and, as one might think, so deserted, that Galeazzo Alessi built in the sixteenth century for the nobles of Genoa. And it is his work, whole streets of it, that has named the city the City of Palaces, as we say, and has given her something of that proud look which clings to her in her title, La Superba. Yet not altogether from the magnificence of her old streets has this name come to her, but in part from the character of her people, and in great measure, too, from her brave position there between the mountains and the sea, a city of precious stone in an amphitheatre of noble hills. Nothing that Genoa could build, steal, or win could even be so splendid as that birthright of hers, her place among the mountains on the shores of the great sea. As one enters Via Garibaldi from Piazza Marose down the vistaed street where a precious strip of the blue sky seems more lovely for the shadowy way, the first house on the right is Palazzo Cambiaso, built by Alessi, while on the left, No. 2, is Palazzo Gambaro, which belonged to the Cambiaso family. No. 3 on the right is Palazzo Parodi, another of Alessi's works, built in 1567 for Franco Lercaro; No. 4 is Palazzo Carega; No. 5, Palazzo Spinola, again by Alessi; while Palazzo Giorgio Doria, No. 6, was also built by him. Here, beside frescoes by the Genoese Luca Cambiaso, you may find a Vandyck, a portrait of a lady and a Sussanah by Veronese. In the Palazzo Adorno too, No. 10, the work of Alessi, you may find several fine pictures, among them three trionfi in the manner of Botticelli, and a Rubens; while in Palazzo Serra, No. 12, but you may not enter, there is a fine hall. The Palazzo Municipale, built by Rocco Lurago at the end of the sixteenth century, has five frescoes of the life of the Doge Grimaldi, and Paganini's violin, a Guarnerius, on which Señor Sarasate played not long ago. It is, however, in Palazzo Rosso, No. 18, possibly a work of Alessi's, that you may see what these Genoese palaces really are, for the Marchesa Maria Brignole-Sale, to whom it belonged, presented it to the city in 1874. It is into a vestibule, desolate enough certainly, that you pass out of the life of the street, and, ascending the great bare staircase, come at last on the third storey into the picture gallery. There is after all, but little to see; for, splendid though some of the pictures may once have been, they are now for the most part ruined. There remains, however, a Moretto, the portrait of a Physician, and the portrait of the Marchese Antonio Giulio Brignole-Sale on horseback, the beautiful work of Vandyck. Looking at this picture and its fellow, the portrait of the Marchesa, it is with sorrow we remember the fate that has befallen so many of Vandyck's masterpieces painted in this city. For either they have been carried away, like the magnificent group of the Lommellini family to Edinburgh, the Marchesa Brignole with her child to England, or they have been repainted and spoiled. It was in 1621, on the 3rd October, that Vandyck, mounted on "the best horse in Rubens' stables," set out from Antwerp for Italy. After staying a short while in Brussels, he journeyed without further delay across France to Genoa. With him came Rubens' friend, Cavaliere Giambattista Nani. He reached Genoa on 20th November, where his friends of the de Wael family greeted him. The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to complain of her ingratitude. He appears to have set himself to paint in the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to have won for himself, with such work as the Young Bacchantes, now in Lord Belper's collection, or the Drunken Silenus, now in Brussels, a reputation but little inferior to his master's. Certainly at this time his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till he had been to Venice, Mantua, and Rome that the influence of Italy and the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious occupation with detail, the over-emphasis of northern work, the mere boisterousness, without any real distinction, that too often spoils Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanises him, gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin refinement too, so that we are ready to forget he was Rubens' country-man, and think of him often enough as an Englishman, endowed as he was with much of the delicate and lovely genius of so many of our artists, full of a passionate yet shy strength, that some may think is the result of continual communion with Latin things, with Italy and Italian work, Italian verse, Italian painting, on the part of a race not Latin, but without the immobility, the want of versatility, common to the Germans, which has robbed them of any great painter since the early Renaissance, and in politics has left them to be the last people of Europe to win emancipation. Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may be found in the work of Vandyck on his return to Genoa, really a new thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness, in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this journey to the south in the sketch-book in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all that we have come to consider as especially his own. We may understand how the pride and boisterous magnificence of Rubens came to seem a little insistent a little stupid too, beside Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St. Anne now in the Louvre, which he notes in Milan, or that Last Supper which is now but a shadow on the wall of S. Maria delle Grazie. And above all, we may see how the true splendour of Titian exposes the ostentation of Rubens, as the sun will make even the greatest fire look dingy and boastful. Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene spirit, becomes aware of this, and, led by the immeasurable glory of the Venetians, slowly escapes from that "Flemish manner" to be master of himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalised the tragedy of a king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lovely as a violet, of Henrietta Maria, and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ and the Pharisees, is in the Palazzo Bianco, not far from Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David, very like the altar-piece at Rouen; a good Ruysdael, with some characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo; and while the Italian pictures are negligible, though some paintings and drawings of the Genoese school may interest us in passing, it is characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be with the foreign work there. As you leave Via Garibaldi and pass down Via Cairoli, on your left you pass Via S. Siro. Turning down this little way, you come almost immediately to the Church of S. Siro. The present building dates from the seventeenth century, but the old church, then called Dei Dodici Apostoli, was the Cathedral of Genoa. It was close by that the blessed Sirus "drew out the dreadful serpent named Basilisk in the year 550." What this serpent may really have been no one knows, but Carlone has painted the scene in fresco in S. Siro. Returning to Via Cairoli, at the bottom, in Piazza Zecca on your left, is one of the Balbi palaces; while in Piazza Annunziata, a little farther on, you come to the beautiful Church of Santissima Annunziata del Vastato, built by Della Porta in 1587. Crossing this Piazza, you enter perhaps the most splendid street in Genoa, Via Balbi, which climbs up at last to the Piazza Acquaverde, the Statue of Columbus, and the Railway. The first palace on your right is Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini, with a fine picture gallery. Here you may see two fine Rubens, a portrait of Philip IV of Spain, and a Silenus with Bacchantes, a great picture of James I of England with his family, painted by some "imitator" of Vandyck, though who it was in Genoa that knew both Vandyck and England is not yet clear; a Ribera, a Reni, a Tintoretto, a Domenichino, and above all else Vandyck's Boy in White Satin, in the midst of these ruined pictures which certainly once would have given us joy. The Boy in White Satin is perhaps the loveliest picture Vandyck left behind him; though it is but partly his after all, the fruit, the parrot, and the monkey being the work of Snyders. On the other side of the Via Balbi, almost opposite the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini, is the Palazzo Balbi, which possesses the loveliest cortile in Genoa, with an orange garden, and in the Great Hall a fine gallery of pictures. Here is the Vandyck portrait of Philip II of Spain, which Velasquez not only used as a model, or at least remembered when he painted his equestrian Olivarez in the Prado, but which he changed, for originally it was a portrait of Francesco Maria Balbi, till, as is said, Velasquez came and painted there the face of Philip II. Certainly Velasquez may have sketched the picture and used it later, but it seems unlikely that he would have painted the face of Philip II, whom he had never seen, though the Genoese at that time might well have asked him to do so.[7] As you continue on your way up Via Balbi, you have on your right the Palazzo dell' Università, with its magnificent staircase built in 1623 by Bartolommeo Bianco. Some statues by Giovanni da Bologna make it worth a visit, while of old the tomb of Simone Boccanegra, the great Doge, made such a visit pious and necessary. Opposite the University is the Palazzo Reale, which once belonged to the Durazzo family. A crucifixion by Vandyck is perhaps not too spoiled to be still called his work. So at last you will come to the Piazza Acquaverde and the Statue of Columbus, which is altogether dwarfed by the Railway Station. Not far away to the left, behind this last, you will find the great Palazzo Doria. It is almost nothing now, but in John Evelyn's day, when accompanied by that "most courteous marchand called Tornson," he went to see "the rarities," it was still full of its old splendour. "One of the greatest palaces here for circuit," he writes, "is that of the Prince d'Orias, which reaches from the sea to the summit of the mountaines. The house is most magnificently built without, nor less gloriously furnished within, having whole tables and bedsteads of massy silver, many of them sett with achates, onyxes, cornelians, lazulis, pearls, turquizes, and other precious stones. The pictures and statues are innumerable. To this palace belong three gardens, the first whereof is beautified with a terrace supported by pillars of marble; there is a fountaine of eagles, and one of Neptune, with other sea-gods, all of the purest white marble: they stand in a most ample basine of the same stone. At the side of this garden is such an aviary as S^r. Fra. Bacon describes in his _Sermones Fidelium_ or Essays, wherein grow trees of more than two foote diameter, besides cypresse, myrtils, lentiscs, and other rare shrubs, which serve to nestle and pearch all sorts of birds, who have an ayre and place enough under their ayrie canopy, supported with huge iron worke stupendious for its fabrick and the charge. The other two gardens are full of orange trees, citrons, and pomegranates; fountaines, grotts, and statues; one of the latter is a colossal Jupiter, under which is a sepulchre of a beloved dog, for the care of which one of this family receiv'd of the K. of Spayne 500 crownes a yeare during the life of the faithful animal. The reservoir of water here is a most admirable piece of art; and so is the grotto over against it." Close by Palazzo Doria is the Church of S. Giovanni di Prè, with its English tomb and Lombard tower, and memories of the two Urban popes Urban V and Urban VI, the first of whom stayed here on his way back to Rome from the Babylonian captivity, while the other murdered eight of his Cardinals close by, and threw their bodies into the sea. This is the quarter of booty, the booty of the Crusaders, and it is in such a place and in the older part of the town near Piazza Sarzano and in the narrow ways behind the Exchange that, as I think, Genoa seems most herself, the port of the Mediterranean, the gate of Italy. Yet what I prefer in Genoa are her triumphant slums, then the palaces and villas with their bigness, so impressive for us who came from the North, which seem to be a remnant of Roman greatness, a vision as it were of solidity and grandeur. Something of this, it is true, haunts almost every Italian city; only nowhere but in Genoa can you see so many palaces together, whole streets of them, huge, overwhelming, and yet beautiful houses, that often seem deserted, as though they belonged to a greater and more splendid age than ours. It is altogether another aspect of these splendid buildings that you see from the ramparts towards Nervi, from the height of the Via Corsica or from the hills. From there, with the whole strength and glory of the sea before you, these palaces, which in the midst of the city are so indestructible and immortal, seem flowerlike, full of delicate hues, fragile and almost as though about to fade; you think of hyacinths, of the blossom of the magnolia, of the fleeting lilac, and the lily that towers in the moonlight to fall at dawn. Returning to the city in the twilight with all this passing and fragile glory in your eyes, it is again another emotion that you receive when, on entering the city, you find yourself caught in the immense crowd of working people flocking homewards or to Piazza Deferrari, to the cafés, through the narrow streets, amid swarms of children, laughing, running, gesticulating or fighting with one another. From the roofs where they seem to live, from the high narrow windows, the warren of houses that would be hovels in the North, but here in the sun are picturesque, women look down lazily and cry out, with a shrillness peculiar to Genoa, to their friends in the street. It is a bath of multitude that you are compelled to take, full of a sort of pungent, invigorating, tonic strength, life crowding upon you and thrusting itself under your notice without ceremony or announcement. If on the 2nd November you chance to be in Genoa, you will find the same insatiable multitude eagerly flocking to the cemetery, that strange and impossible museum of modern sculpture, where the dead are multiplied by an endless apparition of crude marble shapes, the visions of the vulgar hacked out in dazzling, stainless white stone. What would we not give for such a "document" from the thirteenth century as this cemetery has come to be of our own time. It is the crude representation of modern Italian life that you see, realistic, unique, and precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words. All the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the modern world, is expressed there with a naïveté that is, by some miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because someone loved them and they were of no account. The husk of the immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the grocer, horribly wrapped in everlasting marble, has put on ignominy for evermore; while the plebeian, bewildered by the tyranny of life, crouches over his dead wife, for ever afraid lest death tap him too on the shoulder. How the wind whistles among these immortal jests, where the pure stone of the Carrara hills has been fashioned to the ugliness of the middle classes. This is the supreme monument not of Genoa only, but of our time. In that grotesque marble we see our likeness. For there is gathered in indestructible stone all the fear, ostentation, and vulgar pride of our brothers. Ah, poor souls! that for a little minute have come into the world, and are eager not altogether to be forgotten; they too, like the ancients, have desired immortality, and, seeing the hills, have sought to establish their mediocrity among them. Therefore, with an obscene and vulgar gesture, they have set up their own image as well as they could, and, in a frenzied prayer to an unknown God, seem to ask, now that everything has fallen away and we can no longer believe in the body, that they may not be too disgusted with their own clay. Thus in frenzy, fear, and vanity they have carved the likeness of that which was once among the gods. FOOTNOTES: [1] Cf. P. Villari: Primi due Secoli della Storia di Firenze (2^o Edizione), vol. i. p. 246. [2] See Le Mesurier, _Genoa: Five Lectures_, Genoa, A. Donath, 1889, a useful and informing book, to which I am indebted for more than one curious fact. [3] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 82. Le Mesurier thinks that "this angel" refers to "the central figure in a bas-relief" above the inscription and below the right-hand window of the church. [4] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 98. [5] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 107. [6] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 78. [7] See Justi, _Velasquez and his Times_ (English translation), 1880, page 315, and Le Mesurier, _op. cit._, page 163. II. ON THE WAY It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild-flowers. And there, too, on the road to Tuscany, after the pleasant weariness of the way, which is so much longer than those others, some fragment of antiquity is to be the reward of your journey, though nothing so fine as the deserted holiness of Paestum, only the dust of the white temple of Aphrodite crowning the western horn of Spezia, where it rises splendid out of the sea in the sun of Porto Venere. This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in the world. It leads to Italy. Within the gate where all the world is a garden, the way climbs among the olives and oranges, fresh with the fragrance of the sea, the perfume of the blossoms, to the land of heart's desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture of mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten; the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty, that on a night in spring came to her from Greece as it is said among the vineyards, before the vines had budded. For even as Love came to us from heaven, and was born in a stable among the careful oxen, where a few poor shepherds found a Mother with her Child, so Beauty was born in a vineyard in the earliest dawn, when some young men came upon the hard white precious body of a goddess, and drew her from the earth, and began to worship her. Then in their hearts Beauty stirred, as Love did in the hearts of the shepherds and the kings. Nor was that vision, so full of wisdom (a vision of birth or resurrection, was it?) less fruitful than that other so full of Love, when Mary, coming in the twilight of dawn, saw the angel and heard his voice, and after weeping in the garden, heard Love Himself call her by name. Well, if the resurrection of God was revealed in Palestine, it was here among the Tuscan hills that man rose from the dead and first saw the beauty of the flowers and the mystery of the hills. Here, too, is holy land if you but knew it, full of old forgotten gods, out-fashioned deities beside whose shrines, though they be hushed, you may still hear the prayers of worshippers, the tears of desire, the laughter of the beloved. For the old gods are not dead. Though they be forgotten and the voice of Jesus full of sorrowful promises has beguiled the world, still every morning is Aphrodite new born in the spume of the sea, and in many an isle forsaken you may catch the notes of Apollo's lyre, while Dionysus, in the mysterious heat of midday when the husbandman is sleeping, still steals among the grapes, and Demeter even yet in the sunset seeks Persephone among the sheaves of corn. If Jesus wanders in the ways of the city to comfort those who have forgotten the sun, in the woods the gods are still upon their holy thrones, and their love constraineth us. Immortal and beloved, how should they pass away, for, beside their secret places, of old we have hushed our voices, and children have played with them no less than with Jesus of Nazareth. The gods pass, only their gifts remain, the sun and the hills and the sea, but in us they are immortal, not one have we suffered to creep away into oblivion. Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all the way; but those eight _chilometri_ over and done with, there is nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and seashore, will not keep you long, for the sun is high, and the road is calling, and the heat to come; moreover, the beautiful headland of Portofino seems to shut out all Italy from your sight. Once there, you tell yourself, what may not be seen, the Carrara hills, Spezia perhaps, even Pisa maybe, miles and miles away, where Arno winds through the marshes behind the Pineta to the sea. Now, whether or not in your heart of hearts you hope for Pisa, a white peak of Carrara you certainly hope to see, and that ... why, that is Tuscany. So you set out, leaving Genoa and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves, orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia heavy with blossom, there a pomegranate mysterious with fruit and flowers, after another five miles you come to Recco, a modest, sleepy village, where it is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon you may very pleasantly take boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place, full of the débris of the sea, old masts and ropes, here a rusty anchor, there a golden net, with sailors lying asleep on the parapet of the harbour, and the whole place full of the soft sea wind, languorous and yet virile withal, the shady narrow ways, the low archways, the crooked steps pleasant with the song of the sea, the rhythm of the waters. In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city herself in the lap of the mountains, and there, yes, far away, you may see the stainless peaks of Tuscany, whiter than snow, shining in the quiet afternoon; and nearer, but still far away, the crest of the horn of Spezia, with the ruined church of Porto Venere--a church or a temple, is it?--on the headland beside the island of Palmaria. Beside you are the sea and the hills, two everlasting things, with here an old villa, beautiful with many autumns, in a grove of cypress, ilex, and myrtle, those three holy trees that mark death, mystery, and love; while far down on the seashore where the foam is whitest, stands a little ruined chapel in which the gulls cry all day long. But your heart turns ever toward Italy yonder--towards the hills of marble. Will one ever reach them, those far-away pure peaks immaculate in silence, like a thought of God in the loneliness of the mountains? Far away below you lies Rapallo in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and vines. It is there you must sleep, far away still from those visionary peaks, which yet will in some strange way give you a sense of security, as though a legion of bright angels, ghosts in the pale night (for they fade away in the twilight), invisible to other men, were on guard to keep you from all harm. Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep one falls in Rapallo, that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have run for shelter. It is as though one had seen the Holy City, and though it was still far off, it was enough, one was content. [Illustration: ON THE ROAD] Rapallo itself, as you find on your first morning, is beautiful, chiefly by reason of its sea-girt tower. The old castle is a prison, and the town itself, full of modern hotels, is yet brisk with trade in oil and lace; but it is not these things that will hold you there, but that sea-tower and the joy of the woods and gardens. And then there are some surprising things not far away. Portofino, for instance, with its great pine and the ilex woods, its terraced walk and the sea, not the lake of Rapallo, but the sea itself, full of strength and wisdom. Then there is San Fruttuoso, with its convent among the palm trees by the seashore, whither the Doria are still brought by sea for burial. Here they lie, generation on generation, of the race which loved the sea; almost coffined in the deep, for the waves break upon the floor of the crypt that holds them. They could not lie more fitly than on the shore of this sea they won and held for Genoa. San Fruttuoso is difficult to reach save by sea. In the summer the path from Portofino is pleasant enough, but at any other time it is almost impassable. And indeed the voyage by boat from Rapallo to Portofino, and thence to San Fruttuoso, should be chosen, for the beauty of the coast, which, as I think, can nowhere be seen so well and so easily as here. Then, in returning to Portofino, the road along the coast should be followed through Cervara, where Guido, the friend of Petrarch and founder of the convent, lies buried, where Francis I, prisoner of Charles V, was wind-bound, to S. Margherita, the sister-town of Rapallo, and thence through S. Michele di Pagana, where you may see a spoiled Vandyck, to Rapallo. Who may speak of all the splendid valleys and gardens that lie along this shore, for they are gardens within a garden, and where all the world is so fair it is not of any private pleasaunce that one thinks, but of the hills and the wild-flowers and the sea, the garden of God. And if the road, so far, from Genoa beggars description, so that I have thought to leave it almost without a word, what can I hope to say of the way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, perhaps in the company of a peasant who is returning to his farm among the olives, you climb, in the genial heat, among the lower slopes between the great hills and the sea, along terraces of olives, through a whole long day of sunshine, with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious long-drawn-out melody of the _rispetti_ of the peasant girls reaching you ever. And then from the stillness among the olives, where the shade is delicate and fragile, of silver and gold, and the streams creep softly down to the sea, the evening will come as you pass along the winding ways of Chiavari, for in the golden weather one is minded to go softly. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful road to Sestri-Levante, where again you are within sound of the sea that breaks on the one side on a rocky and lofty shore, and on the other creeps softly into a flat beach, the town itself rising on the promontory between these two bays. There, under the headland among the woods, you may find a chapel of black and white marble, surely the haunt of Stella Maris, who has usurped the place of Aphrodite. Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set out at last, leaving the sea behind you for the hills, climbing into the Passo di Bracco, that, as it seems, alone divides you from the land you seek. It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse, in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise to sunset. The climb begins almost at once, and continues really for some eighteen miles, till Baracchino and the Osteria Baracca are reached, in a desolate region of mountains that stretch away for ever, billow on billow. Then you descend only to mount again through the woods, till evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia; and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you, staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile, stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of the Pharos throws its warning over sea and seashore; and gathering in the distance on the far horizon, the night splendid with blue and gold, overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find yourself in Spezia at the foot of the Tuscan hills. Spezia is a modern city which has obliterated the more ancient fortresses, whose ruins still guard the two promontories of her gulf. The chief naval station in Italy, she has crowned all the heights and islands with forts, and in many a little creek hidden away, you continually come upon warships, naval schools, hospitals, and such, while in her streets the sailors and soldiers mingle together, giving the town a curiously modern character, for indeed there is little else to call your attention. The beautiful bay which lies between Porto Venere and Lerici behind the line of islands, that are really fortifications, is, in spite of every violation, a spectacle of extraordinary beauty, and in the old days--not so long ago, after all--when the woods came down to the sea, and Spezia was a tiny village, less even than Lerici is to-day, it must have been one of the loveliest and quietest places in the world. Shut out from Italy by the range of hills that runs in a semicircle from horn to horn of her bay, in those days there were just sun and woods and sea, with a few half pagan peasants and fishermen to break the immense silence. And, as it seems to me, by reason of some magic which still haunts this mysterious seashore, it is ever that world half pagan that you seek, leaving Spezia very gladly every morning for San Terenzo and Lerici for Porto Venere and the enchanted coast. Leaving Spezia very early in the morning, there is nothing more delightful than the voyage across the land-locked bay, past the beautiful headlands and secret coves, to San Terenzo and Lerici. If you leave the steamer at San Terenzo, you may walk along a sort of seawall, built out of the cliff and boulders of the shore, round more than one little promontory, to Lerici, whose castle seems to guard the Tuscan sea. Walking thus along the shore, you pass the Villa Magni, Shelley's house, standing, not as it used to do, up out of the sea, for the road has been built really in the waves; but in many ways the same still, for instance with the broad balcony on the first storey, which pleased Shelley so much; and though a second storey has been added since, and even the name of the house changed, a piece of vandalism common enough in Italy to-day, where, since they do not even spare their own traditions and ancient landmarks, it would be folly to expect them to preserve ours, still you may visit the rooms in which he lived with Mary, and where he told Claire of the death of Allegra. The house stands facing the sea in the deepest part of the bay, nearer to San Terenzo than to Lerici. Both Trelawney and Williams had been searching all the spring for a summer villa for the Shelleys, who, a little weary perhaps of Byron's world, had determined to leave Pisa and to spend the summer on the Gulf of Spezia. Byron was about to establish himself just beyond Livorno, on the slopes of Montenero, in a huge and rambling old villa with eighteenth century frescoes on the walls, and a tangled park and garden running down to the dusty Livorno highway. The place to-day is a little dilapidated, and its statues broken, but in the summer months it becomes the paradise of a school of girls, a fact which I think might have pleased Byron. However, the Shelleys were thinking of no such faded splendour as Villa Dupoy for their summer retreat. "Shelley had no pride or vanity to provide for," says Trelawney, "yet we had the greatest difficulty in finding any house in which the humblest civilised family could exist. "On the shores of this superb bay, only surpassed in its natural beauty and capability by that of Naples, so effectually had tyranny paralysed the energies and enterprise of man, that the only indication of human habitation was a few most miserable fishing villages scattered along the margin of the bay. Near its centre, between the villages of San Terenzo and Lerici, we came upon a lonely and abandoned building called the Villa Magni, though it looked more like a boat or bathing house than a place to live in. It consisted of a terrace or ground-floor unpaved, and used for storing boat-gear and fishing-tackle, and of a single storey over it, divided into a hall or saloon and four small rooms which had once been white-washed; there was one chimney for cooking. This place we thought the Shelleys might put up with for the summer. The only good thing about it was a verandah facing the sea, and almost over it. So we sought the owner and made arrangements, dependent on Shelley's approval, for taking it for six months." Shelley at once decided to accept the offer of this house, though it was unfurnished. Mary and Claire presently set out for Spezia, Shelley remaining in Pisa to manage the removal of the furniture. He reached Lerici on 28th April, writing, immediately on his arrival, to Mary in Spezia. _April 28, 1822_. "DEAREST MARY,--I am this moment arrived at Lerici, where I am necessarily detained waiting the furniture, which left Pisa last night at midnight; and as the sea has been calm and the wind fair, may expect them every moment.... Now to business--Is the Magni House taken? if not pray occupy yourself instantly in finishing the affair, even if you are obliged to go to Sarzana, and send a messenger to me to tell me of your success. I, of course, cannot leave Lerici, to which place the boats (for we were obliged to take two) are directed. But _you_ can come over in the same boat that brings this letter, and return in the evening. "I ought to say that I do not think there is accommodation for you all at this inn; and that even if there were, you would be better off at Spezia; but if the Magni House is taken, then there is no possible reason why you should not take a row over in the boat that will bring this, but don't keep the men long. I am anxious to hear from you on every account.--Ever yours, S." Shelley's fears as to the accommodation of Lerici were by no means without foundation. Within the last two years a decent inn has been open there in the summer, but before that the primitive and not very clean hostelry in which, as I suppose, Shelley lodged, was all that awaited the traveller.[8] It was not for long, however, that Shelley was left in doubt about the house. Villa Magni became his, and, after much trouble with the furniture, for the officials put the customs duty at £300 sterling, they were allowed to bring it ashore, the harbour-master agreeing to consider Villa Magni "as a sort of depôt, until further leave came from the Genoese Government." It was here that, very soon after they had taken possession of the house, Claire learned from Shelley's lips of the death of her child, and on 21st May set out for Florence. A few evenings later, Shelley, walking with Williams on the terrace, and observing the effect of the moonshine on the water, grasped Williams, as he says, "violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach at our feet. Observing him sensibly affected, I demanded of him if he were in pain; but he only answered by saying, 'There it is again--there!' He recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child (Allegra) rise from the sea and clap its hands as in joy, smiling at him." Was this a premonition of his own death, a hint, as it were, that in such a place one like Shelley might well hope for from the gods? Certainly that shore was pagan enough. Sometimes on moonlight nights, in the hot weather, the half savage natives of San Terenzo would dance among the waves, singing in chorus; while Mrs. Shelley tells us that the beauty of the woods made her "weep and shudder." So strong and vehement was her dread that she preferred to go out in the boat which she feared, rather than to walk among the paths and alleys of the trees hung with vines, or in the mysterious silence of the olives. Thus began that happy last summer of Shelley's life. Day by day, he, with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the little boat _Ariel_, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made wonderful voyages. And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams, they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere. Twenty-eight feet long by eight she was: built in Genoa from an English model that Williams, who had been a sailor, had brought with him. Without a deck, schooner-rigged, it took, says Trelawney, "two tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze, though not deficient in beam." Truly Shelley was no seaman. "You will do no good with Shelley," Trelawney told Williams, "until you heave his books and papers overboard, shear the wisps of hair that hang over his eyes, and plunge his arms up to the elbows in a tar bucket." But he said, "I can read and steer at the same time." Read and steer! But indeed it was on this very bay, and almost certainly in the _Ariel_, that he wrote those perfect lines: "She left me at the silent time." It was here too, in Lerici, that Shelley wrote "The Triumph of Life," that splendid fragment in _terza rima_, which is like a pageant suddenly broken by the advent of Death: that ends with the immortal question-- "Then, what is life? I cried," which was for ever to remain unanswered, for he had gone, as he said, "to solve the great mystery." Well, the story is an old one, I shall not tell it again; only here in the bay of Lerici, with his words in my ears, his house before me, and the very terrace where he worked, the ghost of that sorrowful and splendid spirit seems to wander even yet. What was it that haunted this shore, full of foreboding, prophesying death? It was to meet Leigh Hunt that Shelley set out on 1st July with Williams in the _Ariel_ for Leghorn. For weeks the sky had been cloudless, full of the mysterious light, which is, as it seems to me, the most beautiful and the most splendid thing in the world. In all the churches and by the roadsides they were praying for rain. Shelley had been in Pisa with Hunt showing him that most lovely of all cathedrals, and, listening to the organ there, he had been led to agree that a truly divine religion might even yet be established if Love were really made the principle of it instead of Faith. On the afternoon following that serene day at Pisa, he set sail for Lerici from Leghorn with Williams and the boy Charles Vivian. Trelawney was on the _Bolivar_, Byron's yacht, at the time, and saw them start. His Genoese mate, watching too, turned to him and said, "They should have sailed this morning at three or four instead of now; they are standing too much inshore; the current will set them there." Trelawney answered, "They will soon have the land-breeze." "Maybe," continued the mate, "she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board." Then, pointing to the south-west,--"Look at those black lines and the dirty rags hanging on them out of the sky--they are a warning; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief." Then the mist which had hung all day in the offing swallowed the _Ariel_ for ever. It was not until many days after this, Trelawney tells us, "that my worst fears were confirmed. Two bodies were found on the shore--one near Viareggio, which I went and examined. The face and hands and parts of the body not protected by the dress were fleshless. The tall, slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats' poems[9] in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley's." A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the _Times_ in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew more than they cared to tell of that tragedy. For one thing, he had seen an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the rescue of the _Ariel_ and brought off the poet and his companions, she would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera. It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death, but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope of finding gold on "the milord Inglese." There seems but little reason for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the _Times_ in 1875: Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us, however reluctantly, in this explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of his spirit. "Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." FOOTNOTES: [8] For the identity of this inn see Leigh Hunt, _Autobiography_. Constable, 1903, vol. ii. p. 123. [9] The Keats was doubled open at the "Lamia." [10] _Trelawney Records_. Pickering, 1878, pp. 197-200, accepts this story, as clearing up what for fifty years had been a mystery to him. III. PORTO VENERE It is perhaps a more joyful day that may be spent at Porto Venere, the little harbour on the northern shores of the gulf. Starting early you come, still before the sea is altogether subject to the sun, to a little bay of blue clear still water flanked by gardens of vines, of agaves and olives. Here, in silence save for the lapping of the water, the early song of the cicale, the far-away notes of a reed blown by a boy in the shadow by the sea, you land, and, following the path by the hillside, come suddenly on the little port with its few fishing-boats and litter of ropes and nets, above which rises the little town, house piled on house, from the ruined church rising high, sheer out of the sea to the church of marble that crowns the hill. Before you stands the gate of Porto Venere, a little Eastern in its dilapidation, its colour of faded gold, its tower, and broken battlement. Passing under the ancient arch past a shrine of Madonna, you enter the long shadowy street, where red and green vegetables and fruits, purple grapes, and honey-coloured _nespoli_ and yellow oranges are piled in the cool doorways, and the old women sit knitting behind their stalls. Climbing thus between the houses under that vivid strip of soft blue sky, the dazzling rosy beauty of the ruined ramparts suddenly bursts upon you, and beyond and above them the golden ruined church, and farther still, the glistening shining splendour of the sea and the sun that has suddenly blotted out the soft sky. A flight of broken steps leads to a ruined wall, along which you pass to the old church, or temple is it, you ask yourself, so fair it looks, and without the humility of a Christian building. To your right, across a tossing strip of blue water, full of green and gold, rises the island of Palmaria, and beyond that two other smaller islands, Tisso and Tissetto, while to your left lies the whole splendid coast shouting with waves, laughing in the sunshine and the wind of early morning, and all before you spreads the sea. As I stood leaning on the ruined wall looking on all this miracle of joy, a little child, who had hidden among the wind-blown cornflowers and golden broom on the slope of the cliffs, slowly crept towards me with many hesitations and shy peerings; then, no longer afraid, almost naked as he was, he ran to me and took my hand. [Illustration: PORTO VENERE. _Alinari_] "Will the Signore see the church?" said he, pulling me that way. The Signore was willing. Thus it was, hand in hand with Eros, that I mounted the broken steps of the tower of Venus, his mother. How may I describe the wonder of that place? For at last, he before, I following, though he still held my hand, we came out of the stairway on to a platform on the top of the tower surrounded by a broken battlement. It was as though I had suddenly entered the last hiding-place of Aphrodite herself. On the floor sat an old and lame man sharpening a scythe, and beside him a little child lay among the broken corn that was strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned, now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail and began to beat the corn and stalks strewn over the floor, while the old man, quavering a little, sang a long-drawn-out gay melody, and the little girl beat her tiny hands in time to the work and the music. Then, unheard, into this miracle came a young woman,--ah, was it not Persephone,--slim as an osier in the shadow, walking like a bright peacock straight above herself, climbing the steps, and her hands were on her hips and on her black head was a sheaf of corn. Then she breathed deep, gazed over the blue sea, and set her burden down with its fellows on the parapet, smiling and beating her hands at the little girl. Porto Venere rises out of the sea like Tintagel--but a classic sea, a sea covered with broken blossoms. It was evening when I returned again to the Temple of Venus The moon was like a sickle of silver, far away the waves fawned along the shore as though to call the nymphs from the woods; the sun was set; out of the east night was coming. In the great caves, full of coolness and mystery, the Tritons seemed to be playing with sea monsters, while from far away I thought I heard the lamentable voice of Ariadne weeping for Theseus. Ah no, they are not dead, the beautiful, fair gods. Here, in the temple of Aphrodite, on the threshold of Italy, I will lift up my heart. Though the songs we made are dead and the dances forgotten, though the statues are broken, the temples destroyed, still in my heart there is a song and in my blood a murmur as of dancing, and I will carve new statues and rebuild the temples every day. For I have loved you, O Gods, in the forests and on the mountains and by the seashore. I, too, am fashioned out of the red earth, and all the sea is in my heart, and my lover is the wind. As the rivers sing of the sea, so will I sing till I find you. As the mountains wait for the sun, so will I wait in the night of the city. For my joy, and my lord the sun, I give you thanks, that he is splendid and strong and beautiful beyond beauty. For the sea and all mysterious things I give you thanks, that I have understood and am reconciled with them. For the earth when the sun is set, for the earth when the sun is risen, for the valleys and the hills, for the flowers and the trees, I give you thanks, that I am one with them always and out of them was I made. For the wind of morning, for the wind of evening, for the tender night, for the growing day, take, then, my thanks, O Gods, for the cypress, for the ilex, for the olive on the road to Italy in the sunset and the summer. IV. SARZANA AND LUNA It was very early in the morning when I came into Tuscany. Leaving Spezia overnight, I had slept at Lerici, and, waking in the earliest still dawn, I had set out over the hills, hoping to cross the Macra before breakfast. In this tremulous and joyful hour, full of the profound gravity of youth hesitating on the threshold of life, the day rose out of the sea; so, a lily opening in a garden while we sleep transfigures it with its joy. As I climbed the winding hill among the olives, while still a cool twilight hung about the streets of Lerici, the sun stood up over the sea, awakening it to the whole long day of love to come. Far away in the early light, over a sea mysterious of blue and silver and full of ecstasy, the coast curved with infinite beauty into the golden crest of Porto Venere. Spezia, like a broken flower, seemed deserted on the seashore, and Lerici itself, far below me, waking at morning, watched the sleeping ships, the deep breathing of the sea, the shy and yet proud gesture of the day. Then as I crossed the ridge of the hill and began to follow the road downward towards Tuscany between the still olives, where as yet the world had not seen the sun, suddenly all that beautiful world, about to be so splendid, was hidden from me, and instead I saw the delta of a great river, the uplifted peaks of the marble mountains, and there was Tuscany. Past Arcola, that triumphal arch of the middle age, built on high like a city on an aqueduct, I went into the plain; then far away in the growing day I saw the ancient strongholds of the hills, the fortresses of the Malaspina, the castles of the Lunigiana, the eyries of the eagles of old time. There they lay before me on the hills like _le grandi ombre_ of which Dante speaks, Castelnuovo di Magra, Fosdinovo of the Malaspina, Niccola over the woods. Then at a turning of the way at the foot of the hills I had traversed, under that long and lofty bridge that has known so well the hasty footstep of the fugitive, flowed Magra. ... Macra, che, per cammin corto Lo genovese parte dal Toscano. Thus with Dante's verses in my mouth I came into Tuscany. Now the way from Macra to Sarzana lies straight across that great delta which hides behind the eastern horn of the Gulf of Spezia. At the Macra bridge you meet the old road from Genoa to Pisa, and entering Tuscany thus, Sarzana is the first Tuscan city you will see. Luna Nova the Romans called the place, for it was built to replace the older city close to the sea, the ruins of which you may still find beside the road on the way southward, but of Roman days there is nothing left in the new city. It was a fortress of Castruccio Castracani, the birthplace of a great Pope. Of Castruccio, that intolerant great man, I shall speak later, in Lucca, for that was the rose in his shield. Here I wish only to remind the reader who wanders among the ruins of his great castle, that Castracani took Sarzana by force and held it against any; and perhaps to recall the words of Machiavelli, where he tells us that the capture of Sarzana was a feat of daring done to impress the Lucchesi with the splendour of their liberated tyrant. For when the citizens had freed him from the prison of Uguccione della Faggiuola, who had seized the government of Lucca, Castruccio, finding himself accompanied by a great number of his friends, which encouraged him, and by the whole body of the people, which flattered his ambition, caused himself to be chosen Captain-General of all their forces for a twelvemonth; and resolving to perform some eminent action that might justify their choice, he undertook the reduction of several places which had revolted following the example of Uguccione. Having for this purpose entered into strict alliance with the city of Pisa, she sent him supplies, and he marched with them to besiege Sarzana; but the place being very strong, before he could carry it, he was obliged to build a fortress as near it as he could. This new fort in two months' time rendered him master of the whole country, and is the same fort that at this day is called Sarzanella, repaired since and much enlarged by the Florentines. Supported by the credit of so glorious an exploit, he reduced Massa, Carrara, and Lavenza very easily: he seized likewise upon the whole country of Lunigiana ... so that, full of glory, he returned to Lucca, where the people thronged to meet him, and received him with all possible demonstrations of joy. It is, however, rather as the home of Nicholas V, I think, that Sarzana appeals to us to-day, than as the stronghold of Castruccio. The tyrant held so many places, as we shall see, his prowess is everywhere, but Tommaso Parentucelli is like to be forgotten, for his glory is not written in sword-cuts or in any violated city, but in the forgotten pages of the humanists, the beautiful life of Vespasiano da Bisticci. And was not Nicholas V. the first of the Renaissance Popes, the librarian of Cosimo de' Medici, the tutor of the sons of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and of Palla Strozzi? Certainly his great glory was the care he had of learning and the arts: he made Rome once more the capital of the world, he began the Vatican, and the basilica of S. Pietro, yet he was not content till he should have transformed the whole city into order and beauty. In him the enthusiasm and impulse of the Renaissance are simple and full of freshness. Finding Rome still the city of the Emperors and their superstition, he made it the city of man. He was the friend of Alberti, the Patron of all men of learning and poets. "Greece has not fallen," said Filelfo, in remembering him, "but seems to have migrated to Italy, which of old was called Magna Graecia." Yet Tommaso Parentucelli[11] was sprung of poor parent and even though they may have been _nobili_ as Manetti tells us, _De nobili Parentucellorum progenie_,[12] that certainly was of but little assistance to him in his youth. "Maestro Tomaso da Serezano," says Vespasiano the serene bookseller of Florence, with something of Walton's charm--"Maestro Tomaso da Serezano, who was afterwards Pope Nicholas V, was born at Pisa of humble parents. Later on account of discord in that city, his father was imprisoned, so that he went to Sarzana, and there gave to his little son in his tender years lessons in grammar, which, through the excellence of his understanding, he quickly learned. His father died, however, when he who was to come to such eminence was but nine years old, leaving two sons, our Maestro Tomaso, and Maestro Filippo, who later was Cardinal of Bologna. Now Maestro Tomaso fell sick at that time, and his mother, seeing him thus ailing, being a widow and having all her great hope in her sons, was in the greatest anxiety and sorrow, and prayed God unweariedly to spare her little son. Thus intent in prayer, hoping that he would not die, she fell asleep about dawn, when One called to her and said: 'Andreola (for that was her name), doubt nothing that thy son shall live.' And it seemed in her vision that she saw her son in a bishop's robe, and One said to her that he would be Pope. Waking then from this dream, immediately she went to her little son and found him already better, and to all those in the house she told the vision she had had. Now, when the child was well, because of the steadfast hope which the vision had given her, she at once begged him to pursue his studies; which he did, so that when he was sixteen he had a very good knowledge of grammar and the Latin tongue, and began to work at logic, in order later to come at philosophy and theology. Then he left Sarzana and went to Bologna, so that he might the better pursue his studies in every faculty. At Bologna he studied in logic and in philosophy with great success. In a short time he became learned in all the seven Liberal Arts. Staying at Bologna still he was eighteen, and Master of Arts, lacking money, it was necessary for him to go to Sarzana to his mother, who had remarried, in order to have money to furnish his expenses. She was poor and her husband not very rich, and then Tomaso was not his son, but a stepson: he could not obtain money from them. Determined to follow his studies, he thought to go to Florence, the mother of studies and every virtue at that time. So he went thither, and found Messer Rinaldo degli Albizzi, a most exceptional man, who carried him off to instruct his sons, giving him a good salary as a young man of great virtue. At the end of a year Messer Rinaldo left Florence, and Maestro Tomaso wishing to remain in the city, he arranged for him to enter the service of Messer Palla di Nofri Strozzi; and from him he had a very good salary. At the end of another year he had gained so much from these two citizens that he had enough to return to Bologna to his studies, though in Florence he had not lost his time, for he read in every faculty." Such were the early years of one of the most cultured and princely of the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. He died in a moment of misfortune for Europe in 1455, just after the fall of Constantinople, being succeeded on the throne of Christendom by Pius II, Pius Aeneas as he called himself in a moment of enthusiasm, one of the most human of all those men of the world who have become the vicegerent of Jesus. Nicholas V was not a man of the world, he was a scholar, full of the enthusiasm of his day. As a statesman, while he pacified Italy, he saw Byzantium fall into the hands of the barbarians. He was a Pagan in whom there was no guile. His enthusiasm was rather for Apollo and the Muses than for Jesus and the Saints. With a simplicity touching and delightful, he watched Sigismondo Malatesta build his temple at Rimini, and was his friend and loved him well. Pius II, with all his love of nature and the classics, though his own life was full of unfortunate secrets and his pride and vanity truly Sienese, could not look on unmoved while Malatesta built a temple to the old gods in the States of the Church. But then Pius had not lived all the long years of his youth at Luna Nova. Who can tell what half-forgotten deity may have found Maestro Tomaso asleep in the woods, that magician Virgil in his hands,--for on this coast the gods wander even yet,--and, creeping behind him, finding him so fair, may have kissed him on the ears, as the snakes kissed Cassandra when she lay asleep at noon in Troy of old. Certainly their habitations, their old places may still be found. We are not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees, itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana, you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it, among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while scattered on the grass softer than sleep, you may find perhaps the carved name of a goddess, the empty pedestal of a statue. Lying there on a summer day in the everlasting quietness, unbroken even by a wandering wind or the ripple of a stream, some inkling of that old Roman life, always at its best in such country places as this, comes to you, yes, from the time when Juno was yet a little maid among the mossy fountains and the noise of the brooks. Tacitus in his _Agricola_, that consoling book, tells us of those homes of a refined and severe simplicity in Frejus and Como, but it is to Rutilius, with his strange gift of impressionism, you must go for a glimpse of Luna. In his perfect verses[13] we may see the place as he found it when, gliding swiftly on the waves, perhaps on a day like this, he came to those walls of glistening marble, which got their name from the planet that borrows her light from the sun, her brother. The country itself furnished those stones which shamed with their whiteness the laughing lilies, while their polished surface with its veins threw forth shining rays. For this is a land rich in marbles which defy, sure of their victory, the virgin whiteness of the snow itself. Well, there is but little left of that shining city, and yet, as I lay dreaming in the grass-grown theatre, it seemed to be a festal day, and there among the excited and noisy throng of holiday-makers, just for a moment I caught sight of the aediles in their white tunics, and then, far away, the terrified face of a little child, frightened at the hideous masks of the actors. Then, the performance over, I followed home some simple old centurion was it?--who, returned from the wars on the far frontier, had given the city a shady walk and that shrine of Neptune. We came at last to a country house of "pale red and yellow marble," half farm, half villa, lying away from the white road at the point where it begins to decline somewhat sharply to the marshland below. It is close to the sea. Large enough for all requirements, and not expensive to keep in repair, my host explains. At its entrance is a modest but beautiful hall; then come the cloisters, which are rounded into the likeness of the letter D, and these enclose a small and pretty courtyard. These cloisters, I am told, are a fine refuge in a storm, for they are protected by windows and deep over-hanging eaves. Facing the cloisters is a cheerful inner court, then the dining-room towards the seashore, fine enough for anyone, as my host asserts, and when the south-west wind is blowing the room is just scattered by the spray of the spent waves. On all sides are folding doors, or windows quite as large as doors, so that from two sides and the front you command a prospect of three seas as it were; while at the back, as he shows me, one can see through the inner court to the woods or the distant hills. Just then the young mistress of the place comes to greet me, bidden by my host her father, and in a moment I see the nobility of this life, full of pure and honourable things, together with a certain simplicity and sweetness. Seeing my admiration, my host speaks of his daughter, of her love for him, of her delight in his speeches,--for he is of authority in the city,--of how on such occasions she will sit screened from the audience by a curtain, drinking in what people say to his credit. He smiles as he tells me this, adding she has a sharp wit, is wonderfully economical, and loves him well; and indeed she is worthy of him, and doubtless, as he says, of her grandfather. Then my proud old centurion leads me down the alleys of his garden full of figs and mulberries, with roses and a few violets, till in the perfect stillness of this retreat we come to the seashore, and there lies the white city of Luna glistening in the sun. As I take my leave, reluctantly, for, I would stay longer, my hostess is so sweet, my host so charming, I catch sight of the name of the villa cut into the rosy marble of the gates: "Ad Vigilias Albas" I read, and then and then ... Why, what is this? I must have fallen asleep in that old theatre among the débris and the fine grass. Ad Vigilias Albas--"White Nights," nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, certainly. But it is with the ancestors of Marius I seem to have been talking in the old city of Luna, that in his day had already passed away.[14] It was sunset when I found myself at the door of the Inn in Sarzana. FOOTNOTES: [11] Even the name is uncertain. In the Duomo here, in Cappella di S. Tommaso, you may find his mother's grave, on which she is called Andreola dei Calandrini. His uncle, however, is called J.P. Parentucelli. In two Bulls of Felix V he is called Thomas de Calandrinis; cf. Mansi, xxxi. 190. [12] Muratori, _Rer. Ital. Scrip._, III. ii. 107. [13] Sed deverticulo fuimus fortasse loquaces: Carmine propositum jam repetamus iter. Advehimur celeri candentia moenia lapsu: Nominis est auctor sole corusca soror. Indigenis superat ridentia lilia saxis, Et levi radiat picta nitore silex. Dives marmoribus tellus, quae luce coloris Provocat intactas luxuriosa nives. [14] You may see the place to-day--but it is of plaster now--as Pater describes it.--_Marius the Epicurian_, vol. i. 20. V. CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO And truly it is into a city of marble that you come, when, following the dusty road full of the ruts of the bullock-wagons, past Avenza, that little city with a great castle of Castruccio Castracani, after climbing into the gorge where the bullocks, a dozen of them it may be, yoked to a single dray, take all the way, you enter the cold streets of Carrara, that are always full of the sound of falling water. And strangely enough, as one may think, in this far-away place, so close to the mountains as to be littered by their débris, it is an impression of business and of life that you receive beyond anything of the sort to be found in Spezia. Not a beautiful city certainly, Carrara has a little the aspect of an encampment, an encampment that has somehow become permanent, where everything has been built in a hurry, as it were, of the most precious and permanent material. So that, while the houses are of marble, they seem to be with but few exceptions mere shanties without beauty of any sort, that were built yesterday for shelter, and to-morrow will be destroyed. It is true that the Church of S. Andrea is a building of the thirteenth century, in the Gothic manner, with a fine façade and sculptures of a certain merit, but it fails to impress itself on the town, which is altogether alien from it, modern for the most part in the vulgar way of our time, when ornament is a caprice of the rich and merely ostentatious, the many living, without beauty or light, in barracks or huts of a brutal and hideous uniformity. It was a Sunday evening when I came to Carrara; all that world of labouring men and women was in the streets; in the piazza a band played; close to the hotel, in a tent set up for the occasion, a particularly atrocious collection of brass instruments were being blown with might and main to attract the populace to a marionette performance. The whole world seemed dizzy with noise. After dinner I went out into the streets among the people, but it was not any joy I found there, only a mere brutal cessation from toil, in which amid noise and confusion, the labourer sought to forget his labour. More and more as I went among them it seemed to me that the mountains had brutalised those who won from them their snowy treasure. In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw no beautiful or distinguished faces,--the women were without sweetness, the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with us. You may generally find beauty, sweetness, or wisdom in the faces of a Tuscan crowd in any place. Only here you will see the man who has become just the fellow-labourer of the ox. I understood this better when, about four o'clock on the next morning, I went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that little town you come upon at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Age, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, where no green thing has ever grown or even a bird built her nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble, yellow, black, and white stones, that are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor capering, patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp boulders and dazzling rocks, grinding them in pieces, cutting themselves with sharp stones, pulling as though to break their hearts under the tyranny of the stones, not less helpless and insensate than they. Here and there you may see an armed sentry, as though in command of a gang of convicts, here and there an official of some society for the protection of animals, but he is quite useless. Whether he be armed to quell a rebellion or to put the injured animals out of their pain, I know not. In any case, he is a sign of the state of life in these valleys of marble. Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron on iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanised man, have themselves become obscene. The frightful leprous glare of crude whiteness that shines in every cemetery in Europe marks only the dead; the material has in some strange way lost its beauty, and with the loss of beauty in the material the art of sculpture has been lost. These thousands of slaves who are hewing away the mountains are ludicrous and ridiculous in their brutality and absurdity. They have sacrificed their humanity for no end. The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel. Everywhere there is struggle, rebellion, cruelty; everywhere you see men, bound by ropes, slung over the dazzling face of the cliffs, hacking at the mountains with huge iron pikes, or straining to crash down a boulder for the ox wagons. As you get higher an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded itself only to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some frightful tragedy. In the shadowless cool light of early morning, these pallid valleys, horrid with noise of struggle and terror, the snorting of a horse, the bellow of a bullock in pain, seem like some fantastic dream of a new Inferno; but when at last the enormous sun has risen over the mountains, and flooded the glens with furious heat, it is as though you walked in some delirium, a shining world full of white fire dancing in agony around you. You stumble along, sometimes waiting till a wagon and twelve oxen have been beaten and thrust past you on the ascent, sometimes driven half mad by the booming of the dynamite, here threading an icy tunnel, there on the edge of a precipice, almost fainting in the heat, listening madly to the sound of water far below. Then, as you return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize your small baggage and set out where the difficult road leads out of this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea. * * * * * It was midday when, in spite of the sun, I set out up the long hill that leads to La Foce and Massa from Carrara. It is a road that turns continually on itself, climbing always, among the olive woods and chestnuts, where the girls sing as they herd the goats, and the pleasant murmur of the summer, the song of the cicale, the wind of the hills, cleanse your heart of the horror of Carrara. Climbing thus at peace with yourself for a long hour, you come suddenly to La Foce, a sort of ridge or pass between the loftier hills, whence you may see the long-hidden sea, and Montignoso, that old Lombard castle still fierce above the olive woods, and Massa itself, Massa Ducale, a lofty precipitous city crowned by an old fortress. Who may describe the beauty of the way under the far-away peaks of marble, splendid in their rugged gesture, their immortal perfection and indifference! And indeed, from La Foce all the noise and cruelty of that life in the quarries at Carrara is forgotten. As you begin to descend by the beautiful road that winds along the sides of the hills, the burden of those immense quarries, echoing with cries of distress inarticulate and pitiful, falls away from one. Here is Italy herself, fair as a goddess, delicate as a woman, forlorn upon the mountains. Everywhere in the quiet afternoon songs come to you from the shady woods, from the hillsides and the streams. Something of the simplicity and joy of a life we have only known in our hearts is expressed in every fold of the mountains, olive clad and terraced with walks and vines, where the husbandman labours till evening and the corn is ripe or reaping, and the sound of the flute dances like a fountain in the shade. And so, when at evening you enter the noble city of Massa, among the women sitting at their doors sewing or knitting in the sunset, while the children, whole crowds of them, play in the narrow streets, their laughter echoing among the old houses as the sun dances in a narrow valley, or you pass among the girls who walk together in a nosegay, arm in arm, or the young men who lounge together in a crowd against the houses watching them, there is joy in your heart, because this is life, simple and frank and full of hope, without an afterthought or a single hesitation of doubt or fear. There is little to be seen at Massa that is not just the natural beauty of the place, set like a flower among the woods, that climb up to the marble peaks. Not without a certain interest you come upon the Prefettura, which once was the summer castle of Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister, who as a gift from him held Lucca, and was much beloved, from 1805 to 1814. And joyful as the country is under that impartial sun, before that wide and ancient sea, among her quiet woods and broken shrines, it is not without a kind of hesitation and shame almost that you learn that the great fortress which crowns the city is now a prison in which are many half-witted unhappy folk, who in this transitory life have left the common way. It is strange that in so many lands the prison is so often in a place of the greatest beauty. At Tarragona, far away over the sea looking towards Italy, the hospital of those who have for one cause or another fallen by the way is set by the sea-shore, almost at the feet of the waves, so that in a storm the momentary foam from those restless, free waters must often be scattered about the courtyard, where those who have injured us, and whom in our wisdom we have deprived of the world, are permitted to walk. It is much the same in Tangier, where the horrid gaol, always full of groans and the torture of the bastinado, is in the dip of the Kasbah, where it joins the European city with nothing really between it and the Atlantic. In Massa these prisoners and captives can see the sea and the great mountains, and must often hear the piping of those who wander freely in the woods. Even in Italy, it seems, where the criminal is beginning to be understood as a sick person, they have not yet contrived to banish the older method of treatment: as who should say, you are ill and fainting with anaemia, come let me bleed you. It is at Massa that on your way south you come again into the highroad from Genoa to Pisa, for while, having left it at Spezia, you found it again at Sarzana, it was a by-road that led you to Carrara and again to Massa Ducale. Now, though the way you seek be the highway of the pilgrims, it is none the better as a road for that. For the wagons bringing marble to the cities by the way have spoiled it altogether, so that you find it ground with ruts six inches deep and smothered in dust; therefore, if you come by carriage, and still more if you be _en automobile_, it is necessary to go warily. On foot nothing matters but the dust, and if you start early from Massa that will not annoy you, for in the early morning, for some reason of the gods, the dust lies on the highway undisturbed, while by ten o'clock the air is full of it. It is a bad road then all the way to Pietrasanta, but most wonderful and lovely nevertheless. For the most part the sea is hidden from you, for you are in truth on the sea-shore, though far enough from the waves, a land of fields and cucumbers coming between road and water. Swinging along in the dawn, you soon pass that old castle of Montignoso, crumbling on its high rock, built by the Lombard Agilulf to hold the road to Italy. Then not without surprise you pass quite under an old Albergo which crosses the way, where certainly of old the people of Massa took toll of the Tuscans, and the Tuscans taxed all who came into their country. Then the road winds through a gorge beside a river, and at last between delicious woods of olives full of silver and golden shade most pleasant in the heat, past Seravezza in the hills, you come to the little pink and white town of Pietrasanta under the woods, at noon. Pietrasanta is set at the foot of the Hills of Paradise, littered with marble, planted with figs and oleanders, full of the sun. For hours you may climb among the olives on the hills, terraced for vines, shimmering in the heat; and resting there, watch the sleepy sea lost in a silver mist, the mysterious blue hills, listening to the songs of the maidens in the gardens. Thus watching the summer pass by, caught by her beauty, lying on an old wall beautiful with lichen and the colours of many autumns, suddenly you may be startled by the stealthy, unconcerned approach of a great snake three feet long at least, winding along the gully by the roadside. Half fascinated and altogether fearful, you watch her pass by till she disappears bit by bit in an incredibly small fissure in the vineyard wall, leaving you breathless. Or all day long you will lie under the olives waiting for the coolness of evening, listening to the sound of everlasting summer, the piping of a shepherd, the little lovely song of a girl, the lament of the cicale. Then returning to Pietrasanta, you will sit in the evening perhaps in the Piazza there, quite surrounded by the old walls, with its mediaeval air, its lovely Municipio and fine old Gothic churches. Here you may watch all the city, the man and his wife and children, the young girls laughing together, conscious of the shy admiration of the youth of the place; and you will be struck by the beauty of these people, peasants and workmen, their open, frank faces, their grace and strength, their unconcerned delight in themselves, their air of distinction too, coming to them from a long line of ancestors who have lived with the earth, the mountains, and the sea. Then in the early morning, perhaps, you will enter S. Martino and hear the early Mass, where there are still so many worshippers, and then, lingering after the service, you will admire the pulpit, carved really by one of those youths whose frankness and grace surprised you in the Piazza on the night before--Stagio Stagi, a native of this place, a fine artist whose work continually meets you in Pietrasanta. Indeed, in the choir of the church there are some candelabra by him, and an altar, built, as it is said, out of two confessional boxes. In the Baptistery close by are some bronzes, said to be the work of Donatello, and some excellent sculptures by Stagio; while, as though to bear out the hidden paganism, some dim memory of the old gods, that certainly haunts this shrine, the font is an old Roman _tazza_, carved with Tritons and Neptune among the waves; but over it now stands another supposed work of Donatello, S. Giovanni Battista, reconciled, as we may hope, with those whose worship he has usurped. The façade of S. Martino is of the fourteenth century, as is that of S. Agostino, its neighbour, where you may find another altar by Stagio. Then it may be at evening you seek the sea-shore, that mysterious, forlorn coast where the waves break almost with a caress. It was here, or not far away, somewhere between this little wonderful city and Viareggio, then certainly a mere village, that Shelley's body was burned, as Trelawney records.[15] "The lovely and grand scenery that surrounded us," he says, "so exactly harmonised with Shelley's genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us.... Not a human dwelling was in sight.... I got a furnace made at Leghorn of iron bars and strong sheet-iron supported on a stand, and laid in a stock of fuel and such things as were said to be used by Shelley's much-loved Hellenes on their funeral pyres.... At ten on the following morning, Captain S. and myself, accompanied by several officers of the town, proceeded in our boat down the small river which runs through Via Reggio (and forms its harbour for coasting vessels) to the sea.[16] Keeping along the beach towards Massa, we landed at about a mile from Via Reggio, at the foot of the grave; the place was noted by three wand-like reeds stuck in the sand in a parallel line from high to low-water mark. Doubting the authenticity of such pyramids, we moved the sand in the line indicated, but without success. I then got five or six men with spades to dig transverse lines. In the meanwhile Lord Byron's carriage with Mr. Leigh Hunt arrived, accompanied by a party of dragoons and the chief officers of the town. In about an hour, and when almost in despair, I was paralysed with the sharp and thrilling noise a spade made in coming in direct contact with the skull. We now carefully removed the sand. This grave was even nearer the sea than the other [Williams's], and although not more than two feet deep, a quantity of the salt water oozed in. "... We have built a much larger pile to-day, having previously been deceived as to the immense quantity of wood necessary to consume a body in the unconfined atmosphere." Mr. Shelley had been reading the poems of "Lamia" and "Isabella" by Keats, as the volume was found turned back open in his pocket; so sudden was the squall. The fragments being now collected and placed in the furnace here fired, and the flames ascended to the height of the lofty pines near us. We again gathered round, and repeated, as far as we could remember, the ancient rites and ceremonies used on similar occasions. Lord B. wished to have preserved the skull, which was strikingly beautiful in its form. It was very small and very thin, and fell to pieces on attempting to remove it. "Notwithstanding the enormous fire, we had ample time e'er it was consumed to contemplate the singular beauty and romantic wildness of the scenery and objects around us. Via Reggio, the only seaport of the Duchy of Lucca, built and encompassed by an almost boundless expanse of deep, dark sand, is situated in the centre of a broad belt of firs, cedars, pines, and evergreen oaks, which covers a considerable extent of country, extending along the shore from Pisa to Massa. The bay of Spezia was on our right, and Leghorn on our left, at almost equal distances, with their headlands projecting far into the sea, and forming this whole space of interval into a deep and dangerous gulf. A current setting in strong, with a N.W. gale, a vessel embayed here was in a most perilous situation; and consequently wrecks were numerous: the water is likewise very shoal, and the breakers extend a long way from the shore. In the centre of this bay my friends were wrecked, and their bodies tossed about--Captain Williams seven, and Mr. Shelley nine days, e'er they were found. Before us was a most extensive view of the Mediterranean, with the isles of Gorgona, Caprera, Elba, and Corsica in sight. All around us was a wilderness of barren soil with stunted trees, moulded into grotesque and fantastic forms by the cutting S.W. gales. At short and equal distances along the coast stood high, square, antique-looking towers, with flagstaff's on the turrets, used to keep a look-out at sea and enforce the quarantine laws. In the background was the long line of the Italian Alps. "... After the fire was kindled ... more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This, with the oil and salt, made the yellow flames glisten and quiver.... The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put in quarantine." Shelley's ashes were taken to Rome, and buried in the English cemetery there, a place he loved, that is perhaps the most beautiful of the beautiful graveyards of Italy. Of Viareggio itself there is little to be said. It is a town by the seaside, full in summer of holiday-making Tuscans from Florence and the cities round about. A pretty place enough, it possesses an unique market-place covered in by ancient twisted plane trees, where the old women chaffer with the cooks and contadine. But nothing, as it seems to me, and certainly not so modern a place as Viareggio, will keep you long from Pisa. Even on the dusty way from Pietrasanta, at every turn of the road one has half expected to see the leaning tower and the Duomo. And it is really with an indescribable impatience you spend the night in Viareggio. Starting at dawn, still without a glimpse of Pisa, you enter the Pineta before the sun, that lovely, green, cool forest full of silver shadows, with every here and there a little farm for the pine cones, about which they are heaped in great banks. Coming out of this wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers, you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city. Then you cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream. As you turn to look behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains, those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost in the distance and the sky; and so, with half a regret, full of expectancy and excitement nevertheless, you quicken your pace, and even in the heat set out quickly for the white city before you,--Pisa, once lord of the sea, the first great city of Tuscany. FOOTNOTES: [15] I no longer believe it is possible to be certain of the place. At any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong, though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that Boccaccio was a "little priest," and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo, and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley's body was found at Lerici, and that he was burned close by. [16] See Carmichael, _The Old Road_, etc., pp. 183-202. VI. PISA I To enter Pisa by the Porta Nuova, coming at once into the Piazza del Duomo, is as though at midday, on the highway, one had turned aside into a secret meadow full of a strange silence and dazzling light, where have been abandoned among the wild flowers the statues of the gods. For the Piazza is just that--a meadow scattered with daisies, among which, as though forgotten, stand unbroken a Cathedral, a Baptistery, a Tower, and a Cemetery, all of marble, separate and yet one in the consummate beauty of their grouping. And as though weary of the silence and the light, the tower has leaned towards the flowers, which may fade and pass away. So amid the desolation of the Acropolis must the statues of the Parthenon have looked from the hills and the sea, with something of this abandoned splendour, this dazzling solitude, this mysterious calm silence, satisfied and serene. Wherever you may be in Pisa, you cannot escape from the mysterious influence of those marvellous ghosts that haunt the verge of the city, that corner apart where the wind is white on the grass, and the shadows steal slowly through the day. The life of the world is far away on the other side of the city; here is only beauty and peace. If you come into the Piazza, as most travellers do, from the Lung' Arno, as you turn into the Via S. Maria or out of the Borgo into the beautiful Piazza dei Cavalieri, gradually as you pass on your way life hesitates and at last deserts you. In the Via S. Maria, for instance, that winds like a stream from the Duomo towards Arno, at first all is gay with the memory and noise of the river, the dance of the sun and the wind. Then you pass a church; some shadow seems to glide across the way, and it is almost in dismay you glance up at the silent palaces, the colour of pearl, barred and empty; and then looking down see the great paved way where your footsteps make an echo; while there amid the great slabs of granite the grass is peeping. It is generally out of such a shadowy street as this that one comes into the dazzling Piazza del Duomo. But indeed, all Pisa is like that. You pass from church to church, from one deserted Piazza to another, and everywhere you disturb some shadow, some silence is broken, some secret seems to be hid. The presence of those marvellous abandoned things in the far corner of the city is felt in every byway, in every alley, in every forgotten court. "Amid the desolation of a city" this splendour is immortal, this glory is not dead. II "Varie sono le opinioni degli Scrittori circa l'edificazione di Pisa," says Tronci in his _Annali Pisani_, published at Livorno in the seventeenth century. "Various are the opinions of writers as to the building of Pisa, but all agree that it was founded by the Greeks. Cato in his _Fragment_, and Dionysius Halicarnassus in the first book of his _History_, affirm that the founders were the Pisi Alfei Pelasgi, who had for their captain the King Pelops, as Pliny says in his _Natural History_ (lib. 5), and Solinus too, as though it were indubitable: who does not know that Pisa was from Pelops?" Certainly Pisa is very old, and whether or no King Pelops, as Pliny thought, founded the city, the Romans thought her as old as Troy. In 225 B.C. she was an Etruscan city, and the friend of Rome; in Strabo's day she was but two miles from the sea; Caesar's time she became a Roman military station; while in 4 A.D. we read that the disturbances at the elections were so serious that she was left without magistrates. That fact in itself seems to bring the city before our eyes: it is so strangely characteristic of her later history. [Illustration: PISA _Alinari_] But in spite of her enormous antiquity, there are very few left of her Etruscan and Roman days, the remains of some Roman Thermae, Bagni di Nerone near the Porta Lucca being, indeed, all that we may claim, save the urns and sarcophagi scattered in the Campo Santo, from the great days of Rome. The glory of Pisa is the end of the Middle Age and the early dawn of the Renaissance. There, amid all the hurly-burly and terror of invasion and civil wars, she shines like a beacon beside the sea, proud, brave, and full of hope, almost the only city not altogether enslaved in a country in the grip of the barbarian, almost overwhelmed by the Lombards. And indeed, she was one of the first cities of Italy to fling off the Lombard yoke. Favoured by her position on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea, yet not so near the coast as to invite piracy, she waged incessant war on Greek and Saracen. Lombardy, heavy with conquest, fearful for her prize, which was Italy, was compelled to encourage the growth of the naval cities. It was on the sea that the future of Pisa lay, like the glory of the sun that in its splendour and pride passes away too soon. Already in the ninth century we hear of her prowess at Salerno, while in the tenth, having possessed herself of her own government under consuls, she sent a fleet to help the Emperor Otho II in Sicily. Fighting without respite or rest, continually victorious, never downhearted, she had opened the weary story of the civil strife of Italy with a war against Lucca, in the year 1004.[17] It was the first outburst of that hatred in her heart which in the end was to destroy her for she died of a poverty of love. In 1005, still with her fleet engaged in Sicilian waters, the Arab pirates fell upon her, and, forcing the harbour, sacked a whole quarter of the city. For the time Pisa could do little against the foes of Europe, but in 1016 she allied herself with that city which proved at last to be her deadliest foe, Genoa the Proud, and the united fleets swept down on Sardinia for vengeance. It was this victorious expedition that aroused the hatred of the Pisans for Genoa, a jealousy that was only extinguished when at last Pisa was crushed at Meloria. Many were the attempts of the Arabs to regain Sardinia, but Pisa was not to be deceived. Coasting along the African shore, her fleet took Bona and threatened Carthage. Yet in 1050 the Arabs of Morocco and Spain stole the island from her, only Cagliari holding out under the nobles for the mother city. There was more than the loss of Sardinia at stake, for with the victory of the Arabs the highway of the sea was no longer secure, the existence of Pisa, and not of Pisa only, was threatened. So we find Genoa once more standing beside Pisa in the fight of Europe. The fleets again were combined, this time under the command of a Pisan, one Gualduccio, a plebeian. He sailed for Cagliari, landed his men, and engaged the enemy on the beach. The Arabs were led by the King Mogahid, Rè Musetto, as the Italians called him. He was over eighty years old at the time, and though still full of cunning valour, attacked by the fleets in front and the garrison in the rear, his army was defeated and put to flight. He himself, fleeing on horseback, was wounded in two places, and falling was captured; and they took him in chains to Pisa, where he died. Thus Sardinia once more fell into the hands of Europe, and the island, divided in fiefs under the rule of Pisa,[18] was held and governed by her. But Pisa was not yet done with the Arab. She stood for Europe. In 1063 she fought at Palermo, returning laden with booty. It was then, after much discussion in the Senate,[19] sending an embassy to the Pope and another to "Rè Henrico di Germania," that she decided to employ this spoil in building the Duomo, in the place where the old Church of S. Reparata stood, and more anciently the Baths of Hadrian, the Emperor. The temple, Tronci tells us,[20] was dedicated to the Magnificent Queen of the Universe, Mary, ever Virgin, most worthy Mother of God, Advocate of sinners. It was begun in 1064, and many years, as Tronci says, were consumed in the building of it.[21] The pillars--and there are many--were brought by the Pisans from Africa, from Egypt, from Jerusalem, from Sardinia, and other far lands. At this time Pisa was divided into four parts, called _Quartieri_. The first was called _Ponte_, the ensign of which was a rosy Gonfalon; the second, _di Mezzo_, which had a standard with seven yellow stripes on a red field; the third, _Foriporta_, which had a white gate in a rosy field; and the fourth, _Chinsica_ with a white cross in a red field.[22] Nor was the Duomo the only building that the Pisans undertook about this time. Eight years later, the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, called to-day S. Pierino, was built on a spot where of old "there was a temple of the Gentiles" dedicated to Apollo; that, when the Pisans received the faith of Jesus Christ, they gave to St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. This church appears to have been consecrated by the great Archbishop Peter on 30th August 1119. These two churches, and especially the Duomo, still perhaps the most wonderful church in Italy, prove the greatness of the civilisation of Pisa at this time. She was then a self-governed city, owing allegiance, it is true, to the Marquisate of Tuscany, but with consuls of her own. Since she was so warlike, the nobles naturally had a large part in her affairs. In the Crusade of 1099 the Pisans were late, as the Genoese never ceased to remind them,--to come late, in Genoa, being spoken of as "_Come l'ajuto di Pisa_"; and, indeed, like the Genoese, the Pisans thought as much of their own commercial advantage in these Holy Wars as of the Tomb of Jesus. In 1100 they returned from Jerusalem, their merchants having gained, _una loggia, una contrada, un fondaco e una chiesa_ for their nation in Constantinople, with many other fiscal benefits. Nor were they forgetful of their Duomo, for they came home with much spoil, bringing the bodies of the Saints Nicodemus the Prince of the Pharisees, Gamaliel the master of St. Paul, and Abibone, one of the seventy-two disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.[23] Encouraged by their success, not long afterwards, they, in their invincible confidence and force, decided to undertake another enterprise. Urged thereto by their Archbishop Peter, they set out, partly for glory, partly in the hope of spoil to free the thousands of Christians held captive by the Arabs in the Balearic islands. The fleet sailed on the 6th August 1114, the Feast of S. Sisto, the anniversary of other victories. There were, it seems, some three hundred ships of diverse strength; and every sort of person, old and young, took part in this adventure. Going astray, they first landed in Catalonia and did much damage; then, "acknowledging their unfortunate mistake," they found the island, where, under Archbishop Peter and the Pope's gonfalone, they were entirely successful. They released the captives, and, amid the immense spoil, they brought away the son of the Moorish king, whom later they baptized in Pisa and sent back to the Moors. The Pisan dead were, however, very many. At first they thought to load a ship with the slain and bring them home again; but this was not found possible. Sailing at last for Marseilles, they buried them there in the Badia di S. Vittore, later bringing the monks to Pisa. Now, while the glory of Pisa shone thus upon the waters far away, the Lucchesi thought to seize Pisa herself, deprived of her manhood. But the Florentines, who at this time were friends with Pisa, since their commerce depended upon the Porto Pisano, sent a company to guard the city, encamping some two miles off; for since so much loot lay to hand, to wit, Pisa herself, the Florentine captains feared lest they might not be able to hold their men. And, indeed, one of their number entered the city intent on the spoil, but was taken, and they judged him worthy only of death. But the Pisans, not to be outdone in honour, refused to allow him to be executed in their territory; then the Florentines bought a plot of ground near the camp, and killed him there. When the fleet returned and heard this, they determined to send Florence a present to show their gratitude. Now, among the spoil were some bronze gates and two rosy pillars of porphyry, very precious. Then they besought the Florentines to choose one of these, the gates or the pillars, as a gift. And Florence chose the pillars, which stand to-day beside the eastern gate of the Baptistery in that city. But on the way to Florence they encountered the Mugnone in flood, and were thrown down and broken there. Hence the Florentines, that scornful and suspicious folk, swore that the Pisans had cracked their gifts themselves with fire before sending them, that Florence might not possess things so fair. Other jealousies, too, arose out of the success of Pisa, though indirectly. For the Genoese, never content that she should have the overlordship of Sardinia, were still more disturbed when Pope Gelasius II., that Pisan, gave Corsica to Pisa, so that about 1125[24] they made war on her. The war lasted many years, till Innocent II, being Pope and come to Pisa, made peace, giving the Genoese certain rights in Corsica. About this time S. Bernard was in Pisa, where in 1134 Innocent II held a General Council; not for long, however, for in the same year he set out for Milan to reconcile that Church with Rome. Her quarrel with Genoa was scarcely finished when Pisa found herself at war with the Normans in Southern Italy, defending heroically the city of Naples and utterly destroying Amalfi, the wonderful republic of the South.[25] Certainly the might of Pisa was great; her supremacy was unquestionable from Lerici to Piombino, but behind her hills Lucca was on watch, not far away Florence her friend as yet, held the valley of the Arno, while Genoa on the sea dogged her steps between the continents. Thus Pisa stood in the middle of the twelfth century the strongest and most warlike city in Tuscany, full of ambition and the love of beauty and glory. For it was now in 1152 that she began to build the Baptistery, and in 1174 the famous Campanile, a group of buildings with the Duomo unrivalled in the world. Meanwhile the Great Countess of Tuscany had died in 1115; more and more Italy became divided against itself, and by the end of the century Guelph and Ghibelline, commune and noble, were tearing her in pieces. Tuscany, really little more than a group of communes devoted to trade, with the great feudatories ever in the offing, without any real unity, slowly became the stronghold of the Guelphs. Only Pisa,[26] glorying in the strength of the sea and the splendour of war, was Ghibelline, with Siena on her sunny hills. Now, having won Sardinia for herself, her nobles there established were, as was their manner everywhere, continually at feud. The Church, thinking to make Pisan sovereignty less secure, supported the weaker. Already Innocent III had, following this plan, called on the Pisans to withdraw their claim to the island. And it was a Pisan noble, Visconti, who, marrying into one of the island families related to Gregory IX, recognised the Papal suzerainty. Thus this family in Pisa became Guelph. But the other nobles, among whom was the Gherardesca family, threw their weight on the other side, and so Pisa, who had ever leaned that way, became staunchly Ghibelline.[27] The quarrel with Florence was certain sooner or later, for Florence was growing in strength and riches; she would not for ever be content to let Pisa hold her sea-gate, taking toll of all that passed in and out. It was in 1222 that the first war broke out with the White Lily. Any excuse was good enough; the bone of contention appears to have been a lap-dog belonging to one of the Ambassadors[28]. Pisa was beaten. In 1259, nevertheless, she turned on the Genoese and drove them down the seas. But the death of Frederic in 1250 was the true end of the Ghibelline cause in Italy. What then did Pisa look like in these the days of her great power and prosperity? She was a city, we may think, of narrow shadowy streets like the Via delle Belle Torri, full of refuse and garbage too, for then, as now in the remoter places, the household slops were simply hurled out of the windows with a mere _guarda_! called from an upper window. And to the horror of less fortunate cities, these streets were full of "Pagans, Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and foul Chaldeans, with their incense, pearls, and jewels." Yet though so good a Guelph as Donizo, the biographer of the great Countess, can express his horror of these "Gentiles," Genoa, too, must have been in much the same case; but then Genoa was Guelph, and Pisa Ghibelline. Yet then, as to-day in that quiet far corner of the city, in a meadow sprinkled with daisies, the great white Duomo stood a silent witness to the splendour of the noblest republic in Tuscany. But her day was too soon over. In 1254, Florence and Lucca met and defeated her. The Guelphs had won. In Pisa we find the government reformed, elders appointed, a senate, a great council, and Podestà, a Captain of the People. It seemed as though Pisa herself was about to become Guelph, or at any rate to fling out her nobles. But in many a distant colony the nobles ruled, undisturbed by the disaster at home. And then, almost before she had set her house in order, the splendid victory of Monteaperto threw the Guelphs into confusion, and the banners of Pisa once more flew wide and far. But the fatal cause of the Empire was doomed; Manfred fell at Benevento, and Corradino was defeated at Tagliacozzo by Charles of Anjou, who, not content with victory, expelled the Pisan merchants from his ports. There was left to her the sea. Now Ugolino della Gherardesca, of the great family which had been especially enraged by the conduct of Visconti, married his sister to one of that family reigning at Gallura in Sardinia. This man, the judge of Gallura, as he was called, had come to live in Pisa. The Pisans looked with much suspicion on this alliance, and exiled first the Visconti and later Ugolino himself, with all the other Guelphs. Ugolino went to Lucca, and with her help in 1276 overcame his native city and forced her to receive again the exiles. Then the merchandise of Florence passed freely through her port, Lucca regained her fortresses, and Pisa herself fell into the possession of Ugolino. Nevertheless, without a thought of fear, looking ever seaward, she awaited the Genoese attack, certain that it would come, since she was divided within her gates. It was to be a fight to the death. During the year 1282 the Genoese were driven back from the mouth of the Arno, the Pisans were driven from Genoa, and scattered and spoiled by a storm. These were but skirmishes; the fight was yet to come. In Genoa they built a hundred and fifty ships of war; the Pisans, too, were straining every nerve. Then came a running fight off Sardinia, in which the Pisans had the worse of it, losing eight galleys and fifteen hundred men. Yet they were not disheartened. They made Alberto Morosini, a Venetian, their Podestà, and with him as Admirals were Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and Andreotto Saracini. When the treasury was empty the nobles gave their fortunes for the public cause. We hear of one family giving eleven ships of war, others gave six, others less, as they were able. At midsummer 1284 more than a hundred galleys sailed to Genoa, and in scorn shot arrows of silver into the great harbour. But the Genoese were not yet prepared. They were ready a few days later, however, when the watchers by Arno "descried a hundred and seven sail" making for the Porto. Then Pisa thrust forth her ships. With songs and with thanksgiving the Archbishop Ubaldino, at the head of all the clergy of the city, flung the Pisan standard out on the wind. It was night when the fleet was lost to sight in the offing. In that night there came to the Genoese thirty ships by way of reinforcement unknown to the Pisans. These they hid behind the island of Meloria. At dawn the battle broke. In many squadrons the ships flung themselves on one another, and for long the victory hung in the balance. The Pisans had already grappled for boarding, the battle was yet to win, when the Genoese reinforcements sailed out from the island straight for the Pisan Admirals. The battle was over. Flight--it was all that was left for Pisa. Ugolino himself was said to have given the signal. There fell that day five thousand Pisans, with eleven thousand captured, and twenty-eight galleys lost to Genoa. There was no family in Pisa but mourned its dead: for six months on every side nothing was heard but lamentations and mourning. If you would see Pisa, it was said, you must go to Genoa. Pisa had lost the sea. In Tuscany she stood with Arezzo facing the Guelph League. She elected Ugolino her Captain-General.[29] A man of the greatest force and ability, he was ambitious rather for himself than for Pisa. Having many Guelph friends, his business was to beat Genoa and the Guelph League. He succeeded in part. He bribed Florence with certain strongholds to leave the League, and he expelled the Ghibellines from Pisa. Then he offered Genoa Castro in Sardinia as ransom for the Pisan prisoners; but they sent word to the Council that they would not accept their freedom at the price of the humiliation of their city. Such were the Pisans. And, indeed, they threatened that if at such a price they were set free, they would return only to punish those who had thought such treason. Ugolino for his part cared not.[30] He proceeded to bribe Lucca with other strongholds. In the city all was confusion. Ugolino was turned out of the Dictatorship, he became Captain of the People. Not for long, however, for soon he contrived to make himself tyrant again. Now the Genoese, seeing they were like to get nothing out of their prisoners by this, were anxious for a money ransom. But Ugolino, fearing those brave men, broke the truce with Genoa, urging certain pirates of Sardinia to attack the Genoese; and, in order to make sure of this, while he himself went to his castle in the country, he arranged with Ruggieri dei Ubaldini, the Archbishop, to expel the Guelphs, among them his own nephew, from Pisa. The plot succeeded; but Pisa desired that the Archbishop should for the future divide the power with Ugolino. To this Ugolino would not agree, and in a rage he slew the nephew of the Archbishop. Meanwhile, Ugolino's nephew, Nino Visconti, was plotting with him to return. This came to the ears of Ruggieri, who called the Ghibellines to arms, and at last succeeded in capturing Ugolino and his family, after days of fighting. Well had Marco Lombardo, that "wise and valiant man of affairs," told him, "The wrath of God is the only thing lacking to you." "Of a truth," says Villani, the old Florentine Chronicler,--"of a truth the wrath of God soon came upon him, as it pleased God, because of his treacheries and crimes; for when the Archbishop of Pisa and his followers had succeeded in driving out Nino and his party, by the counsel and treachery of Count Ugolino the forces of the Guelphs were diminished; and then the Archbishop took counsel how to betray Count Ugolino; and in a sudden uproar of the people he was attacked and assaulted at the palace, the Archbishop giving the people to understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and given up their fortresses to the Florentines and the Lucchesi; and, being without any defence, the people having turned against him, he surrendered himself prisoner; and at the said assault one of his bastard sons and one of his grandsons were slain, and Count Ugolino was taken and two of his sons and three grandsons, his son's children, and they were put in prison; and his household and followers, the Visconti and Ubizinghi, Guatini and all the other Guelph houses, were driven out of Pisa. Thus was the traitor betrayed by the traitor.... In the said year 1288, in the said month of March ... the Pisans chose for their captain Count Guido of Montefeltro, giving him wide jurisdiction and lordship; and he passed the boundaries of Piedmont, within which he was confined by his terms of surrender to the Church, and came to Pisa; for which thing he and his sons and family and all the commonwealth of Pisa were excommunicated by the Church of Rome, as rebels and enemies against Holy Church. And when the said Count was come to Pisa ... the Pisans, which had put in prison Count Ugolino and his two sons, and two sons of Count Guelpho his son ... in the tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, caused the door of the said tower to be locked and the keys thrown into Arno, and refused to the said prisoners any food, which in a few days died there of hunger. And albeit first the said Count demanded with cries to be shriven; yet did they not grant him a friar or a priest to confess him. And when all the five dead bodies were taken out of the tower, they were buried without honour; and thenceforward the said prison was called the Tower of Hunger, and will be always[31]." Enough of Ugolino. Count Guido, that mystical, fierce soul from Urbino, seeing danger everywhere, called the whole city to the army. Florence had allied herself with Lucca and Genoa[32]. Count Guido's business was to beat them. He did it[33]; so that by the Assumption of Our Lady in 1292 he had won back again nearly all the lost fortresses, and wrung peace from the Guelph League. Nevertheless, Pisa was compelled to sacrifice her captain, and to see Genoa established in Corsica and in part of Sardinia; also she had to pay 160,000 lire to Genoa for the Pisan captives, and in Elba to admit Genoese trade free of tax. Some idea of the glory of Pisa even when she had suffered so much may be had, perhaps, from Tronci's account of that Festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin as it was kept in August 1293, when the peace had been signed. The Anziani, Tronci tells us[34], "were used, for a month before the Festa, to publish it in the following manner. Twenty horses covered all with scarlet, went out of the city bearing twenty youths dressed in fanciful and rich costumes. The first two carried two banners, one of the Comunità, the other of the Popolo. Two others carried two lances of silver washed with gold, on which were the Imperial eagles. Two others bore on their fists two living eagles crowned with gold. The rest followed in a company, dressed in rich liveries. There came after, the trumpeters of the Comunità with the silver trumpets, and others with fifes and wind instruments of divers loudness, and they proclaimed the _Palii_ which were to be won on land and water. "On land, the first prize was of red velvet lined with fur, with a great eagle of silver. This he received who first reached the goal. To the second was given a silken stuff of the value of thirty gold florins, to the third in jest was offered a pair of geese and a bunch of garlic. On the water the race was rowed in little galleys and brigantini. He who came in first won a Bull covered with scarlet, and fifty _scudi_; the second a piece of silken stuff with thirty gold florins, the third got only geese and garlic. "On the first day of August were placed on the towers of the city, certainly some 16,000 in number, three banners on each of them; one with the Imperial eagle, another of the Commune, and the third of the People. In like manner, on the cupola, façade, and corners of the Duomo, on S. Giovanni, on the Campo Santo and the Campanile, these banners flew not only on the top, but at all the angles of the columns. The same were seen on all the churches of the city, and on all the palaces, the Palazzo Pubblico, the Palace of the Podestà, the Palazzo del Capitano del Conservatore, the Corte del Consulato di Mare, on the palaces of the Mercati and of the seven Arti. The Contado followed the example of the city; and thus it continued all the month of August. And the whole people of every sort made great rejoicing and feasting, to which foreigners were particularly invited. "At the first Vespers of the Festa, the Anziani went to the Duomo in state: and before them walked the maidens dressed in new costumes; and after came the trumpeters, and the Captain with his company, and all the other lesser magistrates. When they were come to the Cathedral, the Archbishop, vested _a Pontificale_, began solemn Vespers. This ended, a youth mounted into the pulpit and chanted a prayer in praise of the Assumption of the Most Glorious Virgin. Then Matins was sung; and that finished, the procession made its way round about the church, and was joined by all the Companies and the Regulars, carrying each man a candle of wax of half a pound weight, alight in his hands. The Clergy followed with the Canons and the Archbishop with lighted candles of greater weight; and last came the Anziani, the Podestà, the Captain and other Magistrates, the Representatives of the Arti, and all the People with lights of wax in their hands. And the procession being over, all went to see the illuminations, the bonfires, and the festa, through the city. "On the morning of the Festa, the _ceri_ were placed on the _trabacche_, that were more than sixty in number, carried, by boys dressed in liveries, with much pomp. Immediately after followed the Anziani, the Podestà, and the Captain of the People with all the other Magistrates and Officials and the people, with the Company of Horse richly dressed and with the Companies of Foot; and a little after came all the _arti_, carrying each one his great _cero_ all painted, and accompanied by all the wind instruments. It was a thing sweet to hear and beautiful to see. The offering made, they went out to bring the silver girdle[35] borne with great pomp on a _carretta_; and there assisted all the clergy in procession with exquisite music both of voices and of instruments. The usual ceremonies being over, they encircled the Cathedral, and hung the girdle to the irons that were set round about. Yes, it was this girdle of a great value and very beautiful that was spoken of through the whole world, so that from many a city of Italy people came in haste to see it; but to-day there is nothing of it left save a small particle[36]." Misfortune certainly had not broken the spirit of Pisa. And so it is not surprising that, though she dared scarcely fly her flag on the seas, on land she thought to hold her own. No doubt this hope was strengthened by the advent in 1312 of Henry VII of Luxembourg. With him on her side she dreamed of the domination of Tuscany. But it was not to be. She found money and arms in his cause and her own. She opened a new war with the Guelph League; she suspended her own Government and made him lord of Pisa. He remained with her two months, and then in 1313 he died at Buonconvento. They buried him sadly in the Duomo. The two million florins she had expended were lost for ever. Frederick of Sicily, Henry's ally, though he came to Pisa, refused the proferred lordship, as did Henry of Savoy; and at last Pisa placed herself under the Imperial Vicar of Genoa, for that city also had been delivered by her nobles into the hands of Henry VII. Uguccione della Faggiuola, the Imperial Vicar of Genoa, remained, as Imperial legate, Podestà, Captain of the People, and Elector, bringing with him one thousand German horse. The rest of the army of Henry returned over the Alps. Pisa thought herself on the verge of ruin; she must make terms with her foes. This being done, there appeared to be no further need for Uguccione, whose German troops were expensive, and whose presence did but anger the Guelphs. Uguccione was a man of enormous strength, brave, too, and resolute, swift to decide an issue, wise in council, but a barbarian. What had he to do with peace. His business was war, as he very soon let the Pisans know. Nor were they slow to take him at his word. Pisa was never beaten. Uguccione marched through the streets with the living eagles of the Empire borne before him. Before long he had deprived the Guelphs of power, and was practically tyrant of Pisa. Everything now seemed to depend on victory. Lucca scarcely ten miles away, Guelph by tradition and hatred of Pisa, was in an uproar. Uguccione saw his chance and took it; he flung himself on the city and delivered it up to its own factions while the Pisans sacked it. Nor did they spare the place. The spoil was enormous; among the rest, a large sum belonging to the Pope fell into their hands. Florence and her allies sprang to arms. Uguccione took up the challenge, burnt the lands of Pistoja and San Miniato al Tedesco, ravaged the vineyards of Volterra, seized the fortresses of Val di Nievole, and at last besieged Montecatini. It was now that the Ghibellines of Lucca with Castruccio Castracani joined Uguccione. They met the army of Florence at Montecatini. Machiavelli states that Uguccione fell ill, and had no part in the battle, which was won by Castruccio. Villari, however, gives the glory to Uguccione. It might seem that Uguccione, whether ill or not on the day of battle, was jealous, and perhaps afraid, of Castruccio. Certainly he plotted against him, sending his son Nerli to Lucca with orders to trap Castruccio and imprison him; which was done. Nerli, however, wanted resolution to kill him; and his father hearing this, set out from Pisa with four hundred horse to take the matter in hand. The Pisans, who were by this time completely enslaved by Uguccione, seized the opportunity to rise. Macchiavelli tells us "they cut his Deputies' throats, and slew all his Family. Now, that he might be sure they were in earnest, they chose the Conte de Gherardesca, and made him their Governor." When Uguccione got to Lucca he found the city in an uproar, and the people demanding the release of Castruccio. This he was compelled to allow. With Castruccio at liberty, Lucca was too hot for him, and he fled into Lombardy to the Lords of Scala, where no long time after, he died. After the great victory of Montecatini, Gherardesca and Castruccio soon came to terms with the Guelphs; and all that Pisa really seems to have gained by the war was that she was compelled to build a hospital and chapel for the repose of the souls of the dead at Montecatini. This chapel, hidden away in the Casa dei Trovatelli at the top of Via S. Maria in Pisa, became a glorious monument of the victory of Pisa over Florence. But the freedom of Pisa was gone for ever; others, lords and tyrants, arose, Castruccio Castracani and the rest, yet she was still at bay. On the 2nd October 1325 she again defeated Florence at Altopascio, and even excluded her from the port, and, in 1341, when Florence had bought Lucca from Mastino della Scala for 250,000 florins, she besieged it to prevent the entry of the Florentine army then aided by Milan, Mantova, and Padova, In 1342, the Florentines having failed to relieve Lucca, the Pisans entered the city. The possession of Lucca seemed to put Pisa, where centuries ago Luitprand had placed her, at the head of the province of Tuscany. This view, which certainly she herself was not slow to take, was confirmed when Volterra and Pistoja placed themselves under her protection; yet, as ever, her greatest danger was the discord within her walls. The Republic was weak, nearly a million and a half of florins had been spent on the war, and many tyrants were her allies; moreover, she had lent troops to Milan.[37] It was this moment of reaction after so great an effort that Visconti d'Oleggio chose for a conspiracy against Gherardesca the Captain-General. It is true the plot was discovered, the traitors exiled, and Visconti banished; but the mischief was done. When Lucchino Visconti heard of it in Milan, he imprisoned the Pisan troops in that city and sent Visconti d'Oleggio back with two thousand men to seize Pisa. Thus the war dragged on; and though these Milanese were destroyed for the most part by malaria in the Maremma, still Pisa had no rest. After Visconti came famine, and after the famine the Black Death. Seventy in every hundred of the population died, Tronci tells us,[38] while during the famine, bread, such as it was, had to be distributed every day at the taverns. Then followed a revolution in the city. Count Raniero of the Gherardesca house had succeeded to the Captain-Generalship of Pisa as though it were his right by birth. This brought him many enemies; and, indeed, the city was in uproar for some years: for, while he was so young, Dino della Rocca acted for him. Among the more powerful enemies of della Rocca was Andrea Gambacorti, whose family was soon to enslave the city. Now the one party was called _Bergolini_, for they had named Raniero Bergo for hate, and of these Gambacorti was chief. The other party which was at this time in power, as I have said, was named _Raspanti_, which is to say graspers, and of them Dino della Rocca was head. In the midst of this disputing Raniero died, and the Raspanti were accused of having murdered him, among others by Gambacorti. Every sort of device to heal these wounds was resorted to; marriages and oaths all alike failed. The city blazed with their arson every night, till at last the people rose and expelling the Raspanti, chose Andrea Gambacorti for captain. This happened in 1348. Seven years later, Charles IV, on his way to Rome to be crowned, came to the city. Now the Conte di Montescudaio was known to Charles, who years before had ruled in Lucca; therefore the Raspanti, of when Montescudaio was one, took heart, and at the moment when Charles was in the Duomo receiving the homage of the city, they roused the people assembled in the Piazza, shouting for the Emperor and Liberty; but Charles heeded them not. Nevertheless Gambacorti, to save himself, thought fit to give Charles the lordship of the city; but the people, angered at this, demanded their liberty, so that the magistrates, fearing for peace, reconciled the two factions, who then together demanded of Charles his new lordship. And he gave it them with as good a grace as he could, for his men were few. Then again he heard from Lucca. There, too, they demanded liberty, and especially from the dominion of Pisa, and, it is said, the Lucchesi in France gave him 20,000 florins for this. But Pisa heard of it. When Charles sent his troops to occupy Lucca, the Raspanti saw their opportunity and rose. They put themselves at the head of the people, who slew one hundred and fifty of Charles's Germans, and held Charles himself a prisoner in the Duomo, where he lodged since the Palazzo Comunale had been fired. Montescudaio, however, secretly joined Charles with his men; he burnt the houses of the Gambacorti and dispersed the mob. Apparently Lucca was free. But Charles had reckoned without the Pisan garrison in the subject city. They fired their beacons, and Pisa saw the blaze. It was enough, their dominion was in danger; there were no longer any factions; Raspanti and Bergolini alike stood together for Pisa. They streamed out of the great Porta a Lucca to the relief of their own people, and though six thousand armed peasants opposed them, they won to Lucca and took it, the Pisani still holding the gates. Then they fired the city, and when the flames closed in round S. Michele the Lucchesi surrendered. Thus they served their enemies. But Charles had his revenge. He seized the Gambacorti, and appointing a judge, having given instructions to find them guilty, tried them and beheaded seven of them in Piazza degli Anziani, in spite of the rage of Pisa. Then, with a large amount of treasure, of which he had spoiled the Pisans, he fled back with his barbarians to his Germany. And as soon as he was gone the city took Montescudaio and sent him into exile[39], with the remaining Gambacorti also. So Charles left Pisa more Ghibelline than he found her. It was at this time that Pisa really began to see perhaps her true danger from Florence. Certainly she did everything to prick her into war. But Florence was already victorious. Her answer was more disastrous than any battle; she took her trade from the port of Pisa to the Sienese port Talamone. Then Florence purchased Volterra, over the head of Pisa as it were; and at last, careless whether it pleased the Pisans or no, she permitted the Gambacorti to make raid upon Pisan territory, and allowed Giovanni di Sano, who had lately been in her service, to seize a fortress in the territory of Lucca. The peace was broken. On the brink of ruin, ravaged by plague, Pisa turned to confront her hard, merciless foe. For months Florence ravaged her territory, while she, too weak to strike a blow in her own honour, could but hold her gates. Then the plague left her, and she rose. Bernabò Visconti was sending her help for 150,000 florins.[40] The English were on the way; already over the mountains, Hawkwood and his White Company were coming to save her; meantime she tried to strike for herself. Pietro Farnese of the Florentines laid her low, taking one hundred and fifty prisoners and her general. The English tarried, but a new ally was already by her side. The Black Death which had brought down her pride, now fell upon the enemy, both in camp and in their city of the Lily: and then--the English were come. On the 1st of February 1364, Hawkwood, with a thousand horse and two thousand foot, drove the Florentines through the Val di Nievole; he harried them above Vinci and chased them through Serravalle, crushed them at Castel di Montale, and scattered them in the valley of Arno. They found their city at last, as foxes find their holes, and went to earth. There Pisa halted. Before the gates of Pisa the Florentines for years had struck money: so the Pisans did before Florence. Nor was this all. Halting there three days, says the chronicle,[41] "they caused three palii to be run well-nigh to the gates of Florence. One was on horseback, another was on foot, and the third was run by loose women (_le feminine mundane_); and they caused newly-made priests to sing Mass there, and they coined money of divers kinds of gold and of silver; and on one side thereof was Our Lady, with Her Son in Her arms; on the other side was the Eagle, with the Lion beneath its feet.... Thereafter for further dispite they set up a pair of gallows over against the gate of Florence, and hanged thereon three asses." Florence refused to submit. Other Free Companies such as Hawkwood's joined in the war. The Florentines hired that of the Star. But Hawkwood was not to be denied. He marched up Arno, devastating the country, and at last deigned to return to Pisa by Cortona and Siena. Then Florence did what might have been expected. She bribed Baumgarten, who with his Germans had fought since the rout with Hawkwood. They met at the Borgo di Cascina on 28th July. Hawkwood was caught napping, and Pisa in her turn was humbled. The Florentines returned with two thousand prisoners, having slain a thousand men. They took with them "forty-two wagons full of prisoners, all packed together 'like melons,' with a dead eagle tied by the neck and dragging along the ground."[42] Such was war in Italy in the fourteenth century. Then followed the Doge Agnello: the greatness of Pisa was past. It had ever been the plan of Milan to weaken Florence by aiding Pisa, and to weaken Pisa by this continual war, for it was the Visconti's dream to carry their dominion into Tuscany. Now at this time, amid all these disasters, the Pisan ambassador at Milan was a certain Giovanni dell' Agnello, a merchant, ambitious but without honour. This plebeian readily lent himself to the Visconti to betray the city, if thereby he might win power; and this Visconti promised him, for, said he, "if I win Pisa, you shall be my lieutenant, and all the world will take you even for my ally." Agnello went back to Pisa full of this dream:[43] and at the first opportunity suggested that Visconti would be flattered if a Lord were to be elected in Pisa, if only for a year at a time; and in his subtilty he proposed Pietro d' Albizzo da Vico, a very much respected (_di gran stima_) citizen, as Lord. But Messer Pietro replied by asking to be sent with other citizens to Pescia to arrange the peace with Florence. Then a certain Vanni Botticella applied for the post; and Agnello praised him for his patriotism, but asked him whether he had money enough to be Lord. Certainly Pisa had fallen. By this Agnello was suspected, and indeed one night certain citizens got leave to search his house, for they believed him to be a traitor[44]. But he had warning, and already Hawkwood had sold himself, for it was his business. So, when those citizens had returned disappointed, for they found Agnello abed, he arose and joined his bandits. With Hawkwood he went to the Palazzo dei Anziani, bound the guard and had the Elders summoned, and told them a tale of how the Blessed Virgin had bidden him assume the lordship of the city. Well, he had his way, his bandits saw to that; so the Anziani agreed and swore obedience. Next day Pisa acclaimed her Doge. Agnello remained Doge, or Lord as he preferred to be called, for four years. Then Charles IV marched back over the Alps into Italy. Bought off and thwarted in Lombardy, he came towards Lucca, which the Lucchesi exiles again offered to buy from him. Agnello was terrified. In haste he sent to Charles offering to give him Lucca if he were made sure in Pisa. Outside the walls of Lucca, Charles knighted this astute tradesman. Agnello ran back to Pisa and conferred knighthood on his nephews. Then he built a platform and awaited the Emperor. His end was in keeping with his life. As he stood on the insecure "hustings" which he had built, that in sight of all the people Charles might declare him Imperial Vicar of Pisa, the platform collapsed and Agnello's leg was broken. Now, whether the comic spirit, so helpful to justice, be strong in our Pisans still, I know not, but on learning of the misfortune of their Lord, they rose, and, without noticing their Imperial Vicar, appointed Anziani to rule by the old laws. Then the burghers and nobles--"Cittadini amatori della Patria," Tronci calls them--formed the Campagnia di S. Michele, for it bore on its gonfalon St. Michael Archangel, and the black eagle of the Empire. It was the business of this company to restore peace and unity to the city. The leaders resolved to recall the exiles, among them Pietro Gambacorti. He came, and the city greeted him, and he swore to serve the Republic and to forgive his enemies. A riot followed; the Bergolini armed themselves and burnt the Gambacorti palaces. But Pietro Gambacorti called to the city, which had risen to defend itself and to make reprisals, saying, "I have pardoned them--I, whose parents they slew. By what right do you refuse to do what I have done?"[45] The Bergolini took the government, and there was peace. Then the Campagnia di S. Michele broke up. Not for long, however, could there be peace in Pisa. The Raspanti still held one of the gates; and thinking to better themselves, they sent an embassy to Charles, who was in Lucca, asking his help. He imprisoned the embassy, and at once sent his Germans to seize the city. But the Pisans heard of it. They rang the great bells in the Campanile, and barricaded the gates with the benches and stalls in the Duomo, on the Baptistery they set their bowmen, and on the Campanile the slingers. Then they tore up the streets, and waited to give death for death. The Germans, however, were easily beaten and bought off, and Pisa again returned to her internal quarrels. Out of these sprang, in 1385, Pietro Gambacorti, as Captain of the people. It was the beginning of the last twenty years of Pisa's life as an independent city. She now stood between Visconti in the north and Florence close at hand. Florence was her friend against Visconti for her own sake: she meant to have Pisa herself. Gambacorti did his best. With infinite tact he kept friends with both cities. Under him Pisa seemed to regain something of her old confidence and prosperity. A man of fine courage, simplicity, and passing honest, he was incapable of suspecting a tried friend whom he had benefited. Yet it was by the hand of such an one he fell. Jacopo d'Appiano's father had been exiled with Gambacorti in 1348. Like many another Pisan house which had risen from nothing, Appiano was at feud with certain of his fellow-citizens, among them the Lanfranchi family. For this cause he kept a guard about him. Now Gambacorti, who remembered his father's exile, made Appiano permanent "Chancellor of the Republic": and hoping to reconcile the Lanfranchi with the new chancellor, he sent for Lanfranchi, but the bandits of Appiano murdered him as he went thither, and then joined Appiano in his house. Gambacorti ordered his chancellor to deliver them up, but he refused. Then the Bergolini offered Gambacorti their assistance, but he refused it, trusting to justice. Appiano, however, at the head of the Raspanti, marched to the palace of Gambacorti. The city was in arms, and they had to fight their way. Arrived before the palace, Gambacorti ordering his men not to shoot his friend, agreed to confer with Appiano. So he went out of his house, and as Appiano stretched out his hand, in token, as it were, of friendship, his bandits fell upon him and slew him. A fight followed, in which the Bergolini were beaten; then Appiano became Captain of the People. In truth, it was only a device of Visconti for seizing the city. Appiano admitted the Milanese, and what Agnello had failed to do, he did, for he ruled as the creature of Gian Galeazzo. But there is no honour among thieves. Soon Visconti, hoping to win Pisa all for himself, plotted against Appiano. The quarrel went on, Appiano fearing to make treaty with Florence lest he should fall, and fearing, too, to decide with Visconti lest he should be murdered, till he died, and his son became Captain, only to sell Pisa to Visconti for 200,000 florins, with Elba also, and many castles.[46] Then Gian Galeazzo died in 1404. Now Florence knew that in the confusion which followed the death of the great Visconti, Pisa was weak and almost without defence, so without hesitation she sent an army to seize the city: but Pisa, always at her best in danger, worked night and day, nor was any man idle in building fortifications. In Genoa the Frenchman Boucicault, who had held that city, came to her assistance, for the last thing Genoa or Milan desired was to see Pisa and her port in the hands of Florence. Boucicault imprisoned all the Florentines in Genoa, and seized Livorno, nor would he agree to release his prisoners till Florence had signed a four years' peace. But Pisa soon wearied of this. In the grip of Genoa, fearing Visconti, unable to save herself, she revolted, and Boucicault sold her to Florence, for he had to defend himself in Genoa. It was in August 1405 that Pisa was given up to Florence, but although for a moment Florence then held the city, she was to fight for it in earnest before she could hold it for good. As yet she only possessed the citadel, and by a ruse the Pisans managed to win that from her: then they sent to Florence to negotiate. They offered to buy their freedom, but Florence was obdurate. She was determined to possess herself of Pisa; her armies were ordered to advance. Pisa was ready. At that moment all feuds were forgotten; a united city opposed the Florentines: there was but one way to take it--by famine. And it was thus at last, on 9th October 1406, Pisa fell. Preferring to die rather than to surrender, it would have been into a city of the dead that the armies of Florence would have marched, but for the brutal treachery of Giovanni Gambacorti. As it was, it was only a city of the dying that Florence occupied. After every kind of heroic effort, Giovanni Gambacorti sold Pisa when she was too weak to fight, save against a declared enemy, for 50,000 florins, the citizenship of Florence and Borgo to rule. He opened the gates, and Florence streamed in. There was scarcely a crust left in the city which was at last become the vassal of Florence. Here, truly, the chronicles of Pisa end--in the horrid cruelty, scorn, and disdain so characteristic of the Florentine. Certainly with the Medici a more humane government was adopted, so that in 1472 we read of Lorenzo Magnifico restoring the University to something of its old splendour, but nothing he could do was able to extinguish the undying hatred of Pisa for those who had stolen away her liberty. In 1494 that carnival army of Charles VIII, winding through the valleys and over the mountains, seemed to offer them a hope of freedom. They welcomed him with every sort of joy, and hurled the Marzocco and the Gonfalon of Florence into Arno, all to no purpose. And truly without hope, from 1479 to 1505, they bore heroically three sieges and flung back three different armies of Florence. Soderini and Macchiavelli urged on the war. In 1509, Macchiavelli, that mysterious great man, besieged her on three sides, and at last, forced by hunger and famine, Pisa admitted him on the 8th June. It was her last fight for liberty. But she had won for herself the respect of her enemies. A more humane and moderate policy was adopted in dealing with her. Nevertheless, as in 1406, so now, her citizens fled away, so that there was scarcely left a Pisan in Pisa for the victor to rule. Grand Duke Cosimo seems to have loved her. It was there he founded his Order of the Knights of St. Stephen to harry the pirates in the Mediterranean. Still she was a power on the sea, though in the service of another. And though dead, she yet lived, for she is of those who cannot die. The ever-glorious name of Galileo Galilei crowns her immortality. Born within her walls, he taught at her University, and his first experiments in the knowledge of the law of gravity were made from her bell-tower, while, as it is said, the great lamp of her Duomo taught him the secret of the pendulum. Looking on her to-day, remembering her immortal story, one thinks only of the beauty that is from of old secure in silence on that meadow among the daisies just within her walls. III It is with a peculiar charm and sweetness that Pisa offers herself to the stranger, who maybe between two trains has not much time to give her. And indeed to him she knows she has not much to offer, just a few things passing strange or beautiful, that are spread out for him as at a fair, on the grass of a meadow in the dust and the sun. But to such an one Pisa can never be more than a vision, vanished as soon as seen, in the heat of midday or the shadow of evening. But for me, of all the cities that grow among the flowers in Tuscany, it is Pisa that I love best. She is full of the sun; she has the gift of silence. Her story is splendid, unfortunate, and bitter, and moves to the song of the sea: still she keeps her old ways about her, the life of to-day has not troubled her at all. In her palaces the great mirrors are still filled with the ghosts of the eighteenth century; on her Lung' Arno you may almost see Byron drive by to mount his horse at the gate, while in the Pineta, not far away, Shelley lies at noonday writing verses to Miranda. It is on the Lung' Arno, curved like a bow, so much more lovely than any Florentine way, that what little world is left to Pisa lingers yet. Before one is the Ponte di Mezzo, the most ancient bridge of the city, built in 1660, but really the representative of its forerunners that here bound north and south together: _En moles olim lapidea vix aetatem ferrus nunc mormorea pulchrior et firmior stat simulato Marte virtutis verae specimen saepe datura_, you read on one of the pillars at the northern end. For indeed the first bridge seems to have been of wood, partly rebuilt of stone after the great victory off the coast of Sicily, and finished in 1046[47]. This bridge, called the Ponte Vecchio, took ten years to build, and any doubt we might have as to whether it was of wood or stone is set at rest by Tronci,[48] who tells us that in 1382, "Pietro Gambacorta, together with the Elders and the Consiglio dei Cittadini, determined to rebuild in stone the bridge of wood which passed over Arno from the mouth of the Strada del Borgo to that of S. Egidio, for the greater ornament of the city, chiefly because there were many shops on the bridge that impeded the view of the beautiful Lung' Arno." One sees the bridge that was thus built, the foundations having been laid with much ceremony, a procession and a sung mass, in a seventeenth-century print in the Museo Civico.[49] There is a buttress a quarter of the way from each end, on which houses were still standing. Then in 1635 this bridge was carried away by a flood. A new bridge was immediately built, only to be destroyed in the same way on 1st January 1644. In 1660 the present Ponte di Mezzo was finished by Francesco Nave of Rome. It was on these bridges that the great Pisan game the _Giuoco del Ponte_ was played,[50] a model of which may be found in the Museo. This new bridge, at any rate, does not shut out the view of the beautiful Lung' Arno, _il bello di Pisa_, as one writer calls it. Standing there you may see the yellow river, curved like a bow, pass through the beautiful city, between the palaces of marble, their wrinkled image reflected in the stream, till it is lost in the green fields on its way to the sea; while on the other side, looking eastward, on either side the river are the palaces of Byron and Shelley, just before the hideous iron bridge, where Arno turns suddenly into the city from the plain and the hills. To the south of the bridge is the Loggia dei Banchi, and farther to the west, on the Lung' Arno, the great palace of the Gambacorti rises, now the Palazzo del Comune, and farther still, the Madonna della Spina, a little Gothic church of marble; while if you pass a little way westward, the Torre Guelfa comes into sight at the bend of the river among the ruins of the old arsenal. It is of course to the wonderful group of buildings to the north of the city, just within the walls, that every traveller will first make his way. Passing from Ponte di Mezzo down the Lung' Arno Regio, past the Palazzo Agostini, beautiful in its red brick past Palazzo Lanfreducci with its little chain and enigmatic motto, "Alla Giornata," past the Grand Ducal Palace, you turn at last into the Via S. Maria, a beautiful and lovely street that winds like a stream full of shadows to the Piazza del Duomo. On your right is the Church of S. Niccolò, founded about the year 1000 by Ugo, Marquis of Tuscany. It seems that with Otho III there came into Italy the Marquis Hugh. "I take it," says Villani,[51] "this must have been the Marquis of Brandenburg, inasmuch as there is no other marquisate in Germany." His sojourn in Italy, and especially in our city of Florence, liked him so well that he caused his wife to come thither, and took up his abode in Florence as Vicar of Otho the Emperor. It came to pass as it pleased God, that when he was riding to the chase in the country of Bonsollazzo, he lost sight of all his followers in a wood, and came out, as he supposed, at a workshop where iron was wont to be wrought. Here he found men black and deformed, who in place of iron seemed to be tormenting men with fire and with hammer, and he asked them what this might be: and they answered and said that these were damned souls, and that to similar pains was condemned the soul of the Marquis Hugh by reason of his worldly life, unless he should repent. With great fear he commended himself to the Virgin Mary, and when the vision was ended he remained so pricked in spirit, that after his return to Florence he sold all his patrimony in Germany and commanded that seven monasteries should be founded. The first was the Badia of Florence, to the honour of St. Mary; the second, that of Bonsollazzo, where he beheld the vision; the third was founded at Arezzo, the fourth at Poggibonizzi, the fifth at the Verruca of Pisa, the sixth at the city of Castello, the last was the one at Settimo; and all these abbeys he richly endowed, and lived afterwards with his wife in holy life, and had no son, and died in the city of Florence on St. Thomas's Day in the year of Christ 1006, and was buried with great honour in the Badia of Florence. Tronci[52] says, that beside the Badia di S. Michele di Verruca outside Pisa, "this most pious Marquis" founded also the Church of S. Niccolò, for the use of the Monks of S. Michele Fuori. The Church of S. Niccolò has been altogether restored. The Campanile, however, the oldest tower left in the city, is strange and lovely. It has been given to Niccolò Pisano, but is certainly older than his day, and, resembling as it does the tower of the Badia at Florence and of the Badia at Settimo, seems to be of the same date as the church. There is a gallery joining the church with the palace of the Grand Dukes, to which it served as chapel. Coming as one does out from this narrow deserted street of S. Maria into the space and breadth of the Piazza del Duomo, one is almost blinded by the sudden light and glory of the sun on those buildings, that seem to be made of old ivory intricately carved and infinitely noble. Standing there as though left stranded upon some shore that life has long deserted, they are an everlasting witness to the Latin genius, symbols as it were of what has had to be given up so that we may follow life at the heels of the barbarian Teuton. It was in 1063,[53] after the great victory at Palermo, that the ships of the Republic returning full of spoil, "after much discourse made in the Senate,"[54] it was decided at last to build "a most magnificent temple" to S. Maria Assunta, for it was about the time of her Festa, that is to say, the 15th August, that the victory had been won. This having been decided on, the Republic sent ambassadors to Rome to the Pope and to King Henry of Germany, and the Pope sent the church many privileges, and the King a royal dowry. So they began to build the temple where stood the old Church of S. Reparata, and more anciently the Baths of the Emperor Hadrian; and they brought marble from Africa, Egypt, Jerusalem, Sardinia, and other far places to adorn the church. In 1065 we read that the Pope received under his protection the Chapter and Canons of Pisa. The Cathedral was finished in about thirty years, and was consecrated by Pope Gelasius II in 1118. The architects, two dim names still to be read on the façade ever kissed by the setting sun, were Rainaldus and Busketus. They built in that Pisan style which, as some of us may think, was never equalled till Bramante and his disciples dreamed of St. Peter's and built the little church at Todi, and S. Pietro in Montorio. However this may be, the Duomo of Pisa, the first modern cathedral of Italy, was to be the pattern of many a church built later in the contado, and even in Lucca and Pistoja and the country round about. It was a style at once splendid and devout, not forgetful of the Roman Empire, yet with new thoughts concerning it, so that where a Roman building had once really stood, now a Latin Church should stand, white with marble and glistening with precious stones. It is strange to find in this far-away piazza the great buildings of the city; and stranger still, when we remember that S. Reparata, the church that was destroyed to make room for the Duomo, was called S. Reparata in Palude, in the swamp. It may be that Pisa was less open to attack on this side, or that this being the highest spot near the city, a flood was less to be feared. But there were other foes beside the flood and the enemy, for the church was damaged by fire in 1595, and was restored in 1604. The Duomo is a basilica with nave and double aisles[55], with a transept flanked with aisles, covered by a dome over the crossing. Built all of white marble, that has faded to the tone of old ivory, it is ornamented with black and coloured bands, and stands on a beautiful marble platform in the grass of a meadow. It is, however, the façade that is the most splendid and beautiful part of the church. It consists of seven round arches; in the centre and in each alternate arch is a door of bronze made by Giovanni da Bologna in 1602. Above these arches is the first tier of columns, eighteen in number, of various coloured marbles, supporting the round arches of the first storey; above, the roof of the aisles slopes gradually inwards, and is supported again by a tier of pillars of various marbles, while above rise two other tiers supporting the roof of the nave. On the corners of the church and on the corners of the nave are figures of saints, while above all, on the cusp of the façade, stands Madonna with Her Son in Her arms. The door in the south transept is by Bonannus, whose great doors were destroyed in 1595. Within, the church is solemn and full of light. Sixty-eight antique columns, the spoil of war, uphold the church, while above is a coffered Renaissance ceiling, of the seventeenth century. There is but little to see beside the church itself, a few altar-pieces, one by Andrea del Sarto; a few tombs; the bronze lamp of Battista Lorenzi, which is said to have suggested the pendulum to Galileo, and that is all in the nave. The choir screens, work of the Renaissance, are very lovely, while above them are the _ambones_, from which on a Festa the Epistle and Gospel are sung. The stalls are of the end of the fifteenth century, and the altar, a dreadful over-decorated work, of the year 1825. Matteo Civitali of Lucca made the wooden lectern behind the high altar, and Giovanni da Bologna forged the crucifix, while Andrea del Sarto, not at his best, painted the Saints Margaret and Catherine, Peter and John, to the right and left of the altar. The capital of the porphyry column here is by Stagio Stagi of Pietrasanta, while the porphyry vase is a prize from a crusade. The mosaics in the apsis are much restored, but they are the only known work of Cimabue,[56] and are consequently, even in their present condition, valuable and interesting. The most beautiful and the most interesting work of art in the Duomo is the Madonna, carved in ivory in 1300 by Giovanni Pisano, in the sacristy. This Madonna is a most important link in the history of Italian art; it seems to suggest the way in which French influence in sculpture came into Italy. Such work as this, by some French master, probably came not infrequently into Italian hands; nor was its advent without significance; you may find its influence in all Giovanni's work, and in how much of that which came later.[57] It is but a step across that green meadow to the Baptistery, that like a casket of ivory and silver stands to the west of the Duomo. It was begun in 1153 by Diotisalvi, but the work went very slowly forward. In 1164, out of 34,000 families in Pisa subject to taxes, each gave a gold sequin for the continuation of the work, but it was not finished altogether till the fourteenth century. There are four doors; above them on the east and north are sculptures of the thirteenth century.[58] Truly, one might as well try to describe the face of one's angel as these holy places of Pisa, which are catalogued in every guide-book ever written. At least I will withhold my hand from desecrating further that which is still so lovely. Only, if you would hear the heavenly choirs before death has his triumph over you, go by night into the Baptistery, having bribed some choir-boy to sing for you, and you shall hear from that marvellous roof a thousand angels singing round the feet of San Raniero. Perhaps the loveliest thing here is the great octagonal font of various marbles, in which every Pisan child has been christened since 1157; but it is the pulpit of Niccolò Pisano that everyone praises. Niccolò Pisano appears to have been born in Apulia, and to have come to Pisa about the middle of the thirteenth century. We know scarcely anything of his life. The earliest record in which we find his name is the contract of 1265, in which he binds himself to make a pulpit for the Duomo of Siena.[59] There he is called _Magister Niccolus lapidum de paroccia ecclesie Sancti Blasii de Ponte, de Pisis quondam Petri_. Another document of later date describes him as _Magister Nichola Pietri de Apulia_. Coming thus to Pisa from Apulia, possibly after many wanderings, in about 1250, his childhood had been passed not among the Tuscan hills, but in Southern Italy among the relics of the Roman world. It is not any sudden revelation of Roman splendour he receives in the Campo Santo of Pisa, but just a reminder, as it were, of the things of his childhood, the broken statues of Rome that littered the country of his birth. Thus in a moment this Southerner transforms the rude art of his time here in Tuscany, the work of Bonannus, for instance, the carvings of Biduinus, and the bas-reliefs at San Cassiano,[60] with the faint memory of Rome that lingered like a ghost in the minds of men, that already had risen in the laws and government of the cities, in the desire of men here in Pisa, for instance, for liberty, and that was soon to recreate the world. If the Roman law still lived as tradition and custom in the hearts of men, the statues of the gods were but hiding for a little time in Latin earth. It was Niccolò Pisano who first brought them forth. The pulpit which he made for Pisa--perhaps his earliest work--is in the form of a hexagon resting upon nine columns; the central pillar is set on a strange group, a man, a griffin, and animals; three others are poised on the backs of lions; while three are set on simple pediments on the ground; and three again support the steps. A "trefoil arch" connects the six chief pillars, on each of which stands a statue of a Virtue. It is here that we came for the first time upon a figure not of the Christian world, for Fortitude is represented as Hercules with a lion's cub on his shoulder. In the spandrels of the trefoils are the four Evangelists and six Prophets. Above the Virtues rise pillars clustered in threes, framing the five bas-reliefs and supporting the parapet of the pulpit; and it is here, by these the most beautiful and extraordinary works of that age in Italy, that Niccolò Pisano will be for ever remembered. Poor in composition though they be, they are full of marvellous energy, a Roman dignity and weight. It is antiquity flowering again in a Christian soil, with a certain new radiance and sweetness about it, a naïveté almost ascetic, that was certainly impossible from any Roman hand. On the far side you may see the Birth of Our Lord, where Mary sits in the midst, enthroned, unmoved, with all the serenity of a goddess, while in another part the angel brings her the message with the gesture of an orator. Consider, then, those horses' heads in the Adoration of the Magi, or the high priest in the Presentation, and then compare them with the rude work of Bonannus on the south transept door of the Duomo; no Pisan, certainly no Tuscan, could have carved them thus in high relief with the very splendour of old Rome in every line. And in the Crucifixion you see Christ really for the first time as a God reigning from the cross; while Madonna, fallen at last, is not the weeping Mary of the Christians, but the mother of the Gracchi who has lost her elder son. In the Last Judgment it is a splendid God you see among a crowd of men with heads like the busts in a Roman gallery, with all the aloofness and dignity of those weary emperors. There is almost nothing here of any natural life observed for the first time, and but little of the Christian asceticism so marvellously lovely in the French work of this age; Niccolò has in some way discovered classic art, and has been content with that, as the humanists of the Renaissance were to be content with the discovery of ancient literature later: he has imitated the statues and the bas-reliefs of the sarcophagi, as they copied Cicero. To pass from the Baptistery into the Campo Santo, where among Christian graves the cypresses are dying in the earth of Calvary, and the urns and sarcophagi of pagan days hold Christian dust, is perhaps to make easier the explanation we need of the art of Niccolò. Here, it is said, he often wandered "among the many spoils of marbles brought by the armaments of Pisa to this city." Among these ancient sarcophagi there is one where you may find the Chase of Meleager and the Calydonian boar; this was placed by the Pisans in the façade of the Duomo opposite S. Rocco, and was used as a tomb for the Contessa Beatrice, the mother of the great Contessa Matilda. Was it while wandering here, in looking so often on that tomb on his way to Mass, that he was moved by its beauty till his heart remembered its childhood in a whole world of such things? It must have been so, for here all things meet together and are reconciled in death. Out of the dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,--a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust of Isotta of Rimini. But it is before the fresco of the Triumph of Death that one stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible a subject. Those fair ladies riding on horseback with so brave a show of cavaliers, even they too must come at last to be just dust, is it, or like that swollen body, which seems to taint even the summer sunshine, lying there by the wayside, and come upon so unexpectedly? What love-song was that troubadour, fluttering with ribbons, singing to that little company under the orange-trees, cavaliers and ladies returned from the chase, or whiling away a summer afternoon playing with their falcons and their dogs? The servants have spread rich carpets for their feet, and into the picture trips a singing girl, who has surely called the very loves from Paradise or from the apple-trees covered with blossom, where they make their temporary abode. What love song were they singing, ere the music was frozen on their lips by a falling leaf or chance flutter of bird life calling them to turn, and lo, Death is here? It is in such a place as this that any meditation upon death loses both its sentimental and its ascetic aspect, and becomes wholly aesthetic, so that it can never be before this fresco that such a contemplation should be, as it were, "a lifelong following of one's own funeral." And indeed, it is not any gross fear of death that comes to one at all here in the mysterious sunshine, but a new delight in life. Those joyful pleasant paintings of Benozzo Gozzoli, a third-rate master, but one who is always full of joy and sunshine, with a certain understanding and love, too, of the hills and the trees, seem to confirm us in our delight at the sun and the sea wind, here in Italy, in Italy at last. For, indeed, in what other land than this could a cemetery be so beautiful, and where else in the world do frescoes like these stain the walls out of doors amid a litter of antique statues, graves, and flowers over the heroic or holy dead? Here you may see life at its sanest and most splendid moments. In the long hot days of the vintage, for instance, when the young men tread the wine-press, the girls bear the grapes in great baskets, and boy and girl together pluck the purple fruit. Call it, if you will, the Drunkenness of Noah, you will forget the subject altogether in your delight in the sun and the joy of the vintage itself, where the girls dance among the vines under the burden of the grapes, and the little children play with the dogs, and the goodman tastes the wine. Or again, in the fresco of the Tower of Babel: think if you can of all the mere horror of the confusion, and the terror of death, but in a moment you will forget it, remembering only that heroic Republic which amid her enemies built her splendid city, her beautiful Duomo, her Tower like the horn of an unicorn, and this Campo Santo too, where the hours pass so softly, and the hottest days are cool and full of delight. The Victory of Abraham is a battle gay with the banners of Pisa, when the Gonfalons of Florence lay low in the dust. The Curse of Ham, with its multitude of children, is just the departure of some prodigal for the Sardinian wars on a summer evening beyond the city gate. Thus alone in this place of death Pisa lives, ah! not in the desolate streets of the modern city, but fading on the walls of her Campo Santo, a ghost among ghosts, immortalised by an alien hand. Coming last of all to the greatest wonder of the Piazza, it is really with surprise you find the Campanile so beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful tower of Italy. It is like a lily leaning in the wind, it is like the slanting horn of an unicorn, it is like an ivory Madonna that the artist has not had the heart to carve since the ivory was so fair. Begun in 1174, it was designed by Bonannus. He made it all of white marble, which has faded now to the colour of old ivory. Far away at the top of the tower live the great bells, and especially La Pasquareccia,[61] founded in 1262, stamped with a relief of the Annunciation, for it used to ring the Ave. I think there can be no reasonable doubt that the lean of the Tower is due to some terrible accident which befell it after the third gallery had been built, for the fourth gallery, added in 1204 by Benenabo, begins to rectify the sinking; the rest, built in 1260, continues to throw the weight from the lower to the higher side. As we know, the whole Piazza was a marsh, and just as the foundations of the Tower of S. Niccolò have given a little, so these sank much earlier, offering an unique opportunity to a barbarian architect. There is, as has been often very rightly said, no such thing as a freak in Italian art: its aim was beauty, very simple and direct; nowhere in all its history will you find a grotesque such as this. It is strange that a northerner, William of Innspruck, finished the Tower the fifth storey in 1260; and it may well be that this Teuton brought to the work something of a natural delight in such a thing as this, and contrived to finish it, instead of beginning again. It seems necessary to add that the tower would be more beautiful if it were perfectly upright. The Piazza del Duomo is full of interest. Almost opposite the Campanile, at the corner of the Via S. Maria, is the Casa dei Trovatelli. It was here, as I suppose,[62] that the Pisans built that hospital and chapel to S. Giorgio after the great day of Montecatini.[63] Not far away, behind the Via Torelli in Via Arcevescovado, is the archbishop's palace, with a fine courtyard. If we follow the Via Torelli a little, we pass, on the right, the Oratory of S. Ranieri, the patron saint of Pisa, where there is a crucifix by Giunta Pisano which used to hang in the kitchen of the Convent of S. Anna,[64] not far away, where Emilia Viviani was "incarcerated," as Shelley says. Close by are the few remains of the Baths of Hadrian. At the corner we pass into Via S. Anna, and then, taking the first turning to the left, we come into the great Piazza di S. Caterina, before the church of that name. Built in the thirteenth century, it has a fine Pisan façade, but the church is now closed and the convent has become a boys' school. Passing through the shady Piazza under the plane-trees, we come into the Via S. Lorenzo, and then, turning to the right into Vicolo del Ruschi, we come into a Piazza out of which opens the Piazza di S. Francesco. S. Francesco fell on evil days, and was altogether desecrated, but is now in the hands of the Franciscans again. This is well, for the whole church, founded in 1211, and not the Campanile only, is said to be by Niccolò Pisano.[65] Behind it, in the old convent, is the Museo. As you come into this desecrated and ruined cloister littered with rubbish, among which here and there you may see some quaint or charming thing, it is difficult to remember S. Francis. Yet, indeed, the place was founded by two of his followers, the blessed Agnolo and the blessed Alberto, and still holds in a locked room one of the most extraordinary of his portraits. In the old Chapter-house are some fragments of the pulpit from the Duomo by Giovanni Pisano, destroyed in the fire of 1595. Here we may see very easily the difference between father and son. It is no longer the influence of the antique that gives life to Italian sculpture, but certainly French work, something of that passionate restless energy that, whether we like it or not, puts certain statues at Chartres, for instance, without shame beside the best Greek work. The subjects of these panels are the same as those of Niccolò's pulpit in the Baptistery; one could not wish for a better opportunity of comparing the work of the two men who stand at the source of the Renaissance. Passing through the cloister, we enter the convent through a great room on the first floor, hung with the banners of the Giuoco del Ponte, and bright with service books. In a little room on the left (Sala I) we come into the gallery proper. Here, among all sorts of stained parchments, is the precious remnant of the Cintola del Duomo, that girdle of Maria Assunta which used to be bound round the Duomo.[66] It took some three hundred yards of the fabric, crusted with precious stones, painted with miniatures, sewn with gold and silver, to gird the Duomo. I know not when first it was made, nor who first conceived the proud thought,[67] nor what particular victory put it into his heart. Only the tyrant and thief who stole it I know, Gambacorti, whom Pisa brought back from exile. In the chamber next to this are some strangely beautiful crucifixes by Giunta Pisano, and a little marvellous portrait of S. Francesco on copper with a bright red book in his hand. Of the pictures which follow, but two ever made any impression upon me. One, a Madonna and Child by Gentile da Fabriano, is full of a mysterious loveliness that did not survive him; the other is an altar-piece from S. Caterina by Simone Martini of Siena, where a Magdalen holds the delicate casket of precious ointment, and, as though fainting with the sweetness of her weeping, leans a little, her sleepy, languorous eyes drooping under her heavy hair, which a jewelled ribbon hardly holds up. Something in this "primitive" art has been lost when we come to Angelico, some almost morbid loveliness that you may find even yet in the air about Perugia and Siena, in the delicate flowers there, the honeysuckle which the country people call _le manine della Madonnina_--the little hands of the Virgin, and even in the people sometimes, in their soft gestures and dreamy looks. And for these I pass by the pictures by Benozzo Gozzoli, by Sodoma, and the rest, for they are as nothing. It is, however, not a work of art at all that is perhaps the most interesting thing in the Museo; but a model of the _Giuoco del Ponte_, with certain banners, flags, bucklers, and such, once used by the Pisans in their national game.[68] This _Giuoco_ was played on the Ponte di Mezzo, by the people who lived on the north bank of the river and those on the south, nor were the country folk excluded; and Mr. Heywood tells us that it was no uncommon sight a quarter of a century ago "to see hanging above the doorway of a contadino's house the _targone_ [or shield] with which his sires played at Ponte."[69] The city and countryside being thus divided into two camps, as it were, each chose an army, that was divided into six _squadre_ of from thirty to sixty _soldati_. The _squadre_ of the north were, Santa Maria with a banner of blue and white; San Michele, whose colours were white and red; the Calci, white and green and gold; Calcesana, yellow and black; the Mattaccini, white, blue, and peach-blossom; the Satiri, red and black. The southern _squadre_ were called S. Antonio, whose banner was of flame colour, on which was a pig; S. Martino, with a banner of white, black, and red; San Marco, with a banner of white and yellow with a winged lion, and under its feet was the gospel, on which was written _Pax tibi Marce_; the Leoni, with a banner of black and white; the Dragoni, with a banner of green and white; the Delfini, with a banner of blue and yellow. All these banners were of silk, and very large.[70] Originally the game was played on St. Anthony's day, the 17th of January; later, this first game came to be a sort of trial match, in which the players were chosen for the _Battaglia generale_, which took place on some later date agreed upon by both parties. Thus, I suppose, if any noble visited Pisa, the _Battaglia generale_ would be fought in his honour. The challenge of the side defeated at the last contest having been received, a council of war was held in both camps, and permission being given by the authorities, on that evening, the city was illuminated. The great procession (the _squadre_ in each camp, in the order in which I have named them) took place on the day of battle, each army keeping to its own side of Arno. Then the Piazza del Ponte for the northern army, the Piazza de' Bianchi for the southern, were enclosed with palisades to form the camps, and the battle began. In order to save the _soldato_ from hurt, his head was covered with a _falzata_ of cotton, and guarded by an iron casque with a barred vizor.[71] The body was also swathed in cotton or a doublet of leather, over which iron armour was worn. The arms, too, were covered with quilted leather and the hands in gauntlets, and the legs were protected with gaiters, while round the neck a quilted collar was tied to save the collar bone. The only weapon allowed was the _targone_, a shield of wood curved at the top, and almost but not quite pointed at the foot. At the back of this were two handles, which were gripped by both hands, and the blow delivered with the smaller end of the shield. When the press of the fight was not very great, no doubt this shield was used as a club. These _targoni_ were decorated with mottoes or a device, as we may see from these now in the Museo; they were evidently even heirlooms in the family which had the honour to see one of its members chosen for the _Battaglia_. Four _comandanti_ or captains on each side entered the battle itself. Two of these on each side stood on the parapet of the bridge directing their men. The two northerners wore a scarlet uniform with white facings, the two southerners a green uniform with white facings. Two other _comandanti_ in each army stood on the ground. The two first were unarmed, and were not allowed to interfere with the fight, but the two on the ground, who were allowed two adjutants, could scarcely have been prevented from giving or receiving blows. Before the fight began, the banner of Pisa, a silver cross on a red ground, floated from a staff in the middle of the bridge. This was lowered across the bridge to divide the two armies; and at the close of the fight it was so lowered again, and, according as either side was in the enemy's territory, so the victory went. When the battle was over, the victorious side made procession through the city. If the north had won, all Pisa north of Arno was alight with bonfires, the houses were decorated, everyone was in the streets; while south of Arno the city was in darkness, the people in their houses, not a dog lurked without. Then followed, after a few days, the great trionfo of the victors. "The procession was headed," says Mr. Heywood, "by two trumpeters on horseback, followed by a band of horsemen clad in military costumes, and by war-cars full of arms and banners of the vanquished. Thereafter came certain soldiers on foot with their hands bound, to represent prisoners taken in the battle; then more trumpeters and drummers; and then the triumphal chariot, drawn by four or six horses richly draped and adorned with emblems and mottoes. It was accompanied and escorted by knights and gentlemen on horseback. The noble ladies of the city followed in their carriages, and behind them thronged an infinite people (_infinito popolo_) scattering broadcast various poetical compositions, and singing with sweet melodies in the previously appointed places, the glories of the victory won, making procession through the city until night." After dark, bonfires were lighted. On high above the triumphal car was set some allegorical figure, such as Valour, Victory, or Fame.[72] The last _Giuoco del Ponte_ was fought in 1807. "Certain pastimes," says Signor Tribolati, "are intimately connected with certain institutions and beliefs; and when the latter cease to exist, the former also perish with them. The _Giuoco del Ponte_ was a relic of popular chivalry, one of the innumerable knightly games which adorned the simple, artistic, warlike life of the hundred Republics of Italy.... What have we to do with the arms and banners of the tourneys? At most we may rub the cobwebs away and shake off the dust and lay them aside in a museum."[73] To come out of the Museo, that graveyard of dead beauty, of forgotten enthusiasms, into the quiet, deserted Piazza di S. Francesco, where the summer sleeps ever in the sun and no footstep save a foreigner's ever seems to pass, is to fall from one dream into another, not less mysterious and full of beauty. How quiet now is this old city that once rang with the shouts of the victors home from some sea fight, or returned from the Giuoco. Only, as you pass along Via S. Francesco and turn into Piazza di S. Paolo, the children gather about you, reminding you that in Italy even the oldest places--S. Paolo al Orto, for instance, with its beautiful old tower that is now a dwelling--are put to some use, and are really living still like the gods who have taken service with us, perhaps in irony, to console themselves for our treachery in watching our sadness without them. It is certainly with some such thought as this in his heart the unforgetful traveller will enter S. Pierino, not far from S. Paolo al Orto, at the corner of Via Cavour and Via delle belle Torri. Coming into this old church suddenly out of the sunshine, how dark a place it seems, full of a mysterious melancholy too, a sort of remembrance of change and death, as though some treachery asleep in our hearts had awakened on the threshold and accused us. The crypt has long been used as a charnel house, the guide-book tells you, but maybe it is not any memory of the unremembered and countless dead that has stirred in your heart, but some stranger impulse urging you to a dislike of the darkness, that dim mysterious light that is part of the north and has nothing to do with Italy. How full of twilight it is, yet once in this place a temple to Apollo stood, full of the sun, almost within sound of the sea, when, we know not how,[74] the Pisans received news of Jesus Christ, and, forgetting Apollo, gave his temple to St. Peter. Then in 1072 they pulled down that old "house of idols,"[75] and built this church, calling it S. Pietro in Vincoli, perhaps because of the presence of the old gods, perhaps because it was so dark--who knows; and on the 30th of August 1119, Archbishop Pietro, he who brought the cross of silver from Rome and put in it the banner of the city and led Pisa to victory in Majorca, solemnly consecrated it. I was thinking somewhat in this fashion, resting on a bench in that cool twilight place, where the sounds of life come from very far off, when out of the darkness an old man crept toward me; he seemed as old as the church itself. "The Signore would see the church," he asked; "who can the Signore wish for better than myself?--it is my own church, I am its guardian." Truly he was very old: if he were Apollo, long and evil had been his days; if he were St. Peter, indeed he was very like. It was a long story of buried treasure, buried or lost I know not which, that he tried to tell me, while he pointed to the beautiful pavement, or caressed the old fading pillars, leading me up the broken steps into the greater darkness of the nave, where he showed me one of the most ancient pictures in Pisa, a great, mournful, and grievous crucifix, a colossal Christ, His feet nailed separately to the cross, His body tortured and emaciated, a hideous mask of death;--here in the temple of Apollo. "It is here," said he, smiling, "that Paganism and Christianity were married; and in the temple lie the dead, and in the church the living pray, as you see, Signore, beside these old pillars that were not built for any Christian house. Such is the splendour and antiquity of our city. For, as you know, doubtless, the Duomo itself is built on the foundations of Nero's Palace,[76] S. Andrea (not far away) was once a temple of Venus, in S. Niccola we besought Ceres, and in S. Michele called on Mars; such, Signore, is the splendour and glory of our city...." Evening had come when I found myself again on the Lung' Arno, in a world neither Pagan nor Christian, in which I am a stranger. * * * * * Leaving behind you Ponte di Mezzo and the Lung' Arno, _quasi a modo d'un archo di balestro_,[77] you come into the Borgo, under the low arches of the old houses that make a covered way. This is perhaps the oldest part of Pisa. Almost at once on your right you pass S. Michele in Borgo, built probably just before his death by Fra Guglielmo, that disciple of Niccolò Pisano. Fra Guglielmo died in the convent of S. Caterina, for he had been fifty-seven years in the Dominican Order. Tronci tells us that, being one day in Bologna, where he had gone with Niccolò his master to make a tomb for S. Domenico, when the old tomb was opened he secretly took a bone and hid it, and without saying anything presently set out for Pisa. Arrived there, he placed the relic under the table of the altar of S. Maria Maddalena, and was seen often by the brethren praying there,--they knew not why. But at his death he revealed his pious theft, and showed the bone in its place, and it was guarded and shown to the people. But S. Michele in Borgo is older than Fra Guglielmo, who died about the year 1313. Certainly the crypt is ancient as are the pillars. A certain _Buono_ is said to have built a church here in 990; but little, however, now remaining can be of that date, the church as a whole being of about 1312, and, as I have said, probably the last work of Fra Guglielmo. Passing up the Borgo, here and there we may see signs of ancient Pisa in the sunken pillars, for instance, before a house in a street on the left, Via del Monte, following which we come into the most beautiful Piazza in Pisa, perhaps in Italy, Piazza dei Cavalieri, once the Piazza dei Anziani. On the right is the Church of the Knights of St. Stephen, Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri; next to it is the beautiful palace of the Anziani, later the Palazzo Conventuale dei Cavalieri, rebuilt by Vasari. Almost opposite this is a palace under which the road passes, built to the shape of the Piazza; it marks the spot where the Tower of Hunger once stood, where the eagles of the Republic were housed, and where Conte Ugolino della Gherardesca with his sons and nephews was starved to death by Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Opposite to this is the marble Palazzo del Consiglio, also belonging to the Order of St. Stephen. The Knights of St. Stephen, to whom, indeed, the whole Piazza seems to be devoted, were a religious and military Order founded by Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who sits on horseback in front of the beautiful steps of the _Conventuale_. The object of the Order was to harry the Moorish pirates of the Mediterranean, to redeem their captives, and to convert these Moors to Christianity; nor were they wanting in war, for they fought at Lepanto. Cosimo placed the Order under the protection of St. Stephen, because he had gained his greatest victory on that saint's day. The Knights seem to have been of two kinds: the religious, who took three major vows and lived in the Conventuale under the rule of St. Benedict, and served the Church of S. Stefano; and the military, who might not only hold property but marry. Their cross is very like the cross of Pisa, but red, while that is white. In S. Stefano there is little to see, a few old banners, a series of bad frescoes, and a bust of S. Lussorius by Donatello, perhaps,--at least, that sculptor was working for eighteen months in the city. Before the sixteenth century this Piazza must have been very different from what it is to-day. Where S. Stefano stands now S. Sebastiano stood, that church where the Anziani met so often to decide peace or war.[78] Close by was the palace of the Podestà, while beyond the Palazzo Anziani rose the Torre delle Sette Vie, Torre Gualandi, Torre della Fame, for it bore all three names; only, the last came to it after the hideous crime of Ruggiero. If we cross the Piazza opposite the Palazzo Conventuale, and pass into Via S. Sisto, we come to the church of that saint, where also the Grand Council used to meet. It was founded to commemorate the great victories that came to Pisa on that day. Those antique columns are the spoil of war, as Tronci tells us.[79] Returning to the Piazza, and leaving it by Via S. Frediano, we soon come to the church of that saint, with its lovely and spacious nave and antique columns. A little farther on is the University, La Sapienza, founded by Conte Fazio della Gherardesca in 1338. In that year Conte Fazio enlarged the Piazza degli Anziani, so that _la nobilità_ should be able to walk there more readily; and to render the city more honourable, with the consent of the _Anziani_ and all the Senate, he founded a university, to lead the greatest doctors to lecture there; and to establish the Theatre of the Schools he sent ambassadors in the name of the Republic to Pope Benedict for his authorisation. Needless to say, this was given and in 1340 we find Messer Bartolo da Sassoferrato and Messer Guido da Prato, Doctor of Physics, lecturing on "Chirugia."[80] In 1589, Galileo was Professor of Mathematics here. The present building dates from 1493. Close by, between the University and the Lung' Arno, are the remains of an old gate of the city, Porta Aurea, and some remnants of towers. Crossing Arno by Ponte Solferino, and turning along the Lung' Arno Gambacorti to the left, we come suddenly upon a great Piazza in which an old and splendid church is hidden away. And just as the Duomo, the great church of the northern part of the city, is set just within the walls far away from the Borgo, so here, in the southern part of Pisa, S. Paolo a Ripa d'Arno is abandoned by the riverside on the verge of the country, for the fields are at its threshold. And indeed, this desolate church is really older than the Duomo, for, as some say, it served as the Great Church of Pisa while the Cathedral was building. Founded, as the Pisans assert, by Charlemagne in 805, it was rather the model of the Duomo, if this be true, than, as is generally supposed, a copy of it. Bare for the most part and empty, its original beauty and simplicity still remain to it; nor should any who find it omit to pass into the priest's house, to see the old Baptistery now in the hands of Benedictine nuns. On our way back to Pisa by the Lung' Arno Gambacorti, we may look always with new joy at the Torre Guelfa, almost all that is left of the great arsenal built in 1200. And then you will not pass without entering, it may be, S. Maria della Spina, where of old the huntsmen used to hear Mass at dawn before going about their occasions. And many another church in Pisa is devout and beautiful. S. Sepolcro, which Diotisalvi made, he who built the Baptistery, a church of the Knights Templars below the level of the way; S. Martino too, both in Chinseca, that part of the city named after her who gave the alarm nearly a thousand years ago when the Saracen sails hove in sight.--Ah, do not be in a hurry to leave Pisa for any other city. Let us think of old things for a little, and be quiet. It may be we shall never see that line of hills again--Monti Pisani; it were better to look at them a little carefully. A little while before to-day the most precious of our dreams was not so lovely as that spur of the Apennines. FOOTNOTES: [17] Muratori, _Annali ad ann._: He quotes from _Annali Pisani_ (see tom. vi., Rer. Ital. Scrip): "Fecerunt bellum Pisani cum Lucensibus in Aqua longa, et vicerunt illos." See Arch. St. It. VI. ii. p. 4. Cron. Pis. ad annum. [18] Muratori, _Annali ad ann. 1050_: "et Pisa fuit firmata de tota Sardinia a Romana sede."--_Ann. Pis._, R.I.S., tom. vi. [19] Tronci, _Annali Pisani_, Livorno, 1682, p. 21. [20] Ibid. p. 22. [21] Muratori (_Annali ad ann._) says Pope Alexander visited in this year S. Martino the Duomo of Lucca. Ad ann. 1118 he suggests 1092 for the foundation of the Duomo of Pisa. [22] Thus Tronci; but Volpe, _Studi sulle Istituzioni Comunali a Pisa_, p. 6, tells us that these quarters did not exist till much later,--till after 1164, when the system of division by _porte e base_ was abandoned for division by _quartieri_. Tronci, later, says that the city was unwalled (p. 38). But even in the eleventh century Pisa was a walled city; the first walls included only the Quartiere di Mezzo; and in those days the city proper, the walled part, was called "Populus Pisanus," while the suburbs were called Cinthicanus, Foriportensis, and de Burgis. Cf. _Arch. St. It._ iii. vol. VIII. p. 5. Muratori, _Dissertazioni_, 30, "De Mercat." says that in the tenth century a part of the city was called Kinzic; cf. Fanucci, _St. dei Tre celebri Popoli Maritt._ I. 96. Kinzic is Arabic, and means _magazzinaggi_. [23] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 38. [24] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 60. [25] It was from Amalfi that they brought home the Pandects. [26] The first Podestà of the city was Conte Tedicis della Gherardesca. [27] Pisa was perhaps influenced, too, in her choice of the Ghibelline side by the interference of the Papacy against her in Corsica. While, if Pisa was Ghibelline, Lucca, of course, was Guelph. [28] Cf. G. Villani, _op. cit._ lib. vii. cap. ii., "La cagione perchè si comincio la guerra da' Fiorentini a' Pisani," and Villari, _History of Florence_ (Eng. ed. 1902), p. 176. [29] This seems to give the lie to the accusation of treachery, which said that he gave the signal for flight at Meloria; but in fact it does not, for Pisa elected Ugolino for reasons, in the hope of conciliating Florence; cf. Villari, _op. cit._ p. 284. [30] He knew them to be Ghibellines. [31] It was also called _la muda_. It seems hardly necessary to refer the reader to Dante, _Inferno_, xxxiii. 1-90. This tower (now to be called the Tower of Hunger) was the mew of the eagles. For even as the Romans kept wolves on the Capitol, so the Pisans kept eagles, the Florentines lions, the Sienese a wolf. See Villani, bk. vii. 128. Heywood, _Palio and Ponte_, p. 13, note 2. [32] Florence here means the League, to wit, Prato, Pistoja, Siena even, and all the allies, including the Guelphs of Romagna, who were fighting Arezzo under Archb. Uberti, and Pisa under Archb. Ruggieri. [33] Yet in 1290 Genoa seized Porto Pisano: "Furono allora disfatte le torri ... il fanale e tutte." [34] Tronci, _op. cit._ 269-271. For the _Palio_,--the name of the race and the prize of victory, a piece of silk not too much unlike the banners given at a modern battle of Flowers,--see Heywood, _Palio and Ponte_, 1904, p. 12. [35] The girdle was made of silver and jewels and silk to represent the girdle of the B.V.M. It encircled the Duomo--a most splendid and unique thing, only possible, I think, in Pisa. No parsimonious Florentine could have imagined it. [36] Now in the Museo, room 1. See page 119. [37] Tronci, _op. cit._ 366. [38] See Tronci, _op. cit._ 304. [39] They imprisoned him in Lucca. [40] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 404. [41] Cronaca Sanese in _Muratori_, xv. 177. [42] Heywood, _Palio and Ponte_, p. 22. [43] Tronci, _op. cit._ 412. [44] A pleasing story of how these citizens found Agnello's house in darkness and all sleeping within, of his awakened maid-servant and frightened wife, is told in Marangoni, _Cron. di Pisa_. See _Sismondi_, ed. Boulting (1906), p. 401. [45] _See_ Sismondi, _op. cit._ p. 403. [46] Cf. Sismondi, _op. cit._ p. 557. [47] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 18. [48] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 453. [49] The print is dated 1634. [50] For all things concerning this game and the Palio, see Heywood, _Palio and Ponte_. [51] Villani, _op. cit._ Bk. iv. 2. The Badia, like that of Firenze, seems rather to have been founded by Ugo's mother, Countess Willa. [52] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 9. [53] It may be as well to explain here that the Pisan Calendar differed not only from our own but from that of other cities of Tuscany. The Pisans reckoned from the Incarnation. The year began, therefore, on 25th March: so did the Florentine and the Sienese year, but they reckoned from a year after the Incarnation. The Aretines, Pistoiese, and Cortonese followed the Pisans. [54] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 21. [55] 104 yards long by 35-1/2 yards wide. [56] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of Painting in Italy_, new edition, 1903, vol. i. pp. 185, 186. [57] There is a miracle picture, S. Maria sotto gli Orcagni in the Duomo. Mr. Carmichael, in his book, _In Tuscany_, gives a full account of this picture. See also my _Italy and the Italians_, pp. 117-120. [58] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 103. [59] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 109. [60] See below, p. 134. [61] See _On the Old Road through France to Florence_ (Murray, 1904), in which Mr. Carmichael wrote the Italian part. He has much pleasant information about the bells of Pisa, p. 223. [62] Was it here, or in the Ospedale dei Trovatelli close to S. Michele in Borgo? cf. Tronci, p. 179. [63] See p. 95. [64] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit_, vol. i. p. 146, note. [65] See _Pisa_. da I.B. Supino, 1905, p. 43. [66] See p. 91. [67] Mr. Carmichael (_On the Old Road through France to Florence_, p. 224) says it must have been worth £30,000 of our money. [68] Let me refer the reader again to Mr. William Heywood's exhaustive work on Italian mediaeval games, _Palio and Ponte_, Methuen, 1904. [69] See also F. Tribolati, _Il Gioco del Ponte_, Firenze, 1877, p. 5. [70] Many of these banners are hung in the great Salone--the first room you enter on the first floor of the Museo. [71] All the coverings and armour are illustrated in the _Oplomachia Pisana_ of Camillo Borghi. (Lucca, 1713.) [72] There is a rich literature of poems and _Relazioni_, etc., on the _Gioco del Ponte_. [73] F. Tribolati, _Il Gioco del Ponte_, Firenze, 1877. See also Heywood, _op. cit._ p. 136. [74] Yet it is said that St. Peter himself came to Pisa from Antioch, and founded the Church of S. Pietro in Grado, and consecrated Pierino first bishop of Pisa; cf. Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 3. [75] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 23. [76] He said palace, and palace it may be, for the baths are a quarter of a mile away. [77] So a nineteenth-century writer calls it. Leopardi, too, cannot find words enough to express its beauty: "Questo Lung' Arno è uno spetaccolo così bello così ampio così magnifico," etc. [78] It was in S. Sebastiano that Ruggiero condemned Count Ugolino and his sons. [79] Tronci, _op. cit._ p. 30. [80] Tronci, op. cit. p. 343. VII. LIVORNO[81] It was only after many days spent in the Pineta, those pinewoods that go down to the sea at Gombo, where the silent, deserted shore, strewn with sea-shells and whispering with grass, stretches far away to the Carrara hills, that very early one morning I set out for Livorno, that port which has taken the place of the old Porto Pisano,[82] so famous through the world of old. Leaving Pisa by the Porta a Mare, I soon came to S. Pietro a Grado, a lonely church among the marshes, that once, as I suppose, stood on the seashore. It was here St. Peter, swept out of his course by a storm on his way from Antioch, came ashore before setting out again for Naples, entering Italy first, then, on the shores of Etruria. So the tale goes; but the present church seems to be a building of the twelfth century. Its simple beauty, which the seawind and the sun have kissed for seven hundred years, seems to give character to the whole plain, so ample and green, beyond the wont of Italy; but, indeed, here we are on the threshold of the Maremma, that beautiful, wild, deserted country that man has not yet reclaimed from Death, where the summer is still and treacherous in its loveliness, where in winter for a little while the herdsmen come down with their cattle from the Garfagnana, and the hills musical with love songs. On the threshold of that treacherous summer, as it were, this lonely church stands on guard. Within, she is beautiful, in the old manner, splendid with antique pillars caught about now with iron; but it is perhaps the frescoes, that have faded on the walls till they are scarcely more than the shadows of a thousand forgotten sunsets, that you will care for most. They are the work of Giunta Pisano, or if, indeed, they are not his they are of his school,--a school already decadent, splendid with the beauty that has looked on death and can never be quite sane again. No one, I think, can ever deny the beauty of Giunta's work; it is full of a strange subtilty that is ready to deny life over and over again. He is concerned not with life, but chiefly with religion, and with certain bitter yet altogether lovely colours which evoke for him, and for us too, if we will lend ourselves to their influence, all the misery and pessimism of the end of the Middle Age, its restlessness and ennui, that find consolation only in the memory of the grotesque frailty of the body which one day Jesus will raise up. All the anarchy and discontent of our own time seems to me to be expressed in such work as this, in which ugliness, as we might say, has as much right as beauty. It is, I think, the mistake of much popular criticism in our time to assert that these "primitive" painters were beginners, and could not achieve what they wished. They were not beginners, rather they were the most subtle artists of a convention--and all art is a convention--that was about to die. If one can see their work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish. In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East, under whose shadow Christianity had grown up, to be altogether transformed and humanised by Rome, when she at the head really of humanism and art should once more give to the world the thoughts and life of another people full of joy and temperance--things so hard for the Christian to understand. And it is really with such a painter as Giunta Pisano that Christian art pure and simple comes to end. Some divinity altogether different has touched those who came after: Giotto, who is enamoured of life which the Christian must deny; Angelico, whose world is full of a music that is about to become pagan; Botticelli, who has mingled the tears of Mary with the salt of the sea, and has seen a new star in heaven, and proclaimed the birth not of the Nazarene, but the Cyprian. But it is not such thoughts as these you will find in Livorno, one of the busiest towns in Italy, full of modern business life; material in the manner of the Latin people that by reason of some inherent purity of heart never becomes sordid in our fashion. "There is absolutely nothing to see in Leghorn," says Mr. Hare. Well, but that depends on what you seek, does it not? If you would see a Tuscan city that is absolutely free from the tourist, I think you must go to Livorno. It is true, works of art are not many there; but the statue of Grand Duke Ferdinand, with four Moors in bronze chained to his feet, a work of Piero Jacopo Tacca, made in 1617-1625, is something; though I confess those chained robbers at the feet of a petty tyrant who was as great a robber, he and his forebears, as any among them, are in this age of sentimental liberalism, from which who can escape, a little disconcerting. Ferdinand has his best monument in the city itself, which he founded to take the place of Porto Pisano, that in the course of centuries had silted up. In order to populate the new port, he proclaimed there a religious liberty he denied to his Duchy at large. His policy was splendidly successful. Every sort of outcast made Livorno his home--especially the Jews, for whom Ferdinando had a great respect; but there were there Greeks also, and _nuovi christiani_, Moors converted to Christianity. These last, I think, indeed, must have been worth seeing; for no doubt Ferdinand's politic grant of religious liberty did not include Moors who had not been "converted to Christianity." But the great days of Livorno are over; though who may say if a new prosperity does not await her in the near future, she is so busy a place. Livorno la cara, they call her, and no doubt of old she endeared herself to her outcasts. To-day, however, it is to the Italian summer visitor that she is dear. There he comes for sea-bathing, and it is difficult to imagine a more delightful seaside. For you may live on the hills and yet have the sea. Beyond Livorno rises the first high ground of the Maremma, Montenero, holy long ago with its marvellous picture of the Madonna, which, as I know, still works wonders. Here Byron lived, and not far away Shelley wrote the principal part of _The Cenci_. Passing out by tramway by the Porta Maremmana, you come to Byron's villa, almost at the foot of the hills, on a sloping ground on your right. Entering by the great iron gates of what looks like a neglected park, you climb by a stony road up to the great villa itself, among the broken statues and the stone pines, where is one of the most beautiful views of the Pisan country and seashore, with the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, Elba, and Corsica in the distance. Villa Dupoy, as it was called in Byron's day, is now in the summer months used as a girls' school: and, indeed, it would be easy to house a regiment in its vast rooms, where here and there a seventeenth century fresco is still gorgeous on the walls, and the mirrors are dim with age. From here the walk up to Our Lady of Montenero is delightful; and once there, on the hills above the church, the rolling downs towards Maremma lie before you without a single habitation, almost without a road, a country of heath and fierce rock, desolate and silent, splendid with the wind and the sun. The Church of Madonna lies just under the crest of the hill, and is even to-day a place of many pilgrimages: for the whole place is strewn and hung with thank-offerings, silver hearts, shoes, crutches, and I know not what else, among the pathetic pictures of her kindly works. The picture itself, loaded now with jewellery, is apparently a work of the thirteenth century; but it is said to have been miraculously brought hither from Negroponte. It was found at Ardenza close by, by a shepherd, who carried it to Montenero, where, as I suppose, he lived; but just before he won the top of the hill it grew so heavy he had to set it down. So the peasants built a shrine for it; and the affair getting known, the Church inquired into it, with the result that certainly by the fifteenth century the shrine was in charge of a Religious Order; to-day the monks of the Vallombrosan Benedictines serve the church. One returns always, I think, with regret from Montenero to Livorno; yet, after all, not with more sadness than that which always accompanies us in returning from the country to any city, howsoever fair and lovely. God made the country; man made the town; and though in Italy both God and man have laboured with joy and done better here than anywhere else in the world, who would not leave the loveliest picture to look once more on the sky, or neglect the sweetest music if he might always hear the sea, or give up praising a statue, if he might always look on his beloved? So it is in Italy, where all the cities are fair; flowers they are among the flowers; yet any Tuscan rose is fairer far than ever Pisa was, and the lilies of Madonna in the gardens of Settignano are more lovely than the City of Flowers: come, then, let us leave the city for the wayside, for the sun and the dust and the hills, the flowers beside the river, the villages among the flowers. For if you love Italy you will follow the road. FOOTNOTES: [81] Livorno, in the barbarian dialect of the Genovesi, Ligorno; and hence our word Leghorn. It is excusable that we should have taken St. George from Genoa, but not that we should have stolen her dialect also. [82] Perhaps, but Bocca d'Arno, that delicious place, is far and far to-day from Livorno. VIII. TO SAN MINIATO AL TEDESCO The road from Pisa to Florence, out of the Porta Fiorentina, to-day the greatest gate of the city, passes at first across the Pisan plain, beside Arno though not following it in its wayward and winding course, to Cascina at the foot of those hills behind which Lucca is hidden away: Monti Pisani "Perche i Pisani veder Lucca non ponno." And unlike the way through the Pineta to the sea, the road, so often trodden by the victorious armies of Florence, is desolate and sombre, while beside the way to-day a disused tramway leads to Calci in the hills. On either side of this road, so deep in dust, are meadows lined with bulrushes, while there lies a village, here a lonely church. It is indeed a rather sombre world of half-reclaimed marshland that Pisa thus broods over, in which the only landmarks are the far-away hills, the smoke of a village not so far away, or the tower of a church rising among these fields so strangely green. For Pisa herself is soon lost in the vagueness of a world thus delicately touched by sun and cloud, and seemingly so full of ruinous or deserted things like the beautiful great Church of Settimo, whose tower you may see far away in the golden summer weather standing quite alone in a curve of the river; so that you leave the highway and following a little by-road come upon Pieve di S. Cassiano, a basilica in the ancient Pisan manner set among the trees in a shady place, and over the three doors of the façade you find the beautiful work of Biduino da Pisa, as it is said, sculptures in relief of the resurrection of Lazarus, the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, a fight of dragons, and certain subjects from the Bestiaries. Another lonely church, set, not at the end of a byway by the river, but on the highroad itself, greets you as you enter Cascina. It is the Chiesa della Madonna dell' Acqua, rebuilt in the eighteenth century. In this wide plain there are many churches, some of them of a great antiquity, as S. Jacopo at Zambra and S. Lorenzo alle Corti, and in the hills you may find a place so wonderful as the Certosa di Calci, a monastery founded in 1366, but altered and spoiled in the seventeenth century, and the marvellous Church of S. Giovanni there. Cascina itself is as it were the image of this wide flat country between the hills and the Maremma, where the sun has so much influence and the shadows of the clouds drift over the fields all day long, and the mist shrouds the evening in blue and silver. Desolate and sober enough on a day of rain, when the sun shines this gaunt outpost of Pisa, for it is little more, is as gay as a flower by the wayside. The road runs through it, giving it its one long and almost straight street, while behind the poor houses that have so little to boast of, lies a beautiful old Piazza, with a great palace seemingly deserted on one side and an old tower and a church with a beautiful façade on another. Always a prize of the enemy, Cascina in the Pisan wars fell to Lucca, to the Guelph League, and to Florence. Its old walls, battered long ago, still remain to it, so that from afar, from the Pisan hills, for instance, it looks more picturesque than in fact it proves to be. The high road, Via Pisana, as it is still called, though, indeed, it was more often the way of the Florentines, sometimes almost deserted, sometimes noisy with peasants returning from market, finds the river again at Cascina only to lose it, however, till after a walk of some five miles you come to Pontedera, a wild and miserable place, full of poor and rebellious people, who eye you with suspicion and a sort of envy. Yet in spite of the proclamation of their wretchedness, I think of them now in London, as fortunate. At least upon them the sun will surely shine in the morning, the unsullied infinite night will fall; while for us there is no sun, and in the night the many are too unhappy to remember even that. There in Pontedera they preach their socialism, and none is too miserable to listen; these poor folk have been told they are unhappy, and, indeed, Pontedera is not beautiful. Yet on a market day you may see the whole place transformed. It has an aspect of joy that lights up the dreary street. All day on Friday you may watch them at their little stalls, which litter Via Pisana and make it impassable. You might think you were at a fair, but that a fair in England, at any rate, is not so gay. All along the highway that runs through the town in front of the shops and the inn you see the stalls of the crockery merchants, of the dealers in lace and stuffs, of those who sell macaroni and pasti, and of those who sell mighty umbrellas. And it is then, I think, that Pontedera is at her best; life which ever contrives in Italy to keep something of a gay sanity, disposing for that day at least of the surliness of this people, who are very poor, and far from any great city. As for me, I left Pontedera with all speed, being intent on Vico Pisano, a fortress built by Filippo Brunellesco for the Republic of Florence, after the fall of the old Pisan Rocca of Verruca, on the hill-top. There, too, if we may believe Villani,[83] the Marchese Ugo founded a monastery. To-day on Monte della Verruca there is nothing remaining of the Rocca, and the monastery is a heap of stones; but in Vico Pisano the fortifications and towers of Brunellesco still stand, battered though they be,--gaunt and bitter towers, their battlements broken, the walls that the engines of old time have battered, hung now with ivy, over which, all silver in the wind, the ancient olive leans. Here, where the creeping ivy has hidden the old wounds, and the oleanders speak of the living, and the lilies remind us of the dead, let us, too, make peace in our hearts and suffer no more bitterness for the fallen, nor think hardly of the victor. Florence, too, in her turn suffered slavery and oblivion; and from the same cause as her own victims, because she would not be at peace. If Pisa fell, it was just and right; for that she was Ghibelline, and would not make one with her sisters. For this Siena was lopped like a lily on her hills, and Lucca pruned like her own olive trees, and Pistoia gathered in the plain. This Florence stood for the Guelph cause and for the future, yet she too in her turn failed in love, and great though she was, she too was not great enough. One of her sons, seeing her power, dreamed of the unity of Italy, and for this cause followed Cesare Borgia; but she could not compass it, and so fell at last as Pisa fell, as Siena fell, as all must fall who will not be at one. How beautiful these old towers of Vico Pisano look now among the flowers, yet once they were cruel enough: men defended them and thought nothing of their beauty, and time has spoiled them of defence and left only their beauty to be remembered. For the ancients of Pisa have met for the last time; the signory of Florence plots no more; no more will any Emperor with the pride of a barbarian, the mien of a beggar or a thief, cross the Alps, or such an one as Hawkwood was sell his prowess for a bag of silver; and if the ships of war shall ever put out from Genoa, they will be the ships of Italy. For she who slept so long has awakened at last, and around her as she stands on the Capitol, there cluster full of the ancient Latin beauty that can never die, the beautiful cities of the sea, the plain, and the mountain, who have lost life for her sake, to find it in her. It is a long road of some fifteen miles from Pontedera to S. Miniato al Tedesco: a hot road not without beauty passing through Rotta, own sister to Pontedera, through Castel del Bosco, only a dusty village now, for the castello is gone which guarded the confines of the Republic of Pisa, divided from the Republic of Florence by the Chiecinella, a torrent bed almost without water in the summer heat, while not far away on the southern hills Montopoli thrusts its tower into the sky, keeping yet its ancient Rocca, once in the power of the Bishops of Lucca, but later in the hands of Florence, an answer, as it were, to Castel del Bosco of Pisa in the land where both Pisa and Florence were on guard. There is but little to see at Montopoli, just two old churches and a picture by Cigoli; indeed the place looks its best from afar; and then, since the day is hot, you may spend a pleasanter hour in S. Romano in the old Franciscan church there, which is worth a visit in spite of its modern decorations, and is full of coolness and quiet. It was afternoon when I left S. Romano and caught sight of Castelfranco far away to the north, and presently crossed Evola at Pontevola, and already sunset when I saw the beautiful cypresses of Villa Sonnino and the tower of S. Miniato came in sight. Slowly in front of me as I left Pinocchio a great ox wagon toiled up the hill winding at last under a splendid Piazza fronted with flowers; and it was with surprise and joy that, just as the angelus rang from the Duomo, I came into a beautiful city that, like some forgotten citadel of the Middle Age, lay on the hills curved like the letter S, smiling in the silence while the sun set to the sound of her bells. And indeed you may go far in Tuscany, covered as it is to-day by the trail of the tourist, before you will find anything so fair as S. Miniato. Some distance from the railway, five miles from Empoli, half-way between Pisa and Florence, it alone seems to have escaped altogether the curiosity of the traveller, for even the few who so wisely rest at Empoli come not so far into the country places. Lying on the hills under the old tower of the Rocca, of which nothing else remains, S. Miniato is itself, as it were, a weather-beaten fortress, that was, perhaps, never so beautiful as now, when no one keeps watch or ward. You may wander into the Duomo and out again into the cloistered, narrow streets, and climbing uphill, pass down into the great gaunt church like a fortress, S. Domenico, with its scrupulous frescoes, and though you will see many wonderful and some delightful things, it will be always with new joy you will return to S. Miniato herself, who seems to await you like some virgin of the centuries of faith, that age has not been able to wither, fresh and rosy as when she first stood on her beautiful hills. Yet unspoiled as she is, Otto I has dwelt with her, she was a stronghold of the Emperors, the fortress of the Germans; Federigo Barbarossa knew her well, and Federigo II has loved her and hated her, for here he spoke with poets and made a few songs, and here he blinded and imprisoned Messer Piero della Vigna, that famous poet and wise man, accusing him of treason.[84] Was it that he envied him his verses or feared his wisdom, or did he indeed think he plotted with the Pope? Piero della Vigna was from Capua, in the Kingdom; very eloquent, full of the knowledge of law, the Emperor made him his chancellor, and indeed gave him all his confidence, so that his influence was very great with a man who must have been easily influenced by his friends. Seeing his power, others about the Emperor, remembering Piero's low condition, no doubt sought to ruin him; and, as it seems, at last in this they were successful, forging letters to prove that the chancellor trafficked with the Pope. It was a time of danger for Frederick; he was easily persuaded of Piero's guilt, and having put out his eyes, he imprisoned him. Driven to despair at the loss of that fair world, Piero dashed his head against the walls of his prison, and so died. Dante meets him among the suicides in the seventh circle of the Inferno. But the Rocca of S. Miniato, as it is said, having brought death to a poet and housed many Emperors, gave birth at last to the greatest soldier of the fifteenth century, Francesco Sforza himself, he who made himself Duke of Milan and whose statue Leonardo set himself to make, on which the poets carved _Ecce Deus_. A mere fort, perhaps, in its origin, in the days of Federigo II the Rocca must have been of considerable strength, size, and luxury, dominating as it did the road to Florence and the way to Rome: and then even in its early days it was a stronghold of the German foreigner from which he dominated the Latins round about, and not least the people of S. Miniato. Like all the Tuscans, they could not bear the yoke, and they fled into the valley to S. Genesio: soon to return, however, for the people of the plain liked them as little as he of the tower. This exodus is, as it were, commemorated in the dedication of the Duomo to S. Maria e a S. Genesio. The church is not very interesting; some fragments of the old pulpit or _ambone_, where you may see in relief the Annunciation and a coat of arms with a boar and an inscription, are of the thirteenth century. It is, however, in S. Domenico, not far away, that what remains to S. Miniato of her art treasures will be found. Everyone seems to call the church S. Domenico, but in truth it belongs to S. Jacopo and S. Lucia. As in many another Tuscan city, it guards one side of S. Miniato, while S. Francesco watches on the other, as though to befriend all who may pass by. S. Domenico was founded in 1330, but it has suffered much since then. The chapels, built by the greatest families of the place, in part remain beautiful with the fourteenth-century work of the school of Gaddi and of some pupil of Angelico; but it is a work of the fifteenth century by some master of the Florentine school that chiefly delights us. For there you may see Madonna, her sweet, ambiguous face neither happy nor sad, with the Prince of Life in her lap, while on the one side stand S. Sebastian and St. John Baptist, and on the other perhaps S. Jacopo and S. Roch. Below the donors kneel a man and his wife and little daughter, while in the predella you see our Lord's birth, baptism, and condemnation. Altogether lovely, in that eager yet dry manner, a little uncertain of its own dainty humanism, this picture alone is worth the journey to S. Miniato. Yet how much else remains--a tomb attributed to Donatello in this very chapel, a lovely terra-cotta of the Annunciation given to Giovanni della Robbia, and indeed, not to speak of S. Francesco with its spaciousness and delicate light, and the Palazzo Comunale, with its frescoed Sala del Consiglio, there is S. Miniato itself, full of flowers and the wind. Like a city of a dream, at dawn she rises out of the mists of the valley pure and beautiful upon her winding hills that look both north and south; cool at midday and very still, hushed from all sounds, she sleeps in the sun, while her old tower tells the slow, languorous hours; golden at evening, the sunset ebbs through her streets to the far-away sea, till she sinks like some rosy lily into the night that for her is full of familiar silences peopled by splendid dreams. Then there come to her shadows innumerable--Otto I, Federigo Barbarossa, Federigo II, poor blinded Piero della Vigna, singing his songs, and those that we have forgotten. The ruined dream of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, the resurrection of the Latin race--she has seen them all rise, and two of them she helped to shatter for ever. It is not only in her golden book that she may read of splendour and victory, but in the sleeping valley and the whisper of her olives, the simple song of the husbandman among the corn, the Italian voices in the vineyard at dawn: let her sleep after the old hatred, hushed by this homely music. FOOTNOTES: [83] See p. 107. [84] "Io son colui che tenni ambo le chiavi Del cuor di Federigo e che le volsi Serrando e disserando sì soavi Che dal segreto suo quasi ogni uom tolsi." IX. EMPOLI, MONTELUPO, LASTRA, SIGNA It is but four miles down the hillside and through the valley along Via Pisana to Empoli in the plain. And in truth that way, difficult truly at midday--for the dusty road is full of wagons and oxen--is free enough at dawn, though every step thereon takes you farther from the hills of S. Miniato. Empoli, which you come to not without preparation, is like a deserted market-place, a deserted market-place that has been found, and put once more to its old use. Set as it is in the midst of the plain beside Arno on the way to Florence, on the way to Siena, amid the villages and the cornfields, it was the Granary of the Republic of Florence, its very name, may be, being derived from the word Emporium, which in fact it was. Not less important perhaps to-day than of old, its new villas, its strangely busy streets, its cosy look of importance and comfort there in the waste of plain, serve to hide any historical importance it may have, so that those who come here are content for the most part to go no farther than the railway station, where on the way from Pisa or from Florence they must change carriages for Siena. And indeed, for her history, it differs but little from that of other Tuscan towns within reach of a great city. Yet for Empoli, as her Saint willed, there waited a destiny. For after the rout of the Guelphs, and especially of Florence, the head and front of that cause at Montaperti, when in all Tuscany only Lucca remained free, and the Florentine refugees built the loggia in front of S. Friano, there the Ghibellines of Tuscany proposed to destroy utterly and for ever the City of the Lily, and for this cause Conte Giordano and the rest caused a council to be held at Empoli; and so it happened. Now Conte Giordano, Villani tells us, was sent for by King Manfred to Apulia, and there was proclaimed as his vicar and captain, Conte Guido Novello of the Conti Guidi of Casentino, who had forsaken the rest of the family, which stood for the Guelph cause. This man was eager to fling every Guelph out of Tuscany. There were assembled at that council all the cities round about, and the Conti Guidi and the Conti Alberti, and those of Santafiora and the Ubaldini; and these were all agreed that for the sake of the Ghibelline cause Florence must be destroyed, "and reduced to open villages, so that there might remain to her no renown or fame or power." It was then that Farinata degli Uberti, though a Ghibelline and an exile, rose to oppose this design, saying that if there remained no other, whilst he lived he would defend the city, even with his sword. Then, says Villani, "Conte Giordano, seeing what manner of man he was, and of how great authority, and how the Ghibelline party might be broken up and come to blows, abandoned the design and took new counsel, so that by one good man and citizen our city of Florence was saved from so great fury, destruction, and ruin." But Florence was ever forgetful of her greatest sons, and Farinata's praise was not found in her mouth, but in that of her greatest exile, who, finding him in his fiery tomb, wishes him rest. "Deh se riposi mai vostra semenza Prega io lui." To-day, however, in Empoli the long days are unbroken by the whisperings from any council; and as though to mark the fact that all are friends at last, if you come to her at all, you will sleep at the Aquila Nera in the street of the Lily; Guelph and Ghibelline hate no more. And as though to prove to man, ever more mindful of war than peace, that it is only the works of love after all that abide for ever, in Empoli at least scarcely anything remains from the old beloved days save the churches, and, best of all, the pictures that were painted for them. You pass the Church of S. Maria a Ripa just before you enter the city by the beautiful Porta Pisana, but though you may find some delightful works of della Robbia ware there, especially a S. Lucia, it is in the Collegiata di S. Andrea in the lovely Piazza Farinata degli Uberti, that most of the works have been gathered in some of the rooms of the old college. The church itself is very interesting, with its beautiful façade in the manner of the Badia at Fiesole, where you may see carved on either side of the great door the head of S. Andrea and of St. John Baptist. In the Baptistery, however, comes your first surprise, a beautiful fresco, a Pietà attributed to Masolino da Panicale, where Christ is laid in the tomb by Madonna and St. John, while behind rises the Cross, on which hangs a scourge of knotted chords. And then in the second chapel on the right is a lovely Sienese Madonna, and a strange fresco on the left wall of men taming bulls. In the gallery itself a few lovely things have been gathered together, of which certainly the finest are the angels of Botticini, two children winged and crowned with roses, dressed in the manner of the fifteenth century, with purfled skirts and slashed sleeves powdered with flowers, who bow before the S. Sebastian of Rossellino. Two other works attributed to Botticini, certainly not less lovely, are to be found here: an Annunciation in the manner of his master Verrocchio, where Mary sits, a delicate white girl, under a portico into which Gabriele has stolen at sunset and found her at prayer; far away the tall cypresses are black against the gold of the sky, and in the silence it almost seems as though we might overhear the first Angelus and the very message from the angel's lips. And if this is the Annunciation as it happened long ago in Tuscany, in heaven the angels danced for sure, thinking of our happiness, as Botticini knew; and so he has painted those seven angels playing various instruments, while about their feet he has strewn a song of songs. A S. Andrea and St. John Baptist in a great fifteenth-century altar are also given to him, while below you may see S. Andrea's crucifixion, the Last Supper, and Salome bringing the head of St. John Baptist to Herodias at her supper with Herod. Some fine della Robbia fragments and a beautiful relief of the Madonna and Child by Mino da Fiesole are among the rest of the treasures of the Collegiata, where you may find much that is merely old or curious. Other churches there are in Empoli, S. Stefano, for instance, with a Madonna and two angels, given to Masolino, and the marvellously lovely Annunciation by Bernardo Rossellino; and S. Maria di Fuori, with its beautiful loggia, but they will not hold you long. The long white road calls you; already far away you seem to see the belfries of Florence there, where they look into Arno, for the very water at your feet has held in its bosom the fairest tower in the world, whiter than a lily, rosier than the roses of the hills. With this dream, dream or remembrance, in your heart, it is not Empoli with its brown country face that will entice you from the way. And so, a little weary at last for the shadows of the great city, it was with a sort of impatience I trudged the dusty highway, eager for every turn of the road that might bring the tall towers, far and far away though they were, into sight. Somewhat in this mood, still early in the morning, I passed through Pontormo, the birthplace of the sixteenth-century painter Jacopo Carrucci, who has his name from this little town. Two or three pictures that he painted, a lovely font of the fourteenth century in the Church of S. Michele Arcangiolo, called for no more than a halt, for there, still far away before me, were the hills, the hills that hid Florence herself. It was already midday when I came to the little city of Montelupo at the foot of these hills, and, in front of a beautiful avenue of plane trees, to the trattoria, a humble place enough, and full at that hour of drivers and countrymen, but quite sufficient for my needs, for I found there food, a good wine, and courtesy. Later, in the afternoon, climbing the stony street across Pesa, I came to the Church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and there in the sweet country silence was Madonna with her Son and four Saints, by some pupil of Sandro Botticelli. It is not any new vision of Madonna you will see in that quiet country church, full of afternoon sunshine and wayside flowers, but the same half-weary maiden of whom Botticelli has told us so often, whose honour is too great for her, whose destiny is more than she can bear. Already she has been overwhelmed by our praise and petitions; she has closed her eyes, she has turned away her head, and while the Jesus Parvulus lifts his tiny hands in blessing, she is indifferent, holding Him languidly, as though but half attentive to those priceless words which St. John, with the last light of a smile still lingering round his eyes, notes so carefully in his book. Something of the same eagerness, graver, and more youthful, you may see in the figure of St. Sebastian, who, holding three arrows daintily in his hand, has suddenly looked up at the sound of that Divine childish voice. Two other figures, S. Lorenzo and perhaps S. Roch, listen with a sort of intent sadness there under that splendid portico, where Mary sits on a throne, she who was the carpenter's wife, with so little joy or even surprise. Below, in the predella, you may see certain saints' heads, S. Lorenzo giving alms, the death of S. Lorenzo, the risen Christ. [Illustration: BADIA AL SETTIMO] But though Montelupo possesses such a treasure as this picture, for me at least the fairest thing within her keeping is the old fortress, ruined now, on her high hill, and the view one may have thence. For, following that stony way which brought me to S. Giovanni, I came at last to the walls of an old fortress, that now houses a few peasants, and turning there saw all the Val d'Arno, from S. Miniato far and far away to the west, to little Vinci on the north, where, as Vasari says, Leonardo was born; while below me, beside Arno, rose the beautiful Villa Ambrogiana, with its four towers at the corners; and then on a hill before me, not far away, a little town nestling round another fortress, maybe less dilapidated than Montelupo, Capraja, that goat which caused Montelupo to be built. For in the days when Florence disputed Val d'Arno and the plains of Empoli with many nobles, the Conti di Capraja lorded it here, and, as the Florentines said: "Per distrugger questa Capra non ci vuol altro che un Lupo." To-day Montelupo is but a village; yet once it was of importance not only as a fortress, for that she ceased to be almost when the Counts of Capraja were broken, and certainly by 1203, when Villani tells us that the Florentines destroyed the place because it would not obey the commonwealth; but as a city of art, or at any rate of a beautiful handicraft. Even to-day the people devote themselves to pottery, but of old it was not merely a matter of commerce, but of beauty and craftsmanship. It was through a noisy gay crowd of these folk, the young men lounging against the houses, the girls talking, talking together, arm in arm, as they went to and fro before them, with a wonderful sweet air of indifference to those who eyed them so keenly and yet shyly too, and without anything of the brutal humour of a northern village, that in the later afternoon I again sought the highway. And before I had gone a mile upon my road the whole character of the way was changed; no longer was I crossing a great plain, but winding among the hills, while Arno, noisier than before, fled past me in an ever narrower bed among the rocks and buttresses of what soon became little more than a defile between the hills. Though the road was deep in dust, there was shadow under the cypresses beside the way, there was a whisper of wind among the reeds beside the river, and the song of the cicale grew fainter and the hills were touched with light; evening was coming. And indeed, when at last I had left the splendid villa of Antinori far behind, evening came as I entered Lastra, and by chance taking the wrong road, passing under a most splendid ilex, huge as a temple, I climbed the hill to S. Martino a Gangalandi. Standing there in the pure calm light just after sunset, the whole valley of Florence lay before me. To the left stood Signa, piled on her hill like some fortress of the Middle Age; then Arno, like a road of silver, led past the Villa delle Selve to the great mountain Monte Morello, and there under her last spurs lay Florence herself, clear and splendid like some dream city, her towers and pinnacles, her domes and churches shining in the pure evening light like some delectable city seen in a vision far away, but a reality, and seen at last. Very far off she seemed in that clear light, that presently fading fled away across the mountains before the advance of night, that filled the whole plain with its vague and beautiful shadow. And so, when morning was come, I went again to S. Martino a Gangalandi, but Florence was hidden in light. In my heart I knew I must seek her at once, that even the fairest things were not fair, since she was hidden away. Not without a sort of reluctance I heard Mass in S. Martino, spent a moment before the beautiful Madonna of that place, a picture of the fifteenth century, and looked upon the fortifications of Brunellesco. Everywhere the women sitting in their doorways were plaiting straw, and presently I came upon a whole factory of this craft, the great courtyard strewn with hats of all shapes, sizes, and colours, drying in the sun. Signa, too, across the river as I passed, seemed to be given up to this business. Then taking the road, hot and dusty, I set out--not by Via Pisana, but by the byways, which seemed shorter--for Florence. For long I went between the vines, in the misty morning, all of silver and gold, till I was weary. And at last houses began to strew the way, herds of goats led by an old man in velveteen and a lad in tatters, one herd after another covered me with dust, or, standing in front of the houses, were milked at the doorways, where still the women, their brown legs naked in the sun, plaited the straw. Then at a turning of the way, as though to confirm me in any fears I might have of the destruction of the city I had come so far to see, a light railway turned into the highway between the houses, where already there was not room for two carts to pass. How may I tell my anger and misery as I passed through that endless suburb, the great hooting engine of the train venting its stench, and smoke, and noise into the very windows of the houses, chasing me down the narrow way, round intricate corners, over tiny piazzas, from the very doors of churches. Yet, utterly weary at last, covered with dust, it was in this brutal contrivance that I sought refuge, and after an hour of agony was set down before the Porta al Prato. The bells were ringing the Angelus of midday when I came into Florence. X. FLORENCE Florence is like a lily in the midst of a garden gay with wild-flowers; a broken lily that we have tied up and watered and nursed into a semblance of life, an image of ancient beauty--as it were the _memento mori_ of that Latin spirit which contrived the Renaissance of mankind. As of old, so to-day, she stands in the plain at the foot of the Apennines, that in their sweetness and strength lend her still something of their nobility. Around her are the hills covered with olive gardens where the corn and the wine and the oil grow together between the iris and the rose; and everywhere on those beautiful hills there are villas among the flowers, real villas such as Alberti describes for us, full of coolness and rest, where a fountain splashes in an old courtyard, and the grapes hang from the pergolas, and the corn is spread in July and beaten with the flail. And since the vista of every street in Florence ends in the country, it is to these hills you find your way very often if your stay be long, fleeing from the city herself, perhaps to hide your disappointment, in the simple joy of country life. More and more as you live in Florence that country life becomes your consolation and your delight: for there abide the old ways and the ancient songs, which you will not find in the city. And indeed the great treasure of Florence is this bright and smiling country in which she lies: the old road to Fiesole, the ways that lead from Settignano to Compiobbi, the path through the woods from S. Martino a Mensola, that smiling church by the wayside, to Vincigliata, to Castel di Poggio, the pilgrimage from Bagno a Ripoli to the Incontro. There, on all those beautiful gay roads, you will pass numberless villas whispering with summer, laughing with flowers; you will see the _contadini_ at work in the _poderi_, you will hear the _rispetti_ and _stornelli_ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sung perhaps by some love-sick peasant girl among the olives from sunrise till evening falls. And the ancient ways are not forgotten there, for they still reap with the sickle and sing to the beat of the flail; while the land itself, those places "full of nimble air, in a laughing country of sweet and lovely views, where there is always fresh water, and everything is healthy and pure," of which Leon Alberti tells us, are still held and cultivated in the old way under the old laws by the _contadino_ and his _padrone_. This ancient order, quietness, and beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the _barriera_: and this is a charm in Florence, for you may so easily look on her from afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, of sadness, of regret: she has lost her soul for the sake of the stranger, she has forgotten the splendid past for an ignoble present, a strangely wearying dream of the future. Yet for all her modern ways, her German beer-houses, her English tea-shops, her noisy trams on Lung' Arno, her air as of a museum, her eagerness to show her contempt for the stranger while she sells him her very soul for money, Florence remains one of the most delightful cities of Italy to visit, to live with, to return to again and again. Yet I for one would never live within her walls if I could help it, nor herd with those barbarian, exclamatory souls who in guttural German or cockney English snort or neigh at the beauties industriously pointed out by a loud-voiced cicerone, quoting in American all the appropriate quotations, Browning before Filippo Lippi, Ruskin in S. Croce, Mrs. Browning at the door of S. Felice, Goethe everywhere. No, I will live a little way out of the city on the hillside, perhaps towards Settignano, not too far from the pine woods, nor too near the gate. And my garden there shall be a vineyard, bordered with iris, and among the vines shall be a garden of olives, and under the olives there shall be the corn. And the yellow roses will litter the courtyard, and the fountain will be full of their petals, and the red roses will strew the paths, and the white roses will fall upon the threshold; and all day long the bees will linger in the passion-flowers by the window when the mulberry trees have been stripped of leaves, and the lilies of Madonna, before the vines, are tall and like ghosts in the night, the night that is blue and gold, where a few fire-flies linger yet, sailing faintly over the stream, and the song of the cicale is the burden of endless summer. Then very early in the morning I will rise from my bed under the holy branch of olive, I will walk in my garden before the sun is high, I will look on my beloved city. Yes, I shall look over the near olives across the valley to the hill of cypresses, to the poplars beside Arno that tremble with joy; and first I shall see Torre del Gallo and then S. Miniato, that strange and beautiful place, and at last my eyes will rest on the city herself, beautiful in the mist of morning: first the tower of S. Croce, like a tufted spear; then the tower of Liberty, and that was built for pride; and at last, like a mysterious rose lifted above the city, I shall see the dome, the rosy dome of Brunellesco, beside which, like a slim lily, pale, immaculate as a pure virgin, rises the inviolate Tower of the Lowly, that Giotto built for God. Yes, often I shall thus await the Angelus that the bells of all the villages will answer, and I shall greet the sun and be thankful. Then I shall walk under the olives, I shall weigh the promised grapes, I shall bend the ears of corn here and there, that I may feel their beauty, and I shall bury my face in the roses, I shall watch the lilies turn their heads, I shall pluck the lemons one by one. And the maidens will greet me on their way to the olive gardens, the newly-married, hand in hand with her husband, will smile upon me, she who is heavy with child will give me her blessing, and the children will laugh and peep at me from behind the new-mown hay; and I shall give them greeting. And I shall talk with him who is busy in the vineyard, I shall watch him bare-foot among the grapes, I shall see his wise hands tenderly unfold a leaf or gather up a straying branch, and when I leave him I shall hear him say, "May your bread be blessed to you." Under the myrtles, on a table of stone spread with coarse white linen, such we see in Tuscany, I shall break my fast, and I shall spill a little milk on the ground for thankfulness, and the crumbs I shall scatter too, and a little honey that the bees have given I shall leave for them again. So I shall go into the city, and one will say to me, "The Signore must have a care, for the sun will be hot, in returning it will be necessary to come under the olives." And I shall laugh in my heart, and say, "Have no fear, then, for the sun will not touch me." And how should I but be glad that the sun will be hot, and how should I but be thankful that I shall come under the olives? And I shall come into the city by Porta alla Croce for love, because I am but newly returned, and presently through the newer ways I shall come to the oldest of all, Borgo degli Albizzi, where the roofs of the beautiful palaces almost touch, and the way is cool and full of shadow. There, amid all the hurry and bustle of the narrow, splendid street, I shall think only of old things for a time, I shall remember the great men who founded and established the city, I shall recall the great families of Florence. Here in this Borgo the Albizzi built their towers when they came from Arezzo, giving the city more than an hundred officers, Priori and Gonfalonieri, till Cosimo de' Medici thrust them out with the help of Eugenius IV. The grim, scornful figure of Rinaldo seems to haunt the old palace still. How often in those September days must he have passed to and fro between his palace and the Bargello close by, the Palace of the Podestà: but the people, fearing they knew not what, barricaded the place so that Rinaldo was persuaded to consult with the Pope in S. Maria Novella. At dawn he dismissed his army, and remained alone. Then the friends of Cosimo in exile went to the Pope and thanked him, thus, as some have thought, surprising him into an abandonment of Rinaldo. However that may be, Rinaldo was expelled, leaving the city with these words, "He is a blind man without a guide, who trusts the word of a Pope." And what figure haunts Palazzo Altovite, the home of that fierce Ghibelline house loved by Frederick II, if not that hero who expelled the Duke of Athens. Palazzo Pazzi and Palazzo Nonfinito at the Canto de' Pazzi where the Borgo degli Albizzi meets Via del Proconsolo, brings back to me that madman who first set the Cross upon the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, and who for this cause was given some stones from Christ's sepulchre by Godfrey de Bouillon, which he brought to Florence and presented to the Republic. They were placed in S. Reparata, which stood where the Duomo now is, and, as it is said, the "new fire" was struck from them every Holy Saturday, and the clergy, in procession, brought that sacred flame to the other churches of the city. And the Pazzi, because of their gift, gave the guard of honour in this procession: and this they celebrated with much pomp among themselves; till at last they obtained permission to build a _carro_, which should be lighted at the door of S. Reparata by some machine of their invention, and drawn by four white oxen to their houses. And even to this day you may see this thing, and to this day the car is borne to their canto. But above all I see before that "unfinished" palace the ruined hopes of those who plotted to murder Lorenzo de' Medici with his brother at the Easter Mass in the Duomo. Even now, amid the noise of the street, I seem to hear the shouting of the people, _Vive le Palle, Morte ai Pazzi_. So I shall come into the Proconsolo beside the Bargello, where so many great and splendid people are remembered, and she, too, who is so beautiful that for her sake we forget everything else, Vanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo de' Tornabuoni, whom Verrocchio carved and Ghirlandajo painted. Then I shall follow the Via del Corso past S. Margherita, close to Dante's mythical home, into Via Calzaioli, the busiest street of the city, and I shall think of the strange difference between these three great ways, Via del Proconsolo, Via Calzaioli, and Via Tornabuoni, which mark and divide the most ancient city. I shall turn toward Or San Michele, where on St. John's Day the banners of the guilds are displayed above the statues, and for a little time I shall look again on Verrocchio's Christ and St. Thomas. Then in this pilgrimage of remembrance I shall pass up Via Calzaioli, past the gay cool caffè of Gilli, into the Piazza del Duomo. And again, I shall fear lest the tower may fall like a lopped lily, and I shall wish that Giotto had made it ever so little bigger at the base. Then I shall pass to the right past the Misericordia, where for sure I shall meet some of the _confraternità_, past the great gazing statue of Brunellesco, till, at the top of Via del Proconsolo, I shall turn to look at the Duomo, which, seen from there, seems like a great Greek cross under a dome, that might cover the world. And so I shall pass round the apse of the Cathedral till I come to the door of the Cintola, where Nanni di Banco has marvellously carved Madonna in an almond-shaped glory: and this is one of the fairest things in Florence. And I shall go on my way, past the Gate of Paradise to the open door of the Baptistery, and returning find the tomb of Baldassare Cossa, soldier and antipope, carved by Donatello: and here, in the most ancient church of Florence, I shall thank St. John for my return. Out in the Piazza once more, I shall turn into Borgo S. Lorenzo, and follow it till I come to Piazza di S. Lorenzo, with its bookstalls where Browning found that book, "small quarto size, part print, part manuscript," which told him the story of "The Ring and the Book." There I shall look once more on the ragged, rugged front of S. Lorenzo, and entering, find the tomb of Piero de' Medici, made by Verrocchio, and thinking awhile of those other tombs where Michelangelo hard by carved his Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn, I shall find my way again into the Piazza del Duomo, and, following Via Cerretani, that busy street, I shall come at last into Piazza S. Maria Novella, and there on the north I shall see again the bride of Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella of the Dominicans. Perhaps I shall rest there a little before Duccio's Madonna on her high altar,[85] and linger under the grave, serene work of Ghirlandajo; but it may be the sky will be too fair for any church to hold me, so that passing down the way of the Beautiful Ladies, and taking Via dei Serpi on my left, I shall come into Via Tornabuoni, that smiling, lovely way just above the beautiful Palazzo Antinori, whence I may see Palazzo Strozzi, but without the great lamp at the corner where the flowers are heaped and there are always so many loungers. Indeed, the whole street is full of flowers and sunshine and cool shadow, and in some way, I know not what, it remains the most beautiful gay street in Florence, where past and present have met and are friends. And then I know if I follow this way I shall come to Lung' Arno,--I may catch a glimpse of it even from the corner of Via Porta Rossa over the cabs, past the Column of S. Trinità. [Illustration: PONTE VECCHIO] Presently, in the afternoon, I shall follow Via Porta Rossa, with its old palaces of the Torrigiani (now, Hotel Porta Rossa), and the Davanzati into Mercato Nuovo, where, because it is Thursday, the whole place will be smothered with flowers and children, little laughing rascals as impudent as Lippo Lippi's Angiolini, who play about the Tacca and splash themselves with water. And so I shall pass at last into Piazza della Signoria, before the marvellous palace of the people with its fierce, proud tower, and I shall stand on the spot before the fountains where Humanism avenged itself on Puritanism, where Savonarola, that Ferrarese who burned the pictures and would have burned the city, was himself burned in the fire he had invoked. And I shall look once more on the Loggia de' Lanzi, and see Cellini's young _contadino_ masquerading as Perseus, and in my heart I shall remember the little wax figure he made for a model, now in Bargello, which is so much more beautiful than this young giant. So, under the cool cloisters of Palazzo degli Uffizi I shall come at last on to Lung' Arno, where it is very quiet, and no horses may pass, and the trams are a long way off. And I shall lift up my eyes and behold once more the hill of gardens across Arno, with the Belvedere just within the old walls, and S. Miniato, like a white and fragile ghost in the sunshine, and La Bella Villanella couched like a brown bird under the cypresses above the grey olives in the wind and the sun. And something in the gracious sweep of the hills, in the gentle nobility of that holy mountain which Michelangelo has loved and defended, which Dante Alighieri has spoken of, which Gianozzo Manetti has so often climbed, will bring the tears to my eyes, and I shall turn away towards Ponte Vecchio, the oldest and most beautiful of the bridges, where the houses lead one over the river, and the little shops of the jewellers still sparkle and smile with trinkets. And in the midst of the bridge I shall wait awhile and look on Arno. Then I shall cross the bridge and wander upstream towards Porta S. Niccolò, that gaunt and naked gate in the midst of the way, and there I shall climb through the gardens up the steep hill "... Per salire al monte Dove siede la chiesa...." to the great Piazzale, and so to the old worn platform before S. Miniato itself, under the strange glowing mosaics of the façade: and, standing on the graves of dead Florentines, I shall look down on the beautiful city. Marvellously fair she is on a summer evening as seen from that hill of gardens, Arno like a river of gold before her, leading over the plain lost in the farthest hills. Behind her the mountains rise in great amphitheatres,--Fiesole on the one side, like a sentinel on her hill; on the other, the Apennines, whose gesture, so noble, precise, and splendid, seems to point ever towards some universal sovereignty, some perfect domination, as though this place had been ordained for the resurrection of man. Under this mighty symbol of annunciation lies the city, clear and perfect in the lucid light, her towers shining under the serene evening sky. Meditating there alone for a long time in the profound silence of that hour, the whole history of this city that witnessed the birth of the modern world, the resurrection of the gods, will come to me. Out of innumerable discords, desolations, hopes unfilled, everlasting hatred and despair, I shall see the city rise four square within her rosy walls between the river and the hills; I shall see that lonely, beautiful, and heroic figure, Matilda the great Countess; I shall suffer the dream that consumes her, and watch Germany humble in the snow. And the Latin cause will tower a red lily beside Arno; one by one the great nobles will go by with cruel alien faces, prisoners, to serve the Lily or to die. Out of their hatred will spring that mongrel cause of Guelph and Ghibelline, and I shall see the Amidei slay Buondelmonte Buondelmonti. Through the year of victories I shall rejoice, when Pistoja falls, when Siena falls, when Volterra is taken, and Pisa forced to make peace. Then in tears I shall see the flight at Monteaperti, I shall hear the thunder of the horses, and with hate in my heart I shall search for Bocca degli Abati, the traitor, among the ten thousand dead. And in the council I shall be by when they plot the destruction of the city, and I shall be afraid: then I shall hear the heroic, scornful words of Farinata degli Uberti, when in his pride he spared Florence for the sake of his birth. And I shall watch the banners at Campaldino, I shall hear the intoxicating words of Corso Donati, I shall look into his very face and read the truth. And at dawn I shall walk with Dante, and I shall know by the softness of his voice when Beatrice passeth, but I shall not dare to lift my eyes. I shall walk with him through the city, I shall hear Giotto speak to him of St. Francis, and Arnolfo will tell us of his dreams. And at evening Petrarch will lead me into the shadow of S. Giovanni and tell me of Madonna Laura. But it will be a morning of spring when I meet Boccaccio, ah, in S. Maria Novella, and as we come into the sunshine I shall laugh and say, "Tell me a story." And Charles of Valois will pass by, who sent Dante on that long journey; and Henry VII, for whom he had prayed; and I shall hear the trumpets of Montecatini, and I shall understand the hate Uguccione had for Castracani. And I shall watch the entry of the Duke of Athens, and I shall see his cheek flush at the thought of a new tyranny. Then for the first time I shall hear the sinister, fortunate name Medici. Under the banners of the Arti I shall hear the rumour of their names, Silvestro who urged on the Ciompi, Vieri who once made peace; nor will the death of Gian Galeazzo of Milan, nor the tragedy of Pisa, hinder their advent, for I shall see Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici proclaimed Gonfaloniere of the city. Then they will troop by more splendid than princes, the universal bankers, lords of Florence: Cosimo the hard old man, Pater Patriae, the greatest of his race; Piero, the weakling; Lorenzo il Magnifico, tyrant and artist; and over his shoulder I shall see the devilish, sensual face of Savonarola. And there will go by Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta; Piero the exile; Giovanni the mighty pope, Leo X; Giulio the son of Guiliano, Clement VII; Ippolito the Cardinal, Alessandro the cruel, Lorenzino his assassin, Cosimo l'Invitto, Grand Duke of Tuscany, bred in a convent and mourned for ever. So they pass by, and their descendants follow after them, even to poor, unhappy, learned Gian Gastone, the last of his race. And around them throng the artists; yes, I shall see them all. Angelico will lead me into his cell and show me the meaning of the Resurrection. With Lippo Lippi I shall play with the children, and talk with Lucrezia Buti at the convent gate; Ghirlandajo will take me where Madonna Vanna is, and with Baldovinetti I shall watch the dawn. And Botticelli will lead me into a grove apart: I shall see the beauty of those three women who pass, who pass like a season, and are neither glad nor sorry; and with him I shall understand the joy of Venus, whose son was love, and the tears of Madonna, whose Son was Love also. And I shall hear the voice of Leonardo; and he will play upon his lyre of silver, that lyre in the shape of a horse's head which he made for Sforza of Milan; and I shall see him touch the hands of Monna Lisa. And I shall see the statue of snow that Buonarotti made; I shall find him under S. Miniato, and I shall weep with him. So I shall dream in the sunset. The Angelus will be ringing from all the towers, I shall have celebrated my return to the city that I have loved. The splendour of the dying day will lie upon her; in that enduring and marvellous hour, when in the sound of every bell you may find the names that are in your heart, I shall pass again through the gardens, I shall come into the city when the little lights before Madonna will be shining at the street corners, and the streets will be full of the evening, where the river, stained with fading gold, steals into the night to the sea. And under the first stars I shall find my way to my hillside. On that white country road the dust of the day will have covered the vines by the way, the cypresses will be white half-way to their tops, in the whispering olives the cicale will still be singing; as I pass every threshold some dog will rouse, some horse will stamp in the stable, or an ox stop munching in his stall. In the far sky, marvellous with infinite stars, the moon will sail like a little platter of silver, like a piece of money new from the mint, like a golden rose in a mirror of silver. Long and long ago the sun will have set, but when I come to the gate I shall go under the olives; though I shall be weary I shall go by the longest way, I shall pass by the winding path, I shall listen for the whisper of the corn. And I shall beat at my gate, and one will say _Chi è_, and I shall make answer. So I shall come into my house, and the triple lights will be lighted in the garden, and the table will be spread. And there will be one singing in the vineyard, and I shall hear, and there will be one walking in the garden, and I shall know. FOOTNOTES: [85] Alas, this too has now become as nothing and its place knows it no more.--E.H. XI. FLORENCE PIAZZA DELLA SIGNORIA AND PALAZZO VECCHIO In every ancient city of the world, cities that in themselves for the most part have been nations, one may find some spot holy or splendid that instantly evokes an image of that of which it is a symbol,--which sums up, as it were, in itself all the sanctity, beauty, and splendour of her fame, in whose name there lives even yet something of the glory that is dead. It is so no longer; in what confused street or shapeless square shall I find hidden the soul of London, or in what name then shall I sum up the lucid restless life of Paris? But if I name the Acropolis, all the pale beauty of Athens will stir in my heart; and when I speak the word Capitolium, I seem to hear the thunder of the legions, to see the very face of Caesar, to understand the dominion and majesty of Rome. Something of this power of evocation may still be found in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence: all the love that founded the city, the beauty that has given her fame, the immense confusion that is her history, the hatred that has destroyed her, lingers yet in that strange and lovely place where Palazzo Vecchio stands like a violated fortress, where the Duke of Athens was expelled the city, where the Ciompi rose against the Ghibellines, where Jesus Christ was proclaimed King of the Florentines, where Savonarola, was burned, and Alessandro de' Medici made himself Duke. It is not any great and regular space you come upon in the Piazza della Signoria, such as the huge empty Place de la Concorde of Paris, but one that is large enough for beauty, and full of the sweet variety of the city; it is the symbol of Florence--a beautiful symbol. In the morning the whole Piazza is full of sunlight, and swarming with people: there, is a stall for newspapers; here, a lemonade merchant dispenses his sweet drinks. Everyone is talking; at the corner of Via Calzaioli a crowd has assembled, a crowd that moves and seems about to dissolve, that constantly re-forms itself without ever breaking up. On the benches of the loggia men lie asleep in the shadow, and children chase one another among the statues. Everywhere and from all directions cabs pass with much cracking of whips and hallooing. There stand two Carabinieri in their splendid uniforms, surveying this noisy world; an officer passes with his wife, leading his son by the hand; you may see him lift his sword as he steps on the pavement. A group of tourists go by, urged on by a gesticulating guide; he is about to show them the statues in the loggia; they halt under the Perseus. He begins to speak of it, while the children look up at him as though to catch what he is saying in that foreign tongue. And surely the Piazza, which has seen so many strange and splendid things, may well tolerate this also; it is so gay, so full of life. Very fair she seems under the sunlight, picturesque too, with her buildings so different and yet so harmonious. On the right the gracious beauty of the Loggia de' Lanzi; then before you the lofty, fierce old Palazzo Vecchio; and beside it the fountains play in the farther Piazza. Cosimo I rides by as though into Siena, while behind him rises the palace of the Uguccioni, which Folfi made; and beside you the Calzaioli ebbs and flows with its noisy life, as of old the busiest street of the city. The Palazza Vecchio, peaceful enough now, but still with the fierce gesture of war stands on one side, facing the Piazza, a fortress of huge stones four storeys high--the last, thrust out from the wall and supported by arches on brackets of stone, as though crowning the palace itself. It stands almost four-square, and above rises the beautiful tower, the highest tower in the city, with a gallery similar to the last storey of the palace, and above a loggia borne by four pillars, from which spring the great arches of the canopy that supports the spire; and whereas the battlements of the palazzo are square and Guelph, those of the tower are Ghibelline in the shape of the tail of the swallow. Set, not in the centre of the square, nor made to close it, but on one side, it was thus placed, it is said, in order to avoid the burned houses of the Uberti, who had been expelled the city. However this may be, and its position is so fortunate that it is not likely to be due to any such chance, Arnolfo di Cambio began it in February 1299, taking as his model, so some have thought, the Rocca of the Conti Guidi of the Casentino, which Lapo his father had built. Under the arches of the fourth storey are painted the coats of the city and its gonfaloni. And there you may see the most ancient device of Florence, the lily argent on a field gules; the united coats gules and argent of Florence and Fiesole in 1010; the coat of Guelph Florence, a lily gules on a field argent; and, among the rest, the coat of Charles of Anjou, the lilies or on a field azure. [Illustration: LOGGIA DE' LANZI] On the platform or ringhiera before the great door, the priori watched the greater festas, and made their proclamations, before the Loggia de' Lanzi was built in 1387; and here in 1532 the last Signoria of the Republic proclaimed Alessandro de' Medici first Duke of Florence, in front of the Judith and Holofernes of Donatello, whose warning went unheeded. And indeed, that group, part of the plunder that the people found in Palazzo Riccardi, in the time of Piero de' Medici, who sought to make himself tyrant, once stood beside the great gate of Palazzo Vecchio, whence it was removed at the command of Alessandro, who placed there instead Bandinelli's feeble Hercules and Cacus. Opposite to it Michelangelo's David once stood, till it was removed in our own time to the Accademia, where it looks like a cast. Over the great door where of old was set the monogram of Christ, you may read still REX REGUM ET DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM, and within the gate is a court most splendid and lovely, built after the design of Arnolfo, and once supported by his pillars of stone, but now the columns of Michelozzo, made in 1450, and covered with stucco decoration in the sixteenth century, form the cortile in which, over the fountain of Vasari, Verrocchio's lovely Boy Playing with the Dolphin ever half turns in his play. Altogether lovely in its naturalism, its humorous grace, Verrocchio made it for Lorenzo Magnifico, who placed it in his gardens at Careggi, whence it was brought here by Cosimo I. Passing through that old palace, up the great staircase into the Salone del Cinquecento, where Savonarola was tried, with the Cappella di S. Bernardo, where he made his last communion, and at last up the staircase into the tower, where he was tortured and imprisoned, it is ever of that mad pathetic figure, self-condemned and self-murdered, that you think, till at last, coming out of the Palazzo, you seek the spot of his awful death in the Piazza. Fanatic puritan as he was, vainer than any Medici, it is difficult to understand how he persuaded the Florentines to listen to his eloquence, spoiled as it must have been for them by the Ferrarese dialect. How could a people who were the founders of the modern world, the creators of modern culture, allow themselves to be baffled by a fanatic friar prophesying judgment? Yet something of a peculiar charm, a force that we miss in the sensual and almost devilish face we see in his portrait, he must have possessed, for it is said that Lorenzo desired his company; and even though we are able to persuade ourselves that it was for other reasons than to enjoy his friendship, we have yet to explain the influence he exercised over Sandro Botticelli and Pico della Mirandola, whose lives he changed altogether. In the midst of a people without a moral sense he appears like the spirit of denial. He was kicking against the pricks, he was guilty of the sin against the light, and whether his aim was political or religious, or maybe both, he failed. It is said he denied Lorenzo absolution, that he left him without a word at the brink of the grave but when he himself came to die by the horrible, barbaric means he had invoked in a boast, he did not show the fortitude of the Magnificent. Full of every sort of rebellion and violence, he made anarchy in Florence, and scoffed at the Holy See, while he was a guest of the one and the officer of the other. His bonfires of "vanities," as he called them, were possibly as disastrous for Florence as the work of the Puritan was for England; for while he burned the pictures, they sold them to the Jews. He is dead, and has become one of the bores of history; and while Americans leave their cards on the stone that marks the place of his burning, the Florentines appear to have forgotten him. Peace to his ashes! As you enter the Loggia de' Lanzi, gay with children now, once the lounge of the Swiss Guard, whose barracks were not far away, you wonder who can have built so gay, so happy a place beside the fortress of the Signoria. Yet, in truth, it was for the Priori themselves that loggia was built, though not by Orcagna as it is said, to provide, perhaps, a lounge in summer for the fathers of the city, and for a place of proclamation that all Florence might hear the laws they had made. Yes, and to-day, too, do they not proclaim the tombola where once they announced a victory? Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is still a garden of statues. Looking ever over the Piazza stands the Perseus of Cellini, with the head of Medusa held up to the multitude, the sword still gripped in his hand. It is the masterpiece of one who, like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance--Giotto, Orcagna, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael--did not confine himself to one art, but practised many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello; but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in the look of secret delight that is already half remorseful for all that dead beauty, in the heroic grace with which he stands there after the murder, the dead body marvellously fallen at his feet, Cellini has proved himself the greatest sculptor of his time. That statue cost him dear enough, as he tells you in his Memoirs, but, as Gautier said, it is worth all it cost. On the pedestal you may see the deliverance of Andromeda; but the finest of these reliefs has been taken to the Bargello. The only other bronze here is the work of Donatello--a Judith and Holofernes, under the arch towards the Uffizi. It is Donatello's only large bronze group, and was probably designed for the centre piece of a fountain, the mattress on which Holofernes has fallen having little spouts for water. Judith stands over her victim, who is already dead, her sword lifted to strike again; and you may see by her face that she will strike if it be necessary. Beneath you read--"Exemplum salut. publ. cives posuere, MCCCCXV." Poor as the statue appears in its present position, the three bronze reliefs of the base gain here what they must lose in the midst of a fountain, yet even they too are unfortunate. Indeed, very few statues of this sort were made by the sculptors of the Renaissance; for the most part they confined themselves to single figures and to groups in relief: even Michelangelo but rarely attempted the "freestanding group." It is, however, to such a work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself. Spoiled a little by its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced. Bologna's other group here, Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, is dramatic and well composed, but the forms are feeble and even insignificant. The antique group of Ajax dragging the body of Patrocles, is not a very important copy of some great work, and it is much restored: it was found in a vineyard near Rome. The great fountain which plays beside the Palazzo, where of old the houses of the Uberti stood, is rich and grandiose perhaps, but in some unaccountable way adds much to the beauty of the Piazza. How gay and full of life it is even yet, that splendid and bitter place, that in its beauty and various, everlasting life seems to stand as the symbol of this city, so scornful even in the midst of the overwhelming foreigner who has turned her into a museum, a vast cemetery of art. Only here you may catch something of the old life that is not altogether passed away. Still, in spite of your eyes, you must believe there are Florentines somewhere in the city, that they are still as in Dante's day proud and wise and easily angry, scornful too, a little turbulent, not readily curbed, but full of ambition--great nobles, great merchants, great bankers. Does such an one never come to weep over dead Florence in this the centre of her fame, the last refuge of her greatness, in the night, perhaps, when none may see his tears, when all is hushed that none may mark his sorrow? [Illustration: WAX MODEL FOR THE PERSEUS IN THE BARGELLO _Benvenuto Cellini_ _Alinari_] It was past midnight when once more I came out of the narrow ways, almost empty at that hour, when every footfall resounds between the old houses, into the old Piazza to learn this secret. Far away in the sky the moon swung like a censer, filling the place with a fragile and lovely light. Standing there in the Piazza, quite deserted now save for some cloaked figure who hurried away up the Calzaioli, and two Carabinieri who stood for a moment at the Uffizi corner and then turned under the arches, I seemed to understand something of the spirit that built that marvellous fortress, that thrust that fierce tower into the sky;--yes, surely at this hour some long dead Florentine must venture here to console the living, who, for sure, must be gay so sadly and with so much regret. In the Loggia de' Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone? The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping. I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found, ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some unappeasable regret. Did she hear as of old--that Virgin with narrow half-open eyes and the sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have heard in all the world. XII. FLORENCE THE BAPTISTERY--THE DUOMO--THE CAMPANILE--THE OPERA DEL DUOMO On coming into the Piazza del Duomo, perhaps from the light and space of the Lung' Arno or from the largeness of the Piazza della Signoria, one is apt to think of it as too small for the buildings which it holds, as wanting in a certain spaciousness such as the Piazza of St. Peter at Rome certainly possesses, or in the light of the meadow of Pisa; and yet this very smallness, only smallness when we consider the great buildings set there so precisely, gives it an element of beauty lacking in the great Piazza of Rome and in Pisa too--a certain delicate colour and shadow and a sense of nearness, of homeliness almost; for the shadow of the dome falls right across the city itself every morning and evening. And indeed the Piazza del Duomo of Florence is still the centre of the life of the city, and though to some this may be matter for regret, I have found in just that a sort of consolation for the cabs which Ruskin hated so, for the trams which he never saw; for just these two necessary unfortunate things bring one so often there that of all the cathedrals of Italy that of Florence must be best known to the greatest number of people at all hours of the day. And this fact, evil and good working together for life's sake, makes the Duomo a real power in the city, so that everyone is interested, often passionately interested, in it: it has a real influence on the lives of the citizens, so that nothing in the past or even to-day has ever been attempted with regard to it without winning the people's leave. Yet it is not the Duomo alone that thus lives in the hearts of the Florentines, but the whole Piazza. There they have established their trophies, and set up their gifts, and lavished their treasure. It was built for all, and it belongs to all; it is the centre of the city. This enduring vitality of a place so old, so splendid, and so beloved, is, I think, particularly manifest in the Church of S. Giovanni Battista, the Baptistery. It is the oldest building in Florence, built probably with the stones from the Temple of Mars about which Villani tells us, and almost certainly in its place; every Florentine child, fortunate at least in this, is still brought there for baptism, and receives its name in the place where Dante was christened, where Ippolito Buondelmonti first saw Dianora de' Bardi, where Donatello has laboured, which Michelangelo has loved. Built probably in the sixth or seventh century, it was Arnolfo di Cambio who covered it with marble in 1288, building also three new doorways where before there had been but one, that on the west side, which was then closed. The mere form, those octagonal walls which, so it is said, the Lombards brought into Italy, go to show that the church was used as a Baptistery from the first, though Villani speaks of it as the Duomo; and indeed till 1550 it had the aspect of such a church as the Pantheon in Rome, in that it was open to the sky, so that the rain and the sunlight have fallen on the very floor trodden by so many generations. Humble and simple enough as we see it to-day before the gay splendour of the new façade of the Duomo, it has yet those great treasures which the Duomo cannot boast, the bronze doors of Andrea Pisano and of Ghiberti. [Illustration: PIAZZA DEL DUOMO] Over the south doorway there was placed in the end of the sixteenth century a group by Vincenzo Danti, said to be his best work, the Beheading of St. John Baptist; and under are the gates of Andrea Pisano carved in twenty bronze panels with the story of St. John and certain virtues: and around the gate Ghiberti has twined an exquisite pattern of leaves and fruits and birds, it is strange to find Ghiberti's work thus completing that of Andrea Pisano, who, as it is said, had Giotto to help him, till we understand that originally these southern gates stood where now are the "Gates of Paradise" before the Duomo. Standing there as they used to do before Ghiberti moved them, they won for Andrea not only the admiration of the people, but the freedom of the city. To-day we come to them with the praise of Ghiberti ringing in our ears, so that in our hurry to see everything we almost pass them by; but in their simpler, and, as some may think, more sincere way, they are as lovely as anything Ghiberti ever did, and in comparing them with the great gates that supplanted them, it may be well to remind ourselves that each has its merit in its own fashion. If the doors of Andrea won the praise of the whole city, it was with an ever-growing excitement that Florence proclaimed a public competition, open to all the sculptors of Italy, for the work that remained, those two doors on the north and east. Ghiberti, at that time in Rimini at the court of Carlo Malatesta, at the entreaty of his father returned to Florence, and was one of the two artists out of the thirty-four who competed, to be chosen for the task: the other was Filippo Brunellesco. You may see the two panels they made in the Bargello side by side on the wall. The subject is the Sacrifice of Isaac, and Ghiberti, with the real instinct of the sculptor, has altogether outstripped Brunellesco, not only in the harmony of his composition, but in the simplicity of his intention. Brunellesco seems to have understood this, and, perhaps liking the lad who was but twenty-two years old, withdrew from the contest. However this may be, Ghiberti began the work at once, and finished the door on the north side of the Baptistery in ten years. There, amid a framework of exquisite foliage, leaves, birds, and all kinds of life, he has set the gospel story in twenty panels, beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the Pentecost; and around the gate he has set the four Evangelists and the doctors of the Church and the prophets. Above you may see the group of a pupil of Verrocchio, the Preaching of St. John. In looking on these beautiful and serene works, we may already notice an advance on the work of Andrea Pisano in a certain ease and harmony, a richness and variety, that were beyond the older master. Ghiberti has already begun to change with his genius the form that has come down to him, to expand it, to break down its limitations so that he may express himself, may show us the very visions he has seen. And the success of these gates with the people certainly confirmed him in the way he was going. In the third door, that facing the Duomo, which Michelangelo has said was worthy to be the gate of Paradise, it is really a new art we come upon, the subtle rhythms and perspectives of a sort of pictorial sculpture, that allows him to carve here in such low relief that it is scarcely more than painting, there in the old manner, the old manner but changed, full of a sort of exuberance which here at any rate is beauty. The ten panels which Ghiberti thus made in his own way are subjects from the Old Testament: the Creation of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, of Noah, of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, of Joseph, of Moses on Sinai, of Joshua before Jericho, of David and Goliath, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. At his death in 1455 they were unfinished, and a host of sculptors, including Brunellesco and Paolo Uccello, are said to have handled the work, Antonio del Pollajuolo being credited with the quail in the lower frame. Over the door stands the beautiful work of Sansovino, the Baptism of Christ. It is with a certain sense of curiosity that one steps down into the old church; for in spite of every sort of witness it has the air of some ancient temple: nor do the beautiful antique columns which support the triforium undeceive us. For long enough now the mosaics of the vault have been hidden by the scaffolding of the restorers; but the beautiful thirteenth-century floor of white and black marble, in the midst of which the font once stood, is still undamaged. The font, which is possibly a work of the Pisani, is on one side, set there, as it is said, because of old the roof of the church was open, and many a winter christening spoiled by rain.[86] It was not, however, till 1571 that the old font, surrounded by its small basins, one of which Dante broke in saving a man from drowning there, was removed from the church by Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, for the christening of his son. Certain vestiges of the oldest church remain: you may see a sarcophagus, one of those which, before Arnolfo covered the church with marble, stood without and held the ashes of some of the greater families. But the most beautiful thing here is the tomb that Donatello made for Baldassare Cossa, pirate, condottiere, and anti-pope, who, deposed by the Council of Constance (1414), came to Florence, and, as ever, was kindly received by the people. It stands beside the north door. On a marble couch supported by lions, the gilt bronze statue of this prince of adventurers, who grasped the very chair of St. Peter as booty, lies, his brow still troubled, his mouth set firm as though plotting new conquests even in the grave. Below, on the tomb itself, two winged _angiolini_ hold the great scroll on which we read the name of the dead man, Johannes Quondam Papa XXIII: to which inscription Martin V, Cossa's successful rival at Constance, is said to have taken exception; but the Medici who had built the tomb answered in Pilate's words to the Pharisees, "What I have written, I have written." The three marble figures in niches at the base may be by Michelozzo, who worked with Donatello, or possibly by Pagano di Lapo, as the Madonna above the tomb almost certainly is. Coming up once more into the Piazza from that mysterious dim church, dim with the centuries of the history of the city, you come upon two porphyry columns beside the eastern door. They are the gift of Pisa[87] when her ships returned from the Balearic Islands to Florence, who had defended their city from the Lucchesi. The column with the branch of olive in bronze upon it to the north of the Baptistery reminds us of the miracle performed by the body of S. Zenobio in 490. Borne to burial in S. Reparata, the bier is said to have touched a dead olive tree standing on this spot, which immediately put forth leaves: the column commemorates this miracle. So in Florence they remind us of the gods. In turning now to the Duomo we come to one of the great buildings of the world. Standing on the site of the old church of S. Salvatore, of S. Reparata, it is a building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, begun in 1298 from the designs of Arnolfo; and it is dedicated to S. Maria del Fiore. Coming to us without the wonderful romantic interest, the mysticism and exaltation of such a church as Notre Dame d'Amiens, without the more resolute and heroic appeal of such a stronghold as the Cathedral of Durham, it is more human than either, the work of a man who, as it were, would thank God that he was alive and glad in the world. And it will never bring us delight if we ask of it all the consummate mystery, awe, and magic of the great Gothic churches of the North. The Tuscans certainly have never understood the Christian religion as we have contrived to do in Northern Europe. It came to them really as a sort of divine explanation of a paganism which entranced but bewildered them. Behind it lay the Roman Empire; and its temples became their churches, its halls of justice their cathedrals, its tongue the only language understood of the gods. It is unthinkable that a people who were already in the twelfth century the possessors of a marvellous decadent art in the painting of the Byzantine school, who, finding again the statues of the gods, created in the thirteenth century a new art of painting, a Christian art that was the child of imperial Rome as well as of the Christian Church, who re-established sculpture and produced the only sculptor of the first rank in the modern world, should have failed altogether in architecture. Yet everywhere we may hear it said that the Italian churches, spoken of with scorn by those who remember the strange, subtle exaltation of Amiens, the extraordinary intricate splendour of such a church as the Cathedral of Toledo, are mere barns. But it is not so. As Italian painting is a profound and natural development from Greek and Roman art, certainly influenced by life, but in no doubt of its parentage; so are the Italian churches a very beautiful and subtle development of pagan architecture, influenced by life not less profoundly than painting has been, but certainly as sure of their parentage, and, as we shall see, not less assured of their intention. Just as painting, as soon as may be, becomes human, becomes pagan in Signorelli and Botticelli, and yet contrives to remain true to its new gods, so architecture as soon as it is sure of itself moves with joy, with endless delight and thanksgiving, towards that goal of the old builders: in such a church as S. Maria della Consolazione outside Todi, for instance,--in such a church as S. Pietro might have been,--and that it is not so, we may remind ourselves, is the fault of that return to barbarism and superstition which Luther led in the North. What then, we may ask ourselves, were the aim and desire of the Italian builders, which it seems have escaped us for so long? If we turn to the builders of antiquity and seek for their intention in what remains to us of their work, we shall find, I think, that their first aim was before all things to make the best building they could for a particular purpose, and to build that once for all. And out of these two intentions the third must follow; for if a temple, for instance, were both fit and strong it would be beautiful because the purpose for which it was needed was noble and beautiful. Now the first necessity of the basilica, for instance, was space; and the intention of the builder would be to build so that that space should appear as splendid as possible, and to do this and to enjoy it would necessitate, above all things, light,--a problem not so difficult after all in a land like Italy, where the sun is so faithful and so divine. Taking the necessity, then, of the Italian to be much the same as that of the Roman builder when he was designing a basilica,--that is to say, the accommodation of a crowd of people who are to take part in a common solemnity,--we shall find that the intention of the Italian in building his churches is exactly that of the Roman in building his basilica: he desires above all things space and light, partly because they seem to him necessary for the purpose of the church, and partly because he thinks them the two most splendid and majestic things in the world. Well, he has altogether carried out his intention in half a hundred churches up and down Italy: consider here in Florence S. Croce, S. Maria Novella, S. Spirito, and above all the Duomo. Remember his aim was not the aim of the Gothic builder. He did not wish to impress you with the awfulness of God, like the builder of Barcelona; or with the mystery of the Crucifixion, like the builders of Chartres: he wished to provide for you in his practical Latin way a temple where you might pray, where the whole city might hear Mass or applaud a preacher. He did this in his own noble and splendid fashion as well as it could be done. He has never believed, save when driven mad by the barbarians, in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God. He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the gods for three thousand years. What, then, we are to look for in entering such a church as S. Maria del Fiore is, above all, a noble spaciousness and the beauty of just that.[88] The splendour and nobility of S. Maria del Fiore from without are evident, it might seem, to even the most prejudiced observer; but within, I think, the beauty is perhaps less easily perceived. One comes through the west doors out of the sunshine of the Piazza into an immense nave, and the light is that of an olive garden,--yes, just that sparkling, golden, dancing shadow of a day of spring in an old olive grove not far from the sea. In this delicate and fragile light the beauty and spaciousness of the church are softened and simplified. You do not reason any longer, you accept it at once as a thing complete and perfect. Complete and perfect--yet surely spoiled a little by the gallery that dwarfs the arches and seems to introduce a useless detail into what till then must have been so simple. One soon forgets so small a thing in the immensity and solemnity of the whole, that seems to come to one with the assurance of the sky or of the hills, really without an afterthought. And indeed I find there much of the strange simplicity of natural things that move us we know not why: the autumn fields of which Alberti speaks, the far hills at evening, the valleys that in an hour will make us both glad and sorry, as the sun shines or the clouds gather or the wind sings on the hills. Not a church to think in as St. Peter's is, but a place where one may pray, said Pius IX when he first saw S. Maria del Fiore: and certainly it has that in common with the earth, that you may be glad in it as well as sorry. It is not a museum of the arts; it is not a pantheon like Westminster Abbey or S. Croce; it is the beautiful house where God and man may meet and walk in the shadow. Yet little though there be to interest the curious, Giovanni Acuto, that Englishman Sir John Hawkwood of the White Company, one of the first of the Condottieri, the deliverer of Pisa, "the first real general of modern times," is buried here. You may see his equestrian portrait by Paolo Uccello over the north-west doorway in his habit as he lived. Having fought against the Republic and died in its service, he was buried here with public honours in 1394. And then in the north aisle you may see the statue called a portrait of Poggio Bracciolini[89] by Donatello. Donatello carved a number of statues, of which nine have been identified, for the Opera del Duomo, three of these are now in the Cathedral: the Poggio, the so-called Joshua in the south aisle, which has been said to be a portrait of Gianozzo Manetti; and the St. John the Evangelist in the eastern part of the nave. The Poggio certainly belongs to the series: it would be delightful if the cryptic writing on the borders of the garment were to prove it to be the Job. The St. John Evangelist is an earlier work than the Poggio; it was begun when Donatello was twenty-two years old, and, as Lord Balcarres says, "it challenges comparison with one worthy rival, the Moses of Michelangelo." It was to have stood on one side of the central door. Something of the wonder of this work in its own time may be understood if we compare it, not with the later work of Michelangelo, but with the statues of St. Mark by Niccolò d'Arezzo, the St. Luke of Nanni di Banco, and the St. Matthew of Bernardo Ciuffagni, which were to stand beside it and are now placed in a good light in the nave, while the work of Donatello is almost invisible in this dark apsidal chapel. Of the other works which Donatello made for the Opera del Duomo, the David is in the Bargello, while the Jeremiah, and Habbakuk, the so-called Zuccone, the Abraham, and St. John Baptist are still on the Campanile. The octagonal choir screens carved in relief by Baccio Bandinelli, whom Cellini hated so scornfully because he spoke lightly of Michelangelo, will not keep you long; but there behind the high altar is an unfinished Pietà by Michelangelo himself. It is a late work, but in that fallen Divine Figure just caught in Madonna's arms you may see perhaps the most beautiful thing in the church, less splendid but more pitiful than the St. John of Donatello, but certainly not less moving than that severe, indomitable son of thunder. Above, the dome soars into heaven; that mighty dome, higher than St. Peter's, the despair of Michelangelo, one of the beauties of the world. One wanders about the church looking at the bronze doors of the Sagrestia Nuova, or the terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, always to return to that miracle of Brunellesco's. Not far away in the south aisle you come upon his monument with his portrait in marble by Buggiano. The indomitable persistence of the face! Is it any wonder that, impossible as his dream appeared, he had his way with Florence at last--yes, and with himself too? As you stand at the corner of Via del Proconsolo, and, looking upward, see that immense dome soaring into the sky over that church of marble, something of the joy and confidence and beauty that were immortal in him come to you too from his work. Like Columbus, he conquered a New World. His schemes, which the best architects in Europe laughed at, were treated with scorn by the Consiglio, yet he persuaded them at last. In 1418 he made his designs, and the people, as now, were called upon to vote. Two years went by, and nothing was done; then in 1420 he was elected by the Opera to the post of Provveditore della Cupola, but not alone, for Lorenzo Ghiberti and Battista d'Antonio were elected with him. Still he persisted, and, as the Florentines say, by pretending sickness and leaving the work to Ghiberti, who knew nothing about it and could do nothing without him, in 1421 he won over the Consiglio. He began at once. What his agonies may have been, what profound difficulties he discovered and conquered, we do not know, but by 1434, when Eugenius IV was in Florence and the Duomo was consecrated, his dome was finished, wanting only the lantern and the ball. These he began in 1437, but died too soon to see, for the lantern was not finished till 1458, and it was only in 1471 that Verrocchio cast the bronze ball.[90] Wandering round to the façade, finished in 1886, it is a careful imitation of fifteenth-century work we see, saved from the mere routine of just that, in its design at any rate, by the vote of the people, who, against the opinion of all the artists in Florence at that time, insisted on the cornice following the basilical form of the tower, refusing to endorse the pointed "tricuspidal" design. It is not, however, in such merely competent work as this that we shall find ourselves interested, but rather in the beautiful door on the north just before the transept, over which, in an almond-shaped glory, Madonna gives her girdle to St. Thomas. Given now to Nanni di Banco, a sculptor of the end of the fourteenth century, whom Vasari tells us was the pupil of Donatello, it long passed as the work of Jacopo della Quercia. Certainly one of the loveliest works of the early Renaissance, it is so full of life and gracious movement, so natural and so noble, that everything else in the Cathedral, save the work of Donatello, is forgotten beside it. Madonna enthroned among the Cherubim in her oval mandorla, upheld by four puissant fair angels, turns with a gesture most natural and lovely to St. Thomas, who kneels to her, his drapery in beautiful folds about him, lifting his hands in prayer. Above, three angels play on pipes and reeds; while in a corner a great bear gnaws at the bark of an oak in full leaf. In turning now to the Campanile, which Giotto began in 1334, on the site of a chapel of S. Zenobio, we come to the last building of the great group. Fair and slim as a lily, as light as that, as airy and full of grace, to my mind at least it lacks a certain stability, so that looking on it I always fear in my heart lest it should fall. It seems to lack roots, as it were, yet by no means to want confidence or force. Can it be that, after all, it would have seemed more secure, more firm and established, if the spire Giotto designed for it had in truth been built? The consummate and supreme artist, architect, sculptor, and painter was not content to design so fair, so undreamed-of a flower as this, but set himself to make the statues and the reliefs that were necessary also. And then has he not built as only a painter could have done, in white and rose and green? He died too soon to see the fairest of his dreams, and it is really to two other artists--Taddeo Gaddi and Francesco Talenti--that the actual work, after the first five storeys--those windows, for instance, that add so much to the beauty of the tower--is owing.[91] [Illustration: THE MADONNA DELLA CINTOLA _By Nanni di Banco. Duomo, Florence_ _Alinari_] The reliefs that, set some five-and-twenty feet from the ground, are so difficult to see, are the work of Andrea Pisano, the sculptor of the south gate of the Baptistery. Born at Pontedera, the pupil of Giovanni Pisano, this great and lovable artist has been robbed of much that belongs to him. Vasari tells us--and for long we believed him--that Giotto helped him to design the gate of the Baptistery; and again, that Giotto designed these reliefs for Andrea to carve and found. It might seem impossible to believe that the greatest sculptor then living, fresh from a great triumph, would have consented to use the design of a painter, even though he were Giotto. However this may be, the reliefs really speak for themselves: those on the south side--early Sabianism, house-building, pottery, training horses, weaving, lawgiving, and exploration--are certainly by Andrea; while among the rest the Jubal, the Creation of Man, the Creation of Woman, seem to be his own among the work of his pupils. It is to quite another hand, however, to Luca della Robbia, that the Grammar, Poetry, Philosophy, Astrology, and Music must be given. The genius of Andrea Pisano, at its best in those Baptistery gates, in the panel of the Baptism of our Lord, for instance, or in those marvellous works on the façade of the Duomo at Orvieto, so full of force, vitality, and charm, is, as I think, less fortunate in its expression when he is concerned with such work as these statues of the prophets in the niches on the south wall of the Campanile,--if indeed they be his. Seen as these figures are, beside the large, splendid, realistic work of Donatello, so wonderfully ugly in the Zuccone, so pitiless in the Habakkuk, they are quickly forgotten; but indeed Donatello's work seems to stand alone in the history of sculpture till the advent of Michelangelo. I speak of Donatello elsewhere in this book,[92] but you will find one of his best works among much curious, interesting litter from the Duomo in the Opera del Duomo, the Cathedral Museum in the old Falconieri Palace just behind the apse of the Cathedral. A bust of Cosimo Primo stands over the entrance, and within you find a beautiful head of Brunellesco by Buggiano. It is, however, in a room on the first floor that you will find the great organ lofts, one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, which I suppose are among the best known works of art in the world. Made for the Cathedral, these galleries for singers seem to be imprisoned in a museum. The beautiful youths of Luca, the children of Donatello, for all their seeming vigour and joy, sing and dance no more; they are in as evil a case as the Madonnas of the Uffizi, who, in their golden frames behind the glass, under the vulgar, indifferent eyes of the multitude, envy Madonna of the street-corner the love of the lowly. So it is with the beautiful Cantorie made for God's praise by Donatello and Luca della Robbia. Before the weary eyes of the sight-seer, the cold eyes of the scientific critic, in the horrid silence of a museum, amid so much that is dead, here the headless trunk of some saint, there the battered fragments of what was once a statue, some shadow has fallen upon them, and though they keep still the gesture of joy, they are really dead or sleeping. Is it only sleep? Do they perhaps at night, when all the doors of their prisons are barred and their gaolers are gone, praise God in His Holiness, even in such a hell as this? Who knows? They were made for a world so different, for a time that out of the love of God had seen arise the very beauty of the world, and were glad therefor. Ah, of how many beautiful things have we robbed God in our beggary! We have imprisoned the praise of the artists in the museums that Science may pass by and sneer; we have arranged the saints in order, and Madonna we have carefully hidden under the glass, because now we never dream of God or speak with Him at all. Art is dying, Beauty is become a burden, Nature a thing for science and not for love. They are become too precious, the old immortal things; we must hide them away lest they fade and God take them from us: and because we have hidden them away, and they are become too precious for life, and we have killed them because we loved them, we seldom pass by where they are save to satisfy the same curiosity that leads us to any other charnel-house where the dead are exposed. [Illustration: SINGING BOYS FROM THE CANTORIA OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA _In Opera del Duomo, Florence_ _Alinari_] Thus they have stolen away the silver altar of the Baptistery, that miracle of the fourteenth-century silversmiths, Betto di Geri, Leonardo di Ser Giovanni, and the rest, that it may be a cause of wonder in a museum. So a flower looks between the cold pages of a botanist's album, so a bird sings in his case: for life is to do that for which we were created, and if that be the praise of God in His sanctuary, to stand impotently by under the gaze of innumerable unbelievers in a museum is to die. And truly this is a shame in Italy that so many fair and lovely things have been torn out of their places to be catalogued in a gallery. It were a thousand times better that they were allowed to fade quietly on the walls of the church where they were born. It is a vandalism only possible to the modern world in which the machines have ground out every human feeling and left us nothing but a bestial superstition which we call science, and which threatens to become the worst tyranny of all, that we should thus herd together, catalogue, describe, arrange, and gape at every work of art and nature we can lay our hands on. No doubt it brings in, directly and indirectly, an immense revenue to the country which can show the most of such death chambers. Often by chance or mistake one has wandered into a museum--though I confess I never understood in what relation it stood to the Muses--where your scientist has collected his scraps and refuse of Nature, things that were wonderful or beautiful once--birds, butterflies, the marvellous life of the foetus, and such--but that in his hands have died in order that he may set them out and number them one by one. Here you will find a leg that once stood firm enough, there an arm that once for sure held someone in its embrace: now it is exposed to the horror and curiosity of mankind. Well, it is the same with the Pictures and the statues. Why, men have prayed before them, they have heard voices, tears have fallen where they stood, and they have whispered to us of the beauty and the love of God. To-day, herded in thousands, chained to the walls of their huge dungeons, they are just specimens like the dead butterflies which we pay to see, which some scientific critic without any care for beauty will measure and describe in the inarticulate and bestial syllables of some degenerate dialect he thinks is language. Our unfortunate gods! How much more fortunate were they of the older world: Zeus, whose statue of ivory and gold mysteriously was stolen away; Aphrodite of Cnidus, which someone hid for love; and you, O Victory of Samothrace, that being headless you cannot see the curious, peeping, indifferent multitude. Was it for this the Greeks blinded their statues, lest the gods being in exile, they might be shamed by the indifference of men? And now that our gods too are exiled, who will destroy their images and their pictures crowded in the museums, that the foolish may not speak of them we have loved, nor the scientist say, such and such they were, in stature of such a splendour, carved by such a man, the friend of the friend of a fool? But our gods are dead. FOOTNOTES: [86] I give this story for what it is worth. So far as I know, however, the font was placed in its present position in 1658, more than a hundred years after the church was roofed in. It may, however, have occupied another position before that. [87] See p. 82. [88] To compare an Italian church with a French cathedral would be to compare two altogether different things, a fault in logic, and in criticism the unforgivable sin; for a work of art must be judged in its own category, and praised only for its own qualities, and blamed only for its own defects. [89] Cf. _Donatello_, by Lord Balcarres: Duckworth, 1903, p. 12. [90] Not the ball we see now, which was struck by lightning and hurled into the street in 1492. Verrocchio's was rather smaller than the present ball. [91] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of Painting in Italy_: London, 1903, p. 116, note 4. [92] See pp. 283-289. XIII. FLORENCE OR SAN MICHELE Or San Michele, S. Michele in Orto, was till the middle of the thirteenth century a little church belonging, as it is said, to the Cistercians, who certainly claimed the patronage of it. About 1260, however, the Commune of Florence began to dispute this right with the Order, and at last pulled down the church, building there, thirty years later, a loggia of brick, after a design by Arnolfo di Cambio, according to Vasari, who tells us that it was covered with a simple roof and that the piers were of brick. This loggia was the corn-market of the city, a shelter, too, for the contadini who came to show their samples and to talk, gossip, and chaffer, as they do everywhere in Italy even to-day. And, as was the custom, they made a shrine of Madonna there, hanging on one of the brick pillars a picture (_tavola_) of Madonna that, as it is said, was the work of Ugolino da Siena. This shrine soon became famous for the miracles Madonna wrought there. "On July 3rd," says Giovanni Villani, writing of the year 1292, "great and manifest miracles began to be shown forth in the city of Florence by a figure of Saint Mary which was painted on a pilaster of the loggia of S. Michele d'Orto, where the corn was sold: the sick were healed, the deformed were made straight, and those who were possessed of devils were delivered from them in numbers." In the previous year the Compagnia di Or San Michele, called the Laudesi, had been established, and this Company, putting the fame of the miracles to good use, grew rich, much to the disgust of the Friars Minor and the Dominicans. "The Preaching Friars and the Friars Minor likewise," says Villani, "through envy or some other cause, would put no faith in that image, whereby they fell into great infamy with the people. But so greatly grew the fame of these miracles and the merits of Our Lady, that pilgrims flocked thither from all Tuscany for her festas, bringing divers waxen images because of the wonders, so that a great part of the loggia in front of and around Madonna was filled." Cavalcanti, too, speaks of Madonna di Or San Michele, likening her to his Lady, in a sonnet which scandalised Guido Orlandi-- "Guido an image of my Lady dwells At S. Michele in Orto, consecrate And duly worshipped. Fair in holy state She listens to the tale each sinner tells: And among them that come to her, who ails The most, on him the most doth blessing wait. She bids the fiend men's bodies abdicate; Over the curse of blindness she prevails, And heals sick languors in the public squares. A multitude adores her reverently: Before her face two burning tapers are; Her voice is uttered upon paths afar. Yet through the Lesser Brethren's jealousy She is named idol; not being one of theirs."[93] The feuds of Neri and Bianchi at this time distracted Florence; at the head of the Blacks, though somewhat their enemy, was Corso Donati; at the head of the Whites were the Cerchi and the Cavalcanti. After the horrid disaster of May Day, when the Carraja bridge, crowded with folk come to see that strange carnival of the other world, fell and drowned so many, there had been much fighting in the city, in which Corso Donati stood neutral, for he was ill with gout, and angered with the Black party. Robbed thus of their great leader, the Neri were beaten day and night by the Cerchi, who with the aid of the Cavalcanti and Gherardini rode through the city as far as the Mercato Vecchio and Or San Michele, and from there to S. Giovanni, and certainly they would have taken the city with the help of the Ghibellines, who were come to their aid, if one Ser Neri Abati, clerk and prior of S. Piero Scheraggio, a dissolute and worldly man, and a rebel and enemy against his friends, had not set fire to the houses of his family in Or San Michele, and to the Florentine Calimala near to the entrance of Mercato Vecchio. This fire did enormous damage, as Villani tells us, destroying not only the houses of the Abati, the Macci, the Amieri, the Toschi, the Cipriani, Lamberti, Bachini, Buiamonti, Cavalcanti, and all Calimala, together with all the street of Porta S. Maria, as far as Ponte Vecchio and the great towers and houses there, but also Or San Michele itself. In this disaster who knows what became of the miracle picture of Madonna? For years the loggia lay in ruins, till peace being established in 1336, the Commune decided to rebuild it, giving the work into the hands of the Guild of Silk, which, according to Vasari, employed Taddeo Gaddi as architect. The first stone of the new building was laid on July 29, 1337, the old brick piers, according to Villani, being removed, and pillars of stone set up in their stead.[94] In 1339 the Guild of Silk won leave from the Commune to build in each of these stone piers a niche, which later should hold a statue; while above the loggia was built a great storehouse for corn, as well as an official residence for the officers of the market. [Illustration: OR SAN MICHELE] Nine years later there followed the great plague, of which Boccaccio has left us so terrible an impression. In this dreadful calamity, which swept away nearly two-thirds of the population, the Compagnia di Or San Michele grew very wealthy, many citizens leaving it all their possessions. No doubt very much was distributed in charity, for the Company had become the greatest charitable society in the city, but by 1347, so great was its wealth, that it resolved to build the most splendid shrine in Italy for the Madonna di Or San Michele. The loggia was not yet finished, and after the desolation of the plague the Commune was probably too embarrassed to think of completing it immediately. Some trouble certainly seems to have arisen between the Guild of Silk, who had charge of the fabric, and the Company, who were only concerned for their shrine, the latter, in spite of their wealth, refusing in any way to assist in finishing the building. Whether from this cause or another, a certain suspicion of the Company began to rise in Florence, and Matteo Villani roundly accuses the Capitani della Compagnia of peculation and corruption. However this may be, by 1355 Andrea Orcagna had been chosen to build the shrine of Madonna, which is still to-day one of the wonders of the city. It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna's work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn-market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna. Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city. The architect of this strange and secular building, more like a palace than a church, is unknown. Vasari, as I have said, speaks of Taddeo Gaddi; others again have thought it the work of Orcagna himself; while Francesco Talenti and his son Simone are said to have worked on it. The question is to a large extent a matter of indifference. What is important here is the fact that it is to the greater Guilds and to the Parte Guelfa that we owe the church itself--that is to say, to the merchants and trades of the city--while the beautiful shrine within is due to a secular Company consisting of some of the greatest citizens, and to a large extent opposed to the regular Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis. It is, then, as the great church of the _popolo_ that we have to consider Or San Michele. Here, because their greatest and most splendid deed, the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, had been achieved on St. Anne's Day, July 26, 1343, they built a chapel to St. Anne, and around the church on every anniversary, above the fourteen niches which hold the statues presented by the seven greater arts, by six of the fourteen lesser arts, and by the Magistrato della Mercanzia, that magistracy which governed all the guilds,[95] their banners are set up even to this day. The great Guild of Wool was already responsible for the Duomo, and it was for this reason, it might seem, that to the Guild of Silk was given the care of Or San Michele; not altogether without jealousy, it might seem, for when they had asked leave to place the image of their saint in one of the niches there, all the other guilds had demanded a like favour, thus in an especial manner marking the place as the Church of the Merchants, the true _popolo_; the great popular shrine of Florence, therefore, since Florence was a city of merchants. It is on the south side, in the niche nearest to Via Calzaioli, that the Guild of Silk set its statue of St. John the Evangelist by Baccio da Montelupo; next to it is an empty niche belonging to the Guild of Apothecaries and Doctors. Here a Madonna and Child by Simone Ferrucci once stood, but, owing to a rumour current in the seventeenth century, that Madonna sometimes moved her eyes, the statue was placed inside the church, so that the crowd which always collected to see this miracle might no longer stop the way. In the next niche the Furriers placed a statue of St. James by Nanni di Banco, and beyond, the Guild of Linen set up a statue of St. Mark by Donatello. On the west, in the first niche, is S. Lo, the patron of the Furriers, carved by Nanni di Banco, and beyond, St. Stephen, set there by the Guild of Wool and carved by Ghiberti; while next to him stands St. Matthew, set there by the Bankers and carved by Ghiberti, and cast in 1422 by Michelozzo. On the north, Donatello's statue of St. George used to fill the first niche, somewhat shallower than the rest owing to a staircase inside the church, but it was removed to the Bargello for fear of the weather: the beautiful relief, also by Donatello, below the copy, is still in its place, under the St. George of the Armourers. The four statues in the next niche were placed there by the Guilds of Sculptors, Masons, Smiths, and Bricklayers; they are the work of Nanni di Banco. Further, is the St. Philip of the Shoemakers, again by Nanni di Banco, and the St. Peter of the Butchers, by Donatello. On the east stands St. Luke, placed there by the Notaries, and carved by Giovanni da Bologna; the great bronze group of Christ and St. Thomas, the gift of the Magistrato della Mercanzia, the governor of all the guilds; and the St. John Baptist, the gift of the Calimala, and the work of Ghiberti: this last was the first statue placed here--in 1414. Nanni di Banco, that delightful sculptor of the Madonna della Cintola of the Duomo, has thus four works here at Or San Michele--the S. Lo, the group on the north side, the St. Philip, and the St. James. The St. Philip, and the group which represents the four masons who, being Christians, refused to build a Pagan temple, and were martyred long and long ago, have little merit; and though the S. Lo has a certain force, and the relief below it a wonderful simplicity, they lack altogether the charm of the Madonna della Cintola. Ghiberti has three works here--the St. Stephen, the St. Matthew, and the St. John Baptist, the only sculptures of the kind he ever produced. Full of energy though the St. Stephen may be, it has about it a sort of divine modesty that lends it a charm altogether beyond anything we may find in the St. John Baptist, a figure full of character, nevertheless. It is, however, in the St. Matthew that we see Ghiberti at his best perhaps, in a figure for once full of strength, and altogether splendid. Donatello, too, had three figures here beside the relief beneath the St. George. The St. Peter on the north side is probably the earliest work done for Or San Michele, and is certainly the poorest. The St. Mark on the south side is, however, a fine example of his earlier manner, with a certain largeness, strength, and liberty about it a frankness, too, in expression so that he has made us believe in the goodness of the Apostle, which, as Michelangelo is reported to have said must have vouched for the truth of what he taught. The masterpiece, certainly, of these Tuscan sculptures is the bronze group of Christ and St. Thomas by Verrocchio, which I have so loved. All the work of this master is full of eagerness and force: something of that strangeness without which there is no excellent beauty, that later was so characteristic of the work of his pupil Leonardo, you will find in this work also, a subtlety sometimes a little elaborate, that, as I think is but a sort of over-eagerness to express all he has thought to say. Donatello prepared this niche for him at the end of his life it was almost his last work; and Verrocchio, after many years of labour, had thought to place here really his masterpiece, in the church that, more than any other, belonged to the people of the city, that middle class, as we might say, from which he sprang. How perfectly, and yet not altogether without affectation, he has composed that difficult scene, so that St. Thomas stands a little out of the setting, and places his finger--yes, almost as a child might do--in the wounded side of Jesus, who stands majestically fair before him. It is true the drapery is complicated, a little heavy even, but with what care he has remembered everything! Consider the grace of those beautiful folds, the beauty of the hair, the loveliness of the hands: and then, as Burckhardt reminds us, as a piece of work founded and cast in bronze, it is almost inimitable. * * * * * Within, the church is strange and splendid. It is as though one stood in a loggia in deep shadow, at the end of the day in the last gold of the sunset; and there, amid the ancient fading glory of the frescoes, is the wonderful shrine that Orcagna made for the picture of Madonna, who had turned the Granary of S. Michele into the Church of the People. Finished in 1359, this tabernacle is the loveliest work of the kind in Italy, an unique masterpiece, and perhaps the most beautiful example of the Italian Gothic manner in existence. Orcagna seems to have been at work on it for some ten years, covering it with decoration and carving those reliefs of the Life of the Virgin in that grand style which he had found in Giotto and learned perhaps from Andrea Pisano. To describe the shrine itself would be impossible and useless. It is like some miniature and magic church, a casquet made splendid not with jewels but with beauty, where the miracle picture of Madonna--not that ancient and wonderful picture by Ugolino da Siena, but a work, it is said, of Bernardo Daddi--glows under the lamps. On the west side, in front of the altar, Orcagna has carved the Marriage of the Virgin and the Annunciation; on the south, the Nativity of Our Lord and the Adoration of the Magi; on the north, the Presentation of the Virgin and her Birth; and on the east, the Purification and the Annunciation of her Death. And above these last, in a panel of great beauty, he has carved the Death of the Virgin, where, among the Apostles crowding round her bed, while St. Thomas--or is it St. John?--passionately kisses her feet, Jesus Himself stands with her soul in His arms, that little Child which had first entered the kingdom of heaven. Above this sorrowful scene you may see the Glory and Assumption of Our Lady in a mandorla glory, upheld by six angels, while St. Thomas kneels below, stretching out his arms, assured at last. It is, as it were, the prototype of the Madonna della Cintola, that exquisite and lovely relief which Nanni di Banco carved later for the north gate of the Duomo, only here all the sweetness that Nanni has seen and expressed seems to be lost in a sort of solemnity and strength. Between these panels Orcagna has set the virtues Theological and Cardinal, little figures of much force and beauty; and at the corners he has carved angels bearing palms and lilies. Some who have seen this shrine so loaded with ornament, so like some difficult and complicated canticle, have gone away disappointed. Remembering the strength and significance of Orcagna's work in fresco, they have perhaps looked for some more simple thing, and indeed for a less rhetorical praise. Yet I think it is rather the fault of Or San Michele than of the shrine itself, that it does not certainly vanquish any possible objection and assure us at once of its perfection and beauty. If it could be seen in the beautiful spacious transept of S. Croce, or even in Santo Spirito across Arno, that sense as of something elaborate and complicated would perhaps not be felt; but here in Or San Michele one seems to have come upon a priceless treasure in a cave. FOOTNOTES: [93] Rossetti's translation of Guido Cavalcanti's Sonnet written in exile. [94] Franceschini, however, in his record (_L'Oratorio di S. Michele in Orto in Firenze_: P. Franceschini: Firenze, 1892), says that the Tabernacle of Orcagna was built round the old brick pillars. It may well be that the pillar on which the Madonna was painted or was hung (for it is not clear whether the painting was a panel or a wall painting) was saved while the rest was destroyed. [95] The Parte Guelfa originally set up their statue of St. Louis of Toulouse, carved by Donatello, in the place where now stands the statue of Magistrates, the group of Christ and St. Thomas made by Verrocchio. Eight of the fourteen lesser arts are not represented--namely, the Bakers, the Carpenters, the Leatherworkers, the Saddlers, the Innkeepers, the Vintners, and the Cheesemongers. XIV. FLORENCE PALAZZO RICCARDI, AND THE RISE OF THE MEDICI It is in the Ciompi rising of 1278, that social revolution in which all Florence seems for once to have been interested, that we catch really for the first time the name of Medici. In 1352, Salvestro de' Medici--_non già Salvestro ma Salvator mundi_, Franco Sacchetti calls him--had led the Florentines against the Archbishop of Milan, and in 1370 he had been chosen Gonfaloniere of Justice. He was filling this office against the wishes of the Parte Guelfa, when, not without his connivance, the Ciompi riot broke out against the magnates, whose power he had sought to break by means of the Ordinances of Justice. The result of that bloody struggle was really a victory for the Arti Maggiori, the Arti Minori being bribed with promises and thus separated from the populace, who had sided with the Parte Guelfa, which was beaten for ever. The oligarchy was saved, but the struggle between rich and poor was by no means over. Soon the older Guilds seem to lose grip, and we see instead great trusts arising, associations of wealth, and above all, Banking Companies. What was wanting in Florence, as elsewhere in Italy, was some legitimate authority that might have guided the people in their desire for power. As it was, the city became divided into classes, each anxious to gain power at the expense of others, the result being an oligarchy, continually a prey to schism, merely waiting for a despot to declare himself. Seemingly in the hands of a group of families without any legitimate right, the government was really in the power of one among them, and thus of one man, the head of it, Maso degli Albizzi. Brilliant, clever, and fascinating, Maso ruled with a certain strength and generosity; but Florence was a city of merchants, and between the Scylla of oligarchy and the Charybdis of despotism, was really driven into the latter by her economic position. The Duke Gian Galeazzo of Milan closed the trade routes, and Florence was compelled to fight for her life. Pisa, too, had to be overcome, again for economic reasons, and in 1414 a long war with King Ladislaus brought Cortona into the power of the Republic; but all these wars cost money, and the taxes pressed on the poor, who obtained no advantage from them. Maso's son Rinaldo, who succeeded him before the wars were over, had less ability than his father, and was certainly less beloved; he seems, however, to have been upright and incorruptible. He was, nevertheless, capable of mistakes, and, while engaged in war with Milan, attempted to seize Lucca. At length, when the grumbling of the poor had already gone too far, he readjusted the taxes, and thus alienated the rich also. His own party was divided, he himself heading the more conservative party, which refused to listen to the clamour of the wealthier families for a part in the government, while Niccolò Uzzano, with the more liberal party, would have admitted them. Among these wealthy families excluded from the government was the Medici. The Medici had been banished after the Ciompi riots, but a branch of the family had returned, and was already established in the affections of the people. To the head of this branch, Giovanni de' Medici, all the enemies of Rinaldo looked with hope. This extraordinary man, who certainly was the founder of the greatness of his house, had long since understood that in such an oligarchy as that of Florence, the wealthiest must win. He had busied himself to establish his name and credit everywhere in Europe. He refused to take any open and active part in the fight that he foresaw must, with patience decide in his favour, but on his death, Cosimo, his elder son, no longer put off the crisis. He opposed Rinaldo for the control of the Signoria, and was beaten, in spite of every sort of bribery and corruption. It fell out that Bernardo Guadagni, whom Rinaldo had made his creature, was chosen Gonfaloniere for the months of September and October 1433. Rinaldo at once went to him and persuaded him that the greatest danger to the State was the wealth of Cosimo, who had inherited vast riches, including some sixteen banks in various European cities, from his father. He encouraged him to arrest Cosimo, and to have no fear, for his friends would be ready to help him, if necessary, with arms. Cosimo was cited to appear before the Balia, which, much against the wishes of his friends, he did. "Many," says Machiavelli, "would have him banished many executed, and many were silent, either out of compassion for him or apprehension of other people, so that nothing was concluded." Cosimo, however, was in the meantime a prisoner in the Palazzo Vecchio in the Alberghettino tower[96] in the custody of Federigo Malavolti. He could hear all that was said, and the clatter of arms and the tumult made him fear for his life, and especially he was afraid of assassination or poison, so that for four days he ate nothing. This was told to Federigo, who, according to Machiavelli, addressed him in these words: "You are afraid of being poisoned, and you kill yourself with hunger. You have but small esteem of me to believe I would have a hand in any such wickedness; I do not think your life is in danger, your friends are too numerous, both within the Palace and without; if there be any such designs, assure yourself they must take new measures, I will never be their instrument, nor imbrue my hands in the blood of any man, much less of yours, since you have never offended me. Courage, then, feed as you did formerly, and keep yourself alive for the good of your country and friends, and that you may eat with more confidence, I myself will be your taster." [Illustration: THE FLOWER MARKET, FLORENCE] Now Malavolti one night brought home with him to supper a servant of the Gonfaloniere's called Fargannaccio, a pleasant man and very good company. Supper over, Cosimo, who knew Fargannaccio of old, made a sign to Malavolti that he should leave them together. When they were alone, Cosimo gave him an order to the master of the Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova for 1100 ducats, a thousand for the Gonfaloniere and the odd hundred for himself. On receipt of this sum Bernardo became more moderate, and Cosimo was exiled to Padua. "Wherever he passed," says Machiavelli, "he was honourably received, visited publicly by the Venetians, and treated by them more like a sovereign than a prisoner." Truly the oligarchy had at last produced a despot. The reception of Cosimo abroad seems to have frightened the Florentines, for within a year a Balia was chosen friendly disposed towards him. Upon this Rinaldo and his friends took arms and proceeded to the Palazzo Vecchio, the Senate ordering the gates to be closed against them; protesting at the same time that they had no thought of recalling Cosimo. At this time Eugenius IV, hunted out of Rome by the populace, was living at the convent of S. Maria Novella. Perhaps fearing the tumult, perhaps bribed or persuaded by Cosimo's friends, he sent Giovanni Vitelleschi to desire Rinaldo to speak with him. Rinaldo agreed, and marched with all his company to S. Maria Novella. They appear to have remained in conference all night, and at dawn Rinaldo dismissed his men. What passed between them no man knows, but early in October 1434 the recall of Cosimo was decreed and Rinaldo with his son went into exile. Cosimo was received, Machiavelli tells us, "with no less ostentation and triumph than if he had obtained some extraordinary victory; so great was the concourse of people, and so high the demonstration of their joy, that by an unanimous and universal concurrence he was saluted as the Benefactor of the people and the Father of his country." Thus the Medici established themselves in Florence. Practically Prince of the Commune, though never so in name, Cosimo set himself to consolidate his power by a judicious munificence and every political contrivance known to him. Thus, while he enriched the city with such buildings as his palace in Via Larga, the Convent of S. Marco, the Church of S. Lorenzo, he helped Francesco Sforza to establish himself as tyrant of Milan, and in the affairs of Florence always preferred war to peace, because he knew that, beggared, the Florentines must come to him. Yet it was in his day that Florence became the artistic and intellectual capital of Italy. Under his patronage and enthusiasm the Renaissance for the first time seems to have become sure of itself. The humanists, the architects, the sculptors, the painters are, as it were, seized with a fury of creation; they discover new forms, and express themselves completely, with beauty and truth. For a moment realism and beauty have kissed one another: for reality is not enough, as Alberti will find some day, it is necessary to find and to express the beauty there also. It was an age that was learning to enjoy itself. The world and the beauty of the world laid bare, partly by the study of the ancients, partly by observation, really almost a new faculty, were enough; that conscious paganism which later, but for the great disaster, might have emancipated the world, had not yet discovered itself; in Cosimo's day art was still an expression of joy, impetuous, unsophisticated, simple. In this world of brief sunshine Cosimo appears to us very delightfully as the protector of the arts, the sincere lover of learning, the companion of scholars. To him in some sort the world owes the revival of the Platonic Philosophy, for the Greek Argyropolis lived in his house, and taught Piero his son and Lorenzo his grandson the language of the Gods. When Gemisthus Pletho came to Florence, Cosimo made one of his audience, and was so moved by his eloquence that he determined to establish a Greek academy in the city on the first opportunity. He was the dear friend of Marsilio Ficino, and he founded the Libraries of S. Marco and of the Badia at Fiesole. The great humanists of his time, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio and Niccolò de' Niccoli were his companions, and in his palace in Via Larga, and in his villas at Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, he gathered the most precious treasures, rare manuscripts, and books, not a few antique marbles and jewels, coins and medals and statues, while he filled the courts and rooms, built and decorated by the greatest artists of his time, with the statues of Donatello, the pictures of Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Filippo Lippo, and Benozzo Gozzoli. Cosimo, says Gibbon, "was the father of a line of princes whose name and age are almost synonymous with the restoration of learning; his credit was ennobled with fame; his riches were dedicated to the service of mankind; he corresponded at once with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were often imported in the same vessel." While Burckhardt, the most discerning critic of the civilisation of the Renaissance, tells us that "to him belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, and of inspiring his friends with the same belief." Among those who had loved Cosimo so well as to go with him into exile, had been Michelozzo Michelozzi, the architect and sculptor, the pupil of Donatello. Already, Vasari tells us in 1430, Cosimo had caused Michelozzo to prepare a model for a palace at the corner of Via Larga beside S. Giovannino, for one already made by Brunellesco appeared to him too sumptuous and magnificent, and quite as likely to awaken envy among his fellow-citizens as to contribute to the grandeur and ornament of the city, and to his own convenience. The palace which we see to-day at the corner of Via Cavour and Via Gori and call Palazzo Riccardi, was perhaps not begun till 1444, and is certainly somewhat changed and enlarged since Michelozzo built it for Cosimo Vecchio. The windows on the ground floor, for instance, were added by Michelangelo and the Riccardi family, whose name it now bears, and who bought it in 1695 from Ferdinando II, enlarged it in 1715. In 1417, Cosimo, after his marriage with Contessina de' Bardi, had bought and Michelozzo had rebuilt for him the Villa Careggi, where, in the Albizzi conspiracy, he had retired, he said, "to escape from the contests and divisions in the city." It was here that he lay dying when he wrote to Marsilio Ficino to come to him. "Come to us, Marsilio, as soon as you are able. Bring with you your translation of Plato _De Summo Bono_, for I desire nothing so much as to learn the road to the greatest happiness": and there too Lorenzo his grandson turned his face to the wall, when Savonarola came to him in his last hours and bade him give back liberty to Florence. It is, however, the palace in the Via Larga that recalls to us most vividly the lives and times of these first Medici, Cosimo Vecchio, Piero the gouty, Lorenzo il Magnifico. Michelozzo, Vasari tells us, deserves infinite credit for this building, since it was the first palace built in Florence after modern rules in which the rooms were arranged with a view to convenience and beauty. "The cellars are excavated," he explains, "to more than half their depth under the ground, having four braccia beneath the earth, that is with three above, on account of the lights. There are, besides buttresses, store-rooms, etc., on the same level. In the first or ground floor are two court-yards with magnificent loggia, on which open various saloons, bed-chambers, ante-rooms, writing-rooms, offices, baths, kitchens, and reservoirs, with staircases both for private and public use, all most conveniently arranged. In the upper floors are dwellings and apartments for a family, with all those conveniences proper, not only to that of a private citizen, as Cosimo then was, but sufficient also for the most powerful and magnificient sovereign. Accordingly, in our time, kings, emperors, popes, and whatever of most illustrious Europe can boast in the way of princes, have been most commodiously lodged in this palace, to the infinite credit of the magnificent Cosimo, as well as that of Michelozzo's eminent skill in architecture." It is not, however, the splendour of the palace, fine as it is, or the memory of Cosimo even, that brings us to that beautiful house to-day, but the work of Donatello in the courtyard, those marble medallions copied from eight antique gems, and the little chapel on the second floor, almost an afterthought you might think, since in a place full of splendidly proportioned rooms, it is so cramped and cornered under the staircase, where Benozzo Gozzoli has painted in fresco quite round the walls, the Journey of the Three Kings, in which Cosimo himself, Piero his son, and Lorenzo his grandson, then a golden-haired youth, ride among the rest, in a procession that never finds the manger at Bethlehem, is indeed not concerned with it, but is altogether occupied with its own light-hearted splendour, and the beauty of the fair morning among the Tuscan hills. Is it the pilgrimage of the Magi to the lowly cot of Jesus that we find in that tiny dark chapel, or the journey of man, awake now on the first morning of spring in quest of beauty? Over the grass scattered with flowers, that gay company passes at dawn by little white towns and grey towers, through woods where for a moment is heard the song of some marvellous bird, past running streams, between hedges of pomegranates and clusters of roses; and by the wayside rise the stone-pine and the cypress, while over all is the far blue sky, full of the sun, full of the wind, which is so soft that not a leaf has trembled in the woods, nor the waters stirred in a single ripple. Truly they are come to Tuscany where Beauty is, and are far from Bethlehem, where Love lies sleeping. There on a mule, a black slave beside his stirrup, rides Cosimo Pater Patriae, and beside him comes Piero his son, attended too, and before them on a white horse stepping proudly, with jewels in his cap, rides the golden-haired Lorenzo, the youngest of the three kings, already magnificent, the darling of this world of hills and streams, which one day he will sing better than anyone of his time. Not thus came the Magi of the East across the deserts to stony Judaea, and though the Emperor of the East be of them, and the Patriarch of Constantinople another, we know it is to the knowledge of Plato they would lead us, and not to the Sedes Sapientiae. And so it is before an empty shrine that those clouds of angels sing; Madonna has fled away, and the children are singing a new song, surely the Trionfo of Lorenzo, it is the first time, perhaps, that we hear it-- Quant' e' bella giovinezza. Ah, if they had but known how tragically that day would close. As Cosimo lay dying at Careggi, often closing his eyes, "to use them to it," as he told his wife, who wondered why he lay thus without sleeping, it was perhaps some vision of that conflict which he saw and would fain have dismissed from his mind, already divided a little in its allegiance--who knows--between the love of Plato and the love of Jesus. Piero, his son, gouty and altogether without energy, was content to confirm his political position and to overwhelm the Pitti conspiracy. It is only with the advent of Lorenzo and Giuliano, the first but twenty-one when Piero died, that the spirit of the Renaissance, free for the first time, seems to dance through every byway of the city, and, confronted at last by the fanatic hatred of Savonarola, to laugh in his face and to flee away through Italy into the world. Born in 1448, Lorenzo always believed that he owed almost everything that was valuable in his life to his mother Lucrezia, of the noble Florentine house of Tornabuoni, which had abandoned its nobility in order to qualify for public office. A poetess herself, and the patron of poets, she remained the best counsellor her son ever had. In his early youth she had watched over his religious education, and in his grandfather's house he had met not only statesmen and bankers, but artists and men of letters. His first tutor had been Gentile Becchi of Urbino, afterwards Bishop of Arezzo; from him he learned Latin, but Argyropolus and Ficino and Landino taught him Greek, and read Plato and Aristotle with him. Nor was this all, for we read of his eagerness for every sort of exercise. He could play calcio and pallone, and his own poems witness his love of hunting and of country life, and he ran a horse often enough in the palii of Siena. He was more than common tall, with broad shoulders, and very active. In colour dark, though he was not handsome, his face had a sort of dignity that compelled respect, but he was shortsighted too, and his nose was rather broad and flat. If he lacked the comeliness of outward form, he loved all beauteous things, and was in many ways the most extraordinary man of his age; his verse, for instance, has just that touch of genius which seems to be wanting in the work of contemporary poets. His love for Lucrezia Donati, in whose honour the tournament of 1467 was popularly supposed to be held, though in reality it was given to celebrate his betrothal with Clarice Orsini, seems to have been merely an affectation in the manner of Petrarch, so fashionable at that time. Certainly the Florentines, for that day at least, wished to substitute a lady of their city for the Roman beauty, and Lorenzo seems to have agreed with them. Like the tournament that Giuliano held later in honour of Simonetta Vespucci, which Poliziano has immortalised, and for which Botticelli painted a banner, this pageant of Lorenzo's, for it was rather a pageant than a fight, was sung, too, by Luca Pulci, and was held in Piazza S. Croce. A rumour of the splendour of the dresses, the beauty and enthusiasm of the scene, has come down to us, together with Lorenzo's own account of the day, and Clarice's charming letter to him concerning it. "To follow the custom," he writes unenthusiastically in his Memoir--"to follow the custom and do as others do, I gave a tournament in Piazza S. Croce at a great cost, and with a considerable magnificence; it seems about 10,000 ducats were spent. Although I was not a great fighter, nor even a very strong hitter, I won the prize, a helmet of inlaid silver, with a figure of Mars as a crest." "I have received your letter, in which you tell me of the tournament where you won the prize," writes Clarice, "and it has given me much pleasure. I am glad you are fortunate in what pleases you and that my prayers are heard, for I have no other wish but to see you happy. Give my respects to my father Piero and my mother Lucrezia, and all who are near to you, and I send, too, my respect to you. I have nothing else to say.--Yours, Clarice de Orsinis." Poor little Clarice, she was married to Lorenzo on June 4, in the following year. "I, Lorenzo, took to wife Clarice, daughter of Signor Jacopo, or rather she was given to me." He writes more coldly, certainly, than he was used to do. The marriage festa was celebrated in Palazzo Riccardi with great magnificence. Clarice, who was tall, slender, and shapely, with long delicate hands and auburn hair, but without great beauty of feature, dressed in white and gold, was borne on horseback through the garlanded way, in a procession of girls and matrons, trumpeters and pipers, all Florence following after to the Palace. There in the loggia above the garden she dined with the newly-married ladies of the city. In the courtyard, round the David of Donatello, some seventy of the greatest among the citizens sat together, while the stewards were all sons of the _grandi_. Piero de' Medici entertained each day some thousand guests, while for their entertainment mimic battles were fought, and in the manner of the time wooden forts were built, defended, and taken by assault, and at night there were dances and songs. Almost immediately after the marriage Lorenzo set out for Milan to visit the new Duke, and stand godfather to his heir. All his way through Prato, Pistoja, Lucca, Pietrasanta Sarzana, Pontremoli to Milan was a triumphal progress. He came home to find his father ailing, and on 2nd December 1469, Piero de' Medici died. He was buried in S. Lorenzo, in a tomb made by Verrocchio. It was to a great extent owing to the prompt action of Tommaso Soderini that the power of the Medici did not pass away at Piero's death, as that of many another family had done in Florence. The tried friend of that house, Soderini gathered some six hundred of the leading citizens in the convent of S. Antonio, and, as it seems, with the help of the relatives of Luca Pitti, persuaded them that the fortunes of Florence were wrapped up in the Medici. "The second day after my father's death," writes Lorenzo in his Memoir, "although I, Lorenzo, was very young, in fact only in my twenty-first year, the leading men of the city and of the ruling party came to our house to express their sorrow for our misfortune, and to persuade me to take upon myself the charge of the government of the city as my grandfather and father had already done. This proposal being contrary to the instincts of my age, and entailing great labour and danger, I accepted against my will, and only for the sake of protecting my friends and our own fortunes, for in Florence one can ill live in the possession of wealth without control of the government." Thus Lorenzo came to be tyrant of Florence. It was a rule illegitimate in its essence, purchased with gold, and without any outward sign of office. That it would come to be disputed might have seemed certain. FOOTNOTES: [96] The Alberghettino was the prison in the great tower. XV. FLORENCE SAN MARCO AND SAVONAROLA For there was another spirit, too, moving secretly through the ways of the city, among the crowds that gathered round the Cantastoria of the Mercato Vecchio, or mingled with the wild procession of the carnival, a spirit not of life, but of denial, a little forgetful as yet that the days of the Middle Age were over: and even as one day that joy in the earth and the beauty of world was to pass almost into Paganism, so this mysticism, that was at first like some marvellous fore-taste of heaven, fell into just Puritanism, a brutal political and schismatic hatred in the fanaticism of--let us be thankful for that--a foreigner. "If I am deceived, Christ, thou hast deceived me," Savonarola will come to say; and amid his cursing and prophecies it is perhaps difficult to catch the words of Pico--"We may rather love God than either know Him or by speech utter Him." But in Cosimo's day men had no fear, the day was at the dawn: who could have thought by sunset life would be so disastrous? [Illustration: CHIOSTRO DI S. MARCO] Cosimo de' Medici had a villa near the convent of S. Domenico at Fiesole, where, as it is said, he would often go when Careggi was too far, and the summer had turned the city into a furnace. Here, as we may think, he may well have talked with Fra Angelico, for he would often walk in the cloisters in the evening with the friars, and must have seen and praised the frescoes there. These Dominicans at Fiesole had already sent a colony to Florence, for in June 1435 they had obtained from Pope Eugenius iv, who was then at S. Maria Novella the little church of S. Giorgio across Arno. Seeing the order and comeliness of that convent at Fiesole, Cosimo, on behalf of the magistrates of Florence, presented a petition to the Pope about this time, praying that since he was engaged on a reform of the Religious Orders, which, partly owing to the schism and partly to the plague, were much relaxed, he would suppress the Sylvestrians who dwelt in the old convent of S. Marco, and give it to the Dominicans of Fiesole, who in exchange would give up their convent of S. Giorgio, for in the centre of the city numerous and zealous ministers were needed. Eugenius very gladly agreed to this, and in a Bull of January 1436, S. Marco was given to the Dominican Friars.[97] So they came down from Fiesole in procession, and went through the city accompanied by three bishops, all the clergy, and an immense concourse of people, and Fra Cipriano took possession of S. Marco "in the name of his congregation." The convent at this time would seem to have been in a deplorable state: in the previous year a fire had destroyed much of it, and the church even was without a roof, so that the friars were obliged to build themselves wooden cells to live in, and to roof the church with timber. When Cosimo heard this he prepared at once to rebuild the convent, and sent Michelozzo to see what could be done. Michelozzo first pulled down the old cloister, leaving only the church and the refectory; and in 1437 began to build the beautiful convent we see to-day, completing it in 1443, at a cost of 36,000 ducats. The church which was then restored has suffered many violations since, and is very different to-day from what it was at the end of the fifteenth century. It was consecrated in 1442, on the feast of the Epiphany, by Pope Eugenius in the presence of his Cardinals. The library, Vasari tells us, was built later. It was vaulted above and below, and had sixty-four bookcases of cypress wood filled with most valuable books, among them later the famous collection of Niccolò Niccoli, whose debts Cosimo paid on condition that he might dispose freely of his books, which were arranged here by Thomas of Sarzana, afterwards Nicholas v. The convent thus completed is "believed to be," says Vasari, "the most perfectly arranged, the most beautiful and most convenient building of its kind that can be found in Italy, thanks to the skill and industry of Michelozzo." Fra Angelico was nearly fifty years old when his Order took possession of S. Marco. Already he had painted three choir books, which Cosimo so loved that he wished nothing else to be used in the convent, for, as Vasari tells us, their beauty was such that no words can do justice to it. Born in 1387, he had entered the Order of S. Dominic in 1408 at Fiesole. The convent into which he had come had only been founded in 1406, and as with S. Marco later, so with S. Domenico, many disputes as to the property had to be encountered, so that he had early been a traveller, going with the brethren to Foligno and later to Cortona, returning to Fiesole in 1418. Who amid these misfortunes could have been his master? It might seem that in the silence of the sunny cloister in the long summer days of Umbria some angel passing up the long valleys stayed for a moment beside him, so that for ever after he could not forget that vision. And then, who knows what awaits even us too, in that valley where Blessed Angela heard Christ say, "I love thee more than any other woman in the valley of Spoleto"? It is certainly some divinity that we find in those clouds of saints and angels, those marvellously sweet Madonnas, those majestic and touching crucifixions, that with a simplicity and sincerity beyond praise, Angelico has left up and down Italy, and not least in the convent of S. Marco. Yes, it is a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is to come. It is for Him the sun is darkened; to lighten His footsteps the moon shall rise; because His love has lightened the world men go happily, and because He is here the world is a garden. In all that convent of S. Marco you cannot turn a corner but Christ is awaiting you, or enter a room but His smile changes your heart, or linger on the threshold but He bids you enter in, or eat at midday but you see Him on the Cross, and hear, "Take, eat; this is My Body, which was given for you." You enter the cloister, and the first word is Silence; St. Peter Martyr, with finger on lip, seems to utter the first indispensable word of the heavenly life. The second you see over the door of the chapter-house, Discipline and the denial of the body; St. Dominic with a scourge of nine cords is about to give you the difficult book of heavenly wisdom. The third is spoken by Christ Himself; Faith, for He points to the wound in His side. And the fourth Christ speaks too, for none other may utter it; Love, for as a pilgrim He is welcomed by two pilgrims, two Dominican brothers, to their home. Pass into the Refectory and He is there; go into the Capitolo and He is there also, the Prince of life between two malefactors, hanging on a cross for love of the world, and in His face all the beauty and sweetness of the earth have been gathered and purged of their dross, and between His arms is the kingdom of Heaven. In that room the name of Jesus continually vibrates with an intense and passionate life, more wonderful, more beautiful, and more terrible than the tremor of all the sea. And it has brought together in adoration not the world, which cannot hear its music, but those who above the tumult of their hearts have caught some faint far echo of that supernal concord which has bound together this whispering universe: for there beneath the Cross of Jesus are none but saints, Madonna and the two SS. Maries, St. John the Baptist and St. John the Divine, and beside them kneel the founders of the Religious Orders St. Dominic, the founder of the preaching friars, St. Jerome the father of monasticism, St. Francis the little poor man, St. Bernard who spoke with Madonna, S. Giovanni Gualberto the founder of Vallombrosa, St. Peter Martyr who was wounded for Christ's sake. Above him stands St. Thomas Aquinas the angelic doctor, St. Romuald the founder of Camaldoli St. Benedict who overthrew the temples, St. Augustine who has spoken of the City of God, S. Alberto di Vercelli the founder of the Carmelites. And on the other side, beside St. John Baptist, St. Mark the patron of the convent kneels with his open Gospel, St. Laurence stands with his gridiron, and behind him come the two other Medici saints, S. Cosmo and S. Damiano. Pass into the dormitories, and in every cell you enter Jesus is there before you; on the threshold the angel announces His advent, and little by little, scene by scene, you are involved in the beauty and the tragedy of His life. You see Him transfigured (No. 6), you see Him buffeted (No. 7), you see Him rise from the tomb (No. 8), and you see Him in glory crowning Madonna (No. 9), or as a youth presented in the Temple (No. 11). Many times you come upon Him crucified (15-23), once John baptizes Him in Jordan (24), or Madonna and St. John the Divine weep over Him dead (26). Here He bears His Cross (28), there descends into Hades (31), preaches to the people (32), is betrayed by Judas (33), agonises in the Garden (34), gives us His Body to eat, His Blood to drink (35), is nailed to the Cross (36); crucified (37), and again adored as a Child by the Magi (38), speaks with Mary in the garden (1), is buried (2); the angel announces His birth (3), He is crucified (4), and born in Bethlehem (5). It is the rosary of Jesus that we tell, consisting of the glorious and sorrowful mysteries of His life and death. It is the spirit of Christianity that we see here, blossoming everywhere, haphazard like the wild flowers that are the armies of spring. As Benozzo Gozzoli has expressed with an immense good fortune, the very spirit of the Renaissance at its birth almost, the spirit and the joy of youth, so Angelico with as simple an eagerness and a more sure sincerity has expressed here the very spirit of Christianity,--He that loseth his life shall gain it: take no thought for your life. [Illustration: THE CRUCIFIXION _By Fra Angelica. S. Marco, Florence_ _Alinari_] It was here, then, amid all this mystical and heavenly beauty, that first S. Antonino and later Savonarola sought to oppose the "new religion of love and beauty" which had already filled Florence with a new joy. At first, certainly, that new joy seemed not unfriendly to the mysterious and heavenly beauty of the Christian ideal. It is not till later, when both have been a little spoiled by love, that there seems to have been any antagonism between them. It is true that it was only with reluctance that S. Antonino accepted the Arch-bishopric of Florence, but this seems rather to have been owing to humility, the most beautiful characteristic of a beautiful nature, than to any perception that he might have to oppose that new spirit fostered so carefully, and indeed so unwittingly, by Cosimo de' Medici, his benefactor. Born of Florentine parents in 1389, the son of a notary, Antonino, at the age of sixteen, had entered the convent of S. Domenico at Fiesole, not without a severe test of his steadfastness, for Fra Domenico made him learn the whole of Gratian's decree by heart before he would admit him to the Order. Later, he became priest, wrote his _Summa Theologicae_, and was called by Eugenius, who loved him, to the General Council in Florence in 1439; while there he was made Prior of the Convent of S. Marco. Having set his Congregation in order, and, as such a man was bound to do, endeared himself to the Florentines, he set out for other convents, not in Tuscany only, but in Naples, which needed his presence. He was absent for two years. During that time the See of Florence became vacant, and Eugenius, to the great joy of the city, appointed Antonino Archbishop. Surprised and troubled that he should have been thought of for such a dignity, he set out to hide himself in Sardinia, but, being prevented, came at last to Siena, whence he wrote to the Pope begging him to change his mind, saying that he was old, sick and unworthy. How little he knew Eugenius, the on altogether inflexible will in all that time, so full of trouble for the Church! The Pope sent him to S. Domenico at Fiesole and told the Florentines their Archbishop was at their gates. So, with Cosimo de' Medici at their head, they went out to meet him, but he refused to enter the city till Eugenius threatened him with excommunication. He was consecrated Archbishop of Florence in March 1446 borne in procession from S. Piero down Borgo degli Albizzi to the Duomo.[98] As a boy, it is said, he would pray before the Madonna of Or San Michele, and, indeed, in his Chronicle he defends his Order against the charges of scepticism as to the miracles worked there, with a certain eloquence. Many are the stories told of him, and Poccetti has painted the story of his life round the first cloister of S. Marco, where he was buried in May 1459. S. Antonino was a saint and a theologian, not a politician or an historian. Certainly he did not foresee the tragedy that was already opening, and that was to end, not in the lenten fires of Piazza Signoria, nor even in the death of Savonarola, but in the siege of Florence, the establishment of the House of Medici, the tombs of S. Lorenzo. How often in those days Cosimo would walk with him and Fra Angelico in the cloisters on a summer night, after listening may be to Marsilio Ficino or to the vague and wonderful promises of Argyropolis. "To serve God is to reign," Antonino told him, not without a certain understanding of those restless ambitions which at that time seemed to promise the city nothing but good. And then, was it not Cosimo who had rebuilt the convent, was it not Cosimo who had built S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito too, by the hand of Michelozzo? Antonino was not a politician; the _Chronicon Domini Antonini Archipraesulis Florentini_ is the work rather of a theologian than of an historian: the friend of Leonardo Bruni, or at least well acquainted with his work, he cared rather for charity than for learning; and it was as the father of the poor that Florence loved him. He lived by love. An in those days of uncertain fortune, amid the swift political changes of the time, there were many whom, doubtless, he saved from degradation or suicide. I poveri vergognosi--the poor who are ashamed, it was these he first took under his protection. We read of him sending for twelve men of all classes and various crafts, and, laying the case before them, refounded a charity--_Provveditori dei poveri vergognosi_, which soon became in the mouth of Florence _I Buonomini di S. Martino_, the good men of S. Martin, for the society had its headquarters in the Church S. Martino; and, was not S. Martino himself, as it were, the first of this company? Born in Ferrara in 1452, the grandson of a famous doctor of Padua, Girolamo Savonarola had entered the Dominican Order at Bologna when he was twenty-two years old, finding the world but a wretched place, and the wickedness of men more than he could bear. Something of this strange and almost passionate pessimism remained with him his whole life long. In 1481 he had been sent to the convent of S. Marco, in Florence, when Lorenzo de' Medici had been at the head of affairs for some twelve years. The Pazzi conspiracy, in which Giuliano de' Medici lost his life, had come in 1478, and Lorenzo was fixed more firmly than ever in the affections of the people. Simonetta had been borne like a dead goddess through the streets of the city to burial; Lorenzo was already busy with those carnival songs which, as some thought, were written to corrupt the people: the Renaissance had come. "Gladius Domini super terram cite et velociter," thought Savonarola, unable to understand that life from which he had fled into the cloister. It was the first voice that had been raised against the resurrection of the Gods, but at that moment Martin Luther was lying in his mother's arms, while his father worked in the mines at Eisleben: the Reaction was already born. On a Latin city such as Florence was, Savonarola at first made little or no impression; too often the friars had prophesied evil for no cause, wandering through every little city in Italy denouncing the Signori. It was in San Gemignano, even to-day the most medieval of Tuscan cities, a place of towers and winding narrow ways, that Savonarola first won a hearing; and so it was not till nine years after his first coming to her that Florence seems to have listened to his prophecy, when, in August 1490, in S. Marco he began to preach on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It was a programme half political, half spiritual, that he suggested to those who heard him, the reformation of the Church and the fear of a God who had been forgotten but who would not forget. In the spring of the year following, so great were the crowds who flocked to hear his half-political discourses that he had to preach in the Duomo. There unmistakably we are face to face with a political agitator. "God intends to punish Lorenzo Magnifico,--yes, and his friends too"; and when, a little later, he was made prior of S. Marco, he refused to receive Lorenzo in the house his grandfather had built. In the following year Lorenzo died; Savonarola, as the tale goes, refusing him absolution unless he would restore liberty to the people of Florence. Consider the position. How could Lorenzo restore that which he had never stolen away, that which had, in truth, never had any real existence? He was without office, without any technical right to government, merely the first among the citizens of what, in name at least, was a Republic. If he was a tyrant, he ruled by the will of the people, not by divine right, a thing unknown among the Signori of Italy, nor by the will of the Pope, nor by the will of the Emperor, but by the will of Florence. Yet Savonarola, the Ferrarese, whether or no he refused him absolution, did not hesitate to denounce him, with a wild flood of eloquence and fanatic prophecy worthy of the eleventh century. "Leave the future alone," Lorenzo had counselled him kindly enough: it was just that he could not do, since for him the present was too disastrous. And the future?--the future was big with Charles VIII and his carnival army, gay with prostitutes, bright with favours, and behind him loomed the fires of Piazza della Signoria. The peace of Italy is dead, the Pope told his Cardinals, when in the spring of 1492 Lorenzo passed away at Careggi It was true. In September 1494, Charles VIII, on his way to Naples, came into Italy, was received by Ludovico of Milan at Asti, while his Switzers sacked Rapallo. Was this, then, the saviour of Savonarola's dreams? "It is the Lord who is leading those armies," was the friar's announcement. Amid all the horror that followed, it is not Savonarola that we see to-day as the hero of a situation he had himself helped to create, but Piero Capponi, who, Piero de' Medici having surrendered Pietrasanta and Sarzana, stood for the Republic. On 9th November Piero and Giuliano his brother fled out of Porta di S. Gallo, while Savonarola with other ambassadors went to meet the King. A few days later, on 17th November 1494, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, Pisa in the meantime having revolted, Charles entered Florence[99] with Cardinal della Rovere, the soldier and future Pope, and in his train came the splendour and chivalry of France, the Scotch bowmen, the Gascons, and the Swiss. "Viva la Francia!" cried the people, and Charles entered the Duomo at six o'clock in the evening, down a lane of torches to the high altar. And coming out he was conducted to the house of Piero de' Medici, the people crying still all the time "Viva la Francia!" The days passed in feasting and splendour, Charles began to talk of restoring the Medici, nor were riots infrequent in Borgo Ognissanti; in Borgo S. Frediano the Switzers and French pillaged and massacred, and were slain too in return. Florence, always ready for street fighting, was, as we may think, too much for the barbarians. On 24th November the treaty was signed, an indemnity being paid by the city, but the rioting did not cease. Landucci gives a very vivid account of it. Even the King himself was not slow to pillage: he was discontented with the indemnity offered, and threatened to loot the city. "_Io farò dare nelle trombe_," said he; Piero Capponi was not slow to answer, "_E noi faremo dare nello campane_"--and we will sound our bells. The King gave in, and Florence was saved. On 26th November he heard Mass for the last time in S. Maria del Fiore, and on the 28th he departed--_si partì el Re di Firenze dopo desinare, e andò albergo alla Certosa e tutta sua gente gli andò dietro e innanzi, che poche ce ne rimase_, says Landucci thankfully. Then the city, free from this rascal, who carried off what he could of the treasures of Cosimo and Lorenzo, turned not to Piero Capponi but to another foreigner, Girolamo Savonarola. The political eagerness of this friar now came to the point of action. He set up a Greater Council, which in its turn elected a Council of Eighty; he refused to call a parliament, since he told them that "parliament had ever stolen the sovereignty from the people." Then, on the 1st of April, he said that the Virgin Mary had revealed to him that the city would be more glorious, rich, and powerful than ever before, and, as Landucci says, "_La maggiore parte del popolo gli credeva."_ He also said that the Greater Council was the creation of God, and that whoever should attempt to change it would be eternally damned. Nor was this all. If it were right and splendid for Florence to be free, free as she always had been from the domination of any other city, so it was for revolted Pisa. Yet this fanatic Ferrarese told the people that he had had a vision in which the Blessed Virgin had told him that Florence should make treaty with France, and thus regain Pisa. This was on the return of the King from Naples with Piero de' Medici in his train. However, he met the King at Poggibonsi, told him Florence was his friend, that God desired him to spare it, and with other tales succeeded in keeping Charles out of the city. This, as it seems to me, is the one good deed Savonarola did for Florence. But the people still believed in him, though he turned the whole life of the city into a sort of religious carnival. Now, if Lorenzo had kept the people quiet with songs, Savonarola was equally successful with hymns. "Viva Cristo e la Vergine Maria, nostra regina," shouted the people,--merchants, friars, women, and children dancing before the crucifix with olive boughs in their hands. "On 27th March 1496, which was Palm Sunday, Fra Girolamo made a procession of children with olive branches in their hands and crowns of olive on their heads and all bore, too, a red cross. There were some five thousand boys, and a great number of girls all dressed in white, then after came all the Ufici, and all the guilds, and then all the men, and after all the women of the city. There never was so great a procession," says Landucci. Indeed, there was not a man nor a woman who did not join the company. "It was a holy time, but it was short," says Landucci again, whose own children were among "these holy and blessed companies." Short indeed! The Italian League had been formed against France; only Florence and Ferrara remained outside. If it were politics that had taken Savonarola so high, it was to them he owed his fall. He denounced all Italy, and not least Alexander VI, the vicious but very capable Pope. When he began to denounce Rome he signed his own death; her hour was not yet come. "I announce to you, Italy and Rome, the Lord will come out of His place.... I tell you, Italy and Rome, the Lord will tread you down. I have commanded penance, yet you are worse and worse.... Soon all priests, friars, bishops, cardinals, and great masters shall be trampled down." It was a brave denunciation, and if it were unjust, what was justice to one who had made Jesus King of Florence and established himself as His Vicegerent. The Pope excommunicated him: the factions in Florence--the Arrabbiati, the Compagnacci, the Palleschi--rejoiced; yet the people he had led so long seemed inclined to support him. Then came the plague, and then the discovery of a plot to bring back Piero. Well, Savonarola began to preach again; but he was beaten. Many would not go to hear him, of whom Landucci was one, because of the excommunication.[100] And at last Savonarola himself seems to have seen the end. "If I am deceived, Christ Thou hast deceived me," he says and at last he challenged the fire to prove it. It was too much for the Signoria; they agreed. It was the Franciscans he had to meet; whether or no they meant to persist with the "trial by fire" we shall never know, but when, on 7th April 1498, the fire was lighted in Piazza della Signoria, it was Savonarola who refused. A few minutes later, amid the uproar, a deluge of rain put out the flames. Savonarola's last chance was gone. The people hounded him back to S. Marco, and but for the Guards of the Signoria he would have been torn in pieces. On 8th April, which was Palm Sunday, in the evening, the attack that had been threatening all day began: through the church, through the cloisters the fight raged, while the whole city was in the streets. At last Savonarola and Fra Domenico, his friend, gave themselves up to the guard, really for protection, and were lodged in Palazzo Vecchio. There the Signoria tortured them, with another friar, Silvestro, and at last from Savonarola even they seem to have dragged some sort of admission. What such a confession was worth, drawn from the poor mangled body of a broken man, one can well imagine; but that mattered nothing to the wild beasts he had taught to roar, who now had him at their mercy. The effect of this on the city seems to have been very great. "We had thought him to be a prophet," writes Luca Landucci simply, "and he confessed he was not a prophet, that he had not from God the things he preached.... And I was by when this was read, and I was astonished, bewildered, amazed.... Ah, I expected Florence to be, as it were, a New Jerusalem, ... and I heard the very contrary." The Signoria which tortured Savonarola was presently replaced by another; and though, like its predecessor, it too refused to send him to Rome, it went about to compass his death. Again they tortured him; then on the 23rd May, the gallows having been built over night in the Piazza, they killed him with his companions, afterwards burning their bodies. "They wish to crucify them,"[101] cried one in the crowd; and indeed, the scaffold seems to have resembled a cross. Was it Florence herself perhaps who hung there? FOOTNOTES: [97] Not without protest, for the Sylvestrians appealed to the schismatic counsel at Basle, but got no good by it; and a whole series of lawsuits followed. [98] See p. 256. [99] Cf. L. Landucci, _Diario Fiorentino_ (Sansoni, 1883), p. 80. [100] It would be wrong to conclude that Savonarola attacked the faith of the Catholic Church. He never did. He protested himself a faithful Catholic to the last. He was a puritan and a politician, and it was on these two counts that he fought the Papacy. [101] Landucci, _op. cit. p_. 176. XVI. FLORENCE S. MARIA NOVELLA If Florence built the Baptistery, the Duomo, and the Campanile for the glory of the whole city, that there might be one place, in spite of all the factions, where without difference all might enter the kingdom of heaven, one temple in which all the city might wait till Jesus passed by, one tower which should announce the universal Angelus, she built other churches too, more particular in their usefulness, less splendid in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the city, or their appeal to us to-day. You may traverse the city from east to west without forsaking the old streets, and a little fantastically, perhaps, find some hint in the buildings you pass of that old far-away life, so restless and so fragile, so wanting in unity, and yet, as it seems to us, with but one really profound intention in all its work, the resurrection of life among men. In the desolate but beautiful Piazza of S. Maria Novella, at the gates of the old city, you find a Dominican convent, and before it the great church of that Order, S. Maria Novella herself, the bride of Michelangelo. Then, following Via dei Fossi, you enter the old city at the foot of the Carraja bridge, following Via di Parione past an old Medici palace into Via Porta Rossa and so into Via Calzaioli, where you came upon that strange and beautiful church so like a palace, Or San Michele, built by the merchants, the Church of the Guilds of the city. Passing thence into Piazza Signoria, and so into Via de' Gondi, in the Proconsolo you find the Church of the great monastic Order the Badia of the Benedictines, having passed on your way Palazza Vecchio, the Palace of the Republic, afterwards of the Medici; and the Bargello, the Palace of the Podestà, afterwards a prison; coming later through Borgo de' Greci to the Church of S. Croce, the convent of the Franciscans. Thus, while beyond the old west gate of the city there stood the house of the Dominicans, the Franciscans built their convent on the east, just without the city; and between them in the heart of Florence dwelt the oldest Order of all, the Benedictines, busy with manuscripts. Again, if the tower of authority throws its shadow over the Bargello, it is the tower of liberty that rises over Palazzo Vecchio, and the whole tragedy of the beautiful city seems to be expressed for us in the fact that while the one became a prison the other came to house the gaoler. So this city of warm brick, with its churches of marble, its old ways, its palaces of stone, its convents at the gates, comes to hold for us, as it were, the very dream of Italy, the dream that was too good to last, that was so soon to be shattered by the barbarian. Yet in that little walk through the narrow winding ways from the west to the east of the city, all the eloquence and renown, the strength and beauty of Italy seem to be gathered for you, as in a nosegay you may find all the beauty of a garden. And of all the broken blossoms that you may find by the way, not one is more fragrant and fair than the sweet bride of Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella. Standing in a beautiful Piazza, itself the loveliest thing therein, dressed in the old black and white habit, it dreams of the past: it is full of memories too, for here Boccaccio one Tuesday morning, just after Mass in 1348, amid the desolation of the city, found the seven beloved ladies of the _Decamerone_ talking of death; here Martin V, and Eugenius IV, fugitives from the Eternal City, found a refuge; here Beata Villana confessed her sins; here Vanna Tornabuoni prayed and the Strozzi made their tombs. Full of memories--and of what else, then, but the past can she dream? For her there is no future. Her convent is suppressed, the great cloister has become a military gymnasium. What has she, then, in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, for instance?--the past is all that we have left her. [Illustration: S. MARIA NOVELLA] Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto, the façade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni Rucellai--you may see their blown sail everywhere--with that profound and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci. For Alberti has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance, full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements. In the fagade of his masterpiece, the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, that beautiful unfinished temple where the gods of Greece seem for once to have come to the cradle of Jesus with something of the wonder of the shepherds who left their flocks to worship Him, Leon Alberti has taken as his model the arch of Augustus, that still, though broken, stands on the verge of the city in the Flaminian Way; but as though aware at last of the danger of any mere imitation of antiquity such as that, he has here contrived to express the beauty of Roman things, just what he himself had really felt concerning them, and has combined that very happily with the work of the age that was just then passing away; thus, as it were, creating for us one of the most perfect buildings of the fifteenth century, very characteristic too, in its strange beauty, as of the dead new risen. And then how subtly he has composed this beautiful façade, so that somehow it really adds to the beauty of the Campanile, with its rosy spire, in the background. Within, the church is full of a sort of twilight, in which certainly much of its spaciousness is lost; those chapels in the nave, for instance, added by Vasari in the sixteenth century have certainly spoiled it of much of its beauty. Built in the shape of a tau cross--a Latin cross that is almost tau, in old days it was divided, where still there is a step across the nave into two parts, one of which was reserved for the friars, while the other was given to the people. There is not much of interest in this part of the church: a crucifix over the great door, attributed to Giotto; a fresco of the Holy Trinity, with Madonna and St. John, by Masaccio, that rare strong master; the altar, the fourth in the right aisle, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury,--almost nothing beside. It is in the south transept, where a flight of steps leads to the Rucellai Chapel, that we came upon one of the most beautiful and mysterious things in the city, the Madonna, so long given to Cimabue, but now claimed for Duccio of Siena.[102] Vasari describes for us very delightfully the triumph of this picture, when, so great was the admiration of the people for it that "it was carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church,--he himself being highly rewarded and honoured for it"; while, as he goes on to tell us, when Cimabue was painting it, in a garden as it happened near the gate of S. Pietro, King Charles of Sicily, brother of St. Louis, saw the picture, and praising it, "all the men and women of Florence hastened in great crowds to admire it, making all possible demonstrations of delight. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood, rejoicing in this occurrence, ever after called that place Borgo Allegri,"--the name it bears to this day. However reluctant we may be to find Vasari, that divine gossip, at fault, it might seem that Cimabue's Triumph is a fable, or if, indeed, it happened, was stolen, for the Rucellai Madonna is apparently the work of Duccio the Sienese.[103] Of the works of Cimabue not one remains to us; we do not know, we have certainly no means of knowing, whether he was, as Ghiberti tells us, a painter in the old Greek manner, or whether, as Vasari suggests, he was the true master of Giotto, in that to him was owing the impulse of life which we find so moving in Giotto's work. And then Vasari, it seems, is wrong in his account of Borgo Allegri, for that place was named not after happiness, the happiness of that part of the city in their great neighbour, but from a family who in those days lived thereabout and bore that name. It is, however, of comparatively little importance who painted the picture. The controversy, which is not yet finished, serves for the most part merely to obscure the essential fact that here is the picture still in its own place, and that it is beautiful. Very lovely, indeed, she is, Madonna of Happiness, and still at her feet the poor may pray, and still on her dim throne she may see day come and evening fall. Far up in the obscure height she holds Christ on her knees. Perhaps you may catch the faint dim loveliness of her face in the early dawn amid the beauty of the angels kneeling round her throne when the light steals through the shadowy windows across the hills; or perhaps at evening in the splendour of some summer sunset you may see just for a moment the whiteness of her delicate hands; but she is secret and very far away, she has withdrawn herself to hear the prayers of the poor in spirit who come when the great church is empty, when the tourists have departed, when the workmen have returned to their homes. And beside her in that strange, mysterious place Beata Villana sleeps, where the angels draw back the curtain, in a tomb by Desiderio da Settignano. She was not of the great company whose names we falter at our altars and whisper for love over and over again in the quietness of the night; but of those who are weary. Born to a wealthy Florentine merchant, Andrea di Messer Lapo by name, little Vanna went her ways with the children, yet with a sort of naïve sincerity after all, so that when she heard Saint Catherine praised or Saint Francis, she believed it and wished to be of that company; but the world, full of glamour and laughter in those days, and now too, caught her by the waist and bore her away, in the person of a noble youth of the Benintendi, who loved her well enough; yet it was love she loved rather than her husband; and life calling sweetly enough down the long narrow streets, she followed, yes, till she was a little weary. So she would question her beauty, and, looking in her glass, see not herself but the demon love that possessed her; and again in another mirror she found a devil, she said, like a faun prick-eared and with goat's feet, peering at her with frightening eyes. So she stripped off her fair gay dresses, and took instead the rough hair-shirt, and came at evening across the Piazza to confess in S. Maria Novella; and gave herself to the poor, and forgot the sun till weary she fled away. Her grandson, as it is said, built this tomb to her memory, and they wrote above, Beata Villana. It is always with reluctance, I think, that one leaves that dim chapel of the Rucellai, and yet how many wonderful things await us in the church. In the second chapel of the transept, the Chapel of Filippo Strozzi, who is buried behind the altar, Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Lippo, the pupil of Botticelli, has painted certain frescoes,--a little bewildering in their crowded beauty, it is true, but how good after all in their liveliness, their light and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces of the women--where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St. Philip drives out the Dragon of Hierapolis; while above St. John is martyred, and St. Philip too. But it is in the choir behind the high altar, where for so long the scaffolding has prevented our sight, that we come upon the simple serious work of Domencio Ghirlandajo, whom all the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of an artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still in all his work. Consider, then, the bright facile mediocre work of Benozzo Gozzoli, not at its best, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, remember how in the dark chapel of the Medici palace he lights up the place almost as with a smile, in the gay cavalcade that winds among the hills. There is much fancy there, much observation too; here a portrait, there a gallant fair head, and the flowers by the wayside. Well, it is in much the same way that Ghirlandajo has painted here in the choir of S. Maria Novella. He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the women, he has watched the naïve homely life of the Medici ladies, for instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de' Medici, and the rest. And he was right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting and living work left in Florence. He has understood or divined that one cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to represent something with exactitude that he is at work. So he contents himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century. It is a true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of Ghirlandajo's, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain largeness and splendour. Consider this "Birth of the Virgin." It is full of life and homely observation. You see the tidy dusted room where St. Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth, but another painter would have forgotten it. She is just a careful Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and some water. Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary. She lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly, no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly into the vessel. It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of course, as the critics have not hesitated to do. That perspective, for instance, how good it is: almost as good as Verrocchio's work,--and those dancing _angiolini_; yes, Verrocchio might have thought of them himself. But the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as though the whole scene had been arranged for the sake of her portrait; and, indeed it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra de' Benci, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. In the left corner you may see Marsilio Ficino dressed as a priest; Gentile de' Becchi turns to him, while Cristoforo Landini in a red cloak stands by, and Angelo Poliziano lifts up his hands. Does one ever regret, I wonder, after looking at these realistic fifteenth-century works, that the frescoes of Orcagna--for he painted the whole choir--were destroyed in a storm, it is said, in 1358. Fragments of his work, however, we are told, remained for more than a hundred years, till, indeed, Ghirlandajo was employed to replace them. We find his work, however, sadly damaged it is true, and really his perhaps only in outline, in the Strozzi chapel here, the lofty chapel of north transept, where he has painted on the wall facing the entrance the Last Judgment, while to the left you may see Paradise, to the right the Inferno. The pupil of Giotto and of Andrea Pisano, Orcagna is the most important artist of his time, the one vital link in the chain that unites Masolino with Giotto. He was a universal artist, practising as an architect and goldsmith no less than as a painter. In the Last Judgment in this chapel he seems not only to have absorbed the whole art of his time, but to have advanced it; for to the grandeur and force of his work he added a certain visionary loveliness that most surely already foretells Beato Angelico. If in the Paradise and the Inferno we are less moved by the greatness of his achievement, we remind ourselves how terribly they have suffered from damp, from neglect, from the restorer. In the altar-piece itself we have perhaps the only "intact painting" of his remaining to us, and splendid as it is in colour and form, it lacks something of the rhythm of the frescoes that like some slow and solemn chant fill the chapel with their sincere unforgetable music. As you pass, beckoned by a friar, into the half-ruined cloisters below S. Maria Novella, you come on your right into a little alley of tombs, behind which, on the wall, you may find two bits of fresco by Giotto, the Meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna at the Golden Gate, and the Birth of the Virgin. On your left you pass into the Chiostro Verde, where Paolo Uccello has painted scenes from the Old Testament in a sort of green monotone, for once without enthusiasm. Above you and around you rises the old convent and the great tower; there, in the far corner, perhaps a friar plays with a little cat, here a pigeon flutters under the arches about the little ruined space of grass, the meagre grass of the south, where now and then the shadow of a white cloud passes over the city, whither who knows. For a moment in that silent place you wonder why you have come, you feel half inclined to go back into the church, when shyly the friar comes towards you, and, leading you round the cloister, enters the Cappellina degli Spagnuoli. How much has been written in praise of the frescoes in the Spanish chapel of S. Maria Novella, where Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, used to hear Mass; yet how disappointing they are. In so simple a building, some great artist, you might think, in listening to Ruskin, had really expressed himself, his thoughts about Faith and the triumph of the Church. But the work which we find there is the work of mediocrities, poor craftsmen too, the pupils and imitators of the Sienese and Florentine schools of their time, having nothing in common with the excellent work of Taddeo Gaddi, the beautiful work of Simone Martini of Siena. These figures, so pretty and so ineffectual, which have been labelled here the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, there the Triumph of the Church, have no existence for us as painting; they have passed into literature, and in the pages of Ruskin have found a new beauty that for the first time has given them some semblance of life. FOOTNOTES: [102] Mysterious no longer. For in the autumn of 1907 the chapel was destroyed by fools and the Madonna--just an old panel picture after all--set up in the cold daylight (1908). [103] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i, 187. XVII. FLORENCE S. CROCE The Piazza di S. Croce, in which stands the great Franciscan church of Florence, is still almost as it was in the sixteenth century when the Palazzo del Borgo on the southern side was painted in fresco by the facile brush of Passignano; but whatever charm so old and storied a place might have had for us, for here Giuliano de' Medici fought in a tournament under the eyes of La Bella Simonetta, and here, too, the Giuoco del Calcio was played, it is altogether spoiled and ruined, not only by the dishonouring statue of Dante, which for some unexplained reason has here found a resting-place, but by the crude and staring façade of the church itself, a pretentious work of modern Italy, which lends to what was of old the gayest Piazza in the city, the very aspect of a cemetery. Not long before the end of the thirteenth century, a little shrine of St. Anthony stood where now we may see the great Church of S. Croce, in the midst of the marshes, as it is said, that waste land which in the Middle Age seems to have surrounded every city in Italy. It belonged, as did the land round about, to a certain family called Altafronte, who appear to have presented it to the friars of the neighbouring convent of Franciscans just outside Porta S. Gallo. St. Francis being dead, and the strictness of his rule relaxed, the first stone of the great Church of S. Croce was laid on Holy Cross Day, 1297. Arnolfo, the architect of the Duomo, was the first builder here, till later Giotto was appointed. The church itself is in the form of a tau cross, the eastern end on both sides of the choir consisting of twelve chapels scarcely less deep than the choir and tiny apse, itself a chapel of St. Anthony. The wide and spacious nave, with two aisles, could doubtless hold half the city, as perhaps it did when Fra Francesco of Montepulciano preached here in the early years of the sixteenth century just after the death of Savonarola. And indeed the very real beauty of the church consists in just that splendour of space and light which so few seem to have cared for, but which seems to me certainly in Italy the most precious thing in the world. And then S. Croce is really the Pantheon, as it were, of the city; the golden twilight of S. Maria Novella even would seem too gloomy for the resting-place of heroes. Already before the sixteenth century it had been here that Florence had set up the banners of those she delighted to honour. And though Cosimo I destroyed them when he let Vasari so unfortunately have his way with the church, some remembrance of the glory that of old hung about her seems to have lingered, for here Michelangelo was buried, under a heavy monument by Vasari, and close by Vittorio Alfieri lies in a tomb carved by Canova at the request of the Duchess of Albany. Not far away you come upon the grave of Niccolò Machiavelli, the statesman, and beside it the monument erected to his memory in the eighteenth century. And then here too you find the beautiful tomb of Leonardo Bruni, one of the first great scholars of the modern world, and secretary to the Republic, who died in 1443. It is the masterpiece of Bernardo Rossellino (1409-1464), achieved at the end of the early Renaissance, and forming the very style of such things for those sculptors who came after him. It is true that the lunette of Madonna is a little feeble and without life, though some have given it falsely to Verrocchio, and the two angioloni bearing the arms have little force; but the tomb itself is a thing done once and for all, and the figure of the dead poet is certainly the masterpiece of a man who was perhaps the first sculptor in marble of his time. If we compare it for a moment with the lovely Annunciation of Donatello (1386-1466) on the other side of the gateway, where for once that strong and fearless artist seems to have contented himself with beauty, we shall understand better the achievement of Rossellino; and though it were difficult to imagine a more lovely thing than that Annunciation set there by the Cavalcanti, with the winged wreath of Victory beneath it to commemorate their part in the victory of Florence over Pisa in 1406, as a piece of architecture Rossellino's work is as much better than this earlier design of Donatello's as in every other respect his work falls below it. Covered with all sorts of lovely ornament, the frame supports an elaborate and splendid cornice on which six children stand, three grouped on either side, playing with garlands. And within the frame, as though seen through some magic doorway, Madonna, about to leave her prayers, has been stopped by the message of the angel, who has not yet fallen on his knees. It is as though one had come upon the very scene itself suddenly at sunset on some summer day. If the tomb of Leonardo Bruni is the masterpiece of Bernardo Rossellino, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, the humanist, Bruni's successor as secretary to the Republic, placed in the north aisle exactly opposite, is no less the masterpiece of another of Donatello's friends, Desiderio da Settignano (1428-1464). Standing as they were to do, face to face across the church, no doubt Desiderio was instructed to follow as closely as might be the general design of Rossellino. On a rich bed Marsuppini lies, a figure full of sweetness and strength, while under is the carved tomb, supported by the feet of lions, and borne by a winged shell. On either side two children bear his arms, figures so naïve and lovely that, as it seems to me, Luca della Robbia in his happiest moment might have thought of them almost in despair. Above, under a splendid canopy of flowers and fruit, in a tondo, severe and simple, is Madonna with Our Lord, and on either side an angel bows half-smiling, half-weeping, while without stand two youths of tender age, slender and full of grace, but strong enough to bear the great garland of fruits with lovely and splendid gestures of confidence and expectancy. Before the tomb in the pavement is a plaque of marble also from the hand of Desiderio, and here Gregorio Marsuppini, Carlo's father, lies: other similar works of his you may find here and there in the church. Scattered through the two aisles and the nave are many modern monuments and tablets to famous Italians, Dante who lies at Ravenna, Galileo, Alberti, Mazzini, Rossini, and the rest; they have but little interest. It is not only in the aisles, however, that we find the work of the Florentine sculptors. Galileo Galilei, an ancestor of the great astronomer, is buried in the nave at the west end, under a carved tombstone enthusiastically praised by Ruskin. And then on the first pillar on the right we find the work of Bernardo Rossellino's youngest brother Antonio (1427-1478), who, under the influence of Desiderio da Settignano, has carved there a relief of Madonna and Child, surrounded by a garland of cherubim lovely and fair. Antonio Rossellino's work is scattered all over Tuscany, in Prato, in Empoli, in Pistoja, and we shall find it even in such far-away places as Naples and Forli. His masterpiece, however, the beautiful tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal, is in the Church of S. Miniato al Monte, of which I shall speak later. It was another and younger pupil of Desiderio's, Benedetto da Maiano (1442-1497), who made the beautiful pulpit to the order of that Pietro Mellini, whose bust, also from his hand, is now in the Bargello. It is the most beautiful pulpit in all Italy, splendid alike in its decoration and its construction. It seems doubtful whether the pulpit itself is not earlier than the five reliefs of the life of St. Francis which surround it--The Confirmation of the Order by the Pope, the Test by Fire before the Sultan, the Stigmata, the Death of St. Francis, and the Persecution of the Order. These were carved in 1474, and for the life and charm which they possess are perhaps Benedetto's finest work. In the beautiful niches below he has set some delightful statuettes, representing Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude, and Justice. Passing now into the south transept, we come to the great chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, with its spoiled frescoes of the stories of St. John Baptist, St. John the Divine, St. Nicholas and St. Anthony; while here, too, is the tomb of the Duchess of Albany, who was the wife of the Young Pretender, and who loved Alfieri the poet, whose monument, as we have seen, she caused Canova to make. The south transept ends in the Baroncelli Chapel, which "between the close of December 1332 and the first days of August 1338," Taddeo Gaddi painted in fresco.[104] Giotto died in 1337, and Taddeo, who had served under him, seems to have been content to carry on his practice without bringing any originality of his own to the work. What Taddeo could assimilate of Giotto's manner he most patiently reproduced, so that his work, never anything but a sort of imitation, threatens to overwhelm in its own mediocrity much of the achievement of his master. The beautiful and sincere work of Giotto in him degenerates into a mannerism, a mannerism that the people of his own day seem to have appreciated quite as much as the living work of Giotto himself. Taddeo, trained by his master in the Giottesque manner, became its most patient champion, and practising an art that was in his hands little better than a craft, he finds himself understood, and when Giotto is not available very naturally takes his place. Here in S. Croce, a church in which Giotto himself had worked, we find Taddeo's work everywhere: over the door of the Sacristy he painted Christ and the Doctors; in the Cappella di S. Andrea, the stories of St. Peter and St. Andrew; in the Bellaci chapel, too, and above all in this the chapel of the Baroncelli family. But when Giotto, being long dead, other and newer painters arose, Taddeo's work, out of fashion at last, suffered the oblivion of whitewash, sharing this fate with some of the best work in Italy: so that there is to-day but little left of it in S. Croce save these frescoes, where he has painted, not without a certain vigour and almost a gift for composition, the story of the Blessed Virgin. Close by, without the chapel, is a very beautiful monument the school of Niccolò Pisano; passing this and entering the great door of the Sacristy, we come into a corridor and thence into the Sacristy itself, which Vasari covered with whitewash. Built in the fourteenth century, it is divided into two parts by a grating of exquisitely wrought iron of the same period. Behind this grating is the Rinuccini chapel, painted in fresco by a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, Giovanni da Milano, in whose work we may discern, in spite of the rigid convention of his master, something sincere, a lightness and grace and even perhaps a certain reliance on Nature, which the authority of Giotto had spoiled for Taddeo himself. It is the stories of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Mary Magdalen that he has set himself to tell, with an infinite detail that a little confuses his really fine and sincere work. Repainted though they be, something of their original beauty may still be found there, their simplicity and homely realism. At the end of the corridor is the chapel which Cosimo de' Medici, Pater Patriae caused Michelozzo to build for his delight. Over the altar is one of the loveliest works of the della Robbia school, a Madonna and Child, between St. Anthony of Padua, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John Baptist, St. Laurence, St. Louis of Toulouse, and St. Francis; while on the wall is a later work of the same school, after a work by Verrocchio, where Madonna holds her Son in her arms; and opposite is another work by a Tuscan sculptor, a Tabernacle, by Mino da Fiesole (1431-1484), who certainly has loved the gracious marbles of Desiderio da Settignano. The picture of the Coronation of the Virgin beside this Tabernacle, once the altar-piece of the Baroncelli Chapel, a genuine work of Giotto's, as it is thought, is tender in feeling and magnificent in arrangement and composition. Full of a grave earnestness and full of ardent life,--mark the eagerness of those clouds of Saints,--it is worthy of the painter of the tribune of the Lower Church at Assisi. Returning now to the church itself, we begin our examination of those twelve chapels, which with the choir form the eastern end of S. Croce. The first three chapels have little interest, but the two nearest the choir, Cappella Peruzzi and Cappella Bardi, were both painted in fresco by Giotto, his work there being among the best of his paintings. The Peruzzi Chapel was built by the powerful family that name, who had already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of St. John Baptist and St. John the Divine. In 1714, the new Vasari tells us,[105] and, indeed, we may read as much on the floor of the chapel itself, Bartolommeo di Simone Peruzzi caused the place to be restored, and it was then, as we may suppose, that the work of Giotto was covered with whitewash. It was in 1841 that the Dance of Herodias was discovered, and the whitewash not very carefully, perhaps, removed, and by 1863 the rest of the frescoes here were brought to light. In their original brightness they formed probably "the finest series of frescoes which Giotto ever produced"; but the hand of the restorer has spoiled them utterly, so that only the shadow of their former beauty remains, amid much that is hard or unpleasing. On the left we see the story of St. John Baptist; above, the Angel announces to Zacharias the birth of a son; and, with I know not what mastery of his art, Giotto tells us of it with a simplicity and perfection beyond praise. If we consider the work merely as a composition, it is difficult to imagine anything more lovely; and then how beautiful and full of life is the angel who has entered so softly into the Holy of Holies, not altogether without dismay to the high priest, who, busy swinging his censer before the altar, has suddenly looked up and seen a vision. Below, we see the Birth of St. John Baptist, where Elizabeth is a little troubled, it may be, about her dumb husband, to whom the child has been brought. An old man with an eager and noble gesture seems to argue with Zacharias, holding the child the while by the shoulder, and Zacharias writes the name on his knee. Below this again is the Dance of Herodias, the first of these frescoes to be uncovered and ruined in the process. But even yet, in the perfect grouping of the figures, the splendour of the viol player, the frightened gaze of the servants, we may still see the very hand of Giotto. But it is in the frescoes on the right wall that Giotto is seen at his highest: it is the story of St. John the Divine; above he dreams on Patmos, below he raises Drusiana at the Gate of Ephesus, and is himself received into heaven. Damaged though they be, there is nothing in all Italian art more fundamental, more simple, or more living than these frescoes. It is true that the Dream of St. John is almost ruined, and what we see to-day is very far from being what Giotto painted, but in the Raising of Drusiana and in the Ascension of St. John we find a grandeur and force that are absent from painting till Giotto's time, and for very many years after his death. The restorer has done his best to obliterate all trace of Giotto's achievement, especially in the fresco of Drusiana, but in spite of him we may see here Giotto's very work, the essence of it at any rate, its intention and the variety of his powers of expressing himself. The chapel nearest the choir was built by Ridolfo de' Bardi, it is said, sometime after 1310,[106] and it was for him that Giotto painted there the story of St. Francis; while on the ceiling he has painted the three Franciscan virtues, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, and in the fourth space has set St. Francis in Glory, as he had done in a different manner at Assisi. After the enthusiastic pages of Ruskin,[107] to describe these frescoes, beautiful still, in spite of their universal restoration, would be superfluous. It will be enough to refer the reader to his pages, and to add the subjects of the series. Above, on the left wall, St. Francis renounces his father, while below he appears to the brethren at Arles, and under this we see his death. On the left above, Pope Honorius gives him his Rule, and below, he challenges the pagan priests to the test of the fire before the Sultan, and appears to Gregory IX, who had thought to deny that he received the Stigmata. Beside the window Giotto has painted four great Franciscans, St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare, St. Louis of France, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. All these frescoes in the Bardi Chapel are much more damaged by restoration than those in Cappella Peruzzi. In the choir, behind the high altar, Agnolo Gaddi, one of the two sons of Taddeo, has painted, with a charm and brightness of colour that hide the poor design, the story of the Holy Cross. It was at the request of Jacopo degli Alberti that Agnolo painted these eight frescoes, where the angel gives a branch of the Tree of Life from Eden to Seth, whom Adam, feeling his death at hand, had sent on this errand. Seth returns, however, only to find Adam dead, and the branch is planted on his grave. Then in the course of ages that branch grows to a tree, is hewn down, and, as the Queen of Sheba passes on her way to King Solomon, the carpenters are striving to cut this wood for the Temple, but they reject it and throw it into the Pool of Bethesda. And this rejected tree was at length hewn into the Cross of Our Lord. Then comes Queen Helena to seek that blessed wood, and finding the three crosses, and in ignorance which was that of Our Lord, commands that the dead body of a youth which is borne by shall be touched with them all, one after another. So they find the True Cross, for at its touch the dead rises from his bier. Then they bear the cross before the Queen: till presently it is lost to Chosroes, King of Persia, who took Jerusalem "in the year of Our Lord six hundred and fifteen," and bare away with him that part of the Holy Cross which St. Helena had left there. So he made a tower of gold and of silver, crusted with precious stones, and set the Cross of Our Lord before him, and commanded that he should be called God. Then Heraclius, the Emperor, went out against him by the river of Danube, and they fought the one with the other upon the bridge, and agreed together that the victor should be prince of the whole Empire: and God gave the victory to Heraclius, who bore the Cross into Jerusalem. So Agnolo Gaddi has painted the story in the choir of S. Croce. In the chapels on the north side of the choir there is but little of interest. And then one is a little weary of frescoes. If we return to the south aisle and pass through the door between the Annunciation of Donatello and the tomb of Leonardo Bruni, we shall come into the beautiful cloisters of Arnolfo, where there will be sunshine and the soft sky. Here, too, is the beautiful Cappellone that Brunellesco built for the Pazzi family, whose arms decorate the porch. Under a strange and beautiful dome, which, as Burckhardt reminds us, Giuliano da Sangallo imitated in Madonna delle Carceri at Prato, Brunellesco has built a chapel in the form almost of a Greek cross. And without, before it, he has set, under a vaulted roof, a portico borne by columns, interrupted by a round arch. It is the earliest example, perhaps, of the new Renaissance architecture. Very fair and surprising it is with its frieze of angels' heads by Donatello, helped perhaps by Desiderio da Settignano. Within, too, you come upon Donatello's work again, in the Four Evangelists in the spandrels, and below them the Twelve Apostles. Walking in the cloisters, you find the great ancient refectory of the convent itself, which has here been turned into a museum, while another part of it is used as a barracks; and indeed the finest cloister of the Early Renaissance, one of the loveliest works of Brunellesco, has also been given up to the army of Italy. The museum contains much that, in its removal here or dilapidation, has lost nearly all its interest. The beautiful fresco of St. Eustace, said to be the work of Andrea Castagno, is yet full of delight, while here and there amid these old crucifixes, tabernacles, and frescoes, by pupils of Giotto long forgotten, something will charm you by its sincerity or naïve beauty, so that you will forget, if only for a moment, the destruction that has befallen all around you; the convent that once housed S. Bernardino of Siena, now noisy with conscripts, the library housed in another convent, Dominican once, that like this has become a museum and public monument of vandalism and rapacity. FOOTNOTES: [104] Cf. Crowe and Gavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 124. [105] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 77. [106] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 81. [107] _Mornings in Florence_, by John Ruskin. XVIII. FLORENCE S. LORENZO Something of the eager, restless desire for beauty, for antique beauty, so characteristic of the fifteenth century--for the security and strength of just that, may be found in S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito, those two churches which we owe to the genius of Brunellesco, and in them we seem to find the negation, as it were, of the puritan spirit, of all that the Convent of S. Marco had come to mean: as though when, one day at dawn, the peasants ploughing in some little valley in the hills, had come upon the gleaming white body of the witch Venus, in burning the precious statue which had lain so long in the earth, they had not been able altogether to destroy the spirit, free at last, which in the cool twilight had escaped them to wander about the city. It is the spirit of Rome you come upon in S. Lorenzo, the old Rome of the Basilicas, that were but half Christian after all, and, still in ruin, seem to remember the Gods. A church has stood where S. Lorenzo stands certainly since pagan times, for at the beginning of the fourth century, one Giuliana, who had three daughters but no son, vowed a church to St. Laurence if he would grant her a son; and a son being born to her she founded S. Lorenzo, and called the child Laurence for praise. St. Ambrose is said to have come from Milan to consecrate the place, bringing with him certain relics, the bones of S. Agnola and S. Vitale, victims of the pagans which he had found in Bologna; while for sixty years, till 490, the body of S. Zenobio lay here. In those days, and until the last years of the eleventh century, S. Lorenzo stood without the walls, and when Cosimo came back to Florence, the old church, which had fallen into decay, was already being rebuilt, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, with others, having given the work to Brunellesco. Filippo Brunellesco, however, had got no farther, it seems, than the Sagrestia Vecchia when he died, while Antonio Manetti, who succeeded him as architect, changed somewhat his design. The church was consecrated at last in 1461, some three years before the death of Cosimo, who lies before the high altar. It is really as the resting-place of the Medici that we have come to consider S. Lorenzo, for here lie not only Giovanni di Bicci and Piccarda, the parents of Cosimo Pater Patriae, and Cosimo himself, but Piero and Giovanni his sons, while in the new sacristy lie Giuliano and Lorenzo il Magnifico his grandsons, and their namesakes Giuliano Duc de Nemours and Lorenzo Due d'Urbino; and in the Cappella dei Principi, built in 1604 by Matteo Nigetti, lie the Grand Dukes from Cosimo I to Cosimo III, the rulers of Florence and Tuscany from the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The church itself is in the form of a Latin cross, consisting of nave and aisles and transepts, the nave being covered with a flat coffered ceiling, though the aisles are vaulted. Along the aisles are square chapels, scarcely more than recesses, and above the great doors is a chapel supported by pillars, a design of Michelangelo, who was to have built the façade for Leo X, but, after infinite thought and work in the marble mountains, the Pope bade him abandon it in 1519. For many years a single pillar, the only one that ever came to Florence of all those hewn for the church in Pietrasanta, lay forlorn in the Piazza. Those chapels that flank the aisles have to-day but little interest for us, here and there a picture or a piece of sculpture, but nothing that will keep us for more than a moment from the chapels of the transept, the work of Desiderio da Settignano, of Verrocchio, and, above all, of Donatello. It is all unaware to the tomb of this the greatest sculptor, and in many ways the most typical artist, Florence ever produced, that we come, when, standing in front of the high altar, we read the inscription on that simple slab of stone which marks the tomb of Cosimo Vecchio; for Donatello lies in the same vault with his great patron. A modern monument in the Martelli Chapel, where the beautiful Annunciation by Lippo Lippi hangs under a crucifix by Cellini, in the left transept, commemorates him; but he needs no such reminder here, for about us is his beautiful and unforgetable work: not perhaps the two ambones, which he only began on his return from Padua when he was sixty-seven years old, and which were finished by his pupils Bertoldo and Bellano, but the work in the old sacristy built in 1421 by Brunellesco. How rough is the modelling in the ambone reliefs, as though really, as Bandinelli has said, the sight of the old sculptor was failing; and yet, in spite of age and the intervention of his pupils, how his genius asserts itself in a certain rhythm and design in these tragic panels, where, under a frieze of dancing _putti_,--loves or angels I know not,--of bulls and horses, he has carved the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, and again before Caiaphas, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, in the southern ambone; while in the northern we find the Descent into Hades, where John Baptist welcomes our Lord, who draws forth Adam, and, as Dante records, Abel too, and Noah, Moses, Abraham, and David, Isaac and Jacob and his sons, not without Rachel, _E altri molti, e fecegli beati_, the Resurrection and the Ascension, the Maries at the Tomb, the Pentecost. It is another and very different work you come upon in the Cantoria, which, lovely though it be, seems to be rather for a sermon than for singing, so cold it is, and yet full enough of his perfect feeling for construction, for architecture. It has a rhythm of its own, but it is the rhythm of prose, not of poetry. The old sacristy, which is full of him--for indeed all the decorative work seems to be his--is one of the first buildings of the Renaissance, the beautiful work of Filippo Brunelleschi. Covered by a polygonal dome, the altar itself stands under another dome, low and small; and everywhere Donatello has added beauty to beauty, the two friends for once combining to produce a masterpiece, though not, as it is said, without certain differences between them. "Donatello undertook to decorate the sacristy of S. Lorenzo in stucco for Cosimo de' Medici," Vasari tells us. "In the angles of the ceiling he executed four medallions, the ornaments of which were partly painted in perspective, partly stories of the Evangelists[108] in basso-relievo. In the same place he made two doors of bronze in basso-relievo of most exquisite workmanship: on these doors he represented the apostles, martyrs, and confessors, and above these are two shallow niches, in one of which are S. Lorenzo and S. Stefano; in the other, S. Cosimo and S. Damiano." The sacristy, according to Vasari, was the first work proceeded with in the church. Cosimo took so much pleasure in it that he was almost always himself present, and such was his eagerness, that while Brunellesco built the sacristy, he made Donatello prepare the ornaments in stucco, "with the stone decorations of the small doors and the doors of bronze." And it is in these bronze doors that, as it seems to me, you have Donato at his best, full of energy and life, yet never allowing himself for a moment to forget that he was a sculptor, that his material was bronze and had many and various beauties of its own, which it was his business to express. There are two doors, one on each side of the altar, and these doors are made in two parts, and each part is divided into five panels. With a loyalty and apprehension of the fitness of things really beyond praise, Donatello has here tried to do nothing that was outside the realm of sculpture. It was not for him to make the Gates of Paradise, but the gates of a sacristy in S. Lorenzo. His work is in direct descent from the work of the earliest Italian sculptors, a legitimate and very beautiful development of their work within the confines of an art which was certainly sufficient to itself. Consider, then, the naturalism of that figure who opens his book on his knees so suddenly and with such energy; or again, the exquisite reluctance of him who in the topmost panel turns away from the preaching of the apostle. Certainly here you have work that is simple, sincere, full of life and energy, and is beautiful just because it is perfectly fitting and without affectation.[109] In one of the two small rooms which are on each side of the sacristy, having the altar between them, Brunellesco by Cosimo's orders made a well. Here, Vasari tells us later, Donato placed a marble lavatory, on which Andrea Verrocchio also worked; but the Lavabo we find there to-day seems very doubtfully Donatello's. In the centre of the sacristy itself, Vasari tells us, Cosimo caused the tomb of his father Giovanni to be made beneath a broad slab of marble, supported by four columns; and in the same place he made a sepulchre for his family, wherein he separated the tombs of the men from those of the women. But again this work too seems, in spite of Vasari, to belong rather uncertainly to Donatello. It is very rare to find a detached tomb in Italy, and rarer still to find it under a table, where it is very difficult to see it properly, and the care and beauty that have been spent upon it might seem to be wasted. It is perhaps rather Buggiano's hand than Donato's we see even in so beautiful a thing as this, which Donatello may well have designed. The beautiful bust of S. Lorenzo over the doorway is, however, the authentic work of Donato himself. Full of eagerness, S. Lorenzo looks up as though to answer some request, and to grant it. The splendid porphyry sarcophagus set in bronze before a bronze screen of great beauty, by Verocchio, is certainly one of the finest things here. Every leaf and curl of the foliage seem instinct with some splendid life, seem to tremble almost with the fierceness of their vitality. There lie Giovanni and Piero de' Medici, the uncle and father of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Close by you may see a relief of Cosimo Vecchio, their father. The cloisters, where Lorenzo walked often enough, are beautiful, and then from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il Magnifico, but scattered and partly destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494. Savonarola, however, was a cleverer demagogue than our Oliver (it is well to remember that he was a Dominican), for he persuaded the Signoria to let him have such of the MSS. as he could find for the library of S. Marco. The honour of such a person is perhaps not worth discussing, but we may remind ourselves what Cosimo had done for S. Marco, and how he had built the library there. In 1508 the friars turned these stolen goods into money, selling them back to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who was soon to be Leo X, who carried them to Rome. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Clement VII, presented Leo's collection to the Laurentian Library, which he had bidden Michelangelo to rebuild. This was interrupted by the unfortunate business of 1527, and it was not till Cosimo I came that the library was finished. Perhaps the most precious thing here is the Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1135, and seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406. Amalfi prized these above everything she possessed, Pisa was ready to defend them with her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess herself of them--for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of Rome. Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world? They were, as it were, the symbol of Latin civilisation in the midst of German barbarism. Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804. Here is Petrarch's Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best of all, the only ancient codex in the world of what remains to us of Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that we may best recognise the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the advancement of learning, the civilisation of the world. What, then, was that Savonarola whom all have conspired to praise, whose windy prophecies, whose blasphemous cursings men count as so precious? In truth in his fashion he was but a tyrant too--a tyrant, and a poor one, and therefore the more dangerous, the more disastrous. To the Medici we owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence--the loveliest work of Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of Michelangelo, and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless collection of books and MSS. as this. Is, then, the work of Marsilio Ficino nothing, the labours of a thousand forgotten humanists? What do we owe to Savonarola? He burnt the pictures which to his sensual mind suggested its own obscenity; he stole the MSS., and no doubt would have destroyed them too, to write instead his own rhetorical and extraordinary denunciations of what he did not understand. Who can deny that when he proposed to give freedom to Florence he was dreaming of a new despotism, the despotism, if not of himself, of that Jesus whom he believed had inspired him, and on whom he turned in his rage? That he was brave we know, but so was Cataline; that he believed in himself we like to believe, and so did Arius of Alexandria; that he carried the people with him is certain, and so did they who crucified Jesus; but that he was a turbulent fellow, a puritan, a vandal, a boaster, a wind-bag, a discredited prophet, and a superstitious failure, we also know, as he doubtless did at last, when the wild beast he had roused had him by the throat, and burnt him in the fire he had invoked. His political ideas were beneath contempt; they were insincere, as he proved, and they were merely an excuse for riot. He bade, or is said to have bidden, Lorenzo restore her liberty to Florence. When, then, had Florence possessed this liberty, of which all these English writers who sentimentalise over this unique and unfortunate Ferrarese traitor speak with so much feeling and awe? Florence had never possessed political liberty of any sort whatever; she was ruled by the great families, by the guilds, by an oligarchy, by a despot. She was never free till she lost herself in Italy in 1860. Socially she was freer under the Medici than she was before or has been since.[110] In the production of unique personalities a sort of social freedom is necessary, and Florence under the earlier Medici might seem to have produced more of such men than any other city or state in the history of the world, saving Athens in the time of the despot Pericles. The happiest period in the history of Athens was that in which he was master, even as the greatest and most fortunate years in the history of the Florentine state were those in which Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo ruled in Florence. And when at last Lorenzo died, the Pope saw very clearly that on that day had passed away "the peace of Italy." It is to the grave of this great and unique man you come when leaving the cloisters of S. Lorenzo, and passing round the church into Piazza Madonna, you enter the Cappella Medicea, and, ascending the stairs on the left, find again on the left the new sacristy, built in 1519 by Michelangelo. Lorenzo lies with his murdered brother Giuliano, who fell under the daggers of the Pazzi on that Easter morning in the Duomo, between the two splendid and terrible tombs of his successors, under an unfinished monument facing the altar; a beautiful Madonna and Child, an unfinished work by Michelangelo, and the two Medici Saints, S. Damian by Raffaello da Montelupo, and S. Cosmas by Montorsoli. It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave that draws us to-day to the Sagrestia Nuova, but the monument carved by Michelangelo for two lesser and later Medici: Giuliano, Duc de Nemours, who died in 1516, and Lorenzo, Duc d'Urbino, who died in 1519. When Lorenzo il Magnifico died at Careggi in April 1492, he left seven children: Giovanni, who became Leo X; Piero, who succeeded him and went into exile; Giuliano, who returned; Lucrezia, who married Giacomo Salviati, and was grandmother of Cosimo I; Contessina, who married Piero Ridolfi; Maddalena, who married Francesco Cibo; and Maria, whom Michelangelo is said to have loved. Lorenzo's successor, Piero, did not long retain the power his father had left him; he was vain and impetuous, and, trying to rule without the Signoria, placed Pisa and Livorno in the hands of Charles VIII of France, who was on his carnival way to Naples. Savonarola chased him out, and sacked the treasures of his house. He died in exile. It was his brother Giuliano who returned, Savonarola being executed in 1512. Giuliano was a better ruler than his brother, but he behaved like a despot till his brother Giovanni became Pope, when he resigned the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo, the son of Piero, and while he became Gonfaloniere of Rome and Archbishop, Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino and father of Catherine de' Medici of France. It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo has immortalised with an everlasting gesture of sorrow and contempt. On the right is the tomb of Giuliano, and over it he sits for ever as a general of the Church; on the left is Lorenzo's dust, coffered in imperishable marble, over which he sits plotting for ever. The statues that Michelangelo has carved there have been called Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; but indeed these names, as I have said, are far too definite for them: they are just a gesture of despair, of despair of a world which has come to nothing. They are in no real sense of the word political, but rather an expression, half realised after all, of some immense sadness, some terrible regret, which has fallen upon the soul of one who had believed in righteousness and freedom, and had found himself deceived. It is not the house of Medici that there sees its own image of despair, but rather Florence, which had been content that such things should be. Some obscure and secret sorrow has for a moment overwhelmed the soul of the great poet in thinking of Florence, of the world, of the hearts of men, and as though trying to explain to himself his own melancholy and indignation, he has carved these statues, to which men have given the names of the most tremendous and the most sweet of natural things--Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; and even as in the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo has thought only of Life,--of the Creation of Man, of the Judgment of the World, which is really the Resurrection,--so here he has thought only of Death, of the death of the body, of the soul, and of the wistful life of the disembodied spirit that wanders disconsolate, who knows where?--that sleeps uneasily, who knows how long? FOOTNOTES: [108] Not of the Evangelists, but of St. John: the medallions are the Four Evangelists. [109] See _Donatello_, by Lord Balcarres, p. 136 (London, 1904), where a long comparison is made of the doors of Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia. [110] Even politically, too, as Guicciardini tells us. XIX. FLORENCE CHURCHES NORTH OF ARNO: OGNISSANTI--S. TRINITÀ--SS. APOSTOLI--S. STEFANO--BADIA--S. PIERO--S. AMBROGIO--S. MARIA MADDALENA DE' PAZZI--ANNUNZIATA--OSPEDALE DEGLI INNOCENTI--LO SCALZO--S. APOLLONIA--S. ONOFRIO--S. SALVI To pass through Florence for the most part by the old ways, from church to church, is too often like visiting forgotten shrines in a museum. Something seems to have been lost in these quiet places; it is but rarely after all that they retain anything of the simplicity which once made them holy. To their undoing, they have been found in possession of some beautiful thing which may be shown for money, and so some of them have ceased altogether to exist as churches or chapels or convents; you find yourself walking through them as through a gallery, and if you should so far forget yourself as to uncover your head, some official will eagerly nudge you and say, "It is not necessary for the signore to bare his head: here is no longer a church, but a public monument." A public monument! But indeed, as we know, the Italian "public" is no longer capable of building anything that is beautiful. If it is a bridge they need, it is not such a one as the Trinità that will be built, but some hideous structure of iron, as in Pisa, Venice, and Rome. If it is a monument they wish to carve, they will destroy numberless infinitely precious things, and express themselves as vulgarly as the Germans could do, as in the monument of Vittorio Emmanuele at Rome, which is founded on the ruined palaces of nobles, the convents of the poor. If it is a Piazza they must make, they are no longer capable of building such place as Piazza Signoria, but prefer a hideous and disgusting clearing, such as Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele in Florence. How often have I sat at the little cafe there on the far side of the square, wondering why the house of Savoy should have brought this vandalism from Switzerland. Nor is this strange monarchy content with broken promises and stolen dowries; in its grasping barbarism it must rename the most famous and splendid ways of Italy after itself: thus the Corso of Rome has become Corso Umberto Primo, and we live in daily expectation that Piazza Signoria of Florence will become Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele II. If that has not yet befallen, it is surely an oversight; the Government has been so busy renaming Roman places--the Villa Borghese, for instance--that Florence has so far nearly escaped. Not altogether, however: beyond the Carraja bridge, just before the Pescaia in the Piazza Manin, is the suppressed convent (now a barracks) of the Humiliati, that democratic brotherhood which improved the manufacture of wool almost throughout Italy. What has the Venetian Jew, Daniel Manin, to do with them? Yet he is remembered by means of a bad statue, while the Humiliati and the Franciscans are forgotten: yet for sure they did more for Florence than he. But no doubt it would be difficult to remind oneself tactfully of those one has robbed, and a Venetian Jew looks more in place before a desecrated convent than S. Francis would do. Like the rest of Italy, Florence seems always to forget that she had a history before 1860; yet here at least she should have remembered one of her old heroes, for in the convent garden Giano della Bella, who fought at Campaldino, and was anti-clerical too and hateful to the Pope, the hero of the Ordinances of Justice, used to walk with his friends. _Perisca innanzi la città_, say I, _che tante opere rie si sostengano_. By this let even Venetian Jews, to say nothing of Switzer princes, know how they are like to be remembered when their little day is over. [Illustration: OGNISSANTI] It was in 1256 that the Humiliati founded here in Borgo Ognissanti the Church of S. Caterina, and carved their arms, a woolpack fastened with ropes, over the door. Originally founded by certain Lombard exiles in Northern Germany, the Humiliati were at first at any rate a lay brotherhood, which had learned in exile the craft of weaving wool. Such wool as was to be had in Tuscany, a land of olives and vines, almost without pasture, was poor enough, and it seems to have been only after the advent of the Humiliati that the great Florentine industry began to assert itself, foreign wools being brought in a raw state to the city and sold, dressed and woven into cloth, in all the cities of Europe and the East. This brotherhood, however, in 1140 formed itself into a Religious Order under a Bull of Innocent III, and though from that time the brethren seem no longer to have worked at their craft themselves, they directed the work of laymen whom they enrolled and employed, busying themselves for the most part with new inventions and the management of what soon became an immense business. Their fame was spread all over Italy, for, as Villari tells us,[111] "wherever a house of their Order was established, the wool-weaving craft immediately made advance," so that in 1239 the Commune of Florence invited them to establish a house near the city, as they did in S. Donato a Torri, which was given them by the Signoria. By 1250 we read that the Guild Masters were already grumbling at their distance from the city, so that they removed to S. Lucia sul Prato, under promise of exemption from all taxes; and in 1256 they founded a church and convent in Borgo Ognissanti. The Church of S. Lucia sul Prato still stands, but the Humiliati were robbed of it in 1547 by Cosimo I, who, strangely enough, had taken the old convent of S. Donato a Torri from the friars who had acquired it, in order to build a fortification, and now wished to give them the Church of S. Lucia sul Prato. It is said that the friars began to build their convent, but four years later abandoned the work, removing to S. Jacopo on the other side Arno. However this may be, the Franciscans certainly succeeded the Humiliati in their convent in Borgo Ognissanti about this time, and in 1627 they rebuilt S. Caterina, renaming it S. Salvadore. To-day there is but little worth seeing in this seventeenth-century church,--a St. Augustine by Botticelli, a St. Jerome and two large frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandajo,--but in the old refectory of the convent, which has now become a barracks, is Domenico Ghirlandajo's fresco of the Last Supper. Passing from Ognissanti down the Borgo to Piazza Ponte alla Carraja, you come to the great palace built by Michelozzo for the Ricasoli family: it is now the Hotel New York. Thence you turn into Via di Parione behind the palace, where at No. 7 you pass the Palazzo Corsini, coming at last into Via Tornabuoni, where at the corner is the Church of S. Trinità facing the Piazza. This beautiful and very ancient church stands on the site of an oratory of S. Maria dello Spasimo, destroyed, as it is said, in the tenth century. It was built by the monks of Vallombrosa, and was therefore in the hands of Benedictines. Here, in the Cappella Sassetti, Domenico Ghirlandajo has painted the Life of S. Francis; but it is not with his commonplace treatment, often irrelevant enough, of a subject which Giotto had already used with genius, that we are concerned, but perhaps with the fresco above the altar, and certainly with the marvellous portraits of Sassetti and Nera Cosi his wife, on either side. Here in this portrait for once Ghirlandajo seems to have escaped from the limitations of his cleverness, and to have really expressed himself so that his talent becomes something more than talent, is full of life and charm, and only just fails to convince us of his genius. Many another delightful or surprising thing may be found in the old church, which has more than once suffered from restoration. In a chapel in the right aisle Lorenzo Monaco has painted the Annunciation, while, close by, you may see a beautiful altar by Benedetto da Rovezzano. Over the high altar is the crucifix which bowed to S. Giovanni Gualberto, who forbore to slay his brother's murderer; but the chief treasure of the church is the tomb in the left transept of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole, by Luca della Robbia. It was in the year 1450 that Luca finished his most perfect work in marble--begun and finished, as it is said, within the year--the tomb of Bishop Federighi. And here, as one might almost expect, remembering his happy expressive art in many a terra-cotta up and down in Italy, he has thought of death almost with cheerfulness, not as oblivion, but as just sleep after labour. Amid a profusion of natural things--fruits, garlands, grapes--the old man lies half turned towards us, at rest at last. Behind him Luca has carved a Pietà, and beneath two angels unfold the name of the dead man. The tomb was removed hither from S. Francesco di Paolo. Passing now under the Column of the Trinità across the Piazza between the two palaces, Bartolini Salimbeni and Buondelmonte on the left, and Palazzo Spini on the right, you come into Borgo Santi Apostoli, where, facing the Piazzetta del Limbo, is the little church de' Santi Apostoli, which, if we may believe the inscription on the façade, was founded by Charlemagne and consecrated by Turpin before Roland and Oliver. However that may be, it is, with the exception of the Baptistery, the oldest church on this side Arno, and already existed outside the first walls of the city. Within, the church is beautiful, and indeed Brunellesco is reported by Vasari to have taken it as a model for S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito. In the sacristy lies the stone which Mad Pazzi brought from Jerusalem, and from which the Easter fire is still struck in the Duomo; while in the chapel to the left of the high altar is a beautiful Tabernacle by the della Robbia, and a monument to Otto Altoviti by Benedetto da Rovezzano. The Altoviti are buried here, and their palace, which Benedetto built for them, is just without to the south. This Borgo SS. Apostoli and the Via Lambertesca which continues it are indeed streets of old palaces and towers. Here the Buondelmonti lived, and the Torre de' Girolami, where S. Zanobi is said to have dwelt, still stands, while Via Lambertesca is full of remembrance of the lesser guilds. Borgo SS. Apostoli passes into Via Lambertesca at the corner of Por S. Maria, where of old the great gate of St. Mary stood in the first walls, and the Amidei had their towers. It must have been just here the Statue of Mars was set, under the shadow of which Buondelmonte was murdered so brutally; and thus, as Bandello tells us, following Villani, began the Guelph and Ghibelline factions in Florence. Just out of Via Lambertesca, on the left, is the little Church of S. Stefano and S. Cecilia--S. Cecilia only since the end of the eighteenth century, when that church was destroyed in Piazza Signoria; but S. Stefano, _ad portam ferram_, since the thirteenth century at any rate. This church seems to have been confused by many with the little Santo Stefano, still, I think, a parish church, though now incorporated with the abbey buildings, of the Badia. You pass out of Via Lambertesca by Via de' Lanzi, coming thus into Piazza Signoria; then, passing Palazzo Uguccione, you take Via Condotta to the right, and thus come into Via del Proconsolo at the Abbey gate. Here in this quiet Benedictine house one seems really to be back in an older world, to have left the noise and confusion of to-day far behind, and in order and in quiet to have found again the beautiful things that are from of old. The Badia, dedicated to S. Maria Assunta, was founded in 978 by Countess Willa, the mother of Ugo of Tuscany,[112] and was rebuilt in 1285 by Arnolfo di Cambio. The present building is, however, almost entirely a work of the seventeenth century, though the beautiful tower was built in 1328. Here still, however, in spite of rebuilding, you may see the tomb of the Great Marquis by Mino da Fiesole. "It was erected," says Mr. Carmichael, "at the expense of the monks, not of the Signoria.... Ugo died in 1006, on the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, December 21, and every year on that date a solemn requiem for the repose of his soul is celebrated in the Abbey Church. His helmet and breast-plate are always laid upon the catafalque. In times past--down to 1859, I think--a young Florentine used on this occasion to deliver a panegyric on the Great Prince. I have heard ... that the mass is no longer celebrated. That is not so; but since the city has ceased to care about it, it takes place quietly at seven in the morning, instead of with some pomp at eleven. Then again, it is said that the monks have allowed the panegyric to drop. That too is not the case; it was not they but the Florentines who were pledged to this pious office, and it is the laity alone who have allowed it to fall into desuetude." [Illustration: VIA POR. S. MARIA] Even here we cannot, however, escape destruction and forgetfulness. The monastery has been turned into communal schools and police courts; the abbot has become a parish priest, and his abbey has been taken from him; there are but four monks left. But in the steadfast, unforgetful eyes of that Church which has already outlived a thousand dynasties, and beside whom every Government in the world is but a thing of yesterday, the Abbot of S. Maria is abbot still, and no parish priest at all. It is not, however, such things as this that will astonish the English or American stranger, whose pathetic faith in "progress" is the one touching thing about him. He has come here not to think of deprived Benedictines, or to stand by the tomb of Ugo, of whom he never heard, but to see the masterpiece of Filippino Lippi, the Madonna and St. Bernard, with which a thousand photographs have already made him familiar. Painted in 1480, when Filippino was still, as we may suppose, under the influence of Botticelli, it was given by Piero del Pugliese to a church outside Porta Romana, and was removed here in 1529 during the siege. Passing down Via della Vigna Vecchia, you come at last to the little Church of S. Simone, which the monks of the Badia built about 1202, in their vineyards then, and just within the second walls. At the beginning of the fourteenth century it became a parish church, but was only taken from them at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Within, there is an early picture of Madonna, which comes from the Church of S. Piero Maggiore, now destroyed. You may reach the Piazza di S. Piero (for it still bears that name) if you turn into Via di Mercatino. Here the bishops of Florence were of old welcomed to the city and installed in the See. Thither came all the clergy of the diocese to take part in a strange and beautiful ceremony. Attached to the church was a Benedictine convent, whose abbess seems to have represented the diocese of Florence. There in S. Piero the Archbishop came to wed her, and thus became the guardian of the city. The church is destroyed now, and, as we have seen, all the monks and nuns have departed; the Government has stolen their dowries and thrust them into the streets. Well might the child, passing S. Felice, cry before this came to pass, O bella Libertà! But S. Piero was memorable for other reasons too beside this mystic marriage. There lay Luca della Robbia, Lorenzo di Credi, Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo: where is their dust to-day? As we look at their work in the galleries and churches, who cares what has happened to them, or whether such graves as theirs are rifled or no? Yet not one of them but has done more for Italy than Vittorio Emmanuele; not one of them, O Italia Nuova, but is to-day filling your pockets with gold, while he is nothing in the Pantheon; yet their graves are rifled and forgotten, and him you have placed on the Capitol. It is to another Benedictine convent you come down Via Pietrapiana, past Borgo Allegri, whence the Florentines say they bore Cimabue's Madonna in triumph to S. Maria Novella. It is a pity, truly, that it is not his picture that is in the Rucellai Chapel to-day, and that the name of the Borgo does not come from that rejoicing, but from the Allegri family, who here had their towers. Yet here Cimabue lived, and Ghiberti and Antonio Rossellino. Who knows what beauty has here passed by? The Benedictine Church and Convent at end of Via Pietrapiana is dedicated to S. Ambrogio. It was the first convent of nuns built in Florence, and dates certainly from the eleventh century. Like the rest, it has been suppressed, and indeed destroyed. To-day it is nothing, having suffered restoration, beside the other violations. Within, Verrocchio was buried, and in the Cappella del Miracolo, where in the thirteenth century a priest found the chalice stained with Christ's blood, is the beautiful altar by Mino da Fiesole. The church is full of old frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and such, and is worth a visit, if only for the work of Mino and the S. Sebastian of Leonardo del Tasso. It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. This too is now a barracks and a school. It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the thirteenth century. Perugino was painting there in 1496. More than a hundred years later, Pope Urban VIII, who had some nieces in the Carmelite Convent on the other side Arno, persuaded the monks to exchange their home for the Carmine. S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, who was born Lucrezia, had died in 1607, and later been canonised, so that when the nuns moved here they renamed the place after her. The body of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, however, no longer lies in this desecrated convent, for the little nuns have carried it away to their new home in Piazza Savonarola. There in that place, always so full of children, certain Florentine ladies have nobly built a little church and quiet house, where those who but for them might have been in the street may still innocently pray to God. There, in 1496, as I have said, Perugino finished the fresco of the Crucifixion that he had begun some years before in the chapter-house of the old S. Maria Maddalena. In almost perfect preservation still, this fresco on the wall of that quiet and empty room is perhaps the most perfect expression of the art of Perugino--those dreams of the country and of certain ideal people he has seen there; Jesus and His disciples, Madonna and Mary Magdalen, sweet, smiling, and tearful ghosts passing in the sunshine, less real than the hills, all perhaps that the world was able to bear by way of remembrance of those it had worshipped once, but was beginning to forget. And here at last, in this fresco, the landscape has really become of more importance than the people, who breathe there so languidly. The Crucifixion has found something of the expressiveness, the unction of a Christian hymn, something of the quiet beauty of the Mass that was composed to remind us of it; already it has passed away from reality, is indeed merely a memory in which the artist has seen something less and something more than the truth. Divided into three compartments, we see through the beautiful round arches of some magic casement, as it were, the valleys and hills of Italy, the delicate trees, the rivers and the sky of a country that is holy, which man has taken particularly to himself. And then, as though summoned back from forgetfulness by the humanism of that landscape where the toil and endeavour of mankind is so visible in the little city far away, the cultured garden of the world, a dream of the Crucifixion comes to us, a vision of all that man has suffered for man, summed up, as it were, naturally enough by that supreme sacrifice of love; and we see not an agonised Christ or the brutality of the priests and the soldiers, but Jesus, who loved us, hanging on the Cross, with Mary Magdalen kneeling at his feet, and on the one side Madonna and St. Bernard, and on the other St. John and St. Benedict. And though, in a sort of symbolism, Perugino has placed above the Cross the sun and the moon eclipsed, the whole world is full of the serene and perfect light of late afternoon, and presently we know that vision of the Crucifixion will fade away, and there will be left to us only that which we really know, and have heard and seen, the valleys and the hills, the earth from which we are sprung. There are but six figures in the whole picture, and it is just this spaciousness, perhaps, earth and sky counting for so much, that makes this work so delightful. For it is not from the figures at all that we receive the profoundly religious impression that this picture makes upon all who look unhurriedly upon it; but from the earth and sky, where in the infinite clear space God dwells, no longer hanging upon a Cross tortured by men who have unthinkably made so terrible a mistake, but joyful in His heaven, moving in every living thing He has made; visible only in the invisible wind that passes over the streams suddenly at evening, or subtly makes musical the trees at dawn, walking as of old in His garden, where one day maybe we shall meet Him face to face. Turning down Via di Pinti to the left, and then to the right along Via Alfani, we pass another desecrated monastery in S. Maria degli Angioli, once a famous house of the monks of Camaldoli. This monastery has suffered many violations, and is scarcely worth a visit, perhaps, unless it be to see the fresco of Andrea del Castagno in the cloister, and to remind ourselves that here, in the fifteenth century, Don Ambrogio Traversari used to lecture in the humanities, a cynical remembrance enough to-day. If we take the second street to the right, Via de' Servi, we shall come at once into the beautiful Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. Before us is the desecrated convent of the Servites, now turned into a school, and the Church of SS. Annunziata itself, now the most fashionable church in Florence. On the left and right are the beautiful arcades of Brunellesco, decorated by the della Robbia; the building on the left is now used for private houses, that on the right is the Ospedale degli Innocenti. The equestrian statue was made by Giovanni da Bologna, and represents Ferdinando I. The Order of Servites, whose church and convent are before us, was originally founded by seven Florentines of the Laudesi, that Compagnia di S. Michele in Orto which built Madonna a shrine by the art of Orcagna in Or S. Michele, as we have seen. "I Servi di Maria" they were called, and, determined to quit a worldly life, they retired to a little house where now S. Croce stands; and later, finding that too near the city, went over the hills of Fiesole beyond Pratolino, founding a hermitage on Monte Senario. And I, who have heard their bells from afar at sunset, why should I be sorry that they are no longer in the city. Well, on Monte Senario, be sure, they lived hardly enough on the charity of Florence, so that at last they built a little rest-house just without the city, where SS. Annunziata stands to-day. But in those days Florence was full of splendour and life; it had no fear of the Orders, and even loved them, giving alms. Presently the Servi di Maria were able to build not a rest-house only, but a church and a convent, and then they who served Madonna were not forgotten by her, for did she not give them miraculously a picture of her Annunciation, so beautiful and full of grace that all the city flocked to see it? Thus it used to be. To-day, as I have said, SS. Annunziata is the fashionable church of Florence. The ladies go in to hear Mass; the gentlemen lounge in the cloister and await them. It is not quite our way in England, but then the sun is not so kind to us. It is true that on any spring morning you may see the cloister filled with laughing lilies to be laid at Madonna's feet; but who knows if she be not fled away with her Servi to Monte Senario? Certainly those bells were passing glad and very sweet, and they were ringing, too, the Angelus. However that may be, a committee, we are told, of which Queen Margherita is patron here, "renders a programme of sacred music, chiefly Masses from the ancient masters, admirably executed." It is comforting to our English notions to know that "The subscribers have the right to a private seat in the choir, and the best society of Florence is to be met there." And then, here are frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Andrea del Sarto, under glass too, a Nativity of Christ by Alessio Baldovinetti, not under glass, which seems unfair; and what if they be the finest work of Andrea, since you cannot see them. Within, the church is spoiled and very ugly. On the left is the shrine of Madonna, carved by Michelozzo, to the order of Piero de' Medici, decorated with all the spoils of the Grand Dukes. Ah no, be sure Madonna is fled away! Passing out of the north transept, you come into the cloisters. Here is, I think, Andrea's best work, the Madonna del Sacco, and the tomb of a French knight slain at Campaldino. Passing out of the SS. Annunziata into S. Maria degli Innocenti, we come to a beautiful picture by Domenico Ghirlandajo in the great altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1488. Though scarcely so lovely as the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Accademia, perhaps spoiled a little by over cleaning and restoration, it is one of the most simple and serene pictures in Florence. The predella to this picture is in the Ospedale; it represents the Marriage of the Virgin, the Presentation in the Temple, the Baptism and Entombment of Our Lord. There, too, is a replica of the Madonna of Lippo Lippi in the Uffizi. The Ospedale degli Innocenti was founded in 1421 by the Republic, urged thereto by that Leonardo Bruni who is buried in S. Croce in the tomb by Rossellino. It appears to have been already open in 1450, and was apparently under the government of the Guild of Silk, for their arms are just by the door. It is said to have been the first of its kind in Europe; originally meant for the reception of illegitimate children--Leonardo da Vinci, for instance--it is to-day ready to receive any poor little soul who has come unwanted into the world; it cares for more than a thousand of such every year. Passing out of Piazza degli SS. Annunziata through Via di Sapienza into Piazza di S. Marco, we pass the desecrated convent of the Dominicans, where Savonarola, Fra Antonino, and Fra Angelico lived, now a museum on the right; and passing to the right into Via Cavour, come at No. 69 to the Chiostro dello Scalzo. This is a cloister belonging to the Brotherhood of St. John, which was suppressed in the eighteenth century. The Brotherhood of St. John seems to have come about in this way. When Frate Elias, who succeeded S. Francesco as Minister of the Franciscan Order, began to rule after his own fashion, the Order was divided into two parts, consisting of those who followed the Rule and those who did not. The first were called Observants, the second Conventuals. The Osservanti, or Observants, remained poor, and observed all the fasts; perhaps their greatest, certainly their most widely known Vicar-General was S. Bernardino of Siena. In France the Osservanti were known as the Recollects, and the reform there having been introduced by John de la Puebla, a Spaniard, about 1484, these brethren were known as the Brotherhood of John, or Discalced Friars. In Italy they were called Riformati. All this confusion is now at an end, for Leo XIII, in the Constitution "Felicitate quadam," in 1897 joined all the Observants into one family, giving them again the most ancient and beautiful of their names, the Friars Minor. Here, where these little poor men begged or prayed, Andrea del Sarto was appointed to paint in grisaille scenes from the life of John the Baptist. They have been much injured by damp, and in fact are not altogether Andrea's work. Returning down Via Cavour, if we turn into Via Ventisette Aprile we come to two more desecrated convents,--that of S. Caterina, now the Commando Militare, and facing it, S. Appolonia, now a magazine for military stores. Here, in the refectory of the latter convent, where Michelangelo is said to have had a niece, and for this cause to have built the nuns a door, is the fresco of the Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno; while on the walls are some portraits, brought here from the Bargello, of Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Acciaiuoli, and others. In another suppressed convent, S. Onofrio in Via Faenza, not far away (turn to the left down Via di S. Reparata, and then to the right into Via Guelfa), is another Last Supper, supposed to be the work of a pupil of Perugino,--Morelli says Giannicolo Manni, who painted the miracle picture of Madonna in the Duomo of Perugia. Another picture of the Last Supper--this by Andrea del Sarto--may be found in another desecrated monastery, founded in 1048 by the Vallombrosans, the second monastery of the congregation, S. Salvi, just without the Barriera towards Settignano. It was in front of this monastery that Corso Donati was killed in 1307. He was buried by the monks in the church, and four years later his body was borne away to Florence by his family. This monastery is now turned into houses, and the refectory with the Andrea del Sarto is become a national monument. Like many another desecrated church, convent, or religious house, the Government, as at S. Marco, Chiostro dello Scalzo, and S. Onofrio, charges you twenty-five centesimi to see their stolen goods. FOOTNOTES: [111] Villari, _History of Florence_, London, 1905: p. 318. [112] The best account of this abbey I ever read in English is contained in a book full of similar good things, good English, and good pictures, called _The Old Road through France to Florence_, written by H.W. Nevinson and Montgomery Carmichael, and illustrated by Hallam Murray (Murray, London, 1904). XX. FLORENCE OLTR'ARNO The Sesto Oltr'arno, the Quartiere di S. Spirito as it was called later, was never really part of the city proper, but rather a suburb surrounded, as Florence itself was, by wall and river. The home for the most part of the poor, though by no means without the towers and palaces of the nobles, it seems always to have lent itself readily enough to the hatching of any plot against the Government of the day. Here in 1343 the nobles made their last stand, here the signal was given for the Ciompi rising, and here Luca Pitti built his palace to outdo the Medici. If you cross Arno by the beautiful bridge of S. Trinità, the first street to your left will be Borgo S. Jacopo, the first palace that of the Frescobaldi, whom the Duke of Athens brought into Florence after their exile. This palace, as well as the Church of S. Jacopo close by, where Giano della Bella's death was plotted, were given in 1529 to the Franciscans of S. Salvatore, whose convent had suffered in the siege. S. Jacopo, which still retains a fine romanesque arcade, was originally a foundation of the eleventh century. It seems to have been entirely rebuilt for the friars and the palace turned into a convent in 1580, and again to have suffered restoration in 1790. Close by is a group of old towers, still picturesque and splendid. Turning thence back into Via Maggio, and passing along Via S. Spirito and Via S. Frediano, you come at last on the left into Piazza del Carmine, before the great church of that name. The church of the Carmine and the monastery now suppressed of the Carmelites across Arno were originally built in 1268, with the help of the great families whose homes were in this part of the city,--the Soderini, the Nerli, the Serragli; it remained unfinished for more than two centuries, and in 1771 it was unhappily almost wholly destroyed by fire, only the sacristy and the Brancacci Chapel escaping. Famous now because there Fra Lippo Lippi lived, and there Masolino and Masaccio painted, it is in itself one of the most meretricious and worthless buildings of the eighteenth century, full of every sort of flamboyant ornament and insincere, uncalled-for decoration; and yet, in spite of every vulgarity, how spacious it is, as though even in that evil hour the Latin genius could not wholly forget its delight in space and light. It is then really only the Brancacci Chapel in the south transept that has any interest for us, since there, better than anywhere else, we may see the work of two of the greatest masters of the first years of the Quattrocento. [Illustration: PONTE VECCHIO] Masolino, according to Mr. Berenson, was born in 1384, and died after 1423, while his pupil Masaccio was born in 1401, and died, one of the youngest of Florentine painters, in 1428. Here in the Brancacci Chapel it might seem difficult to decide what may be the work of Masolino and what of his pupil, and indeed Crowe and Cavalcaselle have denied that Masolino worked here at all. Later criticism, however, interested in work that marks a revolution in Tuscan painting, has made it plain that certain frescoes here are undoubtedly from his hand, and Mr. Berenson gives him certainly the Fall of Adam, the Raising of Tabitha, and the Miracle at the Golden Gate, above on the right, as well as the Preaching of St. Peter, above to the left on the altar wall. Masaccio's work is more numerous, consisting of the Expulsion from the Temple and the Payment of the Tribute, above on the right, part of the fresco below the last; St. Peter Baptizing, above to the left on the altar wall, as well as the two frescoes, St. Peter and St. John healing the Sick, and St. Peter and St. John giving Alms, below on either side of the altar. The rest of the frescoes, the St. Paul visiting St. Peter in Prison, below on the left, part of the fresco next to it, the Liberation of St. Peter opposite, and the St. Peter and St. Paul before Nero, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, below on the right, are the work of Filippino Lippi. Masolino da Panicale of Valdelsa was, according to Vasari, a pupil of Lorenzo Ghiberti, and had been in his younger days a very good goldsmith. He was the best among those who helped Ghiberti in the labours of the doors of S. Giovanni, but when about nineteen years of age he seems to have devoted himself to painting, forsaking the art of the goldsmith, and placing himself under Gherardo della Starnina, the first master of his day. He is said to have gone to Rome, and some works of his in S. Clemente would seem to prove this story; but finding his health suffer from the air of the Eternal City, he returned to Florence, and began to paint here in the Church of S. Maria del Carmine, the figure of S. Piero beside the "Chapel of the Crucifixion," which was destroyed in the fire of 1771. This S. Piero, Vasari tells us, was greatly commended by the painters of the time, and brought Masolino the commission for painting the Chapel of the Brancacci family in the same church. Among the rest mentioned by Vasari, he speaks of the Four Evangelists on the roof here, which have now been ruined by over-painting and restoration. A man of an admirable genius, his study and fatigues, Vasari tells us, so weakened him that he was always ailing, till he died at the age of thirty-seven. Yet in looking on his work to-day, beside that of Masaccio, one thinks less, I fancy, of his "study and fatigues," of his structure and technique, than of the admirable beauty of his work. Consider then those splendid young men in the Raising of Tabitha, who pass by almost unconcerned, though one has turned his head to see; the sheer loveliness of Eve and Adam, really for the first time born again here naked and unashamed; or the easy and beautiful gesture of the angel, who bids them begone out of the gate of Paradise. In Masaccio's work you will find a more splendid style, the real majesty of the creator, a strangely sure generalisation and expression; but in Masolino's work there still lingers something of the mere beauty of Gentile da Fabriano, the particular personal loveliness of things which you may know he has touched with a caress or seen always with joy. Masaccio was born at Castello S. Giovanni, on the way to Arezzo. He was the son of a notary, Ser Giovanni di Simone Guidi, called della Scheggia, and his first labours in art, Vasari tells us, were begun at the time when Masolino was working at this chapel in the Carmine. He had evidently been much impressed by the work of Donato, and, indeed, something of the realism of sculpture has passed into his work, in the St. Peter Baptizing, for instance, where he who stands by the side of the pool, awaiting his turn, has much of the reality of a statue. And then with a magical sincerity Masaccio has understood the mere discomfort of such a delay in the cool air, and a shiver seems about to pass over that body, which is as real to us as any figure in the work of Michelangelo. Or again, in the fresco of the Tribute Money, how real and full of energy these people are,--the young man with his back to us, who has been interrupted; Jesus Himself, who has just interposed; Peter, who is protesting. How full of a real majesty is this composition, admirably composed, too, and original even in that. Here, it might seem, we have the end of merely decorative painting, the beginning of realism, of the effect of reality, and it is therefore with surprise we see so facile a master as Filippino Lippi set to finish work of such elemental and tremendous genius. How pretty his work seems beside these realities. Coming out into the Piazza again, and turning to the left down Via S. Frediano, you come almost at once, on the right, to the Church of S. Frediano in Castello. You may enter it from Lung' Arno, but it would scarcely be worth a visit, for it is a late seventeenth-century building, save that in the convent may still be found the cell of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi; for it was this convent that the Carmelite nuns exchanged with the Cistercians for the house in Via di Pinti, called to-day S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, where Perugino painted his beautiful fresco of the Crucifixion. Just across the way is the Mercato di S. Frediano and the suppressed monastery of the Camaldolese, now a school; and by this way you come to Porta S. Frediano, by which Charles VIII of France entered Florence and Rinaldo degli Albizzi left it. The whole of this quarter is given up to the poor and to the Madonna of the street corner, for here her children dwell, the outcasts and refuse of civilisation who work that we may live. It is always with reluctance, in spite of the children that I come by this way, so that if possible I always return by Lung' Arno, past Torrino di S. Rosa and the barracks of S. Friano and the grain store of Cosimo III, past the houses of the Soderini to Ponte alla Carraia, which fell on Mayday 1304, sending so many to that other world they had come out to see, and so past the house of Piero Capponi, the hero of 1494 who kept the Medici at bay, and threatened Charles VIII in the council; then turning down Via Coverelli one comes to Santo Spirito. It was the Augustinian Hermits who, coming to Florence about 1260, bought a vineyard close to where Via Maggio, an abbreviation of Via Maggiore, now is, from the Vellati family. Here they built a monastery and a church, and dedicated them to the Santo Spirito, so that when the city was divided into quartieri this Sestiere d'Oltrarno became Quartiere di S. Spirito. In 1397, as it is said, they determined to rebuild the place on a bigger scale, and to this end appointed Brunellesco their architect. The church was begun in 1433, and was burned down in 1471, during the Easter celebrations, which were particularly splendid in that year owing to the visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza. It was rebuilt, however, in the next twenty years from the designs of Brunellesco, and is to-day the most beautiful fifteenth-century church in Florence, full of light and sweetness, very spacious, too, and with a certain fortunate colour about it that gives it an air of cheerfulness and serenity beyond anything of the kind to be found in the Duomo or S. Lorenzo. And then, the Florentines have been content to leave it alone,--at any rate, so far as the unfinished façade is concerned. It is in the form of a Latin cross, and suggests even yet in some happy way the very genius of the Latin people in its temperance and delight in the sun and the day. The convent, it is true, has been desecrated, and is now a barracks; most of the altars have been robbed of their treasures; but the church itself remains to us a very precious possession from that fifteenth century, which in Italy certainly was so fortunate, so perfect a dawn of a day that was a little disappointing, and at evening so disastrous. Of the works of art remaining in the nave, that spacious nave where one could wander all day long, only the copy of Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's will, I think, detain us for more than a moment. What is left to us of that far-away flower-like beauty of fifteenth-century painting and sculpture will be found in the great transept, that makes of the church a cross of light, a temple of the sun. Here, amid many works of that time given to Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and others, in the south transept there is a Madonna with the family of de' Nerli by Filippino Lippi, and in the Capponi Chapel a fine portrait of Neri Capponi, while in the next chapel Perugino's Vision of St. Bernard, now in Berlin, used to stand. Here, too, is a Statue of St. Sebastian, nearly always invisible, said to be from the hand of Donatello; in the choir is a Madonna enthroned by Lorenzo di Credi. The sacristy is beautiful, built by Giovanni da Sangallo, and the cloisters now spoiled are the work of Ammanati. And then, here Niccolò Niccoli is buried, that great book-collector and humanist; while the barbarians are represented, if only by the passing figure of Martin Luther, not then forsworn, who is said to have preached here on his way to Rome. It is strange to think that these beautiful pillars have heard his rough eloquence, an eloquence that was so soon to destroy the spirit that had conceived them. Close by in Piazza S. Spirito is Palazzo Guadagni, built for Ranieri Dei at the end of the fifteenth century by Cronaca. It was not, however, till 1684 that the Guadagni family came into possession of it. Bernardo Guadagni, it will be remembered, was Gonfaloniere of Justice when Cosimo de' Medici was expelled the city in 1433. Passing this palace and turning to the right into Via Mazzetta, you pass at the corner the Church of S. Felice, which has been so often a refuge,--for at first the Sylvestrians had it, and held it till the fourteenth century, when it passed to the Camaldolese, from whom it passed again to a congregation of Dominican nuns and became a sort of refuge for women who had fled away from their husbands. Within, you may find a few old pictures, a Giottesque Crucifixion, and a Madonna and Saints, a fifteenth-century work. Then, turning into Via Romana, you come, past the gardens of S. Piero in Gattolino, to the Porta Romana, the great gate of the Via Romana, the way to Rome, and before you is the Hill of Gardens, and behind you is the garden of the Pitti Palace, Giardino di Boboli, and farther still, across Via Romana, the Giardino Torrigiani. The Boboli Gardens, with their alley ways of ilex, their cypresses and broken statues, their forgotten fountains, are full of sadness-- "Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur, L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune, Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur, Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune, "Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres, Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau, Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres." But the gardens of the Viale are in spring, at any rate, full of the joy of roses, banks, hedges, cascades of roses, armsful of them, drowsy in the heat and heavy with sweetness. "I'mi trovai, fanciulle, un bel mattino Di mezzo maggio, in un verde giardino." [Illustration: THE BOBOLI] And if it be not the very place of which Poliziano sang in the most beautiful verses he ever wrote, certainly to-day there is nothing more lovely in Florence in spring, and in autumn too, than this Hill of Gardens. In autumn too; for then the way that winds there about the hills is an alley of gold, strewn with the leaves of the plane-trees that the winds have scattered in countless riches under your feet; that whisper still in golden beauty over your head. There, as you walk in spring, while the city unfolds herself before you, a garden of roses in which a lily has towered, or in the autumn afternoons when she is caught in silver mist, a city of fragile and delicate beauty, that is soon lost in the twilight, you may see Florence as she remains in spite of every violation, Città dei Fiori, Firenze la Bella Bellissima, the sweet Princess of Italy. And, like the way of life, this road among the flowers ends in a graveyard, the graveyard of S. Miniato al Monte, under which nestles S. Salvatore, that little brown bird among the cypresses, over the grey olives. The story of S. Miniato makes one of the more quiet chapters of Villani. "Our city of Florence,"[113] he tells you, returning from I know not what delightful digression, "was ruled long time under the government and lordship of the Emperors of Rome, and oft-times the Emperors came to sojourn in Florence, when they were journeying into Lombardy and into Germany and into France to conquer provinces. And we find that Decius the Emperor, in the first year of his reign, which was in the year of Christ 270, was in Florence, the treasure-house and chancelry of the empire, sojourning there for his pleasure; and the said Decius cruelly persecuted the Christians wheresoever he could hear of them or find them out, and he heard tell how the blessed S. Miniato was living as a hermit, near to Florence, with his disciples and companions, in a wood which was called Arisbotto di Firenze, behind the place where now stands his church, above the city of Florence. This blessed Miniato was first-born son to the King of Armenia, and having left his kingdom for the faith of Christ, to do penance and to be far away from his kingdom, he went over-seas to gain pardon at Rome, and then betook himself to the said wood, which was in those days wild and solitary, forasmuch as the city of Florence did not extend, and was not settled beyond Arno but was all on this side,--save only there was one bridge across Arno, not, however, where the bridges now are. And it is said by many that it was the ancient bridge of the Fiesolans which led from Girone to Candegghi, and this was the ancient and direct road and way from Rome to Fiesole and to go into Lombardy and across the mountains. The said Emperor Decius caused the said blessed Miniato to be taken, as his story narrates. Great gifts and rewards were offered him, as to a king's son, to the end he should deny Christ; and he, constant and firm in the faith, would have none of his gifts, but endured divers martyrdoms. In the end the said Decius caused him to be beheaded, where now stands the Church of S. Candida alla Croce at Gorgo; and many faithful followers of Christ received martyrdom in this place. And when the head of the blessed Miniato had been cut off, by a miracle of Christ, with his hands he set it again upon his trunk, and on his feet passed over Arno, and went up the hill where now stands his church, where at that time there was a little oratory in the name of the blessed Peter the Apostle, where many bodies of holy martyrs were buried. And when S. Miniato was come to that place, he gave up his soul to Christ, and his body was there secretly buried by the Christians; the which place, by reason of the merits of the blessed S. Miniato, was devoutly venerated by the Florentines after they were become Christians, and a little church was built there in his honour. But the great and noble church of marble which is there now in our times, we find to have been built later by the zeal of the venerable Father Alibrando, Bishop and citizen of Florence in the year of Christ 1013, begun on the 26th day of April, by the commandment and authority of the Catholic and holy Emperor, Henry II of Bavaria, and of his wife, the holy Empress Gunegonda, which was reigning in those times; and they presented and endowed the said church with many rich possessions in Florence and in the country, for the good of their souls, and caused the said church to be repaired and rebuilt of marble, as it is now. And they caused the body of the blessed Miniato to be translated to the altar, which is beneath the vaulting of the said church, with much reverence and solemnity, by the said bishop and the clergy of Florence, with all the people, both men and women of the city of Florence; but afterwards the said church was completed by the commonwealth of Florence, and the stone steps were made which lead down by the hill; and the consuls of the Art of the Calimala were put in charge of the said work of S. Miniato, and were to protect it." Thus far Villani: to-day S. Miniato, the church, and the great palace built in 1234 by Andrea Mozzi, Bishop of Florence, come to us with memories, not of S. Miniato alone, that somewhat shadowy martyr of so long ago, but of S. Giovanni Gualberto also, of the Benedictines too, and of the Olivetans, of the siege of 1529, when Michelangelo fortified the place in defence of Florence, saving the tower from destruction, as it is said, by swathing it in mattresses; of Cosimo I, who from here held the city in leash. It is the most beautiful of the Tuscan-Romanesque churches left to us in Florence; built in 1013 in the form of a basilica, with a great nave and two aisles, the choir being raised high above the rest of the church on twenty-eight beautiful red ancient pillars, over a crypt where, under the altar, S. Miniato sleeps through the centuries. The fading frescoes of the aisles, the splendour and quiet of this great and beautiful church that has guarded Florence almost from the beginning, that has seen Buondelmonte die at the foot of the Statue of Mars, that has heard the voice of Dante and watched the flight of Corso Donati, have a peculiar fascination, almost ghostly in their strangeness, beyond anything else to be found in the city. And if for the most part the church is so ancient as to rival the Baptistery itself, the Renaissance has left there more than one beautiful thing. For between the two flights of steps that lead out of the nave into the choir, Michelozzo built in 1448, for Piero de' Medici a chapel to hold the crucifix, now in S. Trinità, which bowed to S. Giovanni Gualberto when he forgave his brother's murderer,[114] and in the left aisle is the chapel, built in 1461 by Antonio Rossellino, where the young Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal lies in one of the loveliest of all Tuscan tombs, and there Luca della Robbia has placed some of his most charming terracottas, and Alessio Baldovinetti has painted in fresco. In all Tuscany there is nothing more lovely than that tomb carved in 1467 by Antonio Rossellino for the body of the young Cardinal, but twenty-six years old when he died, "having lived in the flesh as though he were freed from it, an Angel rather than a man." Over the beautiful sarcophagus, on a bed beside which two boy angels wait, the young Cardinal sleeps, his delicate hands folded at rest at last. Above, two angels kneel, about to give him the crown of glory which fadeth not away, and Madonna, borne from heaven by the children, comes with her Son to welcome him home. There, in the most characteristic work of the fifteenth century, you find man still thinking about death, not as a trance out of which we shall awaken to some terrible remembrance, but as sleep, a sweet and fragile slumber, that has something of the drooping of the flowers about it, in a certain touching beauty and regret that is never bitter, but, like the ending of a song or the close of a fair day of spring, that rightly, though not without sadness, passes into silence, into night, in which shine only the eternal stars. It is strange that of all the difficult hills of Italy, it is the steep way hither from Porto S. Niccola, of old, in truth Via Crucis, that comes into Dante's mind when, in the Twelfth Purgatorio, he sees the ascent to the second cornice, where is purged the sin of envy. Something of the immense sadness of that terrible hill seems to linger to-day about the Monti alle Croci: it is truly a hill of the dead, over which hovers, pointing the way, some angel "la creatura bella Bianco vestita, e nella faccia quale Per tremolando mattutina Stella." The Convent of S. Salvatore--S. Francesco al Monte, as it was called of old--was built in 1480 after a design by Cronaca. Hesitating among the cypresses on the verge of the olives gardens, Michelangelo called it La bella Villanella, and truly in its warm simplicity and shy loveliness it is just that, a beautiful peasant girl among the vines in a garden of olives. But she has been stripped of her treasures, her trinkets of silver, her pretty gold chains, her gown of taffetas, her kerchief of silk (do you not remember the verses of Lorenzo), and all these you will find to-day, fading out of use in the Uffizi, where, in a palace that has become a museum, they are most out of place: thus they have robbed the peasants for the sake of the gold of the tourists, the sterile ejaculations of the critics. It is well not to return to the city by the tramway, which rushes through the trees of the Viale Michelangelo like I know not what hideous and shrieking beast of prey, but to wander down towards the Piazzale, and then, just before you came to it, on your left, by S. Salvatore, to go down to Porta S. Miniato, that "gap in the wall," and then to pass by the old wall itself up the hill to Porta di S. Giorgio among the olives between the towers under the Belvedere. It is the most beautiful of all the gates of the city, little, too, and still keeps its fresco of the fourteenth century. FOOTNOTES: [113] Villani, _Cronica_, l. i. c. 57, translated by R.E. Selfe. Constable, 1906. [114] See p. 363. XXI. FLORENCE THE BARGELLO If Arnolfo di Cambio is the architect not only of the Duomo but of the Palazzo Vecchio, and if Orcagna conceived the delicate beauty of the Loggia de' Lanzi, it is, if we may believe Vasari, partly to Arnolfo and partly to Agnolo Gaddi that we owe Bargello, that palace so like a fortress, at the corner of Via del Proconsolo and Via Ghibellina. Begun in the middle of the thirteenth century for the Capitano del Popolo, it later became the Palace of the Podestà, passing at last, under the Grand Dukes, to the Bargello, the Captain of Justice, who turned it barbarously enough into a prison, dividing the great rooms, as it is said, into cells for his prisoners. To-day it is become the National Museum, where all that could be gathered of the work of the Tuscan sculptors is housed and arranged in order. Often as I wander through those rooms or loiter in the shadow under the cloisters of the beautiful courtyard, perhaps the most lovely court in Tuscany, the remembrance of that old fierce life which desired beauty so passionately and was so eager for every superiority, comes to me, and I ask myself how the dream which that world pursued with so much simplicity and enthusiasm can have led us at last to the world of to-day, with its orderly disorder, its trams and telegraphs and steam-engines, its material comfort which, how strangely, we have mistaken for civilisation. In all London there is no palace so fine as this old prison, nor a square so beautiful as Piazza della Signoria. Instead of Palazzo Pitti (so much more splendid is our civilisation than theirs) we are content with Buckingham Palace, and instead of Palazzo Riccardi we have made the desolate cold ugliness of Devonshire House. Our craftsmen have become machine-minders, our people, on the verge of starvation, as we admit, without order, with restraint, without the discipline of service, having lost the desire of beauty or splendour, have become serfs because they are ignorant and fear to die. And it is we who have claimed half the world and thrust upon it an all but universal domination. In thus bringing mankind under our rule, it is ever of our civilisation that we boast, that immense barbarism which in its brutality and materialism first tried to destroy the Latin Church and then the Latin world, which alone could have saved us from ourselves. Before our forests were cleared here in Italy they carved statues, before our banks were founded here in Italy they made the images of the gods, and in those days there was happiness, and men for joy made beautiful things. And to-day, half dead with our own smoke, herded together like wild beasts, slaves of our own inventions, ah, blinded by our unthinkable folly, before the statues that they made, before the pictures that they painted, before the palaces that they built, in the churches where they still pray, stupefied by our own stupidity, brutalised by our own barbarism, we boast of a civilisation that has already made us ridiculous, and of which we shall surely die. Here in the Bargello, the ancient palace of the Podestà of a Latin city, let us be silent and forget our madness before the statues of the Gods, the images of the great and beautiful people of old. Tuscan sculpture, that of all the arts, save architecture, was the first to rise out of the destruction with which the barbarians of the North had overwhelmed the Latin world, came to its own really in the fifteenth century. After the beautiful convention of Byzantium had passed away, and Gruamone and Adeodatus had carved at Pistoja, Biduinus at S. Cassiano, Robertus at Lucca, Bonamicus and Bonannus at Pisa, and Guido da Como again at Pistoja, in the work of Niccolò Pisano at Pisa we come upon the first thought of the Renaissance, the reliefs of the pulpit in the Baptistery, in which the Middle Age seems to have passed over the work of Antiquity almost like a caress. In these panels of the pulpit at Pisa, where Madonna masquerades as Ariadne and the angel speaks with the gesture of Hermes, some sentiment of a new sweetness in the world seems to lurk amid all the naïve classicism, finding expression at last in such a thing, for instance, as the divine figure of Virtue in the pulpit of the Duomo of Siena, in which some have thought to find French influence, the work of the artists of Chartres and Rheims, visible enough, one might think, in the work of Niccolò's son Giovanni Pisano, whose ivory Statue of Madonna is to-day perhaps the greatest treasure of the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa. Niccolò Pisano was from Apulia. He may well have seen the beautiful fragments of Greek and Roman art scattered over the South before he came to Pisa, yet there may, too, be more truth in Vasari's tale than we are sometimes willing to admit, so that in the northern city beside Arno it may well have been with a sort of delight he came upon the art of the ancients, asleep in the beautiful Campo Santo of Pisa, and awakened it, yes, almost with a kiss. It is, however, in the work of his pupils Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo Fiorentino[115] that Tuscan sculpture begins to throw off the yoke of antiquity and to express itself. Fra Guglielmo, another pupil of Niccolò's, in his work at Perugia more nearly preserves the manner of his master, though always inferior to him in beauty and force: but in the work of Arnolfo which remains to us chiefly in the tomb of Cardinal de Braye in S. Domenico at Orvieto, and in the Tabernacle of S. Paolo Fuori at Rome, and more especially in the work of Giovanni Pisano in the pulpit for the Duomo of Pisa, now in the Museo, for instance, we may see the beginnings of that new Tuscan sculpture which in Andrea Pisano and Andrea Orcagna was to make the work of Nanni di Banco, of Ghiberti and Donatello possible, and through them to inspire the art of all the sculptors of the fifteenth century, that is to say of the Renaissance itself. Here in the Bargello it is chiefly that art of the fifteenth century that we see in all its beauty and realism: and though for the proper understanding of it some knowledge of its derivation might seem to be necessary, a knowledge not to be had in the Museo itself, it is really a new impulse in sculpture, different from, though maybe directed by, that older art which we come upon, and may watch there, in its dawn and in its splendour, till with Bandinelli and the pupils of Michelangelo it loses itself in a noisy grandiosity, a futile gesticulation. Realism, I said in speaking of the character of this fifteenth century work, and indeed it is just there that we come upon the very thought of the time. Sculpture is no longer content with mere beauty, it has divined that something is wanting, yes, even in the almost miraculous work of Niccolò Pisano himself; is it only an expression of character, of the passing moment, of movement that is lacking, or something comprising all these things--some indefinable radiance which is very life itself? It is this question which seems to have presented itself to the sculptors of the fifteenth century: and their work is their answer to it. For even as the philosophers and alchemists had sought so patiently for life, for the very essence of it, through all the years of the Middle Age, so art now set out in search of it, the greatest treasure of all, and seems to have found it at last, not hardly or hidden away in some precipitous place of stones, or among the tombs, but as a little child playing among the flowers. The great masters of the Middle Age had set themselves to express in stone or colour the delicate beauty of the soul, its terror, too, in the loneliness of the world, where only as it were by chance it might escape everlasting death. The subtle beauty and pathos of their art has escaped our eyes filled as they are with the marvellous work of Greece, unknown till our own time, the splendid and joyful work of the Renaissance, the mysterious and lovely work of our own day: it remains, nevertheless, a consummate and exquisite art in its dawn, in its noon, in its decadence, but it seeks to express something we have forgotten, and its secret is for the most part altogether hidden from us. It is from this art, as beautiful in its expression of itself as that of Greece, that Niccolò Pisano turns away, not to Nature, but to Antiquity. The movement which followed, producing while it continued almost all that is to-day gathered in the Bargello, together with much else that is still happily where it was born, is as it were an appeal from Antiquity to Life, to Nature. In the simplicity and impulse of this movement, so spontaneous, so touching, so full of a sense of beauty, which sometimes, though not often, becomes prettiness, the art of sculpture, awakened at last from the mysticism of the Middle Age, seems to look back with longing to the antique world, which it would fain claim as its brother, and after a little moment in the sun falls again into a sort of mysticism, a new kingdom of the spirit with Michelangelo, and of the senses merely with Sansovino and Giovanni da Bologna. Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway. In the twilight of this new dawn of the love of nature, perhaps the first figure we may descry is Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (1386-1402), who carved the second south door of the Duomo about 1398, where amid so many lovely natural things, the fig leaf and the oak leaf and the vine, you may see the lion and the ox, the dog and the snail, and man too; little fantastic children peeping out from the foliage, or blowing through musical reeds, or playing with a kitten, tiny naked creatures full of life and gladness. The second door north of the Duomo was carved by Niccolò di Piero d'Arezzo, who was still working more than forty years after Tedesco's death; but his best work, for we pass by his Statue of St. Mark in the chapel of the apex of the Duomo, is the little Annunciation over the niche of the St. Matthew of Or San Michele. In his work on the gate of the Duomo, however, he was assisted by his pupil Nanni di Banco, who, born in the fourteenth century, died in 1420; and in his work, and in that of Jacopo della Quercia, a Sienese, and a much greater man, we see the very dawn itself. Nanni di Banco, Vasari tells us, was a man who "inherited a competent patrimony, and one by no means of inferior condition." He goes on to say that Nanni was the pupil of Donatello, and though in any technical sense that seems to be untrue, it may well be that he sought Donato's advice whenever he could, for he seems to have practised his art for love of it, and may well have recognised the genius of Donatello, who probably worked beside him. He too worked at Or San Michele, where he carved the St. Philip, the delightful relief under the St. George of Donatello, the Four Saints, which seem to us so full of the remembrance of antiquity, and the S. Eligius with its beautiful drapery, a little stupid still, or sleepy is it, with the mystery of the Middle Age that after all was but just passing away. Something of this sleepiness seems also to have overtaken the St. Luke, that tired figure in the Duomo; and so it is with a real surprise that we come at last upon the best work of Nanni's life, "the first great living composition of the Renaissances," as Burckhardt says, the Madonna della Cintola over Niccolò d'Arezzo's door of the Duomo. Even with all the work of Ghiberti, of Donatello even, to choose from, that relief of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory, stretching out her hands among the cherubim, with a gesture so eager and so moving to St. Thomas, who kneels before her, remains one of the most beautiful works of that age, and one of the loveliest in all Tuscany. There follows Ciuffagni (1381-1457), that poor sculptor working in his old age amid much that was splendid and strange at Rimini, where Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) had painted in his youth. For all his genius, Ghiberti, that euphuist, did not influence those who came after him as Donatello did. His work, inspired by the past, by Andrea Pisano, for instance, is full of the lost beauty of the Middle Age, the old secrets of the Gothic manner. His solution of the problem before him, a problem of movement, of character, of life, is to make the relief as purely picturesque as possible; with him sculpture almost passes into painting, using not without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that Michelangelo praised, it seems to be complete in itself, to suggest nothing but the wonderful effect one may get by using the means proper to one art for expression in another, as though one were to write a book that should have the effect upon one of an opera, to allow the strange rhythm and sensuous beauty of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, to disengage itself from pages which were full of just musical words. Ghiberti's gift for composition, as well as his failure to understand, or at least to satisfy the more fundamental needs of his art, may be seen very happily in those two panels now in the Bargello, which he and Brunellesco made in the competition for the gates of the Baptistery. Looking on those two panels, where both artists have carved the Sacrifice of Isaac, you see Ghiberti at his best, the whole interest not divided, as it is in Brunellesco's panel, between the servants and the sacrifice, but concentrated altogether upon that scene which is about to become so tragical. Yet with what energy Brunellesco has conceived an act that in his hands seems really to have happened. How swiftly the angel has seized the hand of Abraham; how splendidly he stands, the old man who is about to kill his only son for the love of God. And then consider the beauty of Isaac, that naked body which in Brunellesco's hands is splendid with life, really living and noble, with a truth and loveliness far in advance of the art of his time. Ghiberti has felt none of the joy of a creation such as this; his Isaac is sleepy, a little surprised and altogether docile; he has not sprung up from his knees as in Brunellesco's panel, but looks up at the angel as though he had never understood that his very life was at stake. Yet it was in those gates which, Brunellesco, as it is said, retiring from the contest, the Opera then gave into his hands, that we shall find the best work of Ghiberti. There it is really the art of Andrea Pisano that he takes as a master, and with so fair an example before him produces as splendid a thing as he ever accomplished, simpler too, and it may be more sincere, though a little lacking in expressiveness and life. All the rest of his work seems to me to be lacking in conviction, to be frankly almost an experiment. His Statue of St. John Baptist, his St. Matthew and St. Stephen, too, at Or San Michele, different though they are, and with six years between each of them, seem alike in this, that they are, while splendid in energy, wanting in purpose, in intention: he never seems sufficiently sure of himself to convince us. His reliquary in bronze containing the ashes of S. Zenobius in the apse of the Duomo, is difficult to see, but it is in the manner of the gates of Paradise. It was not to the disciples of Ghiberti that the future belonged, but to those who have studied with Brunellesco. His crucifix in S. Maria Novella, his Evangelists in the Pazzi Chapel, are among the finest work of that age, full of life and the remembrance of it in their strength and beauty. It is, however, in the art of a contemporary that the new age came at last to its own--in the work of Donatello. In his youth he had worked for the Duomo and for Or San Michele side by side with Nanni di Banco, who may perhaps pass as his master. Of Donatello's life we know almost nothing If we seek to learn something of him, it must be in his works of which so many remain to us. We know, however, that he was the intimate friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates. Donatello was to visit Rome again in later life, but on this first journey that he made with Brunellesco for the purposes of study, he must have become acquainted with what was left of antiquity in the Eternal City. It was too soon for that enthusiasm for antiquity, which later overwhelmed Italian art so disastrously, to have arisen. When Donatello returned about a year later to Florence to work for the Opera del Duomo, it is not any classic influence we find in his statues, but rather the study of nature, an extraordinary desire to express not beauty, scarcely ever that, but character. His work is strong, and often splendid, full of energy, movement, and conviction, but save now and then, as in the S. Croce Annunciation, for instance, it is not content with just beauty. Of his work for the Duomo and the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; it will be sufficient here to note the splendour of the St. John the Divine in the apse of the Duomo, which, as Burckhardt has divined, already suggests the Moses of Michelangelo. The destruction of the unfinished façade has perhaps made it more difficult to identify the figures he carved there, but whether the Poggio of the Duomo, for instance, be Job or no, seems after all to matter very little, since that statue itself, be its subject what it may, remains to us. In his work at Or San Michele, in the St. Peter, in the St. Mark, so like the St. John the Divine and in the St. George, here in the Bargello, we see his progress, and there in that last figure we find just that decision and simplicity which seem to have been his own, with a certain frankness and beauty of youth which are new in his work. [Illustration: ST. JOHN THE DIVINE _By Donatello. Duomo, Florence_ _Alinari_] There are some ten works by the master in the Bargello, together with numerous casts of his statues and reliefs in other parts of Italy, so that he may be studied here better than anywhere else. Looking thus on his work more or less as a whole, it is a new influence we seem to divine for the first time in the marble David, a little faintly, perhaps, but obvious enough in the St. George, a Gothic influence that appears very happily for once, in work that almost alone in Italy seems to need just that, well, as an excuse for beauty. That marble statue of David was made at about the same time as the St. John the Divine, for the Duomo too, where it was to stand within the church in a chapel there in the apse. A little awkward in his half-shy pose, the young David stands over the head of Goliath, uncertain whether to go or stay. It is a failure which passes into the success, the more than success of the St. George, which is perhaps his masterpiece. Made for the Guild of Armourers, from the first day on which it was set up it has been beloved. Michelangelo loved it well, and Vasari is enthusiastic about it, while Bocchi, writing in 1571,[116] devotes a whole book to it. In its present bad light--for the light should fall not across, but from in front and from above, as it did once when it stood in its niche at Or San Michele--it is not seen to advantage, but even so, the life that seems to move in the cold stone may be discerned. With a proud and terrible impetuosity St. George seems about to confront some renowned and famous enemy, that old dragon whom once he slew. Full of confidence and beauty he gazes unafraid, as though on that which he is about to encounter before he moves forward to meet it. Well may Michelangelo have whispered "March!" as he passed by, it is the very order he awaits, the whisper of his own heart. It is in this romantic and beautiful figure that, as it seems to me, that new Gothic influence may be most clearly discerned. M. Reymond, in his learned and pleasant book on Florentine sculpture, has pointed out the likeness which this St. George of Donatello bears to the St. Theodore of Chartres Cathedral, and though it is impossible to deny that likeness, it seems at first almost as impossible to explain it. It is true that many Italians were employed in France in the building of the churches; it is equally true that Michelozzo, the friend and assistant of Donato, was the son of a Burgundian; but it seems as unlikely that an Italian artist, inspired by the French style, returned from France to work in Florence, as that Michelozzo was born with a knowledge of the northern manner which he never practised. An explanation, however, offers itself in the fact that the Religious Orders, those internationalists, continually passed from North to South, from East to West, from monastery to monastery, and that they may well have brought with them certain statues in ivory of Madonna or the Saints, in which such an one as Donatello could have found the hint he needed. That such statues were known in Italy is proved not only by their presence in this museum, but by the ivory Madonna of Giovanni Pisano in the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa. The Marzocco which stood of old on the Ringhiera before the Palazzo Vecchio might seem to be a work of this period, for it is only saved by a kind of good fortune from failure. It is without energy and without life, but in its monumental weight and a certain splendour of design it impresses us with a sort of majesty as no merely naturalistic study of a lion could do. If we compare it for a moment with the heraldic shield in Casa Martelli, where Donato has carved in relief a winged griffin rampant, cruel and savage, with all the beauty and vigour of Verrocchio, we shall understand something of his failure in the Marzocco, and something, too, of his success. In that heavy grotesque and fantastic Lion of the Bargello some suggestion of the monumental art of Egypt seems to have been divined for a moment, but without understanding. In the Casa Martelli, too, you may find a statue of St. John Baptist, a figure fine and youthful and melancholy, with the vague thoughts of youth, really the elder brother as it were of the child of the Bargello, who bears his cross like a delicate plaything, unaware of his destiny. That figure, so full of mystery, seems to have haunted Donatello all his life, and then St. John Baptist was the patron of Florence and presided over every Baptistery in Italy; yet it is always with a particular melancholy that Donatello deals with him, as though in his vague destiny he had found as it were a vision. The child of the Bargello passes into the boy of the Casa Martelli, that lad who maybe has heard a voice sweet enough as yet while wandering by chance on the mountains, sandalled and clad in camel's hair. We see him again as the chivalrous youth of the Campanile, the dedicated, absorbed wanderer of the Bargello, the haggard, emaciated prophet of the Friars' Church at Venice, and at last as the despairing and ancient seer of Siena, a voice that is only a voice weary of itself, crying unheeded in the wilderness. And, as it seems to me in all these figures, which in themselves have so little beauty, it is rather a mood of the soul that Donatello has set himself to express than any delight. He has turned away from physical beauty, in which man can no longer believe, using the body refined almost to the delicacy and transparency of a shell, in which the soul may shine, or at least be seen, in all its moods of happiness or terror. That weary figure who, unconscious of his cross, unconscious of the world, absorbed in his own destiny, in the scroll of his fate, trudges through the wilderness without a thought of the way, is as far from the ideal abstract beauty of the Greeks as from the romantic splendour of Gothic art. Only with him the soul has lost touch with particular things, even as the beauty of the Greeks was purged of all the accidents and feeling that belonged alone to the individual. Like a ghost he passes by, intent on some immortal sorrow; he is like a shadow on a day of sun, a dark cloud over the moon, the wind in the desert. And in a moment, we knew not why, our hearts are restless suddenly, we know not why, we are unhappy, we know not why, we desire to be where we are not, or only to forget. So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a smile of half-conscious delight, is passing from the lips; tyranny is dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de' Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And then in the portrait busts the young Gattemalata, and the terra-cotta of Niccolò da Uzzano, we may see Donatello's devotion to mere truthfulness without an afterthought, as though for him Truth were beauty in its loyalty, at any rate, to the impression of a moment that for the artist is eternity. His marvellous equestrian statue of Gattemalata is in Padua, his tomb and reliefs and statues lie in many an Italian city, but here in the Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at least of his secret. And this seems to me to have been Donatello's intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness, sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work expressed itself by means of the body, so that, though he never carves the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to have found an utterance. His life was full of wanderings; beside the journey to Rome with Brunellesco he went to Siena to make the tomb in the Duomo there of Bishop Pecci of Grosseto, and in 1433, when Cosimo de' Medici went into exile, he was again in Rome, and even in Naples. Returning to Florence after no long time, in 1444, he went to Padua, where he worked in S. Antonio and made the equestrian statue that was the wonder of the world. On his return to Florence, an old man, a certain decadence may be found in his work, so that his reliefs in S. Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his pupils. One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo's villa directing the studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful Michelangelo. But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know nothing. His influence seems to have died with him. Tuscan art after his death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than his. Something of that expressiveness, that _intimité_, which Pater found so characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself. Not vitality merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness--it is the mood of all their work. It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of clairvoyance, as it were, to the passing aspect of the world, of men, of the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted earthenware, as Vasari supposes. Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his school--could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in Italy?--and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the North. Among the first to give Luca commissions for this exquisite work in clay was Piero de' Medici. For him Luca decorated a small book-lined chamber in the great Medici palace that Cosimo had built. His work was for the ceiling and the pavement, the ceiling being a half sphere. For the hot summer days of Italy, when the streets are a blaze of light and the sun seems to embrace the city, this terra-cotta work with its cool whites and blues, was particularly delightful bringing really, as it were, something of the cool morning sea, the soft sky, into a place confined and shut in, so that where they were, coolness and temperance might find a safe retreat. And it was in such work as this that he found his fame. Andrea della Robbia, his nephew, the best artist of his school, follows him, and after come a host of artists, some little better than craftsmen, who add colour to colour, till Luca's blue and white has been almost lost amid the greens and yellows and reds which at last altogether spoil the simplicity and beauty of what was really as delicate as a flower peeping out from the shadow into the sun and the rain. But of one of the pupils of Luca, Agostino di Duccio, 1418-81(?), something more remains than these fragile and yet hardy works in terra-cotta. He has carved in marble with something of Luca's gentleness at Perugia and Rimini. He left Florence, it is said, in 1446, after an accusation of theft, returning there to carve the lovely tabernacle of the Ognissanti. It is said that he had tried unsuccessfully to deal with that block of marble which stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and from which Michelangelo unfolded the David. Two panels attributed to him remain in the Bargello, a Crucifixion and a Pietà, which scarcely do him justice. The last sculptor of the first half of the fifteenth century, his best work seems to me to be at Rimini, where he worked for Sigismondo Malatesta in the temple Alberti had built in that fierce old city by the sea. It is with the second half of the fifteenth century that the art contrived for the delight of private persons, for the decoration of palaces, of chapels, and of tombs, begins. Already Donatello had worked for Cosimo de' Medici, and had made portrait busts, and, as it might seem, the work of Luca della Robbia was especially suited for private altars or oratories, or the cool rooms of a people which had not yet divided its religion from its life. And then, in Florence at any rate, all the great churches were finished, or almost finished; it was necessary for the artist to find other patrons. Among those workers in metal who had assisted Ghiberti when he cast the reliefs of his first baptistery gate was the father of a man who had with his brother learned the craft of the goldsmiths. His name was Antonio Pollajuolo. Born in 1429, he was the pupil of his father and of Paolo Uccello, learning from the latter the art of painting, which he practised, however, like a sculptor, his real triumph being, in that art at any rate, one of movement and force. His best works in sculpture seem to me to be his tombs of Sixtus IV and Innocent VII in S. Pietro in Rome; but here in the Bargello you may see the beautiful bust in terra-cotta of a young condottiere in a rich and splendid armour, and a little bronze group of Hercules and Antaeus. In the Opera del Duomo his silver relief of the Birth of St. John Baptist is one of the finest works of that age; but his art is seen at its highest in that terra-cotta bust here in the Bargello, perhaps a sketch for a bronze, where he has expressed the infinite confidence and courage of one of those captains of adventure, who, with war for their trade, carried havoc up and down Italy. It is, however, in the work of another goldsmith--or at least the pupil of one, whose name he took--that we find the greatest master of the new age, Andrea Verrocchio. Born in 1435, and dead in 1488, he was preoccupied all his life with the fierce splendour of his art, the subtle sweetness that he drew from the strength of his work. The master, certainly, of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo, and finally of Perugino also, he was a painter as well as a sculptor; and though his greatest work was achieved in marble and bronze, one cannot lightly pass by the Annunciation of the Uffizi, or the Baptism of the Accademia. Neglected for so long, he is at last recognised as one of the greatest of all Italian masters of the Renaissance. The pupil of a goldsmith practising the craft of a founder, he cast the sacristy gates of the Duomo for Luca della Robbia. In sculpture he appears to have studied under Donatello, though his work shows little of his influence; and working, as we may suppose, with his master in S. Lorenzo, he made the bronze plaque for the tomb of Cosimo there before the choir, and the monument of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici beside the door of the sacristy. It was again for Lorenzo de' Medici that he made the exquisite Child and Dolphin now in the court of Palazzo Vecchio, and the statue of the young David now in Bargello. The subtle grace and delight of this last seem not uncertainly to suggest the strange and lovely work of Leonardo da Vinci. There for the first time you may discern the smile that is like a ray of sunshine in Leonardo's shadowy pictures. More perfect in craftsmanship and in the knowledge of anatomy than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been inspired by the David of his master, surpasses him in energy and beauty, and while Donatello's figure is involved with the head of Goliath, so that the feet are lost in the massive and almost shapeless bronze, Verrocchio's David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his feet. Simpler, too, and less uncertain is the whole pose of the figure, who is in no doubt of himself, and in his heart he has already "slain his thousands." In the portrait of Monna Vanna degli Albizi, the Lady with the Nosegay, Verrocchio is the author of the most beautiful bust of the Renaissance. She fills the room with sunshine, and all day long she seems to whisper some beloved name. A smile seems ever about to pass over her face under her clustering hair, and she has folded her beautiful hands on her bosom, as though she were afraid of their beauty and would live ever in their shadow. [Illustration: THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI?) _In the Bargello. Andrea Verrocchio_ _Alinari_] In two reliefs of Madonna and Child, one in marble and one in terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo, some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio's hand we see; but in the group of Christ and St. Thomas at Or San Michele, and in the fierce and splendid equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni at Venice, you see him at his best, occupied with a subtle beauty long sought out, and with an expression of the fierce ardour and passion that consumed him all his life. He touches nothing that does not live with an ardent splendour and energy of spirit because of him. If he makes only a leaf of bronze for a tomb, it seems to quiver under his hands with an inextinguishable vitality. Softly beside him, untouched by the passion of his style, grew all the lovely but less passionate works of the sculptors in marble, the sweet and almost winsome monuments of the dead. Bernardo Rossellino, born in 1409, his elder by more than twenty years, died more than twenty years before him, in 1464, carving, among other delightful things, the lovely Annunciation at Empoli, the delicate monument of Beata Villana in S. Maria Novella, and creating once for all, in the tomb of Leonardo Bruni in S. Croce, the perfect pattern of such things, which served as an example to all the Tuscan sculptors who followed, till Michelangelo hewed the great monuments in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. His brother Antonio, born in 1427, worked with him at Pistoja certainly in the tomb of Filippo Lazzari in S. Domenico, surpassing him as a sculptor, under the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. His finest work is the beautiful tomb in S. Miniato of the young Cardinal of Portugal, who died on a journey to Florence. In that strange and lovely place there is nothing more beautiful than that monument under the skyey work of Luca della Robbia, before the faintly coloured frescoes of Alessio Baldovinetti. Under a vision of Madonna borne by angels from heaven, where two angels stoop, half kneeling, on guard, the young Cardinal sleeps, supported by two heavenly children, his hands--those delicate hands--folded in death. Below, on a frieze at the base of the tomb, Antonio has carved all sorts of strange and beautiful things--a skull among the flowers over a garland harnessed to two unicorns; angels too, youthful and strong, lifting the funeral vases. At Naples, again, he carved the altar of the Cappella Piccolomini in S. Maria at Montoliveto. Here in the Bargello some fragments of beautiful things have been gathered--a tabernacle with two adoring angels, a little St. John made in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds, another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sassetti; but his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and languor that were so soon to fall upon him. Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428. He had worked with Donatello in the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that museum of Tuscan work. Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows--Bernardo Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio. He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight. His work in the Bargello is of little account. The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his: Vasari speaks only of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin. He died in 1464, and his work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena. It was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron. In his youth he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in marble. Having acquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have tired, devoting himself to architectural work--porticos, altars, and such--buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards Florence; dying in 1497. It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pass into a still lovely decadence. His facile work is found all over Italy. The three busts of the Bargello are among his earliest and best works--the Piero de' Medici, the Giuliano de' Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della Luna. There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles which have no great merit. A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist as Benedetto da Maiano. With Andrea Sansovino, born in 1460, we come to the art of the sixteenth century, very noble and beautiful, at any rate in its beginning, but so soon to pass into a mere affectation. The pupil, according to Vasari, of Antonio Pollaiuolo, Sansovino's work is best seen in Rome. Here in Florence he made in his youth the altar of the Blessed Sacrament in the left transept of S. Spirito, and in 1502 the Baptism of Christ, over the eastern gates of the Baptistery, but this was finished by another hand. And there followed him Benedetto da Rovezzano, whose style has become classical, the sculptor of every sort of lovely furniture,--mantelpieces, tabernacles, and such,--yet in his beautiful reliefs of the life of S. Giovanni Gualberto you see the work of the sixteenth century at its best, without the freshness and delicate charm of fifteenth-century sculpture, but exquisite enough in its perfect skill, its real achievement. There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise one comes face to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though, following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice, some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful, strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains, of the mountains in which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things as they are. Yet in his youth he had been content with beauty--in the lovely Pietà of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary, alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand. But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself. The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. What secret and immortal sorrow and resentment are expressed in those strange and beautiful figures of the tombs in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo! The names we have, given them are, as Pater has said, too definite for them; they suggest more than we know how to express of our thoughts concerning life, so that for once the soul of man seems there to have taken form and turned to stone. The unfinished Pietà in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave: like so much of his great, tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its passionate intensity--a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen gods. [Illustration: "LA NOTTE" _From Tomb of Giulinto de' Medici. Michelangelo_ _Anderson_] FOOTNOTES: [115] It seems necessary to note that probably Arnolfo Fiorentino and Arnolfo di Cambio are not the same person. Cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 127, note 4. [116] Eccellenza della Statua di S. Giorgio di Donatello: Marescotti, 1684. XXII. FLORENCE ACCADEMIA Florentine art, that had expressed itself so charmingly, and at last so passionately and profoundly, in sculpture, where design, drawing, that integrity of the plastic artist, is everything, and colour almost nothing at all, shows itself in painting, where it is most characteristic, either as the work of those who were sculptors themselves, or had at least learned from them--Giotto, Orcagna, Masaccio, the Pollaiuoli, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo--or in such work as that of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Leonardo, where painting seems to pass into poetry, into a canticle or a hymn, a Trionfo or some strange, far-away, sweet music. The whole impulse of this art lies in the intellect rather than in the senses, is busied continually in discussing life rather than in creating it, in discussing one by one the secrets of movement, of expression; always more eager to find new forms for ideas than to create just life itself in all its splendour and shadow, as Venice was content to do. Thus, while Florence was the most influential school of art in Italy, her greatest sons do not seem altogether to belong to her: Leonardo, a wanderer all his life, founds his school in Milan, and dies at last in France; Michelangelo becomes almost a Roman painter, the sculptor, the architect in paint of the Sistine Chapel; while Andrea del Sarto appears from the first as a foreigner, the one colourist of the school, only a Florentine in this, that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself really--as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints of the Pitti, for instance--into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of great, simple thoughts of life; in that of the Pollaiuoli, so full of movement; but most of all perhaps in the work of Angelico, Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, where the significance of life has passed into beauty, into music. The rise of this school, so full of importance for Italy, for the world, is very happily illustrated in the Accademia della Belle Arti; and if the galleries of the Uffizi can show a greater number of the best works of the Florentine painters, together with much else that is foreign to them; if the Pitti Palace is richer in masterpieces, and possesses some works of Raphael's Florentine period and the pictures of Fra Bartolomeo and Andrea del Sarto, as well as a great collection of the work of the other Italian schools, it is really in the Accademia we may study best the rise of the Florentine school itself, finding there not only the work of Giotto, his predecessors and disciples, but the pictures of Fra Angelico, of Verrocchio, of Filippo Lippi, of Botticelli, the painters of that fifteenth century which, as Pater has told us, "can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type." The art of the Sculptors had been able to free itself from the beautiful but sterile convention of the Byzantine masters earlier than the art of Painting, because it had found certain fragments of antiquity scattered up and down Southern Italy, and in such a place as the Campo Santo of Pisa, to which it might turn for guidance and inspiration. No such forlorn beauty remained in exile to renew the art of painting. All the pictures of antiquity had been destroyed, and though in such work as that of the Cavallini and their school at Assisi there may be found a faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it is rather the shadow of the statues we find there--in the Abraham of the upper church of S. Francesco, for instance--than the more lyrical and mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome. Yet it is there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him not only to recreate the art of painting, but to decide its future in Italy. Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani you may see an altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, amid much beautiful languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or that, coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi, in Florence, in Padua, spoiled though they be by the intervention of fools, the spoliation of the vandals. Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from the convents and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who, not without tears, made them for the love of God: once for sure they made a sunshine in some shadowy place. Hung here to-day in a museum, just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or intention. They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they will never move us again. That rude and almost terrible picture of Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord, stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to us who pass by? Yet once it listened for the prayers of the little nuns of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il Poverello. That passionate and dreadful picture of St. Mary Magdalen covered by her hair as with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all? Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting? And you, O learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the inscription-- "Ne desperetis, vos qui peccare soletis Exemploque meo vos reperate Deo." Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround her still with their beauty, do you even know what they mean? And if you do, are they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend, which has lost even its meaning? No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not know flowers. Then there is the great Ancona (102) from S. Trinità attributed to Cimabue about which the critics have been so eloquent, till under their hands Cimabue has vanished into a mere legend; and Madonna too, is she now any more than a tale that is told? Beside it you find another Madonna (103) from Ognissanti which they agree together is really from the hand of Giotto, though with how much intervention and repainting; but they confess too that there is little to be learnt from it, since Giotto may be seen to better advantage and more truly himself in his frescoes, which yet remain in the churches as of old. And it is for this we have robbed the lowly and stolen away the images of their gods. It is a lesser because a merely imitative art that you see in the work of Taddeo Gaddi and the Madonna and Child with six saints of his son Agnolo, or the Entombment ascribed to Taddeo but really the work of an inferior painter, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini from Or San Michele. Yet those twelve scenes from the lives of Christ and St. Francis are lovely enough; and in the Crucifixion there (112) we seem to see the work of a master. A host of painters, "the Giottesques," as we may call them, followed: Puccio Capanna, Buffalmacco, Francesco da Volterra, Stefano Fiorentino, the grandson of Giotto, Giottino, and Spinello Aretino, all of whom were painting about the middle of the fourteenth century in Giotto's manner but without his genius, or any true understanding of his art. The gradual passing of this derivative work, the prophecy of such painters as Masolino, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico may be found in the work of Orcagna, of Antonio Veneziano, and Starnina, and possibly too in the better-preserved paintings of Lorenzo Monaco of the order of S. Romuald of Camaldoli, in the Annunciation (143), for instance, here in this very room. Andrea Orcagna was born about 1308. He was a man of almost universal genius, but his altarpiece in S. Maria Novella is nearly all that remains to us of his painting, and splendid though it be, has been perhaps spoiled by a later hand than his. In the Accademia here there is a Vision of St. Bernard (No. 138), faint, it is true, but still soft and charming in colour, while in the Uffizi there is in the corridor an altarpiece with St. Matthew in the midst that is certainly partially his own. Nothing at all remains to us of the work of Starnina, the master of Masolino, and thus we lose the link which should connect the art of Giotto and the Giottesques with the art of Masolino and Angelico.[117] It was about the same time as Starnina was painting in the chapel of S. Girolamo at the Carmine that Lorenzo Monaco was working in the manner of Agnolo Gaddi. His work is beautiful by reason of its delicacy and gentleness, but it is so completely in the old manner that Vasari gives his altarpiece of the Annunciation now here in the Accademia (No. 143) to Giotto, praising that master for the tremulous sweetness of Madonna as she shrinks before the Announcing Angel just about to alight from heaven. It is a very different scene you come upon in his altarpiece in S. Trinità, where Gabriel, his beautiful wings furled, has already fallen on his knees, and our Lord Himself, still among the Cherubim, speeds the Dove to Mary, who has looked up from her book suddenly in an ecstasy. [Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS _By Domenico Ghirlandajo, Accademia_ _Anderson_] No work that we possess of the fourteenth century, save Giotto's, prepares us for the frescoes of Masolino: they must be sought in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine. But of the work of Masaccio his pupil, though his best work remains in the same place, there may be found here in the Accademia an early altarpiece of Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Sala III, No. 70). Born in 1401, dying when he was but twenty-seven years of age, he recreated for himself that reality in painting which it had been the chief business of Giotto to discover. Influenced by Donatello, his work is almost as immediate as that of sculpture. Impressive and full of an energy that seems to be life itself, his figures have almost the sense of reality. "I feel," says Mr. Berenson, "that I could touch every figure, that it would yield a definite resistance ... that I could walk round it." There follow Paolo Uccello, whose work will be found in the Uffizi, and Andrea del Castagno, who painted the equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino in the Duomo, and the frescoes in S. Apollonia. Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, which we have loved so much. It is really the Middle Age, quite expressed for once, by one who, standing a little way off perhaps, could almost scorn it, that we come upon in Gentile da Fabriano's picture, on an easel here, of the Adoration of the Shepherds. It is one of the loveliest of all early Umbrian pictures, full of a new kind of happiness that is about to discover the world. And if with Gentile we seem to look back on the Middle Age from the very dawn of the Renaissance, it is the Renaissance itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and best days, that we see in the work of Fra Angelico. One beautiful and splendid picture, the Descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands near Gentile's Adoration, among several later pictures, of which certainly the loveliest is a gentle and serene work by Domenico Ghirlandajo, an Adoration of the Shepherds; but the greater part of Angelico's work to be found here is in another room. There, in many little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden where God talked with Adam. Or he will tell us the story of S. Cosmas and S. Damian, those good saints who despised gold, so that with their brethren they were cast into a furnace, but the beautiful bright flames curled and leaped away from them as at the breath of God, licking feverishly at the persecutors, who with iron forks try to thrust the faggots nearer, while one hides from the heat of the fire behind his shield, and another, already dead, is consumed by the flames. Above in a gallery of marble, decked with beautiful rugs and hangings of needlework, the sultan looks on astonished amid his courtiers. Or it is the story of our Lord he tells us: how in the evening Mary set out from Nazareth mounted on a mule, her little son in her arms, Joseph following afoot, with a pipkin for the fire in the wilderness, and a _fiasco_ of wine lest they be thirsty, a great stick over his shoulder for the difficult way, and a cloak too, for our Lady. Or it is the Annunciation he shows us: how in the dawn of that day of days, his bright wings still tremulous with flight, Gabriel fell like a snowflake in the garden, in the silence of the cypresses between two little loggias, light and fair, where Madonna was praying; far and far away in the faint clear sky the Dove hovers, that is the Spirit of God, the Desire of all Nations. Or it is Hosanna he sings, when Christ rides under the stripped palms into Jerusalem, while the people strew the way with branches. Or again he will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God. How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world scattered in heaven? Truly his master is unknown, for, as perhaps he was too simple to say, St. Luke taught him in an idle hour, after the vision of the Annunciation, when he was tired of writing the Magnificat of Mary: and Angelico was his only pupil. That such things as these could come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world, the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as heaven. It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels. Another friar, but how different. The story, so romantic, so full of laughter and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his best known pages; I shall not tell it again. Four little panels painted by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico. While not far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work.[118] Four other works by Perugino may also be found here,--the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a Pietà, and the Agony in the Garden in the Sala di Perugino, a Crucifixion in the Sala di Botticelli. The Assumption was painted at Vallombrosa late in the year 1500, and is a fine piece of work in Perugino's more mannered style. Above, God the Father, in a glory of cherubim with a worshipping angel on either side, blesses Madonna, who in mid-heaven gazes upward, seated on a cloud, in a mandorla of cherubs, surrounded by four angels playing musical instruments, while two others are at her feet following her in her flight; below, three saints, with St. Michael, stand disconsolate. In the Pietà, painted much earlier, where the dead Christ lies on His Mother's knees, while an angel holds the head of the Prince of Life on his shoulders, and Mary Magdalen weeps at his feet, and two saints, St. John and St. Joseph, perhaps, watch beside Him, there might seem to be little to hold us or to interest us at all; the picture is really without life, just because everything is so unreal, and if we gather any emotion there, it will come to us from the soft sky, full of air and light, that we see through a splendid archway, or from a tiny glimpse of the valley that peeps from behind Madonna's robe. And surely it was in this valley, on a little hill, that, as we may see in another picture here, Christ knelt; yes, in the garden of the world, while the disciples slept, and the angel brought Him the bitter cup. Not far away is Jerusalem, and certain Roman soldiers and the priests; but it is not these dream-like figures that attract us, but the world that remains amid all interior changes still the same, and, for once in his work, those tired men, really wearied out, who sleep so profoundly while Christ prays. In the Crucifixion all the glamour, the religious impression that, in Perugino's work at least, space the infinite heaven of Italy, the largeness of her evening earth, make on one, is wanting, and we find instead a mere insistence upon the subject. The world is dark under the eclipsed sun and moon, and the figures are full of affectation. Painted for the convent of St. Jerome, it was necessary to include that saint and his lion, that strangely pathetic and sentimental beast, so full of embarrassment, that looks at one so wearily from many an old picture in the galleries of the world. If something of that clairvoyance which created his best work is wanting here, it has vanished altogether in that Deposition which Filippino Lippi finished, and instead of a lovely dream of heaven and earth, one finds a laboured picture full of feats of painting, of cleverness, and calculated arrangement. This soft Umbrian world of dreamy landscape, which we find in Perugino's pictures, is like a clearer vision of the land we already descry far off with Fra Angelico, where his angels sing and his saints dance for gladness. It is a different and a more real life that you see in the work of Fra Lippo Lippi. Realism, it is the very thought of all Florentine work of the fifteenth century. Seven pictures by the Frate have been gathered in this gallery,--the Madonna and Child Enthroned, the St. Jerome in the Desert, a Nativity, a Madonna adoring Her Son, and the great Coronation of the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Baptist, and a Madonna and St. Anthony. Here in the Accademia you may see Lucrezia Buti, that pale beauty whom he loved, very fair and full of languor and sweetness. She looks at you out of the crowd of saints and angels gathered round the feet of Madonna, whom God crowns from His throne of jasper. Behind her, looking at her always, Lippo himself comes--_iste perfecit opus_,--up the steps into that choir where the angels crowned with roses lift the lilies, as they wait in some divine interval to sing again Alleluia. And for this too he should be remembered, for his son was Filippino Lippo and his pupil Sandro Botticelli. The Accademia possesses some five pictures by Botticelli,--the Coronation of the Virgin and its predella (Nos. 73, 74), the Madonna with saints and angels (No. 85), the Dead Christ (No. 157), the Salome (No. 161), and the Primavera (No. 80). The Coronation is from the Convent of S. Marco, and seems to have been painted after Botticelli had fallen under the strange, unhappy influence of Savonarola; much the same might be said of the Madonna with saints and angels, where his expressiveness, that quality which in him was genius, seems to have fallen almost into a mannerism, a sort of preconceived attitude; and certainly here, where such a perfect thing awaits us, it is rather to the Spring we shall turn at once than to anything less splendid. The so-called Primavera was painted for Lorenzo de' Medici, and in some vague way seems to have been inspired by Poliziano's verses in praise of Giuliano de' Medici and Bella Simonetta-- "Candida è ella, e Candida la vesta, Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba: Lo innanellato crin dell' aurea testa Scende in la fronte umilmente superba. Ridele attorno tutta la foresta, E quanto può sue cure disacerba. Nell' atto regalmente è mansueta; E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta."[119] Here at last we see the greatest, the most personal artist of the fifteenth century really at his best, in that fortunate moment of half-pensive joy which was so soon to pass away. How far has he wandered, and through what secret forbidden ways, from the simple thoughts of Angelico, the gay worldly laughter of Lippo Lippi. On that strange adventurous journey of the soul he has discovered the modern world, just our way of looking at things, as it were, with a sort of gift for seeing in even the most simple things some new and subtle meaning. And then, in that shadowy and yet so real kingdom in which, not without a certain timidity, he has ventured so far, he has come upon the very gods in exile, and for him Venus is born again from the foam of the sea, and Mars sleeping in a valley will awake to find her beside him, not as of old full of laughter, disdain, and joy; but half reconciled, as it were, to sorrow, to that change which has come upon her so that men now call her Mary, that name in which bitter and sweet are mingled together. With how subtly pensive a mien she comes through the spring woods here in the Primavera, her delicate hand lifted half in protest, half in blessing of that gay and yet thoughtful company,--Flora, her gown full of roses, Spring herself caught in the arms of Aeolus, the Graces dancing a little wistfully together, where Mercurius touches indifferently the unripe fruit with the tip of his caducaeus, and Amor blindfold points his dart, yes almost like a prophecy of death.... What is this scene that rises so strangely before our eyes, that are filled with the paradise of Angelico, the heaven of Lippo Lippi. It is the new heaven, the ancient and beloved earth, filled with spring and peopled with those we have loved, beside whose altars long ago we have hushed our voices. It is the dream of the Renaissance. The names we have given these shadowy beautiful figures are but names, that Grace who looks so longingly and sadly at Hermes is but the loveliest among the lovely, though we call her Simonetta and him Giuliano. Here in the garden of the world is Venus's pleasure-house, and there the gods in exile dream of their holy thrones. Shall we forgive them, and forget that since our hearts are changed they are changed also? They have looked from Olympus upon Calvary; Dionysus, who has borne the youngest lamb on his shoulders, has wandered alone in the wilderness and understood the sorrow of the world; even that lovely, indifferent god has been crucified, and she, Venus Aphrodite, has been born again, not from the salt sea, but in the bitterness of her own tears, the tears of Madonna Mary. It is thus Botticelli, with a rare and personal art, expresses the very thought of his time, of his own heart, which half in love with Pico of Mirandola would reconcile Plato with Moses, and since man's allegiance is divided reconcile the gods. You may discern something, perhaps, of the same thought, but already a little cold, a little indifferent in its appeal, in the Adoration of the Shepherds which Luca Signorelli painted, now in the Uffizi, where the shepherds are fair and naked youths, the very gods of Greece come to worship the Desire of all Nations. But with Botticelli that divine thought is altogether fresh and sincere. It is strange that one so full of the Hellenic spirit should later have fallen under the influence of a man so singularly wanting in temperance or sweetness as Savonarola. One pictures him in his sorrowful old age bending over the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, continually questioning himself as to that doctrine of the Epicureans, to wit, that the soul dies with the body; at least, one reads that he abandoned all labour at his art, and was like to have died of hunger but for the Medici, who supported him.[120] [Illustration: "THE THREE GRACES FROM THE PRIMAVERA" _By Sandro Botticelli. Accademia_ _Anderson_] FOOTNOTES: [117] Cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of Painting in Italy_, 1903, vol. ii. p. 290. [118] For a full consideration of these and other works of Perugino, Gentile da Fabriano, and the Umbrian masters, see my _Cities of Umbria_. [119] Poliziano, Stanza I, str. 43, 44, 46, 47 68, 72, 85, 94; and Alberti, Opere Volgari, _Della Pittura_, Lib. III (Firenze, 1847). [120] Of the work of Verrocchio in this gallery, the Baptism of Christ, in which Leonardo is said, I think mistakenly, to have painted an angel in the left hand kneeling at the feet of Jesus, I speak in the chapter on the Uffizi. XXIII. FLORENCE THE UFFIZI If it is difficult to speak with justice and a sense of proportion of the Accademia delle Belle Arti, how may I hope to succeed with the Uffizi Gallery, where the pictures are infinitely more varied and numerous. It might seem impossible to do more than to give a catalogue of the various works here gathered from royal and ducal collections, from many churches, convents, and monasteries, forming, certainly, with the gallery of the Pitti Palace, the finest collection of the Italian schools of painting in the world. And then in this palace, built for Cosimo I, by Giorgio Vasari, the delightful historian of the Italian painters, you may find not only paintings but a great collection of sculpture also, a magnificent collection of drawings and jewels, together with the Archives, the Biblioteca Nazionale, which includes the Palatine and the Magliabecchian Libraries. It will be best, then, seeing that a whole lifetime were not enough in which to number such treasures, to confine ourselves to a short examination of the sculpture, which is certainly less valuable to us than to our fathers, and to a brief review, hardly more than a personal impression, of the Italian pictures, which are its chiefest treasure. Of the rooms in which are hung the portraits of painters, those unfortunate self-portraits in which some of the greatest painters have not without agony realised their own ugliness, exhibiting themselves in the pose that they have hoped the world would mistake for the very truth, I say nothing. It is true, the older men, less concerned perhaps at staring the word in the face, are not altogether unfortunate in their self-revelation; but consider the portrait of Lord Leighton by himself,--it must have been painted originally as a signboard for Burlington House, for the summer exhibition of the Academy there, as who should say to a discerning public: Here you may have your fill of the impudent and blatant commonplace you love so much. And if such a thing is really without its fellow in these embarrassing rooms, where Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, and Velasquez are shouted down by some forgotten German, some too well remembered English painter, it is but the perfect essence of the whole collection, as though for once Leighton had really understood what was required of him and had done his marvellous best. It is on the top floor of this palace of Cosimo I, after passing the busts of the lords and dukes of the Medici family, that one enters the gallery itself, which, running round three sides of a parallelogram, opens into various rooms of all shapes and sizes. It was Francesco I, second Grand Duke of Tuscany, who began to collect here the various works of art which his predecessors had gathered in their villas and palaces. To this collection Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, his brother, added, on his succession to the Grand-Dukedom, the treasures he had collected in the villa which he had built in Rome, and which still bears the name of his house. To Cosimo II, it might seem, we owe the covered way from this Palazzo degli Uffizi across Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, while Ferdinand II began the collection of those self-portraits of the painters of which I have spoken. Inheriting, as he did through his wife, Vittoria della Rovere, the treasures of Urbino, he brought them here, while it is to his son, Cosimo III, that we owe the presence of Venus de' Medici, which had been dug up in the gardens of Hadrian's villa, and bought by Ferdinando I when he was Cardinal. Most of the Flemish pictures were brought here by Anna, the sister of Gian Gastone, and daughter of Cosimo III, when she returned a widow to Florence from the North. The house of Lorraine also continued to enrich the gallery, which did not escape Napoleon's generals. They took away many priceless pictures, all of which we were not able to force them to restore, though we spent some £30,000 in the attempt. We were, however, able to send back to Italy the Venus de' Medici, which Napoleon had thought to marry to the Apollo Belvedere. As may be supposed, the Gallery of the Uffizi, gathered as it has thus been from so many sources, is as various as it is splendid. It is true that it possesses no work by Velasquez, and if we compare it with such collections as those of the National Gallery or the Louvre, we shall find it a little lacking in proportion as a gallery of universal art. It is really as the chief storehouses of Italian painting that we must consider both it and the Pitti Palace. And both for this reason, and because under its director, Signor Corrado Ricci, a new and clearer arrangement of its contents is being carried out, I have thought it better to speak of the pictures in no haphazard fashion, but, as is now becoming easy, under their respective schools, as the Florentine, the Sienese, the Umbrian, the Venetian, thus suggesting an unity which till now has been lacking in the gallery itself. I. THE FLORENTINE SCHOOL Florentine painting in the fourteenth century may be seen to best advantage in the churches of Florence and in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, for here in the Uffizi there is nothing from Giotto's or Orcagna's hand, though the work of their schools is plentiful. In the first long gallery, among certain Sienese pictures of which I speak elsewhere, you may find these works; and there, too, like antique jewels slumbering in the accustomed sunlight, you come upon the tabernacles and altar-pieces of Don Lorenzo Monaco, monk of the Angeli of Florence, as Vasari calls him, the pupil of Agnolo Gaddi, who has most loved the work of the Sienese. Lorenzo was of the Order of Camaldoli, and belonged to the monastery of the Angeli, which was founded in 1295 by Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, himself of the Military Order of the Virgin Mother of Jesus, whose monks were called Frati Gaudenti, the Joyous Brothers. Born about 1370, seventeen years before Angelico, and dying in 1425, his works, full of an ideal beauty that belongs to some holy place, are altogether lost in the corridors of a gallery. Those works of his, the Virgin and St. John, both kneeling and holding the body of our Lord (40), dated 1404; the Adoration of the Magi (39), or the triptych (41), where Madonna is in the midst with her little Son standing in her lap, while two angels stand in adoration, and St. John Baptist and St. Bartholemew, St. Thaddeus and St. Benedict, wait on either side, was painted in 1410, and was brought here from the subterranean crypt of S. Maria of Monte Oliveto, not far away. Another triptych (1309), the Coronation of the Virgin, in the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco, is perhaps his masterpiece. In the midst is the Coronation of our Lady, surrounded by a glory of angels, while on either side stand ten saints, and on the frames are angels, cherubs, saints, and martyrs, scattered like flowers. Painted in 1413 for the high altar of the Monastery of the Angels, it was lost on the suppression of the Order, and only found about 1830 at the Badia di S. Pietro at Cerreto, in Val d'Elsa. Though it has doubtless suffered from repainting, for we read of a restoration in 1866, it remains, lovely and exquisite beyond any other work of the master. Fra Angelico may well have been the pupil of Lorenzo Monaco. Here in the Uffizi are two of his works, the great Tabernacle (17), with its predella (1294), and the great Coronation of the Virgin (1290), with its predelle (1162 and 1178). The Tabernacle was painted in 1433 for the Arte de' Linaioli, which paid a hundred and ninety gold florins for it. It is an early work, but such an one as in Florence at any rate, only Fra Angelico could have achieved. Within the doors is the Virgin herself, with Christ standing on her knee between two saints, surrounded by twelve angels of heavenly beauty playing on various instruments of music In the doors themselves are St. John Baptist and St. Mark while outside are St. Peter and St. Jerome. In the predella St. Peter preaches at Rome, St. Mark writes his Gospel, the Kings come to adore Jesus in Bethlehem, and St. Mark is martyred. The whole is like some marvellous introit for St. Mark's day, in which the name of Mary has passed by. The Coronation of the Virgin (1290) is like a litany of the saints and of the Virgin herself, chanted in antiphon, ending in the simpler splendour of Magnificat, sung to some Gregorian tone full of gold, of faint blues as of a far-away sky, of pale rose-colours as of roses fading on an altar in the sunlight, and the candles of white are more spotless than the lily is. Amidst a glory of angels, the piping voices of children, she in whose name all the flowers are hidden is crowned Queen of Angels by the Prince of Life. This marvellous dead picture lived once in S. Maria Nuova; its predelle have been torn away from it, but may be found here, nevertheless, in the Birth of St. John Baptist (1162) and the Spozalizio (1178). It is to a painter less mystical, but not less visionary, that we come in the work of Paolo Uccello, the great "Battle" (52), of which two variants exist, one in the Louvre, the other, the most beautiful of the three, in the National Gallery. It is, as some have thought, a picture of the Battle of S. Egidio, where Braccio da Montone made Carlo Malatesta and his nephew Galeotto prisoners in 1416. Splendid as it is, something has been lost to us by restoration. Paola Uccello, the friend of Donatello and of Brunellesco, was all his life devoted to the study of perspective. Many marvellous drawings in which he traced that baffling vista, of which he was wont to exclaim when, labouring far into the night, his wife poor soul, would entreat him to take rest and sleep: "Ah, what a delightful thing is this perspective." And then, much beautiful work of his has perished. It was on this art he staked his life. "What have you there that you are shutting up so close?" Donatello said to him one day when he found him alone at work on the Christ and St. Thomas, which he had been commissioned to paint over the door of the church dedicated to that saint in the Mercato Vecchio. "Thou shalt see it some day,--let that suffice thee," Uccello answered. "And it chanced," says Vasari, "that Donato was in the Mercato Vecchio buying fruit one morning when he saw Paolo Uccello, who was uncovering his picture." Saluting him courteously, therefore, his opinion was instantly demanded by Paolo, who was anxiously curious to know what he would say of the work. But when Donato had examined it very minutely, he turned to Paolo and said: "Why, Paolo, thou art uncovering thy picture just at the very time when thou shouldst be shutting it up from the sight of all." These words wounded Paolo so grievously that he would no more leave his house, but shut himself up, devoting himself only the more to the study of perspective, which kept him in poverty and depression to the day of his death. Paolo had been influenced, it is said, by Domenico Veneziano, who in his turn was influenced by the work of Masolino and Masaccio. Nothing is known of the birthplace of this painter, who appears first at Perugia, and was the master of Piero della Francesca. His work is very rare; in Florence there are two heads of saints in the Pitti, and Mr. Berenson speaks of a fresco of the Baptist and St. Francis in S. Croce. Here in the Uffizi, however, we have a Madonna and four Saints (1305) from his hand, formerly in the Church of S. Lucia de' Magnoli in the Via de' Bardi. It is a very splendid work, and certainly his masterpiece; something of Piero della Francesca's later work may perhaps be discerned there, in a certain force and energy, a sort of dry sweetness in the faint colouring that he seems to have loved. The Virgin is enthroned, and in her lap she holds our Lord; on the left stands St. John Baptist and S. Francis, on the right St. Nicholas and S. Lucia. In the only work by Filippo Lippi in the Uffizi, the beautiful Madonna and Child (1307) that has been so much beloved, we come again to a painter who has been influenced by Masaccio, and thought at least to understand and perhaps transform the work of Lorenzo Monaco and Fra Angelico It is once more in the work of his pupil, Botticelli, that we find some of the chief treasures of the gallery. There are some nine works here by Sandro,--the Birth of Venus (39), the Madonna of the Magnificat (1269 bis), the Madonna of the Pomegranate (1269), the Judith and Holofernes (1158), the Calumny (1182), the Adoration of the Magi (1286), and a Madonna and Child, a Portrait of Piero de' Medici (1154), and St. Augustine (1179). Painted for Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the Birth of Venus is perhaps the most beautiful, the most expressive, and the most human picture of the Quattrocento. She is younger than the roses which the south-west wind fling at her feet, the roses of earth to the Rose of the sea. Not yet has the Shepherd of Ida praised her, nor Adon refused the honey of her throat; not yet has Psyche stolen away her joy, nor Mars rolled her on a soldier's couch amid the spears and bucklers; for now she is but a maid, and she cometh in the dawn to her kingdom dreaming over the sea. If we compare her for a moment with the Madonna of the Magnificat, with the Mary of the Pomegranate, she seems to us more virgin than the Virgin herself; less troubled by a love in which all the sorrow and desire of the world have found expression, less weary of the prayers that will be hers no less than Mary's. How wearily and with what sadness Madonna writes Magnificat, or dreams of the love that even now is come into her arms! Is it that, as Pater has thought, the honour is too great for her, that she would have preferred a humbler destiny, the joy of any other mother of Israel? Who is she, this woman of divine and troubling beauty that masquerades as Venus, and with Christ in her arms is so sad and unhappy. Tradition tells us that he was Simonetta, the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, who, dying still in her youth, was borne through Florence with uncovered face to her grave under the cypresses. Whoever she may be, she haunts all the work of Botticelli, who, it might seem, loved her as one who had studied Dante, and, one of the company of the Platonists of Lorenzo's court, might well love a woman altogether remote from him. As Venus she is a maid about to step for the first time upon the shores of Cypris, and her eyes are like violets, wet with dew that have not looked on the sun; her bright locks heavy with gold her maid has caught about her, and the pale anemones have kissed her breasts, and the scarlet weeds have kissed her on the mouth. As Mary, her destiny is too great for her, and her lips tremble under the beauty of the words she is about to utter; the mystical veils about her head have blinded her, her eyelids have fallen over her eyes, and in her heart she seems to be weeping. But it is another woman not less mysterious who, as Judith, trips homeward so lightly in the morning after the terrible night, her dreadful burden on her head and in her soul some too brutal accusation. Again you may see her as Madonna in a picture brought here from S. Maria Nuova, where she would let Love fall, she is so weary, but that an angel's arm enfolds Him. [Illustration: THE BIRTH OF VENUS _By Sandro Botticelli. Uffizi Gallery_ _Anderson_] In the Calumny you see a picture painted from the description Alberti had given in his treatise on painting of the work of Apelles. "There was in this picture," says Alberti, "a man with very large ears, and beside him stood two women; one was called Ignorance, the other Superstition. Towards him came Calumny. This was a woman very beautiful to look upon, but with a double countenance (_ma parea nel viso troppo astuta_). She held in her right hand a lighted torch, and with the other hand she dragged by the hair a young man (_uno garzonotto_), who lifted his hands towards heaven. There was also a man, pale, _brutto_, and gross, ... he was guide to Calumny, and was called Envy. Two other women accompanied Calumny, and arranged her hair and her ornaments, and one was Perfidy and the other Fraud. Behind them came Penitence, a woman dressed in mourning, all ragged. She was followed by a girl, modest and sensitive, called Truth."[121] The Birth of Venus was the first study of the nude that any painter had dared to paint; but profound as is its significance, Florentine painting was moving forward by means less personal than the genius, the great personal art of Botticelli. Here in the Uffizi you may see an Annunciation (56) of Baldovinetti (1427-99), in which something of that strangeness and beauty of landscape which owed much to Angelico, and more perhaps in its contrivance to Paolo Uccello, was to come to such splendour in the work of Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baldovinetti's pupil, Piero Pollaiuoli (1443-96), the younger brother of Antonio (1429-98), whose work in sculpture is so full of life, was, with his brother's help and guidance, giving to painting some of the power and reality of movement which we look for in vain till his time. In a picture of St. James, with St. Vincent and St. Eustace on either side (1301), you may see Piero's work, the fine, rather powerful than beautiful people he loved. It is, however, in the work of one whom he influenced, Andrea Verrocchio, the pupil of Donatello and Baldovinetti, that, as it seems to me, what was best worth having in his work comes to its own, expressed with a real genius that is always passionate and really expressive. The Baptism in the Accademia, a beautiful but not very charming work, perhaps of his old age, received, Vasari tells us, some touches from the brush of Leonardo, and for long the Annunciation of the Uffizi (1286) passed as Leonardo's work. Repainted though it is, in almost every part (the angel's wings retain something of their original brightness), this Annunciation remains one of the loveliest pictures in the gallery, full of the eagerness and ardour of Verrocchio. In a garden at sunset, behind the curiously trimmed cypresses under a portico of marble, Madonna sits at her _prie dieu_, a marvellously carved sarcophagus of marble, while before her Gabriel kneels, holding the lilies, lifting his right hand in blessing. The picture comes from the Church of Monte Oliveto, not far away. [Illustration: THE ANNUNCIATION _By Andrea Verrocchio, Uffizi Gallery_ _Anderson_] Verrocchio was the master of Lorenzo di Credi and of Leonardo, while, as it is said, Perugino passed through his bottega. There are many works here given to Lorenzo, who seems to have been a better painter than he was a sculptor: the Madonna and Child (24), the Annunciation (1160), the Noli me Tangere (1311), and above all, the Venus (3452), are beautiful, but less living than one might expect from the pupil of Verrocchio. Verrocchio's true pupil, if we may call him a pupil of any master at all who was an universal genius, wayward and altogether personal in everything he did, was Leonardo da Vinci. Of Leonardo's rare work (Mr. Berenson finds but nine paintings that may pass as his in all Europe) there is but one example in the Uffizi, and that is unfinished. It is the Adoration of the Magi (1252), scarcely more than a shadow, begun in 1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter. This Adoration is the only work of his left in Tuscany, and there are but three other paintings from his hand in all Italy. Of these, the fresco of the Last Supper, at Milan, has been restored eight times, and is about to suffer another repainting; while of the two pictures in Rome, the St. Jerome of the Vatican is unfinished, and the Profile of a Girl, in the possession of Donna Laura Minghetti, is "not quite finished" either, Mr. Berenson tells us. It is to the Louvre that we must go to see Leonardo's work as a painter. Tuscan painting at its best, its most expressive, in the work of Botticelli, fails to convince us of sincerity in the work of his pupil Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Filippo. Of all his pictures here in the Uffizi, the two frescoes--the portrait of himself (286), the portrait of an old man (1167), the Adoration of the Magi (1217), painted in 1496, the Madonna and Saints (1268), painted in 1485, it is rather the little picture of Madonna adoring her Son (1549) that I prefer, for a certain sweetness and beauty of colour, before any of his more ambitious works. Ghirlandajo too, that sweet and serene master, is not so lovely here as in the Adoration of the Shepherds at the Accademia. In his so-called Portrait of Perugino (1163),[122] the Adoration of the Magi (1295), and the Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels (1297), his work seems to lack sincerity, in all but the first, at any rate, to be the facile work of one not sufficiently convinced of the necessity for just that without which there is no profound beauty. But the age was full of misfortune; it was necessary, perhaps, to pretend a happiness one did not feel. Certainly in the strangely fantastic work of Pier di Cosimo, the Rescue of Andromeda (1312), for instance, there is nothing of the touching sincerity and beauty of his Death of Procris, now in the National Gallery, which remains his one splendid work. His pupil Fra Bartolommeo, who was later so unfortunately influenced by Michelangelo, may be seen here at his best in a small diptych (1161); in his early manner, his Isaiah (1126) and Job (1130), we see mere studies in drapery and anatomy. His most characteristic work is, however, in the Pitti Gallery, where we shall consider it. Much the same might be said of his partner Albertinelli, and his friend Andrea del Sarto, whom again we shall consider later in the Pitti Palace. It will be sufficient here to point out his beautiful early Noli me Tangere (93), The Portrait of his Wife (188), the Portrait of Himself (280), the Portrait of a Lady, with a Petrarch in her hands (1230), and the Madonna dell' Arpie (1112), that statuesque and too grandiose failure that is so near to success. Michelangelo, that Roman painter--for out of Rome there are but two of his works, and one of these, the Deposition in the National Gallery, is unfinished--has here in the Uffizi a very splendid Holy Family (1139), splendid perhaps rather than beautiful, where in the background we may see the graceful nude figures which Luca Signorelli had taught him to paint there. Luca Signorelli, born in Cortona, the pupil of Piero della Francesca, passes as an Umbrian painter, and indeed his best work may be found there. But he was much influenced by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and is altogether out of sympathy with the mystical art of Umbria. Here in the Uffizi are two of his early works, the Holy Family (1291) and a Madonna and Child (74), where, behind the Virgin holding her divine Son in her lap, you may see four naked shepherds, really the first of their race. This picture was painted for Lorenzo de' Medici, and doubtless influenced Michelangelo when he painted his Holy Family for Messer Angelo Doni, who haggled so badly over his bargain. It is really the decadence, certainly prophesied in the later work of Andrea del Sarto, that we come to in the work of that pupil of his, who was influenced by what he could understand of the work of Michelangelo. Jacopo Pontormo's work almost fails to interest us to-day save in his portraits. The Cosimo I (1270), the Cosimo dei Medici (1267), painted from some older portrait, the Portrait of a Man (1220), have a certain splendour, that we find more attenuated but still living in the work of his pupil Bronzino, who also failed to understand Michelangelo. Fine though his portraits are, his various insincere and badly coloured compositions merely serve to show how low the taste of the time--the time of the end of the Republic--had fallen. Thus we have followed very cursorily, but with a certain faithfulness nevertheless, the course of Florentine Art. With the other schools of Italy we shall deal more shortly. II. THE SIENESE SCHOOL It is as a divine decoration that Sienese art comes to us in the profound and splendid work of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the delicate and lovely work of Simone Martini, the patient work of the Lorenzetti. The masterpiece, perhaps, of Duccio is the great Rucellai Madonna of S. Maria Novella. There is none of his work in the Uffizi; but one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, the Annunciation of Simone Martini (23), from the Church of S. Ansano in Castelvecchio, is in the first Long Gallery here. On a gold ground under three beautiful arches, in the midst of which the Dove hovers amid the Cherubim, Gabriel whispers to the Virgin the mysterious words of Annunciation. In his hand is a branch of olive, and on his brow an olive crown. Madonna, a little overwhelmed by the marvel of these tidings, draws back, pale in her beauty, the half-closed book of prayer in her hands, catching her robe about her; between them is a vase of campanulas still and sweet. Who may describe the colour and the delicate glory of this work? The hand of man can do no more; it is the most beautiful of all religious paintings, subtle and full of grace. Simone was the greatest follower of Duccio. Born in 1284, in 1324 he married Vanna di Memmo, and his brother, Lippo Memmi, sometimes assisted him in his work. Lippo's hand cannot be discerned in the Annunciation--none but Simone himself could have achieved it; but the two saints, who stand one on either side, are his work, as well as the four little figures in the frame. Of the other early Sienese painters, only Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti are represented in the Uffizi. The first, by a Madonna (15) and a Thebaid; the second (16), in the two predella pictures for the altar-piece of S. Procolo, Sassetta, the best of the Sienese Quattrocento painters, is absent, and Vecchietta is only represented by a predella picture (47); it is not till we came to Sodoma, whose famous St. Sebastian (1279) suggests altogether another kind of art, a sensuous and sometimes an almost hysterical sort of ecstasy, as in the Swooning Virgin or the Swoon of St. Catherine at Siena, that we find Sienese painting again. III. THE UMBRIAN SCHOOL[123] Influenced in the beginning by the Sienese, the Umbrian school of painting remained almost entirely religious. The Renaissance passed it by as in a dream, and although in the work of Perugino you find a wonderful and original painter, a painter of landscape too, it is rather in the earlier men, Ottaviano Nelli, whose beautiful work at Gubbio is like a sunshine on the wall of S. Maria Nuova; Gentile da Fabriano, whose Adoration of the Magi is one of the treasures of the Accademia delle Belle Arti; of Niccolò da Foligno, and of Bonfigli whose flower-like pictures are for the most part in the Pinacoteca at Perugia, than in Perugino, or Pinturicchio, or Raphael, that you come upon the most characteristic work of the school. There was no Giotto, no Duccio even, in Umbria. Painting for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty or life, never seems to have taken root in that mystical soil; it is ever with a message of the Church that she comes to us, very simply and sweetly for the most part, it is true, but except in the work of Piero della Francesca, who was not really an Umbrian at all, and in that of his pupil Melozzo da Forli, the work of the school is sentimental and illustrative, passionately beautiful for a moment with Gentile da Fabriano; clairvoyant almost in the best work of Perugino; most beloved, though maybe not most lovely, in the marvellous work of Raphael, who, Umbrian though he be, is really a Roman painter, full of the thoughts of a world he had made his own. Here, in the Uffizi, Gentile da Fabriano is represented by parts of an altar-piece, four isolated saints, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Nicholas of Bari, St. John Baptist, and St. George. It is rather in the beautiful work of Piero della Francesca, and of Signorelli, in the rare and lovely work of Melozzo da Forli, in the sweet and holy work of Perugino, the perfect work of Raphael, that Umbria is represented in the Uffizi, than in the mutilated altar-piece of Gentile da Fabriano. Piero della Francesca was born about 1416 at the little town of Borgo San Sepolcro, just within the borders of Tuscany towards Arezzo.[124] He was a great student of perspective, a friend of mathematicians, of Fra Luca Paccioli, for instance, who later became the friend of Leonardo da Vinci. His work has force, and is always full of the significance of life. Influenced by Paolo Uccello, founding his work on a really scientific understanding of certain laws of vision, of drawing, his work seems to have been responsible for much that is so splendid in the work of Signorelli and Perugino. Nor is he without a faint and simple beauty, which is altogether delightful in his pictures in the National Gallery, for instance the Nativity and the Baptism of our Lord. Here, in the Uffizi, are two portraits from his hand--Count Federigo of Urbino, and his wife Battista Sforza (1300), painted in 1465. Splendid and full of confidence, they are the work of a man who is a consummate draughtsman, and whose drawing here, at any rate, is a thing of life. On the back of these panels Piero has painted an allegory, or a trionfo, whose meaning no one has yet read. The Uffizi has lately been enriched by a work of his pupil, that rare painter, Melozzo da Forli. Two panels of the Annunciation, very beautiful in Colour and full of something that seems strange, coming from that Umbrian country, so mystical and simple, hang now with the portraits of Piero. Nor is the work of Melozzo da Forli's pupil, Marco Palmezzano, whose facile work litters the Gallery of Forli, wanting, for here is a Crucifixion (1095) from his hand, certainly one of his more important pictures. Pietro Vanucci, called Il Perugino, was born about 1446 at Castel della Pieve, some twenty-six miles from Perugia. The greatest master of the Umbrian School, for we are content to call Raphael a Roman painter, his work, so sweet and lovely at its best, is at its worst little better than a repetition of his own mannerisms. Here, in the Uffizi, however, we have four of his best works--the three great portraits, Francesco delle Opere (287), Alessandro Braccesi (1217), and the Portrait of a Lady (1120), long given to Raphael, but which Mr. Berenson assures us is Perugino's; and the Madonna and Child of the Tribuna, painted in 1493. The Francesco delle Opere was perhaps his first portrait, full of virility beyond anything else in his work, save his own portrait at Perugia. For many years this picture, owing, it might seem, to a mistake of the Chevalier Montalvo, was supposed to represent Perugino himself, so that the picture was hung in the Gallery of the Portraits of Painters. At last an inscription was discovered on the back of the picture, which reads as follows: _1494, D'Luglio Pietro Perugino Pinse Franco Delopa_. Francesco delle Opere was a Florentine painter, the brother of Giovanni delle Corniole. He died at Venice, and it may well be that it was at Venice that Perugino first met him. Perugino's picture shows us Francesco, a clean-shaven and young person, holding a scroll on which is written, "Trineta Deum;" the portrait is a half-length, and the hands are visible. In the background is a characteristic country of hill and valley under the deep serene sky, the light and clear golden air that we see in so much of his work. The Portrait of a Lady (1120), long given to Raphael, comes to the Uffizi from the Grand Ducal Villa of Poggio a Caiano; it was supposed to be the portrait of Maddalena Strozzi, wife of Angela Doni. The portrait shows us a young woman, in a Florentine dress of the period, while around her neck is a gold chain, from which hangs a little cross. The Portrait of a Young Man (1217) is painted on wood, and is life size. The Madonna and Child, with two Saints, was painted in 1493 for the Church of S. Domenico at Fiesole, and was placed in the Uffizi by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold in 1756. Madonna sits a little indifferent on a throne under an archway, holding the Child, who turns towards St. John Baptist as he gazes languidly on the ground; while St. Sebastian, a beautiful youth, stands on the other side, looking upwards, and though the arrows have pierced his flesh, he is still full of affected grace, and is so occupied with his prayers that he has not noticed them. On the base of the throne, Perugino has written his name, _Petrus Perusinus Pinxit, An. 1493_. It is in such a work as this that Perugino is really least great. Painted to order, as we may think, it is so full of affectation, of a kind of religiosity, that there is no room left for sincerity. And yet how well he has composed this picture after all, so that there is no sense of crowding, and the sun and sky are not so far away. Is it perhaps that in an age that has become suspicious of any religious emotion we are spoiled for such a picture as this, finding in what it may be was just a natural expression of worship to the simple Friars of S. Domenico long ago, all the ritualism and affectation in which we should find it necessary to hide ourselves before we might approach her, as she seemed to them, a Queen enthroned, _causa nostrae Laetitiae_, between two saints whose very names we find it difficult to remember? How often in our day has Perugino been accused of insincerity, yet it was not so long ago when he lived. Almost all his life he was engaged in painting for the Church those things which were most precious in her remembrance. If men found him insincere, it is strange that among so much that was eager and full of sincerity his work was able to hold its own. His pupil Raphael, that most beloved name, is represented here in the Uffizi only by the Madonna del Cardellino (1129); for the other works attributed to him in the Tribuna are not his. The picture is in his early manner, and was painted about 1548. It has, like so much of Raphael's work, suffered restoration; and indeed these compositions from his hand no longer hold us as they used to do, whether because of that repainting or no, I know not. It is as a portrait painter we think of Raphael to-day, and as the painter of the Stanze at Rome; and therefore I prefer to speak of him with regard to his work in the Pitti Gallery rather than here. With him the Umbrian School passed into the world. IV. THE VENETIAN SCHOOL Nearly all the Venetian pictures were bought in 1654 by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici from Messer Paolo del Sera, a Florentine merchant in Venice. More truly representative of the Renaissance, its humanism and splendour, than any other school of painting in Italy, the earlier works of that great Venetian School are not seen to advantage in the Uffizi. There is nothing here by Jacopo Bellini, nothing by his son Gentile; nor any work from the hands of Antonio or Bartolommeo Vivarini, or Antonello da Messina, who apparently introduced oil painting into Venice. It is not till we come to Giovanni Bellini, born about 1430, that we find a work of the Quattrocento in the delightful but puzzling Allegory (631), where Our Lady sits enthroned beside a lagoon in a strange and lovely landscape of rocks and trees; while beside her kneels St. Catherine of Alexandria, and again, St. Catherine of Siena; farther away stand St. Peter and St. Paul, while below children are playing with fruit and a curious tree; on the other side are Job and St. Sebastian, while in the background you may see the story of the life of St. Anthony. This mysterious picture certainly stands alone in Giovanni Bellini's work, and suggests the thoughts at least of Mantegna; and while it is true that Giovanni had worked at Padua, one is surprised to come upon its influence so late in his life.[125] The influence of the Bellini is to be found in almost all the great painters of Venice in the Cinquecento. We come upon it first in the work of Vittore Carpaccio, of which there is but a fragment here, the delicate little picture, the Finding of the True Cross (583 _bis_); while in two works attributed to Bissolo and Cima da Conegliano (584, 564 _bis_), we see too the influence of Bellini. If Carpaccio was the greatest pupil of Gentile Bellini, in Giorgione we see the first of those marvellous painters who were taught their art by his brother Giovanni. Giorgio Barbarelli, called Giorgione, was born at Castelfranco, a little town in the hills not far from Padua, in 1478. Three of his rare works--there are scarcely more than some fifteen in the world--are here in the Uffizi, the two very early pictures--but all his works were early, for he died in 1510--the Trial of Moses (621), and the Judgment of Solomon (630), and the beautiful portrait of a Knight of Malta (622). Giorgione was the dayspring of the Renaissance in Venice. His work, as Pater foretold of it, has attained to the condition of Music. And though in the portrait of the Knight of Malta, for instance, we have to admit much repainting, something of the original glamour still lingers, so that in looking on it even to-day we may see to how great a place the painters of Venice had been called. It is in the work of his fellow-pupil and Titian that the great Venetian treasure of the Uffizi lies. In the Madonna with St. Anthony (633) we have a picture in Giorgione's early manner, and a later, but still early work, in the Flora (626). The two portraits, Eleonora Gonzaga and Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, were painted in Venice in 1536 or 1538, and came into the Uffizi with the other Urbino pictures, with the Venus of Urbino (1117), for instance, where Titian has painted the Bella of the Pitti Palace naked on a couch, a little dog at her feet, and in her hand a chaplet of roses. In the background two maids search for a gown in a great chest under a loggia. This picture, first mentioned in a letter of 1538, was painted for Duke Guidobaldo della Rovere. The Venus with the little Amor (1108) appears to have been painted about 1545. It is not from Urbino. Dr. Gronau thinks it may be identical with the Venus "shortly described in a book of the Guardaroba of Grand Duke Cosimo II in the year 1621." The Portrait of Bishop Beccadelli (1116) was painted in July 1552, and is signed by Titian. It was bought, with the other Venetian pictures, by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in 1654. I say nothing of Titian here: preferring to speak of him in dealing with his more various and numerous work in the Pitti Palace. Other pupils of Giovanni Bellini, beside Giorgione and Titian, are found here--Palma Vecchio for instance--in a poor picture of Judith with the Head of Holofernes (619); Rondinelli in a Portrait of a Man (354) and a Madonna and two Saints (384); Sebastiano del Piombo in the Farnesina (1123), long given to Raphael, and the Death of Adonis (592). All these men, whose work is so full of splendour, came under the influence of Giorgione after passing through Bellini's bottega. Nor did Lorenzo Lotto, the pupil of Alvise Vivarini, escape the authority of that serene and perfect work, whose beauty lingered so quietly over the youth of the greatest painter of Italy, Tiziano Vecelli: his Holy Family (575) seems to be a work of Giorgione himself almost, that has suffered some change; that change was Lotto. Titian's own pupils, Paris Bordone, Tintoretto, and Schiavone, may also be found here; the first in a Portrait of a Young Man (607), full of confidence and force. Tintoretto has five works here, beside the portrait of himself (378): the Bust of a Young Man (577), the Portrait of Admiral Vernier (601), the Portrait of an Old Man (615), the Portrait of Jacopo Sansovino (638), and a Portrait of a Man (649). His portraits are full of an immense splendour; they sum up often rhetorically enough all that was superficial in the subject, representing him as we may suppose he hardly hoped to see himself. Without the subtle distinction of Titian's art, or the marvellous power of characterisation and expression that he possessed with the earlier men, Tintoretto's work is noble, and almost lyrical in its confidence and beauty. In his day Venice seems to have been the capital of the world, peopled by a race of men splendid and strong, beside whom the men of our time, even the best of them, seem a little vulgar, a little wanting in dignity and life. Two pictures by Paolo Veronese, the early Martyrdom of S. Giustina (589), and the Holy Family and St. Catherine (1136), bring the period to a close. It is a different school of painting altogether that we see in the Piazzetta of Canaletto (1064), perhaps the last picture painted by a Venetian in the gallery. THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS Andrea Mantegna was born, not at Padua, where his greatest work is to be found--three frescoes in the Eremitani--but at Vicenza. Here in the Uffizi, however, we have two works of his middle period, certainly among the best, if not the most beautiful, of his easel pictures. In one we see Madonna and Child in a rocky landscape, where there are trees and flowers (1025); the other is a triptych (1111), one of the many priceless things to be found here. In the midst you may see the Three Kings at the feet of Jesus Parvulus in his Mother's arms, while on one side Mantegna has painted the Presentation in the Temple, and on the other the Resurrection. Long ago this marvellous miniature, that even to-day seems to shine like a precious stone, was in the possession of the Gonzagas of Mantua, from whom it is supposed the Medici bought it. Five male portraits by the Bergamesque master Moroni are to be found here. One (360) is said to be a portrait of himself, though it certainly bears no resemblance to the portrait at Bergamo. I cannot forbear from mentioning the Portrait of a Scholar, which seems to me one of his best works. Moroni was born at Bondo, not far from Albino, in 1525. It is probable that Moretto, who, as Morelli suggests, was a Brescian by birth, though his parents originally came from the same valley as Moroni, Valle del Serio, was his master. Moretto is, I think, a greater painter than Moroni, though perhaps we are only beginning to appreciate the latter. Three pictures here are from the hand of Correggio: the early small panel of Madonna and Child with Angels (1002), once ascribed to Titian, a naïve and charming little work; the Repose in Egypt (1118), grave and beautiful enough, but in some way I cannot explain a little disappointing; and the Madonna adoring her little Son (1134), which is rather commonplace in colour, though delightful in conception. It might seem impossible within the covers of one book to do more than touch upon the enormous wealth of ancient art in the possession of almost every city in Italy; and here in Florence, more than anywhere else, I know my feebleness. If these few notes, for indeed they are nothing more, serve to group the pictures hung in the Uffizi into Schools, to win a certain order out of what is already less a chaos than of old, to give to the reader some idea almost at a glance of what the Uffizi really possesses of the various schools of Italian painting, they will have served their purpose.[126] Of the sculpture, too, I say nothing. Vastly more important and beloved of old than to-day, when the work of the Greeks themselves has come into our hands, and above all the Greek work of the fifth century B.C., there is not to be found in the Uffizi a single marble of Greek workmanship, and but few Roman works that are still untampered with. For myself, I cannot look with pleasure on a Roman Venus patched by the Renaissance, for I have seen the beauty of the Melian Aphrodite; and there are certain things in Rome, in Athens, in London, which make it for ever impossible for us to be sincere in our worship at this shrine. FOOTNOTES: [121] Alberti, _Opere Volgari_ (Firenze, 1847), vol. iv. p. 75. [122] Mr. Berenson calls it a Portrait of Perugino, though for long it passed as a Portrait of Verrocchio by Lorenzo di Credi. [123] For a full account of the Umbrian school see my _Cities of Umbria_. [124] In 1416, Borgo S. Sepolcro was not just within the borders of Tuscany of course, as it is to-day, but just without: it was part of the Papal State till Eugenius IV sold it to Florence. [125] Mr. Berenson calls the picture An Allegory of the Tree of Life, and adds that it is certainly a late work of Giovanni. [126] Of the Flemish, Dutch, German, and French pictures here I intend to say no more than to name a few among them. The most valuable foreign picture in Florence for the student of Italian art is Van der Goes' (1425-82) great triptych (1525) of the Adoration of the Shepherds, with the Family of the donor Messer Portinari, agent of the Medici in Bruges. In the same sala are two Memlings (703, 778), and a Roger van der Weyden (795). Two Holbeins, the Richard Southwell (765), and Sir Thomas More (799), are in the German room; while Dürer's noble and lovely Adoration of the Magi (1141) is still in the Tribuna, and his portrait of his Father (766) is with the other German pictures in the German room. Some too eloquent works of Rubens hang apart, while here and there you may see a Vandyck--Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart (1523), for instance, or Jean de Montfort (1115), a little pensive and proud amid the splendour of Italy. XXIV. FLORENCE THE PITTI GALLERY During the last years of Cosimo de' Medici, Luca Pitti, that rare old knight, sometime Gonfaloniere of Justice, thought to possess himself of the state of Florence, and to this end, besides creating a new Balia against the wishes of Cosimo, distributed, as it is said, some 20,000 ducats in one day, so that the whole city came after him in flocks, and not Cosimo, but he, was looked upon as the governor of Florence. "So foolish was he in his own conceit, that he began two stately and magnificent houses," Machiavelli tells us, "one in Florence, the other at Rusciano, not more than a mile away: but that in Florence was greater and more splendid than the house of any other private citizen whatsoever. To finish this latter, he baulked no extraordinary way, for not only the citizens and better sort presented him and furnished him with what was necessary for it, but the common people gave him all of their assistance; besides, all that were banished or guilty of murder, felony, or any other thing which exposed them to punishment, had sanctuary at that house provided they would give him their labour." Now, when Cosimo was dead, and Piero de' Medici the head of that family, Niccolò Soderini was made Gonfaloniere of Justice, and thinking to secure the liberty of the city he began many good things, but perfected nothing, so that he left that office with less honour than he entered into it. This fortified Piero's party exceedingly, so that his enemies began to resent it and work together to consider how they might kill him, for in supporting Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the Dukedom of Milan--which his father Francesco, just dead, had stolen for himself--they saw, or thought they saw, the way in which Piero would deal if he could with Florence. Thus the Mountain, as the party of his enemies was called, leaned threatening to crush him more surely every day. But Piero, who lay sick at Careggi, armed himself, as did his friends, who were not few in the city. Now the leaders of his enemies were Luca Pitti, Dietosalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and most courageous of all, Niccolò Soderini. He, taking arms, as Piero had done, and followed by most of the people of his quarter, went one morning to Luca's house, entreating him to mount and ride with him to Palazzo Vecchio for the security of the Senate, who, as he said, were of his side. "To do this," said he, "is victory." But Luca had no mind for this game, for many reasons,--for one, he had already received promises and rewards from Piero; for another, he had married one of his nieces to Giovanni Tornabuoni,--so that, instead of joining him, he admonished Soderini to lay aside his arms and return quietly to his house. In the meantime the Senate, with the magistrates, had closed the doors of Palazzo Vecchio without appearing for either side, though the whole city was in tumult. After much discussion, they agreed, since Piero could not be present, for he was sick, to go to him in his palace, but Soderini would not. So they set out without him; and arrived, one was deputed to speak of the tumult, and to declare that they who first took arms were responsible; and that understanding Piero was the man, they came to be informed of his design, and to know whether it were for the advantage of the city. Piero made answer that not they who first took arms were blameworthy, but they who gave occasion for it: that if they considered their behaviour towards him, their meetings at night, their subscriptions and practices to defeat him, they would not wonder at what he had done; that he desired nothing but his own security, and that Cosimo and his sons knew how to live honourably in Florence, either with or without a Balia. Then, turning on Dietosalvi and his brothers, who were all present, he reproached them severely for the favours they had received from Cosimo, and the great ingratitude which they had returned; which reprimand was delivered with so much zeal, that, had not Piero himself restrained them, there were some present who would certainly have killed them. So he had it his own way, and presently new senators being chosen and another gonfaloniere, the people were called together in the Piazza and a new Balia was created, all of Piero's creatures. This so terrified "the Mountain" that they fled out of the city, but Luca Pitti remained, trusting in Giovanni Tornabuoni and the promises of Piero. Now mark his fall. He quickly learned the difference betwixt victory and misfortune, betwixt honour and disgrace. His house, which formerly was thronged with visitors and the better sort of citizens, was now grown solitary and unfrequented. When he appeared abroad in the streets, his friends and relations were not only afraid to accompany him, but even to own or salute him, for some of them had lost their honours for doing it, some their estates, and all of them were threatened. The noble structures which he had begun were given over by the workmen, the good deeds requited with contumely, the honours he had conferred with infamy and disgrace. For many persons, who in the day of his authority had loaded him with presents, required them again in his distress, pretending they were but loans and no more. Those who before had cried him to the skies, cursed him down as fast for his ingratitude and violence; so that now, when it was too late, he began to repent himself that he had not taken Soderini's advice and died honourably, seeing that he must now live with dishonour. So far Machiavelli. The unfinished, half-ruinous palace, designed in 1444 by Brunellesco, was a century later sold by the Pitti, quite ruined now, to Eleonora, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, and was finished by Ammanati. The great wings were added later. In May 1550, Cosimo I entered Palazzo Pitti as his Grand-Ducal residence. To-day it is the King of Italy's Palace in Florence. The Galleria Palatina is a gallery of the masterpieces of the high Renaissance, formed by the Grand Dukes, who brought here from their own villas and from the Uffizi the greatest works in their possession. Like other Italian galleries, it suffered from Napoleon's generals; but though sixty or more pictures were taken to Paris, they all seem to have been returned. Here the Grand Dukes gathered ten pictures by Titian eight by Raphael, as well as two, the Madonna del Baldacchino and the Vision of Ezekiel, which he designed, ten by Andrea del Sarto, six by Fra Bartolommeo, two lovely Peruginos, two splendid portraits by Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, four portraits by Tintoretto, several pictures by Rubens, two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and many lesser pictures. In the royal apartments, among other interesting or beautiful things, is Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo's return from Naples in 1480. It is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if less catholic Salon Carré, the Tribuna of Italian painting. It is strange that, among all the beautiful and splendid pictures with which the Grand Dukes surrounded themselves, there is not one from the hand of Leonardo, nor one that Michelangelo has painted. And then, of the many here that pass under the name of Botticelli, only the Pallas and the Centaur in the royal apartments seems to be really his; so that when we look for the greatest pictures of the Florentine school, we must be content with the strangely unsatisfactory work of Andrea del Sarto, often lovely enough it is true, but as often insincere, shallow, not at one with itself, and certainly a stranger here in Florence. The work of Andrea del Sarto, as we are assured, might but for his tragic story have been so splendid; but in truth that sentimental and pathetic tale neither excuses nor explains his failure, if failure it be. He is the first artist who has worked badly because he loved a woman. He was born in 1456, and became the pupil of Piero di Cosimo. There in that fantastic bottega he must have met Fra Bartolommeo, who later influenced him so deeply. Nor was Michelangelo, or at least his grand and tremendous art, without its effect upon one so easily moved, so subject to every passing mood, as Andrea. Yet he never seems to have expressed just himself, save in those tragic portraits of himself and of his wife, of which there are three here in the Pitti (188, 280, 1176). He has been called the faultless painter, and indeed he seems to be incapable of fault, to be really a little effeminate, a little vague, bewildered by the sculpture of Michelangelo, the confusion of art in Florence, the advent of the colourists, of whom here in Tuscany he is perhaps the chief. It is no intellectual passion you find in that soft, troubled work, where from every picture Lucrezia del Fede looks out at you, posing as Madonna or Magdalen or just herself, and even so, discontented, unhappy, unsatisfactory because she is too stupid to be happy at all. If she were Andrea's tragedy, one might think that even without her his life could scarcely have been different. If we compare, here in the Pitti Gallery, the two pictures of the Annunciation from his hand, we shall see how completely the enthusiasm of his early work is wanting in his later pictures. Something, some divine energy, seems to have gone out of his life, and ever after he is but trying to revive or to counterfeit it. Now and then, as in the Disputa (172), which marks the very zenith of his art, he is almost a great painter, but the Madonna with six Saints (123), painted in 1524, is already full of repetitions,--the kneeling figures in the foreground, for instance, that we find again in the Deposition (58) painted in the same year. Nor in the Assumption (225) painted in 1526, nor in the later picture (191) of 1531, is there any significance, energy, or beauty: they are arrangements of draperies, splendid luxurious pictures without sincerity or emotion. It is not fair to judge him by the St. John Baptist, which has suffered too much from restoration to be any longer his work. Thus it is at last as the painter of the Annunziata and the Scalzo that we must think of him, which, full of grandiose and heavy forms and draperies though they are, still please us better than anything else he achieved, save the great Last Supper of S. Salvi and the portraits of himself and his wife. As a Florentine painter he seems ever among strangers: it is as an exiled Venetian, one who had been forced by some irony of circumstances to forego his birthright in that invigorating and worldly city, which might have revealed to him just the significance of life which we miss in his pictures, that he appears to us; a failure difficult to explain, a weak but beautiful nature spoiled by mediocrity. Fra Bartolommeo was another Florentine who seems, for a moment at any rate, to have been bewildered by the influence of Michelangelo, but as a profound conviction saved him from insincerity, so his splendid sensuality preserved his work from sentimentalism. Born about 1475 at Savignano, not far from Prato, his father sent him to Florence, placing him in the care of Cosimo Rosselli, according to Vasari, but more probably, as we may think, under Piero di Cosimo. Here he seems to have come under the influence of Leonardo, and to have been friends with Mariotto Albertinelli. The great influence of his life, however, was Fra Girolamo Savonarola, whom he would often go to S. Marco to hear. Savonarola was preaching as ever against vanities,--that is to say, pictures, statues, verses, books: things doubtless anathema to one whose whole future depended upon the amount of interest he could awaken in himself. At this time, it seems, Savonarola was asserting his conviction that "in houses where young maidens dwelt it was dangerous and improper to retain pictures wherein there were undraped figures." It seems to have been the custom in Florence at the time of the Carnival to build cabins of wood and furze, and on the night of Shrove Tuesday to set them ablaze, while the people danced around them, joining hands, according to ancient custom, amid laughter and songs. This Savonarola had denounced, and, winning the ear of the people for the moment, he persuaded those who were wont to dance to bring "pictures and works of sculpture, many by the most excellent masters," and to cast them into the fire, with books, musical instruments, and such. To this pile, Vasari tells us, Bartolommeo brought all his studies and drawings which he had made from the nude, and threw them into the flames; so also did Lorenzo di Credi and many others, who were called Piagnoni, among them, no doubt, Sandro Botticelli. The people soon tired, however, of their new vanity, as they had done of the beautiful things they had destroyed at his bidding, and, the party opposed to Savonarola growing dangerous, Bartolommeo with others shut themselves up in S. Marco to guard Savonarola. Fra Girolamo's excommunication, torture, and death, which followed soon after, seem finally to have decided the gentle Bartolommeo to assume the religious habit, which he did not long after at S. Domenico in Prato. Later we find him back in Florence in the Convent of S. Marco, where he is said to have met Raphael and to have learned much from him of the art of perspective. However that may be, he continued to paint there in S. Marco really--saving a journey to Rome where he came under the influence of Michelangelo, a visit to S. Martino in Lucca, and his journey to Venice in 1506--for the rest of his life, being buried there at last in 1517. Six pictures from his hand hang to-day in the Pitti,--a Holy Family (256), the beautiful Deposition (64), an Ecce Homo in fresco (377), the Marriage of St. Catherine, painted in 1512 (208), a St. Mark, painted in 1514 (125), and Christ and the Four Evangelists, painted in 1516 (159). The unpleasing "Madonna appearing to St. Bernard," painted in 1506, now in the Accademia, was his first work after he became a friar. Here, in the Pitti, Bartolommeo is not at his best; for his earlier and more delicate manner, so full of charm and a sort of daintiness, one must go to Lucca, where his picture of Madonna with St. Stephen and St. John Baptist hangs in the Duomo. The grand and almost pompous works in Florence, splendid though they may be in painting, in composition, in colour, scarcely move us at all, so that it might almost seem that in following Savonarola he lost not the world only but his art also, that refined and delicate art which comes to us so gently in his earliest pictures. Something passionate and pathetic, truly, may be found in the Pietà here, together with a certain dramatic effectiveness that is rare in his work. With what an effort, for instance, has St. John lifted the body of his Master from the great cross in the background, how passionately Mary Magdalen has flung herself at His feet; yet the picture seems to be without any real significance, without spirituality certainly, only another colossal group of figures that even Michelangelo has refused to carve. [Illustration: PIETÀ _By Fra Bartolomeo. Pitti Gallery_ _Anderson_] On coming to the work of Raphael, to the work of Titian, we find the great treasure of the Pitti Gallery, beside which the rest is but a background: it is for them really, after all, that we have come here. Raphael Sanzio, the "most beloved name in the history of painting," was born at Urbino in 1483. The pupil first of his father maybe, though Giovanni died when his son was but eleven years old, and later of Timoteo Viti, we hear of Raphael first in the bottega of the greatest of the Umbrian painters, Perugino, at Perugia. Two works of Perugino hang to-day in the Pitti Gallery, the Madonna and Child (219) and the Entombment (164), painted in 1495, for the nuns of S. Chiara. Vasari has much to say of the latter, relating how Francesco del Pugliare offered to give them three times as much as they had paid Perugino for the picture, and to cause another exactly like it to be executed for them by the same hand; but they would not consent, because Pietro had told them he did not think he could equal the one they possessed. It is really Umbria itself we see in that lovely work, which has impressed Bartolommeo so profoundly, the Lake of Trasimeno, surrounded by villages that climb the hills just as Perugino has painted the little city in this picture. And it is in this mystical and smiling country, where the light is so soft and tender, softer than on any Tuscan hills, that the most perfect if not the greatest painter of the Renaissance grew up. You may find some memory of that beautiful land of hills and quiet valleys even in his latest work, after he had learned from every master, and summed up, as it were, the whole Renaissance in his achievement. But in four pictures here in the Pitti, it is the influence of Florence you find imposing itself upon the art of Umbria, transforming it, strengthening it, and suggesting it may be, the way of advance. Something of the art of Pietro you see in the portraits of Madallena Doni (59), Angelo Doni (61), and La Donna Gravida (229), something so akin to the Francesco delle Opere of the Uffizi that it would not be surprising to find the Madallena Doni, at any rate, attributed to Perugino. Yet superficial though they be in comparison with the later portraits, they mark the patient endeavour of his work in Florence, the realism that this city, so scornful of _forestieri_, was forcing upon him as it had already done on Perugino, who in the Francesco, the Bracessi, and the two monks of the Accademia, touches life itself, perhaps, only there in all his work. It is the influence of Florence we seem to find too in the simplicity of the Madonna del Granduca (178). Here is a picture certainly in the manner of Perugino, but with something lost, some light, some beatitude, yet with something gained also, if only in a certain measure of restraint, a real simplicity that is foreign to that master. And then, if we compare it with the Madonna della Sedia (151), which is said to have been painted on the lid of a wine cask, we shall find, I think, that however many new secrets he may learn Raphael never forgot a lesson. It is Perugino who has taught him to compose so perfectly, that the space, small or large, of the picture itself becomes a means of beauty. How perfectly he has placed Madonna with her little Son, and St. John praying beside them, so that until you begin to take thought you are not aware how difficult that composition must have been, and indeed you never remember how small that _tondo_ really is. How eagerly these easel pictures of Madonna have been loved, and yet to-day how little they mean to us; some virtue seems to have gone out of them, so that they move us no longer, and we are indeed a little impatient at their fame, and ready to accuse Raphael of I know not what insincerity or dreadful facility. Yet we have only to look at the portraits to know we are face to face with one of the greatest and most universal of painters. Consider, then, La Donna Velata (245), or the Pope Julius II (79), or the Leo X with the two Cardinals (40), how splendid they are, how absolutely characterised and full of life, life seen in the tranquillity of the artist, who has understood everything, and with whom truth has become beauty. In the Leo X with the Cardinals, Giulio de' Medici and Lorenzo dei Rossi, how tactfully Raphael has contrived the light and shadow so that the fat heavy face of the Pope is not over emphasised, and you discern perfectly the beauty of the head, the delicacy of the nostrils, the clever, sensual, pathetic, witty mouth. And the hands seem to be about to move, to be a little tremulous with life, to be on the verge of a gesture, to have only just become motionless on the edge of the book. It is in these portraits that the art of Raphael is at its greatest, becomes universal, achieves immortality. There remains to be considered the splendid ever-living work of Titian. The early work of the greatest painter of Italy, of the world, greatest in the variety, number, and splendour of his pictures, is represented in the Pitti, happily enough by one of the most lovely of all Italian paintings, the Concert (185), so long given to Giorgone. A monk in cowl and tonsure touches the keys of a harpsichord, while beside him stands an older man, a clerk and perhaps a monk too, who grasps the handle of a viol; in the background, a youthful, ambiguous figure, with a cap and plume, waits, perhaps on some interval, to begin a song. Yet, indeed, that is not the picture, which, whatever its subject may be, would seem to be more expressive than any other in the world. Some great joy, some great sorrow, seems about to declare itself. What music does he hear, that monk with the beautiful sensitive hands, who turns away towards his companion? Something has awakened in his soul, and he is transfigured. Perhaps for the first time, in some rhythm of the music, he has understood everything, the beauty of life which passeth like a sunshine, now that it is too late, that his youth is over and middle age is upon him. His companion, on the threshold of old age, divines his trouble and lays a hand on his shoulder quietly, as though to still the tumult of his heart. Like a vision youth itself, ambiguous, about to possess everything, waits, like a stranger, as though invoked by the music, on an interval that will never come again, that is already passed. If Titian is really the sole painter of this picture, how loyal he has been to his friend, to that new spirit which lighted Venetian art as the sun makes beautiful the world. But indeed one might think that, even with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgone had some part in the Concert, which, after all, passed as his altogether for two hundred and fifty years; was bought, indeed, as his in 1654, only seventy-eight years after Titian's death, by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici from Paolo del Sera, the Florentine collector in Venice. That figure of a youth, ambiguous in its beauty--could any other hand than Giorgone's have painted it; does it ever appear in Titian's innumerable masterpieces at all? Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three, Giorgone must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly sold as his. Titian's other pictures here, with the exception of the Head of Christ (228) and the Magdalen (67), are portraits, all, save the so-called Tommaso Mosti, painted certainly before 1526, of his great middle period. The Magdalen comes from Urbino, where Vasari saw it in the Guardaroba of the great palace. The quality of the picture is one of sheer colour; there is here no other "subject" than a beautiful nude woman,--it is called a Magdalen because it is not called a Venus. Consider, then, the harmony of the gold hair and the fair flesh and the blue of the sky: it is a harmony in gold and rose and blue. The earliest of the great portraits is the Ippolito de' Medici (201); it was painted in Venice in October 1532.[127] Vasari saw this picture in the Guardaroba of Cosimo I. It is a half-length portrait of a distinguished man, still very young, that we see. The Cardinal is not dressed as a Churchman, but as a grandee of Hungary. In the sad and cunning face we seem to foresee the fate that awaited him at Gaeta scarcely three years later, where he was imprisoned and poisoned. The beautiful dull red of the tunic reminds one of the unforgetable red of the cloth on the table beside which Philip II stands in the picture in the Prado. From this profound and almost touching portrait we come to the joy of the Bella (18). It is a hymn to Physical Beauty. There is nothing in the world more splendid or more glad than this portrait, perhaps of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino. How often Titian has painted her!--once as it might seem as the Venus of the Tribune (1117), and again in her own character in the portrait now in the Uffizi (599), where certainly she is not so fair as she we see here as Bella and there as Venus. If this, indeed, be the Duchess of Urbino, then the Venus is also her portrait, for the Bella is described in the list of fine pictures which were brought to Florence in 1631 as a portrait of the same person we know as the Venus of the Tribune. But the first we hear of the Bella is in a letter of the Duke of Urbino in 1536, while the portrait in the Uffizi of Eleonora Gonzaga was painted in Venice in that year; and since the Duchess is certainly an older woman than the Bella, we must conclude either that the Bella was painted many years earlier, which seems impossible, or that it is not a portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga. And, indeed, the latter conclusion seems likely, for who can believe that the Duke would have cared for a nude portrait of his wife as Venus? It seems probable that the Bella is a portrait of his mistress rather than his wife, a mistress whom, since she was so fair, he did not scruple to ask Titian to paint as Venus herself. A harmony in blue and gold, Dr. Gronau calls the picture; adding that, "in spite of its faults or of the restorations which have made it a mere shadow of its former splendour, it remains an immortal example of what the art of the Renaissance at its zenith regarded as the ideal of feminine beauty." If it is beauty and joy we find in the Bella, it is a profound force and confidence that we come upon in the portrait of Aretino painted before 1545,--and life above all. Here is one of the greatest blackguards of history, the "Scourge of Princes," the blackmailer of Popes, the sensualist of the Sonnetti Lussuriosi, the witty author of the _Ragionamenti_. We seem to see his vulgarity, his immense ability, his splendour, and his baseness, and to understand why Titian was wise enough to take him for his friend. What energy, almost bestial in its brutality, you find in those coarse features and over-eloquent lips, and yet the head is powerful, really intellectual too, though without any delicacy or fineness. Aretino himself presented this portrait to Cosimo I in October 1545, inexplicably explaining that the rendering of the dress was not perfect.[128] In another portrait of about the same time, the Young Englishman (92), we have Titian at his best. The extraordinarily beautiful English face, fulfilled with some incalculable romance, is to me at least by far the most delightful portrait in Florence. One seems to understand England, her charm, her fascination, her extraordinary pride and persistence, in looking at this picture of one of her sons. All the tragedy of her kings, the adventure to be met with on her seas, the beauty and culture of Oxford, and the serenity of her country places, come back to one fresh and unsullied by memories of the defiling and trumpery cities that so lately have begun to destroy her. Who this beautiful figure may be we know not, nor, indeed, where the picture may have come from; for if it comes from Urbino it is not well described in the inventory of 1631. After looking upon such a work as this, the Philip II (200), fine though it is, and only less splendid than the Madrid picture, the Portrait of a Man (215), both painted in Augsburg in 1548, and even the lovely portrait of Giulia Varana, Duchess of Urbino, in the royal apartments, seem to lose something of their splendour. Yet if we compare them with the work of Raphael or Tintoretto, they assuredly possess an energy and a vitality that even those masters were seldom able to express. For Titian seems to have created life with something of the ease and facility of a natural force; to have desired always Beauty as the only perfect flower of life; and while he was not content with the mere truth, and never with beauty divorced from life, he has created life in such abundance that his work may well be larger than the achievement of any two other men, even the greatest in painting; yet in his work, in the work that is really his, you will find nothing that is not living, nothing that is not an impassioned gesture reaching above and beyond our vision into the realm of that force which seems to be eternal. FOOTNOTES: [127] Gronau, _Titian_ (London, 1904), p. 291, where Dr. Gronau suggests it may belong to the following year; see also p. 104. [128] Cf. _Lettere di Pietro Aretino_ (1609), vol. iii. p. 238. XXV. TO FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO How weary one grows of the ways of a city,--yes, even in Florence, where every street runs into the country and one may always see the hills and the sky! But even in Athens, when they built the Parthenon, often, I think, I should have found my way into the olive gardens and vineyards about Kephisos: so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams. And then Florence is a city almost without suburbs;[129] at the gate you find the hills, the olive gardens bordered with iris, the vineyards hedged with the rose. Many and fair are the ways to Fiesole: you may go like a burgess in the tram, or like a lord in a coach, but for me I will go like a young man by the bye ways, like a poor man on my feet, and the dew will be yet on the roses when I set out, and in the vineyards they will be singing among the corn-- "Fiorin fiorello, La mi' Rosina ha il labbro di corallo E l'occhiettino suo sembra un gioiello." And then, who knows what awaits one on the way? "E quando ti riscontro per la via Abbassi gli occhi e rassembri una dea, E la fai consumar la vita mia." Of the ways to Fiesole, one goes by Mugnone and one by S. Gervasio, but it will not be by them that I shall go, but out of Barriera delle Cure; and I shall pass behind the gardens of Villa Palmieri, whither after the second day of the _Decamerone_ Boccaccio's fair ladies and gay lords passed from Poggio Gherardo by a little path "but little used, which was covered with herbs and flowers, that opened under the rising sun, while they listened to the song of the nightingales and other birds." Thus between the garden walls I shall come to S. Domenico. S. Domenico di Fiesole is a tiny village half way up the hill of Fiesole, and on one side of the way is the Dominican convent, and on the other the Villa Medici, while in the valley of Mugnone is an abbey of Benedictines, the Badia di Fiesole, founded in 1028. The convent of Dominican friars, where Fra Angelico and S. Antonino, who was the first novice here, lived, and Cosimo de' Medici walked so often, looking down on Florence and Arno there in the evening, was founded in 1405. Suppressed in the early part of the nineteenth century, the convent was despoiled of its frescoes, but in 1880 it was bought back by the Dominicans, so that to-day it is fulfilling its original purpose as a religious house. The church too has suffered many violations, and to-day there are but two frescoes left of all the work Angelico did here,--a triptych in a chapel, a Madonna and Saints restored by Lorenzo di Credi, and a Crucifixion in the sacristy. Of old, Perugino's Baptism now in the Uffizi hung here, but that was taken by Grand Duke Leopold, who gave in exchange Lorenzo di Credi's picture; but the French stole Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Louvre, and gave nothing in return, so that of all the riches of this little place almost nothing remains, only (and this is rare about Florence at any rate) the original owners are in possession, and you may hear Mass here very sweetly. It is down a lane, again between garden walls, that you must go to the Badia, once the great shrine of the Fiesolans, but since the eleventh century an abbey of Benedictines, where S. Romolo once upon a time lay in peace, till, indeed, the oratory not far from the church was stupidly destroyed. The Badia itself was rebuilt in the fifteenth century for Cosimo de' Medici, by the hand, as it is said, of Brunellesco. Here in the loggia that looks over the city the Platonic Academy often met, so that these very pillars must have heard the gentle voice of Marsilio Ficino, the witty speech of the young Lorenzo, the beautiful words of Pico della Mirandola, the laughter of Simonetta, the footsteps of Vanna Tornabuoni. It was, however, not for the Benedictines but for the Augustinians that Cosimo rebuilt the place, giving them, indeed, one of the most beautiful convents in Italy, and one of the loveliest churches too, a great nave with a transept under a circular vaulting, while the façade is part really of the earlier building, older it may be than S. Miniato or the Baptistery itself, as we now see it; and there the pupils of Desiderio da Settignano have worked and Giovanni di S. Giovanni has painted, while Brunellesco is said to have designed the lectern in the sacristy. Later, Inghirami set up his printing press here, while in the church Giovanni de' Medici in 1452 was made Cardinal, and in the convent Giuliano, the Due de Nemours, died in 1516. Returning from this quiet and beautiful retreat to S. Domenico, one may go very well on foot, though not otherwise, by the old road to Fiesole, still between the garden walls; but then, who would go by the new way, noisy with the shrieking of the trams, while by the old way you may tread in the footsteps of the Bishops of Fiesole? They would rest on the way from Florence at Riposo de' Vescovi, and leave their coach at S. Domenico. By the old way, too, you pass Le Tre Pulzelle, the hostel of the Three Maidens, or at least the place where it stood, and where Leo X stayed in 1516. Farther, too, is the little church of S. Ansano, where there is a host of fair pictures, and then suddenly you are in the great Piazza, littered with the booths of the straw-plaiters, in the keen air of Fiesole, among a ruder and more virile people, who look down on Florence all day long. [Illustration: COSTA S. GEORGIO] And indeed, whatever the historians may say, scorning wise tales of old Villani, the Fiesolani are a very different people from the Florentines; and whether Atlas, with Electra his wife, born in the fifth degree from Japhet son of Noah, built this city upon this rock by the counsel of Apollinus, midway between the sea of Pisa and Rome and the Gulf of Venice, matters little. The Fiesolani are not Florentines, people of the valley, but Etruscans, people of the hills, and that you may see in half an hour any day in their windy piazzas and narrow climbing ways. Rough, outspoken, stark men little women keen and full of salt, they have not the assured urbanity of the Florentine, who, while he scorns you in his soul as a barbarian, will trade with you, eat with you, and humour you, certainly without betraying his contempt. But the Fiesolano is otherwise; quarrelsome he is, and a little aloof, he will not concern himself overmuch about you, and will do his business whether you come or go. And I think, indeed, he still hates the Fiorentino, as the Pisan does, as the Sienese does, with an immortal, cold, everlasting hatred, that maybe nothing will altogether wipe out or cause him to forget. All these people have suffered too much from Florence, who understood the art of victory as little as she understood the art of empire. From the earliest times, as it might seem, Florence, a Roman foundation after all, hated Fiesole, which once certainly was an Etruscan city. Time after time she destroyed it, generally in self-defence. In 1010, for instance, Villani tells us that "the Florentines, perceiving that their city of Florence had no power to rise much while they had overhead so strong a fortress as the city of Fiesole, one night secretly and subtly set an ambush of armed men in divers parts of Fiesole. The Fiesolani, feeling secure as to the Florentines, and not being on their guard against them, on the morning of their chief festival of S. Romolo, when the gates were open and the Fiesolani unarmed, the Florentines entered into the city under cover of coming to the festa; and when a good number were within, the other armed Florentines which were in ambush secured the gates; and on a signal made to Florence, as had been arranged, all the host and power of the Florentines came on horse and on foot to the hill, and entered into the city of Fiesole, and traversed it, slaying scarce any man nor doing any harm, save to those who opposed them. And when the Fiesolani saw themselves to be suddenly and unexpectedly surprised by the Florentines, part of them which were able fled to the fortress, which was very strong, and long time maintained themselves there. The city at the foot of the fortress having been taken and over run by the Florentines, and the strongholds and they which opposed themselves being likewise taken, the common people surrendered themselves on condition that they should not be slain nor robbed of their goods; the Florentines working their will to destroy the city, and keeping possession of the bishop's palace. Then the Florentines made a covenant, that whosoever desired to leave the city of Fiesole and come and dwell in Florence might come safe and sound with all his goods and possessions, or might go to any place which pleased him, for the which thing they came down in great numbers to dwell in Florence, whereof there were and are great families in Florence. And when this was done, and the city was without inhabitants and goods, the Florentines caused it to be pulled down and destroyed, all save the bishop's palace and certain other churches and the fortress, which still held out, and did not surrender under the said conditions." Fifteen years later we read again: "In the year of Christ 1125 the Florentines came with an army to the fortress of Fiesole, which was still standing and very strong, and it was held by certain gentlemen _cattani_ which had been of the city of Fiesole, and thither resorted highwaymen and refugees and evil men, which sometimes infested the roads and country of Florence; and the Florentines carried on the siege so long that for lack of victuals the fortress surrendered, albeit they would never have taken it by storm, and they caused it to be all cast down and destroyed to the foundations, and they made a decree that none should ever dare to build a fortress again at Fiesole."[130] Now whether Villani is strictly right in his chronicle matters little or nothing. We know that Fiesole was an Etruscan city, that with the rise of Rome, like the rest, she became a Roman colony; all this too her ruins confirm. With the fall of Rome, and the barbarian invasions, she was perfectly suited to the needs of the Teutonic invader. What hatred Florence had for her was probably due to the fact that she was a stronghold of the barbarian nobles, and the fact that in 1010, as Villani says, the Fiesolani were content to leave the city and descend to Florence, while the citadel held out and had to be dealt with later, goes to prove that the fight was rather between the Latin commune of Florence and the pirate nobles of Fiesole than between Florence and Fiesole itself. Certainly with the destruction of the alien power at Fiesole the city of Florence gained every immediate security; the last great fortress in her neighbourhood was destroyed. To-day Fiesole consists of a windy Piazza, in which a campanile towers between two hills covered with houses and churches and a host of narrow lanes. In the Piazza stands the Duomo, founded in 1028 by Bishop Jacopo Bavaro, who no doubt wished to bring his throne up the hill from the Badia, where of old it was established. Restored though it is, the church keeps something of its old severity and beauty, standing there like a fortress between the hills and between the valleys. It is of basilica form, with a nave and aisles flanked by sixteen columns of sandstone. As at S. Miniato, the choir is raised over a lofty crypt. There is not perhaps much of interest in the church, but over the west door you may see a statue of S. Romolo, while in the choir in the Salutati Chapel there is the masterpiece of Mino da Fiesole, the tomb of Bishop Salutati, who died in 1465, and opposite a marble reredos of Madonna between S. Antonio and S. Leonardo, by the same master. The beautiful bust of Bishop Leonardo over his tomb is an early work, and the tomb itself is certainly among the most original and charming works of the master. If the reredos is not so fine, it is perhaps only that with so splendid a work before us we are content only with the best of all. But it is not to see a church that we have wandered up to Fiesole, for in the country certainly the churches are less than an olive garden, and the pictures are shamed by the flowers that run over the hills. Lounging about this old fortress of a city, one is caught rather by the aspect of natural things--Val d'Arno, far and far away, and at last a glimpse of the Apennines; Val di Mugnone towards Monte Senario, the night of cypresses about Vincigliata, the olives of Maiano--than by the churches scattered among the trees or hidden in the narrow ways that everywhere climb the hills to lose themselves at last in the woodland or in the cornlands among the vines. You wander behind the Duomo into the Scavi, and it is not the Roman Baths you go to see or the Etruscan walls and the well-preserved Roman theatre: you watch the clouds on the mountains, the sun in the valley, the shadows on the hills, listen to a boy singing to his goats, play with a little girl who has slipped her hand in yours looking for soldi, or wonder at the host of flowers that has run even among these ruins. Even from the windows of the Palazzo Pretorio, which for some foolish reason you have entered on your way to the hills, you do not really see the statues and weapons of these forgotten Etruscan people, but you watch the sun that has perhaps suddenly lighted up the Duomo, or the wind that, like a beautiful thought, for a moment has turned the hills to silver. Or if it be up to S. Francesco you climb, the old acropolis of Fiesole, above the palace of the bishop and the Seminary, it will surely be rather to look over the valley to the farthest hills, where Val di Greve winds towards Siena, than to enter a place which, Franciscan though it be, has nothing to show half so fair as this laughing country, or that Tuscan cypress on the edge of that grove of olives. That love of country life, no longer characteristic of the Florentines, which we are too apt to consider almost wholly English, was long ago certainly one of the most delightful traits of the Tuscan character; for Siena was not behind Florence in her delight in the life of the villa.[131] It is perhaps in the Commentaries of Pius II that a love of country byways, the lanes and valleys about his home, through which, gouty and old, he would have himself carried in a litter, is expressed for the first time with a true understanding and appreciation of things which for us have come to mean a good half of life. No such lovely descriptions of scenery may be found perhaps in any Florentine writer before Lorenzo Magnifico, unless indeed it be in the verse of Sacchetti. Yet the Florentine burgess of the fifteenth century, the very man whose simple and hard common-sense got him wealth, or at least a fine competence, and, as he has told us, a good housewife, and made him one of the toughest traders in Europe, would become almost a poet in his country house. Old Agnolo Pandolfini, talking to his sons, and teaching them his somewhat narrow yet wholesome and delightful wisdom, continually reminds himself of those villas near Florence, some like palaces,--Poggio Gherardo for instance,--some like castles,--Vincigliata perhaps,--"in the purest air, in a laughing country of lovely views, where there are no fogs nor bitter winds, but always fresh water and everything pure and healthy." Certainly Cosimo de' Medici was not the first Florentine to retire from the city perhaps to Careggi, perhaps to S. Domenico, perhaps farther still; for already in Boccaccio's day we hear the praise of country life,--his description of Villa Palmieri, for instance, when at the end of the second day of the _Decamerone_ those seven ladies and their three comrades leave Poggio Gherardo for that palace "about two miles westward," whither they came at six o'clock of a Sunday morning in the year 1348. "When they had entered and inspected everything, and seen that the halls and rooms had been cleaned and decorated, and plentifully supplied with all that was needed for sweet living, they praised its beauty and good order, and admired the owner's magnificence. And on descending, even more delighted were they with the pleasant and spacious courts, the cellars filled with choice wines, and the beautifully fresh water which was everywhere round about.... Then they went into the garden, which was on one side of the palace and was surrounded by a wall, and the beauty and magnificence of it at first sight made them eager to examine it more closely. It was crossed in all directions by long, broad, and straight walks, over which the vines, which that year made a great show of giving many grapes, hung gracefully in arched festoons, and being then in full blossom, filled the whole garden with their sweet smell, and this, mingled with the odours of the other flowers, made so sweet a perfume that they seemed to be in the spicy gardens of the East. The sides of the walks were almost closed with red and white roses and with jessamine so that they gave sweet odours and shade not only in the morning but when the sun was high, so that one might walk there all day without fear. What flowers there were there how various and how ordered, it would take too long to tell, but there was not one which in our climate is to be praised, which was not to be found there abundantly. Perhaps the most delightful thing therein was a meadow in the midst, of the finest grass and all so green that it seemed almost black, all sprinkled with a thousand various flowers, shut in by oranges and cedars, the which bore the ripe fruit and the young fruit too and the blossom, offering a shade most grateful to the eyes and also a delicious perfume. In the midst of this meadow there was a fountain of the whitest marble marvellously carved, and within--I do not know whether artificially or from a natural spring--it threw so much water and so high towards the sky through a statue which stood there on a pedestal, that it would not have needed more to turn a mill. The water fell back again with a delicious sound into the clear waters of the basin, and the surplus was carried away through a subterranean way into little waterways most beautifully and artfully made about the meadow, and afterwards ran into others round about, and so watered every part of the garden; it collected at length in one place, whence it had entered the beautiful garden, turning two mills, much to the profit, as you may suppose, of the signore, and pouring down at last in a stream clear and sweet into the valley." If this should seem a mere pleasaunce of delight, the vision of a poet, the garden of a dream, we have only to remember how realistically and simply Boccaccio has described for us that plague-stricken city, scarcely more than a mile away, to be assured of its truthfulness: and then listen to Alberti--or old Agnolo Pandolfini, is it?--in his _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia_, one of the most delightful books of the fifteenth century. He certainly was no poet, yet with what enthusiasm and happiness he speaks of his villa, how comely and useful it is, so that while everything else brings labour, danger, suspicion, harm, fear, and repentance, the villa will bring none of these, but a pure happiness, a real consolation. Yes, it is really as an escape from all the care and anxiety of business, of the wool or silk trade, which he praised so much, that he loves the country. "_La Villa_, the country, one soon finds, is always gracious, faithful, and true; if you govern it with diligence and love, it will never be satisfied with what it does for you, always it will add [**Transcriber's Note: undecipherable] to recompense. In the spring the villa gives you continual delight; green leaves, flowers, odours, songs and in every way makes you happy and jocund: all smiles on you and promises a fine harvest, filling you with good hope, delight, and pleasure. Yes indeed, how courteous is the villa! She gives you now one fruit, now another, never leaving you without some of her own joy. For in autumn she pays you for all your trouble, fruit out of all proportion to your merit, recompense, and thanks; and how willingly and with what abundance--twelve for one: for a little sweat, many barrels of wine, and for what is old in the house, the villa will give you new, seasoned, clear, and good. She fills the house the winter long with grapes, both fresh and dry, with plums, walnuts, pears, apples, almonds, filberts, giuggiole, pomegranates, and other wholesome fruits, and apples fragrant and beautiful. Nor in winter will she forget to be liberal; she sends you wood, oil, vine branches, laurels, junipers to keep out snow and wind, and then she comforts you with the sun, offering you the hare and the roe, and the field to follow them...." Nor are the joys of summer less, for you may read Greek and Latin in the shadow of the courtyard where the fountains splash, while your girls are learning songs and your boys are busy with the contadini, in the vineyards or beside the stream. It is a spirit of pure delight, we find there in that old townsman, in country life, simple and quiet, after the noise and sharpness of the market-place. And certainly, as we pass from Fiesole down the new road where the tram runs, turning into the lanes again just by Villa Galetta, on our way to Maiano, we may fancy we see many places where such a life as that has always been lived, and, as I know, in some is lived to-day. Everywhere on these hills you find villas, and every villa has a garden, and every garden has a fountain, where all day long the sun plays with the slim dancing water and the contadine sing of love in the vineyards. Maiano itself is but a group of such places, among them a great villa painted in the manner of the seventeenth century, spoiled a little by modernity. You can leave it behind, passing into a lane behind Poggio Gherardo, where it is roses, roses all the way, for the podere is hedged with a hedge of roses pink and white, where the iris towers too, streaming its violet banners. Presently, as you pass slowly on your way--for in a garden who would go quickly?--you come upon the little church of S. Martino a Mensola, built, as I think indeed, so lovely it is, by Brunellesco, on a little rising ground above a shrunken stream, and that is Mensola on her way to Arno. She lags for sure, because, lost in Arno, she will see nothing again so fair as her own hills. [Illustration: OUTSIDE THE GATE] S. Martino a Mensola is very old, for it is said that in the year 800 an oratory stood here, dedicated to S. Martino, and that il Beato Andrea di Scozia, Blessed Andrew of Scotland, then archdeacon to the bishopric of Fiesole, rebuilt it and endowed a little monastery, where he went to live with a few companions, taking the rule of St. Benedict. Carocci tells us that about 1550 it passed from the Benedictines to certain monks who already had a house at S. Andrea in Mercato Vecchio of Florence. In 1450 the monastery returned to Benedictines, coming into the possession of the monks of the Badia. Restored many times, the church was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, it may well be by Brunellesco; the portico, restored in 1857, was added in the sixteenth century. Within, the church is charming, having a nave and two aisles, with four small chapels and a great one, which belonged to the Zati family. And then, not without a certain surprise, you come here upon many pictures still in their own place, over the altars of what is now a village church. Over the high altar is a great ancona divided into many compartments: the Virgin with our Lord, S. Maria Maddalena, S. Niccolò, St. Catharine of Alexandria, S. Giuliano, S. Amerigo of Hungary, S. Martino, S. Gregorio, S. Antonio, and the donor, Amerigo Zati. Carocci suggests Bernardo Orcagna as the painter; whoever he may have been, this altarpiece is beautiful, and the more beautiful too since it is in its own place. In the Gherardi Chapel there is an Annunciation given to Giusto d'Andrea, while in another is a Madonna and Saints by Neri di Bicci. In the chapel of the Cecchini there is a fine fifteenth-century work attributed to Cosimo Rosselli. The old monastery is to-day partly the canonica and partly a villa. Following the stream upwards, we pass under and then round the beautiful Villa I Tatti that of old belonged to the Zati family whose altarpiece is in S. Martino, and winding up the road to Vincigliata, you soon enter the cypress woods. All the way to your left Poggio Gherardo has towered over you, Poggio Gherardo where the two first days of the _Decamerone_ were passed. How well Boccaccio describes the place: "On the top of a hill there stood a palace which was surrounded by beautiful gardens, delightful meadows, and cool springs, and in the midst was a great and beautiful court with galleries, halls, and rooms which were adorned with paintings...." Not far away, Boccaccio himself lived on the podere of his father. You come to it if you pass out of the Vincigliata road by a pathway down to Frassignaja, a little stream which, in its hurry to reach Mensola, its sister here, leaps sheer down the rocks in a tiny waterfall. This is the "shady valley" perhaps where in the evening the ladies of the _Decamerone_ walked "between steep rocks to a crystal brook which poured down from a little hill, and there they splashed about with bare hands and feet, and talked merrily with one another." Crossing this brook and following the path round the hillside, where so often the nightingale sings, you pass under a little villa by a stony way to Corbignano, and there, in what may well be the oldest house in the place, at the end of the street, past the miraculous orange tree, just where the hill turns out of sight, you see Boccaccio's house, Casa di Boccaccio, as it is written; and though the old tower has become a loggia, and much has been rebuilt, you may still see the very ancient stones of the place jutting into the lane, where the water sings so after the rain, and the olives whisper softly all night long, and God walks always among the vines. Turning then uphill, you come at last to a group of houses, and where the way turns suddenly there is the Oratorio del Vannella, in the parish of Settignano: it is truly just an old wayside tabernacle, but within is one of the earliest works, a Madonna and Child, of Botticelli, whose father had a podere hereabout. If you follow where the road leads, and turn at last where you may, past the cemetery, you come to Settignano, founded by Septimus Severus or by the Settimia family, it matters little which, for its glory now lies with Desiderio the sculptor, who was born, it seems, at Corbignano, and Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino, who were born here. There is no other village near Florence that has so smiling a face as Settignano among the gardens. There is little or nothing to see, though the church of S. Maria has a lovely terra-cotta of Madonna with Our Lord between two angels in the manner of the della Robbia; but the little town is delightful, full of stonecutters and sculptors, still at work in their shops as they were in the great days of Michelangelo. Far away behind the hill of cypresses Vincigliata still stands on guard, on the hilltop Castel di Poggio looks into the valley of Ontignano and guards the road to Arezzo and Rome. Here there is peace; not too far from the city nor too near the gate, as I said: and so to Firenze in the twilight. NOTE.--_I have said little of the country places about Florence, Settimo, the Certosa in Val d'Ema, the Incontro and such, because there seemed to be too much to say, and I wanted to treat of them in a book that should be theirs only. See my_ Country Walks Round Florence (_Methuen_, 1908). FOOTNOTES: [129] This perhaps is open to criticism: there is a huge suburb of course towards Prato, the other barriere are still fairly in the country. [130] Villani, _Cronica_, translated by R.E. Selfe (London, 1906), pp. 71-3, 97. [131] Cf. Fortini and Sermini for instance. See Symonds' _New Italian Sketches_ (Tauchnitz Ed.), p. 37. XXVI. VALLOMBROSA AND THE CASENTINO, CAMALDOLI AND LA VERNA I. VALLOMBROSA There are many ways that lead from Florence to Vallombrosa--by the hills, by the valley, and by rail--and the best of these is by the valley, but the shortest is by rail, for by that way you may leave Florence at noon and be in your inn by three; but if you go by road you must set out at dawn, so that when evening falls you may hear the whispering woods of the rainy valley Vallis Imbrosa at your journey's end. That is a pleasant way that takes you first to Settignano out of the dust of Via Aretina by the river. Thence you may go by the byways to Compiobbi, past Villa Gamberaja and Terenzano, among the terraced vines and the old olives, coming to the river at last at Compiobbi, as I said, just under Montacuto with its old castle, now a tiny village, on the road to the Incontro, that convent on the hilltop where, as it is said, St. Francis met St. Dominic on the way to Rome. The Via Aretina, deep in dust that has already whitened the cypresses, passes through Compiobbi on its way southward and west; but for me I will cross the river, and go once more by the byways through the valley now, where the wind whispers in the poplars beside Arno, and the river passes singing gently on its way. It is a long road full of the quiet life of the country--here a little farm, there a village full of children; a vineyard heavy with grapes, where a man walks leisurely, talking to his dog, the hose on his shoulders; a little copse that runs down to the stones of Arno, where a little girl sits spinning with her few goats, singing softly some endless chant; a golden olive garden among the corn, where there is no sound but the song of the cicale that sing all day long. And there are so many windings, and though the road leaves the river, it seems always to be returning, always to be bidding good-bye: sometimes it climbs high up above the stream, which just there is very still, sleeping in the shadow under the trees; sometimes it dips quite down to the river bank, a great stretch of dusty shingle across which the stream passes like a road of silver. Slowly in front of me a great flat-bottomed boat crossed the river with two great white oxen. And then at a turning of the way a flock of sheep were coming on in a cloud of dust, when suddenly, at a word from the shepherd who led them, they crossed the wide beach to drink at the river, while he waited under the trees by the roadside. There were trees full of cherries too, so full that in the sunshine they seemed to dance for joy, clothed all in scarlet, so red, so ripe was the fruit. Presently I came upon an old man high up in a tree gathering them in a great basket, and since I was thirsty I asked him for drink, and since I was hungry I asked him for food. He climbed down the great ladder, coming towards me kindly enough, and drew me into the shadow. "Eat as you will, signore, and quench your thirst," said he, as he lifted a handful of the shining fruit, a handful running over, and offered it to me. And he stayed with me and gave me his conversation. So I dined, and when I had finished, "Open that great sack of yours," said he, "and I will send you on your way," but I would not. Just then four others came along in the sun, and on their heads were great bags of leaves, and he bade them come and eat in the shade. Then said I, "What are those leaves that you have there, and what are you going to do with them?" And they laughed, making answer that they were silk. "Silk?" said I. "Silk truly," said they, "since they are the leaves of the mulberry on which the little worm lives that presently will make it." So I went on my way with thanks, thinking in my heart: Are we too then but leaves for worms, out of which, as by a miracle will pass the endless thread of an immortal life? So I came to Pontassieve, crossing the river again where the road begins to leave it. There is nothing good to say of Pontassieve, which has no beauty in itself, and where folk are rough and given to robbery. A glance at the inn--for so they call it--and I passed on, glad in my heart that I had dined in the fields. A mile beyond the town, on the Via Aretina, the road of the Consuma Pass leaves the highway on the left, and by this way it is good to go into Casentino; for any of the inns in the towns of the valley will send to Pontassieve to meet you, and it is better to enter thus than by railway from Arezzo. However, I was for Vallombrosa; so I kept to the Aretine way. I left it at last at S. Ellero, whence the little railway climbs up to Saltino, passing first through the olives and vines, then through the chestnuts, the oaks, and the beeches, till at last the high lawns appeared, and evening fell at the last turn of the mule path over the hill as I came out of the forest before the monastery itself, almost like a village or a stronghold, with square towers and vast buildings too, fallen, alas! from their high office, to serve as a school of forestry, an inn for the summer visitor who has fled from the heat of the valleys. And there I slept. It is best always to come to any place for the first time at evening or even at night, and then in the morning to return a little on your way and come to it again. Wandering there, out of the sunshine, in the stillness of the forest itself, with the ruin of a thousand winters under my feet, how could I be but angry that modern Italy--ah, so small a thing!--has chased out the great and ancient order that had dwelt here so long in quietness, and has established after our pattern a utilitarian school, and thus what was once a guest-house is now a pension of tourists. But in the abbey itself I forgot my anger, I was ashamed of my contempt of those who could do so small a thing. This place was founded because a young man refused to hate his enemy; every stone here is a part of the mountain, every beam a tree of the forest, the forest that has been renewed and destroyed a thousand times, that has never known resentment, because it thinks only of life. Yes, this is no place for hatred; since he who founded it loved his enemies, I also will let them pass by, and since I too am of that company which thinks only of life, what is the modern world to me with its denial, its doubt, its contemptible materialism, its destruction, its misery? Like winter, it will flee away before the first footsteps of our spring. It was S. Giovanni Gualberto who founded the Vallombrosan Order and established here an abbey, whose daughter we now see. Born about the year 1000, he was the son of Gualberto dei Visdomini, Signore of Petroio in Val di Pesa, of the great family who lived in St. Peter's Gate in Florence, and were, according to Villani, the patrons of the bishopric. In those days murder daily walked the streets of every Tuscan city, and so it came to pass that before Giovanni was eighteen years old his brother Ugo had been murdered by one of that branch of his own house which was at feud with Gualberto. Urged on by his father, who, we may be sure, did not spare himself or his friends in seeking revenge, Giovanni was ever on the watch for his enemy, his brother's murderer; and it chanced that as he came into Florence on Good Friday morning in 1018, just before he got to S. Miniato al Monte, at a turning of that steep way he came upon him face to face suddenly in the sunlight. Surely God had delivered him into his hands! Giovanni was on horseback with his servant, and then the hill was in his favour; the other was alone. Seeing he had no chance, for the steel was already cold on his jumping throat, he sank on his knees, and, crossing his arms in the form of Holy Cross, he prayed hard to the Lord Jesus to save his soul alive. Hearing that blessed, beautiful name in the stillness of that morning, when all the bells are silent and the very earth hushed for Christ's death, Giovanni could not strike, but instead lifted up his enemy and embraced him, saying, "I give you not your life only, but my love too for ever. Pray for me that God may pardon my sin." So they went on their way; but Giovanni, when he came to the monastery of S. Miniato of the Benedictines, stole into the church and prayed before the great Crucifix,[132] begging God to pardon him; and while he prayed thus, the Christ miraculously bowed his head, "as it were to give him a token how acceptable was this sacrifice of his resentment." How little that sacrifice seems to us! But it was a great, an unheard-of thing in those days. And for this cause, maybe, Giovanni proposed to remain with the monks, to be received as a novice among them, and to forsake the world for ever. And they received him. Now when Gualberto heard it, he was first very much astonished and then more angry, so that he went presently to take Giovanni out of that place; but he would not, for before his father he cut off his hair and clothed himself in a habit which he borrowed. Then, seeing his purpose, his father let him alone. So for some four years Giovanni lived a monk at S. Miniato; when, the old Abbot dying, his companions wished to make him their Abbot, but he would not, setting out immediately with one companion to search for a closer solitude. And to this end he went to Camaldoli to consult with S. Romualdo; but even there, in that quiet and ordered place, he did not seem to have found what he sought. So he set out again, not without tears, coming at last, on this side of Casentino, upon this high valley, Acqua Bella, as it was then called, because of its brooks. It belonged, with all the forest, to the Contessa Itta dei Guidi, the Abbess of S. Ellero, who gladly presented Giovanni with land for his monastery, and that he built of timber. Nor was he alone, for he had found there already two hermits, who agreed to join him; so under the rule of St. Benedict the Vallombrosan Order was founded.[133] Of S. Giovanni's work in Florence, of his fight with Simony and Nicolaitanism, this is no place to speak. He became the hero of that country; yet such was his humility that he never proceeded further than minor orders, and, though Abbot of Vallombrosa, was never a priest. He founded many houses, S. Salvi among them, while his monks were to be found at Moscetta, Passignano, and elsewhere in Tuscany and Umbria; while his Order was the first to receive lay brothers who, while exempt from choir and silence, were employed in "external offices." It was in July 1073 that he fell sick at Passignano, and on the 12th of that month he died there. Pope Celestine III enrolled him among the saints in 1193. After S. Giovanni's death the Order seems to have flourished by reason of the bequests of the Countess Matilda. There is but little of interest in the present buildings at Vallombrosa, which date from the seventeenth century; nor does the church itself possess anything of importance, unless it be the relic of S. Giovanni enshrined in a casquet of the sixteenth century, a work of Paolo Soliano. About three hundred feet above the monastery is the old Hermitage--the _Celle_--now an hotel. Here those who sought solitude and silence found their way, and indeed it seems to have been a spot greatly beloved, for a certain Pietro Migliorotti of Poppi passed many years there, and refused to think of it as anything but a little paradise; thus it was called Paradisino, the name which it bears to-day. Far and far away lies Florence, with her beautiful domes and towers, and around you are the valleys, Val d'Arno, Val di Sieve, while behind you lies the strangest and loveliest of all, Val di Casentino, hidden in the hills at the foot of the great mountain, scattered with castles, holy with convents; and there Dante has passed by and St. Francis, and Arno is continually born in the hills. And indeed, delightful as the woods of Vallombrosa are, with their ruined shrines and chapels, their great delicious solitude, their unchangeable silence under everything but the wind, that valley-enclosed Clusendinum calls you every day; perhaps in some strange smile you catch for a moment in the sunshine on the woods, or in the aspect of the clouds; it will not be long before you are compelled to set out on your way to seek "Li ruscelletti, che dei verdi colli Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno." II. OF THE WAY TO THE CASENTINO And the path lies through the woods. You make your way under the mountain towards S. Miniato in Alpe, leaving it at Villa del Lago for a mule-track, which leads you at last to Consuma and the road from Pontassieve. The way is beautiful, and not too hard to find, the world about you a continual joy. If you start early, you may breakfast at Consuma (though it were better, perhaps, to carry provisions), for it is but two and a half hours from Vallombrosa. Once at Consuma, the way is easy and good. You climb into the pass, and in another three hours you may be in Romena, Pratovecchio, or Stia. But there are other ways, too, of which the shortest is that by the mountains from Vallombrosa to Montemignajo--that lofty, ruined place; and the loveliest, that from Vallombrosa to Raggiola of the forests; but there be rambles, pilgrimages, paths of delight unknown to any but those who hide for long in the forests of Vallombrosa. Your tourist knows them not; he will go by rail from S. Ellero to Arezzo, and make his way by train up the valley to Stia; your traveller will walk from Vallombrosa to Consuma, where Giuseppe Marari of Stia will send a _vettura_ to meet him. For myself I go afoot, and take a lift when I can, and a talk with it, and this is the happiest way of all to travel. Thus those who are young and wise will set out, putting Dante in their knapsack and Signor Beni's little book[134] in their pocket, and with these two, a good stick, a light heart, and a companion to your liking, the Casentino is yours. And truly there is no more delightful place in which to spend a Tuscan summer. The Pistojese mountains are fine; the air is pure there, the woods lovely with flowers; but they lack the sentimental charm of Casentino. The Garfagnana, again, cannot be bettered if you avoid such touristry as Bagni di Lucca; but then Castelnuovo is bare, and though Barga is fine enough, Piazza al Serchio is a mere huddle of houses, and it is not till you reach Fivizzano on the other side of the pass that you find what you want. In Casentino alone there is everything--mountains, rivers, woods, and footways, convents and castles. And then where is there a better inn than Albergo Amorosi of Bibbiena, unless, indeed, it be the unmatched hostelry at Fivizzano? As for inns, in general they are fair enough; though none, I think, so good as the Amorosi. You may sleep and eat comfortably at Stia, either at Albergo Falterona or Albergo della Stazione Alpina. At Pratovecchio there is Albergo Bastieri; at Poppi the Gelati pension; at Bibbiena the Amorosi, as I say. These will be your centres, as it were. At La Verna you may sleep for one night--not well, but bearably; at Camaldoli, very well indeed in summer; and then, wherever you may be, you will find a fine courtesy, for rough though they seem, these peasants and such, are of the Latin race, they understand the amenities. Saints have been here, and poets: these be no Teutons, but the good Latin people of the Faith; they will give you greeting and welcome. III. STIA AND MONTE FALTERONA Stia is a picturesque little city with a curious arcaded Piazza, a church that within is almost beautiful; yet it is certainly not for anything to be found there that one comes to so ancient and yet so disappointing a place, but because from thence one may go most easily to Falterona to see the sun rise or to find out the springs of Arno, or to visit Porciano, S. Maria delle Grazie, Papiano, and the rest in the hills that shut in this little town at the head of the long valley. Through the great endless sheepfolds you go to Falterona where the girls are singing their endless chants all day long guarded by great sheep-dogs, not the most peacable of companions. All the summer long these pastures nourish the sheep, poor enough beasts at the best. One recalls that in the great days the Guild of Wool got its material from Flanders and from England, because the Tuscan fleece was too hard and poor. Through these lonely pastures you climb with your guide, through forests of oak and chestnut, by many a winding path, not without difficulty, to the steeper sides of the mountain covered with brushwood, into the silence where there is no voice but the voice of the streams. Here in a cleft, under the very summit of Falterona, Arno rises, gushing endlessly from the rock in seven springs of water, that will presently gather to themselves a thousand other streams and spread through Casentino: "Botoli trova poi, venendo giuso Ringhiosi più che non chiede lor possa Ed, a lor, disdegnosa, torce il muso" at the end of the valley. Climbing above that sacred source to the summit of Falterona itself, you may see, if the dawn be clear, the Tyrrhene sea and the Adriatic, the one but a tremor of light far and far away, the other a sheet of silver beyond the famous cities of Romagna. It is from this summit that your way through Casentino should begin. It was there I waited the dawn. For long in the soft darkness and silence I had watched the mountains sleeping under the few summer stars. Suddenly the earth seemed to stir in her sleep, in every valley the dew was falling, in all forests there was a rumour, and among the rocks where I lay I caught a flutter of wings. The east grew rosy; out of the mysterious sea rose a golden ghost hidden in glory, till suddenly across the world a sunbeam fell. It touched the mountains one by one; higher and higher crept the tremulous joy of light, confident and ever more confident, opening like a flower, filling the world with gladness and light. It was the dawn: out of the east once more had crept the beauty of the world. Then in that clear and joyful hour God spread out all the breadth of Italy before me: the plains, the valleys, and the mountains. Far and far away, shining in the sun, Ravenna lay, and lean Rimini and bartered Pesaro. There, the mountains rose over Siena, in that valley Gubbio slept, on that hill stood S. Marino, and there, like a golden angel bearing the Annunciation of Day, S. Leo folded her wings on her mountain. Southward, Arezzo smiled like a flower, Monte Amiata was already glorious; northward lay a sea of mountains, named and nameless, restless with light, about to break in the sun. While to the west Florence lay sleeping yet in the cusp of her hills, her towers, her domes, perfect and fresh in the purity of dawn that had renewed her beauty. It was an altogether different impression, an impression of sadness, of some tragic thing, that I received when at evening I stood above the Castle of Porciano on a hill a little way off, and looked down the valley. It was not any joyful thing that I saw, splendid though it was, but the ruined castles, blind and broken, of the Counts Guidi: Porciano itself, line a jagged menace, rises across Arno, which is heard but not seen; farther, on the crest of a blue hill, round which evening gathers out of the woods, rises the great ruin of Romena like a broken oath; while farther still, far away on its hill in a fold of the valley, Poppi thrusts its fierce tower into the sky, a cruel boast that came to nothing. They are but the ghosts of a forgotten barbarism these gaunt towers of war; they are nothing now, less than nothing, unreconciled though they be with the hills; they have been crumbling for hundreds of years: one day the last stone will fall. For around them is life; the children of Stia, laughing about the fountain, will never know that their ancestors went in fear of some barbarian who held Porciano by murder and took toll of the weak. These shepherd girls, these _contadini_ and their wives and children, they have outlived the Conti Guidi, they have outlasted the greatest of the lords; like the flowers, they run among the stones without a thought of that brutal greatness that would have enslaved them if it could. Not by violence have they conquered, but by love; not by death, but by life. It is just this which I see round every ruin in the Casentino. Force, brute force, is the only futile thing in the world. Why has La Verna remained when Romena is swept away, that strong place, when Porciano is a ruin, when the castle of Poppi is brought low, but that life which is love has beaten hate, and that a kiss is more terrible than a thousand blows. Yes, as one wanders about these hills where life itself is so hard a master, it is just that which one understands in almost every village. You go to S. Maria delle Grazie--Vallombrosella, they call it, since it was a daughter of the monastery of Vallombrosa--and there in that beautiful fifteenth-century church you still find the simple things of life, of love; work of the della Robbia; pictures, too, cheerful flowerlike things, with Madonna like a rose in the midst. Well, not far away across Arno, where it is little, the ruins of Castel Castagnajo and of Campo Lombardo are huddled, though Vallucciole, that tiny village, is laughing with children. It is the same at Romena, where the church still lives, though the castle is ruined. You pass to Pratovecchio; it is the same story, ruins of the Guidi towers, walls, fortifications; but in the convent church of the Dominican sisters they still sing Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles. So on the road to Poppi you come to Campaldino, where Dante fought, where Corso Donati saved the day, where Buonconte fell, and died with the fog in his throat in the still morning air after the battle. Well, that famous field is now a vineyard; you may see the girls gathering the grapes there any morning in early October. Where the horses of the Aretines thundered away, the great patient oxen draw the plough; or a man walks, singing beside his wife, her first-born in her arms. It is the victory of the meek; here, at least, they have inherited the earth. And Certomondo, as of old, sings of our sister the earth. Poppi again--ah, but that fierce old place, how splendid it is, it and its daughter! Like all the rest of these Guidi strongholds, the Rocca of Poppi stands on a hill; it can be seen for miles up and down the valley: and indeed the whole town is like a fortress on a hill, subject only to the ever-changing sky, the great tide of light ebbing and flowing in the valley between the mountains. Poppi is the greatest of the Guidi fortresses; built by Arnolfo, it has much of the nobility of its daughter the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Of all these castles it is the only one that is not a ruin. It is true it has been restored, But you may still find frescoes on its walls in the chapel and in the great hall, work, it is said, of Jacopo da Casentino: and then it has one of the loveliest courtyards in Italy. It is from Poppi one may go very easily in a summer day to Camaldoli, some eight miles or so to the north-west, where the valley comes up in a long arm into the mountains. On that lovely road you pass many an old ruin of the Guidi before you come at last to that monastery of the Camaldolese Order "so beloved of Dante," which was confiscated with the rest in 1866. The monks now hire their own house from the Government, which has let out their hospice for an hotel. About an hour above the monastery, among the pine trees, is the Sacro Eremo, the Holy Hermitage, where in some twenty separate cells the Hermits of Camaldoli live; for, as their arms go to show, the Order is divided into two parts, consisting of monks who live in community, and hermits who live alone. S. Romuald, the founder of the Order, of the family of the Dukes of Ravenna called Honesti, was born in that city in 956. He seems to have grown up amid a certain splendour, and to have been caught by it, but by a love of nature no less; so that often when he was hunting, and found a beautiful or lonely place in the woods away from his companions, he would almost cry out, "How happy were the old hermits, who lived always in such places!" The romance of just that: it seems to have struck him from the first. Not long after, when he was but twenty years old, his father, deciding a dispute with a relation by fighting, fell, and Romuald, who had been compelled to witness this dreadful scene, was so overwhelmed by the result that he retired for a time to the Benedictine Monastery at Classis, not far from Ravenna. After some difficulties had been disposed of, for he was his father's heir, he spent seven years in that monastery; but his sincerity does not appear to have pleased certain of the fathers, so that we find him at last obliged to retire to Venice, where, in fulfilment of his earliest wishes, he placed himself under the guidance of Marinus, a hermit. After many years, in which he seems to have gone to Spain, he returned at last, and took up his hermit life in a marsh near Classis, where the monks of his old monastery sought him, and with the help of Otho III made him their Abbot. This office, however, he did not long retain, for he found it useless to try to reform them. He seems to have wandered about, famous all over Italy, founding many houses, but the most famous of all is this house of Camaldoli, which he founded in 1009. The land was given him by a certain Conte Maldolo, it is said, an Aretine, by whose name the place was ever after known, Campus Maldoli; while another gift, Campus Arrabile, the gift of the same man, is that place where the Hermitage stands. There, in Camaldoli, Romuald built a monastery, "and by several observances he added to St. Benedict's rule, gave birth to a new Order, in which he united the cenobite and eremetical life." It is said that it was after a vision, in which he saw his monks mounting up into heaven dressed in white, that he changed their habit from black to white--the habit they still wear. Whether it be that the hills and valley are indeed more lovely here than anywhere else in Casentino, and that the monks and the hermits lure some indefinable sweet charm to the place, I know not; yet I know that I, who came for a day, stayed a month, returning here again and again from less lovely, less quiet places. Camaldoli is one of the loveliest places in Tuscany in which to spend a summer. Here are mountains, woods, streams, valleys, a monastery, and a hermitage; to desire more might seem churlish, to be content with less when these may be had in quiet, stupid. IV. BIBBIENA, LA VERNA Some eight miles away down the valley, enclosed above a coil of Arno, stands Bibbiena, just a little Tuscan hill city with a windy towered Piazza in which a great fountain plays, and all about the tall cypresses tower in the sun among the vineyards and the corn. Here Cardinal Bibbiena, the greatest ornament of the court of Urbino, was born, of no famous family, but of the Divizi. It is not, however, any memory of so famous and splendid a person that haunts you in these stony streets, but the remembrance rather of a greater if humbler humanist, St. Francis of Assisi. You may see work of the della Robbia in the Franciscan church of S. Lorenzo in the little city, but it is La Verna which to-day overshadows Bibbiena, La Verna where St. Francis nearly seven hundred years ago received the Stigmata from Our Lord, and whence he was carried down to Assisi to die. The way thither is difficult but beautiful: you climb quite into the mountains, and there in a lonely and stony place rises the strange rock, set with cypress and with fir, backed by marvellous great hills. "Mons in quo beneplacitum est Deo habitare in eo." It was on the morning of the 14th September 1224, in the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, that Francesco Bernadone received the Stigmata of Christ's passion while keeping the Lent of St. Michael Archangel on this strange and beautiful mountain. "Ye must needs know," says the author of the _Fioretti_, "that St. Francis, being forty and three years of age in the year 1224, being inspired of God, set out from the valley of Spoleto for to go into Romagna with brother Leo his companion: and as they went they passed by the foot of the castle of Montefeltro; in the which castle there was at that time a great company of gentlefolk.... Among them a wealthy gentleman of Tuscany, by name Orlando da Chiusi of Casentino, who by reason of the marvellous things which he had heard of St. Francis, bore him great devotion and felt an exceeding strong desire to see him and to hear him preach. Coming to the castle St. Francis entered in and came to the courtyard, where all that great company of gentlefolk was gathered together, and in fervour of spirit stood up upon a parapet and began to preach.... And Orlando, touched in the heart by God through the marvellous preaching of St. Francis ... drew him aside and said, 'O Father, I would converse with thee touching the salvation of my soul.' Replied St. Francis: 'It pleaseth me right well; but go this morning and do honour to thy friends who have called thee to the feast, and dine with them, and after we will speak together as much as thou wilt.' So Orlando got him to the dinner; and after he returned to St. Francis and ... set him forth fully the state of his soul. And at the end this Orlando said to St. Francis, 'I have in Tuscany a mountain most proper for devotion, the which is called the Mount La Verna, and is very lonely and right well fitted for whoso may wish to do penance in a place remote from man, or whoso may desire to live a solitary life; if it should please thee, right willingly would I give it to thee and thy companions for the salvation of my soul.' St. Francis hearing this liberal offer of the thing that he so much desired, rejoiced with exceeding great joy; and praising and giving thanks first to God and then to Orlando, he spake thus: 'Orlando, when you have returned to your house, I will send you certain of my companions, and you shall show them that mountain; and if it shall seem to them well fitted for prayer and penitence, I accept your loving offer even now.' So Orlando returned to Chiusi, the which was but a mile distant from La Verna. "Whenas St. Francis had returned to St. Mary of the Angels, he sent one of his companions to the said Orlando ... who, desiring to show them the Mount of La Verna, sent with them full fifty men-at-arms to defend them from the wild beasts of the forest; and thus accompanied, these brothers climbed up the mountain and searched diligently, and at last they came to a part of the mountain that was well fitted for devotion and contemplation, for in that part there was some level ground, and this place they chose out for them and for St. Francis to dwell therein; and with the help of the men-at-arms that bore them company, they made a little cell of branches of trees; and so they accepted, in the name of God, and took possession of, the Mount of La Verna, and of the dwelling-place of the brothers on the mountain, and departed and returned to St. Francis. And when they were come unto him, they told him how, and in what manner, they had taken a place on the mountain ... and, hearing these tidings, St. Francis was right glad, and praising and giving thanks to God, he spake to these brothers with joyful countenance, and said, 'My sons, our forty days' fast of St. Michael the Archangel draweth near: I firmly believe that it is the will of God that we keep this fast on the Mount of Alvernia, which, by divine decree, hath been made ready for us to the end, that to the honour and glory of God, and of His mother, the glorious Virgin Mary, and of the holy Angels, we may, through penance, merit at the hands of Christ the consolation of consecrating this blessed mountain.' Thus saying, St. Francis took with him Brother Masseo da Marignano of Assisi ... and Brother Angelo Tancredi da Rieti, the which was a man of very gentle birth, and in the world had been a knight; and Brother Leo, a man of exceeding great simplicity and purity, for the which cause St. Francis loved him much. So they set out. 'And on the first night they came to a house of the brothers, and lodged there. On the second night, by reason of the bad weather, and because they were tired, not being able to reach any house of the brothers, or any walled town or village, when the night overtook them and bad weather, they took refuge in a deserted and dismantled church, and there laid them down to rest.' But St. Francis spent the night in prayer. 'And in the morning his companions, being aware that, through the fatigues of the night which he had passed without sleep, St. Francis was much weakened in body and could but ill go on his way afoot, went to a poor peasant of these parts, and begged him, for the love of God, to lend his ass for Brother Francis, their Father, that could not go afoot. Hearing them make mention of Brother Francis, he asked them: 'Are ye of the brethren of the brother of Assisi, of whom so much good is spoken?' The brothers answered 'Yes,' and that in very truth it was for him that they asked for the sumpter beast. Then the good man, with great diligence and devotion, made ready the ass and brought it to St. Francis, and with great reverence let him mount thereon, and they went on their way, and he with them behind his ass. And when they had gone on a little way, the peasant said to St. Francis, 'Tell me, art thou Brother Francis of Assisi?' Replied St. Francis, 'Yes.' 'Try, then,' said the peasant, 'to be as good as thou art by all folk held to be, seeing that many have great faith in thee; and therefore I admonish thee, that in thee there be naught save what men hope to find therein.' Hearing these words, St. Francis thought no scorn to be admonished by a peasant, and said not within himself, 'What beast is this doth admonish me?' as many would say nowadays that wear the habit, but straightway threw himself from off the ass upon the ground, and kneeled down before him and kissed his feet, and then humbly thanked him for that he had deigned thus lovingly to admonish him. Then the peasant, together with the companions of St. Francis, with great devotion lifted him from the ground and set him on the ass again, and they went on their way.... As they drew near to the foot of the rock of Alvernia itself, it pleased St. Francis to rest a little under the oak that was by the way, and is there to this day; and as he stood under it, St. Francis began to take note of the situation of the place and the country around. And as he was thus gazing, lo! there came a great multitude of birds from divers parts, the which, with singing and flapping of their wings, all showed joy and gladness exceeding great, and came about St. Francis in such fashion, some settled on his head, some on his shoulders, and some on his arms, some in his lap and some round his feet. When his companions and the peasant marvelled, beholding this, St. Francis, all joyful in spirit, spake thus unto them: 'I believe, brethren most dear, that it is pleasing unto Our Lord Jesus Christ that we should dwell in this lonely mountain, seeing that our little sisters and brothers, the birds, show such joy at our coming.' So they went on their way and came to the place the companions had first chosen." It is not in any other words than those of the writer of the _Fioretti_ that we should care to read of that journey. "Arrived there not long after, Orlando and his company came to visit Francis, bringing with them bread and wine and other victuals; and St. Francis met him gladly and gave him thanks for the holy mountain. Then Orlando built a little cell there, and that done, 'as it was drawing near to evening and it was time for them to depart, St. Francis preached unto them a little before they took leave of him.' Ah, what would we not give just for a moment to hear his voice in that place to-day? There, in this very spot, angels visited him, which said, when he, thinking upon his death, wondered what would become of 'Thy poor little family' after his death, 'I tell thee, in the name of God, that the profession of the Order will never fail until the Day of Judgment, and there will be no sinner so great as not to find mercy with God if, with his whole heart, he love thine Order.' "Thereafter, as the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady drew near, St. Francis sought how he might find a place more solitary and secret, wherein he might the more solitary keep the forty days' fast of St. Michael the Archangel, which beginneth with the said Feast of the Assumption.... And as they searched, they found, on the side of the mountain that looks towards the south, a lonely place, and very proper for his purpose; but they could not win there because in front there was a horrid and fearful cleft in a huge rock; wherefore with great pains they laid a piece of wood over it as a bridge, and got across to the other side. Then St. Francis sent for the other brothers and told them how he was minded to keep the forty days' fast of St. Michael in that lonely place; and therefore he besought them to make him a little cell there, so that no cry of his could be heard of them. And when the cell was made, St. Francis said to them: 'Go ye to your own place and leave me here alone, for, with the help of God, I am minded to keep the fast here without disturbance or distraction, and therefore let none of you come unto me, nor suffer any lay folk to come to me. But Brother Leo, thou alone shalt come to me once a day with a little bread and water, and at night once again at the hour of Matins; and then shalt thou come to me in silence, and when thou art at the bridgehead thou shalt say: "Domine, labia mea operies," and if I answer thee, cross over and come to the cell, and we will say Matins together; and if I answer thee not, then depart straightway.' And so it was. But there came a morning when St. Francis made him no answer, and, contrary to St. Francis's desire, but with the very best of intentions, dear little brother Leo crossed the bridge over the chasm, which you may see to this day, and entered into St. Francis's cell. There he found him in ecstasy, saying, 'Who art Thou, O most sweet, my God? What am I, most vile worm, and Thine unprofitable servant?' Again and again brother Leo heard him repeat these words, and wondering thereat, he lifted his eyes to the sky, and saw there among the stars, for it was dark, a torch of flame very beautiful and bright, which, coming down from the sky, rested on St. Francis's head. So, thinking himself unworthy to behold so sweet a vision, he softly turned away for to go to his cell again. And as he was going softly, deeming himself unseen, St. Francis was aware of him by the rustling of the leaves under his feet. Surely, even to the most doubtful, that sound of the rustling leaves must bring conviction. Then St. Francis explains to brother Leo all that this might mean. "And as he thus continued a long time in prayer, he came to know that God would hear him, and that so far as was possible for the mere creature, so far would it be granted him to feel the things aforesaid.... And as he was thus set on fire in his contemplation on that same morn, he saw descend from heaven a Seraph with six wings resplendent and aflame, and as with swift flight the Seraph drew nigh unto St. Francis so that he could discern him, he clearly saw that he bore in him the image of a man crucified; and his wings were in such guise displayed that two wings were spread above his head, and two were spread out to fly, and other two covered all his body. Seeing this, St. Francis was sore adread, and was filled at once with joy and grief and marvel. He felt glad at the gracious look of Christ, who appeared to him so lovingly, and gazed on him so graciously; but, on the other hand, seeing Him crucified upon the cross, he felt immeasurable grief for pity's sake.... Then the whole mount of Alvernia appeared as though it burned with bright shining flames that lit up all the mountains and valleys round as though it had been the sun upon the earth; whereby the shepherds that were keeping watch in these parts, seeing the mountains aflame, and so great a light around, had exceeding great fear, according as they afterwards told unto the brothers, declaring that this flame rested upon the mount of Alvernia for the space of an hour and more. In like manner at the bright shining of this light, which through the windows lit up the hostels of the country round, certain muleteers that were going into Romagna arose, believing that the day had dawned, and saddled and laded their beasts; and going on their way, they saw the said light die out and the material sun arise. In the seraphic vision, Christ, the which appeared to him, spake to St. Francis certain high and secret things, the which St. Francis in his lifetime desired not to reveal to any man; but after his life was done he did reveal them, as it set forth below; and the words were these: 'Knowest thou,' said Christ, 'what it is that I have done unto thee? I have given thee the Stigmata that are the signs of My Passion, to the end that thou mayest be My standard-bearer. And even as in the day of My death I descended into hell and brought out thence all souls that I found there by reason of these My Stigmata: even so do I grant to thee that every year on the day of thy death thou shalt go to Purgatory, and in virtue of thy Stigmata shalt bring out thence all the souls of thy three Orders,--to wit, Minors, Sisters, Continents,--and likewise others that shall have had a great devotion for thee, and shalt lead them unto the glory of Paradise, to the end that thou mayest be confirmed to Me in death as thou art in life.' Then this marvellous image vanished away, and left in the heart of St. Francis a burning ardour and flame of love divine, and in his flesh a marvellous image and copy of the Passion of Christ. For straightway in the hands and feet of St. Francis began to appear the marks of the nails in such wise as he had seen them in the body of Jesus Christ the crucified, the which had shown Himself to him in the likeness of a Seraph; and thus his hands and feet appeared to be pierced through the middle with nails, and the heads of them were in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet outside the flesh, and their points came out in the back of his hands and of his feet, so that they seemed bent back and rivetted in such a fashion that under the bend and rivetting which all stood out above the flesh might easily be put a finger of the hand as a ring; and the heads of the nails were round and black. Likewise in the right side appeared the image of a wound made by a lance, unhealed, and red and bleeding, the which afterwards oftentimes dropped blood from the sacred breast of St. Francis, and stained with blood his tunic and his hose. Wherefore his companions, before they knew it of his own lips, perceiving nevertheless that he uncovered not his hands and feet, and that he could not put the soles of his feet to the ground ... knew of a surety that in his hands and feet, and likewise in his side, he bore the express image and similitude of Our Lord Jesus Christ crucified." On the day after the feast of St. Michael, St. Francis left La Verna never to return. * * * * * It was with a certain hesitation that I first came to La Verna, as though something divine that was hidden in the life of the Apostle of Humanity might be lost for me in the mere realism of his sacred places. But it was not so. In Italy, it might seem even to-day, St. Francis is not a stranger, and, in fact, I had got no farther than the Cappella degli Uccelli before I seemed to understand everything, and in a place so lonely as this to have found again, yes, that Jesus whom I had lost in the city. On a high precipitous rock on the top of the mountain you come to the convent itself, through a great court, il Quadrante, under a low gateway. The buildings are of the end of the fifteenth century, simple, and with a certain country beauty about them, strong and engaging. In the dim corridors the friars pass you on their way to church at all hours of the day, smiling faintly at you, whom they, in their simple way, receive without question as a friend. It is for St. Francis you have come: it is enough. You pass into the Cappella della Maddalena, where the angel appeared to S. Francesco promising such great things, and it is with a certain confidence you remind yourself, yes, it is true, the Order still lives, here men still speak S. Francesco's name and pray to God. And there, as it is said, Jesus Himself spoke with him, and he wrote the blessing for Frate Leone. Then you enter the Chiesina, the first little church of the Mountain that St. Francis may have built with his own hands, and that S. Bonaventura certainly enlarged; and thus into the great Church of S. Maria Assunta, built in 1348 by the Conte di Pietramala, with its beautiful della Robbias. Coming out again, you pass along the covered way into the Cappella della Stigmata, built in 1263 by the Conte Simone da Battifolle, where behind the high altar is the great Crucifixion by one of the della Robbia. Next to this chapel is the Cappella della Croce, where of old the cell stood in which St. Francis kept the Lent of St. Michael. Close by are the Oratories of S. Antonio di Padua and S. Bonaventura, where they prayed and worked. Below the Chapel of the Stigmata is the Sasso Spicco, whence the devil hurled one of the brethren. For during that Lent, "Francis leaving his cell one day in fervour of spirit, and going aside a little to pray in a hollow of the rock, from which down to the ground is an exceeding deep descent and a horrible and fearful precipice, suddenly the devil came in terrible shape, with a tempest and exceeding loud roar, and struck at him for to push him down thence. St. Francis, not having where to flee, and not being able to endure the grim aspect of the demon, he turned him quickly with hands and face and all his body pressed to the rock, commending himself to God and groping with his hands, if perchance he might find aught to cling to. But as it pleased God, who suffereth not His servants to be tempted above that they are able to bear, suddenly by a miracle the rock to which he clung hollowed itself out in fashion as the shape of his body.... But that which the demon could not do then unto St. Francis ... he did a good while after the death of St. Francis unto one of his dear and pious brothers, who was setting in order some pieces of wood in the self-same place, to the end that it might be possible to cross there without peril, out of devotion to St. Francis and the miracle that was wrought there. On a day the demon pushed him, while he had on his head a great log that he wished to set there, and made him fall down thence with the log upon his head. But God, that had preserved and delivered St. Francis from falling, through his merits delivered and preserved his pious brother from the peril of his fall; for the brother, as he fell, with exceeding great devotion commanded himself in a loud voice to St. Francis, and straightway he appeared unto him, and, catching him, set him down upon the rocks without suffering him to feel a shock or any hurt." Can it have been this "pious brother" who wrote the _Fioretti_? Everywhere you go in La Verna you feel that S. Francesco has been before you; and where there is no tradition to help you, surely you will make one for yourself. Can he who loved everything that had life have failed to love, too, that world he saw from La Penna-- "Nel crudo sasso, intra Tevere ed Amo" --Casentino and its woods and streams, Val d'Arno, Val di Tevere, the hills of Perugia, the valleys of Umbria, the lean, wolfish country of the Marche, the rugged mountains of Romagna. There, on the summit of La Verna, you look down on the broken fortresses of countless wars, the passes through which army after army, company upon company, has marched to victory or fled in defeat; every hill-top seems to bear some ruined Rocca, every valley to be a forgotten battlefield, every stream has run red with blood. All is forgotten, all is over, all is done with. The victories led to nothing; the defeats are out of mind. In the midst of the battle the peasant went on ploughing his field; somewhere not far away the girls gathered the grapes. All this violence was of no account; it achieved nothing, and every victory was but the tombstone of an idea. Here, on La Verna, is the only fortress that is yet living in all Tuscany of that time so long ago. It is a fortress of love. The man who built it had flung away his dagger, and already his sword rusted in its scabbard in that little house in Assisi; he conquered the world by love. His was the irresistible and lovely force, the immortal, indestructible confidence of the Idea, the Idea which cannot die. If he prayed in Latin, he wrote the first verses of Italian poetry. Out of his tomb grew the rose of the Renaissance, and filled the world with its sweetness. He was the son of a burgess in Assisi, and is now the greatest saint in our heaven. With the sun he loved his name has shone round the world, and there is no land so far off that it has not heard it. And we, who loot upon the ruined castles of the Conti Guidi, are here because of him, and speak with his brothers as we gaze. V. A RIVEDERLA Slowly, as the summer waned, I made my way up through the Casentino, once more past the strongholds and the little towns. Now and then on my way I met the herds, already setting out for the winter pastures of Maremma. The grapes were plucking or gathered in, and everywhere there were songs. "Come volete faccia che non pianga, Sapendo che da voi devo partire? E tu, bello, in Maremma, ed io 'n montagna! Chesta partenza mi farà morire." So I came once more over Falterona, down to Castagno, that mountain village where Andrea del Castagno, the follower of Masaccio, was born, to S. Godenzo, between two streams, where Dante knew the castle of the Guidi, and where Conte Tegrimo of Porciano received Henry VII. Here, at last, I was in the very footsteps of Dante; for in the church there, in the choir set high above the old crypt, he signed the deed of alliance between the Guidi and the Ubaldini on 8th June 1302, "Actum in choro Sancti Gaudentii de pede Alpium." Nothing remains of the place as it was in those days, I suppose, save the church, and that has been for the most part rebuilt; but the choir stands, so that we may say here, on 8th June 1302, Dante took quill and signed and spoke with his fellow-exiles. Thence I followed the way to Dicomano by Sieve, at the foot of the Consuma, and then up stream to Borgo S. Lorenzo, the capital of the Mugello, and so by the winding road above the valley under the hills to Fiesole, to Florence, wrapped in rain, through which an evening sun was breaking. FOOTNOTES: [132] Now in S. Trinità in Firenze. [133] Mr. Montgomery Carmichael (_On the Old Road_, etc., p. 293), quoting from Don Diego de' Franchi (_Historia del Patriarcha S. Giovangualberto_, p. 77: Firenze, 1640), says that S. Romuald and S. Giovanni Gualberto vowed eternal friendship between their Orders, "and for a long time, if a Camaldolese was visiting Vallombrosa, he would take off his own and put on a Vallombrosan habit as a symbol that the monks of the two Orders were brothers." [134] _Guida Illustrata del Casentino da C. Beni_: Firenze, 1889. This perhaps the best guide-book in the Tuscan language, is certainly the best for the Casentino. Those who cannot read it must fall back on the charming and delightful book by Miss Noyes, _The Casentino and its Story_: Dent, 1905. It is too good a book to be left useless in its heavy bulky form. Perhaps Miss Noyes will give us a pocket edition. XXVII. PRATO Prato is like a flower that has fallen by the wayside that has faded in the dust of the way. She is a little rosy city, scarcely more than a castello, full of ruined churches; and in the churches are ruined frescoes, ruined statues, broken pillars, spoiled altars. You pass from one church to another--from S. Francesco, with its façade of green and white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle Carceri, to S. Niccolò da Tolentino, to S. Domenico--and you ask yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see: only this flower fallen by the wayside. But in truth Prato is the child of Florence, a rosy child among the flowers--in the country, too, as children should be. Her churches are small. What could be more like a child's dream of a church than La Madonna delle Carceri? And the Palazzo Pretorio--it is a toy palace wonderfully carved and contrived, a toy that has been thrown aside. In the Palazzo Comunale the little daughter of Florence has gathered all her broken treasures: here a discarded Madonna, there a Bambino long since forgotten; flowers, too, flowers of the wayside, faded now, such as a little country girl will gather and toss into your vettura at any village corner in Tuscany; a terra-cotta of Luca della Robbia, and that would be a lily; a Madonna by Nero di Bicci, and that might have been a rose; a few panels by Lippo Lippi, and they were from the convent garden. In Via S. Margherita you come still upon a nosegay of such country blossoms, growing still by the wayside--Madonna with St. Anthony, S. Margherita, S. Costanza, and S. Stefano about her, painted by Filippino Lippo, a very lovely shrine, such as you cannot find in Florence, but which Prato seems glad to possess, on the way to the country itself. And since Prato is a child, there are about her many children; mischievous, shy, joyful little people, who lurk round the coppersmiths, or play in the old churches, or hide about the corridors of Palazzo Comunale. And so it is not surprising that the greatest treasures of Prato are either the work of children--the frescoes, for instance, of Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti in the Duomo--or the presentment of them, yes, in their happiest moments; some dancing, while others play on pipes, or with cymbals full of surprising sweetness, in the open-air pulpit of Donatello; a pulpit from which five times every year a delightful and wonderful thing is shown, not without its significance, too, in this child-city of children--Madonna's Girdle, the Girdle of the Mother of them all, shown in the open air, so that even the tiniest may see. The Duomo itself, simple and small, so that you may not lose your way there, however little you may be, was built in 1317, though a church has stood there apparently since about 750, while the façade, all in ivory and green, is a work of the fifteenth century. Donatello's pulpit, for which a contract was made in 1425 which named Michelozzo with him as one of those _industriosi maestri_ intent on the work, is built into the south-west corner of the church overlooking the Piazza. Almost a complete circle in form, it is separated, unfortunately we may think, into seven panels divided by twin pilasters, where on a mosaic ground groups, crowds almost, of children dance and play and sing. It is the very spirit of childhood you see there, a naïve impetuosity that occasionally almost stumbles or forgets which way to turn; and if these panels have not the subtler rhythm of the Cantoria at Florence, they are more frankly just children's work, so that any day you may see some little maid of Prato gazing at those laughing babies, babies who dance really not without a certain awkwardness and simplicity, as though they were her own brothers, as indeed they are. Under the pulpit, Michelozzo has forged in bronze a relief of one face of a capital, where other children gaze with all the serious innocence of childhood at the pleasant world of the Piazza. Passing under the terra-cotta of Madonna with St. Stephen and St. Laurence, made by Andrea della Robbia in 1489, you enter the church itself, a little dim and mysterious, and full of wonderful or precious things, those pillars, for instance, of green serpentine or the Sacra Cintola, the very Girdle of Madonna herself, in its own chapel there on the left behind the beautiful bronze screen of Bruno di Ser Lapo. There, too, you will always find a group of children, and surely it was for them that Agnolo Gaddi painted those frescoes of the life of Madonna and the gift of her Girdle to St. Thomas. For it seems that doubting Thomas was doubting to the last; he alone of all the saints was the least a child. How they wonder at him now, for first he could not believe that Jesus was risen from the dead, when the flowers rise, when the spring like Mary wanders to-day in tears in the garden. Was she not, indeed, the spring, who at break of day stood trembling on the verge of the garden, looking for the sun, the sun that had been dead all winter long? "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." After all, is it not the cry of our very hearts often enough at Easter, when the summer for which we have waited too long seems never to be coming at all? It came at last, and St. Thomas, like to us maybe, but unlike the children, would not believe it till he had touched the very dayspring with his hands, and felt the old sweetness of the sunshine. And so, when the sun was set and the world desolate, Madonna too came to die, and was received into heaven amid a great company of angels, and they were the flowers, and there she is eternally. Now, when all this came to pass, St. Thomas was not by, and when he came and saw Winter in the world he would not believe that Madonna was dead, nor would he be persuaded that she was crowned Queen of Angels in heaven. And Mary, in pity of his sorrow, sent him by the hands of children "the girdle with which her body was girt,"--just a strip of the blue sky sprinkled with stars,--"and therefore he understood that she was assumpt into heaven." And if you ask how comes this precious thing in Prato, I ask where else, then, could it be but in this little city among the children, where the promise of Spring abides continually, and the Sun is ever in their hearts. Ah, Rose of the world, dear Lily of the fields, you will return; like Spring you will come from that heaven where you are, and in every valley the flowers will run before you and the poppies will stray among the corn, and the proud gladiolus will bow its violet head; then on the hillside I shall hear again the silver laughter of the olives, and in the wide valleys I shall hear all the rivers running to the sea, and the sweet wind will wander in the villages, and in the walled cities I shall find the flowers, and I too, with the children, shall wait on the hills at dawn to see you pass by with the Sun in your arms because it is spring--Stella Matutina, Causa nostrae laetitiae. It was a certain lad of Prato, Michele by name, who, wandering in the wake of the great army in Palestine in 1096 at evening, by one of the wells of the desert, kissed the little daughter of a great priest, who gave him the Girdle of Madonna for love. Returning to Prato with this precious thing, and having nowhere to hide it, he put it, as a child might do, under his bed, and every night the angels for fear mounted guard about it. He died, and it came into the hands of a certain Uberto, a priest of the city; then, one tried to steal it, but he was put to death, and after, the Girdle was placed in the Duomo in a casket of ivory in a chapel of marble between the pillars of serpentine and lamps of gold. And Andrea Pisano carved a statue of Madonna, and they dressed her in silk and placed her on an altar, in which lay hidden the promise of spring. Then Ridolfo Ghirlandajo painted a fresco over the west door, of Madonna with her Girdle, and indeed they did all they knew in honour of their treasure: so that Mino da Fiesole and Rossellino made a pulpit and set it there in the nave, and there, too, you may see Madonna giving her Girdle to St. Thomas, and St. Stephen, the boy martyr, stoned to death, and other remembrances. In the south transept Benedetto da Maiano carved a Madonna and Child, while his brothers carved a Pietà; but it is not such work as this which calls you to the Duomo to-day, but certainly the Girdle itself, which, however, you can only see on certain occasions.[135] And then there is the work of those two children, Fra Lippo Lippi and the little girl who ran away from her convent for love of him, Lucrezia Buti; for though it was Lippo Lippi who painted, it was Lucrezia who served him for model, and since with him painting, for the first time perhaps, came to need life to inspire it, Lucrezia has her part in his work which it would be ungenerous to ignore. Filippo Lippi was born in 1406 in a by-street of Florence called Ardiglione, behind the convent of the Carmelites, where he painted his first frescoes. His mother, poor soul, died in giving him life, and his father died too before he was three years old. For some time he lived in the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who hardly brought him up till he was eight years old, when, as Vasari tells us, no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she took him to the Carmelites, who promised to make a friar of him. Florence was at the moment of its all too brief spring, in which painting and sculpture were to grow almost like flowers at every street corner, with a delicate beauty that is characteristic of wild flowers, which yet are hardy enough in reality. Reality, it is just that which is so touching in the work of this naïve, observant painter, whose work has much of the beauty of a folk-song, one of those rispetti which on every Tuscan hill you may hear any summer day above the song of the cicale. He went about, like the child he was his whole life long, looking at things out of curiosity, and remembering them for love. His adventures, those marvellous adventures of his childhood so carefully related by Vasari,--his capture by pirates on the beach of Ancona, his sojourn in Barbary, his escape hardly won by the astonishment of his art, are tales which, whether true or not, have a real value for us because they are indicative of his life, his view of the world: his life was in itself so daring, so delightful an adventure, that nothing that could have happened to him can seem marvellous beside it. For he has for the first time in Italy seen the things we have seen, and loved them: the children at the street corner, the flowers by the wayside, the girls grouped in a doorway looking sideways up the street, a mother nursing her little struggling son. In 1421 he had taken the habit, and then Masaccio had come to the convent to paint in the Brancacci Chapel, and Fra Filippo watched him, helping him perhaps, certainly fired by his work, till he who had played in the streets of Florence decided that he must be a painter. It is characteristic of his whole method that from the very beginning the cloister was too strait for him; he had the passion for seeing things, people, the life of the city, of strange cities too, for we hear of him vaguely in Naples, but soon in Florence again, where he painted in S. Ambrogio for the nuns the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Accademia. It was this picture which Cosimo came upon, and, finding the painter, took him into his house. And truly, it was something very different from the holy work of Angelico, a painter Cosimo loved so well, that he found in that picture of the Coronation. That Virgin, was she Queen of Angels or some Florentine girl?--and then those angels, are they not the very children of the City of Flowers? But Lippo was not content; he who had found the convent too narrow for him in his insatiable desire for life, was not likely to be content with any burgher's palace. Cosimo ordered pictures, Lippo laughed in the streets, so they locked him in, and he knotted the sheets of the bed together and let himself out of the window, and for days he lived in the streets. So Cosimo let him alone, "labouring to keep him at his work by kindness," understanding, perhaps that it was a child with whom he had to deal, a child full of the wayward impulses of children, the naïve genius of youth, the happiness of all that;--the passions, too, a passion, in Filippo's case, for kisses. He was never far from a girl's arms; and then how he has painted them, shy, roguish, wanton daughters of Florence, with their laughing, obstinate, kicking babies, half laughing, half smiling, altogether serious too, while Lippo paints them with a kiss for payment. He spent some months in Prato with his friend Fra Diamante, who had been his companion in novitiate. The nuns of S. Margherita commissioned him to paint a picture for their high altar, and it was while at work there that he caught sight of Lucrezia Buti. "Fra Filippo," says Vasari, "having had a glance at the girl, who was very beautiful and graceful, so persuaded the nuns that he prevailed upon them to permit him to make a likeness of her for the figure of their Virgin." The picture, now in Paris, was finished, not before Filippo had fallen in love with Lucrezia and she with him, so that he led her away from the nuns; and on a certain day, when she had gone forth to do honour to the Cintola, he bore her from their keeping. "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards; for our vineyards have tender grapes." Vasari tells us that Lucrezia never returned, but remained with Filippo, bearing him a son,--that Filippino "who eventually became a most excellent and very famous painter like his father." And it is said that not Lucrezia alone was involved in that adventure, for she had a sister not less lovely than herself, called Spinetta; she also fled away, and this again brought disgrace on the nuns, so that the Pope himself was compelled to interfere, for they were all living in Prato, not in disgrace but happily, children in a city of children. Cosimo, however, befriended them, and would laugh till the tears came in telling the tale, till Pius II, not altogether himself guiltless of the love of women, at his request unfrocked Filippo and authorised his union with Lucrezia. However this may be, and however strange it may seem, this wolf, who had stolen the lamb from the fold of Holy Church, was engaged by the Duomo authorities in this very city of the theft to paint in fresco there in the choir the story of St. John Baptist and of St. Stephen. It is a masterpiece. As we look to-day on the faded beauty of his work, it is with surprise we ask ourselves why he has signed the fresco of the death of St. Stephen, for instance, Frater Filippus; surely he was frater no longer, but Sponsus. He worked for four years at those frescoes, Fra Diamante coming from Florence to help him. He was a child, and the children of Prato understood him--the Medici too; for when the work in Prato was finished, Piero de' Medici roused himself to find him work, again in a church, the Duomo of Spoleto, where he has painted very sweetly the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Coronation of the Virgin. Could these things have happened in any other city save Prato, or to any other than a child in the days not so long before Savonarola was burned? No; Fra Lippo played among the children of Italy, and has told us of them with simplicity and sweetness,--little stumbling fellows of the house doors, the laughing children about the fountains, the slim, pale girls who walk arm-in-arm, smiling faintly, in every Tuscan city at sunset, the flowers by the wayside, the shepherds of the hills. And he has made Jesus in the image of his little son; and Madonna is but Lucrezia Buti, whom he kissed into the world. You may see them to-day if you will go to Prato. FOOTNOTES: [135] The occasions are Christmas Day, Easter Day, May 1, August 15, and September 8. XXVIII. PISTOJA If St. Francis of Assisi dreamed his whole life long of the resurrection of love among men, and in the valleys of Umbria went about like a second Jesus doing good, with an immense love in his heart singing his Laudes Creaturarum by the wayside; Dante Alighieri, the greatest poet of his country, might almost seem to have been overwhelmed with hatred, a hatred which is perhaps but the terrible reverse of an intolerable love, but which is an impeachment, nevertheless, not only of his own time, of the cities of his country, but of himself too, for while he thus sums up the Middle Age and judges it, he is himself its most marvellous child, losing himself at last in one of its ideals. St. Francis of Assisi, concerned only with humanity, has by love contrived the Renaissance of man, assured as he was by the love of God, His delight in us His creatures. But for Dante, bitter with loneliness, wandering in the Hell, the Purgatory, the Paradise of his own heart, any such wide and overwhelming love might seem to have been impossible. Imprisoned in the adamant of his personality, he has little but hatred and contempt for the world he knew so well. How scornful he is! Some secret sorrow seems to have burnt up the wells of sweetness in his nature, from which he once drew a love for all mankind. He seems to have gone about hating people, so that if he speaks of Florence it is with a passionate enmity, if of Siena with scorn, Pisa has only his contempt, Arezzo is to him abominable and beastly. He has judged his country as God Himself will not judge it, and he kept his anger for ever. And since the great Florentine can bring himself to bid Florence "Godi, Fiorenza poi che sei si grande Che per mare, e per terra batti l'ali, E per l'Inferno il tuo nome si spande," it is not wonderful that Pistoja is lost in his scorn. Coming upon Vanni Fucci continually consumed by the adder, he hears him say "Ahi Pistoja, Pistoja, chè non stanzi D'incenerarti, si che più non duri Poi che in mal far lo seme tuo avanzi?" "O Giustizia di Dio, quanto è severa,..." yet Dante's will beggar it. The origin of Pistoja is obscure. Some ascribe its foundation to the Boian Gauls, some to the Romans; however that may be, it was here in Pistoria, as the city was then called, that the army of the Republic came up with Cataline, and defeated him and slew him in B.C. 62. There follows an impenetrable silence, unbroken till, by the will of the Countess Matilda, Tuscany passed, not without protest as we know, to the Pope, when Pistoja seems to have vindicated its liberty in 1117, its commune contriving her celebrated municipal statutes. In 1198 she made one of the Tuscan League against the empire, and in the first year of the thirteenth century she had extended her power over the neighbouring strongholds from Fucecchio to the Arno. After the death of Frederic II, in 1250, she became Guelph with the greater part of Tuscany, and in 1266 took part with Charles of Anjou and fought on his side at Benevento under the Pistojese captains, Giovanni and Corrado da Montemagno. About this time we first hear the name Cancellieri, Cialdo de' Cancellieri being Potestà. At Campaldino the Pistojese fought under Corso Donati, and turned the battle against the Aretines; and it was under the Potestà Giano della Bella in 1294[136] that the Priore of the twelve _anziani_, established after Campaldino, was named Gonfaloniere of Justice. Villani gives us a vivid picture of Pistoja in 1300. "In these times," says the prince of Florentine chroniclers, "the city of Pistoja being in happy and great and good estate, among the other citizens there was one family very noble and puissant, not, however, of very ancient lineage, which was called Cancellieri, born of Ser Cancelliere, which was a merchant and gained much wealth, and by his two wives had many sons, which, by reason of their riches, all became knights and men of worth and substance, and from them were born many sons and grandsons, so that at this time they numbered more than one hundred men in arms, rich and puissant and of many affairs; and indeed, not only were they the leading citizens of Pistoja, but they were among the more puissant families of Tuscany. There arose among them, through their exceeding prosperity, and through the suggestion of the devil, contempt and enmity, between them which were born of one wife and them which were born of the other; and the one took the name of the Black Cancellieri, and the other of the White, and this grew until they fought together, but it was not any great affair. And one of those on the side of the White Cancellieri, having been wounded, they on the side of the Black Cancellieri, to the end they might be at peace and concord with them, sent him which had done the injury and handed him over to the mercy of them which had received it, that they should take amend, and vengeance for it at their will; they on the side of the White Cancellieri, ungrateful and proud, having neither pity nor love, cut off the hand of him which had been commended to their mercy on a horse-manger. By which sinful beginning not only was the house of Cancellieri divided, but many violent deaths arose thereupon, and all the city of Pistoja was divided, for some held with one part and some with the other, and they called themselves the Whites and the Blacks, forgetting among themselves the Guelph and Ghibelline parties; and many civil strifes and much peril and loss of life arose therefore in Pistoja...." The Whites seem to have been little more than Ghibellines, to which party they presently allied themselves, when Andrea Gherardini was captain. This party soon got the upper hand in Pistoja, thus bringing down the hatred of the Lucchesi and the Fiorentini; a cruel siege and pillage--touchingly described by Dino Campagni--following in 1305. Exiled, the Whites thronged to the banner of Uguccione, and helped to win the battle of Montecatini in 1305. This done, Uguccione became tyrant of Pistoja till Castruccio Castracani flung him out, and by the will of Lewis of Bavaria became himself tyrant of the city, defeating the Florentines again in 1325. In his absence the Florentines besieged Pistoja again three years later, and took it; the fortunate death of Castruccio confirming them in their conquest, which thus became the vassal of the Lily. Such in brief is the story of Pistoja; but if we look a little more closely into the mere confusion of those wars, two facts will perhaps emerge clearly, and help us to understand the position. Florence, a city of merchants, was the last power in Italy to make war for the pleasure of fighting, yet in turn she conquered every city in Tuscany, save Lucca alone.[137] What can have been the overmastering necessity that drove her on so bloody a path? Certainly not a love of empire, for she, who was so unfortunate in the art of government, was not likely to lust for dominion. Like all the Florentine wars, that which at last brought Pisa under her yoke was a war on behalf of the guilds of Florence, a war of merchants. Florence humbled Pisa because Pisa held the way to the sea, she brought Arezzo and Siena low and bought Cortona because they stood on the roads to Rome, whose banker she was.[138] And did not Pistoja guard the way to the north, to Bologna, to Milan, to Flanders, and England, whence came the wool that was her wealth?[139] Thus in those days as to-day, war was not a game which one might play or not as one pleased, but the inexorable result of the circumstances of life. When Bologna closed the passes, Florence was compelled to fight or to die; when Pisa taxed Florentine merchandise she signed her own death. On the other hand, the passionate desire of Pistoja was to be free. Liberty--it was the dream of her life; not the liberty of the people, but the essential liberty of the State, of the city. So she was Ghibelline because Florence was Guelph. All her life long she feared lest Florence should eat her up: that death was ever before her eyes. This and this alone is the cause of the hate of the great Florentine: he hated Florence with an intolerable love because she thrust him out; he hated Pisa, Arezzo, Siena, and Pistoja because they feared or rivalled Florence, and would not be reconciled. His dream of an Italy united under a foreign Emperor, the ghost of the Roman Empire, remained a dream, noble and yet ignoble too. For it is for this that we may accuse him of a lack of clairvoyance, a real failure to appreciate the future, which in the innumerable variety of her cities gave Italy an intellectual life less sustained and clear than the intellectual life of Greece, but more spiritual and more various. In Italy Antiquity and Hebraism became friends, to our undoubted benefit, to the gain of the whole world. But little is left in the smiling, gracious city to-day to recall those bitter quarrels so long ago. Pistoja, beyond any other Tuscan town perhaps, is full of grace, and gives one always, as it were, a smiling salutation. La Ferrignosa she was called of old, but it is the last title that fits her now, for the clank of her irons has long been silent, and nothing any longer disturbs the quiet of her days. S. Atto is her saint, and it is by his street that you enter the city, walled still, coming at last into the Piazza Cino, Cino da Pistoja, one of the sweetest and least fortunate of Tuscan poets. Turning thence into Via Cavour, you come to S. Giovanni Evangelista, once without the walls, but now not far from the middle of the city, really the earliest of her churches, a Lombard building of about 1160, the façade decorated somewhat in the Pisan manner with rows of pillars, while over the gates is a relief of the Last Supper, by Gruamonte, whom some have thought to be the architect of the church. Within is the beautiful pulpit of Fra Guglielmo, disciple of Niccolò Pisano, and there on the east he has carved the Annunciation and the Birth of Jesus; on the north, the Washing of the Disciples' Feet, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, and Christ in Hades; while on the west is the Ascension and the Death of the Virgin. And just as at Bologna, in the tomb of St. Dominic, Fra Guglielmo's work is but an inferior copy of the style of his master, so here in this pulpit, built most probably in 1270, we find just Niccolò's work spoiled, in a mere repetition, feeble, and without any of the devotional spirit we might expect in the work of a friar. Beside it, near the next altar, is a very beautiful group in glazed terra-cotta, in the manner of the della Robbia, by Fra Paolino. The holy water basin supported by figures of the Virtues is a much-injured work by Giovanni Pisano. Following Via Cavour, past Palazzo Panciatichi-Cellesi, through Via Francesco Magni, into Piazza del Duomo, you are in the midst of all that was most splendid in Pistoja of old: the Duomo, with its old fortified tower, Torre del Potestà, which still carries the arms of those captains; the Baptistery, high above the way, designed by Andrea Pisano, with its open-air pulpit and broken sculptures; the magnificent Palazzo del Comune; and opposite, the not less splendid Palazzo Pretorio, the palace of the Podestà. Of old the Piazza was less spacious, but in 1312 it was enlarged, and later, too, the palace of the Capitano, on the north, was destroyed. Here every Wednesday they still hold the corn-market, and every Saturday a market of stuffs, silks, and tissues. It was S. Romolo who first brought the gospel to Pistoja, and the tradition is that he converted a temple built by the Romans to the God Mars into a church, on the spot where now the Duomo stands,[140] and indeed in 1599 certain inscriptions were found, and the capitals of some Roman columns. It is generally thought that a church was built here in the early part of the fifth century, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, on whose day Stilicho, that Roman general who was by birth a Vandal, gained a victory over Radaugasius and his army of some 400,000 Goths, who had ravaged the country as far as Florence in 406. However this may be, in 589 the church was finally rebuilt, and certainly re-dedicated to S. Zenone, the Bishop of Verona, who, so it was said, had saved the Pistojese from the floods by breaking through the Gonfolina Pass, that narrow defile beyond Signa through which the Arno flows, with the Ombrone in her bosom, into the Empolese. After being dedicated at various times to many saints, in 1443 it was given to S. Zenone, whose name it still bears. The present church is for the most part a work of the twelfth century, and certainly not the work of Niccolò Pisano. The façade, like the rest of the church, has suffered an unfortunate restoration. The marble loggia is a work of the fifteenth century, and the two statues are, one of S. Jacopo, by Scarpellino, the other of S. Zenone, by Andrea Vaccà. The beautiful terra-cotta over the great door of Madonna and Child with Angels, and the roof above, are the work of Andrea della Robbia. The frescoes of the story of S. Jacopo are fourteenth-century work of Giovanni Balducci the Pisan. The splendid and fierce Campanile, still called Torre del Potestà, stood till about the year 1200, alone, a stronghold of the city. Giovanni Pisano converted it to its present form in 1301. Within, the church has been greatly spoiled. The monument to Cino da Pistoja, poet and professor, was decreed in 1337 by the Popolo Pistojese, and was moved about the church from one place to another, till in 1839 it was erected in its present position. There you may see him lecturing to his students, and one of them is a woman; can it be that Selvaggia whom he loved? "Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair ..." "Weep, Pistoja," says Petrarch, in not the least musical of his perfect sonnets, in celebrating the death of his master-- "Pianga Pistoia e i cittadin perversi Che perdut' hanno si dolce vicino; E rallegres' il ciel or' ello è gito." Dante, who exchanged sonnets with Cino and rallied him about his inconstancy, calls the Pistojese worthy of the Beast[141] who dwelt among them; Petrarch calls them _i cittadin perversi_; the truth being that the Neri were in power and had exiled "il nostro amoroso messer Cino." Close by, against the west wall, is the great font of Andrea Ferrucci, the disciple of Bernardo Rossellino, with five reliefs of the story of St. John Baptist. Opposite Cino's monument is the tomb of Cardinal Fortiguerra. For long this disappointing monument, so full of gesticulation, passed as the work of Verrocchio; it is to-day attributed rather to Lorenzetto, his disciple. Passing up the north aisle, we enter at last the Cappella del Sacramento, under whose altar St. Felix, the Pistojese, sleeps, while on the south wall hangs one of the best works of Lorenzo di Credi, Madonna with Jesus in her arms, and St. John Baptist and S. Zenone on either side. Opposite is the bust of Bishop Donato de' Medici, by Antonio Rossellino. The little crypt under the high altar is scarcely worth a visit, but the great treasure of the church, the silver frontal of the high altar, is now to be found in the Cappella della Città, and over it, in a chest within the reredos, is the body, still uncorrupted, of S. Atto, Bishop of Pistoja, who died in 1155. The silver frontal, certainly the finest in Italy, with its wings and reredos of silver and enamel, was removed from the high altar in 1786. It is the work of Andrea di Puccio di Ognibene, the Pistojese goldsmith: it was finished in 1316. It is carved with fifteen stories from the New Testament, and with many statues of prophets and pictures of saints. Of the two wings, that on the left, consisting of stories from the Old Testament, with the Nativity, the Presentation and the Marriage of the Virgin, is the work of Pietro of Florence--it was finished about 1357; that on the right, carved in 1371 by Leonardo di Ser Giovanni, consists of the story of St. James and the finding of his body at Campostella. All the guide-books tell you that it was this treasure that Vanni Fucci stole on Shrove Tuesday in 1292, but, as I suppose, since this altar was not begun till 1314, it must have been the earlier treasure which this replaced. Vanni Fucci is famous because of his encounter with Dante in Hell. "Vanni Fucci am I called, Not long since rained down from Tuscany To this dire gullet. Me the bestial life And not the human pleased, mule that I was, Who in Pistoja found my worthy den." Dante tell us-- "I did not mark Through all the gloomy circles of the abyss, Spirit that swelled so proudly 'gainst his God."[142] It is in Pistoja better almost than anywhere else in Italy that these early sculptors--men who were at work here before Niccolò Pisano came from Apulia--may be studied. Rude enough as we may think, they are yet in their subtle beauty, if we will but look at them, the marvellous product of a time which many have thought altogether barbarous. Consider, then, the reliefs over the door of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, or the sculptures on the fagade of S. Bartolommeo in Pantano, the work of Rodolfinus and Guido Bigarelli of Como: they are all works of the twelfth century, and it is, as I think, no naïve beginning we see, but the last hours of an art that is already thousands of years old, about to be born again in the work of Pisano. And indeed we may trace very happily the rise of Tuscan sculpture in Pistoja. Though she possesses no work of Niccolò himself, his influence is supreme in the pulpit of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, and it is the beautiful work of his son Giovanni we see in the great pulpit of S. Andrea, where you enter by a door carved in 1166 by Gruamonte with the Adoration of the Magi. Unlike the work of Fra Guglielmo in S. Giovanni, the pulpit of S. Andrea is hexagonal, and there Giovanni has carved in high relief the Birth of Our Lord, the Adoration of the Magi, the Murder of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment. They were carved in 1301, before Giovanni began the Pisan pulpit now in the Museo in that city. And if we see here the first impulse of the Gothic, the Romantic spirit, in Italian art, as in Niccolò's work we have seen the classic inspiration, it is the far result of these panels that we may discover in the terra-cotta frieze on the vestibule of the Ospedale del Ceppo. That is a work of the sixteenth century, and thus the fifteenth-century work, ever present with us in Florence, is missing here. It is not, however, to any member of the della Robbia clan that we owe this beautiful work, I think, but to some unknown sculptor with whom Buglioni may have worked. For the seven reliefs representing works of Charity and divided by figures of the Virtues are of a surprising splendour, a really classic beauty, and Burckhardt wishes to compare them with the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto and his companions rather than with the sculpture of that time. One wanders about this quiet, alluring city, where the sculptures are scattered like flowers on every church porch and municipal building, without the weariness of the sightseer. One day you go by chance to S. Francesco al Prato, a beautiful and spacious church in a wilderness of Piazza, built in 1294. And there suddenly you come upon the little flowers of St. Francis, faded and fallen--here a brown rose, there a withered petal; here a lily broken short, there a nosegay drooped and dead: and you realise that here you are face to face with something real which has passed away, and so it is with joy you hurry out into the sun, which will always shine with splendour and life, the one thing perhaps that, if these dead might rise from their tombs in S. Francesco, they would recognise as a friend, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Other churches too there are in Pistoja: S. Piero Maggiore, where, as in Florence, so here, the Bishop, coming to the city, was wedded in a lovely symbol to the Benedictine Abbess--there too are the works of Maestro Bono the sculptor; S. Salvadore, which stands in the place where, as it is said, they buried Cataline; S. Domenico, where you may find the beautiful tombs of Andrea Franchi and of Filippo Lazzeri the humanist--this made by Rossellino in 1494. Pistoja is a city of churches; one wanders into them and out again always with new delight; and indeed, they lend a sort of gravity to a place that is light-hearted and alluring beyond almost any other in this part of Tuscany certainly. Thinking thus of her present sweetness, one is glad to find that one poet at least has thought Dante too hard with men. It is strange that it should be Cino who sings-- "This book of Dante's, very sooth to say, Is just a poet's lovely heresy, Which by a lure as sweet as sweet can be Draws other men's concerns beneath its sway; While, among stars' and comets' dazzling play, It beats the right down, let's the wrong go free, Shows some abased, and others in great glee, Much as with lovers is Love's ancient way. Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied, Fixing folks' nearness to the Fiend their foe, Must be like empty nutshells flung aside. Yet through the vast false witness set to grow, French and Italian vengeance on such pride May fall, like Antony's on Cicero."[143] FOOTNOTES: [136] Cf. Dino Campagni, _Cronica Fiorentina_, Book 1, p. 62. When appointed Podestà of Pistoja, Giano rather raised strife than pacified the factions. Cf. also Villari, _History of Florence_, p. 445. [137] Strictly speaking, she never conquered Siena; Charles V did that. [138] In the Middle Age, Cortona and Arezzo were not on the road to Rome, but so far as Florence was concerned, Siena, her holding that she acquired these cities to keep Via Aretina open. Cf. Repetti, v. 715. [139] That Pistoja was not on the great Via Francesca goes for nothing, she threatened it. [140] There is a most excellent little book, _Nuova Guida di Pistoja_, by Cav. Prof. Giuseppe Tigri (Pistoja, 1896), which I strongly recommend to the reader's notice. I wish to acknowledge my debt to it. Unlike so many guides, it is full of life itself, and makes the city live for us also. [141] Bestia, probably a nickname of Vanni Fucci's; cf. _Inferno_, xxiv, 125. [142] _Inferno_, xxiv. 125, 126; xxv. 13, 14. [143] "Cino impugns the verdicts of Dante's _Commedia_," a sonnet translated by D.G. Rossetti. _Note_.--No English writers have written well of Pistoja, for first they always write from a Florentine point of view, and then they quit too soon. I plead guilty too. The key-note to Pistoja is given in that saying of Macchiavelli's, that the Florentine people "per fuggire il nome di crudele lascio distruggere Pistoia." Il Principe, cap. xvii. Cf. also Discorsi iii. 27. It is, of course, all a matter of Panciatichi and Cancellieri. Cf. Zdekauer Statuti Pistoiesi dei Secoli xii. e xiii. XXIX. LUCCA Who that has ever seen the Pistojese the Val di Lima, the country of S. Marcello, the Val di Reno, the country about Pracchia, does not love it--the silent ways through the chestnut woods, the temperance of the hill country after the heat of the cities, the country ways after the ways of the town? And there are songs there too. But to-day my way lies through the valley, Val di Nievole, towards Lucca, lost in the plain at the gate of the Garfagnana. Serravalle, with its old gateway and high Rocca, which fell to Castruccio Castracani; Monsummano, far on the left, with its old church in the valley; Montecatini, with its mineral springs; Buggiano, and Pescia with its mulberries, where the Church of S. Francesco hides and keeps its marvellous portrait of S. Francesco--these are the towns at the foot of the mountains that I shall pass before I turn into the plain between the island hills and come at last to Lucca, Lucca l'Ombrosa, round whose high ramparts that have stood a thousand sieges now in whispering ranks there stand the cool planes of the valley, the shadowy trees that girdle the city with a cintola of green and gold. Lucca is the city of a great soldier, of one of the most charming of Tuscan sculptors, and of Santa Zita. Lucca l'Ombrosa I call her, but she is the city of light too--Luce, light; it is the patriotic derivation of her name. For One came to her with a star in His bosom, the Star of Bethlehem, that heralded the sweet dawn which crept through the valleys and filled them with morning; so Lucca was the first city in Italy, as they say, to receive the light of the gospel. The foundation of this city, which alone of all the cities of Tuscany was to keep in some sort her independence till Napoleon wrested it from her, is obscure. She was not Etruscan, but possibly a Ligurian settlement that came into the power of Rome about 200 B.C., and by 56 B.C. we have certain news of her, for it was here that Caesar, Pompeius, and Crassus formed the triumvirate. Overwhelmed by the disasters that befell the Empire, we hear something of her in the sixth century, when S. Frediano came from Ireland, from Galway, and after a sojourn in Rome became a hermit in the Monti Pisani, till in 565 John III made him Bishop of Lucca. It seems to have been about this time that Lucca began to be of importance, after the fall of the Lombard rule, governed by her own Dukes. And then the Bishops of Lucca, those Bishop Counts who governed her so long, had a jurisdiction which extended to the confines of the Patrimony of St. Peter. The same drama no doubt was played in Lucca as in Pisa or Florence, a struggle betwixt nobles of foreign descent and the young commune of the Latin population. We find Lucca on the papal side in 1064, but in 1081 she joins the Emperor with Siena and Ferrara; but for the most part after Pisa became Ghibelline Lucca was Guelph, for her friends were the enemies of Pisa. Thus the fight went on, a fight really of self-preservation, of civic liberty as it were, each city prizing its ego above every consideration of justice or unity. It was the fourteenth century that gave Lucca her great captain, Castruccio Castracani, the hero of Machiavelli's remarkable sketch, the sketch perhaps for the Prince. It is strange that Machiavelli should have cared to write of the only two men who might in more favourable circumstances have forged a kingdom out of various Republics, Lordships, Duchies, and Marquisates of the peninsula, Castruccio degli Intelminelli and Cesare Borgia. It seems, to follow the virile yet subtle tale of Machiavelli, that at the end of the thirteenth century there was born out of the family of Castracani one Antonio, who, entering himself into Orders, was made a Canon of S. Michele in Lucca, and was even called Messer Antonio. He had for sister a widow of Buonaccorso Cinami, who at the death of her husband had come to live with him, resolved to marry no more. Now behind the house where he lived, Messer Antonio, good man, had a vineyard, and it happened one morning about sunrise that Donna Dianora (for that was the sister's name) walking in the vineyard to gather herbs for a salad (as women frequently do), heard a rustling under the leaves, and turning toward it she fancied it cried, and going towards it she saw the hands and face of a child, which, tumbling up and down in the leaves, seemed to call for relief. Donna Dianora, partly astonished and partly afraid, took it up very tenderly, carried it home, washed it, and having put it in clean clothes, presented it to Messer Antonio. "_Eccololi_!" says she, "and what will Messere do with this?" "Dianora," says he, with a gasp, "Dianora...!" "No, it is not," says she, fluttering suddenly with rage, "and I'll thank you, Messer Antonio," and that she said for spite, "I'll thank you to keep your lewd thoughts to yourself," says she, "and for the fine ladies, fine ladies," says she, "that come to see you at S. Michele," and she fell to weeping, holding the child in her arms. "I that might have had little hands (_manine_) under my chin many's the time if Buonaccorso had not died so old." And she carried the child out of his sight. Then Messer Antonio later, when he understood the case, being no less affected with wonder and compassion than his sister before him, debated with himself what to do, and presently concluded to bring the little fellow up; for, as he said, "I, Antonio, am a priest, and my sister hath no children." So he christened the child Castruccio after his own father, and Dianora looked to him as carefully as if he had been her own. Now Castruccio's graces increased with his years, and therefore in his heart Messer Antonio designed him for a priest; but Dianora would not have it so, and indeed he showed as yet but little inclination to that kind of life, which was not to be wondered at, his natural disposition, as Dianora said, tending quite another way. For though he followed his studies, when he was scarce fourteen years old he began to run after the soldiers and knights, and always to be wrestling and running, and soon he troubled himself very little with reading, unless it were such things as might instruct him for war. And Messer Antonio was sore afflicted. Now the great house in Lucca at that time was Guinigi, and Francesco was then head of it. Ah! a handsome gentleman, rich too, who had borne arms all his life long under the Visconti of Milan. With them he had fought for the Ghibellines till the Lucchesi looked upon him as the very life of that party. This Francesco was used to walk in Piazza S. Michele, where one day he watched Castruccio playing among his companions. Seeing his strength and confidence, he called him to him, and asked him if he did not prefer a gentleman's family, where he could learn to ride the great horse and exercise his arms, before the cloister of a churchman. Guinigi had only to look at him to see which way his heart jumped, so not long after he made a visit to Antonio and begged Castruccio of him in so pressing and yet so civil a manner, that Antonio, finding he could not master the natural inclinations of the lad, let him go. Often after that, Dianora and Antonio too, seeing him ride by in attendance on Francesco, would admire with what address he sat his horse, with what grace he managed his lance, with what comeliness his sword; and indeed scarce any of his age dare meet him at the _Barriere_. He was about eighteen years old when he made his first campaign. For the Guelphs had driven the Ghibellines out of Pavia, and Visconti sought the help of his friends, among them of Francesco Guinigi. Francesco gave Castruccio a company of foot, and marched with him to help Visconti: and Castruccio won such reputation in that fight, that his name galloped through Lombardy, and when he returned to Lucca the whole city had him in respect. Not long after, Guinigi fell sick; in truth he was about to die. Seeing, then, that he had a son scarcely thirteen years old, called Pagolo, he gave him into Castruccio's charge, begging him to show the same generosity to his son as he had received from him. And all this Castruccio promised. Now the head of the Guelph party in Lucca was a certain Signor Giorgio Opizi, who hoped when Francesco was dead to get the city into his power, so that when he saw Castruccio so well thought of and so strong, he began to speak secretly of a new tyranny, by which he meant the growing favour of Castruccio. Pisa at this time was under the government of Uguccione della Faggiuola of Arezzo, whom the Pisans had chosen as their captain, but who had made himself their lord. He had befriended certain Ghibellines banished from Lucca, and therefore Castruccio entered into secret treaty with him in order that these exiles might be restored. So he furnished in Lucca the Tower of Honour, which was in his charge, in case he might have to defend it. He met Uguccione on the night appointed, between Lucca and the hills towards Pisa, and, agreeing with him, Uguccione marched on the city to St. Peter's Gate and set fire to it, while he attacked another on the other side of the town. Meanwhile, his friends within the city ran about in the night calling _To your arms_, and filled the streets with confusion; so that Uguccione easily entered, and, having seized the city, caused all the Opizi to be murdered as well as all the Guelphs he could find. Nor did he stop there, for he exiled one hundred of the best families, who immediately fled to Florence and Pistoja. The Florentines, seeing the Guelph power tottering, put an army in the field, and met the Pisans and Lucchesi at Montecatini. There followed the memorable battle called after that place, in which the Florentines lost some ten thousand men.[144] This was in 1315. Now whether, as Villani says, Uguccione won that battle, or, as Machiavelli asserts, was sick, so that the honour fell to Castruccio, there was already of necessity much jealousy between the two captains; for certainly Castruccio had not called on Uguccione to make him Lord of Lucca, nor had Uguccione obeyed that call for mere love of Castruccio. He therefore, being returned to Pisa, sent his son Nerli to seize Lucca and kill Castruccio, but the lad bungled it: when Uguccione himself set out to repair this, he found the city ready, demanding the release of Castruccio, whom Nerli had imprisoned. Seeing, then, the mood of the city, and that he had but four hundred horse with him, he was compelled to agree to this. And at once Castruccio, who was in no wise daunted, assembled his friends and flung Uguccione out of Lucca. Meantime the Pisans had themselves revolted, so that this tyrant was compelled to retire into Lombardy. It was now that Castruccio saw his opportunity. He got himself chosen Captain-General of all the Lucchese forces for a twelvemonth, and began to reduce the surrounding places near and far which had come under the rule of Uguccione. The first of these to be attacked was Sarzana in Lunigiana. But first he agreed with Pisa, who in hatred of Uguccione sent him men and stores. Sarzana proved very strong, so that before he won it he was compelled to build a fortress beyond the walls, which we may see to this day. Thus Sarzana was taken, and later Massa, Carrara, and Avenza easily enough, until the whole of Lunigiana was in his power, even Fosdinovo, and later Remoli, and that was to secure his way to Lombardy. Then he returned to Lucca, and was received with every sort of joy. About this time Ludovic of Bavaria came into Italy seeking the Imperial Crown, and Castruccio went to meet him with 500 horse, leaving Pagolo Guinigi his Deputy in Lucca. Ludovic received him with much kindness, making him Lord of Pisa and his vicar in all Tuscany: and thus Castruccio became the head of the Ghibelline party both in Lombardy and Tuscany. But Castruccio's aim went higher yet, for he hoped not only to be vicar but master indeed of Tuscany, and to this end he made a league with Matteo Visconti of Milan; and seeing that Lucca had five gates, he divided the country into five parts, and to every part he set a captain, so that presently he could march with 20,000 men beside the Pisans. Now the Florentines were already busy in Lombardy against Visconti, who besought Castruccio to make a diversion. This he readily did, taking Fucecchio and S. Miniato al Tedesco. Then hearing of trouble in Lucca, he returned and imprisoned the Poggi, who had risen against him; an old and notable family, but he spared them not. Meanwhile Florence retook S. Miniato; and Castruccio, not caring to fight while he was insecure at home, made a truce carefully enough, that lasted two years. He now set himself first to make Lucca secure, and for this he built a fortress in the city; and then to possess himself of Pistoja--for he even thought thereby to gain a foothold in Florence herself--and for this he entered into correspondence secretly with both the Neri and the Bianchi there. These two factions did not hesitate to use the enemy of their city to help their ambitions, so that while the Bianchi expected him at one gate, the Neri waited at the other, the one receiving Guinigi and the other Castruccio himself with their men into the city. Not content with thus winning Pistoja, he thought to control the city of Rome also, which he did in the name of the Emperor, the Pope being in Avignon; and this done, he went through the city with two devices embroidered on his coat: the one before read, "He is as pleaseth God," and that behind, "And shall be what God will have him." Now the Florentines were furious at the cunning breach of their truce by which Castruccio had got himself Pistoja; so, while he was in Rome, they determined to capture the place: which they did one night by a ruse, destroying all Castruccio's party. And when he heard it, Castruccio came north in great anger. But at first the Florentines were too quick for him: they got together all of the Guelph league, and before Castruccio was back again, held Val di Nievole. Seeing their greatness--for they were 40,000 in number, while he on his return could muster but 12,000 men at most--he would not meet them in the plain, nor in the Val di Pescia, but resolved to draw that great army into the narrow ways of Serravalle, where he could deal with them. Now Serravalle is a Rocca not on the road but on the hillside above, and the way down into the valley is rather strait than steep till you come to the place where the waters divide: so strait that twenty men abreast take up all the way. That Rocca belonged to a German lord called Manfredi, whose throat Castruccio cheerfully cut. The Florentines, who were eager not only to hold all Val di Nievole but to carry the war away from Pistoja towards Lucca, knew nothing of Serravalle having fallen to Castruccio, so on they came in haste, and encamped above it, hoping to pass the straits next day. There Castruccio fell upon them about midnight, putting all to confusion. Horse and foot fell foul upon one another, and both upon the baggage. There was no way left for them but to run, which they did helter-skelter in the plain of Pistoja, where each man shifted for himself. But Castruccio followed them even to Peretola at the gates of Florence, carrying Pistoja and Prato on the way; there he coined money under their walls,[145] while his soldiers insulted over the conquered; and to make his triumph more remarkable, nothing would serve the turn but naked women must run Corsi on horseback under the very walls of the city. And to deliver their city from Castruccio, the Florentines were compelled to send to the King of Naples, and to pay him annual tribute. But Castruccio's business was always spoiled by revolt, and this time it was Pistoja which rose, and later Pisa. Then the Guelphs raised a great army--30,000 foot and 10,000 horse it was--and after a little, while Castruccio was busy with Pisa, they seized Lastra, Signa, Montelupo, Empoli, and laid siege to S. Miniato: this in May 1328. Castruccio, in no wise discomposed, thought at last Tuscany was in his grasp; therefore he went to Fucecchio and entrenched himself with 20,000 foot and 4000 horse, leaving 5000 foot in Pisa with Guinigi. Fucecchio is a walled city on the other side of Arno opposite S. Miniato. There Castruccio waited; nor could he have chosen better, for the Florentines could not attack him without fording the river from S. Miniato, which they had taken, and dividing their forces. This they were compelled to do, and Castruccio fell upon and beat them, leaving some 20,000 of them dead in the field, while he lost but fifteen hundred. Nevertheless, that proved to be his last fight, for death found him at the top of his fortune; riding into Fucecchio after the battle, he waited a-horseback to greet his men at the great gate of the place which is still called after him. Heated as he was with the fight, it was the evening wind that slew him; for he fell into an ague, and, neglecting it, believing himself sufficiently hardened, it presently killed him, and Pagolo Guinigi ruled in his stead, but without his fortune. Following that strangely successful career, that for Macchiavelli at any rate seemed like a promise of the Deliverer that was to come, the first of modern historians gives us many of Castruccio's sayings set down at haphazard, which bring the man vividly before us. Thus when a friend of his, seeing him engaged in an amour with a very pretty lass, blamed him that he suffered himself to be so taken by a woman--"You are deceived, signore," says Castruccio, "she is taken by me." Another desiring a favour of him with a thousand impertinent and superfluous words--"Hark you, friend," says Castruccio, "when you would have anything of me, for the future send another man to ask it." Something of his dream of dominion may be found in that saying of his when one asked him, seeing his ambition, how Caesar died, and he answered, "Would I might die like him!" Blamed for his severity, perhaps over the Poggi affair, one said to him that he dealt severely with an old friend--"No," says he, "you are mistaken; it was with a new foe." Something of his love for Uguccione--who certainly hated him, but whom he held in great veneration--may be found in his answer to that man who asked him if for the salvation of his soul he never thought to turn monk. "No," says he, "for to me it will be strange if Fra Nazarene should go to Paradise and Ugguccione della Faggiuola to Hell." And Macchiavelli says that what was most remarkable was that, "having equalled the great actions of Scipio and Philip, the father of Alexander, he died as they did, in the forty-fourth year of his age, and doubtless he would have surpassed them both had he found as favourable dispositions at Lucca as one of them did in Macedon and the other in Rome." Just there we seem to find the desire of the sixteenth century for unity that found expression in the deeds of Cesare Borgia, the Discorsi of Niccolò Macchiavelli. [Illustration: THE TOMB OF ILARIA DEL CARETTO _By Jacopo della Quercia. Duomo, Lucca_ _Brogi_] The rest of the history of Lucca is a sort of unhappy silence, out of which from time to time rise the cry of Burlamacchi, a fool, yes, but a hero, the howling of the traitors, the whisper of feeble conspiracies, the purr of an ignoble prosperity, till in 1805 Napoleon came and made her his prey. II But to-day Lucca is like a shadowy pool hidden behind the Pisan hills, like a forgotten oasis in the great plain at the foot of the mountains, a pallid autumn rose, smiling subtly among the gardens that girdle her round about with a sad garland of green, a cincture of silver, a tossing sea of olives. However you come to her, you must pass through those delicate ways, where always the olives whisper together, and their million leaves, that do not mark the seasons, flutter one by one to the ground; where the cicale die in the midst of their song, and the flowers of Tuscany scatter the shade with the colours of their beauty. In the midst of this half-real world, so languidly joyful, in which the sky counts for so much, it is always with surprise you come upon the tremendous perfect walls of this city--walls planted all round with plane-trees, so that Lucca herself is hidden by her crown--a crown that changes as the year changes, mourning all the winter long, but in spring is set with living emeralds, a thousand and a thousand points of green fire that burst into summer's own coronet of flame-like leaves, that fades at last into the dead and sumptuous gold of autumn. It is by Porta S. Pietro that we enter Lucca, coming by rail from Pistoja, and from Pisa too, then crossing La Madonnina and Corso Garibaldi by Via Nazionale, we come almost at once into Piazza Giglio, where the old Palazzo Arnolfi stands--a building of the sixteenth century that is now Albergo Universo. Thence by the Via del Duomo, past S. Giovanni, we enter the Piazza S. Martino, that silent, empty square before the Duomo. The little Church of S. Giovanni that we pass on the way is the old cathedral, standing on the site of a pagan temple, and rebuilt by S. Frediano in 573, after the Lombards had destroyed the first Christian building. The present church dates, in part at least, from the eleventh century, and the three white pillars of the nave are from the Roman building; but the real interest of the church lies in its Baptistery--Lombard work dug out of the earth which had covered it, the floor set in a waved pattern of black and white marble, while in the midst is the great square font in which the people of Lucca were immersed for baptism. Little else remains of interest in this the most ancient church in Lucca--only a fresco of Madonna with St. Nicholas and others, a fifteenth-century work in the north transept, and a beautiful window of the end of the sixteenth century in the Baptistery itself. All that is best in Lucca, all that is sweetest and most naïve, may be found in the beautiful Duomo, which Pope Alexander II consecrated in 1070,--Pope Alexander II, who had once been Bishop of Lucca. _Non è finito_, the sacristan, himself one of the most delightful and simple souls in this little forgotten city, will tell you--it is not finished; and indeed, the alteration that was made in the church in the early part of the fourteenth century--when the nave was lengthened and the roof raised--was never completed; and you may still see where, through so many centuries, that which was so well begun has awaited a second S. Frediano. It is, however, the façade that takes you at once by its ancient smiling aspect, its three great unequal arches, over which, in three tiers, various with beautiful columns, rise the open galleries we have so loved at Pisa. Built, as it is said, in 1204 by Guidetto, much work remains in that beautiful frontispiece to one of the most beautiful churches in Italy that is far older than itself: the statue of S. Martino, the patron, for instance; that labyrinth, too, on the great pier to the right; and perhaps the acts of St. Martin carved between the doors, and below them three reliefs of the months, where in January you see man sitting beside the fire; in February, as is most right, fishing in the Serchio; in March, wisely pruning his trees; in April, sowing his seed; in May, plucking the spring flowers; in June, cutting the corn; in July, beating it out with the flail--the flail that is used to-day in every country place in Tuscany; in August, plucking the fruits; in September, treading the wine-press; in October, storing the wine; in November, ploughing; and in December, for the festa killing a pig. Over the door to the left is the earliest work, as it is said, of Nicolò Pisano, and beneath it an Adoration of the Magi, in which some have found the hand of Giovanni, his son; while above the great door itself Our Lord is in glory, with the Twelve Apostles beneath, and Madonna herself in the midst. Not far away, to the north beside the church, the rosy Campanile towers over Lucca, calling city and country too, to pray at dawn and at noon and at evening. Within, the church is of a great and simple beauty; in the form of a Latin cross, divided into three naves by columns supporting round arches, over which the triforium passes across the transepts, lighted by beautiful Gothic windows: the glass is certainly dreadful, but far away in the choir the windows are filled still with the work of the old masters. The most beautiful and the most wonderful treasure that the church holds, that Lucca itself can boast of, is the great tomb in the north transept, carved to hold for ever the beautiful Ilaria del Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi, whose tower still blossoms in the spring, since she has sat there. It is the everlasting work of Jacopo della Quercia, the Sienese. On her bed of marble the young Ilaria lies, like a lily fallen on a rock of marble, and in her face is the sweet gravity of all the springs that have gone by, and in her hand the melody of all the songs that have been sung; her mouth seems about to speak some lovely affirmation, and her body is a tower of ivory. Can you wonder that the sun lingers here softly, softly, as it steps westward, or that night creeps over her, kissing her from head to foot slowly like a lover? Who was the vandal who robbed so great and noble a thing as this of the relief of dancing children which was found in the Bargello in 1829, and returned here only in 1887? It is, however, the work of another man, a Lucchese too, that fills the Duomo and Lucca itself with a sort, of lyric sweetness in the delicate and almost fragile sculpture of Matteo Civitali. In the south transept he has carved the monument to Pietro da Noceto, the pupil of Pope Nicholas V, and close by, the tomb of Domenico Bertini, his patron, while in the Cappella del Sacramento are two angels from his hands, kneeling on either side the tabernacle. It was he who built the marble parapet, all of red and white, round the choir, the pulpit, and the Tempietto in the nave, gilded and covered with ornaments to hold the Volto Santo, setting there the beautiful statue of St. Sebastian, which we look at to-day with joy while we turn away from that strange and marvellous shrine of the holy face of Jesus which we no longer care to see. Yet one might think that crucifix strange and curious enough for a pilgrimage, beautiful, too, as it is, with the lost beauty of an art as subtle and lovely as the work of the Japanese. "It is really," says Murray, "a work of the eleventh century"; but the Lucchesi will not have it so, for they tell you that it was carved at the bidding of an angel by Nicodemus, and that he, unable to finish his work, since his memory was too full of the wonder of the reality, returning to it one day, perhaps to try again, found it miraculously perfect. At his death it passed into the hands of certain holy men, who, to escape from the fury of the iconoclasts, hid it, till in 782 a Piedmontese bishop found it by means of a vision, and put it aboard ship and abandoned it to the sea. So the tale runs. Cast hither and thither in the waves, the ship at last came ashore at Luna, where the Bishop of Lucca was staying in the summer heat. So, led by God, he would have borne it to Lucca; but the people of Luna, who had heard of its sanctity, objecting, it was placed in a cart drawn by two white oxen, and, as it had been abandoned to the sea, so now it was given to the world. But the oxen, which in fact came from the fields of Lucca, returned thither, to the disgust of the people of Luna, and to the great and holy joy of the Bishop of Lucca, as we may imagine. Such is the tale; but the treasure itself is a crucifix of cedar wood of a real and strange beauty. Whether it be European work or Asiatic I know not, nor does it matter much, since it is beautiful. Dante, who spent some time in Lucca, and there loved the gentle Gentucca, whose name so fortunately chimed with that of the city, speaks of the Volto Santo in _Inferno_, xxi. 48, when in the eighth circle of Hell, over the lake of boiling pitch, the devils cry-- "... Qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto: Qui si nuota altrimenti che nel Serchio." Matteo Civitali, the one artist of importance that Lucca produced, was born in 1435. He remains really the one artist, not of the territory of Florence, who has worked in the manner of the fifteenth-century sculptors of that city. His work is everywhere in Lucca,--here in the Duomo, in S. Romano, in S. Michele, in S. Frediano, and in the Museo in Palazzo Mansi. Certainly without the strength, the constructive ability that sustains even the most delicate work of the Florentines, he has yet a certain flower-like beauty, a beauty that seems ever about to pass away, to share its life with the sunlight that ebbs so swiftly out of the great churches where it is; and concerned as it is for the most part with the tomb, to rob death itself of a sort of immortality, to suggest in some faint and subtle way that death itself will pass away and be lost, as the sun is lost at evening in the strength of the sea. The sentiment that his work conveys to us of a beauty fragile at best, and rather exquisite than splendid, lacks, perhaps, a certain originality and even freshness; yet it preserves very happily just the beauty of flowers, of the flowers that grow everywhere about his home in the slowly closing valleys, the tender hills that lead to Castelnuovo of the Garfagnana, to Barga above the Bagni di Lucca. More and more as you linger in Lucca it is his work you seek out, caught by its sweetness, its delicate and melancholy joy, its strangeness too, as though he had desired to express some long thought-out, recondite beauty, and, half afraid to express himself after all, had let his thoughts pass over the marble as the wind passes over the sand between the Pineta and the sea. It is a beauty gone while we try to apprehend it that we find in his work, and though at last we may tire of this wayward and delicate spirit, while we shall ever return with new joy to the great and noble figure of the young Ilaria del Caretto or to the serene Madonna of Ghirlandajo, hidden in the Sacristy, yet we shall find ourselves seeking for the work of Matteo Civitali as for the first violets of the spring, without a thought of the beauty that belongs to the roses that lord it all the summer long. It is a Madonna of Civitali that greets you at the corner of the most characteristic church of Lucca, S. Michele. There, under the great bronze S. Michele, whose wings seem to brood over the city, you come upon that strange fantastic and yet beautiful fagade which Guidetto built in 1188. Just Pisan work you think, but lacking a certain simplicity and sincerity even, that you find certainly in the Duomo. But if it be true that this fagade was built in 1188, and that the fagade of the Duomo of Pisa was built in 1250, and even that of S. Paolo a Ripa d'Arno there, in 1194, Guidetto's work here in Lucca is the older, and the Pisan master has made but a difficult simplification, perhaps, of this very work. A difficult simplification!--simplicity being really the most difficult achievement in any art, so that though it seem so easy it is really hard to win. Guidetto seems to have built here at S. Michele as a sort of trial for the Duomo, which is already less like an apparition. And if the façade of S. Michele has not the strength or the naturalness of that, leading as it does to nothing but poverty in the midst of which still abides a mutilated work by a great Florentine, Fra Lippo Lippi, it is because Guidetto has gradually won to that difficult simplicity from such a strange and fantastic dream as this. [Illustration: THE TOMB OF THE MARTYR S. ROMANO IN S. ROMANO, LUCCA _Matteo Civitali_ _Alinari_] It is quite another sort of beauty we see when, passing through the deserted, quiet streets, we come to S. Frediano, just within the Porta S. Maria, on the north side of the city. Begun by Perharlt, the Lombard, in 671, with the stones of the amphitheatre, whose ruins are still to be seen hard by, it stood without the city till the great wall was built in the twelfth century, the apse being set where formerly the great door had stood, and the marvellously impressive fagade taking the place of the old apse. Ruined though it be by time and restoration, that mosaic of Our Lord amid the Apostles and Angels still surprises us with a sudden glory, while the Campanile that rises still where of old the door stood is one of the most beautiful in Italy. Within, the church has suffered too from change and restoration. Once of basilical form, it is now spoiled by the chapels that thrust themselves into the nave, but cannot altogether hide the nobility of those ancient pillars or the simplicity of the roof. A few beautiful ancient things may still be found there. The font, for instance, with its rude sculptures, that has been forsaken for a later work by Niccolò Civitali, the nephew of Matteo; the Assumption, carved in wood by that master behind the pulpit; the lovely reliefs of Madonna and Child with Saints, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the Cappella del Sacramento; or the great stone which, as it is said, S. Frediano, that Irishman, lifted into a cart. But it is not of S. Frediano we think in this dark and splendid place, though the stone of his miracle lies before us, but of little S. Zita, patron of housemaids, little S. Zita of Lucca, born in 1211. "Anziani di Santa Zita," the devil calls the elders of Lucca in the eighth circle of Hell; but in her day, indeed, she had no such fame as that. She was born at Montesegradi, a village of the Lucchese, and was put to service at twelve years of age, in the family of the Fantinelli, whose house was close to this church, where now she has a chapel to herself at the west end of the south aisle, with a fine Annunciation of the della Robbia. To think of it!--but in those days it was different; it would puzzle Our Lord to find a S. Zita among our housemaids of to-day. For hear and consider well the virtues of this pearl above price, whose daughters, alas! are so sadly to seek while she dusts the Apostles' chairs in heaven. She was persuaded that labour was according to the will of God, nor did she ever harbour any complaint under contradictions, poverty, hardships; still less did she ever entertain the least idle, inordinate, or worldly desire! She blessed God for placing her in a station where she was ever busy, and where she must perpetually submit her will to that of others. "She was even very sensible of the advantages of her state, which afforded all necessaries of life without engaging her in anxious cares, ... she obeyed her master and mistress in all things, ... she rose always hours before the rest of the family, ... she took care to hear Mass every morning before she was called upon by the duties of her station, in which she employed the whole day with such diligence and fidelity that she seemed to be carried to them on wings, and studied to anticipate them!" Is it any wonder her fellow-servants hated her, called her modesty simplicity, her want of spirit servility? Ah, we know that spirit, we know that pride, S. Zita, and for those wings that bore you, for that thoughtfulness and care, S. Zita, we should be willing to pay you quite an inordinate wage! Nor would your mistress to-day be prepossessed against you as yours was, neither would your master be "passionate," and he would see you, S. Zita, without "transports of rage." Your biographer tells us that it is not to be conceived how much you had continually to suffer in that situation. Unjustly despised, overburdened, reviled, and often beaten, you never repined nor lost patience, but always preserved the same sweetness in your countenance, and abated nothing of your application to your duties. Moreover, you were willing to respect your fellow-servants as your superiors. And if you were sent on a commission a mile or two, in the greatest storms, you set out without delay, executed your business punctually, and returned often almost drowned, without showing any sign of murmuring. And at last, S. Zita, they found you out, they began to treat you better, they even thought so well of you that a single word from you would often suffice to check the greatest transports of your master's rage; and you would cast yourself at the feet of that terrific man, to appease him in favour of others. And all these and more were your virgin virtues, lost, gone, forgotten out of mind, by a world that dreams of no heavenly housemaid save in Lucca where you lived, and where they still keep your April festa, and lay their nosegays on your grave. So I passed in Lucca from church to church, finding here the body of a little saint, there the tomb of a soldier, or the monument of some dear dead woman. In S. Francesco, that desecrated great mausoleum that lies at the end of the Via di S. Francesco not far from the garden tower of Paolo Guinigi, I came upon the humble grave of Castruccio Castracani. In S. Romano, at the other end of the city behind the Palazzo Provinciale, it was the shrine of that S. Romano who was the gaoler of S. Lorenzo I found, a tomb with the delicate flowerlike body of the murdered saint carved there in gilded alabaster by Matteo Civitali. It is chiefly Civitali's work you seek in the Museo in Palazzo Provinciale, for, fine as the work of Bartolommeo is in two pictures to be found there, it is for something more of the country than that you are to come to Lucca. There, in a Madonna Assunta carved in wood and plaster, and daintily painted as it seems he loved to do, you have perhaps the most charming work that has come from his bottega. He was not a great sculptor, but he had seen the vineyards round about, he had wandered in the little woods at the city gates, he had watched the dawn run down the valleys, and the wind that plays with the olives was his friend. He has loved all that is delicate and lovely, the wings of angels, the hands of children, the long blown hair of St. John in his Death of the Virgin, the eyelids that have fallen over the eyes. He is full of grace, and his virtues seem to me to be just those which Lucca herself possesses. Hidden away between the mountains, between the plains and the sea, she achieved nothing, or almost nothing. Castracani for a moment forced her into the pell-mell of awakened Italy, but with his death, and certainly with the fall of the House of Guinigi, she returned to herself, to her own quiet heart, which was enough for her. This one sculptor is almost her sole contribution to Italian art, but she was content that his works should scatter her ways, and that hidden away in her churches his shy flowers should blossom. Civitali and S. Zita, they are the two typical Lucchesi; they sum up a city composed of such as Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, whom Van Eyck painted, that great bourgeoisie which made Italy without knowing it, and, unconcerned while the great men and the rabble fought in the wars or lost their lives in a petty revolution, were eager only to be let alone, that they might continue their labour and gather in wealth. And of them history is silent, for they made her. FOOTNOTES: [144] See p. 94 et seq. [145] This coining of money was as much as to prove that he had a sort of sovereign right over their territory. XXX. OVER THE GARFAGNANA So in the long August days, that are so fierce in the city, I sought once more the hills, the hills that are full of songs, those songs which in Italy have grown with the flowers and are full of just their wistful beauty, their expectancy and sweetness. "Fiorin di grano, Lasciatemi cantar, chè allegra sono, Ho rifatto la pace col mio damo." There in the Garfagnana, as I wandered up past Castelnuovo to the little village of Piazza al Serchio, and then through the hills to Fivizanno, that wonderful old town in a cup of the mountains, I heard the whole drama of love sung by the "vaghe montanine pastorelle" in the chestnut woods or on the high lawns where summer is an eternal spring. "O rosa! O rosa! O rosa gentillina! Quanto bella t'ha fatta la tua mamma! T'ha fatto bella, poi t'ha messo un fiore; T'ha messo alla finestra a far l'amore. T'ha fatto bella e t'ha messo una rosa: T'ha messo alla finestra a far la sposa." sings the young man one morning as he passes the cottage of his beloved, and she, scarcely fourteen, goes to her mother, weeping perhaps-- "Mamma, se non mi date il mio Beppino, Vo' andar pel mondo, e mai più vo' tornare. Se lo vedessi quanto gli è bellino, O mamma, vi farebbe innamorare. E' porta un giubboncin di tre colori, E si chiama Beppino Ruba--cori: E' porta un giubboncin rosso incarnato, E si chiama Beppino innamorato: E' porta un giubboncin di mezza lana; Quest' è Beppino, ed io son la sua dama." Then the _damo_ comes to serenade his mistress-- "Vengo di notte e vengo appassionato, Vengo nell'ora del tuo bel dormire. Se ti risveglio, faccio un gran peccato Perchè non dormo, e manco fo dormire. Se ti risveglio, un gran peccato faccio: Amor non dorme, e manco dormir lascia." And she, who doubtless has heard it all in her little bed, sings on the morrow-- "Oh, quanto tempo l'ho desiderato Un damo aver che fosse sonatore! Eccolo qua che Dio me l'ha mandato Tutto coperto di rose e viole; Eccolo qua che vien pianin pianino, A capo basso, e suona il violino." Then they sing of Saturday and Sunday-- "Quando sara sabato sera, quando? Quando sara domenica mattina, Che vedrò l'amor mio spasseggiando, Che vedrò quella faccia pellegrina, Che vedrò quel bel volto, e quel bel viso, O fior d'arancio côlto in paradiso! Che vedrò quel bel viso e quel bel volto, O fior d'arancio in paradiso côlto!" So all the summer long they play at love; but with October Beppino must go to the Maremma with the herds, and she thinks over this as the time draws near-- "E quando io penso a quelle tante miglia, E che voi, amor mio, l'avete a fare, Nelle mie vene il sangue si rappiglia, Tutti li sensi miei sento mancare; E li sento mancare a poco a poco, Come la cera in sull'ardente foco: E li sento mancare a dramma, a dramma, Come la cera in sull'ardente fiamma." Or again, with half a sob-- "Come volete faccia che non pianga Sapendo che da voi devo partire? E tu bello in Maremma ed io 'n montagna! Chesta partenza mi farà morire...." And at last she watches him depart, winding down the long roads-- "E vedo e vedo e non vedo chi voglio, Vedo le foglie di lontan tremare. E vedo lo mio amore in su quel poggio, E al piano mai lo vedo calare. O poggio traditor, che ne farete? O vivo o morto me lo renderete. O poggio traditor, che ne farai? O vivo o morto me lo renderai." Then she dreams of sending a letter in verses, which recall, how closely, the Swallow song of "The Princess"-- "O Rondinella che passi monti e colli, Se trovi l'amor mio, digli che venga; E digli: son rimasta in questi poggi Come rimane la smarrita agnella. E digli: son rimasta senza nimo Come l'albero secco senza 'l cimo. E digli: son rimasta senza damo, Come l'albero secco senza il ramo. E digli: son rimasta abbandonata Come l'erbetta secca in sulle prata." At length she sends a letter with the help of the village scrivener, and in time gets an answer-- "Salutatemi, bella, lo scrivano; Non lo conosco e non so chi si sia. A me mi pare un poeta sovrano Tanto gli è sperto nella poesia ..." Signor Tigri in his excellent collection of _Canti Toscani_, from which I have quoted, gives some examples too of these letters and their replies, but they are too long to set down here. With spring the lover returns. You may see the girls watching for the lads any day of spring in those high far woods through which the roads wind down to the plains. "Eccomi, bella, che son già venuto Che li sospiri tuoi m'hanno chiamato, E tu credevi d'avermi perduto, Dal ben che ti volevo son tornato. Quando son morto, mi farai un gran pianto; Dirai: è morto chi mi amava tanto! Quando son morto, un gran pianto farai, Padrona del mio cor sempre sarai." Then in the early summer days the promises are given, and long and long before autumn the good priest marries Beppino to his Annuziatina, and doubtless they live happy ever after in those quiet and holy places. It is into this country of happiness you come, a happiness so vaguely musical, when, leaving Lucca in the summer heat, you climb into the Garfagnana. For to your right Bagni di Lucca lies under Barga, with its church and great pulpit; and indeed, the first town you enter is Borgo a Mozzano by Serchio; then, following still the river, you come to Gallicano, and then by a short steep road to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana at the foot of the great pass. The mountains have clustered round you, bare and threatening, and though you be still in the woods it is their tragic nudity you see all day long, full of the disastrous gestures of death, that can never change or be modified or recalled. It is under these lonely and desolate peaks that the road winds to Piazza al Serchio. Castelnuovo is a little city caught in a bend of Serchio, which it spans by a fantastic high bridge that leaps across the shrunken torrent. A mere huddle of mediaeval streets and piazzas in an amphitheatre of mountains, its one claim on our notice is that here is a good inn, kept by a strange tragical sort of man with a beautiful wife, the only sunshine in that forbidding place. She lies there like a jewel among the inhuman rocks, and Serchio for ever whispers her name. Here too, doubtless, came Ariosto, most serene of poets, when in 1522 he was sent to suppress an insurrection in the Garfagnana. But even Ariosto will not keep you long in Castelnuovo, since she whom he would certainly have sung, and whose name you will find in his poem, cannot hold you there. So you follow the country road up stream, a laughing, leaping torrent in September, full of stones longing for rain, towards Camporgiano. It is very early in the morning maybe, as you climb out of the shadow and receive suddenly the kiss of the morning sun over a shoulder of the great mountains, a kiss like the kiss of the beloved. From the village of Piazza al Serchio, where the inn is rough truly but _pulito_, it is a climb of some six chilometri into the pass, where you leave the river, then the road, always winding about the hills, runs level for four miles, and at last drops for five miles into Fivizzano. All the way the mountains stand over you frighteningly motionless and threatening, till the woods of Fivizzano, that magical town, hide you in their shadow, and evening comes as you climb the last hill that ends in the Piazza before the door of the inn. Here are hospitality, kindness, and a welcome; you will get a great room for your rest, and the salone of the palace, for palace it is, for your sojourn, and an old-fashioned host whose pleasure is your comfort, who is, as it were, a daily miracle. He it will be who will make your bed in the chamber where Grand Duke Leopold slept, he will wait upon you at dinner as though you were the Duke's Grace herself, and if your sojourn be long he will make you happy, and if your stay be short you will go with regret. For his pride is your delight, and he, unlike too many more famous Tuscans, has not forgotten the past. Certainly he thinks it not altogether without glory, for he has carved in marble over your bed one of those things which befell in his father's time. Here it is-- "Qui stette per tre giorni Nel Settembre del MDCCCXXXII Leopoldo Il Granduca di Toscana E i fratelli Cojari da Fivizzano L'imagine dell' Ottimo Principi vi possero Perchè rimanesse ai posteri memoria Che la loro casa fu nobilitata Dalle presenza dell' ospite augusto." But nature had ennobled the House of Cojari already. There all day long in the pleasant heat the fountain of Cosimo in plays in the Piazza outside your window, cooling your room with its song. And, indeed, in all Tuscany it would be hard to find a place more delightful or more lovely in which to spend the long summer that is so loath to go here in the south. Too soon, too soon the road called me from those meadows and shadowy ways, the never-ending whisper of the woods, the sound of streams, the song of the mountain shepherd girls, the quiet ways of the hills. It was an hour after sunrise when I set out for Fosdinovo of the Malaspina, for Sarzana, for Spezia, for England. The way lies over the rivers Aulella and Bardine, through Soliero in the valley, through Ceserano of the hills. Thence by a way steep and dangerous I came into the valley of Bardine, only to mount again to Tendola and at last to Foce Cuccù, where on all sides the valleys filled with woods fell away from me, and suddenly at a turning of the way I spied out Fosdinovo, lordly still on its bastion of rock, guarding Val di Magra, looking towards Luna and the sea. Little more than an eyrie for eagles, Fosdinovo is an almost perfect fortress of the Middle Age. It glowers in the sun like a threat over the ways that now are so quiet, where only the bullocks dragging the marble from Carrara pass all day long from Massa to Spezia, from the valley to the sea. It was thence for the first time for many months I looked on a land that was not Tuscany. Already autumn was come in that high place; a flutter of leaves and the wind of the mountains made a sad music round about the old walls, which had heard the voice of Castruccio Castracani, whose gates he had opened by force. And then, as I sat there above the woods towards evening, from some bird passing overhead there fell a tiny feather, whiter than snow, that came straight into my hand. Was it a bird, or my angel, whose beautiful, anxious wings trembled lest I should fall in a land less simple than this? INDEX Adeodatus Agostino di Duccio Alberti, Leon Albertinelli Alessi, Galeazzo Angelico, Beato Apuan Alps Arcola Arnolfo di Cambio Arnolfo Fiorentino Avenza Bagni di Lucca Baldovinetti Bandinelli Barga Bartolommeo, Frate Bellini, Giovanni Benedetto da Maiano Benedetto da Rovezzano Benozzo, Gozzoli Bertoldo di Giovanni Bibbiena Biduino Boccaccio Bonannus Borgo a Mozzano Borgo S. Lorenzo Botticelli Bracco, Passo di Brunellesco Buggiano Byron Calci Camaldoli Camogli Campaldino Capraja Carpaccio Carrara S. Andrea Quarries Cascina Casentino Bibbiena Camaldoli Campaldino Campo Lombardo Castel Castagnajo Falterona La Verna Poppi Porciano Pratovecchio Romena Stia The way to Vallombrosella Vallucciole Castagno Castagno, Andrea del Castel del Bosco Castelfranco Castelnuovo di Garfagnana Castelnuovo di Magra Castracani, Castruccio Cellini, Benvenuto Cervara Chiavari Children in Italy Cimabue Cino da Pistoja Ciuffagni Civitali, Matteo Columbus Consuma Pass Corbignano Correggio Corsica Country Life, Love of Crusades Dante Desiderio da Settignano Dicomano Donatello Doria, the Duccio of Siena Empoli Evelyn's approach to Genoa Faggiuola, Uguccione della Falterona Ferrucci, Andrea Fiesole S. Ansano Badia S. Domenico Duomo S. Francesco Palazzo Pretorio Scavi The way to View from Fivizzano Florence Albizzi, the S. Antonino Beata Villana Boboli gardens Bocca degli Abati Bridges Buondelmonti Campaldino Campanile, the Capponi, Piero Charles VIII. in Churches-- S. Ambrogio SS. Annunziata SS. Apostoli S. Appolonia Badia Baptistery Carmine S. Caterina Chiostro dello Scalzo S. Croce Chapels Choir Cloisters Museo Sacristy S. Donato a Torri Duomo Best aspect of Character of Nave, aspect of S. Felice S. Frediano in Castello S. Jacopo S. Lorenzo Laurentian library New Sacristy Old Sacristy S. Lucia sul Prato S. Marco S. Maria degli Angioli S. Maria degli Innocenti S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi S. Maria Novella Chapels Façade S. Miniato Misericordia Ognissanti S. Onofrio Or San Michele S. Piero Maggiore S. Piero Scheraggio S. Salvatore S. Salvi S. Simone S. Spirito S. Stefano S. Trinità Corso Donati Duke of Athens Farinata degli Uberti Gates-- Porta Alla Croce S. Frediano S. Giorgio S. Miniato S. Niccola Romana Guilds Humiliati Laudesi Liberty in Florence Loggia de' Lanzi Lung'Arno Marsilio Ficino Medici, the-- Alessandro Cosimo Cosimo I. Ferdinando II. Gian Gastone Giovanni Giovanni di Bicci Giulio Guiliano Ippolito Lorenzino Lorenzo Piero Piero the exile Salvestro Mercato Nuovo Montaperti Monte Senario Museums-- Accademia Bargello, the Opera del Duomo Pitti Palace Uffizi The curse of Neri and Bianchi Niccolò Uzzano Oltr'Arno Ospedale degli Innocenti Palazzi-- Albizzi Altoviti Antinori Bargello, _see_ Museums Bartolini Salimbeni Buondelmonte Corsini Davanzati Falconieri, _see_ Opera del Duomo, under Museums Frescobaldi Guadagni Nonfinito Pazzi del Podestà, _see_ Bargello Riccardi Cappella Ricasoli Spini Strozzi Torrigiani Uffizi, _see_ under Museums Uguccione Vecchio Pazzi Piazzas-- SS. Annunziata S. Croce Duomo Limbo S. Lorenzo S. Maria Novella S. Piero Signoria S. Trinità Vittorio Emanuele Pico della Mirandola Pitti, the family of Savonarola Soderini Streets-- delle Belle Donne Borgo Allegri Borgo degli Albizzi Borgo SS. Apostoli Borgo S. Jacopo Borgo S. Lorenzo Calzaioli Cerretani Corso Lambertesca Maggio Por S. Maria Porta Rossa Proconsolo dei Serpi Tornabuoni Viale dei Colli Foce La (di Spezia) Foce La (di Carrara) Fosdinovo Gaddi, Agnolo Gaddi, Taddeo Garfagnana Pass Genoa A living city Acqua Sole Alfonso of Aragon Approach to Arcades Bank of S. George Boccanegra, Doge Guglielmo Boucicault Briglia, the Castelletto, the Catino, the Cemetery Charles V and Churches-- S. Agostino S. Ambrogio Duomo (S. Lorenzo) S. Fruttuoso S. Giovanni di Prè S. Maria di Castello S. Matteo S. Siro S. Stefano Columbus Cross of S. George Crusades Doria, the Doria, Andrea Embriaco Tower of Godfrey of Bouillon Grimaldi History of Libro d'Oro Loggia dei Banchi Moors, expedition against Palaces-- Adorno Balbi Bianco Cambiaso Carega della Casa Doria Doria, Giorgio Ducale Durazzo Pallavicini Gambaro Giorgio Doria Municipale Negrone Pallavicini Parodi Rosso Serra Spinola (via Garibaldi) Spinola (S. di S. Catrina) della Università Piazzas-- Banchi Deferrari Fontane Marose Sarzana Pictures in Genoa-- Botticelli(?) David (Gerard) Domenichino Guido Reni Luca Cambiasi Moretto Murillo Ribera Rubens Ruysdael Tintoretto Vandyck Veronese Zurbaran Porta S. Andrea Ramparts Sforza, the Slums of Streets-- Arcades Balbi Cairoli Garibaldi Salita di S. Caterina Strada degli Orefici Towers Vandyck in Visconti in War with Pisa War with Venice Gentile da Fabriano Gerini Niccola di Pietro Gherardesca Conte Ugolino della Ghiberti Ghirlandajo Giorgione Giotto Giovanni da Bologna Gruamone Guelph and Ghibelline Guglielmo, Fra Guidi, Conti Guido da Como Humiliati Inghirami Italy, approach to Jacopo della Quercia Janus Lastra Laudesi Laurentian Library La Verna Leonardo Lerici Lippi (Fra Lippo) Lippi, Filippino Livorno Monte Nero Lorenzetti, the Lorenzo di Credi Lucca Castruccio Castracane Churches-- Duomo S. Francesco S. Frediano S. Giovanni S. Michele in Borgo S. Romano Matteo Civitali Museo Walls S. Zita Luna Lunigiana Magni, Villa Magra, the Maiano Malaspina Manetti, Gianozzo Mantegna Marco Polo Martini, Simone Masaccio Masolino Massa Matilda Contessa Meloria, battle of Melozzo da Forli Michelangelo Michelozzo Mino da Fiesole Monaco, Lorenzo Monsummano Montecatini Montenero Montelupo Montignoso Moretto Moroni Nanni di Banco Neri and Bianchi Nervi Niccola Niccolò d'Arezzo Nicholas V Ognibene Oratorio della Vannella Orcagna Pandolfini, Agnolo Paris Bordone Perugino, Pietro Pescia Piazza al Serchio Piero della Francesco Piero di Cosimo Piero di Giovanni Tedesco Pietro a Grado, S. Pineta di Pisa Pineta di Viareggio Ponocchio Pisa Agnello, Doge Amalfi Archbishop Peter Assumption, Feast of, in Balearic Islands Benozzo Gozzoli Bergolini and Raspanti S. Bernard in Borgo, The Campagnia di S. Michele Campanile Campo Santo Casa dei Trovatelli Castruccio Castracane Churches-- S. Anna Baptistery S. Caterina Duomo S. Francesco S. Frediano Madonna della Spina S. Maria Maddalena S. Martino S. Michele in Borgo S. Niccola S. Paolo al Orto S. Paolo a Ripa S. Pierino S. Pietro a Grado S. Ranieri S. Sepolcro S. Sisto S. Stefano Cintola del Duomo Corsica Cosimo I Crusades Divisions in Twelfth Century Donatello Etruscan Pisa Florence Galileo Gambacorti Genoa Gentile da Fabriano Gherardesca, Ugolino della Guelph and Ghibelline Guglielmo, Frate History of Knights of S. Stephen Loggia dei Banchi Lucca Lung' Arno Martini, Simone Meloria Montaperti Montecatini Montefeltro, Guido di Museo Palaces-- Agostini Anziani dei Cavalieri del Comune del Consiglio Conventuale Gambacorti del Granduca Lanfreducci del Podestà Palermo Palio and Ponte Piazzas-- dei Cavalieri del Duomo di S. Francesco di S. Paolo Pisano Giovanni Pisano, Giunta Pisano, Niccolò Ponte di Mezzo Ponte Solferino Porta Aurea Porto Pisano Roman Pisa Salerno Torre Guelfa Tower of Hunger "Triumph of Death" Uguccione della Faggiuola University Visconti Pistoia Churches-- S. Andrea Baptistery S. Bartolommeo S. Domenico Duomo S. Francesco al Prato S. Giovanni Evangelista S. Piero Maggiore S. Salvatore Origin of Pistoia Palazzo del Comune Palazzo Pretorio Torre del Podestà Poggio Gherardo Pollaiuolo, Ant. Pontassieve Pontedera Pontevola Pontormo Poppi Porciano Porto Pisano Portofino Portovenere Prisons, position of Rapallo Raphael Recco Riviera di Levante Robbia della Robbia Luca della Romena Rossellino, Antonio Rossellino, Bernardo Rotta Ruta S. Domenico di Fiesole S. Ellero S. Francesco S. Fruttuoso S. Giovanni Gualberto S. Godenzo S. Marcello S. Margherita S. Martino a Mensola S. Michele di Pagana S. Miniato al Tedesco S. Romano S. Romualdo S. Terenzano Sacchetti Saltino Sansovino, Andrea Sarto, Andrea del Sarzana Savonarola Schiavone Serchio Serravalle Sestri Levante Settignano Shelley Simone Martini South, Praise of the Spezia Stagi, Stagio Starnina Stia Tintoretto Titian Torano Tuscany, entrance to Tuscany, the road to Uccello, Paolo Val di Lima Val di Nievole Val di Reno Vallombrosa Vallombrosella Vandyck Vasari Veronese Verrocchio Verruca Viareggio Vicopisano Villa Palmieri Vincigliata 
14972	----	Proofreading Team SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS," ETC FIRST SERIES NEW EDITION LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1914 PREFATORY NOTE In preparing this new edition of the late J.A. Symonds's three volumes of travels, 'Sketches in Italy and Greece,' 'Sketches and Studies in Italy,' and 'Italian Byways,' nothing has been changed except the order of the Essays. For the convenience of travellers a topographical arrangement has been adopted. This implied a new title to cover the contents of all three volumes, and 'Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece' has been chosen as departing least from the author's own phraseology. HORATIO F. BROWN. Venice: _June_ 1898. CONTENTS THE LOVE OF THE ALPS WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE THE CORNICE AJACCIO MONTE GENEROSO LOMBARD VIGNETTES COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE A VENETIAN MEDLEY THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE _THE LOVE OF THE ALPS_[1] Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journey from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony of French plains,--their sluggish streams and never-ending poplar trees--for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no mistake--the well-known, well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy mountains and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We may greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride that we have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for Switzerland. Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and when and where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than to answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman poets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been more depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight; but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and green to entertain it.' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than 'rugged,' 'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic spirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too prominent, and city life absorbed all interests,--not to speak of what perhaps is the weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferent accommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or nature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of robbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the end of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages. Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily needs, when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and political liberty allowed the full development of tastes and instincts, when, moreover, the classical traditions had lost their power, and courts and coteries became too narrow for the activity of man,--then suddenly it was discovered that Nature in herself possessed transcendent charms. It may seem absurd to class them all together; yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same movement--of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been shaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, all questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange, model, preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything that is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the Americans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and walls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it is hard to analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have repelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world before them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there is between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface of the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of Some vague emotion of delight In gazing up an Alpine height, and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast to our London life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that comes from exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep; the blood quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of life, the breaking down of class privileges, the extension of education, which contribute to make the individual greater and society less, render the solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of travelling and improved accommodation leave us free to enjoy the natural beauty which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared to sympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members Shelley's, Wordsworth's, Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or less Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of the omnipresence of the informing mind. Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of the century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think ourselves spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we have been trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey which makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult to write; to define the spirit of the age in which we live is still more difficult; to account for 'impressions which owe all their force to their identity with themselves' is most difficult of all. We must be content to feel, and not to analyse. Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the mountains, of walking tours, of the '_école buissonnière_,' away from courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love. His bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social views, his intense self-engrossment,--all favoured the development of Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative, in this instance. He was but one of the earliest to seize and express a new idea of growing humanity. For those who seem to be the most original in their inauguration of periods are only such as have been favourably placed by birth and education to imbibe the floating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the first cases of an epidemic, which become the centres of infection and propagate disease. At the time of Rousseau's greatness the French people were initiative. In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy, they had for some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which first received a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau, soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations. Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved that Germany and England were not far behind the French. In England this love of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all times been peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not surprising that our life and literature and art have been foremost in developing the sentiment of which we are speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to European thought in this respect. Our travellers in search of the adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of Switzerland an English playground. The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this. To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics, society, and science which the last three centuries have wrought, yet still, in its original love of free open life among the fields and woods, and on the sea, the same. Now the French national genius is classical. It reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and Rousseauism in their literature is as true an innovation and parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. As in the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern character predominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the broader aspects of arts and literatures. The classically minded man, the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant conversation, the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his personal requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessary physical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_ deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art, and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect of taste all men are either Greek or German. At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our _cultus_,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own reasons, its constituents and subjects. Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who live upon their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated every spring. Man, who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works, and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were, which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul breathes freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is God, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of man. The spirit of the world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day; and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with flowers, and the hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the inaccessible ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun, the trees and rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them--the peasants do not even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy when you tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes. But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above human things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associate its thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some of the most solemn moments of life are spent high up above among the mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almost necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sad and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment and elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endears our home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among their solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to make 'of grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of grief,' to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives are merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many, perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon the height of the Stelvio or the slopes of Mürren, or at night in the valley of Courmayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares and doubts and miseries by the mere recognition of unchangeable magnificence; have found a deep peace in the sense of their own nothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to stand upon these pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stood there, how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid the tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name of some well-known valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the sacred hunger in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and in rest beyond ourselves which no man can take from us. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to everything which enables us to rise above depressing and enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in some way or other to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes us know that, whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and gladness are still strong in the world. On this account, the proper attitude of the soul among the Alps is one of silence. It is almost impossible without a kind of impiety to frame in words the feelings they inspire. Yet there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which throng the mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with its emotions--some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets, inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious sentiments to which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that even devout men of the present generation prefer temples _not_ made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive sense of the divine presence not formed into distinct belief' lies at the root of our profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of 'Adonais,' which begin 'He is made one with nature,' by Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel in his noble poems of Pantheism. It is more or less strongly felt by all who have recognised the indubitable fact that religious belief is undergoing a sure process of change from the dogmatic distinctness of the past to some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Such periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its infinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law, no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith, find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certain moments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion no longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they vaguely localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all our being. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of such a mood are the following far humbler verses:-- At Mürren let the morning lead thee out To walk upon the cold and cloven hills, To hear the congregated mountains shout Their pæan of a thousand foaming rills. Raimented with intolerable light The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row Arising, each a seraph in his might; An organ each of varied stop doth blow. Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres, Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun Raises his tenor as he upward steers, And all the glory-coated mists that run Below him in the valley, hear his voice, And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice! There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions, which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery may tend to destroy habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind, and render it more apt to entertain embryonic fancies than to bring ideas to definite perfection. If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a right understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress the mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in a little châlet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams glittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon the snow-fields blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they shone like beacons in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by peak they lost the glow; the soul passed from them, and they stood pale yet weirdly garish against the darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a cloud sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for several weeks there was no change, till I was seized with an overpowering horror of unbroken calm. I left the valley for a time; and when I returned to it in wind and rain, I found that the partial veiling of the mountain heights restored the charm which I had lost and made me feel once more at home. The landscape takes a graver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher peaks, and comes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines upon their slopes--white, silent, blinding vapour-wreaths around the sable spires. Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Again it lifts a little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath its skirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley like a veil, just broken here and there above a lonely châlet or a thread of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then, again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and peaks of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; how desolate the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of broken pine protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on its flank, and the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick the ragged edge of snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellow flowers and red and blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun were shining on them. Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But the scene changes; the mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the steady rain drips down, incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too, what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a north wind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow! We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have just been powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather. Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and Mürren, at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above a lake. The cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into the deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning to see the meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddled up in snow a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long to reappear. You put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find the great cups of the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising of the cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts, dissipated by returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly away more rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists that lose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of the sky. In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at Courmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when all the world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont de la Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies beyond. For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countless spires are scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon; domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge, some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy hill stars sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through the long silent night. Moonlight simplifies and softens the landscape. Colours become scarcely distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far by night than day--higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses of Courmayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reaches the edge of the Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once more to reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark beneath the shadow of the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights of snow still glitter in the steady light: they, too, will soon be dark, until the dawn breaks, tinging them with rose. But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect of Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak. The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Courmayeur, where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we climbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass had just been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a breath of air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upon their crags, as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze. There is nothing more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrow rifts, shut in by woods and precipices. But suddenly the valley broadened, the pines and larches disappeared, and we found ourselves upon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills of water went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling under dock leaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide 'you scarce could see the grass for flowers,' while on every side the tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one another from the Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across the fields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where the snow had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them by name. When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and bread. It was pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and butting at them with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singing all the while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round to talk. An old herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him who we were, and tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which he appeared to regard as an evil very unreal and far away--like the murrain upon Pharaoh's herds which one reads about in Exodus. But he was courteous and polite, doing the honours of his pasture with simplicity and ease. He took us to his châlet and gave us bowls of pure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house, clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were not in the habit of sleeping soundly all night long, they might count the setting and rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He told us how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long cold winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Courmayeur. This, indeed, is the true pastoral life which poets have described--a happy summer holiday among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, and harassed by 'no enemy but winter and rough weather.' Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things--to greetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen,' and 'Guten Abend,' that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tame creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one moment from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow beneath your feet. The latter end of May is the time when spring begins in the high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of snow, the brown turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet stars itself with red and white and gold and blue. You almost see the grass and lilies grow. First come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. These break the last dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island, with the cold wall they have thawed all round them. It is the fate of these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirts of retreating winter; they soon wither--the frilled chalice of the soldanella shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grass has grown; the sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life, scorches their tender petals. Often when summer has fairly come, you still may see their pearly cups and lilac bells by the side of avalanches, between the chill snow and the fiery sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses join with forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassy floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the lilies-of-the-valley clustering about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood by the stream at Macugnaga, mixed with garnet-coloured columbines and fragrant white narcissus, which the people of the villages call 'Angiolini.' There, too, is Solomon's seal, with waxen bells and leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But these lists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw the portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that botanists have called it _Saxifraga cotyledon_; yet, in spite of its long name, it is beautiful and poetic. London-pride is the commonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is as different from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that last Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It is a great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa in the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft of fleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places of dripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop--one of those weeds doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are so uninviting--and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it puts forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs a strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curves down and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away the splendour gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from the roof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water of the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening, glowing with a sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascade of pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone--inaccessible ledges, chasms where winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls, are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the mountains or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecrate the simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is, so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other day we cut an armful opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, and then felt like murderers; it was so sad to hold in our hands the triumph of those many patient months, the full expansive life of the flower, the splendour visible from valleys and hillsides, the defenceless creature which had done its best to make the gloomy places of the Alps most beautiful. After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure to descend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars of Lombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a source of absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects of a mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing than when seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terrace of Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towers and rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiled by clouds, the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of a celestial city--unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet. But those who know by old experience what friendly châlets, and cool meadows, and clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys, send forth fond thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from the marble parapets of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I too shall rest beneath the shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not more than a day's journey from Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. But very sad it is to _leave_ the Alps, to stand upon the terraces of Berne and waft ineffectual farewells. The unsympathising Aar rushes beneath; and the snow-peaks, whom we love like friends, abide untroubled by the coming and the going of the world. The clouds drift over them--the sunset warms them with a fiery kiss. Night comes, and we are hurried far away to wake beside the Seine, remembering, with a pang of jealous passion, that the flowers on Alpine meadows are still blooming, and the rivulets still flowing with a ceaseless song, while Paris shops are all we see, and all we hear is the dull clatter of a Paris crowd. _THE ALPS IN WINTER_ The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet above the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has scenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when summer is passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least romantic glen are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over the grey-green world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larches begin to put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning against the solid blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and the meadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the fields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in the noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now the snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again. The seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are intermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a great snowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early morning, and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is clear, but it clouds rapidly with films of cirrus and of stratus in the south and west. Soon it is covered over with grey vapour in a level sheet, all the hill-tops standing hard against the steely heavens. The cold wind from the west freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noon the air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile has risen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled with a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like and pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from their background. The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkest indigo. There is an indescribable stillness and a sense of incubation. The wind has fallen. Later on, the snow-flakes flutter silently and sparely through the lifeless air. The most distant landscape is quite blotted out. After sunset the clouds have settled down upon the hills, and the snow comes in thick, impenetrable fleeces. At night our hair crackles and sparkles when we brush it. Next morning there is a foot and a half of finely powdered snow, and still the snow is falling. Strangely loom the châlets through the semi-solid whiteness. Yet the air is now dry and singularly soothing. The pines are heavy with their wadded coverings; now and again one shakes himself in silence, and his burden falls in a white cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon the hillside, whitening again as the imperturbable fall continues. The stakes by the roadside are almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothing is seen but the snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stone at its stem and a sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and driven by a young man erect upon the stem. So we live through two days and nights, and on the third a north wind blows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scattered fleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints along the heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. As the clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburned marble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle of fantastic curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies mounded on the roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspread in the softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills are softened into swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary. It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing after snowfall took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl of fleecy vapour--clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky was blue as steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The horn above which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and through the valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquid darkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed into rolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open sky grew still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all, and here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There is movement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walk out on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and the heavens are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by this winter life. It is so light that you can read the smallest print with ease. The upper sky looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphire into turquoise upon the horizon. There is the colour of ivory upon the nearest snow-fields, and the distant peaks sparkle like silver, crystals glitter in all directions on the surface of the snow, white, yellow, and pale blue. The stars are exceedingly keen, but only a few can shine in the intensity of moonlight. The air is perfectly still, and though icicles may be hanging from beard and moustache to the furs beneath one's chin, there is no sensation of extreme cold. During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows have fallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground, the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or topazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous sheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of course quite black, and so transparent that it is easy to see the fishes swimming in the deep beneath; but here and there, where rime has fallen, there sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mosses made of purest frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating than the new world revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley you may walk through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms, all silvered over with hoar spangles--fairy forests, where the flowers and foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks sheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl of water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see it eddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of diamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of dust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals, like tiniest most restless fire-flies rising and falling and passing crosswise in the sun-illumined shade of tree or mountain-side. It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yet one word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore, towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer is standing at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venus is just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon is beside her. To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire, deepening to orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave a greenish pallor. At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a last faint tinge of light, and all beneath is quite white. But the tide of glory turns. While the west grows momently more pale, the eastern heavens flush with afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink and violet. Daffodil and tenderest emerald intermingle; and these colours spread until the west again has rose and primrose and sapphire wonderfully blent, and from the burning skies a light is cast upon the valley--a phantom light, less real, more like the hues of molten gems, than were the stationary flames of sunset. Venus and the moon meanwhile are silvery clear. Then the whole illumination fades like magic. All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in a sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases to glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky. So the journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of light irradiate heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most flawless ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers. As we go, the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head. The whole landscape is transfigured--lifted high up out of commonplaceness. The little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs. Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells but form. There is hardly any colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced in vanishing tints, passing from the almost amber of the distant sunlight through glowing white into pale greys and brighter blues and deep ethereal azure. The pines stand in black platoons upon the hillsides, with a tinge of red or orange on their sable. Some carry masses of snow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The châlets are like fairy houses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel. With their mellow tones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten woodwork relieved against the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of snow depending from their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof and window-sill, they are far more picturesque than in the summer. Colour, wherever it is found, whether in these cottages or in a block of serpentine by the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the charm of immaterial, aërial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And, what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyed without fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low the temperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, and the wind asleep. Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, and trusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the people of the Grisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadian term 'toboggan,' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledge is about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot above the ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back, and guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitous slopes and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse's pace. Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roars fitfully among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountains tower above in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round the frozen ledges at the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed that seems incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or three miles without fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of his weight. It is a strange and great joy. The toboggan, under these conditions, might be compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapids of a river; and what adds to its fascination is the entire loneliness in which the rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes of winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass, and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like plunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through the drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches great masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at night, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with innumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness and of joy is given to the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the exercise. No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with more fascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired with its own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and would probably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as practised on a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run selected for convenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing is a very Bohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on avoiding hard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain his equilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful. Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpine valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many months in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changes constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weather on this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity of the conditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is wonderful because of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the pines clothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light. The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south wind over the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within the influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the turbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently falling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the indescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love nature may enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a single station of the Alps. * * * * * _WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS_ I Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused, everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high above our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue, from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith--_dolce color_. (It is difficult to use the word _colour_ for this scene without suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable, yet felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscape should be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the word-palette. The art of the etcher is more needed than that of the painter.) Heaven overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely, smouldering with dull red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in Sirius, changing from orange to crimson and green in the swart fire of yonder double star. On the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not in hard white light and strong black shadow, but in tones of cream and ivory, rounding the curves of drift. The mountain peaks alone glisten as though they were built of silver burnished by an agate. Far away they rise diminished in stature by the all-pervading dimness of bright light, that erases the distinctions of daytime. On the path before our feet lie crystals of many hues, the splinters of a thousand gems. In the wood there are caverns of darkness, alternating with spaces of star-twinkled sky, or windows opened between russet stems and solid branches for the moony sheen. The green of the pines is felt, although invisible, so soft in substance that it seems less like velvet than some materialised depth of dark green shadow. II Snow falling noiseless and unseen. One only knows that it is falling by the blinking of our eyes as the flakes settle on their lids and melt. The cottage windows shine red, and moving lanterns of belated wayfarers define the void around them. Yet the night is far from dark. The forests and the mountain-bulk beyond the valley loom softly large and just distinguishable through a pearly haze. The path is purest trackless whiteness, almost dazzling though it has no light. This was what Dante felt when he reached the lunar sphere: Parova a me, che nube ne coprisse Lucida, spessa, solida e pulita. Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deep above our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say) perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended brooding on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. Then fancy changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a planet, not yet wholly made, nor called to take her place among the sisterhood of light and song. III Sunset was fading out upon the Rhætikon and still reflected from the Seehorn on the lake, when we entered the gorge of the Fluela--dense pines on either hand, a mounting drift of snow in front, and faint peaks, paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There was no sound but a tinkling stream and the continual jingle of our sledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own path. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for some almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost. The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every sense. IV The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory of dreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing to Klosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was in her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit, with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us inside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where the Alps of Death descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there is a world of whiteness--frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aërial onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were abandoned. Each stood forth tightly accoutred, with short coat, and clinging cap, and gaitered legs for the toboggan. Off we started in line, with but brief interval between, at first slowly, then glidingly, and when the impetus was gained, with darting, bounding, almost savage swiftness--sweeping round corners, cutting the hard snow-path with keen runners, avoiding the deep ruts, trusting to chance, taking advantage of smooth places, till the rush and swing and downward swoop became mechanical. Space was devoured. Into the massy shadows of the forest, where the pines joined overhead, we pierced without a sound, and felt far more than saw the great rocks with their icicles; and out again, emerging into moonlight, met the valley spread beneath our feet, the mighty peaks of the Silvretta and the vast blue sky. On, on, hurrying, delaying not, the woods and hills rushed by. Crystals upon the snow-banks glittered to the stars. Our souls would fain have stayed to drink these marvels of the moon-world, but our limbs refused. The magic of movement was upon us, and eight minutes swallowed the varying impressions of two musical miles. The village lights drew near and nearer, then the sombre village huts, and soon the speed grew less, and soon we glided to our rest into the sleeping village street. V It was just past midnight. The moon had fallen to the western horns. Orion's belt lay bar-like on the opening of the pass, and Sirius shot flame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgent stars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in large sparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggans by their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleets of Lilliput. Through the brown wood-châlets of Selfrangr, up to the undulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us. There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, cooled to zero, but innocent and mild as mother Nature's milk. Then in an instant, down, down through the hamlet, with its châlets, stables, pumps, and logs, the slumbrous hamlet, where one dog barked, and darkness dwelt upon the path of ice, down with the tempest of a dreadful speed, that shot each rider upward in the air, and made the frame of the toboggan tremble--down over hillocks of hard frozen snow, dashing and bounding, to the river and the bridge. No bones were broken, though the race was thrice renewed, and men were spilt upon the roadside by some furious plunge. This amusement has the charm of peril and the unforeseen. In no wise else can colder, keener air be drunken at such furious speed. The joy, too, of the engine-driver and the steeplechaser is upon us. Alas, that it should be so short! If only roads were better made for the purpose, there would be no end to it; for the toboggan cannot lose his wind. But the good thing fails at last, and from the silence of the moon we pass into the silence of the fields of sleep. VI The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stow the hay, and stalls for many cows and horses. It stands snugly in an angle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow. Here at night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine. Returning from my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with a lamp. I lift the latch. The hound knows me, and does not bark. I enter the stable, where six horses are munching their last meal. Upon the corn-bin sits a knecht. We light our pipes and talk. He tells me of the valley of Arosa (a hawk's flight westward over yonder hills), how deep in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blue its little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, 'too beautiful to paint,' its sky in winter! This knecht is an Ardüser, and the valley of Arosa lifts itself to heaven above his Langwies home. It is his duty now to harness a sleigh for some night-work. We shake hands and part--I to sleep, he for the snow. VII The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it where the ice is not yet firm. Little snow has fallen since it froze--about three inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like the ribbed sea-sand. Here and there the ice-floor is quite black and clear, reflecting stars, and dark as heaven's own depths. Elsewhere it is of a suspicious whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracks and chasms, treacherously mended by the hand of frost. Moving slowly, the snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. These are shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricious touch. They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting to light along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the stars look down complacent at this mimicry of heaven. Everything above, around, beneath, is very beautiful--the slumbrous woods, the snowy fells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tender background of the sky. Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet the place is terrible. For, as we walk, the lake groans, with throttled sobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and sighs that shiver, undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and die away in distance when they reach the shore. And now and then an upper crust of ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down? We are in the very centre of the lake. There is no use in thinking or in taking heed. Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast between this circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature? A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to allegorise and sermonise is out of place here. It is but the expedient of those who cannot etch sensation by the burin of their art of words. VIII It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buol sits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family and serving folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula, his child, upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely daughters and nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton from the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with plates of birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; and Georg stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated, it may be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brod is what the Scotch would call a 'bun,' or massive cake, composed of sliced pears, almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a saffron-coloured sweet bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kind of pastry, crisp and flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross, star, and scroll. Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the most unsophisticated punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugal people of Davos, who live on bread and cheese and dried meat all the year, indulge themselves but once with these unwonted dainties in the winter. The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene was feudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race: A race illustrious for heroic deeds; Humbled, but not degraded. During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles in Davos, they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands, ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors to Chiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members of their house are Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs of Muhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the patent of nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat--parted per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth century bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged--is carved in wood and monumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And from immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abend with family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field to drink grampampuli and break the birnen-brod. These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing--brown arms lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons--serious at first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures with a jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the performance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the singing was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation and no shirking of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed the music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But eleven struck; and the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said we should be late for church. They had promised to take me with them to see bell-ringing in the tower. All the young men of the village meet, and draw lots in the Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls the old year out; the other rings the new year in. He who comes last is sconced three litres of Veltliner for the company. This jovial fine was ours to pay to-night. When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through the murky gloom. The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze. Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denser than the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and we found a score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque in length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a French horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; the Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursions upon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on his face the memory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horses struggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged across Bernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thundering speed 'twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens beside the frozen watercourses. Here we were, all met together for one hour from our several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year with clinked glasses and cries of _Prosit Neujahr!_ The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into the snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn the pent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre, where the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many generations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic arch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. But far above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with volleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending in a giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen snow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs, ascending and descending, moved other than angels--the friezejacketed Bürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated with the tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room safely, guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined the rough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys, pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destination was not reached. One more aërial ladder, perpendicular in darkness, brought us swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber, where the bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormous beams, and pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose parapets I saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce wind hurried through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was thronged with men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills, men grappling the bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the stairs, crossing, recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking red wine from gigantic beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs, shouting and yelling in corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted, one could see it by their open mouths and glittering eyes; but not a sound from human lungs could reach our ears. The overwhelming incessant thunder of the bells drowned all. It thrilled the tympanum, ran through the marrow of the spine, vibrated in the inmost entrails. Yet the brain was only steadied and excited by this sea of brazen noise. After a few moments I knew the place and felt at home in it. Then I enjoyed a spectacle which sculptors might have envied. For they ring the bells in Davos after this fashion:--The lads below set them going with ropes. The men above climb in pairs on ladders to the beams from which they are suspended. Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squared and built into the walls, extend from side to side across the belfry. Another from which the bells hang, connects these massive trunks at right angles. Just where the central beam is wedged into the two parallel supports, the ladders reach them from each side of the belfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of the ladder, and leaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair of men can keep one bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade plants one leg upon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart the horizontal pine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm and right. The two have thus become one man. Right arm and left are free to grasp the bell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the beam. With a grave rhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close embrace, swaying and returning to their centre from the well-knit loins, they drive the force of each strong muscle into the vexed bell. The impact is earnest at first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men take something from each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combined energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metal which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates to dervish passion--so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are the rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One grasps the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their place. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of the world. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp, turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into the diurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon the beam. The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging bell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether he ascribed too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that was impossible. There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise, when the body is brought into play, and masses move in concert, of which the subject is but half conscious. Music and dance, and the delirium of battle or the chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures. The mystery of rhythm and associated energy and blood tingling in sympathy is here. It lies at the root of man's most tyrannous instinctive impulses. It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man might well have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on Sylvester Abend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's room, where English, French, and Germans blent together in convivial Babel; and flasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period, wore an archdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and neither were his own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or Anglican from the association. Late in the morning we must sally forth, they said, and roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's night to greet acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one may deny these self-invited guests. We turned out again into the grey snow-swept gloom, a curious Comus--not at all like Greeks, for we had neither torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady's door-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme moment of jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, from humming to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:-- The die is cast! Nay, light the torch! I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho! Why linger pondering in the porch? Upon Love's revel we will go! Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care And caution! What has Love to do With prudence? Let the torches flare! Quick, drown the doubts that hampered you! Cast weary wisdom to the wind! One thing, but one alone, I know: Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind Upon Love's revel we will go! And then again:-- I've drunk sheer madness! Not with wine, But old fantastic tales, I'll arm My heart in heedlessness divine, And dare the road, nor dream of harm! I'll join Love's rout! Let thunder break, Let lightning blast me by the way! Invulnerable Love shall shake His ægis o'er my head to-day. This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin the fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still once more:-- Cold blows the winter wind; 'tis Love, Whose sweet eyes swim with honeyed tears, That bears me to thy doors, my love, Tossed by the storm of hopes and fears. Cold blows the blast of aching Love; But be thou for my wandering sail, Adrift upon these waves of love, Safe harbour from the whistling gale! However, upon this occasion, though we had winter-wind enough, and cold enough, there was not much love in the business. My arm was firmly clenched in Christian Buol's, and Christian Palmy came behind, trolling out songs in Italian dialect, with still recurring _canaille_ choruses, of which the facile rhymes seemed mostly made on a prolonged _amu-u-u-r_. It is noticeable that Italian ditties are specially designed for fellows shouting in the streets at night. They seem in keeping there, and nowhere else that I could ever see. And these Davosers took to them naturally when the time for Comus came. It was between four and five in the morning, and nearly all the houses in the place were dark. The tall church-tower and spire loomed up above us in grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thin snow from fell and forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into their twelvemonth's slumber, which shall be broken only by decorous tollings at less festive times. I wondered whether they were tingling still with the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life--the young men who had clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all their locked-up tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas! how many generations of the young have handled them; and they are still there, frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged, and old, and die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lust of manhood toll them to their graves, on which the tireless wind will, winter after winter, sprinkle snow from alps and forests which they knew. 'There is a light,' cried Christian, 'up in Anna's window!' 'A light! a light!' the Comus shouted. But how to get at the window, which is pretty high above the ground, and out of reach of the most ardent revellers? We search a neighbouring shed, extract a stable-ladder, and in two seconds Palmy has climbed to the topmost rung, while Christian and Georg hold it firm upon the snow beneath. Then begins a passage from some comic opera of Mozart's or Cimarosa's--an escapade familiar to Spanish or Italian students, which recalls the stage. It is an episode from 'Don Giovanni,' translated to this dark-etched scene of snowy hills, and Gothic tower, and mullioned windows deep embayed beneath their eaves and icicles. _Deh vieni alla finestra!_ sings Palmy-Leporello; the chorus answers: _Deh vieni! Perchè non vieni ancora?_ pleads Leporello; the chorus shouts: _Perchè? Mio amu-u-u-r_, sighs Leporello; and Echo cries, _amu-u-u-r!_ All the wooing, be it noticed, is conducted in Italian. But the actors murmur to each other in Davoser Deutsch, 'She won't come, Palmy! It is far too late; she is gone to bed. Come down; you'll wake the village with your caterwauling!' But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon's hat, and resumes a flood of flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewd suspicion that the girl is peeping from behind the window curtain; and tells us, bending down from the ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper, that we must have patience; 'these girls are kittle cattle, who take long to draw: but if your lungs last out, they're sure to show.' And Leporello is right. Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. From the summit of his ladder, by his eloquent Italian tongue, he brings the shy bird down at last. We hear the unbarring of the house door, and a comely maiden, in her Sunday dress, welcomes us politely to her ground-floor sitting-room. The Comus enters, in grave order, with set speeches, handshakes, and inevitable _Prosits_! It is a large low chamber, with a huge stone stove, wide benches fixed along the walls, and a great oval table. We sit how and where we can. Red wine is produced, and eier-brod and küchli. Fräulein Anna serves us sedately, holding her own with decent self-respect against the inrush of the revellers. She is quite alone; but are not her father and mother in bed above, and within earshot? Besides, the Comus, even at this abnormal hour and after an abnormal night, is well conducted. Things seem slipping into a decorous wine-party, when Leporello readjusts the broad-brimmed hat upon his head, and very cleverly acts a little love-scene for our benefit. Fräulein Anna takes this as a delicate compliment, and the thing is so prettily done in truth, that not the sternest taste could be offended. Meanwhile another party of night-wanderers, attracted by our mirth, break in. More _Prosits_ and clinked glasses follow; and with a fair good-morning to our hostess, we retire. It is too late to think of bed. 'The quincunx of heaven,' as Sir Thomas Browne phrased it on a dissimilar occasion, 'runs low.... The huntsmen are up in America; and not in America only, for the huntsmen, if there are any this night in Graubünden, have long been out upon the snow, and the stable-lads are dragging the sledges from their sheds to carry down the mails to Landquart. We meet the porters from the various hotels, bringing letter-bags and luggage to the post. It is time to turn in and take a cup of black coffee against the rising sun. IX Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed. A leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriately be flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the winter snows. The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange. I have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses deep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, where wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders; dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrows over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreaming of Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lamps flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolier wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs; dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the valley, and the room is filled with spectral light. I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with soft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man and an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove. A young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know, and some one wandering on a sandy shore. I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien. Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a wild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven. I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses on the table. I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge circular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at irregular intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red Verona marble. Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest attitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths below. There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is threaded and rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aërial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he says I know not. I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth is riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation. I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone upon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it and moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of many voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then on their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos, longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the still cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant turns the windings of the road below and disappears. I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some high mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine, opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant sea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound shape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to myself, 'and I am alone on Caucasus.' * * * * * BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN I Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_, generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, the raspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of _Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to ripen. I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best Valtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos, where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a flavour unknown at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure to make or think myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled by the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil: Et quo te carmine dicam, Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis. I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank one bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have been less chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Such meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth, then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised by Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhætia? The Etruscans were accomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano which drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps they first planted the vine in Valtelline. Perhaps its superior culture in that district may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpine valley. One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tirano understand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy. Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province. From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles--Von Salis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg--across the hills as governors or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno. In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over snow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. That quaint traveller Tom Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities,' notes the custom early in the seventeenth century. And as that custom then obtained, it still subsists with little alteration. The wine-carriers--Weinführer, as they are called--first scaled the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at Poschiavo and Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the Scaletta rose before them--a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. The country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which the casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, or horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used for this wine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable weather the whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at least four days, with scanty halts at night. The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the interests of the state. However this may have been, when the Graubünden became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign independence, the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so eventually to Italy. According to modern and just notions of nationality, this was right. In their period of power, the Grisons masters had treated their Italian dependencies with harshness. The Valtelline is an Italian valley, connected with the rest of the peninsula by ties of race and language. It is, moreover, geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the Adda, which takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through the Lake of Como, swells the volume of the Po. But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners and Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best produce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by purchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier dues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina road. Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route, travelling from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But until quite recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the Canton. It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank it; and when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable. The fact seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to deal with it; and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate for its full development. II The district where the wine of Valtellina is grown extends, roughly speaking, from Tirano to Morbegno, a distance of some fifty-four miles. The best sorts come from the middle of this region. High up in the valley, soil and climate are alike less favourable. Low down a coarser, earthier quality springs from fat land where the valley broadens. The northern hillsides to a very considerable height above the river are covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the left bank of the Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards. Sassella is the general name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno, Grumello, or Perla di Sassella wine, it would be absurd to suppose that one obtained it precisely from the eponymous estate. But as each of these vineyards yields a marked quality of wine, which is taken as standard-giving, the produce of the whole district may be broadly classified as approaching more or less nearly to one of these accepted types. The Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella of commerce are therefore three sorts of good Valtelline, ticketed with famous names to indicate certain differences of quality. Montagner, as the name implies, is a somewhat lighter wine, grown higher up in the hill-vineyards. And of this class there are many species, some approximating to Sassella in delicacy of flavour, others approaching the tart lightness of the Villa vintage. This last takes its title from a village in the neighbourhood of Tirano, where a table-wine is chiefly grown. Forzato is the strongest, dearest, longest-lived of this whole family of wines. It is manufactured chiefly at Tirano; and, as will be understood from its name, does not profess to belong to any one of the famous localities. Forzato or Sforzato, forced or enforced, is in fact a wine which has undergone a more artificial process. In German the people call it Strohwein, which also points to the method of its preparation. The finest grapes are selected and dried in the sun (hence the _Stroh_) for a period of eight or nine weeks. When they have almost become raisins, they are pressed. The must is heavily charged with sugar, and ferments powerfully. Wine thus made requires several years to ripen. Sweet at first, it takes at last a very fine quality and flavour, and is rough, almost acid, on the tongue. Its colour too turns from a deep rich crimson to the tone of tawny port, which indeed it much resembles. Old Forzato, which has been long in cask, and then perhaps three years in bottle, will fetch at least six francs, or may rise to even ten francs a flask. The best Sassella rarely reaches more than five francs. Good Montagner and Grumello can be had perhaps for four francs; and Inferno of a special quality for six francs. Thus the average price of old Valtelline wine may be taken as five francs a bottle. These, I should observe, are hotel prices. Valtelline wines bought in the wood vary, of course, according to their age and year of vintage. I have found that from 2.50 fr. to 3.50 fr. per litre is a fair price for sorts fit to bottle. The new wine of 1881 sold in the following winter at prices varying from 1.05 fr. to 1.80 fr. per litre. It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the whole produce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage. They go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, make their bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then, when the snow has fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trusted servants go across the passes to bring it home. Generally they have some local man of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for the homeward journey, who takes the casks up to that place and sees them duly charged. Merchants of old standing maintain relations with the same peasants, taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredig at Pontresina or Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi at Samaden, or from Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, the produce of certain vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the present time this wine trade has been conducted with simplicity and honesty by both the dealers and the growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wine is that it is pure. How long so desirable a state of things will survive the slow but steady development of an export business may be questioned. III With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of the Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the district at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady stars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs--the Fluela Bernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula--with less difficulty and discomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them in June. At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long before the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through the interminable snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. The sun's light seemed to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which we toiled; dipped down to touch the topmost pines above our heads; rested in golden calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously played here and there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the precipices of the Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our path it never fell until we reached the very summit of the pass. Then we passed quietly into the full glory of the winter morning--a tranquil flood of sunbeams, pouring through air of crystalline purity, frozen and motionless. White peaks and dark brown rocks soared up, cutting a sky of almost purple blueness. A stillness that might be felt brooded over the whole world; but in that stillness there was nothing sad, no suggestion of suspended vitality. It was the stillness rather of untroubled health, of strength omnipotent but unexerted. From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound into the valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from the smooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, a thousand feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost in snow-drifts. The galleries built as a protection from avalanches, which sweep in rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blocked with snow. Their useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outside them, by paths which instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a fly may creep along a house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whisk from the swinged tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, into the ruin of the gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallen on the higher hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen. Therefore we have no fear, as we whirl fast and faster from the snow-fields into the black forests of gnarled cembras and wind-wearied pines. Then Süss is reached, where the Inn hurries its shallow waters clogged with ice-floes through a sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure and green; for the fountains of the glaciers are locked by winter frosts; and only clear rills from perennial sources swell its tide. At Süss we lost the sun, and toiled in garish gloom and silence, nipped by the ever-deepening cold of evening, upwards for four hours to Samaden. The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz, where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded the immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent films overspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of a mock sun--a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regular intervals by four globes--seemed to portend a change of weather. This forecast fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden across the silent snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet and saffron which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony of Alpine winter. At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind Pitz Languard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in the glorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but a few country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summer have little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard details of bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain flanks, suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfaces of snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what sounds unbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Looking up the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers were distinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil of snow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine light beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some storm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped mists frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the mountains in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air, until, when we had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solid blue. All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and on the morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely bear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of the fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with windless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these contrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops spilt from wine-casks which pass over it. The chief feature of the Bernina--what makes it a dreary pass enough in summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter--is its breadth; illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky; unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves from glittering ice-peaks. A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft like sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aërial shadows of translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst upon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests, violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape had been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices. The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow hurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the weltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then may be tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a line drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole building was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged about the door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledged one another in cups of new Veltliner. The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is badly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places it was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting thinly clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately sideways for hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this parapet, though we were often within an inch of doing so. Had our horse stumbled, it is not probable that I should have been writing this. When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches, we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all charged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open _loggia_ on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the men made us drink out of their _trinketti_. These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession--a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubünden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts and beards;--the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstances witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valär, and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us to drain a _Schluck_ from their unmanageable cruses. Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team. How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or Davos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can scarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent; and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to be shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journey is accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, and consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice and gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, the carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly. At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than a baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage, but it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perils of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers. Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to their women to be tended. Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and _jauchzen_ and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La Rosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a veritable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the Bernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo. IV The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lake presented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the clear green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for acres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal. From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among granite boulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnier terraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appear at intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gate across the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house is romantically perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant _finanzieri_, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their military cloaks and reading novels in the sun as we drove up. Though they made some pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and apologetic eyes--it was a disagreeable duty! A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward to Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known by the name of La Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage church of great beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with many tiers of pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and dominating a fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance. Taken altogether, this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline. The church, they say, was raised at Madonna's own command to stay the tide of heresy descending from the Engadine; and in the year 1620, the bronze statue of S. Michael, which still spreads wide its wings above the cupola, looked down upon the massacre of six hundred Protestants and foreigners, commanded by the patriot Jacopo Robustelli. From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue of poplar-trees to the town of Tirano. We were now in the district where Forzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tirano we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him, Bernard Campbèll. We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren in a vast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult to find a more typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his clean close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping from a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for some Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night.' The air of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree. It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campèlls or Campbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistible to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his first ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tirano two centuries ago.[3] This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with his son, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars, where we tasted several sorts of Valtelline, especially the new Forzato, made a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness with strength, and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly the sort of wine wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn a giant's head. Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars by Madonna, we descended the valley all along the vineyards of Villa and the vast district of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped to drink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed as though god Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right side of the Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers and terraces, which justify its Italian epithet of _Teatro di Bacco_. The rock is a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tints where exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, not trellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion at Chiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitly used; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun's rays are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is of a dull yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth, which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and chalets, dimly traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails above the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to vine-garlanded Dionysos. The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valley is nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda or S. Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from the southern hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty of scenery. Its chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank some special wine called _il vino de' Signori Grigioni_, has been modernised in dull Italian fashion. V The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in carnival uproar of masquers, topers, and musicians all night through. It was as much as we could do to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffee ere we started in the frozen dawn. 'Verfluchte Maddalena!' grumbled Christian as he shouldered our portmanteaus and bore them in hot haste to the post. Long experience only confirms the first impression, that, of all cold, the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. As we lumbered out of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could have fancied myself back once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. The frost was penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longed to be once more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed in that cold coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of the renowned vine districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte di Disgrazia in sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtelline vintage properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probably supplied from the inferior produce of these fields. It was past noon when we reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering in sunlight, dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look as dry and brown as dead beech-leaves at this season. Our Bacchic journey had reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how we made our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by low-arched galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledges down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed that pass from the Italian side in winter will forget. We left the refuge station at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passed them in the midst of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two of their horses stumble in the plunge and roll headlong over. Unluckily in one of these somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into the snow by the first lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like a garden-roller. Had his bed not been of snow, he must have been crushed to death; and as it was, he presented a woeful appearance when he afterwards arrived at Splügen. VI Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shall conclude these notes of winter wanderings in the high Alps with an episode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes. It was late in the month of March, and nearly all the mountain roads were open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came to meet us at the termination of a railway journey in Bagalz. We spent one day in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeld and Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine, which had spread the fields with spring flowers--primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones, and bright blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morning started for our homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declared itself in the night. It blew violently, and the rain soon changed to snow, frozen by a bitter north blast. Crossing the dreary heath of Lenz was both magnificent and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen, all the forests were laden with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts, the whole scene wintrier than it had been the winter through. At Wiesen we should have stayed, for evening was fast setting in. But in ordinary weather it is only a two hours drive from Wiesen to Davos. Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our four horses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper to be prepared, and started between five and six. A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its way between jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledges and through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passage annually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or the Snow-Paths. As we entered the gorge darkness fell, the horses dragged more heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver was hopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns in the road, banged the carriage against telegraph posts and jutting rocks, shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where there was no parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his box without a fight. The darkness by this time was all but total, and a blinding snow-storm swept howling through the ravine. At length we got the carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wet snow toward some wooden huts where miners in old days made their habitation. The place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, is called Hoffnungsau, or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed, it is not ill named; for many wanderers, escaping, as we did, from the dreadful gorge of Avalanches on a stormy night, may have felt, as we now felt, their hope reviving when they reached this shelter. There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, but tearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horses were taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable, which fortunately in these mountain regions will be always found beside the poorest habitation, one of them fell back across a wall and nearly broke his spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In its dismal dark kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, and heard there were two horses on the premises besides our own. It then occurred to us that we might accomplish the rest of the journey with such sledges as they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, if coal-boxes or boxes of any sort could be provided. These should be lashed to the sledges and filled with hay. We were only four persons; my wife and a friend should go in one, myself and my little girl in the other. No sooner thought of than put into practice. These original conveyances were improvised, and after two hours' halt on the Meadow of Hope, we all set forth again at half-past eight. I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim cold of that journey. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts. The road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleum stable-lamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My little girl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep white covering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozen masses to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that it was difficult to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though with neuralgia, from the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on with frost. Nothing could be seen but millions of white specks, whirled at us in eddying concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to the village we met our house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. It was past eleven at night when at last we entered warm rooms and refreshed ourselves for the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses, carriage, and drunken driver reached home next morning. * * * * * OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE Travellers journeying southward from Paris first meet with olive-trees near Montdragon or Monsélimart--little towns, with old historic names, upon the road to Orange. It is here that we begin to feel ourselves within the land of Provence, where the Romans found a second Italy, and where the autumn of their antique civilisation was followed, almost without an intermediate winter of barbarism, by the light and delicate springtime of romance. Orange itself is full of Rome. Indeed, the ghost of the dead empire seems there to be more real and living than the actual flesh and blood of modern time, as represented by narrow dirty streets and mean churches. It is the shell of the huge theatre, hollowed from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall that seems made rather to protect a city than to form a sounding-board for a stage, which first tells us that we have reached the old Arausio. Of all theatres this is the most impressive, stupendous, indestructible, the Colosseum hardly excepted; for in Rome herself we are prepared for something gigantic, while in the insignificant Arausio--a sort of antique Tewkesbury--to find such magnificence, durability, and vastness, impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lioness of Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal, towering, amorphous precipice which formed the background of the scena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking sound of Consul Romanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and deputies, arisen from the dead, with faces hard and stern as those of the warriors carved on Trajan's frieze, might take their seats beneath us in the orchestra, and, after proclamation made, the mortmain of imperial Rome be laid upon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice--thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we turn to gather the first violets of February, and to wonder at the quaint postures of a praying mantis on the grass grown tiers and porches fringed with fern. The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchange the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. The fixed epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes over its bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and bid us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist. Avignon presents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning, when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry ungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal palace, with its terrible Glacière, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate--so runs tradition--the shrieks of wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little French soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is never ruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into their dormitories, eating-places, and drill-grounds. And strange, indeed, it is to see the lines of neat narrow barrack beds, between which the red-legged little men are shaving, polishing their guns, or mending their trousers, in those vaulted halls of popes and cardinals, those vast presence-chambers and audience-galleries, where Urban entertained S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by the Glacière with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those which have never been disturbed from their old habitations. Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness and greyness of this Provençal landscape; and then we find that the scenery round Avignon is eminently picturesque. The view from Les Doms--which is a hill above the Pope's palace, the Acropolis, as it were, of Avignon--embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign, bordered by low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of the majestic Rhone. Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castle of romance, with its round stone towers fronting the gates and battlemented walls of the Papal city. A bridge used to connect the two towns, but it is now broken. The remaining fragment is of solid build, resting on great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically above the bridge into a little chapel. Such, one might fancy, was the bridge which Ariosto's Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins of Charlemagne, when angered by the loss of his love. Nor is it difficult to imagine Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magic lance in rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath. On a clear October morning, when the vineyards are taking their last tints of gold and crimson, and the yellow foliage of the poplars by the river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows, every square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with light and with colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, would make a picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We are on the shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone in front; beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree rises beside a little house, and next to it a crucifix twelve feet or more in height, the Christ visible afar, stretched upon His red cross; arundo donax is waving all around, and willows near; behind, far off, soar the peaked hills, blue and pearled with clouds; past the cypress, on the Rhone, comes floating a long raft, swift through the stream, its rudder guided by a score of men: one standing erect upon the prow bends forward to salute the cross; on flies the raft, the tall reeds rustle, and the cypress sleeps. For those who have time to spare in going to or from the south it is worth while to spend a day or two in the most comfortable and characteristic of old French inns, the Hôtel de l'Europe, at Avignon. Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It contains Horace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, less famous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the 'genius in convulsion,' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvas is unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painter fling his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might have spoiled? For in its way the picture is a masterpiece. There lies Jean Barrad, drummer, aged fourteen, slain in La Vendée, a true patriot, who, while his life-blood flowed away, pressed the tricolor cockade to his heart, and murmured 'Liberty!' David has treated his subject classically. The little drummer-boy, though French enough in feature and in feeling, lies, Greek-like, naked on the sand--a very Hyacinth of the Republic, La Vendée's Ilioneus. The tricolor cockade and the sentiment of upturned patriotic eyes are the only indications of his being a hero in his teens, a citizen who thought it sweet to die for France. In fine weather a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted, not so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of the drive, and for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For some time after leaving Avignon you jog along the level country between avenues of plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the olives, mulberries, and vineyards join their colours and melt subtly into distant purple. After crossing this we reach L'Isle, an island village girdled by the gliding Sorgues, overshadowed with gigantic plane-boughs, and echoing to the plash of water dripped from mossy fern-tufted millwheels. Those who expect Petrarch's Sorgues to be some trickling poet's rill emerging from a damp grotto, may well be astounded at the rush and roar of this azure river so close upon its fountain-head. It has a volume and an arrow-like rapidity that communicate the feeling of exuberance and life. In passing, let it not be forgotten that it was somewhere or other in this 'chiaro fondo di Sorga,' as Carlyle describes, that Jourdain, the hangman-hero of the Glacière, stuck fast upon his pony when flying from his foes, and had his accursed life, by some diabolical providence, spared for future butcheries. On we go across the austere plain, between fields of madder, the red roots of the 'garance' lying in swathes along the furrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren rock, here and there crimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands up and seems to bar all passage. Yet the river foams in torrents at our side. Whence can it issue? What pass or cranny in that precipice is cloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as we enter the narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the cliff-barrier, and find ourselves among the figs and olives of Vaucluse. Here is the village, the little church, the ugly column to Petrarch's memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout, the bridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by moss and water-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure smooth bed the river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh. The rocks on either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards, with here and there a cypress, fig, or mulberry tree. Soon the gardens cease, and lentisk, rosemary, box, and ilex--shrubs of Provence--with here and there a sumach out of reach, cling to the hard stone. And so at last we are brought face to face with the sheer impassable precipice. At its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in which the sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in a mirror--a mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar--so pure, so still, that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;' this is the fountain of Vaucluse. Up from its deep reservoirs, from the mysterious basements of the mountain, wells the silent stream; pauseless and motionless it fills its urn, rises unruffled, glides until the brink is reached, then overflows, and foams, and dashes noisily, a cataract, among the boulders of the hills. Nothing at Vaucluse is more impressive than the contrast between the tranquil silence of the fountain and the roar of the released impetuous river. Here we can realise the calm clear eyes of sculptured water-gods, their brimming urns, their gushing streams, the magic of the mountain-born and darkness-cradled flood. Or again, looking up at the sheer steep cliff, 800 feet in height, and arching slightly roofwise, so that no rain falls upon the cavern of the pool, we seem to see the stroke of Neptune's trident, the hoof of Pegasus, the force of Moses' rod, which cleft rocks and made water gush forth in the desert. There is a strange fascination in the spot. As our eyes follow the white pebble which cleaves the surface and falls visibly, until the veil of azure is too thick for sight to pierce, we feel as if some glamour were drawing us, like Hylas, to the hidden caves. At least, we long to yield a prized and precious offering to the spring, to grace the nymph of Vaucluse with a pearl of price as token of our reverence and love. Meanwhile nothing has been said about Petrarch, who himself said much about the spring, and complained against those very nymphs to whom we have in wish, at least, been scattering jewels, that they broke his banks and swallowed up his gardens every winter. At Vaucluse Petrarch loved, and lived, and sang. He has made Vaucluse famous, and will never be forgotten there. But for the present the fountain is even more attractive than the memory of the poet.[4] The change from Avignon to Nismes is very trying to the latter place; for Nismes is not picturesquely or historically interesting. It is a prosperous modern French town with two almost perfect Roman monuments--Les Arènes and the Maison Carrée. The amphitheatre is a complete oval, visible at one glance. Its smooth white stone, even where it has not been restored, seems unimpaired by age; and Charles Martel's conflagration, when he burned the Saracen hornet's nest inside it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably. Utility and perfect adaptation of means to ends form the beauty of Roman buildings. The science of construction and large intelligence displayed in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice--Palladio's Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--which approaches the dignity and loftiness of Roman architecture; and this it does because of its absolute freedom from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the durability of its material. The temple, called the Maison Carrée, at Nismes, is also very perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light, graceful, airy, but rather thin and narrow, it reminds one of the temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome. But if Nismes itself is not picturesque, its environs contain the wonderful Pont du Gard. A two or three hours' drive leads through a desolate country to the valley of the Cardon, where suddenly, at a turn of the road, one comes upon the aqueduct. It is not within the scope of words to describe the impression produced by those vast arches, row above row, cutting the deep blue sky. The domed summer clouds sailing across them are comprehended in the gigantic span of their perfect semicircles, which seem rather to have been described by Miltonic compasses of Deity than by merely human mathematics. Yet, standing beneath one of the vaults and looking upward, you may read Roman numerals in order from I. to X., which prove their human origin well enough. Next to their strength, regularity, and magnitude, the most astonishing point about this triple tier of arches, piled one above the other to a height of 180 feet above a brawling stream between two barren hills, is their lightness. The arches are not thick; the causeway on the top is only just broad enough for three men to walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a monument, and have set it in such a place--a wilderness of rock and rolling hill, scantily covered with low brushwood, and browsed over by a few sheep--for such a purpose, too, in order to supply Nemausus with pure water. The modern town does pretty well without its water; but here subsists the civilisation of eighteen centuries past intact: the human labour yet remains, the measuring, contriving mind of man, shrinking from no obstacles, spanning the air, and in one edifice combining gigantic strength and perfect beauty. It is impossible not to echo Rousseau's words in such a place, and to say with him: 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces immenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avaient bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette immensité. Je sentais, tout en me faisant petit, je ne sais quoi qui m'élevait l'âme; et je me disais en soupirant, Que ne suis-je né Romain!' There is nothing at Arles which produces the same deep and indelible impression. Yet Arles is a far more interesting town than Nismes, partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly because of its ruinous antiquity, and partly also because of the strong local character of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting thing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in the canto of 'Farinata:'-- Si come ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna, Fanno i sepolcri tutto 'l loco varo; but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue of sepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field. But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chief attractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a special expedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provençal desert where one realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence,'--a wilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, and tufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passes the Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their decay than the older and austerer mediæval towers, which rise up proud and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and nature are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl with masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heaped round fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; the doors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig for tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and lead to vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers--lady's bower or poet's singing-room--now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks and swallows. Within this rocky honeycomb--'cette ville en monolithe,' as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one mountain block--live about two hundred poor people, foddering their wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in calling the place a mediæval town in its original state, for anything more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly be conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. At the end of the last century, when revolutionary effervescence was beginning to ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudality away, defacing the very arms upon the town gate, and trampling the palace towers to dust. The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, the stagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea. In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of Les Baux; and whether they took their title from the rock, or whether, as genealogists would have it, they gave the name of Oriental Balthazar--their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi--to the rock itself, remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving. Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearing for their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field of gules--themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands, blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning, raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchable glowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, in the sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained but cinders--these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dusty titles. Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles: King of Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance; Prince of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Prince of Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Châlons, seized in all its emptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and came therewith to sit on England's throne. The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility. They warred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghers of Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon. Crusading, pillaging, betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it again by deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadour harps, presiding at courts of love,--they filled a large page in the history of Southern France. The Les Baux were very superstitious. In the fulness of their prosperity they restricted the number of their dependent towns, or _places baussenques_, to seventy-nine, because these numbers in combination were thought to be of good omen to their house. Beral des Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one day starting on a journey with his whole force to Avignon. He met an old woman herb-gathering at daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seen a crow or other bird?' 'Yea,' answered the crone, 'on the trunk of a dead willow.' Beral counted upon his fingers the day of the year, and turned bridle. With troubadours of name and note they had dealings, but not always to their own advantage, as the following story testifies. When the Baux and Berengers were struggling for the countship of Provence, Raymond Berenger, by his wife's counsel, went, attended by troubadours, to meet the Emperor Frederick at Milan. There he sued for the investiture and ratification of Provence. His troubadours sang and charmed Frederick; and the Emperor, for the joy he had in them, wrote his celebrated lines beginning-- Plas mi cavalier Francez. And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal. Hearing thereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of armed men. But music had already gained the day; and where the Phoebus of Provence had shone, the Æolus of storm-shaken Les Baux was powerless. Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the great Sordello chanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes of Christendom flock round and eat the heart of the dead lord. 'Let Rambaude des Baux,' cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearly meant, but at this distance almost unintelligible, 'take also a good piece, for she is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep it well who knows so well to husband her own weal.' But the poets were not always adverse to the house of Baux. Fouquet, the beautiful and gentle melodist whom Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wife of Berald, with long service of unhappy love, and wrote upon her death 'The Complaint of Berald des Baux for Adelaisie.' Guillaume de Cabestan loved Berangère des Baux, and was so loved by her that she gave him a philtre to drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad. Many more troubadours are cited as having frequented the castle of Les Baux, and among the members of the princely house were several poets. Some of them were renowned for beauty. We hear of a Cécile, called Passe Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappy François, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won the grace and love of Joan of Naples by his charms. But the real temper of this fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts of love and beauty. The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, and the comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature. History records no end of their ravages and slaughters. It is a tedious catalogue of blood--how one prince put to fire and sword the whole town of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his wife; how a third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to undermine her chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a fourth was flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothing terrible, splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which an example may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated by their chronicler, Jules Canonge. However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories of the ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel and picturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the old towns of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophime at Arles, and of S. Gilles--a village on the border of the dreary flamingo-haunted Camargue. Both of these buildings have porches splendidly encrusted with sculptures, half classical, half mediæval, marking the transition from ancient to modern art. But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer and more elaborate. The whole façade of this church is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon the church steps, and with the old conventional wave-border that is called Etruscan in our modern jargon. From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean mild faces of saints and Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists with half-human, half-animal eyes and wings, are interwoven with the leafy bowers of cupids. Grave apostles stand erect beneath acanthus wreaths that ought to crisp the forehead of a laughing Faun or Bacchus. And yet so full, exuberant, and deftly chosen are these various elements, that there remains no sense of incongruity or discord. The mediæval spirit had much trouble to disentangle itself from classic reminiscences; and fortunately for the picturesqueness of S. Gilles, it did not succeed. How strangely different is the result of this transition in the south from those severe and rigid forms which we call Romanesque in Germany and Normandy and England! * * * * * THE CORNICE It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and drove across the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist. Turbia's Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed round with driving vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended in a chaos between sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed us Villafranca, lying green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes a distant view of higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud. But the whole scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left our English home, and travelled from London day and night? At length we reached the edge of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and the olive-groves, till one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and at last we found ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next day and the next night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on the beach. The rain and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoled ourselves with thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flower were drinking in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight which would come. It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone, the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind was blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caring much what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hill and vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves,--pale, golden-tender trees,--and olives, stretching their grey boughs against the lonely cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines and heath above. Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time. We found a well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing at the bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair, black adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirrored in the water. This was just the well in _Hylas_. Theocritus has been badly treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature, artificial in his pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his verse, just as if he had showed me the very spot. Violets grow everywhere, of every shade, from black to lilac. Their stalks are long, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greeks could make them into chaplets--how Lycidas wore his crown of white violets[5] lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healths to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It is impossible to go wrong in these valleys. They are cultivated to the height of about five hundred feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aqueducts. Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from the mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growth of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and myrtles, continue the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks and peaks some thousand feet in height. Far above all signs of cultivation on these arid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined castles, built centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates. To these mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when they descried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, not very long ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to have been taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have found their way into the patois of the people. There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins on the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely tall and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made these castellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to trace in their foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man's begins. What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vast blue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung midway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close above their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! On penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is a whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet square, huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day three magnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards, up and down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudly chattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten years, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news. Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked together from the cradle to that hour: so true it is that use and custom quicken all our powers, especially of gossiping and scandal-mongering. S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of all these villages. The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rock must be alike intolerable. In appearance it is not unlike the Etruscan towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of a Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticity strike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats of dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone by and left but few traces,--some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relics of the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders. Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note, and Theocritus is still alive. We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are kind, letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the pale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew upon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees, are the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is said, five centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath their shade on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with age: gnarled, split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break into a hundred branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with innumerable sparks and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light. These are the leaves, and the stems are grey with lichens. The sky and sea--two blues, one full of sunlight and the other purple--set these fountains of perennial brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a distance the same olives look hoary and soft--a veil of woven light or luminous haze. When the wind blows their branches all one way, they ripple like a sea of silver. But underneath their covert, in the shade, grey periwinkles wind among the snowy drift of allium. The narcissus sends its arrowy fragrance through the air, while, far and wide, red anemones burn like fire, with interchange of blue and lilac buds, white arums, orchises, and pink gladiolus. Wandering there, and seeing the pale flowers, stars white and pink and odorous, we dream of Olivet, or the grave Garden of the Agony, and the trees seem always whispering of sacred things. How people can blaspheme against the olives, and call them imitations of the willow, or complain that they are shabby shrubs, I do not know.[6] This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or the golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations worshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and yellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars--when 'the trees flourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned their boughs through all the year.' This even now is literally true of the lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everything fits in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goats eat cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round me as I sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, and nibbled bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank and fountain, 'whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,' in spite of Bion's death. The narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still tell their tales of love and death. Hesper still gazes on the shepherd from the mountain-head. The slender cypresses still vibrate, the pines murmur. Pan sleeps in noontide heat, and goat-herds and wayfaring men lie down to slumber by the roadside, under olive-boughs in which cicadas sing. The little villages high up are just as white, the mountains just as grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing is changed--except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus or pastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers--the meal cake, honey, and spilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round. Surely, in some far-off glade, by the side of lemon-grove or garden, near the village, there must be still a pagan remnant of glad Nature-worship. Surely I shall chance upon some Thyrsis piping in the pine-tree shade, or Daphne flying from the arms of Phoebus. So I dream until I come upon the Calvary set on a solitary hillock, with its prayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives and the orange-trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and purple seas. There is the iron cross, the wounded heart, the spear, the reed, the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup of sacrificial blood, the title, with its superscription royal and divine. The other day we crossed a brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossoms and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of man--from Greek legends of the past to the real Christian present--and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing can again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immense espérance a traversé la terre_,' and these chapels, with their deep significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in the midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of men in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets, libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of the righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women telling their rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath the stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with Margaret's anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to contemplation in secluded cloisters,--these are the human forms which gather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists in this, 'Do often violence to thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen whole villages praying together at daybreak before their day's work, singing their _Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Iræ_, to the sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the midst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings and contentions of our soul more than its summer gladness and peace. Even the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the oil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermon on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend of a god's love for a mortal. The hillside tanks and running streams, and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We call the white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed; the fig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit; the locust-beans of the Caruba:--for one suggestion of Greek idylls there is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power. But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin? Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water. Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey and purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough above tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the last few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach with huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with fleecy spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt and fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia above the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as much as seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind the hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While dreaming there, this fancy came into my head: Polyphemus was born yonder in the Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hills found scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in the white house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow. Young Galatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, and shy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountain hyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where violets and sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink coralline and spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms. But Galatea, having filled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swift streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitter with the sea. But Polyphemus remained,--hungry, sad, gazing on the barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves. Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its mediæval castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labuntur tacitisque senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where the butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same hollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by age. The same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, and henbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the castle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one above the other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on a neighbour's neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. The streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and sun _ad libitum_. At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth century. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast. Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet aut Zephyrus_;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and aloes, and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves; tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm; without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables. Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna to S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands, and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their olive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and mischievous children. The country-women come with their large dangling earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their black hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the air alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment of gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the silence, immobility, and _noli me tangere_ aspect of an English congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant--always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy swell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking and spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another version of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds. At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficult vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats and corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and briar and clematis and sarsaparilla. In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang the columns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and deface the altar; above the high altar they raise a crucifix, and below they place a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sad symbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litanies and lurries,' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rage against the traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from the Greek feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I could not but remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral beds prepared: two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What a difference beneath this superficial similarity--[Greek: kalos nekus oia katheudôn]--_attritus ægrâ macie_. But the fast of Good Friday is followed by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is the chief difference. After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull old street of San Remo--three children leaning from a window, blowing bubbles. The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, round and trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The town is certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of houses poured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along the ridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on the shore below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, convent turret and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens and clinging creepers--this white cataract of buildings streams downward from the lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on the hill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, and linked together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection from the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are tall, and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind alleys, where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome. Indeed, San Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its walls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of what once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn cellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure habitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns the meaning of the Italian word _uggia_ from their cold and gloom. During the day they are deserted by every one but babies and witchlike old women--some gossiping, some sitting vacant at the house door, some spinning or weaving, or minding little children--ugly and ancient as are their own homes, yet clean as are the streets. The younger population goes afield; the men on mules laden for the hills, the women burdened like mules with heavy and disgusting loads. It is an exceptionally good-looking race; tall, well-grown, and strong.--But to the streets again. The shops in the upper town are few, chiefly wine-booths and stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread, or cobblers' and tinkers' ware. Notwithstanding the darkness of their dwellings, the people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from their windows, and vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork, climb the six stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof. Look at that mass of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath, with a yellow cat sunning herself upon the parapet! To reach such a garden and such sunlight who would not mount six stories and thread a labyrinth of passages? I should prefer a room upon the east side of the town, looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a sound of water beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with his feathery leaves. The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets. Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart; l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some souls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot upon his thigh;--these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them stand rows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple, praying hands--by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich in sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his home, or saved the baby from the fever. Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands the Palace Borea--a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance style of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads, half lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows. Once it formed the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomy anthill of a hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-day retaining but a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest. There, too, are the barracks and the syndic's hall; the Jesuits' school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for clothes, confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain and tasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery. Under these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at bowls. Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the most part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the cathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it has a sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and horrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the torrent. There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across a tangle of lemon-trees and olives. The stream rushes by through high walls, covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered by one or two old tufty palms. And over all rises the ancient turret of San Siro, like a Spanish giralda, a minaret of pinnacles and pyramids and dome bubbles, with windows showing heavy bells, old clocks, and sundials painted on the walls, and a cupola of green and yellow tiles like serpent-scales, to crown the whole. The sea lies beyond, and the house-roofs break it with grey horizontal lines. Then there are convents, legions of them, large white edifices, Jesuitical apparently for the most part, clanging importunate bells, leaning rose-blossoms and cypress-boughs over their jealous walls. Lastly, there is the port--the mole running out into the sea, the quay planted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats--by which San Remo is connected with the naval glory of the past--with the Riviera that gave birth to Columbus--with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled--with the great name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pier you look back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled town set in illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be the cattle-market. There the small buff cows of North Italy repose after their long voyage or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbing their sides against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all its symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble the drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and knee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded goats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seeking opportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in black petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought on shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked like whitebait, with cuttlefish--amorphous objects stretching shiny feelers on the hot dry sand--and prickly purple eggs of the sea-urchin. Women go about their labour through the throng, some carrying stones upon their heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks of wood in single file, two marching side by side beneath one load of lime, others scarcely visible under a stack of oats, another with her baby in its cradle fast asleep. San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called San Romolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was is buried in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of San Romolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees. The old convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart of the sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something like the Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines and pinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawling streams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on the slopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it the great sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hang in air, and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably. Spanish chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians, hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The house itself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to the mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble contemplations and soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me of the poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediæval monasticism--of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, of silence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and changelessness of daily life. Some precepts of the _Imitatio_ came into my mind: 'Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray or meditate, or work with diligence for the common needs.' 'Praiseworthy is it for the religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem to shun, and keep his eyes from men.' 'Sweet is the cell when it is often sought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its seclusion.' Then I thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under sun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long melodious hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, what flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut, what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such a hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among the Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts and birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionless on the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown peasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So still he lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind and low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet, lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in those long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the spirit of Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia Dio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e nuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would be lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes and mountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract word like Pantheism. Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of that brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon and stars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, and all creatures, are bound together with the soul of man. Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation of the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt the æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of Engelbergs,--always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten with the loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poetic stations. Here is a sentence of the _Imitatio_ which throws some light upon the hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life in studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creature be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is no creature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness of God.' With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra Angelico and S. Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and the skies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance. Though they reasoned '_de conditione humanæ miseriæ_,' and '_de contemptu mundi_,' yet the whole world was a pageant of God's glory, a testimony to His goodness. Their chastened senses, pure hearts, and simple wills were as wings by which they soared above the things of earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with every other creature in the symphony of praise. To them, as to Blake, the sun was no mere blazing disc or ball, but 'an innumerable company of the heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty."' To them the winds were brothers, and the streams were sisters--brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethren in common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by vows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle; they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things were ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forget that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the smallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations. We who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affections more on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the world, and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they were dead to its beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas, fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought of God, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We to whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable quantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interesting in themselves. The monks were less ostensibly concerned about such things, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols of a hidden mystery. The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regarding Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties. They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like. The [Greek: pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma] is very rare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces they found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct. They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent and omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine government. We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point of view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too, we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the life has gone out of it. I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quite distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of spiky leaves, and rear their tall aërial arms against the deep blue background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore, are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray. At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars of heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone and Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of Antibes and the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from the sea. The island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace the dark strip of irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the rising sun. If the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting clouds which crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an apparition in the bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair,' half raised above the sea, it stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in April sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud. If Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the monastic past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to the East; and lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or Daphne, or in the gardens of a Moslem prince. Note.--Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed by a third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely idyllic loveliness, the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in the South. A very few spots in Sicily, the road between Castellammare and Amalfi, and the island of Corfu, are its only rivals in this style of scenery. From Cannes to Sestri is one continuous line of exquisitely modulated landscape beauty, which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in carriage or on foot. * * * * * _AJACCIO_ It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from the Cornice coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to find themselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The difference between the scenery of the island and the shores which they have left is very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice, intolerably dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their base with villages and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents a scene of solitary and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops are covered with snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they are as green as Irish or as English hills, but nearly uninhabited and uncultivated. Valleys of almost Alpine verdure are succeeded by tracts of chestnut wood and scattered pines, or deep and flowery brushwood--the 'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to its traditional outlaws and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides there are hardly any signs of life; the whole country seems abandoned to primeval wildness and the majesty of desolation. Nothing can possibly be more unlike the smiling Riviera, every square mile of which is cultivated like a garden, and every valley and bay dotted over with white villages. After steaming for a few hours along this savage coast, the rocks which guard the entrance to the bay of Ajaccio, murderous-looking teeth and needles ominously christened Sanguinari, are passed, and we enter the splendid land-locked harbour, on the northern shore of which Ajaccio is built. About three centuries ago the town, which used to occupy the extreme or eastern end of the bay, was removed to a more healthy point upon the northern coast, so that Ajaccio is quite a modern city. Visitors who expect to find in it the picturesqueness of Genoa or San Remo, or even of Mentone, will be sadly disappointed. It is simply a healthy, well-appointed town of recent date, the chief merits of which are, that it has wide streets, and is free, externally at least, from the filth and rubbish of most southern seaports. But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery which it commands, and in the heart of which it lies, is of the most magnificent. The bay of Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake--a Lago Maggiore, with greater space between the mountains and the shore. From the snow-peaks of the interior, huge granite crystals clothed in white, to the southern extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak and ridge rises behind ridge in a line of wonderful variety and beauty. The atmospheric changes of light and shadow, cloud and colour, on this upland country, are as subtle and as various as those which lend their beauty to the scenery of the lakes, while the sea below is blue and rarely troubled. One could never get tired with looking at this view. Morning and evening add new charms to its sublimity and beauty. In the early morning Monte d'Oro sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its fresh snow, and the whole inferior range puts on the crystal blueness of dawn among the Alps. In the evening, violet and purple tints and the golden glow of Italian sunset lend a different lustre to the fairyland. In fact, the beauties of Switzerland and Italy are curiously blended in this landscape. In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from the Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchards of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulating champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear streams, is very refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may have wearied of the bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is traversed by excellent roads, recently constructed on a plan of the French Government, which intersect the country in all directions, and offer an infinite variety of rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite of which these roads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of the hills through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus, and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards, olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of the island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchi grow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is so strong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena, referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsica blindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak make darker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side of enclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and out among the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of the landscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver. Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender, and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath and sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep cyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches, convolvuluses, lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there a purple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovely plants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even the flower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favoured Alpine valleys in their early spring. Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the island by improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring to mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome, fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds have disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain villages and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the hills are unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again, the mountains themselves have in many parts been stripped of their forests, and converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching up and down their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation. Another impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit of what is called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed by the national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to the lowlands during the winter, so that fences are broken, young crops are browsed over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mere impossibility. The last and chief difficulty against which the French have had to contend, and up to this time with apparent success, is brigandage. The Corsican system of brigandage is so very different from that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be said about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing at all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a free life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by lawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal and social ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of honour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of his house for generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday. But in either case, if he had killed him fairly, after a due notification of his intention to do so, he was held to have fulfilled a duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then betook himself to the dense tangles of evergreens which I have described, where he lived upon the charity of countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes of those simple people it was a sacred duty to relieve the necessities of the outlaws, and to guard them from the bloodhounds of justice. There was scarcely a respectable family in Corsica who had not one or more of its members thus _alla campagna_, as it was euphemistically styled. The Corsicans themselves have attributed this miserable state of things to two principal causes. The first of these was the ancient bad government of the island: under its Genoese rulers no justice was administered, and private vengeance for homicide or insult became a necessary consequence among the haughty and warlike families of the mountain villages. Secondly, the Corsicans have been from time immemorial accustomed to wear arms in everyday life. They used to sit at their house doors and pace the streets with musket, pistol, dagger, and cartouch-box on their persons; and on the most trivial occasion of merriment or enthusiasm they would discharge their firearms. This habit gave a bloody termination to many quarrels, which might have ended more peaceably had the parties been unarmed; and so the seeds of _vendetta_ were constantly being sown. Statistics published by the French Government present a hideous picture of the state of bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period of thirty years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the island. Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or seeking how to save his own; and agriculture and commerce were neglected for this grisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French began to take strong measures, and, under the Prefect Thuillier, they hunted the bandits from the macchi, killing between 200 and 300 of them. At the same time an edict was promulgated against bearing arms. It is forbidden to sell the old Corsican stiletto in the shops, and no one may carry a gun, even for sporting purposes, unless he obtains a special licence. These licences, moreover, are only granted for short and precisely measured periods. In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of the Corsicans, it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio, and to visit some of the more distant mountain villages--Vico, Cavro, Bastelica, or Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from the capital. Immediately after quitting the seaboard, we enter a country austere in its simplicity, solemn without relief, yet dignified by its majesty and by the sense of freedom it inspires. As we approach the mountains, the macchi become taller, feathering man-high above the road, and stretching far away upon the hills. Gigantic masses of granite, shaped like buttresses and bastions, seem to guard the approaches to these hills; while, looking backward over the green plain, the sea lies smiling in a haze of blue among the rocky horns and misty headlands of the coast. There is a stateliness about the abrupt inclination of these granite slopes, rising from their frowning portals by sharp _arêtes_ to the snows piled on their summits, which contrasts in a strange way with the softness and beauty of the mingling sea and plain beneath. In no landscape are more various qualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to produce so strong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power. Suppose that we are on the road to Corte, and have now reached Bocognano, the first considerable village since we left Ajaccio. Bocognano might be chosen as typical of Corsican hill-villages, with its narrow street, and tall tower-like houses of five or six stories high, faced with rough granite, and pierced with the smallest windows and very narrow doorways. These buildings have a mournful and desolate appearance. There is none of the grandeur of antiquity about them; no sculptured arms or castellated turrets, or balconies or spacious staircases, such as are common in the poorest towns of Italy. The signs of warlike occupation which they offer, and their sinister aspect of vigilance, are thoroughly prosaic. They seem to suggest a state of society in which feud and violence were systematised into routine. There is no relief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no signs of wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness and gracefulness of architecture. Perched upon their coigns of vantage, these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoese marauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on the watch. Forests of immensely old chestnut-trees surround Bocognano on every side, so that you step from the village streets into the shade of woods that seem to have remained untouched for centuries. The country-people support themselves almost entirely upon the fruit of these chestnuts; and there is a large department of Corsica called Castagniccia, from the prevalence of these trees and the sustenance which the inhabitants derive from them. Close by the village brawls a torrent, such as one may see in the Monte Rosa valleys or the Apennines, but very rarely in Switzerland. It is of a pure green colour, absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the granite boulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddying into still, deep pools fringed with fern. Monte d'Oro, one of the largest mountains of Corsica, soars above, and from his snows the purest water, undefiled by glacier mud or the _débris_ of avalanches, melts away. Following the stream, we rise through the macchi and the chestnut woods, which grow more sparely by degrees, until we reach the zone of beeches. Here the scene seems suddenly transferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is carried along abrupt slopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees, overgrown with pink and silver lichens. In the early spring their last year's leaves are still crisp with hoar-frost; one morning's journey has brought us from the summer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights, where no flowers are visible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac crocuses. Snow-drifts stretch by the roadside, and one by one the pioneers of the vast pine-woods of the interior appear. A great portion of the pine-forest (_Pinus larix_, or Corsican pine, not larch) between Bocognano and Corte had recently been burned by accident when we passed by. Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems and branches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were mast-high, and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the mountain fastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of Monte Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys lead downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast. The rock on which it stands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding the valleys of the Golo and the Tavignano. Remembering that Corte was the old capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli's government, we are led to compare the town with Innsprück, Meran, or Grenoble. In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely less striking than those of Bocognano. The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its furious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be illustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in this landscape. When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rocky pasture-lands of Niolo, the history of the Corsican national heroes, Giudice della Rocca and Sampiero, becomes intelligible, nor do we fail to understand some of the mysterious attraction which led the more daring spirits of the island to prefer a free life among the macchi and pine-woods to placid lawful occupations in farms and villages. The lives of the two men whom I have mentioned are so prominent in Corsican history, and are so often still upon the lips of the common people, that it may be well to sketch their outlines in the foreground of the Salvator Rosa landscape just described. Giudice was the governor of Corsica, as lieutenant for the Pisans, at the end of the thirteenth century. At that time the island belonged to the republic of Pisa, but the Genoese were encroaching on them by land and sea, and the whole life of their brave champion was spent in a desperate struggle with the invaders, until at last he died, old, blind, and in prison, at the command of his savage foes. Giudice was the title which the Pisans usually conferred upon their governor, and Della Rocca deserved it by right of his own inexorable love of justice. Indeed, justice seems to have been with him a passion, swallowing up all other feelings of his nature. All the stories which are told of him turn upon this point in his character; and though they may not be strictly true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated among the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and gloomy nation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either to criticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The most famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. On one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message that the captives in his hands should be released if their wives and sisters came to sue for them. The Genoese ladies embarked, and arrived in Corsica, and to Giudice's nephew was intrusted the duty of fulfilling his uncle's promise. In the course of executing his commission, the youth was so smitten with the beauty of one of the women that he dishonoured her. Thereupon Giudice had him at once put to death. Another story shows the Spartan justice of this hero in a less savage light. He was passing by a cowherd's cottage, when he heard some young calves bleating. On inquiring what distressed them, he was told that the calves had not enough milk to drink after the farm people had been served. Then Giudice made it a law that the calves throughout the land should take their fill before the cows were milked. Sampiero belongs to a later period of Corsican history. After a long course of misgovernment the Genoese rule had become unbearable. There was no pretence of administering justice, and private vengeance had full sway in the island. The sufferings of the nation were so great that the time had come for a new judge or saviour to rise among them. Sampiero was the son of obscure parents who lived at Bastelica. But his abilities very soon declared themselves, and made a way for him in the world. He spent his youth in the armies of the Medici and of the French Francis, gaining great renown as a brave soldier. Bayard became his friend, and Francis made him captain of his Corsican bands. But Sampiero did not forget the wrongs of his native land while thus on foreign service. He resolved, if possible, to undermine the power of Genoa, and spent the whole of his manhood and old age in one long struggle with their great captain, Stephen Doria. Of his stern patriotism and Roman severity of virtue the following story is a terrible illustration. Sampiero, though a man of mean birth, had married an heiress of the noble Corsican house of the Ornani. His wife, Vannina, was a woman of timid and flexible nature, who, though devoted to her husband, fell into the snares of his enemies. During his absence on an embassy to Algiers the Genoese induced her to leave her home at Marseilles and to seek refuge in their city, persuading her that this step would secure the safety of her child. She was starting on her journey when a friend of Sampiero arrested her, and brought her back to Aix, in Provence. Sampiero, when he heard of these events, hurried to France, and was received by a relative of his, who hinted that he had known of Vannina's projected flight. 'E tu hai taciuto?' was Sampiero's only answer, accompanied by a stroke of his poignard that killed the lukewarm cousin. Sampiero now brought his wife from Aix to Marseilles, preserving the most absolute silence on the way, and there, on entering his house, he killed her with his own hand. It is said that he loved Vannina passionately; and when she was dead, he caused her to be buried with magnificence in the church of S. Francis. Like Giudice, Sampiero fell at last a prey to treachery. The murder of Vannina had made the Ornani his deadly foes. In order to avenge her blood, they played into the hands of the Genoese, and laid a plot by which the noblest of the Corsicans was brought to death. First, they gained over to their scheme a monk of Bastelica, called Ambrogio, and Sampiero's own squire and shield-bearer, Vittolo. By means of these men, in whom he trusted, he was drawn defenceless and unattended into a deeply wooded ravine near Cavro, not very far from his birthplace, where the Ornani and their Genoese troops surrounded him. Sampiero fired his pistols in vain, for Vittolo had loaded them with the shot downwards. Then he drew his sword, and began to lay about him, when the same Vittolo, the Judas, stabbed him from behind, and the old lion fell dead by his friend's hand. Sampiero was sixty-nine when he died, in the year 1567. It is satisfactory to know that the Corsicans have called traitors and foes to their country Vittoli for ever. These two examples of Corsican patriots are enough; we need not add to theirs the history of Paoli--a milder and more humane, but scarcely less heroic leader. Paoli, however, in the hour of Corsica's extremest peril, retired to England, and died in philosophic exile. Neither Giudice nor Sampiero would have acted thus. The more forlorn the hope, the more they struggled. Among the old Corsican customs which are fast dying out, but which still linger in the remote valleys of Niolo and Vico, is the _vócero_, or funeral chant, improvised by women at funerals over the bodies of the dead. Nothing illustrates the ferocious temper and savage passions of the race better than these _vóceri_, many of which have been written down and preserved. Most of them are songs of vengeance and imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments and utterances of extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters at the side of murdered husbands and brothers. The women who sing them seem to have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchanged the virtues of their sex for Spartan fortitude and the rage of furies. While we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to one of the cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by its mournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yet red. The _gridata_, or wake, is assembled in a dark room. On the wooden board, called _tola_, the corpse lies stretched; and round it are women, veiled in the blue-black mantle of Corsican costume, moaning and rocking themselves upon their chairs. The _pasto_ or _conforto_, food supplied for mourners, stands upon a side table, and round the room are men with savage eyes and bristling beards, armed to the teeth, keen for vengeance. The dead man's musket and pocket-pistol lie beside him, and his bloody shirt is hung up at his head. Suddenly, the silence, hitherto only disturbed by suppressed groans and muttered curses, is broken by a sharp cry. A woman rises: it is the sister of the dead man; she seizes his shirt, and holding it aloft with Mænad gestures and frantic screams, gives rhythmic utterance to her grief and rage. 'I was spinning, when I heard a great noise: it was a gunshot, which went into my heart, and seemed a voice that cried, "Run, thy brother is dying." I ran into the room above; I took the blow into my breast; I said, "Now he is dead, there is nothing to give me comfort. Who will undertake thy vengeance? When I show thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow till the murderer is slain? Who is there left to do it? A mother near her death? A sister? Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin, poor, orphan, and a girl. Yet, O my brother! never fear. For thy vengeance thy sister is enough! '"Ma per fà la to bindetta, Sta siguru, basta anch ella! Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to the hills. My brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"' A _vócero_ declaimed upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale, two cousins, by the sister of the former, is still fiercer and more energetic in its malediction. This Erinnys of revenge prays Christ and all the saints to extirpate the murderer's whole race, to shrivel it up till it passes from the earth. Then, with a sudden and vehement transition to the pathos of her own sorrow, she exclaims:-- 'Halla mai bista nissunu Tumbà l'omi pe li canti?' It appears from these words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed him because they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after, she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for refusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of rage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose to her raging thirst for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train like a sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer! Oh, if I had a son! Oh, if I had a lad!' Her words seem to choke her, and she swoons, and remains for a short time insensible. When the Bacchante of revenge awakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine, Matteo! art thou sleeping? Here I will rest with thee and weep till daybreak.' It is rare to find in literature so crude and intense an expression of fiery hatred as these untranslatable _vóceri_ present. The emotion is so simple and so strong that it becomes sublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange pathos when contrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such terms of endearment as 'my dove,' 'my flower,' 'my pheasant,' 'my bright painted orange,' addressed to the dead. In the _vóceri_ it often happens that there are several interlocutors: one friend questions and another answers; or a kinswoman of the murderer attempts to justify the deed, and is overwhelmed with deadly imprecations. Passionate appeals are made to the corpse: 'Arise! Do you not hear the women cry? Stand up. Show your wounds, and let the fountains of your blood flow! Alas! he is dead; he sleeps; he cannot hear!' Then they turn again to tears and curses, feeling that no help or comfort can come from the clay-cold form. The intensity of grief finds strange language for its utterance. A girl, mourning over her father, cries:-- 'Mi l'hannu crucifissatu Cume Ghiesu Cristu in croce.' Once only, in Viale's collection, does any friend of the dead remember mercy. It is an old woman, who points to the crucifix above the bier. But all the _vóceri_ are not so murderous. Several are composed for girls who died unwedded and before their time, by their mothers or companions. The language of these laments is far more tender and ornate. They praise the gentle virtues and beauty of the girl, her piety and helpful household ways. The most affecting of these dirges is that which celebrates the death of Romana, daughter of Dariola Danesi. Here is a pretty picture of the girl: 'Among the best and fairest maidens you were like a rose among flowers, like the moon among stars; so far more lovely were you than the loveliest. The youths in your presence were like lighted torches, but full of reverence; you were courteous to all, but with none familiar. In church they gazed at you, but you looked at none of them; and after mass you said, "Mother, let us go." Oh! who will console me for your loss? Why did the Lord so much desire you? But now you rest in heaven, all joy and smiles; for the world was not worthy of so fair a face. Oh, how far more beautiful will Paradise be now!' Then follows a piteous picture of the old bereaved mother, to whom a year will seem a thousand years, who will wander among relatives without affection, neighbours without love; and who, when sickness comes, will have no one to give her a drop of water, or to wipe the sweat from her brow, or to hold her hand in death. Yet all that is left for her is to wait and pray for the end, that she may join again her darling. But it is time to return to Ajaccio itself. At present the attractions and ornaments of the town consist of a good public library, Cardinal Fesch's large but indifferent collection of pictures, two monuments erected to Napoleon, and Napoleon's house. It will always be the chief pride of Ajaccio that she gave birth to the great emperor. Close to the harbour, in a public square by the sea-beach, stands an equestrian statue of the conqueror, surrounded by his four brothers on foot. They are all attired in Roman fashion, and are turned seaward, to the west, as if to symbolise the emigration of this family to subdue Europe. There is something ludicrous and forlorn in the stiffness of the group--something even pathetic, when we think how Napoleon gazed seaward from another island, no longer on horseback, no longer laurel-crowned, an unthroned, unseated conqueror, on S. Helena. His father's house stands close by. An old Italian waiting-woman, who had been long in the service of the Murats, keeps it and shows it. She has the manners of a lady, and can tell many stories of the various members of the Buonaparte family. Those who fancy that Napoleon was born in a mean dwelling of poor parents will be surprised to find so much space and elegance in these apartments. Of course his family was not rich by comparison with the riches of French or English nobles. But for Corsicans they were well-to-do, and their house has an air of antique dignity. The chairs of the entrance-saloon have been literally stripped of their coverings by enthusiastic visitors; the horse-hair stuffing underneath protrudes itself with a sort of comic pride, as if protesting that it came to be so tattered in an honourable service. Some of the furniture seems new; but many old presses, inlaid with marbles, agates, and lapis-lazuli, such as Italian families preserve for generations, have an air of respectable antiquity about them. Nor is there any doubt that the young Napoleon led his minuets beneath the stiff girandoles of the formal dancing-room. There, too, in a dark back chamber, is the bed in which he was born. At its foot is a photograph of the Prince Imperial sent by the Empress Eugénie, who, when she visited the room, wept much _pianse molto_ (to use the old lady's phrase)--at seeing the place where such lofty destinies began. On the wall of the same room is a portrait of Napoleon himself as the young general of the republic--with the citizen's unkempt hair, the fierce fire of the Revolution in his eyes, a frown upon his forehead, lips compressed, and quivering nostrils; also one of his mother, the pastille of a handsome woman, with Napoleonic eyes and brows and nose, but with a vacant simpering mouth. Perhaps the provincial artist knew not how to seize the expression of this feature, the most difficult to draw. For we cannot fancy that Letizia had lips without the firmness or the fulness of a majestic nature. The whole first story of this house belonged to the Buonaparte family. The windows look out partly on a little court and partly on narrow streets. It was, no doubt, the memory of this home that made Napoleon, when emperor, design schemes for the good of Corsica--schemes that might have brought him more honour than many conquests, but which he had no time or leisure to carry out. On S. Helena his mind often reverted to them, and he would speak of the gummy odours of the macchi wafted from the hillsides to the seashore. * * * * * _MONTE GENEROSO_ The long hot days of Italian summer were settling down on plain and country when, in the last week of May, we travelled northward from Florence and Bologna seeking coolness. That was very hard to find in Lombardy. The days were long and sultry, the nights short, without a respite from the heat. Milan seemed a furnace, though in the Duomo and the narrow shady streets there was a twilight darkness which at least looked cool. Long may it be before the northern spirit of improvement has taught the Italians to despise the wisdom of their forefathers, who built those sombre streets of palaces with overhanging eaves, that, almost meeting, form a shelter from the fiercest sun. The lake country was even worse than the towns; the sunlight lay all day asleep upon the shining waters, and no breeze came to stir their surface or to lift the tepid veil of haze, through which the stony mountains, with their yet unmelted patches of winter snow, glared as if in mockery of coolness. Then we heard of a new inn, which had just been built by an enterprising Italian doctor below the very top of Monte Generoso. There was a picture of it in the hotel at Cadenabbia, but this gave but little idea of any particular beauty. A big square house, with many windows, and the usual ladies on mules, and guides with alpenstocks, advancing towards it, and some round bushes growing near, was all it showed. Yet there hung the real Monte Generoso above our heads, and we thought it must be cooler on its height than by the lake-shore. To find coolness was the great point with us just then. Moreover, some one talked of the wonderful plants that grew among its rocks, and of its grassy slopes enamelled with such flowers as make our cottage gardens at home gay in summer, not to speak of others rarer and peculiar to the region of the Southern Alps. Indeed, the Generoso has a name for flowers, and it deserves it, as we presently found. This mountain is fitted by its position for commanding one of the finest views in the whole range of the Lombard Alps. A glance at the map shows that. Standing out pre-eminent among the chain of lower hills to which it belongs, the lakes of Lugano and Como with their long arms enclose it on three sides, while on the fourth the plain of Lombardy with its many cities, its rich pasture-lands and cornfields intersected by winding river-courses and straight interminable roads, advances to its very foot. No place could be better chosen for surveying that contrasted scene of plain and mountain, which forms the great attraction of the outlying buttresses of the central Alpine mass. The superiority of the Monte Generoso to any of the similar eminences on the northern outskirts of Switzerland is great. In richness of colour, in picturesqueness of suggestion, in sublimity and breadth of prospect, its advantages are incontestable. The reasons for this superiority are obvious. On the Italian side the transition from mountain to plain is far more abrupt; the atmosphere being clearer, a larger sweep of distance is within our vision; again, the sunlight blazes all day long upon the very front and forehead of the distant Alpine chain, instead of merely slanting along it, as it does upon the northern side. From Mendrisio, the village at the foot of the mountain, an easy mule-path leads to the hotel, winding first through English-looking hollow lanes with real hedges, which are rare in this country, and English primroses beneath them. Then comes a forest region of luxuriant chestnut-trees, giants with pink boles just bursting into late leafage, yellow and tender, but too thin as yet for shade. A little higher up, the chestnuts are displaced by wild laburnums bending under their weight of flowers. The graceful branches meet above our heads, sweeping their long tassels against our faces as we ride beneath them, while the air for a good mile is full of fragrance. It is strange to be reminded in this blooming labyrinth of the dusty suburb roads and villa gardens of London. The laburnum is pleasant enough in S. John's Wood or the Regent's Park in May--a tame domesticated thing of brightness amid smoke and dust. But it is another joy to see it flourishing in its own home, clothing acres of the mountain-side in a very splendour of spring-colour, mingling its paler blossoms with the golden broom of our own hills, and with the silver of the hawthorn and wild cherry. Deep beds of lilies-of-the-valley grow everywhere beneath the trees; and in the meadows purple columbines, white asphodels, the Alpine spiræa, tall, with feathery leaves, blue scabious, golden hawkweeds, turkscap lilies, and, better than all, the exquisite narcissus poeticus, with its crimson-tipped cup, and the pure pale lilies of San Bruno, are crowded in a maze of dazzling brightness. Higher up the laburnums disappear, and flaunting crimson peonies gleam here and there upon the rocks, until at length the gentians and white ranunculuses of the higher Alps displace the less hardy flowers of Italy. About an hour below the summit of the mountain we came upon the inn, a large clean building, with scanty furniture and snowy wooden floors, guiltless of carpets. It is big enough to hold about a hundred guests; and Doctor Pasta, who built it, a native of Mendrisio, was gifted either with much faith or with a real prophetic instinct.[8] Anyhow he deserves commendation for his spirit of enterprise. As yet the house is little known to English travellers: it is mostly frequented by Italians from Milan, Novara, and other cities of the plain, who call it the Italian Righi, and come to it, as cockneys go to Richmond, for noisy picnic excursions, or at most for a few weeks' _villeggiatura_ in the summer heats. When we were there in May the season had scarcely begun, and the only inmates besides ourselves were a large party from Milan, ladies and gentlemen in holiday guise, who came, stayed one night, climbed the peak at sunrise, and departed amid jokes and shouting and half-childish play, very unlike the doings of a similar party in sober England. After that the stillness of nature descended on the mountain, and the sun shone day after day upon that great view which seemed created only for ourselves. And what a view it was! The plain stretching up to the high horizon, where a misty range of pink cirrus-clouds alone marked the line where earth ended and the sky began, was islanded with cities and villages innumerable, basking in the hazy shimmering heat. Milan, seen through the doctor's telescope, displayed its Duomo perfect as a microscopic shell, with all its exquisite fretwork, and Napoleon's arch of triumph surmounted by the four tiny horses, as in a fairy's dream. Far off, long silver lines marked the lazy course of Po and Ticino, while little lakes like Varese and the lower end of Maggiore spread themselves out, connecting the mountains with the plain. Five minutes' walk from the hotel brought us to a ridge where the precipice fell suddenly and almost sheer over one arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenly outstretched asleep it lay beneath us, coloured with the tints of fluor-spar, or with the changeful green and azure of a peacock's breast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San Salvadore had receded into insignificance: the houses and churches and villas of Lugano bordered the lake-shore with an uneven line of whiteness. And over all there rested a blue mist of twilight and of haze, contrasting with the clearness of the peaks above. It was sunset when we first came here; and, wave beyond wave, the purple Italian hills tossed their crested summits to the foot of a range of stormy clouds that shrouded the high Alps. Behind the clouds was sunset, clear and golden; but the mountains had put on their mantle for the night, and the hem of their garment was all we were to see. And yet--over the edge of the topmost ridge of cloud, what was that long hard line of black, too solid and immovable for cloud, rising into four sharp needles clear and well defined? Surely it must be the familiar outline of Monte Rosa itself, the form which every one who loves the Alps knows well by heart, which picture-lovers know from Ruskin's woodcut in the 'Modern Painters.' For a moment only the vision stayed: then clouds swept over it again, and from the place where the empress of the Alps had been, a pillar of mist shaped like an angel's wing, purple and tipped with gold, shot up against the pale green sky. That cloud-world was a pageant in itself, as grand and more gorgeous perhaps than the mountains would have been. Deep down through the hollows of the Simplon a thunderstorm was driving; and we saw forked flashes once and again, as in a distant world, lighting up the valleys for a moment, and leaving the darkness blacker behind them as the storm blurred out the landscape forty miles away. Darkness was coming to us too, though our sky was clear and the stars were shining brightly. At our feet the earth was folding itself to sleep; the plain was wholly lost; little islands of white mist had formed themselves, and settled down upon the lakes and on their marshy estuaries; the birds were hushed; the gentian-cups were filling to the brim with dew. Night had descended on the mountain and the plain; the show was over. The dawn was whitening in the east next morning, when we again scrambled through the dwarf beechwood to the precipice above the lake. Like an ink-blot it lay, unruffled, slumbering sadly. Broad sheets of vapour brooded on the plain, telling of miasma and fever, of which we on the mountain, in the pure cool air, knew nothing. The Alps were all there now--cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowy peaks, from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in the west to the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east. Supreme among them towered Monte Rosa--queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proud pre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italian plain. There is no mountain like her. Mont Blanc himself is scarcely so regal; and she seems to know it, for even the clouds sweep humbled round her base, girdling her at most, but leaving her crown clear and free. Now, however, there were no clouds to be seen in all the sky. The mountains had a strange unshriven look, as if waiting to be blessed. Above them, in the cold grey air, hung a low black arch of shadow, the shadow of the bulk of the huge earth, which still concealed the sun. Slowly, slowly this dark line sank lower, till, one by one, at last, the peaks caught first a pale pink flush; then a sudden golden glory flashed from one to the other, as they leapt joyfully into life. It is a supreme moment this first burst of life and light over the sleeping world, as one can only see it on rare days and in rare places like the Monte Generoso. The earth--enough of it at least for us to picture to ourselves the whole--lies at our feet; and we feel as the Saviour might have felt, when from the top of that high mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them. Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy the lives that are being lived down in those cities of the plain: how many are waking at this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to sorrow, or to 'that unrest which men miscall delight;' while we upon our mountain buttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed from daily cares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has made so fair and wonderful. From this same eyrie, only a few years ago, the hostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been watched moving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of which they were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta. All is peaceful now. It is hard to picture the waving cornfields trodden down, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors of real war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey. But now these memories of Old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago, do but add a calm and beauty to the radiant scene that lies before us. And the thoughts which it suggests, the images with which it stores our mind, are not without their noblest uses. The glory of the world sinks deeper into our shallow souls than we well know; and the spirit of its splendour is always ready to revisit us on dark and dreary days at home with an unspeakable refreshment. Even as I write, I seem to see the golden glow sweeping in broad waves over the purple hills nearer and nearer, till the lake brightens at our feet, and the windows of Lugano flash with sunlight, and little boats creep forth across the water like spiders on a pond, leaving an arrowy track of light upon the green behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tiny chapel and a patch of the further landscape are still kept in darkness by the shadow of the Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as the sun's light comes; cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogs bark; and even the sounds of human life rise up to us: children's voices and the murmurs of the market-place ascending faintly from the many villages hidden among the chestnut-trees beneath our feet; while the creaking of a cart we can but just see slowly crawling along the straight road by the lake, is heard at intervals. The full beauty of the sunrise is but brief. Already the low lakelike mists we saw last night have risen and spread, and shaken themselves out into masses of summer clouds, which, floating upward, threaten to envelop us upon our vantage-ground. Meanwhile they form a changeful sea below, blotting out the plain, surging up into the valleys with the movement of a billowy tide, attacking the lower heights like the advance-guard of a besieging army, but daring not as yet to invade the cold and solemn solitudes of the snowy Alps. These, too, in time, when the sun's heat has grown strongest, will be folded in their midday pall of sheltering vapour. The very summit of Monte Generoso must not be left without a word of notice. The path to it is as easy as the sheep-walks on an English down, though cut along grass-slopes descending at a perilously sharp angle. At the top the view is much the same, as far as the grand features go, as that which is commanded from the cliff by the hotel. But the rocks here are crowded with rare Alpine flowers--delicate golden auriculas with powdery leaves and stems, pale yellow cowslips, imperial purple saxifrages, soldanellas at the edge of lingering patches of the winter snow, blue gentians, crocuses, and the frail, rosy-tipped ranunculus, called glacialis. Their blooming time is brief. When summer comes the mountain will be bare and burned, like all Italian hills. The Generoso is a very dry mountain, silent and solemn from its want of streams. There is no sound of falling waters on its crags; no musical rivulets flow down its sides, led carefully along the slopes, as in Switzerland, by the peasants, to keep their hay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heat and drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic limestone: the rain penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, to reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream. This is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want of shade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, the forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large tracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into trees much higher than a man. It is this which makes an Italian mountain at a distance look woolly, like a sheep's back. Among the brushwood, however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon's seals delight to grow; and the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when the laburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feasting. It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, that we saw a sight of great beauty. The sun had yet about an hour before it sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, except for a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy. Then as we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas, we could see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of the mountain, very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscape to the south and east from sight. It rose with an imperceptible motion, as the Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfort Prometheus in the tragedy of Æschylus. Already the sun had touched its upper edge with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist; when suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared two forms, larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes of such tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud is wont to make. They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and what we did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide their arms. Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing across the ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and kept fading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lasted as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity--'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races who have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful, jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of men upon a vast and shadowy scale. But here another question rose. If the gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be really but glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in this parallel? Without the sun's rays the mists of Monte Generoso could have shown, no shadowy forms. Without some other power than the mind of man, could men have fashioned for themselves those ideals that they named their gods? Unseen by Greek, or Norseman, or Hindoo, the potent force by which alone they could externalise their image, existed outside them, independent of their thought. Nor does the trite epigram touch the surface of the real mystery. The sun, the human beings on the mountain, and the mists are all parts of one material universe: the transient phenomenon we witnessed was but the effect of a chance combination. Is, then, the anthropomorphic God as momentary and as accidental in the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? The God in whom we live and move and have our being must be far more all-pervasive, more incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt not for one moment of His presence and His power. Except for purposes of rhetoric the metaphor that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once such thoughts have been stirred in us by such a sight, can we do better than repeat Goethe's sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism. This translation I made one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher beneath the spires of the Gross Glockner:-- To Him who from eternity, self-stirred, Himself hath made by His creative word! To Him, supreme, who causeth Faith to be, Trust, Hope, Love, Power, and endless Energy! To Him, who, seek to name Him as we will, Unknown within Himself abideth still! Strain ear and eye, till sight and sense be dim; Thou'lt find but faint similitudes of Him: Yea, and thy spirit in her flight of flame Still strives to gauge the symbol and the name: Charmed and compelled thou climb'st from height to height, And round thy path the world shines wondrous bright; Time, Space, and Size, and Distance cease to be, And every step is fresh infinity. What were the God who sat outside to scan The spheres that 'neath His finger circling ran? God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds, Himself and Nature in one form enfolds: Thus all that lives in Him and breathes and is, Shall ne'er His puissance, ne'er His spirit miss. The soul of man, too, is an universe: Whence follows it that race with race concurs In naming all it knows of good and true God,--yea, its own God; and with homage due Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven; Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given. * * * * * _LOMBARD VIGNETTES_ ON THE SUPERGA This is the chord of Lombard colouring in May. Lowest in the scale: bright green of varied tints, the meadow-grasses mingling with willows and acacias, harmonised by air and distance. Next, opaque blue--the blue of something between amethyst and lapis-lazuli--that belongs alone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediæval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built, and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight toward infinity. Above all is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to reach the light of God. This fancy occurred to me as I climbed the slope of the Superga, gazing over acacia hedges and poplars to the mountains bare in morning light. The occasional occurrence of bars across this chord--poplars shivering in sun and breeze, stationary cypresses as black as night, and tall campanili with the hot red shafts of glowing brick--adds just enough of composition to the landscape. Without too much straining of the allegory, the mystic might have recognised in these aspiring bars the upward effort of souls rooted in the common life of earth. The panorama, unrolling as we ascend, is enough to overpower a lover of beauty. There is nothing equal to it for space and breadth and majesty. Monte Rosa, the masses of Mont Blanc blent with the Grand Paradis, the airy pyramid of Monte Viso, these are the battlements of that vast Alpine rampart, in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate. To west and south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Beneath, glides the infant Po; and where he leads our eyes, the plain is only limited by pearly mist. A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity, not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and impressive illustration to the narrative of Suetonius. Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the crisp short hair, low forehead and regular firm features, proper to the noblest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This attitude, together with the tension of the forehead, and the fixed expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus, are all absent here. This face idealises the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high suffering or noble passion. If the bronze were plastic, I see how a great sculptor, by but few strokes, could convert it into an agonising Stephen or Sebastian. As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its development, became unique--the tragic type of pathological desire. What more than all things must have plagued a man with that face was probably the unavoidable meanness of his career. When we study the chapters of Suetonius, we are forced to feel that, though the situation and the madness of Caligula were dramatically impressive, his crimes were trivial and, small. In spite of the vast scale on which he worked his devilish will, his life presents a total picture of sordid vice, differing only from pot-house dissipation and schoolboy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become commonplace and cloying, tedious to the tyrant, and uninteresting to the student of humanity: nor can I believe that Caligula failed to perceive this to his own infinite disgust. Suetonius asserts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to square this testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changed the face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul's hunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making Caligula's face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruin of what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancy that death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer? FERRARI AT VERCELLI It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como have carried away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair and draperies of green and crimson, in a picture they connect thereafter with Gaudenzio Ferrari. And when they come to Milan, they are probably both impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of S. Catherine in the Brera, bearing the same artist's name. If they wish to understand this painter, they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and at Vercelli. In the Church of S. Cristoforo in Vercelli, Gaudenzio Ferrari at the full height of his powers showed what he could do to justify Lomazzo's title chosen for him of the Eagle. He has indeed the strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few really great painters--and among the really great we place Ferrari--leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari's frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty walls. All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angels too, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover round the Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionate as any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again which crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point of idyllic charm to Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel. The 'Crucifixion' and the 'Assumption of Madonna' are very tall and narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almost unmanageable space with a connected action. Of the two frescoes the 'Crucifixion,' which has points of strong similarity to the same subject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything at once truer to life and nobler in tragic style than the fainting Virgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggerated nor spasmodic, but real and sublime--in the suffering of a stately matron. In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpassed. Raphael could scarcely have done better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, a stamp of popular truth, in this episode, which lies beyond Raphael's sphere. It reminds us rather of Tintoretto. After the 'Crucifixion,' I place the 'Adoration of the Magi,' full of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio' (whose marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration of the Shepherds,' with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The 'Assumption of the Magdalen'--for which fresco there is a valuable cartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a fine picture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece in the choir of the same church struck me less than the frescoes. It represents Madonna and a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs curiously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the orchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit. What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richness of reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramatic vehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift and passionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition, simplicity of total effect, harmony in colouring, control over his own luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought grandeur in size and multitude, richness, éclat, contrast. Being the disciple of Lionardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As a composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt the dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he realised them with a force and _furia_ granted to very few of the Italian painters. LANINI AT VERCELLI The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name. Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses; and its hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of Vercelli, I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the noble hall, and devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures valuable for students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of these there is no need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa Mariano. It has a coved roof, with a large flat oblong space in the centre of the ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the fresco-painter's name; and though much injured by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescoes form a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of the painter's design seems to have been the glorification of Music. In the central compartment of the roof is an assembly of the gods, obviously borrowed from Raphael's 'Marriage of Cupid and Psyche' in the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard execution constitutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a barefaced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in colouring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the Roman School are absent: so also is their vigour. But where the grace of form and colour is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours de force_ of Giulio Romano. The scale of tone is silvery golden. There are no hard blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose, or of palest amber, pervade the whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something ravishing in those yellow-haired white-limbed, blooming deities. No movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the senses as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm. The white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snowdrops, and among them, Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest. Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron; realising Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend: [Greek: tois d' ên xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias, stêthea de stilbonta poly pleon ê tu Selana.[9]] It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:-- E i tuoi capei più volte ho somigliati Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[10] Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini or another--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives and the distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left but grace of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seen in many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of conception or vigour of design. Lanini, like Sodoma, was a native of Vercelli; and though he was Ferrari's pupil, there is more in him of Luini or of Sodoma than of his master. He does not rise at any point to the height of these three great masters, but he shares some of Luini's and Sodoma's fine qualities, without having any of Ferrari's force. A visit to the mangled remnants of his frescoes in S. Caterina will repay the student of art. This was once, apparently, a double church, or a church with the hall and chapel of a _confraternita_ appended to it. One portion of the building was painted with the history of the Saint; and very lovely must this work have been, to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming up from the depths of oblivion! Wherever three or four are grouped together, we find an exquisite little picture--an old woman and two young women in a doorway, for example, telling no story, but touching us with simple harmony of form. Nothing further is needed to render their grace intelligible. Indeed, knowing the faults of the school, we may seek some consolation by telling ourselves that these incomplete fragments yield Lanini's best. In the coved compartments of the roof, above the windows, ran a row of dancing boys; and these are still most beautifully modelled, though the pallor of recent whitewash is upon them. All the boys have blonde hair. They are naked, with scrolls or ribbons wreathed around them, adding to the airiness of their continual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room used to stow away the lumber of the church--old boards and curtains, broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of festival adornments, and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten bier. THE PIAZZA OF PIACENZA The great feature of Piacenza is its famous piazza--romantically, picturesquely perfect square, surpassing the most daring attempts of the scene-painter, and realising a poet's dreams. The space is considerable, and many streets converge upon it at irregular angles. Its finest architectural feature is the antique Palace of the Commune: Gothic arcades of stone below, surmounted by a brick building with wonderfully delicate and varied terra-cotta work in the round-arched windows. Before this façade, on the marble pavement, prance the bronze equestrian statues of two Farnesi--insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery--as _barocco_ as it is possible to be in style, but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their _bravura_ attitude, and so happily placed in the line of two streets lending far vistas from the square into the town beyond, that it is difficult to criticise them seriously. They form, indeed, an important element in the pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cotta work of the façade by the contrast of their colour. The time to see this square is in evening twilight--that wonderful hour after sunset--when the people are strolling on the pavement, polished to a mirror by the pacing of successive centuries, and when the cavalry soldiers group themselves at the angles under the lamp-posts or beneath the dimly lighted Gothic arches of the Palace. This is the magical mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western lights with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half shadow over any crudeness and restores the injuries of Time; the hour when all the tints of these old buildings are intensified, etherealised, and harmonised by one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all day; and ere sundown a clearing had come from the Alps, followed by fresh threatenings of thunderstorms. The air was very liquid. There was a tract of yellow sunset sky to westward, a faint new moon half swathed in mist above, and over all the north a huge towered thundercloud kept flashing distant lightnings. The pallid primrose of the West, forced down and reflected back from that vast bank of tempest, gave unearthly beauty to the hues of church and palace--tender half-tones of violet and russet paling into greys and yellows on what in daylight seemed but dull red brick. Even the uncompromising façade of S. Francesco helped; and the Dukes were like statues of the 'Gran Commendatore,' waiting for Don Giovanni's invitation. MASOLINO AT CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA Through the loveliest Arcadian scenery of woods and fields and rushing waters the road leads downward from Varese to Castiglione. The Collegiate Church stands on a leafy hill above the town, with fair prospect over groves and waterfalls and distant mountains. Here in the choir is a series of frescoes by Masolino da Panicale, the master of Masaccio, who painted them about the year 1428. 'Masolinus de Florentia pinxit' decides their authorship. The histories of the Virgin, S. Stephen and S. Lawrence, are represented: but the injuries of time and neglect have been so great that it is difficult to judge them fairly. All we feel for certain is that Masolino had not yet escaped from the traditional Giottesque mannerism. Only a group of Jews stoning Stephen, and Lawrence before the tribunal, remind us by dramatic energy of the Brancacci Chapel. The Baptistery frescoes, dealing with the legend of S. John, show a remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. A soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a vigorous figure, full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptism in Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group of bathers--one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shivering half-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face. The nude has been carefully studied and well realised. The finest composition of this series is a large panel representing a double action--Salome at Herod's table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presenting it to her mother Herodias. The costumes are quattrocento Florentine, exactly rendered. Salome is a graceful slender creature; the two women who regard her offering to Herodias with mingled curiosity and horror, are well conceived. The background consists of a mountain landscape in Masaccio's simple manner, a rich Renaissance villa, and an open loggia. The architecture perspective is scientifically accurate, and a frieze of boys with garlands on the villa is in the best manner of Florentine sculpture. On the mountain side, diminished in scale, is a group of elders, burying the body of S. John. These are massed together and robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his virile dignity of form and action. Indeed this interesting wall-painting furnishes an epitome of Florentine art, in its intentions and achievements, during the first half of the fifteenth century. The colour is strong and brilliant, and the execution solid. The margin of the Salome panel has been used for scratching the Chronicle of Castiglione. I read one date, 1568, several of the next century, the record of a duel between two gentlemen, and many inscriptions to this effect, 'Erodiana Regina,' 'Omnia praetereunt,' &c. A dirty one-eyed fellow keeps the place. In my presence he swept the frescoes over with a scratchy broom, flaying their upper surface in profound unconsciousness of mischief. The armour of the executioner has had its steel colours almost rubbed off by this infernal process. Damp and cobwebs are far kinder. THE CERTOSA The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewildering sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with a lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once been driven round together with the crew of sightseers, can carry little away but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze-work, inlaid agates and labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair painted faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardens with rows of pink primroses in spring, and of begonia in autumn, blooming beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The striking contrast between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance façade, each in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; and thoughts of the two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride of power it is a monument, may be blended with the recollection of art-treasures alien to their spirit. Two great artists, Ambrogio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo, are the presiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon the accurate investigation of records and the comparison of styles, must be left the task of separating their work from that of numerous collaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the whole music is struck by them, Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the façade of the Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the distribution of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The only fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento inspiration, is that the façade is a frontispiece, with hardly any structural relation to the church it masks: and this, though serious from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its sculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seems a wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details to the main design, clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a chaunt of Pergolese or Stradella, will enrapture one who has the sense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy to find the instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in its expenditure of rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and simple structural effect. All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and self-abandonment to inspiration, which we lack in the severer masterpieces of the Tuscan school. To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately Gothic style. Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints and martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of partial decay. Borgognone's oil pictures throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion is transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he loved, are gained without sacrifice of lustre: there is a self-restraint in his colouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeats in colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity. This brusqueness was the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancy in these northern artists. Of all Borgognone's pictures in the Certosa I should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S. Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master's qualities. The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone's majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, or mark the influence of Lionardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Lionardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished: yet Northern Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe laous sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino. The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;--all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution:-- Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay's now competent: A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed! Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunning written on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short clustering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the boasted minion of Fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches. Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved the lashes on their eyelids, heavy with death's marmoreal sleep. He at least has passed no judgment on their crimes. Let us too bow and leave their memories to the historian's pen, their spirits to God's mercy. After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs. Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery as though it ¦were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the choir--those multitudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and Assumptions, and innumerable basreliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art--distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the high altar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this. The space is small: yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Passion. Christ is lying dead among the women on his mother's lap, and there are pitying angels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm, another makes her breast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed, but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross. It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite. The noblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are here fused in a manner of adorable naturalness. From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded with sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle, and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings. The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on their pedestals, and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves in woven lines, and ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance sympathises more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad plain space of waving summer grass beneath our feet. It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will take us back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery wall. Through that grey-green leafage, young with early spring, the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs, whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat well-watered soil. Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song: but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody. _Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!_ Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as this before? SAN MAURIZIO The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more precious. Giotto's Chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco, illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might be cited among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S. Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of S. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescoes by Luini and his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare pietre_, gave the design, at once simple and harmonious, which was carried out with hardly any deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of the convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that need not be described. Simple and severe, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden hue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha,--gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon the church below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought back no thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell. There are twenty-six in all, a sisterhood of stainless souls, the lilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's throne. Soldier saints are mingled with them in still smaller rounds above the windows, chosen to illustrate the virtues of an order which renounced the world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombard suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy. Near the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in an Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and noble, known to us by the chivalrous S. Martin and the glorified Madonna of the Brera frescoes. It is not impossible that the male saints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more nearly Lionardesque in its quietude, must be discerned in Lucy and her sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner church belongs to Luini. Were it not for darkness and decay, we should pronounce this series of the Passion in nine great compositions, with saints and martyrs and torch-bearing genii, to be one of his most ambitious and successful efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part; the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave compassion of S. Rocco, the classical perfection of the cupid with lighted tapers, the gracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways from their Lombard eyelids--these remain to haunt our memory, emerging from the shadows of the vault above. The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. We are in the presence of Christ's agony, relieved and tempered by the sunlight of those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still as the convent, pure as the meditations of a novice. We pass the septum, and find ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity. Above the high altar the whole wall is covered with Luini's loveliest work, in excellent light and far from ill preserved. The space divides into eight compartments. A Pietà, an Assumption, Saints and Founders of the church, group themselves under the influence of Luini's harmonising colour into one symphonious whole. But the places of distinction are reserved for two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de' Bentivogli and his wife, Ippolita Sforza. When the Bentivogli were expelled from Bologna by the Papal forces, Alessandro settled at Milan, where he dwelt, honoured by the Sforzas and allied to them by marriage, till his death in 1532. He was buried in the monastery by the side of his sister Alessandra, a nun of the order. Luini has painted the illustrious exile in his habit as he lived. He is kneeling, as though in ever-during adoration of the altar mystery, attired in a long black senatorial robe trimmed with furs. In his left hand he holds a book; and above his pale, serenely noble face is a little black berretta. Saints attend him, as though attesting to his act of faith. Opposite kneels Ippolita, his wife, the brilliant queen of fashion, the witty leader of society, to whom Bandello dedicated his Novelle, and whom he praised as both incomparably beautiful and singularly learned. Her queenly form is clothed from head to foot in white brocade, slashed and trimmed with gold lace, and on her forehead is a golden circlet. She has the proud port of a princess, the beauty of a woman past her prime but stately, the indescribable dignity of attitude which no one but Luini could have rendered so majestically sweet. In her hand is a book; and she, like Alessandro, has her saintly sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and S. Scolastica. Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese Court so vividly before us as these portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very precious for the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secular style so rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescoes, they are far surpassed both in value and interest by his paintings in the side chapel of S. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, more even than at Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinction of Luini--his unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power over pathos, the refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of his favourite types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese advocate, Francesco Besozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is kneeling, grey-haired and bareheaded, under the protection of S. Catherine of Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the scourging pillar. On the other side stand S. Lawrence and S. Stephen, pointing to the Christ and looking at us, as though their lips were framed to say: 'Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow.' Even the soldiers who have done their cruel work, seem softened. They untie the cords tenderly, and support the fainting form, too weak to stand alone. What sadness in the lovely faces of S. Catherine and Lawrence! What divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini's special province to feel profoundly and to express musically. The very depth of the Passion is there; and yet there is no discord. Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodious representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion, was his inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of S. Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to his subject. Far different is the second episode when Catherine is about to be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture; its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its colouring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemised by Luini's magic into a pure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice of edification. S. Catherine in this incomparable fresco is a portrait, the history of which so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religion on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello says: 'And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monistero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait.' The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty, that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husband told Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d'Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness. They could not, however, agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia. Rich with her father's wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian. With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other. They were friends and frustrated her plans by communicating them to one another. The third loved her with the insane passion of a very young man. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade him murder his two predecessors in her favour. At this time she was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy for the Emperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his household, and waylaid the Count of Masino, as he was returning with his brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both the brothers and the greater part of their suite were killed: but Don Pietro was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sent to prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented from escaping, in spite of 15,000 golden crowns with which she hoped to bribe her jailors, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar and infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini with a S. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of S. Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of disgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artistic presentation in the person of a royal martyr. A HUMANIST'S MONUMENT In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. The epitaph runs as follows:-- En Virtutem Mortis nesciam. Vivet Lancinus Curtius Sæcula per omnia Quascunque lustrans oras, Tantum possunt Camoenæ. 'Look here on Virtue that knows nought of Death! Lancinus Curtius shall live through all the centuries, and visit every shore of earth. Such power have the Muses.' The timeworn poet reclines, as though sleeping or resting, ready to be waked; his head is covered with flowing hair, and crowned with laurel; it leans upon his left hand. On either side of his couch stand cupids or genii with torches turned to earth. Above is a group of the three Graces, flanked by winged Pegasi. Higher up are throned two Victories with palms, and at the top a naked Fame. We need not ask who was Lancinus Curtius. He is forgotten, and his virtue has not saved him from oblivion; though he strove in his lifetime, _pro virili parte_, for the palm that Busti carved upon his grave. Yet his monument teaches in short compass a deep lesson; and his epitaph sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in the Renaissance to their doom. We see before us sculptured in this marble the ideal of the humanistic poet-scholar's life: Love, Grace, the Muse, and Nakedness, and Glory. There is not a single intrusive thought derived from Christianity. The end for which the man lived was Pagan. His hope was earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if this indeed be a survival, not in those winged verses which were to carry him abroad across the earth, but in the marble of a cunning craftsman, scanned now and then by a wandering scholar's eye in the half-darkness of a vault. THE MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX IN THE BRERA The hero of Ravenna lies stretched upon his back in the hollow of a bier covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richly ornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with the minute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the _cinquecento_, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of the young soldier's effigy. The contrast between so much of richness in the merely subordinate details, and this sublime severity of treatment in the person of the hero, is truly and touchingly dramatic. There is a smile as of content in death, upon his face; and the features are exceedingly beautiful--with the beauty of a boy, almost of a woman. The heavy hair is cut straight above the forehead and straight over the shoulders, falling in massive clusters. A delicately sculptured laurel branch is woven into a victor's crown, and laid lightly on the tresses it scarcely seems to clasp. So fragile is this wreath that it does not break the pure outline of the boy-conqueror's head. The armour is quite plain. So is the surcoat. Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbour for a hero's heart, there lies the collar of an order composed of cockle-shells; and this is all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs. Upon the chin is a little tuft of hair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor of Ravenna, like the Hermes of Homer, was [Greek: prôton hypênêtês], 'a youth of princely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for whom the season of bloom is in its prime of grace.' The whole statue is the idealisation of _virtù_--that quality so highly prized by the Italians and the ancients, so well fitted for commemoration in the arts. It is the apotheosis of human life resolved into undying memory because of one great deed. It is the supreme portrait in modern times of a young hero, chiselled by artists belonging to a race no longer heroic, but capable of comprehending and expressing the æsthetic charm of heroism. Standing before it, we may say of Gaston what Arrian wrote to Hadrian of Achilles:--'That he was a hero, if hero ever lived, I cannot doubt; for his birth and blood were noble, and he was beautiful, and his spirit was mighty, and he passed in youth's prime away from men.' Italian sculpture, under the condition of the _cinquecento_, had indeed no more congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honour and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death have poetised the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that of Michelangelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathos of reality. SARONNO The church of Saronno is a pretty building with a Bramantesque cupola, standing among meadows at some distance from the little town. It is the object of a special cult, which draws pilgrims from the neighbouring country-side; but the concourse is not large enough to load the sanctuary with unnecessary wealth. Everything is very quiet in the holy place, and the offerings of the pious seem to have been only just enough to keep the building and its treasures of art in repair. The church consists of a nave, a central cupola, a vestibule leading to the choir, the choir itself, and a small tribune behind the choir. No other single building in North Italy can boast so much that is first-rate of the work of Luini and Gandenzio Ferrari. The cupola is raised on a sort of drum composed of twelve pieces, perforated with round windows and supported on four massive piers. On the level of the eye are frescoes by Luini of S. Rocco, S. Sebastian, S. Christopher, and S. Antony--by no means in his best style, and inferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of this saint. He is tied in a sprawling attitude to a tree; and little of Luini's special pathos or sense of beauty--the melody of idyllic grace made spiritual--appears in him. These four saints are on the piers. Above are frescoes from the early Bible history by Lanini, painted in continuation of Ferrari's medallions from the story of Adam expelled from Paradise, which fill the space beneath the cupola, leading the eye upward to Ferrari's masterpiece. The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playing upon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drum stands a coryphæus of this celestial choir, full length, with waving drapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged, divine creatures are massed together, filling every square inch of the vault with colour. Yet there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selected motive and the necessities of the place acted like a check on Ferrari, who, in spite of his dramatic impulse, could not tell a story coherently or fill a canvas with harmonised variety. There is no trace of his violence here. Though the motion of music runs through the whole multitude like a breeze, though the joy expressed is a real _tripudio celeste_, not one of all these angels flings his arms abroad or makes a movement that disturbs the rhythm. We feel that they are keeping time and resting quietly, each in his appointed seat, as though the sphere was circling with them round the throne of God, who is their centre and their source of gladness. Unlike Correggio and his imitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds, and has in no case made the legs of his angels prominent. It is a mass of noble faces and voluminously robed figures, emerging each above the other like flowers in a vase. Bach too has specific character, while all are robust and full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their instruments of music are all the lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums, fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari's day could show. The scale of colour, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the tints satisfactorily harmonised. But the vigour and invention of the whole work would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence. It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think one moment of Correggio at Parma. Before the _macchinisti_ of the seventeenth century had vulgarised the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth--earth left behind in the persons of the Apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above--had an originality which set at nought all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below, feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of controlling rhythm for the composition is gained by placing Gabriel, Madonna, and Christ at three points in the swirl of angels. Nevertheless, composition--the presiding all-controlling intellect--is just what makes itself felt by absence; and Correggio's special qualities of light and colour have now so far vanished from the cupola of the Duomo that the, constructive poverty is not disguised. Here if anywhere in painting, we may apply Goethe's words--_Gefühl ist Alles._ If then we return to Ferrari's angels at Saronno, we find that the painter of Varallo chose a safer though a far more modest theme. Nor did he expose himself to that most cruel of all degradations which the ethereal genius of Correggio has suffered from incompetent imitators. To daub a tawdry and superficial reproduction of those Parmese frescoes, to fill the cupolas of Italy with veritable _guazzetti di rane_, was comparatively easy; and between our intelligence and what remains of that stupendous masterpiece of boldness, crowd a thousand memories of such ineptitude. On the other hand, nothing but solid work and conscientious inspiration could enable any workman, however able, to follow Ferrari in the path struck out by him at Saronno. His cupola has had no imitator; and its only rival is the noble pendant painted at Varallo by his own hand, of angels in adoring anguish round the Cross. In the ante-choir of the sanctuary are Luini's priceless frescoes of the 'Marriage of the Virgin,' and the 'Dispute with the Doctors.'[11] Their execution is flawless, and they are perfectly preserved. If criticism before such admirable examples of so excellent a master be permissible, it may be questioned whether the figures are not too crowded, whether the groups are sufficiently varied and connected by rhythmic lines. Yet the concords of yellow and orange with blue in the 'Sposalizio,' and the blendings of dull violet and red in the 'Disputa,' make up for much of stiffness. Here, as in the Chapel of S. Catherine at Milan, we feel that Luini was the greatest colourist among _frescanti._ In the 'Sposalizio' the female heads are singularly noble and idyllically graceful. Some of the young men too have Luini's special grace and abundance of golden hair. In the 'Disputa' the gravity and dignity of old men are above all things striking. Passing into the choir, we find on either hand the 'Adoration of the Magi' and the 'Purification of the Virgin,' two of Luini's divinest frescoes. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done no damage here: and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of colour in fresco. The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the colouring; and that is all a devil's advocate could say. It is possible that the absence of blue makes the S. Catherine frescoes in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works of Luini. But nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here. The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of beauty. The landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical picture of the 'Flight into Egypt' where a white-robed angel leads the way. All these lovely things are in the 'Purification,' which is dated _Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit_, MDXXV. The fresco of the 'Magi' is less notable in detail, and in general effect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, one young man of wholly Lionardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions, almost forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter who approaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini's masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or _naïveté._ If he added something slightly humorous which has an indefinite charm, he lacked that freshness as of 'cool, meek-blooded flowers' and boyish voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodoma was closer to the earth, and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty with the fiercer passions of his nature. If Luini had felt passion, who shall say? It appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a religious joyousness. When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to 'a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,' he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno. THE CASTELLO OF FERRARA Is it possible that the patron saints of cities should mould the temper of the people to their own likeness? S. George, the chivalrous, is champion of Ferrara. His is the marble group above the Cathedral porch, so feudal in its medieval pomp. He and S. Michael are painted in fresco over the south portcullis of the Castle. His lustrous armour gleams with Giorgionesque brilliancy from Dossi's masterpiece in the Pinacoteca. That Ferrara, the only place in Italy where chivalry struck any root, should have had S. George for patron, is at any rate significant. The best preserved relic of princely feudal life in Italy is this Castello of the Este family, with its sombre moat, chained drawbridges, doleful dungeons, and unnumbered tragedies, each one of which may be compared with Parisina's history. I do not want to dwell on these things now. It is enough to remember the Castello, built of ruddiest brick, time-mellowed with how many centuries of sun and soft sea-air, as it appeared upon the close of one tempestuous day. Just before evening the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out across the misty Lombard plain. The Castello burned like a hero's funeral pyre, and round its high-built turrets swallows circled in the warm blue air. On the moat slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and gable. Then the sky changed. A roof of thunder-cloud spread overhead with the rapidity of tempest. The dying sun gathered his last strength against it, fretting those steel-blue arches with crimson; and all the fierce light, thrown from vault to vault of cloud, was reflected back as from a shield, and cast in blots and patches on the buildings. The Castle towered up rosy-red and shadowy sombre, enshrined, embosomed in those purple clouds; and momently ran lightning forks like rapiers through the growing mass. Everything around, meanwhile, was quiet in the grass-grown streets. The only sound was a high, clear boy's voice chanting an opera tune. PETRARCH'S TOMB AT ARQUA The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arqua takes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because of its contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain. It is not a grand landscape. It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alps and Apennines sublime. Its charm is a certain mystery and repose--an undefined sense of the neighbouring Adriatic, a pervading consciousness of Venice unseen, but felt from far away. From the terraces of Arqua the eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern slopes, to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches and tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over 'the foam of perilous seas forlorn.' Let a blue-black shadow from a thunder-cloud be cast upon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight strike a solitary bell-tower;--it burns with palest flame of rose against the steely dark, and in its slender shaft and shell-like tint of pink all Venice is foreseen. The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before the church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time--open to the skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream--is Petrarch's sepulchre. Fit resting-place for what remains to earth of such a poet's clay! It is as though archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set it down here on the hillside, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona _mandorlato_, raised on four thick columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Without emblems, allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills, beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of words. Bending here, we feel that Petrarch's own winged thoughts and fancies, eternal and aërial, 'forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality,' have congregated to be the ever-ministering and irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of flesh. ON A MOUNTAIN Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Both ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists. Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of living fire. The Mischabelhörner and the Dom rest stationary angel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of heaven. The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst far, far away. Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic Finsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising from the villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake. A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano. It is good to be alone here at this hour. Yet I must rise and go--passing through meadows, where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of Mozart. These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make them poems: and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had left her throne by Pluto's side, to mourn for her dead youth among the flowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward we hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows honey-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still on those green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable--that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. Man needs to be a mytho-poet at some moments, or, better still, to be a mystic steeped through half-unconsciousness in the vast wonder of the world. Gold and untouched to poetry or piety by scenes that ought to blend the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world without, we can but wonder how this phantom show of mystery and beauty will pass away from us--how soon--and we be where, see what, use all our sensibilities on aught or nought? SIC GENIUS In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of Dosso Dossi. The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, bordered by its beautiful dull gold, shines with the lustre of an emerald. In his happy moods Dosso set colour upon canvas, as no other painter out of Venice ever did; and here he is at his happiest. The picture is the portrait of a jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a feathered cap upon his head. He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries the legend, _Sic Genius_. Behind him is a landscape of exquisite brilliancy and depth. His face is young and handsome. Dosso has made it one most wonderful laugh. Even so perhaps laughed Yorick. Nowhere else have I seen a laugh thus painted: not violent, not loud, although the lips are opened to show teeth of dazzling whiteness;--but fine and delicate, playing over the whole face like a ripple sent up from the depths of the soul within. Who was he? What does the lamb mean? How should the legend be interpreted? We cannot answer these questions. He may have been the court-fool of Ferrara; and his genius, the spiritual essence of the man, may have inclined him to laugh at all things. That at least is the value he now has for us. He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden Sixteenth Century which delicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art. With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through Savonarola asked her why, she only smiled--_Sic Genius_. One evening in May we rowed from Venice to Torcello, and at sunset broke bread and drank wine together among the rank grasses just outside that ancient church. It was pleasant to sit in the so-called chair of Attila and feel the placid stillness of the place. Then there came lounging by a sturdy young fellow in brown country clothes, with a marvellous old wide-awake upon his head, and across his shoulders a bunch of massive church-keys. In strange contrast to his uncouth garb he flirted a pink Japanese fan, gracefully disposing it to cool his sunburned olive cheeks. This made us look at him. He was not ugly. Nay, there was something of attractive in his face--the smooth-curved chin, the shrewd yet sleepy eyes, and finely cut thin lips--a curious mixture of audacity and meekness blent upon his features. Yet this impression was but the prelude to his smile. When that first dawned, some breath of humour seeming to stir in him unbidden, the true meaning was given to his face. Each feature helped to make a smile that was the very soul's life of the man expressed. I broadened, showing brilliant teeth, and grew into a noiseless laugh; and then I saw before me Dosso's jester, the type of Shakspere's fools, the life of that wild irony, now rude, now fine, which once delighted Courts. The laughter of the whole world and of all the centuries was silent in his face. What he said need not be repeated. The charm was less in his words than in his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in every look and gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony: parties of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete Church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's jester smiled--_Sic Genius_. When I slept that night I dreamed of an altar-piece in the Temple of Folly. The goddess sat enthroned beneath a canopy hung with bells and corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, who flourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man of Modena with his white lamb, a new S. John. On her right stood the man of Torcello with his keys, a new S. Peter. Both were laughing after their all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fashion; and under both was written, _Sic Genius_. Are not all things, even profanity, permissible in dreams? * * * * * COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO To which of the Italian lakes should the palm of beauty be accorded? This question may not unfrequently have moved the idle minds of travellers, wandering through that loveliest region from Orta to Garda--from little Orta, with her gemlike island, rosy granite crags, and chestnut-covered swards above the Colma; to Garda, bluest of all waters, surveyed in majestic length from Desenzano or poetic Sirmione, a silvery sleeping haze of hill and cloud and heaven and clear waves bathed in modulated azure. And between these extreme points what varied lovelinesses lie in broad Maggiore, winding Como, Varese with the laughing face upturned to heaven, Lugano overshadowed by the crested crags of Monte Generoso, and Iseo far withdrawn among the rocky Alps! He who loves immense space, cloud shadows slowly sailing over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-capped mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will choose Maggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of the divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of the Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from Villa Serbelloni;--the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaque through depth; the _millefleurs_ roses clambering into cypresses by Cadenabbia; the laburnums hanging their yellow clusters from the clefts of Sasso Eancio; the oleander arcades of Varenna; the wild white limestone crags of San Martiuo, which he has climbed to feast his eyes with the perspective, magical, serene, Lionardesquely perfect, of the distant gates of Adda. Then while this modern Paris is yet doubting, perhaps a thought may cross his mind of sterner, solitary Lake Iseo--the Pallas of the three. She offers her own attractions. The sublimity of Monte Adamello, dominating Lovere and all the lowland like Hesiod's hill of Virtue reared aloft above the plain of common life, has charms to tempt heroic lovers. Nor can Varese be neglected. In some picturesque respects, Varese is the most perfect of the lakes. Those long lines of swelling hills that lead into the level, yield an infinite series of placid foregrounds, pleasant to the eye by contrast with the dominant snow-summits, from Monte Viso to Monte Leone: the sky is limitless to southward; the low horizons are broken by bell-towers and farmhouses; while armaments of clouds are ever rolling in the interval of Alps and plain. Of a truth, to decide which is the queen of the Italian lakes, is but an _infinita quæstio_; and the mere raising of it is folly. Still each lover of the beautiful may give his vote; and mine, like that of shepherd Paris, is already given to the Larian goddess. Words fail in attempting to set forth charms which have to be enjoyed, or can at best but lightly be touched with most consummate tact, even as great poets have already touched on Como Lake--from Virgil with his 'Lari maxume,' to Tennyson and the Italian Manzoni. The threshold of the shrine is, however, less consecrated ground; and the Cathedral of Como may form a vestibule to the temple where silence is more golden than the speech of a describer. The Cathedral of Como is perhaps the most perfect building in Italy for illustrating the fusion of Gothic and Renaissance styles, both of a good type and exquisite in their sobriety. The Gothic ends with the nave. The noble transepts and the choir, each terminating in a rounded tribune of the same dimensions, are carried out in a simple and decorous Bramantesque manner. The transition from the one style to the other is managed so felicitously, and the sympathies between them are so well developed, that there is no discord. What we here call Gothic, is conceived in a truly southern spirit, without fantastic efflorescence or imaginative complexity of multiplied parts; while the Renaissance manner, as applied by Tommaso Rodari, has not yet stiffened into the lifeless neo-Latinism of the later _cinquecento_: it is still distinguished by delicate inventiveness, and beautiful subordination of decorative detail to architectural effect. Under these happy conditions we feel that the Gothic of the nave, with its superior severity and sombreness, dilates into the lucid harmonies of choir and transepts like a flower unfolding. In the one the mind is tuned to inner meditation and religious awe; in the other the worshipper passes into a temple of the clear explicit faith--as an initiated neophyte might be received into the meaning of the mysteries. After the collapse of the Roman Empire the district of Como seems to have maintained more vividly than the rest of Northern Italy some memory of classic art. _Magistri Comacini_ is a title frequently inscribed upon deeds and charters of the earlier middle ages, as synonymous with sculptors and architects. This fact may help to account for the purity and beauty of the Duomo. It is the work of a race in which the tradition of delicate artistic invention had never been wholly interrupted. To Tommaso Rodari and his brothers, Bernardino and Jacopo, the world owes this sympathetic fusion of the Gothic and the Bramantesque styles; and theirs too is the sculpture with which the Duomo is so richly decorated. They were natives of Maroggia, a village near Mendrisio, beneath the crests of Monte Generoso, close to Campione, which sent so many able craftsmen out into the world between the years 1300 and 1500. Indeed the name of Campionesi would probably have been given to the Rodari, had they left their native province for service in Eastern Lombardy. The body of the Duomo had been finished when Tommaso Rodari was appointed master of the fabric in 1487. To complete the work by the addition of a tribune was his duty. He prepared a wooden model and exposed it, after the fashion of those times, for criticism in his _bottega_; and the usual difference of opinion arose among the citizens of Como concerning its merits. Cristoforo Solaro, surnamed Il Gobbo, was called in to advise. It may be remembered that when Michelangelo first placed his Pietà in S. Peter's, rumour gave it to this celebrated Lombard sculptor, and the Florentine was constrained to set his own signature upon the marble. The same Solaro carved the monument of Beatrice Sforza in the Certosa of Pavia. He was indeed in all points competent to criticise or to confirm the design of his fellow-craftsman. Il Gobbo disapproved of the proportions chosen by Rodari, and ordered a new model to be made; but after much discussion, and some concessions on the part of Rodari, who is said to have increased the number of the windows and lightened the orders of his model, the work was finally entrusted to the master of Maroggia. Not less creditable than the general design of the tribune is the sculpture executed by the brothers. The north side door is a master-work of early Renaissance chiselling, combining mixed Christian and classical motives with a wealth of floral ornament. Inside, over the same door, is a procession of children seeming to represent the Triumph of Bacchus, with perhaps some Christian symbolism. Opposite, above the south door, is a frieze of fighting Tritons--horsed sea deities pounding one another with bunches of fish and splashing the water, in Mantegna's spirit. The doorways of the façade are decorated with the same rare workmanship; and the canopies, supported by naked fauns and slender twisted figures, under which the two Plinies are seated, may be reckoned among the supreme achievements of delicate Renaissance sculpture. The Plinies are not like the work of the same master. They are older, stiffer, and more Gothic. The chief interest attaching to them is that they are habited and seated after the fashion of Humanists. This consecration of the two Pagan saints beside the portals of the Christian temple is truly characteristic of the fifteenth century in Italy. Beneath, are little basreliefs representing scenes from their respective lives, in the style of carved predellas on the altars of saints. The whole church is peopled with detached statues, among which a Sebastian in the Chapel of the Madonna must be mentioned as singularly beautiful. It is a finely modelled figure, with the full life and exuberant adolescence of Venetian inspiration. A peculiar feature of the external architecture is the series of Atlantes, bearing on their shoulders urns, heads of lions, and other devices, and standing on brackets round the upper cornice just below the roof. They are of all sorts; young and old, male and female; classically nude, and boldly outlined. These water-conduits, the work of Bernardo Bianco and Francesco Rusca, illustrate the departure of the earlier Renaissance from the Gothic style. They are gargoyles; but they have lost the grotesque element. At the same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique. He has used invention, and substituted for grinning dragons' heads something wild and bizarre of his own in harmony with classic taste. The pictures in the chapels, chiefly by Luini and Ferrari--an idyllic Nativity, with faun-like shepherds and choirs of angels--a sumptuous adoration of the Magi--a jewelled Sposalizio with abundance of golden hair flowing over draperies of green and crimson--will interest those who are as yet unfamiliar with Lombard painting. Yet their architectural setting, perhaps, is superior to their intrinsic merit as works of art; and their chief value consists in adding rare dim flakes of colour to the cool light of the lovely church. More curious, because less easily matched, is the gilded woodwork above the altar of S. Abondio, attributed to a German carver, but executed for the most part in the purest Luinesque manner. The pose of the enthroned Madonna, the type and gesture of S. Catherine, and the treatment of the Pietà above, are thoroughly Lombard, showing how Luini's ideal of beauty could be expressed in carving. Some of the choicest figures in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan seem to have descended from the walls and stepped into their tabernacles on this altar. Yet the style is not maintained consistently. In the reliefs illustrating the life of S. Abondio we miss Luini's childlike grace, and find instead a something that reminds us of Donatello--a seeking after the classical in dress, carriage, and grouping of accessory figures. It may have been that the carver, recognising Luini's defective composition, and finding nothing in that master's manner adapted to the spirit of relief, had the good taste to render what was Luinesquely lovely in his female figures, and to fall back on a severer model for his basreliefs. The building-fund for the Duomo was raised in Como and its districts. Boxes were placed in all the churches to receive the alms of those who wished to aid the work. The clergy begged in Lent, and preached the duty of contributing on special days. Presents of lime and bricks and other materials were thankfully received. Bishops, canons, and municipal magistrates were expected to make costly gifts on taking office. Notaries, under penalty of paying 100 soldi if they neglected their engagement, were obliged to persuade testators, _cum bonis modis dulciter_, to inscribe the Duomo on their wills. Fines for various offences were voted to the building by the city. Each new burgher paid a certain sum; while guilds and farmers of the taxes bought monopolies and privileges at the price of yearly subsidies. A lottery was finally established for the benefit of the fabric. Of course each payment to the good work carried with it spiritual privileges; and so willingly did the people respond to the call of the Church, that during the sixteenth century the sums subscribed amounted to 200,000 golden crowns. Among the most munificent donators are mentioned the Marchese Giacomo Gallio, who bequeathed 290,000 lire, and a Benzi, who gave 10,000 ducats. While the people of Como were thus straining every nerve to complete a pious work, which at the same time is one of the most perfect masterpieces of Italian art, their lovely lake was turned into a pirate's stronghold, and its green waves stained with slaughter of conflicting navies. So curious is this episode in the history of the Larian lake that it is worth while to treat of it at some length. Moreover, the lives of few captains of adventure offer matter more rich in picturesque details and more illustrative of their times than that of Gian Giacomo de' Medici, the Larian corsair, long known and still remembered as Il Medeghino. He was born in Milan in 1498, at the beginning of that darkest and most disastrous period of Italian history, when the old fabric of social and political existence went to ruin under the impact of conflicting foreign armies. He lived on until the year 1555, witnessing and taking part in the dismemberment of the Milanese Duchy, playing a game of hazard at high stakes for his own profit with the two last Sforzas, the Empire, the French, and the Swiss. At the beginning of the century, while he was still a youth, the rich valley of the Valtelline, with Bormio and Chiavenna, had been assigned to the Grisons. The Swiss Cantons at the same time had possessed themselves of Lugano and Bellinzona. By these two acts of robbery the mountaineers tore a portion of its fairest territory from the Duchy; and whoever ruled in Milan, whether a Sforza, or a Spanish viceroy, or a French general, was impatient to recover the lost jewel of the ducal crown. So much has to be premised, because the scene of our hero's romantic adventures was laid upon the borderland between the Duchy and the Cantons. Intriguing at one time with the Duke of Milan, at another with his foes the French or Spaniards, Il Medeghino found free scope for his peculiar genius in a guerilla warfare, carried on with the avowed purpose of restoring the Valtelline to Milan. To steer a plain course through that chaos of politics, in which the modern student, aided by the calm clear lights of history and meditation, cannot find a clue, was of course impossible for an adventurer whose one aim was to gratify his passions and exalt himself at the expense of others. It is therefore of little use to seek motives of statecraft or of patriotism in the conduct of Il Medeghino. He was a man shaped according to Machiavelli's standard of political morality--self-reliant, using craft and force with cold indifference to moral ends, bent only upon wringing for himself the largest share of this world's power for men who, like himself, identified virtue with unflinching and immitigable egotism. Il Medeghino's father was Bernardo de' Medici, a Lombard, who neither claimed nor could have proved cousinship with the great Medicean family of Florence. His mother was Cecilia Serbelloni. The boy was educated in the fashionable humanistic studies, nourishing his young imagination with the tales of Roman heroes. The first exploit by which he proved his _virtù_, was the murder of a man he hated, at the age of sixteen. This 'virile act of vengeance,' as it was called, brought him into trouble, and forced him to choose the congenial profession of arms. At a time when violence and vigour passed for manliness, a spirited assassination formed the best of introductions to the captains of mixed mercenary troops. Il Medeghino rose in favour with his generals, helped to reinstate Francesco Sforza in his capital, and, returning himself to Milan, inflicted severe vengeance on the enemies who had driven him to exile. It was his ambition, at this early period of his life, to be made governor of the Castle of Musso, on the Lake of Como. While fighting in the neighbourhood, he had observed the unrivalled capacities for defence presented by its site; and some pre-vision of his future destinies now urged him to acquire it, as the basis for the free marauding life he planned. The headland of Musso lies about halfway between Gravedona and Menaggio, on the right shore of the Lake of Como. Planted on a pedestal of rock, and surmounted by a sheer cliff, there then stood a very ancient tower, commanding this promontory on the side of the land. Between it and the water the Visconti, in more recent days, had built a square fort; and the headland had been further strengthened by the addition of connecting walls and bastions pierced for cannon. Combining precipitous cliffs, strong towers, and easy access from the lake below, this fortress of Musso was exactly the fit station for a pirate. So long as he kept the command of the lake, he had little to fear from land attacks, and had a splendid basis for aggressive operations. Il Medeghino made his request to the Duke of Milan; but the foxlike Sforza would not grant him a plain answer. At length he hinted that if his suitor chose to rid him of a troublesome subject, the noble and popular Astore Visconti, he should receive Musso for payment. Crimes of bloodshed and treason sat lightly on the adventurer's conscience. In a short time he compassed the young Visconti's death, and claimed his reward. The Duke despatched him thereupon to Musso, with open letters to the governor, commanding him to yield the castle to the bearer. Private advice, also entrusted to Il Medeghino, bade the governor, on the contrary, cut the bearer's throat. The young man, who had the sense to read the Duke's letter, destroyed the secret document, and presented the other, or, as one version of the story goes, forged a ducal order in his own favour.[12] At any rate, the castle was placed in his hands; and affecting to know nothing of the Duke's intended treachery, Il Medeghino took possession of it as a trusted servant of the ducal crown. As soon as he was settled in his castle, the freebooter devoted all his energies to rendering it still more impregnable by strengthening the walls and breaking the cliffs into more horrid precipices. In this work he was assisted by his numerous friends and followers; for Musso rapidly became, like ancient Rome, an asylum for the ruffians and outlaws of neighbouring provinces. It is even said that his sisters, Clarina and Margherita, rendered efficient aid with manual labour. The mention of Clarina's name justifies a parenthetical side-glance at Il Medeghino's pedigree, which will serve to illustrate the exceptional conditions of Italian society during this age. She was married to the Count Giberto Borromeo, and became the mother of the pious Carlo Borromeo, whose shrine is still adored at Milan in the Duomo. Il Medeghino's brother, Giovan Angelo, rose to the Papacy, assuming the title of Pius IV. Thus this murderous marauder was the brother of a Pope and the uncle of a Saint; and these three persons of one family embraced the various degrees and typified the several characters which flourished with peculiar lustre in Renaissance Italy--the captain of adventure soaked in blood, the churchman unrivalled for intrigue, and the saint aflame with holiest enthusiasm. Il Medeghino was short of stature, but well made and powerful; broad-chested; with a penetrating voice and winning countenance. He dressed simply, like one of his own soldiers; slept but little; was insensible to carnal pleasure; and though he knew how to win the affection of his men by jovial speech, he maintained strict discipline in his little army. In all points he was an ideal bandit chief, never happy unless fighting or planning campaigns, inflexible of purpose, bold and cunning in the execution of his schemes, cruel to his enemies, generous to his followers, sacrificing all considerations, human and divine, to the one aim of his life, self-aggrandisement by force and intrigue. He knew well how to make himself both feared and respected. One instance of his dealing will suffice. A gentleman of Bellano, Polidoro Boldoni, in return to his advances, coldly replied that he cared for neither amity nor relationship with thieves and robbers; whereupon Il Medeghino extirpated his family, almost to a man. Soon after his settlement in Musso, Il Medeghino, wishing to secure the gratitude of the Duke, his master, began war with the Grisons. From Coire, from the Engadine, and from Davos, the Alpine pikemen were now pouring down to swell the troops of Francis I.; and their road lay through the Lake of Como. Il Medeghino burned all the boats upon the lake, except those which he took into his own service, and thus made himself master of the water passage. He then swept the 'length of lordly Lario' from Colico to Lecco, harrying the villages upon the shore, and cutting off the bands of journeying Switzers at his pleasure. Not content with this guerilla, he made a descent upon the territory of the Trepievi, and pushed far up towards Chiavenna, forcing the Grisons to recall their troops from the Milanese. These acts of prowess convinced the Duke that he had found a strong ally in the pirate chief. When Francis I. continued his attacks upon the Duchy, and the Grisons still adhered to their French paymaster, the Sforza formally invested Gian Giacomo de' Medici with the perpetual governorship of Musso, the Lake of Como, and as much as he could wrest from the Grisons above the lake. Furnished now with a just title for his depredations, Il Medeghino undertook the siege of Chiavenna. That town is the key to the valleys of the Splügen and Bregaglia. Strongly fortified and well situated for defence, the burghers of the Grisons well knew that upon its possession depended their power in the Italian valleys. To take it by assault was impossible, Il Medeghino used craft, entered the castle, and soon had the city at his disposition. Nor did he lose time in sweeping Val Bregaglia. The news of this conquest recalled the Switzers from the Duchy; and as they hurried homeward just before the battle of Pavia, it may be affirmed that Gian Giacomo de' Medici was instrumental in the defeat and capture of the French King. The mountaineers had no great difficulty in dislodging their pirate enemy from Chiavenna, the Valtelline, and Val Bregaglia. But he retained his hold on the Trepievi, occupied the Valsassina, took Porlezza, and established himself still more strongly in Musso as the corsair monarch of the lake. The tyranny of the Sforzas in Milan was fast going to pieces between France and Spain; and in 1526 the Marquis of Pescara occupied the capital in the name of Charles V. The Duke, meanwhile, remained a prisoner in his Castello. Il Medeghino was now without a master; for he refused to acknowledge the Spaniards, preferring to watch events and build his own power on the ruins of the dukedom. At the head of 4,000 men, recruited from the lakes and neighbouring valleys, he swept the country far and wide, and occupied the rich champaign of the Brianza. He was now lord of the lakes of Como and Lugano, and absolute in Lecco and the adjoining valleys. The town of Como itself alone belonged to the Spaniards; and even Como was blockaded by the navy of the corsair. Il Medeghino had a force of seven big ships, with three sails and forty-eight oars, bristling with guns and carrying marines. His flagship was a large brigantine, manned by picked rowers, from the mast of which floated the red banner with the golden palle of the Medicean arms. Besides these larger vessels, he commanded a flotilla of countless small boats. It is clear that to reckon with him was a necessity. If he could not be put down with force, he might be bought over by concessions. The Spaniards adopted the second course, and Il Medeghino, judging that the cause of the Sforza family was desperate, determined in 1528 to attach himself to the Empire. Charles V. invested him with the Castle of Musso and the larger part of Como Lake, including the town of Lecco. He now assumed the titles of Marquis of Musso and Count of Lecco: and in order to prove his sovereignty before the world, he coined money with his own name and devices. It will be observed that Gian Giacomo de' Medici had hitherto acted with a single-hearted view to his own interests. At the age of thirty he had raised himself from nothing to a principality, which, though petty, might compare with many of some name in Italy--with Carpi, for example, or Mirandola, or Camerino. Nor did he mean to remain quiet in the prime of life. He regarded Como Lake as the mere basis for more arduous undertakings. Therefore, when the whirligig of events restored Francesco Sforza to his duchy in 1529, Il Medeghino refused to obey his old lord. Pretending to move under the Duke's orders, but really acting for himself alone, he proceeded to attack his ancient enemies, the Grisons. By fraud and force he worked his way into their territory, seized Morbegno, and overran the Valtelline. He was destined, however, to receive a serious check. Twelve thousand Switzers rose against him on the one hand, on the other the Duke of Milan sent a force by land and water to subdue his rebel subject, while Alessandro Gonzaga marched upon his castles in the Brianza. He was thus assailed by formidable forces from three quarters, converging upon the Lake of Como, and driving him to his chosen element, the water. Hastily quitting the Valtelline, he fell back to the Castle of Mandello on the lake, collected his navy, and engaged the ducal ships in a battle off Menaggio. In this battle he was worsted. But he did not lose his courage. From Bellagio, from Varenna, from Bellano he drove forth his enemies, rolled the cannon of the Switzers into the lake, regained Lecco, defeated the troops of Alessandro Gonzaga, and took the Duke of Mantua prisoner. Had he but held Como, it is probable that he might have obtained such terms at this time as would have consolidated his tyranny. The town of Como, however, now belonged to the Duke of Milan, and formed an excellent basis for operations against the pirate. Overmatched, with an exhausted treasury and broken forces, Il Medeghino was at last compelled to give in. Yet he retired with all the honours of war. In exchange for Musso and the lake, the Duke agreed to give him 35,000 golden crowns, together with the feud and marquisate of Marignano. A free pardon was promised not only to himself and his brothers, but to all his followers; and the Duke further undertook to transport his artillery and munitions of war at his own expense to Marignano. Having concluded this treaty under the auspices of Charles V. and his lieutenant, Il Medeghino, in March 1532, set sail from Musso, and turned his back upon the lake for ever. The Switzers immediately destroyed the towers, forts, walls, and bastions of the Musso promontory, leaving in the midst of their ruins the little chapel of S. Eufemia. Gian Giacomo de' Medici, henceforth known to Europe as the Marquis of Marignano, now took service under Spain; and through the favour of Anton de Leyva, Viceroy for the Duchy, rose to the rank of Field Marshal. When the Marquis del Vasto succeeded to the Spanish governorship of Milan in 1536, he determined to gratify an old grudge against the ex-pirate, and, having invited him to a banquet, made him prisoner. II Medeghino was not, however, destined to languish in a dungeon. Princes and kings interested themselves in his fate. He was released, and journeyed to the court of Charles V. in Spain. The Emperor received him kindly, and employed him first in the Low Countries, where he helped to repress the burghers of Ghent, and at the siege of Landrecy commanded the Spanish artillery against other Italian captains of adventure: for, Italy being now dismembered and enslaved, her sons sought foreign service where they found best pay and widest scope for martial science. Afterwards the Medici ruled Bohemia as Spanish Viceroy; and then, as general of the league formed by the Duke of Florence, the Emperor, and the Pope to repress the liberties of Tuscany, distinguished himself in that cruel war of extermination, which turned the fair Contado of Siena into a poisonous Maremma. To the last Il Medeghino preserved the instincts and the passions of a brigand chief. It was at this time that, acting for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he first claimed open kinship with the Medici of Florence. Heralds and genealogists produced a pedigree, which seemed to authorise this pretension; he was recognised, together with his brother, Pius IV., as an offshoot of the great house which had already given Dukes to Florence, Kings to France, and two Popes to the Christian world. In the midst of all this foreign service he never forgot his old dream of conquering the Valtelline; and in 1547 he made proposals to the Emperor for a new campaign against the Grisons. Charles V. did not choose to engage in a war, the profits of which would have been inconsiderable for the master of half the civilised world, and which might have proved troublesome by stirring up the tameless Switzers. Il Medeghino was obliged to abandon a project cherished from the earliest dawn of his adventurous manhood. When Gian Giacomo died in 1555, his brother Battista succeeded to his claims upon Lecco and the Trepievi. His monument, magnificent with five bronze figures, the masterpiece of Leone Lioni, from Menaggio, Michelangelesque in style, and of consummate workmanship, still adorns the Duomo of Milan. It stands close by the door that leads to the roof. This mausoleum, erected to the memory of Gian Giacomo and his brother Gabrio, is said to have cost 7800 golden crowns. On the occasion of the pirate's funeral the Senate of Milan put on mourning, and the whole city followed the great robber, the hero of Renaissance _virtù_, to the grave. Between the Cathedral of Como and the corsair Medeghino there is but a slight link. Yet so extraordinary were the social circumstances of Renaissance Italy, that almost at every turn, on her seaboard, in her cities, from her hill-tops, we are compelled to blend our admiration for the loveliest and purest works of art amid the choicest scenes of nature with memories of execrable crimes and lawless characters. Sometimes, as at Perugia, the _nexus_ is but local. At others, one single figure, like that of Cellini, unites both points of view in a romance of unparalleled dramatic vividness. Or, again, beneath the vaults of the Certosa, near Pavia, a masterpiece of the serenest beauty carries our thoughts perforce back to the hideous cruelties and snake-like frauds of its despotic founder. This is the excuse for combining two such diverse subjects in one study. * * * * * _BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI_ From the new town of commerce to the old town of history upon the hill, the road is carried along a rampart lined, with horse-chestnut trees--clumps of massy foliage, and snowy pyramids of bloom, expanded in the rapture of a southern spring. Each pair of trees between their stems and arch of intermingling leaves includes a space of plain, checkered with cloud-shadows, melting blue and green in amethystine haze. To right and left the last spurs of the Alps descend, jutting like promontories, heaving like islands from the misty breadth below: and here and there are towers, half-lost in airy azure; and cities dwarfed to blots; and silvery lines where rivers flow; and distant, vapour-drowned, dim crests of Apennines. The city walls above us wave with snapdragons and iris among fig-trees sprouting from the riven stones. There are terraces over-rioted with pergolas of vine, and houses shooting forward into balconies and balustrades, from which a Romeo might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissance portals grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoes shamming stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs out a promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni is our destination, that masterpiece of the sculptor-architect's craft, with its variegated marbles,--rosy and white and creamy yellow and jet-black,--in patterns, basreliefs, pilasters, statuettes, encrusted on the fanciful domed shrine. Upon the façade are mingled, in the true Renaissance spirit of genial acceptance, motives Christian and Pagan with supreme impartiality. Medallions of emperors and gods alternate with virtues, angels and cupids in a maze of loveliest arabesque; and round the base of the building are told two stories--the one of Adam from his creation to his fall, the other of Hercules and his labours. Italian craftsmen of the _quattrocento_ were not averse to setting thus together, in one framework, the myths of our first parents and Alemena's son: partly perhaps because both subjects gave scope to the free treatment of the nude; but partly also, we may venture to surmise, because the heroism of Hellas counterbalanced the sin of Eden. Here then we see how Adam and Eve were made and tempted and expelled from Paradise and set to labour, how Cain killed Abel, and Lamech slew a man to his hurt, and Isaac was offered on the mountain. The tale of human sin and the promise of redemption are epitomised in twelve of the sixteen basreliefs. The remaining four show Hercules wrestling with Antæus, taming the Nemean lion, extirpating the Hydra, and bending to his will the bull of Crete. Labour, appointed for a punishment to Adam, becomes a title to immortality for the hero. The dignity of man is reconquered by prowess for the Greek, as it is repurchased for the Christian by vicarious suffering. Many may think this interpretation of Amadeo's basreliefs far-fetched; yet, such as it is, it agrees with the spirit of Humanism, bent ever on harmonising the two great traditions of the past. Of the workmanship little need be said, except that it is wholly Lombard, distinguished from the similar work of Della Quercia at Bologna and Siena by a more imperfect feeling for composition, and a lack of monumental gravity, yet graceful, rich in motives, and instinct with a certain wayward _improvvisatore_ charm. This Chapel was built by the great Condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni, to be the monument of his puissance even in the grave. It had been the Sacristy of S. Maria Maggiore, which, when the Consiglio della Misericordia refused it to him for his half-proud, half-pious purpose, he took and held by force. The structure, of costliest materials, reared by Gian Antonio Amadeo, cost him 50,000 golden florins. An equestrian statue of gilt wood, voted to him by the town of Bergamo, surmounts his monument inside the Chapel. This was the work of two German masters, called 'Sisto figlio di Enrico Syri da Norimberga' and 'Leonardo Tedesco.' The tomb itself is of marble, executed for the most part in a Lombard style resembling Amadeo's, but scarcely worthy of his genius. The whole effect is disappointing. Five figures representing Mars, Hercules, and three sons-in-law of Colleoni, who surround the sarcophagus of the buried general, are indeed almost grotesque. The angularity and crumpled draperies of the Milanese manner, when so exaggerated, produce an impression of caricature. Yet many subordinate details--a row of _putti_ in a _cinquecento_ frieze, for instance--and much of the low relief work--especially the Crucifixion with its characteristic episodes of the fainting Maries and the soldiers casting dice--are lovely in their unaffected Lombardism. There is another portrait of Colleoni in a round above the great door, executed with spirit, though in a _bravura_ style that curiously anticipates the decline of Italian sculpture. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with prominent cheek bones and strong jaws, this animated, half-length statue of the hero bears the stamp of a good likeness; but when or by whom it was made, I do not know. Far more noteworthy than Colleoni's own monument is that of his daughter Medea. She died young in 1470, and her father caused her tomb, carved of Carrara marble, to be placed in the Dominican Church of Basella, which he had previously founded. It was not until 1842 that this most precious masterpiece of Antonio Amadeo's skill was transferred to Bergamo. _Hic jacet Medea virgo._ Her hands are clasped across her breast. A robe of rich brocade, gathered to the waist and girdled, lies in simple folds upon the bier. Her throat, exceedingly long and slender, is circled with a string of pearls. Her face is not beautiful, for the features, especially the nose, are large and prominent; but it is pure and expressive of vivid individuality. The hair curls in crisp short clusters, and the ear, fine and shaped almost like a Faun's, reveals the scrupulous fidelity of the sculptor. Italian art has, in truth, nothing more exquisite than this still sleeping figure of the girl, who, when she lived, must certainly have been so rare of type and lovable in personality. If Busti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty--if Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the cropped bloom of youth, idealise the hero of romance--if Michelangelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a despot's soul--if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan magnificently throned in nonchalance at a Pope's footstool--if Verocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and circumstance of scientific war--surely this Medea exhales the flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in that turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies. Such power have mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mute stone speak in poems and clasp the soul's life of a century in some five or six transcendent forms. The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and well-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo. Two lions' heads conjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowed from the vulgar meaning of their name. Many members of the house held important office during the three centuries preceding the birth of the famous general, Bartolommeo. He was born in the year 1400 at Solza, in the Bergamasque Contado. His father Paolo, or Pùho as he was commonly called, was poor and exiled from the city, together with the rest of the Guelf nobles, by the Visconti. Being a man of daring spirit, and little inclined to languish in a foreign state as the dependent on some patron, Pùho formed the bold design of seizing the Castle of Trezzo. This he achieved in 1405 by fraud, and afterwards held it as his own by force. Partly with the view of establishing himself more firmly in his acquired lordship, and partly out of family affection, Pùho associated four of his first-cousins in the government of Trezzo. They repaid his kindness with an act of treason and cruelty, only too characteristic of those times in Italy. One day while he was playing at draughts in a room of the Castle, they assaulted him and killed him, seized his wife and the boy Bartolommeo, and flung them into prison. The murdered Pùho had another son, Antonio, who escaped and took refuge with Giorgio Benzone, the tyrant of Crema. After a short time the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived together in great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enter the service of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and to make himself if possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was a sufficient introduction, and the Duchy of Milan, dismembered upon the death of Gian Maria Visconti, was in such a state that all the minor despots were increasing their forces and preparing to defend by arms the fragments they had seized from the Visconti heritage. Bartolommeo therefore had no difficulty in recommending himself to Filippo d'Arcello, sometime general in the pay of the Milanese, but now the new lord of Piacenza. With this master he remained as page for two or three years, learning the use of arms, riding, and training himself in the physical exercises which were indispensable to a young Italian soldier. Meanwhile Filippo Maria Visconti reacquired his hereditary dominions; and at the age of twenty, Bartolommeo found it prudent to seek a patron stronger than d'Arcello. The two great Condottieri, Sforza Attendolo and Braccio, divided the military glories of Italy at this period; and any youth who sought to rise in his profession, had to enrol himself under the banners of the one or the other. Bartolommeo chose Braccio for his master, and was enrolled among his men as a simple trooper, or _ragazzo_, with no better prospects than he could make for himself by the help of his talents and his borrowed horse and armour. Braccio at this time was in Apulia, prosecuting the war of the Neapolitan Succession disputed between Alfonso of Aragon and Louis of Anjou under the weak sovereignty of Queen Joan. On which side of a quarrel a Condottiere fought mattered but little: so great was the confusion of Italian politics, and so complete was the egotism of these fraudful, violent, and treacherous party leaders. Yet it may be mentioned that Braccio had espoused Alfonso's cause. Bartolommeo Colleoni early distinguished himself among the ranks of the Bracceschi. But he soon perceived that he could better his position by deserting to another camp. Accordingly he offered his services to Jacopo Caldora, one of Joan's generals, and received from him a commission of twenty men-at-arms. It may here be parenthetically said that the rank and pay of an Italian captain varied with the number of the men he brought into the field. His title 'Condottiere' was derived from the circumstance that he was said to have received a _Condotta di venti cavalli_, and so forth. Each _cavallo_ was equal to one mounted man-at-arms and two attendants, who were also called _ragazzi_. It was his business to provide the stipulated number of men, to keep them in good discipline, and to satisfy their just demands. Therefore an Italian army at this epoch consisted of numerous small armies varying in size, each held together by personal engagements to a captain, and all dependent on the will of a general-in-chief, who had made a bargain with some prince or republic for supplying a fixed contingent of fighting-men. The _Condottiere_ was in other words a contractor or _impresario_, undertaking to do a certain piece of work for a certain price, and to furnish the requisite forces for the business in good working order. It will be readily seen upon this system how important were the personal qualities of the captain, and what great advantages those Condottieri had, who, like the petty princes of Romagna and the March, the Montefeltri, Ordelaffi, Malatesti, Manfredi, Orsini, and Vitelli, could rely upon a race of hardy vassals for their recruits. It is not necessary to follow Colleoni's fortunes in the Regno, at Aquila, Ancona, and Bologna. He continued in the service of Caldora, who was now General of the Church, and had his _Condotta_ gradually increased. Meanwhile his cousins, the murderers of his father, began to dread his rising power, and determined, if possible, to ruin him. He was not a man to be easily assassinated; so they sent a hired ruffian to Caldora's camp to say that Bartolommeo had taken his name by fraud, and that he was himself the real son of Pùho Colleoni. Bartolommeo defied the liar to a duel; and this would have taken place before the army, had not two witnesses appeared, who knew the fathers of both Colleoni and the _bravo_, and who gave such evidence that the captains of the army were enabled to ascertain the truth. The impostor was stripped and drummed out of the camp. At the conclusion of a peace between the Pope and the Bolognese, Bartolommeo found himself without occupation. He now offered himself to the Venetians, and began to fight again under the great Carmagnola against Filippo Visconti. His engagement allowed him forty men, which, after the judicial murder of Carmagnola at Venice in 1432, were increased to eighty. Erasmo da Narni, better known as Gattamelata, was now his general-in-chief--a man who had risen from the lowest fortunes to one of the most splendid military positions in Italy. Colleoni spent the next years of his life, until 1443, in Lombardy, manoeuvring against Il Piccinino, and gradually rising in the Venetian service, until his Condotta reached the number of 800 men. Upon Gattamelata's death at Padua in 1440, Colleoni became the most important of the generals who had fought with Caldora in the March. The lordships of Romano in the Bergamasque and of Covo and Antegnate in the Cremonese had been assigned to him; and he was in a position to make independent engagements with princes. What distinguished him as a general, was a combination of caution with audacity. He united the brilliant system of his master Braccio with the more prudent tactics of the Sforzeschi; and thus, though he often surprised his foes by daring stratagems and vigorous assaults, he rarely met with any serious check. He was a captain who could be relied upon for boldly seizing an advantage, no less than for using a success with discretion. Moreover he had acquired an almost unique reputation for honesty in dealing with his masters, and for justice combined with humane indulgence to his men. His company was popular, and he could always bring capital troops into the field. In the year 1443 Colleoni quitted the Venetian service on account of a quarrel with Gherardo Dandolo, the Provoditore of the Republic. He now took a commission from Filippo Maria Visconti, who received him at Milan with great honour, bestowed on him the Castello Adorno at Pavia, and sent him into the March of Ancona upon a military expedition. Of all Italian tyrants this Visconti was the most difficult to serve. Constitutionally timid, surrounded with a crowd of spies and base informers, shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of his palace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his Duchy by means of correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanese despots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicion and intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. He trusted no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another; his bodyguard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captains in the field were watched and thwarted by commissioners appointed to check them at the point of successful ambition or magnificent victory. The historian has a hard task when he tries to fathom the Visconti's schemes, or to understand his motives. Half the Duke's time seems to have been spent in unravelling the webs that he had woven, in undoing his own work, and weakening the hands of his chosen ministers. Conscious that his power was artificial, that the least breath might blow him back into the nothingness from which he had arisen on the wrecks of his father's tyranny, he dreaded the personal eminence of his generals above all things. His chief object was to establish a system of checks, by means of which no one whom he employed should at any moment be great enough to threaten him. The most formidable of these military adventurers, Francesco Sforza, had been secured by marriage with Bianca Maria Visconti, his master's only daughter, in 1441; but the Duke did not even trust his son-in-law. The last six years of his life were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of his lordships; and the war in the March, on which he employed Colleoni, had the object of ruining the principality acquired by this daring captain from Pope Eugenius IV. in 1443. Colleoni was by no means deficient in those foxlike qualities which were necessary to save the lion from the toils spread for him by Italian intriguers. He had already shown that he knew how to push his own interests, by changing sides and taking service with the highest bidder, as occasion prompted. Nor, though his character for probity and loyalty stood exceptionally high among the men of his profession, was he the slave to any questionable claims of honour or of duty. In that age of confused politics and extinguished patriotism, there was not indeed much scope for scrupulous honesty. But Filippo Maria Visconti proved more than a match for him in craft. While Colleoni was engaged in pacifying the revolted population of Bologna, the Duke yielded to the suggestion of his parasites at Milan, who whispered that the general was becoming dangerously powerful. He recalled him, and threw him without trial into the dungeons of the Forni at Monza. Here Colleoni remained a prisoner more than a year, until the Duke's death in 1447, when he made his escape, and profited by the disturbance of the Duchy to reacquire his lordships in the Bergamasque territory. The true motive for his imprisonment remains still buried in obscure conjecture. Probably it was not even known to the Visconti, who acted on this, as on so many other occasions, by a mere spasm of suspicious jealousy, for which he could have given no account. From the year 1447 to the year 1455, it is difficult to follow Colleoni's movements, or to trace his policy. First, we find him employed by the Milanese Republic, during its brief space of independence; then he is engaged by the Venetians, with a commission for 1500 horse; next, he is in the service of Francesco Sforza; once more in that of the Venetians, and yet again in that of the Duke of Milan. His biographer relates with pride that, during this period, he was three times successful against French troops in Piedmont and Lombardy. It appears that he made short engagements, and changed his paymasters according to convenience. But all this time he rose in personal importance, acquired fresh lordships in the Bergamasque, and accumulated wealth. He reached the highest point of his prosperity in 1455, when the Republic of S. Mark elected him General-in-Chief of their armies, with the fullest powers, and with a stipend of 100,000 florins. For nearly twenty-one years, until the day of his death, in 1475, Colleoni held this honourable and lucrative office. In his will he charged the Signory of Venice that they should never again commit into the hands of a single captain such unlimited control over their military resources. It was indeed no slight tribute to Colleoni's reputation for integrity, that the jealous Republic, which had signified its sense of Carmagnola's untrustworthiness by capital punishment, should have left him so long in the undisturbed disposal of their army. The Standard and the Bâton of S. Mark were conveyed to Colleoni by two ambassadors, and presented to him at Brescia on June 24, 1455. Three years later he made a triumphal entry into Venice, and received the same ensigns of military authority from the hands of the new Doge, Pasquale Malipiero. On this occasion his staff consisted of some two hundred officers, splendidly armed, and followed by a train of serving-men. Noblemen from Bergamo, Brescia, and other cities of the Venetian territory, swelled the cortege. When they embarked on the lagoons, they found the water covered with boats and gondolas, bearing the population of Venice in gala attire, to greet the illustrious guest with instruments of music. Three great galleys of the Republic, called Bucentaurs, issued from the crowd of smaller craft. On the first was the Doge in his state robes, attended by the government in office, or the Signoria of S. Mark. On the second were members of the Senate and minor magistrates. The third carried the ambassadors of foreign powers. Colleoni was received into the first state-galley, and placed by the side of the Doge. The oarsmen soon cleared the space between the land and Venice, passed the small canals, and swept majestically up the Canalozzo among the plaudits of the crowds assembled on both sides to cheer their General. Thus they reached the piazzetta, where Colleoni alighted between the two great pillars, and, conducted by the Doge in person, walked to the Church of S. Mark. Here, after Mass had been said, and a sermon had been preached, kneeling before the high altar he received the truncheon from the Doge's hands. The words of his commission ran as follows:-- 'By authority and decree of this most excellent City of Venice, of us the Prince, and of the Senate, you are to be Commander and Captain General of all our forces and armaments on terra firma. Take from our hands this truncheon, with good augury and fortune, as sign and warrant of your power. Be it your care and effort, with dignity and splendour to maintain and to defend the Majesty, the Loyalty, and the Principles of this Empire. Neither provoking, not yet provoked, unless at our command, shall you break into open warfare with our enemies. Free jurisdiction and lordship over each one of our soldiers, except in cases of treason, we hereby commit to you.' After the ceremony of his reception, Colleoni was conducted with no less pomp to his lodgings, and the next ten days were spent in festivities of all sorts. The commandership-in-chief of the Venetian forces was perhaps the highest military post in Italy. It placed Colleoni on the pinnacle of his profession, and made his camp the favourite school of young soldiers. Among his pupils or lieutenants we read of Ercole d'Este, the future Duke of Ferrara; Alessandro Sforza, lord of Pesaro; Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat; Cicco and Pino Ordelaffi, princes of Forli; Astorre Manfredi, the lord of Faenza; three Counts of Mirandola; two princes of Carpi; Deifobo, the Count of Anguillara; Giovanni Antonio Caldora, lord of Jesi in the March; and many others of less name. Honours came thick upon him. When one of the many ineffectual leagues against the infidel was formed in 1468, during the pontificate of Paul II., he was named Captain-General for the Crusade. Pius II. designed him for the leader of the expedition he had planned against the impious and savage despot, Sigismondo Malatesta. King René of Anjou, by special patent, authorised him to bear his name and arms, and made him a member of his family. The Duke of Burgundy, by a similar heraldic fiction, conferred upon him his name and armorial bearings. This will explain why Colleoni is often styled 'di Andegavia e Borgogna.' In the case of René, the honour was but a barren show. But the patent of Charles the Bold had more significance. In 1473 he entertained the project of employing the great Italian General against his Swiss foes; nor does it seem reasonable to reject a statement made by Colleoni's biographer, to the effect that a secret compact had been drawn up between him and the Duke of Burgundy, for the conquest and partition of the Duchy of Milan. The Venetians, in whose service Colleoni still remained, when they became aware of this project, met it with peaceful but irresistible opposition. Colleoni had been engaged continually since his earliest boyhood in the trade of war. It was not therefore possible that he should have gained a great degree of literary culture. Yet the fashion of the times made it necessary that a man in his position should seek the society of scholars. Accordingly his court and camp were crowded with students, in whose wordy disputations he is said to have delighted. It will be remembered that his contemporaries, Alfonso the Magnanimous, Francesco Sforza, Federigo of Urbino, and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, piqued themselves at least as much upon their patronage of letters, as upon their prowess in the field. Colleoni's court, like that of Urbino, was a model of good manners. As became a soldier, he was temperate in food and moderate in slumber. It was recorded of him that he had never sat more than one hour at meat in his own house, and that he never overslept the sunrise. After dinner he would converse with his friends, using commonly his native dialect of Bergamo, and entertaining the company now with stories of adventure, and now with pithy sayings. In another essential point he resembled his illustrious contemporary, the Duke of Urbino; for he was sincerely pious in an age which, however it preserved the decencies of ceremonial religion, was profoundly corrupt at heart. His principal lordships in the Bergamasque territory owed to his munificence their fairest churches and charitable institutions. At Martinengo, for example, he rebuilt and re-endowed two monasteries, the one dedicated to S. Chiara, the other to S. Francis. In Bergamo itself he founded an establishment named' La Pieta,' for the good purpose of dowering and marrying poor girls. This house he endowed with a yearly income of 3000 ducats. The Sulphur baths of Trescorio, at some distance from the city, were improved and opened to poor patients by a hospital which he provided. At Rumano he raised a church to S. Peter, and erected buildings of public utility, which on his death he bequeathed to the society of the Misericordia in that town. All the places of his jurisdiction owed to him such benefits as good water, new walls, and irrigation works. In addition to these munificent foundations must be mentioned the Basella, or Monastery of Dominican friars, which he established not far from Bergamo, upon the river Serio, in memory of his beloved daughter Medea. Last, not least, was the Chapel of S. John the Baptist, attached to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, which he endowed with fitting maintenance for two priests and deacons. The one defect acknowledged by his biographer was his partiality for women. Early in life he married Tisbe, of the noble house of the Brescian Martinenghi, who bore him one daughter, Caterina, wedded to Gasparre Martinengo. Two illegitimate daughters, Ursina and Isotta, were recognised and treated by him as legitimate. The first he gave in marriage to Gherardo Martinengo, and the second to Jacopo of the same family. Two other natural children, Doratina and Ricardona, were mentioned in his will: he left them four thousand ducats a piece for dowry. Medea, the child of his old age (for she was born to him when he was sixty), died before her father, and was buried, as we have seen, in the Chapel of Basella. Throughout his life he was distinguished for great physical strength and agility. When he first joined the troop of Braccio, he could race, with his corselet on, against the swiftest runner of the army; and when he was stripped, few horses could beat him in speed. Far on into old age he was in the habit of taking long walks every morning for the sake of exercise, and delighted in feats of arms and jousting matches. 'He was tall, straight, and full of flesh, well proportioned, and excellently made in all his limbs. His complexion inclined somewhat to brown, but was coloured with sanguine and lively carnation. His eyes were black; in look and sharpness of light, they were vivid, piercing, and terrible. The outlines of his nose and all his countenance expressed a certain manly nobleness, combined with goodness and prudence.' Such is the portrait drawn of Colleoni by his biographer; and it well accords with the famous bronze statue of the general at Venice. Colleoni lived with a magnificence that suited his rank. His favourite place of abode was Malpaga, a castle built by him at the distance of about an hour's drive from Bergamo. The place is worth a visit, though its courts and gates and galleries have now been turned into a monster farm, and the southern rooms, where Colleoni entertained his guests, are given over to the silkworms. Half a dozen families, employed upon a vast estate of the Martinengo family, occupy the still substantial house and stables. The moat is planted with mulberry-trees; the upper rooms are used as granaries for golden maize; cows, pigs, and horses litter in the spacious yard. Yet the walls of the inner court and of the ancient state rooms are brilliant with frescoes, executed by some good Venetian hand, which represent the chief events of Colleoni's life--his battles, his reception by the Signory of Venice, his tournaments and hawking parties, and the great series of entertainments with which he welcomed Christiern of Denmark. This king had made his pilgrimage to Rome and was returning westward, when the fame of Colleoni and his princely state at Malpaga induced him to turn aside and spend some days as the general's guest. In order to do him honour, Colleoni left his castle at the king's disposal and established himself with all his staff and servants in a camp at some distance from Malpaga. The camp was duly furnished with tents and trenches, stockades, artillery, and all the other furniture of war. On the king's approach, Colleoni issued with trumpets blowing and banners flying to greet his guest, gratifying him thus with a spectacle of the pomp and circumstance of war as carried on in Italy. The visit was further enlivened by sham fights, feats of arms, and trials of strength. When it ended, Colleoni presented the king with one of his own suits of armour, and gave to each of his servants a complete livery of red and white, his colours. Among the frescoes at Malpaga none are more interesting, and none, thanks to the silkworms rather than to any other cause, are fortunately in a better state of preservation, than those which represent this episode in the history of the Castle. Colleoni died in the year 1475, at the age of seventy-five. Since he left no male representative, he constituted the Republic of S. Mark his heir-in-chief, after properly providing for his daughters and his numerous foundations. The Venetians received under this testament a sum of 100,000 ducats, together with all arrears of pay due to him, and 10,000 ducats owed him by the Duke of Ferrara. It set forth the testator's intention that this money should be employed in defence of the Christian faith against the Turk. One condition was attached to the bequest. The legatees were to erect a statue to Colleoni on the Piazza of S. Mark. This, however, involved some difficulty; for the proud Republic had never accorded a similar honour, nor did they choose to encumber their splendid square with a monument. They evaded the condition by assigning the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marble pedestal by Andrea Verocchio and Alessandro Leopardi. Colleoni's liberal expenditure of wealth found its reward in the immortality conferred by art. While the names of Braccio, his master in the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiar to few but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamo or Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of the Chapel of S. John and the original of Leopardi's bronze. The annals of sculpture assign to Verocchio, of Florence, the principal share in this statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even granting that he designed the model, its execution must be attributed to his collaborator, the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loth to admit that the chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whose undisputed work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit and splendour of suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchio secured conscientious modelling for man and horse may be assumed; but I am fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates them both is due in no small measure to the handling of his northern fellow-craftsman. While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties, and base ambitions, which constitute the bulk of fifteenth-century Italian history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frank and manly, so simply pious and comparatively free from stain, as Colleoni. The only general of his day who can bear comparison with him for purity of public life and decency in conduct, was Federigo di Montefeltro. Even here, the comparison redounds to Colleoni's credit; for he, unlike the Duke of Urbino, rose to eminence by his own exertion in a profession fraught with peril to men of ambition and energy. Federigo started with a principality sufficient to satisfy his just desires for power. Nothing but his own sense of right and prudence restrained Colleoni upon the path which brought Francesco Sforza to a duchy by dishonourable dealings, and Carmagnola to the scaffold by questionable practice against his masters. * * * * * _CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX_ Few people visit Crema. It is a little country town of Lombardy, between Cremona and Treviglio, with no historic memories but very misty ones belonging to the days of the Visconti dynasty. On every side around the city walls stretch smiling vineyards and rich meadows, where the elms are married to the mulberry-trees by long festoons of foliage hiding purple grapes, where the sunflowers droop their heavy golden heads among tall stems of millet and gigantic maize, and here and there a rice-crop ripens in the marshy loam. In vintage time the carts, drawn by their white oxen, come creaking townward in the evening, laden with blue bunches. Down the long straight roads, between rows of poplars, they creep on; and on the shafts beneath the pyramid of fruit lie contadini stained with lees of wine. Far off across that 'waveless sea' of Lombardy, which has been the battlefield of countless generations, rise the dim grey Alps, or else pearled domes of thunder-clouds in gleaming masses over some tall solitary tower. Such backgrounds, full of peace, suggestive of almost infinite distance, and dignified with colours of incomparable depth and breadth, the Venetian painters loved. No landscape in Europe is more wonderful than this--thrice wonderful in the vastness of its arching heavens, in the stillness of its level plain, and in the bulwark of huge crested mountains, reared afar like bastions against the northern sky. The little town is all alive in this September weather. At every corner of the street, under rustling abeles and thick-foliaged planes, at the doors of palaces and in the yards of inns, men, naked from the thighs downward, are treading the red must into vats and tuns; while their mild-eyed oxen lie beneath them in the road, peaceably chewing the cud between one journey to the vineyard and another. It must not be imagined that the scene of Alma Tadema's 'Roman Vintage,' or what we fondly picture to our fancy of the Athenian Lenaea, is repeated in the streets of Crema. This modern treading of the wine-press is a very prosaic affair. The town reeks with a sour smell of old casks and crushed grape-skins, and the men and women at work bear no resemblance whatever to Bacchus and his crew. Yet even as it is, the Lombard vintage, beneath floods of sunlight and a pure blue sky, is beautiful; and he who would fain make acquaintance with Crema, should time his entry into the old town, if possible, on some still golden afternoon of autumn. It is then, if ever, that he will learn to love the glowing brickwork of its churches and the quaint terra-cotta traceries that form its chief artistic charm. How the unique brick architecture of the Lombard cities took its origin--whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliest middle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed of Gallic, Ligurian, Roman, and Teutonic elements, under the leadership of Longobardic rulers--is a question for antiquarians to decide. There can, however, be no doubt that the monuments of the Lombard style, as they now exist, are no less genuinely local, no less characteristic of the country they adorn, no less indigenous to the soil they sprang from, than the Attic colonnades of Mnesicles and Ictinus. What the marble quarries of Pentelicus were to the Athenian builders, the clay beneath their feet was to those Lombard craftsmen. From it they fashioned structures as enduring, towers as majestic, and cathedral aisles as solemn, as were ever wrought from chiselled stone. There is a true sympathy between those buildings and the Lombard landscape, which by itself might suffice to prove the originality of their almost unknown architects. The rich colour of the baked clay--finely modulated from a purplish red, through russet, crimson, pink, and orange, to pale yellow and dull grey--harmonises with the brilliant greenery of Lombard vegetation and with the deep azure of the distant Alpine range. Reared aloft above the flat expanse of plain, those square _torroni_, tapering into octagons and crowned with slender cones, break the long sweeping lines and infinite horizons with a contrast that affords relief, and yields a resting-place to tired eyes; while, far away, seen haply from some bridge above Ticino, or some high-built palace loggia, they gleam like columns of pale rosy fire against the front of mustering storm-clouds blue with rain. In that happy orchard of Italy, a pergola of vines in leaf, a clump of green acacias, and a campanile soaring above its church roof, brought into chance combination with the reaches of the plain and the dim mountain range, make up a picture eloquent in its suggestive beauty. Those ancient builders wrought cunningly with their material. The bricks are fashioned and fixed to last for all time. Exposed to the icy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer, and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheeding generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of their traceries--they still present angles as sharp as when they were but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first months of their building. This immunity from age and injury they owe partly to the imperishable nature of baked clay; partly to the care of the artists who selected and mingled the right sorts of earth, burned them with scrupulous attention, and fitted them together with a patience born of loving service. Each member of the edifice was designed with a view to its ultimate place. The proper curve was ascertained for cylindrical columns and for rounded arches. Larger bricks were moulded for the supporting walls, and lesser pieces were adapted to the airy vaults and lanterns. In the brickfield and the kiln the whole church was planned and wrought out in its details, before the hands that made a unity of all these scattered elements were set to the work of raising it in air. When they came to put the puzzle together, they laid each brick against its neighbour, filling up the almost imperceptible interstices with liquid cement composed of quicklime and fine sand in water. After five centuries the seams between the layers of bricks that make the bell-tower of S. Gottardo at Milan, yield no point of vantage to the penknife or the chisel. Nor was it in their welding of the bricks alone that these craftsmen showed their science. They were wont to enrich the surface with marble, sparingly but effectively employed--as in those slender detached columns, which add such beauty to the octagon of S. Gottardo, or in the string-courses of strange beasts and reptiles that adorn the church fronts of Pavia. They called to their aid the _mandorlato_ of Verona, supporting their porch pillars on the backs of couchant lions, inserting polished slabs on their façades, and building huge sarcophagi into their cloister alleys. Between terra-cotta and this marble of Verona there exists a deep and delicate affinity. It took the name of _mandorlato_, I suppose, from a resemblance to almond blossoms. But it is far from having the simple beauty of a single hue. Like all noble veined stones, it passes by a series of modulations and gradations through a gamut of associated rather than contrasted tints. Not the pink of the almond blossom only, but the creamy whiteness of the almond kernel, and the dull yellow of the almond nut may be found in it; and yet these colours are so blent and blurred to all-pervading mellowness, that nowhere is there any shock of contrast or violence of a preponderating tone. The veins which run in labyrinths of crossing, curving, and contorted lines all over its smooth surface add, no doubt, to this effect of unity. The polish, lastly, which it takes, makes the _mandorlato_ shine like a smile upon the sober face of the brickwork: for, serviceable as terra-cotta is for nearly all artistic purposes, it cannot reflect light or gain the illumination which comes from surface brightness. What the clay can do almost better than any crystalline material, may be seen in the mouldings so characteristic of Lombard architecture. Geometrical patterns of the rarest and most fanciful device; scrolls of acanthus foliage, and traceries of tendrils; Cupids swinging in festoons of vines; angels joining hands in dance, with fluttering skirts and windy hair, and mouths that symbol singing; grave faces of old men and beautiful profiles of maidens leaning from medallions; wide-winged genii filling the spandrils of cloister arches, and cherubs clustered in the rondure of rose-windows--ornaments like these, wrought from the plastic clay, and adapted with true taste to the requirements of the architecture, are familiar to every one who has studied the church front of Crema, the cloisters of the Certosa, the courts of the Ospedale Maggiore at Milan, or the public palace of Cremona. If the _mandorlato_ gives a smile to those majestic Lombard buildings, the terra-cotta decorations add the element of life and movement. The thought of the artist in its first freshness and vivacity is felt in them. They have all the spontaneity of improvisation, the seductive melody of unpremeditated music. Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient to the brain,' the _plasticatore_ has impressed his most fugitive dreams of beauty on it without effort; and what it cost him but a few fatigueless hours to fashion, the steady heat of the furnace has gifted with imperishable life. Such work, no doubt, has the defects of its qualities. As there are few difficulties to overcome, it suffers from a fatal facility--_nec pluteum coedit nec demorsos sapit ungues_. It is therefore apt to be unequal, touching at times the highest point of inspiration, as in the angels of Guccio at Perugia, and sinking not unfrequently into the commonplace of easygoing triviality, as in the common floral traceries of Milanese windows. But it is never laboured, never pedantic, never dulled by the painful effort to subdue an obstinate material to the artist's will. If marble is required to develop the strength of the few supreme sculptors, terra-cotta saves intact the fancies of a crowd of lesser men. When we reflect that all the force, solemnity, and beauty of the Lombard buildings was evoked from clay, we learn from them this lesson: that the thought of man needs neither precious material nor yet stubborn substance for the production of enduring masterpieces. The red earth was enough for God when He made man in His own image; and mud dried in the sun suffices for the artist, who is next to God in his creative faculty--since _non merita nome di creatore se non Iddio ed il poeta_. After all, what is more everlasting than terra-cotta? The hobnails of the boys who ran across the brickfields in the Roman town of Silchester, may still be seen, mingled with the impress of the feet of dogs and hoofs of goats, in the tiles discovered there. Such traces might serve as a metaphor for the footfall of artistic genius, when the form-giver has stamped his thought upon the moist clay, and fire has made that imprint permanent. Of all these Lombard edifices, none is more beautiful than the Cathedral of Crema, with its delicately finished campanile, built of choicely tinted yellow bricks, and ending in a lantern of the gracefullest, most airily capricious fancy. This bell-tower does not display the gigantic force of Cremona's famous torrazzo, shooting 396 feet into blue ether from the city square; nor can it rival the octagon of S. Gottardo for warmth of hue. Yet it has a character of elegance, combined with boldness of invention, that justifies the citizens of Crema in their pride. It is unique; and he who has not seen it does not know the whole resources of the Lombard style. The façade of the Cathedral displays that peculiar blending of Byzantine or Romanesque round arches with Gothic details in the windows, and with the acute angle of the central pitch, which forms the characteristic quality of the late _trecento_ Lombard manner. In its combination of purity and richness it corresponds to the best age of decorated work in English Gothic. What, however, strikes a Northern observer is the strange detachment of this elaborate façade from the main structure of the church. Like a frontispiece cut out of cardboard and pierced with ornamental openings, it shoots far above the low roof of the nave; so that at night the moon, rising above the southern aisle, shines through its topmost window, and casts the shadow of its tracery upon the pavement of the square. This is a constructive blemish to which the Italians in no part of the peninsula were sensitive. They seem to have regarded their church fronts as independent of the edifice, capable of separate treatment, and worthy in themselves of being made the subject of decorative skill. In the so-called Santuario of Crema--a circular church dedicated to S. Maria della Croce, outside the walls--the Lombard style has been adapted to the manner of the Mid-Renaissance. This church was raised in the last years of the fifteenth century by Gian Battista Battagli, an architect of Lodi, who followed the pure rules of taste, bequeathed to North Italian builders by Bramante. The beauty of the edifice is due entirely to its tranquil dignity and harmony of parts, the lightness of its circling loggia, and the just proportion maintained between the central structure and the four projecting porticoes. The sharp angles of these vestibules afford a contrast to the simplicity of the main building, while their clustered cupolas assist the general effect of roundness aimed at by the architect. Such a church as this proves how much may be achieved by the happy distribution of architectural masses. It was the triumph of the best Renaissance style to attain lucidity of treatment, and to produce beauty by geometrical proportion. When Leo Battista Alberti complained to his friend, Matteo di Bastia, that a slight alteration of the curves in his design for S. Francesco at Rimini would 'spoil his music,' _ciò che tu muti discorda tutta quella musica_, this is what he meant. The melody of lines and the harmony of parts made a symphony to his eyes no less agreeable than a concert of tuned lutes and voices to his ears; and to this concord he was so sensitive that any deviation was a discord. After visiting the churches of Crema and sauntering about the streets awhile, there is nothing left to do but to take refuge in the old Albergo del Pozzo. This is one of those queer Italian inns, which carry you away at once into a scene of Goldoni. It is part of some palace, where nobles housed their _bravi_ in the sixteenth century, and which the lesser people of to-day have turned into a dozen habitations. Its great stone staircase leads to a saloon upon which the various bedchambers open; and round its courtyard runs an open balcony, and from the court grows up a fig-tree poking ripe fruit against a bedroom window. Oleanders in tubs and red salvias in pots, and kitchen herbs in boxes, flourish on the pavement, where the ostler comes to wash his carriages, and where the barber shaves the poodle of the house. Visitors to the Albergo del Pozzo are invariably asked if they have seen the Museo; and when they answer in the negative, they are conducted with some ceremony to a large room on the ground-floor of the inn, looking out upon the courtyard and the fig-tree. It was here that I gained the acquaintance of Signor Folcioni, and became possessor of an object that has made the memory of Crema doubly interesting to me ever since. When we entered the Museo, we found a little old man, gentle, grave, and unobtrusive, varnishing the ugly portrait of some Signor of the _cinquecento_. Round the walls hung pictures, of mediocre value, in dingy frames; but all of them bore sounding titles. Titians, Lionardos, Guido Renis, and Luinis, looked down and waited for a purchaser. In truth this museum was a _bric-à-brac_ shop of a sort that is common enough in Italy, where treasures of old lace, glass, armour, furniture, and tapestry, may still be met with. Signor Folcioni began by pointing out the merits of his pictures; and after making due allowance for his zeal as amateur and dealer, it was possible to join in some of his eulogiums. A would-be Titian, for instance, bought in Verona from a noble house in ruins, showed Venetian wealth of colour in its gemmy greens and lucid crimsons shining from a background deep and glowing. Then he led us to a walnut-wood bureau of late Renaissance work, profusely carved with nymphs and Cupids, and armed men, among festoons of fruits embossed in high relief. Deeply drilled worm-holes set a seal of antiquity upon the blooming faces and luxuriant garlandslike the touch of Time who 'delves the parallels in beauty's brow.' On the shelves of an ebony cabinet close by he showed us a row of cups cut out of rock-crystal and mounted in gilt silver, with heaps of engraved gems, old snuff-boxes, coins, medals, sprays of coral, and all the indescribable lumber that one age flings aside as worthless for the next to pick up from the dust-heap and regard as precious. Surely the genius of culture in our century might be compared to a chiffonnier of Paris, who, when the night has fallen, goes into the streets, bag on back and lantern in hand, to rake up the waifs and strays a day of whirling life has left him. The next curiosity was an ivory carving of S. Anthony preaching to the fishes, so fine and small you held it on your palm, and used a lens to look at it. Yet there stood the Santo gesticulating, and there were the fishes in rows--the little fishes first, and then the middle-sized, and last of all the great big fishes almost out at sea, with their heads above the water and their mouths wide open, just as the _Fioretti di San Francesco_ describes them. After this came some original drawings of doubtful interest, and then a case of fifty-two _nielli_. These were of unquestionable value; for has not Cicognara engraved them on a page of his classic monograph? The thin silver plates, over which once passed the burin of Maso Finiguerra, cutting lines finer than hairs, and setting here a shadow in dull acid-eaten grey, and there a high light of exquisite polish, were far more delicate than any proofs impressed from them. These frail masterpieces of Florentine art--the first beginnings of line engraving--we held in our hands while Signor Folcioni read out Cicognara's commentary in a slow impressive voice, breaking off now and then to point at the originals before us. The sun had set, and the room was almost dark, when he laid his book down, and said: 'I have not much left to show--yet stay! Here are still some little things of interest.' He then opened the door into his bedroom, and took down from a nail above his bed a wooden Crucifix. Few things have fascinated me more than this Crucifix--produced without parade, half negligently, from the dregs of his collection by a dealer in old curiosities at Crema. The cross was, or is--for it is lying on the table now before me--twenty-one inches in length, made of strong wood, covered with coarse yellow parchment, and shod at the four ends with brass. The Christ is roughly hewn in reddish wood, coloured scarlet, where the blood streams from the five wounds. Over the head an oval medallion, nailed into the cross, serves as framework to a miniature of the Madonna, softly smiling with a Correggiesque simper. The whole Crucifix is not a work of art, but such as may be found in every convent. Its date cannot be earlier than the beginning of the eighteenth century. As I held it in my hand, I thought--perhaps this has been carried to the bedside of the sick and dying; preachers have brandished it from the pulpit over conscience-stricken congregations; monks have knelt before it on the brick floor of their cells, and novices have kissed it in the vain desire to drown their yearnings after the relinquished world; perhaps it has attended criminals to the scaffold, and heard the secrets of repentant murderers; but why should it be shown me as a thing of rarity? These thoughts passed through my mind, while Signor Folcioni quietly remarked: 'I bought this Cross from the Frati when their convent was dissolved in Crema.' Then he bade me turn it round, and showed a little steel knob fixed into the back between the arms. This was a spring. He pressed it, and the upper and lower parts of the cross came asunder; and holding the top like a handle, I drew out as from a scabbard a sharp steel blade, concealed in the thickness of the wood, behind the very body of the agonising Christ. What had been a crucifix became a deadly poniard in my grasp, and the rust upon it in the twilight looked like blood. 'I have often wondered,' said Signor Folcioni, 'that the Frati cared to sell me this.' There is no need to raise the question of the genuineness of this strange relic, though I confess to having had my doubts about it, or to wonder for what nefarious purposes the impious weapon was designed--whether the blade was inserted by some rascal monk who never told the tale, or whether it was used on secret service by the friars. On its surface the infernal engine carries a dark certainty of treason, sacrilege, and violence. Yet it would be wrong to incriminate the Order of S. Francis by any suspicion, and idle to seek the actual history of this mysterious weapon. A writer of fiction could indeed produce some dark tale in the style of De Stendhal's 'Nouvelles,' and christen it 'The Crucifix of Crema.' And how delighted would Webster have been if he had chanced to hear of such a sword-sheath! He might have placed it in the hands of Bosola for the keener torment of his Duchess. Flamineo might have used it; or the disguised friars, who made the deathbed of Bracciano hideous, might have plunged it in the Duke's heart after mocking his eyes with the figure of the suffering Christ. To imagine such an instrument of moral terror mingled with material violence, lay within the scope of Webster's sinister and powerful genius. But unless he had seen it with his eyes, what poet would have ventured to devise the thing and display it even in the dumb show of a tragedy? Fact is more wonderful than romance. No apocalypse of Antichrist matches what is told of Roderigo Borgia; and the crucifix of Crema exceeds the sombre fantasy of Webster. Whatever may be the truth about this cross, it has at any rate the value of a symbol or a metaphor. The idea which it materialises, the historical events of which it is a sign, may well arrest attention. A sword concealed in the crucifix--what emblem brings more forcibly to mind than this that two-edged glaive of persecution which Dominic unsheathed to mow down the populations of Provence and to make Spain destitute of men? Looking upon the crucifix of Crema, we may seem to see pestilence-stricken multitudes of Moors and Jews dying on the coasts of Africa and Italy. The Spaniards enter Mexico; and this is the cross they carry in their hands. They take possession of Peru; and while the gentle people of the Incas come to kiss the bleeding brows of Christ, they plunge this dagger in their sides. What, again, was the temporal power of the Papacy but a sword embedded in a cross? Each Papa Rè, when he ascended the Holy Chair, was forced to take the crucifix of Crema and to bear it till his death. A long procession of war-loving Pontiffs, levying armies and paying captains with the pence of S. Peter, in order to keep by arms the lands they had acquired by fraud, defiles before our eyes. First goes the terrible Sixtus IV., who died of grief when news was brought him that the Italian princes had made peace. He it was who sanctioned the conspiracy to murder the Medici in church, at the moment of the elevation of the Host. The brigands hired to do this work refused at the last moment. The sacrilege appalled them. 'Then,' says the chronicler, 'was found a priest, who, being used to churches, had no scruple.' The poignard this priest carried was this crucifix of Crema. After Sixtus came the blood-stained Borgia; and after him Julius II., whom the Romans in triumphal songs proclaimed a second Mars, and who turned, as Michelangelo expressed it, the chalices of Rome into swords and helms. Leo X., who dismembered Italy for his brother and nephew; and Clement VII., who broke the neck of Florence and delivered the Eternal City to the spoiler, follow. Of the antinomy between the Vicariate of Christ and an earthly kingdom, incarnated by these and other Holy Fathers, what symbol could be found more fitting than a dagger with a crucifix for case and covering? It is not easy to think or write of these matters without rhetoric. When I laid my head upon my pillow that night in the Albergo del Pozzo at Crema, it was full of such thoughts; and when at last sleep came, it brought with it a dream begotten doubtless by the perturbation of my fancy. For I thought that a brown Franciscan, with hollow cheeks, and eyes aflame beneath his heavy cowl, sat by my bedside, and, as he raised the crucifix in his lean quivering hands, whispered a tale of deadly passion and of dastardly revenge. His confession carried me away to a convent garden of Palermo; and there was love in the story, and hate that is stronger than love, and, for the ending of the whole matter, remorse which dies not even in the grave. Each new possessor of the crucifix of Crema, he told me, was forced to hear from him in dreams his dreadful history. But, since it was a dream and nothing more, why should I repeat it? I have wandered far enough already from the vintage and the sunny churches of the little Lombard town. * * * * * _CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE_ I It was a gala night. The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light and colour. Royalty in field-marshal's uniform and diamonds, attended by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where we were fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres presented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines, composed of noble faces, waving feathers, sparkling jewels, sculptured shoulders, uniforms, robes of costly stuffs and every conceivable bright colour. Light poured from the huge lustre in the centre of the roof, ran along the crimson velvet cushions of the boxes, and flashed upon the gilded frame of the proscenium--satyrs and acanthus scrolls carved in the manner of a century ago. Pit and orchestra scarcely contained the crowd of men who stood in lively conversation, their backs turned to the stage, their lorgnettes raised from time to time to sweep the boxes. This surging sea of faces and sober costumes enhanced by contrast the glitter, variety, and luminous tranquillity of the theatre above it. No one took much thought of the coming spectacle, till the conductor's rap was heard upon his desk, and the orchestra broke into the overture to Mozart's _Nozze_. Before they were half through, it was clear that we should not enjoy that evening the delight of perfect music added to the enchantment of so brilliant a scene. The execution of the overture was not exactly bad. But it lacked absolute precision, the complete subordination of all details to the whole. In rendering German music Italians often fail through want of discipline, or through imperfect sympathy with a style they will not take the pains to master. Nor, when the curtain lifted and the play began, was the vocalisation found in all parts satisfactory. The Contessa had a meagre _mezza voce_. Susanna, though she did not sing false, hovered on the verge of discords, owing to the weakness of an organ which had to be strained in order to make any effect on that enormous stage. On the other hand, the part of Almaviva was played with dramatic fire, and Figaro showed a truly Southern sense of comic fun. The scenes were splendidly mounted, and something of a princely grandeur--the largeness of a noble train of life--was added to the drama by the vast proportions of the theatre. It was a performance which, in spite of drawbacks, yielded pleasure. And yet it might have left me frigid but for the artist who played Cherubino. This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youth and petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her. The mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits--the richness of her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception of character, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion--into that relief which a sapphire gains from a setting of pearls. I can see her now, after the lapse of nearly twenty years, as she stood there singing in blue doublet and white mantle, with the slouched Spanish hat and plume of ostrich feathers, a tiny rapier at her side, and blue rosettes upon her white silk shoes! The _Nozze di Figaro_ was followed by a Ballo. This had for its theme the favourite legend of a female devil sent from the infernal regions to ruin a young man. Instead of performing the part assigned her, Satanella falls in love with the hero, sacrifices herself, and is claimed at last by the powers of goodness. _Quia multum amavit_, her lost soul is saved. If the opera left much to be desired, the Ballo was perfection. That vast stage of the Scala Theatre had almost overwhelmed the actors of the play. Now, thrown open to its inmost depths, crowded with glittering moving figures, it became a fairyland of fantastic loveliness. Italians possess the art of interpreting a serious dramatic action by pantomime. A Ballo with them is no mere affair of dancing--fine dresses, evolutions performed by brigades of pink-legged women with a fixed smile on their faces. It takes the rank of high expressive art. And the motive of this Ballo was consistently worked out in an intelligible sequence of well-ordered scenes. To moralise upon its meaning would be out of place. It had a conflict of passions, a rhythmical progression of emotions, a tragic climax in the triumph of good over evil. II At the end of the performance there were five persons in our box--the beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dined together first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposed that we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From the Scala Theatre to the Rebecchino is a walk of some three minutes. When we were seated at the supper-table and had talked some while upon indifferent topics, the enthusiasm roused in me by Pauline Lucca burst out. I broke a moment's silence by exclaiming, 'What a wonder-world music creates! I have lived this evening in a sphere of intellectual enjoyment raised to rapture. I never lived so fast before!' 'Do you really think so?' said Miranda. She had just finished a _beccafico_, and seemed disposed for conversation. 'Do you really think so? For my part, music is in a wholly different region from experience, thought, or feeling. What does it communicate to you?' And she hummed to herself the _motif_ of Cherubino's 'Non so più cosa son cosa faccio.'--'What does it teach me?' I broke in upon the melody. 'Why, to-night, when I heard the music, and saw her there, and felt the movement of the play, it seemed to me that a new existence was revealed. For the first time I understood what love might be in one most richly gifted for emotion.' Miranda bent her eyes on the table-cloth and played with her wineglass. 'I don't follow you at all. I enjoyed myself to-night. The opera, indeed, might have been better rendered. The ballet, I admit, was splendid. But when I remember the music--even the best of it--even Pauline Lucca's part'--here she looked up, and shot me a quick glance across the table--'I have mere music in my ears. Nothing more. Mere music!' The professor of biology, who was gifted with, a sense of music and had studied it scientifically, had now crunched his last leaf of salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our _tête-à-tête_. 'Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than music gives, is on the quest--how shall I put it?--of the Holy Grail.' 'And what,' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that music gives?' 'Dear young friend,' replied the professor, 'music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned. Just as in the case of shells and fossils, lovely in themselves, interesting for their history and classification, so is it with music. You must not seek an intellectual meaning. No; there is no _Inhalt_ in music' And he hummed contentedly the air of 'Voi che sapete.' While he was humming, Miranda whispered to me across the table, 'Separate the Lucca from the music.' 'But,' I answered rather hotly, for I was nettled by Miranda's argument _ad hominem_, 'But it is not possible in an opera to divide the music from the words, the scenery, the play, the actor. Mozart, when he wrote the score to Da Ponte's libretto, was excited to production by the situations. He did not conceive his melodies out of connection with a certain cast of characters, a given ethical environment.' 'I do not know, my dear young friend,' responded the professor, 'whether you have read Mozart's Life and letters. It is clearly shown in them how he composed airs at times and seasons when he had no words to deal with. These he afterwards used as occasion served. Whence I conclude that music was for him a free and lovely play of tone. The words of our excellent Da Ponte were a scaffolding to introduce his musical creations to the public. But without that carpenter's work, the melodies of Cherubino are _Selbst-ständig_, sufficient in themselves to vindicate their place in art. Do I interpret your meaning, gracious lady?' This he said bending to Miranda. 'Yes,' she replied. But she still played with her wineglass, and did not look as though she were quite satisfied. I meanwhile continued: 'Of course I have read Mozart's Life, and know how he went to work. But Mozart was a man of feeling, of experience, of ardent passions. How can you prove to me that the melodies he gave to Cherubino had not been evolved from situations similar to those in which Cherubino finds himself? How can you prove he did not feel a natural appropriateness in the _motifs_ he selected from his memory for Cherubino? How can you be certain that the part itself did not stimulate his musical faculty to fresh and still more appropriate creativeness? And if we must fall back on documents, do you remember what he said himself about the love-music in _Die Entführung?_ I think he tells us that he meant it to express his own feeling for the woman who had just become his wife.' Miranda looked up as though she were almost half-persuaded. Yet she hummed again 'Non so più,' then said to herself, 'Yes, it is wiser to believe with the professor that these are sequences of sounds, and nothing more.' Then she sighed. In the pause which followed, her husband, the famous critic, filled his glass, stretched his legs out, and began: 'You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of æsthetics. For my part, to-night I was thinking how much better fitted for the stage Beaumarchais' play was than this musical mongrel--this operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino--that sparkling little _enfant terrible_--becomes a sentimental fellow--a something I don't know what--between a girl and a boy--a medley of romance and impudence--anyhow a being quite unlike the sharply outlined playwright's page. I confess I am not a musician; the drama is my business, and I judge things by their fitness for the stage. My wife agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I like plays. To-night she was better pleased than I was; for she got good music tolerably well rendered, while I got nothing but a mangled comedy.' We bore the critic's monologue with patience. But once again the spirit, seeking after something which neither Miranda, nor her husband, nor the professor could be got to recognise, moved within me. I cried out at a venture, 'People who go to an opera must forget music pure and simple, must forget the drama pure and simple. You must welcome a third species of art, in which the play, the music, the singers with their voices, the orchestra with its instruments--Pauline Lucca, if you like, with her fascination' (and here I shot a side-glance at Miranda), 'are so blent as to create a world beyond the scope of poetry or music or acting taken by themselves. I give Mozart credit for having had insight into this new world, for having brought it near to us. And I hold that every fresh representation of his work is a fresh revelation of its possibilities.' To this the critic answered, 'You now seem to me to be confounding the limits of the several arts.' 'What!' I continued, 'is the drama but emotion presented in its most external forms as action? And what is music but emotion, in its most genuine essence, expressed by sound? Where then can a more complete artistic harmony be found than in the opera?' 'The opera,' replied our host, 'is a hybrid. You will probably learn to dislike artistic hybrids, if you have the taste and sense I give you credit for. My own opinion has been already expressed. In the _Nozze_, Beaumarchais' _Mariage de Figaro_ is simply spoiled. My friend the professor declares Mozart's music to be sufficient by itself, and the libretto to be a sort of machinery for its display. Miranda, I think, agrees with him. You plead eloquently for the hybrid. You have a right to your own view. These things are matters, in the final resort, of individual taste rather than of demonstrable principles. But I repeat that you are very young.' The critic drained his Lambrusco, and smiled at me. 'Yes, he is young,' added Miranda. 'He must learn to distinguish between music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present he mixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette. But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!' All this while Edoardo had bestowed devout attention on his supper. But it appeared that the drift of our discourse had not been lost by him. 'Well,' he said, 'you finely fibred people dissect and analyse. I am content with the _spettacolo_. That pleases. What does a man want more? The _Nozze_ is a comedy of life and manners. The music is adorable. To-night the women were not bad to look at--the Lucca was divine; the scenes--ingenious. I thought but little. I came away delighted. You could have a better play, Caro Signore!' (with a bow to our host). 'That is granted. You might have better music, Cara Signora!' (with a bow to Miranda). 'That too is granted. But when the play and the music come together--how shall I say?--the music helps the play, and the play helps the music; and we--well we, I suppose, must help both!' Edoardo's little speech was so ingenuous, and, what is more, so true to his Italian temperament, that it made us all laugh and leave the argument just where we found it. The bottles of Lambrusco supplied us each with one more glass; and while we were drinking them, Miranda, woman-like, taking the last word, but contradicting herself, softly hummed 'Non so più cosa son,' and 'Ah!' she said, 'I shall dream of love to-night!' We rose and said good-night. But when I had reached my bedroom in the Hôtel de la Ville, I sat down, obstinate and unconvinced, and penned this rhapsody, which I have lately found among papers of nearly twenty years ago. I give it as it stands. III Mozart has written the two melodramas of love--the one a melo-tragedy, the other a melo-comedy. But in really noble art, Comedy and Tragedy have faces of equal serenity and beauty. In the Vatican there are marble busts of the two Muses, differing chiefly in their head-dresses: that of Tragedy is an elaborately built-up structure of fillets and flowing hair, piled high above the forehead and descending in long curls upon the shoulders; while Comedy wears a similar adornment, with the addition of a wreath of vine-leaves and grape-bunches. The expression of the sister goddesses is no less finely discriminated. Over the mouth of Comedy plays a subtle smile, and her eyes are relaxed in a half-merriment. A shadow rests upon the slightly heavier brows of Tragedy, and her lips, though not compressed, are graver. So delicately did the Greek artist indicate the division between two branches of one dramatic art. And since all great art is classical, Mozart's two melodramas, _Don Giovanni_ and the _Nozze di Figaro_, though the one is tragic and the other comic, are twin-sisters, similar in form and feature. The central figure of the melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero of unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous interminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'for ever following and for ever foiled.' He is the incarnation of lust that has become a habit of the soul--rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel. His nature, originally noble and brave, has assumed the qualities peculiar to lust--rebellion, license, cruelty, defiant egotism. Yet, such as he is, doomed to punishment and execration, Don Juan remains a fit subject for poetry and music, because he is complete, because he is impelled by some demonic influence, spurred on by yearnings after an unsearchable delight. In his death, the spirit of chivalry survives, metamorphosed, it is true, into the spirit of revolt, yet still tragic, such as might animate the desperate sinner of a haughty breed. The central figure of the melo-comedy is Cherubino, the genius of love, no less insatiable, but undetermined to virtue or to vice. This is the point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him are still potential. His passion still hovers on the borderland of good and bad. And this undetermined passion is beautiful because of extreme freshness; of infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is the epitome of all that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state of still ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boy yesterday, a man to-morrow--to-day both and neither--something beyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man's responsibility and man's absorbing passions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening to self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend, hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a Northern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in a flash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties. _Nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amans amare_--'I loved not yet, but was in love with loving; I sought what I should love, being in love with loving.' That sentence, penned by S. Augustine and consecrated by Shelley, describes the mood of Cherubino. He loves at every moment of his life, with every pulse of his being. His object is not a beloved being, but love itself--the satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss which merely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. He only knows that he must love. And women love him--half as a plaything to be trifled with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This rising of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we describe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfect words to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? _E pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho chi m' oda, parlo d'amor con me._ But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to act Cherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline Lucca, or you would not ask this question. Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the _Nozze_. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is the standard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of the Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubino we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juan without cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightly bride Susanna. Each of these characters typifies one of the many species of love. But Cherubino anticipates and harmonises all. They are conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He is all love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all love, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic lover? He may become any one of these, for he contains the possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear glad angel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion. This moment in the unfolding of character Mozart has arrested and eternalised for us in Cherubino's melodies; for it is the privilege of art to render things most fugitive and evanescent fixed imperishably in immortal form. IV This is indeed a rhapsodical production. Miranda was probably right. Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the _Nozze_ thus. Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct was well grounded. Music, especially when wedded to words, more especially when those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion. It will not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds; that the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune, and only used the words to get it vocalised. We are forced to go farther back, and ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first place to the composer? why did he use it precisely in connection with this dramatic situation? How can we answer these questions except by supposing that music was for him the utterance through art of some emotion? The final fact of human nature is emotion, crystallising itself in thought and language, externalising itself in action and art. 'What,' said Novalis, 'are thoughts but pale dead feelings?' Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to music an emotional content of some kind. I would go farther, and assert that, while a merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what constitutes a musical dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of his libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to do this with effect. That the Cherubino of Mozart's _Nozze_ is quite different from Beaumarchais' Cherubin does not affect this question. He is a new creation, just because Mozart could not, or would not, conceive the character of the page in Beaumarchais' sprightly superficial spirit. He used the part to utter something unutterable except by music about the soul of the still adolescent lover. The libretto-part and the melodies, taken together, constitute a new romantic ideal, consistent with experience, but realised with the intensity and universality whereby art is distinguished from life. Don Juan was a myth before Mozart touched him with the magic wand of music. Cherubino became a myth by the same Prospero's spell. Both characters have the universality, the symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings. That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music made for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for the music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical condition, and is independent of his boyishness of conduct. This further explains why there may be so many renderings of Cherubino's melodies. Mozart idealised an infinite emotion. The singer is forced to define; the actor also is forced to define. Each introduces his own limit on the feeling. When the actor and the singer meet together in one personality, this definition of emotion becomes of necessity doubly specific. The condition of all music is that it depends in a great measure on the temperament of the interpreter for its momentary shade of expression, and this dependence is of course exaggerated when the music is dramatic. Furthermore, the subjectivity of the audience enters into the problem as still another element of definition. It may therefore be fairly said that, in estimating any impression produced by Cherubino's music, the original character of the page, transplanted from French comedy to Italian opera, Mozart's conception of that character, Mozart's specific quality of emotion and specific style of musical utterance, together with the contralto's interpretation of the character and rendering of the music, according to her intellectual capacity, artistic skill, and timbre of voice, have collaborated with the individuality of the hearer. Some of the constituents of the ever-varying product--a product which is new each time the part is played--are fixed. Da Ponte's Cherubino and Mozart's melodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer and the listener change on each occasion. To assert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, to assert that he only cared about it _quâ_ music, is the same as to say that the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion upon canvas, the sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lap of Mary, meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of their forms and colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that the artist has no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist's nature is unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue. It seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying that to expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongs to poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound. But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive; rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precision is itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value of the counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is a chord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought, while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region of emotion which has not been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotion through the thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has become thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and has taken to itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore the message of music can never rightly be translated into words. It is the very largeness and vividness of the sphere of simple feeling which makes its symbolical counterpart in sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this incontestable defect of seeming vagueness, emotion expressed by music is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, than the same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, it is more immediate, as compensation for being less intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, an indistinct, where each consciousness defines and sets a limitary form. V A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequently finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. This is the point to which the performance of Cherubino's part by Pauline Lucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me--that I have to settle with myself what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be the proper function of music as one of the fine arts. 'Art,' said Goethe, 'is but form-giving.' We might vary this definition, and say, 'Art is a method of expression or presentation.' Then comes the question: If art gives form, if it is a method of expression or presentation, to what does it give form, what does it express or present? The answer certainly must be: Art gives form to human consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man. Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening of manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all events, is its prime function. While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, with form, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the arts employs a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to that medium. The vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are material substances (like stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words. The masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation of their characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded as the craftsman's paramount concern. And in a certain sense this is a right conclusion; for dexterity in the manipulation of the chosen vehicle and power to create a beautiful object, distinguish the successful artist from the man who may have had like thoughts and feelings. This dexterity, this power, are the properties of the artist _quâ_ artist. Yet we must not forget that the form created by the artist for the expression of a thought or feeling is not the final end of art itself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation through which the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the indispensable condition under which the artistic manifestation of the spiritual content must he made. It is the business of art to create an ideal world, in which perception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human life sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should not only estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty for presenting beauty to the æsthetic sense, but that we should also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to invest with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessary that the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist's own. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, the conception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael's 'Madonna di San Sisto.' Still the personality of the artist, his own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking and feeling, his individual attitude towards the material given to him in ideas of human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject and of form, and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take an example: supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is given to the artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the work of art which he produces. But his personal qualities and technical performance determine the degree of success or failure to which he attains in presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty. Signorelli fails where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely form to the religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime, and Raphael of the beautiful. Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what man thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide as life. But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that this subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presented directly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does not teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art's domain. Truth and goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and goodness assume the shape of truth, and in religion truth and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, the unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in art. Whatever art has touched acquires a concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in art have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence. It is on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain portions of the mediæval Christian mythology lent themselves so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. Its secondary aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautiful form has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocent enjoyment. * * * * * From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being can make or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form some portion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary. In other words, there is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, that subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad according as the subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the laws of beauty special to the art itself. Thus we obtain two standards for æsthetic criticism. We judge a statue, for example, both by the sculptor's intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical skill and sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment by Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been more successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because the former has been better understood, although the painter's skill in each is equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor's spirit, finish of execution, and originality of design, while we deplore that want of sympathy with the heroic character which makes his type of physical beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expression vacuous. If the phrase 'Art for art's sake' has any meaning, this meaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, thinks exclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or the quality of beauty. There are many inducements for the artist thus to narrow his function, and for the critic to assist him by applying the canons of a soulless connoisseurship to his work; for the conception of the subject is but the starting-point in art-production, and the artist's difficulties and triumphs as a craftsman lie in the region of technicalities. He knows, moreover, that, however deep or noble his idea may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail in skill or be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a statue or a picture, is the form found for it; and so the form itself seems all-important. The artist, therefore, too easily imagines that he may neglect his theme; that a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced composition, or, as Cellini put it, 'un bel corpo ignudo,' is enough. And this is especially easy in an age which reflects much upon the arts, and pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts and feelings are not of the kind which translate themselves readily into artistic form. But, after all, a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced composition, a sonorous stanza, a learned essay in counterpoint, are not enough. They are all excellent good things, yielding delight to the artistic sense and instruction to the student. Yet when we think of the really great statues, pictures, poems, music of the world, we find that these are really great because of something more--and that more is their theme, their presentation of a noble portion of the human soul. Artists and art-students may be satisfied with perfect specimens of a craftsman's skill, independent of his theme; but the mass of men will not be satisfied; and it is as wrong to suppose that art exists for artists and art-students, as to talk of art for art's sake. Art exists for humanity. Art transmutes thought and feeling into terms of beautiful form. Art is great and lasting in proportion as it appeals to the human consciousness at large, presenting to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form. VI It was necessary in the first place firmly to apprehend the truth that the final end of all art is the presentation of a spiritual content; it is necessary in the next place to remove confusions by considering the special circumstances of the several arts. Each art has its own vehicle of presentation. What it can present and how it must present it, depends upon the nature of this vehicle. Thus, though architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, meet upon the common ground of spiritualised experience--though the works of art produced by the architect, sculptor, painter, musician, poet, emanate from the spiritual nature of the race, are coloured by the spiritual nature of the men who make them, and express what is spiritual in humanity under concrete forms invented for them by the artist--yet it is certain that all of these arts do not deal exactly with the same portions of this common material in the same way or with the same results. Each has its own department. Each exhibits qualities of strength and weakness special to itself. To define these several departments, to explain the relation of these several vehicles of presentation to the common subject-matter, is the next step in criticism. * * * * * Of the fine arts, architecture alone subserves utility. We build for use. But the geometrical proportions which the architect observes, contain the element of beauty and powerfully influence the soul. Into the language of arch and aisle and colonnade, of cupola and façade and pediment, of spire and vault, the architect translates emotion, vague perhaps but deep, mute but unmistakable. When we say that a building is sublime or graceful, frivolous or stern, we mean that sublimity or grace, frivolity or sternness, is inherent in it. The emotions connected with these qualities are inspired in us when we contemplate it, and are presented to us by its form. Whether the architect deliberately aimed at the sublime or graceful--whether the dignified serenity of the Athenian genius sought to express itself in the Parthenon, and the mysticism of mediæval Christianity in the gloom of Chartres Cathedral--whether it was Renaissance paganism which gave its mundane pomp and glory to S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness of royalty its specious splendour to the palace of Versailles--need not be curiously questioned. The fact that we are impelled to raise these points, that architecture more almost than any art connects itself indissolubly with the life, the character, the moral being of a nation and an epoch, proves that we are justified in bringing it beneath our general definition of the arts. In a great measure because it subserves utility, and is therefore dependent upon the necessities of life, does architecture present to us through form the human spirit. Comparing the palace built by Giulio Romano for the Dukes of Mantua with the contemporary castle of a German prince, we cannot fail at once to comprehend the difference of spiritual conditions, as these displayed themselves in daily life, which then separated Italy from the Teutonic nations. But this is not all. Spiritual quality in the architect himself finds clear expression in his work. Coldness combined with violence marks Brunelleschi's churches; a certain suavity and well-bred taste the work of Bramante; while Michelangelo exhibits wayward energy in his Library of S. Lorenzo, and Amadeo self-abandonment to fancy in his Lombard chapels. I have chosen examples from one nation and one epoch in order that the point I seek to make, the demonstration of a spiritual quality in buildings, may be fairly stated. * * * * * Sculpture and painting distinguish themselves from the other fine arts by the imitation of concrete existences in nature. They copy the bodies of men and animals, the aspects of the world around us, and the handiwork of men. Yet, in so far as they are rightly arts, they do not make imitation an object in itself. The grapes of Zeuxis at which birds pecked, the painted dog at which a cat's hair bristles--if such grapes or such a dog were ever put on canvas--are but evidences of the artist's skill, not of his faculty as artist. These two plastic, or, as I prefer to call them, figurative arts, use their imitation of the external world for the expression, the presentation of internal, spiritual things. The human form is for them the outward symbol of the inner human spirit, and their power of presenting spirit is limited by the means at their disposal. Sculpture employs stone, wood, clay, the precious metals, to model forms, detached and independent, or raised upon a flat surface in relief. Its domain is the whole range of human character and consciousness, in so far as these can be indicated by fixed facial expression, by physical type, and by attitude. If we dwell for an instant on the greatest historical epoch of sculpture, we shall understand the domain of this art in its range and limitation. At a certain point of Greek development the Hellenic Pantheon began to be translated by the sculptors into statues; and when the genius of the Greeks expired in Rome, the cycle of their psychological conceptions had been exhaustively presented through this medium. During that long period of time, the most delicate gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, were presented to the contemplation of the consciousness which gave them being, in appropriate types. Strength and swiftness, massive force and airy lightness, contemplative repose and active energy, voluptuous softness and refined grace, intellectual sublimity and lascivious seductiveness--the whole rhythm of qualities which can be typified by bodily form--were analysed, selected, combined in various degrees, to incarnate the religious conceptions of Zeus, Aphrodite, Herakles, Dionysus, Pallas, Fauns and Satyrs, Nymphs of woods and waves, Tritons, the genius of Death, heroes and hunters, lawgivers and poets, presiding deities of minor functions, man's lustful appetites and sensual needs. All that men think, or do, or are, or wish for, or imagine in this world, had found exact corporeal equivalents. Not physiognomy alone, but all the portions of the body upon which the habits of the animating soul are wont to stamp themselves, were studied and employed as symbolism. Uranian Aphrodite was distinguished from her Pandemic sister by chastened lust-repelling loveliness. The muscles of Herakles were more ponderous than the tense sinews of Achilles. The Hermes of the palæstra bore a torso of majestic depth; the Hermes, who carried messages from heaven, had limbs alert for movement. The brows of Zeus inspired awe; the breasts of Dionysus breathed delight. A race accustomed, as the Greeks were, to read this symbolism, accustomed, as the Greeks were, to note the individuality of naked form, had no difficulty in interpreting the language of sculpture. Nor is there now much difficulty in the task. Our surest guide to the subject of a basrelief or statue is study of the physical type considered as symbolical of spiritual quality. From the fragment of a torso the true critic can say whether it belongs to the athletic or the erotic species. A limb of Bacchus differs from a limb of Poseidon. The whole psychological conception of Aphrodite Pandemos enters into every muscle, every joint, no less than into her physiognomy, her hair, her attitude. There is, however, a limit to the domain of sculpture. This art deals most successfully with personified generalities. It is also strong in the presentation of incarnate character. But when it attempts to tell a story, we often seek in vain its meaning. Battles of Amazons or Centaurs upon basreliefs, indeed, are unmistakable. The subject is indicated here by some external sign. The group of Laocoon appeals at once to a reader of Virgil, and the divine vengeance of Leto's children upon Niobe is manifest in the Uffizzi marbles. But who are the several heroes of the Æginetan pediment, and what was the subject of the Pheidian statues on the Parthenon? Do the three graceful figures of a basrelief which exists at Naples and in the Villa Albani, represent Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, or Antiope and her two sons? Was the winged and sworded genius upon the Ephesus column meant for a genius of Death or a genius of Love? This dimness of significance indicates the limitation of sculpture, and inclines some of those who feel its charm to assert that the sculptor seeks to convey no intellectual meaning, that he is satisfied with the creation of beautiful form. There is sense in this revolt against the faith which holds that art is nothing but a mode of spiritual presentation. Truly the artist aims at producing beauty, is satisfied if he conveys delight. But it is impossible to escape from the certainty that, while he is creating forms of beauty, he means something; and that something, that theme for which he finds the form, is part of the world's spiritual heritage. Only the crudest works of plastic art, capricci and arabesques, have no intellectual content; and even these are good in so far as they convey the playfulness of fancy. Painting employs colours upon surfaces--walls, panels, canvas. What has been said about sculpture will apply in a great measure to this art. The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with a view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. A statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in ideal form, fixed and frozen for eternity. The picture is a reflection cast upon a magic glass; not less permanent, but reduced to a shadow of reality. To follow these distinctions farther would be alien from the present purpose. It is enough to repeat that, within their several spheres, according to their several strengths and weaknesses, both sculpture and painting present the spirit to us only as the spirit shows itself immersed in things of sense. The light of a lamp enclosed within an alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn of lustre and toned to coloured softness. Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. But he will have failed of the highest if the light within burns dim, or if he gives the world a lamp in which no spiritual flame is lighted. * * * * * Music transports us to a different region. It imitates nothing. It uses pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind--so artificial that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music relies upon mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility. It is the purest art of pleasure--the truest paradise and playground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even less power than sculpture, to tell a story or to communicate an idea. For we must remember that when music is married to words, the words, and not the music, reach our thinking faculty. And yet, in spite of all, music presents man's spirit to itself through form. The domain of the spirit over which music reigns, is emotion--not defined emotion, not feeling even so defined as jealousy or anger--but those broad bases of man's being out of which emotions spring, defining themselves through action into this or that set type of feeling. Architecture, we have noticed, is so connected with specific modes of human existence, that from its main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who used it. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to the imitation of external things, have all the help which experience and, association render. The mere artificiality of music's vehicle separates it from life and makes its message untranslatable. Yet, as I have already pointed out, this very disability under which it labours is the secret of its extraordinary potency. Nothing intervenes between the musical work of art and the fibres of the sentient being it immediately thrills. We do not seek to say what music means. We feel the music. And if a man should pretend that the music has not passed beyond his ears, has communicated nothing but a musical delight, he simply tells us that he has not felt music. The ancients on this point were wiser than some moderns when, without pretending to assign an intellectual significance to music, they held it for an axiom that one type of music bred one type of character, another type another. A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by changes in its constitution. It is of the utmost importance, said Aristotle, to provide in education for the use of the ennobling and the fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody occurs to the composer, which he certainly connects with no act of the reason, which he is probably unconscious of connecting with any movement of his feeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional mood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus impromptu, he is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that this work has correspondence with emotion. Beethoven calls one symphony Heroic, another Pastoral; of the opening of another he says, 'Fate knocks at the door.' Mozart sets comic words to the mass-music of a friend, in order to mark his sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment. All composers use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, Con Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their music ought to represent. * * * * * Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and consider two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any system of æsthetics. These are dancing and acting. Dancing uses the living human form, and presents feeling or action, the passions and the deeds of men, in artificially educated movements of the body. The element of beauty it possesses, independently of the beauty of the dancer, is rhythm. Acting or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm but as an ideal reproduction of reality. The actor is what he represents, and the element of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation. It is his duty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, not perhaps exactly as Othello and Orestes were, but as the essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought to be. The actor can do this in dumb show. Some of the greatest actors of the ancient world were mimes. But he usually interprets a poet's thought, and attempts to present an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which has for its advantage his own personality in play. * * * * * The last of the fine arts is literature; or, in the narrower sphere of which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. Poetry employs words in fixed rhythms, which we call metres. Only a small portion of its effect is derived from the beauty of its sound. It appeals to the sense of hearing far less immediately than music does. It makes no appeal to the eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour. It produces no tangible object. But language being the storehouse of all human experience, language being the medium whereby spirit communicates with spirit in affairs of life, the vehicle which transmits to us the thoughts and feelings of the past, and on which we rely for continuing our present to the future, it follows that, of all the arts, poetry soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home in the region of the spirit. What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it more than balances by intellectual intensity. Its significance is unmistakable, because it employs the very material men use in their exchange of thoughts and correspondence of emotions. To the bounds of its empire there is no end. It embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts. By words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts. Philosophy finds place in poetry; and life itself, refined to its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the realms where unattainable and imperceptible will have no meaning. If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the human spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestably than any other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gauge its accuracy. For words are the spirit, manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no longer puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty--such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find melody quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a Venetian picture meaningless) is a contradiction in terms. In poetry, life, or a portion of life, lives again, resuscitated and presented to our mental faculty through art. The best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life, or its intensest moments. Therefore the extensive species of the drama and the epic, the intensive species of the lyric, have been ever held in highest esteem. Only a half-crazy critic flaunts the paradox that poetry is excellent in so far as it assimilates the vagueness of music, or estimates a poet by his power of translating sense upon the borderland of nonsense into melodious words. Where poetry falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in the quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concreteness. Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye and to the intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses by indirect suggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most complicated kind of poetry, relies upon the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kind of poetry, seeks the aid of music. But these comparative deficiencies are overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by the width and depth, the intelligibility and power, the flexibility and multitudinous associations, of language. The other arts are limited in what they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life of man which poetry cannot express. Poetry says everything in man's own language to the mind. The other arts appeal imperatively, each in its own region, to man's senses; and the mind receives art's message by the help of symbols from the world of sense. Poetry lacks this immediate appeal to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts through intellectual perception upon all the faculties that make men what they are. VII I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to indicate the presence of the vital spirit, the essential element of thought or feeling, in the work of art. I said it radiated through the form, as lamplight through an alabaster vase. Now the skill of the artist is displayed in modelling that vase, in giving it shape, rich and rare, and fashioning its curves with subtlest workmanship. In so far as he is a craftsman, the artist's pains must be bestowed upon this precious vessel of the animating theme. In so far as he has power over beauty, he must exert it in this plastic act. It is here that he displays dexterity; here that he creates; here that he separates himself from other men who think and feel. The poet, more perhaps than any other artist, needs to keep this steadily in view; for words being our daily vehicle of utterance, it may well chance that the alabaster vase of language should be hastily or trivially modelled. This is the true reason why 'neither gods nor men nor the columns either suffer mediocrity in singers.' Upon the poet it is specially incumbent to see that he has something rare to say and some rich mode of saying it. The figurative arts need hardly be so cautioned. They run their risk in quite a different direction. For sculptor and for painter, the danger is lest he should think that alabaster vase his final task. He may too easily be satisfied with moulding a beautiful but empty form. * * * * * The last word on the topic of the arts is given in one sentence. Let us remember that every work of art enshrines a spiritual subject, and that the artist's power is shown in finding for that subject a form of ideal loveliness. Many kindred points remain to be discussed; as what we mean by beauty, which is a condition indispensable to noble art; and what are the relations of the arts to ethics. These questions cannot now be raised. It is enough in one essay to have tried to vindicate the spirituality of art in general. * * * * * _A VENETIAN MEDLEY_ I.--FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND FAMILIARITY It is easy to feel and to say something obvious about Venice. The influence of this sea-city is unique, immediate, and unmistakable. But to express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when the first astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when the spirit of the place has been harmonised through familiarity with our habitual mood, is difficult. Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture. From our earliest visits, if these have been measured by days rather than weeks, we carry away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sun-litten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth's proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its grave in mud and brine. These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices of violin and clarinette. To the contrasted passions of our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in more tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render something of the patterns I behold. II.--A LODGING IN SAN VIO I have escaped from the hotels with their bustle of tourists and crowded _tables-d'hôte_. My garden stretches down to the Grand Canal, closed at the end with a pavilion, where I lounge and smoke and watch the cornice of the Prefettura fretted with gold in sunset light. My sitting-room and bed-room face the southern sun. There is a canal below, crowded with gondolas, and across its bridge the good folk of San Vio come and go the whole day long--men in blue shirts with enormous hats, and jackets slung on their left shoulder; women in kerchiefs of orange and crimson. Barelegged boys sit upon the parapet, dangling their feet above the rising tide. A hawker passes, balancing a basket full of live and crawling crabs. Barges filled with Brenta water or Mirano wine take up their station at the neighbouring steps, and then ensues a mighty splashing and hurrying to and fro of men with tubs upon their heads. The brawny fellows in the wine-barge are red from brows to breast with drippings of the vat. And now there is a bustle in the quarter. A _barca_ has arrived from S. Erasmo, the island of the market-gardens. It is piled with gourds and pumpkins, cabbages and tomatoes, pomegranates and pears--a pyramid of gold and green and scarlet. Brown men lift the fruit aloft, and women bending from the pathway bargain for it. A clatter of chaffering tongues, a ring of coppers, a Babel of hoarse sea-voices, proclaim the sharpness of the struggle. When the quarter has been served, the boat sheers off diminished in its burden. Boys and girls are left seasoning their polenta with a slice of _zucca_, while the mothers of a score of families go pattering up yonder courtyard with the material for their husbands' supper in their handkerchiefs. Across the canal, or more correctly the _Rio_, opens a wide grass-grown court. It is lined on the right hand by a row of poor dwellings, swarming with gondoliers' children. A garden wall runs along the other side, over which I can see pomegranate-trees in fruit and pergolas of vines. Far beyond are more low houses, and then the sky, swept with sea-breezes, and the masts of an ocean-going ship against the dome and turrets of Palladio's Redentore. This is my home. By day it is as lively as a scene in _Masaniello_. By night, after nine o'clock, the whole stir of the quarter has subsided. Far away I hear the bell of some church tell the hours. But no noise disturbs my rest, unless perhaps a belated gondolier moors his boat beneath the window. My one maid, Catina, sings at her work the whole day through. My gondolier, Francesco, acts as valet. He wakes me in the morning, opens the shutters, brings sea-water for my bath, and takes his orders for the day. 'Will it do for Chioggia, Francesco?' 'Sissignore! The Signorino has set off in his _sandolo_ already with Antonio. The Signora is to go with us in the gondola.' 'Then get three more men, Francesco, and see that all of them can sing.' III.--TO CHIOGGIA WITH OAR AND SAIL The _sandolo_ is a boat shaped like the gondola, but smaller and lighter, without benches, and without the high steel prow or _ferro_ which distinguishes the gondola. The gunwale is only just raised above the water, over which the little craft skims with a rapid bounding motion, affording an agreeable variation from the stately swanlike movement of the gondola. In one of these boats--called by him the _Fisolo_ or Seamew--my friend Eustace had started with Antonio, intending to row the whole way to Chioggia, or, if the breeze favoured, to hoist a sail and help himself along. After breakfast, when the crew for my gondola had been assembled, Francesco and I followed with the Signora. It was one of those perfect mornings which occur as a respite from broken weather, when the air is windless and the light falls soft through haze on the horizon. As we broke into the lagoon behind the Redentore, the islands in front of us, S. Spirito, Poveglia, Malamocco, seemed as though they were just lifted from the sea-line. The Euganeans, far away to westward, were bathed in mist, and almost blent with the blue sky. Our four rowers put their backs into their work; and soon we reached the port of Malamocco, where a breeze from the Adriatic caught us sideways for a while. This is the largest of the breaches in the Lidi, or raised sand-reefs, which protect Venice from the sea: it affords an entrance to vessels of draught like the steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. We crossed the dancing wavelets of the port; but when we passed under the lee of Pelestrina, the breeze failed, and the lagoon was once again a sheet of undulating glass. At S. Pietro on this island a halt was made to give the oarsmen wine, and here we saw the women at their cottage doorways making lace. The old lace industry of Venice has recently been revived. From Burano and Pelestrina cargoes of hand-made imitations of the ancient fabrics are sent at intervals to Jesurun's magazine at S. Marco. He is the chief _impresario_ of the trade, employing hundreds of hands, and speculating for a handsome profit in the foreign market on the price he gives his workwomen. Now we are well lost in the lagoons--Venice no longer visible behind; the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at the mouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in silver silhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, the suggestion of coast-lines scarcely felt in this infinity of lustre, all remind us that our voyage is confined to the charmed limits of an inland lake. At length the jutting headland of Pelestrina was reached. We broke across the Porto di Chioggia, and saw Chioggia itself ahead--a huddled mass of houses low upon the water. One by one, as we rowed steadily, the fishing-boats passed by, emerging from their harbour for a twelve hours' cruise upon the open sea. In a long line they came, with variegated sails of orange, red, and saffron, curiously chequered at the corners, and cantled with devices in contrasted tints. A little land-breeze carried them forward. The lagoon reflected their deep colours till they reached the port. Then, slightly swerving eastward on their course, but still in single file, they took the sea and scattered, like beautiful bright-plumaged birds, who from a streamlet float into a lake, and find their way at large according as each wills. The Signorino and Antonio, though want of wind obliged them to row the whole way from Venice, had reached Chioggia an hour before, and stood waiting to receive us on the quay. It is a quaint town this Chioggia, which has always lived a separate life from that of Venice. Language and race and customs have held the two populations apart from those distant years when Genoa and the Republic of S. Mark fought their duel to the death out in the Chioggian harbours, down to these days, when your Venetian gondolier will tell you that the Chioggoto loves his pipe more than his _donna_ or his wife. The main canal is lined with substantial palaces, attesting to old wealth and comfort. But from Chioggia, even more than from Venice, the tide of modern luxury and traffic has retreated. The place is left to fishing folk and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest quarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and _calli_, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages from Goldoni's and Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and _soprani_. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of _Xe_ and _Ga_. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani in the fourteenth century. From his prison in blockaded Venice the great admiral was sent forth on a forlorn hope, and blocked victorious Doria here with boats on which the nobles of the Golden Book had spent their fortunes. Pietro Doria boasted that with his own hands he would bridle the bronze horses of S. Mark. But now he found himself between the navy of Carlo Zeno in the Adriatic and the flotilla led by Vittore Pisani across the lagoon. It was in vain that the Republic of S. George strained every nerve to send him succour from the Ligurian sea; in vain that the lords of Padua kept opening communications with him from the mainland. From the 1st of January 1380 till the 21st of June the Venetians pressed the blockade ever closer, grappling their foemen in a grip that if relaxed one moment would have hurled him at their throats. The long and breathless struggle ended in the capitulation at Chioggia of what remained of Doria's forty-eight galleys and fourteen thousand men. These great deeds are far away and hazy. The brief sentences of mediæval annalists bring them less near to us than the _chroniques scandaleuses_ of good-for-nothing scoundrels, whose vulgar adventures might be revived at the present hour with scarce a change of setting. Such is the force of _intimité_ in literature. And yet Baffo and Casanova are as much of the past as Doria and Pisani. It is only perhaps that the survival of decadence in all we see around us, forms a fitting framework for our recollections of their vividly described corruption. Not far from the landing-place a balustraded bridge of ample breadth and large bravura manner spans the main canal. Like everything at Chioggia, it is dirty and has fallen from its first estate. Yet neither time nor injury can obliterate style or wholly degrade marble. Hard by the bridge there are two rival inns. At one of these we ordered a seadinner--crabs, cuttlefishes, soles, and turbots--which we ate at a table in the open air. Nothing divided us from the street except a row of Japanese privet-bushes in hooped tubs. Our banquet soon assumed a somewhat unpleasant similitude to that of Dives; for the Chioggoti, in all stages of decrepitude and squalor, crowded round to beg for scraps--indescribable old women, enveloped in their own petticoats thrown over their heads; girls hooded with sombre black mantles; old men wrinkled beyond recognition by their nearest relatives; jabbering, half-naked boys; slow, slouching fishermen with clay pipes in their mouths and philosophical acceptance on their sober foreheads. That afternoon the gondola and sandolo were lashed together side by side. Two sails were raised, and in this lazy fashion we stole homewards, faster or slower according as the breeze freshened or slackened, landing now and then on islands, sauntering along the sea-walls which bulwark Venice from the Adriatic, and singing--those at least of us who had the power to sing. Four of our Venetians had trained voices and memories of inexhaustible music. Over the level water, with the ripple plashing at our keel, their songs went abroad, and mingled with the failing day. The barcaroles and serenades peculiar to Venice were, of course, in harmony with the occasion. But some transcripts from classical operas were even more attractive, through the dignity with which these men invested them. By the peculiarity of their treatment the _recitativo_ of the stage assumed a solemn movement, marked in rhythm, which removed it from the commonplace into antiquity, and made me understand how cultivated music may pass back by natural, unconscious transition into the realm of popular melody. The sun sank, not splendidly, but quietly in banks of clouds above the Alps. Stars came out, uncertainly at first, and then in strength, reflected on the sea. The men of the Dogana watch-boat challenged us and let us pass. Madonna's lamp was twinkling from her shrine upon the harbour-pile. The city grew before us. Stealing into Venice in that calm--stealing silently and shadowlike, with scarce a ruffle of the water, the masses of the town emerging out of darkness into twilight, till San Giorgio's gun boomed with a flash athwart our stern, and the gas-lamps of the Piazzetta swam into sight; all this was like a long enchanted chapter of romance. And now the music of our men had sunk to one faint whistling from Eustace of tunes in harmony with whispers at the prow. Then came the steps of the Palazzo Venier and the deep-scented darkness of the garden. As we passed through to supper, I plucked a spray of yellow Banksia rose, and put it in my buttonhole. The dew was on its burnished leaves, and evening had drawn forth its perfume. IV.--MORNING RAMBLES A story is told of Poussin, the French painter, that when he was asked why he would not stay in Venice, he replied, 'If I stay here, I shall become a colourist!' A somewhat similar tale is reported of a fashionable English decorator. While on a visit to friends in Venice, he avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic passion to a London drawing-room. Anyhow, it is exceedingly difficult to escape from colour in the air of Venice, or from Tintoretto in her buildings. Long, delightful mornings may be spent in the enjoyment of the one and the pursuit of the other by folk who have no classical or pseudo-mediæval theories to oppress them. Tintoretto's house, though changed, can still be visited. It formed part of the Fondamenta dei Mori, so called from having been the quarter assigned to Moorish traders in Venice. A spirited carving of a turbaned Moor leading a camel charged with merchandise, remains above the waterline of a neighbouring building; and all about the crumbling walls sprout flowering weeds--samphire and snapdragon and the spiked campanula, which shoots a spire of sea-blue stars from chinks of Istrian stone. The house stands opposite the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto, where Tintoretto was buried, and where four of his chief masterpieces are to be seen. This church, swept and garnished, is a triumph of modern Italian restoration. They have contrived to make it as commonplace as human ingenuity could manage. Yet no malice of ignorant industry can obscure the treasures it contains--the pictures of Cima, Gian Bellini, Palma, and the four Tintorettos, which form its crowning glory. Here the master may be studied in four of his chief moods: as the painter of tragic passion and movement, in the huge 'Last Judgment;' as the painter of impossibilities, in the 'Vision of Moses upon Sinai;' as the painter of purity and tranquil pathos, in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes;' as the painter of Biblical history brought home to daily life, in the 'Presentation of the Virgin.' Without leaving the Madonna dell' Orto, a student can explore his genius in all its depth and breadth; comprehend the enthusiasm he excites in those who seek, as the essentials of art, imaginative boldness and sincerity; understand what is meant by adversaries who maintain that, after all, Tintoretto was but an inspired Gustave Doré. Between that quiet canvas of the 'Presentation,' so modest in its cool greys and subdued gold, and the tumult of flying, running? doesn't make much sense, but can't figure out a plausible alternative, ascending figures in the 'Judgment,' what an interval there is! How strangely the white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her lamb in the picture of S. Agnes, contrasts with the dusky gorgeousness of the Hebrew women despoiling themselves of jewels for the golden calf! Comparing these several manifestations of creative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for whom his art was the medium for expressing before all things thought and passion. Each picture is executed in the manner suited to its tone of feeling, the key of its conception. Elsewhere than in the Madonna dell' Orto there are more distinguished single examples of Tintoretto's realising faculty. The 'Last Supper' in San Giorgio, for instance, and the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' in the Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are assembled in a group translated from the social customs of the painter's days. Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, where Christ lies sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through the room beneath. A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the central figure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around, may be observed in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes.' It is this which gives dramatic vigour to the composition. But the same effect is carried to its highest fulfilment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode of Christ before the judgment-seat of Pilate, at San Rocco. Of all Tintoretto's religious pictures, that is the most profoundly felt, the most majestic. No other artist succeeded as he has here succeeded in presenting to us God incarnate. For this Christ is not merely the just man, innocent, silent before his accusers. The stationary, white-draped figure, raised high above the agitated crowd, with tranquil forehead slightly bent, facing his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man. We cannot say perhaps precisely why he is divine. But Tintoretto has made us feel that he is. In other words, his treatment of the high theme chosen by him has been adequate. We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto's liveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attention to harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in the power of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the borderland of the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkable instances in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his 'Temptation of Christ.' It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings, and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as she stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah, summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrous fish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his trump-shaped nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril of the deep, although the whale's jaws yawn around him. Between him and the outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there runs a spark of unseen spiritual electricity. To comprehend Tintoretto's touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turn our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek the Accademia, and notice how he here has varied the 'Temptation of Adam by Eve,' choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one so powerfully rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we may take our station, hour by hour, before the 'Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne.' It is well to leave the very highest achievements of art untouched by criticism, undescribed. And in this picture we have the most perfect of all modern attempts to realise an antique myth--more perfect than Raphael's 'Galatea,' or Titian's 'Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne,' or Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus from the Sea.' It may suffice to marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one Sunday morning, opposite the 'Bacchus,' four Germans with a cicerone sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waited an appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips and spake: 'Bacchus war der Wein-Gott.' And they all moved heavily away. _Bos locutus est_. 'Bacchus was the wine-god!' This, apparently, is what a picture tells to one man. To another it presents divine harmonies, perceptible indeed in nature, but here by the painter-poet for the first time brought together and cadenced in a work of art. For another it is perhaps the hieroglyph of pent-up passions and desired impossibilities. For yet another it may only mean the unapproachable inimitable triumph of consummate craft. Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice--in the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the 'Temptation of S. Anthony' at S. Trovaso no less than in the Temptations of Eve and Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the Paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is one of his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we return to the Madonna dell' Orto. I have called him 'the painter of impossibilities.' At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer imaginative force. If we wish to realise this phase of his creative power, and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious fancy--aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the spectator--such men will not take the point of view required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the 'Worship of the Golden Calf' and in the 'Destruction of the World by Water.' It is for them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai in lightnings. The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bid him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia. This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore and the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white house, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the Oasa degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night's rest before their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. So many generations of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust. The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst. Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men dredging for shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil, sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of the Bersaglio, new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into sight at every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-train comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains. Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century. From these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in a certain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion how Venice looked when all her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of restoration. And here and there, in back canals, we come across coloured sections of old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a moment seem to realise our dream. A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with Carpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor would it suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces and churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow panellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the delicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-white Istrian stone. It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage: warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a dark chapel of the Frari; Fra Francesco's fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in S. Zaccaria; Palma's majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; San Giobbe's wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediæval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy. Bather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me one day past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, San Pietro di Castello. The novella is related by Bandello. It has, as will be noticed, points of similarity to that of 'Romeo and Juliet.' V.--A VENETIAN NOVELLA At the time when Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini were painting those handsome youths in tight jackets, parti-coloured hose, and little round caps placed awry upon their shocks of well-combed hair, there lived in Venice two noblemen, Messer Pietro and Messer Paolo, whose palaces fronted each other on the Grand Canal. Messer Paolo was a widower, with one married daughter, and an only son of twenty years or thereabouts, named Gerardo. Messer Pietro's wife was still living; and this couple had but one child, a daughter, called Elena, of exceeding beauty, aged fourteen. Gerardo, as is the wont of gallants, was paying his addresses to a certain lady; and nearly every day he had to cross the Grand Canal in his gondola, and to pass beneath the house of Elena on his way to visit his Dulcinea; for this lady lived some distance up a little canal on which the western side of Messer Pietro's palace looked. Now it so happened that at the very time when the story opens, Messer Pietro's wife fell ill and died, and Elena was left alone at home with her father and her old nurse. Across the little canal of which I spoke there dwelt another nobleman, with four daughters, between the years of seventeen and twenty-one. Messer Pietro, desiring to provide amusement for poor little Elena, besought this gentleman that his daughters might come on feast-days to play with her. For you must know that, except on festivals of the Church, the custom of Venice required that gentlewomen should remain closely shut within the private apartments of their dwellings. His request was readily granted; and on the next feast-day the five girls began to play at ball together for forfeits in the great saloon, which opened with its row of Gothic arches and balustraded balcony upon the Grand Canal. The four sisters, meanwhile, had other thoughts than for the game. One or other of them, and sometimes three together, would let the ball drop, and run to the balcony to gaze upon their gallants, passing up and down in gondolas below; and then they would drop flowers or ribands for tokens. Which negligence of theirs annoyed Elena much; for she thought only of the game. Wherefore she scolded them in childish wise, and one of them made answer, 'Elena, if you only knew how pleasant it is to play as we are playing on this balcony, you would not care so much for ball and forfeits!' On one of those feast-days the four sisters were prevented from keeping their little friend company. Elena, with nothing to do, and feeling melancholy, leaned upon the window-sill which overlooked the narrow canal. And it chanced that just then Gerardo, on his way to Dulcinea, went by; and Elena looked down at him, as she had seen those sisters look at passers-by. Gerardo caught her eye, and glances passed between them, and Gerardo's gondolier, bending from the poop, said to his master, 'O master! methinks that gentle maiden is better worth your wooing than Dulcinea.' Gerardo pretended to pay no heed to these words; but after rowing a little way, he bade the man turn, and they went slowly back beneath the window. This time Elena, thinking to play the game which her four friends had played, took from her hair a clove carnation and let it fall close to Gerardo on the cushion of the gondola. He raised the flower and put it to his lips, acknowledging the courtesy with a grave bow. But the perfume of the clove and the beauty of Elena in that moment took possession of his heart together, and straightway he forgot Dulcinea. As yet he knew not who Elena was. Nor is this wonderful; for the daughters of Venetian nobles were but rarely seen or spoken of. But the thought of her haunted him awake and sleeping; and every feast-day, when there was the chance of seeing her, he rowed his gondola beneath her windows. And there she appeared to him in company with her four friends; the five girls clustering together like sister roses beneath the pointed windows of the Gothic balcony. Elena, on her side, had no thought of love; for of love she had heard no one speak. But she took pleasure in the game those friends had taught her, of leaning from the balcony to watch Gerardo. He meanwhile grew love-sick and impatient, wondering how he might declare his passion. Until one day it happened that, talking through a lane or _calle_ which skirted Messer Pietro'a palace, he caught sight of Elena's nurse, who was knocking at the door, returning from some shopping she had made. This nurse had been his own nurse in childhood; therefore he remembered her, and cried aloud, 'Nurse, Nurse!' But the old woman did not hear him, and passed into the house and shut the door behind her. Whereupon Gerardo, greatly moved, still called to her, and when he reached the door, began to knock upon it violently. And whether it was the agitation of finding himself at last so near the wish of his heart, or whether the pains of waiting for his love had weakened him, I know not; but, while he knocked, his senses left him, and he fell fainting in the doorway. Then the nurse recognised the youth to whom she had given suck, and brought him into the courtyard by the help of handmaidens, and Elena came down and gazed upon him. The house was now full of bustle, and Messer Pietro heard the noise, and seeing the son of his neighbour in so piteous a plight, he caused Gerardo to be laid upon a bed. But for all they could do with him, he recovered not from his swoon. And after a while force was that they should place him in a gondola and ferry him across to his father's house. The nurse went with him, and informed Messer Paolo of what had happened. Doctors were sent for, and the whole family gathered round Gerardo's bed. After a while he revived a little; and thinking himself still upon the doorstep of Pietro's palace, called again, 'Nurse, Nurse!' She was near at hand, and would have spoken to him. But while he summoned his senses to his aid, he became gradually aware of his own kinsfolk and dissembled the secret of his grief. They beholding him in better cheer, departed on their several ways, and the nurse still sat alone beside him. Then he explained to her what he had at heart, and how he was in love with a maiden whom he had seen on feast-days in the house of Messer Pietro. But still he knew not Elena's name; and she, thinking it impossible that such a child had inspired this passion, began to marvel which of the four sisters it was Gerardo loved. Then they appointed the next Sunday, when all the five girls should be together, for Gerardo by some sign, as he passed beneath the window, to make known to the old nurse his lady. Elena, meanwhile, who had watched Gerardo lying still and pale in swoon beneath her on the pavement of the palace, felt the stirring of a new unknown emotion in her soul. When Sunday came, she devised excuses for keeping her four friends away, bethinking her that she might see him once again alone, and not betray the agitation which she dreaded. This ill suited the schemes of the nurse, who nevertheless was forced to be content. But after dinner, seeing how restless was the girl, and how she came and went, and ran a thousand times to the balcony, the nurse began to wonder whether Elena herself were not in love with some one. So she feigned to sleep, but placed herself within sight of the window. And soon Gerardo came by in his gondola; and Elena, who was prepared, threw to him her nosegay. The watchful nurse had risen, and peeping behind the girl's shoulder, saw at a glance how matters stood. Thereupon she began to scold her charge, and say, 'Is this a fair and comely thing, to stand all day at balconies and throw flowers at passers-by? Woe to you if your father should come to know of this! He would make you wish yourself among the dead!' Elena, sore troubled at her nurse's rebuke, turned and threw her arms about her neck, and called her 'Nanna!' as the wont is of Venetian children. Then she told the old woman how she had learned that game from the four sisters, and how she thought it was not different, but far more pleasant, than the game of forfeits; whereupon her nurse spoke gravely, explaining what love is, and how that love should lead to marriage, and bidding her search her own heart if haply she could choose Gerardo for her husband. There was no reason, as she knew, why Messer Paolo's son should not mate with Messer Pietro's daughter. But being a romantic creature, as many women are, she resolved to bring the match about in secret. Elena took little time to reflect, but told her nurse that she was willing, if Gerardo willed it too, to have him for her husband. Then went the nurse and made the young man know how matters stood, and arranged with him a day, when Messer Pietro should be in the Council of the Pregadi, and the servants of the palace otherwise employed, for him to come and meet his Elena. A glad man was Gerardo, nor did he wait to think how better it would be to ask the hand of Elena in marriage from her father. But when the day arrived, he sought the nurse, and she took him to a chamber in the palace, where there stood an image of the Blessed Virgin. Elena was there, pale and timid; and when the lovers clasped hands, neither found many words to say. But the nurse bade them take heart, and leading them before Our Lady, joined their hands, and made Gerardo place his ring on his bride's finger. After this fashion were Gerardo and Elena wedded. And for some while, by the assistance of the nurse, they dwelt together in much love and solace, meeting often as occasion offered. Messer Paolo, who knew nothing of these things, took thought meanwhile for his son's career. It was the season when the Signiory of Venice sends a fleet of galleys to Beirut with merchandise; and the noblemen may bid for the hiring of a ship, and charge it with wares, and send whomsoever they list as factor in their interest. One of these galleys, then, Messer Paolo engaged, and told his son that he had appointed him to journey with it and increase their wealth. 'On thy return, my son,' he said, 'we will bethink us of a wife for thee.' Gerardo, when he heard these words, was sore troubled, and first he told his father roundly that he would not go, and flew off in the twilight to pour out his perplexities to Elena. But she, who was prudent and of gentle soul, besought him to obey his father in this thing, to the end, moreover, that, having done his will and increased his wealth, he might afterwards unfold the story of their secret marriage. To these good counsels, though loth, Gerardo consented. His father was overjoyed at his son's repentance. The galley was straightway laden with merchandise, and Gerardo set forth on his voyage. The trip to Beirut and back lasted usually six months or at the most seven. Now when Gerardo had been some six months away, Messer Pietro, noticing how fair his daughter was, and how she had grown into womanhood, looked about him for a husband for her. When he had found a youth suitable in birth and wealth and years, he called for Elena, and told her that the day had been appointed for her marriage. She, alas! knew not what to answer. She feared to tell her father that she was already married, for she knew not whether this would please Gerardo. For the same reason she dreaded to throw herself upon the kindness of Messer Paolo. Nor was her nurse of any help in counsel; for the old woman repented her of what she had done, and had good cause to believe that, even if the marriage with Gerardo were accepted by the two fathers, they would punish her for her own part in the affair. Therefore she bade Elena wait on fortune, and hinted to her that, if the worst came to the worst, no one need know she had been wedded with the ring to Gerardo. Such weddings, you must know, were binding; but till they had been blessed by the Church, they had not taken the force of a religious sacrament. And this is still the case in Italy among the common folk, who will say of a man, 'Si, è ammogliato; ma il matrimonio non è stato benedetto.' 'Yes, he has taken a wife, but the marriage has not yet been blessed.' So the days flew by in doubt and sore distress for Elena. Then on the night before her wedding, she felt that she could bear this life no longer. But having no poison, and being afraid to pierce her bosom with a knife, she lay down on her bed alone, and tried to die by holding in her breath. A mortal swoon came over her; her senses fled; the life in her remained suspended. And when her nurse came next morning to call her, she found poor Elena cold as a corpse. Messer Pietro and all the household rushed, at the nurse's cries, into the room, and they all saw Elena stretched dead upon her bed undressed. Physicians were called, who made theories to explain the cause of death. But all believed that she was really dead, beyond all help of art or medicine. Nothing remained but to carry her to church for burial instead of marriage. Therefore, that very evening, a funeral procession was formed, which moved by torchlight up the Grand Canal, along the Riva, past the blank walls of the Arsenal, to the Campo before San Pietro in Castello. Elena lay beneath the black felze in one gondola, with a priest beside her praying, and other boats followed bearing mourners. Then they laid her in a marble chest outside the church, and all departed, still with torches burning, to their homes. Now it so fell out that upon that very evening Gerardo's galley had returned from Syria, and was anchoring within the port of Lido, which looks across to the island of Castello. It was the gentle custom of Venice at that time that, when a ship arrived from sea, the friends of those on board at once came out to welcome them, and take and give the news. Therefore many noble youths and other citizens were on the deck of Gerardo's galley, making merry with him over the safe conduct of his voyage. Of one of these he asked, 'Whose is yonder funeral procession returning from San Pietro?' The young man made answer, 'Alas, for poor Elena, Messer Pietro's daughter! She should have been married this day. But death took her, and to-night they buried her in the marble monument outside the church.' A woeful man was Gerardo, hearing suddenly this news, and knowing what his dear wife must have suffered ere she died. Yet he restrained himself, daring not to disclose his anguish, and waited till his friends had left the galley. Then he called to him the captain of the oarsmen, who was his friend, and unfolded to him all the story of his love and sorrow, and said that he must go that night and see his wife once more, if even he should have to break her tomb. The captain tried to dissuade him, but in vain. Seeing him so obstinate, he resolved not to desert Gerardo. The two men took one of the galley's boats, and rowed together toward San Pietro. It was past midnight when they reached the Campo and broke the marble sepulchre asunder. Pushing back its lid, Gerardo descended into the grave and abandoned himself upon the body of his Elena. One who had seen them at that moment could not well have said which of the two was dead and which was living--Elena or her husband. Meantime the captain of the oarsmen, fearing lest the watch (set by the Masters of the Night to keep the peace of Venice) might arrive, was calling on Gerardo to come back. Gerardo heeded him no whit. But at the last, compelled by his entreaties, and as it were astonied, he arose, bearing his wife's corpse in his arms, and carried her clasped against his bosom to the boat, and laid her therein, and sat down by her side and kissed her frequently, and suffered not his friend's remonstrances. Force was for the captain, having brought himself into this scrape, that he should now seek refuge by the nearest way from justice. Therefore he hoved gently from the bank, and plied his oar, and brought the gondola apace into the open waters. Gerardo still clasped Elena, dying husband by dead wife. But the sea-breeze freshened towards daybreak; and the captain, looking down upon that pair, and bringing to their faces the light of his boat's lantern, judged their case not desperate at all. On Elena's cheek there was a flush of life less deadly even than the pallor of Gerardo's forehead. Thereupon the good man called aloud, and Gerardo started from his grief; and both together they chafed the hands and feet of Elena; and, the sea-breeze aiding with its saltness, they awoke in her the spark of life. Dimly burned the spark. But Gerardo, being aware of it, became a man again. Then, having taken counsel with the captain, both resolved to bear her to that brave man's mother's house. A bed was soon made ready, and food was brought; and after due time, she lifted up her face and knew Gerardo. The peril of the grave was past, but thought had now to be taken for the future. Therefore Gerardo, leaving his wife to the captain's mother, rowed back to the galley and prepared to meet his father. With good store of merchandise and with great gains from his traffic, he arrived in that old palace on the Grand Canal. Then having opened to Messer Paolo the matters of his journey, and shown him how he had fared, and set before him tables of disbursements and receipts, he seized the moment of his father's gladness. 'Father,' he said, and as he spoke he knelt upon his knees, 'Father, I bring you not good store of merchandise and bags of gold alone; I bring you also a wedded wife, whom I have saved this night from death.' And when the old man's surprise was quieted, he told him the whole story. Now Messer Paolo, desiring no better than that his son should wed the heiress of his neighbour, and knowing well that Messer Pietro would make great joy receiving back his daughter from the grave, bade Gerardo in haste take rich apparel and clothe Elena therewith, and fetch her home. These things were swiftly done; and after evenfall Messer Pietro was bidden to grave business in his neighbour's palace. With heavy heart he came, from a house of mourning to a house of gladness. But there, at the banquet-table's head he saw his dead child Elena alive, and at her side a husband. And when the whole truth had been declared, he not only kissed and embraced the pair who knelt before him, but of his goodness forgave the nurse, who in her turn came trembling to his feet. Then fell there joy and bliss in overmeasure that night upon both palaces of the Canal Grande. And with the morrow the Church blessed the spousals which long since had been on both sides vowed and consummated. VI.--ON THE LAGOONS The mornings are spent in study, sometimes among pictures, sometimes in the Marcian Library, or again in those vast convent chambers of the Frari, where the archives of Venice load innumerable shelves. The afternoons invite us to a further flight upon the water. Both sandolo and gondola await our choice, and we may sail or row, according as the wind and inclination tempt us. Yonder lies San Lazzaro, with the neat red buildings of the Armenian convent. The last oleander blossoms shine rosy pink above its walls against the pure blue sky as we glide into the little harbour. Boats piled with coal-black grapes block the landing-place, for the Padri are gathering their vintage from the Lido, and their presses run with new wine. Eustace and I have not come to revive memories of Byron--that curious patron saint of the Armenian colony--or to inspect the printing-press, which issues books of little value for our studies. It is enough to pace the terrace, and linger half an hour beneath the low broad arches of the alleys pleached with vines, through which the domes and towers of Venice rise more beautiful by distance. Malamocco lies considerably farther, and needs a full hour of stout rowing to reach it. Alighting there, we cross the narrow strip of land, and find ourselves upon the huge sea-wall--block piled on block--of Istrian stone in tiers and ranks, with cunning breathing-places for the waves to wreak their fury on and foam their force away in fretful waste. The very existence of Venice may be said to depend sometimes on these _murazzi_, which were finished at an immense cost by the Republic in the days of its decadence. The enormous monoliths which compose them had to be brought across the Adriatic in sailing vessels. Of all the Lidi, that of Malamocco is the weakest; and here, if anywhere, the sea might effect an entrance into the lagoon. Our gondoliers told us of some places where the _murazzi_ were broken in a gale, or _sciroccale_, not very long ago. Lying awake in Venice, when the wind blows hard, one hears the sea thundering upon its sandy barrier, and blesses God for the _murazzi_. On such a night it happened once to me to dream a dream of Venice overwhelmed by water. I saw the billows roll across the smooth lagoon like a gigantic Eager. The Ducal Palace crumbled, and San Marco's domes went down. The Campanile rocked and shivered like a reed. And all along the Grand Canal the palaces swayed helpless, tottering to their fall, while boats piled high with men and women strove to stem the tide, and save themselves from those impending ruins. It was a mad dream, born of the sea's roar and Tintoretto's painting. But this afternoon no such visions are suggested. The sea sleeps, and in the moist autumn air we break tall branches of the seeded yellowing samphire from hollows of the rocks, and bear them homeward in a wayward bouquet mixed with cobs of Indian-corn. Fusina is another point for these excursions. It lies at the mouth of the Canal di Brenta, where the mainland ends in marsh and meadows, intersected by broad renes. In spring the ditches bloom with fleurs-de-lys; in autumn they take sober colouring from lilac daisies and the delicate sea-lavender. Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice--a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush. Ere we reach the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset has faded. The western skies have clad themselves in green, barred with dark fire-rimmed clouds. The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. The far reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. Then, at last, we see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere. The quiet of the night has come. Words cannot be formed to express the endless varieties of Venetian sunset. The most magnificent follow after wet stormy days, when the west breaks suddenly into a labyrinth of fire, when chasms of clear turquoise heavens emerge, and horns of flame are flashed to the zenith, and unexpected splendours scale the fretted clouds, step over step, stealing along the purple caverns till the whole dome throbs. Or, again, after a fair day, a change of weather approaches, and high, infinitely high, the skies are woven over with a web of half-transparent cirrus-clouds. These in the afterglow blush crimson, and through their rifts the depth of heaven is of a hard and gemlike blue, and all the water turns to rose beneath them. I remember one such evening on the way back from Torcello. We were well out at sea between Mazzorbo and Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western cloud, scattered in ripples here and there on the waves below, reminding us that day has passed and evening come. And beautiful again are the calm settings of fair weather, when sea and sky alike are cheerful, and the topmost blades of the lagoon grass, peeping from the shallows, glance like emeralds upon the surface. There is no deep stirring of the spirit in a symphony of light and colour; but purity, peace, and freshness make their way into our hearts. VII.--AT THE LIDO Of all these afternoon excursions, that to the Lido is most frequent. It has two points for approach. The more distant is the little station of San Nicoletto, at the mouth of the Porto. With an ebb-tide, the water of the lagoon runs past the mulberry gardens of this hamlet like a river. There is here a grove of acacia-trees, shadowy and dreamy, above deep grass, which even an Italian summer does not wither. The Riva is fairly broad, forming a promenade, where one may conjure up the personages of a century ago. For San Nicoletto used to be a fashionable resort before the other points of Lido had been occupied by pleasure-seekers. An artist even now will select its old-world quiet, leafy shade, and prospect through the islands of Vignole and Sant' Erasmo to snow-touched peaks of Antelao and Tofana, rather than the glare and bustle and extended view of Venice which its rival Sant' Elisabetta offers. But when we want a plunge into the Adriatic, or a stroll along smooth sands, or a breath of genuine sea-breeze, or a handful of horned poppies from the dunes, or a lazy half-hour's contemplation of a limitless horizon flecked with russet sails, then we seek Sant' Elisabetta. Our boat is left at the landing-place. We saunter across the island and back again. Antonio and Francesco wait and order wine, which we drink with them in the shade of the little _osteria's_ wall. A certain afternoon in May I well remember, for this visit to the Lido was marked by one of those apparitions which are as rare as they are welcome to the artist's soul. I have always held that in our modern life the only real equivalent for the antique mythopoeic sense--that sense which enabled the Hellenic race to figure for themselves the powers of earth and air, streams and forests, and the presiding genii of places, under the forms of living human beings, is supplied by the appearance at some felicitous moment of a man or woman who impersonates for our imagination the essence of the beauty that environs us. It seems, at such a fortunate moment, as though we had been waiting for this revelation, although perchance the want of it had not been previously felt. Our sensations and perceptions test themselves at the touchstone of this living individuality. The keynote of the whole music dimly sounding in our ears is struck. A melody emerges, clear in form and excellent in rhythm. The landscapes we have painted on our brain, no longer lack their central figure. The life proper to the complex conditions we have studied is discovered, and every detail, judged by this standard of vitality, falls into its right relations. I had been musing long that day and earnestly upon the mystery of the lagoons, their opaline transparencies of air and water, their fretful risings and sudden subsidence into calm, the treacherousness of their shoals, the sparkle and the splendour of their sunlight. I had asked myself how would a Greek sculptor have personified the elemental deity of these salt-water lakes, so different in quality from the Ægean or Ionian sea? What would he find distinctive of their spirit? The Tritons of these shallows must be of other form and lineage than the fierce-eyed youth who blows his conch upon the curled crest of a wave, crying aloud to his comrades, as he bears the nymph away to caverns where the billows plunge in tideless instability. We had picked up shells and looked for sea-horses on the Adriatic shore. Then we returned to give our boatmen wine beneath the vine-clad _pergola_. Four other men were there, drinking, and eating from a dish of fried fish set upon the coarse white linen cloth. Two of them soon rose and went away. Of the two who stayed, one was a large, middle-aged man; the other was still young. He was tall and sinewy, but slender, for these Venetians are rarely massive in their strength. Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright, bending all the muscles to their stroke. Their bodies are elastically supple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon the ankle. Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration. The type in him was refined to its artistic perfection. Moreover, he was rarely in repose, but moved with a singular brusque grace. A black broad-brimmed hat was thrown back upon his matted _zazzera_ of dark hair tipped with dusky brown. This shock of hair, cut in flakes, and falling wilfully, reminded me of the lagoon grass when it darkens in autumn upon uncovered shoals, and sunset gilds its sombre edges. Fiery grey eyes beneath it gazed intensely, with compulsive effluence of electricity. It was the wild glance of a Triton. Short blonde moustache, dazzling teeth, skin bronzed, but showing white and healthful through open front and sleeves of lilac shirt. The dashing sparkle of this animate splendour, who looked to me as though the sea-waves and the sun had made him in some hour of secret and unquiet rapture, was somehow emphasised by a curious dint dividing his square chin--a cleft that harmonised with smile on lip and steady flame in eyes. I hardly know what effect it would have upon a reader to compare eyes to opals. Yet Stefano's eyes, as they met mine, had the vitreous intensity of opals, as though the colour of Venetian waters were vitalised in them. This noticeable being had a rough, hoarse voice, which, to develop the parallel with a sea-god, might have screamed in storm or whispered raucous messages from crests of tossing billows. I felt, as I looked, that here, for me at least, the mythopoem of the lagoons was humanised; the spirit of the saltwater lakes had appeared to me; the final touch of life emergent from nature had been given. I was satisfied; for I had seen a poem. Then we rose, and wandered through the Jews' cemetery. It is a quiet place, where the flat grave-stones, inscribed in Hebrew and Italian, lie deep in Lido sand, waved over with wild grass and poppies. I would fain believe that no neglect, but rather the fashion of this folk, had left the monuments of generations to be thus resumed by nature. Yet, knowing nothing of the history of this burial-ground, I dare not affirm so much. There is one outlying piece of the cemetery which seems to contradict my charitable interpretation. It is not far from San Nicoletto. No enclosure marks it from the unconsecrated dunes. Acacia-trees sprout amid the monuments, and break the tablets with their thorny shoots upthrusting from the soil. Where patriarchs and rabbis sleep for centuries, the fishers of the sea now wander, and defile these habitations of the dead: Corruption most abhorred Mingling itself with their renownèd ashes. Some of the grave-stones have been used to fence the towing-path; and one I saw, well carved with letters legible of Hebrew on fair Istrian marble, which roofed an open drain leading from the stable of a Christian dog. VIII.--A VENETIAN RESTAURANT At the end of a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom the Hermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated, marshals to the Hades of the _table-d'hôte_. The world has often been compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal I have, not unfrequently, felt fain to reverse the simile. From their separate stations, at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet--[Greek: hadou mageiros]--cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondóla from the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on Baur's Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent æsthete bent on working into clearness his own views of Carpaccio's genius: all these in turn, or all together, must be suffered gladly through well-nigh two long hours. Uncomforted in soul we rise from the expensive banquet; and how often rise from it unfed! Far other be the doom of my own friends--of pious bards and genial companions, lovers of natural and lovely things! Nor for these do I desire a seat at Florian's marble tables, or a perch in Quadri's window, though the former supply dainty food, and the latter command a bird's-eye view of the Piazza. Rather would I lead them to a certain humble tavern on the Zattere. It is a quaint, low-built, unpretending little place, near a bridge, with a garden hard by which sends a cataract of honeysuckles sunward over a too-jealous wall. In front lies a Mediterranean steamer, which all day long has been discharging cargo. Gazing westward up Giudecca, masts and funnels bar the sunset and the Paduan hills; and from a little front room of the _trattoria_ the view is so marine that one keeps fancying oneself in some ship's cabin. Sea-captains sit and smoke beside their glass of grog in the pavilion and the _caffé_. But we do not seek their company at dinner-time. Our way lies under yonder arch, and up the narrow alley into a paved court. Here are oleanders in pots, and plants of Japanese spindle-wood in tubs; and from the walls beneath the window hang cages of all sorts of birds--a talking parrot, a whistling blackbird, goldfinches, canaries, linnets. Athos, the fat dog, who goes to market daily in a _barchetta_ with his master, snuffs around. 'Where are Porthos and Aramis, my friend?' Athos does not take the joke; he only wags his stump of tail and pokes his nose into my hand. What a Tartufe's nose it is! Its bridge displays the full parade of leather-bound brass-nailed muzzle. But beneath, this muzzle is a patent sham. The frame does not even pretend to close on Athos' jaw, and the wise dog wears it like a decoration. A little farther we meet that ancient grey cat, who has no discoverable name, but is famous for the sprightliness and grace with which she bears her eighteen years. Not far from the cat one is sure to find Carlo--the bird-like, bright-faced, close-cropped Venetian urchin, whose duty it is to trot backwards and forwards between the cellar and the dining-tables. At the end of the court we walk into the kitchen, where the black-capped little _padrone_ and the gigantic white-capped chef are in close consultation. Here we have the privilege of inspecting the larder--fish of various sorts, meat, vegetables, several kinds of birds, pigeons, tordi, beccafichi, geese, wild ducks, chickens, woodcock, &c., according to the season. We select our dinner, and retire to eat it either in the court among the birds beneath the vines, or in the low dark room which occupies one side of it. Artists of many nationalities and divers ages frequent this house; and the talk arising from the several little tables, turns upon points of interest and beauty in the life and landscape of Venice. There can be no difference of opinion about the excellence of the _cuisine_, or about the reasonable charges of this _trattoria_. A soup of lentils, followed by boiled turbot or fried soles, beefsteak or mutton cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, with a salad, the whole enlivened with good red wine or Florio's Sicilian Marsala from the cask, costs about four francs. Gas is unknown in the establishment. There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no _ahurissement_ of tourists. And when dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the night invites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a _giro_ in the gondola. IX.--NIGHT IN VENICE Night in Venice! Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be in winter among the high Alps. But the nights of Venice and the nights of the mountains are too different in kind to be compared. There is the ever-recurring miracle of the full moon rising, before day is dead, behind San Giorgio, spreading a path of gold on the lagoon which black boats traverse with the glow-worm lamp upon their prow; ascending the cloudless sky and silvering the domes of the Salute; pouring vitreous sheen upon the red lights of the Piazzetta; flooding the Grand Canal, and lifting the Rialto higher in ethereal whiteness; piercing but penetrating not the murky labyrinth of _rio_ linked with _rio_, through which we wind in light and shadow, to reach once more the level glories and the luminous expanse of heaven beyond the Misericordia. This is the melodrama of Venetian moonlight; and if a single impression of the night has to be retained from one visit to Venice, those are fortunate who chance upon a full moon of fair weather. Yet I know not whether some quieter and soberer effects are not more thrilling. To-night, for example, the waning moon will rise late through veils of _scirocco_. Over the bridges of San Cristoforo and San Gregorio, through the deserted Calle di Mezzo, my friend and I walk in darkness, pass the marble basements of the Salute, and push our way along its Riva to the point of the Dogana. We are out at sea alone, between the Canalozzo and the Giudecca. A moist wind ruffles the water and cools our forehead. It is so dark that we can only see San Giorgio by the light reflected on it from the Piazzetta. The same light climbs the Campanile of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel in a mystery of gloom. The only noise that reaches us is a confused hum from the Piazza. Sitting and musing there, the blackness of the water whispers in our ears a tale of death. And now we hear a plash of oars, and gliding through the darkness comes a single boat. One man leaps upon the landing-place without a word and disappears. There is another wrapped in a military cloak asleep. I see his face beneath me, pale and quiet. The _barcaruolo_ turns the point in silence. From the darkness they came; into the darkness they have gone. It is only an ordinary incident of coastguard service. But the spirit of the night has made a poem of it. Even tempestuous and rainy weather, though melancholy enough, is never sordid here. There is no noise from carriage traffic in Venice, and the sea-wind preserves the purity and transparency of the atmosphere. It had been raining all day, but at evening came a partial clearing. I went down to the Molo, where the large reach of the lagoon was all moon-silvered, and San Giorgio Maggiore dark against the bluish sky, and Santa Maria della Salute domed with moon-irradiated pearl, and the wet slabs of the Riva shimmering in moonlight, the whole misty sky, with its clouds and stellar spaces, drenched in moonlight, nothing but moonlight sensible except the tawny flare of gas-lamps and the orange lights of gondolas afloat upon the waters. On such a night the very spirit of Venice is abroad. We feel why she is called Bride of the Sea. Take yet another night. There had been a representation of Verdi's 'Forza del Destino' at the Teatro Malibran. After midnight we walked homeward through the Merceria, crossed the Piazza, and dived into the narrow _calle_ which leads to the _traghetto_ of the Salute. It was a warm moist starless night, and there seemed no air to breathe in those narrow alleys. The gondolier was half asleep. Eustace called him as we jumped into his boat, and rang our _soldi_ on the gunwale. Then he arose and turned the _ferro_ round, and stood across towards the Salute. Silently, insensibly, from the oppression of confinement in the airless streets to the liberty and immensity of the water and the night we passed. It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting things--the freshness, and the darkness, and the kindness of the brooding, all-enfolding night above the sea. * * * * * _THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING_ The night before the wedding we had a supper-party in my rooms. We were twelve in all. My friend Eustace brought his gondolier Antonio with fair-haired, dark-eyed wife, and little Attilio, their eldest child. My own gondolier, Francesco, came with his wife and two children. Then there was the handsome, languid Luigi, who, in his best clothes, or out of them, is fit for any drawing-room. Two gondoliers, in dark blue shirts, completed the list of guests, if we exclude the maid Catina, who came and went about the table, laughing and joining in the songs, and sitting down at intervals to take her share of wine. The big room looking across the garden to the Grand Canal had been prepared for supper; and the company were to be received in the smaller, which has a fine open space in front of it to southwards. But as the guests arrived, they seemed to find the kitchen and the cooking that was going on quite irresistible. Catina, it seems, had lost her head with so many cuttlefishes, _orai_, cakes, and fowls, and cutlets to reduce to order. There was, therefore, a great bustle below stairs; and I could hear plainly that all my guests were lending their making, or their marring, hands to the preparation of the supper. That the company should cook their own food on the way to the dining-room, seemed a quite novel arrangement, but one that promised well for their contentment with the banquet. Nobody could be dissatisfied with what was everybody's affair. When seven o'clock struck, Eustace and I, who had been entertaining the children in their mothers' absence, heard the sound of steps upon the stairs. The guests arrived, bringing their own _risotto_ with them. Welcome was short, if hearty. We sat down in carefully appointed order, and fell into such conversation as the quarter of San Vio and our several interests supplied. From time to time one of the matrons left the table and descended to the kitchen, when a finishing stroke was needed for roast pullet or stewed veal. The excuses they made their host for supposed failure in the dishes, lent a certain grace and comic charm to the commonplace of festivity. The entertainment was theirs as much as mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took the form by degrees of curiously complicated hospitality. I do not think a well-ordered supper at any _trattoria_, such as at first suggested itself to my imagination, would have given any of us an equal pleasure or an equal sense of freedom. The three children had become the guests of the whole party. Little Attilio, propped upon an air-cushion, which puzzled him exceedingly, ate through his supper and drank his wine with solid satisfaction, opening the large brown eyes beneath those tufts of clustering fair hair which promise much beauty for him in his manhood. Francesco's boy, who is older and begins to know the world, sat with a semi-suppressed grin upon his face, as though the humour of the situation was not wholly hidden from him. Little Teresa, too, was happy, except when her mother, a severe Pomona, with enormous earrings and splendid _fazzoletto_ of crimson and orange dyes, pounced down upon her for some supposed infraction of good manners--_creanza_, as they vividly express it here. Only Luigi looked a trifle bored. But Luigi has been a soldier, and has now attained the supercilious superiority of young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in the piazza and knows the merits of the different cafés. The great business of the evening began when the eating was over, and the decanters filled with new wine of Mirano circulated freely. The four best singers of the party drew together; and the rest prepared themselves to make suggestions, hum tunes, and join with fitful effect in choruses. Antonio, who is a powerful young fellow, with bronzed cheeks and a perfect tempest of coal-black hair in flakes upon his forehead, has a most extraordinary soprano--sound as a bell, strong as a trumpet, well trained, and true to the least shade in intonation. Piero, whose rugged Neptunian features, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough water-life, boasts a bass of resonant, almost pathetic quality. Francesco has a _mezzo voce_, which might, by a stretch of politeness, be called baritone. Piero's comrade, whose name concerns us not, has another of these nondescript voices. They sat together with their glasses and cigars before them, sketching part-songs in outline, striking the keynote--now higher and now lower--till they saw their subject well in view. Then they burst into full singing, Antonio leading with a metal note that thrilled one's ears, but still was musical. Complicated contrapuntal pieces, such as we should call madrigals, with ever-recurring refrains of 'Venezia, gemma Triatica, sposa del mar,' descending probably from ancient days, followed each other in quick succession. Barcaroles, serenades, love-songs, and invitations to the water were interwoven for relief. One of these romantic pieces had a beautiful burden, 'Dormi, o bella, o fingi di dormir,' of which the melody was fully worthy. But the most successful of all the tunes were two with a sad motive. The one repeated incessantly 'Ohimé! mia madre morì;' the other was a girl's love lament: 'Perchè tradirmi, perchè lasciarmi! prima d'amarmi non eri così!' Even the children joined in these; and Catina, who took the solo part in the second, was inspired to a great dramatic effort. All these were purely popular songs. The people of Venice, however, are passionate for operas. Therefore we had duets and solos from 'Ernani,' the 'Ballo in Maschera,' and the 'Forza del Destino,' and one comic chorus from 'Boccaccio,' which seemed to make them wild with pleasure. To my mind, the best of these more formal pieces was a duet between Attila and Italia from some opera unknown to me, which Antonio and Piero performed with incomparable spirit. It was noticeable how, descending to the people, sung by them for love at sea, or on excursions to the villages round Mestre, these operatic reminiscences had lost something of their theatrical formality, and assumed instead the serious gravity, the quaint movement, and marked emphasis which belong to popular music in Northern and Central Italy. An antique character was communicated even to the recitative of Verdi by slight, almost indefinable, changes of rhythm and accent. There was no end to the singing. 'Siamo appassionati per il canto,' frequently repeated, was proved true by the profusion and variety of songs produced from inexhaustible memories, lightly tried over, brilliantly performed, rapidly succeeding each other. Nor were gestures wanting--lifted arms, hands stretched to hands, flashing eyes, hair tossed from the forehead--unconscious and appropriate action--which showed how the spirit of the music and words alike possessed the men. One by one the children fell asleep. Little Attilio and Teresa were tucked up beneath my Scotch shawl at two ends of a great sofa; and not even his father's clarion voice, in the character of Italia defying Attila to harm 'le mie superbe città,' could wake the little boy up. The night wore on. It was past one. Eustace and I had promised to be in the church of the Gesuati at six next morning. We therefore gave the guests a gentle hint, which they as gently took. With exquisite, because perfectly unaffected, breeding they sank for a few moments into common conversation, then wrapped the children up, and took their leave. It was an uncomfortable, warm, wet night of sullen _scirocco_. The next day, which was Sunday, Francesco called me at five. There was no visible sunrise that cheerless damp October morning. Grey dawn stole somehow imperceptibly between the veil of clouds and leaden waters, as my friend and I, well sheltered by our _felze_, passed into the Giudecca, and took our station before the church of the Gesuati. A few women from the neighbouring streets and courts crossed the bridges in draggled petticoats on their way to first mass. A few men, shouldering their jackets, lounged along the Zattere, opened the great green doors, and entered. Then suddenly Antonio cried out that the bridal party was on its way, not as we had expected, in boats, but on foot. We left our gondola, and fell into the ranks, after shaking hands with Francesco, who is the elder brother of the bride. There was nothing very noticeable in her appearance, except her large dark eyes. Otherwise both face and figure were of a common type; and her bridal dress of sprigged grey silk, large veil and orange blossoms, reduced her to the level of a _bourgeoise_. It was much the same with the bridegroom. His features, indeed, proved him a true Venetian gondolier; for the skin was strained over the cheekbones, and the muscles of the throat beneath the jaws stood out like cords, and the bright blue eyes were deep-set beneath a spare brown forehead. But he had provided a complete suit of black for the occasion, and wore a shirt of worked cambric, which disguised what is really splendid in the physique of these oarsmen, at once slender and sinewy. Both bride and bridegroom looked uncomfortable in their clothes. The light that fell upon them in the church was dull and leaden. The ceremony, which was very hurriedly performed by an unctuous priest, did not appear to impress either of them. Nobody in the bridal party, crowding together on both sides of the altar, looked as though the service was of the slightest interest and moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wondered at; for the priest, so far as I could understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte--a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's--did not make matters more intelligible by spasmodically clattering responses. After the ceremony we heard mass and contributed to three distinct offertories. Considering how much account even two _soldi_ are to these poor people, I was really angry when I heard the copper shower. Every member of the party had his or her pennies ready, and dropped them into the boxes. Whether it was the effect of the bad morning, or the ugliness of a very ill-designed _barocco_ building, or the fault of the fat oily priest, I know not. But the _sposalizio_ struck me as tame and cheerless, the mass as irreverent and vulgarly conducted. At the same time there is something too impressive in the mass for any perfunctory performance to divest its symbolism of sublimity. A Protestant Communion Service lends itself more easily to degradation by unworthiness in the minister. We walked down the church in double file, led by the bride and bridegroom, who had knelt during the ceremony with the best man--_compare_, as he is called--at a narrow _prie-dieu_ before the altar. The _compare_ is a person of distinction at these weddings. He has to present the bride with a great pyramid of artificial flowers, which is placed before her at the marriage-feast, a packet of candles, and a box of bonbons. The comfits, when the box is opened, are found to include two magnificent sugar babies lying in their cradles. I was told that a _compare_, who does the thing handsomely, must be prepared to spend about a hundred francs upon these presents, in addition to the wine and cigars with which he treats his friends. On this occasion the women were agreed that he had done his duty well. He was a fat, wealthy little man, who lived by letting market-boats for hire on the Rialto. From the church to the bride's house was a walk of some three minutes. On the way we were introduced to the father of the bride--a very magnificent personage, with points of strong resemblance to Vittorio Emmanuele. He wore an enormous broad-brimmed hat and emerald-green earrings, and looked considerably younger than his eldest son, Francesco. Throughout the _nozze_ he took the lead in a grand imperious fashion of his own. Wherever he went, he seemed to fill the place, and was fully aware of his own importance. In Florence I think he would have got the nickname of _Tacchin_, or turkey-cock. Here at Venice the sons and daughters call their parent briefly _Vecchio_. I heard him so addressed with a certain amount of awe, expecting an explosion of bubbly-jock displeasure. But he took it, as though it was natural, without disturbance. The other _Vecchio_, father of the bridegroom, struck me as more sympathetic. He was a gentle old man, proud of his many prosperous, laborious sons. They, like the rest of the gentlemen, were gondoliers. Both the _Vecchi_, indeed, continue to ply their trade, day and night, at the _traghetto_. _Traghetti_ are stations for gondolas at different points of the canals. As their name implies, it is the first duty of the gondoliers upon them to ferry people across. This they do for the fixed fee of five centimes. The _traghetti_ are in fact Venetian cab-stands. And, of course, like London cabs, the gondolas may be taken off them for trips. The municipality, however, makes it a condition, under penalty of fine to the _traghetto_, that each station should always be provided with two boats for the service of the ferry. When vacancies occur on the _traghetti_, a gondolier who owns or hires a boat makes application to the municipality, receives a number, and is inscribed as plying at a certain station. He has now entered a sort of guild, which is presided over by a _Capo-traghetto_, elected by the rest for the protection of their interests, the settlement of disputes, and the management of their common funds. In the old acts of Venice this functionary is styled _Gastaldo di traghetto_. The members have to contribute something yearly to the guild. This payment varies upon different stations, according to the greater or less amount of the tax levied by the municipality on the _traghetto_. The highest subscription I have heard of is twenty-five francs; the lowest, seven. There is one _traghetto_, known by the name of Madonna del Giglio or Zobenigo, which possesses near its _pergola_ of vines a nice old brown Venetian picture. Some stranger offered a considerable sum for this. But the guild refused to part with it. As may be imagined, the _traghetti_ vary greatly in the amount and quality of their custom. By far the best are those in the neighbourhood of the hotels upon the Grand Canal. At any one of these a gondolier during the season is sure of picking up some foreigner or other who will pay him handsomely for comparatively light service. A _traghetto_ on the Giudecca, on the contrary, depends upon Venetian traffic. The work is more monotonous, and the pay is reduced to its tariffed minimum. So far as I can gather, an industrious gondolier, with a good boat, belonging to a good _traghetto_, may make as much as ten or fifteen francs in a single day. But this cannot be relied on. They therefore prefer a fixed appointment with a private family, for which they receive by tariff five francs a day, or by arrangement for long periods perhaps four francs a day, with certain perquisites and small advantages. It is great luck to get such an engagement for the winter. The heaviest anxieties which beset a gondolier are then disposed of. Having entered private service, they are not allowed to ply their trade on the _traghetto_, except by stipulation with their masters. Then they may take their place one night out of every six in the rank and file. The gondoliers have two proverbs, which show how desirable it is, while taking a fixed engagement, to keep their hold on the _traghetto_. One is to this effect: _il traghetto è un buon padrone_. The other satirises the meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility: _pompa di servitù, misera insegna_. When they combine the _traghetto_ with private service, the municipality insists on their retaining the number painted on their gondola; and against this their employers frequently object. It is therefore a great point for a gondolier to make such an arrangement with his master as will leave him free to show his number. The reason for this regulation is obvious. Gondoliers are known more by their numbers and their _traghetti_ than their names. They tell me that though there are upwards of a thousand registered in Venice, each man of the trade knows the whole confraternity by face and number. Taking all things into consideration, I think four francs a day the whole year round are very good earnings for a gondolier. On this he will marry and rear a family, and put a little money by. A young unmarried man, working at two and a half or three francs a day, is proportionately well-to-do. If he is economical, he ought upon these wages to save enough in two or three years to buy himself a gondola. A boy from fifteen to nineteen is called a _mezz' uomo_, and gets about one franc a day. A new gondola with all its fittings is worth about a thousand francs. It does not last in good condition more than six or seven years. At the end of that time the hull will fetch eighty francs. A new hull can be had for three hundred francs. The old fittings--brass sea-horses or _cavalli_, steel prow or _ferro_, covered cabin or _felze_, cushions and leather-covered back-board or _stramazetto_, maybe transferred to it. When a man wants to start a gondola, he will begin by buying one already half past service--a _gondola da traghetto_ or _di mezza età_. This should cost him something over two hundred francs. Little by little, he accumulates the needful fittings; and when his first purchase is worn out, he hopes to set up with a well-appointed equipage. He thus gradually works his way from the rough trade which involves hard work and poor earnings to that more profitable industry which cannot be carried on without a smart boat. The gondola is a source of continual expense for repairs. Its oars have to be replaced. It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and varnished. Its bottom needs frequent cleaning. Weeds adhere to it in the warm brackish water, growing rapidly through the summer months, and demanding to be scrubbed off once in every four weeks. The gondolier has no place where he can do this for himself. He therefore takes his boat to a wharf, or _squero_, as the place is called. At these _squeri_ gondolas are built as well as cleaned. The fee for a thorough setting to rights of the boat is five francs. It must be done upon a fine day. Thus in addition to the cost, the owner loses a good day's work. These details will serve to give some notion of the sort of people with whom Eustace and I spent our day. The bride's house is in an excellent position on an open canal leading from the Canalozzo to the Giudecca. She had arrived before us, and received her friends in the middle of the room. Each of us in turn kissed her cheek and murmured our congratulations. We found the large living-room of the house arranged with chairs all round the walls, and the company were marshalled in some order of precedence, my friend and I taking place near the bride. On either hand airy bedrooms opened out, and two large doors, wide open, gave a view from where we sat of a good-sized kitchen. This arrangement of the house was not only comfortable, but pretty; for the bright copper pans and pipkins ranged on shelves along the kitchen walls had a very cheerful effect. The walls were whitewashed, but literally covered with all sorts of pictures. A great plaster cast from some antique, an Atys, Adonis, or Paris, looked down from a bracket placed between the windows. There was enough furniture, solid and well kept, in all the rooms. Among the pictures were full-length portraits in oils of two celebrated gondoliers--one in antique costume, the other painted a few years since. The original of the latter soon came and stood before it. He had won regatta prizes; and the flags of four discordant colours were painted round him by the artist, who had evidently cared more to commemorate the triumphs of his sitter and to strike a likeness than to secure the tone of his own picture. This champion turned out a fine fellow--Corradini--with one of the brightest little gondoliers of thirteen for his son. After the company were seated, lemonade and cakes were handed round amid a hubbub of chattering women. Then followed cups of black coffee and more cakes. Then a glass of Cyprus and more cakes. Then a glass of curaçoa and more cakes. Finally, a glass of noyau and still more cakes. It was only a little after seven in the morning. Yet politeness compelled us to consume these delicacies. I tried to shirk my duty; but this discretion was taken by my hosts for well-bred modesty; and instead of being let off, I had the richest piece of pastry and the largest maccaroon available pressed so kindly on me, that, had they been poisoned, I would not have refused to eat them. The conversation grew more, and more animated, the women gathering together in their dresses of bright blue and scarlet, the men lighting cigars and puffing out a few quiet words. It struck me as a drawback that these picturesque people had put on Sunday-clothes to look as much like shopkeepers as possible. But they did not all of them succeed. Two handsome women, who handed the cups round--one a brunette, the other a blonde--wore skirts of brilliant blue, with a sort of white jacket, and white kerchief folded heavily about their shoulders. The brunette had a great string of coral, the blonde of amber, round her throat. Gold earrings and the long gold chains Venetian women wear, of all patterns and degrees of value, abounded. Nobody appeared without them; but I could not see any of an antique make. The men seemed to be contented with rings--huge, heavy rings of solid gold, worked with a rough flower pattern. One young fellow had three upon his fingers. This circumstance led me to speculate whether a certain portion at least of this display of jewellery around me had not been borrowed for the occasion. Eustace and I were treated quite like friends. They called us _I Signori_. But this was only, I think, because our English names are quite unmanageable. The women fluttered about us and kept asking whether we really liked it all? whether we should come to the _pranzo_? whether it was true we danced? It seemed to give them unaffected pleasure to be kind to us; and when we rose to go away, the whole company crowded round, shaking hands and saying: 'Si divertirà bene stasera!' Nobody resented our presence; what was better, no one put himself out for us. 'Vogliono veder il nostro costume,' I heard one woman say. We got home soon after eight, and, as our ancestors would have said, settled our stomachs with a dish of tea. It makes me shudder now to think of the mixed liquids and miscellaneous cakes we had consumed at that unwonted hour. At half-past three, Eustace and I again prepared ourselves for action. His gondola was in attendance, covered with the _felze_, to take us to the house of the _sposa_. We found the canal crowded with poor people of the quarter--men, women, and children lining the walls along its side, and clustering like bees upon the bridges. The water itself was almost choked with gondolas. Evidently the folk of San Vio thought our wedding procession would be a most exciting pageant. We entered the house, and were again greeted by the bride and bridegroom, who consigned each of us to the control of a fair tyrant. This is the most fitting way of describing our introduction to our partners of the evening; for we were no sooner presented, than the ladies swooped upon us like their prey, placing their shawls upon our left arms, while they seized and clung to what was left available of us for locomotion. There was considerable giggling and tittering throughout the company when Signora Fenzo, the young and comely wife of a gondolier, thus took possession of Eustace, and Signora dell' Acqua, the widow of another gondolier, appropriated me. The affair had been arranged beforehand, and their friends had probably chaffed them with the difficulty of managing two mad Englishmen. However, they proved equal to the occasion, and the difficulties were entirely on our side. Signora Fenzo was a handsome brunette, quiet in her manners, who meant business. I envied Eustace his subjection to such a reasonable being. Signora dell' Acqua, though a widow, was by no means disconsolate; and I soon perceived that it would require all the address and diplomacy I possessed, to make anything out of her society. She laughed incessantly; darted in the most diverse directions, dragging me along with her; exhibited me in triumph to her cronies; made eyes at me over a fan, repeated my clumsiest remarks, as though they gave her indescribable amusement; and all the while jabbered Venetian at express rate, without the slightest regard for my incapacity to follow her vagaries. The _Vecchio_ marshalled us in order. First went the _sposa_ and _comare_ with the mothers of bride and bridegroom. Then followed the _sposo_ and the bridesmaid. After them I was made to lead my fair tormentor. As we descended the staircase there arose a hubbub of excitement from the crowd on the canals. The gondolas moved turbidly upon the face of the waters. The bridegroom kept muttering to himself, 'How we shall be criticised! They will tell each other who was decently dressed, and who stepped awkwardly into the boats, and what the price of my boots was!' Such exclamations, murmured at intervals, and followed by chest-drawn sighs, expressed a deep preoccupation. With regard to his boots, he need have had no anxiety. They were of the shiniest patent leather, much too tight, and without a speck of dust upon them. But his nervousness infected me with a cruel dread. All those eyes were going to watch how we comported ourselves in jumping from the landing-steps into the boat! If this operation, upon a ceremonious occasion, has terrors even for a gondolier, how formidable it ought to be to me! And here is the Signora dell' Acqua's white cachemire shawl dangling on one arm, and the Signora herself languishingly clinging to the other; and the gondolas are fretting in a fury of excitement, like corks, upon the churned green water! The moment was terrible. The _sposa_ and her three companions had been safely stowed away beneath their _felze_. The _sposo_ had successfully handed the bridesmaid into the second gondola. I had to perform the same office for my partner. Off she went, like a bird, from the bank. I seized a happy moment, followed, bowed, and found myself to my contentment gracefully ensconced in a corner opposite the widow. Seven more gondolas were packed. The procession moved. We glided down the little channel, broke away into the Grand Canal, crossed it, and dived into a labyrinth from which we finally emerged before our destination, the Trattoria di San Gallo. The perils of the landing were soon over; and, with the rest of the guests, my mercurial companion and I slowly ascended a long flight of stairs leading to a vast upper chamber. Here we were to dine. It had been the gallery of some palazzo in old days, was above one hundred feet in length, fairly broad, with a roof of wooden rafters and large windows opening on a courtyard garden. I could see the tops of three cypress-trees cutting the grey sky upon a level with us. A long table occupied the centre of this room. It had been laid for upwards of forty persons, and we filled it. There was plenty of light from great glass lustres blazing with gas. When the ladies had arranged their dresses, and the gentlemen had exchanged a few polite remarks, we all sat down to dinner--I next my inexorable widow, Eustace beside his calm and comely partner. The first impression was one of disappointment. It looked so like a public dinner of middle-class people. There was no local character in costume or customs. Men and women sat politely bored, expectant, trifling with their napkins, yawning, muttering nothings about the weather or their neighbours. The frozen commonplaceness of the scene was made for me still more oppressive by Signora dell' Acqua. She was evidently satirical, and could not be happy unless continually laughing at or with somebody. 'What a stick the woman will think me!' I kept saying to myself. 'How shall I ever invent jokes in this strange land? I cannot even flirt with her in Venetian! And here I have condemned myself--and her too, poor thing--to sit through at least three hours of mortal dulness!' Yet the widow was by no means unattractive. Dressed in black, she had contrived by an artful arrangement of lace and jewellery to give an air of lightness to her costume. She had a pretty little pale face, a _minois chiffonné_, with slightly turned-up nose, large laughing brown eyes, a dazzling set of teeth, and a tempestuously frizzled mop of powdered hair. When I managed to get a side-look at her quietly, without being giggled at or driven half mad by unintelligible incitements to a jocularity I could not feel, it struck me that, if we once found a common term of communication we should become good friends. But for the moment that _modus vivendi_ seemed unattainable. She had not recovered from the first excitement of her capture of me. She was still showing me off and trying to stir me up. The arrival of the soup gave me a momentary relief; and soon the serious business of the afternoon began. I may add that before dinner was over, the Signora dell' Acqua and I were fast friends. I had discovered the way of making jokes, and she had become intelligible. I found her a very nice, though flighty, little woman; and I believe she thought me gifted with the faculty of uttering eccentric epigrams in a grotesque tongue. Some of my remarks were flung about the table, and had the same success as uncouth Lombard carvings have with connoisseurs in _naïvetés_ of art. By that time we had come to be _compare_ and _comare_ to each other--the sequel of some clumsy piece of jocularity. It was a heavy entertainment, copious in quantity, excellent in quality, plainly but well cooked. I remarked there was no fish. The widow replied that everybody present ate fish to satiety at home. They did not join a marriage feast at the San Gallo, and pay their nine francs, for that! It should be observed that each guest paid for his own entertainment. This appears to be the custom. Therefore attendance is complimentary, and the married couple are not at ruinous charges for the banquet. A curious feature in the whole proceeding had its origin in this custom. I noticed that before each cover lay an empty plate, and that my partner began with the first course to heap upon it what she had not eaten. She also took large helpings, and kept advising me to do the same. I said: 'No; I only take what I want to eat; if I fill that plate in front of me as you are doing, it will be great waste.' This remark elicited shrieks of laughter from all who heard it; and when the hubbub had subsided, I perceived an apparently official personage bearing down upon Eustace, who was in the same perplexity. It was then circumstantially explained to us that the empty plates were put there in order that we might lay aside what we could not conveniently eat, and take it home with us. At the end of the dinner the widow (whom I must now call my _comare_) had accumulated two whole chickens, half a turkey, and a large assortment of mixed eatables. I performed my duty and won her regard by placing delicacies at her disposition. Crudely stated, this proceeding moves disgust. But that is only because one has not thought the matter out. In the performance there was nothing coarse or nasty. These good folk had made a contract at so much a head--so many fowls, so many pounds of beef, &c, to be supplied; and what they had fairly bought, they clearly had a right to. No one, so far as I could notice, tried to take more than his proper share; except, indeed, Eustace and myself. In our first eagerness to conform to custom, we both overshot the mark, and grabbed at disproportionate helpings. The waiters politely observed that we were taking what was meant for two; and as the courses followed in interminable sequence, we soon acquired the tact of what was due to us. Meanwhile the room grew warm. The gentlemen threw off their coats--a pleasant liberty of which I availed myself, and was immediately more at ease. The ladies divested themselves of their shoes (strange to relate!) and sat in comfort with their stockinged feet upon the _scagliola_ pavement. I observed that some cavaliers by special permission were allowed to remove their partners' slippers. This was not my lucky fate. My _comare_ had not advanced to that point of intimacy. Healths began to be drunk. The conversation took a lively turn; and women went fluttering round the table, visiting their friends, to sip out of their glass, and ask each other how they were getting on. It was not long before the stiff veneer of _bourgeoisie_ which bored me had worn off. The people emerged in their true selves: natural, gentle, sparkling with enjoyment, playful. Playful is, I think, the best word to describe them. They played with infinite grace and innocence, like kittens, from the old men of sixty to the little boys of thirteen. Very little wine was drunk. Each guest had a litre placed before him. Many did not finish theirs; and for very few was it replenished. When at last the dessert arrived, and the bride's comfits had been handed round, they began to sing. It was very pretty to see a party of three or four friends gathering round some popular beauty, and paying her compliments in verse--they grouped behind her chair, she sitting back in it and laughing up to them, and joining in the chorus. The words, 'Brunetta mia simpatica, ti amo sempre più,' sung after this fashion to Eustace's handsome partner, who puffed delicate whiffs from a Russian cigarette, and smiled her thanks, had a peculiar appropriateness. All the ladies, it may be observed in passing, had by this time lit their cigarettes. The men were smoking Toscani, Sellas, or Cavours, and the little boys were dancing round the table breathing smoke from their pert nostrils. The dinner, in fact, was over. Other relatives of the guests arrived, and then we saw how some of the reserved dishes were to be bestowed. A side-table was spread at the end of the gallery, and these late-comers were regaled with plenty by their friends. Meanwhile, the big table at which we had dined was taken to pieces and removed. The _scagliola_ floor was swept by the waiters. Musicians came streaming in and took their places. The ladies resumed their shoes. Every one prepared to dance. My friend and I were now at liberty to chat with the men. He knew some of them by sight, and claimed acquaintance with others. There was plenty of talk about different boats, gondolas, and sandolos and topos, remarks upon the past season, and inquiries as to chances of engagements in the future. One young fellow told us how he had been drawn for the army, and should be obliged to give up his trade just when he had begun to make it answer. He had got a new gondola, and this would have to be hung up during the years of his service. The warehousing of a boat in these circumstances costs nearly one hundred francs a year, which is a serious tax upon the pockets of a private in the line. Many questions were put in turn to us, but all of the same tenor. 'Had we really enjoyed the _pranzo_? Now, really, were we amusing ourselves? And did we think the custom of the wedding _un bel costume_?' We could give an unequivocally hearty response to all these interrogations. The men seemed pleased. Their interest in our enjoyment was unaffected. It is noticeable how often the word _divertimento_ is heard upon the lips of the Italians. They have a notion that it is the function in life of the _Signori_ to amuse themselves. The ball opened, and now we were much besought by the ladies. I had to deny myself with a whole series of comical excuses. Eustace performed his duty after a stiff English fashion--once with his pretty partner of the _pranzo_, and once again with a fat gondolier. The band played waltzes and polkas, chiefly upon patriotic airs--the Marcia Reale, Garibaldi's Hymn, &c. Men danced with men, women with women, little boys and girls together. The gallery whirled with a laughing crowd. There was plenty of excitement and enjoyment--not an unseemly or extravagant word or gesture. My _comare_ careered about with a light mænadic impetuosity, which made me regret my inability to accept her pressing invitations. She pursued me into every corner of the room, but when at last I dropped excuses and told her that my real reason for not dancing was that it would hurt my health, she waived her claims at once with an _Ah, poverino!_ Some time after midnight we felt that we had had enough of _divertimento_. Francesco helped us to slip out unobserved. With many silent good wishes we left the innocent playful people who had been so kind to us. The stars were shining from a watery sky as we passed into the piazza beneath the Campanile and the pinnacles of S. Mark. The Riva was almost empty, and the little waves fretted the boats moored to the piazzetta, as a warm moist breeze went fluttering by. We smoked a last cigar, crossed our _traghetto_, and were soon sound asleep at the end of a long pleasant day. The ball, we heard next morning, finished about four. Since that evening I have had plenty of opportunities for seeing my friends the gondoliers, both in their own homes and in my apartment. Several have entertained me at their mid-day meal of fried fish and amber-coloured polenta. These repasts were always cooked with scrupulous cleanliness, and served upon a table covered with coarse linen. The polenta is turned out upon a wooden platter, and cut with a string called _lassa_. You take a large slice of it on the palm of the left hand, and break it with the fingers of the right. Wholesome red wine of the Paduan district and good white bread were never wanting. The rooms in which we met to eat looked out on narrow lanes or over pergolas of yellowing vines. Their whitewashed walls were hung with photographs of friends and foreigners, many of them souvenirs from English or American employers. The men, in broad black hats and lilac shirts, sat round the table, girt with the red waist-wrapper, or _fascia_, which marks the ancient faction of the Castellani. The other faction, called Nicolotti, are distinguished by a black _assisa_. The quarters of the town are divided unequally and irregularly into these two parties. What was once a formidable rivalry between two sections of the Venetian populace, still survives in challenges to trials of strength and skill upon the water. The women, in their many-coloured kerchiefs, stirred polenta at the smoke-blackened chimney, whose huge pent-house roof projects two feet or more across the hearth. When they had served the table they took their seat on low stools, knitted stockings, or drank out of glasses handed across the shoulder to them by their lords. Some of these women were clearly notable housewives, and I have no reason to suppose that they do not take their full share of the housework. Boys and girls came in and out, and got a portion of the dinner to consume where they thought best. Children went tottering about upon the red-brick floor, the playthings of those hulking fellows, who handled them very gently and spoke kindly in a sort of confidential whisper to their ears. These little ears were mostly pierced for earrings, and the light blue eyes of the urchins peeped maliciously beneath shocks of yellow hair. A dog was often of the party. He ate fish like his masters, and was made to beg for it by sitting up and rowing with his paws. _Voga, Azzò, voga!_ The Anzolo who talked thus to his little brown Spitz-dog has the hoarse voice of a Triton and the movement of an animated sea-wave. Azzo performed his trick, swallowed his fish-bones, and the fiery Anzolo looked round approvingly. On all these occasions I have found these gondoliers the same sympathetic, industrious, cheery affectionate folk. They live in many respects a hard and precarious life. The winter in particular is a time of anxiety, and sometimes of privation, even to the well-to-do among them. Work then is scarce, and what there is, is rendered disagreeable to them by the cold. Yet they take their chance with facile temper, and are not soured by hardships. The amenities of the Venetian sea and air, the healthiness of the lagoons, the cheerful bustle of the poorer quarters, the brilliancy of this Southern sunlight, and the beauty which is everywhere apparent, must be reckoned as important factors in the formation of their character. And of that character, as I have said, the final note is playfulness. In spite of difficulties, their life has never been stern enough to sadden them. Bare necessities are marvellously cheap, and the pinch of real bad weather--such frost as locked the lagoons in ice two years ago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement floors of all the houses on the Zattere--is rare and does not last long. On the other hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them to the savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni. They have had to work daily for small earnings, but under favourable conditions, and their labour has been lightened by much good-fellowship among themselves, by the amusements of their _feste_ and their singing clubs. Of course it is not easy for a stranger in a very different social position to feel that he has been admitted to their confidence. Italians have an ineradicable habit of making themselves externally agreeable, of bending in all indifferent matters to the whims and wishes of superiors, and of saying what they think _Signori_ like. This habit, while it smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment and partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us Northern folk break in vain efforts. Our advances are met with an imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are bent on making the world pleasant to us. It is the very reverse of that dour opposition which a Lowland Scot or a North English peasant offers to familiarity; but it is hardly less insurmountable. The treatment, again, which Venetians of the lower class have received through centuries from their own nobility, makes attempts at fraternisation on the part of gentlemen unintelligible to them. The best way, here and elsewhere, of overcoming these obstacles is to have some bond of work or interest in common--of service on the one side rendered, and goodwill on the other honestly displayed. The men of whom I have been speaking will, I am convinced, not shirk their share of duty or make unreasonable claims upon the generosity of their employers. * * * * * _A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS_ I.--THE SESTIERE DI SAN POLO There is a quarter of Venice not much visited by tourists, lying as it does outside their beat, away from the Rialto, at a considerable distance from the Frari and San Rocco, in what might almost pass for a city separated by a hundred miles from the Piazza. This is the quarter of San Polo, one corner of which, somewhere between the back of the Palazzo Foscari and the Campo di San Polo, was the scene of a memorable act of vengeance in the year 1546. Here Lorenzino de' Medici, the murderer of his cousin Alessandro, was at last tracked down and put to death by paid cut-throats. How they succeeded in their purpose, we know in every detail from the narrative dictated by the chief assassin. His story so curiously illustrates the conditions of life in Italy three centuries ago, that I have thought it worthy of abridgment. But, in order to make it intelligible, and to paint the manners of the times more fully, I must first relate the series of events which led to Lorenzino's murder of his cousin Alessandro, and from that to his own subsequent assassination. Lorenzino de' Medici, the Florentine Brutus of the sixteenth century, is the hero of the tragedy. Some of his relatives, however, must first appear upon the scene before he enters with a patriot's knife concealed beneath a court-fool's bauble. II.--THE MURDER OF IPPOLITO DE' MEDICI After the final extinction of the Florentine Republic, the hopes of the Medici, who now aspired to the dukedom of Tuscany, rested on three bastards--Alessandro, the reputed child of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino; Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours; and Giulio, the offspring of an elder Giuliano, who was at this time Pope, with the title of Clement VII. Clement had seen Rome sacked in 1527 by a horde of freebooters fighting under the Imperial standard, and had used the remnant of these troops, commanded by the Prince of Orange, to crush his native city in the memorable siege of 1529-30. He now determined to rule Florence from the Papal chair by the help of the two bastard cousins I have named. Alessandro was created Duke of Cività di Penna, and sent to take the first place in the city. Ippolito was made a cardinal; since the Medici had learned that Rome was the real basis of their power, and it was undoubtedly in Clement's policy to advance this scion of his house to the Papacy. The sole surviving representative of the great Lorenzo de' Medici's legitimate blood was Catherine, daughter of the Duke of Urbino by Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. She was pledged in marriage to the Duke of Orleans, who was afterwards Henry II. of France. A natural daughter of the Emperor Charles V. was provided for her putative half-brother Alessandro. By means of these alliances the succession of Ippolito to the Papal chair would have been secured, and the strength of the Medici would have been confirmed in Tuscany, but for the disasters which have now to be related. Between the cousins Alessandro and Ippolito there was no love lost. As boys, they had both played the part of princes in Florence under the guardianship of the Cardinal Passerini da Cortona. The higher rank had then been given to Ippolito, who bore the title of Magnifico, and seemed thus designated for the lordship of the city. Ippolito, though only half a Medici, was of more authentic lineage than Alessandro; for no proof positive could be adduced that the latter was even a spurious child of the Duke of Urbino. He bore obvious witness to his mother's blood upon his mulatto's face; but this mother was the wife of a groom, and it was certain that in the court of Urbino she had not been chary of her favours. The old magnificence of taste, the patronage of art and letters, and the preference for liberal studies which distinguished Casa Medici, survived in Ippolito; whereas Alessandro manifested only the brutal lusts of a debauched tyrant. It was therefore with great reluctance that, moved by reasons of state and domestic policy, Ippolito saw himself compelled to accept the scarlet hat. Alessandro having been recognised as a son of the Duke of Urbino, had become half-brother to the future Queen of France. To treat him as the head of the family was a necessity thrust, in the extremity of the Medicean fortunes, upon Clement. Ippolito, who more entirely represented the spirit of the house, was driven to assume the position of a cadet, with all the uncertainties of an ecclesiastical career. In these circumstances Ippolito had not strength of character to sacrifice himself for the consolidation of the Medicean power, which could only have been effected by maintaining a close bond of union between its members. The death of Clement in 1534 obscured his prospects in the Church. He was still too young to intrigue for the tiara. The new Pope, Alessandro Farnese, soon after his election, displayed a vigour which was unexpected from his age, together with a nepotism which his previous character had scarcely warranted. The Cardinal de' Medici felt himself excluded and oppressed. He joined the party of those numerous Florentine exiles, headed by Filippo Strozzi, and the Cardinals Salviati and Ridolfi, all of whom were connected by marriage with the legitimate Medici, and who unanimously hated and were jealous of the Duke of Cività di Penna. On the score of policy it is difficult to condemn this step. Alessandro's hold upon Florence was still precarious, nor had he yet married Margaret of Austria. Perhaps Ippolito was right in thinking he had less to gain from his cousin than from the anti-Medicean faction and the princes of the Church who favoured it. But he did not play his cards well. He quarrelled with the new Pope, Paul III., and by his vacillations led the Florentine exiles to suspect he might betray them. In the summer of 1535 Ippolito was at Itri, a little town not far from Gaeta and Terracina, within easy reach of Fondi, where dwelt the beautiful Giulia Gonzaga. To this lady the Cardinal paid assiduous court, passing his time with her in the romantic scenery of that world-famous Capuan coast. On the 5th of August his seneschal, Giovann' Andrea, of Borgo San Sepolcro, brought him a bowl of chicken-broth, after drinking which he exclaimed to one of his attendants, 'I have been poisoned, and the man who did it is Giovann' Andrea.' The seneschal was taken and tortured, and confessed that he had mixed a poison with the broth. Four days afterwards the Cardinal died, and a post-mortem examination showed that the omentum had been eaten by some corrosive substance. Giovann' Andrea was sent in chains to Rome; but in spite of his confession, more than once repeated, the court released him. He immediately took refuge with Alessandro de' Medici in Florence, whence he repaired to Borgo San Sepolcro, and was, at the close of a few months, there murdered by the people of the place. From these circumstances it was conjectured, not without good reason, that Alessandro had procured his cousin's death; and a certain Captain Pignatta, of low birth in Florence, a bravo and a coward, was believed to have brought the poison to Itri from the Duke. The Medicean courtiers at Florence did not disguise their satisfaction; and one of them exclaimed, with reference to the event, 'We know how to brush flies from our noses!' III.--THE MURDER OF ALESSANDRO DE' MEDICI Having removed his cousin and rival from the scene, Alessandro de' Medici plunged with even greater effrontery into the cruelties and debaucheries which made him odious in Florence. It seemed as though fortune meant to smile on him; for in this same year (1535) Charles V. decided at Naples in his favour against the Florentine exiles, who were pleading their own cause and that of the city injured by his tyrannies; and in February of the following year he married Margaret of Austria, the Emperor's natural daughter. Francesco Guicciardini, the first statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken his defence, and was ready to support him by advice and countenance in the conduct of his government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one little rift. For some months past he had closely attached to his person a certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo Pater Patriæ. This Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his most intimate acquaintances called him, was destined to murder Alessandro; and it is worthy of notice that the Duke had received frequent warnings of his fate. A Perugian page, for instance, who suffered from some infirmity, saw in a dream that Lorenzino would kill his master. Astrologers predicted that the Duke must die by having his throat cut. One of them is said to have named Lorenzo de' Medici as the assassin; and another described him so accurately that there was no mistaking the man. Moreover, Madonna Lucrezia Salviati wrote to the Duke from Rome that he should beware of a certain person, indicating Lorenzino; and her daughter, Madonna Maria, told him to his face she hated the young man, 'because I know he means to murder you, and murder you he will.' Nor was this all. The Duke's favourite body-servants mistrusted Lorenzino. On one occasion, when Alessandro and Lorenzino, attended by a certain Giomo, were escalading a wall at night, as was their wont upon illicit love-adventures, Giomo whispered to his master: 'Ah, my lord, do let me cut the rope, and rid ourselves of him!' To which the Duke replied: 'No, I do not want this; but if he could, I know he'd twist it round my neck.' In spite, then, of these warnings and the want of confidence he felt, the Duke continually lived with Lorenzino, employing him as pander in his intrigues, and preferring his society to that of simpler men. When he rode abroad, he took this evil friend upon his crupper; although he knew for certain that Lorenzino had stolen a tight-fitting vest of mail he used to wear, and, while his arms were round his waist, was always meditating how to stick a poignard in his body. He trusted, so it seems, to his own great strength and to the other's physical weakness. At this point, since Lorenzino is the principal actor in the two-act drama which follows, it will be well to introduce him to the reader in the words of Varchi, who was personally acquainted with him. Born at Florence in 1514, he was left early by his father's death to the sole care of his mother, Maria Soderini, 'a lady of rare prudence and goodness, who attended with the utmost pains and diligence to his education. No sooner, however, had he acquired the rudiments of humane learning, which, being of very quick parts, he imbibed with incredible facility, than he began to display a restless mind, insatiable and appetitive of vice. Soon afterwards, under the rule and discipline of Filippo Strozzi, he made open sport of all things human and divine; and preferring the society of low persons, who not only flattered him but were congenial to his tastes, he gave free rein to his desires, especially in affairs of love, without regard for sex or age or quality, and in his secret soul, while he lavished feigned caresses upon every one he saw, felt no esteem for any living being. He thirsted strangely for glory, and omitted no point of deed or word that might, he thought, procure him the reputation of a man of spirit or of wit. He was lean of person, somewhat slightly built, and on this account people called him Lorenzino. He never laughed, but had a sneering smile; and although he was rather distinguished by grace than beauty, his countenance being dark and melancholy, still in the flower of his age he was beloved beyond all measure by Pope Clement; in spite of which he had it in his mind (according to what he said himself after killing the Duke Alessandro) to have murdered him. He brought Francesco di Raffaello de' Medici, the Pope's rival, who was a young man of excellent attainments and the highest hope, to such extremity that he lost his wits, and became the sport of the whole court at Rome, and was sent back, as a lesser evil, as a confirmed madman to Florence.' Varchi proceeds to relate how Lorenzino fell into disfavour with the Pope and the Romans by chopping the heads off statues from the arch of Constantine and other monuments; for which act of vandalism Molsa impeached him in the Roman Academy, and a price was set upon his head. Having returned to Florence, he proceeded to court Duke Alessandro, into whose confidence he wormed himself, pretending to play the spy upon the exiles, and affecting a personal timidity which put the Prince off his guard. Alessandro called him 'the philosopher,' because he conversed in solitude with his own thoughts and seemed indifferent to wealth and office. But all this while Lorenzino was plotting how to murder him. Giovio's account of this strange intimacy may be added, since it completes the picture I have drawn from Varchi:--'Lorenzo made himself the accomplice and instrument of those amorous amusements for which the Duke had an insatiable appetite, with the object of deceiving him. He was singularly well furnished with all the scoundrelly arts and trained devices of the pander's trade; composed fine verses to incite to lust; wrote and represented comedies in Italian; and pretended to take pleasure only in such tricks and studies. Therefore he never carried arms like other courtiers, and feigned to be afraid of blood, a man who sought tranquillity at any price. Besides, he bore a pallid countenance and melancholy brow, walking alone, talking very little and with few persons. He haunted solitary places apart from the city, and showed such plain signs of hypochondria that some began covertly to pass jokes on him. Certain others, who were more acute, suspected that he was harbouring and devising in his mind some terrible enterprise.' The Prologue to Lorenzino's own comedy of 'Aridosiso' brings the sardonic, sneering, ironical man vividly before us. He calls himself 'un certo omiciatto, che non è nessun di voi che veggendolo non l'avesse a noia, pensando che egli abbia fatto una commedia;' and begs the audience to damn his play to save him the tedium of writing another. Criticised by the light of his subsequent actions, this prologue may even be understood to contain a covert promise of the murder he was meditating. 'In this way,' writes Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity with Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian in his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens or wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might happen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of Lorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less chaste than beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and lived not far from the back entrance to the palace of the Medici.' Lorenzino undertook this odious commission, seeing an opportunity to work his designs against the Duke. But first he had to form an accomplice, since he could not hope to carry out the murder without help. A bravo, called Michele del Tavolaccino, but better known by the nickname of Scoronconcolo, struck him as a fitting instrument. He had procured this man's pardon for a homicide, and it appears that the fellow retained a certain sense of gratitude. Lorenzino began by telling the man there was a courtier who put insults upon him, and Scoronconcolo professed his readiness to kill the knave. 'Sia chi si voglia; io l'ammazzerò, se fosse Cristo.' Up to the last minute the name of Alessandro was not mentioned. Having thus secured his assistant, Lorenzino chose a night when he knew that Alessandro Vitelli, captain of the Duke's guard, would be from home. Then, after supper, he whispered in Alessandro's ear that at last he had seduced his aunt with an offer of money, and that she would come to his, Lorenzo's chamber at the service of the Duke that night. Only the Duke must appear at the rendezvous alone, and when he had arrived, the lady should be fetched. 'Certain it is,' says Varchi, 'that the Duke, having donned a cloak of satin in the Neapolitan style, lined with sable, when he went to take his gloves, and there were some of mail and some of perfumed leather, hesitated awhile and said: "Which shall I choose, those of war, or those of love-making?"' He took the latter and went out with only four attendants, three of whom he dismissed upon the Piazza di San Marco, while one was stationed just opposite Lorenzo's house, with strict orders not to stir if he should see folk enter or issue thence. But this fellow, called the Hungarian, after waiting a great while, returned to the Duke's chamber, and there went to sleep. Meanwhile Lorenzino received Alessandro in his bedroom, where there was a good fire. The Duke unbuckled his sword, which Lorenzino took, and having entangled the belt with the hilt, so that it should not readily be drawn, laid it on the pillow. The Duke had flung himself already on the bed, and hid himself among the curtains--doing this, it is supposed, to save himself from the trouble of paying compliments to the lady when she should arrive. For Caterina Ginori had the fame of a fair speaker, and Alessandro was aware of his own incapacity to play the part of a respectful lover. Nothing could more strongly point the man's brutality than this act, which contributed in no small measure to his ruin. Lorenzino left the Duke upon the bed, and went at once for Scoronconcolo. He told him that the enemy was caught, and bade him only mind the work he had to do. 'That will I do,' the bravo answered, 'even though it were the Duke himself.' 'You've hit the mark,' said Lorenzino with a face of joy; 'he cannot slip through our fingers. Come!' So they mounted to the bedroom, and Lorenzino, knowing where the Duke was laid, cried: 'Sir, are you asleep?' and therewith ran him through the back. Alessandro was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, face downwards, and the sword passed through his kidneys and diaphragm. But it did not kill him. He slipped from the bed, and seized a stool to parry the next blow. Scoronconcolo now stabbed him in the face, while Lorenzino forced him back upon the bed; and then began a hideous struggle. In order to prevent his cries, Lorenzino doubled his fist into the Duke's mouth. Alessandro seized the thumb between his teeth, and held it in a vice until he died. This disabled Lorenzino, who still lay upon his victim's body, and Scoronconcolo could not strike for fear of wounding his master. Between the writhing couple he made, however, several passes with his sword, which only pierced the mattress. Then he drew a knife and drove it into the Duke's throat, and bored about till he had severed veins and windpipe. IV.--THE FLIGHT OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI Alessandro was dead. His body fell to earth. The two murderers, drenched with blood, lifted it up, and placed it on the bed, wrapped in the curtains, as they had found him first. Then Lorenzino went to the window, which looked out upon the Via Larga, and opened it to rest and breathe a little air. After this he called for Scoronconcolo's boy, Il Freccia, and bade him look upon the dead man. Il Freccia recognised the Duke. But why Lorenzino did this, no one knew. It seemed, as Varchi says, that, having planned the murder with great ability, and executed it with daring, his good sense and good luck forsook him. He made no use of the crime he had committed; and from that day forward till his own assassination, nothing prospered with him. Indeed, the murder of Alessandro appears to have been almost motiveless, considered from the point of view of practical politics. Varchi assumes that Lorenzino's burning desire of glory prompted the deed; and when he had acquired the notoriety he sought, there was an end to his ambition. This view is confirmed by the Apology he wrote and published for his act. It remains one of the most pregnant, bold, and brilliant pieces of writing which we possess in favour of tyrannicide from that epoch of insolent crime and audacious rhetoric. So energetic is the style, and so biting the invective of this masterpiece, in which the author stabs a second time his victim, that both Giordani and Leopardi affirmed it to be the only true monument of eloquence in the Italian language. If thirst for glory was Lorenzino's principal incentive, immediate glory was his guerdon. He escaped that same night with Scoronconcolo and Freccia to Bologna, where he stayed to dress his thumb, and then passed forward to Venice. Filippo Strozzi there welcomed him as the new Brutus, gave him money, and promised to marry his two sons to the two sisters of the tyrant-killer. Poems were written and published by the most famous men of letters, including Benedetto Varchi and Francesco Maria Molsa, in praise of the Tuscan Brutus, the liberator of his country from a tyrant. A bronze medal was struck bearing his name, with a profile copied from Michelangelo's bust of Brutus. On the obverse are two daggers and a cup, and the date viii. id. Jan. The immediate consequence of Alessandro's murder was the elevation of Cosimo, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and second cousin of Lorenzino, to the duchy. At the ceremony of his investiture with the ducal honours, Cosimo solemnly undertook to revenge Alessandro's murder. In the following March he buried his predecessor with pomp in San Lorenzo. The body was placed beside the bones of the Duke of Urbino in the marble chest of Michelangelo, and here not many years ago it was discovered. Soon afterwards Lorenzino was declared a rebel. His portrait was painted according to old Tuscan precedent, head downwards, and suspended by one foot, upon the wall of the fort built by Alessandro. His house was cut in twain from roof to pavement, and a narrow lane was driven through it, which received the title of Traitor's Alley, _Chiasso del Traditore_. The price of four thousand golden florins was put upon his head, together with the further sum of one hundred florins per annum in perpetuity to be paid to the murderer and his direct heirs in succession, by the Otto di Balia. Moreover, the man who killed Lorenzino was to enjoy all civic privileges; exemption from all taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; the right of carrying arms, together with two attendants, in the city and the whole domain of Florence; and the further prerogative of restoring ten outlaws at his choice. If Lorenzino could be captured and brought alive to Florence, the whole of this reward would be doubled. This decree was promulgated in April 1537, and thenceforward Lorenzino de' Medici lived a doomed man. The assassin, who had been proclaimed a Brutus by Tuscan exiles and humanistic enthusiasts, was regarded as a Judas by the common people. Ballads were written on him with the title of the 'Piteous and sore lament made unto himself by Lorenzino de' Medici, who murdered the most illustrious Duke Alessandro.' He had become a wild beast, whom it was honourable to hunt down, a pest which it was righteous to extirpate. Yet fate delayed nine years to overtake him. What remains to be told about his story must be extracted from the narrative of the bravo who succeeded, with the aid of an accomplice, in despatching him at Venice.[13] So far as possible, I shall use the man's own words, translating them literally, and omitting only unimportant details. The narrative throws brilliant light upon the manners and movements of professional cut-throats at that period in Italy. It seems to have been taken down from the hero Francesco, or Cecco, Bibboni's lips; and there is no doubt that we possess in it a valuable historical document for the illustration of contemporary customs. It offers in all points a curious parallel to Cellini's account of his own homicides and hair-breadth escapes. Moreover, it is confirmed in its minutest circumstances by the records of the criminal courts of Venice in the sixteenth century. This I can attest from recent examination of MSS. relating to the _Signori di Notte_ and the _Esecutori contro la Bestemmia_, which are preserved among the Archives at the Frari. V.--THE MURDER OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI 'When I returned from Germany,' begins Bibboni, 'where I had been in the pay of the Emperor, I found at Vicenza Bebo da Volterra, who was staying in the house of M. Antonio da Roma, a nobleman of that city. This gentleman employed him because of a great feud he had; and he was mighty pleased, moreover, at my coming, and desired that I too should take up my quarters in his palace.' This paragraph strikes the keynote of the whole narrative, and introduces us to the company we are about to keep. The noblemen of that epoch, if they had private enemies, took into their service soldiers of adventure, partly to protect their persons, but also to make war, when occasion offered, on their foes. The _bravi_, as they were styled, had quarters assigned them in the basement of the palace, where they might be seen swaggering about the door or flaunting their gay clothes behind the massive iron bars of the windows which opened on the streets. When their master went abroad at night they followed him, and were always at hand to perform secret services in love affairs, assassination, and espial. For the rest, they haunted taverns, and kept up correspondence with prostitutes. An Italian city had a whole population of such fellows, the offscourings of armies, drawn from all nations, divided by their allegiance of the time being into hostile camps, but united by community of interest and occupation, and ready to combine against the upper class, upon whose vices, enmities, and cowardice they throve. Bibboni proceeds to say how another gentleman of Vicenza, M. Francesco Manente, had at this time a feud with certain of the Guazzi and the Laschi, which had lasted several years, and cost the lives of many members of both parties and their following. M. Francesco being a friend of M. Antonio, besought that gentleman to lend him Bibboni and Bebo for a season; and the two _bravi_ went together with their new master to Celsano, a village in the neighbourhood. 'There both parties had estates, and all of them kept armed men in their houses, so that not a day passed without feats of arms, and always there was some one killed or wounded. One day, soon afterwards, the leaders of our party resolved to attack the foe in their house, where we killed two, and the rest, numbering five men, entrenched themselves in a ground-floor apartment; whereupon we took possession of their harquebuses and other arms, which forced them to abandon the villa and retire to Vicenza; and within a short space of time this great feud was terminated by an ample peace.' After this Bebo took service with the Rector of the University in Padua, and was transferred by his new patron to Milan. Bibboni remained at Vicenza with M. Galeazzo della Seta, who stood in great fear of his life, notwithstanding the peace which had been concluded between the two factions. At the end of ten months he returned to M. Antonio da Roma and his six brothers, 'all of whom being very much attached to me, they proposed that I should live my life with them, for good or ill, and be treated as one of the family; upon the understanding that if war broke out and I wanted to take part in it, I should always have twenty-five crowns and arms and horse, with welcome home, so long as I lived; and in case I did not care to join the troops, the same provision for my maintenance.' From these details we comprehend the sort of calling which a bravo of Bibboni's species followed. Meanwhile Bebo was at Milan. 'There it happened that M. Francesco Vinta, of Volterra, was on embassy from the Duke of Florence. He saw Bebo, and asked him what he was doing in Milan, and Bebo answered that he was a knight errant.' This phrase, derived no doubt from the romantic epics then in vogue, was a pretty euphemism for a rogue of Bebo's quality. The ambassador now began cautiously to sound his man, who seems to have been outlawed from the Tuscan duchy, telling him he knew a way by which he might return with favour to his home, and at last disclosing the affair of Lorenzo. Bebo was puzzled at first, but when he understood the matter, he professed his willingness, took letters from the envoy to the Duke of Florence, and, in a private audience with Cosimo, informed him that he was ready to attempt Lorenzino's assassination. He added that 'he had a comrade fit for such a job, whose fellow for the business could not easily be found.' Bebo now travelled to Vicenza, and opened the whole matter to Bibboni, who weighed it well, and at last, being convinced that the Duke's commission to his comrade was _bona fide_, determined to take his share in the undertaking. The two agreed to have no accomplices. They went to Venice, and 'I,' says Bibboni, 'being most intimately acquainted with all that city, and provided there with many friends, soon quietly contrived to know where Lorenzino lodged, and took a room in the neighbourhood, and spent some days in seeing how we best might rule our conduct.' Bibboni soon discovered that Lorenzino never left his palace; and he therefore remained in much perplexity, until, by good luck, Ruberto Strozzi arrived from France in Venice, bringing in his train a Navarrese servant, who had the nickname of Spagnoletto. This fellow was a great friend of the bravo. They met, and Bibboni told him that he should like to go and kiss the hands of Messer Ruberto, whom he had known in Rome. Strozzi inhabited the same palace as Lorenzino. 'When we arrived there, both Messer Ruberto and Lorenzo were leaving the house, and there were around them so many gentlemen and other persons, that I could not present myself, and both straightway stepped into the gondola. Then I, not having seen Lorenzo for a long while past, and because he was very quietly attired, could not recognise the man exactly, but only as it were between certainty and doubt. Wherefore I said to Spagnoletto, "I think I know that gentleman, but don't remember where I saw him." And Messer Ruberto was giving him his right hand. Then Spagnoletto answered, "You know him well enough; he is Messer Lorenzo. But see you tell this to nobody. He goes by the name of Messer Dario, because he lives in great fear for his safety, and people don't know that he is now in Venice." I answered that I marvelled much, and if I could have helped him, would have done so willingly. Then I asked where they were going, and he said, to dine with Messer Giovanni della Casa, who was the Pope's Legate. I did not leave the man till I had drawn from him all I required.' Thus spoke the Italian Judas. The appearance of La Casa on the scene is interesting. He was the celebrated author of the scandalous 'Capitolo del Forno,' the author of many sublime and melancholy sonnets, who was now at Venice, prosecuting a charge of heresy against Pier Paolo Vergerio, and paying his addresses to a noble lady of the Quirini family. It seems that on the territory of San Marco he made common cause with the exiles from Florence, for he was himself by birth a Florentine, and he had no objection to take Brutus-Lorenzino by the hand. After the noblemen had rowed off in their gondola to dine with the Legate, Bibboni and his friend entered their palace, where he found another old acquaintance, the house-steward, or _spenditore_ of Lorenzo. From him he gathered much useful information. Pietro Strozzi, it seems, had allowed the tyrannicide one thousand five hundred crowns a year, with the keep of three brave and daring companions (_tre compagni bravi e facinorosi_), and a palace worth fifty crowns on lease. But Lorenzo had just taken another on the Campo di San Polo at three hundred crowns a year, for which swagger (_altura_) Pietro Strozzi had struck a thousand crowns off his allowance. Bibboni also learned that he was keeping house with his uncle, Alessandro Soderini, another Florentine outlaw, and that he was ardently in love with a certain beautiful Barozza. This woman was apparently one of the grand courtesans of Venice. He further ascertained the date when he was going to move into the palace at San Polo, and, 'to put it briefly, knew everything he did, and, as it were, how many times a day he spit.' Such were the intelligences of the servants' hall, and of such value were they to men of Bibboni's calling. In the Carnival of 1546 Lorenzo meant to go masqued in the habit of a gipsy woman to the square of San Spirito, where there was to be a joust. Great crowds of people would assemble, and Bibboni hoped to do his business there. The assassination, however, failed on this occasion, and Lorenzo took up his abode in the palace he had hired upon the Campo di San Polo. This Campo is one of the largest open places in Venice, shaped irregularly, with a finely curving line upon the western side, where two of the noblest private houses in the city are still standing. Nearly opposite these, in the south-western angle, stands, detached, the little old church of San Polo. One of its side entrances opens upon the square; the other on a lane, which leads eventually to the Frari. There is nothing in Bibboni's narrative to make it clear where Lorenzo hired his dwelling. But it would seem from certain things which he says later on, that in order to enter the church his victim had to cross the square. Meanwhile Bibboni took the precaution of making friends with a shoemaker, whose shop commanded the whole Campo, including Lorenzo's palace. In this shop he began to spend much of his time; 'and oftentimes I feigned to be asleep; but God knows whether I was sleeping, for my mind, at any rate, was wide-awake.' A second convenient occasion for murdering Lorenzo soon seemed to offer. He was bidden to dine with Monsignor della Casa; and Bibboni, putting a bold face on, entered the Legate's palace, having left Bebo below in the loggia, fully resolved to do the business. 'But we found,' he says, 'that, they had gone to dine at Murano, so that we remained with our tabors in their bag.' The island of Murano at that period was a favourite resort of the Venetian nobles, especially of the more literary and artistic, who kept country-houses there, where they enjoyed the fresh air of the lagoons and the quiet of their gardens. The third occasion, after all these weeks of watching, brought success to Bibboni's schemes. He had observed how Lorenzo occasionally so far broke his rules of caution as to go on foot, past the church of San Polo, to visit the beautiful Barozza; and he resolved, if possible, to catch him on one of these journeys. 'It so chanced on the 28th of February, which was the second Sunday of Lent, that having gone, as was my wont, to pry out whether Lorenzo would give orders for going abroad that day, I entered the shoemaker's shop, and stayed awhile, until Lorenzo came to the window with a napkin round his neck for he was combing his hair--and at the same moment I saw a certain Giovan Battista Martelli, who kept his sword for the defence of Lorenzo's person, enter and come forth again. Concluding that they would probably go abroad, I went home to get ready and procure the necessary weapons, and there I found Bebo asleep in bed, and made him get up at once, and we came to our accustomed post of observation, by the church of San Polo, where our men would have to pass.' Bibboni now retired to his friend the shoemaker's, and Bebo took up his station at one of the side-doors of San Polo; 'and, as good luck would have it, Giovan Battista Martelli came forth, and walked a piece in front, and then Lorenzo came, and then Alessandro Soderini, going the one behind the other, like storks, and Lorenzo, on entering the church, and lifting up the curtain of the door, was seen from the opposite door by Bebo, who at the same time noticed how I had left the shop, and so we met upon the street as we had agreed, and he told me that Lorenzo was inside the church.' To any one who knows the Campo di San Polo, it will be apparent that Lorenzo had crossed from the western side of the piazza and entered the church by what is technically called its northern door. Bebo, stationed at the southern door, could see him when he pushed the heavy _stoia_ or leather curtain aside, and at the same time could observe Bibboni's movements in the cobbler's shop. Meanwhile Lorenzo walked across the church and came to the same door where Bebo had been standing. 'I saw him issue from the church and take the main street; then came Alessandro Soderini, and I walked last of all; and when we reached the point we had determined on, I jumped in front of Alessandro with the poignard in my hand, crying, "Hold hard, Alessandro, and get along with you in God's name, for we are not here for you!" He then threw himself around my waist, and grasped my arms, and kept on calling out. Seeing how wrong I had been to try to spare his life, I wrenched myself as well as I could from his grip, and with my lifted poignard struck him, as God willed, above the eyebrow, and a little blood trickled from the wound. He, in high fury, gave me such a thrust that I fell backward, and the ground besides was slippery from having rained a little. Then Alessandro drew his sword, which he carried in its scabbard, and thrust at me in front, and struck me on the corslet, which for my good fortune was of double mail. Before I could get ready I received three passes, which, had I worn a doublet instead of that mailed corslet, would certainly have run me through. At the fourth pass I had regained my strength and spirit, and closed with him, and stabbed him four times in the head, and being so close he could not use his sword, but tried to parry with his hand and hilt, and I, as God willed, struck him at the wrist below the sleeve of mail, and cut his hand off clean, and gave him then one last stroke on his head. Thereupon he begged for God's sake spare his life, and I, in trouble about Bebo, left him in the arms of a Venetian nobleman, who held him back from jumping into the canal.' Who this Venetian nobleman, found unexpectedly upon the scene, was, does not appear. Nor, what is still more curious, do we hear anything of that Martelli, the bravo, 'who kept his sword for the defence of Lorenzo's person.' The one had arrived accidentally, it seems. The other must have been a coward and escaped from the scuffle. 'When I turned,' proceeds Bibboni, 'I found Lorenzo on his knees. He raised himself, and I, in anger, gave him a great cut across the head, which split it in two pieces, and laid him at my feet, and he never rose again.' VI.--THE ESCAPE OF THE BRAVI Bebo, meanwhile, had made off from the scene of action. And Bibboni, taking to his heels, came up with him in the little square of San Marcello. They now ran for their lives till they reached the traghetto di San Spirito, where they threw their poignards into the water, remembering that no man might carry these in Venice under penalty of the galleys. Bibboni's white hose were drenched with blood. He therefore agreed to separate from Bebo, having named a rendezvous. Left alone, his ill luck brought him face to face with twenty constables (_sbirri_). 'In a moment I conceived that they knew everything, and were come to capture me, and of a truth I saw that it was over with me. As swiftly as I could I quickened pace and got into a church, near to which was the house of a Compagnia, and the one opened into the other, and knelt down and prayed, commending myself with fervour to God for my deliverance and safety. Yet while I prayed, I kept my eyes well open and saw the whole band pass the church, except one man who entered, and I strained my sight so that I seemed to see behind as well as in front, and then it was I longed for my poignard, for I should not have heeded being in a church.' But the constable, it soon appeared, was not looking for Bibboni. So he gathered up his courage, and ran for the Church of San Spirito, where the Padre Andrea Volterrano was preaching to a great congregation. He hoped to go in by one door and out by the other, but the crowd prevented him, and he had to turn back and face the _sbirrí_. One of them followed him, having probably caught sight of the blood upon his hose. Then Bibboni resolved to have done with the fellow, and rushed at him, and flung him down with his head upon the pavement, and ran like mad and came at last, all out of breath, to San Marco. It seems clear that before Bibboni separated from Bebo they had crossed the water, for the Sestiere di San Polo is separated from the Sestiere di San Marco by the Grand Canal. And this they must have done at the traghetto di San Spirito. Neither the church nor the traghetto are now in existence, and this part of the story is therefore obscure.[14] Having reached San Marco, he took a gondola at the Ponte della Paglia, where tourists are now wont to stand and contemplate the Ducal Palace and the Bridge of Sighs. First, he sought the house of a woman of the town who was his friend; then changed purpose, and rowed to the palace of the Count Salici da Collalto. 'He was a great friend and intimate of ours, because Bebo and I had done him many and great services in times passed. There I knocked; and Bebo opened the door, and when he saw me dabbled with blood, he marvelled that I had not come to grief and fallen into the hands of justice, and, indeed, had feared as much because I had remained so long away.' It appears, therefore, that the Palazzo Collalto was their rendezvous. 'The Count was from home; but being known to all his people, I played the master and went into the kitchen to the fire, and with soap and water turned my hose, which had been white, to a grey colour.' This is a very delicate way of saying that he washed out the blood of Alessandro and Lorenzo! Soon after the Count returned, and 'lavished caresses' upon Bebo and his precious comrade. They did not tell him what they had achieved that morning, but put him off with a story of having settled a _sbirro_ in a quarrel about a girl. Then the Count invited them to dinner; and being himself bound to entertain the first physician of Venice, requested them to take it in an upper chamber. He and his secretary served them with their own hands at table. When the physician arrived, the Count went downstairs; and at this moment a messenger came from Lorenzo's mother, begging the doctor to go at once to San Polo, for that her son had been murdered and Soderini wounded to the death. It was now no longer possible to conceal their doings from the Count, who told them to pluck up courage and abide in patience. He had himself to dine and take his siesta, and then to attend a meeting of the Council. About the hour of vespers, Bibboni determined to seek better refuge. Followed at a discreet distance by Bebo, he first called at their lodgings and ordered supper. Two priests came in and fell into conversation with them. But something in the behaviour of one of these good men roused his suspicions. So they left the house, took a gondola, and told the man to row hard to S. Maria Zobenigo. On the way he bade him put them on shore, paid him well, and ordered him to wait for them. They landed near the palace of the Spanish embassy; and here Bibboni meant to seek sanctuary. For it must be remembered that the houses of ambassadors, no less than of princes of the Church, were inviolable. They offered the most convenient harbouring-places to rascals. Charles V., moreover, was deeply interested in the vengeance taken on Alessandro de' Medici's murderer, for his own natural daughter was Alessandro's widow and Duchess of Florence. In the palace they were met with much courtesy by about forty Spaniards, who showed considerable curiosity, and told them that Lorenzo and Alessandro Soderini had been murdered that morning by two men whose description answered to their appearance. Bibboni put their questions by and asked to see the ambassador. He was not at home. In that case, said Bibboni, take us to the secretary. Attended by some thirty Spaniards, 'with great joy and gladness,' they were shown into the secretary's chamber. He sent the rest of the folk away, 'and locked the door well, and then embraced and kissed us before we had said a word, and afterwards bade us talk freely without any fear.' When Bibboni had told the whole story, he was again embraced and kissed by the secretary, who thereupon left them and went to the private apartment of the ambassador. Shortly after he returned and led them by a winding staircase into the presence of his master. The ambassador greeted them with great honour, told them he would strain all the power of the empire to hand them in safety over to Duke Cosimo, and that he had already sent a courier to the Emperor with the good news. So they remained in hiding in the Spanish embassy; and in ten days' time commands were received from Charles himself that everything should be done to convey them safely to Florence. The difficulty was how to smuggle them out of Venice, where the police of the Republic were on watch, and Florentine outlaws were mounting guard on sea and shore to catch them. The ambassador began by spreading reports on the Rialto every morning of their having been seen at Padua, at Verona, in Friuli. He then hired a palace at Malghera, near Mestre, and went out daily with fifty Spaniards, and took carriage or amused himself with horse exercise and shooting. The Florentines, who were on watch, could only discover from his people that he did this for amusement. When he thought that he had put them sufficiently off their guard, the ambassador one day took Bibboni and Bebo out by Canaregio and Mestre to Malghera, concealed in his own gondola, with the whole train of Spaniards in attendance. And though, on landing, the Florentines challenged them, they durst not interfere with an ambassador or come to battle with his men. So Bebo and Bibboni were hustled into a coach, and afterwards provided with two comrades and four horses. They rode for ninety miles without stopping to sleep, and on the day following this long journey reached Trento, having probably threaded the mountain valleys above Bassano, for Bibboni speaks of a certain village where the people talked half German. The Imperial Ambassador at Trento forwarded them next day to Mantua; from Mantua they came to Piacenza; thence, passing through the valley of the Taro, crossing the Apennines at Cisa, descending on Pontremoli, and reaching Pisa at night, the fourteenth day after their escape from Venice. When they arrived at Pisa, Duke Cosimo was supping. So they went to an inn, and next morning presented themselves to his Grace. Cosimo received them kindly, assured them of his gratitude, confirmed them in the enjoyment of their rewards and privileges, and swore that they might rest secure of his protection in all parts of his dominion. We may imagine how the men caroused together after this reception. As Bibboni adds, 'We were now able for the whole time of life left us to live splendidly, without a thought or care.' The last words of his narrative are these: 'Bebo from Pisa, at what date I know not, went home to Volterra, his native town, and there finished his days; while I abode in Florence, where I have had no further wish to hear of wars, but to live my life in holy peace.' So ends the story of the two _bravi_. We have reason to believe, from some contemporary documents which Cantù has brought to light, that Bibboni exaggerated his own part in the affair. Luca Martelli, writing to Varchi, says that it was Bebo who clove Lorenzo's skull with a cutlass. He adds this curious detail, that the weapons of both men were poisoned, and that the wound inflicted by Bibboni on Soderini's hand was a slight one. Yet, the poignard being poisoned, Soderini died of it. In other respects Martelli's brief account agrees with that given by Bibboni, who probably did no more, his comrade being dead, than claim for himself, at some expense of truth, the lion's share of their heroic action. VII.--LORENZINO BRUTUS It remains to ask ourselves, What opinion can be justly formed of Lorenzino's character and motives? When he murdered his cousin, was he really actuated by the patriotic desire to rid his country of a monster? Did he imitate the Roman Brutus in the noble spirit of his predecessors, Olgiati and Boscoli, martyrs to the creed of tyrannicide? Or must this crowning action of a fretful life be explained, like his previous mutilation of the statues on the Arch of Constantine, by a wild thirst for notoriety? Did he hope that the exiles would return to Florence, and that he would enjoy an honourable life, an immortality of glorious renown? Did envy for his cousin's greatness and resentment of his undisguised contempt--the passions of one who had been used for vile ends--conscious of self-degradation and the loss of honour, yet mindful of his intellectual superiority--did these emotions take fire in him and mingle with a scholar's reminiscences of antique heroism, prompting him to plan a deed which should at least assume the show of patriotic zeal, and prove indubitable courage in its perpetrator? Did he, again, perhaps imagine, being next in blood to Alessandro and direct heir to the ducal crown by the Imperial Settlement of 1530, that the city would elect her liberator for her ruler? Alfieri and Niccolini, having taken, as it were, a brief in favour of tyrannicide, praised Lorenzino as a hero. De Musset, who wrote a considerable drama on his story, painted him as a _roué_ corrupted by society, enfeebled by circumstance, soured by commerce with an uncongenial world, who hides at the bottom of his mixed nature enough of real nobility to make him the leader of a forlorn hope for the liberties of Florence. This is the most favourable construction we can put upon Lorenzo's conduct. Yet some facts of the case warn us to suspend our judgment. He seems to have formed no plan for the liberation of his fellow-citizens. He gave no pledge of self-devotion by avowing his deed and abiding by its issues. He showed none of the qualities of a leader, whether in the cause of freedom or of his own dynastic interests, after the murder. He escaped as soon as he was able, as secretly as he could manage, leaving the city in confusion, and exposing himself to the obvious charge of abominable treason. So far as the Florentines knew, his assassination of their Duke was but a piece of private spite, executed with infernal craft. It is true that when he seized the pen in exile, he did his best to claim the guerdon of a patriot, and to throw the blame of failure on the Florentines. In his Apology, and in a letter written to Francesco de' Medici, he taunts them with lacking the spirit to extinguish tyranny when he had slain the tyrant. He summons plausible excuses to his aid--the impossibility of taking persons of importance into his confidence, the loss of blood he suffered from his wound, the uselessness of rousing citizens whom events proved over-indolent for action. He declares that he has nothing to regret. Having proved by deeds his will to serve his country, he has saved his life in order to spend it for her when occasion offered. But these arguments, invented after the catastrophe, these words, so bravely penned when action ought to have confirmed his resolution, do not meet the case. It was no deed of a true hero to assassinate a despot, knowing or half knowing that the despot's subjects would immediately elect another. Their languor could not, except rhetorically, be advanced in defence of his own flight. The historian is driven to seek both the explanation and palliation of Lorenzo's failure in the temper of his times. There was enough daring left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of independence had expired with Ferrucci. Still I have not without forethought dubbed this man a Cinque Cento Brutus. Like much of the art and literature of his century, his action may be regarded as a _bizarre_ imitation of the antique manner. Without the force and purpose of a Roman, Lorenzo set himself to copy Plutarch's men--just as sculptors carved Neptunes and Apollos without the dignity and serenity of the classic style. The antique faith was wanting to both murderer and craftsman in those days. Even as Renaissance work in art is too often aimless, decorative, vacant of intention, so Lorenzino's Brutus tragedy seems but the snapping of a pistol in void air. He had the audacity but not the ethical consistency of his crime. He played the part of Brutus like a Roscius, perfect in its histrionic details. And it doubtless gave to this skilful actor a supreme satisfaction--salving over many wounds of vanity, quenching the poignant thirst for things impossible and draughts of fame--that he could play it on no mimic stage, but on the theatre of Europe. The weakness of his conduct was the central weakness of his age and country. Italy herself lacked moral purpose, sense of righteous necessity, that consecration of self to a noble cause, which could alone have justified Lorenzo's perfidy. Confused memories of Judith, Jael, Brutus, and other classical tyrannicides, exalted his imagination. Longing for violent emotions, jaded with pleasure which had palled, discontented with his wasted life, jealous of his brutal cousin, appetitive to the last of glory, he conceived his scheme. Having conceived, he executed it with that which never failed in Cinque Cento Italy--the artistic spirit of perfection. When it was over, he shrugged his shoulders, wrote his magnificent Apology with a style of adamant upon a plate of steel, and left it for the outlaws of Filippo Strozzi's faction to deal with the crisis he had brought about. For some years he dragged out an ignoble life in obscurity, and died at last, as Varchi puts it, more by his own carelessness than by the watchful animosity of others. Over the wild, turbid, clever, incomprehensible, inconstant hero-artist's grave we write our _Requiescat_. Clio, as she takes the pen in hand to record this prayer, smiles disdainfully and turns to graver business. * * * * * _TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY_ There are few contrasts more striking than that which is presented by the memoirs of Goldoni and Alfieri. Both of these men bore names highly distinguished in the history of Italian literature. Both of them were framed by nature with strongly marked characters, and fitted to perform a special work in the world. Both have left behind them records of their lives and literary labours, singularly illustrative of their peculiar differences. There is no instance in which we see more clearly the philosophical value of autobiographies, than in these vivid pictures which the great Italian tragedian and comic author have delineated. Some of the most interesting works of Lionardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Albert Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto, are their portraits painted by themselves. These pictures exhibit not only the lineaments of the masters, but also their art. The hand which drew them was the hand which drew the 'Last Supper,' or the 'Madonna of the Tribune:' colour, method, chiaroscuro, all that makes up manner in painting, may be studied on the same canvas as that which faithfully represents the features of the man whose genius gave his style its special character. We seem to understand the clear calm majesty of Lionardo's manner, the silver-grey harmonies and smooth facility of Andrea's Madonnas, the better for looking at their faces drawn by their own hands at Florence. And if this be the case with a dumb picture, how far higher must be the interest and importance of the written life of a known author! Not only do we recognise in its composition the style and temper and habits of thought which are familiar to us in his other writings; but we also hear from his own lips how these were formed, how his tastes took their peculiar direction, what circumstances acted on his character, what hopes he had, and where he failed. Even should his autobiography not bear the marks of uniform candour, it probably reveals more of the actual truth, more of the man's real nature in its height and depth, than any memoir written by friend or foe. Its unconscious admissions, its general spirit, and the inferences which we draw from its perusal, are far more valuable than any mere statement of facts or external analysis, however scientific. When we become acquainted with the series of events which led to the conception or attended the production of some masterpiece of literature, a new light is thrown upon its beauties, fresh life bursts forth from every chapter, and we seem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success. What a powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience when, after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' Gibbon tells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the Capitol, among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the mutter of the monks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by Lake Geneva, and laid his pen down and walked forth and saw the stars above his terrace at Lausanne! The memoirs of Alfieri and Goldoni are not deficient in any of the characteristics of good autobiography. They seem to bear upon their face the stamp of truthfulness, they illustrate their authors' lives with marvellous lucidity, and they are full of interest as stories. But it is to the contrast which they present that our attention should be chiefly drawn. Other biographies may be as interesting and amusing. None show in a more marked manner two distinct natures endowed with genius for one art, and yet designed in every possible particular for different branches of that art. Alfieri embodies Tragedy; Goldoni is the spirit of Comedy. They are both Italians: their tragedies and comedies are by no means cosmopolitan; but this national identity of character only renders more remarkable the individual divergences by which they were impelled into their different paths. Thalia seems to have made the one, body, soul, and spirit; and Melpomene the other; each goddess launched her favourite into circumstances suited to the evolution of his genius, and presided over his development, so that at his death she might exclaim,--Behold the living model of my Art! Goldoni was born at Venice in the year 1707; he had already reached celebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, at Asti. Goldoni's grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settled in Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich and ostentatious 'bourgeois.' 'Amid riot and luxury did I enter the world,' says the poet, after enumerating the banquets and theatrical displays with which the old Goldoni entertained his guests in his Venetian palace and country-house. Venice at that date was certainly the proper birthplace for a comic poet. The splendour of the Renaissance had thoroughly habituated her nobles to pleasures of the sense, and had enervated their proud, maritime character, while the great name of the republic robbed them of the caution for which they used to be conspicuous. Yet the real strength of Venice was almost spent, and nothing remained but outward insolence and prestige. Everything was gay about Goldoni in his earliest childhood. Puppet-shows were built to amuse him by his grandfather. 'My mother,' he says, 'took charge of my education, and my father of my amusements.' Let us turn to the opening scene in Alfieri's life, and mark the difference. A father above sixty, 'noble, wealthy, and respectable,' who died before his son had reached the age of one year old. A mother devoted to religion, the widow of one marquis, and after the death of a second husband, Alfieri's father, married for the third time to a nobleman of ancient birth. These were Alfieri's parents. He was born in a solemn palazzo in the country town of Asti, and at the age of five already longed for death as an escape from disease and other earthly troubles. So noble and so wealthy was the youthful poet that an abbé was engaged to carry out his education, but not to teach him more than a count should know. Except this worthy man he had no companions whatever. Strange ideas possessed the boy. He ruminated on his melancholy, and when eight years old attempted suicide. At this age he was sent to the academy at Turin, attended, as befitted a lad of his rank, by a man-servant, who was to remain and wait on him at school. Alfieri stayed here several years without revisiting his home, tyrannised over by the valet who added to his grandeur, constantly subject to sickness, and kept in almost total ignorance by his incompetent preceptors. The gloom and pride and stoicism of his temperament were augmented by this unnatural discipline. His spirit did not break, but took a haughtier and more disdainful tone. He became familiar with misfortunes. He learned to brood over and intensify his passions. Every circumstance of his life seemed strung up to a tragic pitch. This at least is the impression which remains upon our mind after reading in his memoirs the narrative of what must in many of its details have been a common schoolboy's life at that time. Meanwhile, what had become of young Goldoni? His boyhood was as thoroughly plebeian, various, and comic as Alfieri's had been patrician, monotonous, and tragical. Instead of one place of residence, we read of twenty. Scrape succeeds to scrape, adventure to adventure. Knowledge of the world, and some book learning also, flow in upon the boy, and are eagerly caught up by him and heterogeneously amalgamated in his mind. Alfieri learned nothing, wrote nothing, in his youth, and heard his parents say--'A nobleman need never strive to be a doctor of the faculties.' Goldoni had a little medicine and much law thrust upon him. At eight he wrote a comedy, and ere long began to read the plays of Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and Machiavelli. Between the nature of the two poets there was a marked and characteristic difference as to their mode of labour and of acquiring knowledge. Both of them loved fame, and wrought for it; but Alfieri did so from a sense of pride and a determination to excel; while Goldoni loved the approbation of his fellows, sought their compliments, and basked in the sunshine of smiles. Alfieri wrote with labour. Each tragedy he composed went through a triple process of composition, and received frequent polishing when finished. Goldoni dashed off his pieces with the greatest ease on every possible subject. He once produced sixteen comedies in one theatrical season. Alfieri's were like lion's whelps--brought forth with difficulty, and at long intervals; Goldoni's, like the brood of a hare--many, frequent, and as agile as their parent. Alfieri amassed knowledge scrupulously, but with infinite toil. He mastered Greek and Hebrew when he was past forty. Goldoni never gave himself the least trouble to learn anything, but trusted to the ready wit, good memory, and natural powers, which helped him in a hundred strange emergencies. Power of will and pride sustained the one; facility and a good-humoured vanity the other. This contrast was apparent at a very early age. We have seen how Alfieri passed his time at Turin, in a kind of aristocratic prison of educational ignorance. Goldoni's grandfather died when he was five years old, and left his family in great embarrassment. The poet's father went off to practise medicine at Perugia. His son followed him, acquired the rudiments of knowledge in that town, and then proceeded to study philosophy alone at Rimini. There was no man-servant or academy in his case. He was far too plebeian and too free. The boy lodged with a merchant, and got some smattering of Thomas Aquinas and the Peripatetics into his small brain, while he contrived to form a friendship with an acting company. They were on the wing for Venice in a coasting boat, which would touch at Chiozza, where Goldoni's mother then resided. The boy pleased them. Would he like the voyage? This offer seemed too tempting, and away he rushed, concealed himself on board, and made one of a merry motley shipload. 'Twelve persons, actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a storekeeper, eight domestics, four chambermaids, two nurses, children of every age, cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb; it was another Noah's ark.' The young poet felt at home; how could a comic poet feel otherwise? They laughed, they sang, they danced; they ate and drank, and played at cards. 'Macaroni! Every one fell on it, and three dishes were devoured. We had also alamode beef, cold fowl, a loin of veal, a dessert, and excellent wine. What a charming dinner! No cheer like a good appetite.' Their harmony, however, was disturbed. The 'première amoureuse,' who, in spite of her rank and title, was ugly and cross, and required to be coaxed with cups of chocolate, lost her cat. She tried to kill the whole boat-load of beasts--cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, pigeons, even the lamb stood in danger of her wrath. A regular quarrel ensued, was somehow set at peace, and all began to laugh again. This is a sample of Goldoni's youth. Comic pleasures, comic dangers; nothing deep or lasting, but light and shadow cheerfully distributed, clouds lowering with storm, a distant growl of thunder, then a gleam of light and sunshine breaking overhead. He gets articled to an attorney at Venice, then goes to study law at Pavia; studies society instead, and flirts, and finally is expelled for writing satires. Then he takes a turn at medicine with his father in Friuli, and acts as clerk to the criminal chancellor at Chiozza. Every employment seems easy to him, but he really cares for none but literature. He spends all his spare time in reading and in amusements, and begins to write a tragic opera. This proves, however, eminently unsuccessful, and he burns it in a comic fit of anger. One laughable love-affair in which he engaged at Udine exhibits his adventures in their truly comic aspect. It reminds us of the scene in 'Don Giovanni,' where Leporello personates the Don and deceives Donna Elvira. Goldoni had often noticed a beautiful young lady at church and on the public drives: she was attended by a waiting-maid, who soon perceived that her mistress had excited the young man's admiration, and who promised to befriend him in his suit. Goldoni was told to repair at night to the palace of his mistress, and to pour his passion forth beneath her window. Impatiently he waited for the trysting hour, conned his love-sentences, and gloried in the romance of the adventure. When night came, he found the window, and a veiled figure of a lady in the moonlight, whom he supposed at once to be his mistress. Her he eloquently addressed in the true style of Romeo's rapture, and she answered him. Night after night this happened, but sometimes he was a little troubled by a sound of ill-suppressed laughter interrupting the _tête-à-tête_. Meanwhile Teresa, the waiting-maid, received from his hands costly presents for her mistress, and made him promises on her part in exchange. As she proved unable to fulfil them, Goldoni grew suspicious, and at last discovered that the veiled figure to whom he had poured out his tale of love was none other than Teresa, and that the laughter had proceeded from her mistress, whom the faithless waiting-maid regaled at her lover's expense. Thus ended this ridiculous matter. Goldoni was not, however, cured by his experience. One other love-affair rendered Udine too hot to hold him, and in consequence of a third he had to fly from Venice just when he was beginning to flourish there. At length he married comfortably and suitably, settling down into a quiet life with a woman whom, if he did not love her with passion, he at least respected and admired. Goldoni, in fact, had no real passion in his nature. Alfieri, on the other hand, was given over to volcanic ebullitions of the most ungovernable hate and affection, joy and sorrow. The chains of love which Goldoni courted so willingly, Alfieri regarded with the greatest shyness. But while Goldoni healed his heart of all its bruises in a week or so, the tragic poet bore about him wounds that would not close. He enumerates three serious passions which possessed his whole nature, and at times deprived him almost of his reason. A Dutch lady first won his heart, and when he had to leave her, Alfieri suffered so intensely that he never opened his lips during the course of a long journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Piedmont. Fevers, and suicides attempted but interrupted, marked the termination of this tragic amour. His second passion had for its object an English lady, with whose injured husband he fought a duel, although his collarbone was broken at the time. The lady proved unworthy of Alfieri as well as of her husband, and the poet left her in a most deplorable state of hopelessness and intellectual prostration. At last he formed a permanent affection for the wife of Prince Charles Edward, the Countess of Albany, in close friendship with whom he lived after her husband's death. The society of this lady gave him perfect happiness; but it was founded on her lofty beauty, the pathos of her situation, and her intellectual qualities. Melpomene presided at this union, while Thalia blessed the nuptials of Goldoni. How characteristic also were the adventures which these two pairs of lovers encountered! Goldoni once carried his wife upon his back across two rivers in their flight from the Spanish to the Austrian camp at Rimini, laughing and groaning, and perceiving the humour of his situation all the time. Alfieri, on an occasion of even greater difficulty, was stopped with his illustrious friend at the gates of Paris in 1792. They were flying in post-chaises, with their servants and their baggage, from the devoted city, when a troop of _sansculottes_ rushed on them, surged around the carriage, called them aristocrats, and tried to drag them off to prison. Alfieri, with his tall gaunt figure, pallid face, and red voluminous hair, stormed, raged, and raised his deep bass voice above the tumult. For half an hour he fought with them, then made his coachmen gallop through the gates, and scarcely halted till they got to Gravelines. By this prompt movement they escaped arrest and death at Paris. These two scenes would make agreeable companion pictures: Goldoni staggering beneath his wife across the muddy bed of an Italian stream--the smiling writer of agreeable plays, with his half-tearful helpmate ludicrous in her disasters; Alfieri mad with rage among Parisian Mænads, his princess quaking in her carriage, the air hoarse with cries, and death and safety trembling in the balance. It is no wonder that the one man wrote 'La Donna di Garbo' and the 'Cortese Veneziano,' while the other was inditing essays on Tyranny and dramas of 'Antigone,' 'Timoleon,' and 'Brutus.' The difference between the men is seen no less remarkably in regard to courage. Alfieri was a reckless rider, and astonished even English huntsmen by his desperate leaps. In one of them he fell and broke his collar-bone, but not the less he held his tryst with a fair lady, climbed her park gates, and fought a duel with her husband. Goldoni was a pantaloon for cowardice. In the room of an inn at Desenzano which he occupied together with a female fellow-traveller, an attempt was made to rob them by a thief at night. All Goldoni was able to do consisted in crying out for help, and the lady called him 'M. l'Abbé' ever after for his want of pluck. Goldoni must have been by far the more agreeable of the two. In all his changes from town to town of Italy he found amusement and brought gaiety. The sights, the theatres, the society aroused his curiosity. He trembled with excitement at the performance of his pieces, made friends with the actors, taught them, and wrote parts to suit their qualities. At Pisa he attended as a stranger the meeting of the Arcadian Academy, and at its close attracted all attention to himself by his clever improvisation. He was in truth a ready-witted man, pliable, full of resource, bred half a valet, half a Roman _græculus_. Alfieri saw more of Europe than Goldoni. France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, Spain, all parts of Italy he visited with restless haste. From land to land he flew, seeking no society, enjoying nothing, dashing from one inn door to another with his servants and his carriages, and thinking chiefly of the splendid stud of horses which he took about with him upon his travels. He was a lonely, stiff, self-engrossed, indomitable man. He could not rest at home: he could not bear to be the vassal of a king and breathe the air of courts. So he lived always on the wing, and ended by exiling himself from Sardinia in order to escape the trammels of paternal government. As for his tragedies, he wrote them to win laurels from posterity. He never cared to see them acted; he bullied even his printers and correctors; he cast a glove down in defiance of his critics. Goldoni sought the smallest meed of approbation. It pleased him hugely in his old age to be Italian master to a French princess. Alfieri openly despised the public. Goldoni wrote because he liked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers. Against Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we have to set Goldoni's love of Venice and its petty pleasures. He would willingly have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet all his life on the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing the sierras on his Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal of rice in solitude. Goldoni glided through life an easy man, with genial, venial thoughts; with a clear, gay, gentle temper; a true sense of what is good and just; and a heart that loved diffusively, if not too warmly. Many were the checks and obstacles thrown on his path; but round them or above them he passed nimbly, without scar or scathe. Poverty went close behind him, but he kept her off, and never felt the pinch of need. Alfieri strained and strove against the barriers of fate; a sombre, rugged man, proud, candid, and self-confident, who broke or bent all opposition; now moving solemnly with tragic pomp, now dashing passionately forward by the might of will. Goldoni drew his inspirations from the moment and surrounding circumstances. Alfieri pursued an ideal, slowly formed, but strongly fashioned and resolutely followed. Of wealth he had plenty and to spare, but he disregarded it, and was a Stoic in his mode of life. He was an unworldly man, and hated worldliness. Goldoni, but for his authorship, would certainly have grown a prosperous advocate, and died of gout in Venice. Goldoni liked smart clothes; Alfieri went always in black. Goldoni's fits of spleen--for he _was_ melancholy now and then--lasted a day or two, and disappeared before a change of place. Alfieri dragged his discontent about with him all over Europe, and let it interrupt his work and mar his intellect for many months together. Alfieri was a patriot, and hated France. Goldoni never speaks of politics, and praises Paris as a heaven on earth. The genial moralising of the latter appears childish by the side of Alfieri's terse philosophy and pregnant remarks on the development of character. What suits the page of Plautus would look poor in 'Oedipus' or 'Agamemnon.' Goldoni's memoirs are diffuse and flippant in their light French dress. They seem written to please. Alfieri's Italian style marches with dignity and Latin terseness. He rarely condescends to smile. He writes to instruct the world and to satisfy himself. Grim humour sometimes flashes out, as when he tells the story of the Order of Homer, which he founded. How different from Goldoni's naïve account of his little ovation in the theatre at Paris! But it would be idle to carry on this comparison, already tedious. The life of Goldoni was one long scene of shifts and jests, of frequent triumphs and some failures, of lessons hard at times, but kindly. Passions and _ennui_, flashes of heroic patriotism, constant suffering and stoical endurance, art and love idealised, fill up the life of Alfieri. Goldoni clung much to his fellow-men, and shared their pains and pleasures. Alfieri spent many of his years in almost absolute solitude. On the whole character and deeds of the one man was stamped Comedy: the other was own son of Tragedy. If, after reading the autobiographies of Alfieri and Goldoni, we turn to the perusal of their plays, we shall perceive that there is no better commentary on the works of an artist than his life, and no better life than one written by himself. The old style of criticism, which strove to separate an author's productions from his life, and even from the age in which he lived, to set up an arbitrary canon of taste, and to select one or two great painters or poets as ideals because they seemed to illustrate that canon, has passed away. We are beginning to feel that art is a part of history and of physiology. That is to say, the artist's work can only be rightly understood by studying his age and temperament. Goldoni's versatility and want of depth induced him to write sparkling comedies. The merry life men passed at Venice in its years of decadence proved favourable to his genius. Alfieri's melancholy and passionate qualities, fostered in solitude, and aggravated by a tyranny he could not bear, led him irresistibly to tragic composition. Though a noble, his nobility only added to his pride, and insensibly his intellect had been imbued with the democratic sentiments which were destined to shake Europe in his lifetime. This, in itself, was a tragic circumstance, bringing him into close sympathy with the Brutus, the Prometheus, the Timoleon of ancient history. Goldoni's _bourgeoisie_, in the atmosphere of which he was born and bred, was essentially comic. The true comedy of manners, which is quite distinct from Shakspere's fancy or from Aristophanic satire, is always laid in middle life. Though Goldoni tried to write tragedies, they were unimpassioned, dull, and tame. He lacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfieri composed some comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their utmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever in extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. His chiaroscuro was too strong; virtue and villany appearing in pure black and white upon his pages. His hatred of tyrants induced him to transgress the rules of probability, so that it has been well said that if his wicked kings had really had such words of scorn and hatred thrown at them by their victims, they were greatly to be pitied. On the other hand, his pithy laconisms have often a splendidly tragical effect. There is nothing in the modern drama more rhetorically impressive, though spasmodic, than the well-known dialogue between Antigone and Creon:-- '_Cr_. Scegliesti? '_Ant_. Ho scelto. '_Cr_. Emon? '_Ant_. Morte. '_Cr_. L'avrai!' Goldoni's comedies, again, have not enough of serious thought or of true creative imagination to be works of high art. They lean too much to the side of farce; they have none of the tragic salt which gives a dignity to Tartuffe. They are, in a word, almost too enethistically comic. The contrast between these authors might lead us to raise the question long ago discussed by Socrates at Agathon's banquet--Can the same man write both comedies and tragedies? We in England are accustomed to read the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, and to think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom of the Elizabethan theatre obliged this double authorship; yet it must be confessed that Shakspere's comedies are not such comedies as Greek or Romnan or French critics would admit. They are works of the purest imagination, wholly free from the laws of this world; while the tragedies of Fletcher have a melodramatic air equally at variance with the classical Melpomene. It may very seriously be doubted whether the same mind could produce, with equal power, a comedy like the 'Cortese Veneziano' and a tragedy like Alfieri's 'Brutus.' At any rate, returning to our old position, we find in these two men the very opposite conditions of dramatic genius. They are, as it were, specimens prepared by Nature for the instruction of those who analyse genius in its relations to temperament, to life, and to external circumstances. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: This Essay was written in 1866, and published in 1867. Reprinting it in 1879, after eighteen months spent continuously in one high valley of the Grisons, I feel how slight it is. For some amends, I take this opportunity of printing at the end of it a description of Davos in winter.] [Footnote 2: See, however, what is said about Leo Battista Alberti in the sketch of Rimini in the second series.] [Footnote 3: The Grisons surname Campèll may derive from the Romansch Campo Bello. The founder of the house was one Kaspar Campèll, who in the first half of the sixteenth century preached the Reformed religion in the Engadine.] [Footnote 4: I have translated and printed at the end of the second volume some sonnets of Petrarch as a kind of palinode for this impertinence.] [Footnote 5: This begs the question whether [Greek: leukoion] does not properly mean snowflake, or some such flower. Violets in Greece, however, were often used for crowns: [Greek: iostephanos] is the epithet of Homer for Aphrodite, and of Aristophanes for Athens.] [Footnote 6: Olive-trees must be studied at Mentone or San Remo, in Corfu, at Tivoli, on the coast between Syracuse and Catania, or on the lowlands of Apulia. The stunted but productive trees of the Rhone valley, for example, are no real measure of the beauty they can exhibit.] [Footnote 7: Dante, Par. xi. 106.] [Footnote 8: It is but just to Doctor Pasta to remark that the above sentence was written more than ten years ago. Since then he has enlarged and improved his house in many ways, furnished it more luxuriously, made paths through the beechwoods round it, and brought excellent water at a great cost from a spring near the summit of the mountain. A more charming residence from early spring to late autumn can scarcely be discovered.] [Footnote 9: 'The down upon their cheeks and chin was yellower than helichrysus, and their breasts gleamed whiter far than thou, O Moon.'] [Footnote 10: 'Thy tresses have I oftentimes compared to Ceres' yellow autumn sheaves, wreathed in curled bands around thy head.'] [Footnote 11: Both these and the large frescoes in the choir have been chromolithographed by the Arundel Society.] [Footnote 12: I cannot see clearly through these transactions, the muddy waters of decadent Italian plot and counterplot being inscrutable to senses assisted by nothing more luminous than mere tradition.] [Footnote 13: Those who are interested in such matters may profitably compare this description of a planned murder in the sixteenth century with the account written by Ambrogio Tremazzi of the way in which he tracked and slew Troilo Orsini in Paris in the year 1577. It is given by Gnoli in his _Vittoria Accoramboni_, pp. 404-414.] [Footnote 14: So far as I can discover, the only church of San Spirito in Venice was a building on the island of San Spirito, erected by Sansavino, which belonged to the Sestiere di S. Croce, and which was suppressed in 1656. Its plate and the fine pictures which Titian painted there were transferred at that date to S.M. della Salute. I cannot help inferring that either Bibboni's memory failed him, or that his words were wrongly understood by printer or amanuensis. If for S. Spirito we substitute S. Stefano, the account would be intelligible.] * * * * * 
16180	----	ROMAN MOSAICS OR STUDIES IN ROME AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD BY HUGH MACMILLAN D.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.S.A. Scot. AUTHOR OF 'BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE,' 'FIRST FORMS OF VEGETATION,' 'HOLIDAYS IN HIGH LANDS,' 'THE RIVIERA,' ETC. London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1888 PREFACE The title of this book may seem fanciful. It may even be regarded as misleading, creating the idea that it is a treatise like that of Mr. Digby Wyatt on those peculiar works of art which decorate the old palaces and churches of Rome. But notwithstanding these objections, no title can more adequately describe the nature of the book. It is applicable on account of the miscellaneous character of the chapters, which have already appeared in some of our leading magazines and reviews, and are now, with considerable changes and additions, gathered together into a volume. There is a further suitableness in the title, owing to the fact that most of the contents have no claim to originality. As a Roman Mosaic is made up of small coloured cubes joined together in such a manner as to form a picture, so my book may be said to be made up of old facts gathered from many sources and harmonised into a significant unity. So many thousands of volumes have been written about Rome that it is impossible to say anything new regarding it. Every feature of its topography and every incident of its history have been described. Every sentiment appropriate to the subject has been expressed. But Rome can be regarded from countless points of view, and studied for endless objects. Each visitor's mind is a different prism with angles of thought that break up the subject into its own colours. And as is the case in a mosaic, old materials can be brought into new combinations, and a new picture constructed out of them. It is on this ground that I venture to add another book to the bewildering pile of literature on Rome. But I have another reason to offer. While the great mass of the materials of the book is old and familiar, not a few things are introduced that are comparatively novel. The late Dean Alford made the remark how difficult it is to obtain in Rome those details of interest which can be so easily got in other cities. Guide-books contain a vast amount of information, but there are many points interesting to the antiquarian and the historian which they overlook altogether. There is no English book, for instance, like Ruffini's _Dizionario Etimologico-Storico delle Strade, Piazze, Borghi e Vicoli della Città di Roma_, to tell one of the origin of the strange and bizarre names of the streets of Rome, many of which involve most interesting historical facts and most romantic associations of the past. There is no English book on the ancient marbles of Rome like Corsi's _Pietre Antiche_, which describes the mineralogy and source of the building materials of the imperial city, and traces their history from the law courts and temples of which they first formed part to the churches and palaces in which they may now be seen. Every nook in London, with its memories and points of interest, has been chronicled in a form that is accessible to every one. But there is an immense amount of most interesting antiquarian lore regarding out-of-the-way things in Rome which is buried in the transactions of learned societies or in special Italian monographs, and is therefore altogether beyond the reach of the ordinary visitor. Science has lately shed its vivid light upon the physical history of the Roman plain; and the researches of the archæologist have brought into the daylight of modern knowledge, and by a wider comparison and induction have invested with a new significance, the prehistoric objects, customs, and traditions which make primeval Rome and the surrounding sites so fascinating to the imagination. But these results are not to be found in the books which the English visitor usually consults. In the following chapters I have endeavoured to supply some of that curious knowledge; and it is to be hoped that what is given--for it is no more than a slight sample out of an almost boundless store--will create an interest in such subjects, and induce the reader to go in search of fuller information. Many of the points touched upon have provoked endless disputations which are not likely soon to be settled. Indeed there is hardly any line of study one can take up in connection with Rome which does not bristle with controversies; and a feeling of perplexity and uncertainty continually haunts one in regard to most of the subjects. It is not only in the vague field of the early traditions of the city, and of the medieval traditions of the Church, that this feeling oppresses one; it exists everywhere, even in the more solid and assured world of Roman art, literature, and history. Where it is so difficult to arrive at settled convictions, I may be pardoned if I have expressed views that are open to reconsideration. I am aware of the disadvantages connected with thus collecting together a number of separate papers, instead of writing a uniform treatise upon one continuous subject. The picture formed by their union must necessarily have much of the artificiality and clumsiness of the mosaic as compared with the oil or water-colour painting. But only in this form could I have brought together such a great variety of important things. And though I cannot hope that the inherent defect of the mosaic will be compensated by its permanence--for books of this kind do not last--yet it will surely serve some good purpose to have such a collocation of facts regarding a place whose interest is ever varying and never dying. The personal element is almost entirely confined to the first chapter, which deals on that account with more familiar incidents than the others. Twelve years have elapsed since my memorable sojourn in Rome; and many changes have occurred in the Eternal City since then. I have had no opportunity to repeat my visit and to add to or correct my first impressions, desirable as it might be to have had such a revision for the sake of this book. I duly drank of the water of Trevi the night before I left; but the spell has been in abeyance all these years. I live, however, in the hope that it has not altogether lost its mystic power; and that some day, not too far off, I may be privileged to go over the old scenes with other and larger eyes than those with which I first reverently gazed upon them. It needs two visits at least to form any true conception of Rome: a first visit to acquire the personal interest in the city which will lead at home to the eager search for knowledge regarding it from every source; and then the second visit to bring the mind thus quickened and richly stored with information to bear with new comprehension and increased interest upon the study of its antiquities on the spot. HUGH MACMILLAN. CONTENTS CHAPTER I A WALK TO CHURCH IN ROME A Walk to Church in Country--In the Town--Residence in Capo le Case--Church of San Guiseppe--Propaganda--Pillar of Immaculate Conception--Piazza di Spagna--Staircase--Models--Beggars--Church of Trinita dei Monti--Flowers--Via Babuino--Piazza del Popolo--Flaminian Obelisk--Pincian Hill--Porta del Popolo--Church of Santa Maria del Popolo--Monastery of St. Augustine--Presbyterian Church--Villa Borghese--Ponte Molle CHAPTER II THE APPIAN WAY Formation of Appian Way--Tombs on Roman Roads--Loneliness of Country outside Rome--Porta Capena--Restoration of Appian Way--Grove and Fountain of Egeria--Baths of Caracalla--Church of Sts. Nereus and Achilles--Tomb of Scipios--Columbaria--Arch of Drusus--Gate of St. Sebastian--Almo--Tomb of Geta--Plants in Valley of Almo--Catacombs of St. Calixtus--Catacomb of Pretextatus--Catacomb of Sts. Nereus and Achilles--Church of St. Sebastian--Circus of Romulus--Tomb of Cæcilia Metella--Sadness of Appian Way--Imagines Clipeatæ--Profusion of Plant and Animal Life--Solitude--Villa of Seneca--Mounds of Horatii and Curiatii--Villa of Quintilii--Tomb of Atticus--Casale Rotondo--Frattocchie--Bovillæ--Albano--St. Paul's Entrance into Rome by Appian Way CHAPTER III THE CUMÆAN SIBYL Promontory of Carmel--Westmost Point of Italy--Mode of reaching Cumæ--Few Relics of Ancient City--Uncertainty about Sibyl's Cave--Loneliness of Site--Roman Legend of Sibylline Books--Mode of Keeping Them--Sortes Sibyllinæ--Different Sibyls--Apocalyptic Literature--Existing Remains of Sibylline Books--Reverence paid to Sibyl by Christian Writers--Church of Ara Coeli--Roof of Sistine Chapel--Prospective Attitude of Sibyl--Retrospective Characteristic of Greek and Roman Religion--Connection between Hebrew and Pagan Prophecy--Pagan Oracles superseded by Living Oracles of the Gospel CHAPTER IV FOOTPRINTS IN ROME Footprints of our Lord in Church of Domine quo Vadis--Slabs with Footprints in Kircherian Museum--St. Christina's Footprints at Bolsena--Significance of Footmarks--Votive Offerings--Footprint of Mahomet at Jerusalem--Footprint of Christ on Mount of Olives--Footprints of Abraham at Mecca--Drusic Footprints--Phrabat, or Sacred Foot of Buddha--Famous Footprint on Summit of Adam's Peak in Ceylon--Footprints at Gayá--Footprints of Vishnu--Jain Temples--Prehistoric Footprints--Tanist Stones--Dun Add in Argyleshire--Mary's Step in Wales--Footmarks in Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and Brittany--Classical Examples--Footprints in America and Africa--Connection with Primitive Worship CHAPTER V THE ROMAN FORUM Geological History--Volcanic Origin--Early Legends--Cloaca Maxima--Work of Excavation--Ærarium--Capitol--Temple of Concord--Temple of Jupiter--Arch of Septimius Severus--Milliarium Aureum--Mamertine Prison--Pillar of Phocas--Suovetaurilia--Curia Hostilia--Comitium--Curia of Diocletian--Basilica Julia--Vicus Tuscus--Temple of Castor and Pollux--Atrium Vestæ--Temple of Vesta--Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina--Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano--Colosseum--Conflagration in Forum CHAPTER VI THE EGYPTIAN OBELISKS Number of Obelisks in Rome--Sun Worship--Symbolism of Obelisk--Obelisk of Nebuchadnezzar--Original position of Obelisks--Egyptian Propylons--Changes connected with Obelisks in Egypt--Transportation of Obelisks to Rome and other places--Obelisk of Heliopolis--Obelisk of Luxor--Karnac--Lateran Obelisk--Obelisk in Square of St. Peter's--Obelisk of Piazza del Popolo--Association of Fountains with Obelisks--Obelisk of Monte Citorio--Esquiline and Quirinal Obelisks--Obelisk of Trinita dei Monti--Pamphilian Obelisk--Obelisks near Pantheon--Superiority of Oldest Obelisks--Obelisk of Paris--Cleopatra's Needles in London and New York--Religious Devotion of Ancient Egyptians CHAPTER VII THE PAINTED TOMB AT VEII Excursions in neighbourhood of Rome--History of Veii--Uncertainty of its Site--Journey to Isola Farnese--Village of Isola--Romantic Scenery--Desolate Downs--Roman Municipium--Old Gateway--Ponte Sodo--Necropolis of Veii--Painted Tomb--Archaic Frescoes--Objects in Inner Chamber--Etruscan Tombs imitative of Homes of the Living--Worship of the Dead--Cellæ Memoriæ--Antiquity of Tomb at Veii--Mysterious character of Etruscan Language and History CHAPTER VIII HOLED STONES AND MARTYR WEIGHTS Bocca della Verita--Primitive Worship of Clefts in Rocks and Holes in Stones--Cromlechs--Passing through beneath Cromlechs and Gates--Tigillum Sororium--Pillars in Aksa Mosque at Jerusalem--"Threading the Needle" in Ripon Cathedral--Standing Stones of Stennis and Oath of Odin--Cremave--Jewish Covenant--Martyr Stones--Originally Roman Measures of Weight--Made of Jade or Nephrite--Remarkable History of Jade--Prehistoric Glimpses--Relics of Stone Age in Rome--Conservation of things connected with Religion CHAPTER IX ST. ONOFRIO AND TASSO Church of St. Onofrio--Monastery--Garden--Tasso's Oak--Grand View of Rome and Neighbourhood--Tasso's Birthplace at Sorrento--Remarkable Epoch--Bernardo Tasso--Prince of Salerno--Youth of Tasso--Visit to Rome--Sojourn at Venice--Student of Law at Padua--First Poem _Rinaldo_--University of Bologna--House of Este--Leonora--Composition of _Gerusalemme Liberata_--Death of Tasso's Father--Visit to France--_Aminta_ and Pastoral Drama--Publication of _Gerusalemme Liberata_--Della Cruscan Academy--Ariosto--Cold Treatment of Tasso by Alfonso--Confinement in Hospital of St. Anne--Story of Hapless Love--Alleged Madness--Hospital of St. Anne--_Torrismondo_--Release of Tasso--Pilgrimage to Loretto--Residence at Naples--Connection with Milton--_Gerusalemme Conquistata_--Universal Recognition of Poet--Better Days--Closing Scenes of Life at St. Onofrio--Proposed Coronation at Capitol--Too Late--Death--Estimate of Life and Work CHAPTER X THE MARBLES OF ANCIENT ROME Pleasures of Marble Hunting in Rome and Neighbourhood--Artistic and Educational Uses of Marble Fragments--Geological Formation of Rome--Building Materials of Ancient Rome--Marbles of Conquered Countries introduced into Rome--Christian Churches made up of Remains of Pagan Temples--Parian Marble--Porine and Pentelic Marbles--Hymettian Marble--Thasian, Lesbian and Tyrian Marbles--Marble of Carrara--Apollo Belvedere--Colouring of Ancient Statues and Buildings--Gibson's Colour-creed--Time's Hues on Dying Gladiator--Cipollino--Giallo Antico--Africano--Porta Santa--Fior di Persico--Pavonazzetto--Rosso Antico--Sedia Forata--Faun--Black Marbles--Lumachella Marbles--Column of Trajan--Breccias--Alabasters--Verde Antique--Subterranean Church of San Clemente--Ophite and Opus Alexandrinum--Jaspers--Murrhine Cups--Lapis Lazuli--Church of Jesuits--Abundance of Marbles in Ancient Rome CHAPTER XI THE VATICAN CODEX Vatican Library--Origin and History--Monastery of Bobbio--Splendour and Charm of Library--Contents of two Principal Cabinets--Letters of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn--Vatican Codex--Freshness of Appearance--Continuity of Writing--Vacant Space at end of St. Mark's Gospel--A Palimpsest--Origin of Vatican Codex--Sinaitic and Alexandrine Codices--History of Vatican Codex--Edition of Cardinal Mai--Edition of Tischendorf--Disappearance of all Previous Manuscripts--Faults and Deficiencies of Vatican Codex--Vatican Codex used in Revised Version of New Testament--Formation of Sacred Canon CHAPTER XII ST. PAUL AT PUTEOLI Landing of St. Paul in Ship _Castor and Pollux_ at Puteoli--Loveliness of Bay of Naples--Crowded Population and Splendour of Villas--Dissoluteness of Inhabitants--Worship of Roman Emperors--St. Paul's Grief and Anxiety--Encouragement from Brethren--Christians in Tyrian Quarter at Puteoli and at Pompeii--Southern Italy Greek in Blood and Language--Quay at Puteoli--Temples of Neptune and Serapis--Changes of Level in Sea and Land--Monte Nuovo--Destruction of Village of Tripergola--Filling up of Leucrine Lake--Lake of Avernus--Sibyl's Cave--Lough Dearg and Purgatory of St. Patrick--Death Quarter among Prehistoric People in the West--Phlegræan Fields--Scene of Wars of Gods and Giants--Elysian Fields--Pagan Heaven and Hell--Via Cumana and St. Paul--Amphitheatre of Nero--Solfatara--Relics of Volcanic Fires and Ancient Civilisation mixed together--Volcanic Fires and Landscape Beauty--Completion of Gospel in St. Paul's Journey from Jerusalem to Rome CHAPTER I A WALK TO CHURCH IN ROME I know nothing more delightful than a walk to a country church on a fine day at the end of summer. All the lovely promises of spring have been fulfilled; the woods are clothed with their darkest foliage, and not another leaflet is to come anywhere. The lingering plumes of the meadow-sweet in the fields, and the golden trumpets of the wild honeysuckle in the hedges, make the warm air a luxury to breathe; and the presence of a few tufts of bluebells by the wayside gives the landscape the last finishing touch of perfection, which is suggestive of decay, and has such an indescribable pathos about it. Nature pauses to admire her own handiwork; she ceases from her labours, and enjoys an interval of rest. It is the sabbath of the year. At such a time every object is associated with its spiritual idea, as it is with its natural shadow. The beauty of nature suggests thoughts of the beauty of holiness; and the calm rest of creation speaks to us of the deeper rest of the soul in God. On the shadowed path that leads up to the house of prayer, with mind and senses quickened to perceive the loveliness and significance of the smallest object, the fern on the bank and the lichen on the wall, we feel indeed that heaven is not so much a yonder, towards which we are to move, as a here and a now, which we are to realise. A walk to church in town is a different thing. Man's works are all around us, and God's excluded; all but the strip of blue sky that looks down between the tall houses, and suggests thoughts of heaven to those who work and weep; all but the stunted trees and the green grass that struggle to grow in the hard streets and squares, and whisper of the far-off scenes of the country, where life is natural and simple. But even in town a walk to church is pleasant, especially when the streets are quiet, before the crowd of worshippers have begun to assemble, and there is nothing to distract the thoughts. If we can say of the country walk, "This is holy ground," seeing that every bush and tree are aflame with God, we can say of the walk through the city, "Surely the Lord hath been here, this is a dreadful place." And as the rude rough stones lying on the mountain top shaped themselves in the patriarch's dream into a staircase leading up to God, so the streets and houses around become to the musing spirit suggestive of the Father's many mansions, and the glories of the City whose streets are of pure gold, in which man's hopes and aspirations after a city of rest, which are baffled here, will be realised. I have many pleasing associations connected with walks to church in town. Many precious thoughts have come to me then, which would not have occurred at other times; glimpses of the wonder of life, and revelations of inscrutable mysteries covered by the dream-woven tissue of this visible world. The subjects with which my mind was filled found new illustrations in the most unexpected quarters; and every familiar sight and sound furnished the most appropriate examples. During that half-hour of meditation, with my blood quickened by the exercise, and my mind inspired by the thoughts of the service in which I was about to engage, I have lived an intenser life and enjoyed a keener happiness than during all the rest of the week. It was the hour of insight that struck the keynote of all the others. But far above even these precious memories, I must rank my walks to church in Rome. What one feels elsewhere is deepened there; and the wonderful associations of the place give a more vivid interest to all one's experiences. I lived in the Capo le Case, a steep street on the slope between the Pincian and Quirinal hills, situated about three-quarters of a mile from the church outside the Porta del Popolo. This distance I had to traverse every Sunday morning; and I love frequently to shut my eyes and picture the streets through which I passed, and the old well-known look of the houses and monuments. There is not a more delightful walk in the world than that; and I know not where within such a narrow compass could be found so many objects of the most thrilling interest. For three months, from the beginning of February to the end of April, twice, and sometimes four times, every Sunday, I passed that way, going to or returning from church, until I became perfectly familiar with every object; and associations of my own moods of mind and heart mingled with the grander associations which every stone recalled, and are now inextricably bound up with them. With one solitary exception, when the weather in its chill winds and gloomy clouds reminded me of my native climate, all the Sundays were beautiful, the sun shining down with genial warmth, and the sky overhead exhibiting the deep violet hue which belongs especially to Italy. The house in which I lived had on either side of the entrance a picture-shop; and this was always closed, as well as most of the other places of business along the route. The streets were remarkably quiet; and all the circumstances were most favourable for a meditative walk amid such magnificent memories. The inhabitants of Rome pay respect to the Sunday so far as abstaining from labour is concerned; but they make up for this by throwing open their museums and places of interest on that day, which indeed is the only day in which they are free to the public; and they take a large amount of recreation for doing a small amount of penance in the interests of religion. Still there is very little bustle or traffic in the streets, especially in the morning; and one meets with no more disagreeable and incongruous interruptions on the way to church in the Eternal City than he does at home. At the head of the Capo le Case is a small church, beside an old ruinous-looking wall of tufa, covered with shaggy pellitory and other plants, which might well have been one of the ramparts of ancient Rome. It is called San Guiseppe, and has a faded fresco painting on the gable, representing the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, supposed to be by Frederico Zuccari, whose own house--similarly decorated on the outside with frescoes--was in the immediate vicinity. From the windows of my rooms, I could see at the foot of the street the fantastic cupola and bell-turret of the church of St. Andrea delle Fratte, which belonged to the Scottish Catholics before the Reformation, and is now frequented by our Catholic countrymen during Lent, when sermons are preached to them in English. It is the parish church of the Piazza di Spagna, and the so-called English quarter. The present edifice was only built at the end of the sixteenth century, and, strange to say, with the proceeds of the sale of Cardinal Gonsalvi's valuable collection of snuff-boxes; but its name, derived from the Italian word _Fratta_, "thorn-bush," would seem to imply that the church is of much greater antiquity, going back to a far-off time when the ground on which it stands was an uncultivated waste. A miracle is said to have happened in one of the side chapels in 1842, which received the sanction of the Pope. A young French Jew of the name of Alfonse Ratisbonne was discovered in an ecstasy before the altar; which he accounted for by saying, when he revived, that the Virgin Mary had actually appeared to him, and saluted him in this place, while he was wandering aimlessly, and with a smile of incredulity, through the church. This supernatural vision led to his conversion, and he was publicly baptized and presented to the Pope by his godfather, the general of the Jesuits; receiving on the occasion, in commemoration of the miracle, a crucifix, to which special indulgences were attached. At the foot of the Capo le Case is the College of the Propaganda, whose vast size and plain massive architecture, as well as its historical associations, powerfully impress the imagination. It was begun by Gregory XV., in 1622, and completed by his successor, Urban VIII., and his brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, from the plans partly of Bernini and Borromini. On the most prominent parts of the edifice are sculptured bees, which are the well-known armorial bearings of the Barberini family. The Propaganda used to divide with the Vatican the administration of the whole Roman Catholic world. It was compared by the Abbé Raynal to a sword, of which the handle remains in Rome, and the point reaches everywhere. The Vatican takes cognisance of what may be called the domestic affairs of the Church throughout Europe; the College of the Propaganda superintends the foreign policy of the Church, and makes its influence felt in the remotest regions of the earth. It is essentially, as its name implies, a missionary institution, founded for the promotion and guidance of missions throughout the world. Nearly two hundred youths from various countries are constantly educated here, in order that they may go back as ordained priests to their native land, and diffuse the Roman Catholic faith among their countrymen. The average number ordained every year is about fifty. No one is admitted who is over twenty years of age; and they all wear a uniform dress, consisting of a long black cassock, edged with red, and bound with a red girdle, with two bands, representing leading-strings, hanging from the shoulders behind. The cost of their education and support while in Rome, and the expenses of their journey from their native land and back again, are defrayed by the institution. Every visitor to Rome must be familiar with the appearance of the students, as they walk through the streets in groups of three or four, eagerly conversing with each other, with many expressive gesticulations. For the most part they are a fine set of young men, of whom any Church might well be proud, full of zeal and energy, and well fitted to encounter, by their physical as well as their mental training, the hard-ships of an isolated life, frequently among savage races. An annual exhibition is held in a large hall attached to the college in honour of the holy Magi, about the beginning of January, when students deliver speeches in different languages, and take part in musical performances, the score of which is usually composed by the professor of music in the college. The places of honour nearest the stage are occupied by several cardinals, whose scarlet dresses and silver locks contrast strikingly with the black garments of the majority of the assemblage. The strange costumes and countenances of the speakers, coloured with every hue known to the human family, the novel sounds of the different languages, and the personal peculiarities of each speaker in manner and intonation, make the exhibition in the highest degree interesting. Its great popularity is evinced by the crowds that usually attend, filling the hall to overflowing; and though a religious affair, it is pervaded by a lively spirit of fun, in which even the great dignitaries of the Church join heartily. The jurisdiction of the Propaganda is independent. The "congregation" of the college is composed of twenty-five cardinals, sixteen of whom are resident in Rome. One of their number is appointed prefect, and has a prelate for his secretary. They meet statedly, once a month, for the transaction of business, in a magnificent hall in the college. Previous to 1851, the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church in England were administered by the Propaganda; our country being included among heretical or heathen lands to which missionaries were sent. But after that memorable year they were transferred to the ordinary jurisdiction of the See of Rome. This movement was the first distinct act of papal aggression, and provoked fierce hostility among all classes of the Protestant community. However some of us may regret that such powerful and well-organised machinery is employed to propagate to the ends of the earth a faith to which we cannot subscribe, yet no one can read the proud inscription upon the front of the edifice, "Collegio di Propagandâ Fide," and reflect upon the grand way in which the purpose therein defined has been carried out, without a sentiment of admiration. At a time when Protestant Churches were selfishly devoted to their own narrow interests, and utterly unmindful of the Saviour's commission to preach the gospel to every creature, this college was sending forth to different countries, only partially explored, bands of young priests who carried their lives in their hands, and endured untold sufferings so that they might impart to the heathen the blessings of Christian civilisation. There is not a region from China and Japan to Mexico and the South Sea Islands, and from Africa to Siberia, which has not been taken possession of by members of this college, and cultivated for the Church. Names that are as worthy of being canonised as those of any saint in the Roman calendar, on account of their heroic achievements, their holy lives, or their martyr deaths, belong to the rôle of the Propaganda. And while sedulously spreading their faith, they were at the same time adding to the sum of human knowledge; many of the most valuable and important contributions to ethnology, geography, philology, and natural science having been made by the students of this college. Pope Pius IX. in his early days, after he had renounced his military career and become a priest, was sent out by the Propaganda, as secretary to a politico-religious mission which Pius VII. organised and despatched to Chili; and in that country his missionary career of two years exhibited all the devotion of a saint. I had the pleasure of going through the various rooms of this famous institution in the appropriate company of one of the most distinguished Free Church missionaries in India; and was shown by the rector of the college, with the utmost courtesy and kindness, all that was most remarkable about the place. The library is extensive, and contains some rare works on theology and canon law; and in the Borgian Museum annexed to it there is a rich collection of Oriental MSS., heathen idols, and natural curiosities sent by missionaries from various parts of the world. We were especially struck with the magnificent "Codex Mexicanus," a loosely-bound, bulky MS. on white leather, found among the treasures of the royal palace at the conquest of Mexico by Cortes. It is full of coloured hieroglyphics and pictures, and is known in this country through the splendid reproduction of Lord Kingsborough. But the most interesting of all the sights to the visitor is the printing establishment, which at one time was the first in the world, and had the means of publishing books in upwards of thirty different languages. At the present day it is furnished with all the recent appliances; and from this press has issued works distinguished as much for their typographical beauty as for the area they cover in the mission field. Its font of Oriental types is specially rich. We were shown specimens of the Paternoster in all the known languages; and my friend had an opportunity of inspecting some theological works in the obscure dialects of India. The productions of the Propaganda press are very widely diffused. There is a bookseller's shop connected with the establishment, where all the publications of the institution, including the papal bulls, and the principal documents of the State, may be procured. Altogether the college has taken a prominent part in the education of the world. Its influence is specially felt in America, from which a large number of its students come; the young priest who conducted us through the library and the Borgian Museum being an American, very intelligent and affable. The Roman Catholic religion flourishes in that country because it keeps clear of all political questions, and manifests itself, not as a government, in which character it is peculiarly uncompromising and despotic, but as a religion, in which aspect it has a wonderful power of adaptation to the habits and tastes of the people. The Propaganda rules Roman Catholic America very much in the spirit of its own institutions; and one of the most remarkable social phenomena of that country is the absolute subserviency which the political spirit of unbridled democracy yields to its decrees. The bees of the Barberini carved upon its architectural ornaments are no inapt symbol of the spirit and method of working of this busy theological hive, which sends its annual swarms all over the world to gather ecclesiastical honey from every flower of opportunity. Passing beyond the Propaganda, we come to a lofty pillar of the Corinthian order, situated at the commencement of the Piazza di Spagna. It is composed of a kind of gray Carystian marble called _cipollino_, distinguished by veins of pale green rippling through it, like the layers of a vegetable bulb, on account of which it is popularly known as the onion stone. It is one of the largest known monoliths, being forty-two feet in height and nearly five feet in diameter. It looks as fresh as though it were only yesterday carved out of the quarry; but it must be nearly two thousand years old, having been found about a hundred years ago when digging among the ruins of the amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus, constructed in the reign of Cæsar Augustus on the site now called, from a corruption of the old name, Monte Citorio, and occupied by the Houses of Parliament. When discovered the pillar was unfinished, a circumstance which would indicate that it had never been erected. It was left to Pope Pius IX., after all these centuries of neglect and obscurity, to find a use for it. Crowning its capital by a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary, and disfiguring its shaft by a fantastic bronze network extending up two-fifths of its height, he erected it where it now stands in 1854, to commemorate the establishment by papal bull of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It was during his exile at Gaeta, at a time when Italy was torn with civil dissensions, and his own dominions were afflicted with the most grievous calamities, which he could have easily averted or remedied if he wished, that this dogma engrossed the mind of the holy father and his ecclesiastical court. The constitutionalists at Rome were anxiously expecting some conciliatory manifesto which should precede the Pope's return and restore peace and prosperity; and they were mortified beyond measure by receiving only the letter in which this theological fiction was announced by his Holiness. The people cried for the bread of constitutional liberty, and the holy father gave them the stone of a religious dogma to which they were wholly indifferent; thus demonstrating the incompatibility of the functions of a temporal and spiritual sovereign. The pillar of the Immaculate Conception is embellished by statues of Moses, David, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, with texts from Scripture, and very inferior bronze bas-reliefs of the incidents connected with the publication of the dogma. As a work of art, it is heavy and graceless, with hard mechanical lines; and the figure of the Virgin at the top is utterly destitute of merit. The whole monument is a characteristic specimen of the modern Roman school of sculpture. For ages Rome has been considered the foster mother of art, and residence in it essential to the education of the art-faculty. But this is a delusion. Its atmosphere has never been really favourable to the development of genius. There is a moral malaria of the place as fatal to the versatile life of the imagination as the physical miasma is to health. Roman Catholicism has petrified the heart and the fancy; and a petty round of ceremonies, feasts, and social parties dissipates energy and distracts the powers of those who are not under the influence of the Church. The decadence of art has kept pace with the growing corruption of religion. Descending from the purer spiritual conceptions of former times to grosser and more superstitious ideas, it has given outward expression to these in baser forms. Even St. Peter's, though extravagantly praised by so many visitors, is but the visible embodiment of the vulgar splendour of later Catholicism. The pillar of the Immaculate Conception is not only a monument of religious superstition, but also of what must strike every thoughtful observer in Rome--the decadence of art in modern times as compared with the glorious earlier days of a purer Church. And the art of the sculptor is only in keeping with that of the painter in connection with this dogma. For the large frescoes of Podesti, which occupy a conspicuous place in the great hall of the Vatican, preceding the stanze of Raphael, and depict the persons and incidents connected with the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, are worthless as works of art, and present a melancholy contrast to the works of the immortal genius in the adjoining halls, who wrought under the inspiration of a nobler faith. No Titian or Raphael, no Michael Angelo or Bramante, was found in the degenerate days of Pio Nono to immortalise what he called the greatest event of his reign. The square in which the pillar of the Immaculate Conception is situated, along with the surrounding streets, is called the "Ghetto Inglese," for here the English and Americans most do congregate. At almost every step one encounters the fresh open countenances, blue eyes, and fair hair, which one is accustomed to associate with darker skies and ruder buildings. The Piazza di Spagna, so called from the palace of the Spanish ambassador situated in a corner of it, is one of the finest squares of Rome, being paved throughout, and surrounded on every side by lofty and picturesque buildings. In the centre is a quaint old boat-shaped fountain, called Fontana della Barcaccia, its brown slippery sides being tinted with mosses, confervæ, and other growths of wet surfaces. It was designed by Bernini to commemorate the stranding of a boat on the spot after the retiring of the great flood of 1598, which overwhelmed most of Rome. On the site of the Piazza di Spagna, there was, in the days of Domitian, an artificial lake, on which naval battles took place, witnessed by immense audiences seated in a kind of amphitheatre on the borders of the lake. As an object of taste the boat-shaped fountain is condemned by many; but Bernini adopted the form not only because of the associations of the spot, but also because the head of water was not sufficient for a jet of any considerable height. Quaint, or even ugly, as some might call it, it was to me an object of peculiar interest. Its water is of the purest and sweetest; and in the stillness of the hot noon its bright sparkle and dreamy murmur were delightfully refreshing. No city in the world is so abundantly supplied with water as Rome. You hear the lulling sound and see the bright gleam of water in almost every square. A river falls in a series of sparkling cascades from the Fountain of Trevi and the Fontana Paolina into deep, immense basins; and even into the marble sarcophagi of ancient kings, with their gracefully sculptured sides, telling some story of Arcadian times, whose nymphs and naiads are in beautiful harmony with the rustic murmur of the stream, is falling a gush of living water in many a palace courtyard. This sound of many waters is, indeed, a luxury in such a climate; and some of the pleasantest moments are those in which the visitor lingers beside one of the fountains, when the blaze and bustle of the day are over, and the balmy softness of the evening produce a dreamy mood, to which the music of the waters is irresistibly fascinating. The most distinguishing feature of the Piazza di Spagna is the wide staircase which leads up from one side of it to the church of the Trinita dei Monti, with its twin towers, through whose belfry arches the blue sky appears. This lofty staircase comprises one hundred and thirty steps, and the ascent is so gradual, and the landing-places so broad and commodious, that it is quite a pleasure, even for the most infirm persons, to mount it. The travertine of which it is composed is polished into the smoothness of marble by constant use. It is the favourite haunt of all the painters' models; and there one meets at certain hours of the day with beautiful peasant girls from the neighbouring mountains, in the picturesque costumes of the contadini, and old men with grizzled beards and locks, dressed in ragged cloaks, the originals of many a saint and Madonna in some sacred pictures, talking and laughing, or basking with half-shut eyes in the full glare of the sun. These models come usually from Cervaro and Saracinesco; the latter an extraordinary Moorish town situated at a great height among the Sabine hills, whose inhabitants have preserved intact since the middle ages their Arabic names and Oriental features and customs. On this staircase used to congregate the largest number of the beggars of Rome, whose hideous deformities were made the excuse for extorting money from the soft-hearted forestieri. Happily this plague has now greatly abated, and one may ascend or descend the magnificent stair without being revolted by the sight of human degradation, or persecuted by the importunate outcries of those who are lost to shame. The Government has done a good thing in diminishing this frightful mendicancy. But it is to be feared that whilst there are many who beg without any necessity, sturdy knaves who are up to all kinds of petty larceny, there are not a few who have no other means of livelihood, and without the alms of the charitable would die of starvation. The visitor sees only the gay side of such a place as Rome; but there are many tragedies behind the scenes. Centuries of misrule under the papal government had pauperised the people; and the sudden transition to the new state of things has deprived many of the old employments, without furnishing any substitutes, while there is no longer the dole at the convent door to provide for their wants. The whole social organisation of Italy, with its frequent saints' days, during which no work is done, and its numerous holy fraternities living on alms, and its sanctification of mendicancy in the name of religion, has tended to pauperise the nation, and give it those unthrifty improvident habits which have destroyed independence and self-respect. Although, therefore, the Government has publicly forbidden begging throughout the country, it has in some measure tacitly connived at it, as a compromise between an inefficient poor-law and the widespread misery arising from the improvidence of so many of its subjects; the amount of the harvest reaped by the beggars from the visitors to Rome being so much saved to the public purse. And though one does not meet so many unscrupulous beggars as formerly in the main thoroughfares of Rome, one is often annoyed by them on the steps of the churches, where they seem to have the right of sanctuary, and to levy toll upon all for whom they needlessly lift the heavy leathern curtain that hangs at the door. We must remember that mendicancy is a very ancient institution in Italy, and that it will die hard, if it ever dies at all. The church of the Trinita dei Monti, built in 1494 by Charles VIII. of France, occupies a most commanding position on the terrace above the Spanish Square, and is seen as a most conspicuous feature in all the views of Rome from the neighbourhood. An Egyptian obelisk with hieroglyphics, of the age of the Ptolemies, which once adorned the so-called circus in the gardens of Sallust on the Quirinal, now elevated on a lofty pedestal, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and surmounted by a cross, stands in front of the church, and gives an air of antiquity to it which its own four hundred years could hardly impart, as well as forms an appropriate termination to the splendid flight of steps which leads up to it. The church is celebrated for the possession of the "Descent from the Cross," a fresco by Ricciarelli, commonly known by the name of Daniel of Volterra, said to be one of the three finest pictures in the world. But the chapel which it adorns is badly lighted, and the painting has been greatly injured by the French, who attempted to remove it in 1817. It does not produce a very pleasing impression, being dark and oily-looking; and the cross-lights in the place interfere with the expression of the figures. We can recognise much of the force and graphic power of Michael Angelo, whom the painter sedulously imitated, in various parts of the composition; but it seems to me greatly inferior as a whole to the better-known picture of Rubens. In another chapel of this church was interred the celebrated painter Claude Lorraine, who lived for many years in a house not far off; but the French transferred the remains of their countryman to the monument raised to him in their native church in the Via della Scrofa. Adjoining the church is the convent of the Sacred Heart, which formerly belonged to French monks, minims of the order of St. Francis. It suffered severely from the wantonness of the French soldiers who were quartered in it during the French occupation of Rome in the first Revolution. Since 1827 the Convent has been in possession of French nuns, who are all ladies of rank. They each endow the Convent at their initiation with a dowry of £1000; the rest of their property going to their nearest relatives as if they were dead. They spend their time in devotional exercises, in superintending the education of a number of young girls in the higher branches, and in giving advice to those who are allowed to visit them for this purpose every afternoon. The Trinita dei Monti is the only church in Rome where female voices are to be heard chanting the religious services; and on account of this peculiarity, and the fresh sweet voices of the nuns and their pupils, many people flock to hear them singing the Ave Maria at sunset, on Sundays and on great festivals, the singers themselves being invisible behind a curtain in the organ gallery. Mendelssohn found their vespers charming, though his critical ear detected many blemishes in the playing and singing. I visited the church one day. As it is shut after matins, I was admitted at a side door by one of the nuns, who previously inspected me through the wicket, and was left alone, the door being locked behind me. The interior is severely simple and grand, preserving the original pointed architecture inclining to Gothic, and is exquisitely clean and white, as women alone could keep it; in this respect forming a remarkable contrast to the grand but dirty church of the Capuchin monks. I had ample leisure to study the very interesting pictures in the chapels. The solitude was only disturbed by a kneeling figure in black, motionless as a statue behind the iron railing in front of the high altar, or by the occasional presence of a nun, who moved across the transept with slow and measured steps, her face hid by a long white veil which gave her a spirit-like appearance. In the heart of one of the busiest parts of the city, no mountain cloister could be more quiet and lonely. One felt the soothing stillness, lifted above the world, while yet retaining the closest connection with it. It is sweet to leave the busy crowd of various nationalities below, intent only upon pleasure, and, climbing up the lofty staircase, enter this secluded shrine, and be alone with God. In the Piazza di Spagna some shops are always open on Sundays, especially those which minister to the wants and luxuries of strangers. Rows of cabs are ranged in the centre, waiting to be hired, and groups of flower-sellers stand near the shops, who thrust their beautiful bouquets almost into the face of every passer-by. If Rome is celebrated for its fountains, it is equally celebrated for its flowers. Whether it is owing to the soil, or the climate, or the mode of cultivation, or all combined, certain it is that nowhere else does one see flowers of such brilliant colours, perfect forms, and delicious fragrance; and the quantities as well as varieties of them are perfectly wonderful. Delicate pink and straw-coloured tea-roses, camellias, and jonquils mingled their high-born beauties with the more homely charms of wild-flowers that grew under the shadow of the great solemn stone-pines on the heights around, or twined their fresh garlands over the sad ruins of the Campagna. In the hand of every little boy and girl were bunches for sale of wild cyclamens, blue anemones, and sweet-scented violets, surrounded by their own leaves, and neatly tied up with thread. They had been gathered in the princely grounds of the Doria Pamphili and Borghese villas in the neighbourhood of Rome, which are freely opened to all, and where for many days in February and March groups of men, women, and children may be seen gathering vast quantities of those first-born children of the sun. The violets, especially in these grounds, are abundant and luxuriant, making every space of sward shadowed by the trees purple with their loveliness, like a reflection of the violet sky that had broken in through the lattice-work of boughs, and scenting all the air with their delicious perfume. They brought into the hot hard streets the witchery of the woodlands; and no one could inhale for a moment, in passing by, the sweet wafture of their fragrance without being transported in imagination to far-off scenes endeared to memory, and without a thrill of nameless tenderness at the heart. Some of the bunches of violets I was asked to buy were of a much paler purple than the others, and I was at no loss to explain this peculiarity. The plants with the deep violet petals and dark crimson eye had single blossoms, whereas those whose petals were lilac, and whose eye was of a paler red colour, were double. Cultivation had increased the number of petals, but it had diminished the richness of the colouring. This is an interesting example of the impartial balancing of nature. No object possesses every endowment. Defect in one direction is made up by excess in another. The rose pays for its mass of beautiful petals by its sterility; and the single violet has a lovelier hue, and is perfectly fertile, whereas the double one is pale and cannot perpetuate itself. And the moral lesson of this parable of nature is not difficult to read. Leanness of soul often accompanies the fulfilment of our earthly desires; and outward abundance often produces selfishness and covetousness. The peculiar evil of prosperity is discontent, dissatisfaction with present gain and a longing for more, and a spirit of repining at the little ills and disappointments of life. Humble, fragrant, useful contentment belongs to the soul that has the single eye, and "the one thing needful;" and the more we seek to double our possessions and enjoyments in the spirit of selfishness, the less beautiful and fragrant are we in the sight of God and man, and the less good we do in the world. From the Piazza di Spagna I passed onward through a long street called the Via Babuino, from an antique statue of a satyr mutilated into the likeness of a baboon, that used to adorn a fountain about the middle of it, now removed. More business is done on Sunday in this street than in any other quarter, with the exception of the Corso. Here a shop full of bright and beautiful flowers, roses, magnolias, hyacinths, and lilies of the valley, perfumed all the air; there a jeweller's shop displayed its tempting imitations of Etruscan ornaments, and beads of Roman pearls, coral, lapis lazuli, and malachite; while yonder a marble-cutter wrought diligently at his laths, converting some fragment of rare marble--picked up by a tourist among the ruins of ancient Rome--into a cup or letter-weight to be carried home as a souvenir. The Via Babuino opens upon the Piazza del Popolo, the finest and largest square in Rome. In the centre is a magnificent Egyptian obelisk of red Syene granite, about eighty feet in height, carved with hieroglyphics, with four marble Egyptian lions at each corner of the platform upon which it stands, pouring from their mouths copious streams of water into large basins, with a refreshing sound. Perhaps the eyes of Abraham rested upon this obelisk when he went down into Egypt, the first recorded traveller who visited the valley of the Nile; and the familiarity of the sight to the Israelites during their bondage in the neighbourhood may have suggested the wonderful vision of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which regulated their wanderings in the wilderness. God does not paint His revelations on the empty air, but weaves them into the web of history, or pours them into the mould of common earthly objects and ordinary human experiences. Many of the rites and institutions of the Mosaic economy were borrowed from those of the Egyptian priesthood; the tabernacle and its furniture were composed of the gold and jewels of which the Israelites had spoiled the Egyptians; and its form, a tent moved from place to place, accommodated itself to the wandering camp-life of the Israelites. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suppose that He who appeared to Moses at Horeb, not in some unknown supernatural blaze of glory altogether detached from earth, but in the common fire of a shepherd in the common dry vegetation of the desert, and who made use of the common shepherd's rod which Moses carried in his hand to perform the wonderful miracles before Pharaoh, would also make use of the obelisk of Heliopolis, one of the most familiar objects which met their eye during their captivity, as the pattern of the Shechinah cloud which guided His people in their journey to the land of Canaan. The symbol of the sun that shone upon their weary toil as slaves in the clay-pits beside the Nile, now protected and illumined them in their march as freemen through the desert. What they had probably joined their oppressors in worshipping as an idol, they now beheld with awe and reverence as the token of the overshadowing and overshining presence of the living and true God. That flame-shaped obelisk was the link between Egypt and the Holy Land. The divine effigy of it in the sky of the desert--like the manna as the link between the corn of Egypt and the corn of Canaan--marked the transition from the false to the true, from the old world of dark pagan thought, to the new world of religious light. I need not say with what profound interest such a thought invested the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo. I was never weary of looking up at its fair proportions, and trying to decipher its strange hieroglyphics--figures of birds and beasts in intaglio, cut clear and deep into the hard granite, and all as bright in colour and carving as though it had been only yesterday cut out of the quarry instead of four thousand years ago. It was my first glimpse into the mysterious East. It made the wonderful story of Joseph and Moses not a mere narrative in a book, but a living reality standing out from the far past like a view in a stereoscope. Every time I passed it--and I did so at all hours--I paused to enter into this reverie of the olden time. The daylight changed it into a pillar of cloud, casting the shadow of the great thoughts connected with it over my mind; the moonlight shining upon its rosy hue changed it into a pillar of fire, illumining all the inner chambers of my soul. Every Sunday it was the cynosure guiding me on my way to church, and suggesting thoughts and memories in unison with the character of the day and the nature of my work. No other object in Rome remains so indelibly pictured in my mind. From the Piazza del Popolo, three long narrow streets run, like three fingers from the palm of the hand; the Via Babuino, which leads to the English quarter; the famous Corso, which leads to the Capitol and the Forum; and the Ripetta, which leads to St. Peter's and the Vatican. These approaches are guarded by two churches, S. Maria di Monte Santo and S. Maria dei Miracoli, similar in appearance, with oval domes and tetrastyle porticoes that look like ecclesiastical porters' lodges. The name of the Piazza del Popolo is derived, not from the people, as is generally supposed, but from the extensive grove of poplar-trees that surrounded the Mausoleum of Augustus, and long formed the most conspicuous feature in the neighbourhood. The crescent-shaped sides of the square are bounded on the left by a wall, with a bright fountain and appropriate statuary in the middle of it, and a fringe of tall cypress-trees, and on the right by a similar wall, adorned with marble trophies and two columns rough with the projecting prows of ships taken from the ancient temple of Venice and Rome, and rising in a series of terraced walks to the upper platform of the Pincio. At the foot of this _Collis Hortulorum_, "Hill of Gardens," which was a favourite resort of the ancient Romans, Nero was buried; and in earlier republican times it was the site of the famous Villa of Lucullus, who had accumulated an enormous fortune when general of the Roman army in Asia, and spent it on his retirement from active life in the most sumptuous entertainments and the most prodigal luxuries. Here he gave his celebrated feast to Cicero and Pompey. From Lucullus, the magnificent grounds passed into the possession of Valerius Asiaticus; and while his property they became the scene of a tragedy which reminds one of the story of Ahab and Jezebel and the vineyard of Naboth. The infamous Messalina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, coveted the grounds of Asiaticus. With the unscrupulous spirit of Jezebel, she procured the condemnation to death of the owner for crimes that he had never committed; a fate which he avoided by committing suicide. As soon as this obstacle was removed out of her way, she appropriated the villa; and in the beautiful grounds abandoned herself to the most shameless orgies in the absence of her husband at Ostia. But her pleasure and triumph were short-lived. The emperor was informed of her enormities, and hastened home to take vengeance. Having vainly tried all means of conciliation, and attempted without effect to kill herself, she was slain in a paroxysm of terror and anguish, by a blow of the executioner's falchion; and the death of Asiaticus was avenged on the very spot where it happened. The gardens of the Pincio are small, but a fairer spot it would be hard to find anywhere. The grounds are most beautifully laid out, and so skilfully arranged that they seem of far larger extent than they really are. Splendid palm-trees, aloes, and cactuses give a tropical charm to the walks; rare exotics and bloom-laden trees of genial climes, flashing fountains, and all manner of cultivated beauty, enliven the scene; while the air blows fresh and invigorating from the distant hills. From the lofty parapet of the city-wall which bounds it on one side, you gaze into the green meadows and rich wooded solitudes of the Borghese grounds, that look like some rural retreat a score of miles from the city; and from the stone balustrade on the other side you see all Rome at your feet with its sea of brown houses, and beyond the picturesque roofs and the hidden river rising up the great mass of the Vatican buildings and the mighty dome of St. Peter's, which catches like a mountain peak the last level gold of the sunset, and flashes it back like an illumination, while all the intermediate view is in shadow. No wonder that the Pincian Hill is the favourite promenade of Rome, and that on week-days and Sunday afternoons you see multitudes of people showing every phase of Roman life, and hundreds of carriages containing the flower of the Roman aristocracy, with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, crowding the piazza below, ascending the winding road, and driving or walking round between the palms and the pines, over the garden-paths, to the sound of band music. And thus they continue to amuse themselves till the sun has set, and the first sound of the bells of Ave Maria is heard from the churches; and then they wind their way homewards. We pass out from the Piazza through the Porta del Popolo, the only way by which strangers used to approach Rome from the north. It was indeed a more suitable entrance into the Eternal City than the present one; for no human being, with a spark of imagination, would care to obtain his first view of the city of his dreams from the outside of a great bustling railway station. But the Porta del Popolo had annoyances of its own that seemed hardly less incongruous. One had to run the gauntlet of the custom-house here, and to practise unheard-of briberies upon the venal douaniers of the Pope before being allowed to pass on to his hotel. And the first glimpse of the city from this point did not come up to one's expectations, being very much like that of any commonplace modern capital, without a ruin visible, or any sign or suggestion of the mistress of the world. The Porta del Popolo almost marks the position of the old Flaminian gate, through which passed the great northern road of Italy, constructed by the Roman censor, C. Flaminius, two hundred and twenty years before Christ, extending as far as Rimini, a distance of two hundred and ten miles. Through that old gate, and along that old road, the Roman cohorts passed to conquer Britain, then a small isle inhabited by savage tribes. Hardly any path save that to Jerusalem has been trodden by so many human feet as this old Flaminian road. The present gate is said to have been designed by Michael Angelo; but it shows no signs of his genius. On the inner side, above the keystone of the arch, is a lofty brick wall in the shape of a horse-shoe, built exclusively for the purpose of displaying in colossal size, emblazoned in stucco, the city arms, the sun rising above three or four pyramidal mountains arranged above each other. The external façade consists of two pairs of Doric columns of granite and marble flanking the arch, whose colour and beauty have entirely disappeared through exposure to the weather. In the spaces between the columns are two statues, one of St. Peter, and the other of St. Paul, of inferior merit, and very much stained and weather-worn. The inscription above the arch, "To a happy and prosperous entrance," seemed a mockery in the old douanier days, when delays and extortions vexed the soul of the visitor, and produced a mood anything but favourable to the enjoyment of the Eternal City. But now the grievances are over. The occupation of the place is gone. The barracks on the left for the papal guards are converted to other purposes; no custom-house officer now meets one at the gate, and all are free to come and go without passport, or bribe, or hindrance. Since I was in Rome this old gateway being found too narrow has been considerably widened by the addition of a wing on each side of the large central arch, containing each a smaller arch in which the same style of architecture is carried out. On the right as you go out is the remarkable church of Santa Maria del Popolo. It is built in the usual Romanesque style; but its external appearance is very unpretending, and owing to its situation in a corner overshadowed by the wall it is apt to be overlooked. It is an old fabric, eight hundred years having passed away since Pope Paschal II. founded it on the spot where Nero was said to have been buried. From the tomb of the infamous tyrant grew a gigantic walnut-tree, the roosting-place of innumerable crows, supposed to be demons that haunted the evil place. The erection of the church completely exorcised these foul spirits, consecrated the locality, and dispelled the superstitious fears of the people. Reconstructed in the reign of Sixtus IV., about the year 1480, this church has not the picturesque antiquity in this dry climate and clear atmosphere which our Gothic churches in moist England present. Not more widely did the external aspect of the tabernacle in the wilderness, with its dark goat-skin coverings, differ from the interior of the Holy of holies, with its golden furniture, than does the commonplace look of the outside of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo differ from its magnificent interior. It is a perfect museum of sculpture and painting. Splendid tombs of eminent cardinals of the best period of the Renaissance, rare marbles and precious stones in lavish profusion adorn the altars and walls of the chapels; while they are further enriched by beautiful frescoes of sacred subjects from the pencils of Penturicchio and Annibale Caracci. Above the high altar is an ancient picture of the Madonna, with an exceedingly swarthy eastern complexion, which is one among several others in Rome attributed to the pencil of St. Luke the Evangelist, and which is supposed to possess the power of working miracles. One especially magnificent chapel arrests the attention, and leaves a lasting impression--that of the Chigi family, built by Fabio Chigi, better known as Pope Alexander VII. The architecture was planned by Raphael. The design of the strange fresco on the ceiling of the dome, representing the creation of the heavenly bodies, was sketched by him; and he modelled the beautiful statue of Jonah, sitting upon a whale--said to have been carved from a block that fell from one of the temples in the Forum--and sculptured the figure of Elijah, which are among the most conspicuous ornaments of the chapel. This is the only place in which Raphael appears in the character of an architect and sculptor. Like Michael Angelo, the genius of this wonderfully-gifted artist was capable of varied expression; and it seemed a mere accident whether his ideals were represented in stone, or colour, or words. On his single head God seemed to have poured all His gifts; beauty of person, and beauty of soul, and the power to perceive and embody the beauty and the wonder of the world; the eye of light and the heart of fire; "the angel nature in the angel name." And yet amid his fadeless art he faded away; and at the deathless shrines which he left behind the admirer of his genius is left to lament his early death. Such thoughts receive a still more mournful hue from a touching tomb--touching even though its taste be execrable--which records a husband's sorrow on account of the death of his young wife--a princess of both the distinguished houses of Chigi and Odescalchi--who passed away at the age of twenty, in the saddest of all ways--in childbirth. It goes to one's heart to think of the desolate home and the bereaved husband left, as he says, "in solitude and grief." And though the weeper has gone with the wept, and the sore wound which death inflicted has been healed by his own hand nearly a hundred years ago, we feel a wondrous sympathy with that old domestic tragedy. It is a touch of nature that affects one more than all the blazonry and sculpture around. In this weird church of Santa Maria del Popolo, which seems more a mausoleum of the dead than a place of worship for the living, the level rays of the afternoon sun come through the richly-painted windows of the choir; and the warm glory rests first upon a strange monument of the sixteenth century at the entrance, where a ghastly human skeleton sculptured in yellow marble looks through a grating, and then upon a medallion on a tomb, representing a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, illumining the inscription, "Ut Phoenix multicabo dies." And this old expressive symbol speaks to us of death as the Christian's true birth, in which the spirit bursts its earthly shell, and soars on immortal wings to God. And the church straightway to the inner eye becomes full of a transfiguration glory which no darkness of the tomb can quench, and which makes all earthly love immortal. A venerable monastery, tenanted by monks of the order of St. Augustine, is attached to this church, upon whose brown-tiled roofs, covered with gray and yellow lichens, and walls and windows of extreme simplicity, the eye of the visitor gazes with deepest interest. For this was the residence of Luther during his famous visit to Rome. He came to this place in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm; his heart was filled with pious emotions. He knelt down on the pavement when he passed through the Porta del Popolo, and cried, "I salute thee, O holy Rome; Rome venerable through the blood and the tombs of the martyrs!" Immediately on his arrival he went to the convent of his own order, and celebrated mass with feelings of great excitement. But, alas! he was soon to be disenchanted. He had not been many days in Rome when he saw that the city of the saints and martyrs was wholly given up to idolatry and social corruption, and was as different as possible from the city of his dreams. He cared not for the fine arts which covered this pollution with a deceitful iridescence of refinement; and the ruins of pagan Rome had no power to move his heart, preoccupied as it was with horror at the monstrous wickedness which made desolate the very sanctuary of God. When he ascended on his knees the famous Scala Santa, the holy staircase near the Lateran Palace--supposed to have belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem, down whose marble steps our Saviour walked, wearing the crown of thorns and the emblems of mock royalty which the soldiers had put upon him--he seemed to hear a voice whispering to him the words, "The just shall live by faith." Instantly the scales fell from his eyes, and he saw the miserable folly of the whole proceeding; and like a man suddenly freed from fetters, he rose from his knees, and walked firm and erect to the foot of the stairs. He could not remain another day in the city. Returning to his monastery, he there celebrated mass for the last time, and departed on the morrow with the bitter words, "Adieu, O city, where everything is permitted but to be a good man!" Ten years later he burnt the Bull of the Pope in the public square of Wittemberg, and all Europe rang with the tocsin of the Reformation. I never passed that venerable monastery without thinking of the austere German monk and his glorious work; and the old well-known motto of the Reformation which had been his battle-cry in many a good fight of faith received new power and meaning from the associations of the place. To the enlightenment received there, paving the way for religious and political liberty throughout Christendom, I owed the privilege of preaching in Rome. The Presbyterian church--I speak of the past, for since my visit the church has been removed to a more suitable site within the walls--is a little distance farther on, on the opposite side of the street. You enter by a gateway, and find yourself in an open space surrounded with luxuriant hedges in full bloom, and large flowering shrubs, and commanding a fine view of Monte Mario and the open country in that direction, including the meadows where the noble Arnold of Brescia was burnt to death, and his ashes cast into the Tiber. The church is a square, flat-roofed eastern-looking building, in the inside tastefully painted in imitation of panels of Cipollino marble; and on the neat pulpit is carved the symbol of the Scotch Church, the burning bush and its motto, nowhere surely more appropriate than in the place where the Christian faith has been subjected to the flames of pagan and papal persecution for eighteen hundred years, and has emerged purer and stronger. In that simple church I had the privilege of preaching to a large but fluctuating congregation, each day differently composed of persons belonging to various nationalities and denominations, but united by one common bond of faith and love. At stated intervals we celebrated together the touching feast that commemorates our Saviour's dying love, and the oneness of Christians in Him. The wonderful associations of the place lent to such occasions a special interest and solemnity. Surrounded by the ruins of man's glory, we felt deeply how unchanging was the word of God. In a city of gorgeous ceremonials that had changed Christianity into a kind of baptized paganism, we felt it indescribably refreshing to partake, in the beautiful simplicity of our own worship, of the symbols of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord. We seemed to be compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses, apostles, martyrs, and saints, who in the early ages of the Church in this city overcame the world by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto the death. More vividly than anywhere else, we seemed in this place to come to the general assembly and church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to realise that we were built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. On the opposite side of the road is the classic portico that leads to the Borghese Villa. The gate is almost always open; and every person is free to wander at will through the magnificent grounds, upwards of three miles in circuit, and hold picnics in the sunny glades, and pull the wild flowers that star the grass in myriads. On Sunday afternoons multitudes come and go, and a long line of carriages, filled with the Roman nobility and with foreign visitors, in almost endless succession, make the circuit of the drives. The Porta del Popolo becomes too strait for the seething mass of carriages and human beings that pass through it; and it is with difficulty, and some danger to life and limb, that one can force a passage through the gay pleasure-loving crowd. At the Carnival time the ordinary dangers and difficulties are increased tenfold; and the scene presents anything but a Sabbath-like appearance. Nor are the danger and difficulty over when the gate is passed; for the Piazza del Popolo and the streets that lead from it are crowded with carriages and pedestrians going to or returning from the favourite promenade on the Pincian Hill. One runs the gauntlet all the way; meditation is impossible; and the return from church in the afternoon is as different as possible from the morning walk to it. What pleasure can these people derive from the beautiful walks and drives in the Borghese grounds, except perhaps that of seeing and being seen in a crowd? There is no seclusion of nature, no opportunity of quiet thought. On week-days, at certain hours, one may enjoy the place thoroughly without any distraction, and feel amid the lonely vistas of the woods as if buried in the loneliest solitude of the Apennines. And truly on such occasions I know no place so fascinating, so like an earthly Eden! The whole scene thrills one like lovely music. All the charms of nature and art are there focussed in brightest perfection. The grounds are gay with starry anemones, and billowy acacias crested with odorous wreaths of yellow foam, dark and mysterious with tall ilexes, cypresses, and stone-pines, enlivened by graceful palms and tender deciduous trees, musical with falling and glancing waters, and haunted by the statues of Greek divinities that filled men's minds with immortal thoughts in the youth of the world--dimly visible amid the recesses of the foliage. The path leads to a casino in which sculpture and painting have done their utmost to enrich and adorn the apartments. But the result of all this prodigal display of wealth and refinement is exceedingly melancholy. It would be death to inhabit these sumptuous marble rooms when their coolness would be most agreeable; and the witchery of the shadowy wood paths and bowers in their summer perfection can be enjoyed only at the risk of catching fever. Man has made a paradise for himself, but the malaria drives him out of it, and all its costly beauty is almost thrown away. Only during the desolation of winter, or the fair promise and half-developments of spring, can one wander safely through the place. The sting of the serpent is in this Eden. Cursed is the ground for man's sake in the fairest scene that his industry, and genius, and virtue can make for himself; but cursed with a double curse is the ground that he makes a wilderness by his selfishness and wickedness. And this double curse, this fatal Circean spell, has come upon these beautiful grounds in common with all the neighbourhood of Rome because of ages of human waste and wrong-doing. How striking a picture do they present of all earth's beauties and possessions, which promise what they cannot fully accomplish, which give no rest for the head or home for the heart, and in which, when disposed to place our trust, we hear ever and anon the warning cry, "Arise and depart, for this is not your rest, for it is polluted, for it will destroy you with a sore destruction." And not without significance is the circumstance that such a lesson on the vanity of all earthly things should be suggested by what one sees over against the house of prayer. It illustrates and emphasises the precept which bids the worshipper set his affections on things above, so that the house of God may become to him the very gate of heaven. From the entrance of the church, through a long suburb, you trace the old Flaminian road till it crosses the Tiber at the Ponte Molle, the famous Milvian Bridge. It is strange to think of this hoary road of many memories being now laid down with modern tramway rails, along which cars like those in any of our great manufacturing towns continually run. This is one of the many striking instances in which the past and the present are incongruously united in Rome. You see on the right side of the road a picturesque ridge of cliffs clothed with shaggy ilexes and underwood, overhanging at intervals the walls and buildings. It was formed by lava ejected from some ancient volcano in the neighbourhood; and over it was deposited, by the action of acidulated waters rising through the volcanic rock, a stratum of travertine or fresh-water limestone. Not far off is a mineral spring called Acqua Acetosa, much frequented by the inhabitants on summer mornings, which may be considered one of the expiring efforts of volcanic action in the neighbourhood. The Milvian Bridge is associated with most interesting and important historical events. The Roman citizens, two hundred years before Christ, met here the messengers who announced the defeat of Asdrubal on the Metaurus at the end of the second Punic war. Here the ambassadors of the Allobroges implicated in Catiline's conspiracy were arrested by order of Cicero. And from the parapets of the bridge the body of Maxentius, the rival pagan emperor, was hurled into the Tiber, after his defeat by Constantine in the great battle of Saxa Rubra, which took place a little distance off. Visitors to the Vatican will remember the spirited representation of this battle on the walls of Raphael's Stanze, designed by the immortal master, and executed by Giulio Romano, the largest historical subject ever painted. By the tragic details of this battle, men and horses being entangled in the eddies of the river, the Christians were reminded of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, and the consequent deliverance of Israel. The victory on the side of Constantine led to the total overthrow of paganism, and put an end to the age of religious persecution. On this memorable day the seven-branched golden candlestick which Titus had taken from the temple of Jerusalem, according to tradition, was thrown into the Tiber, where it lies under a vast accumulation of mud in the bed of the river. It would thus seem as if the Jewish religion, too, of which the golden candlestick was the most expressive symbol, had come finally to an end in this triumph of Christianity. Of the monuments by which the great battle was commemorated one still survives near the Colosseum, the well-known triumphal arch of Constantine, which is at once a satire upon the decay of art at the time, and the halting of the new emperor between the two religions, containing, as it does, pagan figures and inscriptions mixed up incongruously with Christian ones. We gaze with deep interest upon the serene violet sky which broods over the Milvian Bridge, and which still seems to the fancy to glow with the consciousness of the ancient legend, when we remember that it was in that sky, while on his march to the battle, Constantine saw, surmounting and outshining the noonday sun, the wondrous vision of the flaming cross, with the words "In this conquer," which assured him not only of victory in the approaching engagement, but of the subsequent universal ascendancy of Christianity throughout the world. This vision, which in all probability was only a parhelion, exaggerated by a superstitious and excited imagination, produced a crisis in the life of Constantine. He adopted the Christian faith immediately afterwards, and introduced the cross as the standard of his army; and in the faith of the visionary cross he marched from victory to victory, until at last he reigned alone as head of the Church and Emperor of the world, and brought about relations between Church and State which seemed to the historian Eusebius to be no less than the fulfilment of the apocalyptic vision of the New Jerusalem. Beyond this scene stretches to the faint far-off horizon the desert Campagna; a dim, misty, homeless land, where the moan of the wind sounds ever like the voice of the past, and the pathos of a vanished people breathes over all the scene; with here and there a gray nameless ruin, a desolate bluff, or a grassy mound, marking the site of some mysterious Etruscan or Sabine city that had perished ages before Romulus had laid the foundations of Rome. From the contemplation of these wide cheerless wastes beyond the confines of history, peopled with shadowy forms, with whose long-buried hopes and sorrows no mortal heart can now sympathise, I turn back to the fresh, warm, human interests that await me in the Rome of to-day; feeling to the full that from home to church I have passed through scenes and associations sufficient to make a Sabbath in Rome a day standing out from all other days, never to be forgotten! CHAPTER II THE APPIAN WAY It was the proud boast of the ancient Romans that all roads led to their city. Rome was the centre and mistress of the world; and as the loneliest rill that rises in the bosom of the far-off mountain leads, if followed, to the ocean, so every path in the remotest corner of the vast empire conducted to the great gilded column in the Roman Forum, upon which all distances without the walls were marked. To the Romans the world is indebted for opening up communications with different countries. They were the great engineers and road-makers of antiquity. This seems to have been the work assigned to them in the household of nations. Rome broke down the barriers that separated one nation from another, and fused all distinctions of race and language and religion into one great commonwealth. And for the cohesion of all the elements of this huge political fabric nothing could have been more effectual than the magnificent roads, by which constant communication was kept up between all parts of the empire, and armies could be transported to quell a rising rebellion in some outlying province with the smallest expenditure of time and strength. In this way the genius of this wonderful people was providentially made subservient to the interests of Christianity. At the very time that our Lord commissioned, with His parting breath, the apostles to preach the gospel to every creature, the way was prepared for the fulfilment of that commission. The crooked places had been made straight, and the rough places smooth. Along the roads which the Romans made throughout the world for the march of their armies and the consolidation of their government, the apostles, the soldiers of the Prince of Peace, marched to grander and more enduring victories. Of all the roads of ancient Rome the Via Appia was the oldest and most renowned. It was called by the Romans themselves the _regina viarum_, the "queen of roads." It was constructed by Appius Claudius the Blind, during the Samnite War, when he was Censor, three hundred and thirteen years before Christ, and led from Rome to Capua, being carried over the Pontine Marshes on an embankment. It was afterwards extended to Brindisi, the ancient seaport of Rome on the Adriatic, and became the great highway for travellers from Rome to Greece and all the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. A curious link of connection may be traced between the modern Italian expression, when drinking to a person's health on leaving home, "far Brindisi," and the distant termination of the Appian Way, suggestive, as of old, of farewell wishes for a prosperous journey and a speedy return to the parting guest. The way was paved throughout with broad hexagonal slabs of hard lava, exactly fitted to each other; and here and there along its course may still be seen important remains of it, which prove its excellent workmanship. This method of constructing roads was borrowed by the Romans from the Carthaginians, and was tried for the first time on the Appian Way, all previous roads having been formed of sand and gravel. The greatest breadth of the road was about twenty-six feet between the curbstones; and on both sides were placed, at intervals of forty feet, low columns, as seats for the travel-worn, and as helps in mounting on horseback. Distances of five thousand feet were marked by milestones, which were in the form of columnar shafts, elevated on pedestals with appropriate inscriptions. The physical wants of the traveller were provided for at inns judiciously disposed along the route; while his religious wants were gratified by frequent statues of Mercury, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Hercules, and other deities, who presided over highways and journeys, casting their sacred shadow over his path. Some of the stones of the pavement still show the ruts of the old chariot-wheels, and others are a good deal cracked and worn; but they are sound enough, probably, to outlast the modern little cubes which have replaced them in some parts. A road formed in this most substantial manner for about two hundred miles, involving cuttings through rocks, filling up of hollows, bridging of ravines, and embanking of swamps, must have been an arduous and costly feat of engineering. Appius Claudius is said to have exhausted the Roman treasury in defraying the expenses of its construction. It was frequently repaired, owing to the heavy traffic upon it, by Julius, by Augustus, Vespasian, Domitian, Nerva, and very thoroughly by the Emperor Trajan. In some parts, where the soft ground had subsided, a second pavement was laid over the first; and in the Pontine Marshes we observe traces of no less than three pavements superimposed above each other to preserve the proper level. For a considerable distance outside the Porta Capena, where it commenced, the Appian Way was lined on both sides with tombs belonging to patrician families. This was the case, indeed, with all the other roads of Rome that were converted into avenues of death owing to the strenuous law which prohibited all interments within the walls; but the Appian Way was specially distinguished for the number and magnificence of its tombs. The most illustrious names of ancient Rome were interred beside it. At first the sepulchres of the heroes of the early ages were the only ones; but under the Cæsars these were eclipsed by the funereal pomp of the freedmen, the parasites and sycophants of the emperors. At first the tombs were built of volcanic stone, the only building material found in the neighbourhood; but as Rome became mistress of the world, and gathered the marbles and precious stones of the conquered countries into its own bosom, and as wealth and luxury increased, the tombs were constructed altogether of or cased on the outside with these valuable materials. And this circumstance gives us a clue to the age of the different monuments. The custom of bordering the main approaches of the city with sepulchral monuments was, in all likelihood, derived from the Etruscans, to whom the Romans owed many of their institutions. These monuments were usually structures of great beauty and elegance. Some of them were fashioned as conical mounds, on the slopes of which trees and parterres of flowers were planted; others were built after the model of graceful Grecian temples; others were huge circular masses of masonry; and others were simple sarcophagi with lids, resting on square elevated pedestals. Most of them were adorned with busts and statues of the departed, with altars, columns, and carvings. What these tombs were in their prime, it is difficult for us to picture; but even their remains at the present day produce the conviction that no grander mode of approach to a great city could have been devised. It would seem to us altogether incongruous to line our public roads with tombs, and to transact the business and pursue the pleasures of the living among the dead. All our ideas of propriety would be shocked by seeing a circus for athletic games beside a cemetery. But the ancient Romans had no such feeling. They buried their dead, not in lonely spots and obscure churchyards as we do, but where the life of the city was gayest. One of the grandest of their sepulchral monuments was placed beside one of the most frequented of their circuses. The last objects which a Roman beheld when he left the city, and the first that greeted him on his coming back, were the tombs of his ancestors and friends; and their silent admonition did not deepen the sadness of farewell, or cast a shadow upon the joy of return. Many of the marble sarcophagi were ornamented with beautiful bas-reliefs of mythical incidents, utterly inconsistent, we should suppose, with the purpose for which they were designed. Nuptials, bacchanalian fêtes, games, and dances, are crowded upon their sculptured sides, in seeming mockery of the pitiable relics of humanity within. They treated death lightly and playfully, these ancient Romans, and tried to hide his terror with a mask of smiles, and to cover his dart with a wreath of flowers. Why is it that we Christians look upon death with feelings so widely different? Why, when life and immortality have been brought to light in the gospel, are the mementoes of mortality more painful and saddening to us than they were to these pagans who had no hopes of a resurrection? It seems a paradox, but the Christianity which has brought the greatest hope into the world has also brought the greatest fear. By increasing the value of life, our religion has increased the fear of death. By quickening the conscience, it has quickened the imagination; and that death which to the man conscious only of a physical existence is the mere natural termination of life, to the nature convinced of sin is a violent breach of the beautiful order of the world, and the gate to final retribution. The ancient Roman was but a child in spiritual apprehension, and therefore as a child he surrendered his happy pagan life as thoughtlessly as the weary child falls asleep at the end of its play. No terrors of futurity darkened his last hours; he had his own turn at the feast of life, and as a satisfied guest he was content to depart and make room for others. As cheerfully as he had formerly begun his ordinary journeys from Rome through a street of tombs, so now he took the last journey, he knew not whither, through the valley of the shadow of death, and feared no evil; not because a greater Power was with him to defend him, but because for him no evil except the common pangs of dissolution existed. All that he cared for in death was that he should not be altogether separated from the presence and the enjoyments of human life, from the haunts where he had been so happy. He wished to have his tomb on the public thoroughfare, that he might "feel, as it were, the tide of life as it flowed past his monument, and that his mute existence might be prolonged in the remembrance of his friends." I may observe that the Roman custom of bordering the public roads with tombs gives a significance to the inscriptions which some of them bore,--such as, _Siste, viator_--_Aspice, viator_, "Stop, traveller"--"Look, traveller"; a significance which is altogether lost when the same inscriptions are carved, as we have often seen them, on tombstones in secluded country churchyards where no traveller ever passes by, and hardly even friends come to weep. Modern Rome is unlike all other European cities in this respect, that a short distance beyond its gates you plunge at once into a desert. There is no gradual subsidence of the busy life of the gay metropolis, through suburban houses, villages, and farms, into the quiet seclusion of the country. You pass abruptly from the seat of the most refined arts into the most primitive solitude, where the pulse of life hardly beats. The desolation of the Campagna, that green motionless sea of silence, comes up to and almost washes the walls of the city. You know that you are in the immediate neighbourhood of a teeming population; but you might as well be a hundred miles away in the heart of the Apennines, for any signs of human culture or habitation that you perceive within the horizon. There is no traffic on the road; and only at rare intervals do you meet with a solitary peasant, looking like a satyr in shaggy goat-skin breeches, and glaring wildly at you from his great black eyes as he crosses the waste. Far as the eye can see there is nothing but a melancholy plain, studded here and there with a ruin, and populous only with the visionary forms of the past; and its tragic beauty prepares your mind for passing into the solemn shadow of the great Niobe of cities. But it was not thus in the brilliant days of the Empire. For fifteen miles beyond the walls the Appian Way stretched to the beautiful blue Alban hills, through a continuous suburb of the city, adorned with all the charms of nature and art, palatial villas and pleasure-gardens, groves and vineyards, temples and far-extending aqueducts. These homes and fashionable haunts of the living were interspersed in strange association with the tombs of the dead. Through the gate a constant stream of human life passed in and out; and crowds of chariots and horsemen and wayfarers thronged the road from morning to night. It is only seventeen years since the true point of commencement of the Appian Way was discovered. For a long time the Porta Capena by which it left Rome was supposed to be situated outside of the present walls, in the valley of the Almo. But Dr. Parker, at the period indicated, making some excavations in the narrowest part of the valley between the Coelian and Aventine hills, came upon some massive remains of the original wall of Servius Tullius, and in these he found the true site of the Porta Capena. This discovery, confirming the supposition of Ampère and others, cleared up much that was inexplicable in the topography of this part of Rome, and enabled antiquarians to fix the relative position of all the historical spots. The Via Appia is thus shown to have extended upwards of three-quarters of a mile within the present area of the city, over the space between the wall of Servius Tullius and the wall of Aurelian. And this is still further confirmed by the discovery, three hundred years ago, of the first milestone of the Appian Way in a vineyard, a short distance beyond the modern gate of St. Sebastian, marking exactly a Roman mile from that point to the site of Dr. Parker's discovery. This milestone now forms one of the ornaments on the balustrade at the head of the stairs of the Capitol. The Appian Way shared in the vicissitudes of the city. After the fall of the Western Empire, about the beginning of the sixth century, when it was finally repaired by Theodoric, it fell into desuetude. The people, owing to the unsettled state of the country, were afraid to move from home. A grievous apathy took possession of all classes; agriculture was neglected, and the drains being stopped up, the line of route was inundated, and the road, especially on the low levels, became quite impassable. For centuries it continued in this state, until it was overgrown with a marshy vegetation in the wet places, and covered with turf in the dry. About a hundred years ago Pope Pius VI. drained the Pontine Marshes, and restored other parts of the road, and made it available as the ordinary land-route from Rome to Naples. But it was left to Pio Nono to uncover the road between Rome and Albano, which had previously been confounded with the Campagna, and was only indicated by the double line of ruined tombs. After three years of hard work, and an expenditure of £3000, the part most interesting to the archæologist--namely, from the third to the eleventh milestone--was laid bare, its monuments identified as far as possible, and a wall of loose stones built on both sides, to protect it from the encroachments of the neighbouring landowners. And now the modern traveller can walk or ride or drive comfortably over the very pavement which Horace and Virgil, Augustus and Paul traversed, and gaze upon the ruins of the very objects that met their eyes. Taking our departure from the site of the Porta Capena, we are reminded that it was at the Porta Capena that the survivor of the Horatii met his sister, who had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii, and who, when she saw her brother carrying the cloak of her dead lover, which she had wrought with her own hand, upbraided him in a passion of tears for his cruelty. Enraged at the sight of her grief, Horatius drew his sword and stabbed her to the heart, crying, "So perish the Roman maiden that shall weep for her country's enemy!" The tomb of the hapless maiden long stood on the spot. It was at the Porta Capena also that the senate and people of Rome gave to Cicero a splendid ovation on his return from banishment. Numerous historical buildings clustered round this gate--a temple of Mars, of Hercules, of Honour and Virtue, and a fountain dedicated to Mercury, described by Ovid; but not a trace of these now remains. On the left, at the back of the Coelian Hill, is a valley covered with verdure, wonderfully quiet and rural-looking, though within the walls of a city. In this valley once stood the famous grove where Numa Pompilius had his mysterious interviews with the nymph Egeria. A spring still bubbles forth beside a cluster of farm-buildings, which is said to be the veritable Fountain of Egeria. The temple of the Muses, who were Egeria's counsellors, was close by; and the name of the gate of the city, _Porta Capena_, was in all likelihood a corruption of Camena, the Latin name for Muse, and was not derived, as some suppose, from the city of Capua. The spot outside the present walls, formerly visited as the haunt of the fabled nymph, before the discovery of the site of the Capena gate fixed its true position--beautiful and romantic as it is--was only the nymphæum of some Roman villa, used as a place of retirement and coolness in the oppressive heat of summer. Of all the legends of Rome's earliest days, none is more poetical than that which speaks of the visits of Numa to this mysterious being, whose counsels in these sacred shades were of such value to him in the management of his kingdom, and who dictated to him the whole religious institutions and civil legislation of Rome. Whatever historical basis it may have, the legend has at least a core of moral truth. It illustrates the necessity of solitude and communion with Higher Powers as a preparation for the solemn duties of life. All who have influenced men permanently for good have drawn their inspiration from lonely haunts sacred to meditation--ever since Moses saw the burning bush in the desert, and Elijah bowed his strong soul to the majesty of the still small voice at Horeb. The romance of the grove of Egeria was, however, dispelled when the valley was turned into a place of imprisonment for the Jews. Domitian drove them out of the Ghetto, and shut them up here, with only a basket and a wisp of hay for each person, to undergo unheard-of privations and miseries. The Horticultural Gardens, where the shrubs and plants are grown that ornament the public squares and terraces of the city, now occupy the site of the celebrated grove. The shrill scream of the railway whistle outside the gate, and the smell of the gas-works near at hand--these veritable things of the present century--are fatal to all enchantments, and effectually dissipate the spell of the muses and the mystic fragrance of the Egerian solitude. But wonderful is the persistence of a spring in a spot. Continually changing, it is the most changeless of all things. For ever passing away, it is yet the most steadfast and enduring. Derived from the fleeting vapour--the emblem of inconstancy--it outlasts the most solid structure of man, and continues to well up its waters even when the rock beside it has weathered into dust. The Fountain of Egeria flows to-day in the hollow of the Coelian Hill as it flowed nigh three thousand years ago, although the muses have fled, and the deities Picus and Faunus, which Numa entrapped in the wood of the Aventine, have gone back to their native skies with Jupiter; and Mammon and Philosophy have exorcised that unseen world which once presented so many beauties and wonders to the imagination of man. A little farther on to the right, a side path, called the Via Antonina, leads up to the stupendous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, a mile in circumference, and covering a space of 2,625,000 square yards. The walls, arches, and domes of massive brickwork hanging up in the sky,--the fragments of sculpture and splendid mosaic pavements belonging to these baths,--produced a deeper impression upon my mind than even the ruins of the Colosseum. With the form and majesty of the Colosseum, owing to its compactness and unity, pictures and other representations have made us familiar from infancy, so that it excites no surprise when we actually visit it; but the Baths of Caracalla cannot be pictorially represented as a whole, on account of their vast variety and extent, and therefore we come to the spectacle wholly unprepared, and are at once startled into awe and astonishment. Notwithstanding the wholesale pillage of centuries, enough in the way of chambers and baths, marble statues, pillars, and works of art, still remains in this mountainous mass of masonry to witness to the unparalleled luxury by which the strength of the Roman youth was enervated, and the foundations of the empire sapped. Shelley wrote on the summit of one of the arches his "Prometheus Unbound;" and certainly a fitter place in which to seek inspiration for such a theme could not be found. Beyond the Baths, on the same side of the road, is the most interesting little church of the two saints Nereus and Achilles, Christian slaves who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian. It is supposed that the Nereus whose body reposes in this ancient church is the person referred to by St. Paul in his greetings to the Roman saints at the close of his Epistle--"Salute Nereus, and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints which are with them." Bolland, in his _Acts of the Saints_, mentions that he was a servant in the household of Flavia Domitilla, niece of the celebrated Christian lady of the same name, whose mother was the sister of the Emperor Domitian, and whose two sons were intended to succeed to the imperial throne. This younger Domitilla, although so nearly related to the imperial family, was banished to the island of Pontia, because of her refusal to sacrifice to idols. Her two Christian servants, Nereus and Achilles, accompanied her in her exile, and were afterwards burned alive, along with their mistress, at Terracina, and their ashes deposited in the same resting-place. It is a remarkable circumstance that this church and the catacomb where they were buried at first, should have borne the names of the lowly slaves instead of the name of their illustrious mistress, who was as distinguished by her Christian faith as by her rank. Time brought to these noble martyrs a worthy revenge for their ignoble fate; for when their ashes were taken from the catacomb to this church in the year 524, they were first carried in triumph to the Capitol, and made to pass under the imperial arches, on which was affixed the inscriptions "The Senate and the Roman people to Santa Flavia Domitilla, for having brought more honour to Rome by her death than her illustrious relations by their works." "To Santa Flavia Domitilla, and to the saints Nereus and Achilles, the excellent citizens who gained peace for the Christian republic at the price of their blood." Jeremy Taylor, in his splendid sermon on the "Marriage-ring," has a touching reference to the legendary history of Nereus. The church dedicated to the honour of these Christian slaves has many interesting associations. It stands upon the site of a primitive Christian oratory, called Fasciola, because St. Peter was said to have dropped there one of the bandages of his wounds on the way to execution. And its last reconstruction, retaining all the features of the old architecture with the utmost care, was the pious work of its titular cardinal, Cæsar Baronius, the celebrated librarian of the Vatican, whose Ecclesiastical Annals may be called the earliest systematic work on Church History. The church has an enclosed choir, with two ambones or reading-desks in it, surrounding the altar, as was the custom in the older Christian churches. The mosaics on the tribune representing the "Transfiguration" and "Annunciation" are more than a thousand years old, and are interesting besides as the first embodiments in art of these sacred subjects. Behind the high altar is the pontifical chair, supported by lions, with a Gothic gable, on which Gregory the Great was seated when he delivered his twenty-eighth Homily, a few sentences of which are engraved on the marble. Beyond the church of Sts. Nereus and Achilles, on the opposite side, where the ground rises thirty or forty feet above the level of the road, there is a rude inscription above the door of a vineyard, intimating that the Tomb of the Scipios is here. This is by far the most interesting of all the monuments on the Appian Way. It was the mausoleum of a long line of the most illustrious names in Roman history--patriots and heroes, whose virtues and honours were hereditary. Originally the sepulchre stood above ground, and the entrance to it was by a solid arch of peperino, facing a cross-road leading from the Appian to the Latin Way; but the soil in the course of ages accumulated over it, and buried it out of sight. It was accidentally discovered in 1780, in consequence of a peasant digging in the vineyard to make a cellar, and breaking through a part of the vaulted roof of the tomb. Then was brought suddenly to light the celebrated sarcophagus of plain peperino stone, which contained the remains of the Roman consul, Lucius Scipio Barbatus, after having been undisturbed for nearly twenty-two centuries. Several other sarcophagi belonging to members of the family were found at the same time, along with two busts, one of which is supposed to be that of the poet Ennius, the friend and companion of Scipio Africanus, whose last request on his deathbed was that he might be buried by his side. Pliny remarks that the Scipios had the singular custom of burying instead of burning their dead; and this is confirmed by the discovery of these sarcophagi. I found the mausoleum to consist of a series of chambers and approaches to them, excavated in the solid tufa rock, not unlike the labyrinthine recesses of the catacombs. The darkness was feebly dispelled by the light of wax tapers carried by the guide and myself; and the aspect of the narrow, low-browed passages and chambers was gloomy in the extreme. Here and there were Latin inscriptions attached to the different recesses where the dead had lain; but they were only copies, the originals having been removed to the Vatican, where the sarcophagus of Lucius Scipio Barbatus and the bust of the poet Ennius may now be seen. The very bones of the illustrious dead have been carried off, and after a series of adventures they are now deposited in a beautiful little monument in the grounds of a nobleman near Padua. The gold signet-ring of Scipio Africanus, with a victory in intaglio on a cornelian stone, found in the tomb of his son, who was buried here, is now in the possession of Lord Beverley. It must be remembered, however, that Scipio Africanus, the most illustrious of his family, and the noblest of all the Roman names, was not interred in this mausoleum. A strange mystery hung over the manner of his death and the place of his burial even in Livy's time. Some said that he died at Rome, and others at Liternum. A fragment of an inscription was found near the little lake at the latter place, beside which he resided during the dignified exile of his later years, which contained only the words--"... ta Patria ... ne ..." Antiquarians have filled out this sentence into the touching epigraph recorded by Livy, which Scipio himself wished to be put upon his tomb: "Ingrata Patria, ne ossa quidem, mea habes," "My ungrateful country, thou hast not even my bones." Empty as the tomb of the Scipios looks, no one can behold it without feelings of profound veneration. The history of the most heroic period of ancient Rome is linked with this tomb; and all the romance of the Punic Wars, of Hannibal and Hasdrubal, pass before the mind's eye, as one gazes upon the desecrated chambers where the son and relatives of the great conqueror had reposed in death. Within a short distance of the tomb of the Scipios are the most celebrated of all the Columbaria of Rome. Previous to the fifth century of Rome, the bodies of the dead were buried entire, and deposited in sarcophagi; but after that period cremation became the universal custom. The ashes and calcined bones were preserved in _ollæ_, or little jars like common garden flower-pots, made of the same kind of coarse red earthenware, with a lid attached. These jars were deposited in rows of little niches sunk in the brickwork all round the walls of the tomb, resembling the nests in a pigeon-house; hence the origin of the name. One tomb was thus capable of containing the remains of a large number of persons; no less than six thousand of the freedmen of Augustus being deposited in the Columbarium which bears their name. The entrance to these sepulchral chambers was from the top, descending by an internal stair; and the passages and walls were usually decorated with frescoes and arabesques, illustrating some mythical or historical subject. The names of the dead were carved on marble tablets fixed above the pigeon-holes containing the ashes. Columbaria being only used for dependents and slaves, were generally erected near the tombs of their masters; and hence all along the Appian Way we see numerous traces of them side by side with the gigantic monuments of the patrician families. The Columbaria near the tomb of the Scipios are three in number, and contain the cinerary urns of persons attached to the household of the emperors from the reign of Augustus up to the period of the Antonines, when the system of burying the bodies entire was again introduced. The last discovered Columbarium is the most interesting of the group. Being only thirty-three years exposed, the paintings on the walls and the vases are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the keeper of the library of Apollo in the imperial palace on the Palatine. A most pathetic lamentation in verse is made by one Julia Prima over the ashes of her husband; and an inscription, along with a portrait of the animal, records that beneath are the remains of a favourite dog that was the pet of the whole household--a little touch of nature that links the ages and the zones, and makes the whole world kin. The whole of this region, called Monte d'Oro, for what reason I know not, seems to have been a vast necropolis, in which not only Columbaria for their slaves and freedmen were built by the great patrician families, but also family vaults for the wealthier middle classes were constructed and sold by speculators, just as in our modern town cemeteries. Very near the modern gate of the city the road passes under the so-called Arch of Drusus. It consists of a single arch, whose keystone projects on each side about two feet and a half beyond the plane of the frontage; and is built of huge solid blocks of travertine, with cornices of white marble, and two composite columns of African marble on each side, much soiled and defaced, which are so inferior in style to the rest of the architecture that they are manifestly later additions. The whole monument is much worn and injured; but it is made exceedingly picturesque by a crown of verdure upon the thick mass of soil accumulated there by small increments blown up from the highway in the course of so many centuries. It was long supposed that Caracalla had barbarously taken advantage of the arch to carry across the highway at this point the aqueduct which supplied his baths with water. But the more recent authorities maintain that the arch itself, so far from being the monument of Drusus, was only one of the arches built by Caracalla in a more ornamental way than the rest, as was commonly done when an aqueduct crossed a public road. This theory does away at one fell stroke with the idea so long fondly cherished that St. Paul must have passed under this very arch on his way to Rome, and that his eye must have rested on these very stones upon which we gaze now. It is hard to give up the belief that the stern old arch, severe in its sturdiness and simplicity as the character of the apostle himself, did actually cast its haunted shadow over him on the memorable day when, a prisoner in chains in charge of a Roman soldier, he passed over this part of the Appian Way, and it signalised a far grander triumph than that for which it was originally erected. We should greatly prefer to retain the old idea that under that arch Christianity, as represented by St. Paul, passed to its conquest of the whole Roman world; and passed too in character, the religion of the cross, joy in sorrow, liberty in bonds, strength in weakness, proclaiming itself best from the midst of the sufferings which it overcame. Immediately beyond the Arch of Drusus is the Gate of St. Sebastian, the Porta Appia of the Aurelian wall, protected on either side by two semicircular towers, which from their great height and massiveness have a most imposing appearance. They are composed of the beautiful glowing brick of the ancient Roman structures, and rest upon a foundation of white marble blocks, evidently taken from the Temple of Mars, which once stood close by, and at which the armies entering Rome in triumph used to halt. The gateway was greatly injured in the sixth century during the Gothic War, but was repaired by Belisarius; or, as some say, by Narses. The most remarkable incident connected with it since that period was the triumphal entry into the city of Marco Antonio Colonna, after the victory of Lepanto over the Turks and African corsairs in 1571. This famous battle, one of the few great decisive battles of the world, belongs equally to civil and ecclesiastical history, having checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and thus altered the fortunes of the Church and the world. The famous Spanish poet Cervantes lost an arm in this battle. The ovation given to Colonna by the Romans in connection with it may be said to be the last of the long series of triumphal processions which entered the Eternal City; and in point of splendour and ceremony it vied with the grandest of them,--prisoners and their families, along with the spoil taken from the enemy, figuring in it as of old. A short distance outside the gate, the viaduct of the railway from Civita Vecchia spans the Appian Way, and brings the ancient "queen of roads" and the modern iron-way into strange contrast,--or rather, I should say, into fitting contact; for there is a resemblance between the great works of ancient and modern engineering skill in their mighty enterprise and boundless command of physical resources, which we do not find in the works of the intermediate ages. Beyond the viaduct the road descends into a valley, at the bottom of which runs the classic Almo. It is little better than a ditch, with artificial banks overgrown with weeds, great glossy-leaved arums, and milky-veined thistles, and with a little dirty water in it from the drainings of the surrounding vineyards. And yet this disenchanted brook figures largely in ancient mythical story. Ovid sang of it, and Cicero's letters mention it honourably. It was renowned for its medicinal properties, and diseased cattle were brought to its banks to be healed. The famous _simulacrum_, called the image of Cybele,--a black meteoric stone which fell from the sky at Phrygia, and was brought to Rome during the Second Punic War, according to the Sybilline instructions,--was washed every spring in the waters of the Almo by the priests of the goddess. So persistent was this pagan custom, even amid the altered circumstances of Christianity, that, until the commencement of the nineteenth century, an image of our Saviour was annually brought from the Church of Santa Martina in the Forum and washed in this stream. In the valley of the Almo the poet Terence possessed a little farm of twenty acres, given to him by his friend Scipio Æmilianus. After crossing the Almo, two huge shapeless masses of ruins may be seen above the vineyard walls: that on the left is said to be the tomb of Geta, the son of the Emperor Severus, who was put to death in his mother's arms by order of his unnatural brother. Geta's children and friends, to the number, it is said, of twenty thousand persons, were also put to death on the false accusation of conspiracy; among whom was the celebrated jurist Papinian, who, when required to compose a defence of the murder--as Seneca was asked by Nero to apologise for his crime--nobly replied that "it was easier to commit than to justify fratricide." But so capricious was Caracalla that he soon afterwards executed the accomplices of his unnatural deed, and caused his murdered brother to be placed among the gods, and divine honours to be paid to him. It was in this more humane mood that the tomb whose ruins we see on the Appian Way was ordered to be built. The tomb on the right-hand side of the road is a most incongruous structure as it appears at present, having a circular medieval tower on the top of it, and a common osteria or wine-shop in front; but the old niches in which statues or busts used to stand still remain. It was long supposed to be the mausoleum of the Scipios; but it is now ascertained to be the sepulchre of Priscilla, the wife of Abascantius, the favourite freedman of Domitian, celebrated for his conjugal affection by the poet Statius. Covered with ivy and mural plants, the monument has a very picturesque appearance. The road beyond this rises from the valley of the Almo, and passes over a kind of plateau. It is hemmed in on either side by high ugly walls, shaggy with a profusion of plants which affect such situations. The wild mignonette hangs out its pale yellow spikes of blossoms, but without the fragrance for which its garden sister is so remarkable; and the common pellitory, a near ally of the nettle, which haunts all old ruins, clings in great masses to the crevices, its leaves and ignoble blossoms white with the dust of the road. Here and there a tall straggling plant of purple lithospermum has found a footing, and flourishes aloft its dark violet tiara of blossoms; while bright tufts of wall-flower send up their tongues of flame from an old tomb peering above the wall, as if from a funeral pyre. The St. Mary thistle grows at the foot of the walls in knots of large, spreading, crinkled leaves, beautifully scalloped at the edges; the glazed surface reticulated with lacteal veins, retaining the milk that, according to the legend, flowed from the Virgin's breast, and, forming the Milky Way in mid-heaven, fell down to earth upon this wayside thistle. Huge columns of cactuses and monster aloes may be seen rising above the top of the walls, like relics of a geologic flora contemporaneous with the age of the extinct volcanoes around. But the most curious of all the plants that adorn the walls is a kind of ivy which, instead of the usual dark-greenish or black berries, bears yellow ones. This species is rare, but here it occurs in profusion, and is as beautiful in foliage as it is singular in fruit. The walls themselves, apart from their floral adorning, are very remarkable, and deserving of the most careful and leisurely study. They are built up evidently of the remains of tombs; and numerous fragments of marble sarcophagi, pillars, inscriptions, and rich sculpture are imbedded in them, suggestive of a whole volume of antiquarian lore, so that he who runs may read. On the right of the road, in a vineyard, are several Columbaria belonging to the family of Cæcilius, an obscure Latin poet, who was a predecessor of Terence, and died one hundred and sixty-eight years before Christ; and on the left are the Columbaria of the freedmen of Augustus and Livia, divided into three chambers. These last when discovered excited the utmost interest among antiquarians; but they are now stripped of all their contents and characteristic decorations, and the inscriptions, about three hundred in number, are preserved in the museums of the Capitol and Vatican. On the same side of the road, in a vineyard, a Columbarium was discovered in 1825 belonging to the Volusian family, who flourished in the reign of Nero; one of whose members, Lucius Volusius, who lived to the age of ninety-three, was extolled on account of his exemplary life by Tacitus. On the same plateau is the entrance to the celebrated Catacombs of St. Calixtus. It is on the right-hand side of the road, about a mile and a quarter from the present gate, and near where stood the second milestone on the ancient Appian Way. A marble tablet over the door of a vineyard shaded with cypresses points it out to the visitor. The rock out of which this and all the Roman Catacombs were hewn seems as if created specially for the purpose. Recent geological observations have traced in the Campagna volcanic matter produced at different periods, when the entire area of Rome and its vicinity was the seat of active plutonic agency. This material is of varying degrees of hardness. The lowest and oldest is so firm and compact that it still furnishes, as it used to do, materials for building; the foundations of the city, the wall of Romulus, and the massive blocks on which the Capitol rests, being formed of this substance. Over this a later stratum was deposited called _tufa granolare_, consisting of a similar mechanical conglomerate of scoriæ, ashes, and other volcanic products, but more porous and friable in texture. It is in this last formation, which is so soft that it can be easily hollowed out, and yet so solid that it does not crumble, that the Catacombs are invariably found. There is something that appeals strongly to the imagination in the fact that the early Christians should have formed the homes of their dead and the haunts of their faith in the deposit of the terrible volcano and the stormy sea! The outbursts of the Alban volcanoes were correlated in God's scheme of providence with the outbursts of human fury long ages afterwards; and the one was prepared as a means of defence from the other, by Him who maketh His ministers a flaming fire. The Catacombs were specially excavated for Christian burial,--tombs beneath the tombs of the Appian Way. Unlike the pagans, who burned the bodies of their dead, and deposited, as we have seen, the ashes in cinerary urns which took up but little space, the Christians buried the bodies of their departed friends in rock-hewn sepulchres. They must have derived this custom from the Jewish mode of interment; and they would wish to follow in this the example of their Lord, who was laid in an excavated tomb. Besides, it was abhorrent to their feelings to burn their dead. Their religion had taught them to value the body, which is an integral part of human nature, and has its own share in the redemption of man. Their mode of sepulture therefore required larger space; and as the Christians grew and multiplied, and more burials took place, they extended the subterranean passages and galleries in every direction. It is computed that upwards of six millions of the bodies of the early Christians were deposited in the Catacombs. The name which these rock-hewn sepulchres first received was _cemeteries_, places of sleep; for the Christians looked upon their dead as only asleep, to be awakened by the trump of the archangel at the resurrection. And being used as burial-places, the Catacombs became the inalienable property of the Christians; for, according to Roman law, land which had once been used for interment became _religiosus_, and could not be transferred for any other purpose. It was long supposed that the Catacombs were subsequently made use of as places of abode, when persecution drove the Christians to seek the loneliest spots; but this idea has been dispelled by a more careful examination of them. There can be no doubt, however, that they were employed as places of religious meeting. Numerous inscriptions found in them touchingly record that no Christian worship could be performed in the imperial city without the risk of discovery and death; and therefore the members of the Christian flock were obliged to meet for worship in these dreary vaults. The passages in some places were expanded into large chambers, and there divine service was performed; not only for the benefit of those who came to bury their dead, but also for those who resided in the city, and were Christians in secret. Passing from the roughly-paved road into the vineyard where the Catacombs of St. Calixtus are situated, the first objects that caught my eye were the dark, gaunt ruins of a tomb and a chapel of the third century, now wreathed and garlanded with luxuriant ivy. Beside these ruins I descended into the Catacombs by an ancient staircase, at the foot of which my guide provided me with a long twisted wax taper, calculated to last out my visit. A short distance from the entrance, I came to a vestibule surrounded with loculi or rock-hewn graves. The walls were plastered, and covered with rude inscriptions, scratched with a pointed iron instrument. These were done by pilgrims and devotees in later ages, who had come here--many of them from distant lands--to pay their respects at the graves of the saints and martyrs. Two of these pilgrims, from the diocese of Salzburg, visited these Catacombs in the eighth century, and left behind an account of their visit, which has afforded a valuable clue to Cavaliere de Rossi in his identification of the chambers and graves. Passing from this open space, I soon reached a sepulchral chapel, lined with the graves of the earliest popes--many of them martyrs--who were buried here for about a century, from the year 200 to the year 296 of our era. The gravestones of four of them have been found, with inscriptions in Greek. A beautiful marble tablet by Pope Damasus, who died in 384, stands where the altar of the chapel originally stood, and records the praises of the martyrs whose remains lay in the neighbouring chambers; ending with a wish that he himself might be buried beside them, only he feared that he was unworthy of the honour. This good Pope, like an older "Old Mortality," made it a labour of love, to which he consecrated his life, to rediscover and adorn the tombs which had been hidden under an accumulation of earth and rubbish during the fearful persecution of Diocletian. From this chapel of the Popes I came through a narrow passage to a wider crypt, where the body of St. Cæcilia was laid after her martyrdom in her own house in Rome, in the year 224. There is a rude painting of this saint on the wall, clothed with rich raiment, and adorned with the jewels befitting a Roman lady of high station. And at the back of a niche, where a lamp used to burn before the shrine of the saint, is painted a large head of our Saviour, with rays of glory around it shaped like a Greek cross. This is said to be the oldest representation of our Lord in existence, and from it all our conventional portraits have been taken. Doubts have, however, been thrown upon this by others, who assert that all the paintings in this chamber are not older than the seventh century. After this, I wandered on after my guide through innumerable narrow galleries hewn out of the soft reddish-brown rock, and opening in all directions; all lined with horizontal cavities for corpses, tier above tier, in which once were crowded together old and young,--soldiers, martyrs, rich and poor mingling their dust together, as in life they had shared all things in common. Here social distinctions were abolished; side by side with the obscure and unknown slave were some of the most illustrious names of ancient Rome. These shelves are now empty, for nearly all the bones and relics of the dead have been removed to different churches throughout Europe. Even the inscriptions that were placed above each grave--on marble tablets--have been taken away, and now line the walls of the museums of St. John Lateran and the Vatican. A few, however, remain in their place; and I know nothing more affecting than the study of these. For the most part, they are very short, containing only the name and date; sometimes only an initial letter or a rudely-drawn cross, indicating that it was a time of sore trial, when such hurried obsequies were all that the imminent danger allowed. Sometimes I came upon a larger record--such as, "Thou sleepest sweetly in God;" "In the sleep of peace." But the most touching of all the inscriptions were those which were scratched rudely in a few places on the walls by visitors to the tombs of their fellow-Christians. The survivors came often to weep over the relics of the dead. Here a husband records the virtues of a beloved wife; there, a son invokes the precious memory of a pious father or mother; and all of them express their calm resignation and unshaken hope. One inscription especially struck me. It was very rude, and almost obliterated, for seventeen hundred years had passed over it. It was a husband's lamentation over a dead wife: "O Sophronia! dear Sophronia! thou _mayest_ live?--Thou _shalt_ live!" How eloquently did that rough, faded scrawl, over a long-forgotten grave, speak of the human fear that perhaps his wife was lost to him for ever--"Thou mayest live?" and of the noble faith that triumphed over it--"Thou _shalt_ live!" Nothing affects and astonishes one more in these inscriptions than this calm, assured confidence that death was but a profound sleep,--a rest unspeakably grateful after such a weary life of awful suffering,--and that they should see their beloved ones again. It was a literal realisation of the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: "And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection." They surrendered all that life holds dear, and life itself, from loyalty to the God of truth, knowing whom they had believed, and persuaded that He would keep that which they had committed to Him against the great day. They made their family ties so loyal and sacred, that their human love, in the higher love of Christ Jesus, endured for evermore. In many of the crypts, the emblems of martyrdom are roughly denoted by a sword, an axe, or by faggots and fire. What sorrowful scenes must have taken place in these dreary passages, as the mangled forms of parent, child, brother, or friend were stealthily brought in from the bloody games in the Flavian amphitheatre, or from the cruel tortures of the prison-house, to their last dark, narrow home along the very path I was now treading! A number of rude paintings ornament the walls of the chapels, which repeat over and over again the simple symbols of the Christian faith, and the touching stories of the Bible. The ark of Noah; Daniel in the lions' den; the miracle of Cana; the raising of Lazarus--are among the most common of these frescoes. And they are deeply interesting, as showing that down in these dim and dreary vaults, which presented such a remarkable contrast to the lovely violet sky and the grand architectural magnificence above ground, among men who cared little for the things of time and sense, because life itself had not a moment's security, were nevertheless nourished thoughts of ideal beauty and unearthly grandeur, which afterwards yielded such glorious fruit in the Christian art of Italy. The frescoes of the Catacombs are the feeble beginnings of an artistic inspiration which culminated in the "Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci, and the "Transfiguration" of Raphael. The anchor of hope, the olive-branch of peace, and the palm-branch as the sign of victory and martyrdom, were seen everywhere. The fish, whose Greek name is formed by the initial letters of the titles of our Lord, was carved on the marble tablets and sarcophagi as the anagram of the Saviour; and an Orante, or female figure praying, was represented as the symbol of the Church. The most common of all the figures, however, was that of the Good Shepherd carrying the lost sheep on His shoulders, or leaning on His staff while the sheep were feeding around Him. And a most touching figure it is, when we think of the circumstances of those who carved or painted it in these gloomy aisles. It was into no green pastures, and beside no still waters, that the Good Shepherd led His flock in those awful days, but into waste and howling wildernesses, where their feet were bruised by the hard stones, and their flesh torn by the sharp thorns, and all the storms of the world beat fiercely upon them. But still He was their Good Shepherd, and in the wilderness He spread a table for them, and in the valley of the shadow of death they feared no evil, for He was with them, and His rod and staff comforted them. I wish I could express adequately the emotions which filled my breast while wandering through these Catacombs. Save for the feeble glimmer of my own and the guide's lamp, I was in total darkness,--a darkness that might be felt. Not a sound broke the awful silence except the echo of our footsteps in the hollow passages. Not a trace or a recollection of life recalled me from the thought of absolute impenetrable death around. Each passage seemed so like the other, and the ramifications were so endless and bewildering, that but for the presence of my guide I should inevitably have lost myself. Horrible stories of persons who had gone astray in the inextricable maze, and wandering about in the empty gloom till they perished of exhaustion and starvation, recurred to my mind; and my imagination, intensified by the silence and darkness, vividly realised their sufferings. There is indeed no chill or damp in these labyrinths, and the atmosphere is mild and pleasant, but still the gloom was most oppressive. And yet a deep gratitude fills the soul; for the light there shone in darkness, and it was this very darkness that preserved our religion, when it ran the risk of being extinguished. These fearful subterranean passages were the furrows in which were planted the first germs of the Christian religion,--in which they were long guarded in persecution as the seed-corn under the frost-bound earth in winter, to spring up afterwards when summer smiled upon the world, and yield a glorious harvest to all nations. On the opposite side of the Appian Way, in a vineyard, is the Catacomb of Pretextatus, which is almost as extensive as that of St. Calixtus, and hardly less interesting. It is especially remarkable for a large square crypt, inlaid with brick and plaster, and covered with very fine frescoes and arabesques of birds and foliage. The bodies of St. Januarius, Agapetus, and Felicissimus, who suffered martyrdom in the year 162, were interred in this Catacomb; and two churches, at a subsequent period, were erected over it in honour of the three saints who suffered martyrdom with St. Cæcilia. Recent explorations have brought to light, in a separate part of this Catacomb, curious paintings and inscriptions which have been referred to the mysteries of Mithras--an Oriental worship of the Sun--introduced into Rome about a century before Christ, and which was celebrated in caves. When Christianity became popular, and was threatening the overthrow of polytheism, an attempt was made to counteract its influence in the reign of Alexander Severus, who himself came from the East, by organising this worship. The two systems of religion became, therefore, mixed up together for a while; and hence it is not uncommon to find in pagan sepulchres symbols and arrangements of a Christian character, and in Christian Catacombs Mithraic features. The funeral monuments of those who were converted to Christianity in the earliest ages of the Church indicated the transition between the two religions. We find upon their tombs pagan symbols, which ceased to be identified with pagan worship, and became mere conventional ornaments. We have other evidences along the Appian Way of the eclectic revival of paganism at this time. When alluding to the classic stream of the Almo, I spoke of the associations of the worship of Cybele. This naturalistic cult was introduced from Phrygia, and its orgiastic rites and nameless infamies had a horrible fascination for an age of decaying faith. And not far from the mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii there is a monument, probably of the age of Trajan, with a bas-relief portrait, dedicated to the memory of one _Usia Prima_, a priestess of Isis; this worship, with its painful initiations and splendid ritual, being imported from Egypt in the second century. But although this Neo-paganism appealed more to the passions of men than the sunny humanistic worship of older times, and for a time inspired the most frenzied enthusiasm, it failed utterly to resuscitate the decaying corpse of the old religion. Great Pan was hopelessly dead! At a short distance on the same side of the road is the Catacomb of Sts. Nereus and Achilles, which contained the remains of these saints, and are interesting to us as the most ancient Christian cemetery in the world. The masonry of the vestibule is in the best style of Roman brickwork; and the frescoes on its walls, representing Christ and His apostles, the Good Shepherd, Orpheus, Elijah, etc., indicate a period of high artistic taste. This Catacomb contains the oldest representation extant of the Virgin and Child receiving the homage of the Wise men from the East, supposed to date from the end of the second century, and was often made use of in support of Roman Mariolatry. Several days might be profitably spent by the antiquarian in investigating the contents of the different tiers of galleries; while the geologist would find matter for interesting speculation in the partial intrusion of the older lithoid tufa here and there into the softer and more recent volcanic deposits in which the passages are excavated, and in which numerous decomposing crystals of leucite may be observed. On the same side of the way, farther on, is the Jewish Catacomb, the tombs of which bear Jewish symbols, especially the seven-branched golden candlestick, and are inscribed, not with the secular names and occupations of the occupants, but with their sacred names, as office-bearers of the synagogue, rulers, scribes, etc. The inscriptions are not in Hebrew, but in Greek letters. It is supposed that in this Catacomb were interred the bodies of the Jews who were banished to the valley of Egeria by Domitian. About a quarter of a mile beyond the Catacombs you come to a descent, where there is a wide open space with a pillar in the centre, and behind it the natural rock of a peculiarly glowing red colour, overgrown with masses of ivy, wall-flower, and hawthorn just coming into blossom. Below the road, on the right, is a kind of piazza, shaded by a grove of funereal cypresses; and here is the church of St. Sebastian, one of the seven great basilicas which pilgrims visited to obtain the remission of their sins. It was founded by Constantine, on the site of the house and garden of the pious widow Lucina, who buried there the body of St. Sebastian after his martyrdom. This saint was a Gaulish soldier in the Roman army, who, professing Christianity, was put to death by order of Diocletian. The body of the saint is said to repose under one of the altars, marked by a marble statue of him lying dead, pierced with silver arrows, designed by Bernini. The present edifice was entirely rebuilt by Cardinal Scipio Borghese; and nothing remains of the ancient basilica save the six granite columns of the portico, which were in all likelihood taken from some old pagan temple. It was from the nave of this church that the only Catacomb which used to be visited by pilgrims was entered; all the other Catacombs which have since been opened being at that time blocked up and unknown. Indeed it was to the subterranean galleries under this church that the name of Catacomb was originally applied. In the valley beneath St. Sebastian, on the left, is a large enclosure, covered with the greenest turf, and reminding one more, by its softness and compactness, of an English park than anything I had seen about Rome. Here are the magnificent ruins of what was long known as the Circus of Caracalla; but later investigations have proved that the circus was erected in honour of Romulus, the son of the Emperor Maxentius, in the year 311. It is the best preserved of all the ancient Roman circuses, and affords an excellent clue to the arrangements of such places for chariot races and the accommodation of the spectators. The external walls run on unbroken for about a quarter of a mile. In many places the vaults supporting the seats still remain. The spina in the centre marking the course of the races, on either end of which stood the two Egyptian obelisks which now adorn the Piazza Navona and the Piazza del Popolo, though grass-grown, can be easily defined; and the towers flanking the extremities, where the judges sat, and the triumphal gate through which the victors passed, are almost entire. It would not be difficult, with such aids to the imagination, to conjure up the splendid games that used to take place within that vast enclosure; the chariots of green, blue, white, and red driving furiously seven times round the course, the emperor and all his nobles sitting in the places of honour, looking on with enthusiasm, and the victor coming in at the goal, and the shouts and exclamations of the excited multitude. On the elevated ground behind the circus is a fringe of olive-trees, with a line of feathery elms beyond; and rising over all, the purple background of the Sabine and Alban hills. It is a lonely enough spot now; and the gentle hand of spring clothes the naked walls with a perfect garden of wild flowers, and softens with the greenest and tenderest turf the spots trodden by the feet of so many thousands. In the immediate vicinity of the circus are extensive ruins, visible and prominent objects from the road, consisting of large fragments of walls and apses, dispersed among the vineyards and enclosures. By far the best-known monument on the Appian Way is the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella. It is a conspicuous landmark in the wide waste, and catches the eye at a long distance from many points of view. It is as familiar a feature in paintings of the Campagna almost as the Claudian Aqueduct. This celebrity it owes to its immense size, its wonderful state of preservation, and above all to the genius of Lord Byron, who has made it the theme of some of the most elegant and touching stanzas in _Childe Harold_. Nothing can be finer than the appearance of this circular tower in the afternoon, when the red level light of sunset, striking full upon it, brings out the rich warm glow of its yellow travertine stones in striking relief against the monotonous green of the Campagna. It is built on a portion of rising ground caused by a current of lava which descended from the Alban volcano during some prehistoric eruption, and stopped short here, forming the quarries on the left side of the road which supply most of the paving-stone of modern Rome. The Appian Way was here lowered several feet below the original level, in order to diminish the acclivity; and the mausoleum was consequently raised upon a substructure of unequal height corresponding with the inclination of the plane of ascent. It was originally cased with marble slabs, but these were stripped off during the middle ages for making lime; and Pope Clement XII. completed the devastation by removing large blocks which formed the basement, in order to construct the picturesque fountain of Trevi. A large portion of the Doric marble frieze, however, still remains, on which are sculptured bas-reliefs of rams' heads, festooned with garlands of flowers. Usually the bas-reliefs are supposed to represent bulls' heads; and the name of Capo de Bove (the "head of the ox"), by which the monument has long been known to the common people, is said to be derived from these ornaments. But a careful examination will convince any one that they are in reality rams' heads; and the vulgar name of the tomb was obviously borrowed from the armorial bearings of the Gaetani family, consisting of an ox's head, affixed prominently upon it when it served them as a fortress in the thirteenth century. Pope Boniface VIII., a member of this family, added the curious battlements at the top, which seem so slight and airy in comparison with the severe solidity of the rest of the structure, and are but a poor substitute for the massive conical roof which originally covered the tomb. Nature has done her utmost for nigh two thousand years to bring back this monument to her own bosom, but she has been foiled in all her attempts,--the travertine blocks of its exterior, though fitted to each other without cement, being as smooth and even in their courses of masonry as when first constructed, and almost as free from weather-stains as if they had newly been taken from the quarry. Only on the broad summit, where medieval Vandals broke down the noble pile and desecrated it by their own inferior workmanship, has nature been able to effect a lodgment; and in the breaches of this fortress, which is but a thing of yesterday as compared with the monument, and yet is far more ruinous, she has planted bushes, trees, and thick festoons of ivy, as if laying her quiet finger upon the angry passions of man, and obliterating the memory of his evil deeds by her own fair and smiling growth. The sepulchral vault in the interior was not opened till the time of Paul III., about 1540, when a beautiful marble sarcophagus, adorned with bas-reliefs of the chase, was found in it, which is supposed to be that which stands at the present day in the court of the Palazzo Farnese. This is likely to be true, for it is well known that this Pope, who was a member of the Farnese family, unscrupulously despoiled ancient Rome of many of its finest works of art in order to build and adorn his new palace. A golden urn containing ashes is said to have been discovered at the same time; but if so, it has long since disappeared. On a marble panel below the frieze an inscription in bold letters informs us that this is the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, daughter of Quintus Metellus,--who obtained the sobriquet of _Creticus_ for his conquest of Crete,--and wife of Crassus. She belonged to one of the most haughty aristocratic families of ancient Rome, whose members at successive intervals occupied the highest positions in the state, and several of whom were decreed triumphs by the senate on account of their success in war. Her husband was surnamed _Dives_ on account of his enormous wealth. He is said to have possessed a fortune equal to a million and a half pounds sterling; and to have given an entertainment to the whole Roman people in a time of scarcity, besides distributing to each family a quantity of corn sufficient to last three months. Along with Julius Cæsar and Pompey, he formed the famous first Triumvirate. While the richest, he seems, notwithstanding the above-mentioned act of munificence, to have been one of the meanest of the Romans. He had no steady political principle; he was actuated by bitter jealousy towards his colleagues and rivals; and that unsuccessful expedition which he undertook against the Parthians, in flagrant violation of a treaty made with them by Sulla and renewed by Pompey, and which has stamped his memory with incapacity and shame, was prompted by an insatiable greed for the riches of the East. On the field he occupied himself entirely in amassing fresh treasures, while his troops were neglected. The manner of his death, after the defeat and loss of the greater part of his army, was characteristic of his ruling passion. Tempted to seek an interview with the Parthian general by the offer of the present of a horse with splendid trappings, he was cut down when in the act of mounting into the saddle. His body was contemptuously buried in some obscure spot by the enemy, and his hands and head were sent to the king, who received the ghastly trophies while seated at the nuptial feast of his daughter, and ordered in savage irony molten gold to be poured down the severed throat, exclaiming, "Sate thyself now with the metal of which in life thou wert so fond." There is one incident connected with this most disastrous campaign upon which the imagination loves to dwell. Publius, the younger son of Crassus, born of the woman who lay in this tomb before us, after earning great distinction in Gaul as Cæsar's legate, accompanied his father to the East, and was much beloved on account of his noble qualities and his feats of bravery against the enemy. While endeavouring to repulse the last fierce charge of the Parthians, he was wounded severely by an arrow, and finding himself unable to extricate his troops, rather than desert them he ordered his sword-bearer to slay him. When the news of his son's fall reached the aged father, the old Roman spirit blazed up for a moment in him, and he exhorted his soldiers "not to be disheartened by a loss that concerned himself only." In this last triumph of a nobler nature he disappears from our view; and he who built this magnificent monument to the mother of his gallant son had himself no monument. More fortunate than her husband, whose evil manners live in brass,--less fortunate than her son, whose virtues have been handed down for the admiration of posterity,--Cæcilia Metella has left no record of her existence beyond her name. All else has been swallowed up by the oblivion of ages. Whether her husband raised this colossal trophy of the dust to commemorate his own pride of wealth, or his devoted love for her, we know not. He achieved his object; but he has given to his wife only the mockery of immortality. The substance has gone beyond recall, and but the shadow, the mere empty name, remains. Built up against this monument are the remains of the castle in which the Gaetani family long maintained their feudal warfare, with fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features of interest. It is very unlike any other church in Italy, and reminds one of the country churches of England. What led the Gaetanis to adopt this foreign style of ecclesiastical architecture is a circumstance unexplained. Altogether it is a most incongruous group of objects that are here clustered together--a tomb, a fortress, and a church--and affords a curious illustration of the bizarre condition of society at the time. An extraordinary echo repeats here every sound entrusted to it with the utmost distinctness. It doubtless multiplied the wailings of the mourners who brought to this spot two thousand years ago the ashes of the dead; it sent back the rude sounds of warfare which disturbed the peace of the tomb in the middle ages; and now it haunts the spot like the voice of the past, "informing the solitude," and giving a response to each new-comer according to his mood. Beyond the tomb of Cæcilia Metella the Appian Way becomes more interesting and beautiful. The high walls which previously shut in the road on either side now disappear, and nothing separates it from the Campagna but a low dyke of loose stones. The traveller obtains an uninterrupted view of the immense melancholy plain, which stretches away to the horizon with hardly a single tree to relieve the desolation. Here and there on the waste surface are fragments of ruins which speak to the heart, by their very muteness, more suggestively than if their historical associations were fully known. The mystic light from a sky which over this place seems ever to brood with a sad smile more touching than tears, falls upon the endless arches of the Claudian Aqueduct that remind one, as Ruskin has finely said, of a funeral procession departing from a nation's grave. The afternoon sun paints them with ruby splendours, and gleams vividly upon the picturesque vegetation which a thousand springs have sown upon their crumbling sides. They lead the eye on to the Alban Hills, which form on the horizon a fitting frame to the great picture, tender-toned, with delicate pearly and purple shadows clothing every cliff and hollow, like "harmonies of music turned to shape." I shall never forget my first walk over this enchanted ground. The day was warm and bright, though a little breeze, like the murmur of a child's sleep, occasionally stirred the languid calm. April had just come in; but in this Southern clime spring, having no storms or frosts to fear, lingers in a strange way and unfolds, with slow, patient tenderness, her beauties; not like our Northern spring, which rushes to verdure and bloom as soon as the winter snows have disappeared. And hence, though the few trees along the road had only put forth their first leaves, tender and flaccid as butterfly's wings, the grass was ready to be cut down and was thickly starred with wild flowers. Horace of old said that one could not travel rapidly along the Appian Way, on account of the number and variety of its objects of interest; and the same remark holds good at the present day. It would take months to go over in detail all its wonderful relics of the past. At every step you are arrested by something that opens up a fascinating vista into the old family life of the imperial city. At every step you "set your foot upon some reverend history." From morning to sunset I lingered on this haunted path, and tried to enter into sympathy with old-world sorrows that have left behind no chronicles save these silent stones. It is indeed a path sacred to meditation! One has there an overpowering sense of waste--a depressing feeling of vanity. On every side are innumerable tokens of a vast expenditure of human toil, and love, and sorrow; and it seems as if it had been all thrown away. For two miles and a half from the tomb of Cæcilia Metella I counted fifty-three tombs on the right and forty-eight on the left. The margin of the road on either side is strewn with fragments of hewn marble, travertine, and peperino. Broken tablets, retaining a few letters of the epitaphs of the dead; mutilated statues and alto-relievos; drums and capitals of pillars; a hand or a foot, or a fold of marble drapery,--every form and variety of sculpture, the mere crumbs that had fallen from a profuse feast of artistic beauty, which nobody considers it worth while to pick up, lie mouldering among the grass. At frequent intervals, facing the road, you see with mournful interest the exposed interiors of tombs, showing that beautiful and curious _opus reticulatum_, or reticulated arrangement of bricks or tufa blocks, which is so characteristic of the imperial period, and rows upon rows of neat pigeon-holes in the brickwork, which contained the cinerary urns, all robbed of their treasures, their tear-bottles, and even their bones. Ruthless popes and princes have done their best during all the intervening ages to destroy the monuments by taking away for their own uses the marble and hewn stone which encased them, leaving behind only the inner core of brick and small stones imbedded in mortar which was never meant to be seen. Pitying hands have lately endeavoured to atone for this desecration by lifting here and there out of the rubbish heap on which they were thrown some affecting group of family portraits, some choice specimens of delicate architecture, some mutilated panel on which the stern hard features of a Roman senator look out upon you, and placing them in a prominent position to attract attention. But though they have endeavoured to build up the fragments of the tombs into some semblance of their former appearance, the resuscitation is even more melancholy than was the former ruin. Their efforts at restoration are only the very graves of graves. In some places a side path leading off the main road to a tomb has been uncovered, paved with the original lava-blocks as fresh as when the last mourner retired from it, casting "a lingering look behind;" but it leads now only to a shapeless heap of brick, or to the empty site of a monument that has been razed to the very foundations. One piece of marble sculpture especially arrests the eye, and awakens a chord of feeling in the most callous heart. It represents one of those _Imagines Clipeatæ_ which the ancient Romans were so fond of sculpturing in their temples or upon their tombs; a clam shell or shield with the bust of a man and a woman carved in relief within it, the hand of the one fondly embracing the neck of the other. Below is a long Latin inscription, telling that this is the tomb of a brother and sister who were devotedly attached to each other. Who this soror and frater were, there is no record to tell. All subsidiary details of their lives have been allowed to pass away with the other decorations of the tomb, leaving behind this beautiful expression of household affection in full and lasting relief. I felt drawn more closely to the distant ages by this little carving than by anything else. The huge monuments around weighed down my spirit to the earth. The very effort to secure immortality by the massiveness of these tombs defeated its own object. They spoke only of dust to dust and ashes to ashes; but that little glimpse into the simple love of simple hearts in the far-off past lifted me above all the decays of the sepulchre. It assured me that our deepest heart-affections are the helpers of our highest hopes, and the instinctive guarantees of a life to come. Love creates its own immortality; for "love is love for evermore." Along this avenue of death nothing can be more striking than the profusion of life. It seems as if all the vitality of the many buried generations had there passed into the fuller life of nature. You can trace the street of tombs into the far distance, not only by the ruins that line it on both sides, but also by its borders of grass of a darker green and greater luxuriance than the pale, short, sickly verdure of the Campagna; just as you can trace the course of a moorland stream along the heather by the brighter vegetation which its own waters have created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them: the _Orchis rubra_ with its splendid spike of crimson blossoms, the bee and spider orchises in great variety, whose flowers mimic the insects after whom they are named, sweet-scented alyssum, golden buttercups and hawkweeds, Roman daisies, larger and taller than the English ones, with the bold wide-eyed gaze you see in the Roman peasant-girls, scarlet poppies glowing in a sunshine of their own, like flames in the heart of a furnace, vetches bright azure and pale yellow, dark blue hyacinths, pink geraniums, and "moonlit spires of asphodel," suggestive of the flowery fields of the immortals. My footsteps along the dusty road continually disturbed serpents that wriggled away in long ripples of motion among the tall spears of the grass; while green and golden lizards, sunning themselves on the hot stones, disappeared into their holes with a quick rustling sound at my approach. The air was musical with a perfect chorus of larks, whose jubilant song soared above all sorrow and death to heaven's own gate; and now and then a tawny hawk sailed swiftly across the horizon. Huge plants of gray mullein towered here and there above the sward, whose flannel-like leaves afforded a snug shelter to great quantities of wasps just recovering from their winter torpor. On the very tombs themselves there was a lavish adornment of vegetable life: snow-white drifts of hawthorn and honeysuckle wreaths waved on the summits of those on which a sufficient depth of soil had lodged; the wild dog-rose spread its thorny bushes and passionate-coloured crimson blooms as a fence around others; and even on the barest of them nothing could exceed the wealth of orange lichens that redeemed their poverty and gilded their nakedness with frescoes of fadeless beauty. On some of the rugged masses of masonry grew large hoary tufts of the strange roccella or orchil-weed, which yields the famous purple dye--with which, in all likelihood, the robes of the Cæsars were coloured--and which gave wealth, rank, and name to one princely Italian family, the Rucellai. Over the desolate tombs of those who wore the imperial purple, this humble lichen, that yielded the splendid hue, spread its gray hoar-frost of vegetation. I have already spoken of the solitude of the Campagna; but this part of the Appian Way, leading through it, is exceptionally lonely. It might as well have led over an American prairie or Asiatic steppe on which the foot of man had never intruded. You see along the white reaches of the road at a little distance what looks like a cluster of houses overshadowed by some tall umbrella pine, with all the signs of human life apparently about them; but, as you come near, the sight resolves itself into a mere mass of ruins. The mirage of life turns out to be a tomb--nay, the ruin of a tomb! A carriage full of visitors may, perhaps, be seen at long intervals, their spirits sobered by the melancholy that broods over the scene; or a lumbering cart, laden with wine-casks from Ariccia or Albano, drawn by the soft-eyed mouse-coloured oxen of the Campagna, startles the echoes, and betrays its course by the clouds of dust which it raises. There are no sights or sounds of rural toil in the fields on either side of the way. Only a solitary shepherd, with his picturesque cloak, accompanied by two or three vicious-looking dogs, meets you; or, perhaps, you come unexpectedly upon an artist seated on a tomb and busy sketching the landscape. For hours you may have the scene all to yourself. Even Rome, from this distance, looks like a city of dreams! Its walls and domes have disappeared behind the misty green veil of the horizon; and only the colossal statues of the apostles on the top of the church of S. John Lateran stand out in a halo of golden light, and seem to stretch forth their hands to welcome the approaching pilgrim. It is well known to historians that the villa of Seneca, in which he put himself to death by command of Nero, stood near the fourth milestone on the Appian Way. The circumstances of his death are exceedingly sad. Wishing to get rid of his former tutor, who had become obnoxious to him, the bloodthirsty emperor first attempted to poison him; and when this failed, he accused him, along with his nephew the poet Lucan and several others, of being concerned in a conspiracy against his life. This accusation was false; but it served the purpose of bringing Seneca within reach of his vengeance, under a colour of justice. A tribune with a cohort of soldiers was sent to intimate his fate to the philosopher; allowing him to execute the sentence of death upon himself by whatever means he preferred. Seneca was at supper with his wife Paulina and two friends when the fatal message came. Without any sign of alarm he rose and opened the veins of his arms and legs, having bade farewell to his friends and embraced his wife; and while the blood, impoverished by old age, ebbed slowly from him, he continued to comfort his friends and exhort them to a life of integrity. The last words of one so justly renowned were taken down, and in the time of Tacitus the record was still extant. We should value much these interesting memorials; but they are now irrecoverably lost. His wife, refusing to live without him, also endeavoured to bleed herself to death; but she was recovered by order of Nero almost at the last moment. She remained pale and emaciated ever after from having followed her husband more than half-way on the road to death. No trace of the villa where this pathetic tragedy took place can now be seen; but near the spot where it must have stood, close beside the road, is a marble bas-relief of the death of Atys, the son of Croesus, killed in the chase by Adrastus, placed upon a modern pedestal; and this is supposed to have formed part of the tomb of Seneca. There is no inscription; probably none would be allowed during the lifetime of Nero; and we know that his body was burned privately without any of the usual ceremonies. But if this fragment of sculpture be genuine, the well-known classic story which it tells was an appropriate memorial of one who perished in the midst of the greatest prosperity. No one who is familiar with the history of this "seeker after God," this philosopher who was a pagan John the Baptist in the severity and purity of his mode of life, and in the position which he occupied on the border-line between paganism and Christianity, and who left behind him some of the noblest utterances of antiquity, can gaze upon this interesting bas-relief without being deeply moved. It speaks eloquently of the little dependence to be placed upon the favour of princes; and it points a powerful moral that has been repeatedly enforced in sacred as well as profane history, that he who becomes the accomplice of another in crime, strikes, by that complicity, the death-blow of friendship, and makes himself more hated than even the victim of the crime had been. When Seneca sanctioned, and then defended on political grounds, the matricide of Nero, from that moment his own doom was sealed. Over the former "guide, philosopher, and friend," the shadow of this guilty secret rested, and it deepened and darkened until the pupil embrued his hands in the blood of his teacher. This touching fragment of sculpture is all that now remains of the earthly pomp of one who at one time stood on the very highest summit of human wisdom. There is no likelihood that he ever met the Apostle Paul during his residence in the imperial city, or learned from him any of those precepts that are so wonderfully Christian in their spirit and even words; although an early Christian forger thought it worth while to fabricate a supposititious correspondence between them. The only link of connection between them was the problematical one that St. Paul, with his wide sympathies, may have gazed with interest upon Seneca's villa, as it was pointed out to him on his journey to Rome; and that he was on one occasion dragged as a prisoner into the presence of Seneca's elder brother, that Gallio who dismissed the charge and the accusers with contempt. Passing two massive fragments of a wall, which are supposed to have formed part of a small temple of Jupiter, beside which numerous Christians suffered martyrdom, we come, at the fifth milestone, to a spot associated with one of those poetical legends which occur in the early annals of all nations, and whose hold upon the minds of men is itself an historic truth. Here was the boundary between the territory of Rome and that of Alba. Here was situated the entrenchment called the Cluilian Dyke, where Hannibal encamped, and where previously the Roman and Alban armies were drawn up in battle array, when it was agreed that the quarrel between them should be settled by three champions chosen from each side. Every one knows the story of the Horatii and the Curiatii: how these hapless brothers and cousins fought in sight of both armies with a bravery worthy of the stake; and how, at length, when two of the Roman heroes were slain, and all the Albans were wounded, the third Roman, who was unhurt, feigned to fly, and thus separating his enemies, who followed him as well as their failing strength would permit, easily despatched them one after the other, and thus gained the victory for the Roman cause. This terrible tragedy, which terminated the independent existence of the Alban power, took place in the fields around here; and on the right-hand side of the road are three huge circular mounds, overgrown with long rich grass, planted with tall cypress and ilex trees, and surrounded at the foot with a wall of huge peperino blocks, which antiquarians have determined to be the tombs of the five slaughtered combatants--the farther mound being that of the two Horatii, the second that of one of the Curiatii, and the third that of the other two Curiatii. These tombs are situated exactly where we should have expected to find them from the description of Livy; and they are evidently of far older date than any of the neighbouring tombs of the imperial period. Their form and construction carry us back in imagination to the earliest days of Rome, when Etruscan architecture was universally adopted as a model. For more than twenty-five centuries the huge tent-like mounds have stood, so strikingly different in character from all the other sepulchral monuments of the Appian Way; preserved by the reverential care of successive generations. The modern Romans have not been behind the ancient in the pride with which they have regarded these monuments. They have planted them with the splendid cypress-trees which now add so much to their picturesqueness, and annually repair the ravages of time. I climbed up the steep sides through the long slippery grass to the summits of two of the mounds, and had a grand view of the whole scene of the tragic story, bathed in the dim misty light which always broods over the melancholy Campagna like the spectral presence of the past. The sunshine strove in vain to gild the dark shadows which the cypresses threw over the mound at my feet, and the lonely wind wailed wildly through their closely-huddled shivering branches around me. On the opposite side of the road, beyond the earthen mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii, a large mass of picturesque ruins covers the Campagna for a considerable distance. The peasants persist in calling this spot _Roma Vecchia_, under the idea that ancient Rome stood there, and that these ruins are the remains of the city. Antiquarians, however, are agreed that the ruins belong to the large suburban villa of the Quintilii, one of the noblest and most virtuous families of ancient Rome. One member, the celebrated rhetorician Quintilian, was the first who enjoyed the regular salary allotted by Vespasian to those who provided a solid education for the upper classes. In the time of the Emperor Commodus the villa was owned by two brothers of the Quintilian family, Maximus and Condianus, whose fraternal love is as well known almost as the friendship of Damon and Pythias. They were inseparable in all their pursuits and pleasures; they shared this villa and the surrounding property together; they composed a treatise in common, some fragments of which still survive. They were raised together to the consular dignity by Marcus Aurelius, who greatly valued their virtue and their mutual attachment, and were entrusted together with the civil government of Greece. They were both falsely accused of taking part in a plot against the emperor's life; and Commodus, who coveted their property, had them both put to death together. The tyrant then took possession of their villa, which became as notorious for the evil deeds done in it as it was famous before for the virtuous life of its owners. Here Commodus, the base son of a heroic father, practised those lusts and brutalities which have branded his name as that of one of the most unmitigated monsters that ever stained the pages of history. It was here that the people--exasperated by their sufferings through fire and famine, by the open sale of justice and all public offices, and by the blood shed in the streets by the prætorian cavalry--surrounded the villa, and demanded the head of Cleander, a Phrygian slave whom Commodus had placed at the helm of state because he pandered to his master's vices, and gratified him with rich presents obtained by the vilest means. At the entreaties of his sister and his favourite concubine, the emperor sacrificed his minister, who was with him at the time, sharing in his guilty pleasures; and threw out, from one of the windows of the villa, the bloody head among the crowd, who gratified their vengeance by tossing it about like a football. Here, too, the wretched emperor himself was first poisoned by a cup of wine given to him by his favourite mistress Marcia, on his return weary and thirsty from the Colosseum; and then, as the poison operated too slowly, was strangled in his heavy drugged sleep by his favourite gladiator Narcissus. One could not look upon the bare masses of ruins around without thinking of the terrible orgies that took place there, and of the shout of enthusiastic joy when the news reached Rome that the detested tyrant was no more, and the empire was free to breathe again. The fate of Ahab, who coveted the vineyard of Naboth, overtook him; and but for the interference of his successor, the maddened populace would have dragged his corpse through the streets and flung it into the Tiber. A very extraordinary tomb arrests the attention near the ruins of this villa. It looks like an inverted pyramid, or a huge architectural mushroom. This appearance has been given to the monument by the removal of the large blocks of stone which formed the basement, leaving the massive superincumbent weight to be supported on a very narrow stalk of conglomerate masonry. It is a striking proof of the extraordinary solidity and tenacity of Roman architecture, defying the laws of gravitation. It is called the sepulchre of the Metelli, the family of Cæcilia Metella; but this is a mere guess, as there is no record or inscription to identify it. Next to this singular monument are the remains of a tomb which must be exceedingly interesting to every classical scholar. The inscription indicates that it is the tomb of Quintus Cæcilius, whose nephew and adopted son, Titus Pomponius Atticus, as Cornelius Nepos tells us, was buried in it. This celebrated Roman knight was descended in a direct line from Numa Pompilius. Withdrawing from the civil discords of Rome, he took up his abode in Athens, where he devoted himself to literary and philosophic pursuits and acquired a knowledge of the Greek language so perfect that he could not be distinguished from a native. At the Greek capital, the then university of the world, he secured the devoted friendship of his fellow-student Cicero, whose brother was afterwards married to his sister; and to this intimacy we owe the largest portion of Cicero's unrivalled letters, in which he describes his inmost feelings, as well as the events going on around him. The uncle of Atticus, the brother of his mother, whose family tomb we are now examining, left him at his death an enormous fortune, which he had amassed by usury. Atticus added greatly to it by acting as a kind of publisher to the authors of the day--that is, by employing his numerous slaves in copying and multiplying their manuscripts. He kept himself free from all the political factions of the times, and thus managed to preserve the mutual regard of parties who were hostile to each other,--such as Cæsar and Pompey, Brutus and Antony. He reached the age of seventy-seven years without having had a day's illness; and when at last stricken with an incurable disease, in the spirit of the Epicurean philosophy, since he could enjoy life no longer he starved himself to death, and was interred in his uncle's tomb on the Appian Way. Almost side by side with this ruin is the sepulchre of the family of Cicero's wife, the Terentii, who were related to Pomponius Atticus by the mother's side. In all likelihood Terentia herself, Cicero's brave and devoted but ill-used wife, was interred here with her own friends, for her husband had divorced her in order to marry a beautiful and rich young heiress, whose guardian he had been. Passing on the same side of the road two or three tombs of obscure persons whose names alone are known, we come at the sixth milestone to one of the most extraordinary sepulchral monuments of the Appian Way, called the _Casale Rotondo_. This monument marks the limit to which most visitors extend their explorations. It is circular, like the tomb of Cæcilia Metella; but it is of far larger dimensions, being nearly three hundred and fifty feet in diameter. In the fifteenth century this colossal ruin was converted into a fortress by the Orsini family; and of the remains of this fortification a farmhouse and other buildings were constructed, and these now stand on the summit, surrounded by a tolerably-sized oliveyard and garden, with a sloping grass-grown stair leading up to them on the outside. Notwithstanding their dislike of death and their horror of dead bodies, the modern Romans have no more repugnance to the proximity of tombs than their ancestors had. Shepherds fold their sheep and goats in the interior of the old tombs, whose walls are blackened with the smoke of the fires, and retain an odour of human and animal occupancy more disagreeable than any which the original tenants could have exhaled; and it is by no means unfrequent to find a wine-shop, with a noisy company of wayfarers regaling themselves, in a sepulchre that happens to be conveniently situated by the wayside. So far as can be ascertained, the original appearance of the _Casale Rotondo_ seems to have been that of an enormous circular tower, cased with large blocks of travertine, covered with a pyramidal roof of the same material carved into the semblance of tiles, and surmounted with appropriate sculpture. It was surrounded with a wall of peperino, supporting at intervals vases and statues; and on the outside were semicircular stone seats for the benefit of weary wayfarers. This wall is now grown over with turf, but it can be distinctly traced all round; and the hollow space between it and the tomb is covered with thick grass, and is sometimes filled with water like a fosse. Numerous altars, pedestals, and fine specimens of sculpture in marble and peperino, have been disinterred in this spot, and they are now arranged to advantage at the foot of the huge pile fronting the road. Some of these bear inscriptions which would indicate that the tomb was erected to Messalla Corvinus, the friend of Horace and Augustus, and himself a distinguished historian and poet as well as one of the most influential senators of Rome, by his son Marcus Aurelius Corvinus Cotta, who was consul some years after his father's death. Corvinus died in the eleventh year of our era, so that the tomb has stood for upwards of eighteen centuries and a half; and it is as likely to stand as many more, for what remains of it is as firm and enduring as a rock. In the farmhouse built on its massive platform several generations have lived and died. They have eaten and drunk, they have married and been given in marriage, they have cultivated their vines and olives and consumed their products. And all the time their home and their field of labour have been on a tomb! I did not see the tenants of this curious dwelling during my visit; but if the skeleton at the Egyptian feast was a useful reminder of human mortality to the revellers, one would suppose that the thought of the peculiar character of their home would be sufficient to impart a soberer hue to their lives. What is our earth itself but, on a vaster scale, a _Casale Rotondo_--a garden in a sepulchre--where the dust we tread on was once alive; and we reap our daily bread from human mould-- "Earth builds on the earth castles and towers, Earth says to the earth--All shall be ours." At a distance of about seven minutes' walk is an enormous circular tomb, with a medieval tower of lava stones erected upon it, called the _Torre di Selce_; but there is nothing to indicate who was interred in it, though it must have been a person of some celebrity at the time. An inscription upon a tomb beside it naively tells the passer-by to respect the last resting-place of one who had a shop on the _Via Sacra_, where he sold jewellery and millinery, and was held in much estimation by his customers. Beyond this point there is nothing of any special interest to arrest our attention, till we come to a considerable mass of ruins, consisting of broken Doric columns of peperino, part of a rough mosaic floor and brick pavement, and fragments of walls lined with tufa squares in the _opus reticulatum_ pattern. These remains are supposed to mark the spot on which stood the Temple of Hercules, erected by Domitian, and alluded to in one of the epigrams of the poet Martial. Near this spot are the tomb of the consul Quintus Veranius, who died in Britain in the year 55 of our era; a lofty circular tomb, to some one unknown, with a rude shepherd's hut on the top of it, to which the peasants have given the name of Torraccio; and the tomb of a marble contractor. It may be remarked, in connection with this last mentioned tomb, that a Roman statuary had his workshops for the manufacture of sepulchral monuments and sarcophagi on the Appian Way, which were of great extent, judging from the quantity of sculpture, finished and unfinished, found on the spot. All the sculpture was manifestly copied from Greek originals, for it is hardly conceivable that such groupings and expressions as we see in these bad copies could have been first executed by such inferior artists. In this neighbourhood were the villa and farm of the poet Persius, and portions of the wall are still standing. At the ninth milestone are the tomb and the remains of the villa of the Emperor Gallienus, slain by a conspiracy among his officers at the siege of Milan in the year 268. This emperor has left nothing behind but the memory of his luxury and his vices. When the site of the villa was excavated by an English artist, Gavin Hamilton, at the end of last century, the famous statue of the Discobolus and several other specimens of ancient sculpture were discovered, which are now in the Vatican Gallery. The ground hereabouts produces a whitish efflorescence, and emits a most offensive sulphurous smell. It exhibits the same evidences of recent volcanic activity as the neighbourhood of Lakes Tartarus and Solfatara on the way to Tivoli. The road after this descends into a valley, through which the stream of the Ponticello flows, passing a most massive circular tomb, reminding one of the mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii; and as it ascends gradually on the opposite side, two huge sepulchres of the Imperial period--one on the right hand and the other on the left--attract notice, and are the last on this part of the route. The railway to Naples passes across the road at the eleventh milestone, and disturbs the solemn silence three or four times a day by its incongruous noise. Beyond this is the osteria and village of Frattocchie, where the old Appian Way merges into the new, and ascends continuously to Albano. This neighbourhood is full of historical associations. It was at Frattocchie that the body of Clodius was left lying on the road after his fatal encounter with Milo. This fray furnished the occasion for one of Cicero's most eloquent speeches,--that in defence of Milo,--which was written, but owing to the disturbances in the Forum at the time was not delivered. On the left of the village, near a railway bridge and several quarries of very old hard lava, is the site of Appiolæ, one of the cities of the Latin League, destroyed by Tarquinius Priscus. All the male population were killed, and the women and children transferred to Rome; and with the spoils the Capitolium was completed. The remains of the old city are very slight, consisting of a wall, a few vestiges of a temple, and some foundations on a cliff surrounded by a stream, which could be dammed up and flooded so as to form a fosse. On the right of Frattocchie are the ruins of _Bovillæ_, taken and plundered by Coriolanus, and deserted in the time of Cicero. Some arches of the corridor of an amphitheatre, a reservoir for water, tolerably perfect, and a circus, are still visible. There are also the ruins of a forum. The view, looking back from this elevated position upon the long course of the Appian Way, is exceedingly striking. One feels, when gazing on the long perspective of rugged and mouldering sepulchres, the full force of the name _Strada del Diavolo_ which the peasants give to this street of tombs; and can sympathise with the sentiment that made Charles Dickens say, when standing here at sunset, after having walked all the way from Rome, "I almost felt as if the sun would never rise again, but look its last that night upon a ruined world." We can picture St. Paul's memorable journey from Puteoli to Rome by this route. The thought that the eye of the great apostle must have rested upon the same features of the landscape, and many of the same objects, though now in ruins, that we still behold, invests them with an indescribable charm. From beyond the gates of Albano, near which stood the lofty tomb of Pompey, whose ashes had only recently been brought from the scene of his murder in Egypt, by his devoted wife Cornelia, he would obtain his first glimpse of Rome. And if now it is the most thrilling moment in a man's life to see Rome in its ruin, what must it have been to see it then in its glory! We can imagine that, with the profound emotion of his Master when gazing upon the splendour of Jerusalem from the slope of Olivet, St. Paul would look down from that spot on the capital of the world, and see before him the signs of a magnificence never before or since equalled; but alas! as he knew well, a magnificence that was only the iridescence of social and spiritual corruption, as the pomp of the sepulchres of the Appian Way was but the shroud of death. Doubtless with a sad and pitying heart, he would be led by the cohort of soldiers along the street of tombs, then the most crowded approach to a city of nearly two millions of souls; tombs whose massiveness and solidity were but a vain craving for immortality, and whose epitaphs were the most deeply touching of all epitaphs, on account of the profound despair with which they bade their eternal farewell. Entering into Rome through the Porta Capena; and winding through the valley between the Coelian and Aventine hills, crowded with temples and palaces, he would be brought to the Forum, then a scene of indescribable grandeur; and from thence he would be finally transferred to the charge of Burrus, the prefect of the imperial guards, at the prætorium of Nero's palace, on the Palatine. And here he disappears from our view. We only know of a certainty that for two whole years "he dwelt in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him." Of all the splendid associations of the Appian Way, along which history may be said to have marched exclusively for nigh six hundred years, the most splendid by far is its connection with this ever-memorable journey of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. We can trace the influence of the scenes and objects along the route in all his subsequent writings. He had a deeper yearning for the Gentiles, because he thus beheld with his own eyes the places associated with the darkest aspects of paganism; the scenes that gave rise to the pagan ideas of heaven and hell; the splendid temples in which the human soul had debased itself to objects beneath the dignity of its own nature, and thus prepared itself for all moral corruption; and the massive sepulchral monuments in which the hopeless despair of heathenism had, as it were, become petrified by the Gorgon gaze of death. That Appian Way should be to us the most interesting of all the roads of the world; for by it came to us our civilisation and Christianity--the divine principles and hopes that redeem the soul, retrieve the vanity of existence, open up the path of life through the dark valley of death, and disclose the glorious vista of immortality beyond the tomb. And as we gaze upon the remains of that road, and feel how much we owe to it as the material channel of God's grace to us who were far off, we can say with deepest gratitude of those apostles and martyrs who once walked on this lava pavement, but are now standing on the sea of glass before the throne, "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!" CHAPTER III THE CUMÆAN SIBYL A part of the monotonous coast-line of Palestine extends into the Mediterranean considerably beyond the rest at Carmel. In this bluff promontory the Holy Land reaches out, as it were, towards the Western World; and like a tie-stone that projects from the gable of the first of a row of houses, indicating that other buildings are to be added, it shows that the inheritance of Israel was not meant to be always exclusive, but was destined to comprehend all the countries which its faith should annex. The remarkable geographical position of this long projecting ridge by the sea--itself a symbol and prophecy--and its peculiar physical features, differing from those of the rest of Palestine, and approximating to a European type of scenery, early marked it out as a religious spot. It was held sacred from time immemorial; an altar existed there long before Elijah's discomfiture of the priests of Baal; the people were accustomed to resort to the sanctuary of its "high place" during new moons and Sabbaths; and to its haunted strand came pilgrims from distant regions, to which the fame of its sanctity had spread. One of the great schools of the prophets of Israel, superintended by Elisha, was planted on one of its mountain prominences. The solitary Elijah found a refuge in its bosom, and came and went from it to the haunts of men like one of its own sudden storms; and in its rocky dells and dense thickets of oaks and evergreens were uttered prophecies of a larger history and a grander salvation, which transcended the narrow circle of Jewish ideas as much as the excellency of Carmel transcended the other landscapes of Palestine. To this instance of striking correspondence between the peculiar nature of a spot and its peculiar religious history in Asia, a parallel may be found in Europe. A part of the long uniform western coast-line of Italy stretches out into the Mediterranean at Cumæ, near the city of Naples. Early colonists from Greece, in search of a new home, found in its bays, islands, and promontories a touching resemblance to the intricate coast scenery of their own country. On a solitary rock overlooking the sea they built their citadel and established their worship. In this rock was the traditional cave of the Cumæan Sibyl, where she gave utterance to the inspirations of pagan prophecy a thousand years before St. John received the visions of the Apocalypse on the lone heights of the Ægean isle. The promontory of Cumæ, like that of Carmel, typified the onward course of history and religion--a great advance in men's ideas upon those of the past. The western sea-board is the historic side of Italy. All its great cities and renowned sites are on the western side of the Apennines; the other side, looking eastward, with the exception of Venice and Ravenna, containing hardly any place that stands out prominently in the history of the world. And at Cumæ this western tendency of Italy was most pronounced. On this westmost promontory of the beautiful land--the farthest point reached by the oldest civilisation of Egypt and Greece--the Sibyl stood on her watch-tower, and gazed with prophetic eye upon the distant horizon, seeing beyond the light of the setting sun and "the baths of all the western stars" the dawn of a more wonderful future, and dreamt of a-- "Vast brotherhood of hearts and hands, Choir of a world in perfect tune." Cumæ is only five miles distant from Puteoli, and about thirteen west of Naples. But it lies so much out of the way that it is difficult to combine it with the other famous localities in this classic neighbourhood in one day's excursion, and hence it is very often omitted. It amply, however, repays a special visit, not so much by what it reveals as by what it suggests. There are two ways by which it can be approached, either by the _Via Cumana_, which gradually ascends from Puteoli along the ridge of the low volcanic hills on the western side of Lake Avernus, and passes under the Arco Felice, a huge brick arch, evidently a fragment of an ancient Roman aqueduct, spanning a ravine at a great height; or directly from the western shore of Lake Avernus, by an ancient road paved with blocks of lava, and leading through an enormous tunnel, called the _Grotta de Pietro Pace_, about three-quarters of a mile long, lighted at intervals by shafts from above, said to have been excavated by Agrippa. Both ways are deeply interesting; but the latter is perhaps preferable because of the saving of time and trouble which it effects. The first glimpse of Cumæ, though very impressive to the imagination, is not equally so to the eye. Crossing some cultivated fields, a bold eminence of trachytic tufa, covered with scanty grass and tufts of brushwood, rises between you and the sea, forming part of a range of low hills, which evidently mark the ancient coast-line. On this elevated plateau, commanding a most splendid view of the blue, sunlit Mediterranean as far as Gaeta and the Ponza Islands, stood the almost mythical city; and crowning its highest point, where a rocky escarpment, broken down on every side except on the south, by which it can be ascended, the massive foundations of the walls of the Acropolis may still be traced throughout their whole extent. Very few relics of the original Greek colony survive; and these have to be sought chiefly underneath the remains of Roman-Gothic and medieval dynasties, which successively occupied the place, and partially obliterated each other, like the different layers of writing in a palimpsest. Time and the passions of man have dealt more ruthlessly with this than with almost any other of the renowned spots of Italy. Some fragments of the ancient fortifications, a confused and scattered heap of ruins within the line of the city walls, and a portion of a fluted column, and a single Doric capital of the grand old style, supposed to belong to the temple of Apollo, on the summit of the Acropolis, are all that meet the eye to remind us of this home of ancient faith and prophecy. In the plain at the foot of the rock is the Necropolis of Cumæ, the most ancient burial-place in Italy, from whose rifled Greek graves a most valuable collection of archaic vases and personal ornaments were obtained and transferred to the museums of Naples, Paris, and St. Petersburg; but the tombs themselves have now been destroyed, and only a few marble fragments of Roman sepulchral decoration scattered around indicate the spot. And not far off, partially concealed by earth and underwood, may be seen the ruins of the amphitheatre, with its twenty-one tiers of seats leading down to the arena. You look in vain for any trace of the sanctuary of the most celebrated of the Sibyls. Her tomb is pointed out as a vague ruin a short distance from the Necropolis, among the tombs which line the Via Domitiana; and Justin Martyr and Pausanias both describe a round cinerary urn found in this spot which was said to have contained her ashes. The tufa rock of the Acropolis is pierced with numerous dark caverns and labyrinthine passages, the work of prehistoric inhabitants, which have only been partially explored on account of the difficulty and danger, and any one of which might have been the abode of the prophetess. A larger excavation in the side of the hill facing the sea, with a flight of steps leading up from it into another smaller recess, and numerous lateral openings and subterranean passages, supposed to penetrate into the very heart of the mountain, and even to communicate with Lake Fusaro, is pointed out by the local guides as the Sibyl's Cave, which, as Virgil tells us, had a hundred entrances and issues, from whence as many resounding voices echoed forth the oracles of the inspired priestess. But we are confused in our efforts at identification; for another cavern bore this name in former ages, which was destroyed by the explosion of the combustible materials with which Narses filled it in undermining the citadel. This, we have reason to believe, was the cave which Justin Martyr visited more than seventeen hundred years ago, and of which he has left behind a most interesting account. "We saw," he says, "when we were in Cumæ, a place where a sanctuary is hollowed in the rock--a thing really wonderful and worthy of all admiration. Here the Sibyl delivered her oracles, we were told by those who had received them from their ancestors, and who kept them even as their patrimony. Also, in the middle of the sanctuary, they showed us three receptacles cut in the same rock, and in which, they being filled with water, she bathed, as they said, and when she resumed her garments, she retired into the inner part of the sanctuary, likewise cut in the same rock, and there being seated on a high place in the centre, she prophesied." But after all you do not care to fasten your attention upon any particular spot, for you feel that the whole place is overshadowed by the presence of this mysterious being; and rock, and hill, and bush are invested with an air of solemn majesty, and with the memory of an ancient sanctity. Nature has taken back the ruins of Cumæ so completely to her own bosom, that it is difficult to believe that on this desolate spot once stood one of the most powerful cities of antiquity, which colonised a large part of Southern Italy. A sad, lonely, fateful place it is, haunted for ever by the gods of old, the dreams of men. A silence, almost painful in its intensity, broods over its deserted fields; hardly a living thing disturbs the solitude; and the traces of man's occupancy are few and faint. The air seems heavy with the breath of the malaria; and no one would care to run the risk of fever by lingering on the spot to watch the sunset gilding the gloom of the Acropolis with a halo of kindred radiance. Every breeze that stirs the tall grasses and the leaves of the brushwood of the dismantled citadel has a wail in it; the long-drawn murmur of the peaceful sea at the foot of the hill comes up with a melancholy cadence to the ear; and even on the beautiful cyclamens and veronicas that strive to enliven the ruins of the temples of Apollo and Serapis, emblems of the immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are, has fallen the gray shadow of the past. Each pathetic bit of ruin has about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any historical associations. "Time here seems to have folded its wings." In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one day. Through all the dim ages no feature of its rugged face has changed; and all the potent spell of summer noons can only win from it a languid smile of faintest verdure. The sight of the scanty walls and scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless ages that have left no other memorials of their activity. What is fact and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away borderland where they seem to blend. And I do not envy the man who is not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe with which the mysterious divinity of Cumæ was worshipped by generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves--whose very graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages before our history had begun. Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the Sibyl. It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid by some in Cumæ--where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of his life in exile--and by others in Rome. But the majority of writers associate it with the building of the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Several prodigies, significant of the future fate of Rome and of the reigning dynasty, occurred when the foundations of this temple were dug and the walls of it built. A fresh human head, dripping gore, was found deep down beneath the earth, which implied that this spot was destined to become the head of the whole world; and hence the old name of the "Saturnine Hill" was changed to the "Capitoline." All the gods who had been worshipped from time immemorial on this hill, when consulted by auguries, gave permission for the removal of their shrines and altars in order that room might be provided for the gigantic temple of the great Ruler of the gods, save Terminus and Youth, who refused to abandon the sacred spot, and whose obstinacy was therefore regarded as a sign that the boundaries of the city should never be removed, and that her youth would be perpetually renewed. But a still more wonderful sign of the future of Rome was given on this occasion. A mysterious woman, endowed with preternatural longevity--believed to be no other than Deiphobe, the Cumæan Sibyl herself, the daughter of Circe and Gnostus, who had been the guide of Æneas into the world of the dead--appeared before Tarquin and offered him for a certain price nine books, which contained her prophecies in mystic rhyme. Tarquin, ignorant of the value of the books, refused to buy them. The Sibyl departed, and burned three of them. Coming back immediately, she offered the remaining six at the same price that she had asked for the nine. Tarquin again refused; whereupon the Sibyl burned three more volumes, and returning the third time, made the same demand for the reduced remnant. Struck with the singularity of the proceeding, the king consulted the augurs; and learning from them the inestimable preciousness of the books, he bought them, and the Sibyl forthwith vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared. This legend reads like a moral apothegm on the increasing value of life as it passes away. Whatever credence we may attach to this account of their origin--or rather, whatever sediment of historical truth may have been precipitated in the fable--there can be no doubt that the so-called Sibylline books of Rome did actually exist, and that for a very long period they were held in the highest veneration. They were concealed in a stone chest, buried under the ground, in the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol. Two officers of the highest rank were appointed to guard them, whose punishment, if found unfaithful to their trust, was to be sewed up alive in a sack and thrown into the sea. The number of guardians was afterwards increased, at first to ten and then to fifteen, whose priesthood was for life, and who in consequence were exempted from the obligation of serving in the army and from other public offices in the city. Being regarded as the priests of Apollo, they had each in front of his house a brazen tripod, similar to that on which the priestess of Delphi sat. The contents of the Sibylline books, being supposed to contain the fate of the Roman Empire, were kept a profound secret, and only on occasions of public danger or calamity, and by special order of the senate, were they allowed to be consulted. When the Capitol was burned in the Marsic war, eighty-two years before Christ, they perished in the flames: but so seriously was the loss regarded that ambassadors were sent to Greece, Asia Minor, and Cumæ, wherever Sibylline inspiration was supposed to exist, to collect the prophetic oracles, and thus make up as far as possible for what had been lost. In Cumæ nothing was discovered; but at Erythræa and Samos a large number of mystic verses, said to have been composed by the Sibyl, were found. Some of them were collected into a volume, after having been purged from all spurious or suspected elements; and the volume was brought to Rome, and deposited in two gilt cases at the base of the statue of Apollo, in the temple of that god on the Palatine. More than two thousand prophetic books, pretending to be Sibylline oracles, were found by Augustus in the possession of private persons; and these were condemned to be burned, and in future no private person was allowed to keep any writings of the kind. But in spite of every attempt to authenticate the books that were publicly accepted, the new collection was never regarded with the same veneration as the original volumes of Tarquin which it replaced. A certain suspicion of spuriousness continued to cling to it, and greatly diminished its authority. It was seldom consulted. The Roman emperors after Tiberius--who still further sifted it--utterly neglected the received collection; and not till shortly before the fatal battle of the Milvian Bridge, which overthrew paganism, was it again brought out, by Maxentius, for the purpose of indicating the fate of the enterprise. Julian the Apostate, in his attempt to galvanise the dead pagan religion into the semblance of life, sought to revive an interest in the Sibylline oracles, which were so closely identified with the political and religious fortunes of Rome. But his effort was vain: they fell into greater oblivion than before; and at last they were publicly burned by Stilicho, the father-in-law of the Emperor Honorius--called the Defender of Italy--whose own execution as a traitor at Ravenna shortly afterwards was considered by the pagan zealots as the just vengeance of the gods on his dreadful sacrilege. Unlike the Jewish and Indian faiths, the Greek and Roman religions had no authoritative writings, and were not embodied in a system of elaborate dogmas. The Sibylline oracles may therefore be said to have formed their sacred scriptures, and to have served the purpose of a common religious creed in securing national unity. The original books of the Cumæan Sibyl were written in Greek, which was the language of the whole of the south of Italy at that time. The oracles were inscribed upon palm leaves; to which circumstance Virgil alludes in his description of the sayings of the Cumæan Sibyl being written upon the leaves of the forest. They were in the form of acrostic verses; the letters of the first verse of each oracle containing in regular sequence the initial letters of all the subsequent verses. They were full of enigmas and mysterious analogies, founded upon the numerical value of the initial letters of certain names. It is supposed that they contained not so much predictions of future events, as directions regarding the means by which the wrath of the gods, as revealed by prodigies and calamities, might be appeased. They seemed to have been consulted in the same way as Eastern nations consult the Koran and Hafiz. There was no attempt made to find a passage suitable to the occasion, but one of the palm leaves after being shuffled was selected at random. To this custom of drawing fateful leaves from the Sibylline books--called in consequence _sortes sibyllinæ_--there is frequent allusion by classic authors. We know that the writings of Homer and Virgil were thus treated. The elevation of Septimius Severus to the throne of the Roman Empire was supposed to have been foretold by the circumstance that he opened by chance the writings of Lampridius at the verse, "Remember, Roman, with imperial sway to rule the people." The Bible itself was used by the early Christians for such purposes of divination. St. Augustine, though he condemned the practice as an abuse of the Divine Word, yet preferred that men should have recourse to the Gospels rather than to heathen works. Heraclius is reported by Cedrenus to have asked counsel of the New Testament, and to have been thereby persuaded to winter in Albania. Nicephorus Gregoras frequently opened his Psalter at random in order that there he might find support in the trial under which he laboured. And even in these enlightened days, it is by no means rare to find superstitious men and women using the sacred Scriptures as the old Greeks and Romans used the Sibylline oracles--dipping into them by chance for indications of the Divine Will. The Cumæan Sibyl was not the only prophetess of the kind. There were no less than ten females, endowed with the gift of prevision, and held in high repute, to whom the name of Sibyl was given. We read of the Persian Sibyl, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Erythræan, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian, and the Tiburtine. With the name of the last-mentioned Sibyl tourists make acquaintance at Tivoli. Two ancient temples in tolerable preservation are still standing on the very edge of the deep rocky ravine through which the Anio pours its foaming flood. The one is a small circular building, with ten pillars surrounding the broken-down cella, whose familiar appearance is often represented in plaster models and bronze and marble ornamental articles, taken home as souvenirs by travellers; and the other stands close by, and has been transformed into the present church of St. Giorgio. This latter temple is supposed, from a bas-relief found in it, representing the Sibyl sitting in the act of delivering an oracle, to be the ancient shrine of the Sibyl Albunea mentioned by Horace, Tibullus, and Lactantius. The earliest bronze statues at Rome were those of the three Sibyls, placed near the Rostra, in the middle of the Forum. No specimens of the literature of Rome precede the Sibylline books, except the rude hymn known as the Litany of the Arval Brothers, dating from the time of Romulus himself, which is simply an address to Mars, the Lares, and the Semones, praying for fair weather and for protection to the flocks. And it is thus most interesting to notice that the two compositions which lay at the foundation of all the splendid Latin literature of later ages were of an eminently religious character. One of the most remarkable things connected with the pagan Sibyls were the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave rise. When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic literature. This literature emanated from different nationalities and different schools of thought. It combined classical story and Scripture tradition. Most of it was the product of pre-Christian Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great national excitement. The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future. The books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use; and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as genuine did not hesitate to say that the writers of the Bible had plagiarised parts of their prophecies from the oracles of the Sibyls. Few fragments of the genuine Sibylline books remain to us, and these are to be found chiefly in the writings of Ovid and Virgil, whose "Golden Age" and well-known "Fourth Eclogue" were greatly indebted for their materials to them. But we possess a large collection of the Judæo-Christian oracles, which were probably gathered together by some unknown editor in the seventh century. Originally there were fourteen books of unequal antiquity and value, but some of them have been lost. Cardinal Angelo Mai discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan a manuscript which contained the eleventh book entire, besides a portion of the sixth and eighth books; and a few years later, among the secret stores of the Vatican Library, he found two other manuscripts which contained entire the last four books of the collection. These were published in Rome in 1828. The best edition of all the extant books is that which M. Alexandre issued in Paris, under the name of _Oracula Sibyllina_. This editor exaggerates the extent of the Christian element in the Sibylline prophecies; but his dissertation on the origin and value of the several portions of the books is exceedingly interesting. The oldest book is undoubtedly the third, part of which is preserved in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch, and originally consisted of one thousand verses, most of which we possess. It was probably composed at the beginning of the Maccabean period, about 146 B.C., when Ptolemy VII. (Physcon) had become king of Egypt, and the bitter enemy of the Jews in Alexandria, and when the Jewish nation in Palestine had been rejoicing in their independence, through the overthrow of the empire of the Seleucidæ by the usurper Tryphon. The fourth book was written soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in the year of our era 79, and is a most interesting record of Jewish Essenism. It contains the first anticipation of the return of Nero, but in a Jewish form, without Nero's death and resuscitation. The last of the Sibylline books seems to have been written about the beginning of the seventh century, and was directed against the new creed of Islam, which had suddenly sprung up, and in its fierce fanaticism was carrying everything before it. In this apocalyptic literature--the last growth of Judaism--the voice of paganism itself was employed to witness for the supremacy of the Jewish religion. It embraces all history in one great theocratic view, and completes the picture of the Jewish triumph by the prophecy of a great Deliverer, who shall establish the Jewish law as the rule of the whole earth, and shall destroy with a fiery flood all that is corrupt and perishable. In these respects the Jewish Sibylline oracles have an interesting connection with other apocryphal Jewish writings, such as the Fourth Book of Esdras, the Apocalypse of Henoch, and the Book of Jubilees; and they may all be regarded as attempts to carry down the spirit of prophecy beyond the canonical Scriptures, and to furnish a supplement to them. So highly prized was this group of apocryphal Jewish oracles by the primitive Christians, that several new ones were added to them by Christian hands which have not come down to us in their original state. They were regarded as genuine productions, possessing an independent authority which, if not divine, was certainly supernatural; and some did not hesitate even to place them by the side of the Old Testament prophecies. In the very earliest controversies between Christians and the advocates of paganism, they were appealed to frequently as authorities which both recognised. Christian apologists of the second century, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, and very specially Justin Martyr, implicitly relied upon them as indisputable. Even the oracles of the pagan Sibyl were regarded by Christian writers with an awe and reverence little short of that which they inspired in the minds of the heathen themselves. Clement of Alexandria does not scruple to call the Cumæan Sibyl a true prophetess, and her oracles saving canticles. And St. Augustine includes her among the number of those who belong to the "City of God." And this idea of the Sibyl's sacredness continued to a late age in the Christian Church. She had a place in the prophetic order beside the patriarchs and prophets of old, and joined in the great procession of the witnesses for the faith from Seth and Enoch down to the last Christian saint and martyr. In one of the grandest hymns of the Roman Catholic Church, composed by Tommaso di Celano at the beginning of the fourteenth century, there is an allusion to her, taken from the well-known acrostic in the last judgment scene in the eighth book of the _Oracula Sibyllina_-- "Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla, Teste David cum _Sibylla_." The strange Italian mystic of the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola, who sought to reconcile the Christian sentiment with the imagery and legends of pagan religion, rehabilitated the Sibyl, and consecrated her as the servant of the Lord Jesus. And he was but a specimen of the many _humanists_ of that age who believed that no oracle that had once spoken to living men and women could ever wholly lose its vitality. Like the Delphic Pythia, old, but clothed as a maiden, the ancient Sibyl appeared to them in the garments of immortal youth, with the charm of her early prime. The dim old church of Ara Coeli in Rome, which occupies the site of the celebrated temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and in which Gibbon conceived the idea of his great work on the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, is said to have derived its name from an altar bearing the inscription, "Ara Primogeniti Dei," erected in this place by Augustus, to commemorate the Sibylline prophecy of the coming of our Saviour. She was a favourite subject of Christian art in the middle ages, and was introduced by almost every celebrated painter, along with the prophets and apostles, into the cyclical decorations of the Church. Every visitor to Rome knows the fine picture of the Sibyls by Pinturicchio, on the tribune behind the high altar of the Church of St. Onofrio, where Tasso was buried; and also the still grander head of the Cumæan Sibyl, with its flowing turban by Domenichino, in the great picture gallery of the Borghese Palace. But the highest honour ever conferred upon the Sibyls was that which Michael Angelo bestowed when he painted them on the spandrils of the wonderful roof of the Sistine Chapel. These mysterious beings formed most congenial subjects for the mystic pencil of the great Florentine, and therefore they are more characteristic of his genius than almost any other of his works. He has painted them along with the greater prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, in throne-like niches surrounding the different incidents of the creation. They look like presiding deities, remote from all human weaknesses, and wearing on their faces an air of profound mystery. They are invested, not with the calm, superficial, unconscious beauty of pagan art, but with the solemn earnestness and travail of soul characteristic of the Christian creed, wrinkled and saddened with thought and worn out with vigils; and are striking examples of the truth, that while each human being can bear his own burden, the burden of the world's mystery and pain crushes us to the earth. The Persian Sibyl, the oldest of the weird sisterhood, to whom the sunset of life had given mystical lore, holds a book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of vision; the Libyan Sibyl lifts a massive volume above her head on to her knees; the Cumæan Sibyl intently reads her book at a distance from her dilated eyes; the Erythræan Sibyl, bareheaded, is about to turn over the page of her book; while the Delphic Sibyl, like Cassandra the youngest and most human-looking of them all, holds a scroll in her hand, and gazes with a dreamy mournfulness into the far futurity. These splendid creations would abundantly reward the minute study of many days. They show how thoroughly the great painter had entered into the history and spirit of these mysterious prophetesses, who, while they bore the sins and sorrows of a corrupt world, had power to look for consolation into the secrets of the future. Very beautiful was this reverence paid to the Sibyl amid all the idolatries of paganism and the corruptions of later Judaism. We may regard it as a relic of the early piety of the world. One who could pass over the interests and distractions of her own time, and fix her gaze upon the distant future, must have seemed far removed from the common order of mankind, who live exclusively in the present, and can imagine no other or higher state of things than they see around them. Standing as the heirs of all the ages on this elevated vantage-ground and looking back upon the long course of the centuries--upon the eventful future of the Sibyl, which is the past to us--it seems a matter of course that the world should have spun down the ringing grooves of change as it has done; and we fancy that this must have been obvious to the world's gray fathers. But though the age of the Sibyl seemed the very threshold of time, there was nothing to indicate this to her, nothing to show that she lived in the youth of the world, and that it was destined to ripen and expand with the process of the suns. The same horizon that bounds us in these last days, bound her view in these early days; and things seemed as fully developed and stereotyped then as now, and to-morrow promised to be only a repetition of to-day. To realise, therefore, that the world had a future, and to take the trouble of thinking what would happen a thousand years off, indicated no common habit of mind. And we are the more impressed by it when we consider the spots bewitched by the spell of Circe where it was exercised. That persons dwelling in lonely, northern isles, where the long wash of the waves upon the shore, and the wild wail of the wind in mountain corries stimulated the imagination, and seemed like voices from another world, should see visions and dream dreams, does not surprise us. The power of second sight may seem natural to spots where nature is mysterious and solemn, and full of change and sudden transitions from storm to calm and from sunshine to gloom. But at Cumæ there is a perpetual peace, an unchanging monotony. The same cloudless sky overarches the earth day after day, and dyes to celestial blue the same placid sea that sleeps beside its shore. The fields are drowsy at noon with the same stagnant sunshine; and the same purple glory lies at sunset on the entranced hills; and the olive and the myrtle bloom through the even months with no fading or brightening tint on leaf or stem; and each day is the twin of that which has gone before. Nature in such a region is transparent. No mist, or cloud, or shadow hides her secrets. There is no subtle joy of despair and hope, of decay and growth, connected with the passing of the seasons. In this Arcadian clime we should expect Nature to lull the soul into the sleep of contentment on her lap; and in its perpetual summer happy shepherds might sing eclogues for ever, and, satisfied with the present, have no hope or wish for the future. How wonderful, then, that in such a charmed lotus-land we should meet with the mysterious unrest of soul, and the fixed onward look of the Sibyl to times widely different from her own. And not only is this forward-looking gaze of the Sibyl contrary to what we should have expected in such a changeless land of beauty and ease; it is also contrary to what we should have expected from the paganism of the people. It is characteristic of the Greek religion, as indeed of all heathen religions, that its golden age should be in the past. It instinctively clings to the memory of a former happier time, and shrinks from the unknown future. Its piety ever looks backward, and aspires to present safety or enjoyment by a faithful imitation of an imaginary past. It is always "returning on the old well-worn path to the paradise of its childhood," and contrasting the gloom that overhangs the present with the radiance that shone on the morning lands. In every crisis of terror or disaster it turns with unutterable yearnings to the tradition of the happy age. Or, if it does look forward to the future, it always pictures "the restoration of the old Saturnian reign"; it has no standard of future excellence or future blessedness to attain to, and no yearnings for consummation and perfection hereafter. The very name given to the south of Italy was Hesperia, the "Land of the Evening Star," as if in token of its exhausted history; and it was regarded as the scene of the fabled golden age from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumæan Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes--to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in the future, and was connected with the coming of the Messiah, who should restore the kingdom again unto Israel. And the characteristic of the Christian religion is hope, the expectation of the times of the restitution of all things, and the realisation of the "one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." It is this hopeful element pervading them that gives to the lively oracles of Holy Scripture the triumphant tone which distinguishes them so markedly from the desponding spirit of all false religions, ancient and modern. The subject of the Sibyl brings us to the vexed question of the connection between pagan and Hebrew prophecy. How are we to regard the vaticinations of the heathen oracle? That the great mass of the Sibylline books is spurious is glaringly obvious. But there is a primitive residuum which seems to remind us that the spirit of early prophecy still retained its hold over human nature amid all the corruptions of heathendom, and secured for the Sibyl a sacred rank and authority. We have seen with what reverence the greatest fathers of the Christian Church regarded her. While there was undoubtedly much delusion and deception, conscious or unconscious, mixed up with it, we are constrained at the same time to acknowledge that there was some reality in this prophetic element of paganism, which cannot be explained away as the result of mere political or intellectual foresight or accidental coincidence. It was not all imposture. As a ray of light is contained in all that shines, so a ray of God's truth was reflected in what was best in this pagan prophecy. The fulfilment of many of the ancient oracles cannot be denied without a perversion of all history. There was no doubt an immense difference between the Hebrew prophets and the pagan Sibyl. The predictions of the Sibyl were accompanied by strange fantastic circumstances, and wore the appearance of a blind caprice or arbitrary fate; whereas the announcements of the Hebrew prophets, founded upon the denunciation of moral evil and the reign of sacred and peremptory principles of righteousness in the world, were calm, dignified, and self-consistent. But we cannot, notwithstanding, deny to pagan prophecy some share in the higher influence which inspired and moulded Hebrew prophecy. The apostle of the Gentiles took this view when he called Epimenides the Cretan a prophet. The Bible recognises the existence of true prophets outside the pale of the Jewish Church. Balaam, the son of Beor, was a heathen living in the mountains beyond the Euphrates; and yet the form as well as the substance of his prophecy was cast into the same mould as that of the Hebrew prophets. He is called in the Book of Numbers "the man whose eyes are open;" and God used this power as His organ of intercourse with and influence upon the world. The grand record of his vision is the first example of prophetic utterance respecting the destinies of the world at large; and we see how the base and grovelling nature of the man was overpowered by the irresistible force of the prophetic impulse within him, so that he was constrained to bless the enemies he was hired to curse. And in this respect he represents the purest of the ancient heathen oracles; and his answer to Balak breathes the very essence of prophetic inspiration, and is far in advance of the spirit and thought of the time, reminding us of the noble rebuke of the Cumæan Sibyl to Aristodicus, and of the oracle of Delphi to Glaucus. God did not leave the Gentile nations without some glimpses of the truth which He had revealed so fully and brightly to His own chosen people. While He was the _glory_ of His people Israel, we must not forget that He was a light to lighten the Gentiles. He gave to them oracles and sibyls, who had the "open eye," and saw the vision of the years, and witnessed to a light shining in the darkness, and brought God nearer to a faithless world. Beneath the gross external polytheism of the multitude there were deep, primitive springs of godliness, pure and undefiled, working out their manifestation in noble lives; and those who have ears to hear can listen to the sound of these ancient streams as they flow into the river of life that makes glad the city of our God. We gain immensely by considering the prophetical spirit of Israel as a typical endowment, and the training of the Jews in the household of God, and under His own immediate eye, as the key to the right apprehension of the training of Greece and Rome. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom pointed in their own way, as well as the articulate divine prophecies of Israel, to the coming of Him who is the Desire of all nations, and the true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The wise men of Greece saw the sign of the Son of Man in some such way as the Magi saw the star in the East. They were, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, "Memnons waiting for the day." And not without deep significance did the female soothsayer from the oracle of Dionysius, the prophet-god of the Macedonians, whom Paul and Silas met when they first landed on European soil, greet them with the words, "These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation." In that wonderful confession we recognise the last utterance of the oracle of Delphi and the Sibyl of Cumæ, as they were cast out by a higher and truer faith. Their mission was accomplished and their shrine deserted when God's way was known upon the earth, and His saving health among all nations. "And now another Canaan yields To thine all-conquering ark; Fly from the 'old poetic fields,' Ye Paynim shadows dark! Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays, Lo! here the unknown God of thine unconscious praise. "The olive wreath, the ivied wand, 'The sword in myrtles drest,' Each legend of the shadowy strand Now wakes a vision blest; As little children lisp, and tell of heaven, So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given." CHAPTER IV FOOTPRINTS IN ROME In the fork where a cross-road called the Via Ardeatina branches off from the Appian Way, is a little homely church with the strange name of "Domine quo Vadis." It is associated with one of the most beautiful legends of the early Christian Church touchingly told by St. Ambrose. The Apostle Peter, fleeing from the persecution under Nero that arose after the burning of Rome, came to this spot; and there he saw a vision of the Saviour bearing His cross with His face steadfastly set to go to the city. Filled with wonder and awe, the Apostle exclaimed, "Domine quo Vadis," Lord, whither goest thou? To which the Saviour replied, turning upon Peter the old look of mournful pity when he denied Him in the High Priest's palace at Jerusalem, "Venio Roman iterum crucifigi," I go to Rome to be crucified a second time--and then disappeared. Peter regarding this vision as an indication of his Lord's mind, that he ought not to separate himself from the fortunes of his fellow-Christians, immediately turned back to the city, and met with unflinching courage the martyr's death on the yellow sands of Montorio; being crucified with his head downwards, for he said he was not worthy to die in the same way as his Master. This legend has been made the subject of artistic treatment by Michael Angelo, whose famous statue of our Lord as He appeared in the incident to St. Peter is in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and was for many years a favourite object of worship, until superseded by the predominant worship of Mary. A cast of this statue stands on the floor in front of the altar in the church of Domine quo Vadis. It represents our Lord in the character of a pilgrim, with a long cross in His hand, and an eager onward look in His face and attitude. It is very simple and impressive, and tells the story very effectually. Besides this plaster statue of the Saviour, a circular stone is placed about the centre of the building, surrounded by a low wooden railing, containing the prints of two feet side by side, impressed upon its surface, as if a person had stopped short on a journey. These are said to be the miraculous prints of the Saviour's feet on the pavement of the road when He appeared to Peter; but like the copy of Michael Angelo's statue, this slab is a facsimile, the original stone being preserved among the relics of the neighbouring basilica of St. Sebastian. Unwilling as one is to disturb a legend so beautiful, and with so touching a moral, there can be no doubt that it was an after-thought to account for the footprints; for the material on which they are impressed being white marble, proves conclusively that the slab could never have formed part of the pavement of the Appian Way, which it is well known was composed of an unusually hard lava, found in a quarry near the tomb of Cæcilia Metella; and the distinct marks of the chisel which the impressions bear--for I examined the original footprints very carefully some years ago--indicate a very earthly origin indeed. The traditional relic in all probability belonged to the early subterranean cemetery--leading by a door out of the left aisle of the church of St. Sebastian, to which the name of Catacomb was originally applied. Slabs with footprints carved upon them are by no means rare in Rome. In the Kircherian Museum, in the room devoted to early Christian antiquities, there is a square slab of white marble with two pairs of footprints elegantly incised upon it, pointed in opposite directions, as if produced by a person going and returning, or by two persons crossing each other. There is no record from what catacomb this sepulchral slab was taken. We have descriptions of other relics of the same kind from the Roman Catacombs,--such as a marble slab bearing upon it the mark of the sole of a foot, with the words "In Deo" incised upon it at the one end, and at the other an inscription in Greek meaning "Januaria in God"; and a slab with a pair of footprints carved on it covered with sandals, well executed, which was placed by a devoted husband over the loculus or tomb of his wife. Impressions of feet shod with shoes or sandals are much rarer than those of bare feet; and a pair of feet is a more customary representation than a single foot, which, when carved, is usually in profile. In a dark, half-subterranean chapel, green with damp, belonging to the church of St. Christina in the town of Bolsena, on the great Volscian Mere of Macaulay, there is a stone let into the front of the altar, and protected by an iron grating, on which is rudely impressed a pair of misshapen feet very like those in the church of St. Sebastian at Rome. In the lower church at Assisi there is a duplicate of these footprints. The legend connected with them says that they were produced by the feet of a Christian lady named Christina, living in the neighbourhood in pagan times, who was thrown into the adjoining lake by her persecutors, with a large flat stone attached to her body. Instead of sinking her, the stone formed a raft which floated her in a standing attitude safely to the opposite shore, where she landed--leaving the prints of her feet upon the stone as an incontestable proof of the reality of the miracle. The altar with which the slab is engrafted--with a stone _baldacchino_ over it--I may mention, was the scene of the famous miracle of Bolsena, when a Bohemian priest, officiating here in 1263, was cured of his sceptical doubts regarding the reality of transubstantiation by the sudden appearance of drops of blood on the Host which he had just consecrated--an incident which formed the subject of Raphael's well-known picture in the Vatican, and in connection with which Pope Urban IV. instituted the festival of Corpus Christi. On the Lucanian coast, near the little fishing town of Agrapoli, not far from Pæstum, there is shown on the limestone rock the print of a foot which is said by the inhabitants to have been made by the Apostle Paul, who lingered here on his way to Rome. In the famous church of Radegonde at Poitiers, dedicated to the queen of Clothaire I.--who afterwards took the veil, and was distinguished for her piety--there is shown on a white marble slab a well-defined footmark, which is called "Le pas de Dieu," and is said to indicate the spot where the Saviour appeared to the tutelary saint of the place. Near the altar of the church of St. Genaro de Poveri in Naples, Mary's foot is shown suspended in a glazed frame. In the middle of the footprint there is an oval figure with the old initials of mother, water, matter. The footprint of Mary is very common in churches in Italy and Spain, where it is highly venerated. The significance of these footmarks has been the subject of much controversy. Some have regarded them as symbols of possession--the word "possession" being supposed to be etymologically derived from the Latin words _pedis positio_, and meaning literally the position of the foot. The adage of the ancient jurists was, "Quicquid pes tuus calcaverit tuum erit." The symbol of a foot was carved on the marble slab that closed the _loculus_ or tomb, to indicate that it was the purchased property of the person who reposed in it. This view, however, has not been generally received with favour by the most competent authorities. A more plausible theory is that which regards the sepulchral footmarks in the Catacombs as votive offerings of gratitude, ordered by Christians to be made in commemoration of the completion of their earthly pilgrimage. It was a common pagan custom for persons who had recovered from disease or injury, to hang up as thankofferings in the shrines of the gods who were supposed to have healed them, images or representations, moulded in metal, clay, or wood, of the part that had been affected. In Italy, votive tablets were dedicated to Iris and Hygiea on which footmarks were engraved; and Hygiea received on one occasion tributes of this kind which recorded the gratitude of some Roman soldiers who escaped the amputation which was inflicted upon their comrades by Hannibal. This custom survived in the early Christian Church, and is still kept up, as any one who visits a modern shrine of pilgrimage in Roman Catholic countries can testify. Among such votive offerings, models and carved and painted representations of feet in stone, or wood, or metal, are frequently suspended before the image of the Madonna, in gratitude for recovery from some disease of the feet. We may suppose that as the ancient Romans, when they returned safely from some long and dangerous or difficult journey undertaken for business or health, dedicated in gratitude a representation of their feet to their favourite god--so the early Christians, who in their original condition were pagans, and still cherished many of their old customs, ordered these peculiar footmarks to be made upon their graves, in token of thankfulness that for them the pilgrimage of life was over, and the endless rest begun. There can be little doubt that the slab with the so-called footprints of St. Christina on it at Bolsena, already alluded to, was a pagan ex-votive offering; for the altar on which it is engrafted occupies the site of one anciently dedicated to Apollo, and the legend of St. Christina gradually crystallised around it. And the footprint in the church of Radegonde at Poitiers was more likely pagan than Christian, for Poitiers had a Roman origin, and numerous Roman remains have been found in the town and neighbourhood. A long and curious list might be made of the miraculous impressions said to have been left by our Saviour's feet on the places where He stood. In the centre of the platform at Jerusalem on which the Temple of Solomon stood, covered by the dome of the Sakrah Mosque, a portion of the rough natural limestone rock rises several feet above the marble pavement, and is the principal object of veneration in the place. It has an excavated chamber in one corner, with an aperture through the rocky roof, which has given to the rock the name of "lapis pertusus," or perforated stone. On this rock there are natural or artificial marks, which the successors of the Caliph Omar believed to be the prints of the angel Gabriel's fingers, and the mark of Mohammed's foot, and that of his camel, which performed the whole journey from Mecca to Jerusalem in four bounds. The stone, it is said, originally fell from heaven, and was used as a seat by the venerable prophets of Jerusalem. So long as they enjoyed the gift of prophecy, the stone remained steady under them; but when the gift was withdrawn, and the persecuted seers were compelled to flee for safety to other lands, the stone rose to accompany them: whereupon the angel Gabriel interposed, and prevented the departure of the prophetical chair, leaving on it indelibly the marks of his fingers. It was then supernaturally nailed to its rocky bed by seven brass nails. When any great crisis in the world's fortunes happens, the head of one of these nails disappears; and when they are all gone, the day of judgment will come. There are now only three left, and therefore the Mohammedans believe that the end of all things is not far off. When the Crusaders took possession of the sacred city, they altered the Mohammedan legend, and attributed the mysterious footprint to our Lord when He went out of the Temple to escape the fury of the Jews. There can be no doubt that the marks on the rock are prehistoric, and belong to the primitive worship of Mount Moriah, long before the august associations of Biblical history gathered around it. To this spot the Jews used to come in the fourth century and wail over the rock, and _anoint it with oil_, as if carrying out some dim tradition of former primitive libations. In the Octagon Chapel of the Church of the Ascension on the top of the Mount of Olives, so well known for the magnificent view which it commands of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, is shown the native rock which forms the summit of the hill from which our Lord ascended into heaven. On this rock, it is said by tradition, He left the mark of His footsteps. Arculf, who visited Palestine about the year 700, says: "On the ground in the midst of the church are to be seen the last prints in the dust of our Lord's feet, and the roof appears above where He ascended; and although the earth is daily carried away by believers, yet still it remains as before, and retains the same impression of the feet." Jerome mentions that in his time the same custom was observed, followed by the same singular result. Later writers, however, asserted that the impressions were made, not in the ground, or in the dust, but on the solid rock; and that originally there were two, one of them having been stolen long ago by the Mohammedans, who broke off the fragment of stone on which it was stamped. Sir John Mandeville describes the appearance of the surviving footmark as it looked in his day, 1322: "From that mount our Lord Jesus Christ ascended to heaven on Ascension Day, and yet there appears the impress of His left foot in the stone." What is now seen in the place is a simple rude cavity in the natural rock, which bears but the slightest resemblance to the human foot. It may have been artificially sculptured, or it may be only one of those curious hollows into which limestone rocks are frequently weathered. In either case it naturally lent itself to the sacred legend that has gathered around it. In the Kaaba, the most ancient and remarkable building of the great Mosque at Mecca, is preserved a miraculous stone with the print of Abraham's feet impressed upon it. It is said, by Mohammedan tradition, to be the identical stone which served the patriarch as a scaffold when he helped Ishmael to rebuild the Kaaba, which had been originally constructed by Seth, and was afterwards destroyed by the Deluge. While Abraham stood upon this stone, it rose and sank with him as he built the walls of the sacred edifice. The relic is said to be a fragment of the same gray Mecca stone of which the whole building is constructed,--in this respect differing from the famous black stone brought to Abraham and Ishmael by the angel Gabriel, and built into the north-east corner of the exterior wall of the Kaaba, which is said by scientific men to be either a meteorite or fragment of volcanic basalt. It is popularly supposed to have been originally a jacinth of dazzling whiteness, but to have been made black as ink by the touch of sinful man, and that it can only recover its original purity and brilliancy at the day of judgment. The millions of kisses and touches impressed by the faithful have worn the surface considerably; but in addition to this, traces of cup-shaped hollows have been observed on it. There can be no doubt that both these relics associated with Abraham are of high antiquity, and may have belonged to the prehistoric worship which marked Mecca as a sacred site, long before the followers of the Prophet had set up their shrine there. In the sacred Mosque of Hebron, built over the cave of Machpelah, is pointed out a footprint of the ordinary size on a slab of stone, variously called that of Adam or of Mohammed. It is said to have been brought from Mecca some six hundred years ago, and is enclosed in a recess at the back of the shrine of Abraham, where it is placed on a sort of shelf about three feet above the floor. On the margin of the tank, in the court of the ruined mosque at Baalbec, there are shown four giant footmarks, which are supposed to have been impressed by some patriarch or prophet, but are more likely to have been connected with the ancient religion of Canaan, which lingered here to the latest days of Roman paganism. In the great Druse shrine of Neby Schaib near Hattin there is a square block of limestone in the centre of which is a piece of alabaster containing the imprint of a human foot of natural size, with the toes very clearly defined. The Druses reverently kiss this impression, asserting that the rock exudes moisture, and that it is never dry. There is a split in the rock across the centre of the footprint, which they account for by saying that when the prophet stepped here he split the rock with his tread. In Damascus there was at one time a sacred building called the Mosque of the Holy Foot, in which there was a stone having upon it the print of the feet of Moses. Ibn Batuta saw this curious relic early in the fourteenth century; but both the mosque and the stone have since disappeared. On the eastern side of the Jordan a Bedouin tribe, called the Adwân, worship the print left on a stone by the roadside by a prophetess while mounting her camel, in order to proceed on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Kadriyeh dervishes of Egypt adore a gigantic shoe, as an emblem of the sacred foot of the founder of their sect; and near Madura, a large leather shoe is offered in worship to a deity that, like Diana, presides over the chase. To the student of comparative religion the Phrabat, or Sacred Foot of Buddha, opens up a most interesting field of investigation. In the East, impressions of the feet of this wonderful person are as common as those of Christ and the Virgin Mary in the West. Buddhists are continually increasing the number by copies of the originals; and native painters of Siam who are ambitious of distinction often present these sacred objects to the king, adorned with the highest skill of their art, as the most acceptable gift they can offer. The sacred footprint enters into the very essence of the Buddhist religion; it claims from the Indo-Chinese nations a degree of veneration scarcely yielding to that which they pay to Buddha himself. It is very ancient, and was framed to embody in one grand symbol a complete system of theology and theogony, which has been gradually forgotten or perverted by succeeding ages to the purposes of a ridiculous superstition. It is elaborately carved and painted with numerous symbols, each of which has a profound significance. The liturgy of the Siamese connected with it consists of fifty measured lines of eight syllables each, and contains the names of a hundred and eight distinct symbolical objects,--such as the lion, the elephant, the sun and moon in their cars drawn by oxen, the horse, the serpents, the spiral building, the tree, the six spheres, the five lakes, and the altar--all of which are represented on the foot. This list of symbolical allusions is recited by the priests, and forms an essential part of the ritual of worship. The Siamese priests say that any mortal about to arrive at the threshold of Nivána has his feet emblazoned spontaneously with all the symbols to be seen on the Phrabat. The Siamese acknowledge only five genuine Phrabats made by the actual feet of Buddha. They are called the Five Impressions of the Divine Foot. The first is on a rock on the coast of the peninsula of Malacca, where, beside the mark of Buddha's foot, there is also one of a dog's foot, which is much venerated by the natives. The second Phrabat is on the Golden Mountain, the hill with the holy footstep of Buddha, in Siam, which Buddha visited on one occasion. The impression is that of the right foot, and is covered with a maradop, a pyramidal canopy supported by gilded pilasters. The hollow of the footstep is generally filled with water, which the devotee sprinkles over his body to wash away the stain of his sin. The third Phrabat is on a hill on the banks of the Jumna, in the midst of an extensive and deep forest, which spreads over broken ranges of hills. The Phrabat is on a raised terrace, like that on which most of the Buddhist temples are built. The pyramidal structure which shelters it is of hewn stone ninety feet high, and is like the _baldacchino_ of a Roman Catholic church. There are four impressions on different terraces, each rising above the other, corresponding to the four descents of the deity. The fourth Phrabat is also on the banks of the Jumna. But the fifth and most celebrated of all is the print of the sacred foot on the top of the Amala Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak, in Ceylon. On the highest point of this hill there is a pagoda-like building, supported on slender pillars, and open on every side to the winds. Underneath this canopy, in the centre of a huge mass of gneiss and hornblende, forming the living rock, there is the rude outline of a gigantic foot about five feet long, and of proportionate breadth. Sir Emerson Tennent, who has given a full and interesting account of this last Phrabat in his work on Ceylon, supposes that it was originally a natural hollow in the rock, afterwards artificially enlarged and shaped into its present appearance; but whatever may have been its origin at first, its present shape is undoubtedly of great, perhaps prehistoric, antiquity. In the sacred books of the Buddhists it is referred to, upwards of three hundred years before Christ, as the impression left of Buddha's foot when he visited the earth after the Deluge, with gifts and blessings for his worshippers; and in the first century of the Christian era it is recorded that a king of Cashmere went on a pilgrimage to Ceylon for the express purpose of adoring this _Sri-pada_, or Sacred Footprint. The Gnostics of the first Christian centuries attributed it to Ieu, the first man; and in one of the oldest manuscripts in existence, now in the British Museum--the Coptic version of the "Faithful Wisdom," said to have been written by the great Gnostic philosopher Valentinus in the fourth century--there is mention made of this venerable relic, the Saviour being said to inform the Virgin Mary that He has appointed the Spirit Kalapataraoth as guardian over it. From the Gnostics the Mohammedans received the tradition; for they believe that when Adam was expelled from Paradise he lived many years on this mountain alone, before he was reunited to Eve on Mount Arafath, which overhangs Mecca. The early Portuguese settlers in the island attributed the sacred footprint to St. Thomas, who is said by tradition to have preached the Gospel, after the ascension of Christ, in Persia and India, and to have suffered martyrdom at Malabar, where he founded the Christian Church, which still goes by the name of the Christians of St. Thomas; and they believed that all the trees on the mountain, and for half a league round about its base, bent their crowns in the direction of this sacred object--a mark of respect which they affirmed could only be offered to the footstep of an apostle. The Brahmins have appropriated the sacred mark as the footprint of their goddess Siva. At the present day the Buddhists are the guardians of the shrine; but the worshippers of other creeds are not prevented from paying their homage at it, and they meet in peace and goodwill around the object of their common adoration. By this circumstance the Christian visitor is reminded of the sacred footprint, already alluded to, on the rock of the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, which is part of a mosque, and has five altars for the Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syrian, and Coptic Churches, all of whom climb the hill on Ascension Day to celebrate the festival; the Mohammedans, too, coming in and offering their prayers at the same shrine. The worship paid on the mountain of the sacred foot in Ceylon consists of offerings of the crimson flowers of the rhododendron, which grow freely among the crags around, accompanied by various genuflections and shoutings, and concluding with the striking of an ancient bell, and a draught from the sacred well which springs up a little below the summit. These ceremonies point to a very primitive mode of worship; and it is probable that, as Adam's Peak was venerated from a remote antiquity by the aborigines of Ceylon, being connected by them with the worship of the sun, the sacred footprint may belong to this prehistoric cult. Models of the footprint are shown in various temples in Ceylon. Besides these five great Phrabats, there are others of inferior celebrity in the East. In the P'hra Pathom of the Siamese, Buddha is said to have left impressions of his feet at Lauca and Chakravan. At Ava there is a Phrabat near Prome which is supposed to be a type of the creation. Another is seen in the same country on a large rock lying amidst the hills a day's journey west of Meinbu. Dr. Leyden says that it is in the country of the Lan that all the celebrated founders of the religion of Buddha are reported to have left their most remarkable vestiges. The traces of the sacred foot are sparingly scattered over Pegu, Ava, and Arracan. But among the Lan they are concentrated; and thither devotees repair to worship at the sacred steps of Pra Kukuson, Pra Konnakan, Pra Puttakatsop, and Pra Samutacadam. The footsteps of Vishnu are also frequent in India. Sir William Jones tells us that in the Puranas mention is made of a white mountain on which King Sravana sat meditating on the divine foot of Vishnu at the station Trevirana. When the Hindoos entered into possession of Gayá--one of the four most sacred places of Buddhism--they found the popular feeling in favour of the sacred footprint there so strong that they were obliged to incorporate the relic into their own religious system, and to attribute it to Vishnu. Thousands of Hindoo pilgrims from all parts of India now visit the shrine every year. Indeed to the worshippers of Vishnu the Temple of Vishnupad at Gayá is one of the most holy in all India; and as we are informed in the great work of Dr. Mitra, the later religious books earnestly enjoin that no one should fail, at least once in his lifetime, to visit the spot. They commend the wish for numerous offspring on the ground that, out of the many, one son might visit Gayá, and by performing the rites prescribed in connection with the holy footstep, rescue his father from eternal destruction. The stone is a large hemispherical block of granite, with an uneven top, bearing the carvings of two human feet. The frequent washings which it daily undergoes have worn out the peculiar sectorial marks which the feet contain, and even the outlines of the feet themselves are but dimly perceptible. English architects are now engaged in preserving the ruins of the splendid temple associated with this footprint, where the ministry of India's great teacher--the "Light of Asia"--began. In the Indian Museum at Calcutta there is a large slab of white marble bearing the figure of a human foot surrounded by two dragons. It was brought from a temple in Burmah, where it used to be worshipped as a representation of Buddha's foot. It is seven inches long and three inches broad, and is divided into a hundred and eight compartments, each of which contains a different mystical mark. At Gangautri, on the banks of the Ganges, is a wooden temple containing a footprint of Ganga on a black stone. In a strange subterranean temple, inside the great fort at Allahabad, there are two footprints of Vishnu, along with footprints of Rama, and of his wife Sita. In India the "kaddam rassul," or supposed impression of Mohammed's foot in clay, which is kept moist, and enclosed in a sort of cage, is not unfrequently placed at the head of the gravestones of the followers of Islam. On the summit of a mountain one hundred and thirty-six miles south of Bhagalpur is one of the principal places of Jain worship in India. On the table-land are twenty small Jain temples on different craggy heights, which resemble an extinguisher in shape. In each of them is to be found the Vasu Padukas--a sacred foot similar to that which is seen in the Jain temple at Champanagar. The sect of the Jain in South Bihar has two places of pilgrimage. One is a tank choked with weeds and lotus-flowers, which has a small island in the centre containing a temple, with two stones in the interior, on one of which is an inscription and the impression of the two feet of Gautama--the most common object of worship of the Jains in this district. The other is the place in the same part of the country where the body of Mahavira, one of the twenty-four lawgivers, was burnt about six centuries before Christ. It resembles the other temple, and is situated in an island in a tank. The island is terraced round, and in the cavity of the beehive-like top there is the representation of Mahavira's feet, to which crowds of pilgrims are continually flocking. In the centre of the Jain temple at Puri, where this remarkable man died, there are also three representations of his feet, and one impression of the feet of each of his eleven disciples. But the subject of footprints carries us farther back than the ages of the great historic founders of religion. In almost every part of the earth footprints have been found, cut in the solid rock or impressed upon boulders and other stones. These artificial tracks, like the strange human footprint which Robinson Crusoe discovered on the beach of his lonely island, excite the imagination by their mystery, and open up a vista into a hitherto unexplored world of infinite suggestion. They seem the natural successors of those tracks of birds and reptiles on sandstone and other slabs which form one of the most interesting features in every geological museum; the material on which they are impressed having allowed the substantial forms of the creatures themselves to disappear, while it has carefully preserved the more shadowy and incidental memorials of their life. The naturalist can tell us from the ephemeral impressions on the soft primeval mud, not only what was the true nature of the obscure creatures that produced them untold ages ago, but also the direction in which they were moving along the shore, and the state of the tide and the weather, and the appearance of the country at the time. But regarding those literal human "footprints on the sands of time," which have been left behind by our prehistoric ancestors, we can make no such accurate scientific inductions. They have given rise to much speculation, being considered by many persons to be real impressions of human feet, dating from a time when the material on which they were stamped was still in a state of softness. Superstition has invested them with a sacred veneration, and legends of a wild and mystical character have gathered around them. The slightest acquaintance with the results of geological research has sufficed to dispel this delusion, and to show that these mysterious marks could not have been produced by human beings while the rocks were in a state of fusion; and consequently no intelligent observer now holds this theory of their origin. But superstition dies hard; and there are persons who, though confronted with the clearest evidences of science, still refuse to abandon their old obscurantist ideas. They prefer a supernatural theory that allows free scope to their fancy and religious instinct, to one that offers a more prosaic explanation. There is a charm in the mystery connected with these dim imaginings which they would not wish dispelled by the clear daylight of scientific knowledge. In our own country, footmarks on rocks and stones are by no means of unfrequent occurrence. Some of them, indeed, although associated with myths and fairy tales, have doubtless been produced by natural causes, being the mere chance effects of weathering, without any meaning except to a geologist. But there are others that have been unmistakably produced by artificial means, and have a human history and significance. In Scotland Tanist stones--so called from the Gaelic word _tanaiste_, a chief, or the next heir to an estate--have been frequently found. These stones were used in connection with the coronation of a king or the inauguration of a chief. The custom dates from the remotest antiquity. We see traces of it in the Bible,--as when it is mentioned that "Abimelech was made king by the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem"; and "Adonijah slew sheep and oxen and fat cattle by the stone of Zoheleth, which is by En-rogel, and called all his brethren the king's sons, and all the men of Judah the king's servants"; and that when Joash was anointed king by Jehoiada, "the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was"; and again, King Josiah "stood by a pillar" to make a covenant, "and all the people stood to the covenant." The stone connected with the ceremony was regarded as the most sacred attestation of the engagement entered into between the newly-elected king or chief and his people. It was placed in some conspicuous position, upon the top of a "moot-hill," or the open-air place of assembly. Upon it was usually carved an impression of a human foot; and into this impression, during the ceremony of inauguration, the king or chief placed his own right foot, in token that he was installed by right into the possessions of his predecessors, and that he would walk in their footsteps. It may be said literally, that in this way the king or chief came to an understanding with his people; and perhaps the common saying of "stepping into a dead man's shoes" may have originated from this primitive custom. The most famous of the Tanist stones is the Coronation-stone in Westminster Abbey--the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny--on which the ancient kings of Scotland sat or stood when crowned, and which forms a singular link of connection between the primitive rites that entered into the election of a king by the people, and the gorgeous ceremonies by which the hereditary sovereigns of England are installed into their high office. There is no footmark, however, on this stone. It may be mentioned that before the arrival of the Scottish stone there had been for ages a similar stone at Westminster Hall, which gave the name to and was the original place of sitting for the Court of King's Bench. It was no doubt a relic of the primitive Folkmoot of Westminster, which has developed into the Parliament of England. In the neighbourhood of Upsala is the Mora stone, celebrated in Swedish history as the spot where the kings were publicly elected and received the homage of their subjects. A more characteristic specimen of a Tanist stone may be seen on the top of Dun Add, a rocky isolated hill about two hundred feet high, in Argyleshire, not far from Ardrishaig. On a smooth flat piece of rock which protrudes above the surface there is carved the mark of a right foot, covered with the old _cuaran_ or thick stocking, eleven inches long and four inches and a half broad at the widest part, the heel being an inch less. It is sunk about half an inch in the rock, and is very little weather-worn--the reason being, perhaps, that it has been protected for ages by the turf that has grown over it, and has only recently been exposed. Quite close to it is a smooth polished basin, eleven inches in diameter and eight deep, also scooped out of the rock. With these two curious sculptures is associated a local myth. Ossian, who lived for a time in the neighbourhood, was one day hunting on the mountain above Loch Fyne. A stag which his dogs had brought to bay charged him, and he fled precipitately. Coming to the hill above Kilmichael, he strode in one step across the valley to the top of Rudal Hill, from whence he took a gigantic leap to the summit of Dun Add. But when he alighted he was somewhat exhausted by his great effort, and fell on his knee, and stretched out his hands to prevent him from falling backwards. He thereupon left on the rocky top of Dun Add the enduring impression of his feet and knee which we see at the present day. This myth is of comparatively recent date, and is interesting as showing that all recollection of the original use of the footmark and basin had died away for many ages in the district. There can be no doubt that the footmark indicates the spot to have been at one time the scene of the inauguration of the kings or chiefs of the region; and the basin was in all probability one of those primitive mortars which were in use for grinding corn long before the invention of the quern. Dun Add is one of the oldest sites in Scotland. It has the hoary ruins of a nameless fort, and a well which is traditionally said to ebb and flow with the tide. It was here that the Dalriadic Scots first settled; and Captain Thomas, who is an authority on this subject, supposes that the remarkable relic on Dun Add was made for the inauguration of Fergus More Mac Erca, the first king of Dalriada, who died in Scotland at the beginning of the sixth century, and to have been the exact measure of his foot. King in his _Munimenta Antiqua_ mentions that in the island of Islay there was on a mound or hill where the high court of judicature sat, a large stone fixed, about seven feet square, in which there was a cavity or deep impression made to receive the feet of Macdonald, who was crowned King of the Isles standing on this stone, and swore that he would continue his vassals in the possession of their lands, and do impartial justice to all his subjects. His father's sword was then put into his hand, and the Bishop of Argyle and seven priests anointed him king in presence of all the heads of the tribes in the Isles and mainland, and at the same time an orator rehearsed a catalogue of his ancestors. In the year 1831, when a mound locally known as the "Fairy Knowe," in the parish of Carmylie, Forfarshire, was levelled in the course of some agricultural improvements in the place, there was found, besides stone cists and a bronze ring, a rude boulder almost two tons in weight, on the under side of which was sculptured the mark of a human foot. The mound or tumulus was in all likelihood a moot-hill, where justice was dispensed and the chieftains of the district were elected. In the same county, in the wild recesses of Glenesk, near Lord Dalhousie's shooting-lodge of Milldam, there is a rough granite boulder, on the upper surface of which a small human foot is scooped out with considerable accuracy, showing traces even of the toes. It is known in the glen as the "Fairy's Footmark." There can be no doubt that this stone was once used in connection with the ceremonial of inaugurating a chief. A similar stone, carved with a representation of two feet, on which the primitive chiefs stood when publicly invested with the insignia of office, is still, or was lately, in existence in Ladykirk, at Burwick, South Ronaldshay, Orkney. A local tradition, that originated long after the Pictish chiefs passed away, and a new Norse race, ignorant of the customs of their predecessors, came in, says that the stone in question was used by St. Magnus as a boat to ferry him over the Pentland Firth; while an earlier tradition looked upon it as a miraculous whale which opportunely appeared at the prayer of the saint when about to be overwhelmed by a storm, and carried him on its back safely to the shore, where it was converted into a stone, as a perpetual memorial of the marvellous occurrence. In North Yell, Shetland, there is a rude stone lying on the hillside, on which is sculptured with considerable skill the mark of a human foot. It is known in the district as the "Giant's Step"; another of the same kind, it is said, being over in Unst. It is undoubtedly the stone on which, in Celtic times, the native kings of this part were crowned. About a mile from Keill, near Campbeltown, a very old site, closely connected with the early ecclesiastical history of Scotland, may be seen on a rock what is locally called the "Footprint of St. Columba," which he made when he landed on this shore on one occasion from Iona. It is very rude and much effaced; but it carries the imagination much farther back than the days of St. Columba,--when a pagan chief or king was inaugurated here to rule over the district. In England and Wales there are several interesting examples of footprints on boulders and rocks. A remarkable Tanist stone--which, however, has no carving upon it, I believe--stands, among a number of other and smaller boulders, on the top of a hill near the village of Long Compton, in Cumberland. It is called "The King"; and the popular rhyme of the country people-- "If Long Compton thou canst see, Then king of England thou shalt be"-- points to the fact that the stone must have been once used as a coronation-stone. Not far from the top of a hill near Barmouth in Wales, in the middle of a rough path, may be seen a flat stone, in which there is a footmark about the natural size, locally known as "Llan Maria," or Mary's step, because the Virgin Mary once, it is supposed, put her foot on this rock, and then walked down the hill to a lower height covered with roots of oak-trees. This impression on the stone is associated with several stone circles and cromlechs--one of which bears upon it the reputed marks of Arthur's fingers, and is called Arthur's Quoit--and with a spring of water and a grove, as the path leading to the hill is still known by a Welsh name which means Grove Lane; and these associations undoubtedly indicate that the spot was once a moot-hill or prehistoric sanctuary, where religious and inauguration rites were performed. At Smithhill's Hall, near Bolton-le-Moors, there is still to be seen an object of curiosity to a large number of visitors--the print of a man's foot in the flagstone. It is said to have been produced by George Marsh, who suffered martyrdom during the persecutions of Queen Mary in 1555. When on one occasion the truth of his words was called in question by his enemies, he stamped his foot upon the stone on which he stood, which ever after bore the ineffaceable impression as a miraculous testimony to his veracity. This story must have been an after-thought, to account for what we may suppose to have been a prehistoric Tanist stone. In Ireland footmarks are very numerous, and are attributed by the peasantry to different saints. Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, in their account of Ireland, refer to several curious examples which are regarded by the people with superstitious reverence, and are the occasions of religious pilgrimage. Near the chapel of Glenfinlough, in King's County, there is a ridge with a boulder on it called the Fairy's Stone or the Horseman's Stone, which presents on its flat surface, besides cup-like hollows, crosses, and other markings, rudely-carved representations of the human foot. On a stone near Parsonstown, called Fin's Seat, there are similar impressions--also associated with crosses and cup-shaped hollows which are traditionally said to be the marks of Fin Mac Coul's thumb and fingers. On an exposed and smooth surface of rock on the northern slope of the Clare Hills, in the townland of Dromandoora, there is the engraved impression of a foot clothed with a sandal; and near it is sculptured on the rock a figure resembling the caduceus of Mercury, while there are two cromlechs in the immediate vicinity. The inauguration-stone of the Macmahons still exists on the hill of Lech--formerly called Mullach Leaght, or "hill of the stone"--three miles south of Meaghan; but the impression of the foot was unfortunately effaced by the owner of the farm about the year 1809. In the garden of Belmont on the Greencastle road, about a mile from Londonderry, there is the famous stone of St. Columba, held in great veneration as the inauguration-stone of the ancient kings of Aileach, and which St. Patrick is said to have consecrated with his blessing. On this remarkable stone, which is about seven feet square, composed of a hard gneiss, and quite undressed by the chisel, are sculptured two feet, right and left, about ten inches long each. Boullaye le Gouze mentions that in 1644 the print of St. Fin Bar's foot might be seen on a stone in the cemetery of the Cathedral of Cork; it has long since disappeared. In the Killarney region is the promontory of Coleman's Eye--so called after a legendary person who leapt across the stream, and left his footprints impressed in the solid rock on the other side. These impressions are considered Druidic, and are pointed out as such to the curious stranger by the guides. Near an old church situated on the southern slope of Knockpatrick, in the parish of Graney in Leinster, there is a large flat granite rock with the impression of two feet clearly defined on its surface. Local tradition assigns these footprints to St. Patrick, who addressed the people on this spot, and left behind these enduring signs of his presence. Allusion is made to them in St. Fiaca's Hymn to St. Patrick--"He pressed his foot on the stone; its traces remain, it wears not." Footprints in connection with St. Patrick are to be found in many localities in Ireland, as, for instance, on the seashore south of Skerries, County Dublin, where the apostle landed; and at Skerries, County Antrim, there are marks which are believed to be the footprints of the angel who appeared to St. Patrick. In Ossory two localities are noted as possessing St. Patrick's footprints. So common are the curious sculptures under consideration in Norway and Sweden, that they are known by the distinct name of _Fotsulor_, or Footsoles. They are marks of either naked feet, or of feet shod with primitive sandals. On a rock at Brygdæa in Westerbotten, in Norway, there are no less than thirty footmarks carved on a rock at an equal distance from each other. In other parts of Norway these footprints are mixed up with rude outlines of ships, wheels, and other _hällristningar_, or rock-sculptures. Holmberg has figured many of them in his interesting work entitled _Scandinaviens Hällristningar_. At Lökeberg Bohnslau, Sweden, there is a group of ten pairs of footmarks, associated with cup-shaped hollows and ship-carvings; and at Backa, in the same district, several pairs of feet, or rather shoe-marks, are engraved upon a rock. In Denmark not a few examples of artificial foot-tracks have been observed and described by Dr. Petersen. One was found on a slab belonging to the covering of a gallery in the inside of a tomb in the island of Seeland, and another on one of the blocks of stone surrounding a tumulus in the island of Laaland. In both cases the soles of the feet are represented as being covered; and in all probability they belong to the late stone or earlier bronze age. With these sepulchral marks are associated curious Danish legends, which refer them to real impressions of human feet. The islands of Denmark were supposed to have been made by enchanters, who wished for greater facilities for going to and fro, and dropped them in the sea as stations or stepping-stones on their way; and hence, in a region where the popular imagination poetises the commonest material objects, and is saturated with stories of elves and giants, with magic swords, and treasures guarded by dragons, it was not difficult to conclude that these mysterious foot-sculptures were made by the tread of supernatural beings. Near the station of Sens, in France, there is a curious dolmen, on one of whose upright stones or props are carved two human feet. And farther north, in Brittany, upon a block of stone in the barrow or tumulus of Petit Mont at Arzon, may be seen carved an outline of the soles of two human feet, right and left, with the impressions of the toes very distinctly cut, like the marks left by a person walking on the soft sandy shore of the sea. They are surrounded by a number of waving circular and serpentine lines exceedingly curious. On Calais pier may be seen a footprint where Louis XVIII. landed in 1814; and on the rocks of Magdesprung, a village in the Hartz Mountains, a couple of hundred feet apart, are two immense footprints, which tradition ascribes to a leap made by a huge giantess from the clouds for the purpose of rescuing one of her maidens from the violence of an ancient baron. In not a few places in our own country and on the Continent, rough misshapen marks on rocks and stones, bearing a fanciful resemblance to the outline of the human foot, have been supposed by popular superstition to have been made by Satan. Every classical student is familiar with the account which Herodotus gives of the print of Hercules shown by the Scythians in his day upon a rock near the river Tyras, the modern Dnieper. It was said to resemble the footstep of a man, only that it was two cubits long. He will also recall the description given by the same gossipy writer of the Temple of Perseus in the Thebaic district of Egypt, in which a sandal worn by the god, two cubits in length, occasionally made its appearance as a token of the visit of Perseus to the earth, and a sign of prosperity to the land. Pythagoras measured similar footprints at Olympia, and calculated "ex pede Herculem"! Still more famous was the mark on the volcanic rock on the shore of Lake Regillus--the scene of the memorable battle in which the Romans, under the dictator Posthumius, defeated the powerful confederation of the Latin tribes under the Tarquins. According to tradition, the Roman forces were assisted by Castor and Pollux, who helped them to achieve their signal victory. The mark was supposed to have been left by the horse of one of the great twins "who fought so well for Rome," as Macaulay says in his spirited ballad. On the way to the famous convent of Monte Casino, very near the door, there is a cross in the middle of the road. In front of it a grating covers the mark of a knee, which is said to have been left in the rock by St. Benedict, when he knelt there to ask a blessing from heaven before laying the foundation-stone of his convent. As the site of the monastery was previously occupied by a temple of Apollo, and a grove sacred to Venus, where the inhabitants of the surrounding locality worshipped as late as the sixth century,--to which circumstance Dante alludes,--it is probable that the sacred mark on the rock may have belonged to the old pagan idolatry, and have been a cup-marked stone connected with sacrificial libations. On many rocks of the United States of America may be seen human footprints, either isolated or connected with other designs belonging to the pictorial system of the Aborigines, and commemorating incidents which they thought worthy of being preserved. In the collection of the Smithsonian Museum are three large stone slabs having impressions of the human foot. On two slabs of sandstone, carefully cut from rocks on the banks of the Missouri, may be seen respectively two impressions of feet, carved apparently with moccasins, such as are worn at the present day by the Sioux and other Indians. The other specimen is a flat boulder of white quartz, obtained in Gasconade County, Missouri, which bears on one of its sides the mark of a naked foot, each toe being distinctly scooped out and indicated. The footmark is surrounded by a number of cup-shaped depressions. In many parts of Dacotah, where the route is difficult to find, rocks occur with human footprints carved upon them which were probably meant to serve as geographical landmarks--as they invariably indicate the best route to some Indian encampment or to the shallow parts of some deep river. Among other places these footprints have been met with on the Blue Mountains between Georgia and North Carolina, and also on the Kenawha River. Some stir was made two years ago by the reported discovery of the prints of human feet in a stone quarry on the coast of Lake Managua in Nicaragua. The footprints are remarkably sharp and distinct; one seems that of a little child. The stone in which they are impressed is a spongy volcanic tuff, and the layer superimposed upon them in the quarry was of similar material. These prehistoric footprints were doubtless accidentally impressed upon the volcanic stone, and would seem to throw back the age of man on the earth to a most remote antiquity. In Equatorial Africa footprints have also been found, and are associated with the folklore of the country. Stanley, in his _Dark Continent_, tells us that in the legendary history of Uganda, Kimera, the third in descent from Ham, was so large and heavy that he made marks in the rocks wherever he trod. The impression of one of his feet is shown at Uganda on a rock near the capital, Ulagolla. It was made by one of his feet slipping while he was in the act of hurling his spear at an elephant. In the South Sea Islands department of the British Museum is an impression of a gigantic footstep five feet in length. The connection of prehistoric footprints with sacred sites and places of sepulture would indicate that they had a religious significance--an idea still further strengthened by the fact of their being frequently associated with holy wells and groves, and with cup-shaped marks on cromlechs or sacrificial altars, which are supposed to have been used for the purpose of receiving libations; while their universal distribution points to a hoary antiquity, when a primitive natural cultus spread over the whole earth, traces of which are found in every land, behind the more elaborate and systematic faith which afterwards took its place. They are probably among the oldest stone-carvings that have been left to us, and were executed by rude races with rude implements either in the later stone or early bronze age. Their subsequent dedication to holy persons in Christian times was in all likelihood only a survival of their original sacred use long ages after the memory of the particular rites and ceremonies connected with them passed away. A considerable proportion of the sacred marks are said to be impressions of the female foot, attributed to the Virgin Mary; and in this circumstance we may perhaps trace a connection with the worship of the receptive element in nature, which was also a distinctive feature of primitive religion. It is strange how traces of this primitive worship of footprints survive, not merely in the mythical stories and superstitious practices connected with the objects themselves, but also in curious rites and customs that at first sight might seem to have had no connection with them. The throwing of the shoe after a newly-married couple is said to refer to the primitive mode of marriage by capture; but there is equal plausibility in referring it to the prehistoric worship of the footprint as a symbol of the powers of nature. To the same original source we may perhaps attribute the custom connected with the Levirate law in the Bible, when the woman took off the shoe of the kinsman who refused to marry her, whose name should be afterwards called in Israel "the house of him that hath his shoe loosed." In regard to the general subject, it may be said that we can discern in the primitive adoration of footprints a somewhat advanced stage in the religious thoughts of man. He has got beyond total unconsciousness of God, and beyond totemism or the mere worship of natural objects--trees, streams, stones, animals, etc. He has reached the conception of a deity who is of a different nature from the objects around him, and whose place of abode is elsewhere. He worships the impression of the foot for the sake of the being who left it; and the impression helps him to realise the presence and to form a picture of his deity. That deity is not a part of nature, because he can make nature plastic to his tread, and leave his footmark on the hard rock as if it were soft mud. He thinks of him as the author and controller of nature, and for the first time rises to the conception of a supernatural being. CHAPTER V THE ROMAN FORUM No spot on earth has a grander name or a more imposing history than the Roman Forum. Its origin takes us far back to geological ages--to a period modern indeed in the inarticulate annals of the earth, but compared with which even those great periods which mark the rise and fall of empires are but as the running of the sands in an hour-glass. It opens up a wonderful chapter in the earth's stony book. Everywhere on the site and in the neighbourhood of Rome striking indications of ancient volcanoes abound. The whole region is as certainly of igneous origin, and was the centre of as violent fiery action, as the vicinity of Naples. The volcanic energy of Italy seems to have begun first in this district, and when exhausted there, to have passed gradually to the south, where Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli witness to the great furnace that is still burning fiercely under the beautiful land. No spectacle could have been more sublime than that which the Roman Campagna presented at this period, when no less than ten volcanoes were in full or intermittent action, and poured their clouds of smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged from the craters; and these, deposited and hardened by long pressure under water, formed the reddish-brown earthy rock called tufa, of which the seven hills of Rome are composed. When the sea retired, or rather when the land rose suddenly or gradually, and the volcanoes became extinct, the streams which descended from the mountains and watered the recovered land spread themselves out in numerous fresh-water lakes, which stood an hundred and fifty feet higher than the present bed of the Tiber. In these lakes were formed two kinds of fresh-water strata--the first composed of sand and marl; and the second, where mineral springs gushed forth through the volcanic rock, of travertine--a peculiar reddish-brown or yellow calcareous rock, of which St. Peter's and many of the buildings of modern Rome are composed. We find lacustrine marls on the sides of the Esquiline Hill where it slopes down into the Forum, and fresh-water bivalve and univalve shells in the ground under the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol; while on the face of the Aventine Hill, overhanging the Tiber at a height of ninety feet, is a cliff of travertine, which is half a mile long. The lakes which formed these deposits must have covered their sites for many ages. At last, by some new change of level, the lakes retired, and the Tiber scooped out for itself its present channel to the sea. When man came upon the scene we have no definite information; but numerous flints and stone-weapons have been found among the black pumice breccias of the Campagna mixed with remains of the primitive bison, the elephant, and the rhinoceros. Human eyes must therefore have gazed upon the volcanoes of the Roman plain. Human beings, occupying the outposts of the Sabine Hills, must have seen that plain broken up by the sea into a complicated archipelago, and beheld in the very act of formation that wonderful region destined long ages afterwards to be the scene of some of the greatest events in human history. The Alban Hills, whose present quiet beauty, adorned with white gem-like towns, and softened with the purple hues of heaven, strikes every visitor with admiration, were active volcanoes pouring streams of lava down into the plain even after the foundation of the Eternal City. Livy mentions that under the third king of Rome, a shower of stones, accompanied by a loud noise, was thrown up from the Alban Mount--a prodigy which gave rise to a nine days' festival annually celebrated long after by the people of Latium. The remarkable funereal urns found buried under a bed of volcanic matter between Marino and Castel Gandolfo on the Alban Hills are an incontrovertible proof that showers of volcanic ashes must have been ejected from the neighbouring volcano when the country was inhabited by human beings; nay, when the inhabitants were far advanced in civilisation, for among the objects contained in the funereal urns were implements of writing. At the close of the skirmish between the Romans and Etruscans, near Albano, in which Aruns, the son of Lars Porsenna, was slain, whose tomb may still be seen on the spot, a noise like that which Livy mentions was heard among the surrounding hills. But the most extraordinary of all the volcanic phenomena within the historical period was the sudden rising on two memorable occasions of the waters of the Alban Lake, which now lie deep down within the basin of an extinct crater. The first swallowed up the royal palace of Alba, and was so sudden and violent that neither the king nor any of his household had time to escape. The other occurred during the romantic siege of the Etruscan city of Veii, near Rome, by Camillus, four hundred years before Christ. The waters on that occasion rose two hundred and forty feet in the crater almost to the very edge, and threatened to overflow and inundate the surrounding country, when they were withdrawn by a subterranean canal cut in the rock, and poured into the Tiber by a connecting stream. This emissary, which may still be seen, was constructed owing to a hint given by an Etruscan soothsayer, that the city of Veii would not be captured till the Alban Lake was emptied into the sea. The deep winding cavern on the face of the Aventine Hill, said to have been inhabited by the monstrous giant Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who vomited fire, and was the terror of the surrounding inhabitants, was evidently of volcanic origin; and the local tradition from which Virgil concocted his fable was undoubtedly derived from a vivid recollection of the active operations of a volcano. When Evander, as described in the eighth _Æneid_, conducted his distinguished guest to the top of the Tarpeian Rock, in after ages so famous as the place of public execution, and composed of very hard lava, he assured him that an awful terror possessed the place, and that some unknown god had his abode there. The shepherds said it was Jupiter, and that they had often seen him kindling his lightnings and hurling his thunderbolts from thence. Evander then pointed to the ruined cities of Saturnia and Janiculum, on either side of the Tiber, whose destruction had been caused by the wrath of the god. There can be no doubt that this fable clothed with supernatural colouring some volcanic phenomena which had taken place on this spot during the human period. Even as late as three hundred and ninety years after the foundation of Rome, a chasm opened in the Forum, and emitted flames and pestilential vapours. An oracle declared that this chasm would not close until what constituted the glory of Rome should be cast into it. Marcus Curtius asked if anything in Rome was more precious than arms and valour; and arraying himself in his armour, and mounting on a horse splendidly equipped, he leapt in the presence of the Roman people into the abyss, when it instantly closed for ever. We thus see that the geology of the Roman plain throws no inconsiderable light upon the early history and traditions of the Eternal City, and brings within the cycle of natural phenomena what were long supposed to be purely fabulous incidents, the inventions of a poetic imagination. I have dwelt upon these geological incidents so fully, because nowhere does one realise the striking contrast between the shortness of man's existence on earth, as in places like the Roman plain, where the traces of cosmical energy have been greatest and most enduring. The volcanic origin of the Roman Forum suggests the curious idea of the intimate connection of some of the greatest events of history with volcanic centres. Where the strife of nature has been fiercest, there by a strange coincidence the storm of human passion has been greatest. The geological history of a region is most frequently typical of its human history. We can predicate of a scene where the cosmical disturbance has been great,--where fire and flood have contended for the mastery, leaving the effects of their strife in deepening valleys and ascending hills,--that there man has had a strangely varied and eventful career. The strongholds and citadels of the earth, where the great battles of freedom and civilisation have been fought, were all untold ages previously the centres of violent plutonic disturbances. Edinburgh Castle, enthroned on its trap-rock, once the centre of a volcano, is associated with the most stirring and important events in the history of Scotland; Stirling Castle rises on its trap-rock erupted by volcanic action above a vast plain, across which a hundred battles have swept; Dumbarton Castle, crowning its trappean promontory, has represented in its civil history the protracted periods of earthquake and eruption concerned in the formation of its site; while standing in solitude amid the stormy waters of the Firth of Forth, the Bass Rock, once a scene of fiery confusion, of roaring waves and heaving earthquakes, has formed alternately the prison where religious liberty has been strangled, and the fortress where patriotism has taken its last stand against the forces of the invader. Palestine, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Scotland, the countries that have had the most remarkable history, and have done most to advance the human race, are distinguished above other countries for their geological convulsions and revolutions. The Roman Forum is thus but one specimen among numerous others of a law of Providence which has associated the strife of nature with the strife of man, and caused the ravages of the most terrible elements to prepare the way for the highest development of the human race. Between the Roman Forum and the valley beneath Edinburgh Castle we can trace a striking resemblance, not only in their volcanic origin and the connection between their geological history and their analogous civil history, but also in the fact that they were both filled with small lakes. Between the ridges of the old and new town of Edinburgh, where the railway runs through Princes Street Gardens, there was in the memory of many now living a considerable collection of water called the North Loch. In like manner, in the hollow of the Roman Forum there was originally a small lake, a relic of the numerous lakes of the Campagna, which remained after the last elevation of the land, and which existed pretty far on into the human period. It was fed by three streams flowing from the Palatine, the Capitoline, and the Esquiline Hills, which now run underground and meet at this point. Let us picture to ourselves the appearance of this lake embosomed in the hollow of its hills in the far-off pastoral times, when the mountains and the high table-lands of Italy were the chosen territory of those tribes whose property consisted chiefly in their flocks. The hills of Rome, whose elevation was far more conspicuous in ancient times than it is now, presented a precipitous front of dark volcanic rock to the lake. Their slopes were covered with grass and with natural copse-wood, intermixed with tall ilex trees, or umbrella pines; while on their summits were little villages surrounded with Cyclopean walls perched there not only for security, but also for the healthier air, just as we see at the present day all over Italy. On the summit of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills were Sabine settlements, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. To the green wooded slopes of the Palatine, according to a beautiful tradition, sixty years before the destruction of Troy, came Evander and his Arcadians from Greece, and settled there with their flocks and herds, and led a quiet idyllic life. According to another tradition, Æneas, after the destruction of Troy, came to this spot, and marrying the daughter of a neighbouring king, became the ancestor of the twins Romulus and Remus, the popular founders of Rome, whose romantic exposure and nourishment by a she-wolf are known to every schoolboy. Romulus, after slaying his brother, built a stronghold on the Palatine, which he opened as an asylum for outlaws and runaway slaves, who supported themselves chiefly by plunder. The community of this robber-city consisting almost entirely of males, they provided themselves with wives by the famous stratagem known as the "Rape of the Sabine women." Seizing the daughters of their neighbours, the Sabines of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills, on a festive occasion, they carried them away with them to their fortress. A number of sanguinary fights took place in consequence of this rape around the swampy margin of the lake. In the last of these engagements the combatants were separated by the Sabine women suddenly rushing in with their children between their fathers and brothers and the men who had become their husbands. A mutual reconciliation then ensued, and the two communities contracted a firm and close alliance. The Palatine, Capitoline, and Esquiline villages became henceforth one city, to which from time to time by conquest new accessions were made, until at last all the different settlements on the seven hills of Rome were brought under one rule, and surrounded by a common wall of defence. Mommsen, Niebuhr, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and other critics, have made sad havoc with these romantic stories of the origin of Rome. But although much of the fabulous undoubtedly mingles with them--for the early history of Rome was not written till it had become a powerful state, and then the historian had no records of days long past save what were embodied in popular tradition and poetry--there has recently been a reaction in favour of them, and they must ever be interesting on account of their own intrinsic charm, the element of truth which they contain, and the indelible associations of schoolboy life. When a joint city was thus compacted and called Rome--possibly its old Pelasgic appellation--the first effort of the confederated settlements was to drain the geological lake in the centre of the city into the Tiber, a quarter of a mile distant. This they did by means of the celebrated Cloaca Maxima, a part of which may be seen open at the present day under the pavement of the Roman Forum, near the Temple of Castor and Pollux. This common sewer of Rome is one of its oldest and greatest relics. It was built by the first Tarquin, the fifth king of Rome, a century and a half after the foundation of the city; and although two thousand five hundred years have passed away since the architect formed without cement its massive archway of huge volcanic stones found on the spot, and during all the time it has been subjected to the shock of numerous earthquakes, inundations of the Tiber, and the crash of falling ruins, it still serves its original purpose as effectually as ever, and promises to stand for as many ages in the future as it has stood in the past. It is commonly said that we owe the invention of the arch to the Romans; and this work of undoubted Etruscan architecture is usually considered as among the very first applications of the principle. But the arched drains and doorways discovered by Layard at Nineveh prove that the Assyrians employed the arch centuries before Rome was founded. It had however only a subordinate place and a very limited application in the ancient architecture of the East; and it was left to the Romans to give it due prominence in crossing wide spaces, to make it "the bow of promise," the bridge over which they passed to the dominion of the world. The Cloaca Maxima is a tunnel roofed with two concentric rings of enormous stones, the innermost having an interior diameter of nearly fourteen feet, the height being about twelve feet. So capacious was it that Strabo mentions that a waggon loaded with hay might find room in it; and it is recorded that the Consul Agrippa passed through it in a boat. The mouth of the Cloaca opens into the Tiber, near the little round temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium; but it is often invisible owing to the flooding of the river; and even when the Tiber is low, so much has its bed been silted up that only about three feet below the keystone of the sewer can be seen. Subsequently all the sewers of Rome were connected with it; and at the present day the nose gives infallible proof that it carries off a very large portion of the pollution of the modern city. By the Cloaca Maxima, the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills was for the first time made dry land; all indeed, except a small swamp which remained in one corner of it to a later age, and which the great sewer was not deep enough to drain entirely. Reeds grew around its margin, and boats were employed to cross it, as Ovid tells us. The name Velabrum--from an Etruscan root, signifying water, occurring in some other Italian names such as Velletri, Velino--still given to this locality, where a church stood in the middle ages called S. Silvestro in Lacu, commemorates the existence of the primeval lake; while the legend of the casting ashore of Romulus and Remus on the slope of the Palatine points to the gradual desiccation of the spot. On the level ground, recovered in this way from the waters, was formed the Roman Forum; the word Forum meaning simply an open space, surrounded by buildings and porticoes, which served the purpose of a market-place, a court of justice, or an exchange; for the Romans transacted more of their public and private business out of doors than the severe climate of our northern latitudes will permit us to do. On this common ground representatives of the separate communities located on the different hills of Rome, and comprehended and confederated within the walls of Servius Tullius, met together for the settlement of affairs that concerned them all. As Rome grew in importance, so did this central representative part of it grow with it, until at last, in the time of the Cæsars, it became the heart of the mighty empire, where its pulse beat loudest. There the fate of the world was discussed. There Cicero spoke, and Cæsar ruled, and Horace meditated. If the Temple of Jerusalem was the shrine of religion, the Forum of Rome was the shrine of law; and from thence has emanated that unrivalled system of jurisprudence which has formed the model of every nation since. Being thus the centre of the political power of the empire, the Roman Forum became also the focus of its architectural and civic splendour. It was crowded with marble temples, state buildings, and courts of law to such an extent that we wonder how there was room for them all within such a narrow area. Monuments of great men, statues of Greek sculpture, colonnades, and porticoes, rich with the spoils of subject kingdoms, adorned its sides. The whole region was resplendent with all the pomp and luxury of paganism in its proudest hour; the word "ambition," which came ultimately to signify all strivings for eminence, resolving itself into the elementary meaning of a walk round the Roman Forum, canvassing for votes at municipal elections. Thus the Forum continued until the decay of the empire, when hordes of invaders buried its magnificence in ruins. At the beginning of the seventh century it must have been open and comparatively free from _débris_, as is proved by the fact that the column of Phocas, erected, at that time, stood on the original pavement. Virgil says, in his account of the romantic interview of Evander with Æneas on the spot which was to be afterwards Rome--then a quiet pastoral scene, green with grass, and covered with bushes--that they saw herds of cattle wandering over the Forum, and browsing on the rich pasture around the shores of its blue lake. Strange, the law of circularity, after the lapse of two thousand years, brought round the same state of things in that storied spot. During the middle ages the Roman Forum was known only as the Campo Vaccino, the field of cattle. It was a forlorn waste, with a few ruins scattered over it, and two formal rows of poplar-trees running down the middle of it, and wild-eyed buffaloes and mouse-coloured oxen from the Campagna wandering over the solitude, and cropping the grass and green weeds that grew in the very heart of old Rome. When Gibbon conceived the idea of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, listening to the vespers of the Franciscan friars in the dim church of Ara Coeli in the neighbourhood, the Forum was an unsightly piece of ground, covered with rubbish-heaps, with only a pillar or two emerging from the general filth. When Byron stood beside the "nameless column with the buried base," commemorated in _Childe Harold_, he little dreamt what a rich collection of the relics of imperial times lay under his feet, as completely buried by the wrecks of ages as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the ashes and lava of Vesuvius. From fifteen to twenty feet of soil had accumulated over them. The work of excavation was begun seventy-five years ago by the Duchess of Devonshire, who spent the last years of her life in Rome, and formed the centre of its brilliant society. Napoleon III., the late Emperor of the French, carried on the task thus auspiciously commenced, for the purpose of shedding light upon the parts of Roman history connected with Julius Cæsar, the hero of his book. In spite of much opposition from the Papal Government, the work of exhumation was continued in fits and starts after the French emperor had given it up; and ever since the Italian Government have taken the matter in hand, gangs of labourers under the directorship of the accomplished Signor Rosa have been more or less continually employed, with the result that almost the whole area has been laid bare from the Capitol to the Arch of Titus. The British Archæological Society of Rome has given valuable aid according to the funds in its possession, and the contributions sent from this country for the purpose. When first commenced, the changes caused by these excavations were regarded with no favourable eye by either the artists or the people of Rome. The trees were cut down, the mantle of verdure that for centuries had covered the spot--Nature's appropriate pall for the decay of art--was ruthlessly torn up, and great unsightly holes and heaps of _débris_ utterly destroyed the picturesque beauty of the scene. But the loss to romance was a gain to knowledge; and now that the greatest part of the Forum has been cleared down to the ancient pavement, we are able to form a much more vivid and accurate conception of what the place must have been in the days of the empire, and are in a position to identify buildings which previously had been a theme for endless and violent disputes. It is a very interesting and suggestive coincidence that the Forum of Rome should have been thus disentombed at the very time that Italy rose from its grave of ages, and under a free and enlightened government, having its centre once more in the Eternal City, proved that it had inherited no small share of the spirit of the heroic past. Let us go over in brief detail the various objects of interest that may now be seen in the centre of Roman greatness. Numerous sources of information exist which enable us to identify these monuments, and to form some idea of what they were in their prime. Among these may be mentioned coins and medals of the emperors, with representations upon them of buildings and sculptures in the Forum; a marble stone found at Ancyra, now Angouri in Phrygia, on which is a long inscription regarding the acts and achievements of Augustus, which is of the greatest value in determining the topography of the city; the bas-reliefs on the Arch of Constantine, and on the marble screens of Trajan, recently excavated in the Forum itself, giving a view of its north-western and south-eastern ends; and the remains of the antique marble plan of Rome, now preserved in the Capitoline Museum, originally affixed to the wall of the superb Temple of Rome, and discovered in fragments in 1867 in the garden of the monastery of SS. Cosma e Damiano. We also get most valuable help in the work of identification from the Itineraries of the middle ages--especially from that of the celebrated pilgrim from Einsiedlen, Zwingli's town in Switzerland--who visited Rome in the eighth century, and left his manuscript to his own abbey, where it may still be seen. A vast apparatus of learning has been accumulated from the works of ancient classic authors by the great scholars who have written on the historical localities and buildings of the Forum, from Donati to Becker. Nibby, Canina, Ampère, Bunsen, Plattner, and Uhrlich, in their magnificent works have supplied a mine of wealth from which most subsequent writers on the Forum have enriched their descriptions. The direction of the Forum is nearly from north to south, trending a little from north-east to south-west. It is surprisingly small to have contained such a large number of buildings, and to have bulked so prominently in the eye of the world; its greatest length being only six hundred and seventy-one feet, and its greatest breadth about two hundred and two feet. Beginning at the north end, we see before us the vast mass of the ancient Capitol, the proudest symbol of the majesty of Rome, crowned with the great staring medieval structures of the Roman municipality, rising up into the campanile of Michael Angelo. Until of late years, this renowned building was completely buried beneath a huge mound of rubbish. Now that it has been removed, the venerable fabric stands out distinctly to view, and we behold the massive walls of the Treasury, the Record Office, and the Senate House. The lowest part, constructed of huge blocks of volcanic stones, was the Ærarium or Public Treasury, and is supposed to have been formed out of the original wall of the city of the Sabines, which surrounded the hill of Saturn, as the Capitoline Mount was originally called, long before Romulus laid the foundation of Rome. As the Roman army was paid in coppers, spacious cellars were required for storing the coin, and these were provided in the underground vaults of the Treasury, partially cut out of the volcanic rock of the Capitol, on which the building rests. Above the Treasury, on the second floor, we see the remains of the Doric portico of the Tabularium or Public Record Office, where the records of Rome, engraved upon bronze tablets, were kept. The place is now converted into an architectural museum, where all the most interesting sculptured fragments found in the Forum are preserved, and are exhibited by gaslight owing to the darkness. These buildings, it must be remembered, form the back of the Capitol fronting the Forum. Strictly speaking, they do not belong to the Forum, which should be traced only from their verge. The view on the other side of the Capitol, where a gently-inclined staircase leads up from the streets to the piazza at the top, surrounded by the modern municipal buildings, raised upon the ancient substructures above described, is quite different. But the present aspect of the Capitol is quite disappointing to one who comes to it seeking for evidences of its former grandeur. There is no trace of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, to which the triumphal processions of the Roman armies led up, gorgeous with all the attractions of marble architecture, and the richest spoils of the world, the most splendid monument of human pride which the world then contained. Probably its remains were used up in the construction of the gloomy old church of the _Ara Coeli_, which is supposed by most archæologists to stand upon its site. The Capitol, it may be remarked, was precisely similar to the moot-hill, or open-air court, which existed in our own country in primitive times, and where justice was administered at regular intervals. The tradition of this original use of it still clings to the place as a shadow from the past. The hill has always been appropriated for political purposes. It has continued from the earliest days to be a centre of secular as opposed to ecclesiastical authority. The Popes ceded it to the magistracy, whose municipal buildings now cover it, and placed the church of Ara Coeli--the only one ever built on the Capitoline Hill--under their protection. The place of execution was chosen conveniently near to this moot-hill, or seat of justice; and the criminal, when condemned, was speedily executed, by being hurled over the rock, just outside of the eastern rampart, which surrounded the settlement. We can thus easily understand the association of the Tarpeian Rock with the Capitoline Hill. They were as closely correlated as the moot-hill and the Gallow hill in our own country. The primitive method of execution derived a sanctity from its antiquity, and was continued far on into the most civilised times of the empire. So densely crowded were the historical buildings and remarkable sites in that part of the Forum which lay immediately behind the Capitol, that it is almost impossible now to identify their position or remains. This spot forms the great battle-ground of the antiquaries, whose conclusions in many instances are mere guess-work. Below the medieval tower of the Capitol is a wide space paved with fragments of coloured marbles, and with indications of the ground-plan of a building. This is supposed to mark the site of the Temple of Concord, erected by the great general Camillus, after the expulsion of the Gauls, to perpetuate the concord between the plebeians and patricians on the vexed question of the election of consuls. It was placed beside the old meeting-place of the privileged families. From the charred state of some of its sculptures discovered on the spot, it is supposed to have been destroyed by fire. It was restored and enlarged a hundred and twenty years before Christ by the Consul Opimius immediately after the murder of Caius Gracchus. To the classical student it is specially interesting as the place where Cicero convoked the senate after the discovery of the Catiline conspiracy, for the purpose of fixing the punishment due to one of the greatest of crimes. Among the senators present on that memorable occasion were men of the highest political and philosophical renown, including Cæsar, Cato, and Cicero. They came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as retribution beyond the grave, no future state of consciousness, no immortality of the soul; consequently death was considered too mild a punishment for the impious treason of the conspirators; and a penalty, which should keep alive instead of extinguishing suffering, was advocated. We learn from this extraordinary argument, as Merivale well says, how utter was the religious scepticism among the brightest intellects of Rome only thirty-seven years before the coming of Christ. The very name of the temple itself, dedicated not to a divine being as in a more pious age, but to a mere political abstraction, a mere symbol of a compact effected between two discordant parties in the state, indicated how greatly the Romans had declined from their primitive faith. But the most conspicuous of the ancient remains in this quarter, and the first to attract the notice of every visitor, is the Ionic portico of eight columns, called at first the Temple of Jupiter, and then of Vespasian, but now definitely determined to be the Temple of Saturn, for it is closely connected with the Ærarium, and the Ærarium is said by several ancient authors to have led into the podium of the temple by a doorway in its wall still visible. This temple is supposed to be of very early origin, and to have marked the site of an ancient Sabine altar to the oldest of the gods of Italy long before the arrival of the Romans. It was nearly entire so late as the fifteenth century; but its cella was ruthlessly destroyed shortly afterwards, and its marble ornaments used for making lime. The present group of pillars was so clumsily restored by the French at the beginning of this century that they are seen to differ from each other in diameter, and the frieze is composed of fragments that do not harmonise. But the most remarkable monument of antiquity in this part is the marble triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, which stands in front of the ruins of the Temple of Concord. It invaded the site of the republican Græcostasis, where foreign ambassadors waited for an audience of the senate, and occupied part of the area of the Comitium, whose original character was thereby destroyed; for it was erected at a time when men ceased to care for the venerable associations connected with the early history of their city. One gazes upon this monument of Roman power and pride with deep respect, for it has stood nearly seventeen centuries; and though rusty and sorely battered, and its sculptures much mutilated, it is still one of the most solid and perfect relics of imperial times. It was raised to commemorate the wars of Septimius Severus in Parthia and Arabia; and represents among its carvings the goddess Rome receiving the homage of the Eastern nations. It exhibits on its panels many scenes connected with his campaigns, the memory of which no humane man would have liked to perpetuate. On the upper part of the Arch is a large inscription in honour of the emperor and his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. The name of Geta, however, was afterwards erased by his brother when he had murdered him, and other words substituted. Marks of the erasure may still be seen perfectly distinct after all these centuries, and vividly recall the terrible associations of the incident. The dislike which Caracalla and Geta had for each other was so virulent that their father took them both with him to Britain, in order that they might forget their mutual animosity while engaged in active warfare. Septimius Severus died during this campaign at York, and his sons returned to Rome to work out soon after the domestic tragedy of which this Arch reminds us. On the top of the Arch there was originally a bronze group of a chariot and four horses, with the emperor and his sons driving it. But this was removed at an early date; and in the middle ages the summit of the Arch supported the campanile of the church of St. Sergius and Bacchus that was built up against its sides. A little to the left, the road passing under the Arch joins the Clivus Capitolinus which wound through the Forum, and led up to the great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The pavement of this ancient road, which still exists, is formed of broad hexagonal slabs of lava, and is as smooth and as finely jointed at this day as when the triumphal processions of the victorious Roman generals used to pass over it. At the western corner of the Arch of Severus are the scanty remains of a tall conical pyramid, about fifteen feet in diameter, which is identified as the Umbilicus Romæ, placed in the exact centre of old Rome. Not far from it stood the Milliarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, on which were inscribed all the distances of roads without the walls. The Roman roads throughout the empire terminated at this point. With this central milestone was connected that admirable system of roads which the Romans constructed in our distant island; and it is a remarkable circumstance that the principal railway lines in England are identical with the general direction of the old Roman roads. The Antonine Way is now the Great Western Railway, and the Roman Watling Street, which ran diagonally across the country from Chester in the north-west to Dover in the south-east, is now replaced by the Dover, London, Birmingham, Grand Junction, Chester, and Crewe Railways. The reason of this union of ancient and modern lines of communication is obvious. The Romans formed their roads for the purpose of transporting their armies from place to place, and at certain distances along the roads a series of military stations were established. In course of time these stations became villages, towns, and cities such as Chester, Leicester, Lancaster, Manchester. Thus, strange as it may appear, the Milliarium Aureum of the Roman Forum has had much to do with the origin of our most ancient and important towns, and with the formation of the great lines of railway that now carry on the enormous traffic between them. The exposed vaults immediately behind the Arch of Severus, bounding the Forum in this direction, are richly draped with the long, delicate fronds of the maidenhair fern. Shaded from the sun, it grows here in the crevices of the old walls in greater luxuriance and profusion than elsewhere in the city. There is something almost pathetic in this association of the frailest of Nature's productions with the ruins of the most enduring of man's works. Strength that is crumbling to dust and ashes, and tender beauty that ever clings to the skirts of time, as she steps over the sepulchres of power, have here in their combination a deep significance. The growth of the soft fern on the mouldering old stones seems like the sad, sweet smile of Nature over a decay with which she sympathises, but which she cannot share. The same feeling took possession of me when, wandering over the ruins of the Palaces of the Cæsars on a sunny February afternoon, I saw above the hoary masses of stone the rose-tinted bloom of almond-trees. Out of the gray relics of man's highest hour of pride, the leafless almond-rod blossomed as of old in the holy place of the Hebrew Tabernacle; and its miracle of colour and tenderness was like the crimson glow that lingers at sunset upon Alpine heights, telling of a glory that had long vanished from the spot. Beneath these fern-draped vaults is the oldest prison in the world. The celebrated Mamertine Prison takes us back to the very foundation of the city. It was regarded in the time of the Cæsars as one of the most ancient relics of Rome, and was invested with peculiar interest because of its venerable associations. It consists of a series of vaults excavated out of the solid tufa rock, where it slopes down from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum, each lined with massive blocks of red volcanic stone. For a long time these vaults have been used as cellars under a row of tall squalid-looking houses built over them between the Via di Marforio and the Vicolo del Ghettarello; and the sense of smell gives convincing proof that where prisoners of state used to be confined, provisions of wine, cheese, and oil have been stored. The prison has recently passed into the possession of the British and American Archæological Society of Rome, which pays a certain rent to the Italian Government for its use. By this society it is illuminated and shown every Monday afternoon during the season. One of the members conducts the party through the upper and lower prisons, and explains everything of interest connected with them. Dr. Parker, whose labours have done so much to elucidate this part of ancient Rome, was the guide on the occasion of my visit; and as the party was unusually small, we had a better opportunity of seeing what was to be seen, and hearing the guide's observations. The uppermost vault is still below the level of the surrounding soil, and the entrance to it is by the church of San Giuseppe di Falegnami, the patron of the Roman joiners, built over it. Beneath is a subterranean chapel, forming a sort of crypt to the upper church, called San Pietro in Carcere, containing a curious ancient crucifix, an object of great veneration, and hung round with blazing lamps and rusty daggers, pistols, and other deadly instruments, the votive offerings of bandits and assassins who sought at this shrine of the chief of the apostles to make their peace with heaven. Descending from the chapel by a flight of steps we come through a modern door, opened through the wall for the convenience of the pilgrims who annually visit the sacred spot in crowds, to the ancient vestibule, or grand chamber of the prison, commonly called the Prison of St. Peter from the church tradition which asserts that the great apostle was confined here by order of Nero before his martyrdom. The pillar to which he was bound is still pointed out in the cell; and Dr. Parker, lifting up its cover, showed us a well in the pavement of the floor, which is said to have sprung up miraculously to furnish water for the baptism of the jailors Processus and Martinianus whom he had converted, though, unfortunately for this tradition, the fountain is described by Plutarch as existing in the time of Jugurtha's imprisonment. Indeed there is every reason to believe that this chamber was originally a well-house or a subterranean cistern for collecting water at the foot of the Capitol, from which circumstance it derived its name of Tullianum, from _tullius_, the old Etruscan word for _spring_, and not from Servius Tullius, who was erroneously supposed to have built it. The whole chamber in primitive times was filled with water, and the hole in the roof was used for drawing it out. Dr. Parker gave us a little of the water in a goblet, but, notwithstanding its sacred reputation, it tasted very much like ordinary water, being very cool and fresh, with a slight medicinal taste. He also pointed our attention to a rugged hollow in the wall of the staircase, and told us that this was the print of St. Peter's head in the hard stone, said to have been produced as he stumbled and fell against it, coming down the stair a chained prisoner. It requires no small amount of devotional credulity to recognise the likeness or to believe the story. But there is no need for having recourse to such ecclesiastical legends in order to produce a solemn impression in this chamber. Its classical associations are sufficient of themselves to powerfully affect the imagination. There is no reason to doubt the common belief that this is the identical cell in which the famous Jugurtha was starved to death. The romantic history of this African king is familiar to all readers of Sallust, who gives a masterly account of the Jugurthine war. When finally defeated, after having long defied the Roman army, his person was taken possession of by treachery and carried in chains to Rome, where he adorned the triumphal procession of his conqueror Marius, and was finally cast into this cell, perishing there of cold and hunger. What a terrible ending to the career of a fierce, free soldier, who had spent his life on horseback in the boundless sultry deserts of Western Africa! The temperature of the place is exceedingly damp and chill. Jugurtha himself, when stripped of his clothes by the executioners, and let down into it from the hole in the roof, exclaimed with grim humour, "By Hercules, how cold your bath is!" A more hideous and heart-breaking dungeon it is impossible to imagine. Not a ray of light can penetrate the profound darkness of this living tomb. Sallust spoke of the appearance of it in his day, from the filth, the gloom, and the smell, as simply terrific. The height of the vault is about sixteen feet, its length thirty feet, and its breadth twenty-two feet. It is cased with huge masses of volcanic stone, arranged in courses, converging towards the roof, not on the principle of the arch, but extending horizontally to a centre, as we see in some of the Etruscan tombs. This peculiar style of construction proves the very high antiquity of the chamber. This cell played the same part in Roman history which the Tower of London has done in our own. Here, by the orders of Cicero, were strangled Lentulus, Cethegus, and one or two more of the accomplices of Catiline, in his famous conspiracy. Here was murdered, under circumstances of great baseness, Vercingetorix, the young and gallant chief of the Gauls, whose bravery called forth the highest qualities of Julius Cæsar's military genius, and who, when success abandoned his arms, boldly gave himself up as an offering to appease the anger of the Romans. Here perished Sejanus, the minister and son-in-law of Tiberius, who was detected in a conspiracy against the emperor, and richly deserved his fate on account of his cruelty and treachery. Here also was put to death Simon Bar-Gioras, the governor of the revolted Jews during the last dreadful siege of Jerusalem, who was taken prisoner, and after gracing the triumph of the emperor Titus at Rome, shared the fate which usually happened to captives after such an exhibition. From the Tullianum or Prison of St. Peter, we were led through a tortuous subterranean passage of Etruscan character, a hundred yards long, cut out of the rock. It was so low that we had to stoop all the way, and in some places almost to creep, and so narrow that a very stout person would have some difficulty in forcing himself through. The floor was here and there wet with the overflowing of neighbouring drains, which exhaled a noisome smell; and we had to pick our steps carefully through thick greasy mud, which on the slopes was very slippery and disagreeable. We followed each other in Indian file, stooping low, each with a wax taper burning dimly in the damp atmosphere, and presenting a most picturesque appearance. This passage was discovered only a few years ago. Numerous passages of a similar nature are said to penetrate the volcanic rock on which the Capitol stands, in every direction, like the galleries of an ant's nest. Some of these have been exposed, and others walled up. They connect the Prison with the _Cloaca_, and doubtless furnished means by which the bodies of criminals who had been executed might be secretly disposed of. The passage in question brought us to four other chambers, each darker and more dismal than the other, and partially filled with heaps of rubbish and masses of stone that had fallen from their roofs and sides. At the top of each vault there was a man-hole for letting a prisoner down with cords into it. A visit to these six vaults of the Mamertine Prison gives one an idea that can never be forgotten of the cruelty and tyranny which underlay all the gorgeous despotism of Rome, alike in the kingly, republican, and imperial periods. Some of the remains may still be seen of the _Scalæ Gemoniæ_, the "steps of sighs," down which the bodies of those who were executed were thrown, to be exposed to the insults of the populace. The only circumstance that relieves the intolerable gloom of the associations of the Prison is, that Nævius is said to have written two of his plays while he was confined in it for his attacks on the aristocracy; a circumstance which links it to the Tower of London, which has also its literary reminiscences. After having been immured so long in such disagreeable physical darkness--appropriate emblem of the deeds of horror committed in it--we were truly glad to catch at last a faint glimmer of daylight shimmering into the uppermost passage, and to emerge into the open sunshine, from beneath a house at the farther end of the Vicolo del Ghettarello. A modern carriage-road used to pass along this way, leading up to the Piazza del Campidoglio in front of the Capitol, and cutting the Forum into two parts, concealing a considerable portion of it. This obstruction has now been swept away, and the Forum is fully exposed from end to end. Below this old road we observe the "nameless column" of _Childe Harold_, which long stood with its base buried, and was taken for the ruins of a temple. When excavated in 1813 it was found to stand on an isolated pedestal, with an inscription recording that it was erected by the exarch Smaragdus to the emperor Phocas; and the mode in which the offering was made was worthy of the infamous subject and the venal dedicator. Nothing can be clearer from the style of the monument than that it was stolen from the Temple of Vespasian adjoining; for it is an exact fellow of the three graceful Corinthian pillars still standing in front of the Ærarium. It was near this pillar, a few years after it was raised, that Gregory the Great, before he became Pope, saw the young Saxon captives exposed to be sold as slaves, and was so struck with their innocent looks and hopeless fate that he asked about their nationality and religion. Being told that they were Angli, he said, "_Non Angli, sed Angeli_." The impression made upon him led to a mission for converting the natives of Britain, which set out from Rome under St. Augustine in 596. Thus does the column of the infamous usurper Phocas link itself on the historic page with the conversion of Britain to Christianity. Beside the Pillar of Phocas are two large marble screens or parapets, with magnificent bas-reliefs sculptured on both sides. They were discovered about sixteen years ago _in situ_, and are among the most interesting and important objects that have been brought to light by the recent excavations in the Forum. Their peculiar form has given rise to much controversy; some antiquarians regarding them as an avenue along which voters went up to the poll at the popular elections of consuls, designed either to preserve the voters from the pressure of the mob, or to prevent any but properly qualified persons from getting admission; while others believe that the passage between the double screen led to an altar. This latter opinion seems the more plausible one, for the sculptures on one side represent the _suovetaurilia_--a bull, a ram, and a boar, adorned with ribbons and vittæ, walking in file, which were usually sacrificed for the purification of Rome at the Lustrum, as the census taken every five years was called. The other sculptures on the marble screens consist of a number of human figures in greater or less relief; one of them being supposed to commemorate the provision made by Trajan for the children of poor or deceased citizens in the orphanage which he was the first to found in Rome; and the other, the burning of the deeds which contained the evidence of the public debt of the Roman citizens, which the emperor generously cancelled. But the chief significance of the sculptures lies in their background of architectural and other objects indicating the locality of the scenes represented. They place before us a view of the Forum as it appeared in the time of Trajan, and enable us to identify the various objects which then crowded it, and to fix their relative position. The topographical importance of these reliefs has been well discussed by Signor Brizio and Professor Henzen in the _Proceedings of the Roman Archæological Institute_; and also in a paper read by Mr. Nichols before the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1875. By translating into perspective their somewhat conventional representations of temples, basilicas, and arches, Mr. Nichols has given us in his monograph on the subject two very effective pictorial restorations of the Forum as it was in the days of Trajan. Both the screens exhibit, very distinctly sculptured, a fig-tree and a statue on a pedestal, which are interesting from their classical associations. The tree is not the famous Ruminal fig-tree originally of the Palatine and then of the Comitium, but, as Pliny tells us, a self-sown tree which grew in the mid Forum on the site of the Lake of Curtius, which in Ovid's time, as we learn from himself, was a dry space of natural ground marked off by a low fence, and including an altar. This fig-tree, along with a vine and an olive, which grew associated with it, was much prized on account of the shade which it afforded. The figure under the fig-tree, carrying a vine stem on its left shoulder, and uplifting its right arm, has been recognised as that of Marsyas, whose statue was often put in market-places as an emblem of plenty and indulgence. Martial, Horace, Seneca, and Pliny all alluded to this statue in the Forum, which stood near the edge of the Lake of Curtius, and was crowned with garlands by Julia, the daughter of Augustus, during her disgraceful assignations beside it with her lovers at night. On the east side of the Forum the excavations have been stopped in the meantime, as the modern level of the ground is occupied by valuable houses, and two very interesting old churches, Santa Martina and Sta. Adriano. Under the part not yet exhumed lie the remains of the earliest of all the Basilicas, the Basilica of Porcia, built by the elder Cato in the immediate vicinity of the Curia, and also those of the famous Basilica Æmilia, which probably extended along the greater part of the east side of the Forum. Some of the most important monuments of ancient Rome, known to us only by the writings of classic authors, doubtless lie buried in this locality. Under the church of Sta. Adriano, the famous Curia Hostilia or Senate House, attributed to Tullus Hostilius, stood. The original building was destroyed by fire at the funeral of Clodius, through the carelessness of the populace, who insisted upon burning his body within it; but it was replaced by the Curia Julia, which was rebuilt by Augustus, who added to it an important structure, called in the Ancyran inscription Chalcidicum, for the convenience of the senators. Around it stood the statues of men who had rendered important services to the state; and not far off was an altar and statue of Victory, which formed the last rallying-ground of expiring paganism against the dominating Christianity of the empire. In the year 382 the Christian party had removed this altar and statue; and when their restoration was demanded by Symmachus, the request was refused by Ambrose, as opposed to the conscience of the Christian senators; and this decision being ratified by the votes of the assembly, the doom of paganism, as the national religion, was in consequence sealed. The Curia Julia ceased to serve its original purpose at the death of Caligula, when the consuls convoked the senate in the Capitol instead, to mark their aversion to the rule of the Cæsars; and the building was probably burnt down and finally rebuilt in the time of Diocletian. One of the most curious uses to which it was put, was to mark the _Suprema tempestas_, which closed the hours of legal business, by means of its shadow projected on the pavement; a primitive mode of reckoning time which existed before the first Punic war, and was afterwards superseded by a sun-dial and a clepsydra or water-clock erected in the Forum. Near the Curia under the present roadway must lie the site of the Comitium, or meeting-place of the Roman burgesses. This was far the most important spot in the Forum in the days of the Republic. It was not a covered building, but a templum or a consecrated space open to the air. In its area grew a fig-tree, in commemoration of the sacred tree which sheltered Romulus and Remus in their infancy; and we read of drops of blood and milk falling upon it as omens from the sky. One of the stones on its pavement, from its extraordinary blackness, was called the tombstone of Romulus, and a number of statues adorned its sides, including the three Sibyls, which gave the name of "In Tria Fata" down to medieval times to this part of the Forum. From its rostra, or stone platform, addresses were delivered by political agitators to open-air assemblies of the people. The Comitium reminds us very strikingly of the municipal origin of the Roman empire. In primitive times that mode of government was admirably adapted to the necessities of the city; but when Rome became mistress of the world it was found unfitted to discharge imperial functions. The establishment of the monarchical form of Government overthrew the Comitium, and with it the very life of the Roman city. In front of the church of S. Adriano--said to be no other than the actual Curia of Diocletian, though greatly altered and partly rebuilt by Pope Honorius I. in the year 630--are some fragments of the Basilica Æmilia. This court was erected on the site of the Basilica Fulvia, and superseded by a more splendid building called the Basilica Pauli, which was the Bourse or Exchange of ancient Rome. The building of this last Basilica was interrupted for a long time by the disorders consequent on the assassination of Cæsar. When finished, it was considered to be one of the most magnificent buildings in the world; and was especially admired on account of its beautiful columns of Phrygian marble. These were afterwards removed to decorate the church of St. Paul outside the gate, where some of them that survived the burning of the old edifice may be seen behind the high altar of the new. Between the Curia and the Basilica Æmilia is supposed to have stood the celebrated Temple of Janus, built according to Livy by Numa Pompilius, the closing or opening of which was the signal of peace or war. It was probably at first one of the ancient gates in a line of fortifications uniting the Capitol with the Palatine; and afterwards comprised, besides a passage-way through which a great part of the traffic of Rome passed, a diminutive bronze temple containing a bronze statue of the venerable deity of the Sabines, whose one face looked to the east, and the other to the west. The bronze gates of the temple were closed by Augustus for the third time after the battle of Actium, and finally shut when Christianity became the religion of the empire. Procopius saw the temple still standing in the sixth century; and he tells us that, during the siege of the city by the Goths, when it was defended by Belisarius, some of the adherents of the old pagan superstition made a secret attempt to open the shrine and set the god at liberty. One gazes at the wall of earth and rubbish, fifteen feet deep, marking the present limit of the excavations in this direction, with a profound longing that the obstruction could be removed at once, and the rich antiquarian treasures lying hid underneath brought to light. Few things in Rome appealed more powerfully to my curiosity than this huge bank of _débris_, behind and beneath which imagination was free to picture all kinds of possibilities. On the part that has been uncovered, we see a row of brick bases on which had stood monuments of gilt bronze to some of the distinguished men of Rome; the remains of a line of shops of the third century demolished during the excavations; the pedestal of what is said by some to have been Domitian's and by others Constantine's gigantic equestrian statue; and farther down, rude heaps of masonry, belonging to the substructures of the Rostra and Temple of Julius Cæsar. Part of the curved wall of the Rostra may still be seen built of large blocks of travertine; and in front is a fixed platform, where a large number of people could stand and listen to the speaker. This Rostra is specially interesting because it was constructed in the year of Cæsar's death, and was intended to mark the design of the great triumvir to destroy the memory of the old oligarchy by separating the rostra or "hustings" from their former connection with the senate and comitia, and make them entirely popular institutions. The front of it was afterwards adorned by Augustus with the beaks of ships taken at Actium. The small Heroön or Temple of Cæsar behind the Rostra was erected on the spot where the body of Cæsar was burned before the house which he had so long inhabited, and in a part of the Forum especially associated with his greatest political triumphs. It superseded an altar and lofty column of Numidian marble, at which the people had previously offered sacrifices to the memory of their idol, the first mortal in Rome raised to the rank of the gods; an honour justified, they imagined, not only by his great deeds, but also by his alleged descent from Venus Anadyomene. Running down the middle of the Forum is a rough, ancient causeway, with its blocks of lava still in their original position, but so disjointed that it is no easy task walking over them. On the other side is the raised platform of the Basilica Julia of Augustus, extending from north to south, the whole length of the Forum, with steps leading up to it from the paved street. This stupendous law court, the grandest in Rome where Trajan sat to administer justice, and from whose roof Caligula day after day lavishly threw down money to the people, has, by its own identity being established beyond dispute, more than any other discovery helped to determine the topography of the Roman Forum. It was begun by Julius Cæsar on the site of the older Basilica Sempronia, which had previously partially replaced the _Veteres Tabernæ_ or shops of early times required for the trades carried on in a market-place, and also the schools for children where Appius Claudius had first seen Virginia reading. Having been partially destroyed by fire, Augustus afterwards completed and greatly enlarged the building. It was used as the place of meeting of the _Centumviri_, a court which we learn from the younger Pliny, who himself practised before it, had a hundred and eight judges sitting in four separate tribunals, within sight and hearing of one another, like the old courts in Westminster Hall. The Basilica is not yet entirely excavated, a large part of its breadth being still under modern buildings. It consisted of a series of plain, massive arches built of travertine. The pavement is wonderfully perfect, being composed of a mosaic pattern of valuable marbles, doubtless saved from destruction or removal to build some church or palace by the fortunate circumstance that the ruins of the Basilica covered and concealed them at an early period. On this pavement and on the steps leading up to it are incised numerous squares and circles which are supposed to have been tabulæ lusoriæ, or gaming-tables. A few have inscriptions near them alluding to their use. Cicero mentions the dice-players of the Forum with reprobation; and the fact that such sports should have intruded into the courts of justice shows that the Romans had lost at this time their early veneration for the law. The rows of brick arches seen on the platform are mere modern restorations, placed there by Cavaliere Rosa to indicate the supposed original plan of the building. At the south end of it an opening in the pavement shows a part of the Cloaca Maxima, with the sewerage passing through it underneath. The ancient street between the Basilica Julia and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, is undoubtedly the famous _Vicus Tuscus_, so called after the Etruscan soldiers who belonged to the army of Porsenna, and, being defeated at Ariccia, took refuge in this part of Rome. This street, so often mentioned by classic writers, led to the Circus Maximus, and is now identified with the Via dei Fienili; the point of departure from the Forum being marked by a statue of Vertumnus, the Etruscan god, the ruined pedestal of which, in all likelihood, is that which has lately been unveiled on the steps at the north-east corner of the Basilica Julia. It was considered almost as sacred as the Via Sacra itself, being the route taken by the great procession of the Circensian games, in which the statues of the gods were carried in cars from the Capitol through the Forum to the circus. In front of the Basilica Julia, and on the opposite side of the way, so numerous were the statues which Julius Cæsar contrived to crowd together, that the Emperor Constantine, during his famous visit to Rome, is said to have been almost stupefied with amazement. Some such feeling is produced in our own minds when we reflect that the bewildering array of sculptures in the Roman galleries, admired by a concourse of pilgrims from every country, are but chance discoveries, unnoticed by history, and of no account in their own time. What must have been the feast of splendour of which these are but the crumbs! Perhaps the most beautiful of the ruins of the Forum are the three marble columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux near the Basilica Julia. They are the only prominent objects on the south-west side of the Forum, and at once arrest the eye by their matchless symmetry and grace. Time has dealt very hardly with them, battering their shapely columns and rich Corinthian capitals, and discolouring their pure white Pentelic marble. But it has not succeeded in destroying their wonderful beauty; and the russet hues with which they have been stained by the long lapse of the ages have rather added to them the charm of antique picturesqueness. They rest upon a huge mound of broken masonry, in the interstices of which Nature has sown her seeds of minute life, which spread over it a tender pall of bright vegetation. The three columns are bound together by iron rods, and still further kept in position by the fragments of architrave and cornice supported by them. They are forty-eight feet in height and nearly five feet in diameter, while their flutings are nine inches across. Around the basement a large quantity of broken columns, capitals, and pedestals has been disinterred, some of which have acquired an historic renown on account of the purposes which they have served in the fine arts. Michael Angelo converted one huge fragment into the pedestal of the celebrated bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which he transferred from its original site in front of the Arch of Septimius Severus, where it had stood for thirteen or fourteen centuries, to the front of the Capitol; while out of another fragment Raphael carved the well-known statue of Jonah sitting on a whale, to be seen in the Chigi Chapel of Sta. Maria del Popolo, the only piece of sculpture executed by the immortal painter. The Italian Government has entirely excavated the ruins, and thus set at rest the numerous controversies among antiquaries regarding its true name. The temple of Castor and Pollux probably dates as far back as the year 487 before Christ, when the dictator Postumius vowed to build a monument in commemoration of his victory at the great battle of Lake Regillus, with which the mythical history of Rome closes. It recalls the well-known romantic legend of the mysterious interference of the Dioscuri in that memorable struggle which Macaulay has woven into one of the most spirited of his Lays. The temple is supposed to have been erected on the spot where the divine Twins announced the victory to the people in the Forum at the close of the day. About twenty feet from the eastern corner of the temple are slight remains of a shallow oval basin, which has been identified as the lake or fountain of Juturna, the wife of Janus, the Sabine war-god, where the Dioscuri washed their armour and horses from the blood and dust of the fray. It was probably at first a natural spring gushing out of the tufa rock of the Palatine Hill, but being dried up, it became in later times a _lacus_ or basin artificially supplied with water. For long ages afterwards the anniversary of the great battle was celebrated every year on the fifteenth of July by a splendid pageant worthy of the greatness of the empire. The Roman knights, clothed in purple robes, and crowned with olive wreaths, and bearing their trophies, first offered sacrifice in the shrine of Castor and Pollux, and then formed a procession, in which five thousand persons sometimes took part, which filed in front of the temple and marched through the city. The original building having stood for nearly five hundred years, it began to exhibit signs of decay, and accordingly it was rebuilt upon the old foundations by Augustus, and dedicated by Tiberius. The podium or mass of rubble masonry therefore which we see beneath the three columns at the present day belongs to the time of the kings, while the columns themselves belong to the imperial period. Caligula used the temple as a vestibule to his palace on the Palatine Hill immediately behind. On the brow of that hill, separated only by the pavement of the modern street, projects a labyrinth of vaults, arches, and broken walls, a mighty maze of desolation without a plan, so interspersed with verdure and foliage that "it looks as much a landscape as a ruin." This is supposed to be the palace of Caligula; and its remains abundantly attest the extraordinary magnificence of this imperial domain, which contained all that was rich and rare from the golden East, from beyond the snowy Alps, and from Greece, the home of art. The substructions of this mighty ruin are truly astonishing; they are so vast, so massive, so enduring, that they seem as if built by giants. Concealed by modern houses built up against the foot of the palace, some of the remains of the famous bridge which Caligula threw obliquely over the Forum can be made out; two of the tall brick piers are visible above the houses, and in the gable of the outer house the spring of one of the arches can be distinctly seen. The bridge was constructed by Caligula for the purpose of connecting his palace with the Capitol, on the summit of which stood the magnificent Temple of Jupiter, so that, as he said himself, he might be able to converse conveniently with his colleague, the greatest of the gods! It is probable that it served more than one purpose; that it was used both as an aqueduct and a road for horses and chariots from the Palatine to the Capitol. Be this as it may, it must have been a stupendous structure, nearly a quarter of a mile long, and about a hundred feet high, striding over the whole diagonal of the Forum, with a double or triple tier of arches, like the remains of the Claudian aqueduct that spans the Campagna. The immediate vicinity of the Temple of Castor and Pollux is full of interest to the classical student. To the right of it are the remains of the Regia or Royal Palace, the official residence of the early kings of Rome, and afterwards, during the whole period of the Republic, of the Pontifex Maximus, as the real head of the State as well as the Church. Numa Pompilius resided here in the hope that, by occupying neutral ground, he might conciliate the Latins of the Palatine and the Sabines of the Capitoline Hills. It was also the home of Julius Cæsar during the greater part of his life, where Calpurnia, his wife, dreamed that the pediment of the house had fallen down, and the sacred weapons in the Sacrarium were stirred by a supernatural power; an omen that was but too truly fulfilled when Cæsar went forth to the Forum on the fatal Ides of March, and was carried back a bloody corpse from the Curia of Pompey. It ceased to become the residence of the Pontifex when Augustus bought the house of Hortensius on the Palatine, and elected to dwell there instead; and was therefore given over to the Vestal Virgins to increase their scanty accommodation. The _Atrium Vestæ_, or convent of the Vestal Virgins, adjoined the Regia, and behind it, along the lower slope of the Palatine, stretched the sacred grove of Vesta, which seems to have been used as a place of privileged interment for the sisterhood, as a number of gravestones with the names of vestal virgins upon them were found in digging the foundations of the church of Sta. Maria Liberatrice in the seventeenth century. The residence of the Pontifex Maximus and of the Vestal Virgins, who were regarded as the highest and holiest personages in the State, gave an air of great respectability to this neighbourhood, and it became in consequence the fashionable quarter of Rome. Close beside the house of the Vestal Virgins was the far-famed Temple of Vesta, in which they ministered, whose podium or basement, which is a mere circular mound of rough masonry, may be seen on the spot. The worship of Vesta, the goddess of the household fire, was one of the most primitive forms of religion. It doubtless arose from the great difficulty in prehistoric times of producing fire by rubbing two sticks against one another. Such a flame once procured would be carefully guarded against extinction in some central spot by the unmarried women of the household, who had nothing else to do. And from this central fire all the household fires of the settlement would be obtained. A relic of this prehistoric custom existed in the rule that if the sacred vestal fire was ever allowed to go out it could only be kindled anew by the primitive process of friction. The worship of Vesta survived an old world of exhausted craters and extinct volcanoes, with which was buried a world of lost nations. The Pelasgians brought to Italy the stone of the domestic hearth, the foundation of the family, and the tombstone, the boundary of the fields divided after the death of the head of the family, the foundation of property; and upon this double base arose the great distinctive edifice of the Roman Law, the special gift of Rome to the civilisation of the world. Rhea Sylvia, mother of Romulus, was a Vestal Virgin of Alba, which shows that the worship of Vesta existed in this region long before the foundation of Rome. The origin of the first temple and of the institutions of Vestal Virgins for its service was attributed to Numa Pompilius. The first building, as Ovid tells us, was constructed with wattled walls and a thatched roof like the primitive huts of the inhabitants. It was little more than a covered fireplace. It was the public hearth of the new city, round which were gathered all the private ones. On it burned continually the sacred fire, the symbol of the life of the state, which was believed to have been brought from Troy, and the continuance of which was connected by superstition with the fortunes of Rome. In the secret penetralia of the temple, where no man was allowed to enter, was kept with scrupulous care, for its preservation was equally bound up with the safety of the empire, the Palladium, or image of Pallas, saved from the destruction of Troy, and which was supposed to have originally fallen from heaven. The circular form and the domed roof of the temple were survivals of the prehistoric huts of the Aborigines, which were invariably round, as the traces of their foundations show. With the exception of the Palladium, which remained invisible during all the ages to ordinary mortal eyes until the destructive fire in the Forum, in the reign of Commodus, compelled the Vestal Virgins to expose it in removing it for safety to the imperial court, there was in primitive times no statue or material representation of the goddess except the sacred fire in the mysterious shrine of the temple. Indeed the Romans, as Plutarch tells us, raised no statue to the gods until the year of Rome 170. In this respect the religion of the Romans, whose divinities had no participation in the life and passions of men, and had nothing to do with the human form, differed widely from the religion of the Greeks, which, inspired by the sentiment of the beautiful in man and nature, gave birth to art. The Temple of Vesta, as might have been expected, shared in all the wonderful changes of Roman history. It was abandoned when the Gauls entered Rome, and the Vestal Virgins took the sacred fire and the Palladium to Cære in Etruria for safety. It was destroyed two hundred and forty-one years before Christ, when L. Metellus, the Pontifex Maximus at the time, saved the Palladium with the loss of his eyesight, and consequently of his priesthood, for which a statue was erected to him in the Capitol. It was consumed in the great fire of Nero, and rebuilt by Vespasian, on some of whose coins it is represented. It was finally burnt down in the fire of Commodus, which destroyed at the same time many important buildings in the Forum. The worship of Vesta was prohibited by Gratianus in the year 382 of our era, and the public maintenance of the Vestal Virgins abandoned, in spite of the protestations of Symmachus and the forlorn hope of the pagan party. Great as was the reverence paid to the shrine of Vesta, not being a temple in the proper sense of the term, as it was not consecrated by augury, it had not the right of sanctuary. Mucius Scævola, the unfortunate Pontifex Maximus, was murdered beside the altar by order of Marius, and his blood sprinkled the image of the goddess; and Piso Licinianus, the adopted son of Galba, after the assassination of that emperor beside the Curtian Lake in the Forum, was dragged out from the innermost shrine of the temple, to which he had fled for refuge, and barbarously massacred at the door. But it is impossible to dwell upon all the remarkable events with which this haunted shrine of Rome's earliest and most beautiful worship is associated. Certainly no greater object of interest has been exhumed among all the antiquities of the Eternal City than the little round mass of shapeless masonry which has been identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the basement of the world-renowned temple, the household hearth of old Rome. Opposite the Temple of Vesta, at the north-east corner of the Forum, where it ends, is the magnificent façade of the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, the most perfect of all the Roman temples. There are six splendid Corinthian columns in front and two at the sides, each composed of a single block of green ripple-marked Cipollino marble, about forty-six feet in height and five feet in diameter, with bases and capitals of marble, originally white, but now rusty and discoloured by age; all beautifully proportioned and carved in the finest style of ancient art. These columns were buried to half their height in medieval times; and houses were built up against and between them, the marks of whose roofs are still visible in indentations near their summits. These houses were removed, and the ground excavated down to the bases of the columns in the sixteenth century by Palladio, revealing a grand flight of marble steps, twenty-one in number, leading up to the temple from the street. The excavations at that time were made for the purpose of finding marbles and building materials for the Church of St. Peter's. Two sides of the cella of the temple still remain, formed by large massive blocks of peperino, probably taken from the second wall of Rome, which must have passed very near to the east end of this temple; for the ancient Roman architects were as unscrupulous in appropriating the relics of former ages as their successors. The roughness of these walls was hidden by an outer casing of marble, ornamented with pilasters, of which only the small capitals now remain. Both the cella and the portico still retain a large portion of their magnificent marble entablature; and the frieze and cornice are richly covered with carvings of vases and candelabra, guarded by griffins, exquisite in design and execution. The marble slabs that covered the whole outside of the temple had been burnt for lime in a kiln that stood in front of the portico in the sixteenth century, and in this lime-kiln were found fragments of statues, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions, which were about to be destroyed in that barbarous fashion. The temple was originally begun by Antoninus Pius to the memory of his unworthy wife Faustina in the year 142 of our era, but being unfinished at his death, it was dedicated by the senate to both their names. We see it represented in all its magnificence on some of the coins of this emperor. In the year 1430 Pope Martin V. built over its remains a church called S. Lorenzo in Miranda, whose singular ugliness was in striking contrast to the grandeur of the venerable ruin which embraced it. The floor of this church was ten feet above the original level of the temple, and its roof was carried twenty feet above its cornice. It contained several tombs of the Roman apothecaries, to whose Corporation it belonged. No one will regret that it has been removed; the excavations in front of it having reduced the level of the ground far below its doorway, and thus cut off the approach. It is strange to think of the two different kinds of worship carried on at such widely separated intervals within this remarkable building, first a pagan temple and then a Christian church--worship so different in name and yet so like in reality; for the divine honours paid to a mortal emperor and his wife were transferred in after ages to frail mortals such as Saint Laurence and the Virgin Mary. We are reminded by the inscription above the portico of the temple, "Divo Antonino et Divæ Faustina," that the government of the Cæsars had become an earthly omnipotence in the estimation of the Romans and the subject nations. They looked alone to Cæsar for all their good, and from him they feared their chiefest evil. He had become to them their providence or their fate. The adoration offered to him was not a mere act of homage or sign of fealty, but was most truly and in the highest sense a worship as to a divine being. The view in this part of the Forum, looking down from the Antonine Temple, is most striking and suggestive. It reveals some of the grandest objects of ancient Rome. Immediately beyond is the hoary old church of SS. Cosma e Damiano, with mosaics of the sixth century on its tribune, built out of three ancient temples, as Dr. Parker has clearly proved--the round Temple of Romulus Maxentius, the Temple of Venus, and the Temple of Rome. The south wall of this last-mentioned temple, built of huge square blocks of tufa, to which the marble plan of Rome was fastened by metal hooks, may still be seen in the church; and it is interesting as being the last pagan temple which remained in use in Rome. Here was the last struggle of paganism with the unbelief which itself inspired. The gods of the Pantheon had lost all significance. The worship of abstract qualities, such as Concord and Victory, or of the personification of a local providence in the city of Rome itself, could not satisfy the longing of the human soul. As religion decayed the worship of the gods was superseded by the worship of the emperor. Their statues were decapitated and the head of the emperor was placed upon them. On the statue of Olympic Jove appeared the bust of the contemptible Caligula; and this incongruous adaptation represented the change of the popular faith from its former heavenly idealisations to the most grovelling fetish worship of the time. This deification of the emperors avenged its terrible blasphemy by the sublime wickedness of those who were so raised above humanity. Here, in this last pagan temple of Rome, converted into one of the earliest Christian churches, we see the darkness and despair of the heathen world preparing for that joyful morning light of Christianity which has transferred the faith of mankind to foundations which can never more be shaken. Immediately beyond in the background are the huge gloomy arches of the Basilica of Constantine, fretted with coffers, suspended in mid-air for upwards of sixteen centuries, in defiance of the laws of gravity and the ravages of time and of human destroyers, taken as a model for churches by Roman architects, though built originally for a law court. In front is the Arch of Titus, with its well-known sculptures of the spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem, spanning the highest point of the Via Sacra. And closing up the view is the grandest ruin in the world, the stupendous broken circle of the Colosseum, rising tier above tier into the blue sky, burnt deep brown by the suns of ages, holding the spectator breathless with wonder, and thrilling the mind with the awful associations connected with it. The Forum lies like an open sepulchre in the heart of old Rome. All is death there; the death of nature and the death of a race whose long history has done more to shape the destiny of the world than any other. The soil beneath our feet is formed by the ashes of an extinct fire, and by the dust of a vanished empire. Everywhere the ruins of time and of man are mingled with the relics of an older creation; and the sculptured marbles of the temples and law courts, where Cæsar worshipped and Cicero pled, lie scattered amid the tufa-blocks, the cinders of the long quiescent volcanoes of the Campagna. Nature and man have both accomplished their work in this spot; and the relics they have left behind are only the exuviæ of the chrysalis out of which the butterfly has emerged, or the empty wave-worn shells left high and dry upon an ancient coast-line. It is a remarkable circumstance that the way in which the Forum originated was the very way in which it was destroyed. The cradle of Roman greatness became its tomb. The Forum originated in the volcanic fires of earth; it passed away in the incendiary fires of man. In the month of May 1084 the Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, came with his troops to rescue Gregory VII. from the German army which besieged Rome. Then broke out--whether by accident or design is not known--the terrible conflagration which extended from the Capitol to the Coelian Hill, but raged with the greatest intensity in the Forum. In that catastrophe classical Rome passed away, and from the ashes of the fire arose the Phoenix of modern Rome. The greatest of physical empires was wrecked on this spot, and out of the wreck was constructed the greatest spiritual empire the world has ever known. For the Roman Pontificate, to use the famous saying of Hobbes, was but the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. CHAPTER VI THE EGYPTIAN OBELISKS Among the first objects that arrest the attention and powerfully excite the curiosity of the visitor in Rome are the Egyptian obelisks. They remind him impressively that the oldest things in this city of ages are but as of yesterday in comparison with these imperishable relics of the earliest civilisation. At one time it is said that there were no less than forty-eight obelisks erected in Rome,--six of the largest size and forty-two of the smaller,--all conveyed at enormous cost and with almost incredible labour from the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Tiber. Upwards of thirty of them have perished without leaving any trace behind. They are doubtless buried deep under the ruins of ancient Rome, but the chance of their disinterment is very problematical. One obelisk, indeed, was exposed a hundred and forty years ago in the square of the principal church of the Jesuits, near the Pantheon; but being found to be broken, and also to underlie a corner of the church and the greater part of an adjoining palace, so that it could not be extracted without seriously injuring these buildings, it was covered up again, and was thus lost to the world. As it is, we find in Rome the largest collection of obelisks that exists at the present day in the world, and the best field for studying them. Obelisks were dedicated to the sun, which was the central object of worship, and occupied the most conspicuous position in the religious system of the oldest nations. Sun-worship, that which waited upon some hill-top to catch the first beams of the morning that created a new day, is the oldest and the most natural of all kinds of worship. He was adored as the source of all the life and motion and force in the world by the most primitive people; and we find numerous traces of this ancient sun-worship in the rude stone monuments, with their cup-shaped symbols, that have survived on our moors, in many of the old customs which still linger in our Christianity, and in the name by which the most sacred day of the week is commonly known among us. All the benefits conferred upon our world by the sun must have been strikingly apparent to the ancient Egyptians, dwelling in a land exposed to the sun's vertical rays, and clothed with almost tropical beauty and luxuriance. When they watched the ebbing of the overflowing waters of the Nile, and saw the moist earth on which the sun's rays fell, quickened at once into a marvellous profusion of plant and animal life, they naturally regarded the sun as the Creator, and so deified him in that capacity. The origin of all life, vegetable and animal, to those who stood, as it were, by its cradle, when the world was young and haunted by heaven, seemed a greater mystery and wonder than it is to us in these later faithless ages. Long familiarity with it in its full-grown proportions has made it commonplace to us. Both the obelisk and the pyramid were solar symbols, the obelisk being the symbol of the rising sun, and the pyramid of the setting. The fundamental idea of the obelisk was that of creation by light; that of the pyramid, death through the extinction of light. And this symbolical difference between the two objects was practically expressed by the different situations in which they were placed; the obelisks being all located on the eastern side of the Nile, that being the region of the rising sun, and of the dawn of life; while the pyramids are all found on the western bank of the river, the region of the sunset, with its awfully sterile hills and silent untravelled desert of sand from which no tidings had ever come to living man, where the dead were buried under the shades of night, in their rock-cut cemeteries. It might thus seem, that by placing obelisks in our churchyards in association with the dead, we were violating their original significance, and guilty of adding another to the many incongruities which have arisen from adopting pagan symbols in Christian burying-places. But in reality we find a deeper reason for the association. In some of the oldest sculptures in Egypt, an obelisk is represented as standing on the top of a pyramid; and by this combination it was meant to signify the power of life triumphing over death. And hence the obelisk is the most suitable of all forms to indicate in our cemeteries the glorious truth of the resurrection, life rising victorious out of the transitory condition of death. And how admirably did the obelisk lend itself to its symbolical purposes! There was a most wonderful harmony between the idea and the object which expressed it. Being composed of the most durable of all materials, the hard indestructible granite, the eternal sun was thus fittingly represented by an object that lifts its stern finger in unchangeable defiance of the vicissitudes of the seasons and the ages. Its highly polished surface and rich rosy red colour, its sharply defined lines and narrow proportions, combined with its immense height, suggested the brilliancy and hue and form of a pencil of light. Its tall red column flashing in the strong morning radiance, like a tongue of flame mounting up to its source in the solar fire, or like a ray of the halo that rises up on the low horizon of the Libyan desert, when the dawn has crimsoned all the eastern heavens, might thus well be selected as the most suitable object to bring the invisible sun-god within the ken of human vision and the range of human worship. The poetical imagination may detect a significance even in the difference between the material used in the construction of the obelisk, and that used in the construction of the pyramid, though this may not have been designed by the makers. The obelisks are all formed of granite, the foundation-stone of the globe, belonging to the oldest azoic formation, which laid down the first basis for the appearing of life. The pyramids were nearly all made of nummulitic limestone composed of the remains of organic life; a material which belonged to the latest geologic ages, when whole generations and different platforms of life had come and gone. Thus significantly does the obelisk of granite suggest by its material as by its form the origin of life, as the pyramid suggests by its material and form the extinction of life. But not only was the obelisk raised in connection with the worship of the sun,--it was also intended to honour the reigning monarch who erected it, and whose name and titles were engraved upon it along with the name of the sun. For it was a fundamental idea of the Egyptian religion that the king was not only the son of the solar god, but also the visible human representative of his glory. This was a favourite conception of the ancients. The Incas of Peru regarded themselves as direct descendants of the sun; and the monarchs of the burning Asiatic lands, where the sun rules and dominates everything, assume the name and title of his sons, and clothe themselves with his splendour. The obelisks were thus the symbols of the two great correlative conceptions of the sun in the heavens, and his satellite and representative on the earth--god and the king. This Egyptian faith, as attested by the obelisks, the oldest of all the creeds, antecedent to the theologies of India, Greece, and Rome, ceased not to be venerated till the advent of Christianity swept all material worship away. It awed, as Mr. Cooper has well observed, the mixed multitude in Alexandria under the Cæsars, as it had done the primitive Egyptians under the oldest Pharaohs. It extended over a space of more than three thousand years. During all that long period the obelisk was "the emblem at once of the vivifying power of the sun and of the divine nature of the king, a witness for the divine claim of the sun to be worshipped, and of the right divine of the king to rule." Where is there in all the world, in its most ancient cities, in its loneliest deserts, any class of objects which has been held continuously sacred for so long a time? The description of the sun itself by Ossian applies almost equally well to his worship as thus represented. Obelisks as symbols of the sun and of the creative power of nature, were not confined to Egypt. They belonged to the mythology of all ancient nations. There are modifications of them in India, in prehistoric America, and among the archæological remains of our own country. They were common objects in connection with the Assyrian, Persian and Phoenician religions. And it has been conjectured with much plausibility that the image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth six, the usual proportions of an obelisk, which Nebuchadnezzar set up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon, and commanded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego to adore, was in reality an obelisk after the Egyptian pattern. Such an obelisk was often gilded, and was associated with the worship of the king as its material purpose, and with the creation and origin of life as its symbolic meaning. And if this was the case, there was an unusual aggravation in this idolatry; for the Egyptian obelisks themselves were never worshipped, but were always regarded as the signs of the higher powers whose glory they expressed. The question is naturally asked, Where were the obelisks originally placed? At the present day we find those of them that remain in Egypt, solitary objects without anything near them, and those that have been carried to other lands have been set up in great open squares, or on river embankments in the heart of the largest cities. Fortunately, there is no doubt at all on this point. They stood in pairs at the doors of the great temples, one on each side, where they served the same purpose which the campanile of the Italian church or the spire of a cathedral serves at the present day. Indeed, architects are of opinion that church towers and steeples are mere survivals of the old Egyptian obelisks, which furnished the original conception. The tower corresponded to the shaft of the obelisk, and the steeple to the sharp pyramidal part in which the summit of the obelisk terminated. And though there is usually only one spire or tower now in connection with our churches, there used to be two, as many old examples still extant testify, one standing on each side of the principal entrance after the manner of the Egyptian obelisks. The slender round towers of Brechin and Abernethy, and of Devenish and other places in Ireland, capped by a conical stone roof terminating in a single stone, which were for a long time a puzzle to the antiquary, are now ascertained to be simply steeples connected with Christian churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries. And just as these towers are now left isolated and solitary without a trace of the buildings with which they were associated, so the Egyptian temples have passed away, and the obelisks are left alone in the desert. But we can reconstruct in imagination the massive and lofty buildings in front of which they stood, and where they showed to the greatest advantage. Instead of being dwarfed by the enormous masses of the propylons, their height gained by the near comparison. The obelisks in our squares and vast open spaces have their effect destroyed by the buildings being at a distance from them. There is no scale near at hand to assist the eye in estimating the height; consequently they seem much smaller than they really are. But when seen in the narrow precincts of a temple court, from whose floor they shot up into the blue sky overhead, surrounded by great columns and lofty gates, breaking the monotony of the heavy masses of masonry of which the Egyptian temples were composed, and acting the part which campanili and spires perform in modern churches, a standard of comparison was thus furnished which greatly enhanced their magnitude. Nothing could be grander than the objects associated with the obelisks where they stood. The temple was approached by an avenue of huge sphinxes, in some cases a mile and a half long. Drawing nearer, the worshipper saw two lofty obelisks towering up a hundred feet in height, on the right and left. Behind these he would observe with awe four or six gigantic statues seated with their hands on their knees. And at the back of the statues he would gaze with astonishment upon two massive towers or pylons, broader at the base than at the summit, two hundred feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet high, crowned by a gigantic cornice, with their whole surface covered with coloured sculptures, representing one of the great dramas in the reign of a victorious monarch. Above them would rise the tall masts of coloured cedar-wood, inserted in sinkings chased into the wall, surmounted by the expanded banners of the king, or the heraldic bearings of the temple floating in the breeze. Between the huge propylons opened up the great gateway of the temple, sixty feet high, which led into a vast court, surrounded by columns and open to the sky. Beyond were walls whose roofs were supported by a forest of enormous pillars, which seemed to have been raised by giants. Each hall diminished in size, but increased in sacredness, until the inmost sanctuary was reached; small, dark, and awful in its obscurity. Here was the holy shrine in the shape of a boat or ark, having in it a kind of chest partially veiled, in which was hid the mystic symbol of the god. Like the tabernacle of Israel, the common people were not allowed to go farther than the outer court beyond the obelisks; only kings and priests being permitted to penetrate into the interior recesses, there to observe the ritual ceremonies of the mysterious Egyptian worship. On the plan of the Egyptian temple were modelled the sacred buildings of the Jews; and the famous pillars of burnished brass, wonderful for their workmanship and their costly material, which Solomon erected in the court of his temple, called Jachin and Boaz, had their prototypes in the obelisks of the Nile. The obelisk belongs essentially to a level country; and there is no habitable region in the world so uniformly flat and unbroken by any elevations or depressions of surface as the valley of the Nile. There it produces its greatest effect; its size is not dwarfed by surrounding heights, and comes out by contrast with the small objects that diversify the plain. It forms a conspicuous landmark, a salient point on which the eye may rest with relief as it takes in the wide featureless horizon. In an artificial landscape, where there is no wild unmixed nature, where every inch of ground is cultivated, it is the appropriate culmination of that triumph of human art which is visible everywhere. It was a sense of this harmony of relation that induced the builders of the great cathedrals and temples of the world to place them, not amid varied and rugged scenery, where they might be brought into comparison with nature's work, but uniformly on level expanses of land. There they form the crowning symbol of man's loving care and painstaking endeavour, and give to the artificial landscape, which man has entirely subdued for his own uses, the finishing touch of power. Obelisks are the most enduring monuments of antiquity, and yet no class of objects has undergone such extraordinary vicissitudes. The history of the changes to which they have been subjected reads like a romance. At a remote age, not long after they were erected, most of them were cast down during some political catastrophe, which shook the whole country to its foundations. Under a subsequent dynasty the obelisks seem to have been lifted up to their former places, and regarded with the old veneration. After the lapse of nearly a thousand years, the land was again convulsed by a terrible revolution, the nature of which is still wrapped up in almost impenetrable mystery. A warlike migratory race came from the north-east, and subdued the whole country. This is known as the Hyksos invasion, or the invasion of the Shepherd Kings, and produced the same effects in Egypt as the Norman invasion produced in England. Previous to this period the horse seemed to have been altogether unknown; but after this date it uniformly appears in Egyptian paintings and sculptures. The Hyksos must therefore have been a pastoral race, in all likelihood belonging to the plains of Tartary; and, mounted on horses, they would find little difficulty in overcoming the foot soldiery of Egypt. When they had obtained possession of the country, they burnt down the cities, demolished the temples, and overthrew the obelisks. This disaster, the most dreadful which Egypt had ever known, followed suddenly upon a period of extraordinary prosperity, when new cities were built, and old cities enlarged; works of great public utility were constructed, a mercantile intercourse established with the surrounding nations, and the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, favoured by the long peace and the abundant resources of the country, reached their highest excellence. The reversal of all these signs of prosperity was so overwhelming, that the Egyptians of subsequent ages looked back upon this period of subjection under a foreign yoke which lay upon them for five hundred years, with bitter resentment. When the hated dynasty was at an end, the Egyptians obliterated, as far as they could, every sign of its supremacy, chiselled out the names of its kings on their monuments, and destroyed their records, so that few traces of this revolution remain to dispel the strange mystery in which it is involved. They could never bear to hear the detested names of the Shepherd Kings; and this circumstance throws light upon the passage in Genesis which says that the occupation of a shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. Under the patronage of the new dynasty the arts which had been destroyed were again restored, the monuments of the suppressed religion were freed from their indignities, and once more reinstated with the old honours, and the whole country was reconstructed. But, while the temples were re-erected, and the old worship established with even greater splendour, there can be no doubt that many of the earlier obelisks, owing to their smaller size, as compared with the other gigantic monuments of Egypt, had been destroyed past all reconstruction; and some of them remain in the land at the present day on the sites where, and in the exact manner in which, they were overturned by the Shepherd Kings. But greater changes still happened to the Egyptian obelisks after this. Previously they had been devastated and overturned on their own soil. But now they excited the cupidity of the foreign invaders of Egypt, and were carried away to distant lands as trophies of their victories. The first obelisks that were removed in this way were two of the principal ones that adorned one of the temples of Thebes. After the capture of Thebes by Assurbanipal, the Assyrian king, the famous Sardanapalus of the Greeks, they were transported to the conqueror's palace at Nineveh, and were afterwards lost for ever in the destruction of that city, about sixty years later, or about six hundred years before Christ. The transportation of these enormous masses of stone across the country to the seashore, down the Red Sea, over the Indian Ocean, up the Persian Gulf, and the river Tigris, to their destination in the palace of Nineveh, nearly two thousand miles, must have been a feat of engineering skill at that early period of the world's history, far more wonderful in regard to the difficulties overcome, without any precedent to guide, and considering the rudeness of the means of transport, than anything that has ever been attempted since in the same line. The example of the Assyrian tyrant was followed, after a long interval, by the Romans, who sought to magnify and commemorate their conquests in Egypt by spoiling the land of its characteristic monuments. The Cæsars, one after another, for more than a hundred years, took advantage of their victories and the ruin of the unhappy land of Egypt to convey its beautiful obelisks to their own capital to permanently adorn one or other of the various places of public resort. They seem to have set almost the same high value upon these singular monuments which their inventors did. Pliny and Suetonius describe the almost incredible magnitude of the vessels in which these gigantic masses of stone were conveyed to Ostia, the harbour town, and from thence up the Tiber to Rome. The huge triremes were propelled by the force of hundreds of rowers across the waters of the Mediterranean. From the quay at Rome they were dragged and pushed, by the brute force of thousands in the old Egyptian manner, on low carts supported on rollers instead of wheels, to their destination, where they were set upright by a complicated machinery of ropes and huge upright beams. How many obelisks of Egyptian origin existed at one time in the world we do not know. They were undoubtedly very numerous; but many of them were broken up for building materials. The famous column called Pompey's Pillar stands upon a fragment of an ancient obelisk; and tradition asserts that there are many similar fragments of greater or less antiquity under the ruins of the older houses of Alexandria. At present forty-two obelisks are known to be in existence in different parts of the world. Of these, seventeen remain in Egypt on their original sites, of which no less than eleven are prostrate on the ground, having been overturned by some political or religious revolution, by the force of an earthquake, or by the slow undermining of the infiltrated waters of the Nile. No less than twelve of the oldest and grandest are still to be seen standing erect in Rome, where they constitute by far the most striking and memorable monuments. The others are distributed in various places wide apart. One is in Paris, two are in Constantinople, a fourth, the famous Cleopatra's Needle, is on the Thames Embankment, in the heart of London; a fifth, its old companion in Alexandria, is now in one of the public squares of New York. And there are several diminutive ones, from eight feet in height downwards, in the British Museum, in the Florentine Museum in Florence, in Benevento in Italy, and in the town of Alnwick in Northumberland. The oldest of all the obelisks is the beautiful one of rosy granite which stands alone among the green fields on the banks of the Nile not far from Cairo. It is the gravestone of a great ancient city which has vanished and left only this relic behind. That city was the Bethshemesh of Scripture, the famous On, which is memorable to all Bible readers as the residence of the priest Potipherah whose daughter Asenath Joseph married. The Greeks called it Heliopolis, the city of the sun, because there the worship of the sun had its chief centre and its most sacred shrines. It was the seat of the most ancient university in the world, to which youthful students came from all parts of the world, to learn the occult wisdom which the priests of On alone could teach. Thales, Solon, Eudoxus, Pythagoras, and Plato, all studied there, perhaps Moses too. It was also the birthplace of the sacred literature of Egypt, where were written on papyrus leaves the original chapters of the oldest book in the world, generally known as the "Book of the Dead," giving a most striking account of the conflicts and triumphs of the life after death; a whole copy or fragment of which every Egyptian, rich or poor, wished to have buried with him in his coffin, and portions of which are found inscribed on every mummy case and on the walls of every tomb. In front of one of the principal temples of the sun, in this magnificent city, stood along with a companion, long since destroyed, the solitary obelisk which we now behold on the spot. It alone, as I have said, has survived the wreck of all the glory of the place, as if to assure us that what is given to God, however ignorantly and superstitiously, endures, while all the other works of man perish. It was constructed by Usirtesen I., who is supposed to have reigned two thousand eight hundred years before Christ, and has outlasted all the dynastic changes of the land, and still stands where it originally stood nearly forty-seven centuries ago. What appears of its shaft above ground is sixty-eight feet in height, but its base is buried in the mud of the Nile; and year after year the inundation of the river deposits its film of soil around its foot, and buries it still deeper in its sacred grave. Down the centre of each of its four faces runs a line of deeply-cut hieroglyphics, in whose cavities the wild mason-bees construct their mud-cells and store their honey. Nothing can exceed the beauty and distinctness of these carvings. The pictures of birds and beasts, chiselled in the hard polished granite, have a purity of form and line, a directness of expression and intention, which is most impressive. Its top is somewhat damaged, having been originally protected, as was the case with many of the obelisks which were not finely finished to a point, with a capping of gilded bronze that remained intact till the thirteen century. The inscription on its sides contains nothing of historic value. It is simply a dedication to Usirtesen, who constructed it, under the title of Horus, or the rising sun, which was borne, as I have said, by the kings of Egypt on account of their supposed origin as an incarnation of the sun. At Luxor, a single obelisk, the property of the English, still maintains its ancient position. It is very beautiful, formed of red granite, and covered with elegantly carved inscriptions, running up each of the four faces. The hieroglyphics are cut to an unusual depth, and are remarkably clear and well-formed, indicating that the monument was raised in honour of Rameses the Great, the most illustrious of all the Egyptian monarchs, and the most magnificent and prolific architect the world has ever seen. The top of the obelisk was originally left in a rough unfinished state, the roughness having been concealed by a capping of bronze; but this having been removed long ago, the surface has become very much eroded by exposure, which somewhat detracts from the elegance of the shaft. It has also the peculiarity that its two inner faces are sensibly curved--a peculiarity which it is supposed was designed to make the sunlight fall with softer effect, so as to make the shadows less crude, and the angles less sharp. The shaft, which is eighty-two feet high by eight feet in diameter at the base, is elevated upon a pedestal, which is adorned by statues in high relief of dog-headed monkeys standing in an attitude of adoration at the corners worshipping the sun, and also by standing figures of the god of the Nile presenting offerings, incised in the stone like the hieroglyphics of the shaft. The surroundings of this obelisk are far grander than those of any other obelisk in the world. At present the extent and dimensions of the ruins of Thebes produce an overwhelming effect upon the visitor. But it is almost impossible for us to imagine its magnificence when its temples and obelisks were in their full perfection, and the great Rameses was carried on the shoulders of his officers through the ranks of adoring slaves to behold the completion of the works which had been designed to perpetuate his glory. The ancient city, divided in the middle by the Nile, as London is by the Thames or Glasgow by the Clyde, covered the vast plain, with great houses in the outskirts standing in richly cultivated gardens, each temple surrounded by its own little sacred lake, over which the bodies of the dead were carried by the priests before burial, and the beautiful Mokattam Hills bounding the view, wearing the soft lilac hue of distance. Only two or three places on earth can rival the overwhelming interest which the city possesses. But the colossal associated temples of Karnac and Luxor are absolutely unique. There is nothing on earth to equal them. They are man's greatest achievements in religious architecture. Long rows of stupendous pillars, covered from base to top with coloured pictures and hieroglyphics, containing a whole library of actually written and pictured history and religion, look "like a Brobdingnagian forest turned into stone," in the midst of which the visitor feels himself an insignificant insect. A sense of superhuman awfulness, of personal nothingness and irresistible power, is what these stupendous structures inspire in even the most callous spectator. A confused mass of broken columns and heaps of huge sculptured stones present an appearance as if the old giants had been at war on the spot, hurling rocks at each other. Between Luxor and Karnac extended an avenue of sphinxes, two miles long, numbering more than four thousand pieces of sculpture, now represented by mutilated formless blocks of stone. We see in these vast temples, which were raised by a people inspired with the sentiment that they were the greatest of all nations, to be the chief shrines of the religion of the country, the fruits of the plunder and the tribute of Asia and Africa. The funds necessary to build them had been procured by robbing other nations; and most of the work was done by captives taken in war. Many a fair province had been desolated of its inhabitants, many a splendid city spoiled of its riches, in order to construct these awful halls. Unfortunately, the annual overflow of the inundation of the Nile covers the ground to the depth of a foot or two, staining and eating away the bases of the columns, and overthrowing their enormous drums and architraves. The destruction cannot be prevented, for the water infiltrates through the soil; and some day, ere long, the remaining columns will be hurled down, and the pride of Karnac will lie prone in the dust. Passing westward to Rome, the largest obelisk not only in the Eternal City but in the whole world is that which now adorns the square of St. John Lateran. It is, as usual, of red granite much darkened and corroded by time, and stands with its pedestal and cross one hundred and forty-one feet high; the shaft alone being one hundred and eight feet seven inches in height, with faces about nine feet and a half wide at the base; the whole mass weighing upwards of four hundred and sixty tons. It was found among the ruins of the Circus Maximus broken into three pieces, and was dug up by order of Pope Sixtus V., conveyed to its present site, and re-erected by the celebrated architect Fontana in 1588. The lower end had been so much injured by its fall, that in order to enable it to stand, it was found necessary to cut off about two feet and a half to obtain a level base. On the top of it Fontana added by way of ornament four bronze lions, surmounted by three mountain peaks, out of which sprung the cross, as the armorial bearings of the Popes. Thus crowned with the cross, and consecrated to the honour of Christianity, this noble relic of antiquity acquires an additional interest from its nearness to the great Basilica of the Lateran, which is the representative cathedral of the Papacy and the mother church of Christendom, and to the Lateran Palace, for a thousand years the residence of the Popes of Rome. The history of the Lateran obelisk is unusually varied. It was originally constructed by Thothmes III., and set up by him before the great temple of Amen at Heliopolis. But being an old man at the time, he left his successor to complete it by adding most of the hieroglyphics. It took thirty-six years to carve these sculptures; the four sides from top to bottom being covered with inscriptions in the purest style of Egyptian art. From one of these inscriptions we learn that the obelisk was thrown down in Egypt probably during the invasion of the Shepherd Kings, and was re-erected by the great Rameses, who did not, contrary to the usual custom, arrogate to himself the honours of his predecessor. These sculptures tell us of monarchs who had reigned, and conquered, and died long before the mythic times, when the "pious Æneas," as Virgil tells us, landed on the Italian shore, and Romulus ploughed his significant furrow round the Palatine Hill. A thousand years before the foundation of Rome, and two thousand years before the Christian era, it had been excavated from the quarries of Syene and worshipped at Heliopolis. It was as old to the Cæsars as the days of the Cæsars are to us. Pliny tells us that the work of quarrying, conveying, and setting it up employed twenty thousand men; and there is a dim tradition that so anxious was the king for its safety, when it was erected, that in order to ensure this he bound his own son to the top of it. A close examination of the hieroglyphics reveals the curious fact that the name of the god Amen wherever it occurs, is more deeply carved than the other figures, in order to obliterate the name of some other deity which had previously occupied its place. It is supposed that this circumstance indicates a theological revolution which happened in the history of Egypt when Amenhotep III., the Memnon of the Greek historian, married an Arabian wife of the name of Taia, who introduced her own religion into her adopted country, as Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, introduced the worship of Baal into Israel. When this dynasty was overthrown, in the course of about fifty years, the old faith was restored, and the names of the old gods substituted for those which had usurped their place on the religious monuments. It is supposed that the Lateran obelisk was the one before which Cambyses, the great Persian conqueror, stood lost in admiration, arrested in his semi-religious course of destroying the popular monuments of Egypt. Augustus intended to have removed it to Rome, but was deterred by the difficulty of the undertaking, and also by superstitious scruples, because it had been specially dedicated to the sun, and fixed immovably in his temple. Constantine the Great had no such scruples, believing, as he said, that "he did no injury to religion if he removed a wonder from one temple, and again consecrated it in Rome, the temple of the whole world." He died, however, before he had completed his design, having succeeded only in transporting the obelisk to Alexandria, from whence his son and successor Constantius transferred it to Rome, and placed it on the Spina of the Great Circus. So clumsily, however, was it erected in this place, that several deep holes had to be drilled in the upper part of it, in order that ropes for hauling it up might be put through them; a defect in engineering skill which has disfigured the obelisk, and contrasts strikingly with the resources of the ancient Egyptians, who were able to raise the stone to its position without such a device. The obelisk is thus an enduring monument of three great rulers--Thothmes, who first constructed it in Heliopolis; Constantine, who removed it to Rome; and Pope Sixtus V., who conveyed it from the Circus Maximus, and re-erected it where it now stands. Next in point of height to the Lateran obelisk is the one that stands in the great square of St. Peter's, between two beautiful fountains that are continually showering high in the air their radiant sunlit spray. It is meant to serve as the gnomon of a gigantic dial, traced in lines of white marble in the pavement of the square. Its rosy surface glistening in the rays of the sun, and its long shadow cast before it on the ground, make it a very impressive object. Its origin is involved in mystery, for there is no inscription on it to tell who erected it, or where it came from. This absence of hieroglyphics points to its having been an unfinished work--something having prevented its constructor from recording on it the purpose of its erection, as was usually the case. But as the vacant shadow of the dial and the blank empty lines of the spectrum are more suggestive than any sunlit spaces, so the blank unwritten sides of this obelisk give rise to more speculations than if they had been carved from head to foot with hieroglyphics. On account of this peculiarity, some authors have not hesitated to consider it a mere imitation obelisk, constructed by the Romans at a comparatively late period. This idea, however, is refuted by the evidence of Pliny, who regarded it as a genuine Egyptian relic, and tells us that it was cut from the quarry of Syene, and dedicated to the sun by the son of Sesores, in obedience to an oracle, after his recovery from blindness. It is generally believed that it first stood before one of the temples of Heliopolis, was then removed to Alexandria, and finally transported to Rome by Caligula. This emperor constructed a special vessel for the purpose, of greater dimensions than had ever been seen before; and after it had brought the obelisk to the banks of the Tiber, he commanded it to be filled with stones, and sunk as a caisson in the harbour of Ostia, which he was constructing at the time. On arriving at Rome the obelisk was set up on the Spina of the Circus of Nero, which is now occupied by the sacristy of St. Peter's Church. For fifteen centuries the obelisk remained undisturbed on its site, the only one in the city that escaped being overthrown. At last its foundation giving way, so that it leaned dangerously towards the old Basilica of St. Peter's, Sixtus V. formed the design of removing it to where it now stands, a very short distance from the original spot. The record of its re-erection, the first in papal Rome, by Fontana--a work of extreme difficulty and imposing ceremonial magnificence, which was richly rewarded by the grateful Pope--is exceedingly interesting. A curious legend is usually related in connection with it. A papal edict was proclaimed threatening death to any one who should utter a loud word while the operation of lifting and settling the obelisk was going on. As the "huge crystallisation of Egyptian sweat" rose on its basis there was a sudden stoppage, the hempen cables refused to do their work, and the hanging mass of stone threatened to fall and destroy itself. Suddenly from out the breathless crowd rose a loud, clear voice, "Wet the ropes." There was inspiration in the suggestion; the architect acted upon it, and the obelisk at once took its stand on its base, where it has firmly remained ever since. Not only was the sailor Bresca pardoned for transgressing the papal command, but he was rewarded, and the district of Bordighera, from which he came, received the privilege of supplying the palm leaves for the use of Rome on Palm Sunday--a privilege which it still possesses, and which forms the principal trade of the place. To me the most familiar and interesting of all the Roman obelisks is that which stands in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo, the finest and largest square in Rome. It is about eighty feet high, carved with hieroglyphics, with four marble Egyptian lions, one at each corner of the platform on which it stands, pouring from their mouths copious streams of water into large basins, with a refreshing sound. Lions in Egypt were regarded as symbols of the sun when passing through the zodiacal sign of Leo, the time when the annual inundation of the Nile occurred. They had thus a deep significance in connection with water. The obelisk was originally erected in front of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, by the great Rameses, the Sesostris of the Greeks, whose personal character and wide conquests fill a larger space in the history of ancient Egypt than those of any other monarch. From Heliopolis it was removed to Rome, after the battle of Actium, by Augustus, and placed on the Spina of the Circus Maximus, the sports of which were under the special protection of Apollo, the sun-god, by whose favour it was supposed that the Egyptian victory had been achieved. For four hundred years it acted as a gnomon, regulating by the length and direction of its shadow the hours of the public games of the circus; and then it was overturned during those troublous days in which the empire was rent asunder. Twelve centuries of decay and wreck had buried it from the eyes of men, until it was dug up and placed where it now stands, in 1587, by Pope Sixtus V., to whom modern Rome is indebted for the restoration of many of her ancient monuments, and the construction of many of her public buildings and streets. With the cross planted on its summit, this noble monument was long the first object which met the traveller's eye as he entered Rome from the north by the old Flaminian way. Brought to commemorate the overthrow of the land from whence it came, it has witnessed the overthrow of the conquerors in turn; and now re-erected in the modern capital, it will endure when its glory too has passed away. And out of the ruins of the city of the Popes, as out of the ruins of the city of the Cæsars, some future architect will dig it up to grace the triumph of a brighter and freer resuscitation of the Eternal City than the world has yet seen. The association of fountains at its base with this obelisk seems at first sight as incongruous as the crowning of its apex with a metal cross, for the Christian emblem can never alter the nature of the pagan monument. There is no natural harmony in the association, for there are no fountains or streams of running water in the desert. The obelisk belongs essentially to the dry and parched east; the fountain is the birth of the happier west, bright with the sparkle and musical with the sound of many waters. The obelisk relieves the monotony of immeasurable plains over which a sky of serene unstained blue arches itself in infinite altitude, the image of eternal purity, and the sun rises day after day with the same unsullied brilliance, and sets with the same unmitigable glory. The fountain, on the other hand, is the child of lands whose mountains kiss the clouds and gleam with the purity of everlasting snows, and where each day brings out new beauties, and each season reveals a fresh and ever-varying charm. But although there is no geographical reason why these two objects should be associated, there is a poetical fitness. The obelisk is the symbol of the perpetual past, holding in its changeless unity, as on its carved sides, the memories of former ages; the fountain is the symbol of the perpetual present, ever changing, ever new. The one speaks to us of a petrified old age; the other of an immortal youth. And thus it is in life, each passing moment flowing on with all its changes beside the stern, hard, enduring monument of the irrevocable past on which what is written is changelessly written. How different too are the bright sparkling fountains that leap with ever-varying beauty at the foot of the Flaminian obelisk now, from the dull, sleepy monotonous river that, like a Lethe flood, flowed past it in the old days at Heliopolis! Are they not both symbolical of the new and the old world, of the Christian faith, with its progressive thought and varied expanding life, and the stagnant pagan creed, which impressed the soul with the sense of human helplessness in the face of an unchangeable iron order alike of nature and of society? Another of the great obelisks of Rome is that which stands on Monte Citorio, in front of the present Parliament House. It was brought to Rome by Augustus, who dedicated it anew to the sun, and placed it as the gnomon of a meridian in the midst of the Campus Martius. Originally it had been erected at Heliopolis in honour of Psammeticus I., who reigned about seven hundred years before Christ. This monarch lived during a time when the national religion had become corrupted, and the whole land had come under the influence of Greek thought and Greek customs. But the obelisk which he erected is worthy of the best period of Egyptian art. It is universally admired for the remarkable beauty of its hieroglyphics. The anonymous pilgrim of Einsiedlen mentions that this obelisk was still erect when he visited Rome about the beginning of the ninth century. It seems, however, to have fallen and to have been broken in pieces, nearly three hundred years later, during the terrible conflagration caused by the Norman troops of Robert Guiscard. Several fragments of it were dug up, one after another, during the sixteenth century. The principal part of the shaft was discovered in 1748, among the ruins beneath the choir of the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina. These portions were damaged in such a way as to show clearly the action of fire, proving that the obelisk had been destroyed in the great fire of 1084. Pope Pius VI. gathered together the fragments, and with the aid of granite pieces taken from the ruined column of Antoninus Pius, which stood in the neighbourhood, he formed of these a whole shaft, which represents, as nearly as possible, the original obelisk. It is seventy-two feet high, and is surmounted by a globe and a small pyramid of bronze, which, along with its pedestal, increases its height to one hundred and thirty-four feet. A portion of the lines of the celebrated sun-dial, whose gnomon it formed, was brought to light under the sacristy of San Lorenzo in Lucina in 1463. All the other obelisks in Rome belong to comparatively recent periods, to the decadence of Egypt. None of them are of any great significance to the student of archæology. Several of them were executed in Egypt by order of the Roman emperors, and are therefore not genuine but imitation obelisks. Of this kind may be mentioned the Esquiline and Quirinal obelisks, which were brought to Rome by the emperor Claudius, and placed in the old Egyptian manner, one on each side of the entrance to the great mausoleum of Augustus in the Campus Martius. They are both destitute of hieroglyphics and are broken into several pieces. One now stands on Monte Cavallo, in front of the great Quirinal Palace, betwixt the two well-known gigantic groups of men and horses, statues of Greek origin, supposed to be those of Castor and Pollux, executed by Pheidias and Praxiteles; and the other in the large open space in front of the great Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Another of these bastard obelisks occupies a commanding position at the top of the Spanish Stairs, in front of the Church of Trinita dei Monti. It stood originally on the spina of the circus of Sallust, in his gardens, and is covered with hieroglyphics of the rudest workmanship, which sufficiently proclaim their origin, as a Roman forgery probably of the period of the Antonine emperors. In the midst of the public gardens, on the Pincian Hill, there is another Roman obelisk about thirty feet high, excavated from the quarries of Syene, and set up by Hadrian originally at Antinopolis in Egypt in front of a temple dedicated to the deified Antinous, the lamented favourite of the emperor. It was afterwards transferred to the imperial villa at Tivoli, near Rome, and subsequently to the grounds of the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, from whence it was finally taken to its present site. This obelisk has a special interest because it commemorates one of the most beautiful and touching examples of self-sacrifice which the annals of paganism afford. We are apt to judge of Antinous from the languid beauty of the statue of him in the Roman galleries, as simply the pampered sycophant of a court. But behind his sensual beauty and softness there was an unselfish devotion which the caresses of royalty and the favours of fortune could not spoil. When the oracle declared that the happiness of Hadrian, who was afflicted with a profound melancholy, could only be secured by the sacrifice of what was most dear to him, Antinous went at once and drowned himself in the Nile, and thus gave his life for his imperial friend, who, instead of being made better by the sacrifice, was left altogether inconsolable. The magnificent city founded to perpetuate his memory is now a heap of ruined mounds, and the obelisk that bore his name in Egypt now stands far away in Rome; but time cannot quench the glow of sympathy that kindles in the heart of every one who remembers his story of noble self-sacrificing love. There are three or four obelisks that mark the introduction of the Egyptian worship of Isis into the imperial city of the later emperors. At one time everything Egyptian was fashionable in Rome, and the goddess of Egypt was domesticated in the Roman Pantheon, and temples in her honour were erected in several parts of the city and throughout the empire. Obelisks, fashioned in Egypt by command of the Romans, were often placed in front of the temples. But these spurious obelisks have little dignity or significance, and suffer wofully when brought into comparison with specimens of the genuine work of old Egypt. The largest and most imposing of these monuments of the new faith of the city is the one that now stands in the Piazza Navona, formerly called the Pamphilian Obelisk, in honour of the family name of Pope Innocent X., who placed it there. It is forty feet high, of red granite, broken into five pieces, and covered with hieroglyphics, the whole style and execution of which are so inferior that Winkelman long ago, although he knew nothing of their import, detected the fact of the obelisk being a mere imitation. It was cut and engraved at Syene by order of the emperor Domitian, who designed it to adorn his villa on the Lake of Albano. From thence it was removed by the usurper Maxentius to the circus on the Appian Way, founded by him, and named after his son Romulus. It is now on the site of the old Circus Agonalis, whose form and boundaries are marked out by the houses of the Piazza Navona. Surmounted by the Pope's device of a dove with an olive branch, a vain substitute of heraldry for sacred symbolism, and standing on an artificial rock-work about forty feet high, composed of figures of Tritons and nymphs, disporting themselves amid plashing fountains and marble foliage, the whole subject is incongruous and utterly opposed to the simplicity and majesty of the ancient monuments. Near the Pantheon there is a pair of obelisks which were brought from the East, and stood together before the temple of Isis and Serapis, which is supposed to have been situated on the site of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. They were found when digging the foundations of the church in 1667, along with an altar of Isis, now in the Capitoline Museum. One of these obelisks was erected by Clement XI. in 1711, in front of the Pantheon, in the midst of the fountain of the Piazza. Its height is only about seventeen feet, and the hieroglyphics on it indicate that it was constructed by Psammeticus II., the supposed Hophra of Hebrew history. This same monarch also constructed its twin-fellow which now stands in the Piazza Minerva in the near neighbourhood. The celebrated sculptor Bernini, when re-erecting it at the command of Pope Alexander VII. in 1660, had the exceedingly bad taste to balance it on the back of a marble elephant, the work of his pupil Ferrata; on account of which absurd incongruity Bernini received from the satirical Roman populace the nickname of "The Elephant." Only one obelisk in Rome was not restored or re-erected by any Pope, viz. that which stands in the beautiful grounds of the Villa Mattei in the Coelian Hill. It was found near the Capitol on the site of an ancient temple of Isis, and was presented by the magistrates to the owner of the villa, a great collector of antiquities. It is said that when it was raised in 1563, on its red granite pedestal, the mason who superintended the work incautiously rested his hand on the block, when the shaft suddenly slid down and crushed it, the bones of the imprisoned member being still held between the two stones. The foregoing were the last obelisks erected in Rome by the emperors. After them no more were constructed either in the imperial city or in their native land of Egypt. The language inscribed upon them had come to be superseded by the universal use of the Greek tongue; there was no use therefore in making monuments for the reception of hieroglyphic records which nobody could understand or interpret. The sudden craze for the Egyptian idolatry passed away as suddenly as it sprang up, and Christianity established itself as the religion of the civilised world. The temples in Egypt and Rome were closed, the altars overthrown, and the objects connected with the material symbolism of paganism were destroyed, and objects connected with the spiritual symbolism of Christianity set up in their place. And thus the obelisk, the oldest of all religious symbols, which was constructed at the very dawn of human existence, to mark the worship of the material luminary, fell into disuse and oblivion, when "the Sun of Righteousness" rose above the horizon of the world, with healing in His wings, dispelling all the mists and delusions of error. The art of constructing obelisks followed the usual stages in the history of all human art. Its best period was that which indicated the greatest faith; its worst that which marked the decay of faith. The oldest specimens are invariably the most perfect and beautiful; the most recent exhibit too marked signs of the decrepitude of skill that had come over their makers. Between the oldest specimens and their surroundings there was a harmony and an appropriateness which solemnised the scene and excited feelings of adoration and awe. Between the latest specimens and their surroundings there was an incongruity which proved them to be aliens and strangers on the scene, and was fatal to all reverence; an incongruity which the modern Romans have only intensified by raising them on pedestals of most uncongenial forms, and crowning them with hideous masses of metal, representing the insignia of popes or other objects equally unsuitable. We see in the oldest obelisks a wonderful ease and an exquisite finish of execution, a maturity of thought and skill which none of the later obelisks reached, and which indicate the high-water mark of man's achievement in that line. There is also "a bloom of youth and of the earth's morning" about them which is quite indescribable, and which doubtless came to them because of the power and reality of faith. They were the fresh natural originals in which a deep primitive spontaneous adoration that dominated the whole nature of man expressed itself; while the specimens that were executed afterwards were slavish imitations, expressing a worship and a creed which had become fixed and formal. One of the most valuable results of the expedition of the great Napoleon to Egypt, ostensibly for scientific and antiquarian purposes, but really for military glory, was the acquisition of the Rosetta stone now in the British Museum--which afforded the key to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics--and of the obelisk of Luxor which now adorns the noble Place de la Concord in Paris. The history of the engineering difficulties overcome in bringing this obelisk to France is extremely interesting. Indeed, the story of the transportation of the obelisks from their native home, from time to time, to other lands, is no less romantic and worthy of study than the artistic, religious, or antiquarian phases of the subject. It forms a special literature of its own to which Commander Gorringe of the United States Navy, in his elaborate and magnificent work on Egyptian obelisks, has done the amplest justice. It cost upwards of £100,000 to bring the Luxor Obelisk to Paris, owing to the inexperience of the engineers and the imperfection of their method. But it was worthy of this vast expenditure of toil and money; for standing in an open circus unimpeded by narrow streets, and unspoiled by the tawdry ornaments which disfigure the Roman obelisks, it adds to the magnificent modern city the charm of antique majesty. It stands seventy-six feet and a half in height, with its apex left rough and unfinished, destitute of the gilded cap which formerly completed and protected it. Each of its four sides contains three vertical lines of well-executed hieroglyphics, which show that it was raised in honour of Rameses II., to adorn the stupendous temple of Luxor at Thebes which he constructed. When it lay on its original site, previous to its being transported, it was found to have been cracked at the time of its first erection, and repaired by means of two dove-tailed wedges of wood which had perished long ago. But this defect is not now noticeable. The companion of this obelisk is still standing at Luxor, and has already been described. Both of them show a peculiarity in their lines, which could only be noticed effectually when the pair stood together. This peculiarity is a convexity, or _entasis_, as it is called, on the inner faces. Even to the untrained eye its sides seem not of equal dimensions; and actual measurement shows the irregularity more clearly. This is said, however, to be exceptional to the general rule, and to be foreign to the design of an obelisk in the best period of the Pharaonic art. Still, several magnificent specimens, such as the Luxor and Flaminian obelisks, exhibit it. And they are an illustration of what was a marked characteristic of all classic architecture, which shows a slight curvature or entasis in its long lines. It was early found out that mathematical exactness and beauty were not the same. By making its two sides geometrically equal, the living expression of the most beautiful marble statue is destroyed, and it becomes simply a piece of architecture. It is well known that the two sides of the human face are not precisely the same; the irregularity of the one modifies the irregularity of the other, and thus a higher symmetry and harmony is the result. The two sides of the leaf of the begonia are unequal, and if folded together will not correspond. The same is true of the leaf of the elm and the lime. But when the mass of the foliage is seen together, this irregularity gives an added charm to the whole. Every object in nature has some imperfection, which indicates that it has a relation to some other object, and is but a part of a greater whole. The intentional irregularity of the windows in the Doge's Palace at Venice enhances the effect of the marvellous façade. By comparing the Parthenon at Athens, with its curves and inclinations, with the Madeleine at Paris, we see how far short the copy comes of the original in beauty and expressiveness, because of the exact formality of its right angles. The ancient Egyptians understood this well; and in their architecture they sought to rise to a higher symmetry through irregularity; and we can see in their frequent departure from upright and parallel lines in the construction of their temples, an effort to escape from formal exactness, and a longing for the nobler unity which is realised to the full in the rich variety of the Gothic. We may be sure that "every attempt in art that seeks a theoretical completeness, in so doing sinks from the natural into the artificial, from the living and the divine into the mechanical and commonplace." The Egyptian obelisk is thus but a type of a great law of nature. In this simplest and most primitive specimen of architecture we have an illustration of the principle which gives its expressiveness to the human face, beauty to the flowers of the field, and grandeur to the highest triumphs of human art. The obelisks that remain to be described are the two which to us are the most interesting; the pair of "Cleopatra's Needles" which so long stood side by side at Alexandria, and are now separated by the Atlantic Ocean; one standing on the Thames Embankment in London, and the other in Central Park, New York. They were both set up in front of the great temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, about fifteen centuries before Christ, by Thothmes III., and engraved by Rameses II., the two mightiest of the kings of Egypt. After standing on their original site for fourteen centuries, witnessing the rise and fall of many native dynasties, and the establishment of the Greek dominion under the Ptolemies, they were, when Egypt became a province of Imperial Rome, transferred by Cæsar Augustus to Alexandria. There they adorned the Cæsareum or palace of the Cæsars, which stood by the side of the harbour, was surrounded with a sacred grove, and was the greatest building in the city. What Thebes and Heliopolis were in the time of the Pharaohs, Alexandria became in the time of the Ptolemies. And though, being a parasitical growth, it could not originate works of genius, like its ancient prototypes, it could appropriate those which Heliopolis and Thebes had created. The tragic death of Cleopatra, the last of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, had taken place seven years before the setting up of these obelisks at Alexandria; so that she had in reality nothing to do with them personally. For about fifteen centuries the two obelisks stood in their new position before the Cæsareum. They saw the gradual overthrow, by time's resistless hand, of the magnificent palace which they adorned; and they themselves felt the slow undermining of the sea as it encroached upon the land, until at last one of them fell to the ground about three hundred years ago, and got partially covered over with sand, leaving the other to stand alone. Then came the French invasion of Egypt, and the victories of Nelson and Abercromby, when Mahomet Ali, the ruler of the land, offered the prostrate obelisk to the British nation as a token of gratitude. The offer, however, was not taken advantage of, for various reasons. At last the patriotism and enterprise of a private individual, the late Sir Erasmus Wilson, came to the rescue, when the stone was about to be broken up into building material by the proprietor of the ground on which it lay. An iron water-tight cylinder was constructed for its transport, in which, with much toil, the obelisk was encased and floated. It was taken in tow by a steam-tug, which encountered a fearful storm in the Bay of Biscay. This led to the abandonment of the pontoon cylinder, which floated about for three days, and was at last picked up by a passing steamer, and towed to the coast of Spain; from whence it was brought to England, and set up where it now stands on the Thames Embankment. Its transport cost altogether about £13,000, and was a work of great anxiety and difficulty. Standing seventy feet high on its present site, it forms one of the noblest and most appropriate monuments of the greatest city in the world; awakening the curiosity of every passer-by regarding the mysteries revealed in its enigmatical sculptures. The companion obelisk which had been left standing at Alexandria, after having suffered much from neglect, in the midst of its mean and filthy surroundings, was presented to the American Government by the Khedive of Egypt. But that Government acted in the same supine spirit in which our own had acted; and it was left to the ability of Captain Corringe as engineer, and to the liberality of the millionaire Vanderbilt, who paid the expenses incurred, amounting to £20,000, to bring the obelisk in the hold of a chartered steamer across the Atlantic, and set it up in the midst of New York city. And if the one obelisk is a remarkable sight in London, the other is a still more remarkable sight in New York. There, amid the latest inventions of the West, surrounded by the most recent civilisation of the world, rises up serenely, unchanged to heaven, the earliest monument of the East, surrounded by the most ancient civilisation of the world. "Westward the course of empire takes its way;" and as the old obelisk of Heliopolis witnessed the ending of the four first dramas of human history, so shall it close the fifth and last. The sun in the East rose over its birth; the sun in the West shall set over its death. It is possible that when all the stores of coal and other fuel which form the source of the mechanical power and commercial greatness of northern and western nations shall have been exhausted, a method of directly utilising solar radiation may be discovered. And if so, then the seat of empire will be transferred to parts of the earth that are now burnt up by the intense heat of the sun, but which then will be the most valuable of all possessions. The vast solar radiance now wasted on the furnace-like shores of the Red Sea will be stored up as a source of mechanical power. The commerce of the West will once more return to the East where it began; and the whole region will be repeopled with the life that swarmed there in the best days of old Egypt. But under that new civilisation there will be no return of the old religion of the obelisks; for men will no longer worship the sun as a god, but will use him for the common purposes of life, as a slave. After having thus passed in review so many noble obelisks, a mere tithe of what once existed, the conviction is deepened in our minds that no nation had ever devoted so much time, treasure, and skill to the service of religion as the Egyptian. While the Jews had only one tabernacle and one temple, every city in Egypt--and no country had so many great cities--had its magnificent temple and its hosts of obelisks. The spoils of the whole world were devoted to their construction; a third of the produce of the whole land of Egypt was spent in their maintenance. The daily life of the people was moulded entirely upon the religion of these temples and obelisks; their art and their literature were inspired by it. It organised their society; it built up their empire; and it was the salt which for more than three thousand years conserved a civilisation which has been the marvel and the mystery of every succeeding age. Surely the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, shone on those who were thus fervently stretching the tendrils of their souls to its dawning in the East, who raised these obelisks as symbols of the glorious and beneficent sunlight of the world. CHAPTER VII THE PAINTED TOMB AT VEII Rome after a season becomes oppressive. Your capacity of enjoyment is exhausted. The atmosphere of excitement in which you live, owing to the number, variety, and transcendent interest of the sights that have to be seen, wears out the nervous system, and you have an ardent desire for a little respite and change of scene. I remember that after the first month I had a deep longing to get away into the heart of an old wood, or into a lonely glen among the mountains, where I should see no trace of man's handiwork, and recover the tone of my spirit amid the wildness of nature. For this inevitable reaction of sight-seeing in the city, a remedy may be found by retiring for a day or two to some one or other of the numerous beautiful scenes in the neighbourhood. There is no city in the world more favourably situated for this purpose than Rome. Some of the most charming excursions may be made from it as a centre, starting in the morning and returning at night. Every tourist who stays but a fortnight in the city makes a point of seeing the idyllic waterfalls of Tivoli, the extensive ruins of Hadrian's Villa, the picturesque olive-clad slopes of Frascati and Tusculum, and the lovely environs of Albano on the edge of its richly-wooded lake. But there are spots that are less known at no greater distance, which yet do not yield in beauty or interest to these familiar resorts. Chief among these is Veii, whose very name has in it a far-off old-world sound. When the Campagna has quickened under the breath of the Italian spring into a tender greenness, and is starred with orchids and sweet-scented narcissuses, I know nothing more pleasant than a visit to this renowned spot. Veii was the greatest city of the Etruscan confederacy. When Rome was in its infancy it was in the height of its grandeur. After a ten years' siege it was captured by Camillus; and so stately were its buildings, so beautiful was the scenery around it, and so strong its natural defences, that it was seriously proposed to abandon Rome and transfer the population to it, and thus save the rebuilding of the houses and temples that had been destroyed during the invasion of the Gauls. It was only by a small majority that this project was set aside. Veii never recovered from its overthrow. In vain the Romans attempted to make it one of their own cities by colonising it. Many families established themselves there, but they were afterwards recalled by a decree of the senate, which made it an offence punishable with death for any Roman to remain at Veii beyond a prescribed period. By degrees it dwindled away, until in the days of Propertius its site was converted into pastures; and the shepherd roamed over it with his flocks, unconscious that one of the most famous cities of Italy once stood on the spot. So long ago as the reign of the emperor Hadrian its very locality was forgotten, and its former existence regarded by many with incredulity as a myth of early times. It was left to the enlightened antiquarian skill of our own times, so fruitful in similar discoveries and resuscitations, to find out among the fastnesses of the wilderness around Rome its true position. And although all the difficult problems connected with its citadel and the circuit of its walls have not yet been solved, there can be no doubt that the city stood in the very place which modern archæologists have determined. This place is a little village called Isola Farnese, about eleven miles north-west of Rome. The way that leads to it branches off by a side path for about three miles from the old diligence road between Florence and Rome at La Storta--the last post station where horses were changed about eight miles from the city. It is situated amid ground so broken into heights and hollows that you see no indications of it until you come abruptly upon it, hid in a fold of the undulating Campagna. And the loneliness of the district and of all the paths leading to it is hardly relieved by the appearance of the village itself. I shall not soon forget my visit to this romantic spot, and the delightful day I spent there with a congenial friend. We left Rome in an open one-horse carriage early one morning about the end of April. Passing out at the Porta del Popolo, we quickly traversed the squalid suburb and crossed the Ponte Molle--the famous old Milvian Bridge. We proceeded as far as the Via Cassia on the old Flaminian Way. At the junction of these roads the villa and gardens of Ovid were situated; but their site is now occupied by a humble osteria or wayside tavern. The road passes over an undulating country entirely uncultivated, diversified here and there with copses and thickets of wild figs intermixed with hawthorn, rose-bushes, and broom. A few ilexes and stone-pines arched their evergreen foliage over the road; and the succulent milky stems of the wild fig-trees were covered with the small green fruit, while the downy leaves were just beginning to peep from their sheaths. It was one of those quiet gray days that give a mystic tone to a landscape. The cloudy sky was in harmony with the dim Campagna, that looked under the sunless smoky light unutterably sad and forlorn. Wreaths of mist lingered in the hollows like the shadowy forms of the past; the lark was silent in the sky; and on the desolate bluffs and headlands, where once stood populous cities, were a few hoary tombs whose very names had perished ages ago. But inexpressibly sad as the landscape looked it was relieved by the grand background of the Sabine range capped with snow. The village of La Storta, that flourished in the old posting days, had fallen into decay when the railway diverted the traffic from it; and its inn, with a rude model of St. Peter's carved in wood projecting above its door, was silent and deserted. Passing down a narrow glen, fringed with wood for three miles from this point, we came in sight of the village of Isola. Its situation is romantic, perched on the summit of a steep cliff, with deep richly-wooded ravines around it, and long swelling downs rising beyond. It is surrounded by two streams which unite and fall along with the Formello into the river called La Valca, which has been identified with the fatal Cremera that was dyed red with the blood of the three hundred Fabii. The rock of Isola is most interesting to the geologist, consisting of large fragments of black pumice cemented together by volcanic ashes deposited under water. It is literally a huge heap of cinders thrown out by the rapidly intermittent action of some neighbouring volcano, probably the crater of Baccano, or that which is now filled with the blue waters of Lake Bracciano. The whole mass is very friable, and in every direction the soft rock is hollowed out into sepulchral caves. By many this isolated rock is considered the arx or citadel of Veii; but the existence of so many sepulchral caves in it is, as Mr. Dennis says, conclusive of the fact that it was the Necropolis of the ancient city, which must therefore, according to Etruscan and Roman usage regarding the interment of the dead, have been outside the walls. The tombs have all been rifled and destroyed, and many of the sepulchral caves have been turned to the basest uses for stalling goats and cattle. An air of profound melancholy breathes around the whole spot. It seems to be more connected with the dead than with the living world. And the hamlet which now occupies the commanding site is of the most wretched description. All its houses, which date from the fifteenth century, are ruinous, and are among the worst in Italy; and the baronial castle which crowns the highest point,--built nearly a thousand years ago, the scene of many a conflict between the Colonnas and the Orsinis, and captured on one occasion after a twelve days' siege by Cæsar Borgia,--has been converted into a barn. The inhabitants of the village do not exceed a hundred in number, and present a haggard and sallow appearance--the effect of the dreadful malaria which haunts the spot. It is strange to contrast this blighted and fever-stricken aspect of the place with the description of Dionysius, who praised its air as in his time exceedingly pure and healthy, and its territory as smiling and fruitful. In the little square of the village are several fragments of marble and other relics of Roman domination; and the church, about four or five hundred years old, dedicated to St. Pancrazio, is in a state of great decay. The walls are damp and mouldy, and all the pictures and ornaments are of the rudest description, with the exception of a faded fresco of the coronation of the Virgin, which is a fair specimen of the art of the fifteenth century. The service of the church is supplied by some distant priest or friar in orders. We left our conveyance in the piazza, and took our lunch in one of the houses. We brought our provisions with us from Rome, but we got a coarse but palatable wine from the people, and a rude but clean room in which to enjoy our repast. This inn--if it may be called, so--had at one time a very evil reputation. But nothing could be more simple-hearted than the landlord and his wife, with their group of timid children who clung to their mother's skirts in dread of the strangers. They told us that the poverty of the place was deplorable. Nearly all the people were laid down during the heats of summer with fever; and they were so poor that they could not afford to keep a doctor. Many deaths occurred, and the survivors, emaciated by the disease, were left to drag on a weary existence embittered by numerous privations. At a distance the village on its lofty rock, surrounded by its richly-wooded ravines, looked like a picture of Arcadia; but near at hand the sad reality dispelled the idyllic dream. Taking with us from Isola a guide, originally a big burly man, but now a sad victim to malaria, we set out to visit the site of the ancient city and the few relics which survive. It takes about four hours to complete the circuit of the walls; but there are four objects of special interest, the Arx, the Columbarium, the Ponte Sodo, and the Painted Tomb, which may be visited in less than three. The extent of the city is surprising to those who have been in the habit of thinking that all the ancient towns in the neighbourhood of Rome were mere villages. Dionysius says that it was equal in size to Athens. Veii was indeed fully larger, and was about the dimensions of the city of Rome, included within the walls of Servius Tullius. It occupied the whole extent of the platform on which it was situated; and as the area was bounded on every side by deep ravines, its size was thus absolutely circumscribed. Built for security and not for the comfort and progress of its inhabitants, its confined and inaccessible situation would have unfitted it to become the capital of a great nation, as was at one time proposed. Passing down a richly-wooded glen by a path overhanging a stream, we came to a molino or polenta mill, most romantically situated. Here a fine cascade, about eighty feet high, plunges over the volcanic rock into a deep gulley overshadowed by bushy ilexes. The scenery is very picturesque, and differs widely from that of the rest of the Campagna. In its profusion of broom and hawthorn bushes, whose golden and snowy blossoms contrasted beautifully with the dark hues of the evergreen oaks, and in the snowy gleam of its falling waters, and the hoary gray of its lichen-clad cliffs, it presented features of resemblance to Scottish scenery. It had indeed a peculiar home look about it which produced a very pleasing impression upon our minds. Crossing the stream above the cascade by stepping-stones, between which the water rushed with a strong current, we entered the wide down upon which Veii stood. No one would have supposed that this was the site of one of the most important ancient cities, which held at bay for ten long years the Roman army, and yielded at last to stratagem and not to force. Not a vestige of a ruin could be seen. In the heart of the city the grass was growing in all the soft green transparency of spring, and a few fields of corn were marked out and showed the tender braird above the soil. The relics of the walls that crowned the cliffs have almost entirely disappeared. No Etruscan site has so few remains; and yet its interest is intensified by the extreme desolation. It is more suggestive to the imagination because of the paucity of its objects to appeal to the eye. Legend and history haunt the spot with nothing to distract the mind or dispel its musing melancholy. All trace of human passion has disappeared, and only the eternal calm of nature broods over the spot; the calm that was before man came upon the scene, and that shall be after all his labour is over. On a part of these downs overgrown with briars was situated the Roman Municipium, a colony founded after the subjugation of Veii. It did not cover more than a third of the area of the ancient city. Several excavations were made here, which resulted in the discovery, among other interesting relics of the imperial period, of the colossal heads of Augustus and Tiberius and the mutilated statue of Germanicus now in the Vatican Gallery. On this spot were also found the twelve Ionic columns of white marble which now form the portico of the post-office in the Piazza Colonna at Rome, and also a few of the pillars which adorn the magnificent Basilica of St. Paul's on the Ostian Road. No one looking at these grand columns, so stainless in hue and so perfect in form, would have supposed that they had formed part of the Roman Forum of Veii more than two thousand years ago. Those in front of the post-office look newer than the rest of the building, which is not more than sixty years old. They owed their perfect preservation doubtless to the fact that they were buried deep under the dry volcanic soil for most of the intervening period. It seems strange to think of these ancient columns, that looked down upon the legal transactions of Roman Veii, now standing in one of the busiest squares of modern Rome, associated with one of the most characteristic and important of our modern institutions, of which ancient Rome had not even the germ. Passing through a beautiful copse wood, where cyclamens grew in lavish profusion, forming little rosy clusters about the oak-stools and diffusing a faint spicy smell through the warm air, we came out at one of the gates of the city into open ground. This gate is simply a gap in a shapeless mound, with traces of an ancient roadway passing through it and fragments of walls on either side. Where the stones can be seen projecting through the turf embankment they are smaller than usual in Etruscan cities. Sir William Gell found hereabouts a portion of the wall composed of enormous blocks of tufa--three or four yards long and more than five feet in height--based upon three courses of thin bricks three feet in length, that rested upon the naked rock. Such a mode of wall construction has no resemblance to anything remaining in Rome or in any Etruscan city. It indicates a still higher antiquity; while the brick foundations remind us of the fame which the Etruscans and particularly the people of Veii had acquired on account of their skill in works of terra cotta. The famous Quadriga or brick chariot which adorned the pediment of the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol at Rome was made at Veii, and was a remarkable proof of the superiority of its people in this species of art. Indeed the name of Veii is supposed to have been derived from its skill in the manufacture of terra cotta chariots. The old gateway through which we passed out of the wood was probably the principal entrance into the city, and the one over which Tolumnius King of Veii appeared, standing on the wall, during the famous siege when he was challenged to mortal combat by Cornelius Cossus, as graphically described by Livy. Beneath this gate there is a remarkable tunnel called the Ponte Sodo, bored in the volcanic rock for the passage of the river. It is not, however, visible from this point. You require to descend the steep banks of the river to see it; and a very extraordinary excavation it is, two hundred and forty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and twenty feet high. It was doubtless made to prevent the evil effects of winter floods by the inhabitants of Veii, who had considerable skill in such engineering works. The river sometimes fills the tunnel to the very roof, leaving behind trunks and branches of trees firmly wedged in the clefts of the rock in the inside. It was extremely interesting to stand on this spot and see before me this wonderful Etruscan work, and to lave my hands in the waters of the Formello, which, under the classical name of the Cremera, was prominently associated with early Roman history. It would be difficult to find a lovelier dimple in the fair face of mother earth than the valley through which the Formello flows. Precipitous cliffs rose from the bed of the river opposite to me, enriched with all the hues that volcanic rock assumes under the influences of the weather and the garniture of moss and lichen. A perfect tangle of vegetation crowned their tops and fringed their sides; the dark unchanging verdure of the evergreen oak and ivy contrasting beautifully with the tender autumn-like tints in which the varied spring foliage of the brushwood appeared. Bright flowers and gay blossoms grew in every crevice and nook. The shallow river flowed at my feet through ruts of dark volcanic sand, and amid masses of rock fallen from the cliffs, and stones whose artificial appearance showed that they had formed part of the ramparts that once ran round the whole circuit of the heights. The sunshine sparkled on the gray-green waters, and followed them in bright coruscations for a short distance into the mouth of the tunnel, the other end of which, diminished by the distance, opened into the daylight like the eye-piece of an inverted telescope. I found in the bed of the river fragments of marble and porphyry, cut and polished, that had doubtless come from the pavement of some palace or temple, and attested the truth of the report that has come down to us, that the buildings of Veii were stately and magnificent. To me there is something peculiarly impressive in the presence of a stream in a scene of vanished human greatness. Its eternal sameness contrasts with the momentous changes that have taken place; its motion with the death around; its sunny sparkle with the gloom; while its murmur seems the very requiem of the past. In this giant sepulchre, into which, like the Gulf of Curtius in the Forum, all the greatness of Etruscan and Roman Veii had gone down, the abundance of life was most remarkable. The vegetation sprang up with a rank luxuriance unknown in northern latitudes; lizards darted through the long grass; one snake of considerable length and girth uncoiled itself before me and crawled leisurely away; and the air, as bright and warm as it is in July with us, was murmurous with the hum of insects that danced in the April sunshine. Beyond the Ponte Sodo the precipices disappear and the ground slopes down gently to the edge of the river. Here the valley of the Formello opens up--a quiet green pastoral spot rising on the right hand into bare swelling downs, without a tree, or a bush, or a rock to diversify their surface. On the sloping banks of the river the rock has been cut into a number of basins filled with water, where Sir William Gell supposes that the nymphs of Veii, like those of Troy, "washed their white garments in the days of peace;" but they were in all likelihood only holes caused by the quarrying of the blocks of stone used in the construction of the walls and buildings of the city. The slopes of this valley seem to have formed the principal Necropolis of Veii. Numerous tombs were discovered in it; but after having been rifled of their contents they were filled up again, and all traces of them have disappeared. Only one sepulchre now remains open in the Necropolis, half way up the slope of a mound called the _Poggio Reale_. It is commonly known as "The Painted Tomb," or _La Grotta Campana_--after its discoverer, the Marchese Campana of Rome--who got permission forty-five years ago from the Queen of Sardinia, to whom the property then belonged, to dig in this locality for jewels and other relics of antiquity. Instead of closing the tomb, as was done in the other cases, this accomplished antiquarian, with the good taste for which he was distinguished, left it in the exact condition in which he had found it, so that it might be an object of interest to future visitors. Ascending the slope, we entered a long narrow passage about six feet wide and about fourteen feet deep cut through the tufa rock. This was the original entrance to the tomb; and the discoverer had cleared it out by removing the earth that had accumulated in the course of ages. A solitary crouching lion, carved in a species of volcanic stone, guarded the entrance of the passage. Its companion had been removed some distance, and lay neglected on the slope of the hill. The sculpture is exceedingly uncouth and primitive. At the inner end of the passage a couple of similar lions crouch, one on each side of the door of the tomb. They were placed there in all likelihood as symbols of avenging wrath to inspire fear, and thus prevent the desecration of the dead. Originally the tomb was closed by a great slab of volcanic stone: but this having been broken to pieces and carried away to build the first sheepfold or the nearest peasant's hut, it has been replaced by an iron gate. The walls around were damp and covered with moss and weeds, and the bars of the gate were rusty. Our guide applied the key he had brought with him, and the gate opened with a creaking sound. Lighting a candle, he preceded us into the tomb. I cannot describe the strange mixture of feelings which took possession of me,--wonder, curiosity, and awe. This was my first visit to an Etruscan tomb. In Rome I had been familiar with the monuments of a remote past; I had gazed with interest upon objects over which twenty centuries had passed. But here I was to behold one of the mysterious relics of the world's childhood. I had previously read with deep interest the graphic account of this tomb, which Mr. Dennis gives in his _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, and was therefore prepared in large measure for what I was about to see. I found myself when I entered in a gloomy chamber hewn out of a brown arenaceous clay. The floor was a loose mud, somewhat slippery; and on it I noticed a number of vases, large and small, and of various forms. They were not like the exquisite painted vases which we are accustomed to associate with the name of Etruscan, but of the simplest and most archaic shapes, formed out of the coarsest clay. Some of them had a curious squat appearance, with rude figures painted on them; while others of them were about three feet high, of dark-brown earthenware, and were ornamented with some simple device in neutral tints or in very low relief. They were empty now; but when found they contained ashes and fragments of calcined bones. Just within the door there were two stone benches, on each of which, when the tomb was opened, was stretched a skeleton, which rapidly crumbled under the pressure of the air into a cloud of dust. That on the left was supposed to have been a female; and her companion on the right had doubtless been a warrior, judging from the bronze helmet and breastplate, both much corroded, that were left lying on the bench. He had evidently come by a violent death, for at the back of the helmet was an ugly hole, whose ragged side was outwards, showing that the fierce thrust of the spear had crashed through the face, and protruded beyond the casque. The combination of cinerary urns containing ashes, and of stone couches on which dead bodies were extended in the same tomb, is curious, showing that both modes of sepulture were practised at this period. The skeletons found entire were evidently those of the master and mistress of the household, persons of consideration; and the ashes in the jars were probably the remains of the servants and dependants. On the benches beside the skeletons were a bronze laver and mirror, a simple candlestick, and a brazier used for burning perfumes. The vases were exceedingly interesting, as the first rude attempts of the Etruscans in an art in which afterwards they attained to such marvellous perfection, and the only relics now remaining of the fictile statuary for which Veil was so celebrated. But my interest in these objects was speedily transferred to a far more wonderful sight, which the candle of the guide disclosed to me. On the inner wall, which divided the tomb into two chambers, and on the right and left of the door leading from the one to the other, was a most extraordinary fresco. Seen in the dim light of the candle passing over the different parts, it had a singularly weird and grotesque appearance. The colours were as fresh as if they had been laid on yesterday; and the thought at first flashed across my mind that I was gazing not upon a painting which had been sealed up for nearly thirty centuries, but upon the rude attempts at art of some modern shepherd or rustic belonging to the village of Isola, who sought thus to amuse his leisure moments. But such a thought was dismissed at once as absurd. No one after a few moments' inspection could doubt the genuineness of the painting. It is difficult to describe it, for it is altogether unlike anything to be seen elsewhere in Egyptian or Assyrian, in Greek or Roman tombs. On the right side of the door the upper half of the wall was panelled off by a band of colour, and represented one scene or picture. In the centre was a large horse, that reminded me of a child's wooden toy-horse, such as one sees at a country fair. Its legs were unnaturally long and thin; and the slenderness of its barrel was utterly disproportioned to the breadth of its chest. It was coloured in the most curious fashion: the head, hind-quarters, and near-leg being black; the tail and mane and off-legs yellow; and the rest of the body red, with round yellow spots. It was led by a tall groom; a diminutive youth was mounted upon its back; and a proud, dignified-looking personage, having a double-headed axe or hammer on his shoulder, strode in front. These human figures were all naked, and painted of a deep-red colour. In the same picture I noticed two strange-looking nondescript animals, very rudely drawn, and party-coloured like the horse. One probably represented a cat without a tail, like the Manx breed, half-lying upon the back of the horse, and laying its paw on the shoulder of the youth mounted before it; and the other looked like a dog, with open mouth, apparently barking with all his might, running among the feet of the horse. Interspersed with these figures were most uncouth drawings of flowers, growing up from the ground, and forming fantastic wreaths round the picture, all party-coloured in the same way as the animals. This extraordinary fresco seemed like the scene which presented itself to the apostle, when one of the seals of the Apocalyptic book was opened. I wished that I had beside me some authoritative interpreter who could read for me "this mystic handwriting on the wall." It has been suggested that the silent scene before me represented the passage of a soul to the world of the dead. The lean and starved-looking horse symbolised death; and its red and yellow spots indicated corruption. It may have been the ghost of the horse that was burned with the body of his dead master; for we know that the tribes, from which the Etruscans were supposed to be descended, if not the Etruscans themselves, not only burned their dead, but offered along with them the wives, slaves, horses, and other property of the dead upon their funeral pyre. The horse in this remarkable fresco may therefore have been the death-horse, which is well-known in Eastern and European folklore. The diminutive figure which it carried on its back was the soul of the dead person buried in this tomb; and its small size and the fact of its being on horseback might have been suggested by the thought of the long way it had to go, and its last appearance to the mortal eyes that had anxiously watched it from the extreme verge of this world as it vanished in the dim distance of the world beyond. The groom that led the horse and his rider was the Thanatis or Fate that had inflicted the death-blow; and the figure with the hammer was probably intended for the Mantus--the Etruscan Dispater--who led the way to another state of existence. The deep-red colour of the human figures indicated not only that they belonged to the male sex, but also that they were in a state of glorification. This is further confirmed by the flowers, which looked like those of the lotus, universally regarded amongst the ancients as symbols of immortality. It is difficult to say what part the domestic animals were meant to play in this scene of apotheosis. Painted with the same hues as those of the steed, they were doubtless sacrificed at the death of their master, in order that they might share his fortunes and accompany him into the unseen world; their affection for him, and the reluctance with which they parted from him, being indicated by the cat putting its paw upon his shoulder as if to pull him back, and the dog barking furiously at the heels of the horse. But all this is merely conjectural. And yet I caught such a glimpse of the general significance of the picture, of the spirit that prompted it, as deeply impressed me. It seemed as if my own searching dimly with a candle in the inside of a dark sepulchral cave into the meaning of this fresco of death was emblematical of the groping of the ancient Etruscans, by such feeble light of nature as they possessed, in the midst of the profound, terrible darkness of death, for the great truths of immortality. They had not heard of One who alone with returning footsteps had broken the eternal silence of the tomb, and brought the hope of immortal life to the sleeping dead around. These Etruscan sleepers had been laid to rest in their narrow cell ages before the Son of Man had rolled away the stone from the door of the sepulchre, and carried captivity captive; but He whom they ignorantly worshipped had partially lifted the veil and given them faint glimpses of the things unseen and eternal. And these were doubtless sufficient to redeem their life from its vanity and their death from its fear. Below the fresco which I have thus minutely described is another about the same size, representing a sphinx, with a nondescript animal, which may be either an ass or a young deer standing below it, and a panther or leopard sitting behind in a rampant attitude, with one paw on the haunch of the sphinx, and the other on the tail, and its face turned towards the spectator. The face of the sphinx is painted red. The figure bears some resemblance to the Egyptian type of that chimera in its straight black hair depending behind, and its oblique eyes; but in other respects it diverges widely. On Egyptian monuments the sphinx never appears standing as in this fresco, but crouching in the attitude of reposeful observation. Its form also was always fuller and more rounded than the long-legged, attenuated spectre before us, and it was invariably wingless; whereas the Etruscan sphinx had short wings with curling points, spotted and barred with stripes of black, red, and yellow. This strange mixture of the human and the brutal might be regarded as a symbol of the religious state of the people. We see in it higher conceptions of religion struggling out of lower. In the recumbent wingless sphinx of Egypt we see anthropomorphic ideas of religion emerging out of the gross animal-worship of more primitive times. In the standing and winged Etruscan Sphinx we see these ideas assuming a more predominant form; while in the Greek mythology the emancipation of the human from the brutal was complete, and the gods appeared wholly in the likeness of men. On the wall on the opposite side of the door were two other frescoes, somewhat similar in general appearance to those already described. On the upper panel was a horse with a boy on his back, and a panther sitting on the ground behind him; while on the lower panel there was a huge standing panther or leopard, with his long tongue hanging out of his mouth, and a couple of dogs beneath him, one lifting up its paw, and the other trying to catch the protruded tongue of the panther. All the figures in the four frescoes were painted in the same bizarre style of red, yellow, and black characteristic of the first fresco described; and they had all the same Oriental border of lotus flowers. They had evidently all the same symbolic import; for the sphinx guarded the gate of the unseen world, and leopards or panthers were frequently introduced into the paintings of Etruscan tombs as guardians of the dead. Passing through the doorway I entered an inner and smaller chamber, whose only decoration was six small round discs on the opposite wall, each about fifteen inches in diameter, painted in little segments of various colours,--black, blue, red, yellow, and gray. What they were meant to represent no one has satisfactorily explained. Above them I observed a number of rusty nails fixed in the wall, and traces of others that had fallen out around the doorway. On these nails were originally suspended various articles of household economy or of personal ornament; for the Etruscan sepulchres were always furnished with such things as the tenants took delight in when living. For a proof of this nothing could be more satisfactory than a thorough study of Inghirami's voluminous work. Indeed, all ancient nations buried their dead not only with their weapons and armour, but also with their most precious possessions; and in proportion to the rank and wealth of the deceased were the number and value of the offerings deposited with him in his tomb. We are amazed at the variety and preciousness of the golden ornaments found by Dr. Schliemann in the tombs at Mycenæ; and every Etruscan cemetery that has been opened has yielded an immense number of most precious articles, which the devotion of the survivors sacrificed to the manes of their departed friends. It is to this propensity that we owe all our knowledge of this mysterious race. But the fact, as Mr. Dennis says, that the nails in the interior of this tomb were empty, and that no fragments of the objects suspended were found at the foot of the wall, indicated either that the articles had decayed, being of a perishable nature, or that they had been carried off on account of their superior value. This last is the more probable supposition. The Marchese Campana, who opened the tomb, was late in the field, and had in all likelihood been anticipated by some previous explorer. The work of plundering Etruscan tombs was begun, we have reason to believe, in the time of the early Romans, who were attracted, not merely by the precious metals which they contained, but also by the reputation of their vases, which in the days of the Empire were held in as high esteem as now. Many tombs have doubtless been repeatedly searched. The very architects employed in their construction, as Signor Avolta conjectures, may have preserved the secret of the concealed entrance, and used it for the purpose of spoliation afterwards. Indeed, an unviolated tomb is a very rare exception. No modern excavations were made till about sixty years ago; and yet during that short interval many tombs that were opened and filled up again have been forgotten; and now they are being dug afresh by persons ignorant of this, who spend their labour only to be disappointed. There is little reason, therefore, to believe that the Painted Tomb of Veii was so fortunate as to escape all notice until the Marchese Campana had discovered it. Former visitors had robbed it in all likelihood of any objects of intrinsic value it may have contained, and left only the bronze utensils and armour and the rude archaic vases. On the roughly-hewn roof of this inner chamber of the tomb were carved in high relief two beams in imitation of the rafters of a house; and round the walls at the foot ran a low ledge formed out of the rock, like a family couch, on which stood three very curious boxes of earthenware, about a foot and a half long and a foot high, covered with a projecting lid on which was moulded a human head. These were sepulchral urns of a most primitive form, intermediate between the so-called hut-urns found under the lava in the Necropolis of Alba Longa, and supposed to represent the tents in which the Etruscans lived at the time of their arrival in Italy, and the round vases of a later period. On the same ledge were several vases painted in bands of red and yellow, with a row of uncouth animals executed in relief upon the rim. The form and contents of this chamber afforded striking proof of the fact that the Etruscan tombs were imitations of the homes of the living. These tombs were constructed upon two types: one rising in the form of a tumulus or conical mound above the ground when the situation was a level table-land, and the other consisting of one or two chambers excavated out of the rock when the tomb was situated on the precipitous face of a hill. Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his admirable _Etruscan Researches_, says that the former type recalled the tent, and the latter the cave, which were the original habitations of men. The ancestors of the Etruscans are supposed by him to have been a nomadic race, wandering over the steppes of Asia, and to have dwelt either in caves or tents. At the present day the yourts or permanent houses in Siberia and Tartary are modelled on the plan of both kinds of habitation--the upper part being above the ground, representing the tent; and the lower part being subterranean, representing the cave. And so the descendants of this Asiatic horde, having migrated at a remote period to Italy, preserved the burial traditions of their remote ancestors, and formed their tombs after the model of the tent or cave, according as they were constructed on the level plateau or in the rocky brow of a hill. In further illustration of this theory he says that in olden times when a member of the Tartar tribe died, the tent in which he breathed his last, with all its contents intact, was converted into a tomb by simply covering it with a conical mound of earth or stones, in order to preserve it from the ravages of wolves and other beasts of prey. Even the row of stones that surrounded the outside of the tent and kept down the skins that covered it from being blown away by the storms of the steppe, was introduced into the structure of the tomb, and continued to surround the base of the funeral mound. He finds traces of this circle of stones in the podium or low wall of masonry which encircled every Etruscan tumulus or outside tomb, and a remarkable example in the mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii on the Appian Way at Rome. This theory, however, it is only fair to state, is disputed by other writers, who assert that there was no intentional imitation of tents in Etruscan tombs; for if this had been the design there would have been a correspondence between the conical outside and the conical interior, and no Etruscan tomb has been found with a bell-shaped chamber. The tent-like tumulus, say they, was but the mere rude mound of earth heaped over the dead in an uncultured age; and the mound would be made higher and larger according to the dignity of the deceased; and the podium or row of stones around its foot was simply the retaining wall necessary to give it stability and shape. The tomb at Veii had a narrow entrance-passage; and we find this a marked feature in all Etruscan tombs, which are approached by a vaulted passage of masonry, varying from twelve to a hundred feet in length. This also, according to Dr. Taylor, was but a survival of the low entrance-passage through which the ancient Siberians crept into their subterranean habitations, and which the modern Laplanders and Esquimaux still construct before their snow-huts and underground dwellings, to serve the purpose of a door in keeping out the wind and maintaining the temperature of the interior. The other, or cave type of Etruscan tomb, is that which we see at Veii, and of which there are hundreds of examples all over Central Italy, wherever there are deep valleys bounded by low cliffs. This, too, was modelled after the pattern of the house. There were usually two chambers, an outer and an inner one. The outer was the place of meeting between the living and the dead; the surviving friends feasted there during their annual visit to the tomb, while the dead were laid in the inner chamber in the midst of familiar objects. Here everything was designed to keep up the delusion that the dead were still living in their own homes. The roof of the chamber was carved in imitation of the roof-tree, the rafters, and even the tiles of the house; the rock around was hewn into couches, with cushions and footstools like those on which they reposed when living; on the floor were the wine-jars, the vases, and utensils, consecrated by long use; on the various projections were suspended the mirrors, arms, and golden ornaments that were most prized; while the walls were painted with gay frescoes, representing scenes of festivity in which eating and drinking, music and dancing, played a prominent part. And as the ordinary habitation contained the family, the grandparents, the parents, and the children, all living under the same roof, so the Etruscan tombs were all family abodes--the dead of a whole generation being deposited in the same inner chamber. To the outer chamber, as I have said, came the surviving members of the family at least once a year to hold a funeral feast, and pay their devotions to their departed friends. The tombs of this people were thus at the same time also their temples--the sacred places where they came to perform the rites of their religion, which consisted in worshipping the lares and penates of their beloved dead, and making offerings to them. And by this striking link of the cultus of the dead the ancient Etruscans were connected with the present inhabitants of Northern Asia, the Finns, Laplanders, Tartars, Mongols, and Chinese, who have no temples or places of special honour for their idols, but assemble once a year or oftener at the graves of their ancestors to worship the dead. But after all there is no great difference in this respect between the races, ancient and modern; for the churchyard and the church, the burial vaults and monuments within the cathedral and chapel, show how universal is the instinct that associates the dead with the shrine of religion, and makes the tomb the most appropriate place for giving expression to those blessed hopes of immortality upon which all religion is founded. The sanctuary of the Holy Land derived its sacredness, as well as the charter of its inheritance, from the cave of Machpelah. Around that patriarchal tomb clustered all the grand religious hopes of the covenant people. The early Christians adopted and purified the Etruscan custom which they found in Rome, and erected over the tombs of the martyrs and other illustrious persons _Cellæ Memoriæ_, or memorial chapels, in which on anniversary occasions the friends and brethren assembled to partake of a funeral feast in honour of the dead. The primitive Agapæ, or love-feasts, were often nothing more than such banquets in the memorial cells at the tombs of the faithful. And in our own country, many of our most important churches, towns, and villages took their origin and name from the grave of some saint, who in far-off times hallowed the spot and made it a shrine of worship. There are numerous indications that this Painted Tomb at Veii is of very great antiquity, and may be considered as probably the oldest tomb in Europe. No inscription of any kind has been found on its walls or any of its contents; and this circumstance, which is almost singular so far as all Etruscan tombs yet discovered are concerned, of itself indicates a very remote date, when the art of letters if known at all was only known to a privileged few, and confined to public and sacred monuments. No clue remains to inform us who the Veientine warrior was who met his death in so tragic a manner, and who lay down with his wife and dependants in this tomb, and took the last long sleep without a thought of posterity or the conclusions they might form regarding him. And the argument of hoary antiquity derived from this speechless silence of the tomb is still further strengthened by architectural evidence. The outer wall as seen from the inside is built of rough uncemented blocks of the earliest polygonal construction, such as we see in a few of the oldest Cyclopean cities of Central Italy; and the doorway is formed by the gradual convergence of stones laid in horizontal courses, instead of being arched by regular wedges of stone held together. Now, as the perfect arch was known and constructed in Etruria at a very early period, this pseudo-vault, which indicates complete ignorance of the principle, must belong to a very remote age indeed--to the period of the Cyclopean gateways of Italy and Greece, whose origin is lost in the mist of a far-off antiquity. There are two limits within which the date of the tomb may probably be placed. While its style and decorations are genuinely national and characteristic of the primitive Etruscan tomb, there can be no doubt that several Egyptian features in it, such as the sphinx and the lotus, and in some respects the colouring and physiognomy of the human figures, indicate some acquaintance with the land of the Nile. Now an inscription has been found at Karnac which records that Egypt was invaded by a confederation of Libyans, Etruscans, and other races, and was only saved after a desperate struggle by the valour of Menephtah I. of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The allied forces occupied the country for a time, and took away with them when they departed large spoils, consisting among other things of bronze knives and armour. This happened in the fourteenth or fifteenth century before Christ. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the civilisation of Egypt must at this period have been spread by commerce or war among the Western nations, and produced a powerful influence upon the Etruscans. The imitation of Egyptian models is not so decided in this tomb as it is in the painted tombs of Tarquinii and other Etruscan cities of later date; and this circumstance would indicate that it was constructed at the very commencement of the intercourse of Etruria with Egypt. If we take this historic fact as the limit in one direction, the tomb cannot be older than three thousand three hundred years. On the other hand, we know that Veii was destroyed about four hundred years before Christ, and remained uninhabited and desolate till the commencement of the Empire; we have, therefore, the surest ground for fixing the date of the tomb prior to that event. Somewhere between the invasion of Egypt by the Etruscan confederacy and the fall of Veii--that is, somewhere between the fourteenth and the fourth century before Christ--this sepulchre was hewn in the rock and its tenants interred in it. Carlo Avolta of Corneto on one occasion, opening an Etruscan tomb at Tarquinii, saw a most wonderful sight. From an aperture which he had made above the door of the sepulchre he looked in, and for fully five minutes "gazed upon an Etruscan monarch lying on his stone bier, crowned with gold, clothed in armour, with a shield, spear, and arrows by his side." But as he gazed the figure collapsed, and finally disappeared; and by the time an entrance was made all that remained was the golden crown, some fragments of armour, and a handful of gray dust. Like that Etruscan tomb has been the fate of the Etruscan confederacy. This mighty people left traces of their civilisation "inferior in grandeur perhaps to the monuments of Egypt, in beauty to those of Greece, but with these exceptions surpassing in both the relics of any other nation of remote antiquity." At the period of their highest power they lived in close neighbourhood and connection with a people who got its laws, its rulers, its arts, its religion from them--and might therefore if only in gratitude have preserved their history. But their fate was that of the similar civilisation of Mexico and Peru, which its selfish Spanish conquerors instead of preserving sought studiously to obliterate. The comprehensive history of Etruria written in twenty volumes by the emperor Claudius--who, though very feeble in other things, was yet a scholar, and could have given us much interesting information--perished. Their language, which survived their absorption by Rome, almost as late as the time of the Cæsars, finally disappeared; and though thousands of inscriptions in tombs and on works of art remain--which we are able to read from the close resemblance of the alphabet to the Greek--the key to the interpretation of the language is gone beyond recall. In an age that has unravelled the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the cuneiform characters of Assyria, and the runic inscriptions of Northern Europe, the Etruscan language presents almost the only philological problem that refuses to be solved. Thus when the air and the light of modern investigation penetrated into the mystery which surrounded this strange people, all that was most important had vanished; and only the few ornaments of the tomb remained to tell us of a lost world of art, literature, and human life which had perished not by internal exhaustion, but had fallen before the arms of Rome in the full maturity of its civilisation. CHAPTER VIII HOLED STONES AND MARTYR WEIGHTS In the porch of the interesting old church of Sta. Maria in Cosmedin near the Tiber is preserved a huge circular stone like a millstone. It is composed of white marble, upwards of five feet in diameter, and is finished after the model of the dramatic mask used in the ancient theatres. In the centre is a round hole perforating the mass right through, forming the mouth of the mask. It is called the Bocca della Verita, and has given its name to the irregular piazza in which the church is situated. It is so called from the use to which it has been put from time immemorial, as an ordeal for testing the guilt or innocence of an accused person. If the suspected individual on making an affirmation thrust his hand through the hole and was able to draw it back again, he was pronounced innocent; but if, on the contrary, the hand remained fixed in the marble jaws, the person was declared to have sworn falsely and was pronounced guilty. The marble mouth was supposed by the superstitious to contract or expand itself according to the moral character of the arraigned person. No reason has been given why this singular marble mask should have been placed in this church, nor is anything known of its previous history. Some have conjectured that it served as an impluvium or mouth of a drain in the centre of a court to let the water run off; and others regard it as having been an ornament for a fountain, like the colossal mask of marble out of the mouth of which a jet of water falls into a fountain in the Via de Mascherone, called after it, near the Farnese Palace, and the marble mask which belongs to a small fountain on the opposite side of the river near the Palazzo Salviati. But the question arises, Why should the Bocca della Verita, if such was its origin, have been used for the superstitious purpose connected with it? Our answer to this question must lead us back to the Temple of Ceres and Proserpine which originally stood on the site of the church of Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, and of the materials of which the Christian edifice was largely built. In primitive times the worship of clefts in rocks, holes in the earth, or stones having a natural or artificial perforation, appears to have been almost universal. We find traces of it in almost every country, and amongst almost every people. These sacred chasms or holes were regarded as emblems of the celestial mother, and persons went into them and came out again, so as to be born anew, or squeezed themselves through the holes in order to obtain the remission of their sins. In ancient Palestine this form of idolatry was known as the worship of Baal-perazim, or Baal of the clefts or breaches. David obtained a signal victory over the Philistines at one of the shrines of this god, and burnt there the images peculiar to this mode of worship which the enemy had left behind in its flight. About two miles from Bombay there is a rock on the promontory of the Malabar Hill, which has a natural crevice, communicating with a cavity below, and opening upon the sea. This crevice is too narrow for corpulent persons to squeeze through, but it is constantly resorted to for purposes of moral purification. Through natural or artificial caverns in India pilgrims enter at the south side, and make their exit at the northern, as was anciently the custom in the Mithraic mysteries. Those who pass through such caves are considered to receive by this action a new birth of the soul. According to the same idea the rulers of Travancore, who are Nairs by caste, are made into Brahmins when they ascend the throne by passing through a hole in a large golden image of a cow or lotus flower, which then becomes the property of the Brahmin priests. It is possible that there may be an allusion to this primitive custom in the rule of the Jewish Temple, mentioned by Ezekiel,--"He that entereth in by the way of the north gate to worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he that entereth by the way of the south gate shall go forth by the way of the north gate: he shall not return by the way of the gate whereby he came in, but shall go forth over against it." This arrangement may have been made not as a mere matter of convenience, but as a survival of the old practice of "passing through" a sacred cave or crevice for the forgiveness of sins;--a survival purified and ennobled in the service of God. The oldest of all religious monuments of which we have any existing trace are cromlechs, found mostly in waste, uncultivated places. These are of various forms, but they are mostly tripods, consisting of a copestone poised upon three other stones, two at the head and one at the foot. The supports are rough boulders, the largest masses of stone that could be found or moved; and the copestone is an enormous flat square block, often with cup-shaped hollows carved upon its surface. Under this copestone there was a vacant space, varying in size from a foot or two to the height of a man on horseback. Through this vacant space persons used to pass; and the narrower the space, the more difficult the feat of crawling through, the more meritorious was the act. In our own country there are numerous relics of this primitive custom. In Cornwall there are two holed stones, one called Tolven, situated near St. Buryan, and the other called Men-an-tol, near Madron, which have been used within living memory for curing infirm children by passing them through the aperture. In the parish of Minchin Hampton, Gloucestershire, is a stone called Long Stone, seven or eight feet in height, having near the bottom of it a large perforation, through which, not many years since, children brought from a considerable distance were passed for the cure of measles and whooping-cough. On the west side of the Island of Tyree in Scotland is a rock with a crevice in it through which children were put when suffering from various infantile diseases. In connection with the ancient ruined church of St. Molaisse on the Island of Devenish in Loch Erne in Ireland, there is an artificially perforated stone, through which persons still pass, when the opening will admit, in order to be regenerated. If the hole be too small, they put the hand or the foot through it, and the effect is thus limited. Examples of such holed stones are to be found in some of the old churches of Ireland, such as Castledermot, County Kildare; Kilmalkedar, County Kerry; Kilbarry, near Tarmon Barry, on the Shannon. In Madras, diseased children are passed under the lintels of doorways; and in rural parts of England they used to be passed through a cleft ash tree. At Maryhill, in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, about a year ago, when an epidemic of measles and whooping-cough was prevalent, two mothers took advantage, for the carrying out of this superstition, of the presence in the village of an ass which drew the cart of a travelling rag-gatherer. They stood one on each side of the animal. One woman then took one of the children and passed it face downward through below the ass's belly to the other woman, who in turn handed it back with its face this time turned towards the sky. The process having been repeated three times, the child was taken away to the house, and then the second child was similarly treated. The mothers were thoroughly satisfied that their children were the better of the magic process. A mysterious virtue was supposed to be connected with passing under the ancient gate of Mycenæ by the primitive race who constructed it. Jacob's words at Bethel, "This is the gate of heaven," may have an allusion to the prehistoric custom of the place; for we have reason to believe that a dolmen existed there, consecrated to solar worship, the original name of Bethel being Beth-on, the house of the sun. The hollow space beneath the dolmen was considered the altar-gate leading to paradise, so that whosoever passed through it was certain to obtain new life or immortality. It was an old superstition that the dead required to be brought out of the house not by the ordinary door of the living, but by a breach made specially in the wall, in order that they might thus pass through a species of purgatory. We find an exceedingly interesting example of this primitive superstition in the punishment that was imposed upon the survivor in the famous combat between the Horatii and Curiatii, when he murdered his sister, on account of her unpatriotic devotion to her slain lover. The father of Horatius, after making a piacular sacrifice, erected a beam across the street leading from the Vicus Cyprius to the Carinæ, with an altar on each side--the one dedicated to Juno Sororia and the other to Janus Curiatius--and under this yoke he made his son pass with his head veiled. This beam long survived under the name of Tigillum Sororium or Sister's Beam, and was constantly repaired at the public expense. In modern times there are two most remarkable survivals of the same kind. One of them is in the corridor of the mosque of Aksa at Jerusalem. In this place are two pillars, standing close together, and like those in the mosque of Omar at Cairo, they are used as a test of character. It is said that whosoever can squeeze himself between them is certain of paradise, and must be a good Moslem. The pillars have been worn thin by the friction of countless devotees. An iron bar has now, however, been placed between the pillars by the present enlightened Pasha of Jerusalem to prevent the practice in future. The other instance is what is popularly known as "threading the needle" in the Cathedral of Ripon. Beneath the central tower of this minster there is a small crypt or vaulted cell entered from the nave by a narrow passage. At the north side of this crypt there is an opening thirteen inches by eighteen, called St. Wilfred's needle. This passage was formerly used as a test of character; for only an honest man, one new-born, could pass through it. "They pricked their credits who could not thread the needle," was the quaint remark of old Fuller in reference to the original use of the opening. It may be remarked that the well-known boys' game of "Through the needle's e'e, boys," had its origin in all likelihood in the old superstition. Thus we can trace the use made of the Bocca della Verita in Rome to the primitive idolatry associated perhaps with the Temple of Ceres that formerly stood on the spot. Some other superstitious practices of a closely allied nature may be traced to the same source. In the Orkney Islands, not far from the famous Standing Stones of Stennis, there is a single monolith with a large hole through it, which has become celebrated, owing to the allusion to it of Sir Walter Scott in his novel of the _Pirate_. It is called Odin's Stone; and till a very recent period it was the local custom to take an oath by joining hands through the hole in it; and this oath was considered even by the regular courts of Orkney as peculiarly solemn and binding; the person who violated it being accounted infamous and excluded from society. In the old churchyard of the ruined monastery of Saints Island in the Shannon, there is an ancient black marble flagstone called the "Cremave" or "swearing stone." The saints are said to have made it a revealer of truth. Any one suspected of falsehood is brought here, and if the accused swears falsely the stone has the power to set a mark upon him and his family for several generations. But if no mark appears he is known to be innocent. Many other equally interesting instances might be quoted all akin to the superstition in Rome. It is not too fanciful to suppose that even the Jewish mode of making a covenant had something to do with this primitive custom. The animal offered in sacrifice was divided into two pieces, and so arranged that a space was left between them. Through this space, between the parts, the contracting persons passed in order to ratify the covenant. We have a striking account of this ceremony in the case of Abraham; and it is in allusion to it that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says that we have boldness to enter into the holiest "by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh." The superstitious practices connected with clefts and holed stones were denounced by councils of the Christian Church, which subjected transgressors to various penalties. Consequently this mode of worship came into evil repute; and what was formerly considered a meritorious action, securing the cure of disease or future happiness, became a deed of evil, to be followed by some calamity. For this reason the primitive symbolism was reversed in many cases, such as "passing under a ladder," which is now considered unlucky; or in Eastern lands going between a wall and a pole, between two women or two dogs, which the Talmud forbids as an omen of evil. Passing from the subject of holed stones I proceed to consider another class of interesting prehistoric objects that survive in the more primitive churches of Rome. In the same church of Sta. Maria in Cosmedin--where the Bocca della Verita which I have described occurs--there is a curious crypt called the chapel of St. Cyril, who undertook a mission about the year eight hundred and sixty to convert the Slavs in Bulgaria to Christianity, and suffered martyrdom in the attempt. Beside an ancient altar of primitive construction on one side is preserved a large slab of granite on which St. Cyril is said to have knelt when he was put to death; and half-sunk in the wall opposite are two large, smooth, dark-coloured stones, in shape not unlike curling stones--or an orange from which a portion has been sliced off horizontally. They cannot fail to be seen when attention is directed to them. Such stones, often made level at the top and bottom, and with a ring inserted in the upper surface, are not uncommon in the older churches of Rome, although they are very seldom noticed, as their significance is only known to a few experts. One is placed in the centre of the middle nave of Santa Sabina, on the Aventine, on the top of a short spirally-fluted column of white marble, which marks the spot where St. Dominic, the founder of the order of the Dominicans, used to kneel down and pray. It has received the name of Pietra di Paragone, or the Touchstone. Another may be seen at the entrance of the church of Santa Pudenziana, on the Esquiline, supposed to have been built on the site of the house of the Roman senator Pudens, whose daughter, Pudentiana, St. Peter is said to have converted to Christianity. A third exists among the extensive collection of relics belonging to the ten thousand three hundred martyrs whose remains, according to tradition, were deposited in the church of S. Prassede, at the beginning of the ninth century, by Paschal I. Two stones may be observed upon the gable wall immediately above the basins of holy water in the interior of the church of S. Nicolo in Carcere, near the Ghetto. Two others are inserted in the wall of the Baptistery of St. John Lateran, between the vestibule and the octagonal area containing the so-called gigantic font in which Constantine was baptized. A very interesting stone hangs suspended from the gilded iron grating which protects the crypt or confessional of St. Laurence, immediately underneath the high altar of the great Basilica of San Lorenzo beyond the Gate. A stone still more remarkable, guarded by a strong iron grating, projects half its bulk from the wall on the right-hand side of the arch which divides the transept from the middle nave in the venerable church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Two other stones may be seen in the quaint old church of SS. Cosma e Damiano at the south-eastern angle of the Roman Forum, composed of portions of three pagan temples. They are inserted in the plain whitewashed walls on both sides of the circular arch through which you pass from the round vestibule into the interior of the church. I have noticed similar stones in no less than twenty places besides those I have mentioned; and I am assured that they may be seen in many more churches. It is very difficult to obtain any accurate or satisfactory information regarding these curious stones. They go by the name of _Lapides Martyrum_, or Martyr-stones. During the persecutions of the early Christians in Rome they are said to have been hung round the necks of those who were condemned to be drowned in the Tiber. In the reign of the emperor Diocletian many martyrs perished in this way, and the stones by which they were sunk beneath the fatal waters, according to the popular idea, were afterwards found, and carefully preserved as holy relics in the churches in which they are now to be seen. Beyond doubt they are genuine remains of antiquity, and some of them at least may have been used for the purpose alleged; although we cannot be sure, in any case, that the story connected with particular stones is authentic. St. Sabine desired that the stone which was to be tied to him when thrown in the river should be buried with his body, and this might have been done in the case of other martyrs. The stones in the church of SS. Cosma e Damiano are supposed to have been the very ones that were fastened to the necks of these devoted Christians when they were thrown into the Tiber in the reign of Maximian. But as the place and manner of their martyrdom are involved in hopeless obscurity, the various accounts given of both being contradictory, the ecclesiastical legend has no weight. Cosma and Damian were Arabian doctors who were converted to Christianity, and belonged to the class called "silverless martyrs"--that is, physicians who took no fee from those whom they cured, but only stipulated that they should believe in Christ the Great Physician. They occupied in Christian hagiology the same place as the ancient myth of Esculapius occupied in pagan mythology. Around the stone in the church of Santa Sabina a curious legend has gathered. The sacristan, a Dominican friar of the neighbouring convent, is in the habit of telling the visitors that the devil one day, while St. Dominic was kneeling on the pavement as usual, hurled the huge stone in question, with his utmost force, against the head of the saint; but, strange to say, it either missed him altogether or failed to do him any injury, the saint going calmly on with his devotions as if nothing had happened. On the stone in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere there is an inscription in Latin, informing us that it was fastened round the neck of St. Calixtus, the Bishop of Rome, who, after having been scourged during an outbreak of pagan hostility, was thrown out of a window in his house in the Trastevere, and flung into a well. The stone in the Basilica of S. Lorenzo is connected with the sufferings and death either of St. Justinian or of St. Stephen, the proto-martyr, who was stoned to death in Palestine, and whose remains, miraculously recovered, are supposed to rest in the crypt below, along with those of St. Laurence. All these relics are devoutly worshipped, and they are believed to cure diseases, and to protect against evil those who touch them. Examining the martyr-stones more closely, we find abundant evidence to confirm the account which is usually given of their origin, viz. that they were first used as Roman measures of weight. Several of them have inscribed upon their upper surface the names of the quæstors or prefects who issued them, as well as the number of pounds and ounces which they represented; the pounds being distinguished by figures, and the ounces expressed by dots or small circles. Numbers of such ancient Roman weights of stone, similarly inscribed, may be seen in the Kircherian Museum in the Collegio Romano. One specimen bears an inscription which signifies that, by the authority of Augustus, the weight was preserved in the temple of the goddess Ops, the wife of Saturn, and one of the most ancient deities of Italy, where the public money was deposited. Montfaucon, in the third volume of his learned and elaborate work on Antiquity, has a plate illustrating a number of characteristic specimens of these weights from the cabinet of St. Germain's. This previous use would lead us to suspect that all the stones in the Roman churches did not figure in scenes of martyrdom. Some of them, indeed, were found in the _loculi_ or graves of the Catacombs; but this circumstance of itself does not prove that the body interred therein had been that of a martyr, and that the stone had been employed in his execution. We know that the early Christians were in the habit of depositing in the graves of their friends the articles that were most valued by them during life. And hence, in the Catacombs, a singular variety of objects have been found. Stone weights, therefore, may have been put into the graves of Christians, not as instruments of suffering but as objects typical of the occupation of the departed in this life, in accordance with the habit of their pagan forefathers, which the Roman Christians had adopted. Some, however, of the stones, as I have said, may have been used according to the popular legend for the drowning of martyrs; and these weights were conveniently at hand in places of public resort, and lent themselves readily, by the rings inserted in many of them, to the persecutor's purpose. The material of which they are composed is in nearly all cases the same. It is a stone of extreme hardness and of various shades of colour, from a light green to a dark olive, with a degree of transparency equal to that of wax and susceptible of a fine polish. By some writers it is called a black stone; but this colour may have been given to it by frequent handling when in use, and by the grime of age since. It was called by the Romans, from the use made of it in fabricating measures of weight, _lapis æquipondus_, and from its supposed efficacy in the cure of diseases of the kidneys _lapis nephriticus_. Fabreti says that it got the name of _lapis Lydius_ from the locality from which it was believed to have come. It is a kind of nephrite or jade, a mineral which usually occurs in talcose or magnesian rocks. At one time it was supposed to exist only on the river Kara-Kash, in the Kuen Luen mountains north of Cashmere, and for thousands of years the mines of that locality were the only known worked ones of pure jade. It has since, however, been found in New Zealand and in India; while the discoverers of South America obtained specimens of it in its natural state from the natives of Peru, who used it for making axes and arrow-heads, and gave it the name of _piedra de yjada_, from which comes our common word _jade_, on account of its use as a supposed cure for the iliac passion. It may be mentioned that there is a mineral closely allied to jade called "Saussurite," discovered by the great geologist whose name it bears near Monte Rosa, and since found on the borders of the Lake of Geneva, near Genoa, and in Corsica. It is possible that the martyr-stones may be made of this mineral, for they have not been analysed. But if they are, as it is supposed, made of true jade, the fact opens up many important questions. No stone has a more remarkable history. It is an object of interest alike to the geologist and the antiquarian; and in spite of the most patient inquiry its antecedents are surrounded with a mystery which cannot be satisfactorily solved. Its antiquity is beyond doubt. In the most ancient books of China it is noticed as one of the articles of tribute paid to the emperor. Dr. Schliemann found it among the ruins of Troy. But its history stretches into the misty past far anterior in time to all ordinary records, to Cyclopean constructions, or to pictured and sculptured stones. One of the most curious things brought to light in connection with the prehistoric annals of our race is the wide diffusion of this mineral in regions as far apart as China and Britain. Owing to its extreme hardness and susceptibility to polish, it was highly prized by the neolithic races for the manufacture of stone axes and hammers. In nearly every European country implements of jade belonging to the primitive inhabitants have been discovered. Some of the most beautiful belonged to one of the latest settlements of the stone age at Gerlafingen, in the Lake of Bienne, and were mixed with bronze celts of primitive type, indicating that the people of these lake-dwellings lived during the transition period between stone and bronze. The presence of such celts made of jade obviously points to a connection at a very early period with the East, from whence the stone must have been brought, for it has never been found in a natural state west of the Caspian. An interesting controversy upon this subject was created about eight years ago by the finding in the bed of the Rhone of a jade strigil, an instrument curved and hollowed like a spoon used to scrape the skin while bathing. Various conjectures were formed as to how this isolated object could have found its way from its distant quarry in the East to this obscure spot among the Alps. Professor Max Müller, and those who along with him advocate the Oriental origin of the first settlers in Europe, are of opinion that this strigil and the various jade implements found in the Swiss lake-dwellings, are relics of this Western migration from the primitive cradle of the Aryan race on the plateaus of Central Asia. The implements could only have come from the East, for the other sources of jade supply in New Zealand and America--since discovered--were altogether unknown in those primitive times. And this conclusion is supported by an imposing array of concurrent philological evidence, based upon the resemblances between the Aryan languages of Europe, so strangely akin to each other, and the ancient dialects of India and Persia. But plausible as this argument looks, the more probable explanation is that the inhabitants of Europe obtained the material which they laboriously fashioned into tools from the East, according to a system of barter similar to that which still exists amongst tribes more rude and savage than the Swiss lake-dwellers. Numerous facts of a like tendency are on record, such as the finding in the mounds of the Mississippi valley, side by side, obsidian from Mexico and mica from the Alleghanies, and in the mounds around the great northern lakes large tropical shells two thousand miles from their native habitat. The ancient inhabitants of China and India found at a very early period that they possessed in their jade rocks a very valuable material, in exchange for which they could get what they wanted from the Western races; while these Western races had at least one article which they could barter for the much-prized jade implements, viz. linen cloth, the weaving of which was practised in the oldest settlements, hanks of unspun flax and thread, nets and cloth of the same material having been found not unfrequently in the lake dwellings. What an interesting glimpse into the far-off past does this link of connection between the East and the West give us! It indicates a degree of civilisation which we are not accustomed to associate with these primeval times. Archæologists are of opinion that the race who inhabited Central Europe during the earlier part of the stone age were akin to the modern Laplanders. The people of the lake dwellings, however, and especially those who used jade implements, who replaced them, were a superior and more civilised race. The evidence of the articles which they used, with the exception of jade itself, points not to an Asiatic origin, but rather to a connection with the shores on both sides of the Mediterranean. When they migrated northwards they brought with them the flax and the cereals of Egypt, and introduced with them the southern weeds which grew among these cultivated plants. The seeds of the catch-fly of Crete, which does not grow in Switzerland or Germany, have been found among the relics of the earliest of the lake dwellings; while the familiar corn blue-bottle of our autumn fields was first brought from its native Sicily by this lacustrine people in whose cultivated fields it grew as a weed, and by them spread over all Western and Northern Europe. Such are the interesting associations and profound problems connected with the material of the martyr weights. And it is unique in this respect, that it meets us as far back as the first traces of neolithic man in Central Europe--nay, farther back still, in the palæolithic flints found in the caves near Mentone; and that it is still used in the countries where it is found for a great variety of useful and ornamental purposes, idols being carved out of it, and altars adorned with its semi-transparent olive-green slabs. The inhabitants of the South Sea Islands until recently used it for their stone implements in the same way that the ancient lake dwellers did; and the Mogul emperors of Delhi set such a high value upon it on account of its superstitious virtues that they had it cut, jewelled, and enamelled into the most exquisite forms. In Rome the martyr weights, as relics of the stone age, afford a curious example of a very primitive epoch projecting far into a highly-civilised one. Stone weights continued in use long after bronze and iron implements were constructed, on account of the sacred associations connected with them. Weights and measures were regarded by the Romans as invested with a peculiar religious significance; the stone of which the weights were composed was called from that circumstance, or because of the occult qualities attributed to it, _lapis divinus_; and therefore there was a deep-seated prejudice, which reached down to the days of the highest splendour of the Empire, against the introduction of a new substance. This was the case with all articles used in religious ceremonies. As late as the period of St. Paul's residence in Rome, and at the time of the first persecution of the Christians, ancient pagan rites were celebrated in the Forum, in which the use of metal was forbidden; and only stone hatchets could be employed in slaughtering animals, and only earthen vessels used in carrying the significant parts of the sacrifices into the temples. Treaties were also ratified by striking the victim offered on the occasion with a flint hatchet. The ancient Egyptians, although using iron and bronze for other objects, invariably used stone knives in preparing bodies for the process of embalming. The sacrifices which the Mexicans offered to their idols at the time of the Spanish conquest were cut up by means of knives of obsidian, which they obtained from the lavas of their volcanoes. In the Bible we have several traces of the same universal custom. The Jews seem to have performed the rite of circumcision with flint implements, for we read in Exodus that Zipporah, the wife of Moses, took a sharp stone for that purpose; and the phrase translated "sharp knives" in Joshua v. 2--"At that time the Lord said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time"--should be translated, as in the marginal reference, _knives of flint_. To the same ancient widespread habit may doubtless be referred the prohibition, mentioned in Exodus and Deuteronomy, against making an altar in any special place where God recorded His name, of hewn stone, or polluting it by lifting up any iron tool upon it. So strong is the conservative instinct in religion that to this very day the enlightened Brahmin of India will not use ordinary fire for sacred purposes, will not procure a fresh spark even from flint and steel, but reverts to, or rather continues the primitive way of obtaining it by friction with a wooden drill. Everywhere innovations in religious worship are resisted with more or less reason or prejudice. The instinct is universal, and has its good and its evil side. CHAPTER IX ST. ONOFRIO AND TASSO One of the most romantic shrines of pilgrimage in Rome is the church of St. Onofrio. It is situated in the Trastevere, that portion of the city beyond the Tiber whose inhabitants boast of their pure descent from the ancient Romans. A steep ascent on the slope of the Janiculum, through a somewhat squalid but picturesque street, and terminating in a series of broad steps, leads up to it from the Porta di San Spirito, not far from the Vatican. The ground here is open and stretches away, free from buildings, to the walls of the city. The church has a simple old-fashioned appearance; its roof, walls, and small campanile are painted with the rusty gold of lichens that have sprung from the kisses of four centuries of rain and sun. It was erected in the reign of Pope Eugenius IV. by Nicolo da Forca Palena, an ancestor of that Conte di Palena who was a great friend of Torquato Tasso at Naples. It was dedicated to the Egyptian hermit Honuphrius, who for sixty years lived in a cave in the desert of Thebes, without seeing a human being or speaking a word, consorting with birds and beasts, and living upon roots and wild herbs. A subtle harmony is felt between the history of the hermit and the character of this building raised in his honour. A spot more drowsy and secluded, more steeped in the dreams of the older ages, is not to be found in the whole city. In front of the church there is a long, narrow portico, supported by eight antique columns of the simplest construction, in all likelihood borrowed from some old pagan temple. Under this portico is a beautiful fresco of the Madonna and Child by Domenichino. To the right are three lunettes, which contain paintings by the same great master, representing the Baptism, Temptation, and Flagellation of St. Jerome. On the left of the arcade are portraits of the most prominent saints of the Hieronomyte order. Exposed to the weather at first, these invaluable frescoes had faded into mere spectres of pictures; but they are now protected from further injury by glass. Usually the church is closed, except in the early morning, and visitors are admitted by the custode on ringing a door bell under the portico. The interior is dark and solemn, with much less gilding and meretricious ornament than is usual in Roman churches. It contains, in the side chapels, many objects of interest; frescoes and altar-pieces by Annibale Caracci, Pinturicchio, and Peruzzi; and splendid sepulchral monuments. Of the last the most conspicuous are the marble tomb of Alessandro Guidi, the Italian lyric poet, who died in 1712; and the simple cenotaph in the last chapel on the left of one of the titular cardinals of the church, who died in 1849, the celebrated linguist Mezzofante. But the tomb upon which the visitor will gaze with deepest interest is that of Torquato Tasso, who died in the adjacent monastery in 1595. The chapel of St. Jerome, in which it is situated, the first on the left as you enter, was restored by public subscription in 1857, in a manner which does not reflect much credit upon the artistic taste of modern Rome. Previous to this the remains of the poet reposed for two hundred years in an obscure part of the church close to the door, indicated by a tablet. Above this spot there is a portrait of the time, which from an artistic point of view is very poor, but is said to be a good likeness. Removed on the anniversary of his death, about thirty years ago, to the chapel of St. Jerome, the poet's remains are now covered by a huge marble monument in the cinque-cento style, adorned by a bas-relief of his funeral and a statue of him by Fabris. Whatever may be said regarding the artistic merits of this monument, no one who has read the poet's immortal epic, and is conversant with the sad incidents of his life, can stand on the spot without being deeply moved. Connected with the church is a monastery dedicated to St. Jerome. In one of the upper corridors is a beautiful arched fresco of the Madonna and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, with the donor of the picture in profile kneeling before her. The picture is surrounded by a frame of fruit and flowers on an enamelled ground. The soft, tender features of the infant Jesus, and the quiet dignity and grace of the smiling Madonna, are so characteristic of the style of Leonardo da Vinci that the picture would be at once referred to him by one who did not know its origin. The chamber where Tasso spent the last days of his life is on the upper floor, and is the most conveniently situated in the whole building. It is left very much in the same state as when he lived in it. The walls and ceiling are bare and whitewashed, without any decoration. Here and there are several pale marks, indicating the places of objects that had been removed. In one part is painted on the plaster a false door partially open, behind which is seen the figure of Tasso about to enter; but every person of good taste must condemn the melodramatic exhibition, and wish that he could obliterate it with a daub of whitewash. The custode directed my attention to it with an air of great admiration, and could not understand the scowl with which I turned away my face. There are several most interesting relics of Tasso preserved in this chamber--his table, with an inkstand of wood; his great chair covered with Cordova leather, very aged and worn-looking; the belt which he wore; a small German cabinet; a large China bowl, evidently an heirloom; a metal crucifix of singular workmanship, given to him by Pope Clement VIII., which soothed his dying moments; several of his letters, and an autograph copy of verses. In one corner is the leaden coffin, much corroded, in which his remains were originally deposited. On the table is a mask in reddish wax moulded from the dead face of the poet, and placed upon a plaster bust--a most fantastic combination. From this mask, which is an undoubted original, numerous copies have been taken, which are scattered throughout Europe. It is in consequence somewhat effaced, but it still shows the characteristic features of the poet--the purity of the profile, the fineness of the mouth, and the spiritual beauty and fascinating expression of the whole face. But the incoherence of the adaptation makes it painful to think that this is the best representation of the poet we possess. The extensive garden behind the convent combines a considerable variety of natural features. The monks grow large quantities of lettuce and fennochio; and interspersed among the beds of vegetables are orange and other fruit trees, and little trellises of cane, wreathed with vines. A large tank is supplied with water from a spring whose murmur gives a feeling of animation to the spot. The garden rises at the end into broken elevated ground showing the native rock through its grassy sides. A row of tall old cypresses crowns the ridge--their fluted trunks gray with lichen-stains, and their deep green spires of foliage forming harp-strings on which the evening winds discourse solemn music, as if the spirit of the poet haunted them still. On one side are the picturesque ruins of a shrine overarching a fountain, now dry and choked up with weeds, and fringed with ferns. Cyclamens--called by the Italians _viola pazze_, "mad violets"--grow on its margin in glowing masses; sweet-scented violets in profusion perfume all the air; and a few Judas-trees, loaded with crimson blossoms, without a single leaf to relieve the gorgeous colour, serve as an admirable background, almost blending with the clouds on the low horizon. On the other side the hill slopes down in a series of terraces to the crowded streets of the Trastevere, forming a spacious out-door amphitheatre, in which the Arcadian Academy of Rome used to hold its meetings during the summer months, and where St. Filippo Neri was wont to give those half-dramatic musical entertainments which, originating in the oratory of the religious community established by him, are now known throughout the world as oratorios. Between these two objects still stands the large torso of a tree which bears the name of "Tasso's oak," because the poet's favourite seat was under its shadow. It suffered much from the violence of a thunderstorm in 1842, but numerous branches have since sprouted from the old trunk, and it now affords a capacious shade from the noonday heat. It is a variety of the Valonia oak, with delicate, downy, pale-green leaves, much serrated, and contrasts beautifully with the dark green spires of the cypresses behind. The leaves at the time of my visit had but recently unfolded, and exhibited all the delicacy of tint and perfection of outline so characteristic of young foliage. The garden was in the first fresh flush of spring--that idyllic season which, in Italy more than in any other land, realises the glowing descriptions of the poets. Plucking a leafy twig from the branches and a gray lichen from the trunk as mementoes of the place, I sat down on the mossy hole, and tried to bring back in imagination the haunted past. Nature was renewing her old life; the same flowers still covered the earth with their divine frescoes; but where was he whose spirit informed all the beauty and translated its mystic language into human words? The permanency of nature and the vanity of human life seemed here to acquire new significance. The spot on which I sat commands one of the finest views of Rome and the surrounding country. Down below to the left is the enormous group of buildings connected with St Peter's and the Vatican, whose yellow travertine glows in the afternoon sun like dead gold. Beyond rise the steep green slopes of Monte Mario, with vineyards and olive-groves nestling in its warm folds, crowned with the Villa Mellini beside the "Turner pine," a familiar object in many of the great artist's pictures. Stretching away in the direction of the old diligence road from Florence is a succession of gentle ridges and bluffs of volcanic rock covered with brushwood, among which you can trace the bold headland of the citadel of Fidenæ, and the green lonely site of Antemnæ, and the plateau on which are the scanty remains of the almost mythical Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city, broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately campanile or cupola, and flashing back from the graceful columns of Trajan and Antonine. The Tiber flows between you and that wilderness of reddish-brown roofs cleaving the city in twain. For a brief space you see it on both sides of the Bridge of Hadrian, overlooked by the gloomy mass of the Castle of St. Angelo, and then it hides itself under the shadow of the Aventine Hill, and at last emerges beyond the walls, to pursue its desolate way to the sea through one of the saddest tracts of country in all the world. Away to the right, where the mass of modern buildings ceases, the great shattered circle of the Colosseum stands up against the sky, indicating by its presence where lie, unseen from this point of view, the ruins of the palaces of the Cæsars and the Forum. Beyond the city stretches away the undulating bosom of the Campagna, bathed in a misty azure light; bridged over by the weird, endless arches of the Claudian aqueduct, throwing long shadows before them in the westering sun. Worthy framework for such a picture, the noble semicircle of the Sabine Hills rises on the horizon to the left, terminating in the grand rugged peak of Monte Gennaro, whose every cliff and scar are distinctly visible, and concealing in its bosom the romantic waterfalls of Tivoli and the lone ancestral farm of Horace. On the right the crested Alban heights form the boundary, crowned on the summit with the white convent of Monte Cavo--the ancient temple of Jupiter Latialis, up to which the Roman consuls came to triumph when the Latin States were merged in the Roman Commonwealth--and bearing on their shoulders the sparkling, gem-like towns of Frascati and Albano, with their thrilling memories of Cicero and Pompey; the whole range melting away into the blue vault of heaven in delicate gradations of pale pink and purple. In the wide gap between these ranges of hills--beyond the stone pines and ilex groves of Præneste--the far perspective is closed by a glorious vision of the snow-crowned mountains of the Abruzzi, giving an air of alpine grandeur to the view. And all this vast and varied landscape, comprehending all glories of nature and art, all zones and climates, from the tropical aloes and palms of the Pincian Hill to the arctic snows of the Apennines, is seen through air that acts upon the spirits like wine, and gives the ideal beauty of a picture to the meanest things. Italian poets share in the wonderful charm that belongs to everything connected with their lovely land. They are seen, like the early Tuscan paintings, against a golden background of romance. Petrarch, Dante, Ariosto, invested with this magic light, are themselves more attractive even than their poetic creations. But Torquato Tasso, perhaps, more than them all, appeals to our deepest feelings. No sadder or more romantic life than his can be found in the annals of literature. He was one of those "infanti perduti" to whom life was one long avenue of darkened days. In his temperament, in the character of his genius, and in the story of his life, we can discern striking features of resemblance between him and the wayward, sorrowful Rousseau. Hercules, according to the old fable, "was afflicted with madness as a punishment for his being so near the gods;" and the imaginativeness of a brain which had in it a fibre of insanity, near which genius often perilously lies, may be supposed to account for much that is strange and sad in his career. The place of his birth was a fit cradle for a poet. On the edge of a bold cliff, overlooking the sea at Sorrento, is the Hotel Tasso, known to every traveller in that region. Here, according to the voice of tradition, the immortal poet was born on the 11th of March 1544, eleven years after the death of Ariosto. It is said that the identical chamber in which the event took place has since disappeared, owing to the portion of rock on which it stood having been undermined by the sea; and, as if to give countenance to this, some of the existing apartments are perilously propped up on the very edge of the cliff by buttresses, which, giving way, would hurl the superstructure into the abyss. The original building stood on the site of an ancient temple; and it is probable that, with the exception of one of the bedrooms, which is said to have been Tasso's cabinet, the edifice retains none of the features which it possessed in the days of the poet. But whatever changes may have taken place in the human habitation, the scenes of Nature around, from which he drew the inspirations of his youthful genius, remain unchanged. Every feature of landscape loveliness is focussed in that matchless panorama. Behind is a range of wild mountains, whose many-shaped peaks and crags, clad with pine and olive, assume, as the day wears on, the golden and purple hues of the sky--sloping down into the midst of vineyards and groves of orange, myrtle, and all the luxuriant verdure which the warm sun of the South calls forth, out of which gleam at frequent intervals picturesque villages and farms, which seem more the creation of Nature than of Art. In front is a glorious view of the Bay of Naples, with the enchanted isles of Capri and Ischia sleeping on its bosom, and the reflected images of domes and palaces all along its curving shores "charming its blue waters;" while dominating the whole horizon are the snowy mountains of Campania, broken by the dark purple mass of Vesuvius, rising up with gradual slope to its rounded cone, over which rests continually a column of flame or smoke, "stimulating the imagination by its mystery and terror." Apart from its associations, that landscape would have been one to gaze on entranced, and to dream of for years afterwards. But with its countless memories of all that is greatest and saddest in human history clinging to almost every object, it is indeed one of the most impressive in the world. The land is the land of Magna Græcia. The sea is the sea of Homer and Pindar. Near at hand are the Isles of the Sirens, who allured Ulysses with their magic song; away in the dim distance are the wonderful Doric temples of Pæstum, which go back to the mythical times of Jason and the Argonauts. On the opposite shore is the tomb of Virgil, on the threshold of the scenes which he loved to describe,--the Holy Land of Paganism, the Phlegræan Fields, with the terrible Avernus and the Cave of the Sibyl, and all the spots associated with the Pagan heaven and hell; and in the near neighbourhood Baiæ, with its awful memories of Roman luxury and cruelty, and Puteoli, with its inspiring associations of the Apostle Paul's visit, and the introduction of Christianity into Italy. Meet nurse for any poetic child, the place of his birth was peculiarly so for such a child as Tasso; and we can detect in the subjects of his Muse in after years, the very themes which such a region would naturally have suggested and inspired. The age in which he was born was also eminently favourable for the development of the poetic faculty. By the wonderful discoveries of the starry Galileo, man's intellectual vision was infinitely extended, and the great fundamental idea of modern astronomy--infinite space peopled with worlds like our own--was for the first time realised. It was an era of maritime enterprise; the world was circumnavigated, and new ideas streamed in from each newly-visited region. It was pre-eminently the period of art. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael had just passed away, but Michael Angelo, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese were still living, freeing men's spirits by the productions of their pencil from formal fancies and conventional fetters, and sending them back to the fresh teaching of Nature. The art of printing was giving a new birth to letters, and the reformation of religion a new growth to human thought. A new power had descended into the stagnant waters of European life, and imparted to them a wonderful energy. Along with the revival of classical learning and the general quickening of men's minds, there was blended in the South of Europe a lingering love of romance and chivalry, and a strong religious feeling, which had arisen out of the vigorous reaction of Roman Catholicism. Italy was at this time the acknowledged parent both of the poetry and the general literature of Europe; and the immortal works of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto had formed an almost perfect vernacular language in which the creations of genius could find fittest expression. But Tasso was not only born in a poetic region and in a poetic age: he was also the son of a poet. He inherited the divine faculty; he was cradled in poetry. His father, Bernardo, though he has been put into the shade by his more gifted son, has claims of his own to be remembered by posterity. He occupies a high place in the well-defined group of the chivalric poets of Italy. His principal poem, the _Amadigi_, which was composed about the time of his son's birth, though not published for sixteen years afterwards, treats in a hundred cantos the romantic history of Amadis of Gaul, and deals in giants, enchanted swords, prodigious wounds, and miraculous cures. Various estimates of this long poem have been formed by critics from the favourable analysis of Ginguéné to the severe censure of Sismondi. But in spite of its lack of dramatic power, and the monotony of its imagery, the heat of his genius crystallising only a part of the substance of his work, there can be no question that the poem is distinguished by a certain gravity and elevation of sentiment, which places it high above the romances of the older school, and brings it near to the dignity of epic poetry. In this respect the _Amadigi_ may be said to form an interesting transition from the irregular romance of Ariosto to the symmetrical epic of his own son. The son's poetic path was thus prepared, and the mould in which his immortal work was cast was formed by his father. The fortunes of the two poets read remarkably alike. They are marked by the same extraordinary vicissitudes, and the same general sadness and gloom. The family of Tasso belonged to Bergamo, in the north of Italy, a region which has given birth to several eminent men, among others to Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature. It was originally noble, and had large territorial possessions. One ancestor, Omodeo, who lived in the year 1290, is worthy of special mention as the inventor of the system of postal communication, to which the world owes so much; and hence the family arms of a courier's horn and a badger's skin--tasso being the Italian for badger--which the post-horses, down to within fifty years ago, wore upon their harness. In the time of Bernardo, however, the fortunes of the family had decayed, and the early days of the poet were passed in poverty. Adopted after the death of his parents by his father's brother, the Bishop of Recanati, he was placed at school, where he soon acquired a wonderful familiarity with the Greek and Latin authors, then newly restored to Europe. Highly cultivated, refined, and possessed of great personal beauty, while manifesting at the same time a peculiar talent for diplomacy, Bernardo speedily won his way to distinction. His first work, which was a collection principally of love-poems, celebrating his passion for the beautiful Genevra Malatesta, who belonged to the same family as the ill-fated Parasina of Byron, attracted the attention of the reigning Prince of Salerno, Ferrante Sanseverino, one of the chief patrons of literature in Italy, who thereupon engaged him as his private secretary. At the court of this prince he met Porzia de' Rossi, a lady of noble birth, who was beautiful and accomplished, and possessed what was considered in those days a large fortune. After his marriage with this lady Bernardo and his bride retired to a villa which he had purchased at Sorrento, where he enjoyed for several years an exceptional share of domestic felicity, his wife having proved a most devoted helpmeet to him. In these propitious circumstances the infant that was destined afterwards to confer the greatest lustre upon the family name was born. His father was absent at the time with the Prince of Salerno, who had joined the Spanish army in the new war that had arisen between Charles V. and Francis I.; a war whose chivalrous and inspiring acts the Marquis d'Azeglio made use of in 1866 in his romance of history, _Fieramosca_, to rouse again a spirit of independence in his countrymen. A friend of his father, therefore, held the child at the baptismal font, in the cathedral of Sorrento, where he received the name of Torquato--a name which his elder brother, who lived only a few days, had previously borne. The treaty of Crepi, which concluded the war between Charles V. and Francis I., in which the former was victorious, allowed Bernardo Tasso to return home with his patron ten months after the birth of his son. By this treaty the French king, who had previously assumed the title of King of Naples, resigned all claims upon that State, and the inhabitants were henceforth subjected entirely to the dominion of the Spanish sovereigns of the house of Austria. The emperor, Charles V., appointed the Marquis de Villafranca, better known as Don Pedro de Toledo, to be Viceroy of Naples, who, like his despotic master, carried out his so-called reforms with a high hand, and interfered with the personal and domestic affairs of the inhabitants, so that he speedily roused their resentment. Against the establishment of the Inquisition, which he set about under the mask of zeal for religion, but in reality for the intimidation of the nobles, the whole city rose up in violent opposition. After having exhausted itself in a vain struggle with the viceroy, it resolved to petition the emperor, and commissioned the Prince of Salerno to plead its cause at the Court of Nuremberg. But in consequence of being forestalled by the cunning Don Pedro, the prince, when he arrived, found the case prejudged, and all his arguments and pleadings were of no avail. Disgusted with the failure of his errand, with the coldness of his reception, and with other indignities which he received at the hands of the emperor and his viceroy, he determined to abandon altogether the cause of Austria. Repairing to Venice, he publicly gave effect to his decision; whereupon Don Pedro, too glad to have an opportunity of oppressing his personal enemy, declared the prince a rebel, confiscated his estates, and seized all his personal property. In the misfortunes of his patron Bernardo Tasso shared. He too was proscribed as a rebel; his property at Salerno was seized, and his wife and children were transferred by the viceroy's orders to Naples, where her family resided, and where, under their cruel treatment, instigated by the viceroy, she was deprived of her fortune, and virtually held a prisoner to the day of her death. Such were the dark clouds that, after a brief gleam of the brightest prosperity, hung over the early years of Torquato Tasso. Deprived of the care of a father who followed from court to court the varied fortunes of his benefactor, and in the company of a mother worse than widowed, dependent upon the cold and niggardly charity of friends who were either too timid or superstitious to oppose the patron of the Inquisition, the child grew up in melancholy solitude, like an etiolated plant that has been deprived of the sunshine. The original sadness and sensitiveness of his disposition was much increased by the family misfortunes. In his seventh year he was sent to a school in the neighbourhood, opened by the Jesuits, who were at this time beginning to exert a powerful influence upon society, principally on account of their zeal in the cause of education. At this school he remained for three years, acquiring a wonderful knowledge of Latin and Greek, and manifesting such enthusiasm in his studies that he rose long before day-break, and was so impatient to get to school that his mother was often obliged to send him away in the dark with a lantern. Here he showed the first symptoms of his genius for poetry and rhetoric, and gave public testimony to the deep religious feeling which he inherited from his parents, and which had been so carefully cultivated by his ecclesiastical masters, by joining the communion of the Church. In his tenth year his father left the court of Henry III. of France, and settled in Rome, where he had apartments assigned him in the immense palace of Cardinal Hippolito of the house of Ferrara. These apartments were furnished as handsomely as his impoverished resources allowed, in the hope that he might have his wife and children to live with him. But in spite of all his efforts and entreaties his wife was not allowed by her brothers to rejoin him; while his own position as an outlaw made it impossible for him to enter the kingdom of Naples to rescue her. The only concession he could get from the authorities was permission for her to enter with her daughter Cornelia as pensioners among the nuns in the convent of San Festo; and no sooner was this step taken than her friends openly seized her dowry, on the plea that it would otherwise belong to the convent, as her husband's outlawry cancelled his claims to it. Her boy, of course, could not enter the convent with her; he was therefore sent to his father in Rome. The separation between mother and son, we are told, was most affecting. To her it was the climax of her trials; and, bowed down beneath the weight of her accumulated sufferings, she fell an easy victim to an attack of fever, which, in the short space of twenty-four hours, ended her wretched life. Upon Tasso the parting from a mother whom he was never to see again, and whose personal qualities and grievous trials had greatly endeared her to him, produced an impression which even the great troubles of his after life could never efface. With a mind richly stored, notwithstanding his youthful age, with classic lore, and quickened and made sensitive by a varied and sorrowful career, Torquato Tasso came to Rome. The first occasion of seeing the imperial city must have been exciting and awakening in a high degree to such a boy. He was leaving behind the passive simplicity of the child, and had already a keen interest in the things ennobled by history and cared for by grown-up men. This dawn of a higher consciousness found a congenial sphere in the city of the soul. With what absorbing eagerness his young mind would be drawn to the study of the immortal deeds, which were the inheritance of his race, on the very spot where they were done. He would behold with his eyes the glorious things of which he had heard. There would be much that would shock and disappoint him when he came to be familiar with it. Many of the ancient monuments had been destroyed; and many of the ancient sites, especially the Forum and the Palatine, were deserted wastes which had not yet yielded up their buried treasures of art to the pick and spade of the antiquarian. The ravages inflicted by the ferocious hordes of the Constable Bourbon in 1527 had not yet been obliterated by the restorations and repairs undertaken by Pope Paul III. The city had lost much of its ancient glory, and had not yet exchanged its gloomy medieval aspect for that of modern civilisation. But, in spite of every drawback, he could not sufficiently admire the buildings and the sites which bore witness of all that was grandest in human history. Along with a young relative, Christopher Tasso, he pursued his classical studies in the midst of all these stimulating associations under the tutorship of Maurizio Cattaneo, the most learned master in Italy. The companionship of a youth of his own age did him a great deal of good. It satisfied his affections, it saved him from the loneliness to which his father's ill-health at the time would otherwise have consigned him, and it spurred him on to a healthful exercise of his mental powers. For a short time he led a comparatively happy life in Rome. His father's prospects had somewhat improved. Cardinal Caraffa, who was a personal friend of his, ascended the pontifical throne under the name of Paul IV.; and as they were on the same political side, he hoped that his fortunes would now be retrieved. But this gleam of prosperity speedily vanished. The imperial enmity, which had been the cause of all his previous misfortunes, continued to pursue him like a relentless fate. Philip II. of Spain and the Pope having quarrelled, the formidable Duke of Alba, the new Viceroy of Naples, invaded the Papal States, took Ostia and Tivoli, and threatened Rome itself. With extreme difficulty Bernardo Tasso managed to make his escape to Ravenna, with nothing left him but the manuscript of his _Amadigi_. In the meantime his son was taken to his relatives at Bergamo. In this city, under the shadow of the Alps, Torquato remained for a year in the home of his Roman schoolfellow. The inhabitants have ever since cherished with pride the connection of the Tassos with their town, and have erected a splendid monument to Torquato in the market-place. The exquisite scenery in the neighbourhood had a wonderful effect upon the mind of the youthful poet. It put the finishing touch to his varied education. The snows of the North and the fires of the South, the wild grandeur of the mountains and the soft beauty of the sea, the solitudes of Nature where only the effects of storm and sunshine are chronicled, and the crowded scenes of the most inspiring events in human history, had their share in moulding his temperament and colouring his poetry. From Bergamo Torquato was summoned to Pesaro, since known as the birthplace of Rossini, hence called the "Swan of Pesaro." His father had found a home with the Duke of Urbino, who treated him with the utmost kindness. In the Villa Barachetto, on the shores of the Adriatic, surrounded by the most beautiful scenery and by the finest treasures of art, which have long since been transferred to Paris and Rome, Bernardo Tasso at last completed his _Amadigi_; while, captivated by his grace and intelligence, the duke made Torquato the companion of his son, Francesco Maria, in all his studies and amusements. For two years father and son enjoyed in this place a grateful repose from the buffetings of fortune. But, fired by ambition, Bernardo left Pesaro for Venice, in order to see his poem through the press of Aldus Manutius; and being not only welcomed with open arms by his literary friends in that city, but also appointed secretary of the great Venetian Academy "Della Fama," with a handsome salary, he sent for his son, took a house in a good situation, and resolved to settle down in the place. There was much to captivate the imagination of the youthful Torquato in this wonderful city of the sea, then in the zenith of its fame, surpassing all the capitals of transalpine Europe in the extent of its commerce, in refinement of manners, and in the cultivation of learning and the arts. Its romantic situation, its weird history, its splendid palaces, its silent water-ways, its stirring commerce, its inspiring arts, must have kindled all the enthusiasm of his nature. But he did not yield himself up to the siren attractions of the place, and muse in idleness upon its varied charms. On the contrary, the time that he spent in Venice was the busiest of his life. He was absorbed in the study of Dante and Petrarch; and the results of his devotion may still be seen in the numerous annotations in his handwriting in the copies of these poets which belonged to him, now preserved in the Vatican Library in Rome and the Laurentian Library in Florence. He was also employed by his father in transcribing for the press considerable portions of his poetical works; and these studies and exercises were of much use to him in enabling him to form a graphic and elegant literary style. His own compositions, both in prose and verse, were by this time pretty numerous, though nothing of his had found its way into print as yet. His father saw with much concern the development of his son's genius. Anxious to save him from the trials which he himself had experienced in his literary career, he sent him to the University of Padua to study law, which he thought would be a surer provision for his future life than a devotion to the Muses. One great branch of law, that which relates to ecclesiastical jurisprudence, has always been much esteemed in Italy, and the study of it, in many instances, has paved the way to high honours. Almost all the eminent poets of Italy, Petrarch, Ariosto, Marino, Metastasio, spent their earlier years in this pursuit; but, like Ovid and our own Milton, their nature rebelled against the bondage. They took greater pleasure in the study of the laws for rhyme than in the study of the Pandects of Justinian or the Decretals of Isidore. It was so with Tasso. He attended faithfully the lectures of Guido Panciroli, although these were not compulsory, and waited patiently at the University during the three years of residence which is required for a law degree. But all the time his mind was occupied with other thoughts than those connected with his law studies. Still, uncongenial as they must have been to him, he could not have attended for three years to such studies without unconsciously deriving much benefit from them. They must have impressed upon him those ideas of order and logical arrangement which he afterwards carried out in his writings, and which separate them so markedly from the confused, inconsistent license of the older literature of Italy; and he could not have resided in the birthplace of Livy, in constant association with the highest minds of the time, as a member of a University then the most famous in Europe, numbering no less than ten thousand students from all parts of the world, without his intellectual life being greatly quickened. During ten months of enthusiastic work he produced his first great poem, which, considering his age--for he was then only in his eighteenth year--and the short time occupied in its composition, is one of the most remarkable efforts of genius. He called his poem _Rinaldo_, after the name of the knight whose romantic adventures it celebrates--not the Rinaldo of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, but the Paladin of whom so much is said in the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto,--and dedicated it to Cardinal Lewis of Este, then one of the most distinguished patrons of literature in Italy. It contains a beautiful allusion to his father's genius as the source of his own inspiration. It abounds in the supernatural incidents and personified abstractions characteristic of the romantic school of poetry; and though Galileo said of it that it reminded him of a picture formed of inlaid work, rather than of a painting in oil, it has nevertheless a unity of plot, a sustained interest, and a uniform elevation of style, which distinguishes it from all the poetry of the period. Our own Spenser has imbibed the spirit of some of its most beautiful passages; and several striking coincidences between his _Faerie Queen_ and the _Rinaldo_ can be traced, particularly in the account of the lion tamed by Clarillo, and the well-known incident of Una and the lion in Spenser. The poem of _Rinaldo_ will always be read with interest, as it strikes the keynote of Tasso's great epic, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, many of the finest fictions of which were adopted with very little modification from the earlier work. His letter asking his father's permission to publish it came at a very inopportune moment. Bernardo was smarting just then under the disappointments connected with the reception of his own poem, the _Amadigi_. It produced little impression upon the general public; the copies which he distributed among the Italian nobles procured him nothing but conventional thanks and polite praise; while the magnificent edition which he prepared specially for presentation to Philip II. of Spain, in the hope that he might thereby be induced to interest himself in the restoration of his wife's property at Naples, was not even acknowledged. Wounded thus in his deepest sensibilities, and bewailing the misfortunes of his literary career, we need not wonder that he should have sent a reply peremptorily commanding his son to give up poetry and stick to the law. The young poet in his distress sought the intervention of some of his father's literary friends, and through their mediation the destiny of Torquato Tasso and of Italian poetry was accomplished, and the poem of _Rinaldo_ was given to the world through the renowned press of the Franceschi of Venice. No sooner was it published than it achieved an extraordinary success, for Cervantes had not yet made this class of fiction for ever ridiculous. Notwithstanding that the public were surfeited with romantic poetry, the merits of this new work, constructed upon different principles and carried out in an original style, were such that the literary schools were carried by storm, and the young Tasso, or Tassino, as he was now called to distinguish him from his father, at once leapt into fame. So great was his reputation, that the newly-restored University of Bologna invited him to reside there, so that it might share in the distinction conferred by his name. In this magnificent seat of learning he remained, enjoying the advantage of literary intercourse with the great scholars who then occupied the chairs of the University, until the publication of some anonymous pasquinades, reflecting severely upon the leading inhabitants, of which he was falsely supposed to be the author. In his absence the Government officials visited his rooms and seized his papers. The sensitive poet regarded this suspicion as a stain upon his honour, and the outrage he never forgave. Shaking the dust from his shoes, he departed from Bologna, and for some time led an unsettled life, enjoying the generous hospitality of the nobles whose names he had celebrated in his _Rinaldo_. Returning at length to Padua, where he engaged in the study of Aristotle and Plato, and delivered three discourses on Heroic Poetry in the Academia degli Eterei, or the Ethereals--in which he developed the whole theory of his poetical design--which were afterwards published, the office of Laureate at the court of Ferrara was offered to him by Cardinal Lewis of Este, to whom, as I have said, he had dedicated his _Rinaldo_. Torquato Tasso was now in the full bloom of opening manhood. He was distinguished, like his father, for his personal beauty and grace, with a high, noble forehead, deep gray melancholy eyes, regular well-cut features, and hair of a light brown. He had the advantage of all the culture of his time. His manners were refined by familiar intercourse with the highest nobles of the land, and his mind richly furnished, not only with the stores of classic literature, but also with the literary treasures of his own country; while a residence, more or less prolonged, in the most famous towns, and among the most romantic scenes of Italy, had widened his mental horizon and expanded his sympathies. He had already mounted almost to the highest step of the literary ladder. Nothing could exceed the tokens of respect with which he was everywhere received. But, in spite of all these advantages, Tasso was now beginning to realise the shadows that accompany even the most splendid literary career. His own experience was now confirming to him the truth of what his father had often sought to impress upon his mind,--that the favour of princes was capricious, and that a life of dependence at a court was of all others the most unsatisfactory. Constitutionally disposed to melancholy, irritable and sensitive to the last degree, he brooded over the fancied wrongs and slights which he had received; and at first he was disposed to accept the advice of his father's friend, the well-known Sperone, who strongly dissuaded him from going to the court of Ferrara, painting the nature of the life he would lead there in the most forbidding colours. It would have been well had he listened to this wise counsel, strengthened as it was by his own better judgment; for in that case he might have been spared the mortifications which made the whole of his after life one continued martyrdom. But recovering from a protracted illness, into which the agitation of his spirits threw him, when on a visit to his father at the court of the Duke of Mantua, he passed from the depths of despondency to the opposite extreme of eagerness, and, fired by ambition, he resolved to enter upon the path to distinction which now opened before him. And here we come to the crisis of his life. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a state of things existed in Italy somewhat similar to that which existed in the Highlands of Scotland in earlier times. Each Highland chief maintained an independent court, and among his personal retainers a bard who should celebrate his deeds was considered indispensable. So was it with the princes of Italy. In their train was always found a man of letters whose poetic Muse was dedicated to laureate duties, and was valued in proportion as it recorded the triumphs of the protecting court. For this patronage of art and letters no court was more distinguished than that of Ferrara. "Whoe'er in Italy is known to fame, This lordly home as frequent guest can claim." The family of Este was the most ancient and illustrious in Italy. The house of Brunswick, from which our own royal family is descended, was a shoot from this parent stock. It intermarried with the principal reigning families of Europe. Leibnitz, Muratori, and our own great historian, Gibbon, have traced the lineage and chronicled the family incidents of this ducal house. Lucrezia Borgia and the Parasina of Byron were members of it. For several generations the men and women were remarkable for the curious contrasts of a violent character and the pursuits of the arts of peace which they displayed. Poisonings, assassinations, adulteries, imprisonments for life, conspiracies, were by no means uncommon incidents in their tragical history. And yet under their government Ferrara became the first really modern city in Europe, with well-built streets, a large population, and flourishing trade, attracting wealthy settlers from all parts of Italy. Nearly all the members of the reigning house were distinguished for their personal attractions and their mental capacities. They were also notorious for their love of display. We have books, such as the _Antiquities of the House of Este_ by Muratori, the _Chivalries of Ferrara_, the _Borseid_, and the _Hecatommiti_ of Giraldi, which were written almost to order for the purpose of gratifying this vanity. Borso, the first duke, caused his portrait to be painted in a series of historical representations in one of his principal palaces; Hercules I. kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a splendid procession, which was compared to the festival of Corpus Christi; an Order, which had nothing in common with medieval chivalry, called the Order of the Golden Spur, was instituted by his court, and conferred upon those who reflected lustre by their deeds or their literary gifts upon the house of Este; while, to crown all, we read at this day on the tower of the cathedral of Ferrara the dedicatory inscription beginning with "To the god Hercules II.," which the complaisant inhabitants had put there,--an apotheosis which reminds us of the worst slavery of imperial Rome under Caligula and Domitian. Some of the greatest names of Italy, such as Petrarch, Boiardo, Ariosto, the wonderful prodigy Olympia Morata, and the celebrated poetess Vittoria Colonna--the friend of Michael Angelo--were connected with this brilliant court. The well-known French poet Clement Marot fled to it to escape persecution in his native country. Calvin found a refuge there for some months under the assumed name of Charles d'Heppeville, during which he converted the duchess to the reformed faith. The father of Tasso visited it when it was at the height of its splendour and renown. Hercules II., the then reigning prince, son of Lucrezia Borgia, had earned a great reputation for his literary works and patronage of the fine arts; and his wife, the friend of Calvin, the youngest daughter of Louis XII. of France, was even more remarkable for her talents, being equally skilled in the Latin and Greek languages. This renowned couple drew around them a circle of the most accomplished men and women in Europe, in whose congenial society Bernardo Tasso spent a few months of great enjoyment, delighting all by his wit and social qualities. But notwithstanding all this magnificence and love of learning, the house of Este, among its other contradictory qualities, was distinguished for capriciousness and meanness. Even Muratori, their ardent panegyrist, does not attempt to conceal this blemish. We must deduct a good deal from the high-sounding praise which the courtly writers of Italy bestowed upon this house for its splendid patronage of literature, when we remember that Ariosto, who passed his life in its service, was treated with niggardliness and contempt. He had a place assigned him among the musicians and jugglers, and was regarded as one of the common domestics of the establishment. Guarini, the well-known author of the _Pastor Fido_, contemporary with Tasso, met with much indignity in the service of Alphonso II.; while Panigarola and several other distinguished men were compelled to leave the service of the ducal family by persecution. Benvenuto Cellini, who resided at the court of Ferrara twenty-five years before Tasso, gives a very unfavourable account of the avarice and rapacity which characterised it; and Serassi, the biographer of Tasso, remarks that the court seems to have been extremely dangerous, especially to literary men. It was not therefore, we may suppose, without other reasons than his being merely a Guelph, that Dante in his _Inferno_ placed one of the scions of the house in hell, and uniformly regarded the family with dislike. Tasso himself was destined to experience both the favour and the hostility, the generosity and the neglect, of this capricious house. Ferrara is now a dull sleepy city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants. It is a place that continues to exist not because of its vitality, but by the mere force of habit. Its broad deserted streets and decaying palaces lie silent and sad in the drowsy noon sunshine, like the aisles of a September forest. But in the days of Tasso it was one of the gayest cities of Italy, which looked upon itself as the centre of the world, and all beyond as mere margin. It was always _festa_, always carnival, in Ferrara; and when the poet came to it in his twentieth year, on the last day of October 1565, he found it one brilliant theatre. The reigning duke, Alphonso II., had just been married to the daughter of Ferdinand I., Emperor of Austria; and this splendid alliance was celebrated by tournaments, balls, feasts, and other pageantry, which transcended everything of the kind that had previously been seen in Italy, with the exception, perhaps, of the fêtes connected with the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to his grandfather. The ardent mind of the poet, it need hardly be said, was completely fascinated. He saw himself surrounded daily with all the splendours of chivalry, and lived in the midst of scenes such as haunt the dreams of poets and inspire the pages of romance. Goethe, in his _Torquato Tasso_, an exquisite poem, it may be said, but wanting in dramatic action, gives a vivid picture of the poet's life at the court of Ferrara, which bore some resemblance to his own at the court of Weimar. Two sisters of the reigning prince lived in the palace, and by their beauty and accomplishments imparted to the court an air of great refinement. The younger, the famous Leonora of Este, was about thirty years of age at this time, and therefore considerably older than Tasso. A severe and protracted illness had shut her out from the festivities connected with her brother's marriage, and communicated to her mind a touch of sadness, and to her features a spiritual delicacy which greatly increased her attractiveness. The numerous writers by whom she is mentioned talk with rapture, not only of her beauty and genius, but also of her saintly goodness, which was so great that a single prayer of hers on one occasion was said to have rescued Ferrara from the wrath of Heaven evinced in the inundation of the Po. In the society of these ladies Tasso spent a great deal of his time; and perhaps his intercourse with them, unconstrained by court conventionalities, was not altogether free from those tender feelings which the charms of a lovely and accomplished woman, whatever her rank, might readily excite in a poetic temperament. The author of the _Sorrows of Werther_ did not, therefore, perhaps draw exclusively upon his imagination in picturing the rise and struggle of an unhappy passion for Leonora d'Este in the bosom of the young poet. Whatever may be said regarding this passion, however, there can be no doubt that his heart was at this time enslaved by younger and humbler beauties. He had much of the temperament of his father, who, although exemplary in his single and married life, was distinguished for his Platonic gallantry, and cherished a poetic attachment, according to the fashion of the day, for various ladies throughout his career, such as Genevra Malatesta, the beautiful Tullia of Arragon, and Marguerite de Valois, sister of Henry III. These follies were but the froth of his genius, however; and in this respect his son followed his example. Lucrezia Bendidio, a young lady at court gifted with singular beauty and musical talent, reigned for a while supreme over his affections. But she had other suitors, including the author of the _Pastor Fido_, and the poet Pigna, who was the secretary and favourite of the reigning duke. The Princess Leonora tried to cure Tasso of this passion by persuading him to illustrate the verses of his rival Pigna. Nothing came of this first love, therefore, and the object of it soon after married into the house of Machiavelli. In the congenial atmosphere of the court of Ferrara, surrounded by the flower of beauty and chivalry, stimulated by the associations of his master Ariosto, which every object around recalled, and encouraged by the praises of the sweetest lips in the palace, Tasso set himself diligently to the composition of the great work of his life, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the plan of which he had formed before he left the University of Padua. Among the treasures of the Vatican Library I have seen a sketch in the poet's own handwriting of the first three cantos. This sketch he now modified and enlarged, and in the space of a few months completed five entire cantos. He read the poem as it proceeded to the fair sisters of his patron, and received the benefit of their criticisms. This work, which is "the great epic poem in the strict sense of modern times," occupied altogether eighteen years of the author's life. It was begun in extreme youth, and finished in middle age, and is a most remarkable example of a young man's devotion to one absorbing object. The opening chapters were written amid the bright dreams of youth, and in the happiest circumstances; the closing ones were composed amid the dark clouds of a morbid melancholy, and during an imprisonment tyrannical in all its features. Placed side by side with Homer and Virgil, it may be said with Voltaire that Tasso was more fortunate than either of these immortals in the choice of his subject. It was based, not upon tradition, but upon true history. It appealed not merely to the passions of love and ambition, but to the deepest feelings of the soul, to faith in the unseen and eternal. To humanity at large the wars of the Cross must be more interesting than the wrath of Achilles, and the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre than the siege of Troy. No theme could be more susceptible of poetic treatment than the Crusades. They were full of stirring incident, of continually changing objects and images. The strife took place amid scenes from which the most familiar stories of our childhood have come, and around which have gathered the most sacred associations of the heart. And Tasso's mind was one that was peculiarly adapted to reflect all the special characteristics of the theme. It was deeply religious in its tone, and therefore could enter into the struggle with all the sympathy of real conviction. His luxuriant imagination was chastened by his classical culture; while the pervading melancholy of his temperament gave to the scenes which he described an effect such as a thin veil of mist that comes and goes gives to a mountain landscape. The gorgeous Oriental world of the palm tree and the camel, seen through this sad poetic haze, has all the shadows of the deep northern forests and the tender gloom of the western hills. The rigid outlines of history fade in it to the indefiniteness of fable, and fact becomes as flexible as fancy. The circumstances of the times were also peculiarly favourable for the composition of such a poem. He was at the proper focal distance to appreciate the full interest of the Crusades, not too near to be absorbed in observation and engrossed in the immediate results; not too far off to lose the sympathy for the religious chivalry which inspired the Holy War. Earlier, in the intensely prosaic period that immediately succeeded, the romance of the Crusades was gone; later, Europe was girding itself for the sterner task of reformation. Before the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish enthusiast; later, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum. But just at the time when Tasso wrote there was much, especially in Italy, of that spirit which roused and quickened Europe in the eleventh century, much that appealed to the natural poetry in the human heart. The recent victory of the Christian forces at the famous battle of Lepanto checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and turned men's thoughts back into the old channel of the Crusades; so that Gregory XIII., who ascended the pontifical throne about the time that Tasso had resumed the writing of his _Gerusalemme_, had actually planned an expedition to the Holy Land, like that which his predecessor, Urban II., had sent out. And one of the principal events which the poet witnessed after his arrival at Ferrara, when the marriage rejoicings were over, was the departure of the reigning duke with a company of three hundred gentlemen of his court, arrayed in all the pomp and splendour of the famous Paladins of the first Crusade, to assist the Emperor of Austria in repelling an invasion of the Turks into Hungary. Many of the noble houses of Europe at this time were extremely anxious to trace their origin to the Crusades; and the vanity of the house of Este required that Tasso should make the great hero of his epic--the brave and chivalrous Rinaldo--an ancestor of their family. The scenes and associations, too, in the midst of which his daily life was spent, helped him to realise vividly the pageantry connected with the heroes of his epic. Thus happy in the choice of a subject, and favoured by the spirit of the time and the circumstances in which he was placed, Tasso gave himself up to the composition of his poem with a most absorbing devotion. Like Virgil, he first sketched out his work in prose, and on this groundwork elaborated the charms of colouring and harmony which distinguish the poem. So carefully did he study the military art of his day that all his battles and contests are scientifically described, and are in entire accordance with the most rigorous rules of war; and so thoroughly did he make himself acquainted with the topography of the Holy Land by the aid of books, that Chateaubriand, who read the _Gerusalemme_ under the walls of Jerusalem, was struck with the fidelity of the local descriptions. Tasso occasionally sought relief from his great task by the composition of sonnets and lyrics, which were published in the Rime of the Paduan Academy, and contributed to make him still more popular all over Italy. He also took part in those literary disputations in public which were characteristic of the age; and for three days in the Academy of Ferrara, in the presence of the court, defended against both sexes fifty "Amorous Conclusions" which he had drawn up--a form of controversy which seems to have been a relic of the courts or parliaments of love, very popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One of the ladies of the court impugned with success his twenty-first conclusion "that man loves more intensely and with more stability than woman;" but whether this success was the result of the goodness of her cause, and not rather of her own ability or of Tasso's gallantry, may be left an open question. He afterwards published the whole series of the "Amorous Conclusions," and dedicated them to Genevra Malatesta, who now, as an old married woman, was greatly touched by receiving such a compliment from the son of her former lover. Tasso's father was now dying at Ostiglia, a small place on the Po, of which the Duke of Mantua had made him governor. With talents unimpaired, at the age of seventy-six, and while preparing a new poem upon the episode of Floridante in the _Amadigi_, he was seized with his last illness. His son, full of filial anxiety, hastened to see him, and found the house in wretched disorder; the servants having taken advantage of the helplessness of their master to neglect their duties and steal any valuable property they could lay their hands upon, so that Tasso had not only to take charge of the household affairs, but also to defray out of his own scanty resources the domestic expenditure. After a month's severe struggle his father died in his arms, to the regret of all Italy, and his remains were interred with great pomp by the Duke of Mantua in a marble cenotaph in the principal church of his capital, and were afterwards transferred by Tasso to the church of St. Paul in Ferrara, where they now lie. Thus passed away one of the most conspicuous and unfortunate persons of his age, of whom it has been said that he was "a politician, unlucky in the choice of his party; a client, unlucky in the choice of his patrons; and a poet, unlucky in the choice of his theme." The fatigue and sorrow connected with this bereavement brought on a severe illness, from which Torquato recovered with a sense of loneliness and depression which only deepened as the years went on. From this melancholy he enjoyed, however, a temporary respite by a visit to Paris. The house of Este by frequent intermarriages was connected with the French court, in consequence of which they had a right to use the golden lilies of France in their armorial bearings; and many of the ecclesiastics of the family held rich benefices in that country as well as in their own. Cardinal Lewis, the brother of the reigning duke, resolved to inspect the abbeys that belonged to him in France, and to strengthen the Roman Catholic cause, which had received a severe blow from the Reformation; and among the gentlemen of his train he took with him Tasso, in order to introduce him to his cousin Charles IX., who himself dabbled in poetry and had a fine literary taste. From the French monarch the poet obtained a gracious reception; and by the whole court he was warmly welcomed as one who had worthily commemorated the gallant deeds of the Paladins of France at the siege of Jerusalem. For nearly a year he resided in different parts of France, and notwithstanding the numerous distractions of such a novel mode of life, he added many admirable stanzas to his great epic, inspired by the very scenes among which his hero, Godfrey, and his knights had lived. He left just in time to escape the dreadful massacre of St. Bartholomew; but he may be said to have suffered indirectly on account of it. Though treated with distinction by the French court, his personal wants were left unsupplied, and his patron, Cardinal Lewis, did not make up for this meanness. Voltaire, therefore, had reason to indulge in a cynical sneer at the glowing accounts of his visit given by Italian writers; and Balzac's statement that Tasso left France in the same suit of clothes that he brought with him, after having worn it for a year, is not without foundation. This shabby treatment, however, was part of a wider State policy. The year of Tasso's residence in France was one of preparation for the massacre of St. Bartholomew; but in order to avert the suspicions of the intended victims, the Huguenots were treated with such extraordinary favour by the authorities that the Pope himself was incensed, and remonstrated with the King. Tasso, ignorant of the dreadful secret, spoke candidly and vehemently against the reformed doctrines and those who professed them. His patron therefore simulated deep indignation on account of this imprudence; and as the step fell in both with his personal avarice and his State policy, he broke off the cordial relations that formerly existed between them. On the return of Tasso to Ferrara he occupied himself for about two months with the composition of a pastoral drama called the _Aminta_. This species of poem, which originated with Theocritus, who represented the shepherds of Sicily nearly as they were, and was imitated by Virgil, who idealised the shepherd life, was revived at the court of Ferrara; and some years before a local poet wrote a pastoral describing a romantic Arcadia, which was acted at the palace, and seems to have inspired Tasso with the idea of writing one too. But all previous pastorals--the _Sacrifizio_ of Beccari, the _Aretusa_ of Lollio, the _Sfortunato_ of Argenti--were rough and incongruous medleys compared with the finished production of Tasso, which may be said to mark an era in the history of dramatic poetry. Although Tasso himself did not think much of it, and did not take any steps to publish it, the judgment of his contemporaries and of posterity has placed it next in point of merit to the _Gerusalemme_; and by Italians it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was acted with great splendour at the court of Ferrara, and a few years later at Mantua, when the well-known artist and architect Buontalenti painted the scenery. This fact, however, shows how primitive was the state of the theatre at this time; and how the spectators, little accustomed to histrionic representations, were content to witness dramas that had no plot or action, and to follow the progress of a beautiful poem rather than a dramatic development. The _Aminta_ long retained its popularity as an acted poem in Italy. It was often represented in open-air theatres, like the ancient Greek plays, in gardens or in woods, where Nature supplied the scenery, and the _scalinata_ or stage was only some rising piece of ground. Traces of one of these sylvan theatres may still be seen in the grounds of the Villa Madama, on the eastern slopes of Monte Mario near Rome; and one cannot help thinking that a poem so redolent of the open air, so full of Nature and still natural life, which Tasso himself called Favola Boschereccia, or a Sylvan Fable, was better adapted for such a stage than for the heated air and artificial surroundings of the Italian theatres. Such a pastoral was in entire keeping with the manners of the Italian peasants; and the scenes of Arcadia which it represented might be seen almost everywhere in the beautiful valleys and chestnut-covered hills of their native land. The exquisite loveliness of the climate, and the simplicity and indolence of the people, lent themselves naturally to such ideal dreams. And Tasso in his _Aminta_ only gave expression to the same happy thoughts which the same scenery and the same people had ages before inspired in the mind of Virgil when he wrote his Eclogues. After a few months' quiet sojourn with Lucrezia d'Este, now Duchess of Urbino, at that court, he was appointed secretary to the Duke of Ferrara, in room of his rival Pigna, who for this reason became his mortal enemy, and stirred up against him the persecution which embittered his whole subsequent life. But standing high, as he did, in the favour of the duke, he enjoyed for a while a season of calm repose, during which he finished the great epic poem, which was eagerly looked for throughout Italy. Anxious to make this cherished work of his genius as perfect as possible, he unfortunately was imprudent enough to submit portions of his work to all his learned friends for their opinion. Besides in this way getting the most contradictory advices, sacrificing his own independent judgment, and imposing an unworthy yoke upon his genius, the result was that the fragments of the poem passed from hand to hand, and so got into the possession of the printers, who, eager to profit by the public curiosity, pieced them together, and clandestinely printed them. Even in this fragmentary form, the cantos that appeared in various cities of Italy were received with unbounded applause. The author, as may be imagined, was intensely annoyed at this wrong that had been done to him, and wrote to the Pope, to the Republic of Genoa, and to all the Italian princes who had any authority in the case, to put a stop to the publication of a work which had been circulated without his sanction, but in vain. Even the first complete edition, which was issued in 1581, seems to have been without his consent; for the author complains that he was compelled, by the surreptitious publication of parts of his poem, to finish the work in haste, and he wished for more time to elaborate the plot and polish the style. In the later editions, no less than seven of which appeared the same year, Tasso seems to have been to some extent consulted; but it may be said that the great epic was given to the world in the form in which we now have it, without the author's imprimatur, and without the benefit of his finishing touches. But in spite of this disadvantage it took the whole country at once by storm. Two thousand copies were sold in two days. Throughout literary circles nothing else was spoken of. The exquisite stanzas, full of the true chivalric spirit, touched a responsive chord in every Italian bosom. Not only in the academies of the learned was the poem discussed, not only was it recited before princes amid the splendours of courts, but priests mused over it in the solitude of the cloister, and peasants chanted its sonorous strains as they worked in the fields. Quotations from it, we are told, might be heard from the gondolier on the Grand Canal of Venice, as he greeted his neighbour in passing by, and from the brigand on the far heights of the Abruzzi, as he lay in wait for the unsuspecting traveller; and "a portion of the Crusader's Litany was a favourite chant of the galley-slaves of Leghorn, as, chained together, they dragged their weary steps along the shore." There is no book which it is easier to find fault with than the _Gerusalemme_ when estimated by the satiated critical spirit of modern times, which insists upon brevity, and demands in each line a certain poetic excellence; especially if the poem is known only through the medium of a translation, which, however faithful, is but the turning of the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. We may object to the want of originality in the leading characters, to the occasional inflated style, and the conceits and plays upon words now and then introduced, to the apparently disproportionate influence of love upon the action of the poem, as Hallam has remarked, giving it an effeminate tone, and, above all, to the introduction of so much supernatural machinery in the form of magic and demons; for such supernaturalism is out of keeping altogether with our vaster knowledge of the universe, and our more solemn ideas of Him who pervades it. But it is not by an analysis of particular parts, or a criticism of special peculiarities, that the _Gerusalemme_ should be judged. It is by its effect as a whole, as a highly finished work of art. A single campaign of the first crusade--that of 1099--embraces the whole action of the poem; but the numerous episodes form each a perfect picture, that, like a flower floating on a stream, and illumined by a special gleam of sunlight, does not interrupt the continuous flow of the narrative. In a state of society characterised by much corruption, the sentiments are uniformly pure; and in an artificial age, when Nature was regarded as only the background of human action, the descriptions of the objects of Nature are wonderfully accurate; and the mind of the poet towards the flowers and trees, the woods and hills and streams, was in a childlike state, and had all the freshness and joyousness of childhood. The student is not to be envied who can read without emotion the enthusiastic description of the Crusader's first sight of Jerusalem, the touching pathos of Clorinda's death, and the sublime account of the ruins of Carthage. It would indeed refresh many a mind, surfeited by the vast mass of our modern literature, to go back to the green pastures and still waters of this grand old poem. Every visitor to Florence knows the venerable monastery of San Marco, with its hallowed relics of Savonarola, and its beautiful frescoes of Fra Angelico. In a large apartment of this monastery, which was formerly the library of the monks, are now held the meetings of the famous Della Cruscan Academy, instituted in 1582 for the purpose of purifying the national language. At that time every town of the least importance in Italy had its academy with some strange fantastic name, which was an important element in the intellectual life of the people, and exercised a critical control over the literature of the day. Up to the year 1814 the Della Cruscans assembled in the Palazzo Riccardi, the ancient palace of the Medici; but that stately building being required for Government purposes, the members have since been accommodated in San Marco, where they have sunk into obscurity, many of the inhabitants of Florence being altogether ignorant of the existence of such an institution in their city. I had considerable difficulty in finding out the locality. The furniture of the apartment is exceedingly curious, and is meant to indicate the object of the Academy, which--as its name literally translated, _of the_ bran or _chaff_, signifies--is to sift the fine flour of the language from the corrupt bran that has gathered around it. The chairs are made in imitation of a baker's basket, turned bottom upwards and painted red. On the wall behind each chair is suspended a shovel, with the name of its owner painted upon it, along with a group of flowers in allusion to the famous motto of the Academy, "Il più bel fior ne coglie," "It plucks the fairest flower." On the table, during my visit, there was a model of a flour-dressing machine and some meal sacks; while several printed sheets of a new edition of the Italian Dictionary, which the members were engaged in publishing at the time, with manuscript corrections, were scattered about. At present the Academy, besides doing this important work, occasionally holds public sessions; but it is an effete institution, that has little more than an archæological interest. It was very different, however, in the sixteenth century. Then, in point of numbers and reputation, it was the outstanding literary academy of Italy, and occupied the commanding position from which the all-powerful humanists of the previous age had been driven by the counter reformation. It is chiefly, however, by its attacks upon Tasso that it is now known to fame. No sooner was the _Gerusalemme_ published than comparisons began to be instituted between it and the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto. This latter poem was then in the zenith of its reputation; it was regarded as the supreme standard of literary excellence, and it was slavishly imitated by all the inferior poets of Italy. It was inevitable, therefore, that the two works should be compared together. But as well might the _Æneid_ of Virgil be compared with the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. The _Orlando Furioso_ is a romantic poem in the manner of Ovid, whereas the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is an epic poem in the manner of Homer and Virgil. No Italian poet previous to Tasso had written an epic; and Tasso himself distinctly avowed that he had chosen that form of poetry deliberately; not only as being more congenial to his own mind, but also that he might avoid following in the steps of Ariosto, whose work he regarded as, in its own department, incapable of being excelled, or even equalled. In reply to the generous letter of Ariosto's nephew, who wrote him a letter of congratulation, he said, "The crown you would honour me with already adorns the head of the poet to whom you are related, from whence it would be as easy to snatch it as to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules. I would no more receive it from your hand than I would snatch it myself." But in spite of the altogether different nature of the two poems, and in spite of the distinct disavowals of Tasso, the critics persisted in accusing him of the presumption of entering the lists with Ariosto. And in this idea they were strengthened by the injudicious praises of Camillo Pellegrini, who in a dialogue entitled _Caraffa_ or _Epic Poetry_, likened the _Orlando Furioso_ to a palace, the plan of which is defective, but which contains superb rooms splendidly adorned, and is therefore very captivating to the simple and ignorant; while the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ resembles a smaller palace, whose architecture is perfect, and whose rooms are suitable and elegant without being gaudy, delighting the true masters of art. This squib was published in Florence, and at once aroused the hostility of the Della Cruscans. They were already prejudiced against Tasso on account of his connection with the court of Ferrara, between which and the court of Florence there was a bitter rivalry; and that offence was intensified by the unguarded way in which he spoke of the Florentines as being under the yoke of the Medici, whom he denounced as tyrants. The Academy, which at the time enjoyed the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was therefore too glad to seize upon Pellegrini's squib as a pretext for a vehement attack upon Tasso's epic. Ariosto was dead, had passed among the immortals, and was therefore beyond all envy; but here was a _living_ poet, who belonged to a court which had cruelly treated the daughter of their ruler, Lucrezia de Medici, the first wife of Alfonso of Ferrara, and was a mere youth, who was guilty of the sacrilege of seeking to dethrone their favourite. Ariosto had greatly admired Florence, and celebrated its beauties in one of his finest poems; and was it to be borne that this young upstart, who had presumed to speak disparagingly of their city, should be preferred to him? It would be a useless waste of time to go over in detail the absurd criticisms by which they attempted to throw ridicule upon the _Gerusalemme Liberata_. They would have passed into utter oblivion had not Tasso himself, by condescending to reply to them, given to them an immortality of shame. Not contented with abusing his poem and himself, they also attacked his father, asserting that his _Amadigi_ was a most miserable work, and was pillaged wholesale from the writings of others, and thus wounded the poet in the most tender part. By this combination of critical cavils against him, Tasso was thrown back from the land of poetical vision into a dreary mental wilderness. The effect upon one of his most sensitive nature, predisposed by temperament and the vicissitudes of his life to profound melancholy, was most disastrous. We can trace to this cause the commencement of those mental disorders which, if they never reached actual insanity, bordered upon it, and darkened the rest of his life. His overwrought mind gave way to all kinds of morbid fancies. His body became enfeebled by the agitation of his mind; and the powerful medicines which he was prevailed upon to take to cure his troubles only increased them. Like Rousseau during his sad visit to England, he became suspicious of every one, and lost faith even in himself. Religious doubts commenced to agitate his mind. Distracted by this worst of all evils, he put himself into the hands of the Holy Fraternity at Bologna; and though the inquisitors had sense enough to see that what he considered atheistical doubts were only the illusions of hypochondria, and tried to reassure him as to their belief in the soundness of his faith, he was not satisfied with the absolution which they had given to him. The court of Ferrara was full of unscrupulous intriguers. Tasso's wonderful success could not be forgiven by some of the petty aspirants after literary fame who haunted the ducal precincts. Pigna, whose place as secretary he had usurped, stirred up the jealousy of the other courtiers into open persecution. Leonardo Salvinati, the leader of the Della Cruscan Academy, wishing to ingratiate himself with the court, joined in the hostility. Tasso's papers were stolen, and his letters intercepted and read, and a false construction was put upon everything he did. At first the duke refused to hear the various accusations that were brought against him, and continued to show him every mark of esteem. He had the privilege, in that ceremonious age a very high one, of dining daily with the prince at his own private table. He accompanied the princesses to their country retreats at Urbino, Belriguarda, or Consandoli, where in healthy country pursuits he forgot for a time his troubles. At Urbino he wrote the unfinished canzone to the river Metauro, one of the most touching of his compositions, in which he laments the wounds which fortune had inflicted upon him through the whole of his hapless life. But the tenure of princely favour at Italian courts, amid so many ambitious patrons and anxious suitors, was very precarious. It was uncommonly so at Ferrara. After a while a sudden change passed over the mind of the duke towards Tasso. Whether tired of the poet's incessant complaints, irritated at his incautious conduct--going the length on two occasions of drawing his sword, when provoked, upon members of the ducal household,--or whether his suspicions were aroused regarding the relations between him and his sister Leonora, is not known, but from this time he began to treat Tasso as if he were a madman. He was placed under the charge of the ducal physicians and servants, who reported to their employer every careless word. Removed from Belriguarda, he was ordered to be confined in the Ferrarese convent of San Francisco; and two friars were appointed to watch over him continually. Such a life was unendurable to the proud poet, who disliked the nauseous medicines of the convent as much as its restraint; and taking advantage of a _festa_, when his keepers were unusually negligent, he made his escape by a window. In the disguise of a shepherd he travelled on foot over the mountains of the Abruzzi, getting a morsel of bread and a lodging from the peasants by the way, to his sister's house at Sorrento, now the Vigna Sersale. There he remained during the whole summer, soothed by his sister's affectionate kindness. The monotony of the life, however, began to pall upon him, and he longed to get back to his old scenes of excitement. Undeterred by an evasive reply which the duke sent to an urgent letter of his, he set out for Ferrara; and on his arrival, meeting with a cold reception, he was obliged again to leave the place where he had once been so happy. For a year and a half he wandered over almost the whole of Northern Italy, visiting in turn Venice, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Rome, and Turin. At the last place he arrived without a passport, and in such a miserable condition that the guards at the gates of the city would not have admitted him had he not been recognised by a Venetian printer who happened to be present. His startled looks, his nervous manner, and his perpetual restlessness, confirmed wherever he went the rumour of his madness; and, even if he were not mad, the object of Alfonso of Este's anger might be a dangerous associate. During all this time he was in the greatest poverty, being obliged to sell for bread the splendid ruby and collar of gold which the Duchess of Urbino had presented to him when he recited to her at her own court his pastoral poem of _Aminta_. From the Duke of Urbino and Prince Charles Emanuel of Savoy, however, he received generous treatment; but a fatal spell carried him back a third time to Ferrara. His arrival by an unfortunate coincidence happened to be on the very day that Margaret Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, was to come home as the third bride of Alfonso. The duke, preoccupied with the stately ceremonies connected with his nuptials, took no notice of him; and many of the courtiers from whom he expected an affectionate welcome, taking their cue from their master, turned their backs upon him. What a contrast to his first reception at that court fourteen years before, when he stood among the noble spectators of Alfonso's marriage with his first wife, the Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests! He now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side! No wonder that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim, overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing what he did, he broke forth into the most vehement denunciations of the duke and his whole court, declaring that they were all "a gang of poltroons, ingrates, and scoundrels." These fiery reproaches, which his misery had wrung from the poor poet, were carried by his enemies to the ear of the Duke, and Tasso was immediately seized and imprisoned as a lunatic in the hospital of Santa Anna in Ferrara--in the same year and the same month, it may be mentioned, in which another of the great epic poets of the world, Camoens, the author of the _Lusiad_, finished as a pauper in an hospital his miserable career. While madness was alleged as the ostensible reason, the real motives of this step are involved in as deep a mystery as the cause of Ovid's banishment to Tomi, on the Euxine. Muratori, the author of the _Antiquities of the House of Este_, says that he was confined principally in order that he might be cured; while the Abbate Serassi, who wrote a life of the poet, attributes his imprisonment to his insolence to the duke and his court, and to his desire, repeatedly expressed and acted upon, to leave his patron's service. But both these writers considered the interests of the house of Este more sacred than those of truth. The cause generally accepted is Tasso's supposed attachment to Leonora, the sister of the duke. For a long time he is said to have cherished this passion in secret, concealing it even from the object of it, although evidences of it may be found in some marked form or playful allusion in nearly all his poetical writings; the episode of Olinda and Sophronia in the _Gerusalemme_, which he was urged in vain by his friends to withdraw on the ground of its irrelevancy, being intended to represent his own ill-fated love. On one occasion, however, in a confiding mood, he told the secret to one of the courtiers of Ferrara, whom he believed to be his devoted friend. But what was thus whispered in the closet was proclaimed upon the house-top; and a duel was the result, in which Tasso, as expert in the use of the sword as of the pen, put to flight the cowardly traitor and his two brothers, whom he had brought with him to attack the poet. This adventure, and the cause of it, reached the ears of the duke, whose resentment was kindled by the audacity of a poor poet and dependant of his court in falling in love with a lady of royal birth. On the strength of this suspicion his papers were seized, and all the sonnets, madrigals, and canzones that were supposed to give countenance to it, confiscated. The manuscript of the _Gerusalemme_ itself was retained, and a deaf ear was turned to the poet's entreaties for its restoration. Gibbon, in his _Antiquities of the House of Brunswick_, relates that one day at court, when the duke and his sister Leonora were present, Tasso was so struck with the beauty of the princess, that, in a transport of passion, he approached and kissed her before all the assembly; whereupon the duke, gravely turning to his courtiers, expressed his regret that so great a man should have been thus suddenly bereft of reason, and made the circumstance the pretext for shutting him up in the madhouse of St. Anne. An abortive attempt was made to prove the attachment, about fifty years ago, by a certain Count Alberti, who published a manuscript correspondence purporting to be between Tasso and Leonora, which he discovered in the library of the Falconieri Palace at Rome. The alleged discovery excited an immense amount of interest in this country and on the Continent; but ere the edition was completed the author was accused of having forged the manuscripts in question, and was condemned to the galleys. The story of this hapless love is so romantic in itself, and has been made the theme of so much pathetic poetry, that it would be almost a pity to destroy by proof any foundation upon which it may rest. And yet it is difficult to agree with Professor Rosini, who has ably treated the whole question in a work entitled _Amore de Tasso_, and has come to the conclusion, after carefully weighing all the evidence, that this was the rock upon which Tasso's life made shipwreck. On this theory several circumstances are altogether inexplicable. We may dismiss at once the famous kiss as certainly a myth. Besides the disparity of age, the ill-health, severe piety, and exalted rank of Leonora were formidable barriers in the way of Tasso's contracting a passion for her; and it is well known that the poet, who could not have forgotten so soon a devoted love, did not offer a single tribute of regret to her memory when she died a few years afterwards. It is also but too certain that Leonora left her supposed lover to languish in a dungeon without any reply to his pathetic complaints. The force of gravitation is a mutual thing; and just as the great sun himself cannot but bend a little in turn to the smallest orb that wheels around him, so the august Princess of Este could not but have regarded with womanly interest a devoted admirer, however humble. The poetical gallantry of the day will account for all Tasso's lyrical effusions in praise of Leonora. They were in most instances simply the tributes that were expected from the laureate of a court, especially a laureate who was accused, with some show of reason, by the courtiers of Ferrara, of an enthusiastic devotion to women, and of wasting his life with the day-dreams of love and chivalry. Regarding the question of his madness, which was, as I have said, the ostensible cause of his imprisonment, we are left in almost equal uncertainty. His morbid sensibility, irritated by the treatment which he received alike from his friends and foes, his repeated complaints and occasional violences and extravagances of conduct, may have seemed to a selfish prince to border closely upon mental derangement. But his whole conduct during his imprisonment, the nature of the numerous writings which he produced during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant with everlasting disgrace. Three objects attract the steps of the modern pilgrim in desolate grass-grown Ferrara; the house, distinguished by a tablet, in which Ariosto was born; the ancient castle in the centre of the town, in whose courtyard Ugo and Parasina, whom Byron has immortalised, were beheaded; and next door to the chief hotel--the Europa--and beside the post-office, the huge hospital of St. Anne, in which Tasso was confined. This last object is by far the most interesting. The sight of it is not needed to sadden one more than the deserted streets themselves do. The dungeon, indicated by a long inscription over the door, is below the ground-floor of the hospital; it is twelve feet long, nine feet wide, and seven feet high, and the light penetrates through its grated windows from a small yard. By several authors, including Goethe, considerable doubts have been expressed regarding the authenticity of this cell; and certainly the present features of the place are not confirmatory of the tradition. This doubt, however, has not prevented relic-hunters--among whom Shelley may be included--from carrying off in small fragments the whole of the bedstead that once stood there, as well as cutting off large pieces from the door which still survives. Lamartine wrote in pencil some poetical lines upon the wall; and Byron, with his intense realism, caused himself to be locked for an hour in it, that he might be able to form some idea of the sufferings which he recorded in his _Lament of Tasso_. Less than sixty years ago the insane were treated with the utmost inhumanity as accursed of God; and the asylums in which they were shut up were dismal prisons, where the unfortunate inmates were left in a state of the utmost filth, or were chained and lashed at the caprice of savage keepers. The madhouse which Hogarth drew will aid us in forming a conception of an Italian asylum in the sixteenth century, which was much worse than anything known in our country. The other inmates of the hospital of St. Anne suffered much doubtless; but they were really mad, and were therefore unconscious of their misery. But that alleviation was wanting in the case of Tasso. He was sane and conscious, and his sanity intensified the horror of his situation, "enabling him to gauge with fearful accuracy the depths of the abyss into which he had fallen." One glimpse of him is given to us by Montaigne, who visited the cell, where it seems the unfortunate inmate was made a show of to all whom curiosity or pity attracted to the hospital. "I had even more indignation than compassion when I saw him at Ferrara in so piteous a state--a living shadow of himself." His jailer was Agostino Mosti, who, although he was himself a man of letters, and therefore should have sympathised with Tasso, on the contrary carried out to the utmost the cruel commands of his prince, and by his harsh language and unceasing vigilance immensely aggravated the sufferings of his victim. This inhuman persecution was caused by Mosti's jealously of Tasso as the rival of his beloved master Ariosto, to whom at his own cost he had erected a monument in the church of the Benedictines at Ferrara. For a whole year Tasso endured all the horrors of the sordid cell in which he was immured. After a while he was removed to a larger apartment, in which he could walk about; and permission was granted to him sometimes to leave the hospital for part of a day. But whatever alleviations he might thus have occasionally enjoyed, he was for seven long years a prisoner in the asylum, tantalised by continual expectations held out to him of approaching release. One person only--the nephew of his churlish jailer--acted the part of the Good Samaritan towards him, cheered his solitude, wrote for him, and transmitted the letters of complaint or entreaty which he addressed to his friends, and which would otherwise have been suppressed or forwarded to his relentless enemy. His sufferings increased as the slow weary months passed on, so that we need not wonder that the last years of his captivity should sometimes have been overclouded by visions of a tormenting demon, of flames and frightful noises, with an apparition of the Virgin and Child sent to comfort him. That he should have been able to preserve the general balance of his mind at all in circumstances sufficient to unseat the reason of most men, is a convincing proof of the stability of his intellect, and his unshaken trust in the God of the sorrowful. While we think of this protracted cruelty of the author of his imprisonment, it is some consolation to know that he met with what we may well call a merited retribution. Alfonso, as Sir John Hobhouse tells us, in spite of his haughty splendour, led an unhappy life, and was deserted in the hour of death by his courtiers, who suffered his body to be interred without even the ceremonies that were paid to the meanest of his subjects. His last wishes were neglected; his will was cancelled. He was succeeded by the descendant of a natural son of Alfonso I., the husband of Lucrezia Borgia; and he, falling under the displeasure of the Vatican, was excommunicated; and Ferrara, having been claimed by Pope Clement VIII. as a vacant fief, passed away for ever from the house of Este. "The link Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn, Alfonso! How thy ducal pageants shrink From thee! if in another station born, Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad'st to mourn." At no period of his life was the mind of Tasso more active than during his imprisonment. In the absence of all nourishment from the bright world of Nature which he loved so passionately, his fancy could grow and keep itself leafy, like the cress-seed, which germinates and produces its anti-scorbutic foliage on a bit of flannel moistened with water, without any contact with soil or sunlight, in the long Arctic night of the ice-bound ship. With the ravings of madmen ringing in his ears, he composed some of the most beautiful of his writings, both in prose and verse. Among the manuscripts of the British Museum are preserved some of these writings, whose withered vellum pages we turn over with profound pity, as we think of the sad circumstances in which they were composed. The most valuable of these is the manuscript of the _Torrismondo_, in Tasso's own handwriting, and in the original parchment binding. This work was begun before his imprisonment, and it was not finished until the year after his liberation; but the greater part of it was composed in the wretchedness of his cell at Ferrara. The story upon which it is founded is a very harrowing one, a king of the Ostrogoths marrying his own sister, mistaking her for a foreign princess; but it is treated with very inadequate tragic power, and, like the _Aminta_, displays no real action. Its beauty chiefly consists in its choral odes on the vanity of all earthly things, which are exquisitely sad and touching. We hear in them the wild wail of the poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds up--"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"--the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio--is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to the heart is missed. At last the solicitations of the most powerful princes of Italy on Tasso's behalf overcame the tenacity of Alfonso's will, and the victim was released; but not till he had become so weak and ill that, if the imprisonment had continued a little longer, death would inevitably have opened the door for him. When the order for his liberation had been obtained, his friends made known to him by slow degrees the glad tidings, lest a too sudden shock should prove fatal. He was now free to go wherever he pleased, and to behold the beauties of Nature, which had been the mirage of his prison dreams; but the elasticity of his spirits was gone for ever; the bow had been too long bent to recover its original spring, and the memory of his sufferings haunted him continually, and cast a dark shadow over everything. He could not altogether shake off the fear that he was still in Alfonso's power, and wherever he went he fancied that an officer was in pursuit of him to drag him back to the foul prison in St. Anne's. A modern Italian poet, Aleardo Aleardi, has graphically described the feelings of the gentle poet-knight, roaming, pale and dishevelled, as a mendicant from door to door. But the sufferings that had thus maimed him bodily and mentally had spiritually ennobled him; and there is not a more touching incident in all history than his entreaty to be allowed to kiss the hand of the cruel tyrant, as a last favour before leaving Ferrara for ever, in token of his gratitude for the benefits conferred upon him in happier days,--a favour which Alfonso, to his eternal disgrace, refused to grant. At first Tasso took up his abode at the court of the Duke of Mantua, whose son, Vincenzo Gonzaga, had been the principal instrument in his release, on the occasion of his marriage with the sister of Alfonso of Ferrara. This Vincenzo Gonzaga is shown by the light of history in two opposite characters: as the generous friend and patron of Tasso, and as the pupil of the Admirable Crichton, who in a midnight brawl slew his tutor in circumstances of the utmost baseness and treachery. For a while Tasso was treated with great kindness at Mantua, but, the father dying, the son no sooner ascended the ducal throne than, with the capriciousness peculiar to Italian princes, he turned his back upon the poet whom he had formerly befriended. The incident I have mentioned would have prepared us for this dastardly conduct; the evil side of his nature, which was kept in abeyance during his political pupilage, assuming the predominance on his accession to power. Tasso's proud spirit could not endure the neglect of his once ardent friend, and he set out again into the cold inhospitable world, imploring in his great poverty from a former patron the loan of ten scudi, to pay the expenses of his journey to Rome. On the way he turned aside to make a pilgrimage to Loretto, in order to satisfy that earnest religious feeling which had been the inspiration of his genius, but the bane of his life. The searching scrutinies and the solemn acquittals of the inquisitors of Bologna, Ferrara, and the great tribunal of Rome itself, had not satisfied his morbid mind. And he thought that he might get that peace of conscience which nothing else could give by a visit to the Casa Santa--the house of the Virgin Mary at Loretto. Worn out by the long journey, which he made in the old fashion on foot, he knelt in prayer before the magnificent shrine; and thus, admitted as it were within the domestic enclosure of the holy household, he felt that the Blessed Virgin had given him that calmness and repose of heart which he had not known since he had prayed as a boy beside his mother's knee. Strengthened by the successful accomplishment of his vow, he went on to Rome; but the stern Sixtus V., who was now upon the Papal throne, was too much occupied with the architectural reconstruction of Rome, and with the suppression of brigandage in the Papal States, to bestow any attention upon literature; and Tasso had lost whatever energy he once possessed to assert his claims to recognition among the multitude of sycophants at the Vatican. Sick at heart, he left the imperial city, and directed his steps to Naples, in the hope that on the spot he might succeed in recovering his father's possession and his mother's dowry. But here, too, the same ill-fortune that had hitherto dogged his steps attended him. The lawsuit which he instituted, though it promised well at first, proved a will-o'-the-wisp, which lured him into the bog of absolute penury. His sister was dead; his mother's relatives, formerly hostile, were now, because of the lawsuit, doubly embittered against him. In his distress he sought refuge in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, which is now occupied by the offices of the Municipality of Naples, and the monastery garden converted into a market-place. Here, in one of the finest situations in Naples, commanding one of the loveliest views in the world, and in the congenial society of the monks, his shattered health was recruited, and his mind tranquillised by the beauties of Nature and the exercises of religion. He repaid the kindness of his hosts by writing a poem on the origin of their Order, and by addressing to them one of his best sonnets. Among the visitors who sought him out in this retreat was John Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, who afterwards became his biographer. This accomplished nobleman, "whose name the friendship and Latin hexameters of Milton have rendered at once familiar and musical to English ears," was by far the kindest and most consistent patron that Tasso ever met with. He loaded him with presents, and showed him the most delicate and thoughtful attentions during Tasso's visit at his beautiful villa on the seashore near Naples. He took him with him to his tower of Bisaccio, where he remained all October and November, spending his days, with great advantage to his health, in hunting, and his nights in music and dancing, taking special delight in the marvellous performances of the improvisatori. Milton's acquaintance with Manso may be regarded as one of the most fortunate incidents of his foreign travels, inasmuch as his conversations about Tasso are supposed to have suggested to him the design of writing an epic work like the _Gerusalemme_; and indeed Milton is supposed to have borrowed some of his ideas for _Paradise Lost_ from the _Sette Giornate, or Seven Days of Creation_, a fragmentary poem in blank verse, which Tasso began under the roof of his friend at Naples. This work is now very little known, but it is worthy of being read, if only for the lofty dignity of its style, and the beauty of some of its descriptive parts, particularly the creation of light on the first day, and of the firmament on the second, and the episode of the Phoenix on the fifth. Its association with Milton's far grander work, as literary twins laid for a while in the same cradle, will always invest it with deep interest to the student. Tasso occupied himself at the same time with an altered version of his great poem, which he called the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_. He was induced to undertake this work in order to triumph over his truculent critics, the Della Cruscans, who had condemned the former version. In the Imperial Library at Vienna is preserved the manuscript of this version, with its numerous alterations and erasures, showing how laborious the task of remodelling must have been. He suppressed the touching incident of Olinda and Sophronia. He changed the name of Rinaldo to Riccardo; and ruthlessly swept his pen through all the flatteries, direct and indirect, which he had originally bestowed upon the house of Este. There is hardly a single stanza that is not changed. But in the process of revision he deprived his poem of all life. Religious mysticism has been substituted for the refined chivalry of the Crusades, and poetry and romance have been sacrificed for classical regularity and religious orthodoxy. To any one familiar with the original, the _Conquistata_ must be regarded as the most melancholy book in any language; a sad monument of a noble genius robbed of its power and depressed by calamity. And it is all the more melancholy that the author himself was utterly unconscious of its defects, and got so enamoured of what he considered his improvements, that he wrote and published a discourse called the _Giudizio_--a cold pedantic work, in which he explained the principles upon which he made his alterations. In vain, however, did the author thus commit literary suicide. His immortal poem had passed beyond the reach of revision, and stamped itself too deeply upon the minds and hearts of his countrymen to be effaced by any after version. And now the _Conquistata_ has sunk into well-merited oblivion, while the _Liberata_--"his youthful poetical sin," as he himself called it--is everywhere admired as one of the great classics of the world. For nine years Tasso lived after his imprisonment. But his free life was only a little less burdensome than his prison one. With impaired health and extinguished hope, and only the wreck of his great intellect, he wandered a homeless pilgrim from court to court, drawn like a moth to the brilliant flame that had wrought his ruin. Well would it have been for him had he settled down to some quiet independent pursuit that would have taken him away from the atmosphere of court life altogether, such as the Professorship of Poetry and Ethics which had been offered to him by the Genoese Academy. But the habits of a whole lifetime could not now be given up. His education and training had fitted him for no other mode of life. Without the patronage of the great, literature in those days had not a chance of success; and a thousand incidents in the life of Tasso serve to show that "genius was considered the property, not of the individual, but of his patron"; and with petty meanness was the reward allotted for this appropriation dealt out. His experience of the favour of princes at this period was only a repetition of his own earlier one, and that of his father. His patrons, one after another, got tired of him; and yet he persisted in soliciting their favour. From the door of his former friend, Cardinal Gonzaga, at Rome, he was turned away; and as a fever-stricken mendicant he sought refuge in the Bergamese Hospital of that city, founded by a relative of his own, who little thought that it would one day afford an asylum to the most illustrious of his name. But fate had now discharged its last evil arrow, and began to relent during the two remaining years of his life. The sun that was all day obscured, as it struggled with dark clouds, emerged at last, and made the western sky ablaze with splendour. All over the country nothing was to be heard but the echoes of Tasso's praises. From the fountains of the Adige to the Straits of Messina, in the valleys of Savoy, and in the capitals of Spain and France, his immortal epic was read or recited by the highest and the lowest. Fortunes were made by its sale. The famous bandit Sciarra, who with his troop of robbers had terrified the whole of Southern Italy, hearing that Tasso was at Gaeta, on his journey from Naples to Rome, sent to compliment him, and offer him, not only a free passage, but protection by the way. At Florence, whither he went at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the whole literary society of the place, even including many of the Della Cruscans, showered honours upon him. While at Rome Pope Clement VIII. gave him the most flattering reception, assigned to him an apartment in the Vatican, and an annual income of two hundred scudi. From the representatives of his mother's friends at Naples he was also offered an annuity of two hundred ducats, and a considerable sum in hand, on condition of stopping the lawsuit. Thus furnished with what he had vainly looked for all his life, the means of a comfortable subsistence, his closing days promised a happiness to which he had hitherto been a stranger. But the gifts of fortune were brought to him with sad auguries, like the soft sunny smiles of September skies, which gild the fading leaves with a mockery of May. Tasso came to Rome in November. But the state of his health was so deplorable that he could not remain with safety in the room assigned to him in the Vatican. It was thought, therefore, that the elevated position and salubrious air, as well as the quiet life of the monastery of St. Onofrio, not far off on the same side of the Tiber, would be more suitable for his restoration. Accordingly, Cardinal Cynthio Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement VIII., who had befriended him on many occasions, brought him to St. Onofrio in his own carriage. And as his weary steps crossed the threshold, he said to the monks, who received him with pitying looks, "I come to die among you." Whenever he was able to go out, he spent the last days of his life in the garden of the monastery. There he sat under the shadow of the aged oak that has since become historical; and as he watched the sunset of his life, he would gaze upon the mighty ruins and the glorious view stretching before him with that inspired vision which creates half the beauty it beholds, and with that enhanced appreciation caused by the prospect of the coming darkness which would hide it for ever from his sight. We love to think of the poet in this quiet resting-place, where the noises of the great world reached him only in subdued murmurs. Heaven was above him, and the world beneath. The memory of his wrongs and his ambitions alike vanished in the shadow cast before by his approaching death. Alfonso and Ferrara faded away upon the horizon of eternity; even the fame of his _Gerusalemme_, the great object for which he had lived, had become utterly indifferent to him. In the monastery of St. Onofrio, a bent, sorrow-stricken man, old before his time, joining with the monks in the duties of religion, Tasso appeals more powerfully to our feelings than when in the full flush of youth and happiness he shone the brightest star in the royal court of Alfonso. Awakening to the sense of the great loss that Italy was about to sustain in his death, his friends and admirers proposed that the Pope should confer upon him at the Capitol the laurel wreath that had crowned the brow of Petrarch. But the weather during the winter proved singularly unpropitious for such a ceremony. Rain fell almost every day, and constant sirocco winds depressed the spirits of the people and prevented all outdoor enjoyments. And thus the season wore on till April dawned with the promise of brighter skies, and the day was fixed, and all the _élite_ of Rome and of the chief cities of Italy were invited to attend the coronation. Extensive preparations were made; the whole city was in a flutter of excitement, and the people looked forward to a holiday such as Rome had not seen since the days of the Cæsars. But by this time the poet was dying, fever-wasted, in his lonely cell. He could see from his window, as he lay propped up with pillows on his narrow couch, across the river and its broad valley crowded with houses, the slender campanile of Michael Angelo ascending from the Capitoline Hill, marking the spot where at the moment the people were busy preparing for the magnificent ceremony of the morrow. But not for him was the triumph; it came too late. "Tomorrow," he said, "I shall be beyond the reach of all earthly honour." He received the last rites of the Church from the hands of the diocesan, and passed quietly away with the unfinished sentence upon his lips, "Into thy hands, O Lord," while the concluding strains of the vesper hymn were chanted by the monks. And they who came on the morrow, to summon him to his coronation, found him in the sleep of death. The laurel wreath that was meant for his brow was laid upon his coffin, as it was carried on the very day of his intended coronation, with great pomp, cardinals and princes bearing up the pall, and deposited in the neighbouring church of the monastery. Ever since, the anniversary of his death has been religiously kept by the monks of St. Onofrio. They throw open on that day, the 25th of April, the monastery and garden to the general public; ladies are freely admitted, and a festival is observed, during which portions of the poet's writings are read, his relics exhibited, and his tomb wreathed with flowers. Tasso died, like Virgil his model, in his fifty-first year. Short and chequered and full of trouble as was his life, it is amazing what an immense amount of literary work he accomplished. Since the publication of his _Rinaldo_, in his seventeenth year, he never ceased writing, even in the most unfavourable circumstances. Of his prose and poetical works no less than twenty-five volumes remain to us. These works are all rich in biographical materials. They show an ideal tenderness of feeling, an intense love for everything beautiful, and a deep piety, not only of sentiment but of duty. They are specially interesting to us as links connecting the ancient world with the modern. We can trace the influence of Tasso's genius in very varied quarters. He not only gave a new impulse to the literature of his own country, but even inspired the artistic productions of the day. The most beautiful passages of Spenser's _Faerie Queen_ were suggested by his pastoral poetry; while his chivalrous epic was to Milton at once the incentive and the model of his own immortal work. It is probable that the _New Heloïse_ of Rousseau, and the tragedy of _Zaire_ by Voltaire, would not have been written had not Tasso invested the subject of romantic love and of the Crusades with such a deep interest to the authors. We of this age may miss in Tasso's poetical works the dramatic force to which we are accustomed in such productions; but we acknowledge the spell which the lyrical element that pervades them all, and towards which Tasso's genius was most strongly bent, casts over us. His own personal history strikingly illustrates the vanity of a life spent in dependence upon princes. But fortunately the lesson is no longer needed; for a wide and intelligent constituency of readers all over the world now afford the patronage to literature which was formerly the special privilege of single individuals favoured by rank or fortune. Both to authors and readers this emancipation has been productive of the happiest results. CHAPTER X THE MARBLES OF ANCIENT ROME Marble-hunting is one of the regular pursuits of the visitor in Rome. The ground in almost every part of the ancient city is strewn with fragments of historical monuments. The largest and most valuable pieces have long since been removed by builders and sculptors, to fashion some Papal palace, or to adorn some pretentious church; and at the present day, in almost every stone-mason's shed, blocks of marble belonging to ancient edifices may be seen in process of conversion into articles of modern furniture. Many bits of the rarest kinds, however, still remain, which not unfrequently bear traces of the richest carving. For ages such spots have been quarries to visitors from all parts of the world, who wished to bring home some memorial of their sojourn in the Eternal City, and the supply is still far from being exhausted. That so much material should have survived the wholesale conversion, during the middle ages, of columns and statues into lime, in kilns erected where the temples and palaces were most crowded, and the vast exportation of objects of antiquity to other countries, is a striking proof of the prodigious quantity of marble that must have existed in ancient Rome. Now, however, such relics are more carefully preserved; and as the places where they are found in greatest quantity have been taken under the charge of the Government, and soldiers are constantly on the watch, it is not so easy as it used to be to abstract a fragment that has taken one's fancy. Marble fragments are so eagerly sought after because they make most suitable and convenient souvenirs. Their own beauty and rarity, apart from all historical associations, are a great attraction. Many of them will form, when cut and polished by the lapidary, pretty tazzas and paper-weights, and even the smallest bits can be put together in a mosaic pattern, so as to make extremely beautiful table-tops. Whole rows of lapidary shops in the English quarter of the city, especially in the Via Babuino and the Via Sistina, are maintained by this curious traffic. In the Forum and Colosseum great quantities of marble and alabaster used to be found; but these localities have been so much ransacked that they now afford very scanty gleanings. The Baths of Caracalla and Titus, the recent excavations on the Esquiline, the ruins of the palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine, and the open space marked out for new squares and streets between Sta. Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran, are the best situations within the walls of the city. Outside the supply is almost as large as ever. All over the vast Campagna the foot of the wayfarer strikes against some precious or beautiful relic; and along the Appian and Latin Ways broken pieces of different kinds may be found in such profusion that such spots look like the rubbish-heap around a marble quarry. In the vast grounds over which the imposing ruins of Hadrian's Villa spread, heaps of fragments of marble flooring or casing may be seen in almost every neglected corner, from which it is easy to obtain some lovely bit of giallo antico or pavonazzetto or green porphyry. Beside the ancient quay of Rome, leading to the ruins of the Emporium or Custom-house--at a spot called in modern phrase "La Marmorata," because marble vessels still discharge their cargoes there--immense quantities of marble, alabaster, and porphyry are piled up, that were unshipped untold ages ago for Roman use; and a vineyard a short way off, on the slope of the Aventine, is much frequented by collectors on account of the richness of its finds. But it is not as a mere amusement, or as a means of collecting pretty souvenirs of travel, that such marble-hunting expeditions are to be recommended. They may have a much higher value. The different kinds of marble collected are peculiarly interesting owing to their association with the different epochs of the history of the city and empire; and as the specimens which the geologist obtains throw light upon the formation of the rocky strata of the earth, so the small marble fragments which the student finds in Rome afford a clue to the various stages of its existence. Indeed, a competent knowledge of the marbles of Rome is indispensable to a clear understanding of the age of its ancient monuments. An immense amount of controversy has raged round some remarkable building or statue, which would have been prevented had the nature and origin of the marble of which it was composed been first investigated. The famous statue of the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, for instance, was long regarded as an original production either of Pheidias himself or of his school. But the discovery that the marble of which it is wrought is Lunar or Carrara marble--which was unknown until the time of Julius Cæsar, who first introduced it into Rome--is of itself a proof that it is not a genuine work of Greek art of the best period, but a monument of the decadence, or a copy of an original, wrought in imperial times for the adornment of a summer palace in Italy. In numberless other cases, ancient monuments have been identified by the mineral character and history of their marble materials. The first thing, therefore, which the student during his visit to the city ought to do, is to make himself acquainted with the different varieties of marble that have been found within the walls or in the neighbourhood. For this purpose the Museum in the Collegio della Sapienza or University of Rome will afford invaluable aid. In this institution, conveniently arranged in glass cases, are no less than 607 specimens of various marbles and alabasters used by the ancient Romans in the building or decoration of their houses and public monuments. The collection was made by the late Signor Sanginetti, Professor of Mineralogy in the University, and is quite unique. A great deal of instruction may also be obtained from the mineralogical study of the thousands of marble columns still standing in the older churches and palaces of Rome, most of which have been derived from the ruins of ancient temples and basilicas. Several excellent books may also be consulted with advantage--especially Faustino Corsi's Treatise on the Stones of Antiquity, _Trattato delle Pietre Antiche_, which is the most approved Italian work on the subject, and from which much of the information contained in the following pages has been obtained. No marble quarries exist in the vicinity of Rome. The Sabine Hills are indeed of limestone formation, and large masses of travertine, a fresh-water limestone of igneous origin, occur here and there, but no mineral approaching marble in texture and appearance is found within a very considerable radius of the city. The nearest source of supply is at Cesi, near the celebrated "Falls of Terni," about forty-five miles from Rome, where "Cotanella," the red marble of the Roman States, is found, of which the great columns supporting the arches of the side aisles of St. Peter's are formed. The hills and rocks of Rome are all volcanic, and only the different varieties of eruptive rock were first employed for building purposes. The oldest monuments of the kingly period, such as the Cloaca Maxima, the Mamertine Prison, the Walls of Servius Tullius, and some of the earliest substructures on the Palatine Hill, were all built of the brown volcanic tufa found on or near their sites. This is the material of which the famous Tarpeian Rock and the lower part of most of the Seven Hills is composed. It is the oldest of the igneous deposits of Rome, and seems to have been formed by a conglomerate of ashes and fragments of pumice ejected from submarine volcanoes whose craters have been completely obliterated. It reposes upon marine tertiary deposits, and over it, near the Church of Sta. Agnese, where it is still quarried for building stone, rests a quaternary deposit, in which numerous remains of primeval elephants have been found. Though the Consular or Republican period was a very stormy one, and the reconstruction of the city, after its partial demolition by the Gauls, seems to have been too hurried to allow much attention to be paid to the materials and designs of architecture, yet there are numerous indications in the existing remains of that period that there was a decided advance in these respects upon the ruder art of a former age. Finer and more ornamental varieties of volcanic stone were introduced from a distance, such as the _peperino_ or grayish-green tufa of the Alban Hills, the _Lapis Albanus_ of the ancients, with its glittering particles of mica interspersed throughout its mass; the hard basaltine lava from a quarry near the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, on the Appian Way, and from the bed of the Lago della Colonna, once the celebrated Lake Regillus, to which the name of _Lapis Tusculanus_ or _Selce_ was given; and the _Lapis Gabinus_ or _Sperone_, a compact volcanic concrete found in the neighbourhood of the ancient Gabii on the road to Tivoli, extensively used in the construction of the earliest monuments, particularly the Tabularium and the huge Arco de Pantani. Brick was also largely employed in the construction of the foundations and inner walls of public buildings, being arranged at a later date into ornamental patterns, to which the names of _opus incertum_ and _opus reticulatum_ were given; and in the manufacture of this substance, which they were probably at first taught by the Etruscan artificers of Veii in the neighbourhood, the Romans reached a high degree of perfection. The earliest tombs along the Appian Way were constructed of these different varieties of building materials. The sarcophagi of the Scipios were hollowed out of simple blocks of peperino stone; and the sculptor's art and the material in which he wrought were worthy of the severe simplicity of the heroic age. But towards the close of the Republican period, Rome began to be distinguished for the magnificence of its public monuments. As its area of conquest spread, so did its luxury increase. New divinities were introduced from foreign countries, and domesticated in the Capitol; and these required more sumptuous fanes than those with which the native deities had been contented. The brown tufa of the Tarpeian Rock sufficed for the rude sanctuary of Vesta, the primitive hearth-stone of ancient Rome; but in the reconstruction of the sumptuous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which marked the grandest period of Roman history, the most precious stones of Asia and Africa were employed. Statues were imported wholesale from Greece to adorn temples and theatres, constructed after the models of Greek architecture, with pillars, friezes, and floors of precious Pentelic and Sicilian marble. During the last century of the Republic marble became a common building-stone. The tomb of Cæcilia Metella, and the temples of Ceres, Juno Sospita, and Castor and Pollux, indicate the introduction of this precious and beautiful material. But it was reserved for the period of the Empire to complete the architectural glories of the city. Travertine, usually called _Lapis Tiburtinus_, a straw-coloured volcanic limestone excavated in the plain below Tivoli, which has the useful property of hardening on exposure, was now used as the principal building-stone instead of the former lavas and tufas; and the Colosseum, entirely constructed of travertine, which was treated in the middle ages as a quarry, out of which were built many of the palaces and churches of Rome, attests to this day the beauty and durability of this material. Quarries of crystalline marbles, admirably adapted for the purposes of the sculptor and architect, were opened in the range of the Apennines overlooking the beautiful Bay of Spezia, in the vicinity of Carrara, Massa, and Seravezza, and largely worked in the time of Augustus. This emperor could boast that he had found Rome of brick, and left it of marble. The marbles of each new territory annexed to the Empire were brought at enormous expense into the Imperial City. A quay, to which reference has already been made, was constructed at the broadest part of the Tiber, where the vessels that transported marbles from Africa, and from the most distant parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, landed their cargoes. Here numerous blocks of marble were lately found, one of which was identified as that sent to Nero from a quarry in Carinthia; and another, a column of even more colossal dimensions, weighing about thirty-four tons of valuable African marble, was meant to serve as a memorial pillar of the Council of 1870 on the Janiculum, but the intention was never carried out. So abundant was marble during the first two centuries of the Empire, that it was nothing accounted of. Every temple, palace, and public edifice was built of it either in whole or in part. The tombs that lined the Appian Way on either side for fifteen miles had their brick cores covered with marble slabs; and their magnificence must have impressed every visitor who entered the Imperial City through this avenue of architectural glory shrouding the decays of death. It is obvious, then, that by studying the history of the conquests of Rome, the student can ascertain at what period a particular kind of marble was introduced from its native country, and the proximate date of the building in which this marble had been used. It was a fortunate circumstance for the preservation of the precious marbles of Rome that Christianity laid its cuckoo egg in the nest of the Pagan city. When the capture of Rome by Alaric gave the final blow to heathen worship, by the overthrow of the ruling classes, who alone cherished the proud memories of the ancient faith, the greater number of the temples were still standing without any one to look after the edifices or maintain the religious services. The Christians were therefore free to take possession of the deserted shrines; and they speedily transferred to their own churches the columns and marble decorations that adorned the temples of the gods. Many of the precious stones that once beautified the palaces of emperors and senators were employed to form the altars and the mosaic flooring of the memorial chapels. Almost all the early churches were constructed on or near the sites of the temples, so that the materials of the one might be transported to the other with the least difficulty and expense, just as the settler in the back-woods of America erects his log-house in the immediate vicinity of the trees that are most suitable for his purpose. And the striking contrast between the plain, mean exteriors of the oldest Roman churches--rough, time-stained, and unfinished since their erection--and their gorgeous interiors, with their forests of columns separating the aisles, and the series of richly-sculptured and brilliantly-frescoed chapels, all blazing with gold and marble,--a contrast that reminds us of the surprising difference between the outside of a common clumsy geode lying in the mud, and the sparkling crystals in the drusic cavity at the heart of it,--would lead us to infer that the outer walls were raised in haste to secure the valuable materials on the spot, before they could be otherwise appropriated. Marangoni, a learned Roman archæologist, mentions thirty-five churches in Rome as all raised upon the sites and out of the remains of ancient temples; and no less than six hundred and eighty-eight large columns of marble, granite, porphyry, and other valuable stones, as among the relics of heathen fanes transferred to sacred ground within the city, when the bronze Jupiter was metamorphosed into the Jew Peter, "And Pan to Moses lent his pagan horn." Many of these relics can be traced and identified, for it may be generally presumed, for the reason already given, that none are very far removed from their original situation. I know no more interesting pursuit in Rome than such an investigation; the objects, when their history is ascertained, acquiring a charm from association, over and above their own intrinsic beauty and interest. Most of the materials with which the three hundred and sixty-five churches of modern Rome have been constructed have been derived from the ruins of the ancient city. With the exception of a few comparatively insignificant portions brought from the modern quarries of Carrara, Siena, and Sicily, to complete subordinate details and to give a finish to the work, no marbles, it is said, have been used in ecclesiastical and palatial architecture for the last fifteen hundred years, save those found conveniently on the spot; and hardly a brick has been made or a stone of travertine or tufa hewn out for domestic buildings within the same period. The construction of St. Peter's itself involved more destruction of classical monuments than all the appropriations of previous and subsequent Vandals put together. Much has been lost on account of this extraordinary transmutation and reconsecration, whose loss we can never cease to deplore; but we must not forget at the same time that much has been conserved which would otherwise have wasted away under the slow ravages of time, been consigned to the lime-kiln, or disappeared in obscure and ignoble use. Enough remains to overwhelm us with astonishment, and furnish materials for the study of years. The white marbles of Greece were the first introduced into Rome. Paros supplied the earliest specimens, and long held a monopoly of the trade. _Marmor Parium_, or Marmo Greco duro, as it is called by the modern Italians, is the very flower and consummation of the rocks. This material seems to have been created specially for the use of the sculptor--as that in which he can express most clearly and beautifully his ideal conceptions; and the surpassing excellence of ancient Greek sculpture was largely due to the suitability for high art of the marble of the country, which was so stainlessly pure, delicate, and uniform--as Ruskin remarks, so soft as to allow the sculptor to work it without force, and trace on it his finest lines, and yet so hard as never to betray the touch or moulder away beneath the chisel. Parian marble is by far the most beautiful of the Greek marbles. It is a nearly pure carbonate of lime of creamy whiteness, with a finely crystalline granular structure, and is nearly translucent. It may be readily distinguished from all other white marbles by the peculiarly sparkling light that shines from its crystalline facets on being freshly broken; and this peculiarity enables the expert at once to determine the origin of any fragment of Greek or Roman statuary. The ancient quarries in the island of Paros are still wrought, though very little marble from this source is exported to other countries. In the entablature around the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, which is composed of Parian marble, we see the first example in Rome of the use of ornaments in marble upon the outside of a building; an example that was afterwards extensively followed, for all the tombs of a later age on the Appian Way had their exteriors sheathed with a veneer of marble. The beautiful sarcophagus which contained the remains of the noble lady for whom this gigantic pile was erected, and which is now in the Farnese Palace, was also formed of this material. Most beautiful examples of Parian marble may be seen in the three elegant columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum, belonging to the best period of Græco-Roman architecture; and in the nineteen fluted Corinthian pillars which form the little circular temple of Hercules on the banks of the Tiber, long supposed to be the Temple of Vesta. By far the largest mass of this marble in Rome is the colossal fragment in front of the Colosseum that belonged to the Temple of Venus and Rome; and it helps to give one an idea of the extraordinary grandeur and magnificence of this building in its prime, whose fluted columns, six feet in diameter, and the sheathing of whose outside walls of great thickness, were all made of Parian marble. More extensively employed in Greek and Roman statuary and architecture was the _Marmor Pentelicum_, or Marmo Greco fino of the modern Italians. The quarries which yielded inexhaustible materials for the public buildings and statues of Greece, and for the great monuments of Rome, were situated on the slopes of Mount Pentelicus, near Athens; and after having been closed for ages, have recently been reopened for the restoration of some of the buildings in the Greek capital. The marble is dazzlingly white and fine-grained, but it sometimes contains little pieces of quartz or flint, which give some trouble to the workmen. The Parthenon, crowning like a perfect capital of human art the summit of Nature's rough workmanship in the Acropolis, was built of this marble; and the immortal sculpture of Pheidias on the metopes, the frieze of the cella, and the tympana of the pediments of the temple, known as the Elgin Marbles, were carved out of a material worthy of their incomparable beauty. Innumerable specimens at one time existed in Rome. The arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus are built of it, although the rusty and weather-beaten hue of these venerable monuments hides the nature of the material. Domitian, who restored the celebrated Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, procured columns of Pentelic marble for the purpose from Athens; two of these are now in the nave of the church of Ara Coeli, built upon the site of the temple; and portions of the others, and of the marble decorations, were presented by the magistrates to the Franciscan friars of the neighbouring convent, and by them were wrought in 1348 into the conspicuous staircase leading to the façade of the church, which pious Catholics used to mount on their knees in the manner of the ancient worshippers of Jupiter. Among the statues wrought of this marble may be mentioned the famous group of the Laocoon found in the Baths of Titus; the beautiful Venus de Medici, discovered in the Villa of Hadrian, near Tivoli, and now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; and the well-known "Farnese Bull," sculptured out of a single block of huge dimensions, unearthed out of the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, and now in the Museum of Naples. Massimo d'Azeglio, in his _Recollections_, gives an interesting instance of the value set upon this marble by modern Roman sculptors. Pacetti having purchased an ancient Greek statue of the best period in Pentelic marble, greatly mutilated, and wishing to repair it, could find nothing among the best products of the Carrara quarries to match the marble in purity and fineness of texture, and was therefore obliged to destroy another Greek statue of inferior merit in order to get materials for the restoration. From this combination he succeeded in producing the sleeping figure known as the Barberini Faun, whose forcible abduction by the Pontifical Government on the eve of its being sold to a German prince, so preyed upon the mind of the cruelly-wronged sculptor, that he took to his bed and died. Very like Pentelic marble, but easily distinguishable, is the Marmor Porinum, the Marmo Grechetto duro of the Italians. It is intermediate in the quality of its grain between Parian and Pentelic marble, being finer than the former and not so fine as the latter. The column in front of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, removed by Paul V. in 1614 from the Basilica of Constantine, is composed of this species; as well as the celebrated Torso Belvedere of the Vatican, found near the site of the Theatre of Pompey, to which Michael Angelo traced much of his inspiration, and which, as we learn from a Greek Inscription at the base, was the work of the Rhodian sculptor Apollonios, who carved the group of the "Farnese Bull." Not unlike this Porine marble was the _Marmor Hymettium_ of the ancients; but it was never a great favourite in Rome on account of its large grain and dingy white colour, slightly tinged with green and marked by long parallel dark gray veins of unequal breadth. The metamorphic action was not sufficiently energetic to destroy the last traces of organic matter and the original stratification of the rock; and the crystallising force was not sufficiently exercised to allow of the entire rearrangement of the whole of the particles so as to expel the included impurities. This marble was not therefore fitted for sculpture; but it could be used for certain architectural purposes and for ornamentation. It used to be quarried extensively on Hymettus, the well-known mountain of Attica, celebrated for the quantity and excellence of its honey. The rock on which the aromatic flowers grew in such profusion for the bees, did not, however, partake of the same delightful quality. In working it a peculiar fetid odour of sulphuretted hydrogen, somewhat like that of a stale onion, was emitted, which gave rise to its modern Italian name--Marmo Cipolla. This repulsive quality, however, disappeared quickly on exposure. The finest specimens of this marble in Rome are the forty-six columns in the Church of St. Paul's, outside the gate, which belonged originally to the Basilica Æmilia in the Forum, founded about forty-five years before Christ, and were transferred to the new building when the venerable old church, in which they had stood for fifteen hundred years, was destroyed by fire. Nothing too can be finer than the two rows of Ionic columns of Hymettian marble which divide the immense nave of Santa Maria Maggiore from the side aisles. There are eighteen on either side, each upwards of eight feet in circumference, and are supposed to have been taken from the Temple of Juno Lucina, whose site is assigned by antiquaries to the immediate vicinity. Similar rows of fluted Doric columns of the same marble, ten on each side, adorn the Church of St. Pietro in Vincoli. They are ancient, and belonged to some temple or basilica of the Forum. There are also five ancient pillars of Hymettian marble in the upper Church of San Clemente, taken from the same prolific source. The wall which surrounds the unique choir or presbytery of this most interesting old church is also composed of great slabs of Hymettian marble, taken from the original subterranean church and hastily put together. Some of the ancient pillars of Hymettian marble belonging to the peristyle of the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, still as widely spaced as they used to be, adorn the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, built on the foundation of that shrine; while twenty-four remarkably fine fluted Corinthian columns of the same material divide the triple nave of Santa Sabina on the Aventine, and are supposed to have belonged to the ancient Temple of Juno Regina, erected by Camillus after the destruction of the Etruscan city of Veii. Hymettian marble was one of the first--if not actually the first--species introduced into Rome. In the year of Rome 662, Lucius Crassus the orator brought to the city six columns of it, each twelve feet in height, with which he adorned his house on the Palatine Hill, receiving, on account of this circumstance, from Marcus Brutus the nickname of the Palatine Venus. At the present day the marble is used for corner-stones in the ordinary houses of Athens. Another livid white marble, somewhat resembling the Hymettian, is that which is known to the Italians as Marmo Greco livido. It was called by the ancients _Marmor Thasium_, from Thasos, now Thapso, an island in the north of the Ægean Sea, off the coast of Thrace. The marble dug from the rocky sides of Mount Ipsario--a romantic hill thickly covered with fir trees, and rising three thousand four hundred and twenty-eight feet above the sea--enjoyed considerable reputation among the ancients. In Rome it must have been very common, if the name of Thasian is to be given to all the fragments of nondescript dusky white marble which are found among the ruins. Seneca says that the fish-ponds in his day were formed of that Thasian marble, with which at one time it was rare to adorn even temples. It was considered the least valuable of the white Greek marbles, and was used for the more ordinary purposes; Statius mentioning, in order to show the surpassing splendour of a particular building, that Thasian marble was not admitted into it. But there are not many well-defined monuments of it remaining in Rome. The chief are the bust of Euripides in the Vatican, and the outside casing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius, near the Protestant cemetery, now so weather-beaten and stained with dusky lichens that it is difficult to identify the material of which it is composed. From this marble, by a slight tinge of yellow and a little darker shade, the livid white marble of Lesbos, the _Marmor Lesbium_, or Marmo Greco Giallognolo, may be distinguished. It is not a beautiful material; and yet, strange to say, the statues of some of the most beautiful women of antiquity, such as those of Julia Pia in the Vatican, and of the Capitoline Venus in the Museum of the Capitol, were made of this marble, obtained from the birthplace of Sappho. More beautiful is the kind known as the _Marmor Tyrium_, or the Greco-Turchinicchio, which has a light bluish tinge. It was shipped by the ancients at the port of Tyre from some unknown quarry in Mount Lebanon, which supplied the marble used without stint in the building and decoration of Solomon's Temple and Palace. In this quarry every block was shaped and polished before it was sent to be inserted in its place in the Temple wall, which therefore, as Heber beautifully says, sprang up like some tall palm in majestic silence. In Rome this marble was very rare. The doors in the great piers which support the dome of St. Peter's are each flanked by a pair of spirally-fluted columns of Tyrian marble, supposed to have been brought to Rome by Titus from the Temple of Jerusalem. They originally decorated the confessional of the old Basilica. The twenty-eight steps of the Scala Santa at the Lateran, said by ecclesiastical tradition to have belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem, and to have been the identical ones which our Saviour descended when He left the judgment-hall, are made of this marble; so that, whatever we may think of the tradition itself, there is a feature of verisimilitude in the material. The chief supply of pure white marble in Rome was derived from the quarries in the mountains at Luna, an old Etruscan town near the Bay of Spezia, which fell to decay under the later Roman emperors. This ancient _Marmor Lunense_ is called by the Italians Marmo di Carrara, because it is identical with the famous modern Carrara marble, and belongs to the same range of strata; the ruins of the ancient Luna being only a few miles from the flourishing town of Carrara, the metropolis of the marble trade. From Parian and Pentelic marble, Lunar marble, as already mentioned, can be easily distinguished by the less brilliant sparkle of its crystal facets, as shown by a fresh surface, and also by its more soapy-white colour. It is simply an ordinary Jurassic limestone altered by subsequent metamorphic action. The mountains which contain the quarries are highly picturesque, rising with serried outline to a height of upwards of five thousand feet, their flanks scarred by deep gorges and torrent-beds, and their lower slopes clothed with olive groves, vineyards, and forest trees. Lunar marble was first brought to Rome in the time of Julius Cæsar; and Mamurra, so bitterly reviled by Catullus, the commander of the artificers in Cæsar's army in Gaul, lined with great slabs of this marble the outside and inside of his house on the Coelian Hill--the first recorded instance of veneering or incrusting walls with marble. The discovery of this method of cutting marble into thin slices, and decorating structures of ordinary materials with them, was stigmatised by Pliny as an unreasonable mode of extending luxury. The use of Lunar marble, on account of its easy accessibility, speedily extended to every kind of building, public and private. So vast were the quantities sent to Rome, that Ovid expressed his fear lest the mountains themselves should disappear through the digging out of this marble; and Pliny anticipated that dreadful consequences would be produced by the removal in this way of the great barriers erected by Nature. Many fine specimens still survive the ravages of ages, among which may be mentioned the eleven massive Corinthian columns, upwards of forty-two feet high, and four and a half feet in diameter, which form the peristyle of the Temple of Neptune in the Piazza di Pietra, well known as the old Custom-house. These pillars suffered severely from the action of fire, and are much worn and defaced, but there is a grandeur about them still which deeply impresses the spectator; and the blocks of marble which form the inner part of the architrave and entablature, as seen from the inner side of the court, are so stupendous that the ruins "overhang like a beetling rock of marble on a mountain peak." Grander still is the majestic column of Lunar marble dedicated to Marcus Aurelius, in the Piazza Colonna, which rears aloft its shaft one hundred and twenty-two feet in the air, wreathed around with spiral bands of historic reliefs, illustrating the Roman conquests over the German tribes north of the Danube. Very splendid specimens of the same marble may be seen in the three fluted Corinthian columns and a pilaster belonging to the Temple of Mars Ultor erected by Augustus in his Forum after the battle of Actium, which are the largest columns of any kind of marble in Rome, being eighteen feet in circumference, and upwards of fifty-four feet high. The two well-known pillars of the portico of the Temple of Minerva, called Le Colonnacce, belonging to the adjoining Forum of Nerva, are also composed of the same material; as also the three deeply-fluted Corinthian columns that remain of the Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum, which still retain some traces of the purple colour with which they appear to have been painted. By far the largest single masses of Lunar marble are the two portions of a gigantic frieze and entablature, highly ornamented with sculpture, one measuring one thousand four hundred and ninety cubic feet, and weighing upwards of one hundred tons, lying in the Colonna gardens on the slope of the Quirinal. These relics are supposed to have belonged to the splendid Temple of the Sun, which Aurelian erected after the conquest of Palmyra, and in which he deposited the rich spoils of that city. They are associated therefore with romantic memories of the famous Queen Zenobia, who spent her last days near Tivoli, after having been led captive in fetters of gold to grace the triumphal procession of her conqueror. For statuary purposes Lunar marble was extensively used in ancient Rome. It formed the material out of which the sculptor produced some of the noblest creations of his genius. Of these the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican collection is one of the most remarkable. The evidence of its own material, as already mentioned, has dispelled the old idea that it is one of the masterpieces of the Greek school; and Canova's conjecture, based upon some peculiarities of its drapery, is in all likelihood true, viz. that it was a copy of a bronze original, made, probably at the order of Nero, for one of the baths of the imperial villa at Antium, in whose ruins it was found in the fifteenth century. From the time of the Romans, the white marble of the Montes Lunenses has been used for decorative purposes in many of the churches and public buildings of Italy. It formed the material out of which Michael Angelo, Canova, and Thorwaldsen chiselled their immortal works. Its quality and composition, however, vary very considerably, and small crystals of perfectly limpid quartz, called _Carrara diamonds_, and iron pyrites, occasionally occur, to the annoyance of the sculptor. It becomes soon discoloured when exposed even to the pure air of Italy, but it is capable of resisting decay for very long periods. The opinion current in Paris, that the marbles of Carrara are unable to withstand the effects of the climate of that city, is due to the frequent use of inferior qualities, which are known to artists as _Saloni_ and _Ravaccioni_, and whose particles have but a feeble cohesion, and consequently slight durability. All the white marbles which I have thus described were used in Rome principally for external architecture; and beautiful as a city largely built of them may have looked, it must have had, nevertheless, a garishness and artificiality which would offend the artistic eye. When newly constructed, the Roman temples in the time of the emperors must have been oppressive, reflecting the hot sunshine from their snowy cellæ and pillared porticoes with an insufferable glare. Marble--unlike sandstones, clay-slates, and basalts, which are kindred to the earth and the elements, and find themselves at home in any situation, all things making friends with them, mosses, lichens, ivies--is a dead, cold material, and does not harmonise with surrounding circumstances. Like the snow, which hides the familiar brown soil from us, with its unearthly and uncongenial whiteness, its perpetual snow chills and repels human sympathies. Nature, for a similar reason, introduces white flowers very sparingly into the landscape; and their dazzling whiteness is toned down by the greenery around them, and the balancing of coloured objects near at hand, so that they do not in reality attract more notice than other flowers. The ancient Greeks themselves, keenly sensitive as they were to all external influences, had a fine instinct for this want of harmony between white marble and the tones of nature and the feelings of man; and therefore, in many instances, they coloured not only the marble buildings exposed to view outside, but even the marble statues carefully secluded in the niches within. The Parthenon was thus tinted with vermilion, blue, and gold, which seems to us, who now see only the golden hue with which the suns of ages have dyed its pure Pentelic marble, a barbarous superfluity, but which, to the people of the time, was necessary on account of the dazzling brightness of its material, concealing the exquisite beauty of the workmanship, and the finished grace of its proportions. Colour was used with perfect taste to relieve the sculptured details of the exterior, to articulate and ornament mouldings, and to harmonise the pure white temple with the dark blue sky of Greece and the rich warm tones of her landscape. The magnificent sarcophagi of white marble recently discovered at Sidon, belonging to the best type of Greek art, are most effectively adorned with different tints and gradations of red and purple, gold being sparingly applied. We see many traces of bright colouring on the columns and other parts of the buildings in the Roman Forum. The bas-reliefs on the Lumachella marble of Trajan's Column were originally picked out with profuse gilding and vivid colours; the egg and arrow moulding of the capital being tinted green, red and yellow, the abacus blue and red, the spirals yellow, the prominent figures gilt against backgrounds of different hues, and the water of the various rivers blue. Statues of the deities in Rome were nearly all coloured; and they received a fresh coat of vermilion--which, although it was the hue of divinity, was extremely fugacious--on anniversary occasions or in times of great national rejoicing. All this pleads powerfully in behalf of Gibson's colour-creed, which has had so much prejudice to overcome. The beauty and expression of ancient sculpture, whether for outside or inside decoration, were greatly heightened by this tinting. In cases where it was not employed, Nature herself became the artist, and has burnt into the marble statue or the marble pillar the warm hue of life; and the rusty, withered look of the ruins, over which ages of change have passed, touches us more than the pure white marble structure could have done in the pride of its splendour, and appeals to the tenderest sympathies of beings who see in themselves, and in all around them, the tokens of death and decay. The graceful Corinthian pillars of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum, the three surviving witnesses of its former grandeur, are all the more suggestive to us by reason of the russet hues with which time has stained the snowy purity of their Parian marble; and it is difficult to say, as some one has shrewdly remarked, how much of the touching effect which the drooping figure of the Dying Gladiator of the Capitol produces upon us may be attributed to its discoloration, and to the absence of the dainty spotlessness of the original Greek marble. That grime of ages "lends a sort of warmth, and suggests flesh and blood," so that the suffering is not a cold and frosty incrustation, with which we have nothing to do, but a real tragedy going on before our eyes, by which our sympathies are most deeply moved. In a dry, hot climate, like that of Rome, there are no tender tones of vegetable colouring, no moss or lichen touches of gold or gray or green to relieve the bare cold surface, and the rigid formal outlines of the marble; but out of the sky itself the marble gathers the soft shadows and the rich brown hues that reconcile its strange, unnatural whiteness with the homely ways of the familiar earth. That wonderful violet sky of Rome would glorify the meanest object. The common red brick glows in its translucent atmosphere like a ruby; and the russet defaced column, as it comes out against its vivid light, becomes luminous like a pillar of gold. Brick and marble are of equal æsthetic value in this magic city, in which the uncomely parts and materials have a more abundant comeliness by reason of the medium through which they are seen. Over all things lingers permanently the transfiguring glow that comes to northern lands only in the afternoon. In that land it is always afternoon; the ruins bathe as it were in a perpetual sunset. The air is constantly flooded with a radiance which seems to transfuse itself through every part of the city, making all its ruinous and hoary age bright and living, forming pictures and harmonies indescribable of the humblest objects. The white marbles hitherto described were principally for exterior use. But as Roman wealth and luxury increased coloured marbles were employed for internal decoration; and the effects which the Greeks obtained by the application of pigments, the Romans obtained by the rich hues of precious marbles incrusting their buildings, and durable as these buildings themselves. At first these rare materials were used with a degree of moderation, chiefly in the form of mosaics of small discs or cubes for the pavements of halls and courts. But at length massive pillars were constructed of them, and the vast inside brick surfaces of imperial baths and palaces were crusted over and concealed by slabs of rare and splendid marbles, the lines of which had no necessary connection with the mass behind or beneath. Carthage from the spoils of its temples supplied Rome with many of its rarest columns; and it is probable that not a few of these survive in the Christian basilicas that occupy the sites and were built out of the materials of the old Pagan structures. With the decay of the Roman Empire the use of coloured marbles in art increased, so that even busts and statues had their faces and necks cut in white and the drapery in coloured marble. It attained its fullest development in the Byzantine style, of which, as it appeals to the senses more by colour than by form, it is a predominant characteristic, necessary to its vitality and expression. The early Christian builders contemplated this mode of decoration for their interiors only. Very rarely had they the means to apply it to the outside surface, as in St. Mark's in Venice, which is the great type of the Byzantine church, coloured within and without with the rich hues of marbles and mosaics. Our great Gothic cathedrals, as an eminent architect has said, were the creation of one thought, and hence they were complete when the workmen of the architects left them, and their whole effect is dominated by one idea or one set of ideas; but the early Roman churches were the results of a general co-operation of associated art, and the large and plain surfaces of the interiors were regarded by the sculptor as a framework for the exhibition of his decorative art. Colour was lavished in veneers of rare marbles, and costly mosaics and frescoes covering the walls. There was thus "less unity of purely architectural design, but a greater amount of general artistic wealth." Intermediate between the white marbles used for external architecture and the coloured marbles used for internal decoration, and forming the link between them, is the variety called by the Italians cipollino, or onion-stone. Its classical name is _Marmor Carystium_, from Carystos, a town of Euboea, mentioned by Homer, situated on the south coast of the island at the foot of Mount Oche. This town was chiefly celebrated for its marble, which was in great request at Rome, and also for its large quantities of valuable asbestos, which received the name of Carystian stone, and was manufactured by the Romans into incombustible cloth for the preservation of the ashes of the dead in the process of cremation. The asbestos occurs in the same quarries with this marble, just as this mineral is usually associated with talc schist, in which chlorite and mica are often present. Strabo places the quarries of cipollino at Marmorium, a place upon the coast near Carystos; but Mr. Hawkins mentions in Walpole's _Travels_ that he found the ancient works upon Mount Oche at a distance of three miles from the sea, the place being indicated by some old half-worked columns, lying apparently on the spot where they had been quarried. This marble is very peculiar, and is at once recognised by its gray-green ground colour and the streaks of darker green running through the calcareous substance like the coats of an onion, hence its name. These streaks belong to a different mineral formation. They are micaceous strata; and thus the true cipollino is a mixture of talcose schist with white saccharoidal marble, and may be said to form a transition link between marble and common stone. It belongs to the Dolomitic group of rocks, which forms so large a part of the romantic scenery of South-Eastern Europe, and yields all over the world some of the best and most ornamental building-stones. In this group calc-spar or dolomite wholly replaces the quartz and films of argillaceous matter, of which, especially in Scotland, micaceous schist is usually composed. There are many varieties of cipollino, the most common being the typical marble, a gray-green stone, sometimes more or less white, with veins of a darker green, forming waves rippling over it like those of the sea. It occurs so often among the ruins that it must have been perhaps more frequently used in Rome than any other marble. It was also one of the first introduced, for Mamurra lined the walls of his house on the Coelian with it, as well as with Lunar marble, in the time of Julius Cæsar; but Statius mentions that it was not very highly esteemed, especially in later times, when more valuable marbles came into use. One remarkably fine variety called _Cipollino marino_ is distinguished by its minute curling veins of light green on a ground of clear white. Four very large columns in the Braccio Nuova of the Vatican, which may have belonged originally, like the two large columns of _giallo antico_ in the same apartment, to some sumptuous tomb on the Appian Way, are formed of this variety, and are unique among all the other pillars of cipollino marble to be seen in Rome for the brightness of their colour and the exquisite beauty of their venation. Nothing can be more striking and beautiful than the rich wavelike ripples of green on the cipollino marbles that encase the Baptistery of St. Mark's in Venice, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had sculptured them into the walls of this "ecclesiastical sea-cave." Indeed all the outside and inside walls of the glorious old church are cased with this marble--in the interior up to the height of the capitals of the columns; while above that, every part of the vaults and domes is incrusted with a truly Byzantine profusion of gold mosaics--fit image, as Ruskin beautifully says, of the sea on which, like a halcyon's nest, Venice rests, and of the glowing golden sky that shines above it. Line after line of pleasant undulation ripples on the smooth polished marble as the sea ebbs and flows through the narrow streets of the city. In the churches and palaces of Rome specimens of all the varieties of cipollino may be found, taken from the old ruins, for the marble is not now worked in the ancient quarries. The largest masses of the common kind in Rome are the eight grand old Corinthian columns which form the portico of the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina in the Forum. The height of each shaft, which is composed of a single block, is forty-six feet, and the circumference fifteen feet. The pillars look very rusty and weather-worn, and are much battered with the ill-usage which they have received. One of the most beautiful and highly-prized marbles of ancient Rome was the species which is familiar to every visitor under the name of _Giallo antico_. It must have existed in immense quantities in the time of the emperors, for fragments of it are found almost everywhere, and it is the variety that is most frequently picked up and converted into ornamental articles. It is easily recognised by its deep brownish-yellow colour, resembling somewhat the yellow marbles of Siena and Verona, though invariably richer and brighter. All the varieties are traversed more or less by veins and blotches of a darker yellow or brownish hue, which give them a charming variety. The texture is remarkably fine and close-grained. In this respect _giallo antico_ can be distinguished from every other marble by the touch. When polished it is exquisitely smooth and soft, looking like ivory that has become yellow with age. No fitter material could be employed for the internal pavements or pillars of old temples, presenting a venerable appearance, as if the suns of many centuries had stained it with their own golden hue. From the fact that it was called by the Romans _Marmor Numidicum_, we are led to infer that this marble was quarried in Numidia, and was brought into Rome when the region was made a Roman province by Julius Cæsar. It was probably known to the Romans in the time of Jugurtha; but the age of luxury had not then begun, and Marius and Sulla were more intent upon the glories of war than upon the arts of peace. The quarries on the slopes of the Atlas, worked for three hundred years to supply the enormous demand made by the luxury of the masters of the world, were at last supposed to be exhausted; and the idea has long prevailed that the marble could only be found among the ruins of the Imperial City. But four or five years ago, the sources from which the Romans obtained some of their most precious varieties of this material have been rediscovered in the range of mountains called Djebel Orousse, north-east of Oran in Algeria. All over an extensive rocky plateau in this place numerous shallow depressions plainly indicate the existence of very ancient quarries. A large company has been formed to work and export the marble, which may now be had in illimitable quantity. The largest specimens of _giallo antico_ existing in Rome are the eight fluted Corinthian pillars, thirty feet high and eleven feet in circumference, with capitals and bases of white marble, which stand in pairs within the niches of the Pantheon. In consequence of the fires of former generations, the marble has here and there a tinge of red on the surface. In the Church of St. John Lateran there is a splendid pair of fluted columns of _giallo antico_, which support the entablature over a portal at the northern extremity of the transept. They are thirty feet in height and nine feet in circumference, and were found in Trajan's Forum. In the Arch of Constantine are several magnificent _giallo antico_ columns and pilasters, which are supposed to have belonged to the triumphal arch of Trajan. They are so damaged in appearance, and so discoloured by the weather, that it is not easy, without close inspection, to tell the material of which they are composed. For pavements and the sheathing of interior walls _giallo antico_ was used more frequently than almost any other kind of marble; hence it is mostly found in fragments of thin slabs, with the old polish still glistening upon them. It is difficult to describe, so as to identify it, the species of marble known as _Africano_. It has a great variety of tints, ranging from the clearest white to the deepest black, through yellow and purple. Its texture is very compact and hard, frequently containing veins of quartz, which render it difficult to work. Its ancient name is _Marmor Chium_, for it was brought to Rome from a quarry on Mount Elias, the highest summit in the island of Chios--the modern Scio--which contested the honour of being the birthplace of Homer. It received its modern name of Africano, not from any connection with Africa, but from its dark colour. It enters pretty frequently into the decoration of the Roman churches, though it is rare to see it in large masses. It seems to have been much in fashion for pavements, of which many fragments may be seen among the ruins of Trajan's Forum. The side wall of the second chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Pace in the Piazza Navona is sheathed with large slabs of remarkably fine Africano, "with edges bevelled like a rusticated basement." In the Belvedere Cortile in the Vatican is a portion of an ancient column of this marble, which is the most beautiful specimen in Rome; and the principal portal of the portico of St. Peter's is flanked by a pair of fluted Roman Ionic columns of Africano, which are the largest in the city. Closely allied to this marble is an ancient species which puzzles most visitors by its Protean appearance. Its tints are always neutral, but they vary in depth from the lightest to the darkest shade, and are never mixed but in juxtaposition. Dirty yellows, cloudy reds, dim blues and purples, occur in the ground or in the round or waved blotches or crooked veins. It has a fine grain and a dull fracture. This variety of Africano is known by the familiar name of _Porta Santa_, from the circumstance that the jambs and lintel of the first Porta Santa--a Holy Door annexed by Boniface VIII. to St. Peter's in the year 1300--were constructed of this marble. The Porta Santa, it may be mentioned, was instituted in connection with a centenary jubilee, but afterwards the period of formally opening it was reduced to fifty years, and now it is shortened to twenty-five. On the occasion of the jubilee, on Christmas Eve, the Pope knocks three times with a silver hammer against the masonry with which it is filled up, which is then demolished, and the Holy Door remains open for a whole twelvemonth, and on the Christmas Eve of the succeeding year is closed up in the same manner as before. A similar solemnity is performed by proxy at the Lateran, the Liberian, and the Pauline Basilicas. In all these great churches, as in St. Peter's, the jambs and Lintel of the Holy Door are of Porta Santa marble. This beautiful material was brought from the mountains in the neighbourhood of Jassus--a celebrated fishing town of Caria, situated on a small island close to the north coast of the Jassian Bay. From this circumstance it was called by the ancient Romans _Marmor Jassense_. Near the quarries was a sanctuary of Hestia, with a statue of the goddess, which, though unprotected in the open air, was believed never to be touched by rain. The marble, the most highly-prized variety of which was of a blood-red and livid white colour, was used in Greece chiefly for internal decoration. It was introduced in large quantity into Rome, and there are few churches in which the relics of it that existed in older buildings have not been adapted for ornamental purposes. Among the larger and finer masses of Porta Santa may be enumerated two columns and pilasters which belong to the monument of Clement IX., in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and which are remarkable for their exceedingly fine texture and the unusual predominance of white among the other hues; four splendid Corinthian pillars, considered the finest in Rome, in the nave of Sta. Agnese; the pair of half columns which support the pediment of the altar in the Capella della Presentazione in St. Peter's; and the basin of the handsome fountain in front of the Pillar of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna, constructed by the architect Giacoma della Porta out of an enormous mass of Porta Santa found lying on the ancient wharf. Frequent specimens of a beautiful marble known as _Fior di Persico_, from the resemblance of the colour of its bright purple veins on a white ground to that of the blossom of the peach, may be found in the Roman churches. It was much used for mouldings, sheathings, and pedestals, and also for floors. In the Villa of Hadrian large fragments of slabs of this marble may be found, which lined the walls and floors of what are called the Greek and Latin Libraries. The Portuguese Church in Rome has several columns of Fior di Persico supporting the pediments of altars in the different chapels; especially four pairs of fluted ones which adorn the two altars at the extremity of the nave, which are among the largest and finest in Rome. But the most splendid specimens of all are a pair of columns in the Palazzo Rospigliosi. The dado, eight feet in height, in the gorgeous Corsini chapel in the Church of St. John Lateran, is formed of large tablets of highly-polished Fior di Persico, and the frieze that surrounds the whole chapel is composed of the same beautiful material, whose predominance over every other marble is the peculiarity of this sanctuary. The ancient name of this marble was _Marmor Molossium_, from a region in Epirus--now Albania--which was a Roman province in the time of Pompey. It is associated with the celebrated campaigns in Italy of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, in which Greece was for the first time brought into contact with Rome. The region in which the quarries existed was the most ancient seat of Pelasgic religion. The infinite hues and markings of the coloured marbles have all been painted by Nature with one material only, variously proportioned and applied--the oxide of iron. The varieties of marble are mainly caused by the different degrees in which this substance has pervaded them. They are variable mixtures of the metamorphous carbonates of protoxide of iron and lime. And it is an interesting fact that there is a distinct relation between deposits of magnetic iron ore and the metamorphoses of limestones into marbles; so that this substance not only gives to the marbles their colouring, but also their texture. Even the whitest saccharoidal or statuary marble, which it has not coloured, it has created by the crystallisation of the limestone associated with it. And the marbles of the entire province of the Apuan Alps owe their existence to the large quantities of iron ore disseminated throughout them, which have exercised a great influence on the molecular modification they have undergone. The same changes have been produced on the limestones of Greece and Asia Minor by veins containing iron ore running through them. And of the marbles thus produced, one of the most beautiful is that which is known in Rome by the name of Pavonazzetto, from its peacock-like markings. The ground is a clear white, with numerous veins of a dark red or violet colour, while the grain is fine, with large shining scales. It resembles alabaster in the form and character of its veins, and in its transparent quality. It is a Phrygian marble, and was known to the ancients under the name of _Marmor Docimenum_. The poet Statius notices the legend that it was stained with the blood of Atys. It was a favourite marble of the emperor Hadrian, who employed it to decorate his tomb. It was brought to Rome when Phrygia became a Roman province, after the establishment of Christianity in Asia Minor. At first the quarry yielded only small pieces of the marble, but when it came into the possession of the Romans they developed its resources to the utmost; numerous large monolithic columns being wrought on the spot, and conveyed at great expense and labour to the coast. Colonel Leake supposes that the extensive quarries on the road from Khoorukun and Bulwudun are those of the ancient Docimenum. Hamilton, in his _Researches_, says that he saw numerous blocks of marble and columns in a rough state, and others beautifully worked, lying in this locality. In an open space beside a mosque lay neglected a beautifully-finished marble bath, once intended, perhaps, for a Roman villa; and in the wall of the mosque, and of the cemetery beside it, were numerous friezes and cornices, whose elaborately-finished sculptures of the Ionic and Corinthian orders proved that they were never designed for any building on the spot, but were in all probability worked near the quarries for the purpose of easier transportation, as is done in the quarries of Carrara at the present day. Pavonazzetto is thus associated in an interesting manner with the Phrygian cities of Laodicea and Colosse. When St. Paul was preaching the Gospel through this part of Asia Minor, the architects of Rome were conveying this splendid marble from the quarries of the Cadmus, to adorn the palatial buildings of the Imperial City. No marble was so highly esteemed as this, and no other species is so frequently referred to by the Latin poets. The high altar of the subterranean church, under which the relics of St. Ignatius and St. Clement are supposed to lie, is covered by a canopy supported by elegant columns of pavonazzetto marble; while the high altar of the upper church is similarly surmounted by a double entablature of Hymettian marble, supported by four columns of pavonazzetto. The extra-mural church of St. Paul's had several splendid pillars of Phrygian marble, taken by the emperor Theodosius from the grandest of the law courts of the Republic; but these were unfortunately destroyed during the burning of the old basilica about sixty years ago. We see in the flat pilasters of this purple-veined marble, now erect against the transepts of the restored church, the vestiges of the magnificent Æmilian Basilica in the Forum, of whose celebrated columns Pliny spoke in the highest terms. Specimens of pavonazzetto are to be seen in almost every church in Rome. In the interesting old Church of Sta. Agnese there are two columns of this marble, the flutings of which are remarkable for their cabled divisions. The gallery above is supported on small columns, most of which are of pavonazzetto spirally fluted. In the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli there is also a remarkably fine specimen; while there is a grand pair of columns in the vestibule of St. Peter's between the transept and the sacristy. Fourteen fluted columns of Phrygian marble have been dug up from the site of the Augustan Palace on the Palatine; while the one hundred and twenty employed by the emperor Hadrian, in the Temple of Juno and Jupiter erected by him, have been distributed among several of the Roman churches. The side walls of the splendid staircase of the Bracchi Palace are sheathed with a very rare and beautiful variety, remarkable for the delicacy of its veins and its brilliant polish. The veneer was produced by slicing down two ancient columns discovered near the Temple of Romulus Maxentius in the Forum, converted into the Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano. But the finest of all the pavonazzetto columns of Rome are the ten large ones in the Church of San Lorenzo outside the walls. In the volute of the capital of one of them a frog has been carved, which identifies it as having formerly belonged to the Temple of Jupiter or Juno, within the area of the Portico of Octavia. Pliny tells us that both temples were built at their own expense by two wealthy Lacedæmonian artists, named Sauros and Batrakos; and, having been refused the only recompense they asked--the right to place an inscription upon the buildings,--they introduced into the capitals of the pillars, surreptitiously, the symbols of their respective names, a lizard and a frog. The most precious of the old marbles of Rome is the _Rosso antico_. Its classical name has been lost, unless it be identical, as Corsi conjectures, with the Marmor Alabandicum, described by Pliny as black inclining much to purple. For a long time it was uncertain where it was found, but recently quarries of it have been discovered near the sea at Skantari, a village in the district of Teftion, which show traces of having been worked by the ancients. From these quarries the marble can only be extracted in slabs and in small fragments. This is the case, too, with all the red marbles of Italy, which, in spite of their compact character, scale off very readily, and are friable, vitreous, and full of cleavage planes, in addition to which they are usually only found in thin beds, which prevents their being used for other purposes than table-tops and flooring-slabs. The predominance of magnetic iron ore, to which they owe their vivid colour, has thus seriously affected the molecular arrangement of the rocks. It is probable that _rosso antico_, like the Italian red marbles, belongs to one or other of the Liassic formations, which, in Italy as well as in Greece and Asia Minor, constitutes a well-marked geological horizon by its regular stratification and its characteristic ammonite fossils. The quantity found among the Roman ruins of this marble is very large; many of the shops in Rome carving their models of classical buildings in this material. But the fragments are comparatively small. When used in architecture they have been employed to ornament subordinate features in some of the grander churches. The largest specimens to be seen in Rome are the double-branched flight of seven very broad steps, leading from the nave to the high altar of Santa Prassede. Napoleon Bonaparte, a few months before his fall, had ordered these slabs of _rosso antico_ to be sent to Paris to ornament his throne; but fortunately the order came too late to be executed. The cornice of the present choir is also formed of this very rare marble; while large fragments of the old cornice of the same material, which ran round the whole church, are preserved in the Belvedere Cortile of the Vatican. Tradition asserts that the pieces which have been converted to these sacred uses in the church once belonged to the house of Pudens, the father of its titular saint, in which St. Peter is supposed to have dwelt when in Rome. The entrance to the chamber of the Rospigliosi Palace, which contains the far-famed "Aurora" of Guido Reni on the ceiling, is flanked by a pair of Roman Ionic columns of _rosso antico_, fourteen feet high, which are the largest in Rome, although the quality of the marble is much injured by its lighter colour, and by a white streak which runs up each shaft nearly from top to bottom. In the sixth room of the Casino of the Villa Borghese the jambs of the mantelpiece are composed of _rosso antico_ in the form of caryatides supporting a broad frieze of the same material wrought in bas-relief. This marble seems to have been the favourite material in which to execute statues of the Faun; for every one who has visited the Vatican Sculpture Gallery and the Museum of the Capitol will remember well the beautiful statues of this mythic being in _rosso antico_, which are among their chief treasures, and once adorned the luxurious Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli. This marble is admirably adapted for such sculpture, for it gives to the ideal of the artist the warm vividness of life. And it seems a fit colour, as Nathaniel Hawthorne has said, in which to express the rich, sensuous, earthy side of nature, the happy characteristics of all wild natural things which meet and mingle in the human form and in the human soul; the Adam, the red man formed out of the red clay, in which the life of the animals and the life of the gods coalesce. In the Gabinetto of the Vatican, along with a large square tazza of _rosso antico_, is kept a most curious arm-chair of this marble, called _sedia forata_, found near the Church of St. John Lateran, upon which, in the middle ages, the Popes were obliged to sit at their installation in the presence of the Cardinals. This custom, which was practised as late as the coronation of Julius II. in 1503, arose from a desire to secure the throne of St. Peter from being intruded upon by a second Pope Joan--whether there ever really was such a personage, or whatever gave rise to the curious myth. The chair is like an ordinary library chair, with solid back and sides, sculptured out of a single block, and perforated in the seat with a circular aperture. _Rosso antico_ is not what might strictly be called a beautiful marble. Its colour is dusky and opaque, resembling that of a bullock's liver, marked with numerous black reticulations, so minute and faint as to be hardly visible. But the grain is extremely fine, admitting of the highest polish. Of black marbles--in the formation of which both the animal and vegetable kingdoms have taken part, their substance being composed of the finely-ground remains of foraminifera, corals, and shells, and their colour produced by the carbonaceous deposits of ancient forests--few kinds seem to have been used by the ancient Romans. The _nero antico_ was the species most esteemed, on account of its compact texture, fine grain, and deep black colour, marked occasionally with minute white short straight lines, always broken and interrupted. It is the _Marmor Tænarium_ of the ancients, quarried in the Tænarian peninsula, which forms the most southerly point in Europe, now called Cape Matapan. The celebrated quarries which Pliny eloquently describes, but for which Colonel Leake inquired in vain, were under the protection of Poseidon, whose temple was at the extremity of the peninsula. They attracted, on account of the sanctuary which the temple afforded, large numbers of criminals who fled from the pursuit of justice, and who readily found work in them. Very fine specimens of this marble may be seen in a pair of columns in the obscure Church of Santa Maria Regini Coeli, near the Convent of St. Onofrio, on the other side of the Tiber; in a pair in the church of Ara Coeli; and also in a pair in the third room of the Villa Pamphili Doria, which are extremely fine, and are probably as large as any to be met with. In consequence of the quantity used in the inscriptional tablets of monuments, for which this seems to be the favourite material, _nero antico_ is extremely scarce in modern Rome. The _bigio antico_ is a grayish marble, composed of white and black, sometimes in distinct stripes or waves, and sometimes mingled confusedly together. It was the _Marmor Batthium_ of the ancients, and two of the large columns in the principal portal of the Church of Santa Croce in Jerusalemme are remarkably fine specimens of it, probably taken from the Villa of Heliogabalus, in whose gardens, called the Horti Variani, the church was built. Another species is the _bianco e nero antico_, the _Marmor Proconnesium_ of antiquity, obtained from the celebrated quarries of Proconnesos, an island in the western part of the Propontis. Many of the towns of Greece were decorated with this marble. The internal part of the famous sepulchre erected by Artemisia, the widow of Mausolus, king of Caria, to her husband, and after whom all grand tombs ever since have received the name of mausoleum, was built of this marble. So celebrated were the quarries of Proconnesos that the ancient name of the island was changed to Marmora, and the whole of the Propontis is now called the Sea of Marmora. Although so highly esteemed in Greece, this marble does not seem to have been extensively used in Rome; the finest relics being the four columns supporting the marble canopy, in the form of a Gothic temple, which surmounts the high altar of St. Cæcilia, which is among the most ancient of all the churches of Rome. They were probably derived from some old Roman palace, and are remarkable for the clearness and brilliancy of the white blotches on a black ground. There are different varieties of this marble: one kind in which the blotches or veins are pure black on a pure white ground, and another in which the blotches or veins are pure white on a black ground. In these varieties, however, the black and the white are more confused together, but remain notwithstanding distinct and separate, so that if the veins are white the ground is sure to be black, and _vice versâ_. The ancient _Marmor Rhodium_, or the _giallo e nero_, had golden-coloured veins on a black ground, and, owing to its compact texture, was capable of receiving a high polish. It is very like the celebrated marble of Portovenere, a modern Italian species obtained from the western hills of the Gulf of Spezia, where the formation passes into that of the ammonitiferous limestones of the Lias and of the palæozoic rocks. A beautiful highly-polished specimen of Rhodian marble exists in the mask in front of the tomb of Paul III. in the tribune of St. Peter's, sculptured by Della Porta in 1547, long previous to the discovery of the quarries of Portovenere. It may be remarked that the grain of the latter species is such that it will not keep its polish without extreme care; a circumstance which distinguishes it from the Rhodian marble, whose tenacity in this respect renders it eminently adapted for the more costly class of decorative works. The marbles we have been hitherto considering belong to the older calcareous formations of Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and go down to the upper triassic and muschel-kalk limestones, and perhaps even to those of an older period. But there is a class of ancient marbles in Rome of much more recent geological origin--belonging indeed to the Miocene epoch--which are called Lumachella, from the Italian word signifying snail, on account of the presence in all the species of fossil shells. They vary in colour from the palest straw to the deepest purple. Some of them are exceedingly beautiful and valuable, and they are nearly all more or less rare, being found chiefly in small fragments of ancient pavements. Their substance is formed of the shells of the common oyster in bluish gray and black particles on a white ground, as in the Lumachella d' Egitto; of the cardium or cockle, assuming a lighter or deeper shade of yellow, as in the Lumachella d' Astracane; of the ammonite, as in the L. Corno d' Ammone; of the Anomia ampulla in the L. occhio di Pavone, so called from the circular form of the fossils whichever way the section is made; of encrinites, belemnites, and starfish, showing white or red on a violet ground, as in the L. pavonazza; and "of broken shells, hardly discernible, together with very shining and saccharoid particles of carbonate of lime," as in the _Marmor Schiston_ of the ancients--the _brocatello antico_ of the Italians, so named from its various shades of yellow and purple, resembling silk brocade. The most important specimens of Lumachella marbles are the pair of very fine large columns of L. rosea on the ground-floor of the Schiarra Palace, the balustrade of the high altar of St. Andrea della Valle, two columns in the garden of the Corsini Palace of L. d' Astracane, and a pair of large pillars which support one of the arches of the Vatican Library, formed of L. occhio di pavone. Specimens of brocatello may be found in several churches and palaces, forming mouldings, sheathings, and pedestals. The most interesting of the Lumachella marbles is the _bianca antica_, the Marmor Megarense of the ancients, composed of shells so small as to be scarcely discernible, and so closely compacted that the substance takes a good polish. The well-known Column of Trajan--the first monument (_columna cochlæa_) of this description ever raised in Rome, and far superior to the Antonine Column--is composed of Lumachella marble from Megara. It presents, in twenty-three spiral bands of bas-reliefs, winding round thirty-four blocks of stone, the history of the victories of Trajan over the Dacians, and, without reckoning horses, implements of war, and walls of cities, is said to consist of no less than two thousand five hundred figures, each about two feet two inches high. It is a strikingly suggestive thought, that this majestic pillar--which produced so deep an impression upon the minds of posterity that, according to the beautiful legend, Pope Gregory the Great was moved to supplicate, by means of masses in several of the Roman churches, for the liberation of him whom it commemorated from purgatory--should be composed of the relics of sea-shells. "Memorial pillar! 'mid the wreck of Time, Preserve thy charge with confidence sublime," said Wordsworth; but this sublime charge is committed to frail keeping. It is itself a sepulchre of the dead; and the tragedies of the Dacian war are inscribed upon tragedies that took place long ages before there was any human eye to witness them. The historic sculptures that so deeply move our pity for a conquered people, are based upon the immemorial sculptures of creatures whose sacrifice in whole hecatombs touches us not, because it is part of the order of the world by which life forms the foundation of and minister to life. It is strange how many of the grandest monuments are wrought out of the creations of primeval molluscs. The enduring pyramids themselves are formed of the nummulitic limestone studded with its "Pharaoh's beans," the exuviæ of shell-fish that perished ages before the Nile had created Egypt. Of the breccias there is a great variety among the relics of ancient Rome. A breccia is a rock made up of angular pebbles or fragments of other rocks. When the pebbles are rounded the conglomerate is a pudding-stone. Marble breccias are formed of angular pieces of highly crystalline limestone, united together by a siliceo-calcareous cement, containing usually an admixture of a hornblendic substance, and which is due to a particular action of adjacent masses or veins of iron ore. The hornblendic cement, with its iron or manganese base, produces the variegated appearance which may be seen in specimens from different localities. As may be imagined from their composition, these rocks are as a rule extremely unalterable by ordinary atmospheric agencies, and are susceptible of a high degree of polish, which they retain with the utmost tenacity. They were favourite materials with the ancient Roman decorators; but they do not occur in large masses in the city. A beautiful pair of Roman Ionic columns under the pediment of the altar of the third chapel in the Church of Ara Coeli are made of a valuable breccia called Breccia dorata, distinguished by its small light-golden fragments on a ground of various shades of purple. The high altar of Santa Prisca on the Aventine is supported by one column of Breccia corallina of remarkably fine quality, in which the fragments are white on a ground of light coral-red. In the second chapel of St. Andrea della Valle there are two Corinthian columns of Breccia gialla e nera, which is an aggregate mass of yellow and black fragments: the yellow in its brilliant golden hue surpassing that of all other marbles, and forming a striking contrast to the long irregular black fragments interspersed throughout it. In the first chapel of the same church there are four fluted Corinthian columns of breccia gialla, containing small and regular blotches, of which the prevailing tint is orange, each fragment edged with a rim of deeper yellow that surrounds it like a shadow. A most beautiful variety of Breccia gialla e nera forms the basin of holy water at the entrance of the Church of St. Carlo di Catinari, in which "the colours resemble a golden network spread upon a ground of black"; and an exceedingly lovely urn is seen underneath the altar in one of the chapels of the Portuguese Church, in which white fragments are imbedded in a purple ground which shines through their soft transparency. Not the least attractive objects in the chamber of the Dying Gladiator in the Museum of the Capitol area portion of a large column of very beautiful and extremely valuable Breccia tracagnina, in which golden-yellow, white, red, and blue fragments occur in very nearly equal proportions, and two large pedestals of Breccia di Sete-Bassi--so called from the discovery of the first specimens near the ruins of the Villa of Septimus Bassus on the Appian Way--containing very small purple fragments of an oblong shape, which is the characteristic peculiarity of all the varieties of this species of marble. Probably the most beautiful of all the ancient breccias is that called Breccia della Villa Adriana, from its occasional occurrence in the ruins of Hadrian's Villa, and also Breccia Quintilina, from its having been found in the grounds of the magnificent Villa of Quintilius Varus, commemorated by Horace, at Tivoli, now occupied by the Church of the Madonna di Quintigliolo. The prevailing colour of the fragments is that of a dark brown intermixed with others of smaller size, of red, green, blue, white, purple, bright yellow, and sometimes black, all harmonising together most beautifully. The comparatively small pieces found at Tivoli now adorn the Churches of St. Andrea della Valle, famous for its rich varieties of breccias, St. Domenico e Sisto and Santa Pudenziana, where they appear among the marble sheathing of the walls. In the chapel of the Gaetani in the last-mentioned church, the wall is incrusted with the richest marbles, especially Lumachella and Brocatello, and large tablets of Hadrian's breccia setting off the splendid sarcophagus of Breccia nera e gialla dedicated to Cardinal Gaetani. Along with the breccias which I have thus incidentally noticed, but to which a whole essay might be devoted on account of their beauty, rich variety, and great value and rarity, should be classified a kind of "breccia dure," called Breccia d' Egitto. It is not, however, a true breccia, but a pudding-stone, composed, not of calcareous but of siliceous fragments; and these fragments are not angular, as in the true breccias, but rounded, indicating that they had been carried by water and consequently rounded by attrition. The connected pebbles must have been broken from rocks of great hardness to have withstood the effects of constant abrasion. In the Egyptian breccia are found very fine pebbles of red granite, porphyry of a darker or lighter green, and yellow quartz, held together by a cement of compact felspar. It has a special geological interest, inasmuch as it represents an ancient sea-beach flanking the crystalline rocks of Upper Egypt, where the cretaceous and nummulitic limestones end. The pebbles were derived from the central nucleus of granite from beyond Assouan to the upper end of the Red Sea, round which are folded successive zones of gneiss and schist pierced by intrusive masses of porphyry and serpentine. The pair of beautiful Grecian Ionic columns, and the large green tazza--eighteen feet in circumference--the finest specimen of Egyptian breccia to be seen in Rome, both in the Villa Albani, and the vase of the same material in the chamber of Candelabra in the Vatican, in which the prevailing green colour is crossed by several stripes of pure white quartz, may thus have been sculptured out of a portion of littoral deposit formed from the ruins of the crystalline rocks of the mountain group of Sinai. There is something extremely interesting and suggestive to the imagination in the twofold origin of these conglomerate ornaments of the palaces of Rome. Around them gather the wonderful associations of ancient human history, and the still more awe-inspiring associations of geological history. They speak to us of the conquests of Rome in the desolate tracts of Nubia and Arabia, from which the spoils that enriched its palaces and temples were derived; and of the existence of coast-lines, when Egypt was a gulf stretching from the Mediterranean to the Mountains of the Moon, which became silted up by slow accumulations. Their language, in both relations, is that of ruin. They are survivors both of the ruins of Nature and of Man, and are made up of the wrecks of both. Older far than the marbles which keep them company in the sculptor's halls and churches of Rome, and whose human history is equally eventful, their materials were deposited along the shore of a vanished sea, when the mountains that yielded these marbles lay as calcareous mud in its depths. Alabasters, of which there are numerous varieties, from pure diaphanous white to the deepest black, were favourite decorative materials with the ancient Romans. The different kinds were used for the walls of baths, vases, busts, pillars, and sepulchral lamps, in which the light shining through the transparent sides had an agreeable softness. Cornelius Nepos, as quoted by Pliny, speaks of having seen columns of alabaster thirty-two feet in length; and Pliny says that he himself had seen thirty huge pillars in the dining-hall of Callistus, the freedman of Claudius. One such column still exists in the Villa Albani, which is twenty-two and a half feet in height. The ancients obtained large blocks of alabaster from quarries in Thebes in Egypt, in the neighbourhood of Damascus, and on Mount Taurus. They imported some kinds also from Cyprus, Spain, and Northern Africa. They obtained varieties nearer home, in different parts of Italy, such as the beautiful Alabastro di Tivoli, employed by Hadrian in his villa, and which appears to have been brought from Terni, where it still exists in abundance. From the quarry near Volterra the Etruscans obtained the alabaster for their cinerary urns. The European alabasters are accumulated masses of stalactite and stalagmite, formed by the slow dropping of water charged with sulphate of lime, to which circumstance they owe the parallel stripes or concentric circles with which they are marked, while the rich and delicate varieties of colouring are produced by the oxides of iron which the water carries with it in its infiltration through the intervening strata. They are very soft and perishable, and consequently are very rarely found among the ruins of ancient Rome. The Oriental alabasters, on the other hand, which are distinguished from the European by their superior hardness and durability, are in reality not sulphates, but carbonates of lime. Their hardness is quite equal to that of the best statuary marbles. The ancient quarries on the hill--the modern Mount St. Anthony--near the town of Alabastron, in Middle Egypt, from which the material got its name, have only recently been re-opened, but blocks of large size and perfect beauty have been obtained. Owing to the facility with which alabaster can be reduced by fire to lime, very few large examples of it in Rome have escaped the ruthless kilns of the middle ages. The most interesting specimens of ancient alabaster are the very beautiful vase of Alabastro cotognino, prolate in form, and in colour white, streaked with very light pink, which contained the ashes of Augustus, found in the ruins of his mausoleum, and now in the Vatican; the bust of Julius Cæsar, made of the variety _tartaruga_, from the resemblance of its brownish-yellow markings to tortoise-shell, in the Museum of the Capitol; and the two large blocks of _alabastro a pecorella_, brought from the Villa of Hadrian, in the fourth portico of the Vatican, the largest and most beautiful specimens of this very rare alabaster in Rome, distinguished by white circular blotches, like a flock of sheep huddled together, on a deep blood-red ground. In the churches there are numerous specimens of all the varieties, forming the columns and sheathings of altars, memorial chapels, and monuments; the incrustations of alabaster on the walls of the Borghese chapel, in Santa Maria Maggiore, being conspicuous for their splendid effect. The baldacchino above the high altar of St. Paul's is supported by four splendid columns of Oriental alabaster presented to Gregory XVI. by Mehemet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt. An interesting collection of beautiful and valuable varieties of alabasters may be made in connection with the building operations still carried on in the unfinished façade of the basilica fronting the Tiber. The well-known _Verde antico_ is not a marble, but a mixture of the green precious serpentine of mineralogists and white granular limestone. It may also be called a breccia, for it is composed of black fragments, larger or smaller, derived from other rocks, whose angular shape indicates that they have not travelled far from the spots where they occur. The ancient Romans called it _Lapis Atracius_, from Atrax, a town in Thessaly, in the vicinity of which it was found. It can hardly be distinguished, except by experts, from the modern green marbles of Vasallo in Sardinia, and Luca in Piedmont. It occurs somewhat abundantly in Rome, having been a favourite material with the old Romans for sheathing walls and tables. Magnificent columns of it were introduced into the temples and triumphal arches. We find relics of these in the older churches. Four splendid fluted Corinthian columns of Verde antico, with gilded capitals, support the pediment of the high altar in Sta. Agnese, in the Piazza Navone, which formerly belonged to the Arch of Marcus Aurelius in the Corso. A pair of very fine columns of this precious stone flank each of the niches, containing statues of the twelve apostles, in the piers which divide the middle nave from the side ones in the Church of St. John Lateran. These twenty-four columns are remarkable for the clearness of the white, green, and black colours that occur in them. They are supposed to have been taken from the Baths of Diocletian. Two of the splendid composite columns which support the pediment of the altar in the Corsini chapel of this church are of this marble, and were also taken from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius in the Corso. One most magnificent column of Verde antico has been found, along with seven others of different marbles, in the wall of the narthex of the subterranean Church of San Clemente. A small portion of it is polished to show the beauty of the material, while the rest is dimmed and incrusted with the grime of age. Very different from this is the ancient serpentine or ophite of Sparta called the _Lapis Lacedæmonius_, found in different hills near Krokee, or in Mount Taygetus in Lacedæmon, where the old quarry has recently been opened. It has a base of dark green with angular crystals of felspar of a lighter green imbedded in it. It is a truly eruptive rock, occurring in intrusive bosses, or in beds interstratified with gneiss and mica-schist, and owes its various shades of green to the presence of copper. Owing to its extraordinary hardness, this stone was seldom used for architectural purposes; and the lapidary will charge three times as much for working a fragment of this material into a letter-weight as for making it of any other stone. A pair of fluted Roman Ionic columns, supporting the pediment of the altar of the chapel of St. John the Baptist, in the Baptistery of St. John Lateran, are the only examples of ophite pillars in Rome. Next to these the largest masses are a circular tablet, forming part of the splendid sheathing of one of the ambones in the Church of San Lorenzo; and two elliptical tablets, still larger, engrafted upon the pilasters in front of the high altar of St. Paul's. The principal use to which this stone was devoted in Rome was the construction of mosaic pavements. The emperor Alexander Severus introduced into his palaces and public buildings a kind of flooring composed of small squares of green serpentine and red porphyry, wrought into elegant patterns, which became very fashionable, and was called after himself _Opus Alexandrinum_. The infamous Heliogabalus had previously paved some of the courts of the Palatine with such intarsio work, but his cousin Alexander Severus, following his example, adorned with it all the terraces and walks around, and the pavements within, the isolated villas called Diætæ, dedicated to his mother Mammæa, which he added to the Palatine buildings. We have examples of this beautiful kind of tesselated pavement in some of the chambers of the Baths of Caracalla; and it is highly probable that the _Opus Alexandrinum_ in the transept and middle nave of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere is in part at least contemporaneous with Alexander Severus, who conceded the ground on which the original oratory stood to Pope Calixtus I. in 222, for the special use of the Christians. If this be so, we have in this first place of Christian worship established in Rome the first instance of the application of _Opus Alexandrinum_ to the decoration of a church. In the middle ages the fashion was beautifully imitated by artists of the Cosmati family and their school; and the mosaic pavements of this kind in the medieval churches of Rome are no older than this period. But we have reason to believe that the _Opus Alexandrinum_ in two of the chapels of Santa Maria degli Angeli was taken from the Baths of Diocletian; while the splendid pavement of the whole church, naves, transept, and choir of Santa Croce in Jerusalemme, formed originally part of the decorations of the Sessorian Palace of Sextus Varius, the father of Heliogabalus, after whom the church is sometimes called the Sessorian Basilica. The flooring of the whole upper church of San Clemente was transferred from the older subterranean church, which derived its pavement from some of the ruins of the Palatine or the Forum; and the serpentine fragments, which enter very largely into the composition of the curious old mosaic floor of Ara Coeli must have had a similar origin as far back as the time of its founder, Gregory the Great. The _Lapis Lacedæmonius_ must have been very abundant in Rome during the time of Alexander Severus--judging from the quantities that are made up into mosaics in the churches, and the heaps of broken fragments that are found on the Palatine and at the Marmorata. The circular space around the obelisk in the Piazza of St. Peter's to a considerable extent is paved with it; and specimens of it frequently occur among the ordinary road-metal in the city and neighbourhood. Sicilian jaspers, so called, though really marbles, and purely calcareous, because of their resemblance in colour and form of the blotches to jasper, were wrought in great variety in the quarries in the neighbourhood of the celebrated Taormina, and were transported in the form of columns to Rome. Siliceous jaspers, obtained from the crystalline rocks of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Northern Italy, were also used for columns; and their brilliant red, green, and yellow hues, highly polished, contrasted beautifully with the white marbles of the interiors of the palaces. An even more sumptuous material called _Murrha_ was employed, which has been identified with fluor-spar, a translucent crystalline stone marked with blue, red, and purple, similar to the beautiful substance found near Matlock in Derbyshire. Of this fluor-spar were formed the celebrated murrhine cups which were in use in Rome in the days of Pliny among the richest people, and for which fabulous prices were paid. Several blocks of this material were found some years ago at the Marmorata which had been originally imported from Parthia in the reign of Hadrian. One of them was employed by the Jesuits, when cut up into thin slices, in ornamenting the principal altar in the church of Il Gesu. One of the chambers in the Baths of Titus was paved with slabs of the finest lapis lazula--the _Lapis Cyanus_ of the ancients--derived from the spoils of the Golden House of Nero, and originally procured by order of the luxurious tyrant from Persia and the neighbourhood of Lake Baikal. We can trace fragments of this exquisite pavement in the decoration of the chapel of St. Ignatius in the Church of the Jesuits. The globe, three feet in diameter, over the altar, beneath which repose the remains of Ignatius Loyola, is sheathed with this most precious stone, whose brilliant blue, contrasting with the white marble of the group of the Trinity--one of whose members holds it in His hands--has a splendid effect. The rare and costly marbles with which the Church of Il Gesu is profusely adorned were mostly taken from the ruins of the Baths of Titus by Cardinal Farnese in 1568. From the same source came also the magnificent sarcophagus, sheathed with lapis lazula, under the altar of St. Ignazio, which holds the body of St. Luigi Gonzaga. But it is impossible, within the limits of this chapter, to describe fully the relics of other precious and beautiful stones which may be found among the ruins of ancient Rome, or among the churches to which they have been transferred. Profuse as were the ancient Romans in their general expenditure, upon no objects did they lavish their wealth so extravagantly as upon their favourite marbles and precious stones for the decoration of their public buildings and their private houses. No effort was spared that Rome might be adorned with the richest treasures of the mineral kingdom from all parts of the world. Slaves and criminals were made to minister to this luxury in the various quarries of the Roman dominions, which were the penal settlements of antiquity. The antiquary Ficoroni counted the columns in Rome in the year 1700, and he found no less than eight thousand existing entire; and yet these were but a very small proportion of the number that must once have been there. The palaces and modern churches of Rome owe, as I have said, all their ornaments to this passion of the ancients. There is not a doorstep nor a guardstone at the corner of the meanest court in Rome which is not of marble, granite, or porphyry from some ancient building. Almost all the houses, as Raphael said, have been built with lime made of the costly old marbles. The very streets in the newly-formed parts of the city are macadamised with the fragments of costly baths and pillars. I took up one day, out of curiosity, some of the road-metal near the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and I identified in the handful no less than a dozen varieties of the most beautiful marbles and porphyries from Greece, Africa, and Asia. And when we remember that all these foreign stones were brought into Rome during the interval between the end of the Republic and the time of Constantine--a period of between three hundred and four hundred years--we can form some idea of the extraordinary wealth and luxury of the Imperial City when it was in its prime. CHAPTER XI THE VATICAN CODEX Among the numberless objects of interest to be seen in Rome, a very high place must be assigned to the Codex Vaticanus, probably the oldest vellum manuscript in existence, and the richest treasure of the great Vatican Library. This famous manuscript, which Biblical scholars designate by the letter B, contains the oldest copy of the Septuagint, and the first Greek version of the New Testament. In addition to the profound interest which its own intrinsic value has inspired, it has been invested with a halo of romance seldom associated with dry palæographical studies--on account of the unreasonable jealousy and capricious conduct of its guardians. For a long time it was altogether inaccessible for study to Biblical scholars, and few were allowed even to see it. These restrictions, however, have now happily to a considerable extent been removed; and provided with an order, easily obtained from the Vatican librarian, or from the Prefect of the sacred palaces, in reply to a polite note, any respectable person is permitted to inspect it. The first feeling which one has in the Vatican Library is that of surprise. You might walk through the Great Hall and adjoining galleries without suspecting the place to be a library at all; for the bookcases that line the lower portion of the walls are closed with panelled doors, painted in arabesque on a ground of white and slate colour, and surrounded by gilded mouldings, and not a single book is visible. The vaulted ceiling of the rooms is glowing with gold and ultramarine; the walls are adorned with beautiful frescoes representing the different Councils of the Church; and magnificent tables of polished Oriental granite, and of various precious marbles, vases of porphyry, malachite, and alabaster, and priceless candelabra of Sevres china--the gifts of kings and emperors--occupy the spaces between the pillars and pilasters, and cast their rich shadows on the gleaming marble pavement. A vast variety of objects of rare beauty, artistic value, and antique interest arrest the attention, and would amply reward the study of weeks. The nucleus of the present magnificent collection of books and manuscripts was formed in the Lateran Palace in the year 465 by Bishop Hilary; and, augmented by succeeding pontiffs, the accumulated stores were transferred in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V., the founder of Glasgow University, to the Vatican. What Nicholas began was completed by Sixtus IV. The library was classified according to subjects and writers, and Demetrius Lucensis, under the direction of Platina, made a catalogue of it which is still in existence. During this period Vatican MSS. were lent out to students, as attested by authentic registers containing the autographs of those who enjoyed the privilege. A little later the celebrated Vatican printing press was annexed to the library; and the office of correctors or readers for the accurate printing of ancient books which were wanting in the library was instituted. Pope Sixtus V. erected the present splendid edifice, and used every effort to increase the great collection. Several valuable accessions were made to it after this date, including the library of the Elector Palatine of Germany, the library of the Dukes of Urbino, the libraries of Christina, Queen of Sweden, of the Ottoboni, commenced by Pope Alexander VIII., and of the Marquis Capponi, and the MSS. taken from the convent of S. Basilio at Grotta Ferrata. Under Innocent XIII. in 1721 an attempt was made to prepare for the press a full catalogue of all the MSS. in every language. It was edited by Joseph Simon Assemani and Stephen Evodius, and three volumes were published. But the task was found too great for any one's strength, and was given up finally on account of the political disturbances of the time. The library is a vast unexplored mine of wealth. Unknown literary treasures are contained in the closed cabinets. Among the thirty thousand manuscripts may be hid some of the ancient classical and early Christian treatises, which have been lost for ages, and whose recovery would excite the profoundest interest throughout the civilised world. A large number of these manuscripts had once belonged to the library of the famous Monastery of Bobbio, in the north of Italy, founded in the year 614 by the Irish St. Columbanus. The Irish and Scotch monks who inhabited this monastery were in the dark ages the most zealous collectors of manuscripts in Europe. At the close of the fifteenth century the convent was impoverished and deserted by its lawful occupants; and the Benedictine monks who succeeded them gave away their literary treasures partly to the Ambrosian Library at Milan and partly to the Vatican Library. Cardinal Angelo Mai, who discovered more lost works and transcribed more ancient manuscripts than any one else, found among these treasures in Milan and Rome several most interesting treatises that had long passed into utter oblivion. But though permission is freely granted to duly accredited visitors who may be desirous of consulting manuscripts, the labour of searching among the huge bewildering piles would be overwhelming, and the thought of it would at once paralyse effort. There is no proper catalogue of the printed books; and the list of manuscripts is so deficient as to be altogether worthless. During six months, from November till June, the library is open for study every day, except Thursday and the numerous saints' days, whose recurrence can be easily ascertained beforehand so as to prevent disappointment. I cannot imagine a greater privilege to a student. It is the highest luxury of learning to explore the literary wealth of these princely apartments, that seem to have a climate of their own, like the great Basilica close at hand--the climate of eternal spring--and whose atmosphere breathes the associations of much that is grandest and most memorable in human history. To the charms of some of the noblest productions of human genius working by pen, or pencil, or chisel--adorning roof, and wall, and floor--and vanishing down the long vista in a bright perspective of beauty--Nature adds her crown of perfection. For nothing can exceed the loveliness of the views from the windows of the Papal gardens outside, with their gay flowery parterres, sparkling fountains, depths of shadowy glades and half-hidden sculptured forms of rarest beauty; and, beyond, a purple mountain range, summits old in story, closing up the enchanted vista through the ruddy stems and deep green foliage of tall stone-pines; the whole glowing in the brilliant sunshine and the exquisite violet transparency of the Roman sky. How delightful to spend whole days there and forget the commonplace present in converse with the master minds of the ages, and in dreams of the heroic past; the half-closed shutters and drawn curtains producing a cool and drowsy atmosphere, in delicious contrast with the broiling sun without! Learning, however, would be too apt to fall asleep, and be shorn of its strength on the Delilah lap of such splendid luxury. A few of the most interesting books and manuscripts are now contained in two handsome cabinets placed in the centre of the Great Hall of the library. These cabinets have two cases, an outer and an inner one, and are carefully double-locked. The librarian opened them for me, and displayed their contents, which are usually seen only through a thick plate of protecting glass. In the one cabinet were a manuscript of the Latin poet Terence, of the fourth and fifth century; the celebrated palimpsest of Cicero de Republica, concealed under a version of St. Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms, the oldest Latin manuscript in existence; the famous Virgil of the fifth century, with the well-known portrait of Virgil; the Homilies of St. Gregory of Nazianzum; the folio Hebrew Bible, which was the only thing that Duke Frederico of Urbino reserved for himself of the spoil at the capture of Volterra in 1472, and for which the Jews in Venice offered its weight in gold; a sketch of the first three cantos of the Gerusalemme Liberata in the handwriting of Tasso; a copy of Dante in the handwriting of Boccaccio; and several of Petrarch's autograph sonnets. In the other cabinet is the great gem and glory of the Library--the Codex Vaticanus, in strange association with a number of the love-letters of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, in French and English. This curious correspondence--which, after all that subsequently happened between the English monarch and the Papal Court, we are very much surprised to see in such a place--is in wonderful preservation. But though perfectly legible, the archaic form of the characters and the numerous abbreviations make it extremely difficult to decipher them. The tragic ending of this most inauspicious love-making invests with a deep pathos these faded yellow records of it that seem like the cold, gray ashes of a once glowing fire. In the same cabinet is seen another and altogether different production of this royal author--namely, the dedication copy of the "Assertio Septem Sacramentorum adversus Martinum Luther," written in Latin by Henry VIII. in defence of the seven Roman Catholic Sacraments against Luther, and sent to Leo X., with the original presentation address and royal autograph. The book is a good thick octavo volume, printed in London, in clear type, on vellum, with a broad margin. Only two copies are in existence, one in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the other in the Vatican. For this theological dissertation Henry VIII. received from the Pope the title of "Defender of the Faith," which has descended to the Protestant monarchs of England ever since, and is now inscribed on our coinage. Luther, several of whose manuscripts are in the Library, published a vigorous reply, in which he treated his royal opponent with scant ceremony. The author himself had no scruple in setting it aside when his personal passions were aroused. And Rome has put this inconsistent book beside the letters to Anne Boleyn, as it were in the pillory here for the condemnation of the world. But deeply interesting as were these literary curiosities, I soon turned from them and became engrossed with the priceless manuscript of the Greek Scriptures. I had very little time to inspect it, for I was afraid to exhaust the patience of the librarian. In appearance the manuscript is a quarto volume bound in red morocco; each of the pages being about eleven inches long, and the same in breadth. This is the usual size of the greater number of ancient manuscripts, very few being in folio or octavo, and in this particular resembling printed books. Each page has three columns, containing seventeen or eighteen letters in a line. It is supposed that this arrangement of the writing was borrowed directly from the most primitive scrolls, whose leaves were joined together lengthwise, so that their contents always appeared in parallel columns, as we see in the papyrus rolls that have recently been discovered. This peculiarity in the two or three manuscripts which possess it, is regarded as a proof of their very high antiquity. The writing on almost every page is so clear and distinct that it can be read with the greatest ease. What astonishes one most is the admirable preservation of this Codex, notwithstanding that it must be nearly sixteen hundred years old. It has quite a fresh and recent look; indeed many manuscripts not fifty years old look much more ancient. No one, looking at the faded handwriting of Tasso, Petrarch, and Henry VIII., beside it, would imagine that they were newer by upwards of twelve hundred years. This peculiarity it shares in common with the architectural remains of imperial Rome, which time has dealt so tenderly with that they appear far more recent than the picturesque ruins of our medieval castles and abbeys. This singular look of freshness in the Vatican manuscript is owing to three causes. In the first place, the vellum upon which it is written is exceedingly fine and close-grained in texture, and therefore has resisted the dust and discoloration of centuries, just as the thin and close-grained Roman brick has withstood the ravages of time. Every one is struck with the wonderful beauty of this vellum, composed of the delicate skins of very young calves. And this feature is a further proof of the high antiquity of the Codex, for the oldest manuscripts are invariably written on the thinnest and whitest vellum, while those of later ages are written on thick and rough parchment which speedily became discoloured. In the second place, we have reason to believe that the manuscript was for many ages almost hermetically sealed in some forgotten recess of the Lateran and Vatican Libraries, and thus unconsciously guarded from the attacks of time. In the third place, a careful scrutiny of the individual lines reveals the curious fact that the whole manuscript, six or seven centuries after it had been written, was gone over by a writer, who, finding the letters faint and yellow, had touched them up with a blacker and more permanent ink. It is a strange circumstance that none of the facsimile representations of the pages of the manuscript that have been published give a correct idea of the original, with the exception of that of Dean Burgon in 1871. Not only do the number of lines in a given space in all the so-called facsimiles differ from that of the manuscript, but the general character of the letters is widely different. The importance of seeing the original, therefore, for purposes of study, is apparent. The uncial letters are very small and neat, upright and regular, and their breadth is nearly equal to their height. They are very like those in the manuscript rolls of Herculaneum. Originally the manuscript had no ornamental initial letters, marks of punctuation, or accents; a small interval of the breadth of a letter at the end of particular sections serving as a simple mode of punctuation. The number of such divisions into sections is very considerable,--one hundred and seventy occurring in St. Matthew; sixty-one in St. Mark; one hundred and fifty-two in St. Luke; and eighty in St. John,--and in this respect the Vatican Codex is unique. Where these divisions do not occur, the writing is continuous for several consecutive pages. Thus, while each of the beatitudes, each of the parables, and each of the series of generations in the genealogies of our Lord, are marked off into separate paragraphs by the small empty spaces referred to, there is no break in the text from the twenty-fourth verse of the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew to the seventeenth verse of the twentieth chapter. So much has space been economised, that when the writer finished one book he began another at the top of the very next column; and throughout the manuscript there are very few breaks, and only one entire column left blank. This empty space is very significant; it occurs at the end of the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark's Gospel,--thus omitting altogether the last twelve verses with which we are familiar. That this was done purposely is evident, for it involved a departure from the writer's usual method of continuous writing. The blank column testifies that he knew of the existence of this gap at the end of the Gospel, but did not know of any thoroughly trustworthy material with which to fill it up. And acting upon this authority our Revisers have printed the passage that has been supplied as an appendix, and not as a portion of the original Gospel of St. Mark. The only attempt at ornamentation in the Vatican manuscript is found at the end of Lamentations, Ezekiel, St. John's Gospel, and the Acts of the Apostles, where "an arabesque column of crossed lines, with dots in the intersections at the edge," and surmounted by the well-known monogram of Christ, so frequent in the inscriptions of the Catacombs, composed of the letter P in a cruciform shape, has been delicately and skilfully executed by the pen of the scribe. Most of the books have also brief titles and subscriptions. Such was the original state of the Codex, but the critic of the ninth or tenth century already referred to introduced a great many changes. Not only did he deepen the colour of the ink; he, as Dean Burgon tells us, also accentuated the words carefully throughout, marking all the initial vowels with their proper breathings. He also placed instead of the small initial letter of each book an illuminated capital six times the size of the original uncial, painted in bright red and blue colours which have still retained nearly all their old brilliancy. At the top of the column, whenever a new book commenced, he also placed a broad bar painted in green, with three little red crosses above it. Nor was this all; he exercised his critical judgment in revising the text, and marking his approval or disapproval by certain significant indications. "What he approved of he touched up anew with ink, and added the proper accents; what he condemned he left in the faded brown caligraphy of the original and without accentuation." In this way the Codex may be called a kind of palimpsest, in which we have some portions of the original manuscript, and the rest overlaid with the later revision. We must discriminate carefully between these two elements; for it is obvious that it is the oldest portion that is most interesting and suggestive. The Codex consists of upwards of one thousand five hundred pages, of which two hundred and eighty-four are assigned to the New Testament. Originally it contained the whole Bible, and also the Apocrypha and the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians; which last was so much esteemed by the early Christians that it was regularly read in the churches, and bound up with the Scriptures--to which circumstance, indeed, we are indebted for its preservation to our own time. At present the greater part of Genesis and a part of the Psalms are missing from the old Testament; while, in the New Testament, the Epistle to Philemon, the three Pastoral Epistles, the latter part of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse, in the original handwriting, are lost; their place having been supplied, it is said, in the fifteenth century, from a manuscript belonging to Cardinal Bessarion. From the evidence of its materials--arrangement and style of writing--the very high antiquity of this Codex may be inferred. It is generally supposed to have been written in the beginning of the fourth century. Vercellone, who edited Cardinal Mai's version of it, argues, from the remarkable correspondence of its text with that used by Cyril of Alexandria in his Commentary on St. John, that it must have been written at Alexandria, where there was a band of remarkably skilful caligraphists. He believes that it was one of the fifty manuscript copies of the Holy Scriptures which Eusebius, by order of the emperor Constantine the Great, got prepared in the year 332 for the use of the Christian Church in the newly-formed capital of Constantinople. And a circumstance that seems to corroborate this opinion is, that the Vatican Codex does not contain, as has already been mentioned, the last twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel, a peculiarity which Eusebius says belongs to the best manuscripts of the Gospels. On this supposition, the Vatican Codex would be the very first edition of the Bible that had the seal of a sovereign authority. But it may be of even older date than the time of Constantine, for its marginal references do not correspond with the Eusebian canons; and this fact would seem to imply that it belonged to the third century. Its only rival in point of antiquity is the famous Sinaitic Codex, known by the Hebrew letter [Hebrew: alef], discovered in a most romantic way by Tischendorf in the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Tischendorf has pronounced a decided opinion, not only that this manuscript is of the same age as the Vatican one, but that the Vatican manuscript was written by one of the four writers who, he infers from internal evidence, must have been employed upon the Sinaitic Codex. This opinion, however, has been disputed by other scholars; and it seems improbable, for the Sinaitic Codex has four columns to the page, whereas the Vatican Codex has only three. Its uncial letters are also much larger and plainer than those of the Vatican manuscript; and it has the Ammonian sections and Eusebian canons written in all probability by the original hand. There can be little doubt that the Vatican manuscript goes, if not farther, at least as far back in date as the Council of Nice, and is the oldest and most valuable of extant monuments of sacred antiquity. It may have been transcribed directly from some Egyptian papyrus, or through the medium of only one intervening prototype. Perhaps it was a single copy saved from the fate of many surrendered to be burned by the class of Christian renegades called _traditores_, who averted the martyr's death in the great Diocletian persecution by giving up the sacred books of their religion to their enemies. For this pagan emperor endeavoured not only to deprive the Christian Church of its teachers, like his predecessors, but also to destroy the sacred writings upon which the faith of the Church was founded, and whose character and claims were beginning at this time to be generally recognised. The Alexandrine Codex--which is placed first on the list of uncial manuscripts, and therefore distinguished by the letter A--belongs undoubtedly to a more recent time. It is said by tradition to have been written by a noble Egyptian martyr named Thecla about the beginning of the fifth century, and was sent as a present to Charles I. by Cyrillus Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople, who brought it from Alexandria. It is now one of the greatest treasures of the British Museum. The voice of tradition is confirmed by internal evidence, for it has only two columns in a page, while capital letters of different sizes abound, and vermilion is frequently introduced--all marks of the period indicated. How or when the Codex Vaticanus was brought to the Vatican Library is a matter that is altogether involved in obscurity. It probably formed part of the library in the Lateran Palace, which goes nearly as far back as the time of Constantine, and was transferred along with the other contents of that library to the Vatican in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V. We first hear of it distinctly in a letter written to Erasmus in 1533 by Sepulveda; although there is a somewhat obscure reference to it a few years earlier in the correspondence of the Papal librarian Bombasius with Erasmus. A Roman edition of the Septuagint portion based upon the Vatican MS. appeared in 1587. After that period to 1780 it was several times collated; among others, by Bartolocci, the Vatican librarian; by Bentley, who employed for the purpose the Abbate Mico and Rulotta; and by Birch of Copenhagen, who travelled under the auspices of the King of Denmark. Along with many of the best sculptures and most valuable art-treasures of the Vatican, the precious Codex was taken to Paris in 1810 by order of Napoleon Buonaparte, that unscrupulous robber of foreign palaces and churches for the aggrandisement of his own capital; and while there it was carefully examined by the celebrated critic, J.L. Hug, who was the first to determine, from the nature of its materials and its internal evidence, its very great antiquity. When it was restored, along with the other spoils of the great Roman Palace, it was sealed up by its jealous possessors, and could no longer be consulted for critical purposes. In 1843 Tischendorf could only see it for two days of three hours each. Tregelles, who went to Rome in 1845 for the special purpose of consulting the Codex, provided with a strongly-recommendatory letter of introduction from Cardinal Wiseman, was only permitted to see it, but not to transcribe any of its readings. His pockets, as he himself tells us, were searched, and his pen, ink, and paper taken away, before he was allowed to open it; and if he looked at a passage too long the manuscript was snatched rudely from his hands by the two prelates in watchful attendance. When Dean Alford, in 1861, made use of the manuscript for four days, his labours of collation were carried on in the face of much opposition from the librarian, who insisted that the order of Antonelli permitted him only to see the manuscript, but not to verify passages in it. The reason alleged to the scholars of Europe for this childish jealousy was that the authorities of the Vatican were themselves preparing to publish a thorough collation, and they did not wish the glory of the achievement to pass away from Rome. Cardinal Mai began, indeed, to prepare an edition for publication in 1828; but it did not appear till 1857, three years after the cardinal's death, under the learned editorship of Vercellone. There was a rumour copied into the _Edinburgh Review_ from Sir Charles Lyell's work on the United States, that the cardinal was prevented from publishing his work by Pope Gregory XVI., on account of its variations from the Vulgate, which had been solemnly sanctioned by the decrees of the Council of Trent and the Church's claims to infallibility. It was further asserted that he finally obtained permission to publish his edition on condition that he inserted within brackets the celebrated text 1 John v. 7, which was wanting in the manuscript. Whether this was true or not, it is certain that what the learned cardinal gave to the world was more an edition, a critical recension of the text, than a faithful transcript of the Vatican Codex. Although he had the MS. with him at his residence in the Palazzo Altieri--a circumstance which gave rise to the belief at the time that it had disappeared during the French occupation of Rome--he could only bestow upon the arduous task the scanty leisure available from more engrossing duties. The work was therefore so imperfectly done that the cardinal himself was reluctant to publish it; and the learned and honest Barnabite under whose editorial auspices it appeared was obliged to append a formidable list of errata, and to make a gentle apology in his preface for his friend's inaccuracies. But, with all its defects, the five quarto volumes of the cardinal's reprint has added largely to our critical knowledge of the Codex; and it derives a special interest from the circumstance that it was the first time the Greek Scriptures had ever been published in Rome. Since then Tischendorf, during his second visit to the Eternal City, had an audience of Pope Pius IX., and offered to bring out at his own expense an edition of the Vatican Codex similar to that which he had prepared, under the auspices of the Russian emperor, of the Sinaitic Codex. This request the Pope refused, under the old pretext that he wished to publish such an edition himself. Tischendorf, however, was allowed to use the manuscript more freely than on the former occasion; though several times it was taken away from him, and his labours interrupted, because of alleged breaches of faith on his part. The result of this unusual privilege was that the great Textuary has issued by far the most accurate and satisfactory edition which we possess at present. Pius IX. carried out his intention of publishing a Roman edition in five volumes, printed by the famous press of the Propaganda. The New Testament instalment appeared under the editorship of Vercellone and Cozza in 1868; but Vercellone dying soon after, the subsequent volumes were prepared under less able supervision. The famous manuscript therefore labours under the disadvantage of uncertainty, there being no guarantee that any reading is really that of the original. And while the Alexandrine Codex has been reproduced by photography, and the Sinaitic Codex has been faithfully published, the exact palæography, or the genuine text as it stands, of the Vatican Codex is still a desideratum among scholars. The total disappearance of all manuscripts previous to the Vatican Codex is a matter of surprise, for it has been calculated on sufficient evidence that many thousands of copies of the Gospels were circulated among Christians at the end of the second century. The loss may be attributed to the fact that the older manuscripts were written on less enduring materials. Previous to the second century the principal writing material was paper made of papyrus, a plant found at one time not only in Egypt, but also in the north of Palestine and various parts of southern Italy and Sicily, although now almost extirpated; and we have reason to believe, from one or two incidental notices in St. John's writings, that it was the material employed by the apostles themselves. This papyrus paper was of a very perishable nature, and manuscripts written on it, apart from the wear and tear of continual use, would succumb to the process of decay in a comparatively short period. We are indebted for the preservation of all the papyrus manuscripts that have come down to us from a remote antiquity to the fact of their having been kept in exceptionally favourable circumstances, as in the hermetically-sealed interiors of Egyptian tombs. Those exposed to the air have all disappeared ages ago. In the second century parchment was brought into common use as a writing material, and papyrus paper gradually fell into disuse. And with the change of material the shape of manuscripts was changed; the ancient form of the papyrus-roll giving place, in manuscripts written on parchment, to the form of books with leaves. How we should value the original rolls which contained the handwriting of the evangelists and apostles! With what profound interest should we gaze upon the signature and salutation of St. Paul affixed to the Epistles which he dictated to an amanuensis on account of his defective eyesight! How we should prize the apostolic autograph of the Epistle to the Galatians, of which the writer says, "Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand." What a thrill would pass through us at the sight of those two pastoral Epistles, at the close of which St. John says,--"I had many things to write, but I will not with pen and ink write unto thee"! Our legitimate veneration, however, would be apt to pass over into idolatrous superstition. We should worship such precious documents as the early Christians worshipped the relics of the saints. It was, therefore, a wise providential arrangement that such a temptation should have been taken out of the way. All the original manuscripts of the sacred writings disappeared, on account of the fragile character of their materials, probably in a few years after the death of the writers, no special care having been taken to preserve them; and, as Dr. Westcott has remarked, not a single authentic appeal is made to them in the religious disputes regarding the exact words of certain passages in the Gospels and Epistles in the writings of the second century. But though the Vatican Codex is the oldest manuscript of the New Testament in existence, it does not follow from that circumstance that it is the most reliable. Widely different views of its critical value are entertained by scholars. By some it has been accepted as the most authoritative of all versions, while others have regarded it as one of the most corrupt and imperfect. Indeed the conjecture has been hazarded that the very circumstance of its continued preservation during so many centuries is a proof that it was an unreliable copy long laid aside, and therefore exempt from the wear and tear under which genuine copies of the same date have long ago perished. These extreme views, however, are unjust. While it is not free from many gross inaccuracies and faults, it presents upon the whole a very fair idea of the Greek Vulgate of the early Church, and is worthy of as much respect at least as any single document in existence. The chief peculiarity of the Codex is the large number of important omissions in it; so that, as Dr. Dobbin says, it presents an abbreviated text of the New Testament. A few of these omissions were wilfully made, while the large majority were no doubt caused by the carelessness of the writer in transcribing from the copy before him; for there are several instances of his having written the same words and clauses twice over. On the supposition of the MS. being one of the fifty prepared at Constantine's order, the extreme haste with which such a task would be executed would account for the multitude of clerical errors. Besides the last verses of the Gospel of St. Mark already alluded to, and no less than three hundred and sixty-four other omissions in the same Gospel of greater or less moment, the doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer, in Matthew vi. 13, is wanting; as also the description of the agony of the Saviour and the help of the angel in Luke xxii. 43, 44; the important clause, "For he was before me," in John i. 27; the miraculous troubling of the water in the Pool of Bethesda in John v. 3, 4; the narrative of the adulterous woman in John vii. 53 to viii. 11; the question of Philip and the answer of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts viii. 37; the significant and affecting incidents in Paul's conversion mentioned in Acts ix. 5, 6; and the well-known disputed text of the _Three witnesses in Heaven_, in 1 John v. 7. These omitted passages, which, from internal evidence, apart from the external testimony of the largest number of critical documents, we must acknowledge to be genuine, are the most serious of the lacunæ, amounting altogether to the extraordinary number of two thousand four hundred and fifty-six. They give the document a very distinctive character; while even the less striking disappearances from the text, which can only be apprehended on a close collation, more or less affect the sense. German critics have stamped several of these omissions with their approbation, especially those referring to the supernatural, owing to their well-known repugnance to the miraculous element in Scripture. There are other peculiarities of the Codex which greatly interested me; but the discussion of them would require me to go too much into critical details. I must mention, however, the occasional use in the manuscript of a Latinised orthography. The name of Silvanus, for instance, mentioned in 1 Peter v. 12, is rendered into the Latinised Greek _Silbanou_, instead of Silouanou, the common Greek form; and in 2 Peter iii. 10, instead of the last word of the verse, _katakaêsetai_, "shall be burned up," occurs the singular word _eurethesetai_,--which means, "shall be found." The Syriac and one Egyptian version have the reading "shall not be found"; and either the "not" was accidentally omitted when the Vatican Codex was copied from an earlier exemplar that had that reading, or the writer had some confused idea of the Latin word _urerentur_, "shall be burnt up," in his mind, and adopted the word _eurethesetai_ from its resemblance to it--as a Latin root with a Greek inflection. Some curious examples of Latin forms and constructions might be given; and this circumstance has led to the hypothesis that the origin of the Vatican manuscript might, after all, have been Italian, and not Alexandrian as is commonly supposed. The Codex has also been accused of theological bias; for in John i. 18, "only begotten God" is substituted for "only begotten Son." This is considered by some to be a reference to the polemics of the fourth century regarding the Arian doctrines; although this supposition would make it of later date. The order of the books of the New Testament in the Codex is different from that with which we are familiar. The Catholic Epistles from James to Jude follow the Acts, according to the order of the ancient Greek Church; then come the Pauline Epistles; and the Epistle to the Hebrews comes in between the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians and First Timothy. Its sections, however, are numbered as if it had originally been placed between the Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians; thus showing that this was the arrangement in the older document from which the Codex was copied. One of the Moscow manuscripts, it may be mentioned in connection with this novelty in location, places the Epistle to the Hebrews in a position as abnormal as in the Vatican manuscript--namely, before the Epistle to the Romans. In the formation of the Received Text of our New Testament, the Vatican manuscript was not employed. The basis of the early printed editions--the Elzevir and those of Robert Stephens the celebrated Parisian printer--was the Greek New Testament of Erasmus, published in 1516, compiled with the aid of such manuscripts as he found at Basle, and the Complutensian Polyglot--so called after Complutum, the modern Alcala, in Spain, where it was printed in 1522, under the patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, whose text was said to have been formed from manuscripts sent from the Papal Library at Rome--the Vatican Codex certainly not being among the number, as abundantly appears from internal evidence. But though the Vatican manuscript was not employed in the construction of our Authorised Version, it has recently been used as the chief authority by the New Testament Revisers. Drs. Westcott and Hort have built up their Greek text with special deferential regard to it; and this exclusive devotion has been severely condemned by several critics, such as Dean Burgon, who regard it as an endeavour to balance a pyramid upon its apex. But apart from the contradictory views of such textuaries, there can be no doubt that the Vatican Codex has been of the greatest service in these later days in correcting the Authorised Version, and helping to restore the sacred text as nearly as possible to the purity of the original autographs. And it has added its most valuable testimony to that of the many other ancient manuscripts of the Sacred Writings in existence, that, notwithstanding unimportant variations of readings naturally caused by the great multiplication of copies, the sacred text from the time when it first appeared to the present has been preserved substantially uncorrupt; so that we have the same divine truth presented to us that was presented to the Christians of the ages immediately succeeding the time of the apostles. With all these remarkable associations and points of interest connected with the Vatican manuscript, it is not to be wondered at that I should gaze upon it with a species of veneration. It transported me in imagination to a period when the canon of the New Testament was as yet in a state of flux. The evidence of the Muratorian fragment in the Ambrosian Library at Milan shows to us that the separate books of the New Testament had indeed been collected into one; and a belief in their Divine inspiration equally with the Old Testament Scriptures had begun to be entertained. But there was as yet no prevailing unanimity of opinion as to what books should be admitted into the Canon and what books should be excluded. No formal attempt had as yet been made to reconcile conflicting testimonies; or, if made, the recensions undertaken did not meet with general acceptance. Even a good many years afterwards, as late as at the Council of Laodicea in 361, doubts were still expressed as to the claims of the Apocalypse to canonicity. This book was not originally included in the Vatican Codex; for the manuscript copy of it bound up in the volume is of much later date, and in a different handwriting. And this hesitation regarding the full recognition of certain books, proves the great care that was exercised, and the deep sense of responsibility that was felt, in the collection of the other books. The formation of the sacred Canon was done gradually and imperceptibly; but the result to every thoughtful mind is more suggestive of the inspiration of that Spirit whose operation is like the wind that bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth--than if the process had been more formal and conspicuous. CHAPTER XII ST. PAUL AT PUTEOLI The Gospel first came to Europe in circumstances similar to those in which it came into human history. Through poverty, shame, and suffering--through the manger, the cross, and the sepulchre--did our Saviour accomplish the salvation of the world; through stripes and imprisonment, through the gloom of the inner dungeon and the pain and shame of the stocks, did Paul and Silas declare at Philippi the glad tidings of salvation. Out of the midnight darkness which enveloped the apostles of the Cross, as they sang in the prison, came the marvellous light that was destined to illumine all Europe. Out of the stocks which held fast the feet that came to the shores of the West shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, to proclaim deliverance to the captives, sprang that glorious liberty which has broken every fetter that bound the bodies and souls of men throughout Christendom. After the earthquake that shook the prison walls and released the prisoners came the still, small voice of power, which overthrew the tyrannies and superstitions of ages, and remade society from its very foundations. Very similar were the circumstances in which the apostle landed at the quay of Puteoli. A weary, worn-out prisoner, accused by his own countrymen, on his way to be judged at the tribunal of the Roman emperor, associated with a troop of malefactors, St. Paul disembarked, on the 3d of May of the year 59, from the ship _Castor and Pollux_, after having gone through storm and shipwreck, and first touched the shore of the wonderful land destined afterwards to be the scene of the mightiest triumphs of the Gospel, and the most enlightened centre for its diffusion throughout the world. Like the birth of Rome itself, whose obscure foundation, according to the beautiful myth, was laid by the outcast son of a Vestal Virgin, the kingdom of the despised virgin-born Jesus of Nazareth that cometh not with observation, stole unawares, amid the meanest circumstances, into the very heart of the Roman world. Momentous events were taking place at the time throughout the Roman Empire, attracting all eyes, and engaging the attention of all minds; but the unnoticed landing at Puteoli of the humble Jewish prisoner, judging by its marvellous results, was by far the most important. It marked a new era in the history of the world. And there was something significant in the coincidence that St. Paul should have come to the Italian shore in the ship _Castor and Pollux_, the names not merely of the patrons of sailors, but also of the saviours of Rome. The mighty empire which human tyranny had established has crumbled to pieces, and we walk to-day amid its ruins; but the kingdom of peace and righteousness which Paul came to inaugurate has spread from that coign of vantage over all the earth, and in a world of death and change has impressed upon the minds of men with a new force the idea of the eternal and the unchangeable. Earth holds no fairer scene than that which met the apostle's gaze as he entered the bay of Puteoli. "See Naples, and die," is the cuckoo cry of the modern tourist who visits this enchanted region; and such a vision is indeed worthy to be the last imprinted upon a human retina. It is called by the Italians themselves "Un pezzo di cielo caduto in terra," a piece of heaven fallen upon earth. Shores that curve in every line of beauty, holding out arm-like promontories, into whose embrace the tideless sea runs up; mountain-ranges whose tops in winter are covered with snow, and whose sides are draped with the luxuriant vegetation of the South; a large city rising in a series of semicircular terraces from the deep azure of the sea to the deep azure of the mountains, whose eastern architecture flushes to a vivid rosy hue in the afternoon light like some fabled city of the poets; and dominating the glorious horizon the double peak of Vesuvius forming the centre in which all the features of landscape loveliness are focussed--crowned by its pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. Such is the picture upon which travellers crowd from the ends of the earth to gaze. Nor was the view different in its most important elements in the days of the apostle. The same great forms of the landscape met the eye; and the same magic play of light and colour, the same jewel-points flashing in the waters, the same gleams of purple and crimson wandering over town, and vineyard, and wood, transfigured the scene then, which gives it more than half its loveliness now. But its human elements were different. Swarming with life as are these shores at the present day, they were even more populous then. Where we now wander through picturesque ruins and silent solitudes, prosperous towns and villages stood; and temples, palaces, and summer houses of patrician magnificence crowded upon each other to such an extent that the sea itself was invaded, and an older Venice rose from the waters along the curves of its bays. The shores of Baiæ were the very centre of Roman splendour. The emperor and his court spent a large part of the year there; and noble families, that elsewhere had domains miles in extent, were there satisfied with the smallest space upon which they could build a house and plant a garden. Pompeii and Herculaneum, in all their reckless gaiety, lay, unconscious of danger, at the foot of Vesuvius, then a grassy mountain wooded to the summit with oak and chestnut, and known from time immemorial as a field of pasture for flocks and herds. The Bay of Misenum, now so solitary that the scream of the sea-fowl is almost the only sound that breaks the stillness, was crowded with the vessels of the Roman fleet, commanded by Pliny; and its waters were alive with the pleasure-boats of the patrician youths, filling the air with the music of their laughter and song. Puteoli, or, as it is now called, Pozzuoli, a dull and stagnant fourth-rate town, was then the Liverpool of Italy, carrying on an immense trade in corn between Egypt and the western provinces of the Roman Empire. It rivalled Delos in magnificence, and was called the Little Rome. It had a splendid forum and harbour, and was guarded by fortifications which resisted the repeated attacks of Hannibal. In this region almost every famous Roman of the later days of the Republic and the earlier days of the Empire had his sea-side villa to which he retired from the noise and bustle of the Imperial City. It was the Brighton or more properly the Bath of Rome; for though it was frequented during the burning heats of summer for the sake of its comparative coolness, it was principally chosen as a winter retreat to escape from the frosts and snows of the north. Lucullus carried here the gorgeous luxury and extravagance of his city life; here Augustus and Hadrian had their palaces erected on vast piers thrown out into the sea, whose waters still murmur over their remains; while Cicero built here his _Puteolanum_, delightfully situated on the coast, and surrounded by a shady grove, which he called his Academy, in imitation of Plato, and where he composed his "Academia" and "De Fato." Hardly an inch of the soil but is full of fragments of mosaic pavements. The common stones of the road are often rich marbles, that formed part of imperial structures; and the very dust on which you tread, if analysed, would be found to be a powder of gems and precious stones. But alas! in some of the fairest spots of earth man has been vilest; and like the ancient Cities of the Plain, which stood in a region of Edenic loveliness, the shores of the Bay of Naples were inhabited by a race corrupted with the worst vices of Roman civilisation. Some of the most dreadful crimes that have disgraced humanity were committed on that radiant shore. Yonder sleeps in the azure distance the enchanted isle of Capri, haunted for ever by dreadful memories of the unnameable atrocities with which the Emperor Tiberius had stained its peaceful bowers. On the neighbouring heights of Posilipo are traces of the villa of Vedius, and of the celebrated fish-ponds where he fed his _murenæ_ with the flesh of his disobedient slaves. On the shore of Puteoli the apostle might have seen the remains of one of the maddest freaks of imperial folly--the floating-bridge of Caligula, stretching across the bay for nearly three miles, and decorated with the finest mosaic pavements and sculpture. Over this useless bridge the insane emperor drove in the chariot and armour of Alexander the Great, to celebrate his triumph over the Parthians; and from it, on his return, he ordered the crowd of inoffensive spectators to be hurled into the sea. By withdrawing for the construction of this bridge the ships employed in the harbour, the importation of corn was put a stop to, and a grievous famine, felt even in Rome, was the result. And near at hand was Bauli, where Nero--the very Cæsar to whom it is startling to remember that St. Paul appealed, and before whom he was going to be judged,--only two years before attempted the murder of his own mother, Agrippina, which failed because of her discovery of the plot, but which was most ruthlessly accomplished very soon afterwards. Here too Marcellus was poisoned by Livia, that Tiberius might ascend the throne of Augustus; and Domitian by Nero, that he might enjoy the wealth of his aunt. Here Hadrian, a few days before his own miserable end, compelled his beautiful and accomplished wife, Sabina, to put herself to death, that she might not survive him in such a wretched world. And in the cities at the foot of Vesuvius have been revealed to us, after nature had kindly hidden them for eighteen centuries, tokens of a depravity so utter, that we cannot help looking upon the fiery deluge from the mountain, that soon after St. Paul's visit swept them out of existence, as a Divine judgment like that of Sodom and Gomorrha. And darker even than these monstrosities of wickedness was the divine worship paid on these shores to the Roman emperors. It was a pitiable spectacle when the sailors of an Alexandrian ship, coming into the harbour of Puteoli, gave thanks for their prosperous voyage to the dying Augustus, whom they met cruising on the waters vainly in search of health, and offered him divine honours, which the gratified emperor accepted, and rewarded with gifts. But what shall we think of the worship of the god Caligula and the god Nero? Surely a people who could raise altars and offer sacrifices to such unmitigated monsters must have lost the very conception of religion. Not only virtue, but the very belief in any source of virtue, must have been utterly extirpated in them. When Herod spoke, the people said it was the voice of God; and he was smitten with worms because he gave not God the glory. And surely the superhuman wickedness of the Cæsars may be regarded as a punishment, equally significant, of the fearful blasphemy of the worshipped and the worshippers. No wonder that the shores of Baiæ now present a picture of the saddest desolation. Where man sins, there man suffers. The relation between human crime and the barren wilderness is still as inflexibly maintained as at the first. Until all recollection of the iniquities of the place has passed away it is fitting that these silent shores should remain the desert that they are. We should not wish the old voluptuous magnificence revived; and these myrtle bowers can never more regain the charm of virgin solitudes untainted by man. Italy, like Palestine, has thus an accursed spot in its fairest region--a visible monument to all ages, of the great truth that the tidal wave of retribution will inevitably overwhelm every nation that forgets the eternal distinctions of right and wrong. St. Paul was a man of keen sensibilities and strong imagination. He must therefore at Puteoli have been deeply impressed at once with the loveliness of nature and the wickedness of man. The contrast would present itself to him in a very painful manner. As at Athens--where his spirit was moved within him when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry--so here he must have had that noble indignation against the iniquities of the place--the outrages committed on the laws of God, and the dishonour done to the nature of man made in the Divine image--to which David and Jeremiah, and all the loftiest spirits of mankind, have given such stern and yet patriotic utterance. What others were callous to, filled him with keen shame and sorrow. He who could have wished that himself were accursed from Christ for his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, must have had a profound pity for these wretched victims of profligacy, who were looking in their ignorance for salvation to a brutal mortal worse than themselves,--"the son of perdition, sitting in the temple of God, showing that he was God." And to this feeling of indignation and sorrow, because of the wickedness of the place, must have been added a feeling of personal despondency. From the significant circumstance that the apostle thanked God, and took courage, when he met the Christian brethren at Apii Forum, we may infer that he had previously great heaviness of spirit. He would be more or less than human, if on setting his foot for the first time on the native soil of the conquerors of his country, and the lords of the whole world, and seeing on every side, even at this distance from the imperial city, overwhelming evidences of the luxury and power of the empire, he did not feel oppressed with a sense of personal insignificance. Evil had throned itself there on the high places of the earth, and could mock at the puny efforts of the followers of Jesus to cast it down. Idolatry had so deeply rooted itself in the interests and passions of men which were bound up in its continuance, that it seemed a foolish dream to expect that it would be supplanted by the preaching of the Cross, which to St. Paul's own people was a stumbling-block and to all other nations foolishness. And who was he that he should undertake such a mission--a weak and obscure member of a despised race, a prisoner chained to a soldier, appealing to Cæsar against the condemnation of his own countrymen. We can well believe, that notwithstanding the sustaining grace that was given to him, the heart of the apostle must have been very heavy when he stood in the midst of the jostling crowd on the quay of Puteoli, and took the first step there on Italian soil of his journey to Rome. He felt most keenly all that a man can feel of the shame and offence of the Cross; but nevertheless he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. And his presence there on that Roman quay--a despised prisoner in bonds for the sake of the Gospel--is a picture, that appeals to every heart, of the triumph of Divine strength in the midst of human weakness; and a most striking proof, moreover, that not by might, but by the Spirit of love, does God bring down the strongholds of sin. But God furnished a providential cure for whatever despondency the apostle may have felt. No sooner did he land than he found himself surrounded by Christian brethren, who cordially welcomed him, and persuaded him to remain with them seven days. Such brotherly kindness must have greatly cheered him; and the week spent among these loyal followers of the Lord Jesus must have been a time of bodily and spiritual refreshment opportunely fitting him for the trying experiences before him. Doubtless these brethren were Jewish converts to the Christian faith; for that there were Jewish residents at Puteoli, residing in the Tyrian quarter of the city, we are assured by Josephus; and this we should have expected from the mercantile importance of the place and its intimate commercial relations with the East. How they came under the influence of the Gospel we know not; they may have been among "the strangers of Rome" who came to Jerusalem at Pentecost to keep the national feasts in obedience to the Mosaic Law, and who were then brought to the knowledge of the truth by the preaching of St. Peter; or perhaps they were converts of St Paul's own making, in some of the numerous places which he visited on his missionary tours, and who afterwards came to reside for business purposes at this port. We see in the presence of the Jewish brethren at Puteoli one of the most striking illustrations of the providential pre-arrangements made for the diffusion of the Gospel throughout all nations. The Jews had a more than ordinary attachment to their native land. Patriotism in their case was not only a passion, but a part of their religion; and their love of country was entwined with the holiest feelings of their nature. In Jerusalem alone could God be acceptably worshipped. And yet it was divinely ordered that those who had been for ages the hermits of the human race should become all at once the most cosmopolitan, when the time for imparting to the world the benefits of their isolated religious training had come. And the Jews thus scattered abroad preserved amid their alien circumstances their national worship and customs, and thus became the natural links of connection between the missionaries of the Cross and the Gentiles whom they wished to reach. Through such Jewish channels the Gospel speedily penetrated into remote localities, which otherwise it would have taken a long time to reach. We are struck with distinct traces of the Christian faith in the time of St. Paul in the most unexpected places. For instance, in the National Museum at Naples I have seen rings with Christian emblems engraved upon them, which were found at Pompeii; proving beyond doubt that there had been followers of Jesus even in that dissolute place, who, unlike Lot and his household, were overwhelmed in the same destruction with those whose evil deeds must have daily vexed their righteous souls. The same symbols which we find in the Roman Catacombs,--the palm branch, the sacred fish the monogram of Jesus, the dove, are unmistakably represented on these rings. Some of them are double, indicating that they were used by married persons: one has the palm branch twice repeated; another exhibits the palm and anchor; a third has a dove with a twig in its bill; and one ring has the Greek word _elpis_--hope--inscribed upon it. St. Paul at Puteoli may be said to have dwelt among his own people. Not only was he with his own countrymen and fellow-disciples, but he was in the midst of associations that forcibly recalled his home. The apostle was a citizen of a Greek city, and the language in which he spoke was Greek; and here, in the Bay of Naples, he was in the midst of a Greek colony, where Roman influence had not been able to efface the deep impression which Greece had made upon the place. The original name of the splendid expanse of water before him was the Bay of Cumæ; and Cumæ was absolutely the first Greek settlement in the western seas. Neapolis or Parthenope was the beautiful Greek name of the city of Naples, testifying to its Hellenic origin; and Dicæarchia was the older Greek name of Puteoli, a name used to a late period in preference to its Latin name, derived from the numerous mineral springs in the neighbourhood. The whole lower part of Italy was wholly Greek; its arts, its customs, its literature, were all Hellenic; and its people belonged to the pure Ionic race whose keen imaginations and vivid sensuousness seemed to have been created out of the fervid hues and the pellucid air of their native land. Everywhere the subtle Greek tongue might be heard; and all, so far as Greek influence was concerned, was as unchanged in the days of the apostle as when Pythagoras visited the region, and adopted the inhabitants as the fittest agents in his great scheme of universal regeneration. St. Paul therefore, at Puteoli, might have imagined himself standing on the very soil of classic Hellas, and felt as much at home as in his own native city of Tarsus. This wide diffusion of the Greek language throughout the West as well as the East at this time is another of the remarkable providential pre-arrangements which prepared the way for the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world. A Gentile speech, by a series of wonderful events, was thus made ready over all the world to receive and to communicate the glorious Gospel that was to be preached to all nations. The remains of the ancient pier upon which St. Paul landed may still be seen. Indeed, no Roman harbour has left behind such solid memorials. No less than thirteen of the buttresses that supported its arches are left, three lying under water; all constructed of brick held together by that Roman cement called pozzolana, after the town of Pozzuoli, whose extraordinary tenacity rivals that of the living rock. You can plant your feet upon the very stones upon which the apostle must have stood. And if you happen to be there on the 3d of May you will see a solemn procession of the inhabitants of the decayed town, headed by their priests, celebrating the anniversary of this memorable incident. The first conspicuous object upon which the eye of the apostle would rest on landing would be the Temple of Neptune, of which a few pillars are still standing in the midst of the water. Here Caligula, in his mad passage over his bridge of boats, paused to offer propitiatory sacrifices. Here, too, Cæsar, before he sailed to Greece to encounter the forces of Antony at Actium, sacrificed to Neptune; and here the crew of every ship presented offerings, in order to secure favouring winds and waves when outward bound, or in gratitude when returning home from a successful voyage. Beyond this he would see in all its splendour the famous bathing establishment built over a thermal spring near the sea, which has since been known as the Temple of Serapis, an Egyptian deity, whose worship had spread widely in Italy. Three tall columns of cipollino marble, belonging to the portico of this building, are still standing, with their bases under water; and they have acquired a world-wide interest, especially to geologists, as records of the successive elevations and depressions of the coast-line during the historical period; these changes being indicated on their shafts by the different watermarks and the perforations of marine bivalves or boring-shells well known to be living in the Mediterranean Sea. In the upper part of the town, on a commanding height, he would behold the Temple of Augustus, built for the worship of the deified founder of the Roman Empire. A Christian cathedral dedicated to St. Proculus, who suffered martyrdom in the same year with St. Januarius, containing the tomb of Pergolesi, the celebrated musical composer, now occupies the site of the pagan shrine, and has six of its Corinthian pillars, that looked down upon the apostle as he landed, built into its walls. A temple of Diana and a temple of the Nymphs also adorned the town, from which numerous columns and sculptures have been recently recovered. On every side the apostle would see mournful tokens that the city was wholly given up to idolatry,--to the worship of mortal men and an ignoble crowd of gods and goddesses borrowed from all nations; and yet he had equally sad proofs that the idolatry was altogether a hollow and heartless pretence,--that the superstitious creed publicly maintained by the city had long ceased to command the respect of its recognised defenders. I walked up from the town along the remains of the Via Campana, a cross-road that led from Puteoli to Capua and there joined the famous Appian Way. Along this road the apostle passed on his way to Rome; and it is still paved with the original lava-blocks upon which his feet had pressed. One of the principal objects on the way is the amphitheatre of Nero, with its tiers of seats, its arena, and its subterranean passages, in a wonderful state of preservation, richly plumed with the delicate fronds of the maiden-hair fern, which drapes with its living loveliness so many of the ruins of Greece and Italy. It was here that Nero himself rehearsed the parts in which he wished to act on the more public stage of Rome. The sands of the arena were dyed with the blood of St. Januarius, who was thrown to the wild beasts by order of Diocletian, and whose blood is annually liquefied by a supposititious miracle in Naples at the present day. Behind the amphitheatre the apostle would get a glimpse of the famous Phlegræan Fields so often referred to in the classic poets as the scene of the wars of the gods and the giants. This is the Holy Land of Paganism. All the scenery of the eleventh book of the _Odyssey_ and of the sixth book of the _Æneid_ spreads beneath the eye. At every step you come upon some spot associated with the romantic literature of antiquity. From thence the imaginative shapes of Greek mythology passed into the poetry of Rome. There everything takes us back far beyond the birth of Roman civilisation, and reminds us of the legends of the older Hellenic days, which will exercise an undying spell on the higher minds of the human race down to the latest ages. It is the land of Virgil, whose own tomb is not far off; and under the guidance of his genius we visit the ghostly Cimmerian shores, now bathed in glowing sunshine, and stand on spots that thrilled the hearts of Hercules and Ulysses with awe. There the terrible Avernus, to which the descent was so easy, sleeps in its deep basin, long ago divested by the axe of Agrippa of the impenetrable gloom and mysterious dread which its dark forests had created; its steep banks partly covered with natural copsewood bright with a living mosaic of cyclamens and lilies, and partly formed of cultivated fields. During my visit the delicious odour of the bean blossom pervaded the fields, reminding me vividly of familiar rural scenes far away. Yonder is the subterranean passage called by the common people the Sibyl's Cave, where Æneas came and plucked the golden bough, and, led by the melancholy priestess of Apollo, went down to the dreary world of the dead. It was the general tradition of Pagan nations that the point of departure from this world, as well as the entrance to the next, was always in the west. We find the largest number of the prehistoric relics of the dead on the western shores of our own country. The cave of Loch Dearg--at first connected with primitive pagan rites and subsequently the traditional entrance to the Purgatory of St. Patrick--is situated in the west of Ireland, and corresponds to the cave of the Sibyl and the Lake of Avernus in Italy. Indeed the word Avernus itself bears such a close resemblance to the Gaelic word Ifrinn--the name of the infernal regions, and to the name of Loch Hourn, the Lake of Hell, on the north-west coast of Scotland--that it has given rise to the supposition that it was the legacy of a prehistoric Celtic people who at one time inhabited the Phlegræan Fields. On the other side of Lake Avernus is the Mare Morto, the Lake or Sea of the Dead, with its memories of Charon and his ghostly crew, which now shines in the setting sun like a field of gold sparkling with jewels; and beyond it are the Elysian Fields, the abodes of the blessed, the rich life of whose soil breaks out at every pore into a luxuriant maze of vines and orange trees, and all manner of lovely and fruitful vegetation. Still farther behind is the Acherusian Marsh of the poets, now called the Lake of Fusaro, because hemp and flax are put to steep in it; and the river Styx itself, by which the gods dare not swear in vain, reduced to an insignificant rill flowing into the sea. It is most interesting to think of the apostle Paul being associated with this enchanted region. His presence on the scene is necessary to complete its charm, and to remind us that the vain dreams of those blind old seekers after God were all fulfilled in Him who opened a door for us in heaven, and brought life and immortality to light in the Gospel. St. Paul must have noticed--though Scripture, intent only upon the unfolding of the religious drama, makes no reference to it--the crater of Solfatara, one of the most wonderful phenomena of this wonderful region, for it lay directly in his path, and was only about a mile distant from Puteoli. This was the famous Forum of Vulcan, where the god fashioned his terrible tools, and shook the earth with the fierce fires of his forge. On account of its gaseous fumaroles, and the flames thrown out with a loud roaring noise from one gloomy cavern in its side, this volcano may still be considered active. Its white calcined crater is clothed in some places with green shrubs, particularly with luxuriant sage, myrtle, and white heather; but an eruption took place in it so late as 1198, during which a lava current, a rare phenomenon in this district, flowed from its southern edge to the sea, destroying the ancient cemetery on the Via Puteolana, and forming the present promontory of Olibano. The ground sounds hollow beneath a heavy tread, reminding one unpleasantly that but a thin crust covers the fiery abyss which might break through at any moment. With the exception of Vesuvius, this is the only surviving remnant of the fierce elemental forces which have devastated this coast in every direction. The whole region is one mass of craters of various sizes and ages, some far older than Vesuvius, and others of comparatively recent origin. They are all craters of eruption and not of elevation; and in their formation they have interfered with and in some cases almost obliterated pre-existing ones. Some of them are filled with lakes, and others clothed with luxuriant vineyards, and wild woods fit for the chase, or encircling cultivated fields. To one looking upon it from a commanding position such as the heights of Posilipo, the landscape presents a universally blistered appearance. Hot mineral springs everywhere abound, often associated with the ruins of old Roman baths; and the soil is a white felspathic ash, disposed in layers of such fineness and regularity that they look as if they had been stratified under water, the sea and the shore having alternately given place to each other. Of the white earth abounding on every side, which has given to the place the old name of Campi Leucogæi, and is the result of the metamorphosis of the trachytic tufa by the chemical action of the gases that rise up through the fumaroles, a very fine variety of porcelain--known to collectors as Capo di Monti--used to be made on the hill behind Naples, and it has been supposed that the china clays of Cornwall and other places have been produced from the felspars of the granites in a similar way. The whole of the Solfatara crater has been enclosed for the purpose of manufacturing alum from its soil. On the hillside to the north there are several caverns, called _stufe_, from whence gas and hot steam arise, and these are used by the inhabitants as admirable vapour baths. So late as the year 1538 a terrible volcanic explosion, accompanied with violent earthquakes, happened not far from Puteoli, which threw up from the flat plain on which the village of Tripergola stood, a mountain called Monte Nuovo, four hundred and forty feet high and a mile and a half in circumference, consisting entirely of ashes and cinders, obliterating a large part of the celebrated Leucrine Lake, elevating the site of the temple of Serapis sixteen feet, and then depressing it, and generally changing the old features of this locality. This eruption gave relief to the throes of Lake Avernus, which henceforth ceased to send forth its exhalations, and became the cheerful garden scene which we now behold. Here on a small scale, in the very neighbourhood of man's busiest haunts, occur the cosmical cataclysms which are usually seen only in remote solitudes, and which during the unknown ages of geology have left their indelible records on large portions of the earth's surface. Here we are admitted into the very workshop of Nature, and are privileged to witness her processes of creation. In the neighbourhood of Rome the volcanoes are long extinct. Nature is dead, and there is nothing left but her cold gray ashes. But here we see her in all her vigour, changing and renewing and mingling the ruins of her works in strange association with those of man--the ashes of her volcanoes with the fragments of temples and baths and the houses of Roman senators and poets. The whole region lies over a burning mystery, and one has a constant feeling of insecurity lest the ground should open suddenly and precipitate one into the very heart of it. Naples itself, strange to say, a city of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants, is built in great part within an old broken-down volcanic crater, and the proximity of its awful neighbour shows that it stands perilously on the brink of destruction, and may share at any time the fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Were it not for the safety-valves of Vesuvius and Solfatara, the whole intermediate region, with its towns and villages and swarming population, would be blown into the air by the vehement forces that are struggling beneath. It was this elemental war--fiercer, we have reason to believe, in classic times than now--that gave rise to the religious fables of the poets. The gloomy shades of Avernus, the tremendous battles of the gods, the dark pictures of Tartarus and the Stygian river, were the supernatural suggestions of a fiery soil. To the fierce throes of volcanic action we owe the weird mythology of the ancients, which has imparted such a profound charm to the region, and also, strange as it may seem, the surpassing loveliness of Nature herself. The fairest regions of the earth are ever those where the awful power of fire has been at work, giving to the landscape that passionate expression which lights up a human face with its most impressive beauty. The visit of the apostle to Puteoli served many important purposes. He who had sent his people Israel into Egypt and Babylon that they might be benefited by coming into contact with other civilisations, sent St. Paul to this famous region where Greece and Rome--which, geographically and historically, were turned back to back, the face of Greece looking eastward, the face of Italy looking westward--seemed to meet and to blend into each other, in order that his sympathies might be expanded by coming into contact with all that man could realise of earthly glory or conceive of religion. We can trace the overruling Hand that was shaping the destinies of the Church in the course which he was led to take from Jerusalem to Damascus, and thence to Asia Minor, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Puteoli, and Rome; gathering as he went along the fruits of all the wide diversity of experience and culture characterising these places, to equip him more thoroughly for his work for the Gentiles. And we see also how the doctrines of the Gospel were becoming more clearly and fully unfolded by this method of progression; how questions were settled and principles carried out which have shown to us the exceeding riches of Divine grace in a way that we could not otherwise have known. Like the lines and marks of the chrysalis which appear on the body of the butterfly when it first spreads out its wings to fly--like the folds of the bud which may be seen in the newly-expanded leaf or flower--so Christianity at first emerged from its Jewish sheath with the distinctive marks of Judaism upon it. But as it passed westward from the Holy City, it slowly extricated itself out of the spirit and the trammels of Judaism into the self-restraining freedom which Christ gives to His people. The teaching of the Gospel was fully developed, guarded from all possible misinterpretation, and practically applied to all representative circumstances of men, through its coming into contact with the events, persons, and scenes associated with the wonderful missionary journeyings of the apostle Paul, which began at Jerusalem and terminated at Rome. When the Gospel reached the Imperial City, its relations to Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, were fixed for ever, its own form was perfected, and the conditions for its diffusion matured; and its history henceforth, like that of Rome itself, was synonymous with the history of the world. _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_. WORKS BY THE REV. HUGH MACMILLAN, LL.D., F.R.S.E. BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE. Fifteenth Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth. 6s. "Ably and eloquently written. It is a thoughtful book, and one that is prolific of thought."--_Pall Mall Gazette_. 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If a preacher desires to see how he can give freshness to his ministry, how he can clothe old and familiar truths in new forms, and so invest them with new attractions, how he can secure real beauty and interest without straining after effect, he could not do better than study this book."--_Nonconformist_. THE TRUE VINE; OR, THE ANALOGIES OF OUR LORD'S ALLEGORY. Fifth Edition. Globe 8vo. 6s. "The volume strikes us as being especially well suited for a book of devotional reading."--_Spectator_. "Mr. Macmillan has thrown beautiful light upon many points of natural symbolism. Readers and preachers who are unscientific will find many of his illustrations as valuable as they are beautiful."--_British Quarterly Review_. "It abounds in exquisite bits of description, and in striking facts clearly stated."--_Nonconformist_. FIRST FORMS OF VEGETATION. Second Edition. Corrected and Enlarged. With Coloured Frontispiece and numerous Illustrations. Globe 8vo. 6s. 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18049	----	generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr.) THE DIARY OF AN ENNUYÉE. _A NEW EDITION_. BY MRS. JAMESON, AUTHOR OF "VISITS AND SKETCHES AT HOME AND ABROAD," ETC. ETC. Sad, solemn, soure, and full of fancies fraile, She woxe: yet wist she neither how nor why: She wist not, silly Mayd, what she did aile, Yet wist she was not well at ease, perdie; Yet thought it was not Love, but some Melancholie. SPENSER. PARIS, BAUDRY'S EUROPEAN LIBRARY, SOLD ALSO BY AMYOT, RUE DE LA PAIX; TRUCHY, BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS; THEOPHILE BARROIS, JUN., RUE RICHELIEU; LIBRAIRIE DES ÉTRANGERS, RUE NEUVE-SAINT-AUGUSTIN; AND HEIDELOFF AND CAMPE, RUE VIVIENNE. 1836. * * * * * DIARY OF AN ENNUYÉE.[A] * * * * * _Calais, June 21._--What young lady, travelling for the first time on the Continent, does not write a "Diary?" No sooner have we slept on the shores of France--no sooner are we seated in the gay salon at Dessin's, than we call, like Biddy Fudge, for "French pens and French ink," and forth steps from its case the morocco-bound diary, regularly ruled and paged, with its patent Bramah lock and key, wherein we are to record and preserve all the striking, profound, and original observations--the classical reminiscences--the thread-bare raptures--the poetical effusions--in short, all the never-sufficiently-to-be-exhausted topics of sentiment and enthusiasm, which must necessarily suggest themselves while posting from Paris to Naples. Verbiage, emptiness, and affectation! Yes--but what must I do, then, with my volume in green morocco? Very true, I did not think of that. We have all read the DIARY OF AN INVALID, the best of all diaries since old Evelyn's.-- Well, then,--Here beginneth the DIARY OF A BLUE DEVIL. What inconsistent beings are we!--How strange that in such a moment as this, I can jest in mockery of myself! but I will write on. Some keep a diary, because it is the fashion--a reason why _I_ should not; some because it is _blue_, but I am not _blue_, only a _blue devil_; some for their amusement,--_amusement_!! alas! alas! and some that they may remember,--and I that I may forget, O! would it were possible. When, to-day, for the first time in my life, I saw the shores of England fade away in the distance--did the conviction that I should never behold them more, bring with it one additional pang of regret, or one consoling thought? neither the one nor the other. I leave behind me the scenes, the objects, so long associated with pain; but from pain itself I cannot fly: it has become a part of myself. I know not yet whether I ought to rejoice and be thankful for this opportunity of travelling, while my mind is thus torn and upset; or rather regret that I must visit scenes of interest, of splendour, of novelty--scenes over which, years ago, I used to ponder with many a sigh, and many a vain longing, now that I am lost to all the pleasure they could once have excited: for what is all the world to me now?--But I will not weakly yield: though time and I have not been long acquainted, do I not know what miracles he, "the all-powerful healer," can perform? Who knows but this dark cloud may pass away? Continual motion, continual activity, continual novelty, the absolute necessity for self-command, may do something for me. I cannot quite forget; but if I can cease to remember for a few minutes, or even, it may be, for a few hours? O how idle to talk of "_indulging_ grief:" talk of indulging the rack, the rheumatism! who ever indulged grief that truly felt it? to _endure_ is hard enough. It is o'er! with its pains and its pleasures, The dream of affection is o'er! The feelings I lavish'd so fondly Will never return to me more. With a faith, O! too blindly believing-- A truth, no unkindness could move; My prodigal heart hath expended At once, an existence of love. And now, like the spendthrift forsaken, By those whom his bounty had blest, All empty, and cold, and despairing, It shrinks in my desolate breast. But a spirit is burning within me, Unquench'd, and unquenchable yet; It shall teach me to bear uncomplaining, The grief I can never forget. _Rouen, June 25._--I do not pity Joan of Arc: that heroic woman only paid the price which all must pay for celebrity in some shape or other: the sword or the faggot, the scaffold or the field, public hatred or private heart-break; what matter? The noble Bedford could not rise above the age in which he lived: but _that_ was the age of gallantry and chivalry, as well as superstition: and could Charles, the lover of Agnes Sorel, with all the knights and nobles of France, look on while their champion, and a woman, was devoted to chains and death, without one effort to save her? It has often been said that her fate disgraced the military fame of the English; it is a far fouler blot on the chivalry of France. * * * * * _St. Germains, June 27._--I cannot bear this place, another hour in it will kill me; this sultry evening--this sickening sunshine--this quiet, unbroken, boundless landscape--these motionless woods--the Seine stealing, creeping through the level plains--the dull grandeur of the old chateau--the languid repose of the whole scene--instead of soothing, torture me. I am left without resource, a prey to myself and to my memory--to reflection, which embitters the source of suffering, and thought, which brings distraction. Horses on to Paris! Vite! Vite! _Paris, 28._--What said the witty Frenchwoman?--_Paris est le lieu du monde où l'on peut le mieux se passer de bonheur;_--in that case it will suit me admirably. _29._--We walked and drove about all day: I was amused. I marvel at my own versatility when I think how soon my quick spirits were excited by this gay, gaudy, noisy, idle place. The different appearance of the streets of London and Paris is the first thing to strike a stranger. In the gayest and most crowded streets of London the people move steadily and rapidly along, with a grave collected air, as if all had some business in view; _here_, as a little girl observed the other day, all the people walk about "like ladies and gentlemen going a visiting:" the women well-dressed and smiling, and with a certain jaunty air, trip along with their peculiar mincing step, and appear as if their sole object was but to show themselves; the men ill-dressed, slovenly, and in general ill-looking, lounge indolently, and stare as if they had no other purpose in life but to look about them.[B] _July 12._--"Quel est à Paris le suprême talent? celui d'amuser: et quel est le suprême bonheur? l'amusement." Then _le suprême bonheur_ may be found every evening from nine to ten, in a walk along the Boulevards, or a ramble through the Champs Elysées, and from ten to twelve in a salon at Tortoni's. What an extraordinary scene was that I witnessed to-night! how truly _French_! Spite of myself and all my melancholy musings, and all my philosophic allowances for the difference of national character, I was irresistibly compelled to smile at some of the farcical groups we encountered. In the most crowded parts of the Champs Elysées this evening (Sunday), there sat an old lady with a wrinkled yellow face and sharp features, dressed in flounced gown of dirty white muslin, a pink sash and a Leghorn hat and feathers. In one hand she held a small tray for the contribution of amateurs, and in the other an Italian bravura, which she sung or rather screamed out with a thousand indescribable shruggings, contortions, and grimaces, and in a voice to which a cracked tea-kettle, or a "brazen candlestick turned," had seemed the music of the spheres. A little farther on we found two elderly gentlemen playing at see-saw; one an immense corpulent man of fifteen stone at least, the other a thin dwarfish animal with gray mustachios, who held before him what I thought was a child, but on approaching, it proved to be a large stone strapped before him, to render his weight a counterpoise to that of his huge companion. We passed on, and returning about half an hour afterwards down the same walk, we found the same venerable pair pursuing their edifying amusement with as much enthusiasm as before. * * * * * Before the revolution, sacrilege became one of the most frequent crimes. I was told of a man who, having stolen from a church the silver box containing the consecrated wafers, returned the wafers next day in a letter to the Curé of the Parish, _having used one of them to seal his envelop_. * * * * * July 27.--A conversation with S** always leaves me sad. Can it then be possible that he is right? No--O no! my understanding rejects the idea with indignation, my whole heart recoils from it; yet if it should be so! what then: have I been till now the dupe and the victim of factitious feelings? virtue, honour, feeling, generosity, you are then but words, signifying nothing? Yet if this vain philosophy lead to happiness, would not S** be happy? it is evident he is _not_. When he said that the object existed not in this world which could lead him twenty yards out of his way, did this sound like happiness? I remember that while he spoke, instead of feeling either persuaded or convinced by his captivating eloquence, I was perplexed and distressed; I _suffered_ a painful compassion, and tears were in my eyes. I, who so often have pitied myself, pitied him at that moment a thousand times more; I thought, I would not buy tranquillity at such a price as he has paid for it. Yet _if_ he should be right? that _if_, which every now and then suggests itself, is terrible; it shakes me in the utmost recesses of my heart. S**, in spite of myself, and in spite of all that with most perverted pains he has made himself (so different from what he once was), can charm and interest, pain and perplex me:--not so D**, another disciple of the same school: he inspires me with the strongest antipathy I ever felt for a human being. Insignificant and disagreeable is his appearance, he looks as if all the bile under heaven had found its way into his complexion, and all the infernal irony of a Mephistopheles into his turned-up nose and insolent curled lip. He is, he _says_ he is, an atheist, a materialist, a sensualist: the pains he takes to deprave and degrade his nature, render him so disgusting, that I could not even speak in his presence; I dreaded lest he should enter into conversation with me. I might have spared myself the fear. He piques himself on his utter contempt for, and disregard of, women; and, after all, is not himself worthy these words I bestow on him. * * * * * _Aug. 25._--Here begins, I hope, a new æra. I have had a long and dangerous illness; the crisis perhaps of what I have been suffering for months. Contrary to my own wishes, and to the expectations of others, I _live_: and trusting in God that I have been preserved for some wise and good purpose, am therefore thankful: even supposing I should be reserved for new trials, I cannot surely in this world suffer more than I have suffered: it is not possible that the same causes can be again combined to afflict me. How truly can I say, few and evil have my days been! may I not say as truly, I have not weakly yielded, I have not "gone about to cause my heart to despair," but have striven, and not in vain? I took the remedies they gave me, and was grateful; I resigned myself to _live_, when had I but willed it, I might have died; and when to die and be at rest, seemed to my sick heart the only covetable boon. _Sept. 3._--A terrible anniversary at Paris--still ill and very weak. Edmonde came, _pour me désennuyer_. He has soul enough to bear a good deal of wearing down; but whether the fine qualities he possesses will turn to good or evil, is hard to tell: it is evident his character has not yet settled: it vibrates still as nature inclines him to good, and all the circumstances around him to evil. We talked as usual of women, of gallantry, of the French and English character, of national prejudices, of Shakspeare and Racine (never failing subjects of discussion), and he read aloud Delille's Catacombes de Rome, with great feeling, animation, and dramatic effect. _La mode_ at Paris is a spell of wondrous power: it is most like what we should call in England a rage, a mania, a torrent sweeping down the bounds between good and evil, sense and nonsense, upon whose surface straws and egg-shells float into notoriety, while the gold and the marble are buried and hidden till its force be spent. The rage for cashmeres and little dogs has lately given way to a rage for Le Solitaire, a romance written, I believe, by a certain Vicomte d'Arlincourt. Le Solitaire rules the imagination, the taste, the dress of half Paris: if you go to the theatre, it is to see the "Solitaire," either as tragedy, opera, or melodrame; the men dress their hair and throw their cloaks about them _à la Solitaire_; bonnets and caps, flounces and ribbons, are all _à la Solitaire_; the print shops are full of scenes from Le Solitaire; it is on every toilette, on every work-table;--ladies carry it about in their reticules to show each other that they are _à la mode_; and the men--what can they do but humble their understandings and be _extasiés_, when beautiful eyes sparkle in its defence and glisten in its praise, and ruby lips pronounce it divine, delicious; "quelle sublimité dans les descriptions, quelle force dans les caractères! quelle âme! feu! chaleur! verve! originalité! passion!" etc. "Vous n'avez pas lu le Solitaire?" said Madame M. yesterday. "Eh mon dieu! il est donc possible! vous? mais, ma chère, vous êtes perdue de réputation, et pour jamais!" To retrieve my lost reputation, I sat down to read Le Solitaire, and as I read my amazement grew, and I did in "gaping wonderment abound," to think that fashion, like the insane root of old, had power to drive a whole city mad with nonsense; for such a tissue of abominable absurdities, bombast and blasphemy, bad taste and bad language, was never surely indited by any madman, in or out of Bedlam: not Maturin himself, that king of fustian, "----ever wrote or borrowed Any thing half so horrid!" and this is the book which has turned the brains of half Paris, which has gone through fifteen editions in a few weeks, which not to admire is "_pitoyable_," and not to have read "_quelque chose d'inouie_." The objects at Paris which have most struck me, have been those least vaunted. The view of the city from the Pont des Arts, to-night, enchanted me. As every body who goes to Rome views the Coliseum by moonlight, so nobody should leave Paris without seeing the effect from the Pont des Arts, on a fine moonlight night:-- "Earth hath not any thing to show more fair." It is singular I should have felt its influence at such a moment: it appears to me that those who, from feeling too strongly, have learnt to consider too deeply, become less sensible to the works of art, and more alive to nature. Are there not times when we turn with indifference from the finest picture or statue--the most improving book--the most amusing poem; and when the very commonest, and every-day beauties of nature, a soft evening, a lovely landscape, the moon riding in her glory through a clouded sky, without forcing or asking attention, sink into our hearts? They do not console,--they sometimes add poignancy to pain; but still they have a power, and do not speak in vain: they become a part of us; and never are we so inclined to claim kindred with nature, as when sorrow has lent us her mournful experience. At the time I felt this (and how many have felt it as deeply, and expressed it better!) I did not _think_ it, still less could I have _said it_; but I have pleasure in recording the past impression. "On rend mieux compte de ce qu'on a senti que de ce qu'on sent." _September 8._--Paris is crowded with English; and I do not wonder at it; it is, on the whole, a pleasant place to live in. I like Paris, though I shall quit it without regret as soon as I have strength to travel. Here the social arts are carried to perfection--above all, the art of conversation: every one talks much and talks well. In this multiplicity of words it must happen of course that a certain quantum of ideas is intermixed: and somehow or other, by dint of listening, talking, and looking about them, people _do_ learn, and information to a certain point is general. Those who have knowledge are not shy of imparting it, and those who are ignorant take care not to seem so; but are sometimes agreeable, often amusing, and seldom _bêtes_. Nowhere have I seen unformed sheepish boys, nowhere the surliness, awkwardness, ungraciousness, and uneasy proud bashfulness, I have seen in the best companies in England. Our French friend Lucien has, at fifteen, the air and conversation of a finished gentleman; and our English friend C---- is at eighteen, the veriest log of a lumpish school-boy that ever entered a room. What I have seen of society, I like: the delicious climate too, the rich skies, the clear elastic atmosphere, the _out of doors_ life the people lead, are all (in summer at least) delightful. There may be less _comfort_ here; but nobody feels the want of it; and there is certainly more amusement--and amusement is here truly "le suprême bonheur." Happiness, according to the French meaning of the word, lies more on the surface of life: it is a sort of happiness which is cheap and ever at hand. This is the place to live in for the merry poor man, or the melancholy rich one: for those who have too much money, and those who have too little; for those who only wish, like the Irishman "to live all the days of their life,"--_prendre en légère monnaie la somme des plaisirs_: but to the thinking, the feeling, the domestic man, who only exists, enjoys, suffers through his affections-- "Who is retired as noontide dew, Or fountain in a noonday grove--" to such a one, Paris must be nothing better than a vast frippery shop, an ever-varying galantee show, an eternal vanity fair, a vortex of folly, a pandemonium of vice. _September 18._--Our imperials are packed, our passports signed, and we set off to-morrow for Geneva by Dijon and the Jura. I leave nothing behind me to regret, I see nothing before me to fear, and have no hope but in change; and now all that remains to be said of Paris, and all its wonders and all its vanities, all its glories and all its gaieties, are they not recorded in the ponderous chronicles of most veracious tourists, and what can I add thereto? _Geneva, Saturday Night, 11 o'clock._--Can it be the "blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone" I hear from my window? Shall I hear it to-morrow, when I wake? Have I seen, have I felt the reality of what I have so often imagined? and much, _much_ more? How little do I feel the contretemps and privations which affect others--and feel them _only_ because they affect others! To me they are nothing: I have in a few hours stored my mind with images of beauty and grandeur which will last through my whole existence. * * * * * Yet I know I am not singular; others have felt the same: others, who, capable of "drinking in the soul of things," have viewed nature less with their eyes than their hearts. Now I feel the value of my own enthusiasm; now am I repaid in part for many pains and sorrows and errors it has cost me. Though the natural expression of that enthusiasm be now repressed and restrained, and my spirits subdued by long illness, what but enthusiasm could elevate my mind to a level with the sublime objects round me, and excite me to pour out my whole heart in admiration as I do now! How deeply they have penetrated into my imagination!--Beautiful nature! If I could but infuse into you a portion of my own existence as you have become a part of mine--If I could but bid you reflect back my soul, as it reflects back all your magnificence, I would make you my only friend, and wish no other; content "to love earth only for its earthly sake." I am so tired to-night, I can say nothing of the Jura, nor of the superb ascent of the mountain, to me so novel, so astonishing a scene; nor of the cheerful brilliance of the morning sun, illuminating the high cliffs, and throwing the deep woody vallies into the darkest shadow; nor of the far distant plains of France seen between the hills, and melting away into a soft vapoury light; nor of Morey, and its delicious strawberries and honey-comb; nor of that never-to-be-forgotten moment, when turning the corner of the road, as it wound round a cliff near the summit, we beheld the lake and city of Geneva spread at our feet, with its magnificent back-ground of the Italian Alps, peak beyond peak, snow-crowned! and Mont Blanc towering over all! No description had prepared me for this prospect; and the first impression was rapturous surprise; but by degrees the vastness and the huge gigantic features of the scene pressed like a weight upon "my amazed sprite," and the feeling of its immense extent fatigued my imagination till my spirits gave way in tears. Then came remembrances of those I ought to forget, blending with all I saw a deeper power--raising up emotions, long buried though not dead, to fright me with their resurrection. I was so glad to arrive here, and shall be _so_ glad to sleep--even the dull sleep which laudanum brings me. _Oct. 1._--When next I submit (having the power to avoid it) to be crammed into a carriage and carried from place to place, whether I would or not, and be set down at the stated _points de vue_, while a detestable laquais points out what I am to admire, I shall deserve to endure again what I endured to-day. As there was no possibility of relief, I resigned myself to my fate, and was even amused by the absurdity of my own situation. We went to see the junction of the Arve and the Rhone: or rather to see the Arve pollute the rich, blue transparent Rhone, with its turbid waters. The day was heavy, and the clouds rolled in prodigious masses along the dark sides of the mountains, frequently hiding them from our view, and substituting for their graceful outlines and ever-varying contrast of tint and shade, an impenetrable veil of dark gray vapour. _3rd._--We took a boat and rowed on the lake for about two hours. Our boatman, a fine handsome athletic figure, was very talkative and intelligent. He had been in the service of Lord Byron, and was with him in that storm between La Meillerie and St. Gingough, which is described in the third canto of Childe Harold. He pointed out among the beautiful villas, which adorn the banks on either side, that in which the empress Josephine had resided for six months, not long before her death. When he spoke of her, he rested upon his oars to descant upon her virtues, her generosity, her affability, her goodness to the poor, and his countenance became quite animated with enthusiasm. Here, in France, wherever the name of Josephine is mentioned, there seems to exist but one feeling, one opinion of her beneficence and _amabilité_ of character. Our boatman had also rowed Marie Louise across the lake, on her way to Paris: he gave us no very captivating picture of her. He described her as "_grande, blonde, bien faite et extrêmement fière_:" and told us how she tormented her ladies in waiting; "_comme elle tracassait ses dames d'honneur_." The day being rainy and gloomy, her attendants begged of her to defer the passage for a short time, till the fogs had cleared away, and discovered all the beauty of the surrounding shores. She replied haughtily and angrily, "Je veux faire ce que je veux--allez toujours." M. le Baron M----n, whom we knew at Paris, told me several delightful anecdotes of Josephine: he was attached to her household, and high in her confidence. Napoleon sent him on the very morning of his second nuptials, with a message and billet to the ex-empress. On hearing that the ceremony was performed which had passed her sceptre into the hands of the proud, cold-hearted Austrian, the feelings of the _woman_ overcame every other. She burst into tears, and wringing her hands, exclaimed "Ah! au moins, qu'il soit heureux!" Napoleon resigned this estimable and amiable creature to narrow views of selfish policy, and with her his good genius fled: he deserved it, and verily he hath had his reward. We drove after dinner to Copet; and the Duchesse de Broglie being absent, had an opportunity of seeing the chateau. All things "were there of her"--of her, whose genuine worth excused, whose all-commanding talents threw into shade, those failings which belonged to the weakness of her sex, and her warm feelings and imagination. The servant girl who showed us the apartments, had been fifteen years in Madame de Staël's service. All the servants had remained long in the family, "elle était si bonne et si charmante maîtresse!" A picture of Madame de Staël when young, gave me the idea of a fine countenance and figure, though the features were irregular. In the bust, the expression is not so prepossessing:--_there_ the colour and brilliance of her splendid dark eyes, the finest feature of her face, are of course quite lost. The bust of M. Rocca[C] was standing in the Baron de Staël's dressing-room: I was more struck with it than any thing I saw, not only as a chef-d'oeuvre, but from the perfect and regular beauty of the head, and the charm of the expression. It was just such a mouth as we might suppose to have uttered his well-known reply--"_Je l'aimerai tellement qu'elle finira par m'aimer._" Madame de Staël had a son by this marriage, who had just been brought home by his brother, the Baron, from a school in the neighbourhood. He is about seven years old. If we may believe the servant, Madame de Staël did not acknowledge this son till just before her death; and she described the wonder of the boy on being brought home to the chateau, and desired to call _Monsieur le Baron_ "Mon frère" and "Auguste." This part of Madame de Staël's conduct seems incomprehensible; but her death is recent, the circumstances little known, and it is difficult to judge her motives. As a _woman_, as a _wife_, she might not have been able to brave "the world's dread laugh"--but as a _mother_?---- We have also seen Ferney--a place which did not interest me much, for I have no sympathies with Voltaire:--and some other beautiful scenes in the neighbourhood. The Panorama exhibited in London just before I left it, is wonderfully correct, with one pardonable exception: the artist did not venture to make the waters of the lake of the intense ultramarine tinged with violet as I now see them before me; "So darkly, deeply, beautifully blue;" it would have shocked English eyes as an exaggeration, or rather impossibility. THE PANORAMA OF LAUSANNE. Now blest for ever be that heaven-sprung art Which can transport us in its magic power From all the turmoil of the busy crowd, From the gay haunts where pleasure is ador'd, 'Mid the hot sick'ning glare of pomp and light; And fashion worshipp'd by a gaudy throng Of heartless idlers--from the jarring world And all its passions, follies, cares, and crimes-- And bids us gaze, even in the city's heart, On such a scene as this! O fairest spot! If but the pictured semblance, the dead image Of thy majestic beauty, hath a power To wake such deep delight; if that blue lake, Over whose lifeless breast no breezes play, Those mimic mountains robed in purple light, Yon painted verdure that but _seems_ to glow, Those forms unbreathing, and those motionless woods, A beauteous mockery all--can ravish thus, What would it be, could we now gaze indeed Upon thy _living_ landscape? could we breathe Thy mountain air, and listen to thy waves, As they run rippling past our feet, and see That lake lit up by dancing sunbeams--and Those light leaves quivering in the summer air; Or linger some sweet eve just on this spot Where now we _seem_ to stand, and watch the stars Flash into splendour, one by one, as night Steals over yon snow-peaks, and twilight fades Behind the steeps of Jura! here, O _here_! 'Mid scenes where Genius, Worth and Wisdom dwelt,[D] Which fancy peopled with a glowing train Of most divine creations--Here to stray With _one_ most cherished, and in loving eyes Read a sweet comment on the wonders round-- Would this indeed be bliss? would not the soul Be lost in its own depths? and the full heart Languish with sense of beauty unexprest, And faint beneath its own excess of life? _Saturday._--Quitted Geneva, and slept at St. Maurice. I was ill during the last few days of our stay, and therefore left Geneva with the less regret. I suffer now so constantly, that a day tolerably free from pain seems a blessing for which I can scarce be sufficiently thankful. Such was yesterday. Our road lay along the south bank of the lake, through Evian, Thonon, St. Gingough: and on the opposite shores we had in view successively, Lausanne, Vevai, Clarens, and Chillon. A rain storm pursued, or almost surrounded us the whole morning; but we had the good fortune to escape it. We travelled faster than it could pursue, and it seemed to retire before us as we approached. The effect was surprisingly beautiful; for while the two extremities of the lake were discoloured and enveloped in gloom, that part opposite to us was as blue and transparent as heaven itself, and almost as bright. Over Vevai, as we viewed it from La Meillerie, rested one end of a glorious rainbow: the other extremity appeared to touch the bosom of the lake, and shone vividly against the dark mountains above Chillon. La Meillerie--Vevai! what magic in those names! and O what a power has genius to hallow with its lovely creations, scenes already so lavishly adorned by Nature! it was not, however, of St. Preux I thought, as I passed under the rock of the Meillerie. Ah! how much of happiness, of enjoyment, have I lost, in being forced to struggle against my feelings, instead of abandoning myself to them! but surely I have done right. Let me repeat it again and again to myself, and let that thought, if possible, strengthen and console me. _Monday._--I have resolved to attempt no description of scenery; but my pen is fascinated. I _must_ note a few of the objects which struck me to-day and yesterday, that I may at will combine them hereafter to my mind's eye, and recall the glorious pictures I beheld, as we travelled through the Vallais to Brig: the swollen and turbid (no longer "blue and arrowy") Rhone, rushing and roaring along; the gigantic mountains in all their endless variety of fantastic forms, which enclosed us round,--their summits now robed in curling clouds, and then, as the winds swept them aside, glittering in the sunshine; the little villages perched like eagles' nests on the cliffs, far, far above our heads; the deep rocky channels through which the torrents had madly broken a way, tearing through every obstacle till they reached the Rhone, and marking their course with devastation; the scene of direful ruin at Martigny; the cataracts gushing, bounding from the living rock and plunging into some unseen abyss below; even the shrubs and the fruit trees which in the wider parts of the valley bordered the road side; the vines, the rich scarlet barberries, the apples and pears which we might have gathered by extending our hands;--all and each, when I recall them, will rise up a vivid picture before my own fancy;--but never could be truly represented to the mind of another--at least through the medium of words. And yet, with all its wonders and beauties, this day's journey has not enchanted me like Saturday's. The scenery _then_ had a different species of beauty, a deeper interest--when the dark blue sky was above our heads, and the transparent lake shone another heaven at our feet, and the recollection of great and glorious names, and visions of poetic fancy, and ideal forms more lovely than ever trod this earth, hovered around us:--and then those thoughts which would intrude--remembrances of the far-off absent, who are or have been loved, mingled with the whole, and shed an imaginary splendour or a tender interest, over scenes which required no extraneous powers to enhance their native loveliness.--no charm borrowed from imagination to embellish the all-beautiful reality. _Duomo d'Ossola._--What shall I say of the marvellous, the miraculous Simplon? Nothing: every body has said already every thing that _can_ be said and _exclaimed_. In our descent, as the valley widened, and the stern terrific features of the scene assumed a gentler character, we came to the beautiful village of Davedro, with its cottages and vineyards spread over a green slope, between the mountains and the torrent below. This lovely nook struck me the more from its contrast with the region of snows, clouds, and barren rocks to which our eyes had been for several hours accustomed. In such a spot as Davedro I fancied I should wish to _live_, could I in life assemble round me all that my craving heart and boundless spirit desire;--_or die_, when life had exhausted all excitement, and the subdued and weary soul had learned to be content with repose:--but not not till _then_. We are now in Italy; but have not yet heard the soft sounds of the Italian language. However, we read with great satisfaction the Italian denomination of our Inn, "La grande Alberga della Villa"--called out "Cameriere!" instead of "Garçon!"--plucked ripe grapes as they hung from the treillages above our heads--gathered green figs from the trees, bursting and luscious--panted with the intense heat--intense and overpowering from its contrast with the cold of the Alpine regions we had just left--and fancied we began to feel "----cette vie enivrante, Que le solei du sud inspire à tous les sens." * * * * * _11 at night._--Fatigue and excitement have lately proved too much for me: but I will not sink. I will yet bear up; and when a day thus passed amid scenes like those of a romance, amid all that would once have charmed my imagination, and enchanted my senses, brings no real pleasure, but is ended, as _now_ it ends, in tears, in bitterness of heart, in languor, in sickness, and in pain--ah! let me remember the lesson of resignation I have lately learned; and by elevating my thoughts to a better world, turn to look upon the miserable affections which have agitated me _here_ as----[E] Could I but become as insensible, as regardless of the painful past as I am of the all lovely present! Why was I proud of my victory over passion? alas! what avails it that I have shaken the viper from my hand, if I have no miraculous antidote against the venom which has mingled with my life-blood, and clogged the pulses of my heart! But the antidote of Paul--even faith--may it not be mine if I duly seek it? * * * * * _Arona, on the banks of the Lago Maggiore._--Rousseau mentions somewhere, that it was once his intention to place the scene of the Heloïse in the Borromean Islands. What a French idea! How strangely incongruous had the pastoral simplicity of his lovers appeared in such a scene! It must have changed, if not the whole plan, at least the whole colouring of the tale. Imagine _la divine_ JULIE tripping up and down the artificial terraces of the Isola Bella, among flower pots and statues, and colonnades and grottos; and St. Preux sighing towards her, from some trim fantastic wilderness in the Isola Madre! The day was heavenly, and I shall never forget the sunset, as we viewed it reflected in the lake, which appeared at one moment an expanse of living fire. This is the first we have seen of those effulgent sunsets with which Italy will make us familiar. _Milan._--Our journey yesterday, through the flat fertile plains of Lombardy, was not very interesting; and the want of novelty and excitement made it fatiguing, in spite of the matchless roads and the celerity with which we travelled. Whatever we may think of Napoleon in England, it is impossible to travel on the Continent, and more particularly through Lombardy, without being struck with the magnificence and vastness of his public works--either designed or executed. He is more regretted here than in France; or rather he has not been so soon banished from men's minds. In Italy he followed the rational policy of depressing the nobles, and providing occupation and amusement for the lower classes. I spoke to-day with an intelligent artisan, who pointed out to us a hall built near the public walk by Napoleon, for the people to dance and assemble in, when the weather was unfavourable. The man concluded some very animated and sensible remarks on the late events, by adding expressively, that though many had been benefited by the change, there was to him and all others of his class as much difference between the late reign and the present, as between _l'or et le fer_. The silver shrine of St. Carlo Borromeo, with all its dazzling waste of magnificence, struck me with a feeling of melancholy and indignation. The gems and gold which lend such a horrible splendour to corruption; the skeleton head, grinning ghastly under its invaluable coronet; the skeleton hand supporting a crozier glittering with diamonds, appeared so frightful, so senseless a mockery of the excellent, simple-minded, and benevolent being they were intended to honour, that I could but wonder, and escape from the sight as quickly as possible. The Duomo is on the whole more remarkable for the splendour of the material, than the good taste with which it is employed: the statues which adorn it inside and out, are sufficient of themselves to form a very respectable congregation: they are four thousand in number. _9th, Tuesday._--We gave the morning to the churches, and the evening to the Ambrosian library. The day was, on the whole, more fatiguing than edifying or amusing. I remarked whatever was remarkable, admired all that is usually admired, but brought away few impressions of novelty or pleasure. The objects which principally struck my capricious and fastidious fancy, were precisely those which passed unnoticed by every one else, and are not worth recording. In the first church we visited, I saw a young girl respectably and even elegantly dressed, in the beautiful costume of the Milanese, who was kneeling on the pavement before a crucifix, weeping bitterly, and at the same time fanning herself most vehemently with a large green fan. Another church (St. Alessandro, I think) was oddly decorated for a Christian temple. A statue of Venus stood on one side of the porch, a statue of Hercules on the other. The two divinities, whose attributes could not be mistaken, had been _converted_ from heathenism into two very respectable saints. I forget their _christian names_. Nor is this the most amusing metamorphosis I have seen here. The transformation of two heathen divinities into saints, is matched by the apotheosis of two modern sovereigns into pagan deities. On the frieze of the _salle_, adjoining the amphitheatre, there is a head of Napoleon, which, by the addition of a beard, has been converted into a Jupiter; and on the opposite side, a head of Josephine, which, being already beautiful and dignified, has required no alteration, except in name, to become a creditable Minerva. _10th._--At the Brera, now called the "Palace of the Arts and Sciences," we spent some delightful hours. There is a numerous collection of pictures by Titian, Guido, Albano, Schidone, the three Carraccis, Tintoretto, Giorgione, etc. Some old paintings in fresco, by Luini and others of his age, were especially pointed out to us, which had been cut from the walls of churches now destroyed. They are preserved here, I presume, as curiosities, and specimens of the progress of the arts, for they possess no other merit--none, at least, that I could discover. Here is the "Marriage of the Virgin," by Raffaelle, of which I had often heard. It disappointed me at the first glance, but charmed me at the second, and enchanted me at the third. The unobtrusive grace and simplicity of Raffaelle do not immediately strike an eye so unpractised, and a taste so unformed as mine still is: for though I have seen the best pictures in England, we have there no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the two divinest masters of the Italian art, Raffaelle and Correggio. There are not, I conceive, half a dozen of either in all the collections together, and those we do possess, are far from being among their best efforts. But Raffaelle must not make me forget the Hagar in the Brera: the affecting--the inimitable Hagar! what agony, what upbraiding, what love, what helpless desolation of heart in that countenance! I may well remember the deep pathos of this picture; for the face of Hagar has haunted me sleeping and waking ever since I beheld it. Marvellous power of art! that mere inanimate forms, and colours compounded of gross materials, should thus live--thus speak--thus stand a soul-felt presence before us, and from the senseless board or canvas, breathe into our hearts a feeling, beyond what the most impassioned eloquence could ever inspire--beyond what mere words can ever render. Last night and the preceding we spent at the Scala. The opera was stupid, and Madame Bellochi, who is the present primadonna, appeared to me harsh and ungraceful, when compared to Fodor. The new ballet however, amply indemnified us for the disappointment. Our Italian friends condoled with us on being a few days too late to see _La Vestale_, which had been performed for sixty nights, and is one of Vigano's masterpieces. I thought the _Didone Abbandonata_ left us nothing to regret. The immense size of the stage, the splendid scenery, the classical propriety and magnificence of the dresses, the fine music, and the exquisite acting (for there is very little dancing), all conspired to render it enchanting. The celebrated cavern scene in the fourth book of Virgil, is rather too closely copied in a most inimitable pas de deux; so closely, indeed, that I was considerably alarmed _pour les bienséances_; but little Ascanius, who is asleep in a corner (Heaven knows how he came there), wakes at the critical moment, and the impending catastrophe is averted. Such a scene, however beautiful, would not, I think, be endured on the English stage. I observed that when it began, the curtains in front of the boxes were withdrawn, the whole audience, who seemed to be expecting it, was hushed; the deepest silence, the most delighted attention prevailed during its performance; and the moment it was over, a third of the spectators departed. I am told this is always the case; and that in almost every ballet d'action, the public are gratified by a scene, or scenes, of a similar tendency. The second time I saw the _Didone_, my attention, in spite of the fascination of the scene, was attracted towards a box near us, which was occupied by a noble English family just arrived at Milan. In the front of the box sat a beautiful girl apparently not fifteen, with laughing lips and dimpled cheeks, the very personification of blooming, innocent, _English_ loveliness. I watched her (I could not help it, when my interest was once awakened) through the whole scene. I marked her increased agitation: I saw her cheeks flush, her eyes glisten, her bosom flutter, as if with sighs I could not overhear, till at length, overpowered with emotion, she turned away her head, and covered her eyes with her hand. Mothers!--English mothers! who bring your daughters abroad to finish their education--do you well to expose them to scenes like these, and _force_ the young bud of early feeling in such a precious hot-bed as this? Can a finer finger on the piano,--a finer taste in painting, or any possible improvement in foreign arts and foreign graces, compensate for one taint on that moral purity, which has ever been (and may it ever be!) the boast, the charm of Englishwomen? But what have I to do with all this?--I came here to be amused and to forget;--not to moralize or to criticise. Vigano, who is lately dead, composed the _Didone Abbandonata_ as well as _La Vestale_, Otello, Nina, and others. All his ballets are celebrated for their classical beauty and interest. This man, though but a dancing-master, must have had the soul of a painter, a musician, and a poet in one. He must have been a perfect master of design, grouping, contrast, picturesque, and scenic effect. He must have had the most exquisite feeling for musical expression, to adapt it so admirably to his purposes; and those gestures and movements with which he has so gracefully combined it, and which address themselves but too powerfully to the senses and the imagination--what are they, but the very "poetry of motion," _la poésie mise en action_, rendering words a superfluous and feeble medium in comparison? I saw at the Mint yesterday the medal struck in honour of Vigano, bearing his head on one side, and on the other, Prometheus chained; to commemorate his famous ballet of that name. One of these medals, struck in gold, was presented to him in the name of the government:--a singular distinction for a dancing-master;--but Vigano was a dancing-master of _genius_; and this is the land, where genius in every shape is deified. The enchanting music of the Prometteo by Beethoven, is well known in England, but to produce the ballet on our stage, as it was exhibited here, would be impossible. The entire tribe of our dancers and figurantes, with their jumpings, twirlings, quiverings, and pirouettings, must be first annihilated; and Vigano, or Didelot, or Noverre rise again to inform the whole corps de ballet with another soul and the whole audience with another spirit:--for --"Poiche paga il volgo sciocco, è giusto Scioccamente '_ballar_' per dargli gusto." The Theatre of the Scala, notwithstanding the vastness of my expectations, did not disappoint me. I heard it criticised as being dark and gloomy; for only the stage is illuminated: but when I remember how often I have left our English theatres with dazzled eyes and aching head,--distracted by the multiplicity of objects and faces, and "blasted with excess of light,"--I feel reconciled to this peculiarity; more especially as it heightens beyond measure the splendour of the stage effect. We have the Countess Bubna's box while we are here. She scarcely ever goes herself, being obliged to hold a sort of military drawing-room almost every evening. Her husband, General Bubna, has the command of the Austrian forces in the north of Italy: and though the Archduke Reinier is nominal viceroy, all real power seems lodged in Bubna's bands. He it was who suppressed the insurrection in Piedmont during the last struggle for liberty: 'twas his vocation--more the pity. Eight hundred of the Milanese, at the head of them Count Melzi, were connected with the Carbonari and the Piedmontese insurgents. On Count Bubna's return from his expedition, a list of these malcontents being sent to him by the police, he refused even to look at it, and merely saying that it was the business of the police to _surveiller_ those persons, but _he_ must be allowed to be ignorant of their names, publicly tore the paper. The same night he visited the theatre, accompanied by Count Melzi, was received with acclamations, and has since been deservedly popular. Bubna is a heavy gross-looking man, a victim to the gout, and with nothing martial or captivating in his exterior. He has talents, however, and those not only of a military cast. He was generally employed to arrange the affairs of the Emperor of Austria with Napoleon. His loyalty to his own sovereign, and the soldier-like frankness and integrity of his character, gained him the esteem of the French emperor; who, when any difficulties occurred in their arrangements, used to say impatiently--"Envoyez-moi donc Bubna!" The count is of an illustrious family of Alsace, which removed to Bohemia when that province was ceded to France. He had nearly ruined himself by gambling, when the emperor (so it is said) advised him, or, in other words, commanded him to marry the daughter of one Arnvelt or Arnfeldt, a baptized Jew, who had been servant to a Jewish banker at Vienna; and on his death left a million of florins to each of his daughters. He was a man of the lowest extraction, and without any education; but having sense enough to feel its advantages, he gave a most brilliant one to his daughters. The Countess Bubna is an elegant, an accomplished, and has the character of being also an amiable woman. She is here a person of the very first consequence, the wife of the archduke alone taking precedence of her. A propos of the viceroy, when on the Corso to-day with the Countess Bubna, we met him with the _vice-queen_, as she is styled, here, walking in public. The archduke has not (as the countess observed) _la plus jolie tournure du monde_: his appearance is heavy, awkward, and slovenly, with more than the usual Austrian stupidity of countenance: a complete _testa tedesca_. His beautiful wife, the Princess Maria of Savoy, to whom he has been married only a few months, held his arm; and as she moved a little in front, seemed to drag him after her like a mere appendage to her state. I gazed after them, amused by the contrast: he looking like a dull, stiff, old bachelor, the very figure of Moody in the Country Girl;--she, an elegant, sprightly, captivating creature; decision in her step, laughter on her lips, and pride, intelligence, and mischief in her brilliant eyes. * * * * * We visited yesterday the military college, founded by the viceroy, Eugene Beauharnois, for the children of soldiers who had fallen in battle. The original design is now altered; and it has become a mere public school, to which any boys may be admitted, paying a certain sum a year. We went over the whole building, and afterwards saw the scholars, two hundred and eighty in number, sit down to dinner. Every thing appeared nice, clean, and admirably ordered. At the Mint, which interested me extremely, we found them coining silver crowns for the Levant trade, with the head of Maria Theresa, and the date 1780. We were also shown the beautifully engraved die for the medal which the university of Padua presented to Belzoni. The evening was spent at the Teatro Re, where we saw a bad sentimental comedy (una Commedia di Carattere) exceedingly well acted. One actor I thought almost equal to Dowton, in his own style;--we had afterwards some fine music. Some of the Milanese airs, which the itinerant musicians give us, have considerable beauty and character. There is less monotony, I think, in their general style than in the Venetian music; and perhaps less sentiment, less softness. When left alone to-night, to do penance on the sofa, for my late walks, and recruit for our journey to-morrow,--I tried to adapt English verses to one or two very pretty airs which Annoni brought me to-day, without the Italian words; but it is a most difficult and invidious task. Even Moore, with his unequalled command over the lyric harmonies of our language, cannot perfectly satisfy ears accustomed to the "Linked sweetness long drawn out" of the Italian vowels, combined with musical sounds: fancy such dissonant syllables as _ex_, _pray_, _what_, _breaks_, _strength_, uttered in minim time, hissing and grating through half a bar, instead of the dulcet _anima mia_, _Catina amabile_--_Caro mio tesoro_, etc. STANZAS FOR MUSIC. All that it hoped My heart believed, And when most trusting, Was most deceived. A shadow hath fallen O'er my young years; And hopes when brightest, Were quench'd in tears. I make no plaint-- I breathe no sigh-- My lips can smile, And mine eyes are dry. I ask no pity, I hope no cure-- The heart, tho' broken, Can live, and endure! We left Milan two days ago, and arrived early the same day at Brescia; there is, I believe, very little to see there, and of that little, I saw nothing,--being too ill and too low for the slightest exertion. The only pleasurable feeling I can remember was excited by our approach to the Alps, after traversing the flat, fertile, uninteresting plains of Lombardy. The peculiar sensation of elevation and delight, inspired by mountain scenery, can only be understood by those who have felt it: at least I never had formed an idea of it till I found myself ascending the Jura. But Brescia ought to be immortalized in the history of our travels: for there, stalking down the Corso--_le nez en l'air_--we met our acquaintance L----, from whom we had parted last on the pavé of Piccadilly. I remember that in London I used to think him not remarkable for wisdom,--and his travels have infinitely improved him--in folly. He boasted to us triumphantly that he had run over sixteen thousand miles in sixteen months: that he had bowed at the levée of the Emperor Alexander,--been slapped on the shoulder by the Archduke Constantine,--shaken hands with a Lapland witch,--and been presented in full volunteer uniform at every court between Stockholm and Milan. Yet is he not one particle wiser than if he had spent the same time in walking up and down the Strand. He has contrived, however, to pick up on his tour, strange odds and ends of foreign follies, which stick upon the coarse-grained materials of his own John Bull character like tinfoil upon sackcloth: so that I see little difference between what he was, and what he is, except that from a _simple goose_,--he has become a compound one. With all this, L---- is not unbearable--not _yet_ at least. He amuses others as a butt--and me as a specimen of a new genus of fools: for his folly is not like any thing one usually meets with. It is not, _par exemple_, the folly of stupidity, for he talks much; nor of dullness, for he laughs much; nor of ignorance, for he has seen much; nor of wrong-headedness, for he can be guided right; nor of bad-heartedness, for he is good-natured; nor of thoughtlessness, for he is prudent; nor of extravagance, for he can calculate even to the value of half a lira: but it is an essence of folly, peculiar to himself, and like Monsieur Jacques's melancholy, "compounded of many simples, extracted from various objects, and the sundry contemplation of his travels." So much, for the present, of our friend L----. We left Brescia early yesterday morning, and after passing Desenzano, came in sight of the Lago di Garda. I had from early associations a delightful impression of the beauty of this lake, and it did not disappoint me. It is far superior, I think, to the Lago Maggiore, because the scenery is more _resserrè_, lies in a smaller compass, so that the eye takes in the separate features more easily. The mountains to the north are dark, broken, and wild in their forms, and their bases seemed to extend to the water edge: the hills to the south are smiling, beautiful, and cultivated, studded with white flat-roofed buildings, which glitter one above another in the sunshine. Our drive along the promontory of Sirmione, to visit the ruins of the Villa of Catullus, was delightful. The fresh breeze which ruffled the dark blue lake, revived my spirits, and chased away my head-ache. I was inclined to be enchanted with all I saw; and when our guide took us into an old cellar choked with rubbish, and assured us gravely that it was the very spot in which Catullus had written his Odes to Lesbia. I did not laugh in his face; for, after all, it would be as easy to prove that _it is_, as that it is _not_. The old town and castle of Sirmio are singularly picturesque, whether viewed from above or below, and the grove of olives which crowned the steep extremity of the promontory, interested us, being the first we had seen in Italy: on the whole I fully enjoyed the early part of this day. At Peschiera, which is strongly fortified, we crossed the Mincio.-- O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood, Smooth-flowing Mincius crowned with vocal reeds. Its waters were exquisitely transparent; but it was difficult to remember its poetical pretensions, in sight of those odious barracks and batteries. The reeds mentioned by Virgil and Milton still flourish upon its banks, and I forgave them for spoiling in some degree the beauty of the shore, when I thought of Adelaïde of Burgundy, who concealed herself among them for three days, when she fled from the dungeon of Peschiera to the arms of her lover. I was glad I had read her story in Gibbon, since it enabled me to add to classical and poetical associations, an interest at once romantic and real. The rest to-morrow--for I can write no more. _At Verona, Oct. 20._--I had just written the above when I was startled by a mournful strain from a chorus of voices, raised at intervals, and approaching gradually nearer. I walked to the window, and saw a long funeral procession just entering the church, which is opposite to the door of our inn. I immediately threw over me a veil and shawl, followed it, and stood by while the service was chaunted over the dead. The scene, as viewed by the light of about two hundred tapers, which were carried by the assistants, was as new to me as it was solemn and striking; but it was succeeded by a strange and forlorn contrast. The moment the service was over, the tapers were suddenly extinguished; the priests and the relatives all disappeared in an inconceivably short time, and before I was quite aware of what was going forward: the coffin, stripped of its embroidered pall and garlands of flowers, appeared a mere chest of deal boards, roughly nailed together; and was left standing on tressels, bare, neglected, and forsaken in the middle of the church. I approached it almost fearfully, and with a deeper emotion than I believed such a thing could now excite within me. And here, thought I, rests the human being, who has lived and loved, suffered and enjoyed, and, if I may judge by the splendour of his funeral rites, has been honoured, served, flattered while living:--and now not one remains to shed a last tear over the dead, but a single stranger, a wanderer from a land he perhaps knew not: to whom his very name is unknown! And while thus I moralized, two sextons appeared; and one of them seizing the miserable and deserted coffin, rudely and unceremoniously flung it on his shoulders, and vanished through a vaulted door; and I returned to my room, to write this, and to think how much better, how much more _humanely_, we manage these things in our own England. _Oct. 21._--Verona is a clean and quiet place, containing some fine edifices by Palladio and his pupils. The principal object of interest is the ancient amphitheatre; the most perfect I believe in Italy. The inner circle, with all its ranges of seats, is entire. We ascended to the top, and looked down into the Piazza d'arme, where several battalions of Austrian soldiers were exercising; their arms glittering splendidly in the morning sun. As I have now been long enough in Italy to sympathize in the national hatred of the Austrians, I turned from the sight, resolved not to be pleased. The arena of the amphitheatre is smaller, and less oval in form than I had expected: and in the centre, there is a little paltry gaudy wooden theatre for puppets and tumblers,--forming a grotesque contrast to the massive and majestic architecture around it: but even tumblers and puppets, as Rospo observed, are better than wild beasts and ferocious gladiators. There are also at Verona a triumphal arch to the Emperor Gallienus; the architecture and inscription almost as perfect as if erected yesterday;--and a most singular bridge of three irregular arches, built, I believe, by the Scaligieri family, who were once princes of Verona. It is well known that the story of Romeo and Juliet is here regarded as a traditionary and indisputable fact, and the tomb of Juliet is shown in a garden near the town. So much has been written and said on this subject, I can add only one observation. To the reality of the story it has been objected that the oldest narrator, Masuccio, relates it as having happened at Sienna: but might he not have heard the tradition at Verona, and transferred the scene to Sienna, since he represented it as related by a Siennese?--Della Corte, whose history of Verona I have just laid down, mentions it as a real historical event; and Louis da Porta, in his beautiful novel, la Giulietta, expressly asserts that he has written it down from tradition. If Shakespeare, as it is said, never saw the novel of Da Porta, how came he by the names of Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets: if he _did_ meet with it, how came he to depart so essentially from the story, particularly in the catastrophe? I must get some books, if possible, to clear up these difficulties. 23d, _at Padua._--We spent yesterday morning pleasantly at Vicenza. Palladio's edifices in general disappointed me; partly because I am not architect enough to judge of their merits, partly because, of most of them the situation is bad, and the materials paltry: but the Olympic theatre, although its solid perspective be a mere trick of the art, surprised and pleased me. It has an air of antique and classic elegance in its decorations, which is very striking. I have heard it criticised as a specimen of bad taste and trickery: but why should its solid scenery be considered more a _trick_, and in bad taste, than a curtain of painted canvas? In both a deception is practised and intended. We saw many things in Vicenza and its neighbourhood, which I have not time nor spirits, to dwell upon. We arrived here (at Padua) last night, and to-day I am again ill: unable to see or even to wish to see any thing. My eyes are so full of tears that I can scarcely write. I must lay down my pencil, lest I break through my resolution, and be tempted to record feelings I afterwards tremble to see written down.--O bitter and too lasting remembrance! I must sleep it away--even the heavy and drug-bought sleep to which I am now reduced, is better than such waking moments as these. * * * * * _Venice, October 25th._--I feel while I gaze round me, as if I had seen Venice in my dreams--as if it were itself the vision of a dream. We have been here two days; and I have not yet recovered from my first surprise. All is yet enchantment: all is novel, extraordinary, affecting from the many associations and remembrances excited in the mind. Pleasure and wonder are tinged with a melancholy interest; and while the imagination is excited, the spirits are depressed. The morning we left Padua was bright, lovely, and cloudless. Our drive along the shores of the Brenta crowned with innumerable villas and gay gardens was delightful; and the moment of our arrival at Fusina, where we left our carriages to embark in gondolas, was the most auspicious that could possibly have been chosen. It was about four o'clock: the sun was just declining towards the west: the whole surface of the _lagune_, smooth as a mirror, appeared as if paved with fire;--and Venice, with her towers and domes, indistinctly glittering in the distance, rose before us like a gorgeous exhalation from the bosom of the ocean. It is farther from the shore than I expected. As we approached, the splendour faded: but the interest and wonder grew. I can conceive nothing more beautiful, more singular, more astonishing, than the first appearance of Venice, and sad indeed will be the hour when she sinks (as the poet prophesies) "into the slime of her own canals." The moment we had disembarked our luggage at the inn, we hired gondolas and rowed to the Piazza di San Marco. Had I seen the church of St. Mark any where else, I should have exclaimed against the bad taste which every where prevails in it: but Venice is the proper region of the fantastic, and the church of St. Mark--with its four hundred pillars of every different order, colour, and material, its oriental cupolas, and glittering vanes, and gilding and mosaics--assimilates with all around it: and the kind of pleasure it gives is suitable to the place and the people. After dinner I had a chair placed on the balcony of our inn, and sat for some time contemplating a scene altogether new and delightful. The arch of the Rialto just gleamed through the deepening twilight; long lines of palaces, at first partially illuminated, faded away at length into gloomy and formless masses of architecture; the gondolas glided to and fro, their glancing lights reflected on the water. There was a stillness all around me, solemn and strange in the heart of a great city. No rattling carriages shook the streets, no trampling of horses echoed along the pavement: the silence was broken only by the melancholy cry of the gondoliers, and the dash of their oars; by the low murmur of human voices, by the chime of the vesper bells, borne over the water, and the sounds of music raised at intervals along the canals. The poetry, the romance of the scene stole upon me unawares. I fell into a reverie, in which visionary forms and recollections gave way to dearer and sadder realities, and my mind seemed no longer in my own power. I called upon the lost, the absent, to share the present with me,--I called upon past feelings to enhance that moment's delight. I did wrong--and memory avenged herself as usual. I quitted my seat on the balcony, with despair at my heart, and drawing to the table, took out my books and work. So passed our first evening at Venice. Yesterday we visited the Accademia where there are some fine pictures. The famous assumption by Titian is here, and first made me _feel_ what connoisseurs mean when they talk of the carnations and draperies of Titian. We were shown two designs for monuments to the memory of Titian, modelled by Canova. Neither of them has been erected; but the most beautiful, with a little alteration, and the substitution of a lady's bust for Titian's venerable head, has been dedicated, I believe, to the memory of the Archduchess Christina of Austria. I remember also an exquisite Canaletti, quite different in style and subject from any picture of this master I ever saw. We then rowed to the ducal palace. The council chamber (I thought of Othello as I entered it) is now converted into a library. The walls are decorated with the history of Pope Alexander the Third, and Frederic Barbarossa, painted by the Tintoretti, father and son, Paul Veronese and Palma. Above them, in compartments, hang the portraits of the Doges; among which Marino Faliero is _not_; but his name only, inscribed on a kind of black pall. The Ganymede is a most exquisite little group, attributed to the age of Praxiteles; and not without reason even to the hand of that sculptor. To-day we visited several churches--rich, on the outside, with all the luxury of architecture,--withinside, gorgeous with painting, sculpture, and many-coloured marbles. The prodigality with which the most splendid and costly materials are lavished here is perfectly amazing: pillars of lapis-lazuli, columns of Egyptian porphyry, and pavements of mosaic, altars of alabaster ascended by steps incrusted with agate and jasper:--but to particularize would be in vain. I will only mention three or four which I wish to recollect: the Church of the Madonna della Salute, so called because erected to the Virgin in gratitude for the deliverance of the city from a pestilence, which she miraculously drove into the Adriatic. It is remarkable for its splendid pictures, most of them by Luca Giordano; and the superb high altar. I think it was the Church of the Gesuata which astonished us most. The whole of the inside walls and columns are encrusted with Carrara marble inlaid with verd-antique, in a kind of damask pattern; over the pulpit it fell like drapery, so easy, so graceful, so exquisitely imitated, that I was obliged to touch it to assure myself of the material. Then by way of contrast followed the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore,--one of Palladio's masterpieces. After the dazzling and gorgeous buildings we had left, its beautiful simplicity and correct taste struck me at first with an impression of poverty and coldness. At the Church of St. John and St. Paul is the famous martyrdom, or rather assassination, of St. Peter Martyr, by Titian, one of the most magical pictures in the world. Its tragic horror is redeemed by its sublimity. Here too is a most admirable series of bas-reliefs in white marble, representing the history of our Saviour, the work of a modern sculptor. Here too the Doges are buried; and close to the Church is the equestrian statue of one of the Falieri family: near which Marino Faliero met the conspirators. At the Frati is the grave of Titian: a small square slab covers him, with this inscription:-- "Qui giace il gran Tiziano Vecelli. Emulator dei Zeusi e degli Apelli." there is no monument:--and there needs none. It was, I think, in the Church of St. John and St. Paul, that I saw a singular and beautiful altar of black touch-stone, used when mass is said for the soul of an executed criminal. This is all I can remember of to-day. I am fatigued, and my head aches;--my imagination is yet dazzled:--my eyes are tired of admiring, my mind is tired of thinking, and my heart with feeling.----Now for repose. 27.--To-day we visited the Manfrini Palace, the Casa Pisani, the Palazzo Barberigo, and concluded the morning in the colonnade of St. Mark, and the public gardens. The day has been far less fatiguing than yesterday: for though we have seen an equal variety of objects, they forced the attention less, and gratified the imagination more. At the Manfrini Palace there is the most valuable and splendid collection of pictures I have yet seen in Italy or elsewhere. I have no intention of turning my little Diary into a mere catalogue of names which I can find in every guide-book; but I cannot pass over Giorgione's beautiful group of himself, and his wife and child, which Lord Byron calls "love at full length and life, not love ideal," and it is indeed exquisite. A female with a guitar by the same master is almost equal to it. There are two Lucretias--one by Guido and one by Giordano: though both are beautiful, particularly the former, there was, I thought, an impropriety in the conception of both pictures: the figure was too voluptuous--too exposed, and did not give me the idea of the matronly Lucretia, who so carefully arranged her drapery before she fell. I remember, too, a St. Cecilia by Carlo Dolci, of most heavenly beauty,--two Correggios--Iphigenia in Aulis, by Padovanino: in this picture the figure of Agamemnon is a complete failure, but the lifeless beauty of Iphigenia, a wonderful effort of art: and a hundred others at least, all masterpieces. The Barberigo Palace was the school of Titian. We were shown the room in which he painted, and the picture he left unfinished when he died at the age of 99. It is a David--as vigorous in the touch and style as any of his first pictures. * * * * * It is now some days since I had time to write; or rather the intervals of excitement and occupation found me too much exhausted to take up my pencil. Our stay at Venice has been rendered most agreeable by the kindness of Mr. H----, the British Consul, and his amiable and charming wife, and in their society we have spent much of the last few days. One of our pleasantest excursions was to the Armenian convent of St. Lazaro, where we were received by Fra Pasquale, an accomplished and intelligent monk, and a particular friend of Mr. H----. After we had visited every part of the convent, the printing press--the library--the laboratory--which contains several fine mathematical instruments of English make; and admired the beautiful little tame gazelle which bounded through the corridors, we were politely refreshed with most delicious sweetmeats and coffee; and took leave of Fra Pasquale with regret. There is no opera at present, but we have visited both the other theatres. At the San Luca, they gave us "Elizabeth, the Exile of Siberia," tolerably acted: but there was one trait introduced very characteristic of the place and people: Elizabeth in a tremendous snow storm, is pursued by robbers; and finding a crucifix, erected by the road side, embraces it for protection. The crucifix flies away with her in a clap of thunder, and sets her down safely at a distance from her persecutors. The audience appeared equally enchanted and edified by this scene: some of the women near me crossed themselves, and put their handkerchiefs to their eyes: the men rose from their seats, clapped with enthusiasm, and shouted "Bravo! Miracolo!" At the San Benedetto we were gratified by a deep tragedy entitled "Gabrielle Innocente," so exquisitely absurd, and so grotesquely acted, that the best comedy could scarcely have afforded us more amusement,--certainly not more _merriment_. In the course of the evening, coffee and ices were served in our box, as is the custom here. With Mrs. H---- this evening I had a long and pleasant conversation; she is really one of the most delightful and unaffected women I ever met with: and as there is nothing in my melancholy visage and shrinking reserve to tempt any person to converse with me, I must also set her down as one of the most good-natured. She talked much of Lord Byron, with whom, during his residence here she was on intimate terms. She spoke of him, not conceitedly as one vain of the acquaintance of a great character; nor with affected reserve, as if afraid of committing herself--but with openness, animation, and cordial kindness, as one whom she liked, and had reason to like. She says the style of Lord Byron's conversation is very much that of Don Juan: just in the same manner are the familiar, the brilliant, the sublime, the affecting, the witty, the ludicrous, and the licentious, mingled and contrasted. Several little anecdotes which she related I need not write down; I can scarcely forget them, and it would not be quite fair as they were told _en confiance_. I am no anecdote hunter, picking up articles for "my pocket book." * * * * * A little while ago Captain F. lent me D'Israeli's Essays on the Literary Character, which had once belonged to Lord Byron; and contained marginal notes in his hand-writing. One or two of them are so curiously characteristic that I copy them here. The first note is on a passage in which D'Israeli, in allusion to Lord Byron, traces his fondness for oriental scenery to his having read Rycaut at an early age. On this Lord Byron observes, that he read _every book_ relating to the east before he was ten years old, including De Tott and Cantemir as well as Rycaut: at that age, he says that he _detested_ all poetry, and adds, "when I was in Turkey, I was oftener tempted to turn mussulman than poet: and have often regretted since that _I did not_." At page 99 D'Israeli says, "The great poetical genius of our times has openly alienated himself from the land of his brothers" (over the word _brothers_ Lord Byron has written _Cains_.) "He becomes immortal in the _language_ of a _people_ whom he would _contemn_, he accepts with ingratitude the fame he loves more than life, and he is only truly great on that _spot_ of _earth_, whose genius, when he is no more, will contemplate his shade in sorrow and in anger." Lord Byron has underlined several words in this passage, and writes thus in the margin: "What was rumoured of me in that language, if _true_, I was unfit for England; and if _false_, England was unfit for me. But 'there is a world elsewhere.' I have never for an instant regretted that country,--but often that I ever returned to it. It is not my fault that I am obliged to write in English. If I understood any present language, Italian, for instance, equally well, I would write in it:--but it will require ten years, at least, to form a style. No tongue so easy to acquire a little of, and so difficult to master thoroughly, as Italian." The next note is amusing; at page 342 is mentioned the anecdote of Petrarch, who when returning to his native town, was informed that the proprietor of the house in which he was born had _often_ wished to make alterations in it, but that the town's-people had risen to insist that the house consecrated by his birth should remain unchanged;--"a triumph," adds D'Israeli, "more affecting to Petrarch than even his coronation at Rome." Lord Byron has written in the margin--"It would have pained _me_ more that the proprietor should _often_ have wished to make alterations, than it would give me pleasure that the rest of Arezzo rose against his right (for _right_ he had:) the depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful, than the applause of the highest is pleasing. The sting of the scorpion is more in _torture_ than the possession of any thing short of Venus would be in rapture." * * * * * The public gardens are the work of the French, and occupy the extremity of one of the islands. They contain the only trees I have seen at Venice:--a few rows of dwarfish unhappy-looking shrubs, parched by the sea breezes, and are little frequented. We found here a solitary gentleman, who was sauntering up and down with his hands in his pockets, and a look at once stupid and disconsolate. Sometimes he paused, looked vacantly over the waters, whistled, yawned, and turned away to resume his solemn walk. On a trifling remark addressed to him by one of our party, he entered into conversation, with all the eagerness of a man, whose tongue had long been kept in most unnatural bondage. He congratulated himself on having met with some one who would speak English; adding contemptuously, that "he understood none of the outlandish tongues the people spoke hereabouts:" he inquired what was to be seen here, for though he had been four days in Venice, he had spent every day precisely in the same manner; viz. walking up and down the public gardens. We told him Venice was famous for fine buildings and pictures; he knew nothing of _them_ things. And that it contained also, "some fine statues and antiques"--he cared nothing about them neither--he should set off for Florence the next morning, and begged to know what was to be seen there? Mr. R----told him, with enthusiasm, "the most splendid gallery of pictures and statues in the world!" He looked very blank and disappointed. "Nothing else?" then he should certainly not waste his time at Florence, he should go direct to Rome; he had put down the name of that _town_ in his pocket-book, for he understood it was a very _convenient_ place: he should therefore stay there a week; thence he should go to Naples, a place he had also heard of, where he should stay another week: then he should go to Algiers, where he should stay _three weeks_, and thence to Tunis, where he expected to be very comfortable, and should probably make a long stay; thence he should return home, having seen every thing worth seeing. He scarcely seemed to know how or by what route he had got to Venice--but he assured us he had come "fast enough;"--he remembered no place he had passed through except Paris. At Paris he told us there was a female lodging in the same hotel with himself, who by his description appears to have been a single lady of rank and fashion, travelling with her own carriages and a suite of servants. He had never seen her; but learning through the domestics that she was travelling the same route, he sat down and wrote her a long letter, beginning "Dear Madam," and proposing they should join company, "for the sake of good fellowship, and the _bit of chat_ they might have on their way." Of course she took no notice of this strange billet, "from which," added he with ludicrous simplicity, "I supposed she would rather travel alone." Truly, "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." After this specimen, sketched from life, who will say there are such things as caricatures? * * * * * We visited to-day the Giant's Staircase and the Bridge of Sighs, and took a last farewell of St. Mark--we were surprised to see the church hung with black--the festoons of flowers all removed--masses going forward at several altars, and crowds of people looking particularly solemn and devout. It is the "Giorno dei morte," the day by the Roman Catholics consecrated to the dead. I observed many persons, both men and women, who wept while they prayed, with every appearance of the most profound grief. Leaving St. Mark, I crossed the square. On the three lofty standards in front of the church formerly floated the ensigns of the three states subjects to Venice,--the Morea, Cyprus, and Candia: the bare poles remain, but the ensigns of empire are gone. One of the standards was extended on the ground, and being of immense length, I hesitated for a moment whether I should make a circuit, but at last stepped over it. I looked back with remorse, for it was like trampling over the fallen. We then returned to our inn to prepare for our departure. How I regret to leave Venice! not the less because I cannot help it. _Rovigo, Nov. 3._ We left Venice in a hurry yesterday, slept at Padua, and travelled this morning through a most lovely country, among the Enganean hills to Rovigo, where we are very uncomfortably lodged at the Albergo di San Marco. I have not yet recovered my regret at leaving Venice so unexpectedly; though as a residence, I could scarce endure it; the sleepy canals, the gliding gondolas in their "dusk livery of woe"--the absence of all verdure, all variety--of all _nature_, in short; the silence, disturbed only by the incessant chiming of bells--and, worse than all, the spectacle of a great city "expiring," as Lord Byron says, "before our eyes," would give me the horrors: but as a visitor, my curiosity was not half gratified, and I should have liked to have stayed a few days longer--perhaps after all, I have reason to rejoice that instead of bringing away from Venice a disagreeable impression of satiety, disgust and melancholy, I have quitted it with feelings of admiration, of deep regret, and undiminished interest. Farewell, then, Venice! I could not have believed it possible that it would have brought tears to my eyes to leave a place merely for its own sake, and unendeared by the presence of any one I loved. As Rovigo affords no other amusement I shall scribble a little longer. Nothing can be more arbitrary than the Austrian government at Venice. As a summary method of preventing robberies during the winter months, when many of the gondoliers and fishermen are out of employ, the police have orders to arrest, without ceremony, every person who has no permanent trade or profession, and keep them in confinement and to hard labour till the return of spring. The commerce of Venice has so much and so rapidly declined, that Mr. H---- told us when first he was appointed to the consulship, a hundred and fifty English vessels cleared the port, and this year only five. It should seem that Austria, from a cruel and selfish policy, is sacrificing Venice to the prosperity of Trieste: but why do I call that a cruel policy, which on recollection I might rather term poetical and retributive justice? The grandeur of Venice arose first from its trade in salt. I remember reading in history, that when the king of Hungary opened certain productive salt mines in his dominions, the Venetians sent him a peremptory order to shut them up; and such was the power of the Republic at that time, that he was forced to obey this insolent command, to the great injury and impoverishment of his states. The tables are now turned; the oppressor has become the oppressed. The principal revenue derived from Venice is from the tax on houses, there being no _land tax_. So rapid was the decay of the place, that in two years seventy houses and palaces were pulled down; the government forbade this by a special law, and now taxes are paid for many houses whose proprietors are too poor to live in them. There is no _society_, properly so called, at Venice; three old women of rank receive company now and then, and it is any thing rather than select. Mr. F. told us at Venice, that on entering the states subject to Austria, he had his Johnson's Dictionary taken from him, and could never recover it; so jealous is the government of English principles and English literature, that _all_ English books are prohibited until examined by the police. The whole country from Milan to Padua was like a vast garden, nothing could exceed its fertility and beauty. It was the latter end of the vintage; and we frequently met huge tub-like waggons loaded with purple grapes, reeling home from the vineyards, and driven by men whose legs were stained with treading in the wine-press--now and then, rich clusters were shaken to the ground, as I have seen wisps of straw fall from a hay-cart in England, and were regarded with equal indifference. Sometimes we saw in the vineyards by the road-side, groups of labourers seated among the branches of the trees, and plucking grapes from the vines, which were trailed gracefully from tree to tree and from branch to branch, and drooped with their luxurious burthen of fruit. The scene would have been as perfectly delightful, as it was new and beautiful, but for the squalid looks of the peasantry; more especially of the women. The principal productions of the country seem to be wine and silk. There were vast groves of mulberry-trees between Verona and Padua; and we visited some of the silk-mills, in which the united strength of men invariably performed those operations which in England are accomplished by steam or water. I saw in a huge horizontal wheel, about a dozen of these poor creatures labouring so hard, that my very heart ached to see them, and I begged that the machine might be stopped that I might speak to them:--but when it _Was_ stopped, and I beheld their half savage, half stupified, I had almost said _brutified_ countenances, I could not utter a single word--but gave them something, and turned away. "Compassion is wasted upon such creatures," said R----; "do you not see that their minds are degraded down to their condition? they do not pity themselves:"--but therefore did I pity them the more. * * * * * _Bologna, Nov. 5._--I fear I shall retain a disagreeable impression of Bologna, for here I am again ill. I have seen little of what the town contains of beautiful and curious: and that little, under unpleasant and painful circumstances. Yesterday we passed through Ferrara; only stopping to change horses and dine. We snatched a moment to visit the hospital of St. Anna and the prison of Tasso--the glory and disgrace of Ferrara. Over the iron gate is written "Ingresso alia prigione di Torquato Tasso." The cell itself is miserably gloomy and wretched, and not above twelve feet square. How amply has posterity avenged the cause of the poet on his tyrant!--and as we emerge from his obscure dungeon and descend the steps of the hospital of St. Anna, with what fervent hatred, indignation, and scorn, do we gaze upon the towers of the ugly red brick palace, or rather fortress, which deforms the great square, and where Alphonso feasted while Tasso wept! The inscription on the door of the cell, calling on strangers to venerate the spot where Tasso, "Infermo più di tristezza che delirio," was confined seven years and one month--was placed there by the French, and its accuracy may be doubted; as far as I can recollect. The grass growing in the wide streets of Ferrara is no poetical exaggeration; I saw it rank and long even on the thresholds of the deserted houses, whose sashless windows, and flapping doors, and roofless walls, looked strangely desolate. I will say nothing of Bologna;--for the few days I have spent here have been to me days of acute suffering, in more ways than I wish to remember, and therefore dare not dwell upon. _At Covigliajo in the Apennines._--O for the pencil of Salvator, or the pen of a Radcliffe! But could either, or could both united, give to my mind the scenes of to-day, in all their splendid combinations of beauty and brightness, gloom and grandeur? A picture may present to the eye a small portion of the boundless whole--one aspect of the every-varying face of nature; and words, how weak are they!--they are but the elements out of which the quick imagination frames and composes lovely landscapes, according to its power or its peculiar character; and in which the unimaginative man finds only a mere chaos of verbiage, without form, and void. The scenery of the Apennines is altogether different in character from that of the Alps: it is less bold, less lofty, less abrupt and terrific--but more beautiful, more luxuriant, and infinitely more varied. At one time, the road wound among precipices and crags, crowned with dismantled fortresses and ruined castles--skirted with dark pine forests--and opening into wild recesses of gloom, and immeasurable depths like those of Tartarus profound; then came such glimpses of paradise! such soft sunny valleys and peaceful hamlets--and vine-clad eminences and rich pastures, with here and there a convent half hidden by groves of cypress and cedars. As we ascended we arrived at a height from which, looking back, we could see the whole of Lombardy spread at our feet; a vast, glittering, indistinct landscape, bounded on the north by the summits of the Alps, just apparent above the horizon, like a range of small silvery clouds; and on the east a long unbroken line of bluish light marked the far distant Adriatic; as the day declined, and we continued our ascent (occasionally assisted by a yoke of oxen where the acclivity was very precipitate), the mountains closed around us, the scenery became more wildly romantic, barren, and bleak. At length, after passing the crater of a volcano, visible through the gloom by its dull red light, we arrived at the Inn of Covigliajo, an uncouth dreary edifice, situated in a lonely and desolate spot, some miles from any other habitation. This is the very inn, infamous for a series of the most horrible assassinations, committed here some years ago. Travellers arrived, departed, disappeared, and were never heard of more; by what agency, or in what manner disposed of, could not be discovered. It was supposed for some time that a horde of banditti were harboured among the mountains, and the police were for a long time in active search for them, while the real miscreants remained unsuspected for their seeming insignificance and helplessness; these were the mistress of the inn, the camerière, and the curate of the nearest village, about two leagues off. They secretly murdered every traveller who was supposed to carry property--buried or burned their clothes, packages, and vehicles, retaining nothing but their watches, jewels, and money. The whole story, with all its horrors, the manner of discovery, and the fate of these wretches, is told, I think, by Forsyth, who can hardly be suspected of romance or exaggeration. I have him not with me to refer to; but I well remember the mysterious and shuddering dread with which I read the anecdote. I am glad no one else seems to recollect it. The inn at present contains many more than it can possibly accommodate. We have secured the best rooms, or rather the _only_ rooms--and besides ourselves and other foreigners, there are numbers of native travellers: some of whom arrived on horseback, and others with the Vetturini. A kind of gallery or corridor separates the sleeping rooms, and is divided by a curtain into two parts: the smaller is appropriated to us, as a saloon: the other half, as I contemplate it at this moment through a rent in the curtain, presents a singular and truly Italian spectacle--a huge black iron lamp, suspended by a chain from the rafters, throws a flaring and shifting light around. Some trusses of hay have been shaken down upon the floor, to supply the place of beds, chairs, and tables; and there, reclining in various attitudes, I see a number of dark looking figures, some eating and drinking, some sleeping; some playing at cards, some telling stories with all the Italian variety of gesticulation and intonation; some silently looking on, or listening. Two or three common looking fellows began to smoke their segars, but when it was suggested that this might incommode the ladies on the other side of the curtain, they with genuine politeness ceased directly. Through this motley and picturesque assemblage I have to make my way to my bed-room in a few minutes--I will take another look at them, and then--andiamo! _Florence, Nov. 8._--"La bellisema e famosissima figlia di Roma," as Dante calls her in some relenting moment. Last night we slept in a blood-stained hovel--and to-night we are lodged in a palace. So much for the vicissitudes of travelling. I am not subject to idle fears, and least of all to superstitious fears--but last night, at Covigliajo, I could not sleep--I could not even lie down for more than a few minutes together. The whispered voices and hard breathing of the men who slept in the corridor, from whom only a slight door divided me, disturbed and fevered my nerves; horrible imaginings were all around me: and gladly did I throw open my window at the first glimpse of the dawn, and gladly did I hear the first well-known voice which summoned me to a hasty breakfast. How reviving was the breath of the early morning, after leaving that close, suffocating, ill-omened inn! how beautiful the blush of light stealing downwards from the illumined summits to the valleys, tinting the fleecy mists, as they rose from the earth, till all the landscape was flooded with sunshine: and when at length we passed the mountains, and began to descend into the rich vales of Tuscany--when from the heights above Fesole we beheld the city of Florence, and above it the young moon and the evening star suspended side by side; and floating over the whole of the Val d'Arno, and the lovely hills which enclose it, a mist, or rather a suffusion of the richest rose colour, which gradually, as the day declined, faded, or rather deepened into purple; then I first understood all the enchantment of an Italian landscape.--O what a country is this! All that I see, I _feel_--all that I _feel_, sinks so deep into my heart and my memory! the deeper because I suffer--and because I never think of expressing, or sharing, one emotion with those around me, but lock it up in my own bosom; or at least in my little book--as I do now. _Nov. 10._--We visited the gallery for the first time yesterday morning; and I came away with my eyes and imagination so dazzled with excellence, and so distracted with variety, that I retained no distinct recollection of any particular object except the Venus; which of course was the first and great attraction. This morning was much more delightful; my powers of discrimination returned, and my power of enjoyment was not diminished. New perceptions of beauty and excellence seemed to open upon my mind; and faculties long dormant, were roused to pleasurable activity. I came away untired, unsated; and with a delightful and distinct impression of all I had seen. I leave to catalogues to particularise; and am content to admire and to remember. I am glad I was not disappointed in the Venus which I half expected. Neither was I surprised: but I felt while I gazed a sense of unalloyed and unmingled pleasure, and forgot the cant of criticism. It has the same effect to the eye, that perfect harmony has upon the ear: and I think I can understand why no copy, cast, or model, however accurate, however exquisite, can convey the impression of tenderness and sweetness, the divine and peculiar charm of the original. After dinner we walked in the grounds of the Cascine,--a dairy farm belonging to the grand Duke, just without the gates of Florence. The promenade lies along the bank of the river, and is sheltered and beautiful. We saw few native Italians, but great numbers of English walking and riding. The day was as warm, as sunny, as brilliant as the first days of September in England. To-night, after resting a little, I went out to view the effect of the city and surrounding scenery, by moonlight. It is not alone the brilliant purity of the skies and atmosphere, nor the peculiar character of the scenery which strikes a stranger; but here art harmonizes with nature: the style of the buildings, their flat projecting roofs, white walls, balconies, colonnades and statues, are all set off to advantage by the radiance of an Italian moon. I walked across the first bridge, from which I had a fine view of the Ponte della Trinità, with its graceful arches and light balustrade, touched with the sparkling moonbeams and relieved by dark shadow: then I strolled along the quay in front of the Corsini palace, and beyond the colonnade of the Uffizi, to the last of the four bridges; on the middle of which I stood and looked back upon the city--(how justly styled the Fair!)--with all its buildings, its domes, its steeples, its bridges, and woody hills and glittering convents, and marble villas, peeping from embowering olives and cypresses; and far off the snowy peaks of the Apennines, shining against the dark purple sky: the whole blended together in one delicious scene of shadowy splendour. After contemplating it with a kind of melancholy delight, long enough to get it by heart, I returned homewards. Men were standing on the wall along the Arno, in various picturesque attitudes, fishing, after the Italian fashion, with singular nets suspended to long poles; and as I saw their dark figures between me and the moonlight, and elevated above my eye, they looked like colossal statues. I then strayed into the Piazza del Gran Duca. Here the rich moonlight, streaming through the arcade of the gallery, fell directly upon the fine Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini; and illuminating the green bronze, touched it with a spectral and supernatural beauty. Thence I walked round the equestrian statue of Cosmo, and so home over the Ponte Alla Carrajo. _Nov. 11._--I spent about two hours in the gallery, and for the first time saw the Niobe. This statue has been for a long time a favourite of my imagination, and I approached it, treading softly and slowly, and with a feeling of reverence; for I had an impression that the original Niobe would, like the original Venus, surpass all the casts and copies I had seen both in beauty and expression: but apparently expression is more easily caught than delicacy and grace, and the grandeur and pathos of the attitude and grouping easily copied--for I think the best casts of the Niobe are accurate counterparts of the original; and at the first glance I was capriciously disappointed, because the statue did not _surpass_ my expectations. It should be contemplated from a distance. It is supposed that the whole group once ornamented the pediment of a temple--probably the temple of Diana or Latona. I once saw a beautiful drawing by Mr. Cockerell, of the manner in which he supposed the whole group was distributed. Many of the figures are rough and unfinished at the back, as if they had been placed on a height, and viewed only in front. In the same room with the Niobe is a head which struck me more--the _Alexandre mourant_. The title seemed to me misapplied; for there is something indignant and upbraiding, as well as mournful, in the expression of this magnificent head. It is undoubtedly Alexander--but Alexander reproaching the gods--or calling upon Heaven for new worlds to conquer. I visited also the gallery of Bronzes: it contains, among other master-pieces, the aërial Mercury of John of Bologna, of which we see such a multiplicity of copies. There is a conceit in perching him upon the bluff cheeks of a little Eolus: but what exquisite lightness in the figure!--how it mounts, how it floats, disdaining the earth! On leaving the gallery, I sauntered about; visited some churches, and then returned home depressed and wearied: and in this melancholy humour I had better close my book, lest I be tempted to write what I could not bear to see written. _Sunday._--At the English ambassador's chapel. To attend public worship among our own countrymen, and hear the praises of God in our native accents, in a strange land, among a strange people; where a different language, different manners, and a different religion prevail, affects the mind, or at least ought to affect it;--and deeply too: yet I cannot say that I felt devout this morning. The last day I visited St. Mark's, when I knelt down beside the poor weeping girl and her dove-basket, my heart was touched, and my prayers, I humbly trust, were not unheard: to-day, in that hot close crowded room, among those fine people flaunting in all the luxury of dress, I felt suffocated, feverish, and my head ached--the clergyman too---- * * * * * Samuel Rogers paid us a long visit this morning. He does not look as if the suns of Italy had _revivified_ him--but he is as _amiable_ and amusing as ever. He talked long, _et avec beaucoup d'onction_, of ortolans and figs; till methought it was the very poetry of epicurism; and put me in mind of his own suppers-- "Where blushing fruits through scatter'd leaves invite, Still clad in bloom and veiled in azure light. The wine as rich in years as Horace sings;" and the rest of his description, worthy of a poetical Apicius. Rogers may be seen every day about eleven or twelve in the Tribune, seated opposite to the Venus, which appears to be the exclusive object of his adoration; and gazing, as if he hoped, like another Pygmalion, to animate the statue; or rather perhaps that the statue might animate _him_. A young Englishman of fashion, with as much talent as espieglerie, placed an epistle in verse between the fingers of the statue, addressed to Rogers; in which the goddess entreats him not to come there _ogling_ every day;--for though "partial friends might deem him still alive," she knew by his looks that he had come from the other side of the Styx; and retained her _antique_ abhorrence of the spectral dead, etc. etc. She concluded by beseeching him, if he could not desist from haunting her with his _ghostly_ presence, at least to spare her the added misfortune of being be-rhymed by his muse. Rogers, with equal good nature and good sense, neither noticed these lines nor withdrew his friendship and intimacy from the writer. * * * * * Carlo Dolce is not one of my favourite masters. There is a cloying sweetness in his style, a general want of power which wearies me: yet I brought away from the Corsini Palace to-day an impression of a head by Carlo Dolce (La Poesia), which I shall never forget. Now I recall the picture, I am at a loss to tell where lies the charm which has thus powerfully seized on my imagination. Here are no "eyes upturned like one inspired"--no distortion--no rapt enthusiasm--no Muse full of the God;--but it is a head so purely, so divinely intellectual, so heavenly sweet, and yet so penetrating,--so full of sensibility, and yet so unstained by earthly passion--so brilliant, and yet so calm--that if Carlo Dolce had lived in our days, I should have thought he intended it for the personified genius of Wordsworth's poetry. There is such an individual reality about this beautiful head, that I am inclined to believe the tradition, that it is the portrait of one of Carlo Dolce's daughters who died young:--and yet "Did ever mortal mixture of earth's mould Breathe such divine, enchanting ravishment?" * * * * * _Nov. 15._--Our stay at Florence promises to be far gayer than either Milan or Venice, or even Paris; more diversified by society, as well as affording a wider field of occupation and amusement. Sometimes in the long evenings, when fatigued and over-excited, I recline apart on the sofa, or bury myself in the recesses of a _fauteuil_; when I am aware that my mind is wandering away to forbidden themes, I force my attention to what is going forward; and often see and hear much that is entertaining, if not improving. People are so accustomed to my pale face, languid indifference and, what M---- calls, my _impracticable_ silence, that after the first glance and introduction, I believe they are scarcely sensible of my presence: so I sit, and look, and listen, secure and harboured in my apparent dullness. The flashes of wit, the attempts at sentiment, the affectation of enthusiasm, the absurdities of folly, and the blunders of ignorance; the contrast of characters and the clash of opinions, the scandalous anecdotes of the day, related with sprightly malice, and listened to with equally malicious avidity,--all these, in my days of health and happiness, had power to surprise, or amuse, or provoke me. I could mingle _then_ in the conflict of minds; and hear my part with smiles in the social circle; though the next moment, perhaps, I might contemn myself and others: and the personal scandal, the characteristic tale, the amusing folly, or the malignant wit, were effaced from my mind-- ----"Like forms with chalk Painted on rich men's floors for one feast night." Now it is different: I can smile yet, but my smile is in pity, rather than in mockery. If suffering has subdued my mind to seriousness, and perhaps enfeebled its powers, I may at least hope that it has not soured or imbittered my temper:--if what could once _amuse_, no longer amuses,--what could once _provoke_ has no longer power to irritate: thus my loss may be improved into a gain--_car tout est bien, quand tout est mal_. It is sorrow which makes our experience; it is sorrow which teaches us to feel properly for ourselves and for others. We must feel deeply, before we can think rightly. It is not in the tempest and storm of passions we can reflect,--but afterwards when _the waters have gone over our soul_; and like the precious gems and the rich merchandize which the wild wave casts on the shore out of the wreck it has made--such are the thoughts left by retiring passions. Reflection is the result of feeling; from that absorbing, heart-rending compassion for oneself (the most painful sensation, _almost_, of which our nature is capable), springs a deeper sympathy for others; and from the sense of our own weakness, and our own self-upbraiding, arises a disposition to be indulgent--to forbear--and to forgive--so at least it ought to be. When once we have shed those inexpressibly bitter tears, which fall unregarded, and which we forget to wipe away, O how we shrink from inflicting pain! how we shudder at unkindness!--and think all harshness even in thought, only another name for cruelty! These are but common-place truths, I know, which have often been a thousand times better expressed. Formerly I heard them, read them, and thought I believed them: now I feel them; and feeling, I utter them as if they were something new.--Alas! the lessons of sorrow are as old as the world itself. To-day we have seen nothing new. In the morning I was ill: in the afternoon we drove to the Cascina; and while the rest walked, I spread my shawl upon the bank and basked like a lizard in the sunshine. It was a most lovely day, a summer-day in England. In this paradise of a country, the common air, and earth, and skies, seem happiness enough. While I sat to-day, on my green bank--languid, indeed, but free from pain--and looked round upon a scene which has lost its novelty, but none of its beauty,--where Florence, with its glittering domes and its back-ground of sunny hills, terminated my view on one side, and the Apennines, tinted with rose colour and gold, bounded it on the other, I felt not only pleasure, but a deep thankfulness that such pleasures were yet left to me. Among the gay figures who passed and repassed before me, I remarked a benevolent but rather heavy-looking old gentleman, with a shawl hanging over his arm, and holding a parasol, with which he was gallantly shading a little plain old woman from the November sun. After them walked two young ladies, simply dressed; and then followed a tall and very handsome young man, with a plain but elegant girl hanging on his arm. This was the Grand Duke and his family; with the Prince of Carignano, who has lately married one of his daughters. Two servants in plain drab liveries, followed at a considerable distance. People politely drew on one side as they approached; but no other homage was paid to the sovereign, who thus takes his walk in public almost every day. Lady Morgan is merry at the expense of the Grand Duke's taste for brick and mortar: but monarchs, like other men, must have their amusements; some invent uniforms, some stitch embroidery;--and why should not this good-natured Grand Duke amuse himself with his trowel if he likes it? As to the Prince of Carignano, I give him up to her lash--_le traître_--but perhaps he thought he was doing right: and at all events there are not flatterers wanting, to call his perfidy patriotism. * * * * * I am told that Florence retains its reputation of being the most devout capital in Italy, and that here love, music, and devotion hold divided empire, or rather are _tria juncta in uno_. The liberal patronage and taste of Lord Burghersh, contribute perhaps to make music so much a _passion_ as it is at present. Magnelli, the Grand Duke's Maestra di Cappella, and director of the Conservatorio, is the finest tenor in Italy. I have the pleasure of hearing him frequently, and think the purity of his taste at least equal to the perfection of his voice; rare praise for a singer in these "most brisk and giddy-paced times." He gave us last night the beautiful recitative which introduces Desdemona's song in Othello-- "Nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria!" and the words, the music, and the divine pathos of the man's voice combined, made me feel--as I thought I never could have felt again. TO ---- As sounds of sweetest music, heard at eve, When summer dews weep over languid flowers, When the still air conveys each touch, each tone, However faint--and breathes it on the ear With a distinct and thrilling power, that leaves Its memory long within the raptur'd soul.-- --Even _such_ thou art to me!--and thus I sit And feel the harmony that round thee lives, And breathes from every feature. Thus I sit-- And when most quiet--cold--or silent--_then_ Even then, I feel each word, each look, each tone! There's not an accent of that tender voice, There's not a day-beam of those sunbright eyes, Nor passing smile, nor melancholy grace, Nor thought half utter'd, feeling half betray'd Nor glance of kindness,--no, nor gentlest touch Of that dear hand, in amity extended, That e'er was lost to me;--that treasur'd well, And oft recall'd, dwells not upon my soul Like sweetest music heard at summer's eve! Yesterday we visited the church of San Lorenzo, the Laurentian library, and the Pietra Dura manufactory, and afterwards spent an hour in the Tribune. In a little chapel in the San Lorenzo are Michel Angelo's famous statues, the Morning, the Noon, the Evening, and the Night. I looked at them with admiration rather than with pleasure; for there is something in the severe and overpowering style of this master, which affects me disagreeably, as beyond my feeling, and above my comprehension. These statues are very ill disposed for effect: the confined _cell_ (such it seemed) in which they are placed is so strangely disproportioned to the awful and massive grandeur of their forms. There is a picture by Michel Angelo, considered a chef-d'oeuvre, which hangs in the Tribune, to the right of the Venus: now if all the connaisseurs in the world, with Vasari at their head, were to harangue for an hour together on the merits of this picture, I might submit in silence, for I am no connoisseur; but that it is a disagreeable, a hateful picture, is an opinion which fire could not melt out of me. In spite of Messieurs les Connaisseurs, and Michel Angelo's fame, I would die in it at the stake: for instance, here is the Blessed Virgin, not the "Vergine Santa, d'ogni grazia piena," but a Virgin, whose brick-dust coloured face, harsh unfeminine features, and muscular, masculine arms, give me the idea of a washerwoman, (con rispetto parlando!) an infant Saviour with the proportions of a giant: and what shall we say of the nudity of the figures in the back-ground; profaning the subject and shocking at once good taste and good sense? A little farther on, the eye rests on the divine Madre di Dio of Correggio: what beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love, and humble adoration are blended in the look and attitude with which she bends over her infant! Beyond it hangs the Madonna del Cardellino of Raffaelle: what heavenly grace, what simplicity, what saint-like purity, in the expression of that face, and that exquisite mouth! And from these must I turn back, on pain of being thought an ignoramus, to admire the coarse perpetration of Michel Angelo--because it is Michel Angelo's? But I speak in ignorance.[F] To return to San Lorenzo. The chapel of the Medici, begun by Ferdinand the First, where coarse brickwork and plaster mingle with marble and gems, is still unfinished and likely to remain so: it did not interest me. The fine bronze sarcophagus, which encloses the ashes of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and of his brother Giuliano, assassinated by the Pazzi, interested me far more. While I was standing carelessly in front of the high altar, I happened to look down, and under my feet were these words, "TO COSMO THE VENERABLE, THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY." I moved away in haste, and before I had decided to my own satisfaction upon Cosmo's claims to the gratitude and veneration of posterity, we left the church. At the Laurentian library we were edified by the sight of some famous old manuscripts, invaluable to classical scholars. To my unlearned eyes the manuscript of Petrarch, containing portraits of himself and Laura, was more interesting. Petrarch is hideous--but I was pleased with the head of Laura, which in spite of the antique dryness and stiffness of the painting, has a soft and delicate expression not unlike one of Carlo Dolce's Madonnas. Here we saw Galileo's forefinger, pointing up to the skies from a white marble pedestal; and exciting more derision than respect. At the Pietra Dura, notwithstanding the beauty and durability of some of the objects manufactured, the result seemed to me scarce worth the incredible time, patience, and labour required in the work. _Par exemple_, six months' hard labour spent upon a butterfly in the lid of a snuff-box seems a most disproportionate waste of time. Thirty workmen are employed here at the Grand Duke's expense; for this manufacture, like that of the Gobelins at Paris, is exclusively carried on for the sovereign. _Nov. 20._--I am struck in this place with grand beginnings and mean endings. I have not yet seen a finished church, even the Duomo has no façade. Yesterday we visited the Palazzo Mozzi to see Benvenuto's picture, "The Night after the Battle of Jena." Then several churches--the Santa Croce, which is hallowed ground: the Annonciata, celebrated for the frescos of Andrea del Sarto; and the Carmine, which pleased me by the light elegance of its architecture, and its fine alto-relievos in white marble. In this church is the chapel of the Madonna del Carmele, painted by Masuccio, and the most ancient frescos extant: they are curious rather than beautiful, and going to decay. To-day we visited the school of the Fine Arts: it contains a very fine and ample collection of casts after the antique; and some of the works of modern artists and students are exhibited. Were I to judge from the specimens I have seen here and elsewhere, I should say that a cold, glaring, hard _tea-tray_ style prevails in painting, and a still worse taste, if possible, in sculpture. No soul, no grandeur, no simplicity; a meagre insipidity in the conception, a nicety of finish in the detail; affectation instead of grace, distortion instead of power, and prettiness instead of beauty. Yet the artists who execute these works, and those who buy them, have free access to the marvels of the gallery, and the treasures of the Pitti Palace. Are they sans eyes, sans souls, sans taste, sans every thing, but money and self-conceit? _Nov. 22._--Our mornings, however otherwise occupied, are generally concluded by an hour in the gallery or at the Pitti Palace; the evenings are spent in the Mercato Nuovo, in the workshops of artists, or at the Cascina. To-day at the gallery I examined the Dutch school and the Salle des Portraits, and ended as usual with the Tribune. The Salle des Portraits contains a complete collection of the portraits of painters down to the present day. In general their respective countenances are expressive of their characters and style of painting. Poor Harlow's picture, painted by himself, is here. The Dutch and Flemish painters (in spite of their exquisite pots and pans, and cabbages and carrots, their birch-brooms, in which you can count every twig, and their carpets, in which you can reckon every thread) do not interest me; their landscapes too, however natural, are mere Dutch nature (with some brilliant exceptions), fat cattle, clipped trees, boors, and windmills. Of course I am not speaking of Vandyke, nor of Rubens, he that "in the colours of the rainbow lived," nor of Rembrandt, that king of clouds and shadows; but for mine own part, I would give up all that Mieris, Netscher, Teniers, and Gerard Douw ever produced, for one of Claude's Eden-like creations, or one of Guido's lovely heads--or merely for the pleasure of looking at Titian's Flora once a day, I would give a whole gallery of Dutchmen, if I had them. In the daughter of Herodias, by Leonardo da Vinci, there is the same eternal face he always paints, but with a peculiar expression--she turns away her head with the air of a fine lady, whose senses are shocked by the sight of blood and death, while her heart remains untouched either by remorse or pity. His ghastly Medusa made me shudder while it fascinated me, as if in those loathsome snakes, writhing and glittering round the expiring head, and those abhorred and fiendish abominations crawling into life, there still lurked the fabled spell which petrified the beholder. Poor Medusa! was this the guerdon of thy love? and were those the tresses which enslaved the ocean's lord? Methinks that in this wild mythological fiction, in the terrific vengeance which Minerva takes for her profaned temple, and in the undying snakes which for ever hiss round the head of her victim--there is a deep moral, if woman would lay it to her heart. In Guercino's Endymion, the very mouth is asleep: in his Sybil the very eyes are prophetic, and glance into futurity. The boyish, but divine St. John, by Raffaelle, did not please me so well as some of his portraits and Madonnas; his Leo the Tenth, for instance, his Julius the Second, or even his Fornarina: and I may observe here, that I admire Titian's taste much more than Raffaelle's, _en fait de maîtresse_. The Fornarina is a mere _femme du peuple_, a coarse virago, compared to the refined, the exquisite La Manto, in the Pitti Palace. I think the Flora must have been painted from the same lovely model, as far as I can judge from compared recollections, for I have no authority to refer to. The former is the most elegant, and the latter the most poetical female portrait I ever saw. At Titian's Venus in the Tribune, one hardly ventures to look up; it is the perfection of earthly loveliness, as the Venus de' Medici is all ideal--all celestial beauty. In the multiplied copies and engravings of this picture I see every where the bashful sweetness of the countenance, and the tender languid repose of the figure are made coarse, or something worse: degraded, in short, into a character altogether unlike the original. I say nothing of the Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti; which is not a collection so much as a _selection_ of the most invaluable gems and masterpieces of art. The imagination dazzled and bewildered by excellence can scarcely make a choice--but I think the Madonna Della Seggiola of Raffaelle, Allori's magnificent Judith, Guido's Cleopatra, and Salvator's Catiline, dwell most upon my memory. * * * * * _Nov. 24._--After dinner, we drove to the beautiful gardens of the Villa Strozzi, on the Monte Ulivetto, and the evening we spent at the Cocomero, where we saw a detestable opera, capitally acted, and heard the most vile, noisy, unmeaning music, sung to perfection. _Nov. 26._--Yesterday we spent some hours at Morghen's gallery, looking over his engravings; and afterwards examined the bronze gates of the Baptistery, which Michel Angelo used to call the gates of Paradise. We then ascended the Campanile or Belfry Tower to see the view from its summit. Florence lay at our feet, diminished to a model of itself, with its walls and gates, its streets and bridges, palaces and churches, all and each distinctly visible; and beyond, the Val d'Arno with its amphitheatre of hills, its villas, and its vineyards--classical Fesole, with its ruined castle, and Monte Ulivetto, with its diadem of cypresses; luxuriant nature and graceful art, blending into one glorious picture, which no smoky vapours, no damp exhalations, blotted and discoloured; but all was serenely bright and fair, gay with moving life, and rich with redundant fertility. "O dell' Etruria gran Città Reina, D'arti e di studj e di grand' or feconda; Cui tra quanto il sol guarda, e 'l mar circonda, Ogn' altra in pregio di belta s' inchina: Monti superbi, la cui fronte alpina Fa di sè contra i venti argine e sponda: Valli beate, per cui d'onda in onda L'Arno con passo signoril cammina: Bei soggiorni ove par ch' abbiansi eletto Le grazie il seggio, e, come in suo confine, Sia di natura il bel tutto ristretto, &c." Filicaja will be pardoned for his hyperboles by all who remember that he was himself a Florentine. * * * * * 28.--"Corinne" I find is a fashionable _vade mecum_ for sentimental travellers in Italy; and that I too might be _à la mode_, I brought it from Molini's to-day, with the intention of reading on the spot, those admirable and affecting passages which relate to Florence; but when I began to cut the leaves, a kind of terror seized me, and I threw it down, resolved not to open it again. I know myself weak--I feel myself unhappy; and to find my own feelings reflected from the pages of a book, in language too deeply and eloquently true, is not good for me. I want no helps to admiration, nor need I kindle my enthusiasm at the torch of another's mind. I can suffer enough, feel enough, think enough, without this. Not being well, I spent a long morning at home, and then strayed into the church of the Santo Spirito, which is near our hotel. There is in this church a fine copy of Michel Angelo's Pietà, which a monk, whom I met in the church, insisted was the original. But I believe the _originalissimo_ group is at Rome. There are also two fine pictures, a marriage of the Virgin, in a very sweet Guido-like style, and the woman taken in adultery. This church is the richest in paintings I have seen here. I remarked a picture of the Virgin said to be possessed of miraculous powers; and that part of it visible, is not destitute of merit as a painting; but some of her grateful devotees, having decorated her with a real blue silk gown, spangled with tinsel stars, and two or three crowns, one above another, of gilt foil, the effect is the oddest imaginable. As I was sitting upon a marble step, philosophizing to myself, and wondering at what seemed to me such senseless bad taste, such pitiable and ridiculous superstition, there came up a poor woman leading by the hand a pale and delicate boy, about four years old. She prostrated herself before the picture, while the child knelt beside her, and prayed for some time with fervour; she then lifted him up, and the mother and child kissed the picture alternately with great devotion; then making him kneel down and clasp his little hands, she began to teach him an Ave Maria, repeating it word for word, slowly and distinctly, so that I got it by heart too. Having finished their devotions, the mother put into the child's hands a piece of money, which she directed him to drop into a box, inscribed, "per i poveri vergognosi"--"for the bashful poor;" they then went their way. I was an unperceived witness of this little scene, which strongly affected me: the simple piety of this poor woman, though mistaken in its object, appeared to me respectable; and the Virgin, in her sky-blue brocade and her gilt tiara, no longer an object to ridicule. I returned home rejoicing in kinder, gentler, happier thoughts; for though I may wish these poor people a purer worship, yet, as Wordsworth says somewhere, far better than I could express it-- "Rather would I instantly decline To the traditionary sympathies Of a most rustic ignorance,-- This rather would I do, than see and hear The repetitions wearisome of sense Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place." The Ave Maria which I learnt, or rather _stole_ from my poor woman, pleases me by its simplicity. AVE MARIA. Dio ti salvi, O Maria, piena di grazia! Il Signore è teco! tu sei benedetta fra le donne, e benedetto è il frutto del tuo seno, GESU! Santa Maria! madre di Dio! Prega per noi peccatori, adesso, e nell 'ora della nostra morte! e cosi sia.[G] * * * * * _Sunday._--Attended divine service at the English ambassador's, in the morning, and in the evening, not being well enough to go to the Cascine, I remained at home. I sat down at the window and read Foscolo's beautiful poem, "I sepoleri:" the subject of my book, and the sight of Alfieri's house meeting my eye whenever I looked up, inspired the idea of visiting the Santa Croce again, and I ventured out unattended. The streets, and particularly the Lung' Arno, were crowded with gay people in their holiday costumes. Not even our Hyde Park, on a summer Sunday, ever presented a more lively spectacle or a better dressed mob. I was often tempted to turn back rather than encounter this moving multitude; but at length I found my way to the Santa Croce, which presented a very different scene. The service was over; and a few persons were walking up and down the aisles, or kneeling at different altars. In a chapel on the other side of the cloisters, they were chanting the Via Crucis; and the blended voices swelled and floated round, then died away, then rose again, and at length sunk into silence. The evening was closing fast, the shadows of the heavy pillars grew darker and darker, the tapers round the high altar twinkled in the distance like dots of light, and the tombs of Michel Angelo, of Galileo, of Machiavelli, and Alfieri, were projected from the deep shadow in indistinct formless masses: but I needed not to see them to image them before me; for with each and all my fancy was familiar. I spent about an hour walking up and down--abandoned to thoughts which were melancholy, but not bitter. All memory, all feeling, all grief, all pain were swallowed up in the sublime tranquillity which was within me and around me. How could I think of myself, and of the sorrow which swells at my impatient heart, while all of genius that could die, was sleeping round me; and the spirits of the glorious dead--they who rose above their fellow men by the might of intellect--whose aim was excellence, the noble end "that made ambition virtue," were, or seemed to me, present?--and if those tombs could have opened their ponderous and marble jaws, what histories of sufferings and persecution, wrongs and wretchedness, might they not reveal! Galileo-- "chi vide Sotto l'etereo padiglion rotarsi Piu mondi, e il sole iradiarli immoto." pining in the dungeons of the inquisition; Machiavelli, "quel grande, Che temprando lo scettro a'regnatori, Gil allor ne sfronda----" tortured and proscribed; Michel Angelo, persecuted by envy; and Alfieri perpetually torn, as he describes himself, by two furies--"Ira e Malinconia"-- "La mente e il cor in perpetua lite." But they fulfilled their destinies: inexorable Fate will be avenged upon the favourites of Heaven and nature. I can remember but one instance in which the greatly gifted spirit was not also the conspicuously wretched mortal--our own divine Shakspeare--and of him we know but little. In some books of travels I have met with, Boccaccio, Aretino, and Guicciardini, are mentioned among the illustrious dead of the Santa Croce. The second, if his biographers say true, was a wretch, whose ashes ought to have been scattered in the air. He was buried I believe at Venice--or no matter where. Boccaccio's tomb _is_, or _was_, at Certaldo; and Guicciardini's--I forget the name of the church honoured by his remains--but it is not the Santa Croce. The finest figure on the tomb of Michel Angelo is architecture. It should be contemplated from the left, to be seen to advantage. The effect of Alfieri's monument depends much on the position of the spectator: when viewed in front, the figure of Italy is very heavy and clumsy; and in no point of view has it the grace and delicacy which Canova's statues generally possess. There is a most extraordinary picture in this church representing God the Father supporting a dead Christ, by Cigoli, a painter little known in England, though I have seen some admirable pictures of his in the collections here: his style reminds me of Spagnoletto's. * * * * * Our departure is fixed for Wednesday next: and though I know that change and motion are good for me, yet I dread the fatigue and excitement of travelling; and I shall leave Florence with regret. For a melancholy invalid like myself, there cannot be a more delightful residence: it is gay without tumult--quiet, yet not dull. I have not mingled in society; therefore cannot judge of the manners of the people. I trust they are not exactly what Forsyth describes: with all his taste he sometimes writes like a caustic old bachelor; and on the Florentines he is peculiarly severe. We leave our friend L. behind for a few days, and our Venice acquaintance V. will be our _compagnon de voyage_ to Rome. Of these two young men, the first amuses me by his follies, the latter rather fatigues _de trop de raison_. The first talks too much, the latter too little: the first speaks, and speaks egregious nonsense; the latter never says any thing beyond common-place: the former always makes himself ridiculous, and the latter never makes himself particularly agreeable: the first is (_con rispetto parlando_) a great fool, and the latter would be pleasanter were he less wise. Between these two _opposites_, I was standing this evening on the banks of the Arno, contemplating a sunset of unequalled splendour. L. finding that enthusiasm was his cue, played off various sentimental antics, peeped through his fingers, threw his head on one side, exclaiming, "Magnificent, by Jove! grand! grandissimo! It just reminds me of what Shakspeare says: 'Fair Aurora'--I forget the rest." V. with his hands in his pockets, contemplated the superb spectacle--the mountains, the valley, the city flooded with a crimson glory, and the river flowing at our feet like molten gold--he gazed on it all with a look of placid satisfaction, and then broke out--"Well! this does one's heart good!" L. (I owe him this justice) is not the author of the famous blunder which is now repeated in every circle. I am assured it was our neighbour, Lord G. though I scarce believe it, who on being presented with the Countess of Albany's card, exclaimed--"The Countess of Albany! Ah!--true--I remember: wasn't she the widow of Charles the Second, who married Ariosto?" There is in this celebrated _beveu_, a glorious confusion of times and persons, beyond even my friend L.'s capacity. * * * * * The whole party are gone to the Countess of Albany's to-night to take leave: that being, as L. says, "the correct thing." Our notions of correctness vary with country and climate. What Englishwoman at Florence would not be _au désespoir_, to be shut from the Countess of Albany's parties--though it is a known and indisputable fact, that she was never married to Alfieri? A propos d'Alfieri--I have just been reading a selection of his tragedies--his Filippo, the Pazzi, Virginia, Mirra; and when I have finished Saul, I will read no more of them for some time. There is a superabundance of harsh energy, and a want of simplicity, tenderness, and repose throughout, which fatigues me, until admiration becomes an effort instead of a pleasurable feeling. Marochesi, a celebrated tragedian, who, Minutti says, understood "_la vera filosofia della comica_," used to recite Alfieri's tragedies with him or to him. Alfieri was himself a bad actor and declaimer. I am surprised that the tragedy of Mirra should be a great favourite on the stage here. A very young actress, who made her debût in this character, enchanted the whole city by the admirable manner in which she performed it; and the piece was played for eighteen nights successively; a singular triumph for an actress, though not uncommon for a singer. In spite of its many beauties and the artful management of the story; it would, I think, be as impossible to make an English audience endure the Mirra, as to find an English actress who would exhibit herself in so revolting a part. * * * * * _Tuesday._--Our last day at Florence. I walked down to the San Lorenzo this morning early, and made a sketch of the sarcophagus of Lorenzo de' Medici. Afterwards we spent an hour in the gallery, and bid adieu to the Venus-- "O bella Venere! Che sola sei, Piacer degli uomini E degli dei!" When I went to take a last look of Titian's Flora, I found it removed from its station, and an artist employed in copying it. I could have envied the lady for whom this copy was intended; but comforted myself with the conviction that no hireling dauber in water-colours could do justice to the heavenly original, which only wants motion and speech to live indeed. We then spent nearly two hours in the Pitti Palace; and the court having lately removed to Pisa, we had an opportunity of seeing Canova's Venus, which is placed in one of the Grand Duke's private apartments. She stands in the centre of a small cabinet, pannelled with mirrors, which reflect her at once in every possible point of view. This statue was placed on the pedestal of the Venus de' Medicis during her forced residence at Paris; and is justly considered as the triumph of modern art: but though a most beautiful creature, she is not a goddess. I looked in vain for that full divinity, that ethereal _something_ which breathes round the Venus of the Tribune. In another private room are two magnificent landscapes by Salvator Rosa. Every good catholic has a portrait of the Virgin hung at the head of his bed; partly as an object of devotion, and partly to scare away the powers of evil: and for this purpose the Grand Duke has suspended by his bed-side one of the most beautiful of Raffaelle's Madonnas. Truly, I admire the good taste of his piety, though it is rather selfish thus to appropriate such a gem, when the merest daub would answer the same purpose. It was only by secret bribery I obtained a peep at this picture, as the room is not publicly shown. The lower classes at Florence are in general ill-looking; nor have I seen one handsome woman since I came here. Their costume too is singularly unbecoming; but there is an airy cheerfulness and vivacity in their countenances, and a civility in their manners which is pleasing to a stranger. I was surprised to see the women, even the servant girls, decorated with necklaces of real pearl of considerable beauty and value. On expressing my surprise at this to a shopkeeper's wife, she informed me that these necklaces are handed down as a kind of heir-loom from mother to daughter; and a young woman is considered as dowered who possesses a handsome chain of pearl. If she has no hope of one in reversion, she buys out of her little earnings a pearl at a time, till she has completed a necklace. The style of swearing at Florence is peculiarly elegant and classical; I hear the vagabonds in the street adjuring Venus and Bacchus; and my shoemaker swore "by the aspect of Diana," that he would not take less than ten pauls for what was worth about three;--yet was the knave forsworn. * * * * * JOURNEY TO ROME. SOFFRI E TACI. Ye empty shadows of unreal good! Phantoms of joy!--too long--too far pursued, Farewell! no longer will I idly mourn O'er vanished hopes that never can return; No longer pine o'er hoarded griefs--nor chide The cold vain world, whose falsehood I have tried. _Me_ never more can sweet affections move, Nor smiles awake to confidence and love: To _me_, no more can disappointment spring, Nor wrong, nor scorn one bitter moment bring! With a firm spirit--though a breaking heart, Subdu'd to act through life my weary part, Its closing scenes in patience I await, And by a stern endurance, conquer fate. _December 8._--In beginning another volume, I feel almost inclined to throw the last into the fire; as in writing it I have generally begun the record of one day by tearing away the half of what was written the day before: but though it contains much that I would rather forget, and some things written under the impression of pain, and sick and irritable feelings, I will not yet _ungratefully_ destroy it. I have frequently owed to my little Diary not amusement only, but consolation. It has gradually become not only the faithful depository of my recollections, but the confidante of my feelings, and the sole witness of my tears. I know not if this be wise: but if it be folly, I have the comfort of knowing that a mere act of my will destroys for ever the record of my weakness; and meantime a confidante whose mouth is sealed with a patent lock and key, and whom I can put out of existence in a single moment, is not dangerous; so, as Lord Byron elegantly expresses it, "_Here goes_." We left Florence this morning; and saw the sun rise upon a country so enchantingly beautiful, that I dare not trust myself to description; but I felt it, and still feel it--almost in my heart. The blue cloudless sky, the sun pouring his beams upon a land, which even in this wintry season smiles when others languish--the soft varied character of the scenery, comprising every species of natural beauty--the green slope, the woody hill, the sheltered valley,--the deep dales, into which we could just peep, as the carriage whirled us too rapidly by--the rugged fantastic rocks, cultivated plains, and sparkling rivers, and, beyond all, the chain of the Apennines with light clouds floating across them, or resting in their recesses--all this I saw, and felt, and shall not forget. I write this at Arezzo, the birth-place of Petrarch, of Redi, of Pignotti, and of that Guido who discovered Counter-point. Whether Arezzo is remarkable for any thing else, I am too sleepy to recollect: and as we depart early to-morrow morning, it would only tantalize me to remember. We arrived here late, by the light of a most resplendent moon. If such is this country in winter, what must it be in summer? _9th, at Perugia._--All the beauties of natural scenery have been combined with historical associations, to render our journey of to-day most interesting; and with a mind more at ease, nothing has been wanting to render this one of the most delightful days I have spent abroad. At Cortona, Hannibal slept the night before the battle of Thrasymene. Soon after leaving this town on our left, we came in view of the lake, and the old tower on its banks. There is an ancient ruin on a high eminence to the left, which our postilion called the "Forteressa di Annibale il Carthago." Further on, the Gualandra hills seem to circle round the lake; and here was the scene of the battle. The channel of the Sanguinetto, which then ran red with the best blood of Rome and Carthage, was dry when we crossed it-- "And hooting boys might dry-shod pass, And gather pebbles from the naked ford." While we traversed the field of battle at a slow pace, V. who had his Livy in his pocket, read aloud his minute description of the engagement; and we could immediately point out the different places mentioned by the historian. The whole valley and the hills around are now covered with olive woods; and from an olive tree which grew close to the edge of the lake, I snatched a branch as we passed by, and shall preserve it--an emblem of peace, from the theatre of slaughter. The whole landscape as we looked back upon it from a hill on this side of the Casa del Rano, was exceedingly beautiful. The lake seemed to slumber in the sunshine; and Passignano jutting into the water, with its castellated buildings, the two little woody islands, and the undulating hills enclosing the whole, as if to shut it from the world, made it look like a scene fit only to be peopled by fancy's fairest creations, if the remembrance of its blood-stained glories had not started up, to rob it of half its beauty. Mrs. R---- compared it to the lake of Geneva; but in my own mind, I would not admit the comparison. The lake of Geneva stands alone in its beauty; for there the sublimest and the softest features of nature are united: there the wonderful, the wild, and the beautiful, blend in one mighty scene; and love and heroism, poetry and genius, have combined to hallow its shores. The lake of Perugia is far more circumscribed: the scenery around it wants grandeur and extent; though so beautiful in itself, that if no comparison had been made, no want would have been suggested: and on the bloody field of Thrasymene I looked with curiosity and interest unmingled with pleasure. I have long survived my sympathy with the fighting heroes of antiquity. All this I thought as we slowly walked up the hill, but I was silent as usual: as Jaques says, "I can think of as many matters as other men, but I praise God, and make no boast of it." We arrived here too late to see any thing of the city. _Dec. 10th, at Terni._--The ridiculous _contre-temps_ we sometimes meet with would be matter of amusement to me, if they did not affect others. And in truth, as far as paying well, and scolding well, can go, it is impossible to travel more magnificently, more _à la milor Anglais_ than we do: but there is no controlling fate; and here, as our evil destinies will have it, a company of strolling actors had taken possession of the best quarters before our arrival; and our accommodations are, I must confess, tolerably bad. When we left Perugia this morning, the city, throned upon its lofty eminence, with its craggy rocks, its tremendous fortifications, and its massy gateways, had an imposing effect. Forwards, we looked over a valley, which so resembled a lake, the hills projecting above the glittering white vapour having the appearance of islands scattered over its surface, that at the first glance I was positively deceived; and all my topographical knowledge, which I had conned on the map the night before, completely put to the rout. As the day advanced, this white mist sank gradually to the earth, like a veil dropped from the form of a beautiful woman, and nature stood disclosed in all her loveliness. Trevi, on its steep and craggy hill, detached from the chain of mountains, looked beautiful as we gazed up at it, with its buildings mingled with rocks and olives-- I had written thus far, when we were all obliged to decamp in haste to our respective bed-rooms; as it is found necessary to convert our salon into a dormitory. I know I shall be tired, and very tired to-morrow,--therefore add a few words in pencil, before the impressions now fresh on my mind are obscured. After Trevi came the Clitumnus with its little fairy temple; and we left the carriage to view it from below, and drink of the classic stream. The temple (now a chapel) is not much in itself, and was voted in bad taste by some of our party. To me the tiny fane, the glassy river, more pure and limpid than any fabled or famous fountain of old, the beautiful hills, the sunshine, and the associations connected with the whole scene, were enchanting; and I could not at the moment descend to architectural criticism. The road to Spoleto was a succession of olive grounds, vineyards, and rich woods. The vines with their skeleton boughs looked wintry and miserable; but the olives, now in full fruit and foliage, intermixed with the cypress, the ilex, the cork tree, and the pine, clothed the landscape with a many-tinted robe of verdure. While sitting in the open carriage at Spoleto, waiting for horses, I saw one of that magnificent breed of "milk white steers," for which the banks of the Clitumnus have been famed from all antiquity, led past me gaily decorated, to be baited on a plain without the city. As the noble creature, serene and unresisting, paced along, followed by a wild, ferocious-looking, and far more brutal rabble, I would have given all I possessed to redeem him from his tormentors: but it was in vain. As we left the city, we heard his tremendous roar of agony and rage echo from the rocks. I stopped my ears, and was glad when we were whirled out of hearing. The impression left upon my nerves by this rencontre, makes me dislike to remember Spoleto: yet I believe it is a beautiful and interesting place. Hannibal, as I recollect, besieged this city, but was bravely repulsed. I could say much more of the scenes and the feelings of to-day; but my pencil refuses to mark another letter. * * * * * _Dec. 11th, at Civita Castellana._--I could not write a word to-night in the salon, because I wished to listen to the conversation of two intelligent travellers, who, arriving after us, were obliged to occupy the same apartment. Our accommodations here are indeed deplorable altogether. After studying the geography of my bed, and finding no spot thereon, to which Sancho's couch of pack-saddles and pummels would not be a bed of down in comparison, I ordered a fresh faggot on my hearth: they brought me some ink in a gally-pot--_invisible_ ink--for I cannot see what I am writing; and I sit down to scribble, _pour me désennuyer_. This morning we set off to visit the Falls of Terni (la cascata di Marmore) in two carriages and four: O such equipages!--such ratlike steeds! such picturesque accoutrements! and such poetical looking guides and postilions, ragged, cloaked, and whiskered!--but it was all consistent: the wild figures harmonized with the wild landscape. We passed a singular fortress on the top of a steep insulated rock, which had formerly been inhabited by a band of robbers and their families, who were with great difficulty, and after a regular siege, dislodged by a party of soldiers, and the place dismantled. In its present ruined state, it has a very picturesque effect; and though the presence of the banditti would no doubt have added greatly to the romance of the scene, on the present occasion we excused their absence. We visited the falls both above and below, but unfortunately we neither saw them from the best point of view, nor at the best season. The body of waters is sometimes ten times greater, as I was assured--but can scarce believe it possible. The words "Hell of waters," used by Lord Byron, would not have occurred to me while looking at this cataract, which impresses the astonished mind with an overwhelming idea of power, might, magnificence, and impetuosity; but blends at the same time all that is most tremendous in sound and motion, with all that is most bright and lovely in forms, in colours, and in scenery. As I stood close to the edge of the precipice, immediately under the great fall, I felt my respiration gone: I turned giddy, almost faint, and was obliged to lean against the rock for support. The mad plunge of the waters, the deafening roar, the presence of a power which no earthly force could resist or control, struck me with an awe almost amounting to terror. A bright sunbow stood over the torrent, which, seen from below, has the appearance of a luminous white arch bending from rock to rock. The whole scene was--but how can I say what it was? I have exhausted my stock of fine words; and must be content with silent recollections, and the sense of admiration and wonder unexpressed. Below the fall, an inundation which took place a year ago, undermined and carried away part of the banks of the Nera, at the same time laying open an ancient Roman bridge, which had been buried for ages. The channel of the river and the depth of the soil must have been greatly altered since this bridge was erected. When we returned to the inn at Terni, and while the horses were putting to, I took up a volume of Eustace's tour, which some traveller had accidentally left on the table; and turning to the description of Terni, read part of it, but quickly threw down the book with indignation, deeming all his verbiage the merest nonsense I had ever met with: in fact, it _is_ nonsense to attempt to image in words an individual scene like this. When we had made out our description as accurately as possible, it would do as well for any other cataract in the world: we can only combine rocks, wood, and water, in certain proportions. A good picture may give a tolerable idea of a particular scene or landscape: but no picture, no painter, not Ruysdael himself, can give a just idea of a cataract. The lifeless, silent, unmoving image is there: but where is the thundering roar, the terrible velocity, the glory of refracted light, the eternity of sound, and infinity of motion, in which essentially its effect consists? In the valley beneath the Falls of Terni, there is a beautiful retired little villa, which was once occupied by the late Queen Caroline: and in the gardens adjoining it, we gathered oranges from the trees ourselves for the first time. After passing Mount Soracte, of classical fame, we took leave of the Apennines; having lived amongst them ever since we left Bologna. The costume of this part of the country is very gay and picturesque: the women wear a white head-dress formed of a square kerchief, which hangs down upon the shoulders, and is attached to the hair by a silver pin: a boddice half laced, and decorated with knots of ribbon, and a short scarlet petticoat complete their attire. Between Perugia and Terni I did not see one woman without a coral necklace; and those who have the power, load themselves with trinkets and ornaments. _Rome, December 12._--The morning broke upon us so beautifully between Civita Castellana and Nevi, that we lauded our good fortune, and anticipated a glorious approach to the "Eternal City." We were impatient to reach the heights of Baccano; from which, at the distance of fifteen miles, we were to view the cross of St. Peter's glittering on the horizon, while the postilions rising in their stirrups, should point forward with exultation, and exclaim "ROMA!" But, O vain hope! who can controul their fate? just before we reached Baccano, impenetrable clouds enveloped the whole Campagna. The mist dissolved into a drizzling rain; and when we entered the city, it poured in torrents. Since we left England, this is only the third time it has rained while we were on the road; it seems therefore unconscionable to murmur. But to lose the first view of Rome! the first view of the dome of St. Peter's! no--that lost moment will never be retrieved through our whole existence. We found it difficult to obtain suitable accommodation for our numerous _cortège_, the Hotel d'Europe, and the Hotel de Londres being quite full: and for the present we are rather indifferently lodged in the Albergo di Parigi. So here we are, in ROME! where we have been for the last five hours, and have not seen an inch of the city beyond the dirty pavement of the Via Santa Croce; where an excellent dinner cooked _à l'Anglaise_, a blazing fire, a drawing-room snugly carpeted and curtained, and the rain beating against our windows, would almost persuade us that we are in London; and every now and then, it is with a kind of surprise that I remind myself that I am really in Rome. Heaven send us but a fine day to-morrow! 13.--The day arose as beautiful, as brilliant, as cloudless, as I could have desired for the first day in Rome. About seven o'clock, and before any one was ready for breakfast, I walked out; and directing my steps by mere chance to the left, found myself in the Piazza di Spagna and opposite to a gigantic flight of marble stairs leading to the top of a hill. I was at the summit in a moment; and breathless and agitated by a thousand feelings, I leaned against the obelisk, and looked over the whole city. I knew not where I was: nor among the crowded mass of buildings, the innumerable domes and towers, and vanes and pinnacles, brightened by the ascending sun, could I for a while distinguish a single known object; for my eyes and my heart were both too full: but in a few minutes my powers of perception returned; and in the huge round bulk of the castle of St. Angelo, and the immense façade and soaring cupola of St. Peter's, I knew I could not be mistaken. I gazed and gazed as if I would have drunk it all in at my eyes: and then descending the superb flight of steps rather more leisurely than I had ascended, I was in a moment at the door of our hotel. The rest of the day I wish I could forget--I found letters from England on the breakfast table-- * * * * * Until dinner time were we driving through the narrow dirty streets at the mercy of a stupid _laquais de place_, in search of better accommodations, but without success: and, on the whole, I fear I shall always remember too well the disagreeable and painful impressions of my first day in Rome. _Dec. 18._--A week has now elapsed, and I begin to know and feel Rome a little better than I did. The sites of the various buildings, the situations of the most interesting objects, and the bearings of the principal hills, the Capitol, the Palatine, the Aventine, and the Æsquiline, have become familiar to me, assisted in my perambulations by an excellent plan. I have been disappointed in nothing, for I expected that the general appearance of modern Rome would be mean; and that the impression made by the ancient city would be melancholy; and I had been, unfortunately, too well prepared, by previous reading, for all I see, to be astonished by any thing except the Museum of the Vatican. I entered St. Peter's expecting to be struck dumb with admiration, and accordingly it was so. A feeling of vastness filled my whole mind, and made it disagreeable, almost impossible to speak or exclaim: but it was a style of grandeur, exciting rather than oppressive to the imagination, nor did I experience any thing like that sombre and reverential awe, I have felt on entering one of our Gothic minsters. The interior of St. Peter's is all airy magnificence, and gigantic splendour; light and sunshine pouring in on every side; gilding and gay colours, marbles and pictures, dazzling the eye above, below, around. The effect of the whole has not diminished in a second and third visit; but rather grows upon me. I can never utter a word for the first ten minutes after I enter the church. For the Museum of the Vatican, I confess I was totally unprepared; and the first and second time I walked through the galleries, I was so amazed--so intoxicated, that I could not fix my attention upon any individual object, except the Apollo, upon which, as I walked along confused and lost in wonder and enchantment, I stumbled accidentally, and stood spell-bound. Gallery beyond gallery, hall within hall, temple within temple, new splendours opening at every step! of all the creations of luxurious art, the Museum of the Vatican may alone defy any description to do it justice, or any fancy to conceive the unimaginable variety of its treasures. When I remember that the French had the audacious and sacrilegious vanity to snatch from these glorious sanctuaries the finest specimens of art, and hide them in their villanous old gloomy Louvre, I am confounded. I have been told and can well believe, that the whole _giro_ of the galleries exceed two miles. I have not yet studied the frescos of Raffaelle sufficiently to feel all their perfection; and should be in despair at my own dullness, were I not consoled by the recollection of Sir Joshua Reynolds. At present one of Raffaelle's divine Virgins delights me more than all his camere and logie together; but I can look upon them with due veneration, and grieve to see the ravages of time and damp. * * * * * 19.--Last night we took advantage of a brilliant full moon to visit the Coliseum by moonlight; and if I came away disappointed of the pleasure I had expected, the fault was not in me nor in the scene around me. In its sublime and heart-stirring beauty, it more than equalled, it surpassed all I had anticipated--but--(there must always be a _but!_ always in the realities of this world something to disgust;) it happened that one or two gentlemen joined our party--young men too, and classical scholars, who perhaps thought it fine to affect a well-bred _nonchalance_, a fashionable disdain for all romance and enthusiasm, and amused themselves with _quizzing_ our guide, insulting the gloom, the grandeur, and the silence around them, with loud impertinent laughter at their own poor jokes; and I was obliged to listen, sad and disgusted, to their empty and tasteless and misplaced flippancy. The young barefooted friar, with his dark lanthorn, and his black eyes flashing from under his cowl, who acted as our cicerone, was in picturesque unison with the scene; but--more than one murder having lately been committed among the labyrinthine recesses of the ruin, the government has given orders that every person entering after dusk should be attended by a guard of two soldiers. These fellows therefore necessarily walked close after our heels, smoking, spitting, and spluttering German. Such were my companions, and such was my _cortège_. I returned home vowing that while I remained at Rome, nothing should induce me to visit the Coliseum by moonlight again. To-day I was standing before the Laocoon with Rogers, who remarked that the absence of all parental feeling in the aspect of Laocoon, his self-engrossed indifference to the sufferings of his children (which is noticed and censured, I think, by Dr. Moore) adds to the pathos, if properly considered, by giving the strongest possible idea of that physical agony which the sculptor intended to represent. It may be so, and I thought there was both truth and _tacte_ in the poet's observation. The Perseus of Canova does not please me so well as his Paris; there is more simplicity and repose in the latter statue, less of that theatrical air which I think is the common fault of Canova's figures. It is absolutely necessary to look at the Perseus before you look at the Apollo, in order to do the former justice. I have gazed with admiration at the Perseus for minutes together, then walked from it to the Apollo and felt instantaneously, but could not have expressed, the difference. The first is indeed a beautiful statue, the latter "breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought," as if the sculptor had left a portion of his own soul within the marble to half animate his glorious creation. The want of this informing life is strongly felt in the Perseus, when contemplated after the Apollo. It is delightful when the imagination rises in the scale of admiration, when we ascend from excellence to perfection: but excellence after perfection is absolute inferiority; it sinks below itself, and the descent is so disagreeable and disappointing, that we can seldom estimate justly the object before us. We make comparisons involuntarily in a case where comparisons are odious. * * * * * The weather is cold here during the prevalence of the tramontana: but I enjoy the brilliant skies and the delicious purity of the air, which leaves the eye free to wander over a vast extent of space. Looking from the gallery of the Belvedere at sunset this evening, I clearly saw Tivoli, Albano, and Frascati, although all Rome and part of the Campagna lay between me and those towns. The outlines of every building, ruin, hill, and wood were so distinctly marked, and _stood out_ so brightly to the eye! and the full round moon, magnified through the purple vapour which floated over the Apennines, rose just over Tivoli, adding to the beauty of the scene. O Italy! how I wish I could transport hither all I love! how I wish I were well enough, happy enough, to enjoy all the lovely things I see! but pain is mingled with all I behold, all I feel: a cloud seems for ever before my eyes, a weight for ever presses down my heart. I know it is wrong to repine: and that I ought rather to be thankful for the pleasurable sensations yet spared to me, than lament that they are so few. When I take up my pen to record the impressions of the day, I sometimes turn within myself, and wonder how it is possible that amid the strife of feelings not all subdued, and the desponding of the heart, the mind should still retain its faculties unobscured, and the imagination all its vivacity and its susceptibility to pleasure,--like the beautiful sunbow I saw at the Falls of Terni, bending so bright and so calm over the verge of the abyss which toiled and raged below. * * * * * 22.--This morning was devoted to the Capitol, where the objects of art are ill arranged and too crowded: the lights are not well managed, and on the whole I could not help wishing, in spite of my veneration for the Capitol, that some at least among the divine master-pieces it contains could be transferred to the glorious halls of the Vatican, and shrined in temples worthy of them. The objects which most struck me were the dying Gladiator, the Antinous, the Flora, and the statue called (I know not on what authority) the Faun of Praxiteles. The dying Gladiator is the chief boast of the Capitol. The antiquarian Nibby insists that this statue represents a Gaul, that the sculpture is Grecian, that it formed part of a group on a pediment, representing the vengeance which Apollo took on the Gauls, when, under their king Brennus, they attacked the temple of Delphi: that the cord round the neck is a twisted chain, an ornament peculiar to the Gauls; and that the form of the shield, the bugles, the style of the hair, and the mustachios, all prove it to be a Gaul. I asked, "why should such faultless, such exquisite sculpture be thrown away upon a high pediment? the affecting expression of the countenance, the head 'bowed low and full of death,' the gradual failure of the strength and sinking of the form, the blood slowly trickling from his side--how could any spectator, contemplating it at a vast height, be sensible of these minute traits--the distinguishing perfections of this matchless statue?" It was replied, that many of the ancient buildings were so constructed, that it was possible to ascend and examine the sculpture above the cornice, and though some statues so placed were unfinished at the back, (for instance, some of the figures which belonged to the group of Niobe,) others (and he mentioned the Ægina marbles as an example) were as highly finished behind as before. I owned myself unwilling to consider the Gladiator a Gaul, but the reasoning struck me, and I am too unlearned to weigh the arguments he used, much less confute them. That the statue being of Grecian marble and Grecian sculpture must therefore have come from Greece, does not appear a conclusive argument, since the Romans commonly employed Greek artists: and as to the rest of the argument,--suppose that in a dozen centuries hence, the charming statue of Lady Louisa Russell should be discovered under the ruins of Woburn Abbey, and that by a parity of reasoning, the production of Chantrey's chisel should be attributed to Italy and Canova, merely because it is cut from a block of Carrara marble? we might smile at such a conclusion. Among the pictures in the gallery of the Capitol, the one most highly valued pleases me least of all--the Europa of Paul Veronese. The splendid colouring and copious fancy of this master can never reconcile me to his strange anomalies in composition, and his sins against good taste and propriety. One wishes that he had allayed the heat of his fancy with some cooling drops of discretion. Even his colouring so admired in general, has something florid and meretricious to my eye and taste. One of the finest pictures here is Domenichino's Cumean Sibyl, which, like all other masterpieces, defies the copyist and engraver. The Sibilla Persica of Guercino hangs a little to the left; and with her contemplative air, and the pen in her hand, she looks as if she were recording the effusions of her more inspired sister. The former is a chaste and beautiful picture, full of feeling and sweetly coloured; but the vicinity of Domenichino's magnificent creation throws it rather into shade. Two unfinished pictures upon which Guido was employed at the time of his death are preserved in the Capitol: one is the Bacchus and Ariadne, so often engraved and copied; the other, a single figure, the size of life, represents the Soul of the righteous man ascending to heaven. Had Guido lived to finish this divine picture, it would have been one of his most splendid productions; but he was snatched away to realize, I trust, in his own person, his sublime conception. The head alone is finished, or nearly so; and has a most extatic expression. The globe of the earth seems to sink from beneath the floating figure, which is just sketched upon the canvass, and has a shadowy indistinctness which to my fancy added to its effect. Guercino's chef-d'oeuvre, the Resurrection of Saint Petronilla, (a saint, I believe, of very hypothetical fame,) is also here; and has been copied in mosaic for St. Peters. A magnificent Rubens, the She Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus; a fine copy of Raffaelle's Triumph of Galatea by Giulo Romano; Domenichino's Saint Barbara, with the same lovely inspired eyes he always gives his female saints, and a long et cetera. From the Capitol we immediately drove to the Borghese palace, where I spent half an hour looking at the picture _called_ the Cumean Sibyl of Domenichino, and am more and more convinced that it is a Saint Cecilia and not a Sibyl. We have now visited the Borghese palace four times; and à-propos to pictures, I may as well make a few memoranda of its contents. It is not the most numerous, but it is by far the most valuable and select private gallery in Rome. Domenichino's Chase of Diana, with the two beautiful nymphs in the foreground, is a splendid picture. Titian's Sacred and Profane Love puzzles me completely: I neither understand the name nor the intention of the picture. It is evidently allegorical: but an allegory very clumsily expressed. The aspect of Sacred Love would answer just as well for Profane Love. What is that little cupid about, who is groping in the cistern behind? why does Profane Love wear gloves? The picture, though so provokingly obscure in its subject, is most divinely painted. The three Graces by the same master is also here; two heads by Giorgione, distinguished by all his peculiar depth of character and sentiment, some exquisite Albanos; one of Raffaelle's finest portraits--and in short, an endless variety of excellence. I feel my taste become more and more fastidious every day. * * * * * This morning we heard mass at the Pope's Chapel; the service was read by Cardinal Fesche, and the venerable old pope himself, robed and mitred _en grand costume_, was present. No females are allowed to enter without veils, and we were very ungallantly shut up behind a sort of grating, where, though we had a tolerable view of the ceremonial going forward, it was scarcely possible for us to be seen. Cardinal Gonsalvi sat so near us, that I had leisure and opportunity to contemplate the fine intellectual head and acute features of this remarkable man. I thought his countenance had something of the Wellesley cast. The Pope's Chapel is decorated in the most exquisite taste; splendid at once and chaste. There are no colours--the whole interior being white and gold. At an unfortunate moment, Lady Morgan's ludicrous description of the twisting and untwisting of the Cardinal's tails came across me, and made me smile very _mal à-propos_: it is certainly from the life. Whenever this lively and clever woman describes what she has actually seen with her own eyes, she is as accurately true as she is witty and entertaining. Her sketches after nature are admirable; but her observations and inferences are coloured by her peculiar and rather unfeminine habits of thinking. I never read her "_Italy_" till the other day, when L., whose valet had contrived to smuggle it into Rome, offered to lend it to me. It is one of the books most rigorously proscribed here; and if the Padre Anfossi or any of his satellites had discovered it in my hands, I should assuredly have been fined in a sum beyond what I should have liked to pay. We concluded the morning at St. Peter's, where we arrived in time for the anthem. * * * * * 23.--Our visit to the Barberini palace to-day was solely to view the famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci. Her appalling story is still as fresh in remembrance here, and her name and fate as familiar in the mouths of every class, as if instead of two centuries, she had lived two days ago. In spite of the innumerable copies and prints I have seen, I was more struck than I can express by the dying beauty of the Cenci. In the face the expression of heart-sinking anguish and terror is just not _too_ strong, leaving the loveliness of the countenance unimpaired; and there is a woe-begone negligence in the streaming hair and loose drapery which adds to its deep pathos. It is consistent too with the circumstances under which the picture is traditionally said to have been painted--that is, in the interval between her torture and her execution. A little daughter of the Princess Barberini was seated in the same room, knitting. She was a beautiful little creature; and as my eye glanced from her to the picture and back again, I fancied I could trace a strong family resemblance; particularly about the eyes, and the very peculiar mouth. I turned back to ask her whether she had ever been told that she was like _that_ picture? pointing to Cenci. She shook back her long curls, and answered with a blush and a smile, "Yes, often."[H] The Barberini Palace contains other treasures beside the Cenci. Poussin's celebrated picture of the Death of Germanicus, Raffaelle's Fornarina, inferior I thought to the one at Florence, and a St. Andrew by Guido, in his very best style of heads, "mild, pale, and penetrating;" besides others which I cannot at this moment recall. * * * * * 24.--Yesterday, after chapel, I walked through part of the Vatican; and then, about vesper-time, entered St. Peter's, expecting to hear the anthem: but I was disappointed. I found the church as usual crowded with English, who every Sunday convert St. Peter's into a kind of Hyde Park, where they promenade arm in arm, show off their finery, laugh, and talk aloud: as if the size and splendour of the edifice detracted in any degree from its sacred character. I was struck with a feeling of disgust; and shocked to see this most glorious temple of the Deity metamorphosed into a mere theatre. Mr. W. told me this morning, that in consequence of the shameful conduct of the English, in pressing in and out of the chapel, occupying all the seats, irreverently interrupting the service, and almost excluding the natives, the anthem will not be sung in future. This is not the first time that the behaviour of the English has created offence, in spite of the friendly feeling which exists towards us, and the allowances which are made for our national character. Last year the pope objected to the indecent custom of making St. Peter's a place of fashionable rendezvous, and notified to Cardinal Gonsalvi his desire that English ladies and gentlemen should not be seen arm in arm walking up and down the aisles, during and after divine service. The cardinal, as the best means of proceeding, spoke to the Duchess of Devonshire, who signified the wishes of the Papal Court to a large party, assembled at her house. The hint so judiciously and so delicately given, was at the time attended to, and during a short interval the offence complained of ceased. New comers have since recommenced the same course of conduct: and in fact, nothing _could_ be worse than the exhibition of gaiety and frivolity, gallantry and coquetterie at St. Peter's yesterday. I almost wish the pope may interfere, and with rigour; though, individually, I should lose a high gratification, if our visits to St. Peter's were interdicted. It is surely most ill-judged and unfeeling (to say nothing of the _profanation_, for such it is), to show such open contempt for the Roman Catholic religion in its holiest, grandest temple, and under the very eyes of the head of that church. I blushed for my countrywomen. * * * * * On Christmas Eve we went in a large party to visit some of the principal churches, and witness the celebration of the Nativity; one of the most splendid ceremonies of the Romish Church. We arrived at the chapel of Monte Cavallo about half-past nine; but the pope being ill and absent, nothing particular was going forward; and we left it to proceed to the San Luigi dei Francesi, where we found the church hung from the floor to the ceiling with garlands of flowers, blazing with light, and resounding with heavenly music: but the crowd was intolerable, the people dirty, and there was such an effluence of strong perfumes, in which garlic predominated, that our physical sensations overcame our curiosity: and we were glad to make our escape. We then proceeded to the church of the Ara Celi, built on the site of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and partly from its ruins. The scene here from the gloomy grandeur and situation of the church, was exceedingly fine: but we did not stay long enough to see the concluding procession, as we were told it would be much finer at the Santa Maria Maggiore; for there the _real_ manger which had received our Saviour at his birth was deposited: and this inestimable relic was to be displayed to the eyes of the devout; and with a waxen figure laid within (called here Il Bambino), was to be carried in procession round the church, "with pomp, with music, and with triumphing." The _real_ cradle was a temptation not to be withstood: and to witness this signal prostration of the human intellect before ignorant and crafty superstition, we adjourned to the Santa Maria Maggiore. For processions and shows I care very little, but not for any thing, not for all I suffered at the moment, would I have missed the scene which the interior of the church exhibited; for it is impossible that any description could have given me the faintest idea of it. This most noble edifice, with its perfect proportions, its elegant Ionic columns, and its majestic simplicity, appeared transformed, for the time being, into the temple of some Pagan divinity. Lights and flowers, incense and music, were all around: and the spacious aisles were crowded with the lowest classes of the people, the inhabitants of the neighbouring hills, and the peasantry of the Campagna, who with their wild ruffianlike figures and picturesque costumes, were lounging about, or seated at the bases of pillars, or praying before the altars. How I wished to paint some of the groups I saw! but only Rembrandt could have done them justice. We remained at the Santa Maria Maggiore till four o'clock, and no procession appearing, our patience was exhausted. I nearly fainted on my chair from excessive fatigue; and some of our party had absolutely laid themselves down on the steps of an altar, and were fast asleep; we therefore returned home completely knocked up by the night's dissipation. 27.--"Come," said L. just now, as he drew his chair to the fire, and rubbed his hands with great complacency, "I think we've worked pretty hard to-day; three palaces, four churches--besides odds and ends of ruins we dispatched in the way: to say nothing of old Nibby's lectures in the morning about the Volces, the Saturnines, the Albanians, and the other old Romans--by Jove! I almost fancied myself at school again---- 'Armis vitrumque canter,' as old Virgil or somebody else says. So now let's have a little écarté to put it all out of our heads:--for my brains have turned round like a windmill, by Jove! ever since I was on the top of that cursed steeple on the capitol," etc., etc. I make a resolution to myself every morning before breakfast, that I will be prepared with a decent stock of good-nature and forbearance, and not laugh at my friend L.'s absurdities; but in vain are my amiable intentions: his blunders and his follies surpass all anticipation, as they defy all powers of gravity. I console myself with the conviction that such is his slowness of perception, he does not see that he is the _butt_ of every party; and such his obtuseness of feeling, that if he did see it, he would not mind it; but he is the heir to twenty-five thousand a year, and therefore, as R. said, he can afford to be laughed at. We "dispatched," as L. says, a good deal to-day, though I did not "work quite so hard" as the rest of the party: in fact, I was obliged to return home from fatigue, after having visited the Doria and Sciarra Palaces (the last for the second time), and the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The Doria Palace contains the largest collection of pictures in Rome: but they are in a dirty and neglected condition, and many of the best are hung in the worst possible light: added to this there is such a number of bad and indifferent pictures, that one ought to visit the Doria Gallery half a dozen times merely to select those on which a cultivated taste would dwell with pleasure. Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Joanna of Naples, is considered one of the most valuable pictures in the collection. It exhibits the same cast of countenance which prevails through all his female heads, a sort of sentimental simpering affectation which is very disagreeable, and not at all consistent with the character of Joanna. I was much more delighted by some magnificent portraits by Titian and Rubens; and by a copy of the famous antique picture, the Nozze Aldobrandini, executed in a kindred spirit by the classic pencil of Poussin. The collection at the Sciarra Palace is small but very select. The pictures are hung with judgment, and well taken care of. The Magdalen, which is considered one of Guido's masterpieces, charmed me most: the countenance is heavenly; though full of ecstatic and devout contemplation, there is in it a touch of melancholy, "all sorrow's softness charmed from its despair," which is quite exquisite: and the attitude, and particularly the turn of the arm, are perfectly graceful: but why those odious turnips and carrots in the foreground? They certainly do not add to the sentiment and beauty of the picture.--Leonardo da Vinci's Vanity and Modesty, and Caravaggio's Gamblers, both celebrated pictures in very different styles, are in this collection. I ought not to forget Raffaelle's beautiful portrait of a young musician who was his intimate friend. The Doria and Sciarra palaces contain the only Claudes I have seen in Rome. Since the acquisition of the Altieri Claudes, we may boast of possessing the finest productions of this master in England. I remember but one solitary Claude in the Florentine gallery; and I see none here equal to those at Lord Grosvenor's and Angerstein's. We visited the church of San Pietro in Viscoli, to see Michel Angelo's famous statue of Moses,--of which, who has not heard? I must confess I never was so disappointed by any work of art as I was by this statue, which is easily accounted for. In the first place, I had not seen any model or copy of the original; and, secondly, I _had_ read Zappi's sublime sonnet, which I humbly conceive does rather more than justice to its subject. The fine opening-- "Chi e costui che in dura pietra scolto Siede _Gigante_"-- gave me the impression of a colossal and elevated figure: my surprise, therefore, was great to see a sitting statue, not much larger than life, and placed nearly on the level of the pavement; so that, instead of looking up at it, I almost looked down upon it. The "Doppio raggio in fronte," I found in the shape of a pair of horns, which, at the first glance, gave something quite Satanic to the head, which disgusted me. When I began to recover from this first disappointment--although my eyes were opened gradually to the sublimity of the attitude, the grand forms of the drapery, and the lips, which unclose as if about to speak--I still think that Zappi's sonnet (his acknowledged chef-d'oeuvre) is a more sublime production than the chef-d'oeuvre it celebrates. The mention of Zappi reminds me of his wife, the daughter of Carlo Maratti, the painter. She was so beautiful that she was her father's favourite model for his Nymphs, Madonnas, and Vestal Virgins; and to her charms she added virtue, and to her virtue uncommon musical and literary talents. Among her poems, there is a sonnet addressed to a lady, once beloved by her husband, beginning "Donna! che tanto al mio sol piacesti," which is one of the most graceful, most feeling, most delicate compositions I ever read. Zappi celebrates his beautiful wife under the name of Clori, and his first mistress under that of Filli: to the latter he has addressed a sonnet, which turns on the same thought as Cowley's well known song, "Love in thine eyes." As they both lived about the same time, it would be difficult to tell which of the two borrowed from the other; probably they were both borrowers from some elder poet. The characteristics of Zappi's style, are tenderness and elegance; he occasionally rises to sublimity; as in the sonnet on the Statue of Moses, and that on Good Friday. He never emulates the flights of Guido or Filicaja, but he is more uniformly graceful and flowing than either; his happy thoughts are not spun out too far,--and his _points_ are seldom mere _concetti_. SONETTO. DI GIAMBATTISTA ZAPPI. Amor s'asside alia mia Filli accanto, Amor la segue ovunque i passi gira: In lei parla, in lei tace, in lei sospira, Anzi in lei vive, ond'ella ed ei può tanto. Amore i vezzi, amor le insegna il canto; E se mai duolsi, o se pur mai s'adira, Da lei non parte amor, anzi se mira Amor ne le belle ire, amor nel pianto. Se avvien che danzi in regolato errore, Darle il moto al bel piede, amor riveggio, Come l'auretto quando muove un fiore. Le veggio in fronte amor come in suo seggio, Sul crin, negli occhi, su le labbra amore, Sol d'intorno al suo cuore, amor non veggio.[I] After being confined to the house for three days, partly by indisposition, and partly by a vile sirocco, which brought, as usual, vapours, clouds, and blue devils in its train--this most lovely day tempted me out; and I walked with V. over the Monte Cavallo to the Forum of Trajan. After admiring the view from the summit of the pillar, we went on towards the Capitol, which presented a singular scene: the square and street in front, as well as the immense flight of steps, one hundred and fifty in number, which lead to the church of the Ara Celi, were crowded with men, women, and children, all in their holiday dresses. It was with difficulty we made our way through them, though they very civilly made way for us, and we were nearly a quarter of an hour mounting the steps, so dense was the multitude ascending and descending, some on their hands and knees out of extra-devotion. At last we reached the door of the church, where we understood, from the exclamations and gesticulations of those of whom we inquired, something extraordinary was to be seen. On one side of the entrance was a puppet show, on the other a band of musicians, playing "Di tanti palpati." The interior of the church was crowded to suffocation; and all in darkness, except the upper end, where upon a stage brilliantly and very artificially lighted by unseen lamps, there was an exhibition in wax-work, as large as life, of the Adoration of the Shepherds. The Virgin was habited in the court dress of the last century, as rich as silk and satin, gold lace, and paste diamonds could make it, with a flaxen wig, and high-heeled shoes. The infant Saviour lay in her lap, his head encircled with rays of gilt wire, at least two yards long. The shepherds were very well done, but the sheep and dogs best of all; I believe they were the real animals stuffed. There was a distant landscape, seen between the pasteboard trees, which was well painted, and from the artful disposition of the light and perspective, was almost a deception--but by a blunder very consistent with the rest of the show, it represented a part of the Campagna of Rome. Above all was a profane representation of that Being, whom I dare scarcely allude to, in conjunction with such preposterous vanities, encircled with saints, angels, and clouds; the whole got up very like a scene in a pantomime, and accompanied by music from a concealed orchestra, which was intended, I believe, to be sacred music, but sounded to me like some of Rossini's airs. In front of the stage there was a narrow passage divided off, admitting one person at a time, through which a continued file of persons moved along, who threw down their contributions as they passed, bowing and crossing themselves with great devotion. It would be impossible to describe the ecstasies of the multitude, the lifting up of hands and eyes, the string of superlatives--the bellissimos, santissimos, gloriosissimos, and maravigliosissimos, with which they expressed their applause and delight. I stood in the back-ground of this strange scene, supported on one of the long-legged chairs which V---- placed for me against a pillar, at once amazed, diverted, and disgusted by this display of profaneness and superstition, till the heat and crowd overcame me, and I was obliged to leave the church. I shall never certainly forget the "Bambino" of the Ara Celi: for though the exhibition I saw afterwards at the San Luigi (where I went to look at Domenichino's fine pictures) surpassed what I have just described, it did not so much surprise me. Something in the same style is exhibited in almost every church, between Christmas day and the Epiphany. During our examination of Trajan's Forum to-day, I learnt nothing new, except that Trajan levelled part of the Quirinal to make room for it. The ground having lately been cleared to the depth of about twelve feet, part of the ancient pavement has been discovered, and many fragments of columns set upright: pieces of frieze and broken capitals are scattered about. The pillar, which is now cleared to the base, stands in its original place, but not, as it is supposed, at its original level, for the Romans generally raised the substructure of their buildings, in order to give them a more commanding appearance. The antiquarians here are of opinion that both the pavement of the Basilica and the base of the pillar were raised above the level of the ancient street, and that there is a flight of steps, still concealed, between the pillar and the pavement in front. The famous Ulpian Library was on each side of the Basilica, and the Forum differed from other Forums in not being an open space surrounded by buildings, but a building surrounded by an open space. * * * * * _Dec 31.-Jan. 1._--That hour in which we pass from one year to another, and begin a new account with ourselves, with our fellow creatures, and with God, must surely bring some solemn and serious thoughts to the bosoms of the most happy and most unreflecting among the triflers on this earth. What then must it be to me? The first hour, the first moment of the expiring year was spent in tears, in distress, in bitterness of heart--as it began so it ends. Days, and weeks, and months, and seasons, came and "passed like visions to their viewless home," and brought no change. Through the compass of the whole year I have not enjoyed one single day--I will not say of happiness--but of health and peace; and what I have endured has left me little to learn in the way of suffering. Would to heaven that as the latest minutes now ebb away while I write, memory might also pass away! Would to heaven that I could efface the last year from the series of time, hide it from myself, bury it in oblivion, stamp it into annihilation, that none of its dreary moments might ever rise up again to haunt me, like spectres of pain and dismay! But this is wrong--I feel it is--and I repent, I recall my wish. That great Being, to whom the life of a human creature is a mere point, but who has bestowed on his creatures such capacities of feeling and suffering, as extend moments to hours and days to years, inflicts nothing in vain, and if I have suffered much, I have also learned much. Now the last hour is past--another year opens; may it bring to those I love all I wish them in my heart! to me it can bring nothing. The only blessing I hope from time is _forgetfulness_--my only prayer to heaven is--_rest, rest, rest_. _Jan. 4._--We _dispatched_, as L** would say, a good deal to-day: we visited the Temple of Vesta, the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmadino, the Temple of Fortune, the Ponte Rotto, and the house of Nicolo Rienzi: all these lie together in a dirty, low, and disagreeable part of Rome. Thence we drove to the Pyramid of Caius Cestus.--As we know nothing of this Caius Cestus, but that he lived, died, and was buried, it is not possible to attach any fanciful or classical interest to his tomb, but it is an object of so much beauty in itself, and from its situation so striking and picturesque, that it needs no additional interest. It is close to the ancient walls of Rome, which stretch on either side as far as the eye can reach in huge and broken masses of brickwork, fragments of battlements and buttresses, overgrown in many parts with shrubs and even trees. Around the base of the Pyramid lies the burying-ground of strangers and heretics. Many of the monuments are elegant, and their frail materials and diminutive forms are in affecting contrast with the lofty and solid pile which towers above them. The tombs lie around in a small space "amicably close," like brothers in exile, and as I gazed I felt a kindred feeling with all; for I, too, am a wanderer, a stranger and a heretic; and it is probable that my place of rest may be among them. Be it so! for methinks this earth could not afford a more lovely, a more tranquil, or more sacred spot. I remarked one tomb, which is an exact model, and in the same material with the sarcophagus of Cornelius Scipio, in the Vatican. One small slab of white marble bore the name of a young girl, an only child, who died at sixteen, and "left her parents disconsolate:" another elegant and simple monument bore the name of a young painter of genius and promise, and was erected "by his companions and fellow students as a testimony of their affectionate admiration and regret." This part of old Rome is beautiful beyond description, and has a wild, desolate, and poetical grandeur, which affects the imagination like a dream.--The very air disposes one to reverie. I am not surprised that Poussin, Claude, and Salvator Rosa made this part of Rome a favourite haunt, and studied here their finest effects of colour, and their grandest combinations of landscape. I saw a young artist seated on a pile of ruins with his sketch book open on his knee, and his pencil in his hand--during the whole time we were there he never changed his attitude, nor put his pencil to the paper, but remained leaning on his elbow, like one lost in ecstasy. _Jan 5._--To-day we drove through the quarter of the Jews, called the Ghetta degli Ebrei. It is a long street enclosed at each end with a strong iron gate, which is locked by the police at a certain hour every evening (I believe at ten o'clock); and any Jew found without its precincts after that time, is liable to punishment and a heavy fine. The street is narrow and dirty, the houses wretched and ruinous, and the appearance of the inhabitants squalid, filthy, and miserable--on the whole, it was a painful scene, and one I should have avoided, had I followed my own inclinations. If this specimen of the effects of superstition and ignorance was depressing, the next was not less ridiculous. We drove to the Lateran: I had frequently visited this noble Basilica before, but on the present occasion we were to go over it _in form_, with the usual torments of laquais and ciceroni. I saw nothing new but the cloisters, which remain exactly as in the time of Constantine. They are in the very vilest style of architecture, and decorated with Mosaic in a very elaborate manner: but what most amused us was the collection of relics, said to have been brought by Constantine from the Holy Land, and which our cicerone exhibited with a sneering solemnity which made it very doubtful whether he believed himself in their miraculous sanctity. Here is the stone on which the cock was perched when it crowed to St. Peter, and a pillar from the Temple of Jerusalem, split asunder at the time of the crucifixion; it looks as if it had been _sawed_ very accurately in half from top to bottom; but this of course only renders it more miraculous. Here is also the column in front of Pilate's house, to which our Saviour was bound, and the very well where he met the woman of Samaria. All these, and various other relics, supposed to be consecrated by our Saviour's Passion, are carelessly thrown into the cloisters--not so the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, which are considered as the chief treasures in the Lateran, and are deposited in the body of the church in a rich shrine. The beautiful sarcophagus of red porphyry, which once stood in the Portico of the Pantheon, and contained the ashes of Agrippa, is now in the Corsini chapel here, and encloses the remains of some Pope Clement. The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which stands on the Capitol, was dug from the cloisters of the Lateran. The statue of Constantine in the portico was found in the baths of Constantine: it is in a style of sculpture worthy the architecture of the cloisters.--Constantine was the first Christian emperor, a glory which has served to cover a multitude of sins; it is indeed impossible to forget that he was the chosen instrument of a great and blessed revolution; but in other respects it is as impossible to look back to the period of Constantine without horror--an era when bloodshed and barbarism, and the general depravity of morals and taste seemed to have reached their climax. On leaving the Lateran, we walked to the Scala Santa, said to be the very flights of steps which led to the judgment hall at Jerusalem, and transported hither by the Emperor Constantine; but while the other relics which his pious benevolence bestowed on the city of Rome have apparently lost some of their efficacy, the Scala Santa is still regarded with the most devout veneration. At the moment of our approach, an elegant barouche drove up to the portico, from which two well-dressed women alighted, and pulling out their rosaries, began to crawl up the steps on their hands and knees, repeating a Paternoster and an Ave Maria on every step. A poor diseased beggar had just gone up before them, and was a few steps in advance. This exercise, as we are assured, purchases a thousand years of indulgence. The morning was concluded by a walk on the Mont Pincio. I did not know on that first morning after our arrival, when I ran up the Scalla della Trinità to the top of the Pincian hill, and looked around me with such transport, that I stood by mere chance on that very spot from which Claude used to study his sun sets, and his beautiful effects of evening. His house was close to me on the left, and those of Nicolo Poussin and Salvator Rosa a little beyond. Since they have been pointed out to me, I never pass from the Monte Pincio along the Via Felice without looking up at them with interest: such power has genius, "to hallow in the core of human hearts even the ruin of a wall." * * * * * _Jan. 6._--Sunday, at the English chapel, which was crowded to excess, and where it was at once cold and suffocating. We had a plain but excellent sermon, and the officiating clergyman, Mr. W., exhorted the congregation to conduct themselves with more decorum at St. Peter's, and to remember what was due to the temple of that God who was equally the God of all Christians. We afterwards went to St. Peter's; where the anthem was performed at vespers as usual, and the tenor of the Argentino sung. The music was indeed heavenly--but I did not enjoy it: for though the behaviour of the English was much more decent than I have yet seen it, the crowd round the chapel, the talking, pushing, whispering, and movement, were enough to disquiet and discomfort me; I withdrew, therefore, and walked about at a little distance, where I could just hear the swell of the organ. Such is the immensity of the building, that at the other side of the aisle the music is perfectly inaudible. 7.--Visited the Falconieri Palace to see Cardinal Fesche's gallery. The collection is large and contains many fine pictures, but there is such a _mélange_ of good, bad, and indifferent, that on the whole I was disappointed. L** attached himself to my side the whole morning--to benefit, as he said, by my "tasty remarks;" he hung so dreadfully heavy on my hands, and I was so confounded by the interpretations and explanations his ignorance required, that I at last found my patience nearly at an end. Pity he is so good-natured and so good-tempered, that one can neither have the comfort of heartily disliking him, nor find nor make the shadow of an excuse to shake him off! In the evening we had a gay party of English and foreigners: among them---- * * * * * A REPLY TO A COMPLAINT Trust not the ready smile! 'Tis a delusive glow-- For cold and dark the while The spirits flag below. With a beam of departed joy, The eye may kindle yet: As the cloud in yon wintry sky, Still glows with the sun that is set, The cloud will vanish away-- The sun while shine to morrow-- To me shall break no day On this dull night of sorrow! A REPLY TO A REPROACH. I would not that the world should know, How deep within my panting heart A thousand warmer feelings glow, Than word or look could e'er impart. I would not that the world should guess At aught beyond this outward show; What happy dreams in secret bless-- What burning tears in secret flow. And let them deem me cold or vain; --O there is one who thinks not so! In one devoted heart I reign, And what is all the rest below? 9.--We have had two days of truly English weather; cold, damp, and gloomy, with storms of wind and rain. I know not why, but there is something peculiarly deforming and discordant in bad weather here; and we are all rather stupid and depressed. To me, sunshine and warmth are substitutes for health and spirits; and their absence inflicts positive suffering. There is not a single room in our palazzetto which is weather-proof; and as to a good fire, it is a luxury unknown, but not unnecessary, in these regions. In such apartments as contain no fire-place, a stufa, or portable stove, is set, which diffuses little warmth, and renders the air insupportably close and suffocating. I witnessed a scene last night, which was a good illustration of that extraordinary indolence for which the Romans are remarkable. Our laquais Camillo suffered himself to be turned off, rather than put wood on the fire three times a-day; he would rather, he said, "starve in the streets than break his back by carrying burdens like an ass; and though he was miserable to displease the Onoratissimo Padrone, his first _duty_ was to take care of his own health, which, with the blessing of the saints, he was determined to do." R---- threw him his wages, repeating with great contempt the only word of his long speech he understood, "_Asino!_" "Sono Romano, io," replied the fellow, drawing himself up with dignity. He look his wages, however, and marched out of the house. The impertinence of this Camillo was sometimes amusing, but oftener provoking. He piqued himself on being a profound antiquarian, would confute Nibby, and carried Nardini in his pocket, to whom he referred on all occasions: yet the other day he had the impudence to assure us that Caius Cestus was an English Protestant, who was excommunicated by Pope Julius Cæsar; and took his Nardini out of his pocket to prove his assertion. V---- brought me to-day the "Souvenirs de Félicie," of Madame de Genlis, which amused me delightfully for a few hours. They contain many truths, many half or whole falsehoods, many impertinent things, and several very interesting anecdotes. They are written with all the graceful simplicity of style, and in that tone of lady-like feeling which distinguishes whatever she writes: but it is clear that though she represents these "Souvenirs" as mere extracts from her journal, they have been carefully composed or re-composed for publication, and were always intended to be seen. Now if my poor little Diary should ever be seen! I tremble but to think of it!--what egotism and vanity, what discontent--repining--caprice--should I be accused of?--neither perhaps have I always been just to others; _quand on sent, on réfléchit rarement_. Such strange vicissitudes of temper--such opposite extremes of thinking and feeling, written down at the moment, without noticing the intervening links of circumstances and impressions which led to them, would appear like detraction, if they should meet the eye of any indifferent person--but I think I have taken sufficient precautions against the possibility of such an exposure, and the only eyes which will ever glance over this blotted page, when the hand that writes it is cold, will read, not to _criticise_, but to _sympathise_. 10.--A lovely brilliant day, the sky without a cloud and the air as soft as summer. The carriages were ordered immediately after breakfast, and we sallied forth in high spirits--resolved as L** said, with his usual felicitous application of Shakspeare, "To take the tide in the affairs of men." The baths of Titus are on the Æsquiline; and nothing remains of them but piles of brickwork, and a few subterranean chambers almost choked with rubbish. Some fragments of exquisite arabesque painting are visible on the ceilings and walls; and the gilding and colours are still fresh and bright. The brickwork is perfectly solid and firm, and appeared as if finished yesterday. On the whole the impression on my mind was, that not the slow and gentle hand of time, but sudden rapine and violence had caused the devastation around us; and looking into Nardini on my return, I found that the baths of Titus were nearly entire in the thirteenth century, but were demolished with great labour and difficulty by the ferocious Senator Brancaleone, who, about the year 1257, destroyed an infinite number of ancient edifices, "per togliere ai Nobili il modo di fortificarsi." The ruins were excavated during the pontificate of Julius the Second, and under the direction of Raffaelle, who is supposed to have taken the idea of the arabesques in the Loggie of the Vatican, from the paintings here. We were shown the niche in which the Laocoon stood, when it was discovered in 1502. After leaving the baths, we entered the neighbouring church of San Pietro in Vincoli, to look again at the beautiful fluted Doric columns which once adorned the splendid edifice of Titus: and on this occasion we were shown the chest in which the fetters of St. Peter are preserved in a triple enclosure of iron, wood, and silver. My unreasonable curiosity not being satisfied by looking at the mere outside of this sacred coffer, I turned to the monk who exhibited it, and civilly requested that he would open it, and show us the miraculous treasure it contained. The poor man looked absolutely astounded and aghast at the audacity of my request, and stammered out, that the coffer was never opened, without a written order from his holiness the pope, and in the presence of a cardinal, and, that this favour was never granted to a heretic (con rispetto parlando); and with this excuse we were obliged to be satisfied. The church of San Martino del Monte is built on part of the substructure of the baths of Titus; and there is a door opening from the church, by which you descend into the ancient subterranean vaults. The small, but exquisite pillars, and the pavement, which is of the richest marbles, were brought from the Villa of Adrian at Tivoli. The walls were painted in fresco by Nicolo and Gaspar Poussin, and were once a celebrated study for young landscape painters; almost every vestige of colouring is now obliterated by the damp which streams down the walls. There are some excellent modern pictures in good preservation, I think by Carluccio. This church, though not large, is one of the most magnificent we have yet seen, and the most precious materials are lavished in profusion on every part. The body of Cardinal Tomasi is preserved here, embalmed in a glass case. It is exhibited conspicuously, and in my life I never saw (or smelt) anything so abominable and disgusting. The rest of the morning was spent in the Vatican. I stood to-day for some time between those two great masterpieces, the Transfiguration of Raffaelle, and Domenichino's Communion of St. Jerome. I studied them, I examined them figure by figure, and then in the ensemble, and mused upon the different effects they produce, and were designed to produce, until I thought I could decide to my own satisfaction on their respective merits. I am not ignorant that the Transfiguration is pronounced the "grandest picture in the world," nor so insensible to excellence as to regard this glorious composition without all the admiration due to it. I am dazzled by the flood of light which bursts from the opening heavens above, and affected by the dramatic interest of the group below. What splendour of colour! What variety of expression! What masterly grouping of the heads! I see all this--but to me Raffaelle's picture wants unity of interest: it is two pictures in one: the demoniac boy in the foreground always shocks me; and thus from my peculiarity of taste the pleasure it gives me is not so perfect as it ought to be. On the other hand, I never can turn to the Domenichino without being thrilled with emotion, and touched with awe. The story is told with the most admirable skill, and with the most exquisite truth and simplicity: the interest is one and the same; it all centres in the person of the expiring saint; and the calm benignity of the officiating priest is finely contrasted with the countenances of the group who support the dying form of St. Jerome: anxious tenderness, grief, hope, and fear, are expressed with such deep pathos and reality, that the spectator forgets admiration in sympathy; and I have gazed, till I could almost have fancied myself one of the assistants. The colouring is as admirable as the composition--gorgeously rich in effect, but subdued to a tone which harmonizes with the solemnity of the subject. There is a curious anecdote connected with this picture, which I wish I had noted down at length as it was related to me, and at the time I heard it: it is briefly this. The picture was painted by Domenichino for the church of San Girolamo della Carità. At that time the factions between the different schools of painting ran so high at Rome, that the followers of Domenichino and Guido absolutely stabbed and poisoned each other; and the popular prejudice being in favour of the latter, the Communion of St. Jerome was torn down from its place, and flung into a lumber garret. Some time afterwards, the superiors of the convent wishing to substitute a new altar-piece, commissioned Nicolo Poussin to execute it; and sent him Domenichino's rejected picture as old canvas to paint upon. No sooner had the generous Poussin cast his eyes on it, than he was struck, as well he might be, with astonishment and admiration. He immediately carried it into the church, and there lectured in public on its beauties, until he made the stupid monks ashamed of their blind rejection of such a masterpiece, and boldly gave it that character it has ever since retained, of being the second best picture in the world. * * * * * 11.--A party of four, including L** and myself, ascended the dome of St. Peter's; and even mounted into the gilt ball. It was a most fatiguing expedition, and one I have since repented. I gained, however, a more perfect, and a more sublime idea of the architectural wonders of St. Peter's, than I had before; and I was equally pleased and surprised by the exquisite neatness and cleanliness of every part of the building. We drove from St. Peter's to the church of St. Onofrio, to visit the tomb of Tasso. A plain slab marks the spot, which requires nothing but his name to distinguish it. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well." The poet Guidi lies in a little chapel close by; and his effigy is so placed that the eyes appear fixed upon the tomb of Tasso. In the church of Santa Maria Trastevere (which is held in peculiar reverence by the Tresteverini), there is nothing remarkable, except that like many others in Rome, it is rich in the spoils of antique splendour: afterwards to the palazzo Farneze and the Farnesina, to see the frescos of Raffaelle, Giulio Romano, and the Caraccis, which have long been rendered familiar to me in copies and engravings. 12.--I did penance at home for the fatigue of the day before, and to-day (the 13th) I took a delightful drive of several hours attended only by Saccia. Having examined at different times, and in detail, most of the interesting objects within the compass of the ancient city, I wished to generalize what I had seen, by a kind of _survey_ of the whole. For this purpose, making the Capitol a central point, I drove first slowly through the Forum, and made the circuit of the Palatine Hill, then by the arch of Janus (which by a late decision of the antiquarians, has no more to do with Janus than with Jupiter), and the temple of Vesta, back again over the site of the Circus Maximus, between the Palatine and the Aventine (the scene of the Rape of the Sabines), to the baths of Caracalla, where I spent an hour, musing, sketching, and poetizing; thence to the church of San Stefano Rotundo, once a temple dedicated to Claudius by Agrippina; over the Celian Hill, covered with masses of ruins, to the church of St. John and St. Paul, a small but beautiful edifice; then to the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, from the steps of which there is such a noble view. Thence I returned by the arch of Constantine, and the Coliseum, which frowned on me in black masses through the soft but deepening twilight, through the street now called the Suburra, but formerly the Via Scelerata, where Tullia trampled over the dead body of her father, and so over the Quirinal home. My excursion was altogether delightful, and gave me the most magnificent, and I had almost said, the most _bewildering_ ideas of the grandeur and extent of ancient Rome. Every step was classic ground: illustrious names, and splendid recollections crowded upon the fancy-- "And trailing clouds of glory did they come." On the Palatine Hill were the houses of Cicero and the Gracchi; Horace, Virgil, and Ovid resided on the Aventine; and Mecænas and Pliny on the Æsquiline. If one little fragment of a wall remained, which could with any shadow of probability be pointed out as belonging to the residence of Cicero, Horace, or Virgil, how much dearer, how much more sanctified to memory would it be than all the magnificent ruins of the fabrics of the Cæsars! But no--all has passed away. I have heard the remains of Rome coarsely ridiculed, because, after the researches of centuries, so little is comparatively known--because of the endless disputes of antiquarians, and the night and ignorance in which all is involved; but to the imagination there is something singularly striking in this mysterious veil which hangs like a cloud upon the objects around us. I trod to-day over the shapeless masses of building, extending in every direction as far as the eye could reach. Who had inhabited the edifices I trampled under my feet? What hearts had burned--what heads had thought--what spirits had kindled _there_, where nothing was seen but a wilderness and waste, and heaps of ruins, to which antiquaries--even Nibby himself--dare not give a name? All swept away--buried beneath an ocean of oblivion, above which rise a few great and glorious names, like rocks, over which the billows of time break in vain. "Indi esclamo, qual' notte atra, importuua Tutte l'ampie tue glorie a un tratto amorza? Glorie di senno, di valor, di forza Gia mille avesti, or non hai pur una!" * * * * * One of the most striking scenes I saw to-day was the Roman forum, crowded with the common people gaily dressed (it is a festa or saint's day); the women sitting in groups upon the fallen columns, nursing or amusing their children. The men were playing at mora, or at a game like quoits. Under the vast side of the Palatine Hill, on the side of the Circus Maximus, I met a woman mounted on an ass, habited in a most beautiful and singular holiday costume, a man walked by her side, leading the animal she rode, with lover-like watchfulness. He was _en veste_, and I observed that his cloak was thrown over the back of the ass as a substitute for a saddle. Two men followed behind with their long capotes hanging from their shoulders, and carrying guitars, which they struck from time to time, singing as they walked along. A little in advance there is a small chapel, and Madona. A young girl approached, and laying a bouquet of flowers before the image, she knelt down, hid her face in her apron, and wrung her hands from time to time as if she was praying with fervor. When the group I have just mentioned came up, they left the pathway, and made a circuit of many yards to avoid disturbing her, the men taking off their hats, and the woman inclining her head, in sign of respect, as they passed. All this sounds, while I soberly write it down, very sentimental, and picturesque, and poetical. It was exactly what I saw--what I often see: such is the place, the scenery, the people. Every group is a picture, the commonest object has some interest attached to it, the commonest action is dignified by sentiment, the language around us is music, and the air we breathe is poetry. Just as I was writing the word _music_, the sounds of a guitar attracted me to the window, which looks into a narrow back street, and is exactly opposite a small white house belonging to a vetturino, who has a very pretty daughter. For her this serenade was evidently intended; for the moment the music began, she placed a light in the window as a signal that she listened propitiously, and then retired. The group below consisted of two men, the lover and a musician he had brought with him: the former stood looking up at the window with his hat off, and the musician, after singing two very beautiful airs, concluded with the delicious and popular Arietta "Buona notte, amato bene!" to which the lover _whistled_ a second, in such perfect tune, and with such exquisite taste, that I was enchanted. Rome is famous for serenades and serenaders; but at this season they are seldom heard. I remember at Venice being wakened in the dead of the night by such delicious music, that (to use a hyperbole common in the mouths of this poetical people) I was "transported to the seventh heaven:" before I could perfectly recollect myself, the music ceased, the inhabitants of the neighbouring houses threw open their casements, and vehemently and enthusiastically applauded, clapping their hands, and shouting bravos: but neither at Venice, at Padua, nor at Florence did I hear any thing that pleased and touched me so much as the serenade to which I have just been listening. * * * * * 14.--To-day was quite heavenly--like a lovely May-day in England: the air so pure, so soft, and the sun so warm, that I would gladly have dispensed with my shawl and pelisse. We went in carriages to the other side of the Palatine, and then dispersing in small parties, as will or fancy led, we lounged and wandered about in the Coliseum, and among the neighbouring ruins till dinner time. I climbed up the western side of the Coliseum, at the imminent hazard of my neck; and looking down through a gaping aperture, on the brink of which I had accidentally seated myself, I saw in the colossal corridor far below me, a young artist, who, as if transported out of his senses by delight and admiration, was making the most extraordinary antics and gestures: sometimes he clasped his hands, then extended his arms, then stood with them folded as in deep thought; now he snatched up his portfolio as if to draw what so much enchanted him, then threw it down and kicked it from him as if in despair. I never saw such admirable dumb show: it was better than any pantomime. At length, however, he happened to cast up his eyes, as if appealing to heaven, and they encountered mine peeping down upon him from above. He stood fixed and motionless for two seconds, staring at me, and then snatching up his portfolio and his hat, ran off and disappeared. I met the same man afterwards walking along the Via Felice, and could not help smiling as he passed: he smiled too, but pulled his hat over his face and turned away. I discovered to-day (and it is no slight pleasure to make a discovery for one's self), the passage which formed the communication between the Coliseum and the Palace of the Cæsars, and in which the Emperor Commodus was assassinated. I recognized it by its situation, and the mosaic pavement described by Nibby. If I had time I might moralize here, and make an eloquent tirade _à la Eustace_ about imperial monsters and so forth,--but in fact I _did_ think while I stood in the damp and gloomy corridor, that it was a fitting death for Commodus to die by the giddy playfulness of a child, and the machinations of an abandoned woman. It was not a favourable time or hour to contemplate the Coliseum--the sunshine was too resplendent-- It was a garish, broad, and peering day, Loud, light, suspicious, full of eyes and ears; And every little corner, nook, and hole, Was penetrated by the insolent light. We are told that five thousand animals were slain in the amphitheatre on its dedication--how dreadful! The mutual massacres of the gladiators inspire less horror than this disgusting butchery! To what a pitch must the depraved appetite for blood and death have risen among the corrupted and ferocious populace, before such a sight could be endured! * * * * * 15.--We drove to-day to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Appian Way, to the Fountain of Egeria, and the tomb of the Scipios near the Porta Cappena. I wish the tomb of Cecilia Metella had been that of Cornelia or Valeria. There may be little in a name, but how much there is in association! What this massy fabric wanted in classical fame Lord Byron has lately supplied in poetical interest. The same may be said of the Fountain of Egeria, to which he has devoted some of the most exquisite stanzas in his poem, and has certainly invested it with a charm it could not have possessed before. The woods and groves which once surrounded it, have been all cut down, and the scenery round it is waste and bleak; but the fountain itself is pretty, overgrown with ivy, moss, and the graceful capillaire plant (capello di venere) drooping from the walls, and the stream is as pure as crystal. L**, who was with us, took up a stone to break off a piece of the statue, and maimed, defaced, and wretched as it is, I could not help thinking it a profanation to the place, and stopped his hand, calling him a _barbarous Vandyke_: he looked so awkwardly alarmed and puzzled by the epithet I had given him! The identity of this spot (like all other places here) has been vehemently disputed. At every step to-day we encountered doubt, and contradiction, and cavilling: authorities are marshalled against each other in puzzling array, and the modern unwillingness to be cheated by fine sounds and great names has become a general scepticism. I have no objection to the "shadows, doubts, and darkness" which rest upon all around us; it rather pleases my fancy thus to "dream over the map of things," abandoned to my own cogitations and my own conclusions; but then there are certain points upon which it is very disagreeable to have one's faith disturbed; and the Fountain of Egeria is one of these. So leaving the more learned antiquarians to fight it out, _secundum artem_, and fire each other's wigs if they will, I am determined, and do steadfastly believe, that the Fountain of Egeria I saw to-day is the very identical and original Fountain of Egeria--of Numa's Egeria--and therefore it _is_ so. The tomb of the Scipios is a dirty dark wine cellar: all the urns, the fine sarcophagus, and the original tablets and inscriptions have been removed to the Vatican. I thought to-day while I stood in the sepulchre, and on the very spot whence the sarcophagus of Publius was removed, if Scipio, or Augustus, or Adrian, could return to this world, how would their Roman pride endure to see their last resting-places, the towers and the pyramids in which they fortified themselves, thus violated and put to ignoble uses, and the urns which contained their ashes stuck up as ornaments in a painted room, where barbarian visitors lounge away their hours, and stare upon their relics with scornful indifference or idle curiosity! * * * * * The people here, even the lowest and meanest among them seem to have imbibed a profound respect for antiquity and antiquities, which sometimes produces a comic effect. I am often amused by the exultation with which they point out a bit of old stone, or piece of brick wall, or shapeless fragment of some nameless statue, and tell you it is _antico, molto, antico_, and the half contemptuous tone in which they praise the most beautiful modern production, _é moderna--ma pure non é cativà!_ * * * * * 18.--We had an opportunity of witnessing to-day one of the most splendid ceremonies of the Catholic church. It is one of the four festivals at which the Pope performs mass in state at the Vatican, the anniversary of St. Peter's entrance into Rome, and of his taking possession of the Papal chair; for here St. Peter is reckoned the first Pope. To see the high priest of an ancient and wide-spread superstition publicly officiate in his sacred character, in the grandest temple in the universe, and surrounded by all the trappings of his spiritual and temporal authority, was an exhibition to make sad a reflecting mind, but to please and exalt a lively imagination: I wished myself a Roman Catholic for one half hour only. The procession, which was so arranged as to produce the most striking theatrical effect, moved up the central aisle, to strains of solemn and beautiful music from an orchestra of wind instruments. The musicians were placed out of sight, nor could I guess from what part of the buildings the sounds proceeded; but the blended harmony, so soft, yet so powerful and so equally diffused, as it floated through the long aisles and lofty domes, had a most heavenly effect. At length appeared the Pope, borne on the shoulders of his attendants, and habited in his full Pontifical robes of white and gold; fans of peacocks' feathers were waved on each side of his throne, and boys flung clouds of incense from their censers. As the procession advanced at the slowest possible foot-pace, the Pope from time to time stretched forth his arms which were crossed upon his bosom, and solemnly blessed the people as they prostrated themselves on each side. I could have fancied it the triumphant approach of an Eastern despot, but for the mild and venerable air of the amiable old Pope, who looked as if more humbled than exalted by the pageantry around him. It might be _acting_, but if so, it was the most admirable acting I ever saw: I wish all his attendants had performed their parts as well. While the Pope assists at mass, it is not etiquette for him to do anything for himself: one Cardinal kneeling, holds the book open before him, another carries his handkerchief, a third folds and unfolds his robe, a priest on each side supports him whenever he rises or moves, so that he appears among them like a mere helpless automaton going through a certain set of mechanical motions, with which his will has nothing to do. All who approach or address him prostrate themselves and kiss his embroidered slipper before they rise. When the whole ceremony was over, and most of the crowd dispersed, the Pope, after disrobing, was passing through a private part of the church where we were standing accidentally, looking at one of the monuments. We made the usual obeisance, which he returned by inclining his head. He walked without support, but with great difficulty, and appeared bent by infirmity and age: his countenance has a melancholy but most benevolent expression, and his dark eyes retain uncommon lustre and penetration. During the twenty-one years he has worn the tiara, he has suffered many vicissitudes and humiliations with dignity and fortitude. He is not considered a man of very powerful intellect or very shining talents: he is not a Ganganelli or a Lambertini; but he has been happy in his choice of ministers, and his government has been distinguished by a spirit of liberality, and above all by a partiality to the English, which calls for our respect and gratitude. There were present to-day in St. Peter's about five thousand people, and the church would certainly have contained ten times the number. * * * * * 19.--We went to-day to view the restored model of the Coliseum exhibited in the Piazza di Spagna; and afterwards drove to the manufactory of the beads called _Roman Pearl_, which is well worth seeing _once_. The beads are cut from thin laminæ of alabaster, and then dipped into a composition made of the scales of a fish (the Argentina). When a perfect imitation of pearl is intended, they can copy the accidental defects of colour and form which occur in the real gem, as well as its brilliance, so exquisitely, as to deceive the most practised eye. 20.--I ordered the open carriage early this morning, and, attended only by Scaccia, partly drove and partly walked through some of the finest parts of ancient Rome. The day has been perfectly lovely; the sky intensely blue without a single cloud; and though I was weak and far from well, I felt the influence of the soft sunshine in every nerve: the pure elastic air seemed to penetrate my whole frame, and made my spirits bound and my heart beat quicker. It is true, I had to regret at every step the want of a more cultivated companion, and that I felt myself shamefully--no--not _shamefully_, but _lamentably_ ignorant of many things. There is so much of which I wish to know and learn more: so much of my time is spent in hunting books, and acquiring by various means the information with which I ought already to be prepared; so many days are lost by frequent indisposition, that though I enjoy, and feel the value of all I _do_ know and observe, I am tantalized by the thoughts of all I must leave behind me unseen--there must necessarily be so much of what I do not even _hear_! Yet, in spite of these drawbacks, my little excursion to-day was delightful. I took a direction just contrary to my last expedition, first by the Quattro Fontane to the Santa Maria Maggiore, which I always see with new delight; then to the ruins called the temple of Minerva Medici, which stand in a cabbage garden near another fine ruin, once called the Trofei di Mario, and now the Acqua Giulia: thence to the Porta Maggiore, built by Claudius; and round by the Santa Croce di Gerusalemme. This church was built by Helena, the mother of Constantine, and contains her tomb, besides a portion of the _True Cross_ from which it derives its name. The interior of this Basilica struck me as mean and cold. In the fine avenue in front of the Santa Croce, I paused a few minutes to look round me. To the right were the ruins of the stupendous Claudian Aqueduct with its gigantic arches, stretching away in one unbroken series far into the Campagna: behind me the amphitheatre of Castrense: to the left, other ruins, once called the Temple of Venus and Cupid, and now the Sessorium: in front, the Lateran, the obelisk of Sesostris, the Porta San Giovanni, and great part of the ancient walls; and thence the view extended to the foot of the Apennines. All this part of Rome is a scene of magnificent desolation, and of melancholy yet sublime interest: its wildness, its vastness, its waste and solitary openness, add to its effect upon the imagination. The only human beings I beheld in the compass of at least two miles, were a few herdsmen driving their cattle through the gate of San Giovanni, and two or three strangers who were sauntering about with their note books and portfolios, apparently enthusiasts like myself, lost in the memory of the past and the contemplation of the present. I spent some time in the Lateran, then drove to the Coliseum, where I found a long procession of penitents, their figures and faces totally concealed by their masks and peculiar dress, chaunting the Via Crucis. I then examined the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome, and satisfied myself by ocular demonstration of the truth of the measurements which gave sixty feet for the height of the columns and eighteen feet for the circumference. I knew enough of geometrical proportion to prove this to my own satisfaction. On examining the fragments which remain, each fluting measured a foot, that is, eight inches right across. This appears prodigious, but it is nevertheless true. I am forced to believe to-day what I yesterday doubted, and deemed a piece of mere antiquarian exaggeration. This magnificent edifice was designed and built by the Emperor Adrian, who piqued himself on his skill in architecture, and carried his jealousy of other artists so far, as to banish Apollodorus, who had designed the Forum of Trajan. When he had finished the Temple of Venus and Rome, he sent to Apollodorus a plan of his stupendous structure, challenging him to find a single fault in it. The architect severely criticised some trifling oversights; and the Emperor, conscious of the justice of his criticisms, and unable to remedy the defects, ordered him to be strangled. Such was the fate of Apollodorus, whose misfortune it was to have an Emperor for his rival. They are now clearing the steps which lead to this temple, from which it appears that the length of the portico in front was three hundred feet, and of the side five hundred feet. While I was among these ruins, I was struck by a little limpid fountain, which gushed from the crumbling wall and lost itself among the fragments of the marble pavement. All looked dreary and desolate; and that part of the ruin which from its situation must have been the _sanctum sanctorum_, the shrine of the divinity of the place, is now a receptacle of filth and every conceivable abomination. I walked on to the ruins now called the Basilica of Constantine, once the Temple of Peace. This edifice was in a bad style, and constructed at a period when the arts were at a low ebb: yet the ruins are vast and magnificent. The exact direction of the Via Sacra has long been a subject of vehement dispute. They have now laid open a part of it which ran in front of the Basilica: the pavement is about twelve feet below the present pavement of Rome, and the soil turned up in their excavations is formed entirely of crumbled brickwork and mortar, and fragments of marble, porphyry, and granite. I returned by the Forum and the Capitol, through the Forums of Nerva and Trajan, and so over the Monte Cavallo, home. * * * * * 23.--Last night we had a numerous party, and Signor P. and his daughter came to sing. _She_ is a private singer of great talent, and came attended by her lover or her _fiancé_; who, according to Italian custom, attends his mistress every where during the few weeks which precede their marriage. He is a young artist, a favourite pupil of Camuccini, and of very quiet, unobtrusive manners. La P. has the misfortune to be plain; her features are irregular, her complexion of a sickly paleness, and though her eyes are large and dark, they appeared totally devoid of lustre and expression. Her plainness, the bad taste of her dress, her awkward figure, and her timid and embarrassed deportment, all furnished matter of amusement and observation to some young people, (English of course,) whose propensities for _quizzing_ exceeded their good breeding and good nature. Though La P. does not understand a word of either French or English, I thought she could not mistake the significant looks and whispers of which she was the object, and I was in pain for her, and for her modest lover. I drew my chair to the piano, and tried to divert her attention by keeping her in conversation, but I could get no farther than a few questions which were answered in monosyllables. At length she sang--and sang divinely: I found the pale automaton had a soul as well as a voice. After giving us, with faultless execution, as well as great expression, some of Rossini's finest songs, she sung the beautiful and difficult cavatina in Otello, "_Assisa al piè d'un Salice_," with the most enchanting style and pathos, and then stood as unmoved as a statue while the company applauded loud and long. A moment afterwards, as she stooped to take up a music book, her lover, who had edged himself by degrees from the door to the piano, bent his head too, and murmured in a low voice, but with the most passionate accent, "O brava, brava cara!" She replied only by a look--but it was such a look! I never saw a human countenance so entirely, so instantaneously changed in character: the vacant eyes kindled and beamed with tenderness: the pale cheek glowed, and a bright smile playing round her mouth, just parted her lips sufficiently to discover a set of teeth like pearls. I could have called her at that moment beautiful; but the change was as transient as sudden--it passed like a gleam of light over her face and vanished, and by the time the book was placed on the desk, she looked as plain, as stupid, and as statue-like as ever. I was the only person who had witnessed this little by-scene; and it gave me pleasant thoughts and interest for the rest of the evening. Another trait of character occurred afterwards, which amused me, but in a very different style. Our new Danish friend, the Baron B----, told us he had once been present at the decapitation of nine men, having first fortified himself with a large goblet of brandy. After describing the scene in all its horrible details, and assuring us in his bad German French that it was "_une chose bien mauvaise à voir_," I could not help asking him with a shudder, how he felt afterwards; whether it was not weeks or months before the impressions of horror left his mind? He answered with smiling naïveté and taking a pinch of snuff, "_Ma foi! madame, je n'ai pas pu manger de la viande toute cette journée-là?_" * * * * * 27.--We drove to the Palazzo Spada, to see the famous Spada Pompey, said to be the very statue at the base of which Cæsar fell. I was pleased to find, contrary to my expectations, that this statue has great intrinsic merit, besides its celebrity, to recommend it. The extremities of the limbs have a certain clumsiness which may perhaps be a feature of resemblance, and not a fault of the sculptor; but the attitude is noble, and the likeness of the head to the undisputed bust of Pompey in the Florentine gallery, struck me immediately. The Palazza Spada, with its splendid architecture, dirt, discomfort, and dilapidation, is a fair specimen of the Roman palaces in general. It contains a corridor, which from an architectural deception appears much longer than it really is. I hate tricks--in architecture especially. We afterwards visited the Pantheon, the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, (an odd combination of names,) and concluded the morning at Canova's. It is one of the pleasures of Rome to lounge in the studj of the best sculptors; and it is at Rome only that sculpture seems to flourish as in its native soil. Rome is truly the _city of the soul_, the home of art and artists. With the divine models of the Vatican ever before their eyes, these inspiring skies above their heads, and the quarries of marble at a convenient distance--it is here only they can conceive and execute those works which are formed from the _beau-idéal_; but it is not here they meet with patronage: the most beautiful things I have seen at the various studj have all been executed for English, German, and Russian noblemen. The names I heard most frequently were those of the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire, Prince Esterhazy, and the King of England. Canova has been accused of a want of simplicity, and of giving a too voluptuous expression to some of his figures: with all my admiration of his genius, I confess the censure just. It is particularly observable in the Clori svegliata (the Nymph awakened by Love), the Cupid and Psyche, for Prince Yousouppoff, the Endymion, the Graces, and some others. In some of Thorwaldson's works there is exquisite grace, simplicity, and expression: the Shepherd Boy, the Adonis, the Jason, and the Hebe, have a great deal of antique spirit. I did not like the colossal Christ which the sculptor has just finished in clay: it is a proof that bulk alone does not constitute sublimity: it is deficient in dignity, or rather in _divinity_. At Rodolf Schadow's, I was most pleased by the Cupid and the Filatrice. His Cupid is certainly the most beautiful Cupid I ever saw, superior, I think, both to Canova's and to Thorwaldson's. The Filatrice, though so exquisitely natural and graceful, a little disappointed me; I had heard much of it, and had formed in my own imagination an idea different and superior to what I saw. This beautiful figure has repose, simplicity, nature, and grace, but I felt a _want_--the want of some internal sentiment: for instance, if, instead of watching the rotation of her spindle with such industrious attention, the Filatrice had looked careless, or absent, or pensive, or disconsolate, (like Faust's Margaret at her spinning-wheel,) she would have been more interesting--but not perhaps what the sculptor intended to represent. Schadow is ill, but we were admitted by his order into his private study; we saw there the Bacchante, which he has just finished in clay, and which is to emulate or rival Canova's Dansatrice. He has been at work upon a small but beautiful figure of a piping Shepherd-boy, which is just made out: beside it lay Virgil's Eclogues, and his spectacles were between the leaves.[J] Almost every thing I saw at Max Laboureur's struck me as vapid and finikin. There were some pretty groups, but nothing to tempt me to visit it again. * * * * * 30.--We spent the whole morning at the Villa Albani, where there is a superb collection of antique marbles, most of them brought from the Villa of Adrian at Tivoli. To note down even a few of the objects which pleased me would be an endless task. I think the busts interested me most. There is a basso-relievo of Antinous--the beautiful head declined in his usual pensive attitude: it is the most finished and faultless piece of sculpture in relievo I ever saw; and as perfect and as polished as if it came from the chisel yesterday. There is another basso-relievo of Marcus Aurelius, and Faustina, equal to the last in execution, but not in interest. We found Rogers in the gardens: the old poet was sunning himself--walking up and down a beautiful marble portico, lined with works of art, with his note-book in his hand. I am told he is now writing a poem of which Italy is the subject; and here, with all the Campagna di Roma spread out before him--above him, the sunshine and the cloudless skies--and all around him, the remains of antiquity in a thousand elegant, or venerable, or fanciful forms: he could not have chosen a more genial spot for inspiration. Though we disturbed his poetical reveries rather abruptly, he met us with his usual amiable courtesy, and conversed most delightfully. I never knew him more pleasant, and never saw him so animated. Our departure from Rome has been postponed from day to day in consequence of a _trifling_ accident. An Austrian colonel was taken by the banditti near Fondi, and carried up into the mountains: ten thousand scudi were demanded for his ransom; and for many days past, the whole city has been in a state of agitation and suspense about his ultimate fate. The Austrians, roused by the insult, sent a large body of troops (some say three thousand men) against about one hundred and fifty robbers, threatening to exterminate them. They were pursued so closely, that after dragging their unfortunate captive over the mountains from one fastness to another, till he was nearly dead from exhaustion and ill-treatment, they either abandoned or surrendered him without terms. The troops immediately marched back to Naples, and the matter rests here: I cannot learn that any thing farther will be done. The robbers being at present panic-struck by such unusual energy and activity, and driven from their accustomed haunts, by these valorous champions of good order and good policy, it is considered that the road is now more open and safe than it has been for some time, and if nothing new happens to alarm us, we set off on Friday next. I visited to-day the baths of Dioclesian, and the noble church which Michel Angelo has constructed upon, and out of, their gigantic ruins. It has all that grand simplicity, that _entireness_ which characterizes his works: it contains, too, some admirable pictures. On leaving the church, I saw on each side of the door, the monuments of Salvator Rosa and Carlo Maratti--what a contrast do they exhibit in their genius, in their works, in their characters, in their countenances, in their lives! Near this church (the Santa Maria dei Angeli) is the superb fountain of the Acqua Felice, the first view of which rather disappointed me. I had been told that it represented Moses striking the rock,--a magnificent idea for a fountain! but the execution falls short of the conception. The water, instead of gushing from the rock, is poured out from the mouths of two prodigious lions of basalt, brought, I believe, from Upper Egypt: they seem misplaced here. A little beyond the Ponta Pia is the Campo Scelerato, where the Vestals were interred alive. We afterwards drove to the Santi Apostoli to see the tomb of the excellent Ganganelli, by Canova. Then to Sant' Ignazio, to see the famous ceiling painted in perspective by the jesuit Pozzo. The effect is certainly marvellous, making the interior appear to the eye, at least twice the height it really is; but though the illusion pleased me as a work of art, I thought the trickery unnecessary and misplaced. At the magnificent church of the Gesuiti (where there are two entire columns of giallo antico) I saw a list of relics for which the church is celebrated, and whose efficacy and sanctity were vouched for by a very respectable catalogue of miracles. Among these relics there are a few worth mentioning for their oddity, viz. one of the Virgin's _shifts_, three of her hairs, and the skirt of Joseph's coat. * * * * * 31.--We spent nearly the whole day in the gallery of the Vatican, and in the Pauline and Sistine chapels. _February 1st, at Valletri._--I left Rome this morning exceedingly depressed: Madame de Staël may well call travelling _un triste plaisir_. My depression did not arise from the feeling that I left behind me any thing or any person to regret, but from mixed and melancholy emotions, and partly perhaps from that weakness which makes my hand tremble while I write--which has bound down my mind, and all its best powers, and all its faculties of enjoyment, to a languid passiveness, making me feel at every moment, I am not what I was, or ought to be, or might have been. We arrived, after a short and most delightful journey by Albano, the Lake Nemi, Gensao, etc. at Velletri, the birth-place of that wretch Octavius, and famous for its wine. The day has been as soft and as sunny as a May-day in England, and the country, through which we travelled but too rapidly, beyond description lovely. The blue Mediterranean spread far to the west, and on the right we had the snowy mountains, with their wild fantastic peaks "rushing on the sky." I felt it all in my heart with a mixture of sadness and delight which I cannot express. This land was made by nature a paradise: it seems to want no charm, "unborrowed from the eye,"--but how has memory sanctified, history illustrated, and poetry illumined the scenes around us; where every rivulet had its attendant nymph, where every wood was protected by its sylvan divinity; where every tower has its tale of heroism, and "not a mountain lifts its head unsung;" and though the faith, the glory, and the power of the antique time be passed away--still A spirit hangs, Beautiful region! o'er thy towns and farms, Statues and temples, and memorial tombs. I can allow that one-half, at least, of the beauty and interest we see, lies in our own souls; that it is our own enthusiasm which sheds this mantle of light over all we behold: but, as colours do not exist in the objects themselves, but in the rays which paint them--so beauty is not less real, is not less BEAUTY, because it exists in the medium through which we view certain objects, rather than in those objects themselves. I have met persons who think they display a vast deal of common sense, and very uncommon strength of mind, in rising superior to all prejudices of education and illusions of romance--to whom enthusiasm is only another name for affectation--who, where the cultivated and the contemplative mind finds ample matter to excite feeling and reflection, give themselves airs of fashionable _nonchalance_, or flippant scorn--to whom the crumbling ruin is so much brick and mortar, no more--to whom the tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii is a _stack of chimneys_, the Pantheon _an old oven_, and the Fountain of Egeria a _pig-sty_. Are such persons aware that in all this there is an affectation, a thousand times more gross and contemptible, than that affectation (too frequent perhaps) which they design to ridicule? "Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes, He is a slave--the meanest we can meet." 2.--Our journey to-day has been long, but delightfully diversified, and abounding in classical beauty and interest. I scarce know what to say, now that I open my little book to record my own sensations: they are so many, so various, so painful, so delicious--my senses and my imagination have been so enchanted, my heart so very heavy--where shall I begin? In some of the scenes of to-day--at Terracina, particularly, there was beauty beyond what I ever beheld or imagined: the scenery of Switzerland is of a different character, and on a different scale: it is beyond comparison grander, more gigantic, more overpowering, but it is not so poetical. Switzerland is not Italy--is not the enchanting _south_. This soft balmy air, these myrtles, orange-groves, palm-trees; these cloudless skies, this bright blue sea, and sunny hills, all breathe of an enchanted land; "a land of Faery." Between Velletri and Terracina the road runs in one undeviating line through the Pontine Marshes. The accounts we have of the baneful effects of the malaria here, and the absolute solitude, (not a human face or a human habitation intervening from one post-house to another,) invest the wild landscape with a frightful and peculiar character of desolation. As for the mere exterior of the country, I have seen more wretched and sterile looking spots, (in France, for instance,) but none that so affected the imagination and the spirits. On leaving the Pontine Marshes, we came almost suddenly upon the sunny and luxuriant region near Terracina: here was the ancient city of Anxur; and the gothic ruins of the castle of Theodoric, which frown on the steep above, are contrasted with the delicate and Grecian proportions of the temple below. All the country round is famed in classic and poetic lore. The Promontory (once poetically the _island_) of Circe is still the Monte Circello: here was the region of the Lestrygons, and the scene of part of the Æneid and Odyssey; and Corinne has superadded romantic and charming associations quite as delightful, and quite as _true_. Antiquarians, who, like politicians, "seem to see the things that are not," have placed all along this road, the sites of many a celebrated town and fane--"making hue and cry after many a city which has run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it:" as some old author says so quaintly. At every hundred yards, fragments of masonry are seen by the road-side; portions of brickwork, sometimes traced at the bottom of a dry ditch, or incorporated into a fence; sometimes peeping above the myrtle bushes on the wild hills, where the green lizards lie basking and glittering on them in thousands, and the stupid ferocious buffalo, with his fierce red eyes, rubs his hide and glares upon us as we pass. No--not the grandest monuments of Rome--not the Coliseum itself, in all its decaying magnificence, ever inspired me with such profound emotions as did those nameless, shapeless vestiges of the dwellings of man, starting up like memorial tombs in the midst of this savage but luxuriant wilderness. Of the beautiful cities which rose along this lovely coast, the colonies of elegant and polished Greece--one after another swallowed up by the "insatiate maw" of ancient Rome, nothing remains--their sites, their very names have passed away and perished. We might as well hunt after a forgotten dream. Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride, They had no POET, and they died! In vain they toil'd, in vain they bled, They had no POET--and are dead. I write this a Gaëta--a name famous in the poetical, the classical, the military story of Italy, from the day of Æneas, from whom it received its appellation, down to the annals of the late war. On the site of our inn, (the Albergo di Cicerone,) stood Cicero's Formian Villa; and in an adjoining grove he was murdered in his litter by the satellites of the Triumviri, as he attempted to escape. I stood to-night on a little terrace, which hung over an orange grove, and enjoyed a scene which I would paint, if words were forms, and hues, and sounds--not else. A beautiful bay, enclosed by the Mola di Gaëta, on one side, and the Promontory of Misenum on the other: the sky studded with stars and reflected in a sea as blue as itself--and so glassy and unruffled, it seemed to slumber in the moonlight: now and then the murmur of a wave, not hoarsely breaking on rock and shingles, but kissing the turfy shore, where oranges and myrtles grew down to the water edge. These, and the remembrances connected with all, and a mind to think, and a heart to feel, and thoughts both of pain and pleasure mingling to render the effect more deep and touching.--Why should I write this? O surely I need not fear that I shall _forget_! LINES WRITTEN AT MOLA DI GAETA, NEAR THE RUINS OF CICERO'S FORMIAN VILLA. We wandered through bright climes, and drank the beams Of southern suns: Elysian scenes we view'd, Such as we picture oft in those day dreams That haunt the fancy in her wildest mood. Upon the sea-heat vestiges we stood, Where Cicero dwelt, and watch'd the latest gleams Of rosy light steal o'er the azure flood: And memory conjur'd up most glowing themes, Filling the expanded heart, till it forgot Its own peculiar grief!--O! if the dead Yet haunt our earth, around this hallow'd spot, Hovers sweet Tully's spirit, since it fled The Roman Forum--Forum now no more! Though cold and silent be the sands we tread, Still burns the "eloquent air," and to the shore There rolls no wave, and through the orange shade There sighs no breath, which doth not speak of him, THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY: and though dim Her day of empire--and her laurel crown Torn and defaced, and soiled with blood and tears, And her imperial eagles trampled down-- Still with a queen-like grace, Italia wears Her garland of bright names,--her coronal of stars, (Radiant memorials of departed worth!) That shed a glory round her pensive brow, And make her still the worship of the earth! _Naples. Sunday 3rd._--We left Gaëta early. If the scene was so beautiful in the evening--how bright, how lovely it was this morning! The sun had not long risen; and a soft purple mist hung over part of the sea; while to the north and west the land and water sparkled and glowed in the living light. Some little fishing boats which had just put off, rocked upon the glassy sea, which lent them a gentle motion, though itself appeared all mirror-like and motionless. The orange and lemon trees in full foliage literally bent over the water; and it was so warm at half past eight that I felt their shade a relief. After leaving Gaëta, the first place of note is or _was_ Minturnum, where Marius was taken, concealed in the marshes near it. The marshes remain, the city has disappeared. Capua is still a large town; but it certainly does not keep up its ancient fame for luxury and good cheer: for we found it extremely difficult to procure any thing to eat. The next town is Avversa, a name unknown, I believe, in the classical history of Italy: it was founded, if I remember rightly, by the Norman knights. Near this place is or was the convent where Queen Joanna strangled her husband Andrea, with a silken cord of her own weaving. So says the story: _non lo credo io_. From Avversa to Naples the country is not interesting; but fertile and rich beyond description: an endless succession of vineyards and orange groves. At length we reached Naples; all tired and in a particularly sober and serious mood: we remembered it was the Sabbath, and had forgotten that it was the first day of the Carnival; and great was our amazement at the scene which met us on our arrival-- I looked, I stared, I smiled, I laughed: and all The weight of sadness was in wonder lost. The whole city seemed one vast puppet-show; and the noisy gaiety of the crowded streets almost stunned me. One of the first objects we encountered was a barouche full of Turks and Sultanas, driven by an old woman in a tawdry court dress as coachman; while a merry-andrew and a harlequin capered behind as footmen. Owing to the immense size of the city, and the difficulty of making our way through the motley throng of masks, beggars, lazzaroni, eating-stalls, carts and carriages, we were nearly three hours traversing the streets before we reached our inn on the Chiaja. I feel tired and over-excited: I have been standing on my balcony looking out upon the moonlit bay, and listening to the mingled shouts, the laughter, the music all around me; and thinking--till I feel in no mood to write. * * * * * 7.--Last night we visited the theatre of San Carlo. It did not strike me as equal to the Scala at Milan. The form is not so fine, the extent of the stage is, or appeared to be, less; but there is infinitely more gilding and ornament; the mirrors and lights, the sky-blue draperies produce a splendid effect, and the coup-d'oeil is, on the whole, more gay, more theatre-like. It was crowded in every part, and many of the audience were in dominos and fancy dresses: a few were masked. Rossini's Barbiere di Seviglia, which contains, I think more _melody_ than all his other operas put together, (the Tancredi perhaps excepted,) was most enchantingly sung, and as admirably acted; and the beautiful classical ballet of "Niobe and her Children," would have appeared nothing short of perfection, had I not seen the Didone Abbandonata at Milan. But they have no actress here like the graceful, the expressive Pallerini; nor any actor equal to the Æneas of the Scala. * * * * * The Austrians, who are paramount here, allow masks only twice a week, Sundays and Thursdays. The people seem determined to indemnify themselves for this restriction on their pleasures by every allowed excess during the two days of merriment, which their despotic conquerors have spared them. I am told by M** and S**, our Italian friends, that the Carnival is now fallen off from its wild spirit of fanciful gaiety; that it is stupid, dull, tasteless, in comparison to what it was formerly, owing to the severity of the Austrian police. I know nothing about the propriety of the measures which have been resorted to for curbing the excesses of the Carnival: I think if people _will_ run away instead of fighting for their national rights, they must be content to suffer accordingly--but I meddle not with politics, and with all my heart abhor them. Whatever the gaities of the Carnival may have been formerly, it is scarce possible to conceive a more fantastic, a more picturesque, a more laughable scene than the Strada di Toledo exhibited to-day; the whole city seemed to wear "one universal grin;" and such an incessant fire of sugar-plums (or what seemed such) was carried on, and with such eagerness and mimic fury, that when our carriage came out of the conflict, we all looked as if a sack of flour had been shaken over us. The implements used in this ridiculous warfare, are, for common purposes, little balls of plaster of Paris and flour, made to resemble small comfits: friends and acquaintances pelted each other with real confetti, and those of the most delicious and expensive kinds. A double file of carriages moved in a contrary direction along the Corso; a space in the middle and on each side being left for horsemen and pedestrians, and the most exact order was maintained by the guards and police; so that if by chance a carriage lost its place in the line it was impossible to recover it, and it was immediately obliged to leave the street, and re-enter by one of the extremities. Besides the warfare carried on below, the balconies on each side were crowded with people in gay or grotesque dresses, who had _sacks_ of bon-bons before them, from which they showered vollies upon those beneath, or aimed across the street at each other: some of them filled their handkerchiefs, and then dexterously loosening the corners, and taking a certain aim, flung a volley at once. This was like a cannon loaded with grape-shot, and never failed to do the most terrific execution. Among the splendid and fanciful equipages of the masqueraders, was one, containing the Duke of Monteleone's family, in the form of a ship, richly ornamented, and drawn by six horses mounted by masks for postilions. The fore part of the vessel contained the Duke's party, dressed in various gay costumes, as Tartar warriors and Indian queens. In the stern were the servants and attendants, _travestied_ in the most grotesque and ludicrous style. This magnificent and unwieldly car had by some chance lost its place in the procession, and vainly endeavoured to whip in; as it is a point of honour among the charioteers not to yield the _pas_. Our coachman, however, was ordered (though most unwilling) to draw up and make way for it; and this little civility was acknowledged, not only by a profusion of bows, but by such a shower of delicious sugar plums, that the seats of our carriage were literally covered with them, and some of the gentlemen flung into our laps elegant little baskets, fastened with ribbons, and filled with exquisite sweetmeats. I could not enter into all this with much spirit; "_non son io quel ch'un tempo fui:_" but I was an amused, though a quiet spectator; and sometimes saw much more than those who were actually engaged in the battle. I observed that to-day our carriage became an object of attention, and a favourite point of attack to several parties on foot, and in carriages; and I was at no loss to discover the reason. I had with me a lovely girl, whose truly English style of beauty, her brilliant bloom, heightened by her eager animation, her lips dimpled with a thousand smiles, and her whole countenance radiant with glee and mischievous archness, made her an object of admiration, which the English expressed by a fixed stare, and the Italians by sympathetic smiles, nods, and all the usual superlatives of delight. Among our most potent and malignant adversaries, was a troop of elegant masks in a long open carriage, the form of which was totally concealed by the boughs of laurel, and wreaths of artificial flowers, with which it was covered. It was drawn by six fine horses, fancifully caparisoned, ornamented with plumes of feathers, and led by grotesque masks. In the carriage stood twelve persons in black silk dominos, black hats, and black masks; with plumes of crimson feathers, and rich crimson sashes. They were armed with small painted targets and tin tubes, from which they shot vollies of confetti, in such quantities, and with such dexterous aim, that we were almost overwhelmed whenever we passed them. It was in vain we returned the compliment; our small shot rattled on their masks, or bounded from their shields, producing only shouts of laughter at our expense. A favourite style of mask here, is the dress of an English sailor, straw hats, blue jackets, white trowsers, and very white masks with pink cheeks: we saw hundreds in this whimsical costume. 13.--On driving home rather late this evening, and leaving the noise, the crowds, the confusion and festive folly of the Strada di Toledo, we came suddenly upon a scene, which, from its beauty, no less than by the force of contrast, strongly impressed my imagination. The shore was silent, and almost solitary: the bay as smooth as a mirror, and as still as a frozen lake; the sky, the sea, the mountains round were all of the same hue, a soft grey tinged with violet, except where the sunset had left a narrow crimson streak along the edge of the sea. There was not a breeze, not the slightest breath of air, and a single vessel, a frigate with all its white sails crowded, lay motionless as a monument on the bosom of the waters, in which it was reflected as in a mirror. I have seen the bay more splendidly beautiful; but I never saw so peculiar, so lovely a picture. It lasted but a short time: the transparent purple veil became a dusky pall, and night and shadow gradually enveloped the whole.[K] * * * * * How I love these resplendent skies and blue seas! Nature here seems to celebrate a continual Festa, and to be for ever decked out in holiday costume! A drive along the "_sempre beata Mergellina_" to the extremity of the Promontory of Pausilippo is positive enchantment: thence we looked over a landscape of such splendid and unequalled interest! the shores of Baia, where Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Pliny, Mecænas, lived; the white towers of Puzzuoli and the Islands of Ischia, Procida, and Nisida. There was the Sybil's Cave, Lake Acheron, and the fabled Lethe; there the sepulchre of Misenus, who defied the Triton; and the scene of the whole sixth book of the Æneid, which I am now reading in Annibal Caro's translation: there Agrippina mourned Germanicus; and there her daughter fell a victim to her monster of a son. At our feet lay the lovely little Island of Nisida, the spot on which Brutus and Portia parted for the last time before the battle of Philippi. To the south of the bay the scenery is not less magnificent, and scarcely less dear to memory: Naples, rising from the sea like an amphitheatre of white palaces, and towers, and glittering domes: beyond, Mount Vesuvius, with the smoke curling from its summits like a silver cloud, and forming the only speck upon the intense blue sky; along its base Portici, Annunziata, Torre del Greco, glitter in the sun; every white building--almost every window in every building, distinct to the eye at the distance of several miles: farther on, and perched like white nests on the mountainous promontory, lie Castel a Mare, and Sorrento, the birth-place of Tasso, and his asylum when the injuries of his cold-hearted persecutors had stung him to madness, and drove him here for refuge to the arms of his sister. Yet, farther on, Capua rises from the sea, a beautiful object in itself, but from which the fancy gladly turns to dwell again upon the snowy buildings of Sorrento. "O de la liberté vieille et sainte patrie! Terre autrefois féconde en sublimes vertus! Sous d'indignes Césars maintenant asservie Ton empire est tombé! tes héros ne sont plus! Mais dans son sein l'âme aggrandie Croit sur leurs monumens respirer leur génie, Comme on respire encore dans un temple aboli La Majesté du Dieu dont il était rempli." DE LA MARTINE. THE SONG OF THE SYREN PARTHENOPE. A RHAPSODY, WRITTEN AT NAPLES. Mine are these waves, and mine the twilight depths O'er which they roll, and all these tufted isles That lift their backs like dolphins from the deep, And all these sunny shores that gird us round! Listen! O listen to the Sea-maid's shell! Ye who have wander'd hither from far climes, (Where the coy summer yields but half her sweets,) To breathe my bland luxurious airs, and drink My sunbeams! and to revel in a land Where Nature--deck'd out like a bride to meet Her lover--lays forth all her charms, and smiles Languidly bright, voluptuously gay, Sweet to the sense, and tender to the heart. Listen! O listen to the Sea-maid's shell; Ye who have fled your natal shores in hate Or anger, urged by pale disease, or want, Or grief, that clinging like the spectre bat, Sucks drop by drop the life-blood from the heart, And hither come to learn forgetfulness, Or to prolong existence! ye shall find Both--though the spring Lethean flow no more, There is a power in these entrancing skies And murmuring waters and delicious airs, Felt in the dancing spirits and the blood, And falling on the lacerated heart Like balm, until that life becomes a boon, Which elsewhere is a burthen and a curse. Hear then--O hear the Sea-maid's airy shell, Listen, O listen! 'tis the Syren sings, The spirit of the deep--Parthenope-- She who did once i' the dreamy days of old Sport on these golden sands beneath the moon, Or pour'd the ravishing music of her song Over the silent waters; and bequeath'd To all these sunny capes and dazzling shores Her own immortal beauty, and her _name_. * * * * * This is the last day of the Carnival, the last night of the opera; the people are permitted to go in masks, and after the performances there will be a ball. To-day, when Baldi was describing the excesses which usually take place during the last few hours of the Carnival, he said, "the man who has but half a shirt will pawn it to-night to buy a good supper and an opera-ticket: to-morrow for fish and soup-maigre--fasting and repentance!" * * * * * _Saturday, 23._--I have just seen a most magnificent sight; one which I have often dreamed of, often longed to behold, and having beheld, never shall forget. Mount Vesuvius is at this moment blazing like a huge furnace; throwing up every minute, or half minute, columns of fire and red-hot stones, which fall in showers and bound down the side of the mountain. On the east, there are two distinct streams of lava descending, which glow with almost a white heat, and every burst of flame is accompanied by a sound resembling cannon at a distance.-- I can hardly write, my mind is so overflowing with astonishment, admiration, and sublime pleasure: what a scene as I looked out on the bay from the Sante Lucia! On one side, the evening star and the thread-like crescent of the new moon were setting together over Pausilippo, reflected in lines of silver radiance on the blue sea; on the other the broad train of fierce red light glared upon the water with a fitful splendour, as the explosions were more or less violent: before me all was so soft, so lovely, so tranquil! while I had only to turn my head to be awe-struck by the convulsion of fighting elements. I remember, that on our first arrival at Naples, I was disappointed because Vesuvius did not smoke so much as I had been led to expect from pictures and descriptions. The smoke then lay like a scarcely perceptible cloud on the highest point, or rose in a slender white column; to-day and yesterday, it has rolled from the crater in black volumes, mixing with the clouds above, and darkening the sky. _Half-past twelve._--I have walked out again: the blaze from the crater is less vivid; but there are now four streams of lava issuing from it, which have united in two broad currents, one of which extends below the hermitage. It is probable that by to-morrow night it will have reached the lower part of the mountain. _Sunday, 24._--Just returned from chapel at the English ambassador's, where the service was read by a dandy clergyman to a crowd of fine and superfine ladies and gentlemen, crushed together into a hot room. I never saw extravagance in dress carried to such a pitch as it is by my countrywomen here,--whether they dress at the men or against each other, it is equally bad taste. The sermon to-day was very appropriate, from the text, "_Take ye no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or what ye shall put on_," and, I dare say, it was listened to with singular edification. _5 o'clock._--We have been driving along the Strada Nuova in L**'s britschka, whence we had a fine view of Vesuvius. There are tremendous bursts of smoke from the crater. At one time the whole mountain, down to the very base, was almost enveloped, and the atmosphere round it loaded with the vapour, which seemed to issue in volumes half as large as the mountain itself. If horses are to be had we go up to-night. _Monday night._--I am not in a humour to describe, or give way to any poetical flights, but I must endeavour to give a faithful, sober, and circumstantial account of our last night's expedition, while the impression is yet fresh on my mind; though there is, I think, little danger of my forgetting. We procured horses, which, from the number of persons proceeding on the same errand with ourselves, was a matter of some difficulty. We set out at seven in the evening in an open carriage, and almost the whole way we had the mountain before us, spouting fire to a prodigious height. The road was crowded with groups of people who had come out from the city and environs to take a nearer view of the magnificent spectacle, and numbers were hurrying to and fro in those little flying _corricoli_ which are peculiar to Naples. As we approached, the explosions became more and more vivid, and at every tremendous burst of fire our friend L** jumped half off his seat, making most loud and characteristic exclamations,--"By Jove! a magnificent fellow! now for it, whizz! there he goes, sky high, by George!" The rest of the party were equally enthusiastic in a different style; and I sat silent and quiet from absolute inability to express what I felt. I was almost breathless with wonder, and excitement, and impatience to be nearer the scene of action. While my eyes were fixed on the mountain, my attention was, from time to time, excited by regular rows of small shining lights, six or eight in number, creeping, as it seemed, along the edge of the stream of lava; and, when contrasted with the red blaze which rose behind, and the gigantic black back-ground, looking like a procession of glowworms. These were the torches of travellers ascending the mountain, and I longed to be one of them. We reached Resina a little before nine, and alighted from the carriage; the ascent being so rugged and dangerous, that only asses and mules accustomed to the road are used. Two only were in waiting at the moment we arrived, which L** immediately secured for me and himself; and though reluctant to proceed without the rest of the party, we were compelled to go on before, that we might not lose time, or hazard the loss of our _monture_. We set off then, each with two attendants, a man to lead our animals and a torch-bearer. The road, as we ascended, became more and more steep at every step, being over a stream of lava, intermixed with stones and ashes, and the darkness added to the difficulty. But how shall I describe the scene and the people who surrounded us; the landscape partially lighted by a fearful red glare, the precipitous and winding road bordered by wild looking gigantic aloes, projecting their huge spear-like leaves almost across our path, and our lazzaroni attendants with their shrill shouts, and strange dresses, and wild jargon, and striking features, and dark eyes flashing in the gleam of the torches, which they flung round their heads to prevent their being extinguished, formed a scene so new, so extraordinary, so like romance, that my attention was frequently drawn from the mountain, though blazing in all its tumultuous magnificence. The explosions succeeded each other with terrific rapidity about two in every three minutes; and the noise I can only compare to the roaring and hissing of ten thousand imprisoned winds, mingled at times with a rumbling sound like artillery, or distant thunder. It frequently happened that the guides, in dashing their torches against the ground, set fire to the dried thorns and withered grass, and the blaze ran along the earth like wildfire, to the great alarm of poor L**, who saw in every burning bush a stream of lava rushing to overwhelm us. Before eleven o'clock we reached the Hermitage, situated between Vesuvius and the Somma, and the highest habitation on the mountain. A great number of men were assembled within, and guides, lazzaroni, servants, and soldiers, were lounging round. I alighted, for I was benumbed and tired, but did not like to venture among those people, and it was proposed that we should wait for the rest of our party a little further on. We accordingly left our donkeys and walked forward upon a kind of high ridge which serves to fortify the Hermitage and its environs against the lava. From this path, as we slowly ascended, we had a glorious view of the eruption; and the whole scene around us, in its romantic interest and terrible magnificence, mocked all power of description. There were, at this time, five distinct torrents of lava rolling down like streams of molten lead; one of which extended above two miles below us and was flowing towards Portici. The showers of red-hot stones flew up like thousands of sky rockets: many of them being shot up perpendicularly fell back into the crater, others falling on the outside bounded down the side of the mountain with a velocity which would have distanced a horse at full speed: these stones were of every size, from two to ten or twelve feet in diameter. My ears were by this time wearied and stunned by the unceasing roaring and hissing of the flames, while my eyes were dazzled by the glare of the red, fierce light: now and then I turned them for relief to other features of the picture, to the black shadowy masses of the landscape stretched beneath us, and speckled with shining lights, which showed how many were up and watching that night; and often to the calm vaulted sky above our heads, where thousands of stars (not twinkling as through our hazy or frosty atmosphere, but shining out of "heaven's profoundest azure," with that soft steady brilliance peculiar to a highly rarified medium) looked down upon this frightful turmoil in all their bright and placid loveliness. Nor should I forget one other feature of a scene, on which I looked with a painter's eye. Great numbers of the Austrian forces, now occupying Naples, were on the mountains, assembled in groups, some standing, some sitting, some stretched on the ground and wrapped in their cloaks, in various attitudes of amazement and admiration: and as the shadowy glare fell on their tall martial figures and glittering accoutrements, I thought I had never beheld any thing so wildly picturesque. The remainder of our party not yet appearing, we sent back for our asses and guides, and determined to proceed. About half a mile beyond, our companions came up, and here a division took place; some agreeing to go forward, the rest turning back to wait at the Hermitage. I was of course one of those who advanced. My spirits were again raised, and the grand object of all this daring and anxiety was to approach near enough to a stream of lava to have some idea of its consistency, and the manner in which it flowed, or trickled down. The difficulties of our road now increased, "if _road_ that might be called, which road was none," but black loose ashes, and masses of scoria and lava heaped in ridges, or broken into hollows in a manner not to be described. Even my animal, though used to the path, felt his footing at every step, and if the torch was by accident extinguished, he stopped, and nothing could make him move. My guide, Andrea, was very vigilant and attentive, and, in the few words of Italian he knew, encouraged me, and assured me there was no danger. I had, however, no fear: in fact, I was infinitely too much interested to have been alive to danger, had it really existed. Salvador, well known to all who have visited Mount Vesuvius, had been engaged by Mr. R. as his guide. He is the principal cicerone on the mountain. It is his business to despatch to the king every three hours, a regular account of the height of the eruption, the progress, extent, and direction of the lava, and, in short, the most minute particulars. He also corresponds, as he assured me, with Sir Humphry Davy;[L] and is employed to inform him of every interesting phenomenon which takes place on the mountain. This man has resided at the foot of it, and been principal guide, for thirty-three years, and knows every inch of its territory. As the lava had overflowed the usual footpath leading to that conical eminence which forms the summit of the mountain and the exterior of the crater, we were obliged to alight from our sagacious steeds; and, trusting to our feet, walked over the ashes for about a quarter of a mile. The path, or the ground rather, for there was no path, was now dangerous to the inexperienced foot; and Salvador gallantly took me under his peculiar care. He led me on before the rest, and I followed with confidence. Our object was to reach the edge of a stream of lava, formed of two currents united in a point. It was glowing with an intense heat; and flowing, not with such rapidity as to alarm us, but rather slowly, and by fits and starts. _Trickling_, in short, is the word which expresses its motion: if one can fancy it applied to any object on so large a scale. At this time the eruption was at its extreme height. The column of fire was from a quarter to a third of a mile high; and the stones were thrown up to the height of a mile and a quarter. I passed close to a rock about four feet in diameter, which had rolled down some time before: it was still red-hot, and I stopped to warm my hands at it. At a short distance from it lay another stone or rock, also red-hot, but six times the size. I walked on first with Salvador, till we were within a few yards of the lava--at this moment a prodigious stone, followed by two or three smaller ones, came rolling down upon us with terrific velocity. The gentlemen and guides all ran; my first impulse was to run too; but Salvador called on me to stop and see what direction the stone would take. I saw the reason of this advice, and stopped. In less than a second he seized my arm and hurried me back five or six yards. I heard the whizzing sound of the stone as it rushed down behind me. A little further on it met with an impediment, against which it bolted with such force, that it flew up into the air to a great height, and fell in a shower of red-hot fragments. All this passed in a moment; I have shuddered since when I thought of that moment; but at the time, I saw the danger without the slightest sensation of terror. I remember the ridiculous figures of the men, as they scrambled over the ridges of scoria; and was struck by Salvador's exclamation, who shouted to them in a tone which would have become Cæsar himself,--"Che tema!--Sono Salvador!"[M] We did not attempt to turn back again: which I should have done without any hesitation if any one had proposed it. To have come thus far, and be so near the object I had in view, and then to run away at the first alarm! It was a little provoking. The road was extremely dangerous in the descent. I was obliged to walk part of the way, as the guides advised, and but for Salvador, and the interesting information he gave me from time to time, I think I should have been overpowered. He amused and fixed my attention, by his intelligent conversation, his assiduity, and solicitude for my comfort, and the _naïveté_ and self-complacency with which his information was conveyed. He told me he had visited Mount Ætna (_en amateur_) during the last great eruption of that mountain, and acknowledged with laudable candour, that Vesuvius, in its grandest moments, was a mere bonfire in comparison: the whole cone of Vesuvius, he said, was not larger than some of the masses of rock he had seen whirled from the crater of Mount Ætna, and rolling down its sides. He frequently made me stop and look back: and here I should observe that our guides seemed as proud of the performances of the mountain, and as anxious to show it off to the best advantage, as the keeper of a menagerie is of the tricks of his dancing bear, or the proprietor of "Solomon in all his glory" of his raree-show. Their enthusiastic shouts and exclamations would have kept up my interest had it flagged. "O veda, Signora! O bella! O stupenda!" The last great burst of fire was accompanied by a fresh overflow of lava, which issued from the crater, on the west side, in two broad streams, and united a few hundred feet below, taking the direction of Torre del Greco. After this explosion the eruption subsided, and the mountain seemed to repose: now and then showers of stones flew up, but to no great height, and unaccompanied by any vivid flames. There was a dull red light over the mouth of the crater, round which the smoke rolled in dense tumultuous volumes, and then blew off towards the south-west. After a slow and difficult descent we reached the Hermitage. I was so exhausted that I was glad to rest for a few minutes. My good friend Salvador brought me a glass of _Lachryma Christi_ and the leg of a chicken; and with recruited spirits we mounted our animals and again started. The descent was infinitely more slow and difficult than the ascent, and much more trying to the nerves. I had not Salvador at my side, nor the mountain before me, to beguile me from my fears; at length I prevailed on one of our attendants, a fine tall figure of a man, to sing to me; and though he had been up the mountain _six_ times in the course of the day, he sang delightfully and with great spirit and expression, as he strided along with his hand upon my bridle, accompanied by a magnificent rumbling bass from the mountain, which every now and then drowned the melody of his voice, and made me start. It was past three when we reached Resina, and nearly five when we got home: yet I rose this morning at my usual hour, and do not feel much fatigued. About twelve to-day I saw Mount Vesuvius, looking as quiet and placid as the first time I viewed it. There was little smoke, and neither the glowing lava nor the flames were visible in the glare of the sunshine. The atmosphere was perfectly clear, and as I gazed, almost misdoubting my senses, I could scarcely believe in the reality of the tremendous scene I had witnessed but a few hours before. 26.--The eruption burst forth again to-day, and is exceedingly grand; though not equal to what it was on Sunday night. The smoke rises from the crater in dense black masses, and the wind having veered a few points to the southward, it is now driven in the direction of Naples. At the moment I write this, the skies are obscured by rolling vapours, and the sun, which is now setting just opposite to Vesuvius, shines, as I have seen him through a London mist, red, and shorn of his beams. The sea is angry and discoloured; the day most oppressively sultry, and the atmosphere thick, sulphureous, and loaded with an almost impalpable dust, which falls on the paper as I write. _March 4._--We have had delicious weather almost ever since we arrived at Naples, but these last three days have been perfectly heavenly. I never saw or felt any thing like the enchantment of the earth, air, and skies. The mountain has been perfectly still, the atmosphere without a single cloud, the fresh verdure bursting forth all around us, and every breeze visits the senses, as if laden with a renovating spirit of life, and wafted from Elysium. Whoever would truly enjoy nature, should see her in this delicious land: "où la plus douce nuit succède au plus beau jour;" for here she seems to keep holiday all the year round. To stand upon my balcony, looking out upon the sunshine and the glorious bay; the blue sea, and the pure skies--and to feel that indefinite sensation of excitement, that _superflu de vie_, quickening every pulse and thrilling through every nerve, is a pleasure peculiar to this climate, where the mere consciousness of existence is happiness enough. Then evening comes on, lighted by a moon and starry heavens, whose softness, richness, and splendour, are not to be conceived by those who have lived always in the vapoury atmosphere of England--dear England! I love, like an Englishwoman, its fireside enjoyments, and home-felt delights: an English drawing-room, with all its luxurious comforts--carpets and hearth-rugs, curtains let down, sofas wheeled round, and a group of family faces round a blazing fire, is a delightful picture; but for the languid frame, and the sick heart, give me this pure elastic air, "redolent of spring;" this reviving sunshine and all the witchery of these deep blue skies!-- * * * * * Numbers of people set off post-haste from Rome to see the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and arrived here Wednesday and Thursday; just time enough to be too late. Among them our Roman friend Frattino, who has afforded me more amusement than all our other acquaintance together, and deserves a niche in my gallery of characters. Frattino is a young Englishman, who, if he were in England, would probably be pursuing his studies at Eton or Oxford, for he is scarce past the age of boyhood; but having been abroad since he was twelve years old, and early plunged into active and dissipated life, he is an accomplished man of fashion, and of the world, with as many airs and caprices as a spoiled child. He is by far the most _beautiful_ creature of his sex I ever saw; so like the Antinous, that at Rome he went by that name. The exquisite regularity of his features, the graceful air of his head, his _antique_ curls, the faultless proportions of his elegant figure, make him a _thing_ to be gazed on, as one looks at a statue. Then he possesses talents, wit, taste, and information: the most polished and captivating manners, where he wishes to attract,--high honour and generosity, where women are not concerned,--and all the advantages attending on rank and wealth: but under this fascinating exterior, I suspect our Frattino to be a very worthless, as well as a very unhappy being. While he pleases, he repels me. There is a want of heart about him, a want of fixed principles--a degree of profligacy, of selfishness, of fickleness, caprice and ill-temper, and an excess of vanity, which all his courtly address and _savoir faire_ cannot hide. What would be insufferable in another, is in him bearable, and even interesting and amusing: such is the charm of manner. But all this cannot last: and I should not be surprised to see Frattino, a few years hence, emerge from his foreign frippery, throw aside his libertine folly, assume his seat in the senate, and his rank in British society; and be the very character he now affects to despise and ridicule--"a true-bred Englishman, who rides a thorough-bred horse." * * * * * Our excursion to Pompeii yesterday was "a pic-nic party of pleasure," _à l'Anglaise_. Now a party of pleasure is proverbially a _bore_: and our expedition was in the beginning so unpromising, so mismanaged--our party so numerous, and composed of such a heterogeneous mixture of opposite tempers, tastes, and characters, that I was in pain for the result. The day, however, turned out more pleasant than I expected: exterior polish supplied the want of something better, and our excursion had its pleasures, though they were not such as I should have sought at Pompeii. I felt myself a simple _unit_ among many, and found it easier to sympathise with others, than to make a dozen others sympathise with me. We were twelve in number, distributed in three light barouches, and reached Pompeii in about two hours and a half--passing by the foot of Vesuvius, through Portici, Torre del Greco, and l'Annonziata. The streams of lava, which overwhelmed Torre del Greco in 1794, are still black and barren; but the town itself is rising from its ruins; and the very lava which destroyed it serves as the material to rebuild it. We entered Pompeii by the street of the tombs: near them are the semicircular seats, so admirably adapted for conversation, that I wonder we have not sofas on a similar plan, and similar scale. I need not dwell on particulars, which are to be found in every book of travels: on the whole, my expectations were surpassed, though my curiosity was not half gratified. The most interesting thing I saw--in fact the only thing, for which paintings and descriptions had not previously prepared me, was a building which has been excavated within the last fortnight: it is only partly laid open, and labourers are now at work upon it. Antiquarians have not yet pronounced on its name and design; but I should imagine it to be some public edifice, perhaps dedicated to religious purposes. The paintings on the walls are the finest which have yet been discovered: they are exquisitely and tastefully designed; and though executed merely for _effect_, that effect is beautiful. I remarked one female figure in the act of entering a half-open door: she is represented with pencils and a palette of colours in her hand, similar to those which artists now use: another very graceful female holds a lyre of peculiar construction. These, I presume, were two of the muses: the rest remained hidden. There were two small pannels occupied by sea-pieces, with gallies; and two charming landscapes, so well coloured, and drawn with such knowledge of perspective and effect, that if we may form a comparative idea of the best pictures, from the specimens of taste and skill in mere house-painting, the ancients must have excelled us as much in painting as in sculpture. I remarked on the wall of an entrance or corridor, a dog starting at a wreathed and crested snake, vividly coloured, and full of spirit and expression. While I lingered here a little behind the rest, and most reluctant to depart, a ragged lazzarone boy came up to me, and seizing my dress, pointed to a corner, and made signs that he had something to show me. I followed him to a spot where a quantity of dust and ashes was piled against a wall. He began to scratch away this heap of dirt with hands and nails, much after the manner of an ape, every now and then looking up in my face and grinning. The impediment being cleared away, there appeared on the wall behind, a most beautiful aërial figure with floating drapery, representing either Fame or Victory: but before I had time to examine it, the little rogue flung the earth up again so as to conceal it completely, then pointing significantly at the other workmen, he nodded, shrugged, gesticulated, and held out both his paws for a recompense, which I gave him willingly; at the same time laughing and shaking my head to show I understood his knavery. I rewarded him apparently beyond his hopes, for he followed me down the street, bowing, grinning, and cutting capers like a young savage. The streets of Pompeii are narrow, the houses are very small, and the rooms, though often decorated with exquisite taste, are constructed without any regard to what _we_ should term comfort and convenience; they are dark, confined, and seldom communicate with each other, but have a general communication with a portico, running round a central court. This court is in general beautifully paved with mosaic, having a fountain or basin in the middle, and possibly answered the purpose of a drawing-room. It is evident that the ancient inhabitants of this lovely country lived like their descendants mostly in the open air, and met together in their public walks, or in the forums, and theatres. If they _saw company_, the guests probably assembled under the porticoes, or in the court round the fountain. The houses seem constructed on the same principle as birds construct their nests; as places of retreat and shelter, rather than of assemblage and recreation: the grand object was to exclude the sunbeams; and this, which gives such gloomy and chilling ideas in our northern climes, must here have been delicious. Hurried on by a hungry, noisy, merry party, we at length reached the Caserna (the ancient barracks, or as Forsyth will have it, the prætorium). The central court of this building has been converted into a garden: and here, under a weeping willow, our dinner table was spread. Where Englishmen are, there will be good cheer if possible; and our banquet was in truth most luxurious. Besides more substantial cates, we had oysters from Lake Lucrine, and classically excellent they were; London bottled porter, and half a dozen different kinds of wine. Our dinner went off most gaily, but no order was kept afterwards: the purpose of our expedition seemed to be forgotten in general mirth: many witty things were said and done, and many merry ones, and not a few silly ones. We visited the beautiful public walk and the platform of the old temple of Hercules (I call it _old_, because it was a ruin when Pompeii was entire); the Temple of Isis, the Theatres, the Forum, the Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and returned to Naples. Of all the heavenly days we have had since we came to Naples, this has been the most heavenly: and of all the lovely scenes I have beheld in Italy, what I saw to-day has most enchanted my senses and imagination. The view from the eminence on which the old temple stood, and which was anciently the public promenade, was splendidly beautiful, the whole landscape was at one time overflowed with light and sunshine, and appeared as if seen through an impalpable but dazzling veil. Towards evening the outlines became more distinct: the little white towns perched upon the hills, the gentle sea, the fairy island of Rivegliano with its old tower, the smoking crater of Vesuvius, the bold forms of Mount Lactarius and Cape Minerva, stood out full and clear under the cloudless sky: as we returned, I saw the sun sink behind Capri, which appeared by some optical illusion like a glorious crimson transparency suspended above the horizon: the sky, the earth, the sea, were flushed with the richest rose colour, which gradually softened and darkened into purple: the short twilight faded away, and the full moon, rising over Vesuvius, lighted up the scenery with a softer radiance. Thus ended a day which was not without its pleasures:--yet had I planned a party of pleasure to Pompeii, methinks I could have managed better. _Par exemple_, I would have deferred it a fortnight later, or till the vines were in leaf; I would have chosen for my companions two or at most three persons whom I could name, whose cultivated minds and happy tempers would have heightened their own enjoyment and mine. After spending a few hours in taking a general view of the whole city, we would have sat down on the platform of the old Greek Temple which commands a view of the mountains and the bay; or, if the heat were too powerful, under the shade of the hill near it. There we would make our cheerful and elegant repast, on bread and fruits, and perhaps a bottle of Malvoisie or Champagne: the rest of the day should be devoted to a minute examination of the principal objects of interest and curiosity: we would wait till the shadows of evening had begun to steal over the scene, purpling the mountains and the sea; we would linger there to enjoy all the splendours of an Italian sunset; and then, with minds softened and elevated by the loveliness and solemnity of the scenes around, we would get into our carriage, and drive back to Naples beneath the bright full moon; and, by the way, we would "talk the flowing heart," and make our recollections of the olden time, our deep impressions of the past, heighten our enjoyment of the present: and this would be indeed a day of _pleasure_, of such pleasure as I think I am capable of feeling--of imparting--of remembering with unmixed delight. Such was _not_ yesterday. * * * * * M** brought with him this evening, for our amusement, an old man, a native of Cento, who gains his livelihood by a curious exhibition of his peculiar talents. He is blind, and plays well on the violin: he can recite the whole of the Gerusalemme from beginning to end without missing a word: he can repeat any given stanza or number of stanzas either forwards or backwards: he can repeat the last words one after another of any stanzas: if you give him the first word and the last, he can name immediately the particular line, stanza, and book: lastly, he can tell instantly the exact number of words contained in any given stanza. This exhibition was at first amusing; but as I soon found that the man's head was a mere machine, that he was destitute of imagination, and that far from feeling the beauty of the poet, he did not even understand the meaning of the lines he thus repeated up and down, and backwards and forwards, it ceased to interest me after the first sensations of surprise and curiosity were over. * * * * * After I had read Italian with Signior B** this evening, he amused me exceedingly by detailing to me the plan of two tragedies he is now writing or about to write. He has already produced one piece on the story of Boadicea, which is rather a drama than a regular tragedy. It was acted here with great success. After giving his drama due praise, I described to him the plan and characters of Fletcher's Bonduca; and attempted to give him in Italian some idea of the most striking scenes of that admirable play: he was alternately in enchantment and despair, and I thought he would have torn and bitten his Boadicea to pieces, in the excess of his vivacity. The subject of one of his tragedies is to be the Sicilian Vespers. Casimir Delavigne, who wrote _Les Vêpres Siciliennes_, which obtained some years ago such amazing popularity at Paris, and in which the national vanity of the French is flattered at the expense of the Italians, received a pension from Louis XVIII. B** spoke with contempt of Casimir Delavigne's tragedy, and with indignation of what he called "his wilful misrepresentation of history." He is determined to give the reverse of the picture: the French will be represented as "_gente crudeli--tiranni--oppressori, senza fede_;" Giovanni di Procida, as a hero and patriot, _à l'antique_, and the Sicilians as rising in defence of their freedom and national honour. The other tragedy is to be founded on the history of the famous _Congiura dei Baroni_ in the reign of Ferdinand the First, as related by Giannone. The simple facts of this history need not any ornaments, borrowed from invention or poetry, to form a most interesting tale, and furnish ample materials for a beautiful tragedy, in incident, characters, and situations. B** is a little man, dwarfish and almost deformed in person; but full of talent, spirit, and enthusiasm. I asked him why he did not immediately finish these tragedies, which appeared from the sketches he had given me, so admirably calculated to succeed. He replied, that under the present regime, he dared not write up to his own conceptions; and if he curbed his genius, he could do nothing; "Besides," added he mournfully, "I have no time; I am poor--poverissimo! I must work hard all to-day to supply the wants of to-morrow: I am always surveillé by the police, as a known liberal and _literato_." "_Davvero_," added he, gaily, "I would soon do, or say, or write something to attract the honour of their more particular notice, if I could be certain they would only imprison me for a couple of years, and ensure me during that time a blanket, bread and water, and the use of pen and ink: then I would write! I would write! _dalla mattina alla sera_; and thank my gaolers as my best friends: but pens are poignards, ink is poison in the eyes of the present government; imprisonment for life, or banishment, is the least I could expect. Now the mere idea of imprisonment for life would kill me in a week, and banishment!--_Ah lungi dallá mia bella Patria, come cantare! come scrivere! come vivere! moriro io anzi nell' momento di partire!_" * * * * * I drove to-day, tête-à-tête with Laura, to the Lago d'Agnano, about a mile and a half beyond Pausilippo. This lovely fair lake is not more than two miles in circuit; and embosomed in romantic woody hills: innumerable flocks of wild fowl were skimming over its surface, and gave life and motion to the beautiful but quiet landscape. While we were wandering here, enjoying the stillness and solitude, so delightfully contrasted with the unceasing noise, bustle, and crowd of the city, the charm was rudely broken by the appearance of the king; who, attended by a numerous party of his guards and huntsmen, had been wild boar shooting in the neighbouring woods. The waterfowl, scared by the report of fire arms, speedily disappeared, and the guards shouted to each other, and galloped round the smooth sloping banks; cutting up the turf with their horses' hoofs, and deforming the whole scene with uproar, confusion, and affright. Devoutly did I wish them all twenty miles off. The famous Grotto del Cane is on the south bank of the lake, a few yards from the edge of the water. We saw the torch, when held in the vapour, instantaneously extinguished. The ground all around the entrance of the grotto is hot to the touch; and when I plunged my hand into the deleterious gas, which rises about a foot, or a foot and a half, above the surface of the ground, it was so warm I was glad to withdraw it. The disagreeable old woman who showed us this place, brought with her a wretched dog with a rope round his neck, bleared eyes, thin ribs, and altogether of a most pitiful aspect. She was most anxious to exhibit the common but cruel experiment of suspended animation, by holding his head over the mephitic vapour, insisting that he was accustomed to it, and even liked it; of course, we would not suffer it. The poor animal made no resistance; only drooped his head, and put his tail between his legs, when his tyrant attempted to seize him. Though now so soft, so lovely, and so tranquil, the Lago d'Agnano owes its existence to some terrible convulsion of the elements. The basin is the crater of a sunken volcano, which, bursting forth here, swallowed up a whole city. And the whole region round, bears evident marks of its volcanic origin. * * * * * This morning we visited several churches, not one of them worthy of a remark. The architecture is invariably in the vilest taste; and the interior decorations, if possible, still worse: white-washing gilding, and gaudy colours, every where prevail. We saw, however, some good pictures. At the San Gennaro are the famous frescos of Domenichino and Lanfranco: the church itself is hideous. At the Girolomini there is no want of magnificence and ornament; but a barbarous misapplication of both, as usual. The church of the convent of Santa Chiara was painted in fresco by Ghiotto: it is now white-washed all over. At this church, which I first visited during the merry days of the carnival, I saw a large figure of our Saviour suspended on the cross, dressed in a crimson domino, and blue sash. To what a pitch, thought I, must the love of white-washing and masquerading be carried in this strange city, where the Deity himself is burlesqued, and bad taste is carried to profanation! To-day I saw the same crucifix in a suit of mourning; why should not our South Sea missionaries come and preach here? The church of San Severo is falling to ruins, owing to some defect in the architecture. It is only remarkable for containing three celebrated statues. The man enveloped in a net, and the Pudicità draped from head to foot, pleased me only as specimens of the patience and ingenuity of the sculptor. The dead Christ covered with a veil, by Corradini, has a merit of a higher class: it is most painful to look upon; and affected me so strongly, that I was obliged to leave the church, and go into the air. I went to-day with two agreeable and intelligent friends, to take leave of the Studeo and the Museum. I have often resolved not to make my little journal a mere catalogue of objects, which are to be found in my pocket guide, and bought for a few pence; but I cannot resist the temptation of making a few notes of admiration, and commemoration, for my own peculiar use. The Gallery of Painting contains few pictures; but among them are some master-pieces. The St. John of Leonardo da Vinci (exquisite as it is, considered as a mere painting), provoked me. I am sick of his eternal simpering face: the aspect is that of a Ganymede or a young Bacchus; and if instead of _Ecce Agnus Dei_, they had written over it, _Ecce vinum bonum_, all would have been in character. How I coveted the beautiful "Carità," the Capo d'Opera of Schidone!--and next to it, Parmegiano's Gouvernante--a delicious picture. A portrait of Columbus, said to be by the same master, is not like him, I am sure; for the physiognomy is vacant and disagreeable. Domenichino's large picture of the Angel shielding Innocence from a Demon pleases me, as all his pictures do--but not perfectly: the devil in the corner, with his fork, and hoofs, and horns, shocks my taste as a ludicrous and vulgar idea, far removed from poetry; but the figure of the angel stretching a shield over the infant, is charming. There are also two fine Claudes, two Holy Families, by Raffaelle, in his sweetest style; and one by Correggio, scarcely less beautiful. The Gallery of Sculpture is so rich in chef-d'oeuvres, that to particularise would be a vain attempt. Passing over those which every one knows by heart, the statue of Aristides struck me most. It was found in Herculaneum; and is marked with ferruginous stains, as if by the action of fire or the burning lava; but it is otherwise uninjured, and the grave, yet graceful simplicity of the figure and attitude, and the extreme elegance of the drapery, are truly Grecian. It is the union of _power_ with _repose_--of perfect _grace_ with perfect _simplicity_, which distinguishes the ancient from the modern style of sculpture. The sitting Agrippina, for example, furnished Canova with the model for his statue of Madame Letitia--the two statues are, in point of fact, nearly the same, except that Canova has turned Madame Letitia's head a little on one side; and by this single and trifling alteration has destroyed that quiet and beautiful simplicity which distinguishes the original, and given his statue at once a modern air. The Flora Farnese is badly placed, in a space too confined for its size, and too near the eye; so that the exquisite harmony and delicacy of the figure are partly lost in its colossal proportions: it should be placed at the end of a long gallery or vista. There is here a statue of Nero when he was ten years old; from which it would seem that he was not by nature the monster he afterwards became. The features are beautiful; and the expression all candour and sweetness. One statue struck me exceedingly--not by the choice of the subject, nor the beauty of the workmanship, but from its wonderful force of expression. It is a dying gladiator; but very different from the gladiator of the Capitol. The latter declines gradually, and sickens into death; but memory and feeling are not yet extinct: and what thoughts may pass through that brain while life is thus languishing away! what emotions may yet dwell upon the last beatings of that heart! it is the _sentiment_ which gives such profound pathos to that matchless statue: but the gladiator of the Studii has only physical expression: it is sudden death in all its horrors: the figure is still erect, though the mortal blow has been given; the sword has dropt from the powerless hand; the limbs are stiffening in death; the eyes are glazed; the features fixed in an expression of mortal agony; and in another moment you expect the figure to fall at your feet. The Venus, the Hercules, the Atlas, the Antinous (not equal to that in the Capitol,) the Ganymede, the Apollo, the equestrian statues of the two Balbi, etc. are all familiar to my imagination, from the numerous copies and models I have seen: but the most interesting department of the Museum is the collection of antiques from Herculaneum and Pompeii, which have lately been removed hither from Portici. One room contains specimens of cooking utensils, portable kitchens, tripods, instruments of sacrifice, small bronze Lares, and Penates, urns, lamps, and candelabras of the most elegant forms, and the most exquisite workmanship. Another room contains specimens of ancient armour, children's toys, etc. I remarked here a helmet which I imagine formed part of a trophy; or at least was intended for ornament rather than use. It is exceedingly heavy; and on it is represented in the most exquisite relievo the War of Troy. Benvenuto Cellini himself never produced any thing equal to the chased work on this helmet. In a third room is the paraphernalia of a lady's toilette: mirrors of different sizes, fragments of combs, a small crystal box of rouge, etc. Then follow flutes and pipes, all carved out of bone, surgical instruments, moulds for pastry, sculptors' tools, locks and keys, bells, etc. The room containing the antique glass, astonished me more than any thing else. I knew that glass was an ancient invention: but I thought that its application to domestic purposes was of modern date. Here I found window panes, taken from the Villa of Diomed at Pompeii; bottles of every size and form, white and coloured; pitchers and vases; necklaces; imitations of gems, etc. There is a little jeu d'esprit of Voltaire's "La Toilette de Madame de Pompadour," in which he wittily exalts the moderns above the ancients, and ridicules their ignorance of the luxuries and comforts of life: but Voltaire had not seen the museum of Portici. We can add few distinct articles to the list of comforts and luxuries it contains: though it must be confessed that we have improved upon them, and varied them _ad infinitum_. In those departments of the mechanics which are in any way connected with the fine arts, the ancients appear to have attained perfection. To them belongs the invention of all that embellishes life, of all the graceful forms of imitative art, varied with such exquisite taste, such boundless fertility of fancy, that nothing is left to us but to refine upon their ideas, and copy their creations. With all our new invented machines, and engines, we can do little more than what the ancients performed without them. I ought not to forget one room containing some objects, more curious and amusing than beautiful, principally from Pompeii, such as loaves of bread, reduced to a black cinder, figs in the same state, grain of different kinds, colours from a painter's room, ear-rings and bracelets, gems, specimens of mosaic, etc. etc. * * * * * _March 7._--Frattinto brought me to-day the last numbers of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews: a great treat so far from home. Both contain some clever essays: among them, an article on prisons, in the Edinburgh, interested me most. Methinks these two Reviews stalk through the literary world, like the two giants in Pulci's Morgante Maggiore: the one pounding, slaying, mangling, despoiling with blind fury, like the heavy orthodox club-armed Morgante; the other, like the sneering, witty, half-pagan, half-baptized Margutte, slashing and cutting, and piercing through thick and thin; _à tort et à travers_. Truly the simile is more à-propos than I thought when it first occurred to me. I went the other day to a circulating library and reading-room kept here by a little cross French-woman, and asked to see a catalogue. She showed me, first, a list of all the books, Italian, French, and English, she was allowed to keep and sell: it was a thin pamphlet of about one hundred pages. She then showed me the catalogue of prohibited books, which was at least as thick as a good sized octavo. The book to which I wished to refer, was the second volume of Robertson's Charles the Fifth. After some hesitation, Madame P** led me into a back room; and opening a sliding pannel, discovered a shelf let into the wall, on which were arranged a number of authors, chiefly English and French. I was not surprised to find Rousseau and Voltaire among them; but am still at a loss to guess what Robertson has done or written to entitle him to a place in such select company. 8th.--Forsyth might well say that Naples has no parallel on earth. Viewed from the sea it appears like an amphitheatre of palaces, temples and castles, raised one above another, by the wand of a necromancer: viewed within, Naples gives me the idea of a vast Bartholomew fair. No street in London is ever so crowded as I have seen the streets of Naples. It is a crowd which has no pause or cessation: early in the morning, late at night, it is ever the same. The whole population seems poured into the streets and squares; all business and amusement is carried on in the open air: all those minute details of domestic life, which, in England, are confined within the sacred precincts of _home_, are here displayed to public view. Here people buy and sell, and work, wash, wring, brew, bake, fry, dress, eat, drink, sleep, etc. etc. all in the open streets. We see every hour, such comical, indescribable appalling sights; such strange figures, such wild physiognomies, picturesque dresses, attitudes and groups--and eyes--no! I never saw such eyes before, as I saw to-day, half languor and half fire, in the head of a ruffian Lazzarone, and a ragged Calabrian beggar girl. They would have _embrâsé_ half London or Paris. I know not whether it be incipient illness, or the enervating effects of this soft climate, but I feel unusually weak, and the least exertion or excitement is not only disagreeable but painful. While the rest were at Capo di Monte, I stood upon my balcony looking out upon the lovely scene before me, with a kind of pensive dreamy rapture, which if not quite pleasure, had at least a power to banish pain: and thus hours passed away insensibly-- "As if the moving time had been A thing as stedfast as the scene, On which we gazed ourselves away."[N] All my activity of mind, all my faculties of thought and feeling and suffering, seemed lost and swallowed up in an indolent delicious reverie, a sort of vague and languid enjoyment, the true "_dolce far niente_" of this enchanting climate. I stood so long leaning on my elbow without moving, that my arm has been stiff all day in consequence. "How I wish," said I this evening, when they drew aside the curtain, that I might view the sunset from my sofa, and sky, earth and ocean, seemed to commingle in floods of glorious light--"how I wish I could transport those skies to England!" _Cruelle!_ exclaimed an Italian behind me, _ôtez-nous notre beau ciel, tout est perdu pour nous_. THE LAST EVENING AT NAPLES Yes, Laura! draw the shade aside And let me gaze--while yet I may, Upon that gently heaving tide, Upon that glorious sun-lit bay. Land of Romance! enchanting shore! Fair scenes, near which I linger yet! Never shall I behold ye more, Never this last--last look forget! What though the clouds that o'er me lour Have tinged ye with a mournful hue, Deep in my heart I felt your power, And bless ye, while I sigh--Adieu! _Velletri, March 13._--It is now a week since I opened my little book. Ever since the 9th I have been seriously ill: and yesterday morning I left Naples still low and much indisposed, but glad of a change which should substitute any external excitement, however painful, to that unutterable dying away of the heart and paralysis of the mind which I have suffered for some days past. When we turned into the Strada Chiaja, and I gave a last glance at the magnificent bay and the shores all resplendent with golden light, I could almost have exclaimed like Eve, "must I then leave thee, Paradise!" and dropped a few natural tears--tears of weakness, rather than of grief: for what do I leave behind me worthy one emotion of regret? Even at Naples, even in this all-lovely land, "fit haunt for gods," has it not been with me as it has been elsewhere? as long as the excitement of change and novelty lasts, my heart can turn from itself "to luxuriate with indifferent things:" but it cannot last long; and when it is over, I suffer, I am ill: the past returns with tenfold gloom; interposing like a dark shade between me and every object: an evil power seems to reside in every thing I see, to torment me with painful associations, to perplex my faculties, to irritate and mock me with the perception of what is lost to me: the very sunshine sickens me, and I am forced to confess myself weak and miserable as ever. O time! how slowly you move! how little you can do for me! and how bitter is that sorrow which has no relief to hope but from time alone! Last night we reached Mola di Gaëta, which looked even more beautiful than before, in the eyes of all but _one_, whose senses were blinded and dulled by dejection, lassitude, and sickness. When I felt myself passively led along the shore, placed where the eye might range at freedom over the living and rejoicing landscape--when I heard myself repeating mechanically the exclamations of others, and felt no ray of beauty, no sense of pleasure penetrate to my heart--shall I own, even to myself, the mixture of anguish and terror with which I shrunk back, conscious of the waste within me? The conviction that now it was all over, that the last and only pleasures hitherto left to me had perished, that my mind was contracted by the selfishness of despondency, and my quick spirit of enjoyment utterly subdued into apathy, gave me for a moment a pang sharper than if a keen knife had cut me to the quick; and then I relapsed into a kind of torpid languor of mind and frame, which I thought was resignation, and as such indulged it. From my bed this morning I stepped out upon my balcony just as the sun was rising. I wished to convince myself whether the beauty on which I had lately looked with such admiration and delight, had indeed lost all power to touch my heart. The impression made upon my mind at that instant I can only compare to the rolling away of a palpable and suffocating cloud: every thing on which I looked had the freshness and brightness of novelty: a glory beyond its own was again diffused over the enchanting scene from the stores of my own imagination: the sea breeze which blew against my temples new-strung every nerve; and I left Mola with a heart so lightened and so grateful, that not for hours afterwards, not till fatigue and hurry had again wearied down my spirits, did that impression of happy thankfulness pass away. I am sensible I owed this sudden renovation of health solely to the contemplation of Nature; and a true feeling for all the "maggior pompa" she has poured forth over this glorious region. The shores of Terracina, the azure sea, dancing in the breeze, the waves rolling to our feet, the sublime cliffs, the fleet of forty sail stretching away till lost in the blaze of the horizon, the Circean promontory, even the picturesque fisherman, whom we saw throwing his nets from an insulated rock at some distance from the shore, and whom a very trifling exertion of fancy might have converted into some sea divinity, a Glaucus, or a Proteus, formed altogether a picture of the most wonderful and luxuriant beauty. In England there is a peculiar charm in the soft aërial perspective, which even in the broadest glare of noonday, blends and masses the forms of the distant landscape; and in that mingling of colours into a cool neutral gray tint so grateful to the eye. Hence it has happened that in some of the Italian pictures I have seen in England, I have often been struck by what appeared to me a violence in the colouring, and a sharp decision in the outline, o'erstepping the modesty of nature--that is, of _English nature_: but there is in this climate a prismatic splendour of tint, a glorious all-embracing light, a vivid distinctness of outline, something in the reality more gorgeous, glowing, and luxuriant, than poetry could dare to express, or painting imitate. "Ah that such beauty, varying in the light Of living nature, cannot be portrayed By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill; But is the property of those alone Who have beheld it, noted it with care, And in their minds recorded it with love." WORDSWORTH. And now we have left the enchanting south; myrtle-hedges, palm-trees, orange-groves, bright Mediterranean, all adieu! How, under other circumstances, should I regret you, with what reluctance should I leave you, thus half explored, half enjoyed! but now other thoughts engross me, the hard struggle to overcome myself, or at least to appear the thing I am not.---- * * * * * Man has done what he can to deform this lovely region. The most horrible places we have yet met with are Itri and Fondi, which look like recesses of depravity and dirt, and the houses more like the dens and kennels of wild beasts, than the habitations of civilized human beings. In fact, the populace of these towns consists chiefly of the families of the briganti. The women we saw here were bold coarse Amazons; and the few men who appeared had a slouching gait, and looked at us from under their eyebrows with an expression at once cunning and fierce. We met many begging friars--horrible specimens of their species: altogether I never beheld such a desperate set of canaille as appear to have congregated in these two wretched towns. At Mola I remarked several beautiful women. Their head-dress is singularly graceful: the hair being plaited round the back of the head, and there fastened with two silver pins, much in the manner of some of the ancient statues. The costume of the peasantry, there, and all the way to Rome, is very striking and picturesque. I remember one woman whom I saw standing at her door spinning with her distaff: her long black hair, floating down from its confinement, was spread over her shoulders; not hanging in a dishevelled and slovenly style, but in the most rich and luxuriant tresses. Her attitude as she stood suspending her work to gaze at _me_, as I gazed at her with open admiration, was graceful and dignified; and her form and features would have been a model for a Juno or a Minerva.[O] LINES. Quenched is our light of youth! And fled our days of pleasure, When all was hope and truth, And trusting--without measure. Blindly we believed Words of fondness spoken-- Cruel hearts deceived, So our peace was broken! What can charm us more? Life hath lost its sweetness! Weary lags the hour-- "Time hath lost its fleetness!" As the buds in May Were the joys we cherished, Sweet--but frail as they, Thus they passed and perished! And the few bright hours Wintry age can number, Sickly, senseless flowers, Lingering through December! _Rome, March 15._--We arrived here yesterday morning about one, after a short but delightful journey from Velletri. We have now a suite of apartments in the Hotel d'Europe; and our accommodations are in all respects excellent, almost equal to Schneiderf's at Florence. On entering Rome through the gate of the Lateran, I was struck by the emptiness and stillness of the streets, contrasted with those of Naples; and still more by the architectural grandeur and beauty which everywhere met the eye. This is as it should be: the merry, noisy, half-naked, merry-andrew set of ragamuffins which crowd the streets and shores of Naples, would strangely misbecome the desolate majesty of the "Eternal City." Though we now reside in the most fashionable and frequented part of Rome, the sound of carts and carriages is seldom heard. After nine in the evening a profound stillness reigns; and I distinguish nothing from my window but the splashing of the Fountain della Barchetta. The weather is lovely; we were obliged to close our Venetian blinds against the heat at eight this morning, and afterwards we drove to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where we wandered about in search of coolness and shade. * * * * * 26.--I must now descend to the common occurrences of our every-day life. For the last week we have generally spent the whole or part of the morning, in some of the galleries of art; and the afternoon in the gardens of the neighbouring villas. Those of the Villa Medici have their vicinity to our inn, and their fine air to recommend them. From the Villa Lanti, and the Monte Mario, we have a splendid view of the whole city and Campagna of Rome. The Pope's gardens on the Monte Cavallo, are pleasant, accessible, and very private: the gardens of the Villa Pamfili, are enchanting; but our usual haunt is the garden of the Villa Borghese. In this delightful spot we find shade and privacy, or sunshine and society, as we may feel inclined. To-day it was intensely hot; but we found the cool sequestered walks and alleys of cypress and ilex, perfectly delicious. I spread my shawl upon a green bank carpeted with violets, and lounged in most luxurious indolence. I had a book with me, but felt no inclination to read. The soft air, the trickling and murmuring of innumerable fountains, the urns, the temples, the statues--the localities of the scene--all dispose the mind to a kind of vague but delightful reverie to which we "find no end, in wandering mazes lost." In these gardens we frequently meet the Princess Pauline: sometimes alone, but oftener surrounded by a cortège of beaux. She is no longer the "Venere Vincitrice" of Canova; but her face, though faded, is pretty and intelligent; and she still preserves the "andar celeste," and all the distinguished elegance of her petite and graceful figure. Of the stories told of her, I suppose one half _may_ be true--and that half is quite enough. She is rather more famous for her gallantries, than for her bon-gout in the choice of her favourites; but it is justice to Pauline to add, that her native benevolence of heart seems to have survived all her frailties; and every one who speaks of her here, even those who must condemn her, mention her in a tone of kindness, and even of respect. She is still in deep mourning for the Emperor. The Villa Pamfili is about two miles from Rome on the other side of the Monte Gianicolo. The gardens are laid out in the artificial style of Italian gardening, a style which in England would horrify me as in the vilest and most old-fashioned taste--stiff, cold, unnatural, and altogether detestable. Through what inconsistency or perversity of taste is it then, that I am enchanted with the fantastic elegance, and the picturesque gaiety of the Pamfili gardens; where sportive art revels and runs wild amid the luxuriance of nature? Or is it, as I would rather believe, because these long arcades of verdure, these close _walls_ of laurel, pervious to the air, but impervious to the sunshine, these broad umbrageous avenues and marble terraces, these paved grottoes and ever trickling fountains, these gods and nymphs, and urns and sarcophagi, meeting us at every turn with some classical or poetical association, harmonize with the climate and the country, and the minds of the people; and are _comfortable_ and consistent as a well carpeted drawing-room and a warm chimney-corner would be in England? "But it is all so artificial and unnatural"--Agreed;--so are our yellow unsheltered gravel walks, meandering through smooth shaven lawns, which have no other beauty than that of being dry when every other place is wet; our shapeless flower-beds so elaborately irregular, our clumps and dots of trees, and dwarfish shrubberies. I have seen some over-dressed grounds and gardens in England, the perpetrations of Capability Brown and his imitators, the landscape gardeners, quite as bad as any thing I see here, only in a different style, and certainly more adapted to England and English taste. I must confess, that in these enchanting gardens of the Villa Pamfili, a little less "ingenuity and artifice" would be better. I hate _mere_ tricks and gimcrackery, of which there are a few instances, such as their hydraulic music, jets-d'eau--water-works that play occasionally to the astonishment of children and the profit of the gardeners--but how different, after all, are these Italia gardens to the miserable grandeur, and senseless, tasteless parade of Versailles! In these gardens an interesting discovery has just been made; an extensive burial place, or columbarium, in singular preservation. The skeletons and ashes have not been removed. Some of the tombs are painted in fresco, others floored with very pretty mosaic. The disposition of the urns is curious: they are imbedded in the masonry of the wall with moveable lids. On a tile I found the name of Sextus Pompeius, in letters beautifully formed, and deeply and distinctly cut, and an inscription which I was not Latinist enough to translate accurately, but from which it appears that these columbaria belonged to a branch of the Pompey family. 27.--To-day, after English chapel, I look a walk to the San Gregorio, on the other side of the Palatine, which since I first came to Rome has been to me a favourite and chosen spot. I sat down on the steps of the church to rest, and enjoy at leisure the fine view of the hill and ruins opposite. Arches on arches, a wilderness of desolation! and mingled with massive fragments of the halls and towers of the Cæsars, were young shrubs just putting on their brightest green, and the almond-trees covered with their gay blossoms, and the cloudless and resplendent skies bending over all. I tried to sketch the scene before me, but could not form a stroke. I cannot now take a short walk without feeling its ill effects; and my hand shook so much from nervous weakness, that after a few vain efforts to steady it, I sorrowfully gave up the attempt. On returning home by the Coliseum, and through the Forum and Capitol, I met many things I should wish to remember. After all, what place is like Rome, where it is impossible to move a step without meeting with some incident or object to excite reflection, to enchant the eye, or interest the imagination? Rome may yield to Naples or Florence in mere external beauty; but every other spot on earth, Athens perhaps alone excepted, must yield to Rome in interest. * * * * * 28.--This morning we walked down to the studio of Mr. Wagenal, to see the Ægina marbles; which, as objects of curiosity, interested me extremely. These statues are on a smaller scale than I expected, being not much more than half the size of life, but of better workmanship, and in a style of sculpture altogether different from any thing I ever saw before. They formed the ornaments of the pediment of the Temple of Jupiter in the island of Ægina, and represented a group of fighting and dying warriors, with an armed Pallas in the centre: but the subject is not known. The execution of these statues must evidently be referred to the earliest ages of Grecian art; to a period when sculpture was confined to the exact imitation of natural forms. Several of the figures were extremely spirited, and very correct both in design and execution; but there is no attempt at grace, and a total deficiency of ideal beauty: in the Pallas, especially, the drapery and forms are but one remove from the cold formal Etruscan style, which in its turn is but one remove from the yet more tasteless Egyptian. I think it was at the Villa Albani, I saw the singular Etruscan basso-relievo which I was able to compare mentally with what I saw to-day; and the resemblance in _manner_ struck me immediately. Thorwaldson is now restoring these marbles in the most admirable style for the King of Bavaria, to whom they were sold by Messrs. Cockerel and Linkh (the original discoverers) for 8000_l._ Gibson, the celebrated English sculptor, joined us while looking at the Ægina marbles, and accompanied us to the studio of Pozzi, the Florentine statuary. Here I saw several instances of that affected and meretricious taste which prevails too much among the foreign sculptors. I remember one example almost ludicrous, a female Satyr with her hair turned up behind and dressed in the last Parisian fashion; as if she had just come from under the hands of Monsieur Hyppolite. By the same hand which committed this odd solecism, I saw a statue of Moses, now modelling in clay, which, if finished in marble in a style worthy of its conception, and if not spoiled by some affected niceties in the execution, will be a magnificent and sublime work of art. Gibson afterwards showed us round his own studio: his exquisite group of Psyche borne away by the Zephyrs enchanted me. The necessity which exists for supporting all the figures has rendered it impossible to give them the same aërial lightness I have seen in paintings of the same subject, yet they are all _but_ aërial. Psyche was criticised by two or three of our party; but I thought her faultless: she is a lovely timid girl; and as she leans on her airy supporters, she seems to contemplate her flight down the precipice, half-shrinking, though secure. Mr. W** told me that in the original design, the left foot of one of the Zephyrs rested upon the ground: and that Canova, coming in by chance while Gibson was working on the model, lifted it up, and this simple and masterly alteration has imparted the most exquisite lightness to the attitude. Gibson was Canova's favourite pupil: he has quite the air of a genius: plain features, but a countenance all beaming with fire, spirit, and intelligence. His Psyche remains still in the model, as he has not yet found a patron munificent enough to order it in marble; at which I greatly wonder. Could I but afford to bestow seven hundred pounds on my own gratification, I would have given him the order on the spot.[P] 30.--Yesterday we dined _al fresco_ in the Pamfili gardens: and though our party was rather too large, it was well assorted, and the day went off admirably. The queen of our feast was in high good humour, and irresistible in charms; Frattino very fascinating, T** was caustic and witty, W** lively and clever, Sir J** mild, intelligent, and elegant, V**, as usual, quiet, sensible, and self-complacent, L** as absurd and assiduous as ever. Every body played their part well, each by a tacit convention sacrificing to the _amour propre_ of the rest. Every individual really occupied with his own particular _rôle_, but all apparently happy, and mutually pleased. Vanity and selfishness, indifference and ennui, were veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bonds of politeness and gallantry held together those who knew no common tie of thought or interest; and when parted (as they soon will be, north, south, east, and west), will probably never meet again in this world; and whether they do or not, who thinks or cares! Our luxurious dinner, washed down by a competent proportion of Malvoisie and Champagne, were spread upon the grass, which was literally _flowery turf_, being covered with violets, iris, and anemones of every dye. Instead of changing our plates, we washed them in a beautiful fountain which murmured near us, having first, by a libation, propitiated the presiding nymph for this pollution of her limpid waters. For my own peculiar taste there were too many servants (who on these occasions are always _de trop_), too many luxuries, too much fuss; but considering the style and number of our party, it was all consistently and admirably managed: the grouping of the company, picturesque because unpremeditated, the scenery round, the arcades, and bowers, and columns, and fountains, had an air altogether quite poetical and romantic; and put me in mind of some of Watteau's beautiful garden-pieces, and Stothard's fêtes-champêtres. To me the day was not a day of pleasure; for the small stock of strength and spirits with which I set out was soon exhausted, and the rest of the day was wasted in efforts to appear cheerful and support myself to the end, lest I should spoil the general mirth: on all I looked with complacency tinged with my habitual melancholy. What I most admired was the delicious view, from an eminence in the wildest part of the gardens, over the city and Campagna to the blue Apennines, where Frascati and Albano peeped forth like nests of white buildings glittering upon a rich back ground, tinted with blue and purple; the hill where Cato's villa stood, and still called the Portian Hill, and on the highest point the ruined temple of Jupiter Latialis visible at the distance of seventeen miles, and shining in the setting sun like burnished gold. What I most felt and enjoyed was the luxurious temperature of the atmosphere, the purity and brilliance of the skies, the delicious security with which I threw myself down on the turf without fear of damp and cold, and the thankful consciousness, that neither the light or worldly beings round me, nor the sadness which weighed down my own heart, had quite deadened my once quick sense of pleasure, but left me still some perception of the splendour and classical interest of the glorious scenes around me, combined as it was with all the enchantment of natural beauty-- "----The music and the bloom And all the mighty ravishment of spring." TOLSE AI MARTIRI OGNI CONFIN, CHI AL CORE TOGLIER POTEO LA LIBERTA DEL PIANTO! O ye blue luxurious skies! Sparkling fountains, Snow-capp'd mountains, Classic shades that round me rise! Towers and temples, hills and groves, Scenes of glory, Fam'd in story, Where the eye enchanted roves! O thou rich embroider'd earth! Opening flowers, Leafy bowers, Sights of gladness, sounds of mirth! Why to my desponding heart, Darkly thinking, Sadly sinking, Can ye no delight impart?[Q] _Sunday, 31._--To-day the Holy week begins, and a kind of programma of the usual ceremonies of each day was laid on my toilette this morning. The bill of fare for this day runs thus:-- "Domenica delle Palme, nel Capella Papale nel Palazzo Apostolico, canta messa un Cardinal Prete. Il Sommo Pontefice fa la benedizione delle Palme, con processione per la Sala Regia." I gave up going to the English service accordingly, and consented to accompany R** and V** to the Pope's Chapel. We entered just as the ceremony of blessing the palms was going on: a cardinal officiated for the poor old pope, who is at present ill. After the palms had been duly blessed, they were carried in procession round the splendid anti-chamber, called the Sala Regia; meantime the chapel doors were closed upon them, and on their return, they (not the palms, but the priests) knocked and demanded entrance in a fine recitative; two of the principal voices replied from within; the choir without sung a response, and after a moment's silence the doors were opened, and the service went on. This was very trivial and tedious. Rospo said, very truly, that the procession in Blue Beard was much better _got up_. All these processions sound very fine in mere description, but in the reality there is always something to disappoint or disgust; something which leaves either a ludicrous or a painful impression on the mind. The old priests and cardinals to-day looking like so many old beggar-women dressed up in the cast-off finery of a Christmas pantomime, the assistants smirking and whispering, the singers grinning at each other between every solemn strain of melody, and blowing their noses and spitting about like true Italians--in short, the want of keeping in the _tout ensemble_ shocked my taste and my imagination, and, I may add, better, more serious feelings. It is well to see these things once, that we may not be cheated with fine words, but judge for ourselves. I foresee, however, that I shall not be tempted to encounter any of the more crowded ceremonies. I remarked that all the Italians wore black to-day. We spent the afternoon at the Vatican. We found St. Peter's almost deserted; few people, no music, the pictures all muffled, and the altars hung with black drapery. The scaffolding was preparing for the ceremonies of the week; and, on the whole, St. Peter's appeared, for the first time, disagreeable and gloomy. _Monday, April 1._--Non riconosco oggi la mia bella Italia! Clouds, and cold, and rain, to which we have been so long unaccustomed, seem unnatural; and deform that peculiar character of sunny loveliness which belongs to this country: and, à-propos to climate, I may as well observe now, that since the 1st of February, when we left Rome for Naples, up to this present 1st of April, not one day has been so rainy as to confine us to the house: and on referring to my memoranda of the weather, I find that at Naples it rained one day for a few hours only, and for about two hours on the morning we left it: since then, not a drop of rain has fallen: all hot, cloudless, lovely weather. We have been for the last three weeks in summer costume, and guard against the heat as we should in England during the dog-days. To have an idea of an Italian summer, Mr. W** says we must fancy the present heat _quadrupled_. The day, notwithstanding, has been unusually pleasant, the afternoon, though not brilliant, was clear and soft; and we drove in the open carriage first to the little church of Santa Maria della Pace, to see Raffaelle's famous fresco, the Four Sybils. It is in the finest preservation, and combines all his peculiar graces of design and expression. The colouring has not suffered from time and damp like that of the frescos in the Vatican, but it is at once brilliant and delicate. Nothing can exceed the exquisite grace of the Sibilla Persica, nor the beautiful drapery and inspired look of the Cumana. Fortunately, I had never seen any copy or engraving of this master piece: its beauty was to me enhanced by surprise and all the charm of novelty: and my gratification was complete. We afterwards spent half an hour in the gardens of the Villa Lanti, on the Monte Gianicolo. The view of Rome from these gardens is superb: though the sky was clouded, the atmosphere was perfectly pure and clear: the eye took in the whole extent of ancient and modern Rome; beyond it the Campagna, the Alban Hills, and the Apennines, which appeared of a deep purple, with pale clouds floating over their summits. The city lay at our feet, silent, and clothed with the daylight as with a garment--no smoke, no vapour, no sound, no motion, no sign of life: it looked like a city whose inhabitants had been suddenly petrified, or smitten by a destroying angel; and such was the effect of its strange and solemn beauty, that, before I was aware, I felt my eyes fill with tears as I looked upon it. I saw Naples from the Castle of Saint Elmo--setting aside the sea and Mount Vesuvius, those unequalled features in that radiant picture--the view of the _city_ of Naples is not so fine as the view of Rome: it is, comparatively, deficient in sentiment, in interest, and in dignity. Naples wears on her brow the voluptuous beauty of a syren--Rome sits desolate on her seven-hilled throne, "_the Niobe of Nations_." I wish I could have painted what I saw to-day _as_ I saw it. Yet no--the reality was perhaps too much like a picture to please in a picture: the exquisite harmony of the colouring, the softness of the lights and shades, the solemn death-like stillness, the distinctness of every form and outline, and the classic interest attached to every noble object, combined to form a scene, which hereafter, in the silence of my own thoughts, I shall often love to recall and to dwell upon. To-night I read with Incoronati, the Fourth book of Dante, and two of Petrarch's Canzoni "I' vo pensando," and "Verdi panni," making notes from his explanations and remarks as I went along. These two Canzoni I had selected as being among the most _puzzling_ as well as the most beautiful. Those are strangely mistaken, who from a superficial study of a few of his amatory sonnets, regard Petrarch as a mere love-sick poet, who spent his time in be-rhyming an obdurate mistress; and those are equally mistaken who consider him as the poetical votarist of an imaginary fair one. I know but little, even of the little that is known of his life; for I remember being as much terrified by the ponderous quartos of the Abbé de Sade, as I was discomfited and disappointed by the flimsy octavo of Mrs. Dobson. I am now studying Petrarch in his own works; and it seemeth to me, in my simple wit, that such exquisite touches of truth and nature, such depth and purity of feeling, such felicity of expression, such vivid yet delicate pictures of female beauty, could spring only from a real and heartfelt passion. We know too little of Laura: but it is probable, if she had always preserved a stern and unfeeling indifference, she would not have so entirely commanded the affections of a feeling heart; and had she yielded she would not so long have preserved her influence. Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? In truth she appears to have been the most finished coquette of her own or any other age.[R] 3.--What a delight it would be, if, at the end of a day like this, I had _somebody_ with whom I could talk over things--with whose feelings and impressions I could compare my own--who would direct my judgment, and assist me in arranging my ideas, and double every pleasure by sharing it with me! What would have become of me if I had not thought of keeping a Diary? I should have died of a sort of mental repletion! What a consolation and employment has it been to me to let my overflowing heart and soul exhale themselves on paper! When I have neither power nor spirits to join in common-place conversation, I open my dear little Diary, and feel, while my pen thus swiftly glides along, much less as if I were writing than as if I were speaking--yes! speaking to one who perhaps will read this when I am no more--but not till _then_. I was well enough to _walk_ up to the Rospigliosi Palace this morning to see Guido's Aurora: it is on the ceiling of a pavilion: would it were not! for I looked at it till my neck ached, and my brain turned round "like a parish top." I can only say that it far surpassed my expectations: the colouring is the most brilliant, yet the most harmonious, in the world: and there is a depth, a strength, a richness in the tints, not common to Guido's style. The whole is as fresh as if painted yesterday; though Guido must have died sometime about 1640. On each side of the hall or pavilion adorned by the Aurora, there is a small room, containing a few excellent pictures. The Triumph of David, by Domenichino, a fine rich picture; an exquisite Andromeda, by Guido, painted with his usual delicacy and sentiment; the twelve Apostles, by Rubens, some of them very fine; "the Five Senses," said to be by Carlo Cignani, but if so he has surpassed himself: it is like Domenichino. The Death of Samson, by L. Carracci, wearies the eye by the number and confusion of the figures: it has no principal group upon which the attention can rest. There is also a fine portrait of Nicolo Poussin, by himself, and an interesting head of Guido. At three o'clock we went down to the Capella Sistina to hear the Miserere. In describing the effect produced by this divine music, the time, the place, the scenic contrivance should be taken into account: the time--solemn twilight, just as the shades begin to fall around: the place--a noble and lofty hall where the terrors of Michel Angelo's Last Judgment are rendered more terrible by the gathering gloom, and his sublime Prophets frown dimly upon us from the walls above. The extinguishing of the tapers, the concealed choir, the angelic voices chosen from among the finest in the world, and blended by long practice into the most perfect unison, were combined to produce that overpowering effect which has so often been described. Many ladies wept, and one fainted. Unassisted vocal music is certainly the finest of all: no power of instruments could have thrilled me like the blended stream of melancholy harmony, breathed forth with such an expression of despairing anguish, that it was almost too much to bear. _Good-Friday._--I saw more new, amusing, and delightful things yesterday, than I can attempt to describe or even enumerate: but I think there is no danger of my forgetting general impressions: if my memory should fail me in particulars, my imagination can always recall the whole. In the morning I declined going to see the ceremonies at the Vatican. The procession of the host from the Sistine to the Pauline Chapel; the washing of the Pilgrims' feet, etc.--all these things are less than indifferent to me; and the illness and absence of the poor old pope rendered them particularly uninteresting. Every body went but myself; and it was agreed that we should all meet at the door of the Sistine Chapel at five o'clock. I remained quietly at home on my sofa till one; and then drove to the Museum of the Vatican, where I spent the rest of the day; it was a grand festa, and the whole of the Vatican, including the immense suite of splendid libraries, was thrown open to the public. All the foreigners in Rome having crowded to St. Peter's, or the chapels, to view the ceremonies going on, I was the only stranger amidst an assemblage of the common people and peasantry, who had come to lounge there till the lighting up of the Cross. I walked on and on, hour after hour, lost in amazement, and wondering where and when this glorious labyrinth was to end; successive galleries fitted up with the gay splendour of an Oriental Haram, in which the books and manuscripts are all arranged and numbered in cases; the beautiful perspective of hall beyond hall vanishing away into immeasurable distance; the refulgent light shed overall; and add to this, the extraordinary visages and costumes of the people, who with their families wandered along in groups or singly, all behaving with the utmost decorum, and making emphatic exclamations on the beauties around them. "_Ah! che bella cosa! Cosa rara! O bella assai!_" all furnished me with such ample matter for amusement, and observation, and admiration, that I was insensible to fatigue, and knew not that in five hours I had scarcely completed the circuit of the Museum. One room (the Camera del Papiri) struck me particularly: it is a small octagon, the ceiling and ornaments painted by Raffaelle Mengs with exquisite taste. The group on the ceiling represents the Muse of History writing, while her book reposes on the wings of Time, and a Genius supplies her with materials: the pannels of this room are formed of old manuscripts, pasted up against the walls and glazed. The effect of the whole is as singular as beautiful. A new gallery of marbles has lately been opened by the Pope, called from its form the _Sala della Croce_: in splendid, classical, and tasteful decoration, it equals any of the others, but is not, perhaps, so remarkable for the intrinsic value of its contents. I never more deeply felt my own ignorance and deficiencies than I did to-day. I saw so many things I did not understand, so much which I wished to have explained to me, I longed so inexpressibly for someone to talk to, to exclaim to, to help me to wonder, to admire, to be _extasiée_! but I was alone: and I know not how it is, or why, but when I am alone, not only my powers of enjoyment seem to fail me in a degree, but even my mental faculties; and the multitude of my own ideas and sensations confuse, oppress, and irritate me. I walked through the whole gyro of the Museum, examining the busts and pictures particularly, with the help of Este's admirable catalogue raisonnée, and at half-past five I reached the Sistine just in time to hear the second Miserere: neither the music nor the effort were equal to the first evening. The music, though inferior to Allegri's, was truly beautiful and sublime; but the scenic pageantry did not strike so much on repetition: the chapel was insufferably crowded, I was sick and stupid from heat and fatigue, and to crown all, just in the midst of one of the most overpowering strains, the cry of condemned souls pleading for mercy, which made my heart pause, and my flesh creep--a lady behind me whispered loudly, "Do look what lovely broderie Mrs. L** has on her white satin spencer!" After the Miserere, we adjourned to St. Peter's, to see the illumination of the Girandola. I confess the first glance disappointed me; for the cross, though more than thirty feet in height, looks trivial and diminutive, compared with the immensity of the dome in which it is suspended; but just as I was beginning to admire the sublime effect of the whole scene, I was obliged to leave the church, being unable to stand the fatigue any longer. * * * * * To-day we have remained quietly at home, recruiting after the exertions of yesterday. After dinner, Colonel ---- and Mr. W** began to discuss the politics of Italy, and from abusing the governments they fell upon the people; and being of very opposite principles and parties, they soon began an argument which ended in a warm dispute, and sent me to take refuge in my own room. How I detest politics and discord! How I hate the discussion of politics in Italy! and, above all, the discussion of Italian politics, which offer no point upon which the mind can dwell with pleasure. I have not wandered to Italy--"this land of sun-lit skies and fountains clear," as Barry Cornwall calls it, only to scrape together materials for a quarto tour, or to sweep up the leavings of the "fearless" Lady Morgan; or to dwell upon the heart-sickening realities which meet me at every turn; evils of which I neither understand the cause nor the cure. And yet say not to Italy "Caduta è la tua gloria--e tu nol' vedi!" She does see it,--she does feel it. A spirit is silently and gradually working its way beneath the surface of society, which must, erelong, break forth either for good or for evil. Between a profligate and servile nobility, and a degraded and enslaved populace, a middle class has lately sprung up; the men of letters, the artists, the professors in the sciences, who have obtained property, or distinction at least, in the commotions which have agitated their country, and those who have served at home or abroad in the revolutionary wars. These all seem impelled by one and the same spirit; and make up for their want of numbers by their activity, talents, enthusiasm, and the secret but increasing influence which they exert over the other classes of society. But on subjects like these, however interesting, I have no means of obtaining information at once general and accurate: and I would rather not think, nor speak, nor write, upon "matters which are too high for me." Let the modern Italians be what they may,--what I hear them styled six times a day at least--a dirty, demoralized, degraded, unprincipled race,--centuries behind our thrice-blessed, prosperous, and comfort-loving nation in civilization and morals; if I were come among them as a resident, this picture might alarm me; situated as I am, a nameless sort of person, a mere bird of passage, it concerns me not. I am not come to spy out the nakedness of the land, but to implore from her healing airs and lucid skies the health and peace I have lost, and to worship as a pilgrim at the tomb of her departed glories.--I have not many opportunities of studying the national character; I have no dealings with the lower classes, little intercourse with the higher. No tradesmen cheat me, no hired menials irritate me, no innkeepers fleece me, no postmasters abuse me. I love these rich delicious skies; I love this genial sunshine, which, even in December, sends the spirits dancing through the veins; this pure elastic atmosphere, which not only brings the distant landscape, but almost heaven itself nearer to the eye; and all the treasures of art and nature which are poured forth around me; and over which my own mind, teeming with images, recollections, and associations, can fling a beauty even beyond their own. I willingly turn from all that excites the spleen and disgust of others; from all that may so easily be despised, derided--reviled, and abandon my heart to that state of calm benevolence towards all around me, which leaves me undisturbed, to enjoy, admire, observe, reflect, remember, with pleasure, if not with profit, and enables me to look upon the glorious scenes with which I am surrounded, not with the impertinent inquisition of a book-maker, nor the gloomy calculations of a politician, nor the sneering selfism of a Smelfungus--but with the eye of the painter, and the feeling of the poet. A-propos to poets!--Lady C** has just sent us tickets for Sestini's Accademia to-morrow night. So far from the race of Improvvisatori being extinct, or living only in the pages of Corinne, or in the memory of the Fantastici, and the Bandinelli, the Gianas, and the Corillas of other days,--there is scarcely a small town in Italy, as I am informed, without its Improvvisatore; and I know several individuals in the higher classes of society, both here, and at Florence more particularly, who are remarkable for possessing this extraordinary talent--though, of course, it is only exercised for the gratification of a private circle. Of those who make a public exhibition of their powers, Sgricci and Sestini are the most celebrated--and of these Sgricci ranks first. I never heard him; but Signior Incoronati, who knows him well, described to me his talents and powers as almost supernatural. A wonderful display of his art was the _improvvisazione_--we have no English word for a talent which in England is unknown,--of a regular tragedy on the Greek model, with the choruses and dialogue complete. The subject proposed was from the story of Ulysses, which afforded him an opportunity of bringing in the whole sonorous nomenclature of the Heathen Mythology,--which, says Forsyth, enters in the web of every improvvisatore, and assists the poet both with rhymes and ideas. Most of the celebrated improvvisatori have been Florentines: Sgricci is, I believe, a Neapolitan, and his rival Sestini a Roman. * * * * * _April 7._--Any public exhibition of talent in the Fine Arts is here called an _Accademia_. Sestini gave his Accademia in an anti-chamber of the Palazzo ----, I forget its name, but it was much like all the other _palaces_ we are accustomed to see here; exhibiting the same strange contrast of ancient taste and magnificence, with present meanness and poverty. We were ushered into a lofty room of noble size and beautiful proportions, with its rich fresco-painted walls and ceiling faded and falling to decay; a common brick floor, and sundry window panes broken, and stuffed with paper. The room was nearly filled by the audience, amongst whom I remarked a great number of English. A table with writing implements, and an old shattered jingling piano, occupied one side of the apartment, and a small space was left in front for the poet. Whilst we waited with some impatience for his appearance, several persons present walked up to the table and wrote down various subjects; which on Sestini's coming forward, he read aloud, marking those which were distinguished by the most general applause. This selection formed our evening's entertainment. A lady sat down in her bonnet and shawl to accompany him; and when fatigued, another fair musician readily supplied her place. It is seldom that an improvvisatore attempts to recite without the assistance of music. When Dr. Moore heard Corilla at Florence, she sung to the accompaniment of two violins.[S] La Fantastici preferred the guitar; and I should have preferred either to our jingling harpsichord. However, a few chords struck at intervals were sufficient to support the voice, and mark the time. Several airs were tried, and considered before the poet could fix on one suited to his subject and the measure he intended to employ. In general they were pretty and simple, consisting of very few notes, and more like a chant or recitative, than a regular air: one of the most beautiful I have obtained, and shall bring with me to England. The moment Sestini had made his choice, he stepped forward, and without further pause or preparation, began with the first subject upon his list,--"_Il primo Navigatore_." Gesner's beautiful Idyl of "_The First Navigator_," supplied Sestini with the Story, in all its details; but he versified it with surprizing facility: and, as far as I could judge, with great spirit and elegance. He added, too, some trifling circumstances, and several little _traits_, the naïveté of which afforded considerable amusement. When an accurate rhyme, or apt expression, did not offer itself on the instant it was required, he knit his brows and clenched his fingers with impatience; but I think he never hesitated more than half a second. At the moment the chord was struck, the rhyme was ready. In this manner he poured forth between thirty and forty stanzas, with still increasing animation; and wound up his poem with some beautiful images of love, happiness, and innocence. Of his success I could form some idea by the applauses he received from better judges than myself. After a few minutes' repose and a glass of water, he next called on the company to supply him with rhymes for a sonnet. These, as fast as they were suggested by various persons, he wrote down on a slip of paper. The last rhyme given was "_Ostello_,"--(a common alehouse)--at which he demurred, and submitting to the company the difficulty of introducing so vulgar a word into an heroic sonnet, respectfully begged that another might be substituted. A lady called out "_Avello_" the poetical term for a grave, or a sepulchre, which expression bore a happy analogy to the subject proposed. The poet smiled, well pleased;--and stepping forward with the paper in his hand, he immediately, without even a moment's preparation, recited a sonnet on the second subject upon his list,--"_La Morte di Alfieri_."--I could better judge of the merit of this effusion, because he spoke it unaccompanied by music; and his enunciation was remarkably distinct. The subject was popular, and treated with much feeling and poetic fervour. After lamenting Alfieri as the patriot, as well as the bard, and as the glory of his country, he concluded, by indignantly repelling the supposition that "the latest sparks of genius and freedom were buried in the tomb of Vittorio Alfieri." A thunder of applause followed; and cries of "O bravo Sestini! bravo Sestini!" were echoed from the Italian portion of the audience, long after the first acclamations had subsided. The men rose simultaneously from their seats; and I confess I could hardly keep mine. The animation of the poet, and the enthusiasm of the audience, sent a thrill through every nerve and filled my eyes with tears. The next subject was "_La Morte di Beatrice Cenci_;"--and this, I think, was a failure. The frightful story of _Cenci_ is too well known in England since the publication of Shelley's Tragedy. Here it is familiar to all classes; and though two centuries have since elapsed, it seems as fresh in the memory, or rather in the imagination of these people, as if it had happened but yesterday. The subject was not well chosen for a public and mixed assembly; and Sestini, without adverting to the previous details of horror, confined himself most scrupulously, with propriety, to the subject proposed. He described Beatrice led to execution,--"_con baldanza casta e generosa_"--and the effect produced on the multitude by her youth:--not forgetting to celebrate "_those tresses like threads of gold whose wavy splendour dazzled all beholders_," as they are described by a contemporary writer. He put into her mouth a long and pious dying speech, in which she expressed her trust in the blessed Virgin, and her hopes of pardon from eternal justice and mercy. To my surprise, he also made her in one stanza confess and repent the murder, or rather sacrifice,[T] which she had perpetrated; which is contrary to the known fact, that Beatrice _never_ confessed to the last moment of existence, nor gave any reason to suppose that she repented. The whole was drawn out to too great a length, and, with the exception of a few happy touches, and pathetic sentiments, went off flatly. It was very little applauded. The next subject was the "_Immortality of the Soul_," on which the poet displayed amazing pomp and power of words, and a wonderful affluence of ideas. He showed, too, an intimate acquaintance with all that had ever been said, or sung, upon the same subject, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas. I confess I derived little benefit from all this display of poetry and erudition; for, after the first few stanzas, finding himself irretrievably perplexed by the united difficulties of the language and the subject, I withdrew my attention, and amused myself with the paintings on the walls, and with reveries on the past and present, till I was roused by the acclamations that followed the conclusion of the poem; which excited very general admiration and applause. The company then furnished the _bouts-rimés_ for another sonnet: the subject was "_L'Amor della Patria_." The title, even before he began, was hailed by a round of plaudits; and the sonnet itself was excellent and spirited. _Excellent_ I mean in its general effect, as an _improvvisazione_:--how it would stand the test of cool criticism I cannot tell; nor is that any thing to the purpose: these extemporaneous effusions ought to be judged merely as what they are,--not as finished or correct poems, but as wonderful exercises of tenacious memory, ready wit, and that quickness of imagination which can soar ----"al bel cimento Sulle ali dell' momento." To return to Sestini. It may be imagined, that on such a subject as "_L'Amor della Patria_," the ancient Roman worthies were not forgotten, and accordingly, a Brutus, a Scipio, a Fabius, or a Fabricius, figured in every line. And surely on no occasion could they have been more appropriately introduced:--in Rome, and when addressing Romans, who showed, by their enthusiastic applause, that though the spirit of their forefathers may be extinct, their memory is not. The next subject, which formed a sort of _pendant_ to the Cenci, was the "_Parricide of Tullia_." In this again his success was complete. The stanza in which Tullia ordered her charioteer to "drive on," was given with such effect as to electrify us: and a sudden burst of approbation which caused a momentary interruption, evidently lent the poet fresh spirits and animation. The evening concluded with a lively burlesque, entitled "_Il Mercato d'Amore_" which represented Love as setting up a shop to sell "_la Mercanzia della Gioventù_." The list of his stock in trade, though it could not boast of much originality, was given with admirable wit and vivacity. In conclusion, Love being threatened with a bankruptcy, took shelter, as the poet assured us, in the bright eyes of the ladies present. This farewell compliment was prettily turned, and intended, of course, to be general: but it happened, luckily for Sestini, that just opposite to him, and fixed upon him at the moment, were two of the brightest eyes in the world. Whether he owed any of his inspiration to their beams I know not; but the _à-propos_ of the compliment was seized immediately, and loudly applauded by the gentlemen round us. Sestini is a young man, apparently about five-and-twenty: of a slight and delicate figure, and in his whole appearance, odd, wild, and picturesque. He has the common foreign trick of running his fingers through his black bushy hair; and accordingly it stands on end in all directions. A pair of immense whiskers, equally black and luxuriant, meet at the point of his chin, encircling a visage of most cadaverous hue, and features which might be termed positively ugly, were it not for the "_vago spirito ardento_" which shines out from his dark eyes, and the fire and intelligence which light up his whole countenance, till it almost kindles into beauty. Though he afterwards conversed with apparent ease, and replied to the compliments of the company, he was evidently much exhausted by his exertions. I should fear that their frequent repetition, and the effervescence of mind, and nervous excitement they cannot but occasion, must gradually wear out his delicate frame and feeble temperament, and that the career of this extraordinary genius will be short as it is brilliant.[U] _April 8._--As Maupertuis said after his journey to Lapland--for the universe I would not have missed the sights and scenes of yesterday; but, for the whole universe, I would not undergo such another day of fatigue, anxiety, and feverish excitement. In the morning about ten o'clock, we all went down to St. Peter's, to hear high mass. The absence of the Pope (who is still extremely ill) detracted from the interest and dignity of the ceremony: there was no general benediction from the balcony of St. Peter's; and nothing pleased me, except the general _coup d'oeil_; which in truth was splendid. The theatrical dresses of the mitred priests, the countless multitude congregated from every part of Christendom, in every variety of national costume, the immensity and magnificence of the church, and the glorious sunshine--all these enchanted the eye; but I could have fancied myself in a theatre. I saw no devotion, and I felt none. The whole appeared more like a triumphal pageant acted in honour of a heathen deity, than an act of worship and thanksgiving to the Great Father of all. I observed an immense number of pilgrims, male and female, who had come from various parts of Italy to visit the shrine of St. Peter on this grand occasion. I longed to talk to a man who stood near me, with a very singular and expressive countenance, whose cape and looped hat were entirely covered with scallop shells and reliques, and his long staff surmounted by a death's head. I was restrained by a feeling which I now think rather ridiculous: I feared, lest by conversing with him, I should diminish the effect his romantic and picturesque figure had made on my imagination. The exposition of the relics was from a balcony half way up the dome, so high and distant that I could distinguish nothing but the impression of our Saviour's face on the handkerchief of St. Veronica, richly framed--at the sight whereof the whole multitude prostrated themselves to the earth: the other relics I forget, but they were all equally marvellous and equally credible. We returned after a long fatiguing morning to an early dinner; and then drove again to the Piazza of St. Peter's, to see the far-famed illumination of the church. We had to wait a considerable time; but the scene was so novel and beautiful, that I found ample amusement in my own thoughts and observations. The twilight rapidly closed round us: the long lines of statues along the roof and balustrades, faintly defined against the evening sky, looked like spirits come down to gaze; a prodigious crowd of carriages, and people on foot, filled every avenue: but all was still, except when a half-suppressed murmur of impatience broke through the hushed silence of suspense and expectation. At length, on a signal, which was given by the firing of a cannon, the whole of the immense façade and dome, even up to the cross on the summit, and the semicircular colonnades in front, burst into a blaze, as if at the touch of an enchanter's wand; adding the pleasure of surprise to that of delight and wonder. The carriages now began to drive rapidly round the piazza, each with a train of running footmen, flinging their torches round and dashing them against the ground. The shouts and acclamations of the crowd, the stupendous building with all its architectural outlines and projections, defined in lines of living flame, the universal light, the sparkling of the magnificent fountains--produced an effect far beyond any thing I could have anticipated, and more like the gorgeous fictions of the Arabian Nights, than any earthy reality. After driving round the piazza, we adjourned to a balcony which had been hired for us overlooking the Tiber, and exactly opposite to the Castle of St. Angelo. Hence we commanded a view of the fireworks, which were truly superb, but made me so nervous and giddy with noise and light and wonder, that I was rejoiced when all was over. A flight of a thousand sky-rockets sent up at once, blotting the stars and the moonlight--dazzling our eyes, stunning our ears, and amazing all our senses together, concluded the Holy Week at Rome. To-morrow morning we start for Florence, and to-night I close this second volume of my Diary. Thanks to my little ingenious Frenchmen in the Via Santa Croce, I have procured a lock for a third volume, almost equal to my patent _Bramah_ in point of security, though very unlike it in every other respect. * * * * * _Viterbo_, _April 9._--"In every bosom Italy is the _second_ country in the world, the surest proof that it is in reality the _first_." This elegant and just observation occurs, I think, in Arthur Young's travels; I am not sure I quote the words correctly, but the sense will come home to every cultivated mind with the force of a proverbial truism. One leaves Naples as a man parts with an enchanting mistress, and Rome as we would bid adieu to an old and dear-loved friend. I love it, and grieve to leave it for its own sake; it is painful to quit a place where we leave behind us many whom we love and regret; and almost or quite as painful, I think, to quit a place in which we leave behind us no one to regret, or think of us more; a feeling like this mingled with the sorrow with which I bade adieu to Rome this morning. Our journey has been fatiguing, _triste_, and tedious. * * * * * _Radicofani_, _10th._--I could almost regret at this moment that I am past the age of romance, for I am in a fine situation for mysterious and imaginary horrors, could I but feel again as I did at gay sixteen; but, alas! _ces beaux jours sont passés_! and here I am on the top of a dreary black mountain, in a rambling old inn which looks like a ci-devant hospital or dismantled barracks, in a bed-room which resembles one of the wards of a poor-house, one little corner lighted by my lamp, and the other three parts all lost in black ominous darkness; while a tempest rages without as if it would break in the rattling casements, and burst the roof over our heads; and yet, insensible that I am! I can calmly take up my pen to amuse myself by scribbling, since sleep is impossible. I can look round my vast and solitary room without fancying a ghost or an assassin in every corner, and listen to the raving and lamenting of the storm, without imagining I hear in every gust the shrieks of wailing spirits, or the groans of murdered travellers; only wishing that the wind were rather less cold, or my fire a little brighter, or my dormitory less _infinitely_ spacious; for at present its boundaries are invisible. The first part of our journey this morning was delightful and picturesque; we passed the beautiful lake of Bolsena and Montepulciano, so famous for its wine (_il Rei di Vino_, as Redi calls it in the _Bacco in Toscana_). Later in the day we entered a gloomy and desolate country; and after crossing the rapid and muddy torrent of Rigo, which, as our _Guide des Voyageurs_ wittily informs us, we shall have to cross _four_ times if we are not drowned the _third_ time, we began to ascend the mountainous region which divides the Tuscan from the Roman states--a succession of wild barren hills, intersected in every direction by deep ravines, and presenting a scene, sublime indeed from its waste and wild grandeur, but destitute of all beauty, interest, magnificence and variety. I remember the strange emotion which came across me, when--on the horses stopping to breathe on the summit of a lofty ridge, where all around, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen but the same unvarying, miserable, heart-sinking barrenness, without a trace of human habitation, except the black fort or the highest point of Radicofani--a soft sound of bells came over my ear as if brought upon the wind. There is something in the sound of bells in the midst of a solitude which is singularly striking, and may be cheering or melancholy, according to the mood in which we may happen to be. * * * * * _Florence, April 14._--I have not written a word since we arrived at Sienna. What would it avail me to keep a mere journal of suffering? O that I could change as others do, could forget that such things have been which can never be again! that there were not this tenacity in my heart and soul which clings to the shadow though the substance be gone! This is not a mere effusion of low spirits; I was never more cheerful. I have just left a gay party, where Mr. Rogers (whom by special good fortune we meet at every resting-place, and who dined with us to-day) has been entertaining us delightfully. I disdain low spirits as a mere disease which comes over us, generally from some physical or external cause; to prescribe for them is as easy as to disguise them is difficult: but the hopeless, cureless sadness of a heart which droops with regret, and throbs with resentment, is easily, very easily disguised, but not so easily banished. I hear every body round me congratulating themselves, and _me_ more particularly, that we have at last reached Florence, that we are so far advanced on our road homewards, that soon we shall be at Paris, and Paris is to do wonders--Paris and Dr. R** are to _set me up_ again, as the phrase is. But I shall never be set up again, I shall never live to reach Paris; none can tell how I sicken at the very name of that detested place; none seem aware how fast, how very fast the principle of life is burning away within me: but why should I speak? and what earthly help can now avail me? I can suffer in silence, I can conceal the weakness which increases upon me, by retiring, as if from choice and not necessity, from all exertion not absolutely inevitable; and the change is so gradual, none will perceive it till the great change of all comes, and then I shall be at rest. * * * * * Florence looked most beautiful as we approached it from the south, girt with her theatre of verdant hills, and glittering in the sunshine. All the country from Sienna to Florence is richly cultivated; diversified with neat hamlets, farms and villas. I was more struck with the appearance of the Tuscan peasantry on my return from the Papal dominions than when we passed through the country before: no where in Tuscany have we seen that look of abject negligent poverty, those crowds of squalid beggars which shocked us in the Ecclesiastical States. In the towns where we stopped to change horses, we were presently surrounded by a crowd of people: the women came out spinning, or sewing and plaiting the Leghorn hats; the children threw flowers into our barouche, the men grinned and gaped, but there was no vociferous begging, no disgusting display of physical evils, filth, and wretchedness. The motive was merely that idle curiosity for which the Florentines in all ages have been remarked. I remember an amusing instance which occurred when I was here in December last. I was standing one evening in the Piazza del Gran Duca, looking at the group of the Rape of the Sabines: in a few minutes a dozen people gathered round me, gaping at the statue, and staring at that and at me alternately, either to enjoy my admiration, or find out the cause of it: the people came out of the neighbouring shops, and the crowd continued to increase, till at length, though infinitely amused, I was glad to make my escape. I suffered from cold when first we arrived at Florence, owing to the change of climate, or rather to mere weakness and fatigue: to-day I begin to doubt the possibility of outliving an Italian summer. The blazing atmosphere which depresses the eyelids, the enervating heat, and the rich perfume of the flowers all around us, are almost too much. _April 20._--During our stay at Florence, it has been one of my favourite occupations to go to the Gallery or the Pitti Palace, and placing my portable seat opposite to some favourite pictures, minutely study and compare the styles of the different masters. By the style of any particular painter, I presume we mean to express the combination of two separate essentials--first, his peculiar conception of his subject; secondly, his peculiar method of executing that conception, with regard to colouring, drawing, and what artists call handling. The former department of style lies in the mind, and will vary according to the feelings, the temper, the personal habits, and previous education of the painter: the latter is merely mechanical, and is technically termed the _manner_ of a painter; it may be cold or warm, hard, dry, free, strong, tender: as we say the cold manner of Sasso Ferrato, the warm manner of Giorgione, the hard manner of Holbein, the dry manner of Perugino, the free manner of Rubens, the strong manner of Carravaggio, and so forth; I heard an amateur once observe, that one of Morland's Pig-sties was painted with great _feeling_: all this refers merely to mechanical execution. I am no connaisseur; and I should have lamented, as a misfortune, the want of some fixed principles of taste and criticism to guide my judgment; some nomenclature by which to express certain effects, peculiarities, and excellencies which I felt, rather than understood; if my own ignorance had not afforded considerable amusement to myself, and perhaps to others. I have derived some gratification from observing the gradual improvement of my own taste: and from comparing the decisions of my own unassisted judgment and natural feelings, with the fiat of profound critics and connaisseurs: the result has been sometimes mortifying, sometimes pleasing. Had I visited Italy in the character of a ready-made connaisseur, I should have lost many pleasures; for as the eye becomes more practised, the taste becomes more discriminative and fastidious; and the more extensive our acquaintance with the works of art, the more limited is our sphere of admiration; as if the circle of enjoyment contracted round us, in proportion as our sense of beauty became more intense and exquisite. A thousand things which once had power to charm, can charm no longer; but, _en revanche_, those which _do_ please, please a thousand times more: thus what we lose on one side, we gain on the other. Perhaps, on the whole, a technical knowledge of the arts is apt to divert the mind from the general effect, to fix it on petty details of execution. Here comes a connaisseur, who has found his way, good man! from Somerset House, to the Tribune at Florence: see him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the other extended forwards, describes certain indescribable circumvolutions in the air, and now he retires, now advances, now recedes again, till he has hit the exact distance from which every point of beauty is displayed to the best possible advantage, and there he stands--gazing, as never gazed the moon upon the waters, or love-sick maiden upon the moon! We take him perhaps for another Pygmalion? We imagine that it is those parted and half-breathing lips, those eyes that _seem_ to float in light; the pictured majesty of suffering virtue, or the tears of repenting loveliness; the divinity of beauty, or "_the beauty of holiness_," which have thus transfixed him? No such thing: it is _fleshiness_ of the tints, the _vaghezza_ of the colouring, the brilliance of the carnations, the fold of a robe, or the fore-shortening of a little finger. O! whip me such connaisseurs! the critic's stop-watch was nothing to this. Mere mechanical excellence, and all the tricks of art have their praise as long as they are subordinate and conduce to the general effect. In painting as in her sister arts it is necessary "Che l'arte che tutto fa nulla si scuopre." Of course I do not speak here of the Dutch school, whose highest aim, and highest praise, is exquisite mechanical precision in the representation of common nature and still life: but of those pictures which are the productions of mind, which address themselves to the understanding, the fancy, the feelings, and convey either a moral or a poetical pleasure. In taking a retrospective view of all the best collections in Italy and of the Italian school in particular, I have been struck by the endless multiplication of the same subjects, crucifixions, martyrdoms, and other scripture horrors;--virgins, saints, and holy families. The prevalence of the former class of subjects is easily explained, and has been ingeniously defended; but it is not so easily reconciled to the imagination. The mind and the eye are shocked and fatigued by the succession of revolting and sanguinary images which pollute the walls of every palace, church, gallery, and academy, from Milan to Naples. The splendour of the execution only adds to their hideousness; we at once seek for nature, and tremble to find it. It is hateful to see the loveliest of the arts degraded to such butcher-work. I have often gone to visit a famed collection with a secret dread of being led through a sort of intellectual shambles, and returned with the feeling of one who had supped full of horrors. I do not know how _men_ think, and feel, though I believe many a man, who with every other feeling absorbed in overpowering interest, could look unshrinking upon a real scene of cruelty and blood, would shrink away disgusted and sickened from the cold, obtrusive, _painted_ representation of the same object; for the truth of this I appeal to men. I can only see with woman's eyes, and think and feel as I believe every woman _must_, whatever may be her love for the arts. I remember that in one of the palaces at Milan--(I think it was in the collection of the Duca Litti)--we were led up to a picture defended from the air by a plate of glass, and which being considered as the gem of the collection, was reserved for the last as a kind of _bonne bouche_. I gave but one glance, and turned away loathing, shuddering, sickening. The cicerone looked amazed at my bad taste, he assured me it was _un vero Correggio_ (which by the way I can never believe), and that the duke had refused for it I know not how many thousand scudi. It would be difficult to say what was most execrable in this picture, the appalling nature of the subject, the depravity of mind evinced in its conception, or the horrible truth and skill with which it was delineated. I ought to add that it hung up in the family dining-room and in full view of the dinner-table. There is as picture among the chefs-d'oeuvres in the Vatican, which, if I were pope (or Pope Joan) for a single day, should be burnt by the common hangman, "with the smoke of its ashes to poison the air," as it now poisons the sight by its unutterable horrors. There is another in the Palazzo Pitti, at which I shiver still, and unfortunately there is no avoiding it, as they have hung it close to Guido's lovely Cleopatra. In the gallery there is a Judith and Holofernes which irresistibly strikes the attention--if any thing would add to the horror inspired by the sanguinary subject, and the atrocious fidelity and talent with which it is expressed, it is that the artist was a _woman_. I must confess that Judith is not one of my favourite heroines; but I can more easily conceive how a woman inspired by vengeance and patriotism could execute such a deed, than that she could coolly sit down, and day after day, hour after hour, touch after touch, dwell upon and almost realize to the eye such an abomination as this. We can study anatomy, if (like a certain princess) we have a taste that way, in the surgeon's dissecting-room; we do not look upon pictures to have our minds agonized and contaminated by the sight of human turpitude and barbarity, streaming blood, quivering flesh, wounds, tortures, death, and horrors in every shape, even though it should be all very _natural_. Painting has been called the handmaid of nature; is it not the duty of a handmaid to array her mistress to the best possible advantage? At least to keep her infirmities from view and not to expose her too undressed? But I am not so weak, so cowardly, so fastidious, as to shrink from every representation of human suffering, provided that our sympathy be not strained beyond a certain point. To _please_ is the genuine aim of painting, as of all the fine arts; when pleasure is conveyed through deeply excited interest, by affecting the passions, the senses, and the imagination, painting assumes a higher character, and almost vies with tragedy: in fact, it _is_ tragedy to the eye, and is amenable to the same laws. The St. Sebastians of Guido and Razzi; the St. Jerome of Domenichino; the sternly beautiful Judith of Allori; the Pietà of Raffaelle; the San Pietro Martire of Titian; are all so many tragic _scenes_ wherein whatever is revolting in circumstances or character is judiciously kept from view, where human suffering is dignified by the moral lesson it is made to convey, and its effect on the beholder at once softened and heightened by the redeeming grace which genius and poetry have shed like a glory round it. Allowing all this, I am yet obliged to confess that I am wearied with this class, of pictures, and that I wish there were fewer of them. But there is one subject which never tires, at least never tires _me_, however varied, repeated, multiplied. A subject so lovely in itself that the most eminent painter cannot easily embellish it, or the meanest degrade it; a subject which comes home to our own bosoms and dearest feelings; and in which we may "lose ourselves in all delightfulness," and indulge unreproved pleasure. I mean the _Virgin and Child_, or in other words, the abstract personification of what is loveliest, purest, and dearest, under heaven--maternal tenderness, virgin meekness, and childish innocence, and the _beauty of holiness_ over all. It occurred to me to-day, that if a gallery could be formed of this subject alone, selecting one specimen from among the works of every painter, it would form not only a comparative index to their different styles, but we should find, on recurring to what is known of the lives and characters of the great masters, that each has stamped some peculiarity of his own disposition on his Virgins; and that, after a little consideration and practice, a very fair guess might be formed of the character of each artist, by observing the style in which he has treated this beautiful and favourite subject. Take Raffaelle for example, whose delightful character is dwelt upon by all his biographers; his genuine nobleness of soul, which raised him far above interest, rivalship, or jealousy, the gentleness of his temper, the suavity of his manners, the sweetness of his disposition, the benevolence of his heart, which rendered him so deeply loved and admired, even by those who pined away at his success, and died of his superiority[V]--are all attested by contemporary writers: where but in his own harmonious character, need Raffaelle have looked for the prototypes of his half-celestial creations? His Virgins alone combine every grace which the imagination can require--repose, simplicity, meekness, purity, tenderness; blended without any admixture of earthly passion, yet so varied, that though all his Virgins have a general character, distinguishing them from those of every other master, no two are exactly alike. In the Madonna del Seggiola, for instance, the prevailing expression is a serious and pensive tenderness; her eyes are turned from her infant, but she clasps him to her bosom, as if it were not necessary to _see_ him, to _feel_ him in her heart. In another Holy Family in the Pitti Palace, the predominant expression is maternal rapture: in the Madonna di Foligno, it is a saintly benignity becoming the Queen of Heaven: in the Madonna del Cardellino, it is a meek and chaste simplicity: it is the "_Vergine dolce e pia_" of Petrarch. This last picture hangs close to the Fornarina in the Tribune,--a strange contrast! Raffaelle's love for that haughty and voluptuous virago, had nothing to do with his conception of ideal beauty and chastity; and could one of his own Virgins have walked out of her frame, or if her prototype could have been found on earth, he would have felt, as others have felt--that to look upon such a being with aught of unholy passion would be profanation indeed. Next to Raffaelle, I would rank Correggio, as a painter of Virgins. Correggio was remarkable for the humility and gentleness of his deportment, for his pensive and somewhat anxious disposition, and kindly domestic feelings: these are the characteristics which have poured themselves forth upon his Madonnas. They are distinguished generally by the utmost sweetness, delicacy, grace, and devotional feeling. I remember reading somewhere that Correggio had a large family, and was a particularly fond father; and it is certain, that in the expression of maternal tenderness, he is superior to all but Raffaelle: his Holy Family in the Studii at Naples, and his lovely Virgin in the gallery, are instances. Guido ranks next in my estimation, as a painter of Virgins. He is described as an elegant and accomplished man, remarkable for the modesty of his disposition, and the dignity and grace of his manner; as delicate in his personal habits, and sumptuous in his dress and style of living. He had unfortunately contracted a taste for gaming, which latterly plunged him into difficulties, and tinged his mind with bitterness and melancholy. All his heads have a peculiar expression of elevated beauty, which has been called Guido's air. His Madonnas are all but heavenly: they are tender, dignified, lovely:--but when compared with Raffaelle's, they seem more touched with earthly feeling, and have less of the pure ideal: they are, if I may so express myself, too _sentimental_: sentiment is, in truth, the distinguishing characteristic of Guido's style. It is remarkable, that towards the end of his life, Guido more frequently painted the Mater Dolorosa, and gave to the heads of his Madonnas a look of melancholy, disconsolate resignation, which is extremely affecting. Titian's character is well known: his ardent cheerful temper, his sanguine enthusiastic mind, his love of pleasure, his love of women; and true it is, that through all his glowing pictures, we trace the voluptuary. His Virgins are rather "_des jeunes épouses de la veille_"--far too like his Venuses and his mistresses: they are all luxuriant _human_ beauty; with that peculiar air of blandishment which he has thrown into all his female heads, even into his portraits, and his old women. Witness his lovely Virgin in the Vatican, his Mater Sapientiæ, and his celebrated Assumption at Venice, in which the eyes absolutely float in rapture. There is nothing ideal in Titian's conception of beauty: he paints no saints and goddesses _fancy-bred_: his females are all true, lovely women; not like the heavenly creation of Raffaelle, looking as if a touch, a breath would profane them; but warm flesh and blood--heart and soul--with life in their eyes, and love upon their lips: even over his Magdalenes, his beauty-breathing pencil has shed a something which says, A misura che amò-- Piange i suoi falli! But this is straying from my subject; as I have embarked in this fanciful hypothesis, I shall multiply my proofs and examples, as far as I can, from memory. In some account I have read of Murillo, he is emphatically styled _an honest man_: this is all I can remember of his character; and _truth_ and nature prevail through all his pictures. In his Virgins, we can trace nothing elevated, poetical or heavenly: they have not the _ideality_ of Raffaelle's, nor the tender sweetness of Correggio's; nor the glowing loveliness of Titian's; but they have an individual reality about them, which gives them the air of portraits. That chef-d'oeuvre, in the Pitti Palace, for instance, call it a beautiful peasant girl and her baby, and it is faultless: but when I am told it is the "_Vergine gloriosa, del Re Eterno Madre, Figliuola, e Sposa_," I look instantly for something far beyond what I see expressed. All Murillo's Virgins are so different from each other, that it is plain the artist did not paint from any preconceived idea of his own mind, but from different originals; they are all impressed with that general air of truth, nature, and common life, which stamps upon them a peculiar and distinct character. Andrea del Sarto, who is in style as in character the very reverse of Murillo, fascinated me at first by his enchanting colouring, and the magical aërial depths of his chiaro-oscuro; but on a further acquaintance with his works, I was struck by the predominance of external form and colour over mind and feeling. His Virgins look as if they had been born and bred in the first circles of society, and have a particular air of elegance, an artificial grace, an attraction, which may be entirely traced to exterior; to the cast of the features, the contour of the form, the disposition of the draperies, the striking attitudes, and, above all, the divine colouring: beauty and dignity, and powerful effect, we always find in his pictures: but no _moral_ pathos--no poetry--no sentiment--above all, a strange and total want of devotional expression, simplicity and humility. His Virgin with St. Francis and St. John, which hangs behind the Venus in the Tribunes, is a wonderful picture; and there are two charming Madonnas in the Borghese Palace at Rome. In the first we are struck by the grouping and colouring; in the last, by a certain graceful _lengthiness_ of the limbs and fine animated drawing in the attitudes. But we look in vain for the "sacred and the sweet," for heart, for soul, for countenance. Andrea del Sarto had, in his profession, great talents rather than genius and enthusiasm. He was weak, dissipated, unprincipled; without elevation of mind or generosity of temper; and that his moral character was utterly contemptible, is proved by one trait in his life. A generous patron who had relieved him in his necessity, afterwards entrusted him with a considerable sum of money, to be laid out in certain purchases; Andrea del Sarto perfidiously embezzled the whole, and turned it to his own use. This story is told in his life, with the addition that "he was persuaded to it by his wife, as profligate and extravagant as himself." Carlo Dolce's gentle, delicate, and melancholy temperament, are strongly expressed in his own portrait, which is in the Gallery of Paintings here. All his pictures are tinged by the morbid delicacy of his constitution, and the refinement of his character and habits. They have exquisite finish, but a want of power, degenerating at times into coldness and feebleness; his Madonnas are distinguished by regular feminine beauty, melancholy, devotion, or resigned sweetness: he excelled in Mater Dolorosa. The most beautiful of his Virgins is in Pitti Palace, of which picture there is a duplicate in the Borghese Palace at Rome. Carlo Marratti, without distinguished merit of any kind--unless it was a distinguished merit to be the father of Faustina Zappi,--owed his fortune, his title of _Cavaliere_, and the celebrity he once enjoyed, not to any superiority of genius, but to his successful arts as a courtier, and his assiduous flattery of the great. What can be more characteristic of the man, than his simpering Virgins, fluttering in tasteless, many-coloured draperies, with their sky blue back-grounds, and golden clouds? Caravaggio was a gloomy misanthrope and a profligate ruffian: we read, that he was banished from Rome, for a murder committed in a drunken brawl; and that he died at last of debauchery and want. Caravaggio was perfect in his gamblers, robbers, and martyrdoms, and should never have meddled with Saints and Madonnas. In his famous _Pietà_ in the Vatican, the Virgin is an old beggar-woman, the two Maries are fish-wives, in "maudlin sorrow," and St. Peter and St. John, a couple of bravoes, burying a murdered traveller: _dipinse ferocemente sempre perche feroce era il suo carrattere_, says his biographer; an observation, by the way, in support of my hypothesis. Rubens, with all his transcendent genius, had a coarse imagination: he bore the character of an honest, liberal, but not very refined man. Rubens painted Virgins--would he had let them alone! fat, comfortable farmers' wives, nursing their chubby children. Then follows Vandyke in the opposite extreme. Vandyke was celebrated in his day, for his personal accomplishments: he was, says his biographers, a complete scholar, courtier and gentleman. His beautiful Madonnas are, accordingly, what we might expect--rather too intellectual and lady-like: they all look as if they had been polished by education. The grand austere genius of Michel Angelo was little calculated to portray the dove-like meekness of the _Vergine dolce e pia_, or the playfulness of infantine beauty. In his Mater Amabilis, sweetness and beauty are sacrificed to expression; and dignity is exaggerated into masculine energy. In the Mater Dolorosa, suffering is tormented into agony: the anguish is too human: it is not sufficiently softened by resignation; and makes us turn away with a too painful sympathy. Such is the admirable head in the Palazzo Litti at Milan; such his sublime _Pietà_ in the Vatican--but the last, being in marble, is not quite a case in point. I will mention but two more painters of whose lives and characters I know nothing yet, and may therefore fairly make their works a test of both, and judge of them in their Madonnas, and afterwards measure my own penetration and the truth of my hypothesis, by a reference to the biographical writers. In the few pictures I have seen of Carlo Cignani, I have been struck by the predominance of mind and feeling over mere external form: there is a picture of his in the Rospigliosi Palace--or rather, to give an example which is nearer at hand, and fresh in my memory, there is in the gallery _here_, his Madonna del Rosario. It represents a beautiful young woman, evidently of plebeian race: the form of the face is round, the features have nothing of the beau-ideal, and the whole head wants dignity: yet has the painter contrived to throw into this lovely picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external, which in the living prototype we should term _countenance_; as if a chastened consciousness of her high destiny and exalted character shone through the natural rusticity of her features, and touched them with a certain grace and dignity, emanating from the mind alone, which only mind could give, and mind perceive. I have seen within the last few days, three copies of this picture, in all of them the charming simplicity and rusticity, but in none the exquisite expression of the original: even the hands are expressive, without any particular delicacy or beauty of form. An artist who was copying the picture to-day while I looked at it, remarked this; and confessed he had made several unsuccessful attempts to render the fond pressure of the fingers as she clasps the child to her bosom. Were I to judge of Carlo Cignani by his works, I should pronounce him a man of elevated character, noble by instinct, if not by descent, but simple in his habits, and a despiser of outward show and ostentation. The other painter I alluded to, is Sasso Ferrato, a great and admired manufacturer of Virgins, but a mere copyist, without pathos, power, or originality; sometimes he resembles Guido, sometimes Carlo Dolce; but the graceful harmonious delicacy of the former becomes coldness and flatness in his hands, and the refinement and sweetness of the latter sink into feebleness and insipidity. Were I to judge of his character by his Madonnas, I should suppose that Sasso Ferrato had neither original genius nor powerful intellect, nor warmth of heart, nor vivacity of temper; that he was, in short, a mere mild, inoffensive, good sort of man, studious and industrious in his art, not without a feeling for the excellence he wanted power to attain.[W] I might pursue this subject further, but my memory fails, my head aches, and my pen is tired for to-night. * * * * * Both here and at Rome, I have found considerable amusement in looking over the artists who are usually employed in copying or studying from the celebrated pictures in the different galleries; but I have been taught discretion on such occasions by a ridiculous incident which occurred the other day, as absurdly comic as it was unlucky and vexatious. A friend of mine observing an artist at work in the Pitti palace, whom, by his total silence and inattention to all around, she supposed to be a native Italian who did not understand a word of English, went up to him, and peeping over his shoulder, exclaimed with more truth than discretion, "Ah! what a hideous attempt! that will never be like, I'm sure!" "I am very sorry you think so, ma'am," replied the painter, coolly looking up in her face. He must have read in that beautiful face an expression which deeply avenged the cause of his affronted picture. We have been twice to the opera since we arrived here. At the Pergola, Bassi, though a woman, is the _Primo Uomo_; the rare quality of her voice, which is a kind of rich deep counter-tenor, unfitting her for female parts. Her voice and science are so admirable, that it would be delicious to hear her blindfold; but her large clumsy figure disguised, or rather _exposed_, in masculine attire, is quite revolting. At the Cocomero we had the "Italiana in Algieri:" the Prima Donna, who is an admired singer, gave the comic airs with great power and effect, but her bold execution and her ungraceful unliquid voice disgusted me, and I came away fatigued and dissatisfied. The dancing is execrable at both theatres. From one end of Italy to the other, nothing is listened to in the way of music but Rossini and his imitators. The man must have a transcendant genius, who can lead and pervert the taste of his age as Rossini has done; but unfortunately those who have not his talent, who cannot reach his beauties nor emulate his airy brilliance of imagination, think to imitate his ornamented style by merely crowding note upon note, semi-quavers, demi-semi-quavers, and semi-demi-semi-quavers in most perplexed succession; and thus all Italy, and thence all Europe, is deluged with this busy, fussy, hurry-skurry music, which means nothing, and leaves no trace behind it either on the fancy or the memory. Must it be ever thus? are Paesiello, and Pergolesi, and Cimarosa--and those divine German masters, who formed themselves on the Italian school and surpassed it--Winter and Mozart[X] and Gluck--are they eternally banished? must sense and feeling be for ever sacrificed to mere sound, the human organ degraded into a mere instrument,[Y] and the ear tickled with novelty and meretricious ornament, till the taste is utterly diseased? There was a period in the history of Italian literature, when the great classical writers were decried and neglected, and the genius of one man depraved the taste of the age in which he lived. Marini introduced, or at least rendered general and fashionable, that far-fetched wit, that tinsel and glittering style, that luxurious pomp of words, which was easily imitated by talents of a lower order: yet in the Adonis there are many redeeming passages, some touches of real pathos, and some stanzas of natural and beautiful description: and thus it is with Rossini; his best operas contain some melodies among the finest ever composed, and even in his worst, the ear is every now and then roused and enchanted by a few bars of graceful and beautiful melody, to be in the next moment again bewildered in the maze of unmeaning notes, and the clash of overpowering accompaniments. _Lucca, April 23._--Lucca disappoints me in every respect: it was once, when a republic, one of the most flourishing, rich, and populous cities in Italy; it is now consigned over to the Ex-queen of Etruria; and its fate will be perhaps the same as that of Venice, Pisa, and Sienna, which, when they lost their independence, lost also their public spirit, their public virtue, and their prosperity. It is impossible to conceive any thing more rich and beautiful, than the country between Florence and Lucca, though it can boast little of the elevated picturesque, and is destitute of poetical associations. The road lay through valleys, with the Apennines (which are here softened down into gently sunny hills) on each side. Every spot of ground is in the highest state of cultivation; the boundaries between the small fields of wheat or lupines, were rows of olives or mulberries, with an interminable treillage of vines flung from tree to tree. In England we should be obliged to cut them all down for fear of depriving the crops of heat and sunshine, but here they have no such fears. The style of husbandry is exquisitely neat, and in general performed by manual labour. The only plough I saw would have excited the amusement and amazement of an English farmer: I should think it was exactly similar to the ploughs of Virgil's time: it was drawn by an ox and an ass yoked together, and guided by a woman. The whole country looked as if it had been laid out by skilful gardeners, and the hills in many parts were cut into terraces, that not one available inch of soil might be lost. The products of this luxuriant country are corn, silk, wine, and principally oil: potteries abound, the making of jars and flasks being an immense and necessary branch of trade. The city of Lucca has an appearance in itself of stately solemn dulness, and bears no trace of the smiling prosperity of the adjacent country: the shops are poor and empty, there are no signs of business, and the streets swarm with beggars. The interior of the Duomo is a fine specimen of Gothic: the exterior is Greek, Gothic, and Saracenic jumbled together in vile taste: it contains nothing very interesting. The palace is like other palaces, very fine and so forth; and only remarkable for not containing one good picture, or one valuable work of art. _Pisa, April 25._--Pisa has a look of elegant tranquillity, which is not exactly _dulness_, and pleases me particularly: if the thought of its past independence, the memory of its once proud name in arts, arms, and literature, came across the mind, it is not accompanied by any painful regret caused by the sight of present misery and degradation, but by that philosophic melancholy with which we are used to contemplate the mutability of earthly greatness. The Duomo, the Baptistry, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, stand altogether in a fine open elevated part of the city. The Duomo is a magnificent edifice in bad taste. The interior, with its noble columns of oriental granite, is grand, sombre, and very striking. As to the style of architecture, it would be difficult to determine what name to give it: it is not Greek, nor Gothic, nor Saxon, and exhibits a strange mixture of Pagan and Christian ornaments, not very unfrequent in Italian churches. The Leaning Tower should be contemplated from the portico of the church to heighten its effect: when the perpendicular column cuts it to the eye like a plumb line, the obliquity appears really terrific. The Campo Santo is an extraordinary place: it affects the mind like the cloisters of one of our Gothic cathedrals which it resembles in effect. Means have lately been taken to preserve the singular frescos on the walls, which for five hundred years have been exposed to the open air. I remarked the tomb of that elegant fabulist Pignotti; the last personage of celebrity buried in the Campo Santo. The university of Pisa is no longer what it was when France and Venice had nearly gone to war about one of its law professors, and its colleges ranked next to those of Padua: it has declined in fame, in riches, and in discipline. The Botanic Garden was a few years ago the finest in all Europe, and is still maintained with great cost and care: it contains a lofty magnolia, the stem of which is as bulky as a good sized tree: the gardener told us rather poetically, that when in blossom it perfumed the whole city of Pisa. _Leghorn, April 26._--So different from any thing we have yet seen in Italy! busy streets--gay shops--various costumes--Greeks, Turks, Jews, and Christians, mingled on terms of friendly equality--a crowded port, and all the activity of prosperous commerce. Leghorn is in every sense a _free_ port: all kinds of merchandise enter exempt from duty, all religions are equally tolerated, and all nations trade on an equal footing. The Jews, who are in every other city a shunned and degraded race, are among the most opulent and respectable inhabitants of Leghorn: their quarter is the richest, and, I may add, the _dirtiest_ in the city: their synagogue here is reckoned the finest in Europe, and I was induced to visit it yesterday at the hour of worship. I confess I was much disappointed; and, notwithstanding my inclination to respect always what is respectable in the eyes of others, I never felt so strong a disposition to smile. An old Rabbi with a beard of venerable length, a pointed bonnet, and a long white veil, got up into a superb marble pulpit and chanted in strange nasal tones, something which was repeated after him in various and discordant voices by the rest of the assembly. The congregation consisted of an uncouth set of men and boys, many of them from different parts of the Levant, in the dresses of their respective countries: there was no appearance of devotion, no solemnity; all wore their hats, some were poring over ragged books, some were talking, some sleeping, or lounging, or smoking. While I stood looking about me, without exciting the smallest attention, I heard at every pause a prodigious chattering and whispering, which seemed to come from the regions above, and looking up I saw a row of latticed and skreened galleries where the women were caged up like the monkies at a menagerie, and seemed as noisy, as restless, and as impatient of confinement: the door-keeper offered to introduce me among them, but I was already tired and glad to depart. * * * * * We have visited the pretty English burial-ground, and the tomb of Smollet, which in the true English style is cut and scratched all over with the names of fools, who think thus to link their own insignificance to his immortality. We have also seen whatever else is to be seen, and what all travellers describe: to-morrow we leave Leghorn--for myself without regret: it is a place with which I have no sympathies, and the hot, languid, damp atmosphere, which depresses the spirits and relaxes the nerves, has made me suffer ever since we arrived. * * * * * _Lucca._--Had I never visited Italy I think I should never have understood the word _picturesque_. In England we apply it generally to rural objects or natural scenery, for nothing else in England _can_ deserve the epithet. Civilization, cleanliness, and comfort are excellent things, but they are sworn enemies to the picturesque: they have banished it gradually from our towns, and habitations, into remote countries, and little nooks and corners, where we are obliged to hunt after it to find it; but in Italy the picturesque is every where, in every variety of form; it meets us at every turn, in town and in country, at all times and seasons; the commonest objects of every-day life here become picturesque, and assume from a thousand causes a certain character of poetical interest it cannot have elsewhere. In England, when travelling in some distant county, we see perhaps a craggy hill, a thatched cottage, a mill on a winding stream, a rosy milkmaid, or a smock-frocked labourer whistling after his plough, and we exclaim "How picturesque!" Travelling in Italy we see a piny mountain, a little dilapidated village on its declivity, the ruined temple of Jupiter or Apollo on its summit; a peasant with a bunch of roses hanging from his hat, and singing to his guitar, or a cotadina in her white veil and scarlet petticoat, and we exclaim "How picturesque!" but how different! Again--a tidy drill or a hay-cart, with a team of fine horses, is a very useful, valuable, civilized machine; but a grape-waggon reeling under its load of purple clusters, and drawn by a pair of oxen in their clumsy, ill-contrived harness, and bowing their patient heads to the earth, is much more picturesque. A spinning wheel is very convenient it must be allowed, but the distaff and spindle are much more picturesque. A snug English villa with its shaven lawn, its neat shrubbery, and its park, is a delightful thing--an Italian villa is probably far less _comfortable_, but with its vineyards, its gardens, its fountains, and statutes, is far more picturesque. A laundry-maid at her wash-tub, immersed in soap-suds, is a vulgar idea, though our clothes may be the better for it. I shall never forget the group of women I saw at Terracina washing their linen in a bubbling brook as clear as crystal, which rushed from the mountains to the sea--there were twenty of them at least grouped with the most graceful effect, some standing up to the mid-leg in the stream, others spreading the linen on the sunny bank, some, flinging back their long hair, stood shading their brows with their hands and gazing on us as we passed: it was a _scene_ for a poet, or a painter, or a melo-drama. An English garden, adorned at every turn with statues of the heathen deities (although they were all but personifications of the various attributes of nature,) would be ridiculous. Setting aside the injury they must sustain from our damp, variable climate, they would be _out of keeping_ with all around; here it is altogether different; the very air of Italy is embued with the spirit of ancient mythology; and though "the fair humanities of old religion," the Nymphs, the Fauns, the Dryads be banished from their haunts and live no longer in the faith of reason, yet still, whithersoever we turn, some statue, some temple in ruins, some fragment of an altar, some inscription half effaced, some name half-barbarized, recalls to the fancy those forms of light, of beauty, of majesty, which poetry created to people scenes for which mere humanity was not in itself half pure enough, fair enough, bright enough. What can be more grand than a noble forest of English oak? or more beautiful than a grove of beeches and elms, clothed in their rich autumnal tints? or more delicious than the apple orchard in full bloom? but it is true, notwithstanding, that the olive, and cypress, and cedar, the orange and the citron, the fig and the pomegranate, the myrtle and the vine, convey a different and more luxuriant feeling to the mind; and are associated with ideas which give to the landscape they adorn a character more delightfully, more _poetically_ picturesque. When at Lord Grosvenor's or Lord Stafford's I have been seated opposite to some beautiful Italian landscape, a Claude or a Poussin, with a hill crowned with olives, a ruined temple, a group of peasants seated on a fallen column, or dancing to the pipe and the guitar, and over all the crimson glow of evening, or the violet tints of morning, I have exclaimed with others, "How lovely! how picturesque, how very poetical!" No one thought of saying "How _natural_!" because it is a style of nature with which we are totally unacquainted; and if some amateurs of real taste and feeling prefer a rural cattle scene of Paul Potter or Cuyp, to all the grand or lovely creations of Salvator, or Claude, or Poussin, it is perhaps, because the former are associated in their minds with reality and familiar nature, while the latter appear in comparison mere inventions of the painter's fertile fancy, mere visionary representations of what may or might exist but which do not come home to the memory or the mind with the force of truth or delighted recollection. So when I have been travelling in Italy how often I have exclaimed, "How like a picture!" and I remember once, while contemplating a most glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, "This is truly one of Claude's sunsets!" Now should I live to see again one of my favourite Grosvenor Claudes I shall probably exclaim, "How natural! how like what I have seen so often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio!" And, in conclusion, let it be remembered by those who are inclined to smile (as I have often done) when travellers fresh from Italy _rave_ almost in blank verse, and think it all as unmeaning as "Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber!" let them recollect that it is not alone the _visible_ picturesque of Italy which thus intoxicates; it is not only her fervid skies, her sunsets, which envelope one-half of heaven from the horizon to the zenith, in living blaze; nor her soaring pine-clad mountains; nor her azure seas; nor her fields, "ploughed by the sunbeams;" nor her gorgeous cities, spread out with all their domes and towers, unobscured by cloud or vapours;--but it is something more than these, something beyond, and over all-- ----The gleam, The light that never was on sea or land The consecration, and the poet's dream! _Genoa, 30._--We arrived here late, and I should not write now, weary, weak, sick, and down-spirited as I am, did I not know how the impressions of one day efface those of the former; and as I cannot sleep, it is better to scribble than to think. As to describing all I have seen, thought, and felt in three days, that were indeed impossible: I think I have exhausted all my prose eloquence, and all allowable raptures; so that unless I ramble into absolute poetry, I dare not say a word of the scenery around Sarzana and Lerici. After spending one evening at Sarzana, in lingering through green lanes and watching the millions of fire-flies, sparkling in the dark shade of the trees, and lost again in the brilliant moonlight--we left it the next morning about sunrise, to embark in a felucca at Lerici, as the road between Spezia and Sestri is not yet completed. The groves and vineyards on each side of the road were filled with nightingales, singing in concert loud enough to overpower the sound of our carriage-wheels, and the whole scene, as the sun rose over it, and the purple shadows drew off and disclosed it gradually to the eye, was so enchanting--that positively I will say nothing about it. Lerici is a small fishing town on the Gulf of Spezia. Here I met with an adventure which with a little exaggeration and embellishment, such as no real story-teller ever spares, would make an admirable morceau for a quarto tourist; but, in simple truth, was briefly thus. While some of our party were at breakfast, and the servants and sailors were embarking the carriages and baggage, I sat down to sketch the old grey fort on the cliff above the town; but every time I looked up, the scene was so inexpressibly gay and lovely, it was with difficulty and reluctance I could turn my eyes down to my paper again; and soon I gave up the attempt, and threw away both paper and pencil. It struck me that the view _from_ the castle itself must be a thousand times finer than the view of the castle from below, and without loss of time I proceeded to explore the path leading to it. With some fatigue and difficulty, and after losing myself once or twice, I reached the top of the rock, and there a wicket opened into a walled passage cut into steps to ease the ascent. I knocked at the wicket with three strokes, that being the orthodox style of demanding entrance into the court of an enchanted castle, using my parasol instead of a dagger,[Z] and no one appearing, I entered, and in a few moments reached a small paved terrace in front of the fortress, defended towards the sea by a low parapet wall. The massy portal was closed, and instead of a bugle horn hanging at the gate I found only the handle and fragments of an old birch-broom, which base utensil I presently applied to the purpose of a horn, viz. sounding an alarm, and knocked and knocked--but no hoary-headed seneschal nor armed warder appeared at my summons. After a moment's hesitation, I gave the door a push with all my strength: it yielded, creaking on its hinges, and I stepped over the raised threshold. I found myself in a low dark vaulted hall which appeared at first to have no communication with any other chamber: but on advancing cautiously to the end I found a low door in the side, which had once been defended by a strong iron grating of which some part remained: it led to a flight of stone stairs, which I began to ascend slowly, stopping every moment to listen; but all was still as the grave. On each side of this winding staircase I peeped into several chambers, all solitary and ruinous: more and more surprised, I continued to ascend till I put my head unexpectedly through a trap-door, and found myself on the roof on the tower: it was spacious, defended by battlements, and contained the only signs of warlike preparation I had met with; _videlicet_, two cannons, or culverins, as they are called, and a pyramidal heap of balls, rusted by the sea air. I sat down on one of the cannon, and leaning on the battlements, surveyed the scene around, below me, with a feeling of rapture, not a little enhanced by the novelty and romance of my situation. I was alone--I had no reason to think there was a single human being within hearing. I was at such a vast height above the town and the shore, that not a sound reached me, except an indistinct murmur now and then, borne upwards by the breeze, and the scream of the sea-fowl as they wheeled round and round my head. I looked down giddily upon the blue sea, all glowing and trembling in the sunshine: and the scenery around me was such, as the dullest eye--the coldest, the most _unimaginative_ soul, could not have contemplated without emotion. I sat, I know not how long, abandoned to reveries, sweet and bitter, till I was startled by footsteps close to me, and turning round, I beheld a figure so strange and fantastic, and considering the time, place, and circumstance, so incomprehensible and extraordinary, that I was dumb with surprise. It was a little spare old man, with a face and form which resembled the anatomy of a baboon, dressed in an ample nightgown of flowered silk, which hung upon him as if it had been made for a giant, and trailed on the ground, a yard and a half behind him. He had no stockings, but on his feet a pair of red slippers, turned up in front like those the Turks wear. His beard was grizzled, and on his head he wore one of the long many-coloured woollen caps usually worn in this country, with two tassels depending from it, which nearly reached his knees. I had full time to examine the appearance and costume of this strange apparition as he stood before me, bowing profoundly, and looking as if fright and wonder had deprived him of speech. As soon as I had recovered from my first amazement, I replied to every low bow, by as low a courtesy, and waited till it should please him to begin the parley. At length he ventured to ask, in bad provincial Italian, what I did there? I replied that I was only admiring the fine prospect. He begged to know, "_come diavolo_," I had got there? I assured him I had not got there by any _diabolical_ aid, but had merely walked through the door. _Santi Apostoli!_ did not my excellency know, that, according to the laws and regulations of war, no one could enter the fort, without permission first obtained of the governor? I apologized politely: "And where," said I, "is the governor?" _Il Governatore son io per servirla!_ he replied, with a low bow. You! _O che bel ceffo!_ thought I--"and what, Signor Governor, is the use of your fort?" "To defend the bay and town of Lerici from enemies and pirates." "But," said I, "I see no soldier; where is the garrison to defend the fort?" The little old man stepped back two steps--"_Eccomi!_" he replied, spreading his hand on his breast, and bowing with dignity. It was impossible to make any reply: I therefore wished the governor and garrison good morning; and disappearing through my trap-door, I soon made my way down to the shore, where I arrived out of breath, and just in time to step into our felucca. * * * * * If there be a time when we most wish for those of whom we always think, when we most love those who are always dearest, it must be on such a delicious night as that we passed at Sarzana, or on such a morning as that we spent at Lerici; and if there be a time when we least love those we always love--least wish for them, least think of them, it must be in such a moment as the noontide of yesterday--when the dead calm overtook us, half way between Lerici and Sestri, and I sat in the stern of our felucca, looking with a sort of despairing languor over the smooth purple sea, which scarcely heaved round us, while the flapping sails drooped useless round the masts, and the rowers indolently leaning on their oars, sung in a low and plaintive chorus. I sat hour after hour, still and silent, sickening in the sunshine, dazzled by its reflection on the water, and overcome with deadly nausea: I believe nothing on earth could have roused me at that moment. But evening so impatiently invoked, came at last: the sun set, the last gleam of his "golden path of rays" faded from the waters, the sea assumed the hue of ink; the breeze sprung up, and our little vessel, with all its white sails spread, glanced like a white swan over the waves, leaving behind "a moon-illumined wake." Two hours after dark we reached Sestri, where we found miserable accommodations; and after foraging in vain for something to eat, after our day's fast, we crept to bed, all sick, sleepy, hungry, and tired. * * * * * We leave Genoa to-morrow: I can say but little of it, for I have been ill, as usual, almost ever since we arrived; and though my little Diary has become to me a species of hobby, I have lately found it fatiguing, even to write! and the pleasure and interest it used to afford me, diminish daily. Genoa, though fallen, is still "Genoa the proud." She is like a noble matron, blooming in years, and dignified in decay; while her rival Venice always used to remind me of a beautiful courtezan repenting in sackcloth and ashes, and mingling the ragged remnants of her former splendour with the emblems of present misery, degradation, and mourning. Pursue the train of similitude, Florence may be likened to a blooming bride dressed out to meet her lover; Naples to Tasso's Armida, with all the allurements of the Syren, and all the terrors of the Sorceress; Rome sits crowned upon the grave of her power, widowed indeed, and desolate, but still, like the queenly Constance, she maintains the majesty of Sorrow-- "This is my throne, let kings come bow to it!" * * * * * The coup-d'oeil of Genoa, splendid as it is, is not equal to that of Naples, even setting poetical associations aside: it is built like a crescent round the harbour, rising abruptly from the margin of the water, which makes the view from the sea so beautiful: to the north the hills enclose it round like an amphitheatre. The adjacent country is covered with villas, gardens, vineyards, woods, and olive-groves forming a scene most enchanting to the eye and mind, though of a character very different from the savage luxuriance of the south of Italy. The view of the city from any of the heights around, more particularly from that part of the shore called the Ponente, where we were to-day, is grand beyond description; on every side the church of Carignano is a beautiful and striking object. There is but one street, properly so called, in Genoa--the Strada Nuova; the others are little paved alleys, most of them impassable to carriages, both from their narrowness and the irregularity of the ground on which the city is built. The Strada Nuova is formed of a double line of magnificent palaces, among which the Doria Palace is conspicuous. The architecture is in general fine; and when not good is at least pleasing; the fronts of the houses are in general gaily painted and stuccoed. The best apartments are usually at the top; and the roofs often laid out in terraces, or paved with marble and adorned with flowers and shrubs. I have seen few good pictures here: the best collections are those in the Brignolet and Durazzo palaces. In the latter are some striking pictures by Spagnoletto (or Ribera, as he is called here). In the Brignolet, the Roman Daughter, by Guido, struck me most. I was also pleased by some fine pictures of the Genoese painter Piola, who is little known beyond Genoa. The church of the Carignano, which is a miniature model of St. Peter's, contains Paget's admirable statue of St. Sebastian, which Napoleon intended to have conveyed to Paris. * * * * * Beauty is no rarity at Genoa: I think I never saw so many fine women in one place, though I have seen finer faces at Rome and Naples than any I see here. The mezzaro, a veil or shawl thrown over the head and round the shoulders, is universal, and is certainly the most natural and becoming dress which can be worn by our sex: the materials differ in fineness, from the most exquisite lace and the most expensive embroidery, to a piece of chintz or linen, but the effect is the same. This costume, which prevails more or less through all Italy, but here is general, gives something of beauty to the plainest face, and something of elegance to the most vulgar figure; it can make deformity itself look passable: and when worn by a really graceful and beautiful female, the effect is peculiarly picturesque and bewitching. It was a Festa to-day; and we drove slowly along the Ponente after dinner. Nothing could be more gay than the streets and public walks, crowded with holiday people: the women were in proportion as six to one; and looked like groups dressed to figure in a melodrame or ballet. * * * * * When once we have left Genoa behind us, and have taken our last look of the blue Mediterranean, I shall indeed feel that we have quitted Italy. Piedmont is not Italy. Cities which are only famous for their sieges and fortifications, plains only celebrated as fields of battle and scenes of blood, have neither charms nor interest for me. On Monday we set off for Turin: how I dread travelling! and the motion of the carriage, which has now become _so_ painful! Yet a little, a very little longer, and it will all be over. FAREWELL TO ITALY. Mira il ciel com'e bello, e mira il sole, Ch'a se par che n'inviti, e ne console. Farewell to the Land of the South! Farewell to the lovely clime Where the sunny valleys smile in light, And the piny mountains climb! Farewell to her bright blue seas! Farewell to her fervid skies! O many and deep are the thoughts which crowd On the sinking heart, while it sighs, "Farewell to the Land of the South!" As the look of a face beloved, Was that bright land to me! It enchanted my sense, it sunk on my heart Like music's witchery! In every kindling pulse I felt the genial air, For life is _life_ in that sunny clime, --'Tis _death_ of life elsewhere: Farewell to the Land of the South! The poet's splendid dreams, Have hallowed each grove and hill, And the beautiful forms of ancient Faith Are lingering round us still. And the spirits of other days, Invoked by fancy's spell, Are rolled before the kindling thought, While we breathe our last farewell To the glorious Land of the South! A long--a last adieu, Romantic Italy! Thou land of beauty, and love, and song As once of the brave and free! Alas! for thy golden fields! Alas! for thy classic shore! Alas! for thy orange and myrtle bowers! I shall never behold them more-- Farewell to the Land of the South! _Turin, May 10th._--We arrived here yesterday, after a journey to me most trying and painful: I thought at Novi and afterwards at Asti, that I should have been obliged to give up and confess my inability to proceed; but we know not what we can bear till we prove ourselves; I can live and suffer still. * * * * * I agree with ---- who has just left me, that nothing can be more animating and improving than the conversation of intelligent and clever men, and that lady-society is in general very _fade_ and tiresome: and yet I truly believe that no woman can devote herself exclusively to the society of men without losing some of the best and sweetest characteristics of her sex. The conversation of men of the world and men of gallantry, gives insensibly a taint to the mind; the unceasing language of adulation and admiration intoxicates the head and perverts the heart; the habit of _tête-à-têtes_, the habit of being always either the sole or the principal object of attention, of mingling in no conversation which is not personal, narrows the disposition, weakens the mind, and renders it incapable of rising to general views or principles; while it so excites the senses and the imagination, that every thing else becomes in comparison stale, flat, and unprofitable. The life of a coquette is very like that of a drunkard or an opium eater, and its end is the same--the utter extinction of intellect, of cheerfulness, of generous feeling, and of self-respect. * * * * * _St. Michel, Monday._--I know not why I open my book, or why I should keep accounts of times and places. I saw nothing of Turin but what I beheld from my window: and as soon as I could travel we set off, crossed Mount Cenis in a storm, slept at Lans-le-bourg, and reached this place yesterday, where I am again ill, and worse--worse than ever. Is it not strange that while life is thus rapidly wasting, I should still be so strong to suffer? the pang, the agony is not less acute at this moment, than when, fifteen months ago, the poignard was driven to my heart. The cup, though I have nearly drained it to the last, is not less bitter now than when first presented to my lips. But this is not well; why indeed should I repine? mine was but a common fate--like a true woman, I did but stake my all of happiness upon one cast--and lost! * * * * * _Lyons, 19th._--Good God! for what purpose do we feel! why within our limited sphere of action, our short and imperfect existence have we such boundless capacity for enjoying and suffering? no doubt for some good purpose. But I cannot think as I used to think: my ideas are perplexed: it is all pain of heart and confusion of mind; a sense of bitterness, and wrong, and sorrow, which I cannot express, nor yet quite _suppress_. If the cloud would but clear away that I might feel and see to do what is right! but all is dark, and heavy, and vacant; my mind is dull, and my eyes are dim, and I am scarce conscious of any thing around me. A few days passed here in quiet, and kind Dr. P** have revived me a little. All the way from Turin I have slept almost constantly, if that can be called _sleep_, which was rather the stupor of exhaustion, and left me still sensible of what was passing round me. I heard voices, though I knew not what they said; and I felt myself moved from place to place though I neither knew nor cared whither. * * * * * All that I have seen and heard, all that I have felt and suffered, since I left Italy, recalls to my mind that delightful country. I should regret what I have left behind, had I not outlived all regrets--but one--for there, though I vainly sought from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within; all feeling was not yet worn out of my heart: I was not then blinded nor stupified by sorrow and weakness as I have been since. There are some places we remember with pleasure, because we have been happy there; others, because endeared to us as the residence of friends. We love our country because it is _our country_; our home because it is _home_: London or Paris we may prefer, as comprehending in themselves, all the intellectual pleasures, and luxuries of life: but, dear Italy!--we love it, simply for its own sake: not as in general we are attached to places and things, but as we love a friend, and the face of a friend; there it was "_luxury to be_,"--there I would willingly have died, if so it might have pleased God. Till this evening we have not seen a gleam of sunshine, nor a glimpse of the blue sky, since we crossed Mount Cenis. We entered Lyons during a small drizzling rain. The dirty streets, the black gloomy-looking house, the smoking manufactories, and busy looks of the people, made me think of Florence and Genoa, and their "fair white walls" and princely domes; and when in the evening I heard the whining organ which some wretched Savoyard was grinding near us, I remembered even with emotion the delightful voices I heard singing "_Di piacer mi balza il cor_" under my balcony at Turin--my last recollection of Italy: and to-night, when they opened the window to give me air, I felt, on recovering, the cold chill of the night breeze; and as I shivered, and shrunk away from it, I remembered the delicious and genial softness of our Italian evenings-- * * * * * 22.--No letters from England. Now that it is past, I may confess, that till now, a faint--a very faint hope did cling to my heart. I thought it might have been just possible; but it is over now--_all_ is over! We leave Lyons on Tuesday, and travel by short easy stages; and they think I may still reach Paris. I will hold up--if possible. Yet if they would but lay me down on the road-side, and leave me to die in quietness! to rest is all I ask. 24.--St. Albin. We arrived here yesterday-- * * * * * The few sentences which follow are not legible. Four days after the date of the last paragraph, the writer died at Autun in her 26th year, and was buried in the garden of the Capuchin Monastery, near that city.--EDITOR. THE END. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote A: First published in 1826.] [Footnote B: It must not be forgotten that this was written ten years ago: the aspect of Paris is much changed since then.] [Footnote C: By Christian Friederich Tieck.] [Footnote D: "Rousseau, Voltaire, our Gibbon, and De Staël, Leman! those names are worthy of thy shore." LORD BYRON.] [Footnote E: The sentence which follows is so blotted as to be illegible.--ED.] [Footnote F: This was indeed ignorance! (1834.)] [Footnote G: Hail, O Maria, full of grace! the Lord is with thee! blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, even JESUS. Holy Virgin Mary, mother of God! pray for us sinners--both now and in the hour of death! Amen.--ED.] [Footnote H: The family of the Cenci was a branch of the house of Colonna, now extinct in the direct male line. The last Prince Colonna, left two daughters, co-heiresses, of whom one married the Prince Sciarra, and the other the Prince Barberini. In this manner the portrait of Beatrice Cenci cane into the Barberini family. The authenticity of this interesting picture has been disputed: but last night after hearing the point extremely well contested by two intelligent men, I remained convinced of its authenticity.] [Footnote I: TRANSLATION, EXTEMPORE. Love, by my fair one's side is ever seen, He hovers round her steps, where'er she strays, Breathes in her voice, and in her silence speaks, Around her lives, and lends her all his arms. Love is in every glance--Love taught her song; And if she weep, or scorn contract her brow, Still Love departs not from her, but is seen Even in her lovely anger and her tears. When, in the mazy dance she glides along Still Love is near to poize each graceful step: So breathes the zephyr o'er the yielding flower. Love in her brow is throned, plays in her hair, Darts from her eye and glows upon her lip. But, oh! he never yet approached her heart.] [Footnote J: Poor Schadow died yesterday. He caught cold the other evening at the Duke of Bracciano's uncomfortable, ostentatious palace, where we heard him complaining of the cold of the Mosaic floors: three days afterwards he was no more. He is universally regretted.--_Author's note._] [Footnote K: A chasm occurs here of about twenty pages, which in the original MS. are torn out. Nearly the whole of what was written at Naples has suffered mutilation, or has been purposely effaced; so that in many parts only a detached sentence, or a few words, are legible in the course of several pages.--EDITOR.] [Footnote L: Was the letter addressed 'Alla Sua Excellenza _Seromfridevi_,' which caused so much perplexity at the Post Office and British Museum, and exercised the acumen of a minister of state, from Salvador to his illustrious correspondent?] [Footnote M: Quid times? &c.] [Footnote N: Wordsworth.] [Footnote O: Beyond Fondi I remarked among the wild myrtle-covered hills, a wreath of white smoke rise as if from under ground, and I asked the postilion what it meant? He replied with an expressive gesture, "Signora,--i briganti!" I thought this was a mere trick to alarm us; but it was truth: within twenty hours after we had passed the spot, a carriage was attacked; and a desperate struggle took place between the banditti and the sentinels, who are placed at regular distances along the road, and within hearing of each other. Several men were killed, but the robbers at length were obliged to fly.] [Footnote P: It is understood that this beautiful group has since been executed in marble for Sir George Beaumont.--EDITOR.] [Footnote Q: Written on an old pedestal in the gardens of the Villa Pamfili, yesterday (March 29th).] [Footnote R: See the admirable and eloquent "Essays on Petrarch, by Ugo Foscolo," which have appeared since this Diary was written--EDITOR.] [Footnote S: Corilla (whose real name was Maddaleno Morelli) often accompanied herself on the violin; not holding it against her shoulder, but resting it in her lap. She was reckoned a fine performer on this instrument; and for her distinguished talents was crowned in the Capitol in 1779.--ED.] [Footnote T: Othello--Thou mak'st me call what I intend to do A murder,--which I thought a sacrifice.--] [Footnote U: Sestini died of a brain fever at Paris in November, 1822.--ED.] [Footnote V: The allusion is to La Francia. When Raffaelle sent his famous St. Cecilia to Bologna, it was intrusted to the care of La Francia, who was his particular friend, to be unpacked and hung up. La Francia was old, and had for many years held a high rank in his profession; no sooner had he cast his eyes on the St. Cecilia, than struck with despair at seeing his highest efforts so immeasurably outdone, he was seized with a deep melancholy, and died shortly after.--ED.] [Footnote W: Forsyth complains of some celebrated Madonnas being _unimpassioned_: with submission to Forsyth's taste and acumen--_ought_ they to be _impassioned_?] [Footnote X: Dr. Holland once told me, that when travelling in Iceland, he had heard one of Mozart's melodies played and sung by an Icelandic girl, and that some months afterwards he heard the very same air sung to the guitar by a Greek lady at Salonica. Yet the son of that immortal genius, who has dispensed delight from one extremity of Europe to the other, and from his urn still rules the entranced senses of millions--Charles Mozart, is a poor music master at Milan! this should not be.] [Footnote Y: What Beccaria said in his day is most true of ours, "on paie les musiciens pour émouvoir, on paie les danseurs de corde pour étonner, et la plus grande partie des musiciens veulent faire les danseurs de corde."] [Footnote Z: "With dagger's hilt upon the gate, Who knocks so loud and knocks so late?"--SCOTT.] * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Some minor punctuation, spelling inconsistencies, and typos have been changed from the original publication to reflect the authors' intent: P. 7 oclock--o'clock (Saturday Night, 11 o'clock.) P. 23 dissapointed--disappointed (edifices in general disappointed me) P. 25 on--or (martyrdom, or rather assassination) P. 28 reman--remain (by his birth should remain unchanged) P. 30 pehaps--perhaps (perhaps after all) P. 33 Cavigliajo--Covigliajo (Covigliajo, an uncouth dreary) P. 44 maitresse--maîtresse (fait de maîtresse) P. 50 Madonas--Madonnas (Raffaelle's Madonnas.) P. 51 Appenines--Apennines (Apennines with light clouds) P. 52 creatons--creations (fancy's fairest creations,) P. 56 sungly--snugly (a drawing-room snugly carpeted) P. 57 appeartance--appearance (the general appearance) P. 57 rathers--rather (rather grows upon me) P. 59 Appenines--Apennines (Apennines, rose just over Tivoli,) P. 60 Russel--Russell (Lady Louisa Russell) P. 65 Changed " to ' (nested quotes) ('Armis vitrumque canter,') P. 66 chef d'oeuvre--chef-d'oeuvre (hyphenated for consistency) P. 77 San Gioralmo--San Girolamo (San Girolamo della Carità) P. 79 senerade--serenade (serenade was evidently) P. 80 comtemplate--contemplate (contemplate the coliseum) P. 81 valls--walls (walls, and the stream) P. 90 enthusiam--enthusiasm (to whom enthusiasm is only another name) P. 118 Wet--We (We met many begging friars) P. 120 acessible--accessible (pleasant, accessible, and very private) P. 126 thought--though (the afternoon, though not brilliant, was) P. 126 amosphere--atmosphere (the atmosphere was perfectly) P. 127 Appennines--Apennines (Alban Hills, and the Apennines) P. 152 in--it (it affects the mind) P. 155 Added closing quotes ("ploughed by the sunbeams;"). P. 157 Removed unnecessary opening quotes (The little old man). 
16705	----	A WANDERER IN VENICE BY E.V. LUCAS WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY HARRY MORLEY AND THIRTY-TWO PHOTOGRAPHS FROM PAINTINGS AND A MAP New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1914 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1914. Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE STEPS OF S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE] "In like manner I say, that had there bin an offer made unto me before I took my journey to Venice, eyther that foure of the richest manors of Somerset-shire (wherein I was borne) should be gratis bestowed upon me if I never saw Venice, or neither of them if I should see it; although certainly these manors would do me much more good in respect of a state of livelyhood to live in the world than the sight of Venice, yet notwithstanding I will ever say while I live, that the sight of Venice and her resplendent beauty, antiquities, and monuments, hath by many degrees more contented my minde, and satisfied my desires, than those foure Lordships could possibly have done."--THOMAS CORYAT. [Illustration: A Bird's Eye View Of Venice] PREFACE For a detailed guide to Venice the reader must go elsewhere; all that I have done is invariably to mention those things that have most interested me, and, in the hope of being a useful companion, often a few more. But my chief wish (as always in this series) has been to create a taste. For the history of Venice the reader must also go elsewhere, yet for the sake of clarity a little history has found its way even into these pages. To go to Venice without first knowing her story is a mistake, and doubly foolish because the city has been peculiarly fortunate in her chroniclers and eulogists. Mr. H.F. Brown stands first among the living, as Ruskin among the dead; but Ruskin is for the student patient under chastisement, whereas Mr. Brown's serenely human pages are for all. Of Mr. Howells' _Venetian Life_ I have spoken more than once in this book; its truth and vivacity are a proof of how little the central Venice has altered, no matter what changes there may have been in government or how often campanili fall. The late Col. Hugh Douglas's _Venice on Foot_, if conscientiously followed, is such a key to a treasury of interest as no other city has ever possessed. To Mrs. Audrey Richardson's _Doges of Venice_ I am greatly indebted, and Herr Baedeker has been here as elsewhere (in the Arab idiom) my father and my mother. E.V.L. _June, 1914._ CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE vii CHAPTER I THE BRIDE OF THE ADRIATIC 1 CHAPTER II S. MARK'S. I: THE EXTERIOR 6 CHAPTER III S. MARK'S. II: THE INTERIOR 17 CHAPTER IV THE PIAZZA AND THE CAMPANILE 31 CHAPTER V THE DOGES' PALACE. I: THE INTERIOR 46 CHAPTER VI THE DOGES' PALACE. II: THE EXTERIOR 65 CHAPTER VII THE PIAZZETTA 78 CHAPTER VIII THE GRAND CANAL. I: FROM THE DOGANA TO THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, LOOKING TO THE LEFT 91 CHAPTER IX THE GRAND CANAL. II: BROWNING AND WAGNER 100 CHAPTER X THE GRAND CANAL. III: FROM THE RIO FOSCARI TO S. SIMEONE, LOOKING TO THE LEFT 110 CHAPTER XI THE GRAND CANAL. IV: FROM THE STATION TO THE MOCENIGO PALACE, LOOKING TO THE LEFT 119 CHAPTER XII THE GRAND CANAL. V: BYRON IN VENICE 130 CHAPTER XIII THE GRAND CANAL. VI: FROM THE MOCENIGO PALACE TO THE MOLO, LOOKING TO THE LEFT 143 CHAPTER XIV ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. I: MURANO, BURANO AND TORCELLO 151 CHAPTER XV ON FOOT. I: FROM THE PIAZZA TO SAN STEFANO 162 CHAPTER XVI THE ACCADEMIA. I: TITIAN, TINTORETTO, AND PAUL VERONESE 168 CHAPTER XVII THE ACCADEMIA. II: THE SANTA CROCE MIRACLES AND CARPACCIO 179 CHAPTER XVIII THE ACCADEMIA. III: GIOVANNI BELLINI AND THE LATER PAINTERS 187 CHAPTER XIX THE CANALE DI S. MARCO AND S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE 195 CHAPTER XX ON FOOT. II: THREE CHURCHES AND CARPACCIO AGAIN 206 CHAPTER XXI ON FOOT. III: THE MERCERIA AND THE RIALTO 217 CHAPTER XXII S. ROCCO AND TINTORETTO 231 CHAPTER XXIII THE FRARI AND TITIAN 245 CHAPTER XXIV SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO 254 CHAPTER XXV S. ELENA AND THE LIDO 263 CHAPTER XXVI ON FOOT. IV: FROM THE DOGAN TO S. SEBASTIANO 270 CHAPTER XXVII CHURCHES HERE AND THERE 279 CHAPTER XXVIII GIORGIONE 287 CHAPTER XXIX ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. II: S. LAZZARO AND CHIOGGIA 299 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE STEPS OF S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE _Frontispiece_ S. MARK'S FROM THE PIAZZA. THE MERCERIA CLOCK ON THE LEFT _Facing page_ 10 THE CAMPANILE AND THE PIAZZA FROM COOK'S CORNER " 28 THE CORNER OF THE OLD LIBRARY AND THE DOGES' PALACE " 54 THE PONTE DI PAGLIA AND THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, WITH A CORNER OF THE DOGES' PALACE AND THE PRISON " 66 THE DOGANA (WITH S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE JUST VISIBLE) " 88 DOORWAY OF S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE " 112 THE RIALTO BRIDGE FROM THE PALAZZO DEI DIECI SAVII " 126 THE RIO TORRESELLE AND BACK OF THE PALAZZO DARIO " 152 TRAGHETTO OF S. ZOBENIGO, GRAND CANAL " 198 THE GRAND CANAL, SHOWING S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE " 218 S. MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI " 228 THE COLLEONI STATUE AND SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO " 240 THE PALAZZO PESARO (ORFEI), CAMPO S. BENEDETTO " 276 THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY AND THE LAGOON " 300 VIEW FROM THE DOGANA AT NIGHT " 308 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN MONOTONE ONE OF THE NOAH MOSAICS. In the Atrium of S. Mark's _Facing page_ 18 From a Photograph by Naya. THE PRESENTATION. From the Painting by Titian in the Accademia " 36 From a Photograph by Brogi. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE. From the Painting by Tintoretto in the Doges' Palace " 48 From a Photograph by Naya. S. CHRISTOPHER. From the Fresco by Titian in the Doges' Palace " 62 From a Photograph by Naya. THE ADAM AND EVE CORNER OF THE DOGES' PALACE " 70 From a Photograph by Naya. S. TRIFONIO AND THE BASILISK. From the Painting by Carpaccio at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni " 76 From a Photograph by Anderson. S. JEROME IN HIS CELL. From the Painting by Carpaccio at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni " 82 From a Photograph by Anderson. THE MARRIAGE AT CANA. From the Painting by Tintoretto in the Church of the Salute " 96 From a Photograph by Anderson. VENICE WITH HERCULES AND CERES. From the Painting by Veronese in the Accademia " 102 From a Photograph by Naya. S. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM WITH SAINTS. From the Painting by Piombo in the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo " 116 From a Photograph by Naya. THE DREAM OF S. URSULA. From the Painting by Carpaccio in the Accademia " 120 From a Photograph by Brogi. THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST. From the Painting by Cima in the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora " 136 From a Photograph by Anderson. MADONNA AND SLEEPING CHILD. From the Painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia " 144 From a Photograph by Naya. VENUS, RULER OF THE WORLD. From the Painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia " 158 From a Photograph by Anderson. THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN. From the Painting by Titian in the Accademia " 164 From a Photograph by Brogi. THE MIRACLE OF S. MARK. From the Painting by Tintoretto in the Accademia " 170 From a Photograph by Anderson. THE FEAST IN THE HOUSE OF LEVI. From the Painting by Veronese in the Accademia " 176 From a Photograph by Naya. THE DEPARTURE OF THE BRIDEGROOM AND HIS MEETING WITH URSULA. From the Painting by Carpaccio in the Accademia " 182 From a Photograph by Naya. S. GEORGE. From the Painting by Mantegna in the Accademia " 190 From a Photograph by Brogi. MADONNA AND CHILD. From the Painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia " 192 From a Photograph by Brogi. MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS. From the Painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Church of S. Zaccaria " 208 From a Photograph by Naya. S. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. From the Painting by Carpaccio at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni " 212 From a Photograph by Anderson. S. CHRISTOPHER, S. JEROME AND S. AUGUSTINE. From the painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo " 224 From a Photograph by Naya. THE CRUCIFIXION (CENTRAL DETAIL). From the Painting by Tintoretto in the Scuola di S. Rocco " 236 From a Photograph by Anderson. THE MADONNA OF THE PESARO FAMILY. From the Painting by Titian in the Church of the Frari " 246 From a Photograph by Naya. THE MADONNA TRIPTYCH. By Giovanni Bellini in the Church of the Frari " 252 From a Photograph by Naya. BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI. From the Statue by Andrea Verrocchio " 256 From a Photograph by Brogi. MADONNA WITH THE MAGDALEN AND S. CATHERINE. From the Painting by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia " 260 From a Photograph by Brogi. MADONNA AND SAINTS. From the Painting by Boccaccino in the Accademia " 266 From a Photograph. THE PRESENTATION. From the Painting by Tintoretto in the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto " 282 From a Photograph by Anderson. THE TEMPEST. From the Painting by Giorgione in the Giovanelli Palace " 288 From a Photograph by Naya. ALTAR-PIECE. By Giorgione at Castel Franco " 296 From a Photograph by Naya. A WANDERER IN VENICE CHAPTER I THE BRIDE OF THE ADRIATIC The best approach to Venice--Chioggia--A first view--Another water approach--Padua and Fusina--The railway station--A complete transformation--A Venetian guide-book--A city of a dream. I have no doubt whatever that, if the diversion can be arranged, the perfect way for the railway traveller to approach Venice for the first time is from Chioggia, in the afternoon. Chioggia is at the end of a line from Rovigo, and it ought not to be difficult to get there either overnight or in the morning. If overnight, one would spend some very delightful hours in drifting about Chioggia itself, which is a kind of foretaste of Venice, although not like enough to her to impair the surprise. (But nothing can do that. Not all the books or photographs in the world, not Turner, nor Whistler, nor Clara Montalba, can so familiarize the stranger with the idea of Venice that the reality of Venice fails to be sudden and arresting. Venice is so peculiarly herself, so exotic and unbelievable, that so far from ever being ready for her, even her residents, returning, can never be fully prepared.) But to resume--Chioggia is the end of all things. The train stops at the station because there is no future for it; the road to the steamer stops at the pier because otherwise it would run into the water. Standing there, looking north, one sees nothing but the still, land-locked lagoon with red and umber and orange-sailed fishing-boats, and tiny islands here and there. But only ten miles away, due north, is Venice. And a steamer leaves several times a day to take you there, gently and loiteringly, in the Venetian manner, in two hours, with pauses at odd little places _en route_. And that is the way to enter Venice, because not only do you approach her by sea, as is right, Venice being the bride of the sea not merely by poetical tradition but as a solemn and wonderful fact, but you see her from afar, and gradually more and more is disclosed, and your first near view, sudden and complete as you skirt the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore, has all the most desired ingredients: the Campanile of S. Marco, S. Marco's domes, the Doges' Palace, S. Theodore on one column and the Lion on the other, the Custom House, S. Maria della Salute, the blue Merceria clock, all the business of the Riva, and a gondola under your very prow. That is why one should come to Venice from Chioggia. The other sea approach is from Fusina, at the end of an electric-tram line from Padua. If the Chioggia scheme is too difficult, then the Fusina route should be taken, for it is simplicity itself. All that the traveller has to do is to leave the train at Padua overnight--and he will be very glad to do so, for that last five-hour lap from Milan to Venice is very trying, with all the disentanglement of registered luggage at the end of it before one can get to the hotel--and spend the next morning in exploring Padua's own riches: Giotto's frescoes in the Madonna dell'Arena; Mantegna's in the Eremitani; Donatello's altar in the church of Padua's own sweet Saint Anthony; and so forth; and then in the afternoon take the tram for Fusina. This approach is not so attractive as that from Chioggia, but it is more quiet and fitting than the rush over the viaduct in the train. One is behaving with more propriety than that, for one is doing what, until a few poor decades ago of scientific fuss, every visitor travelling to Venice had to do: one is embarked on the most romantic of voyages: one is crossing the sea to its Queen. This way one enters Venice by her mercantile shipping gate, where there are chimneys and factories and a vast system of electric wires. Not that the scene is not beautiful; Venice can no more fail to be beautiful, whatever she does, than a Persian kitten can; yet it does not compare with the Chioggia adventure, which not only is perfect visually, but, though brief, is long enough to create a mood of repose for the anticipatory traveller such as Venice deserves. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that there are many visitors who want their first impression of this city of their dreams to be abrupt; who want the transition from the rattle of the train to the peace of the gondola to be instantaneous; and these, of course, must enter Venice at the station. If, as most travellers from England do, they leave London by the 2.5 and do not break the journey, they will reach Venice a little before midnight. But whether it is by day or by night, this first shock of Venice is not to be forgotten. To step out of the dusty, stuffy carriage, jostle one's way through a thousand hotel porters, and be confronted by the sea washing the station steps is terrific! The sea tamed, it is true; the sea on strange visiting terms with churches and houses; but the sea none the less; and if one had the pluck to taste the water one would find it salt. There is probably no surprise to the eye more complete and alluring than this first view of the Grand Canal at the Venetian terminus. But why do I put myself to the trouble of writing this when it has all been done for me by an earlier hand? In the most popular of the little guide-books to Venice--sold at all the shops for a franc and twenty centimes, and published in German, English, and, I think, French, as well as the original Italian--the impact of Venice on the traveller by rail is done with real feeling and eloquence, and with a curious intensity only possible when an Italian author chooses an Italian translator to act as intermediary between himself and the English reader. The author is Signor A. Carlo, and the translator, whose independence, in a city which swarms with Anglo-Saxon visitors and even residents, in refusing to make use of their services in revising his English, cannot be too much admired, is Signor G. Sarri. Here is the opening flight of these Two Gentlemen of Venice: "The traveller, compelled by a monotone railway-carriage, to look for hours at the endless stretching of the beautifull and sad Venetian plain, feels getting wear, [? near] this divine Queen of the Seas, whom so many artists, painters and poets have exalted in every time and every way; feels, I say, that something new, something unexpected is really about to happen: something that will surely leave a deep mark on his imagination, and last through all his life. I mean that peculiar radiation of impulsive energy issueing from anything really great, vibrating and palpitating from afar, fitting the soul to emotion or enthusiasm...." Yesterday, or even this morning, in Padua, Verona, Milan, Chioggia, or wherever it was, whips were cracking, hoofs clattering, motor horns booming, wheels endangering your life. Farewell now to all!--there is not a wheel in Venice save those that steer rudders, or ring bells; but instead, as you discern in time when the brightness and unfamiliarity of it all no longer bemuse your eyes, here are long black boats by the score, at the foot of the steps, all ready to take you and your luggage anywhere for fifty per cent more than the proper fare. You are in Venice. If you go to the National Gallery and look at No. 163 by Canaletto you will see the first thing that meets the gaze as one emerges upon fairyland from the Venice terminus: the copper dome of S. Simeon. The scene was not much different when it was painted, say, _circa_ 1740. The iron bridge was not yet, and a church stands where the station now is; but the rest is much the same. And as you wander here and there in this city, in the days to come, that will be one of your dominating impressions--how much of the past remains unharmed. Venice is a city of yesterdays. One should stay in her midst either long enough really to know something about her or only for three or four days. In the second case all is magical and bewildering, and one carries away, for the mind to rejoice in, no very definite detail, but a vague, confused impression of wonder and unreality and loveliness. Dickens, in his _Pictures of Italy_, with sure instinct makes Venice a city of a dream, while all the other towns which he describes are treated realistically. But for no matter how short a time one is in Venice, a large proportion of it should be sacred to idleness. Unless Venice is permitted and encouraged to invite one's soul to loaf, she is visited in vain. CHAPTER II S. MARK'S. I: THE EXTERIOR Rival cathedrals--The lure of S. Mark's--The façade at night--The Doge's device--S. Mark's body--A successful theft--Miracle pictures--Mosaic patterns--The central door--Two problems--The north wall--The fall of Venice--Napoleon--The Austrian occupation--Daniele Manin--Victor Emmanuel--An artist's model--The south wall--The Pietra del Bando--The pillars from Acre. Of S. Mark's what is one to say? To write about it at all seems indeed more than commonly futile. The wise thing to do is to enter its doors whenever one has the opportunity, if only for five minutes; to sit in it as often as possible, at some point in the gallery for choice; and to read Ruskin. To Byzantine architecture one may not be very sympathetic; the visitor may come to Venice with the cool white arches of Milan still comforting his soul, or with the profound conviction that Chartres or Cologne represents the final word in ecclesiastical beauty and fitness; but none the less, in time, S. Mark's will win. It will not necessarily displace those earlier loves, but it will establish other ties. But you must be passive and receptive. No cathedral so demands surrender. You must sink on its bosom. S. Mark's façade is, I think, more beautiful in the mass than in detail. Seen from the Piazza, from a good distance, say half way across it, through the red flagstaffs, it is always strange and lovely and unreal. To begin with, there is the remarkable fact that after years of familiarity with this wonderful scene, in painting and coloured photographs, one should really be here at all. The realization of a dream is always amazing. It is possible--indeed it may be a common experience--to find S. Mark's, as seen for the first time, especially on a Sunday or fête day, when the vast red and green and white flags are streaming before it, a little garish, a little gaudy; too like a coloured photograph; not what one thinks a cathedral ought to be. Should it have all these hues? one asks oneself, and replies no. But the saint does not long permit this scepticism: after a while he sees that the doubter drifts into his vestibule, to be rather taken by the novelty of the mosaics--so much quieter in tone here--and the pavement, with its myriad delicate patterns. And then the traveller dares the church itself and the spell begins to work; and after a little more familiarity, a few more visits to the Piazza, even if only for coffee, the fane has another devotee. At night the façade behaves very oddly, for it becomes then as flat as a drop scene. Seen from the Piazza when the band plays and the lamps are lit, S. Mark's has no depth whatever. It is just a lovely piece of decoration stretched across the end. The history of S. Mark's is this. The first patron saint of Venice was S. Theodore, who stands in stone with his crocodile in the Piazzetta, and to whose history we shall come later. In 828, however, it occurred to the astute Doge Giustiniano Partecipazio that both ecclesiastically and commercially Venice would be greatly benefited if a really first-class holy body could be preserved in her midst. Now S. Mark had died in A.D. 57, after grievous imprisonment, during which Christ appeared to him, speaking those words which are incised in the very heart of Venice, "Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus"--"Peace be to thee, Mark my evangelist"; and he was buried in Alexandria, the place of his martyrdom, by his fellow-Christians. Why should not the sacred remains be stolen from the Egyptian city and brought to Venice? Why not? The Doge therefore arranged with two adventurers, Rustico of Torcello and Buono of Malamocco, to make the attempt; and they were successful. When the body was exhumed such sweetness proceeded from it that all Alexandria marvelled, but did not trace the cause. The saint seems to have approved of the sacrilege. At any rate, when his remains were safely on board the Venetian ship, and a man in another ship scoffed at the idea that they were authentic, the Venetian ship instantly and mysteriously made for the one containing this sceptic, stove its side in, and continued to ram it until he took back his doubts. And later, when, undismayed by this event, one of the sailors on S. Mark's own ship also denied that the body was genuine, he was possessed of a devil until he too changed his mind. The mosaics on the cathedral façade all bear upon the life of S. Mark. That over the second door on the left, with a figure in red, oddly like Anatole France, looking down upon the bed, represents S. Mark's death. In the Royal Palace are pictures by Tintoretto of the finding of the body of S. Mark by the Venetians, and the transportation of it from Alexandria, under a terrific thunderstorm in which the merchants and their camel are alone undismayed. Arrived in Venice the remains were enclosed in a marble pillar for greater safety, but only two or three persons knew which pillar, and, these dying, the secret perished. In their dismay all the people grieved, but suddenly the stones opened and revealed the corpse. Thereafter many miracles were performed by it; Venice was visited by pilgrims from all parts of the world; its reputation as a centre of religion grew; and the Doge's foresight and address were justified. Before, however, S. Mark and his lion could become the protectors of the Republic, S. Theodore had to be deposed. S. Theodore's church, which stood originally on a part of the Piazza (an inscription in the pavement marks the site) now covered by the Campanile and one or two of the flagstaffs, is supposed to have been built in the sixth century. That it was destroyed by fire in the tenth, we know, and it is known too that certain remains of it were incorporated in the present structure of S. Mark's, which dates from the eleventh century, having been preceded by earlier ones. To my mind not one of the external mosaic pictures is worth study; but some of the mosaic patterns over the doors are among the most lovely things I ever saw. Look at the delicate black and gold in the arch over the extreme right-hand door. Look at the black and gold bosses in that next it. On the other side of the main entrance these bosses have a little colour in them. On the extreme left we find symbolism: a golden horseman, the emblems of the four Evangelists, and so forth, while above is a relief in black stone, netted in: this and the group over the central door being the only external statuary in Venice to which the pigeons have no access. The carvings over the central door are interesting, although they have a crudity which will shock visitors fresh from the Baptistery doors at Florence. As in most Venetian sculpture symbolism plays an important part, and one is not always able to translate it. Here are arches within arches: one of scriptural incidents--at any rate Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel are identifiable; one of grotesques and animals; one of uncouth toilers--a shepherd and woodman and so forth--with God the Father on the keystone. What these mean beyond the broad fact that religion is for all, I cannot say. Angels are above, and surmounting the doorway is Christ. Among all this dark stonework one is conscious now and then of little pink touches which examination shows to be the feet of reposing pigeons. Above is the parapet with the four famous golden horses in the midst; above them in the architrave over the central recess is S. Mark's lion with the open book against a background of starred blue. Then angels mounting to Christ, and on each side pinnacled saints. It is all rather barbaric, very much of a medley, and unforgettable in its total effect. Two mysteries the façade holds for me. One is the black space behind the horses, which seems so cowardly an evasion of responsibility on the part of artists and architects for many years, as it was there when Gentile Bellini painted his Santa Croce miracle; and the other is the identity of the two little grotesque figures with a jug, one towards each end of the parapet over the door. No book tells me who they are, and no Venetian seems to know. They do not appear to be scriptural; yet why should they be when the Labours of Hercules are illustrated in sculpture on the façade above them? [Illustration: S. MARK'S FROM THE PIAZZA, THE MERCERIA CLOCK ON THE LEFT] The north façade of S. Mark's receives less attention than it should, although one cannot leave Cook's office without seeing it. The north has a lovely Gothic doorway and much sculpture, including on the west wall of the transept a rather nice group of sheep, and beneath it a pretty little saint; while the Evangelists are again here--S. Luke painting, S. Matthew looking up from his book, S. John brooding, and S. Mark writing. The doorway has a quaint interesting relief of the manger, containing a very large Christ child, in its arch. Pinnacled saints, with holy men beneath canopies between them, are here, and on one point the quaintest little crowned Madonna. At sunset the light on this wall can be very lovely. At the end of the transept is a tomb built against the wall, with lions to guard it, and a statue of S. George high above. The tomb is that of Daniele Manin, and since we are here I cannot avoid an historical digression, for this man stands for the rise of the present Venice. When Lodovico Manin, the last Doge, came to the throne, in 1788, Venice was, of course, no longer the great power that she had been; but at any rate she was Venice, the capital of a republic with the grandest and noblest traditions. She had even just given one more proof of her sea power by her defeat of the pirates of Algiers. But her position in Europe had disappeared and a terrible glow was beginning to tinge the northern sky--none other than that of the French Revolution, from which was to emerge a Man of Destiny whose short sharp way with the map of Europe must disturb the life of frivolity and ease which the Venetians contrived still to live. Then came Napoleon's Italian campaign and his defeat of Lombardy. Venice resisted; but such resistance was merely a matter of time: the force was all-conquering. Two events precipitated her fate. One was the massacre of the French colony in Verona after that city had been vanquished; another was the attack on a French vessel cruising in Venetian waters on the watch for Austrian men-of-war. The Lido fort fired on her and killed her commander, Langier. It was then that Napoleon declared his intention of being a second Attila to the city of the sea. He followed up his threat with a fleet; but very little force was needed, for Doge Manin gave way almost instantly. The capitulation was indeed more than complete; the Venetians not only gave in but grovelled. The words "Pax tibi, Marce, Evangelista meus" on the lion's book on S. Mark façade were changed to "Rights of Man and of Citizenship," and Napoleon was thanked in a profuse epistle for providing Venice with glorious liberty. Various riots of course accompanied this renunciation of centuries of noble tradition, and under the Tree of Liberty in the Piazza the Ducal insignia and the Libro d'Oro were burned. The tricolour flew from the three flagstaffs, and the two columns in the Piazzetta were covered with inscriptions praising the French. This was in May, 1797. So much for Venice under Manin, Lodovico. The way is now paved for Manin, Daniele, who was no relation, but a poor Jewish boy to whom a Manin had stood as godfather. Daniele was born in 1804. In 1805 the Peace of Pressburg was signed, and Venice, which had passed to Austria in 1798, was taken from Austria and united to Napoleon's Italian kingdom, with Eugène Beauharnais, the Emperor's brother-in-law, as ruler under the title Prince of Venice. In 1807 Napoleon visited the city and at once decreed a number of improvements on his own practical sensible lines. He laid out the Giardini Pubblici; he examined the ports and improved them; he revised the laws. But not even Napoleon could be everywhere at once or succeed in everything, and in 1813 Austria took advantage of his other troubles to try and recapture the Queen of the Adriatic by force, and when the general Napoleonic collapse came the restitution was formally made, Venice and Lombardy becoming again Austrian and the brother of Francis I their ruler. All went fairly quietly in Venice until 1847, when, shortly after the fall of the Orleans dynasty in France, Daniele Manin, now an eloquent and burningly patriotic lawyer, dared to petition the Austrian Emperor for justice to the nation whom he had conquered, and as a reply was imprisoned for high treason, together with Niccolò Tommaseo. In 1848, on March 17, the city rose in revolt, the prison was forced, and Manin not only was released but proclaimed President of the Venetian Republic. He was now forty-four, and in the year of struggle that followed proved himself both a great administrator and a great soldier. He did all that was humanly possible against the Austrians, but events were too much for him; bigger battalions, combined with famine and cholera, broke the Venetian defence; and in 1849 Austria again ruled the province. All Italy had been similarly in revolt, but her time was not yet. The Austrians continued to rule until Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel built up the United Italy which we now know. Manin, however, did not live to see that. Forbidden even to return to Venice again, he retired to Paris a poor and broken man, and there died in 1854. The myriad Austrians who are projected into Venice every day during the summer by excursion steamers from Trieste rarely, I imagine, get so far as the Campo dominated by Manin's exuberant statue with the great winged lion, and therefore do not see this fine fellow who lived to preserve his country from them. Nor do they as a rule visit that side of S. Mark's where his tomb stands. But they can hardly fail to see the monument to Victor Emmanuel on the Riva--with the lion which they had wounded so grievously, symbolizing Italy under the enemy, on the one side, and the same animal all alert and confident, on the other, flushed with the assurance which 1866 brought, and the sturdy king riding forth to victory above. This they cannot well help seeing. The little piazzetta on the north side of S. Mark's has a famous well, with two porphyry lions beside it on which small Venetians love to straddle. A bathing-place for pigeons is here too, and I have counted twenty-seven in it at once. Here one day I found an artist at work on the head of an old man--a cunning old rascal with short-cropped grey hair, a wrinkled face packed with craft, and a big pipe. The artist, a tall, bearded man, was painting with vigour, but without, so far as I could discern, any model; and yet it was obviously a portrait on which he was engaged and no work of invention. After joining the crowd before the easel for a minute or so, I was passing on when a figure emerged from a cool corner where he had been resting and held out his hand. He was a cunning old rascal with short-cropped grey hair, a wrinkled face packed with craft, and a big pipe; and after a moment's perplexity I recognized him as the model. He pointed to himself and nodded to the picture and again proffered his open palm. Such money as I have for free distribution among others is, however, not for this kind; but the idea that the privilege of seeing the picture in the making should carry with it an obligation to the sitter was so comic that I could not repulse him with the grave face that is important on such occasions. Later in the same day I met the artist himself in the waters of the Lido--a form of rencontre that is very common in Venice in the summer. The converse is, however, the more amusing and usually disenchanting: the recognition, in the Piazza, in the evening, in their clothes, of certain of the morning's bathers. Disillusion here, I can assure you. On the south wall of S. Mark's, looking over the Molo and the lagoon, is the famous Madonna before whom two lights burn all night. Not all day too, as I have seen it stated. Above her are two pretty cherubs against a light-blue background, holding the head of Christ: one of the gayest pieces of colour in Venice. Justice is again pinnacled here, and on her right, on another pinnacle, is a charming angel, upon whom a lion fondlingly climbs. Between and on each side are holy men within canopies, and beneath is much delicate work in sculpture. Below are porphyry insets and veined marbles, and on the parapet two griffins, one apparently destroying a child and one a lamb. The porphyry stone on the ground at the corner on our left is the Pietra del Bando, from which the laws of the Republic were read to the people. Thomas Coryat, the traveller, who walked from Somerset to Venice in 1608 and wrote the result of his journey in a quaint volume called _Coryat's Crudities_, adds another to the functions of the Pietra del Bando. "On this stone," he says, "are laide for the space of three dayes and three nights the heads of all such as being enemies or traitors to the State, or some notorious offenders, have been apprehended out of the citie, and beheaded by those that have been bountifully hired by the Senate for the same purpose." The four affectionate figures, in porphyry, at the corner of the Doges' Palace doorway, came also from the East. Nothing definite is known of them, but many stories are told. The two richly carved isolated columns were brought from Acre in 1256. Of these columns old Coryat has a story which I have found in no other writer. It may be true, and on the other hand it may have been the invention of some mischievous Venetian wag wishing to get a laugh out of the inquisitive Somerset pedestrian, whose leg was, I take it, invitingly pullable. "Near to this stone," he says, referring to the Pietra del Bando, "is another memorable thing to be observed. A marvailous faire paire of gallowes made of alabaster, the pillars being wrought with many curious borders, and workes, which served for no other purpose but to hang the Duke whensoever he shall happen to commit any treason against the State. And for that cause it is erected before the very gate of his Palace to the end to put him in minde to be faithfull and true to his country. If not, he seeth the place of punishment at hand. But this is not a perfect gallowes, because there are only two pillars without a transverse beame, which beame (they say) is to be erected when there is any execution, not else. Betwixt this gallowes malefactors and condemned men (that are to goe to be executed upon a scaffold betwixt the two famous pillars before mentioned at the South end of S. Mark's street, neare the Adriaticque Sea) are wont to say their prayers, to the Image of the Virgin Mary, standing on a part of S. Mark's Church right opposite unto them." CHAPTER III S. MARK'S. II: THE INTERIOR Vandal guides--Emperor and Pope--The Bible in mosaic--The Creation of the world--Cain and Abel--Noah--The story of Joseph--The golden horses--A horseless city--A fiction gross and palpable--A populous church--The French pilgrims--Rain in Venice--S. Mark's Day--The procession--New Testament mosaics--S. Isidoro's chapel--The chapel of the Males--A coign of vantage--The Pala d'oro--Sansovino--S. Mark's treasures--The Baptistery--The good Andrea Dandolo--The vision of Bishop Magnus--The parasites. Let us now enter the atrium. When I first did so, in 1889, I fell at once into the hands of a guide, who, having completed his other services, offered for sale a few pieces of mosaic which he had casually chipped off the wall with his knife somewhere in the gallery. Being young and simple I supposed this the correct thing for guides to do, and was justified in that belief when at the Acropolis, a few weeks later, the terrible Greek who had me in tow ran lightly up a workman's ladder, produced a hammer from his pocket and knocked a beautiful carved leaf from a capital. But S. Mark's has no such vandals to-day. There are guides in plenty, who detach themselves from its portals or appear suddenly between the flagstaffs with promises of assistance; but they are easily repulsed and the mosaics are safe. Entering the atrium by the central door we come upon history at once. For just inside on the pavement whose tesselations are not less lovely than the ceiling mosaics--indeed I often think more lovely--are the porphyry slabs on which the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa asked pardon of Pope Alexander III, whom he had driven from Rome into an exile which had now brought him to Venice. The story has it that the great Emperor divested himself of his cloak of power and lay full length on these very stones; the Pope placed his foot on his neck, saying, "I will tread on the asp and the basilisk." The Emperor ventured the remark that he was submitting not to the Pope but to S. Peter. "To both of us," said Alexander. That was on July 24, 1177, and on the walls of the Doges' Palace we shall see pictures of the Pope's sojourn in Venice and subsequent triumph. The vestibule mosaics are not easy to study, as the best are in the domes immediately overhead. But they are very interesting in their simple directness. Their authors had but one end in view, and that was to tell the story. As thorough illustrations they could not be overpraised. And here let me say that though Baedeker is an important book in Venice, and S. Mark's Square is often red with it, there is one even more useful and necessary, especially in S. Mark's, and that is the Bible. One has not to be a very profound Biblical student to keep pace, in memory, with the Old Masters when they go to the New Testament; but when the Old is the inspiration, as chiefly here, one is continually at fault. [Illustration: ONE OF THE NOAH MOSAICS _In the Atrium of S. Mark's_] The vestibule mosaics are largely thirteenth century. That is to say, they were being fixed together in these domes and on these walls when England was under the first Edwards, and long indeed before America, which now sends so many travellers to see them--so many in fact that it is almost impossible to be in any show-place without hearing the American accent--was dreamed of. The series begins in the first dome on the right, with the creation of the world, a design spread over three circles. In the inner one is the origin of all things--or as far back as the artist, wisely untroubled by the question of the creation of the Creator, cared to go. Angels seem always to have been. In the next circle we find the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, birds, beasts, and fishes, and finally of man. The outer circle belongs to Adam and Eve. Adam names the animals; his rib is extracted; Eve, a curiously forbidding woman, rather a Gauguinesque type, results; she is presented to Adam; they eat the fruit; they take to foliage; they are judged; the leaves become real garments; they are driven forth to toil, Adam with an axe and Eve with a distaff. On the sides is the story of Cain and Abel carried back to an earlier point than we are accustomed to see it. Later, to the altar Cain brings fruit and Abel a lamb; a hand is extended from heaven to the fortunate Abel while Cain sulks on a chair. The two brothers then share a sentry-box in apparent amity, until Cain becomes a murderer. We next come, on the sides, to the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel. Noah's biography is vivid and detailed. We see him receiving Divine instruction to build the ark, and his workmen busy. He is next among the birds, and himself carries a pair of peacocks to the vessel. Then the beasts are seen, and he carries in a pair of leopards, or perhaps pumas; and then his whole family stand by while two eagles are inserted, and other big birds, such as storks and pelicans, await their turn. I reproduce this series. On the other side the rains have begun and the world is drowning. Noah sends out the dove and receives it again; the waters subside; he builds his altar, and the animals released from the ark gambol on the slopes of Ararat. The third series of events in the life of Noah I leave to the visitor to decipher. One of the incidents so captured the Venetian imagination that it is repeated at the eastern corner of the Ducal Palace lagoon façade. The second dome tells the history of Abraham, and then three domes are given to the best story in the world, the story of Joseph. The first dome treats of his dream, showing him asleep and busy with it, and the result, the pit being a cylinder projecting some feet from the ground. Jacob's grief on seeing the coat of many colours is very dramatic. In the next we find Potiphar's wife, Joseph's downfall, and the two dreaming officials. The third tells of Joseph and Jacob and is full of Egyptian local colour, a group of pyramids occurring twice. On the wall are subsidiary scenes, such as Joseph before Pharaoh, the incident of Benjamin's sack with the cup in it, and the scene of the lean kine devouring the fat, which they are doing with tremendous spirit, all beginning simultaneously from behind. The last dome relates the story of Moses, but it is by an inferior artist and does not compare with the others. The miracle of the manna on the wall is, however, amusing, the manna being rather like melons and the quails as large as pheasants. On the extreme left a cook is at work grilling some on a very open fire. Another inferior mosaic on the north side of the atrium, represents S. Christopher with his little Passenger. It is a pity that Titian's delightful version in the Doges' Palace could not have been followed. The atrium is remarkable not only for its illustrations to Genesis. Its mosaic patterns are very lovely, and its carved capitals. The staircase to the left of the centre door of the church proper leads to the interior galleries and to the exterior gallery, where the golden horses are. Of the interior galleries I speak later. Let me say here that these noble steeds were originally designed and cast for a triumphal arch, to be driven by Victory, in honour of Nero. Filched from Rome by Constantine, they were carried to his own city as an ornament to the imperial hippodrome. In 1204 the great Doge Enrico Dandolo, having humiliated Constantinople, brought the horses to Venice as a trophy, and they were transferred to the service of the church. Here, above the central portal of the cathedral, they stood for nearly six centuries, and then in 1797 a more modern Constantine, one Napoleon, carried them to Paris, to beautify his city. In 1815, however, when there was a redistribution of Napoleonic spoils, back they came to Venice, to their ancient platform, and there they now are, unchanged, except that their golden skins are covered with the autographs of tourists. One odd thing about them is that they and Colleoni's steed are the only horses which many younger and poorer Venetians have ever seen. As to the horselessness of Venice, the last word, as well as one of the first, in English, was written by our old friend Coryat in the following passage: "For you must consider that neither the Venetian Gentlemen nor any others can ride horses in the streets of Venice as in other Cities and Townes, because their streets being both very narrow and slippery, in regard they are all paved with smooth bricke, and joyning to the water, the horse would quickly fall into the river, and so drowne both himselfe and his rider. Therefore the Venetians do use Gondolaes in their streets insteede of horses, I meane their liquid streets: that is, their pleasant channels. So that I now finde by mine owne experience that the speeches of a certaine English Gentleman (with whom I once discoursed before my travels), a man that much vaunted of his observations in Italy, are utterly false. For when I asked him what principall things he observed in Venice, he answered me that he noted but little of the city, because he rode through it in post. A fiction, and as grosse and palpable as ever was coyned." From the horses' gallery there is a most interesting view of the Piazza and the Piazzetta, and the Old Library and Loggetta are as well seen from here as anywhere. Within the church itself two things at once strike us: the unusual popularity of it, and the friendliness. Why an intensely foreign building of great size should exert this power of welcome I cannot say; but the fact remains that S. Mark's, for all its Eastern domes and gold and odd designs and billowy floor, does more to make a stranger and a Protestant at home than any cathedral I know; and more people are also under its sway than in any other. Most of them are sightseers, no doubt, but they are sightseers from whom mere curiosity has fallen: they seem to like to be there for its own sake. The coming and going are incessant, both of worshippers and tourists, units and companies. Guides, professional and amateur, bring in little groups of travellers, and one hears their monotonous informative voices above the foot-falls; for, as in all cathedrals, the prevailing sound is of boots. In S. Mark's the boots make more noise than in most of the others because of the unevenness of the pavement, which here and there lures to the trot. One day as I sat in my favourite seat, high up in the gallery, by a mosaic of S. Liberale, a great gathering of French pilgrims entered, and, seating themselves in the right transept beneath me, they disposed themselves to listen to an address by the French priest who shepherded them. His nasal eloquence still rings in my ears. A little while after I chanced to be at Padua, and there, in the church of S. Anthony, I found him again, again intoning rhetoric. S. Mark's is never empty, but when the rain falls--and in Venice rain literally does fall--it is full. Then do the great leaden spouts over the façade pour out their floods, while those in the courtyard of the Doges' Palace expel an even fiercer torrent. But the city's recovery from a deluge is instant. But the most populous occasion on which I ever saw S. Mark's was on S. Mark's own day--April 25. Then it is solid with people: on account of the procession, which moves from a point in front of the high altar and makes a tour of the church, passing down to the door of the Baptistery, through the atrium, and into the church again by the door close to the Cappella dei Mascoli. There is something in all Roman Catholic ceremonial which for me impairs its impressiveness--perhaps a thought too much mechanism--and I watched this chanting line of choristers, priests, and prelates without emotion, but perfectly willing to believe that the fault lay with me. Three things abide vividly in the memory: the Jewish cast of so many of the large inscrutable faces of the wearers of the white mitres; a little aged, isolated, ecclesiastic of high rank who muttered irascibly to himself; and a precentor who for a moment unfolded his hands and lowered his eyes to pull out his watch and peep at it. Standing just inside the church and watching the people swarm in their hundreds for this pageantry, I was struck by the comparatively small number who made any entering salutation. No children did. Perhaps the raptest worshipper was one of Venice's many dwarfs, a tiny, alert man in blue linen with a fine eloquent face and a great mass of iron-grey hair. This was the only occasion on which I saw the Baptistery accessible freely to all and the door into the Piazzetta open. One should not look at a guide-book on the first visit to S. Mark's; nor on the second or third, unless, of course, one is pressed for time. Let the walls and the floors and the pillars and the ceiling do their own quiet magical work first. Later you can gather some of their history. The church has but one fault which I have discovered, and that is the circular window to the south. Beautiful as this is, it is utterly out of place, and whoever cut it was a vandal. But indeed S. Mark's ought to have a human appeal, considering the human patience and thought that have gone to its making and beautifying, inside and out. No other church has had much more than a tithe of such toil. The Sistine Chapel in Rome is wonderful enough, with its frescoes; but what is the labour on a fresco compared with that on a mosaic? Before every mosaic there must be the artist and the glass-maker; and then think of the labour of translating the artist's picture into this exacting and difficult medium and absolutely covering every inch of the building with it! And that is merely decoration; not structure at all. There are mosaics here which date from the tenth century; and there are mosaics which are being renewed at this moment, for the prosperity of the church is continually in the thoughts of the city fathers. The earliest is that of Christ, the Virgin, and S. Mark, on the inside wall over the central door. My own favourites are all among the earlier ones. Indeed, some of the later ones are almost repulsively flamboyant and self-conscious. Particularly I like the great scene of Christ's agony high up on the right wall, with its lovely green and gold border, touched with red. But all the patterns, especially in the roof arches, are a delight, especially those with green in them. I like too the picture of Christ on a white ass in the right transept, with the children laying their cloaks in His way. And the naïve scene of Christ's temptation above it, and the quaint row of disciples beneath it, waiting to have their feet washed. Of the more modern mosaics the "Annunciation" and "Adoration of the Magi" are among the most pleasing. There are some curious and interesting early mosaics in the chapel of S. Isidoro in the left transept. It is always dark in this tiny recess, but bit by bit the incidents in the pictures are revealed. They are very dramatic, and the principal scene of the saint's torture by being dragged over the ground by galloping horses is repeated in relief on the altar. I have failed to find any life of any S. Isidoro that relates the story. Note the little bronze lions on each side of the altar--two more for that census of Venetian lions which I somewhere suggest might be made. The little chapel on the left of S. Isidoro's is known as the Cappella dei Mascoli, or males, for hither come the young wives of Venice to pray that they may bring forth little gondoliers. That at any rate is one story; another says that it was the chapel of a confraternity of men to which no woman might belong. In the mosaic high up on the left is a most adorably gay little church, and on the altar are a pretty baby and angels. On a big pillar close to this chapel is a Madonna with a votive rifle hung by it; but I have been unable to find its story. It might be a moving one. It is not detail, however lovely, for which one seeks S. Mark's, but general impressions, and these are inexhaustible. It is a temple of beauty and mystery in which to loiter long, and, as I have said, just by the S. Liberale in the gallery of the right transept, I made my seat. From this point one sees under the most favourable conditions the mosaic of the entry into Jerusalem; the choir; the choir screen with its pillars and saints; the two mysterious pulpits, beneath which children creep and play on great days; and all the miracle of the pavements. From here one can follow the Mass and listen to the singing, undisturbed by the moving crowd. S. Mark's is described by Ruskin as an illuminated missal in mosaic. It is also a treasury of precious stones, for in addition to every known coloured stone that this earth of ours can produce, with which it is built and decorated and floored, it has the wonderful Pala d'oro, that sumptuous altar-piece of gold and silver and enamel which contains some six thousand jewels. More people, I guess, come to see this than anything else; but it is worth standing before, if only as a reminder of how far the Church has travelled since a carpenter's son, who despised riches, founded it; as a reminder, too, as so much of this building is, of the day when Constantinople, where in the eleventh century the Pala d'oro was made, was Christian also. The fine carved pillars of the high altar's canopy are very beautiful, and time has given them a quality as of ivory. According to a custodian, without whom one cannot enter the choir, the remains of S. Mark still lie beneath the high altar, but this probably is not true. At the back of the high altar is a second altar with pillars of alabaster, and the custodian places his candle behind the central ones to illustrate their soft lucency, and affirms that they are from Solomon's own temple. His candle illumines also Sansovino's bronze sacristy door, with its fine reliefs of the Deposition and the Resurrection, with the heads of Evangelists and Prophets above them. Six realistic heads are here too, one of which is Titian's, one Sansovino's himself, and one the head of Aretino, the witty and licentious writer and gilt-edged parasite--this last a strange selection for a sacristy door. Sansovino designed also the bronze figures of the Evangelists on the balustrade of the choir stalls and the reliefs of the Doge's and Dogaressa's private pews. There are two Treasuries in S. Mark's, One can be seen every day for half a franc; the other is open only on Fridays and the entrance fee is, I believe, five francs. I have not laid out this larger amount; but in the other I have spent some time and seen various priceless temporal indications of spiritual power. There is a sword of Doge Mocenigo, a wonderful turquoise bowl, a ring for the Adriatic nuptials, and so forth. But I doubt if such details of S. Mark's are things to write about. One should go there to see S. Mark's as a whole, just as one goes to Venice to see Venice. The Baptistery is near the entrance on the left as you leave the church. But while still in the transept it is interesting to stand in the centre of the aisle with one's back to the high altar and look through the open door at the Piazza lying in the sun. The scene is fascinating in this frame; and one also discovers how very much askew the façade of S. Mark's must be, for instead of seeing, immediately in front, the centre of the far end of the square, as most persons would expect, one sees Naya's photograph shop at the corner. The Baptistery is notable for its mosaic biography of the Baptist, its noble font, and the beautiful mural tomb of Doge Andrea Dandolo. Andrea, the last Doge to be buried within S. Mark's, was one of the greatest of them all. His short reign of but ten years, 1343 to 1354, when he died aged only forty-six, was much troubled by war with the Genoese; but he succeeded in completing an alliance against the Turks and in finally suppressing Zara, and he wrote a history of Venice and revised its code of laws. Petrarch, who was his intimate friend, described Andrea as "just, upright, full of zeal and of love for his country ... erudite ... wise, affable, and humane." His successor was the traitor Marino Faliero. The tomb of the Doge is one of the most beautiful things in Venice, all black bronze. It was the good Andrea, not to be confused with old Henry Dandolo, the scourge of the Greeks, to whom we are indebted for the charming story of the origin of certain Venetian churches. It runs thus in the translation in _St. Mark's Rest_:-- "As head and bishop of the islands, the Bishop Magnus of Altinum went from place to place to give them comfort, saying that they ought to thank God for having escaped from these barbarian cruelties. And there appeared to him S. Peter, ordering him that in the head of Venice, or truly of the city of Rivoalto, where he should find oxen and sheep feeding, he was to build a church under his (S. Peter's) name. And thus he did; building S. Peter's Church in the island of Olivolo [now Castello], where at present is the seat and cathedral church of Venice. [Illustration: THE CAMPANILE AND THE PIAZZA FROM COOK'S CORNER] "Afterwards appeared to him the angel Raphael, committing it to him, that at another place, where he should find a number of birds together, he should build him a church: and so he did, which is the church of the Angel Raphael in Dorsoduro. "Afterwards appeared to him Messer Jesus Christ our Lord, and committed to him that in the midst of the city he should build a church, in the place above which he should see a red cloud rest: and so he did, and it is San Salvador. "Afterwards appeared to him the most holy Mary the Virgin, very beautiful, and commanded him that where he should see a white cloud rest, he should build a church: which is the church of S. Mary the Beautiful. "Yet still appeared to him S. John the Baptist, commanding that he should build two churches, one near the other,--the one to be in his name, and the other in the name of his father. Which he did, and they are San Giovanni in Bragora, and San Zaccaria. "Then appeared to him the apostles of Christ, wishing, they also, to have a church in this new city: and they committed it to him that where he should see twelve cranes in a company, there he should build it." Of the Baptistery mosaics the most scanned will always be that in which Salome bears in the head. In another the decapitated saint bends down and touches his own head. The scene of Christ's baptism is very quaint, Christ being half-submerged in Jordan's waves, and fish swimming past during the sacred ceremony. Behind the altar, on which is a block of stone from Mount Tabor, is a very spirited relief of S. George killing the dragon. The adjoining chapel is that named after Cardinal Zeno, who lies in the magnificent central tomb beneath a bronze effigy of himself, while his sacred hat is in crimson mosaic on each side of the altar. The tomb and altar alike are splendid rather than beautiful: its late Renaissance sculptors, being far removed from Donatello, Mino, and Desiderio, the last of whom was one of the authors of the beautiful font in the adjoining Baptistery. Earlier and more satisfactory reliefs are those of an angel on the right of the altar and a Madonna and Child on the left which date from a time when sculpture was anonymous. The mosaics represent the history of S. Mark. One may walk or sit at will in S. Mark's as long as one wishes, free and unharassed; but a ticket is required for the galleries and a ticket for the choir and treasury; and the Baptistery and Zeno chapel can be entered only by grace of a loafer with a key who expects something in return for opening it. The history of this loafer's privilege I have not obtained, and it would be interesting to learn by what authority he is there, for he has no uniform and he accepts any sum you give him. If all the hangers-on of the Roman Catholic Church, in Italy alone, who perform these parasitical functions and stand between man and God, could be gathered together, what a huge and horrible army it would be! CHAPTER IV THE PIAZZA AND THE CAMPANILE The heart of Venice--Old-fashioned music--Teutonic invaders--The honeymooners--True republicanism--A city of the poor--The black shawls--A brief triumph--Red hair--A band-night incident--The pigeons of the Piazza--The two Procuratie--A royal palace--The shopkeepers--Florian's--Great names--Venetian restaurants--Little fish--The old campanile--A noble resolve--The new campanile--The angel vane--The rival campanili--The welcome lift--The bells--Venice from the Campanile. S. Mark's Square, or the Piazza, is more than the centre of Venice: to a large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore among its arcades. No other city has so representative a heart. On the four musical nights here--afternoons in the winter--the Piazza draws like a magnet. That every stranger is here, you may be sure, and most Venetian men. Some sit outside Florian's and the other cafés; others walk round and round the bandstand; others pause fascinated beside the musicians. And so it has been for centuries, and will be. New ideas and fashions come slowly into this city, where one does quite naturally what one's father and grandfather did; and a good instance of such contented conservatism is to be found in the music offered to these contented crowds, for they are still true to Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini, and with reluctance are experiments made among the newer men. In the daytime the population of the Piazza is more foreign than Venetian. In fact the only Venetians to be seen are waiters, photographers, and guides, the knots of errand boys watching the artists, and, I might add, the pigeons. But at night Venice claims it, although the foreigner is there too. It is amusing to sit at a table on the outside edge of Florian's great quadrangle of chairs and watch the nationalities, the Venetians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the Anglo-Saxons, as they move steadily round and round. Venice is, of course, the paradise both of Germans and Austrians. Every day in the spring and summer one or two steamers arrive from Trieste packed with Austrian tourists awfully arrayed. Some hundreds have to return to Trieste at 2 o'clock; other hundreds remain till night. The beautiful word Venezia, which we cheapen but not too cruelly to Venice and the French soften to Venise, is alas! to Teutonic tongues Venedig. The Venetians reach the Square first, smart, knowing, confident, friendly, and cheerful; then the Germans and Austrians, very obviously trippers; and then, after their hotel dinners, at about quarter past nine, the English: the women with low necks, the men in white shirts, talking a shade too loud, monarchs of all they survey. But the honeymooners are the best--the solicitous young bridegrooms from Surbiton and Chislehurst in their dinner-jackets and black ties; their slender brides, with pretty wraps on their heads, here probably for the last or the first time, and so determined to appear Continental and tolerant, bless their hearts! They walk round and round, or sit over their coffee, and would be so happy and unselfconscious and clinging were it not for the other English here. The fine republicanism of Venice is nowhere so apparent as on band nights. Such aristocrats as the city holds (and judging from the condition of the palaces to-day, there cannot be many now in residence) either look exactly like the middle classes or abstain from the Piazza. The prevailing type is the well-to-do citizen, very rarely with his women folk, who moves among street urchins at play; cigar-end hunters; soldiers watchful for officers to salute; officers sometimes returning and often ignoring salutes; groups of slim upright Venetian girls in the stately black shawls, moving, as they always do, like queens; little uniformed schoolboys in "crocodiles"; a policeman or two; a party from the country; a workman with his wife and babies (for though the Venetians adore babies they see no incongruity in keeping them up till ten o'clock); epauletted and cockhatted gendarmes; and at intervals, like ghosts, officials from the arsenal, often alone, in their spotless white linen. Every type of Venetian is seen in the Square, save one--the gondolier. Never have I seen a gondolier there, day or night: not because it is too grand for him, but it is off his beat. When he has done his work he prefers the wine shops of his own sestiere. No thought of any want of welcome would deter him, for Venice is republic to the core. In fact one might go farther and say that it is a city of the poor. Where the poor lived in the great days when the palaces were occupied by the rich, one cannot quite understand, since the palace is the staple building; but there is no doubt as to where they live now: they live everywhere. The number of palaces which are wholly occupied by one family must be infinitesimal; the rest are tenements, anything but model buildings, rookeries. Venice has no aristocratic quarter as other cities have. The poor establish themselves either in a palace or as near it as possible. I have referred to the girls in their black shawls or scialli. They remain in the memory as one of Venice's most distinguished possessions. A handsome young private gondolier in white linen with a coloured scarf, bending to the oar and thrusting his boat forward with muscular strokes, is a delight to watch; but he is without mystery. These girls have grace and mystery too. They are so foreign, so slender and straight, so sad. Their faces are capable of animation, but their prevailing expression is melancholy. Why is this? Is it because they know how secondary a place woman holds in this city of well-nourished, self-satisfied men? Is it that they know that a girl's life is so brief: one day as supple and active as they are now and the next a crone? For it is one of the tragedies that the Venetian atmosphere so rapidly ages women. But in their prime the Venetian girls in the black shawls are distinguished indeed, and there was not a little sagacity in the remark to me by an observer who said that, were they wise, all women would adopt a uniform. One has often thought this, in London, when a nurse in blue or grey passes refreshingly along a pavement made bizarre by expensive and foolish fashions; one realizes it even more in Venice. Most of these girls have dark or black hair. The famous red hair of Venetian women is rarely seen out of pictures. Round and round goes the chattering contented crowd, while every table at each of the four cafés, Florian's and the Aurora, the Quadri and the Ortes Rosa, swells the noise. Now and then the music, or the ordinary murmur of the Square in the long intervals, is broken by the noisy rattle of a descending shop shutter, or the hour is struck by the Merceria clock's bronze giants; now and then a pigeon crosses the sky and shows luminous where the light strikes its breast; now and then a feather flutters from a window ledge, great bats flit up and down, and the mosquitoes shrill in one's ear. It is an entertainment never failing in interest to the observer, and not the least amusing question that one asks oneself is, Where does every one sleep? I shall always remember one band night here, for it was then that I saw a girl and her father whose images will never leave me, I know not why. Every now and then, but seldom indeed, a strange face or form will thus suddenly photograph itself on the memory, when it is only with the utmost concentrated effort, or not at all, that we can call up mental pictures of those near and dear to us. I know nothing of these two; I saw them only once again, and then in just the same fugitive way; but if an artist were now to show me a portrait of either, I could point out where his hand was at fault. The band was playing the usual music--_Il Trovatore_ or _Aïda_ or _Lohengrin_--and the crowd was circulating when an elderly man with a long-pointed grey beard and moustache and the peculiar cast of countenance belonging to them (Don Quixotic) walked past. He wore a straw hat slightly tilted and was smoking a cigar. His arm was passed through that of a tall slender girl of about his own height, and, say, twenty-five, in red. She was leaning towards him and he slightly inclined towards her. They walked faster than Venice, and talked animatedly in English as they passed me, and the world had no one in it but themselves; and so they disappeared, with long strides and a curious ease of combined movement almost like skillful partners in a dance. Two nights later I saw them again. This time she was in black, and again they sailed through the crowd, a little leaning towards each other, he again holding her arm, and again both discussing in English something with such interest that they were conscious of nothing around them. Sitting outside a café on the Piazza every evening for a month, one naturally sees many travellers come and go; but none other in that phantasmagoria left any mark on my mind. Why did these? So much for S. Mark's Square by night. With thousands of persons, to think of S. Mark's Square by day is chiefly to think of pigeons. Many a visitor to Venice who cannot remember the details of a single painting there can show you a photograph of herself with pigeons on her shoulders and arms. Photographers and dealers in maize are here all day to effect these pretty conjunctions; but the Kodak has seriously impaired their profits. The birds are smaller than our London monsters and not quite so brilliantly burnished. How many there are I have no idea; but since they are sacred, their numbers must be ever increasing. Why they are sacred is something of a mystery. One story states that the great Enrico Dandolo had carrier-pigeons with him in the East which conveyed the grand tidings of victories to Venice; another says that the same heroic old man was put in possession of valuable strategic information by means of a carrier-pigeon, and on returning to Venice proclaimed it a bird to be reverenced. There was once a custom of loosing a number of pigeons among the crowd in the Piazza on Palm Sunday. The birds being weighted floundered downwards and were caught and killed for the pot; but such as escaped were held to have earned their liberty for ever. [Illustration: THE PRESENTATION FROM THE PAINTING BY TITIAN _In the Accademia_] At night no doubt the pigeons roost among S. Mark's statuary and on convenient ledges in the neighbourhood; by day, when not on the pavement of the Piazza, the bulk of the flock are dotted about among the reliefs of the Atrio, facing S. Mark's. They have no timidity, but by a kind of honourable understanding they all affect to be startled by the bells at certain hours and the midday gun, and ascend in a grey cloud for a few seconds. They are never so engaging as when flying double, bird and shadow, against the Campanile. Their collective cooing fills the air and makes the Piazza's day music. Venetians crossing the Piazza walk straight on, through the birds, like Moses crossing the Red Sea; the foreigners pick their way. What with S. Mark's and the pigeons, the Campanile and coffee, few visitors have any time to inquire as to the other buildings of the Piazza. Nor are they of much interest. Briefly they are the Old Procuratie, which forms the side on which the clock is, the Atrio or Nuova Fabbrica opposite S. Mark's, and the New Procuratie on the Campanile side. The Old Procuratie, whose main row of windows I once counted, making either a hundred or a hundred and one, is now offices and, above, residences. Here once abode the nine procurators of Venice who, under the Doge, ruled the city. The New Procuratie is now the Royal Palace, and you may see the royal lackeys conversing with the sentinels in the doorway by Florian's. It is the finer building: over the arches it has good sprawling Michael-Angelesque figures, noble lions' heads, and massive ornamentations. I don't know for certain, but I should guess that the Royal Palace in Venice is the only abode of a European King that has shops underneath it. Wisely the sleeping apartments face the Grand Canal, with a garden intervening; were they on the Piazza side sleep would be very difficult. But all the great State rooms overlook the Piazza. The Palace is open on fixed days and shown by a demure flunkey in an English bowler hat, but it should be the last place to be visited by the sightseer. Its only real treasures--the Tintorettos illustrating the life of S. Mark--were not visible on the only occasion on which I ventured in. Beneath these three buildings--the two Procuratie and the Fabbrica Nuova--runs an arcade where the Venetians congregate in wet weather and where the snares for tourists are chiefly laid by the dealers in jewellery, coral, statuary, lace, glass, and mosaic. But the Venetian shopkeepers are not clever: they have not the sense to leave the nibbler alone. One has not been looking in the window for more than two seconds before a silky-voiced youth appears at the door and begins to recommend his wares and invite custom; and then of course one moves away in terror. Here, too, under the arcade, are the head-quarters of the cafés, which do most of their business on the pavement of the Square. Of these Florian's is the oldest and best. At certain hours, however, one must cross the Square to either the Ortes Rosa or Quadri, or be roasted. The original Florian was wise in his choice of site, for he has more shady hours than his rivals opposite. In an advertisement of the café in the musical programme it is stated that, "the oldest and most aristocratic establishment of its kind in Venice, it can count among its clients, since 1720, Byron, Goethe, Rousseau, Canova, Dumas, and Moor," meaning by Moor not Othello but Byron's friend and biographer, the Anacreon of Erin. How Florian's early patrons looked one can see in a brilliant little picture by Guardi in the National Gallery, No. 2099. The café boasts that its doors are never shut, day or night; and I have no doubt that this is true, but I have never tested it in the small hours. Oddly enough there are no restaurants in the Piazza, but many about its borders on the north and west. The visitor to Venice, as a rule, eats in his hotel; and I think he is wise. But wishing to be in Venice rather more thoroughly than that, I once lived in rooms for a month and ate in all the restaurants in turn. Having had this experience I expect to be believed when I say that the restaurants of Venice are not good. The food is monotonous, and the waiting, even at what is called the best, the Bauer-Grünwald, say, or the Pilsen, is leisurely. Add to this that the guests receive no welcome, partly because, all the places being understaffed, no one can be spared for that friendly office, and partly because politeness is not a Venetian foible. An immense interval then elapses before the lista, or bill of fare, is brought, partly because there is no waiter disengaged and partly because there seems to be a law in Venetian restaurants that one lista shall suffice for eight tables. Then comes the struggle--to find anything new either to eat or drink. The lista contains in print a large number of attractive things, but few are obtainable, for on an Italian menu print is nothing: it is only the written words that have any relevance. The print is in Italian and German, the reason being that Italians, Germans, and Austrians are the only people who resort to restaurants. The English and Americans eat in their hotels, en pension. (In Venice, I might say, all foreigners are addressed first in German, except by the little boys in the streets whose one desire on earth is to direct you to S. Marco and be paid for their trouble. They call you _m'soo_.) Once a meal is ordered it comes rapidly enough, but one has to be very hungry to enjoy it. For the most part Venetian food is Italian food: that is to say, almost wholly veal and paste; but in the matter of fish Venice has her specialities. There are, for examples, those little toy octopuses which on my first visit, twenty-five years ago, used to be seen everywhere in baskets at corners, but now have disappeared from the streets. These are known as calamai or calamaretti, and if one has the courage to take the shuddering first step that counts they will be found to be very good. But they fail to look nice. Better still are scampi, a kind of small crawfish, rather like tenderer and sweeter langouste. To the investigator I recommend the dish called variously frutta di mare and fritto misto, in which one has a fried jumble of the smaller sea creatures of the lagoon, to the scampi and calamaretti being added fresh sardines (which the fishermen catch with the hand at low tide), shrimps, little soles, little red mullets, and a slice or two of big cuttle fish. A popular large fish is the bronzino, and great steaks of tunny are always in demand too. But considering Venice's peculiar position with regard to the sea and her boasted dominion over it fish are very dear. Even more striking is the dearness of fruit, but this, I take it, is due to the distance that it must come, either by rail or water. No restaurant that I discovered--as in the fair land of France and indeed elsewhere in Italy--places wine or grapes free on the table. As I say, I tried all the Venetian houses, small and large--the Cappello Nero, the Bella Venezia, the Antico Panada, the Bauer-Grünwald, the Bonvecchiato, the Cavalletti, the Pilsen; and the only one I felt any desire to return to was the Pilsen, which is large and noisy and intensely Teutonic, but a shade more attentive than the others. The Bella Venezia is the best purely Venetian house. I cannot remember the old campanile with enough vividness to be sure, but my impression is that its brick was a mellower tint than that of the new: nearer the richness of S. Giorgio Maggiore's, across the water. Time may do as much for the new campanile, but at present its colour is not very satisfactory except when the sun is setting. Indeed, so new is it that one cannot think of it as having any association whatever with S. Mark's. If it belongs to anything it is to Venice as a whole, or possibly the Royal Palace. Yet one ought not to cavil, for it stands so bravely on the spot where its predecessor fell, and this is a very satisfactory proof that the Venetians, for all the decay of their lovely city and the disappearance of their marvellous power, are Venetians still. The old campanile, after giving various warnings, fell on July 14, 1902, at half-past nine in the morning. On the evening of the same day the Town Council met, under the chairmanship of Count Grimani, the mayor, and without the least hesitation decided that a successor must be erected: in the fine words of the count: "Dov'era, com'era" ("Where it was and as it was"). Sympathy and contributions poured in from the outside world to strengthen the hands of the Venetians, and on S. Mark's Day (April 25), 1903, the first stone was laid. On S. Mark's Day, 1912, the new campanile was declared complete in every part and blessed in the presence of representatives of all Italy, while 2479 pigeons, brought hither for the purpose, carried the tidings to every corner of the country. The most remarkable circumstance about the fall of the campanile is that no one was hurt. The Piazza and Piazzetta are by no means empty at half-past nine in the morning, yet these myriad tons of brick and stone sank bodily to the ground and not a human bruise resulted. Here its behaviour was better than that of the previous campanile of S. Giorgio Maggiore, which, when it fell in 1774, killed one monk and injured two others. Nor was S. Mark's harmed, although its sacristan confesses to have been dumb for three days from the shock. The falling golden angel from the top of the campanile was found in front of the central door as though to protect the church. Sansovino's Loggetta, it is true, was crushed and buried beneath the debris, but human energy is indomitable, and the present state of that structure is a testimony to the skill and tenacity which still inhabit Venetian hands and breasts. What I chiefly miss in the new campanile is any aerial suggestion. It has actual solidity in every inch of it, apart from the fact that it also conveys the idea of solidity, as any building must which has taken the place of one so misguided as to fall down. But its want of this intangible quality, together with its newness, have displaced it in my eyes as the king campanile of Venice. In my eyes the campanile of S. Giorgio Maggiore now reigns supreme, while I am very much attached also to those of the Frari and S. Francesco della Vigna. But let S. Mark's campanile take heart: some day Anno Domini will claim these others too, and then the rivalry will pass. But as it is, morning, noon, and evening the warm red bricks and rich green copper top of S. Giorgio Maggiore's bell-tower draw the gaze first, and hold it longest. It is the most beautiful campanile of all, and its inevitableness is such that did we not know the truth we should wonder if the six days of creation had not included an afternoon for the ordainment of such edifices. It would need a Hans Andersen to describe the feelings of the other Venetian campaniles when S. Mark's tall column fell. S. Giorgio's I imagine instantly took command, but no doubt there were other claimants to the throne. I rather fancy that the Frari's had something to say, and S. Pietro in Castello's also, on account of his age and his early importance; but who could pay any serious attention at that time to a tower so pathetically out of the perpendicular as he now is? The new campanile endeavours to reproduce the old faithfully, and it was found possible to utilize a little of the old material. The figures of Venice on the east wall above the belfry canopy and Justice on the west are the ancient ones pieced together and made whole; the lions on the north and south sides are new. The golden angel on the summit is the old one restored, with the novelty, to her, as to us, of being set on a pivot to act as a vane. I made this discovery for myself, after being puzzled by what might have been fancied changes of posture from day to day, due to optical illusion. One of the shopkeepers on the Square, who has the campanile before his eye continually, replied, however, when I asked him if the figure was fixed or movable, "Fixed." This double duty of the new campanile angel--to shine in golden glory over the city and also to tell the wind--must be a little mortifying to her celestial sister on the campanile of S. Giorgio, who is immovable. But no doubt she has philosophy enough to consider subjection to the caprices of the breeze a humiliation. Another change for which one cannot be too grateful is the lift. For the modest price of a franc one can be whirled to the belfry in a few seconds at any time of the day and refresh one's eyes with the city and the lagoon, the Tyrolese Alps, and the Euganean hills. Of old one ascended painfully; but never again. Before the fall there were five bells, of which only the greatest escaped injury. The other four were taken to a foundry set up on the island of Sant'Elena and there fused and recast at the personal cost of His Holiness the late Pope, who was Patriarch of Venice. I advise no one to remain in the belfry when the five are at work. They begin slowly and with some method; they proceed to a deafening cacophony, tolerable only when one is far distant. There are certain surprises in the view from the campanile. One is that none of the water of the city is visible--not a gleam--except a few yards of the Grand Canal and a stretch of the Canale della Giudecca; the houses are too high for any of the by-ways to be seen. Another revelation is that the floor pattern of the Piazza has no relation to its sides. The roofs of Venice we observe to be neither red nor brown, but something between the two. Looking first to the north, over the three flagstaffs and the pigeon feeders and the Merceria clock, we see away across the lagoon the huge sheds of the dirigibles and (to the left) the long railway causeway joining Venice to the mainland as by a thread. Immediately below us in the north-east are the domes of S. Mark's, surmounted by the graceful golden balls on their branches, springing from the leaden roof, and farther off are the rising bulk of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, with its derivative dome and golden balls, the leaning tower of S. Maria del Pianto, and beyond this the cemetery and Murano. Beneath us on the east side is the Ducal Palace, and we look right into the courtyard and on to the prison roof. Farther away are the green trees of the Giardini Pubblici, the leaning tower of S. Pietro di Castello, and S. Nicholas of the Lido. In the south-east are the Lido's various hotels and the islands of S. Lazzaro (with the campanile) and S. Servolo. In the south is the Grand Canal with a Guardi pattern of gondolas upon it, criss-crossing like flies; then S. Giorgio's lovely island and the Giudecca, and beyond these various islands of the lagoon: La Grazia, S. Clemente, and, in the far distance, Malamocco. In the south-west the Custom House pushes its nose into the water, with the vast white mountain of the Salute behind it. In the west is the Piazza, immediately below, with its myriad tables and chairs; then the backs of the S. Moïse statues; and farther away the Frari and its campanile, the huge telegraph-wire carriers of the harbour; across the water Fusina, and beyond in the far distance the jagged Euganean hills. At sunset the landscape is sharpened and brought nearer. The deep blue of the real sea, beyond the lagoon, grows deeper; the great fields of mud (if it is low tide) gleam and glisten. And so it will ever be. CHAPTER V THE DOGES' PALACE. I: THE INTERIOR Uningratiating splendour--Doges and Heaven--Venetian pride--The most beautiful picture of all--A non-scriptural Tintoretto--The Sala del Collegio--The Sala del Senato--More Doges and Heaven--The Council of Ten--Anonymous charges--Tintoretto's "Last Judgment"--An immense room--Tintoretto's "Paradiso"--Sebastiano Ziani and his exploits--Pope Alexander III and Barbarossa--Old blind Dandolo--The Crusades--Zara--The Fall of Constantinople--Marino Faliero and his fall--The first Doge in the room--The last Doge in the room--The Sala dello Scrutinio--Palma's "Last Judgment"--A short way with mistresses--The rest of the Doges--Two battle pictures--The Doges' suites--The Archæological Museum--The Bridge of Sighs--The dungeons. I have to confess to weariness in the Ducal apartments. The rooms are splendid, no doubt, and the pictures are monuments of energy; but it is the windows that frame the most delectable scenes. In Venice, where the sun usually shines, one's normal wish is to be out, except when, as in S. Mark's there is the wonder of dimness too. For Venice is not like other historic cities; Venice, for all her treasures of art, is first and foremost the bride of the Adriatic, and the call of the sea is strong. Art's opportunity is the dull days and rainy. With the best will to do so, I cannot be much impressed by the glory and power of the Doges. They wear a look, to me, very little removed from Town Councillors: carried out to the highest power, no doubt, but incorrigibly municipal none the less; and the journey through these halls of their deliberations is tedious and unenchanting. That I am wrong I am only too well aware. Does not Venetian history, with its triumphs and pageantry of world-power, prove it? And would Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto have done all this for a Mayor and Corporation? These are awkward questions. None the less, there it is, and the Doges' Palace, within, would impart no thrill to me were it not for Tintoretto's "Bacchus and Ariadne." Having paid for our tickets (for only on Sundays and holidays is the Palace free) we take the Scala d'Oro, designed by Sansovino, originally intended only for the feet of the grandees of the Golden Book. The first room is an ante-room where catalogues are sold; but these are not needed, for every room, or nearly every room, has hand-charts of the paintings, and every room has a custodian eager to impart information. Next is the Hall of the Four Doors, with its famous and typical Titian--Doge Grimani, fully armed and accompanied by warriors, ecstatically acknowledging religion, as symbolized by a woman, a cross, and countless cherubim. Behind her is S. Mark with an expression of some sternness, and beside him his lion, roaring. Doges, it appears,--at any rate the Doges who reigned during Titian's long life--had no sense of humour, or they could not have permitted this kind of self-glorification in paint. Both here and at the Accademia we shall see picture after picture in which these purse-proud Venetian administrators, suspecting no incongruity or absurdity, are placed, by Titian and Tintoretto, on terms of perfect intimacy with the hierarchy of heaven. Sometimes they merely fraternize; sometimes they masquerade as the Three Kings or Wise Men from the East; but always it is into the New Testament that, with the aid of the brush of genius, they force their way. Modesty can never have been a Venetian characteristic; nor is it now, when Venice is only a museum and show place. All the Venetians--the men, that is,--whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; for if its walls do not bear witness, glorious and chromatic, to the greatness of a Doge, it is merely because the greatness of the Republic requires the space. In this room, for example, we find Tiepolo allegorizing Venice as the conqueror of the sea. And now for the jewel of art in the Doges' Palace. It is in the room opposite the door by which we entered--the ante-room of the Sala del Collegio--and it faces us, on the left as we enter: the "Bacchus and Ariadne" of Tintoretto. We have all seen the "Bacchus and Ariadne" of Titian in our National Gallery, that superb, burning, synchronized epitome of the whole legend. Tintoretto has chosen one incident only; Love bringing Bacchus to the arms of Ariadne and at the same moment placing on his head a starry coronal. Even here the eternal pride of Venice comes in, for, made local, it has been construed as Love, or say Destiny, completing the nuptials of the Adriatic (Bacchus) with Venice (Ariadne), and conferring on Venice the crown of supremacy. But that matters nothing. What matters is that the picture is at once Tintoretto's simplest work and his most lovely. One can do nothing but enjoy it in a kind of stupor of satisfaction, so soothing and perfect is it. His "Crucifixion," which we shall see at the Scuola of S. Rocco, must ever be this giant painter's most tremendous achievement; but the picture before us must equally remain his culminating effort in serene, absolute beauty. Three other mythological paintings, companions of the "Bacchus," are here too, of which I like best the "Minerva" and the "Mercury"; but they are far from having the quality of that other. I have an idea that "The Origin of the Milky Way," in the National Gallery, was painted as a ceiling piece to go with these four, but I have no data for the theory, beyond its similarity in size and scheme. The other great picture in this room is Paul Veronese's sumptuous "Rape of Europa." [Illustration: BACCHUS AND ARIADNE FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO _In the Doges' Palace_] The Sala del Collegio itself, leading from this room, is full of Doges in all the magnificence of paint, above the tawdriest of wainscotting. Tintoretto gives us Doge Andrea Gritti praying to the Virgin, Doge Francesco Donato witnessing as an honoured guest the nuptials of S. Catherine, Doge Niccolô da Ponte surveying the Virgin in glory, and Doge Alvise Mocenigo condescending to adore his Saviour. Paul Veronese depicts an allegory of the battle of Lepanto in 1571, at which Venice temporarily overcame the Turks. The kneeling white-bearded warrior beside S. Giustina is the victor, afterwards Doge Sebastiano Venier, and Christ looks on in approval. Tintoretto also painted for the Palace a picture of this battle, but it perished in the fire of 1576. It is Veronese who painted the virtues and attributes on the ceiling, one of his most famous works being the woman with a web, who is sometimes called "Industry" and sometimes "Dialectics," so flexible is symbolism. "Fidelity" has a dog with a fine trustful head. To my weary eye the finest of the groups is that of Mars and Neptune, with flying cherubs, which is superbly drawn and coloured. Nothing but a chaise-longue on which to lie supine, at ease, can make the study of these wonderful ceilings anything but a distressing source of fatigue. The next room is the Sala del Senato, and here again we find a blend of heaven and Venice, with Doges as a common denominator. A "Descent from the Cross" (by Tintoretto) is witnessed by Doge Pietro Lando and Doge Marcantonio Trevisan; and the same hand gives us Pietro Loredan imploring the aid of the Virgin. In the centre ceiling painting Tintoretto depicts Venice as Queen of the Sea. The other artist here is Palma the younger, whose principal picture represents Doge Leonardo Loredan presiding over an attack by a lion on a bull, typifying the position of the Republic when Pope Julius launched the League of Cambray against it in 1508. The Doge does not look dismayed, but Venice never recovered from the blow. The room on the right of the throne leads to the chapel, which has several small pictures. A Giovanni Bellini is over the altar, but it is not one of his best. During his long life in Venice Bellini saw ten Doges, and in his capacity as ducal painter painted four of them. Returning to the Sala delle Quattro Porte (by way of the "Bacchus and Ariadne" room, if we are wise), we make for the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, the terrible Council of Ten. All Venetian histories are eloquent upon this secret Tribunal, which, more powerful far than the Doge himself, for five centuries, beginning early in the fourteenth, ruled the city. On the walls are historical paintings which are admirable examples of story-telling, and on the ceiling are Veroneses, original or copied, the best of which depicts an old man with his head on his hand, fine both in drawing and colour. It was in the wall of the next room that the famous Bocca di Leone was placed, into which were dropped those anonymous charges against Venetian citizens which the Council of Ten investigated, and if true, or, very likely, if not true, punished with such swiftness and thoroughness. How a state that offered such easy temptations to anti-social baseness and treachery could expect to prosper one cannot imagine. It suggests that the Venetian knowledge of human nature was defective at the roots. In the next room the Three Heads of the Council of Ten debated, and here the attendant goes into spasms of delight over a dazzling inlaid floor. This is all that is shown upstairs, for the piombi, or prison cells in the leaden roof, are now closed. Downstairs we come to the two Great Halls--first the gigantic Sala del Maggior Consiglio, with Tintoretto's "Paradiso" at one end; historical pictures all around; the portraits of the Doges above; a gorgeous ceiling which, I fear, demands attention; and, mercifully, the little balcony over the lagoon for escape and recovery. But first let us peep into the room on the left, where the remains of Guariento's fresco of Paradise, which Tintoretto was to supersede, have been set up: a necessarily somewhat meaningless assemblage of delicate tints and pure drawing. Then the photograph stall, which is in that ancient room of the palace that has the two beautiful windows on a lower level than the rest. It is melancholy to look round this gigantic sala of the great Council and think of the pictures which were destroyed by the great fire in 1576, when Sebastiano Venier was Doge, among them that rendering of the battle of Lepanto, the Doge's own victory, which Tintoretto painted with such enthusiasm. A list of only a few of the works of art which from time to time have fallen to the flames would be tragic reading. Among the artists whose paintings were lost in the 1576 fire were, in addition to Tintoretto, Titian, Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Gentile da Fabriano and Carpaccio. Sad, too, to think that the Senators who once thronged here--those grave, astute gentlemen in furred cloaks whom Tintoretto and Titian and Moroni and Moretto painted for us--assemble here no more. Sightseers now claim the palace, and the administrators of Venetian affairs meet in the Municipio, or Town Hall, on the Grand Canal. The best thing about the room is the room itself: the courage of it in a little place like Venice! Next, I suppose, all eyes turn to the "Paradiso," and they can do nothing else if the custodian has made himself one of the party, as he is apt to do. The custodians of Venice are in the main silent, pessimistic men. They themselves neither take interest in art nor understand why you should. Their attitude to you is if not contempt only one remove from it. But one of the officials in the Doges' Palace who is sometimes to be found in this Great Hall is both enthusiastic and vocal. He has English too, a little. His weakness for the "Paradiso" is chiefly due to the circumstance that it is the "largest oil painting in the world." I dare say this is true; but the same claim, I recall, was once made for an original poster in the Strand. The "Paradiso" was one of Tintoretto's last works, the commission coming to him only by the accident of Veronese's death. Veronese was the artist first chosen, with a Bassano to assist, but when he died, Tintoretto, who had been passed over as too old, was permitted to try. The great man, painting on canvas, at the Misericordia, which had been turned into a studio for him, and being assisted by his son Domenico, finished it in 1590; and it was the delight of Venice. At first he refused payment for it, and then consented to take a present, but a smaller one than the Senate wished to offer. The scheme of the work is logical and again illustrates his thoughtful thoroughness. At the head of all is Christ with His Mother, about and around them the angelic host led by the archangels--Michael with the scales, Gabriel with lilies, and Raphael, in prayer, each of whom presides, as we have seen, over one corner of the Palace. The next circle contains the greatest Biblical figures, Moses, David, Abraham, Solomon, Noah, the Evangelists (S. Mark prominent with his lion), and the Early Fathers. The rest of the picture is given to saints and martyrs. Not the least interesting figure is the S. Christopher, on the right, low down by the door. At his feet is the painter's daughter, for years his constant companion, who died while he was at work upon this masterpiece. The ceiling should be examined, if one has the strength, for Veronese's sumptuous allegory of the Apotheosis of Venice. In this work the painter's wife sat for Venice, as she sat also for Europa in the picture which we have just seen in the Ante-Collegio. On the walls are one-and-twenty representations of scenes in Venetian history devoted to the exploits of the two Doges, Sebastiano Ziani (1172-1178) and Enrico Dandolo (1192-1205). The greatest moment in the career of Ziani was the meeting of Barbarossa and the Pope, Alexander III, at S. Mark's, which has already been described; but his reign was eventful throughout. His first act as Doge was to punish the assassination of his predecessor, Vitale Michiel, who, for what was held to be the bad management of an Eastern campaign which utterly and disastrously failed, and for other reasons, was killed by the mob outside S. Zaccaria. To him succeeded Ziani and the close of the long feud between the Pope and the Emperor. It was the Pope's sojourn in Venice and his pleasure in the Venetians' hospitality which led to the elaboration of the ceremony of espousing the Adriatic. The Pope gave Ziani a consecrated ring with which to wed his bride, and much splendour was added to the pageant; while Ziani, on his return from a visit to the Pope at the Vatican, where the reconciliation with Barbarossa made it possible for the Pontiff to be at ease again, brought with him various pompous insignia that enormously increased his prestige among simple folk. It was also Ziani who had the columns of S. Theodore and the Lion erected on the Molo, while it was in his reign that the first Rialto bridge was begun. Having been Doge for six years, he retired to the monastery of S. Giorgio and there died some years later, leaving a large fortune to the poor of Venice and the church of S. Mark. The paintings represent the Pope Alexander III recognized by the Doge when hiding in Venice; the departure of the Papal and Venetian Ambassadors for Pavia to interview the Emperor; the Pope presenting the Doge with a blessed candle; the Ambassadors before the Emperor (by Tintoretto); the Pope presenting the Doge with a sword, on the Molo; the Pope blessing the Doge; the naval battle of Salvatore, in which the Emperor Otto was captured; the Doge presenting Otto to the Pope; the Pope giving Otto his liberty; the Emperor at the Pope's feet in the vestibule of S. Mark's; the arrival of the Pope elsewhere; the Emperor and the Doge at Ancona; the Pope presenting the Doge with gifts in Rome. [Illustration: THE CORNER OF THE OLD LIBRARY AND THE DOGES' PALACE] Ziani seems to have been a man of address, but the great Enrico Dandolo was something more. He was a superb adventurer. He became Doge in 1193, at the trifling age of eighty-four, with eyes that had long been dimmed, and at once plunged into enterprises which, if not greatly to the good of Venice, proved his own indomitable spirit and resource. It was the time of the Fourth Crusade and the Venetians were asked to supply transports for the French warriors of the Cross to the theatre of war. After much discussion Dandolo replied that they would do so, the terms being that the Venetian vessels should carry 4500 horses, 9000 esquires, and 20,000 foot soldiers, with provisions for nine months, and for this they should be paid 85,000 silver marks. Venice also would participate in the actual fighting to the extent of providing fifty galleys, on condition that half of every conquest, whether by sea or by land, should be hers. Such was the arrangement, and the shipbuilding began at once. But disaster after disaster occurred. The Christian commander sickened and died; a number of Crusaders backed out; others went direct to Palestine. This meant that the Venetians, who had prepared for a mighty host, incurred immense expenses which could not be met. As some reparation it was suggested to the small army of Crusaders who did arrive in the city for deportation that on their way to the Holy Land they should stop at Zara, on the Dalmatian coast, an unruly dependence of the Republic, and assist in chastising it. The objections to this course were grave. One was that the King of Hungary, in whose dominions was Zara, was a Christian and a Crusader himself; another that the Pope (Innocent III) forbade the project. Old blind Dandolo, however, was adamant. Not only must the Crusaders help the Venetians whom they had so much embarrassed by their broken bond, but he would go too. Calling the people together in S. Mark's, this ancient sightless bravo asked if it was not right that he should depart on this high mission, and they answered yes. Descending from the pulpit, he knelt at the altar and on his bonnet the Cross was fastened. Before the expedition left, a messenger came from Alexius, nephew of the usurping King of Constantinople and son of the rightful king, praying the Venetians to sail first for Constantinople and support his father's case, and to deal faithfully with Zara later; but Dandolo said that the rebellious Zara had prior claims, and in spite of Papal threats and even excommunication, he sailed for that place on November 10, 1202. It did not take long to subdue the garrison, but winter setting in, Dandolo decided to encamp there until the spring. The delay was not profitable to the Holy Cause. The French and the Venetians grew quarrelsome, and letters from the Pope warned the French (who held him in a dread not shared by their allies) that they must leave Zara and proceed with the Crusade instantly, or expect to suffer his wrath. Then arrived the Prince Alexius once more, with definite promises of money and men for the Crusades if the allies would come at once and win back for him the Constantinople throne. Dandolo, who saw immense Venetian advantage here, agreed, and carrying with it most of the French, the fleet sailed for the Golden Horn. Dandolo, I might remark, was now ninety-four, and it should not be forgotten that it was when he was an emissary of the Republic at Constantinople years before that he had been deprived forcibly of his sight. He was a soldier, a statesman, and (as all good Doges were) a merchant, but he was humanly mindful of past injustices too. Hence perhaps much of his eagerness to turn aside for Byzantium. The plan was for the French to attack on the land; the Venetians on the sea. Blind though he had become, Dandolo's memory of the harbour and fortifications enabled him to arrange the naval attack with the greatest skill, and he carried all before him, himself standing on the prow of a vessel waving the banner of S. Mark. The French on land had a less rapid victory, but they won, none the less, and the ex-king Isaac was liberated and crowned once more, with his son. Both, however, instantly took to tyranny and luxurious excess, and when the time came for the promises of reward to be fulfilled nothing was done. This led to the mortification and anger of the allies, who declared that unless they were paid they would take Constantinople for themselves. War was inevitable. Meanwhile the Greeks, hating alike Venetians, French, and the Pope, proclaimed a new king, who at once killed Alexius; and the allies prepared for battle by signing a treaty, drawn up by the wily nonagenarian, in which in the event of victory Venice took literally the lion's share of the spoils. The fighting then began. At first the Greeks were too strong, and a feeling grew among the allies that withdrawal was best; but Dandolo refused; they fought on, and Constantinople was theirs. Unhappily the victors then lost all control, and every kind of horror followed, including the wanton destruction of works of art beautiful beyond dreams. Such visible trophies of the conquest as were saved and brought back to Venice are now to be seen in S. Mark's. The four bronze horses were Dandolo's spoils, the Pala d'oro, probably the four carved columns of the high altar, and countless stone pillars and ornaments that have been worked into the structure. The terms of the treaty were carried out faithfully, and the French paid the Venetians their original debt. Baldwin, Count of Flanders, the head of the Crusade, was named Emperor and crowned; Venice acquired large tracts of land, including the Ionian Islands; and Dandolo became "Doge of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and Lord of one-fourth and one-eighth of the Roman Empire." The painters have chosen from Dandolo's career the following scenes: Dandolo and the Crusaders pledging themselves in S. Mark's; the capture of Zara; the request of Alexius for help; the first capture of Constantinople by Dandolo, who set the banner on the wall; the second capture of Constantinople; the election of Baldwin as Emperor; the crowning of Baldwin by Dandolo. I said at the beginning of this prêcis of a gigantic campaign that it was not of great profit to Venice; nor was it. All her life she had better have listened to the Little Venice party, but particularly then, for only misfortune resulted. Dandolo, however, remains a terrific figure. He died in Constantinople in 1205 and was buried in S. Sofia. Doge Andrea Dandolo, whose tomb we saw in the Baptistery, was a descendant who came to the throne some hundred and forty years later. Mention of Andrea Dandolo brings us to the portraits of Doges around the walls of this great hall, where the other Dandolo will also be found; for in the place adjoining Andrea's head is a black square. Once the portrait of the Doge who succeeded Andrea was here too, but it was blacked out. Marino Faliero, for he it was, became Doge in 1354 when his age was seventy-six, having been both a soldier and a diplomatist. He found himself at once involved in the war with Genoa, and almost immediately came the battle of Sapienza, when the Genoese took five thousand prisoners, including the admiral, Niccolô Pisani. This blow was a very serious one for the Venetians, involving as it did great loss of life, and there was a growing feeling that they were badly governed. The Doge, who was but a figure-head of the Council of Ten, secretly thinking so too, plotted for the overthrow of the Council and the establishment of himself in supreme power. The Arsenal men were to form his chief army in the revolt; the false alarm of a Genoese attack was to get the populace together; and then the blow was to be struck and Faliero proclaimed prince. But the plot miscarried through one of the conspirators warning a friend to keep indoors; the ringleaders were caught and hanged or exiled; and the Doge, after confessing his guilt, was beheaded in the courtyard of this palace. His coffin may be seen in the Museo Civico, and of his unhappy story Byron made a drama. One of Faliero's party was Calendario, an architect, employed on the part of the Doges' Palace in which we are now standing. He was hanged or strangled between the two red columns in the upper arches of the Piazzetta façade. The first Doge to be represented here is Antenorio Obelerio (804-810), but he had had predecessors, the first in fact dating from 697. Of Obelerio little good is known. He married a foreigner whom some believe to have been an illegitimate daughter of Charlemagne, and her influence was bad. His brother Beato shared his throne, and in the end probably chased him from it. Beato was Doge when Rialto became the seat of government, Malamocco having gone over to the Franks under Pepin. But of Beato no account is here taken, Obelerio's successor being Angelo Partecipazio (810-827), who was also the first occupant of the first Ducal Palace, on the site of a portion of the present one. It was his son Giustiniano, sharing the throne with his father, who hit upon the brilliant idea of stealing the body of S. Mark from Alexandria and of preserving it in Venice, thus establishing that city not only as a religious centre but also as a place of pilgrimage and renown. As Mrs. Richardson remarks in her admirable survey of the Doges: "Was it not well that the government of the Doge Giustiniano and his successors throughout the age should become the special concern of a Saint-Evangelist in whose name all national acts might be undertaken and accomplished; all national desires and plans--as distinct from and dominant over purely ecclesiastical ones--be sanctified and made righteous?" The success of the scheme of theft I have related in an earlier chapter; and how this foresight was justified, history tells. It is odd that Venice does not make more acclamation of Giustiniano (or Partecipazio II). To his brother Giovanni, who early had shown regrettable sympathy with the Franks and had been banished accordingly, Giustiniano bequeathed the Dogeship (as was then possible), and it was in his reign (829-836) that S. Mark's was begun. The last Doge in this room is Girolamo Priuli (1559-1567), of whom nothing of account is remembered save that it was he who invited Tintoretto to work in the palace and on one of the ceilings. You may see his portrait in one of the rooms, from Tintoretto's brush, in the company of Venice, Justice, S. Mark and the Lion. Of the others of the six-and-seventy Doges around the room I do not here speak. The names of such as are important will be found elsewhere throughout this book, as we stand beside their tombs or glide past their palaces. Before leaving the Hall one should, as I have said, walk to the balcony, the door of which the custodian opens for each visitor with a mercenary hand. It should of course be free to all; and Venice would do well to appoint some official (if such could be found) to enforce such liberties. Immediately below is all the movement of the Molo; then the edge of the lagoon with its myriad gondolas; then the sparkling water, with all its busy activities and swaying gondoliers; and away beyond it the lovely island of S. Giorgio. A fairer prospect the earth cannot show. The first Doge in the Sala dello Scrutinio is Pietro Loredan (1567-1570) and the last of all Lodovico Manin (1788-1797) who fell before the inroads of Napoleon. "Take it away," he said to his servant, handing him the linen cap worn beneath the ducal corno, "we shall not need it any more." He retired into piety and left his fortune to good works. This room, also a fine and spacious hall but smaller than the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, has historical pictures, and a "Last Judgment," by Palma the younger, which immensely interests the custodian by reason of a little human touch which may or may not be true. On the left of the picture, in the Infernal regions, low down, will be seen a large semi-nude female sinner in torment; on the right, in heaven, the same person is seen again, in bliss. According to the custodian this lady was the painter's innamorata, and he set her in both places as a reward for her varying moods. The other pictures represent the capture of Zara by Marco Giustiniani in 1346. Zara, I may mention, had very badly the habit of capture: this was the eighth time it had fallen. Tintoretto is the painter, and it is one of his best historical works. The great sea-fight picture on the right wall represents another battle of Lepanto, a later engagement than Venier's; the painter is Andrea Vicentino, who has depicted himself as the figure in the water; while in another naval battle scene, in the Dardanelles, the painter, Pietro Liberi, is the fat naked slave with a poniard. For the rest the guide-book should be consulted. The balcony of the room, which juts over the Piazzetta, is rarely accessible; but if it is open one should tarry there for the fine view of Sansovino's Old Library. The second set of showrooms (which require the expenditure of another lira)--the oldest rooms in the palace--constitute the Archæological Museum. Here one sees a few pictures, a few articles of vertû, some sumptuous apartments, some rich ceilings, and a wilderness of ancient sculpture. The first room shown, the Sala degli Scarlatti, is the bedroom of the Doges, with a massive and rather fine chimney piece and an ornate ceiling. The next room, the Sala dello Scudo, has a fine decorative, if inaccurate, map of the world, made by a monk in the fifteenth century. The next, the Sala Grimani, has rival lions of S. Mark by Jacobello del Fiore, an early Venetian painter, in 1415, and Carpaccio a century later. Jacopo's lion has a very human face; Carpaccio's picture is finer and is also interesting for its architectural details. The next room, the Sala Erizzo, has a very splendid ceiling. The next is not remarkable, and then we come on the right to the Sala dei Filosofi where the custodian displays, at the foot of the staircase, the charming fresco of S. Christopher which Titian made for Doge Andrea Gritti. It is a very pleasing rendering, and the Christ Child never rode more gaily or trustfully on the friendly saint. With true patriotism Titian has placed the incident in a shallow of the lagoon and the Doges' Palace is seen in the distance. Then follow three rooms in the Doges' suite in which a variety of treasures are preserved, too numerous and heterogeneous for description. [Illustration: S. CHRISTOPHER FROM THE FRESCO BY TITIAN _In the Doges' Palace_] The antique section of the Archæological Museum is not of general interest. It consists chiefly of Greek and Roman sculpture collected by Cardinal Grimani or dug from time to time from the soil of Venetian provinces. Here are a few beautiful or precious relics and much that is indifferent. In the absence of a Hermaphrodite, the most popular possession is (as ever) a group of Leda and the Swan. I noted among the more attractive pieces a Roman altar with lovers (Baedeker calls them satyrs), No. 68; a Livia in black marble, No. 102; a nice girl, Giulia Mammea, No. 142; a boy, very like a Venetian boy of to-day, No. 145; a giant Minerva, No. 169; a Venus, No. 174; an Apollo, No. 223. A very beautiful Pietà by Giovanni Bellini, painted under the influence of Dürer, should be sought and found. The Bridge of Sighs, a little way upon which one may venture, is more interesting in romantic fancy than in fact, and its chief merit is to span very gracefully the gulf between the Palace and the Prison. With the terrible cells of the Doges' Palace, to which we are about to descend, it has no connexion. When Byron says, in the famous line beginning the fourth canto of "Childe Harold," I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, he probably meant that he stood in Venice on the Bridge of Straw (Ponte di Paglia) and contemplated the Bridge of Sighs. Because one does not stand on the Bridge of Sighs but in it, for it is merely dark passages lit by gratings. But to stand on the Ponte di Paglia on the Riva and gaze up the sombre Rio del Palazzo with the famous arch poised high over it is one of the first duties of all visitors to Venice and a very memorable experience. Lastly, the horrible cells (which cost half a lira more), upon which and the damp sinister rooms where the place of execution and oubliette were situated, a saturnine custodian says all that is necessary. Let me, however, quote a warning from the little Venetian guide-book: "Everybody to whom are pointed out the prisons to which Carmagnola, Jacopo Foscari, Antonio Foscarini, etc., were confined, will easily understand that such indications cannot be true at all." CHAPTER VI THE DOGES' PALACE. II: THE EXTERIOR The colour of Venice--Sunny Gothic--A magical edifice--The evolution of a palace--A fascinating balcony--The carved capitals--A responsible column--The _Porta della Carta_--The lions of Venice--The Giants' Stairs--Antonio Rizzo--A closed arcade--Casanova--The bronze wells--A wonderful courtyard--Anonymous accusations--A Venetian Valhalla. "That house," said an American on a Lido steamboat, pointing to the Doges' Palace, "is a wonder in its way." Its way is unique. The soft gentle pink of its south and west façades remains in the memory as long and as firmly as the kaleidoscopic hues of S. Mark's. This pink is, I believe, the colour of Venice. Whether or not the Doges' Palace as seen from S. Giorgio Maggiore, with its seventeen massive arches below, its thirty-four slender arches above, above them its row of quatrefoiled circles, and above them its patterned pink wall with its little balcony and fine windows, the whole surmounted by a gay fringe of dazzling white stone--whether or not this is the most beautiful building in the world is a question for individual decision; but it would, I think, puzzle anyone to name a more beautiful one, or one half so charming. There is nothing within it so entrancing as its exterior--always with the exception of Tintoretto's, "Bacchus and Ariadne." The Ducal Palace is Gothic made sprightly and sunny; Gothic without a hint of solidity or gloom. So light and fresh is the effect, chiefly the result of the double row of arches and especially of the upper row, but not a little due to the zig-zagging of the brickwork and the vivid cheerfulness of the coping fringe, that one has difficulty in believing that the palace is of any age at all or that it will really be there to-morrow. The other buildings in the neighbourhood--the Prison, the Mint, the Library, the Campanile: these are rooted. But the Doges' Palace might float away at any moment. Aladdin's lamp set it there: another rub and why should it not vanish? The palace as we see it now has been in existence from the middle of the sixteenth century. Certain internal changes and rebuildings have occurred, but its façades on the Piazzetta and lagoon, the Giants' Stairs, the courtyard, were then as now. But before that time constant structural modification was in progress. The original palace ran beside the Rio del Palazzo from S. Mark's towers to the Ponte di Paglia, with a wing along the lagoon. Its width was equal to that from the present Noah or Vine Corner by the Ponte di Paglia to the fifth column from that corner. Its wing extended to the Piazzetta. A wall and moat protected it, the extent of its ramparts being practically identical with the extent of the present building. This, the first, palace was erected in the ninth century, after the seat of government was changed from Malamocco to Venice proper. [Illustration: THE PONTE OF PAGLIA AND THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, WITH A CORNER OF THE DOGES' PALACE AND THE PRISON] Various conflagrations, in addition to the growing needs of the State, led to rebuilding and enlargement. The first wing was added in the twelfth century, when the basement and first floor of the portion from the Porta della Carta to the thick seventh column from the Adam and Eve group, under the medallion of Venice, on the Piazzetta façade, was set up, but not in the style which we now know. That was copied three centuries later from the Riva or lagoon façade. In 1301 the hall above the original portion on the Rio del Palazzo side, now called the Sala del Senato, was added and the lagoon wing was rebuilt, the lower arches, which are there to-day, being then established. A few years later, a still greater hall being needed, the present Sala del Maggior Consiglio was erected, and this was ready for use in 1423. The lagoon façade as we see it now, with its slender arches above the sturdy arches, thus dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century, and this design gave the key to the builders of later Venice, as a voyage of the Grand Canal will prove. It was the great Doge Tommaso Mocenigo (1413-1423) who urged upon the Senate the necessity of completing the palace. In 1424 the work was begun. Progress was slow and was hindered by the usual fire, but gradually the splendid stone wall on the Rio del Palazzo side went up, and the right end of the lagoon façade, and the Giants' Stairs, and the Piazzetta façade, reproducing the lagoon façade. The elaborately decorated façades of the courtyard came later, and by 1550 the palace was finished. The irregularity of the windows on the lagoon façade is explained by this piecemeal structure. The four plain windows and the very graceful balcony belong to the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. The two ornate windows on the right were added when the palace was brought into line with this portion, and they are lower because the room they light is on a level lower than the great Council Hall's. The two ugly little square windows (Bonington in his picture in the Louvre makes them three) probably also were added then. When the elegant spired cupolas at each corner of the palace roof were built, I do not know, but they look like a happy afterthought. The small balcony overlooking the lagoon, which is gained from the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, and which in Canaletto and Guardi's eighteenth-century pictures always, as now, has a few people on it, was built in 1404. It is to be seen rightly only from the water or through glasses. The Madonna in the circle is charming. She has one child in her arms and two at her knees, and her lap is a favourite resting-place for pigeons. In the morning when the day is fine the green bronze of the sword and crown of Justice (or, as some say, Mars), who surmounts all, is beautiful against the blue of the sky. The Piazzetta façade balcony was built early in the sixteenth century, but the statue of S. George is a recent addition, Canova being the sculptor. Now let us examine the carved capitals of the columns of the Ducal Palace arcade, for these are extremely interesting and transform it into something like an encyclopedia in stone. Much thought has gone to them, the old Venetians' love of symbols being gratified often to our perplexity. We will begin at the end by the Porta della Carta, under the group representing the Judgment of Solomon--the Venetians' platonic affection for the idea of Justice being here again displayed. This group, though primitive, the work of two sculptors from Fiesole early in the fifteenth century, has a beauty of its own which grows increasingly attractive as one returns and returns to the Piazzetta. Above the group is the Angel Gabriel; below it, on the richly foliated capital of this sturdy corner column, which bears so much weight and splendour, is Justice herself, facing Sansovino's Loggetta: a little stone lady with scales and sword of bronze. Here also is Aristotle giving the law to some bearded men; while other figures represent Solon, another jurist, Scipio the chaste, Numa Pompilius building a church, Moses receiving the tables of the law, and Trajan on horseback administering justice to a widow. All are named in Latin. The second capital has cherubs with fruit and birds and no lettering. The third has cranes and no lettering. The fourth is allegorical, representing, but without much psychology, named virtues and vices, such as misery, cheerfulness, folly, chastity, honesty, falsehood, injustice, abstinence. The fifth has figures and no lettering. A cobbler faces the campanile. It is above this fifth column that we notice in the upper row of arches two columns of reddish stain. It was between these that malefactors were strangled. The sixth has symbolical figures which I do not understand. Ruskin suggests that they typify the degradation of human instincts. A knight in armour is here. A musician seated on a fish faces the Old Library. There is no lettering, and as is the case throughout the figures on the wall side are difficult to discern. The seventh represents the vices, and names them: luxury, gluttony, pride, anger, avarice, idleness, vanity, envy. The eighth represents the virtues and names them: hope, faith, fortitude, temperance, humility, charity, justice, prudence. The ninth has virtues and vices, named and mixed: modesty, discord, patience, constancy, infidelity, despair, obedience, liberality. The tenth has named fruits. Ruskin thinks that the eleventh may illustrate various phases of idleness. It has no lettering. The twelfth has the months and their employments, divided thus: January (indoors) and February, March blowing his pipes, April with a lamb and May, June (the month of cherries), July with a sheaf of corn and August, September (the vintage), October and November, and December, pig-sticking. The thirteenth, on a stouter column than the others, because it has a heavier duty, namely, to bear the party wall of the great Council Hall, depicts the life of man. There is no lettering. The scenes represent love (apparently at first sight), courtship, the marriage bed, and so forth, the birth of the baby, his growth and his death. Many years ago this column was shown to me by the captain of a tramp steamer, as the most interesting thing in Venice; and there are others who share his opinion. Above it on the façade is the medallion of the Queen of the Adriatic ruling her domains. The fourteenth capital represents national types, named: Persian, Latin, Tartar, Turk, Hungarian, Greek, Goth, and Egyptian. The fifteenth is more elaborate and ingenious. It represents the ages of man and his place in the stellar system. Thus, infancy is governed by the moon, childhood by Mercury, youth by the sun, and so forth. The sixteenth depicts various craftsmen: the smith, the mason, the goldsmith, the carpenter, the notary, the cobbler, the man-servant, the husbandman. Over this are traces of a medallion, probably of porphyry, now removed. The seventeenth has the heads of animals: lion, bear, wolf, and so forth, including the griffin each with its prey. [Illustration: THE ADAM AND EVE CORNER OF THE DOGES' PALACE] The eighteenth has eight stone-carving saints, some with a piece of coloured marble, all named, and all at work: S. Simplicius, S. Symphorian, who sculps a figure, S. Claudius, and others. And now we are at the brave corner column which unconcernedly assumes a responsibility that can hardly be surpassed in the world. For if it were to falter all would go. Down would topple two of the loveliest façades that man ever constructed or the centuries ever caressed into greater beauty. This corner of the palace has an ever-increasing fascination for me, and at all hours of the day and night this strong column below and the slenderer one above it hold the light--whether of sun or moon or artifice--with a peculiar grace. The design of this capital is, fittingly enough, cosmic. It represents the signs of the Zodiac with the addition, on the facet opposite the Dogana, of Christ blessing a child. Facing S. Giorgio are Aquarius and Capricornus, facing the Lido are Pisces and Sagittarius. Elsewhere are Justice on the Bull, the Moon in a boat with a Crab, and a Virgin reading to the Twins. Above this capital, on the corner of the building itself, are the famous Adam and Eve, presiding over the keystone of the structure as over the human race. It is a naïve group, as the photograph shows, beneath the most tactful of trees, and it has no details of beauty; and yet, like its companions, the Judgment of Solomon and the Sin of Ham, it has a curious charm--due not a little perhaps to the softening effect of the winds and the rains. High above our first parents is the Angel Michael. The first capital after the corner (we are now proceeding down the Riva) has Tubal Cain the musician, Solomon, Priscian the grammarian, Aristotle the logician, Euclid the geometrician, and so forth, all named and all characteristically employed. The second has heads of, I suppose, types. Ruskin suggests that the best looking is a Venetian and the others the Venetians' inferiors drawn from the rest of the world. The third has youths and women with symbols, signifying I know not what. All are corpulent enough to suggest gluttony. This is repeated in No. 11 on the Piazzetta side. The fourth has various animals and no lettering. The fifth has lions' heads and no lettering. The sixth has virtues and vices and is repeated in the fourth on the Piazzetta. The seventh has cranes, and is repeated in the third on the Piazzetta. The eighth has vices again and is repeated in the seventh on the Piazzetta. Above it are traces of a medallion over three triangles. The ninth has virtues and is repeated in the eighth on the Piazzetta. The tenth has symbolical figures, and is repeated in the sixth on the Piazzetta. The eleventh has vices and virtues and is repeated in the ninth on the Piazzetta. The twelfth has female heads and no lettering. The thirteenth has named rulers: Octavius, Titus, Trajan, Priam, Darius, and so forth, all crowned and ruling. The fourteenth has children and no lettering. The fifteenth has heads, male and female, and no lettering. Above it was once another medallion and three triangles. The sixteenth has pelicans and no lettering. The seventeenth and last has children with symbols and no lettering. Above this, on the corner by the bridge, is the group representing the Sin of Ham. Noah's two sons are very attractive figures. Above the Noah group is the Angel Raphael. The gateway of the palace--the Porta della Carta--was designed by Giovanni and Bartolommeo Bon, father and son, in the fourteen thirties and forties. Francesco Foscari (1423-1457) being then Doge, it is he who kneels to the lion on the relief above, and again on the balcony of the Piazzetta façade. At the summit of the portal is Justice once more, with two attendant lions, cherubs climbing to her, and live pigeons for ever nestling among them. I counted thirty-five lions' heads in the border of the window and thirty-five in the border of the door, and these, with Foscari's one and Justice's two, and those on the shields on each side of the window, make seventy-five lions for this gateway alone. Then there are lions' heads between the circular upper arches all along each façade of the palace. It would be amusing to have an exact census of the lions of Venice, both winged and without wings. On the Grand Canal alone there must be a hundred of the little pensive watchers that sit on the balustrades peering down. As to which is the best lion, opinions must, of course, differ, the range being so vast: between, say, the lion on the Molo column and Daniele Manin's flamboyant sentinel at the foot of the statue in his Campo. Some would choose Carpaccio's painted lion in this palace; others might say that the lion over the Giants' Stairs is as satisfying as any; others might prefer that fine one on the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi by the Rialto bridge, and the Merceria clock tower's lion would not want adherents. Why this lovely gateway was called the Porta della Carta (paper) is not absolutely certain: perhaps because public notices were fixed to its door; perhaps because paper-sellers frequented it; perhaps because the scriveners of the Republic worked hereabouts. Passing through it we have before us the Giants' Stairs, designed by Antonio Rizzo and taking their name from the two great figures of Mars and Neptune at the top by Jacopo Sansovino. On the upright of each step is a delicate inlaid pattern--where, in England, so often we read of the virtues of malted milk or other commodity. Looking back from the foot of the stairs we see Sansovino's Loggetta, framed by the door; looking back from the top of the stairs we have in front of us Rizzo's statues of Adam and Eve. This Antonio Rizzo, or Ricci, who so ably fortified Sansovino as a beautifier of Venice, was a Veronese, of whom little is known. He flourished in the second half of the fifteenth century. Every opportunity of passing through the courtyard should be taken, and during the chief hours of the day there is often--but not invariably--a right of way between the Porta della Carta and the Riva, across the courtyard, while the first floor gallery around it, gained by the Giants' Stairs, is also open. For one of those capricious reasons, of which Italian custodians everywhere hold the secret, the delightful gallery looking on the lagoon and Piazzetta is, however, closed. I once found my way there, but was pursued by a frantic official and scolded back again. The courtyard is inexhaustible in interest and beauty, from its bronze well-heads to the grated leaden prison cells on the roof, the terrible piombi which were so dreaded on account of their heat in summer and cold in winter. Here in the middle of the eighteenth century that diverting blackguard, Jacques Casanova, was imprisoned. He was "under the leads" over the Piazzetta wing, and the account of his durance and his escape is one of the most interesting parts, and certainly the least improper, of his remarkably frank autobiography. Venice does not seem to have any pride in this son of hers, but as a master of licentiousness, effrontery, adventurousness, and unblushing candour he stands alone in the world. Born at Venice in 1725, it was in the seminary of S. Cyprian here that he was acquiring the education of a priest when events occurred which made his expulsion necessary. For the history of his utterly unprincipled but vivacious career one must seek his scandalous and diverting pages. In 1755, on an ill-starred return visit to his native city, he was thrown into this prison, but escaping and finding his way to Paris, he acquired wealth and position as the Director of State Lotteries. Casanova died in 1798, but his memories cease with 1774. His pages may be said to supply a gloss to Longhi's paintings, and the two men together complete the picture of Venetian frivolity in their day and night. The well-head nearer the Giants' Stairs was the work of Alberghetti and is signed inside. The other has the head of Doge Francesco Venier (1554-1556) repeated in the design and is stated within to be the work of Niccolò Conti, a son of Venice. Coryat has a passage about the wells which shows how much more animated a scene the ducal courtyard used to present than now. "They yeeld very pleasant water," he writes. "For I tasted it. For which cause it is so much frequented in the Sommer time that a man can hardly come thither at any time in the afternoone, if the sunne shineth very hote, but he shall finde some company drawing of water to drinke for the cooling of themselves." To-day they give water no more, nor do the pigeons come much to the little drinking place in the pavement here but go rather to that larger one opposite Cook's office. Everything that an architect can need to know--and more--may be learned in this courtyard, which would be yet more wonderful if it had not its two brick walls. Many styles meet and mingle here: Gothic and Renaissance, stately and fanciful, sombre and gay. Every capital is different. Round arches are here and pointed; invented patterns and marble with symmetrical natural veining which is perhaps more beautiful. Every inch has been thought out and worked upon with devotion and the highest technical skill; and the antiseptic air of Venice and cleansing sun have preserved its details as though it were under glass. In the walls beneath the arcade on the Piazzetta side may be seen various ancient letter-boxes for the reception of those accusations against citizens, usually anonymous, in which the Venetians seem ever to have rejoiced. One is for charges of evading taxation, another for those who adulterate bread, and so forth. [Illustration: S. TRIFONIO AND THE BASILISK FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO _At S. Giorgio dei Schiavoni_] The upper gallery running round the courtyard has been converted into a Venetian--almost an Italian--Valhalla. Here are busts of the greatest men, and of one woman, Catherine Cornaro, who gave Cyprus to the Republic and whom Titian painted. Among the first busts that I noted--ascending the stairs close to the Porta della Carta--was that of Ugo Foscolo, the poet, patriot, and miscellaneous writer, who spent the last years of his life in London and became a contributor to English periodicals. One of his most popular works in Italy was his translation of Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_. He died at Turnham Green in 1827, but his remains, many years after, were moved to Santa Croce in Florence. Others are Carlo Zeno, the soldier; Goldoni, the dramatist; Paolo Sarpi, the monkish diplomatist; Galileo Galilei, the astronomer and mathematician; the two Cabots, the explorers, and Marco Polo, their predecessor; Niccolò Tommaseo, the patriot and associate of Daniele Manin, looking very like a blend of Walt Whitman and Tennyson; Dante; a small selection of Doges, of whom the great Andrea Dandolo is the most striking; Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Paul Veronese; Tiepolo, a big-faced man in a wig whom the inscription credits with having "renewed the glory" of the two last named; Canova, the sculptor; Daniele Manin, rather like John Bright; Lazzaro Mocenigo, commander in chief of the Venetian forces, rather like Buffalo Bill; and flanking the entrance to the palace Vittorio Pisani and Carlo Zeno, the two patriots and warriors who together saved the Republic in the Chioggian war with the Genoese in the fourteenth century. This collection of great men makes no effort to be complete, but it is rather surprising not to find such very loyal sons of Venice as Canaletto, Guardi and Longhi among the artists, and Giorgione is of course a grievous omission. CHAPTER VII THE PIAZZETTA The two columns--An ingenious engineer--S. Mark's lion--S. Theodore of Heraclea--The Old Library--Jacopo Sansovino--The Venetian Brunelleschi--Vasari's life--A Venetian library--Early printed books--The Grimani breviary--A pageant of the Seasons--The Loggetta--Coryat again--The view from the Molo--The gondolier--Alessandro and Ferdinando--The danger of the traghetto--Indomitable talkers--The fair and the fare--A proud father--The rampino. The Piazzetta is more remarkable in its architectural riches than the Piazza. S. Mark's main façade is of course beyond words wonderful; but after this the Piazza has only the Merceria clock and the Old and the New Procuratie, whereas the Piazzetta has S. Mark's small façade, the Porta della Carta and lovely west façade of the Doges' Palace, the columns bearing S. Mark's lion and S. Theodore, Sansovino's Old Library and Loggetta; while the Campanile is common to both. The Piazzetta has a café too, although it is not on an equality either with Florian's or the Quadri, and on three nights a week a band plays. The famous Piazzetta columns, with S. Theodore and his crocodile (or dragon) on one and the lion of S. Mark on the other, which have become as much a symbol of Venice as the façade of S. Mark's itself, were brought from Syria after the conquest of Tyre. Three were brought in all, but one fell into the water and was never recovered. The others lay on the quay here for half a century waiting to be set up, a task beyond human skill until an engineer from Lombardy volunteered to do it on condition that he was to have any request granted. His request was to be allowed the right of establishing a gaming-table between the columns; and the authorities had to comply, although gambling was hateful to them. A few centuries later the gallows were placed here too. Now there is neither gambling nor hanging; but all day long loafers sit on the steps of the columns and discuss pronto and subito and cinque and all the other topics of Venetian conversation. I wonder how many visitors to Venice, asked whether S. Theodore on his column and the Lion of S. Mark on his, face the lagoon or the Merceria clock, would give the right answer. The faces of both are turned towards the clock; their backs to the lagoon. The lion, which is of bronze with white agates for his eyes, has known many vicissitudes. Where he came from originally, no one knows, but it is extremely probable that he began as a pagan and was pressed into the service of the Evangelist much later. Napoleon took him to Paris, together with the bronze horses, and while there he was broken. He came back in 1815 and was restored, and twenty years ago he was restored again. S. Theodore was also strengthened at the same time, being moved into the Doges' Palace courtyard for that purpose. There are several saints named Theodore, but the protector and patron of the Venetians in the early days before Mark's body was stolen from Alexandria, is S. Theodore of Heraclea. S. Theodore, surnamed Stretelates, or general of the army, was a famous soldier and the governor of the country of the Mariandyni, whose capital was Heraclea. Accepting and professing the Christian faith, he was beheaded by the Emperor Licinius on February 7, 319. On June 8 in the same year his remains were translated to Euchaia, the burial-place of the family, and the town at once became so famous as a shrine that its name was changed to Theodoropolis. As late as 970 the patronage of the Saint gave the Emperor John I a victory over the Saracens, and in gratitude the emperor rebuilt the church where Theodore's relics were preserved. Subsequently they were moved to Mesembria and then to Constantinople, from which city the great Doge Dandolo brought them to Venice. They now repose in S. Salvatore beneath an altar. The west side of the Piazzetta consists of the quiet and beautiful façade of Sansovino's Old Library. To see it properly one should sit down at ease under the Doge's arcade or mount to the quadriga gallery of S. Mark's. Its proportions seem to me perfect, but Baedeker's description of it as the most magnificent secular edifice in Italy seems odd with the Ducal Palace so near. They do not, however, conflict, for the Ducal Palace is so gay and light, and this so serious and stately. The cherubs with their garlands are a relaxation, like a smile on a grave face; yet the total effect is rather calm thoughtfulness than sternness. The living statues on the coping help to lighten the structure, and if one steps back along the Riva one sees a brilliant column of white stone--a chimney perhaps--which is another inspiriting touch. In the early morning, with the sun on them, these statues are the whitest things imaginable. The end building, the Zecca, or mint, is also Sansovino's, as are the fascinating little Loggetta beneath the campanile, together with much of its statuary, the giants at the head of Ricco's staircase opposite, and the chancel bronzes in S. Mark's, so that altogether this is peculiarly the place to inquire into what manner of man the Brunelleschi of Venice was. For Jacopo Sansovino stands to Venice much as that great architect to Florence. He found it lacking certain essential things, and, supplying them, made it far more beautiful and impressive; and whatever he did seems inevitable and right. Vasari wrote a very full life of Sansovino, not included among his other Lives but separately published. In this we learn that Jacopo was born in Florence in 1477, the son of a mattress-maker named Tatti; but apparently 1486 is the right date. Appreciating his natural bent towards art, his mother had him secretly taught to draw, hoping that he might become a great sculptor like Michael Angelo, and he was put as apprentice to the sculptor Andrea Contucci of Monte Sansovino, who had recently set up in Florence and was at work on two figures for San Giovanni; and Jacopo so attached himself to the older man that he became known as Sansovino too. Another of his friends as a youth was Andrea del Sarto. From Florence he passed to Rome, where he came under the patronage of the Pope Julius II, of Bramante, the architect, and of Perugino, the painter, and learned much by his studies there. Returning to Florence, he became one of the most desired of sculptors and executed that superb modern-antique, the Bacchus in the Bargello. Taking to architecture, he continued his successful progress, chiefly again in Rome, but when the sack of that city occurred in 1527 he fled and to the great good fortune of Venice took refuge here. The Doge, Andrea Gritti, welcomed so distinguished a fugitive and at once set him to work on the restoration of S. Mark's cupolas, and this task he completed with such skill that he was made a Senior Procurator and given a fine house and salary. As a Procurator he seems to have been tactful and active, and Vasari gives various examples of his reforming zeal by which the annual income of the Procuranzia was increased by two thousand ducats. When, however, one of the arches of Sansovino's beautiful library fell, owing to a subsidence of the foundations, neither his eminent position nor ability prevented the authorities from throwing him into prison as a bad workman; nor was he liberated, for all his powerful friends, without a heavy fine. He built also several fine palaces, the mint, and various churches, but still kept time for his early love, sculpture, as his perfect little Loggetta, and the giants on the Staircase, and such a tomb as that in S. Salvatore, show. [Illustration: S. JEROME IN HIS CELL FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO _At S. Giorgio dei Schiavoni_] This is Vasari's description of the man: "Jacopo Sansovino, as to his person, was of the middle height, but rather slender than otherwise, and his carriage was remarkably upright; he was fair, with a red beard, and in his youth was of a goodly presence, wherefore he did not fail to be loved, and that by dames of no small importance. In his age he had an exceedingly venerable appearance; with his beautiful white beard, he still retained the carriage of his youth: he was strong and healthy even to his ninety-third year, and could see the smallest object, at whatever distance, without glasses, even then. When writing, he sat with his head up, not supporting himself in any manner, as it is usual for men to do. He liked to be handsomely dressed, and was singularly nice in his person. The society of ladies was acceptable to Sansovino, even to the extremity of age, and he always enjoyed conversing with or of them. He had not been particularly healthy in his youth, yet in his old age he suffered from no malady whatever, in-so-much that, for a period of fifty years, he would never consult any physician even when he did feel himself indisposed. Nay, when he was once attacked by apoplexy, he would still have nothing to do with physic, but cured himself by keeping in bed for two months in a dark and well-warmed chamber. His digestion was so good that he could eat all things without distinction: during the summer he lived almost entirely on fruits, and in the very extremity of his age would frequently eat three cucumbers and half a lemon at one time. "With respect to the qualities of his mind, Sansovino was very prudent; he foresaw readily the coming events, and sagaciously compared the present with the past. Attentive to his duties, he shunned no labour in the fulfilment of the same, and never neglected his business for his pleasure. He spoke well and largely on such subjects as he understood, giving appropriate illustrations of his thoughts with infinite grace of manner. This rendered him acceptable to high and low alike, as well as to his own friends. In his greatest age his memory continued excellent; he remembered all the events of his childhood, and could minutely refer to the sack of Rome and all the other occurrences, fortunate or otherwise, of his youth and early manhood. He was very courageous, and delighted from his boyhood in contending with those who were greater than himself, affirming that he who struggles with the great may become greater, but he who disputes with the little must become less. He esteemed honour above all else in the world, and was so upright a man of his word, that no temptation could induce him to break it, of which he gave frequent proof to his lords, who, for that as well as other qualities, considered him rather as a father or brother than as their agent or steward, honouring in him an excellence that was no pretence, but his true nature." Sansovino died in 1570, and he was buried at San Gimignano, in a church that he himself had built. In 1807, this church being demolished, his remains were transferred to the Seminario della Salute in Venice, where they now are. Adjoining the Old Library is the Mint, now S. Mark's Library, which may be both seen and used by strangers. It is not exactly a British Museum Reading-room, for there are but twelve tables with six seats at each, but judging by its usually empty state, it more than suffices for the scholarly needs of Venice. Upstairs you are shown various treasures brought together by Cardinal Bessarione: MSS., autographs, illuminated books, and incunabula. A fourteenth-century Dante lies open, with coloured pictures: the poet very short on one page and very tall on the next, and Virgil, at his side, very like Christ. A _Relazione della Morte de Anna Regina de Francia_, a fifteenth-century work, has a curious picture of the queen's burial. The first book ever printed in Venice is here: Cicero's _Epistolæ_, 1469, from the press of Johannes di Spira, which was followed by an edition of Pliny the Younger. A fine Venetian _Hypnerotomachia_, 1499, is here, and a very beautiful Herodotus with lovely type from the press of Gregorius of Venice in 1494. Old bindings may be seen too, among them a lavish Byzantine example with enamels and mosaics. The exhibited autographs include Titian's hand large and forcible; Leopardi's, very neat; Goldoni's, delicate and self-conscious; Galileo's, much in earnest; and a poem by Tasso with myriad afterthoughts. But the one idea of the custodian is to get you to admire the famous Grimani Breviary--not alas! in the original, which is not shown, but in a coloured reproduction. Very well, you say; and then discover that the privilege of displaying it is the perquisite of a rusty old colleague. That is to say, one custodian extols the work in order that another may reap a second harvest by turning its leaves. This delightful book dates from the early sixteenth century and is the work of some ingenious and masterly Flemish miniaturist with a fine sense of the open air and the movement of the seasons. But it is hard to be put off with an ordinary bookseller's traveller's specimen instead of the real thing. If one may be so near Titian's autograph and the illuminated _Divine Comedy_, why not this treasure too? January reveals a rich man at his table, dining alone, with his servitors and dogs about him; February's scene is white with snow--a small farm with the wife at the spinning-wheel, seen through the door, and various indications of cold, without; March shows the revival of field labours; April, a love scene among lords and ladies; May, a courtly festival; June, haymaking outside a fascinating city; July, sheep-shearing and reaping; August, the departure for the chase; September, grape-picking for the vintage; October, sowing seeds in a field near another fascinating city--a busy scene of various activities; November, beating oak-trees to bring down acorns for the pigs; and December, a boar hunt--the death. And all most gaily coloured, with the signs of the Zodiac added. The little building under the campanile is Sansovino's Loggetta, which he seems to have set there as a proof of his wonderful catholicity--to demonstrate that he was not only severe as in the Old Library, and Titanic as in the Giants, but that he had his gentler, sweeter thoughts too. The Loggetta was destroyed by the fall of the campanile; but it has risen from its ruins with a freshness and vivacity that are bewildering. It is possible indeed to think of its revivification as being more of a miracle than the new campanile: for the new campanile was a straight-forward building feat, whereas to reconstruct Sansovino's charm and delicacy required peculiar and very unusual gifts. Yet there it is: not what it was, of course, for the softening quality of old age has left it, yet very beautiful, and in a niche within a wonderful restoration of Sansovino's group of the Madonna and Child with S. John. The reliefs outside have been pieced together too, and though here and there a nose has gone, the effect remains admirable. The glory of Venice is the subject of all. The most superb of the external bronzes is the "Mercury" on the left of the façade. To the patience and genius of Signor Giacomo Boni is the restored statuary of the Loggetta due; Cav. Munaretti was responsible for the bronzes, and Signor Moretti for the building. All honour to them! Old Coryat's enthusiasm for the Loggetta is very hearty. "There is," he says, "adjoyned unto this tower [the campanile] a most glorious little roome that is very worthy to be spoken of, namely the Logetto, which is a place where some of the Procurators of Saint Markes doe use to sit in judgement, and discusse matters of controversies. This place is indeed but little, yet of that singular and incomparable beauty, being made all of Corinthian worke, that I never saw the like before for the quantity thereof." Where the Piazzetta especially gains over the Piazza is in its lagoon view. From its shore you look directly over the water to the church and island of S. Giorgio Maggiore, which are beautiful from every point and at every hour, so happily do dome and white façade, red campanile and green roof, windowed houses and little white towers, compose. But then, in Venice everything composes: an artist has but to paint what he sees. From the Piazzetta's shore you look diagonally to the right to the Dogana and the vast Salute and all the masts in the Giudecca canal; diagonally to the left is the Lido with a mile of dancing water between us and it. The shore of the Piazzetta, or more correctly the Molo, is of course the spot where the gondolas most do congregate, apparently inextricably wedged between the twisted trees of this marine forest, although when the time comes--that is, when the gondolier is at last secured--easily enough detached. For there is a bewildering rule which seems to prevent the gondolier who hails you from being your oarsman, and if you think that the gondolier whom you hail is the one who is going to row you, you are greatly mistaken. It is always another. The wise traveller in Venice having chanced upon a good gondolier takes his name and number and makes further arrangements with him. This being done, on arriving at the Molo he asks if his man is there, and the name--let us say Alessandro Grossi, No. 91 (for he is a capital old fellow, powerful and cheerful, with a useful supply of French)--is passed up and down like a bucket at a fire. If Alessandro chances to be there and available, all is well; but if not, to acquire a substitute even among so many obviously disengaged mariners, is no joke. Old Grossi is getting on in years, although still powerful. A younger Herculean fellow whom I can recommend is Ferdinando, No. 88. Ferdinando is immense and untiring, with a stentorian voice in which to announce his approach around the corners of canals; and his acquaintanceship with every soul in Venice makes a voyage with him an amusing experience. And he often sings and is always good-humoured. All gondoliers are not so. A gondolier with a grudge can be a most dismal companion, for he talks to himself. What he says, you cannot comprehend, for it is muttered and acutely foreign, but there is no doubt whatever that it is criticism detrimental to you, to some other equally objectionable person, or to the world at large. The gondolier does not differ noticeably from any other man whose business it is to convey his fellow creatures from one spot to another. The continual practice of assisting richer people than oneself to do things that oneself never does except for a livelihood would seem to engender a sardonic cast of mind. Where the gondolier chiefly differs from, say, the London cabman, is in his gift of speech. Cabmen can be caustic, sceptical, critical, censorious, but they do occasionally stop for breath. There is no need for a gondolier ever to do so either by day or night; while when he is not talking he is accompanying every movement by a grunt. It is this habit of talking and bickering which should make one very careful in choosing a lodging. Never let it be near a traghetto; for at traghetti there is talk incessant, day and night: argument, abuse, and raillery. The prevailing tone is that of men with a grievance. The only sound you never hear there is laughter. The passion for bickering belongs to watermen, although loquacity is shared by the whole city. The right to the back answer is one which the Venetian cherishes as jealously, I should say, as any; so much so that the gondolier whom your generosity struck dumb would be an unhappy man in spite of his windfall. [Illustration: THE DOGANA (WITH S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE JUST VISIBLE)] The gondolier assimilates to the cabman also in his liking to be overpaid. The English and Americans have been overpaying him for so many years that to receive now an exact fare from foreigners fills him with dismay. From Venetians, who, however, do not much use gondolas except as ferry boats, he expects it; but not from us, especially if there is a lady on board, for she is always his ally (as he knows) when it comes to pay time. A cabman who sits on a box and whips his horse, or a chauffeur who turns a wheel, is that and nothing more; but a gondolier is a romantic figure, and a gondola is a romantic craft, and the poor fellow has had to do it all himself, and did you hear how he was panting? and do look at those dark eyes! And there you are! Writing, however, strictly for unattended male passengers, or for strong-minded ladies, let me say (having no illusions as to the gondolier) that every gondola has its tariff, in several languages, on board, and no direct trip, within the city, for one or two persons, need cost more than one franc and a half. If one knows this and makes the additional tip sufficient, one is always in the right and the gondolier knows it. One of the prettiest sights that I remember in Venice was, one Sunday morning, a gondolier in his shirt sleeves, carefully dressed in his best, with a very long cigar and a very black moustache and a flashing gold ring, lolling back in his own gondola while his small son, aged about nine, was rowing him up the Grand Canal. Occasionally a word of praise or caution was uttered, but for the most part they went along silently, the father receiving more warmth from the consciousness of successful paternity than we from the sun itself. Gondoliers can have pride: but there is no pride about a rampino, the old scaramouch who hooks the gondola at the steps. Since he too was once a gondolier this is odd. But pride and he are strangers now. His hat is ever in his hand for a copper, and the transference of your still burning cigar-end to his lips is one of the most natural actions in the world. CHAPTER VIII THE GRAND CANAL. I: FROM THE DOGANA TO THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, LOOKING TO THE LEFT The river of Venice--Canal steamers--Motor boats--Venetian nobility to-day--The great architects--A desirable enactment--The custom house vane--The Seminario and Giorgione--S. Maria della Salute--Tintoretto's "Marriage in Cana"--The lost blue curtain--San Gregorio--The Palazzo Dario--Porphyry--The story of S. Vio--Delectable homes--Browning in Venice--S. Maria della Carità. To me the Grand Canal is the river of Venice--its Thames, its Seine, its Arno. I think of it as "the river." The rest are canals. And yet as a matter of fact to the Venetians the rest are rivers--Rio this and Rio that--and this the canal. During a stay in Venice of however short a time one is so often on the Grand Canal that a knowledge of its palaces should come early. For fifteen centimes one may travel its whole length in a steamboat, and back again for another fifteen, and there is no more interesting half-hour's voyage in the world. The guide books, as a rule, describe both banks from the same starting-point, which is usually the Molo. This seems to me to be a mistake, for two reasons. One is that even in a leisurely gondola "all'ora" one cannot keep pace with literature bearing on both sides at once, and the other is that since one enters Venice at the railway station it is interesting to begin forthwith to learn something of the city from that point and one ought not to be asked to read backwards to do this. In this book therefore the left bank, from the custom house to the railway station, is described first, and then the other side returning from the station to the Molo. The Grand Canal has for long had its steamers, and when they were installed there was a desperate outcry, led by Ruskin. To-day a similar outcry is being made against motor-boats, with, I think, more reason, as I hope to show later. But the steamer is useful and practically unnoticeable except when it whistles. None the less it was an interesting experience in April of this year (1914) to be living on the Grand Canal during a steamer strike which lasted for several days. It gave one the quieter Venice of the past and incidentally turned the gondoliers into plutocrats. But there is a great difference between the steamers and the motor-boat. The steamer does not leave the Grand Canal except to enter the lagoon; and therefore the injustice that it does to the gondolier is limited to depriving him of his Grand Canal fares. The motor-boat can supersede the gondola on the small canals too. It may be urged that the gondolier has only to become an engineer and his position will be as secure. That may be true; but we all know how insidious is the deteriorating influence of petrol on the human character. The gondolier even now is not always a model of courtesy and content; what will he be when the poison of machinery is in him? But there are graver reasons why the motor-boat should be viewed by the city fathers with suspicion. One is purely æsthetic, yet not the less weighty for that, since the prosperity of Venice in her decay resides in her romantic beauty and associations. The symbol of these is the gondola and gondolier, indivisible, and the only conditions under which they can be preserved are quietude and leisure. The motor-boat, which is always in a hurry and which as it multiplies will multiply hooters and whistles, must necessarily destroy the last vestige of Venetian calm. A second reason is that a small motor-boat makes a bigger wash than a crowded Grand Canal steamer, and this wash, continually increasing as the number of boats increases, must weaken and undermine the foundations of the houses on each side of the canals through which they pass. The action of water is irresistible. No natural law is sterner than that which decrees that restless water shall prevail. Enjoyment of voyages up and down the Grand Canal is immensely increased by some knowledge of architecture; but that subject is so vast that in such a _hors d'oeuvre_ to the Venetian banquet as the present book nothing of value can be said. Let it not be forgotten that Ruskin gave years of his life to the study. The most I can do is to name the architects of the most famous of the palaces and draw the reader's attention to the frequency with which the lovely Ducal gallery pattern recurs, like a theme in a fugue, until one comes to think the symbol of the city not the winged lion but a row of Gothic curved and pointed arches surmounted by circles containing equilateral crosses. The greatest names in Venetian architecture are Polifilo, who wrote the _Hypnerotomachia_, the two Bons, Rizzo, Sansovino, the Lombardis, Scarpagnino, Leopardi, Palladio, Sammicheli, and Longhena. In the following notes I have tried to mention the place of practically every rio and every calle so that the identification of the buildings may be the more simple. The names of the palaces usually given are those by which the Venetians know them; but many, if not more, have changed ownership more than once since those names were fixed. Although for the most part the palaces of the Grand Canal have declined from their original status as the homes of the nobility and aristocracy and are now hotels, antiquity stores, offices, and tenements, it not seldom happens that the modern representative of the great family retains the top floor for an annual Venetian sojourn, living for the rest of the year in the country. I wish it could be made compulsory for the posts before the palaces to be repainted every year. And so begins the voyage. The white stone building which forms the thin end of the wedge dividing the Grand Canal from the Canale della Giudecca is the Dogana or Customs House, and the cape is called the Punta della Salute. The figure on the Dogana ball, which from certain points has almost as much lightness as Gian Bologna's famous Mercury, represents Fortune and turns with the wind. The next building (with a green and shady garden on the Giudecca side) is the Seminario Patriarcale, a great bare schoolhouse, in which a few pictures are preserved, and, downstairs, a collection of ancient sculpture. Among the pictures is a much dam-aged classical scene supposed to represent Apollo and Daphne in a romantic landscape. Giorgione's name is often associated with it; I know not with what accuracy, but Signor Paoli, who has written so well upon Venice, is convinced, and the figure of Apollo is certainly free and fair as from a master's hand. Another picture, a Madonna and Child with two companions, is called a Leonardo da Vinci; but Baedeker gives it to Marco d'Oggiano. There is also a Filippino Lippi which one likes to find in Venice, where the prevailing art is so different from his. One of the most charming things here is a little relief of the manger; as pretty a rendering as one could wish for. Downstairs is the tomb of the great Jacopo Sansovino. And now rises the imposing church of S. Maria della Salute which, although younger than most of the Venetian churches, has taken the next place to S. Mark's as an ecclesiastical symbol of the city. To me it is a building attractive only when seen in its place as a Venetian detail; although it must always have the impressiveness of size and accumulation and the beauty that white stone in such an air as this can hardly escape. Seen from the Grand Canal or from a window opposite, it is pretentious and an interloper, particularly if the slender and distinguished Gothic windows of the apse of S. Gregorio are also visible; seen from any distant enough spot, its dome and towers fall with equal naturalness into the majestic Venetian pageant of full light, or the fairy Venetian mirage of the crepuscle. The church was decreed in 1630 as a thankoffering to the Virgin for staying the plague of that year. Hence the name--S. Mary of Salvation. It was designed by Baldassarre Longhena, a Venetian architect who worked during the first half of the seventeenth century and whose masterpiece this is. Within, the Salute is notable for possessing Tintoretto's "Marriage in Cana," one of the few pictures painted by him in which he allowed himself an interval (so to speak) of perfect calm. It is, as it was bound to be in his hands and no doubt was in reality, a busy scene. The guests are all animated; the servitors are bustling about; a number of spectators talk together at the back; a woman in the foreground holds out a vessel to the men opposite to show them the remarkable change which the water has undergone. But it is in the centre of his picture (which is reproduced on the opposite page) that the painter has achieved one of his pleasantest effects, for here is a row of pretty women sitting side by side at the banquetting table, with a soft light upon them, who make together one of the most charming of those rare oases of pure sweetness in all Tintoretto's work. The chief light is theirs and they shine most graciously in it. Among other pictures are a S. Sebastian by Basaiti, with a good landscape; a glowing altar-piece by Titian, in his Giorgionesque manner, representing S. Mark and four saints; a "Descent of the Holy Ghost," by the same hand but under no such influence; and a spirited if rather theatrical "Nativity of the Virgin" by Lucia Giordano. In the outer sacristy the kneeling figure of Doge Agostino Barbarigo should be looked for. The Salute in Guardi's day seems to have had the most entrancing light blue curtains at its main entrance, if we may take the artist as our authority. See No. 2098 in the National Gallery, and also No. 503 at the Wallace collection. But now only a tiny side door is opened. [Illustration: THE MARRIAGE AT CANA FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO _In the Church of the Salute_] A steamboat station, used almost wholly by visitors, is here, and then a canal, and then the fourteenth-century abbey of S. Gregorio, whose cloisters now form an antiquity store and whose severe and simple apse is such a rebuke to Longhena's Renaissance floridity. Next is a delightful little house with one of the old cup-chimneys, forming one of the most desirable residences in Venice. It has a glazed loggia looking down to the Riva. We next come to a brand new spacious building divided into apartments, then a tiny house, and then the rather squalid Palazzo Martinengo. The calle and traghetto of S. Gregorio, and two or three old palaces and the new building which now holds Salviati's glass business, follow. After the Rio del Formase is a common little house, and then the Palazzo Volkoff, once Eleonora Duse's Venetian home. Next is the splendid fifteenth-century Palazzo Dario, to my eyes perhaps the most satisfying of all, with its rich colouring, leaning walls, ancient chimneys and porphyry decorations. Readers of Henri de Régnier's Venetian novel _La Peur de l'Amour_ may like to know that much of it was written in this palace. We shall see porphyry all along the Canal on both sides, always enriching in its effect. This stone is a red or purple volcanic rock which comes from Egypt, on the west coast of the Red Sea. The Romans first detected its beauty and made great use of it to decorate their buildings. Another rio, the Torreselle, some wine stores, and then the foundations of what was to have been the Palazzo Venier, which never was built. Instead there are walls and a very delectable garden--a riot of lovely wistaria in the spring--into which fortunate people are assisted from gondolas by superior men-servants. A dull house comes next; then a _stoffe_ factory; and then the Mula Palace, with fine dark blue poles before it surmounted by a Doge's cap, and good Gothic windows. Again we find trade where once was aristocracy, for the next palace, which is now a glass-works' show-room, was once the home of Pietro Barbarigo, Patriarch of Venice. The tiny church of S. Vio, now closed, which gives the name to the Campo and Rio opposite which we now are, has a pretty history attached to it. It seems that one of the most devoted worshippers in this minute temple was the little Contessa Tagliapietra, whose home was on the other side of the Grand Canal. Her one pleasure was to retire to this church and make her devotions: a habit which so exasperated her father that one day he issued a decree to the gondoliers forbidding them to ferry her across. On arriving at the traghetto and learning this decision, the girl calmly walked over the water, sustained by her purity and piety. The next palace, at the corner, is the Palazzo Loredan where the widow of Don Carlos of Madrid now lives. The posts have Spanish colours and a magnificent man-servant in a scarlet waistcoat often suns himself on the steps. Next is the comfortable Balbi Valier, with a motor launch called "The Rose of Devon" moored to its posts, and a pleasant garden where the Palazzo Paradiso once stood; and then the great and splendid Contarini del Zaffo, or Manzoni, with its good ironwork and medallions and a charming loggia at the side. Robert Browning tried to buy this palace for his son. Indeed he thought he had bought it; but there was a hitch. He describes it in a letter as "the most beautiful house in Venice." The next, the Brandolin Rota, which adjoins it, was, as a hotel, under the name Albergo dell'Universo, Browning's first Venetian home. Later he moved to the Zattere and after that to the Palazzo Rezzonico, to which we are soon coming, where he died. Next we reach the church, convent and Scuola of S. Maria della Carità, opposite the iron bridge, which under rearrangement and restoration now forms the Accademia, or Gallery of Fine Arts, famous throughout the world for its Titians, Tintorettos, Bellinis, and Carpaccios. The church, which dates from the fifteenth century, is a most beautiful brown brick building with delicate corbelling under the eaves. Once there was a campanile too, but it fell into the Grand Canal some hundred and seventy years ago, causing a tidal wave which flung gondolas clean out of the water. We shall return to the Accademia in later chapters: here it is enough to say that the lion on the top of the entrance wall is the most foolish in Venice, turned, as it has been, into a lady's hack. The first house after the Accademia is negligible--newish and dull with an enclosed garden; the next is the Querini; the next the dull Mocenigo Gambara; and then we come to the solid Bloomsbury-blackened stone Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni and its neighbours of the same ownership. Then the Rio S. Trovaso, with a pretty garden visible a little way up, and then a gay new little home, very attractive, with a strip of garden, and next it the fifteenth-century Loredan. A tiny calle, and then the low Dolfin. Then the Rio Malpaga and after it a very delectable new residence with a terrace. A calle and traghetto, with a wall shrine at the corner, come next, and two dull Contarini palaces, one of which is now an antiquity store, and then the Rio S. Barnaba and the majestic sombre Rezzonico with its posts of blue and faded pink. This for long was the home of Robert Browning, and here, as a tablet on the side wall states, he died. "Browning, Browning," exclaim the gondoliers as they point to it; but what the word means to them I cannot say. CHAPTER IX THE GRAND CANAL. II: BROWNING AND WAGNER The Palazzo Rezzonico--Mr. and Mrs. Browning--Browning's Venetian routine--In praise of Goldoni--Browning's death--A funeral service--Love of Italy--The Giustiniani family--A last resource--Wagner in Venice--_Tristan und Isolde_--Plays and Music--The Austrians in power--The gondoliers' chorus--The Foscari Palace. The Rezzonico palace and one of the Giustiniani palaces which are its neighbours have such interesting artistic associations that they demand a chapter to themselves. Browning is more intimately associated with Florence and Asolo than with Venice; but he enjoyed his later Venetian days to the full. His first visit here in 1851, with his wife, was however marred by illness. Mrs. Browning loved the city, as her letters tell. "I have been," she wrote, "between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water up between all that gorgeous colour and carving, the enchanting silence, the moonlight, the music, the gondolas--I mix it all up together, and maintain that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second Venice in the world." Browning left Florence for ever after his wife's death, and to Venice he came again in 1878, with his sister, and thereafter for some years they returned regularly. Until 1881 their home was at the Brandolin Rota. After that they stayed with Mrs. Arthur Bronson, to whom he dedicated _Asolando_, his last book, and who has written a record of his habits in the city of the sea. She tells us that he delighted in walking and was a great frequenter of old curiosity shops. His especial triumph was to discover a calle so narrow that he could not put up an umbrella in it. Every morning he visited the Giardini Pubblici to feed certain of the animals; and on every disengaged afternoon he went over to the Lido, to walk there, or, as Byron had done, to ride. On being asked by his gondolier where he would like to be rowed, he always said, "Towards the Lido," and after his failure to acquire the Palazzo Manzoni he thought seriously for a while of buying an unfinished Lido villa which had been begun for Victor Emmanuel. Browning's desire was to see sunsets from it. Mrs. Bronson tells us that the poet delighted in the seagulls, which in stormy weather come into the city waters. He used to wonder that no books referred to them. "They are more interesting," he said, "than the doves of St. Mark." Venice did not inspire the poet to much verse. There is of course that poignant little drama entitled "In a Gondola," but not much else, and for some reason the collected works omit the sonnet in honour of Goldoni which was written for the ceremonies attaching to the erection of the dramatist's statue near the Rialto. Mrs. Orr tells us that this sonnet, which had been promised for an album in praise of Goldoni, was forgotten until the messenger from the editor arrived for the copy. Browning wrote it while the boy waited. The day was November 27, 1883. Goldoni--good, gay, sunniest of souls-- Glassing half Venice in that verse of thine-- What though it just reflect the shade and shine Of common life, nor render, as it rolls, Grandeur and gloom? Sufficient for thy shoals Was Carnival: Parini's depths enshrine Secrets unsuited to that opaline Surface of things which laughs along thy scrolls. There throng the people: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb,--see,-- On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear king of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that did'st love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee. The Rezzonico is the house most intimately associated with Browning in the public mind, although most of his Venetian life was spent elsewhere. It was here, on his last visit to his son, that the poet died. He had not been very well for some time, but he insisted on taking his daily walk on the Lido even although it was foggy. The fog struck in--it was November--and the poet gradually grew weaker until on December 12, 1889, the end came. At first he had lain in the left-hand corner room on the ground floor; he died in the corresponding room on the top floor, where there was more light. [Illustration: VENICE WITH HERCULES AND CERES FROM THE PAINTING BY VERONESE _In the Accademia_] Browning was buried in Westminster Abbey, but a funeral service was held first in Venice. In his son's words, "a public funeral was offered by the Municipality, which in a modified form was gratefully accepted. A private service, conducted by the British Chaplain, was held in one of the halls of the Rezzonico. It was attended by the Syndic of Venice and the chief City authorities, as well as by officers of the Army and Navy. Municipal Guards lined the entrance of the Palace, and a Guard of Honour, consisting of City firemen in full dress, stood flanking the coffin during the service, which was attended by friends and many residents. The subsequent passage to the mortuary island of San Michele was organized by the City, and when the service had been performed the coffin was carried by firemen to the massive and highly decorated funeral barge, on which it was guarded during the transit by four 'Uscieri' in gala dress, two sergeants of the Municipal Guard, and two firemen bearing torches. The remainder of these followed in their boats. The funeral barge was slowly towed by a steam launch of the Royal Navy. The chief officers of the Municipality, the family, and many others in a crowd of gondolas, completed the procession. San Michele was reached as the sun was setting, when the firemen again received their burden and bore it to the principal mortuary chapel." Later the municipality of Venice fixed the memorial tablet to the wall of the palace. The quotation, from the poet, cut under his name, runs thus:-- Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, Italy. The tablet is a graceful recognition of the devotion of Browning and his wife to their adopted country. Did the authorities, I wonder, know that Browning's love of their city led him always to wear on his watch-chain a coin struck by Manin in 1848 commemorating the overthrow of Austrian power in Venice? The Rezzonico was built by Longhena, the architect of the Salute. Carlo Rezzonico, afterwards Pope Clement XIII, lived here. The Emperor Joseph II stayed here. So much for fact. I like far more to remember the Christmas dinner eaten here--only, alas, in fancy, yet with all the illusion of fact--by Browning and a Scandinavian dramatist named Ibsen, brought together for the purpose by the assiduous Mr. Gosse, as related with such skill and mischief by Mr. Max Beerbohm. Next the Rezzonico is the commonplace Nani; then a tiny calle; and then an antiquity store, one of the three adjoining palaces of the great Giustiniani family, in the second of which once lived Richard Wagner. But first a word as to the Giustiniani's great feat, in the twelfth century, of giving every male member to the Republic. It happened that in 1171 nearly all the Venetians in Constantinople were massacred. An expedition was quickly despatched to demand satisfaction for such a deed, but, while anchored at Scio, the plague broke out and practically demolished this too, among those who perished being the Giustiniani to a man. In order that the family might persist, the sole surviving son, a monk named Niccolò, was temporarily released from his vows to be espoused to the daughter of the Doge, Vitale Michiel. Sufficient sons having been born to them, the father returned to his monastery and the mother sought a convent for herself. In the first of the three Giustiniani palaces Mr. Howells, moving from the Casa Falier across the way, wrote his _Venetian Life_. In the next Wagner wrote part of _Tristan and Isolda_. Needing solitude for this task, the composer came to Venice in the autumn of 1858, and put up first at Danieli's. Needing a more private abode he came here. From his _Autobiography_ I take the story. "I heard that one of the three Giustiniani palaces, situated not far from the Palazzo Foscari, was at present very little patronized by visitors, on account of its situation, which in the winter is somewhat unfavourable. I found some very spacious and imposing apartments there, all of which they told me would remain uninhabited. I here engaged a large stately room with a spacious bedroom adjoining. I had my luggage quickly transferred there, and on the evening of the 30th August I said to myself, 'At last I am living in Venice.' "My leading idea was that I could work here undisturbed. I immediately wrote to Zürich asking for my Erard 'Grand' and my bed to be sent on to me, as, with regard to the latter, I felt that I should find out what cold meant in Venice. In addition to this, the grey-washed walls of my large room soon annoyed me, as they were so little suited to the ceiling, which was covered with a fresco which I thought was rather tasteful. I decided to have the walls of the large room covered with hangings of a dark-red shade, even if they were of quite common quality. This immediately caused much trouble; but it seemed to me that it was well worth surmounting, when I gazed down from my balcony with growing satisfaction on the wonderful canal, and said to myself that here I would complete _Tristan_." The composer's life was very simple. "I worked," he says, "till two o'clock, then I got into the gondola that was always in waiting, and was taken along the solemn Grand Canal to the bright Piazzetta, the peculiar charm of which always had a cheerful effect on me. After this I made for my restaurant in the Piazza San Marco, and when I had finished my meal I walked alone or with Karl along the Riva to the Giardini Pubblici, the only pleasure-ground in Venice where there are any trees, and at nightfall I came back in the gondola down the canal, then more sombre and silent, till I reached the spot where I could see my solitary lamp shining from the night-shrouded façade of the old Palazzo Giustiniani. "After I had worked a little longer Karl, heralded by the swish of the gondola, would come in regularly at eight o'clock for a few hours chat over our tea. Very rarely did I vary this routine by a visit to one of the theatres. When I did, I preferred the performances at the Camploi Theatre, where Goldoni's pieces were very well played; but I seldom went to the opera, and when I did go it was merely out of curiosity. More frequently, when bad weather deprived us of our walk, we patronized the popular drama at the Malibran Theatre, where the performances were given in the daytime. The admission cost us six kreutzers. The audiences were excellent, the majority being in their shirt-sleeves, and the pieces given were generally of the ultra-melodramatic type. However, one day to my great astonishment and intense delight I saw there _Le Baruffe Chioggiote_, the grotesque comedy that had appealed so strongly to Goethe in his days at this very theatre. So true to nature was this performance that it surpassed anything of the kind I have ever witnessed." Wagner's impressions of Venice, where, some twenty-four years later, he was to end his anxious and marvellous life, seem to me so interesting that I quote a little more: "There was little else that attracted my attention in the oppressed and degenerate life of the Venetian people, and the only impression I derived from the exquisite ruin of this wonderful city as far as human interest is concerned was that of a watering-place kept up for the benefit of visitors. Strangely enough, it was the thoroughly German element of good military music, to which so much attention is paid in the Austrian army, that brought me into touch with public life in Venice. The conductors in the two Austrian regiments quartered there began playing overtures of mine, _Rienzi_ and _Tannhäuser_ for instance, and invited me to attend their practices in their barracks. There I also met the whole staff of officers, and was treated by them with great respect. These bands played on alternate evenings amid brilliant illuminations in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, whose acoustic properties for this class of production were really excellent. I was often suddenly startled towards the end of my meal by the sound of my own overtures; then as I sat at the restaurant window giving myself up to impressions of the music, I did not know which dazzled me most, the incomparable Piazza magnificently illuminated and filled with countless numbers of moving people, or the music that seemed to be borne away in rustling glory to the winds. Only one thing was wanting that might certainly have been expected from an Italian audience: the people were gathered round the band in thousands listening most intently, but no two hands ever forgot themselves so far as to applaud, as the least sign of approbation of Austrian military music would have been looked upon as treason to the Italian Fatherland. All public life in Venice also suffered by this extraordinary rift between the general public and the authorities; this was peculiarly apparent in the relations of the population to the Austrian officers, who floated about publicly in Venice like oil on water. The populace, too, behaved with no less reserve, or one might even say hostility, to the clergy, who were for the most part of Italian origin. I saw a procession of clerics in their vestments passing along the Piazza San Marco accompanied by the people with unconcealed derision. "It was very difficult for Ritter to induce me to interrupt my daily arrangements even to visit a gallery or a church, though, whenever we had to pass through the town, the exceedingly varied architectonic peculiarities and beauties always delighted me afresh. But the frequent gondola trips towards the Lido constituted my chief enjoyment during practically the whole of my stay in Venice. It was more especially on our homeward journeys at sunset that I was always over-powered by unique impressions. During the first part of our stay in the September of that year we saw on one of these occasions the marvellous apparition of the great comet, which at that time was at its highest brilliancy, and was generally said to portend an imminent catastrophe. "The singing of a popular choral society, trained by an official of the Venetian arsenal, seemed like a real lagoon idyll. They generally sang only three-part naturally harmonized folk-songs. It was new to me not to hear the higher voice rise above the compass of the alto, that is to say, without touching the soprano, thereby imparting to the sound of the chorus a manly youthfulness hitherto unknown to me. On fine evenings they glided down the Grand Canal in a large illuminated gondola, stopping before a few palaces as if to serenade (when requested and paid for doing so, be it understood), and generally attracted a number of other gondolas in their wake. "During one sleepless night, when I felt impelled to go out on to my balcony in the small hours, I heard for the first time the famous old folk-song of the _gondolieri_. I seemed to hear the first call, in the stillness of the night, proceeding from the Rialto, about a mile away like a rough lament, and answered in the same tone from a yet further distance in another direction. This melancholy dialogue, which was repeated at longer intervals, affected me so much that I could not fix the very simple musical component parts in my memory. However on a subsequent occasion I was told that this folk-song was of great poetic interest. As I was returning home late one night on the gloomy canal, the moon appeared suddenly and illuminated the marvellous palaces and the tall figure of my gondolier towering above the stern of the gondola, slowly moving his huge sweep. Suddenly he uttered a deep wail, not unlike the cry of an animal; the cry gradually gained in strength, and formed itself, after a long-drawn 'Oh!' into the simple musical exclamation 'Venezia!' This was followed by other sounds of which I have no distinct recollection, as I was so much moved at the time. Such were the impressions that to me appeared the most characteristic of Venice during my stay there, and they remained with me until the completion of the second act of _Tristan_, and possibly even suggested to me the long-drawn wail of the shepherd's horn at the beginning of the third act." Later we shall see the palace where Wagner died, which also is on the Grand Canal. Now comes the great and splendid Foscari Palace, once also a Giustiniani home and once also the lodging of a king of France--Henry III, certain of whose sumptuous Venetian experiences we saw depicted on the walls of the Doges' Palace. The Foscari is very splendid with its golden borders to the windows, its rich reliefs and pretty effects of red brickwork, and more than most it brings to mind the lost aristocratic glories of Venice. To-day it is a commercial school, with a courtyard at the back full of weeds. The fine lamp at its corner must give as useful a light as any in Venice. CHAPTER X THE GRAND CANAL. III: FROM THE RIO FOSCARI TO S. SIMEONE, LOOKING TO THE LEFT Napoleon _s'amuse_--Paul Veronese--The Layard collection--The Palazzo Papadopoli--The Rialto Bridge--The keystone--Carpaccio--The "Uncle" of Venice--Modern painting--English artists in Venice--The Civic Museum--Pictures and curiosities--Carnival costumes--Carpaccio and Ruskin--Historical scenes--A pleasant garden. The big palace on the other side of the Rio Foscari, next the shabby brown, deserted house which might be made so desirable with its view down the Canal, is the Balbi, and it has the distinction that Napoleon stood in one of its windows to see a Grand Canal regatta, the races in which ended at this point. Next it is the Angaran, and then a nice little place with lions guarding the terrace gate, at the corner of the Rio della Frescada, one of the prettiest of the side canals. Next we come to another large and solid but very dull house, the Civran (afterwards Grimani); then the forsaken Dandolo, and we are at the steamboat station of S. Toma, where the passengers for the Frari and S. Rocco land. Hereabouts the houses are very uninteresting. Two more and a traghetto and the Rio S. Toma; then the Palazzo Giustiniani, a rich Venetian red, with a glimpse of a courtyard; then the ugliest building in the canal, also red, like the back of a block of flats; and after passing the pretty little Gothic Tiepolo palace with blue posts with yellow bands, and the larger Palazzo Tiepolo adjoining it, we are at the fine fifteenth-century Pisani Moretta, with a double row of rich Gothic windows. Here once hung Veronese's "Family of Darius," now No. 294 in our National Gallery, and, according to Ruskin, "the most precious" of the painter's works. The story goes that Veronese being driven to make use of the Pisani villa at Este as a temporary home, painted the picture while there and left it behind him with a message that he hoped it would pay for his board and lodging. The Pisani family sold it to the National Gallery in 1857. The next palace is the hideous Barbarigo della Terrazza, with a better façade on the Rio S. Polo: now a mosaic company's head-quarters, but once famous for its splendours, which included seventeen Titians, now in Russia; and then the Rio S. Polo and the red Capello Palace where the late Sir Henry Layard made his home and gathered about him those pictures which now, like the Darius, belong to our National Gallery. Next it is the Vendramin, with yellow posts and porphyry enrichment, and then the desolate dirty Querini, and the Bernardo, once a splendid palace but now offices, with its Gothic arches filled with glass. The Rio della Madonnetta here intervenes; then two Donà palaces, the first dating from the twelfth century. A traghetto is here and a pretty calle, and soon we come to one of the palaces which are shown to visitors, the Papadopoli, once the Coccina-Tiepolo, with blue posts and in the spring a Judas-tree red in the garden. My advice to those who visit such palaces as are shown to the public is not to go alone. The rigours of ceremonial can be tempered to a party, and the efficient and discreet French major-domo is less formidable to several visitors than to one. The principal attraction of the Papadopoli Palace is two carnival pictures by Tiepolo; but the visitor is also shown room after room, sumptuous and unliveable in, with signed photographs of crowned heads on ormolu tables. The Rio dei Meloni, where is the Palazzo Albrizzi to which Byron used to resort as a lion, runs by the Papadopoli. At the other corner is the Businello, a nice solid building with two rows of round window-arches. Then the tall decayed Rampinelli and, followed by a calle, the Ramo Barzizza, and next the Mengaldo, with a very choice doorway and arches, now a statuary store; then the yellow Avogadro, now an antiquity dealer's and tenements, with a fondamenta; then a new building, and we reach the fine red palace adjoining the Casa Petrarca, with its ramping garden. These two palaces, which have a sottoportico beneath them leading to S. Silvestro, stand on the site of the palace of the Patriarchs of Grado, who had supreme ecclesiastical power here until the fifteenth century, when the Patriarchate of Venice was founded with a residence near S. Pietro in Castello. From this point a fondamenta runs all the way to the Rialto bridge. The buildings are not of any particular interest, until we come to the last one, with the two arches under it and the fine relief of a lion on the façade: once the head-quarters of the tithe collectors. People have come mostly to speak of the Rialto as though it was the bridge only. But it is the district, of which the bridge is the centre. No longer do wealthy shipowners and merchants foregather hereabouts; for none exist. Venice has ceased to fetch and carry for the world, and all her energies are now confined within her own borders. Enough to live and be as happy as may be! [Illustration: DOORWAY OF S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE] In beauty the Rialto falls far short of most of the bridges of Venice. Its hard angle superimposed on the great arch is unpleasing to the eye accustomed in this city to easy fluid curves. Seen from immediately below, the arch is noble; from any greater distance it is lost in the over-structure, angle and curve conflicting. Ruskin is very enthusiastic over the conceit which placed the Spirito Santo on the keystone of the bridge, the flight, as he thinks, producing an effect of lightness. He is pleased too with the two angels, and especially that one on the right, whose foot is placed with horizontal firmness. On each side of the bridge is a shrine. Before this stone bridge was built in 1588 by Antonio da Ponte it had wooden predecessors. Carpaccio's Santa Croce picture in the Accademia shows us what the immediate forerunner of the present bridge was like. It had a drawbridge in the middle to prevent pursuit that way during brawls. The first palace beyond the bridge, now a decaying congeries of offices, has very rich decorative stone work, foliation and festoons. It was once the head-quarters of the Camerlenghi, the procurators-fiscal of Venice. Then come the long fruit and vegetable markets, and then the new fish market, one of the most successful of new Venetian buildings, with its springing arches below and its loggia above and its iron lamp at the right corner and bronze fisherman at the left. A fondamenta runs right away from the Rialto bridge to a point just beyond the new fish market, with some nice houses on it, over shops, the one on the left of the fish market having very charming windows. The first palace of any importance is the dull red one on the other side of the Calle dei Botteri, the Donà. Then a decayed palace and the Calle del Campanile where the fondamenta ends. Here is the very attractive Palazzo Morosini, or Brandolin, which dates from the fourteenth century. Next is a dull house, and then a small one with little lions on the balustrades, and then the Rio S. Cassiano. Next is a tiny and very ancient palace with an inscription stating that the Venetian painter Favretto worked there; then a calle, and the great pawnshop of Venice, once the Palazzo Corner della Regina, is before us, with a number of its own boats inside the handsome blue municipal posts with S. Mark's lion on each. The Queen of Cyprus was born here; other proud and commanding Corners were splendid here; and now it is a pawnshop! The Calle della Regina, two rather nice, neglected houses (the little pink one quite charming), and we come to the Rio Pesaro and the splendid Palazzo Pesaro, one of the great works of Longhena. Note its fluted pillars and rich stonework. This palace we may enter, for it is now the Tate Gallery of Venice, housing, below, a changing exhibition of contemporary art, and, above, a permanent collection, to which additions are constantly being made, of modern Italian painting. Foreign artists are admitted too, and my eyes were gladdened by Mr. Nicholson's "Nancy," a landscape by Mr. E.A. Walton, a melon-seller by Mr. Brangwyn, a lady in pink by Mr. Lavery, and a fisherman by Mr. Cayley Robinson. A number of Whistler's Venetian etchings may also be seen here, and much characteristic work by Mr. Pennell. Here too are the "Burghers of Calais" and the "Thinker" of Rodin, while a nude by Fantin Latour should be sought for. One of the most interesting pictures so far as subject goes represents the bridge of boats to the Redentore on a recent All Souls' day. I have been absolutely alone in this building, save for the custodians. The Venetian can live very easily without picture galleries, ancient or modern. The Rio della Pergola washes the other side of the Pesaro palace, and then come two or three houses, once Foscarini homes, given up to antiquity dealers, and then the florid white stone façade of the church of S. Stae (or S. Eustachio) with a delightful little Venetian-red annex on the left. There is a campo and steamboat station here too. The next palace has pretty little Gothic windows, and then a small brown house stands in its garden on the site of a burnt Contarini palace. A good red brick fifteenth-century palace, now a wine store, is next, and then the Tron, now an institution, with a garden and well-head seen through the open door. Great scenes have been witnessed in this building, for the Trons were a famous and powerful Venetian family, supplying more than one Doge, and here in 1775 was entertained the Emperor Joseph II. Then the Rio Tron and then the Palazzo Battagia, with two rich coats of arms in relief, which is also by Longhena, but I hope that it was not he who placed the columns on the roof. The tiny Calle del Megio, and we reach the venerable piece of decay which once was the granary of the Venetian Republic--one of the most dignified and attractive buildings on the canal, with its old brick and coping of pointed arches. The Rio del Megio divides the granary from the old Fondaco dei Turchi, once, after a long and distinguished life as a palace, the head-quarters of the Turks in Venice, and now, admirably restored, the civic museum. It is necessary to visit the collections preserved here, but I cannot promise any feelings of exultation among them. The Museo Civico might be so interesting and is so depressing. Baedeker is joyful over the "excellent illustrative guide (1909), 1 franc," but though it may have existed in 1909 there is no longer any trace of it, nor could I obtain the reason why. Since none of the exhibits have descriptive labels (not even the pictures), and since the only custodians are apparently retired and utterly dejected gondoliers, the visitor's spirits steadily fall. One enters to some fine well-heads and other sculpture, not very different from the stock-in-trade of the ordinary dealer in antiquity who has filched a palace. On the next floor is a library; but I found the entrance barred. On the next is a series of rooms, the museum proper. In the first are weapons, banners, and so forth. In the second is a vast huddle of pictures, mostly bad copies, but patience may discover here and there an original by a good hand not at its best. I noticed a Tiepolo sketch that had much of his fine free way in it, and a few typical Longhis. For the rest one imagines that some very indifferent churches have been looted. Follow four rooms of miscellaneous articles: weapons, ropes, a rather fascinating white leather suit in a case, and so forth. Then a room of coins and medals and ducats of the Doges right away from 1279. Then two rooms (VIII and IX) which are more human, containing costumes, laces, fans, the death masks of two Doges in their caps, a fine wooden balustrade from a fifteenth-century palace, a set of marionettes with all their strings, a Vivarini Madonna on an easel. [Illustration: S. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM WITH SAINTS FROM THE PAINTING BY PIOMBO _In the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo_] Then some stairs and a set of eighteenth-century rooms with curiously real carnival costumes in them, like Longhi's pictures come to life, and a painting or two by Guardi, including what purports to be his own portrait. Then a Chinese room, and a Goldoni room with first editions of the little man's plays, his portrait, and other relics. This series undoubtedly brings Venice of the eighteenth-century very vividly before one. Returning to Room X in the main sequence we find wood-carving and pottery. In Room XI, just inside the door on the left, is a noble gondola prow in iron, richly wrought, which one would like to see on a boat once more. Room XII has glass and porcelain; Room XIII has ivories and caskets; and Room XIV has illuminated manuscripts, in one of which, No. 158, is a very attractive tiny little Annunciation; and so we come again to the pictures, in Rooms XV and XVI of which the second contains the pick. But there is little to cause the heart to beat any faster. A quaint and ugly but fascinating thing, attributed to Carpaccio and said to represent two courtesans at home, is the most memorable. Why it should not equally represent two ladies of unimpeachable character, I cannot see. Ruskin went beyond everything in his praises, in _St. Mark's Rest_, of this picture. He suggests that it is the best picture in the world. But read his amazing words. "I know," he says, "no other which unites every nameable quality of painter's art in so intense a degree--breadth with tenderness, brilliancy with quietness, decision with minuteness, colour with light and shade: all that is faithfullest in Holland, fancifullest in Venice, severest in Florence, naturalest in England. Whatever de Hooghe could do in shade, Van Eyck in detail, Giorgione in mass, Titian in colour, Bewick and Landseer in animal life, is here at once; and I know no other picture in the world which can be compared with it." In the same room is a figure of Christ mourned by two little angels, ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, but bearing Durer's monogram. On the stairs are historical Venetian scenes of fires, fights, and ceremonials which we shall find in more abundance at the Querini Stampalia. The top floor is given to Canova, Canaletto, Guardi, and Tiepolo, and is very rich in their drawings and studies. In Canova I find it impossible to be much interested, but the pencil work of the others is often exquisite. From some of Canaletto's exact architectural drawings the Venice of his day could be reconstructed almost stone by stone. Before leaving the Museo Civico let me warn the reader that it is by no means easy of access except in a gondola. Two steamboat stations pretend to deposit you there, but neither does so: S. Stae, from which it is a tortuous walk, and S. Marcuola, on the other side of the Canal, which means a ferry boat. There is a calle and a traghetto next the museum, and then a disreputable but picturesque brown house with a fondamenta, and then the home of the Teodoro Correr who formed the nucleus of the museum which we have just seen and left it to Venice. His house is now deserted and miserable. A police station comes next; then a decayed house; and then the Palazzo Giovanelli, boarded up and forlorn, but not the one which contains the famous Giorgione. And here, at the nice garden on the other side of the Rio S. Giovanni Decollato, I think, we may cease to identify the buildings, for nothing else is important. Beyond S. Simeone, however, at the corner of the Rio della Croce, is a large and shady garden belonging to the Papadopoli family which may be visited on application. It is a very pleasant place. CHAPTER XI THE GRAND CANAL. IV: FROM THE STATION TO THE MOCENIGO PALACE, LOOKING TO THE LEFT The Scalzi--The Labia Palace--The missing cicerone--Tiepolo and Cleopatra--S. Marcuola and Titian--A maker of oars--The death of Wagner--Frescoes on palaces--The Ca' d'Oro--Baron Franchetti--S. Sebastian--The Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne--A merry tapestry--A cardinal's nursery--The Palazzo Lion--The Fondaco dei Tedeschi--Canova, Titian, and Byron. Beginning at the Railway Station and going towards the Ducal Palace, the first building is the church of the Scalzi, by the iron bridge. The church is a very ornate structure famous for its marbles and reliefs, which counterfeit drapery and take the place of altar pictures; but these are an acquired taste. On the ceiling the brave Tiepolo has sprawled a vigorous illustration of the spiriting away of the house of the Virgin to Loreto, near Ancona. Next come a row of shops, and, at the corner, the Lido hotels' motor-launch office, and then several negligible decayed palaces. The first of any importance is the tall seventeenth-century incomplete Flangini with Michael Angelesque figures over the door. Then the Scuola dei Morti with its _memento mori_ on the wall, and then S. Geremia: outside, a fine mass of yellow brick with a commanding campanile; inside, all Palladian coolness. Against the church a little house has been built, and at the corner of the Grand Canal and the Cannaregio is the figure of the Virgin. The great palace a little way down the canal which branches off here--the Cannaregio--is the Labia, interesting chiefly as containing the masterpiece of Tiepolo, unless one agrees with Symonds that his picture of S. Agnes in SS. Apostoli is his greatest effort. So far as I am concerned, Tiepolo painted largely in vain. I can admire the firm decision of his drawing and his skill in composition, but I can never lose the feeling that his right place is the wall of a restaurant or a theater curtain. Still, since at the Palazzo Labia we find him decorating a banqueting hall with a secular subject, all is well. But first to get in, for the Labia, once so sumptuous, is now the home of a hundred poor families, and the daughter of the concierge whose duty it is to display the frescoes prefers play to work. For twenty minutes I waited in the gloomy, deserted hall while her father shuffles off in one direction and her mother in another, both calling "Emma!" "Emma!" with increasing degrees of fury. Small boys and girls joined in the hunt until the neighbourhood had no other sound. At last the little slovenly Emma was discovered, and having been well rated she fetched the key and led me up the grand staircase. Tiepolo chose two scenes from the life of Cleopatra, and there is no doubt that he could draw. In one the voluptuous queen is dissolving a pearl in a goblet of wine; in the other she and her infatuated Roman are about to embark in a splendid galley. The model for the wanton queen is said to have been a gondolier's daughter named Cristina in whom the painter found all the graces that his brush required. [Illustration: THE DREAM OF S. URSULA FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO _In the Accademia_] The frescoes, still in fair preservation, are masterly and aristocratic; but they have left on my mind no impressions that it is a pleasure to revive. Brilliant execution is not enough. Crossing the mouth of the Cannaregio we come to the Querini Palace, now yellow, plain, and ugly. A little campiello, a tiny ugly house and a calle, and we are opposite the Palazzo Contarini, or Lobbia, with brown poles on which a silver heart glistens. It is a huge place, now in part empty, with a pretty cable design at the corner. Next, a shady green garden and an attractive little house with a tiny roof loggia and terrace; then a yellow stucco house with a little portico under it, and then the Palazzo Gritti, now decayed and commonplace. A little house with a dog in relief on it and a pretty colonnade and fondamenta, and then the Palazzo Martinengo, or Mandelli, with that very rare thing in Venice, a public clock on the roof, and a garden. And so we reach the shabby S. Marcuola, her campo, traghetto, and steamer station. S. Marcuola, whose façade, having never been finished, is most ragged and miserable, is a poor man's church, visited by strangers for its early Titian and a "Last Supper" by Tintoretto. The Titian, which is dark and grimy, is quite pleasing, the infant Christ, who stands between S. Andrew and S. Catherine on a little pedestal, being very real and Venetian. There are, however, who deny Titian's authorship; Mr. Ricketts, for example, gives the picture to Francesco Vecellio, the painter's son. Tintoretto's "Last Supper," on the left of the high altar, is more convivial than is usual: there is plenty of food; a woman and children are coming in; a dog begs; Judas is noticeable. Opposite this picture is a rather interesting dark canvas blending seraphim and Italian architecture. Beside the church is the shop of a maker of oars, who may be seen very conscientiously running his eye along a new one. A neat and smiling little house comes next, with blue and white posts and an inscription stating that it was once the home of the architect Pellegrino Orefice; then a little house with pretty windows, now an "antichita"; then the Rio di S. Marcuola; and after a small and ugly little house with a courtyard that might be made very attractive, we come to the rich crumbling red wall of the garden of the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, which is notable as architecture, being one of the works of Pietro Lombardi, in 1481, and also as having once housed the noble Loredan family who produced more than one Doge. Many years later the Duchesse de Berry lived here; and, more interesting still, here died Richard Wagner. We have seen Wagner's earlier residence in Venice, in 1858-59; to this palace he came in the autumn of 1882, an old and feeble man. He was well enough to conduct a private performance of his Symphony in C at the Liceo Martello on Christmas Eve. He died quietly on the February 13th following, and was buried at Bayreuth. In D'Annunzio's Venetian novel _Il Fuoco_, called, in its English translation, _The Flame of Life_, is most curiously woven the personality of Wagner, his ideals and theories, and his life and death in this city. It was D'Annunzio who composed the tablet on the wall. The palace has an imposing but forbidding façade, and a new kind of lion peers over the balcony. On the façade is the motto "Non nobis, Domine." Another garden spreads before the new wing on the right, and a fine acacia-tree is over the gateway. Next is the Palazzo Marcello, and here too the Duchesse de Berry lived for a while. The next, with the little prophet's chamber on the façade and a fine Gothic window and balcony, is the fifteenth-century Erizzo. Then the Piovene, with fluted window pillars and marble decorations; then the Emo, another antiquity shop, with a fine view down the canal from its balcony. A traghetto is here, and then the Palazzo Molin, now a business house, and the Rio della Maddalena. The palace adjoining the Rio is the Barbaro, with an ancient relief on it representing little people being blessed by the Madonna; and then the Barbarigo, with remains of frescoes still to be seen, of which one of a goat and infant is pretty. It was the custom once to decorate all façades in this way, but these are now almost the only ones that remain. Now comes a very poor series of houses to the next rio, the Rio di Noale, the last being the Gussoni, or Grimani, with a nice courtyard seen through the door. It was once decorated with frescoes by Tintoretto. Looking along the Rio di Noale we see the Misericordia, and only a few yards up on the left is the Palazzo Giovanelli where Giorgione's "Tempest" may be seen. At the other corner is the pretty little Palazzo Lezze with a terrace and much greenery, and then the massive but commonplace Boldù palace, adjoining a decayed building on whose fondamenta are piled gondola coverings belonging to the traghetto. A fine carved column is at the corner of the calle, and next it the Palazzo Bonhomo, with two arches of a colonnade, a shrine and fondamenta. Then a nice house with a tumbled garden, and in spring purple wistaria and red Judas-trees, and then the Rio S. Felice and the immense but unimpressive Palazzo Fontana, built possibly by no less an architect than the great Sansovino. A massive head is over the door, and Pope Clement XIII was born here. A little green garden adjoins--the Giardinetto Infantile--and next is a boarded-up dolls' house, and next the Miani or Palazzo Coletti, with two busts on it, and then the lovely Ca' d'Oro, that exquisite riot of Gothic richness. The history of the Ca' d'Oro--or golden house, so called from the prevalence of gold in its ornamentation--is melancholy. It was built by the two Bons, or Buons, of the Doges' Palace for Pietro Contarini in 1425. It passed through various hands, always, one imagines, declining in condition, until at the end of the eighteenth century it was a dramatic academy, and in the middle of the last century the dancer Taglioni lived in it and not only made it squalid but sold certain of its treasures. Of its famous internal marble staircase, for example, no trace remains. Then, after probably more careless tenants, came Baron Franchetti with his wealth and zeal to restore such of its glories as he might, and although no haste is being employed, the good work continues. The palace is not open, but an obliging custodian is pleased to grow enthusiastic to visitors. Slowly but painstakingly the reconstruction proceeds. Painted ceilings are being put back, mosaic floors are being pieced together, cornices are taking the place of terrible papering and boarding: enough of all of the old having remained for the scheme to be faithfully completed. Stepping warily over the crazy floors of these vast rooms, one does not envy Taglioni when the Tramontana blew. She would have to dance then, if ever, or be cold indeed. The façade of the Ca' d'Oro is of course its greatest possession. Venice has nothing more satisfyingly ornate: richness without floridity. But let no one think to know all its beauty until he has penetrated to the little chapel and stood before Mantegna's S. Sebastian, that great simple work of art by an intellectual master. This noble painting, possibly the last from his brush, was found in Mantegna's studio after his death. Notice the smoking candle-wick at the foot, and the motto which says that everything that is not of God is as smoke evanescent. A steamboat station for passengers going towards the Rialto is opposite the Ca' d'Oro calle. Then comes the garden of the Palazzo Pesaro, now the Paraguay consulate; then the Sagredo, an extremely ancient Gothic building with a beautiful window and balcony, now badly served by paint and stucco and shutters; and then another traghetto at the Campo S. Sofia, with a vine ramping over its shelter. Stucco again injures the Palazzo Foscari, which has a pretty relief of the Madonna and Child; then we come to a calle and the Ca' d'Oro steamboat station for passengers going towards the railway. An ugly yellow building comes next, and then the fine dingy Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne with brown posts and ten columns, now the property of Count Antonio Donà dalle Rose, who permits visitors to see it in his absence. It is the first palace since we left the Scalzi that looks as if it were in rightful hands. The principal attraction is its tapestry, some of which is most charming, particularly a pattern of plump and impish cherubs among vines and grapes, which the cicerone boldly attributes to Rubens, but Baedeker to one of his pupils. Whoever the designer, he had an agreeable and robust fancy and a sure hand. The palace seems to have more rooms than its walls can contain, all possessing costly accessories and no real beauty. The bedroom of Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo is shown: his elaborate cradle with a stork presiding over it, surely a case of _trop de zèle_; pretty yellow painted furniture; and a few pictures, including a fine horseback portrait by Moretto, a Cima, a Giovanni Bellini, and the usual Longhis. But it is the riotous little spirits of the vintage that remain in the mind. After the Michiel dalle Colonne is a little newish house and the Gothic Palazzo Michiel da Brusà with blue posts with yellow stripes, rather overweighted with balconies but having nice ironwork; and then the comfortable-looking Mangilli Valmarana with blue posts with red and white tops, and the Rio dei SS. Apostoli with a view of the campanile along it. Next a dull white building with flush windows, and next that the fine and ancient Palazzo da Mosto. This house has many old sculptured slabs worked into the façade, and it seems a great pity that it should so have fallen from its proper state. An ugly modern iron balcony has been set beneath its Gothic windows. Adjoining is a house which also has pretty Gothic windows, and then the dull and neglected Palazzo Mocenigo, with brown posts. Then comes the Rio S. Gio. Crisostomo, and next it a house newly faced, and then the fascinating remains of the twelfth-century Palazzo Lion, consisting of an exposed staircase and a very attractive courtyard with round and pointed arches. It is now a rookery. Washing is hung in the loggia at the top, and ragged children lean from the windows. [Illustration: THE RIALTO BRIDGE FROM THE PALAZZO DEI DIECI SAVII] Next, a pretty little house which might be made very liveable in, facing the fruit market, and then the hideous modern Sernagiotto, dating from 1847 and therefore more than negligible. A green little house with a sottoportico under it, and then a little red brick prison and the ugly Civran palace is reached. Next, the Perducci, now a busy statuary store, and next it the Cà Ruzzini, all spick and span, and the Rio dell'Olio o del Fontego, through which come the fruit barges from Malamocco. And now we touch very interesting history again, for the next great building, with the motor-boats before it, now the central Post Office, is the very Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the head-quarters of German merchants in Venice, on whose walls Giorgione and Titian painted the famous frescoes and in which Tintoretto held a sinecure post. Giorgion's frescoes faced the Canal; Titian's the Rialto. And so we reach the Rialto bridge, on this side of which are no shrines, but a lion is on the keystone, and on each side is a holy man. After the Rialto bridge there is nothing of any moment for many yards, save a house with a high narrow archway which may be seen in Mr. Morley's picture, until we reach Sansovino's Palazzo Manin, now the Bank of Italy, a fine building and the home of the last Doge. The three steamboat stations hereabouts are for passengers for the Riva and Lido, for Mestre, and for the railway station, respectively. The palace next the Ponte Manin, over the Rio San Salvatore, is the Bembo, with very fine windows. Then the Calle Bembo, and then various offices on the fondamenta, under chiefly red façades. At the next calle is a traghetto and then the Palazzo Loredan, a Byzantine building of the eleventh or twelfth century, since restored. It has lovely arches. This and the next palace, the Farsetti, now form the Town Hall of Venice: hence the splendid blue posts and golden lions. In the vestibule are posted up the notices of engagements, with full particulars of the contracting parties--the celibi and the nubili. It was in the Farsetti that Canova acquired his earliest knowledge of sculpture, for he was allowed as a boy to copy the casts collected there. Another calle, the Cavalli, and then a comfortable-looking house with a roof garden and green and yellow posts, opposite which the fondamenta comes to an end. Fenimore Cooper, the novelist of the Red Man, made this palace his home for a while. The pretty little Palazzo Valmarana comes next, and then the gigantic, sombre Grimani with its stone as dark as a Bath or Bloomsbury mansion, which now is Venice's Court of Appeal. The architect was the famous Michele Sammicheli who also designed the Lido's forts. Then the Rio di S. Luca and the Palazzo Contarini, with rich blue posts with white rings, very striking, and two reliefs of horses on the façade. Next a very tiny pretty little Tron Palace; then a second Tron, and then the dreary Martinengo, now the Bank of Naples. In its heyday Titian was a frequent visitor here, its owner, Martino d'Anna, a Flemish merchant, being an intimate friend, and Pordenone painted its walls. Another calle and traghetto and we come to a very commonplace house, and then, after a cinematograph office and another calle, to the Palazzo Benzon, famous a hundred years ago for its literary and artistic receptions, and now spruce and modern with more of the striking blue posts, the most vivid on the canal. In this house Byron has often been; hither he brought Moore. It is spacious but tawdry, and its plate-glass gives one a shock. Then the Rio Michiel and then the Tornielli, very dull, the Curti, decayed, and the Rio dell'Albero. After the rio, the fine blackened Corner Spinelli with porphyry insets. At the steamboat station of S. Angelo are new buildings--one a very pretty red brick and stone, one with a loggia--standing on the site of the Teatro S. Angelo. After the Rio S. Angelo we come to a palace which I always admire: red brick and massive, with good Gothic windows and a bold relief of cupids at the top. It is the Garzoni Palace and now an antiquity dealer's. A calle and traghetto next, a shed with a shrine on its wall, a little neat modern house and the Palazzo Corner with its common new glass, and we are abreast the first of the three Mocenigo palaces, with the blue and white striped posts and gold tops, in the middle one of which Byron settled in 1818 and wrote _Beppo_ and began _Don Juan_ and did not a little mischief. CHAPTER XII THE GRAND CANAL. V: BYRON IN VENICE The beautiful Marianna--Rum-punch--The Palazzo Albrizzi--A play at the Fenice--The sick _Ballerina_--The gondola--Praise of Italy--_Beppo_--_Childe Harold_--Riding on the Lido--The inquisitive English--Shelley in Venice--_Julian and Maddalo_--The view from the Lido--The madhouse--The Ducal prisons. The name of Byron is so intimately associated with Venice that I think a brief account of his life there (so far as it can be told) might be found interesting. It was suggested by Madame de Flanhault that Byron was drawn to Venice not only by its romantic character, but because, since he could go everywhere by water, his lameness would attract less attention than elsewhere. Be that as it may, he arrived in Venice late in 1816, being then twenty-eight. He lodged first in the Frezzeria, and at once set to work upon employments so dissimilar as acquiring a knowledge of the Armenian language in the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro and making love to the wife of his landlord. But let his own gay pen tell the story. He is writing to Tom Moore on November 17, 1816: "It is my intention to remain at Venice during the winter, probably, as it has always been (next to the East) the greenest island of my imagination. It has not disappointed me; though its evident decay would, perhaps, have that effect upon others. But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation. Besides, I have fallen in love, which, next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use, as I can swim), is the best or the worst thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the house of a 'Merchant of Venice,' who is a good deal occupied with business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year. Marianna (that is her name) is in her appearance altogether like an antelope. She has the large, black, oriental eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among _Europeans_--even the Italians--and which many of the Turkish women give themselves by tinging the eyelid, an art not known out of that country, I believe. This expression she has _naturally_--and something more than this. In short--." The rest of this amour, and one strange scene to which it led, very like an incident in an Italian comedy, is no concern of this book. For those who wish to know more, it is to be found, in prose, in the Letters, and, in verse, in _Beppo_. On this his first visit to Venice, Byron was a private individual. He was sociable in a quiet way, attending one or two salons, but he was not splendid. And he seems really to have thrown himself with his customary vigour into his Armenian studies; but of those I speak elsewhere. They were for the day: in the evening, he tells Moore, "I do one of many nothings--either at the theatres, or some of the conversaziones, which are like our routs, or rather worse, for the women sit in a semi-circle by the lady of the mansion, and the men stand about the room. To be sure, there is one improvement upon ours--instead of lemonade with their ices, they hand about stiff _rum-punch_--_punch_, by my palate; and this they think _English_. I would not disabuse them of so agreeable an error,--'no, not for "Venice"'." The chief houses to which he went were the Palazzo Benzon and the Palazzo Albrizzi. Moore when in Venice a little later also paid his respects to the Countess Albrizzi. "These assemblies," he wrote home, "which, at a distance, sounded so full of splendour and gallantry to me, turned into something much worse than one of Lydia White's conversaziones." Here is one of Byron's rattling descriptions of a Venetian night. The date is December 27, 1816, and it is written to his publisher, Murray: "As the news of Venice must be very interesting to you, I will regale you with it. Yesterday being the feast of St. Stephen, every mouth was put in motion. There was nothing but fiddling and playing on the virginals, and all kinds of conceits and divertisements, on every canal of this aquatic city. "I dined with the Countess Albrizzi and a Paduan and Venetian party, and afterwards went to the opera, at the Fenice theatre (which opens for the Carnival on that day)--the finest, by the way, I have ever seen; it beats our theatres hollow in beauty and scenery, and those of Milan and Brescia bow before it. The opera and its Syrens were much like all other operas and women, but the subject of the said opera was something edifying; it turned--the plot and conduct thereof--upon a fact narrated by Livy of a hundred and fifty married ladies having _poisoned_ a hundred and fifty husbands in the good old times. The bachelors of Rome believed this extraordinary mortality to be merely the common effect of matrimony or a pestilence; but the surviving Benedicts, being all seized with the cholic, examined into the matter, and found that their possets had been drugged; the consequence of which was much scandal and several suits at law. "This is really and truly the subject of the Musical piece at the Fenice; and you can't conceive what pretty things are sung and recitativoed about the _horreda straga_. The conclusion was a lady's head about to be chopped off by a Lictor, but (I am sorry to say) he left it on, and she got up and sang a trio with the two Consuls, the Senate in the background being chorus. "The ballet was distinguished by nothing remarkable, except that the principal she-dancer went into convulsions because she was not applauded on her first appearance; and the manager came forward to ask if there was 'ever a physician in the theatre'. There was a Greek one in my box, whom I wished very much to volunteer his services, being sure that in this case these would have been the last convulsions which would have troubled the _Ballerina_; but he would not. "The crowd was enormous; and in coming out, having a lady under my arm, I was obliged in making way, almost to 'beat a Venetian and traduce the state,' being compelled to regale a person with an English punch in the guts which sent him as far back as the squeeze and the passage would admit. He did not ask for another; but with great signs of disapprobation and dismay, appealed to his compatriots, who laughed at him." Byron's first intention was to write nothing in Venice; but fortunately the idea of _Beppo_ came to him, and that masterpiece of gay recklessness and high-spirited imprudence sprang into life. The desk at which he wrote is still preserved in the Palazzo Mocenigo. From _Beppo_ I quote elsewhere some stanzas relating to Giorgione; and here are two which bear upon the "hansom of Venice," written when that vehicle was as fresh to Byron as it is to some of us:-- Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear You should not, I'll describe it you exactly: 'Tis a long covered boat that's common here, Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly. Rowed by two rowers, each call'd "Gondolier," It glides along the water looking blackly, Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe, Where none can make out what you say or do. And up and down the long canals they go, And under the Rialto shoot along, By night and day, all paces, swift or slow, And round the theatres, a sable throng, They wait in their dusk livery of woe,-- But not to them do woeful things belong, For sometimes they contain a deal of fun, Like mourning coaches when the funeral's done. Those useful ciceroni in Venice, the Signori Carlo and Sarri, seem to have had Byron's description in mind. "She is all black," they write of the gondola, "everything giving her a somewhat mysterious air, which awakens in one's mind a thousand various thoughts about what has happened, happens, or may happen beneath the little felze." It is pleasant to think that, no matter upon what other Italian experiences the sentiments were founded, the praise of Italy in the following stanzas was written in a room in the Mocenigo Palace, looking over the Grand Canal upon a prospect very similar to that which we see to-day:-- With all its sinful doings, I must say, That Italy's a pleasant place to me, Who love to see the Sun shine every day, And vines (not nailed to walls) from tree to tree, Festooned, much like the back scene of a play, Or melodrama, which people flock to see, When the first act is ended by a dance In vineyards copied from the South of France. I like on Autumn evenings to ride out, Without being forced to bid my groom be sure My cloak is round his middle strapped about, Because the skies are not the most secure; I know too that, if stopped upon my route, Where the green alleys windingly allure, Reeling with _grapes_ red wagons choke the way,-- In England 'twould be dung, dust or a dray. I also like to dine on becaficas, To see the Sun set, sure he'll rise to-morrow, Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow, But with all Heaven t'himself; the day will break as Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers Where reeking London's smoky cauldron simmers. I love the language, that soft bastard Latin Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, With syllables which breathe of the sweet South, And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in, That not a single accent seems uncouth, Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural, Which were obliged to hiss, and spit and sputter all. I like the women too (forgive my folly!), From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze, And large black eyes that flash on you a volley Of rays that say a thousand things at once, To the high Dama's brow, more melancholy, But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance, Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes, Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies. Byron's next visit to Venice was in 1818, and it was then that he set up state and became a Venetian lion. He had now his gondolas, his horses on the Lido, a box at the Opera, many servants. But his gaiety had left him. Neither in his letters nor his verse did he recapture the fun which we find in _Beppo_. To this second period belong such graver Venetian work (either inspired here or written here) as the opening stanzas of the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_. The first line takes the reader into the very heart of the city and is one of the best-known single lines in all poetry. Familiar as the stanzas are, it would be ridiculous to write of Byron in Venice without quoting them again:-- I stood in Venice, on the "Bridge of Sighs"; A Palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the Enchanter's wand: A thousand Years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles. She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from Ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers At airy distance, with majestic motion, A ruler of the waters and their powers: And such she was;--her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased. [Illustration: THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST FROM THE PAINTING BY CIMA _In the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora_] Byron wrote also, in 1818, an "Ode on Venice," a regret for its decay, in spirit not unlike the succeeding _Childe Harold_ stanzas which I do not here quote. Here too he planned _Marino Faliero_, talking it over with his guest, "Monk" Lewis. Another Venetian play of Byron's was _The Two Foscari_, and both prove that he attacked the old chronicles to some purpose and with all his brilliant thoroughness. None the less he made a few blunders, as when in _The Two Foscari_ there is an allusion to the Bridge of Sighs, which was not, as it happens, built for more than a century after the date of the play. No city, however alluring, could be Byron's home for long, and this second sojourn in Venice was not made any simpler by the presence of his daughter Ada. In 1819 he was away again and never returned. No one so little liked the idea of being rooted as he; at a blow the home was broken. The best account of Byron at this time is that which his friend Hoppner, the British Consul, a son of the painter, wrote to Murray. Hoppner not only saw Byron regularly at night, but used to ride with him on the Lido. "The spot," he says, "where we usually mounted our horses had been a Jewish cemetery; but the French, during their occupation of Venice, had thrown down the enclosure, and levelled all the tombstones with the ground, in order that they might not interfere with the fortifications upon the Lido, under the guns of which it was situated. To this place, as it was known to be that where he alighted from his gondola and met his horses, the curious amongst our country-people, who were anxious to obtain a glimpse of him, used to resort; and it was amusing in the extreme to witness the excessive coolness with which ladies, as well as gentlemen, would advance within a very few paces of him, eyeing him, some with their glasses, as they would have done a statue in a museum, or the wild beasts at Exeter 'Change. However flattering this might be to a man's vanity, Lord Byron, though he bore it very patiently, expressed himself, as I believe he really was, excessively annoyed at it. "The curiosity that was expressed by all classes of travellers to see him, and the eagerness with which they endeavoured to pick up any anecdotes of his mode of life, were carried to a length which will hardly be credited. It formed the chief subject of their inquiries of the gondoliers who conveyed them from _terra firma_ to the floating city; and these people who are generally loquacious, were not at all backward in administering to the taste and humours of their passengers, relating to them the most extravagant and often unfounded stories. They took care to point out the house where he lived, and to give such hints of his movements as might afford them an opportunity of seeing him. "Many of the English visitors, under pretext of seeing his house, in which there were no paintings of any consequence, nor, besides himself, anything worthy of notice, contrived to obtain admittance through the cupidity of his servants, and with the most barefaced impudence forced their way even into his bedroom, in the hopes of seeing him. Hence arose, in a great measure, his bitterness towards them, which he has expressed in a note to one of his poems, on the occasion of some unfounded remark made upon him by an anonymous traveller in Italy; and it certainly appears well calculated to foster that cynicism which prevails in his latter works more particularly, and which, as well as the misanthropical expressions that occur in those which first raised his reputation, I do not believe to have been his natural feeling. Of this I am certain, that I never witnessed greater kindness than in Lord Byron." Byron's note to which Hoppner alludes is in _Marino Faliero_. The conclusion of it is as follows: "The fact is, I hold in utter abhorrence any contact with the travelling English, as my friend the Consul General Hoppner and the Countess Benzoni (in whose house the Converzasione mostly frequented by them is held), could amply testify, were it worth while. I was persecuted by these tourists even to my riding ground at Lido, and reduced to the most disagreeable circuits to avoid them. At Madame Benzoni's I repeatedly refused to be introduced to them; of a thousand such presentations pressed upon me, I accepted two, and both were to Irish women." Shelley visited Byron at the Mocenigo Palace in 1818 on a matter concerning Byron's daughter Allegra and Claire Clairmont, whom the other poet brought with him. They reached Venice by gondola from Padua, having the fortune to be rowed by a gondolier who had been in Byron's employ and who at once and voluntarily began to talk of him, his luxury and extravagance. At the inn the waiter, also unprovoked, enlarged on the same alluring theme. Shelley's letter describing Byron's Venetian home is torn at its most interesting passage and we are therefore without anything as amusing and vivid as the same correspondent's account of his lordship's Ravenna ménage. Byron took him for a ride on the Lido, the memory of which formed the opening lines of _Julian and Maddalo_. Thus:-- I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; and yet more Than all, with a remembered friend I love To ride as then I rode;--for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening north; And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonizing with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aërial merriment. When the ride was over and the two poets were returning in Byron's (or Count Maddalo's) gondola, there was such an evening view as one often has, over Venice, and beyond, to the mountains. Shelley describes it:-- Paved with the image of the sky ... the hoar And aëry Alps towards the North appeared Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared Between the East and West; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills: they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido thro' the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles-- And then--as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. Browning never tired, says Mrs. Bronson, of this evening view from the Lido, and always held that these lines by Shelley were the best description of it. The poem goes on to describe a visit to the madhouse of S. Clemente and the reflections that arose from it. Towards the close Shelley says:-- If I had been an unconnected man I, from this moment, should have formed some plan Never to leave sweet Venice,--for to me It was delight to ride by the lone sea; And then, the town is silent--one may write Or read in gondolas by day or night, Having the little brazen lamp alight, Unseen, uninterrupted; books are there. Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair Which were twin-born with poetry, and all We seek in towns, with little to recall Regrets for the green country. Later in 1818 Mrs. Shelley joined her daughter in Venice, but it was a tragic visit, for their daughter Clara died almost immediately after they arrived. She is buried on the Lido. In a letter to Peacock, Shelley thus describes the city: "Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna, with its domes and turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves, is one of the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have--and literally it has--its foundations in the sea. The silent streets are paved with water, and you hear nothing but the dashing of the oars, and the occasional cries of the gondolieri. I heard nothing at Tasso. The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, and painted black, and carpeted with grey; they curl at the prow and stern, and at the former there is a nondescript beak of shining steel, which glitters at the end of its long black mass. "The Doge's Palace, with its library, is a fine monument of aristocratic power. I saw the dungeons, where these scoundrels used to torment their victims. They are of three kinds--one adjoining the place of trial, where the prisoners destined to immediate execution were kept. I could not descend into them, because the day on which I visited it was festa. Another under the leads of the palace, where the sufferers were roasted to death or madness by the ardours of an Italian sun: and others called the Pozzi--or wells, deep underneath, and communicating with those on the roof by secret passages--where the prisoners were confined sometimes half-up to their middles in stinking water. When the French came here, they found only one old man in the dungeons, and he could not speak." CHAPTER XIII THE GRAND CANAL. VI: FROM THE MOCENIGO PALACE TO THE MOLO, LOOKING TO THE LEFT Mr. W.D. Howells--A gondoliers' quarrel--Mr. Sargent's Diploma picture--The Barbarigo family--Ruskin's sherry--Palace hotels--The Venetian balcony. The next palace, with dark-blue posts, gold-topped, and mural inscriptions, also belonged to the Mocenigo, and here Giordano Bruno was staying as a guest when he was betrayed by his host and burned as a heretic. Then comes the dark and narrow Calle Mocenigo Casa Vecchia. Next is the great massive palace, with the square and round porphyry medallions, of the Contarini dalle Figure; the next, with the little inquisitive lions, is the Lezze. After three more, one of which is in a superb position at the corner, opposite the Foscari, and the third has a fondamenta and arcade, we come to the great Moro-Lin, now an antiquity store. Another little modest place between narrow calli, and the plain eighteenth-century Grassi confronts us. The Campo of S. Samuele, with its traghetto, church, and charming campanile, now opens out. The church has had an ugly brown house built against it. Then the Malipiero, with its tropical garden, pretty marble rail and brown posts, and then two more antiquity stores with hideous façades, the unfinished stonework on the side of the second of which, with the steps and sottoportico, was to have been a palace for the Duke of Milan, but was discontinued. Next the Rio del Duca is the pretty little Palazzo Falier, from one of whose windows Mr. Howells used to look when he was gathering material for his _Venetian Life_. Mr. Howells lived there in the early eighteen-sixties, when a member of the American Consulate in Venice. As to how he performed his consular duties, such as they were, I have no notion; but we cannot be too grateful to his country for appointing him to the post, since it provided him with the experiences which make the most attractive Anglo-Saxon book on Venice that has yet been written. It is now almost half a century since _Venetian Life_ was published, and the author is happily still hale. [Illustration: MADONNA AND SLEEPING CHILD FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Accademia_] It was not at the Palazzo Falier that Mr. Howells enjoyed the ministrations of that most entertaining hand-maiden Giovanna; but it was from here that he heard that quarrel between two gondoliers which he describes so vividly and which stands for every quarrel of every gondolier for all time. I take the liberty of quoting it here, because one gondolier's quarrel is essential to every book that hopes to suggest Venice to its readers, and I have none of my own worth recording. "Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the bows of their boats, with murderous looks, Con la test'alta e con rabbiosa fame. Sì che parea che l'aer ne temesse, and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each others' heads. "But the storm burst in words. "'Figure of a pig!' shrieked the Venetian, 'you have ruined my boat for ever!' "'Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!' returned the countryman, 'and it was my right to enter the canal first.' "They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_ of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of stone lime, while the countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the strange danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of insult: 'Ah-heigh! brutal executioner! Ah, hideous headsman!' Da capo. I now know that these people never intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter. But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it." I too have seen the beginning of many quarrels, chiefly on the water. But I have seen only two Venetians use their fists--and they were infants in arms. For the rest, except at traghetti and at the corners of canals, the Venetians are good-humoured and blessed with an easy smiling tolerance. Venice is the best place in the world, and they are in Venice, and there you are! Why lose one's temper? Next the Casa Falier is a calle, and then the great Giustinian Lolin Palace with brown and yellow posts. Taglioni lived here for a while too. Another calle, the Giustinian, a dull house with a garden and red and white striped posts, and we are at the Iron Bridge and the Campo S. Vitale, a small poor-people's church, with a Venetian-red house against it, and inside, but difficult to see, yet worth seeing, a fine picture by Carpaccio of a saint on horseback. The magnificent palace in good repair that comes next is the Cavalli, with a row of bronze dragons on the façade. This is the home of the Franchetti family, who have done so much for modern Venice, conspicuously, as we have seen, at the Cà d'Oro. Then the Rio dell'Orso o Cavana, and the Palazzo Barbaro with its orange and red striped posts, a beautiful room in which will be familiar to all visitors to the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, for it is the subject of one of Mr. Sargent's most astounding feats of dexterity. It is now the Venetian home of an American; and once no less a personage than Isabella d'Este lived in it very shortly after America was discovered. The older of the two Barbaro palaces is fourteenth century, the other, sixteenth. They will have peculiar interest to anyone who has read _La Vie d'un Patricien de Venise au XVI Siecle_, by Yriarte, for that fascinating work deals with Marcantonio Barbaro, who married one of the Giustiniani and lived here. Nothing of importance--a palace with red and gold posts and an antiquity store--before the next rio, the beautiful Rio del Santissimo o di Stefano; nor after this, until the calle and traghetto: merely two neglected houses, one with a fondamenta. And then a pension arises, next to which is one of the most coveted abodes in the whole canal--the little alluring house and garden that belong to Prince Hohenlohe. The majestic palace now before us is one of Sansovino's buildings, the Palazzo Corner della Cà Grande, now the prefecture of Venice. Opposite it is the beautiful Dario palace and the Venier garden. Next is the Rio S. Maurizio and then two dingy Barbarigo palaces, with shabby brown posts, once the home of a family very famous in Venetian annals. Marco Barbarigo was the first Doge to be crowned at the head of the Giants' Stairs; it was while his brother Agostino was Doge (1486-1501) that Venice acquired Cyprus, and its queen, Caterina Corner, visited this city to abdicate her throne. Cardinal Barbarigo, famous not only for his piety but for refusing to become Pope, was born in this house. Then the Rio S. Maria Zobenigo o dei Furlani and a palace, opposite the steamboat station. Another palace, and then a busy traghetto, with vine leaves over its shelter, and looking up the campo we see the church of S. Maria del Giglio with all its holy statues. Ruskin (who later moved to the Zattre) did most of his work on _The Stones of Venice_ in the house which is now the Palazzo Swift, an annexe of the Grand Hotel, a little way up this campo. Here he lived happily with his young wife and toiled at the minutiæ of his great book; here too he entertained David Roberts and other artists with his father's excellent sherry, which they described as "like the best painting, at once tender and expressive". And now the hotels begin, almost all of them in houses built centuries ago for noble families. Thus the first Grand Hotel block is fourteenth century--the Palazzo Gritti. The next Grand Hotel block is the Palazzo Fini and is seventeenth century, and the third is the Manolesso-Ferro, built in the fourteenth century and restored in the nineteenth. Then comes the charming fourteenth-century Contarini-Fasan Palace, known as the house of Desdemona, which requires more attention. The upper part seems to be as it was: the water floor, or sea storey, has evidently been badly botched. Its glorious possession is, however, its balconies, particularly the lower. Of the Grand Canal balconies, the most beautiful of which is, I think, that which belongs to this little palace, no one has written more prettily than that early commentator, Coryat. "Again," he says, "I noted another thing in these Venetian Palaces that I have very seldome seen in England, and it is very little used in any other country that I could perceive in my travels, saving only in Venice and other Italian cities. Somewhere above the middle of the front of the building, or (as I have observed in many of their Palaces) a little beneath the toppe of the front they have right opposite to their windows, a very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building, the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers, either of marble or free stone to leane over. These kinds of tarrasses or little galleries of pleasure Suetonius calleth Meniana. They give great grace to the whole edifice, and serve only for this purpose, that people may from that place as from a most delectable prospect contemplate and view the parts of the City round about them in the coole evening."--No modern description could improve on the thoroughness of that. Next is the pretty Barozzi Wedmann Palace, with its pointed windows, said to be designed by Longhena, who built the great Salute church opposite, and then the Hotel Alexandra, once the Palazzo Michiel. For the rest, I may say that the Britannia was the Palazzo Tiepolo; the Grand Hotel de l'Europe was yet another Giustiniani palace; while the Grand Canal Hotel was the Vallaresso. The last house of all before the gardens is the office of the Harbour Master; the little pavilion at the corner of the gardens belongs to the yacht club called the Bucintoro, whose boats are to be seen moored between here and the Molo, and whose members are, with those of sculling clubs on the Zattere and elsewhere, the only adult Venetians to use their waters for pleasure. As for the Royal Palace, it is quite unworthy and a blot on the Venetian panorama as seen from the Customs House or S. Giorgio Maggiore, or as one sees it from the little Zattere steamboat as the Riva opens up on rounding the Punta di Dogana. Amid architecture that is almost or quite magical it is just a common utilitarian façade. But that it was once better can be seen in one of the Guardis at the National Gallery, No. 2099. Finally we have Sansovino's mint, now S. Mark's Library, with the steamboat bridge for passengers for the Giudecca and the Zattere in front of it, and then the corner of the matchless Old Library, and the Molo with all its life beneath the columns. And now that we have completed the voyage of the Grand Canal, each way, let me remind the reader that although the largest palaces were situated there, they are not always the best. All over Venice are others as well worth study. CHAPTER XIV ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. I: MURANO, BURANO AND TORCELLO The Campo Santo--The Vivarini--The glass-blowers--An artist at work--S. Pietro--A good Bellini--A keen sacristan--S. Donato--A foreign church--An enthusiast--Signor "Rooskin"--The blue Madonna--The voyage to Burano--The importunate boatman--A squalid town--The pretty lace workers--Torcello--A Christian exodus--Deserted temples--The bishop's throne--The Last Judgment--The stone shutters--The Porto di Lido. The cheap way to Murano is by the little penny steamer from the Fondamenta Nuova. This side of Venice is poor and squalid, but there is more fun here than anywhere else, for on Sundays the boys borrow any kind of craft that can be obtained and hold merry little regattas, which even those sardonic officials, the captains of the steamboats, respect: stopping or easing down so as to interfere with no event. But one should go to Murano by gondola, and go in the afternoon. Starting anywhere near the Molo, this means that the route will be by the Rio del Palazzo, under the Ponte di Paglia and the Bridge of Sighs, between the Doges' Palace and the prison; up the winding Rio di S. Maria Formosa, and then into the Rio dei Mendicanti with a glimpse of the superb Colleoni statue and SS. Giovanni e Paoli and the lions on the Scuola of S. Mark; under the bridge with a pretty Madonna on it; and so up the Rio dei Mendicanti, passing on the left a wineyard with two graceful round arches in it and then a pleasant garden with a pergola, and then a busy squero with men always at work on gondolas new or old. And so beneath a high bridge to the open lagoon, with the gay walls and sombre cypresses of the cemetery immediately in front and the island of Murano beyond. Many persons stop at the Campo Santo, but there is not much profit in so doing unless one is a Blair or an Ashton. Its cypresses are more beautiful from the water than close at hand, and the Venetian tombstones dazzle. Moreover, there are no seats, and the custodian insists upon abstracting one's walking-stick. I made fruitless efforts to be directed to the English section, where among many graves of our countrymen is that of the historical novelist, G.P.R. James. [Illustration: THE RIO TORRESELLE AND BACK OF THE PALAZZO DARIO] Murano is interesting in art as being the home of that early school of painting in which the Vivarini were the greatest names, which supplied altar-pieces for all the Venetian churches until the Bellini arrived from Padua with more acceptable methods. The invaders brought in an element of worldly splendour hitherto lacking. From the concentrated saintliness of the Vivarini to the sumptuous assurance of Titian is a far cry, yet how few the years that intervened! To-day there are no painters in Murano; nothing indeed but gardeners and glass-blowers, and the island is associated purely with the glass industry. Which is the most interesting furnace, I know not, for I have always fallen to the first of all, close to the landing stage, and spent there several amusing half-hours, albeit hotter than the innermost pit. Nothing ever changes there: one sees the same artificers and the same routine; the same flames rage; glass is the same mystery, beyond all conjuring, so ductile and malleable here, so brittle and rigid everywhere else. There you sit, or stand, some score of visitors, while the wizards round the furnace busily and incredibly convert molten blobs of anything (you would have said) but glass into delicate carafes and sparkling vases. Meanwhile the sweat streams from them in rivulets, a small Aquarius ever and anon fetches tumblers of water from a tap outside or glasses of red wine, and a soft voice at your ear, in whatever language you happen to be, supplies a commentary on the proceedings. Beware of listening to it with too much interest, for it is this voice which, when the glass-blowing flags, is proposing to sell you something. The "entrance" may be "free," but the exit rarely is so. Let me describe a particular feat. After a few minutes, in sauntered a little lean detached man with a pointed beard and a long cigar, who casually took from a workman in the foreground a hollow iron rod, at the end of which was a more than commonly large lump of the glowing mass. This he whirled a little, by a rotatory movement of the rod between the palms of his hands, and then again dipped it into the heart of the flames, fetching it out more fiery than ever and much augmented. This too he whirled, blowing down the pipe first (but without taking his cigar from his mouth) again and again, until the solid lump was a great glistening globe. The artist--for if ever there was an artist it is he--carried on this exhausting task with perfect nonchalance, talking and joking with the others the while, but never relaxing the concentration of his hands, until there came a moment when the globe was broken from the original rod and fixed in some magical way to another. Again it went into the furnace, now merely for heat and not for any accretion of glass, and coming out, behold it was a bowl; and so, with repeated visits to the flames, on each return wider and shallower, it eventually was finished as an exact replica of the beautiful greeny-blue flower-dish on a neighbouring table. The artist, still smoking, then sauntered out again for fresh air, and was seen no more for a while. But one should not be satisfied with the sight of the fashioning of a bowl or goblet, however interesting the process may be; but entering the gondola again should insist upon visiting both S. Pietro Martire and S. Donato, even if the gondolier, as is most probable, will affirm that both are closed. The first named is on the left of the canal by which we enter Murano, and which for a while is bordered by glass factories as close together as doctors in Harley Street. The church architecturally is nothing; its value is in its pictures, especially a Bellini and a Basaiti, and its sacristan. This sacristan has that simple keenness which is a rarity in Venice. He rejoices in his church and in your pleasure in it. He displays first the Bellini--a Madonna with the strong protective Bellini hands about the child, above them bodiless cherubim flying, and on the right a delectable city with square towers. The Basaiti is chiefly notable for what, were it cleaned, would be a lovely landscape. Before both the sacristan is ecstatic, but on his native heath, in the sacristy itself, he is even more contented. It is an odd room, with carvings all around it in which sacred and profane subjects are most curiously mingled: here John the Baptist in the chief scenes of his life, even to imprisonment in a wooden cage, into which the sacristan slips a delighted expository hand, and there Nero, Prometheus, Bacchus, and Seneca without a nose. Re-entering the gondola, escorted to it by hordes of young Muranese, we move on to the Grand Canal of the island, a noble expanse of water. After turning first to the right and then to the left, and resisting an invitation to enter the glass museum, we disembark, beside a beautiful bridge, at the cathedral, which rises serenely from the soil of its spacious campo. The exterior of S. Donato is almost more foreign looking than that of S. Mark's, although within S. Mark's is the more exotic. The outside wall of S. Donato's apse, which is the first thing that the traveller sees, is its most beautiful architectural possession and utterly different from anything in Venice: an upper and a lower series of lovely, lonely arches, empty and meaningless in this Saharan campo, the fire of enthusiasm which flamed in their original builders having died away, and this corner of the island being almost depopulated, for Murano gathers now about its glass-works on the other side of its Grand Canal. Hence the impression of desertion is even less complete than at Torcello, where one almost necessarily visits the cathedral in companies twenty to fifty strong. At the door, to which we are guided by a boy or so who know that cigarettes are thrown away at sacred portals, is the sacristan, an aged gentleman in a velvet cap who has a fuller and truer pride in his fane than any of his brothers in Venice yonder. With reason too, for this basilica is so old as to make many Venetian churches mere mushrooms, and even S. Mark's itself an imitation in the matter of inlaid pavement. Speaking slowly, with the perfection of enunciation, and burgeoning with satisfaction, the old fellow moves about the floor as he has done so many thousand times, pointing out this beauty and that, above and below, without the faintest trace of mechanism. In course of time, when he is fully persuaded that we are not only English but worthy of his secret, it comes out that he had the priceless privilege of knowing Signor "Rooskin" in the flesh, and from his pocket he draws a copy of _The Stones of Venice_, once the property of one Constance Boyle, but now his own. This he fondles, for though the only words in his own chapters that he can understand are "Murano" and "Donato," yet did not his friend the great Signor Rooskin write it, and what is more, spend many, many days in careful examination of everything here before he wrote it? For that is what most appeals to the old gentleman: the recognition of his S. Donato as being worthy of such a study. The floor is very beautiful, and there is a faded series of saints by one of the Vivarini of Murano, behind the altar, on which the eye rests very comfortably--chiefly perhaps on the panels which are only painted curtains; but the most memorable feature of the cathedral is the ancient Byzantine mosaic of the Madonna--a Greek Madonna--in the hollow of the apse: a long slender figure in blue against a gold background who holds her hands rather in protest than welcome, and is fascinating rather for the piety which set her there with such care and thought to her glory than for her beauty. Signor Rooskin, it is true, saw her as a symbol of sadness, and some of the most exquisite sentences of "The Stones of Venice" belong to her; but had her robe been of less lovely hues it is possible that he might have written differently. When the church was built, probably in the tenth century, the Virgin was its patron saint. S. Donato's body being brought hither by Doge Domenico Michiel (1118-1130), the church was known as Santa Maria, or San Donato; and to-day it is called S. Donato. And when the time comes for the old sacristan to die, I hope (no matter what kind of a muddle his life has been) that S. Donato will be at hand, near the gate, to pull him through, for sheer faithfulness to his church. The gondola returns by the same route, and as we pass the Campo Santo the rays of the afternoon sun seem so to saturate its ruddy walls that they give out light of their own. It is in order to pass slowly beneath these walls and cypresses that I recommend the gondola as the medium for a visit to Murano. But the penny steamers go to a pier close to S. Donato and are frequent. Murano is within every visitor's range, no matter how brief his stay, but Burano is another matter. The steamer which sails from the pier opposite Danieli's on all fine afternoons except Sundays and holidays requires four hours; but if the day be fine they are four hours not to be forgotten. The way out is round the green island of S. Elena, skirting the Arsenal, the vastness of which is apparent from the water, and under the north wall of Murano, where its pleasant gardens spread, once so gay with the Venetian aristocracy but now the property of market gardeners and lizards. Then through the channels among the shallows, north, towards the two tall minarets in the distance, the one of Burano, the other of Torcello. Far away may be seen the Tyrolean Alps, with, if it is spring, their snow-clad peaks poised in the air; nearer, between us and the islands, is a military or naval station, and here and there yellow and red sail which we are to catch and pass. Venice has nothing more beautiful than her coloured sails, both upon the water and reflected in it. The entrance to Burano is by a long winding canal, which at the Campo Santo, with its battered campanile and sentinel cypress at the corner, branches to left and right--left to Torcello and right to Burano. Here the steamer is surrounded by boatmen calling seductively in their soft rich voices "Goon-dola! Goon-dola!" their aim, being to take the visitor either to the cypress-covered island of S. Francesco in Deserto where S. Francis is believed to have taken refuge, or to Torcello, to allow of a longer stay there than this steamer permits; and unless one is enamoured of such foul canals and importunate children as Burano possesses it is well to listen to this lure. But Burano has charms, notwithstanding its dirt. Its squalid houses are painted every hue that the prism knows, and through the open doors are such arrays of copper and brass utensils as one associates with Holland. Every husband is a fisherman; every wife a mother and a lace maker, as the doorways bear testimony, for both the pillow and the baby in arms are punctually there for the procession of visitors to witness. Whether they would be there did not the word go round that the steamer approached, I cannot say, but here and there the display seems a thought theatrical. Meanwhile in their boats in the canals, or on the pavement mending nets, are the Burano men. Everybody is dirty. If Venice is the bride of the Adriatic, Burano is the kitchen slut. [Illustration: VENUS, RULER OF THE WORLD FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Accademia_] Yet there is an oasis of smiling cleanliness, and that is the chief sight of the place--the Scuola Merletti, under the patronage of Queen Margherita, the centre of the lace-making industry. This building, which is by the church, is, outside, merely one more decayed habitation. You pass within, past the little glass box of the custodian, whose small daughter is steering four inactive snails over the open page of a ledger, and ascend a flight of stairs, and behold you are in the midst of what seem to be thousands of girls in rows, each nursing her baby. On closer inspection the babies are revealed to be pillows held much as babies are held, and every hand is busy with a bobbin (or whatever it is), and every mouth seems to be munching. Passing on, you enter another room--if the first has not abashed you--and here are thousands more. Pretty girls too, some of them, with their black massed hair and olive skins, and all so neat and happy. Specimens of their work, some of it of miraculous delicacy, may be bought and kept as a souvenir of a most delightful experience. For the rest, the interest of Burano is in Burano itself in the aggregate; for the church is a poor gaudy thing and there is no architecture of mark. And so, fighting one's way through small boys who turn indifferent somersaults, and little girls whose accomplishment is to rattle clogged feet and who equally were born with an extended hand, you rejoin the steamer. Torcello is of a different quality. Burano is intensely and rather shockingly living; Torcello is nobly dead. It is in fact nothing but market gardens, a few houses where Venetian sportsmen stay when they shoot duck and are royally fed by kitcheners whose brass and copper make the mouth water, and a great forlorn solitary cathedral. History tells us that in the sixth century, a hundred and more years after the flight of the mainlanders to Rialto and Malamocco, another exodus occurred, under fear of Alboin and the invading Lombards, this time to Torcello. The way was led by the clergy, and quickly a church was built to hearten the emigrants. Of this church there remain the deserted buildings before us, springing from the weeds, but on a scale which makes simple realization of the populousness of the ancient colony. The charming octagonal little building on the right with its encircling arcade is the church of S. Fosca, now undergoing very thorough repair: in fact everything that a church can ask is being restored to it, save religion. No sea cave could be less human than these deserted temples, given over now to sightseers and to custodians who demand admittance money. The pit railed in on the left before the cathedral's west wall is in the ancient baptistery, where complete immersion was practised. The cathedral within is remarkable chiefly for its marble throne high up in the apse, where the bishop sat with his clergy about him on semi-circular seats gained by steps. Above them are mosaics, the Virgin again, as at S. Donato, in the place of honour, but here she is given her Son and instantly becomes more tender. The twelve apostles attend. On the opposite wall is a quaint mosaic of the Last Judgment with the usual sharp division of parties. The floor is very beautiful in places, and I have a mental picture of an ancient and attractive carved marble pulpit. The vigorous climb the campanile, from which, as Signor Rooskin says, may be seen Torcello and Venice--"Mother and Daughter ... in their widowhood." Looking down, it is strange indeed to think that here once were populous streets. On the way to the campanile do not forget to notice the great stone shutters of the windows of the cathedral; which suggest a security impossible to be conveyed by iron. No easy task setting these in their place and hinging them. What purpose the stone arm-chair in the grass between the baptistery and S. Fosca served is not known. One guide will have it the throne of Attila; another, a seat of justice. Be that as it may, tired ladies can find it very consoling in this our twentieth century. For antiquaries there is a museum of excavated relics of Torcello; but with time so short it is better to wander a little, seeking for those wild flowers which in England are objects of solicitude to gardeners, or watching butterflies that are seen in our country only when pinned on cork. The return voyage leaves S. Francesco in Deserto on the right, with the long low Lido straight ahead. Then we turn to the right and the Lido is on the left for most of the way to Venice. After a mile or so the mouth of the Adriatic is passed, where the Doge dropped his ring from the Bucintoro and thus renewed the espousals. On the day which I have in mind two airships were circling the city, and now and then the rays of the sun caught their envelopes and turned them to silver. Beneath, the lagoon was still as a pond; a few fishing boats with yellow sails lay at anchor near the Porto di Lido, like brimstone butterflies on a hot stone; and far away the snow of the Tyrolean alps still hung between heaven and earth. CHAPTER XV ON FOOT. I: FROM THE PIAZZA TO S. STEFANO The Ridotto--The Fenice Theatre--The Goldoni Theatre--_Amleto_--A star part--S. Zobenigo--S. Stefano--Cloisters--Francesco Morosini--A great soldier--Nicolò Tommaseo--The Campo Morosini--Red hair. Leaving the Piazza at the corner diagonally opposite the Merceria clock, we come at once into the busy Salizzada S. Moïse, where the shops for the more expensive tourists are to be found. A little way on the right is the beginning of the Frezzeria, a Venetian shopping centre second only to the Merceria. A little way on the left is the Calle del Ridotto where, divided now into a cinema theatre, auction rooms, a restaurant, and the Grand Canal Hotel, is the once famous Ridotto of which Casanova has much to tell. Here were held masquerades; here were gambling tables; hither Venice resorted to forget that she had ever been great and to make sure that she should be great no longer. The Austrians suppressed it. The church of S. Moïse, with its very florid façade of statuary, has little of interest in it. Keeping with the stream and passing the Bauer-Grünwald restaurant on the left, we come in a few minutes to a bridge--the Ponte delle Ostreghe (or Oysters)--over a rio at the end of which, looking to the right, we see the great Venetian theatre, the Fenice. The Fenice is, I suppose, the most romantic theatre in the world, for the simple reason that the audience, at any rate those who occupy the boxes, all arrive in boats. Before it is a basin for the convenience of navigation, but even with that the confusion on a gala night must be excessive, and a vast space of time must divide the first comers from the last, if the last are to be punctual. And when one translates our own difficulties over cars and cabs at the end of a performance into the terms of gondolas and canals, one can imagine how long it must be before the theatre is emptied. The Fenice is also remarkable among the world's theatres for its size, holding, as it does, three thousand persons. It is peculiar furthermore in being open only for a few weeks in the spring. I have not been to the Fenice, but I once attended a performance of _Amleto_ by "G. Shakespeare" in the Goldoni. It is the gayest of theatres, and the most intimate, for all save the floor and a trifling space under the flat ceiling is boxes; one hundred and twenty-three little ones and eight big ones, each packed with Venetians who really do enjoy a play while it is in progress, and really do enjoy every minute of the interval while it is not. When the lights are up they eat and chatter and scrutinize the other boxes; when the lights are down they follow the drama breathlessly and hiss if any one dares to whisper a word to a neighbour. As for the melancholy Prince of Danimarca, he was not my conception of the part, but he was certainly the Venetians'. Either from a national love of rhetoric, or a personal fancy of the chief actor for the centre of the stage, or from economical reasons, the version of "G. Shakespeare's" meritorious tragedy which was placed before us was almost wholly monologue. Thinking about it now, I can scarcely recall any action on the part of the few other characters, whereas Amleto's millions of rapid words still rain uncomprehended on my ears, and I still see his myriad grimaces and gestures. It was like _Hamlet_ very unintelligently arranged for a very noisy cinema, and watching it I was conscious of what a vast improvement might be effected in many plays if the cinema producer as well as the author attended the rehearsals. But to the Venetians this was as impressive and entertaining a Hamlet as could be wished, and four jolly Jack-tars from one of the men-of-war in the lagoon nearly fell out of their private box in their delight, and after each of the six atti Amleto was called several times through the little door in the curtain. Nor did he fail to respond. About the staging of the play there was a right Shakespearian parsimony. If all the scenery and costumes cost twenty-five pounds, I am surprised. No attempt was made to invest "lo spettro del padre del Amleto" with supernatural graces. He merely walked on sideways, a burly, very living Italian, and with a nervous quick glance, to see if he was clearing the wing (which he sometimes did not), off again. So far as the Goldoni is concerned, Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir Augustus Harris, and Herr Reinhardt have toiled in vain. Amleto's principle, "The play's the thing," was refined down to "Amleto's the thing". Yet no English theatre was ever in better spirits. [Illustration: THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN FROM THE PAINTING BY TITIAN _In the Accademia_] Continuing from the Bridge of the Oysters, we come shortly to S. Zobenigo, or S. Maria del Giglio (of the lily), of which the guide-books take very little account, but it is a friendly, cheerful church with a sweet little dark panelled chapel at the side, all black and gold with rich tints in its scriptural frieze. The church is not famous for any picture, but it has a quaint relief of S. Jerome in his cell, with his lion and his books about him, in the entrance hall, and the first altar-piece on the left seemed to me a pleasant soft thing, and over the door are four female saints freely done. On the façade are stone maps of Zara, Candia, Padua, Rome, Corfu, and Spalata, which originally were probably coloured and must then have been very gay, and above are stone representations of five naval engagements. All that remains of S. Zobenigo's campanile is the isolated structure in the Piazza. It did not fall but was taken down in time. Still following the stream and maintaining as direct a line as the calli permit, we come, by way of two more bridges, a church (S. Maurizio), and another bridge, to the great Campo Morosoni where S. Stefano is situated. For sheer comfort and pleasure I think that S. Stefano is the first church in Venice. It is spacious and cheerful, with a charming rosetted ceiling and carved and coloured beams across the nave, and a bland light illumines all. It is remarkable also as being one of the very few Venetian churches with cloisters. Here one may fancy oneself in Florence if one has the mind. The frescoes are by Pordenone, but they have almost perished. By some visitors to Venice, S. Stefano may be esteemed furthermore as offering a harbour of refuge from pictures, for it has nothing that need be too conscientiously scrutinized. The fine floor tomb with brass ornaments is that of Francesco Morosoni, the heroic defender of Candia against the Turks until, in 1669, further resistance was found to be useless and he made an honourable retreat. Later he was commander of the forces in a new war against the Turks, and in 1686 he was present at the sack of Athens and did what he could (being a lover of the arts as well as a soldier) to check the destroying zeal of his army. It was there that he at last fulfilled his dreams of conquering the Morea. It was while he was conducting this campaign that the Doge Marcantonio Giustinian died, and Morosoni being elected in his place was crowned on his battleship at Porto Porro in Cephalonia. The carousals of the army and navy lasted for three days, at the new Doge's cost, the resources of the fleet having no difficulty in running to every kind of pageantry and pyrotechny. Returning to Venice, after the somewhat inglorious end of his campaign, Morosoni was again crowned. Although a sick man when a year or so later a strong hand was again needed in the Morea, the Doge once more volunteered and sailed from the Lido with the fleet. But he was too old and too infirm, and he died in Nauplia in 1694. Venice was proud of him, and with reason; for he won back territory for her (although she was not able to keep it), and he loved her with a pure flame. But he was behind his time: he was an iron ruler, and iron rule was out of date. The new way was compromise and pleasure. The marble lions that now guard the gate of the Arsenal were saved and brought home by Morosoni, as his great fighting ducal predecessor Enrico Dandolo had in his day of triumph brought trophies from Constantinople. The careers of the two men are not dissimilar; but Morosoni was a child beside Dandolo, for at his death he was but seventy-six. The campo in front of S. Stefano bears Morosoni's name, but the statue in the midst is not that of General Booth, as the English visitor might think, but of Niccolò Tommaseo (1802-1874), patriot and author and the ally of Daniele Manin. This was once a popular arena for bull-fights, but there has not been one in Venice for more than a hundred years. Morosoni's palace, once famous for its pictures, is the palace on the left (No. 2802) as we leave the church for the Accademia bridge. Opposite is another ancient palace, now a scholastic establishment with a fine Neptune knocker. Farther down on the left is a tiny campo, across which is the vast Palazzo Pisani, a very good example of the decay of Venice, for it is now a thousand offices and a conservatory of music. Outside S. Vitale I met, in the space of one minute, two red-haired girls, after seeking the type in vain for days; and again I lost it. But certain artists, when painting in Venice, seem to see little else. And now, being close to the iron bridge which leads to the door of the Accademia, let us see some pictures. CHAPTER XVI THE ACCADEMIA. I: TITIAN, TINTORETTO, AND PAUL VERONESE The important rooms--Venetian art in London--The ceiling of the thousand wings--Some early painters--Titian's "Assumption"--Tintoretto's "Miracle of S. Mark"--A triumph of novelty--The Campanile miracle--Altar-pieces--Paul Veronese--Leonardo drawings--Indifferent works--Jesus in the house of Levi--A painter on his trial--Other Tintorettos--Another miracle of S. Mark--Titian's last painting. The Accademia, which is to Venice what the National Gallery is to London, the Louvre to Paris, and the Uffizi to Florence, is, I may say, at once, as a whole a disappointment; and my advice to visitors is to disregard much of it absolutely. The reasons why Rooms II, IV, IX, X, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX alone are important are two. One is that so wide a gulf is fixed between the best Venetian painters--Bellini, Titian, Carpaccio, Giorgione (but he is not represented here), Palma, Tintoretto, Veronese, and the next best; and the other, that Venetian painting of the second order is rarely interesting. In the Tuscan school an effort to do something authentic or arresting persists even to the fifth and sixth rank of painter; but not so here. Were it not for the Accademia's Tintorettos, Carpaccios and Bellinis, our own Venetian collection in Trafalgar Square would be much more interesting; and even as it is we have in "The Origin of the Milky Way" a Tintoretto more fascinating than any here; in "Bacchus and Ariadne" a more brilliant Titian than any here; some Bellinis, such as "The Agony in the Garden," the portrait of Loredano, and "The Death of S. Peter Martyr," that challenge his best here; two Giorgiones and several pictures notably of his school that cannot be matched here; the finest Catena that exists; a more charming Basaiti than any here; a better Antonello da Messina; and, according to some judges, the best Paul Veronese in the world: "The House of Darius"; while when it comes to Carlo Crivelli, he does not exist here at all. But it has to be remembered that one does not go to Venice to see pictures. One goes to see Venice: that is to say, an unbelievable and wonderful city of spires and palaces, whose streets are water and whose sunsets are liquid gold. Pictures, as we use the word, meaning paintings in frames on the wall, as in the National Gallery or the Louvre, are not among its first treasures. But in painting as decoration of churches and palaces Venice is rich indeed, and by anyone who would study the three great Venetian masters of that art--Tintoretto, Titian and Paul Veronese--it must not only be visited but haunted. Venice alone can prove to the world what giants these men--and especially Tintoretto--could be when given vast spaces to play with; and since they were Venetians it is well that we should be forced to their well-beloved and well-served city to learn it. Let us walk through the Accademia conscientiously, but let us dwell only in the rooms I have selected. The first room (with a fine ceiling which might be called the ceiling of the thousand wings, around which are portraits of painters ranged like the Doges in the great council halls) belongs to the very early men, of whom Jacobello del Fiore (1400-1439) is the most agreeable. It was he who painted one of the two lions that we saw in the museum of the Doges' Palace, the other and better being Carpaccio's. To him also is given, by some critics, the equestrian S. Chrysogonus, in S. Trovaso. His Accademia picture, on the end wall, is strictly local, representing Justice with her lion and S. Michael and S. Gabriel attending. It is a rich piece of decoration and you will notice that it grows richer on each visit. Two other pictures in this room that I like are No. 33, a "Coronation of the Virgin," painted by Michele Giambono in 1440, making it a very complete ceremony, and No. 24, a good church picture with an entertaining predella, by Michele di Matteo Lambertini (died 1469). The "Madonna and Child" by Bonconsiglio remains gaily in the memory too. No doubt about the Child being the Madonna's own. Having finished with this room, one ought really to make directly for Room XVII, although it is a long way off, for that room is given to Giovanni Bellini, and Giovanni Bellini was the instructor of Titian, and Tintoretto was the disciple of Titian, and thus, as we are about to see Titian and Tintoretto at their best here, we should get a line of descent. But I reserve the outline of Venetian painting until the Bellinis are normally reached. [Illustration: THE MIRACLE OF S. MARK FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO _In the Accademia_] The two great pictures of this next room are Titian's "Assumption" and Tintoretto's "Miracle of S. Mark," reproduced opposite page 164, and this one. I need hardly say that it is the Titian which wins the rapture and the applause; but the other gives me personally more pleasure. The Titian is massive and wonderful: perhaps indeed too massive in the conception of the Madonna, for the suggestion of flight is lacking; but it has an earthiness, even a theatricalness, which one cannot forget, superb though that earthiness may be. The cherubs, however, commercial copies of which are always being made by diligent artists, are a joy. The Titians that hang in the gallery of my mind are other than this. A Madonna and Child and a rollicking baby at Vienna: our own "Bacchus and Ariadne"; the Louvre "Man with a Glove": these are among them; but the "Assumption" is not there. Tintoretto's great picture of the "Miracle of S. Mark" was painted between 1544 and 1548, before he was thirty. The story tells that a pious slave, forbidden by his master to visit and venerate the house of S. Mark, disobeyed the command and went. As a punishment his master ordered him to be blinded and maimed; but the hands of the executioners were miraculously stayed and their weapons refused to act. The master, looking on, was naturally at once converted. Tintoretto painted his picture of this incident for the Scuola of S. Mark (now a hospital); but when it was delivered, the novelty of its dramatic vigour--a palpitating actuality almost of the cinema--was too much for the authorities. The coolness of their welcome infuriated the painter, conscious as he was that he had done a great thing, and he demanded the work back; but fortunately there were a few good judges to see it first, and their enthusiasm carried the day. Very swiftly the picture became a wonder of the city. Thus has it always been with the great innovators in art, except that Tintoretto's triumph was more speedy: they have almost invariably been condemned first. An interesting derivative detail of the work is the gateway at the back over which the sculptured figures recline, for these obviously were suggested by casts, which we know Tintoretto to have possessed, of Michael Angelo's tombs in S. Lorenzo's sacristy at Florence. Every individual in the picture is alive and breathing, but none more remarkably so than the woman on the left with a child in her arms and her knee momentarily resting on a slope of the pillar. No doubt some of the crowd are drawn, after the fashion of the time, from public men in Venice; but I know not if they can now be identified. Another legend of S. Mark which, by the way, should have its Venetian pictorial rendering, tells how a man who was working on the Campanile fell, and as he fell had the presence of mind to cry "S. Mark! S. Mark!" whereupon a branch instantly sprang forth from the masonry below and sustained him until help arrived. Tintoretto, who has other miracles of S. Mark in the Royal Palace here and in the Brera at Milan, would have drawn that falling workman magnificently. This room also has two of Tintoretto's simpler canvases--an Adam and Eve (with an error in it, for they are clothed before the apple is eaten) and a Cain and Abel. The other pictures are altar-pieces of much sweetness, by Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Basaiti and Cima. The Carpaccio is the best known by reason of the little charming celestial orchestra at the foot of it, with, in the middle, the adorable mandolinist who has been reproduced as a detail to gladden so many thousands of walls. All have quiet radiance. High over the door by which we entered is a masterly aristocratic allegory by Paul Veronese--Venice with Hercules and Ceres--notable for the superb drawing and vivacity of the cupid with the wheat sheaf. I give a reproduction opposite page 102, but the Cupid unfortunately is not distinct enough. Room III has a Spanish picture by Ribera, interesting so near the Tintorettos, and little else. I am not sure that I am not happier in Room IV than anywhere else in this gallery, for here are the drawings, and by an odd chance Venice is rich in Leonardos. She is rich too in Raphaels, but that is less important. Among the Leonardos, chiefly from his note books, look at No. 217, a child's leg; No. 257, children; No. 256, a darling little "Virgin adoring"; No. 230, a family group, very charming; No. 270, a smiling woman (but this possibly is by an imitator); No. 233, a dancing figure; No. 231, the head of Christ; and the spirited corner of a cavalry battle. Some of the Raphaels are exquisite, notably No. 23, a Madonna adoring; No. 32, a baby; No. 89, a mother and child; and No. 50, a flying angel. In Room V are many pictures, few of which are good enough. It belongs to the school of Giovanni Bellini and is conspicuous for the elimination of character. Vacuous bland countenances, indicative merely of pious mildness, surround you, reaching perhaps their highest point of meek ineffectually in Bissolo. The next room has nothing but dingy northern pictures in a bad light, of which I like best No. 201, a small early unknown French portrait, and No. 198, an old lady, by Mor. Sala VII is Venetian again, the best picture being Romanino's "Deposition," No. 737. An unknown treatment of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary, No. 152, is quaint and interesting. Mary is very comely, with long fair hair. Martha, not sufficiently resentful, lays the table. In Room VIII we again go north and again are among pictures that must be cleaned if we are to see them. And then we come to Room IX and some masterpieces. The largest picture here is Paul Veronese's famous work, "Jesus in the House of Levi," of which I give a reproduction opposite page 176. Veronese is not a great favourite of mine; but there is a blandness and aristocratic ease and mastery here that are irresistible. As an illustration of scripture it is of course absurd; but in Venice (whose Doges, as we have seen, had so little humour that they could commission pictures in which they were represented on intimate terms with the Holy Family) one is accustomed to that. As a fine massive arrangement of men, architecture, and colour, it is superb. It was for painting this picture as a sacred subject--or rather for subordinating sacred history to splendid mundane effects--that the artist was summoned before the Holy Office in the chapel of S. Theodore on July 8, 1573. At the end of Ruskin's brief _Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice_, a translation of the examination is given. Reading it, one feels that Veronese did not come out of it too well. Whistler would have done better. I quote a little. _Question._ Do you know the reason why you have been summoned? _Answer._ No, my lord. _Q._ Can you imagine it? _A._ I can imagine it. _Q._ Tell us what you imagine. _A._ For the reason which the Reverend Prior of SS. Giovanni and Paolo, whose name I know not, told me that he had been here, and that your illustrious lordships had given him orders that I should substitute the figure of the Magdalen for that of a dog; and I replied that I would willingly have done this, or anything else for my own credit and the advantage of the picture, but that I did not think the figure of the Magdalen would be fitting or would look well, for many reasons, which I will always assign whenever the opportunity is given me. _Q._ What picture is that which you have named? _A._ It is the picture representing the last supper that Jesus took with His disciples in the house of Simon. _Q._ Where is this picture? _A._ In the refectory of the Friars of SS. Giovanni and Paolo. _Q._ In this supper of Our Lord, have you painted any attendants? _A._ Yes, my lord. _Q._ Say how many attendants, and what each is doing. _A._ First, the master of the house, Simon; besides, I have placed below him a server, who I have supposed to have come for his own amusement to see the arrangement of the table. There are besides several others, which, as there are many figures in the picture, I do not recollect. _Q._ What is the meaning of those men dressed in the German fashion each with a halbert in his hand? _A._ It is now necessary that I should say a few words. _The Court._ Say on. _A._ We painters take the same license that is permitted to poets and jesters. I have placed these two halberdiers--the one eating, the other drinking--by the staircase, to be supposed ready to perform any duty that may be required of them; it appearing to me quite fitting that the master of such a house, who was rich and great (as I have been told), should have such attendants. _Q._ That fellow dressed like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,--for what purpose is _he_ introduced into the canvas? _A._ For ornament, as is usually done. _Q._ At the table of the Lord whom have you placed? _A._ The twelve Apostles. _Q._ What is St. Peter doing, who is the first? _A._ He is cutting up a lamb, to send to the other end of the table. _Q._ What is he doing who is next to him? _A._ He is holding a plate to receive what St. Peter will give him. _Q._ Tell us what he is doing who is next to this last? _A._ He is using a fork as a tooth-pick. _Q._ Who do you really think were present at that supper? _A._ I believe Christ and His Apostles were present; but in the foreground of the picture I have placed figures for ornament, of my own invention. _Q._ Were you commissioned by any person to paint Germans and buffoons, and such-like things in this picture? _A._ No, my lord; my commission was to ornament the picture as I judged best, which, being large, requires many figures, as it appears to me. _Q._ Are the ornaments that the painter is in the habit of introducing in his frescoes and pictures suited and fitting to the subject and to the principal persons represented, or does he really paint such as strike his own fancy without exercising his judgment or his discretion? _A._ I design my pictures with all due consideration as to what is fitting, and to the best of my judgment. _Q._ Does it appear to you fitting that at our Lord's last supper you should paint buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs, and similar indecencies? _A._ No, my lord. _Q._ Why, then, have you painted them? _A._ I have done it because I supposed that these were not in the place where the supper was served.... _Q._ And have your predecessors, then, done such things? _A._ Michel-Angelo, in the Papal Chapel in Rome, has painted our Lord Jesus Christ, His mother, St. John and St. Peter, and all the Court of Heaven, from the Virgin Mary downwards, all naked, and in various attitudes, with little reverence. _Q._ Do you not know that in a painting like the Last Judgment, where drapery is not supposed, dresses are not required, and that disembodied spirits only are represented; but there are neither buffoons, nor dogs, nor armour, nor any other absurdity? And does it not appear to you that neither by this nor any other example you have done right in painting the picture in this manner, and that it can be proved right and decent? _A._ Illustrious lord, I do not defend it; but I thought I was doing right.... The result was that the painter was ordered to amend the picture, within the month, at his own expense; but he does not seem to have done so. There are two dogs and no Magdalen. The dwarf and the parrot are there still. Under the table is a cat. [Illustration: THE FEAST IN THE HOUSE OF LEVI FROM THE PAINTING BY VERONESE _In the Accademia_] Veronese has in this room also an "Annunciation," No. 260, in which the Virgin is very mature and solid and the details are depressingly dull. The worst Tuscan "Annunciation" is, one feels, better than this. The picture of S. Mark and his lion, No. 261, is better, and in 261a we find a good vivid angel, but she has a terrific leg. The Tintorettos include the beautiful grave picture of the Madonna and Child giving a reception to Venetian Senators who were pleased to represent the Magi; the "Purification of the Virgin," a nice scene with one of his vividly natural children in it; a "Deposition," rich and glowing and very like Rubens; and the "Crucifixion," painted as an altar-piece for SS. Giovanni e Paolo before his sublime picture of the same subject--his masterpiece--was begun for the Scuola of S. Rocco. If one see this, the earlier version, first, one is the more impressed; to come to it after that other is to be too conscious of a huddle. But it has most of the great painter's virtues, and the soldiers throwing dice are peculiarly his own. Room X is notable for a fine Giorgionesque Palma Vecchio: a Holy family, rich and strong and sweet; but the favourite work is Paris Bordone's representation of the famous story of the Fisherman and the Doge, full of gracious light and animation. It seems that on a night in 1340 so violent a storm broke that even the inner waters of the lagoon were perilously rough. A fisherman chanced to be anchoring his boat off the Riva when a man appeared and bade him row him to the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore. Very unwillingly he did so, and there they took on board another man who was in armour, and orders were given to proceed to S. Niccolò on the Lido. There a third man joined them, and the fisherman was told to put out to sea. They had not gone far when they met a ship laden with devils which was on her way to unload this cargo at Venice and overwhelm the city. But on the three men rising and making the sign of the cross, the vessel instantly vanished. The fisherman thus knew that his passengers were S. Mark, S. George, and S. Nicholas. S. Mark gave him a ring in token of their sanctity and the deliverance of Venice, and this, in the picture, he is handing to the Doge. Here, too, is the last picture that Titian painted--a "Deposition". It was intended for the aged artist's tomb in the Frari, but that purpose was not fulfilled. Palma the younger finished it. With what feelings, one wonders, did Titian approach what he knew was his last work? He painted it in 1576, when he was either ninety-nine or eighty-nine; he died in the same year. To me it is one of his most beautiful things: not perhaps at first, but after one has returned to it again and again, and then for ever. It has a quality that his earlier works lack, both of simplicity and pathos. The very weakness of the picture engages and convinces. CHAPTER XVII THE ACCADEMIA. II: THE SANTA CROCE MIRACLES AND CARPACCIO The Holy Cross--Gentile Bellini's Venice--The empty windows--Carpaccio's Venice--The story of S. Ursula--Gay pageantry--A famous bedroom--Carpaccio's life--Ruskin's eulogy. In Room XV are the Santa Croce miracles. The Holy Cross was brought by Filippo da Massaro and presented to the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista. Every year it was carried in solemn procession through Venice and something remarkable was expected of it. The great picture by Gentile Bellini, which shows the progress of the Holy Cross procession across the Piazza in 1496, is historically of much interest. One sees many changes and much that is still familiar. The only mosaic on the façade of S. Mark's which still remains is that in the arch over the left door; and that also is the only arch which has been left concave. The three flagstaffs are there, but they have wooden pediments and no lions on the top, as now. The Merceria clock tower is not yet, and the south arcade comes flush with the campanile's north wall; but I doubt if that was so. The miracle of that year was the healing of a youth who had been fatally injured in the head; his father may be seen kneeling just behind the relic. The next most noticeable picture, also Gentile Bellini's, records a miracle of 1500. The procession was on its way to S. Lorenzo, near the Arsenal, from the Piazza, when the sacred emblem fell into the canal. Straightway in jumped Andrea Vendramin, the chief of the Scuola, to save it, and was supernaturally buoyed up by his sanctified burden. The picture has a religious basis, but heaven is not likely, I think, to be seriously affronted if one smiles a little at these aquatic sports. Legend has it that the little kneeling group on the right is Gentile's own family, and the kneeling lady on the left, with a nun behind her, is Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus. Bellini has made the scene vivid, but it is odd that he should have put not a soul at a window. When we turn to Carpaccio's "Miracle" of 1494, representing the healing of a man possessed of a devil, who may be seen in the loggia at the left, we find a slightly richer sense of history, for three or four women look from the windows; but Mansueti, although a far inferior artist, is the only one to be really thorough and Venetian in this respect. One very interesting detail of Carpaccio's "Miracle" picture is the Rialto bridge of his time. It was of wood, on piles, and a portion in the centre could be drawn up either to let tall masts through or to stop the thoroughfare to pursuers. It is valuable, too, for its costumes and architecture. In a gondola is a dog, since one of those animals finds its way into most of his works. This time it is S. Jerome's dog from the picture at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni. An English translation of the Santa Croce story might well be placed in this room. Before leaving this room one should look again at the haunting portrait of S. Lorenzo Giustiniani, No. 570, by Gentile Bellini, which has faded and stained so graciously into a quiet and beautiful decoration. It is the S. Ursula pictures in Room XVI for which, after Titian's "Assumption," most visitors to Venice esteem the Accademia; but to my mind the charm of Carpaccio is not displayed here so fully as in his decorations at S. Giorgio. The Ursula pictures are, however, of deep interest and are unforgettable. But first for the story. As _The Golden Legend_ tells it, it runs thus. Ursula was the daughter of a Christian king in Britain named Notus or Maurus, and the fame of her beauty and wisdom spread afar, so that the King of England, who was a heathen himself, heard of it and wished her for his son's wife. His son, too, longed for the match, but the paganism of his family was against it. Ursula therefore stipulated that before the marriage could be solemnized the King of England should send to her ten virgins as companions, and each of these virgins and herself, making eleven, should have a retinue of a thousand other virgins, making eleven thousand in all (or to be precise, eleven thousand and eleven) for prayer and consecration; and that the prince moreover should be baptised; and then at the end of three years she would marry him. The conditions were agreed to, and the virgins collected, and all, after some time spent in games and jousting, with noblemen and bishops among the spectators, joined Ursula, who converted them. Being converted, they set sail from Britain for Rome. There they met the pope, who, having a prevision of their subsequent martyrdom, resigned the papacy, much against the will of the Church and for reasons which are not too clear. In Rome they were seen also by two fellow-princes named Maximus and Africanus, who, disliking them for their Christianity, arranged with one Julian, a prince of the Huns, that on their arrival at Cologne, on their return journey, he should behead the whole company, and thus prevent them from further mischief. Meanwhile Ursula's betrothed went to Cologne to meet his bride. With the eleven thousand were many of the most eminent bishops and other men of mark, and directly they arrived at Cologne the Huns fell on them and killed every one except Ursula and another named Cordula. Julian offered to make Ursula his wife, but on her repudiation of the suggestion he shot her through the body with his bow and arrow. Cordula hid in a ship, but the next day suffered death by her own free will and earned a martyr's crown. All this happened in the year A.D. 238. [Illustration: THE DEPARTURE OF THE BRIDEGROOM AND HIS MEETING WITH URSULA FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO _In the Accademia_] Carpaccio, it will be quickly seen, disregards certain details of this version. For example, he makes Ursula's father a King of the Moors, although there is nothing Moorish about either that monarch, his daughter, or his city. The first picture, which has the best light in it, shows the ambassadors from England craving the hand of the princess. At the back is one of those octagonal buildings so dear to this painter, also in the city. His affection for dogs, always noticeable, is to be seen here again, for he has placed three hounds on the quay. A clock somewhat like that of the Merceria is on the little tower. The English ship has a red flag. On the right is the King pondering with Ursula over his reply. In the next picture, No. 573, the ambassadors receive this reply. In the next the ambassadors depart, with the condition that a term of three years must first pass. They return to a strangely unfamiliar England: an England in which Carpaccio himself must have been living for some time in the rôle of architect. This--No. 574--is a delightful and richly mellow scene of activity, and not the least attractive feature of it is the little fiddling boy on the left. Carpaccio has so enjoyed the pageantry and detail, even to frescoes on the house, crowded bridges, and so forth, that his duty as a story-teller has suffered. In the next picture, No. 575, which is really two, divided by the flagstaff, we have on the left the departure of the English prince from an English seaport (of a kind which alas! has disappeared for ever) to join in his lady-love's pilgrimage to Rome. He bids his father farewell. Nothing could be more fascinating than the mountain town and its battlements, and every inch of the picture is amusing and alive. Crowds of gay people assemble and a ship has run on the rocks. On the right, the prince meets Ursula, who also has found a very delectable embarking place. Here are more gay crowds and sumptuous dresses, of which the King's flowered robe is not the least. Farther still to the right the young couple kneel before the monarch. I reproduce this. The apotheosis of S. Ursula, No. 576, is here interposed, very inappropriately, for she is not yet dead or a saint, merely a pious princess. The story is then resumed--in No. 577--with a scene at Rome, as we know it to be by the castle of S. Angelo, in which Ursula and her prince are being blessed by the Pope Cyriacus, while an unending file of virgins extends into the distance. In the next picture, reproduced opposite page 120, Ursula, in her nice great bed, in what is perhaps the best-known bedroom in the world, dreams of her martyrdom and sees an angel bringing her the rewards of fortitude. The picture has pretty thoughts but poor colour. Where the room is meant to be, I am not sure; but it is a very charming one. Note her little library of big books, her writing desk and hour-glass, her pen and ink. Carpaccio of course gives her a dog. Her slippers are beside the bed and her little feet make a tiny hillock in the bedclothes: Carpaccio was the man to think of that! The windows are open and she has no mosquito net. Her princess's crown is at the foot of the bed, or is it perchance her crown of glory? We next see the shipload of bishops and virgins arriving at Cologne. There are fewer Carpaccio touches here, but he has characteristically put a mischievous youth at the end of a boom. There is also a dog on the landing-stage and a bird in the tree. A comely tower is behind with flags bearing three crowns. The next picture shows us, on the left, the horrid massacre of all these nice young women by a brutal German soldiery. Ursula herself is being shot by Julian, who is not more than six feet distant; but she meets her fate with a composure as perfect as if instead of the impending arrow it was a benediction. On the right is her bier, under a very pretty canopy. Wild flowers spring from the earth. Now should come the apotheosis. Carpaccio was not exactly a great painter, but he was human and ingratiating beyond any other that Venice can show, and his pictures here and at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni make the city a sweeter and more lovable place, Vasari is very brief with Vittore Scarpaccia, as he calls him, and there are few known facts. Research has placed his birth at Capo d'Istria about 1450. His earliest picture is dated 1490: his last 1521 or 1522. Gentile Bellini was his master. Ruskin found Carpaccio by far the most sympathetic Venetian painter. Everything that he painted, even, as I point out later, the Museo Civico picture of the two ladies, he exults in, here, there, and everywhere. In his little guide to the Accademia, published in 1877, he roundly calls Carpaccio's "Presentation of the Virgin" the "best picture" in the gallery. In one of the letters written from Venice in _Fors Clavigera_--and these were, I imagine, subjected to less critical examination by their author before they saw the light than any of his writings--is the following summary, which it may be interesting to read here. "This, then, is the truth which Carpaccio knows, and would teach: That the world is divided into two groups of men; the first, those whose God is their God, and whose glory is their glory, who mind heavenly things; and the second, men whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things. That is just as demonstrable a scientific fact as the separation of land from water. There may be any quantity of intermediate mind, in various conditions of bog; some, wholesome Scotch peat,--some, Pontine marsh,--some, sulphurous slime, like what people call water in English manufacturing towns; but the elements of Croyance and Mescroyance are always chemically separable out of the putrescent mess: by the faith that is in it, what life or good it can still keep, or do, is possible; by the miscreance in it, what mischief it can do, or annihilation it can suffer, is appointed for its work and fate. All strong character curdles itself out of the scum into its own place and power, or impotence: and they that sow to the Flesh, do of the Flesh reap corruption; and they that sow to the Spirit, do of the Spirit reap Life. "I pause, without writing 'everlasting,' as perhaps you expected. Neither Carpaccio nor I know anything about duration of life, or what the word translated 'everlasting' means. Nay, the first sign of noble trust in God and man, is to be able to act without any such hope. All the heroic deeds, all the purely unselfish passions of our existence, depend on our being able to live, if need be, through the Shadow of Death: and the daily heroism of simply brave men consists in fronting and accepting Death as such, trusting that what their Maker decrees for them shall be well. "But what Carpaccio knows, and what I know, also, are precisely the things which your wiseacre apothecaries, and their apprentices, and too often your wiseacre rectors and vicars, and _their_ apprentices, tell you that you can't know, because 'eye hath not seen nor ear heard them,' the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God has revealed them to _us_--to Carpaccio, and Angelico, and Dante, and Giotto, and Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli, and me, and to every child that has been taught to know its Father in heaven,--by the Spirit: because we have minded, or do mind, the things of the Spirit in some measure, and in such measure, have entered into our rest." Let me only dare to add that it is quite possible to extract enormous pleasure from the study of Carpaccio's works without agreeing with any of the foregoing criticism. CHAPTER XVIII THE ACCADEMIA. III: GIOVANNI BELLINI AND THE LATER PAINTERS Pietro Longhi--Hogarth--Tiepolo--A gambling wife--Canaletto--Guardi--The Vivarini--Boccaccini--Venetian art and its beginnings--The three Bellinis--Giovanni Bellini--A beautiful room--Titian's "Presentation"--The busy Evangelists--A lovely ceiling. A number of small rooms which are mostly negligible now occur. Longhi is here, with his little society scenes; Tiepolo, with some masterly swaggering designs; Giambettino Cignaroli, whom I mention only because his "Death of Rachel" is on Sundays the most popular picture in the whole gallery; and Canaletto and Guardi, with Venetian canals and palaces and churches. For Tiepolo at his best the Labia Palace must be visited, and Longhi is more numerously represented at the Museo Civico than here. Both Canaletto and Guardi can be better studied in London, at the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. There are indeed no works by either man to compare with the best of ours. No. 494 at Hertford House, a glittering view of the Dogana, is perhaps Guardi's masterpiece in England; No. 135 in the National Gallery, Canaletto's. Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in 1702, five years after Hogarth was born in London. He died in 1762, two years before Hogarth in Chiswick. I mention the English painter because Longhi is often referred to as the Venetian Hogarth. We have a picture or two by him in the National Gallery. To see him once is to see all his pictures so far as technique goes, but a complete set would form an excellent microcosm of fashionable and frivolous Venice of his day. Hogarth, who no doubt approximates more to the Venetian style of painting than to any other, probably found that influence in the work of Sebastiano Ricci, a Venetian who taught in St. Martin's Lane. The brave Tiepolo--Giovanni Battista or Giambattista, as the contraction has it--was born in Venice in 1696, the son of a wealthy merchant and shipowner. In 1721 he married a sister of Guardi, settled down in a house near the bridge of S. Francesco della Vigna, and had nine children. His chief artistic education came from the study of Titian and Paul Veronese, and he quickly became known as the most rapid and intrepid ceiling painter of the time. He worked with tremendous spirit, as one deduces from the the examination of his many frescoes. Tiepolo drew with masterly precision and brio, and his colour can be very sprightly: but one always has the feeling that he had no right to be in a church at all, except possibly to confess. At the National Gallery we have some small examples of Tiepolo's work, which, if greatly magnified, would convey an excellent impression of his mural manner. Tiepolo went to Spain in his old age to work for Charles III, and died there in 1770. His widow survived him by nine years, dying in 1779. She seems to have been a gambler, and there is a story of her staking all her losses one evening against her husband's sketches. Losing, she staked his villa, containing many of his frescoes, and lost again. Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, was born in Venice in 1697, the son of a scene-painter. At first he too painted scenery, but visiting Rome he was fascinated by its architecture and made many studies of it. On returning to Venice he settled down as a topographical painter and practically reproduced his native city on canvas. He died in 1768. Venice possesses only inferior works from his hands; but No. 474 here--the view of the Scuola of S. Marco--is very fine. Canaletto had a nephew named Bernardo Bellotto, who to much of his uncle's skill brought a mellow richness all his own, and since he also took the name of Canaletto, confusion has resulted. He is represented in the Accademia; but Vienna is richest in his work. The great Canaletto has a special interest for us in that in later life he lived for a while in England and painted here. The National Gallery has views of Eton College and of Ranelagh seen through his Venetian eyes. In Venice Tiepolo often added the figures for him. Francesco Guardi was born in Venice in 1712 and died there in 1793, and all his life he was translating the sparkling charm of his watery city into paint. His master was Canaletto, whom he surpassed in charm but never equalled in foot-rule accuracy or in that gravity which makes a really fine picture by the older man so distinguished a thing. Very little is known of Guardi's life. That he married is certain, and he had a daughter who eloped with an Irishman. We are told also that he was very indolent, and late in life came upon such evil days that he established himself at a corner of the Piazza, where Rosen's book-shop now is, and sold sketches to whomever would buy for whatever they would fetch; which is only one remove from a London screever. Guardi's picture of S. Giorgio Maggiore in the Accademia, No. 707, shows us that the earlier campanile, which fell in 1774, was higher and slenderer than the present one. We now come to Room XVII, which has a number of small interesting works, some by great masters. Mantegna is here with a S. George, which I reproduce on the opposite page. Very beautiful it is, both in feeling and colour. It is painted on wood and the dragon is extremely dead. Here too is Piero della Francesca, that rare spirit, but his picture, No. 47, has almost perished. The mild Basaiti and milder Catena are here; a pretty little Caravaggio; two good Cimas, No. 611, sweet and translucent, and No. 592, a Tobias; and excellent examples of both Alvise and Bartolommeo Vivarini, those pioneer brothers, a blue and green dress of the Virgin in No. 615 by Bartolommeo being exquisite. Here too is a Cosimo Tura, No. 628, poor in colour but fine in the drawing of the baby Christ; and a rich unknown Lombardian version of Christ washing His disciples' feet, No. 599, which is not strong in psychology but has noticeable quality. The most purely charming work in the room is a Boccaccio Boccaccini, No. 600, full of sweetness and pretty thoughts. The Madonna is surrounded by saints, the figure in the centre having the true Boccaccini face. The whole picture is a delight, whether as a group of nice holy people, a landscape, or a fantasy of embroidery. The condition of the picture is perfect too. The flight into Egypt, in two phases, goes on in the background. I reproduce it opposite page 266. And then we move to the room devoted to Giovanni Bellini, performing as we do so an act of sacrilege, for one cannot pass through the pretty blue and gold door without interrupting an Annunciation, the angel having been placed on one side of it and the Virgin on the other. [Illustration: S. GEORGE FROM THE PAINTING BY MANTEGNA _In the Accademia_] Giovanni Bellini was born in 1426, nearly a century after Giotto died. His father and teacher was Jacopo Bellini, who had a school of painting in Padua and was the rival in that city of Squarcione, a scientific instructor who depended largely on casts from the antique to point his lessons. Squarcione's most famous pupil was Andrea Mantegna, who subsequently married Giovanni Bellini's sister and alienated his master. According to Vasari, oil-painting reached Venice through Antonello da Messina, who had learned the art in the Netherlands. But that cannot be true. It came to Venice from Verona or Padua long after Florence could boast many fine masters, the delay being due to the circumstance that the Venetians thought more of architecture than the sister art. The first painters to make any success in Venice were the Vivarini of Murano. The next were Giovanni Bellini and Gentile his brother, who arrived from Padua about 1460, the one to paint altar-pieces in the Tuscan manner (for there is little doubt that the sweet simplicity and gentle radiance of the Giotto frescoes in the chapel of the Madonna dell'Arena, which the Paduans had the privilege of seeing for two or three generations before Squarcione was born, had greater influence than either Jacopo Bellini or Mantegna); and the other to paint church pageants, such as we saw in an earlier room. Giovanni remained in Venice till his death, in 1516, at the ripe age of ninety, and nearly to the end was he both a busy painter and an interested and impressionable investigator of art, open to the influence of his own pupil Giorgione, and, when eighty, being the only painter in Venice to recognize the genius of Dürer, who was then on a visit to the city. Dürer, writing home, says that Bellini had implored him for a work and wanted to pay for it. "Every one gives him such a good character that I feel an affection for him. He is very old and is yet the best in painting." In his long life Bellini saw all the changes and helped in their making. He is the most varied and flexible painter of his time, both in manner and matter. None could be more deeply religious than he, none more tender, none more simple, none more happy. In manner he was equally diverse, and could paint like a Paduan, a Tuscan, a Fleming, a Venetian, and a modern Frenchman. I doubt if he ever was really great as we use the word of Leonardo, Titian, Tintoretto, Mantegna; but he was everything else. And he was Titian's master. The National Gallery is rich indeed in Bellini's work. We have no fewer than ten pictures that are certainly his, and others that might be; and practically the whole range of his gifts is illustrated among them. There may not be anything as fine as the S. Zaccaria or Frari altar-pieces, or anything as exquisite as the Allegories in the Accademia and the Uffizi; but after that our collection is unexcelled in its examples. [Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Accademia_] In this little precious room of the Accademia are thirteen Bellinis, each in its way a gem: enough to prove that variousness of which I spoke. The "Madonna degli Alberetti," for example, with its unexpected apple-green screen, almost Bougereau carried out to the highest power, would, if hung in any exhibition to-day, be remarkable but not anachronistic. And then one thinks of the Gethsemane picture in our National Gallery, and of the Christ recently acquired by the Louvre, and marvels. For sheer delight of fancy, colour, and design the five scenes of Allegory are the flower of the room; and here again our thoughts leap forward as we look, for is not the second of the series, "Venus the Ruler of the World," sheer Burne-Jones? The pictures run thus: (1) "Bacchus tempting Endeavour," (2) either Venus, with the sporting babies, or as some think, Science (see the reproduction opposite page 158), (3) with its lovely river landscape, "Blind Chance," (4) the Naked Truth, and (5) Slander. Of the other pictures I like best No. 613, reproduced opposite page 260, with the Leonardesque saint on the right; and No. 610, with its fine blues, light and dark, and the very Venetian Madonna; and the Madonna with the Child stretched across her knees, reproduced opposite page 144. Giovanni Bellini did not often paint anything that can be described as essentially Venetian. He is called the father of Venetian painting, but his child only faintly resembles him, if at all. That curious change of which one is conscious at the National Gallery in passing from Rooms I and VI to Room VII, from Tuscany and Umbria to Venice, is due less to the Bellinis in Room VII than to any painter there. The Bellinis could be hung in Rooms I and VI without violence; the Giorgiones and Titians and Tintorettos would conflict. Bellini's simplicity allies him to Giotto traditions; but there was no simplicity about Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto. They were sophisticated, and the two last were also the painters of a wealthy and commanding Republic. One can believe that Bellini, wherever he was, even in the Doges' Palace, carried a little enclosed portion of the Kingdom of God within him: but one does not think of those others in that way. He makes his Madonnas so much more real and protective too. Note the strong large hands which hold the Child in his every picture. Titian's fine martial challenging John the Baptist is the great picture of the next room, No. XIX. Here also are good but not transcendent portraits by Titian, Tintoretto, and Lotto, and the Battle of Lepanto, with heavenly interference, by Veronese. Finally, we come to the room set apart for Titian's charming conception of "The Presentation of the Virgin," which fills all one wall of it. I give a reproduction opposite page 36. The radiant figure of the thick-set little brave girl in blue, marching so steadily away from her parents to the awe-inspiring but kindly priests at the head of the steps, is unforgettable. Notice the baby in the arms of a woman among the crowd. The picture as a whole is disappointing in colour, and I cherish the belief that if Tintoretto's beautiful variant at the Madonna dell'Orto (see opposite page 282) could be cleaned and set up in a good light it might conquer. Before leaving this room one should give the ceiling a little attention, for it is splendid in its lovely blue and gold, and its coloured carvings are amusing. The four Evangelists have each a medallion. All are studious. S. Matthew, on the upper left as one stands with one's back to the Titian, has an open-air study, and he makes notes as he reads. His eagle is in attendance. S. Mark, with his lion at ease under his chair, has also his open-air desk, and as he reads he thinks. S. John is indoors, reading intently, with a box full of books to fall back on, and a little angel peeping at him from behind his chair. Finally S. Luke, also indoors, writing at a nice blue desk. He holds his pen very daintily and seems to be working against time, for an hour-glass is before him. His bull is also present. Among the many good ceilings of Venice, this is at once the most sumptuous and most charming. CHAPTER XIX THE CANALE DI S. MARCO AND S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE Busy water--The lantern concerts--Venice and modern inventions--Fireworks in perfection--S. Giorgio Maggiore--Palladian architecture--Two Tintorettos--The Life of S. Benedict--Realistic wood-carving--A Giudecca garden--The Redentore--A bridge of boats--A regatta--The view from the Giudecca--House-hunting in Venice. Strictly speaking, the Grand Canal and the Canal of the Guidecca unite in the lagoon; but the stretch of water between the Molo and S. Giorgio is called the Canale di San Marco. It is the busiest water of all. Every little steamer crosses it; motor-boats here are always at full speed; most of the gondolas which are hired start from here; the great mercantile boats cross it on their way in and out of harbours; and the daily invaders from Trieste disembark and embark again in the very middle. Hence it is always a scene of gay and sparkling movement and always more like a Guardi than any other spot in Venice. It is just off the Custom House point, at night, that in the summer the concert barges are moored, each with its little party of musicians, its cluster of Venetian lanterns, arranged rather like paper travesties of the golden balls over S. Mark's domes, and its crowded circle of gondolas, each like a dark private box for two. Now what more can honeymooners ask? For it is chiefly for honeymooners that this is done, since Venetians do not spend money to sit in stationary boats. These concerts are popular, but they are too self-conscious. Moreover, the songs are from all countries, even America; whereas purely Venetian, or at any rate Italian, operatic music should, I think, be given. The stray snatches of song which one hears at night from the hotel window; gondoliers trolling out folk choruses; the notes of a distant mandolin, brought down on the water--these make the true music of Venice. But just as the motor-launch has invaded the lagoon, so has other machinery forced its way into this city--peculiarly the one place in the world which ought to have been meticulously safeguarded against every mechanical invention. When I was living near S. Sebastiano, on my way home at night the gondolier used to take me up the Grand Canal as far as the Foscari lantern and then to the left. In time we came to the campo of S. Pantaleone, where, outside a café, a little group was always seated, over its wine and beer, listening raptly to the music of--what? A gramophone. This means that while the motor is ousting the gondolier, the Venetian minstrel is also under death sentence. It was the same if I chose to walk part of the way, for then I took the steamer to S. Toma and passed through the campo of S. Margherita, which does for the poor of its neighbourhood very much what the Piazza of S. Mark does for the centre of the city and the élite of the world. This campo is one of the largest in Venice, and at night it is very gay. There is a church at one end which, having lost its sanctity, is now a cinema theatre, with luridities pasted on the walls. There is another ancient building converted into a cinema at the opposite end. Between these alluring extremities are various cafés, each with its chairs and tables, and each with a gramophone that pours its notes into the night. The panting of Caruso mingles with Tetrazzini's shrill exultation. In summer there are occasional firework displays on the water between S. Giorgio and the Riva, supplied by the Municipality. The Riva is then crowded, while gondolas put out in great numbers, and myriad overloaded crafts full of poorer sightseers enter the lagoon by all the small canals. Having seen Venetian pyrotechny, one realizes that all fireworks should be ignited over water. It is the only way. A rocket can climb as fiercely and dazzlingly into any sky, no doubt, but over land the falling stars and sparks have but one existence; over water, like the swan "on St. Mary's lake," they have two. The displays last for nearly an hour, and consist almost entirely of rockets. Every kind of rocket is there: rockets which simply soar with a rush, burst into stars and fall; rockets which when they reach the highest point of their trajectory explode with a report that shakes the city and must make some of the campanili very nervous; rockets which burst into a million sparks; rockets which burst into a thousand streamers; rockets whose stars change colour as they fall; rockets whose stars do not fall at once but hang and hover in the air. All Venice is watching, either from the land or the water, and the band plays to a deserted Piazza, but directly the display is over every one hastens back to hear its strains. To get to the beautiful island of S. Giorgio it is almost necessary to take a gondola; for although there is the Giudecca steamer every half hour, it is an erratic boat, and you may be left stranded too long waiting to return. The island is military, save for the church, and that is chiefly a show-place to-day. It is large and light, but it has no charm, for that was not Palladio's gift. That he was a great man, every visitor to Vicenza knows; but it is both easy and permissible to dislike the architecture to which he gives his name. Not that any fault can be found with S. Giorgio Maggiore as a detail in the landscape: to me it will always be the perfect disposition of buildings in the perfect place; but then, on the other hand, the campanile was not Palladio's, nor was the façade, while the principal attraction of his dome is its green copper. The church of the Redentore, on the Giudecca, is much more thoroughly Palladian. Andrea Palladio was born in Vicenza in 1518. In Venice he built S. Giorgio Maggiore (all but the façade), the façade of S. Francesco della Vigna, the Redentore, Le Zitelle and S. Lucia. Such was Palladio's influence that for centuries he practically governed European architecture. Our own St. Paul's would be very different but for him. He died in 1580 and was buried at Vicenza. By the merest chance, but very fortunately, he was prevented from bedevilling the Ducal Palace after the fire in 1576. He had the plans all ready, but a wiser than he, one Da Ponte, undertook to make the structure good without rebuilding, and carried out his word. Terrible to think of what the Vicenza classicist would have done with that gentle, gay, and human façade! [Illustration: TRAGHETTO OF S. ZOBENIGO, GRAND CANAL] S. Giorgio has a few pictures, chief of which are the two great Tintorettos in the choir. These are, however, very difficult to see. My own efforts once led me myself to open the gates and enter, so that I might be nearer and in better light: a proceeding which turned the sacristan from a servant of God into an ugly brawler. A gift of money, however, returned him to his rightful status; but he is a churlish fellow. I mention the circumstance because it is isolated in my Venetian wanderings. No other sacristan ever suggested that the whole church was not equally free or resented any unaccompanied exploration. The Tintorettos belong to his most spacious and dramatic style. One, "The Last Supper," is a busy scene of conviviality. The company is all at one side of the table and the two ends, except the wretched foredoomed Judas. There is plenty to eat. Attendants bustle about bringing more food. A girl, superbly drawn and painted, washes plates, with a cat beside her. A dog steals a bone. The disciples seem restless and the air is filled with angels. Compared with the intensity and single-mindedness of Leonardo, this is a commonplace rendering; but as an illustration to the Venetian Bible, it is fine; and as a work of art by a mighty and original genius glorying in difficulties of light and shade, it is tremendous. Opposite is a quieter representation of the miracle of the manna, which has very charming details of a domestic character in it, the women who wash and sew and carry on other employments being done with splendid ease and naturalness. The manna lies about like little buttons; Moses discourses in the foreground; in the distance is the Israelite host. All that the picture lacks is light: a double portion: light to fall on it, and its own light to be allowed to shine through the grime of ages. Tintoretto also has two altar-pieces here, one an "Entombment," in the Mortuary Chapel--very rich and grave and painful, in which Christ's mother is seen swooning in the background; and the other a death of S. Stephen, a subject rare with the Old Masters, but one which, were there occasion to paint it, they must have enjoyed. Tintoretto has covered the ground with stones. The choir is famous for its series of forty-six carved panels, representing scenes in the life of S. Benedict; but some vandal having recently injured one or two, the visitor is no longer allowed to approach near enough to examine them with the thoroughness that they demand and deserve. They are the work of a carver named Albert de Brule, of whose life I have been able to discover nothing. Since before studying them it is well to know something of the Saint's career, I tell the story here, from _The Golden Legend_, but not all the incidents which the artist fixed upon are to be found in that biography. Benedict as a child was sent to Rome to be educated, but he preferred the desert. Hither his nurse accompanied him, and his first token of signal holiness was his answered prayer that a pitcher which she had broken might be made whole again. Leaving his nurse, he associated with a hermit who lived in a pit to which food was lowered by a rope. Near by dwelt a priest, who one day made a great meal for himself, but before he could eat it he received a supernatural intimation that Benedict was hungry in a pit, and he therefore took his dinner to him and they ate it together. A blackbird once assailing Benedict's face was repelled by the sign of the cross. Being tempted by a woman, Benedict crawled about among briars and nettles to maintain his Spartan spirit. He now became the abbot of a monastery, but the monks were so worldly that he had to correct them. In retaliation they poisoned his wine, but the saint making the sign of the cross over it, the glass broke in pieces and the wine was innocuously spilt. Thereupon Benedict left the monastery and returned to the desert, where he founded two abbeys and drove the devil out of a monk who could not endure long prayers, his method being to beat the monk. Here also, and in the other abbeys which he founded, he worked many miracles: making iron swim, restoring life to the dead, and so forth. Another attempt to poison him, this time with bread, was made, but the deadly stuff was carried away from him by a pet raven. For the rest of the saint's many wonderful deeds of piety you must seek _The Golden Legend_: an agreeable task. He died in the year 518. The best or most entertaining panels seem to me the first, in which the little bald baby saint is being washed and his mother is being coaxed to eat something; the fourth, where we see the saint, now a youth, on his knees; the sixth, where he occupies the hermit's cell and the hermit lets down food; the seventh, where the hermit and Benedict occupy the cell together and a huntsman and dog pursue their game above; the tenth, in the monastery; the twelfth, where the whip is being laid on; the fourteenth, with an especially good figure of Benedict; the sixteenth, where the meal is spread; the twentieth, with the devil on the tree trunk; the twenty-first, when the fire is being extinguished; the twenty-fifth, with soldiers in the distance; the twenty-seventh, with a fine cloaked figure; the twenty-eighth, where there is a struggle for a staff; the thirtieth, showing the dormitory and a cat and mouse; the thirty-second, a burial scene; the thirty-third, with its monsters; the thirty-sixth, in which the beggar is very good; the thirty-ninth, where the soldiers kiss the saint's feet; and the forty-fourth, showing the service in the church and the soldiers' arms piled up. One would like to know more of this Albert de Brule and his work: how long it took; why he did it; how it came to Venice; and so forth. The date, which applies, I suppose, to the installation of the carvings, is 1598. The other carvings are by other hands: the S. George and dragon on the lectern in the choir, and the little courageous boys driving Behemoths on the stalls. As one leaves the church by the central aisle the Dogana is seen framed by the doorway. With each step more of Venice comes into view. The Campanile is worth climbing for its lovely prospect. From the little island of S. Giorgio it is but a stone's throw to the larger island of the Giudecca, with its factories and warehouses and stevedores, and tiny cafés each with a bowling alley at the back. The Giudecca, which looks so populous, is however only skin deep; almost immediately behind the long busy façade of the island are gardens, and then the shallow lagoon stretching for miles, where fishermen are mysteriously employed, day and night. The gardens are restful rather than beautiful--at least that one, open to visitors, on the Rio della Croce, may be thus described, for it is formal in its parallelograms divided by gritty paths, and its flowers are crudely coloured. But it has fine old twisted mulberry trees, and a long walk beside the water, where lizards dart among the stones on the land side and on the other crabs may be seen creeping. On the way to this garden I stopped to watch a family of gossiping bead-workers. The old woman who sat in the door did not thread the beads as the girl does in one of Whistler's Venetian etchings, but stabbed a basketful with a wire, each time gathering a few more. The great outstanding buildings of the Giudecca are Palladio's massive Redentore and S. Eufemia, and at the west end the modern Gothic polenta mill of Signor or Herr Stucky, beyond which is the lagoon once more. In Turner's picture in the National Gallery entitled "San Benedetto, looking towards Fusina" there is a ruined tower where Stucky's mill now stands. The steps of the Redentore are noble, but within it is vast and cold and inhuman, and the statues in its niches are painted on the flat. Tintoretto's "Descent from the Cross" in the church proper is very vivid. In the sacristy, however, the chilled visitor will be restored to life by a truly delightful Madonna and Child, with two little celestial musicians playing a lullaby, said to be by Bellini, but more probably by Alvise Vivarini, and two companion pictures of much charm. Like the Salute, the Redentore was a votive offering to heaven for stopping a plague. Every year, on the third Sunday in July, a bridge of boats crosses the Grand Canal at the Campo S. Zobenigo, and then from the Zattere it crosses the Giudecca canal to this church. That day and night the island is _en fête_. Originally these bridges were constructed in order that the Doges might attend a solemn service; but to-day the occasion is chiefly one of high spirits. In the gallery of the Palazzo Pesaro is a painting representing the event at a recent date; in the Querini Stampalia gallery a more ancient procession may be seen. There, too, are many views of regattas which of old were held on the Grand Canal but now belong to the canal of the Giudecca. The Venetians, who love these races, assemble in great numbers, both on the water, in every variety of craft, and on the quay. The winning-post is off the end of the island of S. Giorgio; the races start from varying points towards the harbour. In April I saw races for six oars, four oars, two oars, and men-of-war's boats. The ordinary rowers were dull, but the powerful bending gondoliers urging their frail craft along with tremendous strokes in unison were a magnificent spectacle. The excitement was intense towards the end, but there was no close finish. Between the races the exchange of chaff among the spectators was continuous. The question of where to live in Venice must, I think, be a difficult one to solve. I mean by live, to make one's home, as so many English and Americans have done. At the first blush, of course, one would say on the Grand Canal; but there are objections to this. It is noisy with steamboat whistles and motor horns, and will become noisier every day and night, as the motor gains increasing popularity. On the other hand, one must not forget that so fine a Venetian taster as Mr. Howells has written, "for myself I must count as half lost the year spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal." Personally, I think, I should seek my home elsewhere. There is a house on this Giudecca--a little way along from the S. Giorgio end--which should make a charming abode; for it has good windows over the water, immediately facing, first, the little forest of masts by the Custom House, and then the Molo and the Ducal Palace, and upon it in the evening would fall the sinking sun, while behind it is a pleasant garden. The drawbacks are the blasts of the big steamers entering and leaving the harbour, the contiguity of some rather noisy works, and the infrequency of steamboats to the mainland. Ruskin was fond of this view. Writing to old Samuel Rogers, he said: "There was only one place in Venice which I never lost the feeling of joy in--at least the pleasure which is better than joy; and that was just half way between the end of the Giudecca and St. George of the Seaweed, at sunset. If you tie your boat to one of the posts there you can see the Euganeans where the sun goes down, and all the Alps and Venice behind you by the rosy sunlight: there is no other spot so beautiful. Near the Armenian convent is, however, very good too also; the city is handsomer, but the place is not so simple and lovely. I have got all the right feeling back now, however; and hope to write a word or two about Venice yet, when I have got the mouldings well out of my head--and the mud. For the fact is, with reverence be it spoken, that whereas Rogers says: 'There is a glorious city in the Sea,' a truthful person must say, 'There is a glorious city in the mud'. It is startling at first to say so, but it goes well enough with marble. 'Oh, Queen of Marble and of Mud.'" Another delectable house is that one, on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore; which looks right up the Giudecca canal and in the late afternoon flings back the sun's rays. But that is the property of the army. Another is at the corner of the Rio di S. Trovaso and the Fondamenta delle Zaterre, with wistaria on it, looking over to the Redentore; but every one, I find, wants this. CHAPTER XX ON FOOT. II: THREE CHURCHES AND CARPACCIO AGAIN The Ponte di Paglia--A gondolier's shrine--The modern prison--Danieli's--A Canaletto--S. Zaccaria--A good Bellini--A funeral service--Alessandro Vittorio--S. Giovanni in Bragora--A good Cima--The best little room--A seamen's institute--Carpaccio at his best--The story of the dragon--The saint triumphant--The story of S. George--S. Jerome and the lion--S. Jerome and the dog--S. Tryphonius and the basilisk--S. Francesco della Vigna--Brother Antonio's picture--The Giustiniani reliefs--Cloisters--A Veronese--Doge Andrea Gritti--Doge Niccolò Sagredo. I propose that we should walk from the Molo to S. Francesco della Vigna. Our first bridge is the Ponte di Paglia (or straw), the wide and easy glistening bridge which spans the Rio del Palazzo at the Noah corner of the Doges' Palace. Next to the Rialto, this is the busiest bridge in the city. Beautiful in itself, it commands great beauty too, for on the north side you see the Bridge of Sighs and on the south the lagoon. On its lagoon façade is a relief of a primitive gondola and the Madonna and Child, but I have never seen a gondolier recognizing the existence of this symbol of celestial interest in his calling. The stern building at the corner of this bridge is the prison, with accommodation for over two hundred prisoners. Leaning one day over the Ponte di Paglia I saw one being brought in, in a barca with a green box--as we should say, a Black and Green Maria. I cannot resist quoting Coryat's lyrical passage in praise of what to most of us is as sinister a building as could be imagined. "There is near unto the Dukes Palace a very faire prison, the fairest absolutely that ever I saw, being divided from the Palace by a little channell of water, and againe joyned unto it by a merveilous faire little gallery that is inserted aloft into the middest of the Palace wall East-ward. [He means the Bridge of Sighs.] I thinke there is not a fairer prison in all Christendome: it is built with very faire white ashler stone, having a little walke without the roomes of the prison which is forty paces long and seven broad.... It is altogether impossible for the prisoners to get forth." The next important building is the famous hotel known as Danieli's, once a palace, which has its place in literature as having afforded a shelter to those feverish and capricious lovers, George Sand and Alfred de Musset. Every one else has stayed there too, but these are the classic guests. If you want to see what Danieli's was like before it became a hotel you have only to look at No. 940 in the National Gallery by Canaletto. This picture tells us also that the arches of the Doges' Palace on the canal side were used by stall-holders. To-day they are merely a shelter from sun or rain and a resting-place, and often you may see a gondolier eating his lunch there. In this picture of Canaletto's, by the way, the loafers have gathered at the foot of the Lion's column exactly as now they do, while the balcony of the great south window of the palace has just such a little knot of people enjoying the prospect; but whether they were there naturally or at the invitation of a custodian eager for a tip (as now) we shall not know. The first calle after Danieli's brings us to S. Zaccaria, one of the few Venetian churches with any marble on its façade. S. Zaccaria has no longer the importance it had when the Doge visited it in state every Easter. It is now chiefly famous for its very beautiful Bellini altar-piece, of which I give a reproduction on the opposite page. The picture in its grouping is typical of its painter, and nothing from his hand has a more pervading sweetness. The musical angel at the foot of the throne is among his best and the bland old men are more righteous than rectitude itself. To see this altar-piece aright one must go in the early morning: as I did on my first visit, only to find the central aisle given up to a funeral mass. The coffin was in the midst, and about it, on their knees, were the family, a typical gondolier all in black being the chief mourner. Such prayers as he might have been uttering were constantly broken into by the repeated calls of an attendant with a box for alms, and it was interesting to watch the struggle going on in the simple fellow's mind between native prudence and good form. How much he ought to give? Whether it was quite the thing to bring the box so often and at such a season? Whether shaking it so noisily was not peculiarly tactless? What the spectators and church officials would think if he refused? Could he refuse? and, However much were these obsequies going to cost?--these questions one could discern revolving almost visibly beneath his short-haired scalp. At last the priests left the high altar and came down to the coffin, to sprinkle it and do whatever was now possible for its occupant; and in a few minutes the church was empty save for the undertaker's men, myself, and the Bellini. It is truly a lovely picture, although perhaps a thought too mild, and one should go often to see it. [Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Church of S. Zaccaria_] The sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, who did so much to perpetuate the features of great Venetians and was the friend of so many artists, including Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, is buried here. The floor slabs of red stone with beautiful lettering should be noticed; but all over Venice such memorials have a noble dignity and simplicity. It will be remembered that the site of this church was determined by the vision of Bishop Magnus, S. John appearing to him and commanding it to be built in honour of his father. The first structure probably dates from the seventh century; the present is fifteenth century, and beneath it is the ancient crypt adjoining the chapel of S. Tarasio, where in the twelfth century a hundred nuns seeking refuge from a fire were suffocated. In the chapel are ecclesiastical paintings, but no proper provision is made for seeing them. Eight Doges lie in S. Zaccaria. Outside I found a great crowd to see the embarcation of the corpse for its last home, the Campo Santo. This, I may say, was rather a late funeral. Most of them are at eight or even earlier. It is best now to return to the Riva by the calle which comes out beside Danieli's and then walk Lido-wards over two bridges and take the first calle after them. This brings us to S. Giovanni in Bragora, S. John's own church, built according to his instructions to Bishop Magnus, and it has one of the keenest little sacristans in Venice. From altar to altar he bustles, fixing you in the best positions for light. The great picture here is the Cima behind the high altar, of which I give a reproduction opposite page 136. A little perch has been made, the better to see it. It represents "The Baptism of Christ," and must in its heyday have been very beautiful. Christ stands at the edge of the water and the Baptist holds a little bowl--very different scene from that mosaic version in S. Mark's where Christ is half submerged. It has a sky full of cherubs, delectable mountains and towns in the distance, and all Cima's sweetness; and when the picture cleaning millionaire, of whom I speak elsewhere, has done his work it will be a joy. There is also a fine Bartolommeo Vivarini here, and the sacristan insists on your admiring a very ornate font which he says is by Sansovino. As you leave, ask him the way to S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, which is close by, and prepare to be very happy. I have said something about the most beautiful spacious places in Venice--S. Mark's, the Doges' Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, and so forth; we now come to what is, without question, the most fascinating small room in Venice. It is no bigger than a billiard-room and unhappily very dark, with a wooden ceiling done in brown, gold, and blue; an altar with a blue and gold canopy; rich panels on the walls; and as a frieze a number of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio, which, in my opinion, transcend in interest the S. Ursula series at the Accademia. The story of the little precious room is this. In the multitude of seafaring men who in the course of their trade came to Venice with cargoes or for cargoes were a large number of Dalmatians, or Sclavonians, whose ships lay as a rule opposite that part of the city which is known as the Riva degli Schiavoni. Their lot being somewhat noticeably hard, a few wealthy Dalmatian merchants decided in 1451 to make a kind of Seamen's Institute (as we should now say), and a little building was the result of this effort, the patron saints of the altar in it being S. George and S. Tryphonius. Fifty years later the original "Institute" was rebuilt and Carpaccio was called in to decorate it. The most famous of the pictures are those on the left wall as you enter--S. George attacking the dragon, S. George subduing the dragon, and (on the end wall) S. George baptising the king and princess. These are not only lovely autumnal schemes of colour, but they are perfect illustrations to a fairy tale, for no artist has ever equalled this Venetian in the art of being entertaining. Look at the spirit of the first picture: the onset of both antagonists; and then examine the detail--the remains of the dragon's victims, the half-consumed maidens; the princess in despair; the ships on the sea; the adorable city mounting up and up the hill, with spectators at every balcony. (I reproduce it opposite page 212). And then in the next how Carpaccio must have enjoyed his work on the costumes! Look at the crowds, the band in full blast, the restless horses which like dragons no more than they like bears. The third, although the subject is less entertaining, shows no decrease of liveliness. Carpaccio's humour underlies every touch of colour. The dog's averted face is one of the funniest things in art--a dog with sceptical views as to baptism!--and the band is hard at it, even though the ceremony, which, from the size of the vase, promises to be very thorough, is beginning. S. George is a link between Venice and England, for we both honour him as a patron. He is to be seen in pictures again and again in Venetian churches, but these three scenes by Carpaccio are the finest. The Saint was a Cappadocian gentleman and the dragon ranged and terrorized the Libyan desert. Every day the people of the city which the dragon most affected bribed him away with two sheep. When the sheep gave out a man was substituted. Then children and young people, to be selected by lot, and the lot in time fell on the king's daughter. The king in despair offered his subjects gold and silver instead, but they refused saying that it was his own law and must be obeyed. They gave her, however (this, though from the lives of the saints, is sheer fairy tale, isn't it?) eight days grace, in which anything might happen; but nothing happened, and so she was led out to the dragon's lair. As she stood there waiting to be devoured, S. George passed by. He asked her what she was doing, and she replied by imploring him to run or the dragon would eat him too. But S. George refused, and instead swore to rescue her and the city in the name (and here the fairy tale disappears) of Jesus Christ. The dragon then advancing, S. George spurred his horse, charged and wounded him grievously with his spear. (On English gold coins, as we all know to our shame, he is given nothing but a short dagger which could not reach the enemy at all; Carpaccio knew better.) Most of the painters make this stroke of the saint decisive; according to them, S. George thrust at the dragon and all was over. But the true story, as Caxton and Carpaccio knew, is, that having wounded the dragon, S. George took the maiden's girdle and tied it round the creature's neck, and it became "a meek beast and debonair," and she led it into the city. (Carpaccio makes the saint himself its leader.) The people were terrified and fled, but S. George reassured them, and promised that if they would be baptised and believe in Jesus Christ he would slay the dragon once and for all. They promised, and he smote off its head; and in the third picture we see him baptising. I have given the charming story as _The Golden Legend_ tells it; but one may also hold the opinion, more acceptable to the orthodox hagiologist, that the dreadful monster was merely symbolical of sin. [Illustration: S. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO _At S. Giorgio dei Schiavoni_] As for S. George himself, the most picturesque and comely of all the saints and one whom all the nations reverence, he was born in Cappadocia, in the third century, of noble Christian parents. Becoming a soldier in Diocletian's army he was made a tribune or colonel. The Emperor showed him marks of especial favour, but when the imperial forces were turned against the Christians, George remonstrated and refused. He was therefore beheaded. For broad comedy the picture of S. Jerome and the lion on the right wall is the best. The story tells us that S. Jerome was one day sitting with the brethren listening to a holy lesson when a lion came hobbling painfully into the monastery. The brethren fled, but S. Jerome, like Androcles, approached the beast, and finding that it had a sore foot, commanded the others to return and minister to it. This they did, and the lion was ever attached to the monastery, one of its duties being to take care of an ass. Carpaccio has not spared the monks: he makes their terror utterly absurd in the presence of so puzzled and gentle a man-eater. In the next picture, the death of the saint, we see the lion again, asleep on the right, and the donkey quietly grazing at the back. As an impressive picture of the death of a good man it can hardly be called successful; but how could it be, coming immediately after the comic Jerome whom we have just seen? Carpaccio's mischief was a little too much for him--look at the pince-nez of the monk on the right reading the service. Then we have S. Jerome many years younger, busy at his desk. He is just thinking of a word when (the camera, I almost said) when Carpaccio caught him. His tiny dog gazes at him with fascination. Not bad surroundings for a saint, are they? A comfortable study, with a more private study leading from it; books; scientific instruments; music; works of art (note the little pagan bronze on the shelf); and an exceedingly amusing dog. I reproduce the picture opposite page 82. Two pictures with scriptural subjects represent Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, and Matthew (an Evangelist rarely painted in Venice, where his colleague Mark has all the attention) being called from the receipt of custom. And finally there is the delightful and vivid representation of S. Tryphonius and the basilisk. This picture, of which I give a reproduction opposite page 76, is both charming and funny. The basilisk is surely in the highest rank of the comic beasts of art. It seems to be singing, but that is improbable; what it is unmistakably not doing is basilisking. The little saint stands by in an attitude of prayer, and all about are comely courtiers of the king. In the distance are delightful palaces in the Carpaccio style of architecture, cool marble spaces, and crowded windows and stairs. The steps of the raised temple in which the saint and the basilisk perform have a beautiful intarsia of foliage similar to that on the Giants' Staircase at the Doges' Palace. So much for the ingredients of this bewitching picture; but as to what it is all about I have no knowledge, for I have looked in vain among books for any information. I find a S. Tryphonius, but only as a grown man; not a word of his tender years and his grotesque attendant. How amusing it would be to forget the halo and set the picture as a theme among a class of fanciful fantastic writers, to fit it with an appropriate fairy story! For of course it is as absolute a fairy tale illustration as the dragon pictures on the other wall. It is now well to ask the way to S. Francesco della Vigna, where we shall find S. Jerome and his lion again. This vast church, with its pretentious and very unwelcoming façade by Palladio covering the friendly red brick, is at the first sight unattractive, so huge and cold and deserted is it. But it has details. It has, for example, just inside the door on the entrance wall, high up, a very beautiful early Christian coloured relief of the Madonna and Child: white on blue, but far earlier than the Delia Robbias. The Madonna is slender as a pole but memorably sweet. It has also a curious great altar picture on wood by a strange painter, Frater Antonius da Negropoñ, as he signs himself--this in a little chapel in the right transept--with most charming details of birds, and flowers, and scrolls, and monochrome reliefs surrounding a Madonna and Child who beam comfort and assurance of joy. The date is supposed to be about 1450 and the source of Brother Antonio's inspiration must have been similar to that of the great Mantegna's. There are also the very delightful marble pictures in the chapel of the Giustiniani family to the left of the choir, the work of the Lombardi. About the walls are the evangelists and prophets (S. John no more than a beautiful and sensitive boy), while over the altar are scenes in the life of S. Jerome, whom we again see with his lion. In one relief he extracts the thorn from its foot; in another the lion assists in holding up the theological work which the saint is perusing, while in his other hand the saint poises a model of the church and campanile of S. Zaccaria. Below, on the altar cloth, is a Last Judgment, with the prettiest little angel boys to sound the dreadful trumps. To these must be added two pictures by Paul Veronese, one with a kneeling woman in it who at once brings to mind the S. Helena in our National Gallery. Furthermore, in the little Cappella Santa is a rich and lovely Giovanni Bellini, with sacred relics in jars above and below it, and outside is the gay little cloistered garden of the still existing monastery, with a figure of S. Francis in the midst of its greenery. So much for the more ingratiating details of this great church, which are displayed with much spirit by a young sacristan who is something of a linguist: his English consisting of the three phrases: "Good morning," "Very nice," and "Come on!" The great church has also various tombs of Doges, the most splendid being that noble floor slab in front of the high altar, beneath which repose the bones of Marcantonio Trevisan (1553-1554). What Trevisan was like may be learned from the relief over the sacristy entrance, where he kneels to the crucifix. He made no mark on his times. Andrea Gritti (1523-1538), who also is buried here, was a more noticeable ruler, a born monarch who had a good diplomatic and fighting training abroad before he came to the throne. He was generous, long-memoried, astute, jovial, angry, healthy, voluptuous and an enthusiast for his country. He not only did all that he could for Venice (and one of his unfulfilled projects was to extend the Ducal Palace to absorb the prison) but he was quite capable of single-handed negotiations with foreign rulers. Other Doges who lie here are the two Contarini, Francesco (1623-1624) and Alvise (1676-1684), but neither was of account; and here, too, in his own chapel lies Alvise's predecessor, Niccolò Sagredo (1674-1676) who had trouble in Candia for his constant companion. Of the Giustiniani only Marcantonio became a Doge and he succeeded Alvise Contarini not only to the throne but to the Candia difficulty, giving way after four years, in 1688, to the great soldier who solved it--Francesco Morosini. CHAPTER XXI ON FOOT. III. THE MERCERIA AND THE RIALTO Walking in Venice--The late Colonel Douglas--Shops--The Merceria clock--S. Zulian--S. Salvatore--Sansovino--Carlo Goldoni--the Campo Bartolommeo and Mr. Howells--S. Giovanni Crisostomo--Piombo and Giorgione--A Sacristan artist--Marino Faliero's house--SS. Apostoli and Tiepolo--Venetian skittles--A broad walk--Filled in canals--The Rialto Bridge--S. Giacomo di Rialto--The two Ghettos--The Rialto hunchback--Vegetables and fruits--The fish market--Symmetrical irony--S. Giovanni Elemosinario--A busy thoroughfare--Old books--The convivial gondoliers. The best of Venice--Venice itself, that is--can never find its way into a book; and even if it did, no reader could extract it again. The best of Venice must be one's own discovery and one's own possession; and one must seek it, as Browning loved to do, in the narrow calli, in the tiny canals, in the smaller campi, or seated idly on bridges careless of time. Chiefly on foot does one realize the inner Venice. I make no effort in this work to pass on any detailed account of my researches in this way. All I would say is that every calle leads to another; there is hardly a dull inch in the whole city; and for the weary some kind of resting-place--a church, a wine shop, a café, or a stone step--is always close by. If you are lost--and in Venice in the poorer populous districts a map is merely an aggravation of dismay, while there is no really good map of the city to be obtained--there is but one thing to do and that is to go on. Before very long you must of necessity come to a calle with more traffic than the others and then you need but flow with the stream to reach some recognizable centre; or merely say "San Marco" or "gondola" to the first boy and he will consider it a privilege to guide you. Do not, however give up before you must, for it is a privilege to be lost in Venice. For those who prefer exercise to sitting in a gondola there is the stimulating and instructive book by the late Col. Douglas, _Venice on Foot_, which is a mine of information and interest; but I must admit that the title is against it. Youthful travellers in particular will have none of it. If Venice is anything at all to them, it is a city of water, every footstep in which is an act of treachery to romance. Even they, however, are pleased to jostle in the Merceria. [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, SHOWING S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE] The shops of Venice, I may say at once, are not good. They satisfy the Venetians, no doubt, but the Venetians are not hard to please; there is no Bond Street or Rue de la Paix. But a busy shopping centre always being amusing, the Merceria and Frezzeria become attractive haunts of the stranger; the Merceria particularly so. To gain this happy hunting ground one must melt away with the crowd through the gateway under the famous blue clock, which is worth a visit on account of its two bronze giants: one punctual and one late, for that one on the left of the bell, as we face the tower from the Piazza, is always a minute or two after his brother in striking the hours. The right hand giant strikes first, swinging all his upper part as he does so; and then the other. From their attitude much of Venice is revealed, but only the thin can enjoy this view, such being the narrowness of the winding stairs and doorway by which it is gained. At Easter a procession of mechanical figures below the clock-face delights the spectators. It was while Coryat was in Venice that one of these giants, I know not which, performed a deed of fatal savagery. The traveller thus describes it: "A certaine fellow that had the charge to looke to the clocke, was very busie about the bell, according to his usuall custome every day, to the end to amend something in it that was amisse. But in the meane time one of those wilde men that at the quarters of the howers doe use to strike the bell, strooke the man in the head with his brazen hammer, giving him such a violent blow, that therewith he fell down dead presently in his place, and never spake more." At the third turning to the right out of the Merceria is the church of S. Giuliano, or S. Zulian, which the great Sansovino built. One evening, hearing singing as I passed, I entered, but found standing-room only, and that only with the greatest discomfort. Yet the congregation was so happy and the scene was so animated that I stayed on and on--long enough at any rate for the offertory box to reach me three separate times. Every one present was either poor or on the borders of poverty; and the fervour was almost that of a salvation army meeting. And why not, since the religion both of the Pope and of General Booth was pre-eminently designed for the poor? I came away with a tiny coloured picture of the Virgin and more fleas than I ever before entertained at the same time. At the end of the Merceria is S. Salvatore, a big quiet church in the Renaissance style, containing the ashes of S. Theodore, the tombs of various Doges, and a good Bellini: a warm, rich, and very human scene of a wayside inn at Emmaus and Christ appearing there. An "Annunciation" by Titian is in the church proper, painted when he was getting very old, and framed by Sansovino; a "Transfiguration" by Titian is in the pretty sacristy, which, like many of the Venetian churches, is presided over by a dwarf. A procession of Venetian sacristans would, by the way, be a strange and grotesque spectacle. The best of the S. Salvatore monuments is that by Sansovino of Doge Francesco Venier (1554-1556), with beautiful figures in the niches from the same hand--that of Charity, on the left, being singularly sweet. When Sansovino made these he was nearly eighty. Sansovino also designed the fine doorway beneath the organ. The most imposing monuments are those of Caterina Cornaro (or Corner) the deposed queen of Cyprus, in the south transept; of three Cardinals of the Corner family; and of the Doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, each with his patron saint above him. The oddity of its architecture, together with its situation at a point where a little silence is peculiarly grateful, makes this church a favourite of mine, but there are many buildings in Venice which are more beautiful. Opposite, diagonally, is one of the depressing sights of Venice, a church turned into a cinema. Leaving S. Salvatore by the main door and turning to the left, we soon come (past a hat shop which offers "Rooswelts" at 2.45 each), to the Goldoni Theatre. Leaving San Salvatore by the same door and turning to the right, we come to Goldoni himself, in bronze, in the midst of the Campo S. Bartolommeo: the little brisk observant satirist upon whom Browning wrote the admirably critical sonnet which I quote earlier in this book. The comedies of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) still hold the Italian stage, but so far as translations can tell me they are very far from justifying any comparison between himself and Molière. Goldoni's _Autobiography_ is not a very entertaining work, but it is told with the engaging minuteness which seems to have been a Venetian trait. The church of S. Bartolommeo contains altar pieces by Giorgione's pupil, Sebastian del Piombo, but there is no light by which to see them. It was in this campo that Mr. Howells had rooms before he married and blossomed out on the Grand Canal, and his description of the life here is still so good and so true, although fifty years have passed, that I make bold to quote it, not only to enrich my own pages, but in the hope that the tastes of the urbane American book which I give now and then may send readers to it. The campo has changed little except that the conquering Austrians have gone and Goldoni's statue is now here. Mr. Howells thus describes it: "Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San Bartolommeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from S. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society. "Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market. "Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt buttons and a paper of hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolommeo. "In San Bartolommeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above and shops below. The ground floor is devoted to the small commerce of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth is the appartimento signorile. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all the odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the crowd. On another balcony a lady sat; at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbours have the amiable custom of studying one another's features through opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror's response to the damsel's constant "Fair or not?" being a believer in every woman's right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the café; to the tide of passers-by from the Merceria; the smooth shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed white-faced Venetians, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms." Having reached Goldoni's statue there are two courses open to us if we are in a mood for walking. One is to cross the Rialto bridge and join the stream which always fills the narrow busy calli that run parallel with the Grand Canal to the Frari. The other is to leave this campo at the far end, at Goldoni's back, and join the stream which is always flowing backwards and forwards along the new Via Vittorio Emmanuele. [Illustration: S. CHRISTOPHER, S. JEROME AND S. AUGUSTINE FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo_] Let me describe both routes, beginning with the second. A few yards after leaving the campo we come on the right to the little church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo where there are two unusually delightful pictures: a Sebastiano del Piombo and a Bellini, with a keen little sacristan who enjoys displaying their beauties and places you in the best light. The Bellini is his last signed work, and was painted when the old man was in his eighty-fifth year. The restorer has been at it, but not to its detriment. S. Christopher, S. Jerome, and S. Augustine are sweetly together in a delectable country; S. Christopher (as the photograph on the opposite page shows) bearing perhaps the most charming Christ Child of all, with his thumb in his mouth. The Piombo--another company of saints--over the high altar, is a fine mellow thing with a very Giorgionesque figure of the Baptist dominating it, and a lovely Giorgionesque landscape spreading away. The picture (which I reproduce opposite page 116) is known to be the last which Sebastiano painted before he went to Rome and gave up Giorgione's influence for Michael Angelo's. It has been suggested that Giorgione merely supplied the design; but I think one might safely go further and affirm that the painting of the right side was his too and the left Piombo's. How far Piombo departed from Giorgione's spell and came under the other may be seen in our National Gallery by any visitor standing before No. 1--his "Raising of Lazarus". Very little of the divine chromatic melody of Castel Franco there! S. Giovanni Crisostomo has also two fine reliefs, one by Tullio Lombardi with a sweet little Virgin (who, however, is no mother) in it, and the twelve Apostles gathered about. The sacristan, by the way, is also an amateur artist, and once when I was there he had placed his easel just by the side door and was engaged in laboriously copying in pencil Veronese's "Christ in the House of Levi" (the original being a mile away, at the Accademia) from an old copper plate, whistling the while. Having no india-rubber he corrected his errors either with a penknife or a dirty thumb. Art was then more his mistress than Pecunia, for on this occasion he never left his work, although more than one Baedeker was flying the red signal of largesse. Continuing on our way we come soon to a point where the Calle Dolfin meets a canal at right angles, with a large notice tablet like a gravestone to keep us from falling into the water. It bears an ancient, and I imagine, obsolete, injunction with regard to the sale of bread by unauthorized persons. Turning to the left we are beneath the arcade of the house of the ill-fated Marino Faliero, the Doge who was put to death for treason, as I have related elsewhere. It is now shops and tenements. Opposite is the church of SS. Apostoli, which is proud of possessing an altar-piece by Tiepolo which some think his finest work, and of which the late John Addington Symonds wrote in terms of excessive rapture. It represents the last communion of S. Lucy, whose eyes were put out. Her eyes are here, in fact, on a plate. No one can deny the masterly drawing and grouping of the picture, but, like all Tiepolo's work, it leaves me cold. I do not suggest the diversion at this moment; but from SS. Apostoli one easily gains the Fondamenta Nuovo, on the way passing through a rather opener Venice where canals are completely forgotten. Hereabouts are two or three popular drinking places with gardens, and on one Sunday afternoon I sat for some time in the largest of them--the Trattoria alla Libra--watching several games of bowls--the giuocho di bocca--in full swing. The Venetian workman--and indeed the Italian workman generally--is never so happy as when playing this game, or perhaps he is happiest when--ball in hand--he discusses with his allies various lines of strategy. The Giudecca is another stronghold of the game, every little bar there having a stamped-down bowling alley at the back of it. The longest direct broad walk in Venice--longer than the Riva--begins at SS. Apostoli and extends to the railway station. The name of the street is the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, and in order to obtain it many canals had to be filled-in. To the loss of canals the visitor is never reconciled. Wherever one sees the words Rio Terra before the name of a calle, one knows that it is a filled-in canal. For perhaps the best example of the picturesque loss which this filling-in entails one should seek the Rio Terra delle Colonne, which runs out of the Calle dei Fabri close to the Piazza of S. Mark. When this curved row of pillars was at the side of water it must have been impressive indeed. And now we must return to the Goldoni statue to resume that other itinerary over the Rialto bridge, which is as much the centre of Venice by day as S. Mark's Square is by night. In another chapter I speak of the bridge as seen from the Grand Canal, which it so nobly leaps. More attractive is the Grand Canal as seen from it; and the visitor to Venice should spend much time leaning upon the parapet of one side and the other at the highest point. He will have it for the most part to himself, for the Venetians prefer the middle way between the shops. These shops are, however, very dull--principally cheap clothiers and inferior jewellers--and the two outer tracks are better. From here may best be seen the façade of the central Post Office, once the Fondaco dei Tedeschi splendid with the frescoes of Giorgione and Titian. The frescoes have gone and it is now re-faced with stucco. From here, too, the beautiful palace of the Camerlenghi at the edge of the Erberia is most easily studied. The Rialto bridge itself exerts no spell. It does not compare in interest or charm with the Ponte Vecchio of Florence. The busiest and noisiest part of Venice begins at the further foot of the bridge, for here are the markets, crowded by housewives with their bags or baskets, and a thousand busy wayfarers. The little church of the market-place--the oldest in Venice--is S. Giacomo di Rialto, but I have never been able to find it open. Commerce now washes up to its walls and practically engulfs it. A garden is on its roof, and its clock has stopped permanently at four. It was in this campo that the merchants anciently met: here, in the district of the Rialto, and not on the bridge itself, as many readers suppose, did Antonio transact his business with one Shylock a Jew. There are plenty of Jews left in Venice; in fact, I have been told that they are gradually getting possession of the city, and judging by their ability in that direction elsewhere, I can readily believe it; but I saw none in the least like the Shylock of the English stage, although I spent some time both in the New Ghetto and the Old by the Cannaregio. All unwilling I once had the company of a small Jewish boy in a gaberdine for the whole way from the New Ghetto to the steamboat station of S. Toma, his object in life being to acquire for nothing a coin similar to one which I had given to another boy who had been really useful. If he avowed once that he was a starving Jewish boy and I was a millionaire, he said it fifty times. Every now and then he paused for an anxious second to throw a somersault. But I was obdurate, and embarking on the steamer, left the two falsehoods to fight it out. The two Ghettos, by the way, are not interesting; no traveller, missing them, need feel that he has been in Venice in vain. At the other end of the Rialto campo, opposite the church, is the famous hunchback, the Gobbo of the Rialto, who supports a rostrum from which the laws of the Republic were read to the people, after they had been read, for a wider audience, from the porphyry block at the corner of S. Mark's. Leaving the Gobbo on our left and passing from the campo at the right-hand corner, we come to the great arcaded markets for fruit and vegetables, and further to the wholesale and retail fish markets, all of which are amusing to loiter in, particularly in the early hours of the morning. To the Erberia are all the fruit-laden barges bound, chiefly from Malamocco, the short cut from the lagoon being through the Rio del Palazzo beneath the Bridge of Sighs and into the Grand Canal, just opposite us, by the Post Office. The fruit market is busy twice a day, in the early morning and in the late afternoon; the fish market in the morning only. [Illustration: S. MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI] The vegetables and fruit differ according to the seasons; the fish are always the same. In the autumn, when the quay is piled high with golden melons and flaming tomatoes, the sight is perhaps the most splendid. The strangest of the fish to English eyes are the great cuttle-fish, which are sold in long slices. It strikes one as a refinement of symmetrical irony that the ink which exudes from these fish and stains everything around should be used for indicating what their price is. Here also are great joints of tunny, huge red scarpenna, sturgeon, mullet, live whole eels (to prove to me how living they were, a fishmonger one morning allowed one to bite him) and eels in writhing sections, aragosta, or langouste, and all the little Adriatic and lagoon fish--the scampi and shrimps and calimari--spread out in little wet heaps on the leaves of the plane-tree. One sees them here lying dead; one can see them also, alive and swimming about, in the aquarium on the Lido, where the prettiest creatures are the little cavalli marini, or sea horses, roosting in the tiny submarine branches. From all the restlessness and turmoil of these markets there is escape in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario, a few yards along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni on the left. Here one may sit and rest and collect one's thoughts and then look at a fine rich altar-piece by Pordenone--S. Sebastian, S. Rocco, and S. Catherine. The lion of the church is a Titian, but it is not really visible. As typical a walk as one can take in democratic Venice is that from this church to the Frari, along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni, parallel with the Grand Canal. I have been here often both by day and by night, and it is equally characteristic at either time. Every kind of shop is here, including two old book-shops, one of which (at the corner of the Campiello dei Meloni) is well worth rummaging in. A gentle old lady sits in the corner so quietly as to be invisible, and scattered about are quite a number of English books among them, when I was last there, a surprising proportion of American minor verse. Another interesting shop here supplies Venetians with the small singing birds which they love so much, a cage by a window being the rule rather than the exception; and it was hereabouts that an old humorous greengrocer once did his voluble best to make me buy a couple of grilli, or crickets, in a tiny barred prison, to make their shrill mysterious music for me. But I resisted. At night, perhaps, is this walk best, for several very popular wine shops for gondoliers are hereabouts, one or two quite large, with rows of barrels along the walls; and it is good to see every seat full, and an arm round many a waist, and everybody merry. Such a clatter of tongues as comes from these taverns is not to be beaten; and now and then a tenor voice or a mandolin adds a grace. CHAPTER XXII S. ROCCO AND TINTORETTO The Scuola di S. Rocco--Defective lighting--A competition of artists--The life of the Virgin--A dramatic Annunciation--Ruskin's analysis--S. Mary of Egypt--The upper hall--"The Last Supper"--"Moses striking the rock"--"The Crucifixion"--A masterpiece--Tintoretto's career--Titian and Michel Angelo--A dramatist of the Bible--Realistic carvings--The life of S. Rocco--A humorist in wood--A model council chamber--A case of reliquaries--The church of S. Rocco--Giorgione or Titian? There are Tintorettos everywhere in Venice, in addition to the immense canvases in the Doges' Palace, but I imagine that were we able to ask the great man the question, Where would he choose to be judged? he would reply, "At the Scuola di S. Rocco,"--with perhaps a reservation in favour of "The Miracle of S. Mark" at the Accademia, and possibly the "Presentation" (for I feel he must have loved that work) at the Madonna dell'Orto, and "The Marriage in Cana," that fascinating scene, in the Salute. In the superb building of the S. Rocco Scuola he reigns alone, and there his "Crucifixion" is. The Scuola and the church, in white stone, hide behind the lofty red-brick apse of the Frari. The Scuola's façade has, in particular, the confidence of a successful people. Within, it is magnificent too, while to its architectural glories it adds no fewer than six-and-fifty Tintorettos; many of which, however, can be only dimly seen, for the great Bartolommeo Bon, who designed the Scuola, forgot that pictures require light. Nor was he unique among Venice's builders in this matter; they mostly either forgot it or allowed their jealousy of a sister art to influence them. "Light, more light," is as much the cry of the groping enthusiast for painting in this fair city, as it was of the dying Goethe. The story of Tintoretto's connexion with the Scuola illustrates his decision and swiftness. The Scuola having been built, where, under the banner of S. Rocco, a philanthropical confraternity might meet to confer as to schemes of social amelioration, it was, in 1560, decided to invite the more prominent artists to make proposals as to its decoration. Tintoretto, then forty-two, Paul Veronese and Schiavone were among them. They were to meet in the Refectory and display their sketches; and on a given day all were there. Tintoretto stood aside while the others unfolded their designs, which were examined and criticized. Then came his turn, but instead of producing a roll he twitched a covering, which none had noticed, and revealed in the middle of the ceiling the finished painting of S. Rocco in glory. A scene of amazement and perplexity ensued. The other artists, accepting defeat, retired from the field; the authorities gazed in a fine state of confusion over the unconventional foreshortening of the saint and his angel. They also pointed out that Tintoretto had broken the condition of the competition in providing a painting when only sketches were required. "Very well," he said, "I make you a present of it." Since by the rules of the confraternity all gifts offered to it had to be accepted, he thus won his footing; and the rest was easy. Two or three years later he was made a brother of the Order, at fifty pounds a year, in return for which he was each year to provide three paintings; and this salary he drew for seventeen years, until the great work was complete. The task comprises the scenes in the life of the Virgin, in the lower hall; the scenes in the life of Christ, on the walls of the upper hall; the scenes from the Old Testament, on the ceiling of the upper hall; and the last scenes in the life of Christ, in the Refectory. In short, the Scuola di S. Rocco is Tintoretto's Sistine Chapel. We enter to an "Annunciation"; and if we had not perceived before, we at once perceive here, in this building, Tintoretto's innovating gift of realism. He brought dailiness into art. Tremendous as was his method, he never forgot the little things. His domestic details leaven the whole. This "Annunciation" is the most dramatic version that exists. The Virgin has been sitting quietly sewing in her little room, poorly enough furnished, with a broken chair by the bed, when suddenly this celestial irruption--this urgent flying angel attended by a horde of cherubim or cupids and heralded by the Holy Spirit. At the first glance you think that the angel has burst through the wall, but that is not so. But as it is, even without that violence, how utterly different from the demure treatment of the Tuscans! To think of Fra Angelico and Tintoretto together is like placing a violet beside a tiger lily. A little touch in the picture should be noticed: a carpenter at work outside. Very characteristic of Tintoretto. Next--but here let me remind or inform the reader that the Venetian Index at the end of the later editions of _The Stones of Venice_ contains an analysis of these works, by Ruskin, which is as characteristic of that writer as the pictures are of their artist. In particular is Ruskin delighted by "The Annunciation," by "The Murder of the Innocents," and, upstairs, by the ceiling paintings and the Refectory series. Next is "The Adoration of the Magi," with all the ingredients that one can ask, except possibly any spiritual rapture; and then the flight into a country less like the Egypt to which the little family were bound, or the Palestine from which they were driven, than one can imagine, but a dashing work. Then "The Slaughter of the Innocents," a confused scene of fine and daring drawing, in which, owing to gloom and grime, no innocents can be discerned. Then a slender nocturnal pastoral which is even more difficult to see, representing Mary Magdalen in a rocky landscape, and opposite it a similar work representing S. Mary of Egypt, which one knows to be austere and beautiful but again cannot see. Since the story of S. Mary of Egypt is little known, I may perhaps be permitted to tell it here. This Mary, before her conversion, lived in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century and was famous for her licentiousness. Then one day, by a caprice, joining a company of pilgrims to Jerusalem, she embraced Christianity, and in answer to her prayers for peace of mind was bidden by a supernatural voice to pass beyond Jordan, where rest and comfort were to be found. There, in the desert, she roamed for forty-seven years, when she was found, naked and grey, by a holy man named Zosimus who was travelling in search of a hermit more pious than himself with whom he might have profitable converse. Zosimus, having given her his mantle for covering, left her, but he returned in two years, bringing with him the Sacrament and some food. When they caught sight of each other, Mary was on the other side of the Jordan, but she at once walked to him calmly over the water, and after receiving the Sacrament returned in the same manner; while Zosimus hastened to Jerusalem with the wonderful story. The next year Zosimus again went in search of her, but found only her corpse, which, with the assistance of a lion, he buried. She was subsequently canonized. The other two and hardly distinguishable paintings are "The Presentation of Christ in the Temple" and "The Assumption of the Virgin." Now we ascend the staircase, on which is a beautiful "Annunciation" by Titian, strangely unlike Tintoretto's version below. Here the Virgin kneels before her desk, expectant, and the angel sails quietly in with a lily. The picture is less dramatic and more sympathetic; but personally I should never go to Venice for an "Annunciation" at all. Here also is Tintoretto's "Visitation," but it is not easily seen. The upper hall is magnificent, but before we examine it let us proceed with the Tintorettos. In "The Adoration of the Shepherds," in the far left-hand corner as one enters, there is an excellent example of the painter's homeliness. It is really two pictures, the Holy Family being on an upper floor, or rather shelf, of the manger and making the prettiest of groups, while below, among the animals, are the shepherds, real peasants, looking up in worship and rapture. This is one of the most attractive of the series, not only as a painting but as a Biblical illustration. In the corresponding corner at the other end of this wall is another of the many "Last Suppers" which Tintoretto devised. It does not compare in brilliance with that in S. Giorgio Maggiore, but it must greatly have interested the painter as a composition, and nothing could be more unlike the formality of the Leonardo da Vinci convention, with the table set square to the spectators, than this curious disordered scramble in which several of the disciples have no chairs at all. The attitudes are, however, convincing, Christ is a gracious figure, and the whole scene is very memorable and real. The Tintorettos on the walls of the upper hall I find less interesting than those on the ceiling, which, however, present the usual physical difficulties to the student. How Ruskin with his petulant impatience brought himself to analyse so minutely works the examination of which leads to such bodily discomfort, I cannot imagine. But he did so, and his pages should be consulted. He is particularly interesting on "The Plague of Serpents." My own favourite is that of Moses striking the rock, from which, it is said, an early critic fled for his life for fear of the torrent. The manna scene may be compared with another and more vivid version of the same incident in S. Giorgio Maggiore. [Illustration: THE CRUCIFIXION (CENTRAL DETAIL) FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO _In the Scuola di S. Rocco_] The scenes from the Life of Christ around the walls culminate in the wonderful "Crucifixion," in the Refectory leading from this room. This sublime work, which was painted in 1565, when the artist was forty-seven, he considered his masterpiece. It is the greatest single work in Venice, and all Tintoretto is in it, except the sensuous colourist of the "Origin of the Milky Way": all his power, all his thought, all his drama. One should make this room a constant retreat. The more one studies the picture the more real is the scene and the more amazing the achievement. I do not say that one is ever moved as one can be in the presence of great simplicity; one is aware in all Tintoretto's work of a hint of the self-conscious entrepreneur; but never, one feels, was the great man so single-minded as here; never was his desire to impress so deep and genuine. In the mass the picture is overpowering; in detail, to which one comes later, its interest is inexhaustible. As an example of the painter's minute thought, one writer has pointed out that the donkey in the background is eating withered palm leaves--a touch of ironical genius, if you like. Ruskin calls this work the most exquisite instance of the "imaginative penetrative." I reproduce a detail showing the soldiers with the ropes and the group of women at the foot of the cross. The same room has Tintoretto's noble picture of Christ before Pilate and the fine tragic composition "The Road to Calvary," and on the ceiling is the S. Rocco of which I have already spoken--the germ from which sprang the whole wonderful series. The story of this, the most Venetian of the Venetian painters and the truest to his native city (for all his life was spent here), may more fittingly be told in this place, near his masterpiece and his portrait (which is just by the door), than elsewhere. He was born in 1518, in the ninth year of our Henry VIII's reign, the son of a dyer, or tintore, named Battista Robusti, and since the young Jacopo Robusti helped his father in his trade he was called the little dyer, or il tintoretto. His father was well to do, and the boy had enough leisure to enable him to copy and to frequent the arcades of S. Mark's Square, under which such artists as were too poor to afford studios were allowed to work. The greatest name in Venetian art at that time, and indeed still, was that of Titian, and Tintoretto was naturally anxious to become his pupil. Titian was by many years Tintoretto's senior when, at the age of seventeen, the little dyer obtained leave to study under him. The story has it that so masterly were Tintoretto's early drawings that Titian, fearing rivalry, refused to teach him any longer. Whether this be true or not, and one dislikes to think of Titian in this way, Tintoretto left the studio and was thrown upon his own resources and ambition. Fortunately he did not need money: he was able even to form a collection of casts from the antique and also from Michael Angelo, the boy's other idol, who when Tintoretto was seventeen was sixty-one. Thus supplied, Tintoretto practised drawing and painting, day and night, his motto being "Titian's colour and Michael Angelo's form"; and he expressed himself as willing to paint anything anywhere, inside a house or outside, and if necessary for nothing, rather than be idle. Practice was what he believed in: practice and study; and he never tired. All painting worth anything, he held, must be based on sound drawing. "You can buy colours on the Rialto," he would remark, "but drawing can come only by labour." Some say that he was stung by a sarcasm of his Tuscan hero that the Venetians could not draw; be that as it may, he made accurate drawing his corner-stone; and so thorough was he in his study of chiaroscuro that he devised little toy houses in which to manufacture effects of light and shade. One of his first pictures to attract attention was a portrait of himself and his brother illuminated by a lamp. So passed, in miscellaneous work, even to painting furniture, at least ten years, towards the close of which he painted for the Madonna dell'Orto his earliest important work, "The Last Judgment," which though derived from Michael Angelo yet indicates much personal force. It was in 1548, when he was thirty, that Tintoretto's real chance came, for he was then invited to contribute to the decoration of the Scuola of S. Marco, and for it he produced one of his greatest works, "The Miracle of S. Mark," now in the Accademia. The novelty of its vivid force and drama, together with its power and assurance, although, as I have said, at first disconcerting to the unprepared critics, soon made an impression; spectators were carried off their feet; and Tintoretto's fame was assured. See opposite page 170. I have not counted the Venetian churches with examples of Tintoretto's genius in them (it would be simpler to count those that have none); but they are many and his industry was enormous. One likes to think of his studio being visited continually by church patrons and prelates anxious to see how their particular commission was getting on. Tintoretto married in 1558, two years after Shakespeare's birth, his wife being something of an heiress, and in 1562 his eldest son, Domenico, who also became an artist, was born. We have seen how in 1560 Tintoretto competed for the S. Rocco decorations; in 1565 he painted "The Crucifixion"; and he was working on the walls of the Scuola until 1588. In the meantime he worked also for the Doges' Palace, his first picture, that of the Battle of Lepanto, being destroyed with many others in the fire of 1576, first obtaining him as a reward a sinecure post in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that central office of German merchants and brokers on the façade of which Giorgione and Titian painted their famous (now obliterated) frescoes. Small posts here with no obligations were given to public servants, much as we give Civil List pensions. Tintoretto's life was very methodical, and was divided strictly between painting and domestic affairs, with few outside diversions. He had settled down in the house which now bears his name and a tablet, close to the church of the Madonna dell'Orto. His children were eight in number, among whom his favourite was Marietta, his eldest daughter. He and she were in fact inseparable, Marietta even donning boy's attire in order to be with him at his work on occasions when as a girl it would have been difficult. Perhaps it is she who so often appears in his pictures as a beautiful sympathetic human girl among so much that is somewhat frigidly Biblical and detached. Among his closer friends were some of the best Venetian intellects, and, among the artists, Andrea Schiavone, who hovers like a ghost about so many painters and their work, Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese, Jacopo da Ponte, or Bassano, and Alessandro Vittoria, the sculptor. He had musician friends, too; for Tintoretto, like Giorgione before him, was devoted to music, and himself played many instruments. He was a man of simple tastes and a quiet and somewhat dry humour; liked home best; chaffed his wife, who was a bit of a manager and had to check his indiscriminate generosity by limiting him to one coin a day; and, there is no doubt whatever, studied his Bible with minuteness. His collected works make the most copious illustrated edition of scripture that exists. [Illustration: THE COLLEONI STATUE AND S.S. GIOVANNI E PAOLO] Certain of Tintoretto's sayings prove his humour to have had a caustic turn. Being once much harassed by a crowd of spectators, including men of civic eminence, he was asked why he painted so quickly when Bellini and Titian had been so deliberate. "They had not so many onlookers to drive them to distraction," he replied. Of Titian, in spite of his admiration for his colour, he was always a little jealous and could not bear to hear him much praised; and colour without drawing eternally vexed him. His own colour is always subservient. The saying of his which one remembers best bears upon the difficulties that beset the conscientious artist: "The farther you go in, the deeper is the sea." Late in life Tintoretto spent much time with the brothers of S. Rocco. In 1594, at the age of seventy-six, he died, after a short illness. All Venice attended his funeral. He was one of the greatest of painters, and, like Michael Angelo, he did nothing little. All was on the grand scale. He had not Michael Angelo's towering superiority, but he too was a giant. His chief lack was tenderness. There is something a little remote, a little unsympathetic, in all his work: one admires and wonders, and awaits in vain the softening moment. To me he is as much a dramatist of the Bible as a painter of it. One is rarely satisfied with the whole of a Tintoretto; but a part of most of his works is superb. Of all his pictures in Venice my favourite secular one is the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the Doges' Palace, which has in it a loveliness not excelled in any painting that I know. Excluding "The Crucifixion" I should name "The Marriage in Cana" at the Salute as his most ingratiating Biblical scene. See opposite pages 48 and 96. The official programme of the Scuola pictures, printed on screens in various languages, badly needs an English revisor. Here are two titles: "Moise who makes the water spring"; "The three children in the oven of Babylony." It also states "worthy of attention are as well the woodcarvings round the wall sides by an anonymous." To these we come later. Let me say first that everything about the upper hall, which you will note has no pillars, is splendid and thorough--proportions, ceiling, walls, carvings, floor. The carvings on each side of the high altar (not those "by an anonymous" but others) tell very admirably the life of the patron saint of the school whose "S.R.," nobly devised in brass, will be found so often both here and in the church across the way. S. Rocco, or Saint Rocke, as Caxton calls him, was born at Montpelier in France of noble parentage. His father was lord of Montpelier. The child, who came in answer to prayer, bore at birth on his left shoulder a cross and was even as a babe so holy that when his mother fasted he fasted too, on two days in the week deriving nourishment from her once only, and being all the gladder, sweeter, and merrier for this denial. The lord of Montpelier when dying impressed upon his exemplary son four duties: namely, to continue to be vigilant in doing good, to be kind to the poor, to distribute all the family wealth in alms, and to haunt and frequent the hospitals. Both his parents being dead, Rocco travelled to Italy. At Acquapendente he healed many persons of the pestilence, and also at Cesena and at Rome, including a cardinal, whom he rendered immune to plague for ever more by drawing a cross on his forehead. The cardinal took him to see the pope, in whose presence Rocco's own forehead shone with a supernatural light which greatly impressed the pontiff. After much further wandering and healing, Rocco himself took the disease under both his arms and was so racked with pain that he kept the other patients in the hospital awake. This distressing him, he crept away where his groans were out of hearing, and there he lay till the populace, finding him, and fearing infection, drove him from the city. At Piacenza, where he took refuge, a spring of fair water, which is there to this day, gushed out of the earth for his liquid refreshment and as mark of heaven's approval; while the hound of a neighbouring sportsman brought him bread from the lord Golard's table: hence the presence of a dog in all representations of the saint. In the church of S. Rocco across the way Tintoretto has a picture of this scene in which we discern the dog to have been a liver-and-white spaniel. Golard, discovering the dog's fidelity to Rocco, himself passed into the saint's service and was so thoroughly converted by him that he became a humble mendicant in the Piacenza streets. Rocco meanwhile continued to heal, although he could not heal himself, and he even cured the wild animals of their complaints, as Tintoretto also shows us. Being at last healed by heaven, he travelled to Lombardy, where he was taken as a spy and imprisoned for five years, and in prison he died, after being revealed as a saint to his gaoler. His dying prayer was that all Christians who prayed to him in the name of Jesus might be delivered from pestilence. Shortly after Rocco's death an angel descended to earth with a table written in letters of gold stating that this wish had been granted. In the carvings in the chancel, the bronzes on the gate and in Tintoretto's pictures in the neighbouring church, much of this story may be traced. The most noteworthy carvings round the room represent types and attributes. Here is the musician, the conspirator (a very Guy Fawkes, with dark lantern and all), the scholar, and so forth, all done with humorous detail by one Pianta. When he came to the artist he had a little quiet fun with the master himself, this figure being a caricature of no less a performer than the great Tintoretto. The little room leading from the upper hall is that rare thing in Venice, a council chamber which presents a tight fit for the council. Just inside is a wax model of the head of one of the four Doges named Alvise Mocenigo, I know not which. Upstairs is a Treasury filled with valuable ecclesiastical vessels, missals and vestments, and two fine religious pictures from the masterly worldly hand of Tiepolo. Among the sacred objects enshrined in gold and silver reliquaries are a piece of the jawbone of S. Barbara, a piece of the cranium of S. Martin, a tiny portion of the veil of the Madonna, and a tooth of S. Apollonius held in triumph in a pair of forceps by a little golden cherub. And now, descending again, let us look once more at the great picture of Him whose Life and Crucifixion put into motion all this curious ecclesiastical machinery--so strangely far from the original idea. The church of S. Rocco is opposite, and one must enter it for Tintoretto's scenes in the life of the saint, and for a possible Giorgione over the altar to the right of the choir in a beautiful old frame. The subject is Christ carrying the cross, with a few urging Him on. The theory that Giorgione painted this picture is gaining ground, and we know that only about a century after Giorgione's death Van Dyck, when sketching in Venice, made some notes of the work under the impression that it was the divine Castel Francan's. The light is poor and the picture is in a bad state, but one is conscious of being in the presence of a work of very delicate beauty and a profound soft richness. The picture, Vasari says, once worked miracles, and years ago it brought in, in votive money, great sums. One grateful admirer has set up a version of it in marble, on the left wall of the choir. Standing before this Giorgione, as before the Tintorettos here and over the way, one again wishes, as so often in Venice, that some American millionaire, in love with this lovely city and in doubt as to how to apply his superfluity of cash, would offer to clean the pictures in the churches. What glorious hues would then come to light! CHAPTER XXIII THE FRARI AND TITIAN A noble church--The tomb of Titian--A painter-prince--A lost garden--Pomp and colour--A ceaseless learner--Canova--Bellini's altar-piece--The Pesaro Madonna--The Frari cat--Tombs vulgar and otherwise--Francesco Foscari--Niccolò Tron's beard. From S. Rocco to the Frari is but a step, and plenty of assistance in taking that step will be offered you by small boys. Outside, the Frari--whose full title is Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari--is worth more attention than it wins. At the first glance it is a barn built of millions of bricks; but if you give it time it grows into a most beautiful Gothic church with lovely details, such as the corbelling under the eaves, the borders of the circular windows, and still more delightful borders of the long windows, and so forth; while its campanile is magnificent. In size alone the Frari is worthy of all respect, and its age is above five centuries. It shares with SS. Giovanni e Paolo the duty of providing Venice with a Westminster Abbey, for between them they preserve most of the illustrious dead. Within, it is a gay light church with fine sombre choir stalls. Next to S. Stefano, it is the most cheerful church in Venice, and one should often be there. Nothing is easier than to frequent it, for it is close to the S. Toma steamboat station, and every visit will discover a new charm. The most cherished possession of the Frari is, I suppose, the tomb of Titian. It is not a very fine monument, dating from as late as 1852, but it marks reverently the resting-place of the great man. He sits there, the old painter, with a laurel crown. Behind him is a relief of his "Assumption", now in the Accademia; above is the lion of Venice. Titian's work is to be seen throughout Venice, either in fact or in influence, and all the great cities of the world have some superb creation from his hand, London being peculiarly fortunate in the possession of his "Bacchus and Ariadne". Standing before the grave of this tireless maker of beauty, let us recall the story of his life. Titian, as we call him--Tiziano Vecellio, or Vecelli, or Tiziano da Cadore, as he was called by his contemporaries--was born in Cadore, a Venetian province. The year of his birth varies according to the biographer. Some say 1477, some 1480, some 1487 or even 1489 and 1490. Be that as it may, he was born in Cadore, the son of a soldier and councillor, Gregorio Vecelli. As a child he was sent to Venice and placed under art teachers, one of whom was Gentile Bellini, and one Giovanni Bellini, in whose studio he found Giorgione. And it is here that his age becomes important, because if he was born in 1477 he was Giorgione's contemporary as a scholar; if ten years later he was much his junior. In either case there is no doubt that Giorgione's influence was very powerful. On Titian's death in 1576 he was thought to be ninety-nine. [Illustration: THE MADONNA OF THE PESARO FAMILY FROM THE PAINTING BY TITIAN _In the Church of the Frari_] One of Titian's earliest known works is the visitation of S. Mary and S. Elizabeth, in the Accademia. In 1507 he helped Giorgione with the Fondaco dei Tedeschi frescoes. In 1511 he went to Padua. In 1512 he obtained a sinecure in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi and was appointed a State artist, his first task being the completion of certain pictures left unfinished by his predecessor Giovanni Bellini, and in 1516 he was put in possession of a patent granting him a painting monopoly, with a salary of 120 crowns and 80 crowns in addition for the portrait of each successive Doge. Thereafter his career was one long triumph and his brush was sought by foreign kings and princes as well as the aristocracy of Venice. Honours were showered upon him at home and abroad, and Charles V made him a Count and ennobled his progeny. He married and had many children, his favourite being, as with Tintoretto, a daughter, whose early death left him, again as with Tintoretto, inconsolable. He made large sums and spent large sums, and his house was the scene of splendid entertainments. It still stands, not far from the Jesuits' church, but it is now the centre of a slum, and his large garden, which extended to the lagoon where the Fondamenta Nuovo now is, has been built over. Titian's place in art is high and unassailable. What it would have been in colour without Giorgione we cannot say; but Giorgione could not affect his draughtsmanship. As it is, the word Titianesque means everything that is rich and glorious in paint. The Venetians, with their ostentation, love of pageantry, and intense pride in their city and themselves, could not have had a painter more to their taste. Had Giorgione lived he would have disappointed them by his preoccupation with romantic dreams; Bellini no doubt did disappoint them by a certain simplicity and divinity; Tintoretto was stern and sparing of gorgeous hues. But Titian was all for sumptuousness. Not much is known of his inner life. He seems to have been over-quick to suspect a successful rival, and his treatment of the young Tintoretto, if the story is true, is not admirable. He was more friendly with Aretino than one would expect an adorner of altars to be. His love of money grew steadily stronger. As an artist he was a pattern, for he was never satisfied with his work but continually experimented and sought for new secrets, and although quite old when he met Michael Angelo in Rome he returned with renewed ambitions. Among his last words, on his death-bed, were that he was at last almost ready to begin. As it happens, it is the pyramidal tomb opposite Titian's that was designed to hold his remains. It is now the tomb of Canova. Why it was not put to its maker's purpose, I do not know, but to my mind it is a far finer thing than the Titian monument and worthier of Titian than of Canova, as indeed Canova would have been the first to admit. But there was some hitch, and the design was laid in a drawer and not taken out again until Canova died and certain of his pupils completed it for himself. Canova was not a Venetian by birth. He was born at Passagno, near Asolo, in 1757, and was taught the elements of art by his grandfather and afterwards by a sculptor named Torretto, who recommended him to the Falier family as a "phenomenon". The Faliers made him their protégé, continued his education in Venice, and when the time was ripe sent him to Rome, the sculptors' Mecca. In Rome he remained practically to the end of his life, returning to Venice to die in 1822. It is possible not too highly to esteem Canova's works, but the man's career was marked by splendid qualities of industry and purpose and he won every worldly honour. In private life he practised unremittingly that benevolence and philanthropy which many Italians have brought to a fine art. It is these two tombs which draw most visitors to the Frari; but there are two pictures here that are a more precious artistic possession. Of these let us look first at Bellini's altar-piece in the Sacristy. This work represents the Madonna enthroned, about her being saints and the little angelic musicians of whom Bellini was so fond. In this work these musicians are younger than usual; one pipes while the other has a mandolin. Above them is the Madonna, grave and sweet, with a resolute little Son standing on her knee. The venerable holy men on either side have all Bellini's suave benignancy and incapacity for sin: celestial grandfathers. The whole is set in a very splendid frame. I give a reproduction opposite page 252, but the colour cannot be suggested. The other great Frari picture--stronger than this but not more attractive--is the famous Titian altar-piece, the "Pesaro Madonna". This is an altar-piece indeed, and in it unite with peculiar success the world and the spirit. The picture was painted for Jacopo Pesaro, a member of a family closely associated with this church, as the tombs will show us. Jacopo, known as "Baffo," is the kneeling figure, and, as his tonsure indicates, a man of God. He was in fact Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus, and being of the church militant he had in 1501 commanded the Papal fleet against the Turks. The expedition was triumphant enough to lead the Bishop to commission Titian to paint two pictures commemorating it. In the first the Pope, Alexander Borgia, in full canonicals, standing, introduces Baffo, kneeling, to S. Peter, on the eve of starting with the ships to chastise the Infidel. S. Peter blesses him and the Papal standard which he grasps. In the second, the picture at which we are now looking (see the reproduction opposite page 246), Baffo again kneels to S. Peter, while behind him a soldier in armour (who might be S. George and might merely be a Venetian warrior and a portrait) exhibits a captured Turk. Above S. Peter is the Madonna, with one of Titian's most adorable and vigorous Babes. Beside her are S. Francis and S. Anthony of Padua, S. Francis being the speaking brother who seems to be saying much good of the intrepid but by no means over-modest Baffo. The other kneeling figures are various Pesari. Everything about the picture is masterly and aristocratic, and S. Peter yields to no other old man in Venetian art, which so valued and respected age, in dignity and grandeur. In the clouds above all are two outrageously plump cherubs--fat as butter, as we say--sporting (it is the only word) with the cross. As I sat one day looking at this picture, a small grey and white cat sprang on my knee from nowhere and immediately sank into a profound slumber from which I hesitated to wake it. Such ingratiating acts are not common in Venice, where animals are scarce and all dogs must be muzzled. Whether or not the spirit of Titian had instructed the little creature to keep me there, I cannot say, but the result was that I sat for a quarter of an hour before the altar without a movement, so that every particular of the painting is photographed on my retina. Six months later the same cat led me to a courtyard opposite the Sacristy door and proudly exhibited three kittens. Jacopo Pesaro's tomb is near the Baptistery. The enormous and repellent tomb on the same wall as the Titian altar-piece is that of a later Pesaro, Giovanni, an unimportant Doge of Venice for less than a year, 1658-1659. It has grotesque details, including a camel, giant negroes and skeletons, and it was designed by the architect of S. Maria della Salute, who ought to have known better. The Doge himself is not unlike the author of a secretly published English novel entitled _The Woman Thou Gavest Me_. As a gentle contrast look at the wall tomb of a bishop on the right of the Pesaro picture. The old priest lies on his bier resting his head on his hand and gazing for ever at the choir screen and stalls. It is one of the simplest and most satisfactory tombs in this church. But it is in the right transept, about the Sacristy door, that the best tombs cluster, and here also, in the end chapel, is another picture, by an early Muranese painter of whom we have seen far too little, Bartolommeo Vivarini, who is credited with having produced the first oil picture ever seen in Venice. His Frari altar-piece undoubtedly had influence on the Bellini in the Sacristy, but it is less beautiful, although possibly a deeper sincerity informs it. Other musicianly angels are here, and this time they make their melody to S. Mark. In the next chapel are some pretty and cool grey and blue tombs. Chief of the tombs in this corner is the fine monument to Jacopo Marcello, the admiral. This lovely thing is one of the most Florentine sculptures in Venice; above is a delicate fresco record of the hero's triumphs. Near by is the monument of Pacifico Bon, the architect of the Frari, with a Florentine relief of the Baptism of Christ in terra-cotta, a little too high to be seen well. The wooden equestrian figure of Paolo Savello, an early work, is very attractive. In his red cap he rides with a fine assurance and is the best horseman in Venice after the great Colleoni. In the choir, where Titian's "Assumption" once was placed, are two more dead Doges. On the right is Francesco Foscari, who reigned from 1423-1457, and is one of the two Foscari (his son being the other) of Byron's drama. Francesco Foscari, whom we know so well by reason of his position in the relief on the Piazzetta façade of the Doges' Palace, and again on the Porta della Carta, was unique among the Doges both in the beginning and end of his reign. He was the first to be introduced to the populace in the new phrase "This is your Doge," instead of "This is your Doge, an it please you," and the first to quit the ducal throne not by death but deposition. But in many of the intervening thirty-four years he reigned with brilliance and liberality and encouraged the arts. His fall was due to the political folly of his son Jacopo and the unpopularity of a struggle with Milan. He died in the famous Foscari palace on the Grand Canal and, in spite of his recent degradation, was given a Doge's funeral. The other Doge here, who has the more ambitious tomb, is Niccolò Tron (1471-1473) who was before all a successful merchant. Foscari, it will be noticed, is clean shaven; Tron bearded; and to this beard belongs a story, for on losing a dearly loved son he refused ever after to have it cut and carried it to the grave as a sign of his grief. The Sacristy is, of course, chiefly the casket that contains the Bellini jewel, but it has other possessions, including the "Stations of the Cross" by Tiepolo, which the sacristan is far more eager to display: a brilliant but fatiguing series. Here, too, are a "Crucifixion" and "Deposition" by Canova. A nice ciborium by the door and a quaint wooden block remain in my memory. [Illustration: THE MADONNA TRIPTYCH BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Church of the Frari_] For the rest, I recall a gaunt Baptist in wood, said to be by Donatello, on one of the altars to the left of the choir; and the bronze Baptist in the Baptistery, less realistic, by Sansovino; the pretty figures of Innocence and S. Anthony of Padua on the holy water basins just inside the main door; and the corners of delectable medieval cities in intarsia work on the stalls. And, after the details and before them, there is always the great pleasant church, with its coloured beams and noble spaces. CHAPTER XXIV SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO A noble statue--Bartolommeo Colleoni--Verrocchio--A Dominican church--Mocenigo Doges--The tortured Bragadino--The Valier monument--Leonardo Loredano--Sebastian Venier--The Chapel of the Rosary--Sansovino--An American eulogy--Michele Steno--Tommaso Mocenigo--A brave re-builder--The Scuola di S. Marco. It is important to reach SS. Giovanni e Paolo by gondola, because the canals are particularly fascinating between this point and, say, the Molo. If one embarks at the Molo (which is the habit of most visitors), the gondolier takes you up the Rio Palazzo, under the Ponte di Paglia and the Bridge of Sighs, past the superb side walls of the Ducal Palace; then to the right, with relics of fine architecture on either side, up the winding Rio di S. Maria Formosa, and then to the right again into the Rio di S. Marina and the Rio dei Mendicanti (where a dyer makes the water all kinds of colours). A few yards up this canal you pass the Fondamenta Dandolo on the right, at the corner of which the most commanding equestrian statue in the world breaks on your vision, behind it rising the vast bulk of the church. All these little canals have palaces of their own, not less beautiful than those of the Grand Canal but more difficult to see. Before entering the church--and again after coming from it--let us look at the Colleoni. It is generally agreed that this is the finest horse and horseman ever cast in bronze; and it is a surprise to me that South Kensington has no reproduction of it, as the Trocadero in Paris has. Warrior and steed equally are splendid; they are magnificent and they are war. The only really competitive statue is that of Gattamalata (who was Colleoni's commander) by Donatello at Padua; but personally I think this the finer. Bartolommeo Colleoni was born in 1400, at Bergamo, of fighting stock, and his early years were stained with blood. The boy was still very young when he saw his father's castle besieged by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and his father killed. On becoming himself a condottiere, he joined the Venetians, who were then busy in the field, and against the Milanese naturally fought with peculiar ardour. But on the declaration of peace in 1441 he forgot his ancient hostility, and in the desire for more battle assisted the Milanese in their campaigns. Fighting was meat and drink to him. Seven years later he returned to the Venetians, expecting to be appointed Captain-General of the Republic's forces, but failing in this wish he put his arm again at the service of the Milanese. A little later, however, Venice afforded him the coveted honour, and for the rest of his life he was true to her, although when she was miserably at peace he did not refrain from a little strife on his own account, to keep his hand in. Venice gave him not only honours and money but much land, and he divided his old age between agriculture and--thus becoming still more the darling of the populace--almsgiving. Colleoni died in 1475 and left a large part of his fortune to the Republic to be spent in the war with the Turks, and a little for a statue in the Piazza of S. Mark. But the rules against statues being erected there being adamant, the site was changed to the campo of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and Andrea Verrocchio was brought from Florence to prepare the group. He began it in 1479 and died while still working on it, leaving word that his pupil, Lorenzo di Credi, should complete it. Di Credi, however, was discouraged by the authorities, and the task was given to Alessandro Leopardi (who made the sockets for the three flagstaffs opposite S. Mark's), and it is his name which is inscribed on the statue. But to Verrocchio the real honour. Among the Colleoni statue's great admirers was Robert Browning, who never tired of telling the story of the hero to those unacquainted with it. The vast church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo does for the Dominicans what the Frari does for the Franciscans; the two churches being the Venetian equivalents of Florence's S. Maria Novella and Santa Croce. Like too many of the church façades of Venice, this one is unfinished and probably ever will be. Unlike the Frari, to which it has a general resemblance, the church of John and Paul is domed; or rather it possesses a dome, with golden balls upon its cupola like those of S. Mark. Within, it is light and immense but far inferior in charm to its great red rival. It may contain no Titian's ashes, but both Giovanni and Gentile Bellini lie here; and its forty-six Doges give it a cachet. We come at once to two of them, for on the outside wall are the tombs of Doge Jacopo Tiepolo, who gave the land for the church, and of his son, Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo. [Illustration: BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI FROM THE STATUE BY ANDREA VERROCCHIO] Just within we find Alvise Mocenigo (1570-1577) who was on the throne when Venice was swept by the plague in which Titian died, and who offered the church of the Redentore on the Guidecca as a bribe to Heaven to stop the pestilence. Close by lie his predecessors and ancestors, Pietro Mocenigo, the admiral, and Giovanni Mocenigo, his brother, whose reign (1478-1485) was peculiarly belligerent and witnessed the great fire which destroyed so many treasures in the Ducal Palace. What he was like you may see in the picture numbered 750 in our National Gallery, once given to Carpaccio, then to Lorenzo Bastiani, and now to the school of Gentile Bellini. In this work the Doge kneels to the Virgin and implores intercession for the plague-stricken city. Pietro's monument is the most splendid, with a number of statues by Pietro Lombardi, architect of the Ducal Palace after the same fire. S. Christopher is among these figures, with a nice little Christ holding on to his ear. In the right aisle we find the monument of Bragadino, a Venetian commander who, on the fall of Cyprus, which he had been defending against the Turks, was flayed alive. But this was not all the punishment put upon him by the Turks for daring to hold out so long. First his nose and ears were cut off; then for some days he was made to work like the lowest labourer. Then came the flaying, after which his skin was stuffed with straw and fastened as a figure-head to the Turkish admiral's prow on his triumphant return to Constantinople. For years the trophy was kept in the arsenal of that city, but it was removed by some means or other, purchase or theft, and now reposes in the tomb at which we are looking. This monument greatly affected old Coryat. "Truly," he says, "I could not read it with dry eyes." Farther on is the pretentious Valier monument, a triumph of bad taste. Here we see Doge Bertucci Valier (1656-1658) with his courtly abundant dame, and Doge Silvestro Valier (1694-1700), all proud and foolish in death, as I feel sure they must have been in life to have commissioned such a memorial. In the choir are more Doges, some of sterner stuff: Michele Morosini (1382), who after only a few months was killed by a visitation of the plague, which carried off also twenty thousand more ordinary Venetians, but who has a tomb of great distinction worthy of commemorating a full and sagacious reign; Leonardo Loredan (1501-1521) whose features we know so well by reason of Bellini's portrait in the National Gallery, the Doge on the throne when the League of Cambray was formed by the Powers to crush the Republic; and Andrea Vendramini (1476-1478) who has the most beautiful monument of all, the work of Tullio and Antonio Lombardi. Vendramini, who came between Pietro and Giovanni Mocenigo, had a brief and bellicose reign. Lastly here lies Doge Marco Corner (1365-1368), who made little history, but was a fine character. In the left transept we find warlike metal, for here is the modern statue of the great Sebastian Venier whom we have already seen in the Ducal Palace as the hero of the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and it is peculiarly fitting that he should be honoured in the same church as the luckless Bragadino, for it was at Lepanto that the Turks who had triumphed at Cyprus and behaved so vilely were for the moment utterly defeated. On the death of Alvise Mocenigo, Venier was made Doge, at the age of eighty, but he occupied the throne only for a year and his end was hastened by grief at another of those disastrous fires, in 1576, which destroyed some of the finest pictures that the world then contained. This statue is vigorous, and one feels that it is true to life, but for the old admiral at his finest and most vivid you must go to Vienna, where Tintoretto's superb and magnificent portrait of him is preserved. There he stands, the old sea dog, in his armour, but bare-headed, and through a window you see the Venetian fleet riding on a blue sea. It is one of the greatest portraits in the world and it ought to be in Venice. The chapel of the Rosary, which is entered just by the statue of Venier, was built in honour of his Lepanto victory. It was largely destroyed by fire in 1867, and is shown by an abrupt white-moustached domineering guide who claims to remember it before that time. Such wood carving as was saved ("Saved! Saved!" he raps out in tones like a pistol shot) is in the church proper, in the left aisle. Not to be rescued were Titian's great "Death of S. Peter, Martyr" a copy of which, presented by King Victor Emmanuel, is in the church, and a priceless altar-piece by Giovanni Bellini. The beautiful stone reliefs by Sansovino are in their original places, and remain to-day as they were mutilated by the flames. Their unharmed portions prove their exquisite workmanship, and fortunately photography has preserved for us their unimpaired form. An American gentleman who followed me into the church, after having considered for some time as to whether or not he (who had "seen ten thousand churches") would risk the necessary fifty centimes, expressed himself, before these Sansovino masterpieces, as glad he came. "These reliefs," he said to me, "seem to be of a high order of merit." The restoration of the chapel is being carried out thoroughly but slowly. Modern Sansovinos, in caps made from the daily paper, are stone-cutting all day long, and will be for many years to come. Returning to the church proper, we find more Doges. An earlier Venier Doge, Antonio (1382-1400), is here. In the left aisle is another fine Ducal monument, that of Pasquale Malipiero (1457-1462), who succeeded Foscari on his deposal and was the first Doge to be present at the funeral of another, for Foscari died only ten days after his fall. Here also lie Doge Michele Steno (1400-1413), who succeeded Antonio Venier, and who as a young man is credited with the insult which may be said to have led to all Marino Faliero's troubles. For Steno having annoyed the Doge by falling in love with a maid of honour, Faliero forbade him the palace, and in retaliation Steno scribbled on the throne itself a scurrilous commentary on the Doge's wife. Faliero's inability to induce the judges to punish Steno sufficiently was the beginning of that rage against the State which led to his ruin. It was during Steno's reign that Carlo Zeno was so foolishly arrested and imprisoned, to the loss of the Republic of one of its finest patriots. [Illustration: MADONNA WITH THE MAGDALEN AND S. CATHERINE FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Accademia_] The next Ducal tomb is the imposing one of the illustrious Tommaso Mocenigo (1413-1423) who succeeded Steno and brought really great qualities to his office. Had his counsels been followed the whole history of Venice might have changed, for he was firm against the Republic's land campaigns, holding that she had territory enough and should concentrate on sea power: a sound and sagacious policy which found its principal opponent in Francesco Foscari, Mocenigo's successor, and its justification years later in the calamitous League of Cambray, to which I have referred elsewhere. Mocenigo was not only wise for Venice abroad, but at home too. A fine of a thousand ducats had been fixed as the punishment of anyone who, in those days of expenses connected with so many campaigns, chiefly against the Genoese, dared to mention the rebuilding or beautifying of the Ducal Palace. But Mocenigo was not to be deterred, and rising in his place with his thousand ducat penalty in his hand, he urged with such force upon the Council the necessity of rebuilding that he carried his point, and the lovely building much as we now know it was begun. That was in 1422. In 1423 Mocenigo died, his last words being a warning against the election of Foscari as his successor. But Foscari was elected, and the downfall of Venice dates from that moment. The last Ducal monument is that of Niccolò Marcello (1473-1474) in whose reign the great Colleoni died. Pietro Mocenigo was his successor. In pictures this great church is not very rich, but there is a Cima in the right transept, a "Coronation of the Virgin," which is sweet and mellow. The end wall of this transept is pierced by one of the gayest and pleasantest windows in the city, from a design of Bartolommeo Vivarini. It has passages of the intensest blue, thus making it a perfect thing for a poor congregation to delight in as well as a joy to the more instructed eye. In the sacristy is an Alvise Vivarini--"Christ bearing the Cross"--which has good colour, but carrying such a cross would be an impossibility. Finally let me mention the bronze reliefs of the life of S. Dominic in the Cappella of that saint in the right aisle. The one representing his death, though perhaps a little on the florid side, has some pretty and distinguished touches. The building which adjoins the great church at right angles is the Scuola di S. Marco, for which Tintoretto painted his "Miracle of S. Mark," now in the Accademia, and thus made his reputation. It is to-day a hospital. The two jolly lions on the façade are by Tullio Lombardi, the reliefs being famous for the perspective of the steps, and here, too, are reliefs of S. Mark's miracles. S. Mark is above the door, with the brotherhood around him. And now let us look again and again at the Colleoni, from every angle. But he is noblest from the extreme corner on the Fondamenta Dandolo. CHAPTER XXV S. ELENA AND THE LIDO The Arsenal--The public gardens--Garibaldi's monument--The art exhibition--A water pageant--The prince and his escort--Venice _versus_ Genoa--The story of Helena--S. Pietro in Castello--The theft of the brides--The Lido--A German paradise. I do not know that there is any need to visit the Arsenal museum except perhaps for the pleasure of being in a Venetian show place where no one expects a tip. It has not much of interest to a foreigner, nor could I discover a catalogue of what it does possess. Written labels are fixed here and there, but they are not legible. The most popular exhibit is the model of the Bucintoro, the State galley in which the Doge was rowed to the Porto di Lido, past S. Nicholas of the Lido, to marry the Adriatic; but the actual armour worn by Henri IV was to me more thrilling. Returning from the Arsenal to the Riva, we come soon, on the left, to the Ponte della Veneta Marina, a dazzlingly white bridge with dolphins carved upon it, and usually a loafer asleep on its broad balustrade; and here the path strikes inland up the wide and crowded Via Garibaldi. The shore of the lagoon between the bridge and the public gardens, whither we are now bound, has some very picturesque buildings and shipyards, particularly a great block more in the manner of Genoa than Venice, with dormer windows and two great arches, in which myriad families seem to live. Here clothes are always drying and mudlarks at play. Mr. Howells speaks in his _Venetian Life_ of the Giardini Pubblici as being an inevitable resort in the sixties; but they must, I think, have lost their vogue. The Venetians who want to walk now do so with more comfort and entertainment in S. Mark's Square. At the Via Garibaldi entrance is a monument to the fine old Liberator, who stands, wearing the famous cap and cloak, sword in hand, on the summit of a rock. Below him on one side is a lion, but a lion without wings, and on the other one of his watchful Italian soldiers. There is a rugged simplicity about it that is very pleasing. Among other statues in the gardens is one to perpetuate the memory of Querini, the Arctic explorer, with Esquimaux dogs at his side; Wagner also is here. In the public gardens are the buildings in which international art exhibitions are held every other year. These exhibitions are not very remarkable, but it is extremely entertaining to be in Venice on the opening day, for all the State barges and private gondolas turn out in their richest colours, some with as many as eighteen rowers all bending to the oar at the same moment, and in a splendid procession they convey important gentlemen in tall hats to the scene of the ceremony, while overhead two great dirigible airships solemnly swim like distended whales. In the afternoon of the 1914 ceremony the Principe Tommaso left the Arsenal in a motor-boat for some distant vessel. I chanced to be proceeding at the time at a leisurely pace from S. Niccolò di Lido to S. Pietro in Castello. Suddenly into the quietude of the lagoon broke the thunder of an advancing motor-boat proceeding at the maximum speed attainable by those terrific vessels. It passed us like a sea monster, and we had, as we clung to the sides of the rocking gondola, a momentary glimpse of the Principe behind an immense cigar. And then a more disturbing noise still, for out of the Arsenal, scattering foam, came four hydroplanes to act as a convoy and guard of honour, all soaring from their spray just before our eyes, and like enraged giant dragon-flies wheeling and swooping above the prince until we lost sight and sound of them. But long before we were at S. Pietro's they were furiously back again. Beyond the gardens, and connected with them by a bridge, is the island of S. Elena, where the foundry was built in which were recast the campanile bells after the fall of 1902. This is a waste space of grass and a few trees, and here the children play, and here, recently, a football ground--or campo di giuoco--has been laid out, with a galvanized iron and pitch-pine shed called splendidly the Tribuna. One afternoon I watched a match there between those ancient enemies Venice and Genoa: ancient, that is, on the sea, as Chioggia can tell. Owing to the heat the match was not to begin until half-past four; but even then the sun blazed. No sooner was I on the ground than I found that some of the Genoese team were old friends, for in the morning I had seen them in the water and on the sand at the Lido, and wondered who so solid a band of brothers could be. Then they played a thousand pranks on each other, the prime butt being the dark young Hercules with a little gold charm on his mighty chest, which he wore then and was wearing now, who guarded the Genoese goal and whose name was Frederici. It was soon apparent that Venice was outplayed in every department, but they tried gallantly. The Genoese, I imagine, had adopted the game much earlier; but an even more cogent reason for their superiority was apparent when I read through the names of both teams, for whereas the Venetians were strictly Italian, I found in the Genoese eleven a Macpherson, a Walsingham, and a Grant, who was captain. Whether football is destined to take a firm hold of the Venetians, I cannot say; but the players on that lovely afternoon enjoyed it, and the spectators enjoyed it, and if we were bored we could pick blue salvia. This island of S. Elena has more interest to the English than meets the eye. It is not merely that it is green and grassy, but the daughter of one of our national heroes is thought to have been buried there: the Empress Helena, daughter of Old King Cole, who fortified Colchester, where she was born. To be born in Colchester and be buried on an island near Venice is not too common an experience; to discover the true cross and be canonized for it is rarer still. But this remarkable woman did even more, for she became the mother of Constantine the Great, who founded the city which old Dandolo so successfully looted for Venice and which ever stood before early Venice as an exemplar. [Illustration: MADONNA AND SAINTS FROM THE PAINTING BY BOCCACCINO _In the Accademia_] Helena, according to the hagiologists, was advanced in years before she knew Christ, but her zeal made up for the delay. She built churches near and far, assisted in services, showered wealth on good works, and crowned all by an expedition to the Holy Land in search of the true cross. Three crosses were found. In order to ascertain the veritable one, a sick lady of quality was touched by all; two were without efficacy, but the third instantly healed her. It is fortunate that the two spurious ones were tried first. Part of the true cross Helena left in the Holy Land for periodical veneration; another part she gave to her son the Emperor Constantine for Constantinople for a similar purpose. One of the nails she had mounted in Constantine's diadem and another she threw into the Adriatic to save the souls of mariners. Helena died in Rome in 326 or 328, and most of the records agree that she was buried there and translated to Rheims in 849; but the Venetians decline to have anything to do with so foolish a story. It is their belief that the saint, whom Paul Veronese painted so beautifully, seeing the cross in a vision, as visitors to our National Gallery know, was buried on their green island. This has not, however, led them to care for the church there with any solicitude, and it is now closed and deserted. The adjoining island to S. Elena is that of Castello, on which stand the church of S. Pietro and its tottering campanile. This church was for centuries the cathedral of Venice, but it is now forlorn and dejected and few visitors seek it. Flowers sprout from the campanile, a beautiful white structure at a desperate angle. The church was once famous for its marriages, and every January, on the last day, the betrothed maidens, with their dowries in their hands and their hair down, assembled on the island with their lovers to celebrate the ceremony. On one occasion in the tenth century a band of pirates concealed themselves here, and descending on the happy couples, seized maidens, dowries, bridegrooms, clergy and all, and sailed away with them. Pursuit, however, was given and all were recaptured, and a festival was established which continued for two or three hundred years. It has now lapsed. Venice is fortunate indeed in the possession of the Lido; for it serves a triple purpose. It saves her from the assaults of her husband the Adriatic when in savage moods; it provides her with a stretch of land on which to walk or ride and watch the seasons behave; and as a bathing station it has no rival. The Lido is not beautiful; but Venice seen from it is beautiful, and it has trees and picnic grounds, and its usefulness is not to be exaggerated. The steamers, which ply continually in summer and very often in winter, take only a quarter of an hour to make the voyage. In the height of the bathing season the Lido becomes German territory, and the chromatic pages of _Lustige Blätter_ are justified. German is the only language on the sea or on the sands, at any rate at the more costly establishments. The long stretch of sand between these establishments, with its myriad tents and boxes, belong permanently to the Italians and is not to be invaded; but the public parts are Teutonic. Here from morning till evening paunchy men with shaven heads lie naked or almost naked in the sun, acquiring first a shrivelling of the cuticle which amounts to flaying, and then the tanning which is so triumphantly borne back to the Fatherland. The water concerns them but little: it is the sunburn on the sands that they value. With them are merry, plump German women, who wear slightly more clothes than the men, and like water better, and every time they enter it send up the horizon. The unaccompanied men comfort themselves with cameras, with which, all unashamed and with a selective system of the most rigid partiality, they secure reminders of the women they think attractive, a Kodak and a hat being practically their only wear. Professional photographers are there too, and on a little platform a combined chiropodist and barber plies his antithetical trades in the full view of the company. The Lido waters are admirably adapted for those who prefer to frolic rather than to swim. Ropes indicate the shallow area. There is then a stretch of sea, which is perhaps eight feet deep at the deepest, for about twenty yards, and then a sandy shoal arises where the depth is not more than three to four feet. Since only the swimmers can reach this vantage ground, one soon learns which they are. But, as I say, the sea takes a secondary place and is used chiefly as a corrective to the sun's rays when they have become too hot. "Come unto those yellow sands!" is the real cry of the Lido as heard in Berlin. CHAPTER XXVI ON FOOT. IV: FROM THE DOGANA TO S. SEBASTIANO The Dogana--A scene of shipping--The Giudecca Canal--On the Zattere--The debt of Venice to Ruskin--An artists' bridge--The painters of Venice--Turner and Whistler--A removal--S. Trovaso--Browning on the Zattere--S. Sebastiano--The life of Paul Veronese--S. Maria de Carmine--A Tuscan relief--A crowded calle--The grief of the bereaved. For a cool day, after too much idling in gondolas, there is a good walk, tempered by an occasional picture, from the Custom House to S. Sebastiano and back to S. Mark's. The first thing is to cross the Grand Canal, either by ferry or a steamer to the Salute, and then all is easy. The Dogana, as seen from Venice and from the water, is as familiar a sight almost as S. Mark's or the Doges' Palace, with its white stone columns, and the two giants supporting the globe, and the beautiful thistledown figure holding out his cloak to catch the wind. Everyone who has been to Venice can recall this scene and the decisive way in which the Dogana thrusts into the lagoon like the prow of a ship of which the Salute's domes form the canvas. But to see Venice from the Dogana is a rarer experience. No sooner does one round the point--the Punta della Salute--and come to the Giudecca canal than everything changes. Palaces disappear and shipping asserts itself. One has promise of the ocean. Here there is always a huddle of masts, both of barges moored close together, mostly called after either saints or Garibaldi, with crude pictures of their namesakes painted on the gunwale, and of bigger vessels and perhaps a few pleasure yachts; and as likely as not a big steamer is entering or leaving the harbour proper, which is at the far end of this Giudecca canal. And ever the water dances and there are hints of the great sea, of which the Grand Canal, on the other side of the Dogana, is ignorant. The pavement of the Zaterre, though not so broad as the Riva, is still wide, and, like the Riva, is broken by the only hills which the Venetian walker knows--the bridges. The first building of interest to which we come is the house, now a hotel, opposite a little alfresco restaurant above the water, which bears a tablet stating that it was Ruskin's Venetian home. That was in his later days, when he was writing _Fors Clavigera_; earlier, while at work on _The Stones of Venice_, he had lived, as we have seen, near S. Zobenigo. Ruskin could be very rude to the Venetians: somewhere in _Fors_ he refers to the "dirty population of Venice which is now neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman," and he was furious alike with its tobacco and its steamboats; yet for all that, if ever a distinguished man deserved honour at the hands of a city Ruskin deserves it from Venice. _The Stones of Venice_ is such a book of praise as no other city ever had. In it we see a man of genius with a passion for the best and most sincere work devoting every gift of appraisement, exposition, and eulogy, fortified by the most loving thoroughness and patience, to the glory of the city's architecture, character, and art. The first church is that of the Gesuati, but it is uninteresting. Passing on, we come shortly to a very attractive house with an overhanging first floor, most delectable windows and a wistaria, beside a bridge; and looking up the canal, the Rio di S. Trovaso, we see one of the favourite subjects of artists in Venice--the huddled wooden sheds of a squero, or a boat-building yard; and as likely as not some workmen will be firing the bottom of an old gondola preliminary to painting her afresh. Venice can show you artists at work by the score, on every fine day, but there is no spot more certain in which to find one than this bridge. It was here that I once overheard two of these searchers for beauty comparing notes on the day's fortune. "The bore is," said one, "that everything is so good that one can never begin." Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist seems to have swum for ever before his eyes. For many years after that, whenever he took up his brush, his first thought was to record yet another Venetian memory. In the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery are many of the canvases to which this worshipper of light endeavoured with such persistence and zeal to transfer some of the actual glory of the universe: each one the arena of the unequal struggle between pigment and atmosphere. But if Turner failed, as every artist must fail, to recapture all, his failures are always magnificent. There are, of course, also numbers of his Venetian water-colours. Where Turner lived when in Venice, I have not been able to discover; but I feel sure it was not at Danieli's, where Bonington was lodging on his memorable sojourn there about 1825. Turner was too frugal for that. The Tate has a brilliant oil rendering of the Doges' Palace by Bonington. The many Venetian water-colours which he made with such rapidity and power are scattered. One at any rate is in the Louvre, a masterly drawing of the Colleoni statue. To enumerate the great artists who have painted in Venice would fill a book. Not all have been too successful; while some have borne false witness. The dashing Ziem, for example, deprived Venice of her translucency; our own Henry Woods and Luke Fildes endow her daughters, who have always a touch of wistfulness, with too bold a beauty. In Whistler's lagoon etchings one finds the authentic note and in Clara Montalba's warm evanescent aquamarines; while for the colour of Venice I cannot remember anything finer, always after Turner, than, among the dead, certain J.D. Hardings I have seen, and, among the living, Mr. Sargent's amazing transcripts, which, I am told, are not to be obtained for love or money, but fall to the lot of such of his friends as wisely marry for them as wedding presents, or tumble out of his gondola and need consolation. Bonington and Harding painted Venice as it is; Turner used Venice to serve his own wonderful and glorious ends. If you look at his "Sun of Venice" in the National Gallery, you will not recognize the fairy background of spires and domes--more like a city of the Arabian Nights than the Venice of fact even in the eighteen-thirties. You will notice too that the great wizard, to whom, in certain rapt moods, accuracy was nothing, could not even write the word Venezia correctly on the sail of a ship. Whistler too, in accordance with his dictum that to say to the artist that he must take nature as she is, is to say to the musician that he must sit on the piano, used Venice after his own caprice, as the study of his etchings will show. And yet the result of both these artists' endeavours--one all for colour and the other all for form--is by the synthesis of genius a Venice more Venetian than herself: Venice essentialized and spiritualized. It was from this bridge that one Sunday morning I watched the very complete removal of a family from the Giudecca to another domicile in the city proper. The household effects were all piled up in the one boat, which father and elder son, a boy of about twelve, propelled. Mother and baby sat on a mattress, high up, while two ragged girls and another boy hopped about where they could and shouted with excitement. As soon as the Rio di S. Trovaso was entered the oarsmen gave up rowing and clawed their way along the wall. Moving has ever been a delight to English children, the idea of a change of house being eternally alluring, but what would they not give to make the exchange of homes like this? We should walk beside this pleasant Rio, for a little way down on the left is the church of S. Trovaso, with a campo that still retains some of the grass which gave these open spaces their name, and a few graceful acacia trees. In this church is a curiously realistic "Adoration of the Magi" by Tintoretto: a moving scene of life in which a Spanish-looking peasant seems strangely out of place. An altar in a little chapel has a beautiful shallow relief which should not be overlooked. The high-altar picture--a "Temptation of S. Anthony" by Tintoretto--is now hidden by a golden shrine, while another of the show pieces, a saint on horseback, possibly by Jacobello del Fiore, in the chapel to the left of the choir, is sadly in need of cleaning, but obviously deserving of every care. We now return to the Zattere, in a house on which, just beyond the Rio di S. Trovaso. Browning often stayed. In one of his letters he thus describes the view from his room: "Every morning at six, I see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view--the still grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the ruins are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins." Still keeping beside the shipping, we proceed to the little Albergo of the Winds where the fondamenta ends. Here we turn to the right, cross a campo with a school beside it, and a hundred boys either playing on the stones or audible at their lessons within walls, and before us, on the other side of the canal, is the church of S. Sebastiano, where the superb Veronese painted and all that was mortal of him was laid to rest in 1588. Let us enter. For Paolo Veronese at his best, in Venice, you must go to the Doges' Palace and the Accademia. Nearer home he is to be found in the Salon Carré in the Louvre, where his great banqueting scene hangs, and in our own National Gallery, notably in the beautiful S. Helena, more beautiful, to my mind, than anything of his in Venice, and not only more beautiful but more simple and sincere, and also in the magnificent "House of Darius". Not much is known of the life of Paolo Caliari of Verona. The son of a stone-cutter, he was born in 1528, and thus was younger than Titian and Tintoretto, with whom he was eternally to rank, who were born respectively in 1477 or 1487 and 1518. At the age of twenty-seven, Veronese went to Venice, and there he remained, with brief absences, for the rest of his life, full of work and honour. His first success came when he competed for the decoration of the ceiling of S. Mark's library and won. In 1560 he visited Rome in the Ambassador's service; in 1565 he married a Veronese woman. He died in 1588, leaving two painter sons. Vasari, who preferred Tuscans, merely mentions him. More than any other painter, except possibly Velasquez, Veronese strikes the observer as an aristocrat. Everything that he did had a certain aloofness and distinction. In drawing, no Venetian was his superior, not even Tintoretto; and his colour, peculiarly his own, is characterized by a certain aureous splendour, as though he mixed gold with all his paints. Tintoretto and he, though latterly, in Titian's very old age, rivals, were close friends. Veronese is the glory of this church, for it possesses not only his ashes but some fine works. It is a pity that the light is not good. The choir altar-piece is his and his also are the pictures of the martyrdom of S. Sebastian, S. Mark, and S. Marcellinus. They are vigorous and typical, but tell their stories none too well. Veronese painted also the ceiling, the organ, and other altar-pieces, and a bust of him is here to show what manner of man he was. Close to the door, on the left as you leave, is a little Titian which might be very fine after cleaning. There are two ways of returning from S. Sebastiano to, say, the iron bridge of the Accademia. One is direct, the other indirect. Let us take the indirect one first. [Illustration: THE PALAZZO PESARO (ORFEI), CAMPO S. BENEDETTO] Leaving the church, you cross the bridge opposite its door and turn to the left beside the canal. At the far corner you turn into the fondamenta of the Rio di S. Margherita, which is a beautiful canal with a solitary cypress that few artists who come to Venice can resist. Keeping on the right side of the Rio di S. Margherita we come quickly to the campo of the Carmine, where another church awaits us. S. Maria del Carmine is not beautiful, and such pictures as it possesses are only dimly visible--a "Circumcision" by Tintoretto, a Cima which looks as though it might be rather good, and four Giorgionesque scenes by Schiavone. But it has, what is rare in Venice, a bronze bas-relief from Tuscany, probably by Verrocchio and possibly by Leonardo himself. It is just inside the side door, on the right as you enter, and might easily be overlooked. Over the dead Christ bend women in grief; a younger woman stands by the cross, in agony; and in a corner are kneeling, very smug, the two donors, Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza. Across the road is a Scuola with ceilings by the dashing Tiepolo--very free and luminous, with a glow that brought to my mind certain little pastorals by Karel du Jardin, of all people! It is now necessary to get to the Campo di S. Barnaba, where under an arch a constant stream of people will be seen, making for the iron bridge of the Accademia, and into this stream you will naturally be absorbed; and to find this campo you turn at once into the great campo of S. Margherita, leaving on your left an ancient building that is now a cinema and bearing to the right until you reach a canal. Cross the canal, turn to the left, and the Campo di S. Barnaba, with its archway under the houses, is before you. The direct way from S. Sebastiano to this same point and the iron bridge is by the long Calle Avogadro and Calle Lunga running straight from the bridge before the church. There is no turning. The Calle Lunga is the chief shopping centre of this neighbourhood--its Merceria--and all the needs of poorer Venetian life are supplied there. But what most interested me was the death-notices in the shop windows. Every day there was a new one; sometimes two. These intimations of mortality are printed in a copper-plate type on large sheets of paper, usually with black edges and often with a portrait. They begin with records as to death, disease, and age, and pass on to eulogise the departed. It is the encomiastic mood that makes them so charming. If they mourn a man, he was the most generous, most punctilious, and most respected of Venetian citizens. His word was inviolable; as a husband and father he was something a little more than perfection, and his sorrowing and desolate widow and his eight children, two of them the merest bambini, will have the greatest difficulty in dragging through the tedious hours that must intervene before they are reunited to him in the paradise which his presence is now adorning. If they mourn a woman, she was a miracle of fortitude and piety, and nothing can ever efface her memory and no one take her place. "Ohè!" if only she had been spared, but death comes to all. The composition is florid and emotional, with frequent exclamations of grief, and the intimations of mortality are so thorough and convincing that one has a feeling that many a death-bed would be alleviated if the dying man could hear what was to be printed about him. After reading several one comes to the conclusion that a single author is responsible for many; and it may be a Venetian profession to write them. A good profession too, for they carry much comfort on their wings. Every one stops to read them, and I saw no cynical smile on any face. CHAPTER XXVII CHURCHES HERE AND THERE S. Maria dei Miracoli--An exquisite casket--S. Maria Formosa--Pictures of old Venice--The Misericordia--Tintoretto's house--The Madonna dell'Orto--Tintoretto's "Presentation"--"The Last Judgment"--A Bellini--Titian's "Tobias"--S. Giobbe--Il Moro--Venetian by-ways--A few minor beauties. Among the smaller beauties of Venice--its cabinet architectural gems, so to speak--S. Maria dei Miracoli comes first. This little church, so small as to be almost a casket, is tucked away among old houses on a canal off the Rio di S. Marina, and it might be visited after SS. Giovanni e Paolo as a contrast to the vastness of that "Pathéon de Venise," as the sacristan likes to call it. S. Maria dei Miracoli, so named from a picture of the Madonna over the altar which has performed many miracles, is a monument to the genius of the Lombardo family: Pietro and his sons having made it, in the fifteenth century, for the Amadi. To call the little church perfect is a natural impulse, although no doubt fault could be found with it: Ruskin, for example, finds some, but try as he will to be cross he cannot avoid conveying an impression of pleasure in it. For you and me, however, it is a joy unalloyed: a jewel of Byzantine Renaissance architecture, made more beautiful by gay and thoughtful detail. It is all of marble, white and coloured, with a massive wooden ceiling enriched and lightened by paint. Venice has nothing else at all like it. Fancy, in this city of aisles and columns and side chapels and wall tombs, a church with no interruptions or impediments whatever. The floor has its chairs (such poor cane-bottomed things too, just waiting for a rich patron to put in something good of rare wood, well carved and possibly a little gilded), and nothing else. The walls are unvexed. At the end is a flight of steps leading to the altar, and that is all, except that there is not an inch of the church which does not bear traces of a loving care. Every piece of the marble carving is worth study--the flowers and foliations, the birds and cupids and dolphins, and not least the saint with a book on the left ambone. S. Maria Formosa, one of the churches mentioned in the beautiful legend of Bishop Magnus--to be built, you remember, where he saw a white cloud rest--which still has a blue door-curtain, is chiefly famous for a picture by a great Venetian painter who is too little represented in the city--Palma the elder. Palma loved beautiful, opulent women and rich colours, and even when he painted a saint, as he does here--S. Barbara (whose jawbone we saw in the S. Rocco treasury)--he could not much reduce his fine free fancy and therefore he made her more of a commanding queen than a Christian martyr. This church used to be visited every year by the Doge for a service in commemoration of the capture of the brides, of which we heard at S. Pietro in Castello. The campo, once a favourite centre for bull-fights and alfresco plays, has some fine palaces, notably those at No. 5250, the Malipiero, and No. 6125, the red Donà. At the south of the campo is the Campiello Querini where we find the Palazzo Querini Stampalia, a seventeenth-century mansion, now the property of the city, which contains a library and a picture gallery. Among the older pictures which I recall are a Holy Family by Lorenzo di Credi in Room III and a Martyrdom of San Sebastian by Annibale Caracci in Room IV. A Judith boldly labelled Giorgione is not good. But although no very wonderful work of art is here, the house should be visited for its scenes of Venetian life, which bring the Venice of the past very vividly before one. Here you may see the famous struggles between the two factions of gondoliers, the Castellani and the Nicolotti, actually in progress on one of the bridges; the departure of the Bucintoro with the Doge on board to wed the Adriatic; the wedding ceremony off S. Niccolò; the marriage of a noble lady at the Salute; a bull-fight on the steps of the Rialto bridge; another in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace; a third in the Piazza of S. Mark in 1741; the game of pallone (now played in Venice no more) in the open space before the Gesuiti; fairs in the Piazzetta; church festivals and regattas. The paintings being contemporary, these records are of great value in ascertaining costumes, architecture, and so forth. I speak elsewhere of the Palazzo Giovanelli as being an excellent destination to give one's gondolier when in doubt. After leaving it, with Giorgione's landscape still glowing in the memory, there are worse courses to take than to tell the poppé to row on up the Rio di Noale to the Misericordia, in which Tintoretto painted his "Paradiso". This great church, once the chief funeral church of Venice, is now a warehouse, lumber rooms, workshops. Beside it is the head-quarters of the _pompes funèbres_, wherein a jovial fellow in blue linen was singing as I passed. At the back of the Misericordia is an ancient abbey, now also secularized, with a very charming doorway surmounted by a pretty relief of cherubs. Farther north is the Sacco of the Misericordia opening into the lagoon. Here are stored the great rafts of timber that come down the rivers from the distant hill-country, and now and then you may see one of the huts in which the lumber-men live on the voyage. From the Misericordia it is a short distance to the Fondamenta dei Mori, at No. 3399 of which is the Casa di Tintoretto, with a relief of the great painter's head upon it. Here he lived and died. The curious carved figures on this and the neighbouring house are thought to represent Morean merchants who once congregated here. Turning up the Campo dei Mori we come to the great church of the Madonna dell'Orto, where Tintoretto was buried. It should be visited in the late afternoon, because the principal reason for seeing it is Tintoretto's "Presentation," and this lovely picture hangs in a dark chapel which obtains no light until the sinking sun penetrates its window and falls on the canvas. To my mind it is one of the most beautiful pictures that Tintoretto painted--a picture in which all his strength has turned to sweetness. We have studied Titian's version in the Accademia, where it has a room practically to itself (see opposite page 36); Tintoretto's is hung badly and has suffered seriously from age and conditions. Titian's was painted in 1540; this afterwards, and the painter cheerfully accepted the standard set by the earlier work. Were I in the position of that imaginary millionaire whom I have seen in the mind's eye busy in the loving task of tenderly restoring Venice's most neglected masterpieces, it is this "Presentation" with which I should begin. [Illustration: THE PRESENTATION FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO _In the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto_] The Madonna dell'Orto is not a church much resorted to by visitors, as it lies far from the beaten track, but one can always find some one to open it, and as likely as not the sacristan will be seated by the rampino at the landing steps, awaiting custom. The church was built in the fourteenth century as a shrine for a figure of the Madonna, which was dug up in a garden that spread hereabout and at once performed a number of miracles. On the façade is a noble slab of porphyry, and here is S. Christopher with his precious burden. The campanile has a round top and flowers sprout from the masonry. Within, the chief glory is Tintoretto. His tomb is in the chapel to the right of the chancel, where hang, on the left, his scene of "The Worship of the Golden Calf," and opposite it his "Last Judgment". The "Last Judgment" is one of his Michael-Angelesque works and also one of his earliest, before he was strong enough or successful enough (often synonymous states) to be wholly himself. But it was a great effort, and the rushing cataract is a fine and terrifying idea. "The Worship of the Golden Calf" is a work interesting not only as a dramatic scriptural scene full of thoughtful detail, but as containing a portrait of the painter and his wife. Tintoretto is the most prominent of the calf's bearers; his Faustina is the woman in blue. Two very different painters--the placid Cima and the serene Bellini--are to be seen here too, each happily represented. Cima has a sweet and gentle altar-piece depicting the Baptist and two saints, and Bellini's "Madonna and Child" is rich and warm and human. Even the aged and very rickety sacristan--too tottering perhaps for any reader of the book to have the chance of seeing--was moved by Bellini. "Bellissima!" he said again and again, taking snuff the while. The neighbouring church of S. Marziale is a gay little place famous for a "Tobias and the Angel" by Titian. This is a cheerful work. Tobias is a typical and very real Venetian boy, and his dog, a white and brown mongrel, also peculiarly credible. The chancel interrupts an "Annunciation," by Tintoretto's son, the angel being on one side and the Virgin on the other. And now for the most north-westerly point of the city that I have reached--the church of S. Giobbe, off the squalid Cannaregio which leads to Mestre and Treviso. This church, which has, I suppose, the poorest congregation of all, is dedicated to one of whom I had never before thought as a saint, although his merits are unmistakable--Job. Its special distinction is the beautiful chapel of the high altar designed by the Lombardi (who made S. Maria dei Miracoli) for Doge Cristoforo Moro to the glory of S. Bernardino of Siena. S. Bernardino is here and also S. Anthony of Padua and S. Lawrence. At each corner is an exquisite little figure holding a relief. On the floor is the noble tombstone of the Doge himself (1462-1471) by Pietro Lombardi. Moro had a distinguished reign, which saw triumphs abroad and the introduction of printing into the city; but to the English he has yet another claim to distinction, and that is that most probably he was the Moro of Venice whom Shakespeare when writing _Othello_ assumed to be a Moor. The church also has a chapel with a Delia Robbia ceiling and sculpture by Antonio Rossellino. The best picture is by Paris Bordone, a mellow and rich group of saints. This book has been so much occupied with the high-ways of Venice--and far too superficially, I fear--that the by-ways have escaped attention; and yet the by-ways are the best. The by-ways, however, are for each of us separately, whereas the high-ways are common property: let that--and conditions of space--be my excuse. The by-ways must be sought individually, either straying where one's feet will or on some such thorough plan as that laid down in Col. Douglas's most admirable book, _Venice on Foot_. Some of my own unaided discoveries I may mention just as examples, but there is no real need: as good a harvest is for every quiet eye. There is the tiniest medieval cobbler's shop you ever saw under a staircase in a courtyard reached by the Sotto-portico Secondo Lucatello, not far from S. Zulian, with a medieval cobbler cobbling in it day and night. There is a relief of graceful boys on the Rio del Palazzo side of the Doges' Palace; there is a S. George and Dragon on a building on the Rio S. Salvatore just behind the Bank of Italy; there is a doorway at 3462 Rio di S. Margherita; there is the Campo S. Maria Mater Domini with a house on the north side into whose courtyard much ancient sculpture has been built. There is a yellow palace on the Rio di S. Marina whose reflection in the water is most beautiful. There is the overhanging street leading to the Ponte del Paradiso. There is the Campo of S. Giacomo dell'Orio, which is gained purely by accident, with its church in the midst and a vast trattoria close by, and beautiful vistas beneath this sottoportico and that. There are the two ancient chimneys seen from the lagoon on a house behind Danieli's. There is the lovely Gothic palace with a doorway and garden seen from the Ponte dell'Erbe--the Palazzo Van Axel. There is the red palace seen from the Fondamenta dell'Osmarin next the Ponte del Diavolo. There is in the little calle leading from the Campo Daniele Manin to the lovely piece of architecture known as the staircase dal Bovolo--a bovolo being a snail--from its convolutions. This staircase, which is a remnant of the Contarini palace and might be a distant relative of the tower of Pisa, is a shining reproach to the adjacent architecture, some of which is quite new. It is a miracle of delicacy and charm, and should certainly be sought for. And above all there is the dancing reflection of the rippling water in the sun on the under sides of bridges seen from the gondola; and of all the bridges that give one this effect of gentle restless radiancy none is better than the Ponte S. Polo. CHAPTER XXVIII GIORGIONE The Palazzo Giovanelli--A lovely picture--A superb innovator--Pictures for houses--_The Tempest_--Byron's criticism--Giorgione and the experts--Vasari's estimate--Leonardo da Vinci--The Giorgionesque fire--A visit to Castel Franco--The besieging children--The Sacristan--A beautiful altar-piece--Pictures at Padua--Giorgiones still to be discovered. It will happen now and then that you will be in your gondola, with the afternoon before you, and will not have made up your mind where to go. It is then that I would have you remember the Palazzo Giovanelli. "The Palazzo Giovanelli, Rio di Noale," say to your gondolier; because this palace is not only open to the public but it contains the most sensuously beautiful picture in Venice--Giorgione's "Tempest". Giorgione, as I have said, is the one transcendentally great Venetian painter whom it is impossible, for certain, to find in any public gallery or church in the city of his adoption. There is a romantic scene at the Seminario next the Salute, an altar-piece in S. Rocco, another altar-piece in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, in each of which he may have had a hand. But none of these is Giorgione essential. For the one true work of this wistful beauty-adoring master we must seek the Palazzo Giovanelli. You can enter the palace either from the water, or on foot at the Salizzada Santa Fosca, No. 2292. A massive custodian greets you and points to a winding stair. This you ascend and are met by a typical Venetian man-servant. Of the palace itself, which has been recently modernized, I have nothing to say. There are both magnificent and pretty rooms in it, and a little boudoir has a quite charming floor, and furniture covered in ivory silk. But everything is in my mind subordinated to the Giorgione: so much so that I have difficulty in writing that word Giovanelli at all. The pen will trace only the letters of the painter's name: it is to me the Palazzo Giorgione. The picture, which I reproduce on the opposite page, is on an easel just inside a door and you come upon it suddenly. Not that any one could ever be completely ready for it; but you pass from one room to the next, and there it is--all green and blue and glory. Remember that Giorgione was not only a Venetian painter but in some ways the most remarkable and powerful of them all; remember that his fellow-pupil Titian himself worshipped his genius and profited by it, and that he even influenced his master Bellini; and then remember that all the time you have been in Venice you have seen nothing that was unquestionably authentic and at the most only three pictures that might be his. It is as though Florence had but one Botticelli, or London but one Turner, or Madrid but one Velasquez. And then you turn the corner and find this! [Illustration: THE TEMPEST FROM THE PAINTING BY GIORGIONE _In the Giovanelli Palace_] The Venetian art that we have hitherto seen has been almost exclusively the handmaid of religion or the State. At the Ducal Palace we found the great painters exalting the Doges and the Republic; even the other picture in Venice which I associate with this for its pure beauty--Tintoretto's "Bacchus and Ariadne"--was probably an allegory of Venetian success. In the churches and at the Accademia we have seen the masters illustrating the Testaments Old and New. All their work has been for altars or church walls or large public places. We have seen nothing for a domestic wall but little mannered Longhis, without any imagination, or topographical Canalettos and Guardis. And then we turn a corner and are confronted by this!--not only a beautiful picture and a non-religious picture but a picture painted to hang on a wall. That was one of Giorgione's innovations: to paint pictures for private gentlemen. Another, was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no concern either with Scripture or history; and this is one of his loveliest. It has all kinds of faults--and it is perfect. The drawing is not too good; the painting is not too good; that broken pillar is both commonplace and foolish; and yet the work is perfect because a perfect artist made it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little sad, all at once, just as an evening landscape can be, and it is unmistakably the work of one who felt beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness took its place. Hence there is only one word that can adequately describe it and that is Giorgionesque. The picture is known variously as "The Tempest," for a thunderstorm is working up; as "The Soldier and the Gipsy," as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle," and as "Giorgione's Family". In the last case the soldier watching the woman would be the painter himself (who never married) and the woman the mother of his child. Whatever we call it, the picture remains the same: profoundly beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked to me, "Each is thinking thoughts unknown to the other"; and they are thoughts of unhappy morrows. This, the Giovanelli Giorgione, which in 1817 was in the Manfrini palace and was known as the "Famiglia di Giorgione," was the picture in all Venice--indeed the picture in all the world--which most delighted Byron. "To me," he wrote, "there are none like the Venetian--above all, Giorgione." _Beppo_ has some stanzas on it. Thus:-- They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians, Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions still Such as of old were copied from the Grecians, In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill; And like so many Venuses of Titian's (The best's at Florence--see it, if ye will), They look when leaning over the balcony, Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione, Whose tints are Truth and Beauty at their best; And when you to Manfrini's palace go, That picture (howsoever fine the rest) Is loveliest to my mind of all the show; It may perhaps be also to _your_ zest And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so, 'Tis but a portrait of his Son and Wife, And self, but _such_ a Woman! Love in life; Love in full life and length, not love ideal, No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name, But something better still, so very real, That the sweet Model must have been the same; A thing that you would purchase, beg, or steal, Wer't not impossible, besides a shame; The face recalls some face, as 'twere with pain. You once have seen, but ne'er will see again; One of those forms which flit by us, when we Are young, and fix our eyes on every face: And, oh! the Loveliness at times we see In momentary gliding, the soft grace, The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree, In many a nameless being we retrace Whose course and home we knew not nor shall know. Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below. The Giovanelli picture is one of the paintings which all the critics agree to give to Giorgione, from Sir Sidney Colvin in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to the very latest monographer, Signor Lionello Venturi, whose work, _Giorgione Giorgionismo_, is a monument to the diversity of expert opinion. Giorgione, short as was his life, lived at any rate for thirty years and was known near and far as a great painter, and it is to be presumed that the work that he produced is still somewhere. But Signor Lionello Venturi reduces his output to the most meagre dimensions; the conclusion being that wherever his work may be, it is anywhere but in the pictures that bear his name. The result of this critic's heavy labours is to reduce the certain Giorgiones to thirteen, among which is the S. Rocco altar-piece. With great daring he goes on to say who painted all the others: Sebastian del Piombo this, Andrea Schiavone that, Romanino another, Titian another, and so forth. It may be so, but if one reads also the other experts--Sir Sidney Colvin, Morelli, Justi, the older Venturi, Mr. Berenson, Mr. Charles Ricketts, Mr. Herbert Cook--one is simply in a whirl. For all differ. Mr. Cook, for example, is lyrically rapturous about the two Padua panels, of which more anon, and their authenticity; Mr. Ricketts gives the Pitti "Concert" and the Caterina Cornaro to Titian without a tremor. Our own National Gallery "S. Liberate" is not mentioned by some at all; the Paris "Concert Champêtre," in which most of the judges believe so absolutely, Signor Lionello Venturi gives to Piombo. The Giovanelli picture and the Castel Franco altar-piece alone remain above suspicion in every book. Having visited the Giovanelli Palace, I found myself restless for this rare spirit, and therefore arranged a little diversion to Castel Franco, where he was born and where his great altar-piece is preserved. But first let us look at Giorgione's career. Giorgio Barbarelli was born at Castel Franco in 1477 or 1478. The name by which we know him signifies the great Giorgio and was the reward of his personal charm and unusual genius. Very little is known of his life, Vasari being none too copious when it comes to the Venetians. What we do know, however, is that he was very popular, not only with other artists but with the fair, and in addition to being a great painter was an accomplished musician. His master was Giovanni Bellini, who in 1494, when we may assume that Giorgione, being sixteen, was beginning to paint, was approaching seventy. Giorgione, says Vasari in an exultant passage, was "so enamoured of beauty in nature that he cared only to draw from life and to represent all that was fairest in the world around him". He had seen, says the same authority, "certain works from the hand of Leonardo which were painted with extraordinary softness, and thrown into powerful relief, as is said, by extreme darkness of the shadows, a manner which pleased him so much that he ever after continued to imitate it, and in oil painting approached very closely to the excellence of his model. A zealous admirer of the good in art, Giorgione always selected for representation the most beautiful objects that he could find, and these he treated in the most varied manner: he was endowed by nature with highly felicitous qualities, and gave to all that he painted, whether in oil or fresco, a degree of life, softness, and harmony (being more particularly successful in the shadows) which caused all the more eminent artists to confess that he was born to infuse spirit into the forms of painting, and they admitted that he copied the freshness of the living form more exactly than any other painter, not of Venice only, but of all other places." Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione's senior by a quarter of a century and one of the greatest names--if not quite the greatest name--in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint. A story says that they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500. One cannot exactly derive any of Giorgione's genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master Verrocchio, after working in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo's pupil and imitator, was long in Venice too. Leonardo and Giorgione share a profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could be too much. It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting, but Giorgione's influence upon others. One of his great achievements was the invention of the _genre_ picture. He was the first lyrical painter: the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet does. He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but sheer beauty. The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no longer mattered. Il fuoco Giorgionesco--the Giorgionesque fire--was the phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting. A comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly how this flame kindled. Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes. His colours burned and glowed. Much of the gorgeousness which we call Titianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, Titian's fellow-worker, and (for Titian's birth date is uncertain: either 1477 or 1487) probably his senior. You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery: Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by Titian would probably have been far different but for Giorgione. So stimulating was Giorgione's genius to Titian, who was his companion in Bellini's studio, that there are certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two, chief among them the "Concert" at the Pitti; while together they decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal. It is assumed that Titian finished certain of Giorgione's works when he died in 1510. The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians, and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, Titian also died of it. Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few trains that it is practically a day's excursion there and back. I sat in the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch of snow. Castel Franco is one of the last cities of the plain; Browning's Asolo is on the slope above it, only four or five miles away. The station being reached at last--for even in Italy journeys end--I rejected the offers of two cabmen, one cabwoman, and one bus driver, and walked. There was no doubt as to the direction, with the campanile of the duomo as a beacon. For a quarter of a mile the road is straight and narrow; then it broadens into an open space and Castel Franco appears. It is a castle indeed. All the old town is within vast crumbling red walls built on a mound with a moat around them. Civic zeal has trimmed the mound into public "grounds," and the moat is lively with ornamental ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel Franco's greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier. If he were like this, one can believe the story of his early death--little more than thirty--which came about through excessive love of a lady, she having taken the plague and he continuing to visit her. Having examined the statue I penetrated the ramparts to the little town, in the midst of which is the church. It was however locked, as a band of children hastened to tell me: intimating also that if anyone on earth knew how to effect an entrance they were the little devils in question. So I was led to a side door, the residence of a fireman, and we pulled a bell, and in an instant out came the fireman to extinguish whatever was burning; but on learning my business he instantly became transformed into the gentlest of sacristans, returned for his key, and led me, followed by the whole pack of children, by this time greatly augmented, to a door up some steps on the farther side of the church. The pack was for coming in too, but a few brief yet sufficient threats from the sacristan acted so thoroughly that not only did they melt away then but were not there when I came out--this being in Italy unique as a merciful disappearance. More than merciful, miraculous, leading one to believe that Giorgione's picture really has supernatural powers. The picture is on a wall behind the high altar, curtained. The fireman-sacristan pulled away the curtain, handed me a pair of opera glasses and sat down to watch me, a task in which he was joined by another man and a boy who had been cleaning the church. There they sat, the three of them, all huddled together, saying nothing, but staring hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant I sat too, peering through the glasses at Giorgione's masterpiece, of which I give a reproduction on the opposite page. It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral. I doubt if Giorgione had the altar-piece temperament. He was not for churches; and indeed there were so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon. He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one critic--I think Mr. Ricketts--has pointed out, something of Rossetti too. Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the Giovanelli picture. [Illustration: ALTAR-PIECE BY GIORGIONE _At Castel Franco_] Yet this altar-piece is very beautiful, and, as I say, it grows more beautiful as you look at it, even under such conditions as I endured, and even after much restoration. The lines and pattern are Giorgione's, howsoever the re-painter may have toiled. The two saints are so kind and reasonable (and never let it be forgotten that we may have, in our National Gallery, one of the studies for S. Liberale), and so simple and natural in their movements and position; the Madonna is at once so sweet and so little of a mother; the landscape on the right is so very Giorgionesque, with all the right ingredients--the sea, the glade, the lovers, and the glow. If anything disappoints it is the general colour scheme, and in a Giorgione for that to disappoint is amazing. Let us then blame the re-painter. The influence of Giovanni Bellini in the arrangement is undoubtable; but the painting was Giorgione's own and his the extra touch of humanity. Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind, for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. Of Padua I want to write much, but here, at this moment, Giotto being forgotten, it is merely as a casket containing two (or more) Giorgiones that the city exists. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours. I went on the occasion of this Giorgione pilgrimage by fast train, and returned in the little tram to Fusina and so, across the lagoon, into Venice, with the sun behind me, and the red bricks of Venice flinging it back. The picture gallery at Padua is crowded with pictures of saints and the Madonna, few of them very good. But that is of no moment, since it has also three isolated screens, upon each of which is inscribed the magic name. The three screens carry four pictures--two long and narrow, evidently panels from a cassone; the others quite small. The best is No. 50, one of the two long narrow panels which together purport to represent the story of Adonis and Erys but do not take the duty of historian very seriously. Both are lovely, with a mellow sunset lighting the scene. Here and there in the glorious landscape occurs a nymph, the naked flesh of whom burns with the reflected fire; here and there are lovers, and among the darkling trees beholders of the old romance. The picture remains in the vision much as rich autumnal prospects can. The other screen is more popular because the lower picture on it yet again shows us Leda and her uncomfortable paramour--that favourite mythological legend. The little pictures are not equal to the larger ones, and No. 50 is by far the best, but all are beautiful, and all are exotics here. Do you suppose, however, that Signor Lionello Venturi will allow Giorgione to have painted a stroke to them? Not a bit of it. They come under the head of Giorgionismo. The little ones, according to him, are the work of Anonimo; the larger ones were painted by Romanino. But whether or not Giorgione painted any or all, the irrefutable fact remains that but for his genius and influence they would never have existed. He showed the way. The eyes of that beautiful sad pagan shine wistfully through. According to Vasari, Giorgione, like his master Bellini, painted the Doge Leonardo Loredan, but the picture, where is it? And where are others mentioned by Vasari and Ridolfi? So fervid a lover of nature and his art must have painted much; yet there is but little left now. Can there be discoveries of Giorgiones still to be made? One wonders that it is possible for any of the glowing things from that hand to lie hidden: their colours should burn through any accumulation of rubbish, and now and then their pulses be heard. CHAPTER XXIX AND LAST ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. II: S. LAZZARO AND CHIOGGIA An Armenian monastery--The black beards--An attractive cicerone--The refectory--Byron's Armenian studies--A little museum--A pleasant library--Tireless enthusiasm--The garden--Old age--The two campanili--Armenian proverbs--Chioggia--An amphibious town--The repulsiveness of roads--The return voyage--Porto Secco--Malamocco--An evening scene--The end. As one approaches the Lido from Venice one passes on the right two islands. The first is a grim enough colony, for thither are the male lunatics of Venice deported; but the second, with a graceful eastern campanile or minaret, a cool garden and warm red buildings, is alluring and serene, being no other than the island of S. Lazzaro, on which is situated the monastery of the Armenian Mechitarists, a little company of scholarly monks who collect old MSS, translate, edit and print their learned lucubrations, and instruct the young in religion and theology. Furthermore, the island is famous in our literature for having afforded Lord Byron a refuge, when, after too deep a draught of worldly beguilements, he decided to become a serious recluse, and for a brief while buried himself here, studied Armenian, and made a few translations: enough at any rate to provide himself with a cloistral interlude on which he might ever after reflect with pride and the wistful backward look of a born scholiast to whom the fates had been unkind. According to a little history of the island which one of the brothers has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with companions. Since then the life of the little community has been easy and tranquil. The extremely welcome visitor is received at the island stairs by a porter in uniform and led by him along the sunny cloisters and their very green garden to a waiting-room hung thickly with modern paintings: indifferent Madonnas and views of the city and the lagoon. By and by in comes a black-bearded father, in a cassock. All the Mechitarists, it seems, have black beards and cassocks and wide-brimmed beavers; and the young seminarists, whom one meets now and then in little bunches in Venice, are broad-brimmed, black-coated, and give promise of being hairy too. The father, who is genial and smiling, asks if we understand French, and deploring the difficulty of the English language, which has so many ways of pronouncing a single termination, whereas the Armenian never exceeds one, leads the way. The first thing to admire is the garden once more, with its verdant cedars of Lebanon and a Judas-tree bent beneath its blood. On a seat in the midst another bearded father beneath a wide hat is reading a proof. And through the leaves the sunlight is splashing on the cloisters, pillars, and white walls. [Illustration: THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY AND THE LAGOON] The refectory is a long and rather sombre room. Here, says the little guide-book to the island, prepared by one of the fathers who had overcome most of the difficulties of our tongue, "before sitting down to dine grace is said in common; the president recites some prayer, two of the scholars recite a psalm, the Lord's prayer is repeated and the meal is despatched in silence. In the meantime one of the novices appears in the pulpit and reads first a lesson from the Bible, and then another from some other book. The meal finished, the president rings a bell, the reader retires to dine, the Community rises, they give thanks and retire to the garden." Next upstairs. We are taken first to the room which was Byron's, where the visitors' book is kept. I looked from the window to see upon what prospect those sated eyes could fall, and found that immediately opposite is now the huge Excelsior Hotel of the Lido. In Byron's day the Lido was a waste, for bathing had hardly been invented. The reverence in which the name and memory of his lordship are still held suggests that he took in the simple brothers very thoroughly. Not only have they his portrait and the very table at which he sat, but his pens, inkstand, and knife. His own letters on his refuge are interesting. Writing to Moore in 1816 he says: "By way of divertisement, I am studying daily, at an Armenian monastery, the Armenian language. I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon; and this--as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement--I have chosen, to torture me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply repay any one the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; but I answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success." He made a few metrical translations into Armenian, but his principal task was to help with an English and Armenian grammar, for which, when it was ready, he wrote a preface. Byron usually came to the monastery only for the day, but there was a bedroom for him which he occasionally occupied. The superior, he says, had a "beard like a meteor." A brother who was there at the time and survived till the seventies told a visitor that his "Lordship was as handsome as a saint." In the lobby adjoining Byron's room are cases of autographs and photographs of distinguished visitors, such as Mr. Howells, Longfellow, Ruskin, Gladstone, King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and so forth. Also a holograph sonnet on the monastery by Bryant. Elsewhere are various curiosities--dolls dressed in national costumes, medals, Egyptian relics, and so forth. In one case is some manna which actually fell from the skies in Armenia during a famine in 1833. The chief room of the library contains not only its priceless MSS., but a famous mummy which the experts put at anything from 2200 to 3500 years old. Another precious possession is a Buddhist ritual on papyrus, which an Armenian wandering in Madras discovered and secured. The earliest manuscript dates from the twelfth century. In a central case are illuminated books and some beautiful bindings; and I must put on record that if ever there was a cicerone who displayed no weariness and disdained merely mechanical interest in exhibiting for the thousandth time his treasures, it is Father Vardan Hatzouni. But the room is so pleasant that, were it not that one enjoys such enthusiasm and likes to stimulate it by questions, it would be good merely to be in it without too curiously examining its possessions. Downstairs is a rather frigid little church, where an embroidered cloth is shown, presented by Queen Margherita. The S. Lazzaro Armenians, I may say, seem always to have attracted gifts, one of their great benefactors being Napoleon III. They are so simple and earnest and unobtrusive--and, I am sure, grateful--that perhaps it is natural to feel generous towards them. Finally we were shown to the printing-room, on our way to which, along the cloisters from the church, we passed through a group of elderly monks, cheerfully smoking and gossiping, who rose and made the most courtly salutation. Here we saw the printing-presses, some of English make, and then the books that these presses turn out. Two of these I bought--the little pamphlet from which I have already quoted and a collection of Armenian proverbs translated into English. The garden is spreading and very inviting, and no sooner were we outside the door than Father Hatzouni returned to some horticultural pursuit. The walks are long and shady and the lagoon is lovely from every point; and Venice is at once within a few minutes and as remote as a star. In the garden is an enclosure for cows and poultry, and the little burial-ground where the good Mechitarists are laid to rest when their placid life is done. Among them is the famous poet of the community, the Reverend Father Gonidas Pakraduni, who translated into Armenian both the _Iliad_ and _Paradise Lost_, as well as writing epics of his own. The _Paradise Lost_ is dedicated to Queen Victoria. Some of the brothers have lived to a very great age, and Mr. Howells in his delightful account of a visit to this island tells of one, George Karabagiak, who survived until he was 108 and died in September, 1863. Life, it seems, can be too long; for having an illness in the preceding August, from which he recovered, the centenarian remarked sadly to one of his friends, "I fear that God has abandoned me and I shall live." Being asked how he was, when his end was really imminent, he replied "Well," and died. As we came away we saw over the wall of the playground the heads of a few black-haired boys, embryo priests; but they wore an air of gravity beyond their years. The future perhaps bears on them not lightly. They were not romping or shouting, nor were any in the water; and just below, at the edge of the sea, well within view and stone range, I noticed an empty bottle on its end, glistening in the sun. Think of so alluring a target disregarded and unbroken by an English school! The returning gondola passes under the walls of the male madhouse. Just before reaching this melancholy island there is a spot at which it is possible still to realize what Venice was like when S. Mark's campanile fell, for one has the S. Giorgio campanile and this other so completely in line that S. Georgio's alone is visible. Some of the Armenian proverbs are very shrewd and all have a flavour of their own. Here are a few:-- "What can the rose do in the sea, and the violet before the fire?" "The mother who has a daughter always has a hand in her purse." "Every one places wood under his own pot." "The day can dawn without the cock's crowing." "If you cannot become rich, become the neighbour of a rich man." "Our dog is so good that the fox has pupped in our poultry house." "One day the ass began to bray. They said to him: 'What a beautiful voice!' Since then he always brays." "Whether I eat or not I shall have the fever, so better eat and have the fever." "The sermon of a poor priest is not heard." "When he rides a horse, he forgets God; when he comes down from the horse, he forgets the horse." "Dine with thy friend, but do no business with him." "To a bald head a golden comb." "Choose your consort with the eyes of an old man, and choose your horse with the eyes of a young man." "A good girl is worth more than seven boys." "When you are in town, if you observe that people wear the hat on one side, wear yours likewise." "The fox's last hole is the furrier's shop." "The Kurd asked the barber: 'Is my hair white or black?' The other answered him: 'I will put it before you, and you will see'." "He who mounts an ass, has one shame; he who falls from it, has two." "Be learned, but be taken for a fool." Of a grumbler: "Every one's grain grows straight; mine grows crooked." Of an impatient man: "He feeds the hen with one hand and with the other he looks for her eggs." I have not printed these exactly as they appear in the little pamphlet, because one has only to turn one page to realize that what the S. Lazzaro press most needs is a proof-reader. I said at the beginning of this book that the perfect way to approach Venice for the first time is from Chioggia. But that is not too easy. What, however, is quite easy is to visit Chioggia from Venice and then, returning, catch some of the beauty--without, however, all the surprise and wonder--of that approach. Steamers leave the Riva, opposite Danieli's, every two hours. They take their easy way up the lagoon towards the Lido for a little while, and then turn off to the right, always keeping in the enclosed channel, for eighteen miles. I took the two o'clock boat on a hot day and am not ashamed to confess that upon the outward voyage I converted it (as indeed did almost everybody else) into a dormitory. But Chioggia awakened me, and upon the voyage back I missed, I think, nothing. Choggia is amphibious. Parallel with its broad main street, with an arcade and cafés under awnings on one side, and in the roadway such weird and unfamiliar objects as vehicles drawn by horses, and even motor-cars noisy and fussy, is a long canal packed with orange-sailed fishing boats and crossed by many little bridges and one superb broad white one. All the men fish; all the women and children sit in the little side streets, making lace, knitting, and stringing beads. Beside this canal the dirt is abnormal, but it carries with it the usual alleviation of extreme picturesqueness, so that Chioggia is always artist-ridden. The steamer gives you an hour in which to drift about in the sunshine and meditate upon the inferiority of any material other than water for the macadamizing of roads. There are sights too: Carpaccio's very last picture, painted in 1520, in S. Domenico; a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele; a cathedral; a Giardino Pubblico; and an attractive stone parapet with a famous Madonna on it revered by fishermen and sailors. The town is historically important, for was not the decisive battle of Chioggia fought here in 1379 between the Venetians and their ancient enemies the Genoese? But I cannot pretend that Chioggia is to my taste. To come to it on the journey to Venice, knowing what is in store, might put one in a mood to forgive its earthy situation and earthy ways; but when, all in love with water, one visits it from Venice, one resents the sound and sight of traffic, the absence of gondolas, and the presence of heat unalleviated. At five o'clock, punctually to the minute, the steamer leaves the quay and breaks the stillness of the placid lagoon. A few fishing boats are dotted about, one of them with sails of yellow and blue, as lovely as a Chinese rug; others the deep red that Clara Montalba has reproduced so charmingly; and a few with crosses or other religious symbols. The boat quickly passes the mouth of the Chioggia harbour, the third spot at which the long thread of land which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic is pierced, and then makes for Palestrina, surely the narrowest town on earth, with a narrower walled cemetery just outside, old boats decaying on the shore, and the skin of naked boys who frolic at the water's edge glowing in the declining sun. Never were such sun-traps as these strips of towns along this island bank, only a few inches above sea level and swept by every wind that blows. Hugging the coast, which is fringed with tamarisk and an occasional shumac, we come next to Porto Secco, another tiny settlement among vegetable gardens. Its gay church, yellow washed, with a green door and three saints on the roof, we can see inverted in the water, so still is it, until our gentle wash blurs all. Porto Secco's front is all pinks and yellows, reds, ochres, and white; and the sun is now so low that the steamer's shadow creeps along these façades, keeping step with the boat. More market gardens, and then the next mouth of the harbour, (known as Malamocco, although Malamocco town is still distant), with a coastguard station, a fort, acres of coal and other signs of militancy on the farther side. It is here that the Lido proper begins and the island broadens out into meadows. At the fort pier we are kept waiting for ten minutes while a live duck submits to be weighed for fiscal purposes, and the delay gives an old man with razor-fish a chance to sell several pennyworths. By this time the sun is very near the horizon, setting in a roseate sky over a lagoon of jade. There is not a ripple. The tide is very low. Sea birds fleck with white the vast fields of mud. The peacefulness of it all under such unearthly beauty is almost disquieting. Next comes Malamocco itself, of which not much is seen but a little campo--almost an English village green--by the pier, and children playing on it. Yet three thousand people live here, chiefly growers of melons, tomatoes, and all the picturesque vegetables which are heaped up on the bank of the Grand Canal in the Rialto market and are carried to Venice in boats day after day for ever. Malamocco was a seat of ducal government when Venice was only a village, and not until the seventh century did the honours pass to Venice: hence a certain alleged sense of superiority on the part of the Malamoccans, although not only has the original Malamocco but the island on which it was built disappeared beneath the tide. Popilia too, a city once also of some importance, is now the almost deserted island of Poveglia which we pass just after leaving Malamocco, as we steam along that splendid wide high-way direct to Venice--between the mud-flats and the sea-mews and those countless groups of piles marking the channel, which always resemble bunches of giant asparagus and sometimes seem to be little companies of drowning people who have sworn to die together. [Illustration: FROM THE DOGANA AT NIGHT] Here we overtake boats on the way to the Rialto market, some hastening with oars, others allowing their yellow sails to do the work, heaped high with vegetables and fruit. Just off the mud the sardine catchers are at work, waist high in the water. The sun has now gone, the sky is burning brighter and brighter, and Venice is to be seen: either between her islands or peeping over them. S. Spirito, now a powder magazine, we pass, and S. Clemente, with its barrack-like red buildings, once a convent and now a refuge for poor mad women, and then La Grazia, where the consumptives are sent, and so we enter the narrow way between the Giudecca and S. Giorgio Maggiore, on the other side of which Venice awaits us in all her twilight loveliness. And disembarking we are glad to be at home again. For even an afternoon's absence is like an act of treachery. And here, re-entering Venice in the way in which, in the first chapter, I advised all travellers to get their first sight of her, I come to an end, only too conscious of how ridiculous is the attempt to write a single book on this city. Where many books could not exhaust the theme, what chance has only one? At most it can say and say again (like "all of the singing") how it was good! Venice needs a whole library to describe her: a book on her churches and a book on her palaces; a book on her painters and a book on her sculptors; a book on her old families and a book on her new; a book on her builders and a book on her bridges; a book--but why go on? The fact is self-evident. Yet there is something that a single book can do: it can testify to delight received and endeavour to kindle an enthusiasm in others; and that I may perhaps have done. INDEX Accademia, the, 98, 168. Adriatic espousals, 27, 54, 161, 263. Alberghetti, 75. Albrizzi, Countess, and Byron, 132. Alexander III., Pope, 18, 53, 54. Americans, 65, 259. _Amleto_, performance of, 163. Animals, 250. Architects, Venetian, 93. Armenian monastery, 299. Armenian proverbs, 304. Arsenal, the, 166, 263. Artists, modern, 14, 272, 276, 306. Austrian rule in Venice, 12, 13, 106-107, 162. Austrian tourists, 13, 32. Barbarigo, Cardinal Gregorio, 125, 147. Barbarigo, Pietro, Patriarch of Venice, 97. Barbaro, Marc Antonio, 147. Basaiti, pictures by, 96, 154, 169, 172, 190. Bathing, 268. Bead-workers, 202. Beauharnais, Eugène, Prince of Venice, 12. Beerbohm, Max, 104. Bellini, Gentile, pictures by, 10, 51, 257. his "Holy Cross" pictures, 179-180. his S. Lorenzo Giustinian, 180. his tomb, 256. Bellini, Giovanni, pictures by, 50, 51, 63, 118, 125, 154, 169, 172, 192, 193, 203, 208, 215, 219, 224, 249, 259, 283. his "Agony," 169. his "Loredano," 169. his "Peter Martyr," 169. his career, 190. and the Venetian School, 193. his last picture, 224. his tomb, 256. Bellotto, Bernardo, _see_ Canaletto. Benedict, S., his life in panels, 200. Benzoni, Countess, and Byron, 138, 139. _Beppo_, Byron's, 134, 290. Berri, Duchesse de, in Venice, 122. Bissolo, picture by, 173. Boccaccini, Boccaccio, picture by, 190. Bon, Bartolommeo, 73, 232. Bon, Giovanni, 73. Bon, Pacifico, his tomb, 251. Bonconsiglio, picture by, 170. Boni, Giacomo, 86. Bonington in Venice, 272. picture by, 273. Book-shops, 229. Bordone, Paris, his "Fisherman and Doge," 177. picture by, 284. Bovolo staircase, 285. Bowls, 226. Bragadino, his career, 257. his tomb, 257. Brangwyn, Frank, picture by, 114. Bridge of Boats, the, 203. Bridge of Sighs, _see_ Doges' Palace. Bronson, Mrs. Arthur, on Browning, 107, 140. Browning, Robert, in Venice, 98, 99, 100. his funeral service, 102. his love of Venice, 103. and the Lido, 140. and the Colleoni statue, 256. on Venice, 275. Browning, and the Zattere, 274. Browning, Mrs., on Venice, 100. Brule, Albert de, his carvings, 200, 201. Bruno, Giordano, in Venice, 143. Bucintoro, the, 263. yacht club, 149. Buono of Malamocco, 8. Burano, the journey to, 157. its charm and dirt, 158. the Scuola Merletti, 158. on Venice, 63. Byron, in Venice, 112, 128, 129. his _Beppo_, 134. on gondolas, 134. his Venetian life, 137. and the Lido, 137. his _Marino Faliero_, 138. his _Two Foscari_, 138. Shelley visits, 139. his _Julian and Maddalo_, 139. on Giorgione's "Tempest," 290. and S. Lazzaro, 299. Byways of Venice, the, 284. Cabots, the, 77. Cafés, 34, 38. Calendario, 59. Calli, narrow, 101. Campanile of S. Mark, the, 43. lift, 43. golden angel, 43. bells, 44, 265. view from, 44. Campaniles, 42, 43, 98, 165, 189, 197, 283. Campo Daniele Manin, 285. Campo Morosoni, 165. Campo S. Bartolommeo, 221. Campo S. Giacomo dell'Orio, 285. Campo S. Margharita, 196. Campo S. Maria Formosa, 280. Campo S. Maria Mater Domini, 285. Campo Santo, 152. Campos, their characteristics, 221. Canal, the Grand, 91-150. Canal, di S. Marco, 195. Canals, filled in, 226. Canaletto, his career, 188. pictures by, 5, 68, 118, 187, 207. Canova, 77. his "St. George," 68. works by, 118, 252. his early studies, 127. his career, 248. his tomb, 248. Caracci, picture by, 281. Caravaggio, picture by, 190. Carlo, A., his guide to Venice, 4, 134. Carmagnola, 64. Carpaccio, pictures by, 62, 73, 113, 117, 146, 172. his "Santo Croce" picture, 180. his S. Ursula pictures, 182. his career, 184. Ruskin on, 184. his pictures, at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 210. his last picture, 306. Casanova, Jacques, in Venice, 75, 162. Castel Franco, 294. Castello, island of, 267. Cat, the Frari, 250. Catena, pictures by, 169, 190. _Childe Harold_, Venice in, 136. Children, Venetian, 26, 39, 120, 227, 245, 295. Chimneys, old, 96, 97, 285. Chioggia, 306. Churches, origin of some, 28. Venice approached from, 1, 307. the most comfortable, 165, 245. Churches: SS. Apostoli, 225. S. Bartolommeo, 221. S. Donato (Murano), 155. S. Eustachio, 115. S. Fosca (Torcello), 160. S. Francesco della Vigna, 214. its campanile, 42. S. Geremia, 119. Gesuati, 271. S. Giacomo di Rialto, 227. S. Giobbe, 284. S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 180, 210. S. Giorgio Maggiore, its campanile, 42, 189. its pictures, 168. its panels, 200. S. Giovanni Crisostomo, 224. S. Giovanni Elemosinario, 229. S. Giovanni in Bragora, 209. S. Giovanni e Paolo, 254. S. Giuliano, 219. S. Gregorio, abbey of, 96. Madonna dell'Orto, 282. S. Marcuola, 121. S. Margiala, 284. S. Maria della Carità, 98. S. Maria del Carmine, 277. S. Maria Formosa, 280. S. Maria del Giglio, 147, 164. S. Maria dei Miracoli, 279. S. Maria della Salute, 95. Misericordia, 281. S. Moise, 162. S. Pietro in Castello, campanile, 43. S. Pietro Martire (Murano), 154. Redentore, 203. S. Rocco, 231, 244. S. Salvatore, 49. Scalzi, 119. S. Sebastiano, 275. S. Stefano, 165. S. Theodore, 9. S. Trovaso, 274. S. Vio, 97. S. Vitale, 146. S. Zaccaria, 207. S. Zobenigo, 164. S. Zulian, 285. Cigharillo, Gianbettino, his "Death of Rachel," 187. Cima, pictures by, 125, 172, 190, 209, 261, 277, 283. Clement XIII, Pope, 103. his birthplace, 123. Clemente, S., island of, 309. Shelley at, 141. Cloisters, 165. Cobbler's shop, a, 285. Colleoni, Bartolommeo, his career, 255. his statue, 21, 151, 255, 262, 273. Concert barges, the, 195. Constantinople, the expedition to, 56. Contarini, Pietro, 124. Conti, Niccolò, 75. Cooper, Fenimore, in Venice, 127. Corner, Catherine, Queen of Cyprus, 76, 114, 147, 180, 220. Correr, Teodoro, 118. Coryat, Thomas, on the Pietra del Bando, 15. on the Acre columns, 16. on absence of horses, 21. on bronze wells, 75. on Loggetta, 86. on palace balconies, 148. on prison, 207. on Merceria giants, 219. on Bragadino monument, 257. Council of Ten, the, 50. Credi, di, picture by, 281. Custodians, 52, 60, 85. Cyprus, the acquirement of, 147. Cyprus, Queen of, _see_ Corner, Catherine. Danieli's Hotel, 104, 207, 272. D'Annunzio, his _Il Fuoco_, 122. Dante, 77. Desdemona, the house of, 148. Dickens, Charles, on Venice, 5. Dogana, the, 94, 270. Doge and Fisherman, the story of, 177. Doges, the, 46. incorrigibly municipal, 46. Doges: Barbarigo, Agostino, 96,147. Barbarigo, Marco, 147. Contarini, Alvise, his tomb, 216. Contarini, Francesco, his tomb, 216. Corner, Marco, his tomb, 258. Dandolo, Andrea, 28, 58, 77, 80. Dandolo, Enrico, 21, 36, 53, 54, 166. Donato, Francesco, 49. Faliero, Marino, 58, 225. Foscari, Francesco, 73. his tomb, 251. his career, 252. Grimani, 47. Gritti, Andrea, 49, 62, 81 his tomb, 216. Giustinian, Marcantonio, 166. Giustinian, Partecipazio, 60. Lando, Pietro, 50. Loredano, Leonardo, 50. painted by Bellini, 169. his tomb, 258. painted by Giorgione, 298. Loredano, Pietro, 50, 61. Malipiero, Pasquale, his tomb, 260. Manin, Lodovico, 11, 61. Marcello, Niccolò, his tomb, 261. Michiel, Domenico, 156. Michiel, Vitale, 53, 104. Mocenigo, Alvise, 49, 243. his tomb, 256. Mocenigo, Giovanni, his tomb, 257. Mocenigo, Pietro, his tomb, 257. Mocenigo, Tommaso, 67. his career, 260. his tomb, 260. Moro, Cristoforo, the original of Othello, 284. his tomb, 284. Morosini, Francesco, his career, 165. his death, 166. his tomb, 165. Morosini, Michele, his tomb, 258. Oberelio, Antenorio, 59. Oberelio, Beato, 59. Partecipazio, Angelo, 59. Partecipazio, Giovanni, 60. Partecipazio, Giustiniano, 7. Pesaro, Giovanni, his tomb, 250. Ponte, Niccolò da, 49. Priuli, Girolamo, 60. his tomb, 220. Priuli, Lorenzo, his tomb, 220. Steno, Michele, his tomb, 260. Tiepolo, Jacopo, his tomb, 256. Tiepolo, Lorenzo, his tomb, 256. Trevisan, Marc Antonio, 50. his tomb, 216. Tron, Niccolò, his career, 252. his tomb, 252. Valier, Bertucci, his tomb, 257. Valier, Silvestro, his tomb, 258. Vendramin, Andrea, his tomb, 258. Venier, Antonio, his tomb, 259. Venier, Francesco, 75. his tomb, 220. Venier, Sebastiano, 49, 51. his career, 158. his tomb, 258. Ziani, Sebastiano, 53. Doges' Palace, the, 15, 16, 46. Scala d'Oro, 47. Sala delle Quattro Porte, 47, 50. Sala del Collegio, 49. Bocca di Leone, 50. Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, 50. Sala del Senato, 50, 67. Sala del Maggior Consiglio, 51, 60, 67, 68. Sala dello Scrutinio, 61. Archæological museum, 62. Bridge of Sighs, 63, 136, 137. the cells, 63. Shelley on, 142. its history, 66. its building, 66, 67. Giants' Stairs, 67, 74. the carved capitals, 68. Porta della Carta, 73, 74, 76. courtyard, 74. its restoration, 198. D'Oggiano, Marco, picture by, 94. Dona dalle Rose, Count Antonio, 125. Donato, S., his body brought to Murano, 156. Douglas, Col., his _Venice on Foot_, 218, 285. Dürer on Bellini, 181 Duse, Eleanora, 97. English travellers, Byron and, 138. Erberia, the, 228. Faliero Conspiracy, the, 49. Fantin-Latour, picture by, 114. Favretto, 114. Fenice Theatre, the, 132, 162. Ferdinando, gondolier, 87. Fildes, Luke, his Venetian pictures, 273. Fiore, Jacobello del, pictures by, 62, 160. Fireworks, Venetian, 197. Fish, 40, 229. Fish-market, 113, 229. Flagstaffs, the Piazza, 256. Flanhault, Mme. de, and Byron, 130. Florian's, 31, 32, 38. Football match, a, 265. Foscari, Jacopo, 64. Foscarini, Antonio, 64. Foscolo, Ugo, 76. France, Anatole, 8. Francesca, Pietro della, picture by, 190. Francesco, S., in Deserto, island, 158. Franchetti, Baron, 124. Franchetti family, 146. Frari church, the exterior, 245. the campanile, 42, 43. Titian's tomb, 246. Canova's tomb, 248. Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor, 18, 53, 54. French occupation, 137. Frezzeria, Byron in the, 130, 162. Fruit in Venice, 40. Fruit-market, _see_ Erberia. Funeral, a, 208. Fusina, Venice approached from, 2, 297. Galileo, autograph of, 77, 84. Gardens, 97, 143, 202, 215. Garibaldi statue, 264. Genoa, the war with, 58. George, S., the story of, 211. Germans in Venice, 268. Giambono, pictures by, 170. Giardinetto Infantile, 123. Giardini Pubblici, 12, 105, 264. Giordano, Luca, picture by, 96. Giorgio Maggiore, S., 197. Giorgione, pictures by, 94, 123, 127, 224, 244, 281, 287. and Titian, 247, 294. his "Tempest," 287. his innovations, 289, 298. and the attributors, 291. his career, 292. his statue, 295. his masterpiece, 296. Giudecca, the, 202. Giustiniani, Marco, 61. Giustiniani, Niccolò, 104. Giustiniani, family, 104, 215. Glass-making at Murano, 152. Gobbo, the, 228. Goethe, in Venice, 106. Goldoni, 77. autograph of, 84. his statue, 101, 220. Browning on, 101. his plays, 220. his _Autobiography_ 221. room at the Museo Civico, the, 117. Theatre, _Hamlet_ at the, 163. Gondolas, Byron on, 134. Shelley on, 141. Gondoliers, 33, 87. Wagner on, 108. their folk-song, 108. Howells on, 144. battles between, 281. Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 104. Gramophone, a, 196. Grossi, Alessandro, gondolier, 87. Grimani, Cardinal, 63. Grimani, Count, 41. Grimani, Breviary, 84. Guardi, Francesco, his career, 189. his "Dogana," 187. Guardi, Francesco, pictures of, 38, 68, 96, 116, 149, 189. Guariento, fresco by, 51. Guides, 17, 259. "Hamlet" in Venice, 163. Harding, J.D., his Venetian pictures, 273. Hatzouni, Fr. Vardan, 302. Helena, S., her life, 266. Henri III of France in Venice, 109. Henri IV, his armour, 263. Hohenlohe, Prince, his palace, 147. Honeymooners, 32, 195. Hoppner on Byron in Venice, 137. Horses, absence of, 21. the golden, 10, 21, 57. House moving, a, 274. Houses, desirable, 96, 204, 205. Howells, W.D., in Venice, 104, 144, 221. his _Venetian Life_, 144. on gondoliers, 144. on Venice, 204, 264. on campos, 221. on S. Lazzaro, 303. Ibsen and Browning, 103. James, G.P.R., buried in Venice, 152. Jerome, S., and the lion, 213, 215. Jews in Venice, 227. Joseph II, Emperor, 103, 115. Lace making at Burano, 158. Lavery, John, picture by, 114. Layard, Sir Henry, in Venice, 111. Lazzaro, S., 299. Byron at, 130, 299, 301. its history, 300. visitors to, 302. the printing-room, 303. "Leda and the Swan," 63, 298. La Grazia, Island of, 309. Leopardi, autograph of, 84. Lewis, "Monk," visits Byron in Venice, 136. Liberi, Pietro, picture by, 61. Library, the Old, 80, 149. Library, S. Mark's, 84. Lido, the, bathing at, 14, 15, 267. Browning at, 101, 102, 140. Byron at, 137, 139. Shelley at, 139. Clara Shelley's, grave, 141. the aquarium, 229. Lion column, the, 54, 79. Lions, 25, 73, 166, 261. a census of, 73. Lippi, Filippino, picture by, 94. Loafers, 30. Loggetta, the, 42, 80, 85. Lombardi, the, 122, 225, 257, 261, 279, 284. Longhena, Baldassarre, his works, 95, 96, 103, 114, 115, 116, 149. Longhi, Pietro, his career, 187. pictures by, 75, 116, 125, 187. Lotto, picture by, 194. Malamocco, 59, 307, 308. Malibran Theatre, 106. Manin, Daniele, his tomb, 11. his career, 12, 103. his statue, 13, 73. his portrait, 77. Mansueti, his "Santa Croce" picture, 180. Mantegna, his "S. Sebastian," 124. his "S. George," 190. Marcello, Jacopo, his tomb, 251. Mark, S., his body brought to Venice, 8, 60. miracles of, 171, 172. legend of, 177. Mark's, S., history, 6, 7. the façade, 6, 7, 10. the mosaics, 8, 9, 17-21, 24-26, 29. external carvings, 9. north façade and piazzetta, 10, 11, 14. the golden horses, 10, 21,57. the atrium, 17. the interior, 22. a procession, 23. chapel of S. Isidoro, 25. Cappella dei Mascoli, 25. the Pala d'Oro, 26. the High Altar, 26. the Treasuries, 27. the Baptistery, 28. Dandolo's tomb, 28. Zeno chapel, 29. Markets, 228. Mary, S., of Egypt, the story of, 234. Matteo Lambertini, Michele di, picture by, 170. Merceria, the, 218. Merceria, clock, 218. giants, 218, 219. Michele, S., island of, 103. Mocenigo, Lazzaro, 77. Molo, the, 87. Montalba, Clara, her Venetian pictures, 273, 307. Moore, Thomas, and Byron, 130. Moore, Thomas, in Venice, 128. Mor, picture by, 173. Moretti, Sig., 86. Moretto, picture by, 125. Motor boats, 92. Munaretti, Cav., 86. Murano, the way to, 151, 157. glass-making at, 152. the early art of, 152. its churches, 154. Museo, Civico, 46, 59, 115, 116. Music, in Venice, 31, 35, 106, 196. Musset, Alfred de, in Venice, 207. Napoleon in Venice, 11, 12, 21, 110. Nicholson, W., picture by, 114. Orefice, Pellegrino, 122. _Othello_, 284. Padua, 2, 297. Painters, foreign, pictures of Venice by, 273. Painting, its coming to Venice, 191. Pala d'Oro, 57. Palaces, present condition of, 33. coloured posts of, 94. on visiting, 111. Palaces: Albrizzi, 112, 132, 139. Angaran, 110. Avogadro, 112. Balbi, 110. Balbi-Valier, 98. Barbarigo, 97, 123, 147. Barbarigo della Terrazza, 111. Barbaro, 123, 146, 147. Sargent's interior of, 146. Barozzi Wedmann, 149. Battagia, 115. Bembo, 127. Benzon, 128, 132. Byron at, 132, 139. Bernardo, 111. Boldù, 123. Bonhomo, 123. Brandolin, 114. Brandolin-Rota, 98, 101. Businello, 112. Cà d'Oro, 124. Camerlenghi, 73, 227. Capello, 111. Cà Ruzzini, 126. Casa Falier, 104. Casa Petrarca, 112. Cavalli, 146. Civran, 110, 126. Coccina-Tiepolo, 111. Coletti, 123. Contarini, 99, 115, 121, 128, 286. Contarini Fasan, 148. Contarini degli Scrigni, 99. Contarini del Zaffo, 98. Corner, 129. Corner della Cà Grande, 147. Corner della Regina, 114. Curti, 128. Dandolo, 110. Dario, 97. Dolfin, 99. Dona, 111, 113, 280. Emo, 123. Erizzo, 123. Falier, 144. W.D. Howells at, 144. Farsetti,127. Fini, 148. Flangini, 119. Fontana, 123. Foscari, 104, 109, 125. Foscarini, 115. Gazzoni, 128. Giovanelli, 118, 123, 281, 287. Giustinian Lolin, 146. Giustiniani, 100, 104, 110, 149. Grassi, 143. Grimani, 110, 123, 128. Gritti, 121, 148. Gussoni, 123. Labia, 120. Lezze, 123. Lion, 126. Lobbia, 121. Loredan, 98, 99, 127. Malipiero, 143, 280. Mandelli 121. Manfrini, 290. Mangilli Valmarana, 126. Manin, 127. Manolesso-Ferro, 148. Manzoni, 101. Marcello, 122. Martinengo, 96, 121, 122, 128. Mengaldo, 112. Miani, 123. Michiel, 149. Michiel, da Brusâ, 126. Michiel, dalle Colonne, 125. Mocenigo, 126, 129, 143. Byron at, 134, 139. Mocenigo Gambara, 99. Molin, 123. Moro-Lin, 143. Morosini, 114, 167. Mosto, da, 126. Mula, 97. Nani, 7, 104. Papadopoli, 111. Paradiso, 98. Perducci, 126. Pesaro, 114, 115, 125. Piovene, 123. Pisani, 167. Pisani Moretta, 111. Querini, 99, 111, 121. Querini Stampalia, 280. Rampinelli, 112. Rezzonico, 98, 99, 102, 103. Sagredo, 125. Swift, 148. Tiepolo, 111, 149. Tornielli, 128. Tron, 115, 128. Valaresso, 149. Valmarana, 128. Van Axel, 285. Vendramin, 111. Vendramin Calergi, 122. Venier, 97. Volkoff, 97. Palestrina, 307. Palladio, Andrea, his career, 198. works of, 214. Palma, pictures by, 177, 280. Palma, the younger, pictures by, 61, 178. Pennell, Joseph, pictures by, 114. Pesaro, Jacopo, 249. his tomb, 250. Petrarch on Andrea Dandolo, 28. Piazza di S. Marco, 31. the pigeons, 36, 76. buildings in, 37. floor pattern, 44. in 1496, 179. Piazzetta, the, 78. Picture cleaning, the need of, 210, 244, 282. Pictures, Venetian, in London, 168, 273. Pictures of Venice by foreign painters, 273. Pietra del Bando, the, 15. Pigeons, 36, 76. Piombo, Sebastian del, picture by, 221, 224. Pisani, Vittorio, 77. Polo, Marco, 77. Ponte di Paglia, 256. Ponte della Veneta Marina, 263. Ponte dell'Erbe, 285. Ponte del Diavolo, 285. Ponte Rialto, 112, 180, 226. Ponte S. Polo, 286. Popilia, 308. Pordenone, pictures by, 128, 165, 229. Porphyry, 97. Poveglia, 308. Prison, the, 206. Querini statue, 264. Rain, 23. Rampino, the, 89. Raphael, drawings by, 173. Red hair, 34, 167. Regattas, 203. Régnier, Henri de, 97. Restaurants, 39, 40. Rialto, 59. _see_ Ponte Rialto. Ribera, picture by, 173. Richardson, Mrs., on the doges, 60. Ricketts, Charles, on Titian, 121. on Giorgione, 291, 296. Ridotto, the, 162. Rizzo, Antonio, work of, 74. Robbia, Delia, ceiling by, 284. Roberts, David, visits Ruskin, 148. Robinson, Cayley, picture by, 114. Rocco, S., the story of, 242. Rodin, works by, 114. Romanino, his "Deposition," 173. Rossellino, Antonio, sculpture by, 284. Royal Palace, the, 37, 149. Rubens, tapestry by, 125. Ruskin, John, on S. Mark's, 26. his _St. Mark's Rest_, 28, 117. on Venice, 69, 72. on the Ponte Rialto, 113. on a Carpaccio, 117. at the Palazzo Swift, 147. at Murano, 156. his _Stones of Venice_, 156, 233, 271. on Torcello, 160. on Carpaccio, 184-186. his _Fors Clavigera_, 185, 271. on the Giudecca, 204. on Tintoretto, 233, 237. on the Venetians, 271. his Zattere home, 271. on S. Maria dei Miracoli, 279. Rustico of Torcello, 8. Sacristans, 42, 198, 209, 210, 216, 220, 224, 225, 252, 279, 283, 295, 296. Salizzada S. Moise, 162. Sammichele, Michele, architect, 128. Sand, George, in Venice, 207. Sansovino, Jacopo, his career, 81. his tomb, 95. Sansovino, his works, 74, 80, 123, 127, 147, 219, 220, 252. Santa Croce miracles, 179-180. Sant'Elena, island of, 265. Sargent, J.S., his interior of the Pal. Barbaro, 146. his Venetian pictures, 273. Sarpi, Paolo, 77. Sarri, G., his guide to Venice, 4, 134. Sarto, Andrea del, 81. Savelli, Paolo, 251. Schiavone, picture by, 277. Scuola dei Morti, 119. Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelistica, 179. Scuola di S. Marco, 238, 261. and Tintoretto's "Miracle," 171. Scuola di S. Rocco, 231. Tintoretto's "Crucifixion," 177. the carvings, 243. Scuola Merletti, Burano, 158. Seagulls, 101. Seminario Patriarcale, 94. Seminario della Salute, 84. Shelley, visits Byron, 139. rides on the Lido, 139. on Venice, 140, 141. on gondolas, 141. Shelley, Mrs., at Venice, 141. Shelley, Clara, her death, 141. Shops and shopkeepers, 38, 218, 227. Spirito, S., island of, 309. Statues: Colleoni, 21, 151, 255, 262, 273. Garibaldi, 264. Giorgione, 295. Manin, 13. Querini, 264. Tommaseo, 166. Wagner, 264. Steamers in Venice, 92. _Stones of Venice, The_, 156, 233, 271. Symonds, J.A., on a Tiepolo, 120, 225. Tagliapietra, Contessa, 97. Taglioni in Venice, 124, 146. Tedeschi, Fondaco dei, 126, 227, 239, 246. Tennyson, 77. Theodore, S., column, 78, 79. the story of, 79. his ashes, 219. Tiepolo, Gianbattista, his career, 188. his portrait, 77. pictures by, 48, 112, 116, 118, 119, 120, 187, 225, 244, 252, 277. Tintoretto, pictures by, 8, 38, 48, 49, 50, 51, 121, 123, 172, 176, 177, 193, 194, 198, 199, 203, 231, 274, 277, 281, 283. his house, 39, 282. his "Bacchus and Ariadne," 48, 65, 241, 288. his "Paradiso," 52, 54. his portrait, 77. his "Marriage in Cana," 95, his "Miracle," 170, 171, 238, 241. his "Crucifixion," 177, 236. his S. Rocco pictures, 231-37. his realism, 233. his career, 237. his children, 240. on Titian, 240. caricatured, 243. his "Presentation," 282. his tomb, 283. Tintoretto, Domenico, pictures by, 52, 128, 237, 284. Titian, pictures by, 48, 51, 62, 76, 96, 111, 121, 127, 171, 193, 219, 220, 229, 235, 259, 276, 284. his portrait, 77. his autograph, 84. his "Bacchus and Ariadne," 169. his "Assumption," 170. his last picture, 178. his "Presentation," 194. Tintoretto on, 240. his career, 246. his tomb, 246. his house, 247. his "Pesaro Madonna," 249. and Giorgione, 294. Tommaseo, Niccolò, 13, 77. his statue, 166. Torcello, 155, 159. Tourists, 32. Town Hall, 127. Tura, Cosimo, picture by, 190. Turchi, Fondaco dei, 115. Turner, J.M.W., his "San Benedetto," 202. his Venetian pictures, 272, 273. Ursula, S., the story of, 181. Van Dyck, in Venice, 244. Vendramin, Andrea, and the Holy Cross, 180. Venetian architects, 93. bead-workers, 202. ceilings, 194. children, 26, 39,120, 227, 245. custodians, 52, 60, 85. fireworks, 197. food, 40. funerals, 208. gardens, 97, 143, 202, 215. girls, 33, 34. glass, 152. lace, 158. life, 281. painting, 291. pictures in London, 187, 188, 189, 192, 207. red hair, 34, 167. regattas, 203. school of painting, 191. women, 34. Venetians and regattas, 203. Ruskin on, 271. in S. Mark's Square, 32. their self-satisfaction, 48. Venice: the Austrian occupation of, 12, 13, 106, 162. artists in, 14, 272, 276, 306. being lost in, 218. Berri, Duchesse de, in, 122. Bonington in, 272. its book-shops, 229. Browning in, 98, 99, 100, 274. on, 275. Mrs. on, 100. Byron in, 112, 128, 129. on, 63. its by-ways, 284. its cafés, 34, 38. its chimneys, 96, 97, 285. a city of the poor, 33. its concerts, 195. Fenimore Cooper in, 127. Dickens, Charles, on, 5. Duse, Eleanora, in, 97. the first sight of, 3. its fish, 40, 229. the French occupation of, 137. its fruit, 40. Germans in, 268. Goethe in, 106. gramophones in, 196. Henry III of France in, 109. honeymooners in, 32, 195. house moving in, 274. houses, desirable, 96, 204, 205. Howells, W.D., in, 104, 144, 221. on, 204, 264. James, G.P.R., in, 152. Jews in, 227. Joseph II, Emperor, in, 103, 115. Layard, Sir H., in, 111. Lewis, "Monk," in, 136. Lions of, 25, 73, 166, 261. Moore, Thomas, in, 128. Motor-boats in, 92. music in, 31, 35, 106, 196. Napoleon in, 11, 12, 21, 110. pictures of, by foreign painters, 273. Pius X, Pope, in, 231. rain in, 23. its republicanism, 32. its restaurants, 39, 40. Roberts, David, in, 148. its roofs, 44. Ruskin in, 92, 93, 147, 272. on, 69, 72. the sacristans of, 42, 198, 209, 210, 216, 220, 224, 225, 252, 279, 283, 295, 296. Seagulls in, 101. Shelley in, 139. on, 140, 141. its shops and shopkeepers, 38, 218, 227. its steamers, 92. tourists in, 32. Turner in, 272. its unfailing beauty, 3. Van Dyck in, 244. Wagner in, 104, 122. walking in, 217. the wells of, 75. where to live in, 204. _Venice on Foot_, 218, 285. Venturi, Sig. Lionello, his _Giorgione e Giorgionismo_, 291. Veronese, Paul, his "Rape of Europa," 49. pictures by, 49, 50, 53, 172, 176, 194, 215, 275. his portrait, 77. his "House of Darius," 111, 169. his "Jesus in the House of Levi," 174. his examination, 174. his life, 275. his tomb, 275. Verrocchio, Andrea, work by, 256, 277. Via Vittorio Emmanuele, 226. Vicentino, Andrea, picture by, 61. Vinci, Leonardo da, works by, 94, 173, 277. and Giorgione, 293. death notices, 278. Vittoria, Alessandro, his grave, 208. Vittorio Emmanuele, monument to, 14. Vivarini, the, pictures by, 116, 152, 156, 190, 203, 210, 251, 261. Wagner in Venice, 104, 122. his statue, 264. Walton, E.A., picture by, 114. Whistler, J.M., his Venetian pictures, 114, 202, 273. Whitman, Walt, 77. Woods, Henry, his Venetian pictures, 273. Yriarte, his _La Vie_, etc., 147. Zattere, the, 271. Browning at, 98, 274. a house on, 205. Zecca, the, 80, 84. Zeno, Carlo, 77, 260. Zeno, Cardinal, 29. Ziem, his Venice pictures, 273. The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author. NEW BOOKS BY E.V. LUCAS A "MOVING-PICTURE NOVEL" *Landmarks* BY E.V. LUCAS, Author of "Over Bemerton's," "London Lavender," etc. _Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._ Mr. Lucas' new story combines a number of the most significant episodes in the life of the central figure; in other words, those events of his career from early childhood to the close of the book which have been most instrumental in building up his character and experience. The episodes are of every kind, serious, humorous, tender, awakening, disillusioning, and they are narrated without any padding whatever, each one beginning as abruptly as in life; although in none of his previous work has the author been so minute in his social observation and narration. 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19061	----	[Illustration: THE PARTHENON] SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS SELECTED AND EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS, ETC. BY FRANCIS W. HALSEY _Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The World's Famous Orations" and of "The Best of the World's Classics," etc._ IN TEN VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED Vol. VIII ITALY, SICILY, AND GREECE PART TWO FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK AND LONDON COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY [_Printed in the United States of America_] CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII Italy, Sicily, and Greece--Part Two IV. THREE FAMOUS CITIES PAGE IN THE STREETS OF GENOA--By Charles Dickens 1 MILAN CATHEDRAL--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 4 PISA'S FOUR GLORIES--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 7 THE WALLS AND "SKYSCRAPERS" OF PISA--By Janet Ross and Nelly Erichson 11 V. NAPLES AND ITS ENVIRONS IN AND ABOUT NAPLES--By Charles Dickens 18 THE TOMB OF VIRGIL--By Augustus J. C. Hare 24 TWO ASCENTS OF VESUVIUS--By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 26 ANOTHER ASCENT--By Charles Dickens 31 CASTELLAMARE AND SORRENTO--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 37 CAPRI--By Augustus J. C. Hare 42 POMPEII--By Percy Bysshe Shelley 45 VI. OTHER ITALIAN SCENES VERONA--By Charles Dickens 52 PADUA--By Theophile Gautier 55 FERRARA--By Theophile Gautier 59 LAKE LUGANO--By Victor Tissot 62 LAKE COMO--By Percy Bysshe Shelley 64 BELLAGIO ON LAKE COMO--By W. D. M'Crackan 66 THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO--By Joseph Addison 69 PERUGIA--By Nathaniel Hawthorne 73 SIENA---By Mr. and Mrs. Edwin H. Blashfield 75 THE ASSISSI OF ST. FRANCIS--By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine 78 RAVENNA--By Edward A. Freeman 80 BENEDICTINE SUBIACO--By Augustus J. C. Hare 83 ETRUSCAN VOLTERRA--By William Cullen Bryant 86 THE PAESTUM OF THE GREEKS--By Edward A. Freeman 88 VII. SICILIAN SCENES PALERMO--By Will S. Monroe 91 GIRGENTI--By Edward A. Freeman 93 SEGESTE--By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 97 TAORMINA--By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 99 MOUNT ÆTNA--By Will S. Monroe 101 SYRACUSE--By Rufus B. Richardson 104 MALTA--By Theophile Gautier 107 VIII. THE MAINLAND OF GREECE ARRIVING IN ATHENS--THE ACROPOLIS--By J. P. Mahaffy 112 A WINTER IN ATHENS HALF A CENTURY AGO--By Bayard Taylor 119 THE ACROPOLIS AS IT WAS--By Pausanias 122 THE ELGIN MARBLES--By J. P. Mahaffy 127 THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS--By J. P. Mahaffy 130 WHERE ST. PAUL PREACHED--By J. P. Mahaffy 134 FROM ATHENS TO DELPHI ON HORSEBACK--By Bayard Taylor 136 CORINTH--By J. P. Mahaffy 140 OLYMPIA--By Philip S. Marden 143 THE TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA AS IT WAS--By Pausanias 146 THERMOPYLÆ--By Rufus B. Richardson 152 SALONICA--By Charles Dudley Warner 155 FROM THE PIERIAN PLAIN TO MARATHON--By Charles Dudley Warner 157 SPARTA AND MAINA--By Bayard Taylor 160 MESSENIA--By Bayard Taylor 164 TIRYNS AND MYCENÆ--By J. P. Mahaffy 169 IX. THE GREEK ISLANDS A TOUR OF CRETE--By Bayard Taylor 175 THE COLOSSAL RUINS AT CNOSSOS--By Philip S. Marden 179 CORFU--By Edward A. Freeman 182 RHODES--By Charles Dudley Warner 185 MT. ATHOS--By Charles Dudley Warner 189 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME VIII FRONTISPIECE THE PARTHENON PRECEDING PAGE 1 VENICE: SANTA MARIA DEL SALUTE FEEDING THE DOVES IN FRONT OF ST. MARK'S VENICE: STATUE OF COLLEONI PALACE IN ST. MARK'S PLACE GONDOLA ON THE GRAND CANAL GENERAL VIEW OF FLORENCE PALACE OF THE DUKES OF ESTE, FERRARA LAKE LUGANO TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE AT CADORE THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS VERONA: TOMB OF THE SCALIGERS MILAN CATHEDRAL BAPTISTERY, CATHEDRAL, AND LEANING TOWER OF PISA FOLLOWING PAGE 96 CITY AND BAY OF NAPLES WITH VESUVIUS IN THE DISTANCE TEMPLE OF THESEUS AT ATHENS PALERMO, SICILY, FROM THE SEA GREEK THEATER, SEGESTA, SICILY TEMPLE OF CONCORD, GIRGENTI, SICILY TEMPLE OF JUNO, GIRGENTI, SICILY AMPHITHEATER AT SYRACUSE, SICILY GREEK TEMPLE AT SEGESTA, SICILY HARBOR OF SYRACUSE, SICILY THE SO-CALLED "SHIP OF ULYSSES," OFF CORFU TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS AT ATHENS THE PLAIN BELOW DELPHI THE ROAD NEAR DELPHI ENTRANCE TO THE STADIUM AT OLYMPIA THRONE OF MINOS IN CRETE [Illustration: VENICE: SANTA MARIA DEL SALUTE] [Illustration: FEEDING THE DOVES IN FRONT OF ST. MARK'S (See Vol. VII for article on these doves)] [Illustration: VENICE: STATUE OF COLLEONI Courtesy John C. Winston Co.] [Illustration: PALACE IN ST. MARK'S PLACE, VENICE (Base of the old Campanile at the right)] [Illustration: GONDOLA ON THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE] [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF FLORENCE] [Illustration: PALACE OF THE DUKES OF ESTE. FERRARA] [Illustration: LAKE LUGANO] [Illustration: TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE AT CADORE (Cadore is in the Italian part of the Dolomites)] [Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, VENICE] [Illustration: TOMB OF THE SCALÍGERS AT VERONA] [Illustration: MILAN CATHEDRAL (See Vol. VII for article on Milan Cathedral)] [Illustration: BAPTISTERY, CATHEDRAL, AND LEANING TOWER OF PISA (See Vol. VII for article on Pisa)] IV THREE FAMOUS CITIES IN THE STREETS OF GENOA[1] BY CHARLES DICKENS The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind of well, or breathing-place. The houses are immensely high, painted in all sorts of colors, and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of repair. They are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris.... When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and the Strada Baldi! The endless details of these rich palaces; the walls of some of them, within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke! The great, heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier; with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering high up--a huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules, massively barred lower windows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers; among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again, as every palace is succeeded by another--the terrace gardens between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty feet above the street--the painted halls, moldering and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in beautiful colors and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry--the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial--the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways--the magnificent and innumerable churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people--make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder; so lively, and yet so dead; so noisy, and yet so quiet; so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering; so wide-awake, and yet so fast asleep; that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant reality!... In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are very dirty; quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable; and emit a peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the city, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation; looking as if it had grown there, like a fungus. Against the Government House, against the old Senate House, round about any large building, little shops stick close, like parasite vermin to the great carcass. And for all this, look where you may; up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere; there are irregular houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their neighbors, crippling themselves or their friends by some means or other, until one, more irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you can't see any further. MILAN CATHEDRAL[2] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE The cathedral, at the first sight, is bewildering. Gothic art, transported entire into Italy at the close of the Middle Ages,[3] attains at once its triumph and its extravagance. Never had it been seen so pointed, so highly embroidered, so complex, so overcharged, so strongly resembling a piece of jewelry; and as, instead of coarse and lifeless stone, it here takes for its material the beautiful lustrous Italian marble, it becomes a pure chased gem as precious through its substance as through the labor bestowed on it. The whole church seems to be a colossal and magnificent crystallization, so splendidly do its forests of spires, its intersections of moldings, its population of statues, its fringes of fretted, hollowed, embroidered and open marblework, ascend in multiple and interminable bright forms against the pure blue sky. Truly is it the mystic candelabra of visions and legends, with a hundred thousand branches bristling and overflowing with sorrowing thorns and ecstatic roses, with angels, virgins, and martyrs upon every flower and on every thorn, with infinite myriads of the triumphant Church springing from the ground pyramidically even into the azure, with its millions of blended and vibrating voices mounting upward in a single shout, hosannah!... We enter, and the impression deepens. What a difference between the religious power of such a church and that of St. Peter's at Rome! One exclaims to himself, this is the true Christian temple! Four rows of enormous eight-sided pillars, close together, seem like a serried hedge of gigantic oaks. Their strange capitals, bristling with a fantastic vegetation of pinnacles, canopies, foliated niches and statues, are like venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of the arches being filled with an inextricable network of foliage, thorny sprigs and light branches, twining and intertwining, and figuring the aerial dome of a mighty forest. As in a great wood, the lateral aisles are almost equal in height to that of the center, and, on all sides, at equal distances apart, one sees ascending around him the secular colonnades. Here truly is the ancient Germanic forest, as if a reminiscence of the religious groves of Irmensul. Light pours in transformed by green, yellow and purple panes, as if through the red and orange tints of autumnal leaves. This, certainly, is a complete architecture like that of Greece, having, like that of Greece, its root in vegetable forms. The Greek takes the trunk of the tree, drest, for his type; the German the entire tree with all its leaves and branches. True architecture, perhaps, always springs out of vegetal nature, and each zone may have its own edifices as well as plants; in this way oriental architectures might be comprehended--the vague idea of the slender palm and of its bouquet of leaves with the Arabs, and the vague idea of the colossal, prolific, dilated and bristling vegetation of India. In any event I have never seen a church in which the aspect of northern forests was more striking, or where one more involuntarily imagines long alleys of trunks terminating in glimpses of daylight, curved branches meeting in acute angles, domes of irregular and commingling foliage, universal shade scattered with lights through colored and diaphanous leaves. Sometimes a section of yellow panes, through which the sun darts, launches into the obscurity its shower of rays and a portion of the nave glows like a luminous glade. A vast rosace behind the choir, a window with tortuous branchings above the entrance, shimmer with the tints of amethyst, ruby, emerald and topaz like leafy labyrinths in which lights from above break in and diffuse themselves in shifting radiance. Near the sacristy a small door-top, fastened against the wall, exposes an infinity of intersecting moldings similar to the delicate meshes of some marvelous twining and climbing plant. A day might be passed here as in a forest, in the presence of grandeurs as solemn as those of nature, before caprices as fascinating, amid the same intermingling of sublime monotony and inexhaustible fecundity, before contrasts and metamorphoses of light as rich and as unexpected. A mystic reverie, combined with a fresh sentiment of northern nature, such is the source of Gothic architecture. PISA'S FOUR GLORIES[4] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE There are two Pisas--one in which people have lapsed into ennui, and live from hand to mouth since the decadence, which is in fact the entire city, except a remote corner; the other is this corner, a marble sepulcher where the Duomo, Baptistery, Leaning Tower and Campo-Santo silently repose like beautiful dead beings. This is the genuine Pisa, and in these relics of a departed life, one beholds a world. In 1083 in order to honor the Virgin, who had given them a victory over the Saracens of Sardignia, they [the Pisans] laid the foundations of their Duomo. This edifice is almost a Roman basilica, that is to say a temple surmounted by another temple, or, if you prefer it, a house having a gable for its façade which gable is cut off at the peak to support another house of smaller dimensions. Five stories of columns entirely cover the façade with their superposed porticos. Two by two they stand coupled together to support small arcades; all these pretty shapes of white marble under their dark arcades form an aerial population of the utmost grace and novelty. Nowhere here are we conscious of the dolorous reverie of the medieval north; it is the fête of a young nation which is awakening, and, in the gladness of its recent prosperity, honoring its gods. It has collected capitals, ornaments, entire columns obtained on the distant shores to which its wars and its commerce have led it, and these ancient fragments enter into its work without incongruity; for it is instinctively cast in the ancient mold, and only developed with a tinge of fancy on the side of finesse and the pleasing. Every antique form reappears, but reshaped in the same sense by a fresh and original impulse. The outer columns of the Greek temple are reduced, multiplied and uplifted in the air, and from a support have become an ornament. The Roman or Byzantine dome is elongated and its natural heaviness diminished under a crown of slender columns with a miter ornament, which girds it midway with its delicate promenade. On the two sides of the great door two Corinthian columns are enveloped with luxurious foliage, calyxes and twining or blooming acanthus; and from the threshold we see the church with its files of intersecting columns, its alternate courses of black and white marble and its multitude of slender and brilliant forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more womanly than its mother. She is not yet an adult, sure in all her steps--she is somewhat awkward. The lateral façades on the exterior are monotonous; the cupola within is a reversed funnel of a peculiar and disagreeable form. The junction of the two arms of the cross is unsatisfactory and so many modernized chapels dispel the charm due to purity, as at Sienna. At the second glance however all this is forgotten, and we again regard it as a complete whole. Four rows of Corinthian columns, surmounted with arcades, divide the church into five naves, and form a forest. A second passage, as richly crowded, traverses the former crosswise, and, above the beautiful grove, files of still smaller columns prolong and intersect each other in order to uphold in the air the prolongation and intersection of the quadruple gallery. The ceiling is flat; the windows are small, and for the most part, without sashes; they allow the walls to retain the grandeur of their mass and the solidity of their position; and among these long, straight and simple lines, in this natural light, the innumerable shafts glow with the serenity of an antique temple.... Nothing more can be added in relation to the Baptistery or the Leaning Tower; the same ideas prevail in these, the same taste, the same style. The former is a simple, isolated dome, the latter a cylinder, and each has an outward dress of small columns. And yet each has its own distinct and expressive physiognomy; but description and writing consume too much time, and too many technical terms are requisite to define their differences. I note, simply, the inclination of the Tower. Some suppose that, when half constructed, the tower sank in the earth on one side, and that the architects continued on; seeing that they did continue this deflection was only a partial obstacle to them. In any event, there are other leaning towers in Italy, at Bologna, for example; voluntarily or involuntarily this feeling for oddness, this love of paradox, this yielding to fancy is one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages. In the center of the Baptistery stands a superb font with eight panels; each panel is incrusted with a rich complicated flower in full bloom, and each flower is different. Around it a circle of large Corinthian columns supports round-arch arcades; most of them are antique and are ornamented with antique bas-reliefs; Meleager with his barking dogs, and the nude torsos of his companions in attendance on Christian mysteries. On the left stands a pulpit similar to that of Sienna, the first work of Nicholas of Pisa (1260), a simple marble coffer supported by marble columns and covered with sculptures. The sentiment of force and of antique nudity comes out here in striking features. The sculptor comprehended the postures and torsions of bodies. His figures, somewhat massive, are grand and simple; he frequently reproduces the tunics and folds of the Roman costume; one of his nude personages, a sort of Hercules bearing a young lion on his shoulders, has the broad breast and muscular tension which the sculptors of the sixteenth century admired. The last of these edifices, the Campo-Santo, is a cemetery, the soil of which, brought from Palestine, is holy ground. Four high walls of polished marble surround it with their white and crowded panels. Inside, a square gallery forms a promenade opening into the court through arcades trellised with ogive windows. It is filled with funereal monuments, busts, inscriptions and statues of every form and of every age. Nothing could be simpler and nobler. A framework of dark wood supports the arch overhead, and the crest of the roof cuts sharp against the crystal sky. At the angles are four rustling cypress trees, tranquilly swayed by the breeze. Grass is growing in the court with a wild freshness and luxuriance. Here and there a climbing flower twined around a column, a small rosebush, or a shrub glows beneath a gleam of sunshine. There is no noise; this quarter is deserted; only now and then is heard the voice of some promenader which reverberates as under the vault of a church. It is the veritable cemetery of a free and Christian city; here, before the tombs of the great, people might well reflect over death and public affairs. THE WALLS AND "SKYSCRAPERS" OF PISA[5] BY JANET ROSS AND NELLY ERICHSON Few cities have preserved their medieval walls with such loving care as Pisa. The circuit is complete save where the traveler enters the city; and there, alas, a wide breach has been made by the restless spirit of modernity. But once past the paltry barrier and the banal square, with its inevitable statue of Victor Emanuel, that take the place of the old Porta Romana, one quickly perceives that the city is a walled one. Glimpses of battlements close the vistas of the streets, and green fields peep through the open gates, marking that abrupt transition between town and country peculiar to a fortified city. The walls are best seen from without. An admirable impression of them can be had on leaving the city by the Porta Lucchese. Turning to the left, after passing a crucifix overshadowed by cypresses, we come to the edge of a stretch of level marshy meadows, gaily pied in spring with orchids and grape hyacinths. Above our heads the high air vibrates with the song of larks. Before us is the long line of the city walls. Strong, grim and gray, they look with nothing to break the outline of square battlements against the sky, but that majestic groups of domes and towers for whose defense they were built. At the angle of the wall to the right is a square watch-tower, backed by groups of cypresses that rise into the air like dark flames. Its little windows command the flat plain as far as the horizon. How easy to imagine the warning blast of the warder's trumpet as he caught sight of a distant enemy, and the wall springing into life at the sound. Armed men buckling on their harness would swarm up ladders to the battlements, the catapult groan and squeak as its lever was forced backward, and at the sharp word of command the first flight of arrows would be loosed. But the dream fades, and we pass on to the angle of the wall where the cypresses stand. From the picturesque Jews' cemetery, to which access is easy, the structure of the walls can be studied in detail because the hand of the restorer has been perforce withheld within its gates. The wall is some forty feet high, built of stone from the Pisan hills, weathered for the most part to a grayish hue. The masonry of the lower half is good. The blocks of stone are large and well laid. Those of the upper half are smaller and the masonry is in places careless and irregular. The red brick battlements are square. At short intervals there are walled-up gateways, round-headed or ogival in form, and the whole surface is rent and patched. Centuries of war and earthquakes, rain and fire, have given it a pleasant irregularity, the record of violent and troublous times. The city can be reentered by the Porta Nuova, only a few yards to the left of the cemetery. So venerable do these battered walls look that we need the full evidence of history to realize that they had more than one predecessor. The memory even of the first walls of Pisa, an ancient city when Rome was young, has been lost. The earliest record of which we know anything appears on a map of the ninth century drawn by one Bonanno; a map, we should rather say professing to be of the ninth century, for churches of the thirteenth century are marked upon it, so it must either have been made, or the churches inserted, then.... The ancient walls were practically swept away by the prosperity of Pisa. Beside the Balearic Islands she had conquered Carthage, the Lipari Islands, Elba, Corsica, and Palermo, and her galleys poured their spoils into the Pisan port. She traded with the East, and was successful in commerce as in war. Her inhabitants increased rapidly. They could no longer be penned within the narrow limits of the old wall, but overflowed in all directions beyond it. Not only was the Borgo thickly populated, but a whole new region called Forisportae, sprang up. So masked was the wall by houses, built into it and huddling against it both on the outside and the inside, that it seems to have been actually invisible. So much so that contemporary chroniclers spoke of Pisa as without walls, and attributed her safety to the valor of her citizens and the multitude of her towers. The ancient wall was evidently so hidden and decayed that Pisa must be regarded as a defenseless city in the twelfth century. It is curious that her citizens should have neglected their own safety at a time when they were masters of fortification and defense; when their fame in these arts had reached as far as Egypt and Syria, and when the Milanese came to them to beg for engineers.... The external appearance of an Italian city in the twelfth century was so unlike anything we are accustomed to in modern times that a strong effort of the imagination is needed to conceive it. Seen from a distance the walls enclosed, not houses, but a forest of tall square shafts, rising into the sky like the crowded chimney stacks in a manufacturing town but far more thickly set together. The city appeared, to use a graphic contemporary metaphor, like a sheaf of corn bound together by its walls. [Illustration: PANEL IN THE CATHEDRAL, SHOWING PART OF THE MEDIEVAL WALL AND TOWERS OF PISA] San Gimignano, tho most of its towers have perished long ago, helps us to imagine faintly what Italian towns were like in the days of Frederick Barbarossa or his grandson Frederick II. For most of the houses were actually towers, long rectangular columns, vying with each other in height and crowded close together on either side of the narrow, airless, darkened streets. Sometimes they were connected with one another by wooden bridges, and all were furnished with wooden balconies used in defensive and offensive warfare with their neighbors. Cities full of towers were common all over southern France and central Italy, but Tuscany had more than any other state, and those of Pisa were the most famous of all. The habit of building and dwelling in towers rather than in houses may have arisen from the difficulty of expanding laterally within an enclosed city; but a stronger reason may be found in the dangers and uncertainty of life in a period when a man might be attacked at any moment by his fellow-citizen, as well as by the enemy of the state. It was a distinct military advantage to overlook one's neighbor, who might be an enemy; and towers rose higher and higher. The spirit of emulation entered, and rich nobles gloried in adding tower to tower and in looking down on all rivals. But whatever the cause of their existence, they were picturesque, and must have presented a gallant sight on the eve of a high festival. The tall shafts were tinged with gold by the western sun, their battlements crowned with three fluttering banners--the eagle of the Emperor, the white cross of the Commune, and the device of the People--looking as tho a cloud of many-colored butterflies were hovering over the city. Again, how dramatic the scene when the city was rent by one of the perpetually recurring faction-fights. Light bridges with grappling-irons were thrown from tower to tower, doors and windows were barricaded, balconies and battlements lined with men in shining mail, bearing the fantastic device of their leader on helm and shield. Mangonels, or catapults, huge engines stationed on the roofs of the towers, sent masses of stone hurtling through the air, whistling arbelast bolts and clothyard shafts flew in thick showers, boiling oil or lead rained down on the heads of those who ventured down to attack the doors, and arrows, with Greek fire attached, were shot with nice aim into the wooden balconies and bridges. Vile insults were hurled where missiles failed to strike. The shouts and shrieks of the combatants were mingled with the crash of a falling tower or with the hissing of a fire-arrow. Where those struck, a red glow arose and a thick cloud of smoke enveloped the defenders. Altho it is evident that towers were very numerous in Pisa, it is difficult to arrive at their precise number. The chroniclers differ greatly in their estimates. Benjamin da Tudela, for instance, says that there were 10,000 in the twelfth century; while Marangone puts the number at 15,000 and Tronci at 16,000. These are round numbers such as the medieval mind loved, but we have abundant evidence that they are not much exaggerated. An intarsia panel in the Duomo, shows how closely the towers were packed together, while the mass of legislation relating to them was directed against abuses that could only have arisen if their number was very large. V NAPLES AND ITS ENVIRONS IN AND ABOUT THE CITY[6] BY CHARLES DICKENS So we go, rattling down-hill, into Naples. A funeral is coming up the street, toward us. The body, on an open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth of crimson and gold. The mourners, in white gowns and masks. If there be death abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages. Some of these, the common Vetturino vehicles, are drawn by three horses abreast, decked with smart trappings and great abundance of brazen ornament, and always going very fast. Not that their loads are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside, four in front, four or five more hanging behind, and two or three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie half-suffocated with mud and dust. Exhibitors of Punch, buffo singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a row of cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders within, and admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl and bustle. Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways, and kennels; the gentry, gaily drest, are dashing up and down in carriages on the Chiaja, or walking in the Public Gardens; and quiet letter-writers, perched behind their little desks and inkstands under the Portico of the Great Theater of San Carlo, in the public street, are waiting for clients. Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right hands, when you look at them? Everything is done in pantomime in Naples, and that is the conventional sign for hunger. A man who is quarreling with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs--expressive of a donkey's ears--whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation. Two people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away without a word, having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers it too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm. The other nods briskly, and goes his way. He has been invited to a friendly dinner at half-past five o'clock, and will certainly come. All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist, with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative--the only negative beggars will ever understand. But, in Naples, those five fingers are a copious language. All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and maccaroni-eating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long, and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the Bay sparkle merrily.... Capri--once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius--Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant beauties of the Bay, lie in the blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times a day; now close at hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest country in the world, is spread about us. Whether we turn toward the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphitheater, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae, or take the other way, toward Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one succession of delights. In the last-named direction, where, over doors and archways, there are countless little images of San Gennaro, with this Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of the burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and maccaroni manufacturies; to Castellamare, with its ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks. Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo, the highest neighboring mountain, down to the water's edge--among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills--and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors--and pass delicious summer villas--to Sorrento, where the poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castellamare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset; with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain (Vesuvius), with its smoke and flame, upon the other, is a sublime conclusion to the glory of the day. That church by the Porta Capuna--near the old fisher-market in the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello began--is memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejeweled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius, which is preserved in two phials in a silver tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a year, to the great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone (distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red. It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur. The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old specters totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of death--as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were used as burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a plague. In the rest, there is nothing but dust. They consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults; as if it, too, were dead and buried. The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it, tho yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the scene. If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii! Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human habitation and everyday pursuits, the chafing of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphoræ in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to this hour--all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of the sea. THE TOMB OF VIRGIL[7] BY AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE A road to the right at the end of the Chiaja, leads to the mouth of the Grotto of Posilipo, above which those who do not wish to leave their carriages may see, high on the left, close above the grotto, the ruined columbarium known as the Tomb of Virgil. A door in the wall, on the left of the approach to the grotto, and a very steep staircase, lead to the columbarium, which is situated in a pretty fruit-garden. Virgil desired that his body should be brought to Naples from Brundusium, where he died, B.C. 19, and there is every probability that he was buried on this spot, which was visited as Virgil's burial-place little more than a century after his death by the poet Statius, who was born at Naples, and who describes composing his own poems while seated in the shadow of the tomb. If further confirmation were needed of the story that Virgil was laid here, it would be found in the fact that Silius Italicus, who lived at the same time with Statius, purchased the tomb of Virgil, restored it from the neglect into which it had fallen, and celebrated funeral rites before it. The tomb was originally shaded by a gigantic bay-tree, which is said to have died on the death of Dante. Petrarch, who was brought hither by King Robert, planted another, which existed in the time of Sannazaro, but was destroyed by relic-collectors in the last century. A branch was sent to Frederick the Great by the Margravine of Baireuth, with some verses by Voltaire. If from no other cause, the tomb would be interesting from its visitors; here Boccaccio renounced the career of a merchant for that of a poet, and a well-known legend, that St. Paul visited the sepulcher of Virgil at Naples, was long commemorated in the verse of a hymn used in the service for St. Paul's Day at Mantua. The tomb is a small, square, vaulted chamber with three windows. Early in the sixteenth century a funeral urn, containing the ashes of the poet, stood in the center, supported by nine little marble pillars. Some say that Robert of Anjou removed it, in 1326, for security to the Castel Nuovo, others that it was given by the Government to a cardinal from Mantua, who died at Genoa on his way home. In either event the urn is now lost. It is just beneath the tomb that the road to Pozzuoli enters the famous Grotto of Posilipo, a tunnel about half a mile long, in breadth from 25 to 30 feet, and varying from about 90 feet in height near the entrance, to little more than 20 feet at points of the interior. Petronius and Seneca mention its narrow gloomy passage with horror, in the reign of Nero, when it was so low that it could only be used for foot-passengers, who were obliged to stoop in passing through. In the fifteenth century King Alphonso I. gave it height by lowering the floor, which was paved by Don Pedro di Toledo a hundred years later. In the Middle Ages the grotto was ascribed to the magic arts of Virgil. In recent years it has been the chief means of communication between Naples and Baiae, and is at all times filled with dust and noise, the flickering lights and resounding echoes giving it a most weird effect. However much one may abuse Neapolitans, we may consider in their favor, as Swinburne observes, "what a terror this dark grotto would be in London!" TWO ASCENTS OF VESUVIUS[8] BY JOHANN WOLGANG VON GOETHE At the foot of the steep ascent, we were received by two guides, one old, the other young, but both active fellows. The first pulled me up the path, the other Tischbein[9]--pulled I say, for these guides are girded round the waist with a leathern belt, which the traveler takes hold of, and being drawn up by his guide, makes his way the easier with foot and staff. In this manner we reached the flat from which the cone rises; toward the north lay the ruins of the summit. A glance westward over the country beneath us, removed, as well as a bath could, all feeling of exhaustion and fatigue, and we now went round the ever-smoking cone, as it threw out its stones and ashes. Wherever the space allowed of our viewing it at a sufficient distance, it appeared a grand and elevating spectacle. In the first place, a violent thundering toned forth from its deepest abyss, then stones of larger and smaller sizes were showered into the air by thousands, and enveloped by clouds of ashes. The greatest part fell again into the gorge; the rest of the fragments, receiving a lateral inclination, and falling on the outside of the crater, made a marvelous rumbling noise. First of all the larger masses plumped against the side, and rebounded with a dull heavy sound; then the smaller came rattling down; and last of all, drizzled a shower of ashes. All this took place at regular intervals, which by slowly counting, we were able to measure pretty accurately. Between the summit, however, and the cone the space is narrow enough; moreover, several stones fell around us, and made the circuit anything but agreeable. Tischbein now felt more disgusted than ever with Vesuvius, as the monster, not content with being hateful, showed an inclination to become mischievous also. As, however, the presence of danger generally exercises on man a kind of attraction, and calls forth a spirit of opposition in the human breast to defy it, I bethought myself that, in the interval of the eruptions, it would be possible to climb up the cone to the crater, and to get back before it broke out again. I held a council on this point with our guides under one of the overhanging rocks of the summit, where, encamped in safety, we refreshed ourselves with the provisions we had brought with us. The younger guide was willing to run the risk with me; we stuffed our hats full of linen and silk handkerchiefs, and, staff in hand, we prepared to start, I holding on to his girdle. The little stones were yet rattling around us, and the ashes still drizzling, as the stalwart youth hurried forth with me across the hot glowing rubble. We soon stood on the brink of the vast chasm, the smoke of which, altho a gentle air was bearing it away from us, unfortunately veiled the interior of the crater, which smoked all round from a thousand crannies. At intervals, however, we caught sight through the smoke of the cracked walls of the rock. The view was neither instructive nor delightful; but for the very reason that one saw nothing, one lingered in the hope of catching a glimpse of something more; and so we forgot our slow counting. We were standing on a narrow ridge of the vast abyss; of a sudden the thunder pealed aloud; we ducked our heads involuntarily, as if that would have rescued us from the precipitated masses. The smaller stones soon rattled, and without considering that we had again an interval of cessation before us, and only too much rejoiced to have outstood the danger, we rushed down and reached the foot of the hill together with the drizzling ashes, which pretty thickly covered our heads and shoulders.... The news [two weeks later] that an eruption of lava had just commenced, which, taking the direction of Ottajano, was invisible at Naples, tempted me to visit Vesuvius for the third time. Scarcely had I jumped out of my cabriolet at the foot of the mountain, when immediately appeared the two guides who had accompanied us on our previous ascent. I had no wish to do without either, but took one out of gratitude and custom, the other for reliance on his judgment--and the two for the greater convenience. Having ascended the summit, the older guide remained with our cloaks and refreshment, while the younger followed me, and we boldly went straight toward a dense volume of smoke, which broke forth from the bottom of the funnel; then we quickly went downward by the side of it, till at last, under the clear heaven, we distinctly saw the lava emitted from the rolling clouds of smoke. We may hear an object spoken of a thousand times, but its peculiar features will never be caught till we see it with our own eyes. The stream of lava was small, not broader perhaps than ten feet, but the way in which it flowed down a gentle and tolerably smooth plain was remarkable. As it flowed along, it cooled both on the sides and on the surface, so that it formed a sort of canal, the bed of which was continually raised in consequence of the molten mass congealing even beneath the fiery stream, which, with uniform action, precipitated right and left the scoria which were floating on its surface. In this way a regular dam was at length thrown up, in which the glowing stream flowed on as quietly as any mill-stream. We passed along the tolerably high dam, while the scoria rolled regularly off the sides at our feet. Some cracks in the canal afforded opportunity of looking at the living stream, from below, and as it rushed onward, we observed it from above. A very bright sun made the glowing lava look dull; but a moderate steam rose from it into the pure air. I felt a great desire to go nearer to the point where it broke out from the mountain; there my guide averred, it at once formed vaults and roofs above itself, on which he had often stood. To see and experience this phenomenon, we again ascended the hill, in order to come from behind to this point. Fortunately at this moment the place was cleared by a pretty strong wind, but not entirely, for all round it the smoke eddied from a thousand crannies; and now at last we stood on the top of the solid roof (which looked like a hardened mass of twisted dough), but which, however, projected so far outward, that it was impossible to see the welling lava. We ventured about twenty steps further, but the ground on which we stept became hotter and hotter, while around us rolled an oppressive steam, which obscured and hid the sun; the guide, who was a few steps in advance of me, presently turned back, and seizing hold of me, hurried out of this Stygian exhalation. After we had refreshed our eyes with the clear prospect, and washed our gums and throat with wine, we went round again to notice any other peculiarities which might characterize this peak of hell, thus rearing itself in the midst of a Paradise. I again observed attentively some chasms, in appearance like so many vulcanic forges, which emitted no smoke, but continually shot out a steam of hot glowing air. They were all tapestried, as it were, with a kind of stalactite, which covered the funnel to the top, with its knobs and chintz-like variation of colors. In consequence of the irregularity of the forges, I found many specimens of this sublimation hanging within reach, so that, with our staves and a little contrivance, we were able to hack off a few, and to secure them. I saw in the shops of the dealers in lava similar specimens, labeled simply "Lava"; and I was delighted to have discovered that it was volcanic soot precipitated from the hot vapor, and distinctly exhibiting the sublimated mineral particles which it contained. ANOTHER ASCENT[10] BY CHARLES DICKENS No matter that the snow and ice lie thick upon the summit of Vesuvius, or that we have been on foot all day at Pompeii, or that croakers maintain that strangers should not be on the mountain by night, in such unusual season. Let us take advantage of the fine weather; make the best of our way to Resina, the little village at the foot of the mountain; prepare ourselves, as well as we can, on so short a notice, at the guide's house, ascend at once, and have sunset half-way up, moonlight at the top, and midnight to come down in! At four o'clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible uproar in the little stable-yard of Signor Salvatore, the recognized head guide, with the gold band round his cap; and thirty under-guides who are all scuffling and screaming at once, are preparing half-a-dozen saddled ponies, three litters, and some stout staves, for the journey. Every one of the thirty quarrels with the other twenty-nine, and frightens the six ponies; and as much of the village as can possibly squeeze itself into the little stable-yard, participates in the tumult, and gets trodden on by the cattle. After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than would suffice for the storming of Naples, the procession starts. The head guide, who is liberally paid for all the attendants, rides a little in advance of the party; the other thirty guides proceed on foot. Eight go forward with the litters that are to be used by and by; and the remaining two-and-twenty beg. We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights of stairs, for some time. At length, we leave these, and the vineyards on either side of them, and emerge upon a bleak, bare region where the lava lies confusedly, in enormous rusty masses; as if the earth had been plowed up by burning thunder-bolts. And now, we halt to see the sunset. The change that falls upon the dreary region and on the whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes on--and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed it, can ever forget! It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the broken ground, we arrive at the foot of the cone, which is extremely steep, and seems to rise, almost perpendicularly, from the spot where we dismount. The only light is reflected from the snow, deep, hard, and white, with which the cone is covered. It is now intensely cold, and the air is piercing. The thirty-one have brought no torches, knowing that the moon will rise before we reach the top. Two of the litters are devoted to the two ladies; the third, to a rather heavy gentleman from Naples, whose hospitality and good-nature have attached him to the expedition, and determined him to assist in doing the honors of the mountain. The rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labor upward over the snow--as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake. We are a long time toiling up; and the head guide looks oddly about him when one of the company--not an Italian, tho an habitué of the mountain for many years: whom we will call, for our present purpose, Mr. Pickle of Portici--suggests that, as it is freezing hard, and the usual footing of ashes is covered by the snow and ice, it will surely be difficult to descend. But the sight of the litters above, tilting up, and down, and jerking from this side to that, as the bearers continually slip, and tumble, diverts our attention, more especially as the whole length of the rather heavy gentleman is, at that moment, presented to us alarmingly foreshortened, with his head downward. The rising of the moon soon afterward, revives the flagging spirits of the bearers. Stimulating each other with their usual watchword, "Courage, friend! It is to eat maccaroni!" they press on, gallantly, for the summit. From tingeing the top of the snow above us with a band of light, and pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while we have been ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the whole white mountain side, and the broad sea down below, and tiny Naples in the distance, and every village in the country round. The whole prospect is in this lovely state, when we come upon the platform on the mountain-top--the region of fire--an exhausted crater formed of great masses of gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some tremendous waterfall, burned up; from every chink and crevice of which, hot, sulfurous smoke is pouring out; while, from another conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising abruptly from this platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth; reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the air like feathers, and fall down like lead. What words can paint the gloom and grandeur of this scene! The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from the sulfur; the fear of falling down through the crevices in the yawning ground; the stopping, every now and then, for somebody who is missing in the dark (for the dense smoke now obscures the moon); the intolerable noise of the thirty; and the hoarse roaring of the mountain; make it a scene of such confusion, at the same time, that we reel again. But, dragging the ladies through it, and across another exhausted crater to the foot of the present volcano, we approach close to it on the windy side, and then sit down among the hot ashes at its foot, and look up in silence; faintly estimating the action that is going on within, from its being full a hundred feet higher, at this minute, than it was six weeks ago. There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an irresistible desire to get nearer to it. We can not rest long, without starting off, two of us on our hands and knees, accompanied by the head guide, to climb to the brim of the flaming crater, and try to look in. Meanwhile, the thirty yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and call to us to come back; frightening the rest of the party out of their wits. What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin crust of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if there be any); and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces, and the shower of red-hot ashes that is raining down, and the choking smoke and sulfur; we may well feel giddy and irrational, like drunken men. But, we contrive to climb up to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into the hell of boiling fire below. Then, we all three come rolling down; blackened, and singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy; and each with his dress alight in half-a-dozen places. You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of descending, is, by sliding down the ashes; which, forming a gradually-increasing ledge below the feet, prevent too rapid a descent. But, when we have crossed the two exhausted craters on our way back, and are come to this precipitous place, there is (as Mr. Pickle has foretold) no vestige of ashes to be seen; the whole being a smooth sheet of ice. In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously join hands, and make a chain of men; of whom the foremost beat, as well as they can, a rough track with their sticks, down which we prepare to follow. The way being fearfully steep, and none of the party--even of the thirty--being able to keep their feet for six paces together, the ladies are taken out of their litters, and placed, each between two careful persons; while others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to prevent their falling forward--a necessary precaution, tending to the immediate and hopeless dilapidation of their apparel. The rather heavy gentleman is abjured to leave his litter too, and be escorted in a similar manner; but he resolves to be brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that his fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and that he is safer so, than trusting to his own legs. In this order, we begin the descent; sometimes on foot, sometimes shuffling on the ice; always proceeding much more quietly and slowly than on our upward way; and constantly alarmed by the falling among us of somebody from behind, who endangers the footing of the whole party, and clings pertinaciously to anybody's ankles. It is impossible for the litter to be in advance, too, as the track has to be made; and its appearance behind us, overhead--with some one or other of the bearers always down, and the rather heavy gentleman with his legs always in the air--is very threatening and frightful. We have gone on thus, a very little way, painfully and anxiously, but quite merrily, and regarding it as a great success--and have all fallen several times, and have all been stopt, somehow or other, as we were sliding away when Mr. Pickle of Portici, in the act of remarking on these uncommon circumstances as quite beyond his experience, stumbles, falls, disengages himself, with quick presence of mind, from those about him, plunges away head foremost, and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the cone! Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of Portici when we reach the place where we dismounted, and where the horses are waiting; but, thank God, sound in limb! And never are we likely to be more glad to see a man alive and on his feet, than to see him now--making light of it too, tho sorely bruised and in great pain. The boy is brought into the Hermitage on the Mountain, while we are at supper, with his head tied up; and the man is heard of, some hours afterward. He, too, is bruised and stunned, but has broken no bones; the snow having, fortunately, covered all the larger blocks of rock and stone, and rendered them harmless. CASTELLAMARE AND SORRENTO[11] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE The sky is almost clear. Only above Naples hangs a bank of clouds, and around Vesuvius huge white masses of smoke, moving and stationary. I never yet saw, even in summer at Marseilles, the blue of the sea so deep, bordering even on hardness. Above this powerful lustrous azure, absorbing three-quarters of the visible space, the white sky seems to be a firmament of crystal. As we recede we obtain a better view of the undulating coast, embraced in one grand mountain form, all its parts uniting like the members of one body. Ischia and the naked promontories on the extreme end repose in their lilac envelop, like a slumbering Pompeiian nymph under her veil. Veritably, to paint such nature as this, this violet continent extending around this broad luminous water, one must employ the terms of the ancient poets, and represent the great fertile goddess embraced and beset by the eternal ocean, and above them the serene effulgence of the dazzling Jupiter. We encounter on the road some fine faces with long elegant features, quite Grecian; some intelligent noble-looking girls, and here and there hideous mendicants cleaning their hairy breasts. But the race is much superior to that of Naples, where it is deformed and diminutive, the young girls there appearing like stunted, pallid grisets. The railroad skirts the sea a few paces off and almost on a level with it. A harbor appears blackened with lines of rigging, and then a mole, consisting of a small half-ruined fort, reflecting a clear sharp shadow in the luminous expanse. Surrounding this rise square houses, gray as if charred, and heaped together like tortoises under round roofs, serving them as a sort of thick shell. On this fertile soil, full of cinders, cultivation extends to the shore and forms gardens; a simple reed hedge protects them from the sea and the wind; the Indian fig with its clumsy thorny leaves clings to the slopes; verdure begins to appear on the branches of the trees, the apricots showing their smiling pink blossoms; half-naked men work the friable soil without apparent effort; a few square gardens contain columns and small statues of white marble. Everywhere you behold traces of antique beauty and joyousness. And why wonder at this when you feel that you have the divine vernal sun for a companion, and on the right, whenever you turn to the sea, its flaming golden waves. With what facility you here forget all ugly objects! I believe I passed at Castellamare some unsightly modern structures, a railroad station, hotels, a guard-house, and a number of rickety vehicles hurrying along in quest of fares. This is all effaced from my mind; nothing remains but impressions of obscure porches with glimpses of bright courts filled with glossy oranges and spring verdure, of esplanades with children playing on them and nets drying, and happy idlers snuffing the breeze and contemplating the capricious heaving of the tossing sea. On leaving Castellamare the road forms a corniche[12] winding along the bank. Huge white rocks, split off from the cliffs above, lie below in the midst of the eternally besieging waves. On the left the mountains lift their shattered pinnacles, fretted walls, and projecting crags, all that scaffolding of indentations which strike you as the ruins of a line of rocked and tottering fortresses. Each projection, each mass throws its shadow on the surrounding white surfaces, the entire range being peopled with tints and forms. Sometimes the mountain is rent in twain, and the sides of the chasm are lined with cultivation, descending in successive stages. Sorrento is thus built on three deep ravines. All these hollows contain gardens, crowded with masses of trees overhanging each other. Nut-trees, already lively with sap, project their white branches like gnarled fingers; everything else is green; winter lays no hand on this eternal spring. The thick lustrous leaf of the orange-tree rises from amid the foliage of the olive, and its golden apples glisten in the sun by thousands, interspersed with gleams of the pale lemon; often in these shady lanes do its glittering leaves flash out above the crest of the walls. This is the land of the orange. It grows even in miserable court-yards, alongside of dilapidated steps, spreading its luxuriant tops everywhere in the bright sunlight. The delicate aromatic odor of all these opening buds and blossoms is a luxury of kings, which here a beggar enjoys for nothing. I passed an hour in the garden of the hotel, a terrace overlooking the sea about half-way up the bank. A scene like this fills the imagination with a dream of perfect bliss. The house stands in a luxurious garden, filled with orange and lemon-trees, as heavily laden with fruit as those of a Normandy orchard; the ground at the foot of the trees is covered with it. Clusters of foliage and shrubbery of a pale green, bordering on blue, occupy intermediate spaces. The rosy blossoms of the peach, so tender and delicate, bloom on its naked branches. The walks are of bright blue porcelain, and the terrace displays its round verdant masses overhanging the sea, of which the lovely azure fills all space. I have not yet spoken of my impressions after leaving Castellamare. The charm was only too great. The pure sky, the pale azure almost transparent, the radiant blue sea as chaste and tender as a virgin bride, this infinite expanse so exquisitely adorned as if for a festival of rare delight, is a sensation that has no equal. Capri and Ischia on the line of the sky lie white in their soft vapory tissue, and the divine azure gently fades away surrounded by this border of brightness. Where find words to express all this? The gulf seemed like a marble vase purposely rounded to receive the sea. The satin sheen of a flower, the soft luminous petals of the velvet orris with shimmering sunshine on their pearly borders, such are the images that fill the mind, and which accumulate in vain and are ever inadequate. The water at the base of these rocks is now a transparent emerald, reflecting the tints of topaz and amethyst; again a liquid diamond, changing its hue according to the shifting influences of rock and depth; or again a flashing diadem, glittering with the splendor of this divine effulgence. CAPRI[13] BY AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE The Island of Capri (in the dialect of the people Crapi), the ancient Capreae, is a huge limestone rock, a continuation of the mountain range which forms the southern boundary of the Bay of Naples. Legend says that it was once inhabited by a people called Teleboae, subject to a king called Telon. Augustus took possession of Capreae as part of the imperial domains, and repeatedly visited it. His stepson Tiberius (A.D. 27) established his permanent residence on the island, and spent the latter years of his life there, abandoning himself to the voluptuous excesses which gave him the name of Caprineus.... The first point usually visited in Capri is the Blue Grotto (Grotta Azzurra), which is entered from the sea by an arch under the wall of limestone cliff, only available when the sea is perfectly calm. Visitors have to lie flat down in the boat, which is carried in by the wave and is almost level with the top of the arch. Then they suddenly find themselves in a magical scene. The water is liquid sapphire, and the whole rocky vaulting of the cavern shimmers to its inmost recesses with a pale blue light of marvelous beauty. A man stands ready to plunge into the water when the boats from the steamers arrive, and to swim about; his body, in the water, then sparkles like a sea-god with phosphorescent silver; his head, out of the water, is black like that of a Moor. Nothing can exaggerate the beauty of the Blue Grotto, and perhaps the effect is rather enhanced than spoiled by the shouting of the boatmen, the rush of boats to the entrance, the confusion on leaving and reaching the steamers. That the Grotta Azzurra was known to the Romans is evinced by the existence of a subterranean passage, leading to it from the upper heights, and now blocked up; it was also well known in the seventeenth century, when it was described by Capraanica. There are other beautiful grottoes in the cliffs surrounding the island, the most remarkable being the natural tunnel called the Green Grotto (Grotta Verde), under the southern rocks, quite as splendid in color as the Grotta Azzurra itself--a passage through the rocks, into which the boat glides (through no hole, as in the case of the Grotta Azzurra) into water of the most exquisite emerald. The late afternoon is the best time for visiting this grotto. Occasionally a small steamer makes the round of the island, stopping at the different caverns. On landing at the Marina, a number of donkey women offer their services, and it will be well to accept them, for the ascent of about one mile, to the village of Capri is very hot and tiring. On the left we pass the Church of St. Costanzo, a very curious building with apse, cupola, stone pulpit, and several ancient marble pillars and other fragments taken from the palaces of Tiberius. The little town of Capri, overhung on one side by great purple rocks, occupies a terrace on the high ridge between the two rocky promontories of the island. Close above the piazza stands the many-domed ancient church, like a mosque, and so many of the houses--sometimes of dazzling whiteness, sometimes painted in gay colors--have their own little domes, that the appearance is quite that of an oriental village, which is enhanced by the palm-trees which flourish here and there. In the piazza is a tablet to Major Hamill, who is buried in the church. He fell under French bayonets, when the troops of Murat, landing at Orico, recaptured the island, which had been taken from the French two years and a half before (May, 1806) by Sir Sidney Smith. Through a low wide arch in the piazza is the approach to the principal hotels. There is a tiny English chapel. An ascent of half an hour by stony donkey-paths leads from Capri to the ruins called the Villa Tiberiana, on the west of the island, above a precipitous rock 700 feet high, which still bears the name of Il Salto.... The visitor who lingers in Capri may interest himself in tracing out the remains of all the twelve villas of Tiberius. A relief exhibiting Tiberius riding a led donkey, as modern travelers do now, was found on the island, and is now in the museum at Naples. Capri has a delightful winter climate, and is most comfortable as a residence. The natives are quite unlike the Neapolitans, pleasant and civil in their manners, and full of courtesies to strangers. The women are frequently beautiful. POMPEII[14] BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY We have been to see Pompeii, and are waiting now for the return of spring weather, to visit, first, Paestum, and then the islands; after which we shall return to Rome. I was astonished at the remains of this city; I had no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining. My idea of the mode of its destruction was this: First, an earthquake shattered it, and unroofed almost all its temples, and split its columns; then a rain of light small pumice-stones fell; then torrents of boiling water, mixed with ashes, filled up all its crevices. A wide, flat hill, from which the city was excavated, is now covered by thick woods, and you see the tombs and the theaters, the temples and the houses, surrounded by the uninhabited wilderness. We entered the town from the side toward the sea, and first saw two theaters; one more magnificent than the other, strewn with the ruins of the white marble which formed their seats and cornices, wrought with deep, bold sculpture. In the front, between the stage and the seats, is the circular space, occasionally occupied by the chorus. The stage is very narrow, but long, and divided from this space by a narrow enclosure parallel to it, I suppose for the orchestra. On each side are the consuls' boxes, and below, in the theater at Herculaneum, were found two equestrian statues of admirable workmanship, occupying the same place as the great bronze lamps did at Drury Lane. The smallest of the theaters is said to have been comic, tho I should doubt. From both you see, as you sit on the seats, a prospect of the most wonderful beauty. You then pass through the ancient streets; they are very narrow, and the houses rather small, but all constructed on an admirable plan, especially for this climate. The rooms are built round a court, or sometimes two, according to the extent of the house. In the midst is a fountain, sometimes surrounded with a portico, supported on fluted columns of white stucco; the floor is paved with mosaic, sometimes wrought in imitation of vine leaves, sometimes in quaint figures, and more or less beautiful, according to the rank of the inhabitant. There were paintings on all, but most of them have been removed to decorate the royal museums. Little winged figures, and small ornaments of exquisite elegance, yet remain. There is an ideal life in the forms of these paintings of an incomparable loveliness, tho most are evidently the work of very inferior artists. It seems as if, from the atmosphere of mental beauty which surrounded them, every human being caught a splendor not his own. In one house you see how the bed-rooms were managed; a small sofa was built up, where the cushions were placed; two pictures, one representing Diana and Endymion, the other Venus and Mars, decorate the chamber; and a little niche, which contains the statue of a domestic god. The floor is composed of a rich mosaic of the rarest marbles, agate, jasper, and porphyry; it looks to the marble fountain and the snow-white columns, whose entablatures strew the floor of the portico they supported. The houses have only one story, and the apartments, tho not large, are very lofty. A great advantage results from this, wholly unknown in our cities. The public buildings, whose ruins are now forests, as it were, of white fluted columns, and which then supported entablatures, loaded with sculptures, were seen on all sides over the roofs of the houses. This was the excellence of the ancients. Their private expenses were comparatively moderate; the dwelling of one of the chief senators of Pompeii is elegant indeed, and adorned with most beautiful specimens of art, but small. But their public buildings are everywhere marked by the bold and grand designs of an unsparing magnificence. In the little town of Pompeii (it contained about twenty thousand inhabitants), it is wonderful to see the number and the grandeur of their public buildings. Another advantage, too, is that, in the present case, the glorious scenery around is not shut out, and that, unlike the inhabitants of the Cimmerian ravines of modern cities, the ancient Pompeiians could contemplate the clouds and the lamps of heaven; could see the moon rise high behind Vesuvius, and the sun set in the sea, tremulous with an atmosphere of golden vapor, between Inarime and Misenum. We next saw the temples. Of the temples of Aesculapius little remains but an altar of black stone, adorned with a cornice imitating the scales of a serpent. His statue, in terra-cotta, was found in the cell. The temple of Isis is more perfect. It is surrounded by a portico of fluted columns, and in the area around it are two altars, and many ceppi for statues; and a little chapel of white stucco, as hard as stone, of the most exquisite proportion; its panels are adorned with figures in bas-relief, slightly indicated, but of a workmanship the most delicate and perfect that can be conceived. They are Egyptian subjects, executed by a Greek artist, who has harmonized all the unnatural extravagances of the original conception into the supernatural loveliness of his country's genius. They scarcely touch the ground with their feet, and their wind-uplifted robes seem in the place of wings. The temple in the midst raised on a high platform, and approached by steps, was decorated with exquisite paintings, some of which we saw in the museum at Portici. It is small, of the same materials as the chapel, with a pavement of mosaic, and fluted Ionic columns of white stucco, so white that it dazzles you to look at it. Thence through the other porticos and labyrinths of walls and columns (for I can not hope to detail everything to you), we came to the Forum. This is a large square, surrounded by lofty porticos of fluted columns, some broken, some entire, their entablatures strewed under them. The temple of Jupiter, of Venus, and another temple, the Tribunal, and the Hall of Public Justice, with their forest of lofty columns, surround the Forum. Two pedestals or altars of an enormous size (for, whether they supported equestrian statues, or were the altars of the temple of Venus, before which they stand, the guide could not tell), occupy the lower end of the Forum. At the upper end, supported on an elevated platform, stands the temple of Jupiter. Under the colonnade of its portico we sat and pulled out our oranges, and figs, and bread, and medlars (sorry fare, you will say), and rested to eat. Here was a magnificent spectacle. Above and between the multitudinous shafts of the sun-shining columns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it, and supporting, as it were, on its line the dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, and tinged toward their summits with streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was one small green island. To the right was Capreae, Inarime, Prochyta, and Misenum. Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, whose foam-like column was sometimes darted into the clear dark sky, and fell in little streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius and the nearer mountains, as through a chasm, was seen the main line of the loftiest Apennines, to the east. The day was radiant and warm. Every now and then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air and light of day, which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen and tremendous sound. This sound was what the Greeks beheld (Pompeii, you know, was a Greek city). They lived in harmony with nature; and the interstices of their incomparable columns were portals, as it were, to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was Athens? What scene was exhibited from the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the temples of Hercules, and Theseus, and the Winds? The island and the Ægean sea, the mountains of Argolis, and the peaks of Pindus and Olympus, and the darkness of the Boeotian forests interspersed? From the Forum we went to another public place; a triangular portico, half enclosing the ruins of an enormous temple. It is built on the edge of the hill overlooking the sea. That black point is the temple. In the apex of the triangle stands an altar and a fountain, and before the altar once stood the statue of the builder of the portico. Returning hence, and following the consular road, we came to the eastern gate of the city. The walls are of an enormous strength, and enclose a space of three miles. On each side of the road beyond the gate are built the tombs. How unlike ours! They seem not so much hiding-places for that which must decay, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits. They are of marble, radiantly white; and two, especially beautiful, are loaded with exquisite bas-reliefs. On the stucco-wall that encloses them are little emblematic figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals, and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The high reliefs represent, one a nautical subject, and the other a Bacchanalian one. Within the cell stand the cinerary urns, sometimes one, sometimes more. It is said that paintings were found within, which are now, as has been everything movable in Pompeii, removed, and scattered about in royal museums. These tombs were the most impressive things of all. The wild woods surround them on either side; and along the broad stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver and rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind, as it were, like the step of ghosts. The radiance and magnificence of these dwellings of the dead, the white freshness of the scarcely-finished marble, the impassioned or imaginative life of the figures which adorn them, contrast strangely with the simplicity of the houses of those who were living when Vesuvius overwhelmed them. I have forgotten the amphitheater, which is of great magnitude, tho much inferior to the Coliseum. I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and, above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence, of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theaters were all open to the mountains and the sky. Their columns, the ideal types of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind; the odor and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly upaithric; and the flying clouds, the stars, or the deep sky, were seen above. VI OTHER ITALIAN SCENES VERONA[15] BY CHARLES DICKENS I had been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet. But, I was no sooner come into the old Market-place, than the misgiving vanished. It is so fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core of even this romantic town; scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful of stories. It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little inn. Noisy vetturini and muddy market-carts were disputing possession of the yard, which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a doorway, who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times. The orchard fell into other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but there used to be one attached to the house--or at all events there may have been--and the Hat (Cappello), the ancient cognizance of the family, may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard. The geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the way of the story, it must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter to have found the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the disused rooms. But the Hat was unspeakably comfortable; and the place where the garden used to be, hardly less so. Besides, the house is a distrustful, jealous-looking house as one would desire to see, tho of a very moderate size. So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my acknowledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at the geese. From Juliet's home, to Juliet's tomb, is a transition as natural to the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet that ever has taught the torches to burn bright in any time. So, I went off, with a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging to an old, old convent, I suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman who was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh plants and young flowers were prettily growing among fragments of old wall, and ivy-covered mounds; and was shown a little tank, or water-trough, which the bright-eyed woman--drying her arms upon her 'kerchief--called "La tomba di Giulietta la sfortunáta." With the best disposition in the world to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright-eyed woman believed; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary fee in ready money. It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that Juliet's resting-place was forgotten. However consolatory it may have been to Yorick's Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and, twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine. Pleasant Verona! With its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded galleries. With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred years ago. With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture, and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and Capulets once resounded. And made Verona's ancient citizens Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments, To wield old partisans. With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful! Pleasant Verona! In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Brá--a spirit of old time among the familiar realities of the passing hour--is the great Roman Amphitheater. So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is there, unbroken. Over certain of the arches, the old Roman numerals may yet be seen; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subterranean passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground and below, as when the fierce thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of the arena. Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one kind or other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the parapet. But little else is greatly changed. When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone up to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless. PADUA[16] BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER Padua is an ancient city and exhibits a rather respectable appearance against the horizon with its bell-turrets, its domes, and its old walls upon which myriads of lizards run and frisk in the sun. Situated near a center which attracts life to itself, Padua is a dead city with an almost deserted air. Its streets, bordered by two rows of low arcades, in nowise recall the elegant and charming architecture of Venice. The heavy, massive structures have a serious, somewhat crabbed aspect, and its somber porticos in the lower stories of the houses resemble black mouths which yawn with ennui. We were conducted to a big inn, established probably in some ancient palace, and whose great halls, dishonored by vulgar uses, had formerly seen better company. It was a real journey to go from the vestibule to our room by a host of stairways and corridors; a map of Ariadne's thread would have been needed to find one's way back. Our windows opened upon a very pleasant view; a river flows at the foot of the wall--the Brenta or the Bacchiglione, I know not which, for both water Padua. The banks of this watercourse were adorned with old houses and long walls, and trees, too, overhung the banks; some rather picturesque rows of piles, from which the fishermen cast their lines with that patience characteristic of them in all countries; huts with nets and linen hanging from the windows to dry, formed under the sun's rays a very pretty subject for a water-color. After dinner we went to the Café Pedrocchi, celebrated throughout all Italy for its magnificence. Nothing could be more monumentally classic. There are nothing but pillars, columnets, ovolos, and palm leaves of the Percier and Fontain kind, the whole very fine and lavish of marble. What was most curious was some immense maps forming a tapestry and representing the different divisions of the world on an enormous scale. This somewhat pedantic decoration gives to the hall an academic air; and one is surprized not to see a chair in place of the bar, with a professor in his gown in place of a dispenser of lemonade. The University of Padua was formerly famous. In the thirteenth century eighteen thousand young men, a whole people of scholars, followed the lessons of the learned professors, among whom later Galileo figured, one of whose bones is preserved there as a relic, a relic of a martyr who suffered for the truth. The façade of the University is very beautiful; four Doric columns give it a severe and monumental air; but solitude reigns in the class-rooms where to-day scarcely a thousand students can be reckoned.... We paid a visit to the Cathedral dedicated to Saint Anthony, who enjoys at Padua the same reputation as Saint Januarius at Naples. He is the "genius loci," the Saint venerated above all others. He used to perform not less than thirty miracles each day, if Casanova[17] is to be believed. Such a performance fairly earned for him his surname of Thaumaturge, but this prodigious zeal has fallen off greatly. Nevertheless, the reputation of the saint has not suffered, and so many masses are paid for at his altar that the number of the priests of the cathedral and of days in the year are not sufficient. To liquidate the accounts, the Pope has granted permission, at the end of the year, for masses to be said, each, one of which is of the value of a thousand; in this fashion Saint Anthony is saved from being bankrupt to his faithful devotees. On the place which adjoins the cathedral, a beautiful equestrian statue by Donatello, in bronze, rises to view, the first which had been cast since the days of antiquity, representing a leader of banditti: Gattamelata, a brigand who surely did not deserve that honor. But the artist has given him a superb bearing and a spirited figure with his baton of a Roman emperor, and it is entirely sufficient.... One thing which must not be neglected in passing through Padua is a visit to the old Church of the Arena, situated at the rear of a garden of luxuriant vegetation, where it would certainly not be conjectured to be located unless one were advised of the fact. It is entirely painted in its interior by Giotto. Not a single column, not a single rib, nor architectural division interrupts that vast tapestry of frescoes. The general aspect is soft, azure, starry, like a beautiful, calm sky; ultramarine dominates; thirty compartments of large dimensions, indicated by simple lines, contain the life of the Virgin and of her Divine Son in all their details; they might be called illustrations in miniature of a gigantic missal. The personages, by naïve anachronisms very precious for history, are clothed in the mode of the times in which Giotto painted. Below these compositions of the purest religious feeling, a painted plinth shows the seven deadly sins symbolized in an ingenious manner, and other allegorical figures of a very good style; a Paradise and a Hell, subjects which greatly imprest the minds of the artists of that epoch, complete this marvelous whole. There are in these paintings weird and touching details; children issue from their little coffins to mount to Paradise with a joyous ardor, and launch themselves forth to go to play upon the blossoming turf of the celestial garden; others stretch forth their hands to their half-resurrected mothers. The remark may also be made that all the devils and vices are obese, while the angels and virtues are thin and slender. The painter wishes to mark the preponderance of matter in the one class and of spirit in the other. FERRARA[18] BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER Ferrara rises solitary in the midst of a flat country more rich than picturesque. When one enters it by the broad street which leads to the square, the aspect of the city is imposing and monumental. A palace with a grand staircase occupies a corner of this vast square; it might be a court-house or a town hall, for people of all classes were entering and departing through its wide doors.... The castle of the ancient dukes of Ferrara, which is to be found a little farther on, has a fine feudal aspect. It is a vast collection of towers joined together by high walls crowned with a battlement forming a cornice, and which emerge from a great moat full of water, over which one enters by a protected bridge. The castle, built wholly of brick or of stones reddened by the sun, has a vermilion tint which deprives it of its imposing effect. It is too much like a decoration of a melodrama. It was in this castle that the famous Lucretia Borgia lived, whom Victor Hugo has made such a monster for us, and whom Ariosto depicts as a model of chastity, grace and virtue; that blonde Lucretia who wrote letters breathing the purest love, and some of whose hair, fine as silk and shining as gold, Byron possest. It was there that the dramas of Tasso and Ariosto and Guarini were played; there that those brilliant orgies took place, mingled with poisonings and assassinations, which characterized that learned and artistic, refined and criminal, period of Italy. It is the custom to pay a pious visit to the problematical dungeon in which Tasso, mad with love and grief, passed so many years, according to the poetic legend which grew up concerning his misfortune. We did not have time to spare and we regretted it very little. This dungeon, a perfectly correct sketch of which we have before our eyes, consists only of four walls, ceiled by a low arch. At the back is to be seen a window grated by heavy bars and a door with big bolts. It is quite unlikely that in this obscure hole, tapestried with cobwebs, Tasso could have worked and retouched his poem, composed sonnets, and occupied himself with small details of toilet, such as the quality of the velvet of his cap and the silk of his stockings, and with kitchen details, such as with what kind of sugar he ought to powder his salad, that which he had not being fine enough for his liking. Neither did we see the house of Ariosto, another required pilgrimage. Not to speak of the little faith which one should place in these unauthenticated traditions, in these relics without character, we prefer to seek Ariosto in the "Orlando Furioso," and Tasso in the "Jerusalem Délivrée" or in the fine drama of Goethe. The life of Ferrara is concentrated on the Plaza Nuova, in front of the church and in the neighborhood of the castle. Life has not yet abandoned this heart of the city; but in proportion as one moves away from it, it becomes more feeble, paralysis begins, death gains; silence, solitude, and grass invade the streets; one feels that one is wandering about a Thebes peopled with ghosts of the past and from which the living have evaporated like water which has dried up. There is nothing more sad than to see the corpse of a dead city slowly falling into dust in the sun and rain. One at least buries human bodies. LAKE LUGANO[19] BY VICTOR TISSOT On emerging from the second tunnel,[20] beyond a wild and narrow gorge, there lies suddenly before us, as in a gorgeous fairyland or in the landscape of a dream, the blue expanse of Lake Lugano, with its setting of green meadows and purple mountains, with the many-colored village spires, and the great white fronts of the hotels and villas. Oh, what a wonderful picture! We feel as if we were going down into an enchanted garden that has been hidden by the great snowy walls of the Alps. The air is full of the perfume of roses and jessamine. The hedges are in flower, butterflies are dancing, insects are humming, birds are singing. Up above, in the mountain, is snow, ice, winter, and silence; here there is sunshine, life, joy, love--all the living delights of spring and summer. Golden harvests are shining on the plains, and the lake in the distance is like a piece of the sky brought down to earth. Lugano is already Italy, not only because of the richness of the soil and the magnificence of the vegetation, but also as regards the language, the manners, and the picturesque costumes. In each valley the dress is different; in one place the women wear a short skirt, an apron held in by a girdle, and a bright colored bodice; in another they wear a cap above which is a large shady hat; in the Val Maroblio they have a woolen dress not very different from that of the Capuchins. The men have not the square figure, the slow, heavy walk of the people of Basle and Lucerne; they are brisk, vigorous, easy; and the women have something of the wavy suppleness of vine branches twining among the trees. These people have the happy, childlike joyousness, the frank good-nature, of those who live in the open air, who do not shut themselves up in their houses, but grow freely like the flowers under the strong, glowing sunshine. At every street corner sellers are sitting behind baskets of extraordinary vegetables and magnificent fruit; and under the arcades that run along the houses, big grocers in shirt sleeves come at intervals to their shop doors to take breath, like hippopotami coming out of the water for the same purpose. In this town, ultramontane in its piety, the bells of churches and convents are sounding all day long, and women are seen going to make their evening prayer together in the nearest chapel. But if the fair sex in Lugano are diligent in frequenting the churches, they by no means scorn the cafés. After sunset the little tables that are all over the great square are surrounded by an entire population of men and women. How gay and amusing those Italian cafés are! full of sound and color, with their red and blue striped awnings, their advance guard of little tables under the shade of the orange-trees, and their babbling, stirring, gesticulating company. The waiters, in black vests and leather slippers, a corner of their apron tucked up in their belt, run with the speed of kangaroos, carrying on metal plates syrups of every shade, ices, sweets in red, yellow, or green pyramids. Between seven and nine o'clock the whole society of Lugano defiles before you. There are lawyers with their wives, doctors with their daughters, bankers, professors, merchants, public officials, with whom are sometimes misted stout, comfortable, jovial-looking canons, wrapping themselves in the bitter smoke of a regalia, as in a cloud of incense. LAKE COMO[21] BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY We have been to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I can not name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and altho they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves--and vineyards. This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where they are divided can hardly be discovered. But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana; so called from a fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the younger Pliny, which is in the courtyard. This house, which was once a magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavoring to procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cypress-trees, of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill-furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful. BELLAGIO ON LAKE COMO[22] BY W. D. M'CRACKEN The picture of the promontory of Bellagio is so beautiful as a whole that the traveler had better stand off for awhile to admire it at a distance and at his leisure. Indeed it is a question whether the lasting impressions which we treasure of Bellagio are not, after all, those derived from across the lake, from the shore-fronts of Tremezzo, Cadenabbia, Menaggio, or Varenna. A colossal, conquering geological lion appears to have come up from the south in times immemorial, bound for the north, and finding further progress stopt by the great sheet of water in front of him, seems to have halted and to be now crouching there with his noble head between his paws and his eyes fixt on the snow-covered Alps. The big white house on the lion's neck is the Villa Serbelloni, now used as the annex of a hotel, and the park of noble trees belonging to the villa forms the lion's mane. Hotels, both large and small, line the quay at the water's edge; then comes a break in the houses, and stately Villa Melzi is seen to stand off at one side. Villa Trotti gleams from among its bowers farther south; on the slope Villa Trivulzio, formerly Poldi, shows bravely, and Villa Giulia has cut for itself a wide prospect over both arms of the lake. At the back of this lion couchant, in the middle ground, sheer mountain walls tower protectingly, culminating in Monte Grigna. The picture varies from hour to hour, from day to day, and from season to season. Its color-scheme changes with wind and sun, its sparkle comes and goes from sunrise to sunset; only its form remains untouched through the night and lives to delight us another day. As the evening wears on, lights appear one by one on the quay of Bellagio, until there is a line of fire along the base of the dark peninsula. The hotel windows catch the glare, the villas light their storied corridors, and presently Bellagio, all aglow, presents the spectacle of a Venetian night mirrored in the lake. By this time the mountains have turned black and the sky has faded. It grows so still on the water that the tinkle of a little Italian band reaches across the lake to Cadenabbia, a laugh rings out into the quiet air from one of the merry little rowboats, and even the slight clatter made by the fishermen, in putting their boats to rights for the night and in carrying their nets indoors, can be distinguished as one of many indications that the day is done. When we land at Bellagio by daylight, we find it to be very much of a bazaar of souvenirs along the water-front, and everybody determined to carry away a keepsake. There is so much to buy--ornamental olive wood and tortoise-shell articles, Como blankets, lace, and what may be described in general terms as modern antiquities. These abound from shop to shop; even English groceries are available. Bellagio's principal street is suddenly converted at its northern end into a delightful arcade, after the arrangement which constitutes a characteristic charm of the villages and smaller towns on the Italian lakes; moreover, the vista up its side street is distinctly original. This mounts steeply from the waterside, like the streets of Algiers, is narrow and constructed in long steps to break the incline. THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO[23] BY JOSEPH ADDISON The town and republic of St. Marino stands on the top of a very high and craggy mountain. It is generally hid among the clouds, and lay under snow when I saw it, though it was clear and warm weather in all the country about it. There is not a spring or fountain, that I could hear of, in the whole dominions; but they are always well provided with huge cisterns and reservoirs of rain and snow water. The wine that grows on the sides of their mountain is extraordinarily good, much better than any I met with on the cold side of the Apennines. This mountain, and a few neighboring hillocks that lie scattered about the bottom of it, is the whole circuit of these dominions. They have what they call three castles, three convents, and five churches and can reckon about five thousand souls in their community.[24] The inhabitants, as well as the historians who mention this little republic, give the following account of its origin. St. Marino was its founder, a Dalmatian by birth, and by trade a mason. He was employed above thirteen hundred years ago in the reparation of Rimini, and after he had finished his work, retired to this solitary mountain, as finding it very proper for the life of a hermit, which he led in the greatest rigors and austerities of religion. He had not been long here before he wrought a reputed miracle, which, joined with his extraordinary sanctity, gained him so great an esteem, that the princess of the country made him a present of the mountain, to dispose of at his own discretion. His reputation quickly peopled it, and gave rise to the republic which calls itself after his name. So that the commonwealth of Marino may boast, at least, of a nobler original than that of Rome, the one having been at first an asylum for robbers and murderers, and the other a resort of persons eminent for their piety and devotion. The best of their churches is dedicated to the saint, and holds his ashes. His statue stands over the high altar, with the figure of a mountain in its hands, crowned with three castles, which is likewise the arms of the commonwealth. They attribute to his protection the long duration of their state, and look on him as the greatest saint next the blessed virgin. I saw in their statute-book a law against such as speak disrespectfully of him, who are to be punished in the same manner as those convicted of blasphemy. This petty republic has now lasted thirteen hundred years,[25] while all the other states of Italy have several times changed their masters and forms of government. Their whole history is comprised in two purchases, which they made of a neighboring prince, and in a war in which they assisted the pope against a lord of Rimini. In the year 1100 they bought a castle in the neighborhood, as they did another in the year 1170. The papers of the conditions are preserved in their archives, where it is very remarkable that the name of the agent for the commonwealth, of the seller, of the notary, and the witnesses, are the same in both the instruments, tho drawn up at seventy years' distance from each other. Nor can it be any mistake in the date, because the popes' and emperors' names, with the year of their respective reigns, are both punctually set down. About two hundred and ninety years after this they assisted Pope Pius the Second against one of the Malatestas, who was then, lord of Rimini; and when they had helped to conquer him, received from the pope, as a reward for their assistance, four little castles. This they represent as the flourishing time of the commonwealth, when their dominions reached half-way up a neighboring hill; but at present they are reduced to their old extent.... The chief officers of the commonwealth are the two capitaneos, who have such a power as the old Roman consuls had, but are chosen every six months. I talked with some that had been capitaneos six or seven times, tho the office is never to be continued to the same persons twice successively. The third officer is the commissary, who judges in all civil and criminal matters. But because the many alliances, friendships, and intermarriages, as well as the personal feuds and animosities, that happen among so small a people might obstruct the course of justice, if one of their own number had the distribution of it, they have always a foreigner for this employ, whom they choose for three years, and maintain out of the public stock. He must be a doctor of law, and a man of known integrity. He is joined in commission with the capitaneos, and acts something like the recorder of London under the lord mayor. The commonwealth of Genoa was forced to make use of a foreign judge for many years, while their republic was torn into the divisions of Guelphs and Ghibelines. The fourth man in the state is the physician, who must likewise be a stranger, and is maintained by a public salary. He is obliged to keep a horse, to visit the sick, and to inspect all drugs that are imported. He must be at least thirty-five years old, a doctor of the faculty, and eminent for his religion and honesty, that his rashness or ignorance may not unpeople the commonwealth. And, that they may not suffer long under any bad choice, he is elected only for three years. The people are esteemed very honest and rigorous in the execution of justice, and seem to live more happy and contented among their rocks and snows, than others of the Italians do in the pleasantest valleys of the world. Nothing, indeed, can be a greater instance of the natural love that mankind has for liberty, and of their aversion to an arbitrary government, than such a savage mountain covered with people, and the Campania of Rome, which lies in the same country, almost destitute of inhabitants. PERUGIA[26] BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----[27] for my companion, kept on even to the city gate, a distance, I should think, of two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation, shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only Italy. Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains, and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil can give an idea of the scene.... We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened, out upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely, shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people, one of whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which we entered last night. The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the streets rapidly run downward on either side. J---- and I followed one of these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this ancient civilization stands. On the right of the gate there was a rude country path, partly overgrown with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the gray city wall, at the base of which the tract kept onward. We followed it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might reenter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower. SIENA[28] BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD That admirers of minute designs and florid detail could appreciate grandeur as well, no one can doubt who has seen the plans of the Sienese cathedral. Its history is one of a grand result, and of far grander, tho thwarted endeavor, and it is hard to realize to-day, that the church as it stands is but a fragment, the transept only, of what Siena willed. From the state of the existing works no one can doubt that the brave little republic would have finished it had she not met an enemy before whom the sword of Monteaperto was useless. The plague of 1348 stalked across Tuscany, and the chill of thirty thousand Sienese graves numbed the hand of master and workman, sweeping away the architect who planned, the masons who built, the magistrates who ordered, it left but the yellowed parchment in the archives which conferred upon Maestro Lorenzo Maitani the superintendence of the works. The façade of the present church is amazing in its richness, undoubtedly possesses some grand and much lovely detail, and is as undoubtedly suggestive, with its white marble ornaments upon a pink marble ground, of a huge, sugared cake. It is impossible to look at this restored whiteness with the sun upon it; the dazzled eyes close involuntarily and one sees in retrospect the great, gray church front at Rheims, or the solemn façade of Notre Dame de Paris. It is like remembering an organ burst of Handel after hearing the florid roulades of the mass within the cathedral. The interior is rich in color and fine in effect, but the northerner is painfully imprest by the black and white horizontal stripes which, running from vaulting to pavement, seem to blur and confuse the vision, and the closely set bars of the piers are positively irritating. In the hexagonal lantern, however, they are less offensive than elsewhere, because the fan-like radiation of the bars above the great gilded statues breaks up the horizontal effect. The decoration of the stone-work is not happy; the use of cold red and cold blue with gilt bosses in relief does much to vulgarize, and there is constant sally in small masses which belittles the general effect. It is evident that the Sienese tendency to floridity is answerable for much of this, and that having added some piece of big and bad decoration, the cornice of papal head, for instance, they felt forced to do away with it or continue it throughout. But this fault and many others are forgotten when we examine the detail with which later men have filled the church. Other Italian cathedrals possess art-objects of a higher order; perhaps no other one is so rich in these treasures. The great masters are disappointing here. Raphael, as the co-laborer of Pinturicchio, is dainty, rather than great, and Michelangelo passes unnoticed in the huge and coldly elaborate altar-front of the Piccolomini. But Marrina, with his doors of the library; Barili, with his marvelous casing of the choir-stalls; Beccafumi, with his bronze and neillo--these are the artists whom one wonders at; these wood-carvers and bronze-founders, creators of the microcosmic detail of the Renaissance which had at last burst triumphantly into Siena. This treasure is cumulative, as we walk eastward from the main door, where the pillars are a maze of scroll-work in deepest cutting, and by the time we reach the choir the head fairly swims with the play of light and color. We wander from point to point, we finger and caress the lustrous stalls of Barili, and turn with a kind of confusion of vision from panel to panel; above our heads the tabernacle of Vecchietta, the lamp bearing angels of Beccafumi make spots of bituminous color, with glittering high-lights, strangely emphasizing their modeling; from these youths, who might be pages to some Roman prefect, the eye travels upward still further, along the golden convolutions of the heavily stuccoed pilasters to the huge, gilded cherubs' heads that frame the eastern rose.... It is incredible that these frescoes are four hundred years old. Surely Pinturicchio came down from his scaffolding but yesterday. This is how the hardly dried plaster must have looked to pope and cardinal and princes when the boards were removed, and when the very figures on these walls--smart youths in tights and slashes, bright-robed scholars, ecclesiastics caped in ermine, ladies with long braids bound in nets of silk--crowded to see themselves embalmed in tempera for curious after-centuries to gaze upon. THE ASSISSI OF ST. FRANCIS[29] BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE On the summit of an abrupt height, over a double row of arcades, appears the monastery; at its base a torrent plows the soil, winding off in the distance between banks of boulders; beyond is the old town prolonging itself on the ridge of the mountain. We ascend slowly under the burning sun, and suddenly, at the end of a court surrounded by slender columns, enter within the obscurity of the cathedral. It is unequalled; before having seen it one has no idea of the art and the genius of the Middle Ages. Append to it Dante and the "Fioretti" of St. Francis, and it becomes the masterpiece of mystic Christianity. There are three churches, one above the other, all of them arranged around the tomb of St. Francis. Over this venerated body, which the people regard as ever living and absorbed in prayer at the bottom of an inaccessible cave, the edifice has arisen and gloriously flowered like an architectural shrine. The lowest is a crypt, dark as a sepulcher, into which the visitors descend with torches; pilgrims keep close to the dripping walls and grope along in order to reach the grating. Here is the tomb, in a pale, dim light, similar to that of limbo. A few brass lamps, almost without lights, burn here eternally like stars lost in mournful obscurity. The ascending smoke clings to the arches, and the heavy odor of the tapers mingles with that of the cave. The guide trims his torch; and the sudden flash in this horrible darkness, above the bones of a corpse, is like one of Dante's visions. Here is the mystic grave of a saint who, in the midst of corruption and worms, beholds his slimy dungeon of earth filled with the supernatural radiance of the Savior. But that which can not be represented by words is the middle church, a long, low spiracle supported by small, round arches curving in the half-shadow, and whose voluntary depression makes one instinctively bend his knees. A coating of somber blue and of reddish bands starred with gold, a marvelous embroidery of ornaments, wreaths, delicate scroll-work, leaves, and painted figures, covers the arches and ceilings with its harmonious multitude; the eye is overwhelmed by it; a population of forms and tints lives on its vaults; I would not exchange this cavern for all the churches of Rome! On the summit, the upper church shoots up as brilliant, as aerial, as triumphant, as this is low and grave. Really, if one were to give way to conjecture, he might suppose that in these three sanctuaries the architect meant to represent the three worlds; below, the gloom of death and the horrors of the infernal tomb; in the middle, the impassioned anxiety of the beseeching Christian who strives and hopes in this world of trial; aloft, the bliss and dazzling glory of Paradise. RAVENNA[30] BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN With exceptions, all the monuments of Ravenna belong to the days of transition from Roman to Medieval times, and the greater part of them come within the fifth and sixth centuries. It was then that Ravenna became, for a season, the head of Italy and of the Western world. The sea had made Ravenna a great haven: the falling back of the sea made her the ruling city of the earth. Augustus had called into being the port of Caesarea as the Peiraieus of the Old Thessalian or Umbrian Ravenna. Haven and city grew and became one; but the faithless element again fell back; the haven of Augustus became dry land covered by orchards, and Classis arose as the third station, leaving Ravenna itself an inland city. Again has the sea fallen back; Caesarea has utterly perished; Classis survives only in one venerable church; the famous pine forest has grown up between the third haven and the now distant Hadriatic. Out of all this grew the momentary greatness of Ravenna. The city, girded with the three fold zone of marshes, causeways, and strong walls, became the impregnable shelter of the later Emperors; and the earliest Teutonic Kings naturally fixt their royal seat in the city of their Imperial predecessors. When this immediate need had passed away, the city naturally fell into insignificance, and it plays hardly any part in the history of Medieval Italy. Hence it is that the city is crowded with the monuments of an age which has left hardly any monuments elsewhere. In Britain, indeed, if Dr. Merivale be right in the date which he gives to the great Northern wall, we have a wonderful relic of those times; but it is the work, not of the architect, but of the military engineers. In other parts of Europe also works of this date are found here and there; but nowhere save at Ravenna is there a whole city, so to speak, made up of them. Nowhere but at Ravenna can we find, thickly scattered around us, the churches, the tombs, perhaps the palaces, of the last Roman and the first Teutonic rulers of Italy. In the Old and in the New Rome, and in Milan also, works of the same date exist; but either they do not form the chief objects of the city, or they have lost their character and position through later changes. If Ravenna boasts of the tombs of Honorius and Theodoric, Milan boasts also, truly or falsely, of the tombs of Stilicho and Athaulf. But at Milan we have to seek for the so-called tomb of Athaulf in a side-chapel of a church which has lost all ancient character, and the so-called tomb of Stilicho, tho placed in the most venerable church of the city, stands in a strange position as the support of a pulpit. At Ravenna, on the other hand, the mighty mausoleum of Theodoric, and the chapel which contains the tombs of Galla Placidia, her brother, and her second husband, are among the best known and best preserved monuments of the city. Ravenna, in the days of its Exarchs, could never have dared to set up its own St. Vital as a rival to Imperial St. Sophia. But at St. Sophia, changed into the temple of another faith, the most characteristic ornaments have been hidden or torn away, while at St. Vital Hebrew patriarchs and Christian saints, and the Imperial forms of Justinian and his strangely-chosen Empress, still look down, as they did thirteen hundred years back, upon the altars of Christian worship. Ravenna, in short, seems, as it were, to have been preserved all but untouched to keep up the memory of the days which were alike Roman, Christian, and Imperial. BENEDICTINE SUBIACO[31] BY AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE One of the excellent mountain roads constructed by Pius IX. leads through a wild district from Olevano to Subiaco. A few miles before reaching Subiaco we skirt a lake, probably one of the Simbrivii Lacus which Nero is believed to have made by damming up the Anio. Here he fished for trout with a golden net, and here he built the mountain villa which he called Sublaqueum--a name which still exists in Subiaco. Four centuries after the valley had witnessed the orgies of Nero, a young patrician of the family of the Anicii-Benedictus, or "the blessed one," being only fourteen at the time, fled from the seductions of the capital to the rocks of Mentorella, but, being followed thither, sought a more complete solitude in a cave above the falls of the Anio. Here he lived unknown to any except the hermit Romanus, who daily let down food to him, half of his own loaf, by a cord from the top of the cliff. At length the hiding-place was revealed to the village priest in a vision, and pilgrims flocked from all quarters to the valley. Through the disciples who gathered around Benedict, this desolate ravine became the cradle of monastic life in the West, and twelve monasteries rose amid its peaks under the Benedictine rule.... Nothing can exceed the solemn grandeur of the situation of the convent dedicated to St. Scholastica, the sainted sister of St. Benedict, which was founded in the fifth century, and which, till quite lately, included as many as sixteen towns and villages among its possessions. The scenery becomes more romantic and savage at every step as we ascend the winding path after leaving St. Scholastica, till a small gate admits us to the famous immemorial Ilex Grove of St. Benedict, which is said to date from the fifth century, and which has never been profaned by ax or hatchet. Beyond it the path narrows, and a steep winding stair, just wide enough to admit one person at a time, leads to the platform before the second convent, which up to that moment is entirely concealed. Its name, Sacro Speco, commemorates the holy cave of St. Benedict. At the portal, the thrilling interest of the place is suggested by the inscription--"Here is the patriarchal cradle of the monks of the West Order of St. Benedict." The entrance corridor, built on arches over the abyss, has frescoes of four sainted popes, and ends in an ante-chamber with beautiful Umbrian frescoes, and a painted statue of St. Benedict. Here we enter the all-glorious church of 1116, completely covered with ancient frescoes. A number of smaller chapels, hewn out of the rock, are dedicated to the sainted followers of the founder. Some of the paintings are by the rare Umbrian master Concioli. A staircase in front of the high altar leads to the lower church. At the foot of the first flight of steps, above the charter of 1213, setting forth all its privileges, is the frescoed figure of Innocent III., who first raised Subiaco into an abbacy; in the same fresco is represented Abbot John of Tagliacozzo, under whom (1217-1277) many of the paintings were executed. On the second landing, the figure of Benedict faces us on a window with his finger on his lips, imposing silence. On the left is the coro, on the right the cave where Benedict is said to have passed three years in darkness. A statue by Raggi commemorates his presence here; a basket is a memorial of that lowered with his food by St. Romanus; an ancient bell is shown as that which rang to announce its approach. As we descend the Scala Santa trodden by the feet of Benedict, and ascended by the monks upon their knees, the solemn beauty of the place increases at every step. On the right is a powerful fresco of Death mowing down the young and sparing the old; on the left, the Preacher shows the young and thoughtless the three states to which the body is reduced after death. Lastly, we reach the Holy of Holies, the second cave, in which Benedict laid down the rule of his order, making its basis the twelve degrees of humility. Here also an inscription enumerates the wonderful series of saints, who, issuing from Subiaco, founded the Benedictine Order throughout the world. ETRUSCAN VOLTERRA[32] BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT For several miles before reaching Volterra, our attention was fixt by the extraordinary aspect of the country through which we were passing. The road gradually ascended, and we found ourselves among deep ravines and steep, high, broken banks, principally of clay, barren, and in most places wholly bare of herbage, a scene of complete desolation, were it not for a cottage here and there perched upon the heights, a few sheep attended by a boy and a dog grazing on the brink of one of the precipices, or a solitary patch of bright green wheat in some spot where the rains had not yet carried away the vegetable mold. In the midst of this desolate tract, which is, however, here and there interspersed with fertile spots, rises the mountain on which Volterra is situated, where the inhabitants breathe a pure and keen atmosphere, almost perpetually cool, and only die of pleurisies and apoplexies; while below, on the banks of the Cecina, which in full sight winds its way to the sea, they die of fevers. One of the ravines of which I have spoken--the "balza," they call it at Volterra--has plowed a deep chasm on the north side of this mountain, and is every year rapidly approaching the city on its summit. I stood on its edge and looked down a bank of soft, red earth five hundred feet in height. A few rods in front of me I saw where a road had crossed the spot in which the gulf now yawned; the tracks of the last year's carriages were seen reaching to the edge on both sides. The ruins of a convent were close at hand, the inmates of which, two or three years since, had been removed by the Government to the town for safety.... The antiquities of Volterra consist of an Etruscan burial-ground, in which the tombs still remain, pieces of the old and incredibly massive Etruscan wall, including a far larger circuit than the present city, two Etruscan gates of immemorial antiquity, older, doubtless, than any thing at Rome, built of enormous stones, one of them serving even yet as an entrance to the town, and a multitude of cinerary vessels, mostly of alabaster, sculptured with numerous figures in "alto relievo." These figures are sometimes allegorical representations, and sometimes embody the fables of the Greek mythology. Among them are many in the most perfect style of Grecian art, the subjects of which are taken from the poems of Homer; groups representing the besiegers of Troy and its defenders, or Ulysses with his companions and his ships. I gazed with exceeding delight on these works of forgotten artists, who had the verses of Homer by heart--works just drawn from the tombs where they had been buried for thousands of years, and looking as if fresh from the chisel. THE PAESTUM OF THE GREEKS[33] BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN Few buildings are more familiar than the temples of Paestum; yet the moment when the traveler first comes in sight of works of untouched Hellenic skill is one which is simply overwhelming. Suddenly, by the side of a dreary road, in a spot backed indeed by noble mountains, but having no charm of its own, we come on these works, unrivaled on our side of the Hadriatic and the Messenian strait, standing in all their solitary grandeur, shattered indeed, but far more perfect than the mass of ruined buildings of later days. The feeling of being brought near to Hellenic days and Hellenic men, of standing face to face with the fathers of the world's civilization, is one which can never pass away. Descriptions, pictures, models, all fail; they give us the outward form; they can not give us the true life. The thought comes upon us that we have passed away from that Roman world out of which our own world has sprung into that earlier and fresher and brighter world by which Rome and ourselves have been so deeply influenced, but out of which neither the Roman nor the modern world can be said to spring. There is the true Doric in its earliest form, in all its unmixed and simple majesty. The ground is strewed with shells and covered with acanthus-leaves; but no shell had suggested the Ionic volute, no acanthus-leaf had suggested the Corinthian foliage. The vast columns, with the sudden tapering, the overhanging capitals, the stern, square abacus, all betoken the infancy of art. But it is an infancy like that of their own Hêraklês; the strength which clutched the serpent in his cradle is there in every stone. Later improvements, the improvements of Attic skill, may have added grace; the perfection of art may be found in the city which the vote of the divine Assembly decreed to Athênê; but for the sense of power, of simplicity without rudeness, the city of Poseidon holds her own. Unlike in every detail, there is in these wonderful works of early Greek art a spirit akin to some of the great churches of Romanesque date, simple, massive, unadorned, like the Poseidônian Doric. And they show, too, how far the ancient architects were from any slavish bondage to those minute rules which moderns have invented for them. In each of the three temples of Paestum differences both of detail and of arrangement may be marked, differences partly of age, but also partly of taste. And some other thoughts are brought forcibly upon the mind. Here indeed we feel that the wonders of Hellenic architecture are things to kindle our admiration, even our reverence; but that, as the expression of a state of things which has wholly passed away, nothing can be less fit for reproduction in modern times. And again, we may be sure that the admiration and reverence which they may awaken in the mind of the mere classical purist is cold beside that which they kindle in the mind which can give them their true place in the history of art. The temples of Paestum are great and noble from any point of view. But they become greater and nobler as we run over the successive steps in the long series by which their massive columns and entablatures grew into the tall clusters and soaring arches of Westminster and Amiens. VII SICILIAN SCENES PALERMO[34] BY WILL S. MONROE While not one of the original Hellenic city-states, Palermo has a superb location on the northern shores of the central island of the central sea; its harbor is guarded by the two picturesque cliffs and the fertile plain that forms the "compagne" is hemmed in by a semicircular cord of rugged mountains. "Perhaps there are few spots upon the surface of the globe more beautiful than Palermo," writes Arthur Symonds. "The hills on either hand descend upon the sea with long-drawn delicately broken outlines, so delicately tinted with aerial hues at early dawn or beneath the blue light of a full moon the panorama seems to be some fabric of fancy, that must fade away, 'like shapes of clouds we form,' to nothing. Within the cradle of these hills, and close upon the tideless water, lies the city. Behind and around on every side stretches the famous Conco d'Oro, or golden shell, a plain of marvelous fertility, so called because of its richness and also because of its shape; for it tapers to a fine point where the mountains meet, and spreads abroad, where they diverge, like a cornucopia. The whole of this long vega is a garden, thick with olive-groves and orange trees, with orchards of nespole and palms and almonds, with fig-trees and locust-trees, with judas-trees that blush in spring, and with flowers as multitudinously brilliant as the fretwork of sunset clouds." During the days of Phoenician and Carthagenian supremacy Palermo was a busy mart--a great clearing-house for the commerce of the island and that part of the Mediterranean. But during the days of the Saracens it became not only a very busy city but also a very beautiful city. The Arabian poets extolled its charms in terms that sound to us exceedingly extravagant. One of them wrote: "Oh how beautiful is the lakelet of the twin palms and the island where the spacious palace stands. The limpid waters of the double springs resemble liquid pearls, and their basin is a sea; you would say that the branches of the trees stretched down to see the fishes in the pool and smile at them. The great fishes in those clear waters, and the birds among the gardens tune their songs. The ripe oranges of the island are like fire that burns on boughs of emerald; the pale lemon reminds me of a lover who has passed the night in weeping for his absent darling. The two palms may be compared to lovers who have gained an inaccessible retreat against their enemies, or raise themselves erect in pride to confound the murmurs and the ill thoughts of jealous men. O palms of two lakelets of Palermo, ceaseless, undisturbed, and plenteous days for ever keep your freshness." With the coming of the Normans Palermo enjoyed even greater prosperity than had been experienced under the liberal rule of the Saracens. This was the most brilliant period in the history of the city. The population was even more mixed than during Moslem supremacy. Besides the Greeks, Normans, Saracens, and Hebrews, there were commercial colonies of Slavs, Venetians, Lombardians, Catalans, and Pisans. The most interesting public monuments at Palermo date from the Norman period; and while many of the buildings are strikingly Saracenic in character and recall similar structures erected by the Arabs in Spain, it will be remembered that the Normans brought no trained architects to the island, but employed the Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews who had already been in the service of the Saracen emirs. But the Arab influence in architecture was dominant, and it survived well into the fourteenth century. GIRGENTI[35] BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN The reported luxury of the Sikeliot cities in this age is, in the double-edged saying of Empedocles, connected with one of their noblest tastes. They built their houses as if they were going to live for ever. And if their houses, how much more their temples and other public buildings? In some of the Sikeliot cities, this was the most brilliant time of architectural splendor. At Syracuse indeed the greatest buildings which remain to tell their own story belong either to an earlier or to a later time. It is the theater alone, as in its first estate a probable work of the first Hierôn, which at all connects itself with our present time. But at Akragas[36] and at Selinous the greatest of the existing buildings belong to the days of republican freedom and independence. At Akragas what the tyrant began the democracy went on with. The series of temples that line the southern wall are due to an impulse which began under Thêrôn and went on to the days of the Carthaginian siege. Of the greatest among them, the temple of Olympian Zeus, this is literally true. There can be little doubt that it was begun as one of the thank-offerings after the victory of Himera, and it is certain that at the coming of Hannibal and Hamilkôn it was still so far imperfect that the roof was not yet added. It was therefore in building during a time of more than seventy years, years which take in the whole of the brilliant days of Akragantine freedom and well-being. To the same period also belong the other temples in the lower city, temples which abide above ground either standing or in ruins, while the older temples in the akropolis have to be looked for underneath buildings of later ages. It was a grand conception to line the southern wall, the wall most open to the attacks of mortal enemies, with this wonderful series of holy places of the divine protectors of the city. It was a conception due, we may believe, in the first instance, to Thêrôn, but which the democracy fully entered into and carried out. The two best preserved of the range stand to the east; one indeed occupies the southeastern corner of the fortified enclosure. Next in order to the west comes the temple which bears a name not unlikely, but altogether impossible and unmeaning, the so-called temple of Concord. No reasonable guess can be made at its pagan dedication; in the fifteenth century of our era it followed the far earlier precedent of the temples in the akropolis. It became the church of Saint Gregory, not of any of the great pontiffs and doctors of the Church, but of the local bishop whose full description as Saint Gregory of the Turnips can hardly be written without a smile. The peristyle was walled up, and arches were cut through the walls of the cella, exactly as in the great church of Syracuse. Saint Gregory of Girgenti plays no such part in the world's history as was played by the Panagia of Syracuse; we may therefore be more inclined to extend some mercy to the Bourbon king who set free the columns as we now see them. When he had gone so far, one might even wish that he had gone on to wall up the arches. In each of the former states of the building there was a solid wall somewhere to give shelter from the blasts which sweep round this exposed spot. As the building now stands, it is, after the Athenian house of Theseus and Saint George, the best preserved Greek temple in being. Like its fellow to the east, it is a building of moderate size, of the middle stage of Doric, with columns less massive than those of Syracuse and Corinth, less slender than those of Nemea. Again to the west stood a temple of greater size, nearly ranging in scale with the Athenian Parthenon, which is assigned, with far more of likelihood than the other names, to Hêraklês. Save one patched-up column standing amid the general ruin, it has, in the language of the prophet, become heaps. All that is left is a mass of huge stones, among which we can see the mighty columns, fallen, each in its place, overthrown, it is clear, by no hand of man but by those powers of the nether world whose sway is felt in every corner of Sicilian soil. These three temples form a continuous range along the eastern part of the southern wall of the city. To the west of them, parted from them by a gate, which, in Roman times at least, bore, as at Constantinople and Spalato, the name of Golden, rose the mightiest work of Akragantine splendor and devotion, the great Olympieion itself. Of this gigantic building, the vastest Greek temple in Europe, we happily have somewhat full descriptions from men who had looked at it, if not in the days of its full glory, yet at least when it was a house standing up, and not a ruin. As it now lies, a few fragments of wall still standing amid confused heaps of fallen stones, of broken columns and capitals, no building kindles a more earnest desire to see it as it stood in the days of its perfection. [Illustration: CITY AND BAY OF NAPLES WITH VESUVIUS IN THE DISTANCE Courtesy International Mercantile Marine Co.] [Illustration: TEMPLE OF THESEUS AT ATHENS] [Illustration: PALERMO, SICILY, FROM THE SEA Courtesy L. C. Page & Co.] [Illustration: GREEK THEATER AT SEGESTA, SICILY] [Illustration: TEMPLE OF CONCORD, GIRGENTI, SICILY] [Illustration: TEMPLE OF JUNO AT GIRGENTI, SICILY] [Illustration: AMPHITHEATER AT SYRACUSE, SICILY] [Illustration: GREEK TEMPLE AT SEGESTA, SICILY Courtesy L. C. Page & Co.] [Illustration: HARBOR OF SYRACUSE, SICILY Courtesy L. C. Page & Co.] [Illustration: THE SO-CALLED "SHIP OF ULYSSES" OFF CORFU Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] [Illustration: TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS AT ATHENS Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] [Illustration: THE PLAIN BELOW DELPHI Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] [Illustration: THE ROAD NEAR DELPHI Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE STADIUM AT OLYMPIA Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] [Illustration: THRONE OF MINOS IN CRETE (Minoan civilization in Crete antedates the Homeric age--perhaps by many centuries) Courtesy Houghton, Mifflin Co.] SEGESTE[37] BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE The temple of Segeste was never finished; the ground around it was never even leveled; the space only being smoothed on which the peristyle was to stand. For, in several places, the steps are from nine to ten feet in the ground, and there is no hill near, from which the stone or mold could have fallen. Besides, the stones lie in their natural position, and no ruins are found near them. The columns are all standing; two which had fallen, have very recently been raised again. How far the columns rested on a socle is hard to say; and without an engraving it is difficult to give an idea of their present state. At some points it would seem as if the pillars rested on the fourth step. In that case to enter the temple you would have to go down a step. In other places, however, the uppermost step is cut through, and then it looks as if the columns had rested on bases; and then again these spaces have been filled up, and so we have once more the first case. An architect is necessary to determine this point. The sides have twelve columns, not reckoning the corner ones; the back and front six, including them. The rollers on which the stones were moved along, still lie around you on the steps. They have been left in order to indicate that the temple was unfinished. But the strongest evidence of this fact is the floor. In some spots (along the sides) the pavement is laid down; in the middle, however, the red limestone rock still projects higher than the level of the floor as partially laid; the flooring, therefore, can not ever have been finished. There is also no trace of an inner temple. Still less can the temple have ever been overlaid with stucco; but that it was intended to do so, we may infer from the fact that the abaci of the capitals have projecting points probably for the purpose of holding the plaster. The whole is built of a limestone, very similar to the travertine; only it is now much fretted. The restoration which was carried on in 1781, has done much good to the building. The cutting of the stone, with which the parts have been reconnected, is simple, but beautiful. The site of the temple is singular; at the highest end of a broad and long valley, it stands on an isolated hill. Surrounded, however, on all sides by cliffs, it commands a very distant and extensive view of the land, but takes in only just a corner of the sea. The district reposes in a sort of melancholy fertility--every where well cultivated, but scarce a dwelling to be seen. Flowering thistles were swarming with countless butterflies, wild fennel stood here from eight to nine feet high, dry and withered of the last year's growth, but so rich and in such seeming order that one might almost take it to be an old nursery-ground. A shrill wind whistled through the columns as if through a wood, and screaming birds of prey hovered around the pediments. TAORMINA[38] BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE When you have ascended to the top of the wall of rocks [at Taormina], which rise precipitously at no great distance from the sea, you find two peaks, connected by a semicircle. Whatever shape this may have had originally from Nature has been helped by the hand of man, which has formed out of it an amphitheater for spectators. Walls and other buildings have furnished the necessary passages and rooms. Right across, at the foot of the semicircular range of seats, the scene was built, and by this means the two rocks were joined together, and a most enormous work of nature and art combined. Now, sitting down at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did any audience, in any theater, have before it such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air--farther on the city lies below you; and altho its buildings are all of modern date, still similar ones, no doubt, stood of old on the same site. After this the eye falls on the whole of the long ridge of Ætna, then on the left it catches a view of the sea-shore, as far as Catania, and even Syracuse, and then the wide and extensive view is closed by the immense smoking volcano, but not horribly, for the atmosphere, with its softening effect, makes it look more distinct, and milder than it really is. If now you turn from this view toward the passage running at the back of the spectators, you have on the left the whole wall of the rocks between which and the sea runs the road to Messina. And then again you behold vast groups of rocky ridges in the sea itself, with the coast of Calabria in the far distance, which only a fixt and attentive gaze can distinguish from the clouds which rise rapidly from it. We descended toward the theater, and tarried awhile among its ruins, on which an accomplished architect would do well to employ, at least on paper, his talent of restoration. After this I attempted to make a way for myself through the gardens to the city. But I soon learned by experience what an impenetrable bulwark is formed by a hedge of agaves planted close together. You can see through their interlacing leaves, and you think, therefore, it will be easy to force a way through them; but the prickles on their leaves are very sensible obstacles. If you step on these colossal leaves, in the hope that they will bear you, they break off suddenly; and so, instead of getting out, you fall into the arms of the next plant. When, however, at last we had wound our way out of the labyrinth, we found but little to enjoy in the city; tho from the neighboring country we felt it impossible to part before sunset. Infinitely beautiful was it to observe this region, of which every point had its interest, gradually enveloped in darkness. MOUNT ÆTNA[39] BY WILL S. MONROE By the ancients Ætna was supposed to be the prison of the mighty chained giant Typhon, the flames proceeding from his breath and the noises from his groans; and when he turned over earthquakes shook the island. Many of the myths of the Greek poets were associated with the slopes of Ætna, such as Demeter, torch in hand, seeking Persephone, Acis and Galatea, Polyphemus and the Cyclops. Ætna was once a volcano in the Mediterranean and in the course of ages it completely filled the surrounding sea with its lava. A remarkable feature of the mountain is the large number of minor cones on its sides--some seven hundred in all. Most of these subsidiary cones are from three to six thousand feet in height and they make themselves most strongly felt during periods of great activity. The summit merely serves as a vent through which the vapors and gases make their escape. The natural boundaries of Ætna are the Alcantara and Simeto rivers on the north, west, and south, and the sea on the east. The most luxurious fertility characterizes the gradual slopes near the base, the decomposed volcanic soil being almost entirely covered with olives, figs, grapes, and prickly pears. Higher up is the timber zone. Formerly there was a dense forest belt between the zone of cultivated land and the tore of cinders and snow; but the work of forest extermination was almost completed during the reign of the Spanish Bourbons. One may still find scattered oak, ilex, chestnut, and pine interspersed with ferns and aromatic herbs. Chestnut trees of surprizing growth are found on the lower slopes. "The Chestnut Tree of the Hundred Horses," for which the slopes of Ætna are famous, is not a single tree but a group of several distinct trunks together forming a circle, under whose spreading branches a hundred horses might find shelter. Above the wooded zone Ætna is covered with miniature cones thrown up by different eruptions and regions of dreary plateau covered with scoriae and ashes and buried under snow a part of the year. While the upper portions of the volcano are covered with snow the greater portion of the year, Ætna does not reach the limit of perpetual snow, and the heat which is emitted from its sides prevents the formation of glaciers in the hollows. One might expect that the quantities of snow and rain which fall on the summit would give rise to numerous streams. But the small stones and cinders absorb the moisture, and springs are found only on the lower slopes. The cinders, however, retain sufficient moisture to support a rich vegetation wherever the surface of the lava is not too compact to be penetrated by roots. The surface of the more recent lava streams is not, as might be supposed, smooth and level, but full of yawning holes and rents. The regularity of the gradual slopes is broken on the eastern side by the Valle del Bove, a vast amphitheater more than three thousand feet in depth, three miles in width, and covering an area of ten square miles. The bottom of the valley is dotted with craters which rise in gigantic steps; and, when Ætna is in a state of eruption, these craters pour forth fiery cascades of lava. The Monte Centenari rise from the Valle del Bove to an elevation of 6,026 feet. At the head of the valley is the Torre del Filosofo at an altitude of 9,570 feet. This is the reputed site of the observatory of Empedocles, the poet and philosopher, who is fabled to have thrown himself into the crater of Ætna to immortalize his name. The lower slopes of Ætna--after the basin of Palermo--include the most densely populated parts of Sicily. More than half a million people live on the slopes of a mountain that might be expected to inspire terror. "Towns succeed towns along its base like pearls in a necklace, and when a stream of lava effects a breach in the chain of human habitations, it is closed up again as soon as the lava has had time to cool." As soon as the lava has decomposed, the soil produces an excellent yield and this tempts the farmer and the fruit grower to take chances. Speaking of the dual effect of Ætna, Freeman says: "He has been mighty to destroy, but he has also been mighty to create and render fruitful. If his fiery streams have swept away cities and covered fields, they have given the cities a new material for their buildings and the fields a new soil rich above all others." SYRACUSE[40] BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON The ruins of Syracuse are not to the casual observer very imposing. But even these ruins have great interest for the archeologist. There is, for example, an old temple near the northern end of Ortygia, for the most part embedded in the buildings of the modern city, yet with its east end cleared and showing several entire columns with a part of the architrave upon them. And what a surprize here awaits one who thinks of a Doric temple as built on a stereotyped plan! Instead of the thirteen columns on the long sides which one is apt to look for as going with a six-column front, here are eighteen or nineteen, it is not yet quite certain which. The columns stand less than their diameter apart, and the abaci are so broad that they nearly touch. So small is the inter-columnar space that archeologists incline to the belief that in this one Doric temple there were triglyphs only over the columns, and not also between them as in all other known cases. Everything about this temple stamps it as the oldest in Sicily. An inscription on the top step, in very archaic letters, much worn and difficult to read, contains the name of Apollo in the ancient form.... The inscription may, of course, be later than the temple; but it is in itself old enough to warrant the supposition that the temple was erected soon after the first Corinthian colonists established themselves in the island. While the inscription makes it reasonably certain that the temple belonged to Apollo, the god under whose guiding hand all these Dorians went out into these western seas, tradition, with strange perversity, has given it the name of "Temple of Diana." But it is all in the family. Another temple ruin on the edge of the plateau, which begins about two miles south of the city, across the Anapos, one might also easily overlook in a casual survey, because it consists only of two columns without capitals, and a broad extent of the foundations from which the accumulated earth has been only partially removed. This was the famous temple of Olympian Zeus, built probably in the days of Hiero I., soon after the Persian war, but on the site of a temple still more venerable. One seeks a reason for the location of this holy place at such a distance from the city. Holm, the German historian of Sicily, argues with some plausibility that this was no mere suburb of Syracuse, but the original Syracuse itself. In the first place, the list of the citizens of Syracuse was kept here down at least to the time of the Athenian invasion. In the second place, tradition, which, when rightly consulted, tells so much, says that Archias, the founder of Syracuse, had two daughters, Ortygia and Syracusa, which may point to two coordinate settlements, Ortygia and Syracuse; the latter, which was on this temple plateau, being subsequently merged in the former, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, giving its name to the combined result. Besides these temple ruins there are many more foundations that tell a more or less interesting story. Then there are remains of the ancient city that can never be ruined--for instance, the great stone quarries, pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the pitiless captors; the Greek theater cut out of the solid rock; the great altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also of solid rock. Then there is a mighty Hexapylon, which closed the fortifications of Dionysius at the northwest at the point where they challenged attack from the land side. With its sally-ports and rock-hewn passages, some capacious enough to quarter regiments of cavalry, showing holes cut in the projecting corners of rock, through which the hitch-reins of the horses were wont to be passed, and its great magazines, it stands a lasting memorial to the energy of a tyrant. But while this fortress is practically indestructible, an impregnable fortress is a dream incapable of realization. Marcellus and his stout Romans came in through these fortifications, not entirely, it is true, by their own might, but by the aid of traitors, against whom no walls are proof. One of the stone quarries, the Latomia del Paradiso, has an added interest from its association with the tyrant who made himself hated as well as feared, while Gelon was only feared without being hated. An inner recess of the quarry is called the "Ear of Dionysius," and tradition says that at the inner end of this recess either he or his creatures sat and listened to the murmurs that the people uttered against him, and that these murmurs were requited with swift and fatal punishment. Certain it is that a whisper in this cave produces a wonderful resonance, and a pistol shot is like the roar of a cannon; but that people who had anything to say about the butcher should come up within ear-shot of him to utter it is not very likely. Historians are not quite sure that the connection of Dionysius with this recess is altogether mythical, but that he shaped it with the fell purpose above mentioned is not to be thought of, as the whole quarry is older than his time, and was probably, with the Latomia dei Cappuccini, a prison for the Athenians. MALTA[41] BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER The city of Valetta, founded in 1566, by the grand master whose name it bears, is the capital of Malta. The city of La Sangle, and the city of Victoria, which occupy two points of land on the other side of the harbor of the Marse, together with the suburbs of Floriana and Burmola, complete the town; encircled by bastions, ramparts, counterscarps, forts, and fortifications, to an extent which renders siege impossible! If you follow one of the streets which surround the town, at each step that you take, you find yourself face to face with a cannon. Gibraltar itself does not bristle more completely with mouths of fire. The inconvenience of these extended works is, that they enclose a vast radius, and demand to defend them, in case of attack, an enormous garrison; always difficult to maintain at a distance from the mother country. From the height of the ramparts, one sees in the distance the blue and transparent sea, broken into ripples by the breeze, and dotted with snowy sails. The scarlet sentinels are on guard from point to point, and the heat of the sun is so fierce upon the glacis, that a cloth stretched upon a frame and turning upon a pivot at the top of a pole, forms a shade for the soldiers, who, without this precaution, must inevitably be roasted on their posts.... The city of Valetta, altho built with regularity, and, so to speak, all in one "block," is not, therefore, the less picturesque. The decided slope of the ground neutralizes what the accurate lines of the street might otherwise have of monotony, and the town mounts by degrees and by terraces the hillside, which it forms into an amphitheater. The houses, built very high like those of Cadiz, terminate in flat roofs that their inhabitants may the better enjoy the sea view. They are all of white Maltese stone; a sort of sandstone easy to work, and with which, at small expense, one can indulge various caprices of sculpture and ornamentation. These rectilinear houses stand well, and have an air of grandeur, which they owe to the absence of (visible) roofs, cornices, and attics. They stand out sharply and squarely against the azure of the heavens, which their dazzling whiteness renders only the more intense; but that which chiefly gives them a character of originality is the projecting balcony hung upon each front; like the "moucharabys" of the East, or the "miradores" of Spain. The palace of the grand masters--to-day the palace of the government--has nothing remarkable in the way of architecture. Its date is recent, and it responds but imperfectly to the idea one would form of the residence of Villiers de I'lle Adam, of Lavalette, and of their warlike ancestors. Nevertheless, it has a certain monumental air, and produces a fine effect upon the great Place, of which it forms one entire side. Two doorways, with rustic columns, break the uniformity of the long façade; while an immense balcony, supported by gigantic sculptured brackets, encircles the building at the level of the first floor, and gives to the edifice the stamp of Malta. This detail, so strictly local in its character, relieves what might be heavy and flat in this architecture; and this palace, otherwise vulgar, becomes thus original. The interior, which I visited, presents a range of vast halls and galleries, decorated with pictures representing battles by sea and land, sieges, and combats between Turkish galleys and the galleys of the "Religion." ... To finish with the knights, I turned my steps toward the Church of St. John--the Pantheon of the Order. Its façade, with a triangular porch flanked by two towers terminating in stone belfries, having for ornament only four pillars, and pierced by a window and door, without sculpture or decoration, by no means prepares the traveler for the splendor within. The first thing which arrests the sight is an immense arch, painted in fresco, which runs the whole length of the nave. This fresco, unhappily much deteriorated by time, is the work of Matteo Preti, called the Calabrese; one of those great second-rate masters, who, if they have less genius, have often more talent than the princes of the art. What there is of science, facility, spirit, expression, and abundant resource, in this colossal picture, is beyond description. Each section of the arch contains a scene from the life of St. John, to whom the church is dedicated, and who was the patron of the Order. These sections are supported, at their descent, by groups of captives--Saracens, Turks, Christians, and others--half naked, or clad in the remains of shattered armor, and placed in positions of humiliation or constraint, who form a species of barbaric caryatides strikingly suited to the subject. All this part of the fresco is full of character, and has a force of coloring very rare in this species of picture. These solid and massive effects give additional strength to the lighter tone of the arch, and throw the skies into a relief and distance singularly profound. I know no similar work of equal grandeur except the ceiling by Fumiana in the Church of St. Pantaleone at Venice, representing the life, martyrdom, and apotheosis of that saint. But the style of the decadence makes itself less felt in the work of the Calabrese than in that of the Venetian. In recompense of this gigantic work, the artist had the honor, like Carravaggio, to be made a Knight of the Order. The pavement of the church is composed of four hundred tombs of knights, incrusted with jasper, porphyry, verd-antique, and precious stones of various kinds, which should form the most splendid sepulchral mosaics conceivable. I say should form, because at the moment of my visit, the whole floor was covered with those immense mats, so constantly used for carpeting the southern churches--a usage which is explained by the absence of pews or chairs, and the habit of kneeling upon the floor to perform one's devotions. I regretted this exceedingly; but the crypt and the chapel contain enough sepulchral wealth to offer some atonement. VIII THE MAINLAND OF GREECE ON ARRIVING IN ATHENS--THE ACROPOLIS[42] BY J. P. MAHAFFY There is probably no more exciting voyage, to any educated man, than the approach to Athens from the sea. Every promontory, every island, every bay, has its history. If he knows the map of Greece, he needs no guide-book or guide to distract him; if he does not, he needs little Greek to ask of any one near him the name of this or that object; and the mere names are sufficient to stir up all his classical recollections. But he must make up his mind not to be shocked at "Ægina" or "Phalrum," and even to be told that he is utterly wrong in his way of pronouncing them. It was our fortune to come into Greece by night, with a splendid moon shining upon the summer sea. The varied outlines of Sunium, on the one side, and Ægina on the other, were very clear, but in the deep shadows there was mystery enough to feed the burning impatience of seeing all in the light of common day; and tho we had passed Ægina, and had come over against the rocky Salamis, as yet there was no sign of Peiræus. Then came the light on Psyttalea, and they told us that the harbor was right opposite. Yet we came nearer and nearer, and no harbor could be seen. The barren rocks of the coast seemed to form one unbroken line, and nowhere was there a sign of indentation or of break in the land. But suddenly, as we turned from gazing on Psyttalea, where the flower of the Persian nobles had once stood in despair, looking upon their fate gathering about them, the vessel had turned eastward, and discovered to us the crowded lights and thronging ships of the famous harbor. Small it looked, very small, but evidently deep to the water's edge, for great ships seemed touching the shore; and so narrow is the mouth, that we almost wondered how they had made their entrance in safety. But we saw it some weeks later, with nine men-of-war towering above all its merchant shipping and its steamers, and among them crowds of ferryboats skimming about in the breeze with their wing-like sails. Then we found out that, like the rest of Greece, the Peiræus was far larger than it looked. It differed little, alas! from more vulgar harbors in the noise and confusion of disembarking; in the delays of its custom-house; in the extortion and insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato's day, "the haunt of sailors, where good manners are unknown." But when we had escaped the turmoil, and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost along the very road of classical days, all our classical notions, which had been seared away by vulgar bargaining and protesting, regained their sway. We had sailed in through the narrow passage where almost every great Greek that ever lived had some time passed; now we went along the line, hardly less certain, which had seen all these great ones going to and fro between the city and the port. The present road is shaded with great silver poplars, and plane trees, and the moon had set, so that our approach to Athens was even more mysterious than our approach to the Peiræus. We were, moreover, perplexed at our carriage stopping under some large plane trees, tho we had driven but two miles, and the night was far spent. Our coachman would listen to no advice or persuasion. We learned afterward that every carriage going to and from the Peiræus stops at this half-way house, that the horses may drink, and the coachman take "Turkish delight" and water. There is no exception made to this custom, and the traveler is bound to submit. At last we entered the unpretending ill-built streets at the west of Athens.... We rose at the break of dawn to see whether our window would afford any prospect to serve as a requital for angry sleeplessness. And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in the world's history has done most for literature and art--the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever glorified, and can not stay their praise--which is ever new and ever old, ever fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living in its death--the Acropolis of Athens. When I saw my dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes--all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and meanness--of loftiness and lowness--as well in outer life as in inward motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in daylight and at night, but never again in this perfect and singular beauty.... I suppose there can be no doubt whatever that the ruins on the Acropolis of Athens are the most remarkable in the world. There are ruins far larger, such as the Pyramids, and the remains of Karnak. There are ruins far more perfectly preserved, such as the great Temple at Paestum. There are ruins more picturesque, such as the ivy-clad walls of medieval abbeys beside the rivers in the rich valleys of England. But there is no ruin all the world over which combines so much striking beauty, so distinct a type, so vast a volume of history, so great a pageant of immortal memories. There is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disappointing. When the traveler reflects how all the Old World's culture culminated in Greece--all Greece in Athens--all Athens in its Acropolis--all the Acropolis in the Parthenon--so much crowds upon the mind confusedly that we look for some enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a visible starting-point into all this history and all this greatness. And at first we look in vain. The shattered pillars and the torn pediments will not bear so great a strain; and the traveler feels forced to admit a sense of disappointment, sore against his will. He has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain; and as is wont to be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not answer to his desire. The pang of disappointment is all the greater when he sees that the tooth of time and the shock of earthquake have done but little harm. It is the hand of man--of reckless foe and ruthless lover--which has robbed him of his hope.... Nothing is more vexatious than the reflection, how lately these splendid remains have been reduced to their present state. The Parthenon, being used as a Greek church, remained untouched and perfect all through the Middle Ages. Then it became a mosque, and the Erechtheum a seraglio, and in this way survived without damage till 1687, when, in the bombardment by the Venetians under Morosini, a shell dropt into the Parthenon, where the Turks had their powder stored, and blew out the whole center of the building. Eight or nine pillars at each side have been thrown down, and have left a large gap, which so severs the front and rear of the temple, that from the city below they look like the remains of two different buildings. The great drums of these pillars are yet lying there, in their order, just as they fell, and some money and care might set them all up again in their places; yet there is not in Greece the patriotism or even the common sense to enrich the country by this restoration, matchless in its certainty as well as in its splendor. But the Venetians were not content with their exploit. They were, about this time, when they held possession of most of Greece, emulating the Pisan taste for Greek sculptures; and the four fine lions standing at the gate of the arsenal in Venice still testify to their zeal in carrying home Greek trophies to adorn their capital. In its great day, and even as Pausanias saw it, the Acropolis was covered with statues, as well as with shrines. It was not merely an Holy of Holies in religion; it was also a palace and museum of art. At every step and turn the traveler met new objects of interest. There were archaic specimens, chiefly interesting to the antiquarian and the devotee; there were the great masterpieces which were the joint admiration of the artist and the vulgar. Even all the sides and slopes of the great rock were honeycombed into sacred grottos, with their altars and their gods, or studded with votive monuments. All these lesser things are fallen away and gone; the sacred eaves are filled with rubbish, and desecrated with worse than neglect. The grotto of Pan and Apollo is difficult of access, and when reached, an object of disgust rather than of interest. There are left but the remnants of the surrounding wall, and the ruins of the three principal buildings, which were the envy and wonder of all the civilized world. The beautiful little temple of Athena Nike, tho outside the Propylæa--thrust out as it were on a sort of great buttress high on the right--must still be called a part, and a very striking part, of the Acropolis. It is only of late years that it has been cleared of rubbish and modern stone-work, thus destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish occupation which the fastidious historian may regret, but realizing to us a beautiful Greek temple of the Ionic Order in some completeness. The peculiarity of this building, which is perched upon a platform of stone, and commands a splendid prospect, is that its tiny peribolus, or sacred enclosure, was surrounded by a parapet of stone slabs covered with exquisite reliefs of winged Victories, in various attitudes. Some of these slabs are now in the Museum of the Acropolis, and are of great interest--apparently less severe than the school of Phidias, and therefore later in date, but still of the best epoch, and of marvelous grace. The position of this temple also is not parallel with the Propylæa, but turned slightly outward, so that the light strikes it at moments when the other building is not illuminated. At the opposite side is a very well-preserved chamber, and a fine colonnade at right angles with the gate, which looks like a guard-room. This is the chamber commonly called the Pinacotheca, where Pausanias saw pictures or frescoes by Polygnotus. A WINTER IN ATHENS HALF A CENTURY AGO[43] BY BAYARD TAYLOR Our sitting-room fronted the south (with a view of the Acropolis and the Areopagus), and could be kept warm without more labor or expense than would be required for an entire dwelling at home. Our principal anxiety was, that the supply of fuel, at any price, might become exhausted. We burned the olive and the vine, the cypress and the pine, twigs of rose trees and dead cabbage-stalks, for aught I know, to feed our one little sheet-iron stove. For full two months we were obliged to keep up our fire, from morning until night. Know ye the land of the cypress and myrtle, where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine? Here it is, with almost snow enough in the streets for a sleighing party, with the Ilissus frozen, and with a tolerable idea of Lapland, when you face the gusts which drive across the Cephissian plain. As the other guests were Greek, our mode of living was similar to that of most Greek families. We had coffee in the morning, a substantial breakfast about noon, and dinner at six in the evening. The dishes were constructed after French and Italian models, but the meat is mostly goat's flesh. Beef, when it appears, is a phenomenon of toughness. Vegetables are rather scarce. Cow's milk, and butter or cheese therefrom, are substances unknown in Greece. The milk is from goats or sheep, and the butter generally from the latter. It is a white, cheesy material, with a slight flavor of tallow. The wine, when you get it unmixed with resin, is very palatable. We drank that of Santorin, with the addition of a little water, and found it an excellent beverage.... Except during the severely cold weather, Athens is as lively a town as may be. One-fourth of the inhabitants, I should say, are always in the streets, and many of the mechanics work, as is common in the Orient, in open shops. The coffee-houses are always thronged, and every afternoon crowds may be seen on the Patissia Road--a continuation of Eolus Street--where the King and Queen take their daily exercise on horseback. The national costume, both male and female, is gradually falling into disuse in the cities, altho it is still universal in the country. The islanders adhere to their hideous dress with the greatest persistence. With sunrise the country people begin to appear in the streets with laden donkeys and donkey-carts, bringing wood, grain, vegetables, and milk, which they sell from house to house.... Venders of bread and coffee-rolls go about with circular trays on their heads, calling attention to their wares by loud and long-drawn cries. Later in the day, peddlers make their appearance, with packages of cheap cotton stuffs, cloth, handkerchiefs, and the like, or baskets of pins, needles, buttons, and tape. They proclaim loudly the character and price of their articles, the latter, of course, subject to negotiation. The same custom prevails as in Turkey, of demanding much more than the seller expects to get. Foreigners are generally fleeced a little in the beginning, tho much less so, I believe, than in Italy.... The winter of 1857-58 was the severest in the memory of any inhabitant. For nearly eight weeks, we had an alternation of icy north winds and snow-storms. The thermometer went down to 20 degrees of Fahrenheit--a degree of cold which seriously affected the orange-, if not the olive-trees. Winter is never so dreary as in those southern lands, where you see the palm trees rocking despairingly in the biting gale, and the snow lying thick on the sunny fruit of the orange groves. As for the pepper trees, with their hanging tresses and their loose, misty foliage, which line the broad avenues radiating from the palace, they were touched beyond recovery. The people, who could not afford to purchase wood or charcoal, at treble the usual price, even tho they had hearths, which they have not, suffered greatly. They crouched at home, in cellars and basements, wrapt in rough capotes, or hovering around a mangal, or brazier of coals, the usual substitute for a stove. From Constantinople we had still worse accounts. The snow lay deep everywhere; charcoal sold at twelve piastres the oka (twenty cents a pound), and the famished wolves, descending from the hills, devoured people almost at the gates of the city. In Smyrna, Beyrout, and Alexandria, the winter was equally severe, while in Odessa it was mild and agreeable, and in St. Petersburg there was scarcely snow enough for sleighing. All Northern Europe enjoyed a winter as remarkable for warmth as that of the South for its cold. The line of division seemed to be about the parallel of latitude 45 degrees. Whether this singular climatic phenomenon extended further eastward, into Asia, I was not able to ascertain. I was actually less sensitive to the cold in Lapland, during the previous winter, with the mercury frozen, than in Attica, within the belt of semi-tropical productions. THE ACROPOLIS AS IT WAS[44] BY PAUSANIAS To the Acropolis there is only one approach; it allows of no other, being everywhere precipitous and walled off. The vestibules have a roof of white marble, and even now are remarkable for both their beauty and size. As to the statues of the horsemen, I can not say with precision whether they are the sons of Xenophon, or merely put there for decoration. On the right of the vestibules is the shrine of the Wingless Victory. From it the sea is visible; and there Ægeus drowned himself, as they say. For the ship which took his sons to Crete had black sails, but Theseus told his father (for he knew there was some peril in attacking the Minotaur) that he would have white sails if he should sail back a conqueror. But he forgot this promise in his loss of Ariadne. And Ægeus, seeing the ship with black sails, thinking his son was dead, threw himself in and was drowned. And the Athenians have a hero-chapel to his memory. And on the left of the vestibules is a building with paintings; and among those that time has not destroyed are Diomedes and Odysseus--the one taking away Philoctetes's bow in Lemnos, the other taking the Palladium from Ilium. Among other paintings here is Ægisthus being slain by Orestes; and Pylades slaying the sons of Nauplius that came to Ægisthus's aid. And Polyxena about to have her throat cut near the tomb of Achilles. Homer did well not to mention this savage act.... And there is a small stone such as a little man can sit on, on which they say Silenus rested, when Dionysus came to the land. Silenus is the name they give to all old Satyrs. About the Satyrs I have conversed with many, wishing to know all about them. And Euphemus, a Carian, told me that sailing once on a time to Italy he was driven out of his course by the winds, and carried to a distant sea, where people no longer sail. And he said that here were many desert islands, some inhabited by wild men; and at these islands the sailors did not like to land, as they had landed there before and had experience of the natives; but they were obliged on that occasion. These islands he said were called by the sailors Satyr-islands; the dwellers in them were red-haired, and had tails at their loins not much smaller than horses.... And as regards the temple which they call the Parthenon, as you enter it everything portrayed on the gables relates to the birth of Athene, and behind is depicted the contest between Poseidon and Athene for the soil of Attica. And this work of art is in ivory and gold. In the middle of her helmet is an image of the Sphinx--about whom I shall give an account when I come to Boeotia--and on each side of the helmet are griffins worked. These griffins, says Aristus the Proconnesian, in his poems, fought with the Arimaspians beyond the Issedones for the gold of the soil which the griffins guarded. And the Arimaspians were all one-eyed men from their birth; and the griffins were beasts like lions, with wings and mouth like an eagle. Let so much suffice for these griffins. But the statue of Athene is full length, with a tunic reaching to her feet; and on her breast is the head of Medusa worked in ivory, and in one hand she has a Victory four cubits high, in the other hand a spear, and at her feet a shield; and near the spear a dragon which perhaps is Erichthonius. And on the base of the statue is a representation of the birth of Pandora--the first woman, according to Hesiod and other poets; for before her there was no race of women. Here too I remember to have seen the only statue here of the Emperor Adrian; and at the entrance one of Iphicrates, the celebrated Athenian general. And outside the temple is a brazen Apollo said to be by Phidias; and they call it Apollo, Averter of Locusts, because when the locusts destroyed the land the god said he would drive them out of the country. And they know that he did so, but they don't say how. I myself know of locusts having been thrice destroyed on Mount Sipylus, but not in the same way; for some were driven away by a violent wind that fell on them, and others by a strong light that came on them after showers, and others were frozen to death by a sudden frost. All this came under my own notice. There is also a building called the Erechtheum, and in the vestibule is an altar of Supreme Zeus, where they offer no living sacrifice, but cakes without the usual libation of wine. And as you enter there are three altars: one to Poseidon (on which they also sacrifice to Erechtheus according to the oracle), one to the hero Butes, and the third to Hephæstus. And on the walls are paintings of the family of Butes. The building is a double one; and inside there is sea-water in a well. And this is no great marvel; for even those who live in inland parts have such wells, as notably Aphrodisienses in Caria. But this well is represented as having a roar as of the sea when the south wind blows. And in the rock is the figure of a trident. And this is said to have been Poseidon's proof in regard to the territory Athene disputed with him. Sacred to Athene is all the rest of Athens, and similarly all Attica; for altho they worship different gods in different townships, none the less do they honor Athene generally. And the most sacred of all is the statue of Athene in what is now called the Acropolis, but was then called the Polis (city) which was universally worshiped many years before the various townships formed one city; and the rumor about it is that it fell from heaven. As to this I shall not give an opinion, whether it was so or not. And Callimachus made a golden lamp for the goddess. And when they fill this lamp with oil it lasts for a whole year, altho it burns continually night and day. And the wick is of a particular kind of cotton flax, the only kind indestructible by fire. And above the lamp is a palm tree of brass reaching to the roof and carrying off the smoke. And Callimachus, the maker of this lamp, altho he comes behind the first artificers, yet was remarkable for ingenuity, and was the first who perforated stone, and got the name of "Art-Critic," whether his own appellation or given him by others. In the temple of Athene Polias is a Hermes of wood (said to be a votive offering of Cecrops), almost hidden by myrtle leaves. And of the antique votive offerings worthy of record, is a folding-chair, the work of Dædalus, and spoils taken from the Persians--as a coat of mail of Masistius, who commanded the cavalry at Platæa, and a scimitar said to have belonged to Mardonius. Masistius we know was killed by the Athenian cavalry; but as Mardonius fought against the Lacedæmonians and was killed by a Spartan, they could not have got it at first hand; nor is it likely that the Lacedæmonians would have allowed the Athenians to carry off such a trophy. And about the olive they have nothing else to tell but that the goddess used it as a proof of her right to the country, when it was contested by Poseidon. And they record also that this olive was burnt when the Persians set fire to Athens; but tho burnt, it grew the same day two cubits. And next to the temple of Athene is the temple of Pandrosus; who was the only one of the three sisters who didn't peep into the forbidden chest. Now the things I most marveled at are not universally known. I will therefore write of them as they occur to me. Two maidens live not far from the temple of Athene Polias, and the Athenians call them the "carriers of the holy things"; for a certain time they live with the goddess, but when her festival comes they act in the following way, by night: Putting upon their heads what the priestess of Athene gives them to carry (neither she nor they know what these things are), these maidens descend, by a natural underground passage, from an inclosure in the city sacred to Aphrodite of the Gardens. In the sanctuary below they deposit what they carry, and bring back something else closely wrapt up. And these maidens they henceforth dismiss, and other two they elect instead of them for the Acropolis. THE ELGIN MARBLES[45] BY J. P. MAHAFFY Morosini[46] wished to take down the sculptures of Phidias from the eastern pediment, but his workmen attempted it so clumsily that the figures fell from their place and were dashed to pieces on the ground. An observing traveler[47] was present when a far more determined and systematic attack was made upon the remaining ruins of the Parthenon. While he was traveling in the interior, Lord Elgin had obtained his famous firman from the Sultan, to take down and remove any antiquities or sculptured stones he might require, and the infuriated Dodwell saw a set of ignorant workmen, under equally ignorant overseers, let loose upon the splendid ruins of the age of Pericles. He speaks with much good sense and feeling of this proceeding. He is fully aware that the world would derive inestimable benefit from the transplanting of these splendid fragments to a more accessible place, but he can not find language strong enough to express his disgust at the way in which the thing was done. Incredible as it may appear, Lord Elgin himself seems not to have superintended the work, but to have left it to paid contractors, who undertook the job for a fixt sum. Little as either Turks or Greeks cared for the ruins, he says that a pang of grief was felt through all Athens at the desecration, and that the contractors were obliged to bribe workmen with additional wages to undertake the ungrateful task. Dodwell will not even mention Lord Elgin by name, but speaks of him with disgust as "the person" who defaced the Parthenon. He believes that had this person been at Athens himself, his underlings could hardly have behaved in the reckless way they did, pulling down more than they wanted, and taking no care to prop up and save the work from which they had taken the support. He especially notices their scandalous proceeding upon taking up one of the great white marble blocks which form the floor or stylobate of the temple. They wanted to see what was underneath, and Dodwell, who was there, saw the foundation--a substructure of Peiræic sandstone. But when they had finished their inspection they actually left the block they had removed, without putting it back into its place. So this beautiful pavement, made merely of closely-fitting blocks, without any artificial or foreign joinings, was ripped up, and the work of its destruction began. I am happy to add that, tho a considerable rent was then made, most of it is still intact, and the traveler of to-day may still walk on the very stones which bore the tread of every great Athenian. The question has often been discust, whether Lord Elgin was justified in carrying off this pediment, the metopes, and the friezes, from their place; and the Greeks of to-day hope confidently that the day will come when England will restore these treasures to their place. This is, of course, absurd, and it may fairly be argued that people who would bombard their antiquities in a revolution are not fit custodians of them in the intervals of domestic quiet. This was my reply to an old Greek gentleman who assailed the memory of Lord Elgin with reproaches. I confess I approved of this removal until I came home from Greece, and went again to see the spoil in its place in our great museum. Tho there treated with every care--tho shown to the best advantage, and explained by excellent models of the whole building, and clear descriptions of their place on it--notwithstanding all this, it was plain that these wonderful fragments lost so terribly by being separated from their place--they looked so unmeaning in an English room, away from their temple, their country and their lovely atmosphere--that one earnestly wished they had never been taken from their place, even at the risk of being made a target by the Greeks or the Turks. I am convinced, too, that the few who would have seen them, as intelligent travelers, on their famous rock, would have gained in quality the advantage now diffused among many, but weakened and almost destroyed by the wrench in associations, when the ornament is severed from its surface, and the decoration of a temple exhibited apart from the temple itself. We may admit, then, that it had been better if Lord Elgin had never taken away these marbles. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to send them back. But I do think that the museum on the Acropolis should be provided with a better set of casts of the figures than those which are now to be seen there. They look very wretched, and carelessly prepared.... THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS[48] BY J. P. MAHAFFY Some ten or twelve years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made when a party of German archeologists laid bare the Theater of Dionysus--the great theater in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern usual in the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks--very deep, and with a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs made by modern workmen.[49] Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how the theater among the Greeks corresponded to our cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons and prebendaries. But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of the later restorers of the theater. For after having been first beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes' time), it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that the theater, as we now have it, can only be called the building of the second or third century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, which is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit, is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, among which one--a shaggy old man, in a stooping posture, represented as coming out from within, and holding up the stone above him--is particularly striking. Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of amusement, the heads of most of these figures since they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any better authority than ordinary report. The pit or center of the theater is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up adjoining the stage, and on this the chorus performed their dances, and sang their odes. But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone close to the front seat, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theater. They are generally supposed to have been added when the building was used for contests of gladiators or of wild beasts; but the partition, being not more than three feet high, would be no protection whatever from an evil-disposed wild beast. All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader's interest in this theater, which I should indeed regret--for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theater which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great competition of Æschylus and Pratinas; and tho front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration. It is indeed very large, tho I think exaggerated statements have been made about its size. I have heard it said that the enormous number of 30,000 people could fit into it--a statement I think incredible; for it did not to me seem larger than, or as large as, other theaters I have seen, at Syracuse, at Megalopolis, or even at Argos. But, no doubt, all such open-air enclosures and sittings look far smaller than covered rooms of the same size. This is certain, that any one speaking on the stage, as it now is, can be easily and distinctly heard by people sitting on the highest row of seats now visible, which can not, I fancy, have been far from the original top of the house. And we may doubt that any such thing were possible when 30,000 people, or a crowd approaching that number, were seated. We hear, however, that the old actors had recourse to various artificial means of increasing the range of their voices. Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which forces back the mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and sceptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of passion, and of pride. WHERE PAUL PREACHED TO THE ATHENIANS[50] BY J. P. MAHAFFY It was on this very Areopagus, where we are now standing, that these philosophers of fashion came into contact with the thorough earnestness, the profound convictions, the red-hot zeal of the Apostle Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers about the place, and every guide will show you the exact place where the Apostle stood, and in what direction he addrest his audience. There are, I believe, even some respectable commentators who transfer their own estimate of St. Paul's importance to the Athenian public, and hold that it was before the court of the Areopagus that he was asked to expound his views. This is more than doubtful. The "blasés" philosophers, who probably yawned over their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher, eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth of what he said, thought the novelty too delicious to be neglected, and brought him forthwith out of the chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the very orchestra where Anaxagoras' books had been proselytizing before him, and where the stiff old heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of the escape from political slavery. It is even possible that the curious knot of idlers did not bring him higher than this platform, which might well be called part of Mars' Hill. But if they chose to bring him to the top, there was no hindrance, for the venerable court held its sittings in the open air, on stone seats; and when not thus occupied, the top of the rock may well have been a convenient place of retirement for people who did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances, and the constant eddies of new gossip in the market-place. It is, however, of far less import to know on what spot of the Areopagus Paul stood, than to understand clearly what he said, and how he sought to conciliate as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, looked down upon him as an intellectual inferior. He starts naturally enough from the extraordinary crowd of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens was remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, with a slight touch of irony, that he finds them very religious indeed, so religious that he even found an altar to a God professedly unknown, or perhaps unknowable.... Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the first heralding of the faith which was to supplant all the temples and altars and statues with which Athens had earned renown as a beautiful city, which was to overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, and even to remodel all the society and the policy of the world. And yet, in spite of this great and decisive triumph of Christianity, there was something curiously prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of its apostle at Athens. Was it not the first expression of the feeling which still possesses the visitor who wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates the educated world--the feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments of Athens would elsewhere excite no small attention, here they are passed by as of no import compared with its heathen splendor? There are very old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, "delicious little Byzantine churches," as Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of St. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprizing how little we notice them at Athens. I was even told--I sincerely hope it was false--that public opinion at Athens was gravitating toward the total removal of one, and that the most perfect, of these churches, which stands in the middle of a main street, and so breaks the regularity of the modern boulevard! FROM ATHENS TO DELPHI ON HORSEBACK[51] BY BAYARD TAYLOR We left Athens on the 13th of April, for a journey to Parnassus and the northern frontier of Greece. It was a teeming, dazzling day, with light scarfs of cloud-crape in the sky, and a delicious breeze from the west blowing through the pass of Daphne. The Gulf of Salamis was pure ultramarine, covered with a velvety bloom, while the island and Mount Kerata swam in transparent pink and violet tints. Crossing the sacred plain of Eleusis, our road entered the mountains--lower offshoots of Cithæron, which divide the plain from that of Boeotia.... We climbed the main ridge of the mountains; and, in less than an hour, reached the highest point--whence the great Boeotian plain suddenly opened upon our view. In the distance gleamed Lake Capaïs, and the hills beyond; in the west, the snowy top of Parnassus, lifted clear and bright above the morning vapors; and, at last, as we turned a shoulder of the mountain in descending, the streaky top of Helicon appeared on the left, completing the classic features of the landscape.... As we entered the plain, taking a rough path toward Platæa, the fields were dotted, far and near, with the white Easter shirts of the people working among the vines. Another hour, and our horses' hoofs were upon the sacred soil of Platæa. The walls of the city are still to be traced for nearly their entire extent. They are precisely similar in construction to those of OEnoë--like which, also, they were strengthened by square towers. There are the substructions of various edifices--some of which may have been temples--and on the side next the modern village lie four large sarcophagi, now used as vats for treading out the grapes in vintage-time. A more harmless blood than once curdled on the stones of Platæa now stains the empty sepulchers of the heroes. We rode over the plain, fixt the features of the scene in our memories, and then kept on toward the field of Leuktra, where the brutal power of Sparta received its first check. The two fields are so near, that a part of the fighting may have been done upon the same ground.... I then turned my horse's head toward Thebes, which we reached in two hours. It was a pleasant scene, tho so different from that of two thousand years ago. The town is built partly on the hill of the Cadmeion, and partly on the plain below. An aqueduct, on mossy arches, supplies it with water, and keeps its gardens green. The plain to the north is itself one broad garden to the foot of the hill of the Sphinx, beyond which is the blue gleam of a lake, then a chain of barren hills, and over all the snowy cone of Mount Delphi, in Euboea. The only remains of the ancient city are stones; for the massive square tower, now used as a prison, can not be ascribed to an earlier date than the reign of the Latin princes.... The next morning we rode down from the Cadmeion, and took the highway to Livadia, leading straight across the Boeotian plain. It is one of the finest alluvial bottoms in the world, a deep, dark, vegetable mold--which would produce almost without limit, were it properly cultivated. Before us, blue and dark under a weight of clouds, lay Parnassus; and far across the immense plain the blue peaks of Mount Oeta. In three hours we reached the foot of Helicon, and looked up at the streaks of snow which melt into the Fountain of the Muses.... As we left Arachova, proceeding toward Delphi, the deep gorge opened, disclosing a blue glimpse of the Gulf of Corinth and the Achaian mountains. Tremendous cliffs of blue-gray limestone towered upon our right, high over the slope of Delphi, which ere long appeared before us. Our approach to the sacred spot was marked by tombs cut in the rock. A sharp angle of the mountain was passed; and then, all at once, the enormous walls, buttressing the upper region of Parnassus, stood sublimely against the sky, cleft right through the middle by a terrible split, dividing the twin peaks which gave a name to the place. At the bottom of this chasm issue forth the waters of Castaly, and fill a stone trough by the road-side. On a long, sloping mountain-terrace, facing the east, stood once the town and temples of Delphi, and now the modern village of Kastri. As you may imagine, our first walk was to the shrine of the Delphic oracle, at the bottom of the cleft between the two peaks. The hewn face of the rock, with a niche, supposed to be that where the Pythia sat upon her tripod, and a secret passage under the floor of the sanctuary, are all that remain. The Castalian fountain still gushes out at the bottom, into a large square enclosure, called the Pythia's Bath, and now choked up with mud, weeds, and stones. Among those weeds, I discerned one of familiar aspect, plucked and tasted it. Watercress, of remarkable size and flavor! We thought no more of Apollo and his shrine, but delving wrist-deep into Castalian mud, gathered huge handfuls of the profane herb, which we washed in the sacred front, and sent to François for a salad.... As the sun sank, I sat on the marble blocks and sketched the immortal landscape. High above me, on the left, soared the enormous twin peaks of pale-blue rock, lying half in the shadow of the mountain slope upheaved beneath, half bathed in the deep yellow luster of sunset. Before me rolled wave after wave of the Parnassian chain, divided by deep lateral valleys, while Helicon, in the distance, gloomed like a thunder-storm under the weight of gathered clouds. Across this wild, vast view, the breaking clouds threw broad belts of cold blue shadow, alternating with zones of angry orange light, in which the mountains seemed to be heated to a transparent glow. The furious wind hissed and howled over the piles of ruin, and a few returning shepherds were the only persons to be seen. And this spot, for a thousand years, was the shrine where spake the awful oracle of Greece. CORINTH[52] BY J. P. MAHAFFY The gulf of Corinth is a very beautiful and narrow fiord, with chains of mountains on either side, through the gaps of which you can see far into the Morea on one side, and into Northern Greece on the other. But the bays or harbors on either coast are few, and so there was no city able to wrest the commerce of these waters from old Corinth, which held the keys by land of the whole Peloponnesus, and commanded the passage from sea to sea. It is, indeed, wonderful how Corinth did not acquire and maintain the first position in Greece. But as soon as the greater powers of Greece decayed and fell away, we find Corinth immediately taking the highest position in wealth, and even in importance. The capture of Corinth, in 146 B.C., marks the Roman conquest of all Greece, and the art-treasures carried to Rome seem to have been as great and various as those which even Athens could have produced. No sooner had Julius Cæsar restored and rebuilt the ruined city, than it sprang at once again into importance, and among the societies addrest in the Epistles of St. Paul, none seems to have lived in greater wealth or luxury. It was, in fact, well-nigh impossible that Corinth should die. Nature had marked out her site as one of the great thoroughfares of the old world; and it was not till after centuries of blighting misrule by the wretched Turks that she sank into the hopeless decay from which not even another Julius Cæsar could rescue her. The traveler who expects to find any sufficient traces of the city of Periander and of Timoleon, and, I may say, of St. Paul, will be grievously disappointed. In the middle of the wretched straggling modern village there stand up seven enormous rough stone pillars of the Doric Order, evidently of the oldest and heaviest type; and these are the only visible relic of the ancient city, looking altogether out of place, and almost as if they had come there by mistake. These pillars, tho insufficient to admit of our reconstructing the temple, are in themselves profoundly interesting. Their shaft up to the capital is of one block, about twenty-one feet high and six feet in diameter. It is to be observed, that over these gigantic monoliths the architrave, in which other Greek temples show the largest blocks, is not in one piece, but two, and made of beams laid together longitudinally. The length of the shafts (up to the neck of the capital) measures about four times their diameter, on the photograph which I possess; I do not suppose that any other Doric pillar known to us is so stout and short. Straight over the site of the town is the great rock known as the Acro-Corinthus. A winding path leads up on the southwest side to the Turkish drawbridge and gate, which are now deserted and open; nor is there a single guard or soldier to watch a spot once the coveted prize of contending empires. In the days of the Achæan League it was called one of the fetters of Greece, and indeed it requires no military experience to see the extraordinary importance of the place. Next to the view from the heights of Parnassus, I suppose the view from this citadel is held the finest in Greece. I speak here of the large and diverse views to be obtained from mountain heights. To me, personally, such a view as that from the promontory of Sunium, or, above all, from the harbor of Nauplia, exceeds in beauty and interest any bird's-eye prospect. Any one who looks at the map of Greece will see how the Acro-Corinthus commands coasts, islands, and bays. The day was too hazy when we stood there to let us measure the real limits of the view, and I can not say how near to Mount Olympus the eye may reach in a suitable atmosphere. But a host of islands, the southern coasts of Attica and Boeotia, the Acropolis of Athens, Salamis and Ægina, Helicon and Parnassus, and endless Ætolian peaks were visible in one direction; while, as we turned round, all the waving reaches of Arcadia and Argolis, down to the approaches toward Mantinea and Karytena, lay stretched out before us. The plain of Argos, and the sea at that side, are hidden by the mountains. But without going into detail, this much may be said, that if a man wants to realize the features of these coasts, which he has long studied on maps, half an hour's walk about the top of this rock will give him a geographical insight which no years of study could attain. OLYMPIA[53] BY PHILIP S. MARDEN Olympia, like Delphi, is a place of memories chiefly. The visible remains are numerous, but so flat that some little technical knowledge is needed to restore them in mind. There is no village at the modern Olympia at all--nothing but five or six little inns and a railway station--so that Delphi really has the advantage of Olympia in this regard. As a site connected with ancient Greek history and Greek religion, the two places are as similar in nature as they are in general ruin. The field in which the ancient structures stand lies just across the tiny tributary river Cladeus, spanned by a footbridge. Even from the opposite bank, the ruins present a most interesting picture, with its attractiveness greatly enhanced by the neighboring pines, which scatter themselves through the precinct itself and cover densely the little conical hill of Kronos close by, while the grasses of the plain grow luxuriantly among the fallen stones of the former temples and apartments of the athletes. The ruins are so numerous and so prostrate that the non-technical visitor is seriously embarrassed to describe them, as is the case with every site of the kind. All the ruins, practically, have been identified and explained, and naturally they all have to do with the housing or with the contests of the visiting athletes of ancient times, or with the worship of tutelary divinities. Almost the first extensive ruin that we found on passing the encircling precinct wall was the Prytaneum--a sort of ancient training table at which victorious contestants were maintained gratis--while beyond lay other equally extensive remnants of exercising places, such as the Palæstra for the wrestlers. But all these were dominated, evidently, by the two great temples, an ancient one of comparatively small size sacred to Hera, and a mammoth edifice dedicated to Zeus, which still gives evidence of its enormous extent, while the fallen column-drums reveal some idea of the other proportions. It was in its day the chief glory of the enclosure, and the statue of the god was even reckoned among the seven wonders of the world. Unfortunately this statue, like that of Athena at Athens, has been irretrievably lost. But there is enough of the great shrine standing in the midst of the ruins to inspire one with an idea of its greatness; and, in the museum above, the heroic figures from its two pediments have been restored and set up in such wise as to reproduce the external adornment of the temple with remarkable success. Gathered around this central building, the remainder of the ancient structures having to do with the peculiar uses of the spot present a bewildering array of broken stones and marbles. An obtrusive remnant of a Byzantine church is the one discordant feature. Aside from this the precinct recalls only the distant time when the regular games called all Greece to Olympia, while the "peace of God" prevailed throughout the kingdom. Just at the foot of Kronos a long terrace and flight of steps mark the position of a row of old treasuries, as at Delphi, while along the eastern side of the precinct are to be seen the remains of a portico once famous for its echoes, where sat the judges who distributed the prizes. There is also a most graceful arch remaining to mark the entrance to the ancient stadium, of which nothing else now remains. Of the later structures on the site, the "house of Nero" is the most interesting and extensive. The Olympic games were still celebrated, even after the Roman domination, and Nero himself entered the lists in his own reign. He caused a palace to be erected for him on that occasion--and of course he won a victory, for any other outcome would have been most impolite, not to say dangerous. Nero was more fortunately lodged than were the other ancient contestants, it appears, for there were no hostelries in old Olympia in which the visiting multitudes could be housed, and the athletes and spectators who came from all over the land were accustomed to bring their own tents and pitch them roundabout, many of them on the farther side of the Alpheios. THE TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA AS IT WAS[54] BY PAUSANIAS Many various wonders may one see, or hear of, in Greece; but the Eleusinian mysteries and Olympian games seem to exhibit more than anything else the Divine purpose. And the sacred grove of Zeus they have from old time called Altis, slightly changing the Greek word for grove; it is, indeed, called Altis also by Pindar, in the ode he composed for a victor at Olympia. And the temple and statue of Zeus were built out of the spoils of Pisa, which the people of Elis razed to the ground, after quelling the revolt of Pisa, and some of the neighboring towns that revolted with Pisa. And that the statue of Zeus was the work of Phidias is shown by the inscription written at the base of it: "Phidias the Athenian, the son of Charmides, made me." The temple is a Doric building, and outside it is a colonnade. And the temple is built of stone of the district. Its height up to the gable is sixty-eight feet, and its length 2,300 feet. And its architect was Libon, a native of Ellis. And the tiles on the roof are not of baked earth; but Pentelican marble, to imitate tiles. They say such roofs are the invention of a man of Naxos called Byzes, who made statues at Naxos with the inscription: "Euergus of Naxos made me, the son of Byzes, and descended from Leto, the first who made tiles of stone." This Byzes was a contemporary of Alyattes the Lydian, and Astyages (the son of Cyaxares), the king of Persia. And there is a golden vase at each end of the roof, and a golden Victory in the middle of the gable. And underneath the Victory is a golden shield hung up as a votive offering, with the Gorgon Medusa worked on it. The inscription on the shield states who hung it up, and the reason why they did so. For this is what it says: "This temple's golden shield is a votive offering from the Lacedæmonians at Tanagra and their allies, a gift from the Argives, the Athenians, and the Ionians, a tithe offering for success in war." The battle I mentioned in my account of Attica, when I described the tombs at Athens. And in the same temple at Olympia, above the zone that runs round the pillars on the outside, are twenty-one golden shields, the offering of Mummius the Roman general, after he had beaten the Achæans and taken Corinth, and expelled the Dorians from Corinth. And on the gables in bas-relief is the chariot race between Pelops and OEnomaus; and both chariots in motion. And in the middle of the gable is a statue of Zeus; and on the right hand of Zeus is OEnomaus with a helmet on his head; and beside him his wife Sterope, one of the daughters of Atlas. And Myrtilus, who was the charioteer of OEnomaus, is seated behind the four horses. And next to him are two men whose names are not recorded, but they are doubtless OEnomaus's grooms, whose duty was to take care of the horses.... The carvings on the gables in front are by Pæonius of Mende in Thracia; those behind by Alcamenes, a contemporary of Phidias and second only to him as statuary. And on the gables is a representation of the fight between the Lapithæ and the Centaurs at the marriage of Pirithous. Pirithous is in the center, and on one side of him is Eurytion trying to carry off Pirithous's wife, and Cæneus coming to the rescue, and on the other side Theseus laying about among the Centaurs with his battle-ax; and one Centaur is carrying off a maiden, another a blooming boy. Alcamenes has engraved this story, I imagine, because he learned from the lines of Homer that Pirithous was the son of Zeus, and knew that Theseus was fourth in descent from Pelops. There are also in bas-relief at Olympia most of the Labors of Hercules. Above the doors of the temple is the hunting of the Erymanthian boar, and Hercules taking the mares of Diomede the Thracian, and robbing Geryon of his oxen in the island of Erytheia, and supporting the load of Atlas, and clearing the land of Elis of its dung.... The image of the god is in gold and ivory, seated on a throne. And a crown is on his head imitating the foliage of the olive tree. In his right hand he holds a Victory in ivory and gold, with a tiara and crown on his head; and in his left hand a scepter adorned with all manner of precious stones, and the bird seated on the scepter is an eagle. The robes and sandals of the god are also of gold; and on his robes are imitations of flowers, especially of lilies. And the throne is richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and with ebony and ivory. And there are imitations of animals painted on it, and models worked on it. There are four Victories like dancers, one at each foot of the throne, and two also at the instep of each foot; and at each of the front feet are Theban boys carried off by Sphinxes, and below the Sphinxes, Apollo and Artemis shooting down the children of Niobe. And between the feet of the throne are four divisions formed by straight lines drawn from each of the four feet. In the division nearest the entrance there are seven models--the eighth has vanished no one knows where or how. And they are imitations of ancient contests, for in the days of Phidias the contests for boys were not yet established. And the figure with its head muffled up in a scarf is, they say, Pantarcas, who was a native of Elis and the darling of Phidias. This Pantarces won the wrestling-prize for boys in the 86th Olympiad. And in the remaining divisions is the band of Hercules fighting against the Amazons. The number on each side is twenty-nine, and Theseus is on the side of Hercules. And the throne is supported not only by the four feet, but also by four pillars between the feet. But one can not get under the throne, as one can at Amyclæ, and pass inside; for at Olympia there are panels like walls that keep one off. At the top of the throne, Phidias has represented above the head of Zeus the three Graces and three Seasons. For these too, as we learn from the poets, were daughters of Zeus. Homer in the Iliad has represented the Seasons as having the care of Heaven, as a kind of guards of a royal palace. And the base under the feet of Zeus (what is called in Attic "thranion") has golden lions engraved on it, and the battle between Theseus and the Amazons--the first famous exploit of the Athenians beyond their own borders. And on the platform that supports the throne there are various ornaments round Zeus, and gilt carving--the Sun seated in his chariot, and Zeus and Hera; and near is Grace. Hermes is close to her, and Vesta close to Hermes. And next to Vesta is Eros receiving Aphrodite, who is just rising from the sea and being crowned by Persuasion. And Apollo and Artemis, Athene and Hercules, are standing by, and at the end of the platform Amphitrite and Poseidon, and Selene apparently urging on her horse. And some say it is a mule and not a horse that the goddess is riding upon; and there is a silly tale about this mule. I know that the size of the Olympian Zeus both in height and breadth has been stated; but I can not bestow praise on the measurers, for their recorded measurement comes far short of what any one would infer from looking at the statue. They make the god also to have testified to the art of Phidias. For they say that when the statue was finished, Phidias prayed him to signify if the work was to his mind; and immediately Zeus, struck with lightning that part of the pavement where in our day is a brazen urn with a lid. And all the pavement in front of the statue is not of white but of black stone. And a border of Parian marble runs round this black stone, as a preservative against spilled oil. For oil is good for the statue at Olympia, as it prevents the ivory being harmed by the dampness of the grove. But in the Acropolis at Athens, in regard to the statue of Athene called the Maiden, it is not oil but water that is advantageously employed to the ivory; for as the citadel is dry by reason of its great height, the statue being made of ivory needs to be sprinkled with water freely. And when I was at Epidaurus, and inquired why they use neither water nor oil to the statue of Æsculapius, the sacristans of the temple informed me that the statue of the god and its throne are over a well. THERMOPYLÆ[55] BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON We took Thermopylæ at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to be impaled.... It may be taken as a well-known fact that the Spercheios has since the time of Herodotus made so large an alluvial deposit around its mouth that, if he himself should return to earth, he would hardly recognize the spot which he has described so minutely. The western horn, which in his time came down so near to the gulf as to leave space for a single carriage-road only, is now separated from it by more than a mile of plain. Each visit to Thermopylæ has, however, deepened my conviction that Herodotus exaggerated the impregnability of this pass. The mountain spur which formed it did not rise so abruptly from the sea as to form an impassable barrier to the advance of a determined antagonist. It is of course difficult ground to operate on, but certainly not impossible. The other narrow place, nearly two miles to the east of this, is still more open, a fact that is to be emphasized, because many topographers, including Colonel Leake, hold that the battle actually took place there, as the great battle between the Romans and Antioches certainly did. This eastern pass is, to be sure, no place where "a thousand may well be stopt by three," and there can not have taken place any great transformation here since classical times, inasmuch as this region is practically out of reach of the Spercheios, and the deposit from the hot sulfur streams, which has so broadened the theater-shaped area enclosed by the two horns, can hardly have contributed to changing the shape of the eastern horn itself. Artificial fortification was always needed here; but it is very uncertain whether any of the stones that still remain can be claimed as parts of such fortification. It is a fine position for an inferior force to choose for defense against a superior one; but while it can not be declared with absolute certainty that this is not the place where the fighting took place, yet the western pass fits better the description of Herodotus. Besides this, if the western pass had been abandoned to the Persians at the outset the fact would have been worth mentioning. As to the heroic deed itself, the view that Leonidas threw away his own life and that of the four thousand, that it was magnificent but not strategy, not war, does not take into account the fact that Sparta had for nearly half a century been looked to as the military leader of Greece. It was audacious in the Athenians to fight the battle of Marathon without them, and they did so only because the Spartans did not come at their call. Sparta had not come to Thermopylæ in force, it is true; but her king was there with three hundred of her best men. Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the place she had won. It had to be done. "So the glory of Sparta was not blotted out." One may have read, and read often, the description of the battle in the school-room, but he reads it with different eyes on the spot, when he can look up at the hillock crowned with a ruined cavalry barrack just inside the western pass and say to himself: "Here on this hill they fought their last fight and fell to the last man. Here once stood the monuments to Leonidas, to the three hundred, and to the four thousand." The very monuments have crumbled to dust, but the great deed lives on. We rode back to Lamia under the spell of it. It was as if we had been in church and been held by a great preacher who knows how to touch the deepest chords of the heart. Euboea was already dark blue, while the sky above it was shaded from pink to purple. Tymphrestos in the west was bathed in the light of the sun that had gone down behind it. The whole surrounding was most stirring, and there was ever sounding in our hearts that deep bass note: "What they did here." SALONICA[56] BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER The city of Salonica lies on a fine bay, and presents an attractive appearance from the harbor, rising up the hill in the form of an amphitheater. On all sides, except the sea, ancient walls surround it, fortified at the angles by large, round towers and crowned in the center, on the hill, by a respectable citadel. I suppose that portions of these walls are of Hellenic, and perhaps, Pelasgic date, but the most are probably of the time of the Latin crusaders' occupation, patched and repaired by Saracens and Turks. We had come to Thessalonica on St. Paul's account, not expecting to see much that would excite us, and we were not disappointed. When we went ashore we found ourselves in a city of perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, commonplace in aspect, altho its bazaars are well filled with European goods, and a fair display of Oriental stuffs and antiquities, and animated by considerable briskness of trade. I presume there are more Jews here than there were in Paul's time, but Turks and Greeks, in nearly equal numbers, form the bulk of the population. In modern Salonica there is not much respect for pagan antiquities, and one sees only the usual fragments of columns and sculptures worked into walls or incorporated in Christian churches. But those curious in early Byzantine architecture will find more to interest them here than in any place in the world except Constantinople. We spent the day wandering about the city, under the guidance of a young Jew, who was without either prejudices or information. On our way to the Mosque of St. Sophia, we passed through the quarter of the Jews, which is much cleaner than is usual with them. These are the descendants of Spanish Jews, who were expelled by Isabella, and they still retain, in a corrupt form, the language of Spain. In the doors and windows were many pretty Jewesses; banishment and vicissitude appear to agree with this elastic race, for in all the countries of Europe Jewish women develop more beauty in form and feature than in Palestine. We saw here and in other parts of the city a novel head-dress, which may commend itself to America in the revolutions of fashion. A great mass of hair, real or assumed, was gathered into a long, slender, green bag, which hung down the back and was terminated by a heavy fringe of silver. Otherwise, the dress of the Jewish women does not differ much from that of the men; the latter wear a fez or turban, and a tunic which reaches to the ankles, and is bound about the waist by a gay sash or shawl. The Mosque of St. Sophia, once a church, and copied in its proportions and style from its namesake in Constantinople, is retired, in a delightful court, shaded by gigantic trees and cheered by a fountain. So peaceful a spot we had not seen in many a day; birds sang in the trees without disturbing the calm of the meditative pilgrim. In the portico and also in the interior are noble columns of marble and verd-antique, and in the dome is a wonderfully quaint mosaic of the Transfiguration. We were shown also a magnificent pulpit of the latter beautiful stone cut from a solid block, in which it is said St. Paul preached. As the Apostle, according to his custom, reasoned with the people out of the Scriptures in a synagogue, and this church was not built for centuries after his visit, the statement needs confirmation; but pious ingenuity suggests that the pulpit stood in a subterranean church underneath this. I should like to believe that Paul sanctified this very spot with his presence; but there is little in its quiet seclusion to remind one of him who had the reputation when he was in Thessalonica of one of those who turn the world upside down. FROM THE PIERIAN PLAIN TO MARATHON[57] BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER At early light of a cloudless morning we were going easily down the Gulf of Thermæ or Salonica, having upon our right the Pierian plain; and I tried to distinguish the two mounds which mark the place of the great battle near Pydna, one hundred and sixty-eight years before Christ, between Æmilius Paulus and King Perseus, which gave Macedonia to the Roman Empire. Beyond, almost ten thousand feet in the air, towered Olympus, upon whose "broad" summit Homer displays the ethereal palaces and inaccessible abode of the Grecian gods. Shaggy forests still clothe its sides, but snow now, and for the greater part of the year, covers the wide surface of the height, which is a sterile, light-colored rock. The gods did not want snow to cool the nectar at their banquets. This is the very center of the mythologic world; there between Olympus and Ossa is the Vale of Tempe, where the Peneus, breaking through a narrow gorge fringed with the sacred laurel, reaches the gulf, south of ancient Heracleum. Into this charming but secluded retreat the gods and goddesses, weary of the icy air, or the Pumblechookian deportment of the court of Olympian Jove, descended to pass the sunny hours with the youths and maidens of mortal mold; through this defile marks of chariot-wheels still attest the passage of armies which flowed either way, in invasion or retreat; and here Pompey, after a ride of forty miles from the fatal field of Pharsalia, quenched his thirst. At six o'clock the Cape of Posilio was on our left, we were sinking Olympus in the white haze of morning, Ossa, in its huge silver bulk, was near us, and Pelion stretched its long white back below. The sharp cone of Ossa might well ride upon the extended back of Pelion, and it seems a pity that the Titans did not succeed in their attempt. We were leaving, and looking our last on the Thracian coasts, once rimmed from Mt. Athos to the Bosphorus with a wreath of prosperous cities. What must once have been the splendor of the Ægean Sea and its islands, when every island was the seat of a vigorous state, and every harbor the site of a commercial town which sent forth adventurous galleys upon any errand of trade or conquest!... We ascended Mt. Pentelicus. Hymettus and Pentelicus are about the same height--thirty-five hundred feet--but the latter, ten miles to the northeast of Athens, commands every foot of the Attic territory; if one should sit on its summit and read a history of the little state, he would need no map. Up to the highest quarries the road is steep, and strewn with broken marble, and after that there is an hour's scramble through bushes and over a rocky path. From these quarries was hewn the marble for the Temple of Theseus, the Parthenon, the Propylæ, the theaters, and other public buildings, to which age has now given a soft and creamy tone; the Pentelic marble must have been too brilliant for the eye, and its dazzling luster was, no doubt, softened by the judicious use of color. Fragments which we broke off had the sparkle and crystalline grain of loaf-sugar, and if they were placed upon the table one would unhesitatingly take them to sweeten his tea. The whole mountain-side is overgrown with laurel, and we found wild flowers all the way to the summit.... We looked almost directly down upon Marathon. There is the bay and the curving sandy shore where the Persian galleys landed; here upon a spur, jutting out from the hill, the Athenians formed before they encountered the host in the plain, and there--alas! it was hidden by a hill--is the mound where the one hundred and ninety-two Athenian dead are buried. It is only a small field, perhaps six miles along the shore and a mile and a half deep, and there is a considerable marsh on the north and a small one at the south end. The victory at so little cost, of ten thousand over a hundred thousand, is partially explained by the nature of the ground; the Persians had not room enough to maneuver, and must have been thrown into confusion on the skirts of the northern swamp, and if over six thousand of them were slain, they must have been killed on the shore in the panic of their embarkation. But still the shore is broad, level, and firm, and the Greeks must have been convinced that the gods themselves terrified the hearts of the barbarians, and enabled them to discomfit a host which had chosen this plain as the most feasible in all Attica for the action of cavalry. AN EXCURSION TO SPARTA AND MAINA[58] BY BAYARD TAYLOR As we approached Sparta, the road descended to the banks of the Eurotas. Traces of the ancient walls which restrained the river still remain in places, but, in his shifting course, he has swept the most of them away, and spread his gravelly deposits freely over the bottoms inclosed between the spurs of the hills. Toward evening we saw, at a distance, the white houses of modern Sparta, and presently some indications of the ancient city. At first, the remains of terraces and ramparts, then the unmistakable Hellenic walls, and, as the superb plain of the Eurotas burst upon us, stretching, in garden-like beauty, to the foot of the abrupt hills, over which towered the sun-touched snows of Taygetus, we saw, close on our right, almost the only relic of the lost ages--the theater. Riding across the field of wheat, which extended all over the scene of the Spartan gymnastic exhibitions, we stood on the proscenium and contemplated these silent ruins, and the broad, beautiful landscape. It is one of the finest views in Greece--not so crowded with striking points, not so splendid in associations as that of Athens, but larger, grander, richer in coloring. Besides the theater, the only remains are some masses of Roman brickwork, and the massive substructions of a small temple which the natives call the tomb of Leonidas.... We spent the night in a comfortable house, which actually boasted of a floor, glass windows, and muslin curtains. On returning to the theater in the morning, we turned aside into a plowed field to inspect a sarcophagus which had just been discovered. It still lay in the pit where it was found, and was entire, with the exception of the lid. It was ten feet long by four broad, and was remarkable in having a division at one end, forming a smaller chamber, as if for the purpose of receiving the bones of a child. From the theater I made a sketch of the valley, with the dazzling ridge of Taygetus in the rear, and Mistra, the medieval Sparta, hanging on the steep sides of one of his gorges. The sun was intensely hot, and we were glad to descend again, making our way through tall wheat, past walls of Roman brickwork and scattering blocks of the older city, to the tomb of Leonidas. This is said to be a temple, tho there are traces of vaults and passages beneath the pavement which do not quite harmonize with such a conjecture. It is composed of huge blocks of breccia, some of them thirteen feet long. I determined to make an excursion to Maina. This is a region rarely visited by travelers, who are generally frightened off by the reputation of its inhabitants, who are considered by the Greeks to be bandits and cut-throats to a man. The Mainotes are, for the most part, lineal descendants of the ancient Spartans, and, from the decline of the Roman power up to the present century, have preserved a virtual independence in their mountain fastnesses. The worship of the pagan deities existed among them as late as the eighth century. They were never conquered by the Turks, and it required considerable management to bring them under the rule of Otho.... Starting at noon, we passed through the modern Sparta, which is well laid out with broad streets. The site is superb, and in the course of time the new town will take the place of Mistra. We rode southward, down the valley of the Eurotas, through orchards of olive and mulberry. We stopt for the night at the little khan of Levetzova. I saw some cows pasturing here, quite a rare sight in Greece, where genuine butter is unknown. That which is made from the milk of sheep and goats is no better than mild tallow. The people informed me, however, that they make cheese from cow's milk, but not during Lent. They are now occupied with rearing Paschal lambs, a quarter of a million of which are slaughtered in Greece on Easter Day. The next morning, we rode over hills covered with real turf, a little thin, perhaps, but still a rare sight in southern lands. In two hours we entered the territory of Maina, on the crest of a hill, where we saw Marathonisi (the ancient Gythium), lying warm upon the Laconian Gulf. The town is a steep, dirty, labyrinthine place, and so rarely visited by strangers that our appearance created quite a sensation.... A broad, rich valley opened before us, crossed by belts of poplar and willow trees, and inclosed by a semicircle of hills, most of which were crowned with the lofty towers of the Mainotes. In Maina almost every house is a fortress. The law of blood revenge, the right of which is transmitted from father to son, draws the whole population under its bloody sway in the course of a few generations. Life is a running fight, and every foe slain entails on the slayer a new penalty of retribution for himself and his descendants for ever. Previous to the revolution most of the Mainote families lived in a state of alternate attack and siege. Their houses are square towers, forty or fifty feet high, with massive walls, and windows so narrow that they may be used as loopholes for musketry. The first story is at a considerable distance from the ground, and reached by a long ladder which can be drawn up so as to cut off all communication. Some of the towers are further strengthened by a semicircular bastion, projecting from the side most liable to attack. The families supplied themselves with telescopes, to look out for enemies in the distance, and always had a store of provisions on hand, in case of a siege. Altho this private warfare has been supprest, the law of revenge exists. From the summit of the first range we overlooked a wild, glorious landscape. The hills, wooded with oak, and swimming in soft blue vapor, interlocked far before us, inclosing the loveliest green dells in their embraces, and melting away to the break in Taygetus, which yawned in the distance. On the right towered the square, embrasured castle of Passava on the summit of an almost inaccessible hill--the site of the ancient Las. Far and near, the lower heights were crowned with tall, white towers. MESSENIA[59] BY BAYARD TAYLOR The plain of Messenia is the richest part of the Morea. Altho its groves of orange and olive, fig and mulberry, were entirely destroyed during the Egyptian occupation, new and more vigorous shoots have sprung up from the old stumps and the desolated country is a garden again, apparently as fair and fruitful as when it excited the covetousness of the Spartan thieves. Sloping to the gulf on the south, and protected from the winds on all other sides by lofty mountains, it enjoys an almost Egyptian warmth of climate. Here it was already summer, while at Sparta, on the other side of Taygetus, spring had but just arrived, and the central plain of Arcadia was still bleak and gray as in winter. As it was market-day, we met hundreds of the country people going to Kalamata with laden asses.... We crossed the rapid Pamisos with some difficulty, and ascended its right bank, to the foot of Mount Evan, which we climbed, by rough paths through thickets of mastic and furze, to the monastery of Vurkano. The building has a magnificent situation, on a terrace between Mount Evan and Mount Ithome, overlooking both the upper and lower plains of the Pamisos--a glorious spread of landscape, green with spring, and touched by the sun with the airiest prismatic tints through breaks of heavy rain-clouds. Inside the courts is an old Byzantine chapel, with fleurs-de-lis on the decorations, showing that it dates from the time of the Latin princes. The monks received us very cordially, gave us a clean, spacious room, and sent us a bottle of excellent wine for dinner. We ascended Ithome and visited the massive ruins of Messene the same day. The great gate of the city, a portion of the wall, and four of the towers of defense, are in tolerable condition. The name of Epaminondas hallows these remains, which otherwise, grand as they are, do not impress one like the cyclopean walls of Tiryns. The wonder is, that they could have been built in so short a time--eighty-five days, says history, which would appear incredible, had not still more marvelous things of the kind been done in Russia. The next day, we rode across the head of the Messenian plain, crossed the Mount Lycæus and the gorge of the Neda, and lodged at the little village of Tragoge, on the frontiers of Arcadia. Our experience of Grecian highways was pleasantly increased by finding fields plowed directly across our road, fences of dried furze built over it, and ditches cutting it at all angles. Sometimes all trace of it would be lost for half a mile, and we were obliged to ride over the growing crops until we could find a bit of fresh trail. The bridle-path over Mount Lycæus was steep and bad, but led us through the heart of a beautiful region. The broad back of the mountain is covered with a grove of superb oaks, centuries old, their long arms muffled in golden moss, and adorned with a plumage of ferns. The turf at their feet was studded with violets, filling the air with delicious odors. This sylvan retreat was the birthplace of Pan, and no more fitting home for the universal god can be imagined. On the northern side we descended for some time through a forest of immense ilex trees, which sprang from a floor of green moss and covered our pathway with summer shade.... We were now in the heart of the wild mountain region of Messenia, in whose fastnesses Aristomenes, the epic hero of the state, maintained himself so long against the Spartans. The tremendous gorge below us was the bed of the Neda, which we crossed in order to enter the lateral valley of Phigalia, where lay Tragoge. The path was not only difficult but dangerous--in some places a mere hand's-breath of gravel, on the edge of a plane so steep that a single slip of a horse's foot would have sent him headlong to the bottom. In the morning, a terrible sirocco levante was blowing, with an almost freezing cold. The fury of the wind was so great that in crossing the exposed ridges it was difficult to keep one's seat upon the horse. We climbed toward the central peak of the Lycæan Hills, through a wild dell between two ridges, which were covered to the summit with magnificent groves of oak. Starry blue flowers, violets and pink crocuses spangled the banks as we wound onward, between the great trunks. The temple of Apollo Epicurius stands on a little platform between the two highest peaks, about 3,500 feet above the sea. On the day of our visit, its pillars of pale bluish-gray limestone rose against a wintry sky, its guardian oaks were leafless, and the wind whistled over its heaps of ruin; yet its symmetry was like that of a perfect statue, wherein you do not notice the absence of color, and I felt that no sky and no season could make it more beautiful. For its builder was Ictinus, who created the Parthenon. It was erected by the Phigalians, out of gratitude to Apollo the Helper, who kept from their city a plague which ravaged the rest of the Peloponnesus. Owing to its secluded position, it has escaped the fate of other temples, and might be restored from its own undestroyed materials. The cella had been thrown down, but thirty-five out of thirty-eight columns are still standing. Through the Doric shafts you look upon a wide panorama of gray mountains, melting into purple in the distance, and crowned by arcs of the far-off sea. On one hand is Ithome and the Messenian Gulf, on the other the Ionian Sea and the Strophades.... We now trotted down the valley, over beautiful meadows, which were uncultivated except in a few places where the peasants were plowing for maize, and had destroyed every trace of the road. The hills on both sides began to be fringed with pine, while the higher ridges on our right were clothed with woods of oak. I was surprised at the luxuriant vegetation of this region. The laurel and mastic became trees, the pine shot to a height of one hundred feet, and the beech and sycamore began to appear. Some of the pines had been cut for ship-timber, but in the rudest and most wasteful way, only the limbs which had the proper curve being chosen for ribs. I did not see a single sawmill in the Peloponnesus; but I am told that there are a few in Euboea and Acarnania.... As we approached Olympia, I could almost have believed myself among the pine-hills of Germany or America. In the old times this must have been a lovely, secluded region, well befitting the honored repose of Xenophon, who wrote his works here. The sky became heavier as the day wore on, and the rain, which had spared us so long, finally inclosed us in its misty circle. Toward evening we reached a lonely little house, on the banks of the Alpheus. Nobody was at home, but we succeeded in forcing a door and getting shelter for our baggage. François had supper nearly ready before the proprietor arrived. The latter had neither wife nor child, tho a few chicks, and took our burglarious occupation very good-humoredly. We shared the same leaky roof with our horses, and the abundant fleas with the owner's dogs. TIRYNS AND MYCENÆ[60] BY J. P. MAHAFFY The fortress of Tiryns may fitly be commented on before approaching the younger, or at least more artistically finished, Mycenæ. It stands several miles nearer to the sea, in the center of the great plain of Argos, and upon the only hillock which there affords any natural scope for fortification. Instead of the square, or at least hewn, well-fitted blocks of Mycenæ, we have here the older style of rude masses piled together as best they would fit, the interstices being filled up with smaller fragments. This is essentially cyclopean building. There is a smaller fort, of rectangular shape, on the southern and highest part of the oblong hillock, the whole of which is surrounded by a lower wall, which takes in both this and the northern longer part of the ridge. It looks, in fact, like a hill-fort, with a large inclosure for cattle around it. Just below the northeast angle of the inner fort, and where the lower circuit is about to leave it, there is an entrance, with a massive projection of huge stones, looking like a square tower, on its right side, so as to defend it from attack. The most remarkable feature in the walls are the covered galleries, constructed within them at the southeast angle. The whole thickness of the wall is often over twenty feet, and in the center a rude arched way is made--or rather, I believe, two parallel ways; but the inner gallery has fallen in, and is almost untraceable--and this merely by piling together the great stones so as to leave an opening, which narrows at the top in the form of a Gothic arch. Within the passage, there are five niches in the outer side, made of rude arches in the same way as the main passage. The length of the gallery I measured, and found it twenty-five yards, at the end of which it is regularly walled up, so that it evidently did not run all the way round. The niches are now no longer open, but seem to have been once windows, or at least to have had some lookout points into the hill country. It is remarkable that, altho the walls are made of perfectly rude stones, the builders have managed to use so many smooth surfaces looking outward, that the face of the wall seems quite clean and well built. At the southeast corner of the higher and inner fort, we found a large block of red granite, quite different from the rough, gray stone of the building, with its surface square and smooth, and all the four sides neatly beveled, like the portal stones at the treasury of Atreus. I found two other similar blocks close by, which were likewise cut smooth on the surface. The intention of these stones we could not guess, but they show that some ornament, and some more finished work, must have once existed in the inner fort. Tho both the main entrances have massive towers of stone raised on their right, there is a small postern at the opposite or west side, not more than four feet wide, which has no defenses whatever, and is a mere hole in the wall. The whole ruin is covered in summer with thistles, such as English people can hardly imagine. The needles at the points of the leaves are fully an inch long, extremely fine and strong, and sharper than any two-edged sword. No clothes except a leather dress can resist them. They pierce everywhere with the most stinging pain, and make antiquarian research in this famous spot a veritable martyrdom, which can only be supported by a very burning thirst for knowledge, or the sure hope of future fame. The rough masses of stone are so loose that one's footing is insecure, and when the traveler loses his balance, and falls among the thistles, he will wish that he had gone to Jericho instead, or even fallen among thieves on the way. It is impossible to approach Mycenæ from any side without being struck with the picturesqueness of the site. If you come down over the mountains from Corinth, as soon as you reach the head of the valley of the Inachus, which is the plain of Argos, you turn aside to the left, or east, into a secluded corner--"a recess of the horse-feeding Argos," as Homer calls it--and then you find on the edge of the valley, and where the hills begin to rise one behind the other, the village of Charváti. When you ascend from this place, you find that the lofty Mount Elias is separated from the plain by two nearly parallel waves of land, which are indeed joined at the northern end by a curving saddle, but elsewhere are divided by deep gorges. The loftier and shorter wave forms the rocky citadel of Mycenæ--the Argion, as it was once called. I need not attempt a fresh description of the Great Treasury. It is in no sense a rude building, or one of a helpless and barbarous age, but, on the contrary, the product of enormous appliances, and of a perfect knowledge of all the mechanical requirements for any building, if we except the application of the arch. The stones are hewn square, or curved to form the circular dome within, with admirable exactness. Above the enormous lintel-stone, nearly twenty-seven feet long, and which is doubly grooved, by way of ornament, all along its edge over the doorway, there is now a triangular window or aperture, which was certainly filled with some artistic carving like the analogous space over the lintel in the gate of the Acropolis. Shortly after Lord Elgin had cleared the entrance, Gell and Dodwell found various pieces of green and red marble carved with geometrical patterns, some of which are reproduced in Dodwell's book. Gell also found some fragments in a neighboring chapel, and others are said to be built into a wall at Nauplia. There are supposed to have been short columns standing on each side in front of the gate, with some ornament surmounting them; but this seems to me to rest on doubtful evidence, and on theoretical reconstruction. Dr. Schliemann, however, asserts them to have been found at the entrance of the second treasury which Mrs. Schliemann excavated, tho his account is somewhat vague. There is the strongest architectural reason for the triangular aperture over the door, as it diminishes the enormous weight to be borne by the lintel; and here, no doubt, some ornament very like lions on the other gate may have been applied. There has been much controversy about the use to which this building was applied, and we can not now attempt to change the name, even if we could prove its absurdity. Pausanias, who saw Mycenæ in the second century A.D., found it in much the same state as we do, and was no better informed than we, tho he tells us the popular belief that this and its fellows were treasure-houses like that of the Minyæ at Orchomenus, which was very much greater, and was, in his opinion, one of the most wonderful things in all Greece. Standing at the entrance, you look out upon the scattered masonry of the walls of Mycenæ, on the hillock over against you. Close behind this is a dark and solemn chain of mountains. The view is narrow and confined, and faces the north, so that, for most of the day, the gate is dark and in shadow. We can conceive no fitter place for the burial of a king, within sight of his citadel, in the heart of a deep natural hillock, with a great solemn portal symbolizing the resistless strength of the barrier which he had passed into an unknown land. But one more remark seems necessary. This treasure-house is by no means a Greek building in its features. It has the same perfection of construction which can be seen at Eleutheræ, or any other Greek fort, but still the really analogous buildings are to be found in far distant lands--in the raths of Ireland, and the barrows of the Crimea. "And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, Land of lost gods and godlike men, are thou! Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, Proclaim thee Nature's varied favourite now: Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface bow, Commingling slowly with heroic earth, Broke by the share of every rustic plough: "Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild: Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, Thine olives ripe as when Minerva smiled, And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields; There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air; Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare; Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair." --From Byron's "Childe Harold." IX THE GREEK ISLANDS A TOUR OF CRETE[61] BY BAYARD TAYLOR Crete lies between the parallels of 35 degrees and 36 degrees, not much farther removed from Africa than from Europe, and its climate, consequently, is intermediate between that of Greece and that of Alexandria. In the morning it was already visible, altho some thirty miles distant, the magnificent snowy mass of the White Mountains gleaming before us, under a bank of clouds. By ten o'clock, the long blue line of the coast broke into irregular points, the Dictynnæan promontory and that of Akroteri thrusting themselves out toward us so as to give an amphitheatric character to that part of the island we were approaching, while the broad, snowy dome of the Cretan Ida, standing alone, far to the east, floated in a sea of soft, golden light. The White Mountains were completely enveloped in snow to a distance of 4,000 feet below their summits, and scarcely a rock pierced the luminous covering. The shores of the Gulf of Khania, retaining their amphitheatric form, rose gradually from the water, a rich panorama of wheat-fields, vineyards and olive groves, crowded with sparkling villages, while Khania, in the center, grew into distinctness--a picturesque jumble of mosques, old Venetian arches and walls, pink and yellow buildings, and palm trees. The character of the scene was Syrian rather than Greek, being altogether richer and warmer than anything in Greece. Khania occupies the site of the ancient Cydonia, by which name the Greek bishopric is still called. The Venetian city was founded in 1252, and any remnants of the older town which may have then remained, were quite obliterated by it. The only ruins now are those of Venetian churches, some of which have been converted into mosques, and a number of immense arched vaults, opening on the harbor, built to shelter the galleys of the Republic. Just beyond the point on which stands the Serai, I counted fifteen of these, side by side, eleven of which are still entire. A little further, there are three more, but all are choked up with sand, and of no present use. The modern town is an exact picture of a Syrian seaport, with its narrow, crooked streets, shaded bazaars, and turbaned merchants. Its population is 9,500, including the garrison, according to a census just completed at the time of our visit. It is walled, and the gates are closed during the night.... Passing through the large Turkish cemetery, which was covered with an early crop of blue anemones, we came upon the rich plain of Khania, lying broad and fair, like a superb garden, at the foot of the White Mountains, whose vast masses of shining snow filled up the entire southern heaven. Eastward, the plain slopes to the deep Bay of Suda, whose surface shone blue above the silvery line of the olive groves; while, sixty miles away, rising high above the intermediate headlands, the solitary peak of Mount Ida, bathed in a warm afternoon glow, gleamed like an Olympian mount, not only the birthplace, but the throne of immortal Jove. Immense olive trees from the dark-red, fertile earth; cypresses and the canopied Italian pine interrupted their gray monotony, and every garden hung the golden lamps of its oranges over the wall. The plain is a paradise of fruitfulness.... In the morning, the horses were brought to us at an early hour, in charge of a jolly old officer of gendarmes, who was to accompany us. As far as the village of Kalepa, there is a carriage road; afterward, only a stony path. From the spinal ridge of the promontory, which we crossed, we overlooked all the plain of Khania, and beyond the Dictynnæan peninsula, to the western extremity of Crete. The White Mountains, tho less than seven thousand, feet in height, deceive the eye by the contrast between their spotless snows and the summer at their base, and seem to rival the Alps. The day was cloudless and balmy; birds sang on every tree, and the grassy hollows were starred with anemones, white, pink, violet and crimson. It was the first breath of the southern spring, after a winter which had been as terrible for Crete as for Greece. After a ride of three hours, we reached a broad valley, at the foot of that barren mountain mass in which the promontory terminates. To the eastward we saw the large monastery of Agia Triada (the Holy Trinity), overlooking its fat sweep of vine and olive land.... In the deep, dry mountain glen which we entered, I found numbers of carob-trees. Rocks of dark-blue limestone, stained with bright orange oxydations, overhung us as we followed the track of a torrent upward into the heart of this bleak region, where, surrounded by the hot, arid peaks, is the Monastery of Governato. We descended on foot to the Monastery of Katholiko, which we reached in half an hour. Its situation is like that of San Saba in Palestine, at the bottom of a split in the stony hills, and the sun rarely shines upon it. Steps cut in the rock lead down the face of the precipice to the deserted monastery, near which is a cavern 500 feet long, leading into the rock. The ravine is spanned by an arch, nearly fifty feet high. At Agia Triada, as we rode up the stately avenue of cypresses, between vineyards and almond trees in blossom, servants advanced to take our horses, and the abbot shouted, "Welcome," from the top of the steps. We were ushered into a clean room, furnished with a tolerable library of orthodox volumes. A boy of fifteen, with a face like the young Raphael, brought us glasses of a rich, dark wine, something like port, some jelly and coffee. The size and substantial character of this monastery attests its wealth, no less than the flourishing appearance of the lands belonging to it. Its large courtyard is shaded with vine-bowers and orange trees, and the chapel in the center has a façade supported by Doric columns. THE COLOSSAL RUINS OF CNOSSOS[62] BY PHILIP S. MARDEN The ruins [of the Cnossos palace] lie at the east of the high road, in a deep valley. Their excavation has been very complete and satisfactory, and while some restorations have been attempted here and there, chiefly because of absolute necessity to preserve portions of the structure, they are not such restorations as to jar on one, but exhibit a fidelity to tradition that saves them from the common fate of such efforts. Little or no retouching was necessary in the case of the stupendous flights of steps that were found leading up to the door of this prehistoric royal residence, and which are the first of the many sights the visitor of to-day may see. It is in the so-called "throne room of Minos" that the restoring hand is first met. Here it has been found necessary to provide a roof, that damage by weather be avoided; and to-day the throne room is a dusky spot, rather below the general level of the place. Its chief treasure is the throne itself, a stone chair, carved in rather rudimentary ornamentation, and about the size of an ordinary chair. The roof is supported by the curious, top-heavy-looking stone pillars, that are known to have prevailed not only in the Minoan but in Mycenæan period; monoliths noticeably larger at the top than at the bottom, reversing the usual form of stone pillar with which later ages have made us more familiar. This quite illogical inversion of what we now regard as the proper form has been accounted for in theory, by assuming that it was the natural successor of the sharpened wooden stake. When the ancients adopted stone supports for their roofs, they simply took over the forms they had been familiar with in the former use of wood, and the result was a stone pillar that copied the earlier wooden one in shape. Time, of course, served to show that the natural way of building demanded the reversal of this custom; but in the Mycenæan age it had not been discovered, for there are evidences that similar pillars existed in buildings of that period, and the representation of a pillar that stands between the two lions on Mycenæ's famous gate has this inverted form. Many hours may be spent in detailed examination of this colossal ruin, testifying to what must have been in its day an enormous and impressive palace. One can not go far in traversing it without noticing the traces still evident enough of the fire that obviously destroyed it many hundred, if not several thousand, years before Christ. Along the western side have been discovered long corridors, from which scores of long and narrow rooms were to be entered. These, in the published plans, serve to give to the ruin a large share of its labyrinthine character. It seems to be agreed now that these were the storerooms of the palace, and in them may still be seen the huge earthen jars which once served to contain the palace supplies. Long rows of them stand in the ancient hallways and in the narrow cells that lead off them, each jar large enough to hold a fair-sized man, and in number sufficient to have accommodated Ali Baba and the immortal forty thieves. In the center of the palace little remains; but in the southeastern corner, where the land begins to slope abruptly to the valley below, there are to be seen several stories of the ancient building. Here one comes upon the rooms marked with the so-called "distaff" pattern, supposed to indicate that they were the women's quarters. The restorer has been busy here, but not offensively so. Much of the ancient wall is intact, and in one place is a bathroom with a very diminutive bathtub still in place. Along the eastern side is also shown the oil press, where olives were once made to yield their coveted juices, and from the press proper a stone gutter conducted the fluid down to the point where jars were placed to receive it. This discovery of oil presses in ancient buildings, by the way, has served in more than one case to arouse speculation as to the antiquity of oil lamps such as were once supposed to belong only to a much later epoch. Whether in the Minoan days they had such lamps or not, it is known that they had at least an oil press and a good one. In the side of the hill below the main palace of Minos has been unearthed a smaller structure, which they now call the "villa," and in which several terraces, have been uncovered rather similar to the larger building above. Here is another throne room, cunningly contrived to be lighted by a long shaft of light from above falling on the seat of justice itself, while the rest of the room is in obscurity. It may be that it requires a stretch of the imagination to compare the palace of Cnossos with Troy, but nevertheless there are one or two features that seem not unlike the discoveries made by Dr. Schliemann on that famous site. Notably so, it seems to me, are the traces of the final fire, which are to be seen at Cnossos as at Troy, and the huge jars, which may be compared with the receptacles the Trojan excavators unearthed, and found still to contain dried peas and other things that the Trojans left behind when they fled from their sacked and burning city. Few are privileged to visit the site of Priam's city, which is hard, indeed, to reach; but it is easy enough to make the excursion to Candia and visit the palace of old King Minos, which is amply worth the trouble, besides giving a glimpse of a civilization that is possibly vastly older than even that of Troy and Mycenæ. For those who reverence the great antiquities, Candia and its pre-classic suburb are distinctly worth visiting, and are unique among the sights of the ancient Hellenic and pre-Hellenic world. CORFU[63] BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN From whichever side our traveler draws near to Corfu, he comes from lands where Greek influence and Greek colonization spread in ancient times, but from which the Greek elements have been gradually driven out, partly by the barbarism of the East, partly by the rival civilization of the West. The land which we see is Hellenic in a sense in which not even Sicily, not even the Great Hellas of Southern Italy, much less than the Dalmatian archipelago, ever became Hellenic. Prom the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra,[64] it is not merely a land fringed by Hellenic colonies; it is a Hellenic island, the dominion of a single Hellenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually Hellenic or so thoroughly hellenized that no one thought of calling their Hellenic position in question. Modern policy has restored it to its old position by making it an integral portion of the modern Greek kingdom. To the south of the present town, connected with it by a favorite walk of the inhabitants of Corfu, a long and broad peninsula stretches boldly into the sea. Both from land and from sea, it chiefly strikes the eye as a wooded mass, thickly covered with the aged olive trees which form so marked a feature in the scenery of the island. A few houses skirt the base, growing on the land side into the suburb of Kastrades, which may pass for a kind of connecting link between the old and the new city. And from the midst of the wood, on the side nearest to the modern town, stands out the villa of the King of the Greeks, the chief modern dwelling on the site of ancient Korkyra. This peninsular hill, still known as Palaiopolis, was the site of the old Corinthian city whose name is so familiar to every reader of Thucydides. On either side of it lies one of its two forsaken harbors. Between the old and the new city lies the so-called harbor of Alkinoos; beyond the peninsula, stretching far inland, lies the old Hyllaic harbor, bearing the name of one of the three tribes which seem to have been essential to the being of a Dorian commonwealth.... This last is the Corfu whose fate seems to have been to become the possession of every power which has ruled in that quarter of the world, with one exception. For fourteen hundred years the history of the island is the history of endless changes of masters. We see it first a nominal ally, then a direct possession, of Rome and of Constantinople; we then see it formed into a separate Byzantine principality, conquered by the Norman lord of Sicily, again a possession of the Empire, then a momentary possession of Venice, again a possession of the Sicilian kingdom under its Angevin kings, till at last it came back to Venetian rule, and abode for four hundred years under the Lion of Saint Mark. Then it became part of that first strange Septinsular Republic of which the Czar was to be the protector and the Sultan the overlord. Then it was a possession of France; then a member of the second Septinsular Republic under the hardly disguised sovereignty of England; now at last it is the most distant, but one of the most valuable, of the provinces of the modern Greek kingdom. Of the modern city there is but little to say. As becomes a city which was so long a Venetian possession, the older part of it has much of the character of an Italian town. It is rich in street arcades; but they present but few architectural features; and we find none of those various forms of ornamental window so common, not only in Venice and Verona, but in Spalato, Cattaro, and Traü. The churches in the modern city are architecturally worthless. They are interesting so far as they will give to many their first impression of orthodox arrangement and orthodox ritual. The few ecclesiastical antiquities of the place belong to the elder city. The suburb of the lower slope of the hill contains three churches, all of them small, but each of which has an interest of its own. RHODES[65] BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER Coming on deck the next morning at the fresh hour of sunrise, I found we were at Rhodes. We lay just off the semicircular harbor, which is clasped by walls--partly shaken down by earthquakes--which have noble, round towers at each embracing end. Rhodes is, from the sea, one of the most picturesque cities in the Mediterranean, altho it has little remains of that ancient splendor which caused Strabo to prefer it to Rome or Alexandria. The harbor wall, which is flanked on each side by stout and round, stone windmills, extends up the hill, and becoming double, surrounds the old town; these massive fortifications of the Knights of St. John have withstood the onsets of enemies and the tremors of the earth, and, with the ancient moat, excite the curiosity of this so-called peaceful age of iron-clads and monster cannon. The city ascends the slope of the hill and passes beyond the wall. Outside and on the right toward the sea are a picturesque group of a couple of dozen stone windmills, and some minarets and a church-tower or two. Higher up the hill is sprinkled a little foliage, a few mulberry trees, and an isolated palm or two; and, beyond, the island is only a mass of broken, bold, rocky mountains. Of its forty-five miles of length, running southwesterly from the little point on which the city stands, we can see but little. Whether or not Rhodes emerged from the sea at the command of Apollo, the Greeks exprest by this tradition of its origin their appreciation of its gracious climate, fertile soil, and exquisite scenery. From remote antiquity it had fame as a seat of arts and letters, and of a vigorous maritime power, and the romance of its early centuries was equaled if not surpassed when it became the residence of the Knights of St. John. I believe that the first impress of its civilization was given by the Phoenicians; it was the home of the Dorian race before the time of the Trojan War, and its three cities were members of the Dorian Hexapolis; it was, in fact, a flourishing maritime confederacy strong enough to send colonies to the distant Italian coast, and Sybaris and Parthenope (modern Naples) perpetuated the luxurious refinement of their founders. The city of Rhodes itself was founded about four hundred years before Christ, and the splendor of its palaces, its statues and paintings gave it a pre-eminence among the most magnificent cities of the ancient world. If the earth of this island could be made to yield its buried treasures as Cyprus has, we should doubtless have new proofs of the influence of Asiatic civilization upon the Greeks, and be able to trace in the early Doric arts and customs the superior civilization of the Phoenicians, and of the masters of the latter in science and art, the Egyptians. Naturally, every traveler who enters the harbor of Rhodes hopes to see the site of one of the seven wonders of the world, the Colossus. He is free to place it on either mole at the entrance of the harbor, but he comprehends at once that a statue which was only one hundred and five feet high could never have extended its legs across the port. The fame of this colossal bronze statue of the sun is disproportioned to the period of its existence; it stood only fifty-six years after its erection, being shaken down by an earthquake in the year 224 B.C., and encumbering the ground with its fragments till the advent of the Moslem conquerors. Passing from the quay through a highly ornamented Gothic gateway, we ascended the famous historic street, still called the Street of the Knights, the massive houses of which have withstood the shocks of earthquakes and the devastation of Saracenic and Turkish occupation. This street, of whose palaces we have heard so much, is not imposing; it is not wide, its solid stone houses are only two stories high, and their fronts are now disfigured by cheap Arab balconies; but the façades are gray with age. All along are remains of carved windows. Gothic sculptured doorways and shields and coats of arms, crosses and armorial legends, are set in the walls, partially defaced by time and the respect of Suleiman for the Knights, have spared the mementos of their faith and prowess. I saw no inscriptions that are intact, but made out upon one shield the words "voluntas mei est." The carving is all beautiful. We went through the silent streets, waking only echoes of the past, out to the ruins of the once elegant church of St. John, which was shaken down by a powder-explosion some thirty years ago, and utterly flattened by an earthquake some years afterward. Outside the ramparts we met, and saluted, with the freedom of travelers, a gorgeous Turk who was taking the morning air, and whom our guide in bated breath said was the governor. In this part of the town is the Mosque of Suleiman; in the portal are two lovely marble columns, rich with age; the lintels are exquisitely carved with flowers, arms, casques, musical instruments, the crossed sword and the torch, and the mandolin, perhaps the emblem of some troubadour knight. Wherever we went we found bits of old carving, remains of columns, sections of battlemented roofs. The town is saturated with the old Knights. Near the mosque is a foundation of charity, a public kitchen, at which the poor were fed or were free to come and cook their food; it is in decay now, and the rooks were sailing about its old, round-topped chimneys. There are no Hellenic remains in the city, and the only remembrance of that past which we searched for was the antique coin, which has upon one side the head of Medusa and upon the other the rose (rhoda) which gave the town its name. The town was quiet; but in pursuit of this coin in the Jews' quarter we started up swarms of traders, were sent from Isaac to Jacob, and invaded dark shops and private houses where Jewish women and children were just beginning to complain of the morning light. Our guide was a jolly Greek, who was willing to awaken the whole town in search of a silver coin. The traders, when we had routed them out, had little to show in the way of antiquities. Perhaps the best representative of the modern manufactures of Rhodes is the wooden shoe, which is in form like the Damascus clog, but is inlaid with more taste. The people whom we encountered in our morning walk were Greeks or Jews. The morning atmosphere was delicious, and we could well believe that the climate of Rhodes is the finest in the Mediterranean, and also that it is the least exciting of cities. MT. ATHOS[66] BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER Beyond Thasos is the Thracian coast and Mt. Pangaus, and at the foot of it Philippi, the Macedonian town where republican Rome fought its last battle, where Cassius leaned upon his sword-point, believing everything lost. Brutus transported the body of his comrade to Thasos and raised for him a funeral pyre; and twenty days later, on the same field, met again that specter of death which had summoned him to Philippi. It was not many years after this victory of the Imperial power that a greater triumph was won at Philippi, when Paul and Silas, cast into prison, sang praises unto God at midnight, and an earthquake shook the house and opened the prison doors. In the afternoon we came in sight of snowy Mt. Athos, an almost perpendicular limestone rock, rising nearly six thousand four hundred feet out of the sea. The slender promontory which this magnificent mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth of four miles. The ancient canal of Xerxes quite severed it from the mainland. The peninsula, level at the canal, is a jagged stretch of mountains (seamed by chasms), which rise a thousand, two thousand, four thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos, the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents, yearly, from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these religious houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an almost complete independence, and preserved in their primitive simplicity the manners and usages of the earliest foundations. Here, as nowhere else in Europe or Asia, can one behold the architecture, the dress, the habits of the Middle Ages. The good devotees have been able to keep themselves thus in the darkness and simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion of the sex always impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of the world are due. No woman, from the beginning till now, has ever been permitted to set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, tho I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to a point that destroys their value even as spiritual tabernacles. The united community is permitted to keep a guard of fifty Christian soldiers, and the only Moslem on the island is the solitary Turkish officer who represents the Sultan; his position can not be one generally coveted by the Turks, since the society of women is absolutely denied him. The libraries of Mt. Athos are full of unarranged manuscripts, which are probably mainly filled with the theologic rubbish of the controversial ages, and can scarcely be expected to yield again anything so valuable as the Tishendorf Scriptures. At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the buildings of the Laura Convent, amid the woods beneath the frowning cliff. And now was produced the apparition of a sunset, with this towering mountain cone for a centerpiece, that surpassed all our experience and imagination. The sea was like satin for smoothness, absolutely waveless, and shone with the colors of changeable silk, blue, green, pink, and amethyst. Heavy clouds gathered about the sun, and from behind them he exhibited burning spectacles, magnificent fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes--one a gigantic cat with a preternatural tail, a cat of doom four degrees long. All this was piled about Mt. Athos, with its sharp summit of snow, its dark sides of rock. FOOTNOTES: [1] From "Pictures from Italy." Dickens made his trip to Italy in 1844. [2] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. Translated by John Durand. [3] Begun in 1386. Its architects were Germans and Frenchmen. [4] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. Translated by John Durand. [5] From "The Story of Pisa." Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. [6] From "Pictures From Italy." [7] From "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily." [8] From "Travels in Italy." [9] A German friend with whom Goethe was traveling. [10] From "Pictures from Italy." [11] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. Translated by John Durand. [12] This term designates a road built along the rocky shore of a seaside, being a figurative application of the architectural term "cornice."--Translator's note. [13] From "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily." [14] From a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, written in 1819. [15] From "Pictures from Italy." [16] From "Journeys in Italy." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902. [17] The memoir writer. [18] From "Journeys in Italy." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902. [19] From "Unknown Switzerland." Published by James Pott & Co. Politically, Lake Lugano is part Swiss and part Italian. [20] The St. Gothard. [21] From a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, written in 1818. [22] From "The Spell of the Italian Lakes." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L. C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1907. [23] From "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703." [24] In the town are now about 1,500 people; in the whole territory of the republic, 9,500. San Marino lies about fourteen miles southwest from Rimini. [25] At the present time, fourteen hundred years; so that San Marino is the oldest as well as the smallest republic in the world. [26] From "French and Italian Note-Books." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, Houghton, Mifflin Co., publishers of Hawthorne's works. Copyright, 1871, 1883, 1889. [27] The author's son, Julian Hawthorne. [28] From "Italian Cities." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1900. [29] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. [30] From "Historical and Architectural Sketches: Chiefly Italian." Published by the Macmillan Co. [31] From "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily." [32] From "Letters of a Traveler." [33] From "Historical and Architectural Sketches: Chiefly Italian." Published by the Macmillan Co. [34] From "Sicily: The Garden of the Mediterranean." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L. C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1909. [35] From "The History of Sicily." Published by the Macmillan Co. [36] The Greek name for Girgenti. [37] From "Travels in Italy." [38] From "Travels in Italy." [39] From "Sicily: The Garden of the Mediterranean." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L. C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1909. [40] From "Vacation Days in Greece." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1903. [41] From "Constantinople." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1875. [42] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [43] From "Travels in Greece and Russia." Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. [44] From the "Description of Greece." Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer who lived in the second century A.D.--in the time of the Roman emperors, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. [45] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [46] The Venetian commander who bombarded the Parthenon in 1687. [47] Edward Dodwell (1767-1832), an English traveler and archeologist, notable for his investigations in Greece when it had been little explored, and author of various records of his work.--Author's note. [48] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [49] This very pattern, in mahogany, with cane seats, and adapted, like all Greek chairs, for loose cushions, was often used in Chippendale work, and may still be found in old mansions furnished at that epoch.--Author's note. [50] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [51] From "Travels in Greece and Russia." Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. [52] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [53] From "Greece and the Aegean Islands." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1907. [54] From the "Description of Greece." Pausanias wrote in the time of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. [55] From "Vacation Days in Greece." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1903. [56] From "In the Levant." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1875. Salonica, formerly Turkish territory, was added to the territory of Greece in 1913, under the terms of the treaty of peace that followed the Balkan war against Turkey. [57] From "In the Levant." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1875. [58] From "Travels in Greece and Russia." Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. [59] From "Travels in Greece and Russia," Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. [60] From "Rambles and Studies in Greece." Published by the Macmillan Co. [61] From "Travels in Greece and Russia." Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. [62] From "Greece and the Ægean Islands." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1907. [63] From "Sketches from the Subject and Neighbor Lands of Venice." Published by the Macmillan Co. [64] The ancient Greek name of Corfu. [65] From "In the Levant." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1876. [66] From "In the Levant." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1876. As one of the results of the Balkan war of 1912-1913, Mt. Athos, which had formerly been under Turkish rule, was added to the territory of Greece. Nature made Mt. Athos a part of the mainland, but a canal was cut by Xerxes across the lowland at the base of the lofty promontory, making it an island. Some parts of this canal still remain. 
2311	----	Travels Through France And Italy By Tobias Smollett INTRODUCTION By Thomas Seccombe I Many pens have been burnished this year of grace for the purpose of celebrating with befitting honour the second centenary of the birth of Henry Fielding; but it is more than doubtful if, when the right date occurs in March 1921, anything like the same alacrity will be shown to commemorate one who was for many years, and by such judges as Scott, Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens, considered Fielding's complement and absolute co-equal (to say the least) in literary achievement. Smollett's fame, indeed, seems to have fallen upon an unprosperous curve. The coarseness of his fortunate rival is condoned, while his is condemned without appeal. Smollett's value is assessed without discrimination at that of his least worthy productions, and the historical value of his work as a prime modeller of all kinds of new literary material is overlooked. Consider for a moment as not wholly unworthy of attention his mere versatility as a man of letters. Apart from Roderick Random and its successors, which gave him a European fame, he wrote a standard history, and a standard version of Don Quixote (both of which held their ground against all comers for over a century). He created both satirical and romantic types, he wrote two fine-spirited lyrics, and launched the best Review and most popular magazine of his day. He was the centre of a literary group, the founder to some extent of a school of professional writers, of which strange and novel class, after the "Great Cham of Literature," as he called Dr. Johnson, he affords one of the first satisfactory specimens upon a fairly large scale. He is, indeed, a more satisfactory, because a more independent, example of the new species than the Great Cham himself. The late Professor Beljame has shown us how the milieu was created in which, with no subvention, whether from a patron, a theatre, a political paymaster, a prosperous newspaper or a fashionable subscription-list, an independent writer of the mid-eighteenth century, provided that he was competent, could begin to extort something more than a bare subsistence from the reluctant coffers of the London booksellers. For the purpose of such a demonstration no better illustration could possibly be found, I think, than the career of Dr. Tobias Smollett. And yet, curiously enough, in the collection of critical monographs so well known under the generic title of "English Men of Letters"--a series, by the way, which includes Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Edgeworth--no room or place has hitherto been found for Smollett any more than for Ben Jonson, both of them, surely, considerable Men of Letters in the very strictest and most representative sense of the term. Both Jonson and Smollett were to an unusual extent centres of the literary life of their time; and if the great Ben had his tribe of imitators and adulators, Dr. Toby also had his clan of sub-authors, delineated for us by a master hand in the pages of Humphry Clinker. To make Fielding the centre-piece of a group reflecting the literature of his day would be an artistic impossibility. It would be perfectly easy in the case of Smollett, who was descried by critics from afar as a Colossus bestriding the summit of the contemporary Parnassus. Whatever there may be of truth in these observations upon the eclipse of a once magical name applies with double force to that one of all Smollett's books which has sunk farthest in popular disesteem. Modern editors have gone to the length of excommunicating Smollett's Travels altogether from the fellowship of his Collective Works. Critic has followed critic in denouncing the book as that of a "splenetic" invalid. And yet it is a book for which all English readers have cause to be grateful, not only as a document on Smollett and his times, not only as being in a sense the raison d'etre of the Sentimental Journey, and the precursor in a very special sense of Humphry Clinker, but also as being intrinsically an uncommonly readable book, and even, I venture to assert, in many respects one of Smollett's best. Portions of the work exhibit literary quality of a high order: as a whole it represents a valuable because a rather uncommon view, and as a literary record of travel it is distinguished by a very exceptional veracity. I am not prepared to define the differentia of a really first-rate book of travel. Sympathy is important; but not indispensable, or Smollett would be ruled out of court at once. Scientific knowledge, keen observation, or intuitive power of discrimination go far. To enlist our curiosity or enthusiasm or to excite our wonder are even stronger recommendations. Charm of personal manner, power of will, anthropological interest, self-effacement in view of some great objects--all these qualities have made travel-books live. One knows pretty nearly the books that one is prepared to re-read in this department of literature. Marco Polo, Herodotus, a few sections in Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the early travellers in Palestine, Commodore Byron's Travels, Curzon and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Mungo Park, Dubois, Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of Borrow (fact or fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace, The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine, The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is good reason to hope, is only one of suspended animation. To come to surer ground, it is a fact worth noting that each of the four great prose masters of the third quarter of the eighteenth century tried his hand at a personal record of travel. Fielding came first in 1754 with his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Twelve years later was published Smollett's Travels through France and Italy. Then, in 1768, Sterne's Sentimental Journey; followed in 1775 by Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides. Each of the four--in which beneath the apparel of the man of letters we can discern respectively the characteristics of police magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist--enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in its day. Fielding's Journal had perhaps the least immediate success of the four. Sterne's Journey unquestionably had the most. The tenant of "Shandy Hall," as was customary in the first heyday of "Anglomania," went to Paris to ratify his successes, and the resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this particular "judicium Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity of the "Ossianite" press, it fully justified the assumption of the booksellers that it would prove a "sound" book. It is full of sensible observations, and is written in Johnson's most scholarly, balanced, and dignified style. Few can read it without a sense of being repaid, if only by the portentous sentence in which the author celebrates his arrival at the shores of Loch Ness, where he reposes upon "a bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign," and reflects that a "uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the understanding." Fielding's contribution to geography has far less solidity and importance, but it discovers to not a few readers an unfeigned charm that is not to be found in the pages of either Sterne or Johnson. A thoughtless fragment suffices to show the writer in his true colours as one of the most delightful fellows in our literature, and to convey just unmistakably to all good men and true the rare and priceless sense of human fellowship. There remain the Travels through France and Italy, by T. Smollett, M.D., and though these may not exhibit the marmoreal glamour of Johnson, or the intimate fascination of Fielding, or the essential literary quality which permeates the subtle dialogue and artful vignette of Sterne, yet I shall endeavour to show, not without some hope of success among the fair-minded, that the Travels before us are fully deserving of a place, and that not the least significant, in the quartette. The temporary eclipse of their fame I attribute, first to the studious depreciation of Sterne and Walpole, and secondly to a refinement of snobbishness on the part of the travelling crowd, who have an uneasy consciousness that to listen to common sense, such as Smollett's, in matters of connoisseurship, is tantamount to confessing oneself a Galilean of the outermost court. In this connection, too, the itinerant divine gave the travelling doctor a very nasty fall. Meeting the latter at Turin, just as Smollett was about to turn his face homewards, in March 1765, Sterne wrote of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus: "The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote later on, "in the grand portico of the Pantheon--he was just coming out of it. ''Tis nothing but a huge cockpit,' said he--'I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de Medici,' replied I--for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet, without the least provocation in nature. I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures had he to tell, 'wherein he spoke of moving accidents by flood and field, and of the cannibals which each other eat, the Anthropophagi'; he had been flayed alive, and bedevil'd, and used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at. 'I'll tell it,' cried Smelfungus, 'to the world.' 'You had better tell it,' said I, 'to your physician.'" To counteract the ill effects of "spleen and jaundice" and exhibit the spirit of genteel humour and universal benevolence in which a man of sensibility encountered the discomforts of the road, the incorrigible parson Laurence brought out his own Sentimental Journey. Another effect of Smollett's book was to whet his own appetite for recording the adventures of the open road. So that but for Travels through France and Italy we might have had neither a Sentimental Journey nor a Humphry Clinker. If all the admirers of these two books would but bestir themselves and look into the matter, I am sure that Sterne's only too clever assault would be relegated to its proper place and assessed at its right value as a mere boutade. The borrowed contempt of Horace Walpole and the coterie of superficial dilettanti, from which Smollett's book has somehow never wholly recovered, could then easily be outflanked and the Travels might well be in reasonable expectation of coming by their own again. II In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the special and somewhat exceptional conditions under which the Travel Letters of Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have seen, was one of the first professional men of all work in letters upon a considerable scale who subsisted entirely upon the earnings of his own pen. He had no extraneous means of support. He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment, inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the burden of a large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people whose social ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett suffered considerably on account of these novel aspirations of his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity. Voltaire was the only figure in the eighteenth century even to approach such a flattering position, and he was for many years a refugee from his own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage, menservants, and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty who had a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to maintain such a position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from year's end to year's end--was a truly Herculean task in days when a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually having recourse to loans. He produced the eight (or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer hard writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this cruel compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a magazine (The British), and a weekly political organ (The Briton). A charge of defamation for a paragraph in the nature of what would now be considered a very mild and pertinent piece of public criticism against a faineant admiral led to imprisonment in the King's Bench Prison, plus a fine of £100. Then came a quarrel with an old friend, Wilkes--not the least vexatious result of that forlorn championship of Bute's government in The Briton. And finally, in part, obviously, as a consequence of all this nervous breakdown, a succession of severe catarrhs, premonitory in his case of consumption, the serious illness of the wife he adored, and the death of his darling, the "little Boss" of former years, now on the verge of womanhood. To a man of his extraordinarily strong affections such a series of ills was too overwhelming. He resolved to break up his establishment at Chelsea, and to seek a remedy in flight from present evils to a foreign residence. Dickens went to hibernate on the Riviera upon a somewhat similar pretext, though fortunately without the same cause, as far as his health was concerned. Now note another very characteristic feature of these Travel Letters. Smollett went abroad not for pleasure, but virtually of necessity. Not only were circumstances at home proving rather too much for him, but also, like Stevenson, he was specifically "ordered South" by his physicians, and he went with the deliberate intention of making as much money as possible out of his Travel papers. In his case he wrote long letters on the spot to his medical and other friends at home. When he got back in the summer of 1765 one of his first cares was to put the Letters together. It had always been his intention carefully to revise them for the press. But when he got back to London he found so many other tasks awaiting him that were so far more pressing, that this part of his purpose was but very imperfectly carried out. The Letters appeared pretty much as he wrote them. Their social and documentary value is thereby considerably enhanced, for they were nearly all written close down to the facts. The original intention had been to go to Montpellier, which was still, I suppose, the most popular health resort in Southern Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this brings us to another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's Travels. Typical Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most Protestant period, and insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett had knocked about the world a good deal and had also seen something of the continent of Europe. He was not prepared to see everything couleur de rose now. His was quite unlike the frame of mind of the ordinary holiday-seeker, who, partly from a voluntary optimism, and partly from the change of food and habit, the exhilaration caused by novel surroundings, and timidity at the unaccustomed sounds he hears in his ears, is determined to be pleased with everything. Very temperamental was Smollett, and his frame of mind at the time was that of one determined to be pleased with nothing. We know little enough about Smollett intime. Only the other day I learned that the majority of so-called Smollett portraits are not presentments of the novelist at all, but ingeniously altered plates of George Washington. An interesting confirmation of this is to be found in the recently published Letters of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Robert Chambers. "Smollett wore black cloaths--a tall man--and extreamly handsome. No picture of him is known to be extant--all that have been foisted on the public as such his relations disclaim--this I know from my aunt Mrs. Smollett, who was the wife of his nephew, and resided with him at Bath." But one thing we do know, and in these same letters, if confirmation had been needed, we observe the statement repeated, namely, that Smollett was very peevish. A sardonic, satirical, and indeed decidedly gloomy mood or temper had become so habitual in him as to transform the man. Originally gay and debonnair, his native character had been so overlaid that when he first returned to Scotland in 1755 his own mother could not recognise him until he "gave over glooming" and put on his old bright smile. [A pleasant story of the Doctor's mother is given in the same Letters to R. Chambers (1904). She is described as an ill-natured-looking woman with a high nose, but not a bad temper, and very fond of the cards. One evening an Edinburgh bailie (who was a tallow chandler) paid her a visit. "Come awa', bailie," said she, "and tak' a trick at the cards." "Troth madam, I hae nae siller!" "Then let us play for a pound of candles."] His was certainly a nervous, irritable, and rather censorious temper. Like Mr. Brattle, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, he was thinking always of the evil things that had been done to him. With the pawky and philosophic Scots of his own day (Robertson, Hume, Adam Smith, and "Jupiter" Carlyle) he had little in common, but with the sour and mistrustful James Mill or the cross and querulous Carlyle of a later date he had, it seems to me, a good deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or liver, a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether dyspeptic or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see things through a veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He felt under no obligation whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a privilege of social distinction, or its discomforts as things to be discreetly ignored in relating his experience to the stay-at-home public. He was not the sort of man that the Tourist Agencies of to-day would select to frame their advertisements. As an advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he would have done well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic of travel is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means the case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his entry into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many heroes returned with conquest to their country, by which so many kings were led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms and States approached the seat of Empire, to deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman people."] or the enviable account of the alfresco meals which the party discussed in their coach as described in Letter VIII. As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one of his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience after this wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords equally disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish, and slothful; postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and impertinent. With this last class of delinquents after much experience he was bound to admit the following dilemma:--If you chide them for lingering, they will contrive to delay you the longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but leaves the expletives to our imagination) they will either disappear entirely, and leave you without resource, or they will find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The only course remaining would be to allow oneself to become the dupe of imposition by tipping the postillions an amount slightly in excess of the authorized gratification. He admits that in England once, between the Devizes and Bristol, he found this plan productive of the happiest results. It was unfortunate that, upon this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness of margin for incidental expenses should have debarred him from having recourse to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as Smollett himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey with much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the novelist was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel as an English Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every point to do it "on the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance or diligence, and insisted on travelling post and in a berline; but he could not bring himself to exceed the five-sou pourboire for the postillions. He would have meat upon maigre days, yet objected to paying double for it. He held aloof from the thirty-sou table d'hote, and would have been content to pay three francs a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were roused when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by nature anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I interpret him at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted, generous type of man. Like a majority, perhaps, of the really open-handed he shared one trait with the closefisted and even with the very mean rich. He would rather give away a crown than be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little of the traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among whom he was going--the Languedocians and Ligurians--were notorious for their nearness in money matters. The result of all this could hardly fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to aggravate the testiness which was due primarily to the bitterness of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign travel--a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods, the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more graphically or magisterially than they are in some of these chapters. Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and Dickens, Smollett was a connoisseur in inns and innkeepers. He knew good food and he knew good value, and he had a mighty keen eye for a rogue. There may, it is true, have been something in his manner which provoked them to exhibit their worst side to him. It is a common fate with angry men. The trials to which he was subjected were momentarily very severe, but, as we shall see in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to him. To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and vigorously by an expert man of letters. They were written ad vivum, as it were, not from worked-up notes or embellished recollections. They were written expressly for money down. They were written rather en noir than couleur de rose by an experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a disillusioned traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement that they were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of course, true, and explains much. The majority of his correspondents were of the medical profession, all of them were members of a group with whom he was very intimate, and the letters were by his special direction to be passed round among them. [We do not know precisely who all these correspondents of Smollett were, but most of them were evidently doctors and among them, without a doubt, John Armstrong, William Hunter, George Macaulay, and above all John Moore, himself an authority on European travel, Governor on the Grand Tour of the Duke of Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and father of the famous soldier. Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died 5th March 1763.] In the circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his original intention to prune the letters considerably before publication) it was only natural that he should say a good deal about the state of his health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to these good people had he not referred frequently and at some length to his spirits and to his symptoms, an improvement in which was the primary object of his journey and his two years' sojourn in the South. Readers who linger over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and Mrs. Fielding's toothache are inconsistent in denouncing the luxury of detail with which Smollett discusses the matter of his imposthume. What I claim for the present work is that, in the first place, to any one interested in Smollett's personality it supplies an unrivalled key. It is, moreover, the work of a scholar, an observer of human nature, and, by election, a satirist of no mean order. It gives us some characteristic social vignettes, some portraits of the road of an unsurpassed freshness and clearness. It contains some historical and geographical observations worthy of one of the shrewdest and most sagacious publicists of the day. It is interesting to the etymologist for the important share it has taken in naturalising useful foreign words into our speech. It includes (as we shall have occasion to observe) a respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become proverbial, and several passages of admirable literary quality. In point of date (1763-65) it is fortunate, for the writer just escaped being one of a crowd. On the whole, I maintain that it is more than equal in interest to the Journey to the Hebrides, and that it deserves a very considerable proportion of the praise that has hitherto been lavished too indiscriminately upon the Voyage to Lisbon. On the force of this claim the reader is invited to constitute himself judge after a fair perusal of the following pages. I shall attempt only to point the way to a satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally, amplifications of what Smollett has to tell us. III As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was almost broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763 with his wife, two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she acted as chaperon, and a faithful servant of twelve years' standing, who in the spirit of a Scots retainer of the olden time refused to leave his master (a good testimonial this, by the way, to a temper usually accredited with such a splenetic sourness), he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a change of climate and surroundings could do for him. On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the dust of Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, complaints which will remind the reader, perhaps, of George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the effect that he had been beslavered by the venomous foam of every sycophantic lacquey and unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms. But Smollett's griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer could inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was undertaken. The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom, but ze devil in ze bill"), and he grizzles lamentably over the seven guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth. Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris, Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition and the return journey to Boulogne en route for England, where the party arrive safe home in July 1765. Smollett's account of Boulogne is excellent reading, it forms an apt introduction to the narrative of his journey, it familiarises us with the milieu, and reveals to us in Smollett a man of experience who is both resolute and capable of getting below the surface of things. An English possession for a short period in the reign of the Great Harry, Boulogne has rarely been less in touch with England than it was at the time of Smollett's visit. Even then, however, there were three small colonies, respectively, of English nuns, English Jesuits, and English Jacobites. Apart from these and the English girls in French seminaries it was estimated ten years after Smollett's sojourn there that there were twenty-four English families in residence. The locality has of course always been a haunting place for the wandering tribes of English. Many well-known men have lived or died here both native and English. Adam Smith must have been there very soon after Smollett. So must Dr. John Moore and Charles Churchill, one of the enemies provoked by the Briton, who went to Boulogne to meet his friend Wilkes and died there in 1764. Philip Thicknesse the traveller and friend of Gainsborough died there in 1770. After long search for a place to end his days in Thomas Campbell bought a house in Boulogne and died there, a few months later, in 1844. The house is still to be seen, Rue St. Jean, within the old walls; it has undergone no change, and in 1900 a marble tablet was put up to record the fact that Campbell lived and died there. The other founder of the University of London, Brougham, by a singular coincidence was also closely associated with Boulogne. [Among the occupants of the English cemetery will be found the names of Sir Harris Nicolas, Basil Montagu, Smithson Pennant, Sir William Ouseley, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir C. M. Carmichael. And among other literary celebrities connected with the place, apart from Dickens (who gave his impressions of the place in Household Words, November 1854) we should include in a brief list, Charles Lever, Horace Smith, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, Professor York Powell, the Marquis of Steyne (Lord Seymour), Mrs. Jordan, Clark Russell, and Sir Conan Doyle. There are also memorable associations with Lola Montes, Heinrich Heine, Becky Sharpe, and above all Colonel Newcome. My first care in the place was to discover the rampart where the Colonel used to parade with little Clive. Among the native luminaries are Daunou, Duchenne de Boulogne, one of the foremost physiologists of the last century, an immediate predecessor of Charcot in knowledge of the nervous system, Aug. Mariette, the Egyptologist, Aug. Angellier, the biographer of Burns, Sainte-Beuve, Prof. Morel, and "credibly," Godfrey de Bouillon, of whom Charles Lamb wrote "poor old Godfrey, he must be getting very old now." The great Lesage died here in 1747.] The antiquaries still dispute about Gessoriacum, Godfrey de Bouillon, and Charlemagne's Tour. Smollett is only fair in justifying for the town, the older portions of which have a strong medieval suggestion, a standard of comparison slightly more distinguished than Wapping. He never lets us forget that he is a scholar of antiquity, a man of education and a speculative philosopher. Hence his references to Celsus and Hippocrates and his ingenious etymologies of wheatear and samphire, more ingenious in the second case than sound. Smollett's field of observation had been wide and his fund of exact information was unusually large. At Edinburgh he had studied medicine under Monro and John Gordon, in company with such able and distinguished men as William Hunter, Cullen, Pitcairn, Gregory, and Armstrong--and the two last mentioned were among his present correspondents. As naval surgeon at Carthagena he had undergone experience such as few literary men can claim, and subsequently as compiler, reviewer, party journalist, historian, translator, statistician, and lexicographer, he had gained an amount of miscellaneous information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days--hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials as regards habitual accuracy of statement have seldom been exceeded. Despite the doctor's unflattering portraits of Frenchmen, M. Babeau admits that his book is one written by an observer of facts, and a man whose statements, whenever they can be tested, are for the most part "singularly exact." Mr. W. J. Prouse, whose knowledge of the Riviera district is perhaps almost unequalled out of France, makes this very remarkable statement. "After reading all that has been written by very clever people about Nice in modern times, one would probably find that for exact precision of statement, Smollett was still the most trustworthy guide," a view which is strikingly borne out by Mr. E. Schuyler, who further points out Smollett's shrewd foresight in regard to the possibilities of the Cornice road, and of Cannes and San Remo as sanatoria." Frankly there is nothing to be seen which he does not recognise." And even higher testimonies have been paid to Smollett's topographical accuracy by recent historians of Nice and its neighbourhood. The value which Smollett put upon accuracy in the smallest matters of detail is evinced by the corrections which he made in the margin of a copy of the 1766 edition of the Travels. These corrections, which are all in Smollett's own and unmistakably neat handwriting, may be divided into four categories. In the first place come a number of verbal emendations. Phrases are turned, inverted and improved by the skilful "twist of the pen" which becomes a second nature to the trained corrector of proofs; there are moreover a few topographical corrigenda, suggested by an improved knowledge of the localities, mostly in the neighbourhood of Pisa and Leghorn, where there is no doubt that these corrections were made upon the occasion of Smollett's second visit to Italy in 1770. [Some not unimportant errata were overlooked. Thus Smollett's representation of the droit d'aubaine as a monstrous and intolerable grievance is of course an exaggeration. (See Sentimental Journey; J. Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad, 1881, p. 135; and Luchaire, Instit. de France.) On his homeward journey he indicates that he travelled from Beaune to Chalons and so by way of Auxerre to Dijon. The right order is Chalons, Beaune, Dijon, Auxerre. As further examples of the zeal with which Smollett regarded exactitude in the record of facts we have his diurnal register of weather during his stay at Nice and the picture of him scrupulously measuring the ruins at Cimiez with packthread.] In the second place come a number of English renderings of the citations from Latin, French, and Italian authors. Most of these from the Latin are examples of Smollett's own skill in English verse making. Thirdly come one or two significant admissions of overboldness in matters of criticism, as where he retracts his censure of Raphael's Parnassus in Letter XXXIII. Fourthly, and these are of the greatest importance, come some very interesting additional notes upon the buildings of Pisa, upon Sir John Hawkwood's tomb at Florence, and upon the congenial though recondite subject of antique Roman hygiene. [Cf. the Dinner in the manner of the Ancients in Peregrine Pickle, (xliv.) and Letters IX. to XL in Humphry Clinker.] After Smollett's death his books were for the most part sold for the benefit of his widow. No use was made of his corrigenda. For twenty years or so the Travels were esteemed and referred to, but as time went on, owing to the sneers of the fine gentlemen of letters, such as Walpole and Sterne, they were by degrees disparaged and fell more or less into neglect. They were reprinted, it is true, either in collective editions of Smollett or in various collections of travels; [For instance in Baldwin's edition of 1778; in the 17th vol. of Mayor's Collection of Voyages and Travels, published by Richard Phillips in twenty-eight vols., 1809; and in an abbreviated form in John Hamilton Moore's New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (folio, Vol. 11. 938-970).] but they were not edited with any care, and as is inevitable in such cases errors crept in, blunders were repeated, and the text slightly but gradually deteriorated. In the last century Smollett's own copy of the Travels bearing the manuscript corrections that he had made in 1770, was discovered in the possession of the Telfer family and eventually came into the British Museum. The second volume, which affords admirable specimens of Smollett's neatly written marginalia, has been exhibited in a show-case in the King's Library. The corrections that Smollett purposed to make in the Travels are now for the second time embodied in a printed edition of the text. At the same time the text has been collated with the original edition of 1766, and the whole has been carefully revised. The old spelling has been, as far as possible, restored. Smollett was punctilious in such matters, and what with his histories, his translations, his periodicals, and his other compilations, he probably revised more proof-matter for press than any other writer of his time. His practice as regards orthography is, therefore, of some interest as representing what was in all probability deemed to be the most enlightened convention of the day. To return now to the Doctor's immediate contemplation of Boulogne, a city described in the Itineraries as containing rien de remarquable. The story of the Capuchin [On page 21. A Capuchin of the same stripe is in Pickle, ch. Ill. sq.] is very racy of Smollett, while the vignette of the shepherd at the beginning of Letter V. affords a first-rate illustration of his terseness. Appreciate the keen and minute observation concentrated into the pages that follow, [Especially on p. 34 to p. 40.] commencing with the shrewd and economic remarks upon smuggling, and ending with the lively description of a Boulonnais banquet, very amusing, very French, very life-like, and very Smollettian. In Letter V. the Doctor again is very much himself. A little provocation and he bristles and stabs all round. He mounts the hygienic horse and proceeds from the lack of implements of cleanliness to the lack of common decency, and "high flavoured instances, at which even a native of Edinburgh would stop his nose." [This recalls Johnson's first walk up the High Street, Edinburgh, on Bozzy's arm. "It was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. . . . As we marched along he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark!'"] And then lest the southrons should escape we have a reference to the "beastly habit of drinking from a tankard in which perhaps a dozen filthy mouths have slabbered as is the custom in England." With all his coarsenesses this blunt Scot was a pioneer and fugleman of the niceties. Between times most nations are gibbetted in this slashing epistle. The ingenious boasting of the French is well hit off in the observation of the chevalier that the English doubtless drank every day to the health of the Marquise de Pompadour. The implication reminded Smollett of a narrow escape from a duello (an institution he reprobates with the utmost trenchancy in this book) at Ghent in 1749 with a Frenchman who affirmed that Marlborough's battles were purposely lost by the French generals in order to mortify Mme. de Maintenon. Two incidents of some importance to Smollett occurred during the three months' sojourn at Boulogne. Through the intervention of the English Ambassador at Paris (the Earl of Hertford) he got back his books, which had been impounded by the Customs as likely to contain matter prejudicial to the state or religion of France, and had them sent south by shipboard to Bordeaux. Secondly, he encountered General Paterson, a friendly Scot in the Sardinian service, who confirmed what an English physician had told Smollett to the effect that the climate of Nice was infinitely preferable to that of Montpellier "with respect to disorders of the breast." Smollett now hires a berline and four horses for fourteen louis, and sets out with rather a heavy heart for Paris. It is problematic, he assures his good friend Dr. Moore, whether he will ever return. "My health is very precarious." IV The rapid journey to Paris by way of Montreuil, Amiens, and Clermont, about one hundred and fifty-six miles from Boulogne, the last thirty-six over a paved road, was favourable to superficial observation and the normal corollary of epigram. Smollett was much impressed by the mortifying indifference of the French innkeepers to their clients. "It is a very odd contrast between France and England. In the former all the people are complaisant but the publicans; in the latter there is hardly any complaisance but among the publicans." [In regard to two exceptional instances of politeness on the part of innkeepers, Smollett attributes one case to dementia, the other, at Lerici, to mental shock, caused by a recent earthquake.] Idleness and dissipation confront the traveller, not such a good judge, perhaps, as was Arthur Young four-and-twenty years later. "Every object seems to have shrunk in its dimensions since I was last in Paris." Smollett was an older man by fifteen years since he visited the French capital in the first flush of his success as an author. The dirt and gloom of French apartments, even at Versailles, offend his English standard of comfort. "After all, it is in England only where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in the French genius. With all their volatility, prattle, and fondness for bons mots they delight in a species of drawling, melancholy, church music. Their most favourite dramatic pieces are almost without incident, and the dialogue of their comedies consists of moral insipid apophthegms, entirely destitute of wit or repartee." While amusing himself with the sights of Paris, Smollett drew up that caustic delineation of the French character which as a study in calculated depreciation has rarely been surpassed. He conceives the Frenchman entirely as a petit-maitre, and his view, though far removed from Chesterfield's, is not incompatible with that of many of his cleverest contemporaries, including Sterne. He conceives of the typical Frenchman as regulating his life in accordance with the claims of impertinent curiosity and foppery, gallantry and gluttony. Thus: "If a Frenchman is capable of real friendship, it must certainly be the most disagreeable present he can possibly make to a man of a true English character. You know, madam, we are naturally taciturn, soon tired of impertinence, and much subject to fits of disgust. Your French friend intrudes upon you at all hours; he stuns you with his loquacity; he teases you with impertinent questions about your domestic and private affairs; he attempts to meddle in all your concerns, and forces his advice upon you with the most unwearied importunity; he asks the price of everything you wear, and, so sure as you tell him, undervalues it without hesitation; he affirms it is in a bad taste, ill contrived, ill made; that you have been imposed upon both with respect to the fashion and the price; that the marquis of this, or the countess of that, has one that is perfectly elegant, quite in the bon ton, and yet it cost her little more than you gave for a thing that nobody would wear. "If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one but in one shape or another he will find means to ruin the peace of a family in which he has been so kindly entertained. What he cannot accomplish by dint of compliment and personal attendance, he will endeavour to effect by reinforcing these with billets-doux, songs, and verses, of which he always makes a provision for such purposes. If he is detected in these efforts of treachery, and reproached with his ingratitude, he impudently declares that what he had done was no more than simple gallantry, considered in France as an indispensable duty on every man who pretended to good breeding. Nay, he will even affirm that his endeavours to corrupt your wife, or deflower your daughter, were the most genuine proofs he could give of his particular regard for your family. "If there were five hundred dishes at table, a Frenchman will eat of all of them, and then complain he has no appetite--this I have several times remarked. A friend of mine gained a considerable wager upon an experiment of this kind; the petit-maitre ate of fourteen different plates, besides the dessert, then disparaged the cook, declaring he was no better than a marmiton, or turnspit." The gross unfairness, no less than the consummate cleverness, of this caricature compels us to remember that this was written in the most insular period of our manners, and during a brief lull in a century of almost incessant mutual hostility between the two nations. Aristocrats like Walpole, Gibbon, and Chesterfield could regard France from a cosmopolitan point of view, as leading the comite of nations. But to sturdy and true-born patriots, such as Hogarth and Smollett, reciprocal politeness appeared as grotesque as an exchange of amenities would be between a cormorant and an ape. Consequently, it was no doubt with a sense of positive relief to his feelings that Smollett could bring himself to sum up the whole matter thus. "A Frenchman lays out his whole revenue upon taudry suits of cloaths, or in furnishing a magnificent repas of fifty or a hundred dishes, one-half of which are not eatable or intended to be eaten. His wardrobe goes to the fripier, his dishes to the dogs, and himself to the devil." These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's honesty of purpose, however, it may be urged that he was always a thoroughgoing patriot, [Witness his violently anti-French play, the Reprisal of 1757.] and that, coming from a Calvinistic country where a measure of Tartufism was a necessary condition of respectability, he reproduces the common English error of ignoring how apt a Frenchman is to conceal a number of his best qualities. Two other considerations deserve attention. The race-portrait was in Smollett's day at the very height of its disreputable reign. Secondly, we must remember how very profoundly French character has been modified since 1763, and more especially in consequence of the cataclysms of 1789 and 1870. Smollett's vis comica is conspicuous in the account of the coiffure of the period and of the superstitious reverence which a Frenchman of that day paid to his hair. In tracing the origin of this superstition he exhibits casually his historical learning. The crine profuso and barba demissa of the reges crinitos, as the Merovingians were called, are often referred to by ancient chroniclers. Long hair was identified with right of succession, as a mark of royal race, and the maintenance of ancient tradition. A tondu signified a slave, and even under the Carolingians to shave a prince meant to affirm his exclusion from the succession. V A general improvement in English roads, roadside inns, and methods of conveyance commenced about 1715. The continental roads lagged behind, until when Arthur Young wrote in 1788-89 they had got badly into arrears. The pace of locomotion between Rome and England changed very little in effect from the days of Julius Caesar to those of George III. It has been said with point that Trajan and Sir Robert Peel, travelling both at their utmost speed achieved the distance between Rome and London in an almost precisely similar space of time. Smollett decided to travel post between Paris and Lyons, and he found that the journey lasted full five days and cost upwards of thirty guineas. [One of the earliest printed road books in existence gives the posts between Paris and Lyons. This tiny duodecimo, dated 1500, and more than worth its weight in gold has just been acquired by the British Museum. On the old Roman routes, see Arnold's Lectures on Modern History, 1842.] Of roads there was a choice between two. The shorter route by Nevers and Moulins amounted to just about three hundred English miles. The longer route by Auxerre and Dijon, which Smollett preferred extended to three hundred and thirty miles. The two roads diverged after passing Fontainebleau, the shorter by Nemours and the longer by Moret. The first road was the smoother, but apart from the chance of seeing the Vendange the route de Burgoyne was far the more picturesque. Smollett's portraiture of the peasantry in the less cultivated regions prepares the mind for Young's famous description of those "gaunt emblems of famine." In Burgundy the Doctor says, "I saw a peasant ploughing the ground with a jackass, a lean cow, and a he-goat yoked together." His vignette of the fantastic petit-maitre at Sens, and his own abominable rudeness, is worthy of the master hand that drew the poor debtor Jackson in the Marshalsea in Roderick Random. His frank avowal of ill temper at the time deprives our entertainment of the unamiable tinge of which it would otherwise have partaken. "The truth is, I was that day more than usually peevish, from the bad weather as well as from the dread of a fit of asthma, with which I was threatened. And I daresay my appearance seemed as uncouth to him as his travelling dress appeared to me. I had a grey, mourning frock under a wide greatcoat, a bob-wig without powder, a very large laced hat, and a meagre, wrinkled, discontented countenance." From Lyons the traveller secured a return berline going back to Avignon with three mules and a voiturier named Joseph. Joseph, though he turned out to be an ex-criminal, proved himself the one Frenchman upon whose fidelity and good service Smollett could look back with unfeigned satisfaction. The sight of a skeleton dangling from a gibbet near Valence surprised from this droll knave an ejaculation and a story, from which it appeared only too evident that he had been first the comrade and then the executioner of one of the most notorious brigands of the century. The story as told by Smollett does not wholly agree with the best authenticated particulars. The Dick Turpin of eighteenth century France, Mandrin has engendered almost as many fables as his English congener. [See Maignien's Bibliographie des Ecrits relatifs a Mandrin.] As far as I have been able to discover, the great freebooter was born at St. Etienne in May 1724. His father having been killed in a coining affair, Mandrin swore to revenge him. He deserted from the army accordingly, and got together a gang of contrebandiers, at the head of which his career in Savoy and Dauphine almost resembles that of one of the famous guerilla chieftains described in Hardman's Peninsular Scenes and Sketches. Captured eventually, owing to the treachery of a comrade, he was put to death on the wheel at Valence on 26th May 1755. Five comrades were thrown into jail with him; and one of these obtained his pardon on condition of acting as Mandrin's executioner. Alas, poor Joseph! Three experiences Smollett had at this season which may well fall to the lot of road-farers in France right down to the present day. He was poisoned with garlic, surfeited with demi-roasted small birds, and astonished at the solid fare of the poorest looking travellers. The summer weather, romantic scenery, and occasional picnics, which Smollett would have liked to repeat every summer under the arches of the Pont du Gard--the monument of antiquity which of all, excepting only the Maison Carree at Nimes, most excited his enthusiastic admiration, all contributed to put him into an abnormally cheerful and convalescent humour. . . . Smollett now bent his steps southwards to Montpellier. His baggage had gone in advance. He was uncertain as yet whether to make Montpellier or Nice his headquarters in the South. Like Toulouse and Tours, and Turin, Montpellier was for a period a Mecca to English health and pleasure seekers abroad. A city of no great antiquity, but celebrated from the twelfth century for its schools of Law and Physic, it had been incorporated definitely with France since 1382, and its name recurs in French history both as the home of famous men in great number and as, before and after the brief pre-eminence of La Rochelle, the rival of Nimes as capital of Protestantism in the South. Evelyn, Burnet, the two Youngs, Edward and Arthur, and Sterne have all left us an impression of the city. Prevented by snow from crossing the Mont Cenis, John Locke spent two winters there in the days of Charles II. (1675-77), and may have pondered a good many of the problems of Toleration on a soil under which the heated lava of religious strife was still unmistakeable. And Smollett must almost have jostled en route against the celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations, who set out with his pupil for Toulouse in February 1764. A letter to Hume speaks of the number of English in the neighbourhood just a month later. Lomenie de Brienne was then in residence as archbishop. In the following November, Adam Smith and his charge paid a visit to Montpellier to witness a pageant and memorial, as it was supposed, of a freedom that was gone for ever, the opening of the States of Languedoc. Antiquaries and philosophers went to moralise on the spectacle in the spirit in which Freeman went to Andorra, Byron to the site of Troy, or De Tocqueville to America. It was there that the great economist met Horne Tooke. Smollett's more practical and immediate object in making this pilgrimage was to interview the great lung specialist, known locally to his admiring compatriots as the Boerhaave of Montpellier, Dr. Fizes. The medical school of Montpellier was much in evidence during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and for the history of its various branches there are extant numerous Memoires pour Servir, by Prunelle, Astruc, and others. Smollett was only just in time to consult the reigning oracle, for the "illustrious" Dr. Fizes died in the following year. He gives us a very unfavourable picture of this "great lanthorn of medicine," who, notwithstanding his prodigious age, his stoop, and his wealth, could still scramble up two pairs for a fee of six livres. More than is the case with most medical patients, however, should we suspect Smollett of being unduly captious. The point as to how far his sketch of the French doctor and his diagnosis was a true one, and how far a mere caricature, due to ill health and prejudice, has always piqued my curiosity. But how to resolve a question involving so many problems not of ordinary therapeutic but of historical medicine! In this difficulty I bethought me most fortunately of consulting an authority probably without a rival in this special branch of medical history, Dr. Norman Moore, who with his accustomed generosity has given me the following most instructive diagnosis of the whole situation. "I have read Smollett's account of his illness as it appears in several passages in his travels and in the statement which he drew up for Professor 'F.' at Montpellier. "Smollett speaks of his pulmonic disorder, his 'asthmatical disorder,' and uses other expressions which show that his lungs were affected. In his statement he mentions that he has cough, shortness of breath, wasting, a purulent expectoration, loss of appetite at times, loss of strength, fever, a rapid pulse, intervals of slight improvement and subsequent exacerbations. "This shortness of breath, he says, has steadily increased. This group of symptoms makes it certain that he had tuberculosis of the lungs, in other words, was slowly progressing in consumption. "His darting pains in his side were due to the pleurisy which always occurs in such an illness. "His account shows also the absence of hopelessness which is a characteristic state of mind in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis. "I do not think that the opinion of the Montpellier professor deserves Smollett's condemnation. It seems to me both careful and sensible and contains all the knowledge of its time. Smollett, with an inconsistency not uncommon in patients who feel that they have a serious disease, would not go in person to the Professor, for he felt that from his appearance the Professor would be sure to tell him he had consumption. He half hoped for some other view of the written case in spite of its explicit statements, and when Professor F-- wrote that the patient had tubercles in his lungs, this was displeasing to poor Smollett, who had hoped against hope to receive--some other opinion than the only possible one, viz., that he undoubtedly had a consumption certain to prove fatal." The cruel truth was not to be evaded. Smollett had tuberculosis, though not probably of the most virulent kind, as he managed to survive another seven years, and those for the most part years of unremitting labour. He probably gained much by substituting Nice for Montpellier as a place to winter in, for although the climate of Montpellier is clear and bright in the highest degree, the cold is both piercing and treacherous. Days are frequent during the winter in which one may stand warmly wrapped in the brilliant sun and feel the protection of a greatcoat no more than that of a piece of gauze against the icy and penetrating blast that comes from "the roof of France." Unable to take the direct route by Arles as at present, the eastward-bound traveller from Montpellier in 1764 had to make a northerly detour. The first stone bridge up the Rhone was at Avignon, but there was a bridge of boats connecting Beaucaire with Tarascon. Thence, in no very placable mood, Smollett set out in mid-November by way of Orgon [Aix], Brignolles and le Muy, striking the Mediterranean at Frejus. En route he was inveigled into a controversy of unwonted bitterness with an innkeeper at le Muy. The scene is conjured up for us with an almost disconcerting actuality; no single detail of the author's discomfiture is omitted. The episode is post-Flaubertian in its impersonal detachment, or, as Coleridge first said, "aloofness." On crossing the Var, the sunny climate, the romantic outline of the Esterelles, the charms of the "neat village" of Cannes, and the first prospect of Nice began gradually and happily to effect a slight mitigation in our patient's humour. Smollett was indubitably one of the pioneers of the Promenade des Anglais. Long before the days of "Dr. Antonio" or Lord Brougham, he described for his countrymen the almost incredible dolcezza of the sunlit coast from Antibes to Lerici. But how much better than the barren triumph of being the unconscious fugleman of so glittering a popularity must have been the sense of being one of the first that ever burst from our rude island upon that secluded little Piedmontese town, as it then was, of not above twelve thousand souls, with its wonderful situation, noble perspective and unparalleled climate. Well might our travel-tost doctor exclaim, "When I stand on the rampart and look around I can scarce help thinking myself enchanted." It was truly a garden of Armida for a native of one of the dampest corners of North Britain. "Forty or fifty years ago, before the great transformation took place on the French Riviera, when Nizza, Villafranca, and Mentone were antique Italian towns, and when it was one of the eccentricities of Lord Brougham, to like Cannes, all that sea-board was a delightful land. Only a hundred years ago Arthur Young had trouble to get an old woman and a donkey to carry his portmanteau from Cannes to Antibes. I can myself remember Cannes in 1853, a small fishing village with a quiet beach, and Mentone, a walled town with mediaeval gates and a castle, a few humble villas and the old Posta to give supper to any passing traveller. It was one of the loveliest bits of Italy, and the road from Nizza to Genoa was one long procession for four days of glorious scenery, historic remnants, Italian colour, and picturesque ports. From the Esterelles to San Remo this has all been ruined by the horde of northern barbarians who have made a sort of Trouville, Brighton, or Biarritz, with American hotels and Parisian boulevards on every headland and bay. First came the half underground railway, a long tunnel with lucid intervals, which destroyed the road by blocking up its finest views and making it practically useless. Then miles of unsightly caravanserais high walls, pompous villas, and Parisian grandes rues crushed out every trace of Italy, of history, and pictorial charm." So writes Mr. Frederic Harrison of this delectable coast, [In the Daily Chronicle, 15th March 1898.] as it was, at a period within his own recollection--a period at which it is hardly fanciful to suppose men living who might just have remembered Smollett, as he was in his last days, when he returned to die on the Riviera di Levante in the autumn of 1771. Travel had then still some of the elements of romance. Rapidity has changed all that. The trouble is that although we can transport our bodies so much more rapidly than Smollett could, our understanding travels at the same old pace as before. And in the meantime railway and tourist agencies have made of modern travel a kind of mental postcard album, with grand hotels on one side, hotel menus on the other, and a faint aroma of continental trains haunting, between the leaves as it were. Our real knowledge is still limited to the country we have walked over, and we must not approach the country we would appreciate faster than a man may drive a horse or propel a bicycle; or we shall lose the all-important sense of artistic approach. Even to cross the channel by time-table is fatal to that romantic spirit (indispensable to the true magic of travel) which a slow adjustment of the mind to a new social atmosphere and a new historical environment alone can induce. Ruskin, the last exponent of the Grand Tour, said truly that the benefit of travel varies inversely in proportion to its speed. The cheap rapidity which has made our villes de plaisir and cotes d'azur what they are, has made unwieldy boroughs of suburban villages, and what the rail has done for a radius of a dozen miles, the motor is rapidly doing for one of a score. So are we sped! But we are to discuss not the psychology of travel, but the immediate causes and circumstances of Smollett's arrival upon the territory of Nice. VI Smollett did not interpret the ground-plan of the history of Nice particularly well. Its colonisation from Massilia, its long connection with Provence, its occupation by Saracens, its stormy connection with the house of Anjou, and its close fidelity to the house of Savoy made no appeal to his admiration. The most important event in its recent history, no doubt, was the capture of the city by the French under Catinat in 1706 (Louis XIV. being especially exasperated against what he regarded as the treachery of Victor Amadeus), and the razing to the ground of its famous citadel. The city henceforth lost a good deal of its civic dignity, and its morale was conspicuously impaired. In the war of the Austrian succession an English fleet under Admiral Matthews was told off to defend the territory of the Nicois against the attentions of Toulon. This was the first close contact experienced between England and Nice, but the impressions formed were mutually favourable. The inhabitants were enthusiastic about the unaccustomed English plan of paying in full for all supplies demanded. The British officers were no less delighted with the climate of Nice, the fame of which they carried to their northern homes. It was both directly and indirectly through one of these officers that the claims of Nice as a sanatorium came to be put so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its prestige as a ville forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new character of a ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's historians, Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice. "Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits, under the genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a new man. His notes on the country, its gardens, its orange groves, its climate without a winter, are pleasant and just and would seem to have been written yesterday instead of more than a hundred years ago. . . . His memory is preserved in the street nomenclature of the place; one of the thoroughfares still bears the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James Nash, The Guide to Nice, 1884, p. 110.)] Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother of George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre Massena, a native of the city, then a lad of six. Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more seemingly irresistible tirades against French folly: one against their persistent hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le Grand, and the second in ridicule of the immemorial French panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets to Nice he feels a return of the craving to take a hand's turn at depreciatory satire upon the nation of which a contemporary hand was just tracing the deservedly better-known delineation, commencing Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease, Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . . Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not unnaturally suspected by friends in England of having some personal motive. In his fifteenth letter home, therefore, Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming anything of the kind. He begins by attempting an amende honorable, but before he has got well away from his exordium he insensibly and most characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of censure, and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent passages--a disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon lines somewhat similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to which is appended a satire on the duello as practised in France, which glows and burns with a radiation of good sense, racy of Smollett at his best. To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will recall similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between the lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but, more particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this subject a propos of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided a duel with Prince Eugene in 1716. "We were sitting in company at table, whence the Prince took up a glass of wine and by a fillip made some of it fly in Oglethorpe's face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been counted as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye on the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what His Highness had done in jest, said, "Mon Prince" (I forget the French words he used), "that's a good joke; but we do it much better in England," and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince's face. An old general who sat by said, "Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l'avez commence," and thus all ended in good humour." In Letter XIII. Smollett settles down to give his correspondents a detailed description of the territory and people of Nice. At one time it was his intention to essay yet another branch of authorship and to produce a monograph on the natural history, antiquities, and topography of the town as the capital of this still unfamiliar littoral; with the late-born modesty of experience, however, he recoils from a task to which he does not feel his opportunities altogether adequate. [See p. 152.] A quarter of Smollett's original material would embarrass a "Guide"-builder of more recent pattern. Whenever he got near a coast line Smollett could not refrain from expressing decided views. If he had lived at the present day he would infallibly have been a naval expert, better informed than most and more trenchant than all; but recognizably one of the species, artist in words and amateur of ocean-strategy. [Smollett had, of course, been surgeon's mate on H.M.S. Cumberland, 1740-41.] His first curiosity at Nice was raised concerning the port, the harbour, the galleys moored within the mole, and the naval policy of his Sardinian Majesty. His advice to Victor Amadeus was no doubt as excellent and as unregarded as the advice of naval experts generally is. Of more interest to us is his account of the slave-galleys. Among the miserable slaves whom "a British subject cannot behold without horror and compassion," he observes a Piedmontese count in Turkish attire, reminding the reader of one of Dumas' stories of a count among the forcats. To learn that there were always volunteer oarsmen among these poor outcasts is to reflect bitterly upon the average happiness of mankind. As to whether they wore much worse off than common seamen in the British navy of the period (who were only in name volunteers and had often no hope of discharge until they were worn out) under such commanders as Oakum or Whiffle [In Roderick Random.] is another question. For confirmation of Smollett's account in matters of detail the reader may turn to Aleman's Guzman d'Afarache, which contains a first-hand description of the life on board a Mediterranean slave galley, to Archenholtz's Tableau d'Italie of 1788, to Stirling Maxwell's Don John of Austria (1883, i. 95), and more pertinently to passages in the Life of a Galley Slave by Jean Marteilhe (edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1895). After serving in the docks at Dunkirk, Marteilhe, as a confirmed protestant, makes the journey in the chain-gang to Marseilles, and is only released after many delays in consequence of the personal interest and intervention of Queen Anne. If at the peace of Utrecht in 1713 we had only been as tender about the case of our poor Catalan allies! Nice at that juncture had just been returned by France to the safe-keeping of Savoy, so that in order to escape from French territory, Marteilhe sailed for Nice in a tartane, and not feeling too safe even there, hurried thence by Smollett's subsequent route across the Col di Tende. Many Europeans were serving at this time in the Turkish or Algerine galleys. But the most pitiable of all the galley slaves were those of the knights of St. John of Malta. "Figure to yourself," wrote Jacob Houblon [The Houblon Family, 1907 ii. 78. The accounts in Evelyn and Goldsmith are probably familiar to the reader.] about this year, "six or seven hundred dirty half-naked Turks in a small vessel chained to the oars, from which they are not allowed to stir, fed upon nothing but bad biscuit and water, and beat about on the most trifling occasion by their most inhuman masters, who are certainly more Turks than their slaves." After several digressions, one touching the ancient Cemenelion, a subject upon which the Jonathan Oldbucks of Provence without exception are unconscionably tedious, Smollett settles down to a capable historical summary preparatory to setting his palette for a picture of the Nissards "as they are." He was, as we are aware, no court painter, and the cheerful colours certainly do not predominate. The noblesse for all their exclusiveness cannot escape his censure. He can see that they are poor (they are unable to boast more than two coaches among their whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes both vices unhesitatingly to their idleness and to their religion. In their singularly unemotional and coolly comparative outlook upon religion, how infinitely nearer were Fielding and Smollett than their greatest successors, Dickens and Thackeray, to the modern critic who observes that there is "at present not a single credible established religion in existence." To Smollett Catholicism conjures up nothing so vividly as the mask of comedy, while his native Calvinism stands for the corresponding mask of tragedy. [Walpole's dictum that Life was a comedy to those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, was of later date than this excellent mot of Smollett's.] Religion in the sunny spaces of the South is a "never-failing fund of pastime." The mass (of which he tells a story that reminds us of Lever's Micky Free) is just a mechanism invented by clever rogues for an elaborate system of petty larceny. And what a ferocious vein of cynicism underlies his strictures upon the perverted gallantry of the Mariolaters at Florence, or those on the two old Catholics rubbing their ancient gums against St. Peter's toe for toothache at Rome. The recurring emblems of crosses and gibbets simply shock him as mementoes of the Bagne. At Rome he compares a presentment of St. Laurence to "a barbecued pig." "What a pity it is," he complains, "that the labours of painting should have been employed on such shocking objects of the martyrology," floggings, nailings, and unnailings... "Peter writhing on the cross, Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows, Bartholomew flayed alive," and so on. His remarks upon the famous Pieta of Michael Angelo are frank to the point of brutality. The right of sanctuary and its "infamous prerogative," unheard of in England since the days of Henry VII., were still capable of affording a lesson to the Scot abroad. "I saw a fellow who had three days before murdered his wife in the last month of pregnancy, taking the air with great composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence." Smollett, it is clear, for all his philosophy, was no degenerate representative of the blind, unreasoning seventeenth-century detestation of "Popery and wooden shoes." Smollett is one of the first to describe a "conversazione," and in illustration of the decadence of Italian manners, it is natural that he should have a good deal to tell us about the Cicisbeatura. His account of the cicisbeo and his duties, whether in Nice, Florence, or Rome, is certainly one of the most interesting that we have. Before Smollett and his almost contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England, though the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later. Most of the "classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme. de Stael, Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant curiosity on such themes was as lively as Lady Mary Montagu had found it in the case of fair Circassians and Turkish harems just thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler. Hence the word came to be applied punningly to the bow depending from a clouded cane or ornamental crook. In sixteenth-century Spain, home of the sedan and the caballero galante, the original term was bracciere. In Venice the form was cavaliere servente. For a good note on the subject, see Sismondi's Italian Republics, ed. William Boulting, 1907, p. 793.] Like so much in the shapes and customs of Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a thing of the past. Freed from the necessity of a systematic delineation Smollett rambles about Nice, its length and breadth, with a stone in his pouch, and wherever a cockshy is available he takes full advantage of it. He describes the ghetto (p. 171), the police arrangements of the place which he finds in the main highly efficient, and the cruel punishment of the strappado. The garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined with the water-torture and the rack, represented the survival of the fittest in the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. The strappado as described by Smollett, however, is a more severe form of torture even than that practised by the Inquisition, and we can only hope that his description of its brutality is highly coloured. [See the extremely learned disquisition on the whole subject in Dr. H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition in Spain, 1907, vol. iii. book vi chap. vii.] Smollett must have enjoyed himself vastly in the market at Nice. He gives an elaborate and epicurean account of his commissariat during the successive seasons of his sojourn in the neighbourhood. He was not one of these who live solely "below the diaphragm"; but he understood food well and writes about it with a catholic gusto and relish (156-165). He laments the rarity of small birds on the Riviera, and gives a highly comic account of the chasse of this species of gibier. He has a good deal to say about the sardine and tunny fishery, about the fruit and scent traffic, and about the wine industry; and he gives us a graphic sketch of the silkworm culture, which it is interesting to compare with that given by Locke in 1677. He has something to say upon the general agriculture, and more especially upon the olive and oil industry. Some remarks upon the numerous "mummeries" and festas of the inhabitants lead him into a long digression upon the feriae of the Romans. It is evident from this that the box of books which he shipped by way of Bordeaux must have been plentifully supplied with classical literature, for, as he remarks with unaffected horror, such a thing as a bookseller had not been so much as heard of in Nice. Well may he have expatiated upon the total lack of taste among the inhabitants! In dealing with the trade, revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of his vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he reveals the curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist. Climate had always been one of his hobbies, and on learning that none of the local practitioners was in a position to exact a larger fee than sixpence from his patients (quantum mutatus the Nice physician of 1907!) he felt that he owed it to himself to make this the subject of an independent investigation. He kept a register of the weather during the whole of his stay, and his remarks upon the subject are still of historical interest, although with Teysseire's minutely exact Monograph on the Climatology of Nice (1881) at his disposal and innumerable commentaries thereon by specialists, the inquirer of to-day would hardly go to Smollett for his data. Then, as now, it is curious to find the rumour current that the climate of Nice was sadly deteriorating. "Nothing to what it was before the war!" as the grumbler from the South was once betrayed into saying of the August moon. Smollett's esprit chagrin was nonplussed at first to find material for complaint against a climate in which he admits that there was less rain and less wind than in any other part of the world that he knew. In these unwonted circumstances he is constrained to fall back on the hard water and the plague of cousins or gnats as affording him the legitimate grievance, in whose absence the warrior soul of the author of the Ode to Independence could never be content. VII For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to Florence and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he decided to travel as far as Leghorn by sea. There was choice between several kinds of small craft which plied along the coast, and their names recur with cheerful frequency in the pages of Marryat and other depictors of the Mediterranean. There was the felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the stern large enough to freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to twelve stout mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance of a hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose, and the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and such sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard. Smollett finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a steersman, for which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis). After adventures off Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the party are glad to make the famous phones on the Torre della Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings in his mediocre verse: Thy pharos Genoa first displayed itself Burning in stillness on its rocky seat; That guiding star so oft the only one, When those now glowing in the azure vault Are dark and silent Smollett's description of Genoa is decidedly more interesting. He arrived at a moment specially propitious to so sardonic an observer, for the Republic had fallen on evil times, having escaped from the clutches of Austria in 1746 by means of a popular riot, during which the aristocracy considerately looked the other way, only to fall into an even more embarrassed and unheroic position vis-a-vis of so diminutive an opponent as Corsica. The whole story is a curious prototype of the nineteenth century imbroglio between Spain and Cuba. Of commonplaces about the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and Gray, who says with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble were I to tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing enough, though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of Genoese noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness. His description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in marble and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests that the "deceipt of the Ligurians," which Virgil censures in the line Haud Ligurum extremus, dum fallere fata sinebant may possibly have been of this Balderstonian variety. But Smollett had little room in his economy for such vapouring speculations. He was as unsentimental a critic as Sydney Smith or Sir Leslie Stephen. He wants to know the assets of a place more than its associations. Facts, figures, trade and revenue returns are the data his shrewd mind requires to feed on. He has a keen eye for harbours suitable for an English frigate to lie up in, and can hardly rest until his sagacity has collected material for a political horoscope. Smollett's remarks upon the mysterious dispensations of Providence in regard to Genoa and the retreat of the Austrians are charged to the full with his saturnine spirit. His suspicions were probably well founded. Ever since 1685 Genoa had been the more or less humiliated satellite of France, and her once famous Bank had been bled pretty extensively by both belligerents. The Senate was helpless before the Austrian engineers in 1745, and the emancipation of the city was due wholly to a popular emeute. She had relapsed again into a completely enervated condition. Smollett thought she would have been happier under British protection. But it is a vicious alternative for a nation to choose a big protector. It was characteristic of the Republic that from 1790 to 1798 its "policy" was to remain neutral. The crisis in regard to Corsica came immediately after Smollett's visit, when in 1765, under their 154th doge Francesco Maria Rovere, the Genoese offered to abandon the island to the patriots under Paoli, reserving only the possession of the two loyal coast-towns of Bonifazio and Calvi. [See Boswell's Corsica, 1766-8.] At Paoli's instance these conciliatory terms were refused. Genoa, in desperation and next door to bankruptcy, resolved to sell her rights as suzerain to France, and the compact was concluded by a treaty signed at Versailles in 1768. Paoli was finally defeated at Ponte Novo on 9th May 1769, and fled to England. On 15th August the edict of "Reunion" between France and Corsica was promulgated. On the same day Napoleon Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio. After a week at Genoa Smollett proceeded along the coast to Lerici. There, being tired of the sea, the party disembarked, and proceeded by chaise from Sarzano to Cercio in Modenese territory, and so into Tuscany, then under the suzerainty of Austria. His description of Pisa is of an almost sunny gaiety and good humour. Italy, through this portal, was capable of casting a spell even upon a traveller so case-hardened as Smollett. The very churches at Pisa are "tolerably ornamented." The Campo Santo and Tower fall in no way short of their reputation, while the brass gates so far excel theirs that Smollett could have stood a whole day to examine and admire them. These agremens may be attributable in some measure to "a very good inn." In stating that galleys were built in the town, Smollett seems to have fallen a victim, for once, to guide-book information. Evelyn mentions that galleys were built there in his time, but that was more than a hundred years before. The slips and dock had long been abandoned, as Smollett is careful to point out in his manuscript notes, now in the British Museum. He also explains with superfluous caution that the Duomo of Pisa is not entirely Gothic. Once arrived in the capital of Tuscany, after admitting that Florence is a noble city, our traveller is anxious to avoid the hackneyed ecstasies and threadbare commonplaces, derived in those days from Vasari through Keysler and other German commentators, whose genius Smollett is inclined to discover rather "in the back than in the brain." The two pass-words for a would-be connoisseur, according to Goldsmith, were to praise Perugino, and to say that such and such a work would have been much better had the painter devoted more time and study to it. With these alternatives at hand one might pass with credit through any famous continental collection. Smollett aspired to more independence of thought and opinion, though we perceive at every turn how completely the Protestant prejudice of his "moment" and "milieu" had obtained dominion over him. To his perception monks do not chant or intone, they bawl and bellow their litanies. Flagellants are hired peasants who pad themselves to repletion with women's bodices. The image of the Virgin Mary is bejewelled, hooped, painted, patched, curled, and frizzled in the very extremity of the fashion. No particular attention is paid by the mob to the Crucified One, but as soon as his lady-mother appeared on the shoulders of four lusty friars the whole populace fall upon their knees in the dirt. We have some characteristic criticism and observation of the Florentine nobles, the opera, the improvisatori, [For details as to the eighteenth-century improvisatore and commedia delle arte the reader is referred to Symonds's Carlo Gozzi. See also the Travel Papers of Mrs. Piozzi; Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, and Doran's Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence. (Vide Appendix A, p. 345)] the buildings, and the cicisbei. Smollett nearly always gives substantial value to his notes, however casual, for he has an historian's eye, and knows the symptoms for which the inquirer who comes after is likely to make inquisition. Smollett's observations upon the state of Florence in Letters XXVII and XXVIII are by no means devoid of value. The direct rule of the Medici had come to an end in 1737, and Tuscany (which with the exception of the interlude of 1798-1814 remained in Austrian hands down to 1860) was in 1764 governed by the Prince de Craon, viceroy of the Empress Maria Theresa. Florence was, indeed, on the threshold of the sweeping administrative reforms instituted by Peter Leopold, the archduke for whom Smollett relates that they were preparing the Pitti Palace at the time of his stay. This Prince governed the country as Grand Duke from 1765 to 1790, when he succeeded his brother as Emperor, and left a name in history as the ill-fated Leopold. Few more active exponents of paternal reform are known to history. But the Grand Duke had to deal with a people such as Smollett describes. Conservative to the core, subservient to their religious directors, the "stupid party" in Florence proved themselves clever enough to retard the process of enlightenment by methods at which even Smollett himself might have stood amazed. The traveller touches an interesting source of biography when he refers to the Englishman called Acton, formerly an East India Company captain, now commander of the Emperor's Tuscan Navy, consisting of "a few frigates." This worthy was the old commodore whom Gibbon visited in retirement at Leghorn. The commodore was brother of Gibbon's friend, Dr. Acton, who was settled at Besancon, where his noted son, afterwards Sir John Acton, was born in 1736. Following in the footsteps of his uncle the commodore, who became a Catholic, Smollett tells us, and was promoted Admiral of Tuscany, John Acton entered the Tuscan Marine in 1775. [Sir John Acton's subsequent career belongs to history. His origin made him an expert on naval affairs, and in 1776 he obtained some credit for an expedition which he commanded against the Barbary pirates. In 1778 Maria Carolina of Naples visited her brother Leopold at Florence, and was impressed by Acton's ugliness and reputation for exceptional efficiency. Her favourite minister, Prince Caramanico, persuaded the Grand Duke, Leopold, to permit Acton to exchange into the Neapolitan service, and reorganize the navy of the southern kingdom. This actually came to pass, and, moreover, Acton played his cards so well that he soon engrossed the ministries of War and Finance, and after the death of Caracciolo, the elder, also that of Foreign Affairs. Sir William Hamilton had a high opinion of the" General," soon to become Field-Marshal. He took a strong part in resistance to revolutionary propaganda, caused to be built the ships which assisted Nelson in 1795, and proved himself one of the most capable bureaucrats of the time. But the French proved too strong, and Napoleon was the cause of his disgrace in 1804. In that year, by special dispensation from the Pope, he married his niece, and retired to Palermo, where he died on 12th August 1811.] Let loose in the Uffizi Gallery Smollett shocked his sensitive contemporaries by his freedom from those sham ecstasies which have too often dogged the footsteps of the virtuosi. Like Scott or Mark Twain at a later date Smollett was perfectly ready to admire anything he could understand; but he expressly disclaims pretensions to the nice discernment and delicate sensibility of the connoisseur. He would never have asked to be left alone with the Venus de Medicis as a modern art-critic is related to have asked to be left alone with the Venus of Rokeby. He would have been at a loss to understand the state of mind of the eminent actor who thought the situation demanded that he should be positively bereft of breath at first sight of the Apollo Belvedere, and panting to regain it, convulsively clutched at the arm of his companion, with difficulty articulating, "I breathe." Smollett refused to be hypnotized by the famous Venus discovered at Hadrian's villa, brought from Tivoli in 1680, and then in the height of its renown; the form he admired, but condemned the face and the posture. Personally I disagree with Smollett, though the balance of cultivated opinion has since come round to his side. The guilt of Smollett lay in criticizing what was above criticism, as the contents of the Tribuna were then held to be. And in defence of this point of view it may at least be said that the Uffizi was then, with the exception of the Vatican, the only gallery of first-rate importance open to the travelling public on the Grand Tour. Founded by Cosimo I, built originally by George Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna, and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in 1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737), was one of the most liberal as regards the freedom of access which he allowed to his accumulated treasures. Among the distinguished antiquaries who acted as curators and cicerones were Sebastiano Bianchi, Antonio Cocchi, Raymond Cocchi, Joseph Bianchi, J. B. Pelli, the Abbe Lanzi, and Zacchiroli. The last three all wrote elaborate descriptions of the Gallery during the last decades of the eighteenth century. There was unhappily an epidemic of dishonesty among the custodians of gems at this period, and, like the notorious Raspe, who fled from Cassel in 1775, and turned some of his old employers to ridicule in his Baron Munchausen, Joseph Bianchi was convicted first of robbing his cabinet and then attempting to set it on fire, for which exploit the "learned and judicious Bianchi," as Smollett called him in his first edition, was sent to prison for life. The Arrotino which Smollett so greatly admired, and which the delusive Bianchi declared to be a representation of the Augur Attus Naevius, is now described as "A Scythian whetting his knife to flay Marsyas." Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly reverential mood. Exactly the same difficulty is experienced in approaching the sacred shrines of art. Enthusiasm about great artistic productions, though we may readily understand it to be justifiable, is by no means so easily communicable. How many people possessing a real claim to culture have felt themselves puzzled by their insensibility before some great masterpiece! Conditions may be easily imagined in which the inducement to affect an ecstasy becomes so strong as to prove overpowering. Many years ago at Florence the loiterers in the Tribuna were startled by the sudden rush into the place of a little man whose literary fame gave him high claims to intuitive taste. He placed himself with high clasped hand before the chief attraction in that room of treasures. "There," he murmured, "is the Venus de Medicis, and here I must stay--for ever and for ever." He had scarcely uttered these words, each more deeply and solemnly than the preceding, when an acquaintance entered, and the enthusiast, making a hasty inquiry if Lady So-and-So had arrived, left the room not to return again that morning. Before the same statue another distinguished countryman used to pass an hour daily. His acquaintance respected his raptures and kept aloof; but a young lady, whose attention was attracted by sounds that did not seem expressive of admiration, ventured to approach, and found the poet sunk in profound, but not silent, slumber. From such absurdities as these, or of the enthusiast who went into raptures about the head of the Elgin Ilissos (which is unfortunately a headless trunk), we are happily spared in the pages of Smollett. In him complete absence of gush is accompanied by an independent judgement, for which it may quite safely be claimed that good taste is in the ascendant in the majority of cases. From Florence Smollett set out in October 1764 for Siena, a distance of forty-two miles, in a good travelling coach; he slept there, and next day, seven and a half miles farther on, at Boon Convento, hard by Montepulciano, now justly celebrated for its wine, he had the amusing adventure with the hostler which gave occasion for his vivid portrait of an Italian uffiziale, and also to that irresistible impulse to cane the insolent hostler, from the ill consequences of which he was only saved by the underling's precipitate flight. The night was spent at Radicofani, five and twenty miles farther on. A clever postilion diversified the route to Viterbo, another forty-three miles. The party was now within sixteen leagues, or ten hours, of Rome. The road from Radicofani was notoriously bad all the way, but Smollett was too excited or too impatient to pay much attention to it. "You may guess what I felt at first sight of the city of Rome." "When you arrive at Rome," he says later, in somewhat more accustomed vein, "you receive cards from all your country folk in that city. They expect to have the visit returned next day, when they give orders not to be at home, and you never speak to one another in the sequel. This is a refinement in hospitality and politeness which the English have invented by the strength of their own genius without any assistance either from France, Italy, or Lapland." It is needless to recapitulate Smollett's views of Rome. Every one has his own, and a passing traveller's annotations are just about as nourishing to the imagination as a bibliographer's note on the Bible. Smollett speaks in the main judiciously of the Castle of St. Angelo, the Piazza and the interior of St. Peter's, the Pincian, the Forum, the Coliseum, the Baths of Caracalla, and the other famous sights of successive ages. On Roman habits and pastimes and the gullibility of the English cognoscente he speaks with more spice of authority. Upon the whole he is decidedly modest about his virtuoso vein, and when we reflect upon the way in which standards change and idols are shifted from one pedestal to another, it seems a pity that such modesty has not more votaries. In Smollett's time we must remember that Hellenic and primitive art, whether antique or medieval, were unknown or unappreciated. The reigning models of taste in ancient sculpture were copies of fourth-century originals, Hellenistic or later productions. Hence Smollett's ecstasies over the Laocoon, the Niobe, and the Dying Gladiator. Greek art of the best period was hardly known in authentic examples; antiques so fine as the Torso of Hercules were rare. But while his failures show the danger of dogmatism in art criticism, Smollett is careful to disclaim all pretensions to the nice discernment of the real connoisseur. In cases where good sense and sincere utterance are all that is necessary he is seldom far wrong. Take the following description for example:-- "You need not doubt but that I went to the church of St. Peter in Montorio, to view the celebrated Transfiguration by Raphael, which, if it was mine, I would cut in two parts. The three figures in the air attract the eye so strongly that little or no attention is paid to those below on the mountain. I apprehend that the nature of the subject does not admit of that keeping and dependence which ought to be maintained in the disposition of the lights and shadows in a picture. The groups seem to be entirely independent of each other. The extraordinary merit of this piece, I imagine, consists not only in the expression of divinity on the face of Christ, but also in the surprising lightness of the figure that hovers like a beautiful exhalation in the air." Smollett's remarks about the "Last Judgement" of Michael Angelo, (that it confuses the eye as a number of people speaking at once confounds the ear; and that while single figures are splendid, the whole together resembles a mere mob, without subordination, keeping, or repose) will probably be re-echoed by a large proportion of the sightseers who gaze upon it yearly. But his description of the "Transfiguration" displays an amount of taste and judgement which is far from being so widely distributed. For purposes of reproduction at the present day, I may remind the reader that the picture is ordinarily "cut in two." and the nether portion is commonly attributed to Raphael's pupils, while the "beautiful exhalation," as Smollett so felicitously terms it, is attributed exclusively to the master when at the zenith of his powers. His general verdict upon Michael Angelo and Raphael has much in it that appeals to a modern taste. Of Raphael, as a whole, he concludes that the master possesses the serenity of Virgil, but lacks the fire of Homer; and before leaving this same Letter XXXIII, in which Smollett ventures so many independent critical judgements, I am tempted to cite yet another example of his capacity for acute yet sympathetic appreciation. "In the Palazzo Altieri I admired a picture, by Carlo Maratti, representing a saint calling down lightning from heaven to destroy blasphemers. It was the figure of the saint I admired, merely as a portrait. The execution of the other parts was tame enough; perhaps they were purposely kept down in order to preserve the importance of the principal figure. I imagine Salvator Rosa would have made a different disposition on the same subject--that amidst the darkness of a tempest he would have illuminated the blasphemer with the flash of lightning by which he was destroyed. This would have thrown a dismal gleam upon his countenance, distorted by the horror of his situation as well as by the effects of the fire, and rendered the whole scene dreadfully picturesque." Smollett confuses historical and aesthetic grandeur. What appeals to him most is a monument of a whole past civilization, such as the Pont du Gard. His views of art, too, as well as his views of life, are profoundly influenced by his early training as a surgeon. He is not inclined by temperament to be sanguine. His gaze is often fixed, like that of a doctor, upon the end of life; and of art, as of nature, he takes a decidedly pathological view. Yet, upon the whole, far from deriding his artistic impressions, I think we shall be inclined rather to applaud them, as well for their sanity as for their undoubted sincerity. For the return journey to Florence Smollett selected the alternative route by Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Perugia, and Arezzo, and, by his own account, no traveller ever suffered quite so much as he did from "dirt," "vermin," "poison," and imposture. At Foligno, where Goethe also, in his travels a score of years or so later, had an amusing adventure, Smollett was put into a room recently occupied by a wild beast (bestia), but the bestia turned out on investigation to be no more or no less than an "English heretic." The food was so filthy that it might have turned the stomach of a muleteer; their coach was nearly shattered to pieces; frozen with cold and nearly devoured by rats. Mrs. Smollett wept in silence with horror and fatigue; and the bugs gave the Doctor a whooping-cough. If Smollett anticipated a violent death from exhaustion and chagrin in consequence of these tortures he was completely disappointed. His health was never better,--so much so that he felt constrained in fairness to drink to the health of the Roman banker who had recommended this nefarious route. [See the Doctor's remarks at the end of Letter XXXV.] By Florence and Lerici he retraced his steps to Nice early in 1765, and then after a brief jaunt to Turin (where he met Sterne) and back by the Col di Tende, he turned his face definitely homewards. The journey home confirmed his liking for Pisa, and gives an opening for an amusing description of the Britisher abroad (Letter XXXV). We can almost overhear Thackeray, or the author of Eothen, touching this same topic in Letter XLI. "When two natives of any other country chance to meet abroad, they run into each other's embrace like old friends, even though they have never heard of one another till that moment; whereas two Englishmen in the same situation maintain a mutual reserve and diffidence, and keep without the sphere of each other's attraction, like two bodies endowed with a repulsive power." Letter XXXVI gives opportunity for some discerning remarks on French taxation. Having given the French king a bit of excellent advice (that he should abolish the fermiers generaux), Smollett proceeds, in 1765, to a forecast of probabilities which is deeply significant and amazingly shrewd. The fragment known as Smollett's Dying Prophecy of 1771 has often been discredited. Yet the substance of it is fairly adumbrated here in the passage beginning, "There are undoubtedly many marks of relaxation in the reins of French government," written fully six years previously. After a pleasing description of Grasse, "famous for its pomatum, gloves, wash-balls, perfumes, and toilette boxes lined with bergamot," the homeward traveller crossed the French frontier at Antibes, and in Letter XXXIX at Marseille, he compares the galley slaves of France with those of Savoy. At Bath where he had gone to set up a practice, Smollett once astonished the faculty by "proving" in a pamphlet that the therapeutic properties of the waters had been prodigiously exaggerated. So, now, in the south of France he did not hesitate to pronounce solemnly that "all fermented liquors are pernicious to the human constitution." Elsewhere he comments upon the immeasurable appetite of the French for bread. The Frenchman will recall the story of the peasant-persecuting baron whom Louis XII. provided with a luxurious feast, which the lack of bread made uneatable; he may not have heard a story told me in Liege at the Hotel Charlemagne of the Belgian who sought to conciliate his French neighbour by remarking, "Je vois que vous etes Français, monsieur, parceque vous mangez beaucoup de pain," and the Frenchman's retort, "Je vois que vous etes lye monsieur, parceque vous mangez beaucoup de tout!" From Frejus Smollett proceeds to Toulon, repeating the old epigram that "the king of France is greater at Toulon than at Versailles." The weather is so pleasant that the travellers enjoy a continual concert of "nightingales" from Vienne to Fontainebleau. The "douche" of Aix-les-Bains having been explained, Smollett and his party proceeded agreeably to Avignon, where by one of the strange coincidences of travel he met his old voiturier Joseph "so embrowned by the sun that he might have passed for an Iroquois." In spite of Joseph's testimonial the "plagues of posting" are still in the ascendant, and Smollett is once more generous of good advice. Above all, he adjures us when travelling never to omit to carry a hammer and nails, a crowbar, an iron pin or two, a large knife, and a bladder of grease. Why not a lynch pin, which we were so carefully instructed how to inquire about in Murray's Conversation for Travellers? But-the history of his troublous travels is drawing to an end. From Lyons the route is plain through Macon, Chalons, Dijon, Auxerre, Sells, and Fontainebleau--the whole itinerary almost exactly anticipates that of Talfourd's Vacation Tour one hundred and ten years later, except that on the outward journey Talfourd sailed down the Rhone. Smollett's old mental grievances and sores have been shifted and to some extent, let us hope, dissipated by his strenuous journeyings, and in June 1765, after an absence of two years, he is once more enabled to write, "You cannot imagine what pleasure I feel while I survey the white cliffs of Dover at this distance [from Boulogne]. Not that I am at all affected by the nescio qua dulcedine natalis soli of Horace. "That seems to be a kind of fanaticism, founded on the prejudices of education, which induces a Laplander to place the terrestrial paradise among the snows of Norway, and a Swiss to prefer the barren mountains of Soleure to the fruitful plains of Lombardy. I am attached to my country, because it is the land of liberty, cleanliness, and convenience; but I love it still more tenderly, as the scene of all my interesting connections, as the habitation of my friends, for whose conversation, correspondence, and esteem I wish alone to live." For the time being it cannot be doubted that the hardships Smollett had to undergo on his Italian journey, by sea and land, and the violent passions by which he was agitated owing to the conduct of refractory postilions and extortionate innkeepers, contributed positively to brace up and invigorate his constitution. He spoke of himself indeed as "mended by ill-treatment" not unlike Tavernier, the famous traveller,--said to have been radically cured of the gout by a Turkish aga in Egypt, who gave him the bastinado because he would not look at the head of the bashaw of Cairo. But Fizes was right after all in his swan-prescription, for poor Smollett's cure was anything but a radical one. His health soon collapsed under the dreary round of incessant labour at Chelsea. His literary faculty was still maturing and developing. His genius was mellowing, and a later work might have eclipsed Clinker. But it was not to be. He had a severe relapse in the winter. In 1770 he had once more to take refuge from overwork on the sunny coast he had done so much to popularize among his countrymen, and it was near Leghorn that he died on 17th September 1771. ANNO AETATIS 51. EHEV! QVAM PROCVL A PATRIA! PROPE LIBVRNI PORTVM, IN ITALIA JACET SEPVLTVS. THOMAS SECCOMBE. ACTON, May 1907. LETTER I BOULOGNE SUR MER, June 23, 1763. DEAR SIR,--You laid your commands upon me at parting, to communicate from time to time the observations I should make in the course of my travels and it was an injunction I received with pleasure. In gratifying your curiosity, I shall find some amusement to beguile the tedious hours, which, without some such employment, would be rendered insupportable by distemper and disquiet. You knew, and pitied my situation, traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity, which it was not in the power of fortune to repair. You know with what eagerness I fled from my country as a scene of illiberal dispute, and incredible infatuation, where a few worthless incendiaries had, by dint of perfidious calumnies and atrocious abuse, kindled up a flame which threatened all the horrors of civil dissension. I packed up my little family in a hired coach, and attended by my trusty servant, who had lived with me a dozen of years, and now refused to leave me, took the road to Dover, in my way to the South of France, where I hoped the mildness of the climate would prove favourable to the weak state of my lungs. You advised me to have recourse again to the Bath waters, from the use of which I had received great benefit the preceding winter: but I had many inducements to leave England. My wife earnestly begged I would convey her from a country where every object served to nourish her grief: I was in hopes that a succession of new scenes would engage her attention, and gradually call off her mind from a series of painful reflections; and I imagined the change of air, and a journey of near a thousand miles, would have a happy effect upon my own constitution. But, as the summer was already advanced, and the heat too excessive for travelling in warm climates, I proposed staying at Boulogne till the beginning of autumn, and in the mean time to bathe in the sea, with a view to strengthen and prepare my body for the fatigues of such a long journey. A man who travels with a family of five persons, must lay his account with a number of mortifications; and some of these I have already happily overcome. Though I was well acquainted with the road to Dover, and made allowances accordingly, I could not help being chagrined at the bad accommodation and impudent imposition to which I was exposed. These I found the more disagreeable, as we were detained a day extraordinary on the road, in consequence of my wife's being indisposed. I need not tell you this is the worst road in England with respect to the conveniences of travelling, and must certainly impress foreigners with an unfavourable opinion of the nation in general. The chambers are in general cold and comfortless, the beds paultry, the cookery execrable, the wine poison, the attendance bad, the publicans insolent, and the bills extortion; there is not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Every landlord and every waiter harangued upon the knavery of a publican in Canterbury, who had charged the French ambassador forty pounds for a supper that was not worth forty shillings. They talked much of honesty and conscience; but when they produced their own bills, they appeared to be all of the same family and complexion. If it was a reproach upon the English nation, that an innkeeper should pillage strangers at that rate; it is a greater scandal, that the same fellow should be able to keep his house still open. I own, I think it would be for the honour of the kingdom to reform the abuses of this road; and in particular to improve the avenue to London by the way of Kent-Street, which is a most disgraceful entrance to such an opulent city. A foreigner, in passing through this beggarly and ruinous suburb, conceives such an idea of misery and meanness, as all the wealth and magnificence of London and Westminster are afterwards unable to destroy. A friend of mine, who brought a Parisian from Dover in his own post-chaise, contrived to enter Southwark after it was dark, that his friend might not perceive the nakedness of this quarter. The stranger was much pleased with the great number of shops full of merchandize, lighted up to the best advantage. He was astonished at the display of riches in Lombard-Street and Cheapside. The badness of the pavement made him find the streets twice as long as they were. They alighted in Upper Brook-Street by Grosvenor-Square; and when his conductor told him they were then about the middle of London, the Frenchman declared, with marks of infinite surprize, that London was very near as long as Paris. On my arrival at Dover I payed off my coachman, who went away with a heavy heart. He wanted much to cross the sea, and endeavoured to persuade me to carry the coach and horses to the other side. If I had been resolved to set out immediately for the South, perhaps I should have taken his advice. If I had retained him at the rate of twenty guineas per month, which was the price he demanded, and begun my journey without hesitation, I should travel more agreeably than I can expect to do in the carriages of this country; and the difference of the expence would be a mere trifle. I would advise every man who travels through France to bring his own vehicle along with him, or at least to purchase one at Calais or Boulogne, where second-hand berlins and chaises may be generally had at reasonable rates. I have been offered a very good berlin for thirty guineas: but before I make the purchase, I must be better informed touching the different methods of travelling in this country. Dover is commonly termed a den of thieves; and I am afraid it is not altogether without reason, it has acquired this appellation. The people are said to live by piracy in time of war; and by smuggling and fleecing strangers in time of peace: but I will do them the justice to say, they make no distinction between foreigners and natives. Without all doubt a man cannot be much worse lodged and worse treated in any part of Europe; nor will he in any other place meet with more flagrant instances of fraud, imposition, and brutality. One would imagine they had formed a general conspiracy against all those who either go to, or return from the continent. About five years ago, in my passage from Flushing to Dover, the master of the packet-boat brought-to all of a sudden off the South Foreland, although the wind was as favourable as it could blow. He was immediately boarded by a customhouse boat, the officer of which appeared to be his friend. He then gave the passengers to understand, that as it was low water, the ship could not go into the harbour; but that the boat would carry them ashore with their baggage. The custom-house officer demanded a guinea for this service, and the bargain was made. Before we quitted the ship, we were obliged to gratify the cabin-boy for his attendance, and to give drink-money to the sailors. The boat was run aground on the open beach; but we could not get ashore without the assistance of three or four fellows, who insisted upon being paid for their trouble. Every parcel and bundle, as it was landed, was snatched up by a separate porter: one ran away with a hat-box, another with a wig-box, a third with a couple of shirts tied up in a handkerchief, and two were employed in carrying a small portmanteau that did not weigh forty pounds. All our things were hurried to the custom-house to be searched, and the searcher was paid for disordering our cloaths: from thence they were removed to the inn, where the porters demanded half-a-crown each for their labour. It was in vain to expostulate; they surrounded the house like a pack of hungry bounds, and raised such a clamour, that we were fain to comply. After we had undergone all this imposition, we were visited by the master of the packet, who, having taken our fares, and wished us joy of our happy arrival in England, expressed his hope that we would remember the poor master, whose wages were very small, and who chiefly depended upon the generosity of the passengers. I own I was shocked at his meanness, and could not help telling him so. I told him, I could not conceive what title he had to any such gratification: he had sixteen passengers, who paid a guinea each, on the supposition that every person should have a bed; but there were no more than eight beds in the cabin, and each of these was occupied before I came on board; so that if we had been detained at sea a whole week by contrary winds and bad weather, one half of the passengers must have slept upon the boards, howsoever their health might have suffered from this want of accommodation. Notwithstanding this check, he was so very abject and importunate, that we gave him a crown a-piece, and he retired. The first thing I did when I arrived at Dover this last time, was to send for the master of a packet-boat, and agree with him to carry us to Boulogne at once, by which means I saved the expence of travelling by land from Calais to this last place, a journey of four-and-twenty miles. The hire of a vessel from Dover to Boulogne is precisely the same as from Dover to Calais, five guineas; but this skipper demanded eight, and, as I did not know the fare, I agreed to give him six. We embarked between six and seven in the evening, and found ourselves in a most wretched hovel, on board what is called a Folkstone cutter. The cabin was so small that a dog could hardly turn in it, and the beds put me in mind of the holes described in some catacombs, in which the bodies of the dead were deposited, being thrust in with the feet foremost; there was no getting into them but end-ways, and indeed they seemed so dirty, that nothing but extreme necessity could have obliged me to use them. We sat up all night in a most uncomfortable situation, tossed about by the sea, cold, arid cramped and weary, and languishing for want of sleep. At three in the morning the master came down, and told us we were just off the harbour of Boulogne; but the wind blowing off shore, he could not possibly enter, and therefore advised us to go ashore in the boat. I went upon deck to view the coast, when he pointed to the place where he said Boulogne stood, declaring at the same time we were within a short mile of the harbour's mouth. The morning was cold and raw, and I knew myself extremely subject to catch cold; nevertheless we were all so impatient to be ashore, that I resolved to take his advice. The boat was already hoisted out, and we went on board of it, after I had paid the captain and gratified his crew. We had scarce parted from the ship, when we perceived a boat coming towards us from the shore; and the master gave us to understand, it was coming to carry us into the harbour. When I objected to the trouble of shifting from one boat to another in the open sea, which (by the bye) was a little rough; he said it was a privilege which the watermen of Boulogne had, to carry all passengers ashore, and that this privilege he durst not venture to infringe. This was no time nor place to remonstrate. The French boat came alongside half filled with water, and we were handed from the one to the other. We were then obliged to lie upon our oars, till the captain's boat went on board and returned from the ship with a packet of letters. We were afterwards rowed a long league, in a rough sea, against wind and tide, before we reached the harbour, where we landed, benumbed with cold, and the women excessively sick: from our landing-place we were obliged to walk very near a mile to the inn where we purposed to lodge, attended by six or seven men and women, bare-legged, carrying our baggage. This boat cost me a guinea, besides paying exorbitantly the people who carried our things; so that the inhabitants of Dover and of Boulogne seem to be of the same kidney, and indeed they understand one another perfectly well. It was our honest captain who made the signal for the shore-boat before I went upon deck; by which means he not only gratified his friends, the watermen of Boulogne, but also saved about fifteen shillings portage, which he must have paid had he gone into the harbour; and thus he found himself at liberty to return to Dover, which he reached in four hours. I mention these circumstances as a warning to other passengers. When a man hires a packet-boat from Dover to Calais or Boulogne, let him remember that the stated price is five guineas; and let him insist upon being carried into the harbour in the ship, without paying the least regard to the representations of the master, who is generally a little dirty knave. When he tells you it is low water, or the wind is in your teeth, you may say you will stay on board till it is high water, or till the wind comes favourable. If he sees you are resolute, he will find means to bring his ship into the harbour, or at least to convince you, without a possibility of your being deceived, that it is not in his power. After all, the fellow himself was a loser by his finesse; if he had gone into the harbour, he would have had another fare immediately back to Dover, for there was a Scotch gentleman at the inn waiting for such an opportunity. Knowing my own weak constitution, I took it for granted this morning's adventure would cost me a fit of illness; and what added to my chagrin, when we arrived at the inn, all the beds were occupied; so that we were obliged to sit in a cold kitchen above two hours, until some of the lodgers should get up. This was such a bad specimen of French accommodation, that my wife could not help regretting even the inns of Rochester, Sittingbourn, and Canterbury: bad as they are, they certainly have the advantage, when compared with the execrable auberges of this country, where one finds nothing but dirt and imposition. One would imagine the French were still at war with the English, for they pillage them without mercy. Among the strangers at this inn where we lodged, there was a gentleman of the faculty, just returned from Italy. Understanding that I intended to winter in the South of France, on account of a pulmonic disorder, he strongly recommended the climate of Nice in Provence, which, indeed, I had often heard extolled; and I am almost resolved to go thither, not only for the sake of the air, but also for its situation on the Mediterranean, where I can have the benefit of bathing; and from whence there is a short cut by sea to Italy, should I find it necessary to try the air of Naples. After having been ill accommodated three days at our inn, we have at last found commodious lodgings, by means of Mrs. B-, a very agreeable French lady, to whom we were recommended by her husband, who is my countryman, and at present resident in London. For three guineas a month we have the greatest part of a house tolerably furnished; four bed-chambers on the first floor, a large parlour below, a kitchen, and the use of a cellar. These, I own, are frivolous incidents, scarce worth committing to paper; but they may serve to introduce observations of more consequence; and in the mean time I know nothing will be indifferent to you, that concerns--Your humble servant. LETTER II BOULOGNE SUR MER, July 15, 1763. DEAR SIR,--The custom-house officers at Boulogne, though as alert, are rather more civil than those on your side of the water. I brought no plate along with me, but a dozen and a half of spoons, and a dozen teaspoons: the first being found in one of our portmanteaus, when they were examined at the bureau, cost me seventeen livres entree; the others being luckily in my servant's pocket, escaped duty free. All wrought silver imported into France, pays at the rate of so much per mark: therefore those who have any quantity of plate, will do well to leave it behind them, unless they can confide in the dexterity of the shipmasters; some of whom will undertake to land it without the ceremony of examination. The ordonnances of France are so unfavourable to strangers, that they oblige them to pay at the rate of five per cent. for all the bed and table linen which they bring into the kingdom, even though it has been used. When my trunks arrived in a ship from the river Thames, I underwent this ordeal: but what gives me more vexation, my books have been stopped at the bureau; and will be sent to Amiens at my expence, to be examined by the chambre syndicale; lest they should contain something prejudicial to the state, or to the religion of the country. This is a species of oppression which one would not expect to meet with in France, which piques itself on its politeness and hospitality: but the truth is, I know no country in which strangers are worse treated with respect to their essential concerns. If a foreigner dies in France, the king seizes all his effects, even though his heir should be upon the spot; and this tyranny is called the droit d'aubaine founded at first upon the supposition, that all the estate of foreigners residing in France was acquired in that kingdom, and that, therefore, it would be unjust to convey it to another country. If an English protestant goes to France for the benefit of his health, attended by his wife or his son, or both, and dies with effects in the house to the amount of a thousand guineas, the king seizes the whole, the family is left destitute, and the body of the deceased is denied christian burial. The Swiss, by capitulation, are exempted from this despotism, and so are the Scots, in consequence of an ancient alliance between the two nations. The same droit d'aubaine is exacted by some of the princes in Germany: but it is a great discouragement to commerce, and prejudices every country where it is exercised, to ten times the value of what it brings into the coffers of the sovereign. I am exceedingly mortified at the detention of my books, which not only deprives me of an amusement which I can very ill dispense with; but, in all probability, will expose me to sundry other inconveniencies. I must be at the expence of sending them sixty miles to be examined, and run the risque of their being condemned; and, in the mean time, I may lose the opportunity of sending them with my heavy baggage by sea to Bourdeaux, to be sent up the Garonne to Tholouse, and from thence transmitted through the canal of Languedoc to Cette, which is a sea-port on the Mediterranean, about three or four leagues from Montpelier. For the recovery of my books, I had recourse to the advice of my landlord, Mons. B--. He is a handsome young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, and keeps house with two maiden sisters, who are professed devotees. The brother is a little libertine, good natured and obliging; but a true Frenchman in vanity, which is undoubtedly the ruling passion of this volatile people. He has an inconsiderable place under the government, in consequence of which he is permitted to wear a sword, a privilege which he does not fail to use. He is likewise receiver of the tythes of the clergy in this district, an office that gives him a command of money, and he, moreover, deals in the wine trade. When I came to his house, he made a parade of all these advantages: he displayed his bags of money, and some old gold which his father had left him. He described his chateau in the country; dropped hints of the fortunes that were settled upon mademoiselles his sisters; boasted of his connexions at court; and assured me it was not for my money that he let his lodgings, but altogether with a view to enjoy the pleasure of my company. The truth, when stript of all embellishments, is this: the sieur B-- is the son of an honest bourgeois lately dead, who left him the house, with some stock in trade, a little money, and a paltry farm: his sisters have about three thousand livres (not quite 140 L) apiece; the brother's places are worth about fifty pounds a year, and his connexions at court are confined to a commis or clerk in the secretary's office, with whom he corresponds by virtue of his employment. My landlord piques himself upon his gallantry and success with the fair-sex: he keeps a fille de joye, and makes no secret of his amours. He told miss C-- the other day, in broken English, that, in the course of the last year, he had made six bastards. He owned, at the same time, he had sent them all to the hospital; but, now his father is dead, he would himself take care of his future productions. This, however, was no better than a gasconade. Yesterday the house was in a hot alarm, on account of a new windfall of this kind: the sisters were in tears; the brother was visited by the cure of the parish; the lady in the straw (a sempstress) sent him the bantling in a basket, and he transmitted it by the carriers to the Enfans trouves at Paris. But to return from this digression: Mr. B-- advised me to send a requete or petition to the chancellor of France, that I might obtain an order to have my books examined on the spot, by the president of Boulogne, or the procureur du roy, or the sub-delegate of the intendance. He recommended an advocat of his acquaintance to draw up the memoire, and introduced him accordingly; telling me at the same time, in private, that if he was not a drunkard, he would be at the head of his profession. He had indeed all the outward signs of a sot; a sleepy eye, a rubicund face, and carbuncled nose. He seemed to be a little out at elbows, had marvellous foul linen, and his breeches were not very sound: but he assumed an air of importance, was very courteous, and very solemn. I asked him if he did not sometimes divert himself with the muse: he smiled, and promised, in a whisper, to shew me some chansonettes de sa facon. Meanwhile he composed the requete in my name, which was very pompous, very tedious, and very abject. Such a stile might perhaps be necessary in a native of France; but I did not think it was at all suitable to a subject of Great-Britain. I thanked him for the trouble he had taken, as he would receive no other gratification; but when my landlord proposed to send the memoire to his correspondent at Paris, to be delivered to the chancellor, I told him I had changed my mind, and would apply to the English ambassador. I have accordingly taken the liberty to address myself to the earl of H--; and at the same time I have presumed to write to the duchess of D--, who is now at Paris, to entreat her grace's advice and interposition. What effect these applications may have, I know not: but the sieur B-- shakes his head, and has told my servant, in confidence, that I am mistaken if I think the English ambassador is as great a man at Paris as the chancellor of France. I ought to make an apology for troubling you with such an unentertaining detail, and consider that the detention of my books must be a matter of very little consequence to any body, but to--Your affectionate humble servant. LETTER III BOULOGNE, August 15, 1763. SIR--I am much obliged to you for your kind enquiries after my health, which has been lately in a very declining condition. In consequence of a cold, caught a few days after my arrival in France, I was seized with a violent cough, attended with a fever, and stitches in my breast, which tormented me all night long without ceasing. At the same time I had a great discharge by expectoration, and such a dejection of spirits as I never felt before. In this situation I took a step which may appear to have been desperate. I knew there was no imposthume in my lungs, and I supposed the stitches were spasmodical. I was sensible that all my complaints were originally derived from relaxation. I therefore hired a chaise, and going to the beach, about a league from the town, plunged into the sea without hesitation. By this desperate remedy, I got a fresh cold in my head: but my stitches and fever vanished the very first day; and by a daily repetition of the bath, I have diminished my cough, strengthened my body, and recovered my spirits. I believe I should have tried the same experiment, even if there had been an abscess in my lungs, though such practice would have been contrary to all the rules of medicine: but I am not one of those who implicitly believe in all the dogmata of physic. I saw one of the guides at Bath, the stoutest fellow among them, who recovered from the last stage of a consumption, by going into the king's bath, contrary to the express injunction of his doctor. He said, if he must die, the sooner the better, as he had nothing left for his subsistence. Instead of immediate death, he found instant case, and continued mending every day, till his health was entirely re-established. I myself drank the waters of Bath, and bathed, in diametrical opposition to the opinion of some physicians there settled, and found myself better every day, notwithstanding their unfavourable prognostic. If I had been of the rigid fibre, full of blood, subject to inflammation, I should have followed a different course. Our acquaintance, doctor C--, while he actually spit up matter, and rode out every day for his life, led his horse to water, at the pond in Hyde-Park, one cold frosty morning, and the beast, which happened to be of a hot constitution, plunged himself and his master over head and ears in the water. The poor doctor hastened home, half dead with fear, and was put to bed in the apprehension of a new imposthume; instead of which, he found himself exceedingly recruited in his spirits, and his appetite much mended. I advised him to take the hint, and go into the cold bath every morning; but he did not chuse to run any risque. How cold water comes to be such a bugbear, I know not: if I am not mistaken, Hippocrates recommends immersion in cold water for the gout; and Celsus expressly says, in omni tussi utilis est natatio: in every cough swimming is of service. I have conversed with a physician of this place, a sensible man, who assured me he was reduced to meer skin and bone by a cough and hectic fever, when he ordered a bath to be made in his own house, and dipped himself in cold water every morning. He at the same time left off drinking and swallowing any liquid that was warm. He is now strong and lusty, and even in winter has no other cover than a single sheet. His notions about the warm drink were a little whimsical: he imagined it relaxed the tone of the stomach; and this would undoubtedly be the case if it was drank in large quantities, warmer than the natural temperature of the blood. He alledged the example of the inhabitants of the Ladrone islands, who never taste any thing that is not cold, and are remarkably healthy. But to balance this argument I mentioned the Chinese, who scarce drink any thing but warm tea; and the Laplanders, who drink nothing but warm water; yet the people of both these nations are remarkably strong, healthy, and long-lived. You desire to know the fate of my books. My lord H--d is not yet come to France; but my letter was transmitted to him from Paris; and his lordship, with that generous humanity which is peculiar to his character, has done me the honour to assure me, under his own hand, that he has directed Mr. N--lle, our resident at Paris, to apply for an order that my books may be restored. I have met with another piece of good fortune, in being introduced to general Paterson and his lady, in their way to England from Nice, where the general has been many years commandant for the king of Sardinia. You must have heard of this gentleman, who has not only eminently distinguished himself, by his courage and conduct as an officer; but also by his probity and humanity in the exercise, of his office, and by his remarkable hospitality to all strangers, especially the subjects of Great-Britain, whose occasions called them to the place where he commanded. Being pretty far advanced in years, he begged leave to resign, that he might spend the evening of his days in his own country; and his Sardinian majesty granted his request with regret, after having honoured him with very particular marks of approbation and esteem. The general talks so favourably of the climate of Nice, with respect to disorders of the breast, that I am now determined to go thither. It would have been happy for me had he continued in his government. I think myself still very fortunate, in having obtained of him a letter of recommendation to the English consul at Nice, together with directions how to travel through the South of France. I propose to begin my journey some time next month, when the weather will be temperate to the southward; and in the wine countries I shall have the pleasure of seeing the vintage, which is always a season of festivity among all ranks of people. You have been very much mis-informed, by the person who compared Boulogne to Wapping: he did a manifest injustice to this place which is a large agreeable town, with broad open streets, excellently paved; and the houses are of stone, well built and commodious. The number of inhabitants may amount to sixteen thousand. You know this was generally supposed to be the portus Itius, and Gessoriacum of the antients: though it is now believed that the portus Itius, from whence Caesar sailed to Britain, is a place called Whitsand, about half way between this place and Calais. Boulogne is the capital of the Boulonnois, a district extending about twelve leagues, ruled by a governor independent of the governor of Picardy; of which province, however, this country forms a part. The present governor is the duc d'Aumout. The town of Boulogne is the see of a bishop suffragan of Rheims, whose revenue amounts to about four-and-twenty thousand livres, or one thousand pounds sterling. It is also the seat of a seneschal's court, from whence an appeal lies to the parliament of Paris; and thither all condemned criminals are sent, to have their sentence confirmed or reversed. Here is likewise a bailiwick, and a court of admiralty. The military jurisdiction of the city belongs to a commandant appointed by the king, a sort of sinecure bestowed upon some old officer. His appointments are very inconsiderable: he resides in the Upper Town, and his garrison at present consists of a few hundreds of invalids. Boulogne is divided into the Upper and Lower Towns. The former is a kind of citadel, about a short mile in circumference, situated on a rising ground, surrounded by a high wall and rampart, planted with rows of trees, which form a delightful walk. It commands a fine view of the country and Lower Town; and in clear weather the coast of England, from Dover to Folkstone, appears so plain, that one would imagine it was within four or five leagues of the French shore. The Upper Town was formerly fortified with outworks, which are now in ruins. Here is a square, a town-house, the cathedral, and two or three convents of nuns; in one of which there are several English girls, sent hither for their education. The smallness of the expence encourages parents to send their children abroad to these seminaries, where they learn scarce any thing that is useful but the French language; but they never fail to imbibe prejudices against the protestant religion, and generally return enthusiastic converts to the religion of Rome. This conversion always generates a contempt for, and often an aversion to, their own country. Indeed it cannot reasonably be expected that people of weak minds, addicted to superstition, should either love or esteem those whom they are taught to consider as reprobated heretics. Ten pounds a year is the usual pension in these convents; but I have been informed by a French lady who had her education in one of them, that nothing can be more wretched than their entertainment. The civil magistracy of Boulogne consists of a mayor and echevins; and this is the case in almost all the towns of France. The Lower Town is continued from the gate of the Upper Town, down the slope of a hill, as far as the harbour, stretching on both sides to a large extent, and is much more considerable than the Upper, with respect to the beauty of the streets, the convenience of the houses, and the number and wealth of the inhabitants. These, however, are all merchants, or bourgeoise, for the noblesse or gentry live all together in the Upper Town, and never mix with the others. The harbour of Boulogne is at the mouth of the small river, or rather rivulet Liane, which is so shallow, that the children wade through it at low water. As the tide makes, the sea flows in, and forms a pretty extensive harbour, which, however, admits nothing but small vessels. It is contracted at the mouth by two stone jetties or piers, which seem to have been constructed by some engineer, very little acquainted with this branch of his profession; for they are carried out in such a manner, as to collect a bank of sand just at the entrance of the harbour. The road is very open and unsafe, and the surf very high when the wind blows from the sea. There is no fortification near the harbour, except a paltry fort mounting about twenty guns, built in the last war by the prince de Cruy, upon a rock about a league to the eastward of Boulogne. It appears to be situated in such a manner, that it can neither offend, nor be offended. If the depth of water would admit a forty or fifty gun ship to lie within cannon-shot of it, I apprehend it might be silenced in half an hour; but, in all probability, there will be no vestiges of it at the next rupture between the two crowns. It is surrounded every day by the sea, at high water; and when it blows a fresh gale towards the shore, the waves break over the top of it, to the terror and astonishment of the garrison, who have been often heard crying piteously for assistance. I am persuaded, that it will one day disappear in the twinkling of an eye. The neighbourhood of this fort, which is a smooth sandy beach, I have chosen for my bathing place. The road to it is agreeable and romantic, lying through pleasant cornfields, skirted by open downs, where there is a rabbit warren, and great plenty of the birds so much admired at Tunbridge under the name of wheat-ears. By the bye, this is a pleasant corruption of white-a-se, the translation of their French name cul-blanc, taken from their colour for they are actually white towards the tail. Upon the top of a high rock, which overlooks the harbour, are the remains of an old fortification, which is indiscriminately called, Tour d'ordre, and Julius Caesar's fort. The original tower was a light-house built by Claudius Caesar, denominated Turris ardens, from the fire burned in it; and this the French have corrupted into Tour d'ordre; but no vestiges of this Roman work remain; what we now see, are the ruins of a castle built by Charlemagne. I know of no other antiquity at Boulogne, except an old vault in the Upper Town, now used as a magazine, which is said to be part of an antient temple dedicated to Isis. On the other side of the harbour, opposite to the Lower Town, there is a house built, at a considerable expence, by a general officer, who lost his life in the late war. Never was situation more inconvenient, unpleasant, and unhealthy. It stands on the edge of an ugly morass formed by the stagnant water left by the tide in its retreat: the very walks of the garden are so moist, that, in the driest weather, no person can make a tour of it, without danger of the rheumatism. Besides, the house is altogether inaccessible, except at low water, and even then the carriage must cross the harbour, the wheels up to the axle-tree in mud: nay, the tide rushes in so fast, that unless you seize the time to a minute, you will be in danger of perishing. The apartments of this house are elegantly fitted up, but very small; and the garden, notwithstanding its unfavourable situation, affords a great quantity of good fruit. The ooze, impregnated with sea salt, produces, on this side of the harbour, an incredible quantity of the finest samphire I ever saw. The French call it passe-pierre; and I suspect its English name is a corruption of sang-pierre. It is generally found on the faces of bare rocks that overhang the sea, by the spray of which it is nourished. As it grew upon a naked rock, without any appearance of soil, it might be naturally enough called sang du pierre, or sangpierre, blood of the rock; and hence the name samphire. On the same side of the harbour there is another new house, neatly built, belonging to a gentleman who has obtained a grant from the king of some ground which was always overflowed at high water. He has raised dykes at a considerable expence, to exclude the tide, and if he can bring his project to bear, he will not only gain a good estate for himself, but also improve the harbour, by increasing the depth at high-water. In the Lower Town of Boulogne there are several religious houses, particularly a seminary, a convent of Cordeliers, and another of Capuchins. This last, having fallen to decay, was some years ago repaired, chiefly by the charity of British travellers, collected by father Graeme, a native of North-Britain, who had been an officer in the army of king James II. and is said to have turned monk of this mendicant order, by way of voluntary penance, for having killed his friend in a duel. Be that as it may, he was a well-bred, sensible man, of a very exemplary life and conversation; and his memory is much revered in this place. Being superior of the convent, he caused the British arms to be put up in the church, as a mark of gratitude for the benefactions received from our nation. I often walk in the garden of the convent, the walls of which are washed by the sea at high-water. At the bottom of the garden is a little private grove, separated from it by a high wall, with a door of communication; and hither the Capuchins retire, when they are disposed for contemplation. About two years ago, this place was said to be converted to a very different use. There was among the monks one pere Charles, a lusty friar, of whom the people tell strange stories. Some young women of the town were seen mounting over the wall, by a ladder of ropes, in the dusk of the evening; and there was an unusual crop of bastards that season. In short, pere Charles and his companions gave such scandal, that the whole fraternity was changed; and now the nest is occupied by another flight of these birds of passage. If one of our privateers had kidnapped a Capuchin during the war, and exhibited him, in his habit, as a shew in London, he would have proved a good prize to the captors; for I know not a more uncouth and grotesque animal, than an old Capuchin in the habit of his order. A friend of mine (a Swiss officer) told me, that a peasant in his country used to weep bitterly, whenever a certain Capuchin mounted the pulpit to hold forth to the people. The good father took notice of this man, and believed he was touched by the finger of the Lord. He exhorted him to encourage these accessions of grace, and at the same time to be of good comfort, as having received such marks of the divine favour. The man still continued to weep, as before, every time the monk preached; and at last the Capuchin insisted upon knowing what it was, in his discourse or appearance, that made such an impression upon his heart "Ah, father! (cried the peasant) I never see you but I think of a venerable goat, which I lost at Easter. We were bred up together in the same family. He was the very picture of your reverence--one would swear you were brothers. Poor Baudouin! he died of a fall--rest his soul! I would willingly pay for a couple of masses to pray him out of purgatory." Among other public edifices at Boulogne, there is an hospital, or workhouse, which seems to be established upon a very good foundation. It maintains several hundreds of poor people, who are kept constantly at work, according to their age and abilities, in making thread, all sorts of lace, a kind of catgut, and in knitting stockings. It is under the direction of the bishop; and the see is at present filled by a prelate of great piety and benevolence, though a little inclining to bigotry and fanaticism. The churches in this town are but indifferently built, and poorly ornamented. There is not one picture in the place worth looking at, nor indeed does there seem to be the least taste for the liberal arts. In my next, I shall endeavour to satisfy you in the other articles you desire to know. Mean-while, I am ever--Yours. LETTER IV BOULOGNE, September 1, 1763. SIR,--I am infinitely obliged to D. H-- for the favourable manner in which he has mentioned me to the earl of H-- I have at last recovered my books, by virtue of a particular order to the director of the douane, procured by the application of the English resident to the French ministry. I am now preparing for my long journey; but, before I leave this place, I shall send you the packet I mentioned, by Meriton. Mean-while I must fulfil my promise in communicating the observations I have had occasion to make upon this town and country. The air of Boulogne is cold and moist, and, I believe, of consequence unhealthy. Last winter the frost, which continued six weeks in London, lasted here eight weeks without intermission; and the cold was so intense, that, in the garden of the Capuchins, it split the bark of several elms from top to bottom. On our arrival here we found all kinds of fruit more backward than in England. The frost, in its progress to Britain, is much weakened in crossing the sea. The atmosphere, impregnated with saline particles, resists the operation of freezing. Hence, in severe winters, all places near the sea-side are less cold than more inland districts. This is the reason why the winter is often more mild at Edinburgh than at London. A very great degree of cold is required to freeze salt water. Indeed it will not freeze at all, until it has deposited all its salt. It is now generally allowed among philosophers, that water is no more than ice thawed by heat, either solar, or subterranean, or both; and that this heat being expelled, it would return to its natural consistence. This being the case, nothing else is required for the freezing of water, than a certain degree of cold, which may be generated by the help of salt, or spirit of nitre, even under the line. I would propose, therefore, that an apparatus of this sort should be provided in every ship that goes to sea; and in case there should be a deficiency of fresh water on board, the seawater may be rendered potable, by being first converted into ice. The air of Boulogne is not only loaded with a great evaporation from the sea, increased by strong gales of wind from the West and South-West, which blow almost continually during the greatest part of the year; but it is also subject to putrid vapours, arising from the low marshy ground in the neighbourhood of the harbour, which is every tide overflowed with seawater. This may be one cause of the scrofula and rickets, which are two prevailing disorders among the children in Boulogne. But I believe the former is more owing to the water used in the Lower Town, which is very hard and unwholsome. It curdles with soap, gives a red colour to the meat that is boiled in it, and, when drank by strangers, never fails to occasion pains in the stomach and bowels; nay, sometimes produces dysenteries. In all appearance it is impregnated with nitre, if not with something more mischievous: we know that mundic, or pyrites, very often contains a proportion of arsenic, mixed with sulphur, vitriol, and mercury. Perhaps it partakes of the acid of some coal mine; for there are coal works in this district. There is a well of purging water within a quarter of a mile of the Upper Town, to which the inhabitants resort in the morning, as the people of London go to the Dog-and-duck, in St. George's fields. There is likewise a fountain of excellent water, hard by the cathedral, in the Upper Town, from whence I am daily supplied at a small expence. Some modern chemists affirm, that no saline chalybeate waters can exist, except in the neighbourhood of coal damps; and that nothing can be more mild, and gentle, and friendly to the constitution, than the said damps: but I know that the place where I was bred stands upon a zonic of coal; that the water which the inhabitants generally use is hard and brackish; and that the people are remarkably subject to the king's evil and consumption. These I would impute to the bad water, impregnated with the vitriol and brine of coal, as there is nothing in the constitution of the air that should render such distempers endemial. That the air of Boulogne encourages putrefaction, appears from the effect it has upon butcher's meat, which, though the season is remarkably cold, we can hardly keep four-and-twenty hours in the coolest part of the house. Living here is pretty reasonable; and the markets are tolerably supplied. The beef is neither fat nor firm; but very good for soup, which is the only use the French make of it. The veal is not so white, nor so well fed, as the English veal; but it is more juicy, and better tasted. The mutton and pork are very good. We buy our poultry alive, and fatten them at home. Here are excellent turkies, and no want of game: the hares, in particular, are very large, juicy, and high-flavoured. The best part of the fish caught on this coast is sent post to Paris, in chasse-marines, by a company of contractors, like those of Hastings in Sussex. Nevertheless, we have excellent soles, skaite, flounders and whitings, and sometimes mackarel. The oysters are very large, coarse, and rank. There is very little fish caught on the French coast, because the shallows run a great way from the shore; and the fish live chiefly in deep water: for this reason the fishermen go a great way out to sea, sometimes even as far as the coast of England. Notwithstanding all the haste the contractors can make, their fish in the summer is very often spoiled before it arrives at Paris; and this is not to be wondered at, considering the length of the way, which is near one hundred and fifty miles. At best it must be in such a mortified condition, that no other people, except the negroes on the coast of Guinea, would feed upon it. The wine commonly drank at Boulogne comes from Auxerre, is very small and meagre, and may be had from five to eight sols a bottle; that is, from two-pence halfpenny to fourpence. The French inhabitants drink no good wine; nor is there any to be had, unless you have recourse to the British wine-merchants here established, who deal in Bourdeaux wines, brought hither by sea for the London market. I have very good claret from a friend, at the rate of fifteen-pence sterling a bottle; and excellent small beer as reasonable as in England. I don't believe there is a drop of generous Burgundy in the place; and the aubergistes impose upon us shamefully, when they charge it at two livres a bottle. There is a small white wine, called preniac, which is very agreeable and very cheap. All the brandy which I have seen in Boulogne is new, fiery, and still-burnt. This is the trash which the smugglers import into England: they have it for about ten-pence a gallon. Butcher's meat is sold for five sols, or two-pence halfpenny a pound, and the pound here consists of eighteen ounces. I have a young turkey for thirty sols; a hare for four-and-twenty; a couple of chickens for twenty sols, and a couple of good soles for the same price. Before we left England, we were told that there was no fruit in Boulogne; but we have found ourselves agreeably disappointed in this particular. The place is well supplied with strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, corinths, peaches, apricots, and excellent pears. I have eaten more fruit this season, than I have done for several years. There are many well-cultivated gardens in the skirts of the town; particularly one belonging to our friend Mrs. B--, where we often drink tea in a charming summer-house built on a rising ground, which commands a delightful prospect of the sea. We have many obligations to this good lady, who is a kind neighbour, an obliging friend, and a most agreeable companion: she speaks English prettily, and is greatly attached to the people and the customs of our nation. They use wood for their common fewel, though, if I were to live at Boulogne, I would mix it with coal, which this country affords. Both the wood and the coal are reasonable enough. I am certain that a man may keep house in Boulogne for about one half of what it will cost him in London; and this is said to be one of the dearest places in France. The adjacent country is very agreeable, diversified with hill and dale, corn-fields, woods, and meadows. There is a forest of a considerable extent, that begins about a short league from the Upper Town: it belongs to the king, and the wood is farmed to different individuals. In point of agriculture, the people in this neighbourhood seem to have profited by the example of the English. Since I was last in France, fifteen years ago, a good number of inclosures and plantations have been made in the English fashion. There is a good many tolerable country-houses, within a few miles of Boulogne; but mostly empty. I was offered a compleat house, with a garden of four acres well laid out, and two fields for grass or hay, about a mile from the town, for four hundred livres, about seventeen pounds a year: it is partly furnished, stands in an agreeable situation, with a fine prospect of the sea, and was lately occupied by a Scotch nobleman, who is in the service of France. To judge from appearance, the people of Boulogne are descended from the Flemings, who formerly possessed this country; for, a great many of the present inhabitants have fine skins, fair hair, and florid complexions; very different from the natives of France in general, who are distinguished by black hair, brown skins, and swarthy faces. The people of the Boulonnois enjoy some extraordinary privileges, and, in particular, are exempted from the gabelle or duties upon salt: how they deserved this mark of favour, I do not know; but they seem to have a spirit of independence among them, are very ferocious, and much addicted to revenge. Many barbarous murders are committed, both in the town and country; and the peasants, from motives of envy and resentment, frequently set their neighbours' houses on fire. Several instances of this kind have happened in the course of the last year. The interruption which is given, in arbitrary governments, to the administration of justice, by the interposition of the great, has always a bad effect upon the morals of the common people. The peasants too are often rendered desperate and savage, by the misery they suffer from the oppression and tyranny of their landlords. In this neighbourhood the labouring people are ill lodged and wretchedly fed; and they have no idea of cleanliness. There is a substantial burgher in the High Town, who was some years ago convicted of a most barbarous murder. He received sentence to be broke alive upon the wheel; but was pardoned by the interposition of the governor of the county, and carries on his business as usual in the face of the whole community. A furious abbe, being refused orders by the bishop, on account of his irregular life, took an opportunity to stab the prelate with a knife, one Sunday, as he walked out of the cathedral. The good bishop desired he might be permitted to escape; but it was thought proper to punish, with the utmost severity, such an atrocious attempt. He was accordingly apprehended, and, though the wound was not mortal, condemned to be broke. When this dreadful sentence was executed, he cried out, that it was hard he should undergo such torments, for having wounded a worthless priest, by whom he had been injured, while such-a-one (naming the burgher mentioned above) lived in ease and security, after having brutally murdered a poor man, and a helpless woman big with child, who had not given him the least provocation. The inhabitants of Boulogne may be divided into three classes; the noblesse or gentry, the burghers, and the canaille. I don't mention the clergy, and the people belonging to the law, because I shall occasionally trouble you with my thoughts upon the religion and ecclesiastics of this country; and as for the lawyers, exclusive of their profession, they may be considered as belonging to one or other of these divisions. The noblesse are vain, proud, poor, and slothful. Very few of them have above six thousand livres a year, which may amount to about two hundred and fifty pounds sterling; and many of them have not half this revenue. I think there is one heiress, said to be worth one hundred thousand livres, about four thousand two hundred pounds; but then her jewels, her cloaths, and even her linen, are reckoned part of this fortune. The noblesse have not the common sense to reside at their houses in the country, where, by farming their own grounds, they might live at a small expence, and improve their estates at the same time. They allow their country houses to go to decay, and their gardens and fields to waste; and reside in dark holes in the Upper Town of Boulogne without light, air, or convenience. There they starve within doors, that they may have wherewithal to purchase fine cloaths, and appear dressed once a day in the church, or on the rampart. They have no education, no taste for reading, no housewifery, nor indeed any earthly occupation, but that of dressing their hair, and adorning their bodies. They hate walking, and would never go abroad, if they were not stimulated by the vanity of being seen. I ought to except indeed those who turn devotees, and spend the greatest part of their time with the priest, either at church or in their own houses. Other amusements they have none in this place, except private parties of card-playing, which are far from being expensive. Nothing can be more parsimonious than the oeconomy of these people: they live upon soupe and bouille, fish and sallad: they never think of giving dinners, or entertaining their friends; they even save the expence of coffee and tea, though both are very cheap at Boulogne. They presume that every person drinks coffee at home, immediately after dinner, which is always over by one o'clock; and, in lieu of tea in the afternoon, they treat with a glass of sherbet, or capillaire. In a word, I know not a more insignificant set of mortals than the noblesse of Boulogne; helpless in themselves, and useless to the community; without dignity, sense, or sentiment; contemptible from pride. and ridiculous from vanity. They pretend to be jealous of their rank, and will entertain no correspondence with the merchants, whom they term plebeians. They likewise keep at a great distance from strangers, on pretence of a delicacy in the article of punctilio: but, as I am informed, this stateliness is in a great measure affected, in order to conceal their poverty, which would appear to greater disadvantage, if they admitted of a more familiar communication. Considering the vivacity of the French people, one would imagine they could not possibly lead such an insipid life, altogether unanimated by society, or diversion. True it is, the only profane diversions of this place are a puppet-show and a mountebank; but then their religion affords a perpetual comedy. Their high masses, their feasts, their processions, their pilgrimages, confessions, images, tapers, robes, incense, benedictions, spectacles, representations, and innumerable ceremonies, which revolve almost incessantly, furnish a variety of entertainment from one end of the year to the other. If superstition implies fear, never was a word more misapplied than it is to the mummery of the religion of Rome. The people are so far from being impressed with awe and religious terror by this sort of machinery, that it amuses their imaginations in the most agreeable manner, and keeps them always in good humour. A Roman catholic longs as impatiently for the festival of St. Suaire, or St. Croix, or St. Veronique, as a schoolboy in England for the representation of punch and the devil; and there is generally as much laughing at one farce as at the other. Even when the descent from the cross is acted, in the holy week, with all the circumstances that ought naturally to inspire the gravest sentiments, if you cast your eyes among the multitude that croud the place, you will not discover one melancholy face: all is prattling, tittering, or laughing; and ten to one but you perceive a number of them employed in hissing the female who personates the Virgin Mary. And here it may not be amiss to observe, that the Roman catholics, not content with the infinite number of saints who really existed, have not only personified the cross, but made two female saints out of a piece of linen. Veronique, or Veronica, is no other than a corruption of vera icon, or vera effigies, said to be the exact representation of our Saviour's face, impressed upon a piece of linen, with which he wiped the sweat from his forehead in his way to the place of crucifixion. The same is worshipped under the name of St. Suaire, from the Latin word sudarium. This same handkerchief is said to have had three folds, on every one of which was the impression: one of these remains at Jerusalem, a second was brought to Rome, and a third was conveyed to Spain. Baronius says, there is a very antient history of the sancta facies in the Vatican. Tillemont, however, looks upon the whole as a fable. Some suppose Veronica to be the same with St. Haemorrhoissa, the patroness of those who are afflicted with the piles, who make their joint invocations to her and St. Fiacre, the son of a Scotch king, who lived and died a hermit in France. The troops of Henry V. of England are said to have pillaged the chapel of this Highland saint; who, in revenge, assisted his countrymen, in the French service, to defeat the English at Bauge, and afterwards afflicted Henry with the piles, of which he died. This prince complained, that he was not only plagued by the living Scots, but even persecuted by those who were dead. I know not whether I may be allowed to compare the Romish religion to comedy, and Calvinism to tragedy. The first amuses the senses, and excites ideas of mirth and good-humour; the other, like tragedy, deals in the passions of terror and pity. Step into a conventicle of dissenters, you will, ten to one, hear the minister holding forth upon the sufferings of Christ, or the torments of hell, and see many marks of religious horror in the faces of the hearers. This is perhaps one reason why the reformation did not succeed in France, among a volatile, giddy, unthinking people, shocked at the mortified appearances of the Calvinists; and accounts for its rapid progress among nations of a more melancholy turn of character and complexion: for, in the conversion of the multitude, reason is generally out of the question. Even the penance imposed upon the catholics is little more than mock mortification: a murderer is often quit with his confessor for saying three prayers extraordinary; and these easy terms, on which absolution is obtained, certainly encourage the repetition of the most enormous crimes. The pomp and ceremonies of this religion, together with the great number of holidays they observe, howsoever they may keep up the spirits of the commonalty, and help to diminish the sense of their own misery, must certainly, at the same time, produce a frivolous taste for frippery and shew, and encourage a habit of idleness, to which I, in a great measure, ascribe the extreme poverty of the lower people. Very near half of their time, which might he profitably employed in the exercise of industry, is lost to themselves and the community, in attendance upon the different exhibitions of religious mummery. But as this letter has already run to an unconscionable length, I shall defer, till another occasion, what I have further to say on the people of this place, and in the mean time assure you, that I am always--Yours affectionately. LETTER V BOULOGNE, September 12, 1763. DEAR SIR,--My stay in this place now draws towards a period. 'Till within these few days I have continued bathing, with some advantage to my health, though the season has been cold and wet, and disagreeable. There was a fine prospect of a plentiful harvest in this neighbourhood. I used to have great pleasure in driving between the fields of wheat, oats, and barley; but the crop has been entirely ruined by the rain, and nothing is now to be seen on the ground but the tarnished straw, and the rotten spoils of the husbandman's labour. The ground scarce affords subsistence to a few flocks of meagre sheep, that crop the stubble, and the intervening grass; each flock under the protection of its shepherd, with his crook and dogs, who lies every night in the midst of the fold, in a little thatched travelling lodge, mounted on a wheel-carriage. Here he passes the night, in order to defend his flock from the wolves, which are sometimes, especially in winter, very bold and desperate. Two days ago we made an excursion with Mrs. B-- and Capt. L-- to the village of Samers, on the Paris road, about three leagues from Boulogne. Here is a venerable abbey of Benedictines, well endowed, with large agreeable gardens prettily laid out. The monks are well lodged, and well entertained. Tho' restricted from flesh meals by the rules of their order, they are allowed to eat wild duck and teal, as a species of fish; and when they long for a good bouillon, or a partridge, or pullet, they have nothing to do but to say they are out of order. In that case the appetite of the patient is indulged in his own apartment. Their church is elegantly contrived, but kept in a very dirty condition. The greatest curiosity I saw in this place was an English boy, about eight or nine years old, whom his father had sent hither to learn the French language. In less than eight weeks, he was become captain of the boys of the place, spoke French perfectly well, and had almost forgot his mother tongue. But to return to the people of Boulogne. The burghers here, as in other places, consist of merchants, shop-keepers, and artisans. Some of the merchants have got fortunes, by fitting out privateers during the war. A great many single ships were taken from the English, notwithstanding the good look-out of our cruisers, who were so alert, that the privateers from this coast were often taken in four hours after they sailed from the French harbour; and there is hardly a captain of an armateur in Boulogne, who has not been prisoner in England five or six times in the course of the war. They were fitted out at a very small expence, and used to run over in the night to the coast of England, where they hovered as English fishing smacks, until they kidnapped some coaster, with which they made the best of their way across the Channel. If they fell in with a British cruiser, they surrendered without resistance: the captain was soon exchanged, and the loss of the proprietor was not great: if they brought their prize safe into harbour, the advantage was considerable. In time of peace the merchants of Boulogne deal in wine brandies, and oil, imported from the South, and export fish, with the manufactures of France, to Portugal, and other countries; but the trade is not great. Here are two or three considerable houses of wine merchants from Britain, who deal in Bourdeaux wine, with which they supply London and other parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The fishery of mackarel and herring is so considerable on this coast, that it is said to yield annually eight or nine hundred thousand livres, about thirty-five thousand pounds sterling. The shop-keepers here drive a considerable traffic with the English smugglers, whose cutters are almost the only vessels one sees in the harbour of Boulogne, if we except about a dozen of those flat-bottomed boats, which raised such alarms in England, in the course of the war. Indeed they seem to be good for nothing else, and perhaps they were built for this purpose only. The smugglers from the coast of Kent and Sussex pay English gold for great quantities of French brandy, tea, coffee, and small wine, which they run from this country. They likewise buy glass trinkets, toys, and coloured prints, which sell in England, for no other reason, but that they come from France, as they may be had as cheap, and much better finished, of our own manufacture. They likewise take off ribbons, laces, linen, and cambrics; though this branch of trade is chiefly in the hands of traders that come from London and make their purchases at Dunkirk, where they pay no duties. It is certainly worth while for any traveller to lay in a stock of linen either at Dunkirk or Boulogne; the difference of the price at these two places is not great. Even here I have made a provision of shirts for one half of the money they would have cost in London. Undoubtedly the practice of smuggling is very detrimental to the fair trader, and carries considerable sums of money out of the kingdom, to enrich our rivals and enemies. The custom-house officers are very watchful, and make a great number of seizures: nevertheless, the smugglers find their account in continuing this contraband commerce; and are said to indemnify themselves, if they save one cargo out of three. After all, the best way to prevent smuggling, is to lower the duties upon the commodities which are thus introduced. I have been told, that the revenue upon tea has encreased ever since the duty upon it was diminished. By the bye, the tea smuggled on the coast of Sussex is most execrable stuff. While I stayed at Hastings, for the conveniency of bathing, I must have changed my breakfast, if I had not luckily brought tea with me from London: yet we have as good tea at Boulogne for nine livres a pound, as that which sells at fourteen shillings at London. The bourgeois of this place seem to live at their ease, probably in consequence of their trade with the English. Their houses consist of the ground-floor, one story above, and garrets. In those which are well furnished, you see pier-glasses and marble slabs; but the chairs are either paultry things, made with straw bottoms, which cost about a shilling a-piece, or old-fashioned, high-backed seats of needle-work, stuffed, very clumsy and incommodious. The tables are square fir boards, that stand on edge in a corner, except when they are used, and then they are set upon cross legs that open and shut occasionally. The king of France dines off a board of this kind. Here is plenty of table-linen however. The poorest tradesman in Boulogne has a napkin on every cover, and silver forks with four prongs, which are used with the right hand, there being very little occasion for knives; for the meat is boiled or roasted to rags. The French beds are so high, that sometimes one is obliged to mount them by the help of steps; and this is also the case in Flanders. They very seldom use feather-beds; but they lie upon a paillasse, or bag of straw, over which are laid two, and sometimes three mattrasses. Their testers are high and old-fashioned, and their curtains generally of thin bays, red, or green, laced with taudry yellow, in imitation of gold. In some houses, however, one meets with furniture of stamped linen; but there is no such thing as a carpet to be seen, and the floors are in a very dirty condition. They have not even the implements of cleanliness in this country. Every chamber is furnished with an armoire, or clothes-press, and a chest of drawers, of very clumsy workmanship. Every thing shews a deficiency in the mechanic arts. There is not a door, nor a window, that shuts close. The hinges, locks, and latches, are of iron, coarsely made, and ill contrived. The very chimnies are built so open, that they admit both rain and sun, and all of them smoke intolerably. If there is no cleanliness among these people, much less shall we find delicacy, which is the cleanliness of the mind. Indeed they are utter strangers to what we call common decency; and I could give you some high-flavoured instances, at which even a native of Edinburgh would stop his nose. There are certain mortifying views of human nature, which undoubtedly ought to be concealed as much as possible, in order to prevent giving offence: and nothing can be more absurd, than to plead the difference of custom in different countries, in defence of these usages which cannot fail giving disgust to the organs and senses of all mankind. Will custom exempt from the imputation of gross indecency a French lady, who shifts her frowsy smock in presence of a male visitant, and talks to him of her lavement, her medecine, and her bidet! An Italian signora makes no scruple of telling you, she is such a day to begin a course of physic for the pox. The celebrated reformer of the Italian comedy introduces a child befouling itself, on the stage, OE, NO TI SENTI? BISOGNA DESFASSARLO, (fa cenno che sentesi mal odore). I have known a lady handed to the house of office by her admirer, who stood at the door, and entertained her with bons mots all the time she was within. But I should be glad to know, whether it is possible for a fine lady to speak and act in this manner, without exciting ideas to her own disadvantage in the mind of every man who has any imagination left, and enjoys the entire use of his senses, howsoever she may be authorised by the customs of her country? There is nothing so vile or repugnant to nature, but you may plead prescription for it, in the customs of some nation or other. A Parisian likes mortified flesh: a native of Legiboli will not taste his fish till it is quite putrefied: the civilized inhabitants of Kamschatka get drunk with the urine of their guests, whom they have already intoxicated: the Nova Zemblans make merry on train-oil: the Groenlanders eat in the same dish with their dogs: the Caffres, at the Cape of Good Hope, piss upon those whom they delight to honour, and feast upon a sheep's intestines with their contents, as the greatest dainty that can be presented. A true-bred Frenchman dips his fingers, imbrowned with snuff, into his plate filled with ragout: between every three mouthfuls, he produces his snuff-box, and takes a fresh pinch, with the most graceful gesticulations; then he displays his handkerchief, which may be termed the flag of abomination, and, in the use of both, scatters his favours among those who have the happiness to sit near him. It must be owned, however, that a Frenchman will not drink out of a tankard, in which, perhaps, a dozen of filthy mouths have flabbered, as is the custom in England. Here every individual has his own gobelet, which stands before him, and he helps himself occasionally with wine or water, or both, which likewise stand upon the table. But I know no custom more beastly than that of using water-glasses, in which polite company spirt, and squirt, and spue the filthy scourings of their gums, under the eyes of each other. I knew a lover cured of his passion, by seeing this nasty cascade discharged from the mouth of his mistress. I don't doubt but I shall live to see the day, when the hospitable custom of the antient Aegyptians will be revived; then a conveniency will be placed behind every chair in company, with a proper provision of waste paper, that individuals may make themselves easy without parting company. I insist upon it, that this practice would not be more indelicate than that which is now in use. What then, you will say, must a man sit with his chops and fingers up to the ears and knuckles in grease? No; let those who cannot eat without defiling themselves, step into another room, provided with basons and towels: but I think it would be better to institute schools, where youth may learn to eat their victuals, without daubing themselves, or giving offence to the eyes of one another. The bourgeois of Boulogne have commonly soup and bouilli at noon, and a roast, with a sallad, for supper; and at all their meals there is a dessert of fruit. This indeed is the practice all over France. On meagre days they eat fish, omelettes, fried beans, fricassees of eggs and onions, and burnt cream. The tea which they drink in the afternoon is rather boiled than infused; it is sweetened all together with coarse sugar, and drank with an equal quantity of boiled milk. We had the honour to be entertained the other day by our landlord, Mr. B--, who spared no cost on this banquet, exhibited for the glory of France. He had invited a newmarried couple, together with the husband's mother and the lady's father, who was one of the noblesse of Montreuil, his name Mons. L--y. There were likewise some merchants of the town, and Mons. B--'s uncle, a facetious little man, who had served in the English navy, and was as big and as round as a hogshead; we were likewise favoured with the company of father K--, a native of Ireland, who is vicaire or curate of the parish; and among the guests was Mons. L--y's son, a pretty boy, about thirteen or fourteen years of age. The repas served up in three services, or courses, with entrees and hors d'oeuvres, exclusive of the fruit, consisted of about twenty dishes, extremely well dressed by the rotisseur, who is the best cook I ever knew, in France, or elsewhere; but the plates were not presented with much order. Our young ladies did not seem to be much used to do the honours of the table. The most extraordinary circumstance that I observed on this occasion--as, that all the French who were present ate of every dish that appeared; and I am told, that if there had been an hundred articles more, they would have had a trial of each. This is what they call doing justice to the founder. Mons. L--y was placed at the head of the table and indeed he was the oracle and orator of the company; tall, thin, and weather-beaten, not unlike the picture of Don Quixote after he had lost his teeth. He had been garde du corps, or life-guardman at Versailles; and by virtue of this office he was perfectly well acquainted with the persons of the king and the dauphin, with the characters of the ministers and grandees, and, in a word, with all the secrets of state, on which he held forth with equal solemnity and elocution. He exclaimed against the jesuits, and the farmers of the revenue, who, he said, had ruined France. Then, addressing himself to me, asked, if the English did not every day drink to the health of madame la marquise? I did not at first comprehend his meaning; but answered in general, that the English were not deficient in complaisance for the ladies. "Ah! (cried he) she is the best friend they have in the world. If it had not been for her, they would not have such reason to boast of the advantages of the war." I told him the only conquest which the French had made in the war, was atchieved by one of her generals: I meant the taking of Mahon. But I did not choose to prosecute the discourse, remembering that in the year 1749, I had like to have had an affair with a Frenchman at Ghent, who affirmed, that all the battles gained by the great duke of Marlborough were purposely lost by the French generals, in order to bring the schemes of madame de Maintenon into disgrace. This is no bad resource for the national vanity of these people: though, in general, they are really persuaded, that theirs is the richest, the bravest, the happiest, and the most powerful nation under the sun; and therefore, without some such cause, they must be invincible. By the bye, the common people here still frighten their wayward children with the name of Marlborough. Mr. B--'s son, who was nursed at a peasant's house, happening one day, after he was brought home, to be in disgrace with his father, who threatened to correct him, the child ran for protection to his mother, crying, "Faites sortir ce vilaine Malbroug," "Turn out that rogue Marlborough." It is amazing to hear a sensible Frenchman assert, that the revenues of France amount to four hundred millions of livres, about twenty millions sterling, clear of all incumbrances, when in fact their clear revenue is not much above ten. Without all doubt they have reason to inveigh against the fermiers generaux, who oppress the people in raising the taxes, not above two-thirds of which are brought into the king's coffers: the rest enriches themselves, and enables them to bribe high for the protection of the great, which is the only support they have against the remonstrances of the states and parliaments, and the suggestions of common sense; which will ever demonstrate this to be, of all others, the most pernicious method of supplying the necessities of government. Mons. L--y seasoned the severity of his political apothegms with intermediate sallies of mirth and gallantry. He ogled the venerable gentlewoman his commere, who sat by him. He looked, sighed, and languished, sung tender songs, and kissed the old lady's hand with all the ardour of a youthful admirer. I unfortunately congratulated him on having such a pretty young gentleman to his son. He answered, sighing, that the boy had talents, but did not put them to a proper use--"Long before I attained his age (said he) I had finished my rhetoric." Captain B--, who had eaten himself black in the face, and, with the napkin under his chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon shaving him; this sea-wit, turning to the boy, with a waggish leer, "I suppose (said he) you don't understand the figure of amplification so well as Monsieur your father." At that instant, one of the nieces, who knew her uncle to be very ticklish, touched him under the short ribs, on which the little man attempted to spring up, but lost the centre of gravity. He overturned his own plate in the lap of the person that sat next to him, and falling obliquely upon his own chair, both tumbled down upon the floor together, to the great discomposure of the whole company; for the poor man would have been actually strangled, had not his nephew loosed his stock with great expedition. Matters being once more adjusted, and the captain condoled on his disaster, Mons. L--y took it in his head to read his son a lecture upon filial obedience. This was mingled with some sharp reproof, which the boy took so ill that he retired. The old lady observed that he had been too severe: her daughter-in-law, who was very pretty, said her brother had given him too much reason; hinting, at the same time, that he was addicted to some terrible vices; upon which several individuals repeated the interjection, ah! ah! "Yes (said Mons. L--y, with a rueful aspect) the boy has a pernicious turn for gaming: in one afternoon he lost, at billiards, such a sum as gives me horror to think of it." "Fifty sols in one afternoon," (cried the sister). "Fifty sols! (exclaimed the mother-in-law, with marks of astonishment) that's too much--that's too much!--he's to blame-- he's to blame! but youth, you know, Mons. L--y--ah! vive la jeunesse!"--"et l'amour!" cried the father, wiping his eyes, squeezing her hand, and looking tenderly upon her. Mr. B-- took this opportunity to bring in the young gentleman, who was admitted into favour, and received a second exhortation. Thus harmony was restored, and the entertainment concluded with fruit, coffee, and liqueurs. When a bourgeois of Boulogne takes the air, he goes in a one-horse chaise, which is here called cabriolet, and hires it for half-a-crown a day. There are also travelling chaises, which hold four persons, two seated with their faces to the horses, and two behind their backs; but those vehicles are all very ill made, and extremely inconvenient. The way of riding most used in this place is on assback. You will see every day, in the skirts of the town, a great number of females thus mounted, with the feet on either side occasionally, according as the wind blows, so that sometimes the right and sometimes the left hand guides the beast: but in other parts of France, as well as in Italy, the ladies sit on horseback with their legs astride, and are provided with drawers for that purpose. When I said the French people were kept in good humour by the fopperies of their religion, I did not mean that there were no gloomy spirits among them. There will be fanatics in religion, while there are people of a saturnine disposition, and melancholy turn of mind. The character of a devotee, which is hardly known in England, is very common here. You see them walking to and from church at all hours, in their hoods and long camblet cloaks, with a slow pace, demure aspect, and downcast eye. Those who are poor become very troublesome to the monks, with their scruples and cases of conscience: you may see them on their knees, at the confessional, every hour in the day. The rich devotee has her favourite confessor, whom she consults and regales in private, at her own house; and this spiritual director generally governs the whole family. For my part I never knew a fanatic that was not an hypocrite at bottom. Their pretensions to superior sanctity, and an absolute conquest over all the passions, which human reason was never yet able to subdue, introduce a habit of dissimulation, which, like all other habits, is confirmed by use, till at length they become adepts in the art and science of hypocrisy. Enthusiasm and hypocrisy are by no means incompatible. The wildest fanatics I ever knew, were real sensualists in their way of living, and cunning cheats in their dealings with mankind. Among the lower class of people at Boulogne, those who take the lead, are the sea-faring men, who live in one quarter, divided into classes, and registered for the service of the king. They are hardy and raw-boned, exercise the trade of fishermen and boatmen, and propagate like rabbits. They have put themselves under the protection of a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, which is kept in one of their churches, and every year carried in procession. According to the legend, this image was carried off, with other pillage, by the English, when they took Boulogne, in the reign of Henry VIII. The lady, rather than reside in England, where she found a great many heretics, trusted herself alone in an open boat, and crossed the sea to the road of Boulogne, where she was seen waiting for a pilot. Accordingly a boat put off to her assistance, and brought her safe into the harbour: since which time she has continued to patronize the watermen of Boulogne. At present she is very black and very ugly, besides being cruelly mutilated in different parts of her body, which I suppose have been amputated, and converted into tobacco-stoppers; but once a year she is dressed in very rich attire, and carried in procession, with a silver boat, provided at the expence of the sailors. That vanity which characterises the French extends even to the canaille. The lowest creature among them is sure to have her ear-rings and golden cross hanging about her neck. Indeed this last is an implement of superstition as well as of dress, without which no female appears. The common people here, as in all countries where they live poorly and dirtily, are hard-featured, and of very brown, or rather tawny complexions. As they seldom eat meat, their juices are destitute of that animal oil which gives a plumpness and smoothness to the skin, and defends those fine capillaries from the injuries of the weather, which would otherwise coalesce, or be shrunk up, so as to impede the circulation on the external surface of the body. As for the dirt, it undoubtedly blocks up the pores of the skin, and disorders the perspiration; consequently must contribute to the scurvy, itch, and other cutaneous distempers. In the quarter of the matelots at Boulogne, there is a number of poor Canadians, who were removed from the island of St. John, in the gulph of St. Laurence, when it was reduced by the English. These people are maintained at the expence of the king, who allows them soldier's pay, that is five sols, or two-pence halfpenny a day; or rather three sols and ammunition bread. How the soldiers contrive to subsist upon this wretched allowance, I cannot comprehend: but, it must be owned, that those invalids who do duty at Boulogne betray no marks of want. They are hale and stout, neatly and decently cloathed, and on the whole look better than the pensioners of Chelsea. About three weeks ago I was favoured with a visit by one Mr. M--, an English gentleman, who seems far gone in a consumption. He passed the last winter at Nismes in Languedoc, and found himself much better in the beginning of summer, when he embarked at Cette, and returned by sea to England. He soon relapsed, however, and (as he imagines) in consequence of a cold caught at sea. He told me, his intention was to try the South again, and even to go as far as Italy. I advised him to make trial of the air of Nice, where I myself proposed to reside. He seemed to relish my advice, and proceeded towards Paris in his own carriage. I shall to-morrow ship my great chests on board of a ship bound to Bourdeaux; they are directed, and recommended to the care of a merchant of that place, who will forward them by Thoulouse, and the canal of Languedoc, to his correspondent at Cette, which is the sea-port of Montpellier. The charge of their conveyance to Bourdeaux does not exceed one guinea. They consist of two very large chests and a trunk, about a thousand pounds weight; and the expence of transporting them from Bourdeaux to Cette, will not exceed thirty livres. They are already sealed with lead at the customhouse, that they may be exempted from further visitation. This is a precaution which every traveller takes, both by sea and land: he must likewise provide himself with a passe-avant at the bureau, otherwise he may be stopped, and rummaged at every town through which he passes. I have hired a berline and four horses to Paris, for fourteen loui'dores; two of which the voiturier is obliged to pay for a permission from the farmers of the poste; for every thing is farmed in this country; and if you hire a carriage, as I have done, you must pay twelve livres, or half-a-guinea, for every person that travels in it. The common coach between Calais and Paris, is such a vehicle as no man would use, who has any regard to his own case and convenience and it travels at the pace of an English waggon. In ten days I shall set out on my journey; and I shall leave Boulogne with regret. I have been happy in the acquaintance of Mrs. B--, and a few British families in the place; and it was my good fortune to meet here with two honest gentlemen, whom I had formerly known in Paris, as well as with some of my countrymen, officers in the service of France. My next will be from Paris. Remember me to our friends at A--'s. I am a little heavy-hearted at the prospect of removing to such a distance from you. It is a moot point whether I shall ever return. My health is very precarious. Adieu. LETTER VI PARIS, October 12, 1763. DEAR SIR,--Of our journey from Boulogne I have little to say. The weather was favourable, and the roads were in tolerable order. We found good accommodation at Montreuil and Amiens; but in every other place where we stopped, we met with abundance of dirt, and the most flagrant imposition. I shall not pretend to describe the cities of Abbeville and Amiens, which we saw only en passant; nor take up your time with an account of the stables and palace of Chantilly, belonging to the prince of Conde, which we visited the last day of our journey; nor shall I detain you with a detail of the Trefors de St. Denis, which, together with the tombs in the abbey church, afforded us some amusement while our dinner was getting ready. All these particulars are mentioned in twenty different books of tours, travels, and directions, which you have often perused. I shall only observe, that the abbey church is the lightest piece of Gothic architecture I have seen, and the air within seems perfectly free from that damp and moisture, so perceivable in all our old cathedrals. This must be owing to the nature of its situation. There are some fine marble statues that adorn the tombs of certain individuals here interred; but they are mostly in the French taste, which is quite contrary to the simplicity of the antients. Their attitudes are affected, unnatural, and desultory; and their draperies fantastic; or, as one of our English artists expressed himself, they are all of a flutter. As for the treasures, which are shewn on certain days to the populace gratis, they are contained in a number of presses, or armoires, and, if the stones are genuine, they must be inestimable: but this I cannot believe. Indeed I have been told, that what they shew as diamonds are no more than composition: nevertheless, exclusive of these, there are some rough stones of great value, and many curiosities worth seeing. The monk that shewed them was the very image of our friend Hamilton, both in his looks and manner. I have one thing very extraordinary to observe of the French auberges, which seems to be a remarkable deviation from the general character of the nation. The landlords, hostesses, and servants of the inns upon the road, have not the least dash of complaisance in their behaviour to strangers. Instead of coming to the door, to receive you as in England, they take no manner of notice of you; but leave you to find or enquire your way into the kitchen, and there you must ask several times for a chamber, before they seem willing to conduct you up stairs. In general, you are served with the appearance of the most mortifying indifference, at the very time they are laying schemes for fleecing you of your money. It is a very odd contrast between France and England; in the former all the people are complaisant but the publicans; in the latter there is hardly any complaisance but among the publicans. When I said all the people in France, I ought also to except those vermin who examine the baggage of travellers in different parts of the kingdom. Although our portmanteaus were sealed with lead, and we were provided with a passe-avant from the douane, our coach was searched at the gate of Paris by which we entered; and the women were obliged to get out, and stand in the open street, till this operation was performed. I had desired a friend to provide lodgings for me at Paris, in the Fauxbourg St. Germain; and accordingly we found ourselves accommodated at the Hotel de Montmorency, with a first floor, which costs me ten livres a day. I should have put up with it had it been less polite; but as I have only a few days to stay in this place, and some visits to receive, I am not sorry that my friend has exceeded his commission. I have been guilty of another piece of extravagance in hiring a carosse de remise, for which I pay twelve livres a day. Besides the article of visiting, I could not leave Paris, without carrying my wife and the girls to see the most remarkable places in and about this capital, such as the Luxemburg, the Palais-Royal, the Thuilleries, the Louvre, the Invalids, the Gobelins, &c. together with Versailles, Trianon, Marli, Meudon, and Choissi; and therefore, I thought the difference in point of expence would not be great, between a carosse de remise and a hackney coach. The first are extremely elegant, if not too much ornamented, the last are very shabby and disagreeable. Nothing gives me such chagrin, as the necessity I am under to hire a valet de place, as my own servant does not speak the language. You cannot conceive with what eagerness and dexterity those rascally valets exert themselves in pillaging strangers. There is always one ready in waiting on your arrival, who begins by assisting your own servant to unload your baggage, and interests himself in your affairs with such artful officiousness, that you will find it difficult to shake him off, even though you are determined beforehand against hiring any such domestic. He produces recommendations from his former masters, and the people of the house vouch for his honesty. The truth is, those fellows are very handy, useful, and obliging; and so far honest, that they will not steal in the usual way. You may safely trust one of them to bring you a hundred loui'dores from your banker; but they fleece you without mercy in every other article of expence. They lay all your tradesmen under contribution; your taylor, barber, mantua-maker, milliner, perfumer, shoe-maker, mercer, jeweller, hatter, traiteur, and wine-merchant: even the bourgeois who owns your coach pays him twenty sols per day. His wages amount to twice as much, so that I imagine the fellow that serves me, makes above ten shillings a day, besides his victuals, which, by the bye, he has no right to demand. Living at Paris, to the best of my recollection, is very near twice as dear as it was fifteen years ago; and, indeed, this is the case in London; a circumstance that must be undoubtedly owing to an increase of taxes; for I don't find that in the articles of eating and drinking, the French people are more luxurious than they were heretofore. I am told the entrees, or duties, payed upon provision imported into Paris, are very heavy. All manner of butcher's meat and poultry are extremely good in this place. The beef is excellent. The wine, which is generally drank, is a very thin kind of Burgundy. I can by no means relish their cookery; but one breakfasts deliciously upon their petit pains and their pales of butter, which last is exquisite. The common people, and even the bourgeois of Paris live, at this season, chiefly on bread and grapes, which is undoubtedly very wholsome fare. If the same simplicity of diet prevailed in England, we should certainly undersell the French at all foreign markets for they are very slothful with all their vivacity and the great number of their holidays not only encourages this lazy disposition, but actually robs them of one half of what their labour would otherwise produce; so that, if our common people were not so expensive in their living, that is, in their eating and drinking, labour might be afforded cheaper in England than in France. There are three young lusty hussies, nieces or daughters of a blacksmith, that lives just opposite to my windows, who do nothing from morning till night. They eat grapes and bread from seven till nine, from nine till twelve they dress their hair, and are all the afternoon gaping at the window to view passengers. I don't perceive that they give themselves the trouble either to make their beds, or clean their apartment. The same spirit of idleness and dissipation I have observed in every part of France, and among every class of people. Every object seems to have shrunk in its dimensions since I was last in Paris. The Louvre, the Palais-Royal, the bridges, and the river Seine, by no means answer the ideas I had formed of them from my former observation. When the memory is not very correct, the imagination always betrays her into such extravagances. When I first revisited my own country, after an absence of fifteen years, I found every thing diminished in the same manner, and I could scarce believe my own eyes. Notwithstanding the gay disposition of the French, their houses are all gloomy. In spite of all the ornaments that have been lavished on Versailles, it is a dismal habitation. The apartments are dark, ill-furnished, dirty, and unprincely. Take the castle, chapel, and garden all together, they make a most fantastic composition of magnificence and littleness, taste, and foppery. After all, it is in England only, where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in the French genius. With all their volatility, prattle, and fondness for bons mots, they delight in a species of drawling, melancholy, church music. Their most favourite dramatic pieces are almost without incident; and the dialogue of their comedies consists of moral, insipid apophthegms, intirely destitute of wit or repartee. I know what I hazard by this opinion among the implicit admirers of Lully, Racine, and Moliere. I don't talk of the busts, the statues, and pictures which abound at Versailles, and other places in and about Paris, particularly the great collection of capital pieces in the Palais-royal, belonging to the duke of Orleans. I have neither capacity, nor inclination, to give a critique on these chef d'oeuvres, which indeed would take up a whole volume. I have seen this great magazine of painting three times, with astonishment; but I should have been better pleased, if there had not been half the number: one is bewildered in such a profusion, as not to know where to begin, and hurried away before there is time to consider one piece with any sort of deliberation. Besides, the rooms are all dark, and a great many of the pictures hang in a bad light. As for Trianon, Marli, and Choissi, they are no more than pigeon-houses, in respect to palaces; and, notwithstanding the extravagant eulogiums which you have heard of the French king's houses, I will venture to affirm that the king of England is better, I mean more comfortably, lodged. I ought, however, to except Fontainebleau, which I have not seen. The city of Paris is said to be five leagues, or fifteen miles, in circumference; and if it is really so, it must be much more populous than London; for the streets are very narrow, and the houses very high, with a different family on every floor. But I have measured the best plans of these two royal cities, and am certain that Paris does not take up near so much ground as London and Westminster occupy; and I suspect the number of its inhabitants is also exaggerated by those who say it amounts to eight hundred thousand, that is two hundred thousand more than are contained in the bills of mortality. The hotels of the French noblesse, at Paris, take up a great deal of room, with their courtyards and gardens; and so do their convents and churches. It must be owned, indeed, that their streets are wonderfully crouded with people and carriages. The French begin to imitate the English, but only in such particulars as render them worthy of imitation. When I was last at Paris, no person of any condition, male or female, appeared, but in full dress, even when obliged to come out early in the morning, and there was not such a thing to be seen as a perruque ronde; but at present I see a number of frocks and scratches in a morning, in the streets of this metropolis. They have set up a petite poste, on the plan of our penny-post, with some improvements; and I am told there is a scheme on foot for supplying every house with water, by leaden pipes, from the river Seine. They have even adopted our practice of the cold bath, which is taken very conveniently, in wooden houses, erected on the side of the river, the water of which is let in and out occasionally, by cocks fixed in the sides of the bath. There are different rooms for the different sexes: the accommodations are good, and the expence is a trifle. The tapestry of the Gobelins is brought to an amazing degree of perfection; and I am surprised that this furniture is not more in fashion among the great, who alone are able to purchase it. It would be a most elegant and magnificent ornament, which would always nobly distinguish their apartments from those, of an inferior rank; and in this they would run no risk of being rivalled by the bourgeois. At the village of Chaillot, in the neighbourhood of Paris, they make beautiful carpets and screen-work; and this is the more extraordinary, as there are hardly any carpets used in this kingdom. In almost all the lodging-houses, the floors are of brick, and have no other kind of cleaning, than that of being sprinkled with water, and swept once a day. These brick floors, the stone stairs, the want of wainscotting in the rooms, and the thick party-walls of stone, are, however, good preservatives against fire, which seldom does any damage in this city. Instead of wainscotting, the walls are covered with tapestry or damask. The beds in general are very good, and well ornamented, with testers and curtains. Twenty years ago the river Seine, within a mile of Paris, was as solitary as if it had run through a desert. At present the banks of it are adorned with a number of elegant houses and plantations, as far as Marli. I need not mention the machine at this place for raising water, because I know you are well acquainted with its construction; nor shall I say any thing more of the city of Paris, but that there is a new square, built upon an elegant plan, at the end of the garden of the Thuilleries: it is called Place de Louis XV. and, in the middle of it, there is a good equestrian statue of the reigning king. You have often heard that Louis XIV. frequently regretted, that his country did not afford gravel for the walks of his gardens, which are covered with a white, loose sand, very disagreeable both to the eyes and feet of those who walk upon it; but this is a vulgar mistake. There is plenty of gravel on the road between Paris and Versailles, as well as in many other parts of this kingdom; but the French, who are all for glare and glitter, think the other is more gay and agreeable: one would imagine they did not feel the burning reflexion from the white sand, which in summer is almost intolerable. In the character of the French, considered as a people, there are undoubtedly many circumstances truly ridiculous. You know the fashionable people, who go a hunting, are equipped with their jack boots, bag wigs, swords and pistols: but I saw the other day a scene still more grotesque. On the road to Choissi, a fiacre, or hackney-coach, stopped, and out came five or six men, armed with musquets, who took post, each behind a separate tree. I asked our servant who they were imagining they might be archers, or footpads of justice, in pursuit of some malefactor. But guess my surprise, when the fellow told me, they were gentlemen a la chasse. They were in fact come out from Paris, in this equipage, to take the diversion of hare-hunting; that is, of shooting from behind a tree at the hares that chanced to pass. Indeed, if they had nothing more in view, but to destroy the game, this was a very effectual method; for the hares are in such plenty in this neighbourhood, that I have seen a dozen together, in the same field. I think this way of hunting, in a coach or chariot, might be properly adopted at London, in favour of those aldermen of the city, who are too unwieldy to follow the hounds a horseback. The French, however, with all their absurdities, preserve a certain ascendancy over us, which is very disgraceful to our nation; and this appears in nothing more than in the article of dress. We are contented to be thought their apes in fashion; but, in fact, we are slaves to their taylors, mantua-makers, barbers, and other tradesmen. One would be apt to imagine that our own tradesmen had joined them in a combination against us. When the natives of France come to London, they appear in all public places, with cloaths made according to the fashion of their own country, and this fashion is generally admired by the English. Why, therefore, don't we follow it implicitly? No, we pique ourselves upon a most ridiculous deviation from the very modes we admire, and please ourselves with thinking this deviation is a mark of our spirit and liberty. But, we have not spirit enough to persist in this deviation, when we visit their country: otherwise, perhaps, they would come to admire and follow our example: for, certainly, in point of true taste, the fashions of both countries are equally absurd. At present, the skirts of the English descend from the fifth rib to the calf of the leg, and give the coat the form of a Jewish gaberdine; and our hats seem to be modelled after that which Pistol wears upon the stage. In France, the haunch buttons and pocketholes are within half a foot of the coat's extremity: their hats look as if they had been pared round the brims, and the crown is covered with a kind of cordage, which, in my opinion, produces a very beggarly effect. In every other circumstance of dress, male and female, the contrast between the two nations, appears equally glaring. What is the consequence? when an Englishman comes to Paris, he cannot appear until he has undergone a total metamorphosis. At his first arrival he finds it necessary to send for the taylor, perruquier, hatter, shoemaker, and every other tradesman concerned in the equipment of the human body. He must even change his buckles, and the form of his ruffles; and, though at the risque of his life, suit his cloaths to the mode of the season. For example, though the weather should be never so cold, he must wear his habit d'ete, or demi-saison. Without presuming to put on a warm dress before the day which fashion has fixed for that purpose; and neither old age nor infirmity will excuse a man for wearing his hat upon his head, either at home or abroad. Females are (if possible) still more subject to the caprices of fashion; and as the articles of their dress are more manifold, it is enough to make a man's heart ake to see his wife surrounded by a multitude of cotturieres, milliners, and tire-women. All her sacks and negligees must be altered and new trimmed. She must have new caps, new laces, new shoes, and her hair new cut. She must have her taffaties for the summer, her flowered silks for the spring and autumn, her sattins and damasks for winter. The good man, who used to wear the beau drop d'Angleterre, quite plain all the year round, with a long bob, or tye perriwig, must here provide himself with a camblet suit trimmed with silver for spring and autumn, with silk cloaths for summer, and cloth laced with gold, or velvet for winter; and he must wear his bag-wig a la pigeon. This variety of dress is absolutely indispensible for all those who pretend to any rank above the meer bourgeois. On his return to his own country, all this frippery is useless. He cannot appear in London until he has undergone another thorough metamorphosis; so that he will have some reason to think, that the tradesmen of Paris and London have combined to lay him under contribution: and they, no doubt, are the directors who regulate the fashions in both capitals; the English, however, in a subordinate capacity: for the puppets of their making will not pass at Paris, nor indeed in any other part of Europe; whereas a French petit maitre is reckoned a complete figure every where, London not excepted. Since it is so much the humour of the English at present to run abroad, I wish they had anti-gallican spirit enough to produce themselves in their own genuine English dress, and treat the French modes with the same philosophical contempt, which was shewn by an honest gentleman, distinguished by the name of Wig-Middleton. That unshaken patriot still appears in the same kind of scratch perriwig, skimming-dish hat, and slit sleeve, which were worn five-and-twenty years ago, and has invariably persisted in this garb, in defiance of all the revolutions of the mode. I remember a student in the temple, who, after a long and learned investigation of the to kalon, or beautiful, had resolution enough to let his beard grow, and wore it in all public places, until his heir at law applied for a commission of lunacy against him; then he submitted to the razor, rather than run any risque of being found non compos. Before I conclude, I must tell you, that the most reputable shop-keepers and tradesmen of Paris think it no disgrace to practise the most shameful imposition. I myself know an instance of one of the most creditable marchands in this capital, who demanded six francs an ell for some lutestring, laying his hand upon his breast at the same time, and declaring en conscience, that it had cost him within three sols of the money. Yet in less than three minutes, he sold it for four and a half, and when the buyer upbraided him with his former declaration, he shrugged up his shoulders, saying, il faut marchander. I don't mention this as a particular instance. The same mean disingenuity is universal all over France, as I have been informed by several persons of veracity. The next letter you have from me will probably be dated at Nismes, or Montpellier. Mean-while, I am ever--Yours. LETTER VII To MRS. M--. PARIS, October, 12, 1763. MADAM,--I shall be much pleased if the remarks I have made on the characters of the French people, can afford you the satisfaction you require. With respect to the ladies I can only judge from their exteriors: but, indeed, these are so characteristic, that one can hardly judge amiss; unless we suppose that a woman of taste and sentiment may be so overruled by the absurdity of what is called fashion, as to reject reason, and disguise nature, in order to become ridiculous or frightful. That this may be the case with some individuals, is very possible. I have known it happen in our own country, where the follies of the French are adopted and exhibited in the most aukward imitation: but the general prevalence of those preposterous modes, is a plain proof that there is a general want of taste, and a general depravity of nature. I shall not pretend to describe the particulars of a French lady's dress. These you are much better acquainted with than I can pretend to be: but this I will be bold to affirm, that France is the general reservoir from which all the absurdities of false taste, luxury, and extravagance have overflowed the different kingdoms and states of Europe. The springs that fill this reservoir, are no other than vanity and ignorance. It would be superfluous to attempt proving from the nature of things, from the first principles and use of dress, as well as from the consideration of natural beauty, and the practice of the ancients, who certainly understood it as well as the connoisseurs of these days, that nothing can be more monstrous, inconvenient, and contemptible, than the fashion of modern drapery. You yourself are well aware of all its defects, and have often ridiculed them in my hearing. I shall only mention one particular of dress essential to the fashion in this country, which seems to me to carry human affectation to the very farthest verge of folly and extravagance; that is, the manner in which the faces of the ladies are primed and painted. When the Indian chiefs were in England every body ridiculed their preposterous method of painting their cheeks and eye-lids; but this ridicule was wrong placed. Those critics ought to have considered, that the Indians do not use paint to make themselves agreeable; but in order to be the more terrible to their enemies. It is generally supposed, I think, that your sex make use of fard and vermillion for very different purposes; namely, to help a bad or faded complexion, to heighten the graces, or conceal the defects of nature, as well as the ravages of time. I shall not enquire at present, whether it is just and honest to impose in this manner on mankind: if it is not honest, it may be allowed to be artful and politic, and shews, at least, a desire of being agreeable. But to lay it on as the fashion in France prescribes to all the ladies of condition, who indeed cannot appear without this badge of distinction, is to disguise themselves in such a manner, as to render them odious and detestable to every spectator, who has the least relish left for nature and propriety. As for the fard or white, with which their necks and shoulders are plaistered, it may be in some measure excusable, as their skins are naturally brown, or sallow; but the rouge, which is daubed on their faces, from the chin up to the eyes, without the least art or dexterity, not only destroys all distinction of features, but renders the aspect really frightful, or at best conveys nothing but ideas of disgust and aversion. You know, that without this horrible masque no married lady is admitted at court, or in any polite assembly; and that it is a mark of distinction which no bourgeoise dare assume. Ladies of fashion only have the privilege of exposing themselves in these ungracious colours. As their faces are concealed under a false complexion, so their heads are covered with a vast load of false hair, which is frizzled on the forehead, so as exactly to resemble the wooly heads of the Guinea negroes. As to the natural hue of it, this is a matter of no consequence, for powder makes every head of hair of the same colour; and no woman appears in this country, from the moment she rises till night, without being compleatly whitened. Powder or meal was first used in Europe by the Poles, to conceal their scald heads; but the present fashion of using it, as well as the modish method of dressing the hair, must have been borrowed from the Hottentots, who grease their wooly heads with mutton suet and then paste it over with the powder called buchu. In like manner, the hair of our fine ladies is frizzled into the appearance of negroes wool, and stiffened with an abominable paste of hog's grease, tallow, and white powder. The present fashion, therefore, of painting the face, and adorning the head, adopted by the beau monde in France, is taken from those two polite nations the Chickesaws of America and the Hottentots of Africa. On the whole, when I see one of those fine creatures sailing along, in her taudry robes of silk and gauze, frilled, and flounced, and furbelowed, with her false locks, her false jewels, her paint, her patches, and perfumes; I cannot help looking upon her as the vilest piece of sophistication that art ever produced. This hideous masque of painting, though destructive of all beauty, is, however, favourable to natural homeliness and deformity. It accustoms the eyes of the other sex, and in time reconciles them to frightfull objects; it disables them from perceiving any distinction of features between woman and woman; and, by reducing all faces to a level, gives every female an equal chance for an admirer; being in this particular analogous to the practice of the antient Lacedemonians, who were obliged to chuse their helpmates in the dark. In what manner the insides of their heads are furnished, I would not presume to judge from the conversation of a very few to whom I have had access: but from the nature of their education, which I have heard described, and the natural vivacity of their tempers, I should expect neither sense, sentiment, nor discretion. From the nursery they are allowed, and even encouraged, to say every thing that comes uppermost; by which means they acquire a volubility of tongue, and a set of phrases, which constitutes what is called polite conversation. At the same time they obtain an absolute conquest over all sense of shame, or rather, they avoid acquiring this troublesome sensation; for it is certainly no innate idea. Those who have not governesses at home, are sent, for a few years, to a convent, where they lay in a fund of superstition that serves them for life: but I never heard they had the least opportunity of cultivating the mind, of exercising the powers of reason, or of imbibing a taste for letters, or any rational or useful accomplishment. After being taught to prattle, to dance and play at cards, they are deemed sufficiently qualified to appear in the grand monde, and to perform all the duties of that high rank and station in life. In mentioning cards, I ought to observe, that they learn to play not barely for amusement, but also with a view to advantage; and, indeed, you seldom meet with a native of France, whether male or female, who is not a compleat gamester, well versed in all the subtleties and finesses of the art. This is likewise the case all over Italy. A lady of a great house in Piedmont, having four sons, makes no scruple to declare, that the first shall represent the family, the second enter into the army, the third into the church, and that she will breed the fourth a gamester. These noble adventurers devote themselves in a particular manner to the entertainment of travellers from our country, because the English are supposed to be full of money, rash, incautious, and utterly ignorant of play. But such a sharper is most dangerous, when he hunts in couple with a female. I have known a French count and his wife, who found means to lay the most wary under contribution. He was smooth, supple, officious, and attentive: she was young, handsome, unprincipled, and artful. If the Englishman marked for prey was found upon his guard against the designs of the husband, then madam plied him on the side of gallantry. She displayed all the attractions of her person. She sung, danced, ogled, sighed, complimented, and complained. If he was insensible to all her charms, she flattered his vanity, and piqued his pride, by extolling the wealth and generosity of the English; and if he proved deaf to all these insinuations she, as her last stake, endeavoured to interest his humanity and compassion. She expatiated, with tears in her eyes, on the cruelty and indifference of her great relations; represented that her husband was no more than the cadet of a noble family--, that his provision was by no means suitable. either to the dignity of his rank, or the generosity of his disposition: that he had a law-suit of great consequence depending, which had drained all his finances; and, finally, that they should be both ruined, if they could not find some generous friend, who would accommodate them with a sum of money to bring the cause to a determination. Those who are not actuated by such scandalous motives, become gamesters from meer habit, and, having nothing more solid to engage their thoughts, or employ their time, consume the best part of their lives, in this worst of all dissipation. I am not ignorant that there are exceptions from this general rule: I know that France has produced a Maintenon, a Sevigine, a Scuderi, a Dacier, and a Chatelet; but I would no more deduce the general character of the French ladies from these examples, than I would call a field of hemp a flower-garden. because there might be in it a few lillies or renunculas planted by the hand of accident. Woman has been defined a weaker man; but in this country the men are, in my opinion, more ridiculous and insignificant than the women. They certainly are more disagreeable to a rational enquirer, because they are more troublesome. Of all the coxcombs on the face of the earth, a French petit maitre is the most impertinent: and they are all petit maitres from the marquis who glitters in lace and embroidery, to the garcon barbier covered with meal, who struts with his hair in a long queue, and his hat under his arm. I have already observed, that vanity is the great and universal mover among all ranks and degrees of people in this nation; and as they take no pains to conceal or controul it, they are hurried by it into the most ridiculous and indeed intolerable extravagance. When I talk of the French nation, I must again except a great number of individuals, from the general censure. Though I have a hearty contempt for the ignorance, folly, and presumption which characterise the generality, I cannot but respect the talents of many great men, who have eminently distinguished themselves in every art and science: these I shall always revere and esteem as creatures of a superior species, produced, for the wise purposes of providence, among the refuse of mankind. It would be absurd to conclude that the Welch or Highlanders are a gigantic people, because those mountains may have produced a few individuals near seven feet high. It would be equally absurd to suppose the French are a nation of philosophers, because France has given birth to a Des Cartes, a Maupertuis, a Reaumur, and a Buffon. I shall not even deny, that the French are by no means deficient in natural capacity; but they are at the same time remarkable for a natural levity, which hinders their youth from cultivating that capacity. This is reinforced by the most preposterous education, and the example of a giddy people, engaged in the most frivolous pursuits. A Frenchman is by some Jesuit, or other monk, taught to read his mother tongue, and to say his prayers in a language he does not understand. He learns to dance and to fence, by the masters of those noble sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole circle of French compliments, which you know are a set of phrases ridiculous even to a proverb; and these he throws out indiscriminately to all women, without distinction in the exercise of that kind of address, which is here distinguished by the name of gallantry: it is no more than his making love to every woman who will give him the hearing. It is an exercise, by the repetition of which he becomes very pert, very familiar, and very impertinent. Modesty, or diffidence, I have already said, is utterly unknown among them, and therefore I wonder there should be a term to express it in their language. If I was obliged to define politeness, I should call it, the art of making one's self agreeable. I think it an art that necessarily implies a sense of decorum, and a delicacy of sentiment. These are qualities, of which (as far as I have been able to observe) a Frenchman has no idea; therefore he never can be deemed polite, except by those persons among whom they are as little understood. His first aim is to adorn his own person with what he calls fine cloaths, that is the frippery of the fashion. It is no wonder that the heart of a female, unimproved by reason, and untinctured with natural good sense, should flutter at the sight of such a gaudy thing, among the number of her admirers: this impression is enforced by fustian compliments, which her own vanity interprets in a literal sense, and still more confirmed by the assiduous attention of the gallant, who, indeed, has nothing else to mind. A Frenchman in consequence of his mingling with the females from his infancy, not only becomes acquainted with all their customs and humours; but grows wonderfully alert in performing a thousand little offices, which are overlooked by other men, whose time hath been spent in making more valuable acquisitions. He enters, without ceremony, a lady's bed-chamber, while she is in bed, reaches her whatever she wants, airs her shift, and helps to put it on. He attends at her toilette, regulates the distribution of her patches, and advises where to lay on the paint. If he visits her when she is dressed, and perceives the least impropriety in her coeffure, he insists upon adjusting it with his own hands: if he sees a curl, or even a single hair amiss, he produces his comb, his scissars, and pomatum, and sets it to rights with the dexterity of a professed friseur. He 'squires her to every place she visits, either on business, or pleasure; and, by dedicating his whole time to her, renders himself necessary to her occasions. This I take to be the most agreeable side of his character: let us view him on the quarter of impertinence. A Frenchman pries into all your secrets with the most impudent and importunate curiosity, and then discloses them without remorse. If you are indisposed, he questions you about the symptoms of your disorder, with more freedom than your physician would presume to use; very often in the grossest terms. He then proposes his remedy (for they are all quacks), he prepares it without your knowledge, and worries you with solicitation to take it, without paying the least regard to the opinion of those whom you have chosen to take care of your health. Let you be ever so ill, or averse to company, he forces himself at all times into your bed-chamber, and if it is necessary to give him a peremptory refusal, he is affronted. I have known one of those petit maitres insist upon paying regular visits twice a day to a poor gentleman who was delirious; and he conversed with him on different subjects, till he was in his last agonies. This attendance is not the effect of attachment, or regard, but of sheer vanity, that he may afterwards boast of his charity and humane disposition: though, of all the people I have ever known, I think the French are the least capable of feeling for the distresses of their fellow creatures. Their hearts are not susceptible of deep impressions; and, such is their levity, that the imagination has not time to brood long over any disagreeable idea, or sensation. As a Frenchman piques himself on his gallantry, he no sooner makes a conquest of a female's heart, than he exposes her character, for the gratification of his vanity. Nay, if he should miscarry in his schemes, he will forge letters and stories, to the ruin of the lady's reputation. This is a species of perfidy which one would think should render them odious and detestable to the whole sex; but the case is otherwise. I beg your pardon, Madam; but women are never better pleased, than when they see one another exposed; and every individual has such confidence in her own superior charms and discretion, that she thinks she can fix the most volatile, and reform the most treacherous lover. If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one, but in one shape or another, he will find means to ruin the peace of a family, in which he has been so kindly entertained. What he cannot accomplish by dint of compliment, and personal attendance, he will endeavour to effect, by reinforcing these with billets-doux, songs, and verses, of which he always makes a provision for such purposes. If he is detected in these efforts of treachery, and reproached with his ingratitude, he impudently declares, that what he had done was no more than simple gallantry, considered in France as an indispensible duty on every man who pretended to good breeding. Nay, he will even affirm, that his endeavours to corrupt your wife, or your daughter, were the most genuine proofs he could give of his particular regard for your family. If a Frenchman is capable of real friendship, it must certainly be the most disagreeable present he can possibly make to a man of a true English character, You know, Madam, we are naturally taciturn, soon tired of impertinence, and much subject to fits of disgust. Your French friend intrudes upon you at all hours: he stuns you with his loquacity: he teases you with impertinent questions about your domestic and private affairs: he attempts to meddle in all your concerns; and forces his advice upon you with the most unwearied importunity: he asks the price of every thing you wear, and, so sure as you tell him undervalues it, without hesitation: he affirms it is in a bad taste, ill-contrived, ill-made; that you have been imposed upon both with respect to the fashion and the price; that the marquise of this, or the countess of that, has one that is perfectly elegant, quite in the bon ton, and yet it cost her little more than you gave for a thing that nobody would wear. If there were five hundred dishes at table, a Frenchman will eat of all of them, and then complain he has no appetite. This I have several times remarked. A friend of mine gained a considerable wager upon an experiment of this kind: the petit maitre ate of fourteen different plats, besides the dessert; then disparaged the cook, declaring he was no better than a marmiton, or turnspit. The French have the most ridiculous fondness for their hair, and this I believe they inherit from their remote ancestors. The first race of French kings were distinguished by their long hair, and certainly the people of this country consider it as an indispensible ornament. A Frenchman will sooner part with his religion than with his hair, which, indeed, no consideration will induce him to forego. I know a gentleman afflicted with a continual head-ach, and a defluxion on his eyes, who was told by his physician that the best chance he had for being cured, would be to have his head close shaved, and bathed every day in cold water. "How (cried he) cut my hair? Mr. Doctor, your most humble servant!" He dismissed his physician, lost his eye-sight, and almost his senses, and is now led about with his hair in a bag, and a piece of green silk hanging like a screen before his face. Count Saxe, and other military writers have demonstrated the absurdity of a soldier's wearing a long head of hair; nevertheless, every soldier in this country wears a long queue, which makes a delicate mark on his white cloathing; and this ridiculous foppery has descended even to the lowest class of people. The decrotteur, who cleans your shoes at the corner of the Pont Neuf, has a tail of this kind hanging down to his rump, and even the peasant who drives an ass loaded with dung, wears his hair en queue, though, perhaps, he has neither shirt nor breeches. This is the ornament upon which he bestows much time and pains, and in the exhibition of which he finds full gratification for his vanity. Considering the harsh features of the common people in this country, their diminutive stature, their grimaces, and that long appendage, they have no small resemblance to large baboons walking upright; and perhaps this similitude has helped to entail upon them the ridicule of their neighbours. A French friend tires out your patience with long visits; and, far from taking the most palpable hints to withdraw, when he perceives you uneasy he observes you are low-spirited, and therefore he will keep you company. This perseverance shews that he must either be void of penetration, or that his disposition must be truly diabolical. Rather than be tormented with such a fiend, a man had better turn him out of doors, even though at the hazard of being run thro' the body. The French are generally counted insincere, and taxed with want of generosity. But I think these reproaches are not well founded. High-flown professions of friendship and attachment constitute the language of common compliment in this country, and are never supposed to be understood in the literal acceptation of the words; and, if their acts of generosity are but very rare, we ought to ascribe that rarity, not so much to a deficiency of generous sentiments, as to their vanity and ostentation, which engrossing all their funds, utterly disable them from exerting the virtues of beneficence. Vanity, indeed, predominates among all ranks, to such a degree, that they are the greatest egotists in the world; and the most insignificant individual talks in company with the same conceit and arrogance, as a person of the greatest importance. Neither conscious poverty nor disgrace will restrain him in the least either from assuming his full share of the conversation, or making big addresses to the finest lady, whom he has the smallest opportunity to approach: nor is he restrained by any other consideration whatsoever. It is all one to him whether he himself has a wife of his own, or the lady a husband; whether she is designed for the cloister, or pre-ingaged to his best friend and benefactor. He takes it for granted that his addresses cannot but be acceptable; and, if he meets with a repulse, he condemns her taste; but never doubts his own qualifications. I have a great many things to say of their military character, and their punctilios of honour, which last are equally absurd and pernicious; but as this letter has run to an unconscionable length, I shall defer them till another opportunity. Mean-while, I have the honour to be, with very particular esteem--Madam, Your most obedient servant. LETTER VIII To MR. M-- LYONS, October 19, 1763. DEAR SIR,--I was favoured with yours at Paris, and look upon your reproaches as the proof of your friendship. The truth is, I considered all the letters I have hitherto written on the subject of my travels, as written to your society in general, though they have been addressed to one individual of it; and if they contain any thing that can either amuse or inform, I desire that henceforth all I send may be freely perused by all the members. With respect to my health, about which you so kindly enquire, I have nothing new to communicate. I had reason to think that my bathing in the sea at Boulogne produced a good effect, in strengthening my relaxed fibres. You know how subject I was to colds in England; that I could not stir abroad after sun-set, nor expose myself to the smallest damp, nor walk till the least moisture appeared on my skin, without being laid up for ten days or a fortnight. At Paris, however, I went out every day, with my hat under my arm, though the weather was wet and cold: I walked in the garden at Versailles even after it was dark, with my head uncovered, on a cold evening, when the ground was far from being dry: nay, at Marli, I sauntered above a mile through damp alleys, and wet grass: and from none of these risques did I feel the least inconvenience. In one of our excursions we visited the manufacture for porcelain, which the king of France has established at the village of St. Cloud, on the road to Versailles, and which is, indeed, a noble monument of his munificence. It is a very large building, both commodious and magnificent, where a great number of artists are employed, and where this elegant superfluity is carried to as great perfection as it ever was at Dresden. Yet, after all, I know not whether the porcelain made at Chelsea may not vie with the productions either of Dresden, or St. Cloud. If it falls short of either, it is not in the design, painting, enamel, or other ornaments, but only in the composition of the metal, and the method of managing it in the furnace. Our porcelain seems to be a partial vitrification of levigated flint and fine pipe clay, mixed together in a certain proportion; and if the pieces are not removed from the fire in the very critical moment, they will be either too little, or too much vitrified. In the first case, I apprehend they will not acquire a proper degree of cohesion; they will be apt to be corroded, discoloured, and to crumble, like the first essays that were made at Chelsea; in the second case, they will be little better than imperfect glass. There are three methods of travelling from Paris to Lyons, which, by the shortest road is a journey of about three hundred and sixty miles. One is by the diligence, or stagecoach, which performs it in five days; and every passenger pays one hundred livres, in consideration of which, he not only has a seat in the carriage, but is maintained on the road. The inconveniences attending this way of travelling are these. You are crouded into the carriage, to the number of eight persons, so as to sit very uneasy, and sometimes run the risque of being stifled among very indifferent company. You are hurried out of bed, at four, three, nay often at two o'clock in the morning. You are obliged to eat in the French way, which is very disagreeable to an English palate; and, at Chalons, you must embark upon the Saone in a boat, which conveys you to Lyons, so that the two last days of your journey are by water. All these were insurmountable objections to me, who am in such a bad state of health, troubled with an asthmatic cough, spitting, slow fever, and restlessness, which demands a continual change of place, as well as free air, and room for motion. I was this day visited by two young gentlemen, sons of Mr. Guastaldi, late minister from Genoa at London. I had seen them at Paris, at the house of the dutchess of Douglas. They came hither, with their conductor, in the diligence, and assured me, that nothing could be more disagreeable than their situation in that carriage. Another way of travelling in this country is to hire a coach and four horses; and this method I was inclined to take: but when I went to the bureau, where alone these voitures are to be had, I was given to understand, that it would cost me six-and-twenty guineas, and travel so slow that I should be ten days upon the road. These carriages are let by the same persons who farm the diligence; and for this they have an exclusive privilege, which makes them very saucy and insolent. When I mentioned my servant, they gave me to understand, that I must pay two loui'dores more for his seat upon the coach box. As I could not relish these terms, nor brook the thoughts of being so long upon the road, I had recourse to the third method, which is going post. In England you know I should have had nothing to do, but to hire a couple of post-chaises from stage to stage, with two horses in each; but here the case is quite otherwise. The post is farmed from the king, who lays travellers under contribution for his own benefit, and has published a set of oppressive ordonnances, which no stranger nor native dares transgress. The postmaster finds nothing but horses and guides: the carriage you yourself must provide. If there are four persons within the carriage, you are obliged to have six horses, and two postillions; and if your servant sits on the outside, either before or behind, you must pay for a seventh. You pay double for the first stage from Paris, and twice double for passing through Fontainbleau when the court is there, as well as at coming to Lyons, and at leaving this city. These are called royal posts, and are undoubtedly a scandalous imposition. There are two post roads from Paris to Lyons, one of sixty-five posts, by the way of Moulins; the other of fifty-nine, by the way of Dijon in Burgundy. This last I chose, partly to save sixty livres, and partly to see the wine harvest of Burgundy, which, I was told, was a season of mirth and jollity among all ranks of people. I hired a very good coach for ten loui'dores to Lyons, and set out from Paris on the thirteenth instant, with six horses, two postillions, and my own servant on horseback. We made no stop at Fontainbleau, though the court was there; but lay at Moret, which is one stage further, a very paltry little town where, however, we found good accommodation. I shall not pretend to describe the castle or palace of Fontainbleau, of which I had only a glimpse in passing; but the forest, in the middle of which it stands, is a noble chace of great extent, beautifully wild and romantic, well stored with game of all sorts, and abounding with excellent timber. It put me in mind of the New Forest in Hampshire; but the hills, rocks, and mountains, with which it is diversified, render it more agreeable. The people of this country dine at noon, and travellers always find an ordinary prepared at every auberge, or public-house, on the road. Here they sit down promiscuously, and dine at so much a head. The usual price is thirty sols for dinner, and forty for supper, including lodging; for this moderate expence they have two courses and a dessert. If you eat in your own apartment, you pay, instead of forty sols, three, and in some places, four livres ahead. I and my family could not well dispense with our tea and toast in the morning, and had no stomach to eat at noon. For my own part, I hate French cookery, and abominate garlick, with which all their ragouts, in this part of the country, are highly seasoned: we therefore formed a different plan of living upon the road. Before we left Paris, we laid in a stock of tea, chocolate, cured neats' tongues, and saucissons, or Bologna sausages, both of which we found in great perfection in that capital, where, indeed, there are excellent provisions of all sorts. About ten in the morning we stopped to breakfast at some auberge, where we always found bread, butter, and milk. In the mean time, we ordered a poulard or two to be roasted, and these, wrapped in a napkin, were put into the boot of the coach, together with bread, wine, and water. About two or three in the afternoon, while the horses were changing, we laid a cloth upon our knees, and producing our store, with a few earthen plates, discussed our short meal without further ceremony. This was followed by a dessert of grapes and other fruit, which we had also provided. I must own I found these transient refreshments much more agreeable than any regular meal I ate upon the road. The wine commonly used in Burgundy is so weak and thin, that you would not drink it in England. The very best which they sell at Dijon, the capital of the province, for three livres a bottle, is in strength, and even in flavour, greatly inferior to what I have drank in London. I believe all the first growth is either consumed in the houses of the noblesse, or sent abroad to foreign markets. I have drank excellent Burgundy at Brussels for a florin a bottle; that is, little more than twenty pence sterling. The country from the forest of Fontainbleau to the Lyonnois, through which we passed, is rather agreeable than fertile, being part of Champagne and the dutchy of Burgundy, watered by three pleasant pastoral rivers, the Seine, the Yonne, and the Saone. The flat country is laid out chiefly for corn; but produces more rye than wheat. Almost all the ground seems to be ploughed up, so that there is little or nothing lying fallow. There are very few inclosures, scarce any meadow ground, and, so far as I could observe, a great scarcity of cattle. We sometimes found it very difficult to procure half a pint of milk for our tea. In Burgundy I saw a peasant ploughing the ground with a jack-ass, a lean cow, and a he-goat, yoked together. It is generally observed, that a great number of black cattle are bred and fed on the mountains of Burgundy, which are the highest lands in France; but I saw very few. The peasants in France are so wretchedly poor, and so much oppressed by their landlords, that they cannot afford to inclose their grounds, or give a proper respite to their lands; or to stock their farms with a sufficient number of black cattle to produce the necessary manure, without which agriculture can never be carried to any degree of perfection. Indeed, whatever efforts a few individuals may make for the benefit of their own estates, husbandry in France will never be generally improved, until the farmer is free and independent. From the frequency of towns and villages, I should imagine this country is very populous; yet it must be owned, that the towns are in general thinly inhabited. I saw a good number of country seats and plantations near the banks of the rivers, on each side; and a great many convents, sweetly situated, on rising grounds, where the air is most pure, and the prospect most agreeable. It is surprising to see how happy the founders of those religious houses have been in their choice of situations, all the world over. In passing through this country, I was very much struck with the sight of large ripe clusters of grapes, entwined with the briars and thorns of common hedges on the wayside. The mountains of Burgundy are covered with vines from the bottom to the top, and seem to be raised by nature on purpose to extend the surface, and to expose it the more advantageously to the rays of the sun. The vandange was but just begun, and the people were employed in gathering the grapes; but I saw no signs of festivity among them. Perhaps their joy was a little damped by the bad prospect of their harvest; for they complained that the weather had been so unfavourable as to hinder the grapes from ripening. I thought, indeed, there was something uncomfortable in seeing the vintage thus retarded till the beginning of winter: for, in some parts, I found the weather extremely cold; particularly at a place called Maison-neuve, where we lay, there was a hard frost, and in the morning the pools were covered with a thick crust of ice. My personal adventures on the road were such as will not bear a recital. They consisted of petty disputes with landladies, post-masters, and postillions. The highways seem to be perfectly safe. We did not find that any robberies were ever committed, although we did not see one of the marechaussee from Paris to Lyons. You know the marechaussee are a body of troopers well mounted, maintained in France as safe-guards to the public roads. It is a reproach upon England that some such patrol is not appointed for the protection of travellers. At Sens in Champagne, my servant, who had rode on before to bespeak fresh horses, told me, that the domestic of another company had been provided before him, altho' it was not his turn, as he had arrived later at the post. Provoked at this partiality, I resolved to chide the post-master, and accordingly addressed myself to a person who stood at the door of the auberge. He was a jolly figure, fat and fair, dressed in an odd kind of garb, with a gold laced cap on his head, and a cambric handkerchief pinned to his middle. The sight of such a fantastic petit maitre, in the character of a post-master, increased my spleen. I called to him with an air of authority, mixed with indignation, and when he came up to the coach, asked in a peremptory tone, if he did not understand the king's ordonnance concerning the regulation of the posts? He laid his hand upon his breast; but before he could make any answer, I pulled out the post-book, and began to read, with great vociferation, the article which orders, that the traveller who comes first shall be first served. By this time the fresh horses being put to the carriage, and the postillions mounted, the coach set off all of a sudden, with uncommon speed. I imagined the post-master had given the fellows a signal to be gone, and, in this persuasion, thrusting my head out at the window, I bestowed some epithets upon him, which must have sounded very harsh in the ears of a Frenchman. We stopped for a refreshment at a little town called Joigne-ville, where (by the bye) I was scandalously imposed upon, and even abused by a virago of a landlady; then proceeding to the next stage, I was given to understand we could not be supplied with fresh horses. Here I perceived at the door of the inn, the same person whom I had reproached at Sens. He came up to the coach, and told me, that notwithstanding what the guides had said, I should have fresh horses in a few minutes. I imagined he was master both of this house and the auberge at Sens, between which he passed and repassed occasionally; and that he was now desirous of making me amends for the affront he had put upon me at the other place. Observing that one of the trunks behind was a little displaced, he assisted my servant in adjusting it: then he entered into conversation with me, and gave me to understand, that in a post-chaise, which we had passed, was an English gentleman on his return from Italy. I wanted to know who he was, and when he said he could not tell, I asked him, in a very abrupt manner, why he had not enquired of his servant. He shrugged up his shoulders, and retired to the inn door. Having waited about half an hour, I beckoned to him, and when he approached, upbraided him with having told me that I should be supplied with fresh horses in a few minutes: he seemed shocked, and answered, that he thought he had reason for what he said, observing, that it was as disagreeable to him as to me to wait for a relay. As it began to rain, I pulled up the glass in his face, and he withdrew again to the door, seemingly ruffled at my deportment. In a little time the horses arrived, and three of them were immediately put to a very handsome post-chaise, into which he stepped, and set out, accompanied by a man in a rich livery on horseback. Astonished at this circumstance, I asked the hostler who he was, and he replied, that he was a man of fashion (un seigneur) who lived in the neighbourhood of Auxerre. I was much mortified to find that I had treated a nobleman so scurvily, and scolded my own people for not having more penetration than myself. I dare say he did not fail to descant upon the brutal behaviour of the Englishman; and that my mistake served with him to confirm the national reproach of bluntness, and ill breeding, under which we lie in this country. The truth is, I was that day more than usually peevish, from the bad weather, as well as from the dread of a fit of the asthma, with which I was threatened: and I dare say my appearance seemed as uncouth to him, as his travelling dress appeared to me. I had a grey mourning frock under a wide great coat, a bob wig without powder, a very large laced hat, and a meagre, wrinkled, discontented countenance. The fourth night of our journey we lay at Macon, and the next day passed through the Lyonnois, which is a fine country, full of towns, villages, and gentlemen's houses. In passing through the Maconnois, we saw a great many fields of Indian corn, which grows to the height of six or seven feet: it is made into flour for the use of the common people, and goes by the name of Turkey wheat. Here likewise, as well as in Dauphine, they raise a vast quantity of very large pompions, with the contents of which they thicken their soup and ragouts. As we travelled only while the sun was up, on account of my ill health, and the post horses in France are in bad order, we seldom exceeded twenty leagues a day. I was directed to a lodging-house at Lyons, which being full they shewed us to a tavern, where I was led up three pair of stairs, to an apartment consisting of three paltry chambers, for which the people demanded twelve livres a day: for dinner and supper they asked thirty-two, besides three livres for my servant; so that my daily expence would have amounted to about forty-seven livres, exclusive of breakfast and coffee in the afternoon. I was so provoked at this extortion, that, without answering one word, I drove to another auberge, where I now am, and pay at the rate of two-and-thirty livres a day, for which I am very badly lodged, and but very indifferently entertained. I mention these circumstances to give you an idea of the imposition to which strangers are subject in this country. It must be owned, however, that in the article of eating, I might save half the money by going to the public ordinary; but this is a scheme of oeconomy, which (exclusive of other disagreeable circumstances) neither my own health, nor that of my wife permits me to embrace. My journey from Paris to Lyons, including the hire of the coach, and all expences on the road, has cost me, within a few shillings, forty loui'dores. From Paris our baggage (though not plombe) was not once examined till we arrived in this city, at the gate of which we were questioned by one of the searchers, who, being tipt with half a crown, allowed us to proceed without further enquiry. I purposed to stay in Lyons until I should receive some letters I expected from London, to be forwarded by my banker at Paris: but the enormous expence of living in this manner has determined me to set out in a day or two for Montpellier, although that place is a good way out of the road to Nice. My reasons for taking that route I shall communicate in my next. Mean-while, I am ever,-- Dear Sir, Your affectionate and obliged humble servant. LETTER IX MONTPELLIER, November 5, 1763. DEAR SIR,--The city of Lyons has been so often and so circumstantially described, that I cannot pretend to say any thing new on the subject. Indeed, I know very little of it, but what I have read in books; as I had but one day to make a tour of the streets, squares, and other remarkable places. The bridge over the Rhone seems to be so slightly built, that I should imagine it would be one day carried away by that rapid river; especially as the arches are so small, that, after great rains they are sometimes bouchees, or stopped up; that is, they do not admit a sufficient passage for the encreased body of the water. In order to remedy this dangerous defect, in some measure, they found an artist some years ago, who has removed a middle pier, and thrown two arches into one. This alteration they looked upon as a masterpiece in architecture, though there is many a common mason in England, who would have undertaken and performed the work, without valuing himself much upon the enterprize. This bridge, as well as that of St. Esprit, is built, not in a strait line across the river, but with a curve, which forms a convexity to oppose the current. Such a bend is certainly calculated for the better resisting the general impetuosity of the stream, and has no bad effect to the eye. Lyons is a great, populous, and flourishing city but I am surprised to find it is counted a healthy place, and that the air of it is esteemed favourable to pulmonic disorders. It is situated on the confluence of two large rivers, from which there must be a great evaporation, as well as from the low marshy grounds, which these rivers often overflow. This must render the air moist, frouzy, and even putrid, if it was not well ventilated by winds from the mountains of Swisserland; and in the latter end of autumn, it must be subject to fogs. The morning we set out from thence, the whole city and adjacent plains were covered with so thick a fog, that we could not distinguish from the coach the head of the foremost mule that drew it. Lyons is said to be very hot in summer, and very cold in winter; therefore I imagine must abound with inflammatory and intermittent disorders in the spring and fall of the year. My reasons for going to Montpellier, which is out of the strait road to Nice, were these. Having no acquaintance nor correspondents in the South of France, I had desired my credit might be sent to the same house to which my heavy baggage was consigned. I expected to find my baggage at Cette, which is the sea-port of Montpellier; and there I also hoped to find a vessel, in which I might be transported by sea to Nice, without further trouble. I longed to try what effect the boasted air of Montpellier would have upon my constitution; and I had a great desire to see the famous monuments of antiquity in and about the ancient city of Nismes, which is about eight leagues short of Montpellier. At the inn where we lodged, I found a return berline, belonging to Avignon, with three mules, which are the animals commonly used for carriages in this country. This I hired for five loui'dores. The coach was large, commodious, and well-fitted; the mules were strong and in good order; and the driver, whose name was Joseph, appeared to be a sober, sagacious, intelligent fellow, perfectly well acquainted with every place in the South of France. He told me he was owner of the coach, but I afterwards learned, he was no other than a hired servant. I likewise detected him in some knavery, in the course of our journey; and plainly perceived he had a fellow-feeling with the inn-keepers on the road; but, in other respects, he was very obliging, serviceable, and even entertaining. There are some knavish practices of this kind, at which a traveller will do well to shut his eyes, for his own ease and convenience. He will be lucky if he has to do with a sensible knave, like Joseph, who understood his interest too well to be guilty of very flagrant pieces of imposition. A man, impatient to be at his journey's end, will find this a most disagreeable way of travelling. In summer it must be quite intolerable. The mules are very sure, but very slow. The journey seldom exceeds eight leagues, about four and twenty miles a day: and as those people have certain fixed stages, you are sometimes obliged to rise in a morning before day; a circumstance very grievous to persons in ill health. These inconveniences, however, were over-balanced by other agreemens. We no, sooner quitted Lyons, than we got into summer weather, and travelling through a most romantic country, along the banks of the Rhone, had opportunities (from the slowness of our pace) to contemplate its beauties at leisure. The rapidity of the Rhone is, in a great measure, owing to its being confined within steep banks on each side. These are formed almost through its whole course, by a double chain of mountains, which rise with all abrupt ascent from both banks of the river. The mountains are covered with vineyards, interspersed with small summer-houses, and in many places they are crowned with churches, chapels, and convents, which add greatly to the romantic beauty of the prospect. The highroad, as far as Avignon, lies along the side of the river, which runs almost in a straight line, and affords great convenience for inland commerce. Travellers, bound to the southern parts of France, generally embark in the diligence at Lyons, and glide down this river with great velocity, passing a great number of towns and villages on each side, where they find ordinaries every day at dinner and supper. In good weather, there is no danger in this method of travelling, 'till you come to the Pont St. Esprit, where the stream runs through the arches with such rapidity, that the boat is sometimes overset. But those passengers who are under any apprehension are landed above-bridge, and taken in again, after the boat has passed, just in the same manner as at London Bridge. The boats that go up the river are drawn against the stream by oxen, which swim through one of the arches of this bridge, the driver sitting between the horns of the foremost beast. We set out from Lyons early on Monday morning, and as a robbery had been a few days before committed in that neighbourhood, I ordered my servant to load my musquetoon with a charge of eight balls. By the bye, this piece did not fail to attract the curiosity and admiration of the people in every place through which we passed. The carriage no sooner halted, than a crowd immediately surrounded the man to view the blunderbuss, which they dignified with the title of petit canon. At Nuys in Burgundy, he fired it in the air, and the whole mob dispersed, and scampered off like a flock of sheep. In our journey hither, we generally set out in a morning at eight o'clock, and travelled 'till noon, when the mules were put up and rested a couple of hours. During this halt, Joseph went to dinner, and we went to breakfast, after which we ordered provision for our refreshment in the coach, which we took about three or four in the afternoon, halting for that purpose, by the side of some transparent brook, which afforded excellent water to mix with our wine. In this country I was almost poisoned with garlic, which they mix in their ragouts, and all their sauces; nay, the smell of it perfumes the very chambers, as well as every person you approach. I was also very sick of been ficas, grives, or thrushes, and other little birds, which are served up twice a day at all ordinaries on the road. They make their appearance in vine-leaves, and are always half raw, in which condition the French choose to eat them, rather than run the risque of losing the juice by over-roasting. The peasants on the South of France are poorly clad, and look as if they were half-starved, diminutive, swarthy, and meagre; and yet the common people who travel, live luxuriously on the road. Every carrier and mule-driver has two meals a day, consisting each of a couple of courses and a dessert, with tolerable small wine. That which is called hermitage, and grows in this province of Dauphine, is sold on the spot for three livres a bottle. The common draught, which you have at meals in this country, is remarkably strong, though in flavour much inferior to that of Burgundy. The accommodation is tolerable, though they demand (even in this cheap country) the exorbitant price of four livres a head for every meal, of those who choose to eat in their own apartments. I insisted, however, upon paying them with three, which they received, though not without murmuring and seeming discontented. In this journey, we found plenty of good mutton, pork, poultry, and game, including the red partridge, which is near twice as big as the partridge of England. Their hares are likewise surprisingly large and juicy. We saw great flocks of black turkeys feeding in the fields, but no black cattle; and milk was so scarce, that sometimes we were obliged to drink our tea without it. One day perceiving a meadow on the side of the road, full of a flower which I took to be the crocus, I desired my servant to alight and pull some of them. He delivered the musquetoon to Joseph, who began to tamper with it, and off it went with a prodigious report, augmented by an eccho from the mountains that skirted the road. The mules were so frightened, that they went off at the gallop; and Joseph, for some minutes, could neither manage the reins, nor open his mouth. At length he recollected himself, and the cattle were stopt, by the assistance of the servant, to whom he delivered the musquetoon, with a significant shake of the head. Then alighting from the box, he examined the heads of his three mules, and kissed each of them in his turn. Finding they had received no damage, he came up to the coach, with a pale visage and staring eyes, and said it was God's mercy he had not killed his beasts. I answered, that it was a greater mercy he had not killed his passengers; for the muzzle of the piece might have been directed our way as well as any other, and in that case Joseph might have been hanged for murder. "I had as good be hanged (said he) for murder, as be ruined by the loss of my cattle." This adventure made such an impression upon him, that he recounted it to every person we met; nor would he ever touch the blunderbuss from that day. I was often diverted with the conversation of this fellow, who was very arch and very communicative. Every afternoon, he used to stand upon the foot-board, at the side of the coach, and discourse with us an hour together. Passing by the gibbet of Valencia, which stands very near the high-road, we saw one body hanging quite naked, and another lying broken on the wheel. I recollected, that Mandrin had suffered in this place, and calling to Joseph to mount the foot-board, asked if he had ever seen that famous adventurer. At mention of the name of Mandrin, the tear started in Joseph's eye, he discharged a deep sigh, or rather groan, and told me he was his dear friend. I was a little startled at this declaration; however, I concealed my thoughts, and began to ask questions about the character and exploits of a man who had made such noise in the world. He told me, Mandrin was a native of Valencia, of mean extraction: that he had served as a soldier in the army, and afterwards acted as maltotier, or tax-gatherer: that at length he turned contrebandier, or smuggler, and by his superior qualities, raised himself to the command of a formidable gang, consisting of five hundred persons well armed with carbines and pistols. He had fifty horses for his troopers, and three hundred mules for the carriage of his merchandize. His head-quarters were in Savoy: but he made incursions into Dauphine, and set the marechaussee at defiance. He maintained several bloody skirmishes with these troopers, as well as with other regular detachments, and in all those actions signalized himself by his courage and conduct. Coming up at one time with fifty of the marechaussee who were in quest of him, he told them very calmly, he had occasion for their horses and acoutrements, and desired them to dismount. At that instant his gang appeared, and the troopers complied with his request, without making the least opposition. Joseph said he was as generous as he was brave, and never molested travellers, nor did the least injury to the poor; but, on the contrary, relieved them very often. He used to oblige the gentlemen in the country to take his merchandize, his tobacco, brandy, and muslins, at his own price; and, in the same manner, he laid the open towns under contribution. When he had no merchandize, he borrowed money off them upon the credit of what he should bring when he was better provided. He was at last betrayed, by his wench, to the colonel of a French regiment, who went with a detachment in the night to the place where he lay in Savoy, and surprized him in a wood-house, while his people were absent in different parts of the country. For this intrusion, the court of France made an apology to the king of Sardinia, in whose territories he was taken. Mandrin being conveyed to Valencia, his native place, was for some time permitted to go abroad, under a strong guard, with chains upon his legs; and here he conversed freely with all sorts of people, flattering himself with the hopes of a pardon, in which, however, he was disappointed. An order came from court to bring him to his trial, when he was found guilty, and condemned to be broke on the wheel. Joseph said he drank a bottle of wine with him the night before his execution. He bore his fate with great resolution, observing that if the letter which he had written to the King had been delivered, he certainly should have obtained his Majesty's pardon. His executioner was one of his own gang, who was pardoned on condition of performing this office. You know, that criminals broke upon the wheel are first strangled, unless the sentence imports, that they shall be broke alive. As Mandrin had not been guilty of cruelty in the course of his delinquency, he was indulged with this favour. Speaking to the executioner, whom he had formerly commanded, "Joseph (dit il), je ne veux pas que tu me touche, jusqu'a ce que je sois roid mort," "Joseph," said he, "thou shalt not touch me till I am quite dead."--Our driver had no sooner pronounced these words, than I was struck with a suspicion, that he himself was the executioner of his friend Mandrin. On that suspicion, I exclaimed, "Ah! ah! Joseph!" The fellow blushed up to the eyes, and said, Oui, son nom etoit Joseph aussi bien que le mien, "Yes, he was called Joseph, as I am." I did not think proper to prosecute the inquiry; but did not much relish the nature of Joseph's connexions. The truth is, he had very much the looks of a ruffian; though, I must own, his behaviour was very obliging and submissive. On the fifth day of our journey, in the morning, we passed the famous bridge at St. Esprit, which to be sure is a great curiosity, from its length, and the number of its arches: but these arches are too small: the passage above is too narrow; and the whole appears to be too slight, considering the force and impetuosity of the river. It is not comparable to the bridge at Westminster, either for beauty or solidity. Here we entered Languedoc, and were stopped to have our baggage examined; but the searcher, being tipped with a three-livre piece, allowed it to pass. Before we leave Dauphine, I must observe, that I was not a little surprized to see figs and chestnuts growing in the open fields, at the discretion of every passenger. It was this day I saw the famous Pont du Garde; but as I cannot possibly include, in this letter, a description of that beautiful bridge, and of the other antiquities belonging to Nismes, I will defer it till the next opportunity, being, in the mean time, with equal truth and affection,--Dear Sir, Your obliged humble Servant. LETTER X MONTPELLIER, November 10, 1763. DEAR SIR,--By the Pont St. Esprit we entered the province of Languedoc, and breakfasted at Bagniole, which is a little paltry town; from whence, however, there is an excellent road through a mountain, made at a great expence, and extending about four leagues. About five in the afternoon, I had the first glimpse of the famous Pont du Garde, which stands on the right hand, about the distance of a league from the post-road to Nismes, and about three leagues from that city. I would not willingly pass for a false enthusiast in taste; but I cannot help observing, that from the first distant view of this noble monument, till we came near enough to see it perfectly, I felt the strongest emotions of impatience that I had ever known; and obliged our driver to put his mules to the full gallop, in the apprehension that it would be dark before we reached the place. I expected to find the building, in some measure, ruinous; but was agreeably disappointed, to see it look as fresh as the bridge at Westminster. The climate is either so pure and dry, or the free-stone, with which it is built, so hard, that the very angles of them remain as acute as if they had been cut last year. Indeed, some large stones have dropped out of the arches; but the whole is admirably preserved, and presents the eye with a piece of architecture, so unaffectedly elegant, so simple, and majestic, that I will defy the most phlegmatic and stupid spectator to behold it without admiration. It was raised in the Augustan age, by the Roman colony of Nismes, to convey a stream of water between two mountains, for the use of that city. It stands over the river Gardon, which is a beautiful pastoral stream, brawling among rocks, which form a number of pretty natural cascades, and overshadowed on each side with trees and shrubs, which greatly add to the rural beauties of the scene. It rises in the Cevennes, and the sand of it produces gold, as we learn from Mr. Reaumur, in his essay on this subject, inserted in the French Memoirs, for the year 1718. If I lived at Nismes, or Avignon (which last city is within four short leagues of it) I should take pleasure in forming parties to come hither, in summer, to dine under one of the arches of the Pont du Garde, on a cold collation. This work consists of three bridges, or tire of arches, one above another; the first of six, the second of eleven, and the third of thirty-six. The height, comprehending the aqueduct on the top, amounts to 174 feet three inches: the length between the two mountains, which it unites, extends to 723. The order of architecture is the Tuscan, but the symmetry of it is inconceivable. By scooping the bases of the pilasters, of the second tire of arches, they had made a passage for foot-travellers: but though the antients far excelled us in beauty, they certainly fell short of the moderns in point of conveniency. The citizens of Avignon have, in this particular, improved the Roman work with a new bridge, by apposition, constructed on the same plan with that of the lower tire of arches, of which indeed it seems to be a part, affording a broad and commodious passage over the river, to horses and carriages of all kinds. The aqueduct, for the continuance of which this superb work was raised, conveyed a stream of sweet water from the fountain of Eure, near the city of Uzes, and extended near six leagues in length. In approaching Nismes, you see the ruins of a Roman tower, built on the summit of a hill, which over-looks the city. It seems to have been intended, at first, as a watch, or signal-tower, though, in the sequel, it was used as a fortress: what remains of it, is about ninety feet high; the architecture of the Doric order. I no sooner alighted at the inn, than I was presented with a pamphlet, containing an account of Nismes and its antiquities, which every stranger buys. There are persons too who attend in order to shew the town, and you will always be accosted by some shabby antiquarian, who presents you with medals for sale, assuring you they are genuine antiques, and were dug out of the ruins of the Roman temple and baths. All those fellows are cheats; and they have often laid under contribution raw English travellers, who had more money than discretion. To such they sell the vilest and most common trash: but when they meet with a connoisseur, they produce some medals which are really valuable and curious. Nismes, antiently called Nemausis, was originally a colony of Romans, settled by Augustus Caesar, after the battle of Actium. It is still of considerable extent, and said to contain twelve thousand families; but the number seems, by this account, to be greatly exaggerated. Certain it is, the city must have been formerly very extensive, as appears from the circuit of the antient walls, the remains of which are still to be seen. Its present size is not one third of its former extent. Its temples, baths, statues, towers, basilica, and amphitheatre, prove it to have been a city of great opulence and magnificence. At present, the remains of these antiquities are all that make it respectable or remarkable; though here are manufactures of silk and wool, carried on with good success. The water necessary for these works is supplied by a source at the foot of the rock, upon which the tower is placed; and here were discovered the ruins of Roman baths, which had been formed and adorned with equal taste and magnificence. Among the rubbish they found a vast profusion of columns, vases, capitals, cornices, inscriptions, medals, statues, and among other things, the finger of a colossal statue in bronze, which, according to the rules of proportion, must have been fifteen feet high. From these particulars, it appears that the edifices must have been spacious and magnificent. Part of a tesselated pavement still remains. The antient pavement of the bath is still intire; all the rubbish has been cleared away; and the baths, in a great measure, restored on the old plan, though they are not at present used for any thing but ornament. The water is collected into two vast reservoirs, and a canal built and lined with hewn stone. There are three handsome bridges thrown over this vast canal. It contains a great body of excellent water, which by pipes and other small branching canals, traverses the town, and is converted to many different purposes of oeconomy and manufacture. Between the Roman bath and these great canals, the ground is agreeably laid out in pleasure-walks. for the recreation of the inhabitants. Here are likewise ornaments of architecture, which savour much more of French foppery, than of the simplicity and greatness of the antients. It is very surprizing, that this fountain should produce such a great body of water, as fills the basin of the source, the Roman basin, two large deep canals three hundred feet in length, two vast basins that make part of the great canal, which is eighteen hundred feet long, eighteen feet deep, and forty-eight feet broad. When I saw it, there was in it about eight or nine feet of water, transparent as crystal. It must be observed, however, for the honour of French cleanliness, that in the Roman basin, through which this noble stream of water passes, I perceived two washerwomen at work upon children's clouts and dirty linnen. Surprized, and much disgusted at this filthy phaenomenon, I asked by what means, and by whose permission, those dirty hags had got down into the basin, in order to contaminate the water at its fountain-head; and understood they belonged to the commandant of the place, who had keys of the subterranean passage. Fronting the Roman baths are the ruins of an antient temple, which, according to tradition, was dedicated to Diana: but it has been observed by connoisseurs, that all the antient temples of this goddess were of the Ionic order; whereas, this is partly Corinthian, and partly composite. It is about seventy foot long, and six and thirty in breadth, arched above, and built of large blocks of stone, exactly joined together without any cement. The walls are still standing, with three great tabernacles at the further end, fronting the entrance. On each side, there are niches in the intercolumniation of the walls, together with pedestals and shafts of pillars, cornices, and an entablature, which indicate the former magnificence of the building. It was destroyed during the civil war that raged in the reign of Henry III. of France. It is amazing, that the successive irruptions of barbarous nations, of Goths, Vandals, and Moors; of fanatic croisards, still more sanguinary and illiberal than those Barbarians, should have spared this temple, as well as two other still more noble monuments of architecture, that to this day adorn the city of Nismes: I mean the amphitheatre and the edifice, called Maison Carree--The former of these is counted the finest monument of the kind, now extant; and was built in the reign of Antoninus Pius, who contributed a large sum of money towards its erection. It is of an oval figure, one thousand and eighty feet in circumference, capacious enough to hold twenty thousand spectators. The architecture is of the Tuscan order, sixty feet high, composed of two open galleries, built one over another, consisting each of threescore arcades. The entrance into the arena was by four great gates, with porticos; and the seats, of which there were thirty, rising one above another, consisted of great blocks of stone, many of which still remain. Over the north gate, appear two bulls, in alto-relievo, extremely well executed, emblems which, according to the custom of the Romans, signified that the amphitheatre was erected at the expence of the people. There are in other parts of it some work in bas-relief, and heads or busts but indifferently carved. It stands in the lower part of the town, and strikes the spectator with awe and veneration. The external architecture is almost intire in its whole circuit; but the arena is filled up with houses--This amphitheatre was fortified as a citadel by the Visigoths, in the beginning of the sixth century. They raised within it a castle, two towers of which are still extant; and they surrounded it with a broad and deep fossee, which was filled up in the thirteenth century. In all the subsequent wars to which this city was exposed, it served as the last resort of the citizens, and sustained a great number of successive attacks; so that its preservation is almost miraculous. It is likely, however, to suffer much more from the Gothic avarice of its own citizens, some of whom are mutilating it every day, for the sake of the stones, which they employ in their own private buildings. It is surprizing, that the King's authority has not been exerted to put an end to such sacrilegious violation. If the amphitheatre strikes you with an idea of greatness, the Maison Carree enchants you with the most exquisite beauties of architecture and sculpture. This is an edifice, supposed formerly to have been erected by Adrian, who actually built a basilica in this city, though no vestiges of it remain: but the following inscription, which was discovered on the front of it, plainly proves, that it was built by the inhabitants of Nismes, in honour of Caius and Lucius Caesar, the grandchildren of Augustus by his daughter Julia, the wife of Agrippa. C. CAESARI. AVGVSTI. F. COS. L CAESARI. AVGMI. F. COS. DESIGNATO. PRINCIPIBVS IVVENTUTIS. To Caius and Lucius Caesar, sons of Augustus, consuls elect, Princes of the Roman youth. This beautiful edifice, which stands upon a pediment six feet high, is eighty-two feet long, thirty-five broad, and thirty-seven high, without reckoning the pediment. The body of it is adorned with twenty columns engaged in the wall, and the peristyle, which is open, with ten detached pillars that support the entablature. They are all of the Corinthian order, fluted and embellished with capitals of the most exquisite sculpture, the frize and cornice are much admired, and the foliage is esteemed inimitable. The proportions of the building are so happily united, as to give it an air of majesty and grandeur, which the most indifferent spectator cannot behold without emotion. A man needs not be a connoisseur in architecture, to enjoy these beauties. They are indeed so exquisite that you may return to them every day with a fresh appetite for seven years together. What renders them the more curious, they are still entire, and very little affected, either by the ravages of time, or the havoc of war. Cardinal Alberoni declared, that it was a jewel that deserved a cover of gold to preserve it from external injuries. An Italian painter, perceiving a small part of the roof repaired by modern French masonry, tore his hair, and exclaimed in a rage, "Zounds! what do I see? harlequin's hat on the head of Augustus!" Without all doubt it is ravishingly beautiful. The whole world cannot parallel it; and I am astonished to see it standing entire, like the effects of inchantment, after such a succession of ages, every one more barbarous than another. The history of the antiquities of Nismes takes notice of a grotesque statue, representing two female bodies and legs, united under the head of an old man; but, as it does not inform us where it is kept, I did not see it. The whole country of Languedoc is shaded with olive trees, the fruit of which begins to ripen, and appears as black as sloes; those they pickle are pulled green, and steeped for some time in a lye made of quick lime or wood ashes, which extracts the bitter taste, and makes the fruit tender. Without this preparation it is not eatable. Under the olive and fig trees, they plant corn and vines, so that there is not an inch of ground unlaboured: but here are no open fields, meadows, or cattle to be seen. The ground is overloaded; and the produce of it crowded to such a degree, as to have a bad effect upon the eye, impressing the traveller with the ideas of indigence and rapacity. The heat in summer is so excessive, that cattle would find no green forage, every blade of grass being parched up and destroyed. The weather was extremely hot when we entered Montpellier, and put up at the Cheval Blanc, counted the best auberge in the place, tho' in fact it is a most wretched hovel, the habitation of darkness, dirt, and imposition. Here I was obliged to pay four livres a meal for every person in my family, and two livres at night for every bed, though all in the same room: one would imagine that the further we advance to the southward the living is the dearer, though in fact every article of housekeeping is cheaper in Languedoc than many other provinces of France. This imposition is owing to the concourse of English who come hither, and, like simple birds of passage, allow themselves to be plucked by the people of the country, who know their weak side, and make their attacks accordingly. They affect to believe, that all the travellers of our country are grand seigneurs, immensely rich and incredibly generous; and we are silly enough to encourage this opinion, by submitting quietly to the most ridiculous extortion, as well as by committing acts of the most absurd extravagance. This folly of the English, together with a concourse of people from different quarters, who come hither for the re-establishment of their health, has rendered Montpellier one of the dearest places in the South of France. The city, which is but small, stands upon a rising ground fronting the Mediterranean, which is about three leagues to the southward: on the other side is an agreeable plain, extending about the same distance towards the mountains of the Cevennes. The town is reckoned well built, and what the French call bien percee; yet the streets are in general narrow, and the houses dark. The air is counted salutary in catarrhous consumptions, from its dryness and elasticity: but too sharp in cases of pulmonary imposthumes. It was at Montpellier that we saw for the first time any signs of that gaiety and mirth for which the people of this country are celebrated. In all other places through which we passed since our departure from Lyons, we saw nothing but marks of poverty and chagrin. We entered Montpellier on a Sunday, when the people were all dressed in their best apparel. The streets were crowded; and a great number of the better sort of both sexes sat upon stone seats at their doors, conversing with great mirth and familiarity. These conversations lasted the greatest part of the night; and many of them were improved with musick both vocal and instrumental: next day we were visited by the English residing in the place, who always pay this mark of respect to new comers. They consist of four or five families, among whom I could pass the winter very agreeably, if the state of my health and other reasons did not call me away. Mr. L-- had arrived two days before me, troubled with the same asthmatic disorder, under which I have laboured so long. He told me he had been in quest of me ever since he left England. Upon comparing notes, I found he had stopped at the door of a country inn in Picardy, and drank a glass of wine and water, while I was at dinner up stairs; nay, he had even spoke to my servant, and asked who was his master, and the man, not knowing him, replied, he was a gentleman from Chelsea. He had walked by the door of the house where I lodged at Paris, twenty times, while I was in that city; and the very day before he arrived at Montpellier, he had passed our coach on the road. The garrison of this city consists of two battalions, one of which is the Irish regiment of Berwick, commanded by lieutenant colonel Tents, a gentleman with whom we contracted an acquaintance at Boulogne. He treats us with great politeness, and indeed does every thing in his power to make the place agreeable to us. The duke of Fitz-James, the governor, is expected here in a little time. We have already a tolerable concert twice a week; there will be a comedy in the winter; and the states of Provence assemble in January, so that Montpellier will be extremely gay and brilliant. These very circumstances would determine me to leave it. I have not health to enjoy these pleasures: I cannot bear a croud of company such as pours in upon us unexpectedly at all hours; and I foresee, that in staying at Montpellier, I should be led into an expence, which I can ill afford. I have therefore forwarded the letter I received from general P--n, to Mr. B--d, our consul at Nice, signifying my intention of going thither, and explaining the kind of accommodation I would choose to have at that place. The day after our arrival, I procured tolerable lodgings in the High Street, for which I pay fifty sols, something more than two shillings per day; and I am furnished with two meals a day by a traiteur for ten livres: but he finds neither the wine nor the dessert; and indeed we are but indifferently served. Those families who reside here find their account in keeping house. Every traveller who comes to this, or any other, town in France with a design to stay longer than a day or two, ought to write beforehand to his correspondent to procure furnished lodgings, to which he may be driven immediately, without being under the necessity of lying in an execrable inn; for all the inns of this country are execrable. My baggage is not yet arrived by the canal of Languedoc; but that gives me no disturbance, as it is consigned to the care of Mr. Ray, an English merchant and banker of this place; a gentleman of great probity and worth, from whom I have received repeated marks of uncommon friendship and hospitality. The next time you hear of me will be from Nice: mean-while, I remain always,--Dear Sir, Your affectionate humble servant. LETTER XI MONTPELLIER, November 12. DEAR DOCTOR--I flattered myself with the hope of much amusement during my short stay at Montpellier.--The University, the Botanical Garden, the State of Physic in this part of the world, and the information I received of a curious collection of manuscripts, among which I hoped to find something for our friend Dr. H--r; all these particulars promised a rich fund of entertainment, which, however, I cannot enjoy. A few days after my arrival, it began to rain with a southerly wind, and continued without ceasing the best part of a week, leaving the air so loaded with vapours, that there was no walking after sun-set; without being wetted by the dew almost to the skin. I have always found a cold and damp atmosphere the most unfavourable of any to my constitution. My asthmatical disorder. which had not given me much disturbance since I left Boulogne, became now very troublesome, attended with fever, cough spitting, and lowness of spirits; and I wasted visibly every day. I was favoured with the advice of Dr. Fitzmaurice, a very worthy sensible physician settled in this place: but I had the curiosity to know the opinion of the celebrated professor F--, who is the Boerhaave of Montpellier. The account I had of his private character and personal deportment, from some English people to whom he was well known, left me no desire to converse with him: but I resolved to consult with him on paper. This great lanthorn of medicine is become very rich and very insolent; and in proportion as his wealth increases, he is said to grow the more rapacious. He piques himself upon being very slovenly, very blunt, and very unmannerly; and perhaps to these qualifications be owes his reputation rather than to any superior skill in medicine. I have known them succeed in our own country; and seen a doctor's parts estimated by his brutality and presumption. F-- is in his person and address not unlike our old acquaintance Dr. Sm--ie; he stoops much, dodges along, and affects to speak the Patois, which is a corruption of the old Provencial tongue, spoken by the vulgar in Languedoc and Provence. Notwithstanding his great age and great wealth, he will still scramble up two pair of stairs for a fee of six livres; and without a fee he will give his advice to no person whatsoever. He is said to have great practice in the venereal branch and to be frequented by persons of both sexes infected with this distemper, not only from every part of France, but also from Spain, Italy, Germany, and England. I need say nothing of the Montpellier method of cure, which is well known at London; but I have some reason to think the great professor F--, has, like the famous Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter, cured many patients that were never diseased. Be that as it may, I sent my valet de place, who was his townsman and acquaintance, to his house, with the following case, and a loui'dore. Annum aetatis, post quadragesimum, tertium, Temperamentum humidum, crassum, pituitarepletum, catarrhis saepissime profligatum. Catarrhus, febre, anxietate et dyspnoea, nunquam non comitatus. Irritatio membranae piuitariae trachaealis, tussim initio aridam, siliquosam, deinde vero excreationem copiosam excitat: sputum albumini ovi simillimum. Accedente febre, urina pallida, limpida: ad akmen flagrante, colorem rubrum, subflavum induit: coctione peracta, sedimentum lateritium deponit. Appetitus raro deest: digestio segnior sed secura, non autem sine ructu perfecta. Alvus plerumque stipata: excretio intestinalis minima, ratione ingestorum habita. Pulsus frequens, vacillans, exilis, quandoquidem etiam intermittens. Febre una extincta, non deficit altera. Aliaque et eadem statim nascitur. Aer paulo frigidior, vel humidior, vestimentum inusitatum indutum; exercitatio paulullum nimia; ambulatio, equitatio, in quovis vehiculo jactatio; haec omnia novos motus suscitant. Systema nervosum maxime irritabile, organos patitur. Ostiola in cute hiantia, materiei perspirabili, exitum praebentia, clauduntur. Materies obstructa cumulatur; sanguine aliisque humoribus circumagitur: fit plethora. Natura opprimi nolens, excessus huius expulsionem conatur. Febris nova accenditur. Pars oneris, in membranam trachaealem laxatam ac debilitatam transfertur. Glandulae pituitariae turgentes bronchia comprimunt. Liber aeri transitus negatur: hinc respiratio difficilis. Hac vero translatione febris minuitur: interdiu remittitur. Dyspnoea autem aliaque symptomata vere hypochondriaca, recedere nolunt. Vespere febris exacerbatur. Calor, inquietudo, anxietas et asthma, per noctem grassantur. Ita quotidie res agitur, donec. Vis vitae paulatim crisim efficit. Seminis joctura, sive in somniis effusi, seu in gremio veneris ejaculati, inter causas horum malorum nec non numeretur. Quibusdam abhinc annis, exercitationibus juvenilibus subito remissis, in vitam sedentariam lapsum. Animo in studia severiora converso, fibre gradatim laxabantur. Inter legendum, et scribendum inclinato corpore in pectus malum, ruebat. Morbo ingruenti affectio scorbutica auxilium tulit. Invasio prima nimium aspernata. Venientibus hostibus non occursum. Cunctando res non restituta. Remedia convenientia stomachus perhorrescebat. Gravescente dyspnoea phlebotomia frustra tentata. Sanguinis missione vis vitae diminuta: fiebat pulsitis debilior, respiratio difficilior. In pejus ruunt omnia. Febris anomala in febriculam continuam mutata. Dyspnoea confirmata. Fibrarum compages soluta. Valetudo penitus eversa. His agitatus furiis, aeger ad mare provolat: in fluctus se precipitem, dat: periculum factum spem non fefellit: decies iteratum, felix faustumque evasit. Elater novus fibris conciliatur. Febricula fugatur. Acris dyspnoea solvitur. Beneficium dextra ripa partum, sinistra perditum. Superficie corporis, aquae marine frigore et pondere, compressa et contracta, interstitia fibrarum occluduntur: particulis incrementi novis partes abrasas reficientibus, locus non datur. Nutritio corporis, via pristina clausa, qua data porta ruit: in membranam pulmonum, minus firmatam facile fertur, et glandulis per sputum rejicitur. Hieme pluviosa, regnante dolores renovantur; tametsi tempore sereno equitatio profuit. Aestate morbus vix ullum progrediebatur. Autumno, valetudine plus declinata, thermis Bathoniensibus solatium haud frustra quaesitum. Aqua ista mire medicata, externe aeque ac interne adhibita, malis levamen attulit. Hiems altera, frigida, horrida, diuturna, innocua tamen successit. Vere novo casus atrox diras procellas animo immisit: toto corpore, tota mente tumultuatur. Patria relicta, tristitia, sollecitudo, indignatio, et saevissima recordatio sequuntur. Inimici priores furore inveterato revertuntur. Rediit febris hectica: rediit asthma cum anxietate, tusse et dolore lateris lancinanti. Desperatis denique rebus, iterum ad mare, veluti ad anceps remedium recurritur. Balneum hoc semper benignum. Dolor statim avolat. Tertio die febris, retrocessit. Immersio quotidiana antemeridiana, ad vices quinquaginta repetita, symptomata graviora subjugavit.-- Manet vero tabes pituitaria: manet temperamentum in catarrhos proclive. Corpus macrescit. Vires delabuntur. The professor's eyes sparkled at sight of the fee; and he desired the servant to call next morning for his opinion of the case, which accordingly I received in these words: "On voit par cette relation que monsieur le consultant dont on n'a pas juge a propos de dire l'age, mais qui nous paroit etre adulte et d'un age passablement avance, a ete sujet cy devant a des rhumes frequens accompagnes de fievre; on ne detaille point (aucune epoque), on parle dans la relation d'asthme auquel il a ete sujet, de scorbut ou affection scorbutique dont on ne dit pas les symptomes. On nous fait scavoir qu'il s'est bien trouve de l'immersion dans l'eau de la mer, et des eaux de Bath. "On dit a present qu'il a une fievre pituitaire sans dire depuis combien de temps. Qu'il lui reste toujours son temperament enclin aux catharres. Que le corps maigrit, et que les forces se perdent. On ne dit point s'il y a des exacerbations dans cette fievre ou non, si le malade a appetit ou non, s'il tousse ou non, s'il crache ou non, en un mot on n'entre dans aucun detail sur ces objets, sur quoi le conseil soussigne estime que monsieur le consultant est en fievre lente, et que vraisemblable le poumon souffre de quelque tubercules qui peut-etre sont en fonte, ce que nous aurions determine si dans la relation on avoit marque les qualites de crachats. "La cause fonchere de cette maladie doit etre imputee a une lymphe epaisse et acrimonieuse, qui donne occasion a des tubercules au pomon, qui etant mis on fonte fournissent au sang des particules acres et le rendent tout acrimonieux. "Les vues que l'on doit avoir dans ce cas sent de procurer des bonnes digestions (quoique dans la relation ou ne dit pas un mot sur les digestions) de jetter un douce detrempe dans la masse du sang, d'en ebasser l'acrimonie et de l'adoucir, de diviser fort doucement a lymphe, et de deterger le poumon, lui procurant meme du calme suppose que la toux l'inquiete, quoique cependant on ne dit pas un mot sur la toux dans la relation. C'est pourquoi on le purgera avec 3 onces de manne, dissoutes dans un verre de decoction de 3 dragmes de polypode de chesne, on passera ensuite a des bouillons qui seront faits avec un petit poulet, la chair, le sang, le coeur et le foye d'une tortue de grandeur mediocre c'est a dire du poid de 8 a 12 onces avec sa coquille, une poignee de chicoree amere de jardin, et une pincee de feuilles de lierre terrestre vertes on seches. Ayant pris ces bouillons 15 matins on se purgera comme auparavant, pour en venir a des bouillons qui seront faits avec la moitie d'un mou de veau, une poignee de pimprenelle de jardin, et une dragme de racine d'angelique concassee. Ayant pris ces bouillons 15 matins, on se purgera somme auparavant pour en venir an lait d'anesse que l'on prendra le matin a jeun, a la dose de 12 a 16 onces y ajoutant un cuilleree de sucre rape, on prendra ce lait le matin a jeun observant de prendre pendant son usage de deux jours l'un un moment avant le lait un bolus fait avec 15 grains de craye de Braincon en poudre fine, 20 grains de corail prepare, 8 grains d'antihectique de poterius, et ce qu'il faut de syrop de lierre terrestre, mais les jour on ou ne prendra pas le bolus on prendra un moment avant le lait 3 on 4 gouttes de bon baume de Canada detrempees dans un demi cuilleree de syrop de lierre terrestre. Si le corps maigrit de plus en plus, je suis d'avis que pendant l'usage du lait d'anesse on soupe tous les soirs avec une soupe au lait de vache. "On continuera l'usage du lait d'anesse tant, que le malade pourra le supporter, ne le purgeant que par necessite et toujours avec la medecine ordonnee. "Au reste, si monsieur le consultant ne passe les nuits bien calmes, il prendra chaque soir a l'heure de sommeil six grains des pilules de cynoglosse, dent il augmentera la dose d'un grain de plus toutes les fois que la dose du jour precedent, n'aura pas ete suffisante pour lui faire passer la nuit bien calme. "Si les malade tousse il usera soit de jour soit de nuit par petites cuillerees a casse d'un looch, qui sera fait avec un once de syrop de violat et un dragme de blanc de baleine. "Si les crachats sent epais et qu'il crache difficilement, en ce cas il prendra une ou deux fois le jour, demi dragme de blanc de baleine reduit on poudre avec un pen de sucre candit qu'il avalera avec une cuilleree d'eau. "Enfin il doit observer un bon regime de vivre, c'est pourquoi il fera toujours gras et seulement en soupes, bouilli et roti, il ne mangera pas les herbes des soupes, et on salera peu son pot, il se privera du beuf, cochon, chair noir, oiseaux d'eau, ragouts, fritures, patisseries, alimens sales, epices, vinaigres, salades, fruits, cruds, et autres crudites, alimens grossiers, ou de difficille digestion, la boisson sera de l'eau tant soit peu rougee de bon vin au diner seulement, et il ne prendra a souper qu'une soupe. Delibere a MONTPELLIER le 11 Novembre. F--. Professeur en l'universite honoraire. Receu vingt et quatre livres. I thought it was a little extraordinary that a learned professor should reply in his mother tongue, to a case put in Latin: but I was much more surprised, as you will also be, at reading his answer, from which I was obliged to conclude, either that he did not understand Latin; or that he had not taken the trouble to read my memoire. I shall not make any remarks upon the stile of his prescription, replete as it is with a disgusting repetition of low expressions: but I could not but, in justice to myself, point out to him the passages in my case which he had overlooked. Accordingly, having marked them with letters, I sent it back, with the following billet. "Apparement Mons. F-- n'a pas donne beaucoup d'attention au memoire de ma sante que j'ai on l'honneur de lui presenter-- 'Monsieur le consultant (dit il) dont on n'a pas juge it propos de dire l'age.'--Mais on voit dans le memoire a No. 1. 'Annum aetatis post quadragesimum tertium.' "Mr. F-- dit que 'je n'ai pas marque aucune epoque. Mais a No. 2 du memoire il trouvera ces mots. 'Quibusdam abbinc annis.' J'ai meme detaille le progres de la maladie pour trois ans consecutifs. "Mons. F-- observe, 'On no dit point s'il y a des exacerbations dans cette fievre ou non.' Qu'il. Regarde la lettre B, il verra, Vespere febris exacerbatur. Calor, inquietudo, anxietas et asthma per noctem grassantur.' "Mons. F-- remarque, 'On ne dit point si le malade a appetit ou non, s'il tousse ou non, s'il crache ou non, en un mot on n'entre dans aucun detail sur ces objets.' Mais on voit toutes ces circonstances detaillees dans la memoire a lettre A, 'Irritatio membranae trachaealis tussim, initio aridam, siliquosam, deinde vero excreationem copiosam excitat. Sputum albumini ovi simillimum. Appetitus raro deest. Digestio segnior sed secura.' "Mons. F-- observe encore, 'qu'on ne dit pas un mot sur la toux dans la relation.' Mais j'ai dit encore a No. 3 de memoire, 'rediit febris hectica; rediit asthma cum anxietate, tusse et dolore lateris lancinante.' "Au reste, je ne puis pas me persuader qu'il y ait des tubercules au poumon, parce que j'ai ne jamais crache de pus, ni autre chose que de la pituite qui a beaucoup de ressemblance au blanc des oeufs. Sputum albumini ovi simillimum. Il me paroit done que ma maladie doit son origine a la suspension de l'exercice du corps, au grand attachement d'esprit, et a une vie sedentaire qui a relache le sisteme fibreux; et qu'a present on pent l'appeller tubes pituitaria, non tubes purulenta. J'espere que Mons. Faura la bonte de faire revision du memoire, et de m'en dire encore son sentiment." Considering the nature of the case, you see I could not treat him more civilly. I desired the servant to ask when he should return for an answer, and whether he expected another fee. He desired him to come next morning, and, as the fellow assured me, gave him to understand, that whatever monsieur might solicit, should be for his (the servant's) advantage. In all probability he did not expect another gratification, to which, indeed, he had no title. Mons. F-- was undoubtedly much mortified to find himself detected in such flagrant instances of unjustifiable negligence, arid like all other persons in the same ungracious dilemma, instead of justifying himself by reason or argument, had recourse to recrimination. In the paper which he sent me next day, he insisted in general that he had carefully perused the case (which you will perceive was a self-evident untruth); he said the theory it contained was idle; that he was sure it could not be written by a physician; that, with respect to the disorder, he was still of the same opinion; and adhered to his former prescription; but if I had any doubts I might come to his house, and he would resolve them. I wrapt up twelve livres in the following note, and sent it to his house. "C'est ne pas sans raison que monsieur F-- jouit d'une si grande reputation. Je n'ai plus de doutes, graces a Dieu et a monsieur F--e. " "It is not without reason that monsieur Fizes enjoys such a large share of reputation. I have no doubts remaining; thank Heaven and monsieur Fizes." To this I received for answer. "Monsieur n'a plus de doutes: j'en suis charme. Receu douze livres. F--, &c." "Sir, you have no doubts remaining; I am very glad of it. Received twelve livres. Fizes, &c." Instead of keeping his promise to the valet, he put the money in his pocket; and the fellow returned in a rage, exclaiming that he was un gros cheval de carosse, a great coach-horse. I shall make no other comment upon the medicines, and the regimen which this great Doctor prescribed; but that he certainly mistook the case: that upon the supposition I actually laboured under a purulent discharge from the lungs, his remedies savour strongly of the old woman; and that there is a total blank with respect to the article of exercise, which you know is so essential in all pulmonary disorders. But after having perused my remarks upon his first prescription, he could not possibly suppose that I had tubercules, and was spitting up pus; therefore his persisting in recommending the same medicines he had prescribed on that supposition, was a flagrant absurdity.--If, for example, there was no vomica in the lungs; and the business was to attenuate the lymph, what could be more preposterous than to advise the chalk of Briancon, coral, antihecticum poterii, and the balm of Canada? As for the turtle-soupe, it is a good restorative and balsamic; but, I apprehend, will tend to thicken rather than attenuate the phlegm. He mentions not a syllable of the air, though it is universally allowed, that the climate of Montpellier is pernicious to ulcerated lungs; and here I cannot help recounting a small adventure which our doctor had with a son of Mr. O--d, merchant in the city of London. I had it from Mrs. St--e who was on the spot. The young gentleman, being consumptive, consulted Mr. F--, who continued visiting and prescribing for him a whole month. At length, perceiving that he grew daily worse, "Doctor (said he) I take your prescriptions punctually; but, instead of being the better for them, I have now not an hour's remission from the fever in the four-and-twenty.--I cannot conceive the meaning of it." F--, who perceived he had not long to live, told him the reason was very plain: the air of Montpellier was too sharp for his lungs, which required a softer climate. "Then you're a sordid villain (cried the young man) for allowing me to stay here till my constitution is irretrievable." He set out immediately for Tholouse, and in a few weeks died in the neighbourhood of that city. I observe that the physicians in this country pay no regard to the state of the solids in chronical disorders, that exercise and the cold bath are never prescribed, that they seem to think the scurvy is entirely an English disease; and that, in all appearance, they often confound the symptoms of it, with those of the venereal distemper. Perhaps I may be more particular on this subject in a subsequent letter. In the mean time, I am ever,-- Dear Sir, Yours sincerely. LETTER XII NICE, December 6, 1763. DEAR SIR,--The inhabitants of Montpellier are sociable, gay, and good-tempered. They have a spirit of commerce, and have erected several considerable manufactures, in the neighbourhood of the city. People assemble every day to take the air on the esplanade, where there is a very good walk, just without the gate of the citadel: but, on the other side of the town, there is another still more agreeable, called the peirou, from whence there is a prospect of the Mediterranean on one side, and of the Cevennes on the other. Here is a good equestrian statue of Louis XIV, fronting one gate of the city, which is built in form of a triumphal arch, in honour of the same monarch. Immediately under the pierou is the physic garden, and near it an arcade just finished for an aqueduct, to convey a stream of water to the upper parts of the city. Perhaps I should have thought this a neat piece of work, if I had not seen the Pont du Garde: but, after having viewed the Roman arches, I could not look upon this but with pity and contempt. It is a wonder how the architect could be so fantastically modern, having such a noble model, as it were, before his eyes. There are many protestants at this place, as well as at Nismes, and they are no longer molested on the score of religion. They have their conventicles in the country, where they assemble privately for worship. These are well known; and detachments are sent out every Sunday to intercept them; but the officer has always private directions to take another route. Whether this indulgence comes from the wisdom and lenity of the government, or is purchased with money of the commanding officer, I cannot determine: but certain it is, the laws of France punish capitally every protestant minister convicted of having performed the functions of his ministry in this kingdom; and one was hanged about two years ago, in the neighbourhood of Montauban. The markets in Montpellier are well supplied with fish, poultry, butcher's meat, and game, at reasonable rates. The wine of the country is strong and harsh, and never drank, but when mixed with water. Burgundy is dear, and so is the sweet wine of Frontignan, though made in the neighbourhood of Cette. You know it is famous all over Europe, and so are the liqueurs, or drams of various sorts, compounded and distilled at Montpellier. Cette is the sea-port, about four leagues from that city: but the canal of Languedoc comes up within a mile of it; and is indeed a great curiosity: a work in all respects worthy of a Colbert, under whose auspices it was finished. When I find such a general tribute of respect and veneration paid to the memory of that great man, I am astonished to see so few monuments of public utility left by other ministers. One would imagine, that even the desire of praise would prompt a much greater number to exert themselves for the glory and advantage of their country; yet in my opinion, the French have been ungrateful to Colbert, in the same proportion as they have over-rated the character of his master. Through all France one meets with statues and triumphal arches erected to Louis XIV, in consequence of his victories; by which, likewise, he acquired the title of Louis le Grand. But how were those victories obtained? Not by any personal merit of Louis. It was Colbert who improved his finances, and enabled him to pay his army. It was Louvois that provided all the necessaries of war. It was a Conde, a Turenne, a Luxemburg, a Vendome, who fought his battles; and his first conquests, for which he was deified by the pen of adulation, were obtained almost without bloodshed, over weak, dispirited, divided, and defenceless nations. It was Colbert that improved the marine, instituted manufactures, encouraged commerce, undertook works of public utility, and patronized the arts and sciences. But Louis (you will say) had the merit of choosing and supporting those ministers, and those generals. I answer, no. He found Colbert and Louvois already chosen: he found Conde and Turenne in the very zenith of military reputation. Luxemburg was Conde's pupil; and Vendome, a prince of the blood, who at first obtained the command of armies in consequence of his high birth, and happened to turn out a man of genius. The same Louis had the sagacity to revoke the edict of Nantz; to entrust his armies to a Tallard, a Villeroy, and a Marsin. He had the humanity to ravage the country, burn the towns, and massacre the people of the Palatinate. He had the patriotism to impoverish and depopulate his own kingdom, in order to prosecute schemes of the most lawless ambition. He had the Consolation to beg a peace from those he had provoked to war by the most outrageous insolence; and he had the glory to espouse Mrs. Maintenon in her old age, the widow of the buffoon Scarron. Without all doubt, it was from irony he acquired the title le Grand. Having received a favourable answer from Mr. B--, the English consul at Nice, and recommended the care of my heavy baggage to Mr. Ray, who undertook to send it by sea from Cette to Villefranche, I hired a coach and mules for seven loui'dores, and set out from Montpellier on the 13th of November, the weather being agreeable, though the air was cold and frosty. In other respects there were no signs of winter: the olives were now ripe, and appeared on each side of the road as black as sloes; and the corn was already half a foot high. On the second day of our journey, we passed the Rhone on a bridge of boats at Buccaire, and lay on the other side at Tarrascone. Next day we put up at a wretched place called Orgon, where, however, we were regaled with an excellent supper; and among other delicacies, with a dish of green pease. Provence is a pleasant country, well cultivated; but the inns are not so good here as in Languedoc, and few of them are provided with a certain convenience which an English traveller can very ill dispense with. Those you find are generally on the tops of houses, exceedingly nasty; and so much exposed to the weather, that a valetudinarian cannot use them without hazard of his life. At Nismes in Languedoc, where we found the Temple of Cloacina in a most shocking condition, the servant-maid told me her mistress had caused it to be made on purpose for the English travellers; but now she was very sorry for what she had done, as all the French who frequented her house, instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the floor, which she was obliged to have cleaned three or four times a day. This is a degree of beastliness, which would appear detestable even in the capital of North-Britain. On the fourth day of our pilgrimage, we lay in the suburbs of Aix, but did not enter the city, which I had a great curiosity to see. The villainous asthma baulked me of that satisfaction. I was pinched with the cold, and impatient to reach a warmer climate. Our next stage was at a paltry village, where we were poorly entertained. I looked so ill in the morning, that the good woman of the house, who was big with child, took me by the hand at parting, and even shed tears, praying fervently that God would restore me to my health. This was the only instance of sympathy, compassion, or goodness of heart, that I had met with among the publicans of France. Indeed at Valencia, our landlady, understanding I was travelling to Montpellier for my health would have dissuaded me from going thither; and exhorted me, in particular, to beware of the physicians, who were all a pack of assassins. She advised me to eat fricassees of chickens, and white meat, and to take a good bouillon every morning. A bouillon is an universal remedy among the good people of France; insomuch, that they have no idea of any person's dying, after having swallowed un bon bouillon. One of the English gentlemen, who were robbed and murdered about thirty years ago between Calais and Boulogne, being brought to the post-house of Boulogne with some signs of life, this remedy was immediately administered. "What surprises me greatly, (said the post-master, speaking of this melancholy story to a friend of mine, two years after it happened) I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not recover." Now, in all probability, this bouillon it was that stopped his breath. When I was a very young man, I remember to have seen a person suffocated by such impertinent officiousness. A young man of uncommon parts and erudition, very well esteemed at the university of G--ow was found early one morning in a subterranean vault among the ruins of an old archiepiscopal palace, with his throat cut from ear to ear. Being conveyed to a public-house in the neighbourhood, he made signs for pen, ink, and paper, and in all probability would have explained the cause of this terrible catastrophe, when an old woman, seeing the windpipe, which was cut, sticking out of the wound, and mistaking it for the gullet, by way of giving him a cordial to support his spirits, poured into it, through a small funnel, a glass of burnt brandy, which strangled him in the tenth part of a minute. The gash was so hideous, and formed by so many repeated strokes of a razor, that the surgeons believed he could not possibly be the perpetrator himself; nevertheless this was certainly the case. At Brignolles, where we dined, I was obliged to quarrel with the landlady, and threaten to leave her house, before she would indulge us with any sort of flesh-meat. It was meagre day, and she had made her provision accordingly. She even hinted some dissatisfaction at having heretics in her house: but, as I was not disposed to eat stinking fish, with ragouts of eggs and onions, I insisted upon a leg of mutton, and a brace of fine partridges, which I found in the larder. Next day, when we set out in the morning from Luc, it blew a north-westerly wind so extremely cold and biting, that even a flannel wrapper could not keep me tolerably warm in the coach. Whether the cold had put our coachman in a bad humour, or he had some other cause of resentment against himself, I know not; but we had not gone above a quarter of a mile, when he drove the carriage full against the corner of a garden wall, and broke the axle-tree, so that we were obliged to return to the inn on foot, and wait a whole day, until a new piece could be made and adjusted. The wind that blew, is called Maestral, in the Provencial dialect, and indeed is the severest that ever I felt. At this inn, we met with a young French officer who had been a prisoner in England, and spoke our language pretty well. He told me, that such a wind did not blow above twice or three times in a winter, and was never of long continuance, that in general, the weather was very mild and agreeable during the winter months; that living was very cheap in this part of Provence, which afforded great plenty of game. Here, too, I found a young Irish recollet, in his way from Rome to his own country. He complained, that he was almost starved by the inhospitable disposition of the French people; and that the regular clergy, in particular, had treated him with the most cruel disdain. I relieved his necessities, and gave him a letter to a gentleman of his own country at Montpellier. When I rose in the morning, and opened a window that looked into the garden, I thought myself either in a dream, or bewitched. All the trees were cloathed with snow, and all the country covered at least a foot thick. "This cannot be the south of France, (said I to myself) it must be the Highlands of Scotland!" At a wretched town called Muy, where we dined, I had a warm dispute with our landlord, which, however, did not terminate to my satisfaction. I sent on the mules before, to the next stage, resolving to take post-horses, and bespoke them accordingly of the aubergiste, who was, at the same time, inn-keeper and post-master. We were ushered into the common eating-room, and had a very indifferent dinner; after which, I sent a loui'dore to be changed, in order to pay the reckoning. The landlord, instead of giving the full change, deducted three livres a head for dinner, and sent in the rest of the money by my servant. Provoked more at his ill manners, than at his extortion, I ferreted him out of a bed-chamber, where he had concealed himself, and obliged him to restore the full change, from which I paid him at the rate of two livres a head. He refused to take the money, which I threw down on the table; and the horses being ready, stepped into the coach, ordering the postillions to drive on. Here I had certainly reckoned without my host. The fellows declared they would not budge, until I should pay their master; and as I threatened them with manual chastisement, they alighted, and disappeared in a twinkling. I was now so incensed, that though I could hardly breathe; though the afternoon was far advanced, and the street covered with wet snow, I walked to the consul of the town, and made my complaint in form. This magistrate, who seemed to be a taylor, accompanied me to the inn, where by this time the whole town was assembled, and endeavoured to persuade me to compromise the affair. I said, as he was the magistrate, I would stand to his award. He answered, "that he would not presume to determine what I was to pay." I have already paid him a reasonable price for his dinner, (said I) and now I demand post-horses according to the king's ordonnance. The aubergiste said the horses were ready, but the guides were run away; and he could not find others to go in their place. I argued with great vehemence, offering to leave a loui'dore for the poor of the parish, provided the consul would oblige the rascal to do his duty. The consul shrugged up his shoulders, and declared it was not in his power. This was a lie, but I perceived he had no mind to disoblige the publican. If the mules had not been sent away, I should certainly have not only payed what I thought proper, but corrected the landlord into the bargain, for his insolence and extortion; but now I was entirely at his mercy, and as the consul continued to exhort me in very humble terms, to comply with his demands, I thought proper to acquiesce. Then the postillions immediately appeared: the crowd seemed to exult in the triumph of the aubergiste; and I was obliged to travel in the night, in very severe weather, after all the fatigue and mortification I had undergone. We lay at Frejus, which was the Forum Julianum of the antients, and still boasts of some remains of antiquity; particularly the ruins of an amphitheatre, and an aqueduct. The first we passed in the dark, and next morning the weather was so cold that I could not walk abroad to see it. The town is at present very inconsiderable, and indeed in a ruinous condition. Nevertheless, we were very well lodged at the post-house, and treated with more politeness than we had met with in any other part of France. As we had a very high mountain to ascend in the morning, I ordered the mules on before to the next post, and hired six horses for the coach. At the east end of Frejus, we saw close to the road on our left-hand, the arcades of the antient aqueduct, and the ruins of some Roman edifices, which seemed to have been temples. There was nothing striking in the architecture of the aqueduct. The arches are small and low, without either grace or ornament, and seem to have been calculated for mere utility. The mountain of Esterelles, which is eight miles over, was formerly frequented by a gang of desperate banditti, who are now happily exterminated: the road is very good, but in some places very steep and bordered by precipices. The mountain is covered with pines, and the laurus cerasus, the fruit of which being now ripe, made a most romantic appearance through the snow that lay upon the branches. The cherries were so large that I at first mistook them for dwarf oranges. I think they are counted poisonous in England, but here the people eat them without hesitation. In the middle of the mountain is the post-house, where we dined in a room so cold, that the bare remembrance of it makes my teeth chatter. After dinner I chanced to look into another chamber that fronted the south, where the sun shone; and opening a window perceived, within a yard of my hand, a large tree loaded with oranges, many of which were ripe. You may judge what my astonishment was to find Winter in all his rigour reigning on one side of the house, and Summer in all her glory on the other. Certain it is, the middle of this mountain seemed to be the boundary of the cold weather. As we proceeded slowly in the afternoon we were quite enchanted. This side of the hill is a natural plantation of the most agreeable ever-greens, pines, firs, laurel, cypress, sweet myrtle, tamarisc, box, and juniper, interspersed with sweet marjoram, lavender, thyme, wild thyme, and sage. On the right-hand the ground shoots up into agreeable cones, between which you have delightful vistas of the Mediterranean, which washes the foot of the rock; and between two divisions of the mountains, there is a bottom watered by a charming stream, which greatly adds to the rural beauties of the scene. This night we passed at Cannes, a little fishing town, agreeably situated on the beach of the sea, and in the same place lodged Monsieur Nadeau d'Etrueil, the unfortunate French governor of Guadeloupe, condemned to be imprisoned for life in one of the isles Marguerite, which lie within a mile of this coast. Next day we journeyed by the way of Antibes, a small maritime town, tolerably well fortified; and passing the little river Loup, over a stone-bridge, arrived about noon at the village of St. Laurent, the extremity of France, where we passed the Var, after our baggage had undergone examination. From Cannes to this village the road lies along the sea-side; and sure nothing can be more delightful. Though in the morning there was a frost upon the ground, the sun was as warm as it is in May in England. The sea was quite smooth, and the beach formed of white polished pebbles; on the left-hand the country was covered with green olives, and the side of the road planted with large trees of sweet myrtle growing wild like the hawthorns in England. From Antibes we had the first view of Nice, lying on the opposite side of the bay, and making a very agreeable appearance. The author of the Grand Tour says, that from Antibes to Nice the roads are very bad, through rugged mountains bordered with precipices On the left, and by the sea to the right; whereas, in fact, there is neither precipice nor mountain near it. The Var, which divides the county of Nice from Provence, is no other than a torrent fed chiefly by the snow that melts on the maritime Alps, from which it takes its origin. In the summer it is swelled to a dangerous height, and this is also the case after heavy rains: but at present the middle of it is quite dry, and the water divided into two or three narrow streams, which, however, are both deep and rapid. This river has been absurdly enough by some supposed the Rubicon, in all probability from the description of that river in the Pharsalia of Lucan, who makes it the boundary betwixt Gaul and Italy-- --et Gallica certus Limes ab Ausoniis disterminat arva colonis. A sure Frontier that parts the Gallic plains From the rich meadows of th' Ansonian swains. whereas, in fact, the Rubicon, now called Pisatello, runs between Ravenna and Rimini.--But to return to the Var. At the village of St. Laurent, famous for its Muscadine wines, there is a set of guides always in attendance to conduct you in your passage over the river. Six of those fellows, tucked up above the middle, with long poles in their hands, took charge of our coach, and by many windings guided it safe to the opposite shore. Indeed there was no occasion for any; but it is a sort of a perquisite, and I did not choose to run any risque, how small soever it might be, for the sake of saving half a crown, with which they were satisfied. If you do not gratify the searchers at St. Laurent with the same sum, they will rummage your trunks, and turn all your cloaths topsy turvy. And here, once for all, I would advise every traveller who consults his own case and convenience, to be liberal of his money to all that sort of people; and even to wink at the imposition of aubergistes on the road, unless it be very flagrant. So sure as you enter into disputes with them, you will be put to a great deal of trouble, and fret yourself to no manner of purpose. I have travelled with oeconomists in England, who declared they would rather give away a crown than allow themselves to be cheated of a farthing. This is a good maxim, but requires a great share of resolution and self-denial to put it in practice. In one excursion of about two hundred miles my fellow-traveller was in a passion, and of consequence very bad company from one end of the journey to the other. He was incessantly scolding either at landlords, landladies, waiters, hostlers, or postilions. We had bad horses, and bad chaises; set out from every stage with the curses of the people; and at this expence I saved about ten shillings in the whole journey. For such a paltry consideration, he was contented to be miserable himself, and to make every other person unhappy with whom he had any concern. When I came last from Bath it rained so hard, that the postilion who drove the chaise was wet to the skin before we had gone a couple of miles. When we arrived at the Devises, I gave him two shillings instead of one, out of pure compassion. The consequence of this liberality was, that in the next stage we seemed rather to fly than to travel upon solid ground. I continued my bounty to the second driver, and indeed through the whole journey, and found myself accommodated in a very different manner from what I had experienced before. I had elegant chaises, with excellent horses; and the postilions of their own accord used such diligence, that although the roads were broken by the rain, I travelled at the rate of twelve miles an hour; and my extraordinary expence from Bath to London, amounted precisely to six shillings. The river Var falls into the Mediterranean a little below St. Laurent, about four miles to the westward of Nice. Within the memory of persons now living, there have been three wooden bridges thrown over it, and as often destroyed in consequence of the jealousy subsisting between the kings of France and Sardinia; this river being the boundary of their dominions on the side of Provence. However, this is a consideration that ought not to interfere with the other advantages that would accrue to both kingdoms from such a convenience. If there was a bridge over the Var, and a post-road made from Nice to Genoa, I am very confident that all those strangers who now pass the Alps in their way to and from Italy, would choose this road as infinitely more safe, commodious, and agreeable. This would also be the case with all those who hire felucas from Marseilles or Antibes, and expose themselves to the dangers and inconveniences of travelling by sea in an open boat. In the afternoon we arrived at Nice, where we found Mr. M--e, the English gentleman whom I had seen at Boulogne, and advised to come hither. He had followed my advice, and reached Nice about a month before my arrival, with his lady, child, and an old gouvernante. He had travelled with his own post-chaise and horses, and is now lodged just without one of the gates of the city, in the house of the count de V--n, for which he pays five loui'dores a month. I could hire one much better in the neighbourhood of London, for the same money. Unless you will submit to this extortion, and hire a whole house for a length of time, you will find no ready-furnished lodgings at Nice. After having stewed a week in a paltry inn, I have taken a ground floor for ten months at the rate of four hundred livres a year, that is twenty pounds sterling, for the Piedmontese livre is about an English shilling. The apartments are large, lofty, and commodious enough, with two small gardens, in which there is plenty of sallad, and a great number of oranges and lemons: but as it required some time to provide furniture, our consul Mr. B--d, one of the best natured and most friendly men in the world, has lent me his lodgings, which are charmingly situated by the sea-side, and open upon a terrace, that runs parallel to the beach, forming part of the town wall. Mr. B--d himself lives at Villa Franca, which is divided from Nice by a single mountain, on the top of which there is a small fort, called the castle of Montalban. Immediately after our arrival we were visited by one Mr. de Martines, a most agreeable young fellow, a lieutenant in the Swiss regiment, which is here in garrison. He is a Protestant, extremely fond of our nation, and understands our language tolerably well. He was particularly recommended to our acquaintance by general P-- and his lady; we are happy in his conversation; find him wonderfully obliging, and extremely serviceable on many occasions. We have likewise made acquaintance with some other individuals, particularly with Mr. St. Pierre, junior, who is a considerable merchant, and consul for Naples. He is a well-bred, sensible young man, speaks English, is an excellent performer on the lute and mandolin, and has a pretty collection of books. In a word, I hope we shall pass the winter agreeably enough, especially if Mr. M--e should hold out; but I am afraid he is too far gone in a consumption to recover. He spent the last winter at Nismes, and consulted F-- at Montpellier. I was impatient to see the prescription, and found it almost verbatim the same he had sent to me; although I am persuaded there is a very essential difference between our disorders. Mr. M--e has been long afflicted with violent spasms, colliquative sweats, prostration of appetite, and a disorder in his bowels. He is likewise jaundiced all over, and I am confident his liver is unsound. He tried the tortoise soup, which he said in a fortnight stuffed him up with phlegm. This gentleman has got a smattering of physic, and I am afraid tampers with his own constitution, by means of Brookes's Practice of Physic, and some dispensatories, which he is continually poring over. I beg pardon for this tedious epistle, and am--Very sincerely, dear Sir, Your affectionate, humble servant. LETTER XIII NICE, January 15, 1764. DEAR SIR,--I am at last settled at Nice, and have leisure to give you some account of this very remarkable place. The county of Nice extends about fourscore miles in length, and in some places it is thirty miles broad. It contains several small towns, and a great number of villages; all of which, this capital excepted, are situated among mountains, the most extensive plain of the whole country being this where I now am, in the neighbourhood of Nice. The length of it does not exceed two miles, nor is the breadth of it, in any part, above one. It is bounded by the Mediterranean on the south. From the sea-shore, the maritime Alps begin with hills of a gentle ascent, rising into mountains that form a sweep or amphitheatre ending at Montalban, which overhangs the town of Villa Franca. On the west side of this mountain, and in the eastern extremity of the amphitheatre, stands the city of Nice, wedged in between a steep rock and the little river Paglion, which descends from the mountains, and washing the town-walls on the west side, falls into the sea, after having filled some canals for the use of the inhabitants. There is a stone-bridge of three arches over it, by which those who come from Provence enter the city. The channel of it is very broad, but generally dry in many places; the water (as in the Var) dividing itself into several small streams. The Paglion being fed by melted snow and rain in the mountains, is quite dry in summer; but it is sometimes swelled by sudden rains to a very formidable torrent. This was the case in the year 1744, when the French and Spanish armies attacked eighteen Piedmontese battalions, which were posted on the side of Montalban. The assailants were repulsed with the loss of four thousand men, some hundreds of whom perished in repassing the Paglion, which had swelled to a surprising degree during the battle, in consequence of a heavy continued rain. This rain was of great service to the Piedmontese, as it prevented one half of the enemy from passing the river to sustain the other. Five hundred were taken prisoners: but the Piedmontese, foreseeing they should be surrounded next day by the French, who had penetrated behind them, by a pass in the mountains, retired in the night. Being received on board the English Fleet, which lay at Villa Franca, they were conveyed to Oneglia. In examining the bodies of those that were killed in the battle, the inhabitants of Nice perceived, that a great number of the Spanish soldiers were circumcised; a circumstance, from which they concluded, that a great many Jews engage in the service of his Catholic majesty. I am of a different opinion. The Jews are the least of any people that I know, addicted to a military life. I rather imagine they were of the Moorish race, who have subsisted in Spain, since the expulsion of their brethren; and though they conform externally to the rites of the Catholic religion, still retain in private their attachment to the law of Mahomet. The city of Nice is built in form of an irregular isosceles triangle, the base of which fronts the sea. On the west side it is surrounded by a wall and rampart; on the east, it is over-hung by a rock, on which we see the ruins of an old castle, which, before the invention of artillery, was counted impregnable. It was taken and dismantled by marechal Catinat, in the time of Victor Amadaeus, the father of his Sardinian majesty. It was afterwards finally demolished by the duke of Berwick towards the latter end of queen Anne's war. To repair it would be a very unnecessary expence, as it is commanded by Montalban, and several other eminences. The town of Nice is altogether indefensible, and therefore without fortifications. There are only two iron guns upon a bastion that fronts the beach; and here the French had formed a considerable battery against the English cruisers, in the war of 1744, when the Mareschal Duke de Belleisle had his headquarters at Nice. This little town, situated in the bay of Antibes, is almost equidistant from Marseilles, Turin, and Genoa, the first and last being about thirty leagues from hence by sea; and the capital of Piedmont at the same distance to the northward, over the mountains. It lies exactly opposite to Capo di Ferro, on the coast of Barbary; and, the islands of Sardinia and Corsica are laid down about two degrees to the eastward, almost exactly in a line with Genoa. This little town, hardly a mile in circumference, is said to contain twelve thousand inhabitants. The streets are narrow; the houses are built of stone, and the windows in general are fitted with paper instead of glass. This expedient would not answer in a country subject to rain and storms; but here, where there is very little of either, the paper lozenges answer tolerably well. The bourgeois, however, begin to have their houses sashed with glass. Between the town-wall and the sea, the fishermen haul up their boats upon the open beach; but on the other side of the rock, where the castle stood, is the port or harbour of Nice, upon which some money has been expended. It is a small basin, defended to seaward by a mole of free-stone, which is much better contrived than executed: for the sea has already made three breaches in it; and in all probability, in another winter, the extremity of it will be carried quite away. It would require the talents of a very skilful architect to lay the foundation of a good mole, on an open beach like this; exposed to the swell of the whole Mediterranean, without any island or rock in the offing, to break the force of the waves. Besides, the shore is bold, and the bottom foul. There are seventeen feet of water in the basin, sufficient to float vessels of one hundred and fifty ton; and this is chiefly supplied by a small stream of very fine water; another great convenience for shipping. On the side of the mole, there is a constant guard of soldiers, and a battery of seven cannon, pointing to the sea. On the other side, there is a curious manufacture for twisting or reeling silk; a tavern, a coffee-house, and several other buildings, for the convenience of the sea-faring people. Without the harbour, is a lazarette, where persons coming from infected places, are obliged to perform quarantine. The harbour has been declared a free-port, and it is generally full of tartans, polacres, and other small vessels, that come from Sardinia, Ivica, Italy, and Spain, loaded with salt, wine, and other commodities; but here is no trade of any great consequence. The city of Nice is provided with a senate, which administers justice under the auspices of an avocat-general, sent hither by the king. The internal oeconomy of the town is managed by four consuls; one for the noblesse, another for the merchants, a third for the bourgeois, and a fourth for the peasants. These are chosen annually from the town-council. They keep the streets and markets in order, and superintend the public works. There is also an intendant, who takes care of his majesty's revenue: but there is a discretionary power lodged in the person of the commandant, who is always an officer of rank in the service, and has under his immediate command the regiment which is here in garrison. That which is here now is a Swiss battalion, of which the king has five or six in his service. There is likewise a regiment of militia, which is exercised once a year. But of all these particulars, I shall speak more fully on another occasion. When I stand upon the rampart, and look round me, I can scarce help thinking myself inchanted. The small extent of country which I see, is all cultivated like a garden. Indeed, the plain presents nothing but gardens, full of green trees, loaded with oranges, lemons, citrons, and bergamots, which make a delightful appearance. If you examine them more nearly, you will find plantations of green pease ready to gather; all sorts of sallading, and pot-herbs, in perfection; and plats of roses, carnations, ranunculas, anemonies, and daffodils, blowing in full glory, with such beauty, vigour, and perfume, as no flower in England ever exhibited. I must tell you, that presents of carnations are sent from hence, in the winter, to Turin and Paris; nay, sometimes as far as London, by the post. They are packed up in a wooden box, without any sort of preparation, one pressed upon another: the person who receives them, cuts off a little bit of the stalk, and steeps them for two hours in vinegar and water, when they recover their full bloom and beauty. Then he places them in water-bottles, in an apartment where they are screened from the severities of the weather; and they will continue fresh and unfaded the best part of a month. Amidst the plantations in the neighbourhood of Nice, appear a vast number of white bastides, or country-houses, which make a dazzling shew. Some few of these are good villas, belonging to the noblesse of this county; and even some of the bourgeois are provided with pretty lodgeable cassines; but in general, they are the habitations of the peasants, and contain nothing but misery and vermin. They are all built square; and, being whitened with lime or plaister, contribute greatly to the richness of the view. The hills are shaded to the tops with olive-trees, which are always green; and those hills are over-topped by more distant mountains, covered with snow. When I turn myself towards the sea, the view is bounded by the horizon; yet in a clear morning, one can perceive the high lands of Corsica. On the right hand, it is terminated by Antibes, and the mountain of Esterelles, which I described in my last. As for the weather, you will conclude, from what I have said of the oranges, flowers, etc. that it must be wonderfully mild and serene: but of the climate, I shall speak hereafter. Let me only observe, en passant, that the houses in general have no chimnies, but in their kitchens; and that many people, even of condition, at Nice, have no fire in their chambers, during the whole winter. When the weather happens to be a little more sharp than usual, they warm their apartments with a brasiere or pan of charcoal. Though Nice itself retains few marks of antient splendor, there are considerable monuments of antiquity in its neighbourhood. About two short miles from the town, upon the summit of a pretty high hill, we find the ruins of the antient city Cemenelion, now called Cimia, which was once the metropolis of the Maritime Alps, and the scat of a Roman president. With respect to situation, nothing could be more agreeable or salubrious. It stood upon the gentle ascent and summit of a hill, fronting the Mediterranean; from the shore of which, it is distant about half a league; and, on the other side, it overlooked a bottom, or narrow vale, through which the Paglion (antiently called Paulo) runs towards the walls of Nice. It was inhabited by a people, whom Ptolomy and Pliny call the Vedantij: but these were undoubtedly mixed with a Roman colony, as appears by the monuments which still remain; I mean the ruins of an amphitheatre, a temple of Apollo, baths, aqueducts, sepulchral, and other stones, with inscriptions, and a great number of medals which the peasants have found by accident, in digging and labouring the vineyards and cornfields, which now cover the ground where the city stood. Touching this city, very little is to be learned from the antient historians: but that it was the seat of a Roman praeses, is proved by the two following inscriptions, which are still extant. P. AELIO. SEVERINO. V. E. P. PRAESIDI. OPTIMO. ORDO. CEMEN. PATRONO. By the Senate of Cemenelion, Dedicated to His Excellency P. Aelius Severinus, the best of Governors and Patrons. This is now in the possession of the count de Gubernatis, who has a country-house upon the spot. The other, found near the same place, is in praise of the praeses Marcus Aurelius Masculus. M. AVRELIO. MASCVLO. V. E. OB. EXIMIAM. PRAESIDATVS EIVS. INTEGRITATEM. ET EGREGIAM. AD OMNES HOMINES MANSVETVDINEM. ET. VRGENTIS ANNONAE. SINCERAM. PRAEBITIONEM. AC. MVNIFICENTIAM. ET. QVOD. AQVAE VSVM. VETVSTATE. LAPSVM. REQVI- SITVM. AC. REPERTVM. SAECVLI FELICITATE. CVRSVI. PRISTINO REDDIDERIT. COLLEG. III. QVIB. EX. SCC. P. EST PATRONO. DIGNISS. Inscribed by the three corporations under the authority of the Senate, to their most worthy Patron, His Excellency M. Aurelius Masculus, in testimony of their gratitude for the blessings of his incorruptible administration, his wonderful affability to all without Distinction, his generous Distribution of Corn in time of Dearth, his munificence in repairing the ruinous aqueduct, in searching for, discovering and restoring the water to its former course for the Benefit of the Community. This president well deserved such a mark of respect from a people whom he had assisted in two such essential articles, as their corn and their water. You know the praeses of a Roman province had the jus sigendi clavi, the right to drive a nail in the Kalendar, the privilege of wearing the latus clavus, or broad studs on his garment, the gladius, infula, praetexta, purpura & annulus aureus, the Sword, Diadem, purple Robe, and gold Ring, he had his vasa, vehicula, apparitores, Scipio eburneus, & sella curulis, Kettledrums, [I know the kettledrum is a modern invention; but the vasa militari modo conclamata was something analogous.] Chariots, Pursuivants, ivory staff, and chair of state. I shall give you one more sepulchral inscription on a marble, which is now placed over the gate of the church belonging to the convent of St. Pont, a venerable building, which stands at the bottom of the hill, fronting the north side of the town of Nice. This St. Pont, or Pontius, was a Roman convert to Christianity, who suffered martyrdom at Cemenelion in the year 261, during the reigns of the emperors Valerian and Gallienus. The legends recount some ridiculous miracles wrought in favour of this saint, both before and after his death. Charles V. emperor of Germany and king of Spain, caused this monastery to be built on the spot where Pontius suffered decapitation. But to return to the inscription: it appears in these words. M. M. A. FLAVIAE. BASILLAE. CONIVG. CARISSIM. DOM. ROMA. MIRAE. ERGA. MARITUM. AMORIS. ADQ. CASTITAT. FAEMINAE. QVAE. VIXIT ANN. XXXV. M. III. DIEB. XII. AVRELIVS RHODISMANVS. AVG. LIB. COMMEM. ALP. MART. ET. AVRELIA, ROMVLA. FILII. IMPATIENTISSIM. DOLOR. EIVS. ADFLICTI ADQ. DESOLATI. CARISSIM. AC MERENT. FERET. FEC. ET. DED, Freely consecrated by Aurelius Rhodismanus, the Emperor's Freedman, to the much honoured memory of his dear Consort Flavia Aurelia of Rome, a woman equally distinguished by her unblemished Virtue and conjugal affection. His children Martial and Aurelia Romula deeply affected and distressed by the Violence of his Grief, erected and dedicated a monument to their dear deserving Parent. [I don't pretend to translate these inscriptions literally, because I am doubtful about the meaning of some abbreviations.] The amphitheatre of Cemenelion is but very small, compared to that of Nismes. The arena is ploughed up, and bears corn: some of the seats remain, and part of two opposite porticos; but all the columns, and the external facade of the building, are taken away so that it is impossible to judge of the architecture, all we can perceive is, that it was built in an oval form. About one hundred paces from the amphitheatre stood an antient temple, supposed to have been dedicated to Apollo. The original roof is demolished, as well as the portico; the vestiges of which may still be traced. The part called the Basilica, and about one half of the Cella Sanctior, remain, and are converted into the dwelling-house and stable of the peasant who takes care of the count de Gubernatis's garden, in which this monument stands. In the Cella Sanctior, I found a lean cow, a he-goat, and a jack-ass; the very same conjunction of animals which I had seen drawing a plough in Burgundy. Several mutilated statues have been dug up from the ruins of this temple; and a great number of medals have been found in the different vineyards which now occupy the space upon which stood the antient city of Cemenelion. These were of gold, silver, and brass. Many of them were presented to Charles Emanuel I. duke of Savoy. The prince of Monaco has a good number of them in his collection; and the rest are in private hands. The peasants, in digging, have likewise found many urns, lachrymatories, and sepulchral stones, with epitaphs, which are now dispersed among different convents and private houses. All this ground is a rich mine of antiquities, which, if properly worked, would produce a great number of valuable curiosities. Just by the temple of Apollo were the ruins of a bath, composed of great blocks of marble, which have been taken away for the purposes of modern building. In all probability, many other noble monuments of this city have been dilapidated by the same barbarous oeconomy. There are some subterranean vaults, through which the water was conducted to this bath, still extant in the garden of the count de Gubernatis. Of the aqueduct that conveyed water to the town, I can say very little, but that it was scooped through a mountain: that this subterranean passage was discovered some years ago, by removing the rubbish which choaked it up: that the people penetrating a considerable way, by the help of lighted torches, found a very plentiful stream of water flowing in an aqueduct, as high as an ordinary man, arched over head, and lined with a sort of cement. They could not, however, trace this stream to its source; and it is again stopped up with earth and rubbish. There is not a soul in this country, who has either spirit or understanding to conduct an inquiry of this kind. Hard by the amphitheatre is a convent of Recollets, built in a very romantic situation, on the brink of a precipice. On one side of their garden, they ascend to a kind of esplanade, which they say was part of the citadel of Cemenelion. They have planted it with cypress-trees, and flowering-shrubs. One of the monks told me, that it is vaulted below, as they can plainly perceive by the sound of their instruments used in houghing the ground. A very small expence would bring the secrets of this cavern to light. They have nothing to do, but to make a breach in the wall, which appears uncovered towards the garden. The city of Cemenelion was first sacked by the Longobards, who made an irruption into Provence, under their king Alboinus, about the middle of the sixth century. It was afterwards totally destroyed by the Saracens, who, at different times, ravaged this whole coast. The remains of the people are supposed to have changed their habitation, and formed a coalition with the inhabitants of Nice. What further I have to say of Nice, you shall know in good time; at present, I have nothing to add, but what you very well know, that I am always your affectionate humble servant. LETTER, XIV NICE, January 20, 1764. DEAR SIR,--Last Sunday I crossed Montalban on horseback, with some Swiss officers, on a visit to our consul, Mr. B--d, who lives at Ville Franche, about half a league from Nice. It is a small town, built upon the side of a rock, at the bottom of the harbour, which is a fine basin, surrounded with hills on every side, except to the south, where it lies open to the sea. If there was a small island in the mouth of it, to break off the force of the waves, when the wind is southerly, it would be one of the finest harbours in the world; for the ground is exceeding good for anchorage: there is a sufficient depth of water, and room enough for the whole navy of England. On the right hand, as you enter the port, there is an elegant fanal, or lighthouse, kept in good repair: but in all the charts of this coast which I have seen, this lanthorn is laid down to the westward of the harbour; an error equally absurd and dangerous, as it may mislead the navigator, and induce him to run his ship among the rocks, to the eastward of the lighthouse, where it would undoubtedly perish. Opposite to the mouth of the harbour is the fort, which can be of no service, but in defending the shipping and the town by sea; for, by land, it is commanded by Montalban, and all the hills in the neighbourhood. In the war of 1744, it was taken and retaken. At present, it is in tolerable good repair. On the left of the fort, is the basin for the gallies, with a kind of dock, in which they are built, and occasionally laid up to be refitted. This basin is formed by a pretty stone mole; and here his Sardinian majesty's two gallies lie perfectly secure, moored with their sterns close to the jette. I went on board one of these vessels, and saw about two hundred miserable wretches, chained to the banks on which they sit and row, when the galley is at sea. This is a sight which a British subject, sensible of the blessing he enjoys, cannot behold without horror and compassion. Not but that if we consider the nature of the case, with coolness and deliberation, we must acknowledge the justice, and even sagacity, of employing for the service of the public, those malefactors who have forfeited their title to the privileges of the community. Among the slaves at Ville Franche is a Piedmontese count, condemned to the gallies for life, in consequence of having been convicted of forgery. He is permitted to live on shore; and gets money by employing the other slaves to knit stockings for sale. He appears always in the Turkish habit, and is in a fair way of raising a better fortune than that which he has forfeited. It is a great pity, however, and a manifest outrage against the law of nations, as well as of humanity, to mix with those banditti, the Moorish and Turkish prisoners who are taken in the prosecution of open war. It is certainly no justification of this barbarous practice, that the Christian prisoners are treated as cruelly at Tunis and Algiers. It would be for the honour of Christendom, to set an example of generosity to the Turks; and, if they would not follow it, to join their naval forces, and extirpate at once those nests of pirates, who have so long infested the Mediterranean. Certainly, nothing can be more shameful, than the treaties which France and the Maritime Powers have concluded with those barbarians. They supply them with artillery, arms, and ammunition, to disturb their neighbours. They even pay them a sort of tribute, under the denomination of presents; and often put up with insults tamely, for the sordid consideration of a little gain in the way of commerce. They know that Spain, Sardinia, and almost all the Catholic powers in the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Levant, are at perpetual war with those Mahometans; that while Algiers, Tunis, and Sallee, maintain armed cruisers at sea, those Christian powers will not run the risque of trading in their own bottoms, but rather employ as carriers the maritime nations, who are at peace with the infidels. It is for our share of this advantage, that we cultivate the piratical States of Barbary, and meanly purchase passports of them, thus acknowledging them masters of the Mediterranean. The Sardinian gallies are mounted each with five-and-twenty oars, and six guns, six-pounders, of a side, and a large piece of artillery amidships, pointing ahead, which (so far as I am able to judge) can never be used point-blank, without demolishing the head or prow of the galley. The accommodation on board for the officers is wretched. There is a paltry cabin in the poop for the commander; but all the other officers lie below the slaves, in a dungeon, where they have neither light, air, nor any degree of quiet; half suffocated by the heat of the place; tormented by fleas, bugs, and lice; and disturbed by the incessant noise over head. The slaves lie upon the naked banks, without any other covering than a tilt. This, however, is no great hardship, in a climate where there is scarce any winter. They are fed with a very scanty allowance of bread, and about fourteen beans a day and twice a week they have a little rice, or cheese, but most of them, while they are in harbour knit stockings, or do some other kind of work, which enables them to make some addition to this wretched allowance. When they happen to be at sea in bad weather, their situation is truly deplorable. Every wave breaks over the vessel, and not only keeps them continually wet, but comes with such force, that they are dashed against the banks with surprising violence: sometimes their limbs are broke, and sometimes their brains dashed out. It is impossible (they say) to keep such a number of desperate people under any regular command, without exercising such severities as must shock humanity. It is almost equally impossible to maintain any tolerable degree of cleanliness, where such a number of wretches are crouded together without conveniences, or even the necessaries of life. They are ordered twice a week to strip, clean, and bathe themselves in the sea: but, notwithstanding all the precautions of discipline, they swarm with vermin, and the vessel smells like an hospital, or crouded jail. They seem, nevertheless, quite insensible of their misery, like so many convicts in Newgate: they laugh and sing, and swear, and get drunk when they can. When you enter by the stern, you are welcomed by a band of music selected from the slaves; and these expect a gratification. If you walk forwards, you must take care of your pockets. You will be accosted by one or other of the slaves, with a brush and blacking-ball for cleaning your shoes; and if you undergo this operation, it is ten to one but your pocket is picked. If you decline his service, and keep aloof, you will find it almost impossible to avoid a colony of vermin, which these fellows have a very dexterous method of conveying to strangers. Some of the Turkish prisoners, whose ransom or exchange is expected, are allowed to go ashore, under proper inspection; and those forcats, who have served the best part of the time for which they were condemned, are employed in public works, under a guard of soldiers. At the harbour of Nice, they are hired by ship-masters to bring ballast, and have a small proportion of what they earn, for their own use: the rest belongs to the king. They are distinguished by an iron shackle about one of their legs. The road from Nice to Ville Franche is scarce passable on horseback: a circumstance the more extraordinary, as those slaves, in the space of two or three months, might even make it fit for a carriage, and the king would not be one farthing out of pocket, for they are quite idle the greatest part of the year. The gallies go to sea only in the summer. In tempestuous weather, they could not live out of port. Indeed, they are good for nothing but in smooth water during a calm; when, by dint of rowing, they make good way. The king of Sardinia is so sensible of their inutility, that he intends to let his gallies rot; and, in lieu of them, has purchased two large frigates in England, one of fifty, and another of thirty guns, which are now in the harbour of Ville Franche. He has also procured an English officer, one Mr. A--, who is second in command on board of one of them, and has the title of captain consulteur, that is, instructor to the first captain, the marquis de M--i, who knows as little of seamanship as I do of Arabic. The king, it is said, intends to have two or three more frigates, and then he will be more than a match for the Barbary corsairs, provided care be taken to man his fleet in a proper manner: but this will never be done, unless he invites foreigners into his service, officers as well as seamen; for his own dominions produce neither at present. If he is really determined to make the most of the maritime situation of his dominions, as well as of his alliance with Great-Britain, he ought to supply his ships with English mariners, and put a British commander at the head of his fleet. He ought to erect magazines and docks at Villa Franca; or if there is not conveniency for building, he may at least have pits and wharfs for heaving down and careening; and these ought to be under the direction of Englishmen, who best understand all the particulars of marine oeconomy. Without all doubt, he will not be able to engage foreigners, without giving them liberal appointments; and their being engaged in his service will give umbrage to his own subjects: but, when the business is to establish a maritime power, these considerations ought to be sacrificed to reasons of public utility. Nothing can be more absurd and unreasonable, than the murmurs of the Piedmontese officers at the preferment of foreigners, who execute those things for the advantage of their country, of which they know themselves incapable. When Mr. P--n was first promoted in the service of his Sardinian majesty, he met with great opposition, and numberless mortifications, from the jealousy of the Piedmontese officers, and was obliged to hazard his life in many rencounters with them, before they would be quiet. Being a man of uncommon spirit, he never suffered the least insult or affront to pass unchastised. He had repeated opportunities of signalizing his valour against the Turks; and by dint of extraordinary merit, and long services not only attained the chief command of the gallies, with the rank of lieutenant-general, but also acquired a very considerable share of the king's favour, and was appointed commandant of Nice. His Sardinian majesty found his account more ways than one, in thus promoting Mr. P--n. He made the acquisition of an excellent officer, of tried courage and fidelity, by whose advice he conducted his marine affairs. This gentleman was perfectly well esteemed at the court of London. In the war of 1744, he lived in the utmost harmony with the British admirals who commanded our fleet in the Mediterranean. In consequence of this good understanding, a thousand occasional services were performed by the English ships, for the benefit of his master, which otherwise could not have been done, without a formal application to our ministry; in which case, the opportunities would have been lost. I know our admirals had general orders and instructions, to cooperate in all things with his Sardinian majesty; but I know, also, by experience, how little these general instructions avail, when the admiral is not cordially interested in the service. Were the king of Sardinia at present engaged with England in a new war against France, and a British squadron stationed upon this coast, as formerly, he would find a great difference in this particular. He should therefore carefully avoid having at Nice a Savoyard commandant, utterly ignorant of sea affairs; unacquainted with the true interest of his master; proud, and arbitrary; reserved to strangers, from a prejudice of national jealousy; and particularly averse to the English. With respect to the antient name of Villa Franca, there is a dispute among antiquarians. It is not at all mentioned in the Itinerarium of Antoninus, unless it is meant as the port of Nice. But it is more surprising, that the accurate Strabo, in describing this coast, mentions no such harbour. Some people imagine it is the Portus Herculis Monaeci. But this is undoubtedly what is now called Monaco; the harbour of which exactly tallies with what Strabo says of the Portus Monaeci-- neque magnas, neque multas capit naves, It holds but a few vessels and those of small burthen. Ptolomy, indeed, seems to mention it under the name of Herculis Portus, different from the Portus Monaeci. His words are these: post vari ostium ad Ligustrium mare, massiliensium, sunt Nicaea, Herculis Portus, Trophaea Augusti, Monaeci Portus, Beyond the mouth of the Var upon the Ligurian Coast, the Marsilian Colonies are Nice, Port Hercules, Trophaea and Monaco. In that case, Hercules was worshipped both here and at Monaco, and gave his name to both places. But on this subject, I shall perhaps speak more fully in another letter, after I have seen the Trophaea Augusti, now called Tourbia, and the town of Monaco, which last is about three leagues from Nice. Here I cannot help taking notice of the following elegant description from the Pharsalia, which seems to have been intended for this very harbour. Finis et Hesperiae promoto milite varus, Quaque sub Herculeo sacratus numine Portus Urget rupe cava Pelagus, non Corus in illum Jus habet, aut Zephirus, solus sua littora turbat Circius, et tuta prohibet statione Monaeci. The Troops advanc'd as far As flows th' Hesperian Boundary, the Var; And where the mountain scoop'd by nature's hands, The spacious Port of Hercules, expands; Here the tall ships at anchor safe remain Tho' Zephyr blows, or Caurus sweeps the Plain; The Southern Blast alone disturbs the Bay; And to Monaco's safer Port obstructs the way. The present town of Villa Franca was built and settled in the thirteenth century, by order of Charles II. king of the Sicilies, and count of Provence, in order to defend the harbour from the descents of the Saracens, who at that time infested the coast. The inhabitants were removed hither from another town, situated on the top of a mountain in the neighbourhood, which those pirates had destroyed. Some ruins of the old town are still extant. In order to secure the harbour still more effectually, Emanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy, built the fort in the beginning of the last century, together with the mole where the gallies are moored. As I said before, Ville Franche is built on the face of a barren rock, washed by the sea; and there is not an acre of plain ground within a mile of it. In summer, the reflexion of the sun from the rocks must make it intolerably hot; for even at this time of the year, I walked myself into a profuse sweat, by going about a quarter of a mile to see the gallies. Pray remember me to our friends at A--'s, and believe me to be ever yours. LETTER XV NICE, January 3, 1764. MADAM,--In your favour which I received by Mr. M--l, you remind me of my promise, to communicate the remarks I have still to make on the French nation; and at the same time you signify your opinion, that I am too severe in my former observations. You even hint a suspicion, that this severity is owing to some personal cause of resentment; but, I protest, I have no particular cause of animosity against any individual of that country. I have neither obligation to, nor quarrel with, any subject of France; and when I meet with a Frenchman worthy of my esteem, I can receive him into my friendship with as much cordiality, as I could feel for any fellow-citizen of the same merit. I even respect the nation, for the number of great men it has produced in all arts and sciences. I respect the French officers, in particular, for their gallantry and valour; and especially for that generous humanity which they exercise towards their enemies, even amidst the horrors of war. This liberal spirit is the only circumstance of antient chivalry, which I think was worth preserving. It had formerly flourished in England, but was almost extinguished in a succession of civil wars, which are always productive of cruelty and rancour. It was Henry IV. of France, (a real knight errant) who revived it in Europe. He possessed that greatness of mind, which can forgive injuries of the deepest dye: and as he had also the faculty of distinguishing characters, he found his account, in favouring with his friendship and confidence, some of those who had opposed him in the field with the most inveterate perseverance. I know not whether he did more service to mankind in general, by reviving the practice of treating his prisoners with generosity, than he prejudiced his own country by patronizing the absurd and pernicious custom of duelling, and establishing a punto, founded in diametrical opposition to common sense and humanity. I have often heard it observed, that a French officer is generally an agreeable companion when he is turned of fifty. Without all doubt, by that time, the fire of his vivacity, which makes him so troublesome in his youth, will be considerably abated, and in other respects, he must be improved by his experience. But there is a fundamental error in the first principles of his education, which time rather confirms than removes. Early prejudices are for the most part converted into habits of thinking; and accordingly you will find the old officers in the French service more bigotted than their juniors, to the punctilios of false honour. A lad of a good family no sooner enters into the service, than he thinks it incumbent upon him to shew his courage in a rencontre. His natural vivacity prompts him to hazard in company every thing that comes uppermost, without any respect to his seniors or betters; and ten to one but he says something, which he finds it necessary to maintain with his sword. The old officer, instead of checking his petulance, either by rebuke or silent disapprobation, seems to be pleased with his impertinence, and encourages every sally of his presumption. Should a quarrel ensue, and the parties go out, he makes no efforts to compromise the dispute; but sits with a pleasing expectation to learn the issue of the rencontre. If the young man is wounded, he kisses him with transport, extols his bravery, puts him into the hands of the surgeon, and visits him with great tenderness every day, until he is cured. If he is killed on the spot, he shrugs up his shoulders--says, quelle dommage! c'etoit un amiable enfant! ah, patience! What pity! he was a fine Boy! It can't be helpt! and in three hours the defunct is forgotten. You know, in France, duels are forbid, on pain of death: but this law is easily evaded. The person insulted walks out; the antagonist understands the hint, and follows him into the street, where they justle as if by accident, draw their swords, and one of them is either killed or disabled, before any effectual means can be used to part them. Whatever may be the issue of the combat, the magistrate takes no cognizance of it; at least, it is interpreted into an accidental rencounter, and no penalty is incurred on either side. Thus the purpose of the law is entirely defeated, by a most ridiculous and cruel connivance. The meerest trifles in conversation, a rash word, a distant hint, even a look or smile of contempt, is sufficient to produce one of these combats; but injuries of a deeper dye, such as terms of reproach, the lie direct, a blow, or even the menace of a blow, must be discussed with more formality. In any of these cases, the parties agree to meet in the dominions of another prince, where they can murder each other, without fear of punishment. An officer who is struck, or even threatened with a blow must not be quiet, until he either kills his antagonist, or loses his own life. A friend of mine, (a Nissard) who was in the service of France, told me, that some years ago, one of their captains, in the heat of passion, struck his lieutenant. They fought immediately: the lieutenant was wounded and disarmed. As it was an affront that could not be made up, he no sooner recovered of his wounds, than he called out the captain a second time. In a word, they fought five times before the combat proved decisive at last, the lieutenant was left dead on the spot. This was an event which sufficiently proved the absurdity of the punctilio that gave rise to it. The poor gentleman who was insulted, and outraged by the brutality of the aggressor, found himself under the necessity of giving him a further occasion to take away his life. Another adventure of the same kind happened a few years ago in this place. A French officer having threatened to strike another, a formal challenge ensued; and it being agreed that they should fight until one of them dropped, each provided himself with a couple of pioneers to dig his grave on the spot. They engaged just without one of the gates of Nice, in presence of a great number of spectators, and fought with surprising fury, until the ground was drenched with their blood. At length one of them stumbled, and fell; upon which the other, who found himself mortally wounded, advancing, and dropping his point, said, "Je te donne ce que tu m'as ote." "I'll give thee that which thou hast taken from me." So saying, he dropped dead upon the field. The other, who had been the person insulted, was so dangerously wounded that he could not rise. Some of the spectators carried him forthwith to the beach, and putting him into a boat, conveyed him by sea to Antibes. The body of his antagonist was denied Christian burial, as he died without absolution, and every body allowed that his soul went to hell: but the gentlemen of the army declared, that he died like a man of honour. Should a man be never so well inclined to make atonement in a peaceable manner, for an insult given in the heat of passion, or in the fury of intoxication, it cannot be received. Even an involuntary trespass from ignorance, or absence of mind, must be cleansed with blood. A certain noble lord, of our country, when he was yet a commoner, on his travels, involved himself in a dilemma of this sort, at the court of Lorrain. He had been riding out, and strolling along a public walk, in a brown study, with his horse-whip in his hand, perceived a caterpillar crawling on the back of a marquis, who chanced to be before him. He never thought of the petit maitre; but lifting up his whip, in order to kill the insect, laid it across his shoulders with a crack, that alarmed all the company in the walk. The marquis's sword was produced in a moment, and the aggressor in great hazard of his life, as he had no weapon of defence. He was no sooner waked from his reverie, than he begged pardon, and offered to make all proper concessions for what he had done through mere inadvertency. The marquis would have admitted his excuses, had there been any precedent of such an affront being washed away without blood. A conclave of honour was immediately assembled; and after long disputes, they agreed, that an involuntary offence, especially from such a kind of man, d'un tel homme, might be attoned by concessions. That you may have some idea of the small beginning, from which many gigantic quarrels arise, I shall recount one that lately happened at Lyons, as I had it from the mouth of a person who was an ear and eye witness of the transaction. Two Frenchmen, at a public ordinary, stunned the rest of the company with their loquacity. At length, one of them, with a supercilious air, asked the other's name. "I never tell my name, (said he) but in a whisper." "You may have very good reasons for keeping it secret," replied the first. "I will tell you," (resumed the other): with these words he rose; and going round to him, pronounced, loud enough to be heard by the whole company, "Je m'appelle Pierre Paysan; et vous etes un impertinent." "My name is Peter Peasant, and you are an impertinent fellow." So saying, he walked out: the interrogator followed him into the street, where they justled, drew their swords, and engaged. He who asked the question was run through the body; but his relations were so powerful, that the victor was obliged to fly his country, was tried and condemned in his absence; his goods were confiscated; his wife broke her heart; his children were reduced to beggary; and he himself is now starving in exile. In England we have not yet adopted all the implacability of the punctilio. A gentleman may be insulted even with a blow, and survive, after having once hazarded his life against the aggressor. The laws of honour in our country do not oblige him either to slay the person from whom he received the injury, or even to fight to the last drop of his own blood. One finds no examples of duels among the Romans, who were certainly as brave and as delicate in their notions of honour as the French. Cornelius Nepos tells us, that a famous Athenian general, having a dispute with his colleague, who was of Sparta, a man of a fiery disposition, this last lifted up his cane to strike him. Had this happened to a French petit maitre, death must have ensued: but mark what followed--The Athenian, far from resenting the outrage, in what is now called a gentlemanlike manner, said, "Do, strike if you please; but hear me." He never dreamed of cutting the Lacedemonian's throat; but bore with his passionate temper, as the infirmity of a friend who had a thousand good qualities to overbalance that defect. I need not expatiate upon the folly and the mischief which are countenanced and promoted by the modern practice of duelling. I need not give examples of friends who have murdered each other, in obedience to this savage custom, even while their hearts were melting with mutual tenderness; nor will I particularize the instances which I myself know, of whole families ruined, of women and children made widows and orphans, of parents deprived of only sons, and of valuable lives lost to the community, by duels, which had been produced by one unguarded expression, uttered without intention of offence, in the heat of dispute and altercation. I shall not insist upon the hardship of a worthy man's being obliged to devote himself to death, because it is his misfortune to be insulted by a brute, a bully, a drunkard, or a madman: neither will I enlarge upon this side of the absurdity, which indeed amounts to a contradiction in terms; I mean the dilemma to which a gentleman in the army is reduced, when he receives an affront: if he does not challenge and fight his antagonist, he is broke with infamy by a court-martial; if he fights and kills him, he is tried by the civil power, convicted of murder, and, if the royal mercy does not interpose, he is infallibly hanged: all this, exclusive of the risque of his own life in the duel, and his conscience being burthened with the blood of a man, whom perhaps he has sacrificed to a false punctilio, even contrary to his own judgment. These are reflections which I know your own good sense will suggest, but I will make bold to propose a remedy for this gigantic evil, which seems to gain ground everyday: let a court be instituted for taking cognizance of all breaches of honour, with power to punish by fine, pillory, sentence of infamy, outlawry, and exile, by virtue of an act of parliament made for this purpose; and all persons insulted, shall have recourse to this tribunal: let every man who seeks personal reparation with sword, pistol, or other instrument of death, be declared infamous, and banished the kingdom: let every man, convicted of having used a sword or pistol, or other mortal weapon, against another, either in duel or rencountre, occasioned by any previous quarrel, be subject to the same penalties: if any man is killed in a duel, let his body be hanged upon a public gibbet, for a certain time, and then given to the surgeons: let his antagonist be hanged as a murderer, and dissected also; and some mark of infamy be set on the memory of both. I apprehend such regulations would put an effectual stop to the practice of duelling, which nothing but the fear of infamy can support; for I am persuaded, that no being, capable of reflection, would prosecute the trade of assassination at the risque of his own life, if this hazard was at the same time reinforced by the certain prospect of infamy and ruin. Every person of sentiment would in that case allow, that an officer, who in a duel robs a deserving woman of her husband, a number of children of their father, a family of its support, and the community of a fellow-citizen, has as little merit to plead from exposing his own person, as a highwayman, or housebreaker, who every day risques his life to rob or plunder that which is not of half the importance to society. I think it was from the Buccaneers of America, that the English have learned to abolish one solecism in the practice of duelling: those adventurers decided their personal quarrels with pistols; and this improvement has been adopted in Great Britain with good success; though in France, and other parts of the continent, it is looked upon as a proof of their barbarity. It is, however, the only circumstance of duelling, which savours of common sense, as it puts all mankind upon a level, the old with the young, the weak with the strong, the unwieldy with the nimble, and the man who knows not how to hold a sword with the spadassin, who has practised fencing from the cradle. What glory is there in a man's vanquishing an adversary over whom he has a manifest advantage? To abide the issue of a combat in this case, does not even require that moderate share of resolution which nature has indulged to her common children. Accordingly, we have seen many instances of a coward's provoking a man of honour to battle. In the reign of our second Charles, when duels flourished in all their absurdity, and the seconds fought while their principals were engaged, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, not content with having debauched the countess of Shrewsbury and publishing her shame, took all opportunities of provoking the earl to single combat, hoping he should have an easy conquest, his lordship being a puny little creature, quiet, inoffensive, and every way unfit for such personal contests. He ridiculed him on all occasions; and at last declared in public company, that there was no glory in cuckolding Shrewsbury, who had not spirit to resent the injury. This was an insult which could not be overlooked. The earl sent him a challenge; and they agreed to fight, at Barns-Elms, in presence of two gentlemen, whom they chose for their seconds. All the four engaged at the same time; the first thrust was fatal to the earl of Shrewsbury; and his friend killed the duke's second at the same instant. Buckingham, elated with his exploit, set out immediately for the earl's seat at Cliefden, where he lay with his wife, after having boasted of the murder of her husband, whose blood he shewed her upon his sword, as a trophy of his prowess. But this very duke of Buckingham was little better than a poltroon at bottom. When the gallant earl of Ossory challenged him to fight in Chelsea fields, he crossed the water to Battersea, where he pretended to wait for his lordship; and then complained to the house of lords, that Ossory had given him the rendezvous, and did not keep his appointment. He knew the house would interpose in the quarrel, and he was not disappointed. Their lordships obliged them both to give their word of honour, that their quarrel should have no other consequences. I ought to make an apology for having troubled a lady with so many observations on a subject so unsuitable to the softness of the fair sex; but I know you cannot be indifferent to any thing that so nearly affects the interests of humanity, which I can safely aver have alone suggested every thing which has been said by, Madam, Your very humble servant. LETTER XVI NICE, May 2, 1764. DEAR DOCTOR,--A few days ago, I rode out with two gentlemen of this country, to see a stream of water which was formerly conveyed in an aqueduct to the antient city of Cemenelion, from whence this place is distant about a mile, though separated by abrupt rocks and deep hollows, which last are here honoured with the name of vallies. The water, which is exquisitely cool, and light and pure, gushes from the middle of a rock by a hole which leads to a subterranean aqueduct carried through the middle of the mountain. This is a Roman work, and the more I considered it, appeared the more stupendous. A peasant who lives upon the spot told us, he had entered by this hole at eight in the morning, and advanced so far, that it was four in the afternoon before he came out. He said he walked in the water, through a regular canal formed of a hard stone, lined with a kind of cement, and vaulted overhead; but so high in most parts he could stand upright, yet in others, the bed of the canal was so filled with earth and stones, that he was obliged to stoop in passing. He said that there were air-holes at certain distances (and indeed I saw one of these not far from the present issue) that there were some openings and stone seats on the sides, and here and there figures of men formed of stone, with hammers and working tools in their hands. I am apt to believe the fellow romanced a little, in order to render his adventure the more marvellous: but I am certainly informed, that several persons have entered this passage, and proceeded a considerable way by the light of torches, without arriving at the source, which (if we may believe the tradition of the country) is at the distance of eight leagues from this opening; but this is altogether incredible. The stream is now called la fontaine de muraille, and is carefully conducted by different branches into the adjacent vineyards and gardens, for watering the ground. On the side of the same mountain, more southerly, at the distance of half a mile, there is another still more copious discharge of the same kind of water, called la source du temple. It was conveyed through the same kind of passage, and put to the same use as the other; and I should imagine they are both from the same source, which, though hitherto undiscovered, must be at a considerable distance, as the mountain is continued for several leagues to the westward, without exhibiting the least signs of water in any other part. But, exclusive of the subterranean conduits, both these streams must have been conveyed through aqueducts extending from hence to Cemenelion over steep rocks and deep ravines, at a prodigious expence. The water from this source du temple, issues from a stone building which covers the passage in the rock. It serves to turn several olive, corn, and paper mills, being conveyed through a modern aqueduct raised upon paultry arcades at the expence of the public, and afterwards is branched off in very small streams, for the benefit of this parched and barren country. The Romans were so used to bathing, that they could not exist without a great quantity of water; and this, I imagine, is one reason that induced them to spare no labour and expence in bringing it from a distance, when they had not plenty of it at home. But, besides this motive, they had another: they were so nice and delicate in their taste of water, that they took great pains to supply themselves with the purest and lightest from afar, for drinking and culinary uses, even while they had plenty of an inferior sort for their bath, and other domestic purposes. There are springs of good water on the spot where Cemenelion stood: but there is a hardness in all well-water, which quality is deposited in running a long course, especially, if exposed to the influence of the sun and air. The Romans, therefore, had good reason to soften and meliorate this element, by conveying it a good length of way in open aqueducts. What was used in the baths of Cemenelion, they probably brought in leaden pipes, some of which have been dug up very lately by accident. You must know, I made a second excursion to these antient ruins, and measured the arena of the amphitheatre with packthread. It is an oval figure; the longest diameter extending to about one hundred and thirteen feet, and the shortest to eighty-eight; but I will not answer for the exactness of the measurement. In the center of it, there was a square stone, with an iron ring, to which I suppose the wild beasts were tied, to prevent their springing upon the spectators. Some of the seats remain, the two opposite entrances, consisting each of one large gate, and two lateral smaller doors, arched: there is also a considerable portion of the external wall; but no columns, or other ornaments of architecture. Hard by, in the garden of the count de Gubernatis, I saw the remains of a bath, fronting the portal of the temple, which I have described in a former letter; and here were some shafts of marble pillars, particularly a capital of the Corinthian order beautifully cut, of white alabaster. Here the count found a large quantity of fine marble, which he has converted to various uses; and some mutilated statues, bronze as well as marble. The peasant shewed me some brass and silver medals, which he has picked up at different times in labouring the ground; together with several oblong beads of coloured glass, which were used as ear-rings by the Roman ladies; and a small seal of agate, very much defaced. Two of the medals were of Maximian and Gallienus; the rest were so consumed, that I could not read the legend. You know, that on public occasions, such as games, and certain sacrifices, handfuls of medals were thrown among the people; a practice, which accounts for the great number which have been already found in this district. I saw some subterranean passages, which seemed to have been common sewers; and a great number of old walls still standing along the brink of a precipice, which overhangs the Paglion. The peasants tell me, that they never dig above a yard in depth, without finding vaults or cavities. All the vineyards and garden-grounds, for a considerable extent, are vaulted underneath; and all the ground that produces their grapes, fruit, and garden-stuff, is no more than the crumpled lime and rubbish of old Roman buildings, mixed with manure brought from Nice. This antient town commanded a most noble prospect of the sea; but is altogether inaccessible by any kind of wheel carriage. If you make shift to climb to it on horseback, you cannot descend to the plain again, without running the risk of breaking your neck. About seven or eight miles on the other side of Nice, are the remains of another Roman monument which has greatly suffered from the barbarity of successive ages. It was a trophy erected by the senate of Rome, in honour of Augustus Caesar, when he had totally subdued all the ferocious nations of these Maritime Alps; such as the Trumpilini Camuni, Vennontes, Isnarci, Breuni, etc. It stands upon the top of a mountain which overlooks the town of Monaco, and now exhibits the appearance of an old ruined tower. There is a description of what it was, in an Italian manuscript, by which it appears to have been a beautiful edifice of two stories, adorned with columns and trophies in alto-relievo, with a statue of Augustus Caesar on the top. On one of the sides was an inscription, some words of which are still legible, upon the fragment of a marble found close to the old building: but the whole is preserved in Pliny, who gives it, in these words, lib. iii. cap. 20. IMPERATORI CAESARI DIVI. F. AVG. PONT. MAX. IMP. XIV. TRIBVNIC. POTEST. XVIII. S. P. Q. R. QVODEIVSDVCTV, AVSPICIISQ. GENIES ALPINAE OMNES, QVAE A MARI SVPERO AD INFERVM PERTINEBANT, SVB IMPERIVM PO. RO. SUNT REDAC. GENTES ALPINAE DEVICTAE. TRVMPILINI CAMVNI, VENNONETES, ISNARCI, BREVNI, NAVNES, FOCVNATES, VINDELICORVM GENTES QVATVOR, CONSVANETES, VIRVCINATES, LICATES, CATENATES, ABI- SONTES, RVGVSCI, SVANETES, CALVCONES, BRIXENTES, LEPONTII, VIBERI, NANTVATES, SEDVNI, VERAGRI, SALASSI, ACITAVONES MEDVLLI, VCINI, CATVRIGES, BRIGIANI, SOGIVNTII, NEMALONES, EDENETES, ESVBIANI, VEAMINI, GALLITAE, TRIVLLATI, ECTINI, VERGVNNI, EGVITVRI. NEMENTVRI, ORATELLI, NERVSCI, VELAVNI, SVETRI. This Trophy is erected by the Senate and People of Rome to the Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Julius, in the fourteenth year of his imperial Dignity, and in the eighteenth of his Tribunician Power, because under his command and auspices all the nations of the Alps from the Adriatic to the Tuscanian Sea, were reduced under the Dominion of Rome. The Alpine nations subdued were the Trumpelini, etc. Pliny, however, is mistaken in placing this inscription on a trophy near the Augusta praetoria, now called Aosta, in Piedmont: where, indeed, there is a triumphal arch, but no inscription. This noble monument of antiquity was first of all destroyed by fire; and afterwards, in Gothic times, converted into a kind of fortification. The marbles belonging to it were either employed in adorning the church of the adjoining village, which is still called Turbia, a corruption of Trophaea; [This was formerly a considerable town called Villa Martis, and pretends to the honour of having given birth to Aulus Helvius, who succeeded Commodus as emperor of Rome, by the name of Pertinax which he acquired from his obstinate refusal of that dignity, when it was forced upon him by the senate. You know this man, though of very low birth, possessed many excellent qualities, and was basely murdered by the praetorian guards, at the instigation of Didius Tulianus. For my part, I could never read without emotion, that celebrated eulogium of the senate who exclaimed after his death, Pertinace, imperante, securi viximus neminem timuimus, patre pio, patre senatus, patre omnium, honorum, We lived secure and were afraid of nothing under the Government of Pertinax, our affectionate Father, Father of the Senate, Father to all the children of Virtue.] or converted into tomb-stones, or carried off to be preserved in one or two churches of Nice. At present, the work has the appearance of a ruinous watch-tower, with Gothic battlements; and as such stands undistinguished by those who travel by sea from hence to Genoa, and other ports of Italy. I think I have now described all the antiquities in the neighbourhood of Nice, except some catacombs or caverns, dug in a rock at St. Hospice, which Busching, in his geography, has described as a strong town and seaport, though in fact, there is not the least vestige either of town or village. It is a point of land almost opposite to the tower of Turbia, with the mountains of which it forms a bay, where there is a great and curious fishery of the tunny fish, farmed of the king of Sardinia. Upon this point there is a watch-tower still kept in repair, to give notice to the people in the neighbourhood, in case any Barbary corsairs should appear on the coast. The catacombs were in all probability dug, in former times, as places of retreat for the inhabitants upon sudden descents of the Saracens, who greatly infested these seas for several successive centuries. Many curious persons have entered them and proceeded a considerable way by torch-light, without arriving at the further extremity; and the tradition of the country is, that they reach as far as the ancient city of Cemenelion; but this is an idle supposition, almost as ridiculous as that which ascribes them to the labour and ingenuity of the fairies: they consist of narrow subterranean passages, vaulted with stone and lined with cement. Here and there one finds detached apartments like small chambers, where I suppose the people remained concealed till the danger was over. Diodorus Siculus tells us, that the antient inhabitants of this country usually lived under ground. "Ligures in terra cubant ut plurimum; plures ad cava, saxa speluncasque ab natura factas ubi tegantur corpora divertunt," "The Ligurians mostly lie on the bare ground; many of them lodge in bare Caves and Caverns where they are sheltered from the inclemency of the weather." This was likewise the custom of the Troglodytae, a people bordering upon Aethiopia who, according to Aelian, lived in subterranean caverns; from whence, indeed they took their name trogli, signifying a cavern; and Virgil, in his Georgics, thus describes the Sarmatae, Ipsi in defossis specubus, secura sub alta Ocia agunt terra.-- In Subterranean Caves secure they lie Nor heed the transient seasons as they fly. These are dry subjects; but such as the country affords. If we have not white paper, we must snow with brown. Even that which I am now scrawling may be useful, if, not entertaining: it is therefore the more confidently offered by--Dear Sir, Yours affectionately. LETTER XVII NICE, July 2, 1764. DEAR SIR,--Nice was originally a colony from Marseilles. You know the Phocians (if we may believe Justin and Polybius) settled in Gaul, and built Marseilles, during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus at Rome. This city flourished to such a degree, that long before the Romans were in a condition to extend their dominion, it sent forth colonies, and established them along the coast of Liguria. Of these, Nice, or Nicaea, was one of the most remarkable; so called, in all probability, from the Greek word Nike, signifying Victoria, in consequence of some important victory obtained over the Salii and Ligures, who were the antient inhabitants of this country. Nice, with its mother city, being in the sequel subdued by the Romans, fell afterwards successively under the dominion of the Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, the kings of Arles, and the kings of Naples, as counts of Provence. In the year one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight, the city and county of Nice being but ill protected by the family of Durazzo, voluntarily surrendered themselves to Amadaeus, surnamed the Red, duke of Savoy; and since that period, they have continued as part of that potentate's dominions, except at such times as they have been over-run and possessed by the power of France, which hath always been a troublesome neighbour to this country. The castle was begun by the Arragonian counts of Provence, and afterwards enlarged by several successive dukes of Savoy, so as to be deemed impregnable, until the modern method of besieging began to take place. A fruitless attempt was made upon it in the year one thousand five hundred and forty-three, by the French and Turks in conjunction: but it was reduced several times after that period, and is now in ruins. The celebrated engineer Vauban, being commanded by Louis XIV to give in a plan for fortifying Nice, proposed, that the river Paglion should be turned into a new channel, so as to surround the town to the north, and fall into the harbour; that where the Paglion now runs to the westward of the city walls, there should be a deep ditch to be filled with sea-water; and that a fortress should be built to the westward of this fosse. These particulars might be executed at no very great expence; but, I apprehend, they would be ineffectual, as the town is commanded by every hill in the neighbourhood; and the exhalations from stagnating sea-water would infallibly render the air unwholesome. Notwithstanding the undoubted antiquity of Nice, very few monuments of that antiquity now remain. The inhabitants say, they were either destroyed by the Saracens in their successive descents upon the coast, by the barbarous nations in their repeated incursions, or used in fortifying the castle, as well as in building other edifices. The city of Cemenelion, however, was subject to the same disasters, and even entirely ruined, nevertheless, we still find remains of its antient splendor. There have been likewise a few stones found at Nice, with antient inscriptions; but there is nothing of this kind standing, unless we give the name of antiquity to a marble cross on the road to Provence, about half a mile from the city. It stands upon a pretty high pedestal with steps, under a pretty stone cupola or dome, supported by four Ionic pillars, on the spot where Charles V. emperor of Germany, Francis I. of France, and pope Paul II. agreed to have a conference, in order to determine all their disputes. The emperor came hither by sea, with a powerful fleet, and the French king by land, at the head of a numerous army. All the endeavours of his holiness, however, could not effect a peace; but they agreed to a truce of ten years. Mezerai affirms, that these two great princes never saw one another on this occasion; and that this shyness was owing to the management of the pope, whose private designs might have been frustrated, had they come to a personal interview. In the front of the colonade, there is a small stone, with an inscription in Latin, which is so high, and so much defaced, that I cannot read it. In the sixteenth century there was a college erected at Nice, by Emanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy, for granting degrees to students of law; and in the year one thousand six hundred and fourteen, Charles Emanuel I. instituted the senate of Nice; consisting of a president, and a certain number of senators, who are distinguished by their purple robes, and other ensigns of authority. They administer justice, having the power of life and death, not only through the whole county of Nice, but causes are evoked from Oneglia, and some other places, to their tribunal, which is the dernier ressort, from whence there is no appeal. The commandant, however, by virtue of his military power and unrestricted authority, takes upon him to punish individuals by imprisonment, corporal pains, and banishment, without consulting the senate, or indeed, observing any form of trial. The only redress against any unjust exercise of this absolute power, is by complaint to the king; and you know, what chance a poor man has for being redressed in this manner. With respect to religion, I may safely say, that here superstition reigns under the darkest shades of ignorance and prejudice. I think there are ten convents and three nunneries within and without the walls of Nice; and among them all, I never could hear of one man who had made any tolerable advances in any kind of human learning. All ecclesiastics are exempted from any exertion of civil power, being under the immediate protection and authority of the bishop, or his vicar. The bishop of Nice is suffragan of the archbishop of Ambrun in France; and the revenues of the see amount to between five and six hundred pounds sterling. We have likewise an office of the inquisition, though I do not hear that it presumes to execute any acts of jurisdiction, without the king's special permission. All the churches are sanctuaries for all kinds of criminals, except those guilty of high treason; and the priests are extremely jealous of their privileges in this particular. They receive, with open arms, murderers, robbers, smugglers, fraudulent bankrupts, and felons of every denomination; and never give them up, until after having stipulated for their lives and liberty. I need not enlarge upon the pernicious consequences of this infamous prerogative, calculated to raise and extend the power and influence of the Roman church, on the ruins of morality and good order. I saw a fellow, who had three days before murdered his wife in the last month of pregnancy, taking the air with great composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence; and nothing is more common, than to see the most execrable villains diverting themselves in the cloysters of some convents at Rome. Nice abounds with noblesse, marquisses, counts, and barons. Of these, three or four families are really respectable: the rest are novi homines, sprung from Bourgeois, who have saved a little money by their different occupations, and raised themselves to the rank of noblesse by purchase. One is descended from an avocat; another from an apothecary; a third from a retailer of wine, a fourth from a dealer in anchovies; and I am told, there is actually a count at Villefranche, whose father sold macaroni in the streets. A man in this country may buy a marquisate, or a county, for the value of three or four hundred pounds sterling, and the title follows the fief; but he may purchase lettres de noblesse for about thirty or forty guineas. In Savoy, there are six hundred families of noblesse; the greater part of which have not above one hundred crowns a year to maintain their dignity. In the mountains of Piedmont, and even in this country of Nice, there are some representatives of very antient and noble families, reduced to the condition of common peasants; but they still retain the antient pride of their houses, and boast of the noble blood that runs in their veins. A gentleman told me, that in travelling through the mountains, he was obliged to pass a night in the cottage of one of these rusticated nobles, who called to his son in the evening, "Chevalier, as-tu donne a manger aux cochons?" "Have you fed the Hogs, Sir Knight?" This, however, is not the case with the noblesse of Nice. Two or three of them have about four or five hundred a year: the rest, in general, may have about one hundred pistoles, arising from the silk, oil, wine, and oranges, produced in their small plantations, where they have also country houses. Some few of these are well built, commodious, and situated; but, for the most part, they are miserable enough. Our noblesse, notwithstanding their origin, and the cheap rate at which their titles have been obtained, are nevertheless extremely tenacious of their privileges, very delicate in maintaining the etiquette, and keep at a very stately distance from the Bourgeoisie. How they live in their families, I do not choose to enquire; but, in public, Madame appears in her robe of gold, or silver stuff, with her powder and frisure, her perfumes, her paint and her patches; while Monsieur Le Comte struts about in his lace and embroidery. Rouge and fard are more peculiarly necessary in this country, where the complexion and skin are naturally swarthy and yellow. I have likewise observed, that most of the females are pot-bellied; a circumstance owing, I believe, to the great quantity of vegetable trash which they eat. All the horses, mules, asses, and cattle, which feed upon grass, have the same distension. This kind of food produces such acid juices in the stomach, as excite a perpetual sense of hunger. I have been often amazed at the voracious appetites of these people. You must not expect that I should describe the tables and the hospitality of our Nissard gentry. Our consul, who is a very honest man, told me, he had lived four and thirty years in the country, without having once eat or drank in any of their houses. The noblesse of Nice cannot leave the country without express leave from the king; and this leave, when obtained, is for a limited time, which they dare not exceed, on pain of incurring his majesty's displeasure. They must, therefore, endeavour to find amusements at home; and this, I apprehend, would be no easy task for people of an active spirit or restless disposition. True it is, the religion of the country supplies a never-failing fund of pastime to those who have any relish for devotion; and this is here a prevailing taste. We have had transient visits of a puppet-shew, strolling musicians, and rope-dancers; but they did not like their quarters, and decamped without beat of drum. In the summer, about eight or nine at night, part of the noblesse may be seen assembled in a place called the Pare; which is, indeed, a sort of a street formed by a row of very paltry houses on one side, and on the other, by part of the town-wall, which screens it from a prospect of the sea, the only object that could render it agreeable. Here you may perceive the noblesse stretched in pairs upon logs of wood, like so many seals upon the rocks by moon-light, each dame with her cicisbeo: for, you must understand, this Italian fashion prevails at Nice among all ranks of people; and there is not such a passion as jealousy known. The husband and the cicisbeo live together as sworn brothers; and the wife and the mistress embrace each other with marks of the warmest affection. I do not choose to enter into particulars. I cannot open the scandalous chronicle of Nice, without hazard of contamination. With respect to delicacy and decorum, you may peruse dean Swift's description of the Yahoos, and then you will have some idea of the porcheria, that distinguishes the gallantry of Nice. But the Pare is not the only place of public resort for our noblesse in a summer's evening. Just without one of our gates, you will find them seated in ditches on the highway side, serenaded with the croaking of frogs, and the bells and braying of mules and asses continually passing in a perpetual cloud of dust. Besides these amusements, there is a public conversazione every evening at the commandant's house called the Government, where those noble personages play at cards for farthings. In carnival time, there is also, at this same government, a ball twice or thrice a week, carried on by subscription. At this assembly every person, without distinction, is permitted to dance in masquerade: but, after dancing, they are obliged to unmask, and if Bourgeois, to retire. No individual can give a ball, without obtaining a permission and guard of the commandant; and then his house is open to all masques, without distinction, who are provided with tickets, which tickets are sold by the commandant's secretary, at five sols a-piece, and delivered to the guard at the door. If I have a mind to entertain my particular friends, I cannot have more than a couple of violins; and, in that case, it is called a conversazione. Though the king of Sardinia takes all opportunities to distinguish the subjects of Great-Britain with particular marks of respect, I have seen enough to be convinced, that our nation is looked upon with an evil eye by the people of Nice; and this arises partly from religious prejudices, and partly from envy, occasioned by a ridiculous notion of our superior wealth. For my own part, I owe them nothing on the score of civilities; and therefore, I shall say nothing more on the subject, lest I should be tempted to deviate from that temperance and impartiality which I would fain hope have hitherto characterised the remarks of,-- Dear Sir, your faithful, humble servant. LETTER XVIII NICE, September 2, 1764. DEAR DOCTOR,--I wrote in May to Mr. B-- at Geneva, and gave him what information he desired to have, touching the conveniences of Nice. I shall now enter into the same detail, for the benefit of such of your friends or patients, as may have occasion to try this climate. The journey from Calais to Nice, of four persons in a coach, or two post-chaises, with a servant on horseback, travelling post, may be performed with ease, for about one hundred and twenty pounds, including every expence. Either at Calais or at Paris, you will always find a travelling coach or berline, which you may buy for thirty or forty guineas, and this will serve very well to reconvey you to your own country. In the town of Nice, you will find no ready-furnished lodgings for a whole family. Just without one of the gates, there are two houses to be let, ready-furnished, for about five loui'dores per month. As for the country houses in this neighbourhood, they are damp in winter, and generally without chimnies; and in summer they are rendered uninhabitable by the heat and the vermin. If you hire a tenement in Nice, you must take it for a year certain; and this will cost you about twenty pounds sterling. For this price, I have a ground floor paved with brick, consisting of a kitchen, two large halls, a couple of good rooms with chimnies, three large closets that serve for bed-chambers, and dressing-rooms, a butler's room, and three apartments for servants, lumber or stores, to which we ascend by narrow wooden stairs. I have likewise two small gardens, well stocked with oranges, lemons, peaches, figs, grapes, corinths, sallad, and pot-herbs. It is supplied with a draw-well of good water, and there is another in the vestibule of the house, which is cool, large, and magnificent. You may hire furniture for such a tenement for about two guineas a month: but I chose rather to buy what was necessary; and this cost me about sixty pounds. I suppose it will fetch me about half the money when I leave the place. It is very difficult to find a tolerable cook at Nice. A common maid, who serves the people of the country, for three or four livres a month, will not live with an English family under eight or ten. They are all slovenly, slothful, and unconscionable cheats. The markets at Nice are tolerably well supplied. Their beef, which comes from Piedmont, is pretty good, and we have it all the year. In the winter we have likewise excellent pork, and delicate lamb; but the mutton is indifferent. Piedmont, also, affords us delicious capons, fed with maize; and this country produces excellent turkeys, but very few geese. Chickens and pullets are extremely meagre. I have tried to fatten them, without success. In summer they are subject to the pip, and die in great numbers. Autumn and winter are the seasons for game; hares, partridges, quails, wild-pigeons, woodcocks, snipes, thrushes, beccaficas, and ortolans. Wild-boar is sometimes found in the mountains: it has a delicious taste, not unlike that of the wild hog in Jamaica; and would make an excellent barbecue, about the beginning of winter, when it is in good case: but, when meagre, the head only is presented at tables. Pheasants are very scarce. As for the heath-game, I never saw but one cock, which my servant bought in the market, and brought home; but the commandant's cook came into my kitchen, and carried it of, after it was half plucked, saying, his master had company to dinner. The hares are large, plump, and juicy. The partridges are generally of the red sort; large as pullets, and of a good flavour: there are also some grey partridges in the mountains; and another sort of a white colour, that weigh four or five pounds each. Beccaficas are smaller than sparrows, but very fat, and they are generally eaten half raw. The best way of dressing them is to stuff them into a roll, scooped of it's crum; to baste them well with butter, and roast them, until they are brown and crisp. The ortolans are kept in cages, and crammed, until they die of fat, then eaten as dainties. The thrush is presented with the trail, because the bird feeds on olives. They may as well eat the trail of a sheep, because it feeds on the aromatic herbs of the mountain. In the summer, we have beef, veal, and mutton, chicken, and ducks; which last are very fat, and very flabby. All the meat is tough in this season, because the excessive heat, and great number of flies, will not admit of its being kept any time after it is killed. Butter and milk, though not very delicate, we have all the year. Our tea and fine sugar come from Marseilles, at a very reasonable price. Nice is not without variety of fish; though they are not counted so good in their kinds as those of the ocean. Soals, and flat-fish in general, are scarce. Here are some mullets, both grey and red. We sometimes see the dory, which is called St Pierre; with rock-fish, bonita, and mackarel. The gurnard appears pretty often; and there is plenty of a kind of large whiting, which eats pretty well; but has not the delicacy of that which is caught on our coast. One of the best fish of this country, is called Le Loup, about two or three pounds in weight; white, firm, and well-flavoured. Another, no-way inferior to it, is the Moustel, about the same size; of a dark-grey colour, and short, blunt snout; growing thinner and flatter from the shoulders downwards, so as to resemble a soal at the tail. This cannot be the mustela of the antients, which is supposed to be the sea lamprey. Here too are found the vyvre, or, as we call it, weaver; remarkable for its long, sharp spines, so dangerous to the fingers of the fishermen. We have abundance of the saepia, or cuttle-fish, of which the people in this country make a delicate ragout; as also of the polype de mer, which is an ugly animal, with long feelers, like tails, which they often wind about the legs of the fishermen. They are stewed with onions, and eat something like cow-heel. The market sometimes affords the ecrivisse de mer, which is a lobster without claws, of a sweetish taste; and there are a few rock oysters, very small and very rank. Sometimes the fishermen find under water, pieces of a very hard cement, like plaister of Paris, which contain a kind of muscle, called la datte, from its resemblance to a date. These petrifactions are commonly of a triangular form and may weigh about twelve or fifteen pounds each and one of them may contain a dozen of these muscles which have nothing extraordinary in the taste or flavour, though extremely curious, as found alive and juicy, in the heart of a rock, almost as hard as marble, without any visible communication with the air or water. I take it for granted, however, that the inclosing cement is porous, and admits the finer parts of the surrounding fluid. In order to reach the muscles, this cement must be broke with large hammers; and it may be truly said, the kernal is not worth the trouble of cracking the shell. [These are found in great plenty at Ancona and other parts of the Adriatic, where they go by the name of Bollani, as we are informed by Keysler.] Among the fish of this country, there is a very ugly animal of the eel species, which might pass for a serpent: it is of a dusky, black colour, marked with spots of yellow, about eighteen inches, or two feet long. The Italians call it murena; but whether it is the fish which had the same name among the antient Romans, I cannot pretend to determine. The antient murena was counted a great delicacy, and was kept in ponds for extraordinary occasions. Julius Caesar borrowed six thousand for one entertainment: but I imagined this was the river lamprey. The murena of this country is in no esteem, and only eaten by the poor people. Craw-fish and trout are rarely found in the rivers among the mountains. The sword-fish is much esteemed in Nice, and called l'empereur, about six or seven feet long: but I have never seen it. [Since I wrote the above letter, I have eaten several times of this fish, which is as white as the finest veal, and extremely delicate. The emperor associates with the tunny fish, and is always taken in their company.] They are very scarce; and when taken, are generally concealed, because the head belongs to the commandant, who has likewise the privilege of buying the best fish at a very low price. For which reason, the choice pieces are concealed by the fishermen, and sent privately to Piedmont or Genoa. But, the chief fisheries on this coast are of the sardines, anchovies, and tunny. These are taken in small quantities all the year; but spring and summer is the season when they mostly abound. In June and July, a fleet of about fifty fishing-boats puts to sea every evening about eight o'clock, and catches anchovies in immense quantities. One small boat sometimes takes in one night twenty-five rup, amounting to six hundred weight; but it must be observed, that the pound here, as well as in other parts of Italy, consists but of twelve ounces. Anchovies, besides their making a considerable article in the commerce of Nice, are a great resource in all families. The noblesse and burgeois sup on sallad and anchovies, which are eaten on all their meagre days. The fishermen and mariners all along this coast have scarce any other food but dry bread, with a few pickled anchovies; and when the fish is eaten, they rub their crusts with the brine. Nothing can be more delicious than fresh anchovies fried in oil: I prefer them to the smelts of the Thames. I need not mention, that the sardines and anchovies are caught in nets; salted, barrelled, and exported into all the different kingdoms and states of Europe. The sardines, however, are largest and fattest in the month of September. A company of adventurers have farmed the tunny-fishery of the king, for six years; a monopoly, for which they pay about three thousand pounds sterling. They are at a very considerable expence for nets, boats, and attendance. Their nets are disposed in a very curious manner across the small bay of St. Hospice, in this neighbourhood, where the fish chiefly resort. They are never removed, except in the winter, and when they want repair: but there are avenues for the fish to enter, and pass, from one inclosure to another. There is a man in a boat, who constantly keeps watch. When he perceives they are fairly entered, he has a method for shutting all the passes, and confining the fish to one apartment of the net, which is lifted up into the boat, until the prisoners are taken and secured. The tunny-fish generally runs from fifty to one hundred weight; but some of them are much larger. They are immediately gutted, boiled, and cut in slices. The guts and head afford oil: the slices are partly dried, to be eaten occasionally with oil and vinegar, or barrelled up in oil, to be exported. It is counted a delicacy in Italy and Piedmont, and tastes not unlike sturgeon. The famous pickle of the ancients, called garum, was made of the gills and blood of the tunny, or thynnus. There is a much more considerable fishery of it in Sardinia, where it is said to employ four hundred persons; but this belongs to the duc de St. Pierre. In the neighbourhood of Villa Franca, there are people always employed in fishing for coral and sponge, which grow adhering to the rocks under water. Their methods do not favour much of ingenuity. For the coral, they lower down a swab, composed of what is called spunyarn on board our ships of war, hanging in distinct threads, and sunk by means of a great weight, which, striking against the coral in its descent, disengages it from the rocks; and some of the pieces being intangled among the threads of the swab, are brought up with it above water. The sponge is got by means of a cross-stick, fitted with hooks, which being lowered down, fastens upon it, and tears it from the rocks. In some parts of the Adriatic and Archipelago, these substances are gathered by divers, who can remain five minutes below water. But I will not detain you one minute longer; though I must observe, that there is plenty of fine samphire growing along all these rocks, neglected and unknown.--Adieu. LETTER XIX NICE, October 10, 1764. DEAR SIR,--Before I tell you the price of provisions at Nice, it will be necessary to say something of the money. The gold coin of Sardinia consists of the doppia di savoia, value twenty-four livres Piedmontese, about the size of a loui'dore; and the mezzo doppia, or piece of twelve livres. In silver, there is the scudo of six livres, the mezzo scudo of three; and the quarto, or pezza di trenta soldi: but all these are very scarce. We seldom see any gold and silver coin, but the loui'dore, and the six, and three-livre Pieces of France; a sure sign that the French suffer by their contraband commerce with the Nissards. The coin chiefly used at market is a piece of copper silvered, that passes for seven sols and a half; another of the same sort, valued two sols and a half. They have on one side the impression of the king's head; and on the other, the arms of Savoy, with a ducal crown, inscribed with his name and titles. There are of genuine copper, pieces of one sol, stamped on one side with a cross fleuree; and on the reverse, with the king's cypher and crown, inscribed as the others: finally, there is another small copper piece, called piccalon, the sixth part of a sol, with a plain cross, and on the reverse, a slip-knot surmounted with a crown; the legend as above. The impression and legend on the gold and silver coins, are the same as those on the pieces of seven sols and a half. The livre of Piedmont consists of twenty sols, and is very near of the same value as an English shilling: ten sols, therefore, are equal to six-pence sterling. Butcher's meat in general sells at Nice for three sols a pound; and veal is something dearer: but then there are but twelve ounces in the pound, which being allowed for, sixteen ounces, come for something less than twopence halfpenny English. Fish commonly sells for four sols the twelve ounces, or five for the English pound; and these five are equivalent to three-pence of our money: but sometimes we are obliged to pay five, and even six sols for the Piedmontese pound of fish. A turkey that would sell for five or six shillings at the London market, costs me but three at Nice. I can buy a good capon for thirty sols, or eighteen-pence; and the same price I pay for a brace of partridges, or a good hare. I can have a woodcock for twenty-four sols; but the pigeons are dearer than in London. Rabbits are very rare; and there is scarce a goose to be seen in the whole county of Nice. Wild-ducks and teal are sometimes to be had in the winter; and now I am speaking of sea-fowl, it may not be amiss to tell you what I know of the halcyon, or king's-fisher. It is a bird, though very rare in this country about the size of a pigeon; the body brown, and the belly white: by a wonderful instinct it makes its nest upon the surface of the sea, and lays its eggs in the month of November, when the Mediterranean is always calm and smooth as a mill-pond. The people about here call them martinets, because they begin to hatch about Martinmass. Their nests are sometimes seen floating near the shore, and generally become the prize of the boys, who are very alert in catching them. You know all sea-birds are allowed by the church of Rome to be eaten on meagre days, as a kind of fish; and the monks especially do not fail to make use of this permission. Sea turtle, or tortoises, are often found at sea by the mariners, in these latitudes: but they are not the green sort, so much in request among the aldermen of London. All the Mediterranean turtle are of the kind called loggerhead, which in the West-Indies are eaten by none but hungry seamen, negroes, and the lowest class of people. One of these, weighing about two hundred pounds, was lately brought on shore by the fishermen of Nice, who found it floating asleep on the surface of the sea. The whole town was alarmed at sight of such a monster, the nature of which they could not comprehend. However, the monks, called minims, of St. Francesco di Paolo, guided by a sure instinct, marked it as their prey, and surrounded it accordingly. The friars of other convents, not quite so hungry, crowding down to the beach, declared it should not be eaten; dropped some hints about the possibility of its being something praeternatural and diabolical, and even proposed exorcisms and aspersions with holy water. The populace were divided according to their attachment to this, or that convent: a mighty clamour arose; and the police, in order to remove the cause of their contention, ordered the tortoise to be recommitted to the waves; a sentence which the Franciscans saw executed, not without sighs and lamentation. The land-turtle, or terrapin, is much better known at Nice, as being a native of this country; yet the best are brought from the island of Sardinia. The soup or bouillon of this animal is always prescribed here as a great restorative to consumptive patients. The bread of Nice is very indifferent, and I am persuaded very unwholesome. The flour is generally musty, and not quite free of sand. This is either owing to the particles of the mill-stone rubbed off in grinding, or to what adheres to the corn itself, in being threshed upon the common ground; for there are no threshing-floors in this country. I shall now take notice of the vegetables of Nice. In the winter, we have green pease, asparagus, artichoaks, cauliflower, beans, French beans, celery, and endive; cabbage, coleworts, radishes, turnips, carrots, betteraves, sorrel lettuce, onions, garlic, and chalot. We have potatoes from the mountains, mushrooms, champignons, and truffles. Piedmont affords white truffles, counted the most delicious in the world: they sell for about three livres the pound. The fruits of this season are pickled olives, oranges, lemons, citrons, citronelles, dried figs, grapes, apples, pears, almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, filberts, medlars, pomegranates, and a fruit called azerolles, [The Italians call them Lazerruoli.] about the size of a nutmeg, of an oblong shape, red colour, and agreeable acid taste. I might likewise add the cherry of the Laurus cerasus, which is sold in the market; very beautiful to the eye, but insipid to the palate. In summer we have all those vegetables in perfection. There is also a kind of small courge, or gourd, of which the people of the country make a very savoury ragout, with the help of eggs, cheese, and fresh anchovies. Another is made of the badenjean, which the Spaniards call berengena: [This fruit is called Melanzana in Italy and is much esteemed by the Jews in Leghorn. Perhaps Melanzana is a corruption of Malamsana.] it is much eaten in Spain and the Levant, as well as by the Moors in Barbary. It is about the size and shape of a hen's egg, inclosed in a cup like an acorn; when ripe, of a faint purple colour. It grows on a stalk about a foot high, with long spines or prickles. The people here have different ways of slicing and dressing it, by broiling, boiling, and stewing, with other ingredients: but it is at best an insipid dish. There are some caperbushes in this neighbourhood, which grow wild in holes of garden walls, and require no sort of cultivation: in one or two gardens, there are palm-trees; but the dates never ripen. In my register of the weather, I have marked the seasons of the principal fruits in this country. In May we have strawberries, which continue in season two or three months. These are of the wood kind; very grateful, and of a good flavour; but the scarlets and hautboys are not known at Nice. In the beginning of June, and even sooner, the cherries begin to be ripe. They are a kind of bleeding hearts; large, fleshy, and high flavoured, though rather too luscious. I have likewise seen a few of those we call Kentish cherries which are much more cool, acid, and agreeable, especially in this hot climate. The cherries are succeeded by the apricots and peaches, which are all standards, and of consequence better flavoured than what we call wall-fruit. The trees, as well as almonds, grow and bear without care and cultivation, and may be seen in the open fields about Nice, but without proper culture, the fruit degenerates. The best peaches I have seen at Nice are the amberges, of a yellow hue, and oblong shape, about the size of a small lemon. Their consistence is much more solid than that of our English peaches, and their taste more delicious. Several trees of this kind I have in my own garden. Here is likewise plenty of other sorts; but no nectarines. We have little choice of plumbs. Neither do I admire the pears or apples of this country: but the most agreeable apples I ever tasted, come from Final, and are called pomi carli. The greatest fault I find with most fruits in this climate, is, that they are too sweet and luscious, and want that agreeable acid which is so cooling and so grateful in a hot country. This, too, is the case with our grapes, of which there is great plenty and variety, plump and juicy, and large as plumbs. Nature, however, has not neglected to provide other agreeable vegetable juices to cool the human body. During the whole summer, we have plenty of musk melons. I can buy one as large as my head for the value of an English penny: but one of the best and largest, weighing ten or twelve pounds, I can have for twelve sols, or about eight-pence sterling. From Antibes and Sardinia, we have another fruit called a watermelon, which is well known in Jamaica, and some of our other colonies. Those from Antibes are about the size of an ordinary bomb-shell: but the Sardinian and Jamaica watermelons are four times as large. The skin is green, smooth, and thin. The inside is a purple pulp, studded with broad, flat, black seeds, and impregnated with a juice the most cool, delicate, and refreshing, that can well be conceived. One would imagine the pulp itself dissolved in the stomach; for you may eat of it until you are filled up to the tongue, without feeling the least inconvenience. It is so friendly to the constitution, that in ardent inflammatory fevers, it is drank as the best emulsion. At Genoa, Florence, and Rome, it is sold in the streets, ready cut in slices; and the porters, sweating under their burthens, buy, and eat them as they pass. A porter of London quenches his thirst with a draught of strong beer: a porter of Rome, or Naples, refreshes himself with a slice of water-melon, or a glass of iced-water. The one costs three half-pence; the last, half a farthing--which of them is most effectual? I am sure the men are equally pleased. It is commonly remarked, that beer strengthens as well as refreshes. But the porters of Constantinople, who never drink any thing stronger than water, and eat very little animal food, will lift and carry heavier burthens than any other porters in the known world. If we may believe the most respectable travellers, a Turk will carry a load of seven hundred weight, which is more (I believe) than any English porter ever attempted to carry any length of way. Among the refreshments of these warm countries, I ought not to forget mentioning the sorbettes, which are sold in coffee-houses, and places of public resort. They are iced froth, made with juice of oranges, apricots, or peaches; very agreeable to the palate, and so extremely cold, that I was afraid to swallow them in this hot country, until I found from information and experience, that they may be taken in moderation, without any bad consequence. Another considerable article in house-keeping is wine, which we have here good and reasonable. The wine of Tavelle in Languedoc is very near as good as Burgundy, and may be had at Nice, at the rate of six-pence a bottle. The sweet wine of St. Laurent, counted equal to that of Frontignan, costs about eight or nine-pence a quart: pretty good Malaga may be had for half the money. Those who make their own wine choose the grapes from different vineyards, and have them picked, pressed, and fermented at home. That which is made by the peasants, both red and white, is generally genuine: but the wine-merchants of Nice brew and balderdash, and even mix it with pigeons dung and quick-lime. It cannot be supposed, that a stranger and sojourner should buy his own grapes, and make his own provision of wine: but he may buy it by recommendation from the peasants, for about eighteen or twenty livres the charge, consisting of eleven rup five pounds; in other words, of two hundred and eighty pounds of this country, so as to bring it for something less than three-pence a quart. The Nice wine, when mixed with water, makes an agreeable beverage. There is an inferior sort for servants drank by the common people, which in the cabaret does not cost above a penny a bottle. The people here are not so nice as the English, in the management of their wine. It is kept in flacons, or large flasks, without corks, having a little oil at top. It is not deemed the worse for having been opened a day or two before; and they expose it to the hot sun, and all kinds of weather, without hesitation. Certain it is, this treatment has little or no effect upon its taste, flavour, and transparency. The brandy of Nice is very indifferent: and the liqueurs are so sweetened with coarse sugar, that they scarce retain the taste or flavour of any other ingredient. The last article of domestic oeconomy which I shall mention is fuel, or wood for firing, which I buy for eleven sols (a little more than six-pence halfpenny) a quintal, consisting of one hundred and fifty pound Nice weight. The best, which is of oak, comes from Sardinia. The common sort is olive, which being cut with the sap in it, ought to be laid in during the summer; otherwise, it will make a very uncomfortable fire. In my kitchen and two chambers, I burned fifteen thousand weight of wood in four weeks, exclusive of charcoal for the kitchen stoves, and of pine-tops for lighting the fires. These last are as large as pineapples, which they greatly resemble in shape, and to which, indeed, they give their name; and being full of turpentine, make a wonderful blaze. For the same purpose, the people of these countries use the sarments, or cuttings of the vines, which they sell made up in small fascines. This great consumption of wood is owing to the large fires used in roasting pieces of beef, and joints, in the English manner. The roasts of this country seldom exceed two or three pounds of meat; and their other plats are made over stove holes. But it is now high time to conduct you from the kitchen, where you have been too long detained by--Your humble servant. P.S.--I have mentioned the prices of almost all the articles in house-keeping, as they are paid by the English: but exclusive of butcher's meat, I am certain the natives do not pay so much by thirty per cent. Their imposition on us, is not only a proof of their own villany and hatred, but a scandal on their government; which ought to interfere in favour of the subjects of a nation, to which they are so much bound in point of policy, as well as gratitude. LETTER XX NICE, October 22, 1764. SIR,--As I have nothing else to do, but to satisfy my own curiosity, and that of my friends, I obey your injunctions with pleasure; though not without some apprehension that my inquiries will afford you very little entertainment. The place where I am is of very little importance or consequence as a state or community; neither is there any thing curious or interesting in the character or oeconomy of its inhabitants. There are some few merchants in Nice, said to be in good circumstances. I know one of them, who deals to a considerable extent, and goes twice a year to London to attend the sales of the East-India company. He buys up a very large quantity of muslins, and other Indian goods, and freights a ship in the river to transport them to Villa Franca. Some of these are sent to Swisserland; but, I believe, the greater part is smuggled into France, by virtue of counterfeit stamps, which are here used without any ceremony. Indeed, the chief commerce of this place is a contraband traffick carried on to the disadvantage of France; and I am told, that the farmers of the Levant company in that kingdom find their account in conniving at it. Certain it is, a great quantity of merchandize is brought hither every week by mules from Turin and other parts in Piedmont, and afterwards conveyed to the other side of the Var, either by land or water. The mules of Piedmont are exceeding strong and hardy. One of them will carry a burthen of near six hundred weight. They are easily nourished, and require no other respite from their labour, but the night's repose. They are the only carriage that can be used in crossing the mountains, being very sure-footed: and it is observed that in choosing their steps, they always march upon the brink of the precipice. You must let them take their own way, otherwise you will be in danger of losing your life; for they are obstinate, even to desperation. It is very dangerous for a person on horseback to meet those animals: they have such an aversion to horses, that they will attack them with incredible fury, so as even to tear them and their riders in pieces; and the best method for avoiding this fate, is to clap spurs to your beast, and seek your safety in flight. I have been more than once obliged to fly before them. They always give you warning, by raising a hideous braying as soon as they perceive the horse at a distance. The mules of Provence are not so mischievous, because they are more used to the sight and society of horses: but those of Piedmont are by far the largest and the strongest I have seen. Some very feasible schemes for improving the commerce of Nice have been presented to the ministry of Turin; but hitherto without success. The English import annually between two and three thousand bales of raw silk, the growth of Piedmont; and this declaration would be held legal evidence. In some parts of France, the cure of the parish, on All Souls' day, which is called le jour des morts, says a libera domine for two sols, at every grave in the burying-ground, for the release of the soul whose body is there interred. The artisans of Nice are very lazy, very needy, very aukward, and void of all ingenuity. The price of their labour is very near as high as at London or Paris. Rather than work for moderate profit, arising from constant employment, which would comfortably maintain them and their families, they choose to starve at home, to lounge about the ramparts, bask themselves in the sun, or play at bowls in the streets from morning 'till night. The lowest class of people consists of fishermen, day labourers, porters, and peasants: these last are distributed chiefly in the small cassines in the neighbourhood of the city, and are said to amount to twelve thousand. They are employed in labouring the ground, and have all the outward signs of extreme misery. They are all diminutive, meagre, withered, dirty, and half naked; in their complexions, not barely swarthy, but as black as Moors; and I believe many of them are descendants of that people. They are very hard favoured; and their women in general have the coarsest features I have ever seen: it must be owned, however, they have the finest teeth in the world. The nourishment of those poor creatures consists of the refuse of the garden, very coarse bread, a kind of meal called polenta, made of Indian corn, which is very nourishing and agreeable, and a little oil; but even in these particulars, they seem to be stinted to very scanty meals. I have known a peasant feed his family with the skins of boiled beans. Their hogs are much better fed than their children. 'Tis pity they have no cows, which would yield milk, butter, and cheese, for the sustenance of their families. With all this wretchedness, one of these peasants will not work in your garden for less than eighteen sols, about eleven pence sterling, per diem; and then he does not half the work of an English labourer. If there is fruit in it, or any thing he can convey, he will infallibly steal it, if you do not keep a very watchful eye over him. All the common people are thieves and beggars; and I believe this is always the case with people who are extremely indigent and miserable. In other respects, they are seldom guilty of excesses. They are remarkably respectful and submissive to their superiors. The populace of Nice are very quiet and orderly. They are little addicted to drunkenness. I have never heard of one riot since I lived among them; and murder and robbery are altogether unknown. A man may walk alone over the county of Nice, at midnight, without danger of insult. The police is very well regulated. No man is permitted to wear a pistol or dagger' on pain of being sent to the gallies. I am informed, that both murder and robbery are very frequent in some parts of Piedmont. Even here, when the peasants quarrel in their cups, (which very seldom happens) they draw their knives, and the one infallibly stabs the other. To such extremities, however, they never proceed, except when there is a woman in the case; and mutual jealousy co-operates with the liquor they have drank, to inflame their passions. In Nice, the common people retire to their lodgings at eight o'clock in winter, and nine in summer. Every person found in the streets after these hours, is apprehended by the patrole; and, if he cannot give a good account of himself, sent to prison. At nine in winter, and ten in summer, there is a curfew-bell rung, warning the people to put out their lights, and go to bed. This is a very necessary precaution in towns subject to conflagrations; but of small use in Nice, where there is very little combustible in the houses. The punishments inflicted upon malefactors and delinquents at Nice are hanging for capital crimes; slavery on board the gallies for a limited term, or for life, according to the nature of the transgression; flagellation, and the strappado. This last is performed, by hoisting up the criminal by his hands tied behind his back, on a pulley about two stories high; from whence, the rope being suddenly slackened, he falls to within a yard or two of the ground, where he is stopped with a violent shock arising from the weight of his body, and the velocity of his descent, which generally dislocates his shoulders, with incredible pain. This dreadful execution is sometimes repeated in a few minutes on the same delinquent; so that the very ligaments are tore from his joints, and his arms are rendered useless for life. The poverty of the people in this country, as well as in the South of France, may be conjectured from the appearance of their domestic animals. The draughthorses, mules, and asses, of the peasants, are so meagre, as to excite compassion. There is not a dog to be seen in tolerable case; and the cats are so many emblems of famine, frightfully thin, and dangerously rapacious. I wonder the dogs and they do not devour young children. Another proof of that indigence which reigns among the common people, is this: you may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. Scarce a sparrow, red-breast, tomtit, or wren, can 'scape the guns and snares of those indefatigable fowlers. Even the noblesse make parties to go a la chasse, a-hunting; that is, to kill those little birds, which they eat as gibier, or game. The great poverty of the people here, is owing to their religion. Half of their time is lost in observing the great number of festivals; and half of their substance is given to mendicant friars and parish priests. But if the church occasions their indigence, it likewise, in some measure, alleviates the horrors of it, by amusing them with shows, processions, and even those very feasts, which afford a recess from labour, in a country where the climate disposes them to idleness. If the peasants in the neighbourhood of any chapel dedicated to a saint, whose day is to be celebrated, have a mind to make a festin, in other words, a fair, they apply to the commandant of Nice for a license, which costs them about a French crown. This being obtained, they assemble after service, men and women, in their best apparel, and dance to the musick of fiddles, and pipe and tabor, or rather pipe and drum. There are hucksters' stands, with pedlary ware and knick-knacks for presents; cakes and bread, liqueurs and wine; and thither generally resort all the company of Nice. I have seen our whole noblesse at one of these festins, kept on the highway in summer, mingled with an immense crowd of peasants, mules, and asses, covered with dust, and sweating at every pore with the excessive heat of the weather. I should be much puzzled to tell whence their enjoyment arises on such occasions; or to explain their motives for going thither, unless they are prescribed it for pennance, as a fore-taste of purgatory. Now I am speaking of religious institutions, I cannot help observing, that the antient Romans were still more superstitious than the modern Italians; and that the number of their religious feasts, sacrifices, fasts, and holidays, was even greater than those of the Christian church of Rome. They had their festi and profesti, their feriae stativae, and conceptivae, their fixed and moveable feasts; their esuriales, or fasting days, and their precidaneae, or vigils. The agonales were celebrated in January; the carmentales, in January and February; the lupercales and matronales, in March; the megalesia in April; the floralia, in May; and the matralia in June. They had their saturnalia, robigalia, venalia, vertumnalia, fornacalia, palilia, and laralia, their latinae, their paganales, their sementinae, their compitales, and their imperativae; such as the novemdalia, instituted by the senate, on account of a supposed shower of stones. Besides, every private family had a number of feriae, kept either by way of rejoicing for some benefit, or mourning for some calamity. Every time it thundered, the day was kept holy. Every ninth day was a holiday, thence called nundinae quasi novendinae. There was the dies denominalis, which was the fourth of the kalends; nones and ides of every month, over and above the anniversary of every great defeat which the republic had sustained, particularly the dies alliensis, or fifteenth of the kalends of December, on which the Romans were totally defeated by the Gauls and Veientes; as Lucan says--et damnata diu Romanis allia fastis, and Allia in Rome's Calendar condemn'd. The vast variety of their deities, said to amount to thirty thousand, with their respective rites of adoration, could not fail to introduce such a number of ceremonies, shews, sacrifices, lustrations, and public processions, as must have employed the people almost constantly from one end of the year to the other. This continual dissipation must have been a great enemy to industry; and the people must have been idle and effeminate. I think it would be no difficult matter to prove, that there is very little difference, in point of character, between the antient and modern inhabitants of Rome; and that the great figure which this empire made of old, was not so much owing to the intrinsic virtue of its citizens, as to the barbarism, ignorance, and imbecility of the nations they subdued. Instances of public and private virtue I find as frequent and as striking in the history of other nations, as in the annals of antient Rome; and now that the kingdoms and states of Europe are pretty equally enlightened, and ballanced in the scale of political power, I am of opinion, that if the most fortunate generals of the Roman commonwealth were again placed at the head of the very armies they once commanded, instead of extending their conquests over all Europe and Asia, they would hardly be able to subdue, and retain under their dominion, all the petty republics that subsist in Italy. But I am tired with writing; and I believe you will be tired with reading this long letter notwithstanding all your prepossession in favour of--Your very humble servant. LETTER XXI NICE, November 10, 1764. DEAR DOCTOR,--In my enquiries about the revenues of Nice, I am obliged to trust to the information of the inhabitants, who are much given to exaggerate. They tell me, the revenues of this town amount to one hundred thousand livres, or five thousand pounds sterling; of which I would strike off at least one fourth, as an addition of their own vanity: perhaps, if we deduct a third, it will be nearer the truth. For, I cannot find out any other funds they have, but the butchery and the bakery, which they farm at so much a year to the best bidder; and the droits d'entree, or duties upon provision brought into the city; but these are very small. The king is said to draw from Nice one hundred thousand livres annually, arising from a free-gift, amounting to seven hundred pounds sterling, in lieu of the taille, from which this town and county are exempted; an inconsiderable duty upon wine sold in public-houses; and the droits du port. These last consist of anchorage, paid by all vessels in proportion to their tonnage, when they enter the harbours of Nice and Villa Franca. Besides, all foreign vessels, under a certain stipulated burthen, that pass between the island of Sardinia and this coast, are obliged, in going to the eastward, to enter; and pay a certain regulated imposition, on pain of being taken and made prize. The prince of Monaco exacts a talliage of the same kind; and both he and the king of Sardinia maintain armed cruisers to assert this prerogative; from which, however, the English and French are exempted by treaty, in consequence of having paid a sum of money at once. In all probability, it was originally given as a consideration for maintaining lights on the shore, for the benefit of navigators, like the toll paid for passing the Sound in the Baltic. [Upon further inquiry I find it was given in consideration of being protected from the Corsairs by the naval force of the Duke of Savoy and Prince of Monaco.] The fanal, or lanthorn, to the eastward of Villa Franca, is kept in good repair, and still lighted in the winter. The toll, however, is a very troublesome tax upon feluccas, and other small craft, which are greatly retarded in their voyages, and often lose the benefit of a fair wind, by being obliged to run inshore, and enter those harbours. The tobacco the king manufactures at his own expence, and sells for his own profit, at a very high price; and every person convicted of selling this commodity in secret, is sent to the gallies for life. The salt comes chiefly from Sardinia, and is stored up in the king's magazine from whence it is exported to Piedmont, and other parts of his inland dominions. And here it may not be amiss to observe, that Sardinia produces very good horses, well-shaped, though small; strong, hardy, full of mettle, and easily fed. The whole county of Nice is said to yield the king half a million of livres, about twenty-five thousand pounds sterling, arising from a small donative made by every town and village: for the lands pay no tax, or imposition, but the tithes to the church. His revenue then flows from the gabelle on salt and wine, and these free-gifts; so that we may strike off one fifth of the sum at which the whole is estimated; and conclude, that the king draws from the county at Nice, about four hundred thousand livres, or twenty thousand pounds sterling. That his revenues from Nice are not great, appears from the smallness of the appointments allowed to his officers. The president has about three hundred pounds per annum; and the intendant about two. The pay of the commandant does not exceed three hundred and fifty pounds: but he has certain privileges called the tour du baton, some of which a man of spirit would not insist upon. He who commands at present, having no estate of his own, enjoys a small commandery, which being added to his appointments at Nice, make the whole amount to about five hundred pounds sterling. If we may believe the politicians of Nice, the king of Sardinia's whole revenue does not fall short of twenty millions of Piedmontese livres, being above one million of our money. It must be owned, that there is no country in Christendom less taxed than that of Nice; and as the soil produces the necessaries of life, the inhabitants, with a little industry, might renew the golden age in this happy climate, among their groves, woods, and mountains, beautified with fountains, brooks, rivers, torrents, and cascades. In the midst of these pastoral advantages, the peasants are poor and miserable. They have no stock to begin the world with. They have no leases of the lands they cultivate; but entirely depend, from year to year, on the pleasure of the arbitrary landholder, who may turn them out at a minute's warning; and they are oppressed by the mendicant friars and parish priests, who rob them of the best fruits of their labour: after all, the ground is too scanty for the number of families which are crouded on it. You desire to know the state of the arts and sciences at Nice; which, indeed, is almost a total blank. I know not what men of talents this place may have formerly produced; but at present, it seems to be consecrated to the reign of dulness and superstition. It is very surprising, to see a people established between two enlightened nations, so devoid of taste and literature. Here are no tolerable pictures, busts, statues, nor edifices: the very ornaments of the churches are wretchedly conceived, and worse executed. They have no public, nor private libraries that afford any thing worth perusing. There is not even a bookseller in Nice. Though they value themselves upon their being natives of Italy, they are unacquainted with music. The few that play upon instruments, attend only to the execution. They have no genius nor taste, nor any knowledge of harmony and composition. Among the French, a Nissard piques himself on being Provencal; but in Florence, Milan, or Rome, he claims the honour of being born a native of Italy. The people of condition here speak both languages equally well; or, rather, equally ill; for they use a low, uncouth phraseology; and their pronunciation is extremely vitious. Their vernacular tongue is what they call Patois; though in so calling it, they do it injustice.--Patois, from the Latin word patavinitas, means no more than a provincial accent, or dialect. It takes its name from Patavium, or Padua, which was the birthplace of Livy, who, with all his merit as a writer, has admitted into his history, some provincial expressions of his own country. The Patois, or native tongue of Nice, is no other than the ancient Provencal, from which the Italian, Spanish and French languages, have been formed. This is the language that rose upon the ruins of the Latin tongue, after the irruptions of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, and Burgundians, by whom the Roman empire was destroyed. It was spoke all over Italy, Spain, and the southern parts of France, until the thirteenth century, when the Italians began to polish it into the language which they now call their own: The Spaniards and French, likewise, improved it into their respective tongues. From its great affinity to the Latin, it was called Romance, a name which the Spaniards still give to their own language. As the first legends of knight-errantry were written in Provencal, all subsequent performances of the same kind, have derived from it the name of romance; and as those annals of chivalry contained extravagant adventures of knights, giants, and necromancers, every improbable story or fiction is to this day called a romance. Mr. Walpole, in his Catalogue of royal and noble Authors, has produced two sonnets in the antient Provencal, written by our king Richard I. surnamed Coeur de Lion; and Voltaire, in his Historical Tracts, has favoured the world with some specimens of the same language. The Patois of Nice, must, without doubt, have undergone changes and corruptions in the course of so many ages, especially as no pains have been taken to preserve its original purity, either in orthography or pronunciation. It is neglected, as the language of the vulgar: and scarce any-body here knows either its origin or constitution. I have in vain endeavoured to procure some pieces in the antient Provencal, that I might compare them with the modern Patois: but I can find no person to give me the least information on the subject. The shades of ignorance, sloth, and stupidity, are impenetrable. Almost every word of the Patois may still be found in the Italian, Spanish, and French languages, with a small change in the pronunciation. Cavallo, signifying a horse in Italian and Spanish is called cavao; maison, the French word for a house, is changed into maion; aqua, which means water in Spanish, the Nissards call daigua. To express, what a slop is here! they say acco fa lac aqui, which is a sentence composed of two Italian words, one French, and one Spanish. This is nearly the proportion in which these three languages will be found mingled in the Patois of Nice; which, with some variation, extends over all Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony. I will now treat you with two or three stanzas of a canzon, or hymn, in this language, to the Virgin Mary, which was lately printed at Nice. 1 Vierge, maire de Dieu, Nuostro buono avocado, Embel car uvostre sieu, En Fenestro adourado, Jeu vous saludi, E demandi en socours; E sense autre preludi, Canti lous uvostre honours. Virgin, mother of God, our good advocate, With your dear son, In Fenestro adored, I salute you, And ask his assistance; And without further prelude, I sing your honours. [Fenestro is the name of a place in this neighbourhood, where there is a supposed miraculous sanctuary, or chapel, of the Virgin Mary.] 2. Qu'ario de Paradis! Que maesta divine! Salamon es d'advis, Giugiar de uvostro mino; Vous dis plus bello: E lou dis ben soven De toutoi lei femello, E non s'engano ren. What air of Paradise! What majesty divine! Solomon is of opinion, To judge of your appearance; Says you are the fairest And it is often said Of all females, And we are not all deceived. 3. Qu'ario de Paradis! Que maesta divine! La bellezzo eblovis; La bonta l'ueigl raffino. Sias couronado; Tenes lou monde en man Sus del trono assettado, Riges lou avostre enfan. What air of Paradise! What majesty divine! The beauty dazzles; The goodness purifies the eye: You are crowned: You hold the world in your hand: Seated on the throne, You support your child. You see I have not chosen this canzon for the beauty and elegance of thought and expression; but give it you as the only printed specimen I could find of the modern Provencal. If you have any curiosity to be further acquainted with the Patois, I will endeavour to procure you satisfaction. Meanwhile, I am, in plain English,--Dear Sir, Ever yours. LETTER XXII NICE, November 10, 1764. DEAR SIR,--I had once thoughts of writing a complete natural history of this town and county: but I found myself altogether unequal to the task. I have neither health, strength, nor opportunity to make proper collections of the mineral, vegetable, and animal productions. I am not much conversant with these branches of natural philosophy. I have no books to direct my inquiries. I can find no person capable of giving me the least information or assistance; and I am strangely puzzled by the barbarous names they give to many different species, the descriptions of which I have read under other appelations; and which, as I have never seen them before, I cannot pretend to distinguish by the eye. You must therefore be contented with such imperfect intelligence as my opportunities can afford. The useful arts practised at Nice, are these, gardening and agriculture, with their consequences, the making of wine, oil, and cordage; the rearing of silk-worms, with the subsequent management and manufacture of that production; and the fishing, which I have already described. Nothing can be more unpromising than the natural soil of this territory, except in a very few narrow bottoms, where there is a stiff clay, which when carefully watered, yields tolerable pasturage. In every other part, the soil consists of a light sand mingled with pebbles, which serves well enough for the culture of vines and olives: but the ground laid out for kitchen herbs, as well as for other fruit must be manured with great care and attention. They have no black cattle to afford such compost as our farmers use in England. The dung of mules and asses, which are their only beasts of burthen, is of very little value for this purpose; and the natural sterility of their ground requires something highly impregnated with nitre and volatile salts. They have recourse therefore to pigeons' dung and ordure, which fully answer their expectations. Every peasant opens, at one corner of his wall, a public house of office for the reception of passengers; and in the town of Nice, every tenement is provided with one of these receptacles, the contents of which are carefully preserved for sale. The peasant comes with his asses and casks to carry it off before day, and pays for it according to its quality, which he examines and investigates, by the taste and flavour. The jakes of a protestant family, who eat gras every day, bears a much higher price than the privy of a good catholic who lives maigre one half of the year. The vaults belonging to the convent of Minims are not worth emptying. The ground here is not delved with spades as in England, but laboured with a broad, sharp hough, having a short horizontal handle; and the climate is so hot and dry in the summer, that the plants must be watered every morning and evening, especially where it is not shaded by trees. It is surprising to see how the productions of the earth are crouded together. One would imagine they would rob one another of nourishment; and moreover be stifled for want of air; and doubtless this is in some measure the case. Olive and other fruit trees are planted in rows very close to each other. These are connected by vines, and the interstices, between the rows, are filled with corn. The gardens that supply the town with sallad and pot-herbs, lye all on the side of Provence, by the highway. They are surrounded with high stone-walls, or ditches, planted with a kind of cane or large reed, which answers many purposes in this country. The leaves of it afford sustenance to the asses, and the canes not only serve as fences to the inclosures; but are used to prop the vines and pease, and to build habitations for the silkworms: they are formed into arbours, and wore as walking-staves. All these gardens are watered by little rills that come from the mountains, particularly, by the small branches of the two sources which I have described in a former letter, as issuing from the two sides of a mountain, under the names of Fontaine de Muraille, and Fontaine du Temple. In the neighbourhood of Nice, they raise a considerable quantity of hemp, the largest and strongest I ever saw. Part of this, when dressed, is exported to other countries; and part is manufactured into cordage. However profitable it may be to the grower, it is certainly a great nuisance in the summer. When taken out of the pits, where it has been put to rot, the stench it raises is quite insupportable; and must undoubtedly be unwholesome. There is such a want of land in this neighbourhood, that terraces are built over one another with loose stones, on the faces of bare rocks, and these being covered with earth and manured, are planted with olives, vines, and corn. The same shift was practised all over Palestine, which was rocky and barren, and much more populous than the county of Nice. Notwithstanding the small extent of this territory, there are some pleasant meadows in the skirts of Nice, that produce excellent clover; and the corn which is sown in open fields, where it has the full benefit of the soil, sun, and air, grows to a surprizing height. I have seen rye seven or eight feet high. All vegetables have a wonderful growth in this climate. Besides wheat, rye, barley, and oats, this country produces a good deal of Meliga, or Turkish wheat, which is what we call Indian corn. I have, in a former letter, observed that the meal of this grain goes by the name polenta, and makes excellent hasty-pudding, being very nourishing, and counted an admirable pectoral. The pods and stalks are used for fuel: and the leaves are much preferable to common straw, for making paillasses. The pease and beans in the garden appear in the winter like beautiful plantations of young trees in blossom; and perfume the air. Myrtle, sweet-briar, sweet-marjoram, sage, thyme, lavender, rosemary, with many other aromatic herbs and flowers, which with us require the most careful cultivation, are here found wild in the mountains. It is not many years since the Nissards learned the culture of silk-worms, of their neighbours the Piedmontese; and hitherto the progress they have made is not very considerable: the whole county of Nice produces about one hundred and thirty-three bales of three hundred pounds each, amounting in value to four hundred thousand livres. In the beginning of April, when the mulberry-leaves, begin to put forth, the eggs or grains that produce the silk-worm, are hatched. The grains are washed in wine, and those that swim on the top, are thrown away as good for nothing. The rest being deposited in small bags of linen, are worn by women in their bosoms, until the worms begin to appear: then they are placed in shallow wooden boxes, covered with a piece of white paper, cut into little holes, through which the worms ascend as they are hatched, to feed on the young mulberry-leaves, of which there is a layer above the paper. These boxes are kept for warmth between two mattrasses, and visited every day. Fresh leaves are laid in, and the worms that feed are removed successively to the other place prepared for their reception. This is an habitation, consisting of two or three stories, about twenty inches from each other, raised upon four wooden posts. The floors are made of canes, and strewed with fresh mulberry-leaves: the corner posts, and other occasional props, for sustaining the different floors, are covered with a coat of loose heath, which is twisted round the wood. The worms when hatched are laid upon the floors; and here you may see them in all the different stages (if moulting or casting the slough, a change which they undergo three times successively before they begin to work. The silk-worm is an animal of such acute and delicate sensations, that too much care cannot be taken to keep its habitation clean, and to refresh it from time to time with pure air. I have seen them languish and die in scores, in consequence of an accidental bad smell. The soiled leaves, and the filth which they necessarily produce, should be carefully shifted every day; and it would not be amiss to purify the air sometimes with fumes of vinegar, rose, or orange-flower water. These niceties, however, are but little observed. They commonly lie in heaps as thick as shrimps in a plate, some feeding on the leaves, some new hatched, some intranced in the agonies of casting their skin, sonic languishing, and some actually dead, with a litter of half-eaten faded leaves about them, in a close room, crouded with women and children, not at all remarkable for their cleanliness. I am assured by some persons of credit, that if they are touched, or even approached, by a woman in her catamenia, they infallibly expire. This, however, must be understood of those females whose skins have naturally a very rank flavour, which is generally heightened at such periods. The mulberry-leaves used in this country are of the tree which bears a small white fruit not larger than a damascene. They are planted on purpose, and the leaves are sold at so much a pound. By the middle of June all the mulberry-trees are stripped; but new leaves succeed, and in a few weeks, they are cloathed again with fresh verdure. In about ten days after the last moulting, the silk-worm climbs upon the props of his house, and choosing a situation among the heath, begins to spin in a most curious manner, until he is quite inclosed, and the cocon or pod of silk, about the size of a pigeon's egg, which he has produced remains suspended by several filaments. It is no unusual to see double cocons, spun by two worms included under a common cover. There must be an infinite number of worms to yield any considerable quantity of silk. One ounce of eggs or grains produces, four rup, or one hundred Nice pounds of cocons; and one rup, or twenty-five pounds of cocons, if they are rich, gives three pounds of raw silk; that is, twelve pounds of silk are got from one ounce of grains, which ounce of grains its produced by as many worms as are inclosed in one pound, or twelve ounces of cocons. In preserving the cocons for breed, you must choose an equal number of males and females; and these are very easily distinguished by the shape of the cocons; that which contains the male is sharp, and the other obtuse, at the two ends. In ten or twelve days after the cocon is finished, the worm makes its way through it, in the form of a very ugly, unwieldy, aukward butterfly, and as the different sexes are placed by one another on paper or linen, they immediately engender. The female lays her eggs, which are carefully preserved; but neither she nor her mate takes any nourishment, and in eight or ten days after they quit the cocons, they generally die. The silk of these cocons cannot be wound, because the animals in piercing through them, have destroyed the continuity of the filaments. It is therefore, first boiled, and then picked and carded like wool, and being afterwards spun, is used in the coarser stuffs of the silk manufacture. The other cocons, which yield the best silk, are managed in a different manner. Before the inclosed worm has time to penetrate, the silk is reeled off with equal care and ingenuity. A handful of the cocons are thrown away into a kettle of boiling water, which not only kills the animal, but dissolves the glutinous substance by which the fine filaments of the silk cohere or stick together, so that they are easily wound off, without breaking. Six or seven of these small filaments being joined together are passed over a kind of twisting iron, and fixed to the wheel, which one girl turns, while another, with her hands in the boiling water, disentangles the threads, joins them when they chance to break, and supplies fresh cocons with admirable dexterity and dispatch. There is a manufacture of this kind just without one of the gates of Nice, where forty or fifty of these wheels are worked together, and give employment for some weeks to double the number of young women. Those who manage the pods that float in the boiling water must be very alert, otherwise they will scald their fingers. The smell that comes from the boiling cocons is extremely offensive. Hard by the harbour, there is a very curious mill for twisting the silk, which goes by water. There is in the town of Nice, a well regulated hospital for poor orphans of both sexes, where above one hundred of them are employed in dressing, dyeing, spinning, and weaving the silk. In the villages of Provence, you see the poor women in the streets spinning raw silk upon distaves: but here the same instrument is only used for spinning hemp and flax; which last, however, is not of the growth of Nice--But lest I should spin this letter to a tedious length, I will now wind up my bottom, and bid you heartily farewell. LETTER XXIII NICE, December 19, 1764. SIR,--In my last, I gave you a succinct account of the silkworm, and the management of that curious insect in this country. I shall now proceed to describe the methods of making wine and oil. The vintage begins in September. The grapes being chosen and carefully picked, are put into a large vat, where they are pressed by a man's naked feet, and the juices drawn off by a cock below. When no more is procured by this operation, the bruised grapes are put into the press, and yield still more liquor. The juice obtained by this double pressure, being put in casks, with their bungs open, begins to ferment and discharge its impurities at the openings. The waste occasioned by this discharge, is constantly supplied with fresh wine, so that the casks are always full. The fermentation continues for twelve, fifteen, or twenty days, according to the strength and vigour of the grape. In about a month, the wine is fit for drinking. When the grapes are of a bad, meagre kind, the wine dealers mix the juice with pigeons'-dung or quick-lime, in order to give it a spirit which nature has denied: but this is a very mischievous adulteration. The process for oil-making is equally simple. The best olives are those that grow wild; but the quantity of them is very inconsiderable. Olives begin to ripen and drop in the beginning of November: but some remain on the trees till February, and even till April, and these are counted the most valuable. When the olives are gathered, they must be manufactured immediately, before they fade and grow wrinkled, otherwise they will produce bad oil. They are first of all ground into a paste by a mill-stone set edge-ways in a circular stone-trough, the wheel being turned by water. This paste is put into trails or circular cases made of grass woven, having a round hole at top and bottom; when filled they resemble in shape our Cheshire cheeses. A number of these placed one upon another, are put in a press, and being squeezed, the oil with all its impurities, runs into a receptacle below fixed in the ground. From hence it is laded into a wooden vat, half filled with water. The sordes or dirt falls to the bottom; the oil swims a-top; and being skimmed off, is barrelled up in small oblong casks. What remains in the vat, is thrown into a large stone cistern with water, and after being often stirred, and standing twelve or fourteen days, yields a coarser oil used for lamps and manufactures. After these processes, they extract an oil still more coarse and fetid from the refuse of the whole. Sometimes, in order to make the olives grind the more easily into a paste, and part with more oil, they are mixed with a little hot water: but the oil thus procured is apt to grow rancid. The very finest, called virgin oil, is made chiefly of green olives, and sold at a very high price, because a great quantity is required to produce a very little oil. Even the stuff that is left after all these operations, consisting of the dried pulp, is sold for fuel, and used in brasieres for warming apartments which have no chimney. I have now specified all the manufactures of Nice which are worth mentioning. True it is, there is some coarse paper made in this neighbourhood; there are also people here who dress skins and make leather for the use of the inhabitants: but this business is very ill performed: the gloves and shoes are generally rotten as they come from the hands of the maker. Carpenter's, joiner's, and blacksmith's work is very coarsely and clumsily done. There are no chairs to be had at Nice, but crazy things made of a few sticks, with rush bottoms, which are sold for twelve livres a dozen. Nothing can be more contemptible than the hard-ware made in this place, such as knives, scissors, and candle-snuffers. All utensils in brass and copper are very ill made and finished. The silver-smiths make nothing but spoons, forks, paultry rings, and crosses for the necks of the women. The houses are built of a ragged stone dug from the mountains, and the interstices are filled with rubble; so that the walls would appear very ugly, if they were not covered with plaister, which has a good effect. They generally consist of three stories, and are covered with tiles. The apartments of the better sort are large and lofty, the floors paved with brick, the roofs covered with a thick coat of stucco, and the walls whitewashed. People of distinction hang their chambers with damask, striped silk, painted cloths, tapestry, or printed linnen. All the doors, as well as the windows, consist of folding leaves. As there is no wainscot in the rooms, which are divided by stone partitions and the floors and cieling are covered with brick and stucco, fires are of much less dreadful consequence here than in our country. Wainscot would afford harbour for bugs: besides, white walls have a better effect in this hot climate. The beds commonly used in this place, and all over Italy, consist of a paillasse, with one or two mattrasses, laid upon planks, supported by two wooden benches. Instead of curtains there is a couziniere or mosquito net, made of a kind of gauze, that opens and contracts occasionally, and incloses the place where you lie: persons of condition, however, have also bedsteads and curtains; but these last are never used in the summer. In these countries, people of all ranks dine exactly at noon; and this is the time I seize in winter, for making my daily tour of the streets and ramparts, which at all other hours of the day are crowded with men, women, children and beasts of burthen. The rampart is the common road for carriages of all kinds. I think there are two private coaches in Nice, besides that of the commandant: but there are sedan chairs, which may be had at a reasonable rate. When I bathed in the summer, I paid thirty sols, equal to eighteen-pence, for being carried to and from the bathing place, which was a mile from my own house. Now I am speaking of bathing, it may not be amiss to inform you that though there is a fine open beach, extending several miles to the westward of Nice, those who cannot swim ought to bathe with great precaution, as the sea is very deep, and the descent very abrupt from within a yard or two of the water's edge. The people here were much surprised when I began to bathe in the beginning of May. They thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death. But, when it was perceived that I grew better in consequence of the bath, some of the Swiss officers tried the same experiment, and in a few days, our example was followed by several inhabitants of Nice. There is, however, no convenience for this operation, from the benefit of which the fair sex must be intirely excluded, unless they lay aside all regard to decorum; for the shore is always lined with fishing-boats, and crouded with people. If a lady should be at the expence of having a tent pitched on the beach where she might put on and of her bathing-dress, she could not pretend to go into the sea without proper attendants; nor could she possibly plunge headlong into the water, which is the most effectual, and least dangerous way of bathing. All that she can do is to have the sea-water brought into her house, and make use of a bathing-tub, which may be made according to her own, or physician's direction. What further I have to say of this climate and country, you shall have in my next; and then you will be released from a subject, which I am afraid has been but too circumstantially handled by-- Sir, Your very humble servant. LETTER XXIV NICE, January 4, 1765. DEAR SIR.,--The constitution of this climate may be pretty well ascertained, from the inclosed register of the weather, which I kept with all possible care and attention. From a perusal of it, you will see that there is less rain and wind at Nice, than in any other part of the world that I know; and such is the serenity of the air, that you see nothing above your head for several months together, but a charming blue expanse, without cloud or speck. Whatever clouds may be formed by evaporation of the sea, they seldom or never hover over this small territory; but, in all probability, are attracted by the mountains that surround it, and there fall in rain or snow: as for those that gather from other quarters, I suppose their progress hitherward is obstructed by those very Alps, which rise one over another, to an extent of many leagues. This air being dry, pure, heavy, and elastic, must be agreeable to the constitution of those who labour under disorders arising from weak nerves, obstructed perspiration, relaxed fibres, a viscidity of lymph, and a languid circulation. In other respects, it encourages the scurvy, the atmosphere being undoubtedly impregnated with sea-salt. Ever since my arrival at Nice, I have had a scorbutical eruption on my right hand, which diminishes and increases according to the state of my health. One day last summer, when there was a strong breeze from the sea, the surface of our bodies was covered with a salt brine, very perceptible to the taste; my gums, as well as those of another person in my family, began to swell, and grow painful, though this had never happened before; and I was seized with violent pains in the joints of my knees. I was then at a country-house fronting the sea, and particularly exposed to the marine air. The swelling of our gums subsided as the wind fell: but what was very remarkable, the scurvy-spot on my hand disappeared, and did not return for a whole month. It is affirmed that sea-salt will dissolve, and render the blood so fluid, that it will exude through the coats of the vessels. Perhaps the sea-scurvy is a partial dissolution of it, by that mineral absorbed from the air by the lymphatics on the surface of the body, and by those of the lungs in respiration. Certain it is, in the last stages of the sea-scurvy, the blood often bursts from the pores; and this phaenomenon is imputed to a high degree of putrefaction: sure enough it is attended with putrefaction. We know that a certain quantity of salt is required to preserve the animal juices from going putrid: but, how a greater quantity should produce putrefaction, I leave to wiser heads to explain. Many people here have scorbutical complaints, though their teeth are not affected. They are subject to eruptions on the skin, putrid gums, pains in the bones, lassitude, indigestion, and low spirits; but the reigning distemper is a marasmus, or consumption, which proceeds gradually, without any pulmonary complaint, the complexion growing more and more florid, 'till the very last scene of the tragedy. This I would impute to the effects of a very dry, saline atmosphere, upon a thin habit, in which there is an extraordinary waste by perspiration. The air is remarkably salt in this district, because the mountains that hem it in, prevent its communication with the circumambient atmosphere, in which the saline particles would otherwise be diffused; and there is no rain, nor dew, to precipitate or dissolve them. Such an air as I have described, should have no bad effect upon a moist, phlegmatic constitution, such as mine; and yet it must be owned, I have been visibly wasting since I came hither, though this decay I considered as the progress of the tabes which began in England. But the air of Nice has had a still more sensible effect upon Mr. Sch--z, who laboured under nervous complaints to such a degree, that life was a burthen to him. He had also a fixed pain in his breast, for which complaint he had formerly tried the air of Naples, where he resided some considerable time, and in a great measure recovered: but, this returning with weakness, faintness, low spirits, and entire loss of appetite, he was advised to come hither; and the success of his journey has greatly exceeded his expectation. Though the weather has been remarkably bad for this climate, he has enjoyed perfect health. Since he arrived at Nice, the pain in his breast has vanished; he eats heartily, sleeps well, is in high spirits, and so strong, that he is never off his legs in the day-time. He can walk to the Var and back again, before dinner; and he has climbed to the tops of all the mountains in this neighbourhood. I never saw before such sudden and happy effects from the change of air. I must also acknowledge, that ever since my arrival at Nice, I have breathed more freely than I had done for some years, and my spirits have been more alert. The father of my housekeeper, who was a dancing-master, had been so afflicted with an asthmatic disorder, that he could not live in France, Spain, or Italy; but found the air of Nice so agreeable to his lungs, that he was enabled to exercise his profession for above twenty years, and died last spring turned of seventy. Another advantage I have reaped from this climate is my being, in a great measure, delivered from a slow fever which used to hang about me, and render life a burthen. Neither am I so apt to catch cold as I used to be in England and France; and the colds I do catch are not of the same continuance and consequence, as those to which I was formerly subject. The air of Nice is so dry, that in summer, and even in winter, (except ill wet weather) you may pass the evening, and indeed the whole night, sub Dio, without feeling the least dew or moisture; and as for fogs, they are never seen in this district. In summer, the air is cooled by a regular sea-breeze blowing from the cast, like that of the West-Indies. It begins in the forenoon, and increases with the heat of the day. It dies away about six or seven; and immediately after sun-set is succeeded by an agreeable land-breeze from the mountains. The sea-breeze from the eastward, however, is not so constant here, as in the West-Indies between the tropicks, because the sun, which produces it, is not so powerful. This country lies nearer the region of variable winds, and is surrounded by mountains, capes, and straights, which often influence the constitution and current of the air. About the winter solstice, the people of Nice expect wind and rain, which generally lasts, with intervals, 'till the beginning of February: but even during this, their worst weather, the sun breaks out occasionally, and you may take the air either a-foot or on horseback every day; for the moisture is immediately absorbed by the earth, which is naturally dry. They likewise lay their account with being visited by showers of rain and gusts of wind in April. A week's rain in the middle of August makes them happy. It not only refreshes the parched ground, and plumps up the grapes and other fruit, but it cools the air and assuages the beets, which then begin to grow very troublesome; but the rainy season is about the autumnal equinox, or rather something later. It continues about twelve days or a fortnight, and is extremely welcome to the natives of this country. This rainy season is often delayed 'till the latter end of November, and sometimes 'till the month of December; in which case, the rest of the winter is generally dry. The heavy rains in this country generally come with a south-west wind, which was the creberque procellis Africus, the stormy southwest, of the antients. It is here called Lebeche, a corruption of Lybicus: it generally blows high for a day or two, and rolls the Mediterranean before it in huge waves, that often enter the town of Nice. It likewise drives before it all the clouds which had been formed above the surface of the Mediterranean. These being expended in rain, fair weather naturally ensues. For this reason, the Nissards observe le lebeche racommode le tems, the Lebeche settles the weather. During the rains of this season, however, the winds have been variable. From the sixteenth of November, 'till the fourth of January, we have had two and twenty days of heavy rain: a very extraordinary visitation in this country: but the seasons seem to be more irregular than formerly, all over Europe. In the month of July, the mercury in Fahrenheit's thermometer, rose to eighty-four at Rome, the highest degree at which it was ever known in that country; and the very next day, the Sabine mountains were covered with snow. The same phaemomenon happened on the eleventh of August, and the thirtieth of September. The consequence of these sudden variations of weather, was this: putrid fevers were less frequent than usual; but the sudden cheek of perspiration from the cold, produced colds, inflammatory sore throats, and the rheumatism. I know instances of some English valetudinarians, who have passed the winter at Aix, on the supposition that there was little or no difference between that air and the climate of Nice: but this is a very great mistake, which may be attended with fatal consequences. Aix is altogether exposed to the north and north-west winds, which blow as cold in Provence, as ever I felt them on the mountains of Scotland: whereas Nice is entirely screened from these winds by the Maritime Alps, which form an amphitheatre, to the land-side, around this little territory: but another incontestible proof of the mildness of this climate, is deduced from the oranges, lemons, citrons, roses, narcissus's, july-flowers, and jonquils, which ripen and blow in the middle of winter. I have described the agreeable side of this climate; and now I will point out its inconveniences. In the winter, but especially in the spring, the sun is so hot, that one can hardly take exercise of any sort abroad, without being thrown into a breathing sweat; and the wind at this season is so cold and piercing, that it often produces a mischievous effect on the pores thus opened. If the heat rarifies the blood and juices, while the cold air constringes the fibres, and obstructs the perspiration, inflammatory disorders must ensue. Accordingly, the people are then subject to colds, pleurisies, peripneumonies, and ardent fevers. An old count advised me to stay within doors in March, car alors les humeurs commencent a se remuer, for then the humours begin to be in motion. During the heats of summer, some few persons of gross habits have, in consequence of violent exercise and excess, been seized with putrid fevers, attended with exanthemata, erisipelatous, and miliary eruptions, which commonly prove fatal: but the people in general are healthy, even those that take very little exercise: a strong presumption in favour of the climate! As to medicine, I know nothing of the practice of the Nice physicians. Here are eleven in all; but four or five make shift to live by the profession. They receive, by way of fee, ten sols (an English six-pence) a visit, and this is but ill paid: so you may guess whether they are in a condition to support the dignity of physic; and whether any man, of a liberal education, would bury himself at Nice on such terms. I am acquainted with an Italian physician settled at Villa Franca, a very good sort of a man, who practises for a certain salary, raised by annual contribution among the better sort of people; and an allowance from the king, for visiting the sick belonging to the garrison and the gallies. The whole may amount to near thirty pounds. Among the inconveniences of this climate, the vermin form no inconsiderable article. Vipers and snakes are found in the mountains. Our gardens swarm with lizzards; and there are some few scorpions; but as yet I have seen but one of this species. In summer, notwithstanding all the care and precautions we can take, we are pestered with incredible swarms of flies, fleas, and bugs; but the gnats, or couzins, are more intolerable than all the rest. In the day-time, it is impossible to keep the flies out of your mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears. They croud into your milk, tea, chocolate, soup, wine, and water: they soil your sugar, contaminate your victuals, and devour your fruit; they cover and defile your furniture, floors, cielings, and indeed your whole body. As soon as candles are lighted, the couzins begin to buz about your ears in myriads, and torment you with their stings, so that you have no rest nor respite 'till you get into bed, where you are secured by your mosquito-net. This inclosure is very disagreeable in hot weather; and very inconvenient to those, who, like me, are subject to a cough and spitting. It is moreover ineffectual; for some of those cursed insects insinuate themselves within it, almost every night; and half a dozen of them are sufficient to disturb you 'till morning. This is a plague that continues all the year; but in summer it is intolerable. During this season, likewise, the moths are so mischievous, that it requires the utmost care to preserve woollen cloths from being destroyed. From the month of May, 'till the beginning of October, the heat is so violent, that you cannot stir abroad after six in the morning 'till eight at night, so that you are entirely deprived of the benefit of exercise: There is no shaded walk in, or near the town; and there is neither coach nor chaise to hire, unless you travel post. Indeed, there is no road fit for any wheel carriage, but the common highway to the Var, in which you are scorched by the reflexion of the sun from the sand and stones, and at the same time half stifled with dust. If you ride out in the cool of the evening, you will have the disadvantage of returning in the dark. Among the demerits of Nice, I must also mention the water which is used in the city. It is drawn from wells; and for the most part so hard, that it curdles with soap. There are many fountains and streams in the neighbourhood, that afford excellent water, which, at no great charge, might be conveyed into the town, so as to form conduits in all the public streets: but the inhabitants are either destitute of public spirit, or cannot afford the expense. [General Paterson delivered a Plan to the King of Sardinia for supplying Nice with excellent water for so small an expence as one livre a house per annum; but the inhabitants remonstrated against it as an intolerable Imposition.] I have a draw-well in my porch, and another in my garden, which supply tolerable water for culinary uses; but what we drink, is fetched from a well belonging to a convent of Dominicans in this neighbourhood. Our linnen is washed in the river Paglion; and when that is dry, in the brook called Limpia, which runs into the harbour. In mentioning the water of this neighbourhood, I ought not to omit the baths of Rocabiliare, a small town among the mountains, about five and twenty miles from Nice. There are three sources, each warmer than the other; the warmest being nearly equal to the heat of the king's bath at Bath in Somersetshire, as far as I can judge from information. I have perused a Latin manuscript, which treats of these baths at Rocabiliare, written by the duke of Savoy's first physician about sixty years ago. He talks much of the sulphur and the nitre which they contain; but I apprehend their efficacy is owing to the same volatile vitriolic principle, which characterises the waters at Bath. They are attenuating and deobstruent, consequently of service in disorders arising from a languid circulation, a viscidity of the juices, a lax fibre, and obstructed viscera. The road from hence to Rocabiliare is in some parts very dangerous, lying along the brink of precipices, impassable to any other carriage but a mule. The town itself affords bad lodging and accommodation, and little or no society. The waters are at the distance of a mile and a half from the town: there are no baths nor shelter, nor any sort of convenience for those that drink them; and the best part of their efficacy is lost, unless they are drank at the fountain-head. If these objections were in some measure removed, I would advise valetudinarians, who come hither for the benefit of this climate, to pass the heats of summer at Rocabiliare, which being situated among mountains, enjoys a cool temperate air all the summer. This would be a salutary respite from the salt air of Nice, to those who labour under scorbutical complaints; and they would return with fresh vigour and spirits, to pass the winter in this place, where no severity of weather is known. Last June, when I found myself so ill at my cassine, I had determined to go to Rocabiliare, and even to erect a hut at the spring, for my own convenience. A gentleman of Nice undertook to procure me a tolerable lodging in the house of the cure, who was his relation. He assured me, there was no want of fresh butter, good poultry, excellent veal, and delicate trout; and that the articles of living might be had at Rocabiliare for half the price we paid at Nice: but finding myself grow better immediately on my return from the cassine to my own house, I would not put myself to the trouble and expence of a further removal. I think I have now communicated all the particulars relating to Nice, that are worth knowing; and perhaps many more than you desired to know: but, in such cases, I would rather be thought prolix and unentertaining, than deficient in that regard and attention with which I am very sincerely,--Your friend and servant. LETTER XXV NICE, January 1, 1765. DEAR SIR,--It was in deference to your opinion, reinforced by my own inclination, and the repeated advice of other friends, that I resolved upon my late excursion to Italy. I could plainly perceive from the anxious solicitude, and pressing exhortations contained in all the letters I had lately received from my correspondents in Britain, that you had all despaired of my recovery. You advised me to make a pilgrimage among the Alps, and the advice was good. In scrambling among those mountains, I should have benefited by the exercise, and at the same time have breathed a cool, pure, salubrious air, which, in all probability, would have expelled the slow fever arising in a great measure from the heat of this climate. But, I wanted a companion and fellow traveller, whose conversation and society could alleviate the horrors of solitude. Besides, I was not strong enough to encounter the want of conveniences, and even of necessaries to which I must have been exposed in the course of such an expedition. My worthy friend Dr. A-- earnestly intreated me to try the effect of a sea-voyage, which you know has been found of wonderful efficacy in consumptive cases. After some deliberation, I resolved upon the scheme, which I have now happily executed. I had a most eager curiosity to see the antiquities of Florence and Rome: I longed impatiently to view those wonderful edifices, statues, and pictures, which I had so often admired in prints and descriptions. I felt an enthusiastic ardor to tread that very classical ground which had been the scene of so many great atchievements; and I could not bear the thought of returning to England from the very skirts of Italy, without having penetrated to the capital of that renowned country. With regard to my health, I knew I could manage matters so as to enjoy all the benefits that could be expected from the united energy of a voyage by sea, a journey by land, and a change of climate. Rome is betwixt four and five hundred miles distant from Nice, and one half of the way I was resolved to travel by water. Indeed there is no other way of going from hence to Genoa, unless you take a mule, and clamber along the mountains at the rate of two miles an hour, and at the risque of breaking your neck every minute. The Apennine mountains, which are no other than a continuation of the maritime Alps, form an almost continued precipice from Villefranche to Lerici, which is almost forty-five miles on the other side of Genoa; and as they are generally washed by the sea, there is no beach or shore, consequently the road is carried along the face of the rocks, except at certain small intervals, which are occupied by towns and villages. But, as there is a road for mules and foot passengers, it might certainly be enlarged and improved so as to render it practicable by chaises and other wheel-carriages, and a toll might be exacted, which in a little time would defray the expence: for certainly no person who travels to Italy, from England, Holland, France, or Spain, would make a troublesome circuit to pass the Alps by the way of Savoy and Piedmont, if he could have the convenience of going post by the way of Aix, Antibes, and Nice, along the side of the Mediterranean, and through the Riviera of Genoa, which from the sea affords the most agreeable and amazing prospect I ever beheld. What pity it is, they cannot restore the celebrated Via Aurelia, mentioned in the Itinerarium of Antoninus, which extended from Rome by the way of Genoa, and through this country as far as Arles upon the Rhone. It was said to have been made by the emperor Marcus Aurelius; and some of the vestiges of it are still to be seen in Provence. The truth is, the nobility of Genoa, who are all merchants, from a low, selfish, and absurd policy, take all methods to keep their subjects of the Riviera in poverty and dependence. With this view, they carefully avoid all steps towards rendering that country accessible by land; and at the same time discourage their trade by sea, lest it should interfere with the commerce of their capital, in which they themselves are personally concerned. Those who either will not or cannot bear the sea, and are equally averse to riding, may be carried in a common chair, provided with a foot-board, on men's shoulders: this is the way of travelling practised by the ladies of Nice, in crossing the mountains to Turin; but it is very tedious and expensive, as the men must be often relieved. The most agreeable carriage from here to Genoa, is a feluca, or open boat, rowed by ten or twelve stout mariners. Though none of these boats belong to Nice, they are to be found every day in our harbour, waiting for a fare to Genoa; and they are seen passing and repassing continually, with merchandize or passengers, between Marseilles, Antibes, and the Genoese territories. A feluca is large enough to take in a post-chaise; and there is a tilt over the stern sheets, where the passengers sit, to protect them from the rain: between the seats one person may lie commodiously upon a mattress, which is commonly supplied by the patron. A man in good health may put up with any thing; but I would advise every valetudinarian who travels this way, to provide his own chaise, mattrass, and bedlinnen, otherwise he will pass his time very uncomfortably. If you go as a simple passenger in a feluca, you pay about a loui'dore for your place, and you must be intirely under the direction of the patron, who, while he can bear the sea, will prosecute his voyage by night as well as by day, and expose you to many other inconveniencies: but for eight zequines, or four loui'dores, you can have a whole feluca to yourself, from Nice to Genoa, and the master shall be obliged to put a-shore every evening. If you would have it still more at your command, you may hire it at so much per day, and in that case, go on shore as often, and stay as long as you please. This is the method I should take, were I to make the voyage again; for I am persuaded I should find it very near as cheap, and much more agreeable than any other. The distance between this place and Genoa, when measured on the carte, does not exceed ninety miles: but the people of the felucas insist upon its being one hundred and twenty. If they creep along shore round the bottoms of all the bays, this computation may be true: but, except when the sea is rough, they stretch directly from one head-land to another, and even when the wind is contrary, provided the gale is not fresh, they perform the voyage in two days and a half, by dint of rowing: when the wind is favourable, they will sail it easily in fourteen hours. A man who has nothing but expedition in view, may go with the courier, who has always a light boat well manned, and will be glad to accommodate a traveller for a reasonable gratification. I know an English gentleman who always travels with the courier in Italy, both by sea and land. In posting by land, he is always sure of having part of a good calash, and the best horses that can be found; and as the expence of both is defrayed by the public, it costs him nothing but a present to his companion, which does not amount to one fourth part of the expence he would incur by travelling alone. These opportunities may be had every week in all the towns of Italy. For my own part, I hired a gondola from hence to Genoa. This is a boat smaller than a feluca, rowed by four men, and steered by the patron; but the price was nine zequines, rather more than I should have payed for a feluca of ten oars. I was assured that being very light, it would make great way; and the master was particularly recommended to me, as an honest man and an able mariner. I was accompanied in this voyage by my wife and Miss C--, together with one Mr. R--, a native of Nice, whom I treated with the jaunt, in hopes that as he was acquainted with the customs of the country, and the different ways of travelling in it, he would save us much trouble, and some expence: but I was much disappointed. Some persons at Nice offered to lay wagers that he would return by himself from Italy; but they were also disappointed. We embarked in the beginning of September, attended by one servant. The heats, which render travelling dangerous in Italy, begin to abate at this season. The weather was extremely agreeable; and if I had postponed my voyage a little longer, I foresaw that I should not be able to return before winter: in which case I might have found the sea too rough, and the weather too cold for a voyage of one hundred and thirty-five miles in an open boat. Having therefore provided myself with a proper pass, signed and sealed by our consul, as well as with letters of recommendation from him to the English consuls at Genoa and Leghorn, a precaution which I would advise all travellers to take, in case of meeting with accidents on the road, we went on board about ten in the morning, stopped about half an hour at a friend's country-house in the bay of St. Hospice, and about noon entered the harbour of Monaco, where the patron was obliged to pay toll, according to the regulation which I have explained in a former letter. This small town, containing about eight or nine hundred souls, besides the garrison, is built on a rock which projects into the sea, and makes a very romantic appearance. The prince's palace stands in the most conspicuous part, with a walk of trees before it. The apartments are elegantly furnished, and adorned with some good pictures. The fortifications are in good repair, and the place is garrisoned by two French battalions. The present prince of Monaco is a Frenchman, son of the duke Matignon who married the heiress of Monaco, whose name was Grimaldi. The harbour is well sheltered from the wind; but has not water sufficient to admit vessels of any great burthen. Towards the north, the king of Sardinia's territories extend to within a mile of the gate; but the prince of Monaco can go upon his own ground along shore about five or six miles to the eastward, as far as Menton, another small town, which also belongs to him, and is situated on the seaside. His revenues are computed at a million of French livres, amounting to something more than forty thousand pounds sterling: but, the principality of Monaco, consisting of three small towns, and an inconsiderable tract of barren rock, is not worth above seven thousand a year; the rest arises from his French estate. This consists partly of the dutchy of Matignon, and partly of the dutchy of Valentinois, which last was given to the ancestors of this prince of Monaco, in the year 1640, by the French king, to make up the loss of some lands in the kingdom of Naples, which were confiscated when he expelled the Spanish garrison from Monaco, and threw himself into the arms of France: so that he is duke of Valentinois as well as of Matignon, in that kingdom. He lives almost constantly in France; and has taken the name and arms of Grimaldi. The Genoese territories begin at Ventimiglia, another town lying on the coast, at the distance of twenty miles from Nice, a circumstance from which it borrows the name. Having passed the towns of Monaco, Menton, Ventimiglia, and several other places of less consequence that lie along this coast, we turned the point of St. Martin with a favourable breeze, and might have proceeded twenty miles further before night: but the women began to be sick, as well as afraid at the roughness of the water; Mr. R-- was so discomposed, that he privately desired the patron to put ashore at St. Remo, on pretence that we should not find a tolerable auberge in any other place between this and Noli, which was at the distance of forty miles. We accordingly landed, and were conducted to the poste, which our gondeliere assured us was the best auberge in the whole Riviera of Genoa. We ascended by a dark, narrow, steep stair, into a kind of public room, with a long table and benches, so dirty and miserable, that it would disgrace the worst hedge ale-house in England. Not a soul appeared to receive us. This is a ceremony one must not expect to meet with in France; far less in Italy. Our patron going into the kitchen, asked a servant if the company could have lodging in the house; and was answered, "he could not tell: the patron was not at home." When he desired to know where the patron was, the other answered, "he was gone to take the air." E andato a passeggiare. In the mean time, we were obliged to sit in the common room among watermen and muleteers. At length the landlord arrived, and gave us to understand, that he could accommodate us with chambers. In that where I lay, there was just room for two beds, without curtains or bedstead, an old rotten table covered with dried figs, and a couple of crazy chairs. The walls had been once white-washed: but were now hung with cobwebs, and speckled with dirt of all sorts; and I believe the brick-floor had not been swept for half a century. We supped in an outward room suitable in all respects to the chamber, and fared villainously. The provision was very ill-dressed, and served up in the most slovenly manner. You must not expect cleanliness or conveniency of any kind in this country. For this accommodation I payed as much as if I had been elegantly entertained in the best auberge of France or Italy. Next day, the wind was so high that we could not prosecute our voyage, so that we were obliged to pass other four and twenty hours in this comfortable situation. Luckily Mr. R-- found two acquaintances in the place; one a Franciscan monk, a jolly fellow; and the other a maestro di capella, who sent a spinnet to the inn, and entertained us agreeably with his voice and performance, in both of which accomplishments he excelled. The padre was very good humoured, and favoured us with a letter of recommendation to a friend of his, a professor in the university of Pisa. You would laugh to see the hyperbolical terms in which he mentioned your humble servant; but Italy is the native country of hyperbole. St. Remo is a pretty considerable town, well-built upon the declivity of a gently rising hill, and has a harbour capable of receiving small vessels, a good number of which are built upon the beach: but ships of any burden are obliged to anchor in the bay, which is far from being secure. The people of St. Remo form a small republic, which is subject to Genoa. They enjoyed particular privileges, till the year 1753, when in consequence of a new gabelle upon salt, they revolted: but this effort in behalf of liberty did not succeed. They were soon reduced by the Genoese, who deprived them of all their privileges, and built a fort by the sea-side, which serves the double purpose of defending the harbour and over-awing the town. The garrison at present does not exceed two hundred men. The inhabitants are said to have lately sent a deputation to Ratisbon, to crave the protection of the diet of the empire. There is very little plain ground in this neighbourhood; but the hills are covered with oranges, lemons, pomegranates, and olives, which produce a considerable traffic in fine fruit and excellent oil. The women of St. Remo are much more handsome and better tempered than those of Provence. They have in general good eyes, with open ingenuous countenances. Their dress, though remarkable, I cannot describe: but upon the whole, they put me in mind of some portraits I have seen, representing the females of Georgia and Mingrelia. On the third day, the wind being abated, though still unfavourable, we reimbarked and rowed along shore, passing by Porto-mauricio, and Oneglia; then turning the promontory called Capo di Melle, we proceeded by Albenga, Finale, and many other places of inferior note. Portomauricio is seated on a rock washed by the sea, but indifferently fortified, with an inconsiderable harbour, which none but very small vessels can enter. About two miles to the eastward is Oneglia, a small town with fortifications, lying along the open beach, and belonging to the king of Sardinia. This small territory abounds with olive-trees, which produce a considerable quantity of oil, counted the best of the whole Riviera. Albenga is a small town, the see of a bishop, suffragan to the archbishop of Genoa. It lies upon the sea, and the country produces a great quantity of hemp. Finale is the capital of a marquisate belonging to the Genoese, which has been the source of much trouble to the republic; and indeed was the sole cause of their rupture with the king of Sardinia and the house of Austria in the year 1745. The town is pretty well built; but the harbour is shallow, open, and unsafe; nevertheless, they built a good number of tartans and other vessels on the beach and the neighbouring country abounds with oil and fruit, particularly with those excellent apples called pomi carli, which I have mentioned in a former letter. In the evening we reached the Capo di Noli, counted very dangerous in blowing weather. It is a very high perpendicular rock or mountain washed by the sea, which has eaten into it in divers places, so as to form a great number of caverns. It extends about a couple of miles, and in some parts is indented into little creeks or bays, where there is a narrow margin of sandy beach between it and the water. When the wind is high, no feluca will attempt to pass it; even in a moderate breeze, the waves dashing against the rocks and caverns, which echo with the sound, make such an awful noise, and at the same time occasion such a rough sea, as one cannot hear, and see, and feel, without a secret horror. On this side of the Cape, there is a beautiful strand cultivated like a garden; the plantations extend to the very tops of the hills, interspersed with villages, castles, churches, and villas. Indeed the whole Riviera is ornamented in the same manner, except in such places as admit of no building nor cultivation. Having passed the Cape, we followed the winding of the coast, into a small bay, and arrived at the town of Noli, where we proposed to pass the night. You will be surprised that we did not go ashore sooner, in order to take some refreshment; but the truth is, we had a provision of ham, tongues, roasted pullets, cheese, bread, wine, and fruit, in the feluca, where we every day enjoyed a slight repast about one or two o'clock in the afternoon. This I mention as a necessary piece of information to those who may be inclined to follow the same route. We likewise found it convenient to lay in store of l'eau de vie, or brandy, for the use of the rowers, who always expect to share your comforts. On a meagre day, however, those ragamuffins will rather die of hunger than suffer the least morsel of flesh-meat to enter their mouths. I have frequently tried the experiment, by pressing them to eat something gras, on a Friday or Saturday: but they always declined it with marks of abhorrence, crying, Dio me ne libere! God deliver me from it! or some other words to that effect. I moreover observed, that not one of those fellows ever swore an oath, or spoke an indecent word. They would by no means put to sea, of a morning, before they had heard mass; and when the wind was unfavourable, they always set out with a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, or St. Elmo, keeping time with their oars as they sung. I have indeed remarked all over this country, that a man who transgresses the institutions of the church in these small matters, is much more infamous than one who has committed the most flagrant crimes against nature and morality. A murderer, adulterer, or s--m--te, will obtain easy absolution from the church, and even find favour with society; but a man who eats a pidgeon on a Saturday, without express licence, is avoided and abhorred, as a monster of reprobation. I have conversed with several intelligent persons on the subject; and have reason to believe, that a delinquent of this sort is considered as a luke-warm catholic, little better than a heretic; and of all crimes they look upon heresy as the most damnable. Noli is a small republic of fishermen subject to Genoa; but very tenacious of their privileges. The town stands on the beach, tolerably well built, defended by a castle situated on a rock above it; and the harbour is of little consequence. The auberge was such as made us regret even the inn we had left at St. Remo. After a very odd kind of supper, which I cannot pretend to describe, we retired to our repose: but I had not been in bed five minutes, when I felt something crawling on different parts of my body, and taking a light to examine, perceived above a dozen large bugs. You must know I have the same kind of antipathy to these vermin, that some persons have to a cat or breast of veal. I started up immediately, and wrapping myself in a great coat, sick as I was, laid down in the outer room upon a chest, where I continued till morning. One would imagine that in a mountainous country like this, there should be plenty of goats; and indeed, we saw many flocks of them feeding among the rocks, yet we could not procure half a pint of milk for our tea, if we had given the weight of it in gold. The people here have no idea of using milk, and when you ask them for it, they stand gaping with a foolish face of surprise, which is exceedingly provoking. It is amazing that instinct does not teach the peasants to feed their children with goat's milk, so much more nourishing and agreeable than the wretched sustenance on which they live. Next day we rowed by Vado and Savona, which last is a large town, with a strong citadel, and a harbour, which was formerly capable of receiving large ships: but it fell a sacrifice to the jealousy of the Genoese, who have partly choaked it up, on pretence that it should not afford shelter to the ships of war belonging to those states which might be at enmity with the republic. Then we passed Albifola, Sestri di Ponente, Novi, Voltri, and a great number of villages, villas, and magnificent palaces belonging to the Genoese nobility, which form almost a continued chain of buildings along the strand for thirty miles. About five in the afternoon, we skirted the fine suburbs of St. Pietro d' Arena, and arrived at Genoa, which makes a dazzling appearance when viewed from the sea, rising like an amphitheatre in a circular form from the water's edge, a considerable way up the mountains, and surrounded on the land side by a double wall, the most exterior of which is said to extend fifteen miles in circuit. The first object that strikes your eye at a distance, is a very elegant pharos, or lighthouse, built on the projection of a rock on the west side of the harbour, so very high, that, in a clear day, you may see it at the distance of thirty miles. Turning the light-house point, you find yourself close to the mole, which forms the harbour of Genoa. It is built at a great expence from each side of the bay, so as to form in the sea two long magnificent jettes. At the extremity of each is another smaller lanthorn. These moles are both provided with brass-cannon, and between them is the entrance into the harbour. But this is still so wide as to admit a great sea, which, when the wind blows hard from south and south-west, is very troublesome to the shipping. Within the mole there is a smaller harbour or wet dock, called Darsena, for the gallies of the republic. We passed through a considerable number of ships and vessels lying at anchor, and landing at the water-gate, repaired to an inn called La Croix de Malthe in the neighbourhood of the harbour. Here we met with such good entertainment as prepossessed us in favour of the interior parts of Italy, and contributed with other motives to detain us some days in this city. But I have detained you so long, that I believe you wish I may proceed no farther; and therefore I take my leave for the present, being very sincerely-- Yours. LETTER XXVI NICE, January 15, 1765. DEAR SIR,--It is not without reason that Genoa is called La superba. The city itself is very stately; and the nobles are very proud. Some few of them may be proud of their wealth: but, in general, their fortunes are very small. My friend Mr. R-- assured me that many Genoese noblemen had fortunes of half a million of livres per annum: but the truth is, the whole revenue of the state does not exceed this sum; and the livre of Genoa is but about nine pence sterling. There are about half a dozen of their nobles who have ten thousand a year: but the majority have not above a twentieth part of that sum. They live with great parsimony in their families; and wear nothing but black in public; so that their expences are but small. If a Genoese nobleman gives an entertainment once a quarter, he is said to live upon the fragments all the rest of the year. I was told that one of them lately treated his friends, and left the entertainment to the care of his son, who ordered a dish of fish that cost a zechine, which is equal to about ten shillings sterling. The old gentleman no sooner saw it appear on the table, than unable to suppress his concern, he burst into tears, and exclaimed, Ah Figliuolo indegno! Siamo in Rovina! Siamo in precipizio! Ah, Prodigal! ruined! undone! I think the pride or ostentation of the Italians in general takes a more laudable turn than that of other nations. A Frenchman lays out his whole revenue upon tawdry suits of cloaths, or in furnishing a magnificent repas of fifty or a hundred dishes, one half of which are not eatable nor intended to be eaten. His wardrobe goes to the fripier; his dishes to the dogs, and himself to the devil, and after his decease no vestige of him remains. A Genoese, on the other hand, keeps himself and his family at short allowance, that he may save money to build palaces and churches, which remain to after-ages so many monuments of his taste, piety, and munificence; and in the mean time give employment and bread to the poor and industrious. There are some Genoese nobles who have each five or six elegant palaces magnificently furnished, either in the city, or in different parts of the Riviera. The two streets called Strada Balbi and Strada Nuova, are continued double ranges of palaces adorned with gardens and fountains: but their being painted on the outside has, in my opinion, a poor effect. The commerce of this city is, at present, not very considerable; yet it has the face of business. The streets are crowded with people; the shops are well furnished; and the markets abound with all sorts of excellent provision. The wine made in this neighbourhood is, however, very indifferent; and all that is consumed must be bought at the public cantine, where it is sold for the benefit of the state. Their bread is the whitest and the best I have tasted any where; and the beef, which they have from Piedmont, is juicy and delicious. The expence of eating in Italy is nearly the same as in France, about three shillings a head for every meal. The state of Genoa is very poor, and their bank of St. George has received such rude shocks, first from the revolt of the Corsicans, and afterwards from the misfortunes of the city, when it was taken by the Austrians in the war of 1745, that it still continues to languish without any near prospect of its credit being restored. Nothing shews the weakness of their state, more than their having recourse to the assistance of France to put a stop to the progress of Paoli in Corsica; for after all that has been said of the gallantry and courage of Paoli and his islanders, I am very credibly informed that they might be very easily suppressed, if the Genoese had either vigour in the council or resolution in the field. True it is, they made a noble effort in expelling the Austrians who had taken possession of their city; but this effort was the effect of oppression and despair, and if I may believe the insinuations of some politicians in this part of the world, the Genoese would not have succeeded in that attempt, if they had not previously purchased with a large sum of money the connivance of the only person who could defeat the enterprize. For my own part, I can scarce entertain thoughts so prejudicial to the character of human nature, as to suppose a man capable of sacrificing to such a consideration, the duty he owed his prince, as well as all regard to the lives of his soldiers, even those who lay sick in hospitals, and who, being dragged forth, were miserably butchered by the furious populace. There is one more presumption of his innocence, he still retains the favour of his sovereign, who could not well be supposed to share in the booty. "There are mysteries in politics which were never dreamed of in our philosophy, Horatio!" The possession of Genoa might have proved a troublesome bone of contention, which it might be convenient to lose by accident. Certain it is, when the Austrians returned after their expulsion, in order to retake the city, the engineer, being questioned by the general, declared he would take the place in fifteen days, on pain of losing his head; and in four days after this declaration the Austrians retired. This anecdote I learned from a worthy gentleman of this country, who had it from the engineer's own mouth. Perhaps it was the will of heaven. You see how favourably, providence has interposed in behalf of the reigning empress of Russia, first in removing her husband: secondly in ordaining the assassination of prince Ivan, for which the perpetrators have been so liberally rewarded; it even seems determined to shorten the life of her own son, the only surviving rival from whom she had any thing to fear. The Genoese have now thrown themselves into the arms of France for protection: I know not whether it would not have been a greater mark of sagacity to cultivate the friendship of England, with which they carry on an advantageous commerce. While the English are masters of the Mediterranean, they will always have it in their power to do incredible damage all along the Riviera, to ruin the Genoese trade by sea, and even to annoy the capital; for notwithstanding all the pains they have taken to fortify the mole and the city, I am greatly deceived if it is not still exposed to the danger, not only of a bombardment, but even of a cannonade. I am even sanguine enough to think a resolute commander might, with a strong squadron, sail directly into the harbour, without sustaining much damage, notwithstanding all the cannon of the place, which are said to amount to near five hundred. I have seen a cannonade of above four hundred pieces of artillery, besides bombs and cohorns, maintained for many hours, without doing much mischief. During the last siege of Genoa, the French auxiliaries were obliged to wait at Monaco, until a gale of wind had driven the English squadron off the coast, and then they went along shore in small vessels at the imminent risque of being taken by the British cruisers. By land I apprehend their march would be altogether impracticable, if the king of Sardinia had any interest to oppose it. He might either guard the passes, or break up the road in twenty different places, so as to render it altogether impassable. Here it may not be amiss to observe, that when Don Philip advanced from Nice with his army to Genoa, he was obliged to march so close to the shore, that in above fifty different places, the English ships might have rendered the road altogether impassable. The path, which runs generally along the face of a precipice washed by the sea, is so narrow that two men on horseback can hardly pass each other; and the road itself so rugged, slippery, and dangerous, that the troopers were obliged to dismount, and lead their horses one by one. On the other hand, baron de Leutrum, who was at the head of a large body of Piedmontese troops, had it in his power to block up the passes of the mountains, and even to destroy this road in such a manner, that the enemy could not possibly advance. Why these precautions were not taken, I do not pretend to explain: neither can I tell you wherefore the prince of Monaco, who is a subject and partizan of France, was indulged with a neutrality for his town, which served as a refreshing-place, a safe port, and an intermediate post for the French succours sent from Marseilles to Genoa. This I will only venture to affirm, that the success and advantage of great alliances are often sacrificed to low, partial, selfish, and sordid considerations. The town of Monaco is commanded by every heighth in its neighbourhood; and might be laid in ashes by a bomb-ketch in four hours by sea. I was fortunate enough to be recommended to a lady in Genoa, who treated us with great politeness and hospitality. She introduced me to an abbate, a man of letters, whose conversation was extremely agreeable. He already knew me by reputation, and offered to make me known to some of the first persons in the republic, with whom he lived in intimacy. The lady is one of the most intelligent and best-bred persons I have known in any country. We assisted at her conversazione, which was numerous. She pressed us to pass the winter at Genoa; and indeed I was almost persuaded: but I had attachments at Nice, from which I could not easily disengage myself. The few days we staved at Genoa were employed in visiting the most remarkable churches and palaces. In some of the churches, particularly that of the Annunciata, I found a profusion of ornaments, which had more magnificence than taste. There is a great number of pictures; but very few of them are capital pieces. I had heard much of the ponte Carignano, which did not at all answer my expectation. It is a bridge that unites two eminences which form the higher part of the city, and the houses in the bottom below do not rise so high as the springing of its arches. There is nothing at all curious in its construction, nor any way remarkable, except the heighth of the piers from which the arches are sprung. Hard by the bridge there is an elegant church, from the top of which you have a very rich and extensive prospect of the city, the sea and the adjacent country, which looks like a continent of groves and villas. The only remarkable circumstance about the cathedral, which is Gothic and gloomy, is the chapel where the pretended bones of John the Baptist are deposited, and in which thirty silver lamps are continually burning. I had a curiosity to see the palaces of Durazzo and Doria, but it required more trouble to procure admission than I was willing to give myself: as for the arsenal, and the rostrum of an ancient galley which was found by accident in dragging the harbour, I postponed seeing them till my return. Having here provided myself with letters of credit for Florence and Rome, I hired the same boat which had brought us hither, to carry us forward to Lerici, which is a small town about half way between Genoa and Leghorn, where travellers, who are tired of the sea, take post-chaises to continue their route by land to Pisa and Florence. I payed three loui'dores for this voyage of about fifty miles; though I might have had a feluca for less money. When you land on the wharf at Genoa, you are plied by the feluca men just as you are plied by the watermen at Hungerford-stairs in London. They are always ready to set off at a minute's warning for Lerici, Leghorn, Nice, Antibes, Marseilles, and every part of the Riviera. The wind being still unfavourable, though the weather was delightful, we rowed along shore, passing by several pretty towns, villages, and a vast number of cassines, or little white houses, scattered among woods of olive-trees, that cover the hills; and these are the habitations of the velvet and damask weavers. Turning Capo Fino we entered a bay, where stand the towns of Porto Fino, Lavagna, and Sestri di Levante, at which last we took up our night's lodging. The house was tolerable, and we had no great reason to complain of the beds: but, the weather being hot, there was a very offensive smell, which proceeded from some skins of beasts new killed, that were spread to dry on an outhouse in the yard. Our landlord was a butcher, and had very much the looks of an assassin. His wife was a great masculine virago, who had all the air of having frequented the slaughter-house. Instead of being welcomed with looks of complaisance, we were admitted with a sort of gloomy condescension, which seemed to say, "We don't much like your company; but, however, you shall have a night's lodging in favour of the patron of the gondola, who is our acquaintance." In short, we had a very bad supper, miserably dressed, passed a very disagreeable night, and payed a very extravagant bill in the morning, without being thanked for our custom. I was very glad to get out of the house with my throat uncut. Sestri di Levante is a little town pleasantly situated on the seaside; but has not the conveniency of a harbour. The fish taken here is mostly carried to Genoa. This is likewise the market for their oil, and the paste called macaroni, of which they make a good quantity. Next day, we skirted a very barren coast, consisting of almost perpendicular rocks, on the faces of which, however, we saw many peasants' houses and hanging terraces for vines, made by dint of incredible labour. In the afternoon, we entered by the Porti di Venere into the bay, or gulf of Spetia or Spezza, which was the Portus Lunae of the ancients. This bay, at the mouth of which lies the island Palmaria, forms a most noble and secure harbour, capacious enough to contain all the navies in Christendom. The entrance on one side is defended by a small fort built above the town of Porto Venere, which is a very poor place. Farther in there is a battery of about twenty guns; and on the right hand, opposite to Porto Venere, is a block-house, founded on a rock in the sea. At the bottom of the bay is the town of Spetia on the left, and on the right that of Lerici, defended by a castle of very little strength or consequence. The whole bay is surrounded with plantations of olives and oranges, and makes a very delightful appearance. In case of a war, this would be an admirable station for a British squadron, as it lies so near Genoa and Leghorn; and has a double entrance, by means of which the cruisers could sail in and out continually, which way soever the wind might chance to sit. I am sure the fortifications would give very little disturbance. At the post-house in Lerici, the accommodation is intolerable. We were almost poisoned at supper. I found the place where I was to lie so close and confined, that I could not breathe in it, and therefore lay all night in an outward room upon four chairs, with a leather portmanteau for my pillow. For this entertainment I payed very near a loui'dore. Such bad accommodation is the less excusable, as the fellow has a great deal of business, this being a great thoroughfare for travellers going into Italy, or returning from thence. I might have saved some money by prosecuting my voyage directly by sea to Leghorn: but, by this time, we were all heartily tired of the water, the business then was to travel by land to Florence, by the way of Pisa, which is seven posts distant from Lerici. Those who have not their own carriage must either hire chaises to perform the whole journey, or travel by way of cambiatura, which is that of changing the chaises every post, as the custom is in England. In this case the great inconvenience arises from your being obliged to shift your baggage every post. The chaise or calesse of this country, is a wretched machine with two wheels, as uneasy as a common cart, being indeed no other than what we should call in England a very ill-contrived one-horse chair, narrow, naked, shattered and shabby. For this vehicle and two horses you pay at the rate of eight paoli a stage, or four shillings sterling; and the postilion expects two paoli for his gratification: so that every eight miles cost about five shillings, and four only, if you travel in your own carriage, as in that case you pay no more than at the rate of three paoli a horse. About three miles from Lerici, we crossed the Magra, which appeared as a rivulet almost dry, and in half a mile farther arrived at Sarzana, a small town at the extremity of the Genoese territories, where we changed horses. Then entering the principalities of Massa and Carrara, belonging to the duke of Modena, we passed Lavenza, which seems to be a decayed fort with a small garrison, and dined at Massa, which is an agreeable little town, where the old dutchess of Modena resides. Notwithstanding all the expedition we could make, it was dark before we passed the Cerchio, which is an inconsiderable stream in the neighbourhood of Pisa, where we arrived about eight in the evening. The country from Sarzana to the frontiers of Tuscany is a narrow plain, bounded on the right by the sea, and on the left by the Apennine mountains. It is well cultivated and inclosed, consisting of meadow-ground, corn fields, plantations of olives; and the trees that form the hedge-rows serve as so many props to the vines, which are twisted round them, and continued from one to another. After entering the dominions of Tuscany, we travelled through a noble forest of oak-trees of a considerable extent, which would have appeared much more agreeable, had we not been benighted and apprehensive of robbers. The last post but one in this days journey, is at the little town of Viareggio, a kind of sea-port on the Mediterranean, belonging to Lucia. The roads are indifferent, and the accommodation is execrable. I was glad to find myself housed in a very good inn at Pisa, where I promised myself a good night's rest, and was not disappointed. I heartily wish you the same pleasure, and am very sincerely--Yours. LETTER XXVII NICE, January 28, 1765. DEAR SIR,--Pisa is a fine old city that strikes you with the same veneration you would feel at sight of an antient temple which bears the marks of decay, without being absolutely dilapidated. The houses are well built, the streets open, straight, and well paved; the shops well furnished; and the markets well supplied: there are some elegant palaces, designed by great masters. The churches are built with taste, and tolerably ornamented. There is a beautiful wharf of freestone on each side of the river Arno, which runs through the city, and three bridges thrown over it, of which that in the middle is of marble, a pretty piece of architecture: but the number of inhabitants is very inconsiderable; and this very circumstance gives it an air of majestic solitude, which is far from being unpleasant to a man of a contemplative turn of mind. For my part, I cannot bear the tumult of a populous commercial city; and the solitude that reigns in Pisa would with me be a strong motive to choose it as a place of residence. Not that this would be the only inducement for living at Pisa. Here is some good company, and even a few men of taste and learning. The people in general are counted sociable and polite; and there is great plenty of provisions, at a very reasonable rate. At some distance from the more frequented parts of the city, a man may hire a large house for thirty crowns a year: but near the center, you cannot have good lodgings, ready furnished, for less than a scudo (about five shillings) a day. The air in summer is reckoned unwholesome by the exhalations arising from stagnant water in the neighbourhood of the city, which stands in the midst of a fertile plain, low and marshy: yet these marshes have been considerably drained, and the air is much meliorated. As for the Arno, it is no longer navigated by vessels of any burthen. The university of Pisa is very much decayed; and except the little business occasioned by the emperor's gallies, which are built in this town, [This is a mistake. No gallies have been built here for a great many years, and the dock is now converted into stables for the Grand Duke's Horse Guards.] I know of no commerce it carried on: perhaps the inhabitants live on the produce of the country, which consists of corn, wine, and cattle. They are supplied with excellent water for drinking, by an aqueduct consisting of above five thousand arches, begun by Cosmo, and finished by Ferdinand I. Grand-dukes of Tuscany; it conveys the water from the mountains at the distance of five miles. This noble city, formerly the capital of a flourishing and powerful republic, which contained above one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, within its walls, is now so desolate that grass grows in the open streets; and the number of its people do not exceed sixteen thousand. You need not doubt but I visited the Campanile, or hanging-tower, which is a beautiful cylinder of eight stories, each adorned with a round of columns, rising one above another. It stands by the cathedral, and inclines so far on one side from the perpendicular, that in dropping a plummet from the top, which is one hundred and eighty-eight feet high, it falls sixteen feet from the base. For my part, I should never have dreamed that this inclination proceeded from any other cause, than an accidental subsidence of the foundation on this side, if some connoisseurs had not taken great pains to prove it was done on purpose by the architect. Any person who has eyes may see that the pillars on that side are considerably sunk; and this is the case with the very threshold of the door by which you enter. I think it would have been a very preposterous ambition in the architects, to show how far they could deviate from the perpendicular in this construction; because in that particular any common mason could have rivalled them; [All the world knows that a Building with such Inclination may be carried up till a line drawn from the Centre of Gravity falls without the Circumference of the Base.] and if they really intended it as a specimen of their art, they should have shortened the pilasters on that side, so as to exhibit them intire, without the appearance of sinking. These leaning towers are not unfrequent in Italy; there is one at Bologna, another at Venice, a third betwixt Venice and Ferrara, and a fourth at Ravenna; and the inclination in all of them has been supposed owing to the foundations giving way on one side only. In the cathedral, which is a large Gothic pile, [This Edifice is not absolutely Gothic. It was built in the Twelfth Century after the Design of a Greek Architect from Constantinople, where by that time the art was much degenerated. The Pillars of Granite are mostly from the Islands of Ebba and Giglia on the coast of Tuscany, where those quarries were worked by the antient Romans. The Giullo, and the verde antico are very beautiful species of marble, yellow and green; the first, antiently called marmor numidicum, came from Africa; the other was found (according to Strabo) on the mons Taygetus in Lacedemonia: but, at present, neither the one nor the other is to be had except among the ruins of antiquity.] there is a great number of massy pillars of porphyry, granite, jasper, giullo, and verde antico, together with some good pictures and statues: but the greatest curiosity is that of the brass-gates, designed and executed by John of Bologna, representing, embossed in different compartments, the history of the Old and New Testament. I was so charmed with this work, that I could have stood a whole day to examine and admire it. In the Baptisterium, which stands opposite to this front, there are some beautiful marbles, particularly the font, and a pulpit, supported by the statues of different animals. Between the cathedral and this building, about one hundred paces on one side, is the famous burying-ground, called Campo Santo, from its being covered with earth brought from Jerusalem. It is an oblong square, surrounded by a very high wall, and always kept shut. Within-side there is a spacious corridore round the whole space, which is a noble walk for a contemplative philosopher. It is paved chiefly with flat grave-stones: the walls are painted in fresco by Ghiotto, Giottino, Stefano, Bennoti, Bufalmaco, and some others of his cotemporaries and disciples, who flourished immediately after the restoration of painting. The subjects are taken from the Bible. Though the manner is dry, the drawing incorrect, the design generally lame, and the colouring unnatural; yet there is merit in the expression: and the whole remains as a curious monument of the efforts made by this noble art immediately after her revival. [The History of Job by Giotto is much admired.] Here are some deceptions in perspective equally ingenious and pleasing; particularly the figures of certain animals, which exhibit exactly the same appearance, from whatever different points of view they are seen. One division of the burying-ground consists of a particular compost, which in nine days consumes the dead bodies to the bones: in all probability, it is no other than common earth mixed with quick-lime. At one corner of the corridore, there are the pictures of three bodies represented in the three different stages of putrefaction which they undergo when laid in this composition. At the end of the three first days, the body is bloated and swelled, and the features are enlarged and distorted to such a degree, as fills the spectator with horror. At the sixth day, the swelling is subsided, and all the muscular flesh hangs loosened from the bones: at the ninth, nothing but the skeleton remains. There is a small neat chapel at one end of the Campo Santo, with some tombs, on one of which is a beautiful bust by Buona Roti. [Here is a sumptuous cenotaph erected by Pope Gregory XIII. to the memory of his brother Giovanni Buoncampagni. It is called the Monumentum Gregorianum, of a violet-coloured marble from Scravezza in this neighbourhood, adorned with a couple of columns of Touchstone, and two beautiful spherical plates of Alabaster.] At the other end of the corridore, there is a range of antient sepulchral stones ornamented with basso-relievo brought hither from different parts by the Pisan Fleets in the course of their expeditions. I was struck with the figure of a woman lying dead on a tomb-stone, covered with a piece of thin drapery, so delicately cut as to shew all the flexures of the attitude, and even all the swellings and sinuosities of the muscles. Instead of stone, it looks like a sheet of wet linen. [One of these antiquities representing the Hunting of Meleager was converted into a coffin for the Countess Beatrice, mother of the famous Countess Mathilda; it is now fixed to the outside of the church wall just by one of the doors, and is a very elegant piece of sculpture. Near the same place is a fine pillar of Porphyry supporting the figure of a Lion, and a kind of urn which seems to be a Sarcophagus, though an inscription round the Base declares it is a Talentum in which the antient Pisans measured the Census or Tax which they payed to Augustus: but in what metal or specie this Census was payed we are left to divine. There are likewise in the Campo Santo two antique Latin edicts of the Pisan Senate injoining the citizens to go into mourning for the Death of Caius and Lucius Caesar the Sons of Agrippa, and heirs declared of the Emperor. Fronting this Cemetery, on the other side of the Piazza of the Dome, is a large, elegant Hospital in which the sick are conveniently and comfortably lodged, entertained, and attended.] For four zechines I hired a return-coach and four from Pisa to Florence. This road, which lies along the Arno, is very good; and the country is delightful, variegated with hill and vale, wood and water, meadows and corn-fields, planted and inclosed like the counties of Middlesex and Hampshire; with this difference, however, that all the trees in this tract were covered with vines, and the ripe clusters black and white, hung down from every bough in a most luxuriant and romantic abundance. The vines in this country are not planted in rows, and propped with sticks, as in France and the county of Nice, but twine around the hedge-row trees, which they almost quite cover with their foliage and fruit. The branches of the vine are extended from tree to tree, exhibiting beautiful festoons of real leaves, tendrils, and swelling clusters a foot long. By this oeconomy the ground of the inclosure is spared for corn, grass, or any other production. The trees commonly planted for the purpose of sustaining the vines, are maple, elm, and aller, with which last the banks of the Arno abound. [It would have been still more for the advantage of the Country and the Prospect, if instead of these they had planted fruit trees for the purpose.] This river, which is very inconsiderable with respect to the quantity of water, would be a charming pastoral stream, if it was transparent; but it is always muddy and discoloured. About ten or a dozen miles below Florence, there are some marble quarries on the side of it, from whence the blocks are conveyed in boats, when there is water enough in the river to float them, that is after heavy rains, or the melting of the snow upon the mountains of Umbria, being part of the Apennines, from whence it takes its rise. Florence is a noble city, that still retains all the marks of a majestic capital, such as piazzas, palaces, fountains, bridges, statues, and arcades. I need not tell you that the churches here are magnificent, and adorned not only with pillars of oriental granite, porphyry, Jasper, verde antico, and other precious stones; but also with capital pieces of painting by the most eminent masters. Several of these churches, however, stand without fronts, for want of money to complete the plans. It may also appear superfluous to mention my having viewed the famous gallery of antiquities, the chapel of St. Lorenzo, the palace of Pitti, the cathedral, the baptisterium, Ponte de Trinita, with its statues, the triumphal arch, and every thing which is commonly visited in this metropolis. But all these objects having been circumstantially described by twenty different authors of travels, I shall not trouble you with a repetition of trite observations. That part of the city which stands on each side of the river, makes a very elegant appearance, to which the four bridges and the stone-quay between them, contribute in a great measure. I lodged at the widow Vanini's, an English house delightfully situated in this quarter. The landlady, who is herself a native of England, we found very obliging. The lodging-rooms are comfortable; and the entertainment is good and reasonable. There is a considerable number of fashionable people at Florence, and many of them in good circumstances. They affect a gaiety in their dress, equipage, and conversation; but stand very much on their punctilio with strangers; and will not, without great reluctance, admit into their assemblies any lady of another country, whose noblesse is not ascertained by a title. This reserve is in some measure excusable among a people who are extremely ignorant of foreign customs, and who know that in their own country, every person, even the most insignificant, who has any pretensions to family, either inherits, or assumes the title of principe, conte, or marchese. With all their pride, however, the nobles of Florence are humble enough to enter into partnership with shop-keepers, and even to sell wine by retail. It is an undoubted fact, that in every palace or great house in this city, there is a little window fronting the street, provided with an iron-knocker, and over it hangs an empty flask, by way of sign-post. Thither you send your servant to buy a bottle of wine. He knocks at the little wicket, which is opened immediately by a domestic, who supplies him with what he wants, and receives the money like the waiter of any other cabaret. It is pretty extraordinary, that it should not be deemed a disparagement in a nobleman to sell half a pound of figs, or a palm of ribbon or tape, or to take money for a flask of sour wine; and yet be counted infamous to match his daughter in the family of a person who has distinguished himself in any one of the learned professions. Though Florence be tolerably populous, there seems to be very little trade of any kind in it: but the inhabitants flatter themselves with the prospect of reaping great advantage from the residence of one of the arch-dukes, for whose reception they are now repairing the palace of Pitti. I know not what the revenues of Tuscany may amount to, since the succession of the princes of Lorraine; but, under the last dukes of the Medici family, they were said to produce two millions of crowns, equal to five hundred thousand pounds sterling. These arose from a very heavy tax upon land and houses, the portions of maidens, and suits at law, besides the duties upon traffick, a severe gabelle upon the necessaries of life, and a toll upon every eatable entered into this capital. If we may believe Leti, the grand duke was then able to raise and maintain an army of forty thousand infantry, and three thousand horse; with twelve gallies, two galeasses, and twenty ships of war. I question if Tuscany can maintain at present above one half of such an armament. He that now commands the emperor's navy, consisting of a few frigates, is an Englishman, called Acton, who was heretofore captain of a ship in our East India company's service. He has lately embraced the catholic religion, and been created admiral of Tuscany. There is a tolerable opera in Florence for the entertainment of the best company, though they do not seem very attentive to the musick. Italy is certainly the native country of this art; and yet, I do not find the people in general either more musically inclined, or better provided with ears than their neighbours. Here is also a wretched troop of comedians for the burgeois, and lower class of people: but what seems most to suit the taste of all ranks, is the exhibition of church pageantry. I had occasion to see a procession, where all the noblesse of the city attended in their coaches, which filled the whole length of the great street called the Corso. It was the anniversary of a charitable institution in favour of poor maidens, a certain number of whom are portioned every year. About two hundred of these virgins walked in procession, two and two together, cloathed in violet-coloured wide gowns, with white veils on their heads, and made a very classical appearance. They were preceded and followed by an irregular mob of penitents in sack-cloth, with lighted tapers, and monks carrying crucifixes, bawling and bellowing the litanies: but the great object was a figure of the Virgin Mary, as big as the life, standing within a gilt frame, dressed in a gold stuff, with a large hoop, a great quantity of false jewels, her face painted and patched, and her hair frizzled and curled in the very extremity of the fashion. Very little regard had been paid to the image of our Saviour on the cross; but when his lady-mother appeared on the shoulders of three or four lusty friars, the whole populace fell upon their knees in the dirt. This extraordinary veneration paid to the Virgin, must have been derived originally from the French, who pique themselves on their gallantry to the fair sex. Amidst all the scenery of the Roman catholic religion, I have never yet seen any of the spectators affected at heart, or discover the least signs of fanaticism. The very disciplinants, who scourge themselves in the Holy-week, are generally peasants or parties hired for the purpose. Those of the confrairies, who have an ambition to distinguish themselves on such occasions, take care to secure their backs from the smart, by means of secret armour, either women's boddice, or quilted jackets. The confrairies are fraternities of devotees, who inlist themselves under the banners of particular saints. On days of procession they appear in a body dressed as penitents and masked, and distinguished by crosses on their habits. There is scarce an individual, whether noble or plebeian, who does not belong to one of these associations, which may be compared to the FreeMasons, Gregoreans, and Antigallicans of England. Just without one of the gates of Florence, there is a triumphal arch erected on occasion of the late emperor's making his public entry, when he succeeded to the dukedom of Tuscany: and herein the summer evenings, the quality resort to take the air in their coaches. Every carriage stops, and forms a little separate conversazione. The ladies sit within, and the cicisbei stand on the foot-boards, on each side of the coach, entertaining them with their discourse. It would be no unpleasant inquiry to trace this sort of gallantry to its original, and investigate all its progress. The Italians, having been accused of jealousy, were resolved to wipe off the reproach, and, seeking to avoid it for the future, have run into the other extreme. I know it is generally supposed that the custom of choosing cicisbei, was calculated to prevent the extinction of families, which would otherwise often happen in consequence of marriages founded upon interest, without any mutual affection in the contracting parties. How far this political consideration may have weighed against the jealous and vindictive temper of the Italians, I will not pretend to judge: but, certain it is, every married lady in this country has her cicisbeo, or servente, who attends her every where, and on all occasions; and upon whose privileges the husband dares not encroach, without incurring the censure and ridicule of the whole community. For my part, I would rather be condemned for life to the gallies, than exercise the office of a cicisbeo, exposed to the intolerable caprices and dangerous resentment of an Italian virago. I pretend not to judge of the national character, from my own observation: but, if the portraits drawn by Goldoni in his Comedies are taken from nature, I would not hesitate to pronounce the Italian women the most haughty, insolent, capricious, and revengeful females on the face of the earth. Indeed their resentments are so cruelly implacable, and contain such a mixture of perfidy, that, in my opinion, they are very unfit subjects for comedy, whose province it is, rather to ridicule folly than to stigmatize such atrocious vice. You have often heard it said, that the purity of the Italian is to be found in the lingua Toscana, and bocca Romana. Certain it is, the pronunciation of the Tuscans is disagreeably guttural: the letters C and G they pronounce with an aspiration, which hurts the ear of an Englishman; and is I think rather rougher than that of the X, in Spanish. It sounds as if the speaker had lost his palate. I really imagined the first man I heard speak in Pisa, had met with that misfortune in the course of his amours. One of the greatest curiosities you meet with in Italy, is the Improvisatore; such is the name given to certain individuals, who have the surprising talent of reciting verses extempore, on any subject you propose. Mr. Corvesi, my landlord, has a son, a Franciscan friar, who is a great genius in this way. When the subject is given, his brother tunes his violin to accompany him, and he begins to rehearse in recitative, with wonderful fluency and precision. Thus he will, at a minute's warning, recite two or three hundred verses, well turned, and well adapted, and generally mingled with an elegant compliment to the company. The Italians are so fond of poetry, that many of them, have the best part of Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrarch, by heart; and these are the great sources from which the Improvisatori draw their rhimes, cadence, and turns of expression. But, lest you should think there is neither rhime nor reason in protracting this tedious epistle, I shall conclude it with the old burden of my song, that I am always--Your affectionate humble servant. LETTER XXVIII NICE, February 5, 1765. DEAR SIR,--Your entertaining letter of the fifth of last month, was a very charitable and a very agreeable donation: but your suspicion is groundless. I assure you, upon my honour, I have no share whatever in any of the disputes which agitate the public: nor do I know any thing of your political transactions, except what I casually see in one of your newspapers, with the perusal of which I am sometimes favoured by our consul at Villefranche. You insist upon my being more particular in my remarks on what I saw at Florence, and I shall obey the injunction. The famous gallery which contains the antiquities, is the third story of a noble stone-edifice, built in the form of the Greek Pi, the upper part fronting the river Arno, and one of the legs adjoining to the ducal-palace, where the courts of justice are held. As the house of Medici had for some centuries resided in the palace of Pitti, situated on the other side of the river, a full mile from these tribunals, the architect Vasari, who planned the new edifice, at the same time contrived a corridore, or covered passage, extending from the palace of Pitti along one of the bridges, to the gallery of curiosities, through which the grand-duke passed unseen, when he was disposed either to amuse himself with his antiquities, or to assist at his courts of judicature: but there is nothing very extraordinary either in the contrivance or execution of this corridore. If I resided in Florence I would give something extraordinary for permission to walk every day in the gallery, which I should much prefer to the Lycaeum, the groves of Academus, or any porch or philosophical alley in Athens or in Rome. Here by viewing the statues and busts ranged on each side, I should become acquainted with the faces of all the remarkable personages, male and female, of antiquity, and even be able to trace their different characters from the expression of their features. This collection is a most excellent commentary upon the Roman historians, particularly Suetonius and Dion Cassius. There was one circumstance that struck me in viewing the busts of Caracalla, both here and in the Capitol at Rome; there was a certain ferocity in the eyes, which seemed to contradict the sweetness of the other features, and remarkably justified the epithet Caracuyl, by which he was distinguished by the antient inhabitants of North-Britain. In the language of the Highlanders caracuyl signifies cruel eye, as we are given to understand by the ingenious editor of Fingal, who seems to think that Caracalla is no other than the Celtic word, adapted to the pronunciation of the Romans: but the truth is, Caracalla was the name of a Gaulish vestment, which this prince affected to wear; and hence he derived that surname. The Caracuyl of the Britons, is the same as the upodra idon of the Greeks, which Homer has so often applied to his Scolding Heroes. I like the Bacchanalian, chiefly for the fine drapery. The wind, occasioned by her motion, seems to have swelled and raised it from the parts of the body which it covers. There is another gay Bacchanalian, in the attitude of dancing, crowned with ivy, holding in her right hand a bunch of grapes, and in her left the thyrsus. The head of the celebrated Flora is very beautiful: the groupe of Cupid and Psyche, however, did not give me all the pleasure I expected from it. Of all the marbles that appear in the open gallery, the following are those I most admire. Leda with the Swan; as for Jupiter, in this transformation, he has much the appearance of a goose. I have not seen any thing tamer; but the sculptor has admirably shewn his art in representing Leda's hand partly hid among the feathers, which are so lightly touched off, that the very shape of the fingers are seen underneath. The statue of a youth, supposed to be Ganymede, is compared by the connoisseurs to the celebrated Venus, and as far as I can judge, not without reason: it is however, rather agreeable than striking, and will please a connoisseur much more than a common spectator. I know not whether it is my regard to the faculty that inhances the value of the noted Esculapius, who appears with a venerable beard of delicate workmanship. He is larger than the life, cloathed in a magnificent pallium, his left arm resting on a knotted staff, round which the snake is twined according to Ovid. Hunc modo serpentem baculum qui nexibus ambit Perspice-- Behold the snake his mystic Rod intwine. He has in his hand the fascia herbarum, and the crepidae on his feet. There is a wild-boar represented lying on one side, which I admire as a master-piece. The savageness of his appearance is finely contrasted with the case and indolence of the attitude. Were I to meet with a living boar lying with the same expression, I should be tempted to stroke his bristles. Here is an elegant bust of Antinous, the favourite of Adrian; and a beautiful head of Alexander the Great, turned on one side, with an expression of languishment and anxiety in his countenance. The virtuosi are not agreed about the circumstance in which he is represented; whether fainting with the loss of blood which he suffered in his adventure at Oxydrace; or languishing with the fever contracted by bathing in the Cydnus; or finally complaining to his father Jove, that there were no other worlds for him to conquer. The kneeling Narcissus is a striking figure, and the expression admirable. The two Bacchi are perfectly well executed; but (to my shame be it spoken) I prefer to the antique that which is the work of Michael Angelo Buonaroti, concerning which the story is told which you well know. The artist having been blamed by some pretended connoisseurs, for not imitating the manner of the ancients, is said to have privately finished this Bacchus, and buried it, after having broke off an arm, which he kept as a voucher. The statue, being dug up by accident, was allowed by the best judges, to be a perfect antique; upon which Buonaroti produced the arm, and claimed his own work. Bianchi looks upon this as a fable; but owns that Vasari tells such another of a child cut in marble by the same artist, which being carried to Rome, and kept for some time under ground, was dug up as an antique, and sold for a great deal of money. I was likewise attracted by the Morpheus in touchstone, which is described by Addison, who, by the bye, notwithstanding all his taste, has been convicted by Bianchi of several gross blunders in his account of this gallery. With respect to the famous Venus Pontia, commonly called de Medicis, which was found at Tivoli, and is kept in a separate apartment called the Tribuna, I believe I ought to be intirely silent, or at least conceal my real sentiments, which will otherwise appear equally absurd and presumptuous. It must be want of taste that prevents my feeling that enthusiastic admiration with which others are inspired at sight of this statue: a statue which in reputation equals that of Cupid by Praxiteles, which brought such a concourse of strangers of old to the little town of Thespiae. I cannot help thinking that there is no beauty in the features of Venus; and that the attitude is aukward and out of character. It is a bad plea to urge that the antients and we differ in the ideas of beauty. We know the contrary, from their medals, busts, and historians. Without all doubt, the limbs and proportions of this statue are elegantly formed, and accurately designed, according to the nicest rules of symmetry and proportion; and the back parts especially are executed so happily, as to excite the admiration of the most indifferent spectator. One cannot help thinking it is the very Venus of Cnidos by Praxiteles, which Lucian describes. "Hercle quanta dorsi concinnitas! ut exuberantes lumbi amplexantes manus implent! quam scite circumductae clunium pulpae in se rotundantur, neque tenues nimis ipsis ossibus adstrictae, neque in immensam effusae Pinguedinem!" That the statue thus described was not the Venus de Medicis, would appear from the Greek inscription on the base, KLEOMENIS APPOLLODOROI ATHINAIOS EPOESEI. Cleomenes filius Apollodori fecit; did we not know that this inscription is counted spurious, and that instead of EPOESEI, it should be EPOIESE. This, however, is but a frivolous objection, as we have seen many inscriptions undoubtedly antique, in which the orthography is false, either from the ignorance or carelessness of the sculptor. Others suppose, not without reason, that this statue is a representation of the famous Phryne, the courtesan of Athens, who at the celebration of the Eleusinian games, exhibited herself coming out of the bath, naked, to the eyes of the whole Athenian people. I was much pleased with the dancing faun; and still better with the Lotti, or wrestlers, the attitudes of which are beautifully contrived to shew the different turns of the limbs, and the swelling of the muscles: but, what pleased me best of all the statues in the Tribuna was the Arrotino, commonly called the Whetter, and generally supposed to represent a slave, who in the act of whetting a knife, overhears the conspiracy of Catiline. You know he is represented on one knee; and certain it is, I never saw such an expression of anxious attention, as appears in his countenance. But it is not mingled with any marks of surprise, such as could not fail to lay hold on a man who overhears by accident a conspiracy against the state. The marquis de Maffei has justly observed that Sallust, in his very circumstantial detail of that conspiracy, makes no mention of any such discovery. Neither does it appear that the figure is in the act of whetting, the stone which he holds in one hand being rough and unequal no ways resembling a whetstone. Others alledge it represents Milico, the freedman of Scaevinus, who conspired against the life of Nero, and gave his poignard to be whetted to Milico, who presented it to the emperor, with an account of the conspiracy: but the attitude and expression will by no means admit of this interpretation. Bianchi, [This antiquarian is now imprisoned for Life, for having robbed the Gallery and then set it on fire.] who shows the gallery, thinks the statue represents the augur Attius Navius, who cut a stone with a knife, at the command of Tarquinius Priscus. This conjecture seems to be confirmed by a medallion of Antoninus Pius, inserted by Vaillant among his Numismata Prestantiora, on which is delineated nearly such a figure as this in question, with the following legend. "Attius Navius genuflexus ante Tarquinium Priscum cotem cultro discidit." He owns indeed that in the statue, the augur is not distinguished either by his habit or emblems; and he might have added, neither is the stone a cotes. For my own part, I think neither of these three opinions is satisfactory, though the last is very ingenious. Perhaps the figure allude to a private incident, which never was recorded in any history. Among the great number of pictures in this Tribuna, I was most charmed with the Venus by Titian, which has a sweetness of expression and tenderness of colouring, not to be described. In this apartment, they reckon three hundred pieces, the greatest part by the best masters, particularly by Raphael, in the three manners by which he distinguished himself at different periods of his life. As for the celebrated statue of the hermaphrodite, which we find in another room, I give the sculptor credit for his ingenuity in mingling the sexes in the composition; but it is, at best, no other than a monster in nature, which I never had any pleasure in viewing: nor, indeed, do I think there was much talent required in representing a figure with the head and breasts of a woman, and all the other parts of the body masculine. There is such a profusion of curiosities in this celebrated musaeum; statues, busts, pictures, medals, tables inlaid in the way of marquetry, cabinets adorned with precious stones, jewels of all sorts, mathematical instruments, antient arms and military machines, that the imagination is bewildered, and a stranger of a visionary turn, would be apt to fancy himself in a palace of the fairies, raised and adorned by the power of inchantment. In one of the detached apartments, I saw the antependium of the altar, designed for the famous chapel of St. Lorenzo. It is a curious piece of architecture, inlaid with coloured marble and precious stones, so as to represent an infinite variety of natural objects. It is adorned with some crystal pillars, with capitals of beaten gold. The second story of the building is occupied by a great number of artists employed in this very curious work of marquetry, representing figures with gems and different kinds of coloured marble, for the use of the emperor. The Italians call it pietre commesse, a sort of inlaying with stones, analogous to the fineering of cabinets in wood. It is peculiar to Florence, and seems to be still more curious than the Mosaic work, which the Romans have brought to great perfection. The cathedral of Florence is a great Gothic building, encrusted on the outside with marble; it is remarkable for nothing but its cupola, which is said to have been copied by the architect of St. Peter's at Rome, and for its size, which is much greater than that of any other church in Christendom. [In this cathedral is the Tomb of Johannes Acutus Anglus, which a man would naturally interpret as John Sharp; but his name was really Hawkwood, which the Italians have corrupted into Acut. He was a celebrated General or Condottiere who arrived in Italy at the head of four thousand soldiers of fortune, mostly Englishmen who had served with him in the army of King Edward III., and were dismissed at the Peace of Bontigny. Hawkwood greatly distinguished himself in Italy by his valour and conduct, and died a very old man in the Florentine service. He was the son of a Tanner in Essex, and had been put apprentice to a Taylor.] The baptistery, which stands by it, was an antient temple, said to be dedicated to Mars. There are some good statues of marble within; and one or two of bronze on the outside of the doors; but it is chiefly celebrated for the embossed work of its brass gates, by Lorenzo Ghiberti, which Buonaroti used to say, deserved to be made the gates of Paradise. I viewed them with pleasure: but still I retained a greater veneration for those of Pisa, which I had first admired: a preference which either arises from want of taste, or from the charm of novelty, by which the former were recommended to my attention. Those who would have a particular detail of every thing worth seeing at Florence, comprehending churches, libraries, palaces, tombs, statues, pictures, fountains, bridge, etc. may consult Keysler, who is so laboriously circumstantial in his descriptions, that I never could peruse them, without suffering the headache, and recollecting the old observation, that the German genius lies more in the back than in the brain. I was much disappointed in the chapel of St. Lorenzo. Notwithstanding the great profusion of granite, porphyry, jasper, verde antico, lapis-lazuli, and other precious stones, representing figures in the way of marquetry, I think the whole has a gloomy effect. These pietre commesse are better calculated for cabinets, than for ornaments to great buildings, which ought to be large masses proportioned to the greatness of the edifice. The compartments are so small, that they produce no effect in giving the first impression when one enters the place; except to give an air of littleness to the whole, just as if a grand saloon was covered with pictures painted in miniature. If they have as little regard to proportion and perspective, when they paint the dome, which is not yet finished, this chapel will, in my opinion, remain a monument of ill taste and extravagance. The court of the palace of Pitti is formed by three sides of an elegant square, with arcades all round, like the palace of Holyrood house at Edinburgh; and the rustic work, which constitutes the lower part of the building, gives it an air of strength and magnificence. In this court, there is a fine fountain, in which the water trickles down from above; and here is also an admirable antique statue of Hercules, inscribed LUSIPPOI ERGON, the work of Lysippus. The apartments of this palace are generally small, and many of them dark. Among the paintings the most remarkable is the Madonna de la Seggiola, by Raphael, counted one of the best coloured pieces of that great master. If I was allowed to find fault with the performance, I should pronounce it defective in dignity and sentiment. It is the expression of a peasant rather than of the mother of God. She exhibits the fondness and joy of a young woman towards her firstborn son, without that rapture of admiration which we expect to find in the Virgin Mary, while she contemplates, in the fruit of her own womb, the Saviour of mankind. In other respects, it is a fine figure, gay, agreeable, and very expressive of maternal tenderness; and the bambino is extremely beautiful. There was an English painter employed in copying this picture, and what he had done was executed with great success. I am one of those who think it very possible to imitate the best pieces in such a manner, that even the connoisseurs shall not be able to distinguish the original from the copy. After all, I do not set up for a judge in these matters, and very likely I may incur the ridicule of the virtuosi for the remarks I have made: but I am used to speak my mind freely on all subjects that fall under the cognizance of my senses; though I must as freely own, there is something more than common sense required to discover and distinguish the more delicate beauties of painting. I can safely say, however, that without any daubing at all, I am, very sincerely--Your affectionate humble servant. LETTER XXIX NICE, February 20, 1765. DEAR SIR,--Having seen all the curiosities of Florence, and hired a good travelling coach for seven weeks, at the price of seven zequines, something less than three guineas and a half, we set out post for Rome, by the way of Sienna, where we lay the first night. The country through which we passed is mountainous but agreeable. Of Sienna I can say nothing from my own observation, but that we were indifferently lodged in a house that stunk like a privy, and fared wretchedly at supper. The city is large and well built: the inhabitants pique themselves upon their politeness, and the purity of their dialect. Certain it is, some strangers reside in this place on purpose to learn the best pronunciation of the Italian tongue. The Mosaic pavement of their duomo, or cathedral, has been much admired; as well as the history of Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards pope Pius II., painted on the walls of the library, partly by Pietro Perugino, and partly by his pupil Raphael D'Urbino. Next day, at Buon Convento, where the emperor Henry VII. was poisoned by a friar with the sacramental wafer, I refused to give money to the hostler, who in revenge put two young unbroke stone-horses in the traces next to the coach, which became so unruly, that before we had gone a quarter of a mile, they and the postilion were rolling in the dust. In this situation they made such efforts to disengage themselves, and kicked with such violence, that I imagined the carriage and all our trunks would have been beaten in pieces. We leaped out of the coach, however, without sustaining any personal damage, except the fright; nor was any hurt done to the vehicle. But the horses were terribly bruised, and almost strangled, before they could be disengaged. Exasperated at the villany of the hostler, I resolved to make a complaint to the uffiziale or magistrate of the place. I found him wrapped in an old, greasy, ragged, great-coat, sitting in a wretched apartment, without either glass, paper, or boards in the windows; and there was no sort of furniture but a couple of broken chairs and a miserable truckle-bed. He looked pale, and meagre, and had more the air of a half-starved prisoner than of a magistrate. Having heard my complaint, he came forth into a kind of outward room or bellfrey, and rung a great bell with his own hand. In consequence of this signal, the postmaster came up stairs, and I suppose he was the first man in the place, for the uffiziale stood before him cap-in-hand, and with great marks of humble respect repeated the complaint I had made. This man assured me, with an air of conscious importance, that he himself had ordered the hostler to supply me with those very horses, which were the best in his stable; and that the misfortune which happened was owing to the misconduct of the fore-postilion, who did not keep the fore-horses to a proper speed proportioned to the mettle of the other two. As he took the affair upon himself, and I perceived had an ascendancy over the magistrate, I contented myself with saying, I was certain the two horses had been put to the coach on purpose, either to hurt or frighten us; and that since I could not have justice here I would make a formal complaint to the British minister at Florence. In passing through the street to the coach, which was by this time furnished with fresh horses, I met the hostler, and would have caned him heartily; but perceiving my intention, he took to his heels and vanished. Of all the people I have ever seen, the hostlers, postilions, and other fellows hanging about the post-houses in Italy, are the most greedy, impertinent, and provoking. Happy are those travellers who have phlegm enough to disregard their insolence and importunity: for this is not so disagreeable as their revenge is dangerous. An English gentleman at Florence told me, that one of those fellows, whom he had struck for his impertinence, flew at him with a long knife, and he could hardly keep him at sword's point. All of them wear such knives, and are very apt to use them on the slightest provocation. But their open attacks are not so formidable as their premeditated schemes of revenge; in the prosecution of which the Italians are equally treacherous and cruel. This night we passed at a place called Radicofani, a village and fort, situated on the top of a very high mountain. The inn stands still lower than the town. It was built at the expence of the last grand-duke of Tuscany; is very large, very cold, and uncomfortable. One would imagine it was contrived for coolness, though situated so high, that even in the midst of summer, a traveller would be glad to have a fire in his chamber. But few, or none of them have fireplaces, and there is not a bed with curtains or tester in the house. All the adjacent country is naked and barren. On the third day we entered the pope's territories, some parts of which are delightful. Having passed Aqua-Pendente, a beggarly town, situated on the top of a rock, from whence there is a romantic cascade of water, which gives it the name, we travelled along the side of the lake Bolsena, a beautiful piece of water about thirty miles in circuit, with two islands in the middle, the banks covered with noble plantations of oak and cypress. The town of Bolsena standing near the ruins of the antient Volsinium, which was the birth-place of Sejanus, is a paultry village; and Montefiascone, famous for its wine, is a poor, decayed town in this neighbourhood, situated on the side of a hill, which, according to the author of the Grand Tour, the only directory I had along with me, is supposed to be the Soracte of the ancients. If we may believe Horace, Soracte was visible from Rome: for, in his ninth ode, addressed to Thaliarchus, he says, Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte-- You see how deeply wreathed with snow Soracte lifts his hoary head, but, in order to see Montefiascone, his eyesight must have penetrated through the Mons Cyminus, at the foot of which now stands the city of Viterbo. Pliny tells us, that Soracte was not far from Rome, haud procul ab urbe Roma; but Montefiascone is fifty miles from this city. And Desprez, in his notes upon Horace, says it is now called Monte S. Oreste. Addison tells us he passed by it in the Campania. I could not without indignation reflect upon the bigotry of Mathilda, who gave this fine country to the see of Rome, under the dominion of which no country was ever known to prosper. About half way between Montefiascone and Viterbo, one of our fore-wheels flew off, together with a large splinter of the axle-tree; and if one of the postilions had not by great accident been a remarkably ingenious fellow, we should have been put to the greatest inconvenience, as there was no town, or even house, within several miles. I mention this circumstance, by way of warning to other travellers, that they may provide themselves with a hammer and nails, a spare iron-pin or two, a large knife, and bladder of grease, to be used occasionally in case of such misfortune. The mountain of Viterbo is covered with beautiful plantations and villas belonging to the Roman nobility, who come hither to make the villegiatura in summer. Of the city of Viterbo I shall say nothing, but that it is the capital of that country which Mathilda gave to the Roman see. The place is well built, adorned with public fountains, and a great number of churches and convents; yet far from being populous, the whole number of inhabitants, not exceeding fifteen thousand. The post-house is one of the worst inns I ever entered. After having passed this mountain, the Cyminus of the antients, we skirted part of the lake, which is now called de Vico, and whose banks afford the most agreeable rural prospects of hill and vale, wood, glade and water, shade and sun-shine. A few other very inconsiderable places we passed, and descended into the Campania of Rome, which is almost a desert. The view of this country in its present situation, cannot but produce emotions of pity and indignation in the mind of every person who retains any idea of its antient cultivation and fertility. It is nothing but a naked withered down, desolate and dreary, almost without inclosure, corn-field, hedge, tree, shrub, house, hut, or habitation; exhibiting here and there the ruins of an antient castellum, tomb, or temple, and in some places the remains of a Roman via. I had heard much of these antient pavements, and was greatly disappointed when I saw them. The Via Cassia or Cymina is paved with broad, solid, flint-stones, which must have greatly incommoded the feet of horses that travelled upon it as well as endangered the lives of the riders from the slipperiness of the pavement: besides, it is so narrow that two modern carriages could not pass one another upon it, without the most imminent hazard of being overturned. I am still of opinion that we excel the ancient Romans in understanding the conveniences of life. The Grand Tour says, that within four miles of Rome you see a tomb on the roadside, said to be that of Nero, with sculpture in basso-relievo at both ends. I did see such a thing more like a common grave-stone, than the tomb of an emperor. But we are informed by Suetonius, that the dead body of Nero, who slew himself at the villa of his freedman, was by the care of his two nurses and his concubine Atta, removed to the sepulchre of the Gens Domitia, immediately within the Porta del Popolo, on your left hand as you enter Rome, precisely on the spot where now stands the church of S. Maria del Popolo. His tomb was even distinguished by an epitaph, which has been preserved by Gruterus. Giacomo Alberici tells us very gravely in his History of the Church, that a great number of devils, who guarded the bones of this wicked emperor, took possession, in the shape of black ravens, of a walnut-tree, which grew upon the spot; from whence they insulted every passenger, until pope Paschal II., in consequence of a solemn fast and a revelation, went thither in procession with his court and cardinals, cut down the tree, and burned it to ashes, which, with the bones of Nero, were thrown into the Tyber: then he consecrated an altar on the place, where afterwards the church was built. You may guess what I felt at first sight of the city of Rome, which, notwithstanding all the calamities it has undergone, still maintains an august and imperial appearance. It stands on the farther side of the Tyber, which we crossed at the Ponte Molle, formerly called Pons Milvius, about two miles from the gate by which we entered. This bridge was built by Aemilius Censor, whose name it originally bore. It was the road by which so many heroes returned with conquest to their country; by which so many kings were led captive to Rome; and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms and states approached the seat of empire, to deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman people. It is likewise famous for the defeat and death of Maxentius, who was here overcome by Constantine the Great. The space between the bridge and Porta del Popolo, on the right-hand, which is now taken up with gardens and villas, was part of the antient Campus Martius, where the comitiae were held; and where the Roman people inured themselves to all manner of exercises: it was adorned with porticos, temples, theatres, baths, circi, basilicae, obelisks, columns, statues, and groves. Authors differ in their opinions about the extent of it; but as they all agree that it contained the Pantheon, the Circus Agonis, now the Piazza Navona, the Bustum and Mausoleum Augusti, great part of the modern city must be built upon the ancient Campus Martius. The highway that leads from the bridge to the city, is part of the Via Flaminia, which extended as far as Rimini; and is well paved, like a modern street. Nothing of the antient bridge remains but the piles; nor is there any thing in the structure of this, or of the other five Roman bridges over the Tyber, that deserves attention. I have not seen any bridge in France or Italy, comparable to that of Westminster either in beauty, magnificence, or solidity; and when the bridge at Black-Friars is finished, it will be such a monument of architecture as all the world cannot parallel. As for the Tyber, it is, in comparison with the Thames, no more than an inconsiderable stream, foul, deep, and rapid. It is navigable by small boats, barks, and lighters; and, for the conveniency of loading and unloading them, there is a handsome quay by the new custom-house, at the Porto di Ripetta, provided with stairs of each side, and adorned with an elegant fountain, that yields abundance of excellent water. We are told that the bed of this river has been considerably raised by the rubbish of old Rome, and this is the reason usually given for its being so apt to overflow its banks. A citizen of Rome told me, that a friend of his lately digging to lay the foundation of a new house in the lower part of the city, near the bank of the river, discovered the pavement of an antient street, at the depth of thirty-nine feet from the present surface of the earth. He therefore concluded that modern Rome is near forty feet higher in this place, than the site of the antient city, and that the bed of the river is raised in proportion; but this is altogether incredible. Had the bed of the Tyber been antiently forty feet lower at Rome, than it is at present, there must have been a fall or cataract in it immediately above this tract, as it is not pretended that the bed of it is raised in any part above the city; otherwise such an elevation would have obstructed its course, and then it would have overflowed the whole Campania. There is nothing extraordinary in its present overflowings: they frequently happened of old, and did great mischief to the antient city. Appian, Dio, and other historians, describe an inundation of the Tiber immediately after the death of Julius Caesar, which inundation was occasioned by the sudden melting of a great quantity of snow upon the Apennines. This calamity is recorded by Horace in his ode to Augustus. Vidimus flavum Tiberim retortis Littore Etrusco violenter undis, Ire dejectum monumenta regis, Templaque Vestae: Iliae dum se nimium querenti, Jactat ultorem; vagus et sinistra Labitur ripa, Jove non probante Uxorius Amnis. Livy expressly says, "Ita abundavit Tiberis, ut Ludi Apollinares, circo inundato, extra portam Collinam ad aedem Erycinae Veneris parati sint," "There was such an inundation of the Tiber that, the Circus being overflowed, the Ludi Appollinares were exhibited without the gate Collina, hard by the temple of Venus Erycina." To this custom of transferring the Ludi Appollinares to another place where the Tyber had overflowed the Circus Maximus, Ovid alludes in his Fasti. Altera gramineo spectabis equiriacampo Quem Tiberis curvis in latus urget aquis, Qui tamen ejecta si forte tenebitur unda, Coelius accipiet pulverulentus equos. Another race thy view shall entertain Where bending Tiber skirts the grassy plain; Or should his vagrant stream that plain o'erflow, The Caelian hill the dusty course will show. The Porta del Popolo (formerly, Flaminia,) by which we entered Rome, is an elegant piece of architecture, adorned with marble columns and statues, executed after the design of Buonaroti. Within-side you find yourself in a noble piazza, from whence three of the principal streets of Rome are detached. It is adorned with the famous Aegyptian obelisk, brought hither from the Circus Maximus, and set up by the architect Dominico Fontana in the pontificate of Sixtus V. Here is likewise a beautiful fountain designed by the same artist; and at the beginning of the two principal streets, are two very elegant churches fronting each other. Such an august entrance cannot fail to impress a stranger with a sublime idea of this venerable city. Having given our names at the gate, we repaired to the dogana, or custom-house, where our trunks and carriage were searched; and here we were surrounded by a number of servitori de piazza, offering their services with the most disagreeable importunity. Though I told them several times I had no occasion for any, three of them took possession of the coach, one mounting before and two of them behind; and thus we proceeded to the Piazza d'Espagna, where the person lived to whose house I was directed. Strangers that come to Rome seldom put up at public inns, but go directly to lodging houses, of which there is great plenty in this quarter. The Piazza d'Espagna is open, airy, and pleasantly situated in a high part of the city immediately under the Colla Pinciana, and adorned with two fine fountains. Here most of the English reside: the apartments are generally commodious and well furnished; and the lodgers are well supplied with provisions and all necessaries of life. But, if I studied oeconomy, I would choose another part of the town than the Piazza d'Espagna, which is, besides, at a great distance from the antiquities. For a decent first floor and two bed-chambers on the second, I payed no more than a scudo (five shillings) per day. Our table was plentifully furnished by the landlord for two and thirty pauls, being equal to sixteen shillings. I hired a town-coach at the rate of fourteen pauls, or seven shillings a day; and a servitore di piazza for three pauls, or eighteen-pence. The coachman has also an allowance of two pauls a day. The provisions at Rome are reasonable and good, the vitella mongana, however, which is the most delicate veal I ever tasted, is very dear, being sold for two pauls, or a shilling, the pound. Here are the rich wines of Montepulciano, Montefiascone, and Monte di Dragone; but what we commonly drink at meals is that of Orvieto, a small white wine, of an agreeable flavour. Strangers are generally advised to employ an antiquarian to instruct them in all the curiosities of Rome; and this is a necessary expence, when a person wants to become a connoisseur in painting, statuary, and architecture. For my own part I had no such ambition. I longed to view the remains of antiquity by which this metropolis is distinguished; and to contemplate the originals of many pictures and statues, which I had admired in prints and descriptions. I therefore chose a servant, who was recommended to me as a sober, intelligent fellow, acquainted with these matters: at the same time I furnished myself with maps and plans of antient and modern Rome, together with the little manual, called, Itinerario istruttivo per ritrovare con facilita tutte le magnificenze di Roma e di alcune citta', e castelli suburbani. But I found still more satisfaction in perusing the book in three volumes, intitled, Roma antica, e moderna, which contains a description of everything remarkable in and about the city, illustrated with a great number of copper-plates, and many curious historical annotations. This directory cost me a zequine; but a hundred zequines will not purchase all the books and prints which have been published at Rome on these subjects. Of these the most celebrated are the plates of Piranesi, who is not only an ingenious architect and engraver, but also a learned antiquarian; though he is apt to run riot in his conjectures; and with regard to the arts of antient Rome, has broached some doctrines, which he will find it very difficult to maintain. Our young gentlemen who go to Rome will do well to be upon their guard against a set of sharpers, (some of them of our own country,) who deal in pictures and antiques, and very often impose upon the uninformed stranger, by selling him trash, as the productions of the most celebrated artists. The English are more than any other foreigners exposed to this imposition. They are supposed to have more money to throw away; and therefore a greater number of snares are laid for them. This opinion of their superior wealth they take a pride in confirming, by launching out into all manner of unnecessary expence: but, what is still more dangerous, the moment they set foot in Italy, they are seized with the ambition of becoming connoisseurs in painting, musick, statuary, and architecture; and the adventurers of this country do not fail to flatter this weakness for their own advantage. I have seen in different parts of Italy, a number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt, ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate, without any knowledge or experience of their own, without any director to improve their understanding, or superintend their conduct. One engages in play with an infamous gamester, and is stripped perhaps in the very first partie: another is pillaged by an antiquated cantatrice; a third is bubbled by a knavish antiquarian; and a fourth is laid under contribution by a dealer in pictures. Some turn fiddlers, and pretend to compose: but all of them talk familiarly of the arts, and return finished connoisseurs and coxcombs, to their own country. The most remarkable phaenomenon of this kind, which I have seen, is a boy of seventy-two, now actually travelling through Italy, for improvement, under the auspices of another boy of twenty-two. When you arrive at Rome, you receive cards from all your country-folks in that city: they expect to have the visit returned next day, when they give orders not to be at home; and you never speak to one another in the sequel. This is a refinement in hospitality and politeness, which the English have invented by the strength of their own genius, without any assistance either from France, Italy, or Lapland. No Englishman above the degree of a painter or cicerone frequents any coffee-house at Rome; and as there are no public diversions, except in carnival-time, the only chance you have of seeing your compatriots is either in visiting the curiosities, or at a conversazione. The Italians are very scrupulous in admitting foreigners, except those who are introduced as people of quality: but if there happens to be any English lady of fashion at Rome, she generally keeps an assembly, to which the British subjects resort. In my next, I shall communicate, without ceremony or affectation, what further remarks I have made at Rome, without any pretence, however, to the character of a connoisseur, which, without all doubt, would fit very aukwardly upon,--Dear Sir, Your Friend and Servant. LETTER XXX NICE, February 28, 1765. DEAR SIR,--Nothing can be more agreeable to the eyes of a stranger, especially in the heats of summer, than the great number of public fountains that appear in every part of Rome, embellished with all the ornaments of sculpture, and pouring forth prodigious quantities of cool, delicious water, brought in aqueducts from different lakes, rivers, and sources, at a considerable distance from the city. These works are the remains of the munificence and industry of the antient Romans, who were extremely delicate in the article of water: but, however, great applause is also due to those beneficent popes who have been at the expence of restoring and repairing those noble channels of health, pleasure, and convenience. This great plenty of water, nevertheless, has not induced the Romans to be cleanly. Their streets, and even their palaces, are disgraced with filth. The noble Piazza Navona, is adorned with three or four fountains, one of which is perhaps the most magnificent in Europe, and all of them discharge vast streams of water: but, notwithstanding this provision, the piazza is almost as dirty, as West Smithfield, where the cattle are sold in London. The corridores, arcades, and even staircases of their most elegant palaces, are depositories of nastiness, and indeed in summer smell as strong as spirit of hartshorn. I have a great notion that their ancestors were not much more cleanly. If we consider that the city and suburbs of Rome, in the reign of Claudius, contained about seven millions of inhabitants, a number equal at least to the sum total of all the souls in England; that great part of antient Rome was allotted to temples, porticos, basilicae, theatres, thermae, circi, public and private walks and gardens, where very few, if any, of this great number lodged; that by far the greater part of those inhabitants were slaves and poor people, who did not enjoy the conveniencies of life; and that the use of linen was scarce known; we must naturally conclude they were strangely crouded together, and that in general they were a very frowzy generation. That they were crouded together appears from the height of their houses, which the poet Rutilius compared to towers made for scaling heaven. In order to remedy this inconvenience, Augustus Caesar published a decree, that for the future no houses should be built above seventy feet high, which, at a moderate computation, might make six stories. But what seems to prove, beyond all dispute, that the antient Romans were dirty creatures, are these two particulars. Vespasian laid a tax upon urine and ordure, on pretence of being at a great expence in clearing the streets from such nuisances; an imposition which amounted to about fourteen pence a year for every individual; and when Heliogabalus ordered all the cobwebs of the city and suburbs to be collected, they were found to weigh ten thousand pounds. This was intended as a demonstration of the great number of inhabitants; but it was a proof of their dirt, rather than of their populosity. I might likewise add, the delicate custom of taking vomits at each other's houses, when they were invited to dinner, or supper, that they might prepare their stomachs for gormandizing; a beastly proof of their nastiness as well as gluttony. Horace, in his description of the banquet of Nasiedenus, says, when the canopy, under which they sat, fell down, it brought along with it as much dirt as is raised by a hard gale of wind in dry weather. --trahentia pulveris atri, Quantum non aquilo Campanis excitat agris. Such clouds of dust revolving in its train As Boreas whirls along the level plain. I might observe, that the streets were often encumbered with the putrefying carcasses of criminals, who had been dragged through them by the heels, and precipitated from the Scalae Gemoniae, or Tarpeian rock, before they were thrown into the Tyber, which was the general receptacle of the cloaca maxima and all the filth of Rome: besides, the bodies of all those who made away with themselves, without sufficient cause; of such as were condemned for sacrilege, or killed by thunder, were left unburned and unburied, to rot above ground. I believe the moderns retain more of the customs of antient Romans, than is generally imagined. When I first saw the infants at the enfans trouves in Paris, so swathed with bandages, that the very sight of them made my eyes water, I little dreamed, that the prescription of the antients could be pleaded for this custom, equally shocking and absurd: but in the Capitol at Rome, I met with the antique statue of a child swaddled exactly in the same manner; rolled up like an Aegyptian mummy from the feet. The circulation of the blood, in such a case, must be obstructed on the whole surface of the body; and nothing be at liberty but the head, which is the only part of the child that ought to be confined. Is it not surprising that common sense should not point out, even to the most ignorant, that those accursed bandages must heat the tender infant into a fever; must hinder the action of the muscles, and the play of the joints, so necessary to health and nutrition; and that while the refluent blood is obstructed in the veins, which run on the surface of the body, the arteries, which lie deep, without the reach of compression, are continually pouring their contents into the head, where the blood meets with no resistance? The vessels of the brain are naturally lax, and the very sutures of the skull are yet unclosed. What are the consequences of this cruel swaddling? the limbs are wasted; the joints grow rickety; the brain is compressed, and a hydrocephalus, with a great head and sore eyes, ensues. I take this abominable practice to be one great cause of the bandy legs, diminutive bodies, and large heads, so frequent in the south of France, and in Italy. I was no less surprised to find the modern fashion of curling the hair, borrowed in a great measure from the coxcombs and coquettes of antiquity. I saw a bust of Nero in the gallery at Florence, the hair represented in rows of buckles, like that of a French petit-maitre, conformable to the picture drawn of him by Suetonius. Circa cultum adeo pudendum, ut coman semper in gradus formatam peregrinatione achaica, etiam pene verticem sumpserit, So very finical in his dress, that he wore his hair in the Greek fashion, curled in rows almost to the crown of his head. I was very sorry however to find that this foppery came from Greece. As for Otho, he wore a galericulum, or tour, on account of thin hair, propter raritatem capillorum. He had no right to imitate the example of Julius Caesar, who concealed his bald head with a wreath of laurel. But there is a bust in the Capitol of Julia Pia, the second wife of Septimius Severus, with a moveable peruke, dressed exactly in the fashionable mode, with this difference, that there is no part of it frizzled; nor is there any appearance of pomatum and powder. These improvements the beau-monde have borrowed from the natives of the Cape of Good Hope. Modern Rome does not cover more than one-third of the space within the walls; and those parts that were most frequented of old are now intirely abandoned. From the Capitol to the Coliseo, including the Forum Romanum and Boarium, there is nothing intire but one or two churches, built with the fragments of ancient edifices. You descend from the Capitol between the remaining pillars of two temples, the pedestals and part of the shafts sunk in the rubbish: then passing through the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, you proceed along the foot of Mons Palatinus, which stands on your right hand, quite covered with the ruins of the antient palace belonging to the Roman emperors, and at the foot of it, there are some beautiful detached pillars still standing. On the left you see the remains of the Templum Pacis, which seems to have been the largest and most magnificent of all the temples in Rome. It was built and dedicated by the emperor Vespasian, who brought into it all the treasure and precious vessels which he found in the temple of Jerusalem. The columns of the portico he removed from Nero's golden house, which he levelled with the ground. This temple was likewise famous for its library, mentioned by Aulus Gellius, Further on, is the arch of Constantine on the right, a most noble piece of architecture, almost entire; with the remains of the Meta Sudans before it; and fronting you, the noble ruins of that vast amphitheatre, called the Colossaeum, now Coliseo, which has been dismantled and dilapidated by the Gothic popes and princes of modern Rome, to build and adorn their paultry palaces. Behind the amphitheatre were the thermae of the same emperor Titus Vespasian. In the same quarter was the Circus Maximus; and the whole space from hence on both sides, to the walls of Rome, comprehending above twice as much ground as the modern city, is almost covered with the monuments of antiquity. I suppose there is more concealed below ground than appears above. The miserable houses, and even garden-walls of the peasants in this district, are built with these precious materials. I mean shafts and capitals of marble columns, heads, arms, legs, and mutilated trunks of statues. What pity it is that among all the remains of antiquity, at Rome, there is not one lodging-house remaining. I should be glad to know how the senators of Rome were lodged. I want to be better informed touching the cava aedium, the focus, the ara deorum penatum, the conclavia, triclinia, and caenationes; the atria where the women resided, and employed themselves in the woolen manufacture; the praetoria, which were so spacious as to become a nuisance in the reign of Augustus; and the Xysta, which were shady walks between two porticos, where the men exercised themselves in the winter. I am disgusted by the modern taste of architecture, though I am no judge of the art. The churches and palaces of these days are crowded with pretty ornaments, which distract the eye, and by breaking the design into a variety of little parts, destroy the effect of the whole. Every door and window has its separate ornaments, its moulding, frize, cornice, and tympanum; then there is such an assemblage of useless festoons, pillars, pilasters, with their architraves, entablatures, and I know not what, that nothing great or uniform remains to fill the view; and we in vain look for that simplicity of grandeur, those large masses of light and shadow, and the inexpressible EUSUINOPTON, which characterise the edifices of the antients. A great edifice, to have its full effect, ought to be isole, or detached from all others, with a large space around it: but the palaces of Rome, and indeed of all the other cities of Italy, which I have seen, are so engaged among other mean houses, that their beauty and magnificence are in a great measure concealed. Even those which face open streets and piazzas are only clear in front. The other apartments are darkened by the vicinity of ordinary houses; and their views are confined by dirty and disagreeable objects. Within the court there is generally a noble colonnade all round, and an open corridore above, but the stairs are usually narrow, steep, and high, the want of sash-windows, the dullness of their small glass lozenges, the dusty brick floors, and the crimson hangings laced with gold, contribute to give a gloomy air to their apartments; I might add to these causes, a number of Pictures executed on melancholy subjects, antique mutilated statues, busts, basso relieves, urns, and sepulchral stones, with which their rooms are adorned. It must be owned, however, there are some exceptions to this general rule. The villa of cardinal Alexander Albani is light, gay, and airy; yet the rooms are too small, and too much decorated with carving and gilding, which is a kind of gingerbread work. The apartments of one of the princes Borghese are furnished in the English taste; and in the palazzo di colonna connestabile, there is a saloon, or gallery, which, for the proportions, lights, furniture, and ornaments, is the most noble, elegant, and agreeable apartment I ever saw. It is diverting to hear all Italian expatiate upon the greatness of modern Rome. He will tell you there are above three hundred palaces in the city; that there is scarce a Roman prince, whose revenue does not exceed two hundred thousand crowns; and that Rome produces not only the most learned men, but also the most refined politicians in the universe. To one of them talking in this strain, I replied, that instead of three hundred palaces, the number did not exceed fourscore; that I had been informed, on good authority, there were not six individuals in Rome who had so much as forty thousand crowns a year, about ten thousand pounds sterling; and that to say their princes were so rich, and their politicians so refined, was, in effect, a severe satire upon them, for not employing their wealth and their talents for the advantage of their country. I asked why their cardinals and princes did not invite and encourage industrious people to settle and cultivate the Campania of Rome, which is a desert? why they did not raise a subscription to drain the marshes in the neighbourhood of the city, and thus meliorate the air, which is rendered extremely unwholsome in the summer, by putrid exhalations from those morasses? I demanded of him, why they did not contribute their wealth, and exert their political refinements, in augmenting their forces by sea and land, for the defence of their country, introducing commerce and manufactures, and in giving some consequence to their state, which was no more than a mite in the political scale of Europe? I expressed a desire to know what became of all those sums of money, inasmuch as there was hardly any circulation of gold and silver in Rome, and the very bankers, on whom strangers have their credit, make interest to pay their tradesmen's bills with paper notes of the bank of Spirito Santo? And now I am upon this subject, it may not be amiss to observe that I was strangely misled by all the books consulted about the current coin of Italy. In Tuscany, and the Ecclesiastical State, one sees nothing but zequines in gold, and pieces of two paoli, one paolo, and half a paolo, in silver. Besides these, there is a copper coin at Rome, called bajocco and mezzo bajocco. Ten bajocchi make a paolo: ten paoli make a scudo, which is an imaginary piece: two scudi make a zequine; and a French loui'dore is worth two zequines and two paoli. Rome has nothing to fear from the catholic powers, who respect it with a superstitious veneration as the metropolitan seat of their religion: but the popes will do well to avoid misunderstandings with the maritime protestant states, especially the English, who being masters of the Mediterranean, and in possession of Minorca, have it in their power at all times, to land a body of troops within four leagues of Rome, and to take the city, without opposition. Rome is surrounded with an old wall, but altogether incapable of defence. Or if it was, the circuit of the walls is so extensive, that it would require a garrison of twenty thousand men. The only appearance of a fortification in this city, is the castle of St. Angelo, situated on the further bank of the Tyber, to which there is access by a handsome bridge: but this castle, which was formerly the moles Adriani, could not hold out half a day against a battery of ten pieces of cannon properly directed. It was an expedient left to the invention of the modern Romans, to convert an ancient tomb into a citadel. It could only serve as a temporary retreat for the pope in times of popular commotion, and on other sudden emergencies; as it happened in the case of pope Clement VII. when the troops of the emperor took the city by assault; and this only, while he resided at the Vatican, from whence there is a covered gallery continued to the castle: it can never serve this purpose again, while the pontiff lives on Monte Cavallo, which is at the other end of the city. The castle of St. Angelo, howsoever ridiculous as a fortress, appears respectable as a noble monument of antiquity, and though standing in a low situation, is one of the first objects that strike the eye of a stranger approaching Rome. On the opposite side of the river, are the wretched remains of the Mausoleum Augusti, which was still more magnificent. Part of the walls is standing, and the terraces are converted into garden-ground. In viewing these ruins, I remembered Virgil's pathetic description of Marcellus, who was here intombed. Quantos ille virum, magnum mavortis ad urbem. Campus aget gemitus, vel que Tyberine, videbis Funera, cum tumulum, preter labere recentem. Along his Banks what Groans shall Tyber hear, When the fresh tomb and funeral pomp appear! The beautiful poem of Ovid de Consolatione ad Liviam, written after the ashes of Augustus and his nephew Marcellus, of Germanicus, Agrippa, and Drusus, were deposited in this mausoleum, concludes with these lines, which are extremely tender: Claudite jam Parcae nimium reserata sepulchra; Claudite, plus justo, jam domus ista patet! Ah! shut these yawning Tombs, ye sister Fates! Too long unclos'd have stood those dreary Gates! What the author said of the monument, you will be tempted to say of this letter, which I shall therefore close in the old stile, assuring you that I ever am,--Yours most affectionately. LETTER XXXI NICE, March 5, 1765 DEAR SIR,--In my last I gave you my opinion freely of the modern palaces of Italy. I shall now hazard my thoughts upon the gardens of this country, which the inhabitants extol with all the hyperboles of admiration and applause. I must acknowledge however, I have not seen the famous villas at Frascati and Tivoli, which are celebrated for their gardens and waterworks. I intended to visit these places; but was prevented by an unexpected change of weather, which deterred me from going to the country. On the last day of September the mountains of Palestrina were covered with snow; and the air became so cold at Rome, that I was forced to put on my winter cloaths. This objection continued, till I found it necessary to set out on my return to Florence. But I have seen the gardens of the Poggio Imperiale, and the Palazzo de Pitti at Florence, and those of the Vatican, of the pope's palace on Monte Cavallo, of the Villa Ludovisia, Medicea, and Pinciana, at Rome; so that I think I have some right to judge of the Italian taste in gardening. Among those I have mentioned, that of the Villa Pinciana, is the most remarkable, and the most extensive, including a space of three miles in circuit, hard by the walls of Rome, containing a variety of situations high and low, which favour all the natural embellishments one would expect to meet with in a garden, and exhibit a diversity of noble views of the city and adjacent country. In a fine extensive garden or park, an Englishman expects to see a number of groves and glades, intermixed with an agreeable negligence, which seems to be the effect of nature and accident. He looks for shady walks encrusted with gravel; for open lawns covered with verdure as smooth as velvet, but much more lively and agreeable; for ponds, canals, basins, cascades, and running streams of water; for clumps of trees, woods, and wildernesses, cut into delightful alleys, perfumed with honeysuckle and sweet-briar, and resounding with the mingled melody of all the singing birds of heaven: he looks for plats of flowers in different parts to refresh the sense, and please the fancy; for arbours, grottos, hermitages, temples, and alcoves, to shelter him from the sun, and afford him means of contemplation and repose; and he expects to find the hedges, groves, and walks, and lawns kept with the utmost order and propriety. He who loves the beauties of simple nature, and the charms of neatness will seek for them in vain amidst the groves of Italy. In the garden of the Villa Pinciana, there is a plantation of four hundred pines, which the Italians view with rapture and admiration: there is likewise a long walk, of trees extending from the garden-gate to the palace; and plenty of shade, with alleys and hedges in different parts of the ground: but the groves are neglected; the walks are laid with nothing but common mould or sand, black and dusty; the hedges are tall, thin and shabby; the trees stunted; the open ground, brown and parched, has scarce any appearance of verdure. The flat, regular alleys of evergreens are cut into fantastic figures; the flower gardens embellished with thin cyphers and flourished figures in box, while the flowers grow in rows of earthen-pots, and the ground appears as dusky as if it was covered with the cinders of a blacksmith's forge. The water, of which there is great plenty, instead of being collected in large pieces, or conveyed in little rivulets and streams to refresh the thirsty soil, or managed so as to form agreeable cascades, is squirted from fountains in different parts of the garden, through tubes little bigger than common glyster-pipes. It must be owned indeed that the fountains have their merit in the way of sculpture and architecture; and that here is a great number of statues which merit attention: but they serve only to encumber the ground, and destroy that effect of rural simplicity, which our gardens are designed to produce. In a word, here we see a variety of walks and groves and fountains, a wood of four hundred pines, a paddock with a few meagre deer, a flower-garden, an aviary, a grotto, and a fish-pond; and in spite of all these particulars, it is, in my opinion, a very contemptible garden, when compared to that of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, or even to those of Kensington and Richmond. The Italians understand, because they study, the excellencies of art; but they have no idea of the beauties of nature. This Villa Pinciana, which belongs to the Borghese family, would make a complete academy for painting and sculpture, especially for the study of antient marbles; for, exclusive of the statues and busts in the garden, and the vast collection in the different apartments, almost the whole outside of the house is covered with curious pieces in basso and alto relievo. The most masterly is that of Curtius on horseback, leaping into the gulph or opening of the earth, which is said to have closed on receiving this sacrifice. Among the exhibitions of art within the house, I was much struck with a Bacchus, and the death of Meleager, represented on an antient sepulchre. There is also an admirable statue of Silenus, with the infant Bacchus in his arms; a most beautiful gladiator; a curious Moor of black marble, with a shirt of white alabaster; a finely proportioned bull of black marble also, standing upon a table of alabaster; a black gipsey with a head, hands, and feet of brass; and the famous hermaphrodite, which vies with that of Florence: though the most curious circumstance of this article, is the mattrass executed and placed by Bernini, with such art and dexterity, that to the view, it rivals the softness of wool, and seems to retain the marks of pressure, according to the figure of the superincumbent statue. Let us likewise own, for the honour of the moderns, that the same artist has produced two fine statues, which we find among the ornaments of this villa, namely, a David with his sling in the attitude of throwing the stone at the giant Goliah; and a Daphne changing into laurel at the approach of Apollo. On the base of this figure, are the two following elegant lines, written by pope Urban VIII. in his younger years. Quisquis amans sequitur fugitivae gaudia formae, Fronde manus implet, baccas vel carpit amaras. Who pants for fleeting Beauty, vain pursuit! Shall barren Leaves obtain, or bitter fruit. I ought not to forget two exquisite antique statues of Venus, the weeping slave, and the youth pulling a thorn out of his foot. I do not pretend to give a methodical detail of the curiosities of Rome: they have been already described by different authors, who were much better qualified than I am for the talk: but you shall have what observations I made on the most remarkable objects, without method, just as they occur to my remembrance; and I protest the remarks are all my own: so that if they deserve any commendation, I claim all the merit; and if they are impertinent, I must be contented to bear all the blame. The piazza of St. Peter's church is altogether sublime. The double colonnade on each side extending in a semi-circular sweep, the stupendous Aegyptian obelisk, the two fountains, the portico, and the admirable facade of the church, form such an assemblage of magnificent objects, as cannot fail to impress the mind with awe and admiration: but the church would have produced a still greater effect, had it been detached entirely from the buildings of the Vatican, It would then have been a master-piece of architecture, complete in all its parts, intire and perfect: whereas, at present, it is no more than a beautiful member attached to a vast undigested and irregular pile of building. As to the architecture of this famous temple, I shall say nothing; neither do I pretend to describe the internal ornaments. The great picture of Mosaic work, and that of St. Peter's bark tossed by the tempest, which appear over the gate of the church, though rude in comparison with modern pieces, are nevertheless great curiosities, when considered as the work of Giotto, who flourished in the beginning of the fourteenth century. His master was Cimabue, who learned painting and architecture of the Grecian artists, who came from Constantinople, and first revived these arts in Italy. But, to return to St. Peter's, I was not at all pleased with the famous statue of the dead Christ in his mother's lap, by Michael Angelo. The figure of Christ is as much emaciated, as if he had died of a consumption: besides, there is something indelicate, not to say indecent, in the attitude and design of a man's body, stark naked, lying upon the knees of a woman. Here are some good pictures, I should rather say copies of good pictures, done in Mosaic to great perfection; particularly a St. Sebastian by Domenichino, and Michael the Archangel, from a painting of Guido Rheni. I am extremely fond of all this artist's pieces. There is a tenderness and delicacy in his manner; and his figures are all exquisitely beautiful, though his expression is often erroneous, and his attitudes are always affected and unnatural. In this very piece the archangel has all the air of a French dancing-master; and I have seen a Madonna by the same hand, I think it is in the Palazzo di Barberini, in which, though the figures are enchanting, the Virgin is represented holding up the drapery of the infant, with the ridiculous affectation of a singer on the stage of our Italian opera. The Mosaic work, though brought to a wonderful degree of improvement, and admirably calculated for churches, the dampness of which is pernicious to the colours of the pallet, I will not yet compare to the productions of the pencil. The glassyness (if I may be allowed the expression) of the surface, throws, in my opinion, a false light on some parts of the picture; and when you approach it, the joinings of the pieces look like so many cracks on painted canvas. Besides, this method is extremely tedious and expensive. I went to see the artists at work, in a house that stands near the church, where I was much pleased with the ingenuity of the process; and not a little surprized at the great number of different colours and tints, which are kept in separate drawers, marked with numbers as far as seventeen thousand. For a single head done in Mosaic, they asked me fifty zequines. But to return to the church. The altar of St. Peter's choir, notwithstanding all the ornaments which have been lavished upon it, is no more than a heap of puerile finery, better adapted to an Indian pagod, than to a temple built upon the principles of the Greek architecture. The four colossal figures that support the chair, are both clumsy and disproportioned. The drapery of statues, whether in brass or stone, when thrown into large masses, appears hard and unpleasant to the eye and for that reason the antients always imitated wet linen, which exhibiting the shape of the limbs underneath, and hanging in a multiplicity of wet folds, gives an air of lightness, softness, and ductility to the whole. These two statues weigh 116,257 pounds, and as they sustain nothing but a chair, are out of all proportion, inasmuch as the supporters ought to be suitable to the things supported. Here are four giants holding up the old wooden chair of the apostle Peter, if we may believe the book De Identitate Cathedrae Romanae, Of the Identity of the Roman Chair. The implements of popish superstition; such as relicks of pretended saints, ill-proportioned spires and bellfreys, and the nauseous repetition of the figure of the cross, which is in itself a very mean and disagreeable object, only fit for the prisons of condemned criminals, have contributed to introduce a vitious taste into the external architecture, as well as in the internal ornaments of our temples. All churches are built in the figure of a cross, which effectually prevents the eye from taking in the scope of the building, either without side or within; consequently robs the edifice of its proper effect. The palace of the Escurial in Spain is laid out in the shape of a gridiron, because the convent was built in consequence of a vow to St. Laurence, who was broiled like a barbecued pig. What pity it is, that the labours of painting should have been so much employed on the shocking subjects of the martyrology. Besides numberless pictures of the flagellation, crucifixion, and descent from the cross, we have Judith with the head of Holofernes, Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, Jael assassinating Sisera in his sleep, Peter writhing on the cross, Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows, Laurence frying upon the coals, Bartholomew flaed alive, and a hundred other pictures equally frightful, which can only serve to fill the mind with gloomy ideas, and encourage a spirit of religious fanaticism, which has always been attended with mischievous consequences to the community where it reigned. The tribune of the great altar, consisting of four wreathed brass pillars, gilt, supporting a canopy, is doubtless very magnificent, if not over-charged with sculpture, fluting, foliage, festoons, and figures of boys and angels, which, with the hundred and twenty-two lamps of silver, continually burning below, serve rather to dazzle the eyes, and kindle the devotion of the ignorant vulgar, than to excite the admiration of a judicious observer. There is nothing, I believe, in this famous structure, so worthy of applause, as the admirable symmetry and proportion of its parts. Notwithstanding all the carving, gilding, basso relievos, medallions, urns, statues, columns, and pictures with which it abounds, it does not, on the whole, appear over-crouded with ornaments. When you first enter, your eye is filled so equally and regularly, that nothing appears stupendous; and the church seems considerably smaller than it really is. The statues of children, that support the founts of holy water when observed from the door, seem to be of the natural size; but as you draw near, you perceive they are gigantic. In the same manner, the figures of the doves, with olive branches in their beaks, which are represented on the wall, appear to be within your reach; but as you approach them, they recede to a considerable height, as if they had flown upwards to avoid being taken. I was much disappointed at sight of the Pantheon, which, after all that has been said of it, looks like a huge cockpit, open at top. The portico which Agrippa added to the building, is undoubtedly very noble, though, in my opinion, it corresponds but ill with the simplicity of the edifice. With all my veneration for the antients, I cannot see in what the beauty of the rotunda consists. It is no more than a plain unpierced cylinder, or circular wall, with two fillets and a cornice, having a vaulted roof or cupola, open in the centre. I mean the original building, without considering the vestibule of Agrippa. Within side it has much the air of a mausoleum. It was this appearance which, in all probability, suggested the thought to Boniface IV. to transport hither eight and twenty cart-loads of old rotten bones, dug from different burying-places, and then dedicate it as a church to the blessed Virgin and all the holy martyrs. I am not one of those who think it is well lighted by the hole at the top, which is about nine and twenty feet in diameter, although the author of the Grand Tour calls it but nine. The same author says, there is a descent of eleven steps to go into it; that it is a hundred and forty-four feet in heighth, and as many in breadth; that it was covered with copper, which, with the brass nails of the portico, pope Urban VIII. took away, and converted into the four wreathed pillars that support the canopy of the high altar in the church of St. Peter, &c. The truth is, before the time of pope Alexander VII. the earth was so raised as to cover part of the temple, and there was a descent of some steps into the porch: but that pontiff ordered the ground to be pared away to the very pedestal or base of the portico, which is now even with the street, so that there is no descent whatsoever. The height is two hundred palmi, and the breadth two hundred and eighteen; which, reckoning fife palmi at nine inches, will bring the height to one hundred and fifty, and the breadth to one hundred and sixty-three feet six inches. It was not any covering of copper which pope Urban VIII. removed, but large brass beams, which supported the roof of the portico. They weighed 186,392 pounds; and afforded metal enough not only for the pillars in St. Peter's church, but also for several pieces of artillery that are now in the castle of St. Angelo. What is more extraordinary, the gilding of those columns is said to have cost forty thousand golden crowns: sure money was never worse laid out. Urban VIII. likewise added two bellfrey towers to the rotunda; and I wonder he did not cover the central hole with glass, as it must be very inconvenient and disagreeable to those who go to church below, to be exposed to the rain in wet weather, which must also render it very damp and unwholesome. I visited it several times, and each time it looked more and more gloomy and sepulchral. The magnificence of the Romans was not so conspicuous in their temples, as in their theatres, amphitheatres, circusses, naumachia, aqueducts, triumphal arches, porticoes, basilicae, but especially their thermae, or bathing-places. A great number of their temples were small and inconsiderable; not one of them was comparable either for size or magnificence, to the modern church of St. Peter of the Vatican. The famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was neither half so long, nor half so broad: it was but two hundred feet in length, and one hundred and eighty-five in breadth; whereas the length of St. Peter's extends to six hundred and thirty-eight feet, and the breadth to above five hundred. It is very near twice as large as the temple of Jupiter Olympius in Greece, which was counted one of the seven wonders of the world. But I shall take another opportunity to explain myself further on the antiquities of this city; a subject, upon which I am disposed to be (perhaps impertinently) circumstantial. When I begin to run riot, you should cheek me with the freedom of a friend. The most distant hint will be sufficient to,--Dear Sir, Yours assuredly. LETTER XXXII NICE, March 10, 1765. DEAR SIR,--The Colossaeum or amphitheatre built by Flavius Vespasian, is the most stupendous work of the kind which antiquity can produce. Near one half of the external circuit still remains, consisting of four tire of arcades, adorned with columns of four orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. The height and extent of it may be guessed from the number of spectators it contained, amounting to one hundred thousand; and yet, according to Fontana's mensuration, it could not contain above thirty-four thousand persons sitting, allowing a foot and an half for each person: for the circuit of the whole building did not exceed one thousand five hundred and sixty feet. The amphitheatre at Verona is one thousand two hundred and ninety feet in circumference; and that of Nismes, one thousand and eighty. The Colossaeum was built by Vespasian, who employed thirty thousand Jewish slaves in the work; but finished and dedicated by his son Titus, who, on the first day of its being opened, produced fifty thousand wild beasts, which were all killed in the arena. The Romans were undoubtedly a barbarous people, who delighted in horrible spectacles. They viewed with pleasure the dead bodies of criminals dragged through the streets, or thrown down the Scalae Gemoniae and Tarpeian rock, for their contemplation. Their rostra were generally adorned with the heads of some remarkable citizens, like Temple-Bar, at London. They even bore the sight of Tully's head fixed upon that very rostrum where he had so often ravished their ears with all the charms of eloquence, in pleading the cause of innocence and public virtue. They took delight in seeing their fellow-creatures torn in pieces by wild beasts, in the amphitheatre. They shouted with applause when they saw a poor dwarf or slave killed by his adversary; but their transports were altogether extravagant, when the devoted captives were obliged to fight in troops, till one side was entirely butchered by the other. Nero produced four hundred senators, and six hundred of the equestrian order, as gladiators in the public arena: even the women fought with wild beasts, as well as with each other, and drenched the amphitheatres with their blood. Tacitus says, "Sed faeminarum illustrium, senatorumque filiorum plures per arenam faedati sunt," "But many sons of Senators, and even Matrons of the first Rank, exposed themselves in this vile exercise." The execrable custom of sacrificing captives or slaves at the tombs of their masters and great men, which is still preserved among the negroes of Africa, obtained also among the antients, Greeks as well as Romans. I could never, without horror and indignation, read that passage in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, which describes twelve valiant Trojan captives sacrificed by the inhuman Achilles at the tomb of his friend Patroclus. Dodeka men Troon megathumon uias eathlous Tous ama pantas pur eathiei. Twelve generous Trojans slaughtered in their Bloom, With thy lov'd Corse the Fire shall now consume. Even Virgil makes his pious Hero sacrifice eight Italian youths to the manes of Pallas. It is not at all clear to me, that a people is the more brave, the more they are accustomed to bloodshed in their public entertainments. True bravery is not savage but humane. Some of this sanguinary spirit is inherited by the inhabitants of a certain island that shall be nameless--but, mum for that. You will naturally suppose that the Coliseo was ruined by the barbarians who sacked the city of Rome: in effect, they robbed it of its ornaments and valuable materials; but it was reserved for the Goths and Vandals of modern Rome, to dismantle the edifice, and reduce it to its present ruinous condition. One part of it was demolished by pope Paul II. that he might employ the stones of it in building the palace of St. Mark. It was afterwards dilapidated for the same purposes, by the cardinals Riarius and Farnese, which last assumed the tiara under the name of Paul III. Notwithstanding these injuries, there is enough standing to convey a very sublime idea of ancient magnificence. The Circi and Naumachia, if considered as buildings and artificial basins, are admirable; but if examined as areae intended for horse and chariot races, and artificial seas for exhibiting naval engagements, they seem to prove that the antient Romans were but indifferently skilled and exercised either in horsemanship or naval armaments. The inclosure of the emperor Caracalla's circus is still standing, and scarce affords breathing room for an English hunter. The Circus Maximus, by far the largest in Rome, was not so long as the Mall; and I will venture to affirm, that St. James's Park would make a much more ample and convenient scene for those diversions. I imagine an old Roman would be very much surprised to see an English race on the course at New-Market. The Circus Maximus was but three hundred yards in breadth. A good part of this was taken up by the spina, or middle space, adorned with temples, statues, and two great obelisks; as well as by the euripus, or canal, made by order of Julius Caesar, to contain crocodiles, and other aquatic animals, which were killed occasionally. This was so large, that Heliogabalus, having filled it with excellent wine, exhibited naval engagements in it, for the amusement of the people. It surrounded three sides of the square, so that the whole extent of the race did not much exceed an English mile; and when Probus was at the expence of filling the plain of it with fir-trees to form a wood for the chace of wild beasts, I question much if this forest was more extensive than the plantation in St. James's Park, on the south side of the canal: now I leave you to judge what ridicule a king of England would incur by converting this part of the park into a chace for any species of animals which are counted game in our country. The Roman emperors seemed more disposed to elevate and surprize, than to conduct the public diversions according to the rules of reason and propriety. One would imagine, it was with this view they instituted their naumachia, or naval engagements, performed by half a dozen small gallies of a side in an artificial basin of fresh water. These gallies I suppose were not so large as common fishing-smacks, for they were moved by two, three, and four oars of a side according to their different rates, biremes, triremes, and quadriremes. I know this is a knotty point not yet determined; and that some antiquarians believe the Roman gallies had different tires or decks of oars; but this is a notion very ill supported, and quite contrary to all the figures of them that are preserved on antient coins and medals. Suetonius in the reign of Domitian, speaking of these naumachia, says, "Edidit navales pugnas, pene justarum classium, effosso, et circumducto juxta Tyberim lacu, atque inter maximas imbres prospectavit," "He exhibited naval engagements of almost intire fleets, in an artificial Lake formed for the purpose hard by the Tyber, and viewed them in the midst of excessive Rains." This artificial lake was not larger than the piece of water in Hyde-Park; and yet the historian says, it was almost large enough for real or intire fleets. How would a British sailor relish an advertisement that a mock engagement between two squadrons of men of war would be exhibited on such a day in the Serpentine river? or that the ships of the line taken from the enemy would be carried in procession from Hyde-Park-Corner to Tower-wharf? Certain it is, Lucullus, in one of his triumphs, had one hundred and ten ships of war (naves longas) carried through the streets of Rome. Nothing can give a more contemptible idea of their naval power, than this testimony of their historians, who declare that their seamen or mariners were formed by exercising small row-boats in an inclosed pool of fresh water. Had they not the sea within a few miles of them, and the river Tyber running through their capital! even this would have been much more proper for exercising their watermen, than a pond of still-water, not much larger than a cold-bath. I do believe in my conscience that half a dozen English frigates would have been able to defeat both the contending fleets at the famous battle of Actium, which has been so much celebrated in the annals of antiquity, as an event that decided the fate of empire. It would employ me a whole month to describe the thermae or baths, the vast ruins of which are still to be seen within the walls of Rome, like the remains of so many separate citadels. The thermae Dioclesianae might be termed an august academy for the use and instruction of the Roman people. The pinacotheca of this building was a complete musaeum of all the curiosities of art and nature; and there were public schools for all the sciences. If I may judge by my eye, however, the thermae Antonianae built by Caracalla, were still more extensive and magnificent; they contained cells sufficient for two thousand three hundred persons to bathe at one time, without being seen by one another. They were adorned with all the charms of painting, architecture, and sculpture. The pipes for convoying the water were of silver. Many of the lavacra were of precious marble, illuminated by lamps of chrystal. Among the statues, were found the famous Toro, and Hercole Farnese. Bathing was certainly necessary to health and cleanliness in a hot country like Italy, especially before the use of linen was known: but these purposes would have been much better answered by plunging into the Tyber, than by using the warm bath in the thermae, which became altogether a point of luxury borrowed from the effeminate Asiatics, and tended to debilitate the fibres already too much relaxed by the heat of the climate. True it is, they had baths of cool water for the summer: but in general they used it milk-warm, and often perfumed: they likewise indulged in vapour-baths, in order to enjoy a pleasing relaxation, which they likewise improved with odoriferous ointments. The thermae consisted of a great variety of parts and conveniences; the natationes, or swimming places; the portici, where people amused themselves in walking, conversing, and disputing together, as Cicero says, In porticibus deambulantes disputabant; the basilicae, where the bathers assembled, before they entered, and after they came out of the bath; the atria, or ample courts, adorned with noble colonnades of Numidian marble and oriental granite; the ephibia, where the young men inured themselves to wrestling and other exercises; the frigidaria, or places kept cool by a constant draught of air, promoted by the disposition and number of the windows; the calidaria, where the water was warmed for the baths; the platanones, or delightful groves of sycamore; the stadia, for the performances of the athletae; the exedrae, or resting-places, provided with seats for those that were weary; the palestrae, where every one chose that exercise which pleased him best; the gymnasia, where poets, orators, and philosophers recited their works, and harangued for diversion; the eleotesia, where the fragrant oils and ointments were kept for the use of the bathers; and the conisteria, where the wrestlers were smeared with sand before they engaged. Of the thermae in Rome, some were mercenary, and some opened gratis. Marcus Agrippa, when he was edile, opened one hundred and seventy private baths, for the use of the people. In the public baths, where money was taken, each person paid a quadrans, about the value of our halfpenny, as Juvenal observes, Caedere Sylvano porcum, quadrante lavari. The victim Pig to God Sylvanus slay, And for the public Bath a farthing pay. But after the hour of bathing was past, it sometimes cost a great deal more, according to Martial, Balnea post decimam, lasso centumque petuntur Quadrantes-- The bathing hour is past, the waiter tir'd; An hundred Farthings now will be requir'd. Though there was no distinction in the places between the first patrician and the lowest plebeian, yet the nobility used their own silver and gold plate, for washing, eating, and drinking in the bath, together with towels of the finest linen. They likewise made use of the instrument called strigil, which was a kind of flesh-brush; a custom to which Persius alludes in this line, I puer, et strigiles Crispini ad balnea defer. Here, Boy, this Brush to Crispin's Bagnio bear. The common people contented themselves with sponges. The bathing time was from noon till the evening, when the Romans ate their principal meal. Notice was given by a bell, or some such instrument, when the baths were opened, as we learn from Juvenal, Redde Pilam, sonat Aes thermarum, ludere pergis? Virgine vis sola lotus abdire domum. Leave off; the Bath Bell rings--what, still play on? Perhaps the maid in private rubs you down. There were separate places for the two sexes; and indeed there were baths opened for the use of women only, at the expence of Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and some other matrons of the first quality. The use of bathing was become so habitual to the constitutions of the Romans, that Galen, in his book De Sanitate tuenda, mentions a certain philosopher, who, if he intermitted but one day in his bathing, was certainly attacked with a fever. In order to preserve decorum in the baths, a set of laws and regulations were published, and the thermae were put under the inspection of a censor, who was generally one of the first senators in Rome. Agrippa left his gardens and baths, which stood near the pantheon, to the Roman people: among the statues that adorned them was that of a youth naked, as going into the bath, so elegantly formed by the hand of Lysippus, that Tiberius, being struck with the beauty of it, ordered it to be transferred into his own palace: but the populace raised such a clamour against him, that he was fain to have it reconveyed to its former place. These noble baths were restored by Adrian, as we read in Spartian; but at present no part of them remains. With respect to the present state of the old aqueducts, I can give you very little satisfaction. I only saw the ruins of that which conveyed the aqua Claudia, near the Porta Maggiore, and the Piazza of the Lateran. You know there were fourteen of those antient aqueducts, some of which brought water to Rome from the distance of forty miles. The channels of them were large enough to admit a man armed on horseback; and therefore when Rome was besieged by the Goths, who had cut off the water, Belisarius fortified them with works to prevent the enemy from entering the city by those conveyances. After that period, I suppose the antient aqueducts continued dry, and were suffered to run to ruins. Without all doubt, the Romans were greatly obliged to those benefactors, who raised such stupendous works for the benefit, as well as the embellishment of their city: but it might have been supplied with the same water through pipes at one hundredth part of the expence; and in that case the enemy would not have found it such an easy matter to cut it off. Those popes who have provided the modern city so plentifully with excellent water, are much to be commended for the care and expence, they have bestowed in restoring the streams called acqua Virgine, acqua Felice, and acqua Paolina, which afford such abundance of water as would plentifully supply a much larger city than modern Rome. It is no wonder that M. Agrippa, the son-in-law, friend, and favourite of Augustus, should at the same time have been the idol of the people, considering how surprisingly he exerted himself for the emolument, convenience, and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. It was he who first conducted this acqua Virgine to Rome: he formed seven hundred reservoirs in the city; erected one hundred and five fountains; one hundred and thirty castella, or conduits, which works he adorned with three hundred statues, and four hundred pillars of marble, in the space of one year. He also brought into Rome, the aqua Julia, and restored the aqueduct of the aqua Marzia, which had fallen to decay. I have already observed the great number of baths which he opened for the people, and the magnificent thermae, with spacious gardens, which he bequeathed to them as a legacy. But these benefactions, great and munificent as they seem to be, were not the most important services he performed for the city of Rome. The common-sewers were first made by order of Tarquinius Priscus, not so much with a view to cleanliness, as by way of subterranean drains to the Velabrum, and in order to carry off the stagnant water, which remained in the lower parts, after heavy rains. The different branches of these channels united at the Forum, from whence by the cloaca Maxima, their contents were conveyed into the Tyber. This great cloaca was the work of Tarquinius Superbus. Other sewers were added by Marcus Cato, and Valerius Flaccus, the censors. All these drains having been choaked up and ruinous, were cleared and restored by Marcus Agrippa, who likewise undermined the whole city with canals of the same kind, for carrying of the filth; he strengthened and enlarged the cloaca maxima, so as to make it capable of receiving a large cart loaded with hay; and directed seven streams of water into these subterranean passages, in order to keep them always clean and open. If, notwithstanding all these conveniences, Vespasian was put to great expence in removing the ordure from the public streets, we have certainly a right to conclude that the antient Romans were not more cleanly than the modern Italians. After the mausolea of Augustus, and Adrian, which I have already mentioned, the most remarkable antient sepulchres at Rome, are those of Caius Cestius, and Cecilia Metella. The first, which stands by the Porta di S. Paolo, is a beautiful pyramid, one hundred and twenty feet high, still preserved intire, having a vaulted chamber within-side, adorned with some ancient painting, which is now almost effaced. The building is of brick, but eased with marble. This Caius Cestius had been consul, was very rich, and acted as one of the seven Epulones, who superintended the feasts of the gods, called Lectisternia, and Pervigilia. He bequeathed his whole fortune to his friend M. Agrippa, who was so generous as to give it up to the relations of the testator. The monument of Cecilia Metella, commonly called Capo di Bove, is without the walls on the Via Appia. This lady was daughter of Metellus Creticus, and wife to Crassus, who erected this noble monument to her memory. It consisted of two orders, or stories, the first of which was a square of hewn stone: the second was a circular tower, having a cornice, adorned with ox heads in basso relievo, a circumstance from which it takes the name of Capo di Bove. The ox was supposed to be a most grateful sacrifice to the gods. Pliny, speaking of bulls and oxen, says, Hinc victimae optimae et laudatissima deorum placatio. They were accounted the best Victims and most agreeable to appease the anger of the Gods. This tower was surmounted by a noble cupola or dome, enriched with all the ornaments of architecture. The door of the building was of brass; and within-side the ashes of Cecilia were deposited in a fluted marble urn, of curious workmanship, which is still kept in the Palazzo Farnese. At present the surface of the ground is raised so much as to cover the first order of the edifice: what we see is no more than the round tower, without the dome and its ornaments; and the following inscription still remains near the top, facing the Via Appia. CAECILLAE Q. CRETICI F. METELLAE CRASSI. To Caecilia Metella, Daughter of Q. Criticus: wife of Crassus. Now we are talking of sepulchral inscriptions, I shall conclude this letter with the copy of a very singular will, made by Favonius Jocundus, who died in Portugal, by which will the precise situation of the famous temple of Sylvanus is ascertained. "Jocundi. Ego gallus Favonius Jocundus P. Favoni F. qui bello contra Viriatum Succubui, Jocundum et Prudentem filios, e me et Quintia Fabia conjuge mea ortos, et Bonorum Jocundi Patris mei, et eorum, quae mihi ipsi acquisivi haeredes relinquo; hac tamen conditione, ut ab urbe Romana huc veniant, et ossa hic mea, intra quinquennium exportent, et via latina condant in sepulchro, jussu meo condito, et mea voluntate; in quo velim neminem mecum, neque servum, neque libertum inseri; et velim ossa quorumcunque sepulchro statim meo eruantur, et jura Romanorum serventur, in sepulchris ritu majorum retinendis, juxta volantatem testatoris; et si secus fecerint, nisi legittimae oriantur causae, velim ea omnia, quae filijs meis relinquo, pro reparando templo dei Sylvani, quod sub viminali monte est, attribui; manesque mei a Pont. max; a flaminibus dialibus, qui in capitolio sunt, opem implorent, ad liberorum meorum impietatem ulciscendam; teneanturque sacerdotes dei Silvani, me in urbem referre, et sepulchro me meo condere. Volo quoque vernas qui domi meae sunt, omnes a praetore urbano liberos, cum matribus dimitti, singulisque libram argenti puri, et vestem unam dori. In Lusitania. In agro VIII. Cal Quintilis, bello viriatino." I, Gallus Favonius Jocundus, son of P. Favonius, dying in the war against Viriatus, declare my sons Jocundus and Prudens, by my wife Quintia Fabia, joint Heirs of my Estate, real and personal; on condition, however, that they come hither within a time of five years from this my last will, and transport my remains to Rome to be deposited in my Sepulchre built in the via latina by my own order and Direction: and it is my will that neither slave nor freedman shall be interred with me in the said tomb; that if any such there be, they shall be removed, and the Roman law obeyed, in preserving in the antient Form the sepulchre according to the will of the Testator. If they act otherwise without just cause, it is my will that the whole estate, which I now bequeathe to my children, shall be applied to the Reparation of the Temple of the God Sylvanus, at the foot of Mount Viminalis; and that my Manes [The Manes were an order of Gods supposed to take cognisance of such injuries.] I shall implore the assistance of the Pontifex maximus, and the Flaminisdiales in the Capitol, to avenge the Impiety of my children; and the priests of Sylvanus shall engage to bring my remains to Rome and see them decently deposited in my own Sepulchre. It is also my will that all my domestic slaves shall be declared free by the city Praetor, and dismissed with their mothers, after having received each, a suit of cloaths, and a pound weight of pure silver from my heirs and Executors.--At my farm in Lusitania, July 25. During the Viriatin war. My paper scarce affords room to assure you that I am ever,--Dear Sir, Your faithful, etc. LETTER XXXIII NICE, March 30, 1765. DEAR SIR,--YOU must not imagine I saw one half of the valuable pictures and statues of Rome; there is such a vast number of both in this capital, that I might have spent a whole year in taking even a transient view of them; and, after all, some of them would have been overlooked. The most celebrated pieces, however, I have seen; and therefore my curiosity is satisfied. Perhaps, if I had the nice discernment and delicate sensibility of a true connoisseur, this superficial glimpse would have served only to whet my appetite, and to detain me the whole winter at Rome. In my progress through the Vatican, I was much pleased with the School of Athens, by Raphael, a piece which hath suffered from the dampness of the air. The four boys attending to the demonstration of the mathematician are admirably varied in the expression. Mr. Webb's criticism on this artist is certainly just. He was perhaps the best ethic painter that ever the world produced. No man ever expressed the sentiments so happily, in visage, attitude, and gesture: but he seems to have had too much phlegm to strike off the grand passions, or reach the sublime parts of painting. He has the serenity of Virgil, but wants the fire of Homer. There is nothing in his Parnassus which struck me, but the ludicrous impropriety of Apollo's playing upon a fiddle, for the entertainment of the nine muses. [Upon better information I must retract this censure; in as much, as I find there was really a Musical Instrument among the antients of this Figure, as appears by a small statue in Bronze, to be still seen in the Florentine Collection.] The Last Judgment, by Buonaroti, in the chapel of Sixtus IV. produced to my eye the same sort of confusion, that perplexes my ear at a grand concert, consisting of a great variety of instruments: or rather, when a number of people are talking all at once. I was pleased with the strength of expression, exhibited in single figures, and separate groupes: but, the whole together is a mere mob, without subordination, keeping, or repose. A painter ought to avoid all subjects that require a multiplicity of groupes and figures; because it is not in the power of that art to unite a great number in one point of view, so as to maintain that dependence which they ought to have upon one another. Michael Angelo, with all his skill in anatomy, his correctness of design, his grand composition, his fire, and force of expression, seems to have had very little idea of grace. One would imagine he had chosen his kings, heroes, cardinals, and prelates, from among the facchini of Rome: that he really drew his Jesus on the Cross, from the agonies of some vulgar assassin expiring on the wheel; and that the originals of his Bambini, with their mothers, were literally found in a stable. In the Sala Regia, from whence the Sistian chapel is detached, we see, among other exploits of catholic heroes, a representation of the massacre of the protestants in Paris, Tholouse, and other parts of France, on the eve of St. Bartholomew, thus described in the Descrizione di Roma, "Nella prima pittura, esprime Georgio Vasari l'istoria del Coligni, grand' amiraglio, di Francia, che come capo de ribelli, e degl'ugonotti, fu ucciso; e nell'altra vicina, la strage fatta in Parigi, e nel regno, de rebelli, e degl'Ugonotti." "In the first picture, George Vasari represents the history of Coligni, high admiral of France, who was slain as head of the rebels and huegonots; and in another near it, the slaughter that was made of the rebels and huegonots in Paris and other parts of the kingdom." Thus the court of Rome hath employed their artists to celebrate and perpetuate, as a meritorious action, the most perfidious, cruel, and infamous massacre, that ever disgraced the annals of any nation. I need not mention the two equestrian statues of Constantine the Great, and Charlemagne, which stand at opposite ends of the great portico of St. Peter's church; because there is nothing in them which particularly engaged my attention. The sleeping Cleopatra, as you enter the court of the Belvedere, in the Vatican, is much admired; but I was better pleased with the Apollo, which I take to be the most beautiful statue that ever was formed. The Nile, which lies in the open court, surmounted with the little children, has infinite merit; but is much damaged, and altogether neglected. Whether it is the same described in Pliny, as having been placed by Vespasian in the Temple of Peace, I do not know. The sixteen children playing about it, denoted the swelling of the Nile, which never rose above sixteen cubits. As for the famous groupe of Laocoon, it surpassed my expectation. It was not without reason that Buonaroti called it a portentous work; and Pliny has done it no more than justice in saying it is the most excellent piece that ever was cut in marble; and yet the famous Fulvius Ursini is of opinion that this is not the same statue which Pliny described. His reasons, mentioned by Montfaucon, are these. The statues described by Pliny were of one stone; but these are not. Antonioli, the antiquary, has in his Possession, pieces of Laocoon's snakes, which were found in the ground, where the baths of Titus actually stood, agreeable to Pliny, who says these statues were placed in the buildings of Titus. Be that as it may, the work which we now see does honour to antiquity. As you have seen innumerable copies and casts of it, in marble, plaister, copper, lead, drawings, and prints, and read the description of it in Keysler, and twenty other books of travels, I shall say nothing more on the subject; but that neither they nor I, nor any other person, could say too much in its praise. It is not of one piece indeed. In that particular Pliny himself might be mistaken. "Opus omnibus et picturae, et statuariae artis praeponendum. Ex uno lapide eum et Liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententia fecere succubi artifices." "A work preferable to all the other Efforts of Painting and Statuary. The most excellent artists joined their Talents in making the Father and his Sons, together with the admirable Twinings of the Serpents, of one Block." Buonaroti discovered the joinings, though they were so artfully concealed as to be before invisible. This amazing groupe is the work of three Rhodian sculptors, called Agesander, Polydore, and Athenodorus, and was found in the thermae of Titus Vespasian, still supposing it to be the true antique. As for the torso, or mutilated trunk of a statue, which is called the school of Michael Angelo, I had not time to consider it attentively; nor taste enough to perceive its beauties at first sight. The famous horses on Monte Cavallo, before the pope's palace, which are said to have been made in emulation, by Phidias and Praxiteles, I have seen, and likewise those in the front of the Capitol, with the statues of Castor and Pollux; but what pleased me infinitely more than all of them together, is the equestrian statue of Corinthian brass, standing in the middle of this Piazza (I mean at the Capitol) said to represent the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Others suppose it was intended for Lucius Verus; a third set of antiquaries contend for Lucius Septimius Severus; and a fourth, for Constantine, because it stood in the Piazza of the Lateran palace, built by that emperor, from whence pope Paul III. caused it to be removed to the Capitol. I considered the trophy of Marius as a very curious piece of sculpture, and admired the two sphinxes at the bottom of the stairs leading to this Piazza, as the only good specimens of design I have ever seen from Aegypt: for the two idols of that country, which stand in the ground floor of the Musaeum of the Capitol, and indeed all the Aegyptian statues in the Camera Aegyptiaca of this very building, are such monstrous misrepresentations of nature, that they never could have obtained a place among the statues of Rome, except as curiosities of foreign superstition, or on account of the materials, as they are generally of basaltes, porphyry, or oriental granite. At the farther end of the court of this Musaeum, fronting the entrance, is a handsome fountain, with the statue of a river-god reclining on his urn; this is no other than the famous Marforio, so called from its having been found in Martis Fore. It is remarkable only as being the conveyance of the answers to the satires which are found pasted upon Pasquin, another mutilated statue, standing at the corner of a street. The marble coffin, supposed to have contained the ashes of Alexander Severus, which we find in one of these apartments, is a curious antique, valuable for its sculpture in basso relievo, especially for the figures on the cover, representilig that emperor and his mother Julia Mammea. I was sorry I had not time to consider the antient plan of Rome, disposed in six classes, on the stair-case of this Musaeum, which was brought hither from a temple that stood in the Forum Boarium, now called Campo vaccine. It would be ridiculous in me to enter into a detail of the vast collection of marbles, basso relievos, inscriptions, urns, busts, and statues, which are placed in the upper apartments of this edifice. I saw them but once, and then I was struck with the following particulars. A bacchanalian drunk; a Jupiter and Leda, at least equal to that in the gallery at Florence; an old praesica, or hired mourner, very much resembling those wrinkled hags still employed in Ireland, and in the Highlands of Scotland, to sing the coronach at funerals, in praise of the deceased; the famous Antinous, an elegant figure, which Pousin studied as canon or rule of symmetry; the two fauns; and above all the mirmillone, or dying gladiator; the attitude of the body, the expression of the countenance, the elegance of the limbs, and the swelling of the muscles, in this statue, are universally admired; but the execution of the back is incredibly delicate. The course of the muscles called longissimi dorsi, are so naturally marked and tenderly executed, that the marble actually emulates the softness of the flesh; and you may count all the spines of the vertebrae, raising up the skin as in the living body; yet this statue, with all its merit, seems inferior to the celebrated dying gladiator of Ctesilas, as described by Pliny, who says the expression of it was such, as appears altogether incredible. In the court, on the opposite side of the Capitol, there is an admirable statue of a lion devouring an horse, which was found by the gate of Ostia, near the pyramid of Caius Cestius; and here on the left hand, under a colonade, is what they call the Columna Rostrata, erected in honour of Caius Duilius, who first triumphed over the Carthaginians by sea. But this is a modern pillar, with the old inscription, which is so defaced as not to be legible. Among the pictures in the gallery and saloon above, what pleased me most was the Bacchus and Ariadne of Guido Rheni; and the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, by Rubens. The court of the Palazzo Farnese is surrounded with antique statues, among which the most celebrated are, the Flora, with a most delicate drapery; the gladiator, with a dead boy over his shoulder; the Hercules, with the spoils of the Nemean lion, but that which the connoisseurs justly esteem above all the rest is Hercules, by Glycon, which you know as well as I do, by the great reputation it has acquired. This admirable statue having been found without the legs, these were supplied by Gulielmo de la Porta so happily, that when afterwards the original limbs were discovered, Michael Angelo preferred those of the modern artist, both in grace and proportion; and they have been retained accordingly. In a little house, or shed, behind the court, is preserved the wonderful group of Dirce, commonly called the Toro Farnese, which was brought hither from the thermae Caracallae. There is such spirit, ferocity, and indignant resistance expressed in the bull, to whose horns Dirce is tied by the hair, that I have never seen anything like it, either upon canvass, or in stone. The statues of the two brothers endeavouring to throw him into the sea are beautiful figures, finely contrasted; and the rope, which one of them holds in a sort of loose coil, is so surprisingly chizzelled, that one can hardly believe it is of stone. As for Dirce herself, she seems to be but a subaltern character; there is a dog upon his hind legs barking at the bull, which is much admired. This amazing groupe was cut out of one stone, by Appollonius and Tauriscus, two sculptors of Rhodes; and is mentioned by Pliny in the thirty-sixth book of his Natural History. All the precious monuments of art, which have come down to us from antiquity, are the productions of Greek artists. The Romans had taste enough to admire the arts of Greece, as plainly appears by the great collections they made of their statues and pictures, as well as by adopting their architecture and musick: but I do not remember to have read of any Roman who made a great figure either as a painter or a statuary. It is not enough to say those professions were not honourable in Rome, because painting, sculpture, and musick, even rhetoric, physic, and philosophy were practised and taught by slaves. The arts were always honoured and revered at Rome, even when the professors of them happened to be slaves by the accidents and iniquity of fortune. The business of painting and statuary was so profitable, that in a free republic, like that of Rome, they must have been greedily embraced by a great number of individuals: but, in all probability, the Roman soil produced no extraordinary genius for those arts. Like the English of this day, they made a figure in poetry, history, and ethics; but the excellence of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, they never could attain. In the Palazzo Picchini I saw three beautiful figures, the celebrated statues of Meleager, the boar, and dog; together with a wolf, of excellent workmanship. The celebrated statue of Moses, by Michael Angelo, in the church of St. Peter in Vincula, I beheld with pleasure; as well as that of Christ, by the same hand, in the Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva. The right foot, covered with bronze, gilt, is much kissed by the devotees. I suppose it is looked upon as a specific for the toothache; for, I saw a cavalier, in years, and an old woman successively rub their gums upon it, with the appearance of the most painful perseverance. You need not doubt but that I went to the church of St. Peter in Montorio, to view the celebrated Transfiguration, by Raphael, which, if it was mine, I would cut in two parts. The three figures in the air attract the eye so strongly, that little or no attention is payed to those below on the mountain. I apprehend that the nature of the subject does not admit of that keeping and dependence, which ought to be maintained in the disposition of the lights and shadows in a picture. The groupes seem to be intirely independent of each other. The extraordinary merit of this piece, I imagine, consists, not only in the expression of divinity on the face of Christ; but also in the surprising lightness of the figure, that hovers like a beautiful exhalation in the air. In the church of St. Luke, I was not at all struck by the picture of that saint, drawing the portrait of the Virgin Mary, although it is admired as one of the best pieces of Raphael. Indeed it made so little impression upon me, that I do not even remember the disposition of the figures. The altar-piece, by Andrea Sacchi, in the church of St. Romauldus, would have more merit, if the figure of the saint himself had more consequence, and was represented in a stronger light. In the Palazzo Borghese, I chiefly admired the following pieces: a Venus with two nymphs; and another with Cupid, both by Titian: an excellent Roman Piety, by Leonardo da Vinci; and the celebrated Muse, by Dominechino, which is a fine, jolly, buxom figure. At the palace of Colorina Connestabile, I was charmed with the Herodias, by Guido Rheni; a young Christ; and a Madonna, by Raphael; and four landscapes, two by Claude Lorraine, and the other two, by Salvator Rosa. In the palazetto, or summerhouse belonging to the Palazzo Rospigliosi, I had the satisfaction of contemplating the Aurora of Guido, the colours of which still remain in high perfection, notwithstanding the common report that the piece is spoiled by the dampness of the apartment. The print of this picture, by Freij, with all its merit, conveys but an imperfect idea of the beauty of the original. In the Palazzo Barberini, there is a great collection of marbles and pictures: among the first, I was attracted by a beautiful statue of Venus; a sleeping faun, of curious workmanship; a charming Bacchus, lying on an antient sculpture, and the famous Narcissus. Of the pictures, what gave me most pleasure was the Magdalen of Guido, infinitely superior to that by Le Brun in the church of the Carmelites at Paris; the Virgin, by Titian; a Madonna, by Raphael, but not comparable to that which is in the Palazzo de Pitti, at Florence; and the death of Germanicus, by Poussin, which I take to be one of the best pieces in this great collection. In the Palazzo Falconeri there is a beautiful St. Cecilia, by Guercino; a holy family, by Raphael; and a fine expressive figure of St. Peter weeping, by Dominechino. In the Palazzo Altieri, I admired a picture, by Carlo Maratti, representing a saint calling down lightning from heaven to destroy blasphemers. It was the figure of the saint I admired, merely as a portrait. The execution of the other parts was tame enough: perhaps they were purposely kept down, in order to preserve the importance of the principal figure. I imagine Salvator Rosa would have made a different disposition on the same subject: that amidst the darkness of a tempest, he would have illuminated the blasphemer with the flash of lightning by which he was destroyed: this would have thrown a dismal gleam upon his countenance, distorted by the horror of his situation as well as by the effects of the fire; and rendered the whole scene dreadfully picturesque. In the same palace, I saw the famous holy family, by Corregio, which he left unfinished, and no other artist would undertake to supply; for what reason I know not. Here too is a judgment of Paris, by Titian, which is reckoned a very valuable piece. In the Palazzo Odescalchi, there is a holy family, by Buonaroti, and another by Raphael, both counted excellent, though in very different stiles, extremely characteristic of those two great rival artists. If I was silly enough to make a parade, I might mention some hundreds more of marbles and pictures, which I really saw at Rome; and even eke out that number with a huge list of those I did not see: but whatever vanity I may have, it has not taken this turn; and I assure you, upon my word and honour, I have described nothing but what actually fell under my own observation. As for my critical remarks, I am afraid you will think them too superficial and capricious to belong to any other person but--Your humble servant. LETTER XXXIV NICE, April 2, 1765. DEAR SIR,--I have nothing to communicate touching the library of the Vatican, which, with respect to the apartments and their ornaments, is undoubtedly magnificent. The number of books it contains does not exceed forty thousand volumes, which are all concealed from the view, and locked up in presses: as for the manuscripts, I saw none but such as are commonly presented to strangers of our nation; some very old copies of Virgil and Terence; two or three Missals, curiously illuminated; the book De Septem Sacramentis, written in Latin by Henry VIII. against Luther; and some of that prince's love letters to Anne Boleyn. I likewise visited the Libreria Casanatense, belonging to the convent of the church called S. Maria Sopra Minerva. I had a recommendation to the principal librarian, a Dominican friar, who received me very politely, and regaled me with a sight of several curious MSS. of the classics. Having satisfied my curiosity at Rome, I prepared for my departure, and as the road between Radicofani and Montefiascone is very stony and disagreeable, I asked the banker Barazzi, if there was not a better way of returning to Florence, expressing a desire at the same time to see the cascade of Terni. He assured me that the road by Terni was forty miles shorter than the other, much more safe and easy, and accommodated with exceeding good auberges. Had I taken the trouble to cast my eyes upon the map, I must have seen, that the road by Terni, instead of being forty miles shorter, was much longer than the other: but this was not the only mistake of Signiore Barazzi. Great part of this way lies over steep mountains, or along the side of precipices, which render travelling in a carriage exceeding tedious, dreadful, and dangerous; and as for the public houses, they are in all respects the most execrable that ever I entered. I will venture to say that a common prisoner in the Marshalsea or King's-Bench is more cleanly and commodiously lodged than we were in many places on this road. The houses are abominably nasty, and generally destitute of provision: when eatables were found, we were almost poisoned by their cookery: their beds were without curtains or bedstead, and their windows without glass; and for this sort of entertainment we payed as much as if we had been genteelly lodged, and sumptuously treated. I repeat it again; of all the people I ever knew, the Italians are the most villainously rapacious. The first day, having passed Civita Castellana, a small town standing on the top of a hill, we put up at what was called an excellent inn, where cardinals, prelates, and princes, often lodged. Being meagre day, there was nothing but bread, eggs, and anchovies, in the house. I went to bed without supper, and lay in a pallet, where I was half devoured by vermin. Next day, our road, in some places, lay along precipices, which over-hang the Nera or Nar, celebrated in antiquity for its white foam, and the sulphureous quality of its waters. Sulfurea nar albus aqua, fontesque velini. Sulphureous nar, and the Velinian streams. It is a small, but rapid stream, which runs not far from hence, into the Tyber. Passing Utricoli, near the ruins of the ancient Ocriculum, and the romantic town of Narni, situated on the top of a mountain, in the neighbourhood of which is still seen standing one arch of the stupendous bridge built by Augustus Caesar, we arrived at Terni, and hiring a couple of chaises before dinner, went to see the famous Cascata delle Marmore, which is at the distance of three miles. We ascended a steep mountain by a narrow road formed for a considerable way along the brink of a precipice, at the bottom of which brawls the furious river Nera, after having received the Velino. This last is the stream which, running from the Lago delle Marmore, forms the cascade by falling over a precipice about one hundred and sixty feet high. Such a body of water rushing down the mountain; the smoak, vapour, and thick white mist which it raises; the double rainbow which these particles continually exhibit while the sun shines; the deafening sound of the cataract; the vicinity of a great number of other stupendous rocks and precipices, with the dashing, boiling, and foaming of the two rivers below, produce altogether an object of tremendous sublimity: yet great part of its effect is lost, for want of a proper point of view, from which it might be contemplated. The cascade would appear much more astonishing, were it not in some measure eclipsed by the superior height of the neighbouring mountains. You have not a front perspective; but are obliged to view it obliquely on one side, standing upon the brink of a precipice, which cannot be approached without horror. This station might be rendered much more accessible, and altogether secure, for the expence of four or five zequines; and a small tax might be levied for the purpose from travellers by the aubergiste at Terni, who lets his calasses for half a zequine a piece to those that are curious to see this phaenomenon. Besides the two postilions whom I payed for this excursion, at the rate of one stage in posting, there was a fellow who posted himself behind one of the chaises, by way of going to point out the different views of the cascade; and his demand amounted to four or five pauls. To give you an idea of the extortion of those villainous publicans, I must tell you that for a dinner and supper, which even hunger could not tempt us to eat, and a night's lodging in three truckle beds, I paid eighty pauls, amounting to forty shillings sterling. You ask me why I submitted to such imposition? I will tell you--I have more than once in my travels made a formal complaint of the exorbitancy of a publican, to the magistrate of the place; but I never received any satisfaction, and have lost abundance of time. Had I proceeded to manual correction, I should have alarmed and terrified the women: had I peremptorily refused to pay the sum total, the landlord, who was the post-master, would not have supplied me with horses to proceed on my journey. I tried the experiment at Muy in France, where I put myself into a violent passion, had abundance of trouble, was detained till it was almost night, and after all found myself obliged to submit, furnishing at the same time matter of infinite triumph to the mob, which had surrounded the coach, and interested themselves warmly in favour of their townsman. If some young patriot, in good health and spirits, would take the trouble as often as he is imposed upon by the road in travelling, to have recourse to the fountain-head, and prefer a regular complaint to the comptroller of the posts, either in France or Italy, he would have ample satisfaction, and do great service to the community. Terni is an agreeable town, pretty well built, and situated in a pleasant valley, between two branches of the river Nera, whence it was called by the antients, Interamna. Here is an agreeable piazza, where stands a church that was of old a heathen temple. There are some valuable paintings in the church. The people are said to be very civil, and provisions to be extremely cheap. It was the birthplace of the emperor Tacitus, as well as of the historian of the same name. In our journey from hence to Spoleto, we passed over a high mountain, (called, from its height, Somma) where it was necessary to have two additional horses to the carriage, and the road winds along a precipice. which is equally dangerous and dreadful. We passed through part of Spoleto, the capital of Umbria, which is a pretty large city. Of this, however, I give no other account from my own observation, but that I saw at a distance the famous Gothic aqueduct of brick: this is mentioned by Addison as a structure, which, for the height of its arches, is not equalled by any thing in Europe. The road from hence to Foligno, where we lay, is kept in good order, and lies through a delightful plain, laid out into beautiful inclosures, abounding with wine, oil, corn, and cattle, and watered by the pastoral streams of the famous river Clitumnus, which takes its rise in three or four separate rivulets issuing from a rock near the highway. On the right-hand, we saw several towns situated on rising grounds, and among the rest, that of Assissio, famous for the birth of St. Francis, whose body, being here deposited, occasions a concourse of pilgrims. We met a Roman princess going thither with a grand retinue, in consequence of a vow she had made for the re-establishment of her health. Foligno, the Fulginium of the antients, is a small town, not unpleasant, lying in the midst of mulberry plantations, vineyards, and corn-fields, and built on both sides of the little river Topino. In choosing our beds at the inn, I perceived one chamber locked, and desired it might be opened; upon which the cameriere declared with some reluctance, "Besogna dire a su' eccellenza; poco fa, che una bestia e morta in questa camera, e non e ancora lustrata," "Your Excellency must know that a filthy Beast died lately in that Chamber, and it is not yet purified and put in order." When I enquired what beast it was, he replied, "Un'eretico Inglese," "An English heretic." I suppose he would not have made so free with our country and religion, if he had not taken us for German catholics, as we afterwards learned from Mr. R--i. Next day, we crossed the Tyber, over a handsome bridge, and in mounting the steep hill upon which the city of Perugia stands, our horses being exhausted, were dragged backwards by the weight of the carriage to the very edge of a precipice, where, happily for us, a man passing that way, placed a large stone behind one of the wheels, which stopped their motion, otherwise we should have been all dashed in pieces. We had another ugly hill to ascend within the city, which was more difficult and dangerous than the other: but the postilions, and the other beasts made such efforts, that we mounted without the least stop, to the summit, where we found ourselves in a large piazza, where the horses are always changed. There being no relays at the post, we were obliged to stay the whole day and night at Perugia, which is a considerable city, built upon the acclivity of a hill, adorned with some elegant fountains, and several handsome churches, containing some valuable pictures by Guido, Raphael, and his master Pietro Perugino, who was a native of this place. The next stage is on the banks of the lake, which was the Thrasimene of the antients, a beautiful piece of water, above thirty miles in circumference, having three islands, abounding with excellent fish: upon a peninsula of it, there is a town and castle. It was in this neighbourhood where the consul Flaminius was totally defeated with great slaughter by Hannibal. From Perugia to Florence, the posts are all double, and the road is so bad that we never could travel above eight and twenty miles a day. We were often obliged to quit the carriage, and walk up steep mountains; and the way in general was so unequal and stony, that we were jolted even to the danger of our lives. I never felt any sort of exercise or fatigue so intolerable; and I did not fail to bestow an hundred benedictions per diem upon the banker Barazzi, by whose advice we had taken this road; yet there was no remedy but patience. If the coach had not been incredibly strong, it must have been shattered to pieces. The fifth night we passed at a place called Camoccia, a miserable cabaret, where we were fain to cook our own supper, and lay in a musty chamber, which had never known a fire, and indeed had no fire-place, and where we ran the risque of being devoured by rats. Next day one of the irons of the coach gave way at Arezzo, where we were detained two hours before it could be accommodated. I might have taken this opportunity to view the remains of the antient Etruscan amphitheatre, and the temple of Hercules, described by the cavalier Lorenzo Guazzesi, as standing in the neighbourhood of this place: but the blacksmith assured me his work would be finished in a few minutes; and as I had nothing so much at heart as the speedy accomplishment of this disagreeable journey, I chose to suppress my curiosity, rather than be the occasion of a moment's delay. But all the nights we had hitherto passed were comfortable in comparison to this, which we suffered at a small village, the name of which I do not remember. The house was dismal and dirty beyond all description; the bed-cloaths filthy enough to turn the stomach of a muleteer; and the victuals cooked in such a manner, that even a Hottentot could not have beheld them without loathing. We had sheets of our own, which were spread upon a mattrass, and here I took my repose wrapped in a greatcoat, if that could be called repose which was interrupted by the innumerable stings of vermin. In the morning, I was seized with a dangerous fit of hooping-cough, which terrified my wife, alarmed my people, and brought the whole community into the house. I had undergone just such another at Paris, about a year before. This forenoon, one of our coach wheels flew off in the neighbourhood of Ancisa, a small town, where we were detained above two hours by this accident; a delay which was productive of much disappointment, danger, vexation, and fatigue. There being no horses at the last post, we were obliged to wait until those which brought us thither were sufficiently refreshed to proceed. Understanding that all the gates of Florence are shut at six, except two that are kept open for the accommodation of travellers; and that to reach the nearest of these gates, it was necessary to pass the river Arno in a ferry-boat, which could not transport the carriage; I determined to send my servant before with a light chaise to enter the nearest gate before it was shut, and provide a coach to come and take us up at the side of the river, where we should be obliged to pass in the boat: for I could not bear the thoughts of lying another night in a common cabaret. Here, however, another difficulty occurred. There was but one chaise, and a dragoon officer, in the imperial troops, insisted upon his having bespoke it for himself and his servant. A long dispute ensued, which had like to have produced a quarrel: but at length I accommodated matters, by telling the officer that he should have a place in it gratis, and his servant might ride a-horse-back. He accepted the offer without hesitation; but, in the mean time, we set out in the coach before them, and having proceeded about a couple of miles, the road was so deep from a heavy rain, and the beasts were so fatigued, that they could not proceed. The postilions scourging the poor animals with great barbarity, they made an effort, and pulled the coach to the brink of a precipice, or rather a kind of hollow-way, which might be about seven or eight feet lower than the road. Here my wife and I leaped out, and stood under the rain up to the ancles in mud; while the postilions still exercising their whips, one of the fore-horses fairly tumbled down the descent, arid hung by the neck, so that he was almost strangled before he could be disengaged from the traces, by the assistance of some foot travellers that happened to pass. While we remained in this dilemma, the chaise, with the officer and my servant, coming up, we exchanged places; my wife and I proceeded in the chaise, and left them with Miss C-- and Mr. R--, to follow in the coach. The road from hence to Florence is nothing but a succession of steep mountains, paved and conducted in such a manner, that one would imagine the design had been to render it impracticable by any sort of wheel-carriage. Notwithstanding all our endeavours, I found it would be impossible to enter Florence before the gates were shut. I flattered and threatened the driver by turns: but the fellow, who had been remarkably civil at first, grew sullen and impertinent. He told me I must not think of reaching Florence: that the boat would not take the carriage on board; and that from the other side, I must walk five miles before I should reach the gate that was open: but he would carry me to an excellent osteria, where I should be entertained and lodged like a prince. I was now convinced that he had lingered on purpose to serve this inn-keeper; and I took it for granted that what he told me of the distance between the ferry and the gate was a lie. It was eight o'clock when we arrived at his inn. I alighted with my wife to view the chambers, desiring he would not put up his horses. Finding it was a villainous house, we came forth, and, by this time, the horses were put up. I asked the fellow how he durst presume to contradict my orders, and commanded him to put them to the chaise. He asked in his turn if I was mad? If I thought I and the lady had strength and courage enough to walk five miles in the dark, through a road which we did not know, and which was broke up by a continued rain of two days? I told him he was an impertinent rascal, and as he still hesitated, I collared him with one hand, and shook my cane over his head with the other. It was the only weapon I had, either offensive or defensive; for I had left my sword, and musquetoon in the coach. At length the fellow obeyed, though with great reluctance, cracking many severe jokes upon us in the mean time, and being joined in his raillery by the inn-keeper, who had all the external marks of a ruffian. The house stood in a solitary situation, and not a soul appeared but these two miscreants, so that they might have murdered us without fear of detection. "You do not like the apartments? (said one) to be sure they were not fitted up for persons of your rank and quality!" "You will be glad of a worse chamber, (continued the other) before you get to bed." "If you walk to Florence tonight, you will sleep so sound, that the fleas will not disturb you." "Take care you do not take up your night's lodging in the middle of the road, or in the ditch of the city-wall." I fired inwardly at these sarcasms, to which, however, I made no reply; and my wife was almost dead with fear. In the road from hence to the boat, we met with an ill-looking fellow, who offered his service to conduct us into the city, and such was our situation, that I was fain to accept his proposal, especially as we had two small boxes in the chaise by accident, containing some caps and laces belonging to my wife, I still hoped the postilion had exaggerated in the distance between the boat and the city gate, and was confirmed in this opinion by the ferryman, who said we had not above half a league to walk. Behold us then in this expedition; myself wrapped up in a very heavy greatcoat, and my cane in my hand. I did not imagine I could have walked a couple of miles in this equipage, had my life been depending; my wife a delicate creature, who had scarce ever walked a mile in her life; and the ragamuffin before us with our boxes under his arm. The night was dark and wet; the road slippery and dirty; not a soul was seen, nor a sound was heard: all was silent, dreary, and horrible. I laid my account with a violent fit of illness from the cold I should infallibly catch, if I escaped assassination, the fears of which were the more troublesome as I had no weapon to defend our lives. While I laboured under the weight of my greatcoat which made the streams of sweat flow down my face and shoulders, I was plunging in the mud, up to the mid-leg at every step; and at the same time obliged to support my wife, who wept in silence, half dead with terror and fatigue. To crown our vexation, our conductor walked so fast, that he was often out of sight, and I imagined he had run away with the boxes. All I could do on these occasions, was to hollow as loud as I could, and swear horribly that I would blow his brains out. I did not know but these oaths and menaces might keep other rogues in awe. In this manner did we travel three long miles, making almost an intire circuit of the city-wall, without seeing the face of a human creature, and at length reached the gate, where we were examined by the guard, and allowed to pass, after they had told us it was a long mile from thence to the house of Vanini, where we proposed to lodge. No matter, being now fairly within the city, I plucked up my spirits, and performed the rest of the journey with such ease, that I am persuaded, I could have walked at the same pace all night long, without being very much fatigued. It was near ten at night, when we entered the auberge in such a draggled and miserable condition, that Mrs. Vanini almost fainted at sight of us, on the supposition that we had met with some terrible disaster, and that the rest of the company were killed. My wife and I were immediately accommodated with dry stockings and shoes, a warm apartment, and a good supper, which I ate with great satisfaction, arising not only from our having happily survived the adventure, but also from a conviction that my strength and constitution were wonderfully repaired: not but that I still expected a severe cold, attended with a terrible fit of the asthma: but in this I was luckily disappointed. I now for the first time drank to the health of my physician Barazzi, fully persuaded that the hardships and violent exercise I underwent by following his advice, had greatly contributed to the re-establishment of my health. In this particular, I imitate the gratitude of Tavernier, who was radically cured of the gout by a Turkish aga in Aegypt, who gave him the bastinado, because he would not look at the head of the bashaw of Cairo, which the aga had in a bag, to be presented to the grand signior at Constantinople. I did not expect to see the rest of our company that night, as I never doubted but they would stay with the coach at the inn on the other side of the Arno: but at mid-night we were joined by Miss C-- and Mr. R--, who had left the carriage at the inn, under the auspices of the captain and my servant, and followed our foot-steps by walking from the ferry-boat to Florence, conducted by one of the boatmen. Mr. R-- seemed to be much ruffled and chagrined; but, as he did not think proper to explain the cause, he had no right to expect that I should give him satisfaction for some insult he had received from my servant. They had been exposed to a variety of disagreeable adventures from the impracticability of the road. The coach had been several times in the most imminent hazard of being lost with all our baggage; and at one place, it was necessary to hire a dozen of oxen, and as many men, to disengage it from the holes into which it had run. It was in the confusion of these adventures, that the captain and his valet, Mr. R-- and my servant, had like to have gone all by the ears together. The peace was with difficulty preserved by the interposition of Miss C--, who suffered incredibly from cold and wet, terror, vexation, and fatigue: yet happily no bad consequence ensued. The coach and baggage were brought safely into Florence next morning, when all of us found ourselves well refreshed, and in good spirits. I am afraid this is not the case with you, who must by this time be quite jaded with this long epistle, which shall therefore be closed without further ceremony by,--Yours always. LETTER XXXV NICE, March 20, 1765. DEAR SIR,--The season being far advanced, and the weather growing boisterous, I made but a short stay at Florence, and set out for Pisa, with full resolution to take the nearest road to Lerici, where we proposed to hire a felucca for Genoa. I had a great desire to see Leghorn and Lucca; but the dread of a winter's voyage by sea in an open boat effectually restrained my curiosity. To avoid the trouble of having our baggage shifted every post, I hired two chaises to Pisa for a couple of zequines, and there we arrived in safety about seven in the evening, though not without fear of the consequence, as the calesses were quite open, and it rained all the way. I must own I was so sick of the wretched accommodation one meets with in every part of Italy, except the great cities, so averse to the sea at this season, and so fond of the city of Pisa, that I should certainly have stayed here the winter, had not I been separated from my books and papers, as well as from other conveniencies and connexions which I had at Nice; and foreseen that the thoughts of performing the same disagreeable voyage in the spring would imbitter my whole winter's enjoyment. I again hired two calesses for Lerici, proposing to lie at Sarzana, three miles short of that place, where we were told we should find comfortable lodging, and to embark next day without halting. When we departed in the morning, it rained very hard, and the Cerchio, which the chaises had formerly passed, almost without wetting the wheels, was now swelled to a mighty river, broad and deep and rapid. It was with great difficulty I could persuade my wife to enter the boat; for it blew a storm, and she had seen it in coming over from the other side hurried down a considerable way by the rapidity of the current, notwithstanding all the efforts of the watermen. Near two hours were spent in transporting us with our chaises. The road between this and Pietra Santa was rendered almost impassable. When we arrived at Massa, it began to grow dark, and the post-master assured us that the road to Sarzana was overflowed in such a manner as not to be passed even in the day-time, without imminent danger. We therefore took up our lodging for the night at this house, which was in all respects one of the worst we had yet entered. Next day, we found the Magra as large and violent as the Cerchio: however, we passed it without any accident, and in the afternoon arrived at Lerici. There we were immediately besieged by a number of patrons of feluccas, from among whom I chose a Spaniard, partly because he looked like an honest man, and produced an ample certificate, signed by an English gentleman; and partly, because he was not an Italian; for, by this time, I had imbibed a strong prejudice against the common people of that country. We embarked in the morning before day, with a gale that made us run the lee-gunwale in the water; but, when we pretended to turn the point of Porto Venere, we found the wind full in our teeth, and were obliged to return to our quarters, where we had been shamefully fleeced by the landlord, who, nevertheless, was not such an exorbitant knave as the post-master, whose house I would advise all travellers to avoid. Here, indeed, I had occasion to see an instance of prudence and oeconomy, which I should certainly imitate, if ever I had occasion to travel this way by myself. An Englishman, who had hired a felucca from Antibes to Leghorn, was put in here by stress of weather; but being aware of the extortion of innkeepers, and the bad accommodation in their houses, he slept on board on his own mattrasses; and there likewise he had all his conveniencies for eating. He sent his servant on shore occasionally to buy provision, and see it cooked according to his direction in some public house; and had his meals regularly in the felucca. This evening he came ashore to stretch his legs, and took a solitary walk on the beach, avoiding us with great care, although he knew we were English; his valet who was abundantly communicative, told my servant, that in coming through France, his master had travelled three days in company with two other English gentlemen, whom he met upon the road, and in all that time he never spoke a word to either, yet in other respects, he was a good man, mild, charitable, and humane. This is a character truly British. At five o'clock in the morning we put to sea again, and though the wind was contrary, made shift to reach the town of Sestri di Levante, where we were most graciously received by the publican butcher and his family. The house was in much better order than before; the people were much more obliging; we passed a very tolerable night, and had a very reasonable bill to pay in the morning. I cannot account for this favourable change any other way, than by ascribing it to the effects of a terrible storm, which had two days before torn up a great number of their olive-trees by the roots, and done such damage as terrified them into humility and submission. Next day, the water being delightful, we arrived by one o'clock in the afternoon at Genoa. Here I made another bargain with our patron Antonio, to carry us to Nice. He had been hitherto remarkably obliging, and seemingly modest. He spoke Latin fluently, and was tinctured with the sciences. I began to imagine he was a person of a good family, who had met with misfortunes in life, and respected him accordingly: but I afterwards found him mercenary, mean, and rapacious. The wind being still contrary, when we departed from Genoa, we could get no further than Finale, where we lodged in a very dismal habitation, which was recommended to us as the best auberge in the place. What rendered it the more uncomfortable, the night was cold, and there was not a fire-place in the house, except in the kitchen. The beds (if they deserved that name) were so shockingly nasty, that we could not have used them, had not a friend of Mr. R-- supplied us with mattrasses, sheets, and coverlets; for our own sheets were on board the felucca, which was anchored at a distance from the shore. Our fare was equally wretched: the master of the house was a surly assassin, and his cameriere or waiter, stark-staring mad. Our situation was at the same time shocking and ridiculous. Mr. R-- quarrelled over night with the master, who swore in broken French to my man, that he had a good mind to poniard that impertinent Piedmontese. In the morning, before day, Mr. R--, coming into my chamber, gave me to understand that he had been insulted by the landlord, who demanded six and thirty livres for our supper and lodging. Incensed at the rascal's presumption, I assured him I would make him take half the money, and a good beating into the bargain. He replied, that he would have saved me the trouble of beating him, had not the cameriere, who was a very sensible fellow, assured him the padrone was out of his senses, and if roughly handled, might commit some extravagance. Though I was exceedingly ruffled, I could not help laughing at the mad cameriere's palming himself upon R--y, as a sensible fellow, and transferring the charge of madness upon his master, who seemed to be much more knave than fool. While Mr. R-- went to mass, I desired the cameriere to bid his master bring the bill, and to tell him that if it was not reasonable, I would carry him before the commandant. In the mean time I armed myself with my sword in one hand and my cane in the other. The inn-keeper immediately entered, pale and staring, and when I demanded his bill, he told me, with a profound reverence that he should be satisfied with whatever I myself thought proper to give. Surprised at this moderation, I asked if he should be content with twelve livres, and he answered, "Contentissimo," with another prostration. Then he made an apology for the bad accommodation of his house, and complained, that the reproaches of the other gentleman, whom he was pleased to call my majorduomo, had almost turned his brain. When he quitted the room, his cameriere, laying hold of his master's last words, pointed to his own forehead, and said, he had informed the gentleman over night that his patron was mad. This day we were by a high wind in the afternoon, driven for shelter into Porto Mauritio, where we found the post-house even worse than that of Finale; and what rendered it more shocking was a girl quite covered with the confluent smallpox, who lay in a room through which it was necessary to pass to the other chambers, and who smelled so strong as to perfume the whole house. We were but fifteen miles from St. Remo, where I knew the auberge was tolerable, and thither I resolved to travel by land. I accordingly ordered five mules to travel post, and a very ridiculous cavalcade we formed, the women being obliged to use common saddles; for in this country even the ladies sit astride. The road lay along one continued precipice, and was so difficult, that the beasts never could exceed a walking pace. In some places we were obliged to alight. Seven hours were spent in travelling fifteen short miles: at length we arrived at our old lodgings in St. Remo, which we found white-washed, and in great order. We supped pretty comfortably; slept well; and had no reason to complain of imposition in paying the bill. This was not the case in the article of the mules, for which I was obliged to pay fifty livres, according to the regulation of the posts. The postmaster, who came along with us, had the effrontery to tell me, that if I had hired the mules to carry me and my company to St. Remo, in the way of common travelling, they would have cost me but fifteen livres; but as I demanded post-horses, I must submit to the regulations. This is a distinction the more absurd, as the road is of such a nature as renders it impossible to travel faster in one way than in another; nor indeed is there the least difference either in the carriage or convenience, between travelling post and journey riding. A publican might with the same reason charge me three livres a pound for whiting, and if questioned about the imposition, reply, that if I had asked for fish I should have had the same whiting for the fifth part of the money: but that he made a wide difference between selling it as fish, and selling it as whiting. Our felucca came round from Porto Mauritio in the night, and embarking next morning, we arrived at Nice about four in the afternoon. Thus have I given you a circumstantial detail of my Italian expedition, during which I was exposed to a great number of hardships, which I thought my weakened constitution could not have bore; as well as to violent fits of passion, chequered, however, with transports of a more agreeable nature; insomuch that I may say I was for two months continually agitated either in mind or body, and very often in both at the same time. As my disorder at first arose from a sedentary life, producing a relaxation of the fibres, which naturally brought on a listlessness, indolence, and dejection of the spirits, I am convinced that this hard exercise of mind and body, co-operated with the change of air and objects, to brace up the relaxed constitution, and promote a more vigorous circulation of the juices, which had long languished even almost to stagnation. For some years, I had been as subject to colds as a delicate woman new delivered. If I ventured to go abroad when there was the least moisture either in the air, or upon the ground, I was sure to be laid up a fortnight with a cough and asthma. But, in this journey, I suffered cold and rain, and stood, and walked in the wet, heated myself with exercise, and sweated violently, without feeling the least disorder; but, on the contrary, felt myself growing stronger every day in the midst of these excesses. Since my return to Nice, it has rained the best part of two months, to the astonishment of all the people in the country; yet during all that time I have enjoyed good health and spirits. On Christmas-Eve, I went to the cathedral at midnight, to hear high mass celebrated by the new bishop of Nice, in pontificalibus, and stood near two hours uncovered in a cold gallery, without having any cause in the sequel to repent of my curiosity. In a word, I am now so well that I no longer despair of seeing you and the rest of my friends in England; a pleasure which is eagerly desired by,--Dear Sir, Your affectionate humble Servant. LETTER XXXVI NICE, March 23, 1766. DEAR SIR,--You ask whether I think the French people are more taxed than the English; but I apprehend, the question would be more apropos if you asked whether the French taxes are more insupportable than the English; for, in comparing burthens, we ought always to consider the strength of the shoulders that bear them. I know no better way of estimating the strength, than by examining the face of the country, and observing the appearance of the common people, who constitute the bulk of every nation. When I, therefore, see the country of England smiling with cultivation; the grounds exhibiting all the perfection of agriculture, parcelled out into beautiful inclosures, cornfields, hay and pasture, woodland and common, when I see her meadows well stocked with black cattle, her downs covered with sheep; when I view her teams of horses and oxen, large and strong, fat and sleek; when I see her farm-houses the habitations of plenty, cleanliness, and convenience; and her peasants well fed, well lodged, well cloathed, tall and stout, and hale and jolly; I cannot help concluding that the people are well able to bear those impositions which the public necessities have rendered necessary. On the other hand, when I perceive such signs of poverty, misery and dirt, among the commonalty of France, their unfenced fields dug up in despair, without the intervention of meadow or fallow ground, without cattle to furnish manure, without horses to execute the plans of agriculture; their farm-houses mean, their furniture wretched, their apparel beggarly; themselves and their beasts the images of famine; I cannot help thinking they groan under oppression, either from their landlords, or their government; probably from both. The principal impositions of the French government are these: first, the taille, payed by all the commons, except those that are privileged: secondly, the capitation, from which no persons (not even the nobles) are excepted: thirdly, the tenths and twentieths, called Dixiemes and Vingtiemes, which every body pays. This tax was originally levied as an occasional aid in times of war, and other emergencies; but by degrees is become a standing revenue even in time of peace. All the money arising from these impositions goes directly to the king's treasury; and must undoubtedly amount to a very great sum. Besides these, he has the revenue of the farms, consisting of the droits d'aydes, or excise on wine, brandy, &c. of the custom-house duties; of the gabelle, comprehending that most oppressive obligation on individuals to take a certain quantity of salt at the price which the farmers shall please to fix; of the exclusive privilege to sell tobacco; of the droits de controlle, insinuation, centieme denier, franchiefs, aubeine, echange et contre-echange arising from the acts of voluntary jurisdiction, as well as certain law-suits. These farms are said to bring into the king's coffers above one hundred and twenty millions of livres yearly, amounting to near five millions sterling: but the poor people are said to pay about a third more than this sum, which the farmers retain to enrich themselves, and bribe the great for their protection; which protection of the great is the true reason why this most iniquitous, oppressive, and absurd method of levying money is not laid aside. Over and above those articles I have mentioned, the French king draws considerable sums from his clergy, under the denomination of dons gratuits, or free-gifts; as well as from the subsidies given by the pays d'etats such as Provence, Languedoc, and Bretagne, which are exempted from the taille. The whole revenue of the French king amounts to between twelve and thirteen millions sterling. These are great resources for the king: but they will always keep the people miserable, and effectually prevent them from making such improvements as might turn their lands to the best advantage. But besides being eased in the article of taxes, there is something else required to make them exert themselves for the benefit of their country. They must be free in their persons, secure in their property, indulged with reasonable leases, and effectually protected by law from the insolence and oppression of their superiors. Great as the French king's resources may appear, they are hardly sufficient to defray the enormous expence of his government. About two millions sterling per annum of his revenue are said to be anticipated for paying the interest of the public debts; and the rest is found inadequate to the charge of a prodigious standing army, a double frontier of fortified towns and the extravagant appointments of ambassadors, generals, governors, intendants, commandants, and other officers of the crown, all of whom affect a pomp, which is equally ridiculous and prodigal. A French general in the field is always attended by thirty or forty cooks; and thinks it is incumbent upon him, for the glory of France, to give a hundred dishes every day at his table. When don Philip, and the marechal duke de Belleisle, had their quarters at Nice, there were fifty scullions constantly employed in the great square in plucking poultry. This absurd luxury infects their whole army. Even the commissaries keep open table; and nothing is seen but prodigality and profusion. The king of Sardinia proceeds upon another plan. His troops are better cloathed, better payed, and better fed than those of France. The commandant of Nice has about four hundred a year of appointments, which enable him to live decently, and even to entertain strangers. On the other hand, the commandant of Antibes, which is in all respects more inconsiderable than Nice, has from the French king above five times the sum to support the glory of his monarch, which all the sensible part of mankind treat with ridicule and contempt. But the finances of France are so ill managed, that many of their commandants, and other officers, have not been able to draw their appointments these two years. In vain they complain and remonstrate. When they grow troublesome they are removed. How then must they support the glory of France? How, but by oppressing the poor people. The treasurer makes use of their money for his own benefit. The king knows it; he knows his officers, thus defrauded, fleece and oppress his people: but he thinks proper to wink at these abuses. That government may be said to be weak and tottering which finds itself obliged to connive at such proceedings. The king of France, in order to give strength and stability to his administration, ought to have sense to adopt a sage plan of oeconomy, and vigour of mind sufficient to execute it in all its parts, with the most rigorous exactness. He ought to have courage enough to find fault, and even to punish the delinquents, of what quality soever they may be: and the first act of reformation ought to be a total abolition of all the farms. There are, undoubtedly, many marks of relaxation in the reins of the French government, and, in all probability, the subjects of France will be the first to take advantage of it. There is at present a violent fermentation of different principles among them, which under the reign of a very weak prince, or during a long minority, may produce a great change in the constitution. In proportion to the progress of reason and philosophy, which have made great advances in this kingdom, superstition loses ground; antient prejudices give way; a spirit of freedom takes the ascendant. All the learned laity of France detest the hierarchy as a plan of despotism, founded on imposture and usurpation. The protestants, who are very numerous in southern parts, abhor it with all the rancour of religious fanaticism. Many of the commons, enriched by commerce and manufacture, grow impatient of those odious distinctions, which exclude them from the honours and privileges due to their importance in the commonwealth; and all the parliaments, or tribunals of justice in the kingdom, seem bent upon asserting their rights and independence in the face of the king's prerogative, and even at the expence of his power and authority. Should any prince therefore be seduced by evil counsellors, or misled by his own bigotry, to take some arbitrary step, that may be extremely disagreeable to all those communities, without having spirit to exert the violence of his power for the support of his measures, he will become equally detested and despised; and the influence of the commons will insensibly encroach upon the pretensions of the crown. But if in the time of a minority, the power of the government should be divided among different competitors for the regency, the parliaments and people will find it still more easy to acquire and ascertain the liberty at which they aspire, because they will have the balance of power in their hands, and be able to make either scale preponderate. I could say a great deal more upon this subject; and I have some remarks to make relating to the methods which might be taken in the case of a fresh rupture with France, for making a vigorous impression on that kingdom. But these I in list defer till another occasion, having neither room nor leisure at present to add any thing, but that I am, with great truth,--Dear Sir, Your very humble Servant. LETTER XXXVII NICE, April 2, 1765. DEAR DOCTOR,--As I have now passed a second winter at Nice I think myself qualified to make some further remarks on this climate. During the heats of last summer, I flattered myself with the prospect of the fine weather I should enjoy in the winter; but neither I, nor any person in this country, could foresee the rainy weather that prevailed from the middle of November, till the twentieth of March. In this short period of four months, we have had fifty-six days of rain, which I take to be a greater quantity than generally falls during the six worst months of the year in the county of Middlesex, especially as it was, for the most part, a heavy, continued rain. The south winds generally predominate in the wet season at Nice: but this winter the rain was accompanied with every wind that blows, except the south; though the most frequent were those that came from the east and north quarters. Notwithstanding these great rains, such as were never known before at Nice in the memory of man, the intermediate days of fair weather were delightful, and the ground seemed perfectly dry. The air itself was perfectly free from moisture. Though I live upon a ground floor, surrounded on three sides by a garden, I could not perceive the least damp, either on the floors, or the furniture; neither was I much incommoded by the asthma, which used always to harass me most in wet weather. In a word, I passed the winter here much more comfortably than I expected. About the vernal equinox, however, I caught a violent cold, which was attended with a difficulty of breathing, and as the sun advances towards the tropic, I find myself still more subject to rheums. As the heat increases, the humours of the body are rarefied, and, of consequence, the pores of the skin are opened; while the east wind sweeping over the Alps and Apennines, covered with snow, continues surprisingly sharp and penetrating. Even the people of the country, who enjoy good health, are afraid of exposing themselves to the air at this season, the intemperature of which may last till the middle of May, when all the snow on the mountains will probably be melted: then the air will become mild and balmy, till, in the progress of summer, it grows disagreeably hot, and the strong evaporation from the sea makes it so saline, as to be unhealthy for those who have a scorbutical habit. When the sea-breeze is high, this evaporation is so great as to cover the surface of the body with a kind of volatile brine, as I plainly perceived last summer. I am more and more convinced that this climate is unfavourable for the scurvy. Were I obliged to pass my life in it, I would endeavour to find a country retreat among the mountains, at some distance from the sea, where I might enjoy a cool air, free from this impregnation, unmolested by those flies, gnats, and other vermin which render the lower parts almost uninhabitable. To this place I would retire in the month of June, and there continue till the beginning of October, when I would return to my habitation in Nice, where the winter is remarkably mild and agreeable. In March and April however, I would not advise a valetudinarian to go forth, without taking precaution against the cold. An agreeable summer retreat may be found on the other side of the Var, at, or near the town of Grasse, which is pleasantly situated on the ascent of a hill in Provence, about seven English miles from Nice. This place is famous for its pomatum, gloves, wash-balls, perfumes, and toilette-boxes, lined with bergamot. I am told it affords good lodging, and is well supplied with provisions. We are now preparing for our journey to England, from the exercise of which I promise myself much benefit: a journey extremely agreeable, not only on that account, but also because it will restore me to the company of my friends, and remove me from a place where I leave nothing but the air which I can possibly regret. The only friendships I have contracted at Nice are with strangers, who, like myself, only sojourn here for a season. I now find by experience, it is great folly to buy furniture, unless one is resolved to settle here for some years. The Nissards assured me, with great confidence, that I should always be able to sell it for a very little loss; whereas I find myself obliged to part with it for about one-third of what it cost. I have sent for a coach to Aix, and as soon as it arrives, shall take my departure; so that the next letter you receive from me will be dated at some place on the road. I purpose to take Antibes, Toulon, Marseilles, Aix, Avignon, and Orange, in my way: places which I have not yet seen; and where, perhaps, I shall find something for your amusement, which will always be a consideration of some weight with,--Dear Sir, Yours. LETTER XXXVIII To DR. S-- AT NICE TURIN, March 18, 1765. DEAR SIR,--Turin is about thirty leagues from Nice, the greater part of the way lying over frightful mountains covered with snow. The difficulty of the road, however, reaches no farther than Coni, from whence there is an open highway through a fine plain country, as far as the capital of Piedmont, and the traveller is accommodated with chaise and horses to proceed either post, or by cambiatura, as in other parts of Italy. There are only two ways of performing the journey over the mountains from Nice; one is to ride a mule-back, and the other to be carried in a chair. The former I chose, and set out with my servant on the seventh day of February at two in the afternoon. I was hardly clear of Nice, when it began to rain so hard that in less than an hour the mud was half a foot deep in many parts of the road. This was the only inconvenience we suffered, the way being in other respects practicable enough; for there is but one small hill to cross on this side of the village of L'Escarene, where we arrived about six in the evening. The ground in this neighbourhood is tolerably cultivated, and the mountains are planted to the tops with olive trees. The accommodation here is so very bad, that I had no inclination to be a-bed longer than was absolutely necessary for refreshment; and therefore I proceeded on my journey at two in the morning, conducted by a guide, whom I hired for this purpose at the rate of three livres a day. Having ascended one side, and descended the other, of the mountain called Braus, which took up four hours, though the road is not bad, we at six reached the village of Sospello, which is agreeably situated in a small valley, surrounded by prodigious high and barren mountains. This little plain is pretty fertile, and being watered by a pleasant stream, forms a delightful contrast with the hideous rocks that surround it. Having reposed myself and my mules two hours at this place, we continued our journey over the second mountain, called Brovis, which is rather more considerable than the first, and in four hours arrived at La Giandola, a tolerable inn situated betwixt the high road and a small river, about a gunshot from the town of Brieglie, which we leave on the right. As we jogged along in the grey of the morning, I was a little startled at two figures which I saw before me, and began to put my pistols in order. It must be observed that these mountains are infested with contrabandiers, a set of smuggling peasants, very bold and desperate, who make a traffic of selling tobacco, salt, and other merchandize, which have not payed duty, and sometimes lay travellers under contribution. I did not doubt but there was a gang of these free-booters at hand; but as no more than two persons appeared, I resolved to let them know we were prepared for defence, and fired one of my pistols, in hope that the report of it, echoed from the surrounding rocks, would produce a proper effect: but, the mountains and roads being entirely covered with snow to a considerable depth, there was little or no reverberation, and the sound was not louder than that of a pop-gun, although the piece contained a good charge of powder. Nevertheless, it did not fail to engage the attention of the strangers, one of whom immediately wheeled to the left about, and being by this time very near me, gave me an opportunity of contemplating his whole person. He was very tall, meagre, and yellow, with a long hooked nose, and small twinkling eyes. His head was eased in a woollen night-cap, over which he wore a flapped hat; he had a silk handkerchief about his neck, and his mouth was furnished with a short wooden pipe, from which he discharged wreathing clouds of tobacco-smoke. He was wrapped in a kind of capot of green bays, lined with wolf-skin, had a pair of monstrous boots, quilted on the inside with cotton, was almost covered with dirt, and rode a mule so low that his long legs hung dangling within six inches of the ground. This grotesque figure was so much more ludicrous than terrible, that I could not help laughing; when, taking his pipe out of his mouth, he very politely accosted me by name. You may easily guess I was exceedingly surprised at such an address on the top of the mountain Brovis: but he forthwith put an end to it too, by discovering himself to be the marquis M--, whom I had the honour to be acquainted with at Nice. After having rallied him upon his equipage, he gave me to understand he had set out from Nice the morning of the same day that I departed; that he was going to Turin, and that he had sent one of his servants before him to Coni with his baggage. Knowing him to be an agreeable companion, I was glad of this encounter, and we resolved to travel the rest of the way together. We dined at La Giandola, and in the afternoon rode along the little river Roida, which runs in a bottom between frightful precipices, and in several places forms natural cascades, the noise of which had well-nigh deprived us of the sense of hearing; after a winding course among these mountains, it discharges itself into the Mediterranean at Vintimiglia, in the territory of Genoa. As the snow did not lie on these mountains, when we cracked our whips, there was such a repercussion of the sound as is altogether inconceivable. We passed by the village of Saorgio, situated on an eminence, where there is a small fortress which commands the whole pass, and in five hours arrived at our inn, on this side the Col de Tende, where we took up our quarters, but had very little reason to boast of our entertainment. Our greatest difficulty, however, consisted in pulling off the marquis's boots, which were of the kind called Seafarot, by this time so loaded with dirt on the outside, and so swelled with the rain within, that he could neither drag them after him as he walked, nor disencumber his legs of them, without such violence as seemed almost sufficient to tear him limb from limb. In a word, we were obliged to tie a rope about his heel, and all the people in the house assisting to pull, the poor marquis was drawn from one end of the apartment to the other before the boot would give way: at last his legs were happily disengaged, and the machines carefully dried and stuffed for next day's journey. We took our departure from hence at three in the morning, and at four, began to mount the Col de Tende, which is by far the highest mountain in the whole journey: it was now quite covered with snow, which at the top of it was near twenty feet thick. Half way up, there are quarters for a detachment of soldiers, posted here to prevent smuggling, and an inn called La Ca, which in the language of the country signifies the house. At this place, we hired six men to assist us in ascending the mountain, each of them provided with a kind of hough to break the ice, and make a sort of steps for the mules. When we were near the top, however, we were obliged to alight, and climb the mountain supported each by two of those men, called Coulants who walk upon the snow with great firmness and security. We were followed by the mules, and though they are very sure-footed animals, and were frost-shod for the occasion, they stumbled and fell very often; the ice being so hard that the sharp-headed nails in their shoes could not penetrate. Having reached the top of this mountain, from whence there is no prospect but of other rocks and mountains, we prepared for descending on the other side by the Leze, which is an occasional sledge made of two pieces of wood, carried up by the Coulants for this purpose. I did not much relish this kind of carriage, especially as the mountain was very steep, and covered with such a thick fog that we could hardly see two or three yards before us. Nevertheless, our guides were so confident, and my companion, who had passed the same way on other occasions, was so secure, that I ventured to place myself on this machine, one of the coulants standing behind me, and the other sitting before, as the conductor, with his feet paddling among the snow, in order to moderate the velocity of its descent. Thus accommodated, we descended the mountain with such rapidity, that in an hour we reached Limon, which is the native place of almost all the muleteers who transport merchandize from Nice to Coni and Turin. Here we waited full two hours for the mules, which travelled with the servants by the common road. To each of the coulants we paid forty sols, which are nearly equal to two shillings sterling. Leaving Limon, we were in two hours quite disengaged from the gorges of the mountains, which are partly covered with wood and pasturage, though altogether inaccessible, except in summer; but from the foot of the Col de Tende, the road lies through a plain all the way to Turin. We took six hours to travel from the inn where we had lodged over the mountain to Limon, and five hours from thence to Coni. Here we found our baggage, which we had sent off by the carriers one day before we departed from Nice; and here we dismissed our guides, together with the mules. In winter, you have a mule for this whole journey at the rate of twenty livres; and the guides are payed at the rate of two livres a day, reckoning six days, three for the journey to Coni, and three for their return to Nice. We set out so early in the morning in order to avoid the inconveniencies and dangers that attend the passage of this mountain. The first of these arises from your meeting with long strings of loaded mules in a slippery road, the breadth of which does not exceed a foot and an half. As it is altogether impossible for two mules to pass each other in such a narrow path, the muleteers have made doublings or elbows in different parts, and when the troops of mules meet, the least numerous is obliged to turn off into one of these doublings, and there halt until the others are past. Travellers, in order to avoid this disagreeable delay, which is the more vexatious, considering the excessive cold, begin the ascent of the mountain early in the morning before the mules quit their inns. But the great danger of travelling here when the sun is up, proceeds from what they call the Valanches. These are balls of snow detached from the mountains which over-top the road, either by the heat of the sun, or the humidity of the weather. A piece of snow thus loosened from the rock, though perhaps not above three or four feet in diameter, increases sometimes in its descent to such a degree, as to become two hundred paces in length, and rolls down with such rapidity, that the traveller is crushed to death before he can make three steps on the road. These dreadful heaps drag every thing along with them in their descent. They tear up huge trees by the roots, and if they chance to fall upon a house, demolish it to the foundation. Accidents of this nature seldom happen in the winter while the weather is dry; and yet scarce a year passes in which some mules and their drivers do not perish by the valanches. At Coni we found the countess C-- from Nice, who had made the same journey in a chair, carried by porters. This is no other than a common elbow-chair of wood, with a straw bottom, covered above with waxed cloth, to protect the traveller from the rain or snow, and provided with a foot-board upon which the feet rest. It is carried like a sedan-chair; and for this purpose six or eight porters are employed at the rate of three or four livres a head per day, according to the season, allowing three days for their return. Of these six men, two are between the poles carrying like common chairmen, and each of these is supported by the other two, one at each hand: but as those in the middle sustain the greatest burthen, they are relieved by the others in a regular rotation. In descending the mountain, they carry the poles on their shoulders, and in that case, four men are employed, one at each end. At Coni, you may have a chaise to go with the same horses to Turin, for which you pay fifteen livres, and are a day and a half on the way. You may post it, however, in one day, and then the price is seven livres ten sols per post, and ten sols to the postilion. The method we took was that of cambiatura. This is a chaise with horses shifted at the same stages that are used in posting: but as it is supposed to move slower, we pay but five livres per post, and ten sols to the postilion. In order to quicken its pace, we gave ten sols extraordinary to each postilion, and for this gratification, he drove us even faster than the post. The chaises are like those of Italy, and will take on near two hundred weight of baggage. Coni is situated between two small streams, and though neither very large nor populous, is considerable for the strength of its fortifications. It is honoured with the title of the Maiden-Fortress, because though several times besieged, it was never taken. The prince of Conti invested it in the war of 1744; but he was obliged to raise the siege, after having given battle to the king of Sardinia. The place was gallantly defended by the baron Leutrum, a German protestant, the best general in the Sardinian service: but what contributed most to the miscarriage of the enemy, was a long tract of heavy rains, which destroyed all their works, and rendered their advances impracticable. I need not tell you that Piedmont is one of the most fertile and agreeable countries in Europe, and this the most agreeable part of all Piedmont, though it now appeared to disadvantage from the rigorous season of the year: I shall only observe that we passed through Sabellian, which is a considerable town, and arrived in the evening at Turin. We entered this fine city by the gate of Nice, and passing through the elegant Piazza di San Carlo, took up our quarters at the Bona Fama, which stands at one corner of the great square, called La Piazza Castel. Were I even disposed to give a description of Turin, I should be obliged to postpone it till another opportunity, having no room at present to say any thing more, but that I am always--Yours. LETTER XXXIX AIX EN PROVENCE, May 10, 1765. DEAR SIR,--I am thus far on my way to England. I had resolved to leave Nice, without having the least dispute with any one native of the place; but I found it impossible to keep this resolution. My landlord, Mr. C--, a man of fashion, with whose family we had always lived in friendship, was so reasonable as to expect I should give him up the house and garden, though they were to be paid for till Michaelmas, and peremptorily declared I should not be permitted to sub-let them to any other person. He had of his own accord assured me more than once that he would take my furniture off my hands, and trusting to this assurance, I had lost the opportunity, of disposing it to advantage: but, when the time of my departure drew near, he refused to take it, at the same time insisting upon having the key of the house and garden, as well as on being paid the whole rent directly, though it would not be due till the middle of September. I was so exasperated at this treatment from a man whom I had cultivated with particular respect, that I determined to contest it at law: but the affair was accommodated by the mediation of a father of the Minims, a friend to both, and a merchant of Nice, who charged himself with the care of the house and furniture. A stranger must conduct himself with the utmost circumspection to be able to live among these people without being the dupe of imposition. I had sent to Aix for a coach and four horses, which I hired at the rate of eighteen French livres a day, being equal to fifteen shillings and nine-pence sterling. The river Var was so swelled by the melting of the snow on the mountains, as to be impassable by any wheel-carriage; and, therefore, the coach remained at Antibes, to which we went by water, the distance being about nine or ten miles. This is the Antipolis of the antients, said to have been built like Nice, by a colony from Marseilles. In all probability, however, it was later than the foundation of Nice, and took its name from its being situated directly opposite to that city. Pliny says it was famous for its tunny-fishery; and to this circumstance Martial alludes in the following lines Antipolitani, fateor, sum filia thynni. Essem si Scombri non tibi missa forem. I'm spawned from Tunny of Antibes, 'tis true. Right Scomber had I been, I ne'er had come to you. The famous pickle Garum was made from the Thynnus or Tunny as well as from the Scomber, but that from the Scomber was counted the most delicate. Commentators, however, are not agreed about the Scomber or Scombrus. Some suppose it was the Herring or Sprat; others believe it was the mackarel; after all, perhaps it was the Anchovy, which I do not find distinguished by any other Latin name: for the Encrasicolus is a Greek appellation altogether generical. Those who would be further informed about the Garum and the Scomber may consult Caelius Apicius de recogninaria, cum notis, variorum. At present, Antibes is the frontier of France towards Italy, pretty strongly fortified, and garrisoned by a battalion of soldiers. The town is small and inconsiderable: but the basin of the harbour is surrounded to seaward by a curious bulwark founded upon piles driven in the water, consisting of a wall, ramparts, casemates, and quay. Vessels lie very safe in this harbour; but there is not water at the entrance of it to admit of ships of any burthen. The shallows run so far off from the coast, that a ship of force cannot lie near enough to batter the town; but it was bombarded in the late war. Its chief strength by land consists in a small quadrangular fort detached from the body of the place, which, in a particular manner, commands the entrance of the harbour. The wall of the town built in the sea has embrasures and salient angles, on which a great number of cannon may be mounted. I think the adjacent country is much more pleasant than that on the side of Nice; and there is certainly no essential difference in the climate. The ground here is not so encumbered; it is laid out in agreeable inclosures, with intervals of open fields, and the mountains rise with an easy ascent at a much greater distance from the sea, than on the other side of the bay. Besides, here are charming rides along the beach, which is smooth and firm. When we passed in the last week of April, the corn was in the ear; the cherries were almost ripe; and the figs had begun to blacken. I had embarked my heavy baggage on board a London ship, which happened to be at Nice, ready to sail: as for our small trunks or portmanteaus, which we carried along with us, they were examined at Antibes; but the ceremony was performed very superficially, in consequence of tipping the searcher with half-a-crown, which is a wonderful conciliator at all the bureaus in this country. We lay at Cannes, a neat village, charmingly situated on the beach of the Mediterranean, exactly opposite to the isles Marguerites, where state-prisoners are confined. As there are some good houses in this place, I would rather live here for the sake of the mild climate, than either at Antibes or Nice. Here you are not cooped up within walls, nor crowded with soldiers and people: but are already in the country, enjoy a fine air, and are well supplied with all sorts of fish. The mountains of Esterelles, which in one of my former letters I described as a most romantic and noble plantation of ever-greens, trees, shrubs, and aromatic plants, is at present quite desolate. Last summer, some execrable villains set fire to the pines, when the wind was high. It continued burning for several months, and the conflagration extended above ten leagues, consuming an incredible quantity of timber. The ground is now naked on each side of the road, or occupied by the black trunks of the trees, which have been scorched without falling. They stand as so many monuments of the judgment of heaven, filling the mind with horror and compassion. I could hardly refrain from shedding tears at this dismal spectacle, when I recalled the idea of what it was about eighteen months ago. As we stayed all night at Frejus, I had an opportunity of viewing the amphitheatre at leisure. As near as I can judge by the eye, it is of the same dimensions with that of Nismes; but shockingly dilapidated. The stone seats rising from the arena are still extant, and the cells under them, where the wild beasts were kept. There are likewise the remains of two galleries one over another; and two vomitoria or great gateways at opposite sides of the arena, which is now a fine green, with a road through the middle of it: but all the external architecture and the ornaments are demolished. The most intire part of the wall now constitutes part of a monastery, the monks of which, I am told, have helped to destroy the amphitheatre, by removing the stones for their own purposes of building. In the neighbourhood of this amphitheatre, which stands without the walls, are the vestiges of an old edifice, said to have been the palace where the imperator or president resided: for it was a Roman colony, much favoured by Julius Caesar, who gave it the name of Forum Julii, and Civitas Forojuliensis. In all probability, it was he who built the amphitheatre, and brought hither the water ten leagues from the river of Ciagne, by means of an aqueduct, some arcades of which are still standing on the other side of the town. A great number of statues were found in this place, together with antient inscriptions, which have been published by different authors. I need not tell you that Julius Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, the historian, was a native of Frejus, which is now a very poor inconsiderable place. From hence the country opens to the left, forming an extensive plain between the sea and the mountains, which are a continuation of the Alps, that stretches through Provence and Dauphine. This plain watered with pleasant streams, and varied with vineyards, corn-fields, and meadow-ground, afforded a most agreeable prospect to our eyes, which were accustomed to the sight of scorching sands, rugged rocks, and abrupt mountains in the neighbourhood of Nice. Although this has much the appearance of a corn-country, I am told it does not produce enough for the consumption of its inhabitants, who are obliged to have annual supplies from abroad, imported at Marseilles. A Frenchman, at an average, eats three times the quantity of bread that satisfies a native of England, and indeed it is undoubtedly the staff of his life. I am therefore surprised that the Provencaux do not convert part of their vineyards into corn-fields: for they may boast of their wine as they please; but that which is drank by the common people, not only here, but also in all the wine countries of France, is neither so strong, nourishing, nor (in my opinion) so pleasant to the taste as the small-beer of England. It must be owned that all the peasants who have wine for their ordinary drink are of a diminutive size, in comparison of those who use milk, beer, or even water; and it is a constant observation, that when there is a scarcity of wine, the common people are always more healthy, than in those seasons when it abounds. The longer I live, the more I am convinced that wine, and all fermented liquors, are pernicious to the human constitution; and that for the preservation of health, and exhilaration of the spirits, there is no beverage comparable to simple water. Between Luc and Toulon, the country is delightfully parcelled out into inclosures. Here is plenty of rich pasturage for black cattle, and a greater number of pure streams and rivulets than I have observed in any other parts of France. Toulon is a considerable place, even exclusive of the basin, docks, and arsenal, which indeed are such as justify the remark made by a stranger when he viewed them. "The king of France (said he) is greater at Toulon than at Versailles." The quay, the jetties, the docks, and magazines, are contrived and executed with precision, order, solidity, and magnificence. I counted fourteen ships of the line lying unrigged in the basin, besides the Tonant of eighty guns, which was in dock repairing, and a new frigate on the stocks. I was credibly informed that in the last war, the king of France was so ill-served with cannon for his navy, that in every action there was scarce a ship which had not several pieces burst. These accidents did great damage, and discouraged the French mariners to such a degree, that they became more afraid of their own guns than of those of the English. There are now at Toulon above two thousand pieces of iron cannon unfit for service. This is an undeniable proof of the weakness and neglect of the French administration: but a more suprizing proof of their imbecility, is the state of the fortifications that defend the entrance of this very harbour. I have some reason to think that they trusted for its security entirely to our opinion that it must be inaccessible. Capt. E--, of one of our frigates, lately entered the harbour with a contrary wind, which by obliging him to tack, afforded an opportunity of sounding the whole breadth and length of the passage. He came in without a pilot, and made a pretence of buying cordage, or some other stores; but the French officers were much chagrined at the boldness of his enterprize. They alleged that he came for no other reason but to sound the channel; and that he had an engineer aboard, who made drawings of the land and the forts, their bearings and distances. In all probability, these suspicions were communicated to the ministry; for an order immediately arrived, that no stranger should be admitted into the docks and arsenal. Part of the road from hence to Marseilles lies through a vast mountain, which resembles that of Estrelles; but is not so well covered with wood, though it has the advantage of an agreeable stream running through the bottom. I was much pleased with Marseilles, which is indeed a noble city, large, populous, and flourishing. The streets of what is called the new Town are open, airy and spacious; the houses well built, and even magnificent. The harbour is an oval basin, surrounded on every side either by the buildings or the land, so that the shipping lies perfectly secure; and here is generally an incredible number of vessels. On the city side, there is a semi-circular quay of free-stone, which extends thirteen hundred paces; and the space between this and the houses that front it, is continually filled with a surprising crowd of people. The gallies, to the number of eight or nine, are moored with their sterns to one part of the wharf, and the slaves are permitted to work for their own benefit at their respective occupations, in little shops or booths, which they rent for a trifle. There you see tradesmen of all kinds sitting at work, chained by one foot, shoe-makers, taylors, silversmiths, watch and clock-makers, barbers, stocking-weavers, jewellers, pattern-drawers, scriveners, booksellers, cutlers, and all manner of shop-keepers. They pay about two sols a day to the king for this indulgence; live well and look jolly; and can afford to sell their goods and labour much cheaper than other dealers and tradesmen. At night, however, they are obliged to lie aboard. Notwithstanding the great face of business at Marseilles, their trade is greatly on the decline; and their merchants are failing every day. This decay of commerce is in a great measure owing to the English, who, at the peace, poured in such a quantity of European merchandize into Martinique and Guadalupe, that when the merchants of Marseilles sent over their cargoes, they found the markets overstocked, and were obliged to sell for a considerable loss. Besides, the French colonists had such a stock of sugars, coffee, and other commodities lying by them during the war, that upon the first notice of peace, they shipped them off in great quantities for Marseilles. I am told that the produce of the islands is at present cheaper here than where it grows; and on the other hand the merchandize of this country sells for less money at Martinique than in Provence. A single person, who travels in this country, may live at a reasonable rate in these towns, by eating at the public ordinaries: but I would advise all families that come hither to make any stay, to take furnished lodgings as soon as they can: for the expence of living at an hotel is enormous. I was obliged to pay at Marseilles four livres a head for every meal, and half that price for my servant, and was charged six livres a day besides for the apartment, so that our daily expence, including breakfast and a valet de place, amounted to two loui'dores. The same imposition prevails all over the south of France, though it is generally supposed to be the cheapest and most plentiful part of the kingdom. Without all doubt, it must be owing to the folly and extravagance of English travellers, who have allowed themselves to be fleeced without wincing, until this extortion is become authorized by custom. It is very disagreeable riding in the avenues of Marseilles, because you are confined in a dusty high road, crouded with carriages and beasts of burden, between two white walls, the reflection from which, while the sun shines, is intolerable. But in this neighbourhood there is a vast number of pleasant country-houses, called Bastides, said to amount to twelve thousand, some of which may be rented ready furnished at a very reasonable price. Marseilles is a gay city, and the inhabitants indulge themselves in a variety of amusements. They have assemblies, a concert spirituel, and a comedy. Here is also a spacious cours, or walk shaded with trees, to which in the evening there is a great resort of well-dressed people. Marseilles being a free port, there is a bureau about half a league from the city on the road to Aix, where all carriages undergo examination; and if any thing contraband is found, the vehicle, baggage, and even the horses are confiscated. We escaped this disagreeable ceremony by the sagacity of our driver. Of his own accord, he declared at the bureau, that we had bought a pound of coffee and some sugar at Marseilles, and were ready to pay the duty, which amounted to about ten sols. They took the money, gave him a receipt, and let the carriage pass, without further question. I proposed to stay one night only at Aix: but Mr. A--r, who is here, had found such benefit from drinking the waters, that I was persuaded to make trial of them for eight or ten days. I have accordingly taken private lodgings, and drank them at the fountain-head, not without finding considerable benefit. In my next I shall say something further of these waters, though I am afraid they will not prove a source of much entertainment. It will be sufficient for me to find them contribute in any degree to the health of--Dear Sir, Yours assuredly. LETTER XL BOULOGNE, May 23, 1765. DEAR DOCTOR,--I found three English families at Aix, with whom I could have passed my time very agreeably but the society is now dissolved. Mr. S--re and his lady left the place in a few days after we arrived. Mr. A--r and lady Betty are gone to Geneva; and Mr. G--r with his family remains at Aix. This gentleman, who laboured under a most dreadful nervous asthma, has obtained such relief from this climate, that he intends to stay another year in the place: and Mr. A--r found surprizing benefit from drinking the waters, for a scorbutical complaint. As I was incommoded by both these disorders, I could not but in justice to myself, try the united efforts of the air and the waters; especially as this consideration was re-inforced by the kind and pressing exhortations of Mr. A--r and lady Betty, which I could not in gratitude resist. Aix, the capital of Provence, is a large city, watered by the small river Are. It was a Roman colony, said to be founded by Caius Sextus Calvinus, above a century before the birth of Christ. From the source of mineral water here found, added to the consul's name, it was called Aquae Sextiae. It was here that Marius, the conqueror of the Teutones, fixed his headquarters, and embellished the place with temples, aqueducts, and thermae, of which, however, nothing now remains. The city, as it now stands, is well built, though the streets in general are narrow, and kept in a very dirty condition. But it has a noble cours planted with double rows of tall trees, and adorned with three or four fine fountains, the middlemost of which discharges hot water supplied from the source of the baths. On each side there is a row of elegant houses, inhabited chiefly by the noblesse, of which there is here a considerable number. The parliament, which is held at Aix, brings hither a great resort of people; and as many of the inhabitants are persons of fashion, they are well bred, gay, and sociable. The duc de Villars, who is governor of the province, resides on the spot, and keeps an open assembly, where strangers are admitted without reserve, and made very welcome, if they will engage in play, which is the sole occupation of the whole company. Some of our English people complain, that when they were presented to him, they met with a very cold reception. The French, as well as other foreigners, have no idea of a man of family and fashion, without the title of duke, count, marquis, or lord, and where an English gentleman is introduced by the simple expression of monsieur tel, Mr. Suchathing, they think he is some plebeian, unworthy of any particular attention. Aix is situated in a bottom, almost surrounded by hills, which, however, do not screen it from the Bize, or north wind, that blows extremely sharp in the winter and spring, rendering the air almost insupportably cold, and very dangerous to those who have some kinds of pulmonary complaints, such as tubercules, abscesses, or spitting of blood. Lord H--, who passed part of last winter in this place, afflicted with some of these symptoms, grew worse every day while he continued at Aix: but, he no sooner removed to Marseilles, than all his complaints abated; such a difference there is in the air of these two places, though the distance between them does not exceed ten or twelve miles. But the air of Marseilles, though much more mild than that of Aix in the winter is not near so warm as the climate of Nice, where we find in plenty such flowers, fruit, and vegetables, even in the severest season, as will not grow and ripen, either at Marseilles or Toulon. If the air of Aix is disagreeably cold in the winter, it is rendered quite insufferable in the summer, from excessive heat, occasioned by the reflexion from the rocks and mountains, which at the same time obstruct the circulation of air: for it must be observed, that the same mountains which serve as funnels and canals, to collect and discharge the keen blasts of winter, will provide screens to intercept intirely the faint breezes of summer. Aix, though pretty well provided with butcher's meat, is very ill supplied with potherbs; and they have no poultry but what comes at a vast distance from the Lionnois. They say their want of roots, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. is owing to a scarcity of water: but the truth is, they are very bad gardeners. Their oil is good and cheap: their wine is indifferent: but their chief care seems employed on the culture of silk, the staple of Provence, which is every where shaded with plantations of mulberry trees, for the nourishment of the worms. Notwithstanding the boasted cheapness of every article of housekeeping, in the south of France, I am persuaded a family may live for less money at York, Durham, Hereford, and in many other cities of England than at Aix in Provence; keep a more plentiful table; and be much more comfortably situated in all respects. I found lodging and provision at Aix fifty per cent dearer than at Montpellier, which is counted the dearest place in Languedoc. The baths of Aix, so famous in antiquity, were quite demolished by the irruptions of the barbarians. The very source of the water was lost, till the beginning of the present century (I think the year 1704), when it was discovered by accident, in digging for the foundation of a house, at the foot of a hill, just without the city wall. Near the same place was found a small stone altar, with the figure of a Priapus, and some letters in capitals, which the antiquarians have differently interpreted. From this figure, it was supposed that the waters were efficacious in cases of barrenness. It was a long time, however, before any person would venture to use them internally, as it did not appear that they had ever been drank by the antients. On their re-appearance, they were chiefly used for baths to horses, and other beasts which had the mange, and other cutaneous eruptions. At length poor people began to bathe in them for the same disorders, and received such benefit from them, as attracted the attention of more curious inquirers. A very superficial and imperfect analysis was made and published, with a few remarkable histories of the cures they had performed, by three different physicians of those days; and those little treatises, I suppose, encouraged valetudinarians to drink them without ceremony. They were found serviceable in the gout, the gravel, scurvy, dropsy, palsy, indigestion, asthma, and consumption; and their fame soon extended itself all over Languedoc, Gascony, Dauphine, and Provence. The magistrates, with a view to render them more useful and commodious, have raised a plain building, in which there are a couple of private baths, with a bedchamber adjoining to each, where individuals may use them both internally and externally, for a moderate expence. These baths are paved with marble, and supplied with water each by a large brass cock, which you can turn at pleasure. At one end of this edifice, there is an octagon, open at top, having a bason, with a stone pillar in the middle, which discharges water from the same source, all round, by eight small brass cocks; and hither people of all ranks come of a morning, with their glasses, to drink the water, or wash their sores, or subject their contracted limbs to the stream. This last operation, called the douche, however, is more effectually undergone in the private bath, where the stream is much more powerful. The natural warmth of this water, as nearly as I can judge from recollection, is about the same degree of temperature with that in the Queen's Bath, at Bath in Somersetshire. It is perfectly transparent, sparkling in the glass, light and agreeable to the taste, and may be drank without any preparation, to the quantity of three or four pints at a time. There are many people at Aix who swallow fourteen half pint glasses every morning, during the season, which is in the month of May, though it may be taken with equal benefit all the year round. It has no sensible operation but by urine, an effect which pure water would produce, if drank in the same quantity. If we may believe those who have published their experiments, this water produces neither agitation, cloud, or change of colour, when mixed with acids, alkalies, tincture of galls, syrup of violets, or solution of silver. The residue, after boiling, evaporation, and filtration, affords a very small proportion of purging salt, and calcarious earth, which last ferments with strong acids. As I had neither hydrometer nor thermometer to ascertain the weight and warmth of this water; nor time to procure the proper utensils, to make the preparations, and repeat the experiments necessary to exhibit a complete analysis, I did not pretend to enter upon this process; but contented myself with drinking, bathing, and using the douche, which perfectly answered my expectation, having, in eight days, almost cured an ugly scorbutic tetter, which had for some time deprived me of the use of my right hand. I observed that the water, when used externally, left always a kind of oily appearance on the skin: that when, we boiled it at home, in an earthen pot, the steams smelled like those of sulphur, and even affected my lungs in the same manner: but the bath itself smelled strong of a lime-kiln. The water, after standing all night in a bottle, yielded a remarkably vinous taste and odour, something analogous to that of dulcified spirit of nitre. Whether the active particles consist of a volatile vitriol, or a very fine petroleum, or a mixture of both, I shall not pretend to determine: but the best way I know of discovering whether it is really impregnated with a vitriolic principle, too subtil and fugitive for the usual operations of chymistry, is to place bottles, filled with wine, in the bath, or adjacent room, which wine, if there is really a volatile acid, in any considerable quantity, will be pricked in eight and forty hours. Having ordered our coach to be refitted, and provided with fresh horses, as well as with another postilion, in consequence of which improvements, I payed at the rate of a loui'dore per diem to Lyons and back again, we departed from Aix, and the second day of our journey passing the Durance in a boat, lay at Avignon. This river, the Druentia of the antients, is a considerable stream, extremely rapid, which descends from the mountains, and discharges itself in the Rhone. After violent rains it extends its channel, so as to be impassable, and often overflows the country to a great extent. In the middle of a plain, betwixt Orgon and this river, we met the coach in which we had travelled eighteen months before, from Lyons to Montpellier, conducted by our old driver Joseph, who no sooner recognized my servant at a distance, by his musquetoon, than he came running towards our carriage, and seizing my hand, even shed tears of joy. Joseph had been travelling through Spain, and was so imbrowned by the sun, that he might have passed for an Iroquois. I was much pleased with the marks of gratitude which the poor fellow expressed towards his benefactors. He had some private conversation with our voiturier, whose name was Claude, to whom he gave such a favourable character of us, as in all probability induced him to be wonderfully obliging during the whole journey. You know Avignon is a large city belonging to the pope. It was the Avenio Cavarum of the antients, and changed masters several times, belonging successively to the Romans, Burgundians, Franks, the kingdom of Arles, the counts of Provence, and the sovereigns of Naples. It was sold in the fourteenth century, by queen Jane I. of Naples, to Pope Clement VI. for the sum of eighty thousand florins, and since that period has continued under the dominion of the see of Rome. Not but that when the duc de Crequi, the French ambassador, was insulted at Rome in the year 1662, the parliament of Provence passed an arret, declaring the city of Avignon, and the county Venaiss in part of the ancient domain of Provence; and therefore reunited it to the crown of France, which accordingly took possession; though it was afterwards restored to the Roman see at the peace of Pisa. The pope, however, holds it by a precarious title, at the mercy of the French king, who may one day be induced to resume it, upon payment of the original purchase-money. As a succession of popes resided here for the space of seventy years, the city could not fail to be adorned with a great number of magnificent churches and convents, which are richly embellished with painting, sculpture, shrines, reliques, and tombs. Among the last, is that of the celebrated Laura, whom Petrarch has immortalized by his poetry, and for whom Francis I. of France took the trouble to write an epitaph. Avignon is governed by a vice-legate from the pope, and the police of the city is regulated by the consuls. It is a large place, situated in a fruitful plain, surrounded by high walls built of hewn stone, which on the west side are washed by the Rhone. Here was a noble bridge over the river, but it is now in ruins. On the other side, a branch of the Sorgue runs through part of the city. This is the river anciently called Sulga, formed by the famous fountain of Vaucluse in this neighbourhood, where the poet Petrarch resided. It is a charming transparent stream, abounding with excellent trout and craw-fish. We passed over it on a stone bridge, in our way to Orange, the Arausio Cavarum of the Romans, still distinguished by some noble monuments of antiquity. These consist of a circus, an aqueduct, a temple, and a triumphal arch, which last was erected in honour of Caius Marius, and Luctatius Catulus, after the great victory they obtained in this country over the Cimbri and Teutones. It is a very magnificent edifice, adorned on all sides with trophies and battles in basso relievo. The ornaments of the architecture, and the sculpture, are wonderfully elegant for the time in which it was erected; and the whole is surprisingly well preserved, considering its great antiquity. It seems to me to be as entire and perfect as the arch of Septimius Severus at Rome. Next day we passed two very impetuous streams, the Drome and the Isere. The first, which very much resembles the Var, we forded: but the Isere we crossed in a boat, which as well as that upon the Durance, is managed by the traille, a moveable or running pulley, on a rope stretched between two wooden machines erected on the opposite sides of the river. The contrivance is simple and effectual, and the passage equally safe and expeditious. The boatman has nothing to do, but by means of a long massy rudder, to keep the head obliquely to the stream, the force of which pushes the boat along, the block to which it is fixed sliding upon the rope from one side to the other. All these rivers take their rise from the mountains, which are continued through Provence and Dauphine, and fall into the Rhone: and all of them, when swelled by sudden rains, overflow the flat country. Although Dauphine affords little or no oil, it produces excellent wines, particularly those of Hermitage and Cote-roti. The first of these is sold on the spot for three livres the bottle, and the other for two. The country likewise yields a considerable quantity of corn, and a good deal of grass. It is well watered with streams, and agreeably shaded with wood. The weather was pleasant, and we had a continued song of nightingales from Aix to Fontainebleau. I cannot pretend to specify the antiquities of Vienne, antiently called Vienna Allobrogum. It was a Roman colony, and a considerable city, which the antients spared no pains and expence to embellish. It is still a large town, standing among several hills on the banks of the Rhone, though all its former splendor is eclipsed, its commerce decayed, and most of its antiquities are buried in ruins. The church of Notre Dame de la Vie was undoubtedly a temple. On the left of the road, as you enter it, by the gate of Avignon, there is a handsome obelisk, or rather pyramid, about thirty feet high, raised upon a vault supported by four pillars of the Tuscan order. It is certainly a Roman work, and Montfaucon supposes it to be a tomb, as he perceived an oblong stone jetting out from the middle of the vault, in which the ashes of the defunct were probably contained. The story of Pontius Pilate, who is said to have ended his days in this place, is a fable. On the seventh day of our journey from Aix, we arrived at Lyons, where I shall take my leave of you for the present, being with great truth--Yours, etc. LETTER XLI BOULOGNE, June 13, 1765. DEAR SIR,--I am at last in a situation to indulge my view with a sight of Britain, after an absence of two years; and indeed you cannot imagine what pleasure I feel while I survey the white cliffs of Dover, at this distance. Not that I am at all affected by the nescia qua dulcedine natalis soli, of Horace. That seems to be a kind of fanaticism founded on the prejudices of education, which induces a Laplander to place the terrestrial paradise among the snows of Norway, and a Swiss to prefer the barren mountains of Solleure to the fruitful plains of Lombardy. I am attached to my country, because it is the land of liberty, cleanliness, and convenience: but I love it still more tenderly, as the scene of all my interesting connexions; as the habitation of my friends, for whose conversation, correspondence, and esteem, I wish alone to live. Our journey hither from Lyons produced neither accident nor adventure worth notice; but abundance of little vexations, which may be termed the Plagues of Posting. At Lyons, where we stayed only a few days, I found a return-coach, which I hired to Paris for six loui'dores. It was a fine roomy carriage, elegantly furnished, and made for travelling; so strong and solid in all its parts, that there was no danger of its being shaken to pieces by the roughness of the road: but its weight and solidity occasioned so much friction between the wheels and the axle-tree, that we ran the risque of being set on fire three or four times a day. Upon a just comparison of all circumstances posting is much more easy, convenient, and reasonable in England than in France. The English carriages, horses, harness, and roads are much better; and the postilions more obliging and alert. The reason is plain and obvious. If I am ill-used at the post-house in England, I can be accommodated elsewhere. The publicans on the road are sensible of this, and therefore they vie with each other in giving satisfaction to travellers. But in France, where the post is monopolized, the post-masters and postilions, knowing that the traveller depends intirely upon them, are the more negligent and remiss in their duty, as well as the more encouraged to insolence and imposition. Indeed the stranger seems to be left intirely at the mercy of those fellows, except in large towns, where he may have recourse to the magistrate or commanding officer. The post stands very often by itself in a lone country situation, or in a paultry village, where the post-master is the principal inhabitant; and in such a case, if you should be ill-treated, by being supplied with bad horses; if you should be delayed on frivolous pretences, in order to extort money; if the postilions should drive at a waggon pace, with a view to provoke your impatience; or should you in any shape be insulted by them or their masters; and I know not any redress you can have, except by a formal complaint to the comptroller of the posts, who is generally one of the ministers of state, and pays little or no regard to any such representations. I know an English gentleman, the brother of an earl, who wrote a letter of complaint to the Duc de Villars, governor of Provence, against the post-master of Antibes, who had insulted and imposed upon him. The duke answered his letter, promising to take order that the grievance should be redressed; and never thought of it after. Another great inconvenience which attends posting in France, is that if you are retarded by any accident, you cannot in many parts of the kingdom find a lodging, without perhaps travelling two or three posts farther than you would choose to go, to the prejudice of your health, and even the hazard of your life; whereas on any part of the post-road in England, you will meet with tolerable accommodation at every stage. Through the whole south of France, except in large cities, the inns are cold, damp, dark, dismal, and dirty; the landlords equally disobliging and rapacious; the servants aukward, sluttish, and slothful; and the postilions lazy, lounging, greedy, and impertinent. If you chide them for lingering, they will continue to delay you the longer: if you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or horse-whip, they will either disappear entirely, and leave you without resource; or they will find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The best method I know of travelling with any degree of comfort, is to allow yourself to become the dupe of imposition, and stimulate their endeavours by extraordinary gratifications. I laid down a resolution (and kept it) to give no more than four and twenty sols per post between the two postilions; but I am now persuaded that for three-pence a post more, I should have been much better served, and should have performed the journey with much greater pleasure. We met with no adventures upon the road worth reciting. The first day we were retarded about two hours by the dutchess D--lle, and her son the duc de R--f--t, who by virtue of an order from the minister, had anticipated all the horses at the post. They accosted my servant, and asked if his master was a lord? He thought proper to answer in the affirmative, upon which the duke declared that he must certainly be of French extraction, inasmuch as he observed the lilies of France in his arms on the coach. This young nobleman spoke a little English. He asked whence we had come; and understanding we had been in Italy, desired to know whether the man liked France or Italy best? Upon his giving France the preference, he clapped him on the shoulder, and said he was a lad of good taste. The dutchess asked if her son spoke English well, and seemed mightily pleased when my man assured her he did. They were much more free and condescending with my servant than with myself; for, though we saluted them in passing, and were even supposed to be persons of quality, they did not open their lips, while we stood close by them at the inn-door, till their horses were changed. They were going to Geneva; and their equipage consisted of three coaches and six, with five domestics a-horseback. The dutchess was a tall, thin, raw-boned woman, with her head close shaved. This delay obliged us to lie two posts short of Macon, at a solitary auberge called Maison Blanche, which had nothing white about it, but the name. The Lionnois is one of the most agreeable and best-cultivated countries I ever beheld, diversified with hill, dale, wood, and water, laid out in extensive corn-fields and rich meadows, well stocked with black cattle, and adorned with a surprising number of towns, villages, villas, and convents, generally situated on the brows of gently swelling hills, so that they appear to the greatest advantage. What contributes in a great measure to the beauty of this, and the Maconnois, is the charming pastoral Soame, which from the city of Chalons winds its silent course so smooth and gentle, that one can scarce discern which way its current flows. It is this placid appearance that tempts so many people to bathe in it at Lions, where a good number of individuals are drowned every summer: whereas there is no instance of any persons thus perishing in the Rhone, the rapidity of it deterring every body from bathing in its stream. Next night we passed at Beaune where we found nothing good but the wine, for which we paid forty sols the bottle. At Chalons our axle-tree took fire; an accident which detained us so long, that it was ten before we arrived at Auxerre, where we lay. In all probability we must have lodged in the coach, had not we been content to take four horses, and pay for six, two posts successively. The alternative was, either to proceed with four on those terms, or stay till the other horses should come in and be refreshed. In such an emergency, I would advise the traveller to put up with the four, and he will find the postilions so much upon their mettle, that those stages will be performed sooner than the others in which you have the full complement. There was an English gentleman laid up at Auxerre with a broken arm, to whom I sent my compliments, with offers of service; but his servant told my man that he did not choose to see any company, and had no occasion for my service. This sort of reserve seems peculiar to the English disposition. When two natives of any other country chance to meet abroad, they run into each other's embrace like old friends, even though they have never heard of one another till that moment; whereas two Englishmen in the same situation maintain a mutual reserve and diffidence, and keep without the sphere of each other's attraction, like two bodies endowed with a repulsive power. We only stopped to change horses at Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, which is a venerable old city; but we passed part of a day at Sens, and visited a manufacture of that stuff we call Manchester velvet, which is here made and dyed to great perfection, under the direction of English workmen, who have been seduced from their own country. At Fontainebleau, we went to see the palace, or as it is called, the castle, which though an irregular pile of building, affords a great deal of lodging, and contains some very noble apartments, particularly the hall of audience, with the king's and queen's chambers, upon which the ornaments of carving and gilding are lavished with profusion rather than propriety. Here are some rich parterres of flower-garden, and a noble orangerie, which, however, we did not greatly admire, after having lived among the natural orange groves of Italy. Hitherto we had enjoyed fine summer weather, and I found myself so well, that I imagined my health was intirely restored: but betwixt Fontainebleau and Paris, we were overtaken by a black storm of rain, sleet, and hail, which seemed to reinstate winter in all its rigour; for the cold weather continues to this day. There was no resisting this attack. I caught cold immediately; and this was reinforced at Paris, where I stayed but three days. The same man, (Pascal Sellier, rue Guenegaud, fauxbourg St. Germain) who owned the coach that brought us from Lyons, supplied me with a returned berline to Boulogne, for six loui'dores, and we came hither by easy journeys. The first night we lodged at Breteuil, where we found an elegant inn, and very good accommodation. But the next we were forced to take up our quarters, at the house where we had formerly passed a very disagreeable night at Abbeville. I am now in tolerable lodging, where I shall remain a few weeks, merely for the sake of a little repose; then I shall gladly tempt that invidious straight which still divides you from--Yours, &c. APPENDIX A A Short List of Works, mainly on Travel in France and Italy during the Eighteenth Century, referred to in connection with the Introduction. ADDISON, JOSEPH. Remarks on Several Parts of Italy. London, 1705. ANCONE, ALESSANDRO D'. Saggio di una bibliografia ragionata dei Viaggi in Italia. 1895. ANDREWS, Dr. JOHN. Letters to a Young Gentleman in setting out for France. London, 1784. ARCHENHOLTZ, J. W. VON. Tableau de l'Angleterre et de l'Italie. 3 vols. Gotha, 1788. ARDOUIN-DUMAZET Voyage en France. Treizieme serie. La Provence Maritime. Paris, 1898. ASTRUC, JEAN. Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de la Faculte de Medicine de Montpellier, 1767. BABEAU, ANTOINE. Voyageurs en France. Paris, 1885. BALLY, L. E. Souvenirs de Nice. 1860. BARETTI, G. M. Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy. 2 vols. London, 1770. BASTIDE, CHARLES. John Locke. Ses theories politiques en Angleterre. Paris, 1907. BECKFORD, WILLIAM. Italy, Spain, and Portugal. By the author of "Vathek." London, 1834; new ed. 1840. BERCHTOLD, LEOPOLD. An Essay to direct the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers. 2 vols. London, 1789. BOULOGNE-SUR-MER et la region Boulonnaise. Ouvrage offert par la ville aux membres de l'Association Francaise. 2 vols. 1899. BRETON DE LA MARTINIERE, J. Voyage en Piemont. Paris, 1803. BROSSES, CHARLES DE. Lettres familieres ecrites d'Italie. 1740. BURTON, JOHN HILL. The Scot Abroad. 2 vols. Edinburgh. 1864. CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, JACQUES. Memoires ecrits par lui-meme. 6 vols. Bruxelles, 1879. CLEMENT, PIERRE. L'Italie en 1671. Paris, 1867. 12mo. COOTE'S NEW GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. 2 vols., folio, 1739. CRAIG, G. DUNCAN. Mie jour; or Provencal Legend, Life, Language, and Literature. London, 1877. DAVIS, Dr. I. B. Ancient and Modern History of Nice. London, 1807. DEJOB, C. Madame de Stael et l'Italie. Paris, 1890. DEMPSTER, C. L. H. The Maritime Alps and their Sea-Board. London, 1885. DORAN, DR. JOHN. Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence. London, 1876. DRAMARD, E. Bibliographie du Boulonnais, Calaisis, etc. Paris, 1869. DUTENS, L. Itineraire des Routes. First edition, 1775. EVELYN, JOHN. Diary, edited by H. B. Wheatley. 4 vols. London, 1879. FERBER, G. G. Travels through Italy, translated by R. E. Raspe. London, 1776. FODERE, FRANCOIS EMILE. Voyage aux Alpes Maritimes. 2 vols. Paris, 1821. FORSYTH, JOSEPH. Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy in the year 1802 and 1803. London, 1812; 4th Edition, 1835. GARDNER, EDMUND G. The Story of Florence. London, 1900. GERMAIN, M. A. Histoire de la Commune de Montpellier. 3 vols. Montpellier, 1853. GIOFFREDO, PIETRO. Storia delle Alpi Marittime . . . libri xxvi. Ed. Gazzera. 1836. GOETHE. Autobiography, Tour in Italy, Miscellaneous Travels, and Wilhelm Meister's Travels (Bohn). GROSLEY, PIERRE JEAN. Nouveaux Memoires sur l'Italie. London, 1764. New Observations on Italy. Translated by Thomas Nugent. 1769. HARE, AUGUSTUS J. C. The Rivieras. 1897. HILLARD, G. S. Six Months in Italy. Boston, 1853; 7th edition, 1863. JEFFERYS, THOMAS. Description of the Maritime Parts of France. With Maps. 1761. JOANNE, ADOLPHE. Provence, Alpes Maritimes. Paris, 1881 (Bibliog., p. xxvii). JONES (of Nayland), WILLIAM. Observations in a Journey to Paris. London, 1777. KOTZEBUE, A. F. F. VON. Travels through Italy in 1804 and 1805. 4 vols. London, 1807. LALANDE, J. J. DE. Voyage en Italie. 6 vols. 12mo. 1768. LEE, EDWIN. Nice et son climat. Paris, 1863. LENOTRE, G. Paris revolutionnaire. Paris, 1895. LENTHERIC, CHARLES. La Provence Maritime, ancienne et moderne. Paris, 1880. Les voies antiques de la Region du Rhone. Avignon, 1882. LUCHAIRE, A. Hist. des Instit. Monarchiques de la France. 2 vols. 1891. MAUGHAM, H. N. The Book of Italian Travel. London, 1903. MERCIER, M. New Pictures of Paris. London, 1800. METRIVIER, H. Monaco et ses Princes. 2 vols. 1862. MILLINGEN, J. G. Sketches of Ancient and Modern Boulogne. London, 1826. MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE. Journal du Voyage en Italie (Querlon). Rome, 1774. MONTESQUIEU, CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON DE. Voyages. Bordeaux, 1894. MONTFAUCON. Travels of the Learned Dr. Montfaucon from Paris through Italy. London, 1712. MOORE, DR. JOHN. A View of Society and Manners in France (2 vols., 1779), and in Italy (2 vols., 1781) NASH, JAMES. Guide to Nice, 1884. NORTHALL, JOHN. Travels through Italy. London, 1766. NUGENT, THOMAS. The Grand Tour. 3rd edition. 4 vols. 1778. PALLIARI, LEA. Notices historiques sur le comte et la ville de Nice. Nice, 1875. PETHERICK, E, A. Catalogue of the York Gate Library. An Index to the Literature of Geography. London, 1881. PIOZZI, HESTER LYNCH. Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany. In 2 vols. London, 1789. RAE, JOHN. Life of Adam Smith. London, 1885. RICHARD, L'ABBE. Description historique et critique de l'Italie. 6 vols. Paris, 1768. RICHARDERIE, BOUCHER DE LA. Bibliotheque des voyages. Paris, 1808. RIGBY, DR. Letters from France in 1789, edited by Lady Eastlake. London, 1880. ROSE, WILLIAM STEWART. Letters from the North of Italy to Henry Hallam. 2 vols. 1819. ROUX, JOSEPH. Statistique des Alpes Maritimes. 2 vols. 1863. RUFFINI, GIOVANNI, D. Doctor Antonio; a Tale. Paris, 1855. SAYOUS, A. Le Dix-huitieme siecle a l'etranger. 2 vols. Paris, 1861. SECCOMBE, THOMAS. Smollett's Travels, edited with bibliographical note, etc. By Thomas Seccombe (Works, Constable's Edition, vol. xi.). 1900. SHARP, SAMUEL. Letters from Italy. London, 1769. SHERLOCK, MARTIN. Letters from an English Traveller. (New English version.) 2 vols. 1802. SMOLLETT, T. Travels through France and Italy. 2 vols. London, 1766. SPALDING, WILLIAM. Italy and the Italian Islands. 3 vols. London, 1841. STAEL, MME. DE. Corinne, ou l'Italie. 1807. STARKE, MARIANA. Letters from Italy, 1792-1798. 9 vols. 1800. Travels on the Continent for the use of Travellers. 1800, 1820, 1824, etc. STENDHAL. Rome, Naples, and Florence, in 1817. London, 1818. STERNE, LAURENCE. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. By Mr. Yorick. 2 vols. London, 1768. STOLBERZ, COUNT F. L. ZU. Travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, etc. Translated by Thomas Holcroft. 1796. TAINE, HENRI. Voyage en Italie. 1866. TALBOT, SIR R. Letters on the French Nation. London, 2 vols.1771, 12mo. TEYSSEIRE, T. Monographie sur le climat de Nice. 1881. THICKNESSE, PHILIP. Useful Hints to those who make the Tour of France in a Series of Letters. London, 1768. A year's Journey through France, etc. 2, vols. 1777. TISSERAND, E. Chronique de Provence . . . de la cite de Nice, etc. 2 vols. Nice, 1862. TWINING FAMILY PAPERS. London, 1887. VIOLLET, PAUL. Hist. des Instit. polit. et administratifs de la France. 2 vols. Paris, 1890-98. WHATLEY, STEPHEN. The Travels and Adventures of J. Massey. Translated from the French. 1743. WILLIAMS, C. THEODORE. The Climate of the South of France. 1869. WINCKELMANN, J. J. Lettres familieres. Amsterdam, 1781. Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. Translated by H. Fuseli. London, 1765. Voyage en Italie de J. J. Barthelemy . . . avec des morceaux inedits de Winckelmann. 1801. YOUNG, ARTHUR. Travels in France during 1787, 1788, 1789, edited by M. Betham-Edwards. 1889. YOUNG, EDWARD. Sa vie et ses oeuvres, par W. Thomas. Paris, 1901. APPENDIX B Short Notes on one or two unfamiliar Words which Smollett helped to domesticate in England. Berline. Swift and Chesterfield both use this for a heavy coach. The most famous berline was that used in the flight to Varennes. The name came from Brandenburg in the time of Frederick William. Bize. Smollett's spelling of bise--the cutting N.N.E. wind which makes Geneva so beautiful, but intolerable in the winter. Brasiere=brasero. A tray for hot charcoal used for warming rooms at Nice. Smollett practically introduced this word. Dried olives were often used as fuel. Calesse, calash, caleche. A low two-wheeled carriage of light construction, with a movable folding hood; hence applied to a hood bonnet as in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford. Cassine. Latin casa, cassa, cassina; the Italian cassina, A small detached house in the fields, often whitewashed and of mean appearance. Smollett uses the word as an equivalent for summer cottage. Cf. bastide as used by Dumas. Cabane has practically replaced cassine in modern French. See Letter XXIV. Cambiatura. The system of changing chaises every post, common in England, but unusual abroad except in Tuscany. Cicisbeo. The word is used by Lady Mary Montagu in her Letters (1718) as cecisbeo. Smollett's best account is in Letter XVII. See Introduction, p. xliii. Conversazione. Gray uses the word for assembly in 1710, but Smollett, I believe, is about the first Englishman to define it properly. Corinth. This was still used as a variant of currant, though adherence to it was probably rather pedantic on Smollett's part (cf. his use of "hough" for hoe). Boswell uses the modern form. Corridore. This word was used by Evelyn, and the correct modern spelling given by Johnson in 1753; but Smollett as often adheres to the old form. Douche. Italian doccia. Smollett is perhaps the first writer to explain the word and assign to it the now familiar French form (Letter XL). Feluca. An Arab word to denote a coasting boat, oar or sail propelled. Nelson and Marryat write felucca. It was large enough to accommodate a post-chaise (Letter XXV). Gabelle. Supposed to be derived from the Arabic kabala, the irksome tax on salt, from which few provinces in France were altogether free, swept away in 1790. Smollett describes the exaction in San Remo. Garum. Used by Smollett for the rich fish sauce of the ancients, equivalent to a saumure, perhaps, in modern French cookery. In the Middle Ages the word is used both for a condiment and a beverage. Improvisatore. A performer in the Commedia delle Arte, of which Smollett gives a brief admiring account in his description of Florence (Letter XXVII). For details of the various elements, the doti, generici, lazzi, etc., see Carlo Gozzi. Liqueur. First used by Pope. "An affected, contemptible expression" (Johnson). Macaroni. "The paste called macaroni" (Letter XXVI) was seen by Smollett in the neighbourhood of its origin near Genoa, which city formed the chief market. Maestral. An old form of mistral, the very dry wind from the N.N.W., described by Smollett as the coldest he ever experienced. Patois. See Letter XXII. ad fin. Pietre commesse. A sort of inlaying with stones, analogous to the fineering of cabinets in wood (Letter XXVIII). Used by Evelyn in 1644. Polenta. A meal ground from maize, which makes a good "pectoral" (Letter XXII). Pomi carli. The most agreeable apples Smollett tasted, stated to come from the marquisate of Final, sold by the Emperor Charles VI. to the Genoese. Preniac. A small white wine, mentioned in Letter IV., from Boulogne, as agreeable and very cheap. Seafarot boots. Jack-boots or wading boots, worn by a Marquis of Savoy, and removed by means of a tug-of-war team and a rope coiled round the heel (see Letter XXVIII). Sporcherie. With respect to delicacy and decorum you may peruse Dean Swift's description of the Yahoos, and then you will have some idea of the sporcherie that distinguishes the gallantry of Nice (Letter XVII). Ital. sporcheria, sporcizia. Strappado or corda. Performed by hoisting the criminal by his hands tied behind his back and dropping him suddenly "with incredible pain" (Letter XX). See Introduction, p. xliv, and Christie, Etienne Dolet, 1899, P. 231. Tartane. From Italian tartana, Arabic taridha; a similar word being used in Valencia and Grand Canary for a two-wheeled open cart. One of the commonest craft on the Mediterranean (cf. the topo of the Adriatic). For different types see Larousse's Nouveau Dictionnaire. Tip. To "tip the wink" is found in Addison's Tatler (No. 86), but "to tip" in the sense of to gratify is not common before Smollett, who uses it more than once or twice in this sense (cf. Roderick Random, chap. xiv. ad fin.) Valanches. For avalanches (dangers from to travellers, see Letter XXXVIII). Villeggiatura. An early adaptation by Smollett of the Italian word for country retirement (Letter XXIX). APPENDIX C Currency of Savoy in the time of Smollett. Ten bajocci=one paolo (6d.). Ten paoli=one scudo (six livres or about 5s.). Two scudi=one zequin. Two zequin=one louid'or. Afterword.--I should be ungrateful were I not to create an epilogue for the express purpose of thanking M. Morel, H. S Spencer Scott, Dr. Norman Moore, W. P. Courtney, G. Whale, D. S. MacColl, Walter Sichel (there may be others), who have supplied hints for my annotations, and I should like further, if one might inscribe such a trifle, to inscribe this to that difficult critic, Mr. Arthur Vincent, who, when I told him I was about it, gave expression to the cordial regret that so well hidden a treasure of our literature (as he regarded the Travels) was to be "vulgarised." 
23430	----	ROLLO IN ROME, BY JACOB ABBOTT. BOSTON: BROWN, TAGGARD & CHASE, (SUCCESSORS TO W. J. REYNOLDS & CO.) 25 & 29 CORNHILL. 1858. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by JACOB ABBOTT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. ELECTROTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. [Illustration: THE VATICAN BY TORCHLIGHT. See page 204.] [Illustration: ROLLO'S TOUR IN EUROPE. Publishers. Boston.] CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I.--THE DILIGENCE OFFICE, 13 II.--THE JOURNEY, 34 III.--THE ARRIVAL AT ROME, 56 IV.--A RAMBLE, 68 V.--GETTING LOST, 88 VI.--THE COLISEUM, 105 VII.--THE GLADIATOR, 127 VIII.--THE TARPEIAN ROCK, 147 IX.--GOING TO OSTIA, 167 X.--THE VATICAN, 192 XI.--CONCLUSION, 208 ENGRAVINGS. THE VATICAN BY TORCHLIGHT, (Frontispiece.) THE MOSAIC SHOP, 12 PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY, 21 THE PONTINE MARSHES, 49 DOING PENANCE, 59 RIDING AMONG THE RUINS, 91 LOOKING DOWN FROM THE COLISEUM, 109 VIEW OF THE LOWER CORRIDORS, 123 ASCENT TO THE CAPITOL, 139 STATUE OF THE GLADIATOR, 143 INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON, 163 THE COLISEUM BY TORCHLIGHT, 209 ROLLO'S TOUR IN EUROPE. ORDER OF THE VOLUMES. ROLLO ON THE ATLANTIC. ROLLO IN PARIS. ROLLO IN SWITZERLAND. ROLLO IN LONDON. ROLLO ON THE RHINE. ROLLO IN SCOTLAND. ROLLO IN GENEVA. ROLLO IN HOLLAND. ROLLO IN NAPLES. ROLLO IN ROME. [Illustration: THE MOSAIC SHOP. See page 73.] ROLLO IN ROME. CHAPTER I. THE DILIGENCE OFFICE. Rollo went to Rome in company with his uncle George, from Naples. They went by the diligence, which is a species of stage coach. There are different kinds of public coaches that ply on the great thoroughfares in Italy, to take passengers for hire; but the most common kind is the diligence. The diligences in France are very large, and are divided into different compartments, with a different price for each. There are usually three compartments below and one above. In the Italian diligences, however, or at least in the one in which Mr. George and Rollo travelled to Rome, there were only three. First there was the _interior_, or the body of the coach proper. Directly before this was a compartment, with a glass front, containing one seat only, which looked forward; there were, of course, places for three persons on this seat. This front compartment is called the _coupé_.[1] It is considered the best in the diligence. [Footnote 1: Pronounced _coupay_.] There is also a seat up above the _coupé_, in a sort of second story, as it were; and this was the seat which Mr. George and Rollo usually preferred, because it was up high, where they could see better. But for the present journey Mr. George thought the high seat, which is called the _banquette_, would not be quite safe; for though it was covered above with a sort of chaise top, still it was open in front, and thus more exposed to the night air. In ordinary cases he would not have been at all afraid of the night air, but the country between Naples and Rome, and indeed the country all about Rome, in every direction, is very unhealthy. So unhealthy is it, in fact, that in certain seasons of the year it is almost uninhabitable; and it is in all seasons considered unsafe for strangers to pass through in the night, unless they are well protected. There is, in particular, one tract, called the _Pontine Marshes_, where the road, with a sluggish canal by the side of it, runs in a straight line and on a dead level for about twenty miles. It so happened that in going to Rome by the diligence, it would be necessary to cross these marshes in the night, and this was an additional reason why Mr. George thought it better that he and Rollo should take seats inside. The whole business of travelling by diligence in Europe is managed in a very different way from stage coach travelling in America. You must engage your place several days beforehand; and when you engage it you have a printed receipt given you, specifying the particular seats which you have taken, and also containing, on the back of it, all the rules and regulations of the service. The different seats in the several compartments of the coach are numbered, and the prices of them are different. Rollo went so early to engage the passage for himself and Mr. George that he had his choice of all the seats. He took Nos. 1 and 2 of the _coupé_. He paid the money and took the receipt. When he got home, he sat down by the window, while Mr. George was finishing his breakfast, and amused himself by studying out the rules and regulations printed on the back of his ticket. Of course they were in Italian; but Rollo found that he could understand them very well. "If we are not there at the time when the diligence starts, we lose our money, uncle George," said he. "It says here that they won't pay it back again." "That is reasonable," said Mr. George. "It will be our fault if we are not there." "Or our misfortune," said Rollo; "something might happen to us." "True," said Mr. George; "but the happening, whatever it might be, would be _our_ misfortune, and not theirs, and so we ought to bear the loss of it." "If the baggage weighs more than thirty _rotolos_, we must pay extra for it," continued Rollo. "How much is a _rotolo_, uncle George?" "I don't know," said Mr. George, "but we have so little baggage that I am sure we cannot exceed the allowance." "The baggage must be at the office two hours before the time for the diligence to set out," continued Rollo, passing to the next regulation on his paper. "What is that for?" asked Mr. George. "So that they may have time to load it on the carriage, they say," said Rollo. "Very well," said Mr. George, "you can take it to the office the night before." "They don't take the risk of the baggage," said Rollo, "or at least they don't guarantee it, they say, against unavoidable accidents or superior force. What does that mean?" "Why, in case the diligence is struck by lightning, and our trunk is burned up," replied Mr. George, "or in case it is attacked by robbers, and carried away, they don't undertake to pay the damage." "And in case of _smarrimento_," continued Rollo, "they say they won't pay damages to the amount of more than nine dollars, and so forth; what is a _smarrimento_, uncle George?" "I don't know," said Mr. George. "It may mean a smash-up," said Rollo. "Very likely," said Mr. George. "Every traveller," continued Rollo, looking again at his paper, "is responsible, personally, for all violations of the custom-house regulations, or those of the police." "That's all right," said Mr. George. "And the last regulation is," said Rollo, "that the travellers cannot smoke in the diligence, nor take any dogs in." "Very well," said Mr. George, "we have no dogs, and we don't wish to smoke, either in the diligence or any where else." "They are very good regulations," said Rollo; and so saying, he folded up the paper, and put it back into his wallet. On the evening before the day appointed for the journey, Rollo took the valise which contained the principal portion of his own and his uncle's clothes, and went with it in a carriage to the office. Mr. George offered to accompany him, but Rollo said it was not necessary, and so he took with him a boy named Cyrus, whom he had become acquainted with at the hotel. The carriage, when it arrived at the diligence station, drove in under an archway, and entered a spacious court surrounded by lofty buildings. There was a piazza, with columns, all around the court. Along this piazza, on the four sides of the building, were the various offices of the different lines of diligences, with the diligences themselves standing before the doors. "Now, Cyrus," said Rollo, "we have got to find out which is our office." But Rollo was saved any trouble on this score, for the coachman drove the carriage directly to the door of the office for Rome. Rollo had told him that that was his destination, before leaving the hotel. There was a man in a sort of uniform at the door of the office. Rollo pointed to his valise, and said, in Italian, "For Rome to-morrow morning." The man said, "Very well," and taking the valise out of the carriage, he put it in the office. Then Rollo and Cyrus got into the carriage again, and rode away. The next morning Mr. George and Rollo went down to breakfast before six o'clock. While they were eating their breakfast, the waiter came in with a cold roast chicken upon a plate, which he set down upon the table. "Ah!" said Mr. George, "that is for us to eat on the way." "Don't the diligence stop somewhere for us to dine?" asked Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "I presume it stops for us to dine, but as we are going to be out all night, I thought perhaps that we might want a supper towards morning. Besides, having a supper will help keep us awake in going across the Pontine Marshes." "Must we keep awake?" asked Rollo. "So they say," replied Mr. George. "They say you are more likely to catch the fever while you are asleep than while you are awake." "I don't see why we should be," said Rollo. "Nor do I," said Mr. George. If Mr. George really did not know or understand a thing, he never pretended to know or understand it. "It may be a mere notion," said Mr. George, "but it is a very prevailing one, at any rate; so I thought it would be well enough for us to have something to keep us awake." "We will take some bread and butter too," said Rollo. Mr. George said that that would be an excellent plan. So they each of them cut one of the breakfast rolls which were on the table in two, and after spreading the inside surfaces well with butter, they put the parts together again. The waiter brought them a quantity of clean wrapping paper, and with this they wrapped up both the chicken and the rolls, and Rollo put the three parcels into his bag. "And now," said Rollo, "what are we to do for drink?" "We might take some oranges," suggested Mr. George. "So we will," said Rollo. "I will go out into the square and buy some." Rollo, accordingly, went out into the square, and for what was equivalent to three cents of American money he bought six oranges. He put the oranges into his pockets, and returned to the hotel. He found Mr. George filling a flat bottle with coffee. He had poured some coffee out of the coffee pot into the pitcher of hot milk, which had still a considerable quantity of hot milk remaining in it, and then, after putting some sugar into it, and waiting for the sugar to dissolve, he had commenced pouring it into the flat bottle. [Illustration: PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY.] "We may like a little coffee too," said Mr. George, "as well as the oranges. We can drink it out of my drinking cup." Rollo put his oranges into Mr. George's bag, for his own bag was now full. When all was ready, and the hotel bill was paid, Mr. George and Rollo got into a carriage which the waiter had sent for to come to the door, and set off for the diligence office. It was only half past seven when they arrived there. Rollo saw what time it was by the great clock which was put up on the front of one of the buildings towards the court yard. "We are too early by half an hour," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "in travelling over new ground we must always plan to be too early, or we run great risk of being too late." "Never mind," said Rollo, "I am glad that we are here before the time, for now I can go around and see the other diligences getting ready to go off." So Rollo began to walk about under the portico, or piazza, to the various diligences which were getting ready to set out on the different roads. There was one where there was a gentleman and two ladies who were quite in trouble. I suppose that among the girls who may read this book there may be many who may think that it must necessarily be a very agreeable thing to travel about Europe, and that if they could only go,--no matter under what circumstances,--they should experience an almost uninterrupted succession of pleasing sensations. But the truth is, that travelling in Europe, like every other earthly source of pleasure, is very far from being sufficient of itself to confer happiness. Indeed, under almost all the ordinary circumstances in which parties of travellers are placed, the question whether they are to enjoy themselves and be happy on any particular day of their journey, or to be discontented and miserable, depends so much upon little things which they did not at all take into the account, or even foresee at all in planning the journey, that it is wholly uncertain when you look upon a party of travellers that you meet on the road, whether they are really having a good time or not. You cannot tell at all by the outward circumstances. There was a striking illustration of this in the case of the party that attracted Rollo's attention in the court of the diligence office. The gentleman's name was Howland. One of the ladies was his young wife, and the other lady was her sister. The sister's name was Louise. Mr. Howland intended to have taken the whole _coupé_ for his party; but when he went to the office, the day before, to take the places, he found that one of the seats of the _coupé_ had been engaged by a gentleman who was travelling alone. "How unlucky!" said Mr. Howland to himself. "We must have three seats, and it won't do for us to be shut up in the interior, for there we cannot see the scenery at all." So he went home, and asked his wife what it would be best to do. "We cannot have three seats together," said he, "unless we go up upon the _banquette_." But the bride said that she could not possibly ride on the _banquette_. She could not climb up to such a high place. Now, Mrs. Howland's real reason for not being willing to ride on the banquette, was not the difficulty of climbing up, for at all the diligence offices they have convenient step ladders for the use of the passengers in getting up and down. The real reason was, she thought it was not genteel to ride there. And in fact it is not genteel. There is no part of the diligence where people who attach much importance to the fashion of the thing are willing to go, except the coupé. "And we don't want to ride in the interior," said Mr. Howland. "No," said the bride, "that is worse than the banquette." "Nor to wait till another day," added Mr. Howland. "No," said Mrs. Howland. "We must go to-morrow, and we must have the _coupé_. The gentleman who has engaged the third seat will give it up to us, I am sure, when he knows that it is to oblige a lady. You can engage the two seats in the coupé, and one more, either on the banquette or in the interior, and then when the time comes to set out we will get the gentleman to let us have his seat. You can pay him the difference." "But, Angelina," said Mr. Howland, "I should not like to ask such a thing of the gentleman. He has taken pains to go a day or two beforehand to engage his seat, so as to make sure of a good one, and I don't think we ought to expect him to give it up to accommodate strangers." "O, he won't mind," said Mrs. Howland. "He would as lief change as not. And if he won't, we can arrange it in some way or other." So Mr. Howland engaged the two places in the coupé, and one on the banquette. When the morning came, he brought his two ladies to the diligence station in good season. He was very unwilling to ask the gentleman to give up his seat; but his wife, who was a good deal accustomed to have her own way, and who, besides, being now a bride, considered herself specially entitled to indulgences, declared that if her husband did not ask the gentleman, she would ask him herself. "Very well," said Mr. Howland, "I will ask him then." So Mr. Howland went to the gentleman, and asked him. He was standing at the time, with his umbrella and walking stick in his hand, near one of the pillars of the portico, smoking a cigar. He looked at Mr. Howland with an expression of some surprise upon his countenance on hearing the proposition, took one or two puffs from his cigar before replying, and then said quietly that he preferred the seat that he had taken in the coupé. "It would be a very great favor to us, if you would exchange with us," said Mrs. Howland, who had come up with her husband, and stood near. "We are three, and we want very much to be seated together. We will very gladly pay the difference of the fare." The gentleman immediately, on being thus addressed by Mrs. Howland, took the cigar out of his mouth, raised his hat, and bowed very politely. "Are you and this other lady the gentleman's party?" he asked. "Yes, sir," said Mrs. Howland. "Then I cannot possibly think of giving up my seat in the coupé," replied the gentleman. "I am a Russian, it is true, but I am not a bear, as I should very justly be considered, if I were to leave a compartment in the coach when _two_ such beautiful ladies as you were coming into it, especially under the influence of any such consideration as that of saving the difference in the fare." The gentleman said this in so frank and good-natured a way that it was impossible to take offence at it, though Mr. Howland felt, that by making the request and receiving such a reply, he had placed himself in a very ridiculous position. "I prize my seat more than ever," said the Russian, still addressing the ladies; "I prize it incalculably, and so I cannot think of going up upon the banquette. But if the gentleman will go up there, I will promise to take the very best care of the ladies possible, while they are in the coupé." Mrs. Howland then took Louise aside, and asked, in a whisper, whether she should have any objection to ride in the interior, in case Mr. Howland could exchange the place on the banquette for one within. Louise was quite troubled that her sister should make such a proposal. She said she should not like very well to go in there among so many strangers, and in a place, too, where she could not see the scenery at all. Besides, Louise thought that it would have been more generous in Angelina, if she thought it necessary for one or the other of them to ride inside, to have offered to take a seat there herself, instead of putting it off upon her sister, especially since it was not so proper, she thought, for her, being a young lady, to ride among strangers, as for one who was married. Mr. Howland then suggested that they should all ascend to the banquette. The persons who had the other two seats there would of course be willing to change for the coupé; or at least, since the coupé was considered the best place, there would be no indelicacy in asking them to do it. But the bride would not listen to this proposal. She never could climb up there, in the world, she said. By this time the coach was ready, and the conductor began to call upon the passengers to take their places, so that there was no more time for deliberation. They were all obliged to take their seats as the conductor called off the names from his way bill. The two ladies entered the coupé in company with the Russian, while Mr. Howland ascended by the step ladder to his seat on the banquette. While the passengers were thus getting seated the postilions were putting in the horses, and in a moment more the diligence set off. Now, here were four persons setting out on a pleasant morning, in a good carriage, to take the drive from Naples to Rome--one of the most charming drives that the whole tour of Europe affords, and yet not one of them was in a condition to enjoy it. Every one was dissatisfied, out of humor, and unhappy. The Russian gentleman was displeased with Mr. Howland for asking him to give up his seat, and he felt uncomfortable and ill at ease in being shut up with two ladies, who he knew were displeased with him for not giving it up. The bride was vexed with the Russian for insisting on his place in the coupé, and with her sister for not being willing to go into the interior, so that she might ride with her husband. Miss Louise was offended at having been asked to sit in the interior, which request, she said to herself, was only part of a systematic plan, which her sister seemed to have adopted for the whole journey, to make herself the principal personage in every thing, and to treat her, Louise, as if she was of no consequence whatever. And last of all, Mr. Howland, on the banquette above, was out of humor with himself for having asked the Russian to give up his seat, and thus subjected himself to the mortification of a refusal, and with his wife for having required him to ask it. Thus they were all at heart uncomfortable and unhappy, and as the horses trotted swiftly on along the smooth and beautiful road which traverses the rich campagna of Naples, on the way to Capua, the splendid scenery was wholly disregarded by every one of them. Now, it is very often so with parties travelling in Europe. The external circumstances are all perhaps extremely favorable, and they are passing through scenes or visiting places which they have thought of and dreamed of at home with beating hearts for many years. And yet now that the time has come, and the enjoyment is before them, there is some internal source of disquiet, some mental vexation or annoyance, some secret resentment or heart-burning, arising out of the circumstances in which they are placed, or the relations which they sustain to one another, which destroys their peace and quiet of mind, and of course incapacitates them for any real happiness. So that, on the whole, judging from what I have seen of tourists in Europe, I should say that those that travel do not after all, in general, really pass their time more happily than those who remain at home. I have two reasons for saying these things. One is, that those of you who have no opportunity to travel, may be more contented to remain at home, and not imagine that those of your friends who go abroad, necessarily pass their time so much more happily than you do. The other reason is, that when you do travel, either in our own country or in foreign lands, you should be more reasonable and considerate, and pay more regard to the wishes and feelings of others, than travellers usually do. Most of the disquietudes and heart-burnings which arise to mar the happiness of parties travelling, come from the selfishness of our hearts, which seems, in some way or other, to bring itself out more into view when we are on a long journey together than at any other time. In the ordinary intercourse of life, this selfishness is covered and concealed by the veil of politeness prescribed by the forms and usages of society. This veil is, however, very thin, and it soon disappears entirely, in the familiar intercourse which is necessarily produced by the incidents and adventures of a journey. In being daily and hourly with each other for a long time, people appear just as they really are; and unless they are really reasonable, considerate, and just towards one another, they are sure sooner or later to disagree. But though the bridal party were very much out of humor with each other, as we have seen, Mr. George and Rollo were entirely free from any such uneasiness. They both felt very light-hearted and happy. They rambled about the court yard till they had seen all that there was there to interest them, and then they went to their own diligence. They opened the coupé door and looked in. "Our seats are Nos. 1 and 2," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George. "One of them is next the window, and the other is in the middle. You may get in first, and take the seat by the window." "No, uncle George," said Rollo, "you had better have the seat by the window." "We will take turns for that seat," said Mr. George, "and you shall begin." Mr. George arranged it to have Rollo take his turn first, because he knew very well that, in the beginning of a journey, such a boy as Rollo was always full of enthusiasm and excitement; and that, consequently, he would enjoy riding at the window much more at first than at a later period. So Rollo got in and took his seat, and Mr. George followed him. In a very few minutes afterwards, the postilions came out with the horses. But I have something particular to say about the postilions and the horses, and I will say it in the next chapter. CHAPTER II. THE JOURNEY. There are a great many curious things to be observed in travelling by the public conveyances on the continent of Europe. One is the way of driving the horses. It is a very common thing to have them driven, not by coachmen, but by postilions. There is a postilion for each pair of horses, and he sits upon the nigh horse of the pair. Thus he rides and drives at the same time. In these cases there is no driver's seat in front of the coach. Or if there is a seat in front, it is occupied by the passengers. All the driving is done by the postilions. The postilions dress in a sort of livery, which is quite gay in its appearance, being trimmed with red. The collars and the lapels of their jackets, too, are ornamented here and there with figures of stage horns and other emblems of their profession. They also wear enormously long and stout boots. These boots come up above their knees. They carry only a short whip, for they only have to whip the horse that they are upon, and the one which is by the side of him, and so they do not have to reach very far. When there are four horses, there are two postilions, and when there are six, three. A large diligence, with six horses, and a gayly dressed postilion mounted on one of the horses of each pair, makes a very grand appearance, you may depend, in coming, upon the gallop, into the streets of a town--the postilions cracking their whips, and making as much noise as they can, and all the boys and girls of the street coming to the doors and windows to see. "I am glad we are going to have postilions, uncle George," said Rollo, as they were getting into the coach. "Why?" asked Mr. George. "Because I like the looks of them," said Rollo; "and then we always go faster, too, when we have postilions. Besides, when there is a seat for a driver on the coach, it blocks up our front windows; but now our windows are all clear." "Those are excellent reasons--all of them," said Mr. George. The postilions did indeed drive very fast, when they once got upon the road. There was a delay of half an hour, at the gate of the city, for the examination of the passports; during which time the postilions, having dismounted from their horses, stood talking together, and playing off jokes upon each other. At length, when the passports were ready, they sprang into their saddles, and set the horses off upon the run. The road, on leaving the gates, entered a wide and beautiful avenue, which was at this time filled with peasants coming into town, for that day was market day in Naples. The people coming in were dressed in the most curious costumes. Multitudes were on foot, others rode crowded together in donkey carts. Some rode on the backs of donkeys, with a load of farming produce before or behind them. The women, in such cases, sat square upon the donkey's back, with both their feet hanging down on one side; and they banged the donkey with their heels to make him get out of the way so that the diligence could go by. The country was very rich and beautiful, and it was cultivated every where like a garden. Here and there were groves of mulberries,--the tree on which the silk worm feeds,--and there were vineyards, with the vines just bursting into leaf, and now and then a little garden of orange trees. In the mean time the postilions kept cracking their whips, and the horses galloped on at such a speed that Rollo had scarcely time to see the objects by the road side, they glided so swiftly by. "Won't the silk worms eat any kind of leaves but mulberry leaves?" he asked. "No," said Mr. George, "at least the mulberry silk worms will not. There are a great many different kinds of silk worms in the world; that is, there are a great many different kinds of caterpillars that spin a thread and make a ball to wrap up their eggs in, and each one lives on a different plant or tree. If you watch the caterpillars in a garden, you will see that each kind lives on some particular leaf, and will not touch any other." "Yes," said Rollo, "we found a big caterpillar once on the caraway in our garden, and we shut him up in a box, in order to see what sort of a butterfly he would turn into, and we gave him different kinds of leaves to eat, but he would not eat any but caraway leaves." "And what became of him at last?" asked Mr. George. "O, he turned into a butterfly," said Rollo. "First he turned into a chrysalis, and then he turned into a butterfly." "There are a great many different kinds of silk worms," said Mr. George; "but in order to find one that can be made useful, there are several conditions to be fulfilled." "What do you mean by conditions to be fulfilled?" asked Rollo. "Why, I mean that there are several things necessary, in order that the silk worm should be a good one to make silk from. In the first place, the fibre of the silk that he spins must be fine, and also strong. In the next place, it must easily unwind from the cocoon. Then the animal must be a tolerably hardy one, so as to be easily raised in great numbers. Then the plant or tree that it feeds upon must be a thrifty and hardy one, and easily cultivated. The mulberry silk worm has been found to answer to these conditions better than any hitherto known; but there are some others that I believe they are now trying, in order to see if they will not be better still. They are looking about in all parts of the world to see what they can find." "Who are looking?" asked Rollo. "The Society of Acclimatation," replied Mr. George. "That is a society founded in Paris, and extending to all parts of the world, that is employed in finding new plants and new animals that can be made useful to man, or finding some that are useful to man in one country, and so introducing them into other countries. They are trying specially to find new silk worms." "There are some kinds of caterpillars in America," said Rollo, "that wind their silk up into balls. I mean to get some of the balls when I go home, and see if I can unwind them." "That will be an excellent plan," said Mr. George. "If I can only find the end," said Rollo. "There must be some art required to find the end," rejoined Mr. George, "and then I believe there is some preparation which is necessary to make the cocoons unwind." "I wish I knew what it was," said Rollo. "You can inquire of some of the people when we stop to dine," replied Mr. George. "But I don't know enough Italian for that," said Rollo. "That's a pity," said Mr. George. In the mean time the horses trotted and galloped on until they had gone about ten miles, and then at length the postilions brought them up at the door of an inn, in a village. Fresh horses were standing all ready at the door, with new postilions. The postilions that had been driving took out their horses and led them away, and then came themselves to the window of the coupé and held out their caps for their _buono mano_, as they call it; that is, for a small present. Every body in Italy, who performs any service, expects, in addition to being paid the price regularly agreed upon for the service, to receive a present, greater or smaller according to the nature of the case. This present is called the _buono mano_.[2] [Footnote 2: Pronounced _bono mahno_.] The postilions always expect a buono mano from the passengers in the stage coach, especially from those who ride in the coupé. Rollo gave them a few coppers each, for himself and for Mr. George, and just as he had done so, a young man without any hat upon his head, but with a white napkin under his arm, came out of the hotel, and advancing to the window of the coupé asked Mr. George and Rollo, in French, if they wished to take any thing. "No," said Mr. George. "Not any thing." "Yes, uncle George," said Rollo, "let us go and see what they have got." He said this, of course, in English, but immediately changing his language into French, he asked the waiter what they could have. The waiter said that they could have some hot coffee. There would not be time for any thing else. "Let us have some hot coffee, uncle George," said Rollo, eagerly. "Very well," said Mr. George. So Rollo gave the order, and the waiter went into the house. In a moment he returned with two cups of very nice coffee, which he brought on a tray. By this time, however, the fresh horses were almost harnessed, so that it was necessary to drink the coffee quick. But there was no difficulty in doing this, for it was very nice, and not too hot. Rollo had barely time to give back the cups and pay for the coffee before the diligence began to move. The postilions started the horses with a strange sort of a cry, that they uttered while standing beside them, and then leaped into the saddles just as they were beginning to run. The journey was continued much in this way during the whole day. The country was delightful; the road was hard and smooth as a floor, and the horses went very fast. In a word, Rollo had a capital ride. After traversing a comparatively level country for some miles, the road entered a mountainous region, where there was a long ascent. At the foot of this ascent was a post house, and here they put on six horses instead of four. Of course there were now three postilions. But although the country was mountainous, the ascent was not steep, for the road was carried up by means of long windings and zigzags, in such a manner that the rise was very regular and gradual all the way. The consequence was, that the six horses took the diligence on almost as fast up the mountains as the four had done on the level ground. About five o'clock in the afternoon the diligence made a good stop, in order to allow the passengers to dine. "We will go in and take dinner with the rest," said Mr. George, "and so save the things that we have put up for a moonlight supper on the Pontine Marshes." "Yes," said Rollo, "I shall like that very much. Besides, I want to go and take dinner with them here, for I want to see how they do it." The place where the diligence stopped was a town called Mola di Gaeta. It stood in a very picturesque situation, near the sea. For though the road, in leaving Naples, had led at first into the interior of the country, and had since been winding about among the mountains, it had now come down again to the margin of the sea. The entrance to the hotel was under a great archway. There were doors to the right and left from this archway, leading to staircases and to apartments. The passengers from the diligence were conducted through one of these doors into a very ancient looking hall, where there was a table set for dinner, with plates enough for twenty persons--that being about the number of passengers contained in the various compartments of the diligence. On the opposite side of the arched way was a door leading to another hall, where there was a table set for the conductor and the postilions. After waiting a few minutes, the company of passengers took their seats at the table. Besides the plates for the guests, there was a row of dishes extending up and down the middle of the table, containing apples, pears, oranges, nuts, raisins, little cakes, and bon-bons of various kinds. There were also in this row two vases containing flowers. Excepting these fruits and sweetmeats, there was nothing eatable upon the table when the guests sat down. It is not customary in European dinners to put any thing upon the table except the dessert. The other dishes are brought round, and presented one by one to each guest. First came the soup. When the soup had been eaten, and the soup plates had been removed, then there was boiled beef. The beef was upon two dishes, one for each side of the table. It was cut very nicely in slices, and each dish had a fork and a spoon in it, for the guests to help themselves with. The dishes were carried along the sides of the table by the waiters, and offered to each guest, the guests helping themselves in succession to such pieces as they liked. After the beef had been eaten, the plates were all changed, and then came a course of fried potatoes; then, after another change of plates, a course of mutton chops; then green peas; then roast beef; then cauliflower with drawn butter; then roast chicken with salad; and lastly, some puddings. For each separate article of all this dinner there was a fresh plate furnished to each guest. After the pudding plates were removed, small plates for the dessert were furnished; and then the fruit, and the nuts, and the bon-bons were served; and the dinner was over. For every two guests there was a decanter of wine. At least it was what they called wine, though in taste it was more like sour cider. The people generally used it by pouring a little of it into their water. When the dinner was over, the passengers all paid the amount that was charged for it, and each gave, besides, a buono mano to the waiter who had waited upon his side of the table. By this time the diligence was ready, and they all went and took their seats in it again. The sun was now going down, and in the course of an hour the last of its rays were seen gilding the summits of the mountains. Soon afterwards the evening began to come on. "Before a great while," said Mr. George, "we shall begin to draw near to the frontier." "Yes," said Rollo, "the frontier between the kingdom of Naples and the dominions of the pope. They will examine the baggage there, I suppose." "No," said Mr. George; "they will not examine the baggage till we get to Rome." "I thought they always examined the baggage at the frontier, when we came into any new country," said Rollo. "They do," said Mr. George, "unless the baggage is under the charge of public functionaries; and then, to save time, they often take it into the capital, and examine it there. I asked one of the passengers at the dinner table, and he said that the trunks were not to be opened till we get to Rome." "They will examine the passports, I suppose," said Rollo. "Yes," replied Mr. George, "they will, undoubtedly, examine the passports at the frontier." You cannot pass from one country in Europe to another, any where, without stopping at the last military station of the country that you leave, to have your passport examined and stamped, in token of permission given you to go out, and also at the first military station of the country which you are about to enter, to have them examined and stamped again, in token of permission to come in. All this, as you may suppose, is very troublesome. Besides that, there are fees to pay, which, in the course of a long journey, amount to a considerable sum. Besides the passport business which was to be attended to, there was a grand change of the diligence establishment at the frontier. The coach itself, which came from Naples, and also the conductor and postilions, were all left at the border, and the passengers were transferred to a new turnout which came from Rome. Indeed, there was a double change; for the Roman diligence brought a load of passengers from Rome to meet the Neapolitan one at the border, and thus each company of travellers had to be transferred to the establishment belonging to the country which they were entering. This change was made in a post house, in a solitary place near the frontier. It caused a detention of nearly an hour, there were so many formalities to go through. It was late in the evening, and the work was done by the light of torches and lanterns. The two diligences were backed up against each other, and then all the trunks and baggage were transferred from the top of one coach to the top of the other, without being taken down at all. The baggage in these diligences is always packed upon the top. You would think that this would make the coach top heavy, and so it does in some degree; but then the body of the coach below is so large and heavy, that the extra weight above is well counterpoised; and then, besides, the roads are so smooth and level, and withal so hard, that there is no danger of an upset. The work of shifting the baggage from one diligence to the other was performed under an archway. There was a door leading from this archway into a large office, where the two companies of passengers were assembled, waiting for the coaches to be ready. All these passengers were loaded with carpet bags, knapsacks, valises, bundles of umbrellas and canes, and other such light baggage which they had had with them inside the coaches. Many of them were sitting on chairs and benches around the sides of the room, with their baggage near them. Others were walking about the room, changing money with each other; that is, those that were going from Rome to Naples were changing the Roman money, which they had left, for Neapolitan money. The money of one of these countries does not circulate well in the other country. In the middle of the room was a great table, where the conductors and other officials were at work with papers and accounts. Rollo could not understand what they were doing. Rollo walked about the office, looking at the different passengers, and observing what was going on, while Mr. George remained near the coaches, to watch the transfer of the baggage. "I want to be sure," said Mr. George, "that our trunk is there, and that they shift it over to the Roman coach." "They are changing money inside," said Rollo. "Have you got any that you want to have changed?" "No," said Mr. George. "I did not know that we could change here; and I calculated closely, and planned it so as not to have any of the Naples money left." "I have got only two or three pieces," said Rollo, "and those I am going to carry home to America for coins." At length the changes were completed, and Mr. George and Rollo, and also all the other passengers who had come in the diligence from Naples, began to take their places in the coach for Rome; while at the same time the other company got into the Naples coach, which was now going to return. The conductor came for his _buono mano_, the new horses were harnessed in, the postilions leaped into the saddles, and thus both parties set out upon their night ride. It was not far from nine o'clock. [Illustration: THE PONTINE MARSHES.] "And now," said Mr. George, "before a great while we shall come upon the Pontine Marshes." The Pontine Marshes form an immense tract of low and level land, which have been known and celebrated in history for nearly two thousand years. Though called marshes, they are so far drained by ancient canals that the land is firm enough for grass to grow upon it, and for flocks of sheep and herds of cattle to feed; but yet it is so low and so unhealthy, that it is utterly uninhabitable by man. The extent of these marshes is immense. The road traverses them in a direct line, and on a perfect level, for twenty-five or thirty miles, without passing a single habitation, except the post houses, and in the middle a solitary inn. And yet there is nothing desolate or dreary in the aspect of the Pontine Marshes. On the contrary the view on every side, in passing across them, is extremely beautiful. The road is wide, and smooth, and level, and is bordered on each side with a double row of very ancient and venerable trees, which give to it, for the whole distance, the character of a magnificent avenue. Think of a broad and handsome avenue, running straight as an arrow for twenty-five miles! Beyond the trees, on one side, there is a wide canal. This canal runs parallel to the road, and you often meet boats coming or going upon it. Beyond the canal, and beyond the trees on the other side, there extends, as far as the eye can reach, one vast expanse of living green, as smooth and beautiful as can be imagined. This immense tract of meadow is divided here and there by hedges or palings, and now and then a pretty grove appears to vary the scene. Immense flocks of sheep, and herds of horses and cattle, are seen feeding every where, and sometimes herdsmen, on horseback galloping to and fro, attending to their charge. Mr. George and Rollo had had a fine opportunity to see the scenery of the Pontine Marshes when they came to Naples, for then they crossed them by day light. Now, however, it was night, and there was not much to be seen except the gnarled and venerable trunks of the trees, on each side of the road, as the light of the diligence lanterns flashed upon them. The postilions drove exceedingly fast all the way over the marshes. The stage stopped three times to change horses. Mr. George kept up a continual conversation with Rollo all the way, in order to prevent him from going to sleep; for, as I have said before, it is considered dangerous to sleep while on the marshes. About midnight Rollo proposed that they should eat their supper. "No," said Mr. George, "we will keep our supper for the last thing. As long as we can keep awake without it we will." So they went on for two hours longer. About one o'clock the moon rose, and the moonbeams shining in through the windows of the coupé, enlivened the interior very much. "The moonlight makes it a great deal pleasanter," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "and it will make it a great deal more convenient for us to eat our supper." The diligence stopped at a post house to change horses, a little before two, and immediately after it set out again. Mr. George said that it was time for them to take their supper. So Rollo opened the two bags, and took out from one the chicken and the two rolls, and from the other the bottle of coffee and the oranges. He placed the things, as he took them out, in a large pocket before him, in the front of the coupé. Mr. George took two newspapers out of his knapsack, one for Rollo and one for himself, to spread in their laps while they were eating. Then, with a sharp blade of his pocket knife, he began to carve the chicken. The chicken was very tender, and the rolls were very nice; and as, moreover, both the travellers were quite hungry, they found the supper in all respects excellent. For drink, they had the juice of the oranges. To drink this juice, they cut a round hole in one end of the orange, and then run the blade of the knife in, in all directions, so as to break up the pulp. They could then drink out the juice very conveniently. At the close of the supper they drank the coffee. The coffee was cold, it is true, but it was very good, and it made an excellent ending to the meal. They made the supper last as long as possible, in order to occupy the time. It was three o'clock before it was finished and the papers cleared away. At half past three, Rollo, in looking out at the window, saw a sort of bank by the side of the road; and on observing attentively, he perceived that there was a curve in the road itself, before them. "Uncle George," said he, "we have got off the marshes!" "I verily believe we have," said Mr. George. "So now we may go to sleep," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George. "I'll lay my head over into the corner, and you may lie against my shoulder." So Mr. George and Rollo placed themselves in as comfortable a position as possible, and composed themselves to sleep. They slept several hours; waking up, or, rather, half waking up, once during the interval, while the diligence stopped for the purpose of changing horses. When they finally awoke, the sun was up high, and was shining in quite bright through the coupé windows. CHAPTER III. THE ARRIVAL AT ROME. When Mr. George and Rollo awoke from their sleep, they found that they were coming into the environs of Rome. The country was green and beautiful, but it seemed almost uninhabited; and in every direction were to be seen immense ruins of tombs, and aqueducts, and other such structures, now gone to decay. There was an ancient road leading out of Rome in this direction, called the _Appian Way_. It was by this road that the apostle Paul travelled, in making his celebrated journey to Rome, after appealing from the Jewish jurisdiction to that of Cæsar. Indeed, the Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, places mentioned in the account of this journey contained in the Acts, were on the very road that Mr. George and Rollo had been travelling in their journey from Naples to Rome. The remains of the Appian Way are still to be traced for many miles south of Rome. The road was paved, in ancient times, with very large blocks of an exceedingly hard kind of stone. These stones were of various shapes, but they were fitted together and flattened on the top, and thus they made a very smooth, and at the same time a very solid, pavement. In many places along the Appian Way this old pavement still remains, and is as good as ever. At length the diligence arrived at the gate of the city. It passed through an arched gateway, leading through an ancient and very venerable wall, and then stopped at the door of a sort of office just within. There were two soldiers walking to and fro before the office. "What are we stopping for here?" asked Rollo. "For the passports, I suppose," said Mr. George. The conductor of the diligence came to the door of the coupé and asked for the passports. Mr. George gave him his and Rollo's, and the conductor carried them, together with those which he had obtained from the other passengers, into the office. He then ordered the postilions to drive on. "How shall we get our passports again?" asked Rollo. "We must send for them to the police office, I suppose," said Mr. George. It is very customary, in the great capitals of Europe, for the police to take the passports of travellers, on their arrival at the gates of the city, and direct them to send for them at the central police office on the following day. After passing the gate, the diligence went on a long way, through a great many narrow streets, leading into the heart of the city. There was nothing in these streets to denote the ancient grandeur of Rome, excepting now and then an old and venerable ruin, standing neglected among the other buildings. Rollo, however, in looking out at the windows of the coupé, saw a great many curious sights, as the diligence drove along. Among these one of the most remarkable was a procession of people dressed in a most fantastic manner, and wearing masks which entirely concealed their faces. There were two round holes in the masks for the eyes. Mr. George told Rollo that these were men doing penance. They had been condemned to walk through the streets in this way, as a punishment for some of their sins. "Why, they treat them just as if they were children," said Rollo. "They _are_ children," said Mr. George, "in every thing but years." [Illustration: DOING PENANCE.] Not long after this, Rollo saw a very magnificent carriage coming along. It was perfectly resplendent with crimson and gold. The horses, too, and the coachman, and the footmen, were gorgeously caparisoned and apparelled in the same manner. Rollo pointed it out to Mr. George. Mr. George said it was a cardinal's carriage. "I wish the cardinal was in it," said Rollo. "I would like to have seen him." "I presume he would have looked very much like any other man," replied Mr. George. "Yes, but he would have been dressed differently, wouldn't he?" "Perhaps so," said Mr. George. "Perhaps he would have had his red hat on," said Rollo. "I should like to see a cardinal wearing his red hat." The badge of the cardinal's office is a hat and dress of a red color. At length the diligence passed under an archway which led into a large open court, similar to the one in Naples where the journey had been commenced. The passengers got out, the horses were unharnessed, and the baggage was taken down. The trunks were all taken into an office pertaining to the custom house, to be examined by the officers there, in order to see whether there were any contraband goods in them. Mr. George unlocked his trunk and lifted up the lid. An officer came up to the place, and patting with his hand upon the top of the clothes, as if to prevent Mr. George from lifting them up to show what was below, he said,-- "Very well; very well; it is sufficient." So saying, he shut down the top of the trunk again, and marked it, "Passed." He then touched his hat, and asked Mr. George if he would make some small present for the benefit of the custom house officers. That is to say, he evaded the performance of his duty as an officer of the customs, in expectation that the traveller would pay him for his delinquency. Most travellers are very willing to pay in such cases. They have various articles in their trunks which they have bought in other countries, and which, strictly speaking, are subject to duty in entering Rome, and they are willing to pay a fee rather than to have their trunks overhauled. Others, of more sturdy morality, refuse to pay these fees. They consider them as of the nature of bribes. So they say to the officers,-- "Examine the baggage as much as you please, and if you find any duties due, I will pay them. But I will not pay any bribes." "Now, Rollo," said Mr. George, when he had got possession of his trunk, "we want a carriage to take us and the baggage to the hotel. You may go and see if you can find one, and I will stay here and look after the baggage. Engage the carriage by the hour." So Rollo went out of the court, and soon found a carriage. Before he got into it, he said to the coachman,-- "_Per hora!_" This means, By the hour. At the same time Rollo held up his watch to the coachman, in order to let him see what o'clock it was. "_Si, signore_," said the coachman. _Si, signore_, is the Italian for Yes, sir. Rollo could not say in Italian where he wished the coachman to go, and so he stood up in the carriage and pointed. Following his indications, the coachman drove in through the archway to the court of the post office, where he found Mr. George waiting. The trunk and the bags were put upon the carriage, in front, and Mr. George got in with Rollo. "Hotel d'Amerique," said Mr. George to the coachman. "_Si, signore_," said the coachman, and immediately he began to drive away. The Hotel d'Amerique was the one where Mr. George had concluded to go. He had found the name and a description of this hotel in his guide book. "Why did you want me to take the carriage by the hour?" asked Rollo. "Because it is very probable," said Mr. George, "that we shall not get in at the Hotel d'Amerique, and in that case we shall have to go to other hotels, and unless we take him by the hour, he would charge a course for every hotel that we go to, and the charge even for _two_ courses, is more than for an hour." The event showed that Mr. George was right in his calculations. The Hotel d'Amerique was full. The waiter, who came out, as soon as he saw the carriage stop at the door, told Mr. George this in French. "Then please tell our coachman," said Mr. George, "to drive us to any other principal hotel that is near here, and if that is full, to another; and so on, until he finds a good place where they can take us in." Mr. George said this, of course, in French. The waiter delivered the message to the coachman in Italian. "Yes," said the coachman, to himself, "that I'll do. But I shall take good care that you don't find any place where you can get in this two hours, if I can help it." The reason why the coachman did not wish that his travellers should find a hotel soon was, of course, because he wished to earn as much money as possible by driving them about. He immediately began to think what hotels would be most likely to be full, and drove first to those. The first of all was a hotel, situated quite near one of the gates of the city, the one where the principal entrance is for all travellers coming from the north. It is called the "Gate of the People,"--or in Italian, _Porto del Popolo_. The gate opens into a large triangular space, which is called the _Piazza del Popolo_. _Piazza_,[3] in Italian, means a public square. [Footnote 3: Pronounced _Piatza_.] This Piazza del Popolo is one of the most celebrated places in Rome. There are three streets that radiate from it directly through the heart of the town. Between the centre and the two side streets, at the corners where they come out upon the square, are two churches exactly alike. They are called sometimes the _twin churches_, on this account. The Piazza del Popolo is a great place for public parades. On one side is a high ascent, with a broad expanse of gardens upon the top, and zigzag roads, handsomely walled up, and ornamented with statues and fountains, and with marble seats placed here and there for foot passengers to rest themselves upon, when ascending. Every year, at the end of what they call Holy Week, they have a great celebration of fireworks from the side of this hill and from the terrace above; and then all the people assemble in the Piazza below to witness them. But I must go back to Mr. George and Rollo. The coachman stopped at a large hotel, fronting upon this square. On inquiring at the bureau, (on the continent of Europe they call an office a bureau) Mr. George found that all the rooms were occupied except one large apartment, of four rooms. This was, of course, more than Mr. George wanted. At the next hotel where the coachman stopped, there were no rooms at all vacant, and at the next only one small room, with a single narrow bed in it. "If we can't find any other," said Rollo, "we will come back and take this, and I will sleep on the floor." "O, no!" said Mr. George. "Why, uncle George!" said Rollo, "I can make it very comfortable on the floor, by rolling up two coats or cloaks into two long rolls, and wedging them in under me, one on one side of me and the other on the other, and then putting a carpet bag under my head for a pillow. It feels just as if you were in a good bed." Mr. George smiled, and got into the carriage again, and the coachman drove on. After a while, he stopped at the door of a hotel which stood in rather a retired place among narrow streets, though there was an open space in front of it. Mr. George inquired for rooms here, and the waiter said that they had one left. "Are there two beds in it?" asked Mr. George. "No, sir," said the waiter, "but we can put two beds in. Would you like to go and see it, sir?" "No," said Mr. George, "I will take it without going to see it. It is the best that we can do." So the porter of the hotel took off the baggage, while Mr. George paid the coachman for an hour and a half of time. Mr. George and Rollo then followed the porter to their room. In order to reach it, they had to ascend several stories, up massive staircases of stone, and then to go out to the extreme end of a long corridor. The room, when they came to it, proved to be quite small, and there was but one bed in it. There was, however, room for another; and the waiter, who had followed them up, said that he would cause another one to be put in without any delay. CHAPTER IV. A RAMBLE. "And now, uncle George," said Rollo, "we'll get ready, and then the first thing that we will do, will be to go down into the dining room and get some breakfast." "Why, we have had our breakfast already," said Mr. George. "We had it at two o'clock this morning, on the Pontine Marshes." "O, no," said Rollo, "that was our supper for last night." "Very well," said Mr. George, "we will have some breakfast. You may go down and order it as soon as you are ready. I will come down by the time that it is on the table." "What shall I order?" asked Rollo. "Whatever you please," said Mr. George. Accordingly Rollo, as soon as he was ready, went down stairs, and looking about in the entrance hall, he saw a door with the words TABLE D'HÔTE, in gilt letters, over it. "Ah," said he to himself, "this is the place." He opened the door, and found himself in a long, narrow room, which seemed, however, more like a passage way than like a room. There was a sort of rack on one side of it for hats and coats. There were several pictures in this room, with prices marked upon them, as if they were for sale, and also a number of very pretty specimens of marble, and inlaid paper weights, and models of columns, temples, and ruins of various kinds, and other such curiosities as are kept every where in Rome to sell to visitors. Rollo looked at all these things as he passed through the room, considering, as he examined them, whether his uncle George would probably wish to buy any of them. One of them was a model of a column, with a spiral line of sculptures extending from the base to the summit. These sculptures represented figures of men and horses, sometimes in battle, sometimes crossing bridges, and sometimes in grand processions entering a town. "This must be a model of some old column in Rome, I suppose," said Rollo to himself. "Perhaps I shall find it some time or other, when I am rambling about the streets. But now I must go and see about breakfast." So saying, Rollo passed on to the end of the passage way, where there was a door with curtains hanging before it. He pushed these curtains aside, opened the door, and went in. He found himself ushered into a dining room, with a long table extending up and down the centre of it. There was a row of massive columns on each side of the table, which supported the vaultings of the ceiling above. In different parts of this table there were small parties of gentlemen and ladies, engaged in taking late breakfasts. Rollo walked down on one side of the table. There was on that side a party consisting of a lady and gentleman with two children, a girl and a boy,--all dressed in such a manner as to give them a foreign air. The gentleman was speaking to the waiter in French when Rollo passed by the party. The boy was sitting next to one of the great pillars. These pillars were so near the table that each one of them took the place of a seat. Rollo walked on and took his seat next beyond the pillar. Of course the pillar was between him and the boy. In a few minutes a waiter came to ask what Rollo would have for breakfast. He asked in French. Rollo gave an order for breakfast for two. He said that his uncle would be down in a few minutes. "Very well, sir," said the waiter. As soon as the waiter had gone, Rollo looked round the other way, and he saw that the other boy was peeping at him from behind the pillar. The boy laughed when he caught Rollo's eye, and Rollo laughed too. The boy seemed to be about nine years old. A moment afterwards the boy began to peep at Rollo from behind the pillar on the back side, and then again on the front side, thus playing a sort of bo-peep. In this way, in a few minutes the two boys began to feel quite acquainted with each other, without, however, having spoken a word. They would, perhaps, have continued this game longer, but just at this moment the breakfast for the party came in, and the boy set himself at work eating a warm roll, buttered, and drinking his coffee. "Can you speak French?" asked Rollo,--of course speaking French himself in asking the question. "Yes," said the boy, "but not very well." "Then," said Rollo to himself, "he cannot be a French boy. Perhaps he is an Italian boy." "Italian?" asked Rollo. "No," said the boy, "not at all. All I know of Italian is _grazia_."[4] [Footnote 4: Pronounced _gratzia_.] "What does that mean?" asked Rollo. "It means, Thank you," said the boy. "He must be a German boy, I think," said Rollo to himself. After pausing a moment, Rollo ventured to ask the boy what his name was. "Charles Beekman," said the boy. He pronounced the name in so English a fashion, that Rollo perceived at once that he must speak English, so he changed from French to English himself, and said,-- "So you are an English boy." "No," said Charles, "I'm an American boy." Rollo here laughed outright, to think how much trouble they had both been taking to speak to each other in French, each supposing the other to be some outlandish foreigner, when, after all, they were both Americans, and could talk perfectly well together in their own mother tongue. Such adventures as these, however, are very frequently met with, in travelling in foreign countries. After finding that they could both speak English, the two boys talked with each other like old friends, for some minutes; and at length finding that the pillar between them was very much in the way, Charles, with his mother's permission, moved his seat round to Rollo's side of it, Rollo himself moving to the next chair, to make room for him. Mrs. Beekman readily consented to this, having first observed that Rollo appeared to be a boy of agreeable and gentlemanly manners and demeanor. When Mr. George at length came down, he was at first quite surprised to find that Rollo had thus obtained a companion; but before the breakfast was completed, he had become quite well acquainted with the Beekman family himself. Towards the end of the breakfast Rollo said that he was going out to take a walk, and he asked Mrs. Beekman to let Charles go with him. Mr. George was going to finish some letters in his room, and was then going to the post office and to the bankers, where Rollo did not particularly wish to go. "It will be better for you and me to go out and take a walk by ourselves," said he to Charles, "if your mother is willing." "Yes," said Mrs. Beekman, "I am willing. Only you must take care and not get lost." "O, no," said Rollo; "I'll take care of that. Besides, if we should get lost, I know exactly what to do." "What would you do?" asked Mr. Beekman. "I would just take a carriage," replied Rollo, "and order the coachman to drive right to the hotel." "Very good," said Mr. Beekman, "that would do very well." Accordingly, after breakfast Mr. George went to his room to finish his letters, while Rollo and Charlie set out on their walk, to see what they could see of Rome. Rollo's plan of taking a carriage, in case of getting lost in a strange city, and ordering the coachman to drive to the hotel, is a very excellent one; but one thing is quite essential to the success of it, and that is, that the person lost should know the name of his hotel. Unfortunately, Rollo was going out without this requisite. Neither he himself nor Mr. George had observed the name of the hotel where the coachman whom they had employed, on their arrival, had finally left them; and in going out Rollo forgot to observe what it was. He did not even take notice of the name of the street. He did observe, however, that the hotel had a small open space, like a square, before it, with a fountain on one side. The water from the fountain flowed into a small stone basin, with curious figures sculptured on the side of it. "Let us go and look at this basin," said Charles, "and see if it would not be a good place for us to sail little boats." The basin was in a cool and pleasant place, being overshadowed by the drooping branches of a great tree. Rollo, however, did not wish to stay by it long. "Let us go now and see the streets of Rome," said he; "we can come out and look at this basin at any time." So the two boys walked along, paying little attention to the direction in which they were going. "We shall find some of the great streets pretty soon," said Rollo, "and then we will take an observation." "What do you mean by that?" asked Charles. "Why, we will take particular notice of some great building, or something else that is remarkable where we come out into the street, and by that means we shall be able to find our way back to the hotel." "Yes," said Charles, "that will be an excellent plan." So the boys went on, and presently they came out into what seemed to be quite a busy street. It was not very wide, but it was bordered with gay-looking shops on each side. These shops were for the sale of models, specimens of marbles, Etruscan vases, mosaics, cameos, and other such things which are sold to visitors in Rome. The number of mosaics and cameos was very great. They were displayed in little show cases, placed outside the shops, under the windows and before the doors, so that people could examine them as they walked along. "O, what a quantity of mosaics and _cameos_!" exclaimed Rollo. "What are mosaics and cameos?" asked Charles. As perhaps some of the readers of this book may not know precisely the meaning of these words, I will here explain to them, as Rollo did to Charles, how mosaics and cameos are made. In the first place, in respect to cameos. Imagine a small flat piece of stone, of different colors on the two sides, say white and black. We will suppose that the white extends half through the thickness of the stone, and that the remaining part of the thickness is black. Stones are often found with such a division of colors, not only white and black, but of all other hues. Now, the artist takes such a stone as this, and marks out some design upon one side of it, say upon the white side. Perhaps the design may be the figure of a man. Then he cuts away all the white of the stone except the figure; and the result is, that he has the figure of the man, or whatever else his design may be, in white, on a black ground, and the whole in one piece of stone, all solid. Besides stone, shell is often used for cameos; many shells being pink, or of some other such color on the inside, and white towards the outside. In such a case, the figures of the design would be pink, or whatever else the color of the stone might be, on a white ground. The artists of Rome are celebrated for making beautiful cameos, both in shell and in stone. The figures are very nicely drawn, and are very beautifully cut, and when finished are set as pins, bracelets, and other ornaments. The _mosaics_, on the other hand, are made in a very different way. In these, the design is represented by different colored stones or bits of glass worked in together, with great care, in an opening made in the material serving for the groundwork. Rollo and Charlie went into one of the shops, and saw a man making one of these mosaics. He was working at a table. On one side was a small painting on a card, which was his model. He was copying this painting in mosaic. The bits of glass that he was working with were in the form of slender bars, not much larger than a stiff bristle. They were of all imaginable colors--the several colors being each kept by itself, in the divisions of a box on the table. The man took up these bars, one by one, and broke off small pieces of them, of the colors that he wanted, with a pair of pincers, and set them into the work. He put them in perpendicularly, and the lower ends went into some soft composition, placed there to receive and hold them. The upper ends, of course, came together at the surface of the work. The man who was making the mosaic told Rollo, that as soon as he had finished placing the pieces for the whole design, he should grind off the surface so as to make it smooth, and polish it. It would then have the appearance of a painted picture. You would think that as the colors of the design are thus represented by separate pieces of glass, put in one after the other, the result would be a sort of mottled appearance, or at least that the gradations of hue would be sharp and harsh in their effect. But it is not so. The pieces are so small, and the different shades succeed each other so regularly, that when viewed from the ordinary distance, the junctions disappear altogether, and the shades mingle and blend together in the softest and most perfect manner. The mosaic which the workman was making in the shop where Rollo and Charles went in, was a small one, intended to form part of a bracelet. There were, however, some in the same shop that were quite large. They were framed like pictures, and were hanging up against the wall. Indeed, there was nothing but the circumstance that they were in a mosaic shop, to denote that they were not pictures, beautifully painted in oil. One was a landscape; another was a portrait of a beautiful girl; another was a basket of fruit and flowers. In some of the churches of Rome, there are mosaics of very large size, which are exact and beautiful copies of some of the most celebrated paintings in the world. Strangers coming into the churches and looking at these pictures, never imagine them to be mosaics, and when they are told that they are so, they can scarcely believe the story. But on examining them very near, or in looking at them through an opera glass,--for sometimes you cannot get very near them,--you can easily see the demarcations between the little stones. It is a very curious circumstance that the most ancient pictures in the churches of Rome and Italy are mosaics, and not paintings. Mosaics seem to have come first in the history of art, and paintings followed, in imitation of them. Indeed, the arranging of different colored stones in a pavement, or in a floor, so as to represent some ornamental design, would naturally be the first attempt at decoration made in the construction of buildings. Then would follow casing the walls with different colored marbles, arranged in pretty ways, and finally the representation of men and animals would be attempted. This we find, from an examination of ancient monuments, was the actual course of things, and painting in oil came in at the end as an imitation of pictures in stone. Rollo and Charles were induced to go into the mosaic shop by the invitation of the workman, whose table, as it happened, stood near the door. He saw the two boys looking in somewhat wistfully, as they went by, and he invited them to walk in. He saw at once from their appearance that they were visitors that had just arrived in town, and though he did not expect that they would buy any of his mosaics themselves, he thought that there might be ladies in their party who would come and buy, if he treated the boys politely. It was on that account that he invited them to come in. And when they had looked about the establishment as much as they wished, and were ready to go away, he gave them each one of his cards, and asked them to give the cards to the ladies of their party. "But there are no ladies of my party," said Rollo. "Who is of your party?" asked the workman. "Only a young gentleman," said Rollo. "O, very well," rejoined the man, "that will do just as well. He will certainly wish to buy mosaics, while he is in Rome, for some of the young ladies of his acquaintance." "I think that is very doubtful," said Rollo; "but nevertheless I will give him the card." So Rollo and Charles bade the mosaic man good by, and went away. They had been so much interested in what they had seen in the mosaic shop, and their attention, now that they had left it, was so much occupied with looking at the display of mosaics and cameos which they saw in the little show cases along the street, that Rollo forgot entirely his resolve to take an observation, so as not to lose his way. The boys walked on together until they came to a long and straight, though not very wide street, which was so full of animation and bustle, and was bordered, moreover, on each side by so many gay looking shops, that Rollo said he was satisfied it must be one of the principal streets of the town. It was, in fact, the principal street in the town. The street is called _the Corso_. It runs in a straight line from the Porto del Popolo, which I have already described, into the very heart of the city. It is near the inner end of this street that the great region of ancient ruins begins. Rollo and Charles began to walk along the Corso, looking at the shops as they went on. They were obliged, however, to walk in the middle of the street, for the sidewalks, where there were any, were so narrow and irregular as to be of very little service. Indeed, almost all the pedestrians walked in the middle of the street. Now and then a carriage came along, it is true, but the people in that case opened to the right and left, and let it go by. After going on for some distance, Charles began to look about him somewhat uneasily. "Rollo," said he, "are you sure that we can find our way home again?" "O! I forgot about the way home," said Rollo; "but never mind; I can find it easily enough. I can inquire. What is the name of the hotel?" "I don't know," said Charles. "Don't know?" repeated Rollo, in a tone of surprise. "Don't know the name of the hotel where you are lodging?" "No," said Charles, "we only came last night, and I don't know the name of the hotel at all." "Nor of the street that it is in?" asked Rollo. "No," said Charles. "Then," said Rollo, in rather a desponding tone, "I don't know what we shall do." Just then a carriage was seen coming along; and Rollo and Charles, who had stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, in their surprise and alarm, were obliged to run quick to get out of the way. The carriage was a very elegant one in red and gold, and there were two elegantly dressed footmen standing behind. "That must be a cardinal's carriage," said Rollo, when the carriage had gone by. "How do you know?" asked Charles. "Uncle George told me about them," said Rollo. "You see Rome and all the country about here is under the government of the pope, and the chief officers of his government are the cardinals; and uncle George told me that they ride about in elegant carriages, in red and gold, very splendid and gay. We saw one of them, too, when we were coming into town." Charles watched the carriage a minute or two, until it had gone some distance away, and then turning to Rollo again, he said,-- "And how about finding our way home again, Rollo?" "Ah!" said Rollo, "in regard to that I don't know. We shall have to take a carriage when we want to go home, so we may as well go on and have our walk out. We are lost now, and we can't be any more lost go where we will." So the boys walked on. Presently they came to a large square, with an immense column standing in the centre of it. This column was so similar to the little model which Rollo had seen at the hotel, that he exclaimed at once that it was the same. It had a spiral line of sculptures winding round and round it, from the base to the summit. The figures, however, were very much corroded and worn away, as were indeed all the angles and edges of the base, and of the capital of the column, by the tooth of time. The column had been standing there for eighteen or twenty centuries. "I saw a model of that very column," said Rollo, "in a little room at the hotel. It is the column of Trajan. I'll prove it to you." So Rollo asked a gentleman, who was standing on the sidewalk with a Murray's Guide Book in his hand, and who Rollo knew, by that circumstance, was an English or American visitor, if that was not the column of Trajan. "No," said the gentleman; "it is the column of Antonine." Rollo looked somewhat abashed at receiving this answer, which turned his attempt to show off his learning to Charles into a ridiculous failure. "I thought it was called the column of Trajan," said he. The gentleman, who, as it happened, was an Englishman, made no reply to this observation, but quietly took out an opera glass from a case, which was strapped over his shoulder, and began studying the sculptures on the column. So Rollo and Charles walked away. "I believe the name of it is the column of Trajan," said Rollo, "for I saw the name of it on the model at the hotel. That man has just come, and he don't know." "Are you sure it is the same column?" suggested Charles. "Yes," said Rollo, "for it was exactly of that shape, and it had the same spiral line of images going round and round it, and a statue on the top. See, how old and venerable it looks! It was built almost two thousand years ago." "What did they build it for?" asked Charles. "Why, I don't know exactly," said Rollo, looking a little puzzled; "for ornament, I suppose." "But I don't see much ornament," said Charles, "in a big column standing all by itself, and with nothing for it to keep up." "But it _has_ something to keep up," rejoined Rollo. "Don't you see, there is a statue on the top of it." "If that's what it is to keep up," said Charles, "I don't see any sense in making the column so tall as to hold up the statue so high that we can't see it." "Nor I," said Rollo, "but they often made tall columns, like these, in ancient times." After rambling about a short time longer, the boys came to another open space, where there was a second column very similar in appearance to the first. "Ah!" said Rollo, "perhaps this is the column of Trajan." Rollo was right this time. There are several large columns standing among the ruins of Rome, and among them are two with spiral lines of sculpture around them, which are extremely similar to each other, and it is not at all surprising that Rollo was at first deceived by the resemblance between them. These columns were built in honor of the victories of great generals, and the spiral lines of sculptures were representations of their different exploits. The statue upon the top of the column was, originally, that of the man in whose honor the column was erected. But in the case of the Roman columns, these original statues have been taken down, and replaced by bronze images of saints, or of the Virgin Mary. Near the column of Trajan was a large sunken space, in the middle of the square, with a railing around it. In the bottom of this sunken space was a pavement, which looked very old, and rising from it were rows of columns with the tops broken off. The old pavement was eight or ten feet below the level of the street. "This must be some old ruin or other," said Rollo; "a temple perhaps." "Only I do not see," said Charles, "why they built their temples down so low." "Nor do I," said Rollo. "But, Rollo," said Charles, "I think it is time for us to begin to try to find our way home. I don't see how you are going to find the way at all." "If I only knew the name of the hotel, or even the name of the street," said Rollo, "I should know at once what to do." CHAPTER V. GETTING LOST. "And now," said Rollo, "the first thing is to find somebody that can speak French or English, for us to inquire of." "What good will that do?" asked Charles, "as long as we don't know what to ask them for?" "True," said Rollo. "That's a real difficulty. I wish we just knew the name of the hotel. At any rate, we will walk along until we find a carriage, and I will be thinking what we had better do." The boys walked along together. Charles kept silence, so as not to interrupt Rollo in his thinking. "All I know," said Rollo, after a short pause, "is, that the long, straight street that we came through, is the Corso. I have heard of that street before. If we could only find our way to the Corso, I believe that I could follow it along, and at last find the mosaic shop, and so get back to our hotel." "Very well," said Charles, "let us try." "Or, we might get into a carriage," said Rollo, "and direct the coachman which way to drive by pointing." "So we could," said Charles. "And I should like that, for I am tired of walking so much." "Then we will get a carriage," said Rollo. "We will take the first one that we see. You shall get inside, and I will mount upon the box with the coachman, and show him which way to go." "No," said Charles, "we will both get inside, for we can stand up there and point." "So we can," said Rollo. There are carriages to be found almost every where in the streets of Rome, especially in the neighborhood of the most interesting ruins. It was not long before Rollo and Charles came in sight of one. The coachman was looking toward them, and was cracking his whip to attract their attention. Rollo and Charles walked directly towards the spot, and Rollo, taking out his watch, and showing the coachman what o'clock it was, said,-- "_Per hora._" This was to notify the coachman that he took the carriage by the hour. "_Si, signore_," said the coachman; and then Rollo and Charles got in. The carriage was entirely open,--the top being turned back,--so that it afforded an uninterrupted view in every direction; and also, by standing up and pointing forward, the boys could easily indicate to the coachman which way they wished him to drive. Rollo, however, in the first instance, directed him in words to drive to the Corso. "_Si, signore_," said the coachman; and so he drove on. The boys sat in the carriage, or stood up to look back at the various objects of interest that attracted them as they passed. The scenes through which the driver took them seemed very strange. Every thing in Rome was strange to them, and their course now lay through a part of the city which they had not been in before. Their attention was continually attracted first upon this side of the carriage and then upon the other, as they rode along; and they pointed out to each other the remarkable objects they were passing. The driver meanwhile upon his seat drove on, entirely indifferent to it all. The scenes that were so new to the boys, were perfectly familiar to him. [Illustration: RIDING AMONG THE RUINS.] He soon entered a region of dark, crooked, and winding alleys, where Rollo said that he and Charles could never have found their way, if they had undertaken it alone. They frequently passed portions of old ruins. In some places these ruins consisted of columns standing alone, or immense fragments of broken arches that had fallen down, and now lay neglected upon the ground. In other places, the remains of ancient temples stood built in with the houses of the street, with market women at their stalls below, forming a strange and incongruous spectacle of ancient magnificence and splendor, surrounded and overwhelmed with modern poverty and degradation. As the carriage drove through these places, Rollo and Charles stood up in it, supporting themselves by pressing their knees against the front seat, and holding on to each other. They stood up thus partly to be enabled to see better, and partly so as to be ready to point out the way as soon as they should enter the Corso. It was not long before they came to the Corso. The coachman then looked round, as if to inquire of the boys what he was to do next. "Go right on," said Rollo; and so saying, he stood up in the carriage, and pointed forward. The coachman, of course, did not understand the words, but the gesture was significant enough, and so he drove on. "Now watch, Charley, sharp," said Rollo; "and when you see the street that you think is the one where we came into the Corso, tell me." So the boys drove on through the Corso, standing up all the time in the middle of the carriage, and looking about them in a very eager manner. They went on in this way for some time, but they could not identify any of the branch streets as the one by which they had come into the Corso. "Never mind," said Rollo; "we will turn off into any of these streets, and perhaps we shall come upon the hotel. We will take the streets that look most like it, and at any rate, we shall have a good ride, and see the city of Rome." Rollo accordingly pointed to a side street when he wished the coachman to turn. The coachman said, "_Si, signore_," and immediately went in that direction. As he advanced in the new street, the boys looked about on all sides to see if they could recognize any signs of their approach to their hotel. After going on a little way, and seeing nothing that looked at all familiar, Rollo made signs to the coachman to turn down another street, which he thought looked promising. The coachman did as he was directed, wondering a little, however, at the strange demeanor of the boys; and feeling somewhat curious to know where they wanted to go. He, however, felt comparatively little interest in the question, after all; for, as he was paid by the hour, it was of no consequence to him where they directed him to drive. Rollo now perceived that Charles began to be somewhat anxious in respect to the situation they were in, and so he tried in every way to encourage him, and to amuse his mind. "I'll tell you what we will do," said Rollo. "This street that we are in now seems to be a good long one, and we will drive through the whole length of it, and you shall look down all the streets that open into it on the right hand, and I will on the left; and if we see any thing that looks like our hotel, we will stop." So they rode on, each boy looking out on his side, until at length they came to the end of the street, where there was a sort of opening, and a river. There was a bridge across the river, and an ancient and venerable-looking castle on the other side of it. "Ah," said Rollo, "here is the River Tiber." "How do you know that that is the name of it?" asked Charles. "Because I know it is the Tiber that Rome is built upon," replied Rollo,--"the Yellow Tiber, as they call it. Don't you see how yellow it is?" As Rollo said this, he made signs for the coachman to turn out to the side of the street at the entrance of the bridge, and to stop there. The coachman did as he was directed, and then Rollo and Charles, still standing up in the carriage, had a fine view of the bridge and of the river, and also of the Castle of St. Angelo beyond. The water of the river was quite turbid, and was of a yellow color. "That's the river," said Rollo, "that Romulus and Remus were floated down on, in that little ark." "What little ark?" asked Charles. "Why, you see," replied Rollo, "when Romulus and Remus were babies, the story is that somebody wanted to have them killed; but he did not like to kill them himself with his own hand, and therefore he put them into a sort of basket, made of bulrushes, and set them afloat on this river, up above here a little way. So they floated down the stream, and came along by here." "Under this bridge?" asked Charles. "Under where this bridge is now," said Rollo; "but of course there was no bridge here then. There was no town here then--nothing but fields and woods." "And what became of the babies?" asked Charles. "Why, they floated down below here a little way," said Rollo, "to a place where there is a turn in the river; and there the basket went ashore, and was upset, and the children crawled out on the sand, and began to cry. Pretty soon a wolf, who was in the thicket near by, heard the crying, and came down to see what it was." "And did he eat them up?" asked Charles. "It was not a he wolf," said Rollo; "it was a she wolf--an old mother wolf. She thought that the children were little wolves, and she came to them, and lay down by them, nursed them, and took care of them, just as if she had been a cat, and they had been her two kittens." "O Rollo," said Charles, "what a story! I don't believe it." "Nor I," said Rollo. "Indeed, I don't think any body nowadays believes it exactly. But that is really the story. You can read it in the history of Rome. These two children, when they grew up, laid the foundations of Rome. I don't really believe that the story is true; but if it is true, this is the very place where the basket, with the two babies in it, must have drifted along." Charles gazed for a few minutes in silence on the current of turbid water which was shooting swiftly under the bridge, and then said that it was time for them to go. "Yes," said Rollo; "and we will turn round and go back, for it is of no use to go over the bridge. I am sure that we did not come over the river when we set out from the hotel, and so we must keep on this side." Rollo concluded, however, not to go back the same way that he came; and so making signs to the coachman for this purpose, he turned into another street, and as the carriage drove along, he and Charles looked out in every direction for their hotel; but no signs of it were to be seen. After going on for some distance, Rollo's attention was attracted by a sign in English over a shop door as follows:-- MANUFACTURE OF ROMAN SCARFS. ENGLISH SPOKEN. "Ah!" he exclaimed, suddenly, "that is just what I wanted to find." And he immediately made a sign for the coachman to stop at the door. "What is it?" asked Charles. "It is a place where they make Roman scarfs," said Rollo, "and I want to get one for my cousin Lucy. She told me to be sure, if I came to Rome, to get her a Roman scarf. You can't get them in any other place." As Rollo said this, he descended from the carriage, and Charles followed him. "They speak English here," said Rollo, as he went into the shop, "and so we shall not have any difficulty." These Roman scarfs are very pretty ornaments for the necks and shoulders of ladies. They are made of silk, and are of various sizes, some being large enough to form a good wide mantle, and others not much wider than a wide ribbon. The central part of the scarf is usually of some uniform hue, such as black, blue, green, or brown; and the ends are ornamented with stripes of various colors, which pass across from side to side. Rollo wished to get a small scarf, and the ground of it was to be green. This was in accordance with the instructions which Lucy had given him. He found great difficulty, however, in making the shopman understand what he wanted. To all that Rollo said, the shopman smiled, and said only, "Yes, sir, yes, sir," and took down continually scarfs and aprons of different kinds, and showed them to Rollo, to see if any of them were what he wanted. At last, by pointing to a large one that had a green ground, and saying, "Color like that," and then to a small one of a different kind, and saying, "Small, like that," the shopman began to understand. "Yes, sir," said the shopman; "yes, sir; I understand. Must one make--make. See!" So saying, the shopman opened a door in the back side of the shop, and showed Rollo and Charles the entrance to a room in the rear, where the boys had heard before the sound of a continual thumping, and where now they saw several silk looms, with girls at work at them, weaving scarfs. "Ah, yes," said Rollo. "You mean that you can make me one. That will be a good plan, Charley," he added. "Lucy will like it all the better if I tell her it was made on purpose for her. "When can you have it done?" asked Rollo. "Yes, sir," said the shopman, bowing and smiling; "yes, sir; yes, sir." "When?" repeated Rollo. "What time?" "Ah, yes, sir," said the shopman. "The time. All time, every time. Yesterday." "Yesterday!" repeated Rollo, puzzled. "To-morrow," said the man, correcting himself. He had said yesterday by mistake for to-morrow. "To-morrow. To-morrow he will be ready--the scarf." "What time to-morrow shall I come?" asked Rollo. "Yes, sir," said the shopman, bowing again, and smiling in a very complacent manner. "Yes, sir, to-morrow." "But what _time_ to-morrow?" repeated Rollo, speaking very distinctly, and emphasizing very strongly the word _time_. "What time?" "O, every time," said the man; "all time. You shall have him every time to-morrow, because you see he will make begin the work on him this day." "Very well," said Rollo, "then I will come to-morrow, about noon." So Rollo and Charles bade the shopman good by, and went out of the shop. "Is that what they call speaking English?" asked Charles. "So it seems," said Rollo. "Sometimes they speak a great deal worse than that, and yet call it speaking English." So Rollo and Charles got into the carriage again. Rollo took out his wallet, and made a memorandum of the name of the shop where he had engaged the sash, and of the street and number. The coachman sat quietly upon his seat, waiting for Rollo to finish his writing, and expecting then to receive directions where he was to go. "If I could only find a commissioner that speaks French or English," said Rollo, "I could tell him what we want, and he could tell the coachman, and in that way we should soon get home." "Can't you find one at some hotel?" asked Charles. "Why, yes," said Rollo. "Why did not I think of that? We'll stop at the very first hotel we come to. I'll let him drive on till he comes to one. No; I'll tell him to go to the Hotel d'Amerique. That is the only name of a hotel that I know." So Rollo pronounced the words "Hotel d'Amerique" to the coachman, and the coachman, saying, "_Si, signore_," drove on. In a short time he drew up before the door of the hotel where Mr. George had stopped first, on arriving in town. A waiter came to the door. "Is there a commissioner here who speaks English or French?" asked Rollo. "Yes, sir," said a man who was standing by the side of the door when the carriage stopped, and who now came forward. "_I_ speak English." "I want you to help us find our hotel," said Rollo. "We don't know the name of it. I shall know it when I see it; and so I want you to get on the box with the coachman, and direct him to drive to one hotel after another, till I see which is the right one." "Very well," said the commissioner, "I will go. Do you remember any thing about the hotel,--how it was situated." "There was a small, open space before it," said Rollo, "and a fountain under a tree by the side of it." "It must have been the Hotel d'Angleterre," said the commissioner. "In going in at the front door, we went _down_ one or two steps, instead of up," said Rollo. "Yes," said the commissioner, "it was the Hotel d'Angleterre." Then seating himself on the box by the side of the coachman, he said to the latter, addressing him in Italian,-- "Lo canda d'Ingleterra," which is the Italian for Hotel d'Angleterre, or, as we should express it in our language, "The English Hotel." The coachman drove on, and in a few minutes came to the hotel. "Yes," said Rollo, as soon as he came in sight of it. "Yes, this is the very place." If Rollo had had any doubts of his being right, they would have been dispelled by the sight of Mr. George, who was standing at the hotel door at the time they arrived. "So you come home in a carriage," said Mr. George. "Why, we got lost," said Rollo. "I did not take notice of the name of our hotel when we went out, and so we could not find our way home again." "That's of no consequence," said Mr. George. "I am glad you had sense enough to take a commissioner. Whenever you get into any difficulty whatever in a European town, go right to a commissioner, and he will help you out." So Rollo paid the coachman and the commissioner, and then he and Charles went into the hotel. CHAPTER VI. THE COLISEUM. The grandest of all the ruins in Rome, and perhaps, indeed, of all the ruins in the world, is the Coliseum. The Coliseum was built as a place for the exhibition of games and spectacles. It was of an oval form, with seats rising one above another on all sides, and a large arena in the centre. There was no roof. The building was so immensely large, that it would have been almost impossible to have made a roof over it. The spectacles which were exhibited in such buildings as these were usually combats, either of men with men, or of men with wild beasts. These were real combats, in which either the men or the beasts were actually killed. The thousands of people that sat upon the seats all around, watched the conflict, while it was going on, with intense excitement, and shouted with ferocious joy at the end of it, in honor of the victors. The men that fought in the arena were generally captives taken in battle, in distant countries, and the wild beasts were lions, tigers, and bears, that were sent home from Africa, or from the dark forests in the north of Europe. The great generals who went out at the head of the Roman armies to conquer these distant realms and annex them to the empire, sent home these captives and wild beasts. They sent them for the express purpose of amusing the Roman people with them, by making them fight in these great amphitheatres. There was such an amphitheatre in or near almost every large town; but the greatest, or at least the most celebrated, of all these structures, was this Coliseum at Rome. Mr. George and Rollo went to the Coliseum in a carriage. After passing through almost the whole length of the Corso, they passed successively through several crooked and narrow streets, and at length emerged into the great region of the ruins. On every side were tall columns, broken and decayed, and immense arches standing meaningless and alone, and mounds of ancient masonry, with weeds and flowers waving in the air on the top of them. There were no houses, or scarcely any, in this part of the city, but only grassy slopes with old walls appearing here and there among them; and in some places enclosed fields and gardens, with corn, and beans, and garden vegetables of every kind, growing at the base of the majestic ruins. The carriage stopped at one end of the Coliseum, where there was a passage way leading through stupendous arches into the interior. They dismissed the carriage, Rollo having first paid the coachman the fare. They then, after gazing upward a moment at the vast pile of arches upon arches, towering above them, advanced towards the openings, in order to go in. There was a soldier with a musket in his hands, bayonet set, walking to and fro at the entrance. He, however, said nothing to Mr. George and Rollo; and so, passing by him, they went in. They passed in under immense arches of the most massive masonry, and between the great piers built to sustain the arches, until they reached the arena. There was a broad gravel walk passing across the arena from end to end, and another leading around the circumference of it. The rest of the surface was covered with grass, smooth and green. The form of the arena was oval, as has already been said, and on every side there ascended the sloping tiers, rising one above another to a vast height, on which the seats for the spectators had been placed. Mr. George and Rollo advanced along the central walk, and looked around them, surveying the scene,--their minds filled with emotions of wonder and awe. "What a monstrous place it was!" said Rollo. "It was, indeed," said Mr. George. "Is it here where the men fought with the lions and the tigers?" asked Rollo, pointing around him over the arena. "Yes," said Mr. George. "And up there, all around were the seats of the spectators, I suppose," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "on those slopes." You must know that the scats, and all the inside finish of the Coliseum, were originally of marble, and people have stripped it all away, and left nothing but the naked masonry; and even that is all now going to ruin. "What did they strip the marble off for?" asked Rollo. "To build their houses and palaces with," replied Mr. George. "Half of the modern palaces of Rome are built of stone and marble plundered from the ancient ruins." "O, uncle George!" exclaimed Rollo. "Come out here where we can sit down," said Mr. George, "and I'll tell you all about it." [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN FROM THE COLISEUM.] So saying, Mr. George led the way, and Rollo followed to one side of the arena, where they could sit down on a large, flat stone, which seemed to have been an ancient step. They were over-shadowed where they sat by piers and arches, and by the masses of weeds and shrubbery that were growing on the mouldering summits of them, and waving in the wind. In the centre of the arena was a large cross, with a sort of platform around it, and steps to go up. And all around the arena, on the sides, at equal distances, there extended a range of little chapels, with crucifixes and other Catholic symbols. The arena of the Coliseum was kept in very neat order. For a wonder, there were no beggars to be seen, but instead of them there were various parties of well-dressed visitors walking about the paths, or sitting on the massive stone fragments which lay under the ruined arches. High up above these arches, the sloping platforms, on which the seats formerly were placed, were to be seen rising one above another, tier after tier, to a great height, with the ruins of galleries, corridors, and vaulted passage ways passing around among them. The upper surfaces of all these ruins were covered with grass and shrubbery. "What has become of all the seats, uncle George?" said Rollo. "Why, the seats, I suppose, were made of marble," replied Mr. George, "or some other valuable material, and so all the stones have been taken away." Presently Rollo saw a party of visitors coming into view far up among the upper stories of the ruins. "Look, uncle George! Look!" said he; "there are some people away up there, as high as the third or fourth story. How do you suppose they got up there? Couldn't you and I go?" "I presume so," said Mr. George. "I suppose that, in the way of climbing, you and I can go as high as most people." While Mr. George was saying this, Rollo was adjusting his opera glass to his eyes, in order to take a nearer view of the party among the ruins. "There are four of them," said he. "I see a gentleman, and two ladies, and a little girl. They seem to be gathering something." "Plants, perhaps," said Mr. George, "and flowers." "Plants!" said Rollo, contemptuously; "I don't believe that any thing grows out of such old stones and mortar but weeds." "We call such things weeds," said Mr. George, "when they grow in the gardens or fields, and are in the way; but when they grow in wild places where they belong, they are plants and flowers." "The gentleman is gathering them from high places all around him," said Rollo, "and is giving them to the ladies, and they are putting them in between the leaves of a book." "They are going to carry them away as souvenirs of the Coliseum, I suppose," said Mr. George. "The girl has got a white stone in her hand," said Rollo. "Perhaps it is a piece of marble that she has picked up," said Mr. George. "Now she has thrown down her white stone," said Rollo, "and has begun to gather flowers." "There is an immense number of plants that grow in and upon the Coliseum," said Mr. George. "A botanist once made a complete collection of them. How many species do you think he found?" "Twenty," said Rollo. "Guess again," said Mr. George. "Fifteen," said Rollo. "O, you must guess more, not less," said Mr. George. "Thirty," said Rollo. "More," said Mr. George. "Forty," said Rollo. "Add one cipher to it," said Mr. George, "and then you will be pretty near right." "What! four hundred?" exclaimed Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George. "A botanist made a catalogue of four hundred and twenty plants, all growing on the ruins of this single building." "O, uncle George!" said Rollo; "I don't think that can possibly be. I mean to see." So saying, Rollo laid the opera glass down upon the seat where he had been sitting, and began to examine the masses of old ruined masonry near him, with a view of seeing how many different kinds of plants he could find. "Must I count every thing, uncle George?" said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "every thing that is a plant. Every different kind of sprig, or little weed, that you can find--mosses, lichens, and all." Rollo began to count. He very soon got up to twenty, and so he came to the conclusion that the guide book--which was the authority on which Mr. George had stated the number of plants found upon the ruins--was right. While Rollo was thus engaged, Mr. George had remained quietly in his seat, and had occupied himself with studying the guide book. "Uncle George," said Rollo, when he came back, "I give it up. I have no doubt that there are hundreds of plants in all, growing on these ruins." "Yes," said Mr. George; "whatever is stated in this book is very apt to prove true." "What else did you read about, uncle George," said Rollo, "while I was counting the plants?" "I read," said Mr. George, "that the Coliseum was begun about A. D. 72, by one of the Roman emperors." "Then it is almost eighteen hundred years old," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George; "and when it was first opened after it was finished, they had a sort of inauguration of it, with great celebrations, that continued one hundred days." "That is over three months," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George; "it was a very long celebration. During this time about five thousand wild beasts were killed in the combats in the arena." "This very arena right before us?" said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George. On hearing this, Rollo looked upon the arena with renewed interest and pleasure. He endeavored to picture to himself the lions, and tigers, and leopards, and other ferocious wild beasts, growling, snarling, and tumbling over each other there, in the desperate combats which they waged among themselves, or with the men sent in to fight with them. "It continued to be used for such fights," added Mr. George, "for four hundred years; and during this time a great many Christians were sent in to be devoured by wild beasts, for the entertainment of the populace. "After a while," continued Mr. George, "the Roman empire became Christian; and then the government put a stop to all these savage games." "And what did they do with the Coliseum then?" asked Rollo. "They did not know what to do with it for a time," said Mr. George; "but at last, when wars broke out, and Rome was besieged, they tried to turn it into a fortress." "I should think it would make an excellent fortress," said Rollo, "only there are no port-holes for the cannon." "Ah! but they had no cannon in those days," said Mr. George. "They had only bows and arrows, spears, javelins, and such sort of weapons, so that they did not require any port-holes. The men could shoot their weapons from the top of the wall." In further conversation on the subject of the Coliseum, Mr. George explained to Rollo how, in process of time, Rome was taken by the barbarians, and a great portion of the Coliseum was destroyed; and then, afterwards, when peace was restored, how the government, instead of repairing the building, pulled it to pieces still more, in order to get marble, and hewn stone, and sculptured columns, to build palaces with; and how, at a later period, there was a plan formed for converting the vast structure into a manufactory; and how, in connection with this plan, immense numbers of shops were fitted up in the arcades and arches below,--and how the plan finally failed, after having cost the pope who undertook it ever so many thousand Roman dollars; how, after this, it remained for many centuries wholly neglected, and the stones, falling in from above, together with the broken bricks and mortar, formed on the arena below, and all around the walls outside, immense heaps of rubbish; and finally, how, about one hundred years ago, people began to take an interest in the ruins, and to wish to clear away the rubbish, and to prop up and preserve what remained of the walls and arches. "It was the French that cleared away the rubbish at last," said Mr. George, "and put the ruins in order." "The French!" repeated Rollo; "how came the French here?" "I don't know," said Mr. George. "The French are every where. And wherever they go, they always take with their armies a corps of philosophers, artists, and men of science, who look up every thing that is curious, and put it in order, and preserve it if they can." "Then I am glad they came here," said Rollo. Here Mr. George shut his book, and rose from his seat, saying, as he did so,-- "The Coliseum is so large that it covers six acres of ground." "Six acres?" repeated Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George. "It is six hundred and twenty feet long. That is monstrous for such a building; but then the steamship Great Eastern is about a hundred feet longer." "Then the Great Eastern is bigger than the Coliseum." "She is longer," said Mr. George, "but she is not so wide nor so high." "And which, all things considered, is the greatest work, do you think?" asked Rollo. "The Coliseum may have cost the most labor," said Mr. George, "but the Great Eastern is far above it, in my opinion, in every element of real greatness. The Coliseum is a most wonderful structure, no doubt; but the building of an iron ship like the Great Eastern, to be propelled by steam against all the storms and tempests of the ocean, to the remotest corners of the earth, with ten thousand tons of merchandise on board, or ten thousand men, is, in my opinion, much the greatest exploit." "At any rate," said Rollo, "the Coliseum makes the finest ruin." "I am not certain of that, even," said Mr. George. "Suppose that the Great Eastern were to be drawn up upon the shore somewhere near London, and be abandoned there; and that then the whole world should relapse into barbarism, and remain so for a thousand years, and afterwards there should come a revival of science and civilization, and people should come here to see the ruins of the Coliseum, and go to London to see those of the great ship, I think they would consider the ship the greater wonder of the two." "I think they would," said Rollo, "if they understood it all as well." "They could not be easily made to believe, I suppose," said Mr. George, "that such an immense structure, all of iron, could have been made, and launched, and then navigated all over the world just by the power of the maze of iron beams and wheels, and machinery, which they would see in ruins in the hold." "Uncle George," said Rollo, "what curious bricks the Romans used!" So saying, Rollo pointed to the bricks in a mass of masonry near where they were standing. These bricks, like all those that were used in the construction of the building, were very flat. They were a great deal longer and a great deal wider than our bricks, and were yet not much more than half as thick. This gave them a very thin and flat appearance. Instead of being red, too, they were of a yellow color. These bricks had not originally been used for outside works, but only for filling in the solid parts of the walls, and for forming the arches. But the stones with which the brick masonry had been covered and concealed having been removed, the bricks were of course in many places brought to view. After looking about for some time, Rollo found a brick with two letters stamped upon it. It was evident that the letters had been stamped upon the clay in the making of the brick, while it was yet soft. The letters were P. D. "Look, uncle George!" said Rollo; "look at those letters! What do you suppose they mean?" "That is very curious," said Mr. George; and so saying he proceeded to examine the letters very closely. "They were evidently stamped upon the brick," he said, "when it was soft. Perhaps they are the initials of the maker's name." "I mean to look and see if all the bricks are stamped so," said Rollo. So Rollo began to examine the other bricks wherever he could find any which had a side exposed to view; but though he found some which contained the letters, there were many others where no letters were to be seen. "Perhaps the letters are on the under side," said Rollo. "I mean to get a stone and knock up some of the bricks, if I can, and see." "No," said Mr. George; "that won't do." "Yes, uncle George," said Rollo; "I want to see very much. And besides, I want to get a piece of a brick with the letters on it, to carry home as a specimen." "A specimen of what?" asked Mr. George. "A specimen of the Coliseum," said Rollo. "No," said Mr. George; "I don't think that will do. They don't want to have the Coliseum knocked to pieces, and carried off any more." "Who don't?" asked Rollo. "The government," said Mr. George; "the pope." "But it's very hard," said Rollo, "if the popes, after plundering the Coliseum themselves for hundreds of years, and carrying off all the beautiful marbles, and columns, and statues, to build their palaces with, can't let an American boy like me take away a little bit of a brick to put into my museum for a specimen." Mr. George laughed and walked on. Rollo, who never persisted in desiring to do any thing which his uncle disapproved of, quietly followed him. "Uncle George," said Rollo, "how do you suppose we can get up into the upper part, among the tiers of seats?" "I think there must be a staircase somewhere," said Mr. George. "We will ramble about, and see if we do not find one." So they walked on. They went sometimes along the margin of the arena, and then at other times they turned in under immense openings in masonry, and walked along the vaulted corridors, which were built in the thickness of the walls. There were several of these corridors side by side, each going entirely round the arena. They were surmounted by stupendous arches, which were built to sustain the upper portions of the building, which contained the seats for the spectators, and the passages on the upper floors leading to them. [Illustration: VIEW OF THE LOWER CORRIDOR.] After rambling on through and among the corridors for some time, Mr. George and Rollo, on emerging again into the arena, came to a wooden gate at the foot of a broad flight of stone steps, which seemed to lead up into the higher stories of the ruin. "Ah!" exclaimed Rollo, as soon as he saw this gateway and the flight of steps beyond it, "this is the gate that leads up to the upper tiers." "Yes," replied Mr. George, "only it is shut and locked." Rollo went to the gate and took hold of it, but found, as Mr. George had said, that it was locked. "But here comes the custodian," said Mr. George. Rollo looked, and saw a man coming along the side of the arena with a key in his hand. When the man came near, he looked at Mr. George and Rollo, and also at the door, and then asked a question in Italian. "_Si, signore_," said Mr. George. So the man advanced and unlocked the door. As soon as he had unlocked it, and Mr. George and Rollo had passed through, he looked towards them again, and asked another question. "_No, signore_," said Mr. George. Mr. George and Rollo then began to go up the stairs, while the man, having locked the door after them, went away. CHAPTER VII. THE GLADIATOR. "How did you know what it was that that man asked you?" asked Rollo. "I knew from the circumstances of the case," replied Mr. George. "The first question I knew must be whether we wished to go up; and the second, whether we wished him to go with us." "What do you suppose they keep the gate locked for?" asked Rollo. "So as to _make_ us pay when we come down," said Mr. George. "Do you suppose they mean to make us pay?" asked Rollo. "They will not make us, exactly," said Mr. George; "but they will expect something, no doubt. There may be another reason, however, why they keep the gate locked; and that is, to prevent children and stragglers from going up, where they might fall and break their necks at some of the exposed and dangerous places." "Do you suppose that there are dangerous places up here?" asked Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George; "I suppose there are a great many; and I advise you to be very careful where you go." The flight of stairs where Mr. George and Rollo were ascending was very broad; and it was formed of the long, flat bricks, such as Rollo had observed below. The bricks were placed edgewise. "I suppose that these steps were covered with slabs of marble, in old times," said Rollo. "Probably," said Mr. George; "either with marble, or some other harder stone." After ascending some distance, Rollo, who went forward, came out upon the landing which led to a range of corridors in the second story, as it were. There were several of these corridors, running side by side, all along the building. On one side, you could pass through arches, and come out to the platforms where the seats had originally been arranged, and where you could look down upon the arena. The seats themselves were all gone, and in their places nothing was left but sloping platforms, all gone to ruin, and covered now with grass, and weeds, and tall bramble bushes. On the other side, you could go out to the outer wall, and look down through immense arched openings, to the ground below.[5] [Footnote 5: See Frontispiece.] "Take care, Rollo," said Mr. George; "don't go too near." "You may go as near as you think it is safe," said Rollo, "and I will keep back an inch from where you go." "That's right," said Mr. George. "There is great pleasure and satisfaction in going into dangerous places with such a sensible boy as you." After rambling about among the arches and corridors of the second story for some time, Mr. George and Rollo mounted to a story above. They found ruins of staircases in great numbers, so that there were a great many different places where they could go up. Mr. George allowed Rollo to go about wherever he pleased, knowing that he would keep at a safe distance from all places where there was danger of falling. From time to time, they met other parties of visitors rambling about the ruins. If these persons were French or German, they generally bowed to Rollo and Mr. George as they passed, and greeted them with a pleasant smile, as if of recognition. If, on the other hand, they were English, they passed directly by, looking straight forward, as if they did not see them at all. Whenever Rollo came to a new staircase, he wished to ascend it, being seemingly desirous of getting up as high as he could. Mr. George made no objection to this. Indeed, he allowed Rollo to choose the way, and to go where he pleased. He himself followed, walking slowly, in a musing manner, filled, apparently, with wondering admiration, and contemplating the stupendous magnitude of the ruin. "Uncle George," said Rollo, "if I had my pressing book here, I would gather some of these plants and press them, to carry home." Mr. George did not answer. He was standing in an advanced position, where he had an uninterrupted survey of the whole interior of the Coliseum; and he was endeavoring to picture to his imagination the scene which must have been presented to view when the vast amphitheatre was filled with spectators. "If I had expected to find so many plants growing on the ruins of a building, I should have brought it," said Rollo. The pressing book which Rollo referred to, was one made expressly for the purpose of pressing flowers. The leaves of it were of blotting paper. Rollo was half inclined to ask Mr. George to put some specimens into the Guide Book; but he did _not_ ask him, because he knew that Mr. George did not like to have dried plants in the Guide Book. Such specimens between the leaves of a book interfere very much with the convenience of using it, by dropping out when you open the book, or impeding the turning of the leaves. "But I mean to come again," continued Rollo, "and bring my pressing book, and then I can get as many specimens as I please. Wouldn't you, uncle George?" "Wouldn't you what?" said Mr. George. Mr. George had been paying very little attention to what Rollo had been saying. "Come again some day," said Rollo, "and bring my pressing book, so as to collect specimens of some of these little plants." "Yes," said Mr. George, "that will be an excellent plan. And I wish, while you are doing it, you would gather some for me. And if you wish for some now, I can let you put them in the Guide Book." "No, I thank you," said Rollo. "I will wait till I come again." The height of the outer walls of the Coliseum is over a hundred and fifty feet, which would be the height of a house fifteen stories high. There are not many church steeples higher than that. If, therefore, you conceive of an oval-shaped field six acres in extent, with a massive wall one hundred and fifty feet high, and divided into four immense stories, surrounding it, and from the top of this wall ranges of seats, with passages between them, sloping in towards the centre, leaving about an acre of open and level space in the centre for the arena, the whole finished in the most magnificent and gorgeous manner, with columns, statues, sculptured ornaments, and all the seats, and walls, and staircases, and corridors, and vestibules, and tribunes, and pavilions for musicians, and seats for judges, designed and arranged in the highest style of architectural beauty, and encased and adorned with variegated marbles of the most gorgeous description,--if, I say, you can conceive of all this, you will have some faint idea of what the Coliseum must have been in the days of its glory. Mr. George and Rollo continued to ascend the different staircases which they met with in their wanderings, until at length they had reached a great elevation; and yet so immense was the extent of the interior of the edifice, that they were not at all too high to see the arena to advantage. Here Rollo crept out upon one of the sloping platforms, where there had formerly been seats for spectators, and calling to Mr. George to follow him, he sat down upon a great square stone, which seemed to have formed a part of the ancient foundation of the seats. "Come, uncle George," said Rollo, "let us sit down here a few minutes, and make believe that the games are going on, and that we are the spectators." "Yes," said Mr. George, "we will. In that way we can get a better idea of what the Coliseum was." "I wish we could bring it all back again," said Rollo, "just as it was in old times, by some sort of magic." "We must do it by the magic of imagination," said Mr. George. "Only," continued Rollo, "the things that they did down in the arena were so dreadful that we could not bear to look at them." "True," said Mr. George. "The spectacles must have been very dreadful, indeed." "Such as when the lions and tigers came out to tear and devour the poor Christians," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George; "but generally, I suppose, when wild beasts and men were brought out together on the arena, it was the beasts that were killed, and not the men. It was a combat, and I suppose that the men were usually victorious. It was the spectacle of the fury of the combat, and of the bravery which the men displayed, and of the terrible danger that they were often exposed to, that so excited and pleased the spectators." "I should not have thought that they could have found any men that would have been willing to fight the beasts," said Rollo. "Perhaps the men were not willing," replied Mr. George, "but were compelled to fight them. Indeed, I suppose that they were generally prisoners of war or criminals. The generals used to bring home a great many prisoners of war from the different countries that they conquered, and these men were trained in Rome, and in other great cities, to fight on the arena, either with wild beasts, or with one another. They were called _gladiators_. There is a statue of one, wounded and dying, somewhere here in Rome." "I should like to see it," said Rollo. "We _shall_ see it, undoubtedly," said Mr. George. "It is one of the most celebrated statues in the world. It is called the _Dying Gladiator_. I presume the sculptor of it made it from his recollections of the posture and expression of face which were witnessed in the case of real gladiators in the arena, when they had been mortally wounded, and were sinking down to die." "We certainly must see it," said Rollo. "We certainly will," rejoined Mr. George. "It is celebrated all over the world. Byron wrote a very fine stanza describing it." "What was the stanza?" asked Rollo. "I don't remember it all," said Mr. George. "It was something about his sinking down upon the ground, leaning upon his hand, and the expression of his face showed, though he yielded to death, he conquered and triumphed over the pain. Then there is something about his wife and children, far away in Dacia, his native land, where he had been captured in fighting to protect them, and brought to Rome to fight and die in the Coliseum, to make amusement for the Roman populace." "I wish you could remember the lines themselves," said Rollo. "Perhaps I can find them in the Guide Book," said Mr. George. So saying, Mr. George opened the Guide Book, and turned to the index. "I believe," said he, "that the statue of the Dying Gladiator is in the Capitol." "We have not been there yet, have we?" asked Rollo. "Yes," replied Mr. George; "we went there the first day, to get a view from the cupola on the summit. But there is a museum of sculptures and statues there which we have not seen yet. You see the Capitol Hill was in ancient times one of the most important public places in Rome, and when the city was destroyed, immense numbers of statues, and inscribed marbles, and beautiful sculptured ornaments were buried up there in the rubbish and ruins. When, finally, they were dug out, new buildings were erected on the spot, and all the objects that were found there were arranged in a museum. Ah! here it is," he added. "I have found the lines." So Mr. George read the lines as follows. He read them in a slow and solemn manner. "I see before me the gladiator lie; He leans upon his hand; his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony; And his drooped head sinks gradually low; And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder shower; and now The arena swims around him--he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. "He heard it, but he heeded not; his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away. He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, There were his young barbarians all at play; There was their Dacian mother--he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday. All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire, And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire." "The Goths did arise and glut their ire," said Mr. George, after he had finished reciting the lines, "for they were in great measure the authors of all this ruin and destruction." After sitting nearly half an hour in this place, Mr. George rose, and, Rollo following him, went back into the corridors again. They rambled along the corridors, and mounted the staircases to higher and higher points, until they had ascended as far as they could go. In these upper regions of the ruin Rollo had a good opportunity to procure specimens of marble and of stamped bricks, for in various places there, he found immense stores of bricks and marble, and other rubbish, piled up in square heaps under arches, or in great recesses among the ruins. Rollo selected some of the bricks which had stamps upon them, and then, with a piece of marble for a hammer, he contrived to break away all of the brick except the part which contained the stamp, and thus procured specimens of a convenient form for carrying. These specimens he wrapped separately in pieces of newspaper, and put them in his pockets. At length Mr. George said it was time for them to go home; so they began to descend. They went down by different passages and staircases from those which they had taken in coming up; but they came out at last at the same gateway. The custodian was just unlocking the gate when they arrived, in order to admit another party. Mr. George gave him a couple of pauls, and then he and Rollo set out to go home. Their way led them over the ancient site of the Roman Forum, which presented to view on every side, as they passed, broken columns and ruined arches, with the mouldering remains of ancient foundations, cropping out here and there amid grassy slopes and mounds. "Uncle George," said Rollo, as they walked along, "we are going directly by the Capitol Hill as we go home. Let us go in now and see the Dying Gladiator." "Very well," said Mr. George, "we will." Accordingly, when they reached the base of the hill, they turned to go up. There was a broad and steep paved ascent leading up the hill, somewhat like a road, only it was too steep for a carriage. Indeed, there were little steps at short intervals, with a sloping pavement between them. You see this ascent in the engraving. It is in the centre of the view. There are statues of lions at the foot of it, with water spouting from their mouths. At the top are larger statues of horses, standing on lofty pedestals, with men by the side of them, holding them by the bridles. These are ancient statues. They were found buried up in rubbish in an obscure quarter of Rome, about two hundred years ago. Beyond, you see other groups of colossal statuary raised on lofty pedestals in various parts of the great square which forms the summit of the hill. [Illustration: ASCENT TO THE CAPITOL.] On the left you see a church, standing in a very high position, with a still steeper ascent than the one I have been describing, leading up to it. On the right is a winding road for carriages, which leads up, by a tolerably gentle ascent, to the great square. The great square is surrounded with vast palaces, almost all of which are filled with paintings, statuary, sculptures, and other treasures of ancient and modern art. Mr. George and Rollo turned to the left after they had ascended into the square, and entered a door over which was an inscription denoting that it led to the museum of sculptures and statues. After ascending one or two staircases, they came to the entrance of a suit of apartments in which the statuary was contained. There was a public functionary, dressed somewhat like a soldier, standing sentinel at the door. He, however, readily allowed Mr. George and Rollo to pass in. There were various other parties of visitors going in at the same time. Mr. George and Rollo walked through one long room after another, with rows of statues, and busts, and other works of ancient sculpture on each side. These marbles were almost all more or less chipped and broken, or otherwise greatly defaced by the hard usage to which they had been subjected. "Uncle George," said Rollo, as they walked along, "how came all their ears and noses broken off in this way?" "Why, all these things were dug out from heaps of stones and rubbish," said Mr. George, "a few hundred years ago. For nearly a thousand years before that time, they were regarded as of no more value than so many old bricks. "Here's a gentleman coming," added Mr. George, interrupting himself, "who looks as if he could speak French. I mean to ask him where the hall of the Dying Gladiator is." Accordingly, when the gentleman came up, Mr. George, accosting him in French, asked him the question, and the gentleman, replying in French, gave the information in a very polite manner. It was a little farther on, he said. "Is there a special hall for the Dying Gladiator?" asked Rollo. "No," said Mr. George, "not for the Dying Gladiator alone. But many of the halls in these museums are named from the most celebrated statue that there is in them. And I knew that the room where the Dying Gladiator is placed was called by that name." So they walked on, and presently they came to the room. There were a great many large statues in it; but among them it was very easy to recognize at once the one which they had come to see, both on account of the conspicuous situation in which it was placed, and also from its form. Here is a representation of it. [Illustration: STATUE OF THE GLADIATOR.] Mr. George and Rollo both looked upon the statue for a few minutes in silence. "Yes," said Rollo, at length, "yes, I see. He is dying. He is sinking gradually down." "Do you see the wound in his side?" asked Mr. George. "Yes," replied Rollo, "and the drops of blood coming out." "He has dropped his sword," said Mr. George. "It is lying there near his hand." "What a short sword!" said Rollo. "There are some other things lying on the ground beneath him, but I do not know what they are." "Nor I," said Mr. George. "One of them seems to be a sort of trumpet. People think from that that this man was a herald." "But I thought he was a gladiator," said Rollo. "They call him a gladiator," replied Mr. George, "but nobody really knows what the statue was originally intended for. You see it was dug up out of a heap of rubbish, just as almost all these statues were, and people have to guess what they were intended for. This statue was dug up in a garden--a garden belonging to an ancient Roman villa." "What does that cord around his neck mean?" asked Rollo. "They think it means that the man was a Gaul. The Gauls used to wear such cords, I believe." "I thought he was a Dacian," said Rollo. "I suppose it is uncertain who he was," replied Mr. George; "but look at his face. See the expression of it. It is an expression of mingled suffering and rage, and yet he looks as if he were so far gone as to begin to be unconscious of every thing around him." "Yes," said Rollo; "he does not seem to notice us at all." "In that," said Mr. George, "is shown the great skill of the sculptor, to express such different, and, as one would think, almost conflicting emotions in the same face, at the same time." After looking at the statue some time longer, Rollo and Mr. George walked around the room, and looked at the other pieces of sculpture that there were there. They afterwards came back again to the gladiator, in order to take one more view of it before they went away. Mr. George advised Rollo to look at it well, and impress the image of it strongly on his mind. "It is one of the treasures of the world," said he; "and in the course of your life, though you may never see it here, in the original, again, you will meet with casts of it and drawings of it without number, and you will find descriptions of it and allusions to it continually recurring in the conversation that you hear and the books that you read. Indeed, the image of the Dying Gladiator forms a part of the mental furnishing of every highly-cultivated intellect in the civilized world." CHAPTER VIII. THE TARPEIAN ROCK. One morning while Mr. George and Rollo were taking breakfast together in the dining room of the hotel, Mr. George remarked that he had received some news that morning. "Is it good news, or bad news?" asked Rollo. "It is good for me," replied Mr. George, "but I rather think you will consider it bad for you." "Tell me what it is," said Rollo, "and then I will tell you how I consider it." So Mr. George informed Rollo that the news which he had received was, that there had been an arrival from America, and that the last night's post had brought the papers to town. "And so," said Mr. George, "I am going to spend the morning at Piale's[6] library, reading the papers, and you will be left to entertain yourself." [Footnote 6: Pronounced _Pe-ah-ly's_.] "O, that's no matter," said Rollo. "I can get Charles Beekman to go with me. We can take care of ourselves very well." "What will you do?" asked Mr. George. "I want to go and see the Tarpeian Rock," said Rollo. "I read about that rock, and about Tarpeia, in a history in America, and I want to see how the rock looks." "Do you know where it is?" asked Mr. George. "No," said Rollo; "but I can find out." "Very well," said Mr. George; "then I leave you to take care of yourself. You can get Charles to go, if his mother will trust him with you." "She will, I am sure," said Rollo. "Why, you got lost when you took him the other day," said Mr. George, "and you had ever so much difficulty in finding your way home again." "O, no, uncle George," said Rollo, "we did not have any difficulty at all. We only had a little fun." Soon after breakfast Mr. George bade Rollo good by, and went off to the bookstore and library, where he was to see and read the American papers. As soon as his uncle had gone, Rollo went up to Mrs. Beekman's room, and knocked at the door. A well-dressed man servant came to the door. It was Mr. Beekman's courier. "Walk in, Mr. Rollo," said the courier; "Mrs. Beekman and Charles will come in a minute." So Rollo went in. The room was a small parlor, very beautifully furnished. In a few minutes Mrs. Beekman and Charles came in, followed by Charles's sister, a lively young lady about twelve years of age. Her name was Almira, though they usually called her Allie. Rollo informed Mrs. Beekman, when she came into the room, that he had come to ask her to allow Charles to go and make an excursion with him. He was going, he said, to see the Tarpeian Rock. "O, I would not go to see the Tarpeian Rock," said Mrs. Beekman. "Some ladies of my acquaintance went to see it the other day, and they said it was nothing at all." "Ah, yes, mother!" said Charles, in an entreating tone of voice, "let me go with Rollo." "Why, there is nothing at all to see," said Mrs. Beekman. "It is only a small, steep face of a rock in a bank. On the Hudson River Railroad you see rocks and precipices forty times as picturesque, all along the way." Still Rollo and Charles were very desirous to go. The truth was, it was not so much what they expected to see at the end of the excursion, which made it so alluring to them, as the interest and excitement of the various adventures which they thought they would meet with on the way. Finally Mrs. Beekman said that she had not the least objection in the world to their going to see the rock, only she was herself perfectly convinced that they would not find any thing worth seeing. "I wish Allie could go too," said Rollo. "Yes, mother," said Allie, clapping her hands. "Why, do you care about seeing the Tarpeian Rock?" asked her mother. "Yes, mother," said Allie, "I wish to see it very much, though I don't know what it is. What is it, Rollo?" "I'll tell you all about it on the way," said Rollo, "if you can only go with us." "But she cannot walk there," said Mrs. Beekman. "No lady ever walks in Rome." "I will take a carriage," said Rollo. "I am afraid you don't know how to manage about a carriage," said Mrs. Beekman. "Yes, mother," replied Charles, "he knows how to manage about a carriage perfectly well. I tried him the other day." Mrs. Beekman finally gave a tardy and reluctant consent to the children's proposal. She did not manage the case very wisely. She should have considered in the first instance what her decision ought to be, and then she should have adhered to it. If she was going to consent at all, she should have consented cordially, and at once. For parents first to refuse their children's request, and then allow themselves to be induced to change their determination by the entreaties and persuasions of the children themselves, is bad management. Allie went into her mother's bed room to get ready, and in a few minutes returned, her countenance beaming with animation and pleasure. They all went down to the door of the hotel. There were several carriages standing in the square. The coachmen, as soon as they saw the party at the door, all began to hold up their whips, and to call to Rollo. Some of them began to move their horses towards him. Rollo glanced his eyes rapidly at the several coaches, and selecting the one which he thought looked the best, he beckoned to the coachman of it. The coachman immediately drew up to the door. He then jumped down from the box, and opened the carriage door. Before getting in, however, Rollo wished to make his bargain; so he said to the coachman,-- "To the Capitol. Two pauls." He spoke these words in the Italian language. He had learned the Italian for "two pauls" long before, and he had looked out the Italian name for the Capitol in his Guide Book that morning, so as to be all ready. The Italian name which he found was _Campidoglio_. The coachman hesitated a moment, and then said, holding up three fingers at the same time,-- "Three pauls." Of course he spoke in Italian. Rollo, instead of answering him, immediately began to turn away and look out towards the other carriages. "_Si, signore, si,_" said the coachman. "Two pauls let it be." So he held open the carriage door wider than ever, and Rollo assisted Allie to get in. He and Charles followed, and then the coachman drove away. "You agreed to give him too much," said Charles, as soon as they were seated. "A paul and a half is the regular fare." "I know it," said Rollo; "but I always offer a little more than the regular fare, especially when I have a lady with me, for then they have not a word to say." "But this man had a word to say," replied Charles. "He wanted you to give him three pauls." "Yes," said Rollo, "sometimes they try a little to make a dispute; but they have no chance at all, and they give right up." Rollo had ordered the coachman to drive to the Capitol, because he had found, by studying the map and the Guide Book, that the entrance to the enclosure where the Tarpeian Rock was to be seen was very near there. He had examined the map attentively, and so he knew exactly which way he must go after being set down at the foot of the Capitol stairs. Accordingly, when the carriage stopped, Rollo got out first himself, and then helped Allie and Charles out. He paid the coachman the price agreed upon, and a couple of coppers over for _buono mano_. "Now," said he to Charles and Allie, "follow me." Rollo went on a little way along a winding street, and then turning to the right, began to go up a steep ascent, formed of very broad steps, which seemed to lead to a higher street. As soon as the party began to go up these steps, they saw several children running down from above to meet them. When these children reached the place where Rollo was, they began saying something very eagerly in Italian, scrambling up the steps again at the same time, so as to keep up with Rollo and his party. "What do these children want?" asked Allie. "I don't know," said Rollo. "I have not the least idea." "I suppose they are begging," said Charles. "No," said Allie. "If they were begging, they would hold out their hands." At the top of the stairs Rollo and his party were met by half a dozen more children, so that there were now eight or ten in all. They ran on before and by the side of Rollo and his party, all looking very eager and animated, talking incessantly, and beckoning and pointing forward. "Ah!" said Rollo, "I know. They want to show us the way to the Tarpeian Rock." "But you said you knew the way," said Allie. "I said I could find it," replied Rollo, "and so I can; but I am willing to pay one of these children for showing me, but not all. Stop a minute, till I choose. Or, rather, you may choose, Allie," he added. The party now stopped, while Allie surveyed the ragged and wretched-looking group before her. "There is not a pretty child among them," said Allie. "You should not look for the best looking one, Allie," said Charles. "You should choose the _worst_ looking one. She is likely to need it most. Pretty looking girls get along well enough." "Then I choose that poor barefooted girl, that looks so pale," said Allie. "Yes," said Rollo; "she looks as if she had had a fever." So Rollo pointed to the girl, and showed her a copper, which he took for the purpose from his pocket. At the same time he made a waving motion with his hand to the rest, to denote that he did not wish for their services, and that they might go away. The barefooted girl seemed greatly pleased. Her pale and emaciated face was lighted up with a smile of pleasure. She ran along forward, beckoning to Rollo and his party to follow. The rest of the children, though they understood perfectly the signal of dismission that Rollo had made to them, were determined not to be sent off in that way; so they went on gesticulating and clamoring as much as ever. Rollo paid no attention to them, but walked on with Charles and Allie at his side. Presently their guide, and all the other children with her, stopped at a sort of gateway in a wall. By the side of the gateway there was an iron ring hanging by a chain. Two or three of the children seized this ring together and pulled it, by which means a bell was rung inside. The other children crowded together on each side of this gate, leaving room, however, for Rollo and his party to go through, and all held out their hands for money. "I am only going to pay the one that I engaged," said Rollo; "but, poor thing, I mean to give her two coppers, instead of one, she looks so sick and miserable." "So I would," said Allie. "And here," she added, putting her hand into her pocket and taking out a Roman copper coin, "I have got a penny here; you may give her that, too." "That is not a penny," said Charles. "That is a _baioccho_." "Never mind," said Allie; "_I_ call it a penny. I can't remember the other name. Besides, it is all the same thing." Rollo gave the three pieces of money to the poor girl, and the rest of the children, when they saw how generous he was, became more clamorous than ever. But Rollo paid no heed to them. Indeed, a moment after he had paid his little guide her money, the gate opened, and the party went in. The poor children were all left outside, and shut out. It was a small girl, about thirteen years old, that opened the gate. Rollo and his party found themselves ushered into a sort of garden. The girl led the way along a narrow path between beds of beans, lettuce, and other garden vegetables. Besides these vegetables, there were groups of shrubbery here and there, among which roses and other flowers were blooming. This garden seemed to be in the heart of the city, for it was bordered on three sides by buildings, and on the fourth by a low wall, which appeared to be built on the brow of a hill, for the roofs and chimneys of other houses, situated on a lower level, could be seen over it below. The girl led the way to a place by this wall, where, by looking over, there could be seen, at a distance along the hill, a small place where the rock which formed the face of it was precipitous. The precipice seemed to be about ten or fifteen feet high. "Is that the Tarpeian Rock?" asked Rollo. The girl who conducted them did not reply, not knowing any language but the Italian. "I've seen a great deal prettier rocks in America," said Allie. "Then are you sorry you came?" asked Rollo. "O, no!" said Allie; "I am very glad I came. But what is it that makes this rock so famous?" "Why, it is the place where, in old times, a very remarkable thing happened," replied Rollo. "I read the story in the history of Rome, when I was studying history in America. There was a girl named Tarpeia. She lived somewhere near the top of this rock, and the wall of the city came somewhere along here, and there was a gate. The Sabines made war against the Romans, and came to attack the city, but they could not get in on account of the walls. One day Tarpeia was on the wall looking down, and she saw some of the Sabine soldiers walking about below." "Why did not they shoot her?" asked Charles. "O, they had no motive for shooting her," replied Rollo. "She was a nice, pretty girl, I suppose, and they liked to look at her, and to talk with her. Besides, they had a cunning plan in view. They asked her whether they could not induce her to open the gates and let them into the city. She said she would do it if they would give her what they wore on their arms. She meant their bracelets. The soldiers in those days used to adorn themselves with rings, and bracelets, and other such things. But then, besides these bracelets they wore their shields and bucklers on their arms. These were very heavy things, made of iron, and covered with hides. So they agreed that they would give her what they wore on their arms, secretly meaning that they would throw their bucklers upon her; but she thought they meant that they would give her their bracelets. "So that night," continued Rollo, "the soldiers came, bringing a great many other soldiers with them, and Tarpeia opened the gate and let them in. The whole troop rushed by her into the town, as fast as they could go, and as they passed they all threw their bucklers upon poor Tarpeia, till she was crushed to death, and buried up by them. It was pretty near this rock where this happened, and so, forever after, they called it the Tarpeian Rock, and that is the reason why so many people come to see it." There was a moment's pause after Rollo had finished his story, during which Allie looked quite concerned. At length she said, in a very earnest tone,-- "I think it was a shame!" "I think they served her just right," said Charles. "O, Charles!" replied Alice, "how can you say so?" The girl who had conducted the party through the garden now began to lead the way back again, and they all followed her. As she walked along, the girl began to gather flowers from the beds and borders, and finally made quite a pretty bouquet. When she got to the gate, and was ready to open it, she presented this bouquet in a very polite and graceful manner to Allie. Rollo took some money from his pocket, and put it into her hand; and then she opened the gate, and let them all out. "How much did you pay her, Rollo?" asked Charles. "I paid her double," said Rollo, "because she was so polite as to give Allie such a pretty bouquet." Allie was now more pleased with her bouquet than before. It pleased her extremely to find that Rollo took so much interest in her receiving a bouquet as to pay something specially for it. So they all went down the steps which led to the foot of the Capitol Hill. "Shall we walk home?" asked Rollo, "or shall I find a carriage, so that we can ride?" "Let us walk," replied Allie, "and then we shall be longer on the way." Just then Rollo, looking at the sky, saw that there were some rather threatening clouds diffused over it. Indeed, on putting out his hand, he plainly felt a sprinkling of rain. "It is going to rain," said he, "and so we shall be obliged to ride. But we can make it longer by stopping to see something on the way." "Well," said Allie, "let's do it. What shall we stop to see?" "If there is going to be a shower," said Rollo, "it would be a good time to stop and see the Pantheon." "What is the Pantheon?" asked Allie. "It is an immense round church, with a great hole in the roof," replied Rollo. "Why don't they mend the hole?" asked Charles. "O, they made it so on purpose," said Rollo. "Made it on purpose!" repeated Allie. "I never heard of such a thing. I should think the rain would come in." "It does come in," said Rollo, "and that is the reason why I want to go and see the Pantheon in the time of a shower. It is so curious to see the rain falling down slowly to the pavement. You see, the church is round, and there is a dome over it, and in the centre of the dome they left a great round hole." "How big?" asked Allie. "It is twenty-eight feet across," said Rollo; "but you would not think it so big when you come to see it. It is up so high that it looks very small. We know how big it is by the size of the wet spot on the floor." By the time that the party had arrived at this point in the conversation, Rollo saw a carriage standing in the street at a little distance before him, and he made a signal to the coachman to come to him. The coachman came. Rollo made his bargain with him, and they all got in. The coachman drove immediately to the Pantheon, and they arrived there just as the shower began to come on. Before the church was an immense portico, supported by columns. The columns, and the whole entablature which they supported, were darkened by time, and cracked, and chipped, and broken in the most remarkable manner. Allie and Charles stood under the portico and looked around, while Rollo paid the coachman. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON.] There was a large open square before the Pantheon, with an ancient and very remarkable looking fountain in the centre of it. There was a basin around this fountain, into which monstrous mouths, carved in marble, were spouting water. When Rollo had paid the coachman, he led the way into the church. Allie and Charles followed him. They found themselves ushered into an immense circular interior, with rows of columns all around the sides, and chapels, and sculptures, and paintings, and beautiful panels of variegated marbles between them. Overhead was an immense dome. This dome is nearly a hundred and fifty feet high, and the circular opening in the centre of it is about thirty feet across. Through this opening the rain was descending in a steady but gentle shower. It was very curious to look up and see the innumerable drops falling slowly from the bright opening above, down to the marble floor. This opening is the only window. There is no other place, as you will see by the engraving, where light can come in. The margin of the opening is formed of an immense brass ring. Such a ring is necessary in a structure like this, and it must be of great thickness and strength, to resist the pressure of the stones crowding in upon it all around. This Pantheon was built by the ancient Romans, two thousand years ago. What it was built for originally nobody now knows. In modern times it has been changed into a church. It is immensely large, being nearly a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and a hundred and fifty feet high. If you will inquire and ascertain what is the size of some large building in your vicinity, and compare it with these dimensions, you will form a clearer idea of the magnitude of this ancient edifice than you can acquire in any other way. Rollo and his party rambled about the Pantheon, looking at the statues, and paintings, and chapels, and observing the groups of pilgrims and of visitors that were continually coming and going, for nearly an hour. By this time the shower had entirely passed away, and the sun having come out bright, they all walked home. CHAPTER IX. GOING TO OSTIA. While Rollo was at Rome, he made the acquaintance of a boy named Copley. Copley was an English boy, and he was about a year older than Rollo. Rollo first saw him at the door of the hotel, as he, Copley, was dismounting from his horse, on his return from a ride which he had been taking into the country. He had been attended on his ride by a servant man named Thomas. Thomas dismounted from his horse first, and held the bridle of Copley's horse while Copley dismounted. "There!" said Copley, walking off with a very grand air, and leaving his horse in Thomas's hands; "take the horse, Thomas, and never bring me such an animal as that again. Next time I ride I shall take Jessie." "But Mr. William has forbidden me to give you Jessie," said Thomas. "He says she is not safe." "It's none of his business," said Copley. "He thinks, because he is a little older than I am, and because he is married,--though he has not been married much more than a month,--that he has a right to order me about just as he pleases. And I am determined not to submit to it--would you?" These last words were addressed to Rollo. Copley had been advancing towards the door of the hotel, while he had been speaking, and had now just reached the step where Rollo was standing. "Who is he?" asked Rollo. "Who is William?" "He is my brother," said Copley; "but that has nothing to do with it." "Are you under his care?" asked Rollo. "Why, I am travelling with him," said Copley; "but he has no business on that account to lord it over me. I have as good a right to have my way as he has to have his." Some further conversation then followed between Copley and Rollo, in which the former said that he had been for several weeks in Rome, in company with his brother. He had an uncle, too, in town, he said, at another hotel. "But I stay with my brother," said Copley, "because he is going to make a longer journey, and I want to go with him." "Where is he going?" asked Rollo. "Why, we have engaged a vetturino," replied Copley, "and are going to travel slowly to Florence, and from Florence into the northern part of Italy, to Milan and Venice, and all those places. Then, afterwards, we shall go over, by some of the passes of the Alps, into Switzerland. I like to travel in that way, I have so much fun in seeing the towns and the country. Besides, when we travel with a vetturino, I almost always ride on the outside seat with him, and he lets me drive sometimes." "Then your uncle is not going that way?" said Rollo. "No," replied Copley; "he is going directly home by water. He is going down to Civita Vecchia, to take the steamer there for Marseilles, and I don't want to go that way." Copley then asked Rollo to go out into the Corso with him. He said that he saw a shop there, as he was coming home, which had a great display of whips at the window, and he wanted to buy a whip, so that when they set out on their journey he could have a whip of his own. "The vetturino never will let me have _his_ whip," said he. "The lash is so long that he says I shall get it entangled in the harness. That's no reason, for he is always getting it entangled himself. But that's his excuse, and so I am going to have a whip of my own." "Well," said Rollo, "I rather think I will go with you; but you must wait here for me a minute or two. I must go up to my room first; but I will come directly down again." Rollo wished to go up to his room to ask his uncle's permission to go with Copley. He made it an invariable rule never to go any where without his uncle's permission. Mr. George was always ready to give permission in such cases, unless there was some really good and substantial reason for withholding it. And whenever Mr. George withheld his consent from any of Rollo's proposals, Rollo always submitted at once, without making any difficulty, even when he thought that his uncle was wrong, and that he might have consented as well as not. It was not altogether principle on the part of Rollo, that made him pursue this course; it was in a great measure policy. "I like travelling about the world with uncle George," he used to say to himself, "and in order that I may travel with him a great deal, I must make it for his interest to take me. That is, I must manage so that he will have a better time when I am with him, than when he goes alone; and in order to do this, I must take care never to give him any trouble or concern of any kind on my account. I must comply with his wishes in every thing, and be satisfied with such pleasures and enjoyments as he fully approves." Rollo did not think of this altogether of himself. It was his father that put the idea into his mind. He did it in a conversation that he had with Rollo the day before he set out on the journey. "Rollo, my boy," said he, "in going on this journey into Italy with your uncle George, there is one danger that you will have to look out for very carefully." "Getting robbed by the brigands?" asked Rollo. "No," said Mr. Holiday; "it is something very different from that, and a great deal worse. That is to say, the evil that you have to fear from it is a great deal worse than any thing that would probably happen to you by being robbed. The danger is of your having too much independence, or, rather, a wrong kind of independence. What is independence?" Rollo reflected a moment in order properly to frame his answer to his father's question. He thought he knew very well what the meaning of the word _independence_ was, but he did not readily know how to clothe the meaning in language. At last he said that he thought independence was doing what you thought was best yourself, without regard to what other people thought. "Very well," said his father. "That's a pretty good definition of it. And now, do you think it is a good quality, or a bad quality?" "A good quality," said Rollo; "that is, I suppose it is good," he added, hesitatingly, "but I don't know." "It depends upon circumstances," said Mr. Holiday. "Should you think that firing his gun when _he_ thought best, instead of when the _captain_ thought best, was a good thing in a soldier, on the field of battle?" "No, sir," said Rollo. "And so, would the independence of the colonel of a regiment," continued Mr. Holiday, "in marching when he thought best, instead of when the general ordered him, be a good quality or a bad quality?" "Bad," said Rollo; "very bad indeed." "Independence is an excellent quality in its own right and proper sphere," said Mr. Holiday; "but when it takes the form of disregarding or rebelling against right and proper authority, it is a very bad quality. It cannot be tolerated. If it were allowed generally to prevail among mankind, the whole world would be thrown into confusion, and nothing could go on. This is now the kind of independence that you must guard against. You are growing up rapidly, and increasing in strength and knowledge every day. You are becoming a young man, and in a great many of the situations in which you are placed, you are fully competent to take care of yourself. Still you are what the law calls a minor. That is, you have not arrived at an age when you can safely be your own master, and support and take care of yourself. Consequently, the law makes it your father's duty, for some years to come, to furnish money for your support, and to provide for you all necessary protection. And the same law makes it your duty to be under my direction, to conform your conduct to my judgment; or, in other words, to do, not as _you_ think best, but as I, or whomsoever I may delegate to act in my stead, thinks best. This is reasonable. As long as a boy depends upon his father for the means of his support, it is right that he should act as his father's judgment dictates. It will be time enough for him to expect that he should act according to his own judgment, in his conduct, when he is able to earn his own living, and so release his father from all responsibility on his account. In a word, the pecuniary responsibility of the father, and the moral obligation of the son, go together." "Yes, father," said Rollo; "I think that is all true." "And now," continued Mr. Holiday, "I put you, for this journey, under your uncle George's care. I delegate my parental power over you to him. It is your duty, therefore, to obey him in all things, and to comply with all his wishes, just as you would if I were in his place." "Yes, father," said Rollo, "I will." "Besides being your duty," added Mr. Holiday, "it is greatly for your interest to do so. If you begin to show your independence, as it is sometimes called, and insist on doing what you think is best, instead of what he thinks is best, so as to cause him trouble, and make him feel anxious and uneasy on your account, you will spoil the pleasure of his journey, and he will not wish to take you with him again." Mr. Holiday had some further conversation with Rollo on the subject, and the effect of what he said was to lead Rollo to think more than he otherwise would have done on the proper course which a boy ought to pursue when travelling under the charge of his uncle, and he resolved that he would, in all cases, not only obey implicitly his uncle's commands, but that he would comply readily and cordially with his wishes, whenever he could ascertain them. Accordingly, in this case, he would not go even out into the Corso without first going up to obtain his uncle's permission. He opened the door of the room, and found his uncle there, writing a letter. "Uncle George," said he, "here is a boy down below, who asks me to go out into the Corso with him." "What boy is it?" asked Mr. George. "I don't know what his name is," said Rollo. "He is an English boy, I suppose. He just came in from taking a ride on horseback." "How long shall you probably be gone?" said Mr. George. "I don't know," said Rollo, hesitating. "Perhaps about half an hour." "Very well," said Mr. George; "you can be gone two hours if you choose. If you form any plan that will require more time than that, come home first and let me know." So Rollo went down stairs again, and having joined Copley at the door, they went together out towards the Corso. In the mean time, Copley's brother William and his wife were waiting in their room for Copley to come up. They knew at what hour he would return from his ride, and they had formed a plan for going in a carriage out upon the Appian Way, to see some ancient ruins there. They knew very well that Copley would not care any thing about the ruins, but he always liked to go with them when they took drives in the environs of Rome. The special reason why Copley was so much interested in going on these excursions was, that he was accustomed, in such cases, to sit on the front seat with the coachman, as he did when travelling with the vetturins, and sometimes he obtained permission to drive a little, by secretly offering the coachman a piece of money. Mr. William had charged his brother to come up to the parlor as soon as he came home from his ride, and Copley ought to have done so. But it was never Copley's practice to pay much heed to requests of this kind from his brother. Mr. William, having waited for some time after he had seen the two horses arrive at the door, wondering all the time why Copley did not come up, went down to the door to inquire what had become of him. The concierge informed him that Copley had gone away with another boy, out to the Corso. So Mr. William ordered the carriage, and he and his wife went away on their excursion alone. Rollo and Copley had a very pleasant walk along the Corso. They were obliged, however, to walk in the middle of the street, for the sidewalks were so narrow and so irregular in shape, sometimes growing narrower and narrower, until at length there was scarcely any thing but the curb-stone left, that Rollo and Copley could not walk upon them. At last, however, they came to the place where Copley had seen the whips. Copley had plenty of money, but I do not know how he would have managed to buy one of the whips, if Rollo had not been with him; for the man who had them to sell could only speak French and Italian, and Copley did not know either of these languages. He had been studying French, it is true, for several years in school, but he had taken no interest in learning the language, and the little knowledge of it which he had acquired was not of such a character as to be of any use to him. As to the Italian, he knew nothing at all of it. Accordingly, Rollo acted as interpreter. "I might have brought our courier with us," said Copley, "only it is such a bore to have him about; and you do just as well." After having bought the whip, Copley proposed that they should go to the diligence office and see if there were any diligences there about setting out on their journeys. The diligence office which Copley referred to was not in the Corso, but in another street, at right angles to it. When the boys reached the office, they found that there were no diligences there; so they rambled on without much idea of where they were going, until at length they came to the river, near one of the bridges leading across it. A short distance below the bridge, there was a small steamboat coming up the river. "Ah, look there!" said Copley. "There's a steamer coming! Where do you suppose that steamer is coming from?" "It is coming from Ostia, I suppose," said Rollo. "At any rate, I know that there is a steamer that goes to Ostia." "Let us go there," said Copley. "Where is Ostia?" "It is at the mouth of the river," said Rollo. "You may know that from the name. _Ostia_ is the Latin word for _mouth_." "I hate Latin," said Copley. The little steamer came rounding up to a pier not far below the bridge. Copley and Rollo leaned over the parapet, and looked to see the passengers get out; but there were very few passengers to come. The boys then went down towards the pier, and on inquiring of a gentleman whom they saw there, they found that the boat went down the river to Ostia every morning, and returned every night, and Copley immediately conceived the idea of going down in her. "Let's go down to-morrow," said he. "It is just far enough for a pleasant sail." Rollo's imagination was quite taken with the idea of sailing down to Ostia. There seems to be something specially attractive to boys in the idea of sailing down to the mouths of rivers. It is so pleasant to watch the gradual widening of the stream, and to meet vessels coming up, and to see the fishermen's boats, and the nets spread on the land, and the little inlets, with the tide flowing in and out, and other indications of the approach towards the sea. Besides, Rollo wished very much to see what sort of a place Ostia was. However, he would not positively promise to go. He said he should like to go very much, but that he could not decide the question until he should go home. "I must see uncle George first," said Rollo. "It is possible that he may have formed some engagement for me to-morrow." "O, never mind what engagement he has formed," said Copley. "Tell him that you can't go with him, because you have agreed to go down the river with me." "No," said Rollo, shaking his head. "Why, what a little fool you are!" said Copley. After remaining some time on the bridge, looking at the steamer, the boys returned home. Rollo took care to arrive at the hotel before the two hours were expired. Mr. George had just finished his letter, and was folding it up and sealing it. "Well, Rollo," said Mr. George, "have you had a pleasant walk?" "Very pleasant, indeed," said Rollo. "We walked in the Corso till Copley had bought his whip, and then we went on till we came to the bridge, and there we saw a steamboat which goes to Ostia and back. Copley wants me to go down with him in her to-morrow. We shall get back about this time, I suppose." Mr. George was at this time just writing the address on the back of his letter. He did not say any thing, but Rollo observed a very slight and almost imperceptible shaking of his head. "You don't like the plan very well, uncle George," said Rollo. "Not very well," said Mr. George. "I feel a little afraid of it." "Then it is of no consequence," said Rollo. "I don't care a great deal about going." Most boys, perhaps, under these circumstances, would have asked why, in order that, after hearing their uncle's objections to their plans, they might argue against them. But Rollo knew very well that this would be very bad policy for him. "If uncle George finds that he has a long argument to maintain against me, every time that he refuses me any thing," said he to himself, "he will soon get tired of having me under his care." So he acquiesced at once in what he perceived was his uncle's opinion, and resolved to tell Copley, when he saw him, that he could not go to Ostia. Copley was to have called that evening at Rollo's room, to obtain his answer; but on further reflection, he concluded not to do so. Indeed, he had a secret feeling that neither Rollo's uncle nor his own brother would approve of the plan of two such boys going alone, in such a country, on an expedition which was entirely outside of the usual range of tourists and travellers. That this expedition _was_ outside the range was evident from the character of the steamboat that the boys had seen, which was evidently not intended for the conveyance of ladies and gentlemen, but of people of the country--and those, moreover, of the lowest class. So Copley concluded that if he were to go at all to Ostia, it would be necessary for him to go by stealth, and he resolved not to say any thing about his plan to his brother or sister. He was very sure, too, that Rollo would fail of obtaining his uncle's consent. So he concluded to say no more to Rollo on the subject, but instead of that, he proposed the plan to another boy of his acquaintance, who lodged with his friends at another hotel. "The best way will be," said he, when he made the proposal, "for us not to tell any body where we are going." "Then they'll wonder where we are," said the boy, "and be frightened half to death about us." "But we can leave word when we go, with the porter of the hotel, or the concierge," said Copley, "that we have gone down the river in the steamboat, and shall not be back till night." "Good," said the other boy; "that's what we'll do." Accordingly, the next morning, the two boys left word at their respective hotels where they were going, and set forth. They stole away very secretly, and after running round the corner, they crept along close to the wall of the hotel, until they thought they were at a safe distance. They reached the boat in good season, went on board, and in due time set sail. About ten o'clock, when the two boys had been gone about an hour, Mr. William began to miss his brother, and to wonder where he had gone. So he rang the bell, and his courier came into the room. "Pacifico," said Mr. William, "do you know where Copley is?" "No, sir," said Pacifico; "I did not see him from since it was nine o'clock." "Go down below," said Mr. William, "and inquire of the concierge and the porters if they have seen him, or know where he is." Mr. William followed Pacifico as he went out, in order to speak a moment to a friend of his who occupied the next apartment. As he came back he met Pacifico at the head of the stairs, and received his answer there. The answer was, that Copley had gone down the river to Ostia with another boy. Mr. William was greatly astonished to hear this. He, however, said nothing to Pacifico, but after pausing a moment, as if reflecting upon what he had heard, he went back into his own apartment. "Maria," said he, addressing his young wife, "where do you think Copley has gone?" "I cannot imagine," said Maria. "He has gone down the Tiber in the steamer to Ostia," replied Mr. William. "Is it possible?" exclaimed Maria, in astonishment. "Yes," said William; "and I am very glad of it." "Glad of it?" repeated Maria, surprised more and more. "Yes," said Mr. William; "for it decides me what to do. I shall send him home with his uncle. I have been half inclined to do this for some time, and this settles the question. It destroys all the peace and comfort of our journey to have a boy with us that is determined to have his own way, without regard to the inconvenience or anxiety that he occasions me." "But how will you manage to get him to go with his uncle?" said Maria. "He will refuse to go, and insist on accompanying us, for his uncle is going directly home, which is what he does not wish to do." "I'll manage that," said Mr. William. "I'll take a hint from his own way of proceeding. I will go off and leave him." "O husband," said Maria, "that will never do." "You'll see how I will manage it," said Mr. William. So saying, Mr. William rang the bell. Pacifico immediately appeared. "I wish to write a letter," said Mr. William. "Bring me some paper, and pen and ink." Pacifico brought the writing materials, and laid them on the table. "I have concluded to leave town this afternoon," said Mr. William, as he took up the pen and began to make preparations to write. "I intend to go as far as Civita Castellana to-night. We will set out at two o'clock. I wish you to go and find our vetturino, and direct him to be here half an hour before that time with the carriage, to load the baggage. He knows that we were going soon, and he will be prepared. In the mean time you may get our baggage ready. Copley's trunk, however, is not to go. Pack that, and send it by a porter over to the Hotel d'Amerique. I am going to leave him there under the care of his uncle." "Very well, sir," said Pacifico; "I shall do it." Pacifico retired, and Mr. William proceeded to write his letter. When it was finished, he read it to his wife, as follows. It was addressed to his father in England. "ROME, June 20, 1858. "DEAR FATHER: We are all well, and, on the whole, have enjoyed our residence in Rome very much. We are now, however, about ready to leave. We set off this afternoon for Florence and the north of Italy. "I have concluded, all things considered, to let Copley return to you with his uncle. Though a pretty good boy in other respects, he does not seem to be quite willing enough to submit to my direction, to make it pleasant for me, or safe for him, that we should travel together. I will not say that it is his _fault_ altogether. It is perhaps because there is not difference enough in our ages for him to feel that I ought to have any authority over him. At any rate, he is unwilling to acknowledge my authority, and he takes so many liberties that I am kept in a constant state of anxiety on his account. Besides, I do not think that it is safe for him to be so much at his own disposal. This country is full of thieves, brigands, and rogues, of the most desperate and reckless character; and young men sometimes suffer extremely in falling into their hands. Copley is not aware of the danger, and he thinks that the restraints which I feel compelled to impose upon him are unnecessary and vexatious. Often he will not submit to them. To-day, he has gone down the river on board one of the country steamers, without saying any thing to me about it; and, though I do not suppose he will get into any difficulty, in making such an excursion, still the fact that he takes the liberty of doing such things keeps me continually uneasy about him, and there is danger that, sooner or later, he will get into some serious trouble. "I have, accordingly, concluded to leave him under uncle's charge, with a view of having him return with uncle to England, by way of the Mediterranean. Uncle will leave here in a few days, and you may accordingly expect to see Copley at home again in the course of a week after receiving this. "With love from Maria and myself for all at home, I am your dutiful son, "WILLIAM GRANT." Mr. William sealed his letter, and then took it down to the "bureau," as the hotel office is called, where he left it with the secretary of the hotel, to be sent to the post office. He then went out at the front door of the hotel to the public square before it, and there taking a carriage, he ordered the coachman to drive to the Hotel d'Amerique. When arrived there, he went to his uncle's apartment, and explained the plan which he had formed, and the reason for it. His uncle said that he would very readily take Copley under his charge. Mr. William then said that he was intending to leave town that day, but he should leave Thomas at his hotel to wait for Copley, and bring him over to the Hotel d'Amerique as soon as he returned. This arrangement was carried into effect. Mr. William directed Thomas to remain in town, to take care of Copley on his return from Ostia, and deliver him safely into his uncle's hands. It occasioned Mr. William no inconvenience to leave Thomas behind for a day, since, though Thomas usually travelled in the same carriage with the family, the vetturino himself always drove. Thomas, together with Pacifico, the courier, rode on an outside seat in front, while Copley sometimes rode inside, though more frequently on the driver's seat, by the side of the vetturino. "Thomas," said Mr. Grant, in giving Thomas his instructions, "I am going to set out on my journey this afternoon, but I shall leave you behind, to come on to-night by the diligence. You will find me at the Hotel of the Post, at Civita Castellana. I wish you to wait here until Copley comes home, and then tell him that I have gone out of town, and shall not be back to-night, and that he is going to spend the night at the Hotel d'Amerique with his uncle. Do not tell him where I have gone, nor that you are coming after me. His uncle will tell him all to-morrow morning." In the mean time, while these occurrences had been taking place at the hotel, Copley and his companion had been sailing down the river on board the little steamboat. They had, on the whole, a pretty pleasant time, though they were somewhat disappointed in the scenery on the banks of the river. The country was perfectly bare of trees, and destitute of all cultivation. There were no villages, and scarcely a human habitation to be seen. The boys, however, met with no trouble, and returned safely home about four o'clock. Copley found Thomas waiting for him at the hotel door. "Mr. Copley," said Thomas, as Copley advanced towards the door, "your brother has gone out of town, and will not be back to-night, and I was to wait here for you, and tell you that you were to go and spend the night at your uncle's apartment at the Hotel d'Amerique." "Good!" said Copley. He felt quite relieved to find that his brother had gone away, as he thus escaped the danger of being called to account for his misdemeanor. "Where has he gone?" asked Copley. "I can't say," said Thomas; "but perhaps your uncle can tell you." By the phrase "I can't say," Thomas secretly meant that he was not at liberty to say, though Copley understood him to mean that he did not know. "Very well," said Copley; "I don't care where he has gone. It makes no difference to me." Copley found that it did make some difference to him, when he learned, the next morning, that his brother had set out on his journey to the north of Italy, and to Switzerland, and had left him behind to return home at once with his uncle by sea. His uncle did not tell him that night where his brother had gone, for fear that Copley might make some difficulty, by insisting on going on after him in the diligence with Thomas. Accordingly, when Copley asked the question, his uncle only answered vaguely, that his brother had gone out somewhere into the environs of Rome. The next morning, however, he handed Copley a note which his brother had left for him, which note Copley, on opening it, found to be as follows:-- "WEDNESDAY MORNING. "DEAR COPLEY: I have concluded to set out this afternoon on my journey north. I am sorry that you are not here to bid me good by. I did not know that you were going down the river. "It must be hard for a boy as old as you to be under the command of one who is, after all, only his brother,--and not a great many years older than he is himself,--for I am not quite ten years older than you. I know you have found this hard, and so I have concluded that you had better return home with uncle. One of these days, when you grow up to manhood, you can make a journey into Italy again, and then you will be your own master, and can do as you please, without any danger. Wishing you a very pleasant voyage, "I am your affectionate brother, "WILLIAM GRANT." Copley's indignation and rage at reading this letter seemed at first to know no bounds. He was, however, entirely helpless. His brother had gone, and he did not even know what road he had taken. Thomas had gone, too, so that there was no help for him whatever. In two days after that, he went with his uncle to Civita Vecchia, the port of Rome, on the Mediterranean, and there embarked on board the steamer "for Marseilles direct," and so returned to England. CHAPTER X. THE VATICAN. On the day when Rollo went with Charles and Allie to see the Tarpeian Rock, the reader will perhaps recollect that Mr. George was engaged at the reading room in reading the American papers which had that morning arrived. When Rollo returned from his excursion, he found that Mr. George had not got home, and he accordingly concluded to go to the reading room and see if he could find him. This reading room is attached to an English bookstore and library, and is a great place of resort for visitors at Rome. It is situated at the end of the Piazza di Spagna, which is one of the principal and most frequented public squares in Rome. This square contains several of the chief hotels, and a great many shops. The bookstore of Piale is the general centre of news and intelligence for all English and American visitors. Here people come to make inquiries for their friends, for there is a register kept at the library with the names of all the English and American visitors in Rome recorded in it, and the addresses of the hotels or private houses where they are lodging. Here all sorts of notices are posted up, such as advertisements of things lost or found, of parties forming for excursions, of couriers wanting places or families wanting couriers, of paintings for sale, carriages for sale or for hire,--and all such things. Piale's establishment contains a number of different rooms. The first that Rollo entered on arriving at the place was the bookstore. This was a small room. There was a desk at one end, where a clerk was sitting. There were shelves filled with books all around the room, and a large table in the centre, which was also covered with books arranged in tiers one above the other in a sloping direction. There were several doors leading off from this apartment, one of which led to a room where a circulating library was kept, and another to the reading room. When Rollo entered the bookstore, he saw several groups of visitors there. There were two or three ladies looking over the books on the shelves. There was a group of gentlemen standing near the desk, talking together, with a paper in their hands which seemed to contain a list of names. Just as Rollo entered, a carriage drove up to the door, and two ladies dismounted from it and came in. Rollo's attention was first attracted to these two ladies. One of them, on entering, accosted the clerk, and asked to look at the register. The clerk immediately gave the two ladies seats at a side table, where there was a large book full of names and addresses. The ladies sat down, and began to look over the book. They had just arrived from Naples, and they wished to know what friends and acquaintances of theirs there were in town. Rollo began to examine the books on the table, or counter, in the middle of the room, and while doing so he happened to pass near the gentlemen that were looking at the paper. "We want twelve," said one of the gentlemen, "and we have got only nine." "Yes," said the other, "we want three more. It must be that there are a great many in town who would like to go, if we could only find them out." Rollo's attention was immediately arrested by these words. It was obvious that the gentlemen were forming a party to go somewhere, or to see something, and he felt quite confident that his uncle George would like to join them. "At any rate," said he to himself, "_I_ should like to go, wherever it is." So Rollo summoned courage to accost the persons who were consulting together, and to ask them if they wished to find some gentlemen to make up a party. "Gentlemen or ladies either," said one of them, "no matter which. We are making up a party to go and see the statues in the Vatican by torch light." When Rollo heard the words "torch light," his interest in the proposed party was greatly increased, and he said he had no doubt that his uncle would like to go. "I am very sure he would like to go," said Rollo, "and to take me." "Very well," said one of the gentlemen, "that will make two. And we only want three. Where is your uncle?" "He is in the reading room," said Rollo. "Wait a moment, and I'll call him." "That's right," said the gentleman. "Tell him it will cost us a scudo and a half apiece." So Rollo, taking out half a paul from his pocket,--that being the price of admission to the reading room for a single day,--and giving it to the clerk at the desk, opened a door by the side of the desk, and passed into the reading room. Instead of being only one reading room, however, he found that there were two, with an open door leading from one to the other. There were a great number of very comfortable sofas and arm chairs all about these rooms, and great tables in the middle of them covered with newspapers and magazines. The walls of both rooms were completely covered with paintings of all sizes, most of which had been left there for sale. There were a great many gentlemen sitting around the tables and upon the sofas, reading. Among them Rollo soon found Mr. George. He had established himself in a comfortable arm chair, near a great window that looked out upon the square. But he was obliged to keep the curtain down, on account of the beggars outside, that gave him no peace as long as they could see him. "Uncle George," said Rollo, "here are some gentlemen who want to make up a party to go and see something by torch light, and I thought that perhaps you and I would like to join it." "Where is it that they are going?" asked Mr. George--"to the Vatican?" "Yes," said Rollo, "it is the Vatican. A scudo and a half apiece." "Very well," said Mr. George. "I should like to go. Where are the gentlemen?" "They are out here in the bookstore. Come out and I will show them to you." So Mr. George laid down his paper, and followed Rollo out into the bookstore. Rollo led the way to the place where the gentlemen were standing, and then introduced his uncle, in a distinct and audible voice, thus,-- "This is my uncle, gentlemen, Mr. George Holiday." The gentlemen greeted Mr. Holiday in a very polite manner, and informed him of their plan, and that they wanted three more names to make up the necessary number for a party. And here I ought to say in explanation, that what is called the "Vatican" is a vast collection of very magnificent and imposing buildings,--consisting of palaces, chapels, halls, galleries, and the like, almost without number,--and it is filled with paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, books, jewels, gems, and other curiosities and treasures of incalculable value. It is situated in close proximity to the great Church of St. Peter's--the largest and most gorgeous church in the world. Indeed, the church and the palaces form, as it were, one vast architectural pile, which is of almost inconceivable magnificence and grandeur. The various edifices which compose the Vatican were several centuries in building, and the immense magnitude and extent of the edifice, and the exhaustless wealth of the treasures of art deposited there, astonish every beholder. The buildings are so extensive that they require eight grand staircases and two hundred smaller ones to gain access to the different stories. There are twenty open courts and over four thousand different rooms. Some of these rooms are galleries nearly a quarter of a mile long, and are filled on each side with sculptures and statuary, or other works of art, from end to end. The length of these galleries is not, however, out of proportion to other parts of the structure. The church of St. Peter's, including the portico, is considerably _more_ than a quarter of a mile long. Now, among the treasures of the Vatican are an immense number of ancient statues which were dug up, in the middle ages, in and around Rome; and some of these sculptures are the most celebrated works of art in the world. They are arranged with great care in a great number of beautiful chambers and halls, and are visited during the daytime by thousands of people that have come to Rome from every part of the world. The picture galleries, the collection of ancient curiosities, and the library rooms containing the books and manuscripts, are also in the same manner thrown open, and they are thronged with visitors almost all the time. These apartments are so numerous and so extensive that in one day a person can do little else than to walk through them, and give one general gaze of bewildering wonder at the whole scene. And a very long walk it is, I can assure you. At one time, when I set out from the painting rooms, (which are far in the interior of the buildings,) with a party of friends, intending to go out, in order to go home, we walked steadily on at our ordinary pace, without stopping, or deviating from our way, and we found that it took us twenty minutes to get out to our carriage! In addition to these visits made during the day, small parties are sometimes formed to visit the galleries of statuary by night. It is found that the illumination of a torch, by the strong contrasts of light and shade which it produces, brings out the expression of the statues in a very striking manner, so as to produce sometimes a most wonderful effect. It is, however, somewhat expensive to exhibit these statues by torch light, partly on account of the cost of the torches, and partly on account of the attendants that are required. The cost is nearly twenty dollars. It is accordingly customary to make up a party, whenever an evening visit to the Vatican is proposed, in order to divide the expense. The number that can see the statues to advantage in these evening visits is from twelve to fifteen. A party of twelve is sufficient to pay the expense at the rate of a scudo and a half for each person.[7] [Footnote 7: The scudo is the Roman dollar. It is worth considerably more than the American dollar.] It was such a plan as this that the gentlemen were forming, whose party Mr. George and Rollo were now proposing to join. The gentlemen had been much pleased with Rollo's appearance and demeanor when he accosted them, and they were now still more pleased, when they saw Mr. George, to find that he was a young gentleman, of about their own age, and that he was so prepossessing in his countenance and in his air and manner. Mr. George readily agreed to join the party. They asked him if he knew of any body else that he thought would like to go. He inquired whether there were to be any ladies in the party. They said that there were to be several. "Then," said Mr. George, "I will be responsible for the twelfth place. I am quite sure that I can find some person that would like to go. "And suppose I find more than one?" said Mr. George. "That will do no harm," replied the gentlemen. "We can have from twelve to fifteen in the party." "Then I will take the three places," said Mr. George, "and I will pay my proportion now. Which of you gentlemen acts as treasurer?" One of the three gentlemen said that he had undertaken to collect and pay over the money, but he added that it was not necessary for Mr. George to pay at that time. Mr. George, however, preferred to do so, and he accordingly took out his purse and paid his four scudi and a half, which was the amount due for three persons. The gentlemen seemed to be quite pleased to find that their party was thus made up, and they told Mr. George that since he had taken and paid for the three remaining places, he might bring with him any number of persons that he pleased, so long as he did not make the party more than fifteen in all. It was agreed, too, that the party was to rendezvous that evening, at eight o'clock, at the foot of the grand staircase, leading from the portico of St. Peter's up to the principal court of the Vatican. Mr. George, as soon as he went home, sent Rollo to Mrs. Beekman's room to inform her of the proposed party, and to ask her if she would like to join it. "And may I invite Allie too?" asked Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "and Charles. Though I don't think they will wish to go, for such children generally feel very little interest in statues." It is true that young persons, like Charles and Allie, generally feel little interest in sculptures and statuary; but, on the other hand, they feel a very great interest in torch light, and both Charles and Allie were exceedingly eager to join the party. It was finally agreed that all three should go. It was arranged that Mr. George and Rollo were to call for them at seven o'clock. Mr. Beekman was engaged to dine that evening with a party of gentlemen, and so he was left out of the account altogether. At seven o'clock, accordingly, Mr. George and Rollo called at Mrs. Beekman's rooms, and a few minutes afterwards they all went together down to the door of the hotel, where Mr. George beckoned to the coachman of one of the carriages that stood in the square. The whole party entered the carriage, after Mr. George had made his bargain with the coachman, and immediately set off. They rode for some distance along a pretty straight road, and then came to a bridge, which was opposite to a great round castle. They went over this bridge, and then turning to the left, under the walls of the castle, they went on towards the Vatican. "We shall arrive there some time before the hour," said Mr. George; "but I thought it was better to be too early than too late." "Yes," replied Mrs. Beekman, "we can amuse ourselves half an hour in rambling about the colonnades and porticos of St. Peter's." In front of St. Peter's there is an immense area, enclosed on each side by a magnificent semicircular colonnade. There are four rows of lofty columns in this colonnade, with a carriage way in the centre between them. The space enclosed between these colonnades is called the _piazza_,[A] and it is adorned with fountains and colossal statues, and on days of public festivities and celebrations, it is filled with an immense concourse of people. It is large enough to contain a great many thousands. [8][Footnote 8: A Pronounced _piatza_.] When Mr. George and his party arrived, they dismissed the carriage and began to walk to and fro under the colonnade and about the piazza. The time passed away very rapidly; and at length, a few minutes before eight, the other carriages began to come. All the persons who belonged to the party were anxious to arrive in time, for they were afraid that, if they were too late, the others would have gone into the Vatican, where, the building being so immense, it might be very difficult to find them. Accordingly, before the clock struck eight, all the party were assembled at the entrance door. The entrance opened from a vast covered gallery, which formed one of the approaches to St. Peter's, between the end of the colonnade and the main front of the building. There were several Swiss sentinels on guard here. They were dressed in what seemed to Rollo a very fantastic garb. In a few minutes the men who were to accompany the party through the galleries appeared. One of them carried a great number of very long candles under his arm. Another had a long pole with a socket at the top of it, and a semicircular screen of tin on one side, to screen the light of the candles from the eyes of the visitors, and to throw it upon the statues. When all was ready, these torch bearers moved on, and were followed by the whole party up the great staircase which led to the galleries of the Vatican. After going upward and onward for some time, they came at length to the entrance of one of the long galleries of sculpture. Here the torch bearers stopped and began to prepare their torches. They cut the long candles in two, so as to make pieces about eighteen inches long. Taking six or eight of these pieces, they placed them together like a bundle of sticks, and tied them, and then crowded the ends together into the socket upon the end of the pole. This socket was made large enough to receive them. They then lighted the wicks, and thus they had a large number of candles all burning together as one. The screen, which I have already spoken of, covered this blaze of light upon one side, so as to keep it from shining upon the faces of the company. Thus provided the torch bearers went on, and the company followed them. Of course, there is only time in the two hours usually appropriated to this exhibition to show a comparatively small number of the statues. The torch bearers accordingly selected such as they thought were most important to be seen, and they passed rapidly on from one to another of these, omitting all the others. When they approached a statue which they were going to exhibit, they would hold the torch up near the face of it in such a manner as to throw a strong light upon the features, and so bring out the expression in a striking manner. The screen shielded the eyes of the company from the direct rays of the flame, and yet there was sufficient light reflected from the marble walls of the gallery, and from the beautiful white surfaces of the statues arranged along them, to enable the company to discern each other very distinctly, and to see all the objects around them. The company passed in this manner through one of the long galleries, stopping here and there to look at the great masterpieces of ancient art, and then they entered into a series of comparatively smaller chambers and halls. Rollo was exceedingly interested in the exhibition, and in all the attendant circumstances of it; but he could not tell whether Allie was pleased or not. She seemed bewildered and struck dumb with amazement at the strange aspect of the scenes and spectacles which were continually presented to view. The immense extent and the gorgeous magnificence of the galleries and halls, the countless multitude of statues, and the almost spectral appearance which they assumed when the torch bearers threw the bright light of the torch upon their cold marble faces, all impressed her with a solemn awe, which seemed so entirely to subdue and silence her, that Rollo could not tell how she felt, or what she thought of the strange spectacle which he had brought her to see. After about an hour, the first set of candles that had been put into the socket of the torch pole were burned down, and then the torch bearers supplied their places with another set formed by the remaining halves of the candles which they had cut in two. These lasted another hour. By that time the company had seen all the most striking and celebrated statues in the principal halls and galleries. They had been making a sort of circuit through the palace in passing through these rooms, and now came out very near the entrance door, where they had come in. Here the torch bearers left them, and went away with their apparatus to the part of the building where they belonged, while the company, descending the grand staircase, came out into one of the porticos of the church, and issuing from the portico they found carriages in waiting upon the piazza, and ready to convey them home. Mr. George and his party reached their hotel about nine o'clock, all very much pleased with the spectacle which they had witnessed. CHAPTER XI. CONCLUSION. Rollo was so much pleased with his torch light visit to the Vatican, and he found, moreover, on talking with Charles and Allie about it the next day, so much evidence of their having been greatly pleased with it, that he planned, a few days afterwards, a torch light visit to the Coliseum. It is very common to make moonlight visits to the Coliseum, but Rollo thought a torch light view of the majestic old ruin would be better. On proposing his plan to his uncle, Mr. George said that he had no objection to it if Rollo would make all the arrangements. He did not know any thing about it himself, he said. Rollo said he had no doubt that he could arrange it, with the help of a commissioner. [Illustration: COLISEUM BY TORCHLIGHT.] So Rollo looked out a good commissioner, and the commissioner arranged the plan. I have not space to describe this visit fully, but must pass on to the conclusion of the book. I will only say that the torches which were employed on this occasion, were different from those employed in the exhibition of the statues in the Vatican, being more like those used by firemen in America. There were also more of them in number, the commissioner having provided four. With these torch bearers to light their way, Rollo's party explored the Coliseum in every part, and they found that the grandeur and sublimity of the immense corridors and vast vaulted passages of the ruin were greatly enhanced by the solemnity of the night, and by the flickering glare of the torches, shining upon the massive piers, and into the dark recesses of the ruin. I do not know how many more torch light visits to wonderful places in Rome Rollo would have planned, had not the time arrived when Mr. George thought it was necessary for them to go back to France. "It is getting late in the season," said Mr. George, "and every body is leaving Rome. I don't think it is safe for us to remain much longer here ourselves, on account of the fever." Rome is extremely unhealthy in the summer months; and in the environs there is a very wide tract of country which is almost entirely uninhabitable all the year round, on account of the prevalence of fever. "Very well," said Rollo, "we will go whenever you please." "We must take our places in the steamer and in the diligences several days beforehand," said Mr. George. "We will go to the steamboat office to-day." There are several lines of steamers that go from Rome to Marseilles, which is the port of landing for travellers going to France and England. Some of these steamers go "direct" across the sea, while others coast along the shore, sailing at night, and stopping during the day at the large towns on the route. The first night they go to Leghorn, the second to Genoa, and the third to Marseilles. At first Mr. George thought that he would take one of these coasting steamers; but he finally concluded to go "direct." "It would be very pleasant," said he to Rollo, "for us to stop at those towns, and ramble about during the day, and then in the evening set sail again, provided we could be at liberty to land at our pleasure, to ramble about unmolested wherever we wished to go, as we can do in America." "And can't we do so?" asked Rollo. "No," said Mr. George. "In the first place we must have our passports stamped here for all the places that we wish to visit, and that will cause us here a great deal of trouble, and not a little expense. Then to land we must have our passports all examined again, and stamped, and there will be more money to pay; and likely as not we should be detained half the morning in getting through all these formalities, and so our time would be passed in fruitless vexation instead of pleasure. Then, when at last we were free, and began our rambles, we should be beset by beggars every where, and have no peace." "What a foolish plan it is to plague travellers so much with all these ceremonies about passports!" said Rollo. "I am not certain that it is foolish for such governments as these," replied Mr. George. "You see, they are governments of force, maintained over the people against their will, by means of military power. The people at large hate the government, and are all the time plotting to destroy it; and if the plotters were allowed to go freely to and fro all over the country, they would be able to organize their plans, and general insurrections would be arranged, and the governments might thus be overthrown. By allowing nobody to travel without a passport, stating who he is, and where he came from, and where he is going, the government keep every thing under their control." "But I think the governments _ought_ to be overthrown," said Rollo, "and better governments, such as the people would like, set up in their places." "So do I," said Mr. George; "but it is not surprising that the governors themselves of these countries don't think so. They wish to retain their stations and their power, whether the people like it or not; and the passport system is a very cunning contrivance to help them do it. And then, besides, they have a very good pretext for keeping up the system." "What is their pretext?" asked Rollo. "They pretend that the object is to assist them in stopping and arresting robbers, and murderers, and other criminals who attempt to escape from one part of the country to another after committing their crimes. And the system is sometimes useful in this way, I have no doubt; though these criminals can often elude the authorities by procuring false passports." "And the plotters against the government, too, I suppose," said Rollo. "Yes," said Mr. George, "sometimes." This conversation took place while Mr. George and Rollo were walking towards the steamboat office, to take their passages to Marseilles. They arrived at the office. The clerk answered their inquiries in respect to the steamer with great politeness. The conversation was in the French language. He told them that the steamer started from Naples every evening, and that it stopped in the morning about eight o'clock at Civita Vecchia[9] to take in the passengers from Rome. It was necessary for the passengers to go from Rome to Civita Vecchia by diligence, or by post, or with a vetturino. [Footnote 9: Pronounced _Tchivita Vekkia_.] "Then there are no carriages from your office," said Mr. George. "No, sir," replied the clerk. "We take the passengers at Civita Vecchia. They find their own conveyances there." "Very well," said Mr. George. "I will take two berths in the steamer for Thursday morning. Can I see a plan of the steamer so as to select the berths?" "No, sir," said the clerk, "we have no plan of the steamer. And besides, we cannot positively promise you any berths. It depends upon how many passengers there are from Naples. The passengers from Rome take the berths that are left vacant. They take them in the order in which they take passage here." "Are there many that have taken passage before us?" asked Mr. George. "No, sir," said the clerk, "only two. Your numbers are 3 and 4." "Then, if there are more than two berths that are not occupied by the Naples passengers, we can have them?" "Yes, sir," said the clerk. "And suppose there are not more than two," asked Rollo, "what shall we do then?" "Why, then you will have sofas or cots," said the clerk. "O, that will do just as well," said Rollo. "I would as lief have a sofa or a cot as a berth." So Mr. George paid the money, and took tickets numbers 3 and 4, and then, having inquired the way to the diligence office, they bade the clerk good morning, and went away. "And now," said Mr. George, "we must go directly to the diligence office, and secure our places for Civita Vecchia. If we put it off, the places might all be taken, and then we should lose the passage money we have paid for the steamer." "Would not they pay us back again?" asked Rollo. "I am afraid not," said Mr. George. "But I think we are in season, for it is now Tuesday, and we do not sail till Thursday." On entering the diligence office, Mr. George saw one or two clerks standing behind a counter. They seemed busy talking with persons who had come in to engage places, and entering their names in great books. As soon as one of the clerks was at liberty Mr. George accosted him, saying that he wished to get two places in the diligence for Civita Vecchia on Wednesday. The clerk looked at the book, and said that all the places were taken for Wednesday, except one. "That's bad," said Mr. George. "We shall have to go down on Tuesday, then, and stay a day at Civita Vecchia. Are there any places for Tuesday?" The clerk looked, and said that every place for Tuesday was engaged. "But there is a coach on Wednesday night," he added, "that arrives at Civita Vecchia in the morning in time for the steamer." Then turning over to another place in his book, he looked at the list of names, and then told Mr. George that there was only one vacant place for Wednesday night. "Dear me, Rollo!" said Mr. George, "how unfortunate! We ought to have attended to this business before." "I'll tell you what we can do," said Rollo. "One of us can go on Wednesday morning, and the other wait here and come on in the night." "That is the only thing that we _can_ do," said Mr. George, "unless we hire a carriage to ourselves, and that would be expensive. Should you dare to go alone?" "O, yes, indeed," said Rollo. "But remember," said Mr. George, "that all the people will be speaking Italian. You will have to ride among them like a deaf and dumb boy." "Never mind that," said Rollo. "Deaf and dumb boys get along in travelling very well. Besides, I am almost sure that there will be somebody in the diligence that can speak French or English." "And which would you rather do," asked Mr. George, "go in the morning or in the evening? If you go in the morning coach, you will have to set out very early, before it is light, and then stay at Civita Vecchia, in a strange hotel, alone, all night. If you go in the evening, you can remain here, where you are acquainted, all day; but then you will have to ride alone in the night." "I would rather go in the morning coach," said Rollo. "Very well," said Mr. George. "That's what we'll do." This conversation between Mr. George and Rollo had been carried on in English; but now Mr. George turned to the clerk, and said in French that he would take the two places that were left, one in the morning coach and one in the evening coach of Wednesday. The place in the morning coach was upon the banquette. The one in the evening coach was in the coupé. Mr. George had scarcely uttered the words by which he engaged the seats, before two gentlemen came in in a hurried manner to ask for seats in the diligence for Wednesday. The clerk told them that the last of them had just been engaged. When Wednesday morning came, Rollo was awakened by the porter of the hotel knocking at his door before it was light. He got up, and opened the door a little way, and took in the candles which the porter handed to him. Mr. George had intended to get up too, and go with Rollo to the office; but Rollo particularly desired that he should not do so. "I have nothing to carry," said he, "but my little valise, and the porter will go with me to take that, and to see me safe through the streets. So that it is not at all necessary for you to go, and I would much rather not have you go." Mr. George perceived that Rollo felt a pride in taking care of himself on this occasion, and so he yielded to this request, and remained in his bed. If he had not been convinced that Rollo would be perfectly safe under the porter's care, he would of course have insisted on going himself. Rollo was soon dressed, and then going to his uncle's bedside, he shook hands with him, and bade him good by. "I shall be looking out for you at the diligence office in Civita Vecchia," said he, "when the diligence arrives to-morrow morning." So saying, he took his candle in one hand and his valise in the other, and sallied forth into the long corridor of the hotel. He had to walk a a great distance along this corridor, passing a great many doors, with a pair of boots or shoes before each of them, before he reached the head of the staircase. He descended the staircase, and at the bottom of it found the porter waiting for him. The porter had another candle, which was upon a table in the hall. He took Rollo's candle, and also the valise, and then unbolted and unlocked the front door. A sleepy-looking boy was ready to lock it again, after Rollo and the porter had gone out. So they sallied forth into the cool morning air. There were lamps burning in the streets, and in one direction, where there was an opening among the buildings, Rollo could see some faint signs of the dawn in the eastern sky. The porter could only speak Italian; so he and Rollo walked along together in silence through the solitary streets. They soon arrived at the diligence office, where there was a bright light of lanterns, and a bustle of people coming and going, and of postilions bringing out horses. The diligence was all ready before the door. The baggage, which had been brought for the purpose the night before, was all loaded. Rollo paid the porter, and then climbed up to his place on the banquette. The horses were soon harnessed in, and the diligence set off; but there were several stoppages necessary at police stations and passport offices before the journey was fairly commenced, so that the sun was rising when Rollo took his final leave of Rome. He had a very pleasant journey across the country, and arrived at Civita Vecchia about three o'clock. As he descended from the coach, a pleasant-looking man, in a sort of official costume, accosted him, asking him if he was going to Leghorn in the steamer that afternoon. The man spoke in English, though with a foreign accent. "No," said Rollo; "I am going to Marseilles to-morrow morning." "Ah! Then you go to the hotel," said the man. "This porter will take your valise, and show you the way." So saying, the man, who was a commissioner of the hotel, put Rollo under the charge of a porter, who conducted him to a large and very substantial-looking hotel near by. Rollo ascended by a flight of stone stairs into the second story of the hotel, and there engaged a room for the night, and ordered dinner. He had a very good dinner, all by himself, in a great dining room with long tables in it, where there were at the same time several other persons and parties dining. After dinner he went out to ramble about the town. He was surprised at the massive masonry of the piers, and breakwaters, and forts, that lined the shores, and at the number of vessels and steamers in the basin. He returned to the hotel in good season, and amused himself there till nine o'clock observing the different parties of travellers that were continually coming and going. The next morning he watched for the diligence from a piazza on the second story of the hotel--the diligence office being at the next door. The diligence arrived at the proper time, and Rollo called out to his uncle George when he saw him getting out from the coupé. This was at seven o'clock; at eight Mr. George and Rollo embarked, with a great many others, in a small boat, to go on board the steamer, and at half past eight the paddles of the steamer began to revolve, and to bear them rapidly away from the shores of Italy out over the blue waters of the Mediterranean, on the route to Marseilles. 
25855	----	STRAY STUDIES FROM ENGLAND AND ITALY. BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN. LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1876. LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. PREFACE. I have to thank the Editors of _Macmillan's Magazine_ and the _Saturday Review_ for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short History.' CONTENTS PAGE A BROTHER OF THE POOR 1 SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE:-- I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT 31 II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE 44 III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA 59 IV. THE WINTER RETREAT 71 V. SAN REMO 79 THE POETRY OF WEALTH 93 LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS 107 CHILDREN BY THE SEA 167 THE FLORENCE OF DANTE 181 BUTTERCUPS 198 ABBOT AND TOWN 211 HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS 241 ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY 257 TWO VENETIAN STUDIES:-- I. VENICE AND ROME 289 II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO 300 THE DISTRICT VISITOR 313 THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD 329 THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS 359 CAPRI 383 CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS 395 THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS 414 A BROTHER OF THE POOR. There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another, "with a ragged edge." It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet, setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a "leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its bound in that of Victoria. Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St. Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney," as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and crime. There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories of one whom it is hard to forget. A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in 1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _métier_;" but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation. From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to be in turn repelled by it also." I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What is my work?" The answer to this question was found both within and without the questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that, like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to face. His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice. He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand. "All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him; we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys. All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates." So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to be inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival. It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself, and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced down on the parish from time to time and threw about meat and blankets till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already doing in the neighbourhood. It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors. There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at "theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable; but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability. Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter. Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies" of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors. But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy, constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to them the stories of the Gospels. It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his operations. There was very little in his manner to show his sense of the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says, laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and _ugliness_ of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the sight of God and His works,--a position in which the villager never is." But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity--its uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the fruits of all this--improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and disease." Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to expose" Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws, and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our indifference." The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains; but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:--"First we must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be taken up and kept at penal work--not for one morning, as now, but for a month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry. Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the labouring classes themselves. But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe, the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades' unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world. His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London. The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket, filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_ lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the material but to the spiritual side of man. "What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered, "Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world. It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment; the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid there is, save about £20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of this life would be within manageable limits." I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists, and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them most was that they had been able to save at all. It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften even into tears as they think of Edward Denison. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT. In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England, but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas, crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the little Britains of the South. Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period, to fragments of mediæval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival. Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles. Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want. The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads. But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath. Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows. And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the Estrelles. Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first penetrated into the West. The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars, transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhône and the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Cæsarius, and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors; the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus," is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly waged within its bounds. Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi, inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment. The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low, gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne. There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediæval existence. The Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work, through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat, and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself. Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes, which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of their lords. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso, the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home, he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose "the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent feeling of disappointment and deception. But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring. From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home, and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!" It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline, revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet "pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands. The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at. Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes little difference in the year's account. It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man. When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the café. Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle, and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. An Italian doctor or an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand, have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads. The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has come. Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony, the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels, from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls' head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the white mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky. The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none of the contrivances to make people laugh--the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun, and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his face or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading, a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and everybody is as happy as possible. And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home. Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk. The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage. He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he goes with the sunshine. It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box. Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes to give a good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and national character find their illustration in a country carnival. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA. The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow, make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:-- What Roman strength Turbia showed In ruin, by the mountain road; How like a gem, beneath, the city Of little Monaco basking glowed. Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen, juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present. Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect uniformity of its existence. The town from which Cæsar sailed to Genoa and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day; he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the forefront of the battle of Crécy. The massacre of these forces drove him home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs, soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the Grimaldis is one of treason and blood--brother murdering brother, nephew murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of daughters outraged by their master's lust. Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work, its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order, while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world. But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord. There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens, rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and its _cuisine_ claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant café; the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement, the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards. The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night. Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on; sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere. Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down. But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener, and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary, the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette. But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order. The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one. The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for "reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making money by an ingenious dodge. Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and "constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual aristocratic fringe--the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than these two little groups of the fools of half a continent. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. IV. THE WINTER RETREAT. It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp, abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The "lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life. Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the _habitué_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all. England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine to-morrow. But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them "good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise. The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft, conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb. No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father, against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home, fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no "evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset. The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat, a little letter-writing, and an early to bed. It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives, donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa at £150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there. But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives, and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients with his nod. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. V. SAN REMO. San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of San Remo. What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep, the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days. What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below. But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden. The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean, rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand colours even in the gloomiest weather. The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo." It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war, or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa. This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts. The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens. Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in 1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation, rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years. The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The "Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for the construction of vessels for the French navy. Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills. But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archæological interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne. The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes the charm of San Remo. THE POETRY OF WEALTH. There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into oblivion, the sight of Château d'If as it rises glowing from the blue waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of wealth. It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans, and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time. There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after generation which require nothing for their realization but the appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us remember what a wonderful amount of hope and anticipation has been thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews. Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of Judæa could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the peace for a midland county. But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those, we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer. Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of international politics. Already those who come in contact with the big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of "armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold." Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief, and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in the mud of November before the loss was replaced. It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an important factor in political questions. Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England the political power which such a national employment of their wealth would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions, and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor. It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost, and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward along the river to the gate. The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place. What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm. Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of the People. Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over Thames. From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over against each other on either side the water. With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel. It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the Church that finds its centre there. And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth. Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance. For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays the bill." But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it down. It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction, but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating step," as men say--with his scholastic formulæ. What he looked for soon came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to the Church. But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But "Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the chapel where he had battled for his life. The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown. The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept away. It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still, impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning. Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see, had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the table of Warham. It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall (his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him. "How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new translation of the 'Iphigenia.' Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table, in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop Warham. Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and, in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins, with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for one--indeed, he is only _too_ prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own. With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth--as we have said--had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all, the degradation of those solemn influences which the Primacy embodies to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors. Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!" Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall and to hear that on the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child. "Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no hindrance to me." The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before. If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm. "Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block. Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this helplessness of terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser, bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. One who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord, are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had no doubt disobeyed it. But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to hear your Grace speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his fellow-commissioners to break up the session. Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections with a contemptuous "You do use us thus to be seen a common lawyer." "Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their slow length along in chapel and hall. At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions, without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the officers to the Marshalsea. From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation, the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion, wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him, the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on to Laud. The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft, it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, and the Codices that bear his name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this century by Dr. Carlyle. The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister. The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring. Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was in fact undone. Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of 'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the Reformation had done. "I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table, the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel. High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy prognostications still exists among the relics in the library--a quarry of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand, "Memorand. Ecclesiæ de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure combustæ sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus." The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale, the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King. Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating 'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge; a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is in his upper study--it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that redeem so much in his life--"to see some manuscripts which I was sending to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn, says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will, the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day (Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my house. For which I bless God and them." So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained. Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May 1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally, to "unkennel that fox," his foe. Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective "the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field. The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century, with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder, Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament, convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the University. When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical" architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned"; times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment, for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:--"Most of the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious, till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'" It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph. No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away. Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom--they were concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered. He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare the see vacant. For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain in his house, though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic, Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him. "O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I live again." With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were trodden under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier expectations--that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church of France. From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library. The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of its broad, high brow and prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard, concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his 'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day--to Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the documents in his charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694. But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to Wharton's time ever been made. The first volume contained the chief monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the Revolution. The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St. Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at Canterbury:--"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave way, his last hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student life:--"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit; plura moliebatur." The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere "pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and of art. Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits which spring from this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth. Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of theirs--a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply. CHILDREN BY THE SEA. Autumn brings its congresses--scientific, ecclesiastical, archæological--but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore. And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children, demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp between the cliffs and the sea. It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from endless dressings--dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch, dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert--an escape from fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea, dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books, they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of the day. The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness, its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is the endless watching for the ships, the first peep at the little dot on the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag, the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to. There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power. The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping high over the pier and ships tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea. It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake and spade, and dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays along the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have a mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which allows you to witness the very moment when the dyke is broken and the sea admitted into basin and canal, or the yet more ecstatic moment when the Union Jack waves over the completed castle. Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight, the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the fresh advance and defiance--this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display of stout little legs, the urchins wage their mimic warfare with the sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed, hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea. But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if they could. Its members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and besiege their mothers for promises that their future life shall be that of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue shirts, and affect as much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each vessel that passes; they come home with a store of naval phrases which are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and watch the waves leaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every ship in the offing is a living thing to them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed. There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box. One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come out of the water! It is pleasant to listen to their prattle as they stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom. Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman, the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless seas. It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up, autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea. But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink, count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over. They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks, and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn finds them again children by the sea. THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's." Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury, while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crécy to equip his armies with Florentine gold. We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the Provençal troubadours half a century before the Florentine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna was already in decay. The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the naïve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of Liège is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino:-- "On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them, they had received no little damage; but such was not the will of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop, who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill. Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part. Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity." "Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence. And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the vendetta. What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy" and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled. The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her," said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple. The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty of his blood." Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:-- "Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing, prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers, full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning." Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:-- "Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the land seemed all his own." He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 'Inferno.' From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day. On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen an Emperor at all. But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city, daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300; both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa Trinità is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren? What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground. Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can know. BUTTERCUPS. It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn, and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way. All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid, chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon, from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of every hound in the kennels. It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter, and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup. It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene. But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes," replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du Goût_. Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother. The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins, grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and sisterhood are very real things indeed. Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it; but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her, and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again. Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes, and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday. But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood. And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the laugh of the buttercup. ABBOT AND TOWN. The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediæval names to the bulk of Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house. Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national chronicle was ever penned in its _scriptorium_ such as that which flings lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly, imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the pages of Mr. Carlyle. It is however to an incident in this abbot's life, somewhat later than most of the events told so vividly in 'Past and Present,' that I wish to direct my readers' attention. A good many eventful years had passed by since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King Henry; it was from the German prison where Richard was lying captive that the old abbot was returning, sad at heart, to his stately house. His way lay through the little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey walls, along the narrow little street that led to the stately gate-tower, now grey with the waste of ages, but then fresh and white from the builder's hand. It may have been in the shadow of that gateway that a group of townsmen stood gathered to greet the return of their lord, but with other business on hand besides kindly greeting. There was a rustling of parchment as the alderman unfolded the town-charters, recited the brief grants of Abbots Anselm and Ording and Hugh, and begged from the Lord Abbot a new confirmation of the liberties of the town. As Sampson paused a moment--he was a prudent, deliberate man in all his ways--he must have read in the faces of all the monks who gathered round him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town--for security of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts--the simple, efficient liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals--the seals of Anselm and Ording and Hugh. "Only the same words as your predecessor used, Lord Abbot, simply the same words"--and then came the silvery jingle of the sixty marks that the townsmen offered for their lord's assent. A moment more and the assent was won, "given pleasantly too," the monks commented bitterly, as "murmuring and grunting," to use their own emphatic phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter-house. But murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old abbot's imperious will. "Let the brethren murmur," he flashed out when one of his friends told him there was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the townsmen; "let them blame me, and say among themselves what they will. I am their father and abbot. So long as I live I will not give mine honour to another." The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to his own finer sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Churchman read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. He had just stood face to face in his German prison with one who, mere reckless soldier as he seemed, had read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition of municipal life. When, busy with the preparations for his Eastern journey, the King sold charter after charter to the burgesses of his towns, it seemed a mere outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying out of his own bitter scoff that he would have sold London itself could he have found a purchaser. But the hard cynical words of the Angevins were veils which they flung over political conceptions too large for the comprehension of their day. Richard was in fact only following out the policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, which was to find its fullest realization under John. The silent growth and elevation of the English people was the real work of their reigns, and in this work the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed and despised, even by the historian of to-day, they had alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free parliament, the right of equal justice by one's peers,--it was these that the towns had brought safely across the ages of Norman rule, these that by the mouth of traders and shop-keepers asked recognition from the Angevin kings. No liberty was claimed in the Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters which he flung back to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know; but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his mitred counsellor to have noted well--the silent revolution which was passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town. It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds, and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details, in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn. It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds, to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them. Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll, for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals. First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn, at his hands. By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"--as Jocelyn grumbles about just such an unnoted change,--by usage, by omission, by downright forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds, remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm. The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough and inadequate as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is." The scandal at last moved the convent itself to action. The monks were divided in opinion, but the saner part determined that their tenants "should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The cellarer's court was abolished; the franchise of the town was extended to the rural possessions of the abbey; the farmers "came to the toll-house, and were written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny." A moral revolution like this is notable at any time, but a change wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes. To him, we can hardly doubt, the revolt of the town-wives, for instance, was more than a mere scream of angry women. The "rep-silver," the commutation for that old service of reaping in the abbot's fields, had ceased to be exacted from the richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort refused to pay. Then the cellarer's men came seizing gate and stool by way of distress till the women turning out, distaff in hand, put them ignominiously to flight. Sampson had his own thoughts about the matter, saw perhaps that the days of inequality were over, that in the England that was coming there would be one law for rich and poor. At any rate he quietly compromised the question for twenty shillings a year. The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who lies there," muttered an angry monk, as he pointed to the tomb in the choir, "would not have done this for five hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should capitulate to a mob of infuriated town-wives was too much for the patience of the brotherhood. All at once they opened their eyes to the facts which had been going on unobserved for so many long years. There was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market space, settlers squatting on their own acre with no leave asked, aldermen who were once only the abbey servants taking on themselves to give permission for this and that, tradesmen thriving and markets increasing, and the abbey never one penny the richer for it all. It was quite time that Abbot Sampson should be roused to do his duty, and to do it in very sharp fashion indeed. However we will let one of the monks tell his own tale in his own gossiping way:-- "In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St. Edmund. The customary rent of £40 which it pays never rises higher. That this is so we imputed solely to the conduct of the townspeople, who are continually building new shops and stalls in the market-place without any leave of the convent" (abbey-land though it was). "The only permission, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, an officer who himself was of old times a mere servant of our sacrist, and bound to pay into his hands the yearly rent of the town, and removable at his pleasure." Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; but into the justice or injustice of it the burgesses refused sturdily to enter. When they were summoned to make answer they pleaded simple possession. "They were in the King's justice, and no answer would they make concerning tenements which they and their fathers had held in peace for a year and a day." Such answer would in fact, they added, be utterly contrary to the freedom of the town. No plea could have been legally more complete as none could have been more provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon the abbot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. Then they retired angrily into the chapter-house, and waited in a sort of white heat to hear what the abbot would do. This is what Sampson did. He quietly bade the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just like one of ourselves, and told us privily that he would right us as far as he could, but that if he were to act it must be by law. Be the case right or wrong, he did not dare eject without trial his free men from land and property which they had held year after year; in fact, if he did so, he would at once fall into the King's justice. At this moment in came the townsfolk into the chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter for an annual quit rent of a hundred shillings. This offer we refused. We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some other abbot's time we might get all back again." Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"--in simple town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear! And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate, half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates. Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions, mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327. On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds, headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at £10,000, £500 worth of coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these the town could never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from Pope and King, interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new lawyer class, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and yet more formidable documents. The religious houses, untroubled by the waste of war, had profited more than any landowners by the general increase of wealth. They had become great proprietors, money-lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had banished from the land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who had not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nicholas Fowke and a band of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of 500 marks and fifty casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to discharge a debt of £22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in a bond for no less a sum than £10,000. The new spirit of commercial enterprise, joined with the troubles of the time, seems to have thrown the whole community into the abbot's hands. It was from the troubles of the time that the burghers looked for escape; and the general disturbance which accompanied the deposition of Edward II. seems to have quickened their longing into action. Their revolt soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison in the town the trembling prior and his monks were brought back to their own chapter-house. The spoil of their registry--the papal bulls and the royal charters, the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen--were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob, they were forced to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a guild to the town, and a full release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined house. But all control over the town was gone. Through spring and summer no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that the abbot was in London, appealing for aid to King and Court, and the whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which had become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the neighbouring villages the priests marched at the head of their flocks to this new crusade. Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed, the wild mass of men, women, and children rushed again on the abbey. For four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered, whilst gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry, went up in flames. From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude swept away too the granges and barns of the abbey farms. The monks had become vast agricultural proprietors: 1,000 horses, 120 oxen, 200 cows, 300 bullocks, 300 hogs, 10,000 sheep were driven off for spoil, and as a last outrage, the granges and barns were burnt to the ground. £60,000, the justiciaries afterwards decided, would hardly cover the loss. Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, there never was a time in English history when government stood with folded hands before a scene such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer neglected; a royal force quelled the riot and exacted vengeance for this breach of the King's peace. Thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the village priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. Twenty were at once summarily hung. But with this first vigorous effort at repression the danger seemed again to roll away. Nearly 200 persons remained indeed under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the King's courts. At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous outrage. Out of patience and irritated by repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed, bound and shaved him, and carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street, lest his hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity offered for his shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope himself, levelled their excommunications against the perpetrators of this daring outrage in vain. The prison of their victim was at last discovered; he was released and brought home. But the lesson seems to have done good. The year 1332 saw a concordat arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages assessed by the royal justiciaries, a sum enormous now but incredible then, were remitted, the outlawry was reversed, the prisoners were released. On the other hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters which had been extorted from the trembling monks were formally cancelled. In other words, the old process of legal oppression was left to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall see, crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found themselves in a mesh of legal claims--old services revived, old dues enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk. Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, the Breton Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist, "with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords; with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong, reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and with pauperism to create that hatred of class to class which hangs like a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose, as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk, in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John. He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.[1] Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to bury it--so ran the sentence of his murderers--while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side. Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them. They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do more, the great crowd ebbed away. Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason; the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury, the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and insult by imprisonment and fine. The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle, the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks' nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St. Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a pleasanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for simple self-government. FOOTNOTES: [1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum prædictæ villæ de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti." HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs. Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves. They are forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain. He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first catch the man himself. There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in a run through the Alps than to see how true the various peoples among their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of the mule-track, the German stops at the châlet in the pine-forest. It is only at the Alpine _table d'hôte_, with a proud consciousness of being seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains, and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson, the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden sitting alone in the rock-clefts and reviewing the losses and gains of the last season--all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real native peculiarities of Englishmen. In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English education and on the amount of information about other countries which it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm. The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come, the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's "decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in their life--form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no fog. But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or the OEggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the rope, what places has he done before?--a thousand questions of this sort are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner. The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The hero stops his dinner politely, and shows her the new little box of lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides, marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this particular peak. What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature, which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent description of the _arête_. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand feet clear." The whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught. Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must come. At last there is a distant _jodel_, and in an hour or so the hero arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words of 'Peaks and Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then, like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud, too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces "Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine hotel. At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board ship where the major, unversed in such matters, began with the churching service, and ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her "lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement, and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires for the sermon which--prescient of his doom--he has slipped into his valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a fine but wandering bass, catching an English word here and there as he goes along. The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more. His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a British parson in regions above the clouds. ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY. In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity, its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of Rome. From beginning to end the Æneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide peace of the world beneath its sway. But the Æneid is no mere outburst of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in welding the nations into a new human race. The Æneid is a song of the future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who by self-mastery had learned to be master of men. It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the Æneid. Filled as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem draws both these impressions together in the figure of Æneas. Æneas is the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to this "end" that the wanderings of Æneas, like the labours of consul and dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the Æneid. Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem." "Italiam quæro patriam" is the key-note of the Æneid, but the Quest of Æneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor," he pleads as Dido turns from him in the Elysian Fields with eyes of speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore or the love-tortures of the Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that Æneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career. But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in the horror of its capture. Æneas comes before us the survivor of an immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends, not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his "moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu, fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from land to land. "Sail where you will," he cries to his pilot, "one land is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. Æneas is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man. "Italiam magnam Grynæus Apollo, Italiam Lyciæ jussere capessere sortes. Hic amor, hæc patria est!" It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of "piety." It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of its hero. Æneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of Æneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there: courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship, family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and the weak. In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded Æneas with the ties and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:-- "Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp, Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp, As wind or slumber light." Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife, but father and household accompany Æneas. Life, he tells them when they bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the "commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with Æneas, and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friendship is as warm and constant as his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death, but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the passionate longing of Æneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy. But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the character of Æneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child, like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the Æneid. Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans," brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the portrait of Æneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his final triumph, Æneas "incusat voce Latinum; Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi." Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples who are destined to be one. It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of Æneas, the struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of Æneas and Dido. Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the Æneid as a whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader and the Tyrian queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to Æneas but to Turnus. It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero. Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious, and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to the character of Æneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for noble ends, passion--the revolt of the individual self against the world's order--seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman with all her loveliness wanted to him the grandeur of man's higher constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper foemina." Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of Æneas as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of classic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of Æneas and not Æneas with the eyes of Dido. When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells. Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a queen, as a Dian over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene, distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and assures them of shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like Æneas, is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland. Like Æneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome. When Æneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from his view. He is weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam moenia surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance of his fame which he gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly asunder, and Dido and Æneas stand face to face. Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of Æneas and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity speaks in the first words of the hero,[6] and the reply of Dido strikes the same sympathetic note.[7] But the fervour of passion is soon to supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite episode of the Æneid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his fiery longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw together. The gratitude of Æneas is still at first subordinate to his quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra est"), it is still generosity and not passion. Passion is born in the long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido listens to the "Tale of Troy." The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the Æneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and the divine end to which the fates were guiding Æneas, closes in fact with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone. The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of Æneas to the Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8] steals subtly on the graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of pity, of fancy, of reverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she showers her questions as one that could never know enough. "Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa." Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychæus seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands. But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like "misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony. She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change in Æneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve. All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of Æneas as the storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her through the streets like a Mænad in the nightly orgies of Cithæron; she flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns with a woman's delicacy to protest against her own violence, "heu, furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little respite, if but for a few hours.[10] She pleads her very loneliness; she catches as it were from Æneas the thought of the boy whose future he had pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity. Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet Æneas in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays Æneas not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day." Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne Æneas to the Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, hæc patria est." Æneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part of his memory as of the things that were.[11] Æneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes "majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the Æneid reflects the terror of that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality, the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered. It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness. It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods" were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world. A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it. "Dî tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti, Præmia digna ferant!" The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of Æneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine order. Man was greater than his fate:-- "Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur, Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est." There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which Æneas addresses himself to his final combat:-- "Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis." But the "dîs aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid. We close it as we close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of Æneas, but his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of Æneas becomes Rome. FOOTNOTES: [2] "Dextræ se parvus Iulus Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis." "His steps scarce matching with my stride." Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children. [3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari, Quem regno Hesperiæ fraudo et fatalibus arvis." [4] "Quibus Hector ab oris Expectate venis?" [5] "Cur dextræ jungere dextram Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?" [6] "O sola infandos Trojæ miserata labores." [7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco." [8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella." [9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammæ." [10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere." [11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissæ." TWO VENETIAN STUDIES. I. VENICE AND ROME. It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water, from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west, where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the mosaics of St. Mark. Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate, its people, its government were not what government or people or patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed, or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral. Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum." It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary, bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State ten centuries before him. It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its decay. Elsewhere the history of mediæval Italy sprang from the difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors, between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna, were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediæval sense of the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted masonry. Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles. Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities, as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello. The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans, rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.' TWO VENETIAN STUDIES. II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO. The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less, her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France, of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible. On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese. The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas, and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue, while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the dæmoniac whose cure forms the subject of the picture. But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On the right the houses are wholly of mediæval type, the flat marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch, while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a "note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings of mediæval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East. Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the "little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries. Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty masterpieces and the great mediæval church of the Frari which stands beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age, its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards. Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a classification of mankind founded on æsthetic refinement and intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men. Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting, as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints, priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The "want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy, unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more. The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret. What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form, throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening, lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so shameful a fall? THE DISTRICT VISITOR. It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter" she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master" himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor. His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him alone. Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But, fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?" are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family. Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace, and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on her giddiness and love of finery. The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble. But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire, by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of "Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices. Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs. D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The "five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice, remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions, to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet. It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever. She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts, and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist. No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood. The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed. The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary, that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms. The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor, in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases "to be visited this morning." The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry, but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune; their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace. All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home," and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods; for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District Visitor. THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is best known as the church of the University, and the church of St. Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police. The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body which reigned supreme within its walls. Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation. Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor. The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of Ælfred. But though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence. But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way. Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons of St. George. But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort; it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a subject. At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of "Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with "Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College. With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research. A medical school which we find established there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew. His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls. The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly, had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac. Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames, broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George, frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its extent. The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and Æthelwold on their plunderer, the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground, piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face, and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell, the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle. Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland. "Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter, and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St. Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer to Christchurch. The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount"; but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford. With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of the town, on the border between the England that remained to the West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about. The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of Æthelred the Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than Æthelred, and his conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties. Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government. From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The "bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead" so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow, and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom; what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty." In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined. It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhône and the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign Cæsar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediæval baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of the Cæsars in the plain of the Po. Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided, the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote, their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown. It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford. Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the "penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust. THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south. There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendée there is a continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M. Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers. To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through Anjou. There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King René. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou. To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St. Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons. But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archæologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St. Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it, buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St. Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain. Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the gardens of the Museum. But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund. Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons. The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church. Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the original Evêché in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings. The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster. But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling. There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely archæological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of the objects of interest which it contains. The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river, at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St. Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power. It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our Angevin Kings. It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him. No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse, its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church, which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins. "From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archæology--it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archæologist; but these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of the Kings. CAPRI. I. We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful. Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island, dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now, alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of the cliff. The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of Castiglione with its crown of mediæval towers, lead up the eye to the huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of cloud. Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone; slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus; olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast where the haze hides the temples of Pæstum; at another the Bay of Naples opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across twenty miles of clear air. The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of "studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the archæologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer, the ruins of mediæval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and Jerusalem. For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals," cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and "rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is, has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap; coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and tempest and the Madonna's help--make up group after group of Caprese life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around. Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day. The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air--the dust of the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing--may perhaps account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is, that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar. Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as the wind veers round to the west. CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. II. Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of _débris_ that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century. The main archæological interest of the island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The smallness of the space--for the lower part of the island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for believing that anything of importance was added after the death of Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus. We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of Cumæ however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city" rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome. The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its shores. It is with the name of the second Cæsar rather than of the first that Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople, became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate, Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it. What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning to Rome. Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisæ, the white line of Neapolis, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiæ--the drunkards wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which strewed the water--were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on, the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground was mainly of his own creation. It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement. By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Pæstum, runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house. In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiæ; it was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty almost perfect arches. The importance of these remains has long been understood by the archæologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque. A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by _débris_, and two semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely pathetic that it must tell its own tale:--"Welcome into Hades, O noble deities--dwellers in the Stygian land--welcome me too, most pitiful of men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth year, and--wretched I--I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more." Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses. Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the "Insula Capreæ cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century. The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income, the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and the two mediæval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction. But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to give a special archæological interest to the little rock-refuge of Capri. THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS. III. The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit, women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist; he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn; and the Sunday before they start--generally one of the last Sundays in January--serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the "Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic, wonderful"--somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic land--comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the "Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore, the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island. And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have 'bombi'--not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of the Municipio." On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector, but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore, and she is _my_ protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore; and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries of terror and delight. Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands, the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one resource is the coral-fishery. The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it, the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence, in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress" breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments--the "spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of pearls; the gold chain or lacétta, worn fold upon fold round the neck; the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane" in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as he leads his bride to her home. THE END. LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN _With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d._ MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. "I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it with genuine admiration. It bears marks of great ability in many ways. There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and arranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but chief of all a remarkable grasp of the subject--many-sided as it is in its unity and integrity--which makes it a work of real historical genius. I am sure I wish it all the success it deserves; and you are quite at liberty to give my opinion about it to any one who asks it."--_Extract from Letter of W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford._ "I think Mr. Green's 'Short History of the English People' admirably suited for students in the Universities and for the higher classes in schools. The object of the book, that of combining the history of the people with the history of the kingdom, is most successfully carried out, especially in the earlier part. It gives, I think, in the main, a true and accurate picture of the general course of English history. It displays throughout a firm hold on the subject, and a singularly wide range of thought and sympathy. As a composition, too, the book is clear, forcible, and brilliant. It is the most truly original book of the kind that I ever saw."--_Extract from Letter of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D., &c. &c._ "Rightly taken, the History of England is one of the grandest human stories, and Mr. Green has so taken it that his book should delight the general reader quite as much as it delights the student."--_Extract from Letter of Professor Henry Morley._ "To say that Mr. Green's book is better than those which have preceded it, would be to convey a very inadequate impression of its merits. It stands alone as the one general history of the country, for the sake of which all others, if young and old are wise, will be speedily and surely set aside. It is perhaps the highest praise that can be given to it, that it is impossible to discover whether it was intended for the young or for the old. The size and general look of the book, its vividness of narration, and its avoidance of abstruse argument would place it among school-books; but its fresh and original views, and its general historical power, are only to be appreciated by those who have tried their own hand at writing history, and who know the enormous difficulties of the task."--MR. SAMUEL R. GARDINER _in the Academy._ "We know of no record of the whole drama of English history to be compared with it. We know of none that is so distinctly a work of genius.... Mr. Green's volume is a really wonderful production. There is a freshness and originality breathing from one end to the other, a charm of style, and a power, both narrative and descriptive, which lifts it altogether out of the class of books to which at first sight it might seem to belong. The range too of subject, and the capacity which the writer shows of dealing with so many different sides of English history, witness to powers of no common order.... The Early History is admirably done; the clear and full narrative which Mr. Green is able to put together of the earliest days of the English people is a wonderful contrast to the confused and proe-scientific talk so common in most of the books which it is to be hoped that Mr. Green's volume will displace."--_Pall Mall Gazette._ +----------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the | | original document have been preserved. | | | | Typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | Page 62 Créçy changed to Crécy | | Page 184 Creçy changed to Crécy | | Page 186 Liége changed to Liège | | Page 230 enterprize changed to enterprise | | Page 237 liker changed to like | | Page 243 Eigi changed to Rigi | | Page 291 adminstrative changed to administrative | | Page 302 immedietely changed to immediately | | Page 374 connexion changed to connection | | Page 404 Apennine changed to Apennines | | Page 419 maccaroni changed to macaroni | | Page 421 maccaroni changed to macaroni | +----------------------------------------------------+ 
27873	----	THE SPIRIT OF ROME BY VERNON LEE. CONTENTS. Explanatory and Apologetic I. First Return to Rome II. A Pontifical Mass at the Sixtine Chapel III. Second Return to Rome IV. Ara Coeli V. Villa Cæsia VI. The Pantheon VII. By the Cemetery SPRING 1895. I. Villa Livia II. Colonna Gallery III. San Saba IV. S. Paolo Fuori V. Pineta Torlonia SPRING 1897. I. Return at Midnight II. Villa Madama III. From Valmontone to Olevano IV. From Olevano to Subiaco V. Acqua Marcia VI. The Sacra Speco VII. The Valley of the Anio VIII. Vicovaro IX. Tor Pignattara X. Villa Adriana XI. S. Lorenzo Fuori XII. On the Alban Hills XIII. Maundy Thursday XIV. Good Friday XV. Asphodels XVI. Nettuno XVII. Torre Astura SPRING 1899. I. The Walls II. Palazzo Cenci III. Monte Cavo IV. A River God V. The Pantheon VI. Santi Quattro Coronati VII. Beyond Pont Molle SPRING 1900. I. Outside the Gates II. Latter-Day Rome III. Santa Balbina IV. The Catacombs V. The Rione Monti VI. Amphoræ VII. Mass at the Lateran VIII. Stage Illusion IX. Santa Maria in Cosmedin X. Inscriptions XI. Palazzo Orsini, formerly Savelli SPRING 1901. I. Quomodo Sedet II. Villa Falconieri III. Porta Latina SPRING 1902. I. The Rubbish-Heap II. The Excavations III. The Meet IV. V. Monte Mario VI. Via Ostiense VII. Palace Yards SPRING 1903. I. Return to Rome II. Palm Sunday III. Mondragone IV. San Saba V. A Convent VI. Colonna Gardens VII. Palo VIII. Fiumicino IX. Via Ardeatina X. San Teodoro WINTER 1904. I. Palo II. A Walk at Dusk III. Tusculum IV. St. Peter's V. The Crypts VI. San Stefano VII. Via Latina SPRING 1905. I. Rome again Postscript THE SPIRIT OF ROME. LEAVES FROM A DIARY. DIS MANIBVS SACRVM. * * * * * TO ALL THE FRIENDS LIVING AND DEAD REAL AND IMAGINARY MORTAL AND IMMORTAL WHO HAVE MADE ROME WHAT IT IS TO ME. EXPLANATORY AND APOLOGETIC. I was brought up in Rome, from the age of twelve to that of seventeen, but did not return there for many years afterwards. I discovered it anew for myself, while knowing all its sites and its details; discovered, that is to say, its meaning to my thoughts and feelings. Hence, in all my impressions, a mixture of familiarity and of astonishment; a sense, perhaps answering to the reality, that Rome--it sounds a platitude--is utterly different from everything else, and that we are therefore in different relations to it. Probably for this reason I have found it impossible to use up, in what I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the colour of one mood. And whatever may have happened there to my small person has left no trace in what I have written. What I meet in Rome is Rome itself. Rome is alive (only the more so for its occasional air of death), and one is too busy loving, hating, being harassed or soothed, and ruminating over its contradictions, to remember much of the pains and joys which mere mortals have given one in its presence. A similar reason has prevented all attempt to rewrite or alter these notes. One cannot sit down and attempt a faithful portrait of Rome; at least I cannot. And the value of these notes to those who love Rome, or are capable of loving it, is that they express, in however stammering a manner, what I said to myself about Rome; or, perhaps, if the phrase is not presumptuous, what Rome, day after day and year after year, has said to me. _Autumn_, 1903. THE SPIRIT OF ROME. I. FIRST RETURN TO ROME. Strange that in the confusion of impressions, not new mainly, but oddly revived (the same things transposed by time into new keys), my most vivid impression should be of something so impersonal, so unimportant, as an antique sarcophagus serving as base to a mediæval tomb. Impressions? Scarcely. My mind seems like an old blotting-book, full of fragments of sentences, of words suggesting something, which refuses to absorb any more ink. How I had forgotten them, and how well I know them, these little details out of the past! the darkish sponge-like holes in the travertine, the reversed capital on the Trinità dei Monti steps, the caryatides of the Stanza dell' Incendio, the scowl or smirk of the Emperors and philosophers at the Capitol: a hundred details. I seem to have been looking at nothing else these fifteen years, during which they have all been absolutely forgotten. The very Campagna to-day, driving out beyond Cecilia Metella, little as I knew it before, seems quite familiar, leaves no impression. Yes, the fences tied like that with reeds, overtopped by sprouting elders, the fat weeds on wall and tomb, the undulations of sere green plain, the white snow-masses floating, as it were, in the blue of the sky; the straddling bits of aqueduct, the lumps of masonry. Am I utterly and for ever spoilt for this? Has it given me so much that it can never give me any more?--that the sight of Arezzo and its towers beneath the blueness and the snow of Falterona, the green marshy valley, with the full Tiber issuing from beneath the last Umbrian Mountains, seemed so much more poignant than all this. Is it possible that Rome in three days can give me nothing more vivid and heady than the thought of that sarcophagus, let into the wall of the Ara Coeli, its satyrs and cupids and grapes and peacocks surmounted by the mosaic crosses, the mediæval inscriptions of Dominus Pandulphus Sabelli? ROME, _February_ 1888. II. A PONTIFICAL MASS AT THE SIXTINE CHAPEL. I never knew so many hours pass so pleasantly as in this tribune, surrounded by those whispering, elbowing, plunging, veiled women in black, under the wall painted with Perugino's Charge of St. Peter, and dadoed with imitation Spanish leather, superb gold and blue scrolls of Rhodian pomegranate pattern and Della Rovere shields with the oak-tree. My first impression is of the magnificence of all these costumes, the Swiss with their halberts, the Knights of Malta, the Chamberlains like so many Rubenses or Frans Halses, the Prelates and cardinals, each with his little train of purple priestlets; particularly of the perfection in wearing these clothes, something analogous to the brownish depth of the purple, the carnation vividness of the scarlet, due to all these centuries of tradition. At the same time, an impression of the utter disconnectedness of it all, the absence of all spirit or meaning; this magnificence being as the turning out of a great rag bag of purple and crimson and gold, of superb artistic things all out of place, useless, patternless, and almost odious: pageantry, ritual, complicated Palestrina music, crowded Renaissance frescoes, that huge Last Judgment, that mass of carefully grouped hideous nudities, brutal, butcher-like, on its harsh blue ground; that ceiling packed with superb pictures and figures, symmetrical yet at random, portentous arm and thighs and shoulders hitting one as it were in the eye. The papal procession, white robes, gold candlesticks, a wizen old priest swaying, all pale with sea-sickness, above the crowd, above the halberts and plumes, between the white ostrich fans, and dabbing about benedictions to the right and left. The shuffle of the people down onto their knees, and scuffle again onto their feet, the shrill reading of the Mass, and endless unfinished cadences, overtopped by unearthly slightly sickening quaverings of the choir; the ceaseless moving about of all this mass of black backs, veils, cloaks, outlines of cheek and ear presenting every now and then among the various kinds of rusty black; no devotion, no gravity, no quiet anywhere, among these creatures munching chocolates and adjusting opera-glasses. M.P.'s voice at my ear, now about Longus and Bonghi's paganism, now about the odiousness of her neighbour who won't let her climb on her seat, the dreadful grief of not seeing the Cardinal's tails, the wonderfulness of Christianity having come out of people like the Apostles (I having turned out Gethsemane in St. Matthew in the Gospel which she brought, together with a large supply of chocolate and the Fioretti di S. Francesco), the ugliness of the women, &c. &c. And meanwhile the fat pink profile perdu, the _toupé_ of grey hair like powder of a colossal soprano sways to and fro fatuously over the gold grating above us. All this vaguely on for a space of time seeming quite indeterminate. Little by little, however, a change came over things, or my impression of them. Is it that one's body being well broken, one's mind becomes more susceptible of homogeneous impressions? I know not. But the higher light, the incense, fills the space above all those black women's heads, over the tapers burning yellow on the carved marble balustrades with the Rovere arms, with a luminous grey vagueness; the blue background of the _Last Judgment_ grows into a kind of deep hyacinthine evening sky, on which twist and writhe like fleshy snakes the group of demons and damned, the naked Christ thundering with His empty hand among them; the voices moving up and down, round and round in endless unended cadences, become strange instruments (all sense of register and vocal cords departing), unearthly harps and bugles and double basses, rasping often and groaning like a broken-down organ, above which warbles the hautboy quaver of the sopranos. And the huge things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, and hang uneasily on arches, and strain themselves wearily on brackets, dreary, magnificent, full of inexplicable feelings all about nothing: the colossal prophetic creature in green and white over the altar, on the keystone of the vault, striking out his arms--to pull it all down or prop it all up? The very creation of the world becoming the creation of chaos, the Creator scudding away before Himself as He separates the light from the darkness. Chaos, chaos, and all these things moving, writhing, making fearful efforts, in a way living, all about nothing and in nothing, much like those voices grating and quavering endlessly long. ROME, _March_ 4, 1888. III. SECOND RETURN TO ROME. I feel very much the grandeur of Rome; not in the sense of the heroic or tragic; but grandeur in the sense of splendid rhetoric. The great size of most things, the huge pilasters and columns of churches, the huge stretches of palace, the profusion of water, the stature of the people, their great beards and heads of hair, their lazy drawl--all this tends to the grand, the emphatic. It is not a grandeur of effort and far-fetchedness like that of Jesuit Spain, still less of achievement and restrained force like that of Tuscany. It is a splendid wide-mouthed rhetoric; with a meaning certainly, but with no restriction of things to mere meaning. The man who has understood Rome best, in this respect, is Piranesi. His edifices, always immensely too big, his vegetation, extravagantly too luxurious, are none too much to render Rome. And those pools of blackness and immense lakes of ink. ROME, _February_ 20, 1889. IV. ARA COELI. Ended the morning characteristically at Ara Coeli, one of the churches here I like best, or rather one of the few I like at all. I find that the pleasure I derive from churches is mainly due to their being the most _inhabited_ things in the world: inhabited by generation after generation, each bringing its something grand or paltry like its feelings, sometimes things stolen from previous generations like the rites themselves with their Pagan and Hebrew colour; bringing something, sticking in something, regardless of crowding (as life is ever regardless of other life): tombs, pictures, silver hearts and votive pictures of accidents and illnesses, paper flowers, marbled woodwork pews, hangings. And each generation also wearing something away, the bricks and marble discs into unevenness, the columns into polish, effacing with their tread the egotism of the effigies, reducing them to that mere film, mere outline of rigid feet, cushioned head and folded hands which is so pious and pathetic. Such a church as Ara Coeli--like those of Ravenna--has this character all the more, that its very pillars are stolen from antique edifices, and show, in their broken flutings or scarred granite, that the weather also has felt its feelings about them, that they have shared in the life not merely of this religion or of that, Pagan or Christian, but in the life of the winds and rains. Such churches as this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you, not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life of the present filched out of the past, like the columns of the temple supporting arches painted with seventeenth-century saints. The organ was playing to the chanting of the monks; and standing before the chapel of S. Bernardino, where the Christ in the gold almond and the worshipping and music-making angels of Pinturicchio rise out of the blue darkness behind the grating, I felt oddly that music of the organ. The sonorous rasping of the bass tubes, the somewhat nasal quaver of the vox humana and the hautboy, was actually the music made by these beribboned Umbrian angels, those long ages ago, in the gloom of their blue cloudy sky, with the blessing, newly arisen Christ in the cherub-spangled gold almond among them. _Holy Saturday._ V. VILLA CÆSIA. Several miles along the Via Nomentana, we came to a strange place, situate in an oasis in the wilderness, or rather in what is already the beginning of a new country--the mere mounds of tufo turning into high slopes, and a few trees (it is odd how they immediately give a soul to this soulless desert), leafless at present, serpentine along the greener grass. And there, with the russet of an oakwood behind, rises a square huddle of buildings, a tall brick watch-tower, battlemented and corbelled in the midst, and a great bay-tree at each corner. On the tower, immediately below the battlements, is the inscription, in huge letters, made, I should think, of white majolica tiles--VILLA CÆSIA. The lettering, besides being broken, is certainly not modern, and has a sharpness of outline telling of the Renaissance. What solitary humanist may have put up that inscription, coming out from Rome to commune in that wilderness, amid the rustle of the oakwood and of the laurel-trees, and the screaming of magpies and owls, with the togaed poets and philosophers of the Past? VI. THE PANTHEON. The back of the Pantheon, and its side, as seen from the steps of the Minerva, the splendid circle of masonry, and arched courses of rose-coloured brickwork, lichened and silvered over, broken off, turned into something almost like a natural cliff of rosy limestone; and at its foot the capitols of magnificent columns, and fragments of delicate dolphined frieze. VII. BY THE CEMETERY. I am struck again this time by one of the things which on my first return after so many years got to mean for my mind Rome. The Aventine, where it slopes down to the Tiber white with fruit blossom, the trees growing freely in masonry and weeds, against the moist sky; this ephemeral exquisiteness seeming to mean more here among the centuries than in any other place. I was right, I think, when I wrote the other day that it would be easier for us to face the thought of danger, death, change, here in Rome than elsewhere. K. told me she felt it when we met at the Cemetery at her poor old aunt's grave. To die here might seem, one would think, more like re-entering into the world's outer existence, returning, as Epictetus has it, _where one is wanted_. The cypresses of the graveyard, there under the city walls, among the ruins, do not seem to unite folk with the terrible unity Death, so much as with the everlasting life of the centuries. _March_ 4, 1893. SPRING 1895. I. VILLA LIVIA. Along the road to Civita Castellana, absolutely deserted. The Tiber between low, interrupted slopes, some covered with longest most compact green grass, others of brown, unreal tufo, like crumbled masonry, or hollowed into Signorelli-looking grottoes, with deep growths of Judas-tree, broom, and scant asphodels; all green and brown, of such shapes that one wonders whether they also, like so many seeming boulders scattered in their neighbourhood, are not in reality masonry, long destroyed towns. The Tiber, pale fawn colour, flush, among greenness, receiving delicate little confluents which have come along under lush foliage; smooth dark shallow streams, stoneless on sandy bottom; one imagines each fought about in those first Roman days. The country is a great pale circular greenness under tender melting sky, with pale distant mountains all round. How Rome seems to have been isolated from all life save the life eternal and unchangeable of grass and water, and cattle and larks; to have been suspended in a sort of void! Further along, reed hovels (some propped in aqueduct arches), hovels also in caves, and squalid osterias, into whose side are built escutcheoned mediæval capitals. A few mounted drovers trot slowly by. At Prima Porta, in this wilderness, a hillock of grass, descending into which you find a small chamber painted all round with a deep hedge of orchard and woodland plants, pomegranates, apples, arbutus, small pines and spruce firs, all most lovingly and knowingly given, with birds nesting and pecking, in brilliant enamel like encaustic on an enamel blue sky. Coming home in rain, Rome appears with cupola of St. Peter's and Vatican gardens so disposed as to seem only a colossal sanctuary in the wilderness. _May_ 8. II. COLONNA GALLERY. Durer?? Portrait of a red-haired Colonna with the ruins of Rome behind him; ruins which, with his violent, wild-man-of-the-woods face, he looks as if he had made. III. SAN SABA. The lovely floor, the minute pieces of marble forming a far-more-lovely-than possible faded purple and lilac rug. Also, the pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a cactus. Looking down into the deserted church through the window of the loggia, one half expects to see stoled ghosts in the vagueness below. Outside and opposite, the immense counterforts of the Palatine, and its terrace and sparse cypresses. IV. S. PAOLO FUORI. The wonderful loveliness of the double colonnade of polished granite pillars on the polished pale grey marble floor; fantastic, like transfigured pools and streams of purest water. _May_ 9. V. PINETA TORLONIA. Asphodels on the banks. As we come up, the peasants drive into the stable, one by one, a lot of mares with their foals. Along the road a drove of great long-horned grey oxen; a bull-calf canters among them. Between us and St. Peter's is a dell full of scrub ilex; walls also, full of valerian and that grey myrrh-like weed. From that little height we face a tremendous black storm, against which all the Sabine and Alban hills flash in the low sunlight, above the green Campagna pale like a strip of sea. _May_ 12. SPRING 1897. I. RETURN AT MIDNIGHT. Driving from the station at midnight, the immensity of everything, gigantic proportions of silent palaces and closed churches. Passing in front of the Quirinal, the colossal Dioscuri with their horses, the fountain flowing down and spurting upwards between them, white under the electric light, against the deep blue darkness. Even the incredible huge vulgarity of modern things, advertisements, yards long at the street corners under the gas, and immense rows of jerry-built houses, somehow help to make up the impression of Rome as a theatre of the ages: a gigantic stage, splendidly impressive to eye and fancy, where Time has strutted and ranted, and ever will continue. At night particularly one feels the Piranesi grandeur, but also the Callot picturesqueness which are secondary qualities of Rome. As a whole the town belongs mainly to the shabby and magnificent seventeenth century. Those hundreds of architecturally worthless Jesuit churches are not, as we are apt stupidly to say, absurd or meaningless, but quite the contrary; admirably suited to their place and function among ruins and vagueness. The beggars and loafers, the inconceivable squalor and lousiness, are also, in this sense, in their rights. _March_ 24. II. VILLA MADAMA. The great empty, unfinished, hulk, very grand and with delicate details, stranded like the ark on Ararat on its hillside of brushwood and market-garden, seems to sum up, in a shape only a little more splendid than usual, the story told on all sides. For on all sides there are great mouldering unfinished villas, barrocco casinos, even fifteenth-century small palaces, deserted among the fields; and everywhere monumental gateways leading to nothing. Their story is that of the unceasing enterprise of pope after pope, and cardinal after cardinal against the inexorable climate of Rome. Each shortlived generation of old men, come to Rome too late to learn, already accustomed to order about and to swagger, refusing to see the ruins left by its predecessors; insisting on having its way with those malarious hillocks and riversides; only to die like the rest, leaving another gaunt enclosure behind. One of the fascinations of Rome is undoubtedly not its murderous quality as such, but the character of which that seems a part, the quality of being a living creature, with unbreakable habits and unanswerable reasons, making it massacre quite quietly, whatever came in its way. Rome, as perhaps only Venice, is an organic city, almost a living being; its _genius loci_ no allegory, but its own real self. _March._ III. FROM VALMONTONE TO OLEVANO. Valmontone, on the railway line to Naples, to which we bicycled back from Segni--a savage village on a hill, pigs burrowing and fighting at its foot--and on its skirt a great stained Palazzo Farnese-like palace. Crossing the low hills of the wide valley between the Alban and Sabine chains, magnificent bare mountains appear seated opposite, crystalline, almost gemlike; and splendid, almost crepuscular, colours in the valley even at noon: deep greens and purples, the pointed straw stacks replacing, as black accents, our Tuscan cypresses. Quantities of blue and white wind-flowers on the banks, and wine-coloured anemones under the thick ilex-like olives; and all round the splendid pale-blue chains of jagged and conical mountains. A population of tattered people and galled horses; much misery; a sort of more savage Umbrian landscape, and without Umbrian serenity; deserted, deserted roads. I am writing from the olive yard above the inn; the rugged little Olevano hanging, almost sliding, down the hillside opposite, black houses and yellow-lichened roofs. OLEVANO, _March_ 28. IV. FROM OLEVANO TO SUBIACO. Yesterday afternoon bicycled and walked from Olevano to Subiaco. A steep mile and a half up to the very crest of the mountains, and then down some sharp corners and one or two very precipitous zigzags, letting myself run down; the first time I have had such a sensation, a sensation largely of fear, partly of joy: a changing view in front, on the side--steeps of sere woods, great mountains, like jasper or some other stone that should be veined amethyst, a smell of freshness, whiffs of violets, at one point a small green lake deep, deep below (Stagno di Rojate); yet an annihilation of both space and time. It was better when Ch. Br. and I dismounted and walked down; the road cut out of the steep wooded hills; on the shady side trickling with water and delicious with moss, primroses, and violets among the sere chestnuts. Here and there a cherry-tree in the valley deep below, like a little puff of smoke. The sweetness of those mountain woods with the great bare lilac mountains all round! A sharp zigzag, a swish over a bridge, where as one rather felt than saw the full green Anio dashing through rocks; and just at sunset we came upon Subiaco--rising violet, with its great pointing castle mound, from the green valley of water and budding poplars into a purple and fiery sky. Then in the dusk through the little town, where the bells were ringing. TIVOLI, _March_ 29. V. ACQUA MARCIA. I sha'n't forget, on the long bleak road from Subiaco to Vicovaro, a violent dry wind against us, veiling all things in dust, a spring near Spiagge: a wide runnel of water spirting out of the travertine and running off into clear rills where the mules drink. The water they collect up here for the Acqua Marcia, whose aqueducts we see about, old arches and new; water, cold, infinitely pure, exquisite, one might say almost fragrant. It was such spirts from the rock, as well as the sight of pure mountain streams, which taught St. Francis his verse about Suor Acqua. St. Francis must have wandered in these fastnesses which (totally unlike the country between Segni and Olevano) are very Umbrian in character. There is a portrait of him, said to be by a contemporary monk, on a pilaster of one of the subterranean chapels of the Sacro Speco above Subiaco: blond, wide-eyed, the cowl drawn over his head. TIVOLI, _March_ 29. VI. THE SACRO SPECO. The Sacro Speco was a very charming surprise. The series of little churches and chapels up and down flights of steps, vaulted and painted in Gothic style, with shrine lamps here and there, were quite open and empty. We walked into them, or rather into a crooked vestibule frescoed by some Umbrian, with no sudden transition from the splendid grove of ilexes, immense branches like beams overhead, from the great hillside of bluish-grey tufo, with only a few bitter herbs on it. The convent of the Sacro Speco is a half-fortified little place into which we could not penetrate. Only a surly monk, found with difficulty (another entered the chapels with a great bundle of wall-flowers and irises), took us into the microscopic garden under the convent battlements hedged with flowering rosemary, where the roses in which St. Benedict rolled are grown (May roses, only bright leaves as yet) literally in the shape of a bed or gridiron, row along row. Though it is not remote-looking, 'tis a splendid place for a hermit's thoughts: the blue-grey hillside running down into the green rushing Anio, the great bare bluish mountains all round, far enough to be visible, a great sense of air and space, for a valley. No vegetation, save a few olives and scrub oaks and the bitter herbs and euphorbus. No scented happy Tuscan things. And deep below, the arches of Nero's Villa--with demons no doubt galore. Those giottesque chapels hold in them, all hung with lamps, a small tufo grotto, the one down which, as in Sodoma's fresco, the angels sent baskets of provisions and the devils made horns at St. Benedict. ROME, _March_ 30. VII. THE VALLEY OF THE ANIO. There is a nice Cosmati cloister at S. Scolastica, lower on the hill, an enormous also fortified-looking monastery, but to which also there is only a mule path. These places are splendidly _meditative_, but they do not give me the idea of hermitages in the wilderness like that ruined Abbey of Sassovivo above Foligno. But the Sacro Speco's little up and down chapels, a miniature Assisi, empty, yet not abandoned on this sunburnt rock, are very impressive. I take great pleasure following the Anio, which we first met coming out of the narrow gorge round the S. Scolastica hill (the other side behind Nero's ruins is a hill covered with pale green scrub, beech, or more likely alder), down below Subiaco. In the ever-widening valley it is an impetuous stream, but not at all a torrent; pale green filling up a narrow bed between pale green willows, here and there slackening into pools with delicate green waving plants: a very unexpected and (to me) inexplicable sight among those mountains which are more arid than any Tuscan ones, and from which very few tributary streams seem to descend. (I can remember crossing only one, full and with waving weeds also.) The Anio swirls round a beautiful wooded promontory, ilexes and even a few cypresses, between Spiagge and Vicovaro, making a little church into a miniature Tivoli Sibilla. One becomes very fond of such a stream, and it is a great delight to see it in its triumph at Tivoli racing headlong into the abyss of the big fall, only a spray cloud revealing it among the thick green; or breaking out into tiny delicate fountains--garden fountains, you would think--among the ilexes and grottoes under the little round Temple; a wonderful mixture of wildness and art, a place, with its high air, its leaping waters and glimpses of distant plain, such as one would really wish for a sibyl, and might imagine for Delphi. An enchanted place with its flight and twitter of birds above the water. I should like to follow the Anio into the Tiber. At sunset, had there been one, we went into the Villa d'Este, entering through the huge deserted courts and grottoed halls of the colossal palace, surprised to find the enchanted gardens, the terraces and cypresses descending on the other side, the grey vague plain and distant mountains--and always the sound of waters. What a solemn magnificent place! How strange a contrast from the Benedictine monastery on its arid rocks, to this huge, solemn, pompous palace, with its plumed gardens and statued hedges, hanging on a hillside too, but what a different one! ROME, _March_ 30. VIII. VICOVARO. There was cultivation all down the valley of the Anio, lots of blossoming cherry-trees; and the peasant-women in stays, and some men in knee breeches, looked prosperous. Subiaco seeming a sort of S. Marcello. Vicovaro is a delightful village above the Anio, with a fine palace of the Bolognettis, a good many houses with handsome carved windows and lintels as in Umbria, a nice circular church with fourteenth-century elaborate statued porch, and a very charming temple portico. Here also the people looked well-to-do and civilised, on the whole like Umbrians; whereas on the Olevano side, even on Sunday, they were in rags and miserably stolid. The little caffè where we eat was lined with political caricatures. Places like Vicovaro and still more the many apparently inaccessible other villages incredibly high up--Cantalupo, Castel Madama, S. Vito, &c., each with its distinguishing _palazzone_--makes one understand _what Rome is made of_--the feudal, savage mountains whence, even like its drinking water which splashes in Bernini fountains, this sixteenth and seventeenth century Rome has descended. _For Rome is not an Urban City_; and underneath all the Bernini palaces, we must imagine things like Palazzo Capranica, with the few mullioned and Gothic windows picked in its fortress-like walls. How I seem to feel what Rome is made of--its strange living components in the past! At Subiaco the streets were strewn, as for a procession, with shredded petals of violets. All kinds of violets grow on those hills, some reddish and as big as pansies; and as we swished past, instead of the dry scent of myrrh and mint of our Tuscan hills, there came a moist smell of violets from the hedgerows. ROME, _March_ 31. IX. TOR PIGNATTARA. Drove to-day with Maria outside Porta Maggiore, little changed since my childhood. Stormy sunshine, the mountains blue, with patches of violet, like dark rainbow splendours, flashing out with white towns; cherry blossoms among the reeds, vague gardens with statues and bits of relief stuck about. Finally the circular domed tomb of Empress Helena, with a tiny church, a bit of orphanage built into it, and all round the priest's well-kept garden and orphans' vegetable garden. A sound of harmonium and girls' hymn issuing out of the ruin, on which grow against the sky great tufts of fennel, of stuff like London pride and of budding lentisk. This _is_ Rome! _March_ 31. X. VILLA ADRIANA. We crossed the Anio twice--first at Ponte Mammolo, where it is Tiber-coloured, and it tugs at the willows; then before it has been polluted by the sulphur water of the Acque Albule (though the sulphur blue water is itself lovely) at a magnificent tower under Tivoli, like Cecilia Metella. An Anio green, rushing flush as at Subiaco, among poplars and willows, fields of sprouting reeds. Villa Adriana: you see it from a distance at the foot of the Tivoli hills--sloping olive woods and domes of pines. What a place! The Armida gardens for a Faust-Rinaldo. Antiquity like a _belle au bois dormant_ in the groves of colossal ilexes, the rows of immense cypresses, above all, enclosed in the magic of those thick old silver-coloured huge unpruned olives, of the high flowering grasses. These vestiges of porticoes and domes and grottoes are not in the least beautiful architecturally; and every statue, every bit of frieze has been ruthlessly removed, only the broken slabs of marble, of wainscot and a few broken mosaics remaining--'tis the only garden near Rome with not _one_ statue in it! But somehow the divine vegetation, the divine view of near blue mountains and blue plain seem to transform all this brick and cement into something beautiful and precious, to turn the few remaining columns and stalked broken capitals (all the rest, vases, baths, floors, marbles, gone to the Vatican) into something exquisite. Perhaps 'tis the very absence of statues which makes one think what statues must have stood there, and feel as if they were still present. Anyhow this quite accidental place, this vanished palace covered over by the olive groves, the box hedges, cypress avenues and pastures of little trumpery farm villas--is far more beautiful and wonderful than any of the art-made Roman gardens, and is, so to speak, their _original_--much as those Tivoli falls seem the prototype of all the Roman fountains. It began to rain as we were there, and thundered through the great halls. Then as it cleared over the mountains, the plain green, vague! was blotted with black rain, a threatening yellow sky above. _April_ 10. XI. S. LORENZO FUORI. The fine _ambones_; the very peculiar and beautiful galleries, with delicate columns, like a triforium on either side of choir for women; the choir with splendid episcopal seat and pale cipolin benches--Tadema like--for priests all round. We must imagine classic antiquity full of this wonderful blond colour of marbles; arrangements of palest lilac, green, rosy yellow, and a white shimmer. Colours such as we see on water at sunset, ineffable. _April_ 10. XII. ON THE ALBAN HILLS. The big olives, pruned square, but of full dense foliage, not smoke-like, but the colour of old dark silver; the vineyards of pale criss-cross blond canes on violet ground. The railway goes round Lake Albano, reflecting blue stormy sky and white cloud balls; a gash when the current alters shows marvellous hyacinth blue. A fringe of budding little trees and of great pale asphodels; the smell of them and of freshness. Beautiful circular church, cupola silvery, ribbed outside, at Ariccia, opposite Palazzo Chigi; a great grim palace, stained grey with damp and time, flanked by four sorts of towers; windows scarce. This solemn type of sixteenth-century _White Devil of Italy_ palace or villa recurs in this neighbourhood; places to keep their secrets; some apparently on the very border of the Campagna, where vines and olives end. Wonderful woods full of flowers between Albano and Genzano. The little round Lake of Nemi disappointed me. Bicycling to Marino, Lake Albano seen from above, waters reflecting black storm, sere oakwoods of Rocca di Papa stormy purple too, and round the highest Latin peak, which looks like an altar slab, a great inky storm, water, hills, sky, all threatening inky green and violet; and against them, on the hill ridge of stones, the delicate pale pink chandeliers of the asphodels. On the other side the slopes of vineyards and pale blue campagna and faint shining sea line, blond under a clear sky. Lovely woods of oak near Marino, through which, alas! we swished down hill. A whole flock of sheep, newly raddled, and faunlike shepherds lying in the shade opposite. In Villa Torlonia at Albano, a pond, surrounded by masks (whence water spouted), deep green water, broken by fountain, green deep ilex groves round; every stone picked out with delicate green moss. And at the end of the vistas the campagna in green, purple blue modelling of evening, hillocks and farms and aqueducts, hay and straw stacks vaguely visible. And beyond the white shiny sea. The storm has disappeared, leaving only a few clouds veiling the Subiaco mountains which we see. How different in memory from these Latin Hills! All up the hill great terraced gardens, piled-up villas: Aldobrandini, Falconieri, Lancillotti. ROME, _April_ 13. XIII. MAUNDY THURSDAY. Yesterday, Giovedi Santo evening, the washing of the high-altar of St. Peter's. A sudden impression of the magnificence of this church, its vastness filled with dusk, a few wax tapers scattered along the nave; in the far distance a lit-up altar throwing its light up into the vault of an aisle, showing the shimmer of golden coffering; the crowd circling unseen. Then the ceremony of washing the high-altar: all the canons, priests and choir-boys mounted onto its dais; and, as they passed, wiped the great slab with a brush of white shavings dipped in oil and wine; then walked round the church in solemn procession, tiny choir-boys first, purple canons, and, lastly, a tall cardinal with scarlet cap, all with their white mops; a penetrating sweet smell of wine and oil filling the place, and seeming to waken paganism. As they turned again towards the high-altar, its huge twisted gilded columns glimmering in the light of the tapers, lights appeared in the Veronica balcony; priests moved to and fro with a great gold cross in that distant lit-up gloom; the canons fell on their knees, great purple poppies. There was the noise of a rattle; more lights in that balcony, and another gold shining thing was displayed; the Veronica this time, with (as you guessed) the outline of a bearded face. It was twilight outside; and St. Peter's, its colonnade, St. Angelo's, the Tiber, looked colossal. MAUNDY THURSDAY. XIV. GOOD FRIDAY. It was overcast yesterday, and the sun set as we approached this place, the train passing through woods of myrtle and lentisk scrub. Suddenly we came upon green fields lying against the skyline, and full of asphodels--a pale golden-rosy sunset under mists, a pinkish full moon rising in the misty blue opposite; and against this pale, serene sky, the hundreds of asphodels, each distinct like a candlestick, rising out of the green. I never saw such a vision of the Elysian fields. Here at Anzio we found a Gesù Morto procession winding with a band, and a red-and-white confraternity, through the little fishing town. At one moment the great black erect Madonna appeared among the torch-light against the deep blue sky, the misty blue moonlit sea. Much less fine than such processions are in Tuscany; but impressive. The little boats, with folded lateen sails, near the pier had coloured lanterns slung from the mast to the bowsprit. The sea broke like ruffled silk. ANZIO, _April_ 17. XV. ASPHODELS. Like Johnson and his wall-fruit, I have never had as many asphodels to look at as I wanted. Ever since I saw them first, rushing by train through the Maremma, nay ever since I saw them in a photograph of a Sicilian temple, nay perhaps, secretly, since hearing their name, I have felt a longing for them, and a secret sense that I was never going to be shown as many as I want. Here I have. Yesterday morning bicycling inland, along a rising road along which alternate green pastures and sea, and woods of dense myrtle and lentisk scrub overtopped by ilexes and cork-trees, _there were asphodels enough_: deep plantations, little fields, like those of cultivated narcissus, compact masses of their pale salmon and grey shot colours and greyish-green leaves, or fringes, each flower distinct against field or sky, on the ledges of rock and the high earth banks. The flowers are rarely perfect when you pick them, some of the starry blossoms having withered and left an untidy fringe instead; but at a distance this half-decay gives them a singular distinction, makes the light fall on the very tips, the silvery buds, sinking the stretching out branches and picking out the pale rose colour with grey. The beauty of the plant is in the candlestick thrust of the branches. The flower has a faint oniony smell, but fresh like box hedge. ANZIO, EASTER DAY. XVI. NETTUNO. Nettuno, a little castellated town on the rocks; battlemented walls and towers, a house with fortified windows, a sixteenth-century fortress, very beautiful. All manner of vines, weeds and lilac flowers growing in the walls. Men in boots and breeches and brigand hats about, women with outside stays. In the evening a flock of goats being milked. Strings of mules, literally strings, beasts tied together. Last evening we bicycled beyond Nettuno on the way to Torre Astura, which you see bounding this semicircular gulf, vague great mountains behind. The Cape of Circe, which looks (and surely must have been) an island, came out faint towards evening, a great cliff ending in something like a castle, apparently in the middle of the sea, mysterious. We got, skirting the sea, to a large heath--a heath, black sandy soil, of budding bracken, grass and asphodels; immense, inexpressibly solemn and fresh; a little wood of cork-trees in the distance, a broken Roman ruin, blue Apennines half hidden in clouds. A few shepherds were going home, looking immense on the flatness, and goats and horses. Song of larks, and suddenly an unexpected booming of surf. Following the sound inexplicably loud, across the deeper black sandy soil, we got to the sea. Most strange against it, a fringe of marshy grass, of bulrushes! Far off the tower of Astura, and the faint Cape of Circe among mists. It began to rain. ANZIO, _Easter_. XVII. TORRE ASTURA. Yesterday evening bicycled farther in the direction of Torre Astura, which seemed quite near in its solitude. The dunes were covered with thick bushes of lentisk, myrtle and similar shrubs; every step bruised some scented thing. Along the sands, black, hard and full of coloured shells, was a strip of bulrushes. The sea, which is tame and messy in the artificial bay formed by the pier of Anzio, was fresh and rushing; the wind swept the brown dark sand like smoke along the ground. Monte Circeo was quite distinct, blue and white its summit an overhanging rock, no castle. Inland stretched the fields of asphodels and the deep woods. We found in the morning a lane or road gone to ruin, running high up from Anzio to Nettuno, and entirely under splendid overarching ilexes; a sunk lane, with here and there a glimpse of blue sea among the evergreen branches. ANZIO, _April_ 19. SPRING 1899. I. THE WALLS. Drove from Porta Angelica to Porta Portese; an immense round, possible, conceivable, only in Rome. I see for the first time the _outside_ of the Vatican, galleries and gardens, realising the sort of fortified town it is, a Rome within Rome. And a fortified one: that long passage (Hall of the Ariadne) between the Belvedere and the Rotunda has battlements (oddly enough, Ghibelline); there are towers and counterforts I cannot identify; and then the immense buttressed walls, with their green vegetation, and slabs and coats of arms of Medicis, Roveres; with the clipped ilexes of the gardens, the pines and bays overtopping, on and on. And in a gap, suddenly, and close enough to take one's breath away, the immensity of St. Peter's and the Cupola. And that this town, which is the Vatican and St. Peter's, these centres of so much life, should, as a fact, look on one side straight onto forsaken roads, and the most desolate of countries! Such a thing is impossible except in Rome; and even in Rome I never suspected it. Continuing outside the walls, we come to the little church of San Pancrazio, on an empty road hedged with reed-tied dry thorns: the little porched doorway leading into an atrium which is an olive garden, big old trees set orderly, and a pillar with the cross; outside at least, a solemn little basilica, making one think of Ravenna. We drove, apparently for miles, up and down, round and round, between two immediately successive gates, San Pancrazio and Portese. Green slopes, dry vineyards with almond blossom among the criss-cross canes, brakes of reeds; here and there rows of little triumphal bay-trees in flower over the walls; great overhanging ornamental gateways, leading to nothing; and, at long intervals, mouldering little villas and _trattorie_, with mulberry-trees clipped into umbrellas. Rome totally disappeared, hidden, heaven knows where, in this country of which there seems an unlimited amount: always more green slopes, more dry vineyards, more distant Campagna. And yet, seemingly close by, the great bells of St. Peter's ring out the thanksgiving service for the Pope. Antonia said, "Shall we go for a minute into St. Peter's? It will be all lit up." And, in that endless emptiness, the words sounded absurd. St. Peter's? Rome? Where? _March_ 13. II. PALAZZO CENCI. This morning, rambling along the unfinished Tiber quays, and the half pulled-down houses of the old Jewish quarter, attracted a little, perhaps, by the name "Vicolo dei Cenci," I let myself be importuned by a red-haired woman into entering the Casa di Beatrice Cenci, a dreary, squalid palace, given over to plasterers among the dust-heaps. And afterwards, beguiled further up flights and flights of black stairs into someone's filthy little kitchen, I was made to look down, through a mysterious window, into the closed church of the Cencis. Looking down, always a curious impression, into a dark, musty place and onto vague somethings which are, they tell me, the tombs of the Cencis. A grim and sordid impression altogether; and heaven knows how sickening a story. Yet what power of popular romance, of great poetry, has enveloped it all! A story one would be ashamed to read through in a cheap newspaper ... and yet!... _March_ 24. III. MONTE CAVO. Yesterday, with Maria, Antonia, and the poet Pascarella, to Rocca di Papa, lunching in a piece of the woods which M. has bought. The grass of the campagna, beyond the aqueducts, is powdered with daisies like a cake with sugar. Further, where the slopes begin, the exquisite brilliant pink of the peach blossom is on the palest yellow criss-cross of reeds in the dry vineyards. I am struck once more by the majestic air of that opening square of Frascati, expanding upwards into terraces, lawns, and ilexes, all flanked by pinnacled and voluted buildings, Villa Aldobrandini, or whatever it is. We drive up through the sere chestnut woods, where wind-flowers and blue squills come up everywhere among the russet leaves. Suddenly, in the faint light, above a clearing, the stacked white trunks, the lilac sereness of the trees; and high up, shimmering and misty, the rock of Rocca di Papa with its piled-up houses. Then through the woods again, on foot, up a path first deep in dry leaves, then paved with hard volcanic flags; chestnut woods, but no longer cut for charcoal (the smoke of its burning rises from below), but in clumps, straight slender boles rising from immense roots. Chestnuts so unlike those of our Apennines that, when, higher up, they are exchanged for beeches, it is only by picking up the fallen dry leaves that we could tell the difference. And beyond, descending towards Nemi, the woods reveal themselves for alder only by their catkins. Immediately above the town of Rocca di Papa, before you begin that ascent through the woods of Monte Cavo, are the Campi d'Annibale, the former crater of the volcano of Mons Latialis, grass fields whose legend Pascarella tells us: that when Hannibal encamped there the Romans raised the necessary money by selling the ground of the enemy's camp! A strange, unexpected place; a great green basin, bleak and bare, marked only by fences like some northern hill-top; on such fell sides shall the Romans camp above the Tyne and Tweed. We climbed up through the woods, Antonia and I, following the keeper in his riding boots, silent, or at most exchanging a word about the flowers, all blue, borage, squill, and dog violets, among the fallen leaves. And little by little there unrolled, deep below us, the dim green plain with a whiteness which is St. Peter's; and then there unfolded, gradually, unexpected, the pale blue of one lake and of a second. Till, near the top, they had both turned into steely mirrors, tarnished, as by breath, by the rapidly passing clouds. And the pink of the leafless woods stretches away, soft and feathery, to distant towns and villages. And we ascend, with the wind arising to meet us, always through softly winding paths, to the summit of the Latin mountain. To a long, gaunt, white, empty house, a circle of ancient moss-grown walls, a circle of old, wind-bent, leafless beeches, with the whole world of earliest Rome misty below, and thin clouds passing rapidly overhead. This is that sort of natural altar, visible as such even from the streets of Rome, of the Latin Jove, which, when we saw it again later from the ridge near Castel Gandolfo, above the deep circular chasm (fringed with asphodel) of the lake, seemed to smoke with a superhuman sacrifice. How Renan, in the _Prêtre di Némi_, has rendered, without descriptions, the charm of that outlook towards Rome from this lower portion of the Latin hills! They cover a very small amount of country, volcanic and isolated; they are a kind of living whole in themselves, with their towns, woods, and those two deep lakes hidden in their fastnesses. The most living range of hills, surely, out of which the greatest life has spread, the vastest, perhaps, in the world. Up there one looks not merely into space unlimited, but into time. What a strange country this Roman one! How different from the rest of Italy; this, with its great plain, its isolated groups of hills, its disdain of river-valley and gorge; a country set aside for different destinies. And yet I own that what these hills represent most to me is the keenness of the air, the sweetness of those straight-boled, pinkish, leafless woods, the freshness of sprouting grass and flowers. _March_ 20. IV. A RIVER GOD. We have been bicycling these two days in the campagna; sunny, windy days, the hills faint in the general blueness. About three miles along the Via Ardeatina we alighted and sat on the grass in a little valley. A little valley between two low grass hills; a stream, a few reeds, two or three scant trees in bud, and the usual fences, leading up to the mountain, framed in, with its white towns, between the green slopes. Grass still short and dry; larks, invisible, singing; a flock of sheep going along with shepherds stopping to set the new-born, tottering lambs to suck. At the valley's mouth, over a wide horse-trough where a donkey cart was watering, a little recumbent river god, rudely carved and much time-stained. _March_ 16. V. THE PANTHEON. A bright day of iciest tramontana, cutting you in two in the square, under the colonnades, and in the narrow chink-opening of the great green bronze doors. Almost entirely empty, that great round place, the light, the cold haunting its grey dome. At the high-altar some priests in purple; the Crucifix and pictures veiled in violet silk. And in the organ loft, buttoned up in great coats, five wretched musicians; not on high, but in a sort of cage set down by the altar. Such singing! but an alto, two tenors and a bass, as in Marcello's psalms. And, frightful as was the performance, I was fascinated by their unaccompanied song: something of long vague passages, and suspended cadences, fitting, in its mixture of complexity and primitiveness, its very rudeness, barbarousness of execution, into the great round bleak temple, with the cold windy sky looking down its roof, the bleakness of outdoors, enclosed, as it were, within doors. _Palm Sunday_, 1899. VI. SANTI QUATTRO CORONATI. I went into several small churches to see the sepulchres. Not like our Tuscan ones; wretched things, mainly tinsel and shabby frippery. At Santa Prisca we trespassed into orchards, almond trees barely green, artichokes and dust-heaps, with the belfries of the Aventine behind, the pillared loggia of San Saba, and the great blocks of the Baths of Caracalla in front. The church, shut on ordinary days, was quite empty, only a dozen Franciscans at office, kneeling by the frame of lighted candles, one of which was extinguished with each verse of hoarse liturgy by a monk kneeling apart. After Sta. Prisca, San Clemente, very Byzantine and fine in the gloom, and then to that dear church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, which has beckoned to me ever since my childhood; and which, with its fortified-looking apse, its yard and great gate-tower, looks like a remote abbey one would drive to, forgotten, hidden, unheard of, for hours and hours from some out-of-the-way country town. "We'll take you to so and so," one's host would say, and one would never have heard the name before.... And there it is, above the modernest slums of modern Rome! The church was darkish; a little light from the sunset just picking out some green and purple of the broken pavement; the tapers of a curtained-off chapel, and tapers above the sepulchre, throwing a broad weak yellow light up to the arched triforium, to the grated gallery whence came the voices of nuns chanting the Lamentations. From round the illuminated sepulchre rose, like a flock of birds on our entrance, a bevy of kneeling nuns in _béguine_ cloak and cap. And in the apse, before the high-altar, was stretched on the slabs, with a night-light at each corner, something dark and mysterious: the crucifix, the form barely defined, shrouded in violet. When the nuns went away a number of children, tiny, tiny girls came in, and knelt round that veiled mysterious thing; a baby at the end of their procession. One of the little girls could not resist, and lifted a corner of the violet silk. But her elder sister quickly slapped her, pulled her kerchief straight, and all was order and piety. The dear church, quite empty save for these children, was full of the smell of the fresh flowers round the sepulchre. A holy, fragrant, venerable, kindly church, safe-hidden behind its pillared atrium and gate-tower; and looking from afar like a hillside fortress among the jerry-built modern streets. _Maundy Thursday_, 1899. VII. BEYOND PONT MOLLE. A meadow near the Tiber, of grass and daisies, tufted with yellow-hearted jonquils. Larks and sun and wind overhead; in the distance the pale mountains, patched with snow. All round, the pale green embosomings of the soft earth hills. If the Umbrians got their love of circular hill lines at home, they learned in Rome the real existence of the green grass valleys and hills unbroken by cultivation, like those behind Perugino's _Crucifixion_ and Spagna's _Muses_. All round, as I sit in that place, the dry last year's stalks dance in the wind above the new grass and flowers. O Easter, Resurrection, Renovation! The larks proclaim it! _Easter_, 1899. SPRING 1900. I. OUTSIDE THE GATES. Rome took hold of me again as usual, yesterday, bicycling near Porta S. Sebastiano. On the walls which enclose those remote forsaken vignas (fit abode for lamias and female vampyres, as in Frau von Degen's tale), nay, even on the gates of old Rome are painted great advertisements exhorting the traveller to go to such or such a curiosity shop. The Arch of Drusus was surrounded by a band of Cookites, listening inattentively to their Bear Leader; and the whole Via Appia, to beyond Cecilia Metella, was alive with cabs and landaus. But such things, which desecrate Venice and spoil Florence, are all right in Rome; Rome, somehow, knows how to subdue them all to her eternal harmony. That all the vulgarities of all the furthest lands should all pass through Rome, like all the barbarians, the nations and centuries, seems proper and fit. The spirit of the place requires them, as much as the captives who came in the triumphs, as the Goths and Huns, as the pilgrims of the Mediæval Jubilees, and it subdues them: subdues them, as it subdues with the chemistry of this odd climate of crumble and decay, the new dreadful houses; as it has made, with the marvellous rank Roman vegetation, a sort of Forum or Palatine of the knocked-down modern houses, the empty unfinished basements behind the hoardings under my window. Driving at midnight from the station, my eye and mind were caught not merely by Castor and Pollux under the electric light, and by the endless walls of high palaces, but also by a colossal advertisement of Anzio, in English, setting forth to the traveller its merits connected with Nero, and I think Coriolanus--Nero and Coriolanus as elements of _réclame_! But here it seems all right; becoming only one of those immense ironies of Time, more dignified than any of Time's paltry creatures of which this place is full. Time, whose presence, whose very cruelties and gigantic jests, brings such peace to the soul in this place. Peace because hope. This litter, this dust-heap (for it is after all not much better, few great or precious or perfect things remaining), dust-heap or rag-fair symbolised by its own most barbarous and vilest and most venerable parts along the Tiber and under the Capitoline,--this Rome accustoms one to take patience and heart of grace. It helps one to conceive the fact that life comes everywhere out of death and subdues it; to feel that, as there are centuries in the Past, so there will be centuries and centuries in the Future. It helps the imagination with its remnants of old, used-up theatre scenes, to guess at all the scene-shifting that will be accomplished, and to take its stand, be it only in the emotion of an instant, as witness of the vague phantasmagoria of the future. Why despair? Why be impatient? only give time, only secure all the possible tickets in the lottery of chance, and our hopes must at last be realised, all will be all right. 'Tis only our miserable impatience, our miserable sense of our own impotent mortality, which makes us fret: and Rome bids us take patience and comfort. We despair of the future, for one reason, because we attribute to the future our own growing sense of fatigue, the feelings of evening. But the future will, for those to whom it belongs, be morning, with the vigour and buoyancy of the awakening. Our ideal would be to preserve in the future the beautiful things--certain flowers of tradition and privilege--of the past. 'Tis a delusion. We might as well hope to keep the old leaves on the trees into next summer. But after the old leaves have fallen and the trees have stood bare, new ones will come, not the same, but similar. _March_ 11. II. LATTER-DAY ROME. As a matter of fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity. Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the eighteenth century completed Rome less than an American of the nineteenth. Not only all roads in space, but all roads across Time, converge hither. _March_ 11. III. SANTA BALBINA. Went to take the English seeds to the gardener at S. Saba, and got in return some plants of border pinks. The most poetical and real place in all Rome. Afterwards bicycled to S. Balbina. Impression of primitive church (the outside has from a distance a look as of something in a Pinturicchio fresco) given over to the Franciscan nuns--thirty--who look after two hundred unruly girls off the streets. Their thick grey cloaks are folded on the pews; images, screens, lecterns, all the litter of a priestly lumber-room, poked here and there, a little portable iron pulpit, not unlike a curtained washstand, in front of a beautiful tomb of a grave mediæval person above a delicate mosaic of the Cosmatis, and a small coloured Rue Bonaparte St. Joseph on the episcopal mosaic throne in the apse! _March_ 15. IV. THE CATACOMBS. To-day Catacombs of S. Domitilla in Via Sette Chiese, with Maria, Guido and Pascarella. The impression of walking for miles by taper-light between those close walls of brown friable stone, or that soft dusty ground, in a warm vague stifling air; the monotonous rough sides, the monotonous corners, the widenings in and out of little Galla Placidia-like crypts, with rough hewn pillars and faded frescoes; of the irregularly cut pigeon-holes, where bits of bone moulder, and the brown earth seems half composed of bone. That brown soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human work, of nature; the Roman soil, a _compost_, as Whitman would say, ready manured! The work of man in this earth (of which a pinch transported into church front or roof produces great tufts of fennel and wild mignonette), the work of man in it merely to have died! No sense of the ages in these Catacombs, or of the solemnity of death, or of the sweetness of religion; black narrow passages gutted for centuries, the poor wretched human remains (save those few turned up by the modern spade) packed, sent off, made presents of, sold to all the churches and convents of Christendom; bits of bones in cotton wool, with faded labels, in glass cases, such as we see in sacristies, &c., or enclosed in glories of enamel and gold! But all gone, gone, those poor humble inhabitants, who were so anxious to be entire for the resurrection of the body!--patrician ladies, slaves, soldiers, eunuchs, theologians--all gone piecemeal all over the distant earth! the corridors swept and empty, the pigeon-holes with only a little brown cocoa-like dust! It was raining all day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place, out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds! How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds--the ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the subterranean tombs at Perugia; the grisliness of the Beauchamp crypt at Warwick. But these catacombs, emptiness, desolation and that old brown lilacky, crumbly Roman earth, in which no plough need move nor spade,--that _terriccio_, that pot-mould of the past. _March_ 16. V. THE RIONE MONTI. Yesterday, in gusty weather, wandered round muddy streets of Rione Monti, and entered some churches. S.S. Cosmae Damiano in Forum: it has got lost, so to speak, in the excavations, and you seek it through blind alleys and a long dark passage--a dirty, tawdry church, with a few frowsy, sluttish people; and behind the ballroom chandeliers above the altar, a Ravenna apse, gold and blue; and lambs in procession on a green ground. Then S. Pietro in Vincoli, which has a delightful position, with its big palm and tower and a certain Romantic Catherine Sforza character; also, what always refreshes me in Rome, its early Renaissance character, before Jesuits, &c. &c., an imported thing from Tuscany, and the fact of the tomb of the Pollajuolos! Michel Angelo's _Moses_ somehow belongs to Rome--has Rome's grandeur, emphasis, and Rome's theatrical quality. All round are buried seventeenth-century prelates. Cinthio Aldobrandini, &c., setting forth glories, but with skeletons as supporters! Decidedly Rome was never more Roman than at present--the pulling down and building and excavating, the inappropriate jostlings of time and character merely add to the eternal quality, serene and ironical. Besides, these demolitions have disclosed many things hitherto hidden, and soon destroyed: here in Rione Monti, for instance, above the tram-lines, great green walls, boulders from Antiquity, and quiet convent gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the illustrated hoardings of a street to be. In the midst of it, in a filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch, dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking the way, with a crowd of sluttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual Roman church stifling dirty smell. These Roman churches, all save the basilicas, are inconceivably ill kept, frowsy, musty, tawdry, sluttish: they belong not to God, but to Rome--the same barbarous Rome of the tumble-down houses, the tattered begging people, the whole untidy squalor of its really Roman parts. Nothing swept and garnished; nothing evincing one grain of past or present reverence--a down-at-heel indifferent idolatry. At last the crowd streamed out, Mass being over, and I entered--and, oh wonder! found myself in a place of all Byzantine splendour: that little chapel, tapestried with crimson silk, lit with hanging lamps, its vaults a marvellous glory of golden--infinite tinted golden--mosaics with great white angels. A bit of Venice, of S. Mark's in this sluttish Rome. Poets really make places. I cannot pass the Consolazione Hospital without thinking of Pompilia's death there; and the imaginary bishop, of whom there is no visible trace, haunts Sta. Prassede. VI. AMPHORÆ. In the afternoon we went to the Via Appia, and in the excavations of Villa Lugari, among sprouting corn and under the song of larks, saw those amphoræ Pascarella had told us of, which, after holding pagan wine, were used to bury Christian children. To me there is nothing repulsive in the thought of this burial in the earth's best product. VII. MASS AT THE LATERAN. To-day, on the way to Porta Furba (the country, where one sees it near the gate, is beginning to be powdered over with peach blossom), I went into the Lateran, and heard and saw a beautiful canonical Mass. Here was the swept and garnished (but it was behind glass doors!) sanctuary, the canons dainty in minever, a splendid monsignore, grey-haired, in three shades of purple; exquisite white and gold officiating priests, like great white peacocks, at the altar; the perfect movement of the incensing, perfect courtesy and dignity of the mutual salutations; and a well-played organ, on a reed stop, giving an imitation Bach _musette_. The whole ceremony, rather like the 6/8 of that _musette_, perhaps a trifle too much of the dancing element, but grave and very perfect. Why should not, at some future period, our philosophers sit in carved oak stalls, in minever and purple, and salute and be saluted, and speak with intervals of _musettes_ on the organ? It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite as odd and grotesque a thing if foretold to St. Paul. VIII. STAGE ILLUSION. I feel that, among other good things, Rome, while it gave my childhood notions of dignity, of time and solemn things, kept my eye and fancy on very short commons. How stunted are the trees (all except the weeds) here! how flowerless the hedges! how empty of life, grace, detail the country! I remember the sort of rapture of the first acquaintance with Tuscan valleys, hills, woods, fields, and all the lovely fulness of dainty real detail. Rome, as I said before, is all theatre scenes; marvellous _coup d'oeils_, into which, advancing (from the Capitol) from opposite the Palatine palms, from the Lateran steps, from the Tiber quays, you find nothing _to go on with_; and in so far it fits, it symbolises, perhaps, its own history--for what is history but a series of such admirable theatrical views; mere delusion, and behind them prose, mere prose? The reality of Rome is, one feels it, in its distant hills. There you can penetrate; thence history streamed. _March_ 19. IX. SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN. After wandering between tremendous hailstorms about the Aventine (the black sky and turbid Tiber from S. Alessio, in odd contrast with the lemons and oranges and freesias of S. Sabina, and with the chill empty churches), I waited for a Mass at S. M. in Cosmedin. Garlands (how poor and inartistic compared to the Tuscan and Venetian ones!) hanging in porch and box strewn at the door. The church, just restored, very swept and garnished still, with its Byzantine delicacy of fluted ribbed columns, carved precious ambones and carpet of lovely marbles, a place for the perfect ritual and splendid vestments of an aristocratic worship, slowly filled with, oh! such a poor, poor, wretched congregation, while the two priests, two sacristans and small choir-boys looked on (with a glance at watch) like people preparing for a play and waiting for a full house; the bell-ringer occasionally hanging on to the rope near the door, and giving a jump as he let go. I don't mean merely poor in fortune, in ragged draggled clothes, the sweepings of those rag-fair quarters, but poor in wretched, ill-grown, ill, dull, stupid bodies and souls, draggle-tailed like their clothes, only two savage-looking peasants having dignity or grace. More like an Irish congregation than an Italian, the two policemen, the women nursing their babies, the dreary sickly nuns, the broken, idiot-looking shabby elderly men in overcoats. At last the priests and choir-boys, to match, went in procession to the altar, and the service began; merely chants with a response from the crowd. But as soon as they began everything seemed to pull together, to be all right, to have significance.... Is it possible that of religious things only the æsthetic side is vital, universal, is what gives or seems to give a meaning, deludes us into a belief in some spirituality? Sometimes one suspects as much: that the unifying element is not so much religion, as, after all, art. _March_ 23. X. INSCRIPTIONS. These are fragments of inscriptions from the Macellus Liviæ, of the time of Valens and Gratian, now transferred to the porch of S. Maria in Trastevere: "Maceus vixit dulcissime cum suis ad supremam diem. C. Gannius primogenitus vix: ann. VII. Desine jam mater lacrimis rinovare querellas--namque dolor talis non tibi contigit uni." So at least I read. Another states that "M. Cocceius Ambrosius Aug: Lib: præpositus vestis albæ triumphalis (?) fecit." When he had lived with Nice (?) his wife forty-five years eleven days "sine ulla querela." Also, "Dis Manib. Rhodope fecerent (?) Berenice et Drusilla delicatæ dulcissimæ suae (_sic_)." Also, "Attidiæ felicissimæ uxori rariosimæ Fl: Antoninus." How these inscriptions, of which I copied out a few yesterday during a heavy shower in the portico of S. M. in Trastevere, make one feel, again by this magic of Rome, the other half of the truth: How little the centuries matter, how vain are these thousands of years, which exist only in our thoughts, how solely important are the brief pangs of us poor obscure shortlived forgotten creatures! _March_ 30. XI. PALAZZO ORSINI, FORMERLY SAVELLI. This is the most Roman house, in my sense, of all Rome. The first evening, when I came into my room, the sunset streaming in, the lights beginning below, it was fantastic and overwhelming. What I said of this being a unique moment in Roman history--the genius of the city stripped of all veils, visible everywhere, is especially true about the view from this window. During my childhood Rome was closed, uniform, without either the detail or the panoramic efforts which speak to the imagination; and ten or fifteen years hence the great gaps will be filled up, and the deep historical viscera, so to speak, of the city closed and grown together. Now, with the torn-down houses, the swept-away quarters, one has not only views of hills and river and bridges, and of gardens and palaces and loggias, hidden once and to be hidden again, but into the very life of the people: the squalor of back streets revealed, of yards looked into, of the open places turned into _immondezzaio_ and play and grazing ground, showing the barbarism and nakedness of the land--showing one that there is here no tradition of anything more active, decent or human than this present demolition. And the _Sventramento_ also reveals the past! From my window, under that sunset behind the trees and fountains and churches of the Janiculum, I look down on a sort of mediæval city of the Trastevere--upon a still stranger, imaginary one made by perspective and fancy; the old bridge, with its two double _hermes_ leading between towers, and the long prison-like walls of the inland buildings, into an imaginary square--an imaginary city with more towers, more Romanesque belfries. This is a case of the imaginary place due to perspective, to bird's-eye view, to some reminiscence. (I trace a resemblance to the arsenal gate at Venice, perhaps also to the inner town at Castelfranco.) This case is an illustration of how large a part illusion, even recognised as such, plays in our feeling. And similarly as regards the _invisible_ view. Here am I, in a house nesting in the theatre of Marcellus, the little orange and lemon garden presumably built actually onto those remaining black arches in which coppersmiths and coopers and saddlers, all the humble trades of a backward little country town or village, have burrowed: the thought of Virgil's line with it all. The mangy green grass in front, where the children fly kites and the inconceivable skeleton horses graze, is the site of the former Ghetto; and behind its remaining synagogue, the little belfry, the houses of the Cencis, are down at heel carts and ragged peasants round the little isolated Ghetto fountain; and on the other side the Aventine, the bridge of--was it Cocles? a land of ballad, of popular romance, of tragedy. _March_ 30. SPRING 1901. I. QUOMODO SEDET.... Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco: "Questo è Gesu Nazzareno"--as the housekeeper might say, "This is the present Earl"--also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the print of _i suoi santissimi piedi_, square little feet, of such a squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as the pattern on a pat of butter. Turning my face, in that tornado of dust, towards Rome, its walls stretch suddenly before me across the vineyards and fields, broken walls, of any mediæval city you please, and hiding, it would seem, emptiness behind them. The desolation of this distant city, with its foreground of squalid hovels, and ill-favoured wine shop and smithies where the very inscriptions, "Vino di Marino," or "Ferracocchio," or "Ova di Giornata," look as if a megalomaniac, escaped from an asylum, had dipped a brush into a paint-pot and splashed all over; this foreground of vague tombs, masonry heaven knows what, all flowered with huge wild mignonette; this other moving background of ragged peasants and unutterable galled horses; the desolation of this dead city which I feel behind those mediæval walls comes home to them, like the sting of the dust whirlpools and roar of the wind. _Quomodo sedet sola civitas_! Meanwhile, close to one of those city gates, is a poster announcing lectures "Sur le costume des Premiers Chrétiens!" But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us, bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Past! At moments like these I feel that one needs be entirely engrossed either in making two ends meet (a clerk or shopkeeper, or one of these haranguing archæologists holding forth under the Arch of Drusus) for his dinner or in tea parties and "jours," and "sport," to endure the company of Rome. I went into the vigna of S. Cesario for the key of the church. It is the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico, seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and Borgia suppers. And in this church and the neighbouring one the impression of the inscriptions recording succession of popes and cardinals, all the magnificent locusts who came swarm after swarm, to devour this land, leaving the broken remains of their hurried magnificence, volutes, plaster churches, and, inscriptions! inscriptions! _April_ 13. II. VILLA FALCONIERI. Villa Falconieri, Frascati--abandoned, overgrown--the wonderful outline of huge Mondragone, with its pines against the mountains. All these villas near each other, and while they open up into the hill and woods (the lovely delicate rose of the budding chestnuts) are still almost within hail of the little town across the valley. So different from the Tuscan villa, even the grandest, say Mte. Gufoni, which is only the extended _fattoria_, its place chosen by the accident of agricultural business. This mouldering rococo villa is inhabited in summer by the Trappists of Tre Fontane, of that Abbey of St. Anastasia which was the suzerain of all Maremma, great part of Umbria and the Tuscan islands! At the end of their miserably cultivated little _orto_, presiding over the few leeks and garlics, on the balustrade towards Rome of all divinities, who but Hortorum Deus! Near Grottaferrata in a flat green field, a nun, all in white, was seated under one of the big olives: a curious biblical figure. _April_ 26. III. PORTA LATINA. Yesterday with P. D. P. at Porta Latina. He told me an extraordinary thing. In the blocked-up arch of that suppressed gate, at the end of a blind alley, an old old couple--a man of ninety and a woman of eighty, had taken up their abode for months; helped occasionally by the monks of the neighbouring convent (with pretty rose-garden) of S. Giovanni a Porta Latina, to whom however permission was refused (the Superior referring to the Card. Vicar and the Card. Vicar to _his_ Confessor) to give a roof to the couple because of the woman; also there was a suspicion that the couple had not been married in church. All this P. D. had learned when these people were still there, in the arch. But we found them gone; and the strangest sight instead. In the immense thickness of the gate a heap of reeds in a corner; and strewn all about in this artificial grotto, old rusty utensils, a grater, a strainer, broken pots, papers, rags, half-burnt logs, a straw hat, and a walking stick! And over a kind of recess, on a plank, a little shrine, two broken Madonnas picked out of some dust-heap, withered flowers in a crock, and a sprig of olive, evidently of last Palm Sunday! Poor little properties, so poor, so wretched that they had remained unmolested, despised even by the poorest, safe at the end of that blind road in that closed-up gate of Rome! That two human beings in our day should have lived there for months, even years (for they returned after an absence, the monk told us); lived, like some anchorites of old, in the ruins, in a grotto made by human hands; with the vineyards all round, and the shrubs and flowers waving from the broken masonry! Their rags and shreds of paper littered the rank grass and acanthus by the walled-up gate, where the little Bramantesque temple stands, built by a French prelate under Julius II., and inscribed "Au plaisir de Dieu." _Au plaisir de Dieu!_ Over the walls, the great bones of the Baths of Caracalla half hidden by trees: and, closing the distance, St. Peters. We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi. The grey Franciscan who showed us round told us that a lady had given five hundred francs for admission of the old man and woman of the gate at the Petites Soeurs; but these required the religious marriage. About a month ago the couple was married and taken off to the Petites Soeurs; the day after the poor old man died! The old people had desired the monks to distribute their bedding and rags to the poor, now they themselves were provided for. And that is how the place came to be abandoned. The old man told the monks he much preferred the arch to the damp cellar where a greengrocer of Rome used to make him sleep. "They had good sides those people," I remarked. "Sfido! bonissimi," said the Franciscan; he was from Albi, but had got to speak with a Roman accent. While we were there, under the impression of that story, of the deserted church, the ragged grey monk, and of that whole squalid, imaginative Roman corner, a little cart drove up with a young man and two little girls, who went round with us and gathered sprays of hawthorn off the walls, leaving the pony to graze meanwhile. "No Romans," said P. D.; and indeed they turned out to be Vicentines, the young man a student of law taking out his young cousins for a _scampagnata_. P. D. very characteristically made them write their names for him in his pocket-book, and bowed to the little girls as if they were duchesses. More characteristically still, my friend carried off the old beggar's stick to keep in his study. _April_ 26. SPRING 1902. I. THE RUBBISH-HEAP. Yesterday wandered in Trastevere and about Piazza Mattei and Montanara and back by 'bus; again this morning tramm'd to Lateran in showers. The squalor of this Rome and of its people! The absence of all trace of any decent past, ancient barbarism as down at heel and unkempt as any modern slum! The starved galled horses, broken harness, unmended clothes and wide-mouthed sluttishness under the mound on which stand the Cenci's houses, a foul mound of demolition and rag-pickers, only a stone's-throw from the brand-new shop streets, the Lungo Tevere, the magnificence of palaces like the Mattei, Caetani, &c. If Rome undoubtedly gives the soul peace by its assurance that the present is as nothing in the centuries, it also depresses one, in other moods, with the feeling that all history is but a vast rubbish-heap and sink; that nothing matters, nothing comes out of all the ages save rags and brutishness. There is a great value for our souls in any place which tells us, by however slight indications, of a past of self-respect, activity and beauty; and I long for Tuscany. _February_ 25. II. THE EXCAVATIONS. In the Forum this morning with Css. B. and the excavator Boni. In the Director's shed a "Campionario," literally pattern sheets of the various strata of excavation: bits of crock, stone, tile, iron, little earthenware spoons for putting sacrificial salt in the fire, even what looked like a set of false teeth. Time represented thus in space. And similarly with the excavations themselves: century under century, each also represented by little more than foot-prints, bases of gone columns, foundations of rough edifices. Among these neatly-dug-out layers of nothingness, these tidy heaps of chips with so few things, stand out the few old column- and temple-ends which Piranesi already drew. I felt very keenly that the past is only a creation of the present. Boni, a very interesting and ardent mind, poetical and mystical, showed us things not really of this earth, not really laid bare by the spade, but existing in realms of fantastic speculation, shaped by argument, faultlessly cast in logical moulds. Too faultlessly methought, for looking at the mere heaps of architectural rubbish, let alone the earth, the various vegetations which have accumulated upon it, I had a sense of the infinite intricacy of all reality, and of the partiality and insufficiency of the paths which our reason (or our fancy in the garb of reason) cuts into it. Rituals and laws whose meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ago, races whose very mien and aspect (often their language) can only be speculated on: all this reappears, takes precision and certainty. But is not this a mere creation, like that of art or of systematic metaphysics? What struck me as the only certainty among these admirable cogent arguments was that the once tank of Juturna, round whose double springs Rome must have arisen to drink and worship, this sacred and healing water where the Dioscuri watered their steeds after Lake Regillus, has been fouled by human privies so deeply that years of dredging and pumping will be required to restore its purity. Of how many things is not this tank a symbol as cogent as any which our archæologist ascribed to those old symbol-mongers of his discourse! With us was a man who took no interest in all these matters; none in the significance of rituals, symbols, or the laws of racial growth and decadence. _He_ wanted to be shown the place where Cæsar had fallen; he was a survivor of the old school of historical interest. Very out of date and droll; but is not this old-fashioned interest in half-imaginary dramatic figures as legitimate as our playing with races, rituals, the laws, the metaphysical essence of the past? _February_ 27. III. THE MEET. The meet the other day, at Maglianella, beyond Porta S. Pancrazio. Desolate, rolling country, pale green wide dells, where streams should be, but are not; roads excavated in the brown volcanic rock, here and there fringed with a few cork-trees; the approach, very much, to Toscanella. But raced along by carriages, bicycles and motor-cars, and leading to a luncheon tent, a car full of hounds, school of cavalry officers, and the redcoats preparing to start. The cloud banks sat on the horizon as on the sea; the sky very pale and blue, moist, with song of larks descending from it. And as the horses cantered along the soft grass, the scent of last year's mint and fennel rose from stubble-fields, and the rank, fresh smell of crushed succulent asphodels. _February_ 27. IV. The cabman who, yesterday evening, took me to Palazzo Gabbrielli instead of Palazzo Orsini, excused himself saying that priests even blunder at the altar--"anche li preti sbajano all' altare." Very Roman! V. MONTE MARIO. With E. de V. on Monte Mario. The weather has cleared; slight tramontana, pure sky, with white storm- or snow-clouds collected like rolled-up curtains, everywhere on the horizon. Great green slopes of grass appear as far as one could see, here and there a little valley full of ilex scrub; in the mist of the distance conical shepherds' huts, with smoke wreath. We sat on a piece of turf, cut in by horses' hoofs, by a stack of faggots; song of lark and bleating of sheep. But for the road, the carriage, it might have been in the Maremma for utter loneliness and freshness. Turning round a few yards further, carriages and motor-cars, and all Rome, with its unfinished new quarters nearest, stretched under us. _March_ 3. VI. VIA OSTIENSE. Day before yesterday with dear Paso along Via Ostiense. Perhaps the most solemn of all those solemn Roman roads, with the solemnity and desolation of the great brimful brown Tiber, between barren banks of mud, added to the solemnity of the empty green country. It is the refusal of vegetation in great part which makes this country strange and solemn. Such vegetation as there is, the asphodels and rare blackthorn along the road, the stumpy oaks or cork-trees or the bends of the river, gaining an importance, a significance out of all proportion; and the thinnest little distant spinny, looking like a mysterious consecrated wood. We got to the top of a hill, and there, far off against the grey flatness, was the lavender line of the sea. It was a brilliant day of freshly fallen distant snow; the air keen and windless, with a feel of the sea as we went towards it. VII. PALACE YARDS. Yesterday P. D. P. took me to see a former Marescotti palace in the Via della Pigna. A very quiet aristocratic part of Rome, of narrow streets between high palaces, and little untraversed squares. The gloominess of the outside succeeded by the sunlight, the spaciousness of a vast courtyard, on to which look sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-century windows, closed by the back of a church with its clock-tower, so that, as Pierino says, it might almost be the piazza of a provincial town. A campanile, fountain, piazza, almost a _sun_, all to oneself. One wonders with what these palaces could ever have been filled by the original owners. We then went into another palace yard; and there was a shop with three young men working at a huge sawdust doll, with porcelain sandalled feet. I thought it was a doll for displaying surgical apparatus, but it turned out to be a female saint, whose head we were shown, life-size, properly expressive with rolling eyes and a little halo. _March_ 6. SPRING 1903. I. RETURN TO ROME. That I should feel it most on return here; find I have returned without _her_, travelled without her, that she is not there to tell; the sense of utter loneliness, of the letter one would write, the greeting one would give--and which no creature now wants! Yesterday morning, feeling ill and very sad, Rome came for half-hour with its odd consolation. I sat on the balcony of the corner room, very high up, in the sunshine. Cabs, with their absurd Roman canter, crossing the diaper of the little square, circling, as I remember them doing in my childhood, round the unwilling fare. A soldier rode across, dismounted, took his beast by the bridle to the cattle-trough in the palace wall opposite; a bit of campagna intruded into town. And motor-cars snorted and bells rang. High up on the same level with me was the hidden real Rome--all that you do not guess while walking in the streets below. Colonna gardens with bridges over the way, and green-clipped hedges and reddening Judas-trees under the big pines, and a row of marble Emperors turning their backs; and, further, the Quirinal with tip of obelisk, and plaster trumpet-blowing Fame; and a palm-tree, its head rising out of I know not what hidden yard, in front of a terrace of drying rags. And at every vista end, pines of the Pincian, Villa Doria, &c.; and domes; and the pale blond roofs with the telephone wires like gossamer stretched over them. Sunshine; distant noise and incessant bells. Rome in a fashion consoling; but how empty! _April_ 3. II. PALM SUNDAY. This morning I know not what ceremony in the Portico of SS. Apostoli: a little procession, some monks, a priest in purple, and a few draggle-tailed people before the closed door, chanting at intervals, till the door opened and they entered, their silver cross in its purple bag ahead, and their little branches of olive. The fine carved Roman eagle in its magnificent garland of oak-leaves, presiding, very fierce and contemptuous, over this little scene. When one effaces the notion of habit, how very odd to see a company of nineteenth-century people, battered and galled by life like old cab-horses, stationing in a portico singing verses and holding branches of olive! There is something refreshing, something of the fields and hills, of leisure and childishness, in the proceeding, if only the poor creatures realised it. But to most of them, I take it, the bearing of a silver cross, of an olive branch, is in reality as utilitarian (though utilitarian in regard to another world) as holding the tail of a saucepan or rattling a money-box. For how many, one wonders, is that door, opening to the cross and the olive branches, the door of an inner temple, of a place swept and garnished in the pious fancy? alas! alas! I went on, on foot, past the Capitol, through the Montanara region, with a growing sense, which I have had ever since return here, of the squalor, the lousiness, the dust-heap, the unblushing _immondezzaio_ quality of Rome and its inhabitants. Everything ragged, filthy, listless; the very cauliflowers they were selling looking all stalk, fit for that refuse midden which symbolises the city. By the Temple of Vesta a lot of carts were drawn up, with galled horses and ragged crouching peasants--that sort of impression which Piranesi gives. A school of little girls, conducted by a nun, was filing out of S. Maria in Cosmedin, and I helped up the leathern curtain for them to pass. Tatters, squalor, with that abundant animal strength and beauty of these people; one feels they have been eating and drinking, and befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a ditch full of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion, makes the fine aristocratic, swept and garnished quality of that Byzantine architecture more delicate and dainty still. The church was finished restoring two years ago, but the population of that low part of Rome, the Piazza Montanara St. Giles, has already given it the squalor of ages. I cannot say how deeply, though vaguely, I felt the meaningless tragic triviality of these successive generations of reality, in the face of that solemn, meaningful abstraction which we call history, which we call humanity, the centuries, Rome. The great holes through which, as through earthquake rents, the innermost life of Rome has become visible in the last thirty years, are beginning to close up. In that sort of rag-fair, witch-burning ground limited only by the island and the belfries of Trastevere which I used to look down upon from Palazzo Orsini, the Jews are building a colossal synagogue. One does not grudge it them, after their Holy Cross Days! But that strange simultaneous vision of the centuries (like that of their life which drowning folk are said to have) is ending with the death agony of old Rome. _April_ 4. III. MONDRAGONE. The white peacocks apparently all gone; but two superb green ones, their tails outspread, glittering on the grass under the olives just below the villa terrace. Near the terrace, where a lot of olive wood was being chopped on a stump of fine fluted column, a bay-tree of the girth of a good-sized oak, bearing pale yellow leaves and blossom, as of beaten metal, the golden bough of the Sibyl. Hard by another bay-tree, a ramping python, rearing up a head of bright green leaves. The loveliness of the chestnut woods on the hill behind, not yet in leaf, but rosy with rising sap; big round olives also, dark silver in front. The same colours and same wonderful rounded dimpled volcanic lie of the land as round Villa Lante at Viterbo. We walked, the Carlo R.'s little governess and I, along round above Mondragone and down by Villa Falconieri; the three children on donkeys in front, Gabriella's boys and their cousins. The pleasantness of the children's voices, of their bear-fighting in the train coming back. A splendid day of sun, wind, of dove's-wing distant Campagna view. _April_ 14. IV. SAN SABA. San Saba to-day, for the second time this year, with those pleasant English people the P.s. It was Thursday, and we were not admitted into the garden (though we were very kindly allowed into the loggia) because the pupils of the Germanic College were having their weekly recreation, a hundred of them. We saw their gowns, like geraniums or capsicums, moving between the columns and under the blossoming orange-trees. And a party of them sat among the fallen pillars and broken friezes outside the little churches singing--and what?--the Lorelei in chorus, "Sie kämmt sich mit goldenem Kamme und singt ein Lied dabei." Oh, friendly romance of Germany, lurking even in the house of the Lord, and cheek-by-jowl with De Propaganda Fide! PAL. SCIARRA, _April_ 16. V. A CONVENT. This morning with Antonia at S. Cecilia in Trastevere, having a special permission from Minister to see the Cavalieri frescoes in the nuns' choir gallery (like poorer, clumsier, _jowlier_ Duccio; Byzantine, with antique braided hair and "Greek" features). The impression of the convent _clausura_--little vestibule, a strongly grated small window inside it, apparently ending only in darkness; the "Ruota," behind which a voice spoke mysteriously as through a telephone, the wooden shelf turning on itself and offering us a key--key opening (by instructions of mysterious voice) an adjacent small room: two straw chairs on either side of small table before a thick black grating; another grating behind that, and a kind of perforated shutter between. The latter rattled away, a nun's face uncertainly seen--faded cheeks, immense eyes, white dress, behind the black double bars; the key restored to the Ruota, and engulfed after directions from the mysterious voice; another door, sound of keys and bolts. In all this a predominant and lugubrious impression of keys and bolts. The little portress, Donna Maria Geltude (for these nuns are Benedictines, and have the handle to their names), a wizen, very ugly little woman, in incredibly shabby but spotless dress, white wool washed threadbare to an appearance of linen, voluminous skirts and black veil. A glazed cloister (with twelfth-century columns), a few pictures, seventeenth-century tables and chairs, as in a passage; more passages similar, with _prie Dieu_ and scant peasant furniture. The little library, a smallish glass press with nothing but Filotea, Fr. de Sales, Vite dei Santi, &c. Might they read them? Yes, but only on asking the Abbess. Terror of nun lest Antonia and I should go on or into anything not mentioned in our permit--the impression that in this life all can be done, but done only by permission. "Men allowed to visit?" Only by permission of Cardinal Segretario di Stato. "Men working in garden, masons, &c.?" Yes, but always with special permission; permission and bars! In all these corridors and stairs not a creature; only at one moment a door stirred, Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden, are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order. The gilt box of the choir, looking down into church; the stalls; the Abbess's gold-headed crozier stuck into her stall (St. Cecilia with harp in it), two lecterns with Latin lessons of the day--the day's martyrology. _April_ 22. VI. COLONNA GARDENS. With Contessa Z. to-day in Colonna Gardens. Great surprise on finding them more romantic than from the outside. A terrace, with all Rome, blond; all manner of unexpected towers and cupolas. The pines of the Janiculum, staircase fountains, waterless but noisy, the Roman veil of vegetation everywhere; and great vague walls of spaliered roses and lemons. In the midst of these terraces and balustrades and crowded nurseries of flowers, the surprise of finding that that great vague building I have noticed from below is a ruin, roofless, full of wild fig, a castle's square keep. Mediæval? antique? the place surely whence the imaginary Nero watched the burning, and harped! _April_ 25. VII. PALO. Palo Beach yesterday; motored there by my French friends. I have had fever some days past, and there was more than mere pleasure and amusement in sitting on the sand and breathing the clean cloudless sea-air, instead of the scirocco stuff we had left, alternately simmering and shivering in Rome. By the way, how little the sea gives to Rome (except at the Aventine corner sometimes by a violent libeccio), and how one feels the futility of this tideless Mediterranean, unable to purify or renovate even a few yards of the inland! Think of the estuaries of the North! of the cleansing vivifying tides and draughts which the ocean thrusts into the very vitals of the countries! No one, one feels, ever landed (since Æneas and his companions) upon this shallow strand, save the raiding Saracens and Barbary pirates, against whom the castle, the martello tower, barely more of Palo, was built. For there is not even here what represents the life of the Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. Here, one understands that a storm would mean mere passive submerging: the water rising higher, covering the straight narrow beach, the low green fields, noiselessly, and retreating when so inclined, with neat stacks of seaweed and samphire left behind. The renovation of Rome, like its drinking water, has always come from the mountains; the Tiber mouth is their outlet, not the inlet of the sea. And the mountain clouds change in shape, stagnate and brood in this low trough; the mountain air faints, dies, in these fever levels. The beach of Palo is only a few yards wide: a low natural wall of corroded tufo, covered with no maritime bent, but ordinary grass; a line of sea refuse, a band of fine black sparkling sand, and little waves fringed black with that mournful sand, breaking feebly against it. A high sky, with a few sailing clouds; and in it, rather than on the sea, some boats, like toy ducks, on the offing, motionless. We sat on the sand, digging into its moist warmth, and amused (I at least) that this glittering beach left no trace on the land; making Carpaccio St. George Dragons (with inserted eyes of sand flint) out of blistered drift-wood; and looking about, later, for bits of antique marble and brick upon the sands. For this lazy sea appears to wash no pebbles of its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into petal-shaped wedges for the _Opus Alexandrinum_. I don't think we saw one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely, precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white marble, Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into a perfect heart, the heart of a marble Artemis or Amazon. This the lazy Roman sea does, and it is surely an unusual feat: roll its shingle into vague shapes of symbolic hearts, hearts of serpentine, of jasper, of various beautiful rose and lilac breccias, of basalt, and of fine rose brick, all scattered on the glittering black sand (with funny mourning edges of violet shells), and in the lip of those little black waves. But far more beautiful and extraordinary and brilliant (and to me far more wonderful and odd) was the still uncorrupted little corpse of a kingfisher: sky-blue breast, greenish turquoise ruff, and glossy dark back, lying in state, as dead birds do. _April_ 29. VIII. FIUMICINO. Three days ago, in heavy rain, taken in motor to Fiumicino. Impression of grass, yellow with buttercups, soused with rain, opening, falling aside as we swish noiselessly into it, under the moving dark sky. Magliana: a big farm; one takes a minute in the soaking filthy yard, among manure and litter, to recognise that this dilapidated, leprous-looking building is a palace, with mullioned fifteenth-century windows and coats of arms and inscriptions of Cibo and Riario popes. From the top of the wide low-stepped staircase (like that, also of the Cibo's originally, of Pal. Ruffo), wide views of meadows of pale rumpled grass, yellow here, and there with clover, and a great yellow Tiber arm unaccountable in this sort of England. This is the place, I believe, where the quails are shot and netted at this time of year; and I suppose Leo X. was on some such expedition when he caught his death here. Fiumicino, a canal or arm of the Tiber, a yellowish marsh, a big, uprooted looking martello tower by the beach, and a little pier with a green boat like a beetle in the rain. The look of Viareggio or Porto Corsini, of all the little God-forsaken and strangled harbours of this country. The sacred island, I suppose, on the other side of a bridge of boats, covered with what seems a scrub of ilex and lentisk. IX. VIA ARDEATINA. Yesterday, again in pelting rain, far along Via Ardeatina (the brutes have taken away the little river god from off that trough in the little valley of poplars). The hollows full of foaming yellow streams, and yellow water gushing everywhere. The great wet green slopes under the dark low sky, with only sheep and here and there a stump of masonry, no trees, no hedges, no walls save of rough stones, no bounding mountains, visible; the whole country transformed into some northern high-lying moorland. A sort of tiny half-ruined, towered and walled St. Gimignano, with many olives about it, seems a ghostly apparition in it all. _May_ 3. X. SAN TEODORO. This morning, trying to lose time before lunching at Monte Savella, I was attracted into that little round brick church nearly always closed, which stands in a circular hole under the Palatine. You go down a flight of steps into a round paved place: and this, with a worn-down sacrificial altar, carved with laurel wreaths, was strewn this morning with ivy leaves and bay. Lifting the big green drapery which had first attracted me to that church, for it hung outside it, and pushing the door, there was a shock of surprise; a plunge into mystery. The round church was empty, dark, but full of the smell of fresh incense; and in that darkness I was fairly blinded by the effulgence of the high-altar, tier upon tier of tapers. When I was able to see, there were three women, black, with red scapulars about their necks, kneeling; and on either side, in the extreme corners of the lit-up altar, two figures, or what, after a second, I decided must be figures, kneeling also. They were on either side of the empty praying stool in front of the altar, on which lay big gilt books and a couple of shimmering stoles. Lit up by that blaze of candles, their whitish folded robes looked almost like fluted marble columns; and as they knelt they ended off like broken columns, for they were, to all appearance, headless. Round their middle each had a white rope, about as thick as a hand, cutting the flutings of the robe; and where the head disappeared, a white penitent's hood thrown backward. They remained absolutely motionless, so that after awhile I began almost to doubt whether I had not interpreted some column or curtain into human figures. But after about five minutes one of the two--the right-hand one--moved slightly, just enough to show the thing was living. There they remained motionless, stooping in their fluted robes and thrown-back hoods, headless; and I went out, leaving them so, through the circular yard strewn with ivy and bay all round that worn away altar. What was it all? I have a vague notion this church is connected with the Cave of Cacus, or the lair of Romulus' she-wolf. _May_ 3. WINTER 1904. I. PALO. Palo again. The little pineta or grove rather of young pines, very close together and tufty, which open out and close fanlike in long green avenues, each with its prismatic star of shivering light, as we race through in the motor. A place where laurel-crowned poets in white should wander with verse-like monotony upon the soft green turf. Beyond, a band of lilac sere field, a band of blue sea; and between the fringe of the compact round pines, the sun setting, its light shivering diamond-like among the needles. _February_ 25. II. A WALK AT DUSK. Yesterday went, in a band at dusk, for a melancholy stroll through the back streets. The Piranesi effect: yards of palaces, Marescotti, Massimo alle Colonne, the staircase of Palazzo Altieri. These immense grass-grown yards, with dreary closed windows all round, fountains alone breaking their silence, look like a bit of provincial life, of some tiny mountain town, enclosed in Rome. At Monte Giordano (Palazzo Gabbrielli) it becomes the walled Umbrian town, castellated. In this gloom, this sadness of icy evening sky between the high roofs, and after the appalling sadness of a church, squalid, dark, a few people kneeling, and the sacristan extinguishing the altars after a Benediction (every grief, one would think, laid down on that floor only to pick up a weight of the grief of others); after this there was something sweet and country-like in the splash of the fountains at Monte Giordano; the water bringing from the free mountains into this gloomy city; and to me the recollection of a Tuscan villa, of peace and serenity. _February_ 27. III. TUSCULUM. To Tusculum to-day with Maria and Du B. This is the place I carried away in my thoughts and wishes, a mere rapidly passed steep grassy hill, topped with pines and leafless chestnuts, from that motor drive last year round by Monte Compatri and Grottaferrata. The steepness and bareness of that great grass slope was heightened to-day by the tremendous gales blowing in a cloudless sky; one felt as if it were that wind which had kept the place so inaccessible, so virgin of trees and people, nay, had made the grass slippery, and polished the black basalt slabs of the path. And that wind struggling upwards against it in the sunshine, with the great rose and lilac sere hills opposite, the pale blond valley behind, seemed to clear the soul also of all rank vegetation, of all thoughts and feelings thick and muddy and leaden; to sweep away all that gets between the reality of things and oneself. One should contrive to have impressions like these sufficiently often in life: this is the excitement which is helpful; the heartbeating, the breathlessness, the pain even, which brace and make us widely sensitive. Brother Wind--why did St. Francis not invoke him?--played with us roughly and healthfully, telling us, in the hurtling against houses, the rustling, soughing among trees, and the whistling in our own hair and ears, of the greatness of the universe's life and the greatness of our own. On the crest, under the thin fringe of bare trees, with the plain of Rome, the snow of the Apennines on one side, the violet woods of Monte Laziale on the other, the surprise of suddenly coming on a rude stone cottage, with headless statues of athletes and togaed Romans built into its rough walls. And in a hollow under delicate leafless chestnuts that wonderful little theatre, cut out of black volcanic stone, as if the representation were to be storm and full moon, making and unmaking of mountains and countries, and the whole of history.... Beginning to come down, and just above that little theatre, as we turned, we saw, beyond the dark ridge of Castel Gandolfo, cupolaed and towered, a narrow belt of light, more brilliant than that of the sky: the light upon the sea. _March_ 7. IV. ST. PETER'S. The greatness of the place had taken me, and quite unexpectedly, at once: the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold, the little encampment of yellow lights ever so far off close to the ground at the Confession; and, above all, the spaciousness, the vast airiness and emptiness, which seemed in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a quality of the place. I had come to see, if I could, Pollaiolo's tomb in the Chapel of the Sacrament. I found the grating closed; and kneeling before it, a foreign northern-looking man, with grizzled, curly hair and beard, and a torn fustian coat and immense nailed shoes. He was muttering prayers, kissing his rosary or medal at intervals, and slightly prostrating himself. But what struck me, and apparently others (for people approached and stared), was his extraordinary intentness and fervour. He was certainly conscious of no one and nothing save whatever his eyes were fixed upon--either the sacrament or the altar behind that railing, or merely some vision of his own. And he seemed not only different from everyone else, but separate, isolated from that vast place which made all the rest of us so small, such tiny details of itself. He was no detail, but an independent reality--he and his prayer, his belief, his nailed shoes: all come who knows how far in what loneliness! I got the sacristan to open, and went in to see the tomb--a mad masquerade thing, everything in wrong relief and showing the wrong side, the very virtues or sciences flat on their backs, so that you could not see them. And in the middle, presenting his stark bronze feet, the brown, mummied-looking, wicked pope, with great nose under his tiara. An insane thing--more so than any Bernini monument, I thought. Perhaps it was the presence of that man praying away outside which affected me to think this. There he was, as little likely to move away, apparently, as the bronze pope stretched out, soles protruded, among the absurd allegories. I went also to see the Pietà, and then stayed a long while walking up and down; but still the man was kneeling there, and might be kneeling, doubtless, till now or till doomsday, if the vergers had not, in closing the doors, turned him out. _March_ 8. V. THE CRYPTS. Yesterday the Grotte Vaticane, the Crypts of St. Peter's, a horrible disappointment, and on the whole absurd impression. That of being conducted (down a little staircase carpeted with stair cloth) through the basement of a colossal hotel, with all the electric light turned on at midday--a basement with lumber-rooms full of rather tawdry antiquities giving off its corridors, and other antiquities (as we see them in Italian inns) crammed against walls and into corners. Donatello and Mino bas-reliefs become sham by their surroundings, apocryphal Byzantine mosaics, second-rate pictures. Even empty sarcophagi and desecrated tombs just as at Riettis or Della Torres at Venice, and with seventeenth-century gilding and painting obbligato overhead. And then into wider corridors, whitewashed, always with that glare of electricity from the low roof; corridors where you expect automatic trucks of coals, or dinner lifts; and where the vague whitewashed cubes of masonry against the walls suggest new-fangled washing or heating apparatus. And instead! they are the resting-place of the Stuarts, only labels telling us so, or of mediæval popes. And that vague arched thing with wooden cover, painted to imitate porphyry, is the tomb of the Emperor Otho; and there, as we go on, it grows upon one that the carved and mitred figures tucked away under arches are not warehoused for sale to forestiere, but lying on the sarcophagus, over the bones or the _praecordia_ of Boniface VIII. of Roveres and Borgias. Waiting at the head of that staircase for the beadle, faint strains of music come from very far. In St. Peter's a great choral service like this one going on in the left-hand chapel, becomes a detail lost as in the life of a whole city. _March_ 17. VI. SAN STEFANO. San Stefano Rotondo on that rainy afternoon, the extraordinary grandeur of this circular church filled with diffuse white light. Architecturally one of the most beautiful Roman churches, certainly, with its circle of columns surrounding the great central well, where two colossal pillars carry the triumphal arch, carry a great blank windowed wall above it, immensely high up. Those columns, that wall, pearly white, of carved and broken marble against pure chalky brilliancy of whitewash, seem in a way the presiding divinities of this great circular sanctuary in the church's centre; or is it the white light, the solemn pure emptiness among them? An immanent presence, greater certainly than could be any gigantic statue. _March_ 18. VII. VIA LATINA. Afterwards, in fitful rain, we went to the Tombs and the little roofless basilica near them in the Via Latina; and walked up and down, a melancholy little party enough, grubbing up marbles and picking them out of the rubbish heap among the quickening grass. The delicate grey sky kept dissolving in short showers; the corn and ploughed purple earth (_that compost!_) were drenched and fragrant with new life; and the air was full of the twitter of invisible larks. But in this warm soft renewal there was, for us, only the mood of lost things and imminent partings; and the song of the peasants in the field hard by told not, as it should, of their mountains, but of this sad, wet landscape traversed by endless lines of ruins. Suddenly in the clouds, a solid dark spot appeared; the top, the altar slab of Mons Latialis. And little by little the clouds slipped lower, the whole mountain range of hills stepped forth from the vapours, with its great peaceful life and strength. _March_ 18. SPRING 1905. I. ROME AGAIN. Yesterday, after D. Laura's, took Du B. that walk through the Ghetto, along the Tiber quays by the island; a stormy, wet day. Rome again! As we stood by the worn Januses of the bridge and looked into the swirling water, thinking of how that Terme Apollo had lain there, the Tiber, like Marsyas, flaying one fair flank of the god; I felt Rome and its unchanging meaning grip me again, and liberate me from the frettings of my own past and present. We went in to see some people who are furnishing an apartment in Palazzo Orsini. A very Roman impression this: the central court of that fortified palace built into the theatre of Marcellus; lemons spaliered and rows of Tangerine trees, with little Moorish-looking fountains between; only the sky above, only the sound of the bubbling fountains. You look out of a window and behold, close by, the unspeakable rag-fair of that foul quarter, with its yells and cries rising up and stench of cheap cooking. We saw some small Renaissance closets, still with their ceilings and fire-places, where tradition says a last Savelli was stabbed. A feudal fortress this, and, like those of the hills round Rome which these ruins mimic, raising its gardens and pompous rooms above the squalor of the mediæval village. Immediately below, the corridors of the theatre; below that, the shops, where pack-saddles, ploughs, scythes, wooden pails--the things of a village--are for sale in the midst of those black arches. And then the dining-room, library, bath-rooms of excellent New Englanders crowning it all; and in the chapel, their telephone! "Take care," I said, "the message will come some day--not across space, but across time. _Con chi parlo?_" Well, say, _The White Devil of Italy!_ In that Campitelli quarter, the constant blind turnings behind the great giant palaces; places for cut-throats, for the sudden onslaught of bravos. I feel very often that if one lived in all this picturesqueness, the horrors of the past, the vacuity of the present, would drive one I know not whither. I have had, more than ever this time, the sense of horror at the barbarism of Rome, of civilisation being encamped in all this human refuse, and doing nothing for it; and the feeling of horror at this absorbing Italy, and at one's liking it! They are impressions of the sort I had at Tangier. And the face of an idiot beggar--the odd, pleased smile above his filth--suddenly brought back to me that special feeling, I suppose of the East. We are wretched, transitional creatures to be so much moved by such things, by this dust-heap of time, and to be pacified in spirit by the sight of all this litter of ages; 'tis a Hamlet and the gravedigger's attitude; and the attitude of Whitman in the fertile field of _This Compost_ is a deal better. SABATO SANTO. POSTSCRIPT. Yesterday morning, while looking through, with a view to copying out, my Roman notes of the last eighteen years, I felt, with odd vividness, the various myselfs who suffered and hoped while writing them. And, even more, I felt the presence of the beloved ones who, unmentioned, not even alluded to, had been present in those various successive Romes of mine. All of them have changed; some are dead, others were never really living. But while I turned over my note-books, there they were back. Back with their feeling of _then_; back with their presence (in one case the presence of a distant companion, to whom I could show these things only in thought); their complete realisation, or their half explicit charm, their still unshattered promise. Of all these I find not a word, barely a name; nothing telling of them to others. Only to me, in these sites, impersonal and almost eternal, on these walls which have stood two thousand years and may stand two thousand more, and these hillsides and roads full of the world's legend--there appear, visible, distinct, the shadows cast by my own life; the forms and faces of those changed, gone, dead ones; and my own. FLORENCE, _April_, 1905. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: The edition from which this text was drawn is volume 4175 of the Tauchnitz Edition of British Authors, where it appeared together with _Laurus Nobilis_, also by Vernon Lee. The volume was published in 1910. Section IV in under Spring 1902 is not named in the original book. The following changes were made to the text: turning out of great rag bag turning out of a great rag bag bégunie béguine comes home to theme comes home to them solemn, meaning full abstraction solemn, meaningful abstraction 
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28600	----	[Illustration] AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME BY FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1899 _All rights reserved_ Copyright, 1898, By The Macmillan Company. Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November, December, 1898; January, 1899. _Norwood Press_ _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_ _Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._ TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME II PAGE REGION VII REGOLA 1 REGION VIII SANT' EUSTACHIO 23 REGION IX PIGNA 44 REGION X CAMPITELLI 64 REGION XI SANT' ANGELO 101 REGION XII RIPA 119 REGION XIII TRASTEVERE 132 REGION XIV BORGO 202 LEO THE THIRTEENTH 218 THE VATICAN 268 SAINT PETER'S 289 LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES VOLUME II Saint Peter's _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Palazzo Farnese 18 The Pantheon 46 The Capitol 68 General View of the Roman Forum 94 Theatre of Marcellus 110 Porta San Sebastiano 130 The Roman Forum, looking west 154 The Palatine 186 Castle of Sant' Angelo 204 Pope Leo the Thirteenth 228 Raphael's "Transfiguration" 256 Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" 274 Panorama of Rome, from the Orti Farnesiani 298 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT VOLUME II PAGE Region VII Regola, Device of 1 Portico of Octavia 3 San Giorgio in Velabro 11 Region VIII Sant' Eustachio, Device of 23 Site of Excavations on the Palatine 31 Church of Sant' Eustachio 39 Region IX Pigna, Device of 44 Interior of the Pantheon 49 The Ripetta 53 Piazza Minerva 55 Region X Campitelli, Device of 64 Church of Aracoeli 70 Arch of Septimius Severus 83 Column of Phocas 92 Region XI Sant' Angelo, Device of 101 Piazza Montanara and the Theatre of Marcellus 106 Site of the Ancient Ghetto 114 Region XII Ripa, Device of 119 Church of Saint Nereus and Saint Achilleus 125 The Ripa Grande and Site of the Sublician Bridge 128 Region XIII Trastevere, Device of 132 Ponte Garibaldi 137 Palazzo Mattei 140 House built for Raphael by Bramante, now torn down 145 Monastery of Sant' Onofrio 147 Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius 159 Interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli 175 Palazzo dei Conservatori 189 Region XIV Borgo, Device of 202 Hospital of Santo Spirito 214 The Papal Crest 218 Library of the Vatican 235 Fountain of Acqua Felice 242 Vatican from the Piazza of St. Peter's 251 Loggie of Raphael in the Vatican 259 Biga in the Vatican Museum 268 Belvedere Court of the Vatican 272 Sixtine Chapel 279 Saint Peter's 289 Mamertine Prison 294 Interior of St. Peter's 305 Pietà of Michelangelo 318 Tomb of Clement the Thirteenth 321 Ave atque Vale. Vignette 327 [Illustration] Ave Roma Immortalis REGION VII REGOLA 'Arenula'--'fine sand'--'Renula,' 'Regola'--such is the derivation of the name of the Seventh Region, which was bounded on one side by the sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to the island of Saint Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates as a 'quarter of the city inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' The mechanics were chiefly tanners, who have always been unquiet and revolutionary folk, but at least one exception to the general statement must be made, since it was here that the Cenci had built themselves a fortified palace on the foundations of a part of the Theatre of Balbus, between the greater Theatre of Marcellus, then held by the Savelli, and the often mentioned Theatre of Pompey. There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of Beatrice was passed, and there she lived for many months after the murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughters and laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt the little church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself and them; but neither he nor they were laid there. The palace used to face the Ghetto, but that is gone, swept away to the very last stone by the municipality in a fine hygienic frenzy, though, in truth, neither plague nor cholera had ever taken hold there in the pestilences of old days, when the Christian city was choked with the dead it could not bury. There is a great open space there now, where thousands of Jews once lived huddled together, crowding and running over each other like ants in an anthill, in a state that would have killed any other people, persecuted occasionally, but on the whole, fairly well treated; indispensable then as now to the spendthrift Christian; confined within their own quarter, as formerly in many other cities, by gates closed at dusk and opened at sunrise, altogether a busy, filthy, believing, untiring folk that laughed at the short descent and high pretensions of a Roman baron, but cringed and crawled aside as the great robber strode by in steel. And close by the Ghetto, in all that remains of the vast Portico of Octavia, is the little Church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria where the Jews were once compelled to hear Christian sermons on Saturdays. [Illustration: PORTICO OF OCTAVIA From a print of the last century] Close by that church Rienzi was born, and it is for ever associated with his memory. His name calls up a story often told, yet never clear, of a man who seemed to possess several distinct and contradictory personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero, a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan. The Buddhist monks of the far East believe today that a man's individual self is often beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentary personalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may in reality be better or worse than they are. The Eastern belief may serve at least as an illustration to explain the sort of mixed character with which Rienzi came into the world, by which he imposed upon it for a certain length of time, and which has always taken such strong hold upon the imagination of poets, and writers of fiction, and historians. Rienzi, as we call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged to Anagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer of the Colonna, and his wife was a washer-woman. Between them, moreover, they made a business of selling water from the Tiber, through the city, at a time when there were no aqueducts. Nicholas Rienzi's mother was handsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and feature for which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many, varied and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineage rarely transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged to that order which is never far removed from madness and always akin to folly. The greatest of his talents was his eloquence, the least of his qualities was judgment, and while he possessed the courage to face danger unflinchingly, and the means of persuading vast multitudes to follow him in the realization of an exalted dream, he had neither the wit to trace a cause to its consequence, nor the common sense to rest when he had done enough. He had no mental perspective, nor sense of proportion, and in the words of Madame de Staël he 'mistook memories for hopes.' He was born in the year 1313, in the turbulent year that followed the coronation of Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg; and when his vanity had come upon him like a blight, he insulted the memory of his beautiful mother by claiming to be the Emperor's son. In his childhood he was sent to Anagni. There it must be supposed that he acquired his knowledge of Latin from a country priest, and there he lived that early life of solitude and retirement which, with ardent natures, is generally the preparation for an outburst of activity that is to dazzle, or delight, or terrify the world. Thence he came back, a stripling of twenty years, dazed with dreaming and surfeited with classic lore, to begin the struggle for existence in his native Rome as an obscure notary. It seems impossible to convey an adequate idea of the confusion and lawlessness of those times, and it is hard to understand how any city could exist at all in such absence of all authority and government. The powers were nominally the Pope and the Emperor, but the Pope had obeyed the commands of Philip the Fair and had retired to Avignon, and no Emperor could even approach Rome without an army at his back and the alliance of the Ghibelline Colonna to uphold him if he succeeded in entering the city. The maintenance of order and the execution of such laws as existed, were confided to a mis-called Senator and a so-called Prefect. The Senatorship was the property of the Barons, and when Rienzi was born the Orsini and Colonna had just agreed to hold it jointly to the exclusion of every one else. The prefecture was hereditary in the ancient house of Di Vico, from whose office the Via de' Prefetti in the Region of Campo Marzo is named to this day; the head of the house was at first required to swear allegiance to the Pope, to the Emperor, and to the Roman People, and as the three were almost perpetually at swords drawn with one another, the oath was a perjury when it was not a farce. The Prefects' principal duty appears to have been the administration of the Patrimony of Saint Peter, in which they exercised an almost unlimited power after Innocent the Third had formally dispensed them from allegiance to the Emperor, and the long line of petty tyrants did not come to an end until Pope Eugenius the Fourth beheaded the last of the race for his misdeeds in the fifteenth century; after him the office was seized upon by the Barons and finally drifted into the hands of the Barberini, a mere sinecure bringing rich endowments to its fortunate possessor. In Rienzi's time there were practically three castes in Rome,--priests, nobles, and beggars,--for there was nothing which in any degree corresponded to a citizen class; such business as there was consisted chiefly in usury, and was altogether in the hands of the Jews. Rome was the lonely and ruined capital of a pestilential desert, and its population was composed of marauders in various degrees. The priests preyed upon the Church, the nobles upon the Church and upon each other, the beggars picked the pockets of both, and such men as were bodily fit for the work of killing were enlisted as retainers in the service of the Barons, whose steady revenues from their lands, whose strong fortresses within the city, and whose possession of the coat and mail armour which was then so enormously valuable, made them masters of all men except one another. They themselves sold the produce of their estates and the few articles of consumption which reached Rome from abroad, in shops adjoining their palaces; they owned the land upon which the corn and wine and oil were grown; they owned the peasants who ploughed and sowed and reaped and gathered; and they preserved the privilege of disposing of their own wares as they saw fit. They feared nothing but an ambush of their enemies, or the solemn excommunication of the Pope, who cared little enough for their doings. The cardinals and prelates who lived in the city were chiefly of the Barons' own order and under their immediate protection. The Barons possessed everything and ruled everything for their own profit; they defended their privileges with their lives, and they avenged the slightest infringement on their powers by the merciless shedding of blood. They were ignorant, but they were keen; they were brave, but they were faithless; they were passionate, licentious and unimaginably cruel. Such was the city, and such the government, to which Rienzi returned at the age of twenty, to follow the profession of a notary, probably under the protection of the Colonna. That the business afforded occupation to many is proved by the vast number of notarial deeds of that time still extant; but it is also sufficiently clear that Rienzi spent much of his time in dreaming, if not in idleness, and much in the study of the ancient monuments and inscriptions upon which no one had bestowed a glance for generations. It was during that period of early manhood that he acquired the learning and collected the materials which earned him the title, 'Father of Archæology.' He seems to have been about thirty years old when he first began to speak in public places, to such audience as he could gather, expanding with ready though untried eloquence the soaring thoughts bred in years of solitary study. Clement the Sixth, a Frenchman, was elected Pope at Avignon, a man who, according to the chronicler, contrasted favourably by his wisdom, breadth of view, and liberality, with a weak and vacillating predecessor. Seeing that they had to do with a man at last, the Romans sent an embassy to him to urge his return to Rome. The hope had long been at the root of Rienzi's life, and he must have already attained to a considerable reputation of learning and eloquence, since he was chosen to be one of the ambassadors. Petrarch conceived the highest opinion of him at their first meeting, and never withdrew his friendship from him to the end; the great poet joined his prayers with those of the Roman envoys, and supported Rienzi's eloquence with his own genius in a Latin poem. But nothing could avail to move the Pope. Avignon was the Capua of the Pontificate,--a vast papal palace was in course of construction, and the cardinals had already begun to erect sumptuous dwellings for themselves. The Pope listened, smiled, and promised everything except return; the unsuccessful embassy was left without means of subsistence; and Rienzi, disappointed in soul, ill in body, and almost starving, was forced to seek the refuge of a hospital, whither he retired in the single garment which remained unsold from his ambassadorial outfit. But he did not languish long in this miserable condition, for the Pope heard of his misfortunes, remembered his eloquence, and sent him back to Rome, invested with the office of Apostolic Notary, and endowed with a salary of five golden florins daily, a stipend which at that time amounted almost to wealth. The office was an important one, but Rienzi exercised it by deputy, continued his studies, propagated his doctrines, and by quick degrees acquired unbounded influence with the people. His hatred of the Barons was as profound as his love of his native city was noble; and if the unavenged murder of a brother, and the unanswered buffet of a Colonna rankled in his heart, and stimulated his patriotism with the sting of personal wrong, neither the one nor the other were the prime causes of his actions. The evils of the city were enormous, his courage was heroic, and after profound reflection he resolved upon the step which determined his tragic career. To the door of the Church of Saint George in Velabro he affixed a proclamation, or a prophecy, which set forth that Rome should soon be restored to the 'Good Estate'; he collected a hundred of his friends in a meeting by night, on the Aventine, to decide upon a course of action, and he summoned all citizens to appear before the church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, towards evening, peacefully and without arms, to provide for the restoration of that 'Good Estate' which he himself had announced. [Illustration: SAN GIORGIO IN VELABRO] That night was the turning-point in Rienzi's life, and he made it a Vigil of Arms and Prayer. In the mysterious nature of the destined man, the pure spirit of the Christian knight suddenly stood forth in domination of his soul, and he consecrated himself to the liberation of his country by the solemn office of the Holy Ghost. All night he kneeled in the little church, in full armour, with bare head, before the altar. The people came and went, and others came after them and saw him kneeling there, while one priest succeeded another in celebrating the Thirty Masses of the Holy Spirit from midnight to early morning. The sun was high when the champion of freedom came forth, bareheaded still, to face the clear light of day. Around him marched the chosen hundred; at his right hand went the Pope's vicar; and before him three great standards displayed allegories of liberty, justice, and peace. A vast concourse of people followed him, for the news had spread from mouth to mouth, and there were few in Rome who had not heard his voice and longed for the 'Good Estate' which he so well described. The nobles heard of the assembly with indifference, for they were well used to disturbances of every kind and dreaded no unarmed rabble. Colonna and Orsini, joint senators, had quarrelled, and the Capitol was vacant; thither Rienzi went, and thence from a balcony he spoke to the people of freedom, of peace, of prosperity. The eloquence that had moved Clement and delighted Petrarch stirred ten thousand Roman hearts at once; a dissatisfied Roman count read in clear tones the laws Rienzi proposed to establish, and the appearance of a bishop and a nobleman by the plebeian's side gave the people hope and encouragement. The laws were simple and direct, and there was to be but one interpretation of them, while all public revenues were to be applied to public ends. Each Region of the city was to furnish a contingent of men-at-arms, and if any man were killed in the service of his country, Rome was to provide for his wife and children. The fortresses, the bridges, the gates, were to pass from the custody of the Barons to that of the Roman people, and the Barons themselves were to retire forthwith from the city. So the Romans made Rienzi Dictator. The nobles refused to believe in a change which meant ruin to themselves. Old Stephen Colonna laughed and said he would throw the madman from the window as soon as he should be at leisure. It was near noon when he spoke; the sun was barely setting when he rode for his life towards Palestrina. The great bell of the Capitol called the people to arms, the liberator was already the despot, and the Barons were already exiles. Rienzi assumed the title of Tribune with the authority of Dictator, and with ten thousand swords at his back exacted a humiliating oath of allegiance from the representatives of the great houses. Upon the Body and Blood of Christ they swore to the 'Good Estate,' they bound themselves to yield up their fortresses within the city, to harbour neither outlaws nor malefactors in their mountain castles, and to serve the Republic loyally in arms whenever they should be called upon to do so. The oath was taken by all, the power that could enforce it was visible to all men's eyes, and Rienzi was supreme. Had he been the philosopher that he had once persuaded himself he was; had he been the pure-hearted Christian Knight of the Holy Spirit he had believed himself when he knelt through the long Office in the little church; had he been the simple Roman Tribune of the People that he proclaimed himself, when he had seized the dictatorship, history might have followed a different course, and the virtues he imposed upon Rome might have borne fruit throughout all Italy. But with Rienzi, each new phase was the possession of a new spirit of good or evil, and with each successive change, only the man's great eloquence remained. While he was a hero, he was a hero indeed; while he was a philosopher, his thoughts were lofty and wise; so long as he was a knight, his life was pure and blameless. But the vanity which inspired him, not to follow an ideal, but to represent that ideal outwardly, and which inflamed him with a great actor's self-persuading fire, required, like all vanity, the perpetual stimulus of applause and admiration. He could have leapt into the gulf with Curtius before the eyes of ten thousand grateful citizens; but he could not have gone back with Cincinnatus to the plough, a simple, true-hearted man. The display of justice followed the assumption of power, it is true; but when justice was established, the unquiet spirit was assailed by the thirst for a new emotion which no boasting proclamation could satisfy, and no adulation could quench. The changes he wrought in a few weeks were marvellous, and the spirit in which they were made was worthy of a great reformer; Italy saw and admired, received his ambassadors and entertained them with respect, read his eloquent letters and answered them with approbation; and Rienzi's court was the tribunal to which the King of Hungary appealed the cause of a murdered brother. Yet his vanity demanded more. It was not long before he assumed the dress, the habits, and the behaviour of a sovereign and appeared in public with the emblems of empire. He felt that he was no longer in spirit the Knight of the Holy Ghost, and he required for self-persuasion the conference of the outward honours of knighthood. He purified himself according to the rites of chivalry in the font of the Lateran Baptistry, consecrated by the tradition of Constantine's miraculous recovery from leprosy, he watched his arms throughout the dark hours, and received the order from the sword of an honourable nobleman. The days of the philosopher, the hero, and the liberator were over, and the reign of the public fool was inaugurated by the most extravagant boasts, and celebrated by a feast of boundless luxury and abundance, to which the citizens of Rome were bidden with their wives and daughters. Still unsatisfied, he demanded and obtained the ceremony of a solemn coronation, and seven crowns were placed successively upon his head as emblems of the seven spiritual gifts. Before him stood the great Barons in attitudes of humility and dejection; for a moment the great actor had forgotten himself in the excitement of his part, and Rienzi again enjoyed the emotion of undisputed sovereignty. But Colonna, Orsini and Savelli were not men to submit tamely in fact, though the presence of an overwhelming power had forced them to outward submission, and in his calmer moments the extravagant tribune was haunted by the dream of vengeance. A ruffian asserted under torture that the nobles were already conspiring against their victor, and Rienzi enticed three of the Colonna and five of the Orsini to the Capitol, where he had taken up his abode. He seized them, held them prisoners all night, and led them out in the morning to be the principal actors in a farce which he dared not turn to tragedy. Condemned to death, their sins confessed, they heard the tolling of the great bell, and stood bareheaded before the executioner. The scene was prepared with the art of a consummate playwright, and the spectators were delighted by a speech of rare eloquence and amazed by the sudden exhibition of a clemency that was born of fear. Magnanimously pardoning those whom he dared not destroy, Rienzi received a new oath of allegiance from his captives and dismissed them to their homes. The humiliation rankled. Laying aside their hereditary feud, Colonna and Orsini made a desperate effort to regain their power. By a misunderstanding they were defeated, and the third part of their force, entering the city without the rest, was overwhelmed and massacred, and six of the Colonna were slain. The low-born Rienzi refused burial for their bodies, knighted his son on the spot where they had fallen, and washed his hands in water that was mingled with their blood. It was his last triumph and his basest. His power was already declining, and though the people had assembled in arms to beat off their former masters, they had lost faith in a leader who had turned out a madman, a knave, and a drunkard. They refused to pay the taxes he would have laid upon them, and resisted the measures he proposed. Clement the Sixth, who had approved his wisdom, punished his folly, and the so-called tribune was deposed, condemned for heresy, and excommunicated. A Neapolitan soldier of fortune, an adventurer and a criminal, took possession of Rome with only one hundred and fifty men, in the name of the Pope, without striking a blow, and the people would not raise a hand to help their late idol as he was led away weeping to the Castle of Sant' Angelo, while the nobles looked on in scornful silence. Rienzi was allowed to depart in peace after a short captivity and became a wanderer and an outcast in Europe. In many disguises he went from place to place, and did not fear to return to Rome in the travesty of a pilgrim. The story of his adventures would fill many pages, but Rome is not concerned with them. In vain he appealed to adventurers, to enthusiasts, and to fanatics to help in regaining what he had lost. None would listen to him, no man would draw the sword. He came to Prague at last, obtained an audience of the Emperor Charles the Fourth, appealed to the whole court, with impassioned eloquence, and declared himself to be Rienzi. The attempt cost him his freedom, for the prudent emperor forthwith sent him a captive to the Pope at Avignon, where he was at first loaded with chains and thrown into prison. But Clement hesitated to bring him to trial, his friend Petrarch spoke earnestly in his favour, and he was ultimately relegated to an easy confinement, during which he once more gave himself up to the study of his favourite classics in peaceful resignation. Meanwhile in Rome his enactments had been abolished with sweeping indifference to their character and importance, and the old misrule was reëstablished in its pristine barbarity. The feud between Orsini and Colonna broke out again in the absence of a common danger. The plague appeared in Europe and decimated a city already distracted by internal discord. Rome was again a wilderness of injustice, as the chronicle says; every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes, the Papal and the public revenues devoured by marauders, the streets full of thieves, and the country infested by outlaws. Clement died, and Innocent the Sixth, another Frenchman, was elected in his stead, 'a personage of great science, zeal, and justice,' who set about to reform abuses as well as he could, but who saw that he could not hope to return to Rome without long and careful preparation. He selected as his agent in the attempt to regain possession of the States of the Church the Cardinal Albornoz, a Spaniard of courage and experience. [Illustration: PALAZZO FARNESE] Meanwhile Rienzi enjoyed greater freedom, and assumed the character of an inspired poet; than which none commanded greater respect and influence in the early years of the Renascence. That he ever produced any verses of merit there is not the slightest evidence to prove, but his undoubted learning and the friendship of Petrarch helped him to sustain the character. He never lacked talent to act any part which his vanity suggested as a means of flattering his insatiable soul. He put on the humility of a penitent and the simplicity of a true scholar; he spoke quietly and wisely of Italy's future and he obtained the confidence of the new Pope. It was in this way that by an almost incredible turn of fortune, the outcast and all but condemned heretic was once more chosen as a means of restoring order in Rome, and accompanied Cardinal Albornoz on his mission to Italy. Had he been a changed man as he pretended to be, he might have succeeded, for few understood the character of the Romans better, and there was no name in the country of which the memories appealed so profoundly to the hearts of the people. The catalogue of his deeds during the second period of power is long and confused, but the history of his fall is short and tragic. Not without a keen appreciation of the difference between his former position as the freely chosen champion of the people, and his present mission as a reformer supported by pontifical authority, he requested the Legate to invest him with the dignity of a senator, and the Cardinal readily assented to what was an assertion of the temporal power. Then Albornoz left him to himself. He entered Rome in triumph, and his eloquence did not desert him. But he was no longer the young and inspired knight, self-convinced and convincing, who had issued from the little church long ago. In person he was bloated with drink and repulsive to all who saw him; and the vanity which had so often been the temporary basis of his changing character had grown monstrous under the long repression of circumstances. With the first moment of success it broke out and dictated his actions, his assumed humility was forgotten in an instant, as well as the well-worded counsels of wisdom by which he had won the Pope's confidence; and he plunged into a civil war with the still powerful Colonna. One act of folly succeeded another; he had neither money nor credit, and the stern Albornoz, seeing the direction he was taking, refused to send him assistance. In his extremity he attempted to raise funds for his soldiers and money for his own unbounded luxury by imposing taxes which the people could not bear. The result was certain and fatal. The Romans rose against him in a body, and an infuriated rabble besieged him at the Capitol. It has been said that the vainest men make the best soldiers. Rienzi was brave for a moment at the last. Seeing himself surrounded, and deserted by his servants, he went out upon a balcony and faced the mob alone, bearing in his hand the great standard of the Republic, and for the last time he attempted to avert with words the tempest which his deeds had called forth. But his hour had come, and as he stood there alone he was stoned and shot at, and an arrow pierced his hand. Broken in nerve by long intemperance and fanatic excitement, he burst into tears and fled, refusing the hero's death in which he might still have saved his name from scorn. He attempted to escape from the other side of the Capitol towards the Forum, and in the disguise of a street porter he had descended through a window and had almost escaped notice while the multitude was breaking down the doors of the main entrance. Then he was seen and taken, and they brought him in his filthy dress to the great platform of the Capitol, not knowing what they should do with him and almost frightened to find their tyrant in their power. They thronged round him, looked at him, spoke to him, but he answered nothing; for his hour was come, the star of his nativity was in the house of death. In that respite, had he been a man, courage might have awed them, eloquence might have touched them, and he might yet have dreamed of power. But he was utterly speechless, utterly broken, utterly afraid. A whole hour passed, and no hand was lifted against him; yet he spoke not. Then one man, tired of his pale and bloated face, silently struck a knife into his heart, and as he fell dead, the rabble rushed upon him and stabbed him to pieces, and a long yell of murderous rage told all Rome that Rienzi was dead. They left his body to the dogs and went away to their homes, for it was evening, and they were spent with madness. Then the Jews came, who hated him also; and they dragged the miserable corpse through the streets; and made a bonfire of thistles in a remote place and burned it; and what was left of the bones and ashes they threw into the Tiber. So perished Rienzi, a being who was not a man, but a strangely responsive instrument, upon which virtue, heroism, courage, cowardice, faith, falsehood and knavery played the grandest harmonies and the wildest discords in mad succession, till humanity was weary of listening, and silenced the harsh music forever. However we may think of him, he was great for a moment, yet however great we may think him, he was little in all but his first dream. Let him have some honour for that, and much merciful oblivion for the rest. [Illustration] REGION VIII SANT' EUSTACHIO The Eighth region is almost symmetrical in shape, extending nearly north and south with a tolerably even breadth from the haunted palace of the Santacroce, where the marble statue of the dead Cardinal comes down from its pedestal to pace the shadowy halls all night, to Santa Maria in Campo Marzo, and cutting off, as it were, the three Regions so long held by the Orsini from the rest of the city. Taking Rome as a whole, it was a very central quarter until the development of the newly inhabited portions. It was here, near the churches of Saint Eustace and Saint Ives, that the English who came to Rome for business established themselves, like other foreigners, in a distinct colony during the Renascence. Upon the chapel of Saint Ives, unconsecrated now and turned into a lecture room of the University, a strange spiral tower shows the talents of Borromini, Bernini's rival, at their lowest ebb. So far as one can judge, the architect intended to represent realistically the arduous path of learning; but whatever he meant, the result is as bad a piece of Barocco as is to be found in Rome. As for the Church of Saint Eustace, it commemorates a vision which tradition attributes alike to Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to Saint Felix, and to Saint Hubert. The genius of Flaubert, who was certainly one of the greatest prose writers of this century, has told the story of the first of these in very beautiful language, and the legend of Saint Hubert is familiar to every one. Saint Eustace is perhaps less known, for he was a Roman saint of early days, a soldier and a lover of the chase, as many Romans were. We do not commonly associate with them the idea of boar hunting or deer stalking, but they were enthusiastic sportsmen. Virgil's short and brilliant description of Æneas shooting the seven stags on the Carthaginian shore is the work of a man who had seen what he described, and Pliny's letters are full of allusions to hunting. Saint Eustace was a contemporary of the latter, and perhaps outlived him, for he is said to have been martyred under Hadrian, when a long career of arms had raised him to the rank of a general. It is an often-told story--how he was stalking the deer in the Ciminian forest one day, alone and on foot, when a royal stag, milk-white and without blemish, crashed through the meeting boughs before him; how he followed the glorious creature fast and far, and shot and missed and shot again, and how at last the stag sprang up a steep and jutting rock and faced him, and he saw Christ's cross between the branching antlers, and upon the Cross the Crucified, and heard a still far voice that bade him be Christian and suffer and be saved; and so, alone in the greenwood, he knelt down and bowed himself to the world's Redeemer, and rose up again, and the vision had departed. And having converted his wife and his two sons, they suffered together with him; for they were thrust into the great brazen bull by the Colosseum, and it was made red hot, and they perished, praising God. But their ashes lie under the high altar in the church to this day. The small square of Saint Eustace is not far from Piazza Navona, communicating with it by gloomy little streets, and on the great night of the Befana, the fair spreads through the narrow ways and overflows with more booths, more toys, more screaming whistles, into the space between the University and the church. And here at the southeast corner used to stand the famous Falcone, the ancient eating-house which to the last kept up the Roman traditions, and where in old days, many a famous artist and man of letters supped on dishes now as extinct as the dodo. The house has been torn down to make way for a modern building. Famous it was for wild boar, in the winter, dressed with sweet sauce and pine nuts, and for baked porcupine and strange messes of tomatoes and cheese, and famous, too, for its good old wines in the days when wine was not mixed with chemicals and sold as 'Chianti,' though grown about Olevano, Paliano and Segni. It was a strange place, occupying the whole of two houses which must have been built in the sixteenth century, after the sack of Rome. It was full of small rooms of unexpected shapes, scrupulously neat and clean, with little white and red curtains, tiled floors, and rush bottomed chairs, and the regular guests had their own places, corners in which they had made themselves comfortable for life, as it were, and were to be found without fail at dinner and at supper time. It was one of those genial bits of old Rome which survived till a few years ago, and was more deeply regretted than many better things when it disappeared. Behind the Church of Saint Eustace runs a narrow street straight up from the Square of the Pantheon to the Via della Dogana Vecchia. It used to be chiefly occupied at the lower end by poulterers' shops, but towards its upper extremity--for the land rises a little--it has always had a peculiarly dismal and gloomy look. It bears a name about which are associated some of the darkest deeds in Rome's darkest age; it is called the Via de' Crescenzi, the street and the abode of that great and evil house which filled the end of the tenth century with its bloody deeds. There is no more unfathomable mystery in the history of mediæval Rome than the origin and power of Theodora, whose name first appears in the year 914, as Lady Senatress and absolute mistress of the city. The chronicler Luitprand, who is almost the only authority for this period, heaps abuse upon Theodora and her eldest daughter, hints that they were of low origin, and brands them with a disgrace more foul than their crimes. No one can read their history and believe that they were anything but patrician women, of execrable character but of high descent. From Theodora, in little more than a hundred years, descended five Popes and a line of sovereign Counts, ending in Peter, the first ancestor of the Colonna who took the name; and, from her also, by the marriage of her second daughter, called Theodora like herself, the Crescenzi traced their descent. Yet no historian can say who that first Theodora was, nor whence she came, nor how she rose to power, nor can any one name the father of her children. Her terrible eldest child, Marozia, married three sovereigns, the Lord of Tusculum, the Lord of Tuscany, and at last Hugh, King of Burgundy, and left a history that is an evil dream of terror and bloodshed. But the story of those fearful women belongs to their stronghold, the great castle of Sant' Angelo. To the Region of Saint Eustace belongs the history of Crescenzio, consul, tribune and despot of Rome. In the street that bears the name of his family, the huge walls of Severus Alexander's bath afforded the materials for a fortress, and there Crescenzio dwelt when his kinswoman Marozia held Hadrian's tomb, and after she was dead. Those were the times when the Emperors defended the Popes against the Roman people. Not many years had passed since Otto the First had done justice upon Peter the Prefect, far away at the Lateran palace; Otto the Second reigned in his stead, and Benedict the Sixth was Pope. The race of Theodora hated the domination of the Emperor, and despised a youthful sovereign whom they had never seen. They dreamed of restoring Rome to the Eastern Empire, and of renewing the ancient office of Exarch for themselves. Benedict stood in their way and was doomed. They chose their antipope, a Roman Cardinal, one Boniface, a man with neither scruple nor conscience, and set him up in the Pontificate; and, when they had done that, Crescenzio seized Benedict and dragged him through the low black entrance of Sant' Angelo, and presently strangled him in his dungeon. But neither did Boniface please those who had made him Pope; and, within the month, lest he should die like him he had supplanted, he stealthily escaped from Rome to the sea, and it is recorded that he stole and carried away the sacred vessels and treasures of the Vatican, and took them to Constantinople. So Crescenzio first appears in the wild and confused history of that century of dread, when men looked forward with certainty and horror to the ending of the world in the year one thousand. And during a dozen years after Benedict was murdered, the cauldron of faction boiled and seethed in Rome. Then, in the year 987, when Hugh Capet took France for himself and for his descendants through eight centuries, and when John the Fifteenth was Pope in Rome, 'a new tyrant arose in the city which had hitherto been trampled down and held under by the violence of the race of Alberic,'--that is, the race of Theodora,--'and that tyrant was Crescentius.' And Crescenzio was the kinsman of Alberic's children. The second Otto was dead, and Otto the Third was a mere boy, when Crescenzio, fortified in Sant' Angelo, suddenly declared himself Consul, seized all power, and drove the Pope from Rome. This time he had no antipope; he would have no Pope at all, and there was no Emperor either, since the young Otto had not yet been crowned. So Crescenzio reigned alone for awhile, with what he called a Senate at his back, and the terror of his name to awe the Roman people. But Pope John was wiser than the unfortunate Benedict, and a better man than Boniface, the antipope and thief; and having escaped to the north, he won the graces of Crescenzio's distant kinsman by marriage and hereditary foe, Duke Hugh of Tuscany, grandson of Hugh of Burgundy the usurper; and from that strong situation he proceeded to offer the boy Otto inducements for coming to be crowned in Rome. He wisely judged from what he had seen during his lifetime that the most effectual means of opposing the boundless license of the Roman patricians was to make an Emperor, even of a child, and he knew that the name of Otto the Great was not forgotten, and that the terrible execution of Peter the Prefect was remembered with a lively dread. Crescenzio was not ready to oppose the force of the Empire; he was surrounded by jealous factions at home, which any sudden revolution might turn against himself, he weighed his strength against the danger and he resolved to yield. The 'Senate,' which consisted of patricians as greedy as himself, but less daring or less strong, had altogether recovered the temporal power in Rome, and Crescenzio easily persuaded them that it would be both futile and dangerous to quarrel with the Emperor about spiritual matters. The 'Consul' and the 'Senate'--which meant a tyrant and his courtiers--accordingly requested the Pope to return in peace and exercise his episcopal functions in the Holy See. Pope John must have been as bold as he was wise, for he did not hesitate, but came back at once. He reaped the fruit of his wisdom and his courage. Crescenzio and the nobles met him with reverence and implored his forgiveness for their ill-considered deeds; the Pope granted them a free pardon, wisely abstaining from any assertion of temporal power, and sometimes apparently submitting with patience to the Consul's tyranny. For it is recorded that some years later, when the Bishops of France sent certain ambassadors to the Pope, they were not received, but were treated with indignity, kept waiting outside the palace three days, and finally sent home without audience or answer because they had omitted to bribe Crescenzio. [Illustration: SITE OF EXCAVATIONS ON THE PALATINE] If Pope John had persuaded Otto to be crowned at once, such things might not have taken place. It was many years before the young Emperor came to Rome at last, and he had not reached the city when he was met by the news that Pope John was dead. He lost no time, designated his private chaplain, the son of the Duke of Franconia, 'a young man of letters, but somewhat fiery on account of his youth,' to be Pope, and sent him forward to Rome at once with a train of bishops, to be installed in the Holy See. In so youthful a sovereign, such action lacked neither energy nor wisdom. The young Pontiff assumed the name of Gregory the Fifth, espoused the cause of the poor citizens against the tyranny of the nobles, crowned his late master Emperor, and forthwith made a determined effort to crush Crescenzio and regain the temporal power. But he had met his match at the outset. The blood of Theodora was not easily put down. The Consul laughed to scorn the pretensions of the young Pope; the nobles were in arms, the city was his, and in the second year of his Pontificate, Gregory the Fifth was driven ignominiously from the gates in a state of absolute destitution. He was the third Pope whom Crescenzio had driven out. Gregory made his way to Pavia, summoned a council of Bishops, and launched the Major Excommunication at his adversary. But the Consul, secure in Sant' Angelo, laughed again, more grimly, and did as he pleased. At this time Basil and Constantine, joint Emperors in Constantinople, sent ambassadors to Rome to Otto the Third, and with them came a certain John, a Calabrian of Greek race, a man of pliant conscience, tortuous mind, and extraordinary astuteness, at that time Archbishop of Piacenza, and formerly employed by Otto upon a mission to Constantinople. Crescenzio, as though to show that his enmity was altogether against the Pope, and not in the least against the Emperor, received these envoys with great honour, and during their stay persuaded them to enter into a scheme which had suddenly presented itself to his ambitious intelligence. The old dream of restoring Rome to the Eastern Empire was revived, the conspirators resolved to bring it to realization, and John of Calabria was a convenient tool for their hands. He was to be Pope; Crescenzio was to be despot, under the nominal protection and sovereignty of the Greek Emperors, and the ambassadors were to conclude the treaty with the latter. Otto was on the German frontier waging war against the Slavs, and Gregory was definitely exiled from Rome. Nothing stood in the way of the plot, and it was forthwith put into execution. Certain ambassadors of Otto's were passing through Rome on their return from the East and on their way to the Emperor's presence; they were promptly seized and thrown into prison, in order to interrupt communication between the two Empires. John of Calabria was consecrated Pope, or rather antipope, Crescenzio took possession of all power, and certain legates of Pope Gregory having ventured to enter Rome were at once imprisoned with the Emperor's ambassadors. It was a daring stroke, and if it had succeeded, the history of Europe would have been different from that time forward. Crescenzio was bold, unscrupulous, pertinacious and keen. He had the Roman nobles at his back and he controlled such scanty revenues as could still be collected. He had violently expelled three Popes, he had created two antipopes, and his name was terror in the ears of the Church. Yet it would have taken more than all that to overset the Catholic Church at a time when the world was ripe for the first crusade; and though the Empire had fallen low since the days of Charles the Great, it was fast climbing again to the supremacy of power in which it culminated under Barbarossa and whence it fell with Frederick the Second. A handful of high-born murderers and marauders might work havoc in Rome for a time, but they could neither destroy that deep-rooted belief nor check the growth of that imperial law by which Europe emerged from the confusion of the dark age--to lose both law and belief again amid the intellectual excitements of the Renascence. Otto the Third was young, brave and determined, and before the treaty with the Eastern Emperors was concluded, he was well informed of the outrageous deeds of the Roman patricians. No sooner had he brought the war on the Saxon frontier to a successful conclusion than he descended again into Italy 'to purge the Roman bilge,' in the chronicler's strong words. On his way, he found time to visit Venice secretly, with only six companions, and we are told how the Doge entertained him in private as Emperor, with sumptuous suppers, and allowed him to wander about Venice all day as a simple unknown traveller, with his companions, 'visiting the churches and the other rare things of the City,' whereby it is clear that in the year 998, when Rome was a half-deserted, half-ruined city, ruled by a handful of brigands living in the tomb of the Cæsars, Venice, under the good Doge Orseolo the Second, was already one of the beautiful cities of the world, as well as mistress of the Adriatic, of all Dalmatia, and of many lovely islands. Otto took with him Pope Gregory, and with a very splendid army of Germans and Italians marched down to Rome. Neither Crescenzio nor his followers had believed that the young Emperor was in earnest; but when it was clear that he meant to do justice, Antipope John was afraid, and fled secretly by night, in disguise. Crescenzio, of sterner stuff, heaped up a vast provision of food in Sant' Angelo, and resolved to abide a siege. The stronghold was impregnable, so far as any one could know, for it had never been stormed in war or riot, and on its possession had depended the long impunity of Theodora's race. The Emperor might lay siege to it, encamp before it, and hem it in for months; in the end he must be called away by the more urgent wars of the Empire in the north, and Crescenzio, secure in his stronghold, would hold the power still. But when the Roman people knew that Otto was at hand and that the antipope had fled, their courage rose against the nobles, and they went out after John, and scoured the country till they caught him in his disguise, for his face was known to many. Because the Emperor was known to be kind of heart, and because it was remembered also that this John of Calabria, who went by many names, had by strange chance baptized both Otto and Pope Gregory, the Duke of Franconia's son, therefore the Romans feared lest justice should be too gentle; and having got the antipope into their hands, they dealt with him savagely, put out his eyes, cut out his tongue and sliced off his nose, and drove him to prison through the city, seated face backwards on an ass. And when the Emperor and the Pope came, they left him in his dungeon. Now at Gaeta there lived a very holy man, who was Saint Nilus, and who afterwards founded the monastery of Grottaferrata, where there are beautiful wall paintings to this day. He was a Greek, like John of Calabria, and though he detested the antipope he had pity on the man and felt compassion for his countryman. So he journeyed to Rome and came before Otto and Gregory, who received him with perfect devotion, as a saint, and he asked of them that they should give him the wretched John, 'who,' he said, 'held both of you in his arms at the Font of Baptism,' though he was grievously fallen since that day by his great hypocrisy. Then the Emperor was filled with pity, and answered that the saint might have the antipope alive, if he himself would then remain in Rome and direct the monastery of Saint Anastasia of the Greeks. The holy man was willing to sacrifice his life of solitary meditation for the sake of his wretched countryman, and he would have obtained the fulfilment of his request from Otto; but Pope Gregory remembered how he himself had been driven out penniless and scantily clothed, to make way for John of Calabria, and his heart was hardened, and he would not let the prisoner go. Wherefore Saint Nilus foretold that because neither the Pope nor the Emperor would have mercy, the wrath of God should overtake them both. And indeed they were both cut off in the flower of their youth--Gregory within one year, and Otto not long afterwards. Meanwhile they sent Nilus away and laid siege to the Castle of Sant' Angelo, where Crescenzio and his men had shut themselves up with a good store of food and arms. No one had ever taken that fortress, nor did any one believe that it could be stormed. But Pope and Emperor were young and brave and angry, and they had a great army, and the people of Rome were with them, every man. They used such engines as they had,--catapults, and battering-rams, and ladders; and yet Crescenzio laughed, for the stone walls were harder than the stone missiles, and higher than the tallest ladders, and so thick that fire could not heat them from without, nor battering-ram loosen a single block in a single course; and many assaults were repelled, and many a brave soldier fell writhing and broken into the deep ditch with his ladder upon him. When the time of fate was fulfilled, the end came on a fair April morning; one ladder held its place till desperate armed hands had reached the rampart, and swift feet had sprung upon the edge, and one brave arm beat back the twenty that were there to defend; and then there were two, and three, and ten, and a score, and a hundred, and the great castle was taken at last. Nor do we know surely that it was ever taken again by force, even long afterwards in the days of artillery. But Crescenzio's hour had come, and the Emperor took him and the twelve chief nobles who were with him, and cut off their heads, one by one, in quick justice and without torture, and the heads were set up on spikes, and the headless bodies were hung out from the high crenellations of the ramparts. Thus ended Crescenzio, but not his house, nor the line of Theodora, nor died he unavenged. [Illustration: CHURCH OF SANT' EUSTACHIO From a print of the last century] It is said and believed that Pope Gregory perished by the hands of the Crescenzi, who lived in the little street behind the Church of Saint Eustace. As for Otto, he came to a worse end, though he was of a pious house, and laboured for the peace of his soul against the temptations of this evil world. For he was young, and the wife of Crescenzio was wonderfully fair, and her name was Stefania. She came weeping before him and mourning her lord, and was beautiful in her grief, and knew it, as many women do. And the young Emperor saw her, and pitied her, and loved her, and took her to his heart in sin, and though he repented daily, he daily fell again, while the woman offered up her body and her soul to be revenged for the fierce man she had loved. So it came to pass, at last, that she found her opportunity against him, and poured poison into his cup, and kissed him, and gave it to him with a very loving word. And he drank it and died, and the prophecy of the holy man, Nilus, was fulfilled upon him. The story is told in many ways, but that is the main truth of it, according to Muratori, whom Gibbon calls his guide and master in the history of Italy, but whom he did not follow altogether in his brief sketch of Crescenzio's life and death, and their consequences. The Crescenzi lived on, in power and great state. They buried the terrible tribune in Santa Sabina, on the Aventine, where his epitaph may be read today, but whither he did not retire in life, as some guide-books say, to end his days in prayer and meditation. And for some reason, perhaps because they no longer held the great Castle, they seem to have left the Region of Saint Eustace; for Nicholas, the tribune's son, built the small palace by the Tiber, over against the Temple of Hercules, though it has often been called the house of Rienzi, whose name was also Nicholas, which caused the confusion. And later they built themselves other fortresses, but the end of their history is not known. In the troubles which succeeded the death of Crescentius, a curious point arises in the chronicle, with regard to the titles of the bishops depending from the Holy See. It is certainly not generally known that, as late as the tenth century, the bishops of the great cities called themselves Popes--the 'Pope of Milan,' the 'Pope of Naples,' and the like--and that Gregory the Seventh, the famous Hildebrand, was the first to decree that the title should be confined to the Roman Pontiffs, with that of 'Servus Servorum Dei'--'servant of the servants of God.' And indeed, in those changing times such a confusion of titles must have caused trouble, as it did when Gregory the Fifth, driven out by Crescentius, and taking refuge in Pavia, found himself, the Pope of Rome, confronted with Arnulf, the 'Pope' of Milan, and complained of his position to the council he had summoned. The making and unmaking of Popes, and the election of successors to those that died, brings up memories of what Rome was during the vacancy of the See, and of the general delight at the death of any reigning Pontiff, good or bad. A certain monk is reported to have answered Paul the Third, that the finest festival in Rome took place while one Pope lay dead and another was being elected. During that period, not always brief, law and order were suspended. According to the testimony of Dionigi Atanagi, quoted by Baracconi, the first thing that happened was that the prisons were broken open and all condemned persons set free, while all men in authority hid themselves in their homes, and the officers of justice fled in terror from the dangerous humour of the people. For every man who could lay hands on a weapon seized it, and carried it about with him. It was the time for settling private quarrels of long standing, in short and decisive fights, without fear of disturbance or interference from the frightened Bargello and the terrorized watchmen of the city. And as soon as the accumulated private spite of years had spent itself in a certain amount of free fighting, the city became perfectly safe again, and gave itself up to laying wagers on the election of the next Pope. The betting was high, and there were regular bookmakers, especially in all the Regions from Saint Eustace to the Ponte Sant' Angelo, where the banks had established themselves under the protection of the Pope and the Guelph Orsini, and where the most reliable and latest news was sure to be obtained fresh from the Vatican. Instead of the Piazza di Spagna and the Villa Medici, the narrow streets and gloomy squares of Ponte, Parione and Sant' Eustachio became the gathering-place of society, high, low and indiscriminate; and far from exhibiting the slightest signs of mourning for its late ruler, the city gave itself up to a sort of Carnival season, all the more delightful, because it was necessarily unexpected. Moreover, the poor people had the delight of speculating upon the wealth of the cardinal who might be elected; for, as soon as the choice of the Conclave was announced, and the cry, 'A pope, a pope!' rang through the streets, it was the time-honoured privilege of the rabble to sack and plunder the late residence of the chosen cardinal, till, literally, nothing was left but the bare walls and floors. This was so much a matter of course, that the election of a poor Pope was a source of the bitterest disappointment to the people, and was one of their principal causes of discontent when Sixtus the Fifth was raised to the Pontificate, it having been given out as certain, but a few hours earlier, that the rich Farnese was to be the fortunate man. [Illustration] REGION IX PIGNA There used to be a tradition, wholly unfounded, but deeply rooted in the Roman mind, to the effect that the great bronze pine-cone, eleven feet high, which stands in one of the courts of the Vatican, giving it the name 'Garden of the Pine-cone,' was originally a sort of stopper which closed the round aperture in the roof of the Pantheon. The Pantheon stands at one corner of the Region of Pigna, and a connection between the Region, the Pantheon and the Pine-cone seems vaguely possible, though altogether unsatisfactory. The truth about the Pine-cone is perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa's artificial lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter's by Pope Symmachus about fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon. No one, so far as I am aware,--not even the excellent Baracconi,--offers any explanation of the name and device of the Ninth Region. Topographically it is nearly a square, of which the angles are the Pantheon, the corner of Via di Caravita and the Corso, the Palazzo di Venezia, and the corner of the new Via Arenula and Via Florida. Besides the Pantheon it contains some of the most notable buildings erected since the Renascence. Here are the palaces of the Doria, of the Altieri, and the 'Palace of Venice' built by Paul the Second, that Venetian Barbo, whose name may have nicknamed the racing horses of the Carnival. Here were the strongholds of the two great rival orders, the Dominicans and the Jesuits, the former in the Piazza della Minerva, the latter in the Piazza del Gesù, and in the Collegio Romano; and here at the present day, in the buildings of the old rivals, significantly connected by an arched passage, are collected the greatest libraries of the city. That of the Dominicans, wisely left in their care, has been opened to the public; the other, called after Victor Emmanuel, is a vast collection of books gathered together by plundering the monastic institutions of Italy at the time of the disestablishment. The booty--for it was nothing else--was brought in carts, mostly in a state of the utmost confusion, and the books and manuscripts were roughly stacked in vacant rooms on the ground floor of the Collegio Romano, in charge of a porter. Not until a poor scholar, having bought himself two ounces of butter in the Piazza Navona, found the greasy stuff wrapped in an autograph letter of Christopher Columbus, did it dawn upon the authorities that the porter was deliberately selling priceless books and manuscripts as waste paper, by the hundredweight, to provide himself with the means of getting drunk. That was about the year 1880. The scandal was enormous, a strict inquiry was made, justice was done as far as possible, and an official account of the affair was published in a 'Green Book'; but the amount of the loss was unknown, it may have been incalculable, and it was undeniably great. The names visibly recorded in the Region have vast suggestions in them,--Ignatius Loyola, the Dominicans, Venice, Doria, Agrippa, and the buildings themselves, which are the record, will last for ages; the opposition of Jesuit and Inquisitor, under one name or another, and of both by the people, will live as long as humanity itself. The crisis in the history of the Inquisition in Rome followed closely upon the first institution of the Tribunal, and seventeen years after Paul the Fourth had created the Court, by a Papal Bull of July twenty-first, 1542, the people burned the Palace of the Inquisition and threatened to destroy the Dominicans and their monastery. [Illustration: THE PANTHEON] So far as it is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious, utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head 'might be compared to the Vesuvius of his native city, since he was ardent in all his actions, wrathful, hard and inflexible, undoubtedly moved by an incredible zeal for religion, but a zeal often lacking in prudence, and breaking out in eruptions of excessive severity.' On the other hand, his lack of perception was such that he remained in complete ignorance of the outrageous deeds done in his name by his two nephews, the one a cardinal, the other a layman, and it was not until the last year of his life that their doings came to his knowledge. This was the man to whom Queen Elizabeth sent an embassy, in the hope of obtaining the Papal sanction for her succession to the throne. Henry the Second of France had openly espoused the cause of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Philip the Second of Spain was also inclined to support, after the failure of his attempt to obtain the hand of Elizabeth for the Duke of Savoy. With France and Spain against her, the Queen appealed to Rome, and to Paul the Fourth. In the eyes of Catholics her mother had never been the lawful wife of Henry the Eighth, and she herself was illegitimate. If the Pope would overlook this unfortunate fact and confirm her crown in the eyes of Catholic Europe, she would make an act of obedience by her ambassador. She had been brought up as a Catholic, she had been crowned by a Roman Catholic bishop, and on first ascending the throne she had shown herself favourable to the Catholic party; the request and proposition were reasonable, if nothing more. Muratori points out that if a more prudent, discreet and gentle Pope had reigned at that time, and if he had received Elizabeth's offer kindly, according to the dictates of religion, which he should have considered to the exclusion of everything else, and without entering into other people's quarrels, nor into the question of his own earthly rights, England might have remained a Catholic country. Paul the Fourth's answer, instead, was short, cold and senseless. 'England,' he said, 'is under the feudal dominion of the Roman Church. Elizabeth is born out of wedlock; there are other legitimate heirs, and she should never have assumed the crown without the consent of the Apostolic See.' This is the generally accepted account of what took place, as given by Muratori and other historians. Lingard, however, whose authority is undeniable, argues against the truth of the story on the ground that the English Ambassador in Rome at the time of Queen Mary's death never had an audience of the Pope. It seems probable, nevertheless, that Elizabeth actually appealed to the Holy See, though secretly and with the intention of concealing the step in case of failure. A child might have foreseen the consequences of the Pope's political folly. Elizabeth saw her extreme danger, turned her back upon Rome forever, and threw herself into the arms of the Protestant party as her only chance of safety. At the same time heresy assumed alarming proportions throughout Europe, and the Pope called upon the Inquisition to put it down in Rome. Measures of grim severity were employed, and the Roman people, overburdened with the taxes laid upon them by the Pope's nephews, were exasperated beyond endurance by the religious zeal of the Dominicans, in whose hands the inquisitorial power was placed. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON] Nor were they appeased by the fall of the two Carafa, which was ultimately brought about by the ambassador of Tuscany. The Pope enquired of him one day why he so rarely asked an audience, and he frankly replied that the Carafa would not admit him to the Pope's presence unless he would previously give a full account of his intentions, and reveal all the secrets of the Grand Duke's policy. Then some one wrote out an account of the Carafa's misdeeds and laid it in the Pope's own Breviary. The result was sudden and violent, like most of Paul's decisions and actions. He called a Consistory of cardinals, made open apology for his nephews' doings, deprived them publicly of all their offices and honours, and exiled them, in opposite directions and with their families, beyond the confines of the Papal States. But the people were not satisfied; they accused the Pope of treating his nephews as scapegoats for his own sins, and the immediate repeal of many taxes was no compensation for the terrors of the Inquisition. There were spies everywhere. No one was safe from secret accusers. The decisions of the tribunal were slow, mysterious and deadly. The Romans became the victims of a secret reign of terror such as the less brave Neapolitans had more bravely fought against and had actually destroyed a dozen years earlier, when Paul the Fourth, then only a cardinal, had persuaded their Viceroy to try his favourite method of reducing heresy. Yet such was the fear of the Dominicans and of the Pope himself that no one dared to raise his voice against the 'monks of the Minerva.' The general dissatisfaction was fomented by the nobles, and principally by the Colonna, who had been at open war with the Pope during his whole reign. Moreover, the severities of his government had produced between Colonna and Orsini one of those occasional alliances for their common safety, which vary their history without adorning it. The Pope seized the Colonna estates and conferred them upon his nephews, but was in turn often repulsed as the fighting ebbed and flowed during the four years of his Pontificate, for the Colonna as usual had powerful allies in the Emperor and in his kingdom of Naples. Changeable as the Roman people always were, they had more often espoused the cause of Colonna than that of the Pope and Orsini. Paul the Fourth fell ill in the summer, when the heat makes a southern rabble dangerous, and the certain news of his approaching end was a message of near deliverance. He lingered and died hard, though he was eighty-four years old and afflicted with dropsy. But the exasperated Romans were impatient for the end, and the nobles were willing to take vengeance upon their oppressor before he breathed his last. As the news that the Pope was dying ran through the city, the spell of terror was broken, secret murmuring turned to open complaint, complaint to clamour, clamour to riot. A vast and angry multitude gathered together in the streets and open places, and hour by hour, as the eager hope for news of death was ever disappointed, and the hard old man lived on, the great concourse gathered strength within itself, seething, waiting, listening for the solemn tolling of the great bell in the Capitol to tell them that Paul the Fourth had passed away. Still it came not. And in the streets and everywhere there were retainers and men-at-arms of the great houses, ready of tongue and hand, but friendly with the people, listening to tales of suffering and telling of their lords' angry temper against the dying Pope. A word here, a word there, like sparks amid sun-dried stubble, till the hot stuff was touched with fire and all broke out in flame. Then words were no longer exchanged between man and man, but a great cry of rage went up from all the throng, and the people began to move, some knowing what they meant to do and some not knowing, nor caring, but moving with the rest, faster and faster, till many were trampled down in the press, and they came to the prisons, to Corte Savella and Tor di Nona, and even to Sant' Angelo, and as they battered at the great doors from without, the prisoners shouted for freedom from within, and their gaolers began to loose their chains, fearing for their own lives, and drew back the bolts to let the stream of riot in. So on that day four hundred condemned men were taken out and let loose, before the Pope was dead. [Illustration: THE RIPETTA From a print of the last century] Yet the people had not enough, and they surged and roared in the streets, quivering with rage not yet half spent. And again words ran along, as fire through dry grass, and suddenly all men thought of the Inquisition, down by the Tiber at the Ripetta. Thought was motion, motion was action, action was to set men free and burn the hated prison to the ground. The prisoners of the Holy Roman Office were seventy-two, and many had lain there long unheard, for the trial of unbelief was cumbrous in argument and slow of issue, and though the Pope could believe no one innocent who was in prison, and though he was violent in his judgments, the saintly Ghislieri was wise and cautious, and would condemn no man hastily to please his master. When he in turn was Pope, the people loved him, though at first they feared him for Pope Paul's sake. When they had burned the Inquisition on that day and set free the accused persons, and it was not yet night, they turned back from the Tiber, still unsatisfied, for they had shed little blood, or none at all, perhaps, and the people of Rome always thirsted for that when their anger was hot. Through the winding streets they went, dividing where the ways were narrow and meeting again where there was room, always towards Pigna, and the Minerva, and the dwelling of the learned black and white robed fathers into whose hands the Inquisition had been given and from whose monastery the good Ghislieri had been chosen to be cardinal. For the rabble knew no difference of thought or act between him and the dying Pope. They bore torches and weapons, and beams for battering down the doors, and they reached the place, a raging horde of madmen. Suddenly before them there were five men on horseback, who were just and did not fear them. These men were Marcantonio Colonna and his kinsman Giuliano Cesarini, and a Salviati, and a Torres and Gianbattista Bernardi, who had all suffered much at the hands of the Pope and had come swiftly to Rome when they heard that he was near death. And at the sight of those calm knights, sitting there on their horses without armour and with sheathed swords, the people drew back a moment, while Colonna spoke. Presently, as he went on, they grew silent and understood his words. And when they had understood, they saw that he was right and their anger was quieted, and they went away to their homes, satisfied with having set free those who had been long in prison. So the great monastery was saved from fire and the monks from death. But the Pope was not yet dead, and while he lived the people were restless and angry by day and night, and ready for new deeds of violence; but Marcantonio Colonna rode through the city continually, entreating them to wait patiently for the end, and because he also had suffered much at Paul's hands, they listened to him and did nothing more. [Illustration: PIAZZA MINERVA] The rest is a history which all men know: how the next Pope was just, and put the Carafa to their trial for many deeds of bloodshed; how the judgment was long delayed that it might be without flaw; how it took eight hours at last to read the judges' summing up; and how Cardinal Carafa was strangled by night in Sant' Angelo, while at the same hour his brother and the two who had murdered his wife were beheaded in Tor di Nona, just opposite the Castle, across the Tiber--a grim tragedy, but the tragedy of justice. Southward a few steps from the Church of the Minerva is the little Piazza della Pigna, with a street of the same name leading out of it. And at the corner of the place is a small church, dedicated to 'Saint John of the Pine-cone,' that is, of the Region. Within lies one of the noble Porcari in a curious tomb, and their stronghold was close by, perhaps built in one block with the church itself. The name Porcari calls up another tale of devotion, of betrayal, and of death, with the last struggle for a Roman Republic at the end of the Middle Age. It was a hopeless attempt, made by a brave man of simple and true heart, a man better and nobler than Rienzi in every way, but who judged the times ill and gave his soul and body for the dream of a liberty which already existed in another shape, but which for its name's sake he would not acknowledge. Stephen Porcari failed where Rienzi partially succeeded, because the people were not with him; they were no longer oppressed, and they desired no liberator; they had freedom in fact and they cared nothing for the name of liberty; they had a ruler with whom they were well pleased, and they did not long for one of whom they knew nothing. But Stephen, brave, pure and devoted, was a man of dreams, and he died for them, as many others have died for the name of Rome and the phantom of an impossible Republic; for Rome has many times been fatal to those who loved her best. In the year 1447 Pope Eugenius the Fourth died, after a long and just reign, disturbed far more by matters spiritual than by any worldly troubles. And then, says the chronicler, a meeting of the Romans was called at Aracoeli, to determine what should be asked of the Conclave that was to elect a new Pope. And there, with many other citizens, Stephen Porcari spoke to the Council, saying some things useful to the Republic; and he declared that Rome should govern itself and pay a feudal tribute to the Pope, as many others of the Papal States did. And the Archbishop of Benevento forbade that he should say more; but the Council and the citizens wished him to go on; and there was disorder, and the meeting broke up, the Archbishop being gravely displeased, and the people afraid to support Stephen against him, because the King of Spain was at Tivoli, very near Rome. Then the Cardinals elected Pope Nicholas the Fifth, a good man and a great builder, and of gentle and merciful temper, and there was much feasting and rejoicing in Rome. But Stephen Porcari pondered the inspired verses of Petrarch and the strange history of Rienzi, and waited for an opportunity to rouse the people, while his brother, or his kinsman, was the Senator of Rome, appointed by the Pope. At last, after a long time, when there was racing, with games in the Piazza Navona, certain youths having fallen to quarrelling, and Stephen being there, and a great concourse of people, he tried by eloquent words to stir the quarrel to a riot, and a rebellion against the Pope. The people cared nothing for Petrarch's verses nor Rienzi's memory, and Nicholas was kind to them, so that Stephen Porcari failed again, and his failure was high treason, for which he would have lost his head in any other state of Europe. Yet the Pope was merciful, and when the case had been tried, the rebel was sent to Bologna, to live there in peace, provided that he should present himself daily before the Cardinal Legate of the City. But still he dreamed, and would have made action of dreams, and he planned a terrible conspiracy, and escaped from Bologna, and came back to Rome secretly. His plan was this. On the feast of the Epiphany he and his kinsmen and retainers would seize upon the Pope and the Cardinals as prisoners, when they were on their way to High Mass at Saint Peter's, and then by threatening to murder them the conspirators would force the keepers of Sant'Angelo to give up the Castle, which meant the power to hold Rome in subjection. Once there, they would call upon the people to acclaim the return of the ancient Republic, the Pope should be set free to fulfil the offices of religion, while deprived of all temporal power, and the vision of freedom would become a glorious reality. But Rome was not with Porcari, and he paid the terrible price of unpopular fanaticism and useless conspiracy. He was betrayed by the folly of his nephew, who, with a few followers, killed the Pope's equerry in a street brawl, and then, perhaps to save himself, fired the train too soon. Stephen shut the great gates of his house and defended himself as well as he could against the men-at-arms who were sent to take him. The doors were closed, says the chronicler, and within there were many armed men, and they fought at the gate, while those in the upper story threw the tables from the windows upon the heads of the besiegers. Seeing that they were lost, Stephen's men went out by the postern behind the house, and his nephew, Battista Sciarra, with four companions, fought his way through, only one of them being taken, because the points of his hose were cut through, so that the hose slipped down and he could not move freely. Those who had not cut their way out were taken within by the governor's men, and Stephen was dragged with ignominy from a chest in which he had taken refuge. The trial was short and sure, for even the Pope's patience was exhausted. Three days later, Stephen Infessura, the chronicler, saw the body of Stephen Porcari hanging by the neck from the crenellations of the tower that used to stand on the right-hand side of Sant' Angelo, as you go towards the Castle from the bridge; and it was dressed in a black doublet and black hose--the body of that 'honourable man who loved the right and the liberty of Rome, who, because he looked upon his banishment as without good cause, meant to give his life, and gave his body, to free his country from slavery.' Infessura was a retainer of the Colonna and no friend of any Pope's, of course; yet he does not call the execution of Porcari an act of injustice. He speaks, rather, with a sort of gentle pity of the man who gave so much so freely, and paid bodily death and shame for his belief in a lofty vision. Rienzi dreamed as high, rose far higher, and fell to the depths of his miserable end by his vanity and his weaknesses. Stephen Porcari accomplished nothing in his life, nor by his death; had he succeeded, no one can tell how his nature might have changed; but in failure he left after him the clean memory of an honest purpose, which was perhaps mistaken, but was honourable, patriotic and unselfish. It is strange, unless it be an accident, that the great opponents, the Dominicans and the Jesuits, should have established themselves on opposite sides of the same street, and it is characteristic that the latter should have occupied more land and built more showy buildings than the former, extending their possessions in more than one direction and in a tentative way, while the rigid Dominicans remained rooted to the spot they had chosen, throughout many centuries. Both are gone, in an official and literal sense. The Dominican Monastery is filled with public offices, and though the magnificent library is still kept in order by Dominican friars, it is theirs no longer, but confiscated to the State, and connected with the Victor Emmanuel Library, in what was the Jesuit Roman College, by a bridge that crosses the street of Saint Ignatius. And the Jesuit College, on its side, is the property of the State and a public school; the Jesuits' library is taken from them altogether, and their dwelling is occupied by other public offices. But the vitality which had survived ages was not to be destroyed by such a trifle as confiscation. Officially both are gone; in actual fact both are more alive than ever. When the Jesuits were finally expelled from their College, they merely moved to the other side of the Dominican Monastery, across the Via del Seminario, and established themselves in the Borromeo palace, still within sight of their rivals' walls, and they called their college the Gregorian University. The Dominicans, driven from the ancient stronghold at last, after occupying it exactly five hundred years, have taken refuge in other parts of Rome under the security of title-deeds held by foreigners, and consequently beyond the reach of Italian confiscation. Yet still, in fact, the two great orders face each other. It was the prayer of Ignatius Loyola that his order should be persecuted, and his desire has been most literally fulfilled, for the Jesuits have suffered almost uninterrupted persecution, not at the hands of Protestants only, but of the Roman Catholic Church itself in successive ages. Popes have condemned them, and Papal edicts have expelled their order from Rome; Catholic countries, with Catholic Spain at their head, have driven them out and hunted them down with a determination hardly equalled, and certainly not surpassed at any time, by Protestant Prussia or Puritan England. Non-Catholics are very apt to associate Catholics and Jesuits in their disapproval, dislike, or hatred, as the case may be; but neither Englishman nor German could speak of the order of Ignatius more bitterly than many a most devout Catholic. To give an idea of the feeling which has always been common in Rome against the Jesuits, it is enough to quote the often told popular legend about the windy Piazza del Gesù, where their principal church stands, adjoining what was once their convent, or monastery, as people say nowadays, though Doctor Johnson admits no distinction between the words, and Dryden called a nunnery by the latter name. The story is this. One day the Devil and the Wind were walking together in the streets of Rome, conversing pleasantly according to their habit. When they came to the Piazza del Gesù, the Devil stopped. 'I have an errand in there,' he said, pointing to the Jesuits' house. 'Would you kindly wait for me a moment?' 'Certainly,' answered the Wind. The Devil went in, but never came out again, and the Wind is waiting for him still. When one considers what the Jesuits have done for mankind, as educators, missionaries and civilizers, it seems amazing that they should be so judged by the Romans themselves. Their devotion to the cause of Christianity against paganism has led many of them to martyrdom in past centuries, and may again so long as Asia and Africa are non-Christian. Their marvellous insight into the nature and requirements of education in the highest sense has earned them the gratitude of thousands of living laymen. They have taught all over the world. Their courage, their tenacity, their wonderful organization, deserve the admiration of mankind. Neither their faults nor their mistakes seem adequate to explain the deadly hatred which they have so often roused against themselves among Christians of all denominations. All organized bodies make mistakes, all have faults; few indeed can boast of such a catalogue of truly good deeds as the followers of Saint Ignatius; yet none have been so despised, so hated, so persecuted, not only by men who might be suspected of partisan prejudice, but by the wise, the just and the good. [Illustration] REGION X CAMPITELLI Rome tends to diminutives in names as in facts. The first emperor was Augustus, the last was Augustulus; with the Popes, the Roman Senate dwindled to a mere office, held by one man, and respected by none; the ascent to the Capitol, the path of triumphs that marked the subjugation of the world, became in the twelfth century 'Fabatosta,' or 'Roast Beans Lane'; and, in the vulgar tongue, 'Capitolium' was vulgarized to 'Campitelli,' and the word gave a name to a Region of the city. Within that Region are included the Capitol, the Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine, with the palaces of the Cæsars. It takes in, roughly, the land covered by the earliest city; and, throughout the greater part of Roman history, it was the centre of political and military life. It merited something better than a diminutive for a name; yet, in the latest revolution of things, it has fared better, and has been more respected, than many other quarters, and still the memories of great times and deeds cling to the stones that are left. In the dark ages, when a ferocious faith had destroyed the remnants of Latin learning and culture, together with the last rites of the old religion, the people invented legend as a substitute for the folklore of all the little gods condemned by the Church; so that the fairy tale is in all Europe the link between Christianity and paganism, and to the weakness of vanquished Rome her departed empire seemed only explicable as the result of magic. The Capitol, in the imagination of such tales, became a tower of wizards. High above all, a golden sphere reflected the sun's rays far out across the distant sea by day, and at night a huge lamp took its place as a beacon for the sailors of the Mediterranean, even to Spain and Africa. In the tower, too, was preserved the mystic mirror of the world, which instantly reflected all that passed in the empire, even to its furthest limits. Below the towers, also, and surmounting the golden palace, there were as many statues as Rome had provinces, and each statue wore a bell at its neck, that rang of itself in warning whenever there was trouble in the part of the world to which it belonged, while the figure itself turned on its base to look in the direction of the danger. Such tales Irving tells of the Alhambra, not more wonderful than those believed of Rome, and far less numerous. There were stories of hidden treasure, too, without end. For, in those days of plundering, men laid their hands on what they saw, and hid what they took as best they might; and later, when the men of the Middle Age and of the Renascence believed that Rome had been destroyed by the Goths, they told strange stories of Gothmen who appeared suddenly in disguise from the north, bringing with them ancient parchments in which were preserved sure instructions for unearthing the gold hastily hidden by their ancestors, because there had been too much of it to carry away. Even in our own time such things have been done. In the latter days of the reign of Pius the Ninth, some one discovered an old book or manuscript, wherein it was pointed out that a vast treasure lay buried on the northward side of the Colosseum within a few feet of the walls, and it was told that if any man would dig there he should find, as he dug deeper, certain signs, fragments of statues, and hewn tablets, and a spring of water. So the Pope gave his permission, and the work began. Every one who lived in Rome thirty years ago can remember it, and the excited curiosity of the whole city while the digging went on. And, strange to say, though the earth had evidently not been disturbed for centuries, each object was found in succession, exactly as described, to a great depth; but not the treasure, though the well was sunk down to the primeval soil. It was all filled in again, and the mystery has never been solved. Yet the mere fact that everything was found except the gold, lends some possibility to the other stories of hidden wealth, told and repeated from generation to generation. The legend of the Capitol is too vast, too varied, too full of tremendous contrasts to be briefly told or carelessly sketched. Archæologists have reconstructed it on paper, scholars have written out its history, poets have said great things of it; yet if one goes up the steps today and stands by the bronze statue in the middle of the square, seeing nothing but a paved space enclosed on three sides by palaces of the late Renascence, it is utterly impossible to call up the past. Perhaps no point of ancient Rome seems less Roman and less individual than that spot where Rienzi stood, silent and terrified, for a whole hour before the old stone lion, waiting for the curious, pitiless rabble to kill him. The big buildings shut out history, hide the Forum, the Gemonian steps, and the Tarpeian rock, and in the very inmost centre of the old city's heart they surround a man with the artificialities of an uninteresting architecture. For though Michelangelo planned the reconstruction he did not live to see his designs carried out, and they fell into the hands of little men who tried to improve upon what they could not understand, and ruined it. The truth is that half a dozen capitols have been built on the hill, destroyed, forgotten, and replaced, each one in turn, during successive ages. It is said that certain Indian jugglers allow themselves to be buried alive in a state of trance, and are taken from the tomb after many months not dead; and it is said that the body, before it is brought to life again, is quite cold, as though the man were dead, excepting that there is a very little warmth just where the back of the skull joins the neck. Yet there is enough left to reanimate the whole being in a little time, so that life goes on as before. So in Rome's darkest and most dead days, the Capitol has always held within it a spark of vitality, ready to break out with little warning and violent effect. [Illustration: THE CAPITOL] For the Capitol, not yet the Capitol, but already the sacred fortress of Rome, was made strong in the days of Romulus, and it was in his time, when he and his men had carried off the Sabine girls and were at war with their fathers and brothers, that Tarpeia came down the narrow path, her earthen jar balanced on her graceful head, to fetch spring water for a household sacrifice. Her father kept the castle. She came down, a straight brown girl with eager eyes and red lips, clad in the grey woollen tunic that left her strong round arms bare to the shoulder. Often she had seen the golden bracelets which the Sabine men wore on their left wrists, and some of them had a jewel or two set in the gold; but the Roman men wore none, and the Roman women had none to wear, and Tarpeia's eyes were eager. Because she came to get water for holy things she was safe, and she went down to the spring, and there was Tatius, of the Sabines, drinking. When he saw how her eyes were gold-struck by his bracelet, he asked her if she should like to wear it, and the blood came to her brown face, as she looked back quickly to the castle where her father was. 'If you Sabines will give me what you wear on your left arms,' she said--for she did not know the name of gold--'you shall have the fortress tonight, for I will open the gate for you.' The Sabine looked at her, and then he smiled quickly, and promised for himself and all his companions. So that night they went up stealthily, for there was no moon, and the gate was open, and Tarpeia was standing there. Tatius could see her greedy eyes in the starlight; but instead of his bracelet, he took his shield from his left arm and struck her down with it for a betrayer, and all the Sabine men threw their shields upon her as they passed. So she died, but her name remains to the rock, to this day. It was long before the temple planned by the first Tarquin was solemnly dedicated by the first consuls of the Republic, and the earthen image of Jupiter, splendidly dressed and painted red, was set up between Juno and Minerva. Many hundred years later, in the terrible times of Marius and Sylla, the ancient sanctuary took fire and was burned, and Sylla rebuilt it. That temple was destroyed also, and another, built by Vespasian, was burned too, and from the last building Genseric stole the gilt bronze tiles in the year 455, when Christianity was the fact and Jupiter the myth, one and twenty years before the final end of Rome's empire; and the last of what remained was perhaps burned by Robert Guiscard after serving as a fortress for the enemies of Gregory the Seventh. [Illustration: CHURCH OF ARACOELI] But we know, at last, that the fortress of the old city stood where the Church of Aracoeli stands, and that the temple was on the other side, over against the Palatine, and standing back a little from the Tarpeian rock, so that the open square of today is just between the places of the two. And when one goes up the steps on the right, behind the right-hand building, one comes to a quiet lane, where German students of archæology live in a little colony by themselves and have their Institute at the end of it, and a hospital of their own; and there, in a wall, is a small green door leading into a quiet garden, with a pretty view. Along the outer edge runs a low stone wall, and there are seats where one may rest and dream under the trees, a place where one might fancy lovers meeting in the moonlight, or old men sunning themselves of an autumn afternoon, or children playing among the flowers on a spring morning. But it is a place of fear and dread, ever since Tarpeia died there for her betrayal, and one may dream other dreams there than those of peace and love. The vision of a pale, strong man rises at the edge, bound and helpless, lifted from the ground by savage hands and hurled from the brink to the death below,--Manlius, who saved the Capitol and loved the people, and was murdered by the nobles,--and many others after him, just and unjust, whirled through the clear air to violent destruction for their bad or their good deeds, as justice or injustice chanced to be in the ascendant of the hour. And then, in the Middle Age, the sweet-scented garden was the place of terrible executions, and the gallows stood there permanently for many years, and men were hanged and drawn and quartered there, week by week, month by month, all the year round, the chief magistrate of Rome looking on from the window of the Senator's palace, as a duty; till one of them sickened at the sight of blood, and ordained that justice should be done at the Bridge of Sant' Angelo, and at Tor di Nona, and in the castle itself, and the summit of the fatal rock was left to the birds, the wild flowers, and the merciful purity of nature. And that happened four hundred years ago. Until our own time there were prisons deep down in the old Roman vaults. At first, as in old days, the place of confinement was in the Mamertine prison, on the southeastern slope, beneath which was the hideous Tullianum, deepest and darkest of all, whence no captive ever came out alive to the upper air again. In the Middle Age, the prison was below the vaults of the Roman Tabularium on the side of the Forum, but it is said that the windows looked inward upon a deep court of the Senator's palace. As civilization advanced, it was transferred a story higher, to a more healthy region of the building, but the Capitoline prison was not finally given up till the reign of Pius the Ninth, at which time it had become a place of confinement for debtors only. Institutions and parties in Rome have always had a tendency to cling to places more than in other cities. It is thus that during so many centuries the Lateran was the headquarters of the Popes, the Capitol the rallying-place of the ever-smouldering republicanism of the people, and the Castle of Sant' Angelo the seat of actual military power as contrasted with spiritual dominion and popular aspiration. So far as the latter is concerned its vitality is often forgotten and its vigour underestimated. One must consider the enormous odds against which the spirit of popular emancipation had to struggle in order to appreciate the strength it developed. A book has been written called 'The One Hundred and Sixty-one rebellions of papal subjects between 896 and 1859'--a title which gives an average of about sixteen to a century; and though the furious partiality of the writer calls them all rebellions against the popes, whereas a very large proportion were revolts against the nobles, and Rienzi's attempt was to bring the Pope back to Rome, yet there can be no question as to the vitality which could produce even half of such a result; and it may be remembered that in almost every rising of the Roman people the rabble first made a rush for the Capitol, and, if successful, seized other points afterwards. In the darkest ages the words 'Senate' and 'Republic' were never quite forgotten and were never dissociated from the sacred place. The names of four leaders, Arnold of Brescia, Stefaneschi, Rienzi and Porcari, recall the four greatest efforts of the Middle Age; the first partially succeeded and left its mark, the second was fruitless because permanent success was then impossible against such odds, the third miscarried because Rienzi was a madman and Cardinal Albornoz a man of genius, and the fourth, because the people were contented and wanted no revolution at all. The first three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls. Its solemn knell announced the death of a Pope, or tolled the last hour of condemned criminals, and men crossed themselves as it echoed through the streets; but at the tremendous sound of its alarm, rung backward till the tower rocked, the Romans ran to arms, the captains of the Regions buckled on their breastplates and displayed their banners, and the people flocked together to do deeds of sudden violence and shortlived fury. In a few hours Stefaneschi of Trastevere swept the nobles from the city; between noon and night Rienzi was master of Rome, and it was from the Capitol that the fierce edicts of both threatened destruction to the unready barons. They fled to their mountain dens like wolves at sunrise, but the night was never slow to descend upon liberty's short day, and with the next dawn the ruined towers began to rise again; the people looked with dazed indifference upon the fall of their leader, and presently they were again slaves, as they had been--Arnold was hanged and burned, Stefaneschi languished in a dungeon, Rienzi wandered over Europe a homeless exile, the straight, stiff corpse of brave Stephen Porcari hung, clad in black, from the battlement of Sant' Angelo. It was always the same story. The Barons were the Sabines, the Latins and the Æquians of Mediæval Rome; but there was neither a Romulus nor a Cincinnatus to lead the Roman people against steel-clad masters trained to fighting from boyhood, bold by inheritance, and sure of a power which they took every day by violence and held year after year by force. In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God. To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron balustrade--the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long continued by Arnold of Brescia. Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli had so long rebelled against the Popes. The fact remains, astonishing and ridiculous,--in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces, seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome; and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed. Now for many years, Rome had been in the hands of a family of converted Jews, known as the Pierleoni, from Pietro Leone, first spoken of in the chronicles as an iniquitous usurer of enormous wealth. They became prefects of Rome; they took possession of Sant' Angelo and were the tyrants of the city, and finally they became the Pope's great enemies, the allies of Roger of Apulia, and makers of antipopes, of whom the first was either Pietro's son or his grandson. They had on their side possession, wealth, the support of a race which never looks upon apostasy from its creed as final, the alliance of King Roger and of Duke Roger, his son, and the countenance, if not the friendship, of Arnold of Brescia, the excommunicated monk of northern Italy, and the pupil of the romantic Abelard. And the Pierleoni had against them the Popes, the great Frangipani family with most of the nobles, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who has been called the Bismarck of the Church. Arnold of Brescia was no ordinary fanatic. He was as brave as Stefaneschi, as pure-hearted as Stephen Porcari, as daring and eloquent as Rienzi in his best days. The violent deeds of his followers have been imputed to him, and brought him to his end; but it was his great adversary, Saint Bernard, who expressed a regretful wish 'that his teachings might have been as irreproachable as his life.' The doctrine for which he died at last was political, rather than spiritual, human rather than theological. In all but his monk's habit he was a layman in his later years, as he had been when he first wandered to France and sat at the feet of the gentle Abelard; but few Churchmen of that day were as spotless in their private lives. He was an agitator, a would-be reformer, a revolutionary; and the times craved change. The trumpet call of the first Crusade had roused the peoples of Europe, and the distracted forces of the western world had been momentarily concentrated in a general and migratory movement of religious conquest; forty years later the fortunes of the Latins in the East were already waning, and Saint Bernard was meditating the inspiring words that sent four hundred thousand warriors to the rescue of the Holy Places. What Bernard was about to attempt for Palestine, Arnold dreamed of accomplishing for Rome. In his eyes she was holy, too, her ruins were the sepulchre of a divine freedom, worthy to be redeemed from tyranny even at the price of blood, and he would have called from the tomb the spirit of murdered liberty to save and illuminate mankind. Where Bernard was a Christian, Arnold was a Roman in soul; where Bernard was an inspired monk, Arnold was in heart a Christian, of that first Apostolic republic which had all things in common. At such a time such a man could do much. Rome was in the utmost distress. At the election of Innocent the Second, the Jewish Pierleoni had set up one of themselves as antipope, and Innocent had been obliged to escape in spite of the protection of the still powerful Frangipani, leaving the Israelitish antipope to rule Rome, in spite of the Emperor, and in alliance with King Roger for nine years, until his death, when it required Saint Bernard's own presence and all the strength of his fiery words to dissuade the Romans from accepting another spiritual and temporal ruler imposed upon them by the masterful Pierleoni. So Innocent returned at last, a good man, much tried by misfortune, but neither wise nor a leader of men. At that time the soldiers of Rome were beaten in open battle by the people of Tivoli, a humiliation which it was not easy to forget. And it is more than probable that the Pierleoni looked on at the Pope's failure in scornful inaction from their stronghold of Sant' Angelo, which they had only nominally surrendered to Innocent's authority. From a distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the picture of the times. 'Who,' asks Bernard, 'is ignorant of the vanity and arrogance of the Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, untractable, and scorning to obey, unless they are too feeble to resist. When they promise to serve, they aspire to reign; if they swear allegiance, they watch the opportunity of revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors, or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern; faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their refusals. Lofty in promise, poor in execution: adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason, are the familiar arts of their policy.' Fearless and in earnest, Arnold came to Rome, and began to preach a great change, a great reform, a great revival, and many heard him and followed him; and it was not in the Pope's power to silence him, nor bring him to any trial. The Pierleoni would support any sedition against Innocent; the Roman people were weary of masters, they listened with delight to Arnold's fierce condemnation of all temporal power, that of the Pope and that of the Emperor alike, and the old words, Republic, Senate, Consul, had not lost their life in the slumber of five hundred years. The Capitol was there, for a Senate house, and there were men in Rome to be citizens and Senators. Revolution was stirring, and Innocent had recourse to the only weapon left him in his weakness. Arnold was preaching as a Christian and a Catholic. The Pope excommunicated him in a general Council. In the days of the Crusades the Major Interdiction was not an empty form of words; to applaud a revolutionary was one thing, to attend the sermons of a man condemned to hell was a graver matter; Arnold's disciples deserted him, his friends no longer dared to protect him under the penalty of eternal damnation, and he went out from Rome a fugitive and an outcast. Wandering from Italy to France, from France to Germany, and at last to Switzerland, he preached his doctrines without fear, though he had upon him the mark of Cain; but if the temporal sovereignty against which he spoke could not directly harm him, the spiritual power pursued him hither and thither, like a sword of flame. A weaker man would have renounced his beliefs, or would have disappeared in a distant obscurity; but Arnold was not made to yield. Goaded by persecution, divinely confident of right, he faced danger and death and came back to Rome. He arrived at a moment when the people were at once elated by the submission of Tivoli, and exasperated against Innocent because he refused to raze that city to the ground. The Pierleoni were ever ready to encourage rebellion. The Romans, at the words Liberty and Republic, rose in a body, rushed to the Capitol, proclaimed the Commonwealth, and forthwith elected a Senate which assumed absolute sovereignty of the city, and renewed the war with Tivoli. The institution then refounded was not wholly abolished until, under the Italian kings, a representative government took its place. The success and long supremacy of Arnold's teaching have been unfairly called his 'reign'; yet he neither caused himself to be elected a Senator, nor at any time, so far as we can learn, occupied any office whatsoever; neither did he profit in fortune by the changes he had wrought, and to the last he wore the garb of poverty and led the simple life which had extorted the reluctant admiration of his noblest adversary. But he could not impose upon others the virtues he practised himself, nor was it in his power to direct the force his teachings had called into life. For the time being the Popes were powerless against the new order. Innocent is said to have died of grief and humiliation, almost before the revolution was complete. His successor, Celestin the Second, reigned but five months and a half, busy in a quarrel with King Roger, and still the new Senate ruled the city. [Illustration: ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS] But saving that it endured, it left no mark of good in Rome; the nobles saw that a new weapon was placed in their hands, they easily elected themselves to office, and the people, deluded by the name of a Republic, had exchanged the sovereignty of the Pope, or the allegiance of the Emperor, for the far more ruthless tyranny of the barons. The Jewish Pierleoni were rich and powerful still, but since Rome was strong enough to resist the Vatican, the Pontificate was no longer a prize worth seizing, and they took instead, by bribery or force, the Consulship or the Presidency of the Senate. Jordan, the brother of the antipope Anacletus, obtained the office, and the violent death of the next Pope, Lucius the Second, was one of the first events of his domination. Lucius refused to bear any longer the humiliation to which his predecessors had tamely submitted. Himself in arms, and accompanied by such followers as he could collect, the Pope made a desperate attempt to dislodge the Senate and their guards from the Capitol, and at the head of the storming party he endeavoured to ascend the old road, known then as Fabatosta. But the Pierleoni and their men were well prepared for the assault, and made a desperate and successful resistance. The Pope fell at the head of his soldiers, struck by a stone on the temple, mortally wounded, but not dead. In hasty retreat, the dying man was borne by his routed soldiers to the monastery of Saint Gregory on the Coelian, under the safe protection of the trusty Frangipani, who held the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum. Of all the many Popes who died untimely deaths he was the only one, I believe, who fell in battle. And he got his deathblow on the slope of that same Capitol where Gracchus and Manlius had died before him, each in good cause. It has been wrongly said that he had all the nobles with him, and that the revolution was of the people alone, aided by the Pierleoni. This is not true. So far as can be known, the Frangipani were his only faithful friends, but it is possible that the Count of Tusculum, seventh in descent from Theodora, and nephew of the first Colonna, at that time holding a part of the Aventine, may have also been the Pope's ally. Be that as it may, the force that Lucius led was very small, and the garrison of the Capitol was overwhelmingly strong. Some say also that Arnold of Brescia was not actually in Rome at that time, that the first revolution was the result of his unforgotten teachings, bearing fruit in the hearts of the nobles and the people, and that he did not come to the city till Pope Lucius was dead. However that may be, from that time forward, till the coming of Barbarossa, Arnold was the idol of the Romans, and their vanity and arrogance knew no bounds. Pope Eugenius the Third was enthroned in the Lateran under the protection of the Frangipani, but within the week he was forced to escape by night to the mountains. The Pierleoni held Sant' Angelo; the people seized and fortified the Vatican, deprived the Pope's Prefect of his office, and forced the few nobles who resisted them to swear allegiance to Jordan Pierleone, making him in fact dictator, and in name their 'Patrician.' The Pope retorted by excommunicating him, and allying himself with Tivoli, but was forced to a compromise whereby he acknowledged the Senate and the supremacy of the Roman people, who, already tired of their dictator, agreed to restore the Prefect to office, and to express some sort of obedience, more spiritual than temporal, to the Pope's authority. But Arnold was still supreme, and after a short stay in the city Eugenius was again a fugitive. It was then that he passed into France, when Lewis the Seventh was ready armed to lead the Second Crusade to the Holy Land; and through that stirring time Rome is dark and sullen, dwelling aloof from Church and Empire in the new-found illusion of an unreal and impossible greatness. Seven hundred years later an Italian patriot exclaimed, 'We have an Italy, but we have no Italians.' And so Arnold of Brescia must many times have longed for Romans to people a free Rome. He had made a republic, but he could not make free men; he had called up a vision, but he could not give it reality; like Rienzi and the rest, he had 'mistaken memories for hopes,' and he was fore-destined to pay for his belief in his country's life with the sacrifice of his own. He had dreamed of a liberty serene and high, but he had produced only a dismal confusion: in place of peace he had brought senseless strife; instead of a wise and simple consul, he had given the Romans the keen and rapacious son of a Jewish usurer for a dictator; where he had hoped to destroy the temporal power of Pope and Emperor, he had driven the greatest forces of his age, and two of the greatest men, to an alliance against him. So he perished. Eugenius died in Tivoli, Anastasius reigned a few months, and sturdy Nicholas Breakspeare was Adrian the Fourth. Conrad the Emperor also died, poisoned by the physicians King Roger sent him from famous Salerno, and Frederick Barbarossa of Hohenstauffen, his nephew, reigned in his stead. Adrian and Frederick quarrelled at their first meeting in the sight of all their followers in the field, for the young Emperor would not hold the Englishman's stirrup on the first day. On the second he yielded, and Pope and Emperor together were invincible. Then the Roman Senate and people sent out ambassadors, who spoke hugely boasting words to the red-haired soldier, and would have set conditions on his crowning, so that he laughed aloud at them; and he and Adrian went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to its factions and its parties. Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him. The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge. The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river, lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year 1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted. He was a martyr--whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all patriot leaders, of all preachers of liberty, past and living, it is not too much to say that Arnold of Brescia was the truest, the bravest and the simplest. * * * * * To them all, the Capitol has been the central object of dreams, and upon its walls the story of their failure has often been told in grotesque figures of themselves. When Rienzi was first driven out, his effigy was painted, hanged by the heels upon one of the towers, and many another 'enemy of the state' was pictured there--Giuliano Cesarini, for one, and the great Sforza, himself, with a scornful and insulting epigraph; as Andrea del Castagno, justly surnamed the 'Assassin,' painted upon the walls of the Signoria in Florence the likeness of all those who had joined in the great conspiracy of the Pazzi, hung up by the feet, as may be seen to this day. It has ever been a place of glory, a place of death and a place of shame, but since the great modern changes it is meant to be only the seat of honour, and upon the slope of the Capitol the Italians, in the first flush of victorious unity, have begun to raise a great monument to their greatest idol, King Victor Emmanuel. If it is not the best work of art of the sort in existence it will probably enjoy the distinction of being the largest, and it is by no means the worst, for the central statue of the 'Honest King' has been modelled with marvellous skill and strength by Chiaradia, whose name is worthy to be remembered; yet the vastness of the architectural theatre provided for its display betrays again the giantism of the Latin race, and when in a future century the broad flood of patriotism shall have subsided within the straight river bed of sober history, men will wonder why Victor Emmanuel, honest and brave though he was, received the greater share of praise, and Cavour and Garibaldi the less, seeing that he got Italy by following the advice of the one, if not by obeying his dictation, and by accepting the kingdom which the other had destined for a republic, but was forced to yield to the monarchy by the superior genius of the statesman. That day is not far distant. After a period of great and disastrous activity, the sleepy indifference of 1830 is again settling upon Rome, the race for imaginary wealth is over, time is a drug in the market, money is scarce, dwellings are plentiful, the streets are quiet by day and night, and only those who still have something to lose or who cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all the clocks were set once a fortnight to follow the sun. Rome is restoring to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's. They are much bigger and finer things than the symmetrical, stuccoed cubes which have lately been piled up everywhere in heaven-offending masses, and one is glad to come back to them after the nightmare that has lasted twenty years. Moreover, one is surprised to find how little permanent effect has been produced by the squandering of countless millions during the building mania, beyond a cruel destruction of trees, and a few modifications of natural local accidents. To do the moderns justice, they have done no one act of vandalism as bad as fifty, at least, committed by the barons of the Middle Age and the Popes of the Renascence, though they have shown much worse taste in such new things as they have set up in place of the old. The charm of Rome has never lain in its architecture, nor in the beauty of its streets, though the loveliness of its old-fashioned gardens contributed much which is now in great part lost. Nor can it be said that the enthralling magic of the city we used to know lay especially in its historical association, since Rome has been loved to folly by half-educated girls, by flippant women of the world and by ignorant idlers without number, as well as by most men of genius who have ever spent much time there. [Illustration: COLUMN OF PHOCAS, LOOKING ALONG THE FORUM] In the Middle Age one man might know all that was to be known. Dante did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediæval scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We cannot all be archæologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old buildings; we know the Portico of the Twelve Gods in Council, the Temple of Concord, the Basilica Julia, the Court of Vesta, the Temple of Castor and Pollux; we have a more vague notion of the Senate Hall; the hideous arch of Septimius Severus stares us in the face; so does the lovely column of evil Phocas, the monster of the east, the red-handed centurion-usurper who murdered an Emperor and his five sons to reach the throne. And perhaps we have been told where the Rostra stood, and the Rostra Julia, and that the queer fragment of masonry by the arch is supposed to be the 'Umbilicus,' the centre of the Roman world. There is no excuse for not knowing these things any more than there is any very strong reason for knowing them, unless one be a student. There is a plan of the Forum in every guide book, with a description that changes with each new edition. And yet, without much definite knowledge,--with 'little Latin and less Greek,' perhaps,--many men and women, forgetting for one moment the guide book in their hands, have leaned upon a block of marble with half-closed, musing eyes, and breath drawn so slow that it is almost quite held in day-dream wonder, and they have seen a vision rise of past things and beings, even in the broad afternoon sunshine, out of stones that remember Cæsar's footsteps, and from walls that have echoed Antony's speech. There they troop up the Sacred Way, the shock-headed, wool-draped, beak-nosed Romans; there they stand together in groups at the corner of Saturn's temple; there the half-naked plebeian children clamber upon the pedestals of the columns to see the sights, and double the men's deep tones with a treble of childish chatter; there the noble boy with his bordered toga, his keen young face, and longing backward look, is hurried home out of the throng by the tall household slave, who carries his school tablets and is answerable with his skin for the boy's safety. The Consul Major goes by, twelve lictors marching in single file before him--black-browed, square-jawed, relentless men, with their rods and axes. Then two closed litters are carried past by big, black, oily fellows, beside whom walk freedmen and Greek slaves, and three or four curled and scented parasites, the shadows of the great men. Under their very feet the little street boys play their games of pitching at tiny pyramids of dried lupins, unless they have filberts, and lupins are almost as good; and as the dandified hanger-on of Mæcenas, straining his ear for the sound of his patron's voice from within the litter, heedlessly crushes the little yellow beans under his sandal, the particular small boy whose stake is smashed clenches his fist, and with flashing eyes curses the dandy's dead to the fourth generation of ascendants, and he and his companions turn and scatter like mice as one of the biggest slaves threateningly raises his hand. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE FORUM] Absurd details rise in the dream. An old crone is selling roasted chestnuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns--the men who mourned for Cæsar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm. All about stretches the vast humming city of low-built houses covering the short steep hills and filling all the hollow between. Northeastward lies the seething Suburra; the yellow river runs beyond the Velabrum and the cattle market to the west; southward rise the enchanted palaces of Cæsar; due east is the Esquiline of evil fame, redeemed and made lovely with trees and fountains by Mæcenas, but haunted even today, say modern Romans, by the spectres of murderers and thieves who there died bloody deaths of quivering torture. All around, as the sun sinks and the cool shadows quench the hot light on the white pavements, the ever-increasing crowds of men--always more men than women--move inward, half unconsciously, out of inborn instinct, to the Forum, the centre of the Empire, the middle of the world, the boiling-point of the whole earth's riches and strength and life. Then as the traveller muses out his short space of rest, the vision grows confused, and Rome's huge ghosts go stalking, galloping, clanging, raving through the surging dream-throng,--Cæsar, Brutus, Pompey, Catiline, Cicero, Caligula, Vitellius, Hadrian,--and close upon them Gauls and Goths and Huns, and all barbarians, till the dream is a medley of school-learned names, that have suddenly taken shadows of great faces out of Rome's shadow storehouse, and gorgeous arms and streaming draperies, and all at once the sight-seer shivers as the sun goes down, and passes his hand over his eyes, and shakes himself, and goes away rather hastily, lest he should fall sick of a fever and himself be gathered to the ghosts he has seen. It matters very little whether the day-dream much resembles the reality of ages long ago, whether boys played with lupins or with hazel-nuts then, or old women roasted chestnuts in the streets, or whether such unloving spirits should be supposed to visit one man in one vision. The traveller has had an impression which has not been far removed from emotion, and his day has not been lost, if it be true that emotion is the soul's only measure of time. There, if anywhere, lies Rome's secret. The place, the people, the air, the crystal brightness of winter, the passion-stirring scirocco of autumn, the loveliness of the long spring, the deep, still heat of summer, the city, the humanity, the memories of both, are all distillers of emotion in one way or another. Above all, the night is beautiful in Rome, when the moon is high and all is quiet. Go down past the silver Forum to the Colosseum and see what it is then, and perhaps you will know what it was in the old days. Such white stillness as this fell then also, by night, on all the broad space around the amphitheatre of all amphitheatres, the wonder of the world, the chief monument of Titus, when his hand had left of Jerusalem not one stone upon another. The same moonbeams fell slanting across the same huge walls, and whitened the sand of the same broad arena when the great awning was drawn back at night to air the place of so much death. In the shadow, the steps are still those up which Dion the Senator went to see mad Commodus play the gladiator and the public fool. On one of those lower seats he sat, the grave historian, chewing laurel leaves to steady his lips and keep down his laughter, lest a smile should cost his head; and he showed the other Senators that it was a good thing for their safety, and there they sat, in their rows, throughout the long afternoon, solemnly chewing laurel leaves for their lives, while the strong madman raved on the sand below, and slew, and bathed himself in the blood of man and beast. There is a touch of frightful humour in the tale. And one stands there alone in the stillness and remembers how, on that same night, when all was over, when the corpses had been dragged away, it may have been almost as it is now. Only, perhaps, far off among the arches and on the tiers of seats, there might be still a tiny light moving here and there; the keepers of that terrible place would go their rounds with their little earthen lamps; they would search everywhere in the spectators' places for small things that might have been lost in the press--a shoulder-buckle of gold or silver or bronze, an armlet, a woman's earring, a purse, perhaps, with something in it. And the fitful night-breeze blew now and then and made them shade their lights with their dark hands. By the 'door of the dead' a torch was burning down in its socket, its glare falling upon a heap of armour, mostly somewhat battered, and all of it blood-stained; a score of black-browed smiths were picking it over and distributing it in heaps, according to its condition. Now and then, from the deep vaults below the arena, came the distant sound of a clanging gate or of some piece of huge stage machinery falling into its place, and a muffled calling of men. One of the keepers, with his light, was singing softly some ancient minor strain as he searched the tiers. That would be all, and presently even that would cease. One thinks of such things naturally enough; and then the dream runs backward, against the sun, as dreams will, and the moon rays weave a vision of dim day. Straightway tier upon tier, eighty thousand faces rise, up to the last high rank beneath the awning's shade. High in the front, under the silken canopy sits the Emperor of the world, sodden-faced, ghastly, swine-eyed, robed in purple; all alone, save for his dwarf, bull-nosed, slit-mouthed, hunch-backed, sly. Next, on the lowest bench, the Vestals, old and young, the elder looking on with hard faces and dry eyes, the youngest with wide and startled looks, and parted lips, and quick-drawn breath that sobs and is caught at sight of each deadly stab and gash of broadsword and trident, and hands that twitch and clutch each other as a man's foot slips in a pool of blood, and the heavy harness clashes in the red, wet sand. Then grey-haired senators; then curled and perfumed knights of Rome; and then the people, countless, vast, frenzied, blood-thirsty, stretching out a hundred thousand hands with thumbs reversed, commanding death to the fallen--full eighty thousand throats of men and women roaring, yelling, shrieking over each ended life. A theatre indeed, a stage indeed, a play wherein every scene of every act ends in sudden death. And then the wildest, deadliest howl of all on that day; a handful of men and women in white, and one girl in the midst of them; the clang of an iron gate thrown suddenly open; a rushing and leaping of great, lithe bodies of beasts, yellow and black and striped, the sand flying in clouds behind them; a worrying and crushing of flesh and bone, as of huge cats worrying little white mice; sharp cries, then blood, then silence, then a great laughter, and the sodden face of mankind's drunken master grows almost human for a moment with a very slow smile. The wild beasts are driven out with brands and red-hot irons, step by step, dragging backward nameless mangled things in their jaws, and the bull-nosed dwarf offers the Emperor a cup of rare red wine. It drips from his mouth while he drinks, as the blood from the tiger's fangs. "What were they?" he asks. "Christians," explains the dwarf. [Illustration] REGION XI SANT' ANGELO The Region of Sant' Angelo, as has been already said, takes its name from the small church famous in Rienzi's story. It encloses all of what was once the Ghetto, and includes the often-mentioned Theatre of Marcellus, now the palace of the Orsini, but successively a fortress of the Pierleoni, appropriately situated close to the Jews' quarter, and the home of the Savelli. The history of the Region is the history of the Jews in Rome, from Augustus to the destruction of their dwelling-place, about 1890. In other words, the Hebrew colony actually lived during nineteen hundred years at that point of the Tiber, first on one side of the river, and afterwards on the other. It is said that the first Jews were brought to Rome by Pompey, as prisoners of war, and soon afterwards set free, possibly on their paying a ransom accumulated by half starving themselves, and selling the greater part of their allowance of corn during a long period. Seventeen years later, they were a power in Rome; they had lent Julius Cæsar enormous sums, which he repaid with exorbitant interest, and after his death they mourned him, and kept his funeral pyre burning seven days and nights in the Forum. A few years after that time, Augustus established them on the opposite side of the Tiber, over against the bridge of Cestius and the island. Under Tiberius their numbers had increased to fifty thousand; they had synagogues in Rome, Genoa and Naples, and it is noticeable that their places of worship were always built upon the shore of the sea, or the bank of a river, whence their religious services came to be termed 'orationes littorales'--which one might roughly translate as 'alongshore prayers.' They were alternately despised, hated, feared and flattered. Tacitus calls them a race of men hated by the gods, yet their kings, Herod and Agrippa--one asks how the latter came by an ancient Roman name--were treated with honour and esteem. The latter was in fact brought up with Drusus, the son of the Emperor Tiberius, his son was on terms of the greatest intimacy with Claudius, and his daughter or grand-daughter Berenice was long and truly loved by Titus, who would have made her Empress had it been possible, to the great scandal of the Emperor's many detractors, as Suetonius has told. Sabina Poppæa, Nero's lowly and evil second wife, loved madly one Aliturius, a Jewish comic actor and a favourite of Nero; and when the younger Agrippa induced Nero to imprison Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Josephus came to Pozzuoli, having suffered shipwreck like the latter, this same Josephus, the historian of the Jews, got the actor's friendship and by his means moved Poppæa, and through her, Nero, to a first liberation of those whom he describes as 'certain priests of my acquaintance, very excellent persons, whom on a small and trifling charge Felix the procurator of Judæa had put in irons and sent to Rome to plead their cause before Cæsar.' It should not be forgotten that Josephus was himself a pupil of Banus, who, though not a Christian, is believed to have been a follower of John the Baptist. And here Saint John Chrysostom, writing about the year 400, takes up the story and tells how Saint Paul attempted to convert Poppæa and to persuade her to leave Nero, since she had two other husbands living; and how Nero turned upon him and accused him of many sins, and imprisoned him, and when he saw that even in prison the Apostle still worked upon Poppæa's conscience, he at last condemned him to die. Other historians have said that Poppæa turned Jewess for the sake of her Jewish actor, and desired to be buried by the Jewish rite when she was dying of the savage kick that killed her and her child--the only act of violence Nero seems to have ever regretted. However that may be, it is sure that she loved the comedian, and that for a time he had unbounded influence in Rome. And so great did their power grow that Claudius Rutilius, a Roman magistrate and poet, a contemporary of Chrysostom, and not a Christian, expressed the wish that Judæa might never have been conquered by Pompey and subdued again by Titus, 'since the contagion of the cancer, cut out, spreads wider, and the conquered nation grinds its conquerors.' And so, with varying fortune, they survived the empire which they had seen founded, and the changes of a thousand years, they themselves inwardly unchanged and unchanging, while following many arts and many trades besides money-lending, and they outlived persecution and did not decay in prosperity. In their seven Roman synagogues they set up models of the temple Titus had destroyed, and of the seven-branched candlestick and of the holy vessels of Jerusalem which were preserved in the temple of Peace as trophies of the Jews' subjection; they made candlesticks and vessels of like shape for their synagogues, nursing their hatred, praying for deliverance, and because those sacred things were kept in Rome, it became a holy city for them, and they throve; and by and by they oppressed their victors. Then came Domitian the Jew-hater, and turned them out of their houses and laid heavy taxes upon them, and forced them for a time to live in the caves and wild places and catacombs of the Aventine, and they became dealers in spells and amulets and love philtres, which they sold dear to the ever-superstitious Romans, and Juvenal wrote scornful satires on them. Presently they returned, under Trajan, to their old dwellings by the Tiber. Thence they crept along the Cestian bridge to the island, and from the island by the Fabrician bridge to the other shore, growing rich again by degrees, and crowding their little houses upon the glorious portico of Octavia, where Vespasian and Titus had met the Senate at dawn on the day when they triumphed over the Jews and the fall of Jerusalem, and the very place of the Jews' greatest humiliation became their stronghold for ages. Then all at once, in the twelfth century, they are the masters. The Pierleoni hold Sant' Angelo, and close to their old quarters fortify the Theatre of Marcellus, and a Pierleone is antipope in name, but a real and ruling Pope in political fact, while Innocent the Second wanders helplessly from town to town, and later, while Lewis the Seventh of France leads the Second Crusade to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, the 'Vicar of Christ' is an outcast before the race of those by whom Christ was crucified. That was the highest point of the Jews' greatness in Rome. [Illustration: PIAZZA MONTANARA AND THE THEATRE OF MARCELLUS From a print of the last century] But it is noticeable that while the Hebrew race possesses in the very highest degree the financial energy to handle and accumulate money, and the tenacity to keep it for a long time, it has never shown that sort of strength which can hold land or political power in adverse circumstances. In the twelfth century the Pierleoni were the masters of Rome; in the thirteenth, they had disappeared from history, though they still held the Theatre of Marcellus; in the fourteenth they seem to have perished altogether and are never heard of again. And it should not be argued that this was due to any overwhelming persecution and destruction of the Jews, since the Pierleoni's first step was an outward, if not a sincere, conversion to Christianity. In strong contrast with these facts stands the history of the Colonna. The researches of the learned Coppi make it almost certain that the Colonna descend from Theodora, the Senatress of Rome, who flourished in the year 914; Pietro della Colonna held Palestrina, and is known to have imprisoned there, 'in an empty cistern,' the governor of Campagna, in the year 1100; like the Orsini, the Colonna boast that during more than five hundred years no treaty was drawn up with the princes of Europe in which their two families were not specifically designated; and at the time of the present writing, in the last days of the nineteenth century, Colonna is still not only one of the greatest names in Europe, but the family is numerous and flourishing, unscathed by the terrible financial disasters which began to ruin Italy in 1888, not notably wealthy, but still in possession of its ancestral palace in Rome, and of immense tracts of land in the hills, in the Campagna, and in the south of Italy--actively engaged, moreover, in the representative government of Italy, strong, solid and full of life, as though but lately risen to eminence from a sturdy country stock--and all this after a career that has certainly lasted eight hundred years, and very probably nearer a thousand. Nor can any one pretend that it owes much to the power or protection of any sovereign, since the Colonna have been in almost constant opposition to the Popes in history, have been exiled and driven from Italy more than once, and have again and again suffered confiscation of all they possessed in the world. There have certainly not been in the same time so many confiscations proclaimed against the Jews. The question presents itself: why has a prolific race which, as a whole, has survived the fall of kingdoms and empires without end, with singular integrity of original faith and most extraordinary tenacity of tradition and custom, together with the most unbounded ambition and very superior mental gifts, never produced a single family of powerful men able to maintain their position more than a century or two, when the nations of Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men necessarily into a closer contact with nature, and therefore induce a healthier life, tending to increase the vitality of a race rather than to diminish it. Whether this be true or not, it is safe to say that no great family has ever maintained its power long by the possession of money, without great lands; and by 'long' we understand at least three hundred years. With regard to the Jews in Rome it is a singular fact that they have generally been better treated by the religious than by the civil authorities. They were required to do homage to the latter every year in the Capitol, and on this occasion the Senator of Rome placed his foot upon the heads of the prostrate delegates, by way of accentuating their humiliation and disgrace, but the service they were required to do on the accession of a new Pope was of a different and less degrading nature. The Israelite School awaited the Pope's passage, on his return from taking possession of the Lateran, standing up in a richly hung temporary balcony, before which he passed on his way. They then presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch, which he blessed on the spot, and took away with him. That was all, and it amounted to a sanction, or permission, accorded to the Jewish religion. As for the sumptuary laws, the first one was decreed in 1215, after the fall of the Pierleoni, and it imposed upon all Jews, and other heretics whomsoever, the wearing of a large circle of yellow cloth sewn upon the breast. In the following century, according to Baracconi, this mark was abolished by the statutes of the city and the Jews were made to wear a scarlet mantle in public; but all licensed Jewish physicians, being regarded as public benefactors, were exempted from the rule. For the profession of medicine is one which the Hebrews have always followed with deserved success, and it frequently happened in Rome that the Pope's private physician, who lived in the Vatican and was a personage of confidence and importance, was a professed Israelite from the Ghetto, who worshipped in the synagogue on Saturdays and looked with contempt and disgust upon his pontifical patient as an eater of unclean food. There was undoubtedly a law compelling a certain number of the Jews to hear sermons once a week, first in the Trinità dei Pellegrini, and afterwards in the Church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and it was from time to time rigorously enforced; it was renewed in the present century under Leo the Twelfth, and only finally abolished, together with all other oppressive measures, by Pius the Ninth at the beginning of his reign. But when one considers the frightful persecution suffered by the race in Spain, it must be conceded that they were relatively well treated in Rome by the Popes. Their bitterest enemies and oppressors were the lower classes of the people, who were always ready to attack and rifle the Ghetto on the slightest pretext, and against whose outrageous deeds the Jews had no redress. [Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS] It was their treatment by the people, rather than the matter itself, which made the carnival races, in which they were forced to run after a hearty meal, together with a great number of Christians, an intolerable tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, so that he only went out late in the evening. Things were no better in Rome under Paul the Fourth, but they were distinctly better in Rome than in Berlin at the time of Mendelssohn's writing. Paul the Fourth, the Carafa Pope, and the friend of the Inquisition, confined the Jews to the Ghetto. There can be no doubt but that the act was intended as a measure of severity against heretics, and as such Pius the Ninth considered it indefensible and abolished it. In actual fact it must have been of enormous advantage to the Jews, who were thus provided with a stronghold against the persecutions and robberies of the rabble. The little quarter was enclosed by strong walls with gates, and if the Jews were required to be within them at night, on pain of a fine, they and their property were at least in safety. This fact has never been noticed, and accounts for the serenity with which they bore their nightly imprisonment for three centuries. Once within the walls of the Ghetto they were alone, and could go about the little streets in perfect security; they were free from the contamination as well as safe from the depredations of Christians, and within their own precincts they were not forced to wear the hated orange-coloured cap or net which Paul the Fourth imposed upon the Jewish men and women. To a great extent, too, such isolation was already in the traditions of the race. A hundred years earlier Venice had created its Ghetto; so had Prague, and other European cities were not long in following. Morally speaking their confinement may have been a humiliation; in sober fact it was an immense advantage; moreover, a special law of 'emphyteusis' made the leases of their homes inalienable, so long as they paid rent, and forbade the raising of the rent under any circumstances, while leaving the tenant absolute freedom to alter and improve his house as he would, together with the right to sublet it, or to sell the lease itself to any other Hebrew; and these leases became very valuable. Furthermore, though under the jurisdiction of criminal courts, the Jews had their own police in the Ghetto, whom they chose among themselves half yearly. It has been stated by at least one writer that the church and square of Santa Maria del Pianto--Our Lady of Tears--bears witness to the grief of the people when they were first forced into the Ghetto in the year 1556. But this is an error. The church received the name from a tragedy and a miracle which are said to have taken place before it ten years earlier. It was formerly called San Salvatore in Cacaberis, the Church of the 'Saviour in the district of the kettle-makers.' An image of the Blessed Virgin stood over the door of a house close by; a frightful murder was done in broad day, and at the sight tears streamed from the statue's eyes; the image was taken into the church, which was soon afterwards dedicated to 'Our Lady of Tears,' and the name remained forever to commemorate the miraculous event. Besides mobbing the Jews in the streets and plundering them when they could, the Roman populace invented means of insulting them which must have been especially galling. They ridiculed them in the popular open-air theatres, and made blasphemous jests upon their most sacred things in Carnival. It is not improbable that 'Punch and Judy' may have had their origin in something of this sort, and 'Judy' certainly suggests 'Giudea,' a Jewess. What the Roman rabble had done against Christians in heathen days, the Christian rabble did against the Jews in the Middle Age and the Renascence. They were robbed, ridiculed, outraged, and sometimes killed; after the fall of the Pierleoni, they appear to have had no civil rights worth mentioning; they were taxed more heavily than the Christian citizens, in proportion as they were believed to be more wealthy, and were less able to resent the tax-gatherer; their daughters were stolen away for their beauty, less consenting than Jessica, and with more violence, and the Merchant of Venice is not a mere fiction of the master playwright. All these things were done to them and more, yet they stayed in Rome, and multiplied, and grew rich, being then, as when Tacitus wrote of them, 'scrupulously faithful and ever actively charitable to each other, and filled with invincible hatred against all other men.' [Illustration: SITE OF THE ANCIENT GHETTO] The old Roman Ghetto has been often described, but no description can give any true impression of it; the place where it stood is a vast open lot, waiting for new buildings which will perhaps never rise, and the memory of it is relegated to the many fast-fading pictures of old Rome. Persius tells how, on Herod's birthday, the Jews adorned their doors with bunches of violets and set out rows of little smoky lamps upon the greasy window-sills, and feasted on the tails of tunny fish--the meanest part--pickled, and eaten off rough red earthen-ware plates with draughts of poor white wine. The picture was a true one ten years ago, for the manners of the Ghetto had not changed in that absolute isolation. The name itself, 'Ghetto,' is generally derived from a Hebrew root meaning 'cut off'--and cut off the Jews' quarter was, by walls, by religion, by tradition, by mutual hatred between Hebrews and other men. It has been compared to a beehive, to an anthill, to an old house-beam riddled and traversed in all directions by miniature labyrinths of worm-holes, crossing, intercommunicating, turning to right and left, upwards and downwards, but hardly ever coming out to the surface. It has been described by almost every writer who ever put words together about Rome, but no words, no similes, no comparisons, can make those see it who were never there. In a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of five hundred yards, and little, if at all, larger than the Palazzo Doria, between four and five thousand human beings were permanently crowded together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced, crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled, toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags; a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly, labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the darkening alleys--'The Sabbath has begun.' And all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops, flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them. Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of the Messiah. And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews concerning the future--even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to save Christian souls from the hell which no Jew could escape save by conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization. They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome, or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies since Titus destroyed the Temple and brought thousands of them, in the train of Pompey's thousands, to build the Colosseum; and the wisest among them, if they be faithful and believing Jews, as many are, ask themselves whether this great change, which looks so like improvement, is really for good, or whether it is the beginning of the end of the oldest nation of us all. [Illustration] REGION XII RIPA In Italian, as in Latin, Ripa means the bank of a river, and the Twelfth Region took its name from being bounded by the river bank, from just below the island all the way to the Aurelian walls, which continue the boundary of the triangle on the south of Saint Sebastian's gate; the third side runs at first irregularly from the theatre of Marcellus to the foot of the Palatine, skirts the hill to the gas works at the north corner of the Circus Maximus, takes in the latter, and thence runs straight to the gate before mentioned. The Region includes the Aventine, Monte Testaccio, and the baths of Caracalla. The origin of the device, like that of several others, seems to be lost. The Aventine, ever since the auguries of Remus, has been especially the refuge of opposition, and more especially, perhaps, of religious opposition. In very early times it was especially the hill of the plebeians, who frequently retired to its heights in their difficulties with the patricians, as they had once withdrawn to the more distant Mons Sacer in the Campagna. The temple of Ceres stood in the immediate neighbourhood of the Circus, on the line of approach to the Aventine, and contained the archives of the plebeian Ædiles. In the times of the Decemvirs, much of the land on the hill was distributed among the people, who probably lived within the city, but went out daily to cultivate their little farms, just as the inhabitants of the hill villages do today. If this were not the case, it would be hard to explain how the Aventine could have been a solitude at night, as it was in the time of the Bacchic orgies, of which the discovery convulsed the republic, and ended in a religious persecution. That was when Scipio of Asia had been accused and not acquitted of having taken a bribe of six thousand pounds of gold and four hundred and eighty pounds of silver to favour Antiochus. It was in the first days of Rome's corruption, when the brilliant army of Asia first brought the love of foreign luxury to Rome; when the soldiers, enriched with booty, began to have brass bedsteads, rich coverlets and curtains, and other things of woven stuff in their magnificent furniture, and little Oriental tables with one foot, and decorated sideboards; when people first had singing-girls, and lute-players, and players on the sharp-strung 'triangle,' and actors, to amuse them at their feasts; when the feasts themselves began to be extravagant, and the office of a cook, once mean and despised, rose to be one of high estimation and rich emolument, so that what had been a slave's work came to be regarded as an art. It was no wonder that such changes came about in Rome, when every triumph brought hundreds and thousands of pounds of gold and silver to the city, when Marcus Fulvius brought back hundreds of crowns of gold, and two hundred and eighty-five bronze statues, and two hundred and thirty statues of marble, with other vast spoils, and when Cnæus Manlius brought home wealth in bullion and in coin, which even in these days, when the value of money is far less, would be worth any nation's having. And with it all came Greek corruption, Greek worship, Greek vice. For years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Mænads were celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol, from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first come to Rome from Etruria, and had then turned Greek, as it were, in the days of the Asian triumphs; and first it was an orgy of drunken women only, as in most ancient times, but soon men were admitted, and presently a rule was made that no one should be initiated who was over twenty years of age, and that those who refused to submit to the horrid rites after being received should perish in the deepest cave of the hill, while the noise of drums and clashing cymbals and of shouting drowned their screams. And many boys and girls were thus done to death; and the conspiracy of the orgies was widespread in Rome, yet the secret was well kept. Now there was a certain youth at that time, whose father had died, and whose mother was one of the Mænads and had married a man as bad as herself. He and she were guardians of her son's fortune, and they had squandered it, and knew that when he came of age they should not be able to give an account of their guardianship. They therefore determined to initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to pieces by the Mænads, and they might escape the law in their fraud. His mother called him, and told him that once, when he had been ill, she had promised the gods that she would initiate him in the Bacchanalia if he recovered, and that it was now time to perform her vow. And doubtless she delighted his ignorance with an account of a beautiful and solemn ceremony. But this youth was dearly loved by a woman whose faith to him covered many sins. She had been a slave when a girl, and with her mistress had been initiated, and knew what the rites were, and how evil and terrible; and since she had been freed she had never gone to them. So when her lover told her he was to go, thinking it good news, she was terrified, and told him that it were better that both he and she should die that night, than that he should be so contaminated. When he knew the truth, he went home and told his mother and his stepfather boldly that he would not go; and they, being beside themselves with anger and disappointment, called four slaves and threw him out into the street. For which deed they died. For the young man went to his father's sister, and told all; and she sent him to the Consul to tell his story, who called the woman that loved him, and promised her protection, so that at last she told the truth, and he brought the matter before the Senate. Then there was great horror at what was told, and the people who had been initiated fled in haste by thousands, and the city was in a turmoil, while the Senate made new and terrible laws against the rites. Many persons were put to death, and a few were taken and imprisoned on suspicion, and many, being guilty, killed themselves. For it was found that more than seven thousand men and women had conspired in the orgies, and the contamination had spread throughout Italy. As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for him, the Senate and the people made a noble and generous decree. For him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever furnishing a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and prætors in the future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not, no one knows. [Illustration: CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLÆUS From a print of the last century] This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint Achillæus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines, beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great, once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps. Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies; and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third--a famous chronicler in his day--and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between Colonna and Orsini. It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine. So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose name was 'of the oak'--for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one please. Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May,--the fifteenth of that month,--when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnæus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable. [Illustration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE] Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went back to their daily life in silence. But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope, while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment--a right perhaps asked for by him, as one of the brothers, and granted for his sake. Baracconi has discovered an account of the ceremony. At the first meeting in August, the governor of the confraternity appointed three brethren to visit all the prisons of Rome and note the names of the prisoners condemned to death, drawing up a precise account of each case, but ascertaining especially which ones had obtained the forgiveness of those whom they had injured. At the second meeting in August, the reports were read, and the brethren chose the fortunate man by ballot. [Illustration: PORTO SAN SEBASTIANO] Then the whole dark company went in procession to the prison. The beadle of the order marched first, bearing his black wand in one hand, and in the other a robe of scarlet silk and a torch for the pardoned man; two brothers followed with staves, others with lanterns, more with lighted torches, and after them was borne the crucifix, the sacred figure's arms hanging down, perhaps supposed to be in the act of receiving the pardoned man, and a crown of silvered olive hung at its feet--then more brothers, and last of all the Governor and the chaplain. The prison doors were draped with tapestries, box and myrtle strewed the ground, and the Governor received the condemned person and signed a receipt for his body. The happy man prostrated himself before the crucifix, was crowned with the olive garland, the Te Deum was intoned, and he was led away to the brotherhood's church, where he heard high mass in sight of all the people. Last, and not least, if he was a pauper, the brethren provided him with a little money and obtained him some occupation; if a stranger, they paid his journey home. But the Roman rabble, says the writer, far preferred an execution to a pardon, and would follow a condemned man to the scaffold in thousands. If he was to be hanged, the person who touched the halter was the most fortunate, and much money was often paid for bits of the rope; and at night, when the wretched corpse was carried away to the church by the brethren, the crowd followed in long procession, mumbling prayers, to kneel on the church steps at last and implore the dead man's liberated spirit to suggest to them, by some accident, numbers to be played at the lottery--custom which recalls the incantations of the witches by the crosses of executed slaves on the Esquiline. [Illustration] REGION XIII TRASTEVERE All that part of Rome which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and a standard of its own. The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language. There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese, which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country. It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality, cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old fashioned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region, has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's traditional skill in modelling stucco has covered vast surfaces of unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the existence of a quantity of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather. It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and never to be inhabited--landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant to be the homes of a rich middle class, and given over at derisory rents to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage. But Trastevere escaped, being despised by the builders on account of its distance from the chief centres. It has even preserved something of the ancient city in its looks and habits. Then, as now, the wine shops and cook shops opened directly upon the street, because they were, as they still often are, mere single, vaulted chambers, having no communication with the inner house by door or stairway. The little inner court, where the well is, may have been wider in those days, but it must always have been a cool, secluded place, where the women could wrangle and tear one another's hair in decent privacy. In the days when everything went to the gutter, it was a wise precaution to have as few windows as possible looking outward. In old Rome, as in Trastevere, there must have been an air of mystery about all dwelling-houses, as there is everywhere in the East. In those days, far more than now, the head of the house was lord and despot within his own walls; but something of that power remains by tradition of right at the present time, and the patriarchal system is not yet wholly dead. The business of the man was to work and fight for his wife and children, just as to fight and hunt for his family were the occupations of the American Indian. In return, he received absolute obedience and abject acknowledgment of his superiority. The government-fed Indian and the Roman father of today do very little fighting, working, or hunting, but in their several ways they still claim much of the same slavish obedience as in old times. One is inclined to wonder whether nowadays the independence of women is not due to the fall in value of men, since it is no longer necessary to pursue wild beasts for food, since fighting is reduced to a science, taught in three months, and seldom needed for a long time, and since work has become so largely the monopoly of the nimble typewriter. Women ask themselves and others, with at least a show of justice, since man's occupation is to sit still and think, whether they might not, with a little practice, sit quite as still as he and think to as good a purpose. In America, for instance, it was one thing to fell big trees, build log huts, dam rivers, plough stony ground, kill bears, and fight Indians; it is altogether another to sit in a comfortable chair before a plate-glass window, and dictate notes to a dumb and skilful stenographer. But with the development of women's independence, the air of privacy, not to say of mystery, disappears from the modern dwelling. In Trastevere things have not gone as far as that. One cannot tread the narrow streets without wondering a little about the lives of the grave, black-haired, harsh-voiced people who go in and out by the dark entrances, and stand together in groups in Piazza Romana, or close to Ponte Sisto, early in the morning, and just before midday, and again in the cool of the evening. It seems to be a part of the real simplicity of the Italian Latin to put on a perfectly useless look of mystery on all occasions, and to assume the air of a conspirator when buying a cabbage; and more than one gifted writer has fallen into the error of believing the Italian character to be profoundly complicated. One is too apt to forget that it needs much deeper duplicity to maintain an appearance of frankness under trying circumstances than to make a mystery of one's marketing and a profound secret of one's cookery. There are few things which the poor Italian more dislikes than to be watched when he is buying and preparing his food, though he will ask any one to share it with him when it is ready; but he is almost as prone to hide everything else that goes on inside his house, unless he has fair warning of a visit, and full time to make preparation for a guest. In the feeling there is great decency and self-respect, as well as a wish to show respect to others. [Illustration: PONTE GARIBALDI] To Romans, Trastevere suggests great names--Stefaneschi, Anguillara, Mattei, Raphael, Tasso. The story of the first has been told already. Straight from the end of the new bridge that bears the name of Garibaldi, stands the ancient tower of the great Guelph house of Anguillara that fought the Orsini long and fiercely, and went down at last before them, when it turned against the Pope. And when he was dead the Orsini bought the lands and strongholds he had given to his so-called nephew, and set the eel of Anguillara in their own escutcheon, in memory of a struggle that had lasted more than a hundred years. The Anguillara were seldom heard of after that; nor does anything remain of them today but the melancholy ruins of an ancient fortress on the lake of Bracciano, not far from the magnificent castle, and the single tower that bears their name in Rome. But Baracconi has discovered a story or a legend about one of them who lived a hundred years later, and who somehow was by that time lord of Cære, or Ceri, again, as some of his ancestors had been. It was when Charles the Fifth came to Rome, and there were great doings; for it was then that the old houses that filled the lower Forum were torn down in a few days to make him a triumphal street, and many other things were done. Then the Emperor gave a public audience in Rome, and out of curiosity the young Titta dell' Anguillara went in to see the imperial show. There he saw that a few of the nobles wore their caps, and he, thinking himself as good as they, put on his own. The Grand Chamberlain asked him why he was covered. 'Because I have a cold,' he answered, and laughed. He was told that only Grandees of Spain might wear their caps in the Emperor's presence. 'Tell the Emperor,' said the boy, 'that I, too, am a Grandee in my house, and that if he would take my cap from my head, he must do it with his sword,' and he laid his hand to the hilt of his own. And when the Emperor heard the story, he smiled and let him alone. Many years ago, before the change of government, the Trasteverine family, into whose possession the ancient tower had come, used to set out at Christmas-tide a little show of lay figures representing the Nativity and the Adoration of the Kings, in the highest story of the strange old place, and almost in the open air. It was a pretty and a peaceful sight. The small figures of the Holy Family, of the Kings, of the shepherds and their flocks, were modelled and coloured with wonderful skill, and in the high, bright air, with the little landscape as cleverly made up as the figures, it all stood out clearly and strangely lifelike. There were many of these Presepi, as they were called, in Rome at that season, but none so pretty as that in the gloomy old tower, of which every step had been washed with blood. Of all tales of household feud and vengeance and murder that can be found in old Rome, one of the most terrible is told of the Mattei, whose great palace used to stand almost opposite the bridge of Saint Bartholomew, leading to the island, and not more than two hundred yards from the Anguillara tower. It happened in the year 1555, about the time when Paul the Fourth, of inquisitorial memory, was elected Pope, thirty years before the sons of the Massimo murdered their father's unworthy wife, and Orsini married Victoria Accoramboni; and the deeds were done within the walls of the old house of which a fragment still remains in the Lungaretta, with a door surmounted by the chequered shield of the Mattei. [Illustration: PALAZZO MATTEI From a print of the last century] At that time there were four brothers of the name, Marcantonio, Piero, Alessandro, and Curzio; and the first two quarrelled mortally, wherefore Piero caused Marcantonio to be murdered by hired assassins. Of these men, Alessandro, who dearly loved both his murdered brother and his younger brother Curzio, slew one with his own hand, but the rest escaped, and he swore a blood feud against Piero. Yet, little by little, his anger subsided, and there was a sort of armed peace between the two. Then it happened that Piero, who was rich, fell in love with his own niece, the beautiful Olimpia, the dowerless daughter of his other brother Curzio; and Curzio, tempted by the hope of wealth, consented to the match, and the dispensation of the Church was obtained for the marriage. It is not rare, even nowadays, for a man to marry his niece in Europe, whether they be Catholics or Protestants, but the Italians are opposed to such marriages; and Alessandro Mattei, pitying the lovely girl, whose life was to be sold for money, and bitterly hating the murderer bridegroom, swore that the thing should not be. Yet he could not prevent the wedding, for Piero was rich and powerful, and of a determined character. So Piero was married, and after the wedding, in the evening, he gave a great feast in his house, and invited to it all the kinsmen of the family, with their wives. And Alessandro Mattei came also, with his son, Girolamo, and bringing with him two men whom he called his friends, but whom no one knew. These were hired murderers, but Piero smiled pleasantly and made a pretence of being well satisfied. The company feasted together, and drank old wine, with songs and rejoicings of all sorts. Then Alessandro rose to go home, for it was late, and Piero led him to the door of the hall to take leave of him courteously, so that all the kinsfolk might see that there was peace, for they were all looking on, some sitting in their places and some standing up out of respect for the elder men as they went to the door. Alessandro stood still, exchanging courtesies with his brother, while his servants brought him his cloak, and the arquebuse he carried at night for safety; for he had his palace across the Tiber, where it stands today. Then taking the hand-gun, he spoke no more words, but shot his brother in the breast, and killed him, and fled, leaving his son behind, for the young man had wished to stay till the end of the feast, and the two hired assassins had been brought by his father to protect him, though he did not know it. When they heard the shot, the women knew that there was blood, so they sprang up and put out the lights in an instant, that the men might not see to kill one another; therefore Curzio, the bride's father, did not see that his brother Alessandro had gone out after the killing. He crept about with a long knife, feeling in the dark for the embroidered doublet which Alessandro wore, and when he thought that he had found it, he struck; but it was Girolamo who was dressed like his father, and the two who were to watch him were on each side of him, and one of them feeling that Curzio was going to strike, and knowing him also by the touch of what he wore, killed him quietly before his blow went home, and dragged out Girolamo in haste, for the door was open, and there was some light in the stairs, whence the servants had fled. But others had sought Alessandro, and other blows had been dealt in the dark, and the bride herself was wounded, but not mortally. Girolamo and the man who had killed Curzio came to the Bridge of Saint Bartholomew, where Alessandro was waiting, very anxious for his son; and when he saw him in the starlight he drew a long breath. But when he knew what had happened and how the murderer had killed Curzio to save the boy, Alessandro was suddenly angry, for he had loved Curzio dearly. So he quickly drew his dagger and stabbed the man in the breast, and threw his body, yet breathing, over the bridge into the river. But that night he left Rome secretly and quickly, and he lived out his days an outlaw, while Girolamo, who was innocent of all, became the head of the Mattei in Rome. It is no wonder that the knife is a tradition in Trastevere. Even now it is the means of settling difficulties, but less often by treachery than in the other regions. For when two young men have a difference it is usual for them to go together into some quiet inner court or walled garden, and there they wind their handkerchiefs round their right wrists and round the hilt of the knife to get a good hold, and they muffle their left arms in their jackets for a shield, and face each other till one is dead. If it be barbarous, it is at least braver than stabbing in the dark. Raphael is remembered in Trastevere for the beautiful little palace of the Farnesina, which he decorated for the great and generous banker, Agostino Chigi, and for the Fornarina, whose small house with its Gothic window stands near the Septimian gate, where the old Aurelian wall crosses Trastevere and the Lungara to the Tiber. And he has made Trastevere memorable for the endless types of beauty he found there, besides the one well-loved woman, and whom he took as models for his work. He lived at the last, not in the house on the Roman side, which belonged to him and is still called his, but in another, built by Bramante, close to the old Accoramboni Palace, in the Piazza Rusticucci, before Saint Peter's, and that one has long been torn down. [Illustration: HOUSE BUILT FOR RAPHAEL BY BRAMANTE, NOW TORN DOWN] We know little enough of that Margaret, called the Fornarina from her father's profession; but we know that Raphael loved her blindly, passionately, beyond all other thoughts; as Agostino Chigi loved the magnificent Imperia for whom the Farnesina was built and made beautiful. And there was a time when the great painter was almost idle, out of love for the girl, and went about languidly with pale face and shadowed eyes, and scarcely cared to paint or draw. He was at work in the Vatican then, or should have been, and in the Farnesina, too; but each day, when he went out, his feet led him away from the Pope's palace and across the square, by the Gate of the Holy Spirit and down the endless straight Lungara towards the banker's palace; but when he reached it he went on to the Fornarina's house, and she was at the window waiting for him. For her sake he refused to marry the great Cardinal Bibbiena's well-dowered niece, Maria, and the world has not ceased to believe that for too much love of the Fornarina he died. But before that, as Fabio Chigi tells, Pope Leo the Tenth, being distressed by the painter's love sickness, asked Agostino Chigi if there were not some way to bring him back to work. And the great banker, as anxious for his Farnesina as the Pope was for his Vatican, spirited away the lovely girl for a time, she consenting for her lover's sake. And Chigi then pretended to search for her, and comforted Raphael with news of her and promises of her return, so that after being half mad with anxiety he grew calmer, and worked for a time at his painting. But soon he languished, and the cure was worse than the evil; so that one day Chigi brought the girl back to him unawares and went away, leaving them together. Of the end we know nothing, nor whether Margaret was with him when he died; we know nothing, save that she outlived him, and died in her turn, and lies in a grave which no one can find. But when all Rome was in sorrow for the dead man, when he had been borne through the streets to his grave, with his great unfinished Transfiguration for a funeral banner, when he had been laid in his tomb in the Pantheon, beside Maria Bibbiena, who had died, perhaps, because he would not love her, then the pale Margaret must have sat often by the little Gothic window near the Septimian gate, waiting for what could not come any more. For she had loved a man beyond compare; and it had been her whole life. [Illustration: MONASTERY OF SANT' ONOFRIO From an old engraving] If one comes from the Borgo by the Lungara, and if one turns up the steep hill to the right, there is the place where Tasso died, seventy-five years after Raphael was gone. The small monastery of Sant' Onofrio, where he spent the last short month of his life, used to be a lonely and beautiful place, and is remembered only for his sake, though it has treasures of its own--the one fresco painted in Rome by Lionardo da Vinci, and paintings by Domenichino and Pinturicchio in its portico and little church, as well as memories of Saint Philip Neri, the Roman-born patron saint of Rome. All these things barely sufficed to restrain the government from turning it into a barrack for the city police a few years ago, when the name of one of Italy's greatest poets should alone have protected it. It was far from the streets and thoroughfares in older times, and the quiet sadness of its garden called up the infinite melancholy of the poor poet who drew his last breath of the fresh open air under the old tree at the corner, and saw Rome the last time, as he turned and walked painfully back to the little room where he was to die. It is better to think of it so, when one has seen it in those days, than to see it as it is now, standing out in vulgar publicity upon the modern avenue. There died the man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many years at a work so perfectly harmonious as 'Jerusalem Freed'; and it seems strange that the hot-headed, changeable southerner should have stood up as the determined champion of the Epic Unity against the school of Ariosto, the great northern poet, who had believed in diversity of action as a fundamental principle of the Epic; it is stranger still and a proof of his power that Tasso should have earned something like universal glory against the long-standing supremacy of Ariosto in the same field, in the same half-century, and living at the same court. Everything in Tasso's life was contradictory, everything in his works was harmonious. Even after he was dead, the contrasts of glory and misery followed his bones like fate. He died in the arms of Cardinal Aldobrandini, the Pope's nephew, almost on the eve of his intended crowning in the Capitol; he was honoured with a magnificent funeral, and his body was laid in an obscure corner, enclosed in a poor deal coffin. It was six years before the monks of Sant' Onofrio dug up the bones and placed them in a little lead box 'out of pity,' as the inscription on the metal lid told, and buried them again under a poor slab that bore his name, and little else; and when a monument was at last made to him in the nineteenth century, by the subscriptions of literary societies, it was so poor and unworthy that it had better not have been set up at all. A curious book might be written upon the vicissitudes of great men's bones. Opposite the Farnesina stands the great Palazzo Corsini, once the habitation of the Riario family, whose history is a catalogue of murders, betrayals, and all possible crimes, and whose only redeeming light in a long history was that splendid and brave Catherine Sforza, married to one of their name, who held the fortress of Forlì so bravely against Cæsar Borgia, who challenged him to single combat, which he refused out of shame, who was overcome by him at last, and brought captive to the Vatican in chains of gold, as Aurelian brought Zenobia. In the days of her power she had lived in the great palace for a time. It looks modern now; it was once a place of evil fame, and is said to have been one of the few palaces in Rome which contained one of those deadly shafts, closed by a balanced trap door that dropped the living victim who stepped upon it a hundred and odd feet at a fall, out of hearing and out of sight for ever. From the Riario it was bought at last, in 1738, by the Corsini, and when they began to repair it, they found the bones of the nameless dead in heaps far down among the foundations. There also lived Christina, Queen of Sweden, of romantic and execrable memory, for twenty years; and here she died, the strangest compound of greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing passion for art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy, composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini, dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and of engravings and medals and beautiful things of every sort--the only woman, perhaps, who was ever like Lucrezia Borgia, and outdid her in all ways. Long before her time, a Riario, the Cardinal of Saint George, had like tastes and drew about him the thinkers and the writers of his age, when the Renascence was at its climax and the Constable of Bourbon had not yet been shot down at the walls a few hundred yards from the Corsini palace, bequeathing the plunder of Rome to his Spaniards and Germans. Here Erasmus spent those hours of delight of which he eloquently wrote in after years, and here, to this day, in the grand old halls whence the Riario sent so many victims to their deaths below, a learned and literary society holds its meetings. Of all palaces in Rome in which she might have lived, fate chose this one for Queen Christina, as if its destiny of contrasts past and future could best match her own. Much more could be told of Trastevere and much has been told already; how Beatrice Cenci lies in San Pietro in Montorio, how the lovely Farnesina, with all its treasures, was bought by force by the Farnese for ten thousand and five hundred scudi,--two thousand and one hundred pounds,--how the Region was swept and pillaged again and again by Emperors and nobles, and people and Popes, without end. But he who should wander through the Regions in their order, knowing that the greatest is last, would tire of lingering in the long Lungara and by the Gate of the Holy Spirit, while on the other side lies the great Castle of Sant' Angelo, and beyond that the Vatican, and Saint Peter's church; and for that matter, a great part of what has not been told here may be found in precise order and ready to hand in all those modern guide books which are the traveller's first leading-strings as he learns to walk in Rome. * * * * * Yet here, on the threshold of that Region which contains many of the world's most marvellous treasures of art--at the Gate of the Holy Spirit, through which Raphael so often passed between love and work--I shall say a few words about that development in which Italy led the world, and something of the men who were leaders in the Renascence. Art is not dependent on the creations of genius alone. It is also the result of developing manual skill to the highest degree. Without genius, works of art might as well be turned out by machinery; without manual skill, genius could have no means of expression. As a matter of fact, in our own time, it is the presence of genius, without manual skill, or foolishly despising it, that has produced a sort of school called the impressionist. To go back to first principles, the word Art, as every child knows, is taken directly from the Latin ars, artis, which the best Latin dictionary translates or defines: 'The faculty of joining anything corporeal or spiritual properly or skilfully,' and therefore: 'skill, dexterity, art, ability,' and then: 'skill or faculty of the mind or body that shows itself in performing any work, trade, profession, art, science.' From the meaning of the Latin word we may eliminate what refers to spiritual things; not because literature, for instance, is not art, as well as music and the rest, but because we have to do with painting, sculpture, architecture, metal working, and the like, in which actual manual skill is a most integral element. Now it is always admitted that art grew out of handicraft, when everything was made by hand, and when the competition between workers was purely personal, because each man worked for himself and not for a company in which his individuality was lost. That is nowhere more clear than in Italy, though the conditions were similar throughout Europe until the universal introduction of machinery. The transition from handicraft to art was direct, quick and logical, and at first it appeared almost simultaneously in all the trades. The Renascence appears to us as a sort of glorious vision in which all that was beautiful suddenly sprang into being again, out of all that was rough and chaotic and barbarous. In real fact the Renascence began among carpenters, and blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove. The true beginning of the Renascence was the first improvement of hand-work after an age in which everything people used had been rougher and worse made than we can possibly imagine. Then one thing suggested another, and each generation found some new thing to do, till the result was a great movement and a great age. But there never was, and never could have been, any art at all without hand-work. Progress makes almost everything by machinery, and dreams of abolishing hand-work altogether, and of making Nature's forces do everything, and provide everything for everybody, so that nobody need work at all, and everybody may have a like share in what is to cost nobody anything. Then, in the dream, everybody will be devoted to what we vaguely call intellectual pursuits, and the human race will be raised to an indefinitely high level. In reality, if such things were possible, we should turn into oysters, or into something about as intelligent. It is the experience of all ages that human beings will not work unless they are obliged to, and degenerate rapidly in idleness, and there have not been many exceptions to the rule. Art grew out of hand-work, but it grew in it, too, as a plant in the soil; when there is no more hand-work, there will be no more art. The two belong to each other, and neither can do without the other. [Illustration: THE FORUM Looking West] Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades, Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no value to the old-fashioned artists who had learned them from generation to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm. The highest of the crafts in the Middle Age was goldsmithing. When almost every other artistic taste had disappeared from daily life in that rough time, the love of personal adornment had survived, and when painters and sculptors were a small band of men, trained to represent certain things in certain ways--trained like a church choir, in fact, to the endless repetition of ancient themes--the goldsmiths had latitude and freedom to their hearts' desire and so many buyers for their work that their own numbers were not nearly so limited as those of 'artists' in the narrow sense. One chief part of their art lay in drawing and modelling, another in casting metals, another in chiselling, and they were certainly the draughtsmen of an age in which the art of drawing was practically lost among painters; and it was because they learned how to draw that so many of them became great painters when the originality of two or three men of genius had opened the way. One says 'two or three,' vaguely, but the art had grown out of infancy when they appeared, and there was an enormous distance between Cimabue, whom people call the father of painting, and the Cosmas family, of whom the last died about the time that Cimabue was born. But though Cimabue was a noble, the Cosmas family who preceded him were artisans first and artists afterwards, and men of the people; and Giotto, whom Cimabue discovered sketching sheep on a piece of slate with a pointed stone, was a shepherd lad. So was Andrea Mantegna, who dominated Italian art a hundred and fifty years later--so was David, one of the greatest poets that ever lived, and so was Sixtus the Fifth, one of the strongest popes that ever reigned--all shepherds. It is rather remarkable that although so many famous painters were goldsmiths, none of the very greatest were. Among the goldsmiths were Orcagna, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Francia, Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto. But Benvenuto Cellini, the greatest of goldsmiths, was never a painter, and the very greatest painters were never goldsmiths, for Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Lionardo da Vinci, Perugino, Raphael, Michelangelo, all began in the profession that made them the greatest artists of their age. It is very hard to get at an idea of what men thought about art in those times. Perhaps it would be near the truth to say that it was looked upon as a universal means of expression. What strikes one most in the great pictures of that time is their earnestness, not in the sense of religious faith, but in the determination to do nothing without a perfectly clear and definite meaning, which any cultivated person could understand, and at which even a child might guess. Nothing was done for effect, nothing was done merely for beauty's sake. It was as if the idea of usefulness, risen with art from the hand-crafts, underlay the intentions of beauty, or of devotion, or of history, which produced the picture. In those times, when the artist put in any accessory he asked himself: 'Does it mean anything?' whereas most painters of today, in the same case, ask themselves: 'Will it look well?' The difference between the two points of view is the difference between jesting and being in earnest--between an art that compared itself with an ideal future, and the art of today that measures itself with an ideal past. The great painters of the Renascence appealed to men and to men's selves, whereas the great painters of today appeal chiefly to men's eyes and to that much of men which can be stirred through the eye only. It was not that those early artists were religious enthusiasts, moved by a spiritual faith such as that which inspired Fra Angelico and one or two others. Few of them were religious men; several of them, like Perugino, were freethinkers. It was not, I think, because they looked upon art itself as a very sacred matter, not to be jested with, since they used their art against their enemies for revenge and ridicule. It was rather because everyone was in earnest then, and was forced to be by the nature of the times; whereas people now are only relatively in earnest, and stake their money only where men once staked their lives. That was one reason. Another may be that the greatest painters of those times were practically men of universal genius and were always men of vast reading and cultivation, the equals and often the superiors of the learned in all other branches of science, literature and art. They were not only great painters, but great men and great thinkers, and far above doing anything solely 'for effect.' Lionardo da Vinci has been called the greatest man of the fifteenth century--so has Michelangelo--so, perhaps, has Raphael. They seemed able to do everything, and they have not been surpassed in what they did as painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, fortifiers of cities, mathematicians, thinkers. No one nowadays ever thinks of a painter as being anything but a painter, and people shrug their shoulders at the idea that an artist can do anything of the kind called 'serious' in this age. [Illustration: EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS] One asks what were the surroundings, the customs, the habits, in which these men grew to be already great at an age when modern boys are at college. One asks whether that system of teaching or education, whatever it may have been, was not much more likely to make great men than ours. And the answer suggests itself: our teaching is for the many, and the teaching of that day was for the few. Let anyone try and imagine the childhood of Giotto as the account of it has come down to us through almost all the authorities. He was born in the year 1276--when Dante was about eleven years old. That was the time when the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were at their height. That was the year in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca got back his lordship over Pisa--where he was to be starved to death with his two sons and two grandsons some twelve years later. That was the time when four Popes died in sixteen months--the time when the Sicilian Vespers drove Charles of Anjou from Sicily for ever--when Guido da Montefeltro was fighting and betraying and fighting again--the time of Dante's early youth, in which fell most of those deeds for which he consigned the doers to hell and their names to immortality. Imagine, then, what a shepherd's hut must have been in those days, in a narrow valley of the Tuscan hills--the small cottage built of unhewn stones picked up on the hillside, fitted together one by one, according to their irregular shapes, and cemented, if at all, with clay and mud from the river bed--the roof of untrimmed saplings tied together and thatched with chestnut boughs, held down by big stones, lest the wind should blow them away. The whole, dark brown and black with the rich smoke of brushwood burned in the corner to boil the big black cauldron of sheep's milk for the making of the rank 'pecorino' cheese. One square room, lighted from the door only. The floor, the beaten earth. The beds, rough-hewn boards, lying one above the other, like bunks, on short strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children, dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and smoke. The food, day in, day out, coarse yellow meal, boiled thick in water and poured out to cool upon the black bench, divided into portions then with a thin hide thong, crosswise and lengthwise, for each person a yellow square, and eaten greedily with unwashed hands that left a little for the great sheep-dog. The drink, spring water and the whey left from the cheese curds, drunk out of a small earthen pot, passed from mouth to mouth. A silent bunch of ignorant human beings, full of thought for the morrow, and of care for the master's sheep that were herded together in the stone pen all round the hut; fighting the wolves in winter, and in summer time listening for the sound of war from the valley, when Guelph and Ghibelline harried all the country, and killed every stray living thing for food. And among these half-starved wretches was a boy of twelve or thirteen years, weak-jointed, short-winded, little better than a cripple and only fit to watch the sheep on summer days when the wolves were not hungry--a boy destined to be one of the greatest artists, one of the greatest architects, and one of the most cultivated men of that or any other age--Giotto. The contrast between his childhood and his manhood is so startling that one cannot realize it. It means that in those days the way from nothing to much was short and straight for great minds--impossible and impracticable for small ones. Great intelligences were not dwarfed to stumps by laborious school work, were not stuffed to a bursting point by cramming, were not artificially inflamed by the periodical blistering of examinations; but average intelligences had not the chance which a teaching planned only for the average gives them now. Talent, in the shape of Cimabue, found genius, in the form of Giotto, clothed in rags, sketching sheep with one stone on another; talent took genius and fed it and showed it the way, and presently genius overtopped talent by a mountain's head and shoulders. Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, to be taught book-learning, and was allowed to spend the other half of his time in the painting room, at the elbow of the greatest living painter. The boy was a sort of apprentice-servant, of course, as all beginners were in those times. In the big house, he probably had a pallet bed in one of those upper dormitories where the menservants slept, and he doubtless fed with them in the lower hall at first. They must have laughed at his unmannerly ways, and at his surprise over every new detail of civilized life, but he had a sharp tongue and could hold his own in a word-fight. There were three tables in a gentleman's house in the Middle Age,--the master's, which was served in different rooms, according to the weather and the time of year; secondly, the 'tinello,' or canteen, as we should call it, for the so-called gentlemen retainers--among whom, by the bye, ranked the chief butler and the head groom, besides the chaplain and the doctor; thirdly, the servants' hall, where all the lower people of the house fed together. Then, as now in old countries, the labour of a large household was indefinitely subdivided, and no servant was expected to do more than one thing, and every servant had an assistant upon whom he forced all the hard work. A shepherd lad, brought in from the hills in his sheepskin coat, sheepskin breeches, and leg swathings of rags and leather, would naturally be the butt of such an establishment. On the other hand, the shepherd boy was a genius and had a tongue like a razor, besides being the favourite of the all-powerful master; and as it was neither lawful nor safe to lay hands on him, his power of cutting speech made him feared. So he learned Latin with the man who had taught Dante,--and Dante was admitted to be the most learned man of his times,--and he ground the colours and washed the brushes for Cimabue, and drew under the master's eye everything that he saw, and became, as the chronicler Villani says of him, 'the most sovereign master of painting to be found in his time, and the one who most of all others took all figures and all action from nature.' And Villani was his contemporary, and knew him when he was growing old, and recorded his death and his splendid funeral. One-half of all permanent success in art must always lie in the mechanical part of it, in the understanding and use of the tools. They were primitive in Giotto's day, and even much later, according to our estimate. Oil painting was not dreamt of, nor anything like a lead pencil for drawing. There was no canvas on which to paint. No one had thought of making an artist's palette. Not one-tenth of the substances now used for colours were known then. A modern artist might find himself in great difficulties if he were called upon to paint a picture with Cimabue's tools. But to Giotto they must have seemed marvellous after his pointed stone pencil and his bit of untrimmed slate. Everything must have surprised and delighted him in his first days in Florence--the streets, the houses, the churches, the people, the dresses he saw; and the boy who had begun by copying the sheep that were before his eyes on the hillside, instantly longed to reproduce a thousand things that pleased him. So, when he was already old enough to understand life and its beauty, he was suddenly transported to the midst of it, just where it was most beautiful; and because he instantly saw that his master's art was unreal and far removed from truth, dead, as it were, and bound hand and foot in the graveclothes of Byzantine tradition, his first impulse was to wake the dead in a blaze of life. And this he did. And after him, from time to time, when art seemed to be stiffening again in the clumsy fingers of the little scholars of the great, there came a true artist, like Giotto, who realized the sort of deathlike trance into which art had fallen, and roused it suddenly to things undreamed of--from Giotto to Titian. And each did all that he meant to do. But afterwards came Tintoretto, who said that he would draw like Michelangelo and paint like Titian; but he could not, though he made beautiful things: and he was the first great artist who failed to go farther than others had gone before him; and because art must either advance or go backward, and no one could advance any more, it began to go backward, and the degeneration set in. About three hundred years elapsed between Giotto's birth and Titian's death, during which the world changed from the rough state of the Middle Age to a very high degree of civilization; and men's eyes grew tired of what they saw all the time, while many of the strong types which had made the change faded away. Men grew more alike, dress grew more alike, thoughts grew more alike. It was the beginning of that overspreading uniformity which we have in our time, which makes it so very easy for any one man to be eccentric, but which makes it so very hard for any one man to be really great. One might say that in those times humanity flowed in very small channels, which a strong man of genius could thwart and direct. But humanity now is a stream so broad that it is almost like an ocean, in which all have similar being, and the big fish come to the surface, and spout and blow and puff without having any influence at all on the tide. There was hardly any such thing possible as eccentricity in Giotto's time. When the dress and manners and language of every little town differed distinctly from those of the nearest village, every man dressed as he pleased, behaved as he had been taught, and spoke the dialect of his native place. There was a certain uniformity among the priesthood, whose long cassock was then the more usual dress of civilians in great cities in times of peace and who spoke Latin among themselves and wrote it, though often in a way that would make a scholar's blood run cold. But there was no uniformity among other classes of men. A fine gentleman who chose to have his cloth tights of several colours, one leg green and one blue, or each leg in quarters of four colours, attracted no attention whatever in the streets; and if one noble affected simple habits and went about in an old leathern jerkin that was rusty in patches from the joints of his armour, the next might dress himself in rich silk and gold embroidery, and wear a sword with a fine enamelled hilt. No one cared, except for himself, and it must have been hard indeed to produce much effect by any eccentricity of appearance. But there was the enormous and constantly changing variety that takes an artist's eye at every turn,--which might make an artist then of a man who nowadays would be nothing but a discontented observer with artistic tastes. I do not think that these things have ever been much noticed as factors in the development of European art. Consider what Florence, for instance, was to the eye at that time. And then consider that, until that time, art had been absolutely prohibited from painting what it saw, being altogether a traditional business in which, as Burckhardt says, the artist had quite lost all freedom of mind, all pleasure and interest in his work, in which he no longer invented, but had only to reproduce by mechanical repetition what the Church had discovered for him, in which the sacred personages he represented had shrivelled to mere emblems, and the greater part of his attention and pride was directed to the rich and almost imperishable materials in which alone he was allowed to work for the honour and glory of the Church. In the second Council of Nicea, held in the year 787, the question of sacred pictures was discussed, and in the acts of the Council the following statement is found:-- 'It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters, but the holy fathers, who have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.' It would be hard to find a clearer definition of the artist's place and work before Giotto. Consider all these things, and then think of the sensations of the first man upon whom it flashed all at once that he might be free and might paint everything he saw, not as monks dictated to him, but as he saw it, to the best of his strength and talent. He must have felt like a creature that had been starved, suddenly turned out free to roam through a world full of the most tempting things and with a capacity to enjoy them all. He did not realize his freedom completely at first; it was impossible for him to throw off at once all the traditions in which he had been brought up and taught; but he realized enough to change the whole direction of all the art that came after him. Two things are remarkable about the early Italian artists. With the solitary exception of Cimabue--the first of the Renascence--none of them was born rich, but, on the other hand, a great many of them were not born poor either. Giotto and Mantegna were shepherd boys, it is true; but Michelangelo was the son of a small official of ancient family in the provinces, the mayor of the little city of Chiusi e Caprese; Lionardo da Vinci's father was a moderately well-to-do land-holder; Raphael's was a successful painter, and certainly not in want. Secondly, a very great number of them made what must have been thought good fortunes in those days, while they were still young men. Some, like Andrea del Sarto, squandered their money and died in misery; one or two, like Fra Angelico, refused to receive money themselves for their work and handed over their earnings to a religious community. None, so far as I can find out, toiled through half a lifetime with neither recognition nor pay, as many a great artist has done in our times--like the Frenchman Millet, for instance, whose Angelus fetched such a fabulous price after his death. The truth is that what we mean by art had just been discovered, and it met with immediate and universal appreciation, and the result was a demand for it which even a greater number of painters could not have oversatisfied. Consequently, there was plenty to do for every man of genius, and there were people not only willing to pay great sums for each work, but who disputed with each other for the possession of good paintings, and quarrelled for what was equivalent to the possession of great artists. Another element in the lives of these men, as in the lives of all who rose to any eminence in those days, was the great variety that circumstances introduced into their existence. Change and variety are favourable to creative genius as they are unfavourable to uncreative study. The scholar and the historian are best left among their books for twenty years at a time, to execute the labour of patient thought which needs perpetual concentration on one subject. If Gibbon had continued to be an amateur soldier and a man of the world, as he began, he might have written a history, but it would not have been the most astonishing history of modern times. In Macaulay's brilliant and often too creative work, one sees the influence of his changing political career, to the detriment of sober study. For the more the creative man sees and lives in his times, the more he is impelled to create. In the midst of his best years of painting, Lionardo da Vinci was called off to build canals, and Cæsar Borgia kept him busy for two years in planning and constructing fortifications. Immediately before that time he had finished his famous Last Supper, in Milan, and immediately afterwards he painted the Battle of Anghiari--now lost--which was the picture of his that most strongly impressed the men of his day. Similarly, Michelangelo was interrupted in his work when, the Constable of Bourbon having sacked Rome, the Medici were turned out of Florence, and the artist was employed by the Republic to fortify and defend the city. It was betrayed, and he escaped and hid himself--and the next great thing he did was the Last Judgment, in the Sixtine Chapel. He did stirring work in wild times, besides painting, and hewing marble, and building Saint Peter's. That brings one back to thinking how much those men knew. Their universal knowledge seems utterly unattainable to us, with all our modern machinery of education. Michelangelo grew up in a suburb of Florence, to which his father moved when he was a child, at a notary's desk, his father trying to teach him enough law to earn him a livelihood. Whenever he had a chance, he escaped to draw in a corner, or to spend forbidden hours in an artist's studio. He was taught Latin and arithmetic by an old schoolmaster, who was probably a priest, and a friend of his father's. At fourteen he earned money in Ghirlandajo's studio, which means that he was already an artist. At twenty-five he was probably the equal of any living man as sculptor, painter, architect, engineer and mathematician. Very much the same might be said of Lionardo. One asks in vain how such enormous knowledge was acquired, and because there is no answer, one falls back upon wild theories about untaught genius. But whatever may be said of painting and sculpture, neither architecture nor engineering, and least of all the mathematics so necessary to both, can be evolved from the inner consciousness. Men worked harder then than now, and their teachers and their tools helped them less, so that they learned more thoroughly what they learned at all. And there was much less to distract a man then, when he had discovered his own talent, while there was everything to spur him. Amusements were few, and mostly the monopoly of rich nobles; but success was quick and generous, and itself ennobled the men who attained to it--that is, it instantly made him the companion, and often the friend, of the most cultivated men and women of the day. Then, as now, success meant an entrance into 'society' for those whose birth had placed them outside of it. But 'society' was different then. It consisted chiefly of men who had fought their own way to power, and had won it by a superiority both intellectual and physical, and of women who often realized and carried out the unsatisfied intellectual aspirations of their husbands and fathers. For wherever men have had much to do, and have done it successfully, what we call culture has been more or less the property of the women. In those times, the men were mostly occupied in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life, but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between small barons, which kept their women constant prisoners in remote castles, for the sake of safety; and there was war on a larger scale between Guelph and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, State and State. The women had more liberty and more time. There were many women students in the universities, as there are now, in Italy, and almost always have been, and there were famous women professors, whose lectures were attended by grown men. No one was surprised at that, and there was no loud talk about women's rights. Nobody questioned the right of women to learn as much as they could, where-ever anything was taught. There were great ladies, good and bad, like Vittoria Colonna and Lucrezia Borgia, who were scholars, and even Greek scholars, and probably equal to any students of their time. Few ladies of Michelangelo's day did not know Latin, and all were acquainted with such literature as there was--Dante, Macchiavelli, Aretino, Ariosto and Petrarch,--for Tasso came later,--the Tuscan minor poets, as well as the troubadours of Provence--not to mention the many collections of tales, of which the scenes were destined to become the subjects of paintings in the later days of the Renascence. Modern society is the enemy of individuality, whether in dress, taste or criticism, and the fear of seeming different from other people is greater than the desire to rise higher than other people by purely personal means. In the same way, socialism is the enemy of all personal distinction, whatever the socialists may say to the contrary, and is therefore opposed to all artistic development and in favour of all that is wholesale, machine-made, and labour-saving. And nobody will venture to say that modern tendencies are not distinctly socialistic. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI The Baths of Diocletian remodelled by Michelangelo] We are almost at the opposite extreme of existence from the early Renascence. That was the age of small principalities; ours is the day of great nations. Anyone who will carefully read the history of the Middle Age and of the Renascence will come to the inevitable conclusion that the greatest artists and writers of today are very far from being the rivals of those who were great then. Shakespeare was almost the contemporary of Titian; there has been neither a Shakespeare nor a Titian since, nor any writer nor artist in the most distant manner approaching them. Yet go backward from them, and you will find Dante, as great as Shakespeare, and at least three artists, Michelangelo, Lionardo da Vinci and Raphael, quite as great as Titian. They lived in a society which was antisocialistic, and they were the growth of a period in which all the ideas of civilized mankind tended in a direction diametrically opposed to that taken by our modern theories. This is undeniable. The greatest artists, poets and literary men are developed where all conditions most develop individuality. The modern state, in which individuality is crushed by the machinery of education in order that all men may think alike, favours the growth of science alone; and scientific men have the least individuality of all men who become great, because science is not creative like art and literature, nor destructive like soldiering, but inquisitive, inventive and speculative in the first place, and secondly, in our age, financial. In old times, when a discovery was made, men asked, 'What does it mean? To what will it lead?' Now, the first question is, 'What will it be worth?' That does not detract from the merit of science, but it shows the general tendency of men's thoughts. And it explains two things, namely, why there are no artists like Michelangelo nor literary men like Shakespeare in our times--and why the majority of such artists and literary men as we have are what is commonly called reactionaries, men who would prefer to go back a century or two, and who like to live in out-of-the-way places in old countries, as Landor lived in Florence, Browning in Venice, Stevenson in Samoa, Liszt in Rome,--besides a host of painters and sculptors, who have exiled themselves voluntarily for life in Italy and France. The whole tendency of the modern world is scientific and financial, and the world is ruled by financiers and led by a financial society which honours neither art nor literature, but looks upon both as amusements which it can afford to buy, and which it is fashionable to cultivate, but which must never for a moment be considered as equal in importance to the pursuit of money for its own sake. It was the great scope for individuality, the great prizes to be won by individuality, the honour paid to individuality, that helped the early painters to their high success. It was the abundance of material, hitherto never used in art, the variety of that material, in an age when variety was the rule and not the exception, it was the richness of that material, not in quantity and variety only, but in individual quality, that made early paintings what we see. It was their genuine and true love of beauty, and of nature and of the eternal relations between nature and beauty, that made those men great artists. It was the hampering of individuality, the exhaustion and disappearance of material and the degeneration of a love of beauty to a love of effect, that put an end to the great artistic cycle in Italy, and soon afterwards in the rest of the world, with Rembrandt and Van Dyck, the last of the really great artists. Progress is not civilization, though we generally couple the two words together, and often confound their values. Progress has to do with what we call the industrial arts, their development, and the consequent increase of wealth and comfort. Civilization means, on the other hand, among many things, the growth and perfecting of art, in the singular; the increase of a general appreciation of art; the refinement of manners which follows upon a widespread improvement of taste; the general elevation of a people's thoughts above the hard conditions in which a great people's struggles for existence, preëminence and wealth take place. Progress, in its right acceptation, ought also to mean some sort of moral progress--such, for instance, as has transformed our own English-speaking race in a thousand years or more from a stock of very dangerous pirates to a law-abiding people--if we may fairly say as much as that of ourselves. Civilization has nothing to do with morality. That is rather a shocking statement, perhaps, but it is a true one. It may be balanced by saying that civilization has nothing to do with immorality either. The early Christians were looked upon as very uncivilized people by the Romans of their time, and the meanest descendants of the Greeks secretly called the Romans themselves barbarians. In point of civilization and what we call cultivation, Alcibiades was immeasurably superior to Saint Paul, Peter the Hermit or Abraham Lincoln, though Alcibiades had no morality to speak of and not much conscience. Moreover, it is a fact that great reformers of morals have often been great enemies of art and destroyers of the beautiful. Fra Bartolommeo, who is thought by many to have equalled Raphael in the latter's early days, became a follower of Savonarola, burned all his wonderful drawings and studies, and shut himself up in a monastery to lead a religious life; and though he yielded after several years to the command of his superiors, and began painting again, he confined himself altogether to devotional subjects as long as he lived, and fell far behind Raphael, who was certainly not an exemplary character, even in those days. In Europe, and in the Latin languages, there is a distinction, and a universally accepted one, between education and instruction. It is something like that which I am trying to make clear between Civilization and Progress. An 'instructed man' means a man who has learned much but who may have no manners at all, may eat with his knife, forget to wash his hands, wear outlandish clothes, and be ignorant even of the ordinary forms of politeness. An 'educated person,' on the contrary, may know very little Latin, and no Greek, and may be shaky in the multiplication table; but he must have perfect manners to deserve the designation, and tact, with a thorough knowledge of all those customs and outward forms which distinguish what calls itself civilized society from the rest of the world. Anyone can see that such instruction, on the one hand, and such education, on the other, are derived from wholly different sources, and must lead to wholly different results; and it is as common nowadays to find men who have the one without the other, as it ever was in ancient Greece or Rome. I should like to assert that it is more common, since Progress is so often mistaken for Civilization and tacitly supposed to be able to do without it, and that Diogenes would not be such a startling exception now as he was in the days of Alexander the Great. But no one would dare to say that Progress cannot go on in a high state of Civilization. All that can be stated with absolute certainty is that they are independent of each other, since Progress means 'going on' and therefore 'change'; whereas Civilization may remain at the same high level for a very long period, without any change at all. Compare our own country with China, for instance. In the arts--the plural 'arts'--in applied science, we are centuries ahead of Asia; but our manners are rough and even brutal compared with the elaborate politeness of the Chinese, and we should labour in vain to imitate the marvellous productions of their art. We may prefer our art to that of the far East, though there are many critics who place the Japanese artists much higher than our own; but no one can deny the superior skill of the Asiatics in the making of everything artistic. Nor must we undervalue in art the importance of the minor and special sort of progress which means a real and useful improvement in methods and materials. That is doubtless a part, a first step, in the general progress which tends ultimately to the invention of machinery, but which, in its development, passes through the highest perfection of manual work. The first effect of this sort of progress in art was to give men of genius new and better tools, and therefore a better means of expression. In a way, almost every painter of early times was an inventor, and had to be, because for a long time the methods and tools of painting were absurdly insufficient. Every man who succeeded had discovered some new way of grinding and mixing colours, of preparing the surface on which he worked, of using the brush and the knife, and of fixing the finished picture by means of varnishes. The question of what painters call the vehicle for colour was always of immense importance. Long before Giotto began to work there seem to have been two common ways of painting, namely, in fresco, with water-colours, and on prepared surfaces by means of wax mixed with some sort of oil. In fresco painting, the mason, or the plasterer, works with the painter. A surface as large as the artist expects to use during a few hours is covered with fresh stucco by the mason, and thoroughly smoothed with a small trowel. Stucco, as used in Italy, is a mixture of slaked lime and white marble dust, or very fine sand which has been thoroughly sifted. If stained to resemble coloured or veined marbles, and immediately ironed till it is dry with hot smooth irons, the surface of the mass is hardened and polished to such a degree that it is almost impossible to distinguish it from real marble without breaking into it. Waxing gives it a still higher polish. But if water-colours are used for painting a picture upon it, and if the colours are laid on while the stucco is still damp, they unite with the lime, and slowly dry to a surface which is durable, but neither so hard nor so polished as that produced when the stucco is ironed. The principal conditions are that the stucco must be moist, the wall behind it absolutely dry and the colours very thin and flowing. Should the artist not cover all that has been prepared for his day's work, the remainder has to be broken out again and laid on fresh the next day. It is now admitted that the wall-paintings of the ancients were executed in this way. As it was impossible for the artist at any time to have the whole surface of the freshly stuccoed wall at his disposal in order to draw his picture before painting it, he either drew the design in red upon the rough dry plaster, and then had the stucco laid over it in bits, or else he made a cartoon drawing of the work in its full size. The outlines were then generally pricked out with a stout pin, and the cartoon cut up into pieces of convenient dimensions, so that the painter could lay them against the fresh stucco and rub the design through, or pounce it, as we should say, with charcoal dust, like a stencil. He then coloured it as quickly as he could. If he made a mistake, or was not pleased with the effect, there was no remedy except the radical one of breaking off the stucco, laying it on fresh, and beginning over again. It was clearly impossible to paint over the same surface again and again as can be done in oil painting. No one knows exactly when eggs were first used in fresco painting, nor does it matter much. Some people used the yolk and the white together, some only one or the other, but the egg was, and is, always mixed with water. Some artists now put gum tragacanth into the mixture. It is then used like water in water-colour work, but is called 'tempera' or 'distemper.' The effect of the egg is to produce an easy flow of the colour with so little liquid that the paint does not run on the surface, as it easily does in ordinary water-colours. The effect of the yellow yolk of the egg upon the tints is insignificant, unless too much be used. By using egg, one may paint upon ordinary prepared canvas as easily as with oils, which is impossible with water-colour. As for the early paintings upon panels of wood, before oils were used, they were meant to be portable imitations of fresco. The wood was accordingly prepared by covering it with a thin coating of fine white cement, or stucco, which was allowed to dry and become perfectly hard, because it was of course impossible to lay it on fresh every day in such small quantities. The vehicle used could therefore not be water, which would have made the colours run. The most common practice of the Byzantine and Romanesque schools seems to have been to use warm melted wax in combination with some kind of oil, the mixture being kept ready at hand over a lighted lamp, or on a pan of burning charcoal. There are artists in Europe, still, who occasionally use wax in this way, though generally mixed with alcohol or turpentine, and the result is said to be very durable. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted many pictures in this way. With regard to using oils on a dry surface in wall painting, instead of fresco, Lionardo da Vinci tried it repeatedly with the result that many of his wall paintings were completely lost within thirty or forty years after they had been painted. The greatest of those which have survived at all, the Last Supper in Milan, has had to be restored so often that little of the original picture remains untouched. The enormous value of linseed oil and nut oil as a vehicle was apparent as soon as it was discovered in Holland. Its great advantages are that, unlike water or egg, it will carry a large quantity of colour upon the canvas at the first stroke, that it dries slowly, so that the same ground may be worked over without haste while it is still fresh, and that it has a very small effect in changing the tints of the original paints used. One may see what value was attached to its use from the fact that those who first brought it to Italy worked in secret. Andrea Castagno, surnamed the Assassin, learned the method from his best friend, Domenico Veneziano, and then murdered him while he was singing a serenade under a lady's window, in order to possess the secret alone. But it soon became universally known and made a revolution in Italian painting. In the older times, when rare and valuable pigments were used, as well as large quantities of pure gold, the materials to be employed and their value were stipulated for in the contract made between the painter and his employer before the picture was begun, and an artist's remuneration at that time was much of the nature of a salary, calculated on an approximate guess at the time he might need for the work. That was, of course, a survival from the time of the Byzantine artists, to whom gold and silver and paints were weighed out by the ecclesiastics for whom they painted, and had to be accounted for in the finished picture. There is a story told of an artist's apprentice, who made a considerable sum of money by selling the washings of his master's brushes when the latter was using a great quantity of ultramarine; and that shows the costliness of mere paints at that time. As for the more valuable materials, the great altar picture in Saint Mark's, in Venice, is entirely composed of plates of pure gold enamelled in different colours, and fastened in a sort of mosaic upon the wood panel as required, the lights and shades being produced by hatching regular lines through the hard enamel with a sharp instrument. The whole technical history of painting lies between that sort of work and the modern painter's studio. Before oil painting became general, artists were largely dependent on commissions in order to do any work except drawing. Fresco needed a wall, and work done in that manner could not be removed from place to place. The old-fashioned panel work with its gold background was so expensive that few artists could afford to paint pictures on the mere chance of selling them. But the facilities and the economy of pure tempera work, and work in oils, soon made easel pictures common. Between the time of Giotto and that of Mantegna another means of expression, besides painting, was found for artists, if not by accident, by the ingenuity of the celebrated goldsmith, Maso Finiguerra, who was the first man in Italy, and probably the first in the world, to take off upon paper impressions in ink from an engraved plate. [Illustration: THE PALATINE] The especial branch of goldsmithing which he practised was what the Italians still call 'niello' work, or the enamelling of designs upon precious metals. The method of doing such work is this. Upon the piece to be enamelled the design is first carefully drawn with a fine point, precisely as in silver chiselling, and corrected till quite perfect in all respects. This design is then cut into the metal with very sharp tools, evenly, but not to a great depth. When completely cut, the enamelling substance, which is generally sulphate of silver, is placed upon the design in just sufficient quantities, and the whole piece of work is then put into a furnace and heated to such a point that the enamel melts and fills all the cuttings of the design, while the metal itself remains uninjured. This is an easier matter than might be supposed, because gold and silver, though soft under the chisel, will not melt except at a very high temperature. When the enamel has cooled, the whole surface is rubbed down to a perfect level, and the design appears with sharp outlines in the polished metal. Now anyone who has ever worked with a steel point on bright metal knows how very hard it is to judge of the correctness of the drawing by merely looking at it, because the light is reflected in all directions into one's eyes, not only from untouched parts of the plate, but from the freshly cut lines. The best way of testing the work is to blacken it with some kind of colour that is free from acid, such as a mixture of lampblack and oil, to rub the surface clean so as to leave the ink only in the engraved lines, and then take an impression of the drawing upon damp paper. That is practically what Finiguerra did, and in so doing he discovered the art of engraving. Probably goldsmiths had done the same before him, as they have always done since, but none of them had thought of drawing upon metal merely for the sake of the impression it would make, and without any intention of using the metal afterwards. Within fifty years of Finiguerra's invention very beautiful engravings were sold all over Italy, and many famous painters engraved their own works--foremost among these, Mantegna and Botticelli. Early Italian art rose thus by regular steps, from the helpless, traditional, imitative work of the Romanesque and Byzantine artists to its highest development. It then passed a succession of climaxes in the masterpieces of Lionardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and thence descended gradually to the miserably low level of the eighteenth century. It is easy to trace the chief objects which painting had in view in its successive phases. Tradition, Reality and Illusion were the three. Cimabue was still a Traditionist. Giotto was the first Realist. Mantegna first aimed at the full illusion which finished art is capable of producing, and though not so great a man as Giotto, was a much greater painter. Then came Lionardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the men of universal genius, who could make use of tradition without being commonplace, who could be realistic without being coarse, and who understood how to produce illusion without being theatrical. In the decay of Italian art what strikes one most strongly is the combination of the three faults which the great men knew how to avoid--coarseness, commonplace thought and theatrical execution. [Illustration: PALAZZO DEI CONSERVATORI From a print of the last century] Cimabue had found out that it was possible to paint sacred pictures without the dictation of priests, as prescribed by the Council of Nice. The idea discovered by Giotto, or rather the fact, namely, that nature could be copied artistically, produced a still greater revolution, and he had hosts of scholars and followers and imitators. But they were nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea to the furthest with varying success. It was realism--sometimes a kind of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto of Pisa--sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as in Masaccio, impetuous and energetic as in Fra Lippo Lippi, fanciful as in Botticelli--but still, always realism, in the sense of using nature directly, without any distinct effort at illusion, the figures mostly taken from life, and generally disposed in one plane, the details minute, the landscapes faithful rather than suggestive. The lives of those men were all typical of the times in which they lived, and especially the life of the holy man we call Beato Angelico, of saintly memory, that of the fiery lay brother, Filippo Lippi, whose astounding talents all but redeemed his little less surprising sins--and lastly that of Andrea Mantegna. The first two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries--the realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist. Beato Angelico--of his many names, it is easier to call him by the one we know best--was born in 1387. At that time the influence of the Empire in Italy was ended, and that of the Popes was small. The Emperors and the Popes had in fact contended for the control of municipal rights in the free Italian cities; with the disappearance of those rights under the Italian despots the cause of contention was gone, as well as the partial liberty which had given it existence. The whole country was cut up into principalities owned and ruled by tyrants. Dante had been dead about sixty years, and the great imperial idea which he had developed in his poem had totally failed. The theoretical rights of man, as usual in the world's history, had gone down before the practical strength of individuals, whose success tended, again, to call into activity other individuals, to the general exaltation of talent for the general oppression of mediocrity. In other words, that condition had been produced which is most favourable to genius, because everything between genius and brute strength had been reduced to slavery in the social scale. The power to take and hold, on the one hand, and the power to conceive and execute great works on the other, were as necessary to each other as supply and demand; and all moral worth became a matter of detail compared with success. In such a state of the world, a man of creative genius who chanced to be a saint was an anomaly; there was no fit place for him but a monastery, and no field for his powers but that of Sacred Art. It was as natural that Angelico should turn monk as that Lippo Lippi, who had been made half a monk against his will, should turn layman. In the peaceful convent of Saint Mark, among the Dominican brethren, Beato Angelico's character and genius grew together; the devout artist and the devotional mystic were inseparably blended in one man, and he who is best remembered as a famous painter was chosen by a wise Pope to be Archbishop of Florence, for his holy life, his gentle character and his undoubted learning. He could not refuse the great honour outright; but he implored the Pope to bestow it upon a brother monk, whom he judged far more worthy than himself. He was the same consistent, humble man who had hesitated to eat meat at the Pope's own table without the permission of the prior of his convent--a man who, like the great Saint Bernard, had given up a prosperous worldly existence in pure love of religious peace. It was no wonder that such a man should become the realist of the angels and a sort of angel among realists--himself surnamed by his companions the 'Blessed' and the 'Angelic.' Beside him, younger than he, but contemporary with him, stands out his opposite, Filippo Lippi. He was not born rich, like Angelico. He came into the world in a miserable by-way of Florence, behind a Carmelite convent. His father and mother were both dead when he was two years old, and a wretchedly poor sister of his father took care of him as best she could till he was eight. When she could bear the burden no longer, she took him to the door of the monastery, as orphans were taken in those days, and gave him over to the charity of the Carmelite fathers. Most of the boys brought to them in that way grew up to be monks, and some of them became learned; but the little Filippo would do nothing but scrawl caricatures in his copybook all day long, and could not be induced to learn anything. But he learned to draw so well that when the prior saw what he could do, he allowed him to paint; and at seventeen the lad who would not learn to read or write knew that he was a great artist, and turned his back on the monastery that had given him shelter, and on the partial vows he had already taken. He was the wildest novice that ever wore a frock. He had almost missed the world, since a little more inclination, a little more time, might have made a real monk of him. But he had escaped, and he took to himself all the world could give, and revelled in it with every sensation of his gifted, sensuous nature. It was only when he could not get what he wanted that he had curious returns of monkish reasoning. The historian of his life says that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination chanced to be predominant at the moment; but if he could by no means accomplish his wishes, he would then depict the object which attracted his attention and he would try, by reasoning and talking with himself, to diminish the violence of his inclination. There was no lack of adventure in his life, either. Once, at Ancona, on the Adriatic, he ventured too far out to sea in an open boat, and he and his companions were picked up by a Barbary pirate and carried off to Africa. But for his genius he might have ended his days there, instead of spending only eighteen months in slavery. A clever drawing of the pirate chief, made on a whitewashed wall with a bit of charcoal from a brazier, saved him. The Moor saw it, was delighted, set him to paint a number of portraits, in defiance of Moses, Mahomet and the Koran, and then, by way of reward, brought him safe across the water to Naples and gave him his liberty. He painted more pictures, earned money, and worked his way back to Florence. As long as he worked at all he did marvels, but a pretty face was enough to make him forget his art, his work and the Princes and Dukes who employed him. Cosimo de Medici once shut him up with his picture, to keep him at it; he tore the sheets of his bed into strips, knotted them together, escaped by the window--and was of course forgiven. The nuns of Saint Margaret employed him to paint an altar-piece for them; he persuaded them to let the most beautiful of their novices sit as a model for one of the figures; he made love to her, of course, and ran away with her, leaving the picture unfinished. It is characteristic of him that though he never forsook her, he refused the Pope's offer of a dispensation from his early vows which would have enabled him to marry her--for he hated all ties and bonds alike, and a regular marriage would have seemed to him almost as bad as slavery in Africa. Lippo represented one extreme of character, Beato Angelico the other. Between them were many men of almost equal genius, but of more common temper, such as Botticelli, who was Lippo's pupil, or Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Angelico. Of Sandro Botticelli we know at least that he resembled his master in one respect--he positively refused to learn anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father, Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the nickname of Botticello--'the little tun'--perhaps on account of his rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. Both Botticelli and Gozzoli, like many first-rate artists of that time, were quiet, hard-working men, devoted to their art, and not remarkable for anything else. The consequence is that little is known about their lives. It is natural that we should know most about the men who were most different from their companions, such as Michelangelo on the one hand, and Benvenuto Cellini on the other, or Beato Angelico and Lippo Lippi, or the clever Buffalmacco--whose practical jokes were told by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and have even brought him into modern literature--and Lionardo da Vinci. Then, as now, there were two types of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars. Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians. As for the latter, he seems scarcely ever to have painted a picture without playing off a practical jest upon his employer, and he began his career by terrifying his master, who insisted upon waking him to work before dawn. He fastened tiny wax tapers upon the backs of thirty black beetles, and as soon as he heard the old man stirring and groping in the dark, he lighted the tapers quickly, and drove the beetles into the room, through a crack under the door, and they ran wildly hither and thither on the pavement. The master took them for demons come to carry off his soul; he almost lost his senses in a fit, and he used half the holy water in Florence to exorcise the house. But ever afterwards he was too much frightened to get up before daylight, and Buffalmacco slept out the long night in peace. Andrea Mantegna, the great painter and engraver, who made the final step in the development of pictorial art in Italy, was a shepherd's son, like Giotto, born about one hundred years after Giotto's death. Similar conditions and a similar bent of genius produced different results in different centuries. Between Giotto and Mantegna the times had changed; men lived differently, thought differently and saw differently. How Mantegna got into the studio of the learned master Squarcione of Padua is not known. The shepherd lad may have strayed in on a summer's day, when the door was open, and attracted the painter's attention and interest. One of the greatest living painters today was a Bavarian peasant boy, who used to walk ten miles barefoot to the city and back on Sundays, carrying his shoes to save them, in order to go into the free galleries and look at the pictures; and somehow, without money, nor credit, nor introduction, he got into the studio of a good master, and became a great artist. Mantegna may have done the same. At all events, he became old Squarcione's favourite pupil. But when he was inside the studio, he found there a vast collection of antique fragments of sculpture, which the master had got together from all sources, and which the pupils were drawing. He was set to drawing them, too, as the best way of learning how to paint. That was the logical manifestation and characteristic expression of Renascence, which was a second birth of Greek and Roman art, science and literature--one might call it, in Italy, the second birth of civilized man. It brought with it the desire and craving for something more than realism, together with the means of raising all art to the higher level required in order to produce beautiful illusions. Men had found time to enjoy as well as to fight and pray. In other words, they fought and prayed less, and the result was that they had more leisure. The women had begun to care for artistic things much earlier, and they had taught their children to care for them, and the result was a general tendency of taste to a higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown man may learn to be a judge and a critic, but he cannot learn to have taste after he is once a man. Taste belongs to education rather than to instruction, and it is the mother that educates, not the schoolmaster. That faculty of taste was what Italy had acquired between the time of Cimabue and the time of Mantegna--roughly speaking, between the year 1200 and the year 1450--between the first emancipation of art from the old Byzantine and Romanesque thraldom and the time when the new art had so overspread the country that engravings of the most famous pictures began to be sold in the streets in every important city in Italy. Only a few years after Mantegna's death, Albert Dürer, the great painter engraver of Nüremberg, appeared before the council of Venice to try and get a copyright for his engravings, which were being so cleverly forged by the famous Raimondi that the copies were sold in the Piazza of Saint Mark as originals. In passing, it is interesting to remember that Dürer, whose engravings now sell for hundreds of dollars each, sold them himself at his own house for prices varying between the values of fifteen and twenty-five cents, according to the size of the plate. The Council of Venice refused him the copyright he asked, but interdicted the copyist from using Dürer's initials. The immense sale of prints popularized art in Italy at the very time when the first great printing houses, like the Aldine, were popularizing learning. Culture, in the same sense in which we use the word, became preëminently the fashion. Everyone wished to be thought clever, and a generation grew up which not only read Latin authors with pleasure, wrote Latin correctly, and had some acquaintance with Greek, but which took a lively interest in artistic matters, and constituted a real public for artists, a much larger and a much more critical one than could be found today among an equal population in any so-called civilized country. The era of collectors began then, and Mantegna's old master was the first of them. Every man of taste did his best to get possession of some fragment of antique sculpture, everyone bought engravings, everyone went to see the pictures of the great masters--everyone tried to get together a little library of printed books. It took two hundred and fifty or three hundred years to develop the Renascence, but what it produced in Italy alone has not been surpassed, and in many ways has not been equalled, in the four hundred years that have followed it. With its culmination, individualities, even the strongest, became less distinctly defined, and the romantic side of the art legend was ended. It is so in all things. The romance of the ocean belongs to those who first steered the perilous course that none had dared before; many have been in danger by the sea, many have perished in the desperate trial of the impossible, but none can be Columbus again; many have done brave deeds in untracked deserts, but none again can be the pioneers who first won through to our West. The last may be the greatest, but the first will always have been the first, the daring, the romantic, who did what no man had done before them. And so it is also in the peaceful ways of art. Giotto, Beato Angelico, Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, never attained to the greatness of Lionardo or Michelangelo or Raphael. Sober criticism can never admit that they did, whatever soft-hearted enthusiasts may say and write. But those earlier men had something which the later ones had not, both in merit and in genius. They fought against greater odds, with poorer weapons, and where their strength failed them, heart and feeling took the place of strength; and their truth and their tenderness went straight to the heart of their young world, as only the highest perfection of illusion could appeal to the eyes of the critical, half-sceptic generation that came after them. And so, although it be true that art is not dependent on genius alone, but also on mechanical skill, yet there is something in art which is dependent on genius and on nothing else. It is that something which touches, that something which creates, that something which itself is life; that something which belongs, in all ages, to those who grope to the light through darkness; that something of which we almost lose sight in the great completeness of the greatest artists, but which hovers like a halo of glory upon the brows of Italy's earliest, truest and tenderest painters. [Illustration] REGION XIV BORGO Borgo, the 'Suburb,' is the last of the fourteen Regions, and is one of the largest and most important of all, for within its limits stand Saint Peter's, the Vatican, and the Mausoleum of Hadrian--the biggest church, the biggest palace and the biggest tomb in the whole world. To those who know something of Rome's great drama, the Castle of Sant' Angelo is the most impressive of all her monuments. Like the Colosseum, it stands out in its round strength alone, sun-gilt and shadowy brown against the profound sky. Like the great Amphitheatre, it has been buffeted in the storms of ages and is war-worn without, to the highest reach of a mounted man, and dinted above that by every missile invented in twelve hundred years, from the slinger's pebble or leaden bullet to the cannon ball of the French artillery. Like the Colosseum, it is the crestless trunk of its former self. But it has life in it still, whereas the Colosseum died to a ruin when Urban the Eighth showed his successor how to tear down the outer wall and build a vast palace with a hundredth part of the great theatre. Sant' Angelo is a living fortress yet, and nearly a thousand years have passed, to the certain knowledge of history, since it was ever a single day unguarded by armed men. Thirty generations of men at arms have stood sentry within its gates since Theodora Senatrix, the strong and sinful, flashed upon history out of impenetrable darkness, seized the fortress and made and unmade popes at her will, till, dying, she bequeathed the domination to her only daughter, and her name to the tale of Roman tyranny. The Castle has been too often mentioned in these pages to warrant long description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the main entrance upwards the fortress is utterly irregular within, full of gloomy chambers, short, turning staircases, dark prisons, endless corridors; and above are terraces and rooms where much noble blood has been shed, and where many limbs have been racked and tortured, and battlements from which men good and bad, guilty and innocent, have been dropped a rope's length by the neck to feed the crows. Here died Stephen Porcari, the brave and spotless; here died Cardinal Carafa for a thousand crimes; and here Lorenzo Colonna, caught and crushed in the iron hands of Sixtus the Fourth, laid his bruised head, still stately, on the block--'a new block,' says Infessura, who loved him and buried him, and could not forget the little detail. The story is worth telling, less for its historical value than for the strange exactness with which it is all set down. Pope Sixtus, backed by the Orsini, was at war with the Colonna to the end of his reign; but once, on a day when there was truce, he seems to have said in anger that he cared not whom the Colonna served nor with whom they allied themselves. And Lorenzo Colonna, Protonotary Apostolic, with his brothers, took the Pope at his word, and they joined forces with the King of Naples, fortifying themselves in their stronghold of Marino, whence the eldest son of the family still takes his title. The Pope, seeing them in earnest and fearing King Ferdinand, sent an embassy of two cardinals to them, entreating them to be reconciled with the Church. But they answered that they would not, for his Holiness had given them permission to ally themselves with whom they pleased, and refused them money for service, and they said that they could not live without pay--a somewhat ironical statement for such men as the Colonna, who lived rather by taking than by giving an equivalent for anything received. [Illustration: CASTLE OF SANT' ANGELO] Then the Pope made war upon King Ferdinand, and when there had been much bloodshed, and plundering and burning on both sides, Prospero Colonna quarrelled with the Duke of Calabria, who was on Ferdinand's side and for whom he had been fighting, and came over to the Church, and so the Colonna were restored to favour, and the Pope made a treaty with the King against Venice, and so another year passed. But after that the quarrel was renewed between Pope Sixtus and Lorenzo Colonna, on pretext that a certain part of the agreement to which they had come had not been executed by the Protonotary; and while the matter was under discussion, the Cardinal of Saint George, nephew of the great Count Jerome Riario, sent word privately to the Protonotary Colonna, warning him either to escape from Rome or to be on his guard if he remained, 'because some one was plotting against him, and hated him.' Wherefore Lorenzo shut himself up in the dwelling of Cardinal Colonna, between the Colonna palace and Monte Cavallo on the Quirinal hill, and many young men, attached to the great house, began to watch in arms, day and night, turn and turn about. And when this became known, the Orsini also began to arm themselves and keep watch at Monte Giordano. Scenting a struggle, a Savelli, siding with Colonna, struck the first blow by seizing forty horses and mules of the Orsini in a farm building on the Tivoli road; and immediately half a dozen robber Barons joined Savelli, and they plundered right and left, and one of them wrote a long and courteous letter of justification to the Pope. But Orsini retorted swiftly, 'lifting' horses and cattle that belonged to his enemies and making prisoners of their retainers. Among others he took two men who belonged to the Protonotary. And the latter, unable to leave Rome in safety, began to fortify himself in the Cardinal's house with many fighting men, and with many strange weapons, 'bombardelle, cerobottane,' and guns and catapults. Whereupon the Pope sent for Orsini, and commanded him, as the faithful adherent of the Church, to go and take the Protonotary prisoner to his house. But while Orsini was marshalling his troops with those of Jerome Riario, at Monte Giordano and in Campo de' Fiori, the Pope sent for the municipal officers of the city and explained that he meant to pardon the Protonotary if the latter would come to the Vatican humbly and of his own free will; and certain of these officers went to the Protonotary as ambassadors, to explain this. To them he answered, in the presence of Stephen Infessura, the chronicler who tells the story, that he had not fortified himself against the Church, but against private and dangerous enemies, against whom he had been warned, and that he had actually found that his house was spied upon by night; but that he was ready to carry out the terms of the old agreement, and finally, that he was ready to go freely to the Pope, trusting himself wholly to His Holiness, without any earnest or pledge for his safety, but that he begged the Pope not to deliver him into the hands of the Orsini. Yet even before he had spoken, the Orsini were moving up their men, by way of Saint Augustine's Church, which is near Piazza Navona. Nevertheless Colonna, the Protonotary, mounted his horse to ride over to the Vatican. But John Philip Savelli stood in the way, and demanded of the officers what surety they would give for Colonna; and they promised him safety upon their own lives. Then Savelli answered them that they should remember their bond, for if Colonna did not come back, or if he should be hurt, he, Savelli, would be avenged upon their bodies. And Colonna rode out, meaning to go to the Pope, but his retainers mounted their horses and rode swiftly by another way and met him, and forced him back. For they told him that if he went, his end would be near, and that they themselves would be outlawed; and some said that before they would let him go, they would cut him to pieces themselves rather than let his enemies do it. And furiously they forced him back, him and his horse, through the winding streets, and brought him again into the stronghold, and bade the officers depart in peace. And the second time two of the officers returned and told the Protonotary to come, for he should be safe. And again he mounted his horse, and struck with the flat of his blade a man who hindered him, and leaped the barrier raised for defence before the palace and rode away. And again his own men mounted and followed him, and overtook him at the cross of Trevi, near by. And one, a giant, seized his bridle and forced him back, saying, 'My Lord, we will not let you go! Rather will we cut you in quarters ourselves; for you go to ruin yourself and us also.' But when they had him safe within the walls, he wrung his hands, and cried out that it was they who, by hindering him, were destroying themselves and him. But many answered, 'If you had gone, you would never have come back.' And it was then the twenty-first hour of the day, and there were left three hours before dark. But the Pope, seeing that Colonna did not come, commanded the Orsini to bring him by force, as they might, even by slaying the people, if the people should defend him; and he ordered them to burn and pillage the regions of Monti, Trevi and Colonna. And with Orsini there were some of those fierce Crescenzi, who still lived in Rome. And they all marched through the city, bearing the standard of the Church, and they passed by Trevi and surrounded the house on Monte Cavallo, and proclaimed the ban against all men who should help the Protonotary; wherefore many of the people departed in fear. Then Orsini first leapt the barrier, and his horse was killed under him by a bombard that slew two men also; and immediately all the Colonna's men discharged their firearms and catapults and killed sixteen of their enemies. But the Orsini advanced upon the house. Then, about the twenty-third hour, the Colonna were weary of fighting against so many, and their powder was not good, so that they fell back from the main gateway, and the Orsini rushed in and filled the arched ways around the courtyard, and set fire to the hay and straw in the stables, and fought their way up the stairs, sacking the house. They found the Protonotary in his room, wounded in the hand and sitting on a chest, and Orsini told him that he was a prisoner and must come. 'Slay me, rather,' he answered. But Orsini bade him surrender and have no fear. And he yielded himself up, and they took him away through the smoking house, slippery with blood. They found also John Philip Savelli, and they stripped him of the cuirass he wore, and setting their swords to him, bade him cry, 'Long live Orsini!' And he answered, 'I will not say it.' Then they wounded him deep in the forehead and smote off both his hands, and gave him many wounds in face and body, and left him dead. And they plundered all the goods of Cardinal Colonna, his plate, his robes, his tapestries, his chests of linen, and they even carried off his cardinal's hat. So the Protonotary, on the faith of Orsini, was led away to the Pope in his doublet, but some one lent him a black cloak on the way. And as they went, Jerome Riario rode beside him and jeered at him, crying out, 'Ha, ha! thou traitor, I shall hang thee by the neck this night!' But Orsini answered Jerome, and said, 'Sir, you shall hang me first!' for he had given his word. And more than once on the way, Riario, drunk with blood, drew his dagger to thrust it into Colonna, but Orsini drove him off, and brought his prisoner safely to the Pope. And his men sacked the quarter of the Colonna; and among other houses of the Colonna's retainers which were rifled they plundered that of Paul Mancino, near by, whose descendant was to marry the sister of Mazarin; and also, among the number, the house of Pomponius Letus, the historian, from whom they took all his books and belongings and clothes, and he went away in his doublet and buskins, with his stick in his hand, to make complaint before the municipality. Then for a whole month all that part of Rome which was dominated by the Colonna was given over to be pillaged and burned by their enemies, while in still Sant' Angelo, the tormentors slowly tore Lorenzo Colonna to pieces, so that the Jewish doctor who was called in to prolong his life said that nothing could save him, for his limbs were swollen and pierced through and through, and many of his bones were broken, and he was full of many deep wounds. Yet in the end, lest he should die a natural death, they prepared the new block and the axe to cut off his head. 'Moreover,' says Infessura, in his own language, 'on the last day of June, when the people were celebrating in Rome the festivity of the most happy decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle, whose head was cut off by the most cruel Nero--on that very day, about an hour and a half after sunrise, the aforesaid Holiness of our Sovereign Lord caused the Protonotary Colonna to be beheaded in the Castle; and there were present the Senator and the Judge of the crime. And when the Protonotary was led out of prison early in the morning to the grating above the Castle, he turned to the soldiers who were there and told them that he had been grievously tormented, wherefore he had said certain things not true. And immediately afterwards, when he was in the closed place below, where he was beheaded, the Senator and Judge sat down as a Tribunal, and caused to be read the sentence which they passed against him, although no manner of criminal procedure had been observed, since all the confessions were extorted under torture, and he had no opportunity of defending himself.' Therefore, when this sentence had been read, the Protonotary addressed those present and said: 'I wish no one to be inculpated through me. I say this in conscience of my soul, and if I lie, may the devil take me, now that I am about to go out of this life; and so thou, Notary who hast read the sentence, art witness of this, and ye all are witnesses, and I leave the matter to your conscience, that you should also proclaim it in Rome,--that those things written in this sentence are not true, and that what I have said I have said under great torture, as ye may see by my condition.' He would not let them bind his hands, but knelt down at the block, and forgave the executioner, who asked his pardon. And then he said in Latin, 'Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit,' and called thrice upon Christ the Saviour, and at the third time, the word and his head were severed together from his body. Then they placed the body in a wooden coffin and took it to Santa Maria Transpontina, the first church on the right, going from the Castle toward Saint Peter's, and when none came to take it away, they sent word to his mother. And she, white-haired and tearless, with burning eyes, came; and she took her son's head from the coffin and held it up to the people, saying, 'Behold the justice of Sixtus,' and she laid it in its place tenderly; and with torches, and the Confraternities, and many priests, the body was taken to the Church of the Holy Apostles, and buried in the Colonna Chapel near the altar. But before it was buried it was seen in the coffin, and taken out, and laid in it again, and all saw the torments which the man had suffered in his feet, which were swollen and bound up with rags; and also the fingers of his hands had been twisted, so that the inside was turned clean outwards, and on the top of his head was a wound, where priests make the tonsure, as though the scalp had been raised by a knife; and he was dressed in a cotton doublet, yet his own had been of fine black silk. Also they had put on him a miserable pair of hose, torn from the half of the leg downwards; and a red cap with a trencher was upon his head, and it was rather a long cap, and the narrator believed that the gaolers had dressed him thus as an insult. 'And I Stephen, the scribe, saw it with my eyes, and with my hands I buried him, with Prosper of Cicigliano, who had been his vassal; and no other retainers of the Colonna would have anything to do with the matter, out of fear, as I think.' Five hundred years had passed since Theodora's day, four hundred more are gone since Lorenzo the Protonotary laid his head upon the block, and still the tradition of terror and suffering clings to Sant' Angelo, and furnishes the subject of an all but modern drama. Such endurance in the character of a building is without parallel in the history of strongholds, and could be possible only in Rome, where the centuries pass as decades, and time is reckoned by the thousand years. [ILLUSTRATION: HOSPITAL OF SANTO SPIRITO From a print of the last century] The main and most important memories in the Region of Borgo, apart from the Castle, and Saint Peter's and the Vatican, are those connected with the Holy Office, the hospital and insane asylum of Santo Spirito, and with the Serristori barracks. In Rome, to go to Santo Spirito means to go mad. It is the Roman Bedlam. But there is another association with the name, and a still sadder one. There, by the gate of the long, low hospital, is still to be seen the Rota--the 'wheel'--the revolving wooden drum, with its small aperture, corresponding to an opening in the grating, through which many thousand infants have been passed by starving women to the mystery within, to a nameless death, or to grow up to a life almost as nameless and obscure. The mother, indeed, received a ticket as a sort of receipt by which she could recognize her child if she wished, but the children claimed were very few. Within, they were received by nursing Sisters, and cared for, not always wisely, but always kindly, and some of them grew up to happy lives. Modern charity, in its philistinism and well-regulated activity, condemns such wholesale readiness to take burdens which might sometimes be borne by those who lay them down. But modern charity, in such condemnation, does not take just account of a mother's love, and believes that to receive nameless children in such a way would 'encourage irresponsibility,' if not vice. And yet in Rome, where half the population could neither read nor write, infanticide was unknown, and fewer children were passed in through the Rota yearly than are murdered in many a modern city. For the last thing the worst mother will do is to kill her child; last only before that will she part with it. Which was more moral, the unrestricted charity of the Rota, or the unrestricted, legal infanticide of the old-fashioned 'baby-farm,' where superfluous children were systematically starved to death by professional harpies? On by the Borgo Santo Spirito, opposite the old church of the Penitentiaries, stands the Palazzo Serristori, memorable in the revolutionary movement of 1867. It was then the barracks of the Papal Zouaves--the brave foreign legion enlisted under Pius the Ninth, in which men of all nations were enrolled under officers of the best blood in Europe, hated more especially by the revolutionaries because they were foreigners, and because their existence, therefore, showed a foreign sympathy with the temporal power, which was a denial of the revolutionary theory which asserted the Papacy to be without friends in Europe. Wholesale murder by explosives was in its infancy then as a fine art; but the spirit was willing, and a plot was formed to blow up the castle of Sant' Angelo and the barracks of the Zouaves. The castle escaped because one of the conspirators lost heart and revealed the treachery; but the Palazzo Serristori was partially destroyed. The explosion shattered one corner of the building. It was said that the fuse burned faster than had been intended, so that the catastrophe came too soon. At all events, when it happened, about dark, only the musicians of the band were destroyed, and few of the regiment were in the building at all, so that about thirty lives were sacrificed, where the intention had been to destroy many hundreds. In the more sane condition of Europe today, it seems to us amazing that Pius the Ninth should have been generally blamed for signing the death warrant of the two atrocious villains who did the deed, and for allowing them to be executed. The fact that he was blamed, and very bitterly, gives some idea of the stupid and senseless prejudice against the popes which was the result of Antonelli's narrow and reactionary policy. [Illustration] LEO THE THIRTEENTH We commonly speak of the nineteenth century as an age of superior civilization. The truth of the assertion depends on what civilization means, but there is no denying that more blood has been shed by civilized nations during the last one hundred and twenty years than in any equal period of the world's history. Anyone may realize the fact by simply recalling the great wars which have devastated the world since the American Revolution. But the carnage was not uninterrupted. The record of death is divided in the midst by the thirty years of comparative peace which followed the battle of Waterloo and preceded the general revolution of 1848. Napoleon had harried the world, from Moscow to Cairo, from Vienna to Madrid, pouring blood upon blood, draining the world's veins dry, exhausting the destroying power of mankind in perpetual destruction. When he was gone, Europe was utterly worn out by his terrible energy, and collapsed suddenly in a state of universal nervous prostration. Then came the long peace, from 1815 to 1848. During that time the European nations, excepting England, were governed by more or less weak and timid sovereigns, and it was under their feeble rule that the great republican idea took root and grew, like a cutting from the stricken tree of the French Revolution, planted in the heart of Europe, nurtured in secret, and tended by devoted hands to a new maturity, but destined to ruin in the end, as surely as the parent stock. Those thirty and odd years were a sort of dull season in Europe--an extraordinarily uneventful period, during which the republican idea was growing, and during which the monarchic idea was decaying. Halfway through that time--about 1830--Joseph Mazzini founded the Society of Young Italy, in connection with the other secret societies of Europe, and acquired that enormous influence which even now is associated with his name. Mazzini and Garibaldi meant to make a republic of Italy. The House of Savoy did not at that time dream of a united Italian Kingdom. The most they dared hope was the acquisition of territory on the north by the expulsion of the Austrians. England and circumstances helped the Savoy family in their sudden and astonishing rise of fortune; for at that time Austria was the great military nation of Europe, while France was the naval power second to England, and through the Bourbons, Italy was largely under the influence of Austria. England saw that the creation of an independent friendly power in the Mediterranean would both tend to diminish Austria's strength by land, and would check France in her continued efforts to make the shores of the Mediterranean hers. She therefore encouraged Italy in revolution, and it is generally believed that she secretly furnished enormous sums of money, through Sir James Hudson, minister in Turin, to further the schemes of Mazzini. The profound hatred of Catholics which was so much more marked in England then than now, produced a strong popular feeling there in favour of the revolutionaries, who inveighed against all existing sovereignties in general, but were particularly bitter against the government of the Popes. The revolution thus supported by England, and guided by such men as Mazzini and Garibaldi, made progress. The legendary nature of Rome, as mistress of the world, appealed also to many Italians, and 'Rome' became the catchword of liberty. The situation was similar in other European countries; secret societies were as active, and to the revolutionaries the result seemed as certain. But the material of monarchic opposition was stronger elsewhere than in Italy. Prussia had Hohenzollerns and Austria had Hapsburgs--races that had held their own and reigned successfully for hundreds of years. The smaller German principalities had traditions of conservative obedience to a prince, which were not easily broken. On the other hand, in Italy the government of the Bourbons and their relatives was a barbarous misrule, of which the only good point was that it did not oppress the people with taxes, and in Rome the Pontifical chair had been occupied by a succession of politically insignificant Popes from Pius the Seventh, Napoleon's victim, to Gregory the Sixteenth. There was no force in Italy to oppose the general revolutionary idea, except the conservatism of individuals, in a country which has always been revolutionary. Much the same was true of France. But in both countries there were would-be monarchs waiting in the background, ready to promote any change whereby they might profit--Louis Napoleon, and the Kings of Sardinia, Charles Albert first, and after his defeat by the Austrians and his abdication, the semi-heroic, semi-legendary Victor Emmanuel. Gregory the Sixteenth died in 1846, and Pius the Ninth was elected in his stead--a man still young, full of the highest ideals and of most honest purpose; enthusiastic, a man who had begun life in military service and was destined to end it in captivity, and upon whom it was easy to impose in every way, since he was politically too credulous for any age, and too diffident, if not too timid, for the age in which he lived. His private virtues made him a model to the Christian world, while his political weakness made him the sport of his enemies. The only stable thing in him was his goodness; everything else was in perpetual vacillation. In every true account of every political action of Pius the Ninth, the first words are, 'the Pope hesitated.' And he hesitated to the last--he hesitated through a pontificate of thirty-two years, he outreigned the 'years of Peter,' and he lost the temporal power. The great movement came to a head in 1848. A year of revolutions, riots, rebellions and new constitutions. So perfectly had it been organized that it broke out almost simultaneously all over Europe--in France, Italy, Prussia and Austria. Just when the revolution was rife Pius the Ninth proclaimed an amnesty. That was soon after his election, and he vacillated into a sort of passive approval of the Young Italian party. It was even proposed that Italy should become a confederation of free states under the presidency of the Pope. No man in his senses believed in such a possibility, but at that time an unusual number of people were not in their senses; Europe had gone mad. Everyone knows the history of that year, when one Emperor, several Kings, and numerous princes and ministers scattered in all directions, like men running away from a fire that is just going to reach a quantity of explosives. The fire was the reaction after long inactivity. Pius the Ninth fled like the rest, when his favourite minister, Count Rossi, had been stabbed to death on the steps of the Cancelleria. Some of the sovereigns got safely back to their thrones. The Pope was helped back by France and kept on his throne, first by the Republic, and then, with one short intermission, by Louis Napoleon. In 1870, the French needed all their strength for their own battles, and gave up fighting those of the Vatican. During that long period, from 1849 to 1870, Pius the Ninth governed Rome in comparative security, in spite of occasional revolutionary outbreaks, and in kindness if not in wisdom. Taxation was insignificant. Work was plentiful and well paid, considering the country and the times. Charities were enormous. The only restriction on liberty was political, never civil. Reforms and improvements of every kind were introduced. When Gregory the Sixteenth died, Rome was practically a mediæval city; when the Italians took it, twenty-four years later, it was a fairly creditable modern capital. The government of Pius the Ninth was paternal, and if he was not a wise father, he was at all events the kindest of men. The same cannot be said of Cardinal Antonelli, his prime minister, who was the best hated man of his day, not only in Europe and Italy, but by a large proportion of Churchmen. He was one of those strong and unscrupulous men who appeared everywhere in Europe as reactionaries in opposition to the great revolution. On a smaller scale--perhaps because he represented a much smaller power--he is to be classed with Disraeli, Metternich, Cavour and Bismarck. In palliation of many of his doings, it should be remembered that he was not a priest; for the Cardinalate is a dignity not necessarily associated with the priesthood, and Antonelli was never ordained. He was a fighter and a schemer by nature, and he schemed and fought all his life for the preservation of the temporal power in Rome. He failed, and lived to see his defeat, and he remained till his death immured in the Vatican with Pius the Ninth. He used to live in a small and almost mean apartment, opening upon the grand staircase that leads up from the court of Saint Damasus. When the Italians entered Rome through the breach at the Porta Pia, Italy was unified. It is a curious fact that Italy was never at any time unified except by force. The difference between the unification under Julius Cæsar and Augustus, and the unification under Victor Emmanuel, is very simple. Under the first Cæsars, Rome conquered the Italians; under the House of Savoy, the Italians conquered Rome. The taking of Rome in 1870 was the deathblow of mediævalism; and the passing away of King Victor Emmanuel and of Pope Pius the Ninth was the end of romantic Italy, if one may use the expression to designate the character of the country through all that chain of big and little events which make up the thrilling story of the struggle for Italian unity. After the struggle for unity, began the struggle for life--more desperate, more dangerous, but immeasurably less romantic. There is all the difference between the two which lies between unsound banking and perilous fighting. The long Pontificate of Pius the Ninth came to a close almost simultaneously with the reign and the life of Victor Emmanuel, first King of United Italy, after the Pope and the King had faced each other during nearly a third of the century, two political enemies of whom neither felt the slightest personal rancour against the other. On his death-bed, the King earnestly desired the Pope's parting blessing, but although the Pope gave it, the message arrived too late, for the old King was dead. Little more than a month later, Pius the Ninth departed this life. That was the end of the old era. The disposition of Europe in the year 1878, when Leo the Thirteenth was crowned, was strongly anti-Catholic. England had reached the height of her power and influence, and represented to the world the scientific-practical idea in its most successful form. She was then traversing that intellectual phase of so-called scientific atheism of which Huxley and Herbert Spencer were the chief teachers. Their view seems not to have been so hostile to the Catholic Church in particular as it was distinctly antagonistic to all religion whatsoever. People were inclined to believe that all creeds were a thing of the past, and that a scientific millennium was at hand. No one who lived in those days can forget the weary air of pity with which the Huxleyites and the Spencerians spoke of all humanity's beliefs. England's enormous political power somehow lent weight to the anti-religious theories of those two leading men of science, which never really had the slightest hold upon the believing English people. Italians, for instance, readily asserted that England had attained her position among nations by the practice of scientific atheism, and classed Darwin the discoverer with Spencer the destroyer; for all Latins are more or less born Anglomaniacs, and naturally envy and imitate Anglo-Saxon character, even while finding fault with them, just as we envy and imitate Latin art and fashions. Under a German dynasty and a Prime Minister of Israelitish name and extraction, the English had become the ideal after which half of Europe hankered in vain. England's influence was then distinctly anti-Catholic. Germany, fresh in unity, and still quivering with the long-forgotten delight of conquest, was also, as an Empire, anti-Catholic, and the Kultur Kampf, which was really a religious struggle, was at its height. Germany's religions are official at the one extreme and popular at the other; but there is no intermediate religion to speak of--and what we should call cultured people, scientific men, the professorial class, are largely atheistic. For some time after the proclamation of the Empire, Germany meant Prussia to the rest of the world--Prussia officially evangelical, privately sceptical, the rigid backbone of the whole German military mammoth. The fact that about one-third of the population of the Empire is Catholic was overlooked by Prussia and forgotten by Europe. France--Catholic in the provinces--was Paris just then--republican Paris. And all French Republics have been anti-Catholic, as all French monarchies have been the natural allies of the Vatican, as institutions, though individual Kings, like Francis the First, have opposed the Popes from time to time. France, in 1878, was recovering with astonishing vitality from her defeat, but the new growth was unlike the old. The definite destruction of the old France had taken place in 1870; and the new France bore little resemblance to the old. It was, as it is now, Catholic, but anti-papal. The smaller northern powers, Scandinavia and Holland, were anti-Catholic of course. Russia has always been the natural enemy of the Catholic Church. Of the remaining European nations, only Austria could be said to have any political importance, and even she was terrorized by the new German Empire. Italy had been the scene of one of those quick comedies of national self-transformation which start trains of consequences rather than produce immediately great results. One may call it a comedy, not in a depreciating sense, but because the piece was played out to a successful issue with little bloodshed and small hindrance. It had been laid down as a principle by the playwrights that the Vatican was the natural enemy of Italian unity; and the playwrights and principal actors, Cavour, Garibaldi and others, were all atheists. The new Italy of their creation was, therefore, an anti-Catholic power, while the whole Italian people, below the artificial scientific level, were, as they are now, profoundly, and even superstitiously, religious. That was the state of the European world when Leo the Thirteenth was elected. [Illustration: POPE LEO XIII. From the Portrait by Lenbach] The Popes have always occupied an exceptional position as compared with other sovereigns. There is not, indeed, in the history of any nation or community any record of an office so anomalous. To all intents and purposes Christianity is a form of socialism, the Church is a democracy, and the government of the Popes has been despotic, in the proper sense,--that is, it has been one of 'absolute authority.' It is probably not necessary to say anything about the first statement, which few, I fancy, will be inclined to deny. Pure socialism means community of property, community of social responsibility, and community of principles. As regards the democratic rules by which the Church governs itself, there cannot be two ways of looking at them. Peasant and prince have an equal chance of wearing the triple crown; but in history it will be found that it has been more often worn by peasants than by princes, and most often by men issuing from the middle classes. Broadly, the requirements have always been those answered by personal merit rather than by any other consideration. The exceptions have perhaps been many, and the abuses not a few, but the general principle cannot be denied, and the present Pope came to the supreme ecclesiastical dignity by much the same steps as the majority of his predecessors. Since his elevation to the pontificate the Pecci family have established, beyond a doubt, their connection with the noble race of that name, long prominent in Siena, and having an ancient and historical right to bear arms and the title of count--a dignity of uncertain value in Italy, south of the Tuscan border, but well worth having when it has originated in the northern part of the country. Joachim Vincent Pecci, since 1878 Pope, under the name of Leo the Thirteenth, was born at Carpineto, in the Volscian hills, in 1810. His father had served in the Napoleonic wars, but had already retired to his native village, where he was at that time a landed proprietor of considerable importance and the father of several children. Carpineto lies on the mountain side, in the neighbourhood of Segni, in a rocky district, and in the midst of a country well known to Italians as the Ciociaria. This word is derived from 'cioce,' the sandals worn by the peasants in that part of the country, in the place of shoes, and bound by leathern thongs to the foot and leg over linen strips which serve for stockings. The sandal indeed is common enough, or was common not long ago, in the Sabine and Samnian hills and in some parts of the Abruzzi, but it is especially the property of the Volscians, all the way from Montefortino, the worst den of thieves in Italy, down to the Neapolitan frontier. Joachim Pecci was born with a plentiful supply of that rough, bony, untiring mountaineer's energy which has made the Volscians what they have been for good or evil since the beginning of history. Those who have been to Carpineto have seen the dark old pile in which the Pope was born, with its tower which tops the town, as the dwellings of the small nobles always did in every hamlet and village throughout the south of Europe. For the Pecci were good gentlefolk long ago, and the portraits of Pope Leo's father and mother, in their dress of the last century, still hang in their places in the mansion. His Holiness strongly resembles both, for he has his father's brow and eyes, and his mother's mouth and chin. In his youth he seems to have been a very dark man, as clearly appears from the portrait of him painted when he was Nuncio in Brussels at about the age of thirty-four years. The family type is strong. One of the Pope's nieces might have sat for a portrait of his mother. The extraordinarily clear, pale complexion is also a family characteristic. Leo the Thirteenth's face seems cut of live alabaster, and it is not a figure of speech to say that it appears to emit a light of its own. Born and bred in the keen air of the Volscian hills, he is a southern Italian, but of the mountains, and there is still about him something of the hill people. He has the long, lean, straight, broad-shouldered frame of the true mountaineer, the marvellously bright eye, the eagle features, the well-knit growth of strength, traceable even in extreme old age; and in character there is in him the well-balanced combination of a steady caution with an unerring, unhesitating decision, which appears in those great moments when history will not wait for little men's long phrases, when the pendulum world is swinging its full stroke, and when it is either glory or death to lay strong hands upon its weight. But when it stops for a time, and hangs motionless, the little men gather about it, and touch it boldly, and make theories about its next unrest. In the matter of physique, there is, indeed, a resemblance between Leo the Thirteenth, President Lincoln and Mr. Gladstone--long, sinewy men all three, of a bony constitution and indomitable vitality, with large skulls, high cheek-bones, and energetic jaws--all three men of great physical strength, of profound capacity for study, of melancholic disposition, and of unusual eloquence. It might almost be said that these three men represent three distinct stages of one type--the real or material, the intellectual and the spiritual. From earliest youth each of the three was, by force of circumstances, turned to the direction which he was ultimately to follow. Lincoln was thrown upon facts for his education; Gladstone received the existing form of education in its highest development, while the Pope was brought up under the domination of spiritual thoughts at a time when they had but lately survived the French Revolution. Born during the height of the conflict between belief and unbelief, Leo the Thirteenth, by a significant fatality, was raised to the pontificate when the Kultur Kampf was raging and the attention of the world was riveted on the deadly struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and Prince Bismarck--a struggle in which the great chancellor found his equal, if not his master. The Pope spent his childhood in the simple surroundings of Carpineto, than which none could be simpler, as everyone knows who has ever visited an Italian country gentleman in his home. Early hours, constant exercise, plain food and farm interests made a strong man of him, with plenty of simple common sense. As a boy he was a great walker and climber, and it is said that he was excessively fond of birding, the only form of sport afforded by that part of Italy, and practised there in those times, as it is now, not only with guns, but by means of nets. It has often been said that poets and lovers of freedom come more frequently from the mountains and the seashore than from a flat inland region. Leo the Thirteenth ranks high among the scholarly poets of our day, and is certainly conspicuous for the liberality of his views. As long as he was in Perugia, it is well known that he received the officers of the Italian garrison and any government officials of rank who chanced to be present in the city, not merely now and then, or in a formal way, but constantly and with a cordiality which showed how much he appreciated their conversation. It may be doubted whether in our country an acknowledged leader of a political minority would either choose or dare to associate openly with persons having an official capacity on the other side. But the stiff mannerism of the patriarchal system which survived until recently from the early Roman times gave him that formal tone and authoritative manner which are so characteristic of his conversation in private. His deliberate but unhesitating speech makes one think of Goethe's 'without haste, without rest.' Yet his formality is not of the slow and circumlocutory sort; on the contrary, it is energetically precise, and helps rather than mars the sound casting of each idea. The formality of strong people belongs to them naturally, and is the expression of a certain unchanging persistence; that of the weak is mostly assumed for the sake of magnifying the little strength they have. The Pope's voice is as distinctly individual as his manner of speaking. It is not deep nor very full, but, considering his great age, it is wonderfully clear and ringing, and it has a certain incisiveness of sound which gives it great carrying power. Pius the Ninth had as beautiful a voice, both in compass and richness of quality, as any baritone singer in the Sixtine choir. No one who ever heard him intone the 'Te Deum' in Saint Peter's, in the old days, can forget the grand tones. He was gifted in many ways--with great physical beauty, with a rare charm of manner, and with a most witty humour; and in character he was one of the most gentle and kind-hearted men of his day, as he was also one of the least initiative, so to say, while endowed with the high moral courage of boundless patience and political humility. Leo the Thirteenth need speak but half a dozen words, with one glance of his flashing eyes and one gesture of his noticeably long arm and transparently thin hand, and the moral distance between his predecessor and himself is at once apparent. There is strength still in every movement, there is deliberate decision in every tone, there is lofty independence in every look. Behind these there may be kindliness, charity, and all the milder gifts of virtue; but what is apparent is a sort of energetic, manly trenchancy which forces admiration rather than awakens sympathy. [Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE VATICAN] When speaking at length on any occasion he is eloquent, but with the eloquence of the dictator, and sometimes of the logician, rather than that of the persuader. His enunciation is exceedingly distinct in Latin and Italian, and also in French, a language in which he expresses himself with ease and clearness. In Latin and Italian he chooses his words with great care and skill, and makes use of fine distinctions, in the Ciceronian manner, and he certainly commands a larger vocabulary than most men. His bearing is erect at all times, and on days when he is well his step is quick as he moves about his private apartments. 'Il Papa corre sempre,'--'the Pope always runs'--is often said by the guards and familiars of the antechamber. A man who speaks slowly but moves fast is generally one who thinks long and acts promptly--a hard hitter, as we should familiarly say. It is not always true that a man's character is indicated by his daily habits, nor that his intellectual tendency is definable by the qualities of his temper or by his personal tastes. Carlyle was one instance of the contrary; Lincoln was another; Bismarck was a great third, with his iron head and his delicate feminine hands. All men who direct, control or influence the many have a right to be judged by the world according to their main deeds, to the total exclusion of their private lives. There are some whose public actions are better than their private ones, out of all proportion; and there are others who try to redeem the patent sins of their political necessities by the honest practice of their private virtues. In some rare, high types, head, heart and hand are balanced to one expression of power, and every deed is a mathematical function of all three. Leo the Thirteenth probably approaches as nearly to such superiority as any great man now living. As a statesman, his abilities are admitted to be of the highest order; as a scholar he is undisputedly one of the first Latinists of our time, and one of the most accomplished writers in Latin and Italian prose and verse; as a man, he possesses the simplicity of character which almost always accompanies greatness, together with a healthy sobriety of temper, habit and individual taste rarely found in those beings whom we might call 'motors' among men. It is commonly said that the Pope has not changed his manner of life since he was a simple bishop. He is, indeed, a man who could not easily change either his habits or his opinions; for he is of that enduring, melancholic, slow-speaking, hard-thinking temperament which makes hard workers, and in which everything tends directly to hard work as a prime object, even with persons in whose existence necessary labour need play no part, and far more so with those whose smallest daily tasks hew history out of humanity in the rough state. Of the Pope's statesmanship and Latinity the world knows much, and is sure to hear more, while he lives--most, perhaps, hereafter, when another and a smaller man shall sit in the great Pope's chair. For he is a great Pope. There has not been his equal, intellectually, for a long time, nor shall we presently see his match again. The era of individualities is not gone by, as some pretend. Men of middle age have seen in a lifetime Cavour, Louis Napoleon, Garibaldi, Disraeli, Bismarck, Leo the Thirteenth--and the young Emperor of Germany. With the possible exception of Cavour, who died, poisoned as some say, before he had lived out his life, few will deny that of all these the present Pope possesses, in many respects, the most evenly balanced and stubbornly sane disposition. That fact alone speaks highly for the judgment of the men who elected him, in Italy's half-crazed days, immediately after the death of Victor Emmanuel. At all events, there he stands, at the head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, as wise a leader as any who in our day has wielded power; as skilled, in his own manner, as any who hold the pen; and better than all that, as straightly simple and honest a Christian man as ever fought a great battle for his faith's sake. Straight-minded, honest and simple he is, yet keen, sensitive and nobly cautious; for there is no nobility in him who risks a cause for the vanity of his own courage, and who, in blind hatred of his enemies, squanders the devotion of those who love him. In a sense, today, the greater the man the greater the peacemaker, and Leo the Thirteenth ranks highest among those who have helped the cause of peace in this century. In spite of his great age, the Holy Father enjoys excellent health, and leads a life full of occupations from morning till night. He rises very early, and when, at about six o'clock in the morning, his valet, Pio Centra, enters his little bedroom, he more often finds the Pope risen than asleep. He is accustomed to sleep little--not more than four or five hours at night, though he rests a short time after dinner. We are told that sometimes he has been found asleep in his chair at his writing-table at dawn, not having been to bed at all. Of late he frequently says mass in a chapel in his private apartments, and the mass is served by Pio Centra. On Sundays and feast-days he says it in another chapel preceding the throne-room. The little chapel is of small dimensions, but by opening the door into the neighbouring room a number of persons can assist at the mass. The permission, when given, is obtained on application to the 'Maestro di Camera,' and is generally conceded only to distinguished foreign persons. After saying mass himself, the Holy Father immediately hears a second one, said by one of the private chaplains on duty for the week, whose business it is to take care of the altar and to assist. Frequently he gives the communion with his own hand to those who are present at his mass. After mass he breakfasts upon coffee and goat's milk, and this milk is supplied from goats kept in the Vatican gardens--a reminiscence of Carpineto and of the mountaineer's early life. Every day at about ten he receives the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, and converses with him for a good hour or more upon current affairs. On Tuesdays and Fridays the Secretary of State receives the Diplomatic Corps in his own apartments, and on those days the Under Secretary confers with the Pope in his chief's place. The acting prefect of the 'Holy Apostolic Palaces' is received by the Pope when he has business to expound. On the first and third Fridays of each month the Maggiordomo is received, and so on, in order, the cardinal prefects of the several Roman congregations, the Under Secretaries, and all others in charge of the various offices. In the papal antechamber there is a list of them, with the days of their audiences. During the morning the Pope receives cardinals, bishops and ambassadors who are going away on leave, or who have just returned, princes and members of the Roman nobility, and distinguished foreigners. At ten o'clock he takes a cup of broth brought by Centra. At two in the afternoon, or a little earlier, he dines, and he is most abstemious, although he has an excellent digestion. His private physician, Doctor Giuseppe Lapponi, has been heard to say that he himself eats more at one meal than the Holy Father eats in a week. Every day, unless indisposed, some one is received in private audience. These audiences are usually for the cardinal prefects of the congregations, the patriarchs, archbishops and bishops who are in Rome at the time, and distinguished personages. When the weather is fine the Pope generally walks or drives in the garden. He is carried out of his apartments to the gate in a sedan-chair by the liveried 'sediarii,' or chair-porters; or if he goes out by the small door known as that of Paul the Fifth, the carriage awaits him, and he gets into it with the private chamberlain, who is always a monsignore. It is as well to say here, for the benefit of non-Catholics, that 'monsignori' are not necessarily bishops, nor even consecrated priests, the title being really a secular one. Two Noble Guards of the corps of fifty gentlemen known under that name ride beside the carriage doors. The closed carriage is a simple brougham, having the Pope's coat of arms painted on the door, but in summer he occasionally goes out in an open landau. He drives several times round the avenues, and when he descends, the officer of the Guards dismounts and opens the carriage door. He generally walks in the neighbourhood of the Chinese pavilion and along the Torrione, where the papal observatory is built. Leo the Thirteenth is fond of variety--and no wonder, shut up for life as he is in the Vatican; he enjoys directing work and improvements in the gardens; he likes to talk with Vespignani, the architect of the Holy Apostolic Palaces, who is also the head of the Catholic party in the Roman municipality, to go over the plans of work he has ordered, to give his opinion, and especially to see that the work itself is executed in the shortest possible time. Time is short for a pope; Sixtus the Fifth, who filled Rome and Italy with himself, reigned only five years; Rodrigo Borgia eleven years; Leo the Tenth, but nine. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF ACQUA FELICE] In 1893 the Pope began to inhabit the new pavilion designed and built by Vespignani in pure fifteenth-century style. It is built against the Torrione, the ancient round tower constructed by Saint Leo the Fourth about the year 850. In 1894 Leo the Thirteenth made a further extension, and joined another building to the existing one by means of a loggia, on the spot once occupied by the old barracks of the papal gendarmes, who are still lodged in the gardens, and whose duty it is to patrol the precincts by day and night. Indeed, the fact that two dynamiters were caught in the garden in 1894 proves that a private police is necessary. During the great heat of summer the Pope, after saying mass, goes into the garden about nine in the morning and spends the whole day there, receiving everyone in the garden pavilion he has built for himself, just as he would receive in the Vatican. He dines there, too, and rests afterward, guarded by the gendarmes on duty, to whom he generally sends a measure of good wine--another survival of a country custom; and in the cool of the day he again gets into his carriage, and often does not return to the Vatican till after sunset, toward the hour of Ave Maria. In the evening, about an hour later,--at 'one of the night,' according to the old Roman computation of time,--he attends at the recitation of the rosary, or evening prayers, by his private chaplain, and he requires his immediate attendants to assist also. He then retires to his room, where he reads, studies or writes verses, and at about ten o'clock he eats a light supper. While in the garden he is fond of talking about plants and flowers with the director of the gardens. He walks with the officer of the Noble Guards and with the private chamberlain on duty. He speaks freely of current topics, tells anecdotes of his own life and visits the gazelles, goats, deer and other animals kept in the gardens. From the cupola of Saint Peter's the whole extent of the grounds is visible, and when the Pope is walking, the visitors, over four hundred feet above, stop to watch him. He has keen eyes, and sees them also. 'Let us show ourselves!' he exclaims on such occasions. 'At least they will not be able to say that the Pope is ill!' The Pope's favourite poets are Virgil and Dante. He knows long passages of both by heart, and takes pleasure in quoting them. When Father Michael, the apostolic prefect to Erithrea, was taking his leave, with the other Franciscans who accompanied him to Africa, his Holiness recited to them, with great spirit, Dante's canto upon St. Francis. The Pope reads the newspapers, passages of interest being marked for him by readers in order to save time. He frequently writes letters to the bishops, and composes encyclicals in a polished and Ciceronian style of Latin. The encyclicals are printed at the private press of the Vatican, an institution founded by him and furnished with all modern improvements. They are first published in the 'Osservatore Romano,' the official daily paper of the Vatican, and then finally translated into Italian and other languages, and sent out to the bishops abroad. Leo the Thirteenth likes to see and talk with men of letters, as well as to read their books. Two years ago he requested Professor Brunelli of Perugia to buy for him the poetical works of the Abbé Zanella. The request is characteristic, for his Holiness insisted upon paying for the book, like anyone else. When great pilgrimages are to be organized, the first step taken is to form committees at the place of origin. The leader of the pilgrimage is usually the head of the diocese, who then writes to Rome to make the arrangements. The Committee on Pilgrimages provides quarters for the pilgrims, at the Lazaret of Saint Martha, or elsewhere, that they may be properly lodged and fed. On the occasion of the celebrated French workingmen's pilgrimage, the great halls in the Belvedere wing, including the old quarters of the engineer corps, and of the artillery and the riding-school, were opened as dining-halls, where the pilgrims came morning and evening to their meals; the kitchen department and the general superintendence were in charge of Sisters, and everything was directed by the Roman Committee of Pilgrimages. The visitors were received by the Circolo, or Society of Saint Peter's, and by the first Artisan Workmen's Association, the members of which waited at table, wearing aprons. The Circolo has an office for pilgrimages which facilitates arrangements with the railways, and provides lodgings in hotels, inns and private houses in Rome for the well-to-do; but the General Committee on Pilgrimages provides lodgings for the poor. The head of the pilgrimage also makes arrangements for the mass which the Holy Father celebrates for the pilgrims, and for the audience which follows. If the pilgrimage is large, the mass is said in Saint Peter's; if small, in the Vatican, either in the Loggia of the Beatification or in the Sala Ducale. At the audience the pilgrims place their offerings in the Pope's hands, and he blesses the rosaries, crosses and other objects of devotion, and gives small silver medals in memory of the occasion. Since 1870 the Pope has not conducted the solemn services either in Saint Peter's or in the Sixtine Chapel. The only services of this kind in which he takes part are those held in the Sixtine Chapel on the anniversary of the death of Pius the Ninth, and on the anniversary of his own coronation, March 3. At these two functions there are also present the Sacred College, the bishops and prelates, the Roman nobility, the Knights of Malta, the Diplomatic Corps in full dress, and any foreign Catholic royal princes who may chance to be in Rome at the time. At the 'public' consistories, held with great pomp in the Sala Regia, the Pope gives the new hat to each new cardinal; but there are also 'private' consistories held in the beautiful Sala del Concistoro, near the hall of the Swiss Guards, at the entrance to the Pope's apartments. Moreover, the Pope appears at beatifications and canonizations, and during the present pontificate these have been generally held in the Hall of Beatifications, a magnificent room with a tribune, above the portico of Saint Peter's, turned into a chapel for the occasion, with innumerable candles and lamps, the transparency of the beatified person, called the Gloria, and standards on which are painted representations of miracles. The last of these ceremonies was held in Saint Peter's, with closed doors, but in the presence of an enormous concourse, with the greatest pomp, the whole of the Noble Guard and the Palatine Guard turning out, and order being preserved by the Swiss Guards, the gendarmes, and the vergers of the basilica, known as the 'Sanpietrini.' In Holy Week, in order to meet the wants of the many eminent and devout Catholics who then flock to Rome, the Holy Father celebrates mass two or three times in the Sala Ducale, which is then turned into a chapel. During these masses motetts are sung by the famous Sixtine choir, under the direction of the old Maestro Mustafa, once the greatest soprano of the century, but at the same time so accomplished a musician as to have earned the common name of 'Palestrina redivivus.' It is to be regretted that he has never allowed any of his beautiful compositions to be published. On such occasions as Christmas Day or the feast of Saint Joachim, by whose name the Pope was christened, he receives the College of Cardinals, the bishops present in Rome, many prelates, the heads of religious bodies, some officers of the old pontifical army and of the guards, and the dignitaries of the papal court, in his own private library, where he talks familiarly with each in turn, and quite without ceremony. Reigning sovereigns, princes and distinguished persons are received in the grand throne-room, where the throne is covered with red velvet, with coats of arms at the angles of the canopy. Upon a large pier-table, in the rococo style, between the windows and opposite the throne, stands a great crucifix of ivory and ebony, between two candlesticks. The carpet used at such times was presented by Spain. Before the Emperor of Germany's visit the Pope himself gave particular directions for the dressing of the throne and the arrangement of the rooms. When great personages are received their suites are also presented, after which the Pope retires with his guest to the small private throne-room. Before coming to the Pope's presence it is necessary to pass through many anterooms, the Sala Clementina, the hall of the palfrenieri and sediarii,--that is, of the grooms and chair-porters,--the hall of the gendarmes, the antechamber of the Palatine Guard, that of the officers on duty, the hall of the Arras, that of the chamberlains and Noble Guards and at last the antechamber of the Maestro di Camera--there are eight in all. Persons received in audience are accompanied by the 'camerieri segreti,' who do the honours in full dress, wearing their chains and carrying their staves. The private library is a spacious room lined with bookcases made of a yellow wood from Brazil, some of which are curtained. Busts of several former Popes stand upon marble columns. To the Pope's bedroom, only his private valet and his secretaries have access. It is of small dimensions, and contains only a bed, in an alcove adorned with graceful marble columns, a writing-table, an arm-chair and kneeling stool, and one wardrobe. Besides these, there is his private study, in which the table and chair stand upon a little carpeted platform, other tables being placed on each side upon the floor, together with an extremely uncomfortable but magnificent straight-backed arm-chair, which is one of the gifts offered on the occasion of the episcopal jubilee. There is, moreover, a little room containing only a lounge and an old-fashioned easy-chair with 'wings' and nothing else. It is here that the Holy Father retires to take his afternoon nap, and the robust nature of his nerves is proved by the fact that he lies down with his eyes facing the broad light of the window. The private apartment occupies the second floor, according to Italian reckoning, though we Americans should call it the third; it is on a level with Raphael's loggie. The floor above it is inhabited by Cardinal Rampolla, the Secretary of State. The 'pontifical court,' as it is called, consists (1898) of Cardinal Rampolla, the Secretary of State; Cardinal Mario Mocenni, the pro-prefect of the Holy Apostolic Palaces, a personage of the highest importance, who has sole control of everything connected with the Vatican palace and all the vast mass of adjoining buildings; the Maggiordomo, who, besides many other functions, is the manager of the museums, galleries and inhabited apartments; the Maestro di Camera, who nearly corresponds to a master of ceremonies, and superintends all audiences; the almoner and manager of the papal charities, assisted by a distinguished priest, who is also a lawyer, formerly secretary to the well-known Monsignor de Merode; a monk of the Dominican order, who supervises the issuing of books printed at the Vatican; a chief steward; four private secretaries, who take turns of service lasting a week for each, and are always with the Pope, and finally the chief of the Vatican police. Moreover, his Holiness has his private preacher, who delivers sermons before him in Advent and Lent, and his confessor, both of whom are always Capuchin monks, in accordance with a very ancient tradition. It must not be supposed by the uninitiated that these few persons in any way represent the central directive administration of the Catholic Church. On the contrary, the only one of them who is occupied in that larger field is Cardinal Rampolla, the Secretary of State. The others are, strictly speaking, the chief personages of the pontifical household, as we should say. But their offices are not sinecures. The Pope's restless energy extracts work from the men about him as one squeezes water from a sponge. In the days of Pius the Ninth, after the fall of the temporal power, the Vatican was overrun and overcrowded with useless but well-paid officials, officers and functionaries great and small, who took refuge there against the advancing wave of change. When Leo the Thirteenth had been on the throne only a few weeks, there was sold everywhere a comic print representing the Pope, with a huge broom, sweeping all the useless people pell-mell down the steps of the Vatican into the Piazza of Saint Peter's. As often happens, the caricaturist saw the truth. In a reign that has lasted twenty years, Leo the Thirteenth has done away with much that was useless, worthless and old-fashioned, and much that cumbered the narrow patch of earth on which so important a part of the world's business is transacted. He is a great simplifier of details, and a strong leveller of obstructions, so that his successor in the pontificate will find it a comparatively easy thing to keep the mechanism in order in its present state. [Illustration: THE VATICAN FROM THE PIAZZA OF SAINT PETER'S] The strictest economy, even to the minutest details, is practised in the Vatican. It appears certain that the accounts of the vast household have often been inspected by the Pope, whose prime object is to prevent any waste of money where so much is needed for the maintenance of church institutions in all parts of the world. In the midst of outward magnificence the papal establishment is essentially frugal, for the splendid objects in the Pope's apartments, even to many of the articles of furniture, are gifts received from the faithful of all nations. But the money which pours into the Vatican from the contributions of Catholics all over Christendom is only held in trust, to be expended in support of missions, of poor bishoprics, and of such devout and charitable organizations as need help, wherever they may be. That nothing may be lost which can possibly be applied to a good purpose is one of Leo the Thirteenth's most constant occupations. He has that marvellous memory for little things which many great leaders and sovereigns have had; he remembers not only faces and names, but figures and facts, with surprising and sometimes discomfiting accuracy. In his private life, as distinguished from his public and political career, what is most striking is the combination of shrewdness and simplicity in the best sense of both words. Like Pius the Ninth, he has most firmly set his face against doing anything which could be construed as financially advantageous to his family, who are good gentlefolk, and well to do in the world, but no more. All that he has as Pope he holds in trust for the Church in the most literal acceptation of the term. The contributions of Catholics, on being received, are immediately invested in securities bearing interest, which securities are again sold as may be necessary for current needs, and expended for the welfare of Catholic Christianity. Every penny is most carefully accounted for. These moneys are generally invested in Italian national bonds--a curious fact, and indicative of considerable confidence in the existing state of things, as well as a significant guarantee of the Vatican's good faith towards the monarchy. It is commonly said in Rome among bankers that the Vatican makes the market price of Italian bonds. Whether this be true or not, it is an undeniable fact that the finances of the Vatican are under the direct and exceedingly thrifty control of the Pope himself. To some extent we may be surprised to find so much plain common sense surviving in the character of one who has so long followed a spiritual career. We should not have looked for such practical wisdom in Pius the Ninth. But the times are changed since then, and are most changed in most recent times. The head of the Catholic Church today must be a modern man, a statesman, and an administrator; he must be able to cope with difficulties as well as heresies; he must lead his men as well as guide his flock; he must be the Church's steward as well as her consecrated arch-head; he must be the reformer of manners as well as the preserver of faith; he must be the understander of men's venial mistakes as well as the censor of their mortal sins. Battles for belief are no longer fought only with books and dogmas, opinions and theories. Everything may serve nowadays, from money, which is the fuel of nations, to wit, which is the weapon of the individual; and the man who would lose no possible vantage must have both a heavy hand and a light touch. By his character and natural gifts, Leo the Thirteenth is essentially active rather than contemplative, and it is not surprising that the chief acts of his pontificate should have dealt rather with political matters than with questions of dogma and ecclesiastical authority. It has certainly been the object of the present Pope to impress upon the world the necessity of Christianity in general, and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, as a means of social redemption and a factor in political stability. This seems to be his inmost conviction, as shown in all his actions and encyclical letters. One is impressed, at every turn, by the strength of his belief in religion and in his own mission to spread it abroad. In regard to forms of faith, the opinions of mankind differ very widely, but the majority of intelligent men now living seem to hold a more or less distinct faith of one sort or another, and to require faith of some sort in their fellow-men. Common atheism has had its little day, and is out of fashion. It is certainly not possible to define that which has taken the place of the pseudo-scientific materialism which plagued society twenty or thirty years ago, and it is certainly beyond the province of this book to examine into the current convictions with which we are to begin the twentieth century. Unprejudiced persons will not, however, withhold their admiration in reviewing the life of a man who has devoted his energies, his intelligence and his strength, not to mention the enormous power wielded by him as the head of the Church, to the furtherance and accomplishment of ends which so many of us believe to be good. For the pontificate of Leo the Thirteenth has differed from that of his predecessor in that it has been active rather than passive. While Pius the Ninth was the head of the Church suffering, Leo the Thirteenth is the leader of the Church militant. This seems to be the reason why he has more than once been accused of inconsistency in his actions, notably in his instructions to French Catholics, as compared with the position he has maintained towards the Italian government. People seem to forget that, whereas the question of temporal power is deeply involved in the latter case, it has nothing whatever to do with the former, and as this question is the one most often brought up against the papacy and discussed in connection with it by people who seem to have very little idea of its real meaning, it may be as well to state here at once the Pope's own view of it. 'The temporary sovereignty is not absolutely requisite for the existence of the papacy, since the Popes were deprived of it during several centuries, but it is required in order that the pontiff's independence may display itself freely, without obstacles, and be evident and apparent in the eyes of the world. It is the social form, so to say, of his guardianship, and of his manifestation. It is necessary--not to existence, but to a right existence. The Pope who is not a sovereign is necessarily a subject, because (in the social existence of a monarchy) there is no mean term between subject and sovereign. A Pope who is a subject of a given government is continually exposed to its influence and pressure, or at least to influences connected with political aims and interests.' [Illustration: RAPHAEL'S "TRANSFIGURATION"] The writer from whom these lines are quoted comes to the natural and logical conclusion that this is not the normal position which should be occupied by the head of the Church. I may remark here that the same view is held in other countries besides Italy. The Emperor of Russia is the undisputed head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Queen Victoria occupies, by the British Constitution, almost exactly the same position towards the Anglican Church. In practice, though certainly not in theory, it is the evident purpose of the young German Emperor, constitutionally or unconstitutionally, to create for himself the same dominant pontifical position in regard to the Churches of the German Empire. It seems somewhat unjust, therefore, that the Popes, whose right to the sovereignty of Rome was for ages as undisputed as that of any King or Emperor in Europe, though secondary in itself to their ecclesiastical supremacy, should be blamed for protesting against what was undoubtedly a usurpation so far as they were concerned, although others may look upon it as a mere incident in the unification of a free people. Moreover, since the unification was accomplished, the vanquished Popes have acted with a fairness and openness which might well be imitated in other countries. The Italians, as a nation, possess remarkable talent and skill in conspiracy, and there is no organization in the world better fitted than that of the Roman Catholic Church for secretly organizing and carrying out a great political conspiracy, if any such thing were ever attempted. The action of the Popes, on the contrary, has been fair and above board. Both Pius the Ninth and Leo the Thirteenth have stated their grievances in the most public manner, and so far have they been from attempting to exercise their vast influence in directing the politics of Italy that they have enjoined upon Italian Catholics to abstain from political contests altogether. Whether in so doing they have pursued a wise course or not, history will decide, probably according to the taste of the historian; but the fact itself sufficiently proves that they have given their enemies more than a fair chance. This seems to have been the form taken by their protests; and this is a fair answer to the principal accusation brought by non-Catholics against the Pope, namely, that he is ready to sacrifice everything in an unscrupulous attempt to regain possession of temporal power. In other matters Leo the Thirteenth has always shown himself to be a statesman, while Pius the Ninth was the victim of his own meek and long-suffering character. To enter into the consideration of the political action of the Pope during the last fifteen years, would be to review the history of the world during that time. To give an idea of the man's character, it would be sufficient to recall three or four of the principal situations in which he has been placed. A volume might be written, for instance, on his action in regard to the German Army Bill, his position towards Ireland, his arbitration in the question of the Caroline Islands, and his instructions to French Catholics. It is extremely hard to form a fair judgment from documents alone, and especially from those documents which most generally come before the public, namely, articles in such reviews as the _Contemporary Review_, on the one hand, and the _Civiltà Cattolica_ on the other. Indeed, the statements on either side, if accepted without hesitation, would render all criticisms futile. Devout Roman Catholics would answer that matters of faith are beyond criticism altogether; but the writers in the _Contemporary_, for instance, will, with equal assurance, declare themselves right because they believe that they cannot be wrong. It would be better to consult events themselves rather than the current opinions of opposite parties concerning them, to set aside the consideration of the aims rightly or wrongly attributed to Leo the Thirteenth, and to look only on the results brought about by his policy in our time. In cases where actions have a merely negative result, it is just to consider the motive alone, if any criticism is necessary, and here there seems to be no particular reason for doubting the Pope's statement of his own case. For instance, in connection with Ireland, the Pope said, in the document known as 'The Circular Letter of the Propaganda': 'It is just that the Irish should seek to alleviate their afflicted condition; it is just that they should fight for their rights, nor is it denied them to collect money to alleviate the condition of the Irish.' In regard to the same matter, the 'Decree of the Holy Office' reads as follows: 'The Holy See has frequently given opportune advice and counsel to the Irish people (upon whom it has always bestowed especial affection), whenever its affairs seem to require it, by which counsel and advice they might be enabled to defend and vindicate their rights without prejudice to justice, and without disturbing the public peace.' A fairer statement of the rights of men, and a more express injunction against public disturbance of any kind, could hardly be expressed in two short sentences. Outside of Italy the position of Leo the Thirteenth in Rome is not generally understood. Most people suppose that the expression 'the prisoner in the Vatican,' which he applies to himself, and which is very generally applied to him by the more ardent of Italian Catholics, is a mere empty phrase, and that his confinement within his small dominion is purely a matter of choice. This is not the case. So far as the political theory of the question is concerned, it is probable that the Pope would not in any case be inclined to appear openly on Italian territory unless he showed himself as the official guest of King Humbert, who would naturally be expected to return the visit. To make such an official visit and such an appearance would be in fact to accept the Italian domination in Rome, a course which, as has already been noticed, would be contrary to the accepted Catholic idea of the social basis necessary for the papacy. It would not necessarily be an uncatholic act, however, but it would certainly be an unpapal one. No one would expect the ex-Empress of the French, for instance, to live openly in Paris, as though the Parisians had never been her subjects, and as though she accepted the Republic in a friendly and forgiving spirit. And the case is to all intents and purposes exactly identical. [Illustration: LOGGIE OF RAPHAEL IN THE VATICAN] But this is not all. It is unfortunately true that there is another and much better reason why Leo the Thirteenth cannot show himself in the streets of Rome. It is quite certain that his life would not be safe. The enthusiastic friends of Italy who read glowing accounts of the development of the new kingdom and write eloquent articles in the same strain will be utterly horrified at this statement, and will, moreover, laugh to scorn the idea that the modern civilized Italian could conspire to take the life of a harmless and unoffending old man. They will be quite right. The modern civilized Italians would treat the Pope with the greatest respect and consideration if he appeared amongst them. Most of them would take off their hats and stand aside while he drove by, and a great many of them would probably go down upon their knees in the streets to receive his blessing. The King, who is a gentleman, and tolerant of religious practices, would treat the head of the Church with respect. The Queen, who is not only religious, but devout, would hail the reappearance of the pontiff with enthusiasm. But unfortunately for the realization of any such thing, Rome is not peopled only by modern civilized Italians, nor Italy either. There is in the city a very large body of social democrats, anarchists and the like, not to mention the small nondescript rabble which everywhere does its best to bring discredit upon socialistic principles--a mere handful, perhaps, but largely composed of fanatics and madmen, people half hysterical from failure, poverty, vice and an indigestion of so-called 'free thought.' There have not been many sovereigns nowadays whose lives have not been attempted by such men at one time or another. Within our own memory an Emperor of Russia, a President of the French Republic and two Presidents of the United States have been actually murdered by just such men. The King of Italy, and the Emperor William the First, Napoleon the Third, Queen Victoria and Alexander the Third have all been assailed by such fanatics within our own recollection, and some of them have narrowly escaped death. Not one of them, with the exception of Alexander the Third, has been so hated by a small and desperate body of men as Leo the Thirteenth is hated by the little band which undoubtedly exists in Italy today. I will venture to say that it is a matter of continual satisfaction to the royal family of Italy, and to the Italian government, that the Pope should really continue to consider himself a prisoner within the precincts of the Vatican, since it is quite certain that if he were to appear openly in Rome the Italian authorities would not, in the long run, be able to protect his life. After all that has been said and preached upon the subject by the friends of Italy, it would be a serious matter indeed if the Pope, taking a practical advantage of his theoretic liberty, should be done to death in the streets of Rome by a self-styled Italian patriot. No one who thoroughly understands Rome at the present day is ignorant that such danger really exists, though it will no doubt be promptly denied by Italian ministers, newspaper correspondents or other intelligent but enthusiastic persons. The hysterical anarchist is unfortunately to be met with all over the world at the present day, side by side with the scientific social democrat, and too often under his immediate protection. Indeed, a great number of the acts of Leo the Thirteenth, if not all of them, have been directed against the mass of social democracy in all its forms, good, bad and indifferent; and to the zeal of his partisans in endeavouring to carry out his suggestions must be attributed some of the strong utterances of the Church's adherents upon matters political. The question of 'assent and obedience' to the Holy See in matters not relating to dogma and faith is, perhaps, the most important of all those in which the papacy is now involved. There appears to be a decided tendency to believe that Catholics ascribe to the Holy See a certain degree of infallibility in regard to national policy and local elections. The Pope's own words do not inculcate a blind obedience as necessary to the salvation of the voter, though it is expressly declared a grave offence to favour the election of persons opposed to the Roman Catholic Church and whose opinions may tend to endanger its position. The idea that the Pope's political utterances can ever be considered as ex cathedrâ is too illogical to be presented seriously to the world by thinking men. Leo the Thirteenth is undoubtedly a first-rate statesman, and it might be to the advantage not only of all good Catholics but of all humanity, and of the cause of peace itself, to follow his advice in national and party politics whenever practicable. To bind oneself to follow the political dictation of Leo the Thirteenth, and to consider such obedience to the Pope as indispensable to salvation, would be to create a precedent. Pius the Ninth was no statesman at all, and there are plenty of instances in history of Popes whose political advice would have been ruinous, if followed, though it was often formulated more authoritatively and more dictatorially than the injunctions from time to time imparted to Catholics by Leo the Thirteenth. An Alexander the Sixth would be an impossibility in our day; but in theory, if another Rodrigo Borgia should be elected to the Holy See, one should be as much bound to obey his orders in voting for the election of the President of the United States as one can possibly be to obey those of Leo the Thirteenth, seeing that the divine right to direct the political consciences of Catholics, if it existed at all, would be inherent in the papacy as an institution, and not merely attributed by mistaken people to the wise, learned and conscientious man who is now the head of the Catholic Church. But the Pope's utterances have lately been interpreted by his too zealous adherents to mean that every Catholic subject or citizen throughout the world, who has the right to vote in his own country, must give that vote in accordance with the dictates of the Church as a whole, and of his bishop in particular, under pain of committing a very grave offence against Catholic principles. A state in which every action of man, public or private, should be guided solely and entirely by his own religious convictions would no doubt be an ideal one, and would approach the social perfection of a millennium. But in the mean time a condition of society in which society itself should be guided by such political opinions as any one man, human and limited, can derive from his own conscience, pure and upright though it be, would be neither logical nor desirable. There are points in the universal struggle for life which do not turn upon questions of moral right and wrong, and which every individual has a preëminent and inherent right to decide for himself. Anyone who undertakes to speak briefly of such a personage as Leo the Thirteenth, and of such a question as the 'assent and obedience' of Catholics in matters not connected with morals or belief, lays himself open to the accusation of superficiality. We are all, however, obliged to deal quickly and decisively, in these days, with practical matters of which the discussion at length would fill many volumes. Most of us cannot do more than form an opinion based upon the little knowledge we have, express it as best we may, and pass on. The man who spends a lifetime in the study of one point, the specialist in fact, is often too ignorant of all other matters to form any general opinion worth expressing. Humanity is too broad to be put under a microscope, too strong to be treated like a little child. No one man, today, in this day of many Cæsars, can say surely and exactly what should be rendered to each of them. Leo the Thirteenth is the leader of a great organization of Christian men and women spreading all over the world; the leader of a vast body of human thought; the leader of a conservative army which will play a large part in any coming struggle between anarchy and order. He may not be here to direct when the battle begins, but he will leave a strong position for his successor to defend, and great weapons for him to wield, since he has done more to simplify and strengthen the Church's organization than a dozen Popes have done in the last two centuries. Men of such character fight the campaigns of the future many times over in their thoughts while all the world is at peace around them, and when the time comes at last, though they themselves be gone, the spirit they called up still lives to lead, the sword they forged lies ready for other hands, the roads they built are broad and straight for the march of other feet, and they themselves, in their graves, have their share in the victories that save mankind from social ruin. [Illustration] THE VATICAN The Mons Vaticanus is sometimes said to have received its name from 'vaticinium,' an oracle or prophecy; for tradition says that Numa chose the Vatican hill as a sacred place from which to declare to the people the messages he received from the gods. It is not, however, one of the seven hills on which ancient Rome was built, but forms a part of a ridge beginning with the Janiculum and ending with Monte Mario, all of which was outside the ancient limits of the city. In our day the name is applied only to the immense pontifical palace adjacent to, and connected with, the basilica of Saint Peter's. The present existence of this palace is principally due to Nicholas the Fifth, the builder pope, whose gigantic scheme would startle a modern architect. His plan was to build the Church of Saint Peter's as a starting point, and then to construct one vast central 'habitat' for the papal administration, covering the whole of what is called the Borgo, from the Castle of Sant' Angelo to the cathedral. In ancient times a portico, or covered way supported on columns, led from the bridge to the church, and it was probably from this real structure that Nicholas began his imaginary one, only a small part of which was ever completed. That small portion alone comprises the basilica and the Vatican Palace, which together form by far the greatest continuous mass of buildings in the world. The Colosseum is 195 yards long by 156 broad, including the thickness of the walls. Saint Peter's Church alone is 205 yards long and 156 broad, so that the whole Colosseum would easily stand upon the ground-plan of the church, while the Vatican Palace is more than half as long again. Nicholas the Fifth died in 1455, and the oldest parts of the present Vatican Palace are not older than his reign. They are generally known as Torre Borgia, from having been inhabited by Alexander the Sixth, who died of poison in the third of the rooms now occupied by the library, counting from the library side. The windows of these rooms look upon the large square court of the Belvedere, and that part of the palace is not visible from without. Portions of the substructure of the earlier building were no doubt utilized by Nicholas, and the secret gallery which connects the Vatican with the mausoleum of Hadrian is generally attributed to Pope John the Twenty-third, who died in 1417; but on the whole it may be said that the Vatican Palace is originally a building of the period of the Renascence, to which all successive popes have made additions. The ordinary tourist first sees the Vatican from the square as he approaches from the bridge of Sant' Angelo. But his attention is from the first drawn to the front of the church, and he but vaguely realizes that a lofty, unsymmetrical building rises on his right. He pauses, perhaps, and looks in that direction as he ascends the long, low steps of the basilica, and wonders in what part of the palace the Pope's apartments may be, while the itinerant vender of photographs shakes yards of poor little views out of their gaudy red bindings, very much as Leporello unrolls the list of Don Giovanni's conquests. If the picture peddler sees that the stranger glances at the Vatican, he forthwith points out the corner windows of the second story and informs his victim that 'Sua Santità' inhabits those rooms, and promptly offers photographs of any other interior part of the Vatican but that. The tourist looks up curiously, and finally gets rid of the fellow by buying what he does not want, with the charitable intention of giving it to some dear but tiresome relative at home. And ever afterward, perhaps, he associates with his first impression of the Vatican the eager, cunning, scapegrace features of the man who sold him the photographs. To fix a general scheme of the buildings in the mind one must climb to the top of the dome of the church and look down from the balcony which surrounds the lantern. The height is so great that even the great dimensions of the biggest palace in the world are dwarfed in the deep perspective, and the wide gardens look small and almost insignificant. But the relative proportions of the buildings and grounds appear correctly, and measure each other, as it were. Moreover, it is now so hard to obtain access to the gardens at all that the usual way of seeing them is from the top of Saint Peter's, from an elevation of four hundred feet. To the average stranger 'the Vatican' suggests only the museum of sculpture, the picture-galleries and the Loggie. He remembers, besides the works of art which he has seen, the fact of having walked a great distance through straight corridors, up and down short flights of marble steps, and through irregularly shaped and unsymmetrically disposed halls. If he had any idea of the points of the compass when he entered, he is completely confused in five minutes, and comes out at last with the sensation of having been walking in a labyrinth. He will find it hard to give anyone an impression of the sort of building in which he has been, and certainly he cannot have any knowledge of the topographical relations of its parts. Yet in his passage through the museums and galleries he has seen but a very small part of the whole, and, excepting when in the Loggie, he probably could not once have stood still and pointed in the direction of the main part of the palace. [Illustration: BELVEDERE COURT OF THE VATICAN GALLERY From a print of the last century] In order to speak even superficially of it all, it is indispensable to classify its parts in some way. Vast and irregular it is at its two ends, toward the colonnade and toward the bastions of the city, but the intervening length consists of two perfectly parallel buildings, each over three hundred and fifty yards long, about eighty yards apart, and yoked in the middle by the Braccio Nuovo of the Museum and a part of the library, so as to enclose two vast courts, the one known as Belvedere,--not to be confused with the Belvedere in the Museum,--and the other called the Garden of the Pigna, from the pine-cone which stands at one end of it. Across the ends of these parallel buildings, and toward the city, a huge pile is erected, about two hundred yards long, very irregular, and containing the papal residence and the apartments of several cardinals, the Sixtine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel, the Borgia Tower, the Stanze and Loggie of Raphael, and the Court of Saint Damasus. At the other end of the parallelogram are grouped the equally irregular but more beautiful buildings of the old Museum, of which the windows look out over the walls of the city, and which originally bore the name of Belvedere, on account of the lovely view. This is said to have been a sort of summer-house of the Borgia, not then connected with the palace by the long galleries. It would be a hopeless and a weary task to attempt to trace the history of the buildings. Some account of the Pope's private apartments has already been given in these pages. They occupy the eastern wing of the part built round the Court of Damasus; that is to say, they are at the extreme end of the Vatican, nearest the city, and over the colonnade, and the windows of the Pope's rooms are visible from the square. The vast mass which rises above the columns to the right of Saint Peter's is only a small part of the whole palace, but is not the most modern, by any means. It contains, for instance, the Sixtine Chapel, which is considerably older than the present church, having been built by Sixtus the Fourth, whose beautiful bronze monument is in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in Saint Peter's. It contains, too, Raphael's Stanze, or halls, and Bramante's famous Loggie, the beautiful architecture of which is a frame for some of Raphael's best work. [Illustration: MICHELANGELO'S "LAST JUDGMENT"] But any good guide book will furnish all such information, which it would be fruitless to give in such a work as this. In the pages of Murray the traveller will find, set down in order and accurately, the ages, the dimensions, and the exact positions of all the parts of the building, with the names of the famous artists who decorated each. He will not find set down there, however, what one may call the atmosphere of the place, which is something as peculiar and unforgettable, though in a different way, as that of Saint Peter's. It is quite unlike anything else, for it is part of the development of churchmen's administration to an ultimate limit in the high centre of churchmanism. No doubt there was much of that sort of thing in various parts of Europe long ago, and in England before Henry the Eighth, and it is to be found in a small degree in Vienna to this day, where the traditions of the departed Holy Roman Empire are not quite dead. It is hard to define it, but it is in everything; in the uniforms of the attendants, in their old-fashioned faces, in the spotless cleanliness of all the Vatican--though no one is ever to be seen handling a broom--in the noiselessly methodical manner of doing everything that is to be done, in the scholarly rather than scientific arrangement of the objects in the museum and galleries--above all, in the visitor's own sensations. No one talks loudly among the statues of the Vatican, and there is a feeling of being in church, so that one is disagreeably shocked when a guide, conducting a party of tourists, occasionally raises his voice in order to be heard. It is all very hard to define, while it is quite impossible to escape feeling it, and it must ultimately be due to the dominating influence of the churchmen, who arrange the whole place as though it were a church. An American lady, on hearing that the Vatican is said to contain eleven thousand rooms, threw up her hands and laughingly exclaimed, 'Think of the housemaids!' But there are no housemaids in the Vatican, and perhaps the total absence of even the humblest feminine influence has something to do with the austere impression which everything produces. On the whole, the Vatican may be divided into seven portions. These are the pontifical residence, the Sixtine and Pauline chapels, the picture galleries, the library, the museums of sculpture and archæology, the outbuildings, including the barracks of the Swiss Guards, and, lastly, the gardens with the Pope's Casino. Of these the Sixtine Chapel, the galleries and museums, and the library, are incomparably the most important. The name Sixtine is derived from Sixtus the Fourth, as has been said, and is usually, but not correctly, spelled 'Sistine.' The library was founded by Nicholas the Fifth, whose love of books was almost equal to his passion for building. The galleries are representative of Raphael's work, which predominates to such an extent that the paintings of almost all other artists are of secondary importance, precisely as Michelangelo filled the Sixtine Chapel with himself. As for the museums, the objects they contain have been accumulated by many popes, but their existence ought, perhaps, to be chiefly attributed to Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, the principal representatives of the Rovere and Medici families. On the walls of the Sixtine Chapel there are paintings by such men as Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, as well as by a number of others; but Michelangelo overshadows them all with his ceiling and his 'Last Judgment.' There is something overpowering about him, and there is no escaping from his influence. He not only covers great spaces with his brush, but he fills them with his masterful drawing, and makes them alive with a life at once profound and restless. One does not feel, as with other painters, that a vision has been projected upon a flat surface; one rather has the impression that a mysterious reality of life has been called up out of senseless material. What we see is not imaginary motion represented, but real motion arrested, as it were, in its very act, and ready to move again. Many have said that the man's work was monstrous. It was monstrously alive, monstrously vigorous; at times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means of carrying it to the concrete. No giantism of limb and feature was beyond the ability of his brush; no astounding foreshortening was too much for his unerring point; no vast perspective was too deep for his knowledge and strength. His production was limited only by the length of his life. Great genius means before all things great and constant creative power; it means wealth of resource and invention; it means quantity as well as quality. No truly great genius, unless cut short by early death, has left little of itself. Besides a man's one great masterpiece, there are always a hundred works of the same hand, far beyond the powers of ordinary men; and the men of Michelangelo's day worked harder than we work. Perhaps they thought harder, too, being more occupied with creation, at a time when there was little, than we are with the difficult task of avoiding the unintentional reinvention of things already invented, now that there is so much. The latter is a real difficulty in our century, when almost every mine of thought has been worked to a normal depth by minds of normal power, and it needs all the ruthless strength of original genius to go deeper, and hew and blast a way through the bedrock of men's limitations to new veins of treasure below. It has been said of Titian by a great French critic that 'he absorbed his predecessors and ruined his successors.' Michelangelo absorbed no one and ruined no one; for no painter, sculptor or architect ever attempted what he accomplished, either before him or after him. No sane person ever tried to produce anything like the 'Last Judgment,' the marble 'Moses,' or the dome of Saint Peter's. Michelangelo stood alone as a creator, as he lived a lonely man throughout the eighty-nine years of his life. He had envy but not competition to deal with. There is no rivalry between his paintings in the Sixtine Chapel and those of the many great artists who have left their work beside his on the same walls. The chapel is a beautiful place in itself, by its simple and noble proportions, as well as by the wonderful architectural decorations of the ceiling, conceived by Michelangelo as a series of frames for his paintings. Beautiful beyond description, too, is the exquisite marble screen. No one can say certainly who made it; it was perhaps designed by the architect of the chapel himself, Baccio Pintelli. There are a few such marvels of unknown hands in the world, and a sort of romance clings to them, with an element of mystery that stirs the imagination, in a dreamy way, far more than the gilded oak tree in the arms of Sixtus the Fourth, by which the name of Rovere is symbolized. Sixtus commanded, and the chapel was built. But who knows where Baccio Pintelli lies? Or who shall find the grave where the hand that carved the lovely marble screen is laid at rest? [Illustration: SIXTINE CHAPEL] It is often dark in the Sixtine Chapel. The tourist can rarely choose his day, and not often his hour, and, in the weary traveller's hard-driven appreciation, Michelangelo may lose his effect by the accident of a thunder shower. Yet of all sights in Rome, the Sixtine Chapel most needs sunshine. If in any way possible, go there at noon on a bright winter's day, when the sun is streaming in through the high windows at the left of the 'Last Judgment.' Everyone has heard of the picture before seeing it, and almost everybody is surprised or disappointed on seeing it for the first time. Then, too, the world's ideas about the terrific subject of the painting have changed since Michelangelo's day. Religious belief can no more be judged by the standard of realism. It is wiser to look at the fresco as a work of art alone, as the most surprising masterpiece of a master draughtsman, and as a marvellous piece of composition. In the lower part of the picture, there is a woman rising from her grave in a shroud. It has been suggested that Michelangelo meant to represent by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness. The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of ideas which made that age terrible and beautiful by turns, devout and unbelieving, strong and weak, scholarly upon a foundation of barbarism, and most realistic when most religious. You may see the reflected confusion in the puzzled faces of most tourists who look at the 'Last Judgment' for the first time. A young American girl smiles vaguely at it; an Englishman glares, expressionless, at it through an eyeglass, with a sort of cold inquiry--'Oh! is that all?' he might say; a German begins at Paradise at the upper left-hand corner, and works his way through the details to hell below, at the right. But all are inwardly disturbed, or puzzled, or profoundly interested, and when they go away this is the great picture which, of all they have seen, they remember with the most clearness. And as Michelangelo set his great mark upon the Sixtine, so Raphael took the Stanze and the Loggie for himself--and some of the halls of the picture-galleries too. Raphael represented the feminine element in contrast with Michelangelo's rude masculinity. There hangs the great 'Transfiguration,' which, all but finished, was set up by the young painter's body when he lay in state--a picture too large for the sentiment it should express, while far too small for the subject it presents--yet, in its way, a masterpiece of composition. For in a measure Raphael succeeded in detaching the transfigured Christ from the crowded foreground, and in creating two distinct centres of interest. The frescoes in the Stanze represent subjects of less artistic impossibility, and in painting them Raphael expended in beauty of design the genius which, in the 'Transfiguration,' he squandered in attempting to overcome insuperable difficulties. Watch the faces of your fellow-tourists now, and you will see that the puzzled expression is gone. They are less interested than they were before the 'Last Judgment,' but they are infinitely better pleased. Follow them on, to the library. They will enter with a look of expectation, and presently you will see disappointment and weariness in their eyes. Libraries are for the learned, and there are but a handful of scholars in a million. Besides, the most interesting rooms, the Borgia apartments, have been closed for many years and have only recently been opened again after being wisely and well restored under the direction of Leo the Thirteenth. Two or three bad men are responsible for almost all the evil that has been said and written against the characters of the Popes in the Middle Age. John the Twelfth, of the race of Theodora Senatrix, Farnese of Naples and Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard, who was Alexander the Sixth, are the chief instances. There were, indeed, many popes who were not perfect, who were more or less ambitious, avaricious, warlike, timid, headstrong, weak, according to their several characters; but it can hardly be said that any of them were, like those I have mentioned, really bad men through and through, vicious, unscrupulous and daringly criminal. According to Guicciardini, Alexander the Sixth knew nothing of Cæsar Borgia's intention of poisoning their rich friend, the Cardinal of Corneto, with whom they were both to sup in a villa on August 17, 1503. The Pope arrived at the place first, was thirsty, asked for drink, and by a mistake was given wine from a flask prepared and sent by Cæsar for the Cardinal. Cæsar himself came in next, and drank likewise. The Pope died the next day, but Cæsar recovered, though badly poisoned, to find himself a ruined man and ultimately a fugitive. The Cardinal did not touch the wine. This event ended an epoch and a reign of terror, and it pilloried the name of Borgia for ever. Alexander expired in the third room of the Borgia apartments, in the raving of a terrible delirium, during which the superstitious bystanders believed that he was conversing with Satan, to whom he had sold his soul for the papacy, and some were ready to swear that they actually saw seven devils in the room when he was dying. The fact that these witnesses were able to count the fiends speaks well for their coolness, and for the credibility of their testimony. It has been much the fashion of late years to cry down the Vatican collection of statues, and to say that, with the exception of the 'Torso' it does not contain a single one of the few great masterpieces known to exist, such as the 'Hermes of Olympia,' the 'Venus of Medici,' the 'Borghese Gladiator,' the 'Dying Gaul.' We are told that the 'Apollo' of the Belvedere is a bad copy, and that the 'Laocoön' is no better, in spite of the signatures of the three Greek artists, one on each of the figures; that the 'Antinous' is a bad Hermes; and so on to the end of the collection, it being an easy matter to demolish the more insignificant statues after proving the worthlessness of the principal ones. Much of this criticism comes to us from Germany. But a German can criticise and yet admire, whereas an Anglo-Saxon usually despises what he criticises at all. Isaac D'Israeli says somewhere that certain opinions, like certain statues, require to be regarded from a proper distance. Probably none of the statues in the Vatican is placed as the sculptor would have placed it to be seen to advantage. Michelangelo believed in the 'Laocoön,' and he was at least as good a judge as most modern critics, and he roughed out the arm that was missing,--his sketch lies on the floor in the corner,--and devoted much time to studying the group. It is true that he is said to have preferred the torso of the 'Hercules,' but he did not withhold his admiration of the other good things. Of the 'Apollo' it is argued that it is insufficiently modelled. Possibly it stood in a very high place and did not need much modelling, for the ancients never wasted work, nor bestowed it where it could not be seen. However that may be, it is a far better statue, excepting the bad restorations, than it is now generally admitted to be, though it is not so good as people used to believe that it was. Apparently there are two ways of looking at objects of art. The one way is to look for the faults; the other way is to look for the beauties. It is plain that it must be the discovery of the beauty which gives pleasure, while the criticism of shortcomings can only flatter the individual's vanity. There cannot be much doubt but that Alcibiades got more enjoyment out of life than Diogenes. The oldest decorated walls in the palace are those by Fra Angelico in the Chapel of Nicholas. For some reason or other this chapel at one time ceased to be used, the door was walled up and the very existence of the place was forgotten. In the last century Bottari, having read about it in Vasari, set to work to find it, and at last got into it through the window which looks upon the roof of the Sixtine Chapel. The story, which is undoubtedly true, gives an idea of the vastness of the palace, and certainly suggests the probability of more forgotten treasures of art shut up in forgotten rooms. One other such at least there is. High up in the Borgia Tower, above the Stanze of Raphael, is a suite of rooms once inhabited by Cardinal Bibbiena, of the Chigi family, and used since then by more than one Assistant Secretary of State. There is a small chapel there, with a window looking upon an inner court. This was once the luxurious cardinal's bath-room, and was beautifully painted by Raphael in fresco, with mythological subjects. In 1835, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Passavant saw it as it had originally been, with frescoes still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its place in a niche painted with river gods. In one of the Vatican's periodical fits of prudery the frescoes were completely hidden with a wooden wainscot, the bath-tub was taken away and the room was turned into a chapel. It is believed, however, that the paintings still exist behind their present covering. The walk through the Museum is certainly one of the most wonderful in the world. There are more masterpieces, perhaps, in Florence; possibly objects of greater value may be accumulated in the British Museum; but nowhere in the world are statues and antiquities so well arranged as in the Vatican, and perhaps the orderly beauty of arrangement has as much to do as anything else with the charm which pervades the whole. One is brought into direct communication with Rome at its best, brilliant with the last reflections of Hellenic light; and again one is brought into contact with Rome at its worst, and beyond its worst, in its decay and destruction. Amid the ruin, too, there is the visible sign of a new growth in the beginnings of Christianity, from which a new power, a new history, a new literature and a new art were to spring up and blossom, and in the rude sculpture of the Shepherd, the Lamb and the Fishes lies the origin of Michelangelo's 'Moses' and 'Pietà.' There, too, one may read, as in a book, the whole history of death in Rome, graven in the long lines of ancient inscriptions, the tale of death when there was no hope, and its story when hope had begun in the belief in the resurrection of the dead. There the sadness of the sorrowing Roman contrasts with the gentle hopefulness of the bereaved Christian, and the sentiment and sentimentality of mankind during the greatest of the world's developments are told in the very words which men and women dictated to the stone-cutter. To those who can read the inscriptions the impression of direct communication with antiquity is very strong. For those who cannot there is still a special charm in the long succession of corridors, in the occasional glimpses of the gardens, in the magnificence of the decorations, as well as in the statues and fragments which line the endless straight walls. One returns at last to the outer chambers, one lingers here and there, to look again at something one has liked, and in the end one goes out remembering the place rather than the objects it contains, and desiring to return again for the sake of the whole sensation one has had rather than for any defined purpose. At the last, opposite the iron turnstile by which visitors are counted, there is the closed gate of the garden. It is very hard to get admission to it now, for the Pope himself is often there when the weather is fine. In the Italian manner of gardening, the grounds are well laid out, and produce the effect of being much larger than they really are. They are not, perhaps, very remarkable, and Leo the Thirteenth must sometimes long for the hills of Carpineto and the freer air of the mountains, as he drives round and round in the narrow limits of his small domain, or walks a little under the shade of the ilex trees, conversing with his gardener or his architect. Yet those who love Italy love its old-fashioned gardens, the shady walks, the deep box-hedges, the stiff little summer-houses, the fragments of old statues at the corners, and even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical jesting of the last century. When all is seen, the tourist gets into his cab and drives down the empty paved way by the wall of the library, along the basilica, and out once more to the great square before the church. Or, if he be too strong to be tired, he will get out at the steps and go in for a few minutes to breathe the quiet air before going home, to get the impression of unity, after the impressions of variety which he has received in the Vatican, and to take away with him something of the peace which fills the cathedral of Christendom. [Illustration] SAINT PETER'S We have an involuntary reverence for all witnesses of history, be they animate or inanimate, men, animals, or stones. The desire to leave a work behind is in every man and man-child, from the strong leader who plants his fame in a nation's marrow, and teaches unborn generations to call him glorious, to the boy who carves his initials upon his desk at school. Few women have it. Perhaps the wish to be remembered is what fills that one ounce or so of matter by which modern statisticians assert that the average man's brain is heavier than the average woman's. The wish in ourselves makes us respect the satisfaction of it which the few obtain. Probably few men have not secretly longed to see their names set up for ages, like the 'Paulus V. Borghesius' over the middle of the portico of Saint Peter's, high above the entrance to the most vast monument of human hands in existence. Modesty commands the respect of a few, but it is open success that appeals to almost all mankind. Pasquin laughed:-- 'Angulus est Petri, Pauli frons tota. Quid inde? Non Petri, Paulo stat fabricata domus.' Which means:-- 'The corner is Peter's, but the whole front Paul's. Not being Peter's, the house is built for Paul.' The thing itself, the central cathedral of Christendom, is so enormous that many who gaze on it for the first time do not even notice that hugely lettered papal name. The building is so far beyond any familiar proportions that at first sight all details are lost upon its broad front. The mind and judgment are dazed and staggered. The earth should not be able to bear such weight upon its crust without cracking and bending like an overloaded table. On each side the colonnades run curving out like giant arms, always open to receive the nations that go up there to worship. The dome broods over all, like a giant's head motionless in meditation. The vastness of the structure takes hold of a man as he issues from the street by which he has come from Sant' Angelo. In the open space, in the square and in the ellipse between the colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together, the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet high produces a monstrous effect upon the mind. Set down in words, a description of it conveys no clear conception; seen for the first time, the impression produced by it cannot be put into language. It is something like a shock to the intelligence, perhaps, and not altogether a pleasant one. Carried beyond the limits of a mere mistake, exaggeration becomes caricature; but when it is magnified beyond humanity's common measures, it may acquire an element approaching to terror. The awe-striking giants of mythology were but magnified men. The first sight of Saint Peter's affects one as though, in the everyday streets, walking among one's fellows, one should meet with a man forty feet high. Involuntarily we conceive that Saint Peter's has always stood where it stands, and it becomes at once, in our imaginations, the witness of much which it really never saw. Its calm seems meant to outlast history; one thinks that, while the Republic built Rome, and Augustus adorned it, and Nero burned it on the other side of the Tiber, the cathedral of the world was here, looking on across the yellow water, conscious of its own eternity, and solemnly indifferent to the ventures and adventures of mankind. It is hard to reduce the great building in imagination to the little basilica built by Constantine the sentimentalist, on the site of Nero's circus; built by some other man perhaps, for no one knows surely; but a little church, at best, compared with many of those which Saint Peter's dwarfs to insignificance now. To remind men of him the effigy of that same Constantine sits on a marble charger there, on the left, beneath the portico, behind the great iron gate, with head thrown back, and lifted hand, and marble eyes gazing ever on the Cross. Some say that he really embraced Christianity only when dying. The names of the churches founded by him in Constantinople are all sentimentally ambiguous, from Sophia, 'wisdom,' to Anastasia, 'resurrection,' or revival, and hence 'spring.' It is strange that the places of worship built by him in Rome, if they were really his work, should bear such exceedingly definite designations and direct dedications as Saint Peter's, Saint John's, Saint Paul's and the Church of the Holy Cross. At all events, whether he believed much or little, Christianity owes him much, and romance is indebted to him for almost as much more. But for Constantine there might have been no Charlemagne, no Holy Roman Empire. In old times criminals of low degree used to be executed on the Esquiline, and were buried there, unburned, unless their bodies were left to wither upon the cross in wind and sun, as generally happened. The place was the hideous feeding ground of wild dogs and carrion birds, and witches went there by night to perform their horrid rites. It was there that Canidia and her companion buried a living boy up to the neck that they might make philters of his vitals. Everyone must remember the end of Horace's imprecation:-- "... insepulta membra different lupi, Et Esquilinæ alites." Then came Mæcenas and redeemed all that land; turned it into a garden, and beautified it; uprooted the mouldering crosses, whereon still hung the bones of dead slaves, and set out trees in their stead; piled thirty feet of clean earth upon the shallow graves of executed murderers and of generations of thieves, and planted shrubbery and flowers, and made walks and paths and shady places. Therefore it happened that the southern spur of the Janiculum became after that time a place of execution and cruel death. The city had never grown much on that side of the Tiber,--that is to say, on the right bank,--and the southern end of the long hill was a wilderness of sand and brushwood. [Illustration: MAMERTINE PRISON] In the deep Mamertine prison, behind the Tabulary of the Forum, it was customary to put to death only political misdoers, and their bodies were then thrown down the Gemonian steps. 'Vixerunt,' said Cicero, grimly, when Catiline's fellow conspirators lay there dead; and perhaps the sword that was to fall upon his own neck was even then forged. The prison is still intact. The blood of Vercingetorix and of Sejanus is on the rocky floor. Men say that Saint Peter was imprisoned here. But because he was not of high degree Nero's executioners led him out across the Forum and over the Sublician bridge, up to the heights of Janiculum. He was then very old and weak, so that he could not carry his cross, as condemned men were made to do. When they had climbed more than half-way up the height, seeing that he could not walk much farther, they crucified him. He said that he was not worthy to suffer as the Lord had suffered, and begged them to plant his cross with the head downward in the deep yellow sand. The executioners did so. The Christians who had followed were not many, and they stood apart weeping. When he was dead, after much torment, and the sentinel soldier had gone away, they took the holy body, and carried it along the hillside, and buried it at night close against the long wall of Nero's circus, on the north side, near the place where they buried the martyrs killed daily by Nero's wild beasts and in other cruel ways. They marked the spot, and went there often to pray. Lately certain learned men have said that he was crucified in the circus itself, but the evidence is slight compared with the undoubted weight of a very ancient tradition, and turns upon the translation of a single word. Within two years Nero fell and perished miserably, scarcely able to take his own life to escape being beaten to death in the Forum. In a little more than a year there were four emperors in Rome; Galba, Otho and Vitellius followed one another quickly; then came Vespasian, and then Titus, with his wars in Palestine, and then Domitian. At last, nearly thirty years after the apostle had died on the Janiculum, there was a bishop called Anacletus, who had been ordained priest by Saint Peter himself. The times being quieter then, this Anacletus built a little oratory, a very small chapel, in which three or four persons could kneel and pray over the grave. And that was the beginning of Saint Peter's Church. But Anacletus died a martyr too, and the bishops after him all perished in the same way up to Eutichianus, whose name means something like 'the fortunate one' in barbarous Greek-Latin, and who was indeed fortunate, for he died a natural death. But in the mean time certain Greeks had tried to steal the holy body, so that the Roman Christians carried it away for nineteen months to the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, after which they brought it back again and laid it in its place. And again after that, when the new circus was built by Elagabalus, they took it once more to the same catacombs, where it remained in safety for a long time. Now came Constantine, in love with religion and inclined to think Christianity best, and made a famous edict in Milan, and it is said that he laid the deep foundations of the old Church of Saint Peter's, which afterward stood more than eleven hundred years. He built it over the little oratory of Anacletus, whose chapel stood where the saint's body had lain, under the nearest left-hand pillar of the canopy that covers the high altar, as you go up from the door. Constantine's church was founded, on the south side, within the lines of Nero's circus, outside of it on the north side, and parallel with its length. Most churches are built with the apse to the east, but Constantine's, like the present basilica, looked west, because from time immemorial the bishop of Rome, when consecrating, stood on the farther side of the altar from the people, facing them over it. And the church was consecrated by Pope Sylvester the First, in the year 326. Constantine built his church as a memorial and not as a tomb, because at that time Saint Peter's body lay in the catacombs, where it had been taken in the year 219, under Elagabalus. But at last, in the days of Honorius, disestablisher of heathen worship, the body was brought back for the last time, with great concourse and ceremony, and laid where it or its dust still lies, in a brazen sarcophagus. Then came Alaric and the Vandals and the Goths. But they respected the church and the Saint's body, though they respected Rome very little. And Odoacer extinguished the flickering light of the Western Empire, and Dietrich of Bern, as the Goths called Theodoric of Verona, founded the Gothic kingdom, and left his name in the Nibelungenlied and elsewhere. At last arose Charles, who was called the 'Great' first on account of his size, and afterwards on account of his conquests, which exceeded those of Julius Cæsar in extent; and this Charlemagne came to Rome, and marched up into the Church of Constantine, and bowed his enormous height for Leo the Third to set upon it the crown of the new empire, which was ever afterwards called the Holy Roman Empire, until Napoleon wiped out its name in Vienna, having girt on Charlemagne's sword, and founded an empire of his own, which lasted a dozen years instead of a thousand. So the ages slipped along till the church was in bad repair and in danger of falling, when Nicholas the Fifth was Pope, in 1450. He called Alberti and Rossellini, who made the first plan; but it was the great Julius the Second who laid the first stone of the present basilica, according to Bramante's plan, under the northeast pillar of the dome, where the statue of Saint Veronica now stands. The plan was changed many times, and it was not until 1626, on the thirteen hundredth anniversary of Saint Sylvester's consecration, that Urban the Eighth consecrated what we now call the Church of Saint Peter. We who have known Saint Peter's since the old days cannot go in under the portico without recalling vividly the splendid pageants we have seen pass in and out by the same gate. Even before reaching it we glance up from the vast square to the high balcony, remembering how from there Pius the Ninth used to chant out the Pontifical benediction to the city and the world, while in the silence below one could hear the breathing of a hundred thousand human beings. [Illustration: PANORAMA From the Orti Farnesiani] That is all in ghostland now, and will soon be beyond the reach of memory. In the coachhouses behind the Vatican, the old state coaches are mouldering; and the Pope, in his great sedia gestatoria, the bearers, the fan-men, the princes, the cardinals, the guards and the people will not in our time be again seen together under the Roman sky. Old-fashioned persons sigh for the pageantry of those days when they go up the steps into the church. The heavy leathern curtain falls by its own weight, and the air is suddenly changed. A hushed, half-rhythmic sound, as of a world breathing in its sleep, makes the silence alive. The light is not dim or ineffectual, but very soft and high, and it is as rich as floating gold dust in the far distance, and in the apse, an eighth of a mile from the door. There is a blue and hazy atmospheric distance, as painters call it, up in the lantern of the cupola, a twelfth of a mile above the pavement. It is all very big. The longest ship that crosses the ocean could lie in the nave between the door and the apse, and her masts from deck to truck would scarcely top the canopy of the high altar, which looks so small under the super-possible vastness of the immense dome. We unconsciously measure dwellings made with hands by our bodily stature. But there is a limit to that. No man standing for the first time upon the pavement of Saint Peter's can make even a wide guess at the size of what he sees unless he knows the dimensions of some one object. Close to Filarete's central bronze door a round disk of porphyry is sunk in the pavement. That is the spot where the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned in the old church; Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa and many others received the crown, the Chrism and the blessing here, before Constantine's ancient basilica was torn down lest it should fall of itself. For he did not build as Titus built--if, indeed, the old church was built by him at all. A man may well cast detail of history to the winds and let his mind stand free to the tremendous traditions of the place, since so much of them is truth beyond all question. Standing where Charles the Great was crowned eleven hundred years ago, he stands not a hundred yards from the grave where the Chief Apostle was first buried. There he has lain now for fifteen hundred years, since the 'religion of the fathers' was 'disestablished,' as we should say, by Honorius, and since the Popes became Pontifices Maximi of the new faith. This was the place of Nero's circus long before the Colosseum was dreamed of, and the foundations of Christendom's cathedral are laid in earth wet with blood of many thousand martyrs. During two hundred and fifty years every bishop of Rome died a martyr, to the number of thirty consecutive Popes. It is really and truly holy ground, and it is meet that the air, once rent by the death cries of Christ's innocent folk, should be enclosed in the world's most sacred place, and be ever musical with holy song, and sweet with incense. It needs fifty thousand persons to fill the nave and transepts in Saint Peter's. It is known that at least that number have been present in the church several times within modern memory; but it is thought that the building would hold eighty thousand--as many as could be seated on the tiers in the Colosseum. Such a concourse was there at the opening of the Oecumenical Council in December, 1869, and at the jubilees celebrated by Leo the Thirteenth; and on all those occasions there was plenty of room in the aisles, besides the broad spaces which were required for the functions themselves. To feel one's smallness and realize it, one need only go and stand beside the marble cherubs that support the holy-water basins against the first pillar. They look small, if not graceful; but they are of heroic size, and the bowls are as big as baths. Everything in the place is vast; all the statues are colossal, all the pictures enormous; the smallest detail of the ornamentation would dwarf any other building in the world, and anywhere else even the chapels would be churches. The eye strains at everything, and at first the mind is shocked out of its power of comparison. But the strangest, most extravagant, most incomprehensible, most disturbing sight of all is to be seen from the upper gallery in the cupola looking down to the church below. Hanging in mid-air, with nothing under one's feet, one sees the church projected in perspective within a huge circle. It is as though one saw it upside down and inside out. Few men could bear to stand there without that bit of iron railing between them and the hideous fall; and the inevitable slight dizziness which the strongest head feels may make one doubt for a moment whether what is really the floor below may not be in reality a ceiling above, and whether one's sense of gravitation be not inverted in an extraordinary dream. At that distance human beings look no bigger than flies, and the canopy of the high altar might be an ordinary table. And thence, climbing up between the double domes, one may emerge from the almost terrible perspective to the open air, and suddenly see all Rome at one's feet, and all the Roman mountains stretched out to south and east, in perfect grace of restful outline, shoulder to shoulder, like shadowy women lying side by side and holding hands. And the broken symmetry of the streets and squares ranges below, cut by the winding ribbon of the yellow Tiber; to the right the low Aventine, with the dark cypresses of the Protestant cemetery beyond, and the Palatine, crested with trees and ruins; the Pincian on the left, with its high gardens, and the mass of foliage of the Villa Medici behind it; the lofty tower of the Capitol in the midst of the city; and the sun clasping all to its heart of gold, the new and the old alike, past and present, youth, age and decay,--generous as only the sun can be in this sordid and miserly world, where bread is but another name for blood, and a rood of growing corn means a pound of human flesh. The sun is the only good thing in nature that always gives itself to man for nothing but the mere trouble of sitting in the sunshine; and Rome without sunshine is a very grim and gloomy town today. It is worth the effort of climbing so high. Four hundred feet in the air, you look down on what ruled half the world by force for ages, and on what rules the other half today by faith--the greatest centre of conquest and of discord and of religion which the world has ever seen. A thousand volumes have been written about it by a thousand wise men. A word will tell what it has been--the heart of the world. Hither was drawn the world's blood by all the roads that lead to Rome, and hence it was forced out again along the mighty arteries of the Cæsars' marches--to redden the world with the Roman name. Blood, blood and more blood,--that was the history of old Rome,--the blood of brothers, the blood of foes, the blood of martyrs without end. It flowed and ebbed in varying tide at the will of the just and the unjust, but there was always more to shed, and there were always more hands to shed it. And so it may be again hereafter; for the name of Rome has a heart-stirring ring, and there has always been as much blood spilled for the names of things as for the things themselves. It is wonderful to stand there and realize what every foot means, beneath that narrow standing room on the gallery outside the lantern, counting from the top downward as one counts the years of certain trees by the branches. For every division there is a pope and an architect: Sixtus the Fifth and Giacomo della Porta, Paul the Third and Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi and Leo the Tenth, Julius the Second and Bramante, Nicholas the Fifth and Alberti. Then the old church of Constantine, and then the little oratory built over Saint Peter's grave by Saint Anacletus, the third or, according to some, the fourth bishop of Rome; then, even before that, Nero's circus, which was either altogether destroyed or had gone to ruins before Anacletus built his chapel. And far below all are buried the great of the earth, deep down in the crypt. There lies the chief Apostle, and there lie many martyred bishops side by side; men who came from far lands to die the holy death in Rome,--from Athens, from Bethlehem, from Syria, from Africa. There lie the last of the Stuarts, with their pitiful kingly names, James the Third, Charles the Third, and Henry the Ninth; the Emperor Otho the Second has lain there a thousand years; Pope Boniface the Eighth of the Caetani, whom Sciarra Colonna took prisoner at Anagni, is there, and Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander the Sixth, lay there awhile, and Agnes Colonna, and Queen Christina of Sweden, and the Great Countess, and many more besides, both good and bad--even to Catharine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, of romantic memory. In the high clear air above, it chills one to think of the death silence down there in the crypt; but when you enter the church again after the long descent, and feel once more the quick change of atmosphere by which a blind man could tell that he was in Saint Peter's, you feel also the spell of the place and its ancient enchantment; you do not regret the high view you left above, and the dead under your feet seem all at once near and friendly. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF SAINT PETER'S] It is not an exaggeration or the misuse of a word to call it magic. Magic is supposed to be a means of communication with beings of another world. It is scarcely a metaphor to say that Saint Peter's is that. It is the mere truth and no more, and you can feel that it is if you will stand, with half-closed eyes, against one of the great pillars, just within hearing of the voices that sing solemn music in the chapel of the choir, and make yourself a day-dream of the people that go up the nave by seeing them a little indistinctly. If you will but remember how much humanity is like humanity in all ages, you can see the old life again as it was a hundred years--two, three, five, ten hundred years before that. If you are fortunate, just then, a score of German seminary students may pass you, in their scarlet cloth gowns, marching two and two in order, till they wheel by the right and go down upon their knees with military precision before the gate of the Chapel of the Sacrament. Or if it be the day and hour, a procession crosses the church, with lights and song and rich vestments, and a canopy over the Sacred Host, which the Cardinal Archpriest himself is carrying reverently before him with upraised hands hidden under the cope, while the censers swing high to right and left. Or the singers from the choir go by, in violet silk and lace, hurrying along the inner south aisle to the door of the sacristy, where heavy yellow cherubs support marble draperies under the monument of Pius the Eighth. If you stand by your pillar a little while, something will surely happen to help your dream, and sweep you back a century or two. And if not, and if you have a little imagination of your own which can stir itself without help from outside, you can call up the figures of those that lie dead below, and of those who in ages gone have walked the dim aisles of the ancient church. Up the long nave comes Pelagius, Justinian's pope, with Narses by his side, to swear by holy cross and sacred gospel that he has not slain Vigilius, Pope before him: and this Narses, smooth-faced, passionless, thoughtful, is the conqueror of the Goths, and having conquered them, he would not suffer that a hair of the remnant of them should be hurt, because he had given his word. High-handed Henry the Fifth, claiming power over the Church, being refused full coronation by Pope Paschal till he yields, seizes Pope and College of Cardinals then and there, and imprisons them till he has starved them to submission, and half requites the Church for Gregory's humiliation of the father whom he himself thrust from the throne--of that Henry whom the strong Hildebrand made to do penance barefoot on the snow in the courtyard of Matilda's Castle at Canossa. And Matilda herself, the Great Countess, the once all beautiful, betrayed in love, the half sainted, the all romantic, rises before you from her tomb below, in straight, rich robes and flowing golden hair, and once more makes gift of all her vast possessions to the Church of Rome. Nicholas Rienzi strides by, strange compound of heroism, vanity and high poetry, calling himself in one breath the people's tribune, and Augustus, and an emperor's son. There is a rush of armed men shouting furiously in Spanish, 'Carne! Sangre! Bourbon!' There is a clanging of steel, a breaking down of gates, and the Constable of Bourbon's horde pours in, irresistible, ravaging all, while he himself lies stark and stiff outside, pierced by Bernardino Passeri's short bolt, and Clement trembles in Sant' Angelo. Christina of Sweden, Monaldeschi's murder red upon her soul, comes next, fawning for forgiveness, to die in due time over there in the Corsini palace by the Tiber. A man may call up half the world's history in half an hour in such a place, toward evening, when the golden light streams through the Holy Dove in the apse. And, in imagination, to those who have seen the great pageants within our memory, the individual figures grow smaller as the magnificence of the display increases out of all proportion, until the church fills again with the vast throngs that witnessed the jubilees of Leo the Thirteenth in recent years, and fifty thousand voices send up a rending cheer while the most splendid procession of these late days goes by. It was in the Chapel of the Sacrament that the body of the good Pope Pius the Ninth was laid in state for several days. That was a strange and solemn sight, too. The gates of the church were all shut but one, and that was only a little opened, so that the people passed in one by one from the great wedge-shaped crowd outside--a crowd that began at the foot of the broad steps in the Piazza, and struggled upward all the afternoon, closer and closer toward the single entrance. For in the morning only the Roman nobles and the prelates and high ecclesiastics were admitted, by another way. Within the church the thin stream of men and women passed quickly between a double file of Italian soldiers. That was the first and last time since 1870 that Italian troops were under arms within the consecrated precincts. It was still winter, and the afternoon light was dim, and it seemed a long way to the chapel. The good man lay low, with his slippered feet between the bars of the closed gate. The people paused as they passed, and most of them kissed the embroidered cross, and looked at the still features, before they went on. It was dim, but the six tall waxen torches threw a warm light on the quiet face, and the white robes reflected it around. There were three torches on each side, too, and there were three Noble Guards in full dress, motionless, with drawn swords, as though on parade. But no one looked at them. Only the marble face, with its kind, far-away smile, fixed itself in each man's eyes, and its memory remained with each when he had gone away. It was very solemn and simple, and there were no other lights in the church save the little lamps about the Confession and before the altars. The long, thin stream of people went on swiftly and out by the sacristy all the short afternoon till it was night, and the rest of the unsatisfied crowd was left outside as the single gate was closed. Few saw the scene which followed, when the good Pope's body had lain four days in state, and was then placed in its coffin at night, to be hoisted high and swung noiselessly into the temporary tomb above the small door on the east side--that is, to the left--of the Chapel of the Choir. It was for a long time the custom that each pope should lie there until his successor died, when his body was removed to the monument prepared for it in the mean time, and the Pope just dead was laid in the same place. The church was almost dark, and only in the Chapel of the Choir and in that of the Holy Sacrament, which are opposite each other, a number of big wax candles shed a yellow light. In the niche over the door a mason was still at work, with a tallow dip, clearly visible below. The triple coffin stood before the altar in the Chapel of the Choir. Opposite, where the body still lay, the Noble Guards and the Swiss Guards, in their breastplates, kept watch with drawn swords and halberds. The Noble Guards carried the bier on their shoulders in solemn procession, with chanting choir, robed bishop, and tramping soldiers, round by the Confession and across the church, and lifted the body into the coffin. The Pope had been very much beloved by all who were near him, and more than one grey-haired prelate shed tears of genuine grief that night. In the coffin, in accordance with an ancient custom, a bag was placed containing ninety-three medals, one of gold, one of silver and one of bronze, for each of the thirty-one years which Pope Pius had reigned; and a history of the pontificate, written on parchment, was also deposited at the feet of the body. When the leaden coffin was soldered, six seals were placed upon it, five by cardinals, and one by the archivist. During the ceremony the Protonotary Apostolic, the Chancellor of the Apostolic Chamber and the Notary of the Chapter of Saint Peter's were busy, pen in hand, writing down the detailed protocol of the proceedings. The last absolution was pronounced, and the coffin in its outer case of elm was slowly moved out and raised in slings, and gently swung into the niche. The masons bricked up the opening in the presence of cardinals and guards, and long before midnight the marble slab, carved to represent the side of a sarcophagus, was in its place, with its simple inscription, 'Pius IX, P.M.' From time immemorial the well containing the marble staircase which leads down to the tomb of Saint Peter has been called the 'Confession.' The word, I believe, is properly applied to the altar-rail, from the ancient practice of repeating there the general confession immediately before receiving the Communion, a custom now slightly modified. But I may be wrong in giving this derivation. At all events, a marble balustrade follows the horseshoe shape of the well, and upon it are placed ninety-five gilded lamps, which burn perpetually. There is said to be no special significance in the number, and they produce very little effect by daylight. But on the eve of Saint Peter's Day, and perhaps at some other seasons, the Pope has been known to come down to the church by the secret staircase leading into the Chapel of the Sacrament, to pray at the Apostle's tomb. On such occasions a few great candlesticks with wax torches were placed on the floor of the church, two and two, between the Chapel and the Confession. The Pope, attended only by a few chamberlains and Noble Guards, and dressed in his customary white cassock, passed swiftly along in the dim light, and descended the steps to the gilded gate beneath the high altar. A marble pope kneels there too, Pius the Sixth, of the Braschi family, his stone draperies less white than Pope Leo's cassock, his marble face scarcely whiter than the living Pontiff's alabaster features. Those are sights which few have been privileged to see. There is a sort of centralization of mystery, if one may couple such words, in the private pilgrimage of the head of the Church to the tomb of the chief Apostle by night, on the eve of the day which tradition has kept from the earliest times as the anniversary of Saint Peter's martyrdom. The whole Catholic world, if it might, would follow Leo the Thirteenth down those marble steps, and two hundred million voices would repeat the prayer he says alone. Many and solemn scenes have been acted out by night in the vast gloom of the enormous church, and if events do not actually leave an essence of themselves in places, as some have believed, yet the knowledge that they have happened where we stand and recall them has a mysterious power to thrill the heart. Opposite the Chapel of the Sacrament is the Chapel of the Choir. Saint Peter's is a cathedral, and is managed by a chapter of Canons, each of whom has his seat in the choir, and his vote in the disposal of the cathedral's income, which is considerable. The chapter maintains the Choir of Saint Peter's, a body of musicians quite independent of the so-called 'Pope's Choir,' which is properly termed the 'Choir of the Sixtine Chapel,' and which is paid by the Pope. There are some radical differences between the two. By a very ancient and inviolable regulation, the so-called 'musico,' or artificial soprano, is never allowed to sing in the Chapel of the Choir, where the soprano singers are without exception men who sing in falsetto, though they speak in a deep voice. On great occasions the Choir of the Sixtine joins in the music in the body of the church, but never in the Chapel, and always behind a lattice. Secondly, no musical instruments are ever used in the Sixtine. In the Chapel of the Choir, on the contrary, there are two large organs. The one on the west side is employed on all ordinary occasions; it is over two hundred years old, and is tuned about two tones below the modern pitch. It is so worn out that an organ-builder is in attendance during every service, to make repairs at a moment's notice. The bellows leak, the stops stick, some notes have a chronic tendency to cipher, and the pedal trackers unhook themselves unexpectedly. But the Canons would certainly not think of building a new organ. Should they ever do so, and tune the instrument to the modern pitch, the consternation of the singers would be great; for the music is all written for the existing organ, and could not be performed two notes higher, not to mention the confusion that would arise where all the music is sung at sight by singers accustomed to an unusual pitch. This is a fact not generally known, but worthy of notice. The music sung in Saint Peter's, and, indeed, in most Roman churches, is never rehearsed nor practised. The music itself is entirely in manuscript, and is the property of the choir master, or, as is the case in Saint Peter's, of the Chapter, and there is no copyright in it beyond this fact of actual possession, protected by the simple plan of never allowing any musician to have his part in his hands except while he is actually performing it. In the course of a year the same piece may be sung several times, and the old choristers may become acquainted with a good deal of music in this way, but never otherwise. Mozart is reported to have learned Allegri's Miserere by ear, and to have written it down from memory. The other famous Misereres, which are now published, were pirated in a similar way. The choir master of that day was very unpopular. Some of the leading singers who had sung the Misereres during many years in succession, and had thus learned their several parts, met and put together what they knew into a whole, which was at once published, to the no small annoyance and discomfiture of their enemy. But much good music is quite beyond the reach of the public--Palestrina's best motetts, airs by Alessandro Stradella, the famous hymn of Raimondi, in short a great musical library, an 'archivio' as the Romans call such a collection, all of which is practically lost to the world. It is wonderful that under such circumstances the choir of Saint Peter's should obtain even such creditable results. At a moment's notice an organist and about a hundred singers are called upon to execute a florid piece of music which many have never seen nor heard; the accompaniment is played at sight from a mere figured bass, on a tumble-down instrument two hundred years old, and the singers, both the soloists and the chorus, sing from thumbed bits of manuscript parts written in old-fashioned characters on paper often green with age. No one has ever denied the extraordinary musical facility of Italians, but if the outside world knew how Italian church music is performed it would be very much astonished. It is no wonder that such music is sometimes bad. But sometimes it is very good; for there are splendid voices among the singers, and the Maestro Renzi, the chief organist, is a man of real talent as well as of amazing facility. His modernizing influence is counter-balanced by that of the old choir master, Maestro Meluzzi, a first-rate musician, who would not for his life change a hair of the old-fashioned traditions. Yet there are moments, on certain days, when the effect of the great old organ, with the rich voices blending in some good harmony, is very solemn and stirring. The outward persuasive force of religion lies largely in its music, and the religions that have no songs make few proselytes. Nothing, perhaps, is more striking, as one becomes better acquainted with Saint Peter's, than the constant variety of detail. The vast building produces at first sight an impression of harmony, and there appears to be a remarkable uniformity of style in all the objects one sees. There are no oil-paintings to speak of in the church, and but few frescoes. The great altar-pieces are almost exclusively fine mosaic copies of famous pictures which are preserved elsewhere. Of these reproductions the best is generally considered to be that of Guercino's 'Saint Petronilla,' at the end of the right aisle of the tribune. Debrosses praises these mosaic altar-pieces extravagantly, and even expresses the opinion that they are probably superior in point of colour to the originals from which they are copied. In execution they are certainly wonderful, and many a stranger looks at them and passes on, believing them to be oil-paintings. They possess the quality of being imperishable and beyond all influence of climate or dampness, and they are masterpieces of mechanical workmanship. But many will think them hard and unsympathetic in outline, and decidedly crude in colour. Much wit has been manufactured by the critics at the expense of Guido Reni's 'Michael,' for instance, and as many sharp things could be said about a good many other works of the same kind in the church. Yet, on the whole, they do not destroy the general harmony. Big as they are, when they are seen from a little distance they sink into mere insignificant patches of colour, all but lost in the deep richness of the whole. As for the statues and monuments, between the 'Pietà' of Michelangelo and Bracci's horrible tomb of Benedict the Fourteenth, there is the step which, according to Tom Paine, separates the sublime from the ridiculous. That very witty saying has in it only just the small ingredient of truth without which wit remains mere humour. Between the ridiculous and the sublime there may sometimes be, indeed, but one step in the execution; but there is always the enormous moral distance which separates real feeling from affectation--the gulf which divides, for instance, Bracci's group from Michelangelo's. [Illustration: PIETÀ OF MICHELANGELO] The 'Pietà' is one of the great sculptor's early works. It is badly placed. It is dwarfed by the heavy architecture above and around it. It is insulted by a pair of hideous bronze cherubs. There is a manifest improbability in the relative size of the figure of Christ and that of the Blessed Virgin. Yet in spite of all, it is one of the most beautiful and touching groups in the whole world, and by many degrees the best work of art in the great church. Michelangelo was a man of the strongest dramatic instinct even in early youth, and when he laid his hand to the marble and cut his 'Pietà' he was in deep sympathy with the supreme drama of man's history. He found in the stone, once and for all time, the grief of the human mother for her son, not comforted by foreknowledge of resurrection, nor lightened by prescience of near glory. He discovered in the marble, by one effort, the divinity of death's rest after torture, and taught the eye to see that the dissolution of this dying body is the birth of the soul that cannot die. In the dead Christ there are two men manifest to sight. 'The first man is of earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.' In the small chapel stands a strangely wrought column, enclosed in an iron cage. The Romans now call it the Colonna Santa, the holy pillar, and it is said to be the one against which Christ leaned when teaching in the temple at Jerusalem. A great modern authority believes it to be of Roman workmanship, and of the third century; but those who have lived in the East will see much that is oriental in the fantastic ornamented carving. It matters little. In actual fact, whatever be its origin, this is the column known in the Middle Age as the 'Colonna degli Spiritati,' or column of those possessed by evil spirits, and it was customary to bind to it such unlucky individuals as fell under the suspicion of 'possession' in order to exorcise the spirit with prayers and holy water. Aretino has made a witty scene about this in the 'Cortegiana,' where one of the Vatican servants cheats a poor fisherman, and then hands him over to the sacristan of Saint Peter's to be cured of an imaginary possession by a ceremonious exorcism. Such proceedings must have been common enough in those days when witchcraft and demonology were elements with which rulers and lawgivers had to count at every turn. Leave the column and its legend in the lonely chapel, with the exquisite 'Pietà'; wander hither and thither, and note the enormous contrasts between good and bad work which meet you at every turn. Up in the right aisle of the tribune you will come upon what is known as Canova's masterpiece, the tomb of Clement the Thirteenth, the Rezzonico pope, as strange a mixture of styles and ideas as any in the world, and yet a genuine expression of the artistic feeling of that day. The grave Pope prays solemnly above; on the right a lovely heathen genius of Death leans on a torch; on the left rises a female figure of Religion, one of the most abominably bad statues in the world; below, a brace of improbable lions, extravagantly praised by people who do not understand leonine anatomy, recall Canova's humble origin and his first attempt at modelling. For the sculptor began life as a waiter in a 'canova di vino,' or wine shop, whence his name; and it was when a high dignitary stopped to breakfast at the little wayside inn that the lad modelled a lion in butter to grace the primitive table. The thing attracted the rich traveller's attention, and the boy's fortune was made. The Pope is impressive, the Death is gentle and tender, the Religion, with her crown of gilded spikes for rays, and her clumsy cross, is a vision of bad taste, and the sleepy lions, when separated from what has been written about them, excite no interest. Yet somehow, from a distance, the monument gets harmony out of its surroundings. [Illustration: TOMB OF CLEMENT THE THIRTEENTH] One of the best tombs in the basilica is that of Sixtus the Fourth, the first pope of the Rovere family, in the Chapel of the Sacrament. The bronze figure, lying low on a sarcophagus placed out on upon the floor, has a quiet manly dignity about it which one cannot forget. But in the same tomb lies a greater man of the same name, Julius the Second, for whom Michelangelo made his 'Moses' in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli--a man who did more than any other, perhaps, to make the great basilica what it is, and who, by a chain of mistakes, got no tomb of his own. He who solemnly laid the foundations of the present church, and lived to see the four main piers completed, with their arches, has only a little slab in the pavement to recall his memory. The protector and friend of Bramante, of Michelangelo and of Raphael,--of the great architect, the great sculptor and the great painter,--has not so much as the least work of any of the three to mark his place of rest. Perhaps he needed nothing but his name. After all, his bones have been allowed to rest in peace, which is more than can be said of all that have been buried within the area of the church. Urban the Sixth had no such good fortune. He so much surprised the cardinals, as soon as they had elected him, by his vigorous moral reforms that they hastily retired to Anagni and elected an antipope of milder manners and less sensitive conscience. He lived to triumph over his enemies. In Piacenza he was besieged by King Charles of Naples. He excommunicated him, tortured seven cardinals whom he caught in the conspiracy and put five of them to death; overcame and slew Charles, refused him burial and had his body exposed to the derision of the crowd. The chronicler says that 'Italy, Germany, England, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Sicily and Portugal were obedient to the Lord Pope Urban the Sixth.' He died peacefully, and was buried in Saint Peter's in a marble sarcophagus. But when Sixtus the Fifth, who also surprised the cardinals greatly, was in a fit of haste to finish the dome, the masons, wanting a receptacle for water, laid hands on Urban's stone coffin, pitched his bones into a corner, and used the sarcophagus as they pleased, leaving it to serve as a water-tank for many years afterwards. In extending the foundations of the church, Paul the Third came upon the bodies of Maria and Hermania, the two wives of Honorius, the Emperor who 'disestablished' paganism in favour of Christianity. They were sisters, daughters of Stilicho, and had been buried in their imperial robes, with many rich objects and feminine trinkets; and they were found intact, as they had been buried, in the month of February, 1543. Forty pounds of fine gold were taken from their robes alone, says Baracconi, without counting all the jewels and trinkets, among which was a very beautiful lamp, besides a great number of precious stones. The Pope melted down the gold for the expenses of the building, and set the gems in a tiara, where, if they could be identified, they certainly exist today--the very stones worn by empresses of ancient Rome. Then, as if in retribution, the Pope's own tomb was moved from its place. Despoiled of two of the four statues which adorned it, the monument is now in the tribune, and is still one of the best in the church. A strange and tragic tale is told of it. A Spanish student, it is said, fell madly in love with the splendid statue of Paul's sister-in-law, Julia Farnese. He succeeded in hiding himself in the basilica when it was closed at night, threw himself in a frenzy upon the marble and was found stone dead beside it in the morning. The ugly draperies of painted metal which now hide much of the statue owe their origin to this circumstance. Classical scholars will remember that a somewhat similar tale is told by Pliny of the Venus of Praxiteles in Cnidus. In spite of many assertions to the effect that the bronze statue of Saint Peter which is venerated in the church was originally an image of Jupiter Capitolinus, the weight of modern authority and artistic judgment is to the contrary. The work cannot really be earlier than the fifth century, and is therefore of a time after Honorius and the disestablishment. Anyone who will take the trouble to examine the lives of the early popes in Muratori may read the detailed accounts of what each one did for the churches. It is not by any means impossible that this may be one of the statues made under Saint Innocent the First, a contemporary of Honorius, in whose time a Roman lady called Vestina made gift to the church of vast possessions, the proceeds of which were used in building and richly adorning numerous places of worship. In any case, since it is practically certain that the statue was originally intended for a portrait of Saint Peter, and has been regarded as such for nearly fifteen hundred years, it commands our respect, if not our veneration. The Roman custom of kissing the foot, then bending and placing one's head under it, signifies submission to the commands of the Church, and is not, as many suppose, an act of devotion to the statue. The practice of dressing it in magnificent robes on the feast of Saint Peter is connected with the ancient Roman custom, which required censors, when entering upon office, to paint the earthen statue of Jupiter Capitolinus a bright red. But the connection lies in the Italian mind and character, which cling desperately to external practices for their hold upon inward principles. It is certainly not an inheritance of uninterrupted tradition, as Roman church music, on the contrary, most certainly is; for there is every reason to believe that the recitations now noted in the Roman missal were very like those used by the ancient Romans on solemn occasions. The church is not only a real landmark. Astronomers say that if there were a building of the same dimensions on the moon we could easily see it with our modern telescopes. It is also, in a manner, one of Time's great mile-stones, of which some trace will probably remain till the very end of the world's life. Its mere mass will insure to it the permanence of the great pyramid of Cheops. Its mere name associates it for ever with the existence of Christianity from the earliest time. It has stamped itself upon the minds of millions of men as the most vast monument of the ages. Its very defects are destined to be as lasting as its beauties, and its mighty faults are more imposing than the small perfections of the Greeks. Between it and the Parthenon, as between the Roman empire and the Athenian commonwealth, one may choose, but one dares not make comparison. The genius of the Greeks absorbed the world's beauty into itself, distilled its perfection, and gave humanity its most subtle quintessence; but the Latin arm ruled the world itself, and the imperial Latin intelligence could never find any expression fitted to its enormous measure. That is the secret of the monstrous element in all the Romans built. And that supernormal giantism showed itself almost for the last time in the building of Saint Peter's, when the Latin race had reached its last great development, and the power of the Latin popes overshadowed the whole world, and was itself about to be humbled. Before Michelangelo was dead Charles the Fifth had been Emperor forty years, Doctor Martin Luther had denied the doctrine of salvation by works, the nations had broken loose from the Popes, and the world was at war. [Illustration] Let us part here, at the threshold of Saint Peter's, not saying farewell to Rome, nor taking leave without hope of meeting on this consecrated ground again; but since the city lies behind us, region beyond region, memory over memory, legend within legend, and because we have passed through it by steps and by stations, very quickly, yet not thoughtlessly nor irreverently, let us now go each our way for a time, remembering some of those things which we have seen and of which we have talked, that we may know them better if we see them again. For a man can no more say a last farewell to Rome than he can take leave of eternity. The years move on, but she waits; the cities fall, but she stands; the old races of men lie dead in the track wherein mankind wanders always between two darknesses; yet Rome lives, and her changes are not from life to death, as ours are, but from one life to another. A man may live with Rome, laugh with her, dream with her, weep with her, die at her feet; but for him who knows her there is no good-bye, for she has taken the high seat of his heart, and whither he goes, she is with him, in joy or sorrow, with wonder, longing or regret, as the chords of his heart were tuned by his angel in heaven. But she is as a well-loved woman, whose dear face is drawn upon a man's heart by the sharp memory of a cruel parting, line for line, shadow for shadow, look for look, as she was when he saw her last; and line for line he remembers her and longs for her smile and her tender word. Yet be the lines ever so deep-graven, and the image ever so sweet and true, when the time of parting is over, when he comes back and she stands where she stood, with eyes that lighten to his eyes, then she is better loved than he knew and dearer than he had guessed. Then the heart that has steadily beaten time to months of parting, leaps like a child at the instant of meeting again; then eyes that have so long fed on memory's vision widen and deepen with joy of the living truth; then the soul that has hungered and starved through an endless waiting, is suddenly filled with life and satisfied of its faith. So he who loves Rome, and leaves her, remembers her long and well, telling himself that he knows how every stone of her walls and her streets would look again; but he comes back at last, and sees her as she is, and he stands amazed at the grandeur of all that has been, and is touched to the heart by the sad loveliness of much that is. Together, the thoughts of love and reverence rise in words, and with them comes the deep wonder at something very great and high. For he himself is grown grey and war-worn in the strife of a few poor years, while through five and twenty centuries Rome has faced war and the world; and he, a gladiator of life, bows his head before her, wondering how his own fight shall end at last, while his lips pronounce the submission of his own mortality to her abiding endurance-- AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS, MORITURUS TE SALUTAT Index A Abruzzi, i. 159; ii. 230 Accoramboni, Flaminio, i. 296 Vittoria, i. 135, 148, 289-296, 297 Agrarian Law, i. 23 Agrippa, i. 90, 271; ii. 102 the Younger, ii. 103 Alaric, i. 252; ii. 297 Alba Longa, i. 3, 78, 130 Albergo dell' Orso, i. 288 Alberic, ii. 29 Albornoz, ii. 19, 20, 74 Aldobrandini, i. 209; ii. 149 Olimpia, i. 209 Alfonso, i. 185 Aliturius, ii. 103 Altieri, i. 226; ii. 45 Ammianus Marcellinus, i. 132, 133, 138 Amphitheatre, Flavian, i. 91, 179 Amulius, i. 3 Anacletus, ii. 295, 296, 304 Anagni, i. 161, 165, 307; ii. 4, 5 Ancus Martius, i. 4 Angelico, Beato, ii. 158, 169, 190-192, 195, 285 Anguillara, i. 278; ii. 138 Titta della, ii. 138, 139 Anio, the, i. 93 Novus, i. 144 Vetus, i. 144 Annibaleschi, Riccardo degli, i. 278 Antiochus, ii. 120 Antipope-- Anacletus, ii. 84 Boniface, ii. 28 Clement, i. 126 Gilbert, i. 127 John of Calabria, ii. 33-37 Antonelli, Cardinal, ii. 217, 223, 224 Antonina, i. 266 Antonines, the, i. 113, 191, 271 Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, i. 46, 96, 113, 114, 190, 191 Appian Way, i. 22, 94 Appius Claudius, i. 14, 29 Apulia, Duke of, i. 126, 127; ii. 77 Aqua Virgo, i. 155 Aqueduct of Claudius, i. 144 Arbiter, Petronius, i. 85 Arch of-- Arcadius, i. 192 Claudius, i. 155 Domitian, i. 191, 205 Gratian, i. 191 Marcus Aurelius, i. 96, 191, 205 Portugal, i. 205 Septimius Severus, ii. 93 Valens, i. 191 Archive House, ii. 75 Argiletum, the, i. 72 Ariosto, ii. 149, 174 Aristius, i. 70, 71 Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73, 76-89 Arnulf, ii. 41 Art, i. 87; ii. 152 and morality, i. 260, 261; ii. 178, 179 religion, i. 260, 261 Barocco, i. 303, 316 Byzantine in Italy, ii. 155, 184, 185 development of taste in, ii. 198 factors in the progress of art, ii. 181 engraving, ii. 186 improved tools, ii. 181 individuality, i. 262; ii. 175-177 Greek influence on, i. 57-63 modes of expression of, ii. 181 fresco, ii. 181-183 oil painting, ii. 184-186 of the Renascence, i. 231, 262; ii. 154 phases of, in Italy, ii. 188 progress of, during the Middle Age, ii. 166, 180 transition from handicraft to, ii. 153 Artois, Count of, i. 161 Augustan Age, i. 57-77 Augustulus, i. 30, 47, 53; ii. 64 Augustus, i. 30, 43-48, 69, 82, 89, 90, 184, 219, 251, 252, 254, 270; ii. 64, 75, 95, 102, 291 Aurelian, i. 177, 179, 180; ii. 150 Avalos, Francesco, d', i. 174, 175 Aventine, the, i. 23, 76; ii. 10, 40, 85, 119-121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 302 Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 6, 9 B Bacchanalia, ii. 122 Bacchic worship, i. 76; ii. 120 Bajazet the Second, Sultan, i. 276 Baracconi, i. 104, 141, 178, 188, 252, 264, 274, 304; ii. 41, 45, 128, 130, 138, 323 Barberi, i. 202 Barberini, the, i. 157, 187, 226, 268, 301; ii. 7 Barbo, i. 202; ii. 45 Barcelona, i. 308 Bargello, the, i. 129, 293, 296; ii. 42 Basil and Constantine, ii. 33 Basilica (Pagan)-- Julia, i. 66, 71, 106; ii. 92 Basilicas (Christian) of-- Constantine, i. 90; ii. 292, 297 Liberius, i. 138 Philip and Saint James, i. 170 Saint John Lateran, i. 107, 112, 117, 278, 281 Santa Maria Maggiore, i. 107, 135, 139, 147, 148, 166, 208, 278; ii. 118 Santi Apostoli, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213 Sicininus, i. 134, 138 Baths, i. 91 of Agrippa, i. 271 of Caracalla, ii. 119 of Constantine, i. 144, 188 of Diocletian, i. 107, 129, 145-147, 149, 289, 292 of Novatus, i. 145 of Philippus, i. 145 of public, i. 144 of Severus Alexander, ii. 28 of Titus, i. 55, 107, 152 Befana, the, i. 298, 299, 300; ii. 25 Belisarius, i. 266, 267, 269 Benediction of 1846, the, i. 183 Benevento, Cola da, i. 219, 220 Bernard, ii. 77-80 Bernardi, Gianbattista, ii. 54 Bernini, i. 147, 301, 302, 303; ii. 24 Bibbiena, Cardinal, ii. 146, 285 Maria, ii. 146 Bismarck, ii. 224, 232, 236, 237 Boccaccio, i. 211, 213 Vineyard, the, i. 189 Bologna, i. 259; ii. 58 Borghese, the, i. 206, 226 Scipio, i. 187 Borgia, the, i. 209 Cæsar, i. 149, 151, 169, 213, 287; ii. 150, 171, 282, 283 Gandia, i. 149, 150, 151, 287 Lucrezia, i. 149, 177, 185, 287; ii. 129, 151, 174 Rodrigo, i. 287; ii. 242, 265, 282 Vanozza, i. 149, 151, 287 Borgo, the Region, i. 101, 127; ii. 132, 147, 202-214, 269 Borromini, i. 301, 302; ii. 24 Botticelli, ii. 188, 190, 195, 200, 276 Bracci, ii. 318 Bracciano, i. 282, 291, 292, 294 Duke of, i. 289 Bramante, i. 305; ii. 144, 145, 274, 298, 322 Brescia, i. 286 Bridge. See _Ponte_ Ælian, the, i. 274 Cestian, ii. 105 Fabrician, ii. 105 Sublician, i. 6, 23, 67; ii. 127, 294 Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded, ii. 129, 131 Brothers of Prayer and Death, i. 123, 204, 242 Brunelli, ii. 244 Brutus, i. 6, 12, 18, 41, 58, 80; ii. 96 Buffalmacco, ii. 196 Bull-fights, i. 252 Burgundians, i. 251 C Cæsar, Julius, i. 29-33, 35-41, 250; ii. 102, 224, 297 Cæsars, the, i. 44-46, 125, 249, 252, 253; ii. 224 Julian, i. 252 Palaces of, i. 4, 191; ii. 95 Caetani, i. 51, 115, 159, 161, 163, 206, 277 Benedict, i. 160 Caligula, i. 46, 252; ii. 96 Campagna, the, i. 92, 94, 158, 237, 243, 253, 282, 312; ii. 88, 107, 120 Campitelli, the Region, i. 101; ii. 64 Campo-- dei Fiori, i. 297 Marzo (Campus Martius), i. 65, 112, 271 the Region, i. 101, 248, 250, 275; ii. 6, 44 Vaccino, i. 128-131, 173 Canale, Carle, i. 287 Cancelleria, i, 102, 305, 312, 315, 316; ii. 223 Canidia, i. 64; ii. 293 Canossa, i. 126; ii. 307 Canova, ii. 320 Capet, Hugh, ii. 29 Capitol, the, i. 8, 14, 24, 29, 72, 107, 112, 167, 190, 204, 278, 282; ii. 12, 13, 21, 22, 52, 64, 65, 67-75, 84, 121, 148, 302 Capitoline hill, i. 106, 194 Captains of the Regions, i. 110, 112, 114 Election of, i. 112 Caracci, the, i. 264 Carafa, the, ii. 46, 49, 50, 56, 111 Cardinal, i. 186, 188; ii. 56, 204 Carnival, i. 107, 193-203, 241, 298; ii. 113 of Saturn, i. 194 Carpineto, ii. 229, 230, 232, 239, 287 Carthage, i. 20, 26, 88 Castagno, Andrea, ii. 89, 185 Castle of-- Grottaferrata, i. 314 Petrella, i. 286 the Piccolomini, i. 268 Sant' Angelo, i. 114, 116, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 259, 278, 284, 308, 314; ii. 17, 28, 37, 40, 56, 59, 60, 109, 152, 202-214, 216, 269 Castracane, Castruccio, i. 165, 166, 170 Catacombs, the, i. 139 of Saint Petronilla, ii. 125 Sebastian, ii. 296 Catanei, Vanossa de, i. 287 Catharine, Queen of Cyprus, ii. 305 Cathedral of Siena, i. 232 Catiline, i. 27; ii. 96, 294 Cato, ii. 121 Catullus, i. 86 Cavour, Count, ii. 90, 224, 228, 237 Cellini, Benvenuto, i. 311, 315; ii. 157, 195 Cenci, the, ii. 1 Beatrice, i. 147, 285-287; ii. 2, 129, 151 Francesco, i. 285; ii. 2 Centra Pio, ii. 238, 239 Ceri, Renzo da, i. 310 Cesarini, Giuliano, i. 174; ii. 54, 89 Chapel, Sixtine. See under _Vatican_ Charlemagne, i. 32, 49, 51, 53, 76, 109; ii. 297 Charles of Anjou, i. ii. 160 Albert of Sardinia, ii. 221 the Fifth, i. 131, 174, 206, 220, 305, 306; ii. 138 Chiesa. See _Church_ Nuova, i. 275 Chigi, the, i. 258 Agostino, ii. 144, 146 Fabio, ii. 146 Christianity in Rome, i. 176 Christina, Queen of Sweden, ii. 150, 151, 304, 308 Chrysostom, ii. 104, 105 Churches of,-- the Apostles, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213 Aracoeli, i. 52, 112, 167; ii. 57, 70, 75 Cardinal Mazarin, i. 186 the Gallows, i. 284 Holy Guardian Angel, i. 122 the Minerva, ii. 55 the Penitentiaries, ii. 216 the Portuguese, i. 250 Saint Adrian, i. 71 Agnes, i. 301, 304 Augustine, ii. 207 Bernard, i. 291 Callixtus, ii. 125 Charles, i. 251 Eustace, ii. 23, 24, 26, 39 George in Velabro, i. 195; ii. 10 Gregory on the Aventine, ii. 129 Ives, i. 251; ii. 23, 24 John of the Florentines, i. 273 Pine Cone, ii. 56 Peter's on the Janiculum, ii. 129 Sylvester, i. 176 Saints Nereus and Achillæus, ii. 125 Vincent and Anastasius, i. 186 San Clemente, i. 143 Giovanni in Laterano, i. 113 Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192 Miranda, i. 71 Marcello, i. 165, 192 Pietro in Montorio, ii. 151 Vincoli, i. 118, 283; ii. 322 Salvatore in Cacaberis, i. 112 Stefano Rotondo, i. 106 Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, i. 102; ii. 3, 10, 110 Santa Francesca Romana, i. 111 Maria de Crociferi, i. 267 degli Angeli, i. 146, 258, 259 dei Monti, i. 118 del Pianto, i. 113 di Grotto Pinta, i. 294 in Campo Marzo, ii. 23 in Via Lata, i. 142 Nuova, i. 111, 273 Transpontina, ii. 212 della Vittoria, i. 302 Prisca, ii. 124 Sabina, i. 278; ii. 40 Trinità dei Pellegrini, ii. 110 Cicero, i. 45, 73; ii. 96, 294 Cimabue, ii. 156, 157, 162, 163, 169, 188, 189 Cinna, i. 25, 27 Circolo, ii. 245 Circus, the, i. 64, 253 Maximus, i. 64, 66; ii. 84, 119 City of Augustus, i. 57-77 Making of the, i. 1-21 of Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 of the Empire, i. 22-56 of the Middle Age, i. 47, 78-99, 92 of the Republic, i. 47 today, i. 55, 92 Civilization, ii. 177 and bloodshed, ii. 218 morality, ii. 178 progress, ii. 177-180 Claudius, i. 46, 255, 256; ii. 102 Cloelia, i. 13 Coelian hill, i. 106 Collegio Romano, i. 102; ii. 45, 61 Colonna, the, i. 51, 94, 104, 135, 153, 157-170, 172, 176, 187, 206, 217, 251, 252, 271, 272, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 37, 51, 54, 60, 106, 107, 126, 204 Giovanni, i. 104 Jacopo, i. 159, 165, 192 Lorenzo, ii. 126, 204-213 Marcantonio, i. 182; ii. 54 Pietro, i. 159 Pompeo, i. 305, 310-317; ii. 205 Prospero, ii. 205 Sciarra, i. 162-166, 192, 206, 213, 229, 275,279, 281, 307 Stephen, i. 161, 165; ii. 13, 16 the Younger, i. 168 Vittoria, i. 157, 173-177; ii. 174 the Region, i. 101, 190-192; ii. 209 War between Orsini and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 12, 18, 126, 204-211 Colosseum, i. 56, 86, 90, 96, 106, 107, 111, 125, 152, 153, 187, 191, 209, 278; ii. 25, 64, 66, 84, 97, 202, 203, 301 Column of Piazza Colonna, i. 190, 192 Comitium, i. 112, 257, 268 Commodus, i. 46, 55; ii. 97, 285 Confraternities, i. 108, 204 Conscript Fathers, i. 78, 112 Constable of Bourbon, i. 52, 259, 273, 304, 309-311; ii. 308 Constans, i, 135, 136 Constantine, i. 90, 113, 163 Constantinople, i. 95, 119 Contests in the Forum, i. 27, 130 Convent of Saint Catharine, i. 176 Convent of Saint Sylvester, i. 176 Corneto, Cardinal of, ii. 282, 283 Cornomania, i. 141 Cornutis, i. 87 Coromania, i. 141, 144 Corsini, the, ii. 150 Corso, i. 96, 106, 108, 192, 196, 205, 206, 229, 251 Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275 Corte Savella, i. 284; ii. 52 Cosmas, the, ii. 156, 157 Costa, Giovanni da, i. 205 Court House, i. 71 Crassus, i. 27, 31; ii. 128 Crawford, Thomas, i. 147 Crescentius, ii. 40, 41 Crescenzi, i. 114; ii. 27, 40, 209 Crescenzio, ii. 28-40 Stefana, ii. 39 Crispi, i. 116, 187 Crusade, the Second, ii. 86, 105 Crusades, the, i. 76 Curatii, i. 3, 131 Customs of early Rome, i. 9, 48 in dress, i. 48 religion, i. 48 D Dante, i. 110; ii. 164, 175, 244 Decameron, i. 239 Decemvirs, i. 14; ii. 120 Decrees, Semiamiran, i. 178 Democracy, i. 108 Development of Rome, i. 7, 18 some results of, i. 154 under Barons, i. 51 Decemvirs, i. 14 the Empire, i. 29, 30 Gallic invasion, i. 15-18 Kings, i. 2-7, 14-45 Middle Age, i. 47, 92, 210-247 Papal rule, i. 46-50 Republic, i. 7-14 Tribunes, i. 14 Dictator of Rome, i. 29, 79 Dietrich of Bern, ii. 297 Dionysus, ii. 121 Dolabella, i. 34 Domenichino, ii. 147 Domestic life in Rome, i. 9 Dominicans, i. 158; ii. 45, 46, 49, 50, 60, 61 Domitian, i. 45, 152, 205; ii. 104, 114, 124, 295 Doria, the, i. 206; ii. 45 Albert, i. 207 Andrea, i. 207 Conrad, i. 207 Gian Andrea, i. 207 Lamba, i. 207 Paganino, i. 207 Doria-Pamfili, i. 206-209 Dress in early Rome, i. 48 Drusus, ii. 102 Duca, Antonio del, i. 146, 147 Giacomo del, i. 146 Dürer, Albert, ii. 198 E Education, ii. 179 Egnatia, i. 75 Elagabalus, i. 77, 177, 179; ii. 296, 297 Election of the Pope, ii. 41, 42, 277 Electoral Wards, i. 107 Elizabeth, Queen of England, ii. 47 Emperors, Roman, i. 46 of the East, i. 95, 126 Empire of Constantinople, i. 46 of Rome, i. 15, 17, 22-28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 72, 99 Encyclicals, ii. 244 Erasmus, ii. 151 Esquiline, the, i. 26, 106, 139, 186; ii. 95, 131, 193 Este, Ippolito d', i. 185 Etruria, i. 12, 15 Euodus, i. 255, 256 Eustace, Saint, ii. 24, 25 square of, ii. 25, 42 Eustachio. See _Sant' Eustachio_ Eutichianus, ii. 296 Eve of Saint John, i. 140 the Epiphany, 299 F Fabius, i. 20 Fabatosta, ii. 64, 84 Farnese, the, ii. 151 Julia, ii. 324 Farnesina, the, ii. 144, 149, 151 Fathers, Roman, i. 13, 78, 79-84 Ferdinand, ii. 205 Ferrara, Duke of, i. 185 Festivals, i. 193, 298 Aryan in origin, i. 173 Befana, i. 299-301 Carnival, i. 193-203 Church of the Apostle, i. 172, 173 Coromania, i. 141 Epifania, i. 298-301 Floralia, i. 141 Lupercalia, i. 194 May-day in the Campo Vaccino, i. 173 Saturnalia, i. 194 Saint John's Eve, i. 140 Festus, ii. 128 Feuds, family, i. 168 Field of Mars. See _Campo Marzo_ Finiguerra, Maso, ii. 186-188 Flamen Dialis, i. 34 Floralia. See _Festivals_ Florence, i. 160 Forli, Melozzo da, i. 171 Fornarina, the, ii. 144, 146 Forum, i, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 64, 72, 111, 126, 129, 194; ii. 64, 92-94, 97, 102, 294, 295 of Augustus, i. 119 Trajan, i. 155, 171, 172, 191 Fountains (Fontane) of-- Egeria, ii. 124 Trevi, i. 155, 156, 186, 267 Tullianum, i. 8 Franconia, Duke of, ii. 36, 53 Francis the First, i. 131, 174, 206, 219, 304 Frangipani, i. 50, 94, 153; ii. 77, 79, 84, 85 Frederick, Barbarossa, ii. 34, 85, 87 of Naples, i. 151 the Second, ii. 34 Fulvius, ii. 121 G Gabrini, Lawrence, ii. 4 Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308 Gaeta, ii. 36 Galba, ii. 295 Galen, i. 55 Galera, i. 282, 291 Galileo, i. 268 Gardens, i. 93 Cæsar's, i. 66, 68 of Lucullus, i. 254, 270 of the Pigna, ii. 273 Pincian, i. 255 the Vatican, ii. 243, 271, 287 Gargonius, i. 65 Garibaldi, ii. 90, 219, 220, 228, 237 Gastaldi, Cardinal, i. 259 Gate. See _Porta_ the Colline, i. 250 Lateran, i. 126, 154 Septimian, ii. 144, 147 Gebhardt, Émile, i. 213 Gemonian Steps, ii. 67, 294 Genseric, i. 96; ii. 70 George of Franzburg, i. 310 Gherardesca, Ugolino della, ii. 160 Ghetto, i. 102; ii. 2, 101, 110-118 Ghibellines, the, i. 129, 153, 158; ii. 6 Ghiberti, ii. 157. Ghirlandajo, ii. 157, 172, 276 Giantism, i. 90-92, 210, 302 Gibbon, i. 160 Giotto, ii. 157, 160-165, 169, 188, 189, 200 Gladstone, ii. 231, 232 Golden Milestone, i. 72, 92, 194 Goldoni, i. 265 Goldsmithing, ii. 156, 157, 186, 187 "Good Estate" of Rienzi, ii. 10-12 Gordian, i. 91 Goths, ii. 297, 307. Gozzoli, Benozzo, ii. 190, 195 Gracchi, the, i. 22, 28 Caius, i. 23; ii. 84 Cornelia, i. 22, 24 Tiberius, i. 23; ii. 102 Gratidianus, i. 27 Guards, Noble, ii. 241, 243, 247, 248, 309, 310, 312 Palatine, ii. 247, 248 Swiss, ii. 246, 247, 310 Guelphs, i. 159; ii. 42, 126, 138 and Ghibellines, i. 129, 153, 275; ii. 160, 162, 173 Guiscard, Robert, i. 95, 126, 127, 129, 144, 252; ii. 70 H Hadrian, i. 90, 180; ii. 25, 202, 203 Hannibal, i. 20 Hasdrubal, i. 21 Henry the Second, ii. 47 Fourth, i. 126, 127; ii. 307 Fifth, ii. 307 Seventh of Luxemburg, i. 273, 276-279; ii. 5 Eighth, i. 219; ii. 47, 274 Hermann, i. 46 Hermes of Olympia, i. 86 Hermogenes, i. 67 Hilda's Tower, i. 250 Hildebrand, i. 52, 126-129; ii. Honorius, ii. 323, 324 Horace, i. 44, 57-75, 85, 87; ii. 293 and the Bore, i. 65-71 Camen Seculare of, i. 75 the Satires of, i. 73, 74 Horatii, i. 3, 131 Horatius, i. 5, 6, 13, 23; ii. 127 Horses of Monte Cavallo, i. 181 Hospice of San Claudio, i. 251 Hospital of-- Santo Spirito, i. 274; ii. 214, 215 House of Parliament, i. 271 Hugh of Burgundy, ii. 30 of Tuscany, ii. 30 Huns' invasion, i. 15, 49, 132 Huxley, ii. 225, 226 I Imperia, ii. 144 Infessura, Stephen, ii. 59, 60, 204-213 Inn of-- The Bear, i. 288 Falcone, ii. 26 Lion, i. 287 Vanossa, i. 288 Inquisition, i. 286; ii. 46, 49, 52, 53, 54 Interminelli, Castruccio degli, i. 165. Irene, Empress, i. 109 Ischia, i. 175 Island of Saint Bartholomew, i. 272; ii. 1 Isola Sacra, i. 93 Italian life during the Middle Age, i. 210, 247 from 17th to 18th centuries, i. 260, 263, 264 J Janiculum, the, i. 15, 253, 270; ii. 268, 293, 294, 295 Jesuit College, ii. 61 Jesuits, ii. 45, 46, 61-63 Jews, i. 96; ii. 101-119 John of Cappadocia, i. 267, 268 Josephus, ii. 103 Juba, i. 40 Jugurtha, i. 25 Jupiter Capitolinus, ii. 324, 325 priest of, i. 80, 133 Justinian, i. 267 Juvenal, i. 112; ii. 105, 107, 124 K Kings of Rome, i. 2-7 L Lampridius, Ælius, i. 178 Lanciani, i. 79, 177 Lateran, the, i. 106, 112-114, 129, 140-142 Count of, i. 166 Latin language, i. 47 Latini Brunetto, ii. 163 Laurentum, i. 55, 93 Lazaret of Saint Martha, ii. 245 League, Holy, i. 305, 306, 313, 314 Lentulus, ii. 128 Lepida, Domitia, i. 255, 256 Letus, Pomponius, i. 139; ii. 210 Lewis of Bavaria, i. 165, 167, 192, 275 the Seventh, ii. 86, 105 Eleventh, i. 104, 151 Fourteenth, i. 253 Library of-- Collegio Romano, ii. 45 Vatican, ii. 275, 276, 282 Victor Emmanuel, ii. 45, 61 Lieges, Bishop of, i. 280 Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 231, 236 Lippi, Filippo, ii. 190, 191, 192-195, 200 Liszt, i. 185, 203; ii. 176 Livia, i. 220, 252 Livy, i. 44, 47 Lombards, the, i. 251 Lombardy, i. 309 Lorrain, i. 264 Loyola, Ignatius, ii. 46, 62 Lucilius, i. 74 Lucretia, i. 5, 12, 13 Lucullus, i. 257, 270 Lupercalia, i. 194 Lupercus, i. 194 M Macchiavelli, ii. 174 Mæcenas, i. 62, 69, 74, 140; ii. 293 Mænads, ii. 122 Maldachini, Olimpia, i. 304, 305 Mamertine Prison, i. 25, ii. 72, 293 Mancini, Maria, i. 170, 187 Mancino, Paul, ii. 210 Manlius, Cnæus, ii. 121 Marcus, i. 29; ii. 71, 84 Titus, i. 80 Mantegna, Andrea, ii. 157, 169, 188, 196-198 Marcomanni, i. 190 Marforio, i. 305 Marino, i. 174 Marius, Caius, i. 25, 29 Marius and Sylla, i. 25, 29, 36, 45, 53; ii. 69 Mark Antony, i. 30, 93, 195, 254 Marozia, ii. 27, 28 Marriage Laws, i. 79, 80 Mary, Queen of Scots, ii. 47 Masaccio, ii. 190 Massimi, Pietro de', i. 317 Massimo, i. 102, 317 Mattei, the, ii. 137, 139, 140, 143 Alessandro, ii. 140-143 Curzio, ii. 140-143 Girolamo, ii. 141-143 Marcantonio, ii. 140, 141 Olimpia, ii. 141, 142 Piero, ii. 140, 141 Matilda, Countess, ii. 307 Mausoleum of-- Augustus, i. 158, 169, 205, 251, 252, 270, 271 Hadrian, i. 102, 252; ii. 28, 202, 270. See _Castle of Sant' Angelo_ Maximilian, i. 151 Mazarin, i. 170, 187 Mazzini, ii. 219, 220 Mediævalism, death of, ii. 225 Medici, the, i. 110; ii. 276 Cosimo de', i. 289; ii. 194 Isabella de', i. 290, 291 John de', i. 313 Messalina, i. 254, 272; ii. 255, 256, 257 Michelangelo, i. 90, 146, 147, 173, 175, 177, 302, 303, 315; ii. 129, 130, 157, 159, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 188, 200, 276-281, 284, 317-319, 322 "Last Judgment" by, i. 173; ii. 171, 276, 280, 315 "Moses" by, ii. 278, 286 "Pietà" by, ii. 286 Middle Age, the, i. 47, 92, 210-247, 274; ii. 163, 166, 172-175, 180, 196 Migliorati, Ludovico, i. 103 Milan, i. 175 Duke of, i. 306 Milestone, golden, i. 72 Mithræum, i. 271 Mithras, i. 76 Mithridates, i. 26, 30, 37, 358 Mocenni, Mario, ii. 249 Monaldeschi, ii. 308 Monastery of-- the Apostles, i. 182 Dominicans, ii. 45, 61 Grottaferrata, ii. 37 Saint Anastasia, ii. 38 Gregory, ii. 85 Sant' Onofrio, ii. 147 Moncada, Ugo de, i. 307, 308 Mons Vaticanus, ii. 268 Montaigne, i. 288 Montalto. See _Felice Peretti_ Monte Briano, i. 274 Cavallo, i. 181, 188, 292, 293; ii. 205, 209 Citorio, i. 193, 252, 271 Giordano, i. 274, 281, 282, 288; ii. 206 Mario, i. 313; ii. 268 Montefeltro, Guido da, ii. 160 Monti-- the Region, i. 101, 106, 107, 111, 112, 125, 133, 134, 144, 150, 185, 305; ii. 133, 209 and Trastevere, i. 129, 145, 153; ii. 133, 209 by moonlight, i. 117 Morrone, Pietro da, i. 159 Muratori, i. 85, 132, 159, 277; ii. 40, 48, 76, 126, 324 Museums of Rome, i. 66 Vatican, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287 Villa Borghese, i. 301 Mustafa, ii. 247 N Naples, i. 175, 182, 307, 308 Napoleon, i. 32, 34, 53, 88, 109, 258; ii. 218, 221, 298 Louis, ii. 221, 223, 237 Narcissus, i. 255 Navicella, i. 106 Nelson, i. 253 Neri, Saint Philip, i. 318 Nero, i. 46, 56, 188, 254, 257, 285; ii. 163, 211, 291 Nilus, Saint, ii. 36, 37, 40 Nogaret, i. 162, 164 Northmen, i. 46, 49 Numa, i. 3; ii. 268 Nunnery of the Sacred Heart, i. 256 O Octavius, i. 27, 30, 43, 89; ii. 291 Odoacer, i. 47; ii. 297 Olanda, Francesco d', i. 176 Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, i. 186, 188 Olympius, i. 136, 137, 138 Opimius, i. 24 Orgies of Bacchus, i. 76; ii. 120 Orgies of the Mænads, ii. 121 on the Aventine, i. 76; ii. 121 Orsini, the, i. 94, 149, 153, 159, 167-169, 183, 216, 217, 271, 274, 306-314; ii. 16, 126, 138, 204 Bertoldo, i. 168 Camillo, i. 311 Isabella, i. 291 Ludovico, i. 295 Matteo, i. 281 Napoleon, i. 161 Orsino, i. 166 Paolo Giordano, i. 283, 290-295 Porzia, i. 187 Troilo, i. 290, 291 Virginio, i. 295 war between Colonna and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 18, 126, 204 Orsino, Deacon, i. 134, 135 Orvieto, i. 314 Otho, ii. 295 the Second, ii. 304 Otto, the Great, i. 114; ii. 28, 30 Second, ii. 28 Third, ii. 29-37 Ovid, i. 44, 63 P Painting, ii. 181 in fresco, ii. 181-183 oil, ii. 184-186 Palace (Palazzo)-- Annii, i. 113 Barberini, i. 106, 187 Borromeo, ii. 61 Braschi, i. 305 Cæsars, i. 4, 191; ii. 64 Colonna, i. 169, 189; ii. 205 Consulta, i. 181 Corsini, ii. 149, 308 Doria, i. 207, 226 Pamfili, i. 206, 208 Farnese, i. 102 Fiano, i. 205 della Finanze, i. 91 Gabrielli, i. 216 the Lateran, i. 127; ii. 30 Massimo alle Colonna, i. 316, 317 Mattei, ii. 140 Mazarini, i. 187 of Nero, i. 152 della Pilotta, i. 158 Priori, i. 160 Quirinale, i. 139, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 304 of the Renascence, i. 205 Rospigliosi, i. 181, 187, 188, 189 Ruspoli, i. 206 Santacroce, i. 237; ii. 23 of the Senator, i. 114 Serristori, ii. 214, 216 Theodoli, i. 169 di Venezia, i. 102, 192, 202 Palatine, the, i. 2, 13, 67, 69, 194, 195; ii. 64, 119 Palermo, i. 146 Palestrina, i. 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 243, 282; ii. 13, 315 Paliano, i. 282 Duke of, i. 157, 189 Palladium, i. 77 Pallavicini, i. 206, 258 Palmaria, i. 267 Pamfili, the, i. 206 Pannartz, i. 317 Pantheon, i. 90, 102, 195, 271, 278; ii. 44, 45, 146 Parione, the Region, i. 101, 297, 312, 317; ii. 42 Square of, ii. 42 Pasquino, the, i. 186, 305, 317 Passavant, ii. 285 Passeri, Bernardino, i. 313; ii. 308 Patarina, i. 107, 202 Patriarchal System, i. 223-228 Pavia, i. 175 Pecci, the, ii. 229 Joachim Vincent, ii. 229, 230. Peretti, the, i. 205 Felice, i. 149, 289-295 Francesco, i. 149, 289, 292 Vittoria. See _Accoramboni_ Perugia, i. 159, 276, 277 Perugino, ii. 157, 260, 276 Pescara, i. 174 Peter the Prefect, i. 114; ii. 230. Petrarch, i. 161 Petrella, i. 286 Philip the Fair, i. 160, 276, 278 Second of Spain, ii. 47 Phocas, column of, ii. 93 Piazza-- Barberini, i. 155 della Berlina Vecchia, i. 283 Chiesa Nuova, i. 155 del Colonna, i. 119, 190 Gesù, ii. 45 della Minerva, ii. 45 Moroni, i. 250 Navona, i. 102, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305; ii. 25, 46, 57 Pigna, ii. 55 of the Pantheon, i. 193; ii. 26 Pilotta, i. 158 del Popolo, i. 144, 206, 259, 273 Quirinale, i. 181 Romana, ii. 136 Sant' Eustachio, ii. 25 San Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192, 205, 250 Saint Peter's, ii. 251, 309 di Sciarra, i. 192 Spagna, i. 251; ii. 42 delle Terme, i. 144 di Termini, i. 144 Venezia, i. 206 Pierleoni, the, ii. 77, 79, 82, 101, 105, 106, 109, 114 Pigna, ii. 45 the Region, i. 101, 102; ii. 44 Pilgrimages, ii. 245 Pincian (hill), i. 119, 270, 272 Pincio, the, i. 121, 189, 223, 253, 255, 256, 259, 264, 272 Pintelli, Baccio, ii. 278, 279 Pinturicchio, ii. 147 Pliny, the Younger, i. 85, 87 Pompey, i. 30 Pons Æmilius, i. 67 Cestius, ii. 102, 105 Fabricius, ii. 105 Triumphalis, i. 102, 274 Ponte. See also _Bridge_ Garibaldi, ii. 138 Rotto, i. 67 Sant' Angelo, i. 274, 283, 284, 287; ii. 42, 55, 270 Sisto, i. 307, 311; ii. 136 the Region, i. 274, 275 Pontifex Maximus, i. 39, 48 Pontiff, origin of title, ii. 127 Pope-- Adrian the Fourth, ii. 87 Alexander the Sixth, i. 258; ii. 269, 282 Seventh, i. 259 Anastasius, ii. 88 Benedict the Sixth, ii. 28-30 Fourteenth, i. 186 Boniface the Eighth, i. 159, 160, 167, 213, 280, 306; ii. 304 Celestin the First, i. 164 Second, ii. 83 Clement the Fifth, i. 275, 276 Sixth, ii. 9, 17-19 Seventh, i. 306, 307, 310, 313, 314; ii. 308 Eighth, i. 286 Ninth, i. 187; ii. 110 Eleventh, i. 171 Thirteenth, ii. 320 Damascus, i. 133, 135, 136 Eugenius the Third, ii. 85 Fourth, ii. 7, 56 Ghisleri, ii. 52, 53 Gregory the Fifth, ii. 32-37 Seventh, i. 52, 126; ii. 307 Thirteenth, i. 183, 293 Sixteenth, i. 305; ii. 221, 223 Honorius the Third, ii. 126 Fourth, ii. 126 Innocent the Second, ii. 77, 79, 82, 105 Third, i. 153; ii. 6 Sixth, ii. 19 Eighth, i. 275 Tenth, i. 206, 209, 302, 303 Joan, i. 143 John the Twelfth, ii. 282 Thirteenth, i. 113 Fifteenth, ii. 29 Twenty-third, ii. 269 Julius the Second, i. 208, 258; ii. 276, 298, 304 Leo the Third, i. 109; ii. 146, 297 Fourth, ii. 242 Tenth, i. 304; ii. 276, 304 Twelfth, i. 202; ii. 111 Thirteenth, i. 77; ii. 218-267, 282, 287, 308, 312, 313 Liberius, i. 138 Lucius the Second, ii. 84, 85 Martin the First, i. 136 Nicholas the Fourth, i. 159, 274 Fifth, i. 52; ii. 58, 268, 269, 298, 304 Paschal the Second, i. 258; ii. 307 Paul the Second, i. 202, 205 Third, i. 219; ii. 41, 130, 304, 323, 324 Fourth, ii. 46, 47, 48-51, 111, 112 Fifth, ii. 289 Pelagius the First, i. 170, 171; ii. 307 Pius the Fourth, i. 147, 305 Sixth, i. 181, 182 Seventh, i. 53; ii. 221 Ninth, i. 76, 183, 315; ii. 66, 110, 111, 216, 221-225, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258, 265, 298, 308, 311 Silverius, i. 266 Sixtus the Fourth, i. 258, 275; ii. 127, 204-213, 274, 278, 321 Fifth, i. 52, 139, 149, 181, 184, 186, 205, 283; ii. 43, 157, 241, 304, 323 Sylvester, i. 113; ii. 297, 298 Symmachus, ii. 44 Urban the Second, i. 52 Sixth, ii. 322, 323 Eighth, i. 181, 187, 268, 301; ii. 132, 203, 298 Vigilius, ii. 307 Popes, the, i. 125, 142, 273 at Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 9 among sovereigns, ii. 228 election of, ii. 41, 42 hatred for, ii. 262-264 temporal power of, i. 168; ii. 255-259 Poppæa, i. 103 Porcari, the, ii. 56 Stephen, ii. 56-60, 204 Porsena of Clusium, i. 5, 6, 12 Porta. See also _Gate_-- Angelica, i. 120 Maggiore, i. 107 Metronia, i. 106 Mugonia, i. 10 Pia, i. 107, 147, 152; ii. 224 Pinciana, i. 193, 250, 264, 266, 269 del Popolo, i. 272, 299 Portese, ii. 132 Salaria, i, 106, 107, 193 San Giovanni, i. 107, 120 Lorenzo, i. 107 Sebastiano, ii. 119, 125 Spirito, i. 311; ii. 132, 152 Tiburtina, i. 107 Portico of Neptune, i. 271 Octavia, ii. 3, 105 Poussin, Nicholas, i. 264 Præneste, i. 156 Prætextatus, i. 134 Prefect of Rome, i. 103, 114, 134 Presepi, ii. 139 Prince of Wales, i. 203 Prior of the Regions, i. 112, 114 Processions of-- the Brotherhood of Saint John, ii. 130 Captains of Regions, i. 112 Coromania, i. 141 Coronation of Lewis of Bavaria, i. 166, 167 Ides of May, ii. 127-129 the Triumph of Aurelian, i. 179 Progress and civilization, i. 262; ii. 177-180 romance, i. 154 Prosper of Cicigliano, ii. 213 Q Quæstor, i. 58 Quirinal, the (hill), i. 106, 119, 158, 182, 184, 186, 187; ii. 205 R Rabble, Roman, i. 115, 128, 132, 153, 281; ii. 131 Race course of Domitian, i. 270, 297 Races, Carnival, i. 108, 202, 203 Raimondi, ii. 315 Rampolla, ii. 239, 249, 250 Raphael, i. 260, 315; ii. 159, 169, 175, 188, 200, 281, 285, 322 in Trastevere, ii. 144-147 the "Transfiguration" by, ii. 146, 281 Ravenna, i. 175 Regions (Rioni), i. 100-105, 110-114, 166 Captains of, i. 110 devices of, i. 100 fighting ground of, i. 129 Prior, i. 112, 114 rivalry of, i. 108, 110, 125 Regola, the Region, i. 101, 168; ii. 1-3 Regulus, i. 20 Religion, i. 48, 50, 75 Religious epochs in Roman history, i. 76 Renascence in Italy, i. 52, 77, 84, 98, 99, 188, 237, 240, 250, 258, 261, 262, 303; ii. 152-201, 280 art of, i. 231 frescoes of, i. 232 highest development of, i. 303, 315 leaders of, ii. 152, 157-159 manifestation of, ii. 197 palaces of, i. 205, 216 represented in "The Last Judgment," ii. 280 results of development of, ii. 199 Reni, Guido, i. 264; ii. 317 Republic, the, i. 6, 12, 15, 53, 110; ii. 291 and Arnold of Brescia, ii. 86 Porcari, ii. 56-60 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 modern ideas of, ii. 219 Revolts in Rome-- against the nobles, ii. 73 of the army, i. 25 of Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73-89 Marius and Sylla, i. 25 Porcari, ii. 56-60 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8, 73 slaves, i. 24 Stefaneschi, i. 281-283; ii. 219-222 Revolutionary idea, the, ii. 219-222 Riario, the, ii. 149, 150, 151 Jerome, ii. 205 Rienzi, Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308 Rioni. See _Regions_ Ripa, the Region, i. 101; ii. 118 Ripa Grande, ii. 127 Ripetta, ii. 52 Ristori, Mme., i. 169 Robert of Naples, i. 278 Rotfredo, Count, i. 114, 115 Rome-- a day in mediæval, i. 241-247 Bishop of, i. 133 charm of, i. 54, 98, 318 ecclesiastic, i. 124 lay, i. 124 a modern Capital, i. 123, 124 foundation of, i. 2 of the Augustan Age, i. 60-62 Barons, i. 50, 84, 104, 229-247; ii. 75 Cæsars, i. 84 Empire, i. 15, 17, 28, 31, 45, 47, 53. 60, 99 Kings, i. 2-7, 10, 11 Middle Age, i. 110, 210-247, 274; ii. 172-175 Napoleonic era, i. 229 Popes, i. 50, 77, 84, 104 Republic, i. 6, 12, 16, 53, 110 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 today, i. 55 sack of, by Constable of Bourbon, i. 259, 273, 309-315 sack of, by Gauls, i. 15, 49, 252 Guiscard, i. 95, 126-129, 252 seen from dome of Saint Peter's, ii. 302 under Tribunes, i. 14 Decemvirs, i. 14 Dictator, i. 28 Romulus, i. 2, 5, 30, 78, 228 Rospigliosi, i. 206 Rossi, Pellegrino, i. 316 Count, ii. 223 Rostra, i. 27; ii. 93 Julia, i. 68; ii. 93 Rota, ii. 215 Rovere, the, i. 258; ii. 276, 279, 321 Rudini, i. 187 Rudolph of Hapsburg, i. 161 Rufillus, i. 65 S Sacchi, Bartolommeo, i. 139, 147 Saint Peter's Church, i. 166, 278; ii. 202, 212, 243, 246, 268, 289, 294, 295, 326 altar of, i. 96 architects of, ii. 304 bronze doors of, ii. 299, 300 builders of, ii. 304 Chapel of the Choir, ii. 310, 313, 314 Chapel of the Sacrament, ii. 274, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313 Choir of, ii. 313-316 Colonna Santa, ii. 319 dome of, i. 96; ii. 302 Piazza of, ii. 251 Sacristy of, i. 171 Salvini, i. 169, 252 Giorgio, i. 313 Santacroce Paolo, i. 286 Sant' Angelo the Region, i. 101; ii. 101 Santorio, Cardinal, i. 208 San Vito, i. 282 Saracens, i. 128, 144 Sarto, Andrea del, ii. 157, 169 Saturnalia, i. 125, 194, 195 Saturninus, i. 25 Satyricon, the, i. 85 Savelli, the, i. 284; ii. 1, 16, 126, 206 John Philip, ii. 207-210 Savonarola, i. 110 Savoy, house of, i. 110; ii. 219, 220, 224 Scævola, i. 13 Schweinheim, i. 317 Scipio, Cornelius, i. 20 of Africa, i. 20, 22, 29, 59, 76; ii. 121 Asia, i. 21; ii. 120 Scotus, i. 182 See, Holy, i. 159, 168; ii. 264-267, 277, 294 Segni, Monseignor, i. 304 Sejanuo, ii. 294 Semiamira, i. 178 Senate, Roman, i. 167, 168, 257 the Little, i. 177, 180 Senators, i. 78, 112, 167 Servius, i. 5, 15 Severus-- Arch of, ii. 92 Septizonium of, i. 96, 127 Sforza, i. 13; ii. 89 Catharine, i. 177; ii. 150 Francesco, i. 306 Siena, i. 232, 268; ii. 229 Signorelli, ii. 277 Slaves, i. 81, 24 Sosii Brothers, i. 72, 73 Spencer, Herbert, ii. 225, 226 Stefaneschi, Giovanni degli, i. 103, 282 Stilicho, ii. 323 Stradella, Alessandro, ii. 315 Streets. See _Via_ Subiaco, i. 282 Suburra, i. 39; ii. 95 Suetonius, i. 43 Sylla, ii. 25-29, 36-42 T Tacitus, i. 46, 254; ii. 103 Tarentum, i. 18, 19 Tarpeia, i. 29; ii. 68, 69 Tarpeian Rock, ii. 67 Tarquins, the, i. 6, 11, 12, 80, 248, 249, 269; ii. 69 Sextus, i. 5, 11 Tasso, i. 188, 189; ii. 147-149 Bernardo, i. 188 Tatius, i. 68, 69 Tempietto, the, i. 264 Temple of-- Castor, i. 27 Castor and Pollux, i. 68; ii. 92, 94 Ceres, ii. 119 Concord, i. 24; ii. 92 Flora, i. 155 Hercules, ii. 40 Isis and Serapis, i. 271 Julius Cæsar, i. 72 Minerva, i. 96 Saturn, i. 194, 201; ii. 94 the Sun, i. 177, 179, 180, 271 Venus and Rome, i. 110 Venus Victorius, i. 270 Vesta, i. 68 Tenebræ, i. 117 Tetricius, i. 179 Theatre of-- Apollo, i. 286 Balbus, ii. 1 Marcellus, ii. 1, 101, 105, 106, 119 Pompey, i. 103, 153 Thedoric of Verona, ii. 297 Theodoli, the, i. 258 Theodora Senatrix, i. 158, 266, 267; ii. 27-29, 203, 282 Tiber, i. 23, 27, 66, 93, 94, 151, 158, 168, 189, 237, 248, 249, 254, 269, 272, 288 Tiberius, i. 254, 287; ii. 102 Titian, i. 315; ii. 165, 166, 175, 188, 278 Titus, i. 56, 86; ii. 102, 295 Tivoli, i. 180, 185; ii. 76, 85 Torre (Tower)-- Anguillara, ii. 138, 139, 140 Borgia, ii. 269, 285 dei Conti, i. 118, 153 Milizie, i. 277 Millina, i. 274 di Nona, i. 274, 284, 287; ii. 52, 54, 72 Sanguigna, i. 274 Torrione, ii. 241, 242 Trajan, i. 85, 192; ii. 206 Trastevere, the Region, i. 101, 127, 129, 278, 307, 311; ii. 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 151 Trevi, the Fountain, i. 155, 186 the Region, i. 155, 187; ii. 209 Tribunes, i. 14 Trinità de' Monti, i. 256, 264 dei Pellegrini, ii. 110 Triumph, the, of Aurelian, i. 179 Triumphal Road, i. 66, 69, 70, 71 Tullianum, i. 8 Tullus, i. 3 Domitius, i. 90 Tuscany, Duke of, ii. 30 Tusculum, i. 158 U Unity, of Italy, i. 53, 77, 123, 184; ii. 224 under Augustus, i. 184 Victor Emmanuel, i. 184 University, Gregorian, the, ii. 61 of the Sapienza, i. 251; ii. 24, 25 Urbino, Duke of, i. 208, 217 V Valens, i. 133 Valentinian, i. 133 Varus, i. 46 Vatican, the, i. 127, 128, 147, 165, 189, 278, 281, 307; ii. 44, 202, 207, 228, 243, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, 269, 271 barracks of Swiss Guard, ii. 275 chapels in, Pauline, ii. Nicholas, ii. 285 Sixtine, ii. 246, 274, 275, 276, 278-281, 285 fields, i. 274 Court of the Belvedere, ii. 269 Saint Damasus, ii. 273 finances of, ii. 253 gardens of, ii. 243, 271, 287 of the Pigna, ii. 273 library, ii. 275, 276, 282 Borgia apartments of, ii. 282 Loggia of the Beatification, ii. 245 Raphael, ii. 273, 274, 276, 285 Maestro di Camera, ii. 239, 248, 250 museums of, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287 picture galleries, ii. 273-284 Pontifical residence, ii. 249 private apartments, ii. 249 Sala Clementina, ii. 248 del Concistoro, ii. 246 Ducale, ii. 245, 247 Regia, ii. 246 throne room, ii. 247 Torre Borgia, ii. 269, 285 Veii, i. 16, 17 Velabrum, i. 67 Veneziano, Domenico, ii. 185 Venice, i. 193, 296, 306; ii. 35, 205 Vercingetorix, ii. 294 Vespasian, i. 46, 56; ii. 295 Vespignani, ii. 241, 242 Vesta, i. 57 temple of, i. 71, 77 Vestals, i. 77, 80, 133, 152; ii. 99 house of, i. 69 Via-- della Angelo Custode, i. 122 Appia, i. 22, 94 Arenula, ii. 45 Borgognona, i. 251 Campo Marzo, i. 150 di Caravita, ii. 45 del Corso, i. 155, 158, 192, 193, 251; ii. 45 della Dateria, i. 183 Dogana Vecchia, ii. 26 Flaminia, i. 193 Florida, ii. 45 Frattina, i. 250 de' Greci, i. 251 Lata, i. 193 Lungara, i. 274; ii. 144, 145, 147 Lungaretta, ii. 140 della Maestro, i. 283 Marforio, i. 106 di Monserrato, i. 283 Montebello, i. 107 Nazionale, i. 277 Nova, i. 69 di Parione, i. 297 de' Poli, i. 267 de Pontefici, i. 158 de Prefetti, ii. 6 Quattro Fontane, i. 155, 187 Sacra, i. 65, 71, 180 San Gregorio, i. 71 San Teodoro, i. 195 de' Schiavoni, i. 158 Sistina, i. 260 della Stelleta, i. 250 della Tritone, i. 106, 119-122, 155 Triumphalis, i. 66, 70, 71 Venti Settembre, i. 186 Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275 Viale Castro Pretorio, i. 107 Vicolo della Corda, i. 283 Victor Emmanuel, i. 53, 166, 184; ii. 90, 221, 224, 225, 238 monument to, ii. 90 Victoria, Queen of England, ii. 263 Vigiles, cohort of the, i. 158, 170 Villa Borghese, i. 223 Colonna, i. 181, 189 d'Este, i. 185 of Hadrian, i. 180 Ludovisi, i. 106, 193 Medici, i. 259, 262, 264, 265, 269, 313 Negroni, i. 148, 149, 289, 292 Publica, i. 250 Villani, i. 160, 277; ii. 164 Villas, in the Region of Monti, i. 149, 150 Vinci, Lionardo da, i. 260, 315; ii. 147, 159, 169, 171, 175, 184, 188, 195, 200 "The Last Supper," by, ii. 171, 184 Virgil, i. 44, 56, 63 Virginia, i. 14 Virginius, i. 15 Volscians, ii. 230 W Walls-- Aurelian, i. 93, 106, 110, 193, 271; ii. 119, 144 Servian, i. 5, 7, 15, 250, 270 of Urban the Eighth, ii. 132 Water supply, i. 145 William the Silent, ii. 263 Witches on the Æsquiline, i. 140 Women's life in Rome, i. 9 Z Zama, i. 21, 59 Zenobia of Palmyra, i. 179; ii. 150. Zouaves, the, ii. 216 
23340	----	CAMPAIGNS OF A NON-COMBATANT, AND HIS ROMAUNT ABROAD DURING THE WAR. BY GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND. NEW YORK: BLELOCK & COMPANY, 19 BEEKMAN STREET, 1866. Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1866, by GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. SCRYMGEOUR, WHITCOMB & CO., Stereotypers, 15 WATER STREET, BOSTON. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: Inconsistency in hyphenation in this etext is as in| |the original book. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ TO "Miles O'Reilly," Who saw the war as vividly as he sang it; and whose aims for the peace that has ensued, are even nobler than the noble influence he exerted during the struggle, these chapters of travel are inscribed by his friend and colleague. PREFACE. In the early part of 1863, while I was resident in London,--the first of the War Correspondents to go abroad,--I wrote, at the request of Mr. George Smith, publisher of the Cornhill Magazine, a series of chapters upon the Rebellion, thus introduced:-- "Few wars have been so well chronicled, as that now desolating America. Its official narratives have been copious; the great newspapers of the land have been represented in all its campaigns; private enterprise has classified and illustrated its several events, and delegates of foreign countries have been allowed to mingle freely with its soldiery, and to observe and describe its battles. The pen and the camera have accompanied its bayonets, and there has not probably been any skirmish, however insignificant, but a score of zealous scribes have remarked and recorded it. "I have employed some leisure hours afforded me in Europe, to detail those parts of the struggle which I witnessed in a civil capacity. The Sketches which follow are entirely personal, and dwell less upon routine incidents, plans, and statistics, than upon those lighter phases of war which fall beneath the dignity of severe history and are seldom related. I have endeavored to reproduce not only the adventures, but the impressions of a novitiate, and I have described not merely the army and its operations, but the country invaded, and the people who inhabit it. "The most that I have hoped to do, is so to simplify a campaign that the reader may realize it as if he had beheld it, travelling at will, as I did, and with no greater interest than to see how fields were fought and won." To those chapters, I have added in this collection, some estimates of American life in Europe, and some European estimates of American life; with my ultimate experiences in the War after my return to my own country. I cannot hope that they will be received with the same favor, either here or abroad, as that which greeted their original publication. But no man ought to let the first four years of his majority slip away unrecorded. I would rather publish a tolerable book now than a possibly good one hereafter. CAMPAIGNS OF A NON-COMBATANT, AND HIS Romaunt abroad during the War. CHAPTER 1. MY IMPRESSMENT. "Here is a piece of James Franklin's printing press, Mr. Townsend," said Mr. Pratt to me, at Newport the other day,--"Ben. Franklin wrote for the paper, and set type upon it. The press was imported from England in 1730, or thereabouts." He produced a piece of wood, a foot in length, and then laid it away in its drawer very sacredly. "I should like to write to that press, Mr. Pratt," I said,--"there would be no necessity in such a case of getting off six columns for to-night's mail." "Well!" said Mr. Pratt, philosophically, "I have a theory that a man grows up to machinery. As your day so shall your strength be. I believe you have telegraphed up to a House instrument, haven't you?" "Mr. Pratt," cried I, with some indignation, "your memory is too good. This is Newport, and I have come down to see the surf. Pray, do not remind me of hot hours in a newspaper office, the click of a Morse dispatch, and work far into the midnight!" So I left Mr. Pratt, of the Newport _Mercury_, with an ostentation of affront, and bade James Brady, the boatman, hoist sail and carry me over to Dumpling Rocks. On the grassy parapet of the crumbling tower which once served the purposes of a fort, the transparent water hungering at its base, the rocks covered with fringe spotting the channel, the ocean on my right hand lost in its own vastness, and Newport out of mind save when the town bells rang, or the dip of oars beat in the still swell of Narragansett,--I lay down, chafing and out of temper, to curse the only pleasurable labor I had ever undertaken. To me all places were workshops: the seaside, the springs, the summer mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never _abandonne_, always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand, one long and pointed, and ever dropping gall; the ineradicable stain upon my thumb; the widest of my circuits, with all my adventure, a paltry sheet of foolscap; and the world in which I dwelt, no place for thought, or dreaminess, or love-making,--only the fierce, fast, flippant existence of news! And with this inward execration, I lay on Dumpling Rocks, looking to sea, and recalled the first fond hours of my newspaper life. To be a subject of old Hoe, the most voracious of men, I gave up the choice of three sage professions, and the sweet alternative of idling husbandry. The day I graduated saw me an _attaché_ of the Philadelphia _Chameleon_. I was to receive three dollars a week and be the heir to lordly prospects. In the long course of persevering years I might sit in the cushions of the night-editor, or speak of the striplings around me as "_my_ reporters." "There is nothing which you cannot attain," said Mr. Axiom, my employer,--"think of the influence you exercise!--more than a clergyman; Horace Greeley was an editor; so was George D. Prentice; the first has just been defeated for Congress; the last lectured last night and got fifty dollars for it." Hereat I was greatly encouraged, and proposed to write a leader for next day's paper upon the evils of the Fire Department. "Dear me," said Mr. Axiom, "you would ruin our circulation at a wink; what would become of our ball column? in case of a fire in the building we couldn't get a hose to play on it. Oh! no, Alfred, writing leaders is hard and dangerous; I want you first to learn the use of a beautiful pair of scissors." I looked blank and chopfallen. "No man can write a good hand or a good style," he said, "without experience with scissors. They give your palm flexibility and that is soon imparted to the mind. But perfection is attained by an alternate use of the scissors and the pen; if a little paste be prescribed at the same time, cohesion and steadfastness is imparted to the man." His reasoning was incontrovertible; but I damned his conclusions. So, I spent one month in slashing several hundred exchanges a day, and paragraphing all the items. These reappeared in a column called "THE LATEST INFORMATION," and when I found them copied into another journal, a flush of satisfaction rose to my face. The editor of the _Chameleon_ was an old journalist, whose face was a sealed book of Confucius, and who talked to me, patronizingly, now and then, like the Delphic Oracle. His name was Watch, and he wore a prodigious pearl in his shirt-bosom. He crept up to the editorial room at nine o'clock every night, and dashed off an hour's worth of glittering generalities, at the end of which time two or three gentlemen, blooming at the nose, and with cheeks resembling a map drawn in red ink, sounded the pipe below stairs, and Mr. Watch said-- "Mr. Townsend, I look to you to be on hand to-night; I am called away by the Water-Gas Company." Then, with enthusiasm up to blood-heat, aroused by this mark of confidence, I used to set to, and scissor and write till three o'clock, while Mr. Watch talked water-gas over brandy and water, and drew his thirty dollars punctually on Saturdays. So it happened that my news paragraphs, sometimes pointedly turned into a reflection, crept into the editorial columns, when water-gas was lively. Venturing more and more, the clipper finally indited a leader; and Mr. Watch, whose nose water-gas was reddening, applauded me, and told me in his sublime way, that, as a special favor, I might write all the leaders the next night. Mr. Watch was seen no more in the sanctum for a week, and my three dollars carried on the concern. When he returned, he generously gave me a dollar, and said that he had spoken of me to the Water-Gas Company as a capital secretary. Then he wrote me a pass for the Arch Street Theatre, and told me, benevolently, to go off and rest that night. For a month or more the responsibility of the _Chameleon_ devolved almost entirely upon me. Child that I was, knowing no world but my own vanity, and pleased with those who fed its sensitive love of approbation rather than with the just and reticent, I harbored no distrust till one day when Axiom visited the office, and I was drawing my three dollars from the treasurer, I heard Mr. Watch exclaim, within the publisher's room-- "Did you read my article on the Homestead Bill?" "Yes," answered Axiom; "it was quite clever; your leaders are more alive and epigrammatic than they were." I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried-- "The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!" "What's this, Watch?" said Axiom. "Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions very readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his salary to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad." That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room. Watch's dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and made a reporter. All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it all, I wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in the five intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of my steel-pen. The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train. Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personæ of the world congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of all kindly caricature. I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner is drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his forehead. He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian standard. He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and will have no italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat with you, drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate with you, spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to typography or paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes a primitive clay pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot offend him more than by looking over any proof except when he is holding it. A chip of himself is the copyholder at his side,--a meagre, freckled, matter of fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a rapid monotone, and is never known to venture any opinion or suggestion whatever. This boy, I am bound to say, will follow the copy if it be all consonants, and will accompany it if it flies out of the window. The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad, shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures, disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which he could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the theatre every night, and he was the dashing escort of the proprietor's wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice of authors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach behind the counter--his own indisputable domain--but sometimes asked us to watch the office while he drank with a theatrical agent at the nearest bar. He was an inveterate gossip, and endowed with a damnable love of slipshod argument; the only oral censor upon our compositions, he hailed us with all the complaints made at his solicitation by irascible subscribers, and stood in awe of the cashier only, who frequently, to our delight and surprise, combed him over, and drove him to us for sympathy. The foreman was still our power behind the throne; he left out our copy on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts of uncurrent bank bills. His wife and he went thrice a year on excursions to the sea-side, and he was forever borrowing a dollar from somebody to treat the lender and himself. The ship-news man could be seen towards the small-hours, writing his highly imaginative department, which showed how the Sally Ann, Master Todd, arrived leaky in Bombay harbor; and there were stacks of newsboys asleep on the boilers, fighting in their dreams for the possession of a fragment of a many-cornered blanket. These, like myself, went into the halcyon land of Nod to the music of a crashing press, and swarmed about it at the dawn like so many gad flies about an ox, to carry into the awakening city the rhetoric and the rubbish I had written. And still they go, and still the great press toils along, and still am I its slave and keeper, who sit here by the proud, free sea, and feel like Sinbad, that to a terrible old man I have sold my youth, my convictions, my love, my life! CHAPTER II. THE WAR CORRESPONDENT'S FIRST DAY. Looking back over the four years of the war, and noting how indurated I have at last become, both in body and in emotion, I recall with a sigh that first morning of my correspondentship when I set out so light-hearted and yet so anxious. It was in 1861. I was accompanied to the War department by an _attaché_ of the United States Senate. The new Secretary, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton, referred me to a Mr. Sanford, "Military Supervisor of Army Intelligence," and after a brief delay I was requested to sign a parole and duplicate, specifying my loyalty to the Federal Government, and my promise to publish nothing detrimental to its interests. I was then given a circular, which stated explicitly the kind of news termed contraband, and also a printed pass, filled in with my name, age, residence, and newspaper connection. The latter enjoined upon all guards to pass me in and out of camps; and authorized persons in Government employ to furnish me with information. Our Washington Superintendent sent me a beast, and in compliment to what the animal might have been, called the same a horse. I wish to protest, in this record, against any such misnomer. The creature possessed no single equine element. Experience has satisfied me that horses stand on four legs; the horse in question stood upon three. Horses may either pace, trot, run, rack, or gallop; but mine made all the five movements at once. I think I may call his gait an eccentric stumble. That he had endurance I admit; for he survived perpetual beating; and his beauty might have been apparent to an anatomist, but would be scouted by the world at large. I asked, ruefully, if I was expected to go into battle so mounted; but was peremptorily forbidden, as a valuable property might be endangered thereby. I was assigned to the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps in the anticipated advance, and my friend, the _attaché_, accompanied me to its rendezvous at Hunter's Mills. We started at two o'clock, and occupied an hour in passing the city limits. I calculated that, advancing at the same ratio, we should arrive in camp at noon next day. We presented ludicrous figures to the grim sabremen that sat erect at street corners, and ladies at the windows of the dwellings smothered with suppressed laughter as we floundered along. My friend had the better horse; but I was the better rider; and if at any time I grew wrathful at my sorry plight, I had but to look at his and be happy again. He appeared to be riding on the neck of his beast, and when he attempted to deceive me with a smile, his face became horribly contorted. Directly his breeches worked above his boots, and his bare calves were objects of hopeless solicitude. Caricatures, rather than men, we toiled bruisedly through Georgetown, and falling in the wake of supply teams on the Leesburg turnpike, rode between the Potomac on one side and the dry bed of the canal on the other, till we came at last to Chain Bridge. There was a grand view from the point of Little Falls above, where a line of foamy cataracts ridged the river, and the rocks towered gloomily on either hand: and of the city below, with its buildings of pure marble, and the yellow earthworks that crested Arlington Heights. The clouds over the Potomac were gorgeous in hue, but forests of melancholy pine clothed the sides of the hills, and the roar of the river made such beautiful monotone that I almost thought it could be translated to words. Our passes were now demanded by a fat, bareheaded officer, and while he panted through their contents, two privates crossed their bayonets before us. "News?" he said, in the shortest remark of which he was capable. When assured that we had nothing to reveal, he seemed immeasurably relieved, and added--"Great labor, reading!" At this his face grew so dreadfully purple that I begged him to sit down, and tax himself with no further exertion. He wiped his forehead, in reply, gasping like a triton, and muttering the expressive direction, "right!" disappeared into a guard-box. The two privates winked as they removed their muskets, and we both laughed immoderately when out of hearing. Our backs were now turned to the Maryland shore, and jutting grimly from the hill before us, the black guns of Fort Ethan Allen pointed down the bridge. A double line of sharp abattis protected it from assault, and sentries walked lazily up and down the parapet. The colors hung against the mast in the dead calm, and the smoke curled straight upward from some log-huts within the fort. The wildness of the surrounding landscape was most remarkable. Within sight of the Capital of the Republic, the fox yet kept the covert, and the farms were few and far apart. It seemed to me that little had been done to clear the country of its primeval timber, and the war had accomplished more to give evidence of man and industry, than two centuries of occupation. A military road had been cut through the solid rocks here; and the original turnpike, which had been little more than a cart track, was now graded and macadamized. I passed multitudes of teams, struggling up the slopes, and the carcasses of mules littered every rod of the way. The profanity of the teamsters was painfully apparent. I came unobserved upon one who was berating his beasts with a refinement of cruelty. He cursed each of them separately, swinging his long-lashed whip the while, and then damned the six in mass. He would have made a dutiful overseer. The soldiers had shown quite as little consideration for the residences along the way. I came to one dwelling where some pertinacious Vandal had even pried out the window-frames, and imperilled his neck to tear out the roof-beams; a dead vulture was pinned over the door by pieces of broken bayonets. "Langley's,"--a few plank-houses, clustering around a tavern and a church,--is one of those settlements whose sounding names beguile the reader into an idea of their importance. A lonesome haunt in time of peace, it had lately been the winter quarters of fifteen thousand soldiers, and a multitude of log huts had grown up around it. I tied my horse to the window-shutter of a dwelling, and picked my way over a slimy sidewalk to the ricketty tavern-porch. Four or five privates lay here fast asleep, and the bar-room was occupied by a bevy of young officers, who were emptying the contents of sundry pocket-flasks. Behind the bar sat a person with strongly-marked Hebrew features, and a watchmaker was plying his avocation in a corner. Two great dogs crouched under a bench, and some highly-colored portraits were nailed to the wall. The floor was bare, and some clothing and miscellaneous articles hung from beams in the ceiling. "Is this your house?" I said to the Hebrew. "I keepsh it now." "By right or by conquest?" "By ze right of conquest," he said, laughing; and at once proposed to sell me a bootjack and an India-rubber overcoat. I compromised upon a haversack, which he filled with sandwiches and sardines, and which I am bound to say fell apart in the course of the afternoon. The watchmaker was an enterprising young fellow, who had resigned his place in a large Broadway establishment, to speculate in cheap jewelry and do itinerant repairing. He says that he followed the "Army Paymasters, and sold numbers of watches, at good premiums, when the troops had money." Soldiers, he informed me, were reckless spendthrifts; and the prey of sutlers and sharpers. When there was nothing at hand to purchase, they gambled away their wages, and most of them left the service penniless and in debt. He thought it perfectly legitimate to secure some silver while "going," but complained that the value of his stock rendered him liable to theft and murder. "There are men in every regiment," said he, "who would blow out my brains in any lonely place to plunder me of these watches." At this point, a young officer, in a fit of bacchanal laughter, staggered rather roughly against me. "Begurpardon," he said, with an unsteady bow, "never ran against person in life before." I smiled assuringly, but he appeared to think the offence unpardonable. "Do asshu a, on honor of gentlemand officer, not in custom of behaving offensively. Azo! leave it to my friends. Entirely due to injuries received at battle Drainesville." As the other gentlemen laughed loudly here, I took it for granted that my apologist had some personal hallucination relative to that engagement. "What giggling for, Bob?" he said; "honor concerned in this matter, Will! Do asshu a, fell under Colonel's horse, and Company A walked over small of my back." The other officers were only less inebriated and most of them spoke boastfully of their personal prowess at Drainesville. This was the only engagement in which the Pennsylvania Reserves had yet participated, and few officers that I met did not ascribe the victory entirely to their own individual gallantry. I inquired of these gentlemen the route to the new encampments of the Reserves. They lay five miles south of the turnpike, close to the Loudon and Hampshire railroad, and along both sides of an unfrequented lane. They formed in this position the right wing of the Army of the Potomac, and had been ordered to hold themselves in hourly readiness for an advance. By this time, my friend S. came up, and leaving him to restore his mortified body, I crossed the road to the churchyard and peered through the open door into the edifice. The seats of painted pine had been covered with planks, and a sick man lay above every pew. At the ringing of my spurs in the threshold, some of the sufferers looked up through the red eyes of fever, and the faces of others were spectrally white. A few groaned as they turned with difficulty, and some shrank in pain from the glare of the light. Medicines were kept in the altar-place, and a doctor's clerk was writing requisitions in the pulpit. The sickening smell of the hospital forbade me to enter, and walking across the trampled yard, I crept through a rent in the paling, and examined the huts in which the Reserves had passed the winter. They were built of logs, plastered with mud, and the roofs of some were thatched with straw. Each cabin was pierced for two or more windows; the beds were simply shelves or berths; a rough fireplace of stones and clay communicated with the wooden chimney; and the floors were in most cases damp and bare. Streets, fancifully designated, divided the settlement irregularly; but the tenements were now all deserted save one, where I found a whole family of "contrabands" or fugitive slaves. These wretched beings, seven in number, had escaped from a plantation in Albemarle county, and travelling stealthily by night, over two hundred miles of precipitous country, reached the Federal lines on the thirteenth day. The husband said that his name was "Jeems," and that his wife was called "Kitty;" that his youngest boy had passed the mature age of eight months, and that the "big girl, Rosy," was "twelve years Christmas comin'." While the troops remained at Langley's, the man was employed at seventy-five cents a week to attend to an officer's horse. Kitty and Rose cooked and washed for soldiers, and the boys ran errands to Washington and return,--twenty-five miles! The eldest boy, Jefferson, had been given the use of a crippled team-horse, and traded in newspapers, but having confused ideas of the relative value of coins, his profits were only moderate. The nag died before the troops removed, and a sutler, under pretence of securing their passage to the North, disappeared with the little they had saved. They were quite destitute now, but looked to the future with no foreboding, and huddled together in the straw, made a picture of domestic felicity that impressed me greatly with the docility, contentment, and unfailing good humor of their dusky tribe. The eyes of the children were large and lustrous, and they revealed the clear pearls beneath their lips as they clung bashfully to their mother's lap. The old lady was smoking a clay pipe; the man running over some castaway jackets and boots. I remarked particularly the broad shoulders and athletic arms of the woman, whose many childbirths had left no traces upon her comeliness. She asked me, wistfully: "Masser, how fur to de nawf?" "A long way," said I, "perhaps two hundred miles." "Lawd!" she said, buoyantly--"is dat all? Why, Jeems, couldn't we foot it, honey?" "You a most guv out before, ole 'oman," he replied; "got a good ruff over de head now. Guess de white massar won't let um starve." I tossed some coppers to the children and gave each a sandwich. "You get up dar, John Thomas!" called the man vigorously; "you tank de gentleman, Jefferson, boy! I wonda wha your manners is. Tank you, massar! know'd you was a gentleman, sar! Massar, is your family from ole Virginny?" It was five o'clock when I rejoined S., and the greater part of our journey had yet to be made. I went at his creeping pace until courtesy yielded to impatience, when spurring my Pegasus vigorously, he fell into a bouncing amble and left the _attaché_ far behind. My pass was again demanded above Langley's by a man who ate apples as he examined it, and who was disposed to hold a long parley. I entered a region of scrub timber further on, and met with nothing human for four miles, at the end of which distance I reached Difficult Creek, flowing through a rocky ravine, and crossed by a military bridge of logs. Through the thick woods to the right, I heard the roar of the Potomac, and a finger-board indicated that I was opposite Great Falls. Three or four dead horses lay at the roadside beyond the stream, and I recalled the place as the scene of a recent cavalry encounter. A cartridge-box and a torn felt hat lay close to the carcasses: I knew that some soul had gone hence to its account. The road now kept to the left obliquely, and much of my ride was made musical by the stream. Darkness closed solemnly about me, with seven miles of the journey yet to accomplish, and as, at eight o'clock, I turned from the turnpike into a lonesome by-road, full of ruts, pools, and quicksands, a feeling of delicious uneasiness for the first time possessed me. Some owls hooted in the depth of the woods, and wild pigs, darting across the road, went crashing into the bushes. The phosphorescent bark of a blasted tree glimmered on a neighboring knoll, and as I halted at a rivulet to water my beast, I saw a solitary star floating down the ripples. Directly I came upon a clearing where the moonlight shone through the rents of a crumbling dwelling, and from the far distance broke the faint howl of farm dogs. A sense of insecurity that I would not for worlds have resigned, now tingled, now chilled my blood. At last, climbing a stony hill, the skies lay beneath me reddening with the flame of camps and flaring and falling alternately, like the beautiful Northern lights. I heard the ring of hoofs as I looked entranced, and in a twinkling, a body of horsemen dashed past me and disappeared. A little beyond, the road grew so thick that I could see nothing of my way; but trusting doubtfully to my horse, a deep challenge came directly from the thicket, and I saw the flash of a sabre, as I stammered a reply. Led to a cabin close at hand, my pass was examined by candle-light, and I learned that the nearest camp of the Reserves was only a mile farther on, and the regiment of which I was in quest about two miles distant. After another half hour, I reached Ord's brigade, whose tents were pitched in a fine grove of oaks; the men talking, singing, and shouting, around open air fires; and a battery of brass Napoleons unlimbered in front, pointing significantly to the West and South. For a mile and a half I rode by the light of continuous camps, reaching at last the quarters of the ----th, commanded by a former newspaper associate of mine, with whom I had gone itemizing, scores of times. His regiment had arrived only the same afternoon, and their tents were not yet pitched. Their muskets were stacked along the roadside, and the men lay here and there wrapped in their blankets, and dozing around the fagots. The Colonel was asleep in a wagon, but roused up at the summons of his Adjutant, and greeting me warmly, directed the cook to prepare a supper of coffee and fried pork. Too hungry to feel the chafing of my sores and bruises, I fell to the oleaginous repast with my teeth and fingers, and eating ravenously, asked at last to be shown to my apartments. These consisted of a covered wagon, already occupied by four teamsters, and a blanket which had evidently been in close proximity to the hide of a horse. A man named "Coggle," being nudged by the Colonel, and requested to take other quarters, asked dolorously if it was time to turn out, and roared "woa," as if he had some consciousness of being kicked. When I asked for a pillow, the Colonel laughed, and I had an intuition that the man "Coggle" was looking at me in the darkness with intense disgust. The Colonel said that he had once put a man on double duty for placing his head on a snowball, and warned me satirically that such luxuries were preposterous in the field. He recommended me not to catch cold if I could help it, but said that people in camp commonly caught several colds at once, and added grimly that if I wished to be shaved in the morning, there was a man close by, who had ground a sabre down to the nice edge of a razor, and who could be made to accommodate me. There were cracks in the bottom of the wagon, through which the cold came like knives, and I was allotted a space four feet in length, by three feet in width. Being six feet in height, my relation to these Procrustean quarters was most embarassing; but I doubled up, chatteringly, and lay my head on my arm. In a short time I experienced a sensation akin to that of being guillotined, and sitting bolt upright, found the teamsters in the soundest of Lethean conditions. As the man next to me snored very loudly, I adopted the brilliant idea of making a pillow of his thigh; which answered my best expectations. I was aroused after a while, by what I thought to be the violent hands of this person, but which, to my great chagrin, proved to be S., intent upon dividing my place with me. Resistance was useless. I submitted to martyrdom with due resignation, but half resolved to go home in the morning, and shun, for the future, the horrible romance of camps. CHAPTER III. A GENERAL UNDER THE MICROSCOPE. When I awoke at Colonel Taggert's tent the morning afterward, I had verified the common experience of camps by "catching several colds at once," and felt a general sensation of being cut off at the knees. Poor S., who joined me at the fire, states that he believed himself to be tied in knots, and that he should return afoot to Washington. Our horses looked no worse, for that would have been manifestly impossible. We were made the butts of much jesting at breakfast; and S. said, in a spirit of atrocity, that camp wit was quite as bad as camp "wittles." I bade him adieu at five o'clock A. M., when he had secured passage to the city in a sutler's wagon. Remounting my own fiery courser, I bade the Colonel a temporary farewell, and proceeded in the direction of Meade's and Reynold's brigades. The drum and fife were now beating _reveillé_, and volunteers in various stages of undress were limping to roll-call. Some wore one shoe, and others appeared shivering in their linen. They stood ludicrously in rank, and a succession of short, dry coughs ran up and down the line, as if to indicate those who should escape the bullet for the lingering agonies of the hospital. The ground was damp, and fog was rising from the hollows and fens. Some signal corps officers were practising with flags in a ploughed field, and negro stewards were stirring about the cook fires. A few supply wagons that I passed the previous day were just creaking into camp, having travelled most of the night. I saw that the country was rude, but the farms were close, and the dwellings in many cases inhabited. The vicinity had previously been unoccupied by either army, and rapine had as yet appropriated only the fields for camps and the fences for fuel. I was directed to the headquarters of Major-General M'Call,--a cluster of wall tents in the far corner of a grain-field, concealed from public view by a projecting point of woods. A Sibley tent stood close at hand, where a soldier in blue overcoat was reading signals through a telescope. I mistook the tent for the General's, and riding up to the soldier was requested to stand out of the way. I moved to his rear, but he said curtly that I was obstructing the light. I then dismounted, and led my horse to a clump of trees a rod distant. "Don't hitch there," said the soldier; "you block up the view." A little ruffled at this manifest discourtesy, I asked the man to denote some point within a radius of a mile where I would _not_ interfere with his operations. He said in reply, that it was not his business to denote hitching-stalls for anybody. I thought, in that case, that I should stay where I was, and he politely informed me that I might stay and be--jammed. I found afterward that this individual was troubled with a kind of insanity peculiar to all headquarters, arising out of an exaggerated idea of his own importance. I had the pleasure, a few minutes afterward, of hearing him ordered to feed my horse. A thickset, gray-haired man sat near by, undergoing the process of shaving by a very nervous negro. The thickset man was also exercising the privileges of his rank; but the more he berated his attendant's awkwardness, the more nervous the other became. I addressed myself mutually to master and man, in an inquiry as to the precise quarters of the General in command. The latter pointed to a wall tent contiguous, and was cursed by the thickset man for not minding his business. The thickset man remarked substantially, that he didn't know anything about it, and was at that moment cut by the negro, to my infinite delight. Before the wall tent in question stood a tall, broad-shouldered gentleman in shirt-sleeves and slippers, warming his back and hands at a fire. He was watching, through an aperture in the tent, the movements of a private who was cleaning his boots. I noticed that he wore a seal ring, and that he opened and shut his eyes very rapidly. He was, otherwise, a very respectable and dignified gentleman. "Is this General M'Call?" said I, a little discomposed. The gentleman looked abstractedly into my eyes, opening and shutting his own several times, as if doubtful of his personality, and at last decided that he _was_ General M'Call. "What is it?" he said gravely, but without the slightest curiosity. "I have a letter for you, sir, I believe." He put the letter behind his back, and went on warming his hands. Having winked several times again, apparently forgetting all about the matter, I ventured to add that the letter was merely introductory. He looked at it, mechanically. "Who opened it?" he said. "Letters of introduction are not commonly sealed, General." "Who are you?" he asked, indifferently. I told him that the contents of the letter would explain my errand; but he had, meantime, relapsed into abstractedness, and winked, and warmed his hands, for at least, five minutes. At the end of that time, he read the letter very deliberately, and said that he was glad to see me in camp. He intimated, that if I was not already located, I could be provided with bed and meals at headquarters. He stated, in relation to my correspondence, that all letters sent from the Reserve Corps, must, without any reservations, be submitted to him in person. I was obliged to promise compliance, but had gloomy forebodings that the General would occupy a fortnight in the examination of each letter. He invited me to breakfast, proposed to make me acquainted with his staff, and was, in all respects, a very grave, prudent, and affable soldier. I may say, incidentally, that I adopted the device of penning a couple of gossipy epistles, the length and folly of which, so irritated General M'Call, that he released me from the penalty of submitting my compositions for the future. I took up my permanent abode with quartermaster Kingwalt, a very prince of old soldiers, who had devoted much of a sturdy life to promoting the militia interests of the populous county of Chester. When the war-fever swept down his beautiful valley, and the drum called the young men from villages and farms, this ancient yeoman and miller--for he was both--took a musket at the sprightly age of sixty-five, and joined a Volunteer company. Neither ridicule nor entreaty could bend his purpose; but the Secretary of War, hearing of the case, conferred a brigade quartermastership upon him. He threw off the infirmities of age, stepped as proudly as any youngster, and became, emphatically, the best quartermaster in the Division. He never delayed an advance with tardy teams, nor kept the General tentless, nor penned irregular requisitions, nor wasted the property of Government. The ague seized him, occasionally, and shook his grey hairs fearfully; but he always recovered to ride his black stallion on long forages, and his great strength and bulk were the envy of all the young officers. He grasped my hand so heartily that I positively howled, and commanded a tall sergeant, rejoicing in the name of Clover, to take away my horse and split him up for kindling wood. "We must give him the blue roan, that Fogg rides," said the quartermaster, to the great dejection of Fogg, a short stout youth, who was posting accounts. I was glad to see, however, that Fogg was not disposed to be angry, and when informed that a certain iron-gray nag was at his disposal, he was in a perfect glow of good humor. The other _attachés_ were a German, whose name, as I caught it, seemed to be Skyhiski; and a pleasant lad called Owen, whose disposition was so mild, that I wondered how he had adopted the bloody profession of arms. A black boy belonged to the establishment, remarkable, chiefly, for getting close to the heels of the black stallion, and being frequently kicked; he was employed to feed and brush the said stallion, and the antipathy between them was intense. The above curious military combination, slept under a great tarpaulin canopy, originally used for covering commissary stores from the rain. Our meals were taken in the open air, and prepared by Skyhiski; but there was a second tent, provided with desk and secretary, where Mr. Fogg performed his clerk duties, daily. When I had relieved my Pegasus of his saddle, and penned some paragraphs for a future letter, I strolled down the road with the old gentleman, who insisted upon showing me Hunter's mill, a storm-beaten structure, that looked like a great barn. The mill-race had been drained by some soldiers for the purpose of securing the fish contained in it, and the mill-wheel was quite dry and motionless. Difficult Creek ran impetuously across the road below, as if anxious to be put to some use again; and the miller's house adjoining, was now used as a hospital, for Lieutenant-Colonel Kane, and some inferior officers. It was a favorite design of the Quartermaster's to scrape the mill-stone, repair the race, and put the great breast-wheel to work. One could see that the soldier had not entirely obliterated the miller, and as he related, with a glowing face, the plans that he had proposed to recuperate the tottering structure, and make it serviceable to the army, I felt a regret that such peaceful ambitions should have ever been overruled by the call to arms. While we stood at the mill window, watching the long stretches of white tents and speculating upon the results of war, we saw several men running across the road toward a hill-top cottage, where General Meade made his quarters. A small group was collected at the cottage, reconnoitring something through their telescopes. As I hastened in that direction, I heard confused voices, thus: "No, it isn't!" "It is!" "Can you make out his shoulder-bar?" "What is the color of his coat?" "Gray!" "No, it's butternut!" "Has he a musket!" "Yes, he is levelling it!" At this the group scattered in every direction. "Pshaw!" said one, "we are out of range; besides, it is a telescope that he has. By----, it is a Rebel, reconnoitring our camp!" There was a manifest sensation here, and one man wondered how he had passed the picket. Another suggested that he might be accompanied by a troop, and a third convulsed the circle by declaring that there were six other Rebels visible in a woods to the left. Mr. Fogg had meantime come up and proffered me a field-glass, through which I certainly made out a person in gray, standing in the middle of the road just at the ridge of a hill. When I dropped my glass I saw him distinctly with the naked eye. He was probably a mile distant, and his gray vesture was little relieved by the blue haze of the forest. "He is going," exclaimed a private, excitedly; "where's the man that was to try a lead on him?" Several started impulsively for their pieces, and some officers called for their horses. "There go his knees!" "His body is behind the hill!" "Now his head----" "Crack! crack! crack!" spluttered musketry from the edge of the mill, and like as many rockets darted a score of horsemen through the creek and up the steep. Directly a faint hurrah pealed from the camp nearest the mill. It passed to the next camp and the next; for all were now earnestly watching; and finally a medley of cheers shook the air and the ear. Thousands of brave men were shouting the requiem of one paltry life. The rash fool had bought with his temerity a bullet in the brain. When I saw him--dusty and still bleeding--he was beset by a full regiment of idlers, to whom death had neither awe nor respect. They talked of the delicate shot, as connoisseurs in the art of murder,--and two men dug him a grave on the green before the mill, wherein he was tossed like a dog or a vulture, to be lulled, let us hope, by the music of the grinding, when grain shall ripen once more. I had an opportunity, after dinner, to inspect the camp of the "Bucktails," a regiment of Pennsylvania backwoodsmen, whose efficiency as skirmishers has been adverted to by all chroniclers of the civil war. They wore the common blue blouse and breeches, but were distinguished by squirrel tails fastened to their caps. They were reputed to be the best marksmen in the service, and were generally allowed, in action, to take their own positions and fire at will. Crawling through thick woods, or trailing serpent-like through the tangled grass, these mountaineers were for a time the terror of the Confederates; but when their mode of fighting had been understood, their adversaries improved upon it to such a degree that at the date of this writing there is scarcely a Corporal's guard of the original Bucktail regiment remaining. Slaughtered on the field, perishing in prison, disabled or paroled, they have lost both their prestige and their strength. I remarked among these worthies a partiality for fisticuffs, and a dislike for the manual of arms. They drilled badly, and were reported to be adepts at thieving and unlicensed foraging. The second night in camp was pleasantly passed. Some sociable officers--favorites with Captain Kingwalt--congregated under the tarpaulin, after supper-hour, and when a long-necked bottle had been emptied and replenished, there were many quaint stories related and curious individualities revealed. I dropped asleep while the hilarity was at its height, and Fogg covered me with a thick blanket as I lay. The enemy might have come upon us in the darkness; but if death were half so sound as my slumber afield, I should have bid it welcome. CHAPTER IV. A FORAGING ADVENTURE. There was a newsboy named "Charley," who slept at Captain Kingwalt's every second night, and who returned my beast to his owner in Washington. The aphorism that a Yankee can do anything, was exemplified by this lad; for he worked my snail into a gallop. He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and appeared to have taken to speculation at the age when most children are learning A B C. He was now in his fourteenth year, owned two horses, and employed another boy to sell papers for him likewise. His profits upon daily sales of four hundred journals were about thirty-two dollars. He had five hundred dollars in bank, and was debating with Captain Kingwalt the propriety of founding an army express and general agency. Such a self-reliant, swaggering, far-sighted, and impertinent boy I never knew. He was a favorite with the Captain's black-boy, and upon thorough terms of equality with the Commanding General. His papers cost him in Washington a cent and a half each, and he sold them in camp for ten cents each. I have not the slightest doubt that I shall hear of him again as the proprietor of an overland mail, or the patron and capitalist of Greenland emigration. I passed the second and third days quietly in camp, writing a couple of letters, studying somewhat of fortification, and making flying visits to various officers. There was but one other Reporter with this division of the army. He represented a New York journal, and I could not but contrast his fine steed and equipments with the scanty accommodations that my provincial establishment had provided for me. His saddle was a cushioned McClellan, with spangled breast-strap and plump saddle-bags, and his bridle was adorned with a bright curb bit and twilled reins. He wore a field-glass belted about his body, and was plentifully provided with money to purchase items of news, if they were at any time difficult to obtain. I resolved inwardly to seize the first opportunity of changing establishments, so that I might be placed upon as good a footing. My relations with camp, otherwise, were of the happiest character; for the troops were State-people of mine, and, as reporters had not yet abused the privileges accorded them, my profession was held in some repute. I made the round of various "messes," and soon adopted the current dissipations of the field,--late hours, long stories, incessant smoking, and raw spirits. There were some restless minds about me, whose funds of anecdote and jest were apparently inexhaustible. I do not know that so many eccentric, adventurous, and fluent people are to be found among any other nationality of soldiers, not excepting the Irish. The blue roan of which friend Fogg had been deprived, exhibited occasional evidences of a desire to break my neck. I was obliged to dispense with the spur in riding him, but he nevertheless dashed off at times, and put me into an agony of fear. On those occasions I managed to retain my seat, and gained thereby the reputation of being a very fine equestrian. As there were few civilians in camp, and as I wore a gray suit, and appeared to be in request at head-quarters, a rumor was developed and gained currency that I was attached to the Division in the capacity of a scout. When my horse became unmanageable, therefore, his speed was generally accelerated by the cheers of soldiers, and I became an object of curiosity in every quarter, to my infinite mortification and dread. The Captain was to set off on the fourth day, to purchase or seize some hay and grain that were stacked at neighboring farms. We prepared to go at eight o'clock, but were detained somewhat by reason of Skyhiski being inebriated the night before, and thereby delaying the breakfast, and afterward the fact that the black stallion had laid open the black-boy's leg. However, at a quarter past nine, the Captain, Sergeant Clover, Fogg, Owen, and myself, with six four-horse wagons, filed down the railroad track until we came to a bridge that some laborers were repairing, where we turned to the left through some soggy fields, and forded Difficult Creek. As there was no road to follow, we kept straight through a wood of young maples and chestnut-trees. Occasionally a trunk or projecting branch stopped the wagons, when the teamsters opened the way with their axes. After two hours of slow advance, we came to the end of the wood, and climbed a succession of hilly fields. From the summit of the last of these, a splendid sweep of farm country was revealed, dotted with quaint Virginia dwellings, stackyards, and negro-cabins, and divided by miles of tortuous worm-fence. The eyes of the Quartermaster brightened at the prospect, though I am afraid that he thought only of the abundant forage; but my own grew hazy as I spoke of the peaceful people and the neglected fields. The plough had furrowed none of these acres, and some crows, that screamed gutturally from a neighboring ash-tree, seemed lean and pinched for lack of their plunder of corn. Many of the dwellings were guarded by soldiers; but of the resident citizens only the women and the old men remained. I did not need to ask where the young men were exiled. The residue that prayed with their faces toward Richmond, told me the story with their eyes. There was, nevertheless, no melodramatic exhibition of feeling among the bereaved. I did not see any defiant postures, nor hear any melting apostrophies. Marius was not mouthing by the ruins of Carthage, nor even Rachel weeping for her Hebrew children. But there were on every hand manifestations of adherence to the Southern cause, except among a few males who feared unutterable things, and were disposed to cringe and prevaricate. The women were not generally handsome; their face was indolent, their dress slovenly, and their manner embarrassed. They lopped off the beginnings and the ends of their sentences, generally commencing with a verb, as thus: "Told soldiers not to carr' off the rye; declared they would; said they bound do jest what they pleased. Let 'em go!" The Captain stopped at a spruce residence, approached by a long lane, and on knocking at the porch with his ponderous fist, a woman came timidly to the kitchen window. "Who's thar?" she said, after a moment. "Come out young woman," said the Captain, soothingly; "we don't intend to murder or rob you, ma'am!" There dropped from the doorsill into the yard, not one, but three young women, followed by a very deaf old man, who appeared to think that the Captain's visit bore some reference to the hencoop. "I wish to buy for the use of the United States Government," said the Captain, "some stacks of hay and corn fodder, that lie in one of your fields." "The last hen was toted off this morning before breakfast," said the old man; "they took the turkeys yesterday, and I was obliged to kill the ducks or I shouldn't have had anything to eat." Here Fogg so misdemeaned himself, as to laugh through his nose, and the man Clover appeared to be suddenly interested in something that lay in a mulberry-tree opposite. "I am provided with money to pay liberally for your produce, and you cannot do better than to let me take the stacks: leaving you, of course, enough for your own horses and cattle." Here the old man pricked up his ears, and said that he hadn't heard of any recent battle; for his part, he had never been a politician; but thought that both parties were a little wrong; and wished that peace would return: for he was a very old man, and was sorry that folks couldn't let quiet folks' property alone. How far his garrulity might have betrayed him, could be conjectured only by one of the girls taking his hand and leading him submissively into the house. The eldest daughter said that the Captain might take the stacks at his own valuation, but trusted to his honor as a soldier, and as he seemed, a gentleman, to deal justly by them. There could be no crop harvested for a twelvemonth, and beggary looked them in the face. I have never beheld anything more chivalrously gallant, than the sturdy old quartermaster's attitude. He blended in tone and face the politeness of a diplomat and the gentleness of a father. They asked him to return to the house, with his _officers_, when he had loaded the wagons; for dinner was being prepared, and they hoped that Virginians could be hospitable, even to their enemies. As to the hay and fodder, none need be left; for the Confederates had seized their horses some months before, and driven off their cows when they retired from the neighborhood. I so admired the queer gables and great brick ovens of the house, that I resolved to tie my horse, and rest under the crooked porch. The eldest young lady had taken me to be a prisoner, and was greatly astonished that the Quartermaster permitted me to go at large. She asked me to have a chair in the parlor, but when I made my appearance there, the two younger sisters fled precipitately. The old man was shaking his head sadly by the fireplace. Some logs burned on the andirons with a red flame. The furniture consisted of a mahogany sideboard, table, and chairs,--ponderous in pattern; and a series of family portraits, in a sprawling style of art, smirked and postured on the wall. The floor was bare, but shone by reason of repeated scrubbing, and the black mantel-piece was a fine specimen of colonial carving in the staunchest of walnut-wood. Directly the two younger girls--though the youngest must have been twenty years of age--came back with averted eyes and the silliest of giggles. They sat a little distance apart, and occasionally nodded or signalled like school children. "Wish you _would_ stop, Bell!" said one of these misses,--whose flaxen hair was plastered across her eyebrows, and who was very tall and slender. "See if I don't tell on you," said the other,--a dark miss with roguish eyes and fat, plump figure, and curls that shook ever so merrily about her shoulders. "Declar' I never said so, if he asks me; declar' I will." "Tell on you,--you see! Won't he be jealous? How he will car' on!" I made out that these young ladies were intent upon publishing their obligations to certain sweethearts of theirs, who, as it afterward seemed, were in the army at Manassas Junction. I said to the curly-haired miss, that she was endangering the life of her enamored; for it would become an object with all the anxious troops in the vicinity to shorten his days. The old man roused up here, and remarked that his health certainly was declining; but he hoped to survive a while longer for the sake of his children; that he was no politician, and always said that the negroes were very ungrateful people. He caught his daughter's eye finally, and cowered stupidly, nodding at the fire. I remarked to the eldest young woman,--called Prissy (Priscilla) by her sister,--that the country hereabout was pleasantly wooded. She said, in substance, that every part of Virginia was beautiful, and that she did not wish to survive the disgrace of the old commonwealth. "Become right down hateful since Yankees invaded it!" exclaimed Miss Bell. "_Some_ Yankee's handsome sister," said Miss Bessie, the proprietor of the curls, "think some Yankees puffick gentlemen!" "Oh, you traitor!" said the other,--"wish _Henry_ heard you say that!" Miss Bell intimated that she should take the first opportunity of telling him the same, and I eulogized her good judgment. Priscilla now begged to be excused for a moment, as, since the flight of the negro property, the care of the table had devolved mainly upon her. A single aged servant, too feeble or too faithful to decamp, still attended to the menial functions, and two mulatto children remained to relieve them of light labor. She was a dignified, matronly young lady, and, as one of the sisters informed me, plighted to a Major in the Confederate service. The others chattered flippantly for an hour, and said that the old place was dreadfully lonesome of late. Miss Bell was _sure_ she should die if another winter, similar to the last, occurred. She loved company, and had always found it _so_ lively in Loudon before; whereas she had positively been but twice to a neighbor's for a twelvemonth, and had quite forgotten the road to the mill. She said, finally, that, rather than undergo another such isolation, she would become a _Vivandiere_ in the Yankee army. The slender sister was altogether wedded to the idea of her lover's. "_Wouldn't_ she tell Henry? and _shouldn't_ she write to Jeems? and oh, Bessie, you would not _dare_ to repeat that before _him_." In short, I was at first amused, and afterwards annoyed, by this young lady, whereas the roguish-eyed miss improved greatly upon acquaintance. After a while, Captain Kingwalt came in, trailing his spurs over the floor, and leaving sunshine in his wake. There was something galvanic in his gentleness, and infectious in his merriment. He told them at dinner of his own daughters on the Brandywine, and invented stories of Fogg's courtships, till that young gentleman first blushed, and afterward dropped his plate. Our meal was a frugal one, consisting mainly of the ducks referred to, some vegetables, corn-bread, and coffee made of wasted rye. There were neither sugar, spices, nor tea, on the premises, and the salt before us was the last in the dwelling. The Captain promised to send them both coffee and salt, and Fogg volunteered to bring the same to the house, whereat the Captain teased him till he left the table. At this time, a little boy, who was ostensibly a waiter, cried: "Miss Prissy, soldiers is climbin' in de hog-pen." "I knew we should lose the last living thing on the property," said this young lady, much distressed. The Captain went to the door, and found three strolling Bucktails looking covetously at the swine. They were a little discomposed at his appearance, and edged off suspiciously. "Halt!" said the old man in his great voice, "where are you men going?" "Just makin' reconnoissance," said one of the freebooters; "s'pose a feller has a right to walk around, hain't he?" "Not unless he has a pass," said the Quartermaster; "have you written permission to leave camp?" "Left'nant s'posed we might. Don't know as it's your business. Never see _you_ in the regiment." "It is my business, as an officer of the United States, to see that no soldier strays from camp unauthorizedly, or depredates upon private property. I will take your names, and report you, first for straggling, secondly for insolence!" "Put to it, Bill!" said the speaker of the foragers; "run, Bob! go it hearties!" And they took to their heels, cleared a pair of fences, and were lost behind some outbuildings. The Captain could be harsh as well as generous, and was about mounting his horse impulsively, to overtake and punish the fugitives, when Priscilla begged him to refrain, as an enforcement of discipline on his part might bring insult upon her helpless household. I availed myself of a pause in the Captain's wrath, to ask Miss Priscilla if she would allow me to lodge in the dwelling. Five nights' experience in camp had somewhat reduced my enthusiasm, and I already wearied of the damp beds, the hard fare, and the coarse conversation of the bivouac. The young lady assented willingly, as she stated that the presence of a young man would both amuse and protect the family. For several nights she had not slept, and had imagined footsteps on the porch and the drawing of window-bolts. There was a bed, formerly occupied by her brother, that I might take, but must depend upon rather laggard attendance. I had the satisfaction, therefore, of seeing the Captain and retinue mount their horses, and wave me a temporary good by. Poor Fogg looked back so often and so seriously that I expected to see him fall from the saddle. The young ladies were much impressed with the Captain's manliness, and Miss Bell wondered _how_ such a _puffick_ gentleman could _reconcile_ himself to the Yankee cause. She had felt a desire to speak to him upon that point as she was _sure_ he was of fine stock, and entirely averse to the invasion of such territory as that of _dear_ old Virginia. There was something in his manner that _so_ reminded her of some one who should be _nameless_ for the present; but the "nameless" was, _of course_, young, _handsome_, and _so_ brave. I ruthlessly dissipated her theory of the Captain's origin, by stating that he was of humble German descent, so far as I knew, and had probably never beheld Virginia till preceded by the bayonets of his neighbors. After tea Miss Bessie produced a pitcher of rare cider, that came from a certain mysterious quarter of the cellar. A chessboard was forthcoming at a later hour, when we amused ourselves with a couple of games, facetiously dubbing our chessman Federals and Confederates. Miss Bell, meanwhile, betook herself to a diary, wherein she minutely related the incidents and sentiments of successive days. The quantity of words underscored in the same autobiography would have speedily exhausted the case of italics, if the printer had obtained it. I was so beguiled by these patriarchal people, that I several times asked myself if the circumstances were real. Was I in a hostile country, surrounded by thousands of armed men? Were the incidents of this evening portions of an historic era, and the ground about me to be commemorated by bloodshed? Was this, in fact, revolution, and were these simple country girls and their lovers revolutionists? The logs burned cheerily upon the hearth, and the ancestral portraits glowered contemplatively from the walls. Miss Prissy looked dreamily into the fire, and the old man snored wheezily in a corner. A gray cat purred in Miss Bell's lap, and Miss Bessie was writing some nonsense in my note-book. A sharp knock fell upon the door, and something that sounded like the butt of a musket shook the porch without. The girls turned pale, and I think that Miss Bessie seized my arm and clung to it. I think also, that Miss Bell attempted to take the other arm, to which I demurred. "Those brutal soldiers again!" said Priscilla, faintly. "I think one of the andirons has fallen down, darter!" said the old man, rousing up. "Tremble for my life," said Miss Bell; "_sure_ shall die if it's _a man_." I opened the door after a little pause, when a couple of rough privates in uniform confronted me. "We're two guards that General Meade sent to protect the house and property," said the tallest of these men; "might a feller come in and warm his feet!" I understood at once that the Quartermaster had obtained these persons; and the other man coming forward, said-- "I fetched some coffee over, and a bag o' salt, with Corporal Fogg's compliments." They deposited their muskets in a corner, and balanced their boots on the fender. Nothing was said for a time. "Did you lose yer poultry?" said the tall man, at length. "All," said Miss Priscilla. "Fellers loves poultry!" said the man, smacking his lips. "Did you lose yer sheep?" said the same man, after a little silence. "The Bucktails cut their throats the first day that they encamped at the mill," said Miss Priscilla. "Them Bucktails great fellers," said the tall man; "them Bucktails awful on sheep: they loves 'em so!" He relapsed again for a few minutes, when he continued: "You don't like fellers to bag yer poultry and sheep, do you?" Miss Priscilla replied that it was both dishonest and cruel. Miss Bell intimated that none but Yankees would do it. "P'raps not," said the tall soldier, drily; "did you ever grub on fat pork, Miss? No? Did you ever gnaw yer hard tack after a spell o' sickness, and a ten-hour march? No? P'raps you might like a streak o' mutton arterwards! P'raps you might take a notion for a couple o' chickens or so! No? How's that, Ike? What do you think, pardner? (to me) I ain't over and above cruel, mum. I don't think the Bucktails is over and above dishonest to home, mum. But, gosh hang it, I think I _would_ bag a chicken any day! I say that above board. Hey, Ike?" When the tall man and his inferior satellite had warmed their boots till they smoked, they rose, recovered their muskets, and bowed themselves into the yard. Soon afterward I bade the young ladies good night, and repaired to my room. The tall man and his associate were pacing up and down the grass-plot, and they looked very cold and comfortless, I thought. I should have liked to obtain for them a draught of cider, but prudently abstained; for every man in the army would thereby become cognizant of its existence. So I placed my head once more upon a soft pillow, and pitied the chilled soldiers who slept upon the turf. I thought of Miss Bessie with her roguish eyes, and wondered what themes were now engrossing her. I asked myself if this was the romance of war, and if it would bear relating to one's children when he grew as old and as deaf as the wheezy gentleman down-stairs. In fine, I was a little sentimental, somewhat reflective, and very drowsy. So, after a while, processions of freebooting soldiers, foraging Quartermasters, deaf gentlemen, Fogg's regiment, and multitudes of ghosts from Manassas, drifted by in my dreams. And, in the end, Miss Bessie's long curls brushed into my eyes, and I found the morning, ruddy as her cheeks, blushing at the window. CHAPTER V. WHAT A MARCH IS IN FACT. I found at breakfast, that Miss Bessie had been placed beside me, and I so far forgot myself as to forget all other persons at the table. Miss Priscilla asked to be helped to the corn-bread, and I deposited a quantity of the same upon Miss Bessie's plate. Miss Bell asked if I did not love _dear_ old Virginia, and I replied to Miss Bessie that it had lately become very attractive, and that, in fact, I was decidedly rebellious in my sympathy with the distressed Virginians. I _did_ except, however, the man darkly mooted as "Henry," and hoped that he would be disfigured--not killed--at the earliest engagement. The deaf old gentleman bristled up here and asked _who_ had been killed at the recent engagement. There was a man named Jeems Lee,--a distant connection of the Lightfoots,--not the Hampshire Lightfoots, but the Fauquier Lightfoots,--who had distinctly appeared to the old gentleman for several nights, robed in black, and carrying a coffin under his arm. Since I had mentioned his name, he recalled the circumstance, and hoped that Jeems Lightfoot had not disgraced his ancestry. Nevertheless, the deaf gentleman was not to be understood as expressing any opinion upon the merits of the war. For _his_ part he thought both sides a little wrong, and the crops were really in a dreadful state. The negroes were very ungrateful people and property should be held sacred by all belligerents. At this point he caught Miss Priscilla's eye, and was transfixed with conscious guilt. I had, meantime, been infringing upon Miss Bessie's feet,--very pretty feet they were!--which expressive but not very refined method of correspondence caused her to blush to the eyes. Miss Bell, noticing the same, was determined to tell '_Henry_' at once, and I hoped in my heart that she would set out for Manassas to further that purpose. The door opened here, and the rubicund visage of Mr. Fogg appeared like the head of the Medusa. He said that 'Captain' had ordered the blue roan to be saddled and brought over to me, but I knew that this was a cunning device on his part, to revisit the dwelling. Miss Bell, somehow caught the idea that Fogg was enamored of her, and the poor fellow was subjected to a volley of tender innuendos and languishing glances, that by turn mortified and enraged him. I bade the good people adieu at eight o'clock, promising to return for dinner at five; and Miss Bessie accompanied me to the lane, where I took leave of her with a secret whisper and a warm grasp of the hand. One of her rings had somehow adhered to my finger, which Fogg remarked with a bilious expression of countenance. I had no sooner got astride of the blue roan than he darted off like the wind, and subjected me to great terror, alternating to chagrin, when I turned back and beheld all the young ladies waving their handkerchiefs. They evidently thought me an unrivalled equestrian. I rode to a picket post two miles from the mill, passing over the spot where the Confederate soldier had fallen. The picket consisted of two companies or one hundred and sixty men. Half of them were sitting around a fire concealed in the woods, and the rest were scattered along the edges of a piece of close timber. I climbed a lookout-tree by means of cross-strips nailed to the trunk, and beheld from the summit a long succession of hazy hills, valleys, and forests, with the Blue Ridge Mountains bounding the distance, like some mighty monster, enclosing the world in its coils. This was the country of the enemy, and a Lieutenant obligingly pointed out to me the curling smoke of their pickets, a few miles away. The cleft of Manassas was plainly visible, and I traced the line of the Gap Railway to its junction with the Orange and Alexandria road, below Bull Run. For aught that I knew, some concealed observer might now be watching me from the pine-tops on the nearest knoll. Some rifleman might be running his practised eye down the deadly groove, to topple me from my perch, and send me crashing through the boughs. The uncertainty, the hazard, the novelty of my position had at this time an indescribable charm: but subsequent exposures dissipated the romance and taught me the folly of such adventures. The afternoon went dryly by: for a drizzling rain fell at noon; but at four o'clock I saddled the blue roan and went to ride with Fogg. We retraced the road to Colonel T----s, and crossing a boggy brook, turned up the hills and passed toward the Potomac. Fogg had been a schoolmaster, and many of his narrations indicated keen perception and clever comprehension. He so amused me on this particular occasion that I quite forgot my engagement for dinner, and unwittingly strolled beyond the farthest brigade. Suddenly, we heard a bugle-call from the picket-post before us, and, at the same moment, the drums beat from the camp behind. Our horses pricked up their ears and Fogg stared inquiringly. As we turned back we heard approaching hoofs and the blue roan exhibited intentions of running away. I pulled his rein in vain. He would neither be soothed nor commanded. A whole company of cavalry closed up with him at length, and the sabres clattered in their scabbards as they galloped toward camp at the top of their speed. With a spring that almost shook me from the saddle and drove the stirrups flying from my feet, the blue roan dashed the dust into the eyes of Fogg, and led the race. Not the wild yager on his gait to perdition, rode so fearfully. Trees, bogs, huts, bushes, went by like lightning. The hot breath of the nag rose to my nostrils and at every leap I seemed vaulting among the spheres. I speak thus flippantly now, of what was then the agony of death. I grasped the pommel of my saddle, mechanically winding the lines about my wrist, and clung with the tenacity of sin clutching the world. Some soldiers looked wonderingly from the wayside, but did not heed my shriek of "stop him, for God's sake!" A ditch crossed the lane,--deep and wide,--and I felt that my moment had come: with a spring that seemed to break thew and sinew, the blue roan cleared it, pitching upon his knees, but recovered directly and darted onward again. I knew that I should fall headlong now, to be trampled by the fierce horsemen behind, but retained my grasp though my heart was choking me. The camps were in confusion as I swept past them. A sharp clearness of sense and thought enabled me to note distinctly the minutest occurrences. I marked long lines of men cloaked, and carrying knapsacks, drummer-boys beating music that I had whistled in many a ramble,--field-officers shouting orders from their saddles, and cannon limbered up as if ready to move,--tents taken down and teams waiting to be loaded; all the evidences of an advance, that I alas should never witness, lying bruised and mangled by the roadside. A cheer saluted me as I passed some of Meade's regiments. "It is the scout that fetched the orders for an advance!" said several, and one man remarked that "that feller was the most reckless rider he had ever beheld." The crisis came at length: a wagon had stopped the way; my horse in turning it, stepped upon a stake, and slipping rolled heavily upon his side, tossing me like an acrobat, over his head, but without further injury than a terrible nervous shock and a rent in my pantaloons. I employed a small boy to lead the blue roan to Captain Kingwalt's quarters, and as I limped wearily after, some regiments came toward me through the fields. General McCall responded to my salute; he rode in the advance. The Quartermaster's party was loading the tents and utensils. The rain fell smartly as dusk deepened into night, and the brush tents now deserted by the soldiers, were set on fire. Being composed of dry combustible material, they burned rapidly and with an intense flame. The fields in every direction were revealed, swarming with men, horses, batteries, and wagons. Some of the regiments began the march in silence; others sang familiar ballads as they moved in column. A few, riotously disposed, shrieked, whistled, and cheered. The standards were folded; the drums did not mark time; the orders were few and short. The cannoneers sat moodily upon the caissons, and the cavalry-men walked their horses sedately. Although fifteen thousand men comprised the whole corps, each of its three brigades would have seemed as numerous to a novice. The teams of each brigade closed up the rear, and a quartermaster's guard was detailed from each regiment to march beside its own wagons. When the troops were fairly under way, and the brush burning along from continuous miles of road, the effect was grand beyond all that I had witnessed. The country people gathered in fright at the cottage doors, and the farm-dogs bayed dismally at the unwonted scene. I refused to ride the blue roan again, but transferred my saddle to a team horse that appeared to be given to a sort of equine somnambulism, and once or twice attempted to lie down by the roadside. At nine o'clock I set out with Fogg, who slipped a flask of spirits into my haversack. Following the tardy movement of the teams, we turned our faces toward Washington. I was soon wet to the skin, and my saddle cushion was soaking with water. The streams crossing the road were swollen with rain, and the great team wheels clogged on the slimy banks. We were sometimes delayed a half hour by a single wagon, the storm beating pitilessly in our faces the while. During the stoppages, the Quartermaster's guards burned all the fence rails in the vicinity, and some of the more indurated sat round the fagots and gamed with cards. Cold, taciturn, miserable, I thought of the quiet farm, house, the ruddy hearth-place, and the smoking supper. I wondered if the roguish eyes were not a little sad, and the trim feet a little restless, the chessmen somewhat stupid, and the good old house a trifle lonesome. Alas! the intimacy so pleasantly commenced, was never to be renewed. With the thousand and one airy palaces that youth builds and time annihilates, my first romance of war towered to the stars in a day, and crumbled to earth in a night. At two o'clock in the morning we halted at Metropolitan Mills, on the Alexandria and Leesburg turnpike. A bridge had been destroyed below, and the creek was so swollen that neither artillery nor cavalry could ford it. The meadows were submerged and the rain still descended in torrents. The chilled troops made bonfires of some new panel fence, and stormed all the henroosts in the vicinity. Some pigs, that betrayed their whereabouts by inoportune whines and grunts, were speedily confiscated, slaughtered, and spitted. We erected our tarpaulin in a ploughed field, and Fogg laid some sharp rails upon the ground to make us a dry bed. Skyhiski fried a quantity of fresh beef, and boiled some coffee; but while we ate heartily, theorizing as to the destination of the corps, the poor Captain was terribly shaken by his ague. I woke in the morning with inflamed throat, rheumatic limbs, and every indication of chills and fever. Fogg whispered to me at breakfast that two men of Reynold's brigade had died during the night, from fatigue and exposure. He advised me to push forward to Washington and await the arrival of the division, as, unused to the hardships of a march, I might, after another day's experience, become dangerously ill. I set out at five o'clock, resolving to ford the creek, resume the turnpike, and reach Long Bridge at noon. Passing over some dozen fields in which my horse at every step sank to the fetlocks, I travelled along the brink of the stream till I finally reached a place that seemed to be shallow. Bracing myself firmly in the saddle, I urged my unwilling horse into the waters, and emerged half drowned on the other side. It happened, however, that I had crossed only a branch of the creek and gained an island. The main channel was yet to be attempted, and I saw that it was deep, broad, and violent. I followed the margin despairingly for a half-mile, when I came to a log footbridge, where I dismounted and swam my horse through the turbulent waters. I had now so far diverged from the turnpike that I was at a loss to recover it, but straying forlornly through the woods, struck a wagon track at last, and pursued it hopefully, until, to my confusion, it resolved itself to two tracks, that went in contrary directions. My horse preferred taking to the left, but after riding a full hour, I came to some felled trees, beyond which the traces did not go. Returning, weak and bewildered, I adopted the discarded route, which led me to a worm-fence at the edge of the woods. A house lay some distance off, but a wheat-field intervened, and I might bring the vengeance of the proprietor upon me by invading his domain. There was no choice, however; so I removed the rails, and rode directly across the wheat to some negro quarters, a little removed from the mansion. They were deserted, all save one, where a black boy was singing some negro hymns in an uproarious manner. The words, as I made them out, were these:-- "Stephen came a runnin', His Marster fur to see; But Gabriel says he is not yar'; He gone to Calvary! O,--O,--Stephen, Stephen, Fur to see; Stephen, Stephen, get along up Calvary!" I learned from this person two mortifying facts,--that I was farther from Washington than at the beginning of my journey, and that the morrow was Sunday. War, alas! knows no Sabbaths, and the negro said, apologetically-- "I was a seyin' some ole hymns, young Mars'r. Sence dis yer war we don't have no more meetin's, and a body mos' forgits his pra'rs. Dere hain't been no church in all Fairfax, sah, fur nigh six months." Washington was nineteen miles distant, and another creek was to be forded before gaining the turnpike. The negro sauntered down the lane, and opened the gate for me. "You jes keep from de creek, take de mill road, and enqua' as ye get furder up," said he; "it's mighty easy, sah, an' you can't miss de way." I missed the way at once, however, by confounding the mill road with the mill lane, and a shaggy dog that lay in a wagon shed pursued me about a mile. The road was full of mire; no dwellings adjoined it, and nothing human was to be seen in any direction. I came to a crumbling negro cabin after two plodding hours, and, seeing a figure flit by the window, called aloud for information. Nobody replied, and when, dismounting, I looked into the den, it was, to my confusion, vacant. The soil, hereabout, was of a sterile red clay, spotted with scrub cedars. Country more bleak and desolate I have never known, and when, at noon, the rain ceased, a keen wind blew dismally across the barriers. I reached a turnpike at length, and, turning, as I thought, toward Alexandria, goaded my horse into a canter. An hour's ride brought me to a wretched hamlet, whose designation I inquired of a cadaverous old woman-- "Drainesville," said she. "Then I am not upon the Alexandria turnpike?" "No. You're sot for Leesburg. This is the Georgetown and Chain Bridge road." With a heavy heart, I retraced my steps, crossed Chain Bridge at five o'clock, and halted at Kirkwood's at seven. After dinner, falling in with the manager of the Washington Sunday morning _Chronicle_, I penned, at his request, a few lines relative to the movements of the Reserves; and, learning in the morning that they had arrived at Alexandria, set out on horseback for that city. Many hamlets and towns have been destroyed during the war. But, of all that in some form survive, Alexandria has most suffered. It has been in the uninterrupted possession of the Federals for twenty-two months, and has become essentially a military city. Its streets, its docks, its warehouses, its dwellings, and its suburbs, have been absorbed to the thousand uses of war. I was challenged thrice on the Long Bridge, and five times on the road, before reaching the city. I rode under the shadows of five earthworks, and saw lines of white tents sweeping to the horizon. Gayly caparisoned officers passed me, to spend their Sabbath in Washington, and trains laden with troops, ambulances, and batteries, sped along the line of railway, toward the rendezvous at Alexandria. A wagoner, looking forlornly at his splintered wheels; a slovenly guard, watching some bales of hay; a sombre negro, dozing upon his mule; a slatternly Irish woman gossiping with a sergeant at her cottage door; a sutler in his "dear-born," running his keen eye down the limbs of my beast; a spruce civilian riding for curiosity; a gray-haired gentleman, in a threadbare suit, going to camp on foot, to say good by to his boy,--these were some of the personages that I remarked, and each was a study, a sermon, and a story. The Potomac, below me, was dotted with steamers and shipping. The bluffs above were trodden bare, and a line of dismal marsh bordered some stagnant pools that blistered at their bases. At points along the river-shore, troops were embarking on board steamers; transports were taking in tons of baggage and subsistence. There was a schooner, laden to the water-line with locomotive engines and burden carriages; there, a brig, shipping artillery horses by a steam derrick, that lifted them bodily from the shore and deposited them in the hold of the vessel. Steamers, from whose spacious saloons the tourist and the bride have watched the picturesque margin of the Hudson, were now black with clusters of rollicking volunteers, who climbed into the yards, and pitched headlong from the wheel-houses. The "grand movement," for which the people had waited so long, and which McClellan had promised so often, was at length to be made. The Army of the Potomac was to be transferred to Fortress Monroe, at the foot of the Chesapeake, and to advance by the peninsula of the James and the York, upon the city of Richmond. I rode through Washington Street, the seat of some ancient residences, and found it lined with freshly arrived troops. The grave-slabs in a fine old churchyard were strewn with weary cavalry-men, and they lay in some side yards, soundly sleeping. Some artillery-men chatted at doorsteps, with idle house-girls; some courtesans flaunted in furs and ostrich feathers, through a group of coarse engineers; some sergeants of artillery, in red trimmings, and caps gilded with cannon, were reining their horses to leer at some ladies, who were taking the air in their gardens; and at a wide place in the street, a Provost-Major was manoeuvring some companies, to the sound of the drum and fife. There was much drunkenness, among both soldiers and civilians; and the people of Alexandria were, in many cases, crushed and demoralized by reason of their troubles. One man of this sort led me to a sawmill, now run by Government, and pointed to the implements. "I bought 'em and earned 'em," he said. "My labor and enterprise set 'em there; and while my mill and machinery are ruined to fill the pockets o' Federal sharpers, I go drunk, ragged, and poor about the streets o' my native town. My daughter starves in Richmond; God knows I can't get to her. I wish to h----l I was dead." Further inquiry developed the facts that my acquaintance had been a thriving builder, who had dotted all Northeastern Virginia with evidences of his handicraft. At the commencement of the war, he took certain contracts from the Confederate government, for the construction of barracks at Richmond and Manassas Junction; returning inopportunely to Alexandria, he was arrested, and kept some time in Capitol-Hill prison; he had not taken the oath of allegiance, consequently, he could obtain no recompense for the loss of his mill property. Domestic misfortunes, happening at the same time, so embittered his days that he resorted to dissipation. Alexandria is filled with like ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess, but has passed into the hands of the dominant nationalists. My informant pointed out the residences of many leading citizens: some were now hospitals, others armories and arsenals; others offices for inspectors, superintendents, and civil officials. The few people that remained upon their properties, obtained partial immunity, by courting the acquaintance of Federal officers, and, in many cases, extending the hospitalities of their homes to the invaders. I do not know that any Federal functionary was accused of tyranny, or wantonness, but these things ensued, as the natural results of civil war; and one's sympathies were everywhere enlisted for the poor, the exiled, and the bereaved. My dinner at the City Hotel was scant and badly prepared. I gave a negro lad who waited upon me a few cents, but a burly negro carver, who seemed to be his father, boxed the boy's ears and put the coppers into his pocket. The proprietor of the place had voluntarily taken the oath of allegiance, and had made more money since the date of Federal occupation than during his whole life previously. He said to me, curtly, that if by any chance the Confederates should reoccupy Alexandria, he could very well afford to relinquish his property. He employed a smart barkeeper, who led guests by a retired way to the drinking-rooms. Here, with the gas burning at a taper point, cobblers, cocktails, and juleps were mixed stealthily and swallowed in the darkness. The bar was like a mint to the proprietor; he only feared discovery and prohibition. It would not accord with the chaste pages of this narrative to tell how some of the noblest residences in Alexandria had been desecrated to licentious purposes; nor how, by night, the parlors of cosey homes flamed with riot and orgie. I stayed but a little time, having written an indiscreet paragraph in the Washington Chronicle, for which I was pursued by the War Department, and the management of my paper, lacking heart, I went home in a pet. CHAPTER VI. DOWN THE CHESAPEAKE. Disappointed in the unlucky termination of my adventures afield, I now looked ambitiously toward New York. As London stands to the provinces, so stands the empire city to America. Its journals circulate by hundreds of thousands; its means are only rivalled by its enterprise; it is the end of every young American's aspiration, and the New Bohemia for the restless, the brilliant, and the industrious. It seemed a great way off when I first beheld it, but I did not therefore despair. Small matters of news that I gathered in my modest city, obtained space in the columns of the great metropolitan journal, the----. After a time I was delegated to travel in search of special incidents, and finally, when the noted Tennessee Unionist, "Parson" Brownlow, journeyed eastward, I joined his _suite_, and accompanied him to New York. The dream of many months now came to be realized. A correspondent on the ----'s staff had been derelict, and I was appointed to his division. His horse, saddle, field-glasses, blankets, and pistols were to be transferred, and I was to proceed without delay to Fortress Monroe, to keep with the advancing columns of McClellan. At six in the morning I embarked; at eleven I was whirled through my own city, without a glimpse of my friends; at three o'clock I dismounted at Baltimore, and at five was gliding down the Patapsco, under the shadows of Fort Federal Hill, and the white walls of Fort McHenry. The latter defence is renowned for its gallant resistance to a British fleet in 1813, and the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," was written to commemorate that bombardment. Fort Carroll, a massive structure of hewn stone, with arched bomb-proof and three tiers of mounted ordnance, its smooth walls washed by the waves, and its unfinished floors still ringing with the trowel and the adze,--lies some miles below, at a narrow passage in the stream. Below, the shores diverge, and at dusk we were fairly in the Chesapeake, under steam and sail, speeding due southward. The _Adelaide_ was one of a series of boats making daily trips between Baltimore and Old Point. Fourteen hours were required to accomplish the passage, and we were not to arrive till seven o'clock next morning. I was so fortunate as to obtain a state-room, but many passengers were obliged to sleep upon sofas or the cabin floor. These boats monopolized the civil traffic between the North and the army, although they were reputed to be owned and managed by Secessionists. None were allowed to embark unless provided with Federal passes; but there were, nevertheless, three or four hundred people on board. About one fourth of these were officers and soldiers; one half sutlers, traders, contractors, newsmen, and idle civilians, anxious to witness a battle, or stroll over the fields of Big Bethel, Lee's Mills, Yorktown, Gloucester, Williamsburg, or West Point; the rest were females on missions of mercy, on visits to sons, brothers, and husbands, and on the way to their homes at Norfolk, Suffolk, or Hampton. Some of these were citizens of Richmond, who believed that the Federals would occupy the city in a few days, and enable them to resume their professions and homes. The lower decks were occupied by negroes. The boat was heavily freighted, and among the parcels that littered the hold and steerage, I noticed scores of box coffins for the removal of corpses from the field to the North. There were quantities of spirits, consigned mainly to Quartermasters, but evidently the property of certain Shylocks, who watched the barrels greedily. An embalmer was also on board, with his ghostly implements. He was a sallow man, shabbily attired, and appeared to look at all the passengers as so many subjects for the development of his art. He was called "Doctor" by his admirers, and conversed in the blandest manner of the triumphs of his system. "There are certain pretenders," he said, "who are at this moment imposing upon the Government. I regret that it is necessary to repeat it, but the fact exists that the Government is the prey of harpies. And in the art of which I am an humble disciple,--that of injecting, commonly called embalming,--the frauds are most deplorable. There was Major Montague,--a splendid subject, I assure you,--a subject that any _Professor_ would have beautifully preserved,--a subject that one esteems it a favor to obtain,--a subject that I in particular would have been proud to receive! But what were the circumstances? I do assure you that a person named Wigwart,--who I have since ascertained to be a veterinary butcher; in plain language, a doctor of horses and asses,--imposed upon the relatives of the deceased, obtained the body, and absolutely ruined it!--absolutely _mangled_ it! I may say, shamefully disfigured it! He was a man, sir, six feet two,--about your height, I think! (to a bystander.) About your weight, also! Indeed quite like you! And allow me to say that, if you should fall into my hands, I would leave your friends no cause for offence! (Here the bystander trembled perceptibly, and I thought that the doctor was about to take his life.) Well! _I_ should have operated thus:--" Then followed a description of the process, narrated with horrible circumstantiality. A fluid holding in solution pounded glass and certain chemicals, was, by the doctor's "system," injected into the bloodvessels, and the subject at the same time bled at the neck. The body thus became hard and stony, and would retain its form for years. He had, by his account, experimented for a lifetime, and said that little "Willie," the son of President Lincoln, had been so preserved that his fond parents must have enjoyed his decease. It seemed to me that the late lamented practitioners, Messrs. Burke and Hare, were likely to fade into insignificance, beside this new light of science. I went upon deck for some moments, and marked the beating of the waves; the glitter of sea-lights pulsing on the ripples; the sweep of belated gulls through the creaking rigging; the dark hull of a passing vessel with a grinning topmast lantern; the vigilant pilot, whose eyes glared like a fiend's upon the waste of blackness; the foam that the panting screw threw against the cabin windows; the flap of fishes caught in the threads of moonlight; the depths over which one bent, peering half wistfully, half abstractedly, almost crazily, till he longed to drop into their coolness, and let the volumes of billow roll musically above him. A woman approached me, as I stood against the great anchor, thus absorbed. She had a pale, thin face, and was scantily clothed, and spoke with a distrustful, timorous voice:-- "You don't know the name of the surgeon-general, do you sir!" "At Washington, ma'am?" "No, sir; at Old Point." I offered to inquire of the Captain: but she stopped me, agitatedly. "It's of no consequence," she said,--"that is, it is of great consequence to me; but perhaps it would be best to wait." I answered, as obligingly as I could, that any service on my part would be cheerfully rendered. "The fact is, sir," she said, after a pause, "I am going to Williamsburg, to--find--the--the body--of my--boy." Here her speech was broken, and she put a thin, white hand tremulously to her eyes. I thought that any person in the Federal service would willingly assist her, and said so. "He was not a Federal soldier, sir. He was a Confederate!" This considerably altered the chances of success, and I was obliged to undeceive her somewhat. "I am sure it was not my fault," she continued, "that he joined the Rebellion. You don't think they'll refuse to let me take his bones to Baltimore, do you, sir? He was my oldest boy, and his brother, my second son, was killed at Ball's Bluff: _He_ was in the Federal service. I hardly think they will refuse me the poor favor of laying them in the same grave." I spoke of the difficulty of recognition, of the remoteness of the field, and of the expense attending the recovery of any remains, particularly those of the enemy, that, left hastily behind in retreat, were commonly buried in trenches without headboard or record. She said, sadly, that she had very little money, and that she could barely afford the journey to the Fortress and return. But she esteemed her means well invested if her object could be attained. "They were both brave boys, sir; but I could never get them to agree politically. William was a Northerner by education, and took up with the New England views, and James was in business at Richmond when the war commenced. So he joined the Southern army. It's a sad thing to know that one's children died enemies, isn't it? And what troubles me more than all, sir, is that James was at Ball's Bluff where his brother fell. It makes me shudder to think, sometimes, that his might have been the ball that killed him." The tremor of the poor creature here was painful to behold. I spoke soothingly and encouragingly, but with a presentiment that she must be disappointed. While I was speaking the supper-bell rang, and I proposed to get her a seat at the table. "No, thank you," she replied, "I shall take no meals on the vessel; I must travel economically, and have prepared some lunch that will serve me. Good by, sir!" Poor mothers looking for dead sons! God help them! I have met them often since; but the figure of that pale, frail creature flitting about the open deck,--alone, hungry, very poor,--troubles me still, as I write. I found, afterward, that she had denied herself a state-room, and intended to sleep in a saloon chair. I persuaded her to accept my berth, but a German, who occupied the same apartment, was unwilling to relinquish his bed, and I had the power only to give her my pillow. Supper was spread in the forecabin, and at the signal to assemble the men rushed to the tables like as many beasts of prey. A captain opposite me bolted a whole mackerel in a twinkling, and spread the half-pound of butter that was to serve the entire vicinity upon a single slice of bread. A sutler beside me reached his fork across my neck, and plucked a young chicken bodily, which he ate, to the great disgust of some others who were eyeing it. The waiter advanced with some steak, but before he reached the table, a couple of Zouaves dragged it from the tray, and laughed brutally at their success. The motion of the vessel caused a general unsteadiness, and it was absolutely dangerous to move one's coffee to his lips. The inveterate hate with which corporations are regarded in America was here evidenced by a general desire to empty the ship's larder. "Eat all you can," said a soldier, ferociously,--"fare's amazin' high. Must make it out in grub." "I always gorges," said another, "on a railroad or a steamboat. Cause why? You must eat out your passage, you know!" Among the passengers were a young officer and his bride. They had been married only a few days, and she had obtained permission to accompany him to Old Point. Very pretty, she seemed, in her travelling hat and flowing robes; and he wore a handsome new uniform with prodigious shoulder-bars. There was a piano in the saloon, where another young lady of the party performed during the evening, and the bride and groom accompanied her with a song. It was the popular Federal parody of "Gay and Happy:" "Then let the South fling aloft what it will,-- We are for the Union still! For the Union! For the Union! We are for the Union still!" The bride and groom sang alternate stanzas, and the concourse of soldiers, civilians, and females swelled the chorus. The reserve being thus broken, the young officer sang the "Star-Spangled Banner," and the refrain must have called up the mermaids. Dancing ensued, and a soldier volunteered a hornpipe. A young man with an astonishing compass of lungs repeated something from Shakespeare, and the night passed by gleefully and reputably. One could hardly realize, in the cheerful eyes and active figures of the dance, the sad uncertainties of the time. Youth trips lightest, somehow, on the brink of the grave. The hilarities of the evening so influenced the German quartered with me, that he sang snatches of foreign ballads during most of the night, and obliged me, at last, to call the steward and insist upon his good behavior. In the gray of the morning I ventured on deck, and, following the silvery line of beach, made out the shipping at anchor in Hampton Roads. The _Minnesota_ flag-ship lay across the horizon, and after a time I remarked the low walls and black derricks of the Rip Raps. The white tents at Hampton were then revealed, and finally I distinguished Fortress Monroe, the key of the Chesapeake, bristling with guns, and floating the Federal flag. As we rounded to off the quay, I studied with intense interest the scene of so many historic events. Sewall's Point lay to the south, a stretch of woody beach, around whose western tip the dreaded _Merrimac_ had so often moved slowly to the encounter. The spars of the _Congress_ and the _Cumberland_ still floated along the strand, but, like them, the invulnerable monster had become the prey of the waves. The guns of the Rip Raps and the terrible broadsides of the Federal gunboats, had swept the Confederates from Sewall's Point,--their flag and battery were gone,--and farther seaward, at Willoughby Spit, some figures upon the beach marked the route of the victorious Federals to the city of Norfolk. The mouth of the James and the York were visible from the deck, and long lines of shipping stretched from each to the Fortress. The quay itself was like the pool in the Thames, a mass of spars, smoke-stacks, ensigns and swelling hills. The low deck and quaint cupola of the famous _Monitor_ appeared close into shore, and near at hand rose the thick body of the _Galena_. Long boats and flat boats went hither and thither across the blue waves: the grim ports of the men of war were open and the guns frowned darkly from their coverts; the seamen were gathering for muster on the flagship, and drums beat from the barracks on shore; the Lincoln gun, a fearful piece of ordnance, rose like the Sphynx from the Fortress sands, and the sodded parapet, the winding stone walls, the tops of the brick quarters within the Fort, were some of the features of a strangely animated scene, that has yet to be perpetuated upon canvas, and made historic. At eight o'clock the passengers were allowed to land, and a provost guard marched them to the Hygeia House,--of old a watering-place hotel,--where, by groups, they were ushered into a small room, and the oath of allegiance administered to them. The young officer who officiated, repeated the words of the oath, with a broad grin upon his face, and the passengers were required to assent by word and by gesture. Among those who took the oath in this way, was a very old sailor, who had been in the Federal service for the better part of his life, and whose five sons were now in the army. He called "Amen" very loudly and fervently, and there was some perceptible disposition on the part of other ardent patriots, to celebrate the occasion with three cheers. The quartermaster, stationed at the Fortress gave me a pass to go by steamer up the York to White House, and as there were three hours to elapse before departure, I strolled about the place with our agent. In times of peace, Old Point was simply a stone fortification, and one of the strongest of its kind in the world. Many years and many millions of dollars were required to build it, but it was, in general, feebly garrisoned, and was, altogether, a stupid, tedious locality, except in the bathing months, when the beauty and fashion of Virginia resorted to its hotel. A few cottages had grown up around it, tenanted only in "the season;" and a little way off, on the mainland, stood the pretty village of Hampton. By a strange oversight, the South failed to seize Fortress Monroe at the beginning of the Rebellion; the Federals soon made it the basis for their armies and a leading naval station. The battle of Big Bethel was one of the first occurrences in the vicinity. Then the dwellings of Hampton were burned and its people exiled. In rapid succession followed the naval battles in the Roads, the siege and surrender of Yorktown, the flight of the Confederates up the Peninsula to Richmond, and finally the battles of Williamsburg, and West Point, and the capture of Norfolk. These things had already transpired; it was now the month of May; and the victorious army, following up its vantages, had pursued the fugitives by land and water to "White House," at the head of navigation on the Pamunkey river. Thither it was my lot to go, and witness the turning-point of their fortunes, and their subsequent calamity and repulse. I found Old Point a weary place of resort, even in the busy era of civil war. The bar at the Hygeia House was beset with thirsty and idle people, who swore instinctively, and drank raw spirits passionately. The quantity of shell, ball, ordnance, camp equipage, and war munitions of every description piled around the fort, was marvellously great. It seemed to me that Xerxes, the first Napoleon, or the greediest of conquerors, ancient or modern, would have beheld with amazement the gigantic preparations at command of the Federal Government. Energy and enterprise displayed their implements of death on every hand. One was startled at the prodigal outlay of means, and the reckless summoning of men. I looked at the starred and striped ensign that flaunted above the Fort, and thought of Madame Roland's appeal to the statue by the guillotine. The settlers were numbered by regiments here. Their places of business were mainly structures or "shanties" of rough plank, and most of them were the owners of sloops, or schooners, for the transportation of freight from New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, to their depots at Old Point. Some possessed a dozen wagons, that plied regularly between these stores and camps. The traffic was not confined to men; for women and children kept pace with the army, trading in every possible article of necessity or luxury. For these--disciples of the dime and the dollar--war had no terrors. They took their muck-rakes, like the man in Bunyan, and gathered the almighty coppers, from the pestilential camp and the reeking battle-field. CHAPTER VII. ON TO RICHMOND. Yorktown lies twenty-one miles northwestward from Old Point, and thither I turned my face at noon, resolving to delay my journey to "White House," till next day morning. Crossing an estuary of the bay upon a narrow causeway, I passed Hampton,--half burned, half desolate,--and at three o'clock came to "Big Bethel," the scene of the battle of June 11, 1861. A small earthwork marks the site of Magruder's field-pieces, and hard by the slain were buried. The spot was noteworthy to me, since Lieutenant Greble, a fellow alumnus, had perished here, and likewise, Theodore Winthrop, the gifted author of "Cecil Dreeme" and "John Brent." The latter did not live to know his exaltation. That morning never came whereon he "woke, and found himself famous." The road ran parallel with the deserted defences of the Confederates for some distance. The country was flat and full of swamps, but marked at intervals by relics of camps. The farm-houses were untenanted, the fences laid flat or destroyed, the fields strewn with discarded clothing, arms, and utensils. By and by, we entered the outer line of Federal parallels, and wound among lunettes, crémaillères, redoubts, and rifle-pits. Marks of shell and ball were frequent, in furrows and holes, where the clay had been upheaved. Every foot of ground, for fifteen miles henceforward, had been touched by the shovel and the pick. My companion suggested that as much digging, concentred upon one point, would have taken the Federals to China. The sappers and miners had made their stealthy trenches, rod by rod, each morning appearing closer to their adversaries, and finally, completed their work, at less than a hundred yards from the Confederate defences. Three minutes would have sufficed from the final position, to hurl columns upon the opposing outworks, and sweep them with the bayonet. Ten days only had elapsed since the evacuation (May 4), and the siege guns still remained in some of the batteries. McClellan worshipped great ordnance, and some of his columbiads, that were mounted in the water battery, yawned cavernously through their embrasures, and might have furnished sleeping accommodations to the gunners. A few mortars stood in position by the river side, and there were Parrott, Griffin, and Dahlgren pieces in the shore batteries. However numerous and powerful were the Federal fortifications, they bore no comparison, in either respect, to those relinquished by the revolutionists. Miniature mountain ranges they seemed, deeply ditched, and revetted with sods, fascines, hurdles, gabions or sand bags. Along the York riverside there were water batteries of surpassing beauty, that seemed, at a little distance, successions of gentle terraces. Their pieces were likewise of enormous calibre, and their number almost incredible. The advanced line of fortifications, sketched from the mouth of Warwick creek, on the South, to a point fifteen miles distant on the York: one hundred and forty guns were planted along this chain of defences; but there were two other concentric lines, mounting, each, one hundred and twenty, and two hundred and forty guns. The remote series consisted of six forts of massive size and height, fronted by swamps and flooded meadows, with frequent creeks and ravines interposing; sharp _fraise_ and _abattis_ planted against scarp and slope, pointed cruelly eastward. There were two water batteries, of six and four thirty-two columbiads respectively, and the town itself, which stands upon a red clay bluff, was encircled by a series of immense rifled and smooth-bore pieces, including a powerful pivot-gun, that one of McClellan's shells struck during the first day's bombardment, and split it into fragments. At Gloucester Point, across the York river, the great guns of the _Merrimac_ were planted, it is said, and a fleet of fire-rafts and torpedo-ships were moored in the stream. By all accounts, there could have been no less than five hundred guns behind the Confederate entrenchments, the greater portion, of course, field-pieces, and, as the defending army was composed of one hundred thousand men, we must add that number of small arms to the list of ordnance. If we compute the Federals at so high a figure,--and they could scarcely have had less than a hundred thousand men afield,--we must increase the enormous amount of their field, siege, and small ordnance, by the naval guns of the fleet, that stood anchored in the bay. It is probable that a thousand cannon and two hundred thousand muskets were assembled in and around Yorktown during this memorable siege. The mind shudders to see the terrible deductions of these statistics. The monster, who wished that the world had but one neck, that he might sever it, would have gloated at such realization! How many days or hours would have here sufficed to annihilate all the races of men? Happily, the world was spared the spectacle of these deadly mouths at once aflame. Beautiful but awful must have been the scene, and the earth must have staggered with the shock. One might almost have imagined that man, in his ambition, had shut his God in heaven, and besieged him there. While the fortifications defending it amazed me, the village of Yorktown disappointed me. I marvelled that so paltry a settlement should have been twice made historic. Here, in the year 1783, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his starving command to the American colonists and their French allies. But the entrenchments of that earlier day had been almost obliterated by these recent labors. The field, where the Earl delivered up his sword, was trodden bare, and dotted with ditches and ramparts; while a small monument, that marked the event, had been hacked to fragments by the Southerners, and carried away piecemeal. Yet, strange to say, relics of the first bombardment had just been discovered, and, among them, a gold-hilted sword. I visited, in the evening, the late quarters of General Hill, a small white house with green shutters, and also the famous "Nelson House," a roomy mansion where, of old, Cornwallis slept, and where, a few days past, Jefferson Davis and General Lee had held with Magruder, and his associates, a council of war. It had been also used for hospital purposes, but some negroes were now the only occupants. The Confederates left behind them seventy spiked and shattered cannon, some powder, and a few splintered wagons; but in all material respects, their evacuation was thorough and creditable. Some deserters took the first tidings of the retreat to the astonished Federals, and they raised the national flag within the fortifications, in the gray of the morning of the 4th of May. Many negroes also escaped the vigilance of their taskmasters, and remained to welcome the victors. The fine works of Yorktown are monuments to negro labor, for _they_ were the hewers and the diggers. Every slave-owner in Eastern Virginia was obliged to send one half of his male servants between the ages of sixteen and fifty to the Confederate camps, and they were organized into gangs and set to work. In some cases they were put to military service and made excellent sharpshooters. The last gun discharged from the town was said to have been fired by a negro. I slept on board a barge at the wharf that evening, and my dreams ran upon a thousand themes. To every American this was hallowed ground. It had been celebrated by the pencil of Trumbull, the pen of Franklin, and the eloquence of Jefferson. Scarce eighty years had elapsed since those great minds established a fraternal government; but the site of their crowning glory was now the scene of their children's shame. Discord had stolen upon their councils and blood had profaned their shrine. I visited next day a bomb-proof postern, or subterranean passage, connecting the citadel with the outworks, and loitered about the fortifications till noon, when I took passage on the mail steamer, which left the Fortress at eleven o'clock, and reached White House at dusk the same evening. The whole river as I ascended was filled with merchant and naval craft. They made a continuous line from Old Point to the mouth of York River, and the masts and spars environing Yorktown and Gloucester, reminded one of a scene on the Mersey or the Clyde. At West Point, there was an array of shipping scarcely less formidable, and the windings of the interminably crooked Pamunkey were marked for leagues by sails, smoke-stacks, and masts. The landings and wharves were besieged by flat-boats and sloops, and Zouaves were hoisting forage and commissary stores up the red bluffs at every turn of our vessel. The Pamunkey was a beautiful stream, densely wooded, and occasional vistas opened up along its borders of wheat-fields and meadows, with Virginia farm-houses and negro quarters on the hilltops. Some of the houses on the river banks appeared to be tenanted by white people, but the majority had a haunted, desolate appearance, the only signs of life being strolling soldiers, who thrust their legs through the second story windows, or contemplated the river from the chimney-tops, and groups of negroes who sunned themselves on the piazza, or rushed to the margin to gaze and grin at the passing steamers. There were occasional residences not unworthy of old manorial and baronial times, and these were attended at a little distance by negro quarters of logs, arranged in rows, and provided with mud chimneys built against their gables. Few of the Northern navigable rivers were so picturesque and varied. We passed two Confederate gunboats, that had been half completed, and burned on the stocks. Their charred elbows and ribs, stared out, like the remains of some extinct monsters; a little delay might have found each of them armed and manned, and carrying havoc upon the rivers and the seas. West Point was simply a tongue, or spit of land, dividing the Mattapony from the Pamunkey river at their junction; a few houses were built upon the shallow, and some wharves, half demolished, marked the terminus of the York and Richmond railroad. A paltry water-battery was the sole defence. Below Cumberland (a collection of huts and a wharf), a number of schooners had been sunk across the river, and, with the aid of an island in the middle, these constituted a rather rigid blockade. The steamboat passed through, steering carefully, but some sailing vessels that followed required to be towed between the narrow apertures. The tops only of the sunken masts could be discerned above the surface, and much time and labor must have been required to place the boats in line and sink them. Vessels were counted by scores above and below this blockade, and at Cumberland the masts were like a forest; clusters of pontoons were here anchored in the river, and a short distance below we found three of the light-draught Federal gunboats moored in the stream. It was growing dark as we rounded to at "White House;" the camp fires of the grand army lit up the sky, and edged the tree-boughs on the margin with ribands of silver. Some drums beat in the distance; sentries paced the strand; the hum of men, and the lowing of commissary cattle, were borne towards us confusedly; soldiers were bathing in the river; team-horses were drinking at the brink; a throng of motley people were crowding about the landing to receive the papers and mails. I had at last arrived at the seat of war, and my ambition to chronicle battles and bloodshed was about to be gratified. At first, I was troubled to make my way; the tents had just been pitched; none knew the location of divisions other than their own, and it was now so dark that I did not care to venture far. After a vain attempt to find some flat-boats where there were lodgings and meals to be had, I struck out for general head-quarters, and, undergoing repeated snubbings from pert members of staff, fell in at length, with a very tall, spare, and angular young officer, who spoke broken English, and who heard my inquiries, courteously; he stepped into General Marcy's tent, but the Chief of Staff did not know the direction of Smith's division; he then repaired to Gen. Van Vleet, the chief Quartermaster, but with ill success. A party of officers were smoking under a "fly," and some of these called to him, thus-- "Captain! Duke! De Chartres! What do you wish?" It was, then, the Orleans Prince who had befriended me, and I had the good fortune to hear that the division, of which I was in search, lay a half mile up the river. I never spoke to the Bourbon afterward, but saw him often; and that he was as chivalrous as he was kind, all testimony proved. A private escorted me to a Captain Mott's tent, and this officer introduced me to General Hancock. I was at once invited to mess with the General's staff, and in the course of an hour felt perfectly at home. Hancock was one of the handsomest officers in the army; he had served in the Mexican war, and was subsequently a Captain in the Quartermaster's department. But the Rebellion placed stars in many shoulder-bars, and few were more worthily designated than this young Pennsylvanian. His first laurels were gained at Williamsburg; but the story of a celebrated charge that won him the day's applause, and McClellan's encomium of the "Superb Hancock," was altogether fictitious. The musket, not the bayonet, gave him the victory. I may doubt, in this place, that any extensive bayonet charge has been known during the war. Some have gone so far as to deny that the bayonet has ever been used at all. Hancock's regiments were the 5th Wisconsin, 49th Pennsylvanian, 43d New York, and 6th Maine. They represented widely different characteristics, and I esteemed myself fortunate to obtain a position where I could so eligibly study men, habits, and warfare. During the evening I fell in with the Colonel of each of these regiments, and from the conversation that ensued, I gleaned a fair idea of them all. The Wisconsin regiment was from a new and ambitious State of the Northwest. The men were rough-mannered, great-hearted farmers, wood-choppers, and tradesmen. They had all the impulsiveness of the Yankee, with less selfishness, and quite as much bravery. The Colonel was named Cobb, and he had held some leading offices in Wisconsin. A part of his life had been adventurously spent, and he had participated in the Mexican war. He was an ardent Republican in politics, and had been Speaker of a branch of the State Legislature. He was an attorney in a small county town when the war commenced, and his name had been broached for the Governorship. In person he was small, lithe, and capable of enduring great fatigue. His hair was a little gray, and he had no beard. He did not respect appearances, and his sword, as I saw, was antique and quite different in shape from the regulation weapon. He had penetrating gray eyes, and his manners were generally reserved. One had not to regard him twice to see that he was both cautious and resolute. He was too ambitious to be frank, and too passionate not to be brave. In the formula of learning he was not always correct; but few were of quicker perception or more practical and philosophic. He might not, in an emergency, be nicely scrupulous as to means, but he never wavered in respect to objects. His will was the written law to his regiment, and I believed his executive abilities superior to those of any officer in the brigade, not excepting the General's. The New York regiment was commanded by a young officer named Vinton. He was not more than thirty-five years of age, and was a graduate of the United States Military Academy. Passionately devoted to engineering, he withdrew from the army, and passed five years in Paris, at the study of his art. Returning homeward by way of the West Indies, he visited Honduras, and projected a filibustering expedition to its shores from the States. While perfecting the design, the Rebellion commenced, and his old patron, General Scott, secured him the colonelcy of a volunteer regiment. He still cherished his scheme of "Colonization," and half of his men were promised to accompany him. Personally, Colonel Vinton was straight, dark, and handsome. He was courteous, affable, and brave,--but wedded to his peculiar views, and, as I thought, a thorough "Young American." The Maine regiment was fathered by Colonel Burnham, a staunch old yeoman and soldier, who has since been made a General. His probity and good-nature were adjuncts of his valor, and his men were of the better class of New Englanders. The fourth regiment fell into the hands of a lawyer from Lewistown, Pennsylvania. He had been also in the Mexican war, and was remarkable mainly for strictness with regard to the sanitary regulations of his camps. He had wells dug at every stoppage, and his tents were generally fenced and canopied with cedar arbors. General Hancock's staff was composed of a number of young men, most of whom had been called from civil life. His brigade constituted one of three commanded by General Smith. Four batteries were annexed to the division so formed; the entire number of muskets was perhaps eight thousand. The Chief of Artillery was a Captain Ayres, whose battery saved the three months' army at Bull Run. It so happened that he came into the General's during the evening, and recited the particulars of a gunboat excursion, thirty miles up the Pamunkey, wherein he had landed his men, and burned a quantity of grain, some warehouses, and shipping. I pencilled the facts at once, made up my letter, and mailed it early in the morning. CHAPTER VIII. RUSTICS IN REBELLION. At White House, I met some of the mixed Indians and negroes from Indiantown Island, which lies among the osiers in the stream. One of these ferried me over, and the people received me obsequiously, touching their straw hats, and saying, "Sar, at your service!" They were all anxious to hear something of the war, and asked, solicitously, if they were to be protected. Some of them had been to Richmond the previous day, and gave me some unimportant items happening in the city. I found that they had Richmond papers of that date, and purchased them for a few cents. They knew little or nothing of their own history, and had preserved no traditions of their tribe. There was, however, I understood, a very old woman extant, named "Mag," of great repute at medicines, pow-wows, and divination. I expressed a desire to speak with her, and was conducted to a log-house, more ricketty and ruined than any of the others. About fifty half-breeds followed me in respectful curiosity, and they formed a semicircle around the cabin. The old woman sat in the threshold, barefooted, and smoking a stump of clay pipe. "Yaw's one o' dem Nawden soldiers, Aunt Mag!" said my conductor. "He wants to talk wid ye." "Sot down, honey," said the old woman, producing a wooden stool; "is you a Yankee, honey? Does you want you fauchun told by de ole 'oman?" I perceived that the daughter of the Delawares smelt strongly of fire-water, and the fumes of her calumet were most unwholesome. She was greatly disappointed that I did not require her prophetic services, and said, appealingly-- "Why, sar, all de gen'elmen an' ladies from Richmond has dere fauchuns told. I tells 'em true. All my fauchuns comes out true. Ain't dat so, chillen?" A low murmur of assent ran round the group, and I was obviously losing caste in the settlement. "Here is a dime," said I, "that I will give you, to tell me the result of the war. Shall the North be victorious in the next battle? Will Richmond surrender within a week? Shall I take my cigar at the Spotswood on Sunday fortnight?" "I'se been a lookin' into dat," she said, cunningly; "I'se had dreams on dat ar'. Le'um see how de armies stand!" She brought from the house a cup of painted earthenware containing sediments of coffee. I saw her crafty white eyes look up to mine as she muttered some jargon, and pretended to read the arrangement of the grains. "Honey," she said, "gi' me de money, and let de ole 'oman dream on it once mo'! It ain't quite clar' yit, young massar. Tank you, honey! Tank you! Let de old 'oman dream! Let de ole 'oman dream!" She disappeared into the house, chuckling and chattering, and the sons of the forest, loitering awhile, dispersed in various directions. As I followed my conductor to the riverside, and he parted the close bushes and boughs to give us exit, the glare of the camp-fires broke all at once upon us. The ship-lights quivered on the water; the figures of men moved to and fro before the fagots; the stars peeped timorously from the vault; the woods and steep banks were blackly shadowed in the river. Here was I, among the aborigines; and as my dusky acquaintance sent his canoe skimming across the ripples, I thought how inexplicable were the decrees of Time and the justice of God. Two races united in these people, and both of them we had wronged. From the one we had taken lands; from the other liberties. Two centuries had now elapsed. But the little remnant of the African and the American were to look from their Island Home upon the clash of our armies and the murder of our braves. By the 19th of May the skirts of the grand army had been gathered up, and on the 20th the march to Richmond was resumed. The troops moved along two main roads, of which the right led to New Mechanicsville and Meadow Bridges, and the left to the railroad and Bottom Bridges. My division formed the right centre, and although the Chickahominy fords were but eighteen miles distant, we did not reach them for three days. On the first night we encamped at Tunstalls, a railroad-station on Black Creek; on the second at New Cold Harbor, a little country tavern, kept by a cripple; and on the night of the third day at Hogan's farm, on the north hills of the Chickahominy. The railroad was opened to Despatch Station at the same time, but the right and centre were still compelled to "team" their supplies from White House. In the new position, the army extended ten miles along the Chickahominy hills; and while the engineers were driving pile, tressel, pontoon, and corduroy bridges, the cavalry was scouring the country, on both flanks, far and wide. The advance was full of incident, and I learned to keep as far in front as possible, that I might communicate with scouts, contrabands, and citizens. Many odd personages were revealed to me at the farm-houses on the way, and I studied, with curious interest, the native Virginian character. They appeared to be compounds of the cavalier and the boor. There was no old gentleman who owned a thousand barren acres, spotted with scrub timber; who lived in a weather-beaten barn, with a multiplicity of porch and a quantity of chimney; whose means bore no proportion to his pride, and neither to his indolence,--that did not talk of his ancestry, proffer his hospitality, and defy me to an argument. I was a civilian,--they had no hostility to me,--but the blue-coats of the soldiers seared their eyeballs. In some cases their daughters remained upon the property; but the sons and the negroes always fled,--though in contrary directions. The old men used to peep through the windows at the passing columns; and as their gates were wrenched from the hinges, their rails used to pry wagons out of the mud, their pump-handles shaken till the buckets splintered in the shaft, and their barns invaded by greasy agrarians, they walked to and fro, half-weakly, half-wrathfully, but with a pluck, fortitude, and devotion that wrung my respect. Some aged negro women commonly remained, but these were rather incumbrances than aids, and they used the family meal to cook bread for the troops. An old, toothless, grinning African stood at every lane and gate, selling buttermilk and corn-cakes. Poor mortal, sinful old women! They had worked for nothing through their three-score and ten, but avarice glared from their shrivelled pupils, and their last but greatest delight lay in the coppers and the dimes. One would have thought that they had outlived the greed of gold; but wages deferred make the dying miserly. The lords of the manors were troubled to know the number of our troops. For several days the columns passed with their interminable teams, batteries, and adjuncts, and the old gentlemen were loth to compute us at less than several millions. "Why, look yonder," said one, pointing to a brigade; "I declar' to gracious, there ain't no less than ten thousand in _them_!" "Tousands an' tousands!" said a wondering negro at his elbow. "I wonda if dey'll take Richmond dis yer day?" Many of them hung white flags at their gate-posts, implying neutrality; but nobody displayed the Federal colors. If there were any covert sympathizers with the purposes of the army, they remembered the vengeance of the neighbors and made no demonstrations. There was a prodigious number of stragglers from the Federal lines, as these were the bane of the country people. They sauntered along by twos and threes, rambling into all the fields and green-apple orchards, intruding their noses into old cabins, prying into smoke-houses, and cellars, looking at the stock in the stables, and peeping on tiptoe into the windows of dwellings. These stragglers were true exponents of Yankee character,--always wanting to know,--averse to discipline, eccentric in their orbits, entertaining profound contempt for everything that was not up to the measure of "to hum." "Look here, Bill, I say!" said one, with a great grin on his face; "did you ever, neow! I swan! they call that a plough down in these parts." "Devilishest people I ever see!" said Bill, "stick their meetin'-houses square in the woods! Build their chimneys first and move the houses up to 'em! All the houses breakin' out in perspiration of porch! All their machinery with Noah in the ark! Pump the soil dry! Go to sleep a milkin' a keow! Depend entirely on Providence and the nigger!" There was a mill on the New Bridge road, ten miles from White House, with a tidy farm-house, stacks, and cabins adjoining. The road crossed the mill-race by a log bridge, and a spreading pond or dam lay to the left,--the water black as ink, the shore sandy, and the stream disappearing in a grove of straight pines. A youngish woman, with several small children, occupied the dwelling, and there remained, besides, her fat sister-in-law and four or five faithful negroes. I begged the favor of a meal and bed in the place one night, and shall not forget the hospitable table with its steaming biscuit; the chubby baby, perched upon his high stool; the talkative elderly woman, who took snuff at the fireplace; the contented black-girl, who played the Hebe; and above all, the trim, plump, pretty hostess, with her brown eyes and hair, her dignity and her fondness, sitting at the head of the board. When she poured the bright coffee into the capacious bowl, she revealed the neatest of hands and arms, and her dialect was softer and more musical than that of most Southerners. In short, I fell almost in love with her; though she might have been a younger playmate of my mother's, and though she was the wife of a Quartermaster in a Virginia regiment. For, somehow, a woman seems very handsome when one is afield; and the contact of rough soldiers, gives him a partiality for females. It must have required some courage to remain upon the farm; but she hoped thereby to save the property from spoliation. I played a game of whist with the sister-in-law, arguing all the while; and at nine o'clock the servant produced some hard cider, shellbarks, and apples. We drank a cheery toast: "an early peace and old fellowship!"--to which the wife added a sentiment of "always welcome," and the baby laughed at her knee. How brightly glowed the fire! I wanted to linger for a week, a month, a year,--as I do now, thinking it all over,--and when I strolled to the porch,--hearing the pigeons cooing at the barn; the water streaming down the dam; the melancholy monotony of the pine boughs;--there only lacked the humming mill-wheel, and the strong grip of the miller's hand, to fill the void corner of one's happy heart. But this was a time of war, when dreams are rudely broken, and mine could not last. The next day some great wheels beat down the bridge, and the teams clogged the road for miles; the waiting teamsters saw the miller's sheep, and the geese, chickens, and pigs, rashly exposed themselves in the barnyard; these were killed and eaten, the mill stripped of flour and meal, and the garden despoiled of its vegetables. A quartermaster's horse foundered, and he demanded the miller's, giving therefor a receipt, but specifying upon the same the owner's relation to the Rebellion; and, to crown all, a group of stragglers, butchered the cows, and heaped the beef in their wagons to feed their regimental friends. When I presented myself, late in the afternoon, the yard and porches were filled with soldiers; the wife sat within, her head thrown upon the window, her bright hair unbound, and her eyes red with weeping. The baby had cried itself to sleep, the sister-in-law took snuff fiercely, at the fire; the black girl cowered in a corner. "There is not bread in the house for my children," she said; "but I did not think they could make me shed a tear." If there were Spartan women, as the story-books say, I wonder if their blood died with them! I hardly think so. If I learned anything from my quiet study of this and subsequent campaigns, it was the heartlessness of war. War brutalizes! The most pitiful become pitiless afield, and those who are not callous, must do cruel duties. If the quartermaster had not seized the horses, he would have been accountable for his conduct; had he failed to state the miller's disloyalty in the receipt, he would have been punished. The men were thieves and brutes, to take the meal and meat; but they were perhaps hungry and weary, and sick of camp food; on the whole, I became a devotee of the George Fox faith, and hated warfare, though I knew nothing to substitute for it, in _crises_. Besides, the optimist might have seen much to admire. Individual merits were developed around me; I saw shop-keepers and mechanics in the ranks, and they looked to be better men. Here were triumphs of engineering; there perfections of applied ingenuity. I saw how the weakest natures girt themselves for great resolves, and how fortitude outstripped itself. It is a noble thing to put by the fear of death. It was a grand spectacle, this civil soldiery of both sections, supporting their principles, ambitions, or whatever instigated them, with their bodies; and their bones, lie where they will, must be severed, when the plough-share some day heaves them to the ploughman. One morning a friend asked me to go upon a scout. "Where are your companies?" said I. "There are four behind, and we shall be joined by six at Old Cold Harbor." I saw, in the rear, filing through a belt of woods, the tall figures of the horsemen, approaching at a canter. "Do you command?" said I again. "No! the Major has charge of the scout, and his orders are secret." I wheeled beside him, as the cavalry closed up, waved my hand to Plumley, and the girls, and went forward to the rendezvous, about six miles distant. The remaining companies of the regiment were here drawn up, watering their nags. The Major was a thick, sunburnt man, with grizzled beard, and as he saw us rounding a corner of hilly road, his voice rang out-- "Attention! Prepare to mount!" Every rider sprang to his nag; every nag walked instinctively to his place; every horseman made fast his girths, strapped his blankets tightly, and lay his hands upon bridle-rein and pommel. "Attention! Mount!" The riders sprang to their seats; the bugles blew a lively strain; the horses pricked up their ears; and the long array moved briskly forward, with the Captain, the Major, and myself at the head. We were joined in a moment by two pieces of flying artillery, and five fresh companies of cavalry. In a moment more we were underway again, galloping due northward, and, as I surmised, toward Hanover Court House. If any branch of the military service is feverish, adventurous, and exciting, it is that of the cavalry. One's heart beats as fast as the hoof-falls; there is no music like the winding of the bugle, and no monotone so full of meaning as the clink of sabres rising and falling with the dashing pace. Horse and rider become one,--a new race of Centaurs,--and the charge, the stroke, the crack of carbines, are so quick, vehement, and dramatic, that we seem to be watching the joust of tournaments or following fierce Saladins and Crusaders again. We had ridden two hours at a fair canter, when we came to a small stream that crossed the road obliquely, and gurgled away through a sandy valley into the deepnesses of the woods. A cart-track, half obliterated, here diverged, running parallel with the creek, and the Major held up his sword as a signal to halt; at the same moment the bugle blew a quick, shrill note. "There are hoof-marks here!" grunted the Major,--"five of 'em. The Dutchman has gone into the thicket. Hulloo!" he added, precipitately--"there go the carbines!" I heard, clearly, two explosions in rapid succession; then a general discharge, as of several persons firing at once, and at last, five continuous reports, fainter, but more regular, and like the several emptyings of a revolver. I had scarcely time to note these things, and the effect produced upon the troop, when strange noises came from the woods to the right: the floundering of steeds, the cries and curses of men, and the ringing of steel striking steel. Directly the boughs crackled, the leaves quivered, and a horse and rider plunged into the road, not five rods from my feet. The man was bareheaded, and his face and clothing were torn with briars and branches. He was at first riding fairly upon our troops, when he beheld the uniform and standards, and with a sharp oath flung up his sword and hands. "I surrender!" he said; "I give in! Don't shoot!" The scores of carbines that were levelled upon him at once dropped to their rests at the saddles; but some unseen avenger had not heeded the shriek; a ball whistled from the woods, and the man fell from his cushion like a stone. In another instant, the German sergeant bounded through the gap, holding his sabre aloft in his right hand; but the left hung stiff and shattered at his side, and his face was deathly white. He glared an instant at the dead man by the roadside, leered grimly, and called aloud-- "Come on, Major! Dis vay! Dere are a squad of dem ahead!" The bugle at once sounded a charge, the Major rose in the stirrups, and thundered "Forward!" I reined aside, intuitively, and the column dashed hotly past me. With a glance at the heap of mortality littering the way, I spurred my nag sharply, and followed hard behind. The riderless horse seemed to catch the fever of the moment, and closed up with me, leaving his master the solitary tenant of the dell. For perhaps three miles we galloped like the wind, and my brave little traveller overtook the hindmost of the troop, and retained the position. Thrice there were discharges ahead; I caught glimpses of the Major, the Captain, and the wolfish sergeant, far in the advance; and once saw, through the cloud of dust that beset them, the pursued and their individual pursuers, turning the top of a hill. But for the most part, I saw nothing; I _felt_ all the intense, consuming, burning ardor of the time and the event. I thought that my hand clutched a sabre, and despised myself that it was not there. I stood in the stirrups, and held some invisible enemy by the throat. In a word, the bloodiness of the chase was upon me. I realized the fierce infatuation of matching life with life, and standing arbiter upon my fellow's body and soul. It seemed but a moment, when we halted, red and panting, in the paltry Court House village of Hanover; the field-pieces hurled a few shells at the escaping Confederates, and the men were ordered to dismount. It seemed that a Confederate picket had been occupying the village, and the creek memorized by the skirmish was an outpost merely. Two of the man Otto's party had been slain in the woods, where also lay as many Southerners. Hanover Court House is renowned as the birthplace of Patrick Henry, the colonial orator, called by Byron the "forest Demosthenes." In a little tavern, opposite the old Court House building, he began his humble career as a measurer of gills to convivials, and in the Court House,--a small stone edifice, plainly but quaintly constructed,--he gave the first exhibitions of his matchless eloquence. Not far away, on a by-road, the more modern but not less famous orator, Henry Clay, was born. The region adjacent to his father's was called the "Slashes of Hanover," and thence came his appellation of the "Mill Boy of the Slashes." I had often longed to visit these shrines; but never dreamed that the booming of cannon would announce me. The soldiers broke into both the tavern and court-house, and splintered some chairs in the former to obtain relics of Henry. I secured Richmond newspapers of the same morning, and also some items of intelligence. With these I decided to repair at once to White House, and formed the rash determination of taking the direct or Pamunkey road, which I had never travelled, and which might be beset by Confederates. The distance to White House, by this course, was only twenty miles; whereas it was nearly as far to head-quarters; and I believed that my horse had still the persistence to carry me. It was past four o'clock; but I thought to ride six miles an hour while daylight lasted, and, by good luck, get to the depot at nine. The Major said that it was foolhardiness; the Captain bantered me to go. I turned my back upon both, and bade them good by. CHAPTER IX. PUT UNDER ARREST. While daylight remained, I had little reason to repent my wayward resolve. The Pamunkey lay to my left, and the residences between it and the road were of a better order than others that I had seen. This part of the country had not been overrun, and the wheat and young corn were waving in the river-breeze. I saw few negroes, but the porches were frequently occupied by women and white men, who looked wonderingly toward me. There were some hoof-marks in the clay, and traces of a broad tire that I thought belonged to a gun-carriage. The hills of King William County were but a little way off, and through the wood that darkened them, sunny glimpses of vari-colored fields and dwellings now and then appeared. I came to a shabby settlement called New Castle, at six o'clock, where an evil-looking man walked out from a frame-house, and inquired the meaning of the firing at Hanover. I explained hurriedly, as some of his neighbors meantime gathered around me. They asked if I was not a soldier in the Yankee army, and as I rode away, followed me suspiciously with their eyes and wagged their heads. To end the matter I spurred my pony and soon galloped out of sight. Henceforward I met only stern, surprised glances, and seemed to read "murder" in the faces of the inhabitants. A wide creek crossed the road about five miles further on, where I stopped to water my horse. The shades of night were gathering now; there was no moon; and for the first time I realized the loneliness of my position. Hitherto, adventure had laughed down fear; hereafter my mind was to be darkened like the gloaming, and peopled with ghastly shadows. I was yet young in the experience of death, and the toppled corpse of the slain cavalry-man on the scout, somehow haunted me. I heard his hoof-falls chiming with my own, and imagined, with a cold thrill, that his steed was still following me; then, his white rigid face and uplifted arms menaced my way; and, at last, the ruffianly form of his slayer pursued him along the wood. They glided like shadows over the foliage, and flashed across the surfaces of pools and rivulets. I heard their steel ringing in the underbrush, and they flitted around me, pursuing and retreating, till my brain began to whirl with the motion. Suddenly my horse stumbled, and I reined him to a halt. The cold drops were standing on my forehead. I found my knees a-quiver and my breathing convulsive. With an expletive upon my unmanliness, I touched the nag with my heel, and whistled encouragingly. Poor pony! Fifty miles of almost uninterrupted travel had broken his spirit. He leaped into his accustomed pace: but his legs were unsteady and he floundered at every bound. There were pools, ruts, and boughs across the way, with here and there stretches of slippery corduroy; but the thick blackness concealed these, and I expected momentarily to be thrown from the saddle. By and by he dropped from a canter into a rock; from a rock to an amble; then into a walk, and finally to a slow painful limp. I dismounted and took him perplexedly by the bit. A light shone from the window of a dwelling across some open fields to the left, and I thought of repairing thither; but some deep-mouthed dogs began to bay directly, and then the lamp went out. A tiny stream sang at the roadside, flowing toward some deeper tributary; lighting a cigar, I made out, by its fitful illuminings, to wash the limbs of the jaded nag. Then I led him for an hour, till my own limbs were weary, troubled all the time by weird imaginings, doubts, and regrets. When I resumed the saddle the horse had a firmer step and walked pleasantly. I ventured after a time to incite him to a trot, and was going nicely forward, when a deep voice, that almost took my breath, called from the gloom-- "Who comes there? Halt, or I fire! Guard, turn out!" Directly the road was full of men, and a bull's-eye lantern flashed upon my face. A group of foot-soldiery, with drawn pistols and sabres, gathered around me, and I heard the neigh of steeds from some imperceptible vicinity. "Who is it, Sergeant?" said one. "Is there but one of 'em?" said another. "Cuss him!" said a third; "I was takin' a bully snooze." "Who are yeou?" said the Sergeant, sternly; "what are yeou deouin' aout at this hour o' the night? Are yeou a rebbil?" "No!" I answered, greatly relieved; "I am a newspaper correspondent of Smith's division, and there's my pass!" I was taken over to a place in the woods, where some fagots were smouldering, and, stirring them to a blaze, the Sergeant read the document and pronounced it right. "Yeou hain't got no business, nevertheless, to be roamin' araound outside o' picket; but seein' as it's yeou, I reckon yeou may trot along!" I offered to exchange my information for a biscuit and a drop of coffee, for I was wellnigh worn out; while one of the privates produced a canteen more wholesome than cleanly, another gave me a lump of fat pork and a piece of corn bread. They gathered sleepily about me, while I told of the scout, and the Sergeant said that my individual ride was "game enough, but nothin' but darn nonsense." Then they fed my horse with a trifle of oats, and after awhile I climbed, stiff and bruised, to the saddle again, and bade them good night. I knew now that I was at "Putney's," a ford on the Pamunkey, and an hour later I came in sight of the ship-lights at White House, and heard the steaming of tugs and draught-boats, going and coming by night. I hitched my horse to a tree, pilfered some hay and fodder from two or three nags tied adjacent, and picked my way across a gangway, several barge-decks, and a floating landing, to the mail steamer that lay outside. Her deck and cabin were filled with people, stretched lengthwise and crosswise, tangled, grouped, and snoring, but all apparently fast asleep. I coolly took a blanket from a man that looked as though he did not need it, and wrapped myself cosily under a bench in a corner. The cabin light flared dimly, half irradiating the forms below, and the boat heaved a little on the river-swells. The night was cold, the floor hard, and I almost dead with fatigue. But what of that! I felt the newspapers in my breast pocket, and knew that the mail could not leave me in the morning. Blessed be the news-gatherer's sleep! I think he earned it. It was very pleasant, at dawn, to receive the congratulations of our agent, with whom I breakfasted, and to whom I consigned a hastily written letter and all the Richmond papers of the preceding day. He was a shrewd, sanguine, middle-aged man, of large experience and good standing in our establishment. He was sent through the South at the beginning of the Rebellion, and introduced into all public bodies and social circles, that he might fathom the designs of Secession, and comprehend its spirit. Afterward he accompanied the Hatteras and Port Royal expeditions, and witnessed those celebrated bombardments. Such a thorough individual abnegation I never knew. He was a part of the establishment, body and soul. He agreed with its politics, adhered to all its policies, defended it, upheld it, revered it. The Federal Government was, to his eye, merely an adjunct of the paper. Battles and sieges were simply occurrences for its columns. Good men, brave men, bad men, died to give it obituaries. The whole world was to him a Reporter's district, and all human mutations plain matters of news. I hardly think that any city, other than New York, contains such characters. The journals there are full of fever, and the profession of journalism is a disease. He cashed me a draft for a hundred dollars, and I filled my saddle-bags with smoking-tobacco, spirits, a meerschaum pipe, packages of sardines, a box of cigars, and some cheap publications. Then we adjourned to the quay, where the steamer was taking in mails, freight and passengers. The papers were in his side-pocket, and he was about to commit them to a steward for transmission to Fortress Monroe, when my name was called from the strand by a young mounted officer, connected with one of the staffs of my division. I thought that he wished to exchange salutations or make some inquiries, and tripped to his side. "General McClellan wants those newspapers that you obtained at Hanover yesterday!" A thunderbolt would not have more transfixed me. I could not speak for a moment. Finally, I stammered that they were out of my possession. "Then, sir, I arrest you, by order of General McClellan. Get your horse!" "Stop!" said I, agitatedly, "--it may not be too late. I can recover them yet. Here is our agent,--I gave them to him." I turned, at the word, to the landing where he stood a moment before. To my dismay, he had disappeared. "This is some frivolous pretext to escape," said the Lieutenant; "you correspondents are slippery fellows, but I shall take care that you do not play any pranks with me. The General is irritated already, and if you prevaricate relative to those papers he may make a signal example of you." I begged to be allowed to look for----; but he answered cunningly, that I had better mount and ride on. An acquaintance of mine here interfered, and testified to the existency of the agent and his probable connection with the journals. Pale, flurried, excited, I started to discover him, the Lieutenant following me closely meantime. We entered every booth and tent, went from craft to craft, sought among the thick clusters of people, and even at the Commissary's and Quartermaster's pounds, that lay some distance up the railroad. "I am sorry for you, old fellow," said the Lieutenant, "but your accomplice has probably escaped. It's very sneaking of him, as it makes it harder for you; but I have no authority to deal with him, though I shall take care to report his conduct at head-quarters." I found that the Lieutenant was greatly gratified with the duty entrusted to him. He had been at the cavalry quarters on the return of the scouting party, and had overheard the Major muttering something as to McClellan's displeasure at receiving no Richmond journals. The Major had added that one of the correspondents took them to White House, and, mentioning me by name, this young and aspiring satellite had blurted out that he knew me, and could doubtless overtake me at the mail-boat in the morning. The Commanding General authorised him to arrest me _with the papers_, and report at head-quarters. This was then a journey to recommend him to authority, and it involved no personal danger. I was not so intimidated that I failed to see how the Lieutenant would lose his gayest feather by failing to recover the journals, and I dexterously insinuated that it would be well to recommence the search. This time we were successful. The shrewd, sanguine, middle-aged man was coolly contemplating the river from an outside barge, concealed from the shore by piled boxes of ammunition. He was reading a phonetic pamphlet, and appeared to take his apprehension as a pleasant morning call. I caught one meaning glance, however, that satisfied me how clearly he understood the case. "Ha! Townsend," said he, smilingly, "back already? I thought we had lost you. One of your military friends? Good-day, Lieutenant." "I am under arrest, my boy," said I, "and you will much aggravate General McClellan, if you do not consign those Richmond journals to his deputy here." "Under arrest? You surprise me! I am sorry, Lieutenant that you have had so fatiguing a ride, but the fact is, those papers have gone down the river. If the General is not in a great hurry, he will see their columns reproduced by us in a few days." "How did they go?" said the Lieutenant, with an oath, "if by the mail-boat I will have General Van Vliet despatch a tug to overhaul her." "I am very sorry again," said the bland civilian, smoothing his hands: "but they went by the _South America_ at a much earlier hour." I looked appealingly to him; the satellite stared down the river perplexedly, but suddenly his eye fell upon something that absorbed it; and he turned like a madman to---- "By! ---- sir, you are lying to me. There is the _South America_ moored to a barge, and her steam is not up!" "Those words are utterly uncalled for," said the agent,--"but you cannot irritate me, my dear sir! I know that youth is hot,--particularly military youth yet inexperienced; and therefore I pardon you. I made a mistake. It was not the _South America_, it was--it was--upon my word I cannot recall the name!" "You do not mean to!" thundered the young Ajax, to whose vanity, ----'s speech had been gall; "my powers are discretionary: I arrest you in the name of General McClellan." "Indeed! Be sure you understand your orders! It isn't probable that such a fiery blade is allowed much discretionary margin. The General himself would not assume such airs. Why don't you shoot me? It might contribute to your promotion, and that is, no doubt, your object. I know General McClellan very well. He is a personal friend of mine." His manner was so self-possessed, his tone so cutting, that the young man of fustian--whose name was Kenty--fingered his sword hilt, and foamed at the lips. "March on," said he,--"I will report this insolence word for word." He motioned us to the quay; we preceded him. The sanguine gentleman keeping up a running fire of malevolent sarcasm. "Stop!" said he quietly, as we reached his tent,--"I have not sent them at all. They are here. And you have made all this exhibition of yourself for nothing. I am the better soldier, you see. You are a drummer-boy, not an officer. Take off your shoulder-bars, and go to school again." He disappeared a minute, returned with two journals, and looking at me, meaningly, turned to their titles. "Let me see!" he said, smoothly,--"_Richmond Examiner_, May 28, _Richmond Enquirer_, May 22. There! You have them! Go in peace! Give my respects to General McClellan! Townsend, old fellow, you have done your full duty. Don't let this young person frighten you. Good by." He gave me his hand, with a sinister glance, and left something in my palm when his own was withdrawn. I examined it hastily when I girt up my saddle. It said: "_Your budget got off safe, old fellow._" He had given Kenty some old journals that were of no value to anybody. When we were mounted and about to start, the Lieutenant looked witheringly upon his persecutor-- "Allow me to say, sir," he exclaimed, "that you are the most unblushing liar I ever knew." "Thank you, kindly," said----, taking off his hat, "you do me honor!" Our route was silent and weary enough. The young man at my side, unconscious of his wily antagonist's deception, boasted for some time that he had attained his purposes. As I could not undeceive him, I held my tongue; but feared that when this trick should be made manifest, the vengeance would fall on me alone. I heartily wished the unlucky papers at the bottom of the sea. To gratify an adventurous whim, and obtain a day's popularity at New York, I had exposed my life, crippled my nag, and was now to be disgraced and punished. What might or might not befall me, I gloomily debated. The least penalty would be expulsion from the army; but imprisonment till the close of the war, was a favorite amusement with the War Office. How my newspaper connection would be embarrassed was a more grievous inquiry. It stung me to think that I had blundered twice on the very threshold of my career. Was I not acquiring a reputation for rashness that would hinder all future promotion and cast me from the courts of the press. Here the iron entered into my soul; for be it known, I loved Bohemia! This roving commission, these vagabond habits, this life in the open air among the armies, the white tents, the cannon, and the drums, they were my elysium, my heart! But to be driven away, as one who had broken his trust, forfeited favor and confidence, and that too on the eve of grand events, was something that would embitter my existence. We passed the familiar objects that I had so often buoyantly beheld,--deserted encampments, cross-roads, rills, farm-houses, fields, and at last came to Daker's. I called out to them, and explained my woful circumstances with rueful conciseness. It was growing dark when we came to general headquarters, two miles beyond Gaines's Mill. The tents were scattered over the surface of a hill, and most of them were illumined by candles. The Lieutenant gave our horses to an orderly, and led the way through two outer circles of wall-tents, between which and the inner circle, guards were pacing, to deny all vulgar ingress. A staff officer took in our names, and directly returned with the reply of "Pass in!" We were now in the sacred enclosure, secured by flaming swords. Four tents stood in a row, allotted respectively to the Chief of Staff, the Adjutant-General, the telegraph operators, and the select staff officers. Just behind them, embowered by a covering of cedar boughs, stood the tent of General McClellan. Close by, from an open plot or area of ground, towered a pine trunk, floating the national flag. Lights burned in three of the tents: low voices, as of subdued conversation, were heard from the first. A little flutter of my heart, a drawing aside of canvas, two steps, an uncovering, and a bow,--I stood at my tribunal! A couple of candles were placed upon a table, whereat sat a fine specimen of man, with kindly features, dark, grayish, flowing hair, and slight marks of years upon his full, purplish face. He looked to be a well-to-do citizen, whose success had taught him sedentary convivialities. A fuming cigar lay before him; some empty champagne bottles sat upon a pine desk; tumblers and a decanter rested upon a camp-stool; a bucket, filled with water and a great block of ice, was visible under the table. Five other gentlemen, each with a star in his shoulder-bar, were dispersed upon chairs and along a camp bedside. The tall, angular, dignified gentleman with compressed lips and a "character" nose, was General Barry, Chief of Artillery. The lithe, severe, gristly, sanguine person, whose eyes flashed even in repose, was General Stoneman, Chief of Cavalry. The large, sleepy-eyed, lymphatic, elderly man, clad in dark, civil gray, whose ears turned up habitually as from deafness, was Prince de Joinville, brother to Louis Philippe, King of France. The little man with red hair and beard, who moved quickly and who spoke sharply, was Seth Williams, Adjutant-General. The stout person with florid face, large, blue eyes, and white, straight hair, was General Van Vliet, Quartermaster-General. And the man at the table, was General Marcy, father-in-law to McClellan, and Executive officer of the army. Maps, papers, books, and luggage lay around the room; all the gentlemen were smoking and wine sparkled in most of the glasses. Some swords were lying upon the floor, a pair of spurs glistened by the bed, and three of the officers had their feet in the air. "What is it you wish, Lieutenant?" said General Marcy, gravely. The boor in uniform at my side, related his errand and order, gave the particulars of my arrest, declaimed against our agent, and submitted the journals. He told his story stammeringly, and I heard one of the officers in the background mutter contemptuously when he had finished. "Were you aware of the order prohibiting correspondents from keeping with the advance?" said the General, looking up. "I had not been notified from head-quarters. I have been with the army only a week." "You knew that you had no business upon scouts, forages, or reconnoissances; why did you go?" "I went by invitation." "Who invited you?" "I would prefer not to state, since it would do him an injury." Here the voices in the background muttered, as I thought, applaudingly. Gaining confidence as I proceeded, I spoke more boldly-- "I am sure I regret that I have disobeyed any order of General McClellan's; but there can nothing occur in the rear of an army. Obedience, in this case, would be indolence and incompetence; for only the reliable would stay behind and the reckless go ahead. If I am accredited here as a correspondent, I must keep up with the events. And the rivalries of our tribe, General, are so many, that the best of us sometimes forget what is right for what is expedient. I hope that General McClellan will pass by this offence." He heard my rambling defence quietly, excused the Lieutenant, and whistled for an orderly. "I don't think that you meant to offend General McClellan," he said, "but he wishes you to be detained. Give me your pass. Orderly, take this gentleman to General Porter, and tell him to treat him kindly. Good night." When we got outside of the tent, I slipped a silver half-dollar into the orderly's hand, and asked him if he understood the General's final remark. He said, in reply, that I was directed to be treated with courtesy, kindness, and care, and asked me, in conclusion, if there were any adjectives that might intensify the recommendation. When we came to General Porter, the Provost-Marshal, however, he pooh-poohed the qualifications, and said that _his_ business was merely to put me under surveillance. This unamiable man ordered me to be taken to Major Willard, the deputy Provost, whose tent we found after a long search. The Major was absent, but some young officers of his mess were taking supper at his table, and with these I at once engaged in conversation. I knew that if I was to be spared an immersion in the common guardhouse, with drunkards, deserters, and prisoners of war, I must win the favor of these men. I gave them the story of my arrest, spoke lightly of the offence and jestingly of the punishment, and, in fact, so improved my cause that, when the Major appeared, and the Sergeant consigned me to his custody, one of the young officers took him aside, and, I am sure, said some good words in my favor. The Major was a bronzed, indurated gentleman, scrupulously attired, and courteously stern. He looked at me twice or thrice, to my confusion; for I was dusty, wan, and running over with perspiration. His first remark had, naturally, reference to the lavatory, and, so far as my face and hair were concerned, I was soon rejuvenated. I found on my return to the tent, a clean plate and a cup of steaming coffee placed for me, and I ate with a full heart though pleading covertly the while. When I had done, and the tent became deserted by all save him and me, he said, simply-- "What am I to do with you, Mr. Townsend?" "Treat me as a gentleman, I hope, Major." "We have but one place of confinement," said he, "the guardhouse; but I am loth to send you there. Light your pipe, and I will think the matter over." He took a turn in front, consulted with some of his associates, and directly returning, said that I was to be quartered in his office-tent, adjoining. A horror being thus lifted from my mind, I heard with sincere interest many revelations of his military career. He had been a common soldier in the Mexican war, and had fought his way, step by step, to repeated commissions. He had garrisoned Fort Yuma, and other posts on the far plains, and at the beginning of the war was tendered a volunteer brigade, which he modestly declined. His tastes were refined, and a warm fancy, approaching poetry, enhanced his personal reminiscences. His face softened, his eyes grew milder, his large, commanding mouth relaxed,--he was young again, living his adventures over. We talked thus till almost midnight, when two regulars appeared in front,--stiff, ramrodish figures, that came to a jerking "present," tapped their caps with two fingers, and said, explosively; "Sergeant of Guard, Number Five!" The Major rose, gave me his hand, and said that I would find a candle in my tent, with waterproof and blankets on the ground. I was to give myself no concern about the nag, and might, if I chose, sit for an hour to write, but must, on no account, attempt to leave the canvas, for the guard would instantly shoot me down. The guard in question had a _doppel-ganger_,--counterpart of himself in inflexibility,--and both were appendages of their muskets. He was not probably a sentient being, certainly not a conversational one. He knew the length of a stride, and the manual of bayonet exercise, but was, during his natural life, a blind idolater of a deity, called "Orders." The said "Orders," for the present evening, were walking, not talking, and he was dumb to all conciliatory words. He took a position at one end of my tent, and his double at the other end. They carried their muskets at "support arms," and paced up and down, measuredly, like two cloaked and solemn ghosts. I wrapped myself in the damp blankets, and slept through the bangs of four or five court-martials and several executions. At three o'clock, they changed ramrods,--the old doppel-gangers going away, and two new ones fulfilling their functions. CHAPTER X. AFTER THE VICTORY. The two ramrods were still pacing to and fro, when I aroused in the gray of the morning; but they looked very misty and moist, as if they were impalpables that were shortly to evaporate. The Major poked his head between the flaps at eight o'clock, and said that breakfast was ready; but the ramrod nearest me kept vigilantly alongside, and I thought he had been invited also. The other ramrod guarded the empty tent, and I think that he believed me a doppel-ganger likewise. I wondered what was to be done with me, as the hours slipped rapidly by. The guards were relieved again at ten o'clock, and Quartermaster's men commenced to take down the tents. Camps were to be moved, and I inquired solicitously if I was to be moved also. The Major replied that prisoners were commonly made to walk along the road, escorted by horsemen, and I imagined, with dread, the companionship of negroes, estrays, ragged Confederates, and such folk, while the whole army should witness my degradation. Finally, all the tents were lifted and packed in wagons, as well as the furniture. I adhered to a stool, at which the teamster looked wistfully, and the implacable sentinels walked to and fro. A rumor became current among the private soldiers, that I was the nephew of the southern General Lee, whose wife had been meantime captured at Hanover Court House. Curious groups sauntered around me, and talked behind their hands. One man was overheard to say that I had fought desperately, and covered myself with glory, and another thought that I favored my uncle somewhat, and might succeed to his military virtues. "I guess I'll take that cheer, if you ain't got no objection," said the teamster, and he slung it into the wagon. What to do now troubled me materially; but one of the soldiers brought a piece of rail, and I "squatted" lugubriously on the turf. "If you ever get to Richmond," said I, "you shall be considerately treated." (Profound sensation.) "Thankee!" replied the man, touching his cap; "but I'm werry well pleased _out_ o' Richmond, Captain." Here the Major was seen approaching, a humorous smile playing about his eyes. "You are discharged," said he; "General Marcy will return your pass, and perhaps your papers." I wrung his hand with indescribable relief, and he sent the "ramrod" on guard, to saddle my horse. In a few minutes, I was mounted again, much to the surprise of the observers of young Lee, and directly I stood before the kindly Chief of Staff. At my request, he wrote a note to the division commander, specifying my good behavior, and restoring to me all privileges and immunities. He said nothing whatever as to the mistake in the papers, and told me that, on special occasions, I might keep with advances, by procuring an extraordinary pass at head-quarters. In short, my arrest conduced greatly to my efficiency. I invariably carried my Richmond despatches to General Marcy, thereafter, and, if there was information of a legitimate description, he gave me the benefit of it. My own brigade lay at Dr. Gaines's house, during this time, and we did not lack for excitement. Just behind the house lay several batteries of rifled guns, and these threw shells at hourly intervals, at certain Confederate batteries across the river. The distance was two miles or less; but the firing was generally wretched. Crowds of soldiers gathered around, to watch the practice, and they threw up their hats applaudingly at successful hits. Occasionally a great round shot would bound up the hill, and a boy, one day, seeing one of these spent balls rolling along the ground, put out his foot to stop it, but shattered his leg so dreadfully that it had to be amputated. Dr. Gaines was a rich, aristocratic, and indolent old Virginian, whose stables, summerhouses, orchards, and negro-quarters were the finest in their district. The shooting so annoyed him that he used to resort to the cellar; several shots passed through his roof, and one of the chimneys was knocked off. His family carriages were five in number, and as his stables were turned into hospitals, these were all hauled into his lawn, where their obsolete trimmings and queer shape constantly amused the soldiers. About this time I became acquainted with some officers of the 5th Maine regiment, and by permission, accompanied them to Mechanicsville. I was here, on the afternoon of Thursday, May 27, when the battle of Hanover Court House was fought. We heard the rapid growl of guns, and continuous volleys of musketry, though the place was fourteen miles distant. At evening, a report was current that the Federals had gained a great victory, and captured seven hundred prisoners. The truth of this was established next morning; for detachments of prisoners were from time to time brought in, and the ambulances came to camp, laden with the wounded. I took this opportunity of observing the Confederate soldiers, as they lay at the Provost quarters, in a roped pen, perhaps one hundred rods square. It was evening, as I hitched my horse to a stake near-by, and pressed up to the receptacle for the unfortunates. Sentries enclosed the pen, walking to-and-fro with loaded muskets; a throng of officers and soldiers had assembled to gratify their curiosity; and new detachments of captives came in hourly, encircled by sabremen, the Southerners being disarmed and on foot. The scene within the area was ludicrously moving. It reminded me of the witch-scene in Macbeth, or pictures of brigands or Bohemian gypsies at rendezvous, not less than five hundred men, in motley, ragged costumes, with long hair, and lean, wild, haggard faces, were gathered in groups or in pairs, around some fagot fires. In the growing darkness their expressions were imperfectly visible; but I could see that most of them were weary, and hungry, and all were depressed and ashamed. Some were wrapped in blankets of rag-carpet, and others wore shoes of rough, untanned hide. Others were without either shoes or jackets, and their heads were bound with red handkerchiefs. Some appeared in red shirts; some in stiff beaver hats; some were attired in shreds and patches of cloth; and a few wore the soiled garments of citizen gentlemen; but the mass adhered to homespun suits of gray, or "butternut," and the coarse blue kersey common to slaves. In places I caught glimpses of red Zouave breeches and leggings; blue Federal caps, Federal buttons, or Federal blouses; these were the spoils of anterior battles, and had been stripped from the slain. Most of the captives were of the appearances denominated "scraggy" or "knotty." They were brown, brawny, and wiry, and their countenances were intense, fierce, and animal. They came from North Carolina, the poorest and least enterprising Southern State, and ignorance, with its attendant virtues, were the common facial manifestations. Some lay on the bare ground, fast asleep; others chatted nervously as if doubtful of their future treatment; a few were boisterous, and anxious to beg tobacco or coffee from idle Federals; the rest--and they comprehended the greater number--were silent, sullen, and vindictive. They met curiosity with scorn, and spite with imprecations. A child--not more than four years of age, I think--sat sleeping in a corner upon an older comrade's lap. A gray-bearded pard was staunching a gash in his cheek with the tail of his coat. A fine-looking young fellow sat with his face in his hands, as if his heart were far off, and he wished to shut out this bitter scene. In a corner, lying morosely apart, were a Major, three Captains, and three Lieutenants,--young athletic fellows, dressed in rich gray cassimere, trimmed with black, and wearing soft black hats adorned with black ostrich-feathers. Their spurs were strapped upon elegantly fitting boots, and they looked as far above the needy, seedy privates, as lords above their vassals. After a time, couples and squads of the prisoners were marched off to cut and carry some firewood, and water, for the use of their pen, and then each Confederate received coffee, pork, and crackers; they were obliged to prepare their own meals, but some were so hungry that they gnawed the raw pork, like beasts of prey. Those who were not provided with blankets, shivered through the night, though the rain was falling, and the succession of choking coughs that ran through the ranks, told how ill they could afford the exposure. Major Willard had charge of these men, and he sent a young officer to get me admittance to the pen, that I might speak with them. "Good evening, Major," I said, to the ranking Confederate officer, and extended my hand. He shook it, embarrassedly, and ran me over with his eye, as if to learn my avocation. "Can I obtain any facts from you," I continued, "as to the battle of Hanover?" "Fuh what puhpose?" he said, in his strong southern dialect. "For publication, sir." He sat up at once, and said that he should be happy to tell me anything that would not be a violation of military honor. I asked him, therefore, the Confederate Commandant at Hanover, the number of brigades, regiments, and batteries engaged, the disposition of forces, the character of the battle, and the losses, so far as he knew, upon his own side. Much of this he revealed, but unguardedly let out other matters, that direct inquiry could not have discovered. I took notes of the legitimate passages, trusting to memory for the rest; and think that I possessed his whole stock of information, in the course of an hour's manoeuvring. It seemed that General Branch, formerly a member of the Federal congress, had been sent with some thousands of Carolina troops across the upper Chickahominy, to see if it would not be possible to turn the Federal right, and cut off one of its brigades; but a stronger Federal reconnoissance had gone northward the day before, and discovering Branch's camp-fires, sent, during the night, for reinforcements. In the end, the "North State" volunteers were routed, their cannon silenced or broken, and seven hundred of their number captured. The Federals lost a large number of men killed, and the wounded upon both sides, were numerous. The Confederate Major was of the class referred to in polite American parlance, as a "blatherskite." He boasted after the manner of his fellow-citizens from the county of "Bunkum," but nevertheless feared and trembled, to the manifest disgust of one of the young Captains. "Majuh!" said this young man, "what you doin' thah! That fellow's makin' notes of all your slack; keep your tongue! aftah awhile you'll tell the nombah of the foces! Don't you s'pose he'll prent it all?" The Major had, in fact, been telling me how many regiments the "old Nawth State, suh," had furnished to the "suhvice," and I had the names of some thirty colonels, in order. The young Captain gave me a sketch of General Branch, and was anxious that I should publish something in extenuation of North Carolina valor. "We have lost mo' men," said he, "than any otha' Commonwealth; but these Vuhginians, whose soil, by----! suh, we defend suh! Yes, suh! whose soil we defend; these Vuhginians, stigmatize us as cowads! _We_, suh! yes suh, _we_, that nevah wanted to leave the Union,--_we cowads_! Look at ou' blood, suh, ou' blood! That's it, by----! look at that! shed on every field of the ole Dominion,--killed, muhdud, captued, crippled! We _cowads_! I want you prent that!" I was able to give each of the officers a drop of whiskey from my flask, and I never saw men drink so thirstily. Their hands and lips trembled as they took it, and their eyes shone like lunacy, as the hot drops sank to the cold vitals, and pricked the frozen blood. Mingling with the privates, I stirred up some native specimens of patriotism, that appeared to be in great doubt as to the causes and ends of the war. They were very much in the political condition of a short, thick, sententious man, in blue drilling breeches, who said-- "Damn the country! What's to be done with _us_?" One person said that he enlisted for the honor of his family, that "fit in the American Revolution;" and another came out to "hev a squint et the fightin'." Several were northern and foreign lads, that were working on Carolina railroads, and could not leave the section, and some labored under the impression that they were to have a "slice" of land and a "nigger," in the event of Southern independence. A few comprehended the spirit of the contest, and took up arms from principle; a few, also, declared their enmity to "Yankee institutions," and had seized the occasion to "polish them off," and "give them a ropein' in;" but many said it was "dull in our deestreeks, an' the niggers was runnin' away, so I thought I'ud jine the foces." The great mass said, that they never contemplated "this box," or "this fix," or "these suckemstances," and all wanted the war to close, that they might return to their families. Indeed, my romantic ideas of rebellion were ruthlessly profaned and dissipated. I knew that there was much selfishness, peculation, and "Hessianism" in the Federal lines, but I had imagined a lofty patriotism, a dignified purpose, and an inflexible love of personal liberty among the Confederates. Yet here were men who knew little of the principles for which they staked their lives;--who enlisted from the commonest motives of convenience, whim, pelf, adventure, and foray; and who repented, after their first misfortune, with the salt rheum in their eyes. I think that all "great uprisings" resolve to this complexion. With due reverence for my own ancestry, I think that they sometimes stooped from greatness to littleness. I must confess that certain admissions in my revolutionary textbook are much clearer, now that I have followed a campaign. And if, as I had proposed, I could have witnessed the further fortunes of the illustrious Garibaldi, I think that some of his compatriots would have been found equally inconsistent. Let no man believe that the noblest cause is fought out alone by the unerring motives of duty and devotion. The masses are never so constant. They cannot appreciate an abstraction, however divine. Any of the gentlemen in question would have preferred their biscuit and fat pork before the political enfranchisement of the whole world! I rode across the fields to the Hogan, Curtis, and Gaines mansions; for some of the wounded had meantime been deposited in each of them. All the cow-houses, wagon-sheds, hay-barracks, hen-coops, negro cabins, and barns were turned into hospitals. The floors were littered with "corn-shucks" and fodder; and the maimed, gashed, and dying lay confusedly together. A few, slightly wounded, stood at windows, relating incidents of the battle; but at the doors sentries stood with crossed muskets, to keep out idlers and gossips. The mention of my vocation was an "open sesame," and I went unrestrained, into all the largest hospitals. In the first of these an amputation was being performed, and at the door lay a little heap of human fingers, feet, legs, and arms. I shall not soon forget the bare-armed surgeons, with bloody instruments, that leaned over the rigid and insensible figure, while the comrades of the subject looked horrifiedly at the scene. The grating of the murderous saw drove me into the open air, but in the second hospital which I visited, a wounded man had just expired, and I encountered his body at the threshold. Within, the sickening smell of mortality was almost insupportable, but by degrees I became accustomed to it. The lanterns hanging around the room streamed fitfully upon the red eyes, and half-naked figures. All were looking up, and saying, in pleading monotone: "Is that you, doctor?" Men with their arms in slings went restlessly up and down, smarting with fever. Those who were wounded in the lower extremities, body, or head, lay upon their backs, tossing even in sleep. They listened peevishly to the wind whistling through the chinks of the barn. They followed one with their rolling eyes. They turned away from the lantern, for it seemed to sear them. Soldiers sat by the severely wounded, laving their sores with water. In many wounds the balls still remained, and the discolored flesh was swollen unnaturally. There were some who had been shot in the bowels, and now and then they were frightfully convulsed, breaking into shrieks and shouts. Some of them iterated a single word, as, "doctor," or "help," or "God," or "oh!" commencing with a loud spasmodic cry, and continuing the same word till it died away in cadence. The act of calling seemed to lull the pain. Many were unconscious and lethargic, moving their fingers and lips mechanically, but never more to open their eyes upon the light; they were already going through the valley and the shadow. I think, still, with a shudder, of the faces of those who were told mercifully that they could not live. The unutterable agony; the plea for somebody on whom to call; the longing eyes that poured out prayers; the looking on mortal as if its resources were infinite; the fearful looking to the immortal as if it were so far off, so implacable, that the dying appeal would be in vain; the open lips, through which one could almost look at the quaking heart below; the ghastliness of brow and tangled hair; the closing pangs; the awful _quietus_. I thought of Parrhasius, in the poem, as I looked at these things:-- "Gods! Could I but paint a dying groan----." And how the keen eye of West would have turned from the reeking cockpit of the _Victory_, or the tomb of the Dead Man Restored, to this old barn, peopled with horrors. I rambled in and out, learning to look at death, studying the manifestations of pain,--quivering and sickening at times, but plying my avocation, and jotting the names for my column of mortalities. At eleven o'clock there was music along the high-road, and a general rushing from camps. The victorious regiments were returning from Hanover, under escort, and all the bands were pealing national airs. As they turned down the fields towards their old encampments, the several brigades stood under arms to welcome them, and the cheers were many and vigorous. But the solemn ambulances still followed after, and the red flag of the hospitals flaunted bloodily in the blue midnight. Both the prisoners and the wounded were removed between midnight and morning to White House, and as I had despatches to forward by the mail-boat, I rode down in an ambulance, that contained six wounded men besides. The wounded were to be consigned to hospital boats, and forwarded to hospitals in northern cities, and the prisoners were to be placed in a transport, under guard, and conveyed to Fort Delaware, near Philadelphia. Ambulances, it may be said, incidentally, are either two-wheeled or four-wheeled. Two-wheeled ambulances are commonly called "hop, step, and jumps." They are so constructed that the forepart is either very high or very low, and may be both at intervals. The wounded occupants may be compelled to ride for hours in these carriages, with their heels elevated above their heads, and may finally be shaken out, or have their bones broken by the terrible jolting. The four-wheeled ambulances are built in shelves, or compartments, but the wounded are in danger of being smothered in them. It was in one of these latter that I rode, sitting with the driver. We had four horses, but were thrice "swamped" on the road, and had to take out the wounded men once, till we could start the wheels. Two of these men were wounded in the face, one of them having his nose completely severed, and the other having a fragment of his jaw knocked out. A third had received a ball among the thews and muscles behind his knee, and his whole body appeared to be paralyzed. Two were wounded in the shoulders, and the sixth was shot in the breast, and was believed to be injured inwardly, as he spat blood, and suffered almost the pain of death. The ride with these men, over twenty miles of hilly, woody country, was like one of Dante's excursions into the Shades. In the awful stillness of the dark pines, their screams frightened the hooting owls, and the whirring insects in the leaves and tree-tops quieted their songs. They heard the gurgle of the rills, and called aloud for water to quench their insatiate thirst. One of them sang a shrill, fierce, fiendish ballad, in an interval of relief, but plunged, at a sudden relapse, in prayers and curses. We heard them groaning to themselves, as we sat in front, and one man, it seemed, was quite out of his mind. These were the outward manifestations; but what chords trembled and smarted within, we could only guess. What regrets for good resolves unfulfilled, and remorse for years misspent, made hideous these sore and panting hearts? The moonlight pierced through the thick foliage of the wood, and streamed into our faces, like invitations to a better life. But the crippled and bleeding could not see or feel it,--buried in the shelves of the ambulance. CHAPTER XI. BALLOON BATTLES. Some days ago, as I was sitting in Central Park, under a tree no bigger than Jonah's gourd, broiling nicely brown, and seasoning the process by reading what the lesser weeklies said about me, I saw at the Park gate a great phantasm, like a distended sausage, swaying to and fro as if striving to burst, and directly the horrible thing blew upwards, spilling all the stuffing from the case. I saw in a moment that the apparition was a balloon, and that the aeronaut was only emptying ballast. Straight toward me the floating vessel came, so close to the ground that I could hear the silk crackle and the ropes creak, till, directly, a man leaned over the side and shouted-- "Is that you, Townsend?" "Hallo, Lowe!" "I want you to get on your feet and be spry about it: we have a literary party here, and wish you to write it up. I'll let one bag of ballast go, as we touch the grass, and you must leap in simultaneously. Thump!" Here the car collided with the ground, and in another instant, I found quantities of dirt spilled down my back, and two or three people lying beneath me. The world slid away, and the clouds opened to receive me. Lowe was opening a bottle of Heidsick, and three or four gentlemen with _heads sick_ were unclosing the petals of their lips to get the afternoon dew. These were the various critics and fugitive writers of the weekly and daily press. They looked as if they wanted to put each other over the side of the car, but smothered their invective at my advent, as if I were so much pearl-ash. It was just seven o'clock, and the Park lay like a veined and mottled blood-stone in the red sunset. The city wilted to the littleness of a rare mosaic pin, its glittering point parting the blue scarf of the bay, and the white bosom of the ocean swelling afar, all draped with purple clouds like golden hair, in which the entangled gems were the sails of the white ships. I said this aloud, and all the party drew their lead pencils. They forgot the occasion in my eloquence, and wanted to report me. Just here, I drew a field-glass from the aeronaut, and reconnoitred the streets of the city. To my dismay there was nobody visible on Broadway but gentlemen. I called everybody's attention to the fact, and it was accounted for on the supposition that the late bank forgeries and defalcations, growing out of the extravagance of womankind, had prompted all the husbands to make of their homes nunneries. We observed, however, close by every gentleman, something that resembled a black dog with his tail curled over his back. "Stuff!" said one, "they're hay wagons." "No!" cried Lowe, "they're nothing of the sort; they are waterfalls, and the ladies are, of course, invisible under them." We accepted the explanation, and thought the trip very melancholy. No landscape is complete without a woman. Very soon we struck the great polar current, and passed Harlem river; the foliage of the trees, by some strange anomaly, began to ascend towards us, but Lowe caught two or three of the supposed leaves, and they proved to be greenbacks. There was at once a tremendous sensation in the car; we knew that we were on the track of Ketchum and his carpet-bag of bank-notes. "Is there any reward out?" cried Lowe. "Not yet!" "Then we won't pursue him." As we slowly drifted to the left, the Hudson shone through the trees, and before dusk we swept across Lake Mahopec. I heard a voice singing to the dip of oars, and had to be held down by five men to restrain an involuntary impulse to quit my company. "Townsend," said Lowe, "have you the copy of that matter you printed about me in England? This is the time to call you to account for it. We are two or three miles above _terra firma_, and I might like to drop you for a parachute." I felt Lowe's muscle, and knew myself secure. Then I unrolled the pages, which I fortunately carried with me, and told him the following news about himself:-- The aeronaut of the Army of the Potomac was Mr. S. T. C. Lowe; he had made seven thousand ascensions, and his army companion was invariably either an artist, a correspondent, or a telegrapher. A minute insulated wire reached from the car to headquarters, and McClellan was thus informed of all that could be seen within the Confederate works. Sometimes they remained aloft for hours, making observations with powerful glasses, and once or twice the enemy tested their distance with shell. On the 13th of April, the Confederates sent up a balloon, the first they had employed, at which Lowe was infinitely amused. He said that it had neither shape nor buoyancy, and predicted that it would burst or fall apart after a week. It certainly occurred that, after a few fitful appearances, the stranger was seen no more, till, on the 28th of June, it floated, like a thing of omen, over the spires of Richmond. At that time the Federals were in full retreat, and all the acres were covered with their dead. On the 11th of April, at five o'clock, an event at once amusing and thrilling occurred at our quarters. The commander-in-chief had appointed his personal and confidential friend, General Fitz John Porter, to conduct the siege of Yorktown. Porter was a polite, soldierly gentleman, and a native of New Hampshire, who had been in the regular army since early manhood. He fought gallantly in the Mexican war, being thrice promoted and once seriously wounded, and he was now forty years of age,--handsome, enthusiastic, ambitious, and popular. He made frequent ascensions with Lowe, and learned to go aloft alone. One day he ascended thrice, and finally seemed as cosily at home in the firmament as upon the solid earth. It is needless to say that he grew careless, and on this particular morning leaped into the car and demanded the cables to be let out with all speed. I saw with some surprise that the flurried assistants were sending up the great straining canvas with a single rope attached. The enormous bag was only partially inflated, and the loose folds opened and shut with a crack like that of a musket. Noisily, fitfully, the yellow mass rose into the sky, the basket rocking like a leather in the zephyr; and just as I turned aside to speak to a comrade, a sound came from overhead, like the explosion of a shell, and something striking me across the face laid me flat upon the ground. Half blind and stunned, I staggered to my feet, but the air seemed full of cries and curses. Opening my eyes ruefully, I saw all faces turned upwards, and when I looked above,--the balloon was adrift. The treacherous cable, rotted with vitriol, had snapped in twain; one fragment had been the cause of my downfall, and the other trailed, like a great entrail, from the receding car, where Fitz John Porter was bounding upward upon a Pegasus that he could neither check nor direct. The whole army was agitated by the unwonted occurrence. From battery No. 1, on the brink of the York, to the mouth of Warwick river, every soldier and officer was absorbed. Far within the Confederate lines the confusion extended. We heard the enemy's alarm-guns, and directly the signal flags were waving up and down our front. The General appeared directly over the edge of the car. He was tossing his hands frightenedly, and shouting something that we could not comprehend. "O--pen--the--valve!" called Lowe, in his shrill tones; "climb--to--the--netting--and--reach--the--valve--rope." "The valve!--the valve!" repeated a multitude of tongues, and all gazed with thrilling interest at the retreating hulk that still kept straight upward, swerving neither to the east nor the west. It was a weird spectacle,--that frail, fading oval, gliding against the sky, floating in the serene azure, the little vessel swinging silently beneath, and a hundred thousand martial men watching the loss of their brother in arms, but powerless to relieve or recover him. Had Fitz John Porter been drifting down the rapids of Niagara, he could not have been so far from human assistance. But we saw him directly, no bigger than a child's toy, clambering up the netting and reaching for the cord. "He can't do it," muttered a man beside me; "the wind blows the valve-rope to and fro, and only a spry, cool-headed fellow can catch it." We saw the General descend, and appearing again over the edge of the basket, he seemed to be motioning to the breathless hordes below, the story of his failure. Then he dropped out of sight, and when we next saw him, he was reconnoitring the Confederate works through a long black spy-glass. A great laugh went up and down the lines as this cool procedure was observed, and then a cheer of applause ran from group to group. For a moment it was doubtful that the balloon would float in either direction; it seemed to falter, like an irresolute being, and moved reluctantly southeastward, towards Fortress Monroe. A huzza, half uttered, quivered on every lip. All eyes glistened, and some were dim with tears of joy. But the wayward canvas now turned due westward, and was blown rapidly toward the Confederate works. Its course was fitfully direct, and the wind seemed to veer often, as if contrary currents, conscious of the opportunity, were struggling for the possession of the daring navigator. The south wind held mastery for awhile, and the balloon passed the Federal front amid a howl of despair from the soldiery. It kept right on, over sharpshooters, rifle-pits, and outworks, and finally passed, as if to deliver up its freight, directly over the heights of Yorktown. The cool courage, either of heroism or despair, had seized upon Fitz John Porter. He turned his black glass upon the ramparts and masked cannon below, upon the remote camps, upon the beleaguered town, upon the guns of Gloucester Point, and upon distant Norfolk. Had he been reconnoitring from a secure perch at the tip of the moon, he could not have been more vigilant, and the Confederates probably thought this some Yankee device to peer into their sanctuary in despite of ball or shell. None of their great guns could be brought to bear upon the balloon; but there were some discharges of musketry that appeared to have no effect, and finally even these demonstrations ceased. Both armies in solemn silence were gazing aloft, while the imperturbable mariner continued to spy out the land. The sun was now rising behind us, and roseate rays struggled up to the zenith, like the arcs made by showery bombs. They threw a hazy atmosphere upon the balloon, and the light shone through the network like the sun through the ribs of the skeleton ship in the _Ancient Mariner_. Then, as all looked agape, the air-craft "plunged, and tacked, and veered," and drifted rapidly toward the Federal lines again. The allelujah that now went up shook the spheres, and when he had regained our camp limits, the General was seen clambering up again to clutch the valve-rope. This time he was successful, and the balloon fell like a stone, so that all hearts once more leaped up, and the cheers were hushed. Cavalry rode pell-mell from several directions, to reach the place of descent, and the General's personal staff galloped past me like the wind, to be the first at his debarkation. I followed the throng of soldiery with due haste, and came up to the horsemen in a few minutes. The balloon had struck a canvas tent with great violence, felling it as by a bolt, and the General, unharmed, had disentangled himself from innumerable folds of oiled canvas, and was now the cynosure of an immense group of people. While the officers shook his hands, the rabble bawled their satisfaction in hurrahs, and a band of music marching up directly, the throng on foot and horse gave him a vociferous escort to his quarters. Five miles east of Richmond, in the middle of May, we found the balloon already partially inflated, resting behind a ploughed hill that formed one of a ridge or chain of hills, bordering the Chickahominy. The stream was only a half-mile distant, but the balloon was sheltered from observation by reason of its position in the hollow. Heretofore the ascensions had been made from remote places, for there was good reason to believe that batteries lined the opposite hills; but now, for the first time, Lowe intended to make an ascent whereby he could look into Richmond, count the forts encircling it, and note the number and position of the camps that intervened. The balloon was named the "Constitution," and looked like a semi-distended boa-constrictor, as it flapped with a jerking sound, and shook its oiled and painted folds. It was anchored to the ground by stout ropes affixed to stakes, and also by sand-bags which hooked to its netting. The basket lay alongside; the generators were contained in blue wooden wagons, marked "U. S.;" and the gas was fed to the balloon through rubber and metallic pipes. A tent or two, a quantity of vitriol in green and wicker carboys, some horses and transportation teams, and several men that assisted the inflation, were the only objects to be remarked. As some time was to transpire before the arrangements were completed, I resorted to one of the tents and took a comfortable nap. The "Professor" aroused me at three o'clock, when I found the canvas straining its bonds, and emitting a hollow sound, as of escaping gas. The basket was made fast directly, the telescopes tossed into place; the Professor climbed to the side, holding by the network; and I coiled up in a rope at the bottom. "Stand by your cables," he said, and the bags of ballast were at once cut away. Twelve men took each a rope in hand, and played out slowly, letting us glide gently upward. The earth seemed to be falling away, and we poised motionless in the blue ether. The tree-tops sank downward, the hills dropped noiselessly through space, and directly the Chickahominy was visible beyond us, winding like a ribbon of silver through the ridgy landscape. Far and wide stretched the Federal camps. We saw faces turned upwards gazing at our ascent, and heard clearly, as in a vacuum, the voices of soldiers. At every second the prospect widened, the belt of horizon enlarged, remote farmhouses came in view; the earth was like a perfectly flat surface, painted with blue woods, and streaked with pictures of roads, fields, fences, and streams. As we climbed higher, the river seemed directly beneath us, the farms on the opposite bank were plainly discernible, and Richmond lay only a little way off, enthroned on its many hills, with the James stretching white and sinuous from its feet to the horizon. We could see the streets, the suburbs, the bridges, the outlaying roads, nay, the moving masses of people. The Capitol sat white and colossal on Shockoe Hill, the dingy buildings of the Tredegar works blackened the river-side above, the hovels of rockets clustered at the hither limits, and one by one we made out familiar hotels, public edifices, and vicinities. The fortifications were revealed in part only, for they took the hue of the soil, and blended with it; but many camps were plainly discernible, and by means of the glasses we separated tent from tent, and hut from hut. The Confederates were seen running to the cover of the woods, that we might not discover their numbers, but we knew the location of their camp-fires by the smoke that curled toward us. A panorama so beautiful would have been rare at any time, but this was thrice interesting from its past and coming associations. Across those plains the hordes at our feet were either to advance victoriously, or be driven eastward with dusty banners and dripping hands. Those white farm-houses were to be receptacles for the groaning and the mangled; thousands were to be received beneath the turf of those pasture fields; and no rod of ground on any side, should not, sooner or later, smoke with the blood of the slain. "Guess I got 'em now, jest where I want 'em," said Lowe, with a gratified laugh; "jest keep still as you mind to, and squint your eye through my glass, while I make a sketch of the roads and the country. Hold hard there, and anchor fast!" he screamed to the people below. Then he fell imperturbably to work, sweeping the country with his hawk-eye, and escaping nothing that could contribute to the completeness of his jotting. We had been but a few minutes thus poised, when close below, from the edge of a timber stretch, puffed a volume of white smoke. A second afterward, the air quivered with the peal of a cannon. A third, and we heard the splitting shriek of a shell, that passed a little to our left, but in exact range, and burst beyond us in the ploughed field, heaving up the clay as it exploded. "Ha!" said Lowe, "they have got us foul! Haul in the cables--quick!" he shouted, in a fierce tone. At the same instant, the puff, the report, and the shriek were repeated; but this time the shell burst to our right in mid-air, and scattered fragments around and below us. "Another shot will do our business," said Lowe, between his teeth; "it isn't a mile, and they have got the range." Again the puff and the whizzing shock. I closed my eyes, and held my breath hard. The explosion was so close, that the pieces of shell seemed driven across my face, and my ears quivered with the sound. I looked at Lowe, to see if he was struck. He had sprung to his feet, and clutched the cordage frantically. "Are you pulling in there, you men?" he bellowed, with a loud imprecation. "Puff! bang! whiz-z-z-z! splutter!" broke a third shell, and my heart was wedged in my throat. I saw at a glimpse the whole bright landscape again. I hoard the voices of soldiers below, and saw them running across fields, fences, and ditches, to reach our anchorage. I saw some drummer-boys digging in the field beneath for one of the buried shells. I saw the waving of signal flags, the commotion through the camps,--officers galloping their horses, teamsters whipping their mules, regiments turning out, drums beaten, and batteries limbered up. I remarked, last of all, the site of the battery that alarmed us, and, by a strange sharpness of sight and sense, believed that I saw the gunners swabbing, ramming, and aiming the pieces. "Puff! bang! whiz-z-z-z! splutter! crash!" "Puff! bang! whiz-z-z-z! splutter! crash!" "My God!" said Lowe, hissing the words slowly and terribly, "_they have opened upon us from another battery_!" The scene seemed to dissolve. A cold dew broke from my forehead. I grew blind and deaf. I had fainted. "Pitch some water in his face," said somebody. "He ain't used to it. Hallo! there he comes to." I staggered to my feet. There must have been a thousand men about us. They were looking curiously at the aeronaut and me. The balloon lay fuming and struggling on the clods. "Three cheers for the Union bal-loon!" called a little fellow at my side. "Hip, hip--hoorooar! hoorooar! hoorooar!" "Tiger-r-r--yah! whoop!" CHAPTER XII. SEVEN PINES AND FAIROAKS. Returning from White House on Saturday, May 29, I heard the cannon of "Seven Pines." The roar of artillery came faintly upon the ear in the dells and woods, but in the open stretches of country, or from cleared hill-tops, I could hear also the volleys of musketry. It was the battle sound that assured me of bloody work; for the musket, as I had learned by experience, was the only certain signification of battle. It is seldom brought into requisition but at close quarters, when results are intended; whereas, cannon may peal for a fortnight, and involve no other destruction than that of shell and powder. I do not think that any throb of my heart was unattended by some volley or discharge. Dull, hoarse, uninterrupted, the whole afternoon was shaken by the sound. It was with a shudder that I thought how every peal announced flesh and bone riven asunder. The country people, on the way, stood in their side yards, anxiously listening. Riders or teamsters coming from the field, were beset with inquiries; but in the main they knew nothing. As I stopped at Daker's for dinner, the concussion of the battle rattled our plates, and the girls entirely lost their appetites, so that Glumley, who listened and speculated, observed that the baby face was losing all the lines of art, and was quite flat and faded in color. Resuming our way, we encountered a sallow, shabby person, driving a covered wagon, who recognized me at once. It was the "Doctor" who had lightened the journey down the Chesapeake, by a discourse upon embalming. He pointed toward the field with a long bony finger, and called aloud, with a smirk upon his face-- "I have the apparatus here, you see. They will need me out yonder, you know. There's opportunity there for the development of the 'system.'" I did not reach my own camp at Gaines's Farm, till late in the day. The firing had almost entirely ceased, but occasional discharges still broke the repose of evening, and at night signal rockets hissed and showered in every direction. Next day the contest recommenced; but although not farther in a direct line, than seven miles, from our encampment, I could not cross the Chickahominy, and was compelled to lie in my tent all day. These two battles were offered by the Confederates, in the hope of capturing that portion of the Federal army that lay upon the Richmond side of the river. Some days previously, McClellan had ordered Keyes's corps, consisting of perhaps twelve thousand men, to cross Bottom Bridge, eight miles down the Chickahominy, and occupy an advanced position on the York River railroad, six miles east of Richmond. Keyes's two divisions, commanded by Generals Couch and Casey, were thus encamped in a belt of woods remote from the body of the army, and little more than a mile from the enemy's line. Heintzelman's corps was lying at the Bridge, several miles in their rear, and the three finest corps in the army were separated from them by a broad, rapid river, which could be crossed at two places only. The troops of Keyes were mainly inexperienced, undisciplined volunteers from the Middle States. When their adversaries advanced, therefore, in force, on the twenty-ninth instant, they made a fitful, irregular resistance, and at evening retired in panic and disorder. The victorious enemy followed them so closely, that many of the Federals were slain in their tents. During that night, the Chickahominy, swollen by rains, overflowed its banks, and swept away the bridges. The beaten and disorganized relic of the fight of "Seven Pines," was thus completely isolated, and apparently to be annihilated at daybreak. But during the night, twenty thousand fresh men of Sumner's corps, forded the river, carrying their artillery, piece by piece across, and at dawn they assumed the offensive, seconded by the encouraged columns of Keyes. The fight was one of desperation; at night the Federals reoccupied their old ground at Fairoaks, and the Confederates retired, leaving their dead and wounded on the field. They lost, among their prisoners, General Pettigrew, of South Carolina, who was severely wounded, and with whom I talked as he lay in bed at Gaines's Mansion. He appeared to be a chivalrous, gossipy old gentleman, and said that he was the last South Carolinian to stand by the Union. On the succeeding day, Monday, June 2, I rode to "Grape-Vine Bridge," and attempted to force my horse through the swamp and stream; but the drowned mules that momentarily floated down the current, admonished me of the folly of the hazard. The bridge itself was a swimming mass of poles and logs, that yielded with every pressure; yet I saw many wounded men, who waded through the water, or stepped lightly from log to log, and so gained the shore, wet from head to foot. Long lines of supply teams and ambulances were wedged in the depth of the thick wood, bordering the river; but so narrow were the corduroy approaches to the bridge, and so fathomless the swamp on either hand, that they could neither go forward, nor return. The straggling troops brought the unwelcome intelligence, that their comrades on the other side were starving, as they had crossed with a single ration of food, and had long ago eaten their last morsels. While I was standing close by the bridge, General McClellan, and staff, rode through the swamp, and attempted to make the passage. The "young Napoleon," urged his horse upon the floating timber, and at once sank over neck and saddle. His staff dashed after him, floundering in the same way; and when they had splashed and shouted, till I believed them all drowned, they turned and came to shore, dripping and discomfited. There was another Napoleon, who, I am informed, slid down the Alps into Italy; the present descendant did not slide so far, and he shook himself, after the manner of a dog. I remarked with some surprise, that he was growing obese; whereas, the active labors of the campaign had reduced the dimensions of most of the Generals. I secured my horse, and placed a drummer-boy beside him, to prevent abduction or mistake; then stripping from top to toe, and holding my garments above my head, I essayed the difficult passage; as a commencement, I dropped my watch, but the guard-hook caught in a log and held it fast. Afterward, I slipped from the smooth butt of a tree, and thoroughly soused myself and clothing; a lumber-man from Maine, beheld my ill luck, and kindly took my burden to the other side. An estuary of the Chickahominy again intervened, but a rough scow floated upon it, which the Captain of Engineers sent for me, with a soldier to man the oars. I neglected to "trim boat," I am sorry to add, although admonished to that effect repeatedly by the mariner; and we swamped in four feet of water. I resembled a being of one of the antediluvian eras, when I came to land, finally, and might have been taken for a slimy Iguanodon. I sacrificed some of my under clothing to the process of cleansing and drying, and so started with soaking boots, and a deficiency of dress, in the direction of Savage's. Passing the "bottom," or swamp-land, I ascended a hill, and following a lane, stopped after a half hour at a frame-mansion, unpainted, with some barns and negro-quarters contiguous, and a fine grove of young oaks, shading the porch. An elderly gentleman sat in the porch, sipping a julep, with his feet upon the railing, and conversing with a stout, ruddy officer, of decidedly Milesian physiognomy. When I approached, the latter hurriedly placed a chair between himself and me, and said, with a stare-- "Bloodanowns! And where have ye been? Among the hogs, I think?" I assured him that I did not intend to come to close quarters, and that it would be no object on my part to contaminate him. The old gentleman called for "William," a tall, consumptive servant, whose walk reminded me of a stubborn convict's, in the treadmill, and ordered him to scrape me, which was done, accordingly, with a case-knife. The young officer proposed to dip me in the well and wring me well out, but I demurred, mainly on the ground that some time would be so consumed, and that my horse was waiting on the other side. He at once said that he would send for it, and called "Pat," a civilian servant, in military blue, who was nursing a negro baby with an eye, it seemed, to obtain favor with the mother. The willingness of the man surprised me, but he said that it was a short cut of four miles to the railroad bridge, which had been repaired and floored, and that he could readily recover the animal and return at three o'clock. My benefactor, the officer, then mixed a julep, which brought a comfortable glow to my face, and said, without parley-- "You're a reporter, on the----" He said further, that he had been Coroner's Surgeon in New York for many years, and had learned to know the representatives of newspapers, one from the other, by generic manner and appearance. Three correspondents rode by at the time, neither of whom he knew personally, but designated them promptly, with their precise connections. In short, we became familiar directly, and he told me that his name was O'Gamlon, Quartermaster of Meagher's Irish brigade, Sumner's corps. He was established with the elderly gentleman,--whose name was Michie,--and had two horses in the stable, at hand. He proposed to send me to the field, with a note of introduction to the General, and another to Colonel Baker, of the New York 88th (Irish), who could show me the lines and relics of battle, and give me the lists of killed, wounded, and missing. I repaired to his room, and arrayed myself in a fatigue officer's suit, with clean underclothing, after which, descending, I climbed into his saddle, and dashed off, with a mettlesome, dapper pony. The railroad track was about a mile from the house, and the whole country, hereabout, was sappy, dank, and almost barren. Scrub pines covered much of the soil, and the cleared fields were dotted with charred stumps. The houses were small and rude; the wild pigs ran like deer through the bushes and across my path; vultures sailed by hundreds between me and the sky; the lane was slippery and wound about slimy pools; the tree-tops, in many places, were splintered by ball and shell. I crossed the railroad, cut by a high bridge, and saw below the depot, at Savage's, now the head-quarters of General Heintzelman. Above, in full view, were the commands at Peach Orchard and Fairoaks, and to the south, a few furlongs distant, the Williamsburg and Richmond turnpike ran, parallel with the railway, toward the field of Seven Pines. The latter site, was simply the junction of the turnpike with a roundabout way to Richmond, called the "Nine Mile Road," and Fairoaks was the junction of the diverging road with the railroad. Toward the latter I proceeded, and soon came to the Irish brigade, located on both sides of the way, at Peach Orchard. They occupied the site of the most desperate fighting. A small farm hollowed in the swampy thicket and wood, was here divided by the track, and a little farm-house, with a barn, granary, and a couple of cabins, lay on the left side. In a hut to the right General Thomas Francis Meagher made his head-quarters, and a little beyond, in the edges of the swamp timber, lay his four regiments, under arms. A guard admonished me, in curt, lithe speech, that my horse must come no further; for the brigade held the advance post, and I was even now within easy musket range of the imperceptible enemy. An Irish boy volunteered to hold the rein, while I paid my respects to the Commander. I encountered him on the threshold of the hut, and he welcomed me in the richest and most musical of brogues. Large, corpulent, and powerful of body; plump and ruddy--or as some would say, bloated--of face; with resolute mouth and heavy animal jaws; expressive nose, and piercing blue-eyes; brown hair, mustache, and eyebrows; a fair forehead, and short sinewy neck, a man of apparently thirty years of age, stood in the doorway, smoking a cigar, and trotting his sword fretfully in the scabbard. He wore the regulation blue cap, but trimmed plentifully with gold lace, and his sleeves were slashed in the same manner. A star glistened in his oblong shoulder-bar; a delicate gold cord seamed his breeches from his Hessian boots to his red tasselled sword-sash; a seal-ring shone from the hand with which he grasped his gauntlets, and his spurs were set upon small aristocratic feet. A tolerable physiognomist would have resolved his temperament to an intense sanguine. He was fitfully impulsive, as all his movements attested, and liable to fluctuations of peevishness, melancholy, and enthusiasm. This was "Meagher of the Sword," the stripling who made issue with the renowned O'Connell, and divided his applauses; the "revolutionist," who had outlived exile to become the darling of the "Young Ireland" populace in his adopted country; the partisan, whose fierce, impassioned oratory had wheeled his factious element of the Democracy into the war cause; and the soldier, whose gallant bearing at Bull Run had won him a brigadiership. He was, to my mind, a realization of the Knight of Gwynne, or any of the rash, impolitic, poetic personages in Lever and Griffin. Ambitious without a name; an adventurer without a definite cause; an orator without policy; a General without caution or experience, he had led the Irish brigade through the hottest battles, and associated them with the most brilliant episodes of the war. Every adjunct of the place was strictly Hibernian. The emerald green standard entwined with the red, white, and blue; the gilt eagles on the flag-poles held the Shamrock sprig in their beaks; the soldiers lounging on guard, had "69" or "88" the numbers of their regiments, stamped on a green hat-band; the brogue of every county from Down to Wexford fell upon the ear; one might have supposed that the "year '98" had been revived, and that these brawny Celts were again afield against their Saxon countrymen. The class of lads upon the staff of Meagher, was an odd contrast to the mass of staff officers in the "Grand Army." Fox-hunters they all seemed to me, and there was one, who wore a long, twisted, pomatumed moustache, who talked of steeple chases, all the while, and wanted to have "a healthy dash" of some kind. A class of Irish exquisites, they appeared to be,--good for a fight, a card-party, or a hurdle jumping,--but entirely too Quixotic for the sober requirements of Yankee warfare. When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted, the Irish brigade was called upon. But, ordinarily, they were regarded, as a party of mad fellows, more ornamental than useful, and entirely too clannish and factious to be entrusted with power. Meagher himself seemed to be less erratic than his subordinates; for he had married a New York lady, and had learned, by observation, the superiority of the pelfish, plodding native before his own fitful, impracticable race. His address was infatuating: but there was a certain airiness, indicative of vanity, that revealed his great characteristic. He loved applause, and to obtain it had frittered away his fine abilities, upon petty, splendid, momentary triumphs. He was generous to folly, and, I have no doubt, maintained his whole staff. When I requested to be shown the field, and its relics, Meagher said, in his musical brogue, that I need only look around. "From the edge of that wood," he said, "the Irish brigade charged across this field, and fell upon their faces in the railway cutting below. A regiment of Alabamians lay in the timber beyond, with other Southerners in their rear, and on both flanks. They thought that we were charging bayonets, and reserved their fire till we should approach within butchering distance. On the contrary, I ordered the boys to lie down, and load and fire at will. In the end, sir, we cut them to pieces, and five hundred of them were left along the swamp fence, that you see. There isn't fifty killed and wounded in the whole Irish brigade." A young staff officer took me over the field. We visited first the cottage and barns across the road, and found the house occupied by some thirty wounded Federals. They lay in their blankets upon the floors,--pale, helpless, hollow-eyed, making low moans at every breath. Two or three were feverishly sleeping, and, as the flies revelled upon their gashes, they stirred uneasily and moved their hands to and fro. By the flatness of the covering at the extremities, I could see that several had only stumps of legs. They had lost the sweet enjoyment of walking afield, and were but fragments of men, to limp forever through a painful life. Such wrecks of power I never beheld. Broad, brawny, buoyant, a few hours ago, the loss of blood, and the nervous shock, attendant upon amputation, has wellnigh drained them to the last drop. Their faces were as white as the tidy ceiling; they were whining like babies; and only their rolling eyes distinguished them from mutilated corpses. Some seemed quite broken in spirit, and one, who could speak, observing my pitiful glances toward his severed thigh, drew up his mouth and chin, and wept as if with the loss of comeliness all his ambitions were frustrated. A few attendants were brushing off the insects with boughs of cedar, laving the sores, or administering cooling draughts. The second story of the dwelling was likewise occupied by wounded, but in a corner clustered the terrified farmer and his family, vainly attempting to turn their eyes from the horrible spectacle. The farmer's wife had a baby at her breast, and its little blue eyes were straying over the room, half wonderingly, half delightedly. I thought, with a shudder, of babyhood thus surrounded, and how, in the long future, its first recollections of existence should be of booming guns and dying soldiers! The cow-shed contained seven corpses, scarcely yet cold, lying upon their backs, in a row, and fast losing all resemblance to man. The farthest removed, seemed to be a diminutive boy, and I thought if he had a mother, that she might sometime like to speak with me. When I took their names, I thought what terrible agencies I was fulfilling. Beyond my record, falsely spelled, perhaps, they would have no history. And people call such deaths glorious! Upon a pile of lumber and some heaps of fence-rails, close by, sat some dozens of wounded men, mainly Federals, with bandaged arms and faces, and torn clothing. There was one, shot in the foot, who howled at every effort to remove his boot; the blood leaked from a rent in the side, and at last, the leather was cut, piecemeal from the flesh. These ate voraciously, though in pain and fear; for a little soup and meat was being doled out to them. The most horrible of all these scenes--which I have described perhaps too circumstantially--was presented in the stable or barn, on the premises, where a bare dingy floor--the planks of which tilted and shook, as one made his way over them--was strewn with suffering people. Just at the entrance sat a boy, totally blind, both eyes having been torn out by a minnie-ball, and the entire bridge of the nose shot away. He crouched against the gable, in darkness and agony, tremulously fingering his knees. Near at hand, sat another, who had been shot through the middle of the forehead, but singular to relate, he still lived, though lunatic, and evidently beyond hope. Death had drawn blue and yellow circles beneath his eyes, and he muttered incomprehensibly, wagging his head. Two men, perfectly naked, lay in the middle of the place, wounded in bowels and loins; and at a niche in the weather-boarding, where some pale light peeped in, four mutilated wretches were gaming with cards. I was now led a little way down the railroad, to see the Confederates. The rain began to fall at this time, and the poor fellows shut their eyes to avoid the pelting of the drops. There was no shelter for them within a mile, and the mud absolutely reached half way up their bodies. Nearly one third had suffered amputation above the knee. There were about thirty at this spot, and I was told that they were being taken to Meadow Station on hand cars. As soon as the locomotive could pass the Chickahominy, they would be removed to White House, and comfortably quartered in the Sanitary and hospital boats. Some of them were fine, athletic, and youthful, and I was directed to one who had been married only three days before. "Doctor," said one, feebly, "I feel very cold: do you think that this is death? It seems to be creeping to my heart. I have no feeling, in my feet, and my thighs are numb." A Federal soldier came along with a bucket of soup, and proceeded to fill the canteens and plates. He appeared to be a relative of Mark Tapley, and possessed much of that estimable person's jollity-- "Come, pardner," he said, "drink yer sup! now, old boy, this'ill warm ye; sock it down and ye'll see yer sweetheart soon. You dead, Ally-bammy? Go way, now. You'll live a hundred years, you will. That's wot you'll do. Won't he, lad? What? Not any? Get out! You'll be slap on your legs next week and hev another shot at me the week a'ter that. You know you will! Oh! you Rebil! You, with the butternut trousers! Say! Wake up and take some o' this. Hello! lad, pardner. Wake up!" He stirred him gently with his foot; he bent down to touch his face. A grimness came over his merriment. The man was stiff and dumb. Colonel Baker, commanding the 88th New York, was a tall, martial Irishman, who opened his heart and bottle at the same welcome, and took me into the woods, where some of the slain still remained. He had slept not longer than an hour, continuously, for seventy hours, and during the past night had been called up by eight alarums. His men lay in the dark thickets, without fires or blankets, as they had crossed the Chickahominy in light marching order. "Many a lad," said he, "will escape the bullet for a lingering consumption." We had proceeded but a very little way, when we came to a trodden place beneath the pines, where a scalp lay in the leaves, and the imprint of a body was plainly visible. The bayonet scabbard lay at one side, the canteen at the other. We saw no corpses, however, as fatigue parties had been burying the slain, and the whole wood was dotted with heaps of clay, where the dead slept below in the oozy trenches. Quantities of cartridges were scattered here and there, dropped by the retreating Confederates. Some of the cartridge-pouches that I examined were completely filled, showing that their possessors had not fired a single round; others had but one cartridge missing. There were fragments of clothing, hair, blankets, murderous bowie and dirk knives, spurs, flasks, caps, and plumes, dropped all the way through the thicket, and the trees on every hand were riddled with balls. I came upon a squirrel, unwittingly shot during the fight. Not those alone who make the war must feel the war! At one of the mounds the burying party had just completed their work, and the men were throwing the last clods upon the remains. They had dug pits of not more than two feet depth, and dragged the bodies heedlessly to the edges, whence they were toppled down and scantily covered. Much of the interring had been done by night, and the flare of lanterns upon the discolored faces and dead eyes must have been hideously effective. The grave-diggers, however, were practical personages, and had probably little care for dramatic effects. They leaned upon their spades, when the rites were finished, and a large, dry person, who appeared to be privileged upon all occasions, said, grinningly-- "Colonel, your honor, them boys 'ill niver stand forninst the Irish brigade again. If they'd ha' known it was us, sur, begorra! they 'ud ha' brought coffins wid 'em." "No, niver!" "They got their ticket for soup!" "We kivered them, fait', will inough!" shouted the other grave-diggers. "Do ye belave, Colonel," said the dry person, again, "that thim ribals'll lave us a chance to catch them. Be me sowl! I'm jist wishin to war-rum me hands wid rifle practice." The others echoed loudly, that they were anxious to be ordered up, and some said that "Little Mac'll give 'em his big whack now." The presence of death seemed to have added no fear of death to these people. Having tasted blood, they now thirsted for it, and I asked myself, forebodingly, if a return to civil life would find them less ferocious. I dined with Colonel Owen of the 69th Pennsylvania (Irish) volunteers. He had been a Philadelphia lawyer, and was, by all odds, the most consistent and intelligent soldier in the brigade. He had been also a schoolmaster for many years, but appeared to be in his element at the head of a regiment, and was generally admitted to be an efficient officer. He shared the prevailing antipathy to West Point graduates; for at this time the arrogance of the regular officers, and the pride of the volunteers, had embittered each against the other. His theory of military education was, the establishment of State institutions, and the reorganization of citizenship upon a strict militia basis. After dinner, I rode to "Seven Pines," and examined some of the rifle pits used during the engagement. A portion of this ground only had been retaken, and I was warned to keep under cover; for sharpshooters lay close by, in the underbrush. A visit to the graves of some Federal soldiers completed the inspection. Some of the regiments had interred their dead in trenches; but the New Englanders were all buried separately, and smooth slabs were driven at the heads of the mounds, whereon were inscribed the names and ages of the deceased. Some of the graves were freshly sodded, and enclosed by rails and logs. They evidenced the orderly, religious habits of the sons of the Puritans; for, with all his hardness of manner and selfishness of purpose, I am inclined to think that the Yankee is the best manifestation of Northern character. He loves his home, at least, and he reveres his deceased comrades. When I returned to Michie's, at six o'clock, the man "Pat," with a glowing face, came out to the gate. "That's a splendid baste of yours, sur," he said,--"and sich a boi to gallop." "My horse doesn't generally gallop," I returned, doubtfully. When I passed to the barn in the rear, I found to my astonishment, a sorrel stallion, magnificently accoutred. He thrust his foot at me savagely, as I stood behind him, and neighed till he frightened the spiders. "Pat," said I, wrathfully, "you have stolen some Colonel's nag, and I shall be hanged for the theft." "Fait, sur," said Pat, "my ligs was gone intirely, wid long walkin', and I sazed the furst iligant baste I come to." CHAPTER XIII. STUART'S RAID. The old Chickahominy bridges were soon repaired, and the whole of Franklin's corps crossed to the south side. McClellan moved his head-quarters to Dr. Trent's farm, a half-mile from Michie's, and the latter gentleman's fields and lawn were made white with tents. Among others, the Chief of Cavalry, Stoneman, pitched his canopy under the young oaks, and the whole reserve artillery was parked in the woods, close to the house. The engineer brigade encamped in the adjacent peach-orchard and corn-field, and the wheat was trampled by battery and team-horses. Smith's division now occupied the hills on the south side of the Chickahominy, and the Federal line stretched southeastward, through Fairoaks, to White Oak Swamp, seven miles away. Porter's corps still lay between Mechanicsville and New Bridge, on the north bank of the river, and my old acquaintances, the Pennsylvania Reserves, had joined the army, and now formed its extreme right wing. This odd arrangement of forces was a subject of frequent comment: for the right was thus four miles, and the left fourteen miles, from Richmond. The four corps at once commenced to entrench, and from Smith's redoubt on the river bluffs, to Casey's entrenched hill at White Oak, a continuous line of moderately strong earthworks extended. But Porter and the Reserves were not entrenched at all, and only a few horsemen were picketed across the long reach of country from Meadow Bridge to Hanover Court House. Both flanks, in fact, were open, and the left was a day's march from the right. We were, meantime, drawing our supplies from White House, twenty miles in the rear; there were no railroad guards along the entire line, and about five companies protected the grand depot. Two gunboats lay in the river, however, and as the teams still went to and fro, a second depot was established at a place called Putney's or "Garlic," five miles above White House. I went often, and at all hours of the day and night, over this exposed and lonely route. My horse had been, meantime, returned to the Provost Quarters, and the rightful owner had obtained his stallion in exchange. I rode the said stallion but once, when he proceeded to walk sideways, and several times rivalled the renowned Pegasus in his aerial flights. The man named "Pat" essayed to show his paces one day, but the stallion took him straight into Stoneman's wall-tent, and that officer shook the Irishman blind. My little bob-tailed brownie was thrice endeared to me by our separation; but I warned the man "Pat" to keep clear of him thereafter. The man "Pat" was a very eccentric person, who slept on the porch at Michie's, and used to wake up the house in the small hours, with the story that somebody was taking the chickens and the horses. He was the most impulsive person that I ever knew, and when I entrusted despatches to him once, he put them on the hospital boat by mistake, and they got to New York at the close of the campaign. Michie's soon became a correspondents' rendezvous, and we have had at one time, at dinner, twelve representatives of five journals. The Hon. Henry J. Raymond, Ex-Lieutenant Governor of New York, and proprietor of the _Times_ newspaper, was one of our family for several weeks. He had been a New Hampshire lad, and, strolling to New York, took to journalism at the age of nineteen years. His industry and probity obtained him both means and credit, and, also, what few young journalists obtain, social position. He was the founder of Harper's Magazine, one of the most successful serials in America, and many English authors are indebted to him for a trans-Atlantic recognition of their works. He edited an American edition of _Jane Eyre_ before it had attracted attention in England, and conducted the _Courier and Enquirer_ with great success for many years. The _Times_ is now the most reputable of the great New York dailies, and Mr. Raymond has made it influential both at home and abroad. He has retained, amidst his social and political successes, a predilection for "Bohemia," and became an indefatigable correspondent. I rode out with him sometimes, and heard, with interest, his accounts of the Italian war, whither he also went in furtherance of journalism. Among our quill cavalry-men was a fat gentleman from Philadelphia, who had great fear of death, and who used to "tear" to White House, if the man "Pat" shot a duck in the garden. He was a hearty, humorous person, however, and an adept at searching for news. O'Ganlon rode with me several times to White House, and we have crossed the railroad bridge together, a hundred feet in the air, when the planks were slippery, the sides sloping, and the way so narrow that two horses could not pass abreast. He was a true Irishman, and leaped barricades and ditches without regard to his neck. He had, also, a partiality for by-roads that led through swamps and close timber. He discovered one day a cow-path between Daker's and an old Mill at Grapevine Bridge. The long arms of oaks and beech trees reached across it, and young Absalom might have been ensnared by the locks at every rod therein. Through this devious and dangerous way, O'Ganlon used to dash, whooping, guiding his horse with marvellous dexterity, and bantering me to follow. I so far forgot myself generally, as to behave quite as irrationally, and once returned to Michie's with a bump above my right eye, that rivalled my head in size. At other times I rode alone, and my favorite route was an unfrequented lane called the "Quaker Road," that extended from Despatch Station, on the line of rail, to Daker's, on the New Bridge Road. Much of this way was shut in by thick woods and dreary pine barrens; but the road was hard and light, and a few quiet farms lay by the roadside. There was a mill, also, three miles from Daker's, where a turbulent creek crossed the route, and at an oak-wood, near by, I used to frighten the squirrels, so that they started up by pairs and families; I have chased them in this way a full mile, and they seemed to know me after a time. We used to be on the best of terms, and they would, at length, stand their ground saucily, and chatter, the one with the other, flourishing their bushy appendages, like so many straggling "Bucktails." When I turned from the beaten road, where the ruts were like a ditch and parapet, and dead horses blackened the fields; where teams went creaking day and night, and squads of sabremen drove pale, barefooted prisoners to and fro like swine or cattle, the silence and solitude of this by-lane were beautiful as sleep. Many of the old people living in this direction had not seen even a soldier or a sutler, save some mounted scouts that vanished in clouds of dust; but they had listened with awe to the music of cannon, though they did not know either the place or the result of the fighting. If fate has ordained me to survive the Rebellion, I shall some day revisit these localities; they are stamped legibly upon my mind, and I know almost every old couple in New Kent or Hanover counties. I have lunched at all the little springs on the road, and eaten corn-bread and bacon at most of the cabins. I have swam the Pamunkey at dozens of places, and when my finances were low, and my nag hungry, have organized myself into a company of foragers, and broken into the good people's granaries. I do not know any position that admitted of as much adventure and variety. There was always enough danger to make my journeys precariously pleasant, and, when wearied of the saddle, my friends at Daker's and Michie's had a savory julep and a comfortable bed always prepared. I had more liberty than General McClellan, and a great deal more comfort. Mrs. Michie was a warm-hearted, impulsive Virginia lady, with almost New England industry, and from very scanty materials she contrived to spread a bountiful table. Her coffee was bubbling with rich cream, and her "yellow pone" was overrunning with butter. A cleanly black girl shook a fly-brush over our shoulders as we ate, and the curious custom was maintained of sending a julep to our bedrooms before we rose in the mornings. Our hostess was too hospitable to be a bitter partisan, and during five weeks of tenure at her residence, we never held an hour's controversy. She had troubles, but she endured them patiently. She saw, one by one, articles of property sacrificed or stolen; she heard the servants speaking impudently; and her daughters and son were in a remote part of the State. The young man was a Confederate Surgeon at Lynchburg, and the young ladies had taken refuge in Rockbridge County. The latter were, from all accounts, pretty and intelligent, and one day, as I examined some parcels of books in the parlors, I found a volume of amateur poems that some laboring bard had dedicated to the youngest of them. Mr. Michie was a fine old Virginia gentleman, who remembered Thomas Jefferson well, as he had been reared in that great statesman's village, Charlottesville. He told me many anecdotes of Patrick Henry, John Randolph, and other distinguished patriots. I wrote in one of the absent daughter's albums the following lines:-- Alas! for the pleasant peace we knew, In the happy summers of long ago, When the rivers were bright, and the skies were blue, By the homes of Henrico: We dreamed of wars that were far away, And read, as in fable, of blood that ran, Where the James and Chickahominy stray, Through the groves of Powhattan. 'Tis a dream come true; for the afternoons Blow bugles of war, by our fields of grain, And the sabres clink, as the dark dragoons Come galloping up the lane; The pigeons have flown from the eves and tiles, The oat-blades have grown to blades of steel, And the Huns swarm down the leafy aisles Of the grand old Commonweal. They have torn the Indian fisher's nets, Where flows Pamunkey toward the sea, And blood runs red in the rivulets, That babbled and brawled in glee; The corpses are strewn in Fairoak glades, The hoarse guns thunder from Drury's Ridge, The fishes that played in the cove, deep shades, Are frightened from Bottom Bridge. I would that the year were blotted away, And the strawberry grew in the hedge again; That the scythe might swing in the tangled hay, And the squirrel romp in the glen; The walnut sprinkle the clover slopes, Where graze the sheep and the spotted steer; And the winter restore the golden hopes, That were trampled in a year. On Friday, June 13, I made one of my customary trips to White House, in the company of O'Ganlon. The latter individual, in the course of a "healthy dash" that he made down the railroad ties,--whereby two shoes shied from his mare's hoofs,--reined into a quicksand that threatened to swallow his steed. He afterward left his sword at Summit Station, and I, obligingly, rode back three miles to recover it. We dined at Daker's, where Glumley sat beside the baby-face, pursuant to his art-duties, and the plump, red-cheeked miss sat beside me. O'Ganlon was entertained by the talkative daughter, who drove him quite mad; so that, when we resumed our horses, he insisted upon a second "healthy dash," and disappeared through a strip of woods. I followed, rationally, and had come to a blacksmith's shop, at the corner of a diverging road, when I was made aware of some startling occurrence in my rear. A mounted officer dashed past me, shouting some unintelligible tidings, and he was followed in quick succession by a dozen cavalry-men, who rode as if the foul fiend was at their heels. Then came a teamster, bare-backed, whose rent harness trailed in the road, and directly some wagons that were halted before the blacksmith's, wheeled smartly, and rattled off towards White House. "What is the matter, my man?" I said to one of these lunatics, hurriedly. "The Rebels are behind!" he screamed, with white lips, and vanished. I thought that it might be as well to take some other road, and so struck off, at a dapper pace, in the direction of the new landing at Putney's or "Garlic." At the same instant I heard the crack of carbines behind, and they had a magical influence upon my speed. I rode along a stretch of chestnut and oak wood, attached to the famous Webb estate, and when I came to a rill that passed by a little bridge, under the way, turned up its sandy bed and buried myself in the under-brush. A few breathless moments only had intervened, when the roadway seemed shaken by a hundred hoofs. The imperceptible horsemen yelled like a war-party of Camanches, and when they had passed, the carbines rang ahead, as if some bloody work was being done at every rod. I remained a full hour under cover; but as no fresh approaches added to my mystery and fear, I sallied forth, and kept the route to Putney's, with ears erect and expectant pulses. I had gone but a quarter of a mile, when I discerned, through the gathering gloom, a black, misshapen object, standing in the middle of the road. As it seemed motionless, I ventured closer, when the thing resolved to a sutler's wagon, charred and broken, and still smoking from the incendiaries' torch. Further on, more of these burned wagons littered the way, and in one place two slain horses marked the roadside. When I emerged upon the Hanover road, sounds of shrieks and shot issued from the landing at "Garlic," and, in a moment, flames rose from the woody shores and reddened the evening. I knew by the gliding blaze that vessels had been fired and set adrift, and from my place could see the devouring element climbing rope and shroud. In a twinkling, a second light appeared behind the woods to my right, and the intelligence dawned upon me that the cars and houses at Tunstall's Station had been burned. By the fitful illumination, I rode tremulously to the old head-quarters at Black Creek, and as I conjectured, the depot and train were luridly consuming. The vicinity was marked by wrecked sutler's stores, the embers of wagons, and toppled steeds. Below Black Creek the ruin did not extend: but when I came to White House the greatest confusion existed. Sutlers were taking down their booths, transports were slipping their cables, steamers moving down the stream. Stuart had made the circuit of the Grand Army to show Lee where the infantry could follow. CHAPTER XIV. FEVER DREAMS IN WAR. A subtle enemy had of late joined the Confederate cause against the invaders. He was known as Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were subterranean,--through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the dead; and aerial,--through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at first very bright, and afterward lustreless; their skins grew hard and sallow; their lips faded to a dry whiteness; all the fluids of the body were consumed; and they crumbled to corruption before life had fairly gone from them. This visitation has been, by common consent, dubbed "the Chickahominy fever," and some have called it the typhus fever. The troops called it the "camp fever," and it was frequently aggravated by affections of the bowels and throat. The number of persons that died with it was fabulous. Some have gone so far as to say that the army could have better afforded the slaughter of twenty thousand men, than the delay on the Chickahominy. The embalmers were now enjoying their millennium, and a steam coffin manufactory was erected at White House, where twenty men worked day and night, turning out hundreds of pine boxes. I had, occasion, in one of my visits to the depot, to repair to the tent of one of the embalmers. He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him, standing over the nude, hard corpse, he reminded me of the implacable vulture, looking into the eyes of Prometheus. His battery and tube were pulsing, like one's heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained at the neck. I compared the discolored body with the figure of _Ianthe_, as revealed in Queen Mab, but failed to see the beautifulness of death. "If you could only make him breathe, Professor," said an officer standing by. The dry skin of the embalmer broke into chalky dimples, and he grinned very much as a corpse might do:-- "Ah!" he said, "_then_ there would be money made." To hear these embalmers converse with each other was like listening to the witch sayings in Macbeth. It appeared that the arch-fiend of embalming was a Frenchman named Sonça, or something of that kind, and all these worthies professed to have purchased his "system." They told grisly anecdotes of "operations," and experimented with chemicals, and congratulated each other upon the fever. They would, I think, have piled the whole earth with catacombs of stony corpses, and we should have no more green graves, but keep our dead with us as household ornaments. The negroes did not suffer with the fever, although their quarters were close and filthy. Their Elysium had come; there was no more work. They slept and danced and grinned, and these three actions made up the sum of their existence. Such people to increase and multiply I never beheld. There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost, degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,--thieving, quarrelling, deceiving,--but they failed to do any rights, and their worship was animal, and almost profane. They sang incongruous mixtures of hymns and field songs:-- "Oh! bruddern, watch an' pray, _watch_ an' pray! De harvest am a ripenin' our Lord an' Marser say! Oh! ho! yo! dat ole coon, de serpent, ho! oh! Watch an' pray!" I have heard them sing such medleys with tears in their eyes, apparently fervid and rapt. A very gray old man would lead off, keeping time to the words with his head and hands; the mass joining in at intervals, and raising a screaming alleluja. Directly they would all rise, link hands, and proceed to dance the accompaniment. The motion would be slow at first, and the method of singing maintained; after a time they would move more rapidly, shouting the lines together; and suddenly becoming convulsed with strange excitement, they would toss up their arms, leap, fall, groan, and, seemingly, lose consciousness. Their prayers were earnest and vehement, but often degenerated to mere howls and noises. Some of both sexes had grand voices, that rang like bugles, and the very impropriety of their music made it fascinating. It used to seem to me that any of the great composers might have borrowed advantageously some of those original negro airs. In many cases, their owners came within the lines, registered their allegiance, and recovered the negroes. These were often veritable Shylocks, that claimed their pounds of flesh, with unblushing reference to the law. The poor Africs went back cowed and tearful, and it is probable that they were afterward sent to the far South, that terrible _terra incognita_ to a border slave. Among the houses to which I resorted was that of a Mr. Hill, one mile from White House. He had a thousand acres of land and a valuable fishery on the Pamunkey. The latter was worth, in good seasons, two thousand dollars a year. He had fished and farmed with negroes; but these had leagued to run away, and he sent them across the river to a second farm that he owned in King William County. It was at Hill's house that the widow Custis was visiting when young Washington reined at the gate, on his road to Williamsburg. With reverent feelings I used to regard the old place, and Hill frequently stole away from his formidable military household, to talk with me on the front porch. Perhaps in the same moonlights, with the river shimmering at their feet, and the grapevine shadowing the creaky corners,--their voices softened, their chairs drawn very close, their hands touching with a thrill,--the young soldier and his affianced had made their courtship. I sometimes sat breathless, thinking that their figures had come back, and that I heard them whispering. Hill was a Virginian,--large, hospitable, severe, proud,--and once I ventured to speak upon the policy of slavery, with a view to develop his own relation to the "institution." He said, with the swaggering manner of his class, that slavery was a "domestic" institution, and that therefore no political law could reach it. I insinuated, quietly, that no political law should therefore sustain it, and took exception to the idea that what was domestic was therefore without the province of legislation. When I exampled polygamy, Hill became passionate, and asked if I was an abolitionist. I opined that I was not, and he so far relented as to say that slavery was sanctioned by divine and human laws; that it was ultimately to be embraced by all white nationalities, and that the Caucasian was certain, in the end, to subjugate and possess every other race. He pointed, with some shrewdness, to the condition of the Chinese in California and Australia, and epitomized the gradual enslaving of the Mongol and Malay in various quarters of the world. "As to our treatment of niggers," he said, curtly, "I never prevaricate, as some masters do, in that respect. I whip my niggers when they want it! If they are saucy, or careless, or lazy, I have 'em flogged. About twice a year every nigger has to be punished. If they ain't roped over twice a year, they take on airs and want to be gentlemen. A nigger is bound by no sentiment of duty or affection. You must keep him in trim by fear." Among the victims of the swamp fever, were Major Larrabee, and Lieutenant-Colonel Emory, of the Fifth Wisconsin regiment; I had been indebted to them for many a meal and draught of spirits. I had talked with each of them, when the camps were darkened and the soldiery asleep. Larrabee was a soldier by nature,--adventurous, energetic, intrepid, aggressive. He had been a country Judge in Wisconsin, and afterwards a member of Congress. When the war commenced, he enlisted as a common soldier, but public sentiment forced the State Government to make him a Major. Emory was a mild, reflective, unimpassioned gentleman,--too modest to be eminent, too scrupulous to be ambitious. The men were opposites, but both capital companions, and they were seized with the fever about the same time. The Major was removed to White House, and I visited him one day in the hospital quarters. Surgeon General Watson, hospital commandant, took me through the quarters; there was quite a town of sick men; they lay in wall-tents--about twenty in a tent,--and there were daily deaths; those that caught the fever, were afterwards unfit for duty, as they took relapses on resuming the field. The tents were pitched in a damp cornfield; for the Federals so reverenced their national shrines, that they forbade White House and lawn to be used for hospital purposes. Under the best circumstances, a field hospital is a comfortless place; but here the sun shone like a furnace upon the tents, and the rains drowned out the inmates. If a man can possibly avoid it, let him never go to the hospital: for he will be called a "skulker," or a "shyster," that desires to escape the impending battle. Twenty hot, feverish, tossing men, confined in a small tent, like an oven, and exposed to contumely and bad food, should get a wholesome horror of war and glory. So far as I could observe and learn, the authorities at White House carried high heads, and covetous hands. In brief, they lived like princes, and behaved like knaves. There was one--whose conduct has never been investigated--who furnished one of the deserted mansions near by, and brought a lady from the North to keep it in order. He drove a span that rivalled anything in Broadway, and his wines were luscious. His establishment reminded me of that of Napoleon III. in the late Italian war, and yet, this man was receiving merely a Colonel's pay. My impression is that everybody at White House robbed the Government, and in the end, to cover their delinquencies, these scoundrels set fire to an immense quantity of stores, and squared their accounts thus: "Burned on the Pamunkey, June 28, commissary, quartermaster's, and hospital stores, one million dollars." The time was now drawing to a close that I should pass amid the familiar scenes of this region. The good people at Daker's were still kindly; but having climbed into the great bed one night, I found my legs aching, my brain violently throbbing, my chest full of pain and my eyes weak. When I woke in the morning my lips were fevered, I could eat nothing, and when I reached my saddle, it seemed that I should faint. In a word, the Chickahominy fever had seized upon me. My ride to New Bridge was marked by great agony, and during much of the time I was quite blind. I turned off, at Gaines's Mill, to rest at Captain Kingwalt's; but the old gentleman was in the grip of the ague, and I forebore to trouble him with a statement of my grievances. Skyhiski made me a cup of tea, which I could not drink, and Fogg made me lie on his "poncho." It was like old times come back, to hear them all speak cheerfully, and the man Clover said that if there "warn't" a battle soon, he knew what he'd do, he did! he'd go home, straight as a buck! "Becoz," said the man Clover, flourishing his hands, "I volunteered to fight. To _fight_, sir! not to dig and drive team. Here we air, sir, stuck in the mud, burnin' with fever, livin' on hardtack. And thair's Richmond! Just thair! You can chuck a stone at it, if you mind to. A'ter awhile them rebbils'll pop out, and fix us. Why ain't we led up, sa-a-y?" The man Clover represented common sentiment among the troops at this time; but I told him that in all probability he would soon be gratified with a battle. My prediction was so far correct, that when I met the man Clover on the James River, a week afterward, he said, with a rueful countenance-- "Sa-a-a-y! It never rains but it pours, does it?" As I rode from the camp of the Pennsylvania Reserves, at noon, on the 21st of June, I seemed to feel a gloomy premonition of the calamities that were shortly to fall upon the "Army of the Potomac." I passed in front of Hogan house; through the wood above the mill; along Gaines's Lane, between his mansion and his barn; across a creek, tributary to the Chickahominy; and up the ploughed hills by a military road, toward Grapevine Bridge. Lieutenant-Colonel Heath, of the Fifth Maine Regiment, was riding with me, and we stopped at the tip of an elevated field to look back upon the scene. I was very sick and weary, and I lay my head upon the mane of my nag, while Heath threw a leg across his saddle pommel, and straightened his slight figure; we both gazed earnestly. The river lay in the hollow or ravine to the left, and a few farm-houses sat among the trees on the hill-tops beyond. A battery was planted at each house, and we could see the lines of red-clay parapets marking the sites. From the roof of one of the houses floated a speck of canvas,--the revolutionary flag. A horseman or two moved shadow-like across a slope of yellow grain. Before and back the woods belted the landscape, and some pickets of both sides paced the river brink: they did not fire upon each other. Our side of the Chickahominy was not less peaceful. A couple of batteries lay below us, in the meadows; but the horses were dozing in the harness, and the gunners, standing bolt upright at the breech, seemed parts of their pieces; the teamsters lay grouped in the long grass. Immediately in front, Gaines's Mansion and outhouses spotted a hillside, and we could note beyond a few white tents shining through the trees. The roof of the old mill crouched between a medley of wavy fields and woods, to our right, and just at our feet a tiny rill divided Gaines's Mill from our own. Behind us, over the wilderness of swamp and bog-timber, rose Smith's redoubt, with the Federal flag flaunting from the rampart. "Townsend," said Heath, as he swept the whole country with his keen eye, "do you know that we are standing upon historic ground?" He had been a poet and an orator, and he seemed to feel the solemnity of the place. "It may become historic to-morrow," I replied. "It is so to-day," he said, earnestly; "not from battle as yet; _that_ may or may not happen; but in the pause before the storm there is something grand; and this is the pause." He took his soft beaver in his hand, and his short red hair stood pugnaciously back from his fine forehead. "The men that have been here already," he added, "consecrated the place; young McClellan, and bluff, bull-headed Franklin; the one-armed devil, Kearney, and handsome Joe Hooker; gray, gristly Heintzelman; white-bearded, insane Sumner; Stuart, Lee, Johnston, the Hills----" "Why not," said I, laughingly, "Eric the red,--the redoubtable Heath!" "Why not?" he said, with a flourish; "Fate may have something in store for me, as well as for these." I have thought, since, how terribly our light conversation found verification in fact. If I had said to Heath, that, at the very moment, Jefferson Davis and his Commander-in-chief were sitting in the dwelling opposite, reconnoitring and consulting; that, even now, their telescopes were directed upon us; that the effect of their counsel was to be manifest in less than a week; that one of the bloodiest battles of modern times was to be fought beside and around us; that six days of the most terrible fighting known in history were to ensue; that my friend and comrade was standing upon the same clods which would be reddened, at his next coming, with his heart's blood; and that the trenches were to yawn beneath his hoofs, to swallow himself and his steed,--if I had foretold these things as they were to occur, I wonder if the "pause before the storm" would have been less awful, and our ride campward less sedate. Poor Heath! Gallant New Englander! he called at my bedside, the sixth day following, as I lay full of pain, fear, and fever, and after he bade me good by, I heard his horse's hoofs ringing down the lane. Ten minutes afterward he was shot through the head. When I reached Michie's, at three o'clock, I had to be helped from the saddle, and the fever was raging in my whole body before nightfall. My hands were flushed, my face hot, but my feet were quite cold, and I was seized with chills that seemed to shake my teeth from my head. Mrs. Michie made me a bowl of scorching tea, and one of the black-girls bathed my limbs in boiling water. The fever dreams came to me that night, in snatches of burning sleep, and toward morning I lay restlessly awake, moving from side to side, famishing for drink, but rejecting it, when they brought it to my lips. The next day, my kind hostess gave me some nourishing soup, but after a vain effort to partake of it, I was compelled to put it aside. O'Ganlon procured some pickled fruit and vegetables from a sutler, which I ate voraciously, quaffing the vinegar like wine. Some of my regimental friends heard of my illness, and they sent me quiet luxuries, which gladdened me, though I did not eat. During the day I had some moments of ease, when I tried to read. There was a copy of Wordsworth's poems in the house, and I used to repeat stanzas from "Peter Bell," till they rang, in eddies of rhyme, through my weak brain, and continued to scan and jangle far into the nights. Some of these fever-dreams were like delusions in delirium: peopled with monsters, that grinned and growled. Little black globules used to leer from corners, and after a time they began to revolve toward me, increasing as they came, and at length rolling like mountains of surge. I frequently woke with a scream, and found my body in profuse perspiration. There were fiery snakes, also, that, at first, moved slowly around me, and I followed them with red and terrified eyes. After awhile they flashed in circles of lightning, and hissed showers of sparks, until I became quite crazed with fear. The most horrible apparitions used to come to my bedside, and if I dropped to sleep with any thought half formed or half developed, the odd half of that thought became impregnated, somehow, and straightway loomed up a goblin, or a giant, or a grotesque something, that proceeded to torture me, like a sort of Frankenstein, for having made it. Amid all these ghastly things, there came beautiful glimpses of form, scene, and sensation, that straightway changed to horrors. I remember, for example, that I was gliding down a stream, where the boughs overhead were as shady as the waters, and there were holy eyes that seemed to cool my fever; but suddenly the stream became choked with corpses, that entangled their dead limbs with mine, until I strangled and called aloud,--waking up O'Ganlon and some reporters who proposed to give me morphine, that I might not alarm the house. How the poor soldiers fared, in the hot hospitals, I shudder to think; but a more merciful decree spared my life, and kind treatment met me at every hand. Otherwise, I believe, I should not be alive to-day to write this story; for the fever had seized me in its severest form, and I had almost tutored myself to look upon my end, far from my home and on the very eve of my manhood. O'Ganlon, at last, resolved to send me to White House, and started thither one day, to obtain a berth for me upon a Sanitary steamer. The next day an ambulance came to the door. I tried to sit up in bed, and succeeded; I feebly robed myself and staggered to the stairs. I crawled, rather than walked, to the hall below; but when I took a chair, and felt the cool breeze from the oaks fanning my hair, I seemed to know that I should get well. "Boom! Boom! Boom!" pealed some cannon at the moment, and all the windows shook with the concussion. Directly we heard volleys of musketry, and then the camps were astir. Horses went hither and thither; signal flags flashed to-and-fro; a battery of the Reserve Artillery dashed down the lane. I felt my strength coming back with the excitement; I even smiled feebly as the guns thundered past. "Take away your ambulance, old fellow," I said, "I shan't go home till I see a battle." CHAPTER XV. TWO DAYS OF BATTLE. The Confederates had been waiting two months for McClellan's advance. Emboldened by his delay they had gathered the whole of their available strength from remote Tennessee, from the Mississippi, and from the coast, until, confident and powerful, they crossed Meadow Bridge on the 26th of June, 1862, and drove in our right wing at Mechanicsville. The reserves of Gen. McCall were stationed here; they made a wavering resistance,--wherein four companies of Bucktails were captured bodily,--and fell back at nightfall upon Porter's Corps, at Gaines's Mill. Fitz John Porter commanded the brigades of Gens. Sykes and Morrell,--the former made up solely of regulars. He appeared to have been ignorant of the strength of the attacking party, and he telegraphed to McClellan, early on Thursday evening, that he required no reinforcements, and that he could hold his ground. The next morning he was attacked in front and flank; Stewart's cavalry fell on his right, and turned it at Old Church. He formed at noon in new line of battle, from Gaines's House, along the Mill Road to New Coal Harbor; but stubbornly persisted in the belief that he could not be beaten. By three o'clock he had been driven back two miles, and all his energies were unavailing to recover a foot of ground. He hurled lancers and cavalry upon the masses of Jackson and the Hills, but the butternut infantry formed impenetrable squares, hemmed in with rods of steel, and as the horsemen galloped around them, searching for previous points, they were swept from their saddles with volleys of musketry. He directed the terrible fire of his artillery upon them, but though the gray footmen fell in heaps, they steadily advanced, closing up the gaps, and their lines were like long stretches of blaze and ball. Their fire never slackened nor abated. They loaded and moved forward, column on column, like so many immortals that could not be vanquished. The scene from the balloon, as Lowe informed me, was awful beyond all comparison,--of puffing shells and shrieking shrapnel, with volleys that shattered the hills and filled the air with deathly whispers. Infantry, artillery, and horse turned the Federal right from time to time, and to preserve their order of battle the whole line fell back toward Grapevine Bridge. At five o'clock Slocum's Division of volunteers crossed the creek from the south side, and made a desperate dash upon the solid columns of the Confederates. At the same time Toombs's Georgia Brigade charged Smith's redoubt from the south side, and there was a probability of the whole of both armies engaging before dark. My fever of body had so much relinquished to my fever of mind, that at three o'clock I called for my horse, and determined to cross the bridge, that I might witness the battle. It was with difficulty that I could make my way along the narrow corduroy, for hundreds of wounded were limping from the field to the safe side, and ammunition wagons were passing the other way, driven by reckless drivers who should have been blown up momentarily. Before I had reached the north side of the creek, an immense throng of panic-stricken people came surging down the slippery bridge. A few carried muskets, but I saw several wantonly throw their pieces into the flood, and as the mass were unarmed, I inferred that they had made similar dispositions. Fear, anguish, cowardice, despair, disgust, were the predominant expressions of the upturned faces. The gaunt trees, towering from the current, cast a solemn shadow upon the moving throng, and as the evening dimness was falling around them, it almost seemed that they were engulfed in some cataract. I reined my horse close to the side of a team, that I might not be borne backward by the crowd; but some of the lawless fugitives seized him by the bridle, and others attempted to pull me from the saddle. "Gi' up that hoss!" said one, "what business you got wi' a hoss?" "That's my critter, and I am in for a ride; so you get off!" said another. I spurred my pony vigorously with the left foot, and with the right struck the man at the bridle under the chin. The thick column parted left and right, and though a howl of hate pursued me, I kept straight to the bank, cleared the swamp, and took the military route parallel with the creek, toward the nearest eminence. At every step of the way I met wounded persons. A horseman rode past me, leaning over his pommel, with blood streaming from his mouth and hanging in gouts from his saturated beard. The day had been intensely hot and black boys were besetting the wounded with buckets of cool lemonade. It was a common occurrence for the couples that carried the wounded on stretchers to stop on the way, purchase a glass of the beverage, and drink it. Sometimes the blankets on the stretchers were closely folded, and then I knew that the man within was dead. A little fellow, who used his sword for a cane, stopped me on the road, and said-- "See yer! This is the ball that jes' fell out o' my boot." He handed me a lump of lead as big as my thumb, and pointed to a rent in his pantaloons, whence the drops rolled down his boots. "I wouldn't part with that for suthin' handsome," he said; "it'll be nice to hev to hum." As I cantered away he shouted after me-- "Be sure you spell my name right! it's Smith, with an 'E'--S-M-I-T-H-E." In one place I met five drunken men escorting a wounded sergeant; the latter had been shot in the jaw, and when he attempted to speak, the blood choked his articulation. "You let go him, pardner," said one of the staggering brutes, "he's not your sergeant. Go 'way!" "Now, sergeant," said the other, idiotically, "I'll see you all right, sergeant. Come, Bill, fetch him over to the corn-crib and we'll give him a drink." Here the first speaker struck the second, and the sergeant, in wrath, knocked them both down. All this time the enemy's cannon were booming close at hand. I came to an officer of rank, whose shoulder-emblem I could not distinguish, riding upon a limping field-horse. Four men held him to his seat, and a fifth led the animal. The officer was evidently wounded, though he did not seem to be bleeding, and the dust of battle had settled upon his blanched, stiffening face, like grave-mould upon a corpse. He was swaying in the saddle, and his hair--for he was bare-headed--shook across his white eyeballs. He reminded me of the famous Cid, whose body was sent forth to scare the Saracens. A mile or more from Grapevine Bridge, on a hill-top, lay a frame farm-house, with cherry trees encircling it, and along the declivity of the hill were some cabins, corn-sheds, and corn-bins. The house was now a Surgeon's headquarters, and the wounded lay in the yard and lane, under the shade, waiting their turns to be hacked and maimed. I caught a glimpse through the door, of the butchers and their victims; some curious people were peeping through the windows at the operation. As the processions of freshly wounded went by, the poor fellows, lying on their backs, looked mutely at me, and their great eyes smote my heart. Something has been written in the course of the war upon straggling from the ranks, during battle. But I have seen nothing that conveys an adequate idea of the number of cowards and idlers that so stroll off. In this instance, I met squads, companies, almost regiments of them. Some came boldly along the road; others skulked in woods, and made long detours to escape detection; a few were composedly playing cards, or heating their coffee, or discussing the order and consequences of the fight. The rolling drums, the constant clatter of file and volley-firing,--nothing could remind them of the requirements of the time and their own infamy. Their appreciation of duty and honor seemed to have been forgotten; neither hate, ambition, nor patriotism could force them back; but when the columns of mounted provosts charged upon them, they sullenly resumed their muskets and returned to the field. At the foot of the hill to which I have referred the ammunition wagons lay in long lines, with the horses' heads turned from the fight. A little beyond stood the ambulances; and between both sets of vehicles, fatigue-parties were going and returning to and from the field. At the top of the next hill sat many of the Federal batteries, and I was admonished by the shriek of shells that passed over my head and burst far behind me, that I was again to look upon carnage and share the perils of the soldier. The question at once occurred to me: Can I stand fire? Having for some months penned daily paragraphs relative to death, courage, and victory, I was surprised to find that those words were now unusually significant. "Death" was a syllable to me before; it was a whole dictionary now. "Courage" was natural to every man a week ago; it was rarer than genius to-day. "Victory" was the first word in the lexicon of youth yesterday noon; "discretion" and "safety" were at present of infinitely more consequence. I resolved, notwithstanding these qualms, to venture to the hill-top: but at every step flitting projectiles took my breath. The music of the battle-field, I have often thought, should be introduced in opera. Not the drum, the bugle, or the fife, though these are thrilling, after their fashion; but the music of modern ordnance and projectile, the beautiful whistle of the minie-ball, the howl of shell that makes unearthly havoc with the air, the whiz-z-z of solid shot, the chirp of bullets, the scream of grape and canister, the yell of immense conical cylinders, that fall like redhot stoves and spout burning coals. All these passed over, beside, beneath, before, behind me. I seemed to be an invulnerable something at whom some cunning juggler was tossing steel, with an intent to impinge upon, not to strike him. I rode like one with his life in his hand, and, so far as I remember, seemed to think of nothing. No fear, _per se_; no regret; no adventure; only expectancy. It was the expectancy of a shot, a choking, a loud cry, a stiffening, a dead, dull tumble, a quiver, and--blindness. But with this was mingled a sort of enjoyment, like that of the daring gamester, who has played his soul and is waiting for the decision of the cards. I felt all his suspense, _more_ than his hope; and withal, there was excitement in the play. Now a whistling ball seemed to pass just under my ear, and before I commenced to congratulate myself upon the escape, a shell, with a showery and revolving fuse, appeared to take the top off my head. Then my heart expanded and contracted, and somehow I found myself conning rhymes. At each clipping ball,--for I could hear them coming,--a sort of coldness and paleness rose to the very roots of my hair, and was then replaced by a hot flush. I caught myself laughing, syllabically, and shrugging my shoulders, fitfully. Once, the rhyme that came to my lips--for I am sure there was no mind in the iteration--was the simple nursery prayer-- "Now I lay me down to sleep," I continued to say "down to sleep," "down to sleep," "down to sleep," till I discovered myself, when I ceased. Then a shell, apparently just in range, dashed toward me, and the words spasmodically leaped up: "Now's your time. This is your billet." With the same insane pertinacity I continued to repeat "Now's your time, now's your time," and "billet, billet, billet," till at last I came up to the nearest battery, where I could look over the crest of the hill; and as if I had looked into the crater of a volcano, or down the fabled abyss into hell, the whole grand horror of a battle burst upon my sight. For a moment I could neither feel nor think. I scarcely beheld, or beholding did not understand or perceive. Only the roar of guns, the blaze that flashed along a zigzag line and was straightway smothered in smoke, the creek lying glassily beneath me, the gathering twilight, and the brownish blue of woods! I only knew that some thousands of fiends, were playing with fire and tossing brands at heaven,--that some pleasant slopes, dells, and highlands were lit as if the conflagration of universes had commenced. There is a passage of Holy Writ that comes to my mind as I write, which explains the sensation of the time better than I can do:-- "_He opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit._ "_And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth._"--Revelation, ix. 2, 3. In a few moments, when I was able to compose myself, the veil of cloud blew away or dissolved, and I could see fragments of the long columns of infantry. Then from the far end of the lines puffed smoke, and from man to man the puff ran down each line, enveloping the columns again, so that they were alternately visible and invisible. At points between the masses of infantry lay field-pieces, throbbing with rapid deliveries, and emitting volumes of white steam. Now and then the firing slackened for a short time, when I could remark the Federal line, fringed with bayonets, stretching from the low meadow on the left, up the slope, over the ridge, up and down the crest, until its right disappeared in the gloaming of wood and distance. Standards flapped here and there above the column, and I knew, from the fact that the line became momentarily more distinct, that the Federals were falling stubbornly back. At times a battery would dash a hundred yards forward, unlimber, and fire a score of times, and directly would return two hundred yards and blaze again. I saw a regiment of lancers gather at the foot of a protecting swell of field; the bugle rang thrice, the red pennons went upward like so many song birds, the mass turned the crest and disappeared, then the whole artillery belched and bellowed. In twenty minutes a broken, straggling, feeble group of horsemen returned; the red pennons still fluttered, but I knew that they were redder for the blood that dyed them. Finally, the Federal infantry fell back to the foot of the hill on which I stood; all the batteries were clustering around me, and suddenly a column of men shot up from the long sweep of the abandoned hill, with batteries on the left and right. Their muskets were turned towards us, a crash and a whiff of smoke swept from flank to flank, and the air around me rained buck, slug, bullet, and ball! The incidents that now occurred in rapid succession were so thrilling and absorbing that my solicitude was lost in their grandeur. I sat like one dumb, with my soul in my eyes and my ears stunned, watching the terrible column of Confederates. Each party was now straining every energy,--the one for victory, the other against annihilation. The darkness was closing in, and neither cared to prolong the contest after night. The Confederates, therefore, aimed to finish their success with the rout or capture of the Federals, and the Federals aimed to maintain their ground till nightfall. The musketry was close, accurate, and uninterrupted. Every second was marked by a discharge,--the one firing, the other replying promptly. No attempt was now made to remove the wounded; the coolness of the fight had gone by, and we witnessed only its fury. The stragglers seemed to appreciate the desperate emergency, and came voluntarily back to relieve their comrades. The cavalry was massed, and collected for another grand charge. Like a black shadow gliding up the darkening hillside, they precipitated themselves upon the columns: the musketry ceased for the time, and shrieks, steel strokes, the crack of carbines and revolvers succeeded. Shattered, humiliated, sullen, the horse wheeled and returned. Then the guns thundered again, and by the blaze of the pieces, the clods and turf were revealed, fitfully strewn with men and horses. The vicinity of my position now exhibited traces of the battle. A caisson burst close by, and I heard the howl of dying wretches, as the fires flashed like meteors. A solid shot struck a field-carriage not thirty yards from my feet, and one of the flying splinters spitted a gunner as if he had been pierced by an arrow. An artillery-man was standing with folded arms so near that I could have reached to touch him; a whistle and a thumping shock and he fell beneath my nag's head. I wonder, as I calmly recall these episodes now, how I escaped the death that played about me, chilled me, thrilled me,--but spared me! "They are fixing bayonets for a charge. My God! See them come down the hill." In the gathering darkness, through the thick smoke, I saw or seemed to see the interminable column roll steadily downward. I fancied that I beheld great gaps cut in their ranks though closing solidly up, like the imperishable Gorgon. I may have heard some of this next day, and so confounded the testimonies of eye and ear. But I knew that there was a charge, and that the drivers were ordered to stand by their saddles, to run off the guns at any moment. The descent and bottom below me, were now all ablaze, and directly above the din of cannon, rifle, and pistol, I heard a great cheer, as of some salvation achieved. "The Rebels are repulsed! We have saved the guns!" A cheer greeted this announcement from the battery-men around me. They reloaded, rammed, swabbed, and fired, with naked arms, and drops of sweat furrowed the powder-stains upon their faces. The horses stood motionless, quivering not half so much as the pieces. The gristly officers held to their match-strings, smothering the excitement of the time. All at once there was a running hither and thither, a pause in the thunder, a quick consultation-- "'Sdeath! They have flanked us again." In an instant I seemed overwhelmed with men. For a moment I thought the enemy had surrounded us. "It's all up," said one; "I shall cross the river." I wheeled my horse, fell in with the stream of fugitives, and was borne swiftly through field and lane and trampled fence to the swampy margin of the Chickahominy. At every step the shell fell in and among the fugitives, adding to their panic. I saw officers who had forgotten their regiments or had been deserted by them, wending with the mass. The wounded fell and were trodden upon. Personal exhibitions of valor and determination there were; but the main body had lost heart, and were weary and hungry. As we approached the bridge, there was confusion and altercation ahead. The people were borne back upon me. Curses and threats ensued. "It is the Provost-guard," said a fugitive, "driving back the boys." "Go back!" called a voice ahead. "I'll blow you to h--ll, if you don't go back! Not a man shall cross the bridge without orders!" The stragglers were variously affected by this intelligence. Some cursed and threatened; some of the wounded blubbered as they leaned languidly upon the shoulders of their comrades. Others stoically threw themselves on the ground and tried to sleep. One man called aloud that the "boys" were stronger than the Provosts, and that, therefore, the "boys" ought to "go in and win." "Where's the man that wants to mutiny?" said the voice ahead; "let me see him!" The man slipped away; for the Provost officer spoke as though he meant all he said. "Nobody wants to mutiny!" called others. "Three cheers for the Union." The wounded and well threw up their hats together, and made a sickly hurrah. The grim officer relented, and he shouted stentoriously that he would take the responsibility of passing the wounded. These gathered themselves up and pushed through the throng; but many skulkers plead injuries, and so escaped. When I attempted to follow, on horseback, hands were laid upon me and I was refused exit. In that hour of terror and sadness, there were yet jests and loud laughter. However keenly I felt these things, I had learned that modesty amounted to little in the army; so I pushed my nag steadily forward and scattered the camp vernacular, in the shape of imprecations, left and right. "Colonel," I called to the officer in command, as the line of bayonets edged me in, "may I pass out? I am a civilian!" "No!" said the Colonel, wrathfully. "This is no place for a civilian." "That's why I want to get away." "Pass out!" I followed the winding of the woods to Woodbury's Bridge,--the next above Grapevine Bridge. The approaches were clogged with wagons and field-pieces, and I understood that some panic-stricken people had pulled up some of the timbers to prevent a fancied pursuit. Along the sides of the bridge many of the wounded were washing their wounds in the water, and the cries of the teamsters echoed weirdly through the trees that grew in the river. At nine o'clock, we got under way,--horsemen, batteries, ambulances, ammunition teams, infantry, and finally some great siege 32s. that had been hauled from Gaines's House. One of these pieces broke down the timbers again, and my impression is that it was cast into the current. When we emerged from the swamp timber, the hills before us were found brilliantly illuminated with burning camps. I made toward head-quarters, in one of Trent's fields; but all the tents save one had been taken down, and lines of white-covered wagons stretched southward until they were lost in the shadows. The tent of General McClellan alone remained, and beneath an arbor of pine boughs, close at hand, he sat, with his Corps Commanders and Aides, holding a council of war. A ruddy fire lit up the historical group, and I thought at the time, as I have said a hundred times since, that the consultation might be selected for a grand national painting. The crisis, the hour, the adjuncts, the renowned participants, peculiarly fit it for pictorial commemoration. The young commander sat in a chair, in full uniform, uncovered. Heintzelman was kneeling upon a fagot, earnestly speaking. De Joinville sat apart, by the fire, examining a map. Fitz John Porter was standing back of McClellan, leaning upon his chair. Keyes, Franklin, and Sumner, were listening attentively. Some sentries paced to and fro, to keep out vulgar curiosity. Suddenly, there was a nodding of heads, as of some policy decided; they threw themselves upon their steeds, and galloped off toward Michie's. As I reined at Michie's porch, at ten o'clock, the bridges behind me were blown up, with a flare that seemed a blazing of the Northern Lights. The family were sitting upon the porch, and Mrs. Michie was greatly alarmed with the idea that a battle would be fought round her house next day. O'Ganlon, of Meagher's staff, had taken the fever, and sent anxiously for me, to compare our symptoms. I bade the good people adieu before I went to bed, and gave the man "Pat" a dollar to stand by my horse while I slept, and to awake me at any disturbance, that I might be ready to scamper. The man "Pat," I am bound to say, woke me up thrice by the exclamation of-- "Sure, yer honor, there's--well--to pay in the yard! I think ye and the Doctor had better ride off." On each of those occasions, I found that the man Pat had been lonesome, and wanted somebody to speak to. What a sleep was mine that night! I forgot my fever. But another and a hotter fever burned my temples,--the fearful excitement of the time! Whither were we to go, cut off from the York, beaten before Richmond,--perhaps even now surrounded,--and to be butchered to-morrow, till the clouds should rain blood? Were we to retreat one hundred miles down the hostile Peninsula,--a battle at every rod, a grave at every footstep? Then I remembered the wounded heaped at Gaines's Mill, and how they were groaning without remedy, ebbing at every pulse, counting the flashing drops, calling for water, for mercy, for death. So I found heart; for I was not buried yet. And somehow I felt that fate was to take me, as the great poet took Dante, through other and greater horrors. CHAPTER XVI. M'CLELLAN'S RETREAT. The scene presented in Michie's lawn and oak grove, on Saturday morning, was terribly picturesque, and characteristic of the calamity of war. The well was beset by crowds of wounded men, perishing of thirst, who made frantic efforts to reach the bucket, but were borne back by the stronger desperadoes. The kitchen was swarming with hungry soldiers who begged corn-bread and half-cooked dough from the negroes. The shady side-yard was dotted with pale, bruised, and bleeding people, who slept out their weariness upon the damp grass, forgetful, for the moment, of their sores. Ambulances poured through the lane, in solemn procession, and now and then, couples of privates bore by some wounded officer, upon a canvas "stretcher." The lane proving too narrow, at length, for the passing vehicles, the gate-posts and fence were torn up, and finally, the soldiers made a footway of the hall of the dwelling. The retreat had been in progress all night, as I had heard the wagons through my open windows. By daylight the whole army was acquainted with the facts, that we were to resign our depot at White House, relinquish the North bank of the river, and retire precipitately to the shores of the James. A rumor--indignantly denied, but as often repeated--prevailed among the teamsters, surgeons, and drivers, that the wounded were to be left in the enemy's hands. It shortly transpired that we were already cut off from the Pamunkey. A train had departed for White House at dawn, and had delivered its cargo of mortality safely; but a second train, attempting the passage, at seven o'clock had been fired into, and compelled to return. A tremendous explosion, and a shaft of white smoke that flashed to the zenith, informed us, soon afterward, that the railroad bridge had been blown up. About the same time, the roar of artillery recommenced in front, and regiments that had not slept for twenty hours, were hurried past us, to take position at the entrenchments. A universal fear now found expression, and helpless people asked of each other, with pale lips-- "How far have we to walk to reach the James?" It was doubtful, at this time, that any one knew the route to that river. A few members of the signal corps had adventured thither to open communication with the gunboats, and a small cavalry party of Casey's division had made a foray to New Market and Charles City Court House. But it was rumored that Wise's brigade of Confederates was now posted at Malvern Hills, closing up the avenue of escape, and that the whole right wing of the Confederate army was pushing toward Charles City. Malvern Hills, the nearest point that could be gained, was about twenty miles distant, and Harrison's Landing--presumed to be our final destination--was thirty miles away. To retreat over this distance, encumbered with baggage, the wounded and the sick, was discarded as involving pursuit, and certain calamity. Cavalry might fall upon us at every turning, since the greater portion of our own horse had been scouting between White House and Hanover, when the bridges were destroyed, and was therefore separated from the main army. At eight o'clock--weak with fever and scarcely able to keep in the saddle--I joined Mr. Anderson of the _Herald_, and rode toward the front, that I might discover the whereabouts of the new engagement. Winding through a cart-track in Michie's Woods, we came upon fully one third of the whole army, or the remnant of all that portion engaged at Gaines's Mill;--the Reserves, Porter's Corps, Slocum's division, and Meagher's brigade,--perhaps thirty-thousand men. They covered the whole of Tent's farm, and were drawn up in line, heavily equipped, with their colors in position, field officers dismounted, and detachments from each regiment preparing hot coffee at certain fires. A very few wagons--and these containing only ammunition--stood harnessed beside each regiment. In many cases the men lay or knelt upon the ground. Such hot, hungry, weary wretches, I never beheld. During the whole night long they had been crossing the Chickahominy, and the little sleep vouchsafed them had been taken in snatches upon the bare clay. Travelling from place to place, I saw the surviving heroes of the defeat: Meagher looking very yellow and prosaic; Slocum,--small, indomitable, active; Newton,--a little gray, a trifle proud, very mercurial, and curiously enough, a Virginian; Meade,--lithe, spectacled, sanguine; and finally General McCall, as grave, kindly odd and absent, as I had found him four months before. The latter worthy was one of the first of the Federal Generals to visit Richmond. He was taken prisoner the second day afterward, and the half of his command was slain or disabled. I went to and fro, obtaining the names of killed, wounded and missing, with incidents of the battle as well as its general plan. These I scrawled upon bits of newspaper, upon envelopes, upon the lining of my hat, and finally upon my shirt wristbands. I was literally filled with notes before noon, and if I had been shot at that time, endeavors to obtain my name would have been extremely difficult. I should have had more titles than some of the Chinese princes; some parts of me would have been found fatally wounded, and others italicized for gallant behavior. Indeed, I should have been shot in every part, taken prisoner at every place, killed outright in every skirmish, and marvellously saved through every peril. My tombstone would have been some hundreds of muster-rolls and my obituary a fortune to a newspaper. I recollect, with some amusement, the credit that each regiment took upon itself for distinguished behavior. There were few Colonels that did not claim all the honors. I fell in with a New Jersey brigade, that had been decimated of nearly half its _quota_, and a spruce young Major attempted to convey an idea of the battle to me. He said, in brief, that the New Jersey brigade, composed mainly of himself and his regiment, and some few organizations of little consequence,--although numbering ten thousand odd soldiers,--had received the whole shock of a quantity of "Rebels." The said "Rebels" appeared to make up one fourth part of the population of the globe. There was no end to them. They seemed to be several miles deep, longer and more crooked than the Pamunkey, and stood with their rear against Richmond, so that they couldn't fall back, even if they wanted to. In vain did the New Jersey brigade and his regiment attack them with ball and bayonet. How the "Rebels" ever withstood the celebrated charge of his regiment was altogether inexplicable. In the language of the Major,--"the New Jersey brigade,--and my regiment,--fit, and fit, and fit, and give 'em 'get out!' But sir, may I be----, well there (expression inadequate), we couldn't budge 'em. No, sir! (very violently,) not budge 'em, sir! _I_ told the boys to walk at 'em with cold steel. Says I: 'Boys, steel'ill fetch 'em, or nothin' under heaven!' Well, sir, at 'em we went,--me and the boys. There ain't been no sich charge in the whole war! Not in the whole war, sir! (intensely fervid;) leave it to any impartial observer if there has been! We went up the hill, square in the face of all their artillery, musketry, cavalry, sharpshooters, riflemen,--everything, sir! Everything! (energetically.) One o' my men overheard the Rebel General say, as we came up: says he,--'that's the gamest thing I ever see.' Well! we butchered 'em frightful. We must a killed a thousand or two of 'em, don't you think so, Adjutant? But, sir,--it was all in vain. No go, sir! no, sir, no go! (impressively.) And the New Jersey brigade and my regiment fell back, inch by inch, with our feet to the foe (rhetorically.) Is that so, boys?" The "boys," who had meantime gathered around, exclaimed loudly, that it was "true as preachin," and the Major added, in an undertone that his name was spelled * * *. "But where were Porter's columns?" said I, "and the Pennsylvania Reserves?" "I didn't see 'em," said the Major: "I don't think they was there. If they had a been, why wa'n't they on hand to save my regiment, and the New Jersey brigade?" It would be wrong to infer from these vauntings, that the Federals did not fight bravely and endure defeat unshrinkingly. On the contrary, I have never read of higher exemplifications of personal and moral courage, than I witnessed during this memorable retreat. And the young Major's boasting did not a whit reduce my estimate of his efficiency. For in America, swaggering does not necessarily indicate cowardice. I knew a Captain of artillery in Smith's division, who was wordier than Gratiano, and who exaggerated like Falstaff. But he was a lion in action, and at Lee's Mills and Williamsburg his battery was handled with consummate skill. From Trent's farm the roadway led by a strip of corduroy, through sloppy, swampy woods, to an open place, beyond a brook, where Smith's division lay. The firing had almost entirely ceased, and we heard loud cheers running up and down the lines, as we again ventured within cannon range. On this spot, for the second time, the Federals had won a decided success. And in so far as a cosmopolitan could feel elated, I was proud, for a moment, of the valor of my division. The victors had given me meals and a bed, and they had fed my pony when both of us were hungry. But the sight of the prisoners and the collected dead, saddened me somewhat. These two engagements have received the name of the First and Second battles of Golding's Farm. They resulted from an effort of Toombs's Georgia brigade to carry the redoubt and breastworks of General Smith. Toombs was a civilian, and formerly a senator from Georgia. He had no military ability, and his troops were driven back with great slaughter, both on Friday and Saturday. Among the prisoners taken was Colonel Lamar of (I think) the 7th Georgia regiment. He passed me, in a litter, wounded, as I rode toward the redoubt. Lamar was a beautiful man, shaped like a woman, and his hair was long, glossy, and wavy with ringlets. He was a tiger, in his love of blood, and in character self-willed and vehement. He was of that remarkable class of Southern men, of which the noted "Filibuster" Walker was the great exponent. I think I may call him an apostle of slavery. He believed it to be the destiny of our pale race to subdue all the dusky tribes of the earth, and to evangelize, with the sword, the whole Western continent, to the uses of master and man. Such people were called disciples of "manifest destiny." He threw his whole heart into the war; but when I saw him, bloodless, panting, quivering, I thought how little the wrath of man availed against the justice of God. From Smith's on the right, I kept along a military road, in the woods, to Sedgwick's and Richardson's divisions, at Fairoaks. Richardson was subsequently slain, at the second battle of Bull Run. He was called "Fighting Dick," and on this particular morning was talking composedly to his wife, as she was about to climb to the saddle. His tent had been taken down, and soldiers were placing his furniture in a wagon. A greater contrast I never remarked, than the ungainly, awkward, and rough General, with his slight, trim, pretty companion. She had come to visit him and had remained until commanded to retire. I fancied, though I was separated some distance, that the little woman wept, as she kissed him good by, and he followed her, with frequent gestures of good-hap, till she disappeared behind the woods. I do not know that such prosaic old soldiers are influenced by the blandishments of love; but "Fighting Dick" never wooed death so recklessly as in the succeeding engagements of New Market and Malvern Hills. From Seven Pines to the right of Richardson's head-quarters, ran a line of alternate breastwork, redoubt, and stockade. The best of these redoubts was held by Captain Petit, with a New York Volunteer battery. I had often talked with Petit, for he embodied, as well as any man in the army, the martial qualifications of a volunteer. He despised order. Nobody cared less for dress and dirt. I have seen him, sitting in a hole that he hollowed with his hands, tossing pebbles and dust over his head, like another Job. He had profound contempt for any man and any system that was not "American." I remember asking him, one day, the meaning of the gold lace upon the staff hats of the Irish brigade. "Means run like shell!" said Petit, covering me with dirt. "Don't the Irish make the best soldiers?" I ventured. "No!" said Petit, raining pebbles, "I had rather have one American than ten Irishmen." The fighting of Petit was contrary to all rule; but I think that he was a splendid artillery-man. He generally mounted the rampart, shook his fist at the enemy, flung up his hat, jumped down, sighted the guns himself, threw shells with wonderful accuracy, screamed at the gunners, mounted the rampart again, halloed, and, in short, managed to do more execution, make more noise, attract more attention and throw more dirt than anybody in the army. His redoubt was small, but beautifully constructed, and the parapet was heaped with double rows of sandbags. It mounted rifled field-pieces, and, at most times, the gunners were lying under the pieces, asleep. Not any of the entrenched posts among the frontier Indians were more enveloped in wilderness than this. The trees had been felled in front to give the cannon play, but behind and on each side belts of dense, dwarf timber covered the boggy soil. To the left of Petit, on the old field of Seven Pines, lay the divisions of Hooker and Kearney, and thither I journeyed, after leaving the redoubtable volunteer. Hooker was a New Englander, reputed to be the handsomest man in the army. He fought bravely in the Mexican war, and afterwards retired to San Francisco, where he passed a Bohemian existence at the Union Club House. He disliked McClellan, was beloved by his men, and was generally known as "Old Joe." He has been one of the most successful Federal leaders, and seems to hold a charmed life. In all probability he will become Commander-in-chief of one of the grand armies. Kearney has passed away since the date of which I speak. He was known as the "one-armed Devil," and was, by odds, the best educated of all the Federal military chiefs. But, singularly enough, he departed from all tactics, when hotly afield. His personal energy and courage have given him renown, and he loved to lead forlorn hopes, or head storming-parties, or ride upon desperate adventures. He was rich from childhood, and spent much of his life in Europe. For a part of this time he served as a cavalry-man with the French, in Algiers. In private life he was equally reckless, but his tastes were scholarly, and he was generous to a fault. Both Kearney and Hooker were kind to the reporters, and I owe the dead man many a favor. General Daniel Sickles commanded a brigade in this corps. To the left, and in the rear of Heintzelman's corps, lay the divisions of Casey and Couch, that had relapsed into silence since their disgrace at Seven Pines. General Casey was a thin-haired old gentleman, too gracious to be a soldier, although I believe that he is still in the service. His division comprised the extreme left of the Grand Army, and bordered upon a deep, impenetrable bog called "White Oak Swamp." It was the purpose of McClellan to place this swamp between him and the enemy, and defend its passage till his baggage and siege artillery had obtained the shelter of the gunboats, on the shores of the James. I rode along this whole line, to renew my impressions of the position, and found that sharp skirmishing was going on at every point. When I returned to Savage's, where McClellan's headquarters had temporarily been pitched, I found the last of the wagons creaking across the track, and filing slowly southward. The wounded lay in the out-houses, in the trains of cars, beside the hedge, and in shade of the trees about the dwelling. A little back, beside a wood, lay Lowe's balloon traps, and the infantry "guard," and cavalry "escort" of the Commander-in-chief were encamped close to the new provost quarters, in a field beyond the orchard. An ambulance passed me, as I rode into the lane; it was filled with sufferers, and two men with bloody feet, crouched in the trail. From the roof of Savage's house floated the red hospital flag. Savage himself was a quiet Virginia farmer, and a magistrate. His name is now coupled with a grand battle. I felt very hungry, at four o'clock, but my weak stomach revolted at coarse soldier fare, and I determined to ride back to Michie's. I was counselled to beware; but having learned little discretion afield, I cantered off, through a trampled tillage of wheat, and an interminable woods. In a half hour I rode into the familiar yard; but the place was so ruined that I hardly recognized it. Not a panel of fence remained: the lawn was a great pool of slime; the windlass had been wrenched from the well; a few gashed and expiring soldiers lay motionless beneath the oaks, the fields were littered with the remains of camps, and the old dwelling stood like a haunted thing upon a blighted plain. The idlers, the teamsters, and the tents were gone,--all was silence,--and in the little front porch sat Mrs. Michie, weeping; the old gentleman stared at the desolation with a working face, and two small yellow lads lay dolorously upon the steps. They all seemed to brighten up as I appeared at the gate, and when I staggered from my horse, both of them took my hands. I think that tears came into all our eyes at once, and the little Ethiops fairly bellowed. "My friends," I said, falteringly, "I see how you have suffered, and sympathize with you, from my heart." "Our beautiful property is ruined," said Mrs. Michie, welling up. "Yer's five years of labor,--my children's heritage,--the home of our old age,--look at it!" The old gentleman stood up gravely, and cast his eyes mournfully around. "I have nobody to accuse," he said; "my grief is too deep for any hate. This is war!" "What will the girls say when they come back?" was the mother's next sob; "they loved the place: do you think they will know it?" I did not know how to reply. They retained my hands, and for a moment none of us spoke. "Don't think, Mr. Townsend," said the chivalrous old gentleman again, "that we like you less because some of your country people have stripped us. Mother, where is the gruel you made for him?" The good lady, expecting my return, had prepared some nourishing chicken soup, and directly she produced it. I think she took heart when I ate so plentifully, and we all spoke hopefully again. Their kindness so touched me, that as the evening came quietly about us, lengthening the shadows, and I knew that I must depart, I took both their hands again, doubtful what to say. "My friends,--may I say, almost my parents? for you have been as kind,--good by! In a day, perhaps, you will be with your children again. Richmond will be open to you. You may freely go and come. Be comforted by these assurances. And when the war is over,--God speed the time!--we may see each other under happier auspices." "Good by!" said Mr. Michie; "if I have a house at that time, you shall be welcome." "Good by," said Mrs. Michie; "tell your mother that a strange lady in Virginia took good care of you when you were sick." I waved a final adieu, vaulted down the lane, and the wood gathered its solemn darkness about me. When I emerged upon Savage's fields, a succession of terrible explosions shook the night, and then the flames flared up, at points along the railroad. They were blowing up the locomotives and burning the cars. At the same hour, though I could not see it, White House was wrapped in fire, and the last sutler, teamster, and cavalry-man had disappeared from the shores of the Pamunkey. I tossed through another night of fever, in the captain's tent of the Sturgis Rifles,--McClellan's body guard. And somehow, again, I dreamed fitfully of the unburied corpses on the field of Gaines's Mill. CHAPTER XVII. A BATTLE SUNDAY. In the dim of the morning of our Lord's Sabbath, the twenty-ninth of June, 1862, I sat in my saddle at Savage's. The gloom was very cheerless. A feeling of hopeless vagabondism oppressed me. I remembered the Disinherited Knight, the Wandering Jew, Robinson Crusoe, and other poor errants in the wide world, and wondered if any of them ever looked so ruefully as I, when the last wagon of the Grand Army disappeared through the shadow. The tent had been taken down at midnight. I had been dozing in the saddle, with parched lips and throbbing temples, waiting for my comrade. Head-quarters had been intending to move, without doing it, for four hours, and he informed me that it was well to stay with the Commanding General, as the Commanding General kept out of danger, and also kept in provisions. I was sick and petulant, and finally quarrelled with my friend. He told me, quietly, that I would regret my harshness when I should be well again. I set off for White Oak, but repented at "Burnt Chimneys," and turned back. In the misty dawn I saw the maimed still lying on the ground, wrapped in relics of blankets, and in one of the outhouses a grim embalmer stood amid a family of nude corpses. He dealt with the bodies of high officers only; for, said he-- "I used to be glad to prepare private soldiers. They were wuth a five dollar bill apiece. But, Lord bless you, a Colonel pays a hundred, and a Brigadier-General two hundred. There's lots of them now, and I have cut the acquaintance of everything below a Major. I might," he added, "as a great favor, do a Captain, but he must pay a Major's price. I insist upon that! Such windfalls don't come every day. There won't be another such killing for a century." A few horsemen of the escort loitered around head-quarters. All the tents but one had been removed, and the staff crouched sleepily upon the refuse straw. The rain began to drizzle at this time, and I unbuckled a blanket to wrap about my shoulders. Several people were lying upon dry places, here and there, and espying some planks a little remote, I tied my horse to a peach-tree, and stretched myself languidly upon my back. The bridal couch or the throne were never so soft as those knotty planks, and the drops that fell upon my forehead seemed to cool my fever. I had passed into a sort of cognizant sleep when a harsh, loud, cruel voice awakened me, and I seemed to see a great Polyphemus, stretching his hands into the clouds, and gaping like an earthquake. "Boy," I heard him say, to a slight figure, near at hand, "boy, what are you standing there for? What in ---- do you want?" "Nothing!" "Take it, and go, ---- ---- you! Take it, and go!" I peeped timorously from my place, and recognized the Provost-General of the Grand Army. He had been sleeping upon a camp chest, and did not appear to be refreshed thereby. "I feel sulky as ----!" he said to an officer adjoining; "I feel ---- bad-humored! Orderly!" "General!" "Whose horses are these?" "I don't know, General!" "Cut every ---- ---- one of 'em loose. Wake up these ---- ---- loafers with the point of your sabre! Every ---- ---- one of 'em! That's what I call ---- ----boldness!" He strutted off like the great Bomba or the Czar, and I thought I never beheld a more exceptional person in any high position. With a last look at Savage's white house, the abandoned wretches in the lawn, the blood-red hospital flag, the torn track and smouldering cars, I turned my face southward, crossed some bare plains, that had once been fields, and at eight o'clock passed down the Williamsburg road, toward Bottom Bridge. The original roadway was now a bottomless stretch of sand, full of stranded wheels, dead horses, shreds of blankets, discarded haversacks, and mounds of spilled crackers. Other routes for wagons had been opened across fields, over bluffs, around pits and bogs, and through thickets and woods. The whole country was crossed with deeply-rutted roads, as if some immense city had been lifted away, and only its interminably sinuous streets remained. Near Burnt Chimneys, a creek crossing the road made a ravine, and here I overtook the hindmost of the wagons. They had been stalled in the gorge, and a provost guard was hurrying the laggard teamsters. The creek was muddy beyond comparison, and at the next hill-top I passed "Burnt Chimneys," a few dumb witnesses that pointed to heaven. A mile or two further, I came to some of the retreating regiments, and also to five of the siege thirty-twos with which Richmond was to have been bombarded. The main army still lay back at their entrenchments to cover the retreat, and at ten o'clock I heard the roar of field guns; the pursuit had commenced, and the Confederates were pouring over the ramparts at Fairoaks. I did not go back; battles were of no consequence to me. I wanted some breakfast. If I could only obtain a cup of warm coffee and a fragment of meat, I thought that I might recover strength. But nothing could be obtained anywhere, for money or charity. The soldiers that I passed looked worn and hungry, for their predecessors had swept the country like herds of locusts; but one cheerful fellow, whom I addressed, produced a lump of fat pork that I tried to eat, but made a signal failure. All my baggage had been left at Michie's, where it remains to this moment. None cared to be hospitable to correspondents at this despondent hour, and a horrible idea of starvation took possession of my mind. A mile from White Oak Swamp, some distance back of the road, lay the Engineer Brigade. They were now on the eve of breaking camp, and when I reached Colonel McCloud Murphy's, his chests were packed, and all his provisions had gone ahead. He gave me, however, a couple of hard crackers and a draught of whiskey and quinine, whereby I rallied for a moment. At General Woodbury's I observed a middle-aged lady, making her toilet by a looking-glass hung against the tent-pole. She seemed as careful of her personal appearance, in this trying time, as if she had been at some luxurious court. There were several women on the retreat, and though the guns thundered steadily behind, they were never flurried, but could have received company, or accepted offers of marriage, with the utmost complacency. If there was any one that rouged, I am sure that no personal danger would have disturbed her while she heightened her roses; and she would have tied up her back hair in defiance of shell or grape. At Casey's ancient head-quarters, on the bluff facing White Oak Swamp, I found five correspondents. We fraternized immediately, and they all pooh-poohed the battle, as such an old story that it would be absurd to ride back to the field. We knew, however, that it was occurring at Peach Orchard, on a part of the old ground at Fairoaks. These gentlemen were in rather despondent moods, and there was one who opined that we were all to be made prisoners of war. In his own expressive way of putting it, we were to be "gobbled up." This person was stout and inclined to panting and perspiration. He wore glasses upon a most pugnacious nose, and his large, round head was covered with short, bristly, jetty hair. "I promised my wife," said this person, who may be called Cindrey, "to stay at home after the Burnside business. The Burnside job was very nearly enough for me. In fact I should have quite starved on the Burnside job, if I hadn't took the fever. And the fever kept me so busy that I forgot how hungry I was. So I lived over that." At this point he took off his glasses and wiped his face; the water was running down his cheeks like a miniature cataract, and his great neck seemed to emit jets of perspiration. "Well," he continued, "the Burnside job wasn't enough for me; I must come out again. I must follow the young Napoleon. And the young Napoleon has made a pretty mess of it. I never expect to get home any more; I know I shall be gobbled up!" A youngish, oldish, oddish fellow, whom they called "Pop," here told Mr. Cindrey to keep his pulse up and take a drink. A tall, large person, in semi-quaker garb, who did not look unlike George Fox, run to seed, said, with a flourish, that these battles were nothing to Shiloh. He was attached to the provincial press, and had been with the army of the West until recently. Without any exception, he was the "fussiest," most impertinent, most disagreeable man that I ever knew. He always made a hero of himself in his reports, and if I remember rightly, their headings ran after this fashion:-- "_Tremendous Battle at_ ROANOKE! _The Correspondent of_ THE BLUNDERBUSS _hoists the_ NATIONAL FLAG above the REBEL RAMPARTS!!!" or again--"_Grand Victory at_ SHILOH! _Mr. Twaddle, our Special Correspondent_, TAKEN PRISONER!!! _He_ ESCAPES!!! _He is_ FIRED UPON!!! _He wriggles through_ FOUR SWAMPS and SEVEN HOSTILE CAMPS! _He is_ AGAIN CAPTURED! _He_ STRANGLES _the sentry_! _He drinks the Rebel Commander, Philpot_, BLIND! _Philpot gives him_ THE PASSWORD!! --> _Philpot compliments the Blunderbuss._ <-- OUR _Correspondent gains the Gunboats_! _He is_ TAKEN ABOARD! _His welcome!_ _Description of_ HIS BOOTS! _Remarks, etc._, ETC., ETC!!!" This man was anxious to regulate not only his own newspaper, but he aspired to control the entire press. And his self adulation was incessant. He rung all the changes upon Shiloh. Every remark suggested some incident of Shiloh. He was a thorough Shilohite, and I regretted in my heart that the "Rebels" had not shut him away at Shiloh, that he might have enjoyed it to the end of his days. The man "Pop" produced some apple whiskey, and we repaired to a spring, at the foot of the hill, where the man "Pop" mixed a cold punch, and we drank in rotation. I don't think that Cindrey enjoyed his draught, for it filtered through his neck as if he had sprung a leak there; but the man Twaddle might have taken a tun, and, as the man "Pop" said, the effect would have been that of "pouring whiskey through a knot-hole." It was arranged among our own reporters, that I, being sick, should be the first of the staff to go to New York. The man "Pop" said jocosely, that I might be allowed to die in the bosom of my family. The others gave me their notes and lists, but none could give me what I most needed,--a morsel of food. At eleven o'clock our little party crossed White Oak Creek. There was a corduroy bridge upon which the teams travelled, and a log bridge of perilous unsteadiness for foot passengers. But the soldiers were fording the stream in great numbers, and I plunged my horse into the current so that he spattered a group of fellows, and one of them lunged at me with a bayonet. Beyond the creek and swamp, on the hillsides, baggage wagons and batteries were parked in immense numbers. The troops were taking positions along the edge of the bottom, to oppose incursions of the enemy, when they attempted pursuit, and I was told that the line extended several miles westward, to New Market Cross Roads, where, it was thought, the Confederates would march out from Richmond to offer battle. The roadway, beyond the swamp, was densely massed with horse, foot, cannon, and teams. The latter still kept toward the James, but the nags suffered greatly from lack of corn. Only indispensable material had been hauled from the Chickahominy, and the soldiers who fought the ensuing protracted battles were exhausted from hunger. Everything had an uncomfortable, transient, expectant appearance, and the feeble people that limped toward the _ultima thule_ looked fagged and wretched. There were some with balls in the groin, thigh, leg, or ankle, that made the whole journey, dropping blood at every step. They were afraid to lie down, as the wounded limbs might then grow rigid and stop their progress. While I pitied these maimed persons, I held the sick in greater sympathy. The troubles of the one were local; the others were pained in every bone. Bullets are fearful tenants, but fevers are worse. And some of the flushed, staggering folk, that reeled along the roadside, were literally out of their minds. They muttered and talked incoherently, and shouted ribald songs till my blood curdled to see them. At the first house on the right of the road, a half-mile past the Creek, I noticed many idle soldiers climbing the white palings, to watch something that lay in the yard. A gray-haired man was expiring, under the coolness of a spreading tree, and he was even now in the closing pangs. A comrade at his side bathed his brow with cool water, but I saw that he would shortly be with Lazarus or Dives. His hands were stretched stiffly by his sides, his feet were rigidly extended, and death was hardening into his bleached face. The white eyeballs glared sightlessly upward: he was looking into the other world. The heat at this time was so intolerable that our party, in _lieu_ of any other place of resort, resolved to go to the woods. The sun set in heaven like a fiery furnace, and we sweat at every pore. I was afraid, momentarily, of sunstroke, and my horse was bathed in foam. Some companies of cavalry were sheltered in the edges of the woods, and, having secured our nags, we penetrated the depths, and spread out our blankets that we might lie down. But no breath of air stirred the foliage. The "hot and copper sky" found counterpart in the burning earth, and innumerable flies and insects fastened their fangs in our flesh. Cindrey was upon the rack, and it seemed to me that he possessed a sort of capillary perspiration, for the drops stood at tips of each separate bristle. He appeared to be passing from the solid to the fluid state, and I said, ungenerously, that the existing temperature was his liquifying point. "Then," said the man "Pop," with a youngish, oldish smile, "we may as well liquor up." "I don't drink!" said Twaddle, with a flourish. "During all the perilous hours of Shiloh, I abstained. But I am willing to admit, in respect to heat, that Shiloh is nowhere at present. And, therefore, I drink with a protest." "No man can drink from my bottle, with a protest," said "Pop." "It isn't regular, and implies coercion. Now I don't coerce anybody, particularly you." "Oh!" said Twaddle, drinking like a fish, or, as "Pop" remarked, enough to float a gunboat; "oh! we often chaffed each other at Shiloh." "If you persist in reminding me of Shiloh," blurted Cindrey, "you'll be the ruin of me,--you and the heat and the flies. You'll have me dissolving into a dew." Here he wiped his forehead, and killed a large blue fly, that was probing his ear. We all resolved to go to sleep, and Twaddle said that _he_ slept like a top, in the heat of action, at Shiloh. "Pop" asked him, youngishly, to be kind enough to capture no redoubts while we slumbered, and not to raise the national flag over any ramparts for fifteen minutes. Then he grinned oldishly, and commenced to snore, with his flask in his bosom. I am certain that nobody ever felt a tithe of the pain, hunger, heat, and weariness, which agonized me, when I awoke from a half-hour's sweltering nap. My clothing was soaking with water; I was almost blind; somebody seemed to be sawing a section out of my head; my throat was hot and crackling; my stomach knew all the pangs of emptiness; I had scarcely strength to motion away the pertinacious insects. A soldier gave me a trifle of boiling water from his canteen; but I gasped for air; we were living in a vacuum. Sahara could not have been so fierce and burning. Two of us started off to find a spring. We made our way from shade to shade, expiring at every step, and finally, at the base of the hill, on the brink of the swamp, discovered a rill of tepid water, that evaporated before it had trickled a hundred yards. If a sleek and venomous water-snake--for there were thousands of them hereabout--had coiled in the channel, I would still have sucked the draught, bending down as I did. Then I bethought me of my pony. He had neither been fed nor watered for twenty hours, and I hastened to obtain him from his place along the woodside. To my terror, he was gone. Forgetful of my weakness, I passed rapidly, hither and thither, inquiring of cavalry-men, and entertaining suspicions of every person in the vicinity. Finally, I espied him in charge of a rough, thievish sabreman, who affected not to see me. I went up to the animal, and pulled the reins from his shoulder, to discover the brand mark,--"U. S." As I surmised, he had not been branded, and I turned indignantly upon the fellow:-- "My friend, how came you by this horse?" "Quartermaster!" said the man, guiltily. "No sir! He belongs to me. Take off that cavalry-saddle, and find mine, immediately." "Not if the court knows itself," said the man--"and it thinks it do!" "Then," said I, white with rage, "I shall report you at once, for theft." "You may, if you want to," replied the man, carelessly. I struck off at once for the new Provost Quarters, at a farm-house, close by. The possible failure to regain my animal, filled me with rueful thoughts. How was I, so dismounted, to reach the distant river? I should die, or starve, on the way. I thought I should faint, when I came to the end of the first field, and leaned, tremblingly, against a tree. I caught myself sobbing, directly, like a girl, and my mind ran upon the coolness of my home with my own breezy bedroom, soft paintings, and pleasant books. These themes tortured me with a consciousness of my folly. I had forsaken them for the wickednesses of this unhappy campaign. And my body was to blacken by the road-side,--the sable birds of prey were to be my mourners. But, looking through my tears, a moving something passed between me and the sky. A brownish bay pony, trailing a fence-rail by his halter, and browsing upon patches of oats. I whistled thrice and the faithful animal trotted to my feet, and extended his great nose to be rubbed. I believe that this horse was the only living thing in the army that sympathized with me. He knew that I was sick, and I thought once, that, like the great dogs of Saint Bernard, he was about to get upon his knees, that I might the more readily climb upon his back. He did, however, stand quietly, while I mounted, and I gave him a drink at the foot of the hill. Returning, I saw the soldier, wrongfully accused, eyeing me from his haunt beneath the trees. I at once rode over to him, and apologized for my mistake. "Never mind," said the man, complacently. "You was all right. I might a done the same thing. Fact is," he added, "I did hook this hoss, but I knew you wan't the party." During the rest of the day I travelled disconsolately, up and down the road, winding in and out of the lines of teams. I was assured that it would be impossible to get to the James till next day, as no portion of that army had yet advanced so far. The moody minutes of that afternoon made the longest part of my life, while the cannon at Peach Orchard and Savage's, roared and growled incessantly. Toward the close of the day I fell in with Captain Hill, of the New York Saratoga regiment, who gave me the outline of the fight. The Confederates had discovered that we were falling back, by means of a balloon, of home manufacture,--the first they had been able to employ during the entire war. They appeared at our entrenchments on Sunday morning, and finding them deserted, commenced an irregular pursuit, whereby, they received terrible volleys of musketry from ambuscaded regiments, and retired, in disorder, to the ramparts. This was the battle of "Peach Orchard," and was disastrous to the Southerners. In the afternoon, they again essayed to advance, but more cautiously. The Federals, meantime, lay in order of battle upon Savage's, Dudley's, and Crouch's farms, their right resting on the Chickahominy, their centre on the railroad, and their left beyond the Williamsburg turnpike. For a time, an artillery contest ensued, and the hospitals at Savage's, where the wounded lay, were thrice fired upon. The Confederates finally penetrated the dense woods that belted this country, and the battle, at nightfall, became fervid and sanguinary. The Federals held their ground obstinately, and fell back, covered by artillery, at midnight. The woods were set on fire, in the darkness, and conflagration painted fiery terrors on the sky. The dead, littered all the fields and woods. The retreating army had marked its route with corpses. This was the battle of "Savage's," and neither party has called it a victory. During the rest of the night the weary fugitives were crossing White Oak Creek and Swamp. Toward daybreak, the last battery had accomplished the passage; the bridge was destroyed; and preparations were made to dispute the pursuit in the morning. I noted these particulars and added to my lists of dead and captured. At dusk I was about to sleep, supperless, upon the bare ground, when my patron, Colonel Murphy, again came in sight, and invited me to occupy a shelter-tent, on the brow of the hill at White Oak. To my great joy, he was able to offer me some stewed beef, bread and butter, and hot coffee. I ate voraciously, seizing the food in my naked fingers, and rending it like a beast. The regiment of Colonel Murphy was composed of laborers, and artificers of every possible description. There were blacksmiths, moulders, masons, carpenters, boat-builders, joiners, miners, machinists, riggers, and rope-makers. They could have bridged the Mississippi, rebuilt the Tredegar works, finished the Tower of Babel, drained the Chesapeake, constructed the Great Eastern, paved Broadway, replaced the Grand Trunk railroad, or tunnelled the Straits of Dover. I have often thought that the real greatness of the Northern army lay in its ingenuity and industry, not in its military qualifications. Our conversation turned upon these matters, as we sat before the Colonel's tent in the evening, and a Chaplain represented the feelings of the North in this manner: "We must whip them. We have got more money, more men, more ships, more ingenuity. They are bound to knuckle at last. If we have to lose man for man with them, their host will die out before ours. And we wont give up the Union,--not a piece of it big enough for a bird or a bee to cover,--though we reduce these thirty millions one half, and leave only the women and children to inherit the land." The heart of the army was now cast down, though a large portion of the soldiers did not know why we were falling back. I heard moody, despondent, accusing mutterings, around the camp-fires, and my own mind was full of grief and bitterness. It seemed that our old flag had descended to a degenerate people. It was not now, as formerly, a proud recollection that I was an American. If I survived the retreat, it would become my mission to herald the evil tidings through the length and breadth of the land. If I fainted in their pursuit, a loathsome prison, or a grave in the trenches, were to be my awards. When I lay down in a shelter-tent, rolling from side to side, I remembered that this was the Sabbath day. A battle Sabbath! How this din and slaughter contrasted with my dear old Lord's days in the prayerful parsonage! The chimes in the white spire, where the pigeons cooed in the hush of the singing, were changed to cannon peals; and the boys that dozed in the "Amen corner," were asleep forever in the trampled grain-fields. The good parson, whose clauses were not less truthful, because spoken through his nose, now blew the loud trumpet for the babes he had baptized, to join the Captains of fifties and thousands; and while the feeble old women in the side pews made tremulous responses to the prayer for "thy soldiers fighting in thy cause," the banners of the Republic were craped, dusty, and bloody, and the scattered regiments were resting upon their arms for the shock of the coming dawn. Thus I thought, tossing and talking through the long watches, and toward morning, when sleep brought fever-dreams, a monstrous something leered at me from the blackness, saying, in a sort of music-- "Gobbled up! Gobbled up!" CHAPTER XVIII. BY THE RIVERSIDE. A crash and a stunning shock, as of a falling sphere, aroused me at nine o'clock. A shell had burst in front of our tent, and the enemy's artillery was thundering from Casey's old hill, beyond the swamp. As I hastily drew on my boots,--for I had not otherwise undressed,--I had opportunity to remark one of those unaccountable panics which develop among civilian soldiers. The camps were plunged into disorder. As the shells dropped here and there, among the tents and teams, the wildest and most fearful deeds were enacted. Here a caisson blew up, tearing the horses to pieces, and whirling a cannoneer among the clouds. There an ammunition wagon exploded, and the air seemed to be filled with fragments of wood, iron, and flesh. A boy stood at one of the fires, combing out his matted hair; suddenly his head flew off, spattering the brains, and the shell--which we could not see--exploded in a piece of woods, mutilating the trees. The effect upon the people around me was instantaneous and appalling. Some, that were partially dressed, took to their heels, hugging a medley of clothing. The teamsters climbed into the saddles, and shouted to their nags, whipping them the while. If the heavy wheels hesitated to revolve, they left horses and vehicles to their fate, taking themselves to the woods; or, as in some cases, cut traces and harness, and galloped away like madmen. In a twinkling our camps were almost deserted, and the fields, woods, and roads were alive with fugitives, rushing, swearing, falling, and trampling, while the fierce bolts fell momentarily among them, making havoc at every rod. To join this flying, dying mass was my first impulse; but after-thought reminded me that it would be better to remain. I must not leave my horse, for I could not walk the whole long way to the James, and the fever had so reduced me that I hardly cared to keep the little life remaining. I almost marvelled at my coolness; since, in the fulness of strength and health, I should have been one of the first of the fugitives; whereas, I now looked interestedly upon the exciting spectacle, and wished that it could be daguerreotyped. Before our artillery could be brought to play, the enemy, emboldened at his success, pushed a column of infantry down the hill, to cross the creek, and engage us on our camping-ground. For a time I believed that he would be successful, and in that event, confusion and ruin would have overtaken the Unionists. The gray and butternut lines appeared over the brow of the hill,--they wound at double quick through the narrow defile,--they poured a volley into our camps when half-way down, and under cover of the smoke they dashed forward impetuously, with a loud huzza. The artillery beyond them kept up a steady fire, raining shell, grape, and canister over their heads, and ploughing the ground on our side, into zigzag furrows,--rending the trees, shattering the ambulances, tearing the tents to tatters, slaying the horses, butchering the men. Directly Captain Mott's battery was brought to bear; but before he could open fire, a solid shot struck one of his twelve-pounders, breaking the trunnion and splintering the wheels. In like manner one of his caissons blew up, and I do not think that he was able to make any practise whatever. A division of infantry was now marched forward, to engage the Confederates at the creek side; but two of the regiments--and I think that one was the 20th New York--turned bodily, and could not be rallied. The moment was full of significance, and I beheld these failures with breathless suspense. In five minutes the pursuers would gain the creek, and in ten, drive our dismayed battalions, like chaff before the wind. I hurried to my horse, that I might be ready to escape. The shell and ball still made music around me. I buckled up my saddle with tremulous fingers, and put my foot upon the stirrup. But a cheer recalled me and a great clapping of hands, as at some clever performance in the amphitheatre. I looked again. A battery from our position across the road, had opened upon the Confederate infantry, as they reached the very brink of the swamp. For a moment the bayonets tossed wildly, the dense column staggered like a drunken man, the flags rose and fell, and then the line fell back disorderly. At that instant a body of Federal infantry, that I had not seen, appeared, as by invocation; their steel fell flashingly, a column of smoke enveloped them, the hills and skies seemed to split asunder with the shock,--and when I looked again, the road was strewn with the dying and dead; the pass had been defended. As the batteries still continued to play, and as the prospect of uninterrupted battle during the day was not a whit abated, I decided to resume my saddle, and, if possible, make my way to the James. The geography of the country, as I had deciphered it, satisfied me that I must pass "New Market," before I could rely upon my personal safety. New Market was a paltry cross-road's hamlet, some miles ahead, but as near to Richmond as White Oak Creek. The probabilities were, that the Confederates would endeavor to intercept us at this point, and so attack us in flank and rear. As I did not witness either of these battles, though I heard the discharge of every musket, it may be as well to state, in brief, that June 30 was marked by the bloodiest of all the Richmond struggles, excepting, possibly, Gaines's Mill. While the Southern artillery engaged Franklin's corps, at White Oak Crossing, and their left made several unavailing attempts to ford the creek with infantry,--their entire right and centre, marched out the Charles City Road, and gave impetuous battle at New Market. The accounts and the results indicate that the Federals won the day at New Market, sheerly by good fighting. They were parching with thirst, weak with hunger, and it might have been supposed that reverses had broken their spirit. On the contrary they did not fall back a rod, during the whole day, and at evening Heintzelman's corps crowned their success by a grand charge, whereat the Confederates broke and were pursued three miles toward Richmond. The gunboats Galena and Aroostook, lying in the James at Turkey Bend, opened fire at three o'clock, and killed promiscuously, Federals and Confederates. But the Southern soldiers were superstitious as to gunboats, and they could not be made to approach within range of the Galena's monstrous projectiles. I shall always recall my journey from White Oak to Harrison's Bar, as marked by constantly increasing beauties of scenery, and terrors of event. At every hoof-fall I was leaving the low, boggy, sparsely settled Chickahominy region, for the high farm-lands of the James. The dwellings, as I progressed, became handsome; the negro quarters were less like huts and cattle-sheds; the ripe wheatfields stretched almost to the horizon; the lawns and lanes were lined with ancient shade-trees; there were picturesque gates and lodges; the fences were straight and whitewashed, there were orchards, heavy with crimson apples, where the pumpkins lay beneath, like globes of gold, in the rows of amber corn. Into this patriarchal and luxuriant country, the retreating army wound like a great devouring serpent. It was to me, the coming back of the beaten _jetters_ through _Midgards_, or the repulse of the fallen angels from heaven, trampling down the river-sides of Eden. They rode their team-horses into the wavy wheat, and in some places, where the reapers had been at work, they dragged the sheaves from the stacks, and rested upon them. Hearing of the coming of the army, the proprietors had vainly endeavored to gather their crops, but the negroes would not work, and they had not modern implements, whereby to mow the grain rapidly. The profanation of those glorious stretches of corn and rye were to me some of the most melancholy episodes of the war. No mind can realize how the grain-fields used to ripple, when the fresh breezes blew up and down the furrows, and the hot suns of that almost tropical climate, had yielded each separate head till the whole landscape was like a bright cloud, or a golden sea. The tall, shapely stalks seemed to reach out imploringly, like sunny-haired virgins, waiting to be gathered into the arms of the farmer. They were the Sabine women, on the eve of the bridal, when the insatiate Romans tore them away and trampled them. The Indian corn was yet green, but so tall that the tasselled tops showed how cunningly the young ears were ripening. There were melons in the corn-rows, that a week would have developed, but the soldiers dashed them open and sucked the sweet water. They threw clubs at the hanging apples till the ground was littered with them, and the hogs came afield to gorge; they slew the hogs and divided the fresh pork among themselves. As I saw, in one place, dozens of huge German cavalry-men, asleep upon bundles of wheat, I recalled their Frankish forefathers, swarming down the Apennines, upon Italy. The air was so sultry during a part of the day, that one was constantly athirst. But there was a belt of country, four miles or more in width, where there seemed to be neither rills nor wells. Happily, the roads were, in great part, enveloped in stately timber, and the shade was very grateful to men and horses. The wounded still kept with us, and many that were fevered. They did not complain with words; but their red eyes and painful pace told all the story. If we came to rivulets, they used to lie upon their bellies, along the margins, with their heads in the flowing water. The nags were so stiff and hot, that, when they were reined into creeks, they refused to go forward, and my brown animal once dropped upon his knees, and quietly surveyed me, as I pitched upon my hands, floundering in the pool. I remember a stone dairy, such as are found upon Pennsylvania grazing farms, where I stopped to drink. It lay up a lane, some distance from the road, and two enormous tulip poplar trees sheltered and half-concealed it. A tiny creek ran through the dairy, over cool granite slabs, and dozens of earthen milk-bowls lay in the water, with the mould of the cream brimming at the surface. A pewter drinking-mug hung to a peg at the side, and there were wooden spoons for skimming, straining pails, and great ladles of gourd and cocoanut. A cooler, tidier, trimmer dairy, I had not seen, and I stretched out my body upon the dry slabs, to drink from one of the milk-bowls. The cream was sweet, rich, and nourishing, and I was so absorbed directly, that I did not heed the footfalls of a tall, broad, vigorous man, who said in a quiet way, but with a deep, sonorous voice, and a decided Northern twang-- "Friend, you might take the mug. Some of your comrades will want to drink from that bowl." I begged his pardon hastily, and said that I supposed he was the proprietor. "I reckon that I must give over my ownership, while the army hangs around here," said the man; "but I must endure what I can't cure." Here he smiled grimly, and reached down the pewter cup. Then he bent over a fresh bowl, and dexterously dipped the cup full of milk, without seeming to break the cream. "Drink that," he said; "and if there's any better milk in these parts, I want to know the man." He looked at me critically, while I emptied the vessel, and seemed to enjoy my heartiness. "If you had been smart enough to come this way, victorious," added the man, straightforwardly, "instead of being out-generalled, whipped, and driven, I should enjoy the loss of my property a great deal more!" There was an irresistible heartiness in his tone and manner. He had, evidently, resolved to bear the misfortunes of war bravely. "You are a Northern man?" I said, inquiringly. "How do you know?" "There are no such dairies in Virginia; a Virginian never dipped a mug of milk after your fashion; you haven't the Virginia inflection, and very weak Virginia principles." The man laughed dryly, and filled himself a cup, which he drank sedately. "I reckon you are correct," he said; "pretty much correct, any way. I'm a New Yorker, from the Mohawk Valley, and I have been showing these folks how they can't farm. If there's anybody that farms better than I do, I want to know the man!" He looked at the flowing water, the clean slabs and walls, the shining tins, and smacked his lips satisfactorily. I asked him if he farmed with negroes, and if the prejudices of the country affected either his social or industrial interests. He answered that he was obliged to employ negroes, as he had thrice tried the experiment of working with whites, but with ill success. "_I_ would have kept 'em," he added, in his great voice, closing a prodigious fist, "but the men would not stay. I couldn't make the neighbors respect them. There was nobody for 'em to associate with. They were looked upon as niggers, and they got to feel it after a while. So I have had only niggers latterly; but I get more work from them than any other man in these parts. If there's anybody that gets more work out of niggers than I do, I want to know the man!" There was a sort of hard, hearty defiance about him, typical of his severe, angular race, and I studied his large limbs and grim, full face with curious admiration. He told me that he hired his negro hands from the surrounding slave-owners, and that he gave them premiums upon excess of work, approximating to wages. In this way they were encouraged to habits of economy, perseverance, and sprightliness. "I don't own a nigger," he said, "not one! But I don't think a nigger's much too good to be a slave. I won't be bothered with owning 'em. And I won't be conquered into 'the institution.' I said, when I commenced, that I should not buy niggers, and I won't buy niggers, because I said so! As to social disadvantages, every Northern man has 'em here. They called me an abolitionist; and a fellow at the hotel in Richmond did so to my face. I knocked him into a heap, and nobody has meddled with me since." "Of course," he said, after a moment, "it won't do to inflame these people. These people are like my bulls, and you mustn't shake a red stick at 'em. Besides, I'm not a fanatic. I never was. My wife's one of these people, and I let her think as she likes. But, if there's anybody in these parts that wants to interfere with me, I should like to know the man!" The contemptuous tone in which he mentioned "these people" amused me infinitely, and I believed that his resolute, indomitable manner would have made him popular in any society. He was shrewd, withal, and walked beside me to his gate. When the regiments halted to rest, by the wayside, he invited the field officers to the dairy, and so obtained guards to rid him of depredators. He would have escaped very handsomely, but the hand of war was not always so merciful, and a part of the battle of Malvern Hills was fought upon his property. I have no doubt that he submitted unflinchingly, and sat more stolidly amid the wreck than old Marius in battered Carthage. Until two o'clock in the afternoon I rode leisurely southward, under a scorching sky, but still bearing up, though aflame with fever. The guns thundered continuously behind, and the narrow roads were filled, all the way, with hurrying teams, cavalry, cannon, and foot soldiers. I stopped, a while, by a white frame church,--primly, squarely built,--and read the inscriptions upon the tombs uninterestedly. Some of the soldiers had pried open the doors, and a wounded Zouave was delivering a mock sermon from the pulpit. Some of his comrades broke up the meeting by singing-- "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave," and then a Major ordered them out, and put a guard upon the building. The guard played cards upon the door sills. I was frequently obliged, by the crowded state of the roads, to turn aside into woods, fens, and fields, and so make precarious progress. Sometimes I strayed, unwittingly, a good way from the army, and recovered the route with difficulty. On one of these occasions, I was surprised by a person in civil dress, who seemed to shoot up out of the ground. He was the queerest, grimmest, fearfulest man that I have ever known, and, at first, I thought that the arch fiend had appeared before me. The wood was very deep here, and there were no wayfarers but we two. It was quite still; but now and then we heard the rumble of wagons, and the crack of teamster's whips. The man in question wore dead black beard, and his eyebrows were of the same intense, lustreless hue. So were his eyes and his hair; but the latter formed a circle or cowl around his head. He had a pale skin, his fingers, were long and bony, and he rode dexterously in and out, among the tree boles, with his hat in his hand. His horse was as black as himself, and, together, they made a half-brigandish, half-satanic appearance. I reined in sharply, when I saw this person, and he looked at me like the evil-eye, through his great owlish orbs. "Good day," he said, in profound basso, as low I think as "double G," and when he opened his mouth, I saw that his teeth were very white. I saluted him gravely, and, not without a shudder, rode beside him. He proved to be a sort of Missionary, from the Evangelical religious denominations of the North, to inquire into the spiritual condition of the soldiers. Camps were full of such people, but I had not found any man who appeared to be less qualified for his vocation; to have such a figure at one's deathbed, would be like a foretaste of the great fiend. He had a fashion of working his scalp half way down to his eyes, as he spoke, and when he smiled,--though he never laughed aloud,--his eyelashes did not contract, as with most people, but rather expanded, till his eyeballs projected from his head. On such occasions, his white teeth were revealed like a row of fangs, and his leprous skin grew yet paler. "The army has not even the form of godliness," said this man. In the course of his remarks, he had discovered that I was a correspondent, and at once turned the conversation into a politico-religious channel. "The form of godliness is gone," said the man again in "double G." "This is a calamitous fact! I would it were not so! I grieve to state it! But inquiry into the fact, has satisfied me that the form of godliness does not exist. Ah!" When the man said "Ah!" I thought that my horse would run away, and really, the tone was like the deep conjuration in Hamlet: "_swear-r-r-r_!" "For example," said the man, who told me that his name was Dimpdin,--"I made some remarks to the 1st New Jersey, on Sabbath week. The field officers directed the men to attend; I opened divine service with a feeling hymn; a very feeling hymn! A long measure hymn. By Montgomery! I commenced earnestly in prayer. In appropriate prayer! I spoke advisedly for a short hour. What were the results? The deplorable results? There were men, sir, in that assembly, who went to sleep. To sleep!" He must have gone a great way below "double G," this time, and I did not see how he could get back. He drew his scalp quite down to the bridge of his nose, and, seeing that my horse pricked up his ears, timorously smiled like the idol of Baal. "There were men, sir, who did worse. Not simply failing to be hearers of the word! But doers of evil! Men who played cards during the service. Played cards! Gambled! Gambled! And some,--abandoned wretches!--who mocked me! Lifted up their voices and mocked! Mockers, gamblers, slumberers!" I never heard anything so awful as the man Dimpdin's voice, at the iteration of these three words. They seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, and rang through the wood like the growl of a lion. He told me that he was engaged upon a Memorial to the Evangelical Union, which should state the number of unconverted men in the ranks, and the number of castaways. He accredited the loss of the campaign to the prevailing wickedness, but was unwilling to admit that the Southern troops were more religious. His theory of reform, if I remember it, embraced the raising of Chaplains to the rank of Major, with proportionate pay and perquisites, the establishment of a military religious bureau, and a Chaplain-General with Aides. Each soldier, officer, teamster, and drummer-boy was to have a Testament in his knapsack, and services should be held on the eve of every battle, and at roll-call in the mornings. There was to be an inspection of Testaments as of muskets. For swearing, a certain sum should be subtracted from the soldier's pay, and conferred upon the Chaplains. "In fact," said Dimpdin, tragically,--scalping himself meanwhile,--"the church must be recognized in every department, and if my Memorial be acted upon favorably, we shall have such victories, in three months, as will sweep Rebellion into the grave. Yes! Into the grave! The grave!" I was obliged to say, here, that my horse could not stand these sepulchral noises, and that my nerves, being shattered by the fever, were inadequate to bear the shock. So the man Dimpdin smiled, like a window-mummy, and contented himself with looking like Apollyon. We reached a rill directly, and he produced a wicker flask, with a Britannia drinking-case. "Young men love stimulating drinks," said Dimpdin,--"strong drinks! alcoholic drinks! Here is a portion of Monongahela! old Monongahela! We will refresh ourselves!" He found a lemon, accidentally, in his saddle-bag, and contrived an informal punch, with wonderful dexterity. I took a draught modestly, and he emptied the rest, with an "Ah!" that shook the woods. I wondered if the man Dimpdin would suggest the apportionment of flasks to soldiers, in his Evangelical report! He left me, when we regained the road, to ride with a lithe, bronchial person, in white neckcloth and coat cut close at the collar. They looked like the fox and the fiend, in the fable, and I seemed to hear the man Dimpdin's voice for three succeeding weeks. At three o'clock, I climbed a gentle hill,--and I was now very weary and weak,--and from the summit, looked upon the river James, flowing far off to the right, through woods, and bluffs, and grainfields, and reedy islands. At last, I had gained the haven. The bright waters below me seemed to cool my red, fiery eyes, and a sort of blessed blindness fell for a time upon me, so that, when I looked again my lashes were wet. The prospect was truly beautiful. Far to the west, standing out from the chalky bluffs, were scattered the white camps of Wise's Confederate brigade. Beyond, on the remote bank of the river, lay farm-lands, and stately mansions, and some one showed me, rising faintly in the distance, "Drury's Bluff," the site of Fort Darling, where the gunboats were repulsed in the middle of May. Below, in the river, lay the _Galena_, and a little way astern, the _Aroostook_. Signal-men, with flags, were elevated upon the masts of each, and the gunners stood upon the decks, as waiting some emergency. The vessels had steam up, and seemed to be ready for action at any moment. This was Grand Turkey Bend, and the rising ground on which I stood, was known as "Malvern Hills." A farm-house lay to my left, and repairing thither, I cast myself from the nag, and lay down in the shady yard, thankful that I had reached the haven, and only solicitous now to escape the further privations of McClellan's Peninsular Campaign. CHAPTER XIX. THE HOSPITAL TRANSPORT. An earnest desire now took possession of me, to be the first of the correspondents to reach New York. The scenes just transpired had been unparalleled in the war, and if, through me, the ---- should be the first to make them public, it would greatly redound to my credit. Perhaps no profession imparts an enthusiasm in any measure kindred to that of the American Newsgatherer. I was careless of the lost lives and imperilled interests, the suffering, the defeat: no emotions either of the patriot or the man influenced me. I only thought of the _eclat_ of giving the story to the world, and nurtured an insane desire to make to Fortress Monroe, by some other than the common expedient. That this was a paltry ambition I know; but I write what happened, and to the completion of my sketch of a correspondent, this is necessary to be said. I found Glumley at the old mansion referred to, and stealthily suggested to him the seizing of an open boat, whereby we might row down to the Fortress. He rejected it as impracticable, but was willing to hazard a horseback ride down the Peninsula. I knew that this would not do, and after a short time I continued my journey down the riverside, hopeful of finding some transport or Despatch boat. I was now in Charles City County, and the river below me was dotted with woodland islands. I soon got upon the main road to Harrison's Point or Bar, and followed the stream of ambulances and supply teams for more than an hour. At last we reached a diverging lane, through which we passed to a landing, close to a fine dwelling, whose style of architecture I may denominate, the "Gothic run mad." An old cider-press was falling into rottenness on the lawn; four soldiers were guarding the well, that the mob might not exhaust its precious contents, and between some negro-huts and the brink of the bluff, stood a cluster of broad-armed trees, beneath whose shade the ambulance-drivers were depositing the wounded. I have made these chapters sufficiently hideous, without venturing to transcribe these new horrors. Suffice it to say that the men whom I now beheld had been freshly brought from the fight of New Market, and were suffering the first agonies of their wounds. One hour before, they had felt all the lustiness of life and adventure. Now, they were whining like babes, and some had expired in the ambulances. The act of lifting them to the ground so irritated their wounds that they howled dismally, and yet were so exhausted that after lying upon the ground awhile, they quietly passed into sleep. Such are the hardening results of war, that some soldiers, who were unhurt, actually refused to give a trifle of river water from their canteens to their expiring comrades. At one time a brutal wrangle occurred at the well, and the guard was compelled to seek reinforcement, or the thirsty people would have massacred them. I was now momentarily adding to my notes of the battles, and the wounded men very readily gave me their names; for they were anxious that the account of their misfortunes should reach their families, and I think also, that some martial vanity lingered, even among those who were shortly to crumble away. A longboat came in from the Galena, after a time, and General McClellan, who had ridden down to the pier, was taken aboard. He looked to be very hot and anxious, and while he remained aboard the vessel, his staff dispersed themselves around the banks and talked over the issues of the contest. As the General receded from the strand, every sweep of the long oars was responded to from the hoarse cannon of the battle-field, and when he climbed upon deck, the steamer moved slowly up the narrow channel, and the signal-man in the foretop flourished his crossed flag sturdily. Directly, the _Galena_ opened fire from her immense pieces of ordnance, and the roar was so great that the explosions of field-guns were fairly drowned. She fired altogether by the direction of the signals, as nothing could be seen of the battle-field from her decks. I ascertained afterward that she played havoc with our own columns as well as the enemy's, but she brought hope to the one, and terror to the other. The very name of gunboat affrighted the Confederates, and they were assured, in this case, that the retreating invaders, had at length reached a haven. The _Galena_ kept up a steady fire till nightfall, and the Federals, taking courage, drove their adversaries toward Richmond, at eve. Meanwhile the Commanding General's escort and body-guard had encamped around us, and during the night the teams and much of the field cannon fell back. I obtained shelter and meals from Quartermaster Le Duke of Iowa, whose canvas was pitched a mile or more below, and as I tossed through the watches I heard the splashing of water in the river beneath, where the tired soldiers were washing away the powder of the battle. In the morning I retraced to head-quarters, and vainly endeavored to learn something as to the means of going down the river. Commanders are always anxious to grant correspondents passes after a victory; but they wish to defer the unwelcome publication of a defeat. I was advised by Quartermaster-General Van Vliet, however, to proceed to Harrison's Bar, and, as I passed thither, the last day's encounters--those of "Malvern Hills"--occurred. The scenes along the way were reiterations of terrors already described,--creaking ambulances, staggering foot soldiers, profane wagoners, skulking officers and privates, officious Provost guards, defiles, pools and steeps packed with teams and cannon, wayside houses beset with begging, gossiping, or malicious soldiers, and wavy fields of wheat and rye thrown open to man and beast. I was amused at one point, to see some soldiers attack a beehive that they might seize the honey. But the insects fastened themselves upon some of the marauders, and after indescribable cursing and struggling, the bright nectar and comb were relinquished by the toilers, and the ravishers gorged upon sweetness. Harrison's Bar is simply a long wharf, extending into the river, close by the famous mansion, where William Henry Harrison, a President of the United States, was born, and where, for two centuries, the scions of a fine old Virginia family have made their homestead. The house had now become a hospital, and the wounded were being conveyed to the pier, whence they were delivered over to some Sanitary steamers, for passage to Northern cities. I tied my horse to the spokes of a wagon-wheel, and asked a soldier to watch him, while I repaired to the quay. A half drunken officer was guarding the wharf with a squad of men, and he denied me admittance, at first, but when I had said something in adulation of his regiment--a trick common to correspondents--he passed me readily. The ocean steamer _Daniel Webster_ was about being cast adrift when I stepped on board, and Colonel Ingalls, Quartermaster in charge, who freely gave me permission to take passage in her, advised me not to risk returning to shore. So, reluctantly, I resigned my pony, endeared to me by a hundred adventures, and directly I was floating down the James, with the white teams and the tattered groups of men, receding from me, and each moment the guns of Malvern Hills growing fainter. Away! praised be a merciful God! away from the accursed din, and terror, and agony, of my second campaign,--away forever from the Chickahominy. For awhile I sat meditatively in the bow of the boat, full of strange perplexities and thankfulness. I had escaped the bullet, and fever, and captivity, and a great success in my profession was about to be accorded to me, but there was much work yet to be done. The rough material I had for a grand account of the closing of the campaign; but these fragmentary figures and notes must be wrought into narrative, and to avail myself of their full significance, I must lose no moment of application. I found that I was one of four correspondents on board, and we resolved to district the boat, each correspondent taking one fourth of the names of the sick and wounded. The spacious saloons, the clean deck, the stairways, the gangways, the hold, the halls,--all were filled with victims. They lay in rows upon straw beds, they limped feverishly here and there; some were crazed from sunstroke, or gashes; and one man that I remember counted the rivets in the boilers over the whole hundred miles of the journey, while another,--a teamster,--whipped and cursed his horses as if he had mistaken the motion of the boat for that of his vehicle. The _Daniel Webster_ was one of a series of transports supplied for the uses of the wounded by a national committee of private citizens. Her wood work was shining and glossy, her steel shone like mirrors, and she was cool as Paradise. Out of the smoke, and turmoil, and suffocation of battle these wretched men had emerged, to enjoy the blessedness, unappreciated before, of shelter, and free air and cleanliness. There was ice in abundance on board, and savory lemonade lay glassily around in great buckets. Women flitted from group to group with jellies, _bonbons_, cigars, and oranges, and the grateful eyes of the prostrate people might have melted one to tears. These women were enthusiasts of all ages and degrees, who proffered themselves, at the beginning of the war, as stewardesses and nurses. From the fact that some of them were of masculine natures, or, in the vocabulary of the times, "strong-minded," they were the recipients of many coarse jests, and imputations were made upon both their modesty and their virtue. But I would that any satirist had watched with me the good offices of these Florence Nightingales of the West, as they tripped upon merciful errands, like good angels, and left paths of sunshine behind them. The soldiers had seen none of their countrywomen for months, and they followed these ambassadors with looks half-idolatrous, half-downcast, as if consciously unworthy of so tender regard. "If I could jest die, now," said one of the poor fellows to me, "with one prayer for my country, and one for that dear young lady!" There was one of these daughters of the good Samaritan whose face was so full of coolness, and her robes so airy, flowing, and graceful, that it would have been no miracle had she transmuted herself to something divine. She was very handsome, and her features bore the imprint of that high enthusiasm which may have animated the maid of Arc. One of the more forward of the correspondents said to her, as she bore soothing delicacies to the invalids, that he missed the satisfaction of being wounded, at which she presented an orange and a cigar to each of us in turn. Among the females on board, I remarked one, very large, angular, and sanguine, who sat at a small table, dispensing luxuries with the manners of a despot and the charity of a child. She had a large vessel of boiling coffee, from which she drew spicy quantities at intervals; and when the troops thronged around eagerly, she rebuked the more forward, and called up some emaciated, bashful fellows, giving them the preference. Every soldier who accepted coffee was obliged to take a religious tract, and she gave them away with a grim satisfaction that was infinitely amusing and interesting. I ventured to ask this imperative person for a bottle of ink, and after some difficulty,--arising out of a mistaken notion on her part that I was dangerously wounded,--she vaulted over a chair, and disappeared into a state-room. When she returned, her arms were filled with a perfect wilderness of stationery, and having supplied each of us in turn, she addressed herself to me in the following sententious manner:-- "See here! You reporter! (There's ink!) I want to be put in the newspapers! Look at me! Now! Right straight! (Pens?) Here I am; thirteen months at work; been everywhere; done good; country; church; never noticed. Never!--Now! I want to be put in newspapers." At this point the Imperatress was called off by some soldiers, who presumed to draw coffee without her consent. She slapped one of them soundly, and at once overpowered him with kindnesses, and tracts; then she returned and gave me a photograph, representing herself with a basket of fruit, and a quantity of good books. I took note of her name, but unfortunately lost the memorandum, and unless she has been honored by some more careful scribe, I fear that her labors are still unrecognized. During much of the trip, I wrote material parts of my report, copied portions of my lists, and managed before dusk, to get fairly underway with my narrative. From the deck of the steamer I beheld at five o'clock, what I had long wished to see,--the famous island of Jamestown, celebrated in the early annals of the New World, as the home of John Smith, and of Nathaniel Bacon, and as the resort of the Indian Princess, Pocahontas. A single fragment of a tower, the remnant of the Colonial church, was the only ruin that I could see. At seven o'clock we dropped anchor in Hampton Roads, and a boat let down from the davits. Some of my wily compeers endeavored to fill all the stern seats, that I might not be pulled to shore; but I swung down by a rope, and made havoc with their shins, so that they gained nothing; the surf beat so vehemently against the pier at Old Point, that we were compelled to beach the boat, and I ran rapidly through the ordnance yard to the "Hygeia House," where our agent boarded; he had gone into the Fortress to pass the night, and when I attempted to follow him thither, a knot of anxious idlers, who knew that I had just returned from the battle-fields, attempted to detain me by sheer force. I dashed rapidly up the plank walk, reached the portal, and had just vaulted into the area, when the great gates swung to, and the tattoo beat; at the same instant the sergeant of guard challenged me:-- "Who comes there? Stand fast! Guard prime!" A dozen bright musket-barrels were levelled upon me, and I heard the click of the cocks as the fingers were laid upon the triggers. When I had explained, I was shown the Commandant's room, and hastening in that direction, encountered Major Larrabee, my old patron of the fifth Wisconsin regiment. He took me to the barracks, where a German officer, commanding a battery, lodged, and the latter accommodated me with a camp bedstead. Here I related the incidents of the engagements, and before I concluded, the room was crowded with people. I think that I gave a sombre narration, and the hearts of those who heard me were cast down. Still, they lingered; for the bloody story possessed a hideous fascination, and I was cross-examined so pertinaciously that my host finally arose, protesting that I needed rest, and turned the party out of the place. The old fever-dreams returned to me that night, and my brain spun round for hours before I could close my eyes. CHAPTER XX. ON FURLOUGH AWHILE. Counter winds and tides had so delayed the _Adelaide_, on which I departed for New York with my despatches, that it became a doubtful question as to whether we could make connection with the early train for New York. The captain shook his head distrustfully when he had looked at his watch, and told me that he frequently failed to land his passengers in time. The bitterness of the doubt so troubled me, that I paced the decks, looking at the approaching city, and thinking that all my labor was to be disappointed in the end. I could not telegraph my narrative and lists, for Government controlled the wires; and moreover, the Associated Press regulations forbade any newspaper to telegraph exclusive news from any point but Washington. I half resolved to hire a special locomotive, but it was doubtful that the railway authorities could procure one, at 60 short notice. Unless I overtook the eight o'clock A. M. train, I could not get to New York before two o'clock next morning,--too late for the press. Besides, how did I know that some correspondent had not reached Washington, by way of one of the Potomac vessels, and so forestalled me? Here was an opportunity to be the first of all our correspondents to publish the incidents and results of six days' stupendous warfare,--but escaping at the very moment of realization. The seconds were hours as we swept past Fort Carroll, rounded Fort McHenry, and swung toward our moorings, under Fort Federal Hill. "If we make a prompt landing," said the Captain, "you may barely get the train." I stood with my bundles of notes upon the high deck, and signalled a cab-driver. He caught the precious manuscript, and bolted for his cab. In another second he was 'dashing like a runaway up the pier, over the bridge, through Pratt Street, and--out of sight. Slowly the great hulk turned awkwardly about; one turn of her paddles brought us close enough to fling a rope, a second drew her very near the shore; the distance was fearful, but I braced myself for the leap. "Stand clear!" I called to the score of hackmen. A little run, a spring,--and I fell upon my feet, rolled over upon my face, gathered myself to the arms of all the Jehus, and was carried off bodily by a man with a great knob on his forehead as big as the end of his whip-handle. "G'lang! Who-o-o-oh! Swis-s-s!" I think that I promised that man everything under the sun to catch the train. I recollect that the knob on his forehead grew black and bulging as he lashed his horse. I found myself standing up in the cab, screaming like the driver. We were both insane, and the horse must have been of the breed of _Pegasus_, for I could feel the vehicle gyrating in the air. Now we turned a lamp-post, and the glass splintered somewhere; a dog howled as we drove over his appendage; a woman with a baby gave a short scream and disappeared into the earth; a policeman gave chase, but we laughed him to scorn. Huzza! Here we are! The train stands puffing at the long platform. "Your bundle, yer honor! Wasn't I the boy to make the keers?" "Didn't I projuce yer honor in good time, sur?" I only know that I flung a greenback to the two,--that I vainly besought the ticket agent to give me no change, but consign it to the first engineer who failed to make time,--that I wrote on the back of my hat for four hours,--that I devoured a chicken and as many eggs as she had laid in a lifetime, at Havre de Grace,--that I leaped upon the platform at Broad and Prime streets, Philadelphia, at noon,--that I plunged into a cab, and said, significantly-- "New York Ferry!" It chafed me to pass through the promenade street of my home-city, without a moment to spare for my family or friends. The cab-horse slipped in Chestnut Street, and I went over the rest of the route on foot, at a dog-trot pace, passing in various quarters for a sportsman, a professional runner, and a lunatic. I was greatly aggravated between Amboy and Camden, by persons making inquiries for brothers, sons, and acquaintances. At last, when I attained the steamer, the Captain kindly shut me up in his office, and I went on with my narrative till my eyes were burning and my hands failed in their function. Kill von Kull and its picturesque shores went by; we emerged into the beautiful bay, and winding among its buoys, harbor lights, and shipping, came to, at length, at the foot of Christopher Street. I repaired to the office at once, and wrote far into the night, refraining, finally, from sheer blindness and exhaustion, and dropped asleep in the carriage as I was taken toward the Metropolitan Hotel. The next day was Friday, July 4, the anniversary of American Independence, and my version of the six-days' battles caused universal gloom and grief. I had furnished five pages or forty columns of closely printed matter, and thousands of tremulous fingers were tracing out the names of their dead dear ones, while I sipped my wine and rehearsed for the hundredth time, the incidents of the retreat to a multitude of men. Cards and letters came to me by the gross, from bereaved countrymen, and I was obliged, finally, to add a postscript to my account, and a protest that I knew no more, and could answer no interrogatories. A bath, fresh clothing, and rich food so far improved my appearance in a few days, that I presented no other traces of sickness and travel than a sunburnt face, and a rheumatic walk. With restoration came a revival of old desires, appetites, and attachments. It required one additional campaign to sober me in these respects, and I was not a little relieved, to receive an order on the fourth day, to proceed to Washington, and attach myself to the "Army of Virginia" at the head of which Major-General John Pope had just been placed. After two quieter days' enjoyment, in the Quaker City, I reported myself at the Capital, but was debarred from taking the field at once, owing to the tardiness of the new Commander. For two weeks or more, I loitered around Washington, and although the time passed monotonously, I saw many persons and events which have much to do with the history of the Rebellion. The story of "Washington During the War" has yet to be written in all its vividness of enterprise, devotion, and infamy. It has been, in periods of peace, a dull, dolorous town, of mammoth hotels, paltry dwellings, empty lots, prodigiously wide avenues, a fossil population, and a series of gigantic public buildings, which seemed dropped by accident into a fifth-rate backwoods settlement. During the sessions Washington was overrun with "Smartness": Smart pages, smart messengers, smart cabmen, smart publicans, smart politicians, smart women, smart scoundrels! Greatness became commonplace here, and Mr. Douglas might drink at Willard's Bar, with none so poor to do him reverence, or General Winfield Scott strut like a colossus along "the Avenue," and the sleepy negroes upon their backs would give him the attention of only one eye. It was interesting, to notice how rapidly provincial eminence lost caste here. Slipkins, who was "Honorable" at home, and of whom his county newspaper said that "this distinguished fellow citizen of ours will be heard from, among the greatest of the free,"--Slipkins moved to and fro unnoticed, and voted with his party, and drank much brandy and water, and left no other record at the Capital than some unpaid bills, and perhaps an unacknowledged heir. A gaping rustic and his new bride, or a strolling foreigner, marvelling and making notes at every turn, might be observed in the Patent Office examining General Washington's breeches, but these were at once called "greenies," and people put out their tongues and winked at them. The Secretaries' ladies gave parties now and then, attended by the folks who sold them horses, or carpets, or wines; the President gave a "levee," whereat a wonderfully Democratic horde gathered to pinch his hands and ogle his lady; the Marine band (in _red_ coats), played twice a week in the Capital grounds, and Senators, Cyprians, Ethiops, and children rallied to enjoy; a theatre or two played time-honored dramas with Thespian companies; a couple of scholars lectured in the sombre Smithsonian Institution; an intrigue and a duel filled some most doleful hiatus; and a clerk absconded with half a million, or an Indian agent robbed the red men and fell back to the protection of his "party." A very dismal, a very dirty, and a very Democratic settlement was the American Capital, till the war came. Even the war lost half its interest in Washington. A regiment marching down Broadway was something to see, but the same regiment in Pennsylvania Avenue looked mean and matter-of-fact. A General in the field, or riding uncovered through Boston or Baltimore, or even lounging at the bar of the Continental or the Astor House or the Tremont, was invested with an atmosphere half heroic, half poetic; but Generals in Washington may be counted by pairs, and I used to sit at dinner with eight or a dozen of them in my eye. There was the new Commander-in-Chief, Halleck, a short, countryfied person, whose blue coat was either threadbare or dusty, or lacked some buttons, and who picked his teeth walking up and down the halls at Willard's, and argued through a white, bilious eye and a huge mouth. There was General Mitchel, also, who has since passed away,--a little, knotty gentleman, with stiff, gray, Jacksonian hair. And General Sturgis passed in and out perpetually, with impressive, individual Banks, or some less prominent person, all of them wearing the gold star upon their shoulders, and absolute masters of some thousands of souls. The town, in fact, was overrun with troops. Slovenly guards were planted on horseback at crossings, and now and then they dashed, as out of a profound sleep, to chase some galloping cavalier. Gin and Jews swarmed along the Avenue, and I have seen gangs of soldiers of rival regiments, but oftener of rival nationalities, pummelling each other in the highways, until they were marched off by the Provosts. The number of houses of ill-fame was very great, and I have been told that Generals and Lieutenants of the same organization often encountered and recognized each other in them. Contractors and "jobbers" used to besiege the offices of the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the venerable Welles (who reminded me of Abraham in the lithographs), and the barnacled Stanton, seldom appeared in public. Simple-minded, straightforward A. Lincoln, and his ambitious, clever lady, were often seen of afternoons in their barouche; the little old-fashioned Vice-President walked unconcernedly up and down; and when some of the Richmond captives came home to the Capital, immense meetings were held, where patriotism bawled itself hoarse. A dining hour at Willard's was often wondrously adapted for a historic picture, when accoutred officers, and their beautiful wives,--or otherwise,--sat at the _table d'-hôte_, and sumptuous dishes flitted here and there, while corks popped like so many Chinese crackers, and champagne bubbled up like blood. At night, the Provost Guard enacted the farce of coming by deputations to each public bar, which was at once closed, but reopened five minutes afterward. Congress water was in great demand for weak heads of mornings, and many a young lad, girt up for war, wasted his strength in dissipation here, so that he was worthless afield, and perhaps died in the hospital. The curse of civil war was apparent everywhere. One had but to turn his eye from the bare Heights of Arlington, where the soldiers of the Republic lay demoralized, to the fattening vultures who smoked and swore at the National, to see the true cause of the North's shortcomings,--its inherent and almost universal corruption. Human nature was here so depraved, that man lost faith in his kind. Death lurked behind ambuscades and fortifications over the river, but Sin, its mother, coquetted _here_, and as an American, I often went to bed, loathing the Capital, as but little better than Sodom, though its danger had called forth thousands of great hearts to throb out, in its defence. For every stone in the Capitol building, a man has laid down his life. For every ripple on the Potomac, some equivalent of blood has been shed. I lodged for some time in Tenth Street, and took my meals at Willard's. The legitimate expenses of living in this manner were fourteen dollars a week; but one could board at Kirkwood's or Brown's for seven or eight dollars, very handsomely. A favorite place of excursion, near the city, was "Crystal Spring," where some afternoon orgies were enacted, which should have made the sun go into eclipse. I repaired once to Mount Vernon, and looked dolorously at the tomb of the _Pater Patris_, and once to Annapolis, on the Chesapeake, which the war has elevated into a fine naval station. At length Pope's forces were being massed along the line of the Rappahannock, below the Occoquan river, and upon the "Piedmont" highlands. "Piedmont" is the name applied to the fine table-lands of Northern Virginia, and the ensuing campaign has received the designation of the "Piedmont Campaign." Pope's army proper was composed of three corps, commanded respectively by Generals Irvin McDowell, Franz Siegel, and Nathaniel P. Banks. But a portion of General McClellan's peninsular army had meantime returned to the Potomac, and the corps of General Burnside was stationed at Fredericksburg, thirty miles or more below Pope's head-quarters at Warrenton. I presented myself to General Pope on the 12th of July, at noon. His Washington quarters consisted of a quiet brick house, convenient to the War office, and the only tokens of its importance were some guards at the threshold, and a number of officers' horses, saddled in the shade of some trees at the curb. The lower floor of the dwelling was appropriated to quartermasters' and inspectors' clerks, before whom a number of people were constantly presenting themselves, with applications for passes;--sutlers, in great quantities, idlers, relic-hunters, and adventurers in still greater ratio, and, last of all, citizens of Virginia, solicitous to return to their farms and families. The mass of these were rebuffed, as Pope had inaugurated his campaign with a show of severity, even threatening to drive all the non-combatants out of his lines, unless they took the Federal oath of allegiance. He gave me a pass willingly, and chatted pleasantly for a time. In person he was dark, martial, and handsome,--inclined to obesity, richly garbed in civil cloth, and possessing a fiery black eye, with luxuriant beard and hair. He smoked incessantly, and talked imprudently. Had he commenced his career more modestly, his final discomfiture would not have been so galling; but his vanity was apparent to the most shallow observer, and although he was brave, clever, and educated, he inspired distrust by his much promising and general love of gossip and story-telling. He had all of Mr. Lincoln's garrulity (which I suspect to be the cause of their affinity), and none of that good old man's unassuming common sense. The next morning, at seven o'clock, I embarked for Alexandria, and passed the better half of the forenoon in negotiating for a pony. At eleven o'clock, I took my seat in a bare, filthy car, and was soon whirled due southward, over the line of the Orange and Alexandria railroad. The country between Alexandria and Warrenton Junction, or, indeed, between Washington and Richmond, was not unlike those masterly descriptions of Gibbon, detailing the regions overrun by Hyder Ali. The towns stood like ruins in a vast desert, and one might write musing epitaphs at every wind-beaten dwelling, whence the wretched denizens had fled in cold and poverty to a doubtful hospitality in the far South. Fences there were none, nor any living animals save the braying hybrids which limped across the naked plains to eke out existence upon some secluded patches of grass. These had been discharged from the army, and they added rather than detracted from the lonesomeness of the wild. Their great mournful eyes and shaggy heads glared from copses, and in places where they had lain down beside the track to expire. If we sometimes pity these dumb beasts as they drag loaded wains, or heavy omnibuses, or sub-soil ploughs, we may also bestow a tender sentiment upon the army mules. Flogged by teamsters, cursed by quartermasters, ridiculed by roaring regiments of soldiers, strained and spavined by fearful draughts, stalled in bogs and fainting upon hillsides,--their bones will evidence the sites of armies, when the skeletons of men have crumbled and become reabsorbed. I have seen them die like martyrs, when the inquisitor, with his bloody lash, stood over them in the closing pangs, and their last tremulous howl has almost moved to tears. Some of the dwellings seemed to be occupied, but the tidiness of old times was gone. The women seemed sunburnt and hardened by toil. They looked from their thresholds upon the flying train, with their hair unbraided and their garters ungyved,--not a negro left to till the fields, nor a son or brother who had not travelled to the wars. They must be now hewers of wood, and drawers of water, and the fingers whereon diamonds used to sparkle, must clench the axe and the hoe. At last we came to Bull Run, the dark and bloody ground where the first grand armies fought and fled, and again to be consecrated by a baptism of fire. The railway crossed the gorge upon a tall trestle bridge, and for some distance the track followed the windings of the stream. A black, deep, turgid current, flowing between gaunt hills, lined with cedar and beech, crossed here and there by a ford, and vanishing, above and below, in the windings of wood and rock; while directly beyond, lie the wide plains of Manassas Junction, stretching in the far horizon, to the undulating boundary of the Blue Ridge. As the Junction remains to-day, the reader must imagine this splendid prospect, unbroken by fences, dwellings, or fields, as if intended primevally to be a place for the shock of columns, with redoubts to the left and right, and fragments of stockades, dry rifle pits, unfinished or fallen breastworks, and, close in the foreground, a medley of log huts for the winter quartering of troops. The woods to the north mark the course of Bull Run; a line of telegraph poles going westward points to Manassas Gap; while the Junction proper is simply a point where two single track railways unite, and a few frame "shanties" or sheds stand contiguous. These are, for example, the "New York Head-quarters," kept by a person with a hooked nose, who trades in cakes, lemonade, and (probably) whiskey, of the brand called "rotgut;" or the "Union Stores," where a person in semi-military dress deals in India-rubber overcoats, underclothing, and boots. As the train halts, lads and negroes propose to sell sandwiches to passengers, and soldiers ride up to take mail-bags and bundles for imperceptible camps. In the distance some teams are seen, and a solitary horseman, visiting vestiges of the battle; sidings beside the track are packed with freight cars, and a small mountain of pork barrels towers near by; there are blackened remains of locomotives a little way off, but these have perhaps hauled regiments of Confederates to the Junction; and over all--men, idlers, ruins, railway, huts, entrenchments--floats the star-spangled banner from the roof of a plank depot. The people in the train were rollicking and well-disposed, and black bottles circulated freely. I was invited to drink by many persons, but the beverage proffered was intolerably bad, and several convivials became stupidly drunk. A woman in search of her husband was one of the passengers, and those contiguous to her were as gentlemanly as they knew how to be. "A pretty woman, in war-time," said a Captain, aside, to me, "is not to be sneezed at." At "Catlett's," a station near Warrenton Junction, we narrowly escaped a collision with a train behind, and the occupants of our train, women included, leaped down an embankment with marvellous agility. Here we switched off to the right, and at four o'clock dismounted at the pleasant village of Warrenton. CHAPTER XXI. CAMPAIGNING WITH GENERAL POPE. The court-house village of Fauquier County contained a population of twelve or fifteen hundred at the commencement of the war. Its people embraced the revolutionary cause at the outstart, and furnished some companies of foot to the Confederate service, as well as a mounted company known as the "Black Horse Cavalry." The guns of Bull Run were heard here on the day of battle, and hundreds of the wounded came into town at nightfall. Thenceforward Warrenton became prominently identified with the struggle, and the churches and public buildings were transmuted to hospitals. After the Confederates retired from Manassas Junction, the vicinity of Warrenton was a sort of neutral ground. At one time the Southern cavalry would ride through the main street, and next day a body of mounted Federals would pounce upon the town, the inhabitants, meanwhile, being apprehensive of a sabre combat in the heart of the place. Some people were ruined by the war; some made fortunes. The Mayor of the village was named Bragg, and he was a trader in horses, as well as a wagon-builder. There were two taverns, denominated respectively, the "Warrenton Inn," and the "Warren Green Hotel." I obtained a room at the former. A young man named Dashiell kept it. He was a fair-complexioned, clever, high-strung Virginian, and managed to obtain a great deal of paper money from both republics. It is an encomium in America, to say that a man "Can keep a hotel," but what shall be said of the man who can keep a hotel in war-time? I observed young Dashiell's movements from day to day, and I am satisfied that his popularity arose from his fairness and frankness. He charged nine dollars a week for room, and "board," of three meals, but could, with difficulty, obtain meat and vegetables for the table. His mother and his brother-in-law lived in the house. The latter was a son of Mayor Bragg, and had been twice in the Confederate service. He was engaged both at Bull Run and at Fairfax Court House, and made no secret of his activity at either place. But he was treated considerately, though he vaunted intolerably. The "Inn" was a frame dwelling, with a first floor of stone, surrounded by a double portico. The first room (entering from the street) was the office, consisting of a bare floor, some creaking benches, some chairs with whittled and broken arms, a high desk, where accounts were kept, a row of bells, numbered, communicating with the rooms. Hand-bills were pinned to the walls, announcing that William Higgins was paying good prices for "likely" field hands, that Timothy Ingersoll's stock of dry goods was the finest in Piedmont, that James Mason's mulatto woman, named Rachel, had decamped on the night of Whitsuntide, and that one hundred dollars would be paid by the subscriber for her return. Most of these bills were out of date, but some recent ones were exhibited to me calling for volunteers, labelled, "Ho! for winter-quarters in Washington;" "Sons of the South arise!"--"Liberty, glory, and no Yankeedom!" A bellcord hung against the "office" door, communicating with the stables, where a deaf hostler might _not_ be rung up. In the back yard, suspended from a beam, and upright, hung a large bell, which called the boarders to meals. It commonly rung thrice, and I was told on inquiry, by the cook-- "De fust bell, sah, is to prepah to prepah for de table; dat bell, when de fust cook don't miss it, is rung one hour befo' mealtime. De second bell, sah, is to _prepah_ for de table; de last bell, to _come_ to de table." I should have been better pleased with the ceremony, if the food had been more cleanly, more wholesome, and more abundant. We used to clear the plates in a twinkling, and if a person asked twice for beef, or butter, he was stared at by the negroes, as if he had eaten an entire cow. I soon brought the head-waiter to terms by promising him a dollar a week for extra attendance, and could even get ice after a time, which was a luxury. There was a bar upon the premises, which opened stealthily, when there were liquors to be sold. Cider (called champaigne) could be purchased for three dollars a bottle, and whiskey came to hand occasionally. There were cigars in abundance, and I used to sit on the upper porch of evenings, puffing long after midnight, and watching the sentinels below. There was some female society in Warrenton, but the blue-coats engrossed it all. The young women were ardent partisans, but also very pretty; and treason, somehow, heightened their beauty. Disloyalty is always pardonable in a woman, and these ladies appreciated the fact. They refused to walk under Federal flags, and stopped their ears when the bands played national music; but every evening they walked through the main street, arm in arm with dashing Lieutenants and Captains. Many flirtations ensued, and a great deal of gossip was elicited. In the end, some of the misses fell out among themselves, and hated each other more than the common enemy. I overheard a young lady talking in a low tone one evening, to a Captain in the Ninth New York regiment. "If you knew my brother," she said, "I am sure you would not fire upon _him_." As there were plain, square, prim porches to all the dwellings, the ladies commonly took positions therein of evenings, and a grand promenade commenced of all the young Federals in the town. The streets were pleasantly shaded, and a leafy coolness pervaded the days, though sometimes, of afternoons, the still heat was almost stifling. A jaunt after supper often took me far into the country, and the starlights were softer than one's peaceful thoughts. To be a civilian was a distinguished honor now, and I enjoyed the staring of the citizens, who pondered as to my purposes and pursuits, as only villagers can do. There is a quiet pleasure in being a strange person in a country town, and so far from objecting to the inquisitiveness of the folk, I rather like it. One may be passing for a young duke, or tourist, or clergyman, or what not? The Ninth New York (militia) regiment guarded Warrenton, and it was composed of clever, polite young fellows, who had taken to volunteering before there was any promise of war, and who turned out, pluckily, when the strife began. Perhaps public sentiment or pride of organization influenced them. They were all good-looking and tidy, and their dress-parades, held in the main street, were handsome affairs. I have never seen better disciplined columns, and the youthful faces of the soldiers, with the staid locality of the exhibition,--young women, negroes, dogs and babies, and old men looking on,--seemed to contradict the bloody mission of the troops. The old men, referred to, were villagers of such long standing that had the Court of Saint James, or the Vatican, or the battle of Waterloo been moved into their country, they would have still been villagers to the last. They met beside the Warrenton Inn, under the shade of the trees, at eleven o'clock every morning, and borrowed the New York papers of the latest date. One individual, slightly bald, would read aloud, and the rest crouched or stood about him, making grunts and remarks at intervals. They did not wish to believe the Federal reports, but they must needs read, and as most of them had sons in the other army, their pulses were constantly tremulous with anxiety. I think that Pope's resolve to transport these harmless old people beyond his lines was very barbarous, and the soldiers denounced it in similar terms. They spoke of Pope, as of some terrible despot, and wished to know when he was coming to town, as they had appointed a committee, and drafted a petition, asking his forbearance and charity. When these villagers found me out to be a Newspaper Correspondent, they regarded me with amusing interest, and marvelled what I would say of their town. A villager is very sensitive as to his place of residence, and these good people read the----daily, confounding me with all the paper,--editorial, correspondence, and, I verily believe, advertisements. One of them wished me to board at his residence, and I was, after a time, invited out to dinner and tea frequently. The negroes remained in Warrenton, in great numbers, and held carnival of evenings when the bands played. "Contrabands" were coming daily into town, and idleness and vice soon characterized the mass of them. They were ignorant, degraded, animal beings, and many of them loved rum; it was the last link that bound them to human kind. Servants could be hired for four dollars a month and "keep;" but they were "shiftless" and unprofitable. The Provost-Marshal of the place was a Captain Hendrickson. His quarters were in the Court House building, and he kept a zealous eye upon sutlers and citizens. The former trespassed in the sales of liquors to soldiers, and the latter were accused of maintaining a contraband mail, and of conspiring to commit divers offences. There were a number of churches in the village, all of which served as hospitals, and in the quiet cemetery west of the town, two hundred slain soldiers were interred. A stake of white pine was driven at the head of each grave. Here lay some of the men who had helped to change the destinies of a continent. No public worship was held in the place. The Sundays were busy as other days: trains came and went, teams made dust in the streets, cavalry passed through the village, music arose from all the outlying camps; parades and inspections were made, and all the preparations for killing men were relentlessly forwarded. A pleasant entertainment occurred one evening, when a plot of ground adjoining the Warrenton Inn, was appropriated for a camp theatre. Candle footlights were arranged, and the stage was canopied with national flags. The citizens congregated, and the performers deferred to their prejudices by singing no Federal songs. Tho negroes climbed the trees to listen, and their gratified guffaws made the night quiver. The war lost half its bitterness at such times; but I thought with a shudder of Stuart's thundering horsemen, charging into the village, and closing the night's mimicry with a horrible tragedy. Some of the dwellings about the place were elegant and spacious, but many of these were closed and the owners removed. Two newspapers had been published here of old, and while ransacking the office of one of them, I discovered that the type had been buried under the floor. The planks were speedily torn away, and the cases dragged to light. I obtained some curious relics, in the shape of "cuts" of recruiting officers, runaway negroes, etc., as well as a column of a leader, in type, describing the first battle of Bull Run. For two weeks I had little to do, as the campaign had not yet fairly commenced, and I passed many hours every day reading. A young lawyer, in the Confederate service, had left an ample library behind him, and the books passed into the hands of every invader in the town. Pope finally arrived at Warrenton, and as the troops seemed to be rapidly concentrating, I judged it expedient to procure a horse at once, and canvassed the country with that object. By paying a quartermaster the Government price ($130), I could select a steed from the pound, but inspection satisfied me that a good saddle nag could not be obtained in this way. After much parleying with Hebrews and chaffing with country people, I heard that Mayor Bragg kept some fair animals, and when I stated my purpose at his house, he commenced the business after a fashion immemorial at the South, by producing some whiskey. When Mayor Bragg had asked me pertinently, if I knew much about the "pints of a hoss," and what "figger in the way of price" would suit me, he told an erudite negro named "Jeems" to trot out the black colt. The black colt made his appearance by vaulting over a gate, and playfully shivering a panel of fence with his "off" hoof. Then he executed a flourish with his tail, leaped thrice in the air, and bit savagely at the man "Jeems." When I asked Mayor Bragg if the black colt was sufficiently gentle to stand fire, he replied that he was gentle as a lamb and offered to put me astride him. I had no sooner taken my seat, however, than the black colt backed, neighed, flourished, and stood erect, and finally ran away. A second animal was produced, less mettlesome, but also black, finely strung, daintily hoofed, and as Mayor Bragg said, "just turned four year." The price of this charger was one hundred and ninety dollars; but in consideration of my youth and pursuit, Mayor Bragg proposed to take one hundred and seventy-five; we compromised upon a hundred and fifty dollars, Major Bragg throwing in a halter, and by good luck I procured a saddle the same evening, so that I rode triumphantly through the streets of Warrenton, and fancied that all the citizens were admiring my new purchase. I was struck with the fact, that Mayor Bragg, though an ardent patriot, would accept of neither Confederate nor Virginia money; he required payment for his animal, in Father Chase's "greenbacks." Mounted anew, I fell into my former active habits, and made two journeys, to Sperryville and Little Washington, in one direction, to Madison in another; each place was probably twenty miles distant; the latter was merely a cavalry outpost, where Generals Hatch and Bayard were stationed, and the former villages were the head-quarters, respectively, of General Banks and General Siegel. Madison was, at this time, a precarious place for a long tarrying. I went to sleep in the inn on the night of my arrival, and at that time the place was thronged with cavalry and artillery-men. Next morning, when I aroused, not a blue-coat could be seen. They had fallen back in the darkness, and prudently abstaining from breakfast, I galloped northward, as if the whole Confederate army was at my heels. These old turnpike roads were now marked by daily chases and rencontres. A few Virginians, fleetly mounted, would provoke pursuit from a squad of Federals, and the latter would be led into ambuscades. A quaint incident happened in this manner, near Madison. Captain T. was chasing a party of Confederates one afternoon, when his company was suddenly fired upon from a wheatfield, parties rising up on both sides of the road, and discharging carbines through the fence rails. Three or four men, and as many horses were slain; but the ambushing body was outnumbered, and several of its members killed. Among others, a young lieutenant took deliberate aim at Captain T. at the distance of twelve yards; and, seeing that he had missed, threw up his carbine to surrender. The Captain had already drawn his revolver, and, amazed at the murderous purpose, he shot the assassin in the head, killing him instantly. Nobody blamed Captain T., but he was said to be a humane person, and the affair preyed so continually upon his mind, that he committed suicide one night in camp. At Sperryville I saw and talked with Franz Siegel, the idol of the German Americans. He had been a lieutenant in his native country, but subsided, in St. Louis, to the rank of publican, keeping a beer saloon. When the war commenced, he was appointed to a colonelcy, in deference to the large German republican population of Missouri. His abilities were speedily manifested in a series of engagements which redeemed the Southern border, and he finally fought the terrible battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, which broke the spirit of the Confederates west of the Mississippi. The man who fought "mit Siegel" in those days, was always told in St. Louis: "Py tam! you pays not'ing for your lager." Siegel now commanded one of Pope's corps. He was a diminutive person, but well-knit, emaciated by his active career, feverish and sanguine of face, and, as it appeared to me, consuming with energy and ambition. As a General he was prompt to decide and do, and his manner of dealing with Confederate property was severer than that of any American. He battered the splendid mansion hotel of White Sulphur Springs to the ground, for example, when somebody discharged a rifle from its window. He preferred to fight by retreating, and if pursued, generally unmasked his guns and made massacre with the scattered opponents. Another German commander was Blenker, whose corps of Germans might have belonged to the free bands of the Black forest. They were the most lawless men in the Federal service, and what they did not steal they destroyed. Such volunteers were mercenaries, in every sense of the word. I have been told that they slaughtered sheep and cattle in pure wantonness, and the rats of Ehrenfels did not make a cleaner sweep of provisions. The Germans, as a rule, lacked the dash of the Irish troops and the tact of the Americans. They thought and fought in masses, had little individuality, and were thick-skulled; but they were persevering and had their hearts in the cause. General Banks was a fine representative of the higher order of Yankee. Originally a machinist in a small manufacturing town near Boston, he educated himself, and was elected successively Legislator, Governor, Congressman, and General of volunteers. His personal graces were equalled by his energy, and his ability was considerable. He has been very successful in the field, and has conducted a retreat unparalleled in the war; these things being always reckoned among American successes. The country hereabout was mountainous, healthy, and well adapted for campaigning. Streams and springs were numerous, and there were fine sites for camps. The deserted toll-houses along the way glowered mournfully through the rent windows, and I fancied them, sometimes, as I rode at night, haunted by the shambling tollman. Ancient road that wind'st deserted, Through the level of the vale,-- Sweeping toward the crowded market, Like a stream without a sail, Standing by thee, I look backward, And, as in the light of dreams, See the years descend and vanish, Like thy tented wains and teams.--T. B. READ. To provide myself with thorough equipment for Pope's campaign, I returned to Washington, and purchased a patent camp-bed, which strapped to my saddle, saddle bags of large capacity, India-rubber blankets, and a full suit of waterproof cloth,--hat, coat, _genoullieres_, and gauntlets. I had my horse newly shod, I drew upon my establishment for an ample sum of money, and, to properly inaugurate the campaign, I gave an entertainment in the parlor of the inn. Pipes, cold ham, a keg of beer, and a demijohn of whiskey comprised the attractions of the night. The guests were three Captains, two Adjutants, two Majors, a Colonel, four Correspondents, several Lieutenants, and a signal officer. There was some jesting, and much laughing, considerable story-telling, and (toward the small hours) a great deal of singing. Much heroism was evolved; all the guests were devoted to death and their country; and there was one person who took off his coat to fight an imaginary something, but changed his mind, and dropped asleep directly. At length, a gallant Captain, to demonstrate his warlike propensities, fired a pistol through the front window; and somebody blowing out the candles, the whole party retired to rest upon the floor. In this delightful way my third campaign commenced, and next evening I set off for the advance. CHAPTER XXII. ARMY MORALS. Some of General McDowell's aides had invited me to pass a night with them at Warrenton Springs. Fully equipped, I joined Captain Ball, of Cincinnati, and we rode southward, over a hard, picturesque turnpike, under a clear moonlight. The distance was seven miles, and a part of this route was enlivened by the fires, halloos, and the music of camps. Volunteers are fond of serenading their officers; and this particular evening was the occasion of much merry-making, since a majority of the brass bands were to be mustered out of the service to-morrow. We could hear the roll of drums from imperceptible localities, and the sharp winding of bugles broke upon the silence like the trumpet of the Archangel. Stalwart shapes of horsemen galloped past us, and their hoofs made monotone behind, till the cadence died so gradually away that we did not know when the sound ceased and when the silence began. The streams had a talk to themselves, as they strolled away into the meadow, and an owl or two challenged us, calling up a corporal hawk. This latter fellow bantered and blustered, and finally we fell into an ambush of wild pigs, which charged across the road and plunged into the woods. There were despatch stations at intervals, where horses stood saddled, and the couriers waited for hoof-beats, to be ready to ride fleetly toward head-quarters. Anon, we saw wizard lights, as of Arctic skies, where remote camps built conflagration; and trudging wearily down the stony road, poor ragged, flying negroes, with their families and their worldly all, came and went--God help them!--and touched their hats so obsequiously that my heart was wrung, and I felt a nervous impulse to put them upon my steed and take their burdens upon my back. Little sable folk, asleep and ahungered, drawn to that barefoot woman's breast; and the tired boy, weeping as he held to his father's hand; and the father with the sweat of fatigue and doubt upon his forehead,--children of Ishmael all; war raging in the land, but God overhead! These are the "wandering Jews" of our day, hated North and South, because they are poor and blind, and do no harm; but out of their wrongs has arisen the abasement of their wrongers. Is there nothing over all? We entered the beautiful lawn of the Springs' hotel, at ten o'clock, and a negro came up to take our horses. By the lamplight and moonlight I saw McDowell's tent, a sentry pacing up and down before it, and the thick, powerful figure of the General seated at a writing-table within. Irvin McDowell was one of the oldest officers in the service, and when the war commenced he became a leading commander in the Eastern army. At Bull Run he had a responsible place, and the ill success of that battle brought him into unpleasant notoriety. Though he retained a leading position he was still mistrusted and disliked. None bore ingratitude so stolidly. He may have flinched, but he never replied; and though ambitious he tried to content himself with subordinate commands. Some called him a traitor, others an incompetent, others a plotter. If McClellan failed, McDowell was cursed. If Pope blundered, McDowell received half the contumely. But he loosened no cord of discipline to make good will. Implacable, dutiful, soldierly, rigorous in discipline, sententious, brave,--the most unpopular man in America went on his way, and I think that he is recovering public favor again. The General of a republic has a thorny path to tread, and almost every public man has been at one time disgraced during the civil war. McDowell, I think, has been treated worse than any other. Our nags being removed, we repaired to one of the rustic cottages which bounded the lawn, and I was introduced to several members of the staff; among others, to a Count Saint Alb, an Austrian. He had been an officer in his native country; but came to America, anxious for active service, and was appointed to Gen. McDowell's Staff with the rank of Captain. I understood that he was writing a book upon America. There are many such adventurers in the Federal service, but the present one was clever and amusing, and he spoke English fluently. Our tea was plain but abundant, consisting of broiled beef, fresh bread, butter, and cheese; and the inveterate whiskey was produced afterward, when we assembled on the piazza, so that the hours passed by pleasantly, if not profitably, and we retired at two o'clock. In the morning I bathed in the clear, cold sulphur spring, where thousands of invalid people had come for healing waters. A canopy covered the spring, and a soldier stood on guard at the top of the descending steps, to preserve the property in its original cleanliness. This was one of the most famous medical springs on the American continent; the water was so densely impregnated that its peculiarly offensive smell could be detected at the distance of a mile. The place was going to ruin now. All the bathing-rooms were falling apart, the pipes had been carried off to be moulded into bullets, and the great hotel was desolate. I walked into the ball-room; but the large gilded mirrors had been splintered, and lewd writings defaced the wall. Some idlers were asleep upon the piazzas, and the furniture was removed or broken. Some rustic cottages dotted the lawn, but these were now inhabited by officers and their servants. A few days were to finish the work of rapine, and a heap of ashes was to mark the scene of tournament, coquetry, and betrothal. I witnessed a review of troops in a field contiguous, at nine o'clock. The heat was so intense that many men fell out of line and were carried off to their camps. McDowell passed exactingly from man to man, examined muskets, clothing, and knapsacks, and the inspection was proceeding, when I bade my friends good by and set out for Culpepper. I crossed the North Rappahannock, or Hedgemain river, upon a precarious bridge of planks. A new bridge for artillery was being constructed close by; for the river beneath had a swift, deep current, and could with difficulty be forded. Patches of wagons, squads of horse, and now and then a regiment of infantry, varied the monotony of the journey. The country was high, woody, and sparsely settled. At noon I overtook Tower's brigade, and observing the 94th N. Y. Regiment resting in the woods, I dismounted and made the acquaintance of its Colonel. He was at this juncture greatly enraged with some of his soldiers who had been plucking green apples. "Boy," he said to one, "put down that fruit! Drop it, or I'll blow your head off! Directly you'll double up, pucker, and say that you have the "di-o-ree," and require an ambulance. Orderly!" A sergeant came up and touched his cap. "Take your musket," said the Colonel; "go out to that orchard, and order those men away. If they hesitate or object, shoot them!" A few such colonels would marvellously improve the volunteer organization. The Hazel or North Anne river, a branch of the Hedgemain, interposed a few miles further on, and passing through a covered bridge, I turned down the north bank, crossed some spongy fields, and at length came to a dry place in the edge of a woods, where I tied my nag, spread out my bed, and prepared to dine. A box of sardines, a lemon, and some fresh sandwiches constituted the repast, and being dusty and parched I stripped afterward and swam across the river. Seeing that my horse plunged and neighed, with swollen eyeballs, and every evidence of terror, I hastened toward him and discovered a black snake, six feet or more in length, which seemed about to coil itself around the nag's leg. The size and contiguity of the reptile at first appalled me, and my mind was not more composed when the serpent, at my approach, manifested an inclination to assume the offensive. Its folds were thicker than my arm, and it commenced to revolve rapidly, at length running up a sapling, suspending itself by the tail, and hissing vehemently. It belonged to the family of "racers," and was hideous and powerful beyond any specimen that I had seen. I blew it into halves at the second discharge of my pistol, and at once resumed my saddle, indisposed to remain longer amidst such acquaintances. At four o'clock I saw Culpepper, a trim little village, lying in the hollow of several hills. A couple of steeples added to its picturesqueness, and a swift creek, crossed by a small bridge, interposed between myself and the main part of the place. It looked like Sunday when I rode through the principal street. The shutters were closed in the shop windows, the dwellings seemed tenantless, no citizens were abroad, no sutlers had invaded the country; only a few cavalry-men clustered about an ancient pump to water their nags, and some military idlers were sitting upon the long porch of a public house, called the Virginia Hotel. I tied my horse to a tree, the bole of which had been gnawed bare, and found the landlord to be an old gentleman named Paine, who appeared to be somewhat out of his head. Two days before the Confederate cavalry had vacated the village, and the army had been encamped about the town for many months. A sabre conflict had taken place in the streets; and these events, happening in rapid succession, combined with the insolence of some Federal outriders, had so agitated the host that his memory was quite gone, and he could not perform even the slightest function. There is a panacea for all these things, which the faculty and philanthropy alike forbid, but which my experience in war-matters has invariably found unfailing. I produced my flask, and gently insinuated it to the old gentleman's lips. He possessed instinct sufficient to uncork and apply it, and the results were directly apparent, in a partial recovery of memory. He said that meals were one dollar each, board four dollars a day, or by the week twenty-five dollars. These terms are unknown in America; but when Mr. Paine added that horse provender was one dollar per "feed," I looked aghast, and required some stimulant myself to appreciate the enormity of the reckoning. I discovered, however, that the people of the village were almost starving; that beef had been fifty cents a pound during the whole winter, flour twenty-five dollars per barrel, coffee one dollar and a quarter a pound, and corn one dollar per bushel. The army had swept the country like famine, and the citizens had pinched, pining faces, with little to eat to-day and nothing for to-morrow. I acquiesced in the charge, as no choice remained, and asked to be shown to my room. A burly negro, apparently suffering _delirium tremens_, seized my baggage with quaking hands, and lifting a pair of red eyes upon me, shuffled through a bare hall, up a stairway, and into a bedroom. I never saw a more hideous being in my life, and when he had flung my luggage upon the floor, he sank into a chair, and glared wofully into my face, breathing like one about to expire. "Young Moss," said he, "cant you give a po' soul a drop o' sperits? Do for de good Lord's sake! Do, Moss, fo' de po' nigga's life. Do! do! Moss." I poured him out a little in a tumbler, less from charity than from fear; for he knew that I was provided with a bottle, and I seemed to read murder in his eyes. He drank like one athirst and scant of breath, making a dry, chuckling noise with his throat. When he had finished, he leaned his powerful neck and head upon the bed and groaned terribly. "Moss," he said again, "ain't you got no tobacco, Moss? I haint had none since Christmas. I's mos dead I'm po' sinful nigga'. Do give some tobacco to po' creature, do!" I told him that I did not chew the weed, but gave him a crushed cigar, and he thrust it into his mouth, as if it was food and he was perishing. This wretched animal performed the duties of a chambermaid upon the premises; he made the beds, attended to the toilets, answered the bells, etc. He finally became so offensive that I forbade him my room, and he revenged himself by paltry thefts. There were two other servants, a woman with a baby, and a shrewd, dishonest mulatto man, who was the steward and carver. This fellow secreted provender in the kitchen and sold it stealthily to hungry soldiers. A public house so mismanaged I had nowhere met. Sometimes we could get no breakfast till noon, and finally the price of dinner went up to one dollar and a half, with nothing to eat. The table was protected from flies by a series of paper fans, pendant from the ceiling and connected by a cord, which an ebony boy pulled, at the foot of the room to keep them in motion. This boy being worked day and night, often fell asleep upon his stool, when the yellow man boxed his ears, or knocked him down; and then he would fan with such vigor that a perfect gale swept down the table. The landlord was a kindly old man, but he could not "keep a hotel," and the strong-minded part of the house consisted of his wife and four daughters. Gen. Ben Butler would have sent these young women to Ship Island, five times of a day. They were very bad-mannered and always sat apart at one end of the cloth, talking against the "Yankees." As there was no direct provocation to do so, this boldness was gratuitous, and detracted rather than added to my estimate of the heroism of Southern women. I have known them to burst into the office, crowded with blue-coats, and scream-- "Pop, Yankees thieving in garden!" or, "Pop, drive these Yankees out of parlor!" Every afternoon when the pavement was unusually patronized by young officers, these women would sally out, promenade in crinoline, silk stockings, and saucy hoods, and the crowd would fall respectfully back to let them pass. A flag hung from a hospital over the sidewalk, and with a pert flourish, the landlord's daughters filed off the pavement, around the ensign, and back again. This was amusing, I thought, but not very clever, and rather immodest. Had they been handsome, some romance might have attached to the act; but being homely and not marriageable, I smiled at the occurrence and entered it in my diary as "patriotism run mad." The stable arrangements were, if possible, worse. One had to be certain, from actual presence, that his horse was fed at all, and during the first three days of my tenure, the black hostler lost me a breast strap, a halter, a crupper strap, and finally emptied my saddle-bags. Now and then a woman made her appearance at a front window, stealthily peeping into the street, or a neighboring farmer ventured into town upon a lean consumptive mule. The very dogs were skinny and savage for want of sustenance, and when a long, cadaverous hog emerged from nowhere one day, and tottered up the main street, he was chased, killed, and quartered so rapidly, that the famous steam process seemed to have been applied to him, of being dropped into a hopper, and tumbling out, a medley of hams, ribs, lard, and penknives. The stock of provisions at the hotel finally gave out, and I was compelled to purchase morsels of meat from the steward. Dreadful visions of famishing ensued, but ultimately the railway was opened to town, and a sutler started a shop in the village. I lived upon sardines and crackers for two days, and a Major Fifield, Superintendent of Military Railroads, gave me savory breakfasts of ham afterward. Troops were now concentrating in the neighborhood of Culpepper, and a bevy of camps encircled the little village. Crawford's Brigade, of Banks's Corps, garrisoned the place, and a Provost Marshal occupied the quaint Court House. Reconnoissances were made southward daily, and I joined one of these, which left the village on the second of August, at three o'clock, for Orange Court House, seventeen miles on the way to Richmond. Detachments of a Vermont and a New York cavalry regiment composed the reconnoitring party, and the whole was commanded by Gen. Crawford, a clever and unostentatious soldier. We bivouacked that night near Raccoon Ford, on the river Rapidan. No fires were built; for we knew that the enemy was all around us, and we slept coldly and imperfectly till the gray of Sunday morning. At daylight we galloped into the main street of Orange Court House, having first sent a squadron around the village, to ride in at the other end. At the very moment of our entry, a company or more of Confederate horse was also trotting into town. Both parties sounded the charge simultaneously, and the carbines exploded in the very heart of the village. For a minute or more a sabre fight ensued, alternated by the firing of revolvers; but the defenders were overmatched, and several of them having been slain, they turned to escape. At that moment, however, our other squadron charged upon them, effectually blocking up the street, and the whole party surrendered. A major, who exhibited some obstinacy, was felled from the saddle by a terrible cut, which clove his skull, and a very dexterous young fellow, who attempted to escape by a side street, dodged a bevy of pursuers and saved his head by the loss of both his ears. The disfigured corpses of those freshly slain were laid along the sidewalk in a row; and after some invasion of henroosts and private pantries, we remounted, and with fifty or more prisoners crossed the Rapidan, and were welcomed into Culpepper with cheers. The prisoners were lodged in the loft of the Court House, and their officers were paroled, and boarded among the neighbors. They complied with the terms of their parole very honorably, and bore testimony to the courtesy of their captors. I talked with them often upon the tavern porch, but an undue intimacy with any of them might have brought me into disrepute. Although the larders of the village were supposed to be empty, savory meals were nevertheless sent daily to these cavalry-men, and it was evident that the people on all hands sympathized with their soldiery. The stringent orders of Pope, relative to removing the disaffected beyond his lines, were never enforced. I doubt if the veritable commander himself meant to do more than intimidate evil doers; but I saw frequent evidences of scrupulous humanity on the part of his general officers. One day, when I was negotiating with the Provost for the purchase of some port wine, stored upon the premises of a village druggist, a sergeant elbowed his way into the presence of the Marshal, and pushed forward two very dirty lads, who gave their ages respectively, as ten and thirteen years. They were of Hibernian parentage, and belonged to the class of newsboys trading with the different brigades. The younger lad was wiping his nose and eyes with a relic of a coat sleeve, and the elder was studying the points of the case, with a view to an elaborate defence. The sergeant produced a thick roll of bills and laid them upon the desk. "Gineral Crawford," said he, "orders these boys to be locked up in the jail. They have been passing this stuff upon the country folks, and belong to a gang of young varmints who follers the 'lay.' The Gineral is going to have 'em brought up at the proper time and punished." The bills were fair imitations of Confederate currency, and were openly sold in the streets of Northern cities at the rate of thousands of dollars for a penny. These lads probably purchased horses, swine, or fowls with them, or perhaps paid some impoverished widow for board in the worthless counterfeit. The younger lad sobbed and howled when the order for his incarceration had been announced, but the elder made a stout remonstrance. He didn't know the Gineral would arrest him. Everybody else passed the bills. He thought they wos good bills; some man gave 'em to him. They wan't passed, nohow, upon nobody but _Rebels_! He could prove that! He "know'd" a quartermaster that passed 'em. Wouldn't they let him and Sam off this wunst? They were both sent to Coventry, despite their tears, and down to the last day of our tenure in Culpepper, I saw these wicked urchins peeping through the grates of the old brick jail, where they lay in the steam and vapor, among negroes, drunkards, and thieves,--an evidence of justice, which it is a pleasure to record, in this free narrative. I joined a mess in the Ninth New York regiment finally, and contrived to exist till the fifth of the month, when Pope moved his head-quarters to a hill back of Culpepper, and thereafter I lived daintily for a little while. On the 8th of August, however, an event occurred, which disturbed the wisest calculations of the correspondent and the Generals, THE BATTLE OF CEDAR MOUNTAIN. CHAPTER XXIII. GOING INTO ACTION. While General Pope's army was concentrating between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, the army of General Stonewall Jackson was lying upon the south bank of the Rapidan, and that renowned commander's head-quarters were at Gordonsville, about thirty miles from Culpepper. It was generally presumed that Jackson had fortified Gordonsville, intending to lie in wait there, or possibly to oppose the crossing of Pope upon the banks of the river. It was not believed that Jackson's force was very great, because the main body of the Confederates were held below Richmond, where McClellan's army still remained. The Southern capital seemed to be menaced both from the North and the South; but in reality, the Grand Army was re-embarking at Harrison's Bar, and sailing up the Chesapeake in detachments, to effect a junction with Pope on the plains of Piedmont. So important a movement could not be concealed from the Confederates, and they had resolved to annihilate Pope before McClellan's reinforcements could arrive. It was the work of two weeks to transport eighty or a hundred thousand men three hundred miles, and finding that Burnside's corps had already landed upon the Potomac, Stonewall Jackson determined to cross the Rapidan and cripple the fragment of Pope's forces stationed at Culpepper. Stonewall Jackson is one of the many men whose extraordinary military genius has been developed by the civil war. But unlike the mass who have become famous in a day, and lost their laurels in a week, Jackson's glory has steadily increased. He was first brought into notice at Winchester, where he fought a fierce battle with Banks, and derived the _sobriquet_ which he has retained to the present time. Soon afterward, he chased Banks's army down the Shenandoah Valley, and across the Potomac. Afterward, he bore a conspicuous part in the engagement below Richmond, and was now to become prominent in the most daring episodes of the whole war. His excellence was _activity_. He scrupled at no fatigue, marched his troops over steep and circuitous roads, was everywhere when unexpected, and nowhere when sought, and his boldness was equal to his energy. He did not fear to attack overpowering numbers, if the situation demanded it. All that General Lee might plan, General Jackson would dare to execute; and he has been, above all others, the Soult of the Southern war, while Stuart was its Murat, and Lee its Napoleon. We first had intimation of the advance of Jackson on the afternoon of the 7th of August. Two regiments of cavalry, picketed upon the Rapidan, rode pell-mell into Culpepper, reporting a large Southern force at the fords, and rapidly advancing. Pope at once ordered the whole of one of these regiments under arrest, and it was the opinion of the army that the approach was a feint, or, at most, a reconnoissance in force. Subsequent information satisfied the incredulous, however, that a considerable body of troops were marching northward, and their outriding scouts had been seen at Cedar Mountain, only six miles from Culpepper. The latter is one of the many woody knobs or heights that environ the village, but it is nearer than any other, and should have been occupied by Pope, simultaneously with his arrival. It is scarcely a mountain in elevation, but so high that the clouds often envelope its crest, and it commands a view of all the surrounding country. There are cleared patches up its sides, and the highest of these constitutes the farm of a clergyman, after whom the eminence is sometimes called "Slaughter's Mountain." At its base lie a few pleasant farms; and a shallow rivulet or creek, called Cedar Run, crosses the road between the mountain and Culpepper. Upon the mountain side Jackson had placed his batteries, and his infantry lay in dense thickets and belts of woods before the hill and on each side of it. The position was a powerful, though not an impregnable one; for batteries might readily be pushed up the slope, and our infantry had often ascended steeper eminences. But an opposing army scattered about the meadow lands below, would find its several components exposed to shot and shell, thrown from points three or four hundred feet above them. When it had been discovered that the enemy had anticipated us in seizing this strong position, word was at once despatched to Banks and Siegel to bring up their columns without delay. The brigade of General Crawford was marched through Culpepper at noon on Friday; and that afternoon, foot-sore, but enthusiastic, regiments began to arrive in rapid succession. I had been passing the morning of Friday with Colonel Bowman, a modest and capable gentleman, when the serenity of our converse was disturbed by a sergeant, who rode into camp with orders for a prompt advance in light marching order. In a twinkling all the camps in the vicinity were deserted, and the roads were so blocked with soldiers on my return, that I was obliged to ride through fields. I trotted rapidly into the village, and witnessed a scene exciting and martial beyond anything which I had remarked with the Army of Virginia. Regiments were pouring by all the roads and lanes into the main street, and the spectacle of thousands of bayonets, extending as far as the eye could reach, was enhanced by the music of a score of bands, throbbing all at the same moment with wild music. The orders of officers rang out fitfully in the din, and when the steel shifted from shoulder to shoulder, it was like looking down a long sparkling wave. Above the confusion of the time, the various nativities of volunteers roared their national ballads. "St. Patrick's Day," intermingled with the weird refrain of "Bonnie Dundee," and snatches of German sword-songs were drowned by the thrilling chorus of the "Star-Spangled Banner." Then some stentor would strike a stave of-- "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave," and the wild, mournful music would be caught up by all,--Germans, Celts, Saxons, till the little town rang with the thunder of voices, all uttering the name of the grim old Moloch, whom--more than any one save Hunter--Virginia hates. Suddenly, as if by rehearsal, all hats would go up, all bayonets toss and glisten, and huzzas would deafen the winds, while the horses reared upon their haunches and the sabres rose and fell. Then, column by column, the masses passed eastward, while the prisoners in the Court-House cupola looked down, and the citizens peeped in fear through crevices of windows. Being unattached to the staff of any General at the time, and therefore at liberty as a mere spectator, I rode rapidly after the troops, passed the foremost regiments, and unwittingly kept to the left, which I did not discover in the excitement of the ride, till my horse was foaming and my face furrowed with heat drops. I saw that the way had been little travelled, and inquiry at a log farm-house, some distance further, satisfied me that I had mistaken the way. Two men in coarse brown suits, were chopping wood here, and they informed me, with an oath, that the last soldiers seen in the neighborhood, had been Confederate pickets. A by-road enabled me to recover the proper route, and from the top of a hill overlooking Culpepper, I had a view of the hamlet, nestling in its hollow; the roads entering it, black with troops, and all the slopes covered with wagon-trains, whose white canopies seemed infinite. The skies were gorgeously dyed over the snug cottages and modest spires; some far woods were folded in a pleasant haze; and the blue mountains lifted their huge backs, voluming in the distance, like some boundary for humanity, with a happier land beyond. Here I might have stood, a few months before, and heard the church bells; and the trees around me might have been musical with birds. But now the parsons and the choristers were gone; the scaffold was erected, the axe bare, and with a good by glance at the world and man, some hundreds of wretches were to drop into eternity. We have all read of the guillotine in other lands; it was now before me in my own. As I passed into the highway again, and riding through narrow passages, grazing officers' knees, turning vicious battery horses, winding in and out of woods, making detours through pasture fields, leaping ditches, and so making perilous progress, I passed many friends who hailed me cheerfully,--here a brigadier-general who waved his hand, or a colonel who saluted, or a staff officer who rode out and exchanged inquiries or greetings, or a sergeant who winked and laughed. These were some of the men whose bodies I was to stir to-morrow with my foot, when the eyes that shone upon me now would be swollen and ghastly. Some of the privates seeing me in plain clothes, as I had joined the army merely as a visitor and with no idea of seeing immediate service there, mistook me for a newspaper correspondent, which in one sense I was; and I was greeted with such cries as-- "Our Special Artist!" "Our Own Correspondent!" "Give our Captain a setting up, you sir!" "Puff our Colonel!" "Give me a good obituary!" "Where's your pass, bub?" "Halloo! Jenkins. Three cheers for Jenkins!" I shall not soon forget one fellow, who planted himself in my path (his regiment had halted), and leaning upon his musket looked steadily into my eyes. "Ef I had a warrant for the devil," he said, "I'd arrest that feller." Many of the soldiers were pensive and thoughtful; but the mass were marching to their funerals with boyish outcries, apparently anxious to forget the responsibilities of the time. "Let's sing, boys." "Oh! Get out, or I'll belt you over the snout." "Halloo! Pardner, is there water over there?" "Three groans for old Jeff!" "Hip-hip--hoo-roar! Hi! Hi!" A continual explosion of small arms, in the shape of epithets, jests, imitations of the cries of sheep, cows, mules, and roosters, and snatches of songs, enlivened the march. If something interposed, or a halt was ordered, the men would throw themselves in the dust, wipe their foreheads, drink from their canteens, gossip, grin, and shout confusedly, and some sought opportunities to straggle off, so that the regiments were materially decimated before they reached the field. The leading officers maintained a dignity and a reserve, and reined their horses together in places, to confer. At one time, a private soldier came out to me, presenting a scrap of paper, and asked me to scrawl him a line, which he would dictate. It was as follows:-- "_My dear Mary, we are going into action soon, and I send you my love. Kiss baby, and if I am not killed I will write to you after the fight._" The man asked me to mail the scrap at the first opportunity; but the same post which carried his simple billet, carried also his name among the rolls of the dead. At five o'clock I overtook Crawford's brigade, drawn up in front of a fine girdle of timber, in a grass field, and on the edge of Cedar Creek. Their ambulances had been unhitched, and ranged in a row against the woods and the soldiers were soon formed in line of battle, extending across the road, with their faces toward the mountain. In this order they moved through the creek, and disappeared behind the ridge of a cornfield. The hill towered in front, but with the naked eye I could distinguish only a speck of floating something above the roof of Slaughter's white house. This was said to be a flag, though I did not believe it; and as there were no evidences of any enemy, which I could determine, I turned my attention to the immediate necessities of myself and my horse. A granary lay at a little distance, and as I was hastening thither, a trooper came along with a blanket full of corn. Fortuitously, he dropped about a dozen ears, which I secured, and hitched my animal to a tree, where he munched until I had fallen asleep. The latter event happened in this wise. I had observed a slight person in the uniform of a surgeon. He was dividing a large lump of pork at the time, and three great crackers lay before him. I approached and introduced myself, and in a few minutes I was a partial proprieter of the meat, and he a recipient of some drink. The same person directed me to occupy a shelf of the ambulance, and when we lay down together he narrated some of his experiences in Martinsburg, when the Confederates occupied the place after Banks's retreat. He had charge of a hospital at that time, and witnessed the entrance of the Confederate army. The wildness of the people was unbounded, he said, and all who had given so much as a drop of cold water to the invaders were pointed out and execrated. The properties of a few, said to be Unionists, were endangered; and ruffianly soldiers climbed to the windows of the hospital, hooting and taunting the sick. Not to be outdone in bitterness, the tenants flung up their crutches and cheered for the "Union,"--that darling idea, which has marshalled a million of men and filled hecatombs with its champions. In a few days the Federals took possession of the town anew, and the Southern element was in turn oppressed. This is Civil War,--more cruel than the excesses of hereditary enemies. A year before these people of the Shenandoah were fellow-countrymen of the soldiery they contemned. CHAPTER XXIV CEDAR MOUNTAIN. There being nothing to eat in the vicinity of the ambulances, I mounted anew at five o'clock and rode back toward Culpepper. No portion of the troops of Crawford were visible now, and only some gray smoke moved up the side of the mountain. A few stragglers were bathing their faces in Cedar Creek, and some miles in the rear lay several of McDowell's brigades under arms. Their muskets were stacked along the sides of the road, the men lay sleepily upon the ground,--company by company, each in its proper place,--the field-officers gossiping together, and the colors upright and unfurled. I was stopped, all the way along the lines, and interrogated as to what was happening in front. "Any Reb-bils out yonder?" asked a grim, snappish Colonel. "Guess they don't mean to fight before breakfast!" blurted a Captain. "Wish they'd cut away, anyway, if they goin' to!" muttered a chorus of privates. At the village there was nothing to be purchased, although some sutlers' stores lay at the depot, guarded by Provost officers. I persuaded a negro to give me a mess of almost raw pork, and a woman, with a child at the breast, cooked me some biscuit. There were many civilians and idle officers in the town, and the streets were lined with cavalry. Mr. Paine, the landlord, was losing the remnant of his wits, and the young ladies were playing the "Bonnie Blue Flag," and laughing satirically at some young officers who listened. The correspondents began to show themselves in force, and a young fellow whom I may call Chitty, representing a provincial journal, greatly amused me, with the expression of fears that there might be no engagement after all. Chitty was an attorney, who had forsaken a very moderate practice, for a press connection, and he informed me, in confidence, that he was gathering materials for a history of the war. By reason of his attention to this weighty project, he failed to do any reporting, and as his mind was not very well balanced, he was commonly taken to be a simpleton. As there was nobody else to talk to, I amused myself with Chitty during the forenoon, and he narrated to me some doubtful intrigues which had varied his career in Piedmont. But Chitty had mingled in no battles, and now that a contest was about to take place, his heart warmed in anticipation. He asked me if the hottest fighting would not probably occur on the right, and intimated, in that event, his desire to carry despatches through the thickest of the fray. Death was welcome to Chitty if he could so distinguish himself. Between Chitty and a nap in a wagon, I managed to loiter out the morning, and at three o'clock, a cannon peal, so close that it shook the houses, brought my horse upon his haunches. For awhile I did not leave the village. Cannon upon cannon exploded; the young ladies ceased their mirth; the landlord staggered with white lips into the air, and after a couple of hours, I heard the signal that I knew so well--a volley of musketry. Full of all the old impulses, I climbed into the saddle, and spurred my horse towards the battle-field. The ride over six miles of clay road was a capital school for my pony. Every hoof-fall brought him closer to the cannon, and the sound had become familiar when he reached the scene. At four o'clock, the musketry was close and effective beyond anything I had known, and now and then I could see, from secure places, the spurts of white cannon-smoke far up the side of the mountain. The action was commenced by emulous skirmishers, who crawled from the woodsides, and annoyed each other from coverts of ridge, stump, and stone heap. A large number of Southern riflemen then threw themselves into a corner of wood, considerably advanced from their main position. Their fire was so destructive that General Banks felt it necessary to order a charge. Two brigades, when the signal was given, marched in line of battle, out of a wood, and charged across a field of broken ground toward the projecting corner. As soon as they appeared, sharpshooters darted up from a stretch of scrub cedars on their right, and a battery mowed them down by an oblique fire from the left. The guns up the mountain side threw shells with beautiful exactness, and the concealed rifle-men in front poured in deadly showers of bullet and ball. As the men fell by dozens out of line, the survivors closed up the gaps, and pressed forward gallantly. The ground was uneven, however, and solid order could not be observed throughout. At length, when they had gained a brookside at the very edge of the wood, the column staggered, quailed, fell into disorder, and then fell back. Some of the more desperate dashed singly into the thicket, bayoneting their enemies, and falling in turn in the fierce grapple. Others of the Confederates ran from the wood, and engaged hand to hand with antagonists, and, in places, a score of combatants met sturdily upon the plain, lunging with knife and sabre bayonet, striking with clubbed musket, or discharging revolvers. But at last the broken lines regained the shelter of the timber, and there was a momentary lull in the thunder. For a time, each party kept in the edges of the timber, firing at will, but the Confederates were moving forward in masses by detours, until some thousands of them stood in the places of the few who were at first isolated. Distinct charges were now made, and a large body of Federals attempted to capture the battery before Slaughter's house, while separate brigades charged by front and flank upon the impenetrable timber. The horrible results of the previous effort were repeated; the Confederates preserved their position, and, at nightfall, the Federals fell back a mile or more. From fifteen hundred to two thousand of the latter were slain or wounded, and, though the heat of the battle had lasted not more than two hours, nearly four thousand men upon both sides were maimed or dead. The valor of the combatants in either cause was unquestionable. But no troops in the world could have driven the Confederates out of the impregnable mazes of the wood. It was an error to expose columns of troops upon an open plain, in the face of imperceptible sharpshooters. The batteries should have shelled the thickets, and the infantry should have retained their concealment. The most disciplined troops of Europe would not have availed in a country of bog, barren, ditch, creek, forest, and mountain. Compared to the bare plain of Waterloo, Cedar Mountain was like the antediluvian world, when the surface was broken by volcanic fire into chasms and abysses. In this battle, the Confederate batteries, along the mountain side, were arranged in the form of a crescent, and, when the solid masses charged up the hill, they were butchered by enfilading fires. On the Confederate part, a thorough knowledge of the country was manifest, and the best possible disposition of forces and means; on the side of the Federals, there was zeal without discretion, and gallantry without generalship. During the action, "Stonewall" Jackson occupied a commanding position on the side of the mountain, where, glass in hand, he observed every change of position, and directed all the operations. General Banks was indefatigable and courageous; but he was left to fight the whole battle, and not a regiment of the large reserve in his rear, came forward to succor or relieve him. As usual, McDowell was cursed by all sides, and some of Banks's soldiers threatened to shoot him. But the unpopular Commander had no defence to make, and said nothing to clear up the doubts relative to him. He exposed himself repeatedly, and so did Pope. The latter rode to the front at nightfall,--for what purpose no one could say, as he had been in Culpepper during the whole afternoon,--and he barely escaped being captured. The loss of Federal officers was very heavy. Fourteen commissioned officers were killed and captured out of one regiment. Sixteen commissioned officers only remained in four regiments. One General was taken prisoner and several were wounded. A large number of field-officers were slain. During the progress of the fight I galloped from point to point along the rear, but could nowhere obtain a panoramic view. The common sentiment of civilians, that it is always possible to see a battle, is true of isolated contests only. Even the troops engaged, know little of the occurrences around them, and I have been assured by many soldiers that they have fought a whole day without so much as a glimpse of an enemy. The smoke and dust conceal objects, and where the greatest execution is done, the antagonists have frequently fired at a line of smoke, behind which columns may, or may not have been posted. It was not till nightfall, when the Federals gave up the contested ground, and fell back to some cleared fields, that I heard anything of the manner of action and the resulting losses. As soon as the firing ceased, the ambulance corps went ahead and began to gather up the wounded. As many of these as could walk passed to the rear on foot, and the spectacle at eight o'clock was of a terrible character. The roads were packed with ambulances, creaking under fearful weights, and rod by rod, the teams were stopped, to accommodate other sufferers who had fallen or fainted on the walk. A crippled man would cling to the tail of a wagon, while the tongue would be burdened with two, sustaining themselves by the backs of the horses. Water was sought for everywhere, and all were hungry. I met at sundry times, friends who had passed me, hopeful and humorous the day before, now crawling wearily with a shattered leg or dumb with a stiff and dripping jaw. To realize the horror of the night, imagine a common clay road, in a quiet, rolling country, packed with bleeding people,--the fences down, horsemen riding through the fields, wagons blocking the way, reinforcements in dark columns hurrying up, the shouting of the well to the ill, and the feeble replies,--in a word, recall that elder time when the "earth was filled with violence," and add to the idea that the time was in the night. I assumed my old rôle of writing the names of the wounded, but when, at nine o'clock, the 10th Maine regiment--a fragment of the proud column which passed me in the morning--returned, I hailed Colonel Beale, and reined with him into a clover-field, the files following wearily. Tramping through the tall garbage, with few words, and those spoken in low tones, we stopped at length in a sort of basin, with the ground rising on every side of us. The men were placed in line, and the Company Sergeants called the rolls. Some of the replies were thrilling, but all were prosaic:-- "Smith!" "Smith fell at the first fire, Sergeant. Bill, here, saw him go down." "Sturgis!" "Sam's in the ambulance, wi' his thigh broke. I don't believe he'll live, Sergeant!" "Thompson!" "Dead." "Vinton!" "Yar! (feebly said) four fingers shot off!" In this way, the long lists were read over, while the survivors chatted, laughed, and disputed, talking of the incidents of the day. Most of the men lay down in the clover, and some started off in couples to procure water. The field-officers gave me some items relative to the conflict, and as they were ordered to remain here, I resolved to pass the night with them. Obtaining a great fence-rail, I lashed my horse to it by his halter, and, removing his saddle and bridle, left him free to graze in the vicinity. Then I unfolded my camp-bed, covered myself with a rubber blanket, and continued to listen to the conversation. Of course, accusations, bitter mutterings, moodiness, and melancholy, prevailed. I heard these for some time, interspersed with sententious eulogies upon particular persons, and references to isolated events. The evening was one of the pleasantest of the year, in all that nature could contribute; a fine starlight, a transparent atmosphere, a coolness, and a fragrance of sweet-clover blossoms. I had laid my head upon my arm, and shut my eyes, and felt drowsiness come upon me, when something hurtled through the air, and another gun boomed on the stillness. A shell, describing an arc of fire, fell some distance to our left, and, in a moment, a second shell passed directly over our heads. "----!" said an officer; "have they moved a battery so close? See! it is just at the end of this field!" I looked back! At the top of the basin in which we lay, something flashed up, throwing a glare upon the woody background, and a shell, followed by a shock, crashed ricochetting, directly in a line with us, but leaped, fortunately, above us, and continued its course far beyond. "They mean 'em for us," said the same voice; "they see these lights where the fools have been warming their coffee. Halloo!" Another glare of fire revealed the grouped men and horses around the battery, and for a moment I thought the missile had struck among us. There was a splutter, as of shivering metal flying about, and, with a sort of intuition, the whole regiment rose and ran. I started to my feet and looked for my horse. His ears were erect, his eyeballs distended, and his nostrils were tremulous with fright. A fifth shell, so perfectly in range that I held my breath, and felt my heart grow cold, came toward and passed me, and, with a toss of his head, the nag flung up the rail as if it had been a feather. He seemed literally to juggle it, and it flitted here and there, so that I dared not approach him. A favorable opportunity at length ensued, and I seized the animal by his halter. He was now wild with panic, and sprang toward me as if to trample me. In vain I endeavored to pull him toward the saddle. Fresh projectiles darted beside and above us, and the last of these seemed to pass so close that I could have reached and touched it. The panic took possession of me. I grasped my camp-bed, rather by instinct than by choice, and, holding it desperately under my arm, took to my heels. It was a long distance to the bottom of the clover-field, and the swift iron followed me remorselessly. At one moment, when a shell burst full in my face, half blinding me, I felt weak to faintness, but still I ran. I had wit enough to avoid the high road, which I knew to be packed with fugitives, and down which, I properly surmised, the enemy would send his steady messengers. Once I fell into a ditch, and the breath was knocked out of my body, but I rolled over upon my feet with marvellous sprightliness, till, at last, when I gained a corn-field, my attention was diverted to a strange, rattling noise behind me. I turned and looked. It was my horse, the rail dangling between his legs, his eyes on fire in the night. As we regarded each other, a shell burst between us. He dashed away across the inhospitable fields, and I fell into the high road among the routed. Expletives like these ensued:-- "Sa-a-ay! Hoss! Pardner! Are you going to ride over this wounded feller?" "Friend, have you a drop of water for a man that's fainted here?" "Halloo! Buster! Keep that bayonit out o' my eye, if you please!" "Where's Gen. Banks? I hearn say he's a prisoner." "I do' know!" "Was we licked, do you think?" "No! We warn't nothin' o' the kind. Siegel's outflanked 'em and okkepies the field. A man jus' told me so." "Huzza! Hearties, cheer up! Siegel's took the field, and Stonewall Jackson's dead." "Three cheers for Siegel." "Hoorooar, hoor--" "Oh! Get out! That's all blow. Don't try stuff me! We're lathered; that's the long and shawt of it." "Is that so? Boys, I guess we're beat!" Such was the character of exclamations that ran here and there, and after a little volley of them had been let off, a long pause succeeded, when only the sighs of the injured and the tramp of men and nags broke the silence. Overhead the starlight and the blue sky; on either side the rolling, shadowy fields; and wrapping the horizon in a gray, grisly girdle, the reposing woods plentiful with dew. Nature was putting forth all her still, sweet charms, as if to make men witness the damned contrast of their own wrath, violence, and murder. Even thus, perhaps,--I reasoned,--in the days of old, did the broken multitudes of Xerxes return by the shores of the golden Archipelago; and the Hellespont shone as peacefully as these silvernesses of earth and firmament. The dulness of history became invested with new intelligence. I filled in the details of a thousand routs conned in school-days, when only the dry outlines lay before me. They were mysteries before, and lacked the warmness of life and truth; but now I _saw_ them! The armor and the helmets fell away, with all other trappings of custom, language, and ceremony. This pale giant, who walked behind the ambulance, leaning upon the footboard, was the limping Achilles, with the arrow of Paris festering in his heel. This ancient veteran, with his back to the field, was the fugitive Æneas, leaving Troy behind. And these, around me, belonged to the columns of Barbazona, scattered at Legnano by the revengeful Milanese. Cobweb, and thick dust, and faded parchment had somewhat softened those elder events; but in their day they were tangible, practical, and prosaic, like this scene. Years will roll over this, as over those, and folks will read at firesides, half doubtfully, half wonderingly, the story of this bafflement, when no fragment of its ruin remains. It was a profound feeling that I should thus be walking down the great retreat of time, and that the occurrences around me should be remembered forever! There were a few prisoners in the mass, walking before cavalry-men. Nobody interfered with them, and they were not in a position to feel elated. Now and then, when we reached an ambulance, the fugitives would press around it to inquire if any of their friends were within. Rough recognitions would ensue, as thus:-- "Bobby, is that you, back there?--Bobby Baker?" "Who is it?" (feebly uttered.) "Me, Bobby--Josh Wiggins. Are you shot bad, Bobby?" "Shot in the thigh; think the bone's broke. You haven't got a drop of water, have you?" "No, Bobby; wish I had. Have anymore of our boys been hurt that you know of?" "Switzer is dead; Bill Cringle and Jonesy are prisoners; 'Pud' White is in the ambulance ahead; 'Fol' Thompson's lost an arm; that's all I know." When we had gone two miles or more, we found a provost column drawn across the road, and a mounted officer interrogating all who attempted to pass:-- "Stop there! You're not wounded." "Yes, I am." "Pass on! Halt boy! Go back. Men, close up there. Stop that boy." "I am sun-struck, Major." "You lie! Drive him back. Go back, now!" Beyond this the way was comparatively clear; but as I knew that other guards held the road further on, I passed to the right, and with the hope of finding a rill of water, went across some grass fields, keeping toward the low places. The fields were very still, and I heard only the subdued noises wafted from the road; but suddenly I found myself surrounded by men. They were lying in groups in the tall grass, and started up suddenly, like the clansmen of Roderick Dhu. At first I thought myself a prisoner, and these some cunning Confederates, who had lain in wait. But, to my surprise, they were Federal uniforms, and were simply skulkers from various regiments, who had been hiding here during the hours of battle. Some of these miserable wretches asked me the particulars of the fight, and when told of the defeat, muttered that they were not to be hood-winked and slaughtered. "I was sick, anyway," said one fellow, "and felt like droppin' on the road." "I didn't trust my colonel," said another; "he ain't no soldier." "I'm tired of the war, anyhow," said a third, "and my time's up soon; so I shan't have my head blown off." As I progressed, dozens of these men appeared; the fields were strewn with them; a true man would rather have been lying with the dead on the field of carnage, than here, among the craven and base. I came to a spring at last, and the stragglers surrounded it in levies. One of them gave me a cup to dip some of the crystal, and a prayerful feeling came over me as the cooling draught fell over my dry palate and parched throat. Regaining the road, I encountered reinforcements coming rapidly out of Culpepper, and among them was the 9th New York. My friend Lieutenant Draper, recognized me, and called out that he should see me on the morrow, if he was not killed meantime. Culpepper was filling with fugitives when I passed up the main street, and they were sprinkled along the sidewalks, gossiping with each other. The wounded were being carried into some of the dwellings, and when I reached the Virginia Hotel, many of them lay upon the porch. I placed my blanket on a clean place, threw myself down exhaustedly, and dropped to sleep directly. CHAPTER XXV. OUT WITH A BURYING PARTY. When I rose, at ten o'clock on the morning of Sunday, August 10, the porch was covered with wounded people. Some fierce sunbeams were gliding under the roof, shining in the poor fellows' eyes, and they were stirring wearily, though asleep. Picking my way among the prostrate figures, I resorted to the pump in the rear of the tavern for the purpose of bathing my face. A soldier stood there on guard, and he refused to give me so much as a draught of water. The wounded needed every drop, and there were but a few wells in the town. I strolled through the main street, now crowded with unfortunates, and pausing at the Court House, found the seat of justice transmuted to a headquarters for surgeons, where amputations were being performed. Continuing by a street to the left, I came to the depot, and here the ambulances were gathered with their scores of inmates. A tavern contiguous to the railway was also a hospital, but in the basement I found the transportation agents at breakfast, and they gave me a bountiful meal. It was here arranged between myself and an old friend--a newspaper correspondent who had recently married, and whose wife awaited him at Willard's in Washington--that he should proceed at once to New York with the outline of the fight, and that I should follow him next day (having, indeed, to report for duty and fresh orders at Head-quarters of the army in Washington,) with particulars and the lists of killed. I commenced my part of the labors at once, employing three persons to assist me, and we districted Culpepper, so that no one should interfere with the grounds of the other. My own part of the work embraced both hotel-hospitals, the names and statements of the prisoners of the Court House loft, and interviews with some of the generals and colonels who lay at various private residences. The business was not a desirable one; for hot hospital rooms were now absolutely reeking, and many of the victims were asleep. It would be inhuman to awaken these; but in many cases those adjacent knew nothing, and with all assiduity the rolls must be imperfect. I found one man who had undergone a sort of mental paralysis and could not tell me his own name. However, I groped through the several chambers where the bleeding littered the bare floors. Some of them were eating voraciously, and buckets of ice-water were being carried to and fro that all might drink. Some male nurses were fanning the sleeping people with boughs of cedar; but the flies filled the ceiling, and, attracted by the wounds, they kept up a constant buzzing. I imagined that mortification would rapidly ensue in this broiling atmosphere. A couple of trains were being prepared below, to transport the sufferers to Washington, and from time to time individuals were carried into the air and deposited in common freight-cars upon the hard floors. Here they were compelled to wait till late in the evening, for no trains were allowed to leave the village during the day. At the Virginia Hotel, I visited, among others, the room in which I had lodged when I first came to Culpepper. Eight persons now occupied it, and three of them lay across the bed. I took the first man's name, and as the man next to him seemed to be asleep, I asked the first man to nudge him gently. "I don't think he is alive," said the man; "he hasn't moved since midnight. I've spoken to him already." I pulled a blanket from the head of the figure, and the tangled hair, yellow skin, and stiffened jaw told all the story. The other man looked uneasily into the face of the corpse and then lay down with his back toward it. "I hope they'll take it out," said he, "I don't want to sleep beside it another night." The guard at the Court House allowed me to ascend to the loft, and the prisoners--forty or fifty in number--clustered around me. They had received, a short time before, their day's allotment of crackers and bread, and some of them were sitting in the cupola, with their bare legs hanging over the rails. They were anxious to have their names printed, and I learned from the less cautious the names of the brigades to which they belonged. Before I left the room I had obtained the number of regiments in Jackson's command and the names of his brigadier-generals. Some prisoners arrived while I was noting these matters. They had been sent to pick up arms, canteens, cartridge-boxes, etc., from the battle-field, and some of our cavalry had ridden them down and captured them. They were a little discomposed, but said, for the most part, that they were weary of the war and glad to be in custody. As a rule, Northern and Southern troops have the same general manners and appearances. These were more ragged than any Federals I had ever known, and their appetites were voracious. I found General Geary, a Pennsylvania brigade Commander, in the dwelling of a lady near the end of the town. He had received a bullet in the arm, and, I believe, submitted to amputation afterward. He was a tall, athletic man, upwards of six feet in height, and a citizen of one of the mountainous interior counties of the Quaker State. His life had been marked by much adventure, and he had been elevated to many important civil positions in various quarters of the Republic. He occupied a leading place, in the Mexican war, and was afterward Mayor of San Francisco and Governor of Kansas. He acted with the Southern wing of the Democratic party, and was discreetly ambitious, promoting the agricultural interests of his commonwealth, and otherwise fulfilling useful civil functions. He was a fine exemplar of the American gentleman, preserving the better individualities of his countrymen, but discarding those grosser traits, which have given us an unenviable name abroad. Geary could not do a mean thing, and his courage came so naturally to him that he did not consider it any cause of pride. The bias of party, which in America diseases the best natures, had in some degree affected the General. He was prone to go with his party in any event, when often, I think, his fine intelligence would have prompted him to an independent course. But I wish that all our leading men possessed his manliness, for then more dignity and self-respect, and less "smartness," might be apparent in our social and political organizations. He was lying on his back, with his shattered arm bandaged, and resting on his breast. Twitches of keen pain shot across his face now and then, but he received me with a simple courtesy that made his patience thrice heroic. He did not speak of himself or his services, though I knew both to be eminent; but McDowell had insulted him, as he rode disabled from the field, and Geary felt the sting of the word more than the bullet. He had ventured to say to McDowell that the Reserves were badly needed in front, and the proud "Regular" had answered the officious "Volunteer," to the effect that he knew his own business. Not the least among the causes of the North's inefficiency will be found this ill feeling between the professional and the civil soldiery. A Regular contemns a Volunteer; a Volunteer hates a Regular. I visited General Augur--badly wounded--in the drawing-room of the hotel, and paused a moment to watch Colonel Donnelly, mortally wounded, lying on a spread in the hall. The latter lingered a day in fearful agony; but he was a powerful man in physique, and he fought with death through a bloody sweat, never moaning nor complaining, till he fell into a blessed torpidity, and so yielded up his soul. The shady little town was a sort of Golgotha now. Feverish eyes began to burn into one's heart, as he passed along the sidewalks. Red hospital flags, hung like regalia from half the houses. A table for amputations was set up in the open air, and nakedness glared hideously upon the sun. How often have they brought out corpses in plain boxes of pine, and shut them away without sign, or ceremony, or tears, driving a long stake above the headboard. The ambulances came and went, till the line seemed stretching to the crack of doom; while, as in contemplation of further murder, the white-covered ammunition-teams creaked southward, and mounted Provosts charged upon the skulkers, driving them to a pen, whence they were forwarded to their regiments. Old Mr. Paine, the landlord, tottered up to me, with a tear in his eye, and said-- "My good Lord, sir! Who is responsible for this?" He did not mean to suggest argument. It was the language of a human heart pitying its brotherhood. At twelve o'clock I started anew for the field, and fell in with Captain Chitty on the way. He stated that his courage during the fight surpassed his most heroic expectations, and added, in an undertone, that he was deliberating as to whether he should allow his name to be mentioned officially, since several military men were urging that honor upon him. I dissuaded Chitty from this intent, upon the ground that his reputation for modesty might be sacrificed. Chitty at once said that he would take my advice. We encountered Surgeon Ball, of Ohio, after a time, and he informed us that a day's armistice had been agreed upon, to allow for the burial of the dead. The work of interment was already commenced in front, and the surgeon had been ordered to see to the wounded, some of whom still lay on the places where they fell. He allowed us to accompany him in the capacity of cadets, but we first diverged a little from the road, that he might obtain his portmanteau of instruments. I fell into a little difficulty here, by unwittingly asking aloud of the 28th Pennsylvania regiment, if that was not the organization which hid itself during the fight? The 28th had been ordered, on the morning of Saturday, to occupy Telegraph Mountain,--an elevation in the rear of Cedar Mountain,--which was used for a Federal signal-post. Nobody having notified the 28th to return to camp, they remained on the mountain, passively witnessing the carnage, and came away in the night. But although my remark was jestingly said, the knot of soldiers who heard it were intensely excited. They spoke of taking me "off that hoss," and called me a New York "Snob," who "wanted his head punched." This irate feeling may be attributed to the rivalry which exists between the "Empire" and the "Keystone" States, the latter being very jealous of the former, and claiming to have sent more troops to the war than any other commonwealth. The 28th volunteers doubtless expected a terrific onslaught from the next issue of the Philadelphia papers. The reserve, which had lain some miles in the rear the previous evening, were now massed close to the field, but in the woods, that the enemy might not count their numbers from his high position. Stopping at times to chat with brother officers, at last I reached the meadow whence I had been driven the previous evening. I looked for my nag in vain. One soldier told me that he had seen him at daylight limping along the high road; but after sundry wild-goose chases, I gave up the idea of recovering him. At last I passed the outlying batteries, with their black muzzles scanning the battle-ground, and ascending the clover field, came upon the site of the battery which had so discomfited us the previous night. A signal vengeance had overtaken it. Some splinters of wheel and an overturned caisson, with eight horses lying in a group,--their hoofs extended like index boards, their necks elongated along the ground, and their bodies swollen--were the results of a single shell trained upon the battery by a cool artillerist. Beyond, the road and fields were strown with knapsacks, haversacks, jackets, canteens, cartridge-boxes, shoes, bayonets, knives, buttons, belts, blankets, girths, and sabres. Now and then a mule or a horse lay at the roadside, with the clay saturated beneath him; and some of the tree-tops, in the depth of the woods, were scarred, split, and barked, as if the lightning had blasted them. Now passing a disabled wagon, now marking a dropped horseshoe, now turning a capsized ambulance, now regarding a perfect wilderness of old clothes, we emerged from the timber at last, and came to the place where I had slept on the eve of the battle. A hurricane had apparently swept the country here, and the fences had been transported bodily. Sometimes the ground looked, for limited areas, as if there had been a rain of kindling-wood; and there were furrows in the clay, like those made by some great mole which had ploughed into the bowels of the earth. All the tree boles were pierced and perforated, and boughs had been severed so that they littered the way. Cedar Creek ran merrily across what had been the road,--the waters limpid and cool as before,--and when I passed beyond, I entered the region of dead men. Some poisonous Upas had seemingly grown here, so that adventurers were prostrated by its exhalations. A tributary rivulet formed with the creek a triangular enclosure of ground, where most of the Federals had fallen. To the left of the road stood a cornfield; to the right a stubble-field, dotted with stone heaps: deep woods formed the background to these, and scrub-timber, irregularly disposed, the foreground. On the right of the stubble lay a great stretch of "barren," spotted with dwarf cedars, and on the left of the cornfield stood a white farm-house, with orchards and outbuildings; beyond, the creek had hollowed a ravine among the hills, and the far distance was bounded by the mountains on the Rapidan. In the immediate front, towered Cedar Mountain, with woods at its base; and the roadway in which I stood, lost itself a little way on in the mazes of the thicket. Looking down one of the rows of corn, I saw the first corpse--the hands flung stiffly back, the feet set stubbornly, the chin pointing upward, the features losing their sharpness, the skin blackening, the eyes great and white-- "A heap of death--a chaos of cold clay." Turning into the cornfield, we came upon one man with a spade, and another man lying at his feet. He was digging a grave, and when we paused to note the operation, he touched his cap:-- "Pardner o' mine," he said, indicating the body; "him and I fit side by side, and we agreed, if it could be done, to bury each other. There ain't no sich man as that lost out o' the army, private or officer,--with all respect to you." It was a eulogy that sounded as if more deserved, because it was homely. There are some that I have read, much finer, but not as honest. At little distances we saw parties of ten or twenty, opening trenches, the tributary brook, only, dividing the Confederate and Federal fatigue parties. Close to this brook, in the cornfield, lay a fallen trunk of a tree, and four men sat upon it. Two of them wore gray uniforms, two wore blue. The latter were Gens. Roberts and Hartsuff of the Federal army. They were waiting for Gens. Stuart and Early, of the Confederate army: and the four were to define the period of the armistice. The men in gray were Major Hintham of Mississippi, and Lieut. Elliott Johnston of Maryland. Hintham was a lean, fiery, familiar man, who wore the uniform of several field-marshals. An ostrich feather was stuck in his soft hat and clasped by a silver star upon a black velvet ground. A golden cord formed his hat-band, and two tassels, as huge as those of drawing-room curtains, fell upon his back. His collar was plentifully embroidered as well as his coat-sleeves, and a black seam ran down his trousers. He wore spurs of prodigious size, and looked, in the main, like a tragedian about to appear upon the stage. The other man was young, stout, and good humored; and he talked sententiously, with a little vanity, but much courtesy. The Federals had nothing to say to these, they dealt only with equals in rank. It became a matter of professional ambition, now, to obtain the greatest amount of information from these Confederates, without appearing to depart from any conventionality of the armistice. I got along very well till Chitty came up, and his interrogatives were so pert and pointed that he very nearly spoiled the entire labor. Young Johnston was a Baltimorean, and wished his people to know something of him; he gave me a card, stated that he was one of Gen. Garnett's aids, and had opened the armistice, early in the day, by riding into the Federal lines with a flag of truce. By detachments, new bodies of Confederate officers joined us, most of them being young fellows in gray suits: and at length Gen. Early rode down the hillside and nodded his head to our party. It was the custom of our newspapers to publish, with its narrative of each battle, a plan of the field; and in furtherance of this object, having agreed to act for my absent friend, I moved a little way from the place of parley, and laying my paper on the pommel of my saddle proceeded to sketch the relative positions of road, brook, mountain, and woodland. While thus busily engaged, and congratulating myself upon the fine opportunities afforded me, a lithe, indurated, severe-looking horseman rode down the hill, and reining beside me, said-- "Are you making a sketch of our position?" "Not for any military purpose." "For what?" "For a newspaper engraving." "Umph!" The man rode past me to the log, and when I had finished my transcript, I resumed my place at the group. The new comer was Major General J. E. B. Stuart, one of the most famous cavalry leaders in the Confederate army. He was inquiring for General Hartsuff, with whom he had been a fellow-cadet at West Point; but the Federal General had strolled off, and in the interval Stuart entered into familiar converse with the party. He described the Confederate uniform to me, and laughed over some reminiscences of his raid around McClellan's army. "That performance gave me a Major-Generalcy, and my saddle cloth there, was sent from Baltimore as a reward, by a lady whom I never knew." Stuart exhibited what is known in America as "airiness," and evidently loved to talk of his prowess. Directly Gen. Hartsuff returned, and the forager rose, with a grim smile about his mouth-- "Hartsuff, God bless you, how-de-do?" "Stuart, how are you?" They took a quiet turn together, speaking of old school-days, perhaps; and when they came back to the log, Surgeon Ball produced a bottle of whiskey, out of which all the Generals drank, wishing each other an early peace. "Here's hoping you may fall into our hands," said Stuart; "we'll treat you well at Richmond!" "The same to you!" said Hartsuff, and they all laughed. It was a strange scene,--this lull in the hurricane. Early was a North Carolinian, who lost nearly his whole brigade at Williamsburg. He wore a single star upon each shoulder, and in other respects resembled a homely farmer. He kept upon his horse, and had little to say. Crawford was gray and mistrustful, calmly measuring Stuart with his eye, as if he intended to challenge him in a few minutes. Hartsuff was fair and burly, with a boyish face, and seemed a little ill at ease. Stuart sat upon a log, in careless posture, working his jaw till the sandy gray beard brushed his chin and became twisted in his teeth. Around, on foot and on horse, lounged idle officers of both armies; and the little rill that trickled behind us was choked in places with corpses. A pleasanter meeting could not have been held, if this were a county training. The Surgeon told Gen. Stuart that some of his relatives lived near the Confederate Capital, and as the General knew them, he related trifling occurrences happening in their neighborhoods, so that the meeting took the form of a roadside gossip, and Stuart might have been a plain farmer jaunting home from market. The General, who was called "JEB" by his associates, so far relented finally as to give me leave to ride within the Confederate outer lines, and Lieut. Johnson accompanied me. The corpses lay at frequent points, and some of the wounded who had not been gathered up, remained at the spots where they had fallen. One of these, whose leg had been broken, was incapable of speaking, and could hardly be distinguished from the lifeless shapes around him. The number of those who had received their death wound on the edge of the brook, while in the act of leaping across was very great. I fancied that their faces retained the mingled ardor and agony of the endeavor and the pang. There seemed to be no system in the manner of interment, and many of the Federals had thrown down their shovels, and strolled across the boundary, to chaff and loiter with the "Butternuts." No one, whom I saw, exhibited any emotion at the strewn spectacles on every side, and the stories I had read of the stony-heartedness during the plague, were more than rivalled by these charnel realities. Already corruption was violating the "temples of the living God." The heat of the day and the general demoralizing influences of the climate, were making havoc with the shapely men of yesterday, and nature seemed hastening to reabsorb, and renew by her marvellous processes, what was now blistering and burdening her surface. Enough, however, of this. Satiated with the scenes of war, my ambition now was to extend my observations to the kingdoms of the Old World. CHAPTER XXVI. OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT IN ENGLAND. The boy's vague dream of foreign adventure had passed away; my purpose was of a tamer and more practical cast; it was resolved to this problem: "How could I travel abroad and pay my expenses?" Evidently no money could be made by home correspondence. The new order of journals had no charity for fine moral descriptions of church steeples, ruined castles, and picture galleries; I knew too little of foreign politics to give the Republic its semi-weekly "sensation;" and exchange was too high at the depreciated value of currency to yield me even a tolerable reward. But might I not reverse the policy of the peripatetics, and, instead of turning my European experiences into American gold, make my knowledge of America a bill of credit for England? What capital had I for this essay? I was twenty-one years of age; the last three years of my minority had been passed among the newspapers; I knew indifferently well the distribution of parties, the theory of the Government, the personalities of public men, the causes of the great civil strife. And I had mounted to my saddle in the beginning of the war, and followed the armies of McClellan and Pope over their sanguinary battle-fields. The possibility thrilled me like a novel discovery, that the Old World might be willing to hear of the New, as I could depict it, fresh from the theatre of action. At great expense foreign correspondents had been sent to our shores, whose ignorance and confidence had led them into egregious blunders; for their travelling outlay merely, I would have guaranteed thrice the information, and my sanguine conceit half persuaded me that I could present it as acceptably. I did not wait to ponder upon this suggestion. The guns of the second action of Bull Run growled a farewell to me as I resigned my horse and equipments to a successor. With a trifle of money, I took passage on a steamer, and landed at Liverpool on the first of October, 1862. Among my acquaintances upon the ship was a semi-literary adventurer from New England. I surmised that his funds were not more considerable than my own; and indeed, when he comprehended my plans, he confessed as much, and proposed to join enterprises with me. "Did you ever make a public lecture?" he asked. Now I had certain blushing recollections of having entertained a suburban congregation, long before, with didactic critiques upon Byron, Keats, and the popular poets. I replied, therefore, misgivingly, in the affirmative, and Hipp, the interrogator, exclaimed at once-- "Let us make a lecturing tour in England, and divide the expenses and the work; you will describe the war, and I will act as your agent." With true Yankee persistence Hipp developed his idea, and I consented to try the experiment, though with grave scruples. It would require much nerve to talk to strange people upon an excitable topic; and a camp fever, which among other things I had gained on the Chickahominy, had enfeebled me to the last degree. However, I went to work at once, inditing the pages in a snug parlor of a modest Liverpool inn, while Hipp sounded the patrons and landlord as to the probable success of our adventure. Opinions differed; public lectures in the Old World had been generally gratuitous, except in rare cases, but the genial Irish proprietor of the _Post_ advised me to go on without hesitation. We selected for the initial night a Lancashire sea-side town, a summer resort for the people of Liverpool, and filled at that time with invalids and pleasure-seekers. Hipp, who was a sort of American Crichton, managed the business details with consummate tact. I was announced as the eye-witness and participator of a hundred actions, fresh from the bloodiest fields and still smelling of saltpetre. My horse had been shot as I carried a General's orders under the fire of a score of batteries, and I was connected with journals whose reputations were world-wide. Disease had compelled me to forsake the scenes of my heroism, and I had consented to enlighten the Lancashire public, through the solicitation of the nobility and gentry. Some of the latter had indeed honored the affair with their patronage. We secured the three village newspapers by writing them descriptive letters. The parish rector and the dissenting preachers were waited upon and presented with family tickets; while we placarded the town till it was scarcely recognizable to the oldest inhabitant. On the morning of the eventful day I arrived in the place. The best room of the best inn had been engaged for me, and waiters in white aprons, standing in rows, bowed me over the portal. The servant girls and gossips had fugitive peeps at me through the cracks of my door, and I felt for the first time all the oppressiveness of greatness. As I walked on the quay where the crowds were strolling, looking out upon the misty sea, at the donkeys on the beach, and at the fishing-smacks huddled under the far-reaching pier, I saw my name in huge letters borne on the banner of a bill-poster, and all the people stopping to read as they wound in and out among them. How few thought the thin, sallow young man, in wide breeches and square-toed boots, who shambled by them so shamefacedly, to be the veritable Mentor who had crossed the ocean for their benefit. Indeed, the embarrassing responsibility I had assumed now appeared to me in all its vividness. My confidence sensibly declined; my sensitiveness amounted to nervousness; I had half a mind to run away and leave the show entirely to Hipp. But when I saw that child of the Mayflower stolidly, shrewdly going about his business, working the wires like an old operator, making the largest amount of thunder from so small a cloud, I was rebuked of my faintheartedness. In truth, not the least of my misgivings was Hipp's extraordinary zeal. He gave the townsmen to understand that I was a prodigy of oratory, whose battle-sketches would harrow up their souls and thrill them like a martial summons. It brought the blush to my face to see him talking to knots of old men after the fashion of a town crier at a puppet-booth, and I wondered whether I occupied a more reputable rank, after all, than a strolling gymnast, giant, or dwarf. As the twilight came on my position became ludicrously unenviable. The lights in the town-hall were lit. I passed pallidly twice or thrice, and would have given half my fortune if the whole thing had been over. But the minutes went on; the interval diminished; I faced the crisis at last and entered the arena. There sat Hipp, taking money at the head of the stairs, with piles of tickets before him; and as he rose, gravely respectful, the janitor and some loiterers took off their hats while I passed. I entered the little bare dressing-room; my throat was parched as fever, my hands were hot and tremulous; I felt my heart sag. How the rumble of expectant feet in the audience-room shook me! I called myself a poltroon, and fingered my neck-tie, and smoothed my hair before the mirror. Another burst of impatient expectation made me start; I opened the door, and stood before my destiny. The place was about one third filled with a representative English audience, the males preponderating in number. They watched me intently as I mounted the steps of the rostrum and arranged my port-folio upon a musical tripod; then I seated myself for a moment, and tried to still the beating of my foolish heart. How strangely acute were my perceptions of everything before me! I looked from face to face and analyzed the expressions, counted the lines down the corduroy pantaloons, measured the heavily-shod English feet, numbered the rows of benches and the tubes of the chandeliers, and figured up the losing receipts from this unremunerative audience. Then I rose, coughed, held the house for the last time in severe review, and repeated-- "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN--A grand contest agitates America and the world. The people of the two sections of the great North American Republic, having progressed in harmony for almost a century, and become a formidable power among the nations, are now divided and at enmity; they have consecrated with blood their fairest fields, and built monuments of bones in their most beautiful valleys," etc. For perhaps five minutes everything went on smoothly. I was pleased with the clearness of my voice; then, as I referred to the origin of the war, and denounced the traitorous conspiracy to disrupt the republic, faint mutterings arose, amounting to interruptions at last. The sympathies of my audience were, in the main, with the secession. There were cheers and counter cheers; storms of "Hear, hear," and "No, no," until a certain youth, in a sort of legal monkey-jacket and with ponderously professional gold seals, so distinguished himself by exclamations that I singled him out as a mark for my bitterest periods. But while I was thus the main actor in this curious scene, a strange, startling consciousness grew apace upon me; the room was growing dark; my voice replied to me like a far, hollow echo; I knew--I knew that I was losing my consciousness--that I was about to faint! Words cannot describe my humiliation at this discovery. I set my lips hard and straightened my limbs; raised my voice to a shrill, defiant pitch, and struggled in the dimming horror to select my adversary in the monkey-jacket and overwhelm him with bitter apostrophes. In vain! The novelty, the excitement, the enervation of that long, consuming fever, mastered my overtaxed physique. I knew that, if I did not cease, I should fall senseless to the floor. Only in the last bitter instant did I confess my disability with the best grace I could assume. "My friends," I said, gaspingly, "this is my first appearance in your country, and I am but just convalescent; my head is a little weak. Will you kindly bear with me a moment while the janitor gets me a glass of water?" A hearty burst of applause took the sting from my mortification. A bald old gentleman in the front row gravely rose and said, "Let me send for a drop of brandy for our young guest." They waited patiently and kindly till my faintness passed away, and when I rose, a genuine English cheer shook the place. I often hear it again when, here in my own country, I would speak bitterly of Englishmen, and it softens the harshness of my condemnation. But I now addressed myself feverishly to my task, and my disgrace made me vehement and combative. I glared upon the individual in the monkey-jacket as if he had been Mr. Jefferson Davis himself, and read him a scathing indictment. The man in the monkey-jacket was not to be scathed. He retorted more frequently than before; he was guilty of the most hardy contempt of court. He was determined not to agree with me, and said so. "Sir," I exclaimed at last, "pray reserve your remarks till the end of the lecture, and you shall have the platform." "I shall be quite willing, I am sure," said the man in the monkey-jacket with imperturbable effrontery. Then, as I continued, the contest grew interesting; explosions of "No, no," were interrupted with volleys of "Ay, ay," from my adherents. Hipp, who had squared accounts, made all the applause in his power, standing in the main threshold, and the little auditory became a ringing arena, where we fought without flinching, standing foot to foot and drawing fire for fire. The man in the monkey-jacket broke his word: silence was not his forte; he hurled denials and counter-charges vociferously; he was full of gall and bitterness, and when I closed the last page and resumed my chair, he sprang from his place to claim the platform. "Stop," cried Hipp, in his hard nasal tone, striding forward; "you have interrupted the lecturer after giving your parole; we recall our promise, as you have not stood by yours. Janitor, put out the lights!" The bald old gentleman quietly rose. "In England," he said, "we give everybody fair play; tokens of assent and dissent are commonly made in all our public meetings; let us have a hearing for our townsman." "Certainly," I replied, giving him my hand at the top of the stairs, "nothing would afford me more pleasure." The man in the monkey-jacket then made a sweeping speech, full of loose charges against the Americans, and expressive of sympathy with the Rebellion; but, at the finishing, he proposed, as the sentiment of the meeting, a vote of thanks to me, which was amended by another to include himself. Many of the people shook hands with me at the door, and the bald old gentleman led me to his wife and daughter, whose benignities were almost parental. "Poor young man!" said the old lady; "a must take care of 'is 'ealth; will a come hoom wi' Tummas and me and drink a bit o' tea?" I strolled about the place for twenty-four hours on good terms with many townsmen, while Hipp, full of pluck and business, was posting me against all the dead walls of a farther village. Again and again I sketched the war-episodes I had followed, gaining fluency and confidence as by degrees my itinerant profession lost its novelty, but we as steadily lost money. The houses were invariably bad; we had the same fiery discussions every evening, but the same meagre receipts, and in every market town of northwestern Lancashire we buried a portion of our little capital, till once, after talking myself hoarse to a respectable audience of empty benches, Hipp and I looked blankly into each other's faces and silently put our last gold pieces upon the table. We were three thousand miles from home, and the possessors of ten sovereigns apiece. I reached out my hand with a pale smile:-- "Old fellow," I said, "let us comfort ourselves by the assurance that we have deserved success. The time has come to say good by." "As you will," said Hipp: "it is all the fault of this pig-headed nation. Now I dare say if we had brought a panorama of the war along, it would have been a stunning success; but standing upon high literary and forensic ground, of course they can't appreciate us. Confound 'em!" I think that Hipp has since had but two notions,--the exhibition of that panorama, or, in the event of its failure, a declaration of war against the British people. He followed me to Liverpool, and bade me adieu at Birkenhead, I going Londonward with scarcely enough money to pay my passage, and he to start next day for Belfast, to lecture upon his own hook, or, failing (as he afterward did), to recross the Atlantic in the steerage of a ship. My feelings, as the train bore me steadily through the Welsh border, by the clustering smoke-stacks of Birmingham, by the castled tower of Warwick, and along the head waters of the Thames and Avon, were not of the most enthusiastic description. I had no money and no friends; I had sent to America for a remittance, but in the interval of six weeks required for a reply, must eat and drink and lodge, and London was wide and pitiless, even if I dared stoop to beg assistance. Let no young man be tempted to put the sea between his home and himself, how seductive soever be the experiences of book-makers and poetic pedestrians. One hour's contemplation of poverty in foreign lands will line the boy's face with the wrinkles of years, and burn into his soul that withering dependency which will rankle long after his privations are forgotten. In truth, my circumstances were so awkward that my very desperation kept me calm. I had a formal letter to one English publisher, but not any friendly line whatever to anybody; and as the possibilities of sickness, debt, enemies, came to mind, I felt that I was no longer the hero of a romance, but face to face with a hard, practical, terrible reality. It was night when I landed at the Paddington Station, and taking an omnibus for Charing Cross, watched the long lines of lamps on Oxford Street, and the glitter of the Haymarket theatres, and at last the hard plash of the fountains in Trafalgar Square, with the stony statues grouped so rigidly about the column to Nelson. I walked down Strand with my carpet-bag in my hands, through Fleet Street and under Temple Bar, till, weary at last from sheer exercise, I dropped into a little ale-house under a great, grinning lantern, which said, in the crisp tone of patronage, the one word, "beds." They put me under the tiles, with the chimney-stacks for my neighbors, and I lay awake all night meditating expedients for the morrow: so far from regret or foreboding, I longed for the daylight to come that I might commence my task, confident that I could not fail where so many had succeeded. They were, indeed, inspirations which looked in upon me at the dawn. The dome of St. Paul's guarding Paternoster Row, with Milton's school in the background, and hard by the Player's Court, where, in lieu of Shakespeare's company, the American presses of the _Times_ shook the kingdom and the continent. I thought of Johnson, as I passed Bolt Alley, of Chatterton at Shoe Lane, of Goldsmith as I put my foot upon his grave under the eaves of the Temple. The public has nothing to do with the sacrifices by which my private embarrassment received temporary relief. Though half the race of authors had been in similar straits, I would not, for all their success, undergo again such self-humiliation. It is enough to say that I obtained lodgings in Islington, close to the home of Charles Lamb, and near Irving's Canterbury tower; and that between writing articles on the American war, and strategic efforts to pay my board, two weeks of feverish loneliness drifted away. I made but one friend; a young Englishman of radical proclivities, who had passed some years in America among books and newspapers, and was now editing the foreign column of the _Illustrated London News_. He was a brave, needy fellow, full of heart, but burdened with a wife and children, and too honestly impolitic to gain money with his fine abilities by writing down his own unpopular sentiments. He helped me with advice and otherwise. "If you mean to work for the journals," he said, "I fear you will be disappointed. I have tried six years to get upon some daily London paper. The editorial positions are always filled; you know too little of the geography and society of the town to be a reporter, and such miscellaneous recollections of the war as you possess will not be available for a mere newspaper. But the magazines are always ready to purchase, if you can get access to them. In that quarter you might do well." I found that the serials to which my friend recommended me shared his own advanced sentiments, but were unfortunately without money. So I made my way to the counter of the Messrs. Chambers, and left for its junior partner an introductory note. The reply was to this effect. I violate no confidence, I think, in reproducing it:-- "SIR,--I shall be glad to see any friend of----, and may be found," etc., etc. "I fear that articles upon the American war, written by an American, will not, however, be acceptable in this journal, as the public here take a widely different view of the contest from that entertained in your own country, and the feeling of horror is deepening fast." Undeterred by this frank avowal, I waited upon the publisher at the appointed time,--a fine, athletic, white-haired Scotchman, whose name is known where that of greater authors cannot reach, and who has written with his own hand as much as Dumas _père_. He met me with warm cordiality, rare to Englishmen, and when I said-- "Sir, I do not wish the use of your paper to circulate my opinions,--only my experiences," he took me at once to his editor, and gave me a personal introduction. Fortunately I had brought with me a paper which I submitted on the spot; it was entitled, "Literature of the American War," collated from such campaign ballads as I could remember, eked out with my own, and strung together with explanatory and critical paragraphs. The third day following, I received this announcement in shockingly bad handwriting:-- "D'r S'r, "Y'r article will suit us. "The ed. C. J." For every word in this communication, I afterward obtained a guinea. The money not being due till after the appearance of the article, I anticipated it with various sketches, stories, etc., all of which were largely fanciful or descriptive, and contained no paragraph which I wish to recall. In other directions, I was less successful. Of two daily journals to which I offered my services, one declined to answer my letter, and the other demanded a quarto of credentials. So I lived a fugitive existence, a practical illustration of Irving's "Poor Devil Author," looking as often into pastry-shop windows, testing all manner of cheap Pickwickian veal-pies, breakfasting upon a chop, and supping upon a herring in my suburban residence, but keeping up pluck and _chique_ so deceptively, that nobody in the place suspected me of poverty. I went for some American inventors, to a rifle ground, and explained to the Lords of the Admiralty the merits of a new projectile; wrote letters to all the Continental sovereigns for an itinerant and independent embassador, and was at last so poor that my only writing papers were a druggist's waste bill-heads. An article with no other "backing" than this was fortunate enough to stray into the _Cornhill Magazine_. I found that its proprietor kept a banking-house in Pall Mall, and doubtful of my welcome on Cornhill, ventured one day in my unique American costume,--slouched hat, wide garments, and squared-toed boots,--to send to him directly my card. He probably thought from its face that a relative of Mr. Mason's was about to open an extensive account with him. As it was, once admitted to his presence, he could not escape me. The manuscript lay in his hands before he fully comprehended my purpose. He was a fine specimen of the English publisher,--robust, ruddy, good-naturedly acute,--and as he said with a smile that he would waive routine and take charge of my copy, I knew that the same hands had fastened upon the crude pages of Jane Eyre, and the best labors of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray. Two more weary weeks elapsed; I found it pleasant to work, but very trying to wait. At the end my courage very nearly failed. I reached the era of self-accusation; to make myself forget myself I took long, ardent marches into the open country; followed the authors I had worshipped through the localities they had made reverend; lost myself in dreaminesses,--those precursors of death in the snow,--and wished myself back in the ranks of the North, to go down in the frenzy, rather than thus drag out a life of civil indigence, robbing at once my brains and my stomach. One morning, as I sat in my little Islington parlor, wishing that the chop I had just eaten had gone farther, and taking a melancholy inventory of the threadbare carpet and rheumatic chairs, the door-knocker fell; there were steps in the hall; my name was mentioned. A tall young gentleman approached me with a letter: I received him with a strange nervousness; was there any crime in my record, I asked fitfully, for which I had been traced to this obscure suburb for condign arrest and decapitation? Ha! ha! it was my heart, not my lips, that laughed. I could have cried out like Enoch Arden in his dying apostrophe:-- "A sail! a sail! I am saved!" for the note, in the publisher's own handwriting, said this, and more:-- "DEAR SIR,--I shall be glad to send you fifteen guineas immediately, in return for your article on General Pope's Campaign, if the price will suit you." But I suppressed my enthusiasm. I spoke patronizingly to the young gentleman. Dr. Johnson, at the brewer's vendue, could not have been more learnedly sonorous. "You may say in return, sir, that the sum named will remunerate me." At the same time the instinct was intense to seize the youth by the throat, and tell him that if the remittance was delayed beyond the morning, I would have his heart's-blood! I should have liked to thrust him into the coal-hole as a hostage for its prompt arrival, or send one of his ears to the publishing house with a warning, after the manner of the Neapolitan brigands. That afternoon I walked all the way to Edmonton, over John Gilpin's route, and boldly invested two-pence in beer at the time-honored Bell Inn. I disdained to ride back upon the omnibus for the sum of threepence, but returned on foot the entire eight miles, and thought it only a league. Next day my check came duly to hand,--a very formidable check, with two pen-marks drawn across its face. I carried it to Threadneedle Street by the unfrequented routes, to avoid having my pockets picked, and presented it to the cashier, wondering if he knew me to be a foreign gentleman who had written for the _Cornhill Magazine_. The cashier looked rather contemptuous, I thought, being evidently a soulless character with no literary affinities. "Sir," he said, curtly, "this check is crossed." "Sir!" "We can't cash the check; it is crossed." "What do you mean by crossed?" "Just present it where you got it, and you will find out." The cashier regarded me as if I had offered a ticket of leave rather than an order for the considerable amount of seventy-five dollars. I left that banking-house a broken man, and stopped with a long, long face at a broker's to ask for an explanation. "Yesh, yesh," said the little man, whose German silver spectacles sat upon a bulbously Oriental nose; "ze monish ish never paid on a crossed shequc. If one hash a bank-account, you know, zat ish different. Ze gentleman who gif you dis shequc had no bishness to crosh it if you have no banker." I was too vain to go back to Cornhill and confess that I had neither purse nor purser; so I satisfied the broker that the affair was correct, and he cashed the bill for five shillings. That was the end of my necessities; money came from home, from this and that serial; my published articles were favorably noticed, and opened the market to me. Whatever I penned found sale; and some correspondence that I had leisure to fulfil for America brought me steady receipts. Had I been prudent with my means, and prompt to advantage myself of opportunities, I might have obtained access to the best literary society, and sold my compositions for correspondingly higher prices. Social standing in English literature is of equal consequence with genius. The poor Irish governess cannot find a publisher, but Lady Morgan takes both critics and readers by storm. A duchess's name on the title-page protects the fool in the letter-press; irreverent republicanism is not yet so great a respecter of persons. I was often invited out to dinner, and went to the expense of a dress-coat and kids, without which one passes the genteel British portal at his peril; but found that both the expense and the stateliness of "society" were onerous. In this department I had no perseverance; but when, one evening, I sat with the author of "Vanity Fair," in the concert rooms at Covent Garden, as Colonel Newcome and Clive had done before me, and took my beer and mutton with those kindly eyes measuring me through their spectacles, I felt that such grand companionship lifted me from the errantry of my career into the dignity of a renowned art. I moved my lodgings, after three months, to a pleasant square of the West End, where I had for associates, among others, several American artists. Strange men were they to be so far from home; but I have since found, that the poorer one is the farther he travels, and the majority of these were quite destitute. Two of them only had permanent employment; a few, now and then, sold a design to a magazine; the mass went out sketching to kill time, and trusted to Providence for dinner. But they were good fellows for the most part, kindly to one another, and meeting in their lodgings, where their tenure was uncertain, to score Millais, or praise Rosetti, or overwhelm Frith. My own life meantime passed smoothly. I had no rivals of my own nationality; though one expatriated person, whose name I have not heard, was writing a series of prejudiced articles for _Fraser_, which he signed "A White Republican." I thought him a very dirty white. One or two English travellers at the same time were making amusingly stupid notices of America in some of the second-rate monthlies; and Maxwell, a bustling Irishman, who owns _Temple Bar_, the _Saint James_, and _Sixpenny Magazine_, and some half dozen other serials, was employing a man to invent all varieties of rubbish upon a country which he had never beheld nor comprehended. After a few months the passages of the war with which I was cognizant lost their interest by reason of later occurrences. I found myself, so to speak, wedged out of the market by new literary importations. The enforcement of the draft brought to Europe many naturalized countrymen of mine, whose dislike of America was not lessened by their unceremonious mode of departure from it; and it is to these, the mass of whom are familiarly known in the journals of this country, that we owe the most insidious, because the best informed, detraction of us. _Macmillan's Magazine_ did us sterling service through the papers of Edward Dicey, the best literary _feuilletonist_ in England; and Professor Newman, J. Stuart Mill, and others, gave us the limited influence of the _Westminster Review_. The _Cornhill_ was neutral; _Chambers's_ respectfully inimical; _Bentley_ and _Colburn_ antagonistically flat; Maxwell's tri-visaged publications grinningly abusive; _Good Words_ had neither good nor bad words for us; _Once a Week_ and _All the Year Round_ gave us a shot now and then. _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_ disliked our form of Government, and all its manifestations. The rest of the reviews, as far as I could see, pitied and berated us pompously. It was more than once suggested to me to write an experimental paper upon the failure of republicanism; but I knew only one American--a New York correspondent--who lent himself to a systematic abuse of the Government which permitted him to reside in it. He obtained a newsboy's fame, and, I suspect, earned considerable. He is dead: let any who love him shorten his biography by three years. However, I at last concluded a book,--if I may so call what never resulted in a volume,--at which, from the first, I had been pegging away. I called it "The War Correspondent," and made it the literal record of my adventures in the saddle. When some six hundred MS. pages were done I sent it to a publisher; he politely sent it back. I forwarded it to a rival house; in this respect only both houses were agreed. Having some dim recollection of the early trials of authors I perseveringly gave that copy the freedom of the city; the verdict upon it was marvellously identical, but the manner of declension was always soothing. They separately advised me not to be content with one refusal, but to try some other house, though I came at last to think, by the regularity of its transit to and fro, that one house only had been its recipient from the first. At last, assured of its positive failure, I took what seemed to be the most philosophic course,--neither tossing it into the Thames, after the fashion of a famous novelist, nor littering my floor with its fragments, and dying amidst them like a _chiffonnier_ in his den: I cut the best paragraphs out of it, strung them together, and published it by separate articles in the serials. My name failed to be added to the British Museum Catalogue; but that circumstance is, at the present time, a matter of no regret whatever. When done with the war I took to story-writing, using many half-forgotten incidents of American police-reporting, of border warfare, of the development of civilization among the pioneers, of thraldom in the South, and the gold search on the Pacific. The majority of these travelled across the water, and were republished. And when America, in the garb of either fact or fiction, lost novelty, I entered the wide field of miscellaneous literature among a thousand competitors. An author's ticket to the British Museum Reading-room put the whole world so close around me that I could touch it everywhere. I never entered the noble rotunda of that vast collection without an emotion of littleness and awe. Lit only from the roof, it reminded me of the Roman Pantheon; and truly all the gods whom I had worshipped sat, not in statue, but in substance, along its radiating tables, or trod its noiseless floors. Half the literature of our language flows from thence. One may see at a glance grave naturalists knee-deep in ichthyological tomes, or buzzing over entomology; pale zealots copying Arabic characters, with the end to rebuild Bethlehem or the ruins of Mecca; biographers gloating over some rare original letter; periodical writers filching from two centuries ago for their next "new" article. The Marquis of Lansdowne is dead; you may see the _Times_ reporter yonder running down the events of his career. Poland is in arms again, and the clever compiler farther on means to make twenty pounds out of it by summing up her past risings and ruins. The bruisers King and Mace fought yesterday, and the plodding person close by from _Bell's Life_ is gleaning their antecedents. Half the _literati_ of our age do but like these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy and science ran before types were so facile or letters became a trade. The novelty of this life soon wore away, and I found myself the creature of no romance, but plodding along a prosy road with very practical people. I carried my MSS. into Paternoster Row like anybody's book-keeper, and accused the world of no particular ingratitude that it could not read my name with my articles, and that it gave itself no concern to discover me. Yet there was a private pleasure in the congeniality of my labor, and in the consciousness that I could float upon my quill even in this vast London sea. Once or twice my articles went across the Channel and returned in foreign dress. I wonder if I shall ever again feel the thrill of that first recognition of my offspring coming to my knee with their strange French prattle. I was not uniformly successful, but, if rejected, my MSS. were courteously returned, with a note from the editor. As a sample I give the following. The original is a lithographed fac-simile of the handwriting of Mr. Dickens, printed in blue ink, the date and the title of the manuscript being in another handwriting. OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND." A WEEKLY JOURNAL CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. NO. 26 WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W. C. _January 27, 1863._ Mr. Charles Dickens begs to thank the writer of the paper entitled "A Battle Sunday" for having done him the favor to offer it as a contribution to these pages. He much regrets, however, that it is not suited to the requirements of "All the Year Round." The manuscript will be returned, under cover, if applied for as above. The prices of miscellaneous articles in London are remunerative. Twenty-four shillings a magazine page is the common valuation: but specially interesting papers rate higher. Literature as a profession, in England, is more certain and more progressive than with us. It is not debased with the heavy leaven of journalism. Among the many serial publications of London, ability, tact, and industry should always find a liberal market. There is less of the vagrancy of letters,--Bohemianism, Mohicanism, or what not,--in London than in either New York or Paris. I think we have the cleverer fugitive writers in America, but those of England seemed to me to have more self-respect and conscientiousness. The soul of the scribe need never be in pledge if there are many masters. While a good writer in any department can find work across the water, I would advise no one to go abroad with this assurance solely. My success--if so that can be called which yielded me life, not profit--was circumstantial, and cannot be repeated. I should be loth to try it again upon purely literary merits. After nine months of experiment I bade the insular metropolis adieu, and returned no more. The Continent was close and beckoning; I heard the confusion of her tongues, and saw the shafts of her Gothic Babels probing the clouds, and for another year I roamed among her cities, as ardent and errant as when I went afield on my pony to win the spurs of a War Correspondent. CHAPTER XXVII. SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES. Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace, where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in cocked hat and an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the casement to watch the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously. Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they make, and what passions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing. Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated passions, which keep us forever in freshness and fever,--love and art. In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way, but that of art shines steadily in the East. Thither look our American young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their devotions,--painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like religion. Having passed the first thrill and disappointment,--for pure art speaks only to the pure by intuition or initiation, and I was yet a novice,--my old newspaper curiosity revived to learn of the successful living rather than of the grand dead. Correspondents, like poets, are born, not made: the venerable associations around me--monuments, cloisters, palaces, the homes and graves of great men whom I revered, the aisles where every canvas bore a spell name--could not wean me from that old, reportorial habit of asking questions, peeping into private nooks, and making notes upon contemporary things, just as I had done for three years, in cities, on routes, on battle-fields. And as the old world seemed to me only a great art museum, I longed to look behind the tapestry at the Ghobelin weavers, pulling the beautiful threads. "Where dwell these gay and happy students, who quit our hard, bright skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of the spirit of the masters?" Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian rambling were spent in association with the folk I esteemed only less than my own exemplars. Art, in all ages, is the flowery way. No pursuit gives so great joy in the achieving, none achieved yields higher meed of competence, contentment, and repute. Its ambition is more genial and subdued than that of literature, its rivalry more courteous and exalting; its daily life should be pastoral and domestic, free from those feverish mutations and adventures which cross the incipient author, and it is forever surrounded by bright and beautiful objects which linger too long upon the eye to stir the mind to more than emulation. Is it harsh to say that artists have been too well rewarded, and thinkers and writers too ill? Vasari dines at the ducal table, while Galileo's pension is the rack; the mob which carries Cimabue's canvas in triumph, drives Dante into exile; Rubens is a king's ambassador, and Grotius is sent to jail; to Reynolds's levees, poor, bankrupt Goldsmith steals like an unwelcome guest, and Apelles's gold is paid to him in measures, while Homer, singing immortal lines, goes blind and begging. Art students take rank in Italy among the best of travellers, but Bohemianism in art is at one's peril. There are many wasted lives among the clever fellows who go abroad ostensibly for study. I recall Jimman, who was an expert with the pencil, and who colored with excellent discrimination. He went to Dusseldorf at first, and became known to Leutze, who praised his sketches. He began to associate at once with students and tipplers, and dissipated less by drinking than by talking. I have a theory that more men are lost to themselves and the age by a love of "gabbing" than by drinking. It is not hard to eschew cognac and claret, but there is no cure for "buzzing." There is a drunkenness of talk which takes possession of one, and Jimman would have had the _delirium tremens_ in a week, with nobody to listen to him. To my mind the Trappiste takes the severest of monastic vows. Jimman used to rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he fell in with a lot of Germans,--the most incurable race of gossipers in the world,--and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way his ambition burnt away, his money was squandered, he lost facility of manipulation, and came back to Paris at the age of twenty-eight, to pursue the same listless, garrulous existence; debts and grisettes, buzzing and brandy, the utterance of resolves which expired in the utterance, and Jimman finally became, perforce, a common apprentice to a moulder, that he might not entirely starve. I saw him, for the last time, in the Louvre, looking at Zurbaran's "Kneeling Monk." "Ah, Townsend," he said, "I might have done something like that. All my zeal is gone." And he began to chat in the same loose, familiar way. Dumbness and deafness would have been endowments rather than deprivations for him. I had rooms in Florence with Gypsum and Stagg. The former was a young, industrious fellow, of German descent, who worked hard, but not wisely. He spent half a year in copying a face by Paul Veronese, and the other half in sketching an old convent yard. But he did not visit, and an artist, to get orders and take rank, must be seen as well as be earnest. He need not be hail-fellow, but should keep well in the circle of respectable travellers; for these are to be his patrons, if he pleases them. Gypsum was over-modest and too conscientious; he had only a trifle of money, and was careless of his attire. So he disregarded society, and society forgot him. Therefore, at dawn, he betook himself to the old convent-yard, and stood at his easel bravely, never so unhappy as when one of the church's innumerable holy days arrived, for then he was forbidden to work upon the convent premises. With all his conscientiousness he received no orders; while Stagg, who was not more clever, proportioned to his longer experience, was befriended on every hand, because he went to the American chapel regularly and wore a dress-coat at the sociables. Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli. I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I anticipated. A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white and dimpled knee. She had the large dark eyes of the professional _modello_, and a bosom as ripe as Titian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge of his knot-hole. Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver pieces with a "_Mille grazie, Signore!_" and went home to take dinner with her little brothers. A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a month,--seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present. The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral habits, but the second one she lost by an excess of greed. She resolved to make them useful by day, as well as by night, and put them to work at the studios of individual artists. But as no one artist wanted three models, the girls had to separate, and, out of the mother's vigilance, the second one, Orsolo, went to the atelier of a wicked and handsome fellow, and met with the usual romance of her class. The oldest girl, Luigia, married a man-model, and their nuptials must have been of a most prosaic character. Among the many men who thus stood for the artists, was one old fellow, tall, and bearded, and massively characterized, who used to remain motionless for hours; until he seemed to be dead. He had been a model in every stage of life, from childhood to the grave, and represented every subject from Garibaldi to Moses. The walks in and around Florence occupied all my Sabbaths. Stagg and I used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint George" arises before me when I would conceive of any noble humanity, and the sweep of Orgagna's great arches give me an idea of vastness like the sea; in the Pitti palace only giants should abide; the Campanile goes up to heaven as beautiful as Jacob's ladder, and in the perpetual twilight of the Duomo I was not of half the stature I believed when roaming under the loftier sky. I saw a jail in Florence, and it troubled me; who in that beautiful city could do a crime? How should old age, or bad passions, or sickness, or shame, exist in that limpid atmosphere, in the shadow of such architecture, in the presence of those pictures? CHAPTER XXVIII. A CORRESPONDENT ONCE MORE. Again on the way to Washington! I have made the trip more than sixty times. I saw the Gunpowder Bridge in flames when Baltimore was in arms and the Capital cut off from the North. I saw from Perryville the State flag of Maryland waving at Havre de Grace across the Susquehanna. I saw at the Washington Navy Yard the blackened body of Ellsworth, manipulated by the surgeons. I moved through the city with McClellan's onward army toward the transports which were to carry it to the Peninsula. The awful tidings of the seven days' retreat came first through the Capital in my haversack, and before Stonewall Jackson fell upon the flank of Pope, I crossed the Long Bridge with the story of the disaster of Cedar Mountain. In like manner the crowning glory of Five Forks made me its earliest emissary, and the murder of the President brought me hot from Richmond to participate in the pursuit of Booth and chronicle his midnight expiation. Again am I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pass the Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages--pray God this be the last!--comes upon me like the sequences of delirium. As I look abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ascending dome of the capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had so sure faith in the eternity of his institutions. More masonry has been laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol, double-railed all the roads between New York and the Potomac, and gone on as if architecture were imperishable, while thrice the Rebels swept down toward the Relay. And we have done one strategic thing, which, I think, will compare with the passing of Vicksburg or the raid of Sherman; we have turned Philadelphia. This modern Pompeii used to be the stumbling-block on the great highway. It was to the direct Washington route what Hell-gate was to the Sound Channel. We were forbidden the right of way through it, on the ground that by retarding travel Philadelphia would gain trade, and had to cross the Delaware on a scow, or lay up in some inn over night. New Jerseymen, I hear, pray every morning for their daily stranger; Philadelphia has much sinned to entrap its daily customer. But Maillefert--by which name I designate the inevitable sledge which spares the grand and pulverizes the little--has built a road around the Quaker City. It is a very curious road, going by two hypothenuses of about fifteen miles to make a base of three or four, so that we lose an hour on the way to the Capital, all because of Philadelphia's overnight toil. The bridge at Perryville will be one of the staunchest upon our continent: the forts around Baltimore make the outlying landscapes scarcely recognizable to the returning Maryland Rebels. At last,--woe be the necessity! we have garrisoned our cities. The Relay House is the most picturesque spot between the two foci of the country. Wandering through the woods, I see the dirty blouses of the remnant of "the boys" and the old abatis on the height looks sunburnt and rusty; away through the gorge thunders the Baltimore and Ohio train, over what ruins and resurrections, torn up a hundred times, and as obstinately relaid, until all its engineers are veteran officers, and can stand fire both of the furnace and the musket. Everybody in the country is a veteran; the contractor, who ran his schooner of fodder past the Rebel batteries; the correspondent, whose lean horse slipped through the crevices of dropping shells; the teamster, who whipped his mule out of the mud-hole, while his ammunition wagon behind grew hot with the heaviness of battle; the old farmer, who took to his cellar while the fight raged in his chimneys, but ventured out between the bayonet charges to secure his fatted calf. Annapolis Junction has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than shells, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe upon all her multitudinous graves. There are close to the city fine bits of landscape, where the fields dip gracefully into fertile basins, and rise in swells of tilled fields and orchard to some knoll, enthroning a porticoed home. Two years ago all these fields were quagmires, where stranded wheels and the carcasses of hybrids, looked as if a mud-geyser had opened near by. The grass has spread its covering, as the birds spread their leaves over the poor babes in the wood, and we walk we know not where, nor over what struggles, and shadows, and sorrows. I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sympathy. Who ever loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in corral,--miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and capable of holding ink between their ribs. They mounch, and mounch, and wear the same stolid eye which you have seen under the driver's lash, and in the vaulting moment of victory. No stunning receptions greet them, no cheers and banquets when Muley comes marching home; over at _Giesboro_ they come in crippled, die by the musket without a murmur, and are immediately boiled down and forgotten. I was once beaten by a rival correspondent upon a prominent battle, by riding a mule with my despatches. He walked into a mud-puddle just half way between the field and the post-office, and stopped there till morning. Here we are, at Washington. I have been in most of the cities of Europe: some of them have dirty suburbs, but the first impression of the Capitol City is dreary in the extreme; a number of the lost tribes have established booths contiguous to the terminus, wherein the filthiest people in the world eat the filthiest dishes; a man's sense of cleanliness vanishes when he enters the District of Columbia. I have been astonished to remark how greatness loses its stature here. Mr. Charles Sumner is a handsome man on Broadway or Beacon Street, but eating dinner at Thompson's, his shoulders seem to narrow and his fine face to grow commonplace. Above the squalid wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle, you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a pandemonium of legs in the air, and an agglomeration of saliva, ending with an impertinent clerk and two crescents of lazy waiters, who shy whisks, and are ambitious to run superfluous errands, for the warrant to rob you. Of people, you see squads; of residents, none. The public edifices have not picked their company, neither have the public functionaries. There is a quantity of vulgar statuary lying around, horses standing on their tails, and impossible Washingtons imbedded in arm-chairs; but the noble facade of the treasury always suggests to me Couture's great picture of the Decadence, where, under a pure colonnade, some tipplers are carousing. If we are to have statues at the Capital, let us make them with uplifted hands, and shame upon their grave, contemplative faces. Shall we ever make Washington the representative Capital of the country? Certainly all efforts to improve the site worthy of the seat of gigantic legislation have hitherto failed. The sword and the malaria have attacked it. Every year sees the President driven from his Mansion by pestilential vapors, and the sanitary condition of the city is extraordinarily bad. The carcasses of slain horses at Giesboro send their effluvia straight into Washington on the wind, and the "Island," or that part of the city between the river and the canal, is dangerous almost all the year. Moreover, the entire river front of the city seems to be untenable, except for negroes; the Washington monument stands on the yielding plain in the rear of the Chief Magistrate's, a stunted ruin, finding no foundation; and much of the great Capital reserve near by, would be a dead weight, if any effort were made to dispose it of, as building lots. The small portion of Washington lying upon Capitol Hill, is the most salubrious and covetable; but it is a lonesome journey by night around the Capitol grounds to the city. The finest residences lie north of the President's house, but the number of these grows apace, and the quantity of capital invested in private real estate, remains almost stationary. We recall but two or three citizens of Washington who have spent their money on the spot where they have made it. Corcoran was the most generous; he erected a museum of art, and Government has made it a Commissary depot! But how few of the illustrious Senators, Chief Justices, Generals, etc., who draw their sustenance from the Capital, care a penny to decorate it? Compare the home of Governor Sprague on 6th Street, to his splendid mansion at Providence, or the Club House of the Secretary of State, to his place at Auburn. Washington has power, but it cannot attract. It is the solitary monarch, at whose feet all kneel, but by none beloved. Strangers repair to it, grow rich, and quit it with their earnings. Government works nobly to imitate the Palaces of the Cæsars, and the public edifices leave our municipal structures far beneath, but these marble and granite piles seem to mock the littleness of individual ambition. Two hotels have been built during the war, both of the caravansary class, but the city, for four years, has been miserably incompetent to entertain its guests, or to command their respect. Washington, to be a city, lacks three elements--commerce, representation, health; the environs are picturesque, and the new forts on the hill-tops little injure the landscape. But the question is not premature, whether Washington city will ever answer the purposes of a stable seat of government, and reflect the enterprise, patriotism, and taste of the American people. I have sometimes thought that these huge public buildings,--now inadequate to accommodate the machinery of the Government,--would, at some future day, be the nucleus of a great _lycee_, and that Washington would become the Padua of the Republic, its University and Louvre, while legislation and administration, despairing of giving dignity to the place, would depart for a more congenial locality. At any rate, the old Federal theory of a sylvan seat of government has failed. For a sequestered and virtuous retreat of legislation, we have corruption augmented by dirt, and business stagnation aggravated by disease. There are virtues in the town; but these must be searched for, and the vices are obvious. CHAPTER XXIX. FIVE FORKS. I commence my account on the battle-field, but must soon make the long and lonely ride to Humphrey's Station, where I shall continue it. I am sitting by Sheridan's camp-fire, on the spot he has just signalized by the most individual and complete victory of the war. All his veterans are around him, stooping by knots over the bright fagots, to talk together, or stretched upon the leaves of the forest, asleep, with the stains of powder yet upon their faces. There are dark masses of horses blackened into the gray background, and ambulances are creaking to and fro. I hear the sobs and howls of the weary, and note, afar off, among the pines, moving lights of burying parties, which are tumbling the slain into the trenches. A cowed and shivering silence has succeeded the late burst of drums, trumpets, and cannon; the dead are at rest; the captives are quiet; the good cause has won again, and I shall try to tell you how. Many months ago the Army of the Potomac stopped before Petersburg, driven out of its direct course to Richmond. It tried the Dutch Gap and the powder-ship, and shelled and shovelled till Sherman had cut five States in half, and only timid financiers, sutlers, and congressional excursionists paid the least attention to the armies on the James. We had fights without much purpose at our breastworks, and at Hatcher's Run, but the dashing achievements of Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley overtopped all our dull infantry endeavors, and he shared with Sherman the entire applause of the country. No one knows but that behind these actors stood the invisible prompter, Grant; yet prompters, however assiduous, never divide applauses with the _dramatis personæ_; and therefore, when Sheridan, the other day, by one of those slashing adventures which hold us breathless, appeared on the Pamunkey and crossed the peninsula to City Point, even the armies of the Potomac and James were agitated. The _personnel_ of the man, not less than his renown, affected people. A very Punch of soldiers, a sort of Rip Van Winkle in regimentals, it astonished folks, that with so jolly and grotesque a guise, he held within him energies like lightning, the bolts of which had splintered the fairest parts of the border. But nobody credited General Sheridan with higher genius than activity; we expected to hear of him scouring the Carolina boundary, with the usual destruction of railways and mills, and therefore said at once that Sheridan would cut the great Southside road. But in this last chapter Sheridan must take rank as one of the finest military men of our century. The battle of "Five Forks" was, perhaps, the most ingeniously conceived and skilfully executed that we have ever had on this continent. It matches in secretiveness and shrewdness the cleverest efforts of Napoleon, and shows also much of that soldier's broadness of intellect and capacity for great occasions. Sheridan had scarcely time to change his horses' shoes before he was off, and after him much of our infantry also moved to the left. We passed our ancient breastworks at Hatcher's Run, and extended our lines southwestward till they touched Dinwiddie Court House, thirty miles from City Point. The Rebels fell back with but little skirmishing, until we faced northward and reached out toward their idolized Southside Railway; then they grew uneasy, and, as a hint of their opposition, fought us the sharp battle of Quaker Road on Thursday. Still, we reached farther and farther, marvelling to find that, with his depleted army, Lee always overmatched us at every point of attack; but on Friday we quitted our intrenchments on the Boydtown plank-road, and made a bold push for the White Oak road. This is one of the series of parallel public ways running east and west, south of the Southside, the Vaughan road being the first, the Boydtown plank-road the second, and the old Court-House road the third. It became evident to the Rebels that we had two direct objects in view: the severing of their railway, and the occupation of the "Five Forks." The latter is a magnificent strategic point. Five good roads meet in the edge of a dry, high, well-watered forest, three of them radiating to the railway, and their tributaries unlocking all the country. Farther south, their defences had been paltry, but they fortified this empty solitude as if it had been their capital. Upon its principal road, the "White Oak," aforenamed, they had a ditched breastwork with embrasures of logs and earth, reaching east and west three miles, and this was covered eastward and southeastward by rifle-pits, masked works, and felled timber; the bridges approaching it were broken; all the roads picketed, and a desperate resolve to hold to it averred. This point of "Five Forks" may be as much as eight miles from Dinwiddie Court House, four from the Southside road, and eighteen from Humphrey's, the nearest of our military railway stations. A crooked stream called Gravelly Run, which, with Hatcher's, forms Rowanty Creek, and goes off to feed the Chowan in North Carolina, rises near "Five Forks," and gives the name of Gravelly Run Church to a little Methodist meeting-house, built in the forest a mile distant. That meeting-house is a hospital to-night, running blood, and at "Five Forks" a victor's battle-flags are flying. The Fifth Army Corps of General Warren, has had all of the flank fighting of the week to do. It lost five or six hundred men in its victory of Thursday, and on Friday rested along the Boydtown plank-road, at the house of one Butler, chiefly, which is about seven miles from Five Forks. On Friday morning, General Ayres took the advance with one of its three divisions, and marched three-quarters of a mile beyond the plank-road, through a woody country, following the road, but crossing the ubiquitous Gravelly Run, till he struck the enemy in strong force a mile and a half below White Oak road. They lay in the edge of a wood, with a thick curtain of timber in their front, a battery of field-pieces to the right, mounted in a bastioned earthwork, and on the left the woods drew near, encircling a little farm-land and negro-buildings. General Ayres's skirmish-line being fired upon, did not stand, but fell back upon his main column, which advanced at the order. Straightway the enemy charged headlong, while their battery opened a cross fire, and their skirmishers on our left, creeping down through the woods, picked us off in flank. They charged with a whole division, making their memorable yell, and soon doubled up Ayres's line of battle, so that it was forced in tolerable disorder back upon General Crawford, who commanded the next division. Crawford's men do not seem to have retrieved the character of their predecessors, but made a feint to go in, and, falling by dozens beneath the murderous fire, gave up the ground. Griffin's division, past which the fugitives ran, halted awhile before taking the doubtful way; the whole corps was now back to the Boydtown plank-road, and nothing had been done to anybody's credit particularly. General Griffin rode up to General Chamberlain in this extremity. Chamberlain is a young and anxious officer, who resigned the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College to embrace a soldier's career. He had been wounded the day before, but was zealous to try death again. "Chamberlain," said Griffin, "can't you save the honor of the Fifth corps?" The young General formed his men at once,--they had tasted powder before,--the One Hundred and eighty-fifth New York and the One Hundred and ninety-eighth Pennsylvania. Down they went into the creek waist deep, up the slope and into the clearing, muskets to the left of them, muskets in front of them, cannon to the right of them; but their pace was swift, like their resolve; many of them were cut down, yet they kept ahead, and the Rebels, who seemed astonished at their own previous success, drew off and gave up the field. Almost two hours had elapsed between the loss and the recovery of the ground. The battle might be called Dabney's Farm, or more generally the fight of Gravelly Run. The brigades of Generals Bartlett and Gregory rendered material assistance in the pleasanter finale of the day. An order was soon after issued to hasten the burial of the dead and quit the spot, but Chamberlain petitioned for leave to charge the Rebel earthwork in the rear, and the enthusiasm of his brigade bore down General Warren's more prudent doubt. In brief, Griffin's division charged the fort, drove the Rebels out of it, and took position on the White Oak road, far east of Five Forks. While Griffin's division must be credited with this result, it may be said that their luck was due as much to the time as the manner of their appearance; the Rebel divisions of Pickett and Bushrod Johnston were, in the main, by the time Griffin came up, on their way westward to attack Sheridan's cavalry. Ayres and Crawford had charged as one to four, but the forces were quite equalized when Chamberlain pushed on. The corps probably lost twelve hundred men. In this action, the Rebels, for the first time for many weeks, exhibited all their traditional irresistibility and confidence. The merit of the affair, I am inclined to think, should be awarded to them; but a terrible retribution remained for them in the succeeding day's decrees. The ill success of the earlier efforts of Sheridan, show conclusively the insufficiency of ever so good cavalry to resist well organized and resolute infantry. Concentrating at Dinwiddie Court House, he proceeded to scour so much of the country that he almost baffled conjecture as to where his quarters really were. As many thousand cavalry as constitute his powerful force seem magnified, thus mounted and ever moving here and there, to an incredible number. The Court House, where he remained fittingly for a couple of days, is a cross-road's patch, numbering about twelve scattered buildings, with a delightful prospect on every side of sterile and monotonous pines. This is, I believe, the largest village in the district, though Dinwiddie stands fourth in population among Virginia counties. At present there is almost as great a population underground as the ancient county carried on its census. Indeed, one is perplexed at every point to know whence the South draws its prodigious armies. Some English officers have been visiting Dinwiddie during the week, and one of them said, curtly: "Blast the country! it isn't worth such a row, you know. A very good place to be exiled, to be sure, but what can you ever make of it!" This soulless Briton had never read any of the poems about the "boundless continent," and had no distinct conception of "size." From Dinwiddie fields, Sheridan's men went galloping, by the aid of maps and cross-examination, into every by-road; but it was soon apparent that the Rebel infantry meant to give them a push. This came about on Friday, with a foretaste on Thursday. Little Five Forks, is a cross-road not far from Dinwiddie Court House, in the direction of Petersburg. Big Five Forks, which, it must be borne in mind, gives name to the great battle of Saturday, is farther out by many miles, and does not lie within our lines. But, if the left of the army be at Dinwiddie, and the right at Petersburg, Little Five Forks will be first on the front line, though when Sheridan fought there, it was neutral ground, picketed but not possessed. Very early in the week, when the Rebels became aware of the extension of our lines, they added to the regular force which encamped upon our flank line at least a division of troops. These were directed to avoid an infantry fight, but to seek out the cavalry, and, by getting it at disadvantage, rid the region both of the harmfulness of Sheridan, and that prestige of his name, so terrifying to the Virginia house-wife. So long as Sheridan remained upon the far left, the Southside road was unsafe, and the rapidity with which his command could be transferred from point to point rendered it a formidable balance of power. The Rebels knew the country well, and the peculiar course of the highways gave them every advantage. The cavalry of Sheridan's army proper, is divided into two corps, commanded by Generals Devin and Custer; the cavalry of the Potomac is commanded by General Crook; Mackenzie has control of the cavalry of the James. On Friday, these were under separate orders, and the result was confusion. The infantry was beaten at Gravelly Run, and the cavalry met in flank and front by overwhelming numbers, executed some movements not laid down in the manual. The centre of the battle was Little Five Forks, though the Rebels struck us closer to Dinwiddie Court House, and drove us pell mell up the road into the woods, and out the old Court House road to Gravelly Run. We rallied several times, and charged them into the woods, but they lay concealed in copses, and could go where sabres were useless. The plan of this battle-field will show a series of irregular advances to puzzle anybody but a cavalry-man. The full division of Bushrod Johnston and General Pickett, were developed against us, with spare brigades from other corps. Our cavalry loss during the day was eight hundred in killed and wounded; but we pushed the Rebels so hard that they gave us the field, falling back toward Big Five Forks, and we intrenched immediately. Two thousand men comprise our losses of Friday in Warren's corps and Sheridan's command, including many valuable officers. We shall see how, under a single guidance, splendid results were next day obtained with half the sacrifice. On Friday night General Grant, dissatisfied, like most observers, with the day's business, placed General Sheridan in the supreme command of the whole of Warren's corps and all the cavalry. General Warren reported to him at nightfall, and the little army was thus composed:-- _General Sheridan's Forces, Saturday April 1, 1865._ Three divisions of infantry, under Generals Griffin, Ayres, and Crawford. Two divisions of cavalry, formerly constituting the Army of the Shenandoah, now commanded by General Merritt, under Generals Devin and Custer. One division cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, under General Crook. Brigade or more cavalry Army of the James, under General Mackenzie. In this composition the infantry was to the cavalry in the proportion of about two to one, and the entire force a considerable army, far up in the teens. Sheridan was absolute, and his oddly-shaped body began to bob up and down straightway; he visited every part of his line, though it stretched from Dinwiddie Court House to the Quaker road, along the Boydtown Plank and its adjuncts. At daybreak on Saturday he fired four signal-guns, to admonish Warren he was off; and his cavalry, by diverging roads, struck their camps. Just south of Culpepper is a certain Stony creek, the tributaries to which wind northward and control the roads. Over Stony creek went Crook, making the longest detour. Custer took a bottom called Chamberlain's bed; and Devin advanced from Little Five Forks, the whole driving the Rebels toward the left of their works on White Oak road. We must start with the supposition that our own men far outnumbered the Rebels. The latter were widely separated from their comrades before Petersburg, and the adjustment of our infantry as well as the great movable force at Sheridan's disposal, renders it doubtful that they could have returned. At any rate they did not do so, whether from choice or necessity, and it was a part of our scheme to push them back into their entrenchments. This work was delegated to the cavalry entirely, but, as I have said before, mounted carbineers, are no match for stubborn, bayoneted infantry. So when the horsemen were close up to the Rebels, they were dismounted, and acted as infantry to all intents. A portion of them, under Gregg and Mackenzie, still adhered to the saddle, that they might be put in rapid motion for flanking and charging purposes; but fully five thousand indurated men, who had seen service in the Shenandoah and elsewhere, were formed in line of battle on foot, and by charge and deploy essayed the difficult work of pressing back the entire Rebel column. This they were to do so evenly and ingeniously, that the Rebels should go no farther than their works, either to escape eastward or to discover the whereabouts of Warren's forces, which were already forming. Had they espied the latter they might have become so discouraged as to break and take to the woods; and Sheridan's object was to capture them as well as to rout them. So, all the afternoon, the cavalry pushed them hard, and the strife went on uninterruptedly and terrifically. I have no space in this hurried despatch to advert either to individual losses or to the many thrilling episodes of the fight. It was fought at so close quarters that our carbines were never out of range; for had this been otherwise, the long rifles of the enemy would have given them every advantage. With their horses within call, the cavalry-men, in line of battle, stood together like walls of stone, swelling onward like those gradually elevating ridges of which Lyell speaks. Now and then a detachment of Rebels would charge down upon us, swaying the lines and threatening to annihilate us; for at no part of the action, till its crisis, did the Southern men exhibit either doubt or dismay, but fought up to the standard of the most valiant treason the world has ever had, and here and there showing some of those wonderful feats of individual courage which are the miracles of the time. A colonel with a shattered regiment came down upon us in a charge. The bayonets were fixed; the men came on with a yell; their gray uniforms seemed black amidst the smoke; their preserved colors, torn by grape and ball, waved yet defiantly; twice they halted, and poured in volleys, but came on again like the surge from the fog, depleted, but determined; yet, in the hot faces of the carbineers, they read a purpose as resolute, but more calm, and, while they pressed along, swept all the while by scathing volleys, a group of horsemen took them in flank. It was an awful instant; the horses recoiled; the charging column trembled like a single thing, but at once the Rebels, with rare organization, fell into a hollow square, and with solid sheets of steel defied our centaurs. The horsemen rode around them in vain; no charge could break the shining squares, until our dismounted carbineers poured in their volleys afresh, making gaps in the spent ranks, and then in their wavering time the cavalry thundered down. The Rebels could stand no more; they reeled and swayed, and fell back broken and beaten. And on the ground their colonel lay, sealing his devotion with his life. Through wood and brake and swamp, across field and trench, we pushed the fighting defenders steadily. For a part of the time, Sheridan himself was there, short and broad, and active, waving his hat, giving orders, seldom out of fire, but never stationary, and close by fell the long yellow locks of Custer, sabre extended, fighting like a Viking, though he was worn and haggard with much work. At four o'clock the Rebels were behind their wooden walls at Five Forks, and still the cavalry pressed them hard, in feint rather than solemn effort, while a battalion dismounted, charged squarely upon the face of their breastworks which lay in the main on the north side of the White Oak road. Then, while the cavalry worked round toward the rear, the infantry of Warren, though commanded by Sheridan, prepared to take part in the battle. The genius of Sheridan's movement lay in his disposition of the infantry. The skill with which he arranged it, and the difficult manoeuvres he projected and so well executed, should place him as high in infantry tactics as he has heretofore shown himself superior in cavalry. The infantry which had marched at 2½ P. M. from the house of Boisseau, on the Boydtown plank-road, was drawn up in four battle lines, a mile or more in length, and in the beginning facing the White Oak road obliquely; the left or pivot was the division of General Ayres, Crawford had the center and Griffin the right. These advanced from the Boydtown plank-road, at ten o'clock, while Sheridan was thundering away with the cavalry, mounted and dismounted, and deluding the Rebels with the idea that he was the sole attacking party; they lay concealed in the woods behind the Gravelly Run meeting-house, but their left was not a half-mile distant from the Rebel works, though their right reached so far off that a novice would have criticized the position sharply. Little by little, Sheridan, extending his lines, drove the whole Rebel force into their breastworks; then he dismounted the mass of his cavalry and charged the works straight in the front, still thundering on their flank. At last, every Rebel was safe behind his intrenchments. Then the signal was given, and the concealed infantry, many thousand strong, sprang up and advanced by eçhelon to the right. Imagine a great barndoor shutting to, and you have the movement, if you can also imagine the door itself, hinge and all, moving forward also. This was the door:-- AYRES--CRAWFORD--GRIFFIN. Stick a pin through Ayres and turn Griffin and Crawford forward as you would a spoke in a wheel, but move your pin up also a very little. In this way Ayres will advance, say half a mile, and Griffin, to describe a quarter revolution, will move through a radius of four miles. But to complicate this movement by eçhelon, we must imagine the right when half way advanced cutting across the centre and reforming, while Crawford became the right and Griffin the middle of the line of battle. Warren was with Crawford on this march. Gregory commanded the skirmishers. Ayres was so close to the Rebel left that he might be said to hinge upon it; and at 6 o'clock the whole corps column came crash upon the full flank of the astonished Rebels. Now came the pitch of the battle. We were already on the Rebel right in force, and thinly in their rear. Our carbineers were making feint to charge in direct front, and our infantry, four deep, hemmed in their entire left. All this they did not for an instant note, so thorough was their confusion; but seeing it directly, they, so far from giving up, concentrated all their energy and fought like fiends. They had a battery in position, which belched incessantly, and over the breastworks their musketry made one unbroken roll, while against Sheridan's prowlers on their left, by skirmish and sortie, they stuck to their sinking fortunes, so as to win unwilling applause from mouths of wisest censure. It was just at the coming up of the infantry that Sheridan's little band was pushed the hardest. At one time, indeed, they seemed about to undergo extermination; not that they wavered, but that they were so vastly overpowered. It will remain to the latest time a matter of marvel that so paltry a cavalry force could press back sixteen thousand infantry; but when the infantry blew like a great barndoor--the simile best applicable--upon the enemy's left, the victory that was to come had passed the region of strategy and resolved to an affair of personal courage. We had met the enemy; were they to be ours? To expedite this consummation every officer fought as if he were the forlorn hope. Mounted on his black pony, the same which he rode at Winchester, Sheridan galloped everywhere, his flushed face all the redder, and his plethoric, but nervous figure all the more ubiquitous. He galloped once straight down the Rebel front, with but a handful of his staff. A dozen bullets whistled for him together; one grazed his arm, at which a faithful orderly rode; the black pony leaped high, in fright, and Sheridan was untouched, but the orderly lay dead in the field, and the saddle dashed afar empty. General Warren rode with Crawford most of the afternoon, mounted likewise, and making two or three narrow escapes. He was dark, dashing, and individual as ever, but for some reason or other was relieved of his command after the battle, and Griffin was instated in his place. General Sheridan ordered Warren to report to General Grant's head-quarters, sending the order by an aid. Warren, on his own hook, did not meet on Friday with his general success, and on Saturday Sheridan was the master-spirit; but Warren is a General as well as a gentleman, and is only overshadowed by a greater genius,--not obliterated. Ayres, accounted the best soldier in the Fifth corps, but too quietly modest for his own favor, fought like a lion in this pitch of battle, making all the faint-hearted around him ashamed to do ill with such an example contiguous. General Bartlett, keen-faced and active like a fiery scimitar, was leading his division as if he were an immortal! He was closest at hand in the most gallant episodes, and held at nightfall a bundle of captured battle-flags. But Griffin, tall and slight, was the master-genius of the Fifth corps, to which by right he has temporarily succeeded. He led the charge on the flank, and was the first to mount the parapet with his horse, riding over the gunners as May did at Cerro Gordo, and cutting them down. Bartlett's brigade, behind him, finished the business, and the last cannon was fired for the day against the conquering Federals. General Crawford fulfilled his full share of duties throughout the day, amply sustained by such splendid brigade commanders as Baxter, Coulter, and Kellogg, while Gwin and Boweryman were at hand in the division of General Ayres; not to omit the fallen Winthrop, who died to save a friend and win a new laurel. What shall I say for Chamberlain, who, beyond all question, is the first of our brigade commanders, having been the hero of both Quaker Road and Gravelly Run, and in this action of Five Forks making the air ring with the applauding huzzas of his soldiers, who love him? His is one of the names that will survive the common wreck of shoulder-straps after the war. But I am individualizing; the fight, as we closed upon the Rebels, was singularly free from great losses on our side, though desperate as any contest ever fought on the continent. One prolonged roar of rifle shook the afternoon; we carried no artillery, and the Rebel battery, until its capture, raked us like an irrepressible demon, and at every foot of the intrenchments a true man fought both in front and behind. The birds of the forest fled afar; the smoke ascended to heaven; locked in so mad frenzy, none saw the sequel of the closing day. Now Richmond rocked in her high towers to watch the impending issue, but soon the day began to look gray, and a pale moon came tremulously out to watch the meeting squadrons. Imagine along a line of a full mile, thirty thousand men struggling for life and prestige; the woods gathering about them--but yesterday the home of hermit hawks and chipmonks--now ablaze with bursting shells, and showing in the dusk the curl of flames in the tangled grass, and, rising up the boles of the pine trees, the scaling, scorching tongues. Seven hours this terrible spectacle had been enacted, but the finale of it had almost come. It was by all accounts in this hour of victory when the modest and brave General Winthrop of the first brigade, Ayres division, was mortally wounded. He was riding along the breastworks, and in the act as I am assured, of saving a friend's life, was shot through to the left lung. He fell at once, and his men, who loved him, gathered around and took him tenderly to the rear, where he died before the stretcher on which he lay could be deposited beside the meeting-house door. On the way from the field to the hospital he wandered in mind at times, crying out, "Captain Weaver how is that line? Has the attack succeeded?" etc. When he had been resuscitated for a pause he said: "Doctor, I am done for." His last words were: "Straighten the line!" And he died peacefully. He was a cousin of Major Winthrop, the author of "Cecil Dreeme." He was twenty-seven years of age. I had talked with him before going into action, as he sat at the side of General Ayres, and was permitted by the guard of honor to uncover his face and look upon it. He was pale and beautiful, marble rather than corpse, and the uniform cut away from his bosom showed how white and fresh was the body, so pulseless now. General Griffin said to me: "This victory is not worth Winthrop's life." Winthrop went into the service as a simple color-bearer. He died a brevet brigadier. At seven o'clock the Rebels came to the conclusion that they were outflanked and whipped. They had been so busily engaged that they were a long time finding out how desperate were their circumstances; but now, wearied with persistent assaults in front, they fell back to the left, only to see four close lines of battle waiting to drive them across the field, decimated. At the right the horsemen charged them in their vain attempt to fight "out," and in the rear straggling foot and cavalry began also to assemble; slant fire, cross fire, and direct fire, by file and volley rolled in perpetually, cutting down their bravest officers and strewing the fields with bleeding men; groans resounded in the intervals of exploding powder, and to add to their terror and despair, their own artillery, captured from them, threw into their own ranks, from its old position, ungrateful grape and canister, enfilading their breastworks, whizzing and plunging by air line and ricochet, and at last bodies of cavalry fairly mounted their intrenchments, and charged down the parapet, slashing and trampling them, and producing inexplicable confusion. They had no commanders, at least no orders, and looked in vain for some guiding hand to lead them out of a toil into which they had fallen so bravely and so blindly. A few more volleys, a new and irresistible charge, a shrill and warning command to die or surrender, and, with a sullen and tearful impulse, five thousand muskets are flung upon the ground, and five thousand hot, exhausted, and impotent men are Sheridan's prisoners of war. Acting with his usual decision, Sheridan placed his captives in care of a provost-guard, and sent them at once to the rear. Those which escaped, he ordered the fiery Custer to pursue with brand and vengeance; and they were pressed far into the desolate forest, spent and hungry, many falling by the way of wounds or exhaustion, many pressed down by hoof or sabre-stroke, and many picked up in mercy and sent back to rejoin their brethren in bonds. We captured in all fully six thousand prisoners. General Sheridan estimated them modestly at five thousand, but the provost-marshal assured me that he had a line four abreast a full mile long. I entirely bear him out, having ridden for forty minutes in a direction opposite to that they were taking, and growing weary at last of counting or of seeing them. They were fine, hearty fellows, almost all Virginians, and seemed to take their capture not unkindly. They wore the gray and not very attractive uniform of the Confederacy, but looked to be warm and fat, and passing along in the night, under the fir-trees, conveyed at most a romantic idea of grief and tribulation. They were put in a huge pen, midway between Big and Little Five Forks, for the night, the officers sharing the same fare with the soldiers, from whom, indeed, they were undistinguishable. Thus ended the splendid victory of Five Forks, the least bloody to us, but the most successful, proportionate to numbers engaged, that has been fought during the war. One man out of every three engaged took a prisoner. We captured four cannon, an ambulance train and baggage-teams, eight thousand muskets, and twenty-eight battle-flags. General Longstreet, it is thought, commanded. Neither he nor Pickett nor Bushrod Johnston, division commanders, were taken; they were wise enough to see that the day was lost, and imitated Bonaparte after Waterloo. I attribute this victory almost entirely to Sheridan; it was won by strategy and persistence, and in great part by men who would not stand fire the day before. The happy distribution of duties between cavalry and infantry excited a fine rivalry, and the consciousness of Sheridan's guidance inspired confidence. Has any battle so successful ever been fought in Virginia? or, indeed, in the East? I think not. It has opened to us the enemy's flank, so that we can sweep down upon the Appomattox and inside of his breastworks, enabling us to shorten our lines of intrenchments one half, if no more, and putting out of Lee's service fifteen thousand of his choicest troops. And all this, General Sheridan tells me, has cost him personally no more than eight hundred men, and the service no more than fifteen hundred. Compare this with Chancellorsville, Williamsburg, the Wilderness, Bull Run, and what shall we say? The enemy must have lost in this fight three thousand in killed and wounded. The scene at Gravelly Run meeting-house at 8 and at 10 o'clock on Saturday night, is one of the solemn contrasts of the war, and, I hope, the last of them. A little frame church, planted among the pines, and painted white, with cool, green window-shutters, holds at its foot a gallery for the negroes, and at the head a varnished pulpit. I found its pews moved to the green plain over the threshold, and on its bare floors the screaming wounded. Blood ran in little rills across the planks, and, human feet treading in them, had made indelible prints in every direction; the pulpit-lamps were doing duty, not to shed holy light upon holy pages, but to show the pale and dusty faces of the beseeching; and as they moved in and out, the groans and curses of the suffering replace the gush of peaceful hymns and the deep responses to the preacher's prayers. Federal and Confederate lay together, the bitterness of noon assuaged in the common tribulation of the night, and all the while came in the dripping stretchers, to place in this golgotha new recruits for death and sorrow. I asked the name of the church, but no one knew any more than if it had been the site of some obsolete heathen worship. At last, a grinning sergeant smacked his thumbs as if the first idea of his life had occurred to him, and led me to the pulpit. Beneath some torn blankets and rent officers' garments, rested the hymn book and Bible, which he produced. Last Sunday these doled out the praises of God, and the frightened congregation worshipped at their dictation. Now they only served by their fly leaves to give me my whereabouts, and said:-- _Presented to Gravelly Run Meeting House by the Ladies._ Over the portal, the scenes within were reiterated, except that the greatness of a starry night replaced the close and terrible arena of the church. Beneath the trees, where the Methodist circuit-rider had tied his horse, and the urchins, daring class-meeting, had wandered away to cast stones at the squirrels, and measure strength at vaulting and running, the gashed and fevered lay irregularly, some soul going out at each whiff of the breeze in the fir-tops; and the teams and surgeons, and straggling soldiers, and galloping orderlies passed all the night beneath the old and gibbous moon and the hushed stars, and by the trickle of Gravelly Run stealing off, afeared. But the wounded had no thought that night; the victory absorbed all hearts; we had no losses to notice where so much was won. A mile past the church, going away from head-quarters all the time, lies Five Forks, the object and name of the battle. A large open field of perhaps thirty acres, interposes between the church and the commencement of the Rebel works. Their left is only some rails and logs to mask marksmen, but the work proper is a very long stretch of all obstructions of a man's height in relief. The White Oak road runs directly in front of these intrenchments, and was, at the time I passed, the general highway for infantry returning from the field and cavalry-men concentrating at General Sheridan's bivouac. Riding a mile I came upon the Five Forks proper, and just to the left, at the foot of some pines, the victor and his assistants were congregated. Sheridan sat by some fagots, examining a topographical map of the country he had so well traversed; possibly with a view to design further aggressive movements in the morning. He is opposite me now as I pen these paragraphs by the imperfect blaze of his bivouac fire. He is good humored and talkative, like all men conscious of having achieved a great work, and has been good enough to sketch for me the plan of the day's operations, from which I have compiled much of the statement above. Close by lies Custer, trying to sleep, his long yellow hair covering his face; and General Griffin, now commanding the Fifth corps, goes here and there issuing orders, while aides and orderlies rode in and out, bearing further fresh messages of deeds consummated or proposed. We shall have a hot night no doubt, for away off to the right, continue volleys of musketry and discharges of artillery, intermixed with what seem to be thunderbolts of our men-of-war at anchor in the Appomatox and James,--if such can be heard at this great distance,--which tell us that the lines are in motion. CHAPTER XXX. RICHMOND DESOLATE. The scenes of entering the doomed stronghold, when Grant had burst its gates, ought to be made vivid as the spectacle of death. With my good and talented associate, Mr. Jerome B. Stillson, I hold the Spotswood Hotel, and from this caravansary of the late capital as thoroughly identified with Rebellion as the inn at Bethlehem with the gospel, we date our joint paragraphs upon the condition of the city. A week cannot have exhausted the curiosity of the North to learn the exact appearance of a city which has stood longer, more frequent, and more persistent sieges, than any in Christendom. This town is the Rebellion; it is all that we have directly striven for; quitting it, the Confederate leaders have quitted their sheet-anchor, their roof-tree, their abiding hope. Its history is the epitome of the whole contest, and to us, shivering our thunderbolts against it for more than four years, Richmond is still a mystery. Know then, that, whether coming from Washington or Baltimore, the two points of embarkation, all bound hitherward must rendezvous at Fortress Monroe; thence, in such excellent steamers as the _Dictator_, start up the broad James River. To own a country-house upon the "Jeems" river is the Virginia gentleman's ultimate aspiration. There, with a tobacco-farm, and wide wheatlands, his feet on his front-porch rails, a Havana cigar between his teeth, and a colored person to bring him frequent juleps, the Virginia gentleman, confident in the divinity of slavery, hopes in his natural, refined idleness, to watch the little family graveyard close up to his threshold, till it shall kindly open and give him sepulture. Elsewhere men aim to be successful, or enterprising, or eloquent, or scholarly, but that nobleness of hospitality, high spirit, dignity, and affability which constitute our idea of chivalry is everywhere save here an exotic. We say that chivalry is "played out," and that the prestige of "first families" is gone with the hurried retreat before Grant's salamanders. Not so. Secession as a cause is past the range of possibilities. But no people in their subjugation wear a better front than these brave old spirits, whose lives are not their own. Fire has ravaged their beautiful city, soldiers of the color of their servants, guard the crossings and pace the pavement with bayoneted muskets. But gentlemen they are still, in every pace, and inch, and syllable,--such men as we were wont to call brothers and countrymen. However, the James River, at which we commenced, has not a town upon it between the sea and the head of navigation. It is a strong commentary upon this patriarchal civilization, judged by our gregarious tastes, that one of the noblest streams in the world should show to the traveller only here and there a pleasant mansion, flanked by negro cabins, but nowhere a church-spire nor a steam-mill. All that we see from Fortress Monroe to City Point are ridges of breastworks, rifle-pits, and forts, lying bare, yellow, and deserted, to defend its passage, excepting at James Island, where the solitary and broken tower of the ancient colony holds guard over some bramble and ruin. Here Smith founded the celebrated settlement, which wooed to its threshold the gentle Pocahontas, and fell to fragments at the behest of the fiery Bacon. The ramparts on the James will remain forever; great as they are, they would hardly hold the bones of the slain in the capture and defence. Four hours from Fortress Monroe we pass Harrison's Landing, where two grand armies, _beaten_ aside from Richmond, sought the shelter of the river, and at City Point quit our large craft, to be transferred to a light draught vessel, which is to carry the first mail going to Richmond under the national flag since the beginning of the war. City Point is still a populous place, and the millions of mules upon it bray hoarsely; but we leave all these behind, as well as the national standard, which flaunts over General Grant's late head-quarters, and steam past the mouth of the Appomattox to go through the enemy's lines. Henceforward every foot of the way is freshly interesting. The Rebel ram _Atlanta_ in tow of a couple of tugs, goes past us with a torpedo boat at the rear. She is raking, slant, and formidable; but "old glory" is waving on her. Directly our own leviathan, the _Roanoke_ drifts up, and all her storm-throated tars cheer like the belch of her guns. We see to the right, the tip of Malvern Hill, ever sorrowful and sacred, and soon a great unfinished ram careens by, which never grew to battle-size; the true colors shine above her bulwarks like a flower growing in a carcass. Then at little intervals there are frequent prizes from the docks of Richmond, tugs, transports, barges, some of which show under our beautiful banner the Rebel cross, pale and contemptible. These malcontents committed as great crime against good taste in substituting for our starry emblem this artistic abomination, as against law and policy in changing the configuration of the Union. There is another flag, however, which we see, half exultantly, half vindictively,--the cross of St. George,--flying from a British cutter. By and by we come to our intrenchments upon the upper James and at Bermuda Hundred. Now they are very listless and half empty. The boys have gone off to tread on Lee's shanks. Only a few vessels stand at the landings, and the few remnants have laid down the rifle, and taken up the fishing-pole. One should come up this river to get a conception of our splendid navy. Sharp-pointed gunboats, with bullet-proof crows' nests and swivels that are the gentlest murderers ever polished; monitors through whose eyeholes a ball a big as a cook-stove squints from a columbiad socket; ferry-boats which are speckled with brass cannon, and all sorts of craft that can float and manoeuvre, provided they look at us through deadly muzzles are there to the number of fifty or sixty, as many as make the entire navies of all other American nations. After the war we must have a great naval review, and invite all the crowned heads to attend it. Soon we reach Dutch Gap, where lies Butler's canal, or "Butler's gut," as the sailors call it. The river at this point is so crooked that Butler must have laid it out by the aid of his wrong eye. The canal is meant to cut on a long elbow; but being almost at right angles to the course of the river, only the most obliging tide would run through it. As a consequence, it is a sort of a sluice merely, of insufficient width, and as a "sight" very disappointing to great expectations. Between the points of debouch of this canal crosses a drawbridge of pontoons, for the use of our troops, and just beyond it Aiken's Landing, where the flag of truce boat stopped. A fine brick mansion stands in shore, with a wharf abreast it. The banks around it are trodden here with many feet. These are the traces of the poor prisoners who reached here, fevered, and starving and naked, to catch for the first time the sight of cool waters and friends, and the bright flag which they had followed to the edge of the grave. How they threw up their hats, and cheered to the feeblest, and wept, and danced, and laughed. Long be the place remembered, as holy, neutral ground, where death never trod, and multitudes passed from suffering, to freedom and home. Beyond this point, the most formidable Rebel works we have seen, line the high bluffs and ridges. They are monuments of patient labor, and make of themselves hills as great as nature's. But the siege pieces, which often bellowed upon them like thunderbolts along the mountain-tops, are gone now, and only straggling, meddling fellows pass them at all. The highest of these works commands both ends of the Dutch Gap canal, and while our lads were digging they often hid themselves in caves which they dug in the cliff-sides. We reach the first torpedo at length; a little red flag marks it, by which the boat slips tremulously, though another and another are before, at the sight of which our nervous folks are agitated. Here is a monitor with a drag behind it, which has just fished up one; and the sequel is told by a bloody and motionless figure upon the deck. These torpedoes are the true dragon teeth of Cadmus, which spring up armed men. Happily for us, the Rebels have sown but few of them, and the position of these was pointed out by one of their captains who deserted to our side. In the midst of these lie the obstructions. Great hulks of vessels and chained spars, and tree-tops which reach quite across the river, except where our pioneers have hewn a little gap to let the steamer through. Upon these obstructions a hundred cannon bear from the cliffs before us, and as we go further we see the whole river-bed sprinkled with strange contrivances to keep back our thunder-bearers. We think it absolutely impossible, under any circumstances, that our fleet could have got to Richmond so long as the Rebels contested the passage; each step forward finds new and greater obstacles. The channel is as narrow as Harlem River and as crooked as a walk in the ramble of Central Park. Each elbow of the stream is muscular with snag and snare wherever the swift stream swoops around abruptly. Jagged abatis, driven piles, and artificial lumber, bar the way before us. To the right of us, to the left of us, behind us, stand up the bare parapets, crowned with airy lookout towers, where, at the coming of a nautilus, the whole horizon and foreground would rain crossfires of shell and iron bolts, to sweep into annihilation the tiniest or the staunchest opposition from the earth's surface, and under the earth and above the earth death waited to leap up and draw the daring to its bosom. Not one, nor two, nor three lines of defences frowned down as we cautiously steamed along, but every precipice was bristling with defiance, as if the deep subterranean fires underlying our race had burst here fitfully and frequently, heaving up the swells of the hills till they lay hard and barren for human ingenuity to garnish them with anxious artillery. All along were the deep funnel-shaped cases of the torpedoes just disentombed. But at nightfall Drury's Bluff flitted by like the battlemented wall of a city, and then we saw no more. The band that greeted us from a distance stops playing as the boat nears the wharf. There is a stillness, in the midst of which Richmond, with her ruins, her spectral roof, afar, and her unchanging spires, rests beneath a ghastly, fitful glare,--the night stain which a great conflagration leaves behind it for weeks,--struggling silently with colossal shadows along the foreground, two hideous walls alone arise in front, shutting these gleams. They are the Libby Prison and Castle Thunder. Right and left, and far in the moonlighted perspective beyond, there is a soft glitter upon cornices and domes. A haggard glow of candles, faintly defines the thoroughfares that have not suffered ruin; while massive, and upon a height overlooking all, stands the Capitol, flying its black shadow from the sinking moon across a hundred crumbling walls, until its edges touch the windows of the Libby. But over its massive roof, dimly seen through the mists of the river, and, as before, "through the mists of the deep," the banner of the Union, banished for four years, is shaken out again, broad and beautiful, by the breath of an April night. Upon the face of every leaning figure on the steamer's deck, in sight of that radiant signal, is the same half-melancholy, half-triumphant smile. The thought of the battle which has passed, of the army, which, after struggling through years for this majestic procession, has swept by and beyond without the view for which its straining eyes have yearned, is sad and strange. There comes back dimly suggestive, a story of Iran and his host, thundering at the gates of Tupelo, for the possession of a wondrous jewel, and awakening once upon a dawn to learn that Tupelo was an empty casket,--to turn back longing, "wondering eyes upon the city, and to hunt the fleeing prize afar." Yet unto those legions of the republic which have emptied Richmond of a prize which yet they may have easily clutched, there go out reverence and blessing even larger than might be bestowed upon them resting in camp, upon these overlooking hills. That true allegiance, that calm and stern self-sacrifice which impels an army forward past the sweet applauses and rewarding calms to which great victories might entitle it, are the purest sources of its glory and its fame. God bless the army that has permitted us to consummate this journey and to gaze upon this spectacle, while it does not impress us too proudly, too triumphantly. Both pride and triumph have, of course, a place in the tumultuous feeling that surges through the hearts of all; yet as in every true man is born an instinct of compassion for a fallen foe, we prefer that the shout should go up in honor of our victory alone, and not because these have suffered. The boat touches the shore at Rockett's, the foot of Richmond. A few minutes' walk and we tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And this is Richmond." We are under the shadow of ruins. From the pavements where we walk far off into the gradual curtain of the night, stretches a vista of desolation. The hundreds of fabrics, the millions of wealth, that crumbled less than a week ago beneath one fiery kiss, here topple and moulder into rest. A white smoke-wreath rising occasionally, enwraps a shattered wall as in a shroud. A gleam of flame shoots a grotesque picture of broken arches and ragged chimneys into the brain. Huge piles of debris begin to encumber the sidewalks, and even the pavements, as we go on. The streets in some places are quite choked up from walking. We are among the ruins of half a city. The wreck, the loneliness, seem interminable. The memory of lights in houses above, beheld while upon the steamer, alone keeps despondency from a victory over hope; and although the continued existence of the Spottswood Hotel is vouched for by authority, my lodge in such a wilderness seems next to impossible. Away to the right, above the waste of blackened walls, around the phantom-looking flag upon the capitol,--the only sign betwixt heaven and earth, or upon the earth, that Richmond is not wholly deserted,--beyond and out of the ruins, we walk past one of two open doorways where the moon serves as candle to a group of talking negroes. The gas works, injured by fire, are not working, and "ile" has not been struck in the Confederacy. Not a white man appears until we reach the Spottswood,--there before the entrance is a conclave of officers,--then, at last, entering, we stand in that most famous of Southern hotels, the interior of which is filled with the very aroma of the Rebellion. A thankful yielding up of carpet-bags and valises to the indignant negro waiters, and then a brief moonlight stroll toward the capitol. Within the gates of the Square, that swing on their hinges silent as the hour we pass alone, before us stands the magnificent monument crowned with Crawford's equestrian statue of Washington. The right hand of the rider, lifted against the sky, points a prophetic finger toward the southwest. Dark, and motionless, and grand, it is the one symbol belonging solely to the Union, which they have not dared to desecrate; which they have strangely chosen to consider neither as an insult nor a rebuke. Gazing beyond at the capitol itself, and back again at the figure which overlooks the building, it is not hard to imagine that, while the noisy debates of a congress of traitors to the Union that he founded were in progress, those bronze lips sometimes smiled in scorn. Leaving Richmond proper, and descending into the low, squalid portion of the town known as Rocketts, one sees among the many large warehouses, used without exception for the storage of tobacco, a certain one more irregular than the rest. An archway leads into it, and upon the outside of the second story windows runs a long ledge or footway, whereupon sentries used to stride, guarding the miserable people within. This is the jail of Castle Thunder, and it was the civil or State prison of the capital. Ill as were the accommodations of prisoners of war, the treatment of their own unoffending citizens by the Rebel government was ten times more infamous. We could not repress indignation, nor by any philosophic or charitable effort excuse the atrocious tyranny which here lashed, chained, handcuffed, tortured, shot, and hung, hundreds of people whom it could not stultify or impress. We may grant that the Confederacy had become a government; that, in its perilous incipiency, it had apology for severity and rigor with all malcontents; that, in its own struggle for death or life, it might, in self-defence, absorb all private liberty; but even thus the terrible testimony of this Castle Thunder is an everlasting stigma upon the Southern cause. We entered its strong portal, and there in the new commandant's room lay the record left behind by the Confederates. Its pages made one shudder. These are some of the entries:-- "George Barton,--giving food to Federal prisoners of war; forty lashes upon the bare back. Approved. Sentence carried into effect July 2. "Peter B. Innis,--passing forged government notes; chain and ball for twelve months; forty lashes a day. Approved. "Arthur Wright,--attempting to desert to the enemy; sentenced to be shot. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26. "John Morton,--communicating with the enemy; to be hung. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26." In an inner room are some fifty pairs of balls and chains, with anklets and handcuffs upon them, which have bent the spirit and body of many a resisting heart. Within are two condemned cells, perfectly dark,--a faded flap over the window peep-hole,--the smell from which would knock a strong man down. For in their centre lies the sink, ever open, and the floors are sappy with uncleanliness. To the right of these, a door leads to a walled yard not forty feet long, nor fifteen wide, overlooked by the barred windows of the main prison rooms, and by sentry boxes upon the wall-top. Here the wretched were shot and hung in sight of their trembling comrades. The brick wall at the foot of the yard is scarred and crushed by balls and bullets which first passed through some human heart and wrote here their damning testimony. The gallows had been suspended from a wing in the ledge, and in mid-air the impotent captive swung, none daring or willing to say a good word for him; and not for any offence against God's law, not for wronging his neighbor, or shedding blood, or making his kind miserable, but for standing in the way of an upstart organization, which his impulse and his judgment alike impelled him to oppose. This little yard, bullet-marked, close, and shut from all sympathy, is to us the ghastliest spot in the world. Can Mr. Davis visit it, and pray as he does so devoutly afterward? When men plead the justice of the South, and arguments are prompt to favor them, let this prison yard rise up and say that no such crimes in liberty's name have ever been committed, on this continent, at least. Up stairs, in Castle Thunder, there are two or three large rooms, barred and dimly lit, and two or three series of condemned cells, pent-up and pitchy, where, by a refinement of cruelty, the ceiling has been built low so that no man can stand upright. Here fifteen or twenty were crowded together, and, in the burning atmosphere, they stripped themselves stark naked, so that when in the morning the cell-doors were opened, they came forth as from the grave, begging for death. There are women's cells too; for this great and valiant government recognized women as belligerents, and locked them up close to a sentry's cartridge, so that, in the bitterness of solitude, they were unsexed, and railed, and blasphemed, like wanton things. On the pavements before the jail, were hidden numberless guards, who shot at every rag fluttering from the cages, and all this little circle of death and terror was enacted close to the bright river, and airy pediment of that high capitol, where bold men hoped by war to wring from a reluctant Union, acknowledgment of arrogant independence to rein civilization as it pleased, and warp the destinies of our race. CHAPTER XXXI. THE RUINS OF THE REBELLION. When Richmond was a plain city, a county seat, and the residence of a governor and commonwealth legislature, its enterprise was as gradual as its hospitality and private probity were steadfast. It was always a fierce political arena, and its two great journals, the _Whig_ and _Enquirer_, were not more violently partisan than its hustings. In the latter its debaters were wide-famed. No such "stump" has ever existed in America, commencing with Patrick Henry, whose eloquence was as intense and telling as his statesmanship was errant and inconsistent, and passing through the shrill and bitter apostrophies of John Randolph down to the latest era of Henry A. Wise, the most sufferable and interminable campaign orator extant, and John Minor Botts, scarcely his inferior. With us, out of door rhetoric is dry, studied, and argumentative; here an inspiration, based upon feeling rather than reason, and so earnest that it knew no personal friendship where its political affinities stopped. Whig and Democrat were not men of the same race or family in Richmond; they passed each other on the sidewalk with a sneer or a scowl, and knew no coalition even in the house of God. Even when the Whig party as an organization deceased, the Whigs, as individuals, retained their traditional antipathy, and the advent of secession was decried by these, not because they loved the Union more, but the triumphant Democracy the less. Separation was a feature of the hated faith, and no good could come out of Nazareth. The Union men of Richmond who have hungered in Castle Thunder, and been driven, needy and naked, from the South, were all old line Whigs, distrusting the North, but disliking Democracy. However, the war burst at last, heralded by that mysterious lunatic who appeared like a warning giant in the twilight day of the Union,--old John Brown; and as the Gulf States wheeled into line and pulled down the old colors, the Old Dominion, Southern and slaveholding, was too impulsive not to follow the whirlwind. She did not go for policy's sake, nor for principle's sake, but for emotion's sake. How wild and jubilant, and confident, were those Richmond mass meetings, at which separation was counselled! How awful seems their levity at this distance, with the city conquered and in ruins! On the Capitol Hill the mad orators inveighed; within the Capitol met the disunion assembly in secret and prolonged session; before the American, the Exchange, and the Spottswood hotels, visiting commissioners harangued the crowd; the people went to ballot on the day of State suicide, with laughing and wagging, and at the decree that Virginia and her people had resolved to quit the fabric of their fathers, bonfires and illuminations lit up the river and the sky. Done, these were the men to stand fast. Done in dream, the first acts were mirages rather than comprehensible events. They marched upon Harper's Ferry; they suppressed the Unionists in their midst; they erased the sacred mottoes of amity and unity from their monuments, and won to the new cause they so blindly embraced every inch of their soil except Old Point, where Fortress Monroe still stood defiant, to be in the end the source of their downfall. Gayly went the populace of Richmond, and splendid parties made the nights lustrous. When they heard that their town was mentioned, among many others, as the probable Confederate capital, they threw their hearts into the suggestion and offered lands and edifices as free gifts for the honor of being the centre of the South. A few, more interested, beheld in the coming of the seat of government higher rents and increased patronage, crowded hotels, and railway stock at a premium; but the mass, with the enthusiasm of women or children, thought only of their beloved city growing in rank and power; the home of legislators, orators, and savans; the seat of all rank and the depository of archives. At last the good news came; Richmond was the capital of a great nation; that courtesy bound all grateful Virginian hearts to the common cause forever; the heyday and gratulation were renewed; the new President, and the reverend senators appeared on Richmond streets; the citizens were proud and happy. There was no spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia laughed at these, flushed in the present, and invincible in the past. They only held high heads,--and trade, with vanity, grew strong, till every citizen wondered why all this glory had been so long delayed, and despised the ten years preceding the rupture, if not, indeed, the whole past of the Union. The President of the United States proclaimed war; an army marched upon the city. Not until the battle of Bull Run, when the dead and mangled came by hundreds into the town, did any one discover the consequences of Richmond's new distinction; but by this time the Rebel government had absorbed Virginia, and was master of the city. Thenceforward Richmond was the scene of all terrors, the prey of all fears and passions. Campaign after campaign was directed against her; she lived in the perpetual thunder of cannon; raiders pressed to her gates; she was a great garrison and hospital only, besieged and cut off from her own provinces; armies passed through her to the sound of drums, and returned to the creak of ambulances. She lost her social prestige, and became a barrack-city, filled with sutlers, adventurers, and refugees, till, bearing bravely up amid domestic riot and horrible demoralization,--a jail, a navy-yard, a base of operations,--she grew pinched, and base, and haggard, and, at last, deserted. Given over to sack and fire, the wretches who used her retreated in the night, and the enemies she had provoked marched over her defences, and laid her--spent, degenerate, and disgraced--under martial law. The outline of the scenes immediately associated with the evacuation of Richmond has been told by telegraph. Now that the stupefied citizens have recovered reason and memory so well as to tell us the story, it seems the most dramatic and fearful of the war. On Saturday the city was calm and trusting; Lee, its idol, held Grant, at Petersburg, fast; the daily journals came out as usual, filled with soothing accounts; that night came vague rumors of reverses; in the morning vaguer rumors of evacuation; by Sunday night the public records were burned in the streets, and the only remaining railway carried off the specie of the banks; before daylight on Monday, the explosions of bridges and half-built ships of war shook the houses; in the imperfect day, women, and old men, and children began to sway and surge before the guarded depot, which refused to admit them; then the town fell afire; no remonstrance could pacify the incendiaries; the spring wind carried the flame from the burning boats on the canal to the great Galligo Mills, to files of massive warehouses groaning with tobacco, into the heart of the town, where stores, and vaults, and banks, and factories lined the wide, undulating streets; it filled the gray concave with flame till the stars of the dawn shrank to pale invisibility in the advancing glare, and the crackle of hot roofs and beams, and the crash of walls and timbers, drowned the cries of the frightened and bankrupt, who beheld their fortunes wither in an hour, and the inheritance of their children fall to ashes. By the red, consuming light, poured past the straggling Confederate soldiers, dead to the acknowledgment of private rights, and sacking shop and home with curses and ribaldry; the suburban citizens and the menial negroes adopted their examples; carrying off whatever came next their hands, and with arms full of "swag," dropping it in the highway, lured by some dearer plunder. Negroes, with baskets of stolen champagne and rare jars of tamarinds, sought their dusky quarters to swill and carouse; and whites of the middle, and even of the higher class, lent themselves to theft, who, before this debased era, would have died before so surrendering their honor. All was peril, terror, and license; all who had nothing to lose were thieves; all who had anything left to lose were cowards. The conflagration swept through the densest, proudest blocks, driving off, not only the resident worthy, but the resident corrupt. Where were the lewd contractors, who had hoarded Confederate scrip by the basest exactions? With the fall of the capital their dollars dwindled to dust; four years of crime had resulted in beggary; still, with grasping palms, they adhered to their valueless paper, bearing it away. But of all the wretched, the Cyprians were the foremost. These inhabited the dense and business part of the town, where their houses were serried and compact; and, driven forth by the fire, they sought the street in their plumes and calicoes, to spend a cold and shivering bivouac in the square of the Capitol. From afar, the rich men of Sunday watched the flames of Monday sweeping on in terrible impetuosity, knowing that every tongue of light which leaped on high carried with it the competence they had sinned to acquire. And behind all, plunderer, incendiary, and straggler, came the one vague, overlapping, dreadful fear of--the enemy. Would they finish what friends had commenced,--the sack, the desolation, the slaughter of the place? Richmond had cost them half a million of lives, a mountain of blood and wealth, four years of deadly struggle; would they not complete its ruin? The morning came; the Confederates were gone; cavalry in blue galloped up the streets; a brigade of white infantry filed after them; then came the detested negroes. Behold! the victors, the subjugators, assist to quench the flames,--and Richmond is captured, but secure! Many of the churches were open on the Sunday of April 9, 1865, and were thinly attended by the more adventurous of the citizens, with a sprinkling of soldiers and Northern civilians. Mr. Woodbridge, at the Monument Church, built on the site of a famous burnt theatre, prayed for "all in authority," and held his tongue upon dangerous topics. The First Baptist Negro Church has been occupied all the week by Massachusetts chaplains, and Northern negro preachers, who have talked the gospel of John Brown to gaping audiences of wool, white-eyeball, and ivory, telling them that the day of deliverance has come, and that they have only to possess the land which the Lord by the bayonet has given them. To-day, Mr. Allen, the regular white preacher, occupied the pulpit, and told the negroes that slavery was a divine institution, which would continue forever, and that the duty of every good servant was to stay at home and mind his master. Half of the enlightened Africans got up midway of the discourse and left; the rest were in doubt, and two or three black class-leaders, whom the parson had wheeled over, prayed lustily that the Lord would keep Old Virginny from new ideas and all Yankee salvations; so that in the end the population were quite tangled up, as much so as if they had read the book of Revelation. I attended Saint Paul's, the fashionable Episcopalian church, where Lee, Davis, Memminger, and the rest had been communicants, and heard Doctor Minnegerode discourse. He was one of the Prussian refugees of 1848, and, though a hot Jacobin there, became a more bitter secessionist here. He is learned, fluent, and thoughtful, but speaks with a slight Teutonic accent. Jeff Davis's pew was occupied by nobody, the door thereof being shut. Jeff was a very devout man, but not so much so as Lee, who made all the responses fervently, and knelt at every requirement. This church is capable of "seating" fifteen hundred persons, has galleries running entirely around it, and is sustained at the roof within by composite pilasters of plaster, and at the pulpit by columns of mongrel Corinthian; the _tout ensemble_ is very excellent; a darkey sexton gave us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had yet preserved some little article of jewelry--a finger-ring, a brooch, a bracelet, showing how the last thing in woman to die is her vanity. Poor, proud souls! Last Sunday many of them were heiresses; now many of them could not pay the expenses of their own funerals. There were some Confederate officers in the house. They reminded me of the captive Jews holding worship in their gutted Temple. Some ruffians broke into this church after the occupation, and wrote ribaldry in the Bible and hymn-book. Dr. Minnegerode dared not pray for the Confederate States, and his sermon was trite, based upon the text of the eleventh chapter of the Acts--"The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." In the opening lesson, however, he aimed poison at the North, selecting the forty-fourth and following Psalms, commencing, "We have heard with our ears, O God! our fathers have told us, what work Thou didst in their days, in the times of old." Then it spoke of the heathen being driven out and the chosen people planted; afflicted by God's disfavor, the forefathers held the territory, and the generation extant would yet rout its enemies. But now the old stock were put to shame, a reproach to their neighbors and those that dwelt round about them. "Thou hast broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death," going not forth with our armies, bowing our souls to the dust till our bellies cleave unto the earth; we are killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter. Let all who would drink the essence of sorrow and anguish, read this wonderful Psalm, to learn how after this recapitulation, the parson said aloud the thrilling invocation. "Arise! for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake." Then came the next Psalm, light and tripping, full of praise for the king and his bride, coming to the nuptials with her virgin train: "instead of thy fathers, shall be thy children, whom thou mayst make princes in all the earth." A poetic parallel might be drawn between all this and the early hopes of Richmond; but the third Psalm came in like a beautiful peroration. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,--the Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah! He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire." Clear, direct, and in meaning monotone, the captive high-priest read all this, so fearfully applicable to the subjugated and ruined town, and then the organ threw its tender music into the half-empty concave, sobbing like a far voice of multitudes, until the sweet singing of Madame Ruhl, the chorister, swept into the moan of pipes, and rose to a grand peal, quivering and trilling, like a nightingale wounded, making more tears than the sublimest operatic effort and the house reeled and trembled, as if Miriam and her chanting virgins were lifting praises to God in the midst of the desert. That part of the New Testament read, by some strange fatuity, touches also the despair of the city. It told of Christ betrayed by Iscariot, deserted by his disciples, saying to his few trusty ones: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." "Can ye not watch with me one hour?" he says to the timid and sleeping; and turning to his conquerors, avers that the Son of Man shall return to Jerusalem, "sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." All this, of course, was the prescribed lesson for the Sunday before Easter, which to-day happened to be; but had the pastor searched it out to meet the exigencies of the place and time, it could not have been more _apropos_. He read also from Daniel, where the king's dream was interpreted; his realm, like a tree worn down to the root, and the king himself making his dwelling with the wild asses, but in the end "thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule." Again the organ rang, and the wonderful voice of the choristers alternated with deep religious prayers, whose refrain was, "Have mercy upon us." Only one Sunday gone by, the church was densely packed with Rebel officers and people; Mrs. Lee was there, and the president, in his high and whitened hairs. Midway of the discourse a telegram came up the aisle, borne by a rapid orderly. The president read it, and strode away; the preacher read it, and faltered, and turned pale; it said: My lines are broken; Richmond must be evacuated by midnight. ROBERT E. LEE. Ill news travels without words; the whole house felt that the great calamity had come; they broke for the doors, and left the rector, alone and frightened, to finish the solemn services. Now the enemy is here; the music and the prayer are not interrupted. God is over all, whether Davis or Lincoln be uppermost. This campaign, so gloriously and promptly finished, has consumed just eleven days. It took three to flank the Rebel army, one to capture Petersburg, one to occupy Richmond, and six to pursue, overtake, and capture the Army of Northern Virginia. No such memorable fighting has ever been known on our continent, and it parallels the Italian, the Austerlitz, and the Jena campaigns; in breadth of conception, it outrivals them all; it took less men to do it than the last two; it shows equal sagacity with any of them, but none of their brilliant episodes; and, unlike them, we cannot trace its full credit to any single personality. It has made the army immortal, but the lustre of it is diffused, not concentrating upon any single head. Grant must be credited with most of the combinations; yet without the genius and activity of Sheridan, the bewildering rapidity of Sherman, and the steadfastness of such reliable men as Wright, Parke, and Griffin, these combinations would have fallen apart. It is said that Stoneman and Sheridan were to have joined their separate cavalry commands at Lynchburg, and effect a simultaneous junction with the Army of the Potomac. This failed, through a miscalculation of distance or time; but had they succeeded, we should have been less than three days in turning Lee's right, and so made the campaign even more concise. But Grant's talent has been marked and signal. He is the long-expected "coming man." None can be lukewarm in surveying the nice adjustment of so many separate and converging routes to a grand series of victories. Sherman leaves the Rebellion no Gulf city to inhabit, and cuts off Lee's retreat while he absorbs Johnston; the navy closes the last seaport; Sheridan severs all communication with Richmond, and swells the central forces; then the Rebels are lured from their lines and scattered on their right; the same night the intrenchments of Petersburg are stormed, Richmond falls as this prop is removed, being already hungry-hearted, and the flushed army falls upon Lee and finishes the war. Is not this work for gratulation? Glory to the army, perfect at last, and to Grant, to Sheridan, to each of its commanders! Let us not do injustice to Lee. His tactics at the close of his career were as brilliant as necessity would permit. He could not feed Richmond, even though its impregnable works were behind him to retire to. So he gave his government time to evacuate, and, with his thinned and famishing ranks, made a bold push to join Johnston, some of whose battalions had already reinforced him; overtaken on the way, and punished anew, he did as any great and humane commander would do,--stopped the effusion of blood uselessly, and gave up his sword. Unless Davis has been captured, we would think it improbable that he had given up the Rebel cause. He was born to revolutionize, containing within himself all the elements of a Rebel leader, and too proud to yield, even when, like Macbeth, pursued to his castle-keep. I am assured by those who know him best that he has been, throughout, the absolute master of the Confederacy, overawing Lee, who, from the first, was a reluctant Rebel; and his design was, until abandoned by his army, to hold Richmond, even through starvation, making, behind its tremendous fortifications, a defence like that of Leyden or Genoa. There is no more faith in the Rebellion; it will be a long time before the United States is greatly beloved, but it will be always obeyed. Our soldiers look well, most of them being newly uniformed, and behave like gentlemen. Courtesy will conquer all that bayonets have not won. The burnt district is still hideously yawning in the heart of the town, a monument to the sternness of those bold revolutionists who are being hunted to their last quarry. Despotism, under the plea of necessity, has met with its end here as it must everywhere. We shall have no more experiments for liberty out of the Union, if the new Union will grant all that it gave before. Yesterday, when our splendid levies were paraded in the street, with foot, cavalry, and cannon, in admirable order, and kindly-eyed men in command, I looked across their cleanly lines, tipped with bayonets, to the Capitol they had won, bearing at last the tri-color we all love and honor, as the symbol of our homes and the hope of the world, and thought how more grandly, even in her ruin, Richmond stood in the light of its crowding stars, rather than the den of a desperate cabal, whose banner was known in no city nor sea, but as the ensign of corsairs, and hailed only by fustian peers, now rent in the grip of our eagle, and without a fane or an abiding-place. Let us go on, not conquerors, but Republicans, battering down only to rebuild more gloriously,--not narrowing the path of any man, but opening to high and low a broader destiny and a purer patriotism. CHAPTER XXXII. WAR EXECUTIONS. To have looked upon seventeen beings of human organism, ambition, sense of pain and of disgrace, brought forward with all the solemnities of a living funeral, and launched from absolute cognition to direct death, should put one in the category of Calcraft, Ketch, and Isaacs. Yet, I do not think it would be right to so classify me. I know an excellent clergyman, who has seen and assisted in fifty odd executions. He says, as I say, that each new one is an augmented terror. But he is upon the spot to smooth the felon's troubled spirit, and I am with him to teach the felon's boon companions the direness of the penalty. Without either the Chaplain or myself, capital punishment would lose half its effectiveness. And this is why I write the present article,--to relieve myself from the pertinacious inquiries with which I have been assailed since my return from the melancholy episodes of the executions at Washington. I am button-holed at every corner, and put through a cross-examination, to which Holt's or Bingham's had no searchingness: "How did Mrs. Suratt die?" "Was the rope attached to her left ear?" "What sort of rope was it, for example?" "Do her pictures look like her?" "Pray describe how Payne twisted, and whether you think Atzeroth's neck was dislocated?" And, after answering these questions, replete as they are with horrible curiosity, the questioner turns away, saying, "Dear me! I wouldn't see a man hung for a thousand dollars." I am weary of such hypocrisy, and I shall, in this paper, speak of some executions I have witnessed. I was quite a small boy, at school, when my chum and model, Bill Everett, dragged me off to Wayland's Mill, to see old Mrs. Kitty White suspended. She was a very infamous old woman, who had been in the habit of kidnapping black children, and running them by night from the Eastern shore across the bay to Virginia, where they were sold. If they became noisy and obstreperous before they left her house, and suspicion fell upon her, she clove their skulls with a hatchet, and buried them in her garden. When finally discovered, the remains of nearly a score marked how wholesale had been her wickedness. This old woman was very drunk when she came to be hanged, and so was the sheriff who assisted her. She called him impolite names, and carried a pipe in her mouth, and went off smoking and cursing. I remember that I cried very loudly, so that Bill Everett had to choke me, and saw ghosts for so many nights succeeding, that Crouch, our maid of all work, had to sit at my bedside till I fell asleep. The atrocity of a crime makes great difference in one's desire to see its after tragedy; and the next hanging I attended was almost world-famed. Four men were suspended for shooting down an entire family in cold blood. They had embarked on a raid of robbery, and emerging from the barren scrub of Delaware Forest, fell upon a snug and secluded Maryland farm-house, where the farmer's family were taking their supper. They fired through the ruddy windows, and brought the man down at his wife's feet; she, in turn, fell upon her threshold, rushing forth into the darkness, and the remnant of the family perished except two boys, who slipped away and gave the alarm. The jailer's boys of Chestertown went to school with me, and I was invited by the least of them to visit the jail,--a tumble-down old structure with goggly windows, and so unsafe that the felons had to be ironed to almost their own weight. And into the cell where the four fiends were lying, the jailer's big boy, for a big joke, pushed me, and locked the door upon me. I was alone with the same bloody-handed men who had so recently, and for a trifle of gold, made the fireside a shamble, and the night a howling terror. They appreciated the joke, and drew me to them, while their chains clanked, and pressed to my face their wild and prickly beards. There was one of them, named Drummond, who swore he would cut my heart out, and they executed a sort of death-tune on the floor with their balls and links. I lost all knowledge and perception in my fright, and cannot, at this interval, remember anything succeeding, but the execution. They were put to death upon a single long scaffold, the counterpart of that erected for the Booth conspirators, and the rope attached to the neck of the least guilty, broke when the drop fell, and cast him upon the ground, lacerated, but conscious, to be picked up and again suspended, while he begged for life, like a child. The sixth miscreant murdered from revenge, which is just a trifle better than avarice: his girl preferred another, and the disappointed man, Bowen, went to sea. Returning, he found the united lovers in the exultation of happiness; a child had just been born to them, and, touched by their content, Bowen gave the old rival his hand, and asked him out to accept a bumper. They drank again and again,--the spirits burning their blood to fire, and reviving again the bitter story of Bowen's love and shame. Within the hour, the husband lay at the jilted man's feet! He was condemned to death, and I undertook to describe his exit for a weekly newspaper. Still I see him, broad and muscular, climbing the gallows stair with his peaked cap, deathly white, and looking up at the sun as if he dreaded its eye. There was the muttering of prayers, the spasm of one spectator taken sick at the crisis, and the dull thump of the scaffold falling in. The preacher Harden, who fondled his wife on his knee, and fed her the while with poison, passed away so recently, that I need not revive the scene into which all his bad life should have been prolonged. The death of Armstrong, expiating a hypocrite's life at Philadelphia, is not so well remembered: he killed an old man in the heart of the city, riding in a wagon, and dumped him out when he reached the suburbs. His life, to the end, was marked by all insolence and infamy, and on the day of the execution, he made a pretended confession, inculpating two innocent persons. One hour after this, he made the following speech:-- MY FRIENDS: I have a few words to say to you; I am going to die; and let me say, in passing, I die in peace with my Maker; and if, at this moment, a pardon was offered me on condition of giving up my Maker, I would not take it; and I die in peace with all the world, and forgive all my enemies. I desire you to take warning by my fate. Sabbath-breaking was the first cause. I bid you farewell, gentlemen, (here he mentioned various officers), and I bid you all farewell. I die in peace with everybody. The Sheriff, very nervous, gave a signal to the drop-man too soon, and a serious accident very nearly occurred. The props were readjusted, all but the main support removed, and that unhinged; the Sheriff waved his handkerchief, and with the dead thump of the trap-lids against their cushions, and the heavy jerking of the noose knot against the victim's throat, the young murderer hung dangling in the air, not a limb quivering, and only a convulsive movement of the shoulders, to indicate the struggle which life maintained when giving up its place in the body. There was a rush forward. The doctors grasped his wrist. Some spectators passed their hands across his knees to feel the tremulous sinews; one or two felt a faintness, and a dozen made coarse jokes; and one or more speculated as to the issue of his immortal part, or the degree of his pain, or the probability of his cognizance. In seven minutes he was beyond the reach of execution or executioner, and a hurdle being wheeled from the stable, they cut down his body, while a few scrambled for the rope, and it was wheeled on a run into the convict's corridor for his old father to claim. The neck was not broken, nor the flesh discolored. Some said that he died "game;" and all went away, leaving the old man and a brother to sit by the remains and weep, that so great calamity had darkened their home and blighted their lives. Few lamented him, for he had youth, but none of its elements of sympathy; and those who would make, even of his dying speech, a text and a lesson, are instancing a lie more grievous than the murder which he did. In England, I saw two men and a woman suffer death on the common sidewalk; just as if we were to hang people in New York on the pavement before the Tombs. No man, anxious to see an execution in London, need be disappointed. Once or twice a month the wolves are brought to the slaughter, and all the people are invited to enjoy the spectacle. A woman, one Catharine Wilson, was to be hanged for poisoning. She was middle aged, and had been reputable. Her manner of making way with folks was to act as sick-nurse, and mingling poison with their medicine, possess herself of the trifles upon their persons. She had sent six souls to their account in this way; but, discovered in the seventh attempt, all the other cases leaked out. She was condemned, of course, and on the Sunday evening previous to the execution, as I was returning from Spurgeon's Tabernacle, the omnibus upon which I sat passed through the Old Bailey. There were the carpenters joining the timbers of the scaffold, and building black barricades across the street. A murmuring crowd stood around in the solemn night, and the funereal walls of old Newgate glowered like a horrible vault upon the dimly-lit street. The public houses across the way were filled up with guests. All the front parlors and front bedrooms had been let at fat prices, and suppers were spread in them for the edification of their tenants. Do you remember the thrilling chapter of "The Jew's last night alive," in "Oliver Twist?" Well, this was the scene! These were the same beams and uprights. There, huge, massive, and blackened with smoky years, rose the cold, impervious stones; and yonder, casting its sharp pinnacles into the sky, is the tower of St. Sepulchre's Church, where the bell hangs muffled for the morrow's tolling away of a sinner's life. Old Fagin heard it, though it was no new sound to him; for Field Lane, where he kept his "fence," lies a very little way off,--little more than a stone's throw, and when, in the morning, I dressed at an early hour and hurried to the place of execution, I saw Charley Bates, and the Dodger, and Nancy, and Toby Crackit, and the rest, shying men's hats in the air, and looking out for the "wipes" and the "tickers." All the streets leading to Newgate were like great conduits, where human currents babbled along, emptying themselves into the Old Bailey. Mothers by the dozen were out with their infants, holding them aloft tenderly, to show them the noose and the cross-beam. Fathers came with their sons, and explained very carefully to them the method of strangulation. Little girls, on their way to workshops, had turned aside to see the playful affair, and traders in fancy soap and shoe-blacking, pea-nuts and shrimps, Banbury cakes, and Chelsea buns, and Yarmouth bloaters, were making the morning hilarious with their odd cries and speeches. Along the chimney-pots of Green Arbour Court, where Goldsmith penned the "Vicar of Wakefield," lads and maidens were climbing, that they might have commanding places. There was one young woman who had some difficulty in climbing over a battlement, and the mob hailed her failure with roars of mirth. But she persevered, though there was a high wind blowing, and then called loudly for her male attendant to follow her. He obeyed dutifully, and they both seated themselves upon a chimney-top,--a picture of love rewarded,--and waited for the show. The moments, as marked upon St. Sepulchre's clock, went grudgingly, as if the index-hands were unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of what was to come. Meantime, the police had their hands full; for some merry urchins were darting between their legs, and it was dangerous to keep one's hat on his head, for it hazarded plucking off and shying here and there. At the chamber-windows aforesaid, crowded the tipsy occupants, men and women, red-eyed with drinking, and leering stupidly upon the surging heads below. Some asked if Calcraft did the "job," and others volunteered sketches of Calcraft's life. One man boasted that he had taken a pot of beer with him, and another added that the hangman's children and his own went to school together. "He pockets," said the man, "two-pun ten for every one he drops, besides his travelling expenses, and he has put away three hundred and twenty folks. He is a clever fellow, is Calcraft, and he is going to retire soon." So the hours passed; the great clock-hands journeyed onward; all eyes watched them attentively; suddenly the deep bells struck a terrible one--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight, and the bells of the neighborhood answered, some hoarsely, others musically, others faintly, as if ashamed. Before the tones had died away, three persons appeared upon the scaffold,--a woman, pinioned and wearing a long, sharp, snowy, shrowdy, death-cap; a man in loose black robes with a white neckhandkerchief, and a burly, surly fellow, in black cloth, bareheaded, and having a curling jetty beard around his heavy jaws. It is but a moment, that, standing on tiptoe, you catch this scene. The priest stretches his hand toward the people, and says some unintelligible words; those of the mob curse each other, and some scream out that they are dying in the press. Then the scaffold is clear; the woman stands alone,--God forgive her!--and when you look again, a bundle of old clothes, tipped with a sugar-loaf, is all that is visible, and the gallows-cord is very straight and tight. For the last chapter, consult the graveyard within the jail walls! The guillotining which I witnessed in Paris, in the month of June, 1864, may be deemed worthy of an extended description:-- Couty de la Pommerais was a young physician of Paris, descended from a fine family, and educated beyond the requirements of a French Faculty. He was handsome and manly, and gave evidences of ambition at an early age. He was popularly called the Comte de la Pommerais, and at the time of his apprehension, was expecting a decoration from the Papal Government, with the rank he desired. Like all French students, he was incontinent, and had several mistresses. The last of these was a widow named Pauw, who appears to have loved him sincerely. She had some little fortune, which they consumed together; and then la Pommerais married a rich young lady, with whom he lived one year. Her mother died suddenly at the end of that time, and as la Pommerais was interested in getting certain moneys which the elder lady controlled, the manner of her death led to suspicions of poisoning. However, the woman was interred, but the son-in-law was not so fortunate as he supposed, and he ceased to live with his wife, but returned to Madame Pauw, who still adored him. Upon this fond, foolish woman he seems to have premeditated a deep and intricate crime; and it was for this that he suffered death. She must have been dishonest like himself, for she consented to a scheme of swindling the insurance companies; but, unlike himself, she lacked the wit to be silent, and was heard to hint mysteriously that she should soon be grand and happy. La Pommerais persuaded her to have her life insured, which was done for 515,000 francs, or upward of $100,000. When the matter had transpired some time, he persuaded her to feign sickness. The simple woman asked why she should do so. "The insurance people," he replied, "will, when they consider that you are dangerously ill, prefer to give you 100,000f., rather than pay the 515,000f. in the certainty of your death. You can give them up your policy, accept the compromise, get well again, and be rich." Yet this counterfeited sickness was meant by the villain to prepare the neighbors of Mme. Pauw for the death which he intended to ensue. He was to make it known to all, that she was dangerously ill; she was to uphold his testimony; and he was to kill her in due time, and take the whole of the insurance. At length, the farce was finished. La Pommerais gave to Mme. Pauw, a poison difficult to detect, called _digitalline_, the essential principle of our common foxglove; she died unconscious of his deception, loving him to the last, and he claimed the 515,000 francs at the insurance office. He was suspected, accused, and tried. The old suspicions relative to his mother-in-law were revived; the bodies were exhumed and examined; upon evidence entirely circumstantial and technical, he was convicted, and sentenced to be guillotined. His learning and standing made the trial a famous one; his bearing during the long proceedings was calm and collected; he was handsome, and had much sympathy: but the jury found him guilty, and the Emperor refused to extend his clemency to the case. He was put in a strait jacket and locked up in La Roquette, the prison for the condemned. The prison of _La Roquette_ (or the Rocket Prison) is situated in the eastern suburbs of Paris, a mile beyond the Bastile. It does not look unlike our American jails; a high exterior wall of rough stone, over the top of which one gets a glimpse of the prison gables, with a huge gate in the arched portal, guarded forever by sentinels. Before this gate is a small open plot of ground, planted with trees. _Rue de la Roquette_ passes between it and a second prison, immediately facing the first, called the _Prison des Jeunes Detenus_, or, as we would say in America, the "House of Refuge." Standing between the two jails, and looking away from Paris, one will see the great metropolitan cemetery of _Père la Chaise_, scarcely a stone's throw distant, and behind him will be the great _abbatoir_ or public slaughter-house of Menilmontant, with the vast area of roofs and spires of Paris stretching beyond it to the horizon. It was to this region of vacant lots and lonesome, glowering houses, that thousands of Parisians bent their steps the night before the execution. The news had gone abroad that la Pommerais would not be pardoned. It was also generally credited that this would be the last execution ever held in Paris, since there is a general desire for the abolition of capital punishment in France, and a conviction that the Legislature, at its next session, will substitute life-imprisonment. This, with the rarity of the event, and that terrible allurement of blood which distinguishes all populaces, brought out all the excitable folk of the town; and at dusk, on the night before the expiation, the whole neighborhood of La Roquette was crowded with men and women. All classes of Parisians were there,--the _blouses_, or workingmen, standing first in number; the students from the Latin Quartier being well represented, and idlers, and well-dressed nondescripts without enumeration,--distributing themselves among women, dogs, and babies. Venders of _gateaux_, muscles, and fruit were out in force. The "Savage of Paris," clothed in his war plumes, paint, greaves, armlets, and moccasins, was selling razors by gaslight; here and there ballad-mongers were singing the latest songs, and boys, with chairs to let, elbowed into the intricacies of the crowd, which amused itself all the night long by smoking, drinking, and hallooing. At last, the mass became formidable in numbers, covering every inch of ground within sight of the prison, and many soldiers and _sergeants de ville_, mounted and on foot, pushed through the dense mass to restore order. At midnight, a body of cavalry forced back the people from the square of La Roquette. A number of workmen, issuing from the prison-gates, proceeded to set up the instrument of death by the light of blazing torches. The flame lit up the dark jail walls, and shone on the helmets and cuirasses of the sabre-men, and flared upon spots of the upturned faces, now bringing them into strong, ruddy relief, now plunging them into shadow. When the several pieces had been framed together, we had a real guillotine in view,--the same spectre at which thousands of good and bad men had shuddered; and the folks around it, peering up so eagerly, were descendants of those who stood on the _Place de la Concorde_ to witness the head of a king roll into the common basket. Imagine two tall, straight timbers, a foot apart, rising fifteen feet from the ground. They are grooved, and spring from a wide platform, approached by a flight of steps. At the base, rests a spring-plank or _bascule_, to which leather thongs are attached to buckle down the victim, and a basket or _pannier_ filled with sawdust to receive the severed head. Between these, at their summit, hangs the shining knife in its appointed grooves, and a cord, which may be disconnected by a jerk, holds it to its position. Two men will be required to work the instrument promptly,--the one to bind the condemned, the other to drop the axe. The _bascule_ is so arranged that the whole weight and length of the trunk will rest upon it, leaving the head and neck free, and when prone it will reach to the grooves, leaving space for the knife to pass below it. The knife itself is short and wide, with a bright concave edge, and a rim of heavy steel ridges it at the top; it moves easily in the greased grooves, and may weigh forty pounds. It has a terrible fascination, hanging so high and so lightly in the blaze of the torches, which play and glitter upon it, and cast stains of red light along its keen blade, as if by their brilliance all its past blood-marks had become visible again. A child may send it shimmering and crashing to the scaffold, but only God can fasten together the warm and throbbing parts which it shall soon dissever. And now that the terrible creature has been recreated, the workmen slink away, as if afraid of it, and a body of soldiers stand guard upon it, as if they fear that it might grow thirsty and insatiate as in the days of its youth. The multitude press up again, reinforced every hour, and at last the pale day climbs over the jail-walls, and waiting people see each other by its glimmer. The bells of Notre Dame peal out; a hundred towers fall into the march of the music; the early journals are shrieked by French newsboys, and folks begin to count the minutes on their watches. There are men on the ground who saw the first guillotine at work. They describe the click of the cleaver, the steady march of victims upon the scaffold-stairs, the rattle of the death-cart turning out of the _Rue Saint Honore_, the painted executioners, with their dripping hands, wiping away the jets of blood from the hard, rough faces; nay! the step of the young queen, white-haired with care, but very beautiful, who bent her body as she had never bent her knee, and paid the penalty of her pride with the neck which a king had fondled. At four minutes to six o'clock on Thursday morning, the wicket in the prison-gate swung open; the condemned appeared, with his hands tied behind his back, and his knees bound together. He walked with difficulty, so fettered; but other than the artificial restraints, there was no hesitation nor terror in his movements. His hair, which had been long, dark, and wavy, was severed close to his scalp; his beard had likewise been clipped, and the fine moustache and goatee, which had set off his most interesting face, no longer appeared to enhance his romantic, expressive physiognomy. Yet his black eyes and cleanly cut mouth, nostrils, and eyebrows, demonstrated that Couty de la Pommerais was not a beauty dependent upon small accessories. There was a dignity even in his painful gait; the coarse prison-shirt, scissored low in the neck, exhibited the straight columnar throat and swelling chest; for the rest, he wore only a pair of black pantaloons and his own shapely boots. As he emerged from the wicket, the chill morning air, laden with the dew of the truck gardens near at hand, blew across the open spaces of the suburbs, and smote him with a cold chill. He was plainly seen to tremble; but in an instant, as if by the mere force of his will, he stood motionless, and cast a first and only glance at the guillotine straight before him. It was the glance of a man who meets an enemy's eye, not shrinkingly, but half-defiant, as if even the bitter retribution could not abash his strong courage. The dramatic manner which is characteristic of the most real and earnest incidents of French life had its fascination for la Pommerais, even at his death-hour. Not Mr. Booth nor Mr. Forrest could have expressed the rallying, startling, almost thrilling recognition of an instrument of death, better than this actual criminal, whose last winkful of daylight was blackened by the guillotine. It reminded one of Damon, in the pitch of the tragedy:-- "I stand upon the scaffold--I am standing on my throne." His dark eye was scintillant; his nostril grew full; his shoulders fell back as if to exhibit his broad, compact figure in manlier outline; he seemed to feel that forty thousand men and women, and young children were looking upon him to see how he dared to die, and that for a generation his bearing should go into fireside descriptions. Then he moved on between the files of soldiers at his shuffling pace, and before him went the _aumonier_ or chaplain, swaying the crucifix, behind him the executioner of Versailles--a rough and bearded man--to assist in the final horror. It was at this intense moment a most wonderful spectacle. As the prisoner had first appeared, a single great shout had shaken the multitude. It was the French word "_Voila!_" which means "Behold!" "See!" Then every spectator stood on tiptoe; the silence of death succeeded; all the close street was undulant with human motion; a few house roofs near by were dizzy with folks who gazed down from the tiles; all the way up the heights of Père la Chaise, among the pale chapels and monuments of the dead, the thousands of stirred beings swung and shook like so many drowned corpses floating on the sea. Every eye and mind turned to the little structure raised among the trees, on the space before _La Roquette_, and there they saw a dark, shaven, disrobed young man, going quietly toward his grave. He mounted the steps deliberately, looking toward his feet; the priest held up the crucifix, and he felt it was there, but did not see it; his lips one moment touched the image of Christ, but he did not look up nor speak; then, as he gained the last step, the _bascule_ or swingboard sprang up before him; the executioner gave him a single push, and he fell prone upon the plank, with his face downward; it gave way before him, bearing him into the space between the upright beams, and he lay horizontally beneath the knife, presenting the back of his neck to it. Thus resting, he could look into the _pannier_ or basket, into whose sawdust lining his head was to drop in a moment. And in that awful space, while all the people gazed with their fingers tingling, the legitimate Parisian executioner gave a jerk at the cord which held the fatal knife. With a quick, keen sound, the steel became detached; it fell hurtling through the grooves; it struck something with a dead, dumb thump; a jet of bright blood spurted into the light, and dyed the face of an attendant horribly red; and Couty de la Pommerais's head lay in the sawdust of the pannier, while every vein in the lopped trunk trickled upon the scaffold-floor! They threw a cloth upon the carcass and carried away the pannier; the guillotine disappeared beneath the surrounding heads; loud exclamations and acclaims burst from the multitude; the venders of trash and edibles resumed their cheerful cries, and a hearse dashed through the mass, carrying the warm body of the guillotined to the cemetery of Mt. Parnasse. In thirty minutes, newsboys were hawking the scene of the execution upon all the quays and bridges. In every café of Paris some witness was telling the incidents of the show to breathless listeners, and the crowds which stopped to see the funeral procession of the great Marshal Pelissier divided their attention between the warrior and the poisoner,--the latter obtaining the preponderance of fame. I wonder sometimes, if the ultimate penalty, however enforced, greatly assists example, or dignifies justice. But this would involve a very long controversy, over which many sage heads have sadly ached. In the open daylight, when my face is shining, and my life secure, I take the humanitarian side, and denounce the barbarities of the gibbet. But when I come down the dark stairs of the daily paper office, after midnight, and see three or four stealthy fellows hiding in the shadows, and go up the black city unarmed with my pocket full of greenbacks, I think the gallows quite essential as a warning, and indorse it, even after seventeen executions. So end my desultory chapters of desultory life. It has been, in the arranging of them, difficult to reject material,--not to select it. I am amazed to find what a world of dead leaves lies around my feet, as if I were a tree that blossomed and shed its covering every day. There are baskets-full of copy still remaining, from which the temptation is great to gather. It is sad to have written so much at twenty-five, and yet to have only drifting convictions. I may have succeeded in depicting the lives of certain young gentlemen who reported the war. All of us, who were young, loved the business, and were glad to quit it. For myself, I am weary of travel; rather than publish again from these fragments of my fugitive life, let me weave their material into a more poetic story, softened by some years of stay at home. 
3397	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Roundabout to Boston by William Dean Howells ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart's content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he was. I. Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as letters to the 'Boston Advertiser', after vainly offering them to more aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great new series of the 'Biglow Papers' gathered volume with the force they had from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking. At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree. I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London. Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives, especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in "the dress of an American gentleman." The morning after his arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which, according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his newspapers from the general rule. Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the Lieutenant-Governor, and "How fortunate," he added, when we were got back into the gondola, "that I should have happened to bring my court dress with me!" I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister. I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley, except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, "to act officiously, not officially, in the matter," and the hapless claimant got what was left of his estate. I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his worshipper's own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted, single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were not so many as they have since become. For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well thought of in every way. At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister, could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna. II. One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States, according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics. I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but I had read, before I met him, his novel of 'Archy Moore, or The White Slave', which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent, silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came. I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round, "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way," and so left the room. I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a deserting sailor must be kept in the consul's custody till some vessel of our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy. Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit, and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to attest the authenticity of the American eagle. III. Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for "Recent Italian Comedy." It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing. Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand, at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer, try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes, almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it. The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction, never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book. I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them. At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in the book called Italian Journeys. But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens. At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late into the night, and early into the morning. About two o'clock, when all the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice: "If you have a friend to dine, Give him your best wine; If you have two, The second-best will do." As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people, for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to me as if we were equal in deed and in fame? The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and bidding each other the 'Dorma bene' which has the quality of a benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement it holds highest and best. IV. I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati; there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere, and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight. My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard's. "Get a basis," said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised with him, among other acquaintances. "Get a salaried place, something regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest." But it was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis, though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects. There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper, then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well, we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been buying my material. I had begun printing in the 'Nation' those letters about my Italian journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the 'Nation'. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week, and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the skies. This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it (not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an end. I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned high, to my heart's content, of literary things with them and him. With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality. There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself. There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. "Whose hand is this, Lorry?" he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, "whose hand is this?" Then there was nothing for Graham but to say, "It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly down without a word. V. It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters, and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in discussing an obscure point in Browning's poem of 'My Last Duchess'. I have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis's personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy. He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer, his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in literature, for the 'Howadji' books, and for the lovely fantasies of 'Prue and I', and for the sound-hearted satire of the 'Potiphar Papers', and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him. His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic, though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women's rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little question of their own honesty. I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in concerning him. There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor, the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts. VI. Of those evenings at the Taylors' in New York, I can recall best the one which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr. and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly, "Don't despise Boston!" and I answered, as we shook hands, "Few are worthy to live in Boston." It was New-Year's eve, and that night it came on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the 'Atlantic Monthly'. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the 'Nation', and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor & Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Act officiously, not officially Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong George William Curtis Give him your best wine Longfellow Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions Motley Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong Women's rights 
28294	----	Transcriber's note: The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been preserved faithfully. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. PILGRIMAGE FROM THE ALPS TO THE TIBER. Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge. by REV. J.A. WYLIE, LL.D. Author of "The Papacy," &c. &.c. Edinburgh Shepherd & Elliot, 15, Princes Street. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co. MDCCCLV. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE THE INTRODUCTION, 1 CHAPTER II. THE PASSAGE OF THE ALPS, 8 CHAPTER III. RISE AND PROGRESS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM IN PIEDMONT, 23 CHAPTER IV. STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VAUDOIS VALLEYS, 43 CHAPTER V. STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE VAUDOIS CHURCH, 62 CHAPTER VI. FROM TURIN TO NOVARA--PLAIN OF LOMBARDY, 83 CHAPTER VII. FROM NOVARA TO MILAN--DOGANA--CHAIN OF THE ALPS, 94 CHAPTER VIII. CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN, 105 CHAPTER IX. ARCO DELLA PACE--ST AMBROSE, 119 CHAPTER X. THE DUOMO OF MILAN, 126 CHAPTER XI. MILAN TO BRESCIA--THE REFORMERS, 137 CHAPTER XII. THE PRESENT THE IMAGE OF THE PAST, 152 CHAPTER XIII. SCENERY OF LAKE GARDA--PESCHIERA--VERONA, 158 CHAPTER XIV. FROM VERONA TO VENICE--THE TYROLESE ALPS, 168 CHAPTER XV. VENICE--DEATH OF NATIONS, 178 CHAPTER XVI. PADUA--ST ANTONY--THE PO--ARREST, 198 CHAPTER XVII. FERRARA--RENÉE AND OLYMPIA MORATA, 209 CHAPTER XVIII. BOLOGNA AND THE APENNINES, 216 CHAPTER XIX. FLORENCE AND ITS YOUNG EVANGELISM, 237 CHAPTER XX. FROM LEGHORN TO ROME--CIVITA VECCHIA, 262 CHAPTER XXI. MODERN ROME, 276 CHAPTER XXII. ANCIENT ROME--THE SEVEN HILLS, 289 CHAPTER XXIII. SIGHTS IN ROME--CATACOMBS--PILATE'S STAIRS--PIO NONO, &C., 302 CHAPTER XXIV. INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE, 333 CHAPTER XXV. INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE--(CONTINUED), 352 CHAPTER XXVI. JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE PAPAL STATES, 366 CHAPTER XXVII. EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE PAPAL STATES, 401 CHAPTER XXVIII. MENTAL STATE OF THE PRIESTHOOD IN ITALY, 415 CHAPTER XXIX. SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC CUSTOMS OF THE ROMANS, 430 CHAPTER XXX. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE WHOLE, OR, ROME HER OWN WITNESS, 447 ROME, AND THE WORKINGS OF ROMANISM IN ITALY. CHAPTER I. THE INTRODUCTION. I did not go to Rome to seek for condemnatory matter against the Pope's government. Had this been my only object, I should not have deemed it necessary to undertake so long a journey. I could have found materials on which to construct a charge in but too great abundance nearer home. The cry of the Papal States had waxed great, and there was no need to go down into those unhappy regions to satisfy one's self that the oppression was "altogether according to the cry of it." I had other objects to serve by my journey. There is one other country which has still more deeply influenced the condition of the race, and towards which one is even more powerfully drawn, namely, Judea. But Italy is entitled to the next place, as respects the desire which one must naturally feel to visit it, and the instruction one may expect to reap from so doing. Some of the greatest minds which the pagan world has produced have appeared in Italy. In that land those events were accomplished which have given to modern history its form and colour; and those ideas elaborated, the impress of which may still be traced upon the opinions, the institutions, and the creeds of Europe. In Italy, too, empire has left her ineffaceable traces, and art her glorious footsteps. There is, all will admit, a peculiar and exquisite pleasure in visiting such spots: nor is there pleasure only, but profit also. One's taste may be corrected, and his judgment strengthened, by seeing the masterpieces of ancient genius. New trains of thought may be suggested, and new sources of information opened, by the sight of men and of manners wholly new. But more than this,--I believed that there were lessons to be learned there, which it was emphatically worth one's while going there to learn, touching the working of that politico-religious system of which Italy has so long been the seat and centre. I had previously been at some little pains to make myself acquainted with this system in its principles, and wished to have an opportunity of studying it in its effects upon the government of the country, and the condition of the people, as respects their trade, industry, knowledge, liberty, religion, and general happiness. All I shall say in the following pages will have a bearing, more or less direct, upon this main point. It is impossible to disjoin the present of these countries from the past; nor can the solemn and painful enigma which they exhibit be unriddled but by a reference to the past, and that not the immediate, but the remote past. There is truth, no doubt, in the saying of the old moralist, that nations lose in moments what they had acquired in years; but the remark is applicable rather to the accelerated speed with which the last stages of a nation's ruin are accomplished, than to the slow and imperceptible progress which usually marks its commencement. Unless when cut off by the sudden stroke of war, it requires five centuries at least to consummate the fall of a great people. One must pass, therefore, over those hideous abuses which are the immediate harbingers of national disaster, and which exclusively engross the attention of ordinary inquirers, and go back to those remote ages, and those minute and apparently insignificant causes, amid which national declension, unsuspected often by the nation itself, takes its rise. The destiny of modern Europe was sealed so long ago as A.D. 606, when the Bishop of Rome was made head of the universal Church by the edict of a man stained with the double guilt of usurpation and murder. Religion is the parent of liberty. The rise of tyrants can be prevented in no other way but by maintaining the supremacy of God and conscience; and in the early corruptions of the gospel, the seeds were sown of those frightful despotisms which have since arisen, and of those tremendous convulsions which are now rending society. The evil principle implanted in the European commonwealth in the seventh century appeared to lie dormant for ages; but all the while it was busily at work beneath those imposing imperial structures which arose in the middle ages. It had not been cast out of the body politic; it was still there, operating with noiseless but resistless energy and terrible strength; and while monarchs were busily engaged founding empires and consolidating their rule, it was preparing to signalize, at a future day, the superiority of its own power by the sudden and irretrievable overthrow of theirs. Thus society had come to resemble the lofty mountain, whose crown of white snows and robe of fresh verdure but conceal those hidden fires which are smouldering within its bowels. Under the appearance of robust health, a moral cancer was all the while preying upon the vitals of society, eating out by slow degrees the faith, the virtue, the obedience of the world. The ground at last gave way, and thrones and hierarchies came tumbling down. Look at the Europe of our day. What is the Papacy, but an enormous cancer, of most deadly virulency, which has now run its course, and done its work upon the nations of the Continent. The European community, from head to foot, is one festering sore. Soundness in it there is none. The Papal world is a wriggling mass of corruption and suffering. It is a compound of tyrannies and perjuries,--of lies and blood-red murders,--of crimes abominable and unnatural,--of priestly maledictions, socialist ravings, and atheistic blasphemies. The whine of mendicants, the curses, groans, and shrieks of victims, and the demoniac laughter of tyrants, commingle in one hoarse roar. Faugh! the spectacle is too horrible to be looked at; its effluvia is too fetid to be endured. What is to be done with the carcase? We cannot dwell in its neighbourhood. It would be impossible long to inhabit the same globe with it: its stench were enough to pollute and poison the atmosphere of our planet. It must be buried or burned. It cannot be allowed to remain on the surface of the earth: it would breed a plague, which would infect, not a world only, but a universe. It is in this direction that we are to seek for instruction; and here, if we are able to receive it, thirty generations are willing to impart to us their dear-bought experience. Lessons which have cost the world so much are surely worth learning. But I do not mean to treat my readers to lectures on history, instead of chapters on travel. It is not an abstract disquisition on the influence of religion and government, such as one might compose without stirring from his own fire-side, which I intend to write. It is a real journey we are about to undertake. You shall have facts as well as reflections,--incidents as well as disquisitions. I shall be grave,--as who would not at the sight of fallen nations?--but "when time shall serve there shall be smiles." You shall climb the Alps; and when their tops begin to burn at sunrise, you shall join heart and song with the music of the shepherd's horn, and the thunder of a thousand torrents, as they rush headlong down amid crags and pine-forests from the icy summits. You shall enter, with pilgrim feet, the gates of proud capitals, where puissant kings once reigned, but have passed away, and have left no memorial on earth, save a handful of dust in a stone-coffin, or a half-legible name on some mouldering arch. The solemn and stirring voice of Monte Viso, speaking from the midst of the Cottian Alps, will call you from afar to the martyr-land of Europe. You shall worship with the Waldenses beneath their own Castelluzzo, which covers with its mighty shadow the ashes of their martyred forefathers, and the humble sanctuary of their living descendants. You shall count the towns and campaniles on the broad Lombardy. You shall pass glorious days on the top of renowned cathedrals, and sit and muse in the face of the eternal Alps, as the clouds now veil, now reveal, their never-trodden snows. You shall cross the Lagunes, and see the winged lion of St Mark soaring serenely amid the bright domes and the ever calm seas of Venice, where you may list "The song and oar of Adria's gondolier, Mellowed by distance, o'er the waters sweep." You shall travel long sleepless nights in the _diligence_, and be ferried at day-break over "ancient rivers." You shall tread the grass-grown streets of Ferrara, and the deserted halls of Bologna, where the wisdom-loving youth of Europe erst assembled, but whose solitude now is undisturbed, save by the clank of the Croat's sabre, or the wine-flagon of the friar. You shall visit cells dim and dank, around which genius has thrown a halo which draws thither the pilgrim, who would rather muse in the twilight of the naked vault, than wander amid the marble glories of the palace that rises proudly in its neighbourhood. You shall go with me, at the hour of vespers, to aisled cathedrals, which were ages a-building, and the erection of which swallowed up the revenues of provinces,--beneath whose roof, ample enough to cover thousands and tens of thousands, you may see a solitary priest, singing a solemn dirge over a "Religion" fallen as a dominant belief, and existing only as a military organization; while statues, mute and solemn, of mailed warriors, grim saints, angels and winged cherubs, ranged along the walls, are the only companions of the surpliced man, if we except a few beggars pressing with naked knees the stony floor. You shall see Florence,-- "The brightest star of star-bright Italy." You shall be stirred by the craggy grandeur of the Apennines, and soothed by the living green of the Tuscan vales, with their hoar castles, their olives, their dark cypresses, and their forests,-- "Where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn." You shall taste the vine of Italy, and drink the waters of the Arno. You shall wander over ancient battle-fields, encounter the fierce Apennine blast, and be rocked on the Mediterranean wave, which the sirocco heaps up, huge and dark, and pours in a foaming cataract upon the strand of Italy. Finally, we shall tread together the sackcloth plain on which Rome sits, with the leaves of her torn laurel and the fragments of her shivered sceptre strewn around her, waiting with discrowned and downcast head the bolt of doom. Entering the gates of the "seven-hilled city," we shall climb the Capitol, and survey a scene which has its equal nowhere on the earth. Mouldering arches, fallen columns, buried palaces, empty tombs, and slaves treading on the dust of the conquerors of the world, are all that now remain of Imperial Rome. What a scene of ruin and woe! When the twilight falls, and the moon begins to climb the eastern arch, mark how the Coliseum projects, as if in pity, its mighty shadow across the Forum, and covers with its kindly folds the mouldering trophies of the past, and draws its mantle around the nakedness of the Cæsars' palace, as if to screen it from the too curious eye of the visitor. Rome, what a history is thine! One other tragedy, terrible as befits the drama it closes, and the curtain will drop in solemn, and, it may be, eternal silence. CHAPTER II. THE PASSAGE OF THE ALPS. The Rhone--Plains of Dauphiny--Mont Blanc and the "Reds"--Landscape by Night--Democratic Club in the _Diligence_--Approach the Alps--Festooned Vines--Begin the Ascent--Chamberry--Uses of War--An Alpine Valley--Sudden Alternations of Beauty and Grandeur--Travellers--Evening--Grandeur of Sunset--Supper at Lanslebourg--Cross the Summit at Midnight--Morning--Sunrise among the Alps--Descent--Italy. It was wearing late on an evening of early October 1851 when I crossed the Rhone on my way to the Alps. It had rained heavily during the day, and sombre clouds still rested on the towers of Lyons behind me. The river was in flood, and the lamps on the bridge threw a troubled gleam upon the impetuous current as it rolled underneath. It was impossible not to recollect that this was the stream on the banks of which Irenæus, the disciple of Polycarp, himself the disciple of John, had, at almost the identical spot where I crossed it, laboured and prayed, and into the floods of which had been flung the ashes of the first martyrs of Gaul. These murky skies formed no very auspicious commencement of my journey; but I cherished the hope that to-morrow would bring fair weather, and with fair weather would come the green valleys and gleaming tops of the Alps, and, the day after, the sunny plains of Italy. This fair vision beckoned me on through the deep road and the scudding shower. We struck away into the plains of Dauphiny,--those great plains that stretch from the Rhone to the Alps, and which offer to the eye, as seen from the heights that overhang Lyons, a vast and varied expanse of wood and meadow, corn-field and vineyard, city and hamlet, with the snowy pile of Mont Blanc rising afar in the horizon. On the previous evening I had climbed these heights, so stately and beautiful, with convents hanging on their sides, and a chapel to Mary crowning their summit, to renew my acquaintance, after an interval of some years' absence, with the monarch of the Alps. I was greatly pleased to find, especially in these times, that my old friend had not grown "red." Since I saw him last, changes not a few had passed upon Europe, and more than one monarch had fallen; but Mont Blanc sat firmly in his seat, and wore his icy crown as proudly as ever. Since my former visit to Lyons the "Reds" had made great progress in all the countries at the foot of the Alps. Their party had been especially progressive in Lyons; so much so as to affect the nomenclature of the hills that overlook that city on the north. That hill, which is nearly wholly covered with the houses and workshops of the silk-weavers, is now known as the "red mountain," its inhabitants being mostly of that faction; while the hill on the west of it, that, namely, which I had ascended on the evening before, and which is chiefly devoted to ecclesiastical persons and uses, is called the "white mountain." But while men had been changing their faith, and hills their names, Mont Blanc stood firmly by his old creed and his old colours. There he was, dazzlingly, transcendently white, defying the fuller's art to whiten him, and shading into dimness the snowy robe of the priest; looking with royal majesty over his wide realm; standing unchanged in the midst of a theatre of changes; abiding for ever, though kingdoms at his feet were passing away; pre-eminent in grace and glory amidst his princely peers; and looking the earthly type of that eternal and all-glorious One, who stands supreme and unapproachable amid the powers, dominions, and royalties of the universe. The night wore on without any noticeable event, or any special interruption, save what was occasioned necessarily by our arrival at the several stages, and the changes consequent thereon of horses and postilions. There was a rag of a moon overhead,--at least so one might judge from the hazy light that struggled through the fog,--by the help of which I kept watching the landscape till past midnight. Then a spirit of drowsiness invaded me. It was not sleep, but sleep's image, or sleep's counterfeit,--an uneasy trance, in which a confused vision of tall trees, with their head in the clouds, and very long and very narrow fields, marked off by straight rows of very upright poplars, and large heavy-looking houses, with tall antique roofs, kept marching past, without variety and without end. I would wake up at times and look out. There was the same picture before me. I would fall back into my trance again, and, an hour or so after, I would again wake up; still the identical picture was there. I could not persuade myself that the _diligence_ had moved from the spot, despite the rumbling of its wheels and the jingling of the horses' bells. All night long the same changeless picture kept moving on and on, ever passing, yet never past. I may be said to have crossed the Alps amid a torrent of curses. My place was in the _banquette_, the roomiest and loftiest part of the lofty _diligence_, and which, perched in front, and looking down upon the inferior compartments of the _diligence_, much as the attics of a three-storey house look down upon the lower suits of apartments, commands a fine view of the country, when it is daylight and clear weather. There sat next me in the _banquette_ a young Savoyard, who travelled with us as far as Chamberry, in the heart of the Alps; and on the other side of the Savoyard sat the _conducteur_. This last was a Piedmontese, a young, clever, obliging fellow, with a voluble tongue, and a keen dark eye in his head. Scarce had we extricated ourselves from the environs of Lyons, or had got beyond the reach of the guns that look so angrily down upon it from the heights, till these two broke into a conversation on politics. The conversation soon warmed into an energetic and vehement discussion, or philippic I should rather say. Their discourse was far too rapid, and I was too unfamiliar with the language in which it was uttered to do more than gather its scope and drift. But I could hear the names of France and Austria repeated every other sentence; and these names were sure to be followed by a volley of curses, fierce, scornful, and defiant. Austria was cursed,--France was cursed: they were cursed individually,--they were cursed conjunctly,--once, again, and a hundred times. What were the politics of the passengers in the other compartments of the diligence I know not; but little did they wot that they had a democratic club overhead, and that more treason was spouted that night in their company than might have got us all into trouble, had there been any evesdropper in any corner of the vehicle. When I chanced to awake, they were still at it. The harsh grating sound of the anathemas haunted me during my sleep even. It was like a rattling hail-shower, or like the continuous corruscations of lightning,--the lightning of the Alps. Had it been possible for the authorities to know but a tithe of what was spoken that night by my two neighbours, their journey would have been short: they would have been shot at the next station, to a certainty. With the night, the dream-like landscape, and the maledictory harangues which had haunted me during the darkness, passed away, and the morning found us nearing the mountains. The Alps open upon you by little. One who has never climbed these hills imagines himself standing at their feet, and looking up the long unbroken vista of fields, vineyards, forests, and naked rocks, to the eternal snows of their summit. Not so. They do not come marching thus upon you in all their grandeur to overwhelm you. To see them thus, you must stand afar off,--at least fifty miles away. There you can take in the whole at a glance, from the beauteous fringe of stream, and hamlet, and woodland, that skirts their base, to the white serrated line that cuts so sharply the blue of the firmament. Nearer them,--unless, indeed, in the great central valleys, where you can see the icy fields hanging in the firmament at an awful distance above you,--their snow-clad summits are invisible, being hidden by an intervening sea of ridges, that are strewn over with rocks, or wave darkly with pines. As we approached the mountains, they offered to the eye a beauteous chain of verdant hills, with the morning mists hanging on their sides. The torrents were in flood from the recent rains; the woods had the rich tints of autumn upon them; but the charm of the scene lay in the beautiful festoonings of the vine. The uplands before me were barred by what I at first took to be long horizontal layers of fleecy cloud. On a nearer approach, these turned out to be the long branchy arms of the vine. The vine-stock is made to lean against the cut trunk of a chestnut or poplar tree, and its branches are bent horizontally, and extended till they meet those of the neighbouring vine-stock, which have been similarly dealt with. In this way, continuous lines of luxuriant foliage, with pendulous blood-red clusters in their season, may be made to run for miles together along the hill-side. There might be from thirty to forty parallel lines in those I now saw. Tinted with the morning sun, and relieved against the deep verdure of the mountain, they appeared like stripes of amber, or floating lines of cloud fringed with gold. It was the Mont Cenis route I was traversing,--the least rugged of all the passes of the Alps, and the same by which Hannibal, as some suppose, passed into Italy. The day cleared up into one of unusual brilliancy. We began to ascend by a path cut in the rock of the mountain, having on our left an escarpment of limestone several hundred feet high, and on our right a deep gorge, with a white foaming torrent at its bottom. The frontier chain passed, we descended into a rich valley, with a fine stream flowing through it, and the poor town of Les Echelles hiding from view in one of its angles. These noble valleys are sadly blotted by filth and disease. The contrast offered betwixt the noble features of nature and the degraded form of man is painful and humiliating. Bowed down by toil, stolid with ignorance, disfigured with the goitre, struck with cretinism, the miserable beings around you do more to sadden you than all that the bright air and glorious hills can do to exhilarate you. The valley where we now were was a complete _cul de sac_. It was walled in all round by limestone hills of great height, and the eye sought in vain for visible outlet. At length one could see a white line running half-way up the mountain's face, and ending in an opening no bigger than a pigeon-hole. We slowly climbed this road,--for road it was; and when we came to the diminutive opening we had seen from the valley below, it expanded into a tunnel,--one of the great works of Napoleon,--which ran right through the mountain, and brought us out on the other side. We now traversed a narrow and rocky ravine, which at length expanded into a magnificent valley, rich in vines and fruit-trees of all kinds, and overhung by lofty mountains. On this plain, surrounded by the living grandeur of nature, and the faded renown of its monastic and archiepiscopal glory, and half-buried amid foliage and ruins, sits Chamberry, the capital of Savoy. At Chamberry our route underwent a change. Beauty now gave place to grandeur; but still a grandeur blended with scenes of exquisite loveliness. These I cannot stay to describe at length. The whole day was passed in winding and climbing among the hills. We toiled slowly to rise above the plains we had left, and to approach the region where winter spreads out her boundless sea of ice and snow. We followed the magnificent road which we owe to the genius of Napoleon. The fruits of Marengo are gone. Austerlitz is but a name. But the passes of the Alps remain. "When will it be ready for the transport of the cannon?" enquired Napoleon respecting the Simplon road. War is a rough pioneer; but without such a pioneer to clear the way the world would stand still. Look back. What do you see throughout the successive ages? War, with his red eye, his iron feet, and his gleaming brand, marching in the van; and commerce, and arts, and Christianity, following in the wake of this blood-besmeared Anakim. Such has ever been the order of procession. Mankind in the mass are a sluggish race, and will march only when the word of command is sounded from iron-throated, hoarse-voiced war. Look at the Alps. What do you see? A gigantic form, busy amid the blinding tempests and the eternal ice of their summits. With herculean might he rends the rocks and levels the mountains. Who is he, and what does he there? That is war, in the person of Napoleon, hewing a path through rocks and glaciers, for the passage of the Bible and the missionary. Under the reign of the Mediator the promise to Christianity is, All is yours. War is yours, and Peace is yours. As we passed on, innumerable nooks of beauty opened to the eye, and romantic peaks ever and anon shot up before us. Now the path led along a meadow, with its large bright flowers; and now along the brink of an Alpine river, with its worn bed and tumultuous floods. Now it rounded the shoulder of a hill; and now it lost itself in some frightful gorge, where the overhanging mountain, with its drapery of pine forests, made it dark as midnight almost. You emerge into daylight again, and begin the same succession of green meadow, pine-clad hill, foaming torrent, and black gorge. Thus you go onward and upward. At length white Alps begin to look down upon you, and give you warning that you are nearing those central regions where eternal winter holds his seat amid pinnacles of ice and wastes of snow. Let us take an individual picture. The road has made a sudden turn; and a valley, hitherto concealed by the mountains, opens unexpectedly. It is some three or four miles long; and the road traverses it straight as the arrow's flight, till it loses itself amid the rocks and foliage at the bottom of the mountain which you see lying across the valley. On this hand is a stream of water, clear as crystal; on that is the ridgy, wavy, lofty mass of a purple Alp. The bright air and light incorporate, as it were, with the substance of the mountain, and spiritualize it, so that it looks of mould intermediate betwixt the earth and the firmament. The path is bordered with the most delicious verdure, fresh and soft as a carpet, and freckled with the dancing shadows of the trees. On this hand is a chalet, with a vine climbing its wall and mantling its doorway; on that is a verdant knoll, planted a-top with chestnut trees; and from amidst their rich, massy foliage, the little spire of the church, with its glittering vane, looks forth. Near it is the curé's house, buried amidst flower-blossoms, the foliage of vines, and the shadows of the sycamore and chestnut. There is not a spot in the little valley which beauty has not clothed and decked with the most painstaking care; while grandeur has built up a wall all round, as if to keep out the storms that sometimes rage here. It looks so quiet and tranquil, and is so shut in from the great world outside, that one thinks of it as a spot which happy beings from another sphere might come to visit, and where he might list the melody of their voices, as they walk at even-tide amid the bowers of this earthly Eden. The road makes another turn, and the scene is changed in a moment,--in the twinkling of an eye. The happy valley is gone,--it has vanished like a dream; and a scene of stern, savage, overpowering sublimity rises before you. Alp is piled upon Alp, chasms yawn, torrents growl, jutting rocks threaten; and far over head is the dark pine forest, amid which you can descry, perhaps, the frozen billows of the glacier, or have glimpses of those still higher and drearier regions where winter sits on her eternal throne, and holds undivided sway. Your farther progress is completely barred. So it looks. A cyclopean wall rises from earth to heaven. The gate of rock by which you entered seems to have closed its ponderous jaws behind you, and shut you in,--there to remain till some supernatural power rend the mountains and give you egress. The mood of mind changes with the scene. The beauty soothed and softened you; now you grow impulsive and stern. The awful forms around you blend with the soul, as it were, and impart something of their own vastness to it. You feel yourself carried into the very presence of that Power which sank the foundations of the mountains in the depths of the earth, and built up their giant masses above the clouds; which hung the avalanche on their brow, clove their unfathomable abysses, poured the river at their feet, and taught the forked lightning to play around their awful icy steeps. You seem to hear the sound of the Almighty's footsteps still echoing amid these hills. There passes before you the shadow of Omnipotence; and a great voice seems to proclaim the Godhead of Him "who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance." The road was comparatively solitary. We passed at times a waggoner, who was conveying the produce of the plains to some village among the mountains; and then a couple of pedestrians, with the air of tradesmen, on their way perhaps to a Swiss town to seek employment; and next a cowherd, driving home his herds from the glades of the forest; and now an occasional gendarme would present himself, and force you to remember, what you would willingly have forgotten amid such scenes, that there were such things as armies in the world; and sometimes the long, dark figure of the curé, reading his breviary to economize time, might be seen gliding along before you, representative of the murky superstition that still fills these valleys, and which, indeed, you can read in the stolid face of the Savoyard, as he sits listlessly under the broad easings of his cottage roof. Anon the evening came, walking noiselessly upon the mountains, and shedding on the spirit a not unpleasant melancholy. The Alps seemed to grow taller. Deep masses of shade were projected from summit to summit. Pine forest, and green vale, and dashing torrent, and quiet hamlet, all retired from view, as if they wished to go to sleep beneath the friendly shadows. A deep and reverent silence stole over the Alps, as if the stillness of the firmament had descended upon them. Over all nature was shed this spirit of quiet and profound tranquillity. Every tree was motionless. The murmur of the brook, the wing of the bird, the creak of our diligence, the voices of the postilion and _conducteur_, all felt the softening influence of the hour. But mark! what glory is this which begins to burn upon the crest of the snowy Alps? First there comes a flood of rosy light, and then a deep bright crimson, like the ruby's flash or the sapphire's blaze, and then a circlet of flaming peaks studs the horizon. It looks as if a great conflagration were about to begin. But suddenly the light fades, and piles of cold, pale white rise above you. You can scarce believe them to be the same mountains. But, quick as the lightning, the flash comes again. A flood of glory rolls once more along their summits. It is a last and mighty blaze. You feel as if it were a struggle for life,--as if it were a war waged by the spirits of darkness against these celestial forms. The struggle is over: the darkness has prevailed. These mighty mountain torches are extinguished one after one; and cold, ghastly piles, of sepulchral hue, which you shiver to look up at, and which remind you of the dead, rise still and calm in the firmament above you. You feel relieved when darkness interposes its veil betwixt you and them. The night sets in deep, and calm, and beautiful, with troops of stars overhead. The voice of streams, all night long, fills the silent hills with melodious echoes. We now threaded the black gorge of the Arc, passing, unperceived in the darkness, Fort Lesseillon, which, erecting its tiers of batteries above this tremendous natural fosse, looks like a mailed warrior guarding the entrance to Italy. It was eleven o'clock, and we were toiling up the mountain. We had left all human habitations far below, as we thought, when suddenly we were startled by a peal of village bells. Never had bells sounded sweeter in my fancy than those I now heard in these dreary regions. These were the convent bells of the little village of Lanslebourg, which lies at the foot of the summit of the Mont Cenis. Here we were to sup. It was a sort of Arbour in the midst of the hill Difficulty, where we Pilgrims might refresh ourselves before beginning our last and steepest ascent. It was a most substantial repast, as all suppers in that part of the world are; and we had the pleasure of thinking that we were perhaps the highest supper party in Europe. It was our last meal before crossing the mountain, and passing from the modern to the ancient world; for the ridge of the Alps is the limit that divides the two. On this side are modern times; on that are the dark ages. You retrograde five full centuries when you step across the line. We ate our supper, as did the Israelites their last meal in Egypt, with our loins girded,--scarce even our greatcoats put off, and our staff in our hand. Now for the summit. We started at midnight. Above us was an ebon vault, studded thick with large bright stars. Around us was the awful silence of the mountains. The night was luminous; for in that elevated region darkness is unknown, save when the storm-cloud shrouds it. Of our party, some betook them to the diligence, and were carried over asleep; others of us, leaving the vehicle to follow the road, which zig-zags up to the summit, addressed ourselves to the old route, which winds steeply upward, now through forests of stunted firs, now over a matting of thick, short grass, and now over the bare debris-strewn scalp of the mountain. The convent bells followed us with their sweet chimes up the hill, and formed a link between us and the living world below. The echoes of our voices were strangely loud. They rung out in the thin elastic air, as if all we said had been caught up and repeated by some invisible being,--some genius of the mountains. The hours wore away; and so delighted were we with the novelty of our position,--climbing the summits of the Alps at midnight,--that they seemed but so many minutes. Ere we were aware, the night was past, and the dawn came upon us; and with the dawn, new and stupendous glories burst forth. How fresh and holy the young day, as it drew aside the curtains of the east, and smiled upon the mountains! The valleys were buried under a fathomless ocean of haze; but the pearly light, sown by the rosy hand of morn, fringed the mountain ridges, and a multitudinous sea of silvery waves spread out around us. The dawn stole on, waxing momentarily; and the great white Alps, which had been standing all night around us so silent, and cold, and sepulchral-like, in their snowy shrouds, now began to grow palpable and less dream-like. The stars put out their fires as the pure crystal light mounted into the sky. Each successive scene was lovely,--inexpressibly lovely,--but momentary. We wished we could have stereotyped it till we had had time to admire it; but while we were gazing it had passed and was gone, like the other glories of the world. But, lo! the sun is near. Mighty torch-bearers run before his chariot, and cry to the rocks, the pine-forests, the torrents, the glaciers, the vine-clad vales, the flower-enamelled glades, the rivers, the cities, that their king is coming. Awake and worship! A mighty Alp, whose loftier stature or more favourable position gives it the start of all the others, has caught the first ray; and suddenly, as if an invisible hand had kindled it, it rises into the firmament, a pyramid of flame, soft, mild, yet gloriously bright, like a dome of living sapphire. While you gaze, another flashes upon you, and another, and another, and at length the whole horizon is filled with gigantic pyres. The stupendous vision has risen so suddenly, that you almost look if you may see the seraph which has flown round and kindled these mighty torches. The glory is inexpressible, and on a scale so vast, that you have no words to describe it. You can scarce believe it to be reflected light which gives such glory to these mountains. They are so rosy, so vividly, intensely radiant, that you feel as if that boundless effulgence emanated from themselves,--were flowing forth from some hidden fountain of light within. It is like no other scene of earthly glory you ever saw. You can compare it only to some celestial city which has been let down from the firmament upon the tops of the mountains, with its glittering turrets, its domes of sapphire, and its wall of alabaster, needing no sun or other source of earthly light to enlighten and glorify it. But while you gaze, it is gone. The sun is up, and the mighty mountain-torches which had carried the tidings of his coming to the countries beneath are extinguished. It was now full day, and we had reached the summit of the pass. Above us were still the snow-clad peaks; but the road does not ascend higher. We now crossed the frontier, and were in Italy. A little rocky plain surrounded by weather-beaten peaks, a deep blue lake, and a sea of bare ridges in front, were all that we saw of Italy. The road now began sensibly to decline, and the diligence quickened its pace. We soon reached the ridges before us, and began to descend over the brow of the Alps, which are steep and perpendicular as a wall almost, on their southern side. You first traverse a region covered with immense lichen-clothed boulders; next come stretches of heath; then stunted firs: by and by fruit and forest trees begin to make their appearance; next comes the lovely acacia; and last of all the vine, tall and luxuriant, veiling the peasant's cot with its shadow. The road is literally a series of hanging stairs, which zig-zag down the face of the mountain. At certain points the rock is perforated; at others it is hewn into terraces; and at others the path rests on vast substructions of masonry. Now an immense rock leans over the road, and now you find yourself on the edge of some frightful precipice, with the gulph running right down many thousands of feet, and a white torrent at the bottom, boiling and struggling, but unable to make itself heard at that height on the mountain. The turns are frequent and sharp; and the heavy, overladen vehicle, in its furious downward career, gives a swing at each, as if it would cut short the passage into Italy, and land the passenger, sooner than he wishes, at the bottom. At length, after four hours' riding, the descent is accomplished. The scene has changed in the twinkling of an eye. The plain is as level as a floor. The warm sun,--the brilliant sky,--the luxuriant vines,--the handsome architecture,--the picturesque costumes,--the dark oval faces, and black fiery eyes of the natives,--all tell you that it is a new world into which you have entered,--that this is ITALY. CHAPTER III. RISK AND PROGRESS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM IN PIEDMONT. First Entrance into Italy--Never can be Repeated--The Cathedral of Turin--The Royal Palace--The Museum--Egyptian Mummies--Reflections--Landmark of the Vaudois Valleys--Piedmontese House of Commons--Piedmontese Constitution--Perils that surrounded it--Providentially shielded from these--Numbers and Wealth of the Priesthood--Want of Public Opinion--Rise of a Free Press--Its Power--The _Gazetta del Popolo_--The Bible quoted by the Journalists--The flourishing State of the Country--The Waldensian Temple and Congregation--Workmen's Clubs--The Capuchin Monastery--A Capuchin Friar--Sunset. One can enter Italy for the first time only once. For, however often we may climb the Alps, and tread the land that lies stretched out at their base, it is with a cold pulse, compared with the fever of excitement into which we are thrown by the first touch of that soil. The charm is flown; the tree of knowledge has been plucked; and never more can we taste the dreamy yet intense delight which attended the first unfolding of the gates of the Alps, and the first rising of the fair vision of Italy. In truth, the Italy which one comes to see on his second visit is not the Italy that first drew him across the Alps. That was the Italy of history, or rather of his own imagination. The fair form his fancy was wont to conjure up, draped in the glowing recollections of empire and of arms, and encompassed with the halo of heroic deeds, he can see no more. There meets him, on the other side of the Alps, a vision very unlike this. The Italy of the Cæsars is gone; and where she sat is now a poor, naked, cowering thing, with a chain upon her arm,--the Italy of the Popes. But the fascination attends the traveller some short way into that land. Indeed, he is loath to lose it, and would rather see Italy through the warm colourings of history, and the bright hues of his own fancy, than look upon her as she is. I shall never forget the intense excitement that thrilled me when I found myself rolling along on the magnificent avenue of pollard-elms, that runs all the way from Rivoli to Turin. The voluptuous air, which seemed to fill the landscape with a dreamy gaiety; the intense sunlight, which tinted every object with extraordinary brilliancy, from the bright leaves overhead, to the burning domes of Turin in front; the dark eyes of the natives, which flashed with a fervour like that of their own sun; the Alps towering above me, and running off in a vast unbroken line of glittering masses,--all contributed to form a picture of so novel and brilliant a kind, that it absolutely produced an intoxication of delight. I passed a few days at Turin; and the pleasure of my stay was much enhanced by the society of my friend the Rev. John Bonar, whom I had met at Chamberry, _en route_, with his family, for Malta. We visited together the chief objects of interest in the capital of Piedmont. The churches we saw of course. And though we had been carried blindfolded across the Alps, and set down in the cathedral of Turin, the statuary alone would have told us that we were in Italy. The most unpractised eye could see at once the difference betwixt these statues and those of the Transalpine churches. The Italian sculptors seemed to possess some secret by which they could make the marble live. Some half-dozen of priests, with red copes (I presume it was a martyr's day, for on such days the Church's dress is red), ranged in a pew near the altar, were singing psalms. Whether the good men were thinking of their dinner, I knew not; but they yawned portentously, wrung their hands with an air of helplessness, and looked at us as if they half expected that we would volunteer to do duty for an hour or so in their stead. A bishop chanting his psalter under the groined roof of cathedral, and a covenanter praying in his hill-side cave, would form an admirable picture of two very different styles of devotion. There were some dozen of old women on the floor, whom the mixed motive of saying their prayers and picking up a chance alms seemed to have drawn thither. From the Duomo we went to the King's palace. We walked through a suit of splendid apartments, though not quite accordant in their style of ornament and comfort with our English ideas. The floor and roof were of rich and beautiful mosaics; the walls were adorned with the more memorable battles of the Sardinian nation; and the furniture was minutely and elaborately inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Three rooms more particularly attracted my attention. The first contained the throne of the kings of Savoy,--a gilded chair, under a crimson canopy, and surrounded by a gilt railing. I thought, as I gazed upon it, how often the power of that throne had lain heavily upon the poor Waldenses. The other room contained the bed on which King Charles Albert died. It is yet in my readers' recollection, that Charles Albert died at Oporto; but the whole furniture of the room in which he breathed his last was transported, together with his ashes, to Turin. It was an affecting sight. There it stood, huddled into a corner,--a poor bed of boards, with a plain coverlet, such as a Spanish peasant might sleep beneath; a chest of deal drawers; and a few of the necessary utensils of a sick chamber. The third room contained the Queen's bed of state. Its windows opened sweetly upon the fine gardens of the palace, where the first ray, as it slants downwards from the crest of the Alps into the valley of the Po, falls on the massy foliage of the mulberry and the orange. On the table were some six or eight books, among which was a copy of the Psalms of David. "It is very fine," said my friend Mr Bonar, glancing up at the gilded canopy and silken hangings of the bed, and poking his hand at the same time into its soft woolly furnishings, "but nothing but blankets can make it comfortable." From the palace we passed to the Museum. There you see pictures, statues, coins stamped with the effigies of kings that lived thousands of years ago, and papyrus parchments inscribed with the hieroglyphics of old Egypt, and other curiosities, which it has required ages to collect, as it would volumes to describe. Not the least interesting sight there is the gods of Egypt,--cats, ibises, fish, monkeys, heads of calves and bulls, all lying in their original swathings. I looked narrowly at these divinities, but could detect no difference betwixt the god-cat of Egypt and the cats of our day. Were it possible to re-animate one of them, and make it free of our streets, I fear the god would be mistaken for an ordinary quadruped of its own kind, pelted and worried by mischievous boys and dogs, as other cats are. I do not know that a modern priest of Turin has any very good ground for taunting an old Egyptian priest with his cat-worship. If it is impossible to tell the difference betwixt a cat which is simply a cat, and a cat which is a god, it is just as impossible to tell the difference betwixt a bread-wafer which is simply bread, and a bread-wafer which is the flesh and blood, the soul and divinity, of Christ. Seeing in Egypt the gods died, it will not surprise the reader that in Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth, through which the features could be seen not indistinctly. Now, thought I, I shall hear all about old Egypt. Perhaps this man has seen Joseph, or talked with Jacob, or witnessed the wonders of the exodus. Come, tell me your name or profession, or some of the strange events of your history. Did you don the mail-coat of the warrior, or the white robe of the priest? Did you till the ground, and live on garlic; or were you owner of a princely estate, and wont to sit on your house-top of evenings, enjoying the delicious twilight, and the soft flow of the Nile? Come now, tell me all. The door of a departed world seemed about to open. I felt as if standing on its threshold, and looking in upon the shadowy forms that peopled it. But ah! these lips spoke not. With the Rosetta stone as the key, I could compel the granite slabs and the brown worn parchments around me to give up their secrets. But where was the key that could open that breast, and read the secrets locked up in it? And this form had still a living owner! This awoke a train of thought yet more solemn. Who, what, and where is he? Anxious as I had been to have the door of that mysterious past in which he had lived opened to me, I was yet more anxious to look into that more mysterious and awful future into which he had gone. What had he seen and felt these four thousand years? Did the ages seem long to him, or was it but as a few days since he left the earth? I went close up to the dark curtain, but there was no opening,--no chink by which I could see into the world beyond. Will no kind hand draw the veil aside but for a moment? There it has hung unlifted age after age, concealing, with its impenetrable folds, all that mortals would most like to know. Myriads and myriads have passed within, but not one has ever given back voice, or look, or sign, to those they left behind, and from whom never before did they conceal thought or wish. Why is this? Do they not still think of us? Do they not still love us? Would they softly speak to us if they could? What gulf divides them? Ah! how silent are the dead! Close by the great highway into Italy lie the "Valleys of the Vaudois." One might pass them without being aware of their near presence, or that he was treading upon holy ground;--so near to the world are they, and yet so completely hidden from it. Ascend the little hill on the south of Turin, and follow with your eye the great wall of the Alps which bounds the plain on the north. There, in the west, about thirty miles from where you stand, is a tall pyramidal-shaped mountain, towering high above the other summits. That is Monte Viso, which rises like a heaven-erected beacon, to signify from afar to the traveller the land of the Waldenses, and to call him, with its solemn voice, to turn aside and see the spot where "the bush burned and was not consumed." We shall make a short, a very short visit to these valleys, than which Europe has no more sacred soil. But first let us speak of some of the bulwarks which an all-wise Providence has erected in our day around a Church and people whose existence is one of the great living miracles of the world. The revolutions which swept over Italy in 1848 were the knell of the other Italian States, but to Piedmont they were the trumpet of liberty. No man living can satisfactorily explain why the same event should have operated so disasterously for the one, and so beneficially for the other. No reason can be found in the condition of the country itself: the thing is inexplicable on ordinary principles; and the more intelligent Piedmontese at this day speak of it as a miracle. But so is the fact. Piedmont is a constitutional kingdom; and I went with M. Malan, himself a Waldensian, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, to see the hall where their Parliament sits. A spacious flight of steps conducts to a noble hall, in form an ellipse, and surmounted by a dome. At one end of the ellipse hangs a portrait of the President, and underneath is his richly gilt chair, with a crimson-covered table before it. Right in front of the Speaker's chair, on a lower level, is placed the tribune, which much resembles the precentor's desk in a Scottish church. The tribune is occupied only when a Minister makes a Ministerial declaration, or a Convener of a Committee gives in his Report. An open space divides the tribune from the seats of the members. These last run all round the hall, in concentric rows of benches, also covered with crimson. "There, on the right," said M. Malan, "sit the priest party. In the front are the Ministerial members; on the left is my seat. There is an extreme left to which I do not belong: I have not passed the constitutional line. This lower tier of galleries is for the conductors of the press and the diplomatic corps; this higher gallery is for ladies and military men. We are 204 members in all. We have a member for every twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Our population is four millions and a half. Our House of Peers contains only ninety members. The King has the privilege of nominating to it, but peers so created are only for life." It was, in truth, a marvellous sight;--a free and independent Parliament meeting in the ancient capital of the bigoted Piedmont, with a free press and a public looking on, and one of the long proscribed Vaudois race occupying a seat in it. The more I thought of it, the more I wondered. The causes which had led to so extraordinary a result seemed clearly providential. When King Charles Albert in 1848 gave his subjects a Constitution, no one had asked it, and few there were who could value it, or even knew what a Constitution meant. One or two public writers there were who said that public opinion demanded it; but, in sooth, there was then no public opinion in the country. Soon after this the campaign in Lombardy was commenced, and the result of that campaign threatened the Piedmontese Constitution with extinction. The Piedmontese army was beaten by the Austrians, and had to make a hasty and inglorious retreat into their own country. Every one then expected that Radetzky would march upon Turin, put down the Constitution, and seize upon Sardinia. Contrary to his usual habits, the old warrior halted on the frontier, as if kept back by an invisible power, and the Constitution was saved. Then came the death of Charles Albert, of a broken heart, in Oporto, whither he had fled; and every one believed that the Piedmontese charter would accompany its author to the tomb. The dispositions and policy of the new king were unknown; but the probability was that he would follow the example of his brother sovereigns of Italy, all of whom had begun to revoke the Constitutions which they had so recently inaugurated with solemn oaths. Happily these fears were not realized. The new perils passed over, and left the Constitution unscathed. King Victor Immanuel,--a constitutional monarch simply by accident,--turned out a good-natured, easy-minded man, who loved the chase and his country seat, and found it more agreeable to live on good terms with his subjects, and enjoy a handsome civil list,--which his Parliament has taken care to vote him,--than to be indebted for his safety and a bankrupt exchequer to the bayonets of his guards. Thus marvellously, hitherto, in the midst of dangers at home and re-action abroad, has the Piedmontese charter been preserved. I dwell with the greater minuteness on this point, because on the integrity of that charter are suspended the civil liberties of the Church of the Vaudois. When I was in Turin the Constitution was three years old; but even then its existence was exceedingly precarious. The King could have revoked it at any moment; and there was not then, I was assured by General Beckwith,--who knows the state of the Piedmontese nation well,--moral power in the country to offer any effectual resistance, had the royal will decreed the suppression of constitutional government. "But," added he, "should the Constitution live three years longer, the people by that time will have become so habituated to the working of a free Constitution, and public opinion will have acquired such strength, that it will be impossible for the monarch to retrace his steps, even should he be so inclined." It is exactly three years since that time, and the state of the Piedmontese nation at this moment is such as to justify the words of the sagacious old man. The first grand difficulty in the way of the Constitution was, the numbers and power of the priesthood. In no country in Europe,--not even in France and Austria, when their size is compared,--were the benefices so numerous, or their holders so luxuriously fed. Piedmont was the paradise of priests. The ecclesiastical statistics of that kingdom, furnished to the French journal _La Presse_, on occasion of the introduction of the bill for suppressing the convents, on the 8th of January 1855, reveals a state of things truly astonishing. Notwithstanding that the population is only four and a half millions, there are in Sardinia 7 archbishops; 34 bishops; 41 chapters, with 860 canons attached to the bishoprics; 73 simple chapters, with 470 canons; 1100 livings for the canons; and, lastly, 4267 parishes, with some thousands of parish priests. The domain of the Church represents a capital of 400 millions of francs, with a yearly revenue of 17 millions and upwards. This enormous wealth is divided amongst the clergy in proportions grossly unequal. The 41 prelates of Sardinia enjoy a revenue of nearly a million and a half of francs, which is double what used to maintain all the bishops of the French empire. The Archbishop of Turin has an income of 120,000 francs, which is more than the whole bench of Belgian bishops. The other prelates are paid in proportion. As a set-off to this wealth, there are in Sardinia upwards of 2000 curates, not one of whom has so much as 800 francs, or about L.35 sterling. These are thus tempted to prey upon the people. Such is the terrible organization which the King and Parliament have to encounter in carrying out their reforms, and such is the fearful incubus which has pressed for ages upon the social rights and industrial energies of the Piedmontese people. But this is but a part of the great sacerdotal army encamped in Piedmont. There are 71 religious orders besides, divided into 604 houses, containing in all 8563 monks and nuns. The expense of feeding these six hundred houses, with their army of eight thousand strong, forms an item of two millions and a-half of francs, and represents a capital of forty-five millions. The greatest admirer of these fraternities will scarce deny that this is a handsome remuneration for their services; indeed, we never could make out what these services really are. They do not teach the youth, or pray with the aged. For reading they have no taste; and to write what will be read, or preach what will be listened to, is far beyond their ability. Their pious hands disdain all contact with the plough, and the loom, and the spade. They share with their countrymen neither the labours of peace, nor the dangers of war. They lounge all day in the streets, or about the wine shops; and, when the dinner-hour arrives, they troop home-wards, to retail the gossip of the town over a groaning board and a well-filled flagon. Thus they fatten like pigs, being about as cleanly, but scarce as useful. It is not surprising that a bill should at last have reached the Chambers, proposing, _first_, the better distribution of the revenues of the Church, equal to a fourth of the kingdom; and, _second_, the suppression of those "houses," the rules of which bind over their members to sheer, downright idleness, leaving only those who have some show of public duty to perform. The priests denounce the bill as "spoliation and robbery" of course, and prophesy all manner of things against so wicked a kingdom. Doubtless it is daring impiety in the eyes of Rome to forbid a man with a shaven crown and a brown cloak to play the idler and vagabond. We are only surprised that the people of Piedmont have so long suffered their labours to be eaten up by an order of men useless, and worse than useless. Another grand difficulty in Piedmont was the absence of a middle class,--wealthy, intelligent, and independent. No one felt that he had rights, and you never heard people saying there, as you may do in Britain, "this is my right, and I will have it." A feeling of individual right, and of responsibility,--for the two go together,--was then just beginning to dawn upon the popular mind. This was accompanied by a certain amount of disorganizing influence; not that of Socialism,--which, happily, scarce existed in Piedmont,--but that of self-action. Every one was feeling his own way. The priests, of course, were exceedingly wroth, and loudly accused Protestantism as the cause of all this commotion in men's minds. Alas! there was no Protestantism in Piedmont, for it had been one of the most bigoted kingdoms in Italy. It was their own handiwork; for a tyranny always produces a democracy. As if by a miracle, a powerful and popular press started up in Turin. The writers in the _Opinione_ and the _Gazetta del Popolo_, acting, I suspect, on a hint given by some Vaudois that there was an old book, now little known, that would help them in the war they were now waging, went to the Bible, and, finding that it made against the priests, were liberal in their quotations from it. Their most telling hits were the extracts from Scripture; and finding it so, they quoted yet more largely. The priests were much concerned to see Holy Scripture so far profaned as to be quoted in newspapers, and exposed freely to the gaze of the vulgar. But what could they do? Their own literary qualifications did not warrant them to enter the lists with these writers: they had forgot the way to preach, unless at Lent; they could work the confessional, but even it began to be silenced by the powerful artillery of the press. At an earlier stage they might have roused the peasantry, and marched upon the Constitution, whose life they knew was the death of their power; but it was too late in 1851. An attempt of this sort made a year or two after, among the peasantry of the Val d'Aosta, turned out a miserable failure. Thus, a movement which in other countries came forward under the sanction of the priesthood, from the very outset in Piedmont took a contrary direction, and set in full against the Church. Since that day liberty has been working itself, bit by bit, into the action of the Constitution, and the feelings of the people; and now, I believe, neither King nor Parliament, were they so inclined, could put it down. The sum of the matter then is, that of all the kingdoms which the era of 1848 started in the path of free government, the brave little State of Piedmont alone has persevered to this day. Amid the wide weltering sea of Italian anarchy and despotism, here, and here alone, liberty finds a spot on which to plant her foot. Again we ask, why is this? There is nothing in the past history of the country,--nothing in the present state of the nation,--which can account for it. We must look elsewhere for a solution; and we do not hesitate to avow our firm conviction, that a special Providence has shielded the Constitution of Piedmont, because with that Constitution is bound up the liberties of the ancient martyr Church of the Vaudois. It was the only one of the Italian Constitutions that carried in it so sacred a guarantee of permanency. On the 17th of February 1848 (the day is worth remembering), Charles Albert, by a royal edict, admitted the Waldenses to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights, in common with the rest of their fellow-subjects. Now, for the first time in a thousand years, the trumpet of liberty sounded amid the Vaudois valleys; and the shout of joy which the Alps sent back seemed like the first response to the prayer which had so often ascended from these hills, "How long, O Lord." Would not Sodom have been spared had ten righteous men been found in it? and why not Piedmont, seeing the Waldensian Church was there? Yes, Piedmont is the little Zoar of the Italian plains! Little may its people reck to whom it is they owe their escape. It is nevertheless a truth that, but for the poor Vaudois, whom, instigated by the Pope, they long and ruthlessly laboured to exterminate, their country would have been at this day in the same gulph of social demoralization and political re-action with Tuscany, and Naples, and Rome. These last were taken, and Piedmont escaped. And the country is truly flourishing. It has thriven every day since Charles Albert emancipated the Vaudois. No one can cross its frontier without being struck with the contrast it presents to the other Italian States. While they are decaying like a corpse, it is flourishing like the chestnut-tree of its own mountains. The very faces of the people may tell you that the country is free and prosperous. Its citizens walk about with the cheerful, active air of men who have something to do and to enjoy, and not with the listless, desponding, heart-sick look which marks the inhabitants of the other States of Italy. Here, too, you miss that universal beggary and vagabondism that disfigure and pollute all the other countries of the Peninsula. What rich loam the ploughman turns up! What magnificent vines shade its plains! Public works are in progress, railways have been formed, and new houses are building. Not fewer than a hundred houses were built in Turin last year, which is more, I verily believe, than in all the other Italian towns out of Piedmont taken together. Thus, while the other States of Italy are foundering in the tempest, Piedmont lives because it carries the Vaudois and their fortunes. From the hall of the Chamber of Deputies I went with M. Malan to the office of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, to be introduced to its editors. The _Gazetta del Popolo_ is a daily paper, with a circulation of 15,000; and, being sold at a penny, is universally read by the middle and lower classes. It is the _Times_ of Piedmont. Its editors are men of great talent, and write with the practical good sense and racy style of Cobbett. They are not religious men, neither are they Romanists, though nominally connected with the Church of the State; but they are warm advocates of constitutional government, hearty haters of the Papacy, and have done much to enlighten the public mind, and loosen it from Romanism. They first of all made inquiries respecting the external resemblance of Puseyistic and Popish worship, as I had seen the latter in Italy. They made yet more eager inquiries respecting the progress and prospects of Puseyism in England, and about a then recent declaration of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the effect that there were only two Bishops in the Church of England that had gone over to Puseyism. They seemed to feel that the fortunes of the Papacy would turn mainly upon the fortunes of Puseyism in England. As regarded the Archbishop, I replied, that I believed in the substantial accuracy of his statement, that there were not more than two members of the episcopate who could be held to be decided Puseyites; and as regarded the progress of Puseyism, I said, that it had been making great and rapid progress, but that the papal aggression, in my humble opinion, had dealt a somewhat heavy blow to both Popery and Puseyism,--that so long as Romanism came begging for toleration, it had found great favour in the eyes of the liberals; but when it came claiming to govern, it had scared away many of its former supporters, who had come to know it better,--and that the Protestant feeling which the aggression had evoked on the part of the Court, the Parliament, and the people, had tended to discourage Romanism, and all kindred or identical creeds. They were delighted to hear this, and said that they would baptize the fact in the _Gazetta del Popolo_, "the assassination of the Papacy by Cardinal Wiseman." Their paper, M. Malan afterwards told me, is published on Sabbaths as well (there are worse things done on that day in Italy, even by bishops), on which day they print their weekly sermon. "You won't preach," say they to the priests; "therefore we will;" and it is in their Sabbath sheet that they make their bitterest assaults upon the priesthood. They quote largely from Scripture: not that they wish to establish evangelical truth, of which they know little, but because they find such quotations to be the most powerful weapons which they can employ against the Papacy. In truth, they advertised in this way the Bible to their countrymen, many of whom had never heard of such a book till then. I was inexpressibly delighted to find such men in Turin wielding such influence, and took the liberty of saying at parting, that we in England had beheld with admiration the noble stand Piedmont had made in behalf of constitutional government,--that we were watching with intense interest the future career of their nation,--that we were cherishing the hope that they would manfully maintain the ground they had taken up,--and that in England, and especially in Scotland, we felt that the root of all the despotism of the Continent was the Papacy,--that the way to strike for liberty was to strike at Rome,--and that till the Papacy was overthrown, never would the nations of the world be either free or happy. They assured me that in these sentiments they heartily concurred, and that they were the very ideas they were endeavouring to propagate. They gave me, on taking leave, a copy of that morning's paper as a _souvenir_; and on examining it afterwards, I found that the topic of its leading article was quite in the vein of our conversation. The great bulk of the liberal party in Piedmont shared even then the ideas of the editors of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, and felt that to lay the foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,--it is the primal truth in the science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections have been against kings and aristocrats: even in 1848 the Italians were willing to accept the leadership of the Pope. The perfidies and atrocities of which they have since been the victims have burned the essential tyranny of the papal system into their minds; and the next insurrection that takes place will be against the Papacy. A constitution, a free press, and a public opinion, are but the outward defences of a divine and immortal principle, which, rooted in the soil of Piedmont, has outlived a long winter, and is now beginning to bud afresh, and to send forth goodlier shoots than ever. To this I next turned. Conducted by M. Malan, I went to the western quarter of Turin, where, amid the gardens and elegant mansions of the suburbs, workmen were digging the foundations of what was to be a spacious building. On this spot the Dominicans in former ages had burned the bodies of the martyrs; and now the Waldensian temple stands here,--a striking proof, surely, of the immortality of truth,--to rise, and live, and speak boldly, on the very spot where she had been bound to a stake, burned, and extinguished, as the persecutor believed. This church, not the least elegant in a city abounding with elegant structures, has since been opened, and is filled every Sabbath with well-nigh a thousand auditors,--the largest congregation, I will venture to say, in Turin. In 1851 I could visit the cradle of this movement. It had its first rise in the labours of Felix Neff, twenty-five years before; but it was not till the revolution of 1848 that it appeared above ground. Even in 1851, colportage among the Piedmontese was prohibited, though it was allowable to print or import the Bible for the use of the Waldenses, and the Government winked at its sale to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. I was shown in M. Malan's banking office the Bible depot, and was gratified to find that the sales which were made to applicants only had during the past year amounted to a thousand copies. Evening meetings were held every day of the week, in various parts of Turin, at which the Bible was read, and points of controversy betwixt Christianity and Romanism eagerly discussed. The Rev. M. Meille, the able editor of the _Buona Novella_,--a paper then just starting,--informed me that not fewer than ninety persons had been present at the meeting superintended by him the night before. These week-day assemblages, as well as the Sabbath audiences, were of a very miscellaneous character,--Vaudois, who had come to Turin to be servants, for, prior to the revolution, they could be nothing else; Piedmontese tradesmen; Swiss, Germans, and Italian refugees, to whom three pastors ministered,--one in French, one in German, and a third in the Italian tongue. There were then not fewer than ten re-unions every week in Turin. The idea, too, had been started of taking advantage of the workmen's clubs for the propagation of the gospel. A network of such societies covered northern and central Italy. The clubs in Turin corresponded with those in Genoa, Alessandria, and all the principal towns of Piedmont; and these again with similar clubs in central Italy; and any new theory or doctrine introduced into one soon made the round of all. The plan adopted was to send evangelical workmen into these clubs, who were listened to as they propounded the new plan of justification by faith. The clubs in Turin were first leavened with the gospel; thence it was extended to Genoa, and gradually also to central Italy. While the _prolétaires_ in France were discussing the claims of labour, the workmen in Piedmont were canvassing the doctrines of the New Testament; and hence the difference betwixt the two countries. It was now drawing towards sunset, and I purposed enjoying the twilight,--delicious in all climates, but especially in Italy,--on the terrace of the College or Monastery of the Capuchins. This monastery stands on the Collina, a romantic height on the south of Turin, washed by the Po, with villas and temples on its crest and summits. I took my way through the noble street that leads southwards, halting at the book-stalls, and picking out of their heaps of rubbish an Italian copy of the Catechism of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Collina was all in a blaze; the windows of the Palazzo Regina glittered in the setting beams; and the dome of the Superga shone like gold. Crossing the Po, I ascended by the winding avenue of shady acacias, which are planted there to protect the cowled heads of the fathers from the noonday sun. One of the monks was winding his way up hill, at a pace which gave me full opportunity of observing him. A little black cap covered his scalp; his round bullet-head, which bristled with short, thick-set hairs, joined on, by a neck of considerably more than the average girth, to shoulders of Atlantean dimensions. His body was enveloped in a coarse brown mantle, which descended to his calves, and was gathered round his middle with a slender white cord. His naked feet were thrust into sandals. The features of the "religious" were coarse and swollen; and he strode up hill before me with a gait which would have made a peaceful man, had he met him on a roadside in Scotland, give him a wide offing. Parties of soldiers wounded in the late campaign were sauntering in the square of the monastery, or looking over the low wall at the city beneath. Their pale and sickly looks formed a striking contrast to the athletic forms of the full-fed monks. It was inexplicable to me, that the youth of Sardinia, immature and raw, should be drafted into the army, while such an amount of thews and sinews as this monastery, and hundreds more, contained, should be allowed to run to waste, or worse. If but for their health, the monks should be compelled to fight the next campaign. The sun went down. Long horizontal shafts of golden light shot through amidst the Alps; their snows glittered with a dazzling whiteness: whiteness is a weak term;--it was a brilliant and lustrous glory, like that of light itself. Anon a crimson blush ran along the chain. It faded; it came again. A wall of burning peaks, from two to three hundred miles in length, rose along the horizon. Eve, with her purple shadows, drew on; and I left the mountains under a sky of vermilion, with Monte Viso covering with its shadow the honoured dust that sleeps around it, and pointing with its stony finger to that sky whither the spirits of the martyred Vaudois have now ascended. It seemed to say, "Come and see." CHAPTER IV. STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VAUDOIS VALLEYS. Journey to "Valleys"--Dinner at Pignerolo--Grandeur of Scenery--Associations--Bicherasio--Procession of _Santissimo_--Connection betwixt the History and the Country of the Vaudois--The Three Valleys of Martino, Angrona, and Lucerna--Their Arrangement--Strength--Fertility--La Tour--The Castelluzzo--Scenery of the Val Lucerna--The Manna of the Waldenses--Populousness of the Valleys--Variety of Productions--The Roman Flood and the Vaudois Ark. The Valleys of the Vaudois lie about thirty miles to the south-west of Turin. The road thither it is scarce possible to miss. Keeping the lofty and pyramidal summit of Monte Viso in your eye, you go straight on, in a line parallel with the Alps, along the valley of the Po, which is but a prolongation of the great plain of Lombardy. On my way down to these valleys, I observed on the roadside numerous little temples, which the natives, in true Pagan fashion, had erected to their deities. The niches of these temples were filled with Madonnas, crucifixes, and saints, gaunt and grizzly, with unlighted candles stuck before them, or rude paintings and tinsel baubles hung up as votive offerings. The signboards--especially those of the wine venders--were exceedingly religious. They displayed, for the most part, a bizarre painting of the Virgin, and occasionally of the Pope; and not unfrequently underneath these personages were a company of heretics, such as those I was going to visit, sweltering in flames. Were a Protestant vintner to sell his ale beneath a picture of Catholics burning in hell, I fear we should never hear the last of it. But I must say, that these pictures seemed the production of past times. They were one and all sorely faded, as if their owners were beginning to be somewhat ashamed of them, or lacked zeal to repair them. The _conducteur_ of the stage had an Italian translation of Mr Gladstone's well-known pamphlet on Naples in his hand, which then covered all the book-stalls in Turin, and was read by every one. This led to a lively discussion on the subject of the Church, between him and two fellow-travellers, to whom I had been introduced at starting, as Waldenses. I observed that, although he appeared to come off but second best in the controversy, he bore all with unruffled humour, as if not unwilling to be beaten. At length, after a ride of twenty miles over the plain, in which the husbandman, with plough as old in its form as the Georgics, was turning up a soil rich, black, and glossy as the raven's wing, we arrived at Pignerolo, a town on the borders of the Vaudois land. The two Vaudois and myself adjourned to the hotel to dine. Even in this we had an instance of changed times. In this very town of Pignerolo a law had been in existence, and was not long repealed, forbidding, under severe penalties, any one to give meat or drink to a Vaudois. The "Valleys" were only ten miles distant, and we agreed to walk thither on foot. Indeed, all such spots must be so visited, if one would feel their full influence. Leaving Pignerolo, the road began to draw into the bosom of the mountains, and the scenery became grander at every step. On the right rose the hills of the Vaudois, with knolls glittering with woods and cottages scattered at their feet. On the left, long reaches of the Po, meandering through pasturages and vineyards, gleamed out golden in the western sun. The scenery reminded me much of the Highlands at Comrie, only it was on a scale of richness and magnificence unknown to Scotland. After advancing a few miles, I chanced to turn and look back. The change the mountains had undergone struck me much. A division of Alps, tall and cloud-capped, appeared to have broken off from the main army, and to have come marching into the plain; and while the mountains were closing in upon us behind, they appeared to be falling back in front, and arranging themselves into the segment of a vast circle. A magnificent amphitheatre had risen noiselessly around us. On all sides save the south, where a reach of the valley was still visible, the eye met only a lofty wall of mountains, hung in a rich and gorgeous tapestry of bright green pasturages and shady pine-forests, with the frequent sunlight gleam of white chalets. The snows of their summits were veiled in masses of cloud, which the southerly winds were bringing up upon them from the Mediterranean. I seemed to have entered some stately temple,--a temple not of mortal workmanship,--which needed no tall shaft, no groined roof, no silver lamps, no chisel or pencil of artist to beautify it, and no white-robed priest to make it holy. It had been built by Him whose power laid the foundations of the earth, and hung the stars in heaven; and it had been consecrated by sacrifices such as Rome's mitred priests never offered in aisled cathedral. Nor had it been the scene only of lofty endurance: it had been the scene also of sweet and holy joys. There the Vaudois patriarchs, like Enoch, had "walked with God;" there they had read his Word, and kept his Sabbaths. They had sung his praise by these silvery brooks, and kneeled in prayer beneath these chestnut trees. There, too, arose the shout of triumphant battle; and from those valleys the Vaudois martyrs had gone up, higher than these white peaks, to take their place in the white-robed and palm-bearing company. Can the spirit, I asked myself, ever forget its earthly struggles, or the scene on which they were endured? and may not the very same picture of beauty and grandeur now before my eye be imprinted eternally on the memory of many of the blessed in Heaven? There was silence on plain and mountain,--a hush like that of a sanctuary, reverent and deep, and broken only by the flow of the torrent and the sound of voices among the vineyards. I could not fail to observe that sounds here were more musical than on the plain. This is a peculiarity belonging to mountainous regions; but I have nowhere seen it so perceptible as here. Every accent had a fullness and melody of tone, as if spoken in a whispering gallery. Right in the centre of the circle formed by the mountains was the entrance of the Vaudois valleys. The place was due north from where we now were, but we had to make a considerable detour in order to reach it. A long low hill, rough with boulders and feathery with woods, lay across the mouth of these valleys; and we had to go round it on the west, and return along the fertile vale which divides it from the high Alps, whose straths and gorges form the dwellings of the Waldenses. A dream it seemed to be, walking thus within the shadow of the Vaudois hills. And then, too, what a strange chance was it which had thrown me into the society of my two Waldensian fellow-travellers! They had met me on the threshold of their country, as if sent to bid me welcome, and conduct my steps into a land which the prayers and sufferings of their forefathers had for ever hallowed. They could not speak a word of my tongue; and to them my transalpine Italian was not more than intelligible. Yet, such is the power of a common sympathy, the conversation did not once flag all the way; and it had reference, of course, to one subject. I told them that I was not unacquainted with their glorious history;--that from a child I had known the noble deeds of their fathers, who had received an equal place in my veneration with the men of old, "who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouth of lions. And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy;"--and that, next to the hills of my own land, hallowed, too, with martyr-blood, I loved the mountains within whose shadow my wandering steps had now brought me. The eyes of my Vaudois friends kindled; they were not unconscious, I could see, of their noble lineage; and they were visibly touched by the circumstance that a stranger from a distant land--drawn thither by sympathy with the great struggles of their nation--should come to visit their mountains. Every object in any way connected with their history, and especially with their persecutions, was carefully pointed out to me. "There," said they, "is our frontier church, the first of the Vaudois candles," pointing to a white edifice that gleamed out upon us amid woods and rocks, on the summit of a hill, soon after leaving Pignerolo. They mentioned, too, with peculiar emphasis, the year of the last great massacre of their brethren. The memory of that transaction, I feel assured, will perish only with the Vaudois race. Nor can I forget the evident pride with which, on nearing the valley of Lucerne, they pointed to the giant form of their Castelluzzo, now looming through the shades of night, and told me that in the caves of that mighty rock their fathers found shelter, when the valley beneath was covered with armed men. Nowhere had I seen more luxuriant vines. They were festooned, too, after the manner of those I had seen among the Alps; but here the effect was more beautiful. They were literally stretched out over entire fields in an unbroken web of boughs. Clothed with luxuriant foliage, they looked like another azure canopy extended over the soil. There was ample room beneath for the ploughman and his bullocks. The golden beams, struggling through the massy foliage, fell in a mellow and finely tinted shower on the newly ploughed soil. Wheat is said to ripen better beneath the vine-shade than in the open sun. The season of grapes was shortly past; but here and there large clusters were still pendent on the bough. Hitherto, although we had been skirting the Vaudois territory, we had not set foot upon it. The line which separates it from the rest of Piedmont touches the small town of Bicherasio, on the western flank of the low hill I have mentioned; and the roofs of the little town were already in sight. Passing, on the left, a white-walled mass-house on a small height, with the priest looking at us from amid the autumn-tinted vine leaves that shaded the wall, we entered the town of Bicherasio. The first sight we saw was a procession advancing up the street at double-quick time. I was at first sorely puzzled what to make of it. There was an air of mingled fun and gravity on the faces of the crowd; but the former so greatly predominated, that I took the affair for a frolic of the youths of Bicherasio. First came a squad of dirty boys, some of whom carried prayer-books: these were followed by some dozen or so of young women in their working attire, ranged in line, and carrying flambeaux. In the centre of the procession was a tall raw-boned priest, of about twenty-five years of age, with a little box in his hand. His head was bare, and he wore a long brown dress, bound with a cord round his middle. A canopy of crimson cloth, sorely soiled and tarnished, was borne over him by four of the taller lads. He had a flurried and wild look, as if he had slept out in the woods all night, and had had time only to shake himself, and put his fingers through his hair, before being called on to run with his little box. The procession closed, as it had opened, with a cloud of noisy and dirty urchins hanging on the rear of the priest and his flambeaux-bearing company. The whole swept past us at such a rapid pace, that I could only, by way of divining its object, open large wondering eyes upon it, which the large-boned lad in the brown cloak noticed, and repaid with a scowl, which broke no bones, however. "He is carrying the _santissimo_," said my fellow-travellers, when the procession had passed, "to a dying man." We passed the line, and set foot on the Vaudois territory. Being now on privileged soil, and safe from any ebullition which the scant reverence we had paid the procession of the _santissimo_ might have drawn upon us, we entered a small albergo, and partook together of a bottle of wine. Our long walk, and the warmth of the evening, made the refreshment exceedingly agreeable. By way of commending the qualities of their soil, my companions remarked, that "this was the vine of the land." I felt disposed to deal with it as David did with the water of the well of Bethlehem, for here-- "The nurture of the peasant's vines Hath been the martyr's blood!" It was dark before I reached La Tour; but one of my fellow-travellers--the other having left us at San Giovanni--accompanied me every footstep of the way, having passed his own dwelling two full miles, to do me this kindness. I must remind the reader, that this is simply a look in upon the Vaudois, on my way to Rome. I purpose here no description in full of the territory of the Vaudois, or of the people of the Vaudois. Their hills were shrouded in cloud and rain all the while I lived amongst them; and although my intention was to visit on foot every inch of their country, and more especially the scenes of their great struggles, I was compelled, after waiting well nigh a week, to take my departure without having accomplished this part of my object. Leaving, then, the seeing and describing these famous valleys to some possibly future day, all I shall attempt here is to convey some idea of the structural arrangement--the osteology, if I may call it so--of the Waldensian territory, and the general condition of the Waldensian people. First, of their country. A country and its people can never well be separated. The former, with silent but ceaseless influence, moulds the genius and habits of the latter, and determines the character of their history. It marks them out as fated for slavery or freedom,--degradation or glory. The country of the Vaudois is the material basis of their history; and the sublime points of their scenery join in, as it were, with the sublime passages of their nation. Without such a country, we cannot conceive how the Vaudois could have escaped extermination. The fertility and grandeur of their valleys were no chance gifts, but special endowments, having reference to the mighty moral struggle of which they were the destined theatre. It is this sentiment that forms the living spirit in the beautiful lines of Mrs Hemans, entitled, "The Hymn of the Vaudois Mountaineers:"-- For the strength of the hills we bless thee. Our God, our fathers' God. Thou hast made thy children mighty, By the touch of the mountain sod. Thou hast fixed our ark of refuge Where the spoiler's foot ne'er trod; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God! We are watchers of a beacon Whose light must never die; We are guardians of an altar 'Midst the silence of the sky. The rocks yield founts of courage, Struck forth as by thy rod; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God! For the dark resounding caverns, Where thy still small voice is heard; For the strong pines of the forests That by thy breath are stirred; For the storms on whose free pinions Thy spirit walks abroad; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God! The banner of the chieftain Far, far below us waves; The war horse of the spearman Cannot reach our lofty caves. Thy dark clouds wrap the threshold Of freedom's last abode; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God! For the shadow of thy presence Round our camp of rock outspread; For the stern defiles of battle, Bearing record of our dead; For the snows and for the torrents, For the free heart's burial sod; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God! We read in the Apocalypse, that "the woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days." "A place prepared" undoubtedly implies a special arrangement and a special adaptation, in the future dwelling of the Church, to the mission to be assigned her. The "wilderness" of the Apocalypse, we are inclined to think, is the great chain of the Alps; and the "place prepared" in that wilderness, we are also inclined to think, are the Cottian Alps, and more especially those valleys in the Cottian Alps which the confessors, known as the Vaudois, inhabited. Long after Rome had subjugated the plains, she possessed scarce a foot-breadth among the mountains. These, throughout well-nigh their entire extent, from where the Simplon road now cuts the chain, to the sea, were peopled by the professors of the gospel. They were a Goshen of light in the midst of an Egypt of darkness; and in these peaceful and sublime solitudes holy men fed their flocks amid the green pastures and beside the clear waters of evangelical truth. But persecution came: it waxed hot; and every succeeding century beheld these confessors fewer in number, and their territory more restricted. At last all that remained to the Vaudois were only three valleys at the foot of Monte Viso; and if we examine their structure, we will find them arranged with special reference to the war the Church was here called to wage. The three valleys are the Val Martino, the Val Angrona, and the Val Lucerna. Nothing could be simpler than their arrangement; at the same time, nothing could be stronger. The three valleys spread out like a fan,--radiating, as it were, from the same point, and stretching away in a winding vista of vineyards, meadows, chestnut groves, dark gorges, and foaming torrents, to the very summits and glaciers of the Alps. Nearly at the point of junction of the Val Angrona and the Val Lucerna stands La Tour, the capital of the valleys. It consists of a single street (for the few off-shoots are not worth mentioning) of two-storey houses, whitewashed, and topped with broad eves, which project till they leave only a narrow strip of sky visible overhead. The town winds up the hill for a quarter of a mile or so, under the shadow of the famous Castelluzzo,--a stupendous mountain of rock, which shoots up, erect as a column on its pedestal, to a height of many thousands of feet, and, in other days, sheltered, as I have said, in its stony arms, the persecuted children of the valleys, when the armies of France and Savoy gathered round its base. How often I watched it, during my stay there, as its mighty form now became lost, and now flashed forth from the mountain mists! Over what sad scenes has that rock looked! It has seen the peaceful La Tour a heap of smoking ruins, and the clear waters of the Pelice, which meander at its feet, red with the blood of the children of the valleys. It has heard the wrathful execrations of armed men ascending where the prayers and praises of the Vaudois were wont to come, borne on the evening breeze,--scenes unspeakably affecting, but which, nevertheless, from the principle which they embodied, and the Christian heroism which they evoked, add dignity to humanity itself. When we would rebut those universal libels which infidels have written upon our race, we point to the Vaudois. However corrupt whole nations and continents may have been, that nature which could produce the Vaudois must have originally possessed, and be still capable of having imparted to it, God-like qualities. The strength of the Vaudois position, as I take it, lies in this, that the three valleys have their entrance within a comparatively narrow space. The country of the Vaudois was, in fact, an immense citadel, with its foundation on the rock, and its top above the clouds, and with but one gate of entrance. That gate could be easily defended; nay, it _was_ defended. He who built this mighty fortress had thrown up a rampart before its gate, as if with a special eye to the protection of its inmates. The long hill of which I have already spoken, which rises to a height of from four to five hundred feet, lies across the opening of these valleys, at about a mile's breadth, and serves as a wall of defence. But even granting that this entrance should be forced, as it sometimes was, there were ample means within the mountains themselves, which were but a congeries of fortresses, for prolonging the contest. The valleys abound with gorges and narrow passages, where one man might maintain the way against fifty. There were, too, escarpments of rock, with galleries and caves known only to the Vaudois. Even the mists of their hills befriended them; veiling them, on some memorable instances, from the keen pursuit of their foes. Thus, every foot-breadth of their territory was capable of being contested, and _was_ contested against the flower of the French and Sardinian armies, led against them in overwhelming numbers, with a courage which Rome never excelled, and a patriotism which Greece never equalled. I found, too, that it was "a good land" which the Lord their God had given to the Vaudois,--"a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive and honey." The same architect who built the fortress had provisioned it, so to speak, and that in no stinted measure. He who placed magazines of bread in the clouds, and rained it upon the Israelites when they journeyed through the desert, had laid up store of corn, and oil, and wine, in the soil of these valleys; so that the Vaudois, when their enemies pressed them on the plain, and cut off their supplies from without, might still enjoy within their own mountain rampart abundance of all things. On the first morning after my arrival, I walked out along the Val Lucerna southward. Flowers and fruit in rich profusion covered every spot of ground under the eye, from the banks of the stream to the skirts of the mist that veiled the mountains. The fields, which were covered with the various cultivation of wheat, maize, orchards, and vineyards, were fenced with neatly dressed hedge-rows. The vine-stocks were magnificently large, and their leaves had already acquired the fine golden yellow which autumn imparts. At a little distance, on a low hill, deeply embosomed in foliage, was the church of San Giovanni, looking as brilliantly white as if it had been a piece of marble fresh from the chisel. Hard by, peeping out amidst fruit-bearing trees, was the village of Lucerna. On the right rose the mighty wall of the Alps; on the left the valley opened out into the plain of the Po, bounded by a range of blue-tinted hills, which stretched away to the south-west, mingling in the distant horizon with the mightier masses of the Alps. The sun now broke through the haze; and his rays, falling on the luxuriant beauty of the valley, and on the more varied but not less rich covering of the hill-side,--the pasturages, the winding belts of planting, the white chalets,--lighted up a picture which a painter might have exhibited as a relic of an unfallen world, or a reminiscence of that garden from which transgression drove man forth. After breakfast, I sallied out to explore the valley of Lucerne, at the entrance of which is placed, as I have said, La Tour, the capital of the Waldenses. My intention was to trace its windings all the way, past the village and church of Bobbio, and up the mountains, till it loses itself amid the snows of their summits,--an expedition which was brought to an abrupt termination by the black clouds which came rolling up the valley at noon like the smoke of a furnace, followed by torrents of rain. Threading my way through the narrow winding street of La Tour, and skirting the base of the giant Castelluzzo, I emerged upon the open valley. I was enchanted by its mingled loveliness and grandeur. Its bottom, which might be from one to two miles in breadth, though looking narrower, from the titanic character of its mountain-boundary, was, up to a certain point, one continuous vineyard. The vine there attains a noble stature, and stretches its arms from side to side of the valley in rich and lovely festoons, veiling from the great heat of the sun the golden grain which grows underneath. On either hand the mountains rise to the sky, not bare and rocky, but glowing with the vine, or shady with the chestnut, and pouring into the lap of the Vaudois, corn, and wine, and fruit. Their sides were covered throughout with vineyards, corn-fields, glades of green pasturages, clumps of forests and fruit-trees, mansions and chalets, and silvery streamlets, which meandered amid their terraces, or leaped in flashing light down the mountain, to join the Pelice at its bottom. Not a foot-breadth was barren. This teeming luxuriance attested at once the qualities of the soil and sun, and the industry of the Vaudois. As I proceeded up the Val Lucerna, the same scene of mingled richness and magnificence continued. The golden vine still kept its place in the bottom of the valley, and stretched out its arms in very wantonness, as if the limits of the Val Lucerna were too small for its exuberant and generous fruitfulness. The hills gained in height, without losing in fertility and beauty. They offered to the eye the same picture of vine-rows, pasturages, chestnut-groves, and chalets, from the torrent at their bottom, up to the edge of the floating mist that covered their tops. At times the sun would break in, and add to the variety of lights which diversified the landscape. For already the hand of autumn had scattered over the foliage her beautiful tints of all shades, from the bright green of the pastures, down through the golden yellow of the vine, to the deep crimson of those trees which are the first to fade. A farther advance, and the aspect of the Val Lucerna changed slightly. The vineyards ceased on the level grounds at the bottom of the valley, and in their place came rich meadow lands, on which herds were grazing. The hills on the left were still ribbed with the vine. On the right, along which, at a high level on the hill-side, ran the road, the chestnut groves became more frequent, and large boulders began occasionally to be seen. It was here that the rolling mass of cloud, so fearfully black, that it seemed of denser materials than vapour, which had followed me up hill, overtook me, and by the deluge of rain which it let fall, effectually forbade my farther progress. The same shower which forbade my farther exploration of the Val Lucerna, arresting me, with cruel interdict, as it seemed, on the very threshold of a region teeming with grandeur, and encompassed with the halo of imperishable deeds, threw me, by a sort of compensatory chance, upon the discovery of another most interesting peculiarity of the Waldensian territory. The heavy rain compelled me to seek shelter beneath the boughs of a wide-spread chestnut-tree; and there, for the space of an hour, I remained perfectly dry, though the big drops were falling all around. Soon a continuous beating, as if of the fall of substances from a considerable height on the ground, attracted my attention,--tap, tap, tap. The sound told me that something was falling bigger and heavier than the rain-drops; but the long grass prevented me at first seeing what it was. A slight search, however, showed me that the tree beneath which I stood was actually letting fall a shower of nuts. These nuts were large and fully ripened. The breeze became slightly stronger, and the fruit shower from the trees increased so much, that a soft muffled sound rang through the whole wood. It was literally raining food. Some millions of nuts must have fallen that day in the Val Lucerna. I saw the young peasant girls coming from the chalets and farm-houses, to glean beneath the boughs; and a short time sufficed to fill their sacks, and send them back laden with the produce of the chestnut-tree. These nuts are roasted and eaten as food; and very nutritious food they are. In all the towns of northern Italy you see persons in the streets roasting them in braziers over charcoal fires, and selling them to the people, to whom they form no very inconsiderable part of their food. I have oftener than once, on a long ride, breakfasted on them, with the help of a cluster of grapes, or a few apples. This was the manna of the Waldenses. And how often have the persecuted Vaudois, when driven from their homes, and compelled to seek refuge in those high altitudes where the vine does not grow, subsisted for days and weeks upon the produce of the chestnut-tree! I could not but admire in this the wise arrangement of Him who had prepared these valleys as the future abode of his Church. Not only had He taught the earth to yield her corn, and the hills wine, but even the skies bread. Bread was rained around their caves and hiding-places, plenteous as the manna of old; and the Vaudois, like the Israelites, had but to gather and eat. I came also to the conclusion, that the land which the Lord had given to the Waldenses was a "large" as well as a "good" land. It is only of late that the Vaudois have been restricted to the three valleys I have named; but even taking their country as at present defined, its superficial area is by no means so inconsiderable as it is apt to be accounted by one who hears of it as confined to but three valleys. Spread out these valleys into level plains, and you find that they form a large country. It is not only the broad bottom of the valley that is cultivated;--the sides of the hills are clothed up to the very clouds with vineyards and corn-lands, and are planted with all manner of trees, yielding fruit after their kind. Where the husbandman is compelled to stop, nature takes up the task of the cultivator; and then come the chestnut-groves, with their loads of fruit, and the short sweet grass on which cattle depasture in summer, and the wild flowers from which the bees elaborate their honey. Overtopping all are the fields of snow, the great reservoirs of the springs and rivers which fertilize the country. This arrangement admitted, moreover, of far greater variety, both of climate and of produce, than could possibly obtain on the plain. There is an eternal winter at the summit of these mountains, and an almost perpetual summer at their feet. In accordance with this great productiveness, I found the hills of the Vaudois exceedingly populous. They are alive with men, at least as compared with the solitude which our Scottish Highlands present. I had brought thither my notions of a valley taken from the narrow winding and infertile straths of Scotland, capable of feeding only a few scores of inhabitants. Here I found that a valley might be a country, and contain almost a nation in its bosom. But, not to dwell on other peculiarities, I would remark, that such a dwelling as this--continually presenting the grandest objects--must have exerted a marked influence upon the character of the inhabitants. It was fitted to engender intrepidity of mind, a love of freedom, and an elevation of thought. It has been remarked that the inhabitants of mountainous regions are less prone than others to the worship of images. On the plain all is monotony. Summer and winter, the same landmarks, the same sky, the same sounds, surround the man. But around the dweller in the mountains,--and especially such mountains as these,--all is variety and grandeur. Now the Alps are seen with their sunlight summits and their shadowless sides; anon they veil their mighty forms in clouds and tempests. The living machinery of the mist, too, is continually varying the landscape, now engulphing valleys, now blotting out crags and mountain peaks, and suspending before the eye a cold and cheerless curtain of vapour; anon the curtain rises, the mist rolls away, and green valley and tall mountain flash back again upon you, thrilling and delighting you anew. What variety and melody of sounds, too, exist among the hills! The music of the streams, the voices of the peasants, the herdsman's song, the lowing of the cattle, the hum of the villages. The winds, with mighty organ-swell, now sweep through their mountain gorges; and now the thunder utters his awful voice, making the Alps to tremble and their pines to bow. Such was the land of the Vaudois; the predestined abode of God's Church during the long and gloomy period of Anti-christ's reign. It was the ark in which the one elect family of Christendom was to be preserved during the flood of error that was to come upon the earth. And I have been the more minute in the description of its general structure and arrangements, because all had reference to the high moral end it was appointed to serve in the economy of Providence. When of old a flood of waters was to be sent on the world, Noah was commanded to build an ark of gopher wood for the saving of his house. God gave him special instructions regarding its length, its breadth, its height: he was told where to place its door and window, how to arrange its storeys and rooms, and specially to gather "of all food that is eaten," that it might be for food for him and those with him. When all had been done according to the Divine instructions, God shut in Noah, and the flood came. So was it once more. A flood was to come upon the earth; but now God himself prepared the ark in which the chosen family were to be saved. He laid its foundations in the depths, and built up its wall of rock to the sky. A door also made He for the ark, with lower, second, and third storeys. It was beautiful as strong. Corn, wine, and oil were laid up in store within it. All being ready, God said to his persecuted ones in the early Church, "Come, thou and all thy house, into the ark." He gave them the Bible to be a light to them during the darkness, and shut them in. The flood came. Century after century the waters of Papal superstition continued to prevail upon the earth. At length all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, and all flesh died, save the little company in the Vaudois ark. CHAPTER V. STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE VAUDOIS CHURCH. Dawn of the Reformation--Waldensian Territory a Portion of Italy--Two-fold Mission of Italy--Origin of the Vaudois--Evidence of Romanist Historians--Evidence of their own Historians--Evidence arising from the Noble Leyçon from their Geographical Position--Grandeur of the Vaudois Annals--Their Martyr Age--Their Missionary Efforts--Present Condition--Population--Churches--Schools--Stipends--Students--Social and Moral Superiority--Political and Social Disabilities--The Year 1848 their Exodus--Their Mission--A Sabbath in the Vaudois Sanctuary--Anecdote--Lesson Taught by their History. How often during the long night must the Vaudois have looked from their mountain asylum upon a world engulphed in error, with the mingled wonder and dismay with which we may imagine the antediluvian fathers gazing from the window of their ark upon the bosom of the shoreless flood! What an appalling and mysterious dispensation! The fountains of the great deep had a second time been broken up, and each successive century saw the waters rising. Would Christianity ever re-appear? Or had the Church completed her triumphs, and finished her course? And was time to close upon a world shrouded in darkness, with nought but this feeble beacon burning amid the Alps? Such were the questions which must often have pressed upon the minds of the Vaudois. Like Noah, too, they sent forth, from time to time, messengers from their ark, to go hither and thither, and see if yet there remained anywhere, in any part of the earth, any worshippers of the true God. They returned to their mountain hold, with the sorrowful tidings that nowhere had they found any remnant of the true Church, and that the whole world wondered after the beast. The Vaudois, however, had power given them to maintain their testimony. In the midst of universal apostacy, and in the face of the most terrible persecutions, they bore witness against Rome. And ever as that Church added another error to her creed, the Vaudois added another article to their testimony; and in this way Romish idolatry and gospel truth were developed by equal stages, and an adequate testimony was maintained all through that gloomy period. The stars of the ecclesiastical firmament fell unto the earth, like the untimely figs of the fig-tree; but the lamp of the Alps went not out. The Vaudois, not unconscious of their sacred office, watched their heaven-kindled beacon with the vigilance of men inspired by the hope that it would yet attract the eyes of the world. At length--thrice welcome sight!--the watch-fires of the German reformers, kindled at their own, began to streak the horizon. They knew that the hour of darkness had passed, and that the time was near when the Church would leave her asylum, and go forth to sow the fields of the world with the immortal seed of truth. We must be permitted to remark here, that the fact that the Waldensian territory is really a part of Italy, and that the Vaudois, or Valdesi, or People of the Valleys (for all three signify the same thing), are strictly an Italian people, invests ITALY with a new and interesting light. In all ages, Pagan as well as Christian, Italy has been the seat of a twofold influence,--the one destructive, the other regenerative. In classic times, Italy sent forth armies to subjugate the world, and letters to enlighten it. Since the Christian era, her mission has been of the same mixed character. She has been at once the seat of idolatry and the asylum of Christianity. Her idolatry is of a grosser and more perfected type than was the worship of Baal of old; and her Christianity possesses a more spiritual character, and a more powerfully operative genius, than did the institute of Moses. We ought, then, to think of Italy as the land of the martyr as well as of the persecutor,--as not only the land whence our Popery has come, which has cost us so many martyrs of whom we are proud, and has caused the loss of so many souls which we mourn,--but also as the fountain of that blessed light which broke mildly on the world in the preaching of John Huss, and more powerfully, a century afterwards, in the reformation of the sixteenth century. Though there was no audible voice, and no visible miracle, the Waldenses were as really chosen to be the witnesses of God during the long night of papal idolatry, as were the Jews to be his witnesses during the night of pagan idolatry. They are sprung, according to the more credible historical accounts, from the unfallen Church of Rome; they are the direct lineal descendants of the primitive Christians of Italy; they never bowed the knee to the modern Baal; their mountain sanctuary has remained unpolluted by idolatrous rites; and if they were called to affix to their testimony the seal of a cruel martyrdom, they did not fall till they had scattered over the various countries of Europe the seed of a future harvest. Their death was a martyrdom endured in behalf of Christendom; and scarcely was it accomplished till they were raised to life again, in the appearance of numerous churches both north and south of the Alps. Why is it that all persons and systems in this world of ours must die in order to enter into life? We enter into spiritual life by the death of our old nature; we enter into eternal life by the death of the body; and Christianity, too, that she might enter into the immortality promised her on earth, had to die. The words of our Lord, spoken in reference to his own death, are true also in reference to the martyrdom of the Waldensian Church:--"Verily verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The first question touching this extraordinary people respects their origin. When did they come into being, and of what stock are they sprung? This question forces itself with singular power upon the mind of the traveller, who, after traversing cities and countries covered with darkness palpable as that of Egypt of old, and seeing nought around him but image-worship, lights unexpectedly, in the midst of these mountains, upon a little community, enjoying the knowledge of the true God, and worshipping Him after the scriptural and spiritual manner of prophets and apostles of old. He naturally seeks for an explanation of a fact so extraordinary. Who kindled that solitary lamp? Their enemies have striven to represent them as dissenters from Rome of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and it is a common error even among ourselves to speak of them as the followers of Peter Waldo, the pious merchant of Lyons, and to date their rise from the year 1160. We cannot here go into the controversy; suffice it to say, that historical documents exist which show that both the Albigenses and the Waldenses were known long before Peter Waldo was heard of. Their own traditions and ancient manuscripts speak of them as having maintained the same doctrine "from time immemorial, in continued descent from father to son, even from the times of the apostles." The Nobla Leyçon,--the Confession of Faith of the Vaudois Church, of the date of 1100,--claims on their behalf the same ancient origin; Ecbert, a writer who flourished in 1160--the year of Peter Waldo--speaks of them as "perverters," who had existed during many ages; and Reinerus, the inquisitor, who lived a century afterwards, calls them the most dangerous of all sects, because the most ancient; "for some say," adds he, "that it has continued to flourish since the time of Sylvester; others, from the time of the apostles." This last is a singular corroboration of the authenticity of the Nobla Leyçon, which refers to the corruptions which began under Sylvester as the cause of their separation from the communion of the Church of Rome. Rorenco, the grand prior of St Roch, who was commissioned to make enquiries concerning them, after hinting that possibly they were detached from the Church by Claude, the good Bishop of Turin, in the eighth century, says "that they were not a new sect in the ninth and tenth centuries." Campian the Jesuit says of them, that they were reputed to be "more ancient than the Roman Church." Nor is it without great weight, as the historian Leger observes, that not one of the Dukes of Savoy or their ministers ever offered the slightest contradiction to the oft-reiterated assertions of the Vaudois, when petitioning for liberty of conscience, "We are descendants," said they, "of those who, from father to son, have preserved entire the apostolical faith in the valleys which we now occupy."[1] We have no doubt that, were the ecclesiastical archives of Lombardy, especially those of Turin and Milan, carefully searched, documents would be found which would place beyond all doubt what the scattered proofs we have referred to render all but a certainty. The historical evidence for the antiquity of the Vaudois Church is greatly strengthened by a consideration of the geographical position of "the Valleys." They lie on what anciently was the great high-road between Italy and France. There existed a frequent intercourse betwixt the Churches of the two countries; pastors and private members were continually going and returning; and what so likely to follow this intercourse as the evangelization of these valleys? There is a tradition extant, that the Apostle Paul visited them, in his journey from Rome to Spain. Be this as it may, one can scarce doubt that the feet of Irenæus, and of other early fathers, trod the territory of the Vaudois, and preached the gospel by the waters of the Pelice, and under the rocks and chestnut trees of Bobbio. Indeed, we can scarce err in fixing the first rise of the Vaudois Churches at even an earlier period,--that of apostolic times. So soon as the Church began to be wasted by persecution, the remote corners of Italy were sought as an asylum; and from the days of Nero the primitive Christians may have begun to gather round those mountains to which the ark of God was ultimately removed, and amid which it so long dwelt. "I go up to the ancient hills, Where chains may never be; Where leap in joy the torrent rills; Where man may worship God alone, and free. There shall an altar and a camp Impregnably arise; There shall be lit a quenchless lamp, To shine unwavering through the open skies. And song shall 'midst the rocks be heard, And fearless prayer ascend; While, thrilling to God's holy Word, The mountain-pines in adoration bend. And there the burning heart no more Its deep thought shall suppress; But the long-buried truth shall pour Free currents thence, amidst the wilderness." How could a small body of peasants among the mountains have discovered the errors of Rome, and have thrown off her yoke, at a time when the whole of Europe received the one and bowed to the other? This could not have happened in the natural order of things. Above all, if they did not arise till the twelfth or thirteenth century, how came they to frame so elaborate and full a testimony as the _Noble Lesson_ against Rome? A Church that has a creed must have a history. Nor was it in a year, or even in a single age, that they could have compiled such a creed. It could acquire form and substance only in the course of centuries,--the Vaudois adding article to article, as Rome added error to error. We can have no reasonable doubt, then, that in the Vaudois community we have a relic of the primitive Church. Compared with them, the house of Savoy, which ruled so long and rigorously over them, is but of yesterday. They are more ancient than the Roman Church itself. They have come down to us from the world before the papal flood, bearing in their heaven-built and heaven-guarded ark the sacred oracles; and now they stand before us as a witness to the historic truth of Christianity, and a living copy, in doctrine, in government, and in manners, of the Church of the Apostles. Fain would we tell at length the heroic story of the Vaudois. We use no exaggerated speech,--no rhetorical flourish,--but speak advisedly, when we say, that their history, take it all in all, is the brightest, the purest, the most heroic, in the annals of the world. Their martyr-age lasted five centuries; and we know of nothing, whether we regard the sacredness of the cause, or the undaunted valour, the pure patriotism, and the lofty faith, in which the Vaudois maintained it, that can be compared with their glorious struggle. This is an age of hero-worship. Let us go to the mountains of the Waldenses: there we will find heroes "unsung by poet, by senators unpraised," yet of such gigantic stature, that the proudest champions of ancient Rome are dwarfed in their presence. It was no transient flash of patriotism and valour that broke forth on the soil of the Vaudois: that country saw sixteen generations of heroes, and five centuries of heroic deeds. Men came from pruning their vines or tending their flocks, to do feats of arms which Greece never equalled, and which throw into the shade the proudest exploits of Rome. The Jews maintained the worship of the true God in their country for many ages, and often gained glorious victories; but the Jews were a nation; they possessed an ample territory, rich in resources; they were trained to war, moreover, and marshalled and led on by skilful and courageous chiefs. But the Waldenses were a primitive and simple people; they had neither king nor leader; their only sovereign was Jehovah; their only guides were their _Barbes_. The struggle under the Maccabees was a noble one; but it attained not the grandeur of that of the Vaudois. It was short in comparison; nor do its single exploits, brave as they were, rise to the same surpassing pitch of heroism. When read after the story of the Vaudois, the annals of Greece and Rome even, fruitful though they be in deeds of heroism, appear cold and tame. In short, we know of no other instance in the world in which a great and sacred object has been prosecuted from father to son for such a length of time, with a patriotism so pure, a courage so unshrinking, a devotion so entire, and amidst such a multitude of sacrifices, sufferings, and woes, as in the case of the Vaudois. The incentives to courage which have stimulated others to brave death were wanting in their case. If they triumphed, they had no admiring circus to welcome them with shouts, and crown them with laurel; and if they fell, they knew that there awaited their ashes no marble tomb, and that no lay of poet would ever embalm their memory. They looked to a greater Judge for their reward. This was the source of that patriotism, the purest the world has ever seen, and of that valour, the noblest of which the annals of mankind make mention. Innocent III., who hid under a sanctimonious guise the boundless ambition and quenchless malignity of Lucifer, was the first to blow the trumpet of extermination against the poor Vaudois. And from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century they suffered not fewer than thirty persecutions. During that long period they could not calculate upon a single year's immunity from invasion and slaughter. From the days of Innocent their history becomes one long harrowing tale of papal plots, interdicts, excommunications, of royal proscriptions and perfidies, of attack, of plunder, of rapine, of massacre, and of death in every conceivable and horrible way,--by the sword, by fire, and by unutterable tortures and torments. The Waldenses had no alternative but to submit to these, or deny their Saviour. Yet, driven to arms,--ever their last resource,--they waxed valiant in fight, and put to flight the armies of the aliens. They taught their enemies that the battle was not to the strong. When the cloud gathered round their hills, they removed their wives and little ones to some rock-girt valley, to the caverns of which they had taken the precaution of removing their corn and oil, and even their baking ovens; and there, though perhaps they did not muster more than a thousand fighting men in all, they waited, with calm confidence in God, the onset of their foes. In these encounters, sustained by Heaven, they performed prodigies of valour. The combined armies of France and Piedmont recoiled from their shock. Their invaders were almost invariably overthrown, sometimes even annihilated; and their sovereigns, the Dukes of Savoy, on whose memory there rests the indelible blot of having pursued this loyal, industrious, and virtuous people with ceaseless and incredible injustice, cruelty, treachery, and perfidy, finding that they could not subdue them, were glad to offer them terms of peace, and grant them new guarantees of the quiet possession of their ancient territory. Thus an invisible omnipotent arm was ever extended over the Vaudois and their land, delivering them miraculously in times of danger, and preserving them as a peculiar people, that by their instrumentality Jehovah might accomplish his designs of mercy towards the world. Nor were the Waldenses content simply to maintain their faith. Even when fighting for existence, they recognised their obligations as a missionary Church, and strove to diffuse over the surrounding countries the light that burned amid their own mountains. Who has not heard of the Pra de la Torre, in the valley of Angrona? This is a beautiful little meadow, encircled with a barrier of tremendous mountains, and watered by a torrent, which, flowing from an Alpine summit, _La Sella Vecchia_, descends with echoing noise through the dark gorges and shining dells of the deep and romantic valley. This was the inner sanctuary of the Vaudois. Here their _Barbes_ sat; here was their school of the prophets; and from this spot were sent forth their pastors and missionaries into France, Germany, and Britain, as well as into their own valleys. It was a native and missionary of these valleys, Gualtero Lollard, which gave his name, in the fourteenth century, to the Lollards of England, whose doctrines were the day-spring of the Reformation in our own country. The zeal of the Vaudois was seen in the devices they fell upon to distribute the Bible, and along with that a knowledge of the gospel. Colporteurs travelled as pedlars; and, after displaying their laces and jewels, they drew forth, and offered for sale, or as a gift, a gem of yet greater value. In this way the Word of God found entrance alike into cottage and baronial castle. It is a supposed scene of this kind which the following lines depict:-- Oh! lady fair, these silks of mine Are beautiful and rare,-- The richest web of the Indian loom Which beauty's self might wear; And these pearls are pure and mild to behold, And with radiant light they vie: I have brought them with me a weary way;-- Will my gentle lady buy? * * * * * Oh! lady fair, I have got a gem, Which a purer lustre flings Than the diamond flash of the jewell'd crown On the lofty brow of kings: A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, Whose virtue shall not decay,-- Whose light shall be as a spell to thee, And a blessing on the way! * * * * * The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, As a small and meagre book, Unchased by gold or diamond gem, From his folding robe he took. Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price;-- May it prove as such to thee! Nay, keep thy gold--I ask it not; _For the Word of God is free!_ * * * * * And she hath left the old gray halls, Where an evil faith hath power, And the courtly knights of her father's train, And the maidens of her bower; And she hath gone to the Vaudois vale, By lordly feet untrod, Where the poor and needy of earth are rich In the perfect love of God! But, turning from this inviting theme, to which volumes only could do justice, let us lift the curtain, and look at this simple, heroic people, as they appear now, after the "great tribulation" of five centuries. The Protestant population of "the Valleys" is 22,000 and upwards. They have fifteen churches and parishes, and twenty-five persons in all engaged in the work of the ministry. This was their state in 1851. Since then, two other parishes, Pignerolo and Turin, have been added. To each church a school is attached, with numerous sub-schools. It is to the honour of the Vaudois that they led the way in that system of general education which is extending itself, more or less, in every State in Europe. Repeated edicts of the Waldensian Table rendered it imperative upon the community to provide means of religious and elementary education for all the children capable of receiving it. They have a college at La Tour, fifteen primary schools, and upwards of one hundred secondary schools. The whole Waldensian youth is at school during winter. In their congregations, the sacrament of the Supper is dispensed four times in the year; and it is rare that a young person fails to become a communicant after arriving at the proper age. There are two preaching days at every dispensation of the ordinance; and the collections made on these occasions are devoted to the poor. There was at that time no plate at the church-door on ordinary Sabbaths; and no contributions were made by the people for the support of the gospel. I presume this error is rectified now, however; for it was then in contemplation to adopt the plan in use in Scotland, and elsewhere, of a penny-a-week subscription. The stipends of the Waldensian pastors are paid from funds contributed by England and Holland. Each receives fifteen hundred francs yearly,--about sixty-two pounds sterling. Their incomes are supplemented by a small glebe, which is attached to each _living_. The contribution for the schools and the hospitals is compulsory. In their college, in 1851, there were seventy-five students. Some were studying for the medical profession, some for commercial pursuits; others were qualifying as teachers, and some few as pastors. The Waldenses inhabit their hills, much as the Jews did their Palestine. Each man lives on his ancestral acres; and his farm or vineyard is not too large to be cultivated by himself and his family. There are amongst them no titles of honour, and scarce any distinctions of rank and circumstances. They are a nation of vine-dressers, husbandmen, and shepherds. In their habits they are frugal and simple. Their peaceful deportment and industrial virtues have won the admiration, and extorted the acknowledgments, even of their enemies. In the cultivation of their fields, in the breed and management of their cattle and their flocks, in the arrangements of their dairies, and in the cleanliness of their cabins, they far excel the rest of the Piedmontese. To enlarge their territory, they have had recourse to the same device with the Jews of old; and the Vaudois mountains, like the Judæan hills, exhibit in many places terraces, rising in a continuous series up the hill-side, sown with grain or planted with the vine. Every span of earth is cultivated. The Vaudois excel the rest of the Piedmontese in point of morals, just as much as they excel them in point of intelligence and industry. All who have visited their abodes, and studied their character, admit, that they are incomparably the most moral community on the Continent of Europe. When a Vaudois commits a crime,--a rare occurrence,--the whole valleys mourn, and every family feels as if a cloud rested on its own reputation. No one can pass a day among them without remarking the greater decorum of their deportment, and the greater kindliness and civility of their address. I do not mean to say that, either in respect of intelligence or piety, they are equal to the natives of our own highly favoured Scotland. They are surrounded on all sides by degradation and darkness; they have just escaped from ages of proscription; books are few among their mountains; and they have suffered, too, from the inroads of French infidelity; an age of Moderatism has passed over them, as over ourselves; and from these evils they have not yet completely recovered. Still, with all these drawbacks, they are immensely superior to any other community abroad; and, in simplicity of heart, and purity of life, present us with no feeble transcript of the primitive Church, of which they are the representatives. The lotus-flower is said to lift its head above the muddy current of the Nile at the precise moment of sunrise. It was indicative, perhaps, of the dawning of a new day upon the Vaudois and Italy, that that Church experienced lately a revival. That revival was almost immediately followed by the boon of political and social emancipation, and by a new and enlarged sphere of spiritual action. The year 1848 opened the doors of their ancient prison, and called them to go forth and evangelize. Formerly, all attempts to extend themselves beyond their mountain abode, and to mingle with the nations around them, were uniformly followed by disaster. The time was not come; and the integrity of their faith, and the accomplishment of their high mission, would have been perilled by their leaving their asylum. But when the revolutions of 1848 threw the north of Italy open to their action, then came forth the decree of Charles Albert, declaring the Vaudois free subjects of Piedmont, and the Church of "the Valleys" a free Church. The disabilities under which the Waldenses groaned up till this very recent period may well astonish us, now that we look back to them. Up till 1848 the Waldensian was proscribed, in both his civil and religious rights, beyond the limits of his own valleys. Out of his special territory he dared not possess a foot-breadth of land; and, if obliged to sell his paternal fields to a stranger, he could not buy them back again. He was shut out from the colleges of his country; he could not practise as a member of any of the learned professions; every avenue to distinction and wealth was closed against him,--his only crime being his religion. He could not marry but with one of his own people; he could not build a sanctuary,--he could not even bury his dead,--beyond the limits of "the Valleys." The children were often taken away and trained in the idolatrous rites of Romanism, and the unhappy parents had no remedy. They were slandered, too, to their sovereigns, as men marked by hideous deformities; and great was the surprise of Charles Albert to find, on a visit he paid to the Valleys but a little before granting their emancipation, that the Vaudois were not the monsters he had been taught to believe. I have been told, that to this very day they carry their dead to the grave in open coffins, to give ocular demonstration of the falsehood of the calumnies propagated by their enemies, that the corpses of these heretics are sometimes consumed by invisible flames, or carried off by evil spirits before burial. But now all these disabilities are at an end. The year 1848 swept them all away; and a bulwark of constitutional feeling and action has since grown up around the Vaudois, cutting off the prospect of these disabilities ever being re-imposed, unless, indeed, Austria and France should combine to put down the Piedmontese constitution. But hitherto that nation which gave religious liberty to the people of God has had its own political liberties wonderfully protected. The year 1848, then, was the "exodus" of the Vaudois. And why were they brought out of their house of bondage? Surely they have yet a work to do. Their great mission, which was to bear witness for the truth during the domination of Antichrist, they nobly fulfilled; but are they to have no part in diffusing over the plains of Italy that light which they so long and so carefully preserved? This undoubtedly is their mission. All the leadings of Providence declare it to be so. They were visited with revival, brought from their Alpine asylum, had full liberty of action given them, all at the moment that Italy had begun to be open to the gospel. They are the native evangelists of their own country: let them remember their own and their fathers' sufferings, and avenge themselves on Rome, not with the sword, but the Bible. And let British Christians aid them in this great work, assured that the door to Rome and Italy lies through the valleys of the Vaudois. The last day of my sojourn in the Waldensian territory was Sabbath the 19th of October, and I worshipped with that people,--rare enjoyment!--in their sanctuary. The day broke amid high winds and torrents of rain. The clouds now veiled, now revealed, the hill-side, with its variously tinted foliage, and its white torrents dashing headlong to the vale. The mighty form of the Castelluzzo was seen struggling through mists; and high above the winds rose the roar of the swollen waters. At a quarter before ten, the church-bell, heard through the pauses of the storm, came pealing from the heights. The old church of La Tour,--the new and more elegant fabric which stands in the village was not then opened,--is sweetly placed at the base of the Castelluzzo, embowered amid vines and fragrant foliage, and commanding a noble view of the plains of Piedmont. Even amidst the driving mists and showers its beauty could not fail to be felt. The scenery was-- "A blending of all beauties, streams and dells, Fruits, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field, mountain, vine." General Beckwith did me the honour to call at my hotel, and I walked with him to the church. Outside the building--for worship had not commenced--were numerous little conversational parties; and around it lay the Vaudois dead, sleeping beneath the shadow of their giant rock, and free, at last and for ever, from the oppressor. They had found another "exodus" from their house of bondage than that which King Charles Albert had granted their living descendants. We entered, and found the schoolmaster reading the liturgy. This service consists of two chapters of the Bible, with at times the reflections of Ostervald annexed; during it the congregation came dropping in,--the husbandmen and herdsmen of the Val Lucerna,--and took their seats. In a little the elders entered in a body, and seated themselves round a table in front of the pulpit. Next came the pastor, habited, like our Scotch ministers, in gown and bands, when the regent instantly ceased. The pastor began the public worship by giving out a psalm. He next offered a prayer, read the ten commandments, and then preached. The sermon was an half-hour's length precisely, and was recited, not read; for I was told the Waldenses have a strong dislike to read discourses. The minister of La Tour is an old man, and was trained under an order of things unfavourable to that higher standard of pulpit qualification, and that fuller manifestation of evangelical and spiritual feeling, which, I am glad to say, characterize all the younger Waldensian pastors. The people listened with great attention to his scriptural discourse; but I was sorry to observe that there were few Bibles among them,--a circumstance that may be explained perhaps with reference to the state of the weather, and the long distance which many of them have to travel. The storm had the effect at least of thinning the audience, and bringing it down from about 800, its usual number, to 500 or so. The church was an oblong building, with the pulpit on one of the side walls, and a deep gallery, resting on thick, heavy pillars, on the other. The men and women occupied separate places. With this exception, I saw nothing to remind me that I was out of Scotland. One may find exactly such another congregation in almost any part of our Scottish Highlands, with this difference, that the complexions of the Vaudois are darker than that of our Highlanders. They have the same hardy, weather-beaten features, and the same robust frames. I saw many venerable and some noble heads among them,--men who would face the storms of the Alps for the lost wanderer of the flock, and the edicts and soldiers of Rome for their home-steads and altars. There they sat, worshipping their fathers' God, amid their fathers' mountains,--victorious over twelve centuries of proscription and persecution, and holding their sanctuaries and their hills in defiance of Europe. In the evening Professor Malan preached in the schoolhouse of Margarita, a small village on the ascent from La Tour to Castelluzzo. He discoursed with great unction, and the crowded audience hung upon his lips. On my way back to my hotel, Professor Malan narrated to me a touching anecdote, which I must here put down. Monsignor Mazzarella was a judge in one of the High Courts of Sicily; but when the atrocities of the re-action began, he refused to be a tool of the Government, and resigned his office. He came to Turin, like numerous other political refugees; and in one of the re-unions of the workmen, he learned the doctrine of "justification by faith." Soon thereafter, that is, in the summer of 1851, he and a few companions paid a visit to the Vaudois Church. A public meeting, over which Professor Malan presided, was held at La Tour, to welcome M. Mazzarella and his friends. Professor Malan expressed his delight at seeing them in "the Valleys;" welcomed them as the first fruits of Italy; and, in the name of the Vaudois Church, gave them the right hand of fellowship. The reply of the converted exiles was truly affecting, and moved the assembly to tears. Rising up, Mazzarella said, "We are the children of your persecutors; but the sons have other hearts than the fathers. We have renounced the religion of the oppressor, and embraced that of the Vaudois, whom our ancestors so long persecuted. You have been the people of God, the confessors of the truth; and here before you this night I confess the sin of my fathers in putting your fathers to death." Mazzarella at this day is an evangelist in Genoa. In his speech we hear the first utterance of repentant Christendom. "The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee the city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel." I had now been well nigh a week in "the Valleys." A dream long and fondly cherished had become a reality; and next morning I started for Turin. The eventful history of the Vaudois teaches one lesson at least, which we Protestants would do well to ponder at this hour. The measures of the Church of Rome are quick, summary, and on a scale commensurate with the danger. Her motto is instant, unpitying, unsparing, utter extermination of all that oppose her. Twice over has the human mind revolted against her authority, and twice over has she met that revolt, not with argument, but with the sword. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Waldensian movement had grown to such a head, that the dominion of Rome was in imminent jeopardy. Had she delayed, the Reformation would have been anticipated by some centuries. She did not delay. She cried for help to the warriors of France and Savoy; and, by the help of some hundred thousand soldiers, she put down the Waldensian movement as an aggressive power. The next revolt against her authority was the Reformation. Here again she boldly confronted the danger. She grasped her old weapon; and, by the help of the sword and the Jesuits, she put down that movement in one half the countries of Europe, and greatly weakened it in the other half. We are now witnessing a third revolt against her authority; and it remains to be seen how the Church of Rome will deal with it. Will she now adopt half measures? Will she now falter and draw back,--she that never before feared enemy or spared foe? Will that Church that quenched in blood the Protestantism of the Waldenses,--that put down the Reformation in France by one terrible blow,--that by the help of dungeons and racks banished the light from Italy and Spain,--will that Church, we ask, spare the Protestantism of Britain? What folly and infatuation to think that she will! What matters it that, in rooting out British Protestantism, she should shed oceans of blood, and sound the death-knell of a whole nation? These are but dust in the balance to her: her dominion must be maintained at all costs. Her motto still is,--let Rome triumph though the heavens should fall. But she tells us that she repents. Repents, does she? She has grown pitiful, and tender hearted, has she? She fears blood now, and starts at the cry of murdered nations! Ah! she repents; but it is her clemency, not her crimes, of which she repents. She repents that she did not make one wide St Bartholomew of Europe; that when she planted the stake for Huss, and Cranmer, and Wishart, she did not plant a million of stakes. Then the Reformation would not have been. Yes, she repents, deeply, bitterly repents, her fatal blunder. But it will not be her fault, the _Univers_ assures us, if she have to repent such a blunder a second time. Let us hear the priests speaking through one of the country papers in France:--"The wars of religion were not deplorable catastrophes; these great butcheries renewed the life of France. The incense cast away the smell of the corpses, and psalms covered the noise of angry shouts. Holy water washed away all the bloody stains. With the Inquisition, the most beautiful weather succeeded to storms, and the fires that burned the heretics shone like supernatural torches." The hand that wrote these lines would more gladly light the faggot. Let only the present regime in France last a few years, and the priests will again rejoice in seeing the colour of heretic blood. There cannot and will not be peace in the world, they say, till for every Protestant a gibbet or stake has been erected, and not one man left to carry tidings to posterity that ever there was such a thing as Protestantism on the earth. CHAPTER VI. FROM TURIN TO NOVARA. At Turin begins Pilgrimage to Rome--Description of _Diligence_--Dora Susina--Plain of Lombardy--Its Boundaries--Nursed by the Alps--Lessons taught thereby--The Colina--Inauspicious Sunset--The Road to Milan--The Po--Its Source--Tributaries and Function--Evening--Home remembered in a Foreign Land--Inference thence regarding Futurity--Thunderstorm among the Alps--Thunderstorm on the Plain of Lombardy--Grandeur of the Lightning--Enter Novara at Day-break. I had two objects in view in crossing the Alps. The first was to visit the land of the Vaudois; the second was to see Rome. The first of these objects I had accomplished in part; the second remained to be undertaken. This plain of Piedmont was the richest my foot had ever trodden; but often did I turn my eyes wistfully towards the Apennines, which, like a veil, shut out the Italy of the Romans and the City of the Seven Hills. At Turin, which the Po so sweetly waters, and over which the snow-clad hills of the Swiss fling their noble shadows, properly begins my journey to Rome. I started in the _diligence_ for Milan about four of the afternoon of the 21st October. Did you ever, reader, set foot in a _diligence_? It is a castle mounted on wheels, rising storey upon storey to a fearful height. It is roomy withal, and has apartments enough within its leathern walls for well-nigh the population of a village. There is the glass _coupé_ in front, the drawing-room of the house. There is the _interieur_, which you may compare, if you please, to the dining-room, only there you do not dine; and there is the _rotundo_, a sort of cabin attached, the limbo of the establishment, in which you may find half-a-dozen unhappy wights for days and nights doing penance. Then, in the very fore-front of this moving castle--hung in mid air, as it were--there is the _banquette_. It is the roomiest of all, and has, moreover, spacious untenanted spaces behind, where you may stow away your luggage; and, being the loftiest compartment, it commands the country you may happen to traverse. On this account the _banquette_ was the place I almost always selected, unless when so unfortunate as to find it already bespoke. Half-hours are of no value in the south of the Alps, and a very liberal allowance of this commodity was made us before starting. At last, however, the formidable process of loading was completed, and away we went, rumbling heavily over the streets of Turin to the crack of the postilion's whip and the music of the horses' bells. On emerging from the buildings of the city, we crossed the fine bridge over the Dora Susina, an Alpine stream, which attains almost the dignity of a river, and which, swollen by recent rains, was hurrying on to join the Po. Our course now lay almost due east, over the great plain of Lombardy; and there are few rides in any part of the world which can bring the traveller such a succession of varied, rich, and sublime sights. The plain itself, level as the floor of one's library, and wearing a rich carpeting, green at all seasons, of fruits and verdure, ran out till it touched the horizon. On the north rose the Alps, a magnificent wall, of stature so stupendous, that they seemed to prop the heavens. On the south were the gentler Apennines. Between these two magnificent barriers, this goodly plain--of which I know not if the earth contains its equal--stretches away till it terminates in the blue line of the Adriatic. On its ample bosom is many a celebrated spot, many an interesting object. It has several princely cities, in which art is cultivated, and trade flourishes to all the extent which Austrian fetters permit. Its old historic towns are numerous. The hoar of eld is upon them. It has rags of castles and fortresses which literally have braved for a thousand years the battle and the breeze. It has spots where empires have been lost and won, and where the dead of the tented field sleep their dreamless sleep. It has fine old cathedrals, with their antique carvings, their recumbent statues of old-world bishops, and their Scripture pieces by various masters, sorely faded; and here and there, above the rich foliage of its various woods, like the tall mast of a ship at sea, is seen the handsome and lofty campanile, so peculiar to the architecture of Lombardy. The great Alps look down with most benignant aspect upon this plain. They seem quite proud of it, and nurse it with the care and tenderness of a parent. Noble rivers not a few--the Ticino, the Adige, and streams and torrents without number--do they send down, to keep its beauty ever fresh. These streams cross and re-cross its green bosom in all directions, forming by their interlacings a curious network of silvery lines, like the bright threads in the mine, or the white veins in the porphyritic slab. Observe this little flower, with its bright petals, growing by the wayside. That humble flower owes its beauty to yonder chain. From the frozen summits of the Alps come the waters at which it daily drinks. And when the dog-days come, and a fiery sun looks down upon the plain from a sky that is cloudless for months together, and when every leaf droops, and even the tall poplar seems to bow itself beneath the intolerable heat, the mountains, pitying the panting plain, send down their cool breezes to revive it. Would that from the lofty pinnacles of rank and talent there descended upon the lower levels of society an influence equally wholesome and beneficent! Were there more streams from the mountain, there would be more fruits upon the plain. The world would not be the scorched desert which it is, in which the vipers of envy and discontent hiss and sting; but a fragrant garden, full of the fruits of social order and of moral principle. Truly, man might learn many a useful lesson from the earth on which he treads: the great, to dispense freely out of their abundance,--for by dispensing they but multiply their blessings, as Mont Blanc, by sending down its streams to enrich the plain, feeds those snows which are its glory and crown,--and the humble, the lesson of a thankful reciprocation. This plain does not drink in the waters of the Alps, and sullenly refuse to own its obligations. Like a duteous child, it brings its yearly offering to the foot of Mont Blanc,--fields of golden wheat, countless vines with their blood-red clusters, fruits of every name, and flowers of every hue;--such is the noble tribute which this plain, year by year, lays at the feet of its august parent. There is but one drawback to its prosperity. Two sombre shadows fall gloomily athwart its surface. These are Austria and Rome. The plain of Lombardy is so broad, and the road to Milan by Novara is so much on a level with its general surface, that the eye catches the distant Apennines only at the more elevated points. The screen which here, and for miles after leaving Turin, shuts out the view of the Apennines, is the Colina. The Colina is a range of lovely hills, which rise to a height of rather more than 1200 feet, and run eastward along the plain a few miles south of the Milan road. Soft and rich in their covering, picturesque in their forms, and indented with numerous dells, they look like miniature Alps set down on the plain, nearly equidistant from the great white hills on the north and the purple peaks on the south. The sun was near his setting; and his level rays, passing through fields of vapour,--presages of storm,--and shorn of the fiery brilliancy which is wont at eve to set these hills on a blaze, fell softly upon the dome of the Superga, and lighted up the white villas which stud the mountain by hundreds and hundreds throughout its whole extent. Vividly relieved by the deep azure of the vineyards, and looking, from their distance, no bigger than single blocks, these villas reminded one of a shower of marble, freshly fallen, and glittering in pearly whiteness in the setting rays. The road, which to me had an almost sacred character, being the beginning of my journey to Rome, was a straight line,--straight as the arrow's flight,--between fields of rich meadow land, and rows of elms and poplars, which ran on and on, till, in the far distance, they appeared to converge to a point. It was a broad, macadamized, substantial highway, of about thirty feet in width, having a white line of curb-stones placed eight or ten paces apart; outside of which was an excellent pathway for foot passengers. On the left rose the Alps, calm and majestic, clothed in the purple shadows of evening. I have mentioned the Po as flowing past Turin. This stream is doubtless the relic of that mighty flood which covered, at some former period, the vast space between the Alps and the Apennines, from the Graian and Cottian chains on the west, to the shores of the Adriatic on the east. As the waters drained off, this central channel alone was left, to receive and convey to the sea the innumerable torrents which are formed by the springs and snows of the mountains. The noble river thus formed is called the Po,--the pride of Italy, and the king of its streams. The Greeks, who clothed it with fable, and drowned Phaeton in its stream, called it Eridanus. Its Roman appellation was Padus, which in course of time resolved itself into its present name, the Po. Unlike the Nile, which rolls in solemn and solitary majesty through Egypt without permitting one solitary rill to mingle with its flood, the Po welcomes every tributary, and accepts its help in discharging its great function of giving drink to every flower, and tree, and field, and city, in broad Lombardy. It receives, in its course through Piedmont alone, not fewer than fifty-three torrents and rivers; and in depth and grandeur of stream it is not unworthy of the praises which the Greek and Roman poets lavished upon it. The cradle of this noble stream is placed in the centre of the ancient territory of the Vaudois, whose most beautiful mountain, Monte Viso, is its nursing parent. A fountain of crystal clearness, placed half-way up this hill, is its source. Thence it goes forth to water Piedmont and Venetian-Lombardy, and to mingle at last with the clear wave of the Adriatic,--emblem of those living waters which were to go forth from this same land into all quarters of Europe. The sun had now set; and I marked that this evening no golden beams among the mountains, no burning peaks, attended his departure. He went in silent sadness, like a friend quitting a circle which he fears may before his return be visited with calamity. With him departed the glory of the scene. The vine-clad Colina, erst sparkling with villas, put out its lights, and resolved itself into a dark bank, which leaned, cloud-like, against the sky. The stupendous white piles on the left drew a thin night vapour around them, and retired from the scene, like some mighty spirit gathering his robe about him, and leaving the earth, which his presence had enlightened, dark and solitary. The plain lay before us a sombre expanse, in which all objects--towns, spires, and forests--were fast blending into one darkly-shaded and undefined picture. Dwellers in _diligences_, as well as dwellers in hotels, must sleep if they can; but the hour for "turning in" had scarce arrived, and meanwhile, I remember, my thoughts took strongly a homeward direction. With these, of course, I shall not trouble the reader; only I must be permitted to mention a misconception into which I had fallen, in connection with my journey, and into which it is possible others may fall in similar circumstances. One is apt to imagine, before starting, that should he reach such a country as Italy, he will there feel as if home was very distant, and the events of his former life far removed in point of time. He thinks that a journey across the Alps has somehow a talismanic power to change him. He crosses the Alps, but finds that he is the same man still. Home has come with him: the friendships, the joys, the sorrows, of his past existence are as near as ever; nay, far nearer, for now he is alone with them; and though he goes southward, and kingdoms and mountain-chains are between him and his native country, he cannot feel that he is a foot-breadth more distant than ever. He moves about through strange lands in a shroud of home feelings and recollections. How wretched, thought I, the man whom guilt chases from his country! He flies to distant lands in the hope of shaking off the remembrance of his crime. He finds that, go where he will, the spectre dogs his steps. In Paris, in Milan, in Rome, the grizzly form starts up before him. He must change, not his country, but his heart--himself--before he can shake off his companion. May not the same principle be applicable, in some extent, to our passage from earth into the world beyond? When at home in Scotland, I had thought of Italy as a distant country; but now that I was in Italy, Scotland seemed very near--much nearer than Italy had done when in Scotland. We who are dwellers on earth think of the state beyond as very remote; but once there, may we not feel as if earth was in close proximity to us,--as if, in fact, the two states were divided by but a narrow gulph? Certain it is that the passage across it will work in us no change; and, like the stranger in a foreign country, we shall enter with an eternal shroud of joys and sorrows, springing out of the deeds and events of our present existence. I found that if in this region the day had its beauty, the night had its sublimity and terrors. I had years before become familiar with the phenomena of thunder-storms among the Alps; and one who has seen lightning only in the sombre sky of Britain can scarce imagine its intense brilliancy in these more southern latitudes. With us it breaks with a red fiery flicker; there it bursts upon you like the sun, and pours a flood of noonday light over earth and sky. One evening, in particular, I shall never forget, on which I saw this phenomenon in circumstances highly favourable to its finest effect. I had walked out from Geneva to pass a few hours with the Tronchin family, whose mansion stands on the southern shores of the lake. It was evening; and the deep rolling of the thunder gave us warning that a storm had come on. We stepped out upon the lawn to enjoy the spectacle; for in the vicinity of the Alps, whose summits attract the fluid, the lightning is seldom dangerous to life. All was dark as midnight; not even the front of the mansion could we see. In a moment the flash came; and then it was day,--boundless, glorious day. All nature was set before us as if under the light of a cloudless sun. The lawn, the blue lake, the distant Alpine summits, the landscape around, with its pines, villas, and vineyards, all leaped out of the womb of night, stood in vivid intense splendour before the eye, and in a twinkling was again gone. This amazing transition from midnight to noonday, and from noonday to midnight, was repeated again and again. I was now to witness the sublimities of a thunder-storm on the plain of Lombardy. Right before us, on the far-off horizon, gleams of light began to shoot along the sky. The play of the electric fluid was so rapid and incessant, as to resemble rather the continuous flow of light from its fountain, than the fitful flashes of lightning. At times these gleams would mantle the sky with all the soft beauty of moonlight, and at others they would dart angrily and luridly athwart the horizon. Soon the storm assumed a grander form. A ball of fire would suddenly blaze forth, in livid, fiery brilliancy; and, remaining motionless, as it were, for an instant, would then shoot out lateral streams or rays, coloured sometimes like the rainbow, and quivering and fluttering like the outspread wings of eagles. One's imagination could almost conceive of it as being a real bird, the ball answering to the body, while the flashes flung out from it resembled the wings, which were of so vast a spread, that they touched the Apennines on the one hand, and the Alps on the other. The storm took yet another form, and one that increased the sublimity of the scene, by adding a slight feeling of uneasiness to the admiration with which we had contemplated it so far. A cloud of pitchy darkness rose in the south, and crossed the plain, shedding deepest night in its track, and shooting its fires downward on the earth as it came onwards. It passed right over our heads, enveloping us for the while (like some mighty archer, with quiver full of arrows) in a shower of flaming missiles. The interval between the flashes was brief,--so very brief, that we were scarcely sensible of any interval at all. There was not more than four seconds between them. The light was full and strong, as if myriads and myriads of bude lights had been kindled on the summits of the Apennines. In short, it was day while it lasted, and every object was visible, as if made so by the light of the sun. The horses which dragged our vehicle along the road,--the postilion with the red facings on his dress,--the meadows and mulberry woods which bordered our path,--the road itself, stretching away and away for miles, with its rows of tall poplars, and its white curb-stones, dotted with waggons and couriers, and a few foot-passengers,--and the red autumnal leaves, as they fell in swirling showers in the gust,--all were visible. Indeed, we may be said to have performed several miles of our journey under broad daylight, excepting that these sudden revelations of the face of nature alternated with moments of profoundest night. At length the big rain-drops came rattling to the earth; and, to protect ourselves, we drew the thick leathern curtain of the _banquette_, buttoning it tight down all around. It kept out the rain, but not the lightning. The seams and openings of the covering seemed glowing lines of fire, as if the _diligence_ had been literally engulphed in an ocean of living flame. The whole heavens were in a roar. The Apennines called to the Alps; the Alps shouted to the Apennines; and the plain between quaked and trembled at the awful voice. At length the storm passed away to the north, and found its final goal amid the mountains, where for hours afterwards the thunder continued to growl, and the lightnings to sport. Order being now restored among the elements, we endeavoured to snatch an hour's sleep. It was but a dreamy sort of slumber, which failed to bestow entire unconsciousness to external objects. Faded towns and tall campaniles seemed to pass by in a ghost-like procession, which was interrupted only by the arrival of the _diligence_ at the various stages, where we had to endure long, weary halts. So passed the night. At the first dawn we entered Novara. It lay, spread out on the dusky plain, an irregular patch of black, with the clear, silvery crescent of a moon hanging above it. CHAPTER VII. THE INTRODUCTION. Novara--Examination of Passports--Dawn--Monks prefer Dim Light to Clear--Battle of Novara, and its Results--The Ticino--Croats--Austrian Frontier and Dogana--Examination of Books and Baggage--Grandeur of the Alps from this Point--Contrast betwixt the Rivers and the Governments of Italy--Proof from thence of the Fall--Providence "from seeming Evil educing Good"--Rich but Monotonous Scenery of the Plain--Youth of the Alps, and Decay of the Lombard nations--The only Remedy--An Expelled Democrat--First View of Milan. Novara, of course, like all decent towns in Lombardy and elsewhere, at four in the morning was a-bed, and our heavy vehicle, as its harsh echoes broke roughly on the silent streets, sounded strangely loud. We were driven right into a courtyard, to have our passports examined. We had left Turin the evening before, with a clean bill of political health, duly certified by three legations,--the Sardinian, the English, and the Austrian; and in so short a journey--not to speak of the flood and fire we had passed through--it was scarce possible that we could have contracted fresh pollution. We were examined anew, however, lest the plague-spot should have broken out upon us. All was found right, and we were let go to a neighbouring restaurant, where we swallowed a cup of coffee,--our only meal betwixt Turin and Milan. After a full hour's halt, we re-mounted the _diligence_, and set forth. On emerging from the streets of the city, I found the east in the glow of dawn. Still, and pure, and calm broke the light; and under its ray the rich plain awoke into beauty, forgetful of the fiery bolts which had smitten it, and the darkness and destruction which had so lately passed across it. "Hail, holy light!" exclaims the bard of "Paradise." Yes, light is holy. It is undefiled and pure, as when "God saw the light that it was good." Man has ravaged the earth and reddened the seas; but light has escaped his contaminating touch, and is still as God made it, unless, indeed, when man imprisons it within the stained glass of the cathedral, and then obligingly helps its dimness by lighting a score or so of tapers. Did no monk ever think of putting a stained window in the east, and compelling the sun to ogle the world through spectacles? "The light is good," said He who created it, as He saw it darting its first pure beam across creation. Not so, says the Puseyite; it is not good unless it is coloured. I looked with interest on the plains around Novara; for there, albeit no trace of the bloody fray remains, the army of Charles Albert in 1848 met the host of Radetzky; and there the fate of the campaign for Italian independence was decided. The battle which was fought on these plains led to the destruction of King Charles Albert, but not to the destruction of his kingdom of Sardinia,--though why Radetzky did not follow up his victory by a march on Turin, is to this hour a mystery. Nay, though it sounds a little paradoxical, it is probable that this battle, by destroying the king, saved the kingdom. Had Charles Albert survived till the re-action set in 1849 and 1850, there is too much reason to fear, from his antecedents, that he would have thrown himself into the current with the rest of the Italian rulers; and so Sardinia would have missed the path of constitutional liberty and material development which it has since, under King Victor Emanuel, so happily pursued. Had that happened, the horizon of Italy, dark as it is at this hour, would have been still darker, and the peninsula, from the Alps to Sicily, would not have contained a single spot where the hunted friends of liberty could have found asylum. We soon approached the Ticino, the boundary between Sardinia and Austrian Lombardy. The Ticino is a majestic river, here spanned by one of the finest bridges in Italy. It contains eleven arches; is of the granite of Mount Torfano; and, like almost all the great modern works in Italy, was commenced by Napoleon, though finished only after his fall. Here, then, was the gate of Austria; and seated at that gate I saw three Croats,--fit keepers of Austrian order. I was not ignorant of the hand these men had had in the suppression of the revolution of 1848, and of the ruthless tragedies they were said to have enacted in Milan and other cities of Lombardy; and I rode up to them in the eager desire of scrutinizing their features, and reading there the signs of that ferocity which had given them such wide-spread but evil renown. They sat basking themselves on a bench in front of the Dogana, with their muskets and bayonets glittering in the sun. They were lads of about eighteen, of decidedly low stature, of square build, and strongly muscular. They looked in capital condition, and gave every sign that the air of Lombardy agreed with them, and that they had had their own share at least of its corn and wine. They wore blue caps, gray duffle greatcoats like those used by our Highlanders, light blue pantaloons fitting closely their thick short leg, and boots which rose above the ankle, and laced in front. The prevailing expression on their broad swarthy faces was not ferocity, but stolidity. Their eyes were dull, and contrasted strikingly with the dark fiery glances of the children of the land. They seemed men of appetites rather than passions; and, if guilty of cruel deeds, were likely to be so from the dull, cold, unreflecting ferocity of the bull-dog, rather than from the warm impulsive instincts of the nobler animals. In stature and feature they were very much the barbarian, and were admirably fitted for being what they were,--the tools of the despot. No wonder that the _ideal_ Italian abominates the _Croat_. The Dogana! So soon! 'Twas but a few miles on the other side of the Ticino that we passed through this ordeal. But perhaps the river, glorious as it looks, flowing from the democratic hills of the Swiss, may have infected us with political pravity; so here again we must undergo the search, and that not a mere _pro forma_ one. The _diligence_ vomits forth, at all its mouths, trunks, carpet-bags, and packages, encased, some in velvet, some in fir-deals, and some in brown paper. The multifarious heap was carried into the Dogana, and its various articles unroped, unlocked, and their contents scattered about. One might have thought that a great fair was about to begin, or that a great Industrial Exhibition was to be opened on the banks of the Ticino. The hunt was especially for books,--bad books, which England will perversely print, and Englishmen perversely read. My little stock was collected, bound together with a cord, and sent in to the chief douanier, who sat, Radamanthus-like, in an inner apartment, to judge books, papers, and persons. There is nothing there, thought I, to which even an Austrian official can take exception. Soon I was summoned to follow my little library. The man examined the collection volume by volume. At last he lighted on a number of the _Gazetta del Popolo_,--the same which I have already mentioned as given me by the editors in Turin. This, thought I, will prove the dead fly in my box of ointment. The sheet was opened and examined. "Have you," said the official, "any more?" I could reply with a clear conscience that I had not. To my surprise, the paper was returned to me. He next took up my note-book. Now, said I to myself, this is a worse scrape than the other. What a blockhead I am not to have put the book into my pocket; for, except in extreme cases, the traveller's person is never searched. The man opened the thin volume, and found it inscribed with mysterious and strange characters. It was written in short-hand. He turned over the leaves; on every page the same unreadable signs met the eye. He held it by the top, and next by the bottom: it was equally inscrutable either way. He shut it, and examined its exterior, but there was nothing on the outside to afford a key to the mystic characters within. He then turned to me for an explanation of the suspicious little book. Affecting all the unconcern I could, I told him that it contained only a few commonplace jottings of my journey. He opened the book; took one other leisurely survey of it; then looked at me, and back again at the book; and, after a considerable pause, big with the fate of my book, he made me a bland bow, and handed me the volume. I was equally polite on my part, inly resolving, that henceforward Austrian douanier should not lay finger on my note-book. The halt here was one of from two to three hours, which were spent in unlading the _diligence_, opening and locking trunks,--for in Austria nothing is done in a hurry, save the trial and execution of Mazzinists. But the long halt was nothing to me: I could not possibly lose time, and I could scarce be stopped at the wrong place; and certainly the bridge of the Ticino is the very spot one would select for such a halt, were the matter left in one's own choice. It commands the finest assemblage of grand objects, in a ride abounding in magnificent objects throughout. Having been pronounced, in passport phrase, "good to enter Austria,"--for my carpet-bag was clean, though doubtless my mind was foul with all sorts of notions which, in the latitude of Austria, are rankly heretical,--(and, by the way, of what use is it to search trunks, and leave breasts unexplored? Here is an imperfection in the system, which I wonder the Jesuits don't correct)--having, I say, had the Croat-guarded gates of Austria opened to me till I should find it convenient to enter, I retraced the few paces which divided the Dogana from the bridge, and stood above the rolling floods of the Ticino. Refreshing it verily was to turn from the petty tyrannies of an Austrian custom-house, to the free, joyous, and glorious face of nature. Before me were the Alps, just shaking the cold night mists from their shaggy pine-clad sides, as might a lion the dew-drops from his mane. Here rose Monte Rosa in a robe of never-fading glory and beauty; and there stood Mont Blanc, with his diadem of dazzling snows. The giant had planted his feet deep amid rolling hills, covered with villages, and pine-forests, and rich pastures. Anywhere else these would have been mountains; but, dwarfed by the majestic form in whose presence they stood, they looked like small eminences, scattered gracefully at his base, as pebbles at the foot of some lofty pile. On his breast floated the fleecy clouds of morn, while his summit rose high above these clouds, and stood, in the calm of the firmament, a stupendous pile of ice and snow. Never had I seen the Alps to such advantage. The level plain ran quite up to them, and allowed the eye to take their full height from their flower-girt base to their icy summit. Hundreds and hundreds of peaks ran along the sky, conical, serrated, needle-shaped, jagged, some flaming like the ruby in the morning ray, others dazzlingly white as the alabaster. As I bent over the parapet, gazing on the flood that rolled beneath, I could not help contrasting the bounty of nature with the oppression of man. Here had this river been flowing through the long centuries, dispensing its blessings without stop or grudge. Day and night, summer and winter, it had rolled gladsomely onwards, bringing verdure to the field, fruitage to the bough, and plenty to the peasant's cot. Now it laved the flower on its brink,--now it fed the umbrageous sycamore and the tall poplar on the plain,--and now it sent off a crystal streamlet to meander through corn-field and meadow-land. It exacted nothing of man for the blessings it so unweariedly dispensed. It gave all freely. Whether, said I to myself, does Italy owe most to its rivers or to its Governments? Its rivers give it corn and wine: its Governments give it chains and prisons. They load the patient Lombard with burdens that press him down into toil and poverty; or they lead him away to shed his blood and lay his bones in a foreign soil. Why is it that all the functions of nature are beneficent? Even the storms that rage around Mont Blanc, the ice of its eternal winter, yield only good. Here they come, a river of crystal water, decking with living green this far-spreading plain. But the institutions of man are not so. From their frozen summits have too oft, alas! descended, not the peaceful river, but the thundering avalanche, burying in irretrievable ruin, man, with his labours and hopes. I suspect, however, that this is a narrow as well as a sombre philosophy. Doubtless the great fact of the Fall is written on the face of life. Nevertheless, we have a strong belief that the mighty schemes of Providence, like the arrangements of external nature, will all in the end become dispensers of good; that those evil systems which have burdened the earth, like those mountains of ice and snow which rise on its surface, have their uses, though as yet we stand too near them, and too much within the sphere of their tempests and their avalanches, fully to comprehend these uses. We must descend into the low-lying plains of the future, and contemplate them afar off; and then the glaciers and tempests of these moral Mont Blancs may dissolve into tender showers and crystal rivers, which will fructify and gladden the world. In a few minutes I must leave the bridge of the Ticino. Could I, when far away,--in the seclusion of my own library, for instance,--bid the Alps rise before me, in stupendous magnificence, as now? I turned round, and fixed my gaze on the tamer objects of the plain; then back again to the mountains; but every time I did so, I felt the scene as new. Its glory burst on me as if seen for the first time. Alas! thought I, if this majestic image has so faded in the interval of a few moments, what will it be years after? A scene like this, it is true, can never be forgotten; but it is but a dwarfed picture that lives in the memory; and it is well, perhaps, it should be so; for were one to see always the Alps, with what eyes would one look upon the tamer though still romantic hills of his own country! And we may extend the principle. There are times when great truths--eternal verities--flash upon the soul in Alpine magnitude. It is a new world that discloses itself, and we are thrilled by its glory; but for the effective discharge of ordinary duties, it is better, perhaps, that these stupendous objects should be seen "as through a glass darkly," though still seen. All too soon was the _diligence_ ready to start. From the bridge of the Ticino the scenery was decidedly tamer. The Alps fell more into the background, and with their white peaks disappeared the chief glory of the scene. The plain was so level, and its woods of mulberry and walnut so luxuriant, that little could be seen save the broad road, with its white lines of curb-stones running on and on, and losing itself in the deep foliage of the plain. Its windings and turnings, though coming only at an interval of many miles, were a pleasant relief from the sameness of the journey. Occasionally side views of great fertility opened upon us. There were the small farms of the Lombard; and there was the tall Lombard himself, striding across his fields. If the farms were small, amends was made by the largeness of the farm-house. There was no great air of comfort about it, however. It wanted its little garden, and its over-arching vine-bough, which one sees in the happier cantons of Switzerland; and the furrowed and care-shaded face of the owner bespoke greater acquaintance with hard labour than with the dainties which the bounteous earth so freely yields. The Lombard plants, but another eats. We could see, too, how extensively and thoroughly irrigated was the plain. Numerous canals, brim-full of water, the gift of the Alps, traversed it in all directions; and by means of a system of sluices and aqueducts the surrounding fields could be flooded at pleasure. The plain enjoys thus the elements of a boundless fertility, and is the seat of an almost eternal summer. Hic Ver perpetuum, atque alienis mensibus Æstas. But the little towns we passed looked so very old and tottering, and the inhabitants, too, appeared as much oppressed with years or cares as the heavy dilapidated architecture amid which they dwelt, and out of which they crept as we passed by, that one's heart grew sad. How evident was it that the immortal spirit was withered, and that the land, despite its images of grandeur and sublimity, nourished a stricken race! The Alps were still young, but the men that lived within their shadow had grown very old. Their ears had too long been familiar with the clank of chains, and their hearts were too sad to catch up the utterances of freedom which came from their mountains. The human soul was dying, and will die, unless new fire from a celestial source descend to rekindle it. Architecture, music, new constitutions, the ever glorious face of nature itself, will not prevent the approaching death of the continental nations. There is but one book in the world that can do it,--the Book of Life. Unfold its pages, and a more blessed and glorious effulgence than that which lights up the Alps at sunrise will break upon the nations; but, alas! this cannot be so long as the Jesuit and the Croat are there. We saw, too, on our journey, other things that did not tend to put us into better spirits. As we approached Milan, we met a couple of gensdarmes leading away a poor foot-sore revolutionist to the frontier. Ah! said I inly, could the Jesuits look into my breast, they would find there ideas more dangerous to their power, in all probability, than those that this man entertains; and yet, while he is expelled, I am admitted. No thanks to them, however. I rode onwards. League followed league of the richest but the most unvaried scenery. Campanile and hamlet came and went: still Milan came not. I strained my eyes in the direction in which I expected its roofs and towers to appear, but all to no purpose. At length there rose over the green woods that covered the plain, as if evoked by enchantment, a vision of surpassing beauty. I gazed entranced. The lovely creation before me was white as the Alpine snows, and shot up in a glorious cluster of towers, spires, and pinnacles, which flashed back the splendours of the mid-day sun. It looked as if it had sprung from under the chisel but yesterday. Indeed, one could hardly believe that human hands had fashioned so fair a structure. It was so delicate, and graceful, and aerial, and unsullied, that I thought of the city which burst upon the pilgrims when they had got over the river, or that which a prophet saw descending out of heaven. Milan, hid in rich woods, was before me, and this was its renowned Cathedral. CHAPTER VIII. CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN. The Barrier--Beautiful Aspect of the City--Hotel Royale--History of Milan--Dreariness of its Streets--Decay of Art--Decay of Trade--The Cathedral--Beauty, not Sublimity, its Characteristic--Its Exterior described--The Piazza of the Cathedral--Austrian Cannon--Pamphlets on Purgatory--Punch--Punch _versus_ the Priest--Church and State in Italy--Austrian Oppression--Confiscation of Estates in Lombardy--Forced Loans--Niebuhr's Idea that the Dark Ages are returning. It was an hour past noon when the _diligence_, with its polyglot freight, drove up to the harrier. There gathered round the vehicle a white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding passports. These the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was handed at the same time to each passenger a printed paper, in which the same notification was four times repeated,--first in Italian, next in French, then in German, and lastly in English,--enjoining the holder, under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number of hours at the Police Office. It was under these conditions,--a pilgrim from a far land,--that I appeared at the gates of Milan. The passport detention seemed less an annoyance here than I had ever felt it before. The beauteous city, sitting so tranquilly amidst the sublimest scenery, seemed to have something of a celestial character about it. It looked so resplendent, partly by reason of the materials of which it is built, and partly by reason of the sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun only can shine, that none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, and none but pure men might enter at its gates. There were white sentinels at its portals; rows of white houses formed its exterior; and in the middle of the city, floating above it,--for it seemed to float rather than to rest on foundations,--was its snow-white temple,--a place too holy almost, as it seemed, for human worship and human worshippers; and then the city had for battlements a glorious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the clouds. Everything conspired to cheat the visitor into the belief that he had come at last to an abode where every hurtful passion was hushed, and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat. "All right," shouted the passport official: the gensdarmes, who guarded the path with naked bayonet, stepped aside; and the quick, sharp crack of the postilion's whip set the horses a-moving. We skirted the spacious esplanade, and saw in the distance the beauteous form of the Arco della Pace. We had not gone far till the drum's roll struck upon the ear, and a long glittering line of Austrian bayonets was seen moving across the esplanade. It was evident that the time had not yet come to Milan, all glorious as she seemed, when men "shall learn war no more." We plunged into a series of narrow streets, which open on the Mercato Vecchio. We crossed the Corso, and came out upon the broad promenade that traverses Milan from the square of the Duomo to the Porta Orientale. We soon found ourselves at the _diligence_ office; and there, our little colony of various nations breaking up, I bade adieu to the good vehicle which had carried me from Turin, and took my way to the Hotel Royale, in the Contrada dei tre Re. At the first summons of the porter's bell the gate opened. On entering, I found myself in what had been one of the palaces of Milan when the city was in its best days. But the Austrian eagle had scared the native princes and nobles of the Queen of Lombardy, who were gone, and had left their streets to be trodden by the Croat, and their palaces to be tenanted by the wayfarer. The buildings of the hotel formed a spacious quadrangle, three storeys high, with a finely paved court in the centre. I was conducted up stairs to my bed-room, which, though by no means large, and plainly furnished, presented the luxury of extreme cleanliness, with its beautifully polished wooden floor, and its delicately white napery and curtains. The saloon on the ground-floor opened sweetly into a little garden, with its fountain, its bit of rock-work, and its gods and nymphs of stone. The apartment had a peculiarly comfortable air at breakfast-time. The hissing urn, flanked by the tea-caddy; the rich brown coffee, the delicious butter, and the not less delicious bread, the produce of the plains around, not unnaturally white, as with us, but golden, like the wheat when it waves in the autumnal sun; and the guests, mostly English, which assembled morning after morning,--made the return of this hour very pleasant. Establishing myself at the Albergo Reale for this and the two following days, I sallied out, to wander everywhere and see everything. Milan is of ancient days; and few cities have seen greater changes of fortune. In the reign of Diocletian and Maximilian it became the capital of the western empire, and was filled with the temples, baths, theatres, and other monuments which usually adorn royal cities. The tempest which Attila, in the middle of the fifth century, conducted across the Alps, fell upon it, and swept it away. Scarce a vestige of the Roman Milan has come down to our day. A second Milan was founded, but only to fall, in its turn, before the arms of Frederick Barbarossa. There was a strong vitality in its site, however; and a third Milan,--the Milan of the present day,--arose. This city is a huge collection of churches and barracks, cafés and convents, theatres and palaces, traversed by narrow streets, ranged mostly in concentric circles round its grand central building, the Duomo. The streets, however, that lead to its various ports, are spacious thoroughfares, adorned with noble and elegant mansions. Such is the arrangement of the town in which I now found myself. I sought everywhere for the gay Milan,--the white-robed city I had seen an hour ago,--but it was gone; and in its room sat a silent and sullen town, with an air of most depressing loneliness about it. There were few persons on the streets; and these walked as if they dragged a chain at their heels. I passed through whole streets of a secondary character, without meeting a single individual, or hearing the sound of man or of living thing. It seemed as if Milan had proclaimed a fast and gone to church; but when I looked into the churches, I saw no one there save a solitary figure in white, in the distance, bowing and gesticulating with extraordinary fervour, in the presence of dumb pictures and dim tapers. How can a worship in which no one ever joins edify any one? I could discover no signs of a flourishing art. There were not a few pretty and some beautiful things in the shop-windows; but the latter were all copies generally of the more striking natural objects in the neighbourhood, or of the works of art in the city, the productions of other times,--things which a dying genius might produce, but not such as a living genius, free to give scope to her invention, would delight to create. Such was the art of Milan,--the feeble and reflected gleam of a glory now set. As regards the trade of Milan,--a yet more important matter,--I could see almost no signs of it either. There were walking sticks, and such things, in considerable variety in the shops; but little of more importance. The fabrics of the loom, and the productions of the plane, the forge, and the printing press, which crowd our cities and dwellings, and give honest bread to our artizans, were all wanting in Milan. How its people contrived to get through the twenty-four hours, and where they got their bread, unless it fell from the clouds, I could not discover. What an air of languor and weariness on the faces of the people! Amid these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow, of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if one may judge from their looks,--a future full of revolutions, to conduct, mayhap, to freedom; more probably to the scaffold. I turned sharply round the corner of a street, and there, as if it had risen from the earth, was the Cathedral. As the sun breaking through a fog, or an Alpine peak flashing through mists, so burst this magnificent pile upon me; and its sudden revelation dispelled on the instant all my gloomy musings. I could only stand and gaze. Beauty, not sublimity, is the attribute of this pile. Beauty it rains around it in a never-ending, overflowing shower, as the sun does light, or Mont Blanc glory. I sought for some one presiding idea, simple and grand, which might take its place in the mind, and dwell there as an image of glory, never more to fade; but I could find no such idea. The pile is the slow creation of centuries, and the united conception of innumerable minds, which have clubbed their ideas, so to speak, to produce this Cathedral. Quarries of marble and millions of money have been expended upon it; and there is scarce an architect or sculptor of eminence who has flourished since the fourteenth century, who has not contributed to it some separate grace or glory; and now the Cathedral of Milan is perhaps the most numerous assemblage of beauties in stone which the world contains. Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to bottom,--its carved portals, its flying buttresses, its arabesque pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-reliefs, its beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some Alpine group, whose flashing peaks shoot up by hundreds around some snow-white central summit. The building, too, is populous as a city. There are upwards of three thousand statues upon it, and places for a thousand more. Here stands a monk, busy with his beads,--there a mailed warrior,--there a mitred bishop,--there a pilgrim, staff in hand,--there a nun, gracefully veiled,--and yonder hundreds of seraphs perched upon the loftier pinnacles, and looking as if a white cloud of winged creatures from the sky had just lighted upon it. I purposed to-morrow to climb to the roof, and thence survey the plains of Lombardy and the chain of the Alps; so, turning away from the door, I made the tour of the square in which the Cathedral stands. I came first upon a row of cannon, so pointed as to sweep the square. Behind the guns, piled on the pavement, were stacks of arms, and soldiers loitering beside them. Ah! thought I, these are the loving ties that bind the people of Lombardy to the House of Hapsburg. The priest's chant is heard all day long within that temple; and outside there blend with it the sentinel's tramp and the drum's roll. I passed on, and came next upon a most unusual display of literature. Four-paged pamphlets in hundreds lay piled upon stalls, or were ranged in rows against the wall. The subjects discussed in these pamphlets were of a high spiritual cast, and woodcuts were freely employed to aid the reader's apprehension. These latter belonged to a very different style of art from that conspicuous in the Cathedral, but they had the merit of great plainness; and a glance at the woodcut enabled one to read at once the story of the pamphlet. The wall was all a-blaze with flames; and I saw the advantage of an infallible Church to teach one secrets which the Bible does not reveal. The sin chiefly insisted on was that of despising the priest; and the punishment awaiting it was set before me in a way I could not possibly mistake. Here, for instance, was a wealthy sinner, who lay dying in a splendid mansion. With horrible impiety, the man had refused the wafer, and ordered the priest about his business, despite the imploring tears of wife and family, who surrounded his bed. A glance at the other compartment of the picture showed the consequence of this. There you found the man just launched into the other world. A crowd of black fiends, hideous to behold, had seized upon the poor soul, and were dragging it down into a weltering gulf of lurid flame. In another picture you had an equally graphic illustration of the happiness of obeying Mother Church. Here lay one dying amid beads, crucifixes, and shaven crowns. The devil was fleeing from the house in terror; and in the compartment devoted to the spiritual world, the soul was following a benevolent-looking gentleman, who carried a big key, and was walking in the direction of a very magnificent mansion on a high hill, where, I doubt not, a welcome and hospitable reception waited both. The same lesson was repeated along the wall times without number. Here was the doctrine of purgatory as incontestably proved as painted flames, and images of creatures with tails who tormented other creatures who had no tails, could prove it. If there was no purgatory, how could the painters of an infallible Church ever have given so exact a representation of it? And exact it must have been, else the priests would never have allowed these pictures to be hung up here, under their very eye. This was as much as to write "_cum privilegio_" underneath them. The whole scenery of purgatory was here most vividly depicted. There were fiends flying off with souls, or tossing them with pitchforks into the flames. There were boiling cauldrons, red-hot gridirons, cataracts of fire, and innumerable other modes of torment. A walk along this infernal gallery was enough, one would have thought, to make the boldest purgatory-despiser quail. But no one who has a little spare cash, and is willing to part with it, need fear either purgatory or the devil. In the large marble house in the centre of the square one might buy at a reasonable rate an excision of some thousands of years from his appointed sojourn in that gloomy region. And doubtless that was one reason for bringing this purgatorial gallery and the indulgence-market into such close proximity. It reminded the people of the latter inestimable blessing; and without some such salutary impulse the traffic in indulgences might flag. I could not but remark, that the only person for whom these extraordinary representations appeared to have any attractions was myself. Not so the exhibition on the other side of the square. Having perused with no ordinary interest, though, I fear, with not much profit, this "Theory of a Future State," I crossed the quadrangle, passing right under the eastern towers of the Cathedral, and came suddenly upon a knot of persons gathered round a tall rectangular box, in which was enacting the melo-drama of Punch. These persons were enjoying the fun with a relish which was noways abated by the spectacle over the way. The whole thing was acted exactly as I had seen it before; but to me it was a novelty to hear Punch, and all the other interlocutors in the piece, discourse in the language in which Dante had sung, and in which I had heard, just before leaving Scotland, Gavazzi declaim. In all lands Punch is an astute scoundrel; but, strange to say, in all lands the popular feeling is on his side. His imperturbable coolness and truculent villany procured him plaudits among the Milanese, as I had seen them do elsewhere. Courage and self-possession are valuable qualities, and for their sake we sometimes forgive bad men and bad causes; whereas, from nothing do we more instinctively recoil than from hypocrisy. On this principle it is, perhaps, that we have a sort of liking for Punch, incorrigible scoundrel as he is; and that great criminals, who rob and murder at the head of armies, we deify, while little ones we hang. I had now completed my tour of the Cathedral, and could not help reflecting on the miscellaneous, and apparently incongruous, character of the spectacles grouped together in the square. In the middle was the great temple, in which priests, in stole and mitre, celebrated the high mysteries of their Church. In one of the angles were rows of mounted cannon, and a forest of bayonets. In another was seen the whole process of refining souls in purgatory. Strange, that if men here are shut up in prisons and hulks amid desperadoes, they come out more finished villains than they entered; whereas hereafter, if men are shut up with even worse characters, amid blazing fires, glowing gridirons, and cauldrons of boiling lead, they come out perfected in virtue. They pass at once from the society of fiends, where they have been whipped, roasted, and I know not what, to the society of angels. This is a strange schooling to give dignity to the character and conscious purity to the mind. And yet Rome subjects all her sons to this discipline for a longer or shorter period. Much do we marvel, that the same process which unfits men for associating with respectable people here should be the very thing to prepare them for good society hereafter. The other side of the square Punch had all to himself; and Punch, I saw, was the favourite. The inhabitants of Milan kept as respectable a distance from the painted fiends as if they had been veritable Satans, ready to clutch the incautious passer-by, and carry him off to their den. They kept the same respectable distance from the Austrian cannon; and these were no painted terrors. And as regards the Cathedral, scarce a solitary foot crossed its threshold, though there,--astounding prodigy!--He who made the worlds was Himself made many times every day by the priests. But Punch had a dense crowd of delighted spectators around him; and yet he competed with the priest at immense disadvantage. Punch played his part in a humble wooden shed, while the priest played his in a magnificent marble Cathedral, with a splendid wardrobe to boot. Still the people seemed to feel, that the only play in which there was any earnestness was that which was enacted in the wooden box. A stranger from India or China, who was not learned in either the religion or the drama of Europe, would probably have been unable to see any great difference between the two, and would have taken both for religious performances; concluding, perhaps, that that in the Cathedral was the established form, while that in the wooden box was the disestablished; in short, that Punch had been a priest at some former period of his life, and sung mass and sold indulgences; but that, imbibing some heterodox notions, or having fallen into some peccadillo, such as eating flesh on Friday, he had been unfrocked and driven out, and compelled to play the priest in a wooden tabernacle. To return once more to the paintings and woodcuts illustrative of the punitive and purgative processes of purgatory, and which were in a style of art that demonstratively shows, that if Italy is advancing in the knowledge of a future life, she is retrograding in the arts of the present,--to recur, I say, to these, there rested some doubt, to say the least of it, over their revelations of the world to come; but there rested no doubt whatever over their revelations of the present condition of Church and State in Italy. On this head the cannon and woodcuts told far more than the priests wished, or perhaps thought. They showed that both the State and the Church in that country are now reduced to their _ultima ratio_, brute force. The State has lost all hope of governing its subjects by giving them good laws, and inspiring them with loyalty; and the Church has long since abandoned the plan of producing obedience and love by presenting great truths to the mind. Both have found out a shorter and more compendious policy. The State, speaking through her cannon, says, "Obey me or die;" and the Church, speaking through purgatory, says, "Believe me or burn." There is one comfort in this, however,--the present system is obviously the last. When force gives way, all gives way. The Church will stand, doubtless, because they tell us she is founded on a rock; but what will become of the State? When men can be awed neither by painted fiends nor real cannon, what is to awe them? Indeed, we shrewdly suspect, that even now the fiends would count for little, were it not for the fiends incarnate, in the shape of Croats, by which the others are backed. The Lombards would boldly face the gridirons, cauldrons, and stinging creatures gathered in the one corner of the square at Milan, if they but knew how to muzzle the cannon which are assembled in the other. In truth, things in this part of the world are not looking up. A universal serfdom and barbarism are slowly creeping over all men and all systems. The Government of Austria has become more revolutionary than the Revolution itself. By violating the rights of property, it has indorsed the worst doctrines of Socialism. That Government has, in a great number of instances, seized upon estates, without making out a title to them by any regular process of law. After the attempted outbreak at Milan in 1852, the landed property of well-nigh all the royalist emigrants was swept away by a decree of sequestration. The _Milan Gazette_ published a list of seventy-two political refugees whose property has been laid under sequestration in the provinces of Milan, Como, Mantua, Lodi, Pavia, Brescia, Cremona, Bergamo, and Sondrio. In this list we find the names of many distinguished persons, such as Count Arese, the two Counts Borromeo, General Lechi, Duke Litta, Count Litta, Marquis Pallavicini, Marquis Rosales, Princess Belgioso. The pretext for seizing their estates was, that their owners had contributed to the revolutionary treasury; which was incredible to those who know the difference in feeling and views which separate the royalist emigrant nobles of Lombardy from the democratic republicans that follow Mazzini. In truth, the Government of Vienna needs their estates; and, imitating the example of the French Convention, and furnishing another precedent for Socialism when it shall come into power, it seized them without any colour of right or form of law. Another branch of the scourging tyranny of Austria is the system of forced loans. Some of the wealthiest families of Lombardy have been impoverished by these, and, of course, thrown into the ranks of the disaffected. The Austrian method of making slavery maintain itself is also peculiarly revolting. The hundred millions raised annually in Venetian Lombardy, instead of being spent in the service of these provinces, are devoted to the payment of the troops that keep down Hungary. The soldiers levied in Italy are sent into the German provinces; and those raised in Croatia are employed in keeping down Italy. Thus Italy holds the chain of Hungary, and Hungary, in her turn, that of Italy; and so insult is added to oppression. The very roots of liberty are being dug out of the soil. The free towns have lost their rights; the provinces their independence; and the tendency of things is towards the formation of great centralized despotisms. Thus an Asiatic equality and barbarism is sinking down upon continental Europe. So much is this the case, that some of the thinking minds in Germany are in the belief that the dark ages are returning. The following passage in the "Life and Letters of Niebuhr," written less than two months before his death in 1831, is almost prophecy:-- "It is my firm conviction that we, particularly in Germany, are rapidly hastening towards barbarism; and it is not much better in France. "That we are threatened with devastation such as that two hundred years ago, is, I am sorry to say, just as clear to me; and the end of the tale will be, _despotism enthroned amidst universal ruin. In fifty years, and probably much less, there will be no trace left of free institutions, or the freedom of the press, throughout all Europe, at least on the Continent_. Very few of the things which have happened since the revolution in Paris have surprised me." The half of that period has scarce elapsed, and the prognostication of Niebuhr has been all but realized. At this hour, Piedmont excepted, there is _no trace left of free institutions, or the freedom of the press_, in Southern and Eastern Europe. Nor will these nations ever be able to lift themselves out of the gulph into which they have fallen. Revolution, Socialism, war, will only hasten the advent of a centralized despotism. We know of only one agency,--even Christianity,--which, by reviving the virtue and self-government of the individual, and the moral strength of nations, can recover their liberties. If Christianity can be diffused, well; if not, I do firmly believe with Niebuhr that, on the Continent at least, we shall have a return of "the dark ages," and "despotism enthroned amidst universal ruin." CHAPTER IX. ARCO DELLA PACE. Depressing Effect produced by Sight of Slavery--The Castle of Milan--Non-intercourse of Italians and Austrians--Arco della Pace--Contrasted with the Duomo--Evening--Ambrose--Milanese Inquisition--The Two Symbols. It was now drawing towards evening; and I must needs see the sun go down behind the Alps. There are no sights like those which nature has provided for us. What are embattled cities and aisled cathedrals to the eternal hills, with their thunder-clouds, and their rising and setting suns? Making my exit by the northern gate of the city, I soon forgot, in the presence of the majestic mountains, the narrow streets and clouded faces amid which I had been wandering. Their peaks seemed to look serenely down upon the despots and armies at their feet; and at sight of them, the burden I had carried all day fell off, and my mind mounted at once to its natural pitch. How crushing must be the endurance of slavery, if even the sight of it produces such prostration! Day by day it eats into the soul, weakening its spring, and lowering its tone, till at last the man becomes incapable of noble thoughts or worthy deeds; and then we condemn him because he lies down contentedly in his chains, or breaks them on the heads of his oppressors. Emerging from the lanes of the city, I found myself on a spacious esplanade, enclosed on three of its sides by double rows of noble elms, and bounded on the remaining side by the cafés and wine-shops of the city, filled with a crowd of loquacious, if not gay, loiterers. In the middle of the esplanade rose the Castle of Milan,--a gloomy and majestic pile, of irregular form, but of great strength. It was on the top of this donjon that the beacon was to be kindled which was to call Lombardy to arms, in the projected insurrection of 1852. The soft green of the esplanade was pleasantly dotted by white groupes in the Austrian uniform, who loitered at the gates, or played games on the sward. But neither here nor in the cafés, nor anywhere else, did I ever see the slightest intercourse betwixt the soldiers and the populace. On the contrary, the two seemed on every occasion to avoid each other, as men, not only of different nations, but of different eras. There are two monuments, and only two, in Italy, which redeem its modern architecture from the reproach of universal degeneracy. One of these is the Triumphal Arch of Milan, known also as the Arco della Pace. It was full in view from where I stood, rising on the northern edge of the esplanade, with the line of road stretching out from it, and running on and on towards the Alps, over which it climbs, forming the famous Simplon Pass. I crossed the plain in the direction of the Arco della Pace, to have a nearer inspection of it. It was more to my taste than the Duomo. The Cathedral, much as I admired it, had a bewildering and dissipating effect. It presented a perfect universe of towers, pinnacles, and statues, flashing in the Italian sun, and in the yet more dazzling splendour of its own beauty. But, stript of the tracery with which it is so profusely covered, and the countless statues that nestle in its niches, it would be a withered, naked, and unsightly thing, like a tree in winter. Not so the arch to which I was advancing. It rose before me in simple grandeur. It might be defaced,--it might grow old; but its beauty could not perish while its form remained. It presents but one simple and grand idea; and, seen once, it never can be forgotten. It takes its place as an image of beauty, to dwell in the mind for ever. To look upon it was to draw in concentration and strength. I found this arch guarded by a Croat,--beauty in the keeping of barbarism. Much I wondered what sensations it could produce in such a mind: of course, I had no means of knowing. I touched the arch with my palm, to ascertain the quality of its polish and workmanship. The Croat made a threatening gesture, which I took as a hint not to repeat the action. I walked under it,--walked round it,--viewed it on all sides; but why should I describe what the engraver's art has made so familiar all over Europe? And such is the power of a simple and sublime idea,--whether the pen or the chisel has given it body,--to transmit itself, and retain its hold on the mind, that, though I had only now seen the Arco della Pace for the first time, I felt as if I had been familiar with it all my life; and so, doubtless, does my reader. The little squat figure, with the swarthy face, and dull, cold eye, that kept pacing beside it, watched me all the while my survey was going on. Sorely must it have puzzled him to discover the cause of the interest I took in it. Most probably he took me for a necromancer, whose simple word might transport the arch across the Alps. The very spirit of peace pervaded the scene around the Arco della Pace. Peace descended from the summits of the Alps, and peace breathed upon me from the tops of the elms. It was sweet to see the gathering of the shadows upon the great plain; it was sweet to see the waggoner come slowly along the great Simplon road; it was sweet to see the husbandman unyoke his bullocks, and come wending his way homeward over the rich ploughed land, beneath the beautiful festoonings of the vine; sweet even were the city-stirs, as, mellowed by distance, they broke upon the ear; but sweeter than all was it to mark the sun's departure among the Alps. One might have fancied the mountains a wall of sapphire inclosing some terrestrial paradise,--some blessed clime, where hunger, and thirst, and pain, and sorrow, were unknown. Alas! if such were Lombardy, what meant the Croat beside me, and the black eagle blazoned on the flag, that I saw floating on the Castle of Milan? The sight of these symbols of foreign oppression recalled the haggard faces and toil-bent frames I had seen on my journey to Milan. I thought of the rich harvests which the sun of Lombardy ripens only that the Austrian may reap them, and the fertile vines which the Lombard plants only that the Croat may gather them. I thought of the sixty thousand expatriated citizens whose lands the Government had confiscated, and of the victims that pined in the fortresses and dungeons of Lombardy; and I felt that truly this was no paradise. To me, who could demand my passport and re-cross the Alps whenever I pleased, these mountains were a superb sight; but what could the poor Lombard, whom Radetzky might order to prison or to execution on the instant, see in them, but the walls of a vast prison? The light was fast fading, and I re-crossed the esplanade, on my way back to the city. High above its roofs, rose the spires and turrets of the Duomo, looking palely in the twilight, and reminding one of a cluster of Norwegian pines, covered with the snows of winter. As I slowly and musingly pursued my way, my mind went back to the better days of Milan. Here Ambrose had lived; and how oft, at even-tide, had his feet traversed this very plain, musing, the while, on the future prospects of the Church. Ah! little did he think, that what he believed to be the opening day was but a brief twilight, dividing the pagan darkness now past from the papal night then fast descending. But to the Churches of Lombardy it was longer light than to those of southern Italy. Ambrose went to the grave; but the spirit of the man who had closed the Cathedral gates in the face of the Goths of Justina, and exacted a public repentance of the Emperor Theodosius, lived after him. From him, doubtless, the Milanese caught that love of independence in spiritual matters which long afterwards so honourably distinguished them. They fought a hard battle with Rome for their religious freedom, but the battle proved a losing one. It was not, however, till towards the twelfth century, when every other Church in Christendom almost had acknowledged the claims of Rome, and an Innocent was about to mount the throne of the Vatican, that the complete subjugation of the Churches of Lombardy was effected. When the sixteenth century, like the breath of heaven, opened on the world, the Reformation began to take root in Lombardy. But, alas! the ancient spirit of the Milanese revived for but a moment, only to be crushed by the Inquisition. The arts by which this terrible tribunal was introduced into the duchy finely illustrate the policy of Rome, which knows so well how to temporize without relinquishing her claims. Philip II. proposed to establish this tribunal in Milan after the Spanish fashion; and Pope Pius IV. at first favoured his design. But finding that the Milanese were determined to resist, the pontiff espoused their cause, and told them, in effect, that it was not without reason that they dreaded the Spanish Inquisition. It was, he said, a harsh, cruel, inexorable Court--(he forgot that he had sanctioned it by a bull)--which condemned men without trial; but he had an Inquisition of his own, which never did any one any harm, and which his subjects in Rome were exceedingly fond of. This he would send to them. The Milanese were caught in the trap. In the hope of getting rid of the Spanish Inquisition, they accepted the Roman one, which proved equally fatal in the end. The degradation of Lombardy dates from that day. The Inquisition paved the way for Austrian domination. The familiars of the Holy Office were the avant couriers of the black eagles and Croats of the house of Hapsburg. In the arch behind me, so simple withal, and yet so noble in its design, and whose beauty, dependent on no adventitious helps or meretricious ornaments, but inherent in itself, was seen and felt by all, I saw, I thought, a type of the Gospel; while the many-pinnacled and richly-fretted Cathedral before me seemed the representative of the Papacy. As stands this arch, in simple but eternal beauty, beside the inflated glories of the Duomo, so stands the gospel amid the spurious systems of the world. They, like the Cathedral, are elaborate and artificial piles. The stones of which they are built are absurd doctrines, burdensome rites, and meaningless ceremonies. In beautiful contrast to their complexity and inconsistency, the Gospel presents to the world one simple and grand idea. They perplex and weary their votaries, who lose themselves amid the tangled paths and intricate labyrinths with which they abound. The Gospel, on the other hand, offers a plain and straight path to the enquirer, which, once found, can never be lost. These systems grow old, and, having lived their day, return to the earth, out of which they arose. The Gospel never dies,--never grows old. Fixed on an immoveable basis, it stands sublimely forth amid the lapse of ages and the decay of systems, charming all minds by its simplicity, and subduing all minds by its power. It says nothing of penances, nothing of pilgrimages, nothing of tradition, nor of works of supererogation, nor of efficacious sacraments dispensed by the hands of an apostolically descended clergy: its one simple and sublime announcement is, that _Eternal Life is the Free Gift of God through the Death of his Son_. CHAPTER X. THE DUOMO OF MILAN. Interior Disappoints at First Sight--Expands into Magnificence--Description of Interior--Mummy of San Carlo Borromeo--His too early Canonization--A Priest at Mass--The Two Mysteries--Distinction between Religion and Worship--Roof of Cathedral--Aspect of Lombardy from thence--Ascend to the Top of Tower--Objects in the Square--Miniature of the World--The Alps from the Cathedral Roof--Martyr Associations--A Future Morning. My next day was devoted to the Cathedral. Entering by the great western doorway,--a low-browed arch, rich in carving and statuary,--I pushed aside the thick, heavy quilt that closes the entrance of all the Italian churches, and stood beneath the roof. My first feeling was one of disappointment; so great was the contrast betwixt the airy and sunlight beauty of the exterior, and the massive and sombre grandeur within. The marble of the floor was sorely fretted by the foot: its original colours of blue and red had passed into a dingy gray, chequered with the variously-tinted light which flowed in through the stained windows. The white walls and unadorned pillars looked cold and naked. Beggars were extending their caps towards you for an alms. On the floor rose a stack of rush-bottomed chairs, as high as a two-storey house,--as if the priests, dreading an eméute, had made preparations by throwing up a barricade. A carpenter, mounted on a tall ladder, was busied, with hammer and nails, suspending hangings of tapestry along the nave, in honour, I presume, of some saint whose fête-day was approaching. The dim light could but feebly illuminate the many-pillared, long-aisled building, and gave to the vast edifice something of a cavern look. But by and by the eye got attempered; and then, like an autumnal haze clearing away from the face of the landscape, and revealing the glories of green meadow, golden field, and wooded mountain, the obscurity that wrapped pillar and aisle gradually brightened up, and the temple around me began to develope into the noblest proportions and the most impressive grandeur. Some hundred and fifty feet over head was suspended the stone roof; and one could not but admire the lightness and elegance of its groined vaultings, and the stately stature of the columns that supported it. Their feet planted on the marble floor, they stood, bearing up with unbowing strength, through the long centuries, the massive, stable, steadfast roof, from which the spirit of tranquillity and calm seemed to breathe upon you. On either hand three rows of colossal pillars ran off, forming a noble perspective of well nigh five hundred feet. They stretched away over transept and chancel, towards the great eastern window, which, like a sun glowing with rosy light, was seen rising behind the high altar, bearing on its ample disc the emblazoned symbols of the Book of the Apocalypse. The aisles were deep and shadowy; and through their forests of columns there broke on the sight glimpses of monumental tombs and altars ranged against the wall. I passed slowly along in front of these beautiful monuments, and read upon their marble the names of warriors and cardinals, some of whom still keep their place on the page of history. It took me some three hours to make the circuit of the Cathedral; but I shall not spend as many minutes in describing the works of art--some of them marvels of their kind--which passed under my eye; for my readers, I suspect, would not thank me for doing worse what the guide-books have done better. Below the great window in the apsis,--the same that contains what is one of the earliest of modern commentaries on the Book of Revelation,--the pavement was perforated by a number of small openings; and on looking down, I could see a subterranean chamber, with burning lamps. Its wall was adorned with pictures like the great temple above: and I could plainly hear the low chant of priests issuing from it. I had lighted, in short, upon a subterranean chapel; and here, in a shrine of gold and silver, lay embalmed the body of a former Archbishop of Milan--San Carlo Borromeo. Through the glass-lid of the coffin you could see the half-rotten corpse,--for the skill of the embalmer had been no match for the stealthy advances of decay,--tricked out in its gorgeous vestments, with the ring glittering on its finger, and the mitre pressing upon its fleshless skull. San Carlo Borromeo is the patron saint of Milan; and hence these perpetual lamps and ceaseless chantings at his tomb. The black withered face and naked skull grin horribly at the flaunting finery that surrounds him; and one almost expects to see him stretch out his skeleton hands, and tear it angrily in rags. The unusually short period of thirty years was all that intervened betwixt the death and the canonization of San Carlo; and his mother, who was alive at the time, though a very aged woman, had the peculiar satisfaction of seeing her son placed on the altars of Rome, and become an object of worship,--a happiness which, so far as we know, has not been enjoyed by mortal mother since the days of Juno and other ladies of her time. We do not envy San Carlo his honours; but we submit whether it was judicious to confer them just so soon. Before decreeing worship to one, would it not be better to let his contemporaries pass from the stage of time? Incongruous reminiscences are apt to mix themselves up with his worship. San Carlo had been like other children when young, we doubt not, and was none the worse of the castigation he received at times from the hand of her whose duty it now became to worship him. His mother little dreamt that it was an infant god she was chastising. "He was a pleasant companion," said a lady, when informed of the canonization of St Francis de Sales, "but he cheated horribly at cards." "When I was at Milan," says Addison, "I saw a book newly published, that was dedicated to the present head of the Borromean family, and entitled, _A Discourse on the Humility of Jesus Christ, and of St Charles Borromeo_." I came round, and stood in front of the high altar. It towers to a great height, looking like the tall mast of a ship; and, could any supposable influence throw the marble floor on which it rests into billows, it might ride safely on their tops, beneath the stone roof of the Cathedral. A priest was saying mass, and some half-dozen of persons on the wooden benches before the chancel were joining in the service. It was a cold affair; and the vastness of the building but tended to throw an air of insignificance over it. The languid faces of the priest and his diminutive congregation brought vividly to my recollection the crowd of animated countenances I had seen outside the same building, around Punch, the day before. The devotion before me was a dead, not a living thing. It had been dead before the foundations of this august temple were laid. But it loved to revisit "the glimpses" of these tapers, and to grimace and mutter amid these shadowy aisles. To nothing could I compare it but to the skeleton in the chapel beneath, that lay rotting in a shroud of gorgeous robes. It was as much a corpse as that skeleton, and, like it too, it bore a shroud of purple and scarlet, and fine linen and gold, which concealed only in part its ghastliness. Were Ambrose to come back, he would once more close his Cathedral gates, but this time in the face of the priests. "Without controversy," says the apostle, "great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh." "Without controversy, great is the mystery of" iniquity. "God was manifest in the" mass. These are the two INCARNATIONS--the two MYSTERIES. They stand confronting one another. Romish writers style the mass emphatically "the mystery;" and as that dogma is a capital one in their system, it follows that their Church has _mystery_ written on her forehead, as plainly as John saw it on that of the woman in the Apocalypse. But farther, what is the principle of the mass? Is it not that Christ is again offered in sacrifice, and that the pain he endures in being so propitiates God in your behalf? Is not, then, the area of Europe that is covered with masses "_the place where our Lord was crucified_?" The stream can never rise higher than its source; and so is it with worship. That worship that cometh of man cannot, in the nature of things, rise higher than man. The worship of Rome is manifestly man-contrived. It may be expected, therefore, to rise to the level of his tastes, but not a hairbreadth higher. It may stimulate and delight his faculties, such as they are, but it cannot regenerate them. At the best, it is only the æsthetic faculties which the worship of Rome calls into exercise. It presents no truth to the mind, and cannot therefore act upon the moral powers. God is unseen: He is hidden in the dark shadow of the priest. How, then, can He be regarded with confidence or love? The doctrine of the atonement,--the central glory of the Christian system,--is unknown. It is eclipsed by the mass. If you want to be religious,--to obtain salvation,--you buy masses. You need not cultivate any moral quality. You need not even be grateful. You have paid the market-price of the salvation you carry home, and are debtor to no one. Those who speak of the worship of the Church of Rome as well fitted to make men devout, only betray their complete ignorance of all that constitutes worship. Men must be devout before they can worship. There is no error in the world more common than that of putting worship for religion. Worship is not the cause, but the effect. Worship is simply the expression of an inward feeling, that feeling being religion; and nothing is more obvious, than that till this feeling be implanted, there can be no worship. The man may bow, or chant, or mutter; he cannot worship. He may be dazzled by fine pictures, but not melted into love or raised to hope by glorious truths. Moral feelings can be produced not otherwise than by the apprehension of moral truths; but in the Church of Rome all the great verities of revelation lie out of sight, being covered with the dense shadow of symbol and error. A single verse of Scripture would do more to awaken mind and produce devotion than all the statues and fine pictures of all the cathedrals in Italy. I got weary at last of these shadowy aisles and the priests' monotonous chant; and so, paying a small fee, I had a low door in the south transept opened to me; and, groping my way up a stair of an hundred and fifty steps, or rather more, I came out upon the top of the Cathedral. I had left a noble temple, but only to be ushered into a far nobler,--its roof the blue vault, its floor the great Lombardy plain, and its walls the Alps and Apennines. The glory of the temple beneath was forgotten by reason of the greater glory of that into which I had entered. It was not yet noon, and the morning mists were not yet wholly dissipated. The Alps and the Apennines were imprisoned in a shroud of vapour. Nevertheless the scene was a noble one. Lombardy was level as the sea. I have seen as level and as circular an expanse from a ship's deck, when out of sight of land, but nowhere else. One of the most prominent features of the scene were the long straight rows of the Lombardy poplar, which, rooted in its native soil, and drinking its native waters, shoots up into the most goodly stature and the most graceful form. And then, there were glimpses of beautifully green meadows, and long silvery lines of canals; and all over the plain there peeped out from amidst rich woods, the white walls of hamlets and towns, and the tall, slender Campanile. The country towards the north was remarkably populous. From the gates of Milan to the skirts of the mists that veiled the Alps the plain was all a-gleam with white-walled villages, beautifully embowered. A fairer picture, or one more suggestive of peace and happiness, is perhaps nowhere to be seen. But, alas! past experience had taught me, that these dwellings, so lovely when seen from afar, would sink, on a near approach, into ill-furnished and filthy hovels, with inmates groaning under the double burden of ignorance and poverty. When the more distant objects allowed me to attend to those at hand, I found that I was not alone on the Cathedral's roof. There were around me an assembly of some thousands. The only moving figure, it is true, was myself: the rest stood mute and motionless, each in his little house of stone; but so eloquent withal, in both look and gesture, that you half expected to find yourself addressed by some one in this life-like crowd of figures. I ascended to the different levels by steps on the flying buttresses. A winding staircase in a turret of open tracery next carried me to the Octagon, where I found myself surrounded by a new zone of statues. Here I again made a long halt, admiring the landscape as seen under this new elevation, and doing my best to scrape acquaintance with my new companions. I now prepared for my final ascent. Entering the spire, I ascended its winding staircase, and came out at the foot of the pyramid that crowns the edifice. Higher I could not go. Here I stood at a height of about three hundred and fifty feet, looking down upon the city and the plain. I had left the grosser forms of monks and bishops far beneath, and was surrounded--as became my aerial position--with winged cherubs, newly alighted, as it seemed, on the spires and turrets which shot up like a forest at my feet. Here I waited the coming of the Alps, with all the impatience with which an audience at the theatre waits the rising of the curtain. Meanwhile, till it should please Monte Rosa and her long train of white-robed companions to emerge, I had the city spectacles to amuse me. There was Milan at my feet. I could count its every house, and trace the windings of its every street and lane, as easily as though it had been laid down upon a map. I could see innumerable black dots moving about in the streets,--mingling, crossing, gathering in little knots, then dissolving, and the constituent atoms falling into the stream, and floating away. Then there came a long white line with nodding plumes; and I could faintly hear the tramp of horses; and then there followed a mustering of men and a flashing of bayonets in the square below. I sat watching the manoeuvres of the little army beneath for an hour or so, while drum and clarionet did their best to fill the square with music, and send up their thousand echoes to break and die amid the spires and statues of the Cathedral. At last the mimic war was ended, and I was left alone, with the silent and moveless, but ever acting statues around and below me. What a picture, thought I, of the pageantry of life, as viewed from a higher point than this world! Instead of an hour, take a thousand years, and how do the scenes shift! The golden spectacle of empire has moved westward from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Tiber and the Thames. You can trace its track by the ruins it has left. The field has been illuminated this hour by the gleam of arts and empire, and buried in the darkness of barbarism the next. Man has been ever busy. He has builded cities, fought battles, set up thrones, constructed systems. There has been much toil and confusion, but, alas! little progress. Such would be the sigh which some superior being from some tranquil station on high would heave over the ceaseless struggle and change in the valley of the world. And yet, amid all its changes, great principles have been taking root, and a noble edifice has been emerging. But, lo! the mists are rising, and yonder are the Alps. Now that the curtain is rent, one flashing peak bursts upon you after another. They come not in scores, but in hundreds. And now the whole chain, from the snowy dome of the Ortelles in the far-off Tyrol, to the beauteous pyramid of Monte Viso in the south-western sky, is before you in its noble sweep of many hundreds of miles, with thousands of snowy peaks, amid which, pre-eminent in glory, rises Monte Rosa. Turning to the south, you have the purple summits of the Apennines rising above the plain. Between this blue line in the south and that magnificent rampart of glaciers and peaks in the north, what a vast and dazzling picture of meadows, woods, rivers, cities, with the sun of Italy shining over all! Ye glorious piles! well are ye termed everlasting. Kings and kingdoms pass away, but on you there passes not the shadow of change. Ye saw the foundations of Rome laid;--now ye look down upon its ruins. In comparison with yours, man's life dwindles to a moment. Like the flower at your foot, he blooms for an instant, and sinks into the tomb. Nay, what is a nation's duration, when weighed against thine? Even the forests that wave on your slopes will outlast empires. Proud piles, how do ye stamp with insignificance man's greatest labours! This glorious edifice on which I stand,--ages was it in building; myriads of hands helped to rear it; and yet, in comparison with your gigantic masses, what is it?--a mere speck. Already it is growing old;--ye are still young. The tempests of six thousand winters have not bowed you down. Your glory lightened the cradle of nations,--your shadows cover their tomb. But to me the great charm of the Alps lay in the sacred character which they wore. They seemed to rise before me, a vast temple, crowned, as temple never was, with sapphire domes and pinnacles, in which a holy nation had worshipped when Europe lay prostrate before the Dagon of the Seven Hills. I could go back to a time when that plain, now covered, alas! with the putridities of superstition, was the scene of churches in which the gospel was preached, of homes in which the Bible was read, of happy death-beds, and blessed graves,--graves in which, in the sublime words of our catechism, "the bodies of the saints being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the Resurrection." Sleep on, ye blessed dead! This pile shall crumble into ruin; the Alps dissolve, Rome herself sink; but not a particle of your dust shall be lost. The reflection recalled vividly an incident of years gone by. I had sauntered at the evening hour into a retired country churchyard in Scotland. The sun, after a day of heavy rain, was setting in glory, and his rays were gilding the long wet grass above the graves, and tinting the hoar ruins of a cathedral that rose in the midst of them, when my eye accidentally fell upon the following lines, which I quote from memory, carved in plain characters upon one of the tombstones:-- The wise, the just, the pious, and the brave, Live in their death, and flourish from the grave. Grain hid in earth repays the peasant's care, And evening suns but set to rise more fair. There are no such epitaphs in the graveyards of Lombardy; nor could there be any such in that of Dunblane, but for the Reformation. CHAPTER XI. MILAN TO BRESCIA. Biblioteca Ambrosiana--A Lamp in a Sepulchre--The Palimpsests--Labours of the Monks in the Cause of Knowledge--Cardinal Mai--He recovers many valuable Manuscripts of the Ancients which the Monks had Mutilated--Ulfila's Bible--The War against Knowledge--The Brazent Serpent at Sant' Ambrogio--Passport Office--Last Visit to the Duomo and the Arco Della Pace--The Alps apostrophized--Dinner at a Restaurant--Leave Milan--Procession of the Alps--Treviglio--The River Adda--The Postilion--Evening, with dreamy, decaying Borgos--Caravaggio--Supper at Chiari--Brescia--Arnold of Brescia. The morning of my last day in Milan was passed in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. This justly renowned library was founded in 1609 by Cardinal Borromeo, the cousin of that Borromeo whose mummy lies so gorgeously enshrined in the subterranean chapel of the Duomo. This prelate was at vast care and expense to bring together in this library the most precious manuscripts extant. For this purpose he sent learned men into every part of Europe, with instructions to buy whatever of value they might be fortunate enough to discover, and to copy such writings as their owners might be unwilling to part with. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is worth a visit, were it only to see the first public library established in Europe. There were earlier libraries, and some not inconsiderable ones, but only in connection with cathedrals and colleges; and access to them was refused to all save to the members of these establishments. This, on the contrary, was opened to the public; and, with a liberality rare in those days, writing materials were freely supplied to all who frequented it. The library buildings form a quadrangle of massive masonry, with a grave, venerable look, becoming its name. The collection is upwards of 80,000 volumes; but, what is not very complimentary to the literary tastes of the prefetto and honorary canons of Sant' Ambrogio, the curators of the library, they are arranged, not according to their subjects, but according to their sizes. This library reminded me of a lamp in an Etrurian tomb. There was light enough in that hall to illuminate the whole duchy of the Milanese, could it but find an outlet. As it is, I fear a few straggling rays are all that are able to escape. There is no catalogue of the books, save some very imperfect lists; and I was told that there is a pontifical bull against making any such. I saw a few visitors in its halls, attracted, like myself, by its curiosities; but I saw no one who had come to restore volumes they had read, and receive others in their room. The modern inhabitant of Milan gives his days and nights to the café and the club,--not to the library. He lives and dies unpolluted by the printing press,--an execrable invention of the fifteenth century, from which a paternal Government and an infallible Church employ their utmost energies to shield him. The works of dead authors he dare not read; the productions of living ones he dare not print; and the only compositions to which he has access are the decrees of the Austrian police, and the Catechism of the Jesuit. He fully appreciates, of course, the care taken to preserve the purity of his political and religious faith, and will one day show the extent of his gratitude. I saw in this library the famous _Palimpsests_. My readers know, of course, what these are. The _Palimpsests_ are little books of vellum, from which an original and ancient writing has been erased, to make room for the productions of later ages and of other pens. These pages bore originally the thoughts of Virgil and Livy, and, in short, of almost all the great writers of pagan, antiquity; but the monks, who did not relish their pagan notions, thought the vellum would be much better bestowed if filled with their own homilies. The good fathers conceived the project of enlightening and evangelizing the world by purging of its paganism all the vellum in Europe; and, being much intent on their object, they succeeded in it to an amazing extent. "A second deluge learning did o'errun, And the monks finished what the Goths begun." Our readers have often seen with what rapidity a fog swallows up a landscape. They have marked, with a feeling of despair, golden peak and emerald valley sinking hopelessly in the dank drizzle. So the classics went down before the monks. The ancients were set a-trudging through the world in a monk's cowl and a friar's frock. On the same page from which Cicero had thundered, a monk now discoursed. Where Livy's pictured narrative had been, you found only a dull wearisome legend. Where the thunder of Homer's lyre or the sweet notes of Virgil's muse had resounded, you heard now a dismal croak or a lugubrious chant. Such was the strange metamorphosis which the ancients were compelled to endure at the hands of the' monks; and such was the way in which they strove to earn the gratitude of succeeding ages by the benefits they conferred on learning. It gives us pleasure to say that Cardinal Mai was amongst the most distinguished of those who undertook the task of setting free the imprisoned ancients,--of stripping them of the monk's hood and the friar's habit, and presenting them to the world in their own form. He laboured in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and succeeded in exhuming from darkness and dust the treasures which neglect and superstition had buried there. In the number of the works which the monks had palimpsested, and which Mai rescued from destruction, we may cite some fragments of Homer, with a great number of paintings equally ancient, and of which the subjects are taken from the works of this great poet; the unpublished writings of Cornelius Fronto; the unpublished letters of Antoninus Pius, of Marcus Aurelius, of Lucius Verus, and of Appian; some fragments of discourses of Aurelius Symmachus; the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which were up to that time imperfect; unpublished fragments of Plautus, of Isæus, of Themistius; an unpublished work of the philosopher Porphyrius; some writings of the Jew Philo; the ancient interpreters of Virgil; two books of the Chronicles of Eusebius Pamphilus; the VI. and XIV. Sibylline Books; and the six books of the Republic of Cicero. I saw, too, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, fragments of the version of the Bible made in the middle of the fourth century, by Ulfila, bishop of the Mæsogoths. The labours of the bishop underwent a strange dispersion. The gospels are at Upsala; the epistles were found at Wolfenbuttel; while a portion of the Acts of the Apostles and of the Old Testament were extracted from the palimpsests. The original writing--the superincumbent rubbish being removed--looked out in a bold, well defined character, in as fresh a black, in some places, as when newly written; in others, in a dim, rusty colour, which a practised eye only could decipher. Thus the war against knowledge has gone on. The Caliph Omer burnt the Alexandrine library. Next came the little busy creatures the monks, who, mothlike, ate up the ancient manuscripts. Last of all appeared the Pope, with his Index Expurgatorius, to put under lock and key what the Caliph had spared, and the monks had not been able to devour. The torch, the sponge, the anathema, have been tried each in its turn. Still the light spreads. I cannot enter on the other curious manuscripts which this library contains; nor have I anything to say of the numerous beautiful portraits and pictures with which its walls are adorned. The _Cenacolo_, or "Last Supper," by Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the Dominican convent, is fast perishing. It has not yet "lost all its original brightness," and is mightier in its decay than most other pictures are in the bloom and vigour of their youth. I recollect the great Scottish painter Harvey saying to me, that he was more affected by "that ruin," than he was by all the other works of art which he saw in Italy. The grandeur of the central head has never been approached in any copy. One thing I regret,--I did not visit the Sant' Ambrogio, and so missed seeing the famous brazen serpent which is to hiss just before the world comes to an end. This serpent is the same that Moses made in the wilderness, and which Hezekiah afterwards brake in pieces: at least it would be heresy in Milan not to believe this. It must be comfortable to a busy age, which has so many things to think of without troubling itself about how or when the world is to end, to know that, if it must end, due warning will be given of that catastrophe. The vineyards of Lombardy are good, and monks, like other men, occasionally get thirsty; and it might spoil the good fathers' digestion were the brazen serpent of Sant' Ambrogio to hiss after dinner. But doubtless it will be discreet on this head. There is said to be in some one of the graveyards of Orkney, a tombstone on which an angel may be seen blowing a great trumpet with all his might, while the dead man below is made to say, "When I hear this, I will rise." The stone-trumpet will be heard to blow, we daresay, about the same time that the serpent of Sant' Ambrogio will be heard to hiss. I was now to bid farewell to Milan, and turn my face towards the blue Adriatic. But one unpleasant preliminary must first be gone through. The police had opened the gates of Milan to admit me, and the same authorities must open them for my departure. I walked to the passport office, where the officials received me with great politeness, and bade me be seated while my passport was being got ready. This interesting process was only a few minutes in doing; and, on payment of the customary fee, was handed me "all right" for Venice, bating the innumerable intermediate inspections and _visés_ by the way; for a passport, like a chronometer, must be continually compared with the meridian, and put right. I put my passport into my pocket; but on opening it afterwards, I got a surprise. Its pages were getting covered all over with little creatures with wings, and, as my fancy suggested, with stings,--the black eagles of Austria. How was I to carry in my pocket such a cage of imps? How was I to sleep at night in their company? Should they take it into their head to creep out of my book, and buzz round my bed, would it not give me unpleasant dreams? And yet part with them I could not. These black, impish creatures must be my pioneers to Venice. I now made haste to take my last look of the several objects which had endeared themselves to me during my short stay. I felt towards them as friends,--long known and beloved friends; and never should I turn and look on the track of my past existence without seeing their forms of beauty, dim and indistinct, it might be, as the haze of lapsed time should gather over them; still, always visible,--never altogether blotted out. I walked round the Cathedral for the last time. There it stood,--beauty, like an eternal halo, sitting rainbow-like upon its towers and pinnacles. Its thousand statues and cherubs stood silent and entranced, tranquil as ever, all unmoved by the city's din, reminding one of dwellers in some region of deep and unbroken bliss. "Glorious pile!" said I, apostrophizing it, "I am but a pilgrim, a shadow; so are all who now look on thee,--shadows. But you will continue to delight the ages to come, as you have done those that are past." I had a run, too, to the _Piazza di Armi_, to see Beauty incarnate, if I may so express myself, in the form of the Arco della Pace. It is a gem, the brightest of its kind that earth contains. The faultless grace of its form is finely set off by the overwhelming Alpine masses in the distance, which seemed as if raised on purpose to defend it, and which rise, piled one above another, in furrowed, jagged, unchiselled, fearful sublimity. I came round by the boulevard of the Porte Orientale, on my way back to the city. It is a noble promenade. Above are the boughs of the over-arching elms; on this hand are the city domes and cathedral spires, with their sweet chimes continually falling on the ear; and on that are the suburban gardens, with the poplars and campaniles rising in stately grace beyond. The glorious perspective is terminated by the Alps. As the breezes from their flashing summits stirred the leaves overhead, they seemed to speak of liberty. I wonder the Croat don't impose silence on them. What right have they, by their glowing peaks, and their free play of light and shade, and their storms, and their far-darting lightnings, to stir the immortal aspirations in man's bosom? These white hills are great, unconquerable democrats. They will continually be singing hymns in praise of liberty. Yet why they should, I know not. Milan is deaf. Why preach liberty to men in chains? Surely the Alps,--the free and joyous Alps,--which scatter corn and wine from their horn of plenty so unweariedly, have no delight in tormenting the enslaved nations at their feet. Why do ye not, ye glorious mountains, put on sackcloth, and mourn with the mourning nations beneath you? How can ye look down on these dungeons, on these groaning victims, on the tears of so many widows and orphans, and yet wear these robes of beauty, and sing your song of gladness at sunrise? Or do ye descry from afar the coming of a better era? and is the glory that mantles your summits the kindling of an inward joy at the prospect of coming freedom? and are these whisperings of liberty the first utterances of that shout with which you will welcome the opening of the tomb and the rising of the nations? The formidable process of loading the _diligence_ was not yet completed. There was a perfect Mont Blanc of luggage to transfer from the courtyard to the top of the _diligence_, not in a hurry, but calmly and deliberately. The articles were to be selected one by one, and put upon the top, and taken down again, and laid in the courtyard, and put up a second time, and perhaps a third time; and after repeated attempts and failures, and a reasonable amount of vociferation and emphatic ejaculations on the part of postilions and commissionaires, the thing was to be declared completed, and finally roped down, and the great leathern cover drawn over all. Still the process would be got through before the hour of table d'hote at the Albergo de Reale. I must needs therefore dine at a restaurant. I betook me to one of these establishments hard by the _diligence_ office, and took my place at a small table, with its white napery, small bottle of wine, and roll of Lombardy bread, in the same room with some thirty or so of the merchants and citizens of Milan. I intimated my wish to dine _à la carte_; and instantly the waiter placed the tariff before me, with its list of dishes and prices. I selected what dishes I pleased, marking, at the same time, what I should have to pay for each. I dined well, having respect to the journey of two days and a night I was about to begin, and knowing, too, that an Italian _diligence_ halts only at long intervals. The reckoning, I thought, could be no dubious or difficult matter. I knew the dishes I had eaten, and I saw the prices affixed, and I concluded that a simple arithmetical process would infallibly conduct me to the aggregate cost. But when my bill was handed me (a formality dispensed with in the case of those beside me), I found that my reckoning and that of "mine host" differed materially. The sum total on his showing was three times greater than on mine. I was curious to discover the source of this rather startling discrepancy in so small a sum. I went over again the list of eaten dishes, and once more went through the simple arithmetical process which gave the sum total of their cost, but with no difference in the result. It was plain that there was some mysterious quality in the arithmetic, or some nice distinctions in the cookery, which I had not taken into account, which disturbed my calculations. I became but the more anxious to have the riddle explained. In my perplexity I applied to the waiter, who referred me to his master. The day was hot; and boiling, stewing, and roasting, is hot work; and this may account for the passion into which my simple interrogatory put "mine host." "It was a just bill, and must be paid." I hinted that I did not impugn its justice, but simply craved some explanation about its items. Whereupon mine host, becoming cooler, condescended to inform me that I had not dined exactly according to the _carte_; that certain additions had been made to certain dishes; and that it did not become an Englishman to inquire farther into the matter. If not so satisfactory as might be wished, this defence was better than I had expected; so, paying my debts to Boniface, I departed, consoling myself with the reflection, that if I had three times more to pay than my neighbours, having fared neither better nor worse than they, I had, unlike these poor men, eaten my dinner without fetters on my hands. This time the _banquette_ of the _diligence_, with all its rich views, was bespoke, so I had to content myself with the _interieur_. It was roomy, however; there were but four of us, and its window admitted, I found, ample views of meadow and mountain. We drove to the station of the Venice railway, pleasantly situated amid orchards and extra-mural albergos. The horses were taken out, and the immense vehicle was lifted up,--wheels, baggage, passengers and all,--and put upon a truck. Away went the long line of carriages,--away went the _diligence_, standing up like a huge leathern castle upon its truck; while the engine whistled, snorted, screeched, groaned, and uttered all sorts of irreverent and every-day sounds, just as if the Alps had not been looking down upon it, and classic towns ever and anon starting up beside its path: a glorious vision of fresh meadows, bordered with little canals, brimful of water, and barred with the long shadows of campanile and sycamore,--for the sun was westering,--shot past us. The Alps came on with more slow and majestic pace. As peak after peak passed by, it seemed as if the whole community of hills had commenced a general march on Monte Viso, with all their crags, glaciers, and pine-forests. One might have thought that Sovran Blanc had summoned the nobles and high princes of his kingdom to meet him in his hall of audience, to debate some weighty point of Alpine government. An august assembly as ever graced monarch's court, in their robes of white and their cornets of eternal ice, would these tall and proud forms present. Treviglio, beyond which the railway has not yet been opened, was reached in less than two hours. When near the town, the vast mirror of the blue Como, spread out amid the dark overhanging mountains, burst upon us. From it flowed forth the Adda, which we crossed. As its mighty stream, burning in the sunset, rolled along, it spangled with glory the green plain, as the milky-way the firmament. There is nothing in nature like these Alpine rivers. They fill their banks with such a wasteful prodigality of water, and they go on their way with a conscious might, as if they felt that behind them is an eternally exhaustless source. Let the sun smite them with his fiercest ray; they dread him not. Others may shrink and dry up under his beam: their fountains are the snows of a thousand winters. On reaching the station, our _diligence_,--including passengers, and all that pertained to them,--was lifted from its truck and put on wheels, and once more stood ready to move, in virtue of its own inherent power, that is, so soon as the horses should be attached. This operation was performed in the calm eve, amid the glancing casements of the little town, on which the purple hills and the tall silent poplars looked complacently down. Away we rumbled, the declining light still resting sweetly on the woods and hamlets. There are no postilions in the world, I believe, who can handle their whip like those of Italy. In very pride and joy our postilion cracked his whip, till the woods rang again. He took a peculiar delight in startling the echoes of the old villages, and the ears of the old villagers. Each report was like that of a twelve-pounder. This continual thunder, kept up above their heads, did not in the least affright the horses: they rather seemed proud of a master who could handle his whip in so workmanlike a fashion. He could so time the strokes as to make not much worse melody than that of some music-bells I have heard. He could play a tune on his whip. We passed, as the evening thickened its shadows, several ancient _borgos_. Gray they were, and drowsy, as if the sleep of a century weighed them down. They seemed to love the quiet, dying light of eve; and as they drew its soft mantle around them, they appeared most willing to forget a world which had forgotten them. They had not always led so quiet a life. Their youth had been passed amid the bustle of commerce; their manhood amid the alarms and rude shocks of war; and now, in their old age, they bore plainly the marks of the many shrewd brushes they had had to sustain when young. The houses were tall and roomy, and their architecture of a most substantial kind; but they had come to know strange tenants, that is, those of them that _had_ tenants, for not a few seemed empty. At the doors of others, dark withered faces looked out, as if wondering at the unusual din. I felt as if it were cruel to rouse these quiet slumber-loving towns, by dragging through their streets so noisy a vehicle as a _diligence_. We passed Caravaggio, famous as the birthplace of the two great painters who have both taken their name from their city,--the Caravacchi. We passed, too, the little Mozonnica, that is, all of it which the calamities of the middle ages have left. Darkness then fell upon us,--if a firmament begemmed with large lustrous stars could be called dark. The night wore on, varied only by two events of moment. The first was supper, for which we halted at about eleven o'clock, in the town of Chiari. At eleven at night people should think of sleeping,--not of eating. Not so in Italy, where supper is still the meal of the day. An Italian _diligence_ never breakfasts, unless a small cup of coffee, hurriedly snatched while the horses are being put to, can be called such. Sometimes it does not even dine; but it never omits to sup. The supper chamber in Chiari was most sumptuously laid out,--vermicelli soup, flesh, fowls, cheese, pastry, wine,--every viand, in short, that could tempt the appetite. But at midnight I refused to be tempted, though most of the other guests partook abundantly. I was much struck, on leaving the town, with the massive architecture of the houses, the strength of the gates, and other monuments of former greatness. Imagine Edinburgh grown old and half-ruined, and you have a picture of the towns of Italy, which was a land of elegant stone-built cities at a time when the capitals of northern Europe were little better than collections of wooden sheds half-buried in mire. There followed a long ride. Sleep, benignant goddess, looked in upon us, and helped to shorten the way. What surprised me not a little was, how soundly my companions snoozed, considering how they had supped. The stages passed slowly and wearily. At length there came a long, a very long halt. I roused myself, and stepped out. I was in a spacious street, with the cold biting wind blowing through it. The horses were away; the postilions had disappeared; some of the passengers were perambulating the pavement, and the rest were fast asleep in the _diligence_, which stood on the causeway, like a stranded vessel on the beach. On consulting my watch, I found it was three in the morning, and in answer to my inquiries I was told that I was in Brescia,--a famous city; but I should have preferred to visit it at a more seasonable hour. "The best feelings," says the poet, "must have victual," and the most classic towns must have sleep; so Brescia, forgetful that famous geographers who lived well-nigh two thousand years ago had mentioned its name, and that famous poets had sung its streams, and that it still contains innumerable relics of its high antiquity, slept on much as a Scotch village would have done at the same hour. Time is of no value on the south of the Alps. This long halt at this unseasonable hour was simply to set down an honest woman who had come with us from Milan. She was as big well-nigh as the _diligence_ itself; but what caused all our trouble was, not herself, but her trunk. It lay at the bottom of an immense pile of baggage, which rose on the top of the vehicle; and before it could be got at, every article had to be taken down, and put on the pavement. Of course, the baggage had to be put back, and the operation was gone through most deliberately and leisurely. A full hour and a half was consumed in the process; and the passengers, having no place to retire to, did their best to withstand the chill night air by a quick march on the street. So, these silent midnight streets I was treading were those of Brescia,--Brescia, within whose walls had met the valour of the mountains and the arts of the plain. I was now treading where pagan temples had once stood, where Christian sanctuaries had next arisen, and where there had been disciples not a few when the light of the Reformation broke on northern Italy. I remembered, too, that this was the city of "Arnold of Brescia," one of the reformers before the Reformation. Arnold was a man of great learning, an intrepid champion of the Church's purity, and the founder of the "Arnoldists," who inherited the zeal and intrepidity of their master. On the death of Innocent II., in the middle of the twelfth century, Arnold, finding Rome much agitated from the contests between the Pope and the Emperor, urged the Romans to throw off the yoke of a priest, and strike for their independence. The Romans lacked spirit to do so; and when, seven centuries afterwards, they came to make the attempt under Pius IX., they failed. Arnold was taken and crucified, his body reduced to ashes, and it was left to time, with its tragedies, to vindicate the wisdom of his advice, and avenge his blood; but to this hour no such opportunity of freeing themselves from thraldom as that which the Brescians then missed has presented itself. "Time flows,--nor winds, Nor stagnates, nor precipitates his course; But many a benefit borne upon his breast For human-kind sinks out of sight, is gone, No one knows how; nor seldom is put forth An angry arm that snatches good away, Never perhaps to re-appear." CHAPTER XII. THE PRESENT THE IMAGE OF THE PAST. Failure of the Reformation in Italy--Causes of this--Italian Martyrs--Their great Numbers--Consequences of rejecting the Reformation--The _Present_ the Avenger of the _Past_--Extract from the _Siècle_ to this Effect--An "Accepted Time" for Nations--Alternative offered to the several European Nations in the Sixteenth Century--According to their Choice then, so is their Position now--Protestant and Popish Nations contrasted. Of the singular interest that attaches to Italy during the first days of the Reformation I need not speak. The efforts of the Italians to throw off the papal yoke were great, but unsuccessful. Why these efforts came to nought would form a difficult but instructive subject of inquiry. They failed, perhaps, partly from being made so near the centre of the Roman power,--partly from the want of union and comprehension in the plans of the Italian reformers,--partly by reason of the dependence of the petty princes of the country upon the Pope,--and partly because the great sovereigns of Europe, although not unwilling that the Papacy should be weakened in their own country, by no means wished its extinction in Italy. But though Italy did not reach the goal of religious freedom, the roll of her martyrs includes the names of statesmen, scholars, nobles, priests, and citizens of all ranks. From the Alps to Sicily there was not a province in which there were not adherents of the doctrines of the Reformation, nor a city of any note in which there was not a little church, nor a man of genius or learning who was not friendly to the movement. There was scarce a prison whose walls did not immure some disciple of the Lord Jesus; and scarce a public square which did not reflect the gloomy light of the martyr's pile. Much has been done, by mutilating the public records, to consign these events to oblivion, and the names of many of the martyrs have been irretrievably lost; still enough remains to show that the doctrines of the Reformation were then widely spread, and that the numbers who suffered for them in Italy were great. Need I mention the names of Milan, of Vicenza, of Verona, of Venice, of Padua, of Ferrara,--one of the brightest in this constellation,--of Bologna, of Florence, of Sienna, of Rome? Most of these cities are renowned in the classic annals; all of them shared in the wealth and independence which the commerce of the middle ages conferred on the Italian republics; all of them figure in the revival of letters in the fifteenth century; but they are encompassed by a holier and yet more unfading halo, as the spots where the Italian reformers lived,--where they preached the blessed truths of the Bible to their countrymen,--and where they sealed their testimony with their blood. "During the whole of this century," that is, the sixteenth, says Dr M'Crie, in his "Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy," "the prisons of the Inquisition in Italy, and particularly at Rome, were filled with victims, including persons of noble birth, male and female, men of letters, and mechanics. Multitudes were condemned to penance, to the galleys, or other arbitrary punishments; and from time to time individuals were put to death." "The following description," says the same historian, "of the state of matters in 1568 is from the pen of one who was residing at that time on the borders of Italy:--'At Rome some are every day burnt, hanged, or beheaded. All the prisons and places of confinement are filled; and they are obliged to build new ones. That large city cannot furnish jails for the number of pious persons which are continually apprehended.'" I had time to ruminate on these things as I paced to and fro in the empty midnight streets of Brescia. Methought I could hear, in the silent night, the cry of the martyrs whose ashes sleep in the plains around, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth!" Yes; God has judged, and is avenging; and the doom takes the very form that the crime wore. An era of dungeons, and chains, and victims, has again come round to Italy; but this time it is "the men which dwell on the" papal "earth" that are suffering. When the Italians permitted Arnold, and thousands such as he, to be put to death, they were just opening the way for the wrath of the Papacy to reach themselves, which it has now done. Ah! little do those who gnash their teeth in the extremity of their torments, and curse the priests as the authors of these, reflect that their own and their fathers' wickedness, still unrepented of, has not less to do with their present miseries than the priestly tyranny which they so bitterly and justly execrate. In those ages these men were the _tools_ of the priesthood; in this they are its _victims_. Thus it is that the Present, in papal Europe, and especially in Italy, rises stamped with the likeness of the Past. The _Siècle_ of Paris, while the _Siècle_ was yet free, brought out this fact admirably, when it reminded the champions of Popery that the horrors of the first French Revolution were not new things, but old, which the Jacobins inherited from the Papists; and went on to ask them "if they have forgotten that the Convention found all the laws of the Terror written upon the past? The Committee of Public Safety was first contrived for the benefit of the monarchy. Were not the commissions called revolutionary tribunals first used against the Protestants? The drums which Santerre beat round the scaffolds of royalists followed a practice first adopted to drown the psalms of the reformed pastors. Were not the fusilades first used at the bidding of the priests to crush heresy? Did not the law of the suspected compel Protestants to nourish soldiers in their houses, as a punishment for refusing to go to mass? Were not the houses burned down of those who frequented Protestant preaching? Were not the properties of the Protestant emigrants confiscated? Did not the Marshal Nouilles order a war against bankers? Was not the law of the maximum, which regulated prices, practised by the regency? Was not the law of requisition for the public roads practised to prepare the roads for Queen Marie Leczinska? It is true, many priests perished in the Terror, but they were men of terror perishing by terror,--men of the sword perishing by the sword." I could not help feeling, too, when reflecting upon the state of Brescia, and of all the towns of Italy, and, indeed, of all the countries of Europe, that to nations, as well as individuals, there is "an accepted time" and a "day of salvation," which if they miss, they irremediably perish. If they enter not in when the door is open, it is in vain that they knock when it is shut. The same sentiment has been expressed by our great poet, in the well-known lines,-- "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound In shallows and in miseries." The sixteenth century started the European nations in a new career, and put it in the power of each to choose the principle of will or authority,--the compendious principle according to which both Church and State were governed under the Papacy, or that of law,--expressing not the will of one man, but the collective reason of the nation,--the distinctive principle of government under Protestantism. The century in question placed government by the canon law or government by the Bible side by side, and invited the nations of Europe to make their choice. The nations made their choice. Some ranged themselves on this side, some on that; and the sixteenth century saw them standing abreast, like competitors at the ancient Olympic games, ready, on the signal being given, to dart forward in the race for victory. They did not stand abreast, be it observed. The several competitors in this high race did not start on equally advantageous terms. The rich and powerful nations declared for Popery and arbitrary government; the weak and third-rate ones, for Protestantism. On one side stood Spain, then at the head of Europe,--rich in arts, in military glory, in the genius and chivalry of its people, in the resources of its soil, and mistress, besides, of splendid colonies. By her side stood France,--the equal of Spain in art, in civilization, in military genius, and inferior only to her proud neighbour in the single article of colonies. Austria came next, and then Italy. Such were the illustrious names ranged on the one side. All of them were powerful, opulent, highly civilized; and some of them cherished the recollections of imperishable renown, which is a mighty power in itself. We have no such names to recount on the other side. Those nations which entered the lists against the others were but second and third-rate Powers: Britain, which scarce possessed a foot-breadth of territory beyond her own island,--Holland, a country torn from the waves,--the Netherlands and Prussia, neither of which were of much consideration. In every particular the Protestant nations were inferior to the Papal nations, save in the single article of their Protestantism: nevertheless, that one quality has been sufficient to counterbalance, and far more than counterbalance, all the advantages possessed by the others. Since the day we speak of, what a different career has been that of these nations! Three centuries have sufficed to reverse their position. Civilization, glory, extent of territory, and material wealth, have all passed over from the one side to the other. Of the Protestant nations, Britain alone is more powerful than the whole of combined Europe in the sixteenth century. But, what is remarkable also, we find the various nations of Europe at this hour on the same side on which they ranged themselves in the sixteenth century. Those that neglected the opportunity which that century brought them of adopting Protestantism and a free government are to this day despotic. France has submitted to three bloody revolutions, in the hope of recovering what she criminally missed in the sixteenth century; but her tears and her blood have been shed in vain. The course of Spain, and that of the Italian States, have been not unsimilar. They have plunged into revolutions in quest of liberty, but have found only a deeper despotism. They have dethroned kings, proclaimed new constitutions, brought statesmen and citizens by thousands to the block; they have agonized and bled; but they have been unable to reverse their fatal choice at the Reformation. CHAPTER XIII. SCENERY OF LAKE GARDA--PESCHIERA--VERONA. Lake Garda--Memories of Trent--The Council of Trent fixed the Destiny as well as Creed of Rome--Questions for Infallibility--Why should Infallibility have to grope its Way?--Why does it reveal Truth piecemeal?--Why does it need Assessors?--The Immaculate Conception--Town of Desenzano--Magnificent Bullocks--Land of Virgil--Grandeur of Lake Garda--The Iron Peschiera--The Cypress Tree--Verona--Imposing Appearance of its Exterior--Richness and Beauty of surrounding Plains--Palmerston. When the morning broke we were skirting the base of the Tyrolese Alps. I could see masses of snow on some of the summits, from which a piercingly cold air came rushing down upon the plains. In a little the sun rose; and thankful we were for his warmth. Day was again abroad on the waters and the hills; and soon we forgot the night, with all its untoward occurrences. The face of the country was uneven; and we kept alternately winding and climbing among the spurs of the Alps. At length the magnificent expanse of Lake Garda, the Benacus of the ancients, opened before us. In breadth it was like an arm of the sea. There were one or two tall-masted ships on its waters; there were fine mountains on its northern shore; and on the east the conspicuous form of Monte Baldo leaned over it, as if looking at its own shadow in the lake. With the Lago di Garda came the memories of Trent; for at the distance of twenty miles or so from its northern shore is "the little town among the mountains," where the famous Council assembled, in which so many things were voted to be true which had been open questions till then, but to doubt which now were certain and eternal anathema. The Reformation addressed to Rome the last call to reconsider her position, and change her course while yet it was possible. It said to her, in effect, Repent now: to-morrow it will be too late. Rome gave her reply when she summoned the Council of Trent. That Council crystallized, so to speak, the various doubtful opinions and dogmas which had been floating about in solution, and fixed the creed of Rome. It did more,--it fixed her doom. Amid these mountains she issued the fiat of her fate. When she published the proceedings of Trent to the world, she said, "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; so help me----." To whom did she make her appeal? To the Emperor in the first place, when she prayed for the vengeance of the civil sword; and to the Prince of Darkness in the second, when she invoked damnation on all her opponents. Then her course was irrevocably fixed. She dare not now look behind her: to change a single iota were annihilation. She must go forward, amid accumulating errors, and absurdities, and blasphemies: amid opposing arts and sciences, and knowledge, she must go steadily onward,--onward to the precipice! It is interesting to mark, as we can in history, first, the feeble germinations of a papal dogma; next, its waxing growth; and at last, after the lapse of centuries, its full development and maturity. It is easy to conceive how a mere human science should advance only by slow and gradual stages,--astronomy, for instance, or geology, or even the more practical science of mechanics. Their authors have no infallible gift of discerning truth from error. They must observe nature; they must compare facts; they must deduce conclusions; they must correct previous errors; and this is both a slow and a laborious process. But Infallibility is saved all this labour. It knows at once, and from the beginning, all that is true, and all that is erroneous. It does so, or it is not Infallibility. Why, then, was it not till the sixteenth century that Infallibility gave anything like a fixed and complete creed to the Church? Why did it permit so many men, in all preceding ages, to live in ignorance of so many things in which it could so easily have enlightened them? Why did it permit so many questions to be debated, which it could so easily have settled? Why did it not give that creed to the Church in the first century which it kept back till the sixteenth? Why does it deal out truth piecemeal,--one dogma in this century, another in the next, and so on? Why does it not tell us all at once? And why, even to this hour, has it not told us all, but reserved some very important questions for future decision, or revelation rather? If it is replied that the Pope must first collect the suffrages of the Catholic bishops, this only lands us in deeper perplexities. Why should the Pope need assessors and advisers? Can Infallibility not walk alone, that it uses crutches? Can an infallible man not know truth from error till first he has collected the votes of fallible bishops? Why should Infallibility seek help, which it cannot in the nature of things need? If it is further replied, that this Infallibility is lodged betwixt the Pope and the Council, we are only confronted with greater difficulties. Is it when the decree has been voted by the Council that it becomes infallible? Then the Infallibility resides in the Council. Or is it when it is confirmed by the Pope that it becomes infallible? In that case the Infallibility is in the Pope. Or is it, as others maintain, only when the decree has been accepted by the Church that it is infallible, and does the Pope not know whether he ought to believe his own decree till he has heard the judgment of the Church? We had thought that Infallibility was one and indivisible; but it seems it may be parted in twain; nay, more, it may be broken down into an indefinite number of parts; and though no one of these parts taken separately is Infallibility, yet taken together they constitute Infallibility. In other words, the union of a number of finite quantities can make an infinite. Sound philosophy, truly! If we go back, then, as the Ultramontanist will, to the dogma that the seat of Infallibility is the chair of Peter, the question returns, why cannot, or will not, the Pope determine in one age what he is able and willing to determine in another? The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, for instance, if it is a truth now, was a truth in the first age, when it was not even dreamed of; it was a truth in the twelfth century, when it _was_ dreamed of; it was a truth in the seventeenth century, when it gave rise to so many scandalous divisions and conflicts; and yet it was not till December 1854 that Infallibility pronounced it to be a truth, and so momentous a truth, that no one can be saved who doubts it. Will any Romanist kindly explain this to us? We can accept no excuses about the variety of opinion in the Church, or about the darkness of the age. No haze, no clouds, can dim an infallible eye. Infallibility should see in the dark as well as in the daylight; and an infallible teacher is bound to reveal all, as well as to know all. And how happens it, too, that the Pope is infallible in only one science,--even the theological? In astronomy he has made some terrible blunders. In geography he has taken the earth to be a plain. In politics, in trade, and in all ordinary matters, he is daily falling into mistakes. He cannot tell how the wind may blow to-morrow. He cannot tell whether the dish before him may not have poison in it. And yet the man who is daily and hourly falling into mistakes on the most common subjects has only to pronounce dogmatically, and he pronounces infallibly. He has but to grasp the pen, with a hand, it may be, like Borgia's, fresh from the poisoned chalice or the stiletto, and straightway he indites lines as holy and pure as ever flowed from the pen of a Paul or a John! The road now led down upon the lake, which lay gleaming like a sheet of silver beneath the morning sun. We entered the poor, faded, straggling town of Desenzano, where the usual motley assemblage of commissionaires, albergo-masters, dwarfs, beggars, and idlers of all kinds, waited to receive us. The poor old town crept close in to the strand, as if a draught of the crystal waters would make it young again. It reminded me of the company of halt, blind, and impotent folk which lay at the pool of Bethesda. So lay paralytic Desenzano by the shores of the Lake Garda. Alas! sunshine and storm pass across the scene, clothing the waters and the hills with alternate beauty and grandeur; but all changes come alike to the poor, tradeless, bookless, spiritless town. Whether summer comes in its beauty or winter in its storms, Desenzano is old, withered, dying Desenzano still. I hurried to an albergo, swallowed a cup of coffee, and rejoined the _diligence_. Our course lay along the southern shore of the lake, over a fine rolling country, richly covered with vineyards, and where the rich red soil was being ploughed with bullocks. Such bullocks I had never before seen. The stateliest of their kind which graze the meadows of England and Scotland are but as grasshoppers in comparison. Truly, I saw before me the Anakims of the cattle tribe. To them the yoke was no burden. As they marched on with vast outspread horns, they could have dragged a hundred ploughs after them. They were not unworthy of Virgil's verse. And it gave additional charms to the region to think that Mantua, the poet's birthplace, lay not a long way to the south, and that, doubtless, the author of the Bucolics often visited in his youth this very spot, and walked by the margin of these waters, and marked the light and shade on these noble hills; or, turning to the rich agricultural country on the right, had seen exactly such bullocks as those I now saw, drawing exactly such ploughs, and making exactly such furrows in the red earth; and, spreading the beauty of his own mind over the picture, he had gone and imprinted it eternally on his page. The true poet is a real clairvoyant. He may not give you the shape, or colour, or size of objects; he may not tell how tall the mountains, or how long the hedge-rows, or how broad the fields; but by some wonderful art he can convey to your mind what is present to his own. On this principle it was, perhaps, that the landscape, with all its scenery, was familiar to me. I had seen it long years before. These were the very fields, the very bullocks, the very ploughs, the very swains, my imagination had painted in my schoolboy days, when I sat with the page of the great pastoral poet of Italy open before me,--too frequently, alas! only open. On these shores, too, had dwelt the poet Catullus; and a doubtful ruin which the traveller sees on the point of the long sharp promontory of Sermio, which runs up into the lake from the south, still bears the name of Catullus' Villa. If these are the ruins of Catullus' house, which is very questionable, he must have lived in a style of magnificence which has fallen to the lot of but few poets. The complexion of a day or of a lifetime may hang upon the commonest occurrence. A shoe here dropped from the foot of one of the horses; and the postilion, diving into the recesses of the _diligence_, and drawing forth a box with the requisite tools, began forthwith, on the highway, the process of shoeing. I stepped out, and walked on before, thankful for the incident, which had given me the opportunity of a saunter along the road. You can _see_ nature from the windows of your carriage, but you can _converse_ with her only by a quiet stroll amidst her scenes. On the right were the great plains which the Po waters, finely mottled with meadow and corn-field, besprint with chestnut trees, mulberries, and laurels, and fringed, close by the highway, with rolling heights, on which grew the vine. On the left was the far expanding lake, with its bays and creeks, and the shadows of its stately hills mirrored on its surface. It looked as if some invisible performer was busy shifting the scenes for the traveller's delight, and spreading a different prospect before his eye at every few yards. New bays were continually opening, and new peaks rising on the horizon. "It was so rough with tempests when we passed by it," says Addison, "that it brought into my mind Virgil's description of it." "Here, vexed by winter storms, _Benacus_ raves, Confused with working sands and rolling waves; Rough and tumultuous, like a sea it lies; So loud the tempest roars, so high the billows rise." I saw it in more peaceful mood. Cool and healthful breezes were blowing from the Tyrol; and the salubrious character of the region was amply attested by the robust forms of the inhabitants. I have seldom seen a finer race of men and women than the peasants adjoining the Lake Garda. They were all of goodly stature, and singularly graceful and noble in their gait. In a few hours we approached the strong fortress of Peschiera. We passed through several concentric lines of fortifications, walls, moats, drawbridges, and sloping earthen embankments, in which cart-loads of balls, impelled with all the force which powder can give, would sink and be lost. In the very heart of these grim ramparts, like a Swiss hamlet amid its mountain ranges, or a jewel in its iron-bound casket, lay the little town of Peschiera, sleeping quietly beside the blue and full-flooded Mincio, Virgil's own river:-- "Where the slow Mincius through the valley strays; Where cooling streams invite the flocks to drink, And reeds defend the winding water's brink." It issues from the lake, and, flowing underneath the ramparts, freshens a spot which otherwise wears sufficiently the grim iron-visaged features of war. Nothing can surpass the grandeur of Lake Garda, which here almost touches the walls of the fortress. It lies outspread like the sea, and runs far up to where the snow-clad summits of the Tyrol prop the northern horizon. Leaving behind us the iron Peschiera and the blue Garda, we held on our way over an open, breezy country, where the stony and broken scenery of the mountains began to mingle with the rich cultivation of the plains. It reminded me of the line where the lowlands of Perthshire join its highlands. Here the cypress tree met me for the first time. The familiar form of the poplar,--now too familiar to give pleasure,--disappeared, and in its room came the less stately but more graceful and beautiful form of the cypress. The cypress is silence personified. It stands wrapt in its own thoughts. One can hardly see it without asking, "What ails thee? Is it for the past you mourn?" Yet, pensive as it looks, its unconscious grace fills the landscape with beauty. Verona, gilded by the beams of Shakspeare's mighty genius, and by the yet purer glory of the martyrs of the Reformation, was in sight miles before we reached it. It reposes on the long gentle slope of a low hill, with plenty of air and sunlight. The rich plains at its feet, which stretch away to the south, look up to the old town with evident affection and pride, and strive to cheer it by pouring wheat, and wine, and fruits into its markets. Its appearance at a distance is imposing, from its numerous towers, and the long sweep of its forked battlements, which seem to encircle the whole acclivity on which the town stands, leaving as much empty space within their lines as might contain half-a-dozen Veronas. Its environs are enchanting. Behind it, and partly encircling it on the east, are an innumerable array of low hills, of the true Italian shape and colour. These were all a-gleam with white villas; and as they sparkled in the sunlight, relieved against the deep azure of the mountains, they showed like white sails on the blue sea, or stars in the dark sky. At its gates we were met, of course, by the Austrian gendarmerie. To have the affair of the passport finished and over as quickly as possible, I unfolded the sheet, and carelessly hung it over the window of the carriage. The corner of the paper, which bore, in tall, bold characters, the name of her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, caught the eye of a passenger. "PALMERSTON!" "PALMERSTON!" he shouted aloud. Instantly there was a general rush at the document; and fearing that it should be torn in pieces, which would have been an awkward affair for me, seeing without it it would be impossible to get forward, and nearly as impossible to get back, I surrendered it to the first speaker, that it might be passed round, and all might gratify their curiosity or idolatry with the sight of a name which abroad is but a synonym for "England." After making the tour of the _diligence_, the passport was handed out to the gendarme, who, feeling no such intense desire as did the passengers to see the famous characters, had waited good-naturedly all the while. The man surveyed with grim complacency a name which was then in no pleasant odour with the statesmen and functionaries of Austria. In return he gave me a paper containing "permission to sojourn for a few hours in Verona," with its co-relative "permission to depart." I felt proud of my country, which could as effectually protect me at the gates of Verona as on the shores of the Forth. CHAPTER XIV. FROM VERONA TO VENICE. Interior of Verona--End of World seemingly near in Italy--The Monks and the Classics--A Cast-Iron Revolutionist--A Beautiful Glimpse--Railway Carriages--Railway Company--Tyrolese Alps--Dante's Patmos--Vicenza--Padua--The Lagunes--The Omnibus or Gondola--Silence of City--Sail through the Canals--Charon and his Boat--Piazza of Saint Mark. The gates of Verona opened, and the enchantment was gone. He who would carry away the idea of a magnificent city, which the exterior of Verona suggests, must go round it, not through it. The first step within its walls is like the stroke of an enchanter's wand. The villa-begemmed city, with its ramparts and its cypress-trees, takes flight, and there rises before the traveller an old ruinous town, with dirty streets and a ragged and lazy population. It reminds one of what he meets in tales of eastern romance, where young and beautiful princesses are all at once transformed by malignant genuises into old and withered hags. In truth, on entering an Italian town one feels as if the last trumpet were about to sound. The world, and all that is in it, seems old--very old. Man is old, his dwellings are old, his works are old, and the very earth seems old. All seems to betoken that it is the last age, and that the world is winding up its business, preparatory to the final closing of the drama. Commerce, the arts, empire,--all have taken their departure, and have left behind only the vestiges of their former presence. The Italians, living in a land which is but a sort of sepulchre, look as if they had voted that the world cannot outlast the present century, and that it is but a waste of labour to rebuild anything or repair anything. Accordingly, all is allowed to go to decay,--roads, bridges, castles, palaces; and the only thing which is in any degree cared for are their churches. Why make provision for posterity, when there is to be none? Why erect new houses, when those already built will last their time and the world's? Why repair their mouldering dwellings, or renew the falling fences of their fields, or replace their dying olives with young trees, or even patch their own ragged garments? The crack of doom will soon be upon them, and all will perish in the great conflagration. They account it the part of wisdom, then, to pass the interval in the least fatiguing and most agreeable manner possible. They sip their coffee, and take their stroll, and watch the shadows as they fall eastward from their purple hills. Why should they incur the toil of labouring or thinking in a world that is soon to pass away, and which is as good as ended already? Of Verona I can say but little. My stay there, which was not much over the hour, afforded me no opportunity for observation. Its famous Amphitheatre, coeval with the great Coliseum at Rome, and the best preserved Roman Amphitheatre in the world, I had not time to visit. Its numerous churches, with their frescoes and paintings, I less regret not having seen. Its _Biblioteca Capitolare_, which is said to be an unwrought quarry of historic and patristic lore, I should have liked to visit. There, too, the monks of the middle ages were caught tripping. "Sophocles or Tacitus," in the words of Gibbon, "had been compelled to resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the golden legend." The "Institutes of Caius," which were the foundation of the Institutes of Justinian, were discovered in this library palimpsested. A rumour had been spread that the author of the Pandects had reduced the "Institutes of Caius" to ashes, that posterity might not discover the source of his own great work. Gibbon ventured to contradict the scandal, and to point to the monks as the probable devastators. His sagacity was justified when Niebuhr discovered in the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona these very Institutes beneath the homilies of St. Jerome. Verona yet retains one grand feature untouched by decay or time,--the river Adige,--which, passing underneath the walls, dashes through the city in a magnificent torrent, spanned by several noble bridges of ancient architecture, and turns in its course several large floating mills, which are anchored across the stream. The market-place, a large square, was profusely covered with the produce of the neighbouring plains. I purchased a roll of bread and a magnificent cluster of grapes, and lunched in fine style. At Verona the railway resumes, and runs all the way to Venice. What a transition from the _diligence_--the lumbering, snail-paced _diligence_--to the rail. It is like passing by a single leap from the dark ages to modern times. Then only do you feel what you owe to Watt. In my humble opinion, the Pope should have put the steam-engine into the Index Expurgatorius. His priests in France have attended at the opening of railways, and blessed the engines. What! bless the steam-engine! Sprinkle holy water on the heads of Mazzini and Gavazzi. For what are these engines, but so many cast-iron Mazzinis and Gavazzis. The Pope should have anathematized the steam-engine. He should have cursed it after the approved pontifical fashion, in standing and in running, in watering and in coaling. He should have cursed it in the whole structure of its machinery,--in its funnel, in its boiler, in its piston, in its cranks, and in its stopcocks. I can see a hundred things which are sure to be crushed beneath its ponderous wheels. I can see it tearing ruthlessly onwards, and dashing through prejudices, opinions, usages, and time-honoured and venerated institutions, and sweeping all away like so many cobwebs. Was the Argus of the Vatican asleep when this wolf broke into the fold? But _in_ he is, and the Pope's bulls will have enough to do to drive him out. But more of this anon. The station of the railway is on the east of the town, in a spot of enchanting loveliness. It was the first and almost the only spot that realized the Italy of my dreams. It was in a style of beauty such as I had not before seen, and was perfect in its kind. The low lovely hills were ranged in crescent form, and were as faultless as if Grace herself had moulded them on her lathe. Their clothing was a deep rich purple. White villas, like pearls, sparkled upon them; and they were dotted with the cypress, which stood on their sides in silent, meditative, ethereal grace. The scene possessed not the sublime grandeur of Switzerland, nor the rugged picturesqueness of Scotland: its characteristic was the finished, spiritualized, voluptuous beauty of Italy. But hark! the railway-bell rings out its summons. The carriages on the Verona and Venice Railway are not those strong-looking, crib-like machines which we have in England, and which seem built, as our jails and bridewells are, in anticipation that the inmates will do their best to get out. They are roomy and elegant saloons (though strong in their build), of about forty feet in length, and may contain two hundred passengers a-piece. They are fitted up with a tier of cushioned seats running round the carriage, and two sofa-seats running lengthways in the middle. At each end is a door by which the guard enters and departs, and passes along the whole train, as if it were a suit of apartments. So far as I could make out, I was the only _Englese_ in the carriage, which was completely filled with the citizens and peasantry of the towns and rural districts which lay on our route,--the mountaineer of the Tyrol, the native of the plain, the inhabitant of the city of Verona, of Vicenza, of Venice. There was a greater amount of talk, and of vehement and eloquent gesture, than would have been seen in the same circumstances in England. The costume was varied and picturesque, and so too, but in a less degree, the countenance. There were in the carriage tall athletic forms, reared amid the breezes and vines of the Tyrol; and there were noble faces,--faces with rich complexions, and dark fiery eyes, which could gleam in love or burn in battle, and which bore the still farther appendage of moustache and beard, in which the wearer evidently took no little pride, and on which he bestowed no little pains. The company had somewhat the air of a masquerade. There was the Umbrian cloak, the cone-shaped beaver, the vest with its party-coloured lacings. There were the long loose robe and low-crowned hat of the priest, with its enormous brim, as if to shade the workings of his face beneath. There was the brown cloak of the friar; and there were hats and coats of the ordinary Frank fashion. The Leghorn bonnet is there unknown, as almost all over the Continent, unless among the young girls of Switzerland; and the head-gear of the women mostly was a plain cotton napkin, folded on the brow and pinned below the chin,--a custom positively ugly, which may become a mummy or a shaven head, but not for those who have ringlets to show. Some with better taste had discarded the napkin, and wore a smart cap. On the persons of not a few of the females was displayed a considerable amount of value, in the shape of gold chains, rings, and jewellery. This is an indication, not of wealth, but of poverty and stagnant trade. It was a custom much in use among oriental ladies before banks were established. The plains eastward of Verona on the right were amazingly rich, and the uplands and heights on the left were crowned with fine castles and beautiful little temples. Yet the beauty and richness of the region could not soothe Dante for his lost Florence. For here was his "Patmos," if we may venture on imagery borrowed from the history of a greater seer; and here the visions of the Purgatorio had passed before his eye. After a few hours' riding, the fine hills of the Tyrolese Alps came quite up to us, disclosing, as they filed past, a continuous succession of charming views. When the twilight began to gather, and they stood in their rich drapery of purple shadows, their beauty became a thing indescribable. We saw Vicenza, where, of all the spots in Italy, the Reformation found the largest number of adherents, and where Palladio arose in the sixteenth century, to arrest for a while, by his genius, the decay of the architectural arts in Italy. We saw, too, the gray Padua looking at us through the sombre shadows of its own and the day's decline. We continued our course over the flat but rich country beyond; and as night fell we reached the edge of the Lagunes. I looked out into the watery waste with the aid of the faint light, but I could see no city, and nothing whereon a city could stand. All was sea; and it seemed idle to seek a city, or any habitation of man, in the midst of these waters. But the engine with its great red eye could see farther into the dark; and it dashed fearlessly forward, and entered on the long bridge which I saw stretching on and away over the flood, till its farther end, like that of the bridge which Mirza saw in vision, was lost in a cloud. I could see, as we rode on, on the bosom of the flood beneath us, twinkling lights, which were probably lighthouses, and black dots, which we took for boats. After a five miles' run through scenery of this novel character, the train stopped, and we found that we had arrived, not in a cloud or in a quicksand, as there seemed some reason to fear, but in a spacious and elegant station, brilliantly lighted with gas, and reminding one, from its sudden apparition and its strange site, of the fabled palace of the Sicilian Fairy Queen, only not built, like hers, of sunshine and sea-mist. We were marched in file past, first the tribunal of the searchers, and next the tribunal of the passport officials; and then an Austrian gendarme opening to each, as he passed this ordeal, the door of the station-house, I stepped out, to have my first sight, as I hoped, of the Queen of the Adriatic. I found myself in the midst of the sea, standing on a little platform of land, with a cloudy mass floating before me, resembling, in the uncertain light, the towers and domes of a spectral city. It was now for the first time that I realized the peculiar position of Venice. I had often read of the city whose streets were canals and whose chariots were gondolas; but I had failed to lay hold of it as a reality, and had unconsciously placed Venice in the region of fable. There was no missing the fact now. I was hemmed in on all sides by the ocean, and could not move a step without the certainty of being drowned. What was I to do? In answer to my inquiries, I was told that I must proceed to my hotel in an omnibus. This sounded of the earth, and I looked eagerly round to see the desired vehicle; but horses, carriage, wheels, I could see none. I could no more conceive of an omnibus that could swim on the sea, than the Venetians could of a gondola that could move on the dry land. I was shown a large gondola, to which the name of omnibus was given, which lay at the bottom of the stairs waiting for passengers. I descended into it, and was followed by some thirty more. We were men of various nations and various tongues, and we took our seats in silence. We pushed off, and were soon gliding along on the Grand Canal. Not a word was spoken. Although we had been a storming party sent to surprise an enemy's fort by night, we could not have conducted our proceedings in profounder quiet. There reigned as unbroken a stillness around us, as if, instead of the midst of a city, we had been in the solitude of the high seas. No foot-fall re-echoed through that strange abode. Sound of chariot-wheel there was none. Nothing was audible but the soft dip of the oar, and the startled shout of an occasional gondolier, who feared, perhaps, that our heavier craft might send his slim skiff to the bottom. In about a quarter of an hour we turned out of the Grand Canal, and began threading our way amid those innumerable narrow channels which traverse Venice in all directions. Then it was that the dismal silence of the city fell upon my heart. The canals we were now navigating were not over three yards in width. They were long and gloomy; and tall, massive palaces, sombre and spectral in the gloom, rose out of the sea on either hand. There were columns at their entrances, with occasional pieces of statuary, for which time had woven a garland of weeds. Their lower windows were heavily grated; their marble steps were laved by the idle tide; and their warehouse doors, through which had passed, in their time, the merchandise of every clime, had long been unopened, and were rotting from age. As we pursued our way, we passed under low-browed arches, from which uncouth faces, cut in the stone, looked down upon us, and grinned our welcome. The voice of man, the light of a candle, the sound of a millstone, was not there. It seemed a city of the dead. The inhabitants had lived and died ages ago, and had left their palaces to be tenanted by the mermaids and spirits of the deep, for other occupants I could see none. Spectral fancies began to haunt my imagination. I conceived of the canal we were traversing as the Styx, our gondola as the boat of Charon, and ourselves as a company of ghosts, who had passed from earth, and were now on our silent way to the inexorable bar of Rhadamanthus. A more spectral procession we could not have made, with our spectral boat gliding noiselessly through the water, with its spectral steersman, and its crowd of spectral passengers, though my fancy, instead of being a fancy, had been a reality. All things around me were sombre, shadowy, silent, as Hades itself. Suddenly our gondola made a rapid sweep round a tall corner. Then it was that the Queen of the Adriatic, in all her glory, burst upon us,-- "Looking a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers." We were flung right in front of the great square of St. Mark. It was like the instantaneous raising of the curtain from some glorious vision, or like the sudden parting of the clouds around Mont Blanc; or, if I may use such a simile, like the unfolding of the gates of a better world to the spirit, after passing through the shadows of the tomb. The spacious piazza, bounded on all sides with noble structures in every style of architecture, reflected the splendour of a thousand lamps. There was the palace of the Doge, which I knew not as yet; and there, on its lofty column, was the winged lion of St Mark, which it was impossible not to know; and, crowding the piazza, and walking to and fro on its marble floor, was a countless multitude of men in all the costumes of the world. With the deep hum of voices was softly blended the sound of the Italian lute. A few strokes of the oar brought us to the Hotel dell' Europa. I made a spring from the gondola, and alighted on the steps of the hotel. CHAPTER XV. CITY OF VENICE. Sabbath Morning--Beauty of Sunrise on the Adriatic--Worship in S. Mark's--Popish Sabbath-schools--Sale of Indulgences for Living and Dead--An Astrologer--How the Venetians spend their Sabbath Afternoon and Evening--The Martyrs of Venice--A Young Englishman in Trouble--The Doge's Palace--The Stone Lions--The Prisons of Venice--The Venetians Discard their Old God, and adopt a New--The Gothic Tower--The Academy of Fine Arts--The Moral of Venice--Why do Nations Die?--Common Theory Unsatisfactory--History hitherto a Series of ever-recurring Cycles, ending in Barbarism--Instances--The "Three-score and Ten" of Nations--The Solution to be sought with reference to the False Religions--The Intellect of the Nation outgrows these--Conscience is Dissolved--Virtue is Lost--Slavery and Barbarism ensue--Christianity only can give Immortality to Nations--Decadence of Civilization under Romanism--A Papist foretelling the Doom of Popery. The deep boom of the Austrian cannon awoke me next morning at day-break. I remembered that it was Sabbath; and never had I seen the Sabbath dawn amidst a silence so majestic. More tranquil could not have been its first opening in the bowers of Eden. In this city of ocean there was no sound of hurrying feet, no rattle of chariot-wheel, nor any of those multitudinous noises that distract the cities of earth. There was silence on the domes of Venice, silence on her seas, silence in the air around her. In a little the sun rose, and shed a flood of glory on the Lagunes. It would be difficult to describe the grandeur of the scene, which has nothing elsewhere of the kind to equal it,--the white marble city, serenely seated on the bosom of the Adriatic, with the Lagunes outspread in the morning sun like a mirror of molten gold. But, alas! it was only a glorious vision; for the power and wealth of Venice are departed. "The long file Of her dead Doges are declined to dust. * * * * * Empty halls, Thin streets and foreign aspects, such as must Too oft remind her who and what enthrals, Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely walls." The gun which had awaked me reminds the Queen of the Adriatic every morning that the day of her dominion and glory is over, and that the night has come upon her,--a night, the deep unbroken shadows of which, even the bright morning that was now opening on the Adriatic could not dispel. After breakfast I hurried to the church of S. Mark. Mass was proceeding as usual; and a large crowd of worshippers,--spectators I should rather say,--stood densely packed in the chancel. If I except the Madeleine in Paris, I have nowhere seen in a Roman Catholic church an attendance at all approximating even a tolerable congregation, save here. I remarked, too, that these were not the beggars which usually form the larger proportion of the attendance, such as it is, in Roman churches. The people in S. Mark's were well dressed, though it was not easy to conceive where these fine clothes had come from, seeing the sea has now failed Venice, and land she never possessed. This was the first symptom I saw (I met others in the course of the day) that in Venice the Roman religion has a stronger hold upon the people than in the rest of Italy. It is an advantage in this respect to be some little distance from Rome, and to have an insular position. Besides, I believe that the priests in Venetian Lombardy, and, I presume, in Venice also, are men of more reputable lives than their brethren in other parts of the Peninsula. Anciently it was not so. Venice was wont to be termed "the paradise of monks." There no pleasure allowable to a man of the world was forbidden to a priest. The Senate, jealous of everything that might abridge its authority, encouraged this relaxation of the Church's discipline, in the hope of lowering the influence of its clergy with the people. S. Mark's is an ancient, quaint-looking pile, with the dim hoar light of history around it. On its threshold Pope Alexander III. met the Emperor Frederick in 1177, and, with pride unabated by his enforced flight from Rome in the disguise of a cook, put his foot upon the monarch's neck, repeating the words of the psalm,--"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder." This high temple of the Adriatic is vast and curious, but wanting in effect, owing to the low roof and the gloomy light. The Levant was searched for columns and marbles to decorate it; acres of gold-leaf have been expended in gilding it; and every corner is stuck full of allegorical devices, some of which are so very ingenious, that they have not yet been read. The priests wore a style of dress admirably befitting the finery of the Cathedral; for their vestments were bespangled with gold and curious devices. What a contrast to the simple temple and the plain earnest worshippers with whom I had passed my former Sabbath amid the Vaudois hills! But the God of the Vaudois, unlike the wafer-god of the priests, "dwelleth not in temples made with hands." Passing along on the narrow paved footpaths which tie back to back the long lofty ranges of the city,--the fronts being filled with the ocean,--I visited several of its one hundred and twenty churches. I found mass ended, and the congregation, if any such there had been, dismissed; but I saw what was even more indicative of a reviving superstition: in every church I entered I found classes of boys and girls under instruction. The Sabbath-school system was in full operation in Venice, in Rome's behalf. The boys were in charge of the young priests; and the girls, of the nuns and sisters. In some cases, laymen had been pressed into the service, and were occupied in unfolding the mysteries of transubstantiation to the young mind. Seating myself on a bench in presence of a class of boys, I watched the course of instruction. Their text-book was the "Catechism of Christian Doctrine," which contains the elements of the Roman faith, as fixed by the Council of Trent. The boys were repeating the Catechism to the teacher. No explanations were given, for the process was simply that of fixing dogmas in the memory,--of conveying as much of fact, or what professed to be so, as it was possible to convey into the mind without awakening the understanding. The boys were taught to _believe_, not _reason_; and those who acquitted themselves best had little medals and pictures of St Francis given them as prizes. I remarked that most of the shops were shut: indeed, so little business is done in Venice, that this involved no sacrifice to the traders. As it was, however, the city contrasted favourably with Paris; than the Sabbaths of which, I know of nothing more terrible on earth. I remarked, too, that if the trade of the Adriatic is at an end, and beggars crowd the quays which princes once trod, and gondolas, in funereal black, glide gloomily through those waters which rich argosies ploughed of old, the spiritual traffic of Venice flourishes more than ever. I read on the doors of all the churches, "INDULGENCES SOLD HERE FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, AS IN ROME." What matters it that the Adriatic is no longer the highway of the world's merchandise, and that India is now closed to Venice? Is not the whole of Peter's treasury open to her; and, to facilitate the enriching commerce, have not the priests obligingly opened a direct road to the celestial mine, to spare the Venetians the necessity of the more circuitous path by the Seven Hills? Happy Venice! her children may be starved now, but paradise is their's hereafter. After noon each betook himself to what pastime he pleased. Not a few opened their shops. Others gathered round an astrologer,--a personage no longer to be seen in the cities of the west,--who had taken his stand on the _Riva degli Schiavoni_, and there, begirt with zone inscribed with cabalistic characters, and holding in his hand his wizard's staff, was setting forth, with stentorian voice, his marvellous power of healing by the combined help of the stars and his drugs. By the way, why should the profession of astrology and the cognate arts be permitted to only one class of men? In the middle ages, two classes of conjurors competed for the public patronage, but with most unequal success. The one class professed to be master of spells that were all-powerful over the elements of the material world,--the air, the earth, the ocean. The other arrogated an equal power over the invisible and spiritual world. They were skilled in a mysterious rite, which had power to open the gates of purgatory, and dismiss to a happier abode, souls there immured in woe. The pretensions of both were equally well founded: both were jugglers, and merited to have fared alike; but society, while it lavished all its credence and all its patronage upon the one, denounced the other as impostors. One colossal system of necromancy filled Europe; but the age gave the priest a monopoly; and so jealously did it guard his rights, that the conjuror who did not wear a cassock was banished or burned. We can assign no reason for the odium under which the one lay, and the repute in which the other was held, save that the art, though one, was termed witchcraft in the one case, and religion in the other. The one was compelled to shroud his mysteries in the darkness of the night, and seek the solitary cave for the performance of his spells. The arts of the other were performed in magnificent and costly cathedrals, in presence of admiring assemblies. The latter were the licensed dealers in magic; and, enjoying the public patronage, they carried their pretensions to a pitch which their less favoured brethren dared not attempt to rival. They juggled on a gigantic scale, and the more enormous the cheat, the better was it received. They rapidly grew in numbers and wealth. Their chief, the great Roman necromancer, enjoyed the state of a temporal prince, and had a whole kingdom appropriated to his use, that he might suitably support his rank and dignity as arch-conjuror. But to return to Venice;--the great stream of concourse flowed in the direction of the _Giardini Pubblici_, which are a nook of one of the more southerly islands on which the city stands, fitted up as a miniature landscape, its lilliputian hills and vales being the only ones the Venetians ever see. The intercourse betwixt Venice and the Continent has no doubt become more frequent since the opening of the railway; but formerly it was not uncommon to find persons who had never been on the land, and who had no notion of ploughs, waggons, carts, gardens, and a hundred other things that seem quite inseparable from the existence of a nation. Twilight came, walking with noiseless sandals on the seas. A delicious light mantled the horizon; the domes of the city stood up with silent sublimity into the sky; and over them floated, in the deep azure, a young moon, thin as a single thread, and bright as the polished steel. "A silver bow, New bent in heaven." When darkness fell on the Lagunes, the glories of the piazza of San Marco again blazed forth. What with cafés and countless lamps, a flood of light fell upon the marble pavement, on which some ten or twelve thousand people, rich and poor, were assembled, and were being regaled with occasional airs from a numerous band. The Sabbath closed in the Adriatic not altogether so tranquilly as it had opened. The Venetians have long been famous for their peculiar skill in combining devotion with pleasure,--more devout than home in the morning, and gayer than Paris in the evening. Such has long been the character of the Queen of the Adriatic. She has been truly, as briefly described by the poet,-- "The revel of the earth, the mask of Italy!" Once a better destiny appeared to be about to dawn on Venice. In the sixteenth century the Reformation knocked at her gates, and for a moment it seemed as if these gates were to be opened, and the stranger admitted. Had it been so, the chair of her Doge would not now have been empty, nor would Austrian manacles have been pressing upon her limbs. "The evangelical doctrine had made such progress," writes Dr M'Crie, "in the city of Venice, between the years 1530 and 1542, that its friends, who had hitherto met in private for mutual instruction and religious exercises, held deliberations on the propriety of organizing themselves into regular congregations, and assembling in public." Several members of the Senate were favourable to it, and hopes were entertained at one time that the authority of that body would be interposed in its behalf. This hope was strengthened by the fact, that when Ochino ascended the pulpit, "the whole city ran in crowds to hear their favourite preacher." But, alas! the hope was delusive. It was the Inquisition, not the Reformation, to which Venice opened her gates; and when I surveyed her calm and beautiful Lagunes, my emotions partook at once of grief and exultation,--grief at the remembrance of the many midnight tragedies enacted on them, and exultation at the thought, that in the seas of Venice there sleeps much holy dust awaiting the resurrection of the just. "Drowning was the mode of death to which they doomed the Protestants," says Dr M'Crie, "either because it was less cruel and odious than committing them to the flames, or because it accorded with the customs of Venice. But if the _autos da fe_ of the Queen of the Adriatic were less barbarous than those of Spain, the solitude and silence with which they were accompanied were calculated to excite the deepest horror. At the dead hour of midnight the prisoner was taken from his cell, and put into a gondola or Venetian boat, attended only, besides the sailors, by a single priest, to act as confessor. He was rowed out into the sea, beyond the Two Castles, where another boat was in waiting. A plank was then laid across the two gondolas, upon which the prisoner, having his body chained, and a heavy stone affixed to his feet, was placed; and, on a signal given, the gondolas retiring from one another, he was precipitated into the deep." "We can do nothing against the truth," says the apostle. Venice is rotting in her Lagunes: the Reformation, shaking off the chains with which men attempted to bind it, is starting on a new career of progress. Next morning, at breakfast in my hotel, formerly the palace of the Giustiniani, I met a young Englishman, who had just come from Rome. He had the misfortune to be of the same name with one on the "suspected list," and for this offence he was arrested on entering the Austrian territory; and, though allowed to come on to Venice, his passport was taken from him, and his journey to England, which he meant to make by way of Trieste and Vienna, stopped. The list to which I have referred, which is kept at all the continental police offices, and which the eye of policeman or sbirro only can see, has created a sort of inquisition for Europe. The poor traveller has no means of knowing who has denounced him, or why; and wherever he goes, he finds a vague suspicion surrounding him, which he can neither penetrate nor clear up, and which exposes him to numberless and by no means petty annoyances. I accompanied my friend, after breakfast, to the _Prefecture_, to transact my own passport matters, and was glad to find that the authorities were now satisfied that he was not the same man who figured on the black list. Still they had no apology, no reparation, to offer him: on the contrary, he was informed that he must submit to a detention of two or three days more, till his passport should be forwarded from the provincial office where it was lying. His misfortune was my advantage, for it gave me an intelligent and obliging companion for the rest of the day; and we immediately set out to visit together all the great objects in Venice. It would be preposterous to dwell on these, for an hundred pens have already described them better; and my object is to advert to one great lesson which this fallen city,--for the sea, which once was the bulwark and throne of Venice, is now her prison,--teaches. Betaking ourselves to a gondola, we passed down the Giudecca, Canal. We much admired--as who would not?--the-noble palaces which on either hand rose so proudly from the bosom of the deep, yet invested with an air of silent desolation, which made the heart sad, even while their beauty delighted the eye. We disembarked at the stairs of the _piazzetta_ of S. Mark, and repaired to the Doge's palace,--the dwelling of a line of rulers haughtier than kings, and the throne of a republic more oppressive than tyrannies. We walked through its truly majestic halls, glowing with great paintings from Venetian history; and visited its senatorial chamber, and saw the vacant places of its nobles, and the empty chair of its Doge. There was here no lack of materials for moralizing, had time permitted. She that sat as a Queen upon the waves,--that said, "I am of perfect beauty,"--that sent her fleets to the ends of the earth, and gathered to her the riches and glory of all nations,--alas! how is she fallen! "The princes of the sea" have "come down from their thrones, and" laid "away their robes, and put off their broidered garments." "What city is like" Venice,--"like the destroyed in the midst of the sea!" We passed out between the famous stone lions, which, even so late as the end of the last century, no Venetian could look on but with terror. There they sat, with open jaws, displaying their fearfully significant superscription, "_Denunzie secrete_,"--realizing the poet's idea of republics guarded by dragons and lions. The use of these guardian lions the Venetians knew but too well. Accusations dropped by spies and informers into their open mouths, were received in a chamber below. Thus the bolt fell upon the unsuspicious citizen, but the hand from which it came remained invisible. Crossing by the "bridge of sighs,"--the canal, _Rio de Palazzo_, which runs behind the ducal palace,--we entered the state prisons of Venice. In the dim light I could discern what seemed a labyrinth of long narrow passages; traversing which, we arrived at the dungeons. I entered one of them: it was vaulted all round; and its only furniture, besides a ring and chain, was a small platform of boards, about half a foot from the floor, which served as the prisoner's bed. In the wall of the cell was a small aperture, by which the light might be made to stream in upon the prisoner, when the jailor did not wish to enter, simply by placing the lamp in an opposite niche in the passage. Here crime, despair, madness, and sometimes innocence, have dwelt. Horrible secrets seemed to hover about its roof, and float in its air, and to be ready to break upon me from every stone of the dungeon. I longed, yet trembled, to hear them. But silent they are, and silent they will remain, till that day when "the sea shall give up its dead." There are yet lower dungeons, deep beneath water-mark, but I was told that these are now walled up. We emerged again upon the marble piazzetta; and more welcome than ever was the bright light, and the noble grace of the buildings. At its southern extremity, where the piazzetta looks out upon the Adriatic, are two stately granite columns; the one surmounted by St Theodore, and the other by the lion of St Mark. These are the two gods of Venice. They were to the Republic what the two calves were to Israel,--their all-powerful protectors; and so devoutly did the Venetians worship them, that even the god of the Seven Hills became jealous of them. "The Venetians in general care little about God," says an old traveller, "less about the Pope, but a great deal about St Mark." St Theodore sheltered the Republic in its infancy; but when it grew to greatness, it deemed it unbecoming its dignity to have only a subordinate for its tutelar deity. Accordingly, Venice sought and obtained a god of the first water. The Republic brought over the body of St Mark, enshrined it in a magnificent church, and left its former patron no alternative but to cross the Lagunes, or occupy a second place. Before bidding adieu to the piazza of St Mark, around which there hovers so many historic memories, and which every style of architecture, from the Greek and the Byzantine down to the Gotho-Italian, has met to decorate, and which, we may add, in point of noble grace and chaste beauty is perhaps not excelled in the world, we must be allowed to mention one object, which appeared to us strangely out of keeping with the spot and its edifices. It is the tall Gothic tower that rises opposite the Byzantine front of S. Mark's Cathedral. It attains a height of upwards of three hundred feet, and is used for various purposes, which, however, it could serve equally well in some other part of Venice. It strikes one the more, that it is the one deformity of the place. It reminded me of the entrance of a clown at a royal levee, or the appearance of harlequin in a tragedy. Betaking ourselves again to a gondola, and gliding noiselessly along the grand canal,-- "For silent rows the songless gondolier," we visited the _Academia delle Belle Arte_. It resembled a great and elaborately compiled work on painting, and I could there read off the history of the rise and progress of the art in Venice. The several galleries were arranged, like the successive chapters of a book, in chronological order, beginning with the infancy of the art, and going on to its full noon, under the great masters of the Lombard school,--Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and others. The pictures of the inner saloons were truly magnificent; but on these I do not dwell. Let us sit down here, in the midst of the seas, and meditate a little on the great _moral_ of Venice. We shall let the poet state the case:-- "Her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased." But now, after power, wealth, empire, have come corruption, slavery, ruin; and Venice,-- "Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, Sinks, like a sea-weed, into whence she rose." But the course which Venice has run is that of all States which have yet appeared in the world. History is but a roll of defunct empires, whose career has been alike; and Venice and Rome are but the latest names on the list. Egypt, Chaldea, Tyre, Greece, Rome,--to all, as if by an inevitable law, there came, after the day of civilization and empire, the night of barbarism and slavery. This has been repeated again and again, till the world has come to accept of it as its established course. We see States emerging from infancy and weakness slowly and laboriously, becoming rich, enlightened, powerful; and the moment they seemed to have perfected their civilization, and consolidated their power, they begin to fall. The past history of our race is but a history of efforts, successful up to a certain point, but only to a certain point; for whenever that point has been reached, all the fruits of past labour,--all the accumulations of legislators, philosophers, and warriors,--have been swept away, and the human family have found that they had to begin the same laborious process over again,--to toil upwards from the same gulph, to be overtaken by the same disaster. History has been simply a series of ever-recurring cycles, ending in barbarism. This is a discouraging aspect of human affairs, and throws a doubtful shadow upon the future; but it is the aspect in which history exhibits them. The Etrurian tombs speak of an era of civilization and power succeeded by barbarism. The mounds of Nineveh speak of a similar revolution. The day of Greek glory sank at last in unbroken night. At the fall of the Roman empire, barbarism overspread Europe; and now the cycle appears to have come round to the nations of modern Europe. Since the middle of last century there has been a marked and fearfully rapid decline in all the States of continental Europe. The entire region south of the Alps, including the once powerful kingdoms of Italy and Spain, is sunk in slavery and barbarism. France alone retains its civilization; but how long is it likely to retain it, with its strength undermined by revolution, and its liberties completely prostrated? Niebuhr has given expression in his works to his decided opinion, _that the dark ages are returning_. And are we not at this moment witnessing an attempted repetition of the Gothic invasion of the fourth century, in the barbarian north, which is pressing with ever-growing weight upon the feeble barrier of the East? "Nations melt From power's high pinnacle, when they have felt The sunshine for a while, and downward go Like lauwine loosen'd from the mountain's belt." But why is this? It would almost seem, when we look at these examples and facts, as if there were some malignant influence sporting with the world's progress,--some adverse power fighting against man, baulking all his efforts at self-advancement, and compelling him, Sysiphus-like, to roll the stone eternally. Has the Creator set limits to the life of kingdoms, as to that of man? Certain it is, they have seldom survived their twelfth century. The most part have died at or about their twelve hundred and sixtieth year. Is this the "three-score-and-ten" of nations, beyond which they cannot pass? The common explanation of the death of nations is, that power begets wealth, wealth luxury, and luxury feebleness and ruin. But we are unable to accept this as a satisfactory account of the matter. It appears a mere _statement_ of the fact,--not a _solution_ of it. It is evidently the design of Providence that nations should live happily in the abundant enjoyment of all good things; and that every human being should have all that is good for him, of what the earth produces, and the labour of man can create. Then, why should affluence, and the other accessories of power, have so uniformly a corrupting and dissolving effect upon society? This the common theory leaves unexplained. There is no necessary connection betwixt the enjoyment of abundance and the corruption of nations. The Creator surely has not ordained laws which must necessarily result in the death of society. The real solution, we think, it is not difficult to find. All religions, one excepted, which have hitherto appeared in the world, have been unable to hold the balance between the _intellect_ and the _conscience_ beyond a certain stage; and therefore, all kingdoms which have arisen hitherto have been unable to exist beyond a certain term. So long as a nation is in its childhood, a false religion affords room enough for the free play of its intellect. Its religion being regarded as true and authoritative, the conscience of the nation is controlled by it. So long as conscience is upheld, law has authority, individual and social virtue is maintained, and the nation goes on acquiring power, amassing wealth, and increasing knowledge. But whenever it attains a certain stage of enlightenment, and a certain power of independent thinking, it begins to canvass the claims of that religion which formerly awed it. It discovers its falsehood, the national conscience breaks loose, and an era of scepticism ensues. With the destruction of conscience and the rise of scepticism, law loses its authority, individual honour and social virtue decline, and slavery or anarchy complete the ruin of the state. This is the course which the nations of the world have hitherto run. They have uniformly begun to decline, not when they attained a certain amount of power or of wealth, but when they attained such an amount of intellectual development as set free the national conscience from the restraints of religion, or what professed to be so. No false religion can carry a nation beyond a certain point; because no such religion can stand before a certain stage of light and inquiry, which is sure to be reached; and when that stage is reached,--in other words, whenever the intellect dissolves the bonds of conscience,--the basis of all authority and order is razed, and from that moment national decline begins. Hence, in all nations an era of scepticism has been contemporaneous with an era of decay. Let us take the ancient Romans as an example. In the youth of their nation their gods were revered; and in the existence of a national conscience, a basis was found for law and virtue; and while these lasted the empire flourished. But by and by the genius of its great thinkers leavened the nation; an era of scepticism ensued; that scepticism inaugurated an age of feeble laws and strong passions; and the declension which set in issued at length in downright barbarism. Papal Rome has run the very same course. The feeble intellect of the European nations accepted Romanism as a religion, just as the Romans before them had accepted of paganism. But the Reformation introduced a period of growing enlightenment and independent thinking; and by the end of the eighteenth century, Romanism had shared the fate which paganism had done before it. The masses of Europe generally had lost faith in it as a religion; then came the atheism of the French school; an era of feeble laws and strong passions again returned; the selfish and isolating principle came into play; and at this moment the nations of continental Europe are rapidly sinking into barbarism. Thus, the history of the race under the reign of the false religions exhibits but alternating fits of superstition and scepticism, with their corresponding eras of civilization and barbarism. And it necessarily must be so; because, these religions not being compatible with the indefinite extension of man's knowledge, they do not secure the continued action and authority of conscience; and without conscience, national progress, and even existence, is impossible. Is there, then, no immortality in reserve for nations? Must they continue to die? and must the history of our race in all time coming be just what it has been in all time past,--a series of rapidly alternating epochs of partial civilization and destructive barbarism? No. He who is the former of society is the author of the Bible; and we may be sure that there is a beautiful meetness and harmony between the laws of the one and the doctrine of the other. Christianity alone can enable society to fulfil its terrestrial destiny, because it alone is true, and, being true, it admits of the utmost advancement of the human understanding. In its case the centrifugal force of the intellect can never overcome the centripetal power of the conscience. It has nothing to fear from the advance of science. It keeps pace with the human mind, however rapid its progress. Nay, more; the more the human mind is enlarged, the more apparent becomes the truth of Christianity, and, by consequence, the greater becomes the authority of conscience. Under the reign of Christianity, then, there is no point in the onward progress of society where conscience dissolves, and leaves man and nations devoid of virtue; there is no point where conviction compels man to become a sceptic, and scepticism pulls him down into barbarism. As the atmosphere which surrounds our planet supplies the vital element alike to the full-grown man and to the infant, so Christianity supplies the breath of life to society in all its stages,--in its full-grown manhood, as well as in its immature infancy. There is more meaning than the world has yet understood in the statement that the Gospel has brought "life and immortality to light." Its Divine Founder introduced upon the stage that system which is the _life_ of nations. The world does not furnish an instance of a nation that has continued to be Christian, that has perished. We believe the thing to be impossible. While great Rome has gone down, and Venice sits in widowed glory on the Adriatic, the poor Waldenses are still a people. The world tried but could not extinguish them. Christianity is synonymous with life: it gives immortality to nations here, and to the individual hereafter. Hence Daniel, when unfolding the state of the world in the last age, gives us to understand that, when once thoroughly Christianized, society will no longer be overwhelmed by those periodic lapses into barbarism which in every former age has set limits to the progress of States. "And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed." Unlike every preceding era, immortality will then be the chief characteristic of nations. But must it not strike every one, in connection with this subject, that in proportion as Romanism developes itself, the nations under its sway sink the deeper into barbarism? This fact Romanist writers now see and bewail. What stronger condemnation of their system could they pronounce? For surely if religion be of God, it must, like all else that comes from Him, be beneficent in its influence. He who ordained the sun to irradiate the earth with his light, and fructify it with his warmth, would not have given a religion that fetters the understanding and barbarises the species. And yet, if Romanism be divine, He has done so; for the champions of that Church, compelled by the irresistible logic of facts, now tacitly acknowledge that a decaying civilization is following in the wake of Roman Catholicism in every part of the world. Listen, for instance, to the following confession of M. Michel Chevalier, in the _Journal des Debats_:-- "I cannot shut my eyes to the facts that militate against the influence of the Catholic spirit,--facts which have transpired more especially during the last third of a century, and which are still in progress,--facts that are fitted to excite in every mind that sympathises with the Catholic cause, the most lively apprehensions. On comparing the respective progress made since 1814 by non-Catholic Christian nations, with the advancement of power attained by Catholic nations, one is struck with astonishment at the disproportion. England and the United States, which are Protestant Powers, and Russia, a Greek Power, have assumed to an incalculable degree the dominion of immense regions, destined to be densely peopled, and already teeming with a large population. England has nearly conquered all those vast and populous regions known under the generic name of India. In America she has diffused civilization to the extreme north, in the deserts of Upper Canada. Through the toil of her children, she has taken possession of every point and position of an island,--New Holland (Australia),--which is as large as a continent; and she has been sending forth her fresh shoots over all the archipelagos with which the great ocean is studded. The United States have swollen out to a prodigious extent, in wealth and possessions, over the surface of their ancient domain. They have, moreover, enlarged on all sides the limits of that domain, anciently confined to a narrow stripe along the shores of the Atlantic. They now sit on the two oceans. San Francisco has become the pendant of New York, and promises speedily to rival it in its destinies. They have proved their superiority over the Catholic nations of the New World, and have subjected them to a dictatorship which admits of no farther dispute. To the authority of these two Powers,--England and the United States,--after an attempt made by the former on China, the two most renowned empires of the East,--empires which represent nearly the numerical half of the human race,--China and Japan,--seem to be on the point of yielding. Russia, again, appears to be assuming every day a position of growing importance in Europe. During all this time, what way has been made by the Catholic nations? The foremost of them all, the most compact, the most glorious,--France,--which seemed fifty years ago to have mounted the throne of civilization, has seen, through a course of strange disasters, her sceptre shivered and her power dissolved. Once and again has she risen to her feet, with noble courage and indomitable energy; but every time, as all expected to see her take a rapid flight upward, fate has sent her, as a curse from God, a revolution to paralyze her efforts, and make her miserably fall back. Unquestionably, since 1789 the balance of power between Catholic civilization and non-Catholic civilization has been reversed." CHAPTER XVI. PADUA. Doves of Venice--Re-cross the Lagunes--Padua--Wretchedness of Interior--Misery of its Inhabitants--Splendour of its Churches--The Shrine of St Antony--His Sermon to a Congregation of Fishes--A Restaurant in Padua--Reach the Po at Day-break--Enter Peter's Patrimony--Find the Apostles again become Fishermen and Tax-Gatherers--Arrest--Liberty. Contenting myself with a hasty perusal of the great work on painting which the academy forms, and which it had taken so many ages and so many various masters to produce, I returned again to the square of St Mark. Doves in thousands were assembled on the spot, hovering on wing at the windows of the houses, or covering the pavement below, at the risk, as it seemed, of being trodden upon by the passengers. I inquired at my companion what this meant. He told me that a rich old gentleman by last will and testament had bequeathed a certain sum to be expended in feeding these fowls, and that, duly as the great clock in the Gothic tower struck two, a certain quantity of corn was every day thrown from a window in the piazza. Every dove in the "Republic" is punctual to a minute. There doves have come to acquire a sort of sacred character, and it would be about as hazardous to kill a dove in Venice, as of old a cat in Egypt. We wish some one would do as much for the beggars, which are yet more numerous, and who know no more, when they get up in the morning, where they are to be fed, than do the fowls of heaven. Trade there is none; "to dig," they have no land, and, even if they had, they are too indolent; they want, too, the dove's wing to fly away to some happier country. Their seas have shut them in; their marble city is but a splendid prison. The story of Venice is that of Tyre over again,--her wealth, her glory, her luxuriousness, and now her doom. But we must leave her. Bidding adieu, on the stairs of St Mark, to the partner of the day's explorations, with a regret which those only can understand who have had the good fortune to meet an intelligent and estimable companion in a foreign land, I leaped into a gondola, and glided away, leaving Venice sitting in silent melancholy beauty amid her tideless seas. Traversing again the long bridge over the Lagunes, and the flat country beyond, covered with memorials of decay in the shape of dilapidated villas, and crossing the full-volumed Brenta, rolling on within its lofty embankments, I sighted the fine Tyrolean Alps on the right, and, after a run of twenty-four miles, the gray towers of Padua, at about a mile's distance from the railway, on the left. Poor Padua! Who could enter it without weeping almost. Of all the wretched and ruinous places I ever saw, this is the most wretched and ruinous,--hopelessly, incurably ruinous. Padua does, indeed, look imposing at a little distance. Its fine dome, its numerous towers, the large vine-stocks which are rooted in its soil, the air of vast fertility which is spread over the landscape, and the halo of former glory which, cloud-like, rests above it, consort well with one's preconceived ideas of this once illustrious seat of learning, which even the youth of our own land were wont to frequent; but enter it,--alas the dismal sight!--ruins, filth, ignorance, poverty, on every hand. The streets are narrow and gloomy, from being lined with heavy and dark arcades; the houses, which are large, and bear marks of former opulence, are standing in many instances untenanted. Not a few stately mansions have been converted into stables, or carriers' sheds, or are simply naked walls, which the dogs of the city, or other creatures, make their den. The inhabitants, pale, emaciated, and wrapt in huge cloaks, wander through the streets like ghosts. Were Padua a heap of ruins, without a single human being on or near its site, its desolation would be less affecting. An unbearable melancholy sat down upon me the moment I entered it, and the recollection oppresses me at the distance of three years. In the midst of all this ruin and poverty, there rise I know not how many duomos and churches, with fine cupolas and towers, as if they meant to mock the misery upon which they look. They are the repositories of vast wealth, in the shape of silver lamps, votive offerings, paintings, and marbles. To appropriate a penny of that treasure in behalf of the wretched beings who swarm unfed and untaught in their neighbourhood, would bring down upon Padua the terrible ire of their great god St Antony. He is there known as "Il Santo" (the saint), and has a gorgeous temple erected in his honour, crowned with not less than eight cupolas, and illuminated day and night by golden lamps and silver candlesticks, which burn continually before his shrine. "There are narrow clefts in the monument that stands over him," says Addison, "where good Catholics rub their beads, and smell his bones, which they say have in them a natural perfume, though very like apoplectic balsam; and, what would make one suspect that they rub the marble with it, it is observed that the scent is stronger in the morning than at night." Were the precious metals and the costly marbles which are stored up in this church transmuted into current coin, the whole province of Padua might be supplied with ploughs and other needful implements of agriculture. But it is better that nature alone should cultivate their fields, and that the Paduans should eat only what she is pleased to provide for them, than that, by robbing the shrine of St Antony, they should forfeit the good esteem of so powerful a patron, "the thrice holy Antony of Padua; the powerful curer of leprosy, tremendous driver away of devils, restorer of limbs, stupendous discoverer of lost things, great and wonderful defender from all dangers." The miracles and great deeds of "the saint" are recorded on the tablets and bas-reliefs of the church. His most memorable exploit was his "preaching to an assembly of fishes," whom, "when the heretics would not regard his preaching," says his biographer, "he called together, in the name of God, to hear his holy Word." The congregation and the sermon were both extraordinary; and, if any reader is curious to see what a saint could have to say to a congregation of fishes, he will find the oration quoted _ad longam_ in "Addison's Travels." The mule on which this great man rode was nearly as remarkable as his master. With a devotion worthy of the mule of St Antony, he left his hay, after a long fast, to be present at mass. The modern Paduans, from what I saw of them, fast quite as oft and as long as Antony's mule; whether they are equally punctual at mass I do not know. My stay in Padua extended only from four in the afternoon till nine at night. The hours wore heavily, and I sought for a restaurant where I might dine. I was fortunate enough at length to discover a vast hall, or shed I should rather say, which was used as a restaurant. Some rich and noble Paduan had called it his in other days; now it received as guests the courier and the wayfarer. Its massive walls were quite naked, and enclosed an apartment so spacious, that its extremities were lost in darkness. Some dozen of small tables, all ready for dinner being served upon them, occupied the floor; and some three or four persons were seated at dinner. I took my seat at one of the tables, and was instantly served with capillini soup, and the usual _et ceteras_. I made a good repast, despite the haunted look of the chamber. On the conclusion of my dinner I repaired to the market-place, and, till the hour of _diligence_ should arrive, I began pacing the pavement beneath the shadow of the town-hall, which looks as if it had been built as a kind of anticipation of the crystal palace, and the roof of which is said to be the largest unsupported by pillars in the world. It covers--so the Paduans believe--the bones of Livy, who is claimed as a native of Padua. It was here Petrarch died, which has given occasion to Lazzarini to join together the cradle of the historian and the tomb of the poet, in the following lines addressed to Padua:-- Here was he born whose lasting page displays Rome's brightest triumphs, and who painted best; Fit style for heroes, nor to shun the test, Though Grecian art should vie, and Attic lays. And here thy tuneful swan, Arezzo lies, Who gave his Laura deathless name; than whom No bard with sweeter grace has poured the song. O, happy seat! O, favoured by the skies! What store and store is thine, to whom belong So rich a cradle and so rich a tomb! I bought a pennyworth of grapes from one of the poor stall-keepers, and, in return for my coin, had my two extended palms literally heaped. I can safely say that the vine of Padua has not declined; the fruit was delicious; and, after making my way half through my purchase, I collected a few hungry boys, and divided the fragments amongst them. It was late and dark when, ensconced in the interior of the _diligence_, we trundled out of the poor ruined town. The night was dreary and somewhat cold; I courted sleep, but it came not. My companions were mostly young Englishmen, but not of the intellectual stamp of the companion from whom I had parted that morning on the quay of Venice. They appeared to be travelling about mainly to look at pictures and smoke cigars. As to learning anything, they ridiculed the idea of such a thing in a country where there "was no society." It did not seem to have occurred to them that it might be worth while learning how it had come to pass that, in a country where one stumbles at every step on the stupendous memorials of a past civilization and knowledge, there is now no society. At length, after many hours' riding, we drew up before a tall white house, which the gray coat and bayonet of the Croat, and the demand for passports, told me was a police office. It was the last dogana on the Austrian territory. We were next requested to leave the _diligence_ for a little. The day had not yet broke, but I could see that we were on the brink of a deep and broad river, which we were preparing to cross, but how, I could not discover, for I could see no bridge, but only something like a raft moored by the margin of the stream. On this frail craft we embarked, horses, _diligence_, passengers, and all; and, launching out upon the impetuous current, we reached, after a short navigation, the opposite shore. The river we had crossed was the Po, and the craft which had carried us over was a _pont colant_, or flying bridge. This was the frontier of the Papal States; and now, for the first time, I found myself treading the sacred soil of Peter's patrimony. Peter, in the days of his flesh, was a fisherman; but some of his brother apostles were tax-gatherers; and here was the receipt of custom again set up. Both "toll" and "fishing-net," I had understood, were forsaken when their Master called them; but on my arrival I found the apostles all busy at their old trades: some fishing for men at Rome; and others, at the frontiers, levying tribute, both of "the children" and of "strangers;" for on looking up, I could see by the dim light a low building, like an American log-house, standing at a little distance from the river's brink, with a huge sign-board stuck up over the door, emblazoned with the keys and the tiara. This told me that I was in the presence of the Apostolic Police-Office,--an ecclesiastical institution which, I doubt not, has its authority somewhere in the New Testament, though I cannot say that I have ever met with the passage in my readings in that book; but that, doubtless, is because I want the Church's spectacles. When one gets his name inserted in an Italian way-bill, he delivers up his passport to the _conducteur_, who makes it his business to have it viséed at the several stations which are planted thick along all the Italian routes,--the owner, of course, reckoning for the charges at the end of the journey. In accordance with this custom, our _conducteur_ entered the shed-like building I have mentioned, to lay his way-bill and his passports before the officials within. In the interim, we took our places in the vehicle. The _conducteur_ was in no hurry to return, but I dreaded no evil. I had had a wakeful night; and now, throwing myself into my nook in the _diligence_, the stillness favoured sleep, and I was half unconscious, when I found some one pulling at my shoulder, and calling on me to leave the carriage. "What is the matter?" I inquired. "Your passport is not _en règle_," was the reply. "My passport not right!" I answered in astonishment; "it has been viséed at every police-office betwixt and London; and especially at those of Austria, under whose suzerainty the territory of Ferrara is, and no one may prevent me entering the Papal States." The man coolly replied, "You cannot go an inch farther with us;" and proceeded to take down my luggage, and deposit it on the bank. I stept out, and bade the man conduct me to the people inside. Passing under the papal arms, we threaded a long narrow passage,--turned to the left,--traversed another long passage,--turned to the left again, and stood in a little chamber dimly lighted by a solitary lamp. The apartment was divided by a bench, behind which sat two persons,--the one a little withered old man, with small piercing eyes, and the other very considerably younger and taller, and with a face on which anxiety or mistrust had written fewer sinister lines. They quickly told me that my passport was not right, and that I could not enter the Papal States. I asked them to hand me the little volume; and, turning over its pages, I traced with them my progress from London to the Po, and showed that, on the testimony of every passport-office and legation, I was a good man and true up to the further banks of their river; and that if I was other now, I must have become so in crossing, or since touching their soil. They gave me to understand, in reply, that all these testimonies went for nothing, seeing I wanted the _imprimatur_ of the papal consul in Venice. I assured them that omission was owing to misinformation I had received in Venice; that the Valet de Place (an authority in all such matters) at the Albergo dell' Europa had assured me that the two visées I had got in Venice were quite enough; and that the pontifical visée could be obtained in Ferrara or Bologna; and entreated them to permit me to go on to Ferrara, where I would lay my passport before the authorities, and have the error rectified. I shall never forget the emphasis with which the younger of the two officials replied, "Non possum." I had often declined "possum" to my old schoolmaster in former days, little dreaming that I was to hear the vocable pronounced with such terrible meaning in a little cell, at day-break, on the banks of the Po. The postilion cracked his whip,--I saw the _diligence_ move off,--and the sound of its retreating wheels seemed like a farewell to friends and home. A sad, desolate feeling weighed upon me as I turned to the faces of the police-officers and gendarmes in whose power I was left. We all went back together into the little apartment of the passport office, where I opened a conversation with them, in order to discover what was to be done with me,--whether I was to be sent back to Venice, or home to England, or simply thrown into the Po. I made rapid progress in my Italian studies that day; and had it been my hap to be arrested a dozen days on end by the papal authorities, I should by that time have been a fluent Italian speaker. The result of much questioning and explanation was, that if I liked to forward a petition to the authorities in Ferrara, accompanied by my passport, I should be permitted to wait where I was till an answer could be returned. It was my only alternative; and, hiring a special messenger, I sent him off with my passport, and a petition craving permission to enter "the States," addressed to the Pontifical Legation at Ferrara. Meanwhile, I had a gendarme to take care of me. To while away the time, I sallied out, and sauntered along the banks of the river. It was now full day: and the cheerful light, and the noble face of the Po,--here a superb stream, equal almost to the Rhine at Cologne,--rolling on to the Adriatic, chased away my pensiveness. The river here flows between lofty embankments,--the adjoining lands being below its level, and reminding one of Holland; and were any extraordinary inundation to happen among the Alps, and force the embankments of the Po, the territory around Ferrara, if not also that city itself, would infallibly be drowned. A few lighters and small craft, lifting their sails to the morning sun, were floating down the current; and here and there on the banks was a white villa,--the remains of that noble setting of palaces which adorned the Po when the House of D'Este vied in wealth and splendour with the larger courts of Europe. Prisoners must have breakfast; and I found a poor café in the little village, where I got a cup of coffee and an egg,--the latter unboiled, by the way; and discussed my meal in presence of the gendarme, who sat opposite me. Toward noon the messenger returned, and to my joy brought back the papal permission to enter "the States." Light and short as my constraint had been, it was sufficient to make me feel what a magic influence is in liberty. I could again go whither I would; and the poor village of Ponte Lagoscuro, and even the faces of the two officials, assumed a kindlier aspect. Bidding these last, whose Italian urbanity had won upon me, adieu, I started on foot for Ferrara, which lay on the plain some five miles in advance. The road thither was a magnificent one; but I learned afterwards that I had Napoleon to thank for it; but alas, what a picture the country presented! The water was allowed to stagnate along the path, and a thick, green scurf had gathered upon it. The rich black soil was covered with weeds, and the few houses I saw were mere hovels. The sun shone brilliantly, however, and strove to gild this scene of neglect and wretchedness. The day was the 28th of October, and the heat was that of a choice summer day in Scotland, with a much balmier air. I hurried on along the deserted road, and soon, on emerging from a wood, sighted the town of Ferrara, which stretched along the plain in a low line of roofs, with a few towers breaking the uniformity. Presenting my "pass" to the sentinel at the barrier, I entered the city in which Calvin had found an asylum and Tasso a prison. Poor fallen Ferrara! Commerce, learning, the arts, religion, had by turns shed a glory upon it. Now all is over; and where the "Queen of the Po" had been, there sits on the darkened plain a poor city, mouldering into dust, with the silence of a sepulchre around it. I entered the suburbs, but sound of human voice there was none; not a single human being could I see. It might be ages since these streets were trodden, for aught that appeared. The doors were closed, and the windows were stanchioned with iron. In many cases there was neither door nor window; but the house stood open to receive the wind or rain, the fowls of heaven, or the dogs of the city, if any such there were. I passed on, and drew nigh the centre of the town; and now there began to be visible some signs of vitality. Struck at the extremities, life had retreated to the heart. A square castellated building of red brick, surrounded on all sides by a deep moat, filled with the water of the Po, and guarded by Austrian soldiers, upreared its towers before me. This was the Papal Legation. I entered it, and found my passport waiting me; and the tiara and the keys, emblazoned on its pages, told me that I was free of the Papal States. CHAPTER XVII. FERRARA. Lovely in its Ruins--Number and Wealth of its Churches--Tasso's Prison--Renée's Palace--Calvin's Chamber--Influence of Woman on the Reformation--Renée and her Band--Re-union above--Utter Decay of its Trade, its Manufactures, its Knowledge. Even in its ruins Ferrara is lovely. It wears in the tomb the sunset hues of beauty. Its streets run out in straight lines, and are of noble breadth and length. Unencumbered with the heavy arcades that darken Padua, the marble fronts of its palaces rise to a goodly height, covered with rich but exceedingly sweet and chaste designs. On the stone of their pilasters and door-posts the ilex puts forth its leaf, and the vine its grapes; and the carving is as fresh and sharp, in many instances, as if the chisel were but newly laid aside. But it is melancholy to see the long grass waving on its causeways, and the ivy clinging to the deserted doorways and balconies of palatial residences, and to hear the echoes of one's foot sounding drearily in the empty street. I passed the afternoon in visiting the churches. There is no end of these, and night fell before I had got half over them. It amazes one to find in the midst of ruins such noble buildings, overflowing with wealth. Pictures, statuary, marbles, and precious metals, dazzle, and at last weary, the traveller, and form a strange contrast to the desolate fields, the undrained swamps, the mouldering tenements, and the beggarly population, that are collected around them. Of the churches of Ferrara, we may say as Addison of the shrine of Loretto, "It is indeed an amazing thing to see such a prodigious quantity of riches lie dead and untouched, in the midst of so much poverty and misery as reign on all sides of them. If these riches were all turned into current coin, and employed in commerce, they would make Italy the most flourishing country in the world." Two objects specially invited my attention in Ferrara: the one was the prison of Tasso,--the other the palace of Renée, the Duchess of Ferrara. Tasso's prison is a mere vault in the courtyard of the hospital of St Anna, built up at one end with a brick wall, and closed at the other by a low and strong door. The floor is so damp that it yields to the foot; and the arched roof is so low that there is barely room to stand upright. I strongly doubt whether Tasso, or any other man, could have passed seven years in this cell and come out alive. It is written all over within and without with names, some of them illustrious ones. "Byron" is conspicuous in the crowd, cut in strong square characters in the stone; and near him is "Lamartine," in more graceful but smaller letters. Tasso seems to have regarded his country as a prisoner not less than himself, and to have strung his harp at times to bewail its captivity. The dungeon "in which Alphonso bade his poet dwell" was dreary enough, but that of Italy was drearier still; for it is Italy, fully more than the poet, that may be regarded as speaking in the following lines, which furnish evidence that, along with Dante, and all the great minds of the period, Torquato Tasso had seen the hollowness of the Papal Church, and felt the galling bondage which that Church inflicts on both the intellect and the soul. "O God, from this Egyptian land of woe, Teeming with idols and their monstrous train, O'er which the galling yoke that I sustain Like Nilus makes my tears to overflow, To thee, her land of rest, my soul would go: But who, ah! who will break my servile chain? Who through the deep, and o'er the desert plain Will aid and cheer me, and the path will show? Shall God, indeed, the fowls and manna strew,-- My daily bread? and dare I to implore Thy pillar and thy cloud to guide me, Lord? Yes, he may hope for all who trusts thy word. O then thy miracles in me renew; Thine be the glory, and my boasting o'er." From the reputed prison of Tasso I went to see the roof which had sheltered the presiding intellect of the Reformation,--John Calvin. Tasso's glory is like a star, burning with a lovely light in the deep azure; Calvin's is like the sun, whose waxing splendour is irradiating two hemispheres. The palace of the illustrious Renée,--now the Austrian and Papal Legations, and literally a barrack for soldiers,--has no pretensions to beauty. Amid the graceful but decaying fabrics of the city, it erects its square unadorned mass of dull red, edged with a strip of lawn, a few cypresses, and a moat brim-full of water, which not only surrounds it on all sides, but intersects it by means of arches, and makes the castle almost a miniature of Venice. Good part of the interior is occupied as passport offices and guard-rooms. The staircase is of noble dimensions. Some of the rooms are princely, their panellings being mostly covered with paintings, but not of the first excellence. The small room in the southern quadrangle which Calvin is said to have occupied is now fitted up as an oratory; and a very pretty little show-room it is, with its marble altar-piece, its silver candlesticks, its crucifixes, and, in short, all the paraphernalia of such places. If there be any efficacy in holy water, the little chamber must by this time be effectually cleansed from the sad defilement of the arch-heretic. Ferrara is indissolubly connected with the Reformation in Italy. In fact, it was the centre of the movement in the south of the Alps. This distinction it owed to its being the residence of Renée, the daughter of Louis XII. of France, and wife of Hercules II., Duke of Ferrara. This lady, to a knowledge of the ancient classics and contemporary literature, and the most amiable and generous dispositions, added a deep love of evangelical truth, and gladly extended shelter to the friends of the Reformation, whom persecution now forced to leave their native country. Thus there came to be assembled round her a galaxy of talent, learning, and piety. If we except John Calvin, who was known during his brief sojourn of three months as Charles Heppeville, the two noblest minds in this illustrious band were women,--Renée and Olympia Morata. The cause of the Reformation lies under great obligations to woman; though the part she acted in that great drama has never been sufficiently acknowledged.[2] In the heart of woman, when sanctified by Divine grace, there lies concealed under a veil of gentleness and apparent timidity, a fund of fortitude and lofty resolution, which requires a fitting occasion to draw it forth; but when that occasion arrives, there is seen the strength and grandeur of the female character. For woman, whatever is noble, beautiful, and sublime, has peculiar attractions. A just cause, overborne by power or numbers, appeals peculiarly to her unselfish nature; and thus it has happened that the Reformation sometimes found in woman its most devoted disciple and its most undaunted champion. Who can tell how much the firmness and perseverance of the more prominent actors in these struggles were owing to her wise and affectionate counsels? And not only has she been the counsellor of man,--she has willingly shared his sufferings; and the same deep sensibility which renders her so shrinking on ordinary occasions, has at these times given her unconquerable strength, and raised her above the desolation of a prison,--above the shame and horror of a scaffold. Of such mould were the two illustrious women I have mentioned,--the accomplished Renée, the daughter of a king of France, and the yet more accomplished Olympia Morata, the daughter of a schoolmaster and citizen of Mantua. To me these halls were sacred, for the feet which had trodden them three centuries ago. They were thronged with Austrian soldiers and passport officials; but I could people them with the mighty dead. How often had Renée assembled her noble band in this very chamber! How often here had that illustrious circle consulted on the steps proper to be taken for advancing their great cause! How often had they indulged alternate fears and hopes, as they thought now of the power arrayed against them, and now of the progress of the truth, and the confessors it was calling to its aid in every city of Italy! And when the deliberations and prayers of the day were ended, they would assemble on this lawn, to enjoy, under these cypresses, the delicious softness of the Italian twilight. Ah! who can tell the exquisite sweetness of such re-unions! and how inexpressibly soothing and welcome to men whom persecution had forced to flee from their native land, must it have been to find so secure a haven as this so unexpectedly opened to receive them! But ah! too soon were they forced out upon an ocean of storms. They were driven to different countries and to various fates,--some to a life of exhausting labour and conflict, some to exile, and some to the stake. But all this is over now: they dread the dungeon and the stake no more; they are wanderers no longer, having come to a land of rest. Renée has once again gathered her bright band around her, under skies whose light no cloud shall ever darken, and whose calm no storm shall ever ruffle. But do they not still remember and still speak of the consultations and sweet communings which they had together under the shady cypress trees, and the still, rich twilights of Ferrara? Ferrara was the first town subject to the Pope I had entered; and I had here an opportunity of marking the peculiar benefits which attend infallible government. This city is only less wretched than Padua; and the difference seems to lie rather in the more cheerful look of its buildings, than in any superior wealth or comfort enjoyed by its people. Its trade is equally ruined; it is even more empty of inhabitants; its walls, of seven miles' circuit, enclose but a handful of men, and these have a wasted and sickly look, owing to the unhealthy character of the country around. The view from its ramparts reminded me of the prospect from the walls of York. The plain is equally level; the soil is naturally more rich; but the drainage and cultivation of the English landscape are wanting. The town once enjoyed a flourishing trade in hemp,--an article which found its way to our dockyards; but this branch of traffic now scarcely exists. The native manufactures of Ferrara have been ruined; and a feeble trade in corn is almost all that is left it. How is this? Is its soil less fertile? Has its natural canal, the Po, dried up? No; but the Government, afraid perhaps that its fields would yield too plenteously, its artizans become too ingenious, and its citizens too wealthy in foreign markets, has laid a heavy duty on its exports, and on every article of home manufacture. Hence the desolate Polesina without, and the extinct forges and empty workshops within, its walls. A city whose manufactures were met with in all the markets of Europe is now dependent for its own supply on the Swiss. The ruin of its trade dates from its annexation to the Papal States. The decay of intelligence has kept pace with that of trade. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ferrara was one of the lights of Europe: now I know not that there is a single scholar in its university; and its library of eighty thousand volumes and nine hundred manuscripts, among which are the Greek palimpsests of Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom, and the manuscripts of Ariosto and Tasso, is becoming, equally with Ariosto's dust, which reposes in its halls, the prey of the worm. I have to thank the papal police at Ponte Lagoscuro for the opportunity of seeing Ferrara; for, with the bad taste which most travellers in Italy display on this head, I had overlooked this town, and booked myself right through to Bologna. I lodged at a fine old hotel, whose spacious apartments left me in no doubt that it had once belonged to some of the princely families of Ferrara. I saw there, however, men who had "a lean and hungry look," and not such as Cæsar wished to have about him,--"fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights;" and my suspicions which were awakened at the time have since unfortunately been confirmed, for I read in the newspapers, rather more than a year ago, that the landlord had been shot. CHAPTER XVIII. BOLOGNA AND THE APENNINES. Road from Ferrara to Bologna--Wayside Oratories--Miserable Cultivation--Barbarism of People--Aspect of Bologna--Streets, Galleries, and Churches of its Interior--Decay of Art--San Petronio--View of Plain from Hill behind Bologna--Tyranny of Government--Night Arrests--Ruinous Taxation--Departure from Bologna--Brigands--The Apennines--Storm among these Mountains--Two Russian Travellers--Dinner at the Tuscan Frontier--Summit of the Pass--Halt for the Night at a Country Inn--The Hostess and her Company--Supper--Resume Journey next Morning--First Sight of Florence. On the morrow at ten I took my departure for Bologna. It was sweet to exchange the sickly faces and unnatural silence of the city for the bright sun and the living trees. The road was good,--so very good, that it took me by surprise. It was not in keeping with the surrounding barbarism. Instead of a hard-bottomed, macadamized highway, which traversed the plain in a straight line, bordered by noble trees, I should have expected to find in this region of mouldering towns and neglected fields, a narrow, winding, rutted path, ploughed by torrents and obstructed by boulders; and so, I am sure, I should have done, had any of the native governments of Italy had the making of this road. But it had been designed and executed by Napoleon; and hence its excellence. His roads alone would have immortalized him. They remain, after all his victories have perished, to attest his genius. Would that that genius had been turned to the arts of peace! Conquerors would do well to ponder the eulogium pronounced on a humble tailor who built a bridge out of his savings,--that the world owed more to the scissors of that man than to the sword of some conquerors. Along the road, at short intervals, were little temples, where good Catholics who had a mind might perform their devotions. This reminded me that I was now in Peter's patrimony,--the holy land of Romanism; and where, it was presumed, the wayfarer would catch the spirit of devotion from the soil and air. The hour of prayer might be past,--I know not; but I saw no one in these oratories. Little shrines were perched upon the trees, formed sometimes of boards, at others simply of the cavity of the trunk; while the boughs were bent so as to form a canopy over them. Little images and pictures had been stuck into these shrines; but the rooks,--these black republicans,--like the "reds" at Rome, had waged a war for possession, and, pitching overboard the little gods that occupied them, were inhabiting in their room. The "great powers" were too busy, or had been so, in the restoration of greater personages, to take up the quarrel of these minor divinities. A strange silence and dreariness brooded over the region. The land seemed keeping its Sabbaths. The fields rested,--the villages were asleep,--the road was untrodden. Had one been dropt from the clouds, he would have concluded that it was but a century or so since the Flood, and that these were the rude primitive great-grandchildren of Noah, who had just found their way into these parts, and were slowly emerging from barbarism. The fields around afforded little indication of such an instrument as the plough; and one would have concluded from the garments of the people, that the loom was among the yet uninvented arts. The harnessings of the horses formed a curiously tangled web of thong, and rope, and thread, twisted, tied, and knotted. It would have puzzled OEdipus himself to discover how a horse could ever be got into such gear, or, being in, how it ever could be got out. There seemed a most extraordinary number of beggars and vagabonds in Peter's patrimony. A little congregation of these worthies waited our arrival at every village, and whined round us for alms so long as we remained. Others, not quite so ragged, stood aloof, regarding us fixedly, as if devising some pretext on which to claim a paul of us. There were worse characters in the neighbourhood, though happily we saw none of them. But at certain intervals we met the Austrian patrol, whose duty it was to clear the road of brigands. Peter, it appeared to us, kept strange company about him,--idlers, beggars, vagabonds, and brigands. It must vex the good man much to find his dear children disgracing him so in the eyes of strangers. These dismal scenes accompanied us half the way. We then entered the Bolognese, and things began to look a little better. Bologna, though under the Papal Government, has long been famous for nourishing a hardy, liberty-loving people, though, if report does them justice, extremely licentious and infidel. Its motto is "_libertas_;" and the air of liberty is favourable, it would seem, to vegetation; for the fields looked greener the moment we had crossed the barrier. Soon we were charmed with the sight of Bologna. Its appearance is indeed imposing, and gives promise of something like life and industry within its walls. A noble cluster of summits,--an offshoot of the Apennines,--rises behind the city, crowned with temples and towers. Within their bosky declivities, from which tall cypress-trees shoot up, lie embowered villas and little watch-towers, with their glittering vanes. At the foot of the hill is spread out the noble city, with its leaning towers and its tall minaret-looking steeples. The approach to the walls reminded me that below these ramparts sleeps Ugo Bassi. I afterwards searched for his resting-place, but could find no one who either would or could show me his tomb. A more eloquent declaimer than even Gavazzi, I have been assured by those who knew him, was silenced when Ugo Bassi fell beneath the murderous fire of the Croat's musket. After the death-like desertion and silence of Ferrara, the feeble bustle of Bologna seemed like a return to the world and its ways. Its streets are lined with covered porticoes, less heavy than those of Padua, but harbouring after nightfall, says the old traveller ARCHENHOLTZ, robbers and murderers, of whom the latter are the more numerous. He accounts for this by saying, that whereas the robber has to make restitution before receiving absolution, the murderer, whether condemned to die or set at liberty, receives full pardon, without the "double labour," as Sir John Falstaff called it, of "paying back." Its hundred churches are vast museums of sculpture and painting. Its university, which the Bolognese boast is the oldest in Europe, rivalled Padua in its glory, and now rivals it in its decay. Its two famous leaning towers,--the rent in the bottom of one is quite visible,--are bending from age, and will one day topple over, and pour a deluge of old bricks upon the adjoining tenements. Its "Academy of the Fine Arts" is, after Rome and Florence, the finest in Italy. It is filled with the works of the Caracci, Domenichino, Guido Albani, and others of almost equal celebrity. I am no judge of such matters; and therefore my reader need lay no stress upon my criticisms; but it appeared to me, that some paintings placed in the first rank had not attained that excellence. The highly-praised "Victory of Sampson over the Philistines," I felt, wanted the grandeur of the Hebrew Judge on this the greatest occasion of his life; although it gave you a very excellent representation of a thirsty man drinking, with rows of prostrate people in the background. Other pieces were disfigured by glaring anachronisms in time and dress. The artist evidently had drawn his inspiration, not from the _Bible_, but from the _Cathedral_. The Apostles in some cases had the faces of monks, and looked as if they had divided their time betwixt Liguori and the wine-flagon. Several Scriptural personages were attired in an ecclesiastical dress, which must have been made by some tailor of the sixteenth century. But there is one picture in that gallery that impressed me more than any other picture I ever saw. It is a painting of the Crucifixion by Guido. The background is a dark thundery mass of cloud, resting angrily above the dimly-seen roofs and towers of Jerusalem. There is "darkness over all the land;" and in the foreground, and relieved by the darkness, stands the cross, with the sufferer. On the left is John, looking up with undying affection. On the right is Mary,--calm, but with eyes full of unutterable sorrow. Mary Magdalene embraces the foot of the cross: her face and upper parts are finely shaded; but her attitude and form are strongly expressive of reverence, affection, and profound grief. There are no details: the piece is simple and great. There are no attempts to produce effect by violent manifestations of grief. Hope is gone, but love remains; and there before you are the parties standing calm and silent, with their great sorrow. It so happened that the exhibition of the works of living artists was open at the time, and I had a good opportunity of comparing the present with the past race of Italian painters. I soon found that the race of Guidos was extinct, and that the pencil of the masters had fallen into the hands of but poor copyists. The present artists of Italy have given over painting saints and Scripture-pieces, and work mostly in portraits and landscapes. They paint, of course, what will sell; and the public taste appears decidedly to have changed. There was a great dearth of good historical, imaginative, and allegorical subjects; too often an attempt was visible to give interest to a piece by an appeal to the baser passions. But the living artists of that country fall below not only their great predecessors, but even the artists of Scotland. This exhibition in Bologna did not by any means equal in excellence or interest the similar exhibition opened every spring in Edinburgh. The statuary displayed only beauty and voluptuousness of form: it wanted the simple energy and the chastened grandeur of expression which characterize the statuary of the ancients, and which have made it the admiration of all ages. The only god whom the Bolognese worship is San Petronio. His temple, in which Charles V. was crowned by Clement VII., stands in the Piazza Maggiore, the forum of Bologna in the middle ages, and rivals the "Academy" itself in its paintings and sculptures. Though the façade is not finished, nor likely soon to be, it is one of the largest churches in Italy, and is a fine specimen of the Italian Gothic. In a little side chapel is the head of San Petronius himself, certified by Benedict XIV. On the forms on the cathedral floor lie little framed pictures of the saint, with a prayer addressed to him. I saw a country girl enter the church, drop on her knees, kiss the picture, and recite the prayer. I afterwards read this prayer, though not on bended knee; and can certify that a grosser piece of idolatry never polluted human lips. Petronio was addressed by the same titles in which the Almighty is usually approached; as, "the most glorious," "the most merciful." "Towards him they bend With awful reverence prone; and as a god Extol him equal to the Highest in heaven." Higher blessings, whether for time or for eternity, than those for which the devotee was directed to supplicate San Petronio, man needs not, and God has not to bestow. Daily bread, protection from danger, grace to love San Petronio, grace to serve San Petronio, pardon, a happy death, deliverance from hell, and eternal felicity in Paradise,--all who offered this prayer,--and other prayer was unheard beneath that roof,--supplicated of San Petronio. The Church of Rome affirms that she does not pray _to the_ saints, but _through_ them,--namely, as intercessors with Christ and God. This is no justification of the practice, though it were the fact; but it is not the fact. In protestant countries she may insert the name of God at the end of her prayers; but in popish countries she does not deem it needful to observe this formality. The name of Christ and of God rarely occurs in her popular formulas. In the Duomo of Bologna, the only god supplicated,--the only god known,--is San Petronio. The tendency of the worship of the Church of Rome is to efface God from the knowledge and the love of her members. And so completely has this result been realized, that, as one said, "You might steal God from them without their knowing it." Indeed, that "Great and Dreadful Name" might be blotted out from the few prayers of that Church in which it is still retained, and its worship would go on as before. What possible change would take place in the Duomo of San Petronio at Bologna, and in thousands of other churches in Italy, though Rome was to decree in _words_, as she does in _deeds_, that "_there is no God_?" On the second day of my stay at Bologna I ascended the fine hill on the north of the city. A noble pillared arcade of marble, three miles in length, leads up to the summit. At every twelve yards or so is an alcove, with a florid painting of some saint; and at each station sits a poor old woman, who begs an alms of you, in the name of the saint beneath whose picture she spins her thread,--her own thread being nearly ended. There met me here a regiment of little priests, of about an hundred in number, none of whom seemed more than ten years of age, and all of whom wore shoes with buckles, silk stockings, breeches, a loose flowing robe, a white-edged stock, and shovel hat,--in short, miniature priests in dress, in figure, and in everything save their greater sportiveness. On the summit is a magnificent church, containing one of those black madonnas ascribed to Luke, and said to have been brought hither by a hermit from Constantinople in the twelfth century. Be this as it may, the black image serves the Bolognese for an occasion of an annual festival, kept with fully as much hilarity as devotion. From the summit one looks far and wide over Italy. Below is spread out the plain of Lombardy, level as the sea, and as thickly studded with white villas as the heavens with stars. On the north, the cities of Mantua and Verona, and numerous other towns and villages, are visible. On the east, the towers and cathedral roofs of Ferrara are seen rising above the woods that cover the plain; and the view is bounded by the Adriatic, which, like a thin line of blue, runs along the horizon. On the south and west is the hill country of the Apennines, among whose serrated peaks and cleft sides is many a lovely dell, rich in waters, and vines, and olive trees. The distant country towards the Mediterranean lay engulphed in a white mist. A violent electrical action was going on in it, which, like a strong wind moving upon its surface, raised it into billows, which appeared to sweep onward, tossing and tumbling like the waves of ocean. I had taken up my abode at the Il Pellegrino, one of the best recommended hotels in Bologna,--not knowing that the Austrian officers had made it their head-quarters, and that not a Bolognese would enter it. At dinner-time I saw only the Austrian uniform around the table. This was a matter of no great moment. Not so what followed. When I went to bed, there commenced overhead a heavy shuffling of feet, and an incessant going and coming, with slamming of doors, and jolting of tables, which lasted all night long. A sad tragedy was enacting above me. The political apprehensions are made over-night in the Italian towns; and I little doubt that the soldiers were all night busily engaged in bringing in prisoners, and sending them off to jail. The persons so arrested are subjected to moral and physical tortures, which speedily prostrate both mind and body, and sometimes terminate in death. Loaded with chains, they are shut up in stinking holes, where they can neither stand upright nor lie down at their length. The heat of the weather and the foul air breed diseases of the skin, and cover them with pustules. The food, too, is scanty, often consisting of only bread and water. The Government strive to keep their cruel condition a secret from their relatives, who, notwithstanding, are able at times to penetrate the mystery that surrounds them, but only to have their feelings lacerated by the thought of the dreadful sufferings undergone by those who are the objects of their tenderest affection. And what agony can be more dreadful than to know that a father, a husband, a son, is rotting in a putrid cell, or being beaten to death by blows, while neither relief nor sympathy from you can reach the sufferer? The case of a young man of the name of Neri, formerly healthy and handsome, found its way to the public prints. Broken down by blows, he was carried to the military hospital in an almost dying condition, where an English physician, in company with an Austrian surgeon, found him with lacerated skin, and the vertebral bones uncovered. He was enduring at the same time so acute pain from inflammation of the bowels, that he was unable, but by hints, to express his misery. It was here that the atrocities of the Papal Nuncio BEDINI were perpetrated,--the same man who was afterwards chased from the soil of America by a storm of execration evoked against him by the friends and countrymen of the victims who had been tortured and shot during his sway in Bologna. In short, the acts of the Holy Office are imitated and renewed; so that numbers, distracted and maddened by the torments which they endure, avow offences which they never committed, and name accomplices whom they never had; and the retractations of these unhappy beings are of no avail to prevent new arrests. The Bolognese are permitted to weep their complicated evils only in secret; to do so openly would be charged as a crime. The fiscal oppression is nearly as unbearable as the political and social. The taxation, both as regards its amount and the mode of enforcing it, is ruinous to the individual, and operates as a fatal check to the progress of industry. The country is eaten up with foreign soldiers. The great hotels in all the principal towns resemble casernes. The reader may judge of my surprise on opening my bed-room door one morning, to find that a couple of Croats had slept on the mat outside of it all night. It might be a special mark of honour to myself; but I rather think that they are accustomed to bivouac in the passages and lobbies. The eternal drumming in the streets is enough to deafen one for life. To the traveller it is sufficiently annoying; how much more so to the Bolognese, who knows that that is music for which he must pay dear! Since 1848, the aggregate of taxation between Leghorn and Ancona has been increased about 40 per cent.; and the taxes are levied upon a principle of arbitrary assessment which compels the rich to simulate poverty, as in Turkey, lest they should be stripped of their last farthing. In Bologna, the payments of the house and land tax, which used to be made every two months, are now collected for the same sums every seven weeks; and a per centage is added at the pleasure of the Government, of which no one knows the amount till the collector calls with his demand. In other towns an income-tax is levied upon trades and professions, framed upon no rule but the supposed capabilities of the individual assessed to pay. Bologna, I may note, although in the Papal States, is now quite an Austrian town. The Austrians have there six-and-twenty pieces of artillery, and are building extensive barracks for cavalry and infantry. Bologna belongs to that part of the Papal States called the Four Legations, where, whether it pleases the Pope to be so protected or not, it is now quite understood that the Austrians have come to stay. The officer in command at Bologna styles himself its civil as well as military governor. On the third day after my arrival, I started at four of the morning for Florence. It was dark as we rode through the streets of Bologna; and our _diligence_, piled a-top with luggage, smashed several of the oil-lamps, which dangled on cords at a dangerous proximity to the causeway. I don't know that the Bolognese would miss them, for we left the street very little, if at all, darker than we found it. I looked forward with no little interest to the day's ride, which was to lie among the dells of the Apennines, and to terminate at eve with the fair sight of the Queen of the Arno. How unlike the reality, will appear in the sequel. In half an hour we came in the dim light to a little valley, where the village bell was sweetly chiming the matins. I note the spot because I narrowly missed being an actor in a tragedy which took place here the very next morning. I may tell the story now, though I anticipate somewhat. I was sitting at the table d'hote in Florence three days after, when the gentleman on my right began to tell the company how he had travelled from Bologna on the Saturday previous, and how he and all his fellow-passengers had been robbed on the way. They had got to the spot I have indicated, when suddenly a little band of brigands, which lay in ambush by the wayside, rushed on the _diligence_. Some mounted on the front, and attended to the outside passengers; others took charge of those in the _interieur_. Now it was, when the passengers saw into what hands they had fallen, that nothing was heard but groaning in all parts of the _diligence_. Our informant, who sat next the window in the _interieur_, was seized by the collar, a long knife was held to his breast, and he was admonished to use all diligence in making over to his new acquaintance any worldly goods he had about him. He had to part with his gold watch and chain, his breast-pin, and sundry other articles of jewellery; but his purse and sovereigns he contrived to drop among the straw at the bottom of the vehicle. All the rest fared as he did, and some of them worse, for they lost their money as well as jewels. These grave proceedings were diversified by a somewhat humorous incident. The coachman had providently put his dinner in the form of a sausage, rolled in brown paper, under his seat. This is the form in which Austrian zwanzigers are commonly made up; and the brigands, fancying the coachman's sausage to be a roll of silver zwanzigers, seized on it with avidity, and bore it off in triumph. They were proceeding to rifle the baggage, when, hearing the horse-patrol approaching, they plunged into the thicket as suddenly as they had appeared. The morning chimes were sounding, as on the previous day, while this operation was going on. But what is not a little extraordinary is, that all this took place within two miles of the city gates of Bologna, where there could not be fewer than twelve thousand Austrian soldiers. But these, I presume, were too much engaged on this, as on previous nights, in apprehending and imprisoning the citizens in the Pope's behalf, to think of looking after brigands. In Peter's privileged patrimony one may rob, murder, and break every command of the decalogue, and defy the police, provided he obey the Church. Were I to travel that road again, I would provide myself with a tinsel watch and appendages, and a sausage carefully rolled up in paper, to avoid the unpleasantness of meeting such wellwishers empty-handed. In another half hour we came to the spurs of the Apennines. The day was breaking, and its light, I hoped, would lay open many a sweet dell and many a romantic peak, before evening. These hopes, as, alas! too often happens in the longer journey of life, were to be suddenly dashed. I felt a warm, suffocating current of air breathing over the valley, and looked up to see the furnace whence, as I supposed, it proceeded. This was the sirocco, the herald of the tempest that soon thereafter burst upon us. Masses of whitish cloud came rolling over the summits of the hills; furious gusts came down upon us from the heights; and in a few minutes we found ourselves contending with a hurricane such as I have never seen equalled save on one other occasion. The cloud became fearfully black, and made the lightning the more awful as it touched with fire the peaks around us, and bathed in an ocean of flame the vines and hamlets on the hill-side. Terrible peals of thunder broke over us; and these were followed by torrents of rain, which the furious winds dashed against our vehicle with the force and noise of a cataract. We had to make our way up the mountain's side in the face of this tempest. At times more than a dozen animals were yoked to our _diligence_,--horses, oxen, and beasts of every kind which we could press into the service; while half-a-dozen postilions, shouting and cracking their whips, strove to urge the motley cavalcade onward. Still we crept up only by inches. The road in most cases wound over the very peak of the mountain; and there the tempest, rushing upon us from all sides at once, threatened to lay our vehicle, which shook and quivered in the blast, flat on its side, or toss it into the valley below. The storm continued to rage with unabated violence from day-break till mid-day; and, by favour of horses, bullocks, and postilions, we kept moving on at the rate of two miles an hour, now climbing, now descending, well knowing that at every summit a fresh buffeting awaited us. I had as my companions on this journey, two Russian gentlemen, with whom afterwards, at several points of my tour, I came into contact. They were urbane and intelligent men, full of their own country and of the Czar, yet professing great respect for England, which they had just visited, and looking down with a contempt they were at little pains to conceal, upon the Frenchmen and Italians among whom they were moving. They possessed the sobriety of mind, the turn for quiet, shrewd observation, in short, much of the physical and intellectual stamina, of Englishmen, with just a shade less of the exquisite polish which marks the latter wherever they are met with. These, no doubt, were favourable specimens of the Russian nation; but it is such men who give the tone to a State, while the masses below execute their designs. I have ever since felt that, should we ever meet that people on the field of battle, the contest would be no ordinary one. I recollect one of these gentlemen meeting me on the streets of Rome some weeks afterwards, and informing me that he had been the day before to visit the ball on the top of St Peter's, and that he had been delighted at seeing his Emperor's name, in his Emperor's own handwriting, inside the ball, with a few lines beneath the signature, stating that he had stood in that ball, and had there prayed for Mother Holy Russia,--a fact full of significance. About mid-day we came, wet, and weary, and cold, to the Duana on the Tuscan frontier, where was a poor inn, at which, after our passports had been viséed, and our trunks and carpet-bags plumbed, we dined. There were some twenty of us at table; a priest taking the top, and the _conducteur_ the bottom. I remember that two persons of the party kept their hats on at table, and that these were the priest and a poor country lad,--the priest because he presided perhaps, and the countryman because, not knowing the etiquette of the point, he wisely determined to follow in that, as in greater matters, the priest. Our dinner consisted of coarse broth, black bread, buffalo beef, and wine of not the sweetest flavour; but what helped us was an excellent appetite, for we had not breakfasted beyond a few chestnuts and grapes picked up at the poor villages through which we passed. We obtained, however, an hour's shelter from the elements. We resumed our journey, and in about an hour's ride we gained the central chain of the Apennines. Happily the tempest had moderated somewhat; for this, lying midway between the two seas, is ordinarily the stormiest point of the pass. We crossed it, however, with less inconvenience than we had looked for. The summits, which had hitherto been conical, with vines straggling up their sides, now became rounded, or ran off in serrated lines, with sides scarred with tempests and strewn with stones. The scenery was bleak and desolate, as that of the Grampian pass leading by Spittal of Glenshee to Dee-side. But as we continued our descent, the richly wooded glens returned; the clouds rose; and at one time I ventured to hope that I should yet have my first sight of Florence under a golden sky, and that Milton's description might, after all, be applicable to this day of storms:-- "As when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the low'ring element Scowls o'er the darken'd landskip snow or shower; If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings." But the hope was short-lived: no Florence was I to see that night; nor was note of bird to gladden the dells. The mists again fell, and hid in premature night those fine valleys, so famous in Florentine history, which we were now approaching. We wound round hills, traversed deep ravines, heard on every side the thunder of the swollen torrents, and, when the parting vapour permitted, had glimpses of the luxuriant woods of myrtle and laurel that clothe these valleys,-- "Where round some mouldering tower pale ivy creeps, And low-brow'd rocks hang nodding o'er the deeps." At last we found ourselves on the banks of a broad and swollen river,--the Save,--with no means of transit save a dismantled bridge, so sorely shattered by the flood, that it was an even question whether our vehicle might not, like the last straw on the dromedary's back, sink the structure outright. We dismounted, and, by the help of lights, measured first the bridge, and next the _diligence_, and found that the breadth of the former exceeded that of the latter by just two inches. The passengers passed on foot; the _diligence_, with the baggage, came after; and so all arrived safely on the other side. Our first care was to assemble a council of war in the poor inn which stood on the spot, and deliberate what next to do. The _conducteur_ opened the debate. "We had," he said, "twenty miles of road still before us; the way lay through deep ravines, and over torrents which the rains must have rendered impassable: it would be long past midnight till we should reach Florence,--if we should ever reach it: his opinion was, therefore, that we ought to stay where we were; nevertheless, if we insisted, he would go on at all risks." So counselled our leader; and if we wanted an argument on the other side, we had only to look around. The walls of the inn were naked and black; the floor was covered inch-deep with slime, the deposit of the flood which had that day broke into the dwelling; and the place was evidently unequal to the "entertainment" of such a number of "men and horses" as had thus unexpectedly been thrown upon it. It is not wonderful, in these circumstances, that a small opposition party sprung up, headed by an English lady, whose delicate slippers were never made for such a floor as that on which she now stood. She could see no danger in going on, and urged us to set forward. Better counsels prevailed, however; and we resolved to endure the evils we knew, rather than adventure on those we knew not. The next matter to be negotiated was supper, of which the aspect of the place gave no great promise. The landlady was a thin, wiry, black, voluble Tuscan. "Have you beef?--Have you cheese?--Have you macaroni?"--inquired several voices in succession. "Oh, she had all these, and a great many dainties besides, in the morning; but the flood,--the flood!" The same flood, however, which had swept off our hostess's larder, had swept in a great deal of good company, and she was evidently resolved on setting the one evil over against the other. She now showered upon us a long, rapid, and vehement address; and he who has not heard the Tuscan discourse does not know what volubility is. "What does she say?" I inquired at one of my two Russian friends. "She says very many words," he replied, "but the meaning is moneys, moneys." "Have you any coffee?" I asked. "Oh, coffee! delightful coffee; but it had gone sailing down the flood." "And it carried off the eggs too, I suppose?" "No; I have eggs." We resolved to sup on eggs. A fire of logs was kindled up stairs, and a table was extemporized out of some deals. In a quarter of an hour in came our supper,--black bread, fried eggs, and a skein of wine. We fell to; but, alack! what from the smut of the chimney and the dust of the pan, the eggs were done in the _chiaro scuro_ style; the wine had so villanous a twang, that a few sips of it contented me; and the bread, black as it was, was the only thing palatable. I got the landlady persuaded to boil me an egg; and though the Italian peasants only dip their eggs in hot water, and serve them up raw, it was preferable to the conglomerate of the pan. We made merry, however, over our poor meal and the grateful warmth of the fire; and somewhere towards midnight we entertained the question of going to bed. We had avoided the topic as long as possible, from a foreboding that our hostess would present us with some rueful tale of blankets lost in the flood. Besides, we were not without misgivings that, should the clouds return and the river rise as before, house and all might follow the other things down the stream, and no one could tell where we might find ourselves on awakening. On broaching the subject, however, we found to our delight, that cribs, couches, shakedowns, and all sorts of contrivances, with store of cloaks, garments, and blankets, had been got ready for our use. We were told off into parties; and the first to be sorted were the two Russians, an Italian, and myself. We four were shown into a room, which, to our great surprise, contained two excellent four-posted beds, one of which was allotted to the two Russian gentlemen, and the other to the Italian and myself. Our mode of turning in was somewhat novel. The Russians put away simply their greatcoats, and lay down beneath the coverlet. My bed-fellow the Italian took up a position for the night by throwing himself, as he was, on the top of the bed-clothes. Not approving of either mode, I slipped off both greatcoat and coat, and, covering myself with the blankets, soon forgot in sleep all the mishaps of the day. The voice of the _conducteur_ shouting at the door of our apartment awakened us before day-break. Our company mustered with what haste they could, and we again betook us to the road, "While the still morn went out with sandals gray." The path lay along the banks of the torrent Carza, and the valley we found frightfully scarred by the flood of the former day. Fierce torrents rushing from the hills had torn the fences, ploughed up the road, piled up hillocks of mud among the vineyards, and covered with barren sand, or strewn with stones, many an acre of fine meadow. Had we attempted the path in the darkness, our course must have found a speedy termination. At length, ascending a steep hill, we found ourselves overlooking the valley of the Arno. Every traveller taxes his descriptive powers to the utmost to paint the view from this hill-top; and I verily believe that, seen under a cloudless sky, it is one of the most enchanting landscapes in the world. The numberless conical hills,--the white villas and villages, which lie as thick as if the soil had produced them,--the silvery stream of the Arno,--the rich chestnut and olive woods,--the domes of the Italian Athens,--the songs,--the fragrance,--and the great wall of the Apennines bounding all,--must present a picture of rare magnificence. But I saw it under different conditions, and must needs describe it as it appeared. Sub-Apennine Italy was before me, and it seemed the Italy I had dreamed of, could I only see it; but, alas! it was blotted with mists, and overshadowed by a black canopy of cloud. Outspread, far as the eye could extend southward, was a landscape of ridges and conical tops, separated by winding wreaths of white mist, giving to the country the aspect of an ocean broken up into creeks, and bays, and channels, with no end of islands. The hills were covered to their very summits with the richest vegetation; and the multitude of villages sprinkled over them lent them an air of great animation. The great chain of the Apennines, with rolling masses of cloud on its summits, ran along on the east, and formed the bounding wall of the prospect. Below us there floated on the surface of the mist an immense dome, looking like a balloon of huge size about to ascend into the air. It did not ascend, however; but, surrounded by several tall shafts and towers which rose silently out of the mist, it remained suspended over the same spot. Like a buoy at sea affixed to the place where some noble vessel lies entombed, this dome told us that engulphed in this ocean of vapour lay FLORENCE, with her rich treasures of art, and her many stirring recollections and traditions. CHAPTER XIX. FLORENCE AND ITS YOUNG EVANGELISM. Beauty of Position--Focus of Italian Art--Education on the Æsthetic Principle--Effects as shown in the Character and Manners of the Florentines--The result not Civilization, but Barbarism--The Artizans of Britain surpass the Florentines in Civilization--Early English Scholars at Florence--Man's Power for Good--Savonarolo--History of present Religious Movement in Tuscany--Condition of Tuscan Government and Priesthood prior to 1848--Attempts to introduce Religious Books--The Priests compel the Government to interfere--The Revolution of 1848--The Bible translated and seized--Visit of Vaudois Pastors--Secret Religious Press--Work now carried on by the Converts--Denunciation of DEATH for Bible Reading--Great Increase of Converts notwithstanding--Present State and Prospects of Movement--Leave Florence--Beauty of the Vale of the Arno--Pisa--Arrive at Leghorn. Of Florence "the Beautiful," I must say that its beauty appeared scarce equal to its fame. In an age when the capitals of northern Europe were of wood, the Queen of the Arno may have been without a rival on the north of the Alps; but now finer streets, handsomer squares, and nobler façades, may be seen in any of our second-rate towns. But its dome, by Brunelleschi, the largest in the world,--its tall campanile,--its baptistry, with its beautiful gates,--and its public statuary,--are worthy of all admiration. Its environs are superb. Florence is sweetly embosomed in an amphitheatre of mountains, of the most lovely forms and the richest and brightest colouring. Castles and convents crown their summits; while their slopes display the pillar-like cypress, the gray olive, the festooned vine, with a multitude of embowered villas. On the north-east, right in the fork of the Apennines, lie the bosky and wooded dells of Valombrosa. On the north, seated on a pyramidal hill, is the ancient Fiesole, which the genius of Milton has touched and immortalized. On the west are the spacious lawns and parks of the Grand Duke; while the noble valley runs off to the south-west, carpeted with vines, or covered with chestnut woods, with the Arno stealing silently through it in long reaches to the sea. During my stay, the girdling Apennines were tipped with the snows of winter; and when the sun shone out, they formed a gleaming circlet around the green valley, like a ring of silver enclosing an enormous emerald. I saw the sun but seldom, however. The bad weather which had overtaken me amid the Apennines descended with me into the valley of the Arno; and murky clouds, with torrents of rain, but too often obscured the sky. But I could fancy the delicious beauty of a summer eve in Florence, with the still balmy air enwrapping the purple hills, the tall cypresses, the domes, and the gently stealing waters. In spring the region must be a very paradise. Indeed, spring is seldom absent from the banks of the Arno; for though at times savage Winter is heard growling amid the Apennines, he dare seldom venture farther than midway down their slopes. I cannot recall the past glories of Florence, or even touch on Cosmo's "immortal century;" I cannot speak of its galleries, so rich in painting, so unrivalled in statuary; nor can I enter its Pitti palace, with its hanging gardens; or the city churches, with their store of frescoes and paintings; or its Santa Crocé, with its six mighty tombs,--those even of Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, Alfieri, Leonardo Aretino. The size of Florence brings all these objects within a manageable distance; and, during my stay of well-nigh a week, I visited them, as any one may do, almost every day. But every traveller has entered largely into their description, and I pass them over, to touch on other things more rarely brought into view. Florence is the focus of Italian art; and here, if anywhere, one can see the effect of educating a population solely on the æsthetic principle. The Florentines have no books, no reading-rooms, no public lectures, no preaching in their churches even, bating the occasional harangue of a monk. They are left to be trained solely by fine pictures and lovely statues. From these they are expected to learn their duties as men and as citizens. The sole employment of the people is to produce these things; their sole study, to be able to admire them. The result is not civilization, but barbarism. Nor can it well be otherwise. We find the "beautiful" abundantly in nature, but never dissociated from the "useful;" teaching us that it cannot be safely sought but in union with what is true and good; and that we cannot make it "an end" without reversing the whole constitution of our nature. When a people make the love of "the beautiful" their predominant passion, they rapidly decline in the better and nobler qualities. The beautiful yields only enjoyment; and those who live only to enjoy soon become intensely selfish. That enjoyment, moreover, is immediate, and so affords no room for the exercise of patience and foresight. A race of triflers arise, who think only of the present hour. They are wholly undisciplined in the higher qualities of mind,--in perseverance and self-control; and, being withdrawn from the contemplation of facts and principles, they become incapable of attending to the useful duties of life, and are wholly unable to rise to the higher efforts of virtue and patriotism. The Italian Governments, for their own ends, have restricted their subjects to the fine arts, but at the expense of the trade, the agriculture, and the civilization, of their dominions. The fabric of British power was not raised on the æsthetic principle. Take away our books, and give us pictures; shut up our schools and churches, and give us museums and galleries; instead of our looms and forges, substitute chisels and pencils; and farewell to our greatness. The artizan of Birmingham or Glasgow is a more civilised man than the same class in the Italian cities. His dwelling, too, displays an amount of comfort and elegance which few in Italy below the rank of princes, and not always they, can command. The condition of the Italian people shows conclusively that the predominating study of "the beautiful" has a most corrupting and enfeebling effect. In fact, their pictures have paved the way for their tyrants; and when one marks their demoralizing effects, he feels how salutary is the restriction of the Decalogue against their use in Divine worship. If pictures and images lead to idolatry in the Church, their exclusive study as infallibly produces serfdom in the State. In the early dawn of the Reformation, several of our own countrymen visited the city of the Medici, that they might have access to the works of antiquity which Cosmo had collected, and enjoy the converse of the learned men that thronged his palace. "William Selling," says D'Aubigné, "a young English ecclesiastic, afterwards distinguished at Canterbury by his zeal in collecting valuable manuscripts,--his fellow-countrymen, Grocyn, Lilly, and Latimer, 'more bashful than a maiden,'--and, above all, Linacre, whom Erasmus ranked above all the scholars of Italy,--used to meet in the delicious villa of the Medici, with Politian, Chalcondyles, and other men of learning; and there, in the calm evenings of summer, under that glorious Tuscan sky, they dreamt romantic visions of the Platonic philosophy. When they returned to England, these learned men laid before the youth of Oxford the marvellous treasures of the Greek language." We are repaying the debt, by sending to that land a better philosophy than any these learned men ever brought from it. This leads us to speak of the religious movement in progress in Tuscany. After all, man's power for evil is extremely limited. The very opposite is the ordinary estimate. When we mark the career of a conqueror like Napoleon, or the withering effects of an organization like that of Rome, and compare these with the feeble results of a preacher like Savonarola, whose body the fire reduced to ashes, and whose disciples persecution speedily scattered, we say that man's power to destroy his species is almost omnipotent,--his power to benefit them scarce appreciable. But spread out the long cycles of history and the long ages of the world, and you learn that the triumphs of evil, though sudden, are temporary, and those of truth slow but eternal. A true word spoken by a single man has in it more power than armies, and will, in the long run, do more to bless than all that tyrannies can do to blight mankind. Savonarola, feeble as he seemed, and unprotected as he was, wielded a power greater than that of Rome. The truths sown by the preacher on the banks of the Arno so many centuries ago are not yet dead. They are springing up; and, long after Rome shall have passed away, they will be a source of liberty, of civilization, of arts, and of eternal life, to his countrymen. A political storm heralded the quiet spring-time of evangelical truth which has of late blessed that land. Prior to 1848, although there had been no change for the better in the law, a very considerable degree of practical liberty was enjoyed by the subjects of Tuscany. The Tuscans are naturally a quiet, well-behaved people; the Grand Duke was an easy, kind-hearted man; his Government was exceedingly mild; and, as he conducted himself towards his people like a father, he was greatly beloved by them. Tuscany at that period was universally acknowledged to be the happiest province of Italy. The priesthood of those days were a good-natured, easy set of men also. They had never known opposition. They could not imagine the possibility of anything occurring to endanger their power, and therefore were exceedingly tolerant in the exercise of it. They were an illiterate and ill-informed race. An Abbatte of their own number assured Dr Stewart, so far back as 1845, that there was not one amongst them, from the Archbishop downwards, who could read Hebrew, nor half-a-dozen who could be found among the upper orders who could read Greek. They were masters of as much Latin as enabled them to get through the mass; but they were wholly unskilled in the modern tongues of Europe, and entire strangers to modern European literature. Though poorly paid, they durst not eke out their means of subsistence by entering into any trade. Many of them were fain to become major domos in rich families, and might be seen chaffering in the markets in the public piazza, and weighing out flour, coffee, and oil to the servants at home. No priest can say more than one mass a-day; and for that he is paid one lira, or eightpence sterling. Such being the state of matters, little notice was taken of what foreign Protestants might be doing. The priests were secure in their ignorance, and deemed it impossible that any attempt would be made to introduce the diabolical heresies of Luther among their orthodox flocks. Indeed, these flocks were removed almost beyond the reach of contamination, not so much by the vigilance of the priests, as by their own ignorance and bigotry. The degree of popular enlightenment may be judged of from the following circumstance which happened to Dr Stewart, and of which the Doctor himself assured me Soon after his first coming into Tuscany in 1845, he came into contact with a countryman, who, on being told that he was a Protestant minister, began instantly to scrutinize his lower extremities, to ascertain whether he had cloven hoofs. The priests had told the people that Protestants were just devils in disguise. The Government, I have said, was a mild one. It was more: it was affected with the usual Italian sluggishness and indolence,--the _dolce far niente_; and accordingly it winked at innumerable ongoings, so long as these did not attract public attention. Bibles and religious Protestant works were introduced secretly, the Government knowing it, but winking at it, as the Church did not complain. The arrest of the deputation from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to the Holy Land in 1839 was an exception to what I have now stated, but such an exception as confirms the general statement. The deputation, with the ignorance of us Britishers abroad for the first time, imagined that because Leghorn was a free port, they were free to give away Bibles, tracts, and all kinds of religious books; and accordingly they made vigorous use of their time. Scarcely had they stepped on shore when they commenced a liberal distribution of Bibles, books on the "Evidences," and other valuable works, among the boatmen, facchini, and beggars. It did not occur to them, that of those to whom they gave these books, few could read, and none were able to appreciate them. Many persons who received these books carried them to the priests, who, confounded at the suddenness as well as the boldness of the assault, carried them to the police, and the police to the Government; and before the deputation had been an hour and a half in Thomson's hotel, they were under arrest. It was the Church which compelled the Government to interfere; and it is the Church which is now driving forward the civil power in its mad career of persecution. As a proof that we bring no heavier charge against the priests than they deserve, we may mention, that in 1849 Dr Stewart was summoned to appear before the delegate of Government, to answer for having allowed one or two Italian Protestant ministers to preach in his pulpit. The delegate informed him that the Government was not taking this step of its own accord, but that the Archbishop of Florence was compelling the Government to put the law in force, and that the Archbishop was the prosecutor in the case. The old statute of Ferdinand I., which allows to foreigners the full exercise of their religion within the city of Leghorn, was taken advantage of to open the Scotch church there. This was in 1845. It was two years after this,--in the winter of 1847-48,--that the religious movement first developed itself,--full six months before the revolutions and changes of 1848. The work was at first confined almost entirely to a handful of foreigners--Captain Pakenham; M. Paul, a Frenchman, and the Swiss pastor in Florence;---- at----; and Mr Thomson, Vice-Consul at Leghorn. Count Guicciardini was the only Florentine connected with the movement. It was resolved to print and circulate such books as were likely to pass the censorship, and might be openly sold by all booksellers. The censor of that day was a remarkably liberal man, and he gave his consent very willingly. Five or six little volumes were printed in that country; but the people were not yet prepared for such a step; the books lay unsold, and were got into circulation only by being given away as presents. But the very fact that the friends of the movement had been able to print and publish such works openly at Florence, with the approbation of the censor, greatly encouraged them. It was next proposed to attempt to get the censor's approbation to an edition of the New Testament; and the work was before him waiting his imprimatur, when the revolutions of 1848 broke over Italy with the suddenness of one of its own thunder-storms. I cannot go particularly into the changes that followed, and which are known to my readers through other sources,--the flight of the Grand Duke,--the new Tuscan Constitution,--the free press. The political for a time buried the religious. Captain Pakenham, taking advantage of the liberty enjoyed under the republic, commenced printing an edition of Martini's Bible (the Romanist version), believing that it would be more acceptable than Diodati's (the Protestant version). Before he had got the book put into circulation, the re-action commenced, the Grand Duke returned, and the work was seized. When engaged in making the seizure, the gendarmes pressed a young apprentice printer to tell them whether there were any more copies concealed. The lad replied that he had only one suggestion to offer, which was, that, now they had seized the book, they should seize the author too. And who is he? eagerly inquired the gendarmes, preparing to start on the chase. Jesus Christ, was the lad's reply. Meanwhile the revolution had greatly enlarged the privileges of the Waldensian Church in Piedmont, and three of her pastors, MM. Malan, Meille, and Geymonat, arrived in Florence in the winter of 1848-49, for the purpose of making themselves more familiar with the tongue and accent of the Tuscans, in order to be able to avail themselves of the greater openings of usefulness now presented to them, both in their own country and in central Italy. They preached occasionally, and attended the prayer-meeting, which now greatly increased, and which was the only one at this time among the Florentines. Having by their visit helped forward the good work, these evangelists, after a six months' stay in Florence, returned to their own country. A full year elapsed between the departure of the Waldensian brethren and the movement among the Florentines to obtain an Italian pastor. After much deliberation they resolved on this step, and in May 1850 a deputation set out for the Valleys, which, arriving at La Tour, prevailed on Professor Malan to accept of the charge at Florence. M. Malan returned to that city, and, on the 1st of July 1850, began his ministry, among a little flock of thirty persons, in the Swiss chapel Via del Seraglio, in which the Grisons had a right to Italian service. The work now went rapidly forward. Formerly there had been but one re-union; now there were ten in Florence alone, besides others in the towns and villages adjoining. M. Malan had service once a fortnight in Italian; and so large was the attendance, that the chapel, which holds four hundred, was crowded to the door with Florentine converts or inquirers. The priests took the alarm. They wrought upon the mind of the deformed Archduchess,--a great bigot, and sister to the Grand Duke. A likely tool she was; for she had made a pilgrimage to Rimini, and offered on the shrine of the winking Madonna a diamond tiara and bracelet. The result I need not state. The immediate result was, that the Italian service was put a stop to in January 1851; and the final result was the banishment of Malan and Geymonat from Tuscany in the May of that year,--the expulsion of the pastors being accompanied with circumstances of needless severity and ignominy. Geymonat, after lying two days in the Bargello of Florence, was brought forth and conducted on foot by gendarmes, chained like an assassin, to the Piedmontese frontier. On this miserable journey he was thrust every night into the common prison, along with characters of the worst description, whose blasphemies he was compelled to hear. The foul air and the disgusting food of these places made him sometimes despair of coming out alive; but he had his recompense in the opportunities which he thus enjoyed of preaching the gospel to the gendarmes by the way, and to the keepers of the prisons, some of whom heard him gladly. The departure of the Vaudois pastors threw the work into the hands of the native converts, by whom it has been carried on ever since. It is to be feared that, in the absence of pastors, not a little that is political is mixed with the religious. It is difficult forming an estimate of the numbers of the converts and inquirers. They have meetings in all the towns of Tuscany and Lucca, between whom a constant intercourse is maintained. Each member subscribes two crazzia a-week for the purchase of Protestant religious books. To supply these books, two presses are at work,--one in Turin, the other in Florence. The latter is a secret press, which the police, with all their efforts, have not been able to this day to discover. The Bible can be got into Tuscany with great difficulty; yet the demand for it is greater than ever. The converts have been tried by every mode of persecution short of death; yet their numbers grow. The prisons are full with political and religious offenders; yet fresh arrests continually take place in Florence. The first and more notable instance of persecution on which the Government of Tuscany ventured, after the banishment of Count Guicciardini and his companions, was the imprisonment of Francesco and Rosa Madiai, for reading the Word of God in the Italian language. The sufferings of these confessors turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel. The attention of many of their own countrymen was drawn to the cause of their sufferings; and the bigotry of the Grand Duke, or rather of the Court of Rome, with which the Tuscan Government had entered into a concordat for the suppression of heresy, was proclaimed before all Europe. A Protestant deputation visited Florence to intercede in behalf of these confessors; but their plea found so little favour with the Grand Duke, that he immediately issued a decree, reviving an old law which makes all offences against the religion of the State punishable _by death_. To provide for carrying the decree into effect, a guillotine was imported from Lucca, and an executioner was hired at a salary of ten pounds a month. As if this were not sufficiently explicit, the Grand Duke told his subjects that he was "_determined to root out Protestantism from his State, though he should be handed down to posterity as a monster of cruelty_." Neither the spectacle of the guillotine nor the terrible threat of the Grand Duke could arrest the progress of the good work. The Bible was sought after, and read in secret; and the numbers who left the communion of the Romish Church grew and multiplied daily. In the beginning of 1853, the Protestants, or Evangelicals as they prefer to call themselves in Tuscany, were estimated at many thousands. I doubt not that this estimate was correct, if viewed as including all who had separated their interests from the Church of Rome; but I just as little doubt that a majority of these, if brought to the test, rather than suffer would have denied the Gospel. Many of them knew it only as a political badge, not as a _new life_. But, on the judgment of those who had the best means of knowing, there were at least _a thousand_ in Tuscany who had undergone a change of heart, and were prepared to confess Christ on the scaffold. To hunt out these peaceful ones, and bring them to punishment, is the grand object of the priesthood; and in the confessional they have an instrumentality ready-made for the purpose. Taking advantage of the greater timidity of the female mind, it has become a leading question with the confessor, "Does your husband read the Bible? Has he political papers?" Alas! according to the ancient prophecy, the brother delivers up the brother to death. I heard of some affecting cases of this sort when I was in Florence. Of the fifty persons, or thereabouts, who were then in prison on religious grounds, not a few had been accused by their own relatives, the accusation being extorted by the threat of withholding absolution. At the beginning of the English Reformation, with an infernal refinement of cruelty, children were often compelled to light the faggots which were to consume their parents; and in Tuscany at this hour, the trembling wife is compelled, by the threat of eternal damnation, to disclose the secret which is to consign the husband to a dungeon. The police are never far from the confessor's box, and wait only the signal from it, what house to visit, and whom to drag to prison. As with us in former days, the Bible is secreted in the most unlikely places; it is read at the dead hour of night; and the prayers and praises that follow are offered in whispering accents,--for fear of the priests and the guillotine. Every subsidiary agency that might further the progress of the truth has been suppressed by the Government. All the liberal papers have been put down. They appeared again and again under new names, but only to encounter, under every form, the veto of the authorities. At last their whole printing establishments were confiscated. The public press having been silenced, the secret one continued to speak to the Tuscans from its hiding-place; and its voice was the more heard that the other was dumb. Besides Bibles, a variety of religious books have issued from it, and have been widely circulated. Among the translated works spread among the Tuscans are D'Aubigné's "History of the Reformation," M'Crie's "Suppression of the Reformation in Italy," "The Mother's Catechism," Watts' "Catechism," "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a variety of religious tracts. The prohibition of a book by the Government is sure to be followed by a universal demand for it; and the Government decree is thus the signal for going to press with a new edition of the forbidden work. Mr Gladstone's letters on Naples were prohibited by Government; and the very means adopted to keep the Tuscans ignorant of what Englishmen thought of the state of Naples, and of the Continent generally, only led to its being better known. Though not a single copy of these letters was to be seen in the shops or on the stalls, they found their way into every one's hands. The same thing happened to Count Guicciardini. The Government prohibited his statement, and all Florence read it. The well-known hatred of the priests to the Bible has been its best recommendation in the eyes of the Tuscans. Thus the Government finds that it cannot move a step without inflicting deadly damage on its own interests. Its interposition is fatal only to the cause it seeks to help. To prohibit a book is to publish it; to bring a man to trial is to give liberty an opportunity of speaking through his advocate; to cast a confessor of the Lord Jesus into prison is but to erect a light-house amidst the Tuscan darkness. The Government and the priesthood find that their efforts are foiled and their might paralyzed by a mysterious power, which they know not how to grapple with. The guillotine has stood unused: not that any scruples of conscience or any feelings of humanity restrain the priests; fain would they bring every convert to the scaffold if they dared; but the odium which they well know would attend such a deed deters them; and they anxiously wait the coming of a time when it may be safe to do what could not be done at present but at the risk of damaging, and perhaps ruining, their cause. It does not follow that the Tuscan priesthood have not the guilt of blood to answer for. If the confessors of the Gospel in that land are not perishing by the guillotine, they are pining in prisons, and sinking into the grave, by reason of the choking stench, the disgusting vermin, and the insufficient food, to which they are exposed. But the condition of these victims, perishing unknown and unpitied in the fangs of an ecclesiastical tyranny, is not the most distressing spectacle which Tuscany at this hour presents. Theirs is an enviable state, compared with that of the great body of the people. These occupy but a larger prison, and groan in yet stronger fetters; while their captivity is uncheered by any such hope as that which sustains the Tuscan confessors of the truth. Mistrust of their Church is widely spread in the country. There is no religion in Tuscany. There is as little morality. The marriage vow is but little regarded, and the seducer boasts of his triumphs over married chastity, as if they were praiseworthy deeds. Thousands have plunged into atheism. Of those who have not gone this length, the great body are dissatisfied, ill at ease, without confidence in the doctrines of Rome, but ignorant of a more excellent way. Straitly shut up, they grope blindfolded round the walls of their prison-house, wistfully turning their eyes to any ray of light that strikes in through its crevices. How this state of things may end is known only to God;--whether in the gradual spread of Gospel light, and the peaceful fall of that system which has so long enthralled the intellect and soul of the Tuscans; or whether, as a result of the growing exasperation and deepening horrors of these bondsmen, they may give a violent wrench to the pillars of the ecclesiastical and social fabric, and pull it down upon the heads of themselves and their oppressors. I may avail myself of this opportunity of introducing a few recent facts relative to the analogous work in Genoa; and this I do because these facts are of a character which may enable the reader more clearly to conceive of the present religious condition of Italy, and the state of the movement in that country. The north of Italy and kingdom of Sardinia, as I have already said, since the Constitution granted in 1848, is open to the promulgation of evangelical truth; that is, it may be taught in almost every conceivable way, provided it is not done offensively or obtrusively. While the religion of the State is Roman Catholic, there is toleration and liberty of conscience to all; indeed, there is _no religion_ at all. The king cares for none of these things, and most of his Ministers are at one with him. The present Ministry is Liberal; and Count Cavour is, to all intents and purposes, Radical. It is said that he declares he will never rest until Sardinia is another England. The Constitution is something very similar to that of England, and only requires to be developed. The present Government, however, is more liberal than the Constitution; and the Constitution gives more liberty than the majority of the people are yet able to receive: hence collision frequently takes place. Old statutes are still unrepealed; and the priest party compels the Government to do things which they are very unwilling to do. For example, one of the Cereghini was recently tried, and condemned to pay a fine of two hundred pauls, and go to prison for four months, for having some little thing to do in publishing a small controversial catechism against the Romish Church, and vending it rather too openly. An appeal was made against the sentence, and it stands unexecuted, and will do. As a matter of law, the executive Government is obliged to take up such cases and deal with them; and the nobility or priesthood--for they are one and the same--are ever on the look-out for such cases. The case of Captain Pakenham, who was expelled from Sardinia, comes under this head. The Constitution is the same now as it was then; only it is further developed in the minds of the people, and the same offence would not now likely meet the same unjust punishment, or create the same stir among the people, as it did then. But Captain Pakenham need not have been expelled from the State if our British Ministers in Sardinia had done their duty; but they are sometimes only too glad to get quit of such men as Captain Pakenham. If they had protested against the sentence, it would never have been executed. Such a thing would never have occurred to an American subject. "British residents or travellers in Italy," writes one to us, "will never have any comfort or satisfaction under the union-jack, until the present race of consuls and plenipotentiaries, sitting in high places, truckling with petty kings and grand dukes, is hanged, every one of them. There is an obliging old consul at Rome who might be exempted." The following extract from a letter written in March last, and addressed to ourselves, from the Rev. David Kay, the able pastor of the Scotch congregation in Genoa, will be read with deep interest. We know none who knows better than Mr Kay the condition of Sardinia, or is more familiar with all that has been done and is doing there. What he says of the moral condition of Genoa may be taken as a fair sample of the other towns and States of Italy. None of them are superior to Genoa in this respect, and most of them, we believe, are below it. Alas! the picture is a sad one. "Nothing could be more foolish or detrimental to the evangelical work in Sardinia than for every man and woman who enters the country, to pass through it or spend a few months even, to commence 'doing something,' as they generally express it. They scatter Bibles and tracts broad-cast, without knowing anything of the people they give them to; and nine-tenths of these books are carried forthwith to the priest or the pawnshop, generally the former, and are burned. This does not affect them much, perhaps, because they will soon be off; but it renders the position of those stationed in the country very precarious. The priest likes very much to collect all the Bibles, Testaments, tracts, &c., into a heap, and, before setting the match to them, bring some of his English friends to see them. This is no exaggeration. At least two such cases have come under my notice. Knowledge and prudence are very essential qualities,--some knowledge of the country and its people, and some little common sense to use that knowledge well. If our British travellers and residents would give the Italians a better example of how the Sabbath ought to be kept, and is kept, by the serious in Britain, and let precept for the most part alone,--the real missionary work to be done by people competent,--generally speaking, they would advance the work far more than by the way they often adopt. We talk of liberal Sardinia; but _liberal_ is a relative term, and all who know Sardinia will only apply it relatively. When an injudicious thing is done, or even when a lawful thing is done injudiciously, we soon see where the liberty of Sardinia is. It is as lawful for a man to have a thousand Italian Bibles in his house as to have a thousand copies of 'Rob Roy.' Both packages come regularly through the custom-house, and duty is paid for them; and yet the other day in Nice several houses were searched by the gendarmes, and all Bibles and tracts carried away. This is contrary to the Constitution of the country, and yet it was done. Englishmen will make a cry about it, and demand justice (a thing generally sold to the highest bidder); but it is no use,--only harm will be done by it. Every day things in _kind_ differing in _degree_ are done throughout the State. The long and short of the matter is this; the minds of the people must open, and be allowed time to open gradually, ere the liberal Constitution of Sardinia can be applied to its full extent. And it is the forgetting this, or not knowing it, that usually brings these things about. Something, perhaps a very common thing, and quite lawful, and done every day, is done in a foolish way, and a foolish thing is done by the executive Government to meet it. It is not the present generation,--it has been too long under the yoke,--but the rising generation, that will exhibit the new Constitution. The grand secret is to do as much as possible,--and almost anything may be done,--and say nothing about it. It is truly interesting to watch the gradual opening up of the long shut kingdom, and very exciting to give every day a stronger blow to the wedge that opens it. I remember well, when I came here, nearly two years ago, Italian Bibles could not be got into Genoa, as other goods, by paying the duty on them, although it was perfectly lawful then, as now, to bring them in that way. For a year past we have got all the Bibles the Bible-senders of Britain will send us. Hundreds or thousands of them can be brought through the custom-house without any difficulty. We are anxiously waiting the arrival of six thousand at this moment. And yet a month has not passed since four thousand religious books,--less mischievous by far than the Bible,--were sent from our port to Marseilles. They could not be landed in any part of his Majesty's dominions. From these facts you will see that we live in a kingdom of practical contradictions. "The priests, meanwhile, are by no means idle. They are instructing their people in the dogmas of their Church; and for this they have classes in the evening,--the zealous at least, among them have. Apart from their petty persecution in preventing us getting a place of worship (the affair of the 'Madre di Dio' you know all about, as also their general story of every convert being paid), they send missionaries to England once or twice a-year, (there is a priest whom I know just now returned), who bring, generally prostitutes, but women of a better order if they can find them, put them into a convent, to train, and, when trained, send them out to strengthen the Catholics here in their faith, and, if possible, bring back to the fold those who have gone to Geymonat; and highly accomplished trustworthy dames they send home to England to bring out others, or remain there and proselytise; or they send them here and there among the English on the Continent, sometimes to profess one thing and sometimes another. A few weeks ago one tried her skill upon us residing in Genoa, and partially succeeded. Her tale was, that she was the daughter of an English clergyman, who came abroad with her aunt, travelling in great style of course, and was put into a convent, and kept there against her will; and now she had contrived to make her escape, and perfectly trembled when she saw a priest, or even heard one named; and, although of high family, was ready to teach or do anything in an English family, to be out of reach of the priests. The things she told were most harrowing, and some of them very true-like. One English gentleman here thought of taking her into his family as governess, until he should get her father to come for her. I was asked to visit her at his house, and hear her woeful history. I went; but the line 'Timeo Danaos,' &c., was ever forcing itself upon me as I walked musingly along to the house, which was a little distance out of town. While hearing her long unconnected string of falsehoods, the thing that astonished me was, why the Roman Catholic priests should have chosen such an ugly woman to do such a piece of work; and not only had she the most forbidding appearance of any woman I ever saw, but she was the most illiterate; not a single sentence came correctly from her lips, and, in pronunciation, the letter 'h' ever was prefixed to the 'aunt' and the 'Oxford,'--the very quintescence of Cockneyism. It was clear to my mind that she had 'done' the priests, and the sequel proves my suspicions to be correct. That day before she left, she discovered that she was suspected, and very prudently threw off her mask very soon after. Her correct history we are only getting bit by bit; but all we have learned convinces us that she has deceived the Italian priest, who knows very little of English, by persuading him that she is the daughter of an English clergyman, and very highly connected in England. You have enough of the story to see the kind of plot regularly carried on. What they expected to gain by passing her off upon us, we cannot tell, unless that they wished to know earlier and more fully our movements. There is an English pervert here just now,--a weak fool, but an educated one,--on a mission to Geymonat's people, to assure them that they have committed a great sin. Having proved both systems of religion, he can judge, and there is no comfort whatever in the Protestant. He has taken up his abode here, and is prosecuting his mission vigorously. "A traveller passing through Genoa, and visiting the churches, particularly on a feast-day, would fancy that the Genoese, or, indeed, the Catholics in Sardinia generally, are the most devoted Catholics in Italy. Many have gone away with that impression. The reason is this. All who attend the churches in Genoa do so from choice,--from religious motives; and even feel, in these days of heresy, that they are wearing the martyr's crown,--standing firmly for the true Church, while all without are scoffers; whereas in the Tuscan, Roman, and Neapolitan States, people attend church from compulsion. If they are not in church on certain days, and at mass, they are immediately suspected. I believe the male population of Italy is one moving mass of infidelity. Sardinia is professedly so. In Genoa not one young man in a hundred attends church. If you see him there, it is to select a pretty woman for his own purposes. Morality is at a very low ebb,--lower far than you can have any idea of. Every man is sighing after his neighbour's wife; and he confesses it, and talks as gallantly of his conquest as if he had fought on the heights of Alma. A stranger walking the streets in the evening would not suppose this, for he would not be attacked, as in a town in Britain; but they have their dens, and licensed ones too. Shocking as it may appear, these houses are regularly licensed by the Government; and medical men visit them once every week for sanitary purposes. The defilement of the marriage-bed is little or nothing thought of. Marriage here is generally a money speculation, and is very frequently brought about through means of regular brokers or agents, who receive a per centage on the bride's dowry. A woman without a pretty good dowry has very little chance of a husband, unless she is young and very pretty, and willing to accept an old man. There are very few women in Geymonat's congregation. The converts are nearly all men." While we rejoice in the spread of the light, we cannot but marvel at the mysterious connection which may be traced between the first and the second reformations in Italy, as regards the spots where this divine illumination is now breaking out. We have already adverted to the progress of the Gospel in the sixteenth century in so many of the cities of Italy, and the long roll of confessors and martyrs which every class of her citizens contributed to furnish. Not only did these men, in their prisons and at their stakes, sow the seeds of a future harvest, but they appear to have earned for the towns in which they lived, and the families from which they were sprung, a hereditary right, as it were, to be foremost in confessing that cause at every subsequent era of its revival. We cannot mark but with a feeling of heartfelt gratitude to God, in whose sight the death of his saints is precious, and who, by the eternal laws of his providence, has ordained that the example of the martyr shall prove more powerful and more lasting than that of the persecutor, that on the _self-same spots_ where these men died of old, the same mighty movement has again broken out. And not only are the same cities of Turin, and Milan, and Venice, and Genoa, and Florence, figuring in this second reformation of Italy, but the same families and the same names from which God chose his martyrs in Italy three centuries ago are again coming forward, and offering themselves to the dungeon, and the galleys, and the scaffold, in the cause of the Gospel. Does not this finely illustrate the indestructible nature of truth, which enables it to survive a long period of dormancy and of apparent death, and to flourish anew from what seemingly was its tomb? And does it not also shed a beautiful light upon the order of the providence of God, whereby he remembers and revisits the seed of the righteous man, and keeps his mercy to a thousand generations of them that fear Him? On Wednesday the 6th of November, after a stay of well-nigh a week in Florence, I took my departure by rail for Pisa. The weather was still wild and wintry, and the Apennines were white with snow to almost their bottom. The railway runs along the valley, close to the Arno, which, swollen with the rains, had flooded the vineyards and meadows in many places. A truly Italian vale is that of the Arno, whose silvery stream in ordinary times is seen winding and glistening amid the olives and the chestnut groves which border its course. When evening came, a deep spiritual beauty pervaded the region. As we swept along, many a romantic hill rose beside our path, with its clustering village, its mantling vines, and its robe of purple shadows; and many a long withdrawing ravine opened on the right and left, with its stream, and its crags, and its olives, and its castles. What would we have given for but a minute's pause, to admire the finer points! But the engine held its onward way, as if its course had been amidst the most indifferent scenery in the world. It made amends, however, for the enchanting views which it swept into oblivion behind, by perpetually opening in front others as lovely and fascinating. The twilight had set, and the moon was shining brightly, when we reached the station at Pisa. The Austrian soldier who kept the gate challenged me as I passed, but I paid no attention, and hurried on. Had he secured my passport, I would infallibly have been detained a whole day. I traversed the long winding streets of the decaying town, crossed the Arno, on which the city stands, and, coming out on the other side of Pisa, found myself in presence of its fine ecclesiastical buildings. A moon nearly full, which seemed to veil while it in reality heightened their beauty, enabled me to see these venerable edifices to advantage. The hanging tower is a beautiful pile of white marble; the Cathedral is one of the most chastely elegant specimens of architecture in all Italy; the baptistry, too peculiar to be classic, is, nevertheless, a tasteful and elegant design. Having surveyed these lovely creations of the wealth and genius of a past age, I returned in time to take my seat in the last train for Leghorn. The country betwixt Pisa and the coast is perfectly flat, and the flooded Arno had converted it into a sea. I could see nothing around me but a watery waste, above which the railway rose but a few inches. I felt as if again amid the Lagunes of Venice. After an hour and a half's riding, we reached Leghorn, where I took up my abode at Thomson's hotel, so well and so favourably known to English travellers. After my long sojourn in Italian _albergi_, whose uncarpeted floors, and chinky windows and doors, are but ill fitted to resist the winds and cold of winter, I sat down in "Thomson's,"--furnished as it is with all the comforts of an English inn,--with a feeling of home-comfort such as I have rarely experienced. CHAPTER XX. FROM LEGHORN TO ROME. First Sight of the Mediterranean--Embark at Leghorn--Elba--Italian Coast--Civita Vecchia--Passport Offices--Aspect and Population of Civita Vecchia--Papal Dungeons--Start for Rome--First View of the Campagna--Its Desolation--Changed Times--The Postilion--The Road--The Milestones--First Sight of the Eternal City--The Gate--Desolate Look of the City by Night--The Pope's Custom-House and Custom-House Officer. I rose early next morning, and walked down to the harbour, to have my first sight of the Mediterranean,--that renowned sea, on whose shores the classic nations of antiquity dwelt, and art and letters arose,--on whose waters the commerce of the ancient world was carried on, and the battles of ancient times fought,--whose scenery had often inspired the Greek and Latin poets,--and the grandeur of whose storms Inspiration itself had celebrated. A stiff breeze was blowing, and a white curl crested the wave, and freckled the deep blue of the waters. The Mediterranean looked young and joyous in the morning sun, as when it bore the fleets of Tyre, or heard the victorious shouts of Rome, albeit it is now edged with mouldering cities, and listens only to the clank of chains and the sigh of enslaved nations. Early in the forenoon I waited on the Rev. Dr Stewart, the accomplished minister of the Free Church in Leghorn. He opened freely to me his ample stores of information on the subject of Tuscany, and the work in progress in that country. We called afterwards on Mr Thomas Henderson, a native of Scotland, but long settled in Leghorn as a merchant. This kind and Christian man has since, alas! gone to his grave; but the future historian of the Reformation in Italy will rank him with those pious merchants in our own land who in former days consecrated their energy and wealth to the work of furthering the Gospel, and of sheltering its poor persecuted disciples. After sojourning so long among strange faces and strange tongues, it was truly pleasant to meet two such friends,--for friends I felt them to be, though never till that day had I seen their faces. At four of the afternoon I embarked in the steamer for Civita Vecchia, the port of Rome. The vessel I did not like at first: it was dirty, crowded, and, from some fault in the loading, lurched over while a stiff breeze was rising. By and by we got properly under weigh, and swept gallantly over the waves, along the coast, whose precipices and headlands were getting indistinct in the fading twilight. I walked the deck till past midnight, watching the moon as she rode high amid the scud overhead, and the beacon-lights of the island of Elba, as they gleamed full and bright astern. "What of the night?" I asked the helmsman. "Buono notte, Signore," was the reply. I descended to my berth. I awoke at four of the morning, and found the steamer labouring in a rolling sea. The sirocco was blowing, and a huge black wave rolled up before it from the south. The distant coast stretched along on the left, naked and iron-bound, with the high lands of Etruria rising behind it. I wondered whether that coast had looked as unkindly to Æneas, when first he cast anchor on it after long ploughing the deep? We drew towards that silent shore, where signs of man and his labours we could discover none; and in an hour or so a small bay opened under the vessel's bows. The swell was rising every moment, and the steamer made some magnificent bounds in taking the entrance to the harbour. We entered the port of Civita Vecchia at six, passing between the two round towers, with their tiers of guns looking down upon us; and cast anchor in the ample basin, protected by the lofty walls of the forts, over which the green-topped waves occasionally looked as if enraged at missing their prey. Here we were, but not a man of us could land till first our passports had been submitted to the authorities on shore. The passengers, who were of all classes, from the English nobleman with his equipage and horses, down to the lazzaroni of Naples, crowded the deck promiscuously; and amongst them I was happy to meet again my two Russian friends, with whom I had shared the same bed-room among the Apennines. In about an hour and a half we were boarded by a police-officer. Forming us into a row on deck, and calling our names one by one, this functionary handed to each a billet, permitting the holder to go ashore, on condition of an instant compearance at the pontifical police-office. An examination of the baggage followed. This done, I leaped into one of the small boats which lay alongside the steamer, and was rowed to the quay at a few strokes, but for which service I had to recompense the boatman with about as many pauls. No sooner had I set foot on shore, than the everlasting passport bother began. The "apostolic consul" at Florence had certified me as "good for Rome;" the governor of Leghorn had but the day before done the same; but here were I know not how many officials, all assuring me that without their signatures in addition, Rome I should never see. First came the English consul, who graciously gave me--what Lord Palmerston had already given--permission to travel in the Papal States, charging me at the same time five pauls. I could not help saying, that it was all very well for nations that made no pretensions to liberty to sell to their subjects the right of moving over the earth, but that it appeared to me to be somewhat inconsistent in Britain to do so. The consul looked as if he could not bring himself to believe that he had heard aright. The number of my visa told me that I was the 4318th Englishman who had entered the port of Civita Vecchia that season. I next took my way to the French consulate in the town-hall. I found the ante-chamber filled with Etrurian antiquities, in which the district adjoining Civita Vecchia on the north is particularly rich; and the sight of these was more than worth the moderate charge of one paul, which was made for my visée. At length I got this business off my hand; and, having secured my seat in the _diligence_ for Rome, I had leisure to take a stroll through the town. Civita Vecchia, though the port of Rome, and raised thus above its original insignificance, is but a poor place. A black hill leans over it on the north, and a naked beach, dreary and silent, runs off from it on the south. A small square, overlooked by stately mansions, emblazoned with the arms of the consuls of the various nations, forms its nucleus, from which numerous narrow and wriggling streets run out, much like the claws of a crab, from its round bulby body. It smells rankly of garlic and other garbage, and would be much the better would the Mediterranean give it a thorough cleansing once a-week. Its population is a motley and worshipful assemblage of priests, monks, French soldiers, facini, and beggars; and it would be hard to say which is the idlest, or which is the dirtiest. They seemed to be gathered promiscuously into the caffés,--priests, facini, and all,--rattling the dice and sipping coffee. Every one you come in contact with has some pretext or other for demanding a paulo of you. The Arabs of the desert are not more greedy of _backsheish_. A gentleman, as well dressed as I was at least, made up to me when I had taken my seat in the _diligence_, and, after talking five minutes on indifferent subjects, ended by demanding a paulo. "For what?" I asked, with some little surprise. "For entertaining Signore," he replied. Yet why blame these poor people? What can they do but beg? Trade, husbandry, books,--all have fled from that doomed shore. There are three conspicuous buildings in Civita Vecchia. Two of these are hotels; the third and largest is a prison. This is one of the State prisons of the Pope. Rising story above story, and meeting the traveller on the very threshold of the country, it thrusts somewhat too prominently upon his notice the Pope's peculiar method of propagating Christianity,--namely, by building dungeons and hiring French bayonets. But to do the Pope justice, he is most unwearied in Christianizing his subjects after his own fashion. His prisons are well-nigh as numerous as his churches; and if the latter are but thinly attended, the former are crowded. He is a man "instant in season and out of season," as a good shepherd ought to be: he watches while others sleep; for it is at night that his sbirri are most active, running about in the darkness, and carrying tenderly to a safe fold those lambs which are in danger of being devoured by the Mazzinian wolves, or ensnared by Bible heretics. But to be serious,--when one finds as many prisons as churches in a territory ruled over by a minister of the Gospel, he begins to feel that there is something frightfully wrong somewhere. When I passed the fortress of Civita Vecchia, many a noble heart lay pining within its walls. No fewer, I was assured, than two thousand Romans were there shut up as galley-slaves, their only crime being, that they had sought to substitute a lay for a sacerdotal Government,--the regime of constitutionalism for that of infallibility. In this prison the renowned brigand Gasperoni, the uncle of the prime minister of the Pope, Antonelli, had been confined; but, being too much in the way of English travellers, he was removed farther inland. This man was wont to complain loudly to those who visited him, of the cruel injustice which the world had done his fair fame. "I have been held up," he was used to say, "as a person who has murdered hundreds. It is a foul calumny. I never cut more than thirty throats in my life." He had had, moreover, to carry on his profession at a large outlay, having to pay the Pope's police an hundred scudi a-month for information. At last mid-day came, and off we started for Rome. We trundled down the street at a tolerable pace; and one could not help feeling that every revolution of the wheel brought him nearer the Eternal City. Suddenly our course was brought to an unexpected stop. Another examination of passports and baggage at the gate! not, I verily believe, in the hope of finding contraband wares, but of having a pretext to exact a few more pauls. The half-hour wore through, though wearily. The gate was flung open; and there lay before us a blackened expanse, stretching far and wide, dreary and death-like, terminated here by the sea, and there by the horizon,--the Campagna di Roma. I turned for relief to the ocean, all angry with tempest as it was; and felt that its struggling billows were a more agreeable sight than the tomb-like stillness of the plain. The sirocco was still blowing; and the largest breakers I ever saw were tumbling on the beach. The only bright and pleasant thing in the picture was the shining, sandy coast, with its margin of white foam. It ran off in a noble crescent of fifty miles, and was seen in the far distance terminating in the low sandy promontory of Fumacina, where the Tiber falls into the sea. Alas! what vicissitudes had that coast been witness to! There, where the idle wave was now rolling, rode in other days the galleys of Rome; and there, where the stifling sirocco was sweeping the herbless plain, rose the villas of her senators, amid the bloom and fragrance of the orange and the olive. To that coast Cæsar had loved to come, to inhale its breezes, and to pass, in the society of his select friends, those hours which ambition left unoccupied. But what a change now! There was no sail on that sea; there was no dwelling on that shore: the scene was lonely and desolate, as if keel had never ploughed the one, nor human foot trodden the other. I had seated myself in front of the vehicle, in the hope of catching the first glimpse of St Peter's, as its dome should emerge above the plain; but so wretched were our cattle, that though we started at mid-day, and had only fifty miles of road, night fell long before we reached the gates of the Eternal City. I saw the country well, however, so long as daylight lasted. We kept in sight of the shore for twenty-five miles; and glad I was of it; for the waves, with their crest of snow and voice of thunder, seemed old friends, and I shuddered to think of plunging into that black silent wilderness on the left. At the gate of Civita Vecchia the desolation begins; and such desolation! I had often read that the Campagna was desolate; I had come there expecting to find it desolate; but when I saw that desolation I was confounded. I cannot describe it; it must be seen to be conceived of. It is not that it is silent;--the Highlands of Scotland are so. It is not that it is barren;--the sands of Arabia are so. They are as they were and should be. But not so the Campagna. There is something frightfully unnatural about its desolation. A statue is as still, as silent, and as cold, as the corpse; but then it never had life; and while you love to gaze on the one, the other chills you to the heart. So is it with the Campagna. While the sands of the desert exhilarate you, and the silence of the Swiss or Scottish Highlands is felt to be sublime, the desolation of the Campagna is felt to be unnatural: it overawes and terrifies you. Such a void in the heart of Europe, and that, too, in a land which was the home of art,--where war accumulated her spoils, and wealth her treasures,--and which gave letters and laws to the surrounding world,--is unspeakably confounding. One's faith is staggered in the past history of the country. The first glance of the blackened bosom of the Campagna makes one feel as if he had retrograded to the barbarous ages, or had been carried thousands and thousands of miles from home, and set down in a savage country, where the arts had not yet been invented, or civilization dawned. Its surface is rough and uneven, as if it had been tumbled about at some former period; it is dotted with wild bushes; and here and there lonely mounds rise to diversify it. There are no houses on it, save the post-houses, which are square, tower-like buildings, having the stables below and the dwellings above. It has its patches of grass, on which herds depasture, followed by men clothed in sheepskins and goatskins, and looking as savage almost as the animals they tend. It is, in short, a wilderness, and more frightful than the other wildernesses of the earth, because the traveller feels that here there is the hand of doom. The land lies scathed and blackened under the curse of the Almighty. To Rome the words of the prophet are as applicable as to Babylon, whom she resembled in sin, and with whom she is now joined in punishment: "Because of the wrath of the Lord, it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate. Every one that goeth by Babylon shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues. Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest. I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah: it shall never be inhabited, neither dwelt in from generation to generation; but wild beasts of the deserts shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there." About half-way to Rome the road parted company with the shore, and we turned inland over the plain. The night came on with drifting showers, which descended in torrents, lashing the naked plain, and battering our vehicle with the force and noise of a waterspout. And though at length the moon rose, and looked out at times from the cloud, she had nothing to show us but houseless, treeless desolation; and, as if scared at what she saw, she instantly hid her face in another mass of vapour. The stages were short, and the halts long; for which the postilion had but too good excuse, in the tangled web of thong and cord which formed the harnessings of his horses. The harnessing of an Italian _diligence_ is a mystery to all but an Italian postilion. The postilion, on arriving at a stage, has to get down, shake himself, stride into the post to announce his arrival, unharness his horses, lead them deliberately into the stable, bring out the fresh ones, transfer the same harness to their backs, put them to, gulp down his glass of brandy, address a few more last observations to the loiterers, and, finally, light his cigar. He then mounts with a flourish of his whip; but his wretched nags are not able to proceed at a quicker trot than from three to four miles an hour. He meets very probably a brother of the trade, who has been at Rome, and is returning with his horses. He dismounts on the road, inquires the news, and mounts again at his pleasure. In short, you are completely in the postilion's power; and he is quite as much an autocrat in his way as the Czar himself. He sings, it may be, but his song is the very soul of melancholy,-- "Roma, Roma, Roma, non e piu, Come prima era." It needed but a glance at that pale moon, and drifting cloud, and naked plain, to tell me that "Rome was not now as in her first age." As the night grew late, the inquiries became more frequent, "Are we not yet at Rome?" We were not yet at Rome; but we did all that men could with four, and sometimes six, half-starved animals, bestrode by drowsy postilions, to reach it. Now we were labouring in deep roads,--now fording impetuous torrents,--and now jolting along on the hard pavement of the Via Aurelia. By the glimpses of the moon we could see the milestones by the roadside, with "ROME" upon them. Seldom has writing thrilled me so. To find a name which fills history, and which for thirty centuries has extorted the homage of the world, and still awes it, written thus upon a common milestone, and standing there amid the tempest on the roadside, had in it something of the sublime. Was it then a reality, and not a dream? and should I in a very short time be in Rome itself,--that city which had been the theatre of so many events of world-wide influence, and which for so many ages had borne sway over all the kings and kingdoms of the earth? Meanwhile the night became darker, and the torrents of rain more frequent and more heavy. Towards midnight we began to climb a low hill. We could see that there was cultivation upon it, and, unless we were mistaken, a few villas. We had passed its summit, and were already engaged in the descent, when a terrific flash of lightning broke through the darkness, and tipped with a fiery radiance every object around us. On the left was the old hoary wall, with a whitish bulby mass hanging inside of it. On the right was a steep bank, with a few straggling vines dripping wet. The road between, on which we were winding downwards, was deep and worn. I had had my first view of Rome; but in how strange a way! In a few minutes we were standing at the gate. Some little delay took place in opening it. The moments which one passes on the threshold of Rome are moments he never can forget. While waiting there till it should please the guard to open that old gate, the whole history of the wonderful city on whose threshold I now stood seemed to pass before my mind,--her kings, her consuls, her emperors,--her legislators, her orators, her poets,--her popes,--all seemed to stalk solemnly past, one after one. There was the great Romulus; there was the proud Tarquin; there was Scylla with his laurel, and Livy with his page, and Virgil with his lay, and Cæsar with his diadem, and Brutus with his dagger; there was the lordly Augustus, the cruel Nero, the beastly Caligula, the warlike Trajan, the philosophic Antoninus, the stern Hildebrand, the infamous Borgia, the terrible Innocent; and last of all, and closing this long procession of shades, came one, with shuffling gait and cringing figure, who is not yet a shade,--Pio Nono. The creak of the old gate, as the sentinel undid its bolt and threw back its ponderous doors, awoke me from my reverie. We were stopped the moment we had entered the gate, and desired to mount to the guard-room. In a small chamber on the city-wall, seated at a table, on which a lamp was burning, we found a little tight-made brusque French officer, busied in overhauling the passports. Declaring himself satisfied after a slight survey, he hinted pretty plainly that a few pauls would be acceptable. "Did you ever," whispered my Russian friend, "see such a people?" We were remounting our vehicle, when a soldier climbed up, with musket and fixed bayonet, and forced himself in between my companion and myself, to see us all right to the custom-house, and to take care that we dropped no counterband goods by the way. Away we trundled; but the Campagna itself was not more solitary than that rain-battered and half-flooded street. No ray streamed out from window; no sound or voice of man broke the stillness; no one was abroad; the wind moaned; and the big drops fell heavily upon the plashy lava-paved causeway; but, with these exceptions, the silence was unbroken; and, to add to the dreariness, the city was in well-nigh total darkness. I intently scrutinized the various objects, as the glare of our lamps brought them successively into view. First there came a range of massive columns, which stalked past us, wearing in the sombre night an air of Egyptian grandeur. They came on and on, and I thought they should never have passed. Little did I dream that this was the piazza of St Peter's, and that the bulb I had seen by favour of the lightning was the dome of that renowned edifice. Next we found ourselves in a street of low, mean, mouldering houses; and in a few moments thereafter we were riding under the walls of an immense fortress, which rose above us, till its battlements were lost in the darkness. Then turning at right angles, we crossed a long bridge, with shade-like statues looking down upon us from either parapet, and a dark silent river flowing underneath. I could guess what river that was. We then plunged into a labyrinth of streets of a rather better description than the one already traversed, but equally dreary and deserted. We kept winding and turning, till, as I supposed, we had got to the heart of the city. In all that way we had not met a human being, or seen aught from which we could infer that there was a living creature in Rome. At last we found ourselves in a small square,--the site of the Forum of Antoninus, though I knew it not then,--in one of the sides of which was an iron gate, which opened to receive us, _diligence_ and all, and which was instantly closed and locked behind us; while two soldiers, with fixed bayonets, took their stand as sentinels outside. It was a vast barn-looking, cavern-like place, with mouldering Corinthian columns built into its massive wall, and its roof hung so high as to be scarce visible in the darkness. It had been a temple of Antoninus Pius, and was now converted into the Pope's dogana or custom-house. In a few minutes there entered a dapper, mild-faced, gentle-mannered, stealthy-paced man, with a thick long cloak thrown over his shoulders, to protect him from the night air. The Pope's dogana-master stood before us. He paced to and fro in the most unconcerned way possible; and though it was past midnight, and trunks and carpet-bags were all open and ready, he seemed reluctant to begin the search. Nevertheless the baggage was disappearing, and its owners departing at the iron gate,--a mystery I could not solve. At length this most affable of dogana-masters drew up to me, and in a quiet way, as if wishing to conceal the interest he felt in me, he shook me warmly by the hand. I felt greatly obliged to him for this welcome to Rome, but would have felt more so if, instead of this salute, he had opened the gate and let me go. In about five minutes he again came round to where I stood, and, grasping my hand a second time, gave it a yet heartier squeeze. I was at a loss to explain this sudden friendship; for I was pretty sure this exceedingly agreeable gentleman had never seen me till that moment. How long this might have lasted I know not, had not a person in the dogana, compassionating my dullness, stepped up to me, and whispered into my ear to give the searcher a few paulos. I was a little scandalized at this proposal to bribe his Holiness's servant; but I could see no chance otherwise of having the iron gate opened. Accordingly, I got ready the requisite douceur; and, waiting his return, which soon happened, took care to drop the few pauls into his palm at the next squeeze. On the instant the gate opened. But alas! I was in a worse plight than ever. There was no commissario to be had at that hour. I was in total darkness; not a door was open; nor was there an individual in the street; and, recollecting the reputation Rome had of late acquired for midnight assassinations, I began to grow a little apprehensive. After wandering about for some time, I lighted on a French sentry, who obligingly led me to a caffé hard by, which is kept open all night. There I found a young German, an artist evidently, who, having finished his coffee, politely volunteered to conduct me to the Hotel d'Angleterre. CHAPTER XXI. MODERN ROME. Tower of Capitol best Site for studying Topography of Rome--Resemblance in the Sites of great Cities--Site of Rome--Campagna di Roma--Its Extent and Boundaries--Ancient Fertility and Magnificence--Modern Desolation of Campagna--Approach to Rome from the North--Etruria--Solitariness of this once famous Highway--First Sight of Rome--The Flaminian Way--The Porta del Popolo--The Piazza del Popolo--Its Antiquities--Pincian Hill--General Plan of Rome--The Corso--The Via Ripetta--The Via Babuina--Population--Disproportionate Numbers of Priests--Variety of Ecclesiastical Costumes--Dresses of the various Orders--Their indescribably Filthy Appearance--The ordinary Priest--The Priest's Face--The Beggars--Want of Arrangement in its Edifices--Rome an unrivalled Combination of Grandeur and Dirt. One of my first days in Rome was passed on the top of the tower of the Capitol. It is incomparably the best spot on which to study the topography of the Eternal City, with that of the surrounding region. Here one stands between the living and the dead,--between the city of the Cæsars, which lies entombed on the Seven Hills, with the vine, the ivy, and the jessamine mantling its grave, and the city of the Popes, spread out with its cupolas, and towers, and everlasting chimes, on the low flat plain of the Campus Martius. The world has not such another ruin,--so vast, colossal, and magnificent,--as Rome. Let us sketch the features of the scene as they here present themselves. There would appear to be a law determining the _site_, as well as the _character_, of great events. It has often been remarked, that there is a resemblance between all the great battle-fields of the world. One attribute in especial they all possess, namely, that of vastness; inspiring the mind of the spectator with an idea of grandeur, to which the recollection of the carnage of which they were the scene adds a feeling of melancholy. The Troy and the Marathon of the ancient world have found their representative in the modern one, in that gloomy expanse in Flanders where Napoleon witnessed the total defeat of his arms and the final overthrow of his fortunes. We would make the same remark regarding great capitals. There is a family likeness in their sites. The chief cities of the ancient world arose, for the most part, on extensive plains, nigh some great river; for rivers were the railroads of early times. I might instance queenly Thebes, which arose in the great valley of the Nile, with a boundary of fine mountains encircling the plain on which it stood. Babylon found a seat on the great plain of Chaldea, on the banks of the Euphrates. Niniveh arose on the same great plain, on the banks of the Tigris, with the glittering line of the snowy Kurdistan chain bounding its horizon. To come down to comparatively modern times, ROME has been equally fortunate with her predecessors in a site worthy of her greatness and renown. No one needs to be told that the seat of that city, which for so many ages held the sceptre of the world, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA. I need not dwell on the magnificence of that truly imperial plain, to which nature has given, in a country of hills, dimensions so goodly. From the foot of the Apennines it runs on and on for upwards of an hundred miles, till it meets the Neapolitan frontier at Terracina. Its breadth from the Volscian hills to the sea cannot be less than forty miles. Towards the head of this great plain lies Rome, than which a finer site for the capital of a great empire could nowhere have been found. By nature it is most fertile; its climate is delicious. It is watered by the Tiber, which is seen winding through it like a thread of gold. A boundary of glorious hills encloses it on all sides save the south-west. On the south-east are the gentle Volscians, clothed with flourishing woods and sparkling with villas. Running up along the plain, and lying due east of Rome, are the Sabine hills, of a deep azure colour, with a fine mottling of light and shade upon their sides. Shutting in the plain on the north, and sweeping round it in a magnificent bend towards the west, are the craggy and romantic Apennines. Such was the stage on which sat invincible, eternal Rome. This plain was traversed, moreover, by thirty-three highways, which connected the city with every quarter of the habitable globe. Its surface exhibited the richest cultivation. From side to side it was covered with gardens and vineyards, in the verdure and blossoms of an almost perpetual spring; amid which rose the temples of the gods of Rome, the trophies of her warriors, the tombs and monuments of her legislators and orators, and the villas and rural retreats of her senators and merchants. Indeed, this plain would seem, in imperial times, to have been one vast city, stretching out from the white strand of the Mediterranean to the summit of the Volscian hills. But in proportion to its GRANDEUR then is its DESOLATION now. From the sea to the mountains it lies silent, waste, unploughed, unsown,--a houseless, treeless, blackened wilderness. "Where," you exclaim, "are its highways?" They are blotted out. "Where are its temples, its palaces, its vineyards?" All swept away. Scarce a heap remains, to tell of its numerous and magnificent structures. Their very ruins are ruined. The land looks as if the foot of man had never trodden it, and the hand of man never cultivated it. Here it rises into melancholy mounds; there it sinks into hollows and pits: like that plain which God overthrew, it neither is sown nor beareth. It is inhabited by the fox, haunted by the brigand, and frequented in spring and autumn by a few herdsmen, clad in goats'-skins, and living in caves and wigwams, and reminding one, by their savage appearance, of the satyrs of ancient mythology. It is silent as a sepulchre. John Bunyan might have painted it for his "Valley of the Shadow of Death." I shall suppose that you are approaching Rome from the north. You have disengaged yourself from the Apennines,--the picturesque Apennines,--in whose sunny vales the vine still ripens, and on whose sides the olive still lingers. You are advancing along a high plateau which rises here and there into conical mounts, on which sits some ancient and renowned city, dwindled now into a poor village, whose inhabitants are husbandmen, and who move about oppressed by the languor that weighs upon this whole land. Beneath your feet are subterranean chambers, in which mailed warriors sleep,--for it is the ancient land of Etruria over which your track lies. Before the wolf suckled Romulus, this soil had nourished a race of heroes. The road, so filled in former times by a never-failing concourse of legions going forth to battle or returning in triumph,--of consuls and legates bearing the high behests of the senate to the subject provinces,--and of ambassadors and princes coming to sue for peace, or to lay their tributary gifts at the feet of Rome,--is now solitary and untrodden, save by the traveller from a far country, or the cowled and corded pilgrim whose vow brings him to the shrine of the apostles. Stacks of mouldering brickwork attract the eye by the wayside,--the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on the milestones; but you cannot persuade yourself that Rome you shall find in the heart of a desert like this. You have gained the brow of a low hill; you have passed the summit, and got half-way down the declivity; when suddenly a vision bursts on your sight that rivets you to the spot. There is the Tiber rolling its yellow floods at your feet; and there, spread out in funereal gloom between the mountains and the sea, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA. The spectacle is sublime, despite its desolation. There is but one object in the vast expanse, but that is truly a majestic one. Alone, on the silent plain, judgment-stricken and sackcloth-clad, occupying the same spot where she "glorified herself and lived deliciously," and said in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow," is ROME. You are to cross the Tiber. Already your steps are on the Pons Milvius, where Christianity triumphed over Paganism in the person of Constantine, and over the parapet of which Maxentius, in his flight, flung the seven-branched golden candlestick, which Titus brought from the temple of Jerusalem. The Flaminian way, which you are now to traverse, runs straight to the gate of Rome. In front is the long line of the city walls, within which you can descry the proud dome of St Peter's, the huge rotundity of St Angelo, or "Hadrian's Mole," and a host of inferior cupolas and towers, which in any other city would suffice to give a character to the place, but are here thrown into the shade by the two unrivalled structures I have named. You are not less than two miles from the gate; yet such are the purity and transparency of an Italian sky, that every stone almost in the old wall,--every scar which the hand of time or the ravages of war have made in it,--is visible. As you advance, Monte Mario rises on the right, with a temple on its crest, and rows of pine-trees and cypresses on its sides. On the left, at a goodly distance, are seen the purple hills of Frascati and Albano, with their delicate chequering of light and shadow, and the Tiber, appearing to burst like a river of gold from their azure bosom. The beauty of these objects is much heightened by the blackness of the plain around. We now enter Rome. The square in which we find ourselves,--the Porta del Popolo,--is worthy of Rome. It is a clean, neatly-paved quadrangular area, of an hundred and fifty by an hundred yards in extent, edged on all sides by noble mansions. Fronting you as you enter the gate are the domes of two fine churches, in one of which Luther preached when he was in Rome. Between them the Corso is seen shooting out in a long narrow line of lofty façades, traversing the entire length of the city from north to south. On the right is the house of Mr Cass, the United States' consul, behind which rises a series of hanging gardens. There was dug the grave of Nero; but the ashes of the man before whom the world trembled cannot now be found. On the left rises the terraced slope of the Pincian hill, with its galleries, its statues, its stately cypresses, and its noble carriage-drive. On the opposite declivity are the gardens of Sallust, looking down on the _campus sceleratus_, where the unfaithful vestal-virgins were burned. In the middle of the spacious area is a fine fountain, whose waters are received into a spacious basin, guarded by marble lions. And there, too, stands the obelisk of Rhamses I., severe and solemn, a stranger, like ourselves, from a far land. This is the same which that monarch erected before the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, the ON of Scripture, and which Augustus transported to Rome. It is a single block of red granite, graven from top to bottom with hieroglyphics, which it is quite possible the eyes of Moses may have scanned. When that column was hewn, not a stone had been laid on the Capitol, and the site of Rome was a mere marsh; yet here it stands, with its mysterious scroll still unread. Speak, stranger, and tell us, with thy deep Coptic voice, the secrets of four thousand years ago. Say, wouldst thou not like to revisit thy native Nile, and spend thine age beside the tombs of the Pharaohs, the companions of thy youth, and amidst the congenial silence of the sands of Egypt? The traveller who would enjoy the finest view of the modern city must ascend the Pincian hill. In the basin beneath him he beholds spread out a flat expanse of red-tiled roofs, traversed by the long line of the Corso, and bristling with the tops of innumerable domes, columns, and obelisks. Some thirty or forty cupolas give an air of grandeur to the otherwise uninteresting mass of red; and conspicuous amongst these, over against the spectator, is the princely dome of St Peter's, and the huge bulk of the Castle of St Angelo. The Tiber is seen creeping sluggishly at the base of the Janiculum, the sides of which are thinly dotted with villas and gardens, while its summit is surmounted by a long stretch of the old wall. Standing in the Piazza del Popolo, the person is in a good position for comprehending the arrangement of modern Rome. Here three streets have their rise, which, running off in diverging lines, like spokes from the nave of a wheel, traverse the city, and form, with the cross streets which connect them, the osteology of the Eternal City. This at least is the arrangement which obtains till you reach the region lying around the Capitol, which is an inextricable network of lanes, courts, and streets. The centre one of the three streets we have indicated is the Corso. It is a good mile in length, and runs straight south, extending from the Flaminian gate to almost the foot of the Capitol. To an English eye it is wanting in breadth, though the most spacious street in Rome. It is but indifferently kept in point of cleanliness, though the most fashionable promenade of the Romans. Here only you find anything resembling a flag-pavement: all the other streets are causewayed from side to side with small sharp pieces of lava, which pain the foot at every step. The shops are small and dark, resembling those of our third and fourth-rate towns, and exhibiting in their wares a superabundance of cameos, mosaics, Etruscan vases, and statuary,--these being almost the sole native manufacture of Rome. It is adorned with several truly noble palaces, and with the colonnades and porticos of a great number of churches. It was the boast of the Romans that the Pope could say mass in a different church every day of the year. This, we believe, is true, there being more than three hundred and sixty churches in that city, but not one copy of the Bible that is accessible by the people. The second street,--that on the right,--is the Via Ripetta, which leads off in the direction of St Peter's and the Vatican. It takes one nigh the tomb of Augustus, now converted into a hippodrome; the Pantheon, whose pristine beauty remains undefaced after twenty centuries; the Collegio Romano; and, towards the foot of the Capitol, the Ghetto,--a series of mean streets, occupied by the Jews. The third street,--that on the left,--is the Via Babuino. It traverses the more aristocratic quarter of Rome,--if we can use such a phrase in reference to a city whose nobles are lodging-house keepers, and live-- "Garreted In their ancestral palace,"-- running on by the Piazza di Spagna, which the English so much frequent, to the Quirinal, the Pope's summer palace, and the form of Trajan, whose column, after the many copies which have been made of it, still stands unrivalled and unapproached in beauty. "And though the passions of man's fretful race Have never ceased to eddy round its base, Not injured more by touch of meddling hands Than a lone obelisk 'mid Nubian sands." On the Corso there is considerable bustle. The little buying and selling that is done in Rome is transacted here. Half the population that one sees in the Corso are priests and French soldiers. The population of Rome is not much above an hundred thousand; its ecclesiastical persons, however, are close on six thousand. Let us imagine, if we can, the state of things were the ecclesiastics of all denominations in Scotland to be doubled, and the whole body to be collected into one city of the size of Edinburgh! Such is the state of Rome. The great majority of these men have no duty to do, beyond the dreary and monotonous task of the daily lesson in the breviary. They have no sermons to write and preach; they do not visit the sick; they have no books or newspapers; they have no family duties to perform. With the exception of the Jesuits, who are much employed in the confessional, the whole fraternity of regulars and seculars, white, black, brown, and gray, live on the best, and literally do nothing. But, of course, six thousand heads cannot be idle. The amount of mischief that must be continually brewing in Rome,--the wars that shake convents,--the gossip and scandal that pollute society,--the intrigues that destroy families,--may be more easily imagined than told. Were the secret history of that city for but one short week to be written, what an astounding document it would be! and what a curious commentary on that mark of a "true Church," _unity_! Well were it for the world were the plots hatched in Rome felt only within its walls. On the streets of the Eternal City you meet, of course, every variety of ecclesiastical costume. The eye is at first bewildered with the motley show of gowns, cloaks, cowls, scapulars, and veils; of cords, crosses, shaven heads, and naked feet,--provoking the reflection what a vast deal of curious gear it takes to teach Christianity! There you have the long black robe and shovel hat of the secular priest; the tight-fitting frock and little three-cornered bonnet of the Jesuit; the shorn head and black woollen garment of the Benedictine;--there is the Dominican, with his black cloak thrown over his white gown, and his shaven head stuck into a slouching cowl;--there is the Franciscan, with his half-shod feet, his three-knotted cord, and his coarse brown cloak, with its numerous pouches bulging with the victuals he has been begging for;--there is the Capuchin, with his bushy beard, his sandaled feet, his patched cloak, and his funnel-shaped cowl, reminding one of Harlequin's cap;--there is the Carmelite, with shaven head begirt with hairy continuous crown, loose flowing robe, and broad scapular;--there is the red gown of the German student, and the wallet of the begging friar. This last has been out all morning begging for the poor, and is now returning with replenished wallet to his convent on the Capitol, where dwell monks now, as geese aforetime. After dining on the contents of his well-filled sack, with a slight addition from the vineyards of the Capitol, he will scatter the crumbs among the crowd of beggars which may be seen at this hour climbing the convent stairs. But however these various orders may differ in the colour of their cloaks or the shape of their tonsure, there is one point in which they all agree,--that is, dirt. They are indescribably filthy. Clean water and soap would seem to be banished the convents, as indulgences of the flesh which cannot be cherished without deadly peril to the soul, and which are to be shunned like heresy itself. They smell like goats; and one trembles to come within the droppings of their cloak, lest he should carry away a few little _souvenirs_, which the "holy man" might be glad to part with. A fat, stalwart, bacchant, boorish race they are, giving signs of anything but fasting and flagellation; and I know of nothing that would so dissipate the romance which invests monks and nuns in the eyes of some, like bringing a ship-load of them over to this country, and letting their admirers see and smell them. Even the ordinary priest appears but little superior to the monk in the qualities we have named. Dirty in person, slovenly in dress, and wearing all over a careless, fearless, bullying air, he looks very little the gentleman, and, if possible, less the clergyman. But in Rome he can afford to despise appearances. Is he not a priest, and is not Rome his own? Accordingly, he plants his foot firmly, as if he felt, like Antæus, that he touches his native earth; he sweeps the crowd around with a full, scornful, defiant eye; and should Roman dare to measure glances with him, that brow of brass would frown him into the dust. In Rome the "priest's face" attains its completest development. That face has not its like among all the faces of the world. It is the same in all countries, and can be known under every disguise,--a soldier's uniform or a porter's blouse. At Maynooth you may see it in all stages of growth; but at Rome it is perfected; and when perfected, there is an entire blotting out of all the kindly emotions and human sympathies, and there meets the eye something that is at once below and above the face of man. If we could imagine the scorn, pride, and bold bad daring of one of Milton's fallen angels, grafted on a groundwork of animal appetites, we should have a picture something like the priest's face. The priests will not be offended should the beggars come next in our notice of the Eternal City. The beggars of Rome are almost an institution of themselves; and, though not chartered, like the friars, their numbers and their ancient standing have established their rights. What is it that strikes you on first entering the "Holy City?" Is it its noble monuments,--its fine palaces,--its august temples? No; it is its flocks of beggars. You cannot halt a moment, but a little colony gathers round you. Every church has its beggar, and sometimes a whole dozen. If you wish to ascertain the hours of any ceremony in a church, you are directed to ask its beggar, as here you would the beadle. Every square, every column, every obelisk, every fountain, has its little colony of beggars, who have a prescriptive right to levy alms of all who come to see these objects. We shall afterwards advert to the proof thence arising as to the influence of the system of which this city is the seat. Rome, though it surpasses all the cities of the earth in the number, beauty, and splendour of its public monuments, is imposing only in parts. It presents no effective _tout ensemble_. Some of its noblest edifices are huddled into corners, and lost amid a crowd of mean buildings. The Pantheon rises in the fish-market. The Navonna Mercato, which has the finest fountain in Italy, is a rag-fair. The church of the Lateran is approached through narrow rural lanes. The splendid edifice of St Paul's stands outside the walls, in the midst of swamps and marshes so unwholesome, that there is not a house near it. The meanest streets of Rome are those that lie around St Peter's and the Vatican. The Corso is in good part a line of noble palaces; but in other parts of the city you pass through whole streets, consisting of large massive structures, once comfortable mansions, but now squalid, filthy, and unfurnished hovels, resembling the worst dens of our great cities. It cannot fail to strike one, too, as somewhat anomalous, that there should be such a vast deal of ruins and rubbish in the _Eternal_ City. And as regards its sanitary condition, there may be a great deal of holiness in Rome, but there is very little cleanliness in it. When a shower falls, and the odour of the garbage with which the streets are littered is exhaled, the smell is insufferable. One had better not describe the spectacles that one sees every day on the marble stairs of the churches. The words of Archenholtz in the end of last century are still applicable:--"Filth," says he, "infects all the great places of Rome except that of St. Peter's; nor would this be excepted from the general rule, but that it lies at greater distance from the dwellings. It is incredible to what a pitch filthiness is carried in Rome. As palaces and houses are mostly open, their entrance is usually rendered unsufferable, being made the receptacle of the most disgustful wants." In fine, Rome is the most extraordinary combination of grandeur and ruin, magnificence and dirt, glory and decay, which the world ever saw. We must distinguish, however: the grandeur has come down to the Popes from their predecessors,--the filth and ruin are their own. CHAPTER XXII. ANCIENT ROME--THE SEVEN HILLS. Site of Ancient Rome--Calm after the Storm--The Seven Hills--Their General Topography--The Aventine--The Palatine--The Ruins of the Palace of Cæsar--View of Ruins of Rome from the Palatine--The Cælian--The Viminale--The Quirinal--Other two Hills, the Janiculum and the Vatican--The Forum--The Arch of Titus--The Coliseum--The Mamertine Prison--External Evidence of Christianity--Rome furnishes overwhelming Proofs of the Historic Truth of the New Testament--These stated--The Three Witnesses in the Forum--The Antichrist come--_Coup d'OEil_ of Rome. But where is the Rome of the Cæsars, that great, imperial, and invincible city, that during thirteen centuries ruled the world? If you would see her, you must seek for her in the grave. You are standing, I have supposed, on the tower of the Capitol, with your face towards the north, gazing down on the flat expanse of red roofs, bristling with towers, columns, and domes, that covers the plain at your feet. Turn now to the south. There is the seat of her that once was mistress of the world. There are the Seven Hills. They are furrowed, tossed, cleft; and no wonder. The wars, revolutions, and turmoils of two thousand years have rolled their angry surges over them; but now the strife is at an end; and the calm that has succeeded is deep as that of the grave. These hills, all unconscious of the past, form a scene of silent and mournful beauty, with fragments of temples protruding through their soil, and humble plants and lowly weeds covering their surface. The topography of these famous hills it is not difficult to understand. If you make the Capitoline in which you stand the centre one, the remaining six are ranged round it in a semi-circle. They are low broad swellings or mounts, of from one to two miles in circumference. We shall take them as they come, beginning at the west, and coming round to the north. First comes the AVENTINE. It rises steep and rocky, with the Tiber washing its north-western base. It is covered with the vines and herbs of neglected gardens, amid which rises a solitary convent and a few shapeless ruins. At its southern base are the baths of Caracalla, which, next to the Coliseum, are the greatest ruin in Rome. Descend its eastern slope,--cross the valley of the Circus Maximus,--and you begin to climb the PALATINE hill, the most famous of the seven. The Palatine stands forward from the circular line, and is divided from where you stand only by the little plain of the Forum. It was the seat of the first Roman colony; and when Rome grew into an empire, the palace of the Cæsars rose upon it, and the Palatine was henceforward the abode of the world's master. The site is nearly in the middle of ancient Rome, and commands a fine view of the other hills, the Capitol only overtopping it. The imperial palace which rose on its summit must have been a conspicuous as well as imposing object from every part of the city. Three thousand columns are said to have adorned an edifice, the saloons, libraries, baths, and porticos of which, the wealth and art of ancient Rome had done their utmost to make worthy of their imperial occupant. A dark night has overwhelmed the glory that once irradiated this mount. It is now a huge mountain of crumbling brickwork, bearing on its broad level top a luxuriant display of cabbages and vines, amid which rise the humble walls of a convent, and a small but tasteful villa, which is owned, strange to say, by an Englishman. The proprietor of the villa and the little colony of monks are now the only inhabitants of the Palatine. In walking over it, you stumble upon blocks of marble, remains of terraces, vaults still retaining their frescoes, arches, porticos, and vast substructions of brickwork, all crushed and blended into one common ruin. In these halls power dwelt and crime revelled: now the owl nestles in their twilight vaults, and the ivy mantles their crumbling ruins. The western side of this mound rises steep and lofty, crested with a row of noble cypress trees. They are tall and upright, and wear in the mind's eye a shadowy shroud of gloom, looking like mourners standing awed and grief-stricken beside the grave of the Cæsars. When the twilight falls and the stars come out, their dark moveless figures, relieved against the sky, present a sight peculiarly impressive and solemn. The general aspect and condition of the Palatine have been sketched by Byron with his usual power:-- "Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower, grown, Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped On what were chambers, arch crushed, column strown In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescoes steeped In subterranean damps, where the owl peeped, Deeming it midnight;--temples, baths, or halls, Pronounce who can; for all that learning reaped From her research hath been, that these are walls. Behold the imperial mount! 'tis thus the mighty falls." But Cowper rises to a yet higher pitch, and reads the true moral which is taught by this fallen mount. For to Rome may we apply his lines on the fall of the once proud monarchy of Spain. "Art thou, too, fallen, Iberia? Do we see The robber and the murderer weak as we? Thou that hast wasted earth, and dared despise Alike the wrath and mercy of the skies, Thy pomp is in the grave, thy glory laid Low in the pits thine avarice has made. We come with joy from our eternal rest, To see the oppressor in his turn oppressed. Art thou the god, the thunder of whose hand Rolled over all our desolated land, Shook principalities and kingdoms down, And made the mountains tremble at his frown? The sword shall light upon thy boasted powers, And waste them, as thy sword has wasted ours. 'Tie thus Omnipotence his law fulfils, And Vengeance executes what Justice wills." One day I ascended the Palatine, picking my steps with care, owing to the abominations of all kinds that cover the path, to spend an hour on the mount, and survey from thence the mighty wrecks of empire strewn around it. The steps of the stair by which I ascended were formed of blocks of marble, the half-effaced carvings on which showed that they had formed parts of former edifices. Protruding from the soil, and strewn over its surface, were fragments of columns and capitols of pillars. I emerged on the summit at the spot where the vestibule of Nero's palace is supposed to have stood. I thought of the guards, the senators, the ambassadors, that had crowded this spot,--the spoils, trophies, and monuments, that had adorned it; and my heart sank at the sight of its naked desolation and dreary loneliness. The flat top of the hill ran off to the south, covered with a various and somewhat incongruous vegetation. Here was a thicket of laurels, and there a clump of young oaks; here a garden of vines, and there rows of cabbages. A monk, habited in brown, was looking out at the door of his convent; and one or two women were busy among the vegetables, making up a load for market. On the farther edge of the hill rose the tall, moveless, silent cypresses of which I have spoken. On the right rose the square tower of the Capitol, with the perperine substructions of its Tabularium, coeval with the age of the kings; and skirting its base were the cupolas of modern churches, and the nodding columns of fallen temples, beautiful even in their ruin, and more eloquent than Cicero, whose living voice had often been heard on the spot where they now moulder in silent decay. A little nearer was the naked, jagged front of the Tarpeian rock, crested a-top with gardens, and its base buried in rubbish, which is slowly gaining on its height. In front was a noble bend of the Tiber, rolling on in mournful majesty, amid the majestic silence of these mighty desolations. Beyond were the red roofs and mean streets of the Trastevere, with the empty upland slope of the Janiculum, crowned by the line of the gray wall. Behind, and immediately beneath me, was the Forum, where erst the Romans assembled to enact their laws and choose their magistrates. A ragged line of ghastly ruins,--porticos without temples, and temples without porticos, their noble vaultings yawning like caverns in the open day,--was seen bounding its farther edge. Its floor was a rectangular expanse of shapeless swellings and yawning pits. Here reposed a herd of buffaloes; there a little drove of swine; yonder stood a row of carts; and in the midst of these noways picturesque objects rose the gray arch of Titus. At its base sat a beggar; while an artist, at a little distance, was sketching it with the calotype. A peasant was traversing the Via Sacra, bearing to his home a supply of city-baked bread. A dozen or two of old men with spades and barrows were clearing away the earth from the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome. In the south-eastern angle of the plain rose the titanic bulk of the Coliseum, fearfully gashed and torn, yet sublime in its decay. Over the furrowed and ragged summits of the Cælian and Esquiline mounts were seen the early snows, glittering on the peaks of the Volscian and Sabine range. Such was the scene which presented itself to me from the top of the Palatine. How different, I need not say, from that which must have often met the eye of Cæsar from the same point, prompting the proud boast,--"Is not this great" Rome, "that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?" "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, that didst weaken the nations!... Is this the man that did make the earth to tremble,--that did shake kingdoms,--that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof?" A little eastward of the Palatine, and seen over its shoulder, as surveyed from the tower of the Capitol, is the CÆLIAN Mount. Its summit is marked by the ruins of an ancient edifice,--the Curia Hostilia,--and the statued front of a modern temple,--the church of S. John Lateran, which is even more renowned in the pontifical annals than the other is in classic story. Moving your eye across the valley of the Forum, it falls upon the flat surface of the ESQUILINE. It is marked, like the former, by an ancient ruin and a modern edifice. Amid its vineyards and rural lanes rise the massive remains of the baths of Titus, and the gorgeous structure of Maria Maggiore. The VIMINALE comes next; but forming, as it did, a plain betwixt the Esquiline and the Quirinal, it is difficult to trace its limits. It is distinguishable mainly by the baths of Dioclesian, now a French barrack, and the church of San Lorenzo, which occupies its highest point. The QUIRINAL is the last of the Seven Hills. It is covered with streets, and crowned with the summer palace and gardens of the Pope. Thus have we made the tour of the Seven Hills, commencing at the Aventine on the extreme right, and proceeding in a semicircular line over the low swellings which lie in their peaceful covering of flower and weed, onward to the Quirinal, which rises, with its glittering casements, on the extreme left. They hold in their arms, as it were, modern Rome, with the Tiber, like a golden belt, tying in the city, and bounding the Campus Martius, on which it is seated. On the west of the Tiber are other two hills, which, though not of the seven, are worth mentioning. The first is the JANICULUM, with the _Trastevere_ at its base. The inhabitants of this district pride themselves on their pure Roman blood, and look down upon the rest of the inhabitants as a mixed race; and certainly, if ferocious looks and continual frays can make good their claim, they must be held as a colony of the olden time, which, nestling in this nook of Rome, have escaped the intermixtures and revolutions of eighteen centuries. It has been remarked that there is a striking resemblance between their faces and those of the ancient Romans, as graven on the arch of Titus. They are the nearest neighbours of the Pope, whose own hill, the VATICAN, rises a little to the north of them. On the Vatican mount stood anciently the circus of Nero; and here many of the early Christians, amid unutterable torments, yielded up their lives. On the spot where they died have arisen the church of St Peter and the palace of the Vatican,--now but another name for whatever is formidable to the liberties of the world. But beyond question, the spot of all others the most interesting in Rome is the Forum. You look right down into it from where you stand. Whether it be the eloquence, or the laws, or the victories, or the magnificent monuments of ancient Rome, the light reflected from them all is concentrated on this plain. How often has Tully spoken here! How often has Cæsar trodden it! Over that very pavement which the excavations have laid bare, the chariots of Scylla, and of Titus, and of a hundred other warriors, have rolled. But the triumphs which this plain witnessed, once deemed eternal, are ended now; and the clods which that Italian slave turns up, or which that priest treads on so proudly, are perchance part of the dust of that heroic race which conquered the world. The tombs of the Cæsars are empty now, and their ashes have been scattered long since over the soil of Rome. Of the many beautiful edifices that stood around this plain, not one remains entire: a few mouldering columns, half buried in rubbish, or dug out of the soil, only remain to show where temples stood. But there is one little arch which has survived that dire tempest of ruin in which temple and tower went down,--the Arch of Titus, which has sculptured upon its marble the sad story of the fall of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Jews. That little arch, wonderful to tell, stands between two mighty ruins,--the fallen palace of the Cæsars on the one hand, and the kingly but ruined mass of the Coliseum on the other. As regards the Coliseum, architects, I believe, do not much admire it; but to myself, who did not look at it with a professional eye, it seemed as if I had never seen a ruin half so sublime. I never grew weary of gazing upon it. It rises amid the hoar ruins of Rome, scarred and rent, yet wearing an eternal youth; for with the most colossal size it combines in the very highest degree simplicity of design and beauty of form. To stand on its area, and survey the sweep of its broken benches, is to feel as if you were standing in the midst of an amphitheatre of hills, and were gazing on concentric mountain-ranges. How powerfully do its associations stir the soul! How many spirits now in glory have died on that arena! The Romans, we shall suppose, have been occupied all day in witnessing mimic fights, which display the skill, but do not necessarily imperil the life, of the combatants. But now the sun is westering; the shadow of the Palatine begins to creep across the Forum, and the villas on the Alban hills burn in the setting rays, and the Romans, before retiring to their homes, demand their last grand spectacle,--the death of some poor unhappy captive or gladiator. The victim steps upon the arena amid the deep stillness of the overwhelming multitude. It is no mimic combat his: he is "appointed to death." This lets us into the peculiar force of Paul's words, "I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were, appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men." But the most touching recollection connected with this city is this,--even that part of the Word of God was written in it, and that a greater than Cæsar has trodden its soil. A few paces below where we stand is the Mamertine prison, in whose dungeons, it is probable, Paul was confined; for this was the state-prison, and offences against religion were accounted state-offences. It is hewn in the rock of the Capitoline hill, dungeon below dungeon; and when surveying it, I could not but feel, that among all the exploits of Roman valour, there was not one half so heroic as that of the man who, with a cruel death staring him in the face, could sit down in this dungeon, where day never dawned, and write these heroic words,--"I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." Here I may be allowed to allude to a branch of the external evidence of Christianity which has not received all the notice to which it is entitled. When surveying from the tower of the Capitol the ruins of ancient Rome, I felt strongly the absurdity--the almost idiotcy--of denying the historic truth of Christianity. On such a spot one might as well deny that ancient Rome existed, as deny that Christianity was preached here eighteen centuries ago, and rose upon the ruins of paganism. At the distance of Rome, and amid the darkness of Italian ignorance, we can conceive of a Roman holding that the life of Knox is a fable,--that no such man ever existed, or ever preached in Scotland, or ever effected the Reformation from Popery. But bring him to the Castle Hill of Edinburgh,--bid him look round upon city and country, studded with the churches and schools of the reformed faith, planted by Knox,--show him the mouldering remains of the old cathedrals from which the priesthood and faith of Rome were driven out,--and, unless his mind is constituted in some extraordinary way, he would no longer doubt that such a man as Knox existed, and that Scotland has been reformed from Romanism to Presbyterianism. So is it at Rome. Around you are the temples of the ancient paganism. Here are ruins still bearing the inscriptions and effigies of the pagan deities and the pagan rites. Can any sane man doubt that paganism once reigned here? You can trace the history of its reign still graven on the ruins of Rome; but you can trace it down till only seventeen centuries ago: then it suddenly stops; a new writing appears upon the stones; a new religion has acquired the ascendancy in Rome, and left its memorials graven upon pillar, and column, and temple. Can any man doubt that Paul visited this city,--that he preached here, as the "Acts of the Apostles" records,--and that, after two centuries of struggles and martyrdoms, the faith which he preached triumphed over the paganism of Rome? Look along the Via Sacra,--that narrow paved road which leads southward from the Capitol: the very stones over which the chariot of Scylla rolled are still there. The road runs straight between the Palatine Mount, where the ivy and the cypress strive to mantle the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars, and the wonderful and ever beautiful structure of the Coliseum. In the valley between is a beautiful arch of marble,--the Arch of Titus. The palace of the world's master lies in ruins on the one side of it; the Coliseum, the largest single structure which human hands ever created, stands rent, and scarred, and bowed, on the other; and between these two mighty ruins this little arch rises entire. What a wonderful providence has spared it! On that arch is graven the record of the fall of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Jews; and the great fact of the existence of the Old Testament economy is also attested upon it; for there plainly appears on the stone, the furniture of the temple, the golden candlestick, the table of shew-bread, and the silver trumpets. But further, about two miles to the south of Rome are the Catacombs. In these catacombs, which, not unlike the coal-mines of our own country, traverse under ground the Campagna for a circuit of many miles, the early Christians, lived during the primitive persecutions. There they worshipped, there they died, and there they were buried; and their simple tombstones, recording that they died in peace, and in the hope of eternal life through Christ, are still to be seen to the number of many thousands. How came these tombstones there, if early Christianity and the early martyrs be a fable? If Christianity be a forgery, the arch of Titus, with its sacred symbols, is also a forgery; the catacombs, with all their tombstones, are also a forgery; and the hundred monuments in Rome, with the traces of early Christianity graven upon them, are also a forgery; and the person or persons who forged Christianity, in order to give currency to their forgery, must have been at the incredible pains of building the arch of Titus, and chiselling out its sculpture work; they must have dug out the catacombs, and filled them, with infinite labour, with forged tombstones; and they must have covered the monuments of Rome with forged inscriptions. Would any one have been at the pains to have done all this, or could he have done it without being detected? When the Romans rose in the morning, and saw these forged inscriptions, they must have known that they were not there the day before, and would have exposed the trick. But the idea is absurd, and no man can seriously entertain it whom an inveterate scepticism has not smitten with the extreme of senility or idiotcy. There is far more evidence at Rome for the historic truth of Christianity than for the existence of Julius Cæsar or of Scipio, or of any of the great men whose existence no one ever takes it into his head to doubt. Here, in the Forum, are THREE WITNESSES, which testify respectively to three leading facts of Christianity. These witnesses are,--the Arch of Titus, the fallen Palace on the Palatine, and the Column of Phocas. The Arch of Titus proclaims the end of the Old Testament economy; for there, graven on its marble, is the record of the fall of the temple, and the dispersion of the Jewish nation. The ruin on the Palatine tells that the "let" which hindered the revelation of the Man of Sin has now been "taken out of the way," as Paul foretold; for there lies the prostrate throne of the Cæsars, which, while it stood, effectually forbade the rise of the popes. But this solitary pillar, which stands erect where so many temples have fallen, with what message is it freighted? It witnesses to the rise of Antichrist. That column rose with the popes; for Phocas set it up to commemorate the assumption of the title of Universal Bishop by the pastor of Rome; and here has it been standing all the while, to proclaim that "that wicked" is now revealed, "whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming." Such is the united testimony borne by these three Witnesses,--even that the Antichrist is come. To complete this _coup d'oeil_ of Rome, it is necessary only that we transfer our gaze for an instant to the more distant objects. Though swept, as the site of Rome now is, with the besom of destruction, the outlines, which no ruin can obliterate, are yet grand as ever. Immediately beneath you are the red roofs and glittering domes of the city; around is a gay fringe of vineyards and gardens; and beyond is the dark bosom of the Campagna, stretching far and wide, meeting the horizon on the west and south, and confined on the east and north by a wall of glorious hills,--the sweet Volscians, the blue Sabines, the craggy Apennines, with their summits--at least when I saw them--hoary with the snows of winter. Spectacle terrible and sublime! Ruin colossal and unparalleled! The Campagna is a vast hall, amid the funereal shadows and unbroken stillness of which repose in mournful state the ASHES OF ROME. CHAPTER XXIII. STRIKING OBJECTS IN ROME. The Baths of Caracalla--The Catacombs--Evidence thence arising against Romanism--The Scala Santa, or Pilate's Stairs--Peasants from Rimini climbing them--Irreverence of Devotees--Unequal Terms on which the Pope offers Heaven--Church of Ara Cæli--The Santissimo Bambino--Conversation with the Monks who exhibit it--The Ghetto, or Jew's Quarter--Efforts to Convert them to Romanism--Tyrannical Restrictions still imposed upon them--Their Ineradicable Characteristics of Race--The Vatican--The Apollo Belvedere--Pio Nono--His Dress and Person--St Peter's--Its Grandeur and Uselessness--Motto on Egyptian Obelisk--Gate of San Pancrazio--Graves of the French--The Convents--Exhibition of Nuns--Collegio Romano and Father Perrone--An American Student--The English Protestant Chapel--Preaching there--American Chaplain--Collection in Rome for Building a Cathedral in London--Sermon on Immaculate Conception in Church of Gesu--Ave Maria--Family Worship in Hotel--Early Christians of Rome--Paul. I have already mentioned my arrival at midnight, and how thankful I was to find an open door and an empty bed at the Hotel d'Angleterre. The reader may guess my surprise and joy at discovering next morning that I had slept in a chamber adjoining that of my friend Mr Bonar, from whom I had parted, several weeks before, at Turin. After breakfast, we sallied out to see the Catacombs. I had found Rome in cloud and darkness on the previous night; and now, after a deceitful morning gleam, the storm returned with greater violence than ever. Torrents swept the streets; the lightning was flashing on the old monuments; fearful peals of thunder were rolling above the city; and we were compelled oftener than once during our ride to seek the shelter of an arched way from the deluge of rain that poured down upon us. Skirting the base of the Palatine, and emerging on the Via Appia, we arrived at the Baths of Caracalla, which we had resolved to visit on our way to the Catacombs. No words can describe the ghastly grandeur of this stupendous ruin, which, next to the Coliseum, is the greatest in Rome. Besides its saloons, theatre, and libraries, it contained, it is said, sixteen hundred chairs for bathers. As was its pristine splendour, so now is its overthrow. Its cyclopean walls, and its vast chambers, the floors of which are covered to the depth of some twelve or twenty feet with fallen masses of the mosaic ceiling, like immense boulders which have rolled down from some mountain's top, are spread over an area of about a mile in circuit. The ruins, here capped with sward and young trees, there rising in naked jagged turrets like Alpine peaks, had a romantic effect, which was not a little heightened by the alternate darkness of the thunder-cloud that hung above them, and the incessant play of the lightning among their worn pinnacles. Resuming our course along the Appian Way, we passed the tomb of the Scipios; and, making our exit by the Sebastian gate, we came, after a ride of two miles in the open country, to the basilica of San Sebastiano, erected over the entrance to the Catacombs. Pulling a bell which hung in the vestibule, a monk appeared as our cicerone, and we might have been pardoned a little misgiving in committing ourselves to such a guide through the bowels of the earth. His cloak was old and tattered, his face was scourged with scorbutic disease, misery or flagellation had worn him to the bone, and his restless eye cast uneasy glances on all around. He carried in his hand a little bundle of tallow candles, as thin and worn as himself almost; and, having lighted them, he gave one to each of us, and bade us follow. We descended with him into the doubtful night. The place was a long shaft or corridor, dug out of the brown tuffo rock, with the roof about two feet overhead, and the breadth two thirds or so of the height. The descent was easy, the turnings frequent, and light there was none, save the glimmerings of our slender tapers. The origin of the Catacombs is still a disputed question; but the most probable opinion is, that they were formed by digging out the pozzolana or volcanic earth, which was used as a cement in the great buildings of Rome. They extend in a zone round the city, and form a labyrinth of subterranean galleries, which traverse the Campagna, reaching, according to some, to the shore of the Mediterranean. He who adventures into them without a guide is infallibly lost. They speak at Rome of a professor and his students, to the number of sixty, who entered the Catacombs fifty years ago, and have not yet returned. Certain it is, that many melancholy accidents have occurred in them, which have induced the Government to wall them up to a certain extent. I had not gone many yards till I felt that I was entirely at the mercy of the monk, and that, should he play me false, I must remain where I was till doomsday. But what invests the Catacombs with an interest of so touching a kind is the fact, that here the Christian Church, in days of persecution, made her abode. What! in darkness, and in the bowels of the earth? Yes: such were the Christians which that age produced. At every few paces along the galleries you see the quadrangular excavations in which the dead were laid. There, too, are the niches in which lamps were placed, so needful in the subterranean gloom; and occasionally there opens to your taper a large square chamber, with its walls of dark-brownish tuffo and its stuccoed roof, which has evidently been used for family purposes, or as a chapel. How often has the voice of prayer and praise resounded here! The Catacombs are a stupendous monument of the faith and constancy of the primitive Church. You have the satisfaction here of knowing that you have the very scenes before you that met the eyes of the first Christians. Time has not altered them; superstition has not disfigured them. Such as they were when the primitive believers fled to them from a Nero's cruelty or a Domitian's tyranny, so are they now. These remarkable excavations were well known down till the sixth century. Amid the barbarism of the ages that succeeded, all knowledge of them was lost; but in the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the art of printing had been invented, and the world could profit by the discovery, the Catacombs were re-opened. Most of the gravestones were removed to the Vatican, and built into the _Lapidaria Galleria_, where I spent a day copying them; but so accurately have they been described by Maitland, in his "Church in the Catacombs," that I beg to refer the reader who wishes farther information respecting these deeply interesting memorials, to his valuable work. They are plain, unchiselled slabs of marble, with simple characters, scratched with some sharp instrument by the aid of the lamp, recording the name and age of the person whose remains they enclosed, to which is briefly added, "in peace," or "in Christ." Piety here is to be tested, not by the profession on the tombstone, but by the sacrifice of the life. A palm branch carved on the stone is the usual sign of martyrdom. I saw a few slabs still remaining as they had been placed seventeen centuries ago, fastened into the tuffo rock with a cement of earth. When the Catacombs were opened, a witness rose from the dead to confront Rome. No trace has been discovered which could establish the slightest identity in doctrine, in worship, or in government, between the present Church of Rome and the Church of the Catacombs. Will the reader accompany me to another and very different scene? We leave these midnight vaults, and tread again the narrow lava-paved Appian road; and through rural lanes we seek the summit of the Cælian mount, where stands in statued pomp the church of St John Lateran. Here are shown the _Scala Santa_ which were brought from Jerusalem, and which the Church of Rome certifies as the very stairs which Christ ascended when he went to be judged of Pilate. On the north side of the quadrangle is an open building, with three separate flights of steps leading up from the pavement to the first floor. The middle staircase, which is covered with wood to preserve the marble, is the _Scala Santa_, which it is lawful to ascend only on your knees. Having reached the top, you may again use your feet, and descend by either of the other two stairs. Placed against the wall at the foot of the Scala Santa, is a large board, with the conditions to be observed in the ascent. Amongst other provisions, no one is allowed to carry a cane up the Scala Santa, nor is dog allowed to set foot on these stairs. On the pavement stood a sentry-box; and in the box sat a little dark-visaged man, so very withered, so very old, and so very crabbed, that I almost was tempted to ask him whether he had been imported along with the stairs. He rattled his little tin-box violently, which seemed half full of small coins, and invited me to ascend. "What shall I have for doing so?" I asked. "Fifteen years' indulgence," was the instant reply. There might be about fifteen steps in the stair, which was at the rate of a year's indulgence for every step. The terms were fair; for with an ordinary day's work I might lay up some thousands of years' indulgence. There was but one drawback in the matter. "I don't believe in purgatory," I rejoined. "What is that to me?" said the old man, tartly, accompanying the remark with a quick shrug of the shoulders and a curl of his thin lip. I turned to the staircase. Three peasant lads from Rimini--where the Madonna still winks, and good Catholic hearts still believe--were piously engaged in laying up a stock of merit against a future day, on the Scala Santa. Swinging the upper part of their bodies, and holding their feet aloft lest their wooden-soled shoes should touch the precious marble, or rather its wooden casing, they were slowly making way on the steps. In a little they were joined by a Frenchman, with his wife and little daughter; and the whole began a general march up the staircase. Whether it was the greater vigour of their piety, or the greater vigour of their limbs, I know not; but the peasants had flung themselves up before the lady had mastered five steps of the course. It occurred to me that this way of earning heaven was not one that placed all on a level, as they should be. These strong sinewy lads were getting fifteen years' indulgence with no greater effort than it cost the lady to earn five. The party, on reaching the top, entered a room on the right, and dropt on their knees before a little box of bones which stood in one corner, then before a painting of the Saviour which hung in the other; muttered a few words of prayer; and, descending the lateral stairs, commenced over again the same process. In no time they had laid up at least a hundred years' indulgence a-piece. The Frenchman and his lady went through the operation with a grave face; but the peasants quite lost the mastery over theirs, and the building rung with peals of laughter at the ridiculous attitudes into which they were compelled to throw themselves. Even in the little chapel above, bursts of smothered merriment interrupted their prayers. I looked at the little man in the box, to see how he was taking it; but he was true to his own remark, "What is that to me?" Indeed, this behaviour by no means detracted from the merit of the deed, or shortened by a single day the term of indulgence, in the estimation of the Italians. _Their_ understanding of devotion and _ours_ are totally different. With us devotion is a mental act; with them it is a mechanical act, strictly so. The mind may be absent, asleep, dead; it is devotion nevertheless. These peasants had undertaken to climb Pilate's staircase on their knees; not to give devout or reverent feelings into the bargain: they had done all they engaged to do, and were entitled to claim their hire. The staircase, as my readers may remember, has a strange connection with the Reformation. One day, as Luther was dragging his body up these steps, he thought he heard a voice from heaven crying to him, _The just shall live by faith._ Amazed, he sprang to his feet. New light entered into him. Luther and the Reformation were advanced a stage. From the Scala Santa in the Lateran I went to see the Santissimo Bambino in the church of Ara Cæli, on the Capitol. This church is squatted on the spot where stood the temple of Jupiter Ferretrius of old. It is one of the largest churches in Rome, and is unquestionably the ugliest. A magnificent staircase of an hundred and twenty-four steps of Parian marble leads up to it; but the church itself is as untasteful as can well be imagined. It presents its gable to the spectator, which is simply a vast unadorned expanse of brick, the breadth greatly exceeding the height, and terminating a-top in a sort of coping, that looks like a low, broad chimney, or rather a dozen chimneys in one. The edifice always reminded me of a short, stout Quaker, with a brim of even more than the usual breadth, standing astride on the Capitol. Entering by the main doorway in the west, I passed along the side aisle, on my way to the little chapel near the altar where the Bambino is kept. The wall here was covered with little pictures in thousands, all in the homeliest style of the art, and representing persons falling into the sea, or tumbling over precipices, or ridden over by carts. These were votive offerings from persons who had been in the situations represented, and who had been saved by the special interposition of Mary. Arms, legs, and heads of brass, and in some instances of silver, bore testimony to the greater wealth or the greater devotion of others of the devotees. Passing through a door on the left, at the eastern extremity of the church, I entered the little chapel or side closet, in which the Bambino is kept. Here two barefooted monks, with not more than the average dirt on their persons, were in attendance, to show me the "god." They began by lighting a few candles, though the sunlight was streaming in at the casement. I was near asking the monks the same question which the Protestant inhabitants of a Hungarian village one day put to their Catholic neighbours, as they were marching in procession through their streets,--"Is your god blind, that you burn candles to him at mid-day?" The tapers lighted, one of the friars dropped on his knees, and fell to praying with great vigour. I fear my deportment was not so edifying as the place and circumstances required; for I could see that ever and anon the monk cast side-long glances at me, as at a man who was scarce worthy of so great a sight as was about to be shown him. The other monk, drawing a key from under his cloak, threw open the doors of a sort of cupboard that stood against the wall. The interior was fitted up not unlike the stage of a theatre. A tall figure, covered with a brown cloak, stood leaning on a staff in the foreground. By his side stood a female, considerably younger, and attired in an elegant robe of green. These two regarded with fixed looks a little cradle or casket at their feet. The background stretched away into a hilly country, amid whose knolls and dells were shepherds with their flocks. The figures were Joseph and Mary, and the vista beyond was meant to represent the vicinity of Bethlehem. Taking up the casket, the monk, with infinite bowings and crossings, undid its swathings, and solemnly drew forth the Bambino. Poor little thing! it was all one to it whether one or a hundred candles were burning beside it: it had eyes, but saw not. It was bandaged, as all Italian children are, from head to foot, the swathings enveloping both arms and legs, displaying only its little feet at one extremity, and its round chubby face at the other. But what a blaze! On its little head was a golden crown, burning with brilliants; and from top to toe it was stuck so full of jewels, that it sparkled and glittered as if it had been but one lustrous gem throughout. Two women, who had taken the opportunity of an Inglise visiting the idol, now entered, leading betwixt them a little child, and all three dropped on their knees before the Bambino. I begged the monk to inform me why these women were here on their knees, and praying. "They are worshipping the Bambino," he replied. "Oh! worshipping, are they?" I exclaimed, in affected surprise; "how stupid I am; I took it for a piece of wood." "And so it is," rejoined the monk; "but it is miraculous; it is full of divine virtue, and works cures." "Has it wrought any of late?" I inquired. "It has," replied the religioso; "it cured a woman of dropsy two weeks ago." "In what quarter of Rome did she live?" I asked. "She lived in the Vatican," replied the Franciscan. "We have some great doctors in the city I come from," I said; "we have some who can take off an arm, or a leg, or a nose, without your feeling the slightest pain; but we have no doctor like this little doctor. But, pray tell me, why do you permit the cardinals or the Pope ever to die, when the Bambino can cure them?" The monk turned sharply round, and gave me a searching stare, which I stood with imperturbable gravity; and then, taking me for either a very dull or a very earnest questioner, he proceeded to explain that the cure did not depend altogether on the power of the Bambino, but also somewhat on the faith of the patient. "Oh, I see how it is," I replied. "But pardon me yet farther; you say the Bambino is of wood, and that these honest women are praying to it. Now I have been taught to believe that we ought not to worship wood." To make sure both of my interrogatories and of the monk's answers, I had been speaking to him through my friend Mr Stewart, whose long residence in Rome had made him perfectly master of the Italian tongue. "Oh," replied the Franciscan, "_all Christians here worship it_." But now the signs had become very manifest that my inquiries had reached a point beyond which it would not be prudent to push them. The monk was getting very red in the face; his motions were growing quick and violent; and, with more haste than reverence, he put back his god into its crib, and prepared to lock it up in its press. His fellow monk had started to his feet, and was rapidly extinguishing the candles, as if he smelt the unwholesome air of heresy. The women were told to be off; and the exhibition closed with somewhat less show of devotion than it had opened. Here, by the banks of the Tiber, as of old by the Euphrates, sits the captive daughter of Judah; and I went one afternoon towards twilight to visit the Ghetto. It is a narrow, dark, damp, tunnel-like lane. Old Father Tiber had been there but a day or two previously, and had left, as usual, very distinct traces of his visit, in the slime and wet that covered the place. Formerly it was shut in with gates, which were locked every night at Ave Maria: now the gates are gone, and the broken and ragged door-posts show where they had hung. Opposite the entrance of the Ghetto stands a fine church, with a large sculpture-piece over its portal, representing a crucifix, surrounded with the motto, which meets the eye of the Jew every time he passes out or comes in, "All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a gainsaying and disobedient people." The allusion here, no doubt, is to their unwillingness to pay their taxes, for that is the only sense in which the Pope's hands are all day long stretched out towards this people. Recently Pio Nono contracted a loan for twenty-one millions of francs, with the house of Rothschild; and thus, after persecuting the race for ages, the Vicar of God has come to lean for the support of his tottering throne upon a Jew. To do the Pope justice, however, the Jews in Rome are gathered once a-year into a church, where a sermon is preached for their conversion. The spectacle is said to be a very edifying one. The preacher fires off from the pulpit the hardest hits he can; and the Jews sit spitting, coughing, and making faces in return; while a person armed with a long pole stalks through the congregation, and admonishes the noisiest with a firm sharp rap on the head. The scene closes with a baptism, in which, it is affirmed, the same Jew sometimes plays the same part twice, or oftener if need be. The tyrannical spirit of Popery is seen in the treatment to which these descendants of Abraham are subjected in Rome, down to the present hour. Inquisitors are appointed to search into and examine all their books; all Rabbinic works are forbidden them, the Old Testament in Hebrew only being allowed to them; and any Jew having any forbidden book in his possession is liable to the confiscation of his property. Nor is he permitted to converse on the subject of religion with a Christian. They are not permitted to bury their dead with religious pomp, or to write inscriptions on their tombstones; they are forbidden to employ Christian servants; and if they do anything to disturb the faith of a Jewish convert to Romanism, they are subject to the confiscation of all their goods, and to imprisonment with hard labour for life; they are not allowed to sell meat butchered by themselves to Christians, nor unleavened bread, under heavy penalties; nor are they permitted to sleep a night beyond the limits of their quarters, nor to have carriage or horses of their own, nor to drive about the city in carriages, nor to use public conveyances for journeying, if any one object to it. Enter the Ghetto, and you feel instantly that you are among another race. An indescribable languor reigns over the rest of Rome. The Romans walk the streets with their hands in their pockets, and their eyes on the ground, for a heavy heart makes the limbs to drag. But in the Ghetto all is activity and thrift. You feel as if you had been suddenly transported into one of the busiest lanes of Glasgow or Manchester. Eager faces, with keen eyes and sharp features, look out upon you from amid the bundles of clothes and piles of all kinds of articles which darken the doors and windows of their shops. Scarce have you crossed the threshold of the Ghetto when you are seized by the button, dragged helplessly into a small hole stuffed with every imaginable sort of merchandise, and invited to buy a dozen things at once. No sooner have you been let go than you are seized by another and another. The women were seated in the doors of their shops and dwellings, plying busily their needle. One fine Jewish matron I marked, with seven buxom daughters round her, all working away with amazing nimbleness, and casting only a momentary glance at the stranger as he passed. How inextinguishable the qualities of this extraordinary people! Here, in this desolate land, and surrounded by the overwhelming torpor and laziness of Rome, the Jews are as industrious and as intent on making gain as their brethren in the commercial cities of Britain. I drew up with a young lad of about twenty, by way of feeling the pulse of the Ghetto; but though I tried him on both the past and the present, I succeeded in striking no chord to which he would respond. He seemed one of the prophet's dried bones,--very dry. Seventy years did their fathers dwell by the Euphrates; but here, alas! has the harp of Judah hung upon the willow for eighteen centuries. Beneath the dark shadow of the Vatican do they ever think of the sunny and vine-clad hills of their Palestine? I spent days not a few in the saloons of the Vatican. Into these noble chambers,--six thousand in number, it is said,--have been gathered all the masterpieces of ancient art which have been dug up from the ruins of villas, and temples, and basilicas, where they had lain buried for ages. Of course, I enter on no description of these. Let me only remark, that though I had seen hundreds of copies of some of these sculptures,--the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, for instance,--no copy I had ever seen had given me any but the faintest idea of the transcendent beauty and power of the originals. The artist, I found, had flung into them, without the slightest exaggeration of feature, a tremendous energy, an intense life, which perhaps no coming age will ever equal, and certainly none surpass. What a sublime, thrilling, ever-acting tragedy, for instance, is the Laocoon group! But from these efforts of a genius long since passed from the earth, I pass to one who represents in his living person a more tragical drama than any depicted in marble in the halls of the Vatican. One day as I was wandering through these apartments, the rumour ran through them that the Pope was going out to take an airing. I immediately ran down to the piazza, where I found a rather shabby coach with red wheels, to which were yoked four coal-black horses, with a very fat coachman on the box, in antique livery, and two postilions astride the horses, waiting for Pius. Some half-dozen of the _guardia nobile_, mounted on black horses, were in attendance; and, loitering at the bottom of the stairs, were the stately forms of the Swiss guards, with their shining halberds, and their quaint striped dress of yellow and purple. I had often heard of the Pope in the symbols of the Apocalypse, and in the pages of history as the antichrist; and now I was to see him with the eye in the person of Pio Nono. After waiting ten minutes or so, the folding doors in an upper gallery of the piazza were thrown open, and I could see a head covered with a white skull-cap,--the Popes never wear a wig,--passing along the corridor, just visible above the stone ballustrade. In a minute the Pope had descended the stairs, and was advancing along the open pavement to his carriage. The Swiss guard stood to their halberds. A Frenchman and his lady,--the same, if I mistake not, whom I had seen on the Scala Santa,--spreading his white handkerchief on the causeway, uncovered and dropped on his knees; a row of German students in red gowns went down in like manner; a score or so of wretched-looking old men, who were digging up the grass in the piazza, formed a prostrate group in the middle; and a little knot of Englishmen,--some four of us only,--stood erect at about six yards from the line of the procession. Pio Nono, though king of the kings of the earth, was attired with severe simplicity. His sole dress, save the skull-cap I have mentioned, and red slippers, was a gown of white stuff, which enveloped his whole person from the neck downwards, and looked not unlike a camlet morning dressing-gown. A small cross which dangled on his breast was his only ornament. The fisherman's ring I was too far off to see. In person he is a portly, good-looking gentleman; and, could one imagine him entering the pulpit of a Scotch Secession congregation, or an English Methodist one, his appearance would be hailed with looks of satisfaction. His colour was fresher than the average of Italy; and his face had less of the priest in it than many I have seen. There was an air of easy good nature upon it, which might be mistaken for benevolence, blended with a smile, which appeared ever on the point of breaking into a laugh, and which utterly shook the spectator's confidence in the firmness and good faith of its owner. Pius stooped slightly; his gait was a sort of amble; there was an air of irresolution over the whole man; and one was tempted to pronounce,--though the judgment may be too severe,--that he was half a rogue, half a fool. He waived his hand in an easy, careless way to the students and Frenchman, and made a profound bow to the English party. St Peter's is close by: let us enter it. As among the Alps, so here at first, one is altogether unaware of the magnitudes before him. What strikes you on entering is the vast sweep of the marble floor. It runs out before you like a vast plain or strath, and gives you a colossal standard of measurement, which you apply unconsciously to every object,--the pillars, the statues, the roof; and though these are all colossal too, yet so nicely are they proportioned to all around them, that you take no note of their bulk. You pass on, and the grandeur of the edifice opens upon you. Beneath you are rows of dead popes; on either side rise gigantic statues and monuments which genius has raised to their memory; and in front is the high altar of the Roman world, towering to the height of a three-story house, yet looking, beneath that sublime roof, of only ordinary size. You are near the reputed tombs of Peter and Paul, before which an hundred golden lamps burn day and night. And now the mighty dome opens upon you, like the vault of heaven itself. You begin to feel the wondrous magnificence of the edifice in which you stand, and you give way to the admiration and awe with which it inspires you. But next moment comes the saddening thought, that this pile, unrivalled as it is among temples made with hands, is literally useless. There is no worship in it. Here the sinner hears no tidings of a free salvation. This temple but enshrines a wafer, and serves once or twice a-year as the scene of an idle pageant on the part of a few old men. Nay, not only is it useless,--it is one of the strongholds which superstition has thrown up for perpetuating its sway over the world. You see these few poor people kneeling before these burning lamps. Their prayer is directed, not upwards through that dome to the heavens above it, but downwards into that vault where sleep, as they believe, the ashes of Peter and Paul. Rome has ever discouraged family worship, and taught men to pray in churches. Why? To increase the power of the Church and the priesthood. A country covered with households in which family worship is kept is like a country covered with fortresses;--it is impregnable. Every house is a citadel, and every family is a little army. Or mark yonder female who kneels before the perforated brazen lattice of yonder confessional-box. She is whispering her sins into the ear of a shaven priest, who receives them into his own black heart. It is but a reeking cess-pool, not a fountain of cleansing, to which she has come. Such are the uses of St Peter's,--a temple where the _Church_ is glorified at the expense of _religion_. Its high altar stops the way to the throne of grace, and its priest bars your access to a Redeemer's blood. And how was this temple built? Romanists speak of it as a monument of the piety of the faithful. But what is the fact? Did it not come out of the foul box of Tetzel the indulgence-monger? Every stone in it is representative of so much sin. With all its grandeur, it is but a stupendous monument of the follies and vices, the crimes and the superstition, of Christendom in the ages which preceded the Reformation. It has cost Rome dear. We do not allude to the twelve millions its erection is said to have cost, but to the mighty rent to which it gave rise in the Roman world. In the centre of the magnificent piazza of St Peter's stands an Egyptian obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, with the words graven upon it, "Christ reigns." Verily that is a great truth; and there are few spots where one feels its force so strongly as here. The successive paganisms of the world have been overruled as steps in the world's progress. Their corruptions have been based upon certain great truths, which they have written, as it were, upon the general mind of the world. The paganism which flourished where that column was hewn was an admission of _God's existence_, though it strove to divert attention from the truth on which it was founded, by the multitude of false gods which it invented. In like manner, the paganism that flourishes, or rather that is fading, where this column now stands, is an admission of the _necessity of a Mediator_; though it strives, as its predecessor did, to hide this glorious truth under a cloud of spurious mediators. But we see in this how every successive move on the part of idolatry has in reality been a retreat. Truth is gradually advancing its parallels against the citadel of error, and the world is toiling slowly upward to its great rest. Thus Christ shows that He reigns. From this silent prophet at the Pope's door, let us skirt along the Janiculum, to the gate of San Pancrazio. The site is a commanding one; and you look down into the basin in which Rome reposes, where many a cupola, and tower, and pillared façade, rises proudly out of the red roofs that cover the Campus Martius. If it is toward sunset, you can see the sheen of the villas which are sprinkled over the Sabine and Volscian hills, and are much struck with the fine amphitheatre which the mountains around the city form. What must have been the magnificence of ancient Rome, with her seven hills, and her glorious Campagna, with such a mountain-wall! But let us mark the old gate. It was here that the struggle betwixt the French and the Romans took place in 1849. The wall is here of brick,--very old, and of great breadth; and if struck with a cannon ball, it would crumble into dust by inches, but not fall in masses: hence the difficulty which the French found of breaching it. The towers of the gate are dismantled, and the top of the wall for some thirty yards is of new brick; but, with these exceptions, no other traces remain of the bloody conflict which restored the Pope to his throne. Of old, when Dagon fell, and the human head rolled in one direction and the fishy tail lay in another, "they took Dagon," we are told, and, fastening together the dissevered parts, "they set him in his place again." Idol worshippers are the same in all ages. Oftener than once has the Dagon of the Seven Hills fallen; the crown has rolled in one direction; the "palms of his hands" have been seen in another; and only the sacerdotal stump has remained; but the kings of Europe have taken Dagon, and, by the help of bayonets, have "set him in his place again;" and, having set up _him_ who could not set up himself, have worshipped him as the prop of their own power. What I had come hither to see especially was the graves of those who had fallen. On the left of the road, outside the gate, I found a grassy plateau, of some half-dozen acres, slightly furrowed, but bearing no such indications as I expected to find of such carnage as had here taken place. A Roman youth was sauntering on the spot; and, making up to him, I asked him to be so good as show me where they had buried the Frenchmen. "Come along," said he, "and I will show you the French." We crossed the plateau in the direction of a vineyard, which was enclosed with a stone-wall. The gate was open, and we entered. Stooping down, the youth laid hold on a whitish-looking nodule, of about the size of one's fist, and, holding it out to me, said, "that, Signor, is part of a Frenchman." I thought at first the lad was befooling me; but on examining the substance, I found that it was animal matter calcined, and had indeed formed part of a human being. The vineyard for acres and acres was strewn with similar masses. I now saw where the French were buried. The siege took place in the heat of summer; and every evening, when the battle was over, the dead were gathered in heaps, and burned, to prevent infection; and there are their remains to this day, manuring the vineyards around the walls. I wonder if the evening breezes, as they blow over the Janiculum, don't waft across the odour to the Vatican. Let us descend the hill, and re-enter the city. There is a class of buildings which you cannot fail to note, and which at first you take to be prisons. They are large, gloomy-looking houses, of from three to four stories, with massive doors, and windows closed with strong upright iron stanchions, crossed with horizontal bars, forming a network of iron of so close a texture, that scarce a pigeon could squeeze itself through. Ah, there, you say, the brigand or the Mazzinist groans! No; the place is a convent. It is the dwelling, not of crime, but of "heavenly meditation." The beings that live there are so perfectly happy, so glad to have escaped from the evil world outside, and so delighted with their paradise, that not one of them would leave it, though you should open these doors, and tear away these iron bars. So the priests say. Is it not strange, then, to confine with bolt and bar beings who intend anything but escape? and is it not, to say the least, a needless waste of iron, in a country where iron is so very scarce and so very dear? It would be worth while making the trial, if only for a summer's day, of opening these doors, and astonishing Rome with the great amount of happiness within it, of which, meanwhile, it has not the least idea. I have seen the dignitaries entering, but no glimpse could I obtain of the interior; for immediately behind the strong outer door is an inner one, and how many more I know not. Mr Seymour has told us of a nun, while he was in Rome, who found her way out through all these doors and bars; but, instead of fleeing back into her paradise, she rushed straight to the Tiber, and sought death beneath its floods. But although I never was privileged to see the interior of a Roman convent, I saw on one occasion the inmates of these paradises. During my sojourn in that city, it was announced that the nuns of a certain convent were to sing at Ave Maria, in a church adjoining the Piazza di Spagna; and I went thither to hear them. The choristers I did not see; they sat in a remote gallery, behind a screen. Their voices, which in clearness and brilliancy of tone surpassed the finest instruments, now rose into an overpowering melodious burst, and now died away into the sweetest, softest whispers. Within the low rail, their faces fronting the altar, and their backs turned on the audience, sat a row of spectres. Start not, reader; spectres they were,--fleshless, bloodless spectres. I saw them enter: they came like the sheeted dead; they wore long white dresses; their faces were pale and livid, like those that look out upon you from coffins; their forms were thin and wasted, and cast scarce a shadow as they passed between you and the beams of the sinking sun. Their eyes they lifted not, but kept them steadfastly fixed on the ground, over which they crept noiselessly as shadows creep. They sat mute and moveless, as if they had been statues of cold marble, all the while these brilliant notes were rolling above them. But I observed they were closely watched by the priests. There were several beside the altar; and whichever it was who happened for the moment to be disengaged, he turned round, and stood regarding the nuns with that stern anxious look with which one seeks to control a mastiff or a maniac. Were the priests afraid that, if withdrawn for a moment from the influence of their eye, a wail of woe would burst forth from these poor creatures? The last hallelujah had been pealed forth,--the shades of eve were thickening among the aisles,--when the priests gave the signal to the nuns. They rose, they moved; and, with eyes which were not lifted for a moment from the floor on which they trod, they disappeared by the same private door by which they had entered. I have seen gangs of galley slaves,--I have seen the husbands and sons of Rome led away manacled into banishment,--I have seen men standing beneath the gallows; but never did I see so woe-struck a group as this. Than have gone back with these nuns to their "paradise," as it is cruelly termed, I felt that I would rather have lain, where the lost nun is, in the Tiber. Before visiting Italy, I had read and studied the lectures of Father Perrone, Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the Collegio Romano, and had had frequent occasion to mention his name in my own humble pages; for I had nowhere found so clear a statement of the views held by the Church of Rome on the important doctrine of Original Sin, as that given in the Father's writings, and few had spoken so plainly as he had done on the wickedness of toleration. Being in Rome, I was naturally desirous of seeing the Father, and hearing him prelect. Accompanied by a young Roman student, whose acquaintance I had the happiness to make, but whose name I do not here mention, I repaired one day to the Collegio Romano,--a fine quadrangular building; and, after visiting its library, in whose "dark unfathomed caves" lies full many a monkish gem, I passed to the class-room of Professor Perrone. It was a lofty hall, benched after the manner of our own class-rooms, and hung round with portraits of the Professor's predecessors in office,--at least I took them for such. A tall pulpit rose on the end wall, with a crucifix beside it. The students were assembling, and mustered to the number of about an hundred. They were raw-boned, seedy-looking lads, of from seventeen to twenty-two. They all wore gowns, the majority being black, but some few red. Had I been a rich man, and disposed to signalize my visit to the Collegio Romano by some appropriate gift, I would have presented each of its students with a bar of soap, with directions for its use. In a few minutes the Professor entered, wearing the little round cap of the Jesuits. With that quiet stealthy step (an unconscious struggle to pass from matter into spirit, and assume invisibility) which is inseparable from the order, Father Perrone walked up to the pulpit stairs, which, after doffing his cap, and muttering a short prayer before the crucifix, he ascended, and took his place. It may interest those who are familiar with his writings, to know that Father Perrone is a man of middle size, rather inclined to obesity, with a calm, pleasant, thoughtful face, which becomes lighted up, as he proceeds, with true Italian vivacity. His lecture for the day was on the Evidences; and of course it was not the heretics, but the infidels, whom he combated throughout. In the number of his students was a young Protestant American, whom I first met in the house of the Rev. Mr Hastings, the American chaplain, where I usually passed my Sabbath evenings. This young man had chalked out for himself the most extraordinary theological course I ever heard of. He had first of all gone through a full curriculum in one of the old orthodox halls of the United States; he had then passed into Germany, where he had taken a course of neology and philosophy; and now he had come to Rome, where he intended to finish off with a course of Romanism. I ventured to engage him in a conversation on what he had learned in Germany; but we had not gone far till both found that we had lost ourselves in a dark mist; and we were glad to lay hold on an ordinary topic, as a clue back to the daylight. The young divine purposed returning to his native land, and spending his days as a Presbyterian pastor. Will the reader go back with me to the point where we began our excursion through Rome,--the Flaminian Gate? I invite the reader's special attention to a building on the right. It stands a few paces outside the gate. The building possesses no architectural attractions, but it is illustrative of a great principle. The first floor is occupied as a granary; the second floor is occupied as a granary; the third floor,--how is it occupied,--the attic story? Why, it is the English Protestant Church! Here is the toleration which the Pope grants us in Rome. There are from six hundred to a thousand English subjects resident in Rome every winter; but they dare not meet within the walls to open the Bible, or to worship God as his Word enjoins. They must go out without the gate, as if they were evil-doers; they must climb the stairs of this granary, as if they meditated some deed of darkness; and only when they have got into this garret are they at liberty to worship God. The Pope comes, not in person, but in his cardinals and priests, to Britain; and he claims the right of building his mass-houses, and of celebrating his worship, in every town and village of our empire. We permit him to do so; for we will fight this great battle with the weapons of toleration. We disdain to stain our hands or tarnish our cause by any other: these we leave to our opponents. But when we go to Rome, and offer to buy with our money a spot of ground on which to erect a house for the worship of God, we are told that we can have--no, not a foot's-breadth. Why, I say, the gospel had more toleration in Pagan Rome, aye, even when Nero was emperor, than it has in Papal Rome under Pio Nono. When Christianity entered Rome in the person of the Apostle Paul, did the tyrant of the Palatine strike her dumb? By no means. For the space of two years, her still small voice ceased not to be heard at the foot of the Capitol. "And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house [in Rome], and received all that came in unto him; preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him." Let any minister or missionary attempt to do so now, and what would be his fate? and what the fate of any Roman who might dare to visit him? Instant banishment to the one,--instant imprisonment to the other. The Pope has set up the symbol of intolerance and persecution at his gate. He has written over the portals of Rome, as Dante over the gates of hell, "All ye who enter here, abandon"--God. I do not say that the place is incommodious internally. The stigma lies in the proscription put upon Protestant worship. It is held to be an abomination so foul, that it cannot be tolerated within the walls of Rome. And the same spirit which banishes the worship to a garret, would banish the worshipper to a prison, or condemn him to a stake, if it dared. The same principle that makes Rome lock her earthly gates against the Protestant now, makes her lock her heavenly gates against him eternally. There are, however, annoyances of a palpable and somewhat ludicrous kind attending this expulsion of the Protestant worship beyond the walls. The granary to which I have referred adjoins the cattle and pig market. In Rome, although it is a mortal sin to eat the smallest piece of flesh on a Friday, it is no sin at all to buy and sell swine's flesh on a Sabbath. Accordingly, the pig-market is held on Sabbath; and it is customary to drive the animals into the back courts of the English meeting-house before carrying them to market. So I was informed, when at Rome, by a member of the English congregation. The uproar created by the animals is at times so great as to disturb the worshippers in the attic above, who have been under the necessity of putting their hands into their pockets, and buying food for the swine, in order to keep them quiet during the hours of divine service. Thus the English at Rome are able to conduct their worship with some degree of decorum only when both cardinals and swine are propitious. Should either be out of humour,--a thing conceivable to happen to the most obese cardinal and the sweetest-tempered pig,--the English have but little chance of quiet. Nor is that the worst of it. I read not long since in the public journals, a letter from a Romish dignitary,--Dr Cahill, if I mistake not,--who, with an immense amount of bravery, stated that there was no Roman Catholic country in the world where full toleration was not enjoyed; and that, as regarded Rome, any Roman might change his religion to-morrow with perfect impunity. He might adopt Protestantism or Quakerism, or any other ism he pleased, provided he could show that he was not acting under the compulsion of a bribe. But how stands the fact? I passed three Sabbaths in Rome; I worshipped each Sabbath in the English Protestant chapel; and what did I see at the door of that chapel? I saw two gendarmes, with a priest beside them to give them instructions. And why were they there? They were there to observe all who went in and out at that chapel; and provided a Roman had dared to climb these stairs, and worship with the English congregation, the gendarmes would have seized him by the collar, and dragged him to the Inquisition. So much for the liberty the poor Romans enjoy to change their religion. The writer of that letter with the same truth might have told the people of England that there is no such city as Rome in all the world. I was much taken with the ministrations of the Rev. Francis B. Woodward, the resident chaplain, on hearing him for the first time. He looked like one whose heart was in his work, and I thought him evangelical, so far as the absence of all reference to what Luther has termed "the article of a standing or a falling Church" allowed me to form an opinion. But next Sabbath my confidence was sorely shaken. Mr Woodward was proceeding in a rich and sweetly pious discourse on the necessity of seeking and cultivating the gifts of the Spirit, and of cherishing the hope of glory, when, towards the middle of his sermon, the evangelical thread suddenly snapped. "How are we," abruptly asked the preacher, "to become the sons of God?" I answer, by baptism. By baptism we are made children of God and heirs of heaven. But should we fall from that happy state, how are we to recover it? I answer, by penance. And then he instantly fell back again into his former pious strain. I started as if struck, and looked round to see how the audience were taking it. But I could discover no sign that they felt the real significancy of the words they had just heard. It seemed to me that the English chaplain was outside the gate for the purpose of showing men in at it; and were I the Pope, instead of incurring the scandal of banishing him beyond the walls, I would assign him one of the best of the many hundred empty churches in Rome. The Rev. Mr Hastings, the American chaplain, conducted worship in the dining-room of Mr Cass, the American Consul, to a little congregation of some thirty persons. He was a good man, and a sound Protestant, but lacked the peculiar qualities for such a sphere. He has since passed from Rome and the earth, and joined, I doubt not, albeit disowned as a heretic in the city in which he laboured, "the General Assembly and Church of the first-born" on high. I have already mentioned that the priests boast that the Pope could say mass in a different church every day of the year. Nevertheless there is next to no preaching in Rome. In Italy they convert men, not by preaching sermons, but by giving them wafers to swallow,--not by conveying truth into the mind, but by lodging a little dough in the stomach. Hence many of their churches stand on hill-tops, or in the midst of swamps, where not a house is in sight. During my sojourn of three weeks, I heard but two sermons by Roman preachers. I was sauntering in the Forum one day, when, observing a little stream of paupers--(how could such go to the convents to beg if they did not go to sermon?)--flowing into the church of San Lorenzo, I joined in the procession, and entered along with them. At the door was a tin-box for receiving contributions for erecting a temple in London, where "their poor destitute fellow-countrymen might hear the true gospel." Were these "destitute fellow-countrymen" in Rome, the Pope would find accommodation for them in some one of his dungeons; but with the English Channel between him and them, he builds with paternal care a church for their use. We doubt not the exiles will duly appreciate his kindness. Every twentieth person or so dropped a little coin into the box as he passed in. A knot of some one or two hundreds was gathered round a wooden stage, on which a priest was declaiming with an exuberance of vehement gesture. On the right and left of him stood two hideous figures, holding candles and crucifixes, and enveloped from head to foot in sackcloth. They watched the audience through two holes in their masks; and I thought I could see a cowering in that portion of the crowd towards which the muffled figures chanced for the time to be turned. I felt a chilly terror creeping over me as the masks turned their great goggle eyes upon me; and accordingly withdrew. The regular weekly sermon in Rome is that preached every Sabbath afternoon in the church of the Jesuits. This church is resplendent beyond all others in the Eternal City, in marbles and precious stones, frescoes and paintings. Here, too, in magnificent tombs, sleep St Ignatius, the founder of the order, and Cardinal Bellarmin, one of the "Church's" mightiest champions. Its ample roof might cover an assembly of I know not how many thousands. About half-way down the vast floor, on the side wall, stood the pulpit; and before it were set some scores of forms for the accommodation of the audience, which might amount to from four hundred to six hundred, chiefly elderly persons. At three o'clock the preacher entered the pulpit, and, having offered a short prayer in silence, he replaced on his head his little round cap, and flung himself into his theme. That theme was one then and still very popular (I mean with the preachers,--for the people take not the slightest interest in these matters) at Rome,--the Immaculate Conception. I can give only the briefest outline of the discourse; and I daresay that is all my readers will care for. In proof of the immunity of Mary from original sin, the preacher quoted all that St Jerome, and St Augustine, and a dozen fathers besides, had said on the point, with the air of a man who deemed these quotations quite conclusive. Had they related to the theory of eclipses, or been snatches from some old pagan poet in praise of Juno, the audience would have been equally well pleased with them. I looked when the father would favour his audience with a few proofs from St Matthew and St Luke; but his time did not permit him to go so far back. He next appealed to the miracles which the Virgin Mary had wrought. I expected much new information here, as my memory did not furnish me with any well-accredited ones; but I was somewhat disappointed when the preacher dismissed this branch of his subject with the remark, that these miracles were so well known, that he need not specify them. Having established his proposition first from tradition, and next from miracles, the preacher wound up by declaring that the Immaculate Conception was a doctrine which all good Catholics believed, and which no one doubted save the children of the devil and the slaves of hell. The sermon seemed as if it had been made to answer exactly the poet's description:-- "And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw, Daily devours apace, and nothing sed; But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." When this edifying sermon was ended, "Ave Maria" began. A train of white-robed priests entered, and gathered in a cloud round the high altar. The organ sent forth its thunder; the flashing censers shot upwards to the roof, and, as they rose and fell, emitted fragrant wreaths of incense. The crowd poured in, and swelled the assembly to some thousands; and when the priests began to chant, the multitude which now covered the vast floor dropped on their knees, and joined in the hymn to the Virgin. This service, of all I witnessed in Rome, was the only one that partook in the slightest degree of the sublime. I must except one other, celebrated in an upper chamber, and _truly_ sublime. It was my privilege to pass my first Sabbath in Rome in the society of the Rev. John Bonar and that of his family, and at night we met in Mr Bonar's room in the hotel, and had family worship. I well remember that Mr Bonar read on this occasion the last chapter of that epistle which Paul "sent by Phebe, servant of the Church at Cenchrea," to the saints at Rome. The disciples to whom the Apostle in that letter sends greetings had lived in this very city; their dust still slept in its soil; and were they to come back, I felt that, if I were a real Christian, we would recognise each other as dear brethren, and would join together in the same prayer; and as their names were read out, I was thrilled and melted, as if they had been the names of beloved and venerated friends but newly dead:--"Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks; unto whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Likewise _greet_ the church that is in their house. Salute my well-beloved Epenetus, who is the first fruits of Achaia unto Christ. Greet Mary, who bestowed much labour on us. Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me. Greet Amplias, my beloved in the Lord. Salute Urbane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys my beloved. Salute Apelles, approved in Christ. Salute them which are of Aristobulus' _household_. Salute Herodion my kinsman. Greet them that be of the _household_ of Narcissus, which are in the Lord. Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the Lord. Salute the beloved Persis, which laboured much in the Lord. Salute Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine. Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, and the brethren which are with them. Salute Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints which are with them." Uppermost in my mind, in all my wanderings in and about Rome, was the glowing fact that here Paul had been, and here he had left his ineffaceable traces. I touched, as it were, scriptural times and apostolic men. Had he not often climbed this Capitol? Had not his feet pressed, times without number, this lava-paved road through the Forum? These Volscian and Sabine mountains, so lovely in the Italian sunlight, had often had his eye rested upon them! I began to love the soil for his sake, and felt that the presence of this one holy man had done more to hallow it than all that the long race of emperors and popes had done to desecrate it. CHAPTER XXIV. INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE. The Church the Destroyer of the Country--The Pontifical Government just the Papacy in Action--That Government makes Men _Beggars_, _Slaves_, _Barbarians_--Influence of Pontifical Government on Trade--Iron--Great Agent of Civilization--Almost no Iron in Papal States--The Church has forbidden it--Prohibitive Duties on Iron--Machinery likewise prohibited--Antonelli's Extraordinary Note--Paucity of Iron-Workmen and Mechanics in the Papal States--Barbarous Aspect of the Country--Roman Ploughs--Roman Carts--How Grain is there Winnowed--Husbandry of Italy--Its Cabins--Its Ragged Population--Its Farms--Ruin of its Commerce--Isolation of Rome--Reasons why--Proposed Railway from Civita Vecchia to Ancona--Frustrated by the Government--Wretched Conveyance of Merchandise--Pope's Steam Navy--Papal Custom-houses--Bribery--Instances. It is time to concentrate my observations, and to make their light converge around that evil system that sits enthroned in this old city. Of all the great ruins in Italy, the greatest by far is the Italians themselves. The ruin of the Italians I unhesitatingly lay at the door of the Church;--she is the nation's destroyer. When I first saw the Laocoon in the Vatican, I felt that I saw the symbol of the country;--there was Italy writhing in the folds of the great Cobra di Capella, the Papacy. I cannot here go into the ceremonies practised at Rome, and which present so faithful a copy, both in their forms and in their spirit, of the pagan idolatry. Nor can I speak of the innumerable idols of gold and silver, wood and stone, with which their churches are crowded, and before which you may see votaries praying, and priests burning incense, all day long. Nor can I speak of the endless round of fêtes and festivals which fill up the entire year, and by which the priests seek to dazzle, and, by dazzling, to delude and enthral, the Romans. Nor can I detain my readers with tales and wonders of Madonnas which have winked, and of the blind and halt which have been cured, which knaves invent and simpletons believe. Nor can I detail the innumerable frauds for fleecing the Romans;--money for indulgences,--money for the souls in purgatory,--money for eating flesh on Friday,--money for votive offerings to the saints. The church of the Jesuits is supposed to be worth a million sterling, in the shape of marbles, paintings, and statuary; and in this way the capital of the country is locked up, while not a penny can be had for making roads or repairing bridges, or promoting trade and agriculture. I cannot enter into these matters: I must confine my attention to one subject,--THE PONTIFICAL GOVERNMENT. When I speak of the Pontifical Government, I just mean the Papacy. The working of the Papal Government is simply the working of the Papacy; for what is that Government, but just the principles of the Papacy put into judicial gear, and employed to govern mankind? It is the Church that governs the Papal States; and as she governs these States, so would she govern all the earth, would we let her. The Pontifical Government is therefore the fairest illustration that can be adduced of the practical tendency and influence of the system. I now arraign the system in the Government. I am prepared to maintain, both on general principles, and on facts that came under my own observation while in Rome, that the Pontifical Government is the most flagitiously unjust, the most inexorably cruel, the most essentially tyrannical Government, that ever existed under the sun. It is the necessary, the unchangeable, the eternal enemy of liberty. I say, looking at the essential principles of the Papacy, that it is a system claiming infallibility, and so laying reason and conscience under interdict,--that it is a system claiming to govern the world, not _by_ God, but _as_ God,--that it is a system claiming supreme authority in all things spiritual, and claiming the same supreme authority, though indirectly, in all things temporal,--that it sets no limits to its jurisdiction, but, on the contrary, makes that jurisdiction to range indiscriminately over heaven, earth, and hell. Looking at these principles, which no Papist can deny to be the fundamental and vital elements of his system, I maintain that, if there be any one thing more than another ascertained and indisputable within the compass of man's knowledge, it is this, that the domination of a system like the Papacy is utterly incompatible with the enjoyment of a single particle of liberty on the part of any human being. And I now proceed to show, that the conclusion to which one would come, reasoning from the essential principles of this system, is just the conclusion at which he would arrive by observing the workings of this system, as exhibited at this day in Italy. I shall arrange the facts I have to state under three heads:--_First_, Those that relate to the TRADE of the Roman States: _second_, Those that relate to the administration of JUSTICE: and _third_, Those that relate to EDUCATION and KNOWLEDGE. I shall show that the Pontifical Government is so conducted as regards Trade, that it can have no other effect than to make the Romans _beggars_. I shall show, in the second place, that the Pontifical Government is so conducted as regards Justice, that it can have no other effect than to make the Romans _slaves_. And I shall show, in the third place, that the Pontifical Government is so conducted as regards Education, that it can have no other effect than to make the Romans _barbarians_. This is the threefold result that Government is fitted to work out: this is the threefold result it has wrought out. It has made the Romans beggars,--it has made the Romans slaves,--it has made the Romans barbarians. Observe, I do not touch the religious part of the question. I do not enter on any discussion respecting Purgatory, or Transubstantiation, or the worship of the Virgin. I look simply at the bearings of that system upon man's temporal interests; and I maintain that, though man had no hereafter to provide for, and no soul to be saved, he is bound by every consideration to resist a system so destructive to the whole of his interests and happiness in time. I come now to trace the workings of the Papacy on the Trade of the Papal States. But here I am met, on the threshold of my subject, by this difficulty, that I am to speak of what scarce exists; for so effectually has the Pontifical Government developed its influence in this direction, that it has all but annihilated trade in the Papal States. If you except the manufacture of cameos, Roman mosaics, a little painting and statuary, there is really no more trade in the country than is absolutely necessary to keep the people from starvation. The trade and industry of the Roman States are crushed to death under a load of monopolies and restrictive tariffs, invented by infallible wisdom for protecting, but, as it seems to our merely fallible wisdom, for sacrificing, the industry of the country. Let us take as our first instance the Iron Trade. We all know the importance of iron as regards civilization. Civilization may be said to have commenced with iron,--to have extended over the earth with iron; and so closely connected are the two, that where iron is not, there you can scarce imagine civilization to be. It is by iron in the form of the plough that man subjugates the soil; and it is by iron in the form of the sword that he subjugates kingdoms. What would our country be without its iron,--without its railroads, its steam-ships, its steam-looms, its cutlery, its domestic utensils? Almost all the comforts and conveniences of civilized life are obtained by iron. You may imagine, then, the condition of the Papal States, when I state that iron is all but unknown in them. It is about as rare and as dear as the gold of Uphaz. And why is it so? There is abundance of iron in our country; water-carriage is anything but expensive; and the iron manufacturers of Britain would be delighted to find so good a market as Italy for their produce. Why, then, is iron not imported into that country? For this simple reason, that the Church has forbidden its introduction. Strange, that it should forbid so useful a metal where it is so much needed. Yet the fact is, that the Pope has placed its importation under an as stringent prohibition almost as the importation of heresy: perhaps he smells heresy and civilization coming in the wake of iron. The duty on the introduction of bar-iron is two baiocchi la libbra, equivalent to fifty dollars, or £12 10s., per ton; which is about twice the price of bar-iron in this country. This duty is prohibitive of course. The little iron which the Romans possess they import mostly from Britain, in the form of pig-iron; and the absurdity of importing it in this form appears from the fact that there is no coal in the States to smelt it,--at least none has as yet been discovered: wood-char is used in this process. When the pig-iron is wrought up into bar-iron, it is sold at the incredible price of thirty-eight Roman scudi the thousand pounds, which is equivalent, in English money, to £23 15s. per ton, or four times its price in Britain. The want of the steam-engine vastly augments the cost of its manufacture. There is a small iron-work at Terni, eighty miles from Rome, which is set down there for the advantage of water-power, which is employed to drive the works. The whole raw material has to be carted from Rome, and, when wrought up, carted back again, adding enormously to the expense. There is another at Tivoli, also moved by water-power. The whole raw material has, too, to be carted from Rome, and the manufactured article carted back, causing an outlay which would soon more than cover the expense of steam-engine and fuel. At Terni some sixty persons are employed, including boys and men. The manager is a Frenchman, and most of the workmen are Frenchmen, with wages averaging from forty to fifty baiocchi; labourers at the works have from twenty-five to thirty baiocchi per day,--from a shilling to fifteenpence. During the reign of Gregory XVI. machinery was admitted into the Papal States at a nominal duty, or one baiocchi the hundred Roman pounds. It is not in a day that a country like Italy can be taught the advantage of mechanical power. The Romans, like every primitive people, are apt to cleave to the rude, unhandy modes which they and their fathers have practised, and to view with suspicion and dislike inventions which are new and strange. But they were beginning to see the superiority of machinery, and to avail themselves of its use. A large number of hydraulic presses, printing presses, one or two steam-engines, a few threshing-mills, and other agricultural implements, were introduced under this nominal duty; and, had a little longer time been allowed, the country would have begun to assume somewhat of a civilized look. But Gregory died; and, as if to show the utter hopelessness of anything like progress on the part of the Pontifical Government, it was the present Pope who took the retrograde step of restoring the law shutting out machines. Cardinal Tosti, the Treasurer to Gregory's Government, was succeeded by his Excellenza Monsignor (now Cardinal) Antonelli, one of the earliest official acts of whom was the appending a note to the tariff on machinery, which subjected machines, all and sundry, to the duty imposed in the tariff on their component parts. For example, a machine composed of iron, brass, steel, and wood, according to Antonelli's note, would have to pay separate duty on each of the materials composing it. The way in which the thing was done is a fine sample of the spirit and style of papal legislation, and shows how the same subtle but perverted ingenuity, the same specious but hypocritical pretexts, with which the theological part of the system abounds, are extended also to its political and civil managements. Antonelli did not rescind the tariff; he but appended a note, the quiet but sure effect of which was to render it null. He did not tax machines as a whole; they were still free, viewed in their corporate capacity: he but taxed their individual parts. This ingenious legislator, by a saving clause, exempted from the operation of his note _machines of new invention_, which, after being proved to be such, were to be admitted at the nominal duty! What machines would not be of new invention in the Roman States, where there is absolutely no machinery, saving--with all reverence for the apostolic chamber--the guillotine? But farther, Antonelli, to show at once his ingenuity and philanthropy, enacted that machines which had never before been introduced into the States should be admitted at the nominal duty. Mark the extent of the boon herein conferred on Italy. We shall suppose that one of each of the industrial and agricultural machines in use in Britain is admitted into the Roman States under this law. It is admitted duty-free. Well, but the second plough, or the second loom, or the second steam-engine, arrives. It must pay a prohibitive duty. It is not a new machine. You can make as many as you please from the one already introduced, says Antonelli. But who is to make them? There are no mechanics deserving the name in Rome; who, by the way, are the very people Antonelli said he meant to benefit. But, apart from the want of mechanical skill, there is the dearth of the raw material; for maleable iron was selling in Rome at upwards of £21 per ton, at a time when the cost of bar-iron in this country was only from £6 to £7 per ton. Such insane legislation on the part of the sacerdotal Government could not be committed through ignorance or stupidity. There must be some strong reason that does not appear at first sight for this wholesale sacrifice of the interests of the country. We shall speak of this anon: meanwhile we pursue our statement. Antonelli supported his note,--that note which ratified the banishment of the arts from Italy, and gave barbarism an eternal infeftment in the soil,--by affirming that it was passed in order to encourage l'industria dello Stato; which is as if one should say that he had cut his neighbour's throat to protect his life; for certainly Antonelli's note cut the throat of industry. Well, one would think, seeing this legislation was meant to protect the industry of the State and the interests of the iron-workmen, that these iron-workmen must be a large body. How many iron-workmen are there in the Papal States? An hundred thousand? One thousand? There are not more in all than one hundred and fifty! And for these one hundred and fifty iron-workmen (to which we may add the seventy cardinals, the most of whom are speculators in iron), the rest of the community is put beyond the pale of civilization, the ordinary arts and utensils are proscribed, improvement is at a stand-still, and the country is doomed to remain from age to age in barbarism. And what is the aspect of the country? It is decidedly that of a barbarous land. Everything has an old-world look, as if it belonged to the era of the Flood. Iron being so enormously dear, its use is dispensed with wherever it is possible. Almost all implements of agriculture, of carriage, almost all domestic utensils, and many tools of trade, are made of wood. In consequence, they do very little work; and that little but indifferently well. Nothing could be more primitive than the _plough_ of the Romans. It consists of a single stick or lever, fixed to a block having the form of a sock or coulter, with a projection behind, on which the ploughman puts his foot, and assists the bullocks over a difficulty. The work done by this implement we would not call ploughing: it simply scratches the surface to the depth of some three or four inches, with which the poor husbandman is content. The soil is in general light, but it might be otherwise tilled; and, were it so, would yield far other harvests than those now known in Italy. Their _carts_, too, are of the rudest construction, and may be regarded as ingenious models of the form which should combine the largest bulk with the least possible use. They have high wheels, and as wide-set as those in our country, with nothing to fill the dreary space between but an uncouth-looking nut-shell of a box. The infallible Government of the Pope has not judged it beneath it to legislate in reference to them. They must be made of a certain prescribed capacity, and stamped for the purchase and sale of lime and pozzolano. In this happy country, all things, from the Immaculate Conception down to the pozzolano cart, are cared for by the sacerdotal Government. The open-bodied carts have bars (the length and distance apart of which are also regulated by the pontiff) placed on the trams, and are licensed for the sale of green wood, which must be sold at from three and a half to four dollars a load. The barozza is another open-bodied cart, with bars placed around the trams, and contains about twelve sacks of wood-char, which is sold at from eight to ten dollars. This is the fuel of the country, and, when kindled, does well enough for cooking. It gives considerable heat and but little smoke, but lacks the cheerfulness and comfort of an English fire-side, which is unknown in Rome. Every agricultural process is conducted in the same rude and slovenly way. And how can it be otherwise, when the Church, for reasons best known to itself, denies the people the use of the indispensable instruments? It solemnly legislates that one British plough may be imported; and graciously permits its subjects, in a land where there are no mechanics, to make as many additional ploughs as they need. Is it not peculiarly modest in these men, who show so little wisdom in temporal matters, to ask the entire world to surrender its belief to them in things spiritual and divine? Every one knows how we winnow corn in Britain. How do they conduct that process at Rome? A cart-load of grain is poured out on the barn-floor; some dozen or score of women squat down around it, and with the hand separate the chaff from the wheat, pickle by pickle. In this way a score of women may do in a week what a farmer in our country could do easily in a couple of hours. An effort was made to persuade the predecessor of the present Pontiff, Gregory XVI., to sanction the admission into Rome of a winnowing-machine. Its mode of working and uses were explained to the Pontiff. Gregory shook his head; for Infallibility indicates its doubts at times, just as mortals do, by a shake of the head. It was a dangerous thing to introduce into Rome, said the infallible Gregory. Perhaps it was; for if the Romans had begun to winnow grain, they might have learned to winnow other things besides grain. The husbandry of Italy, as a system, is in a most backward state. Its cultivation is the cultivation of Ireland. And yet Italy is excelled by few countries on earth, perhaps by none, in point of its external defences, and its inexhaustible internal resources; which, however, under its present Government, are utterly wasted. On the north it is defended by the wall of the Alps, and on all its other sides by the ocean, whose bays offer boundless facilities for commerce. The plains of Lombardy are eternally covered with flowers and fruit. The valleys of Tuscany still boast the olive, the orange, and the vine. The wide waste of the Campagna di Roma is of the richest soil, and, spread out beneath the warm sun, might mingle on its surface the fruits of the torrid with those of the temperate zones. Instead of this, Italy presents to the traveller's eye a deplorable spectacle of wretched cabins, untilled fields, and a population oppressed by sloth and covered with rags. The towns are filled mostly with idlers and beggars. With all my inquiries, I could never get a clear idea of how they live. The alms-houses are numerous; for when a Government puts down trade, it must build hospitals and poor's-houses, or see its subjects die of starvation. In Rome, for example, besides the convents, where a number of poor people get a meal a day,--a sufficiently meagre one,--there is the government _Beneficenza_, which the more intelligent part account a great curse. Some fifteen hundred or two thousand persons, many of them able-bodied men, receive fifteen baiocchi,--sevenpence half-penny,--per day, in return for which they pouter about with barrows, removing earth from the old ruins, or cleaning the streets, which are none the cleaner, or picking grass in the square of the Vatican. Many deplorable tales are told in Rome of these people, and of the dire sacrifice made of the female portion of their families. But the grand resource is beggary, especially from foreigners; and if a beggar earn a penny a day, he will make a shift to live. He will purchase half a pound of excellent macaroni with the one baiocchi, and a few apples or grapes with the other; and thus he is provided for for the day. The inhabitants of these countries do not eat so substantially as we do. Should he earn nothing, he has it in his choice to steal or starve. This is the prolific source of brigandage and vagabondism. In the country, the peasants (and there almost all are peasants) live by cultivating a small patch of land. The farms, like those in Ireland, are mere crofts. The proprietor, who lives in the city, provides not only the land, but the implements and cattle also, and in return receives a stipulated portion of the fruits. His share is often as high as a half, never lower than a fourth. The farmer is a tenant-at-will most commonly, but removals are rare; and sometimes, as in Ireland, the same lands remain in the occupation of the same families for generations. Their conical little hills, with their peasant villages a-top, are curiously ribbed with a particoloured vegetation, each family cultivating their couple of acres after their own fashion; while the plain is not unfrequently abandoned to marshes, or ruins, or wild herbage. To dig drains, to clear out the substructions, to re-open the ancient water-courses, or to follow any improved system of cropping, is far beyond the enterprise of the poor farmer. He has neither skill, nor capital, nor savings. If nature takes the matter into her own hand, well; if not, one bad harvest irretrievably lands him in famine. Thus, with a soil and climate not excelled perhaps in the world, the husbandman drags out his life in poverty, and is often on the very brink of starvation. Whatever beauty and fertility that land still retains, it owes to nature, not to man. Indeed, it is now only the skeleton of Italy that exists, with here and there patches of its former covering,--nooks of exquisite beauty, which strike one the more from the desolation that surrounds them. But its cultivated portions are every year diminishing. Its woods and olives are fast disappearing; and by and by the very beasts of the field will be compelled to leave it, and the King of the Seven Hills, could we conceive of his remaining behind, will be left to reign in undisputed and unenvied supremacy over the storks and frogs, and other animals, that breed and swarm in its marshes. The commerce of Italy, too, is extinct. How can it be otherwise? Under their terrible stagnation and death of mind, the Italians produce nothing for export. In that country there are no factories, no mining operations, no ship-building, no public works, no printing presses, no tools of trade. In short, they create nothing but a few articles of vertu; and even in those arts in which alone their genius is allowed to exert itself, foreigners excel them. The best sculptors and painters at Rome are Englishmen. And as regards their soil, which might send its wheat, and wine, and olives, all delicious naturally, to every part of the world, its harvests are now able but to feed the few men who live in the country. As to imports, both raw and manufactured, which the Romans need so much, we have seen how the sacerdotal Government takes effectual means to prevent these reaching the population. The Pontiff has enclosed his territory with a triple wall of protective duties and monopolies, to keep out the foreign merchant; and thus not only are the Romans forbidden to labour for themselves, but they are prevented profiting by the labour of others. There is a monopoly of sugar-refining, a monopoly of salt-making, and, in short, of every thing which the Romans most need. These monopolies are held by the favourites of the Government; and though generally the houses that hold them are either unwilling or unable to make more than a tithe of what the Romans would require, no other establishment can produce these articles, and they cannot be imported but at a ruinous duty. We are reminded of another grievance under which the Romans groan. The few articles that are landed on their coast have to encounter tedious and almost insuperable delays before they can find their way to the capital. This is owing to the wretched state of the communication, which is kept purposely wretched in order to isolate Rome and the Romans from the rest of the world. That Church likes to sit apart and keep intact her venerable prestige, which would be apt to be contemned were it looked at close at hand. She dreads, too, to let her people come in contact with the population of other States. A few thousands of English aristocracy she can afford to admit annually within her territory. Their money she needs, and their indifference gives her no uneasiness. But to have the mass of a free people circulating through her capital would be a death-blow to her influence. She deems it, then, a wise policy, indeed a necessary safeguard, to make the access such as only money and time can overcome, though at the sacrifice of the trade and comforts of the people. Repeated attempts have been made to connect Rome with the rest of Europe; but hitherto, through the singularly adroit management of the Government, all such attempts have been fruitless. In 1851 the long talked of concession for railways in the Roman States was obtained by Count Montalembert. The railways were to be constructed by foreign money and foreign agency, of course. A line from Rome to Ancona, and another from Rome to Civita Vecchia, were talked of, which would have put the Eternal City in immediate communication with the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. _Che belle cose!_ the Italians might be heard uttering wherever grouped. It looked too well; an extravagant guarantee was offered to the Intraprendenti (contractors) by the Roman Government. The Parisian Count was to procure capitalists for the undertaking. The general opinion at the time was, that the Government was insincere in their extravagant guarantee; and they stipulated with the Count a condition as to time, calculated, as was supposed, to frustrate the undertaking. In this, however, the Government was outwitted; for capitalists were found within the prescribed time, engineers appointed, and contracts entered into. The iron-works of Terni and Tivoli amalgamated, in the hope of doing an extensive business by manufacturing the rails, &c.; and announced in their prospectus the intention of working the La Tolfa ironstone near Civita Vecchia. Many were induced to sink money in this amalgamated concern, and there it fruitlessly remains. The affray at Ferrara put the scutch upon the mighty railway scheme. Were the Government in earnest on the subject of railways, sufficient capital might easily be raised to construct a line between Rome and Civita Vecchia, which would be of incalculable benefit to Rome. Vessels of heavy burden can discharge at the port of Civita Vecchia. Merchandise could thence be transmitted by rail to Rome, where its arrival could be calculated on to half an hour; and of what immense advantage would this be, contrasted with the present maritime conveyance, which keeps merchants in expectation of goods for days and weeks, and not unfrequently for a whole month, with bills of lading in hand from Marseilles, Genoa, Leghorn, Naples, and Sicily, by vessels carrying from fifty to a hundred and fifty tons! The entrance to the mouth of the Tiber at Fuma-Cina is both difficult and dangerous; so much so, that sailing masters will not hazard the attempt if the weather is in the least degree stormy. They are obliged frequently to return to Civita Vecchia or Leghorn, until the weather will permit their entering the river at Fuma-Cina. There their vessels require to be lightened, or partly discharged into barges, there not being sufficient water in the Tiber to allow them to ascend to Rome; the average depth of water throughout the year being from four to five feet, which is only sufficient for the Pope's navy force, employed in tugging barges from Fuma-Cina to Rome. It is not the least important part of the Roman merchants' business to know that their long-expected goods have entered the river. This is ascertained at the custom-house at Ripa Grande, where the intelligence is chronicled every evening, on return of the navy force. That navy consists of three small steamers, thirty horse power, and a dredging boat. Two of the steamers are kept for the traffic between Fuma-Cina and the custom-house at Rome. The other is employed on the upper part of the river, starting from the Ripetta in Rome for the Sabina country, going up about forty miles, and returning with wine, oil, Indian corn, and wood for fuel, green and charred. The dredging boat is scarcely ever used. The constantly filthy state of the river causes so much deposit, that the machine is unable to overcome it. There are custom-houses, of course, on all the frontiers. A very respectable amount of bribery is done in these places: indeed, I never could see that much business of any other sort was transacted in them. I have already stated, that the first thing I was compelled to do on entering Rome was to give a bribe, in order to escape from the old temple of Antoninus, in which I unexpectedly found myself locked up. I met an intelligent Scotchman in Rome, who had newly returned from Naples, and who had to endure a half-day's detention at Terra Cina because he refused to pay the ransom of six scudi put upon his trunks, and insisted on their being searched. Corruption pervades all classes of functionaries. In Rome itself there are two custom-houses; one for merchandise imported by sea, and the other for overland goods. The hours for business are from nine o'clock till twelve o'clock. Declarations for relieving goods must be made betwixt nine and eleven, the other hour being appropriated to winding up the business of the preceding two hours. Almost everything which the country produces, whether for man or for beast, on entering the city has to pay duty at the gate. This is termed _Dazio di Consumo_. This department of the revenue is farmed out to an officer, whose servants are stationed at the gates for the purpose of uplifting the duty; and there, as in all the other Government custom-houses, much systematic cheating goes on. As an example, I may relate what happened to my friend Mr Stewart, whose acquaintance I had the good fortune to make in Rome, and whose information on all matters of trade in the Roman States, well known to him from long practical experience, was not only of the highest value, but was the means of affording me an insight into the workings of Romanism on the temporal condition of its subjects, such as few travellers have an opportunity of attaining. Mr Stewart was engaged to take charge of the one little iron-work in the city; and the transaction I am about to relate in his own words took place when he was entering the gates. "Along with my furniture," says he, "I had a trunk containing wearing-apparel and two _pocket-pistols_. The latter, I knew, were prohibited, and made the agent employed to pass the articles acquainted with the dilemma, which he heartily laughed at,--by way, I suppose, of having a bone to pick. 'Leave the matter to me,' said he, adding, 'the officials must be recompensed, you know.' That of course; and, to be reasonable, he inquired if I would give three dollars, for which sum he would guarantee their safety. I consented to this in preference to losing them, or being obliged to send them out of the country. Notwithstanding the agent's assurance, I felt naturally anxious at the barefaced transaction, which was coolly gone about. When the trunk should have been examined, the attention of the officials was voluntarily directed to some other article, while the agent's porters turned the trunk upside down, chalked it, and replied to the query, that it had been examined, and was not even opened, which the officials well knew, and for the consideration of three dollars they betrayed trust. The trunk might have contained jewellery, or even _screw-nails_,--both pay a high duty. The latter especially, being made at Tivoli, are prohibited, or admitted at the prohibitive duty of twenty-five baiocchi the Roman pound,--sufficient to illustrate what might have been the result of this transaction in a mercantile point of view, not to speak of the opportunity afforded for introducing the _Bible_. The officials are all indifferently remunerated, and thus do business for themselves at the cost of the Government. They are also very incapable for the discharge of their duty. For example, the _Governor_ of the custom-house seriously asked me, preparatory to making a declaration for a _steam-boiler_, whether it was made of _wood_ or of _iron_. The boiler was not before him; but the idea of a steam-boiler of wood from the lips of the Governor of a custom-house was astounding." "Books of all kinds are taken to the land custom-house, where the _Revisore_ is stationed for books alone. The _Revisore_ speaks English tolerably well." CHAPTER XXV. INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE--(CONTINUED). Why does the Church systematically discourage Trade?--Railways--Much needed--Church opposes them--Could not a man take a journey of twenty or two hundred miles and be a good Catholic?--Motion is Liberty--Motion contributed to overthrow the Serfdom of the Middle Ages--Popes understand the connection between Motion and Liberty--Romans chained to the Soil--Gregory XVI. and the Iron-bridge--Gas in Rome--Spread of the Malaria--The Pontine Marshes--Neglect of Soil--Number of Paupers--How the Church prevents the Cultivation of the Campagna--Church Lands in England and Scotland--The price which Italy pays for the Papacy--Whether would the old Roman Woman or an old Scotch Woman make the better Ruler? Let us pause here, and inquire into the cause of this most deplorable state of matters. Is not the Papal Government manifestly sacrificing its own interests? Would it not be better for itself were Italy covered with a prosperous agriculture and a flourishing trade? Were its cities filled with looms and forges, would not its people have more money to spend on masses and absolutions? and, instead of the Government subsisting on foreign loans, and being always on the eve of bankruptcy, it might fill its exchequer from the vast resources of the country, and have, moreover, the pleasure of seeing around it a prosperous and happy people. This is all very true. None knows better the value of money than Rome; but she knows, too, the infinite hazard of acquiring it in the way of allowing trade and industry to enter the Papal States. Indeed, to do so would be to record sentence of banishment against herself. Every one must have remarked the difference betwixt the artizan of Birmingham and the peasant of Ireland. They seem to belong to two different races of men almost. The former is employed in making a certain piece of mechanism, or in superintending its working. He is compelled to calculate, to trace effects to their causes, and to study the relations of the various parts before him to the whole. In short, he is taught to think; and that thinking power he applies to all other subjects. His habits of life teach him to ask for reasons, and to accept of opinions only on evidence. The mind of the latter lies dead. Were Italy filled with a race of men like the first, the papacy could not live a day. Were trade, and machinery, and wealth to come in, the torpor of Italy would be broken up; and--terrible event to the papacy!--mind would awaken. What though the Pope reigns over a wasted land and a nation of beggars? he _does_ reign; he counts for a European sovereign; and his system continues to exist as a power. As men in shipwreck throw overboard food, jewels, all, to save life, so Romanism has thrown all overboard to save itself. Nothing could be a stronger proof of this than the fact that, as the effects and benefits of trade become the more developed, the pontifical Government tightens its restrictions. The note of Antonelli, the present ruling spirit of the papacy, was the most prohibitive ever framed against the introduction of iron, in other words, of civilization. This is the price which Italy must pay for the Pope and his religion. She cannot participate in the advantages of foreign trade; she cannot enjoy the facilities and improvements of modern times; because, were she to enjoy these, she would lose the papacy. She must be content to remain in the barbarism of the middle ages, covered with that moral malaria which has smitten all things in that doomed land, and under the influence of which, the cities, the earth itself, and man, for whom it was made, are all sinking into one common ruin.[3] We have yet other illustrations of the pestiferous influence of Romanism on the temporal happiness of its subjects. We have already alluded to the determined manner in which the Pontifical Government has hitherto withstood the introduction of railways. And yet, if there be a country in Europe where railways are indispensable, it is the Papal States. The roads in the territory blessed by the Government of Christ's vicar, are more like canals than roads, with this difference, that there is too little water in them for floating a boat, and far too much for comfortable travelling. Besides, they are infested by brigands, whose pursuit a railway might enable you to distance. But a railway the subjects of the Pontifical Government cannot have. And why? One would think that the mere mode of conveyance is a very harmless affair. What is it to the Pontifical Government whether the peasant of the Alban hills, or the citizen of Bologna, or the merchant of Ancona, visit Rome on foot, or in his waggon, or by rail? Is he not the same man? Will his ride convert him into a heretic, or shake his faith in Peter's successor? or will the laying down of a few miles of railroad weaken the foundations of that Church which boasts that she is founded on a rock, and that the gates of hell themselves shall not prevail against her? Or if it be said that it is not the mode of the journey, but the length of the journey, what difference can it make whether the man travel twenty miles or two hundred miles? The stability of the Church cannot be seriously endangered by a few miles less or more. Is the Pope's system of so peculiar a kind, that though it is possible for the man who walks twenty miles on foot to believe in it, it is wholly impossible for the man who rides two hundred miles by rail to do so? We know of no Roman doctor who has attempted to fix the precise number of miles which a good Catholic may travel from home without endangering his salvation. One would think that all this is plain enough; that there is no element of danger here; and yet the sharper instincts of the papacy have discovered that herein lies danger, and great danger, to its power. If the influence of Rome is to be preserved, it is not enough that the Bible be put out of existence, that the missionary be banished, and that the art of printing, and all means of diffusing ideas, be proscribed and exterminated: the very right of moving over the earth must be taken from man. Even _motion_ must be placed under anathema. We have a saying that _knowledge is power_. I would say that _motion is liberty_. The serfdom of the middle ages was in good degree maintained by binding man to the soil. Astriction to the soil was at once the foundation and the symbol of that serfdom. The baron became the master of the body of the man; he became also the master of his mental ideas. But when the serf acquired the power of locomotion, he laid the foundation of his emancipation; and from that hour feudalism began to crumble. As the serfs' power of motion enlarged, their liberty enlarged. As formerly they had known slavery by its symbol _immovability_, so now they tasted freedom by its symbol _motion_. The serf travelled beyond the valley in which he was born; he saw new objects; he met his fellow-men; and learned to think. At last motion was perfected; the steam-engine hissed past him, and he felt that now he was completely unchained. I do not give this as a theory of the rise and progress of modern liberty; but unquestionably there is a close and intimate connection between motion and liberty. The Popes are shrewd enough to see this connection; and herein lies their opposition to railroads. They have attempted, and still do attempt, to perpetuate papal serfdom, by tying their subjects to their paternal acres and their native town. Were my reader living in London or in Edinburgh, and wished to visit Chelsea or Portobello, how would he proceed? Go to the railway station and buy a ticket, and his journey is made. But were the country under the Pontifical Government, he would find it impossible to manage the matter quite so expeditiously. He must first present himself at the office of the prefect of police. He must state where he wishes to go to; what business he has there; how long he intends remaining. He must give his name, his age, his residence, and a certificate, if required, from his parish priest; and then, should the object of his journey be approved of, a description of his person will be taken down, a passport will be made out, for which he must pay some six or eight pauls; and after this process has been gone through, but not sooner, he may set out on his little journey. Very few of those who live in Rome were ever more than outside its walls. Even the nobles have the utmost difficulty in getting so far as Civita Vecchia; very few of them ever saw the sea. The Popes know that ideas as well as merchandise travel by rail; and that if the Romans are allowed to go from home, and to see new objects, new faces, and to hear new ideas, a process will be commenced which will ultimately, and at no distant day, undermine the papacy. But among men of ordinary intelligence there will be but one opinion regarding a system that sees an enemy not only in the Bible, but in the most necessary and useful arts,--in the steam-ship, in the railroad, in the electric telegraph; in short, in all the improvements and usages of civilized life. Such a system assuredly has perdition written upon its forehead. The late Pope Gregory XVI. would not allow even an iron bridge to be thrown across the Tiber. The Romans solicited this, to get rid of a ferry-boat by which the Tiber is crossed at the point in question; but no; an iron bridge there could not be. And why? Ah, said Gregory, if we have an iron bridge in Rome, we shall next have an iron road; and if we have an iron road, "_adio_," the papacy will take its departure, and that by steam. But the Pope had another reason for withholding his sanction from the iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet, springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge erected, the Tiber flows between two populous regions of the city. There is in consequence a considerable concourse, and the passengers are carried over, as I have said, in a ferry-boat, for which a couple of baiocchi is paid by each person to the ferryman. The money thus collected forms part of the revenues of a certain church in Rome, where the priests who receive it sing masses for the souls in purgatory. If you abolish the ferry-boat, it was argued, you will abolish the penny; and if you abolish the penny, what is to become of the poor souls in purgatory? and for the sake of the _souls_, the _living_ were forced to do without the bridge. I need scarcely say that there is no gas in Rome. And sure I am, if there be a dark spot in all the universe,--a place above all others needing light of all kinds, moral, mental, and physical,--it is this dark dungeon termed Rome. It has a few oil-lamps, swung on cords, at most respectable distances from one another; and you see their hazy, sickly, dying gleam far above you, making themselves visible, but nothing besides; and after sunset, Rome is plunged in darkness, affording ample opportunity for assassinations, robberies, and evil deeds of all kinds. I know not how many companies have been formed to light Rome with gas. An attempt was made to light in this way the Eternal City during the pontificate of Gregory XVI. A deputation went to the Vatican, and told the Pope that they would light his capital with gas. "Gas!" exclaimed Gregory, who had an owl-like dread of light of all kinds; "there shan't be gas in Rome while I am in Rome." Gregory is not in Rome now; Pio Nono is in the Vatican: but the same oil-lamps which lighted the Rome of Gregory XVI. still flourish in the Rome of Pio Nono.[4] All have heard of the Pontine Marshes,--a chain of swamps which run along the foot of the Volscian Mountains, and are the birthplace of the malaria,--a white vapour, which creeps snake-like over the country, and smites with deadly fever whoever is so foolhardy as to sleep on the Campagna during its continuance. These marshes, I understand, are increasing; and the malaria is increasing in consequence. That fatal vapour now comes every summer to the gates of Rome: it covers a certain quarter of the city, which, I was told, is uninhabitable during its continuance; and if nothing be done to lessen the malaria at its source, it will, some century or half century after this, envelope in its pestilential folds the whole of the Eternal City, and the traveller will gaze with awe on the blackened ruins of Rome, as he does on those of Babylon on the plain of Chaldea: so, I say, will he see the heaps of Rome on the wasted bosom of the Campagna deserted by man, and become the dwelling-place of the dragons and satyrs of the wilderness. But matters are not come to this yet. An English company (for every attempted improvement in Rome has originated with English skill and capital) was formed some years ago, to drain the Pontine Marshes. They went to the Vatican; and Sir Humphrey Davy being then in Rome, they induced him to accompany them, in the hope that his high scientific authority would have some weight with the Pontiff. They stated their object, which was to drain the Pontine Marshes. They assured the Pontiff it was practicable to a very large extent; and they pointed out its manifold advantages, as regarded the health of the country, and other things. "Drain the Pontine Marshes!" exclaimed Pope Gregory, in a tone of surprise and horror at this new project of these everlastingly scheming English heretics,--"Drain the Pontine Marshes! God made the Pontine Marshes; and if He had intended them to be drained, He would have drained them himself." The barrenness that afflicts all countries which are the seat of a false religion is a public testimony of the Divine indignation against idolatry. For the sin of man the earth was originally cursed: and wherever wicked systems exist, there a manifest curse rests upon the earth. The Mohammedan apostacy and the Roman apostacy are now seated in the midst of wildernesses. And, to make the fact more striking, these lands, which are deserts now, were anciently the best cultivated on the globe. There stood the proudest of earth's cities,--there the arts flourished,--and there men were free after the measure of ancient freedom. All this is at an end long since. Ruins, silence, and a sickly and sinking population, are the mournful spectacles which greet the eye of the traveller in Papal and Mohammedan countries. Thus God bears outward testimony against the Papal and Mohammedan systems. He has cursed the ground for their sakes; not in the way of miracle,--not by sending an angel to smite it, or by raining brimstone upon it, as he did on Sodom: the angel that has smitten the dominions of the Pope and of the False Prophet,--the brimstone and fire which have been rained upon them,--are the wicked systems which have there grown up, and by which Government has been rendered blind, infatuated, and tyrannical, and man stupid, indolent, and vicious. But the laws the Almighty has established, according to which idolatry necessarily and uniformly blights the earth and the men who live upon it, only show that his indignation against these evil systems is unchangeable and eternal, and will pursue them till they perish. Of this the state of the plain around Rome, the _Agro Romano_, forms a terrible example. I have endeavoured in former chapters to exhibit a picture of the frightful desolation of this once magnificent plain. He that set his mark on the brow of the first murderer has set his mark on this plain, where so much blood has been shed. "Now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength." But God has cursed this plain through the instrumentality of this evil system the Papacy, and I shall show you how. I have already shown that there is not, and cannot be, anything like trade in Rome, beyond what is necessary to repair the consumpt of articles in daily use. In the absence of trade there is a proportionate amount of idleness; and that idleness, in its turn, breeds beggary, vagabondism, and crime. The French Prefect, Mr Whiteside tells us, published a statistical account of Rome; and how many paupers does he say there are in it? Why, not fewer than thirty thousand. Thirty thousand paupers in one city, and that city, in its usual state, of but about a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants! Subtract the priests, the English residents, and the French soldiers, and every third man is a beggar. I was fortunate enough one evening to meet, in a certain shop in Rome, an intelligent Roman, willing to talk with me on the state of the country. The shopkeeper, as soon as he found the turn the conversation had taken, discreetly stepped out, and left it all to ourselves. "I never in all my life," I remarked, "saw a city in which I found so many beggars. The people seem to have nothing to do, and nothing to eat. There are here some hundred thousand of you cooped up within these old walls, and one half the population do nothing all day long but whine at the heels of English travellers, or hang on at the doors of the convents, waiting their one meal a-day. Why is this? Outside the walls is a magnificent plain, which, were it cultivated, would feed ten Romes, instead of one. Why don't you take picks, or spades, or ploughs,--anything you can lay hands on,--and go out to that plain, and dig it, and plant it, and sow it, and reap it, and eat and drink, and be merry?" "Ah! so we would," said he. "Then, why don't you?" "We dare not," he replied. "Dare not! Dare not till the earth God has given you?" "It is the Church's," he said. "But come now," said he, "and I will explain how it comes to be so." He went on to say, that one portion of the Campagna was gifted to the convents in Rome, another portion was gifted to the nunneries, another to the hospitals, and another to the pontifical families,--that is, to the sons and daughters, or, as they more politely speak in Rome, the nephews and nieces, of the Popes. These were the owners of the great Roman plain; and in their hands almost every acre of it was locked up, inaccessible to the plough, and inaccessible to the people. Even in our country it is found that corporations make the worst possible landlords, and that lands in the possession of such bodies are always less productive than estates managed in the ordinary way. But what sort of farming are we to expect from such corporations as we find in the city of Rome? What skill or capital have a brotherhood of lazy monks, to enable them to cultivate their lands? What enterprise or interest have a sisterhood of nuns to farm their property? They know they shall have their lifetime of it, and that is all they care for. Accordingly, they let their lands for grazing, on payment of a mere trifle of annual rent; and so the Campagna lies unploughed and unsown. A tract of land extending from Civita Vecchia to well nigh the gates of Rome,--which would make a Scotch dukedom or a German principality,--belonging to the _San Spirito_, does little more, I was told, than pay its working. The land labours under an eternal entail, which binds it over to perpetual sterility. It is God's, _i.e._ it is the Church's; and no one,--no, not even the Pope,--dare alienate a single acre of it. No Pope would set his face to such a piece of reformation, well knowing that every brotherhood and sisterhood in Rome would rise in arms against him. And even though he should screw his courage to such an encounter, he is met by the canon law. The Pope who shall dare to secularize a foot-breadth of land which has been gifted to the Church is by that law accursed. Here, then, is the price which the Romans pay for the Papacy. Outside the walls of the city lie the estates of the Church, depastured at certain seasons by a few herds, tended by men clad in skins, and looking as savage as the animals they tend; while inside the walls are some hundred thousand Romans, enduring from one year's end to another all the miseries of a partial famine. Nor is there the least hope that matters will mend so long as the Papacy lasts. For while the Papacy is in Italy, the Campagna, once so populous and rich, will be what it now is,--a desert. And the Papal States, lapsed into more than primeval sterility, overrun by brigandage and beggary, are the picture of what Britain would be under the Papacy. Let the Roman Church get the upper hand in this country, and, be assured, the first thing it will do will be to demand back every acre of land that once belonged to it. Before the Reformation, half the lands of England, and a third of the lands of Scotland, were in the possession of the Church. She keeps a chart of them to this hour: she knows every foot-breadth of British soil that at any time belonged to her: she holds its present possessors to be robbers and sacrilegious men; and the first moment she has the power, she will compel them to disgorge what she holds to be ill-gotten wealth, and endow her with the broad acres she once possessed. Nor will she stop here. By haunting death-beds,--by putting in motion the machinery of the confessional,--by the threat of purgatory in this case, and the lure of paradise in that,--she will speedily add to her former ample domain. And what will our country then become? We shall have Mother Church for landlord; and while she feasts daily at her sumptuous board, we shall have what the Romans now have,--the crumbs. We shall have monks and nuns for our farmers; and under their management, farewell to the smiling fields, the golden harvests, and the opulent cities, of Scotland and England. Our country will again become what it was before the Reformation,--a land of moors, and swamps, and forests, with a few patches of indifferent cultivation around our convents and abbacies. Vagabondism, lay and sacerdotal, will flourish once more in Britain; trade and commerce will be put down, as savouring of independence and intelligence; indolence and beggary will be sanctified; and troops of friars, with wallets on their backs, impudence on their brows, and profanity and filthiness on their tongues, will scour the country, demanding that every threshold and every purse shall be open to them. This result will come as surely as to-morrow will come, provided we permit the Papacy to raise its head once more among us. Let no one imagine that this terrible wreck of man, and of all his interests,--of civilization, of industry, of trade and commerce,--has happened of chance, and that there is no connection between this deplorable state of matters and the system which has prevailed in Italy. On the contrary, it is the direct, the necessary, and the uniform result of that system. The barbarian hates art because he does not understand its uses, and dreads its power. But the hatred the Pope bears to the useful arts is not that of the barbarian. It is the intelligent, the consistent hatred of a man who knows what he is about. It is the hatred of a man who comprehends both the character of his own system, and the tendency of modern improvements, and who sees right well, that if these improvements are introduced, the Papacy must fall. Self-preservation is the first law of systems, as of individuals; and the Papacy, feeling the antagonism between itself and these things, ever has and ever will resist them. It cannot tolerate them though it would. Speculatists and sentimentalists may talk as they please; but the destruction of that system is the first requisite to the regeneration of Italy. Such, then, is the condition of Italy at this day. Were we to find a state of things like this in the centre of Africa, or in some barbarous region thousands and thousands of miles away from European literature, arts, and influences, where the plough and the loom had yet to be invented, it would by no means surprise us. But to find a state of matters like this in the centre of Europe,--in Italy, once the head of civilization and influence, the birthplace of modern art and letters,--is certainly wonderful. But the wonder is completed when we reflect that this state of things obtains under a Government claiming to be guided by a higher than mortal sagacity,--a Government which says that it never did, and never can, err,--a Government that is supernatural and infallible. Supernatural and infallible! Why, I say, go out into the street,--stop the first old woman you meet,--carry her to Rome,--put a three-storied cap on her head,--enthrone her on the high altar in St Peter's,--burn incense before her, and call her infallible,--I say that old woman will be a more enlightened ruler that Pio Nono. The old Scotch woman or English woman would beat the old Roman woman hollow. The facts I have stated are sad enough; but the more harrowing picture of the working of the papal system has yet to be shown. CHAPTER XXVI. JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE PAPAL STATES. Justice the Pillar of the State--Claim implied in being God's Vicar, namely, that the Pope governs the World as God would govern it, were He personally present in it--No Civil Code in the Papal States--Citizens have no Rights save as Church Members--No Lay Judges--The Pontifical Government simply the Embodiment of the Papacy--Courts of Justice visited--Papal Tribunals--The Rota--Signatura--Cassation--Exceptional Tribunals--Apostolical Chamber--House of Peter--Justice bought and sold at Rome--POLITICAL JUSTICE--Gregorian Code--Case of Pietro Leoni--Accession of Pius IX.--His Popularity at first--Re-action--Case of Colonel Calendrelli--The Three Citizens of Macarata--The Hundred Young Men of Faenza--Butchery at Sinigaglia--Horrible Executions at Ancona--Estimated Number of Political Prisoners 30,000--Pope's Prisons described--Horrible Treatment of Prisoners--The Sbirri--The Spies--Domiciliary Restraint--Expulsions from Rome--Imprisonment without reason assigned--Manner in which Apprehensions are made--Condemnations without Evidence or Trial--Misery of Rome--The Pope's Jubilee. We turn now to the JUSTICE of the Papal States. Alas! if in the preceding chapters on _Trade_ we were discoursing on what does not exist, we are now emphatically to speak of what is but a shadow, a mockery. To say that in the Papal States Justice is not,--that it is a negation,--is only to state half the truth. Were that all, thankful indeed would the Romans be. But, alas! in the seat of Justice there sits a stern, irresponsible, lawless power, before which virtue is confounded and dumb, and wickedness only can stand erect. On the importance of justice to the welfare of society I need not enlarge. It is the main pillar of the State. But where are you to look for justice,--justice in its unmixed, eternal purity,--if not at Rome? Rome is the seat of the Vicar of God. Ponder, I pray you, all that this title imports. The Vicar of God is just God on earth; and the government of God's Vicar is just the government of God. It is the possession and exercise of the same authority, the same attributes, the same moral infallibility, and the same moral omnipotence, in the government of mankind, which God possesses and exercises in the government of the universe. The government of the Pope is a model set up on the earth, before kings and nations, of God's righteous and holy government in the heavens. As I, the Vicar of Christ, govern men, so would Christ himself, were he here in the Vatican, govern them. If the claim advanced by the Pope, when he takes to himself the title of God's Vicar, amounts to anything, it amounts to this,--to all this, and nothing less than this. The case being so, where, I ask, are you entitled to look for justice, if not at Rome? This is her throne: here she sits, or should, according to the theory of the popedom, high above the disturbing and blinding passions of earth, serenely calm and inexorably true, weighing all actions in her awful scales, and giving forth those solemn awards which find their response in the universal reason and conscience of mankind. If so, what mean these dungeons? Why these trials shrouded in secrecy? Why this clanking of chains, and that cry which has gone up to heaven, and which pleads for justice there? Come near, I pray you, and look at the Pope's justice; enter his tribunals, and see the working of his courts; listen to the evidence which is there received, and the sentences which are there pronounced; visit his dungeons and galleys; and then tell me what you think of the administration of this man who styles himself God's Vicar. Let me first of all give prominence to the fact that in the Papal States there is no _civil_ code. It is a purely _spiritually_ governed region. The Church sustains herself as judge in _all_ causes, and holds her law as sufficiently comprehensive in its principles, and sufficiently flexible and practical in its special provisions, to determine all questions that can arise, of whatever nature,--whether relating to the body or the soul of man, to his property or his conscience. By what is strictly and purely church law are all things here adjudicated, for other law there is none. That law is the decretals and bulls of the popes. Only think of such a code! The Roman jurisprudence amounts to many hundreds of volumes, and its precedents range over many centuries, so that the most plodding lawyer and the most industrious judge may well despair of ever being able to tell exactly what the law says on any particular case, or of being able to find a clue to the true interpretation, granting that he sincerely wishes to do so, through the inextricable labyrinth of decisions by which he is to be guided. This law was made by the Church and for the Church, and gives to the citizen, as such, no right or privilege of any kind. Whatever rights the Roman possesses, he possesses solely in his character of Church member; he has a right to absolution when he confesses; a right to the undisturbed possession of his goods when he takes the sacrament; but he has no rights in his character of citizen; and when he falls out of communion with the Church, he falls at the same time from all rights whatever. He is beyond the pale of the Church, and beyond the pale of the law. Our freethinkers, who are so ready to fraternise with the Romanists, would do well to consider how they would like this sort of regimen. Let me, in the second place, give prominence to the fact, that in the Papal States there are no lay judges. There all are "anointed prelates." This applies to all the tribunals, from the highest to the lowest. In short, the whole machinery of the Government is priestly. Its head is a priest,--the Pope; its Prime Minister is a priest; its Chancellor of the Exchequer is a priest; its Secretary at War is a priest; all are priests. These functionaries cannot be impeached. However gross their blunders, or glaring their malversations, they are secure from censure; because to punish them would be to say that they had erred, and to say that they had erred would be to impeach the infallibility of the Pontifical Government. A treasurer who enriches himself and robs the exchequer may be promoted to the cardinalate, but cannot be censured. The highest mark of displeasure on which the popes have ventured in such cases has been, to appoint to a dignity with a very inadequate salary. The Government of the Papal States, both in its _law_ and in its _administration_, being strictly sacerdotal, the great fairness of the test we are now applying to the Papacy is undeniable. It would be very unfair to try the religion of Britain by the government of Britain, or to charge on Christianity the errors, the injustice, and the oppression which our rulers may commit, because our religion is one thing, and our Government is another. But it is not so in the Papal States. There the Church is the Government. The papal Government is simply the embodiment of the papal religion. And I cannot conceive a fairer, a more accurate, or a more comprehensive test of the genius and tendency of a religion, than simply the condition of that country where the making of the law, the administration of the law, the control of all persons, the regulation of all affairs, and the adjudication of all questions, are done by that religion; and where, with no one impediment to obstruct it, and with every conceivable advantage to aid it, it can exhibit all its principles and accomplish all its objects. If that religion be true, the condition of such country ought to be the most blessed on the face of the earth. One day I visited the courts of justice, which are on Mount Citorio. We ascended a spacious staircase (I say we, for Mr Stewart, the intelligent and obliging companion of my wanderings in Rome, was with me), and entered a hall crowded with a number of shabby-looking people. We turned off into a side-room, not larger than one's library, where the court was sitting. Behind a table slightly raised, and covered with green cloth, sat two priests as judges. A counsel sat with them, to assist occasionally. On the wall at their back hung a painting of Pont. Max. Pius IX.; and on the table stood a crucifix. The judges wore the round cap of the Jesuits. I saw men in coarse bombazeen gowns, which I took for macers: these, I soon discovered, were the advocates. They were clownish-looking men, with great lumpish hands, and an unmistakeably cowed look. They addressed the court in short occasional speeches in Latin; for it is one of the privileges of the Roman people to have their suits argued in a tongue they don't understand. There were some half-dozen people lounging in the place. There was an air of unconcern and meanness on the court, and all its practitioners and attendants; but, being infallible, it can dispense with the appearance of dignity. I asked Mr Stewart to conduct me to the criminal court, which was sitting in another apartment under the same roof. He showed me the door within which the assize is held, but told me at the same time, that neither myself nor any one in Rome could cross that threshold,--the judge, the prisoner, his advocate, the public prosecutor, and the guard, being the only exceptions. Let me now describe the machinery by which justice, as it is called, is administered. The judges, I have said, are prelates; and as in Rome the administration of justice is a low occupation compared with the Church, priests which are incapable, or which have sinned against their order, are placed on the tribunals. A prelate who has a knowledge of jurisprudence is a phenomenon; hence the judges do not themselves examine the merits of causes, but cause them to be investigated by a private auditor, whom they select from the practising counsel. According to the report of this individual, the members of the tribunal pronounce their judgment, no matter what objections may be pled, or arguments offered, to the contrary. This system gives rise, as may well be conceived, to innumerable acts of partiality and injustice. There is a tribunal of appeal for the Romagnias, another for the Marshes, and a third for the Capitol. Besides these, there are tribunals of the third class throughout the States. The tribunal of appeal for the Capitol is the ROMAN ROTA. Before this court our own Henry, and the other kings of Europe, carried their causes, in those days when the Pope was really a grand authority, and ruled Christendom. Having now little business as regards monarchs and the international quarrels of kingdoms, it has been converted into a tribunal for private suits. It still shrouds itself in its mediæval secresy, which, if it robs its decisions of public confidence, at least screens the ignorance of its judges from public contempt. There are, besides, the tribunals of the _Signatura_ and of _Cassation_, in which partiality examines, incompetence pronounces judgment, delays exhaust the patience and the money of the suitors, and the decent veil of a dead language wraps up the illegality. Besides these, there are the _exceptional_ tribunals, which are very numerous. Among them the chief is the _ecclesiastical_ jurisdiction, so extensive, that it is sufficient that some very trifling interest of a priest, or of some charity fund, or even of a Jew or a recent convert, is concerned, to transfer the cause to the bar of the privileged tribunal. The jurisdiction of the exceptional tribunal is exercised in the provinces by the vicar-general of the bishop; and in Rome the suits are laid before the private auditors of the cardinal-vicar, and of the bishop _in partibus_, his assistant. The auditors pronounce judgment in the name of the cardinal or the bishop, who signs it without any examination on his part. The suits which concern the public finances are decided by the exceptional tribunal, and a tribunal called the "_Plena Camera_" (full chamber); and any private person who might chance to gain his cause is condemned, as an invariable maxim, to pay the costs. Exceptional tribunals are to be found in very many parochial places, especially in those parishes near Rome where the judges are named by, and are removable at the will of, the baron. It can easily be imagined what sort of a chance any one may have who should have a suit with the baron. Besides all these, we must not omit the _Reverend Apostolical Chamber_, always on the brink of bankruptcy, which has been in the habit of exacting contributions, that they may sell to speculators the revenues of succeeding years. Thus private families, invested with iniquitous privileges, extort money from the unfortunate labourers, by royal authority and the help of the bailiff. There is another tribunal which should be styled _monstrous_, rather than by the milder term of exceptional; this is the "_Fabbrica di S. Petro_" (house of St Peter.) To this was granted, by the caprice of the Pope, the right to claim from the immediate or distant heirs of any testator, _even at remote epochs_, the sum of unpaid legacies for pious purposes. The Cardinal Arch-Priest and the Commons, who represent the pretended creditor, are judges between themselves and the presumed debtor. They search the archives; they open and they close testamentary documents not ever published; they arbitrarily burden the estates of the citizens with mortgages or charges; and they commence their proceedings where other tribunals leave off,--that is, by an execution and seizure, under the pretence of securing the credits not yet determined upon. To the commissaries of this strange tribunal in the provinces is awarded the fifth of the sum claimed. Whosoever desires to settle the question by a compromise is not permitted to attempt it, unless he shall first have satisfied this fifth, and paid the expenses, besides the fees of the fiscal advocate. If any one should have the rare luck to gain his suit, as, for instance, by producing the receipt in full, he must nevertheless pay a sum for the judgment absolving him. The presidents of the tribunals--the minor judges, comprising the private auditors of the Vicar of Rome--have the power of legitimatizing all contracts for persons affected by legal incapacity. This is generally done without examination, and merely in consideration of the fee which they receive. It would take a long chapter to narrate the sums which have been, by a single stroke of the pen, wrongfully taken from poor widows and orphans. Incapacity for the management of one's affairs is sometimes pronounced by the tribunal, but very frequently is decreed by the prelate-auditor of the Pope, without any judicial formality. Thus any citizen may at any moment find himself deprived of the direction of his private affairs and business. Such is the machinery employed for dispensing justice by a man who professes to be the infallible fountain of equity, and the world's teacher as regards the eternal maxims of justice. Justice! The word is a delusion,--a lie. It is a term which designates a tyranny worse than any under which the populations of Asia groan.[5] It would be wearisome to adduce individual cases, even were I able to do so. But, indeed, the vast corruption of the _civil justice_ of the Papal States must be evident from what I have said. A law so inextricable!--judges so incompetent, who decide without examining!--tribunals which sit in darkness! Why, justice is not dispensed in Rome; it is bought and sold; it is simply a piece of merchandise; and if you wish to obtain it, you cannot, but by going to the market, where it is openly put up for sale, and buying it with your money. Mr Whiteside, a most competent witness in this case, who spent two winters in Rome, and made it his special business to investigate the Roman jurisprudence, both in its theory and in its practice, tells us in effect, in his able work on Italy, that if you are so unfortunate as to have a suit in the Roman courts, the decision will have little or no reference to the merits of the cause, but will depend on whether you or your opponent is willing to approach the judgment-seat with the largest bribe. Such, in substance, is Mr Whiteside's testimony; and precisely similar was the evidence of every one whom I met in Rome who had had any dealings with the papal tribunals. But I turn to the political justice of the Papal States,--a department even more important in the present state of Italy, and where the specific acts are better known. Let us look first at the tribunal set up in Rome for the trial of all crimes against the State. And let the reader bear in mind, that offences against the Church are crimes against the State, for there the Church is the State. A secret, summary, and atrocious tribunal it is, differing in no essential particular from that sanguinary tribunal in Paris where Robespierre passed sentence, and the guillotine executed it. The Gregorian Code[6] enacts, that in cases of sedition or treason, the trial may take place by a commission nominated by the Pope's Secretary; that the trial shall be secret; that the prisoner shall not be confronted with the witnesses, or know their names; that he may be examined in prison and by torture. The accused, according to this barbarous code, has no means of proving his innocence, or defending his life, beyond the hasty observations on the evidence which his advocate, who is appointed in all cases by the tribunal, may be able to make on the spur of the moment. This tribunal is simply the Inquisition; and yet it is by this tribunal that the Pope, who professes to be the first minister of justice on earth, governs his kingdom. No man is safe at Rome. However innocent, his liberty and life hang by a single thread, which the Government, by the help of such a tribunal as this, may snap at any moment. This is the established, the legal course of papal justice. Let the reader lift his eyes, and survey, if he have courage, the wide weltering mass of misery and despair which the Papal States present. We cannot bring all into view; we must permit a few only to speak for the rest. Here they come from a region of doom, to tell to the free people of Britain, if they will hear them, the dread secrets of their prison-house; and, we may add, to warn them, "lest they also come into this place of torment." I shall first of all take a case that occurred before the Revolution, lest any one should affirm of the cases that are to follow, that the Pontifical Government had been exascerbated by the insurrection, and hurried into measures of more than usual severity. This case I give on the authority of Mr Whiteside, who, being curious to see a _political process_ in the Roman law, after some trouble procured the following, which, having been compiled under the orders of Pius IX., may be relied on as strictly accurate. Pietro Leoni had acted as official attorney to the poor. Well, in 1831, under the pontificate of Gregory XVI., he was arrested on a charge of being a member of a political club. He was brought to trial, acquitted, set free, but deprived of his office, though why I cannot say, unless it was for the crime of being innocent. To sustain an aged father, a wife and children, Pietro had to work harder than ever. In 1836 he was again arrested,--suddenly, without being told for what,--hurried to the Castle of St Angelo, in the dungeons of which he had to undergo a rigorous examination, from which nothing could be elicited. He was not released, however, but kept there, till witnesses could be found or hired. At length a certain vine-dresser came forward to accuse Leoni. One day, said the vine-dresser, Pietro Leoni, whom he had never seen till then, came to his door, and, after a short conversation with him, in the presence of his sons, handed him a manuscript relating to a _reform society_, of which, he said, he had been a member for years. The vine-dresser buried this document at the bottom of a tree in his garden. The spot was searched, but nothing was found; his strange story was contradicted by his wife and sons; and the Pontifical Government could not for very shame condemn him on such evidence; but neither did they let him go. A full year passed over him in the dungeons of St Angelo. At last three additional witnesses--(their names never were known)--were produced against him. And what did they depose? Why, that they had heard some one say that he had heard Pietro Leoni say, that he (Leoni) was a member of a secret society; and on this hearsay evidence did the Pontifical Government condemn the poor attorney to a life-long slavery in the galleys. We find him ten long years thereafter still in the dungeons of the Castle of St Angelo, and writing the Pope in a strain which one would think might have moved a heart of stone. The petition is printed in the process. It begins,-- "Most holy father, divest yourself of the splendours of royalty, and, dressed in the garb of a private citizen, cause yourself to be conducted into these subterranean prisons, where there is buried, not an enemy of his country, not a violator of the laws, but an innocent citizen, whom a secret enemy has calumniated, and who has had the courage to sustain his innocence in presence of a judge prejudiced or corrupted.... Command this living tomb to be opened, and ask an unhappy man the cause of his misfortunes." And concludes thus,-- "But, holy father, neither the prolonged imprisonment of ten years, nor separation from my family, nor the total ruin of my earthly prospects, should ever reduce me to the baseness of admitting a crime which I did not commit. And I call God to witness that I am innocent of the accusation brought against me; and that the true cause of my unjust condemnation was, and is, a private pique and personal enmity.... Listen, therefore, to justice,--to the humble entreaties of an aged father,--a desolate wife,--unhappy children,--who exist in misery, and who with tears of anguish implore your mercy." Did the heart of Gregory relent? Did he hasten to the prison, and beg his prisoner to come forth? Ah, no: the petition was received, flung aside, and forgotten; and Pietro Leoni continued to lie in the dungeons of St Angelo till death came to the Vatican, and Gregory went to his account, and the prison-doors of St Angelo were opened, as a matter of course, not of right, on the accession of a new Pope. No wonder that Lambruschini and Marini, the chief actors in the atrocities committed under Gregory, resisted that amnesty by which Pietro Leoni, and hundreds more, were raised from the grave, as it were, to proclaim their villanies. I give this case because it occurred before the Revolution, and is a fair sample, as a Roman advocate assured Mr Whiteside, of the calm, every-day working of the Pontifical Government under Gregory XVI. I come now to relate other cases, if possible more affecting, which came under my own cognizance, more or less, while in Rome. But let me first glance at the rejoicings that filled Rome on the accession of Pius IX. A bright but perfidious gleam heralded the night, which has since settled down so darkly on the Papal States. The scene I describe in the words of Mr Stewart, who was an eye-witness of it:--"I was at Rome when Pope Pius IX. made his formal triumphal entrance into the city by the Porta del Popolo, where was a magnificent arch entering to the Corso. The arch was erected specially for the occasion, and executed with much artistic skill. Banners were waving in profusion along the Corso, bearing, some of them, very far-fetched epithets; while every balcony and window was studded with gay and admiring citizens, all alike eager in demonstrating their attachment to the Holy Father. Nothing, in fact, could exceed the gaiety of the scene: all and sundry seemed bent on the one idea of displaying their loyalty. What with garlands of flowers, white handkerchiefs, and vivas, the feelings were worked up to such a pitch, that the _young nobles_, when the state carriage arrived at the Piazza Colonna, actually unyoked the horses, and scampered off with carriage and Pope, to the Quirinal Palace, nearly a mile. This ebullition of feeling was undoubtedly the result of the general amnesty, and the bright expectations then cherished of a new era for Italy." Such an ebullition may appear absurd, and even childish, to us, who have been so long accustomed to liberty; but we must bear in mind that the Romans had groaned in fetters for centuries, and these, as they believed, had now been struck off for ever. "Was there," asked Mr Whiteside of a sculptor in Rome, "really affecting yourself, any practical oppression under old Gregory?" The artist started. "No man," said he, "could count on one hour's security or happiness: I knew not but there might be a spy behind that block of marble: the pleasure of life was spoiled. I had three friends, who, supping in a garden near this spot, were suddenly arrested, flung into prison, and lay there, though innocent, till released by Pio Nono." As regards the amnesty of Pio Nono, which so intoxicated the Romans, it is common for popes to make political capital of the errors and crimes of their predecessors; and as regards his reforming policy, which deluded others besides the Italians, it was a very transparent dodge to restore the papacy to its old supremacy. The Cobra di Capella relaxed its folds on Italy for a moment, to coil itself more firmly round the rest of the world. Of this none are now better aware than the Romans. The re-action,--the flight,--the Republic,--the bombardment,--the return to the Vatican on a path deluged with his subjects' blood,--all I pass over. But how shall I describe or group the horrors that have darkened and desolated the Papal States from that hour to this? What has their history been since, but one terrible tale of apprehensions, proscriptions, banishments, imprisonments, and executions, the full recital of which would make the ear of him that hears it to tingle? Nero and Caligula were monsters of crime; but their capricious tyranny, while it fell heavily on individuals, left the great body of the empire comparatively untouched. But the tyranny of the Pope penetrates every home, and crushes every person and thing. There was not under Nero a tenth part of the misery in Rome which there is now. Were the acts of Nero and of Pio to be fully written, I have not a doubt,--I am certain,--that the government of the imperial despot would be seen to be liberty itself, compared with the measureless, remorseless, inappeasable, wide-wasting tyranny of the sacerdotal one. The diadem was light indeed, compared with the tiara. The little finger of the Popes is thicker than the loins of the Cæsars. The sights I saw, and the facts I heard, actually poisoned my enjoyment of Rome. What pleasure could I take in statues and monuments, when I saw the wretched beings that lived beside them, and marked the faces on which despair was painted, the forms that grief had bowed to the very dust, the dead men who wandered in the streets and about the old ruins, as if they sought, but could not find, their graves? Ah! there _is_ not, there never _was_, on earth a tyranny like the Papacy. But let me come to particulars. I shall first narrate the story of Colonel Calendrelli. It was told me by our own consul in Rome, Mr Freeborn, who knew intimately the colonel, and deeply interested himself in his case. Colonel Calendrelli was treasurer at war during the Republic. The Republic came to an end; the Pontifical Government returned; and Colonel Calendrelli, being unable to get away along with the other agents and friends of the Republic, was, of course, apprehended by the restored Government. It was necessary to find some pretext on which to condemn the colonel; and what, does the reader think, was the charge preferred against Colonel Calendrelli? Why, it was this, that the colonel had embezzled the public funds to the amount of twenty scudi. Twenty scudi! How much is that? Only five pounds sterling! That Colonel Calendrelli, a gentleman, a scholar, a man on whose honesty a breath had never been blown, should risk character and liberty for five pounds sterling! Why, the Pontifical Government should have made it five hundred or five thousand pounds, if they wished to have the accusation believed. Well, then, on the charge of defrauding the public treasury to the extent of twenty Roman scudi was Colonel Calendrelli brought to trial, and condemned! Condemned to what? To the galleys. Nor does that bring fully out the iniquity of the sentence. Our consul in Rome assured me that he had investigated the case, from his friendship for the colonel, and that the matter stood thus:--The colonel had engaged a man to do a piece of work, for which he was to receive five pounds as wages. The work was done, the wages were paid, the man's receipt was tendered, and the witnesses in whose presence the money had been paid bore their testimony to the fact. All these proofs were before Mr Freeborn. Nay, more; the papal tribunal that tried the case was told that all these witnesses and documents were ready to be produced. And yet, in the teeth of this evidence, completely establishing the innocence of Colonel Calendrelli, which, indeed, no one doubted, was the colonel condemned to the galleys; and when I was in Rome, he was working as a galley-slave on the high-road near Civita Vecchia, chained to another galley-slave. This is a sample of the pontifical justice. Take another case. The tragedy I am now to relate was consummated during my stay in the Eternal City. In the town of Macerata, to the east of Rome, it happened one day that a priest was fired at as he was passing along the street at dusk. He was not shot, happily;--the ball, missing the priest, sank deep in a door on the other side of the way. This happened under the Republic; and the police either could not or would not discover the perpetrator of the deed. The thing was the talk of the town for a day or so, and was then forgotten for ever, as every one thought. But no. The Republic came to an end; back came the pontifical police to Macerata; and then the affair of the priest was brought up. The prefect had not been installed in his office many days till a person presented himself before him, and said, "I am the man who shot at the priest." "You!" exclaimed the prefect. "Yes; and I was hired to shoot him by----," naming three young men of the town, who had been the most active supporters of the Republic. These were precisely the three young men, of all others in Macerata, whom it was most for the interest of the Papacy to get rid of. That very day these three young men were apprehended. They were at last brought to trial; and will it be believed, that on the solitary and uncorroborated testimony of a man who, according to his own confession, was a hired assassin,--and surely I do the man no injustice if I suppose that, if he was willing for money to commit murder, he might be willing for money, or some priestly consideration, to commit perjury,--on the single and unsupported evidence, I say, of this man, a hired assassin according to his own confession, were these three young men condemned? And to what? To death!--and while I was in Rome they were actually guillotined! I saw their sentence placarded on the Piazza Colonna on the morning after my arrival in Rome. This writing of doom was the first thing I read in that city. It bore the names of the accused, the alleged crime, and an abstract of the evidence, or, I should say, volunteered statement, of the would-be assassin. It had the terrible guillotine at the top, and the fisherman's ring at the bottom; and though I had known nothing more of the case than the Government account of it, as contained in that paper, I would have said that it was enough to cover any Government with eternal infamy. Indeed, I don't believe that there is a Government under the sun, save the Pope's, that would have done an atrocity like it. I had some talk with our consul, Mr Freeborn, about that case too, and he assured me that, bad as these cases were, they were not worse than scores, aye, hundreds, that to his knowledge had been perpetrated in Rome, and all over the Papal States, since the return of the Pontifical Government. He added, that if Mr Gladstone would come to Rome, and visit the prisons, and examine the state of the country generally, he would have a more harrowing tale to unfold than that with which he had recently thrilled the British public on the subject of Naples: that in Naples there was still something like trade, but in Rome there was nothing but downright grinding misery. There are few tales in any history more harrowing than the following. The events were posterior to my visit to Rome, and were published at the time in the American _Crusader_. It happened that several papal proconsuls were slain in the city of Faenza: all of them had served under Gregory XVI., in the galleys, as felons and forgers. Being favoured by the papal power, they tried to deserve it by becoming the tyrants of the unhappy population. When the gloomy news of their tragical end reached the Holy Father, the answer returned to the governor of that city, as to what he should do in such a case, as the true perpetrators could not be found, was, "_Arrest all the young men of Faenza!_" and more than a hundred youths were immediately snatched away from the bosom of their families, handcuffed and chained, thrown into the city prisons, and distributed afterwards among the gangs of malefactors, whose lives had been a continual series of robberies and murders! Thirty of these unfortunate victims were marched off to Rome, where they were locked up in a dungeon. Innocent as well as unconscious of the crime of which they were accused, they supplicated the President of the Sacred Consulta,--who is an anointed prelate,--asking only for justice; not for mercy and forgiveness, but for a regular trial. All was useless; the archbishop had neither ear nor heart, and the petition was forgotten. Thinking that, after all, even at Rome, and even among the high dignitaries of the Church of Sodom and Gomorrah, there might be found a man of human feeling, they wrote a second petition, which was this time addressed to a different personage of the Church, his Excellency Mgr. Mertel, Minister of Grace and Justice! The prisoners asserted to the high papal functionary the illegality of their arrest,--their sufferings without any imputation of guilt,--the painful condition of their families, increased still more by the famine which now desolates the Roman States, and the want of their support. The supplicants were brought before Mgr. Mertel, who, feigning pity and interest for the sufferers (attention, reader!) offered them the choice of _ten years in the chain-gang, or to be transported to the United States_, the _refugium peccatorum_! They protested; but of what benefit is a legal and natural protest to thirty poor defenceless and guiltless young men, loaded with chains by a papal bureaucrat, surrounded by fifty ruffians armed to the teeth? On the night of the 5th of May 1853, the sepulchral silence of the subterranean prisons of St Angelo was interrupted by the rattling of keys and muskets. The thirty young citizens of Faenza were called out of their dens, and one by one, bending under his fetters, was escorted to a steamer waiting on the muddy Tiber to carry them to a distant land! The beautiful moon of Italy, as some call it, was shining benevolently over Rome and her iniquities; the streets, deserted by the people, were trodden by French patrols; all was silent as the grave itself; and not a friend was there to bid them adieu; not a relative to speak a consoling word to the departing; and none to acquaint the unfortunates who remained behind with their terrible calamity! This was their parting from Rome, at three o'clock, after midnight! But let us follow the victims of papal fury over the wide waters. Cast into the steerage, always handcuffed, the vessel rolling in a heavy and tempestuous sea, these wretched young men remained eighty hours in a painful position, till they reached Leghorn, where they were conducted to the quarantine, as though affected with leprosy and plague, and thence embarked for New York, where they arrived totally destitute of clothes and means of subsistence. The autumn of 1852 will be long remembered in the Papal States, from the occurrence of numerous tragedies of a like deplorable character. Sixty-five citizens of Sinigaglia had been apprehended on the charge of being concerned in the political disturbances of 1848,--an accusation on which the Pope himself might have been apprehended. These citizens, however, had not been so prudent as to turn when the Pope did. In the August of 1852 they were all brought to trial before the Sacra Consulta of Rome, with the exception of thirteen who had made their escape. Twenty-eight of these persons were condemned to the galleys for life, and twenty-four were sentenced to be shot. These unhappy men displayed great unconcern at their execution,--some singing the _Marseillaise_, others crying _Viva Mazzini_. The Swiss troops, not the Austrian soldiers, were made the executioners in this case. The Sinigaglia trials were followed by similar prosecutions at Ancona, Jesi, Pesaro, and Funa, where unhappy groupes of citizens, indicted for political offences, waited the tender mercies which the "Holy Father" dispenses to his _figli_ by the hands of Swiss and Austrian carabiniers. Let us state the result at Ancona. The executions took place on the 25th of October 1852, and they may be reckoned amongst the most appalling ever witnessed. The sentence was officially published at Rome after the execution, and contained, as usual, simply the names of the judges and the prisoners, a summary of the evidence unsupported by the names of any witnesses, and the penalty awarded--_death_. The victims were nine in number. The sacerdotal Government gave them a priest as well as a scaffold, but only one would accept the insulting mockery. The others, being hopelessly recusant, were allowed to intoxicate themselves with rum. "The shooting of them was entrusted to a detachment of Roman artillerymen, armed with short carbines, old-fashioned weapons, many of which missed fire, so that at the first discharge some of the prisoners did not fall, but ran off, with the soldiers pursuing and firing at them repeatedly; others crawled about; and one wretch, after being considered dead, made a violent exertion to get up, rendering a final _coup de grace_ necessary." The writer who recorded these accounts added, that other executions were to follow, and that, if these wholesale slaughters were necessary, they ought, in the dominions of a pontifical sovereign, to be conducted with more delicacy, that is, in a more summary fashion. In truth, such executions are a departure from the approved pontifical method of killing,--which is not by fusillades and in open day, but in silence and night, by the help of the rack and the dungeon. I cannot go into any minute detail of the imprisonments, banishments, and massacres by which the Pope has signalized his return to his palace and the chair of Peter. But I may state a few facts, from which some idea of their number may be gathered. When Pio Nono fled from Rome to Gaeta, what was the amount of its population? Not less than a hundred and sixty thousand. I conversed with a distinguished literary Englishman who chanced to visit Rome at the time I speak of, and who assured me that there could not be fewer than two hundred thousand in Rome then, for Italians had flocked thither from every country under heaven, expecting a new era for their city and nation. But I shall give the Pope the benefit of the smaller number. When he fled, there were, I shall suppose, only a hundred and sixty thousand human beings in his city of Rome. Take the same Rome six months after his return, and how many do you find in it? According to the most credible accounts, the population of the Eternal City had dwindled down to little above a hundred thousand. Here are sixty thousand human beings lacking in this one city. What has become of them? Where have they gone to? I shall suppose that some were fortunate enough to escape to Malta, some to Belgium, some to England, and others to America. I shall suppose that twenty thousand contrived to get away. And let me here do justice to Mr Freeborn, the British consul, who saved much blood by issuing British passports to these unhappy men when the French entered Rome. Twenty thousand, I shall suppose, made good their flight. But thirty thousand and upwards are still lacking. Where are your subjects, Pio Nono? Were we to put this interrogatory to the Pope, he would reply, I doubt not, as did another celebrated personage in history, "Am I my brother's keeper?" But ah! might not the same response as of old be made to this disclaimer, "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground?" Again we say, Where are your subjects, Pio Nono? Ask any Roman, and he will tell you where these men are. Ask our own consul, Mr Freeborn, and he will tell you where they are. They are, those of them that have not been shot, rotting at this hour at the bottom of the Pope's dungeons. That is where they are. There is a singular unanimity in Rome amongst all parties, as to the number of political prisoners now under confinement. This I had many opportunities of testing. I met a Roman one evening in a book-shop, and, after a rather lengthened conversation, I said to him, "Can you tell me how many prisoners there are at present in the Roman States?" "No," he replied, "I cannot." "But," I rejoined, "have you no idea of their number?" He solemnly said, "God only knows." I pressed him yet farther, when he stated, that the common estimate, which he believed to be not above the truth, rather under, was, that there were not fewer than thirty thousand political prisoners in the various fortresses and dungeons of the Papal States. Thirty thousand was the estimate of Mr Freeborn. Thirty thousand was the estimate of Mr Stewart, who, mingling with the Romans, knew well the prevailing opinion. Of course, precise accuracy is unattainable in such a case. No one ever counted these prisoners. No list of them is kept,--none that is open to the public eye at least; but it is well known, that there is scarce a family in Rome which does not mourn some of its members lost to it, and scarce an individual who has not an acquaintance in prison; and I have little doubt that the Roman estimate is not far from the truth, and that it is just as likely to be below as above it. When I was in Rome, all the jails in the city were crowded. The cells in the Castle of St Angelo,--those subterranean dungeons where day never dawned, and where the captive's groan can never reach a human ear,--were filled. All the great fortresses throughout the country,--the vast ranges of galley-prisons at Civita Vecchia, the fortress of Ancona, the castle of Bologna, the fortress of Ferrara, and hundreds of minor prisons over the country,--all were filled,--filled, do I say! they were crowded,--crowded to suffocation with choking, despairing victims. In the midst of this congeries of dungeons, surrounded by clanking chains and weeping captives, stands the chair of the "Holy Father." Let us take a look into these prisons, as described to me by reputable and well-informed parties in Rome. These prisons are of three classes. The first class consists of cells of from seven to eight feet square. The space is little more than a man's height when he stands erect, and a man's length when he stretches himself on the floor, and can contain only that amount of atmospheric air necessary for the consumption of one person. These cells are now made to receive two prisoners, who are compelled to divide betwixt them the air adequate for only one. The second class consists of cells constructed to hold ten persons each. In the present great demand for prison-room these are held to afford ample accommodation for a little crowd of twenty persons. Their one window is so high in the wall, that the wretched men who are shut in here are obliged to mount by turns on each other's shoulders, to obtain a breath of air. Last of all comes the common prison. It is a spacious place, containing from forty to fifty persons, who lie day and night on straw too foul for a stable. It matters not what the means of the prisoner may be; he must wear the prison dress, and live on the prison diet. The jailor is empowered, should the slightest provocation be offered, to flog the prisoner, or to load his limbs so heavily with irons, that he scarce can move. And who are they who tenant these places? Violators of the law,--brigands, murderers? No! Those who have been dragged thither are the very _elite_ of the Roman population. There many of them lie for years, without being brought to trial; and if they thus escape the scaffold, they perish more slowly, but not less surely, and much more miserably, by the pestilential air, the unwholesome food, and the horrible treatment of the jail. Nor is this the worst of it. I was told by those in Rome who had the best opportunities of knowing, but whose names I do not here choose to mention, that the sufferings of the prisoners had been much aggravated,--indeed, made unendurable,--by the expedient of the Government which confines malefactors and desperadoes along with them. These characters are permitted to have their own way in the prisons; they lord it over the rest, compel them to do the most disgusting offices, and attempt even outrages on their person, which propriety leaves without a name. Their sufferings are indescribable. The consequence of this accumulation of horrors,--foul air, insufficient food, and the fearful society with which the walls and chains of their prison compel them to mingle,--is, that a great many of the prisoners have died, some have sought to terminate their woe by suicide, while others have been carried raving to a madhouse. Mr Freeborn assured me that several of his Roman acquaintances had been carried to these places sane men, as well as innocent men, and, after a short confinement, they had been brought out maniacs and madmen. He would have preferred to have seen them shot at once. It is a prelate who has charge of these prisons. I have described the higher machinery which the Pope employs,--the tribunals,--judges,--the secret process,--the tyrannous Gregorian Code; let me next bring into view the inferior machinery of the Pontifical Government. The Roman _sbirri_ have an European reputation. One must be no ordinary villain,--he must be, in short, a perfected and finished scoundrel,--to merit a place in this honourable corps. The _sbirri_ are chiefly from the kingdom of Naples. They dress in plain clothes, go in twos and threes, are easily distinguished, and are permitted to carry larger walking-sticks than the Romans, whom the French commandant has forbidden to come abroad with any but the merest twig. Some of these spies wear spurs, the better to deceive and to succeed in their fiendish work. No disguise, however, can conceal the _sbirro_. His look, so unmistakeably villanous, proclaims the spy. These fellows will not be defeated in their purposes. They carry, it is said, _articles of conviction_, that is, political papers, on their person, which they use, in lack of other material, to compass the ruin of their victim. They can stop any one they please on the street, compel him to produce his papers, and, when they choose not to be satisfied with them, march him off to prison. When they visit a house where they have resolved to make a seizure, they search it; and if they do not find what may criminate the man, they drop the papers they have brought with them, and swear that they found them in the house. What can solemn protestations do against armed ruffians, backed by hireling judges, who, like Impaccianti and Belli, have been taken from the bagnio and the galleys, thrust into orders, and elevated to the bench, to do the work of their patrons?[7] Such must show that they deserve promotion. The people loathe and dread the _sbirri_, knowing that whatever they do in their official capacity is done well, and speedily followed up by those in authority. But there is a class in the service of the Pontifical Government yet more wicked and dangerous. What! exclaims the reader, more wicked and dangerous than the _sbirri_! Yes, the _sbirri_ profess to be only what they are,--the base tools of a tyrannical Government, which seems to thirst insatiably for vengeance; but there exists an invisible power, which the citizen feels to be ever at his side, listening to his every word, penetrating his inmost thought, and ready at any moment to effect his destruction. At noonday, at midnight, in society, in private, he feels that its eye is upon him. He can neither see it nor avoid it. Would he flee from it, he but throws himself into its jaws. I refer to a class of vile and abandoned men, entirely at the service of the Government, whose position in society, agreeable manners, flexibility of disposition, and thorough knowledge of affairs, which they study for base ends, and handle most adroitly in conversation, enable them to penetrate the secret feelings of all classes. They now condemn and now applaud the conduct of Government, as the subject and circumstances require, and all to extract an unfriendly sentiment against those in authority, if such there be in the mind of the man with whom they are conversing. If they succeed, the person is immediately denounced; an arrest follows, or domiciliary restraint. The numbers that have found their way to prison and to the galleys through this secret and mysterious agency are incredible. Nor can any man imagine to himself the dreadful state of Rome under this terrible espionage. The Roman feels that the air around him is full of eyes and ears; he dare not speak; he dreads even to think; he knows that a thought or a look may convey him to prison. The oppression is not of equal intensity in all cases. Some are subjected only to domiciliary restraint. In this predicament are many respectably connected young men. They are told to consider themselves as prisoners in their own houses, and not to appear beyond the threshold, but at the penalty of exchanging their homes for the common jail. Others, again, whose apparent delinquency has been less, are allowed the freedom of the open air during certain specified hours. At the expiry of this time they must withdraw to their houses: Ave Maria is in many cases the retiring hour. Another tyrannical proceeding on the part of the Government, which was productive of wide-spread misery, was the compelling hundreds of people, from the labourer to the man in business, to leave Rome for their place of birth. These measures, which would have been oppressive under any circumstances, were rendered still more oppressive by the shortness of the notice given to those on whom this sentence of expulsion fell. Some had twenty-four hours, and others thirty-six, to prepare for their departure. The labourer might plead that he had no money, and must beg his way with wife and children. The man in business might justly represent that to eject him in this summary fashion was just to ruin him; for his business could not be properly wound up; it must be sacrificed. But no appeal was sustained; no remonstrance was listened to. The stern mandate must be obeyed, though the poor man should die on the road. Go he must, or be conveyed in irons. And, as regards those who were fortunate enough to reach their native villages, alas! their sufferings did then but begin. These villages, in most cases, did not need them, and could afford no opening in the line of business or of labour in which they had been trained. They were houseless and workless in their native place; and, if they did not die of a broken heart, which many of them did, they went "into the country," as they say in Italy,--that is, they became brigands, or are at this hour dragging out the remainder of their lives in poverty and wretchedness. How atrociously, too, have many of the Romans been carried from their business to prison. Against these men neither proof nor witness existed; but a spy had denounced them, or they had fallen under the suspicions of the Government, and there they are in the dungeon. Their families might starve, their business might go to the dogs, but the vengeance of the Government must be satiated. Such persons are confined for a longer or shorter period, according to the view taken of their character or associates; and if nothing be elicited by the secret ordeal of examination, the prison-door is opened, and the prisoner is requested to go home. No apology is offered; no redress is obtained. Such cases, I was told, were numerous. One such came to my knowledge through Mr Stewart. An acquaintance of his, a druggist, was one day dragged summarily from his business, and lodged in jail, where he was detained a whole month, although to this hour he has not been told what he had done, or said, or thought amiss. During the Constitution this man had been called in, in his scientific capacity simply, to superintend an electric telegraph which ran, if I mistake not, betwixt the Capitol and St Peter's. But beyond this he had taken no political action and expressed no political sentiment whatever. He knew well that this would avail him nothing; and glad he was to escape from incarceration with the remark, _meno male, alias_, it might have been worse. They say that the Inquisition was an affair of the sixteenth century; that its fires are cold; its racks and screws are rusted; and that it would be just as impossible to bring back the Inquisition as to bring back the centuries in which it flourished. That is fine talking; and there are simpletons who believe it. But look at Rome. What is the Government of the Papal States, but just the Government of the Inquisition? There there are midnight apprehensions, secret trials, familiars, torture by flogging, by loading with irons, and other yet more refined modes of cruelty,--in short, all the machinery of the Holy Office. The canon law, whose full blessing Italy now enjoys, is the Inquisition; for wherever the one comes, there the other will follow it. Let me describe the secresy and terror with which apprehensions are made at Rome. The forms of the Inquisition are closely followed herein. The deed is one of darkness, and the darkest hours of the twenty-four, namely, from twelve till two of the morning, are taken for its perpetration. At midnight half a dozen _sbirri_ proceed to the house of the unhappy man marked out for arrest. Two take their place at the door, two at the windows, and two at the back-door, to make all sure. They knock gently at the door. If it is opened, well; if not, they knock a second time. If still it is not opened, it is driven in by force. The _sbirri_ rush in; they seize the man; they drag him from his bed; there is no time for parting adieus with his family; they hurry him through the streets to prison. That very night, or the next, his trial is proceeded with,--that is, when it is intended that there shall be further proceedings; for many, as we have said, are imprisoned for long months, without either accusation or trial. But what a mockery is the trial! The prisoner is never confronted with his accuser, or with the impeaching witnesses. He is allowed no opportunity of disproving the charge; sometimes he is not even informed what that charge is. He has no means of defending his life. He has no doubt an advocate to defend him; but the advocate is always nominated by the court, and is usually taken from the partizans of the Government; and nothing would astonish him more than that he should succeed in bringing off his prisoner. And even when he honestly wishes to serve him, what can he do? He has no exculpatory witnesses; he has had no time to expiscate facts; the evidence for the prosecution is handed to him in court; and he can make only such observations as occur at the moment, knowing all the while that the prisoner's fate is already determined on. Sometimes the prisoner, I was told, is not even produced in court, but remains in his cell while his liberty and life are hanging in the balance. At day-break his prison-door opens, and the jailor enters, holding in his hand a little slip of paper. Ah! well does the prisoner know what that is. He snatches it hastily from the jailor's hands, hurries with it to his grated window, through which the day is breaking, holds it up with trembling hands, and reads his doom. He is banished, it may be, or he is sentenced to the galleys; or, more wretched still, he is doomed to the scaffold. Unhappy man! 'twas but last eve that he laid him down in the midst of his little ones, not dreaming of the black cloud that hung above his dwelling; and now by next dawn he is in the Pope's dungeons, parted from all he loves, most probably for ever, and within a few hours of the galleys or the scaffold. I saw these men taken out of Rome morning by morning,--that is, such of them as were banished. They passed under the windows of my own apartment in the Via Babuino. I have seen as many as twenty-four led away of a morning. They were put by half-dozens into carts, to which they were tied by twos, and chained together, as if they had been brigands. Thus they moved on to the Flaminian gate, each cart escorted by a couple of mounted gendarmes. The spectacle, alas! was too common to find spectators; not a Roman followed it, or showed that he was conscious of it, save by a mournful look at the melancholy cavalcade from his window, knowing that what was their lot to-day might be his to-morrow. And what the appearance and apparent profession of these men? Those I saw had much the air of intelligent and respectable artizans; for I believe it is this class that are now bearing the brunt of the papal tyranny. The higher classes were swept off before, and the rage of the Government is now venting itself in a lower and wider sphere. An intelligent Scotchman, who had charge of the one iron-shop in the Corso, informed me that now all the tolerably skilled workmen had been so weeded out of the city by the Pope, that it was scarce possible to find hands to do the little work that requires to be done in Rome. If there be among my readers a mechanic who has been indifferent to the question between this country and the Papacy, as one the settlement of which could not affect his interests either way, I tell him he never made a greater mistake all his life. If the Papacy succeed, his interests will be the very first to suffer, in the ruin of trade. Nor will that suffice; if a skilled man, he will be held to be a dangerous man; and, having taken from him his bread, the Papacy will next take from him his liberty, as she is now doing to his brethren in Rome. And what becomes of the families of these unhappy men? This is the most painful part of the business. Their livelihood is gone; and nothing remains but to go out into the street and beg,--to beg, alas! from beggars. It is not unfrequent in Rome to find families in competence this week, and literally soliciting alms the next. You may see matrons deeply veiled, that they may not be known by their acquaintances, hanging on at the doors of hotels, in the hope of receiving the charity of English travellers. Shame on the tyranny that has reduced the Roman matrons to this! Nor is even this the worst. Deprived of their protectors, moral ruin sometimes comes in the wake of the physical privations and sufferings by which these families are overtaken. Thus the misery of Rome is widening every day. Ah! could I bring before my readers the picture of that doomed city;--could I show them Rome as it sits cowering beneath the shadow of this terrible tyranny;--could I make them see the cloud that day and night hangs above it;--could I paint the sorrow that darkens every face; the suspicion and fear that sadden the Roman's every word and look;--could I tell the number of the broken hearts and the desolate hearths which these old walls enclose;--ah, there is not one among my readers who would not give me his tears as plenteously as ever the clouds of heaven gave their rain. And he who styles himself God's Vicar sees all this misery! Sees it, do I say! he is the author of it. It is to uphold his miserable throne that these prisons are filled, and that these widows and orphans cry in the streets. And yet he tells us that his reign is a model of Christ's reign. 'Tis a fearful blasphemy. When did Christ build dungeons, or gather _sbirri_ about him, or send men to the galleys and the scaffold? Is that the account which we have of his ministry? No; it is very different. "The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound." A few months ago, when the Pope proclaimed his newest invented dogma,--the Immaculate Conception,--he gave, in honour of the occasion, a grand jubilee to the Roman Catholic world. We all know what a jubilee is. There is a vast treasury above, filled with the merits of Pio Nono and of such as he, out of which those who have not enough for their own salvation may supplement their deficiencies. At the Pope's girdle hangs the key of this treasury; and when he chooses to open it, straightway down there comes a shower of celestial blessings. Well, the Pope told his children throughout the world that he meant to unlock this treasury; and bade his children be ready to receive with open arms and open hearts, this vast beneficence of his. Ah! Pio Nono, this is not the jubilee we wish. Draw your bolts; break the fetters of your thirty thousand captives; open your dungeons, and give back the fathers, the husbands, the sons, the brothers, which you have torn from their families. Put off your robe, quit your palace, take the Bible in your hand, and go round the world preaching the gospel, as your Master did. Do this, and we shall have had a jubilee such as the world has not seen for many a long year. But ah! you but mock us,--bitterly, cruelly mock us,--when you deny us blessings which it is in your power to give, and offer us those which are not yours to bestow. But it is a mockery which will return, and at no distant day, in sevenfold vengeance upon, we say not Pio Nono, but the papal system. Untie the fetters of these men; make them free for but a few hours; and with what terrible emphasis will they demand back the friends whom the Papacy has buried in dungeons or murdered on the open scaffold! They will seek their lost sons and brothers with an eye that will not pity, and a hand that will not spare. CHAPTER XXVII. EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE PAPAL STATES. Education of a Roman Boy--Seldom taught his Letters--Majority of Romans unable to Read--Popular Literature of Italy--- Newspaper of the Roman States--Censorship of the Press--Studies in the Collegio Romano--Rome unknown at Rome--Schools spring up under the Republic--Extinguished on the Return of the Pope--Conversation with three Roman Boys--Their Ideas respecting the Creator of the World, Christ, the Virgin--Questions asked at them in the Confessional--Religion in the Roman States--Has no Existence--Ceremony mistaken for Devotion--Irreverence--The Six Commands of the Church--Contrast betwixt the Cost and the Fruits of the Papal Religion--Popular Hatred of the Papacy. The influence of Romanism on trade, and industry, and justice, has been less frequently a theme of discussion than its influence on knowledge. While, therefore, I have dwelt at considerable length on the former, I shall be very brief under the present head. I shall here adduce only a few facts which I had occasion to see or hear during my stay in the Papal States. The few schoolmasters which are found in Italy are not a distinct class, as with us; they are priests, and mostly Jesuits. There are three classes of catechisms used in the schools; the pupil beginning with the lowest, and of course finishing off with the highest. But of what subjects do these catechisms treat? A little history, one would say, that the pupil may have some notion of what has been before him; and a little geography, that he may know there are such things as land and sea, and cities beyond, which he cannot see, shut up in Rome. With us, the lowest amount of education that ever receives the name comprises at least the three R's, as they are termed,--Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic. But these are far too mundane matters for a Jesuit to occupy his time in expounding. The education of the Italian youth is a thoroughly religious one, taking the term in its Roman sense. The little catechisms I have spoken of are filled with the weightier matters of their law,--the miracles wrought by the staff of this saint, the cloak of that other, and the relics of a third; the exalted rank of the Virgin, and the homage thereto appertaining; Transubstantiation, with all the uncouth and barbarous jargon of "substances" and "accidents" in which that mystery is wrapped up. An initiation into these matters forms the education of the Roman boy; and after he has been locked up in school for a certain length of time, he is turned adrift, to begin the usual aimless life of the Italian. It does not follow, because he has been at school, that he can read. He is seldom taught his letters; better not, lest in after life he should come in contact with books. And, despite the vigilance of the censorship and the Index, bad books, such as the Bible, are finding their way into the Roman States; and it is better, therefore, not to entrust the people with the key of knowledge; for nothing is so useless as knowledge under an infallible Church. The matters which the Italian youth are taught they are taught by rote. "Ignorance is the mother of devotion,"--a maxim sometimes quoted with a sneer, but one which embodies a profound truth as regards that kind of devotion which is prevalent at Rome. I have seen estimates by Gavazzi and other Italians, of the proportion who can read in the Roman States. It is somewhere about one in a hundred. The reader will take the statement at what it is worth. I had no means of testing its accuracy; but all my inquiries on the subject led me to believe that the overwhelming majority cannot read. And where is the use of learning one's letters in a land where there are no books; and there are none that deserve the name in Rome. The book-stalls in Italy are heaped with the veriest rubbish: the "Book of Dreams," "Rules for Winning at the Lottery," "The Five Dolours of the Virgin," "Tracts on the Miracles of the Saints," "Relations," professedly given by Christ about his sufferings, and said to have been found in his sepulchre, and in other places equally likely. At Rome, on the streets at least, where all other kinds of rubbish are tolerated, even this rubbish is not suffered to exist; for there, book-stalls I saw none. There are, however, one or two miserable book-shops where these things may be had. There was but one newspaper (so called, I presume, because it contained no news) published in Rome at the time of my visit,--the _Giornale di Roma_, which, I presume, still occupies the field alone. It contains a daily list of the arrivals and departures (foreigners, of course, for the gates of Rome never open to the Romans), the proclamations of the Government, the days of the lottery, and such matters. Under the foreign head were chronicled the consecration of Catholic temples, the visits of royal personages, a profound silence being observed on all political facts and speculations. And this is all the Romans can know, through legitimate channels, of what is going on beyond the walls of Rome. A daily paper was started during the Republic, and admirably managed; but, of course, it was suppressed on the return of the Papal Government. A few copies of the _Times_ reach Rome every morning. They are not given out till towards mid-day, for they must first be read; and if the "editorials" are not to the taste of the Sacred College, they are not given out at all. The paper, during my short stay, was stopped for nearly a week on end; and the disappointment was the greater, that rumours were then current in Rome that something was on the tapis in Paris, and that the change in the constitution of France, whatever it might be, would not be postponed till the May of 1852, as was then believed in the north of Europe, but would be attempted in the beginning of December 1851. The tidings of the _coup d'etat_, which met me on the morning of the 3d December in the south of France, brought the full realization of these rumours. In the _Giornale di Roma_ not a strayed dog can be advertised without permission of the censor. In Brescia there is a censorship for gravestones; and in Rome a strict watch is kept over the English burying-ground, lest any one should write a verse of Scripture above a heretic's grave. The expression of thought is more dreaded than brigandage. Those who aspire to the learned professions go to the Collegio Romano. But let the reader mark how the Roman Church here, as everywhere else, contrives to keep up the show of educating, and takes care all the while to impart the smallest possible amount of knowledge,--constructs a machinery which, through some mischievous perversion, is without results. The Collegio Romano has a numerous staff of professors, who prelect on theology, logic, history, mathematics, natural philosophy, and other branches. This looks well; but observe its working. All the lectures are delivered in Latin, which differs considerably from the modern Italian; and as the Roman youth spend only one year in the study of the Latin tongue before entering the Collegio Romano, the lectures might nearly as well, so far as the run of the students is concerned, be in Arabic. Nine-tenths of the young men leave the Collegio Romano as learned as they entered it. The higher priesthood are educated at the _Sapienza_, where, I believe, a thorough training in theological dialectics is given. It is impossible not to see that the Italians are a people of quick perceptions, lively sensibilities, and warm and kindly dispositions; but it is just as impossible not to see that they are deplorably untaught. The stranger is mortified to find that he knows far more of their ruins and of their past history than they themselves do. The peasant wanders over the huge mounds that diversify the Seven Hills, or traverses the Appian, or passes under the arch of Titus, without knowing or caring who erected these structures, or having even a glimmering of the heroic story in which they were, so to speak, the actors. When he looks back into the past, all is night. Nowhere is Rome so little known as in Rome itself. How different was it when the Pope received Italy! Then Italy occupied the van of civilization. And when the Byzantine empire fell, and the scholars of the East fled westward, carrying with them the rich treasures of the Greek language and literature, learning had a second morning in Italy. Famous colleges arose, to which the youth of Europe repaired. Philosophers and poets of imperishable name shed a lustre upon the country; but the Roman Church soon discovered that Italy was acquiring knowledge at the expense of its Romanism, and she applied the band to the national mind. And now that same Italy that once held aloft the lamp of knowledge to the world is herself in darkness, and, sad sight! is seen, with quenched orbs, groping about in the midnight. And yet proofs are not wanting to show that, were the interdict of the Church taken off, Italy would at once throw herself into the race, and might soon rival the most successful of her contemporaries. Most of my readers, I doubt not, are familiar with the name of M. Leone Levi, now engaged on the great work of the codification of the commercial laws of the three kingdoms, and their assimilation to the continental codes. The fact I am now to state, and which speaks volumes as regards the efforts of "the Church" to educate Italy, I had from this gentleman; and to those who know him, any testimony of mine to his intelligence and uprightness is superfluous. M. Leone Levi, an Italian Jew, was born at Ancona, but eventually settled in England. During the Roman Republic, he paid a visit to Italy. But such a change! He scarce knew his native Italy,--it was so unlike the Italy he had left. In every town, and village, and rural district, schools had sprung up since the fall of the Pontifical Government. There were day-schools and night-schools, week-day-schools and Sabbath-schools. The young men and young women had forgotten their "light loves," and were busied in educating themselves, and in educating the little boys and girls below them. The country appeared to have resolved itself into a great educational institute. He was inexpressibly delighted. Such a change he had never dared to hope for in his native land. But ah! back came the Pope; and in a week,--in one short week,--every one of these schools was closed. The Roman youth are again handed over to the Jesuit. Italy is again sunk in its old torpor and stagnation; and one black cloud of barbaric ignorance extends from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. I sat down one day on the steps of the temple of Vesta, which, though gray and crumbling with age, is one of the most beautiful of the ruins of Rome. Three boys came about me to beg a few baiocchi. The youngest boy, I found, was ten years, and the oldest fifteen. I took the opportunity of putting a few questions to them, judging them a fair sample of the Roman youth. My queries were pitched low enough. "Can you tell me," I asked, "who made the world?" The question started a subject on which they seemed never to have thought before. They stood in a muse for some seconds; and then all three looked round them, as if they expected to see the world's Maker, or to read His name somewhere. At last the youngest and smartest of the three spoke briskly up,--"The masons, Signor." It was now my turn to feel the excitement of a new idea. Yet I thought I could see the train of thought that led to the answer. The masons had made the baths of Caracalla; the masons had made the Coliseum, and those other stupendous structures which in bulk rival the hills, and seem as eternal as the earth on which they rest; and why might not the masons have made the whole affair? I might have puzzled the boy by asking, "But who made the masons?" My object, however, was simply to ascertain the amount of his knowledge. I demurred to the proposition that the masons had made the world, and desired them to try again. They did try again, and at last the eldest of the three found his way to the right answer,--"God." "Have you ever heard of Christ?" I asked. "Yes." "Who is he? Can you tell me anything about him?" I could elicit nothing under these heads. "Whose Son is he?" I then asked. "He is Mary's Son," was the reply. "Where is Christ?" I inquired. "He is on the Cross," replied the boy, folding his arms, and making the representation of a crucifix. "Was Christ ever on earth?" I asked. He did not know. "Are you aware of anything he ever did?" He had never heard of anything that Christ had done. I saw that he was thinking of those hideous representations which are to be seen in all the churches of Rome, of a man hanging on a cross. That was the Christ of the boys. Of Christ the Son of the living God,--of Christ the Saviour of sinners,--and of his death as an atonement for human guilt,--they had never heard. In a city swarming with professed ministers of the gospel, these boys knew no more of Christianity than if they had been Hottentots. I next inquired respecting Mary, and here the boys seemed more at home. "Who is she?" "She is God's mother." "Where is she?" "She is in that church," pointing to the church on one side of the piazza,--the Bocca di Verita, if I mistake not,--before which criminals are sometimes executed; "and in that," pointing to the church on the other side of the piazza. "She is here, there, everywhere." "Was Mary ever on earth?" "Yes," was the answer. "What did she do when here?" "Oh," replied the little boy, "that is an antique affair: I was not here then." "Do you go to church?" I asked the eldest boy. "Yes." "Do you take the sacrament?" "I have taken it four times." I learned afterwards that the priests are attempting to seize upon the rising generation in Italy, by compelling all the children from twelve years and upwards to go to mass. "Do you go to confession?" I next asked. "Yes, I confess." "Do other boys and girls, your acquaintances, go to confession?" "Yes, all go," he replied. "We meet the priest in church on Sabbath, and he tells us when to come and confess." "Well, when you go to confess, what does the priest ask you?" "He asks me if I steal, and do other bad actions." "When you confess that you have done a bad action, what then?" "The first time I do it, the priest pardons me." "If you confess it a second time, what happens?" "The second time he beats me with a rod." "Does the priest ask you about anything else?" I inquired. "Yes," he rejoined; "he asks me about my father and my mother." "What does he ask you about them?" "He asks me if they do dirty actions," said the boy. Now, here the enormity and vileness of the confessional peeped out. Here one can see how the confessor can look into every hearth, and into every heart, in Rome. The priests had dragged this young boy into their den, and taught him to play the spy on his father and mother. The hand that fed him, the bosom that cherished him, he must learn to betray. I appeal to the fathers and mothers of Britain, whether, than see their children degraded to such infamous purposes, they would not an hundred times rather see them laid in the silent grave. Yet some are labouring to introduce the confessional among us. Should they succeed, it will be the garrotte on the throat of English liberty. As regards RELIGION in Italy, this is an inquiry that lies rather beyond the limits I have marked out for myself. I may be permitted, however, a few remarks. It appeared to me that the very idea of religion had perished among the Italians. Not only had they lost the thing itself, but they had lost the power of conceiving of it. Religion unquestionably is a state of mind towards God; and devotion is a mental act resulting from that state of mind. We cannot conceive of an automaton performing an act of devotion, or of being religious; and yet, if religion be what it is taken to be at Rome, there is nothing to hinder an automaton being religious, nay, far more religious than flesh and blood, inasmuch as timber and iron will not so soon wear out under incessant crossings and genuflections. Religion at Rome is to kiss a crucifix; religion at Rome is to climb Pilate's stairs; religion at Rome is to repeat by rote a certain number of prayers before some beautiful painting or statue; or to remain a certain number of hours on one's bare knees on the paved floor; or to wear a hair-shirt. Of religion as a mental act,--as an act of faith, and love, and reverence,--the Italian is not able to form even the idea. Hence the want of decorum that shocks a stranger on visiting the Italian churches. He finds bishops at the altar unable to restrain their sallies of wit and their bursts of laughter. And after this, what can he look for among the ordinary worshippers? The young man can go through his devotions perfectly well, and make love all the while to the young woman at his side. Young ladies can count their beads to the Virgin, and continue their gossip on matters of dress or scandal. It never occurs to them that this in the least deteriorates their worship. The beads have been counted, and an Ave Maria said with each; and what more does the Church require? Religion as a feeling of the mind, and devotion as an act of the soul, are unknown to them. I recollect meeting in the rural lanes leading from St John Lateran to the church of Maria Maggiore, a small party of Roman girls, who were strangely mixing mirth and worship,--chatting, laughing, and singing hymns to the Virgin,--just as Scotch maidens on a harvest field might diversify their labours with "Home, Sweet Home," or any other air. This irreverent familiarity shows itself in other ways, after the manner of the ancient pagans, who took strange liberties with their gods. When the drawing of the lottery is about to take place, the Romans most devoutly supplicate the Virgin for success; but should their number come out a blank, they may be heard reviling her in the open street, and applying to her every conceivable epithet of abuse. So far as the moral code of Romanism is concerned, sinless perfection is no difficult attainment. The commands of the Church are six; and these six have quite thrown into the shade the ten of the decalogue. They are the payment of tithes,--the not marrying in the prohibited seasons,--the hearing of mass on Sundays and festivals,--the keeping of the prescribed fasts,--confession once a-year at least,--and the taking of the communion in Easter week. The last two are strictly enforced. On the approach of Easter, the priest goes round and gives a ticket to every parishioner; and if these are not returned through the confessional, a policeman waits on the person, and tells him that he has been remiss in his religious duties, and must submit himself to the Church's discipline, which he, the Church's officer, has come to administer to him in the Church's penitentiary or dungeons. Innumerable are the methods taken by the Romans to evade confession, among which the more common is to hire some one to confess for them. Others, though they go, confess nothing of moment. "You all here believe in the Pope and purgatory," I remarked to a commissario one day. "A few old women do," he replied. "Do _you_ not believe in them?" I asked. "I believe in one God; but I do not believe in one priest," said he. "I hope you will say so next time you go to confession," I observed. "I don't confess," he replied. "How can you avoid confessing?" I enquired. "I pay an old woman," he answered, "who can confess for me every day if she pleases." There is not a greater contrast in the world than that which exists betwixt the cost of the papal religion and its fruits,--betwixt the numbers and wealth of the clergy, and the knowledge and morality of the people. Under these heads we append below some very instructive notices.[8] In fine, one word will suffice to describe the religion of Rome; and that word is ATHEISM. There may be exceptions, but as a general rule the Romans believe in nothing. And how can it be otherwise? Of the gospel they know absolutely nothing beyond what the priest tells them; even that he, the priest, can change a wafer into God, and, by giving it to people to eat, can save them from hell. This the Romans cannot believe; and therefore their creed is a negation. In the room of indifference, which could not be said to believe or disbelieve, because it never thought on the subject, has now come intense hatred of the Papacy, from the destruction of the nation's hopes under Pio Nono. He who seven years ago heard the streets of Rome echoing to the cry that she alone was _La Regina delle Genti_,--"sat a queen, and should see no sorrow,"--can best form an estimate of the terrible re-action that has followed the tumult of that hour, and can best understand how it has happened, that now the hatred wherewith the Italians hate the Papacy is greater than the love wherewith they loved it. Tradition, by its fooleries,--the mass, by its monstrosity,--the priest, by his immoralities,--and, above all, the Pope, by his perfidy and tyranny,--have made the papal religion to stink in the nostrils of the great mass of the Roman people. You might as well look for religion in pandemonium itself, as in a country groaning under such a complication of vices and miseries. Nay, there is more faith in pandemonium than in Rome; for we are told that the devils believe and tremble; but in Rome, generally speaking, there is faith in nothing. And for this fearful state of matters the Papacy, beyond all question, is responsible. CHAPTER XXVIII. MENTAL STATE OF THE PRIESTHOOD IN ITALY. First Impressions in Rome erroneous--The unseen Rome--Her devotement to one thing--In what light do the Priests in Italy regard their own System?--Can they possibly believe their Cheats to be Miracles?--A goodly number of the Priests Infidels--Others never thought on the subject--Some have strong Misgivings--Others convinced of the Falsehood of that Church, but lack Courage or Opportunity to leave it--Making Allowance for all these Classes, the Majority of Priests do believe in their System--The Explanation of this--The real Ruler in the Church of Rome, not the Pope, nor the Cardinals, nor the Jesuits, but the System--Human Machinery--The Pontiff--The College of Cardinals--Antonelli--The Bishops and Priests--The Jesuits--Their Activity and Importance at Rome--Their Appearance described. When an Englishman visits the Eternal City, he is very apt, during the first days of his sojourn, to underrate the power and influence of the Papal system. At home he has been used to see power associated with splendour, and surrounded with the fruits and monuments of intelligence. At Rome everything on which he sets his eye bears marks of a growing barbarism and decay. Outside the walls of the city is a vast desert, attesting the utter extinction of industry. Within is an air of stagnation and idleness, which bespeaks the utter absence of all mental activity. A very considerable portion of the population have no occupation but begging. The naked heads, necks, and feet of the monks and friars are offensive from want of cleanliness. The higher ecclesiastics even are coarse and vulgar men. The fine monuments reared by the taste and wealth of former ages want keeping. Their churches, despite the paintings and statuary with which they are filled, are rendered disagreeable by the beggars that haunt them, and the incense that is continually burned in them. Their very processions do not rise above a tawdry half-barbaric grandeur; and one must be far gone in the Puseyite malady before such exhibitions can inspire him with anything like reverence. The visitor looks around on this strange scene, so unlike what his imagination had pictured, and exclaims, "Where and in what lies the secret of this city's power?" Here there is neither art, nor industry, nor wealth, nor knowledge! Here all the bodily and all the mental faculties of man appear to be folded up in a worse than mediæval stupor. Where are the elements of that power for which this city is renowned, and by which she is able to thwart and control the civilized and powerful Governments of the north of Europe? Would, says he to himself, that those who venerate Rome when divided from her by the Alps and the ocean, would come here and see with their own eyes her contemptible vileness and inconceivable degradation; and that those statesmen who are moved by a secret fear to bow the knee to her, would come hither and mark the baseness of her before whom they are content to lower the honour and independence of their country! Such, we say, are the first impressions of the visitor to Rome. But a few days suffice to correct this erroneous estimate. The person looks around him; he looks below him. There he discovers the real Rome. It is not the Rome that is seen,--it is the Rome that is unseen,--before which the nations tremble. Beneath his feet are tremendous agencies at work. There are the pent-up fires that shake the globe. Rome, cut off from all the world, and surrounded by leagues of silent and blackened deserts, is the centre of energies that rest not day nor night, and the action of which is felt at the very extremities of the earth. It seems, indeed, as if Rome had been set free from all the anxieties and labours which occupy the minds and hands of the rest of the world, of very purpose that she might attend to only one thing. The labours of the husbandman and the artificer she has forborne. Like the lilies of the field, she toils not, neither does she spin. She sits in the midst of her deserts, like the sorceress on the heath, or the conspirator in his den, hatching plots against the world. Rome is the pandemonium of the earth, and the Pope is the Lucifer of the world's drama. Fallen he is from the heaven of power and grandeur which he occupied in the twelfth century; and he and his compeers lie sunk in a very gulph of anarchy and barbarism. Lifting up his eyes, he beholds afar off the happy nations of Protestantism, reaping the reward of a free Bible and a free Government, in the riches of their commerce and the stability of their power. The sight is tormenting and intolerable, and the pontiff is stung thereby into ceaseless attempts to retrieve his fall. If he cannot mount to his old seat, and sit there once more in superhuman pride and unapproachable power above the bodies and the souls of men, he may at least hope to draw down those he so much envies into the same gulph with himself. Hence the villanies and plots of all kinds of which Rome is full, and which form a source of danger to the nations of Christendom, from which they may hope to be delivered only when the Papacy shall have been finally destroyed. What I propose here is to sketch the _mental state_ of the priests of Italy, so far as my opportunities enabled me to judge. The subject is more recondite than the foregoing; the facts are less accessible; and my statements must partake more of the inferential than did those embraced in the former branches of the subject. The first question that arises is, in what light do the priests in Italy regard their own system? Do they look upon it as an unrivalled compound of imposture and tyranny,--a cunning invention for procuring mitres, tiaras, purple robes, and other good things for themselves? or do they regard it as indeed founded in truth, and clothed with the sanction of heaven? They are behind the scenes, and have access to see and hear many things which are not meant for the eye and ear of the public. The man who pulls the strings of a winking Madonna can scarce persuade himself, one should think, that the movement that follows is the effect of supernatural power. The priest who liquefies the blood of St Januarius by the warmth of his hand or the warmth of the fire, must know that what he has performed is neither more nor less than a very ordinary juggle. The monk who falls a rummaging in the Catacombs, or in any of the old graveyards about Rome, and finds there a parcel of decayed bones, which he passes off as those of Saint Theodosia or Saint Anathanasius, but which are as likely to be the bones of an old pagan, or a Goth, or a brigand, can hardly believe, one should suppose, his own tale. If the Pope believes in his own relics, what conceptions must he have of Peter? What a strange configuration of body must he believe the apostle to have had! Peter must have been a man with some dozen of heads; with a score of arms, and a hundred fingers or so on each arm; in short, a perfect realization of the old pagan fable of the giant Briareus. The Pope must believe this, or he must believe that he gives his attestation to what is not true. Above all, one can hardly imagine it possible that any man in whom reason had not been utterly quenched could believe in the monstrous dogma of transubstantiation. What! can a priest at any hour he pleases give existence to Him who exists from eternity? Can he enclose within a little silver box that Almighty One whom the heaven, even the heaven of heavens, cannot contain? Let a man confess at the bar of the High Court of Edinburgh that he believes himself to be God, and the Court will pronounce that that man is insane, and will hold him incompetent to manage his affairs. And yet every Roman Catholic priest professes to believe a more startling dogma,--even that he is the creator of God. And yet, instead of calling that insanity, we must, I suppose, call it religion. Seeing, then, the priests are called every day to do things which their senses must tell them are juggles, and to profess their belief in dogmas which their reason must tell them are monstrous and blasphemous absurdities, is it possible, you ask, that the priests in Italy can believe in their own system? I must here say, that I do think the majority of them do believe in it. A goodly number of the priests of Italy are infidels. They no more believe in the Pope than they believe in the pagan Jupiter. But then, were they to speak out their disbelief, and to say that purgatory is a mere bugbear for frightening men and getting their money, they know that a dungeon would instantly be their lot; and infidelity has little of the martyr spirit in it. These men, like Leo the Tenth, as thorough an infidel as ever lived, hold that it would be the height of folly to quarrel with a fable that brings them so much gain. Others are mere worldly men. They were never at the pains to inquire whether their system is true or false. They sing their mass in the morning; they pass their forenoons at the café, sipping coffee, and taking a hand at cards; a stoup of wine washes down a substantial dinner; and, after a saunter along the Corso, or an airing on the Pincian, they doff their clerical vestments, and go to sup with the nuns, who have the reputation of being excellent cooks. Others there are whose minds are occasionally visited by strong misgivings. The cloud, so to speak, will open for a moment, and reveal to their astonished sight, not the majestic form of Truth, but a gigantic and monstrous imposture. A mysterious hand at times lifts the veil, and lo! they find themselves in the presence, not of a divinity, but of a demon. They disclose their doubts when they next go to confession. My son, says the father confessor, these are the suggestions of the Evil One. You must arm yourself against the Tempter by fasting and penance. A hair shirt or an iron girdle is called in to silence the voice of reason and the remonstrances of conscience; and here the matter ends. And there are a few--in every age there have been a few such--in the Church of Rome, and at present they are very considerably on the increase, who, in the midst of darkness, by some wondrous means have seen the light. A tract, a Bible, or some Protestant friend whom Providence had thrown in their way, or some one of the few passages of Scripture inserted in their Breviary, may have taught them a better way than that of Rome. Instead of stopping short at the altar of Mary, or at any of the thousand shrines which Rome has erected as so many barriers between the sinner and God, they go at once to the Divine mercy-seat, and pour their supplications direct into the ear of the Great Mediator. You ask, why do these men remain in a Church which they see to be apostate? Fain would they fly, but they know not how or where. They lift their eyes to the Alps on the one side,--to the ocean on the other. Alas! they may surmount these barriers; but more difficult still than to scale the mountains or to traverse the ocean is it to escape beyond the power of Rome. Woe to the unhappy man who begins to feel his fetters! He awakes to find that he is in a wide prison, with a sentinel posted at every outlet: escape seems hopeless; and the man buries his secret in his breast. Some few there are who, more daring by nature, or specially strengthened from above, adventure on the immense hazards of flight. Of these, some are caught, thrown into a dungeon, and are heard of no more. Others find their way to England, or some other Protestant State. But here new trials await them. They are ignorant of our language perhaps. They find themselves among strangers, whose manners seem to them cold and distant. They are without means of living; and, carrying with them too, it may be, some of the stains of their former profession, they encounter difficulties which are the more stumbling that they are unexpected. On these various grounds, the number of priests who leave the Church of Rome has been, and always will be, small, till some great revolution or upbreak takes place in that Church. But, making the most ample allowance for all these classes,--for the men who are atheists and infidels,--for the mere worldings, whose only tie to their Church is the gain it brings them,--and for those who are either doubters, or whose doubts have passed into full conviction that the Church of the Pope is not the Church of Jesus Christ,--making, I say, full allowance for all these, I have little doubt that the majority of the priests in Italy,--it may be not much more than a majority, but still a majority,--are sincere believers in their system. They are not ignorant of the frauds, the knaveries, the fables, and hypocrisies, by which that system is supported. They cannot shut their eyes to these, which they regard, in fact, as sanctified by the end to which they are devoted; but they separate between these and the system itself; and though they cannot tell the line where truth ends and falsehood begins, still they look upon their system, on the whole, as founded in truth, and carrying with it the sanction of Heaven. Indeed, belief is a weak term to express the power the system has over them. It is rather a paralyzing awe, a freezing terror, like that with which his grim deity inspires the barbarian, which holds captive the strongest mind, and lays reason and conscience prostrate in the dust. Such I believe to be the state of mind of the greater number of the Italian priesthood. But how comes this? What is it which has produced this universal slavery? Is it the Pope? Is it the cardinals? Is it the Jesuits? No; for these men, though the tyrants of others, are themselves slaves. All are bound by the same chain of adamant, to the car of the same demon. A mournful procession of dead men truly, with the triple crown in front, and the sandals of the barefooted Capuchin bringing up the rear. What is it, I repeat, that holds the whole body in subjection, from the Pope down to the friar? It is the system, the abstract system, with its overwhelming prestige,--that system which lives on though popes die; the genius of the Papacy, if you will. This is the real monarch of that spiritual kingdom. A little power of mental abstraction,--and the subtile genius of the Italian gives him that power in a high degree,--will enable any one to separate betwixt the system and its agents. Some one has remarked, that he could form an abstraction of a lord mayor, not only without his horse, and gown, and gold chain, but even without the stature, features, hands, and feet of any particular lord mayor. The same can be done of the Papacy. We can form an abstraction of the Papacy not only without the tiara and the keys, but even without the stature and lineaments, the hands and feet, of any particular Pope. When we have formed such an abstraction, we have got the real ruler of the Papacy. That it is the system that is the dominant power in the Church of Rome, is evident from this one fact, namely, that councils have sometimes deposed the Pope to save the Papacy. There is in the Pope's kirk, then, a power greater than the Pope. The system has taken body and shape, as it were, and sits upon the Seven Hills, a mysterious, awe-inspiring divinity or demon; and the Pope, equally with the friar, bows his head and does obeisance. Wherever the pontiff looks,--whether backward into history, or around him in the world,--there are the monuments of this ever living, ever present, and all pervading power. It requires more force than the mind of fallen man is capable of, to believe that a system which has filled history with its deeds and the world with its trophies, which has compelled the homage of myriads and myriads of minds, and before which the haughtiest conquerors and the most puissant intellects have bowed with the docility of children, is, after all, an unreality,--a mere spectre of the middle ages,--a ghost conjured up by credulity and knavery from the tombs of defunct idolatries. This, I say, is the true state of things in Italy. Its priesthood are subdued by their own system,--by its high claims to antiquity,--its world-wide dominion,--its imposing though faded magnificence,--its perverted logic,--its pseudo sanctity. These not only carry it over the reason, but in some degree over the senses also; and the more fully persuaded the priests are of the truth and divinity of their system, they feel only the more fully warranted to employ fraud and force in its support,--the winking Madonna to convince one class, and the dungeon and the iron chain to silence the other. Having spoken of the abstract and spiritual power that reigns over Italy, and, I may say, over the whole Catholic world, let me now speak of the corporeal and human machinery by which the Papacy is carried on. First comes the Pope. Pio Nono is a man of sixty-three. His years and the various misfortunes of his reign sit lightly upon him. Were the Pope much given to reflection, there are not wanting unpleasant topics enough to darken the clear Italian sunlight, as it streams in through the windows of the Vatican palace. Once was he chased from Rome; and now that he is returned, can he call Rome his own? Not he. The real master of Rome is the commandant of the French garrison. And while outside the walls are the dead whom he slew with the sword of France, inside are the living, whose sullen scowl or fierce glare he may see through the French files, as he rides out of an afternoon.[9] But Pio Nono takes all in good part. There is not a wrinkle on his brow; no unpleasant thought appears to shade the jovial light of his broad face. He sits down to dinner with evidently a good appetite; he sleeps soundly at night, and troubles not his poor head by brooding over misfortunes which he cannot mend, or charging himself with the direction of plots which he is not competent to manage. But, if not fitted to take the lead in cabinets, nature has formed him to shine in a procession. He has a portly figure, a face radiant with blandness, dissimulation, and vanity; and he looks every inch the Pope, as he is carried shoulder-high in St Peter's, and sits blazing in his jewelled tiara and purple robes, between two huge fans of peacocks' feathers. To these accomplishments he adds that of a fine voice; and when he gives his blessing from the balcony of St Peter's, or assembles the Romans in the Forum, as he did on a late occasion, when he lifted up hands dripping with his subjects' blood, to call his hearers to repentance, his tones ring out, in the deep calm air of Rome, clear and loud as those of a bell. Such is the man who is the nominal head of the Papacy. We say the _nominal_ head; for such a system as the Papacy, involving the consideration of so many interests, and requiring such skilful steering to clear the rocks and quicksands amid which the bark of Peter is now moving, demands the presence at the helm of a steadier hand and a clearer eye than those of Pio Nono. I come next to the College of Cardinals. In so large a body we find, as might be expected, various grades of both intellectual and moral character; and of course there are the corresponding indications on their faces. An overbearing arrogance, which always communicates to the countenance an air of vulgarity, more or less, is a very prevailing trait. The average intellect in the sacred college is not so high as one would expect in men who have risen to the top of their profession; and for this reason, perhaps, that birth has fully more to do with their elevation than talent or services. One scrutinises their faces curiously when one remembers that these men are the living representatives of the apostles. They profess to hold the rank, to be clothed with the functions, and to inherit the supernatural endowments, of the first inspired preachers. There you may look for the burning eloquence of a Paul, the boldness of a Peter, the love of a John, the humility, patience, zeal, of all. You go round the circle, and examine one by one the faces of these living Pauls and Peters. Verily, if their prototypes were like their modern representatives, the spread of the gospel at first was by far the mightiest miracle the world ever saw. On one you find the unmistakeable marks of sordid appetite and self-indulgence: on another, low intrigue has imprinted the most sinister lines: a third is a mere man of the world;--his prayers and vigils have been kept at the shrine of pleasure. But along with much that is sordid and worldly, there are astute and far-seeing minds in the sacred college; and foremost in this class stands Antonelli. His pale face, and clear, cold, penetrating eye, reveal the presiding genius of the Papacy. He is the Prime Minister of the Pope; and though his is not the brow on which the tiara sits, he is the real head of the system. From his station on the Seven Hills his keen eye watches and directs every movement in the papal world. Those mighty projects which the Papacy is endeavouring to realize in every part of the earth have their first birth in his fertile and daring brain. His family are well known at Rome, and some of his ancestors were men of renown in their own way. His uncle was the most famous Italian brigand of modern times, and his exploits are still celebrated in the popular songs of the country. The occupation of the yet more celebrated nephew is not so dissimilar after all; for what is Antonelli, but the leader of a crew of bandits, whose hordes scour Europe, arrayed in sacerdotal garb, and in the name of heaven rob men of their wealth, their liberty, and their souls, and carry back their booty to their den on the Seven Hills. Next come the Bishops and Priests. These men are the agents and spies of the cardinals, as the cardinals of the Pope. The time which they are required to devote to spiritual, or rather, I should say, to official duties, is small indeed. To study the Scriptures, visit the sick, instruct the people, which form the proper work of ministers of the gospel, are duties altogether unknown in Rome. There, as I have said, they convert and save men, not by preaching, but by giving them wafers to swallow. This is a short and simple process; and when a priest has gone through this pantomime once, he can repeat it all his days after without the slightest preparation. Their time and energies, therefore, can be almost wholly devoted to other work. And what is that work? It is, in short, to propagate their superstition, and rivet the fetters of the priesthood upon the population. The bishops and priests manage the upper classes; and for the lower grades of Romans there are friars and monks of every order and of every colour. The city swarms with these men. The frogs and lice of Egypt were not more numerous, and certainly not more filthy. Unwashed and uncombed, they enter, with their sandalled feet and shaven crowns, every dwelling, and penetrate into every bosom. You see them in the wine-shops; you see them mixing with the populace on the street; while others, with wallets on their backs, may be seen climbing the stairs of the houses, for the double purpose of begging for the poor, but in reality for their own paunch, and of retailing the latest miracle, or some thousand times told legend. Thus the darkness is carried down to the very bottom of society; and while the Pope and his cardinals sit at the summit in gilded glory, the monk, in robe of serge and girdle of rope, is busied at the bottom; and, to support their individual and united action, the priests have two powerful institutions at Rome, like foot soldiers advancing under cover of artillery,--the Confessional and the Inquisition. But emphatically _the_ order at Rome is the Jesuits. They are the prime movers in all that is done there, as well as the keenest supporters of the Papacy in all parts of the world. They are the most indefatigable confessors, as well as the most eloquent preachers. Their regularity is like that of nature itself. Every hour of the day has its duty; and their motions are as punctual as that of the heavenly bodies. Duly every morning as the clock strikes five, they are at the altar or in the confessional. Their head-quarters are at the Gesu. I shall suppose that the reader is passing through the long corridor of that magnificent church. Every three or four paces is a door, leading to a small apartment, which is occupied by a father. Outside each door hangs a sheet of paper, on which the father puts a list of the employments for the day. When he goes out, he sticks a pin opposite the piece of business which has called him away, so that, should any one call and find him not within, he can know at once, by consulting the card, how the father is occupied, and whether he is accessible at that particular time. Among the items of business which usually appear on the card, "conference" is now one of very frequent occurrence, which indicates no inconsiderable amount of business, having reference to foreign parts, at present on the hands of the order. I shall suppose that the reader is passing along the Corso. Has he marked that tall thin man who has just passed him, "Walking in beauty like the night?" There is an air of tidiness in his dress, and of comparative cleanliness on his person. He wears a small round cap, with three corners; or, if a hat, one of large brim. Neither cowl nor scapular fetters his motions; a plain black gown, not unlike a frock-coat, envelopes his person. How softly his footsteps fall! You scarce hear their sound as he glides past you. His face, how unruffled! As the lake, when the winds are asleep, hides under a moveless surface, resplendent as a sheet of gold, the dark caverns at its bottom, so does this calm, impassable face the workings of the heart beneath. This man holds in his hands the threads of a conspiracy which is exploding at that moment, mayhap in China, or in the Pacific, or in Peru, or in London. He is at Rome at present, and appears in his proper form and dress as a Jesuit. But that man can change his country, he can change his tongue, and, Proteus-like, multiply his shapes among mankind. Next year that man whom you now meet on the streets of Rome may be in Scotland in the humble guise of a pedlar, vending at once his earthly and his spiritual wares. Or he may be in England, acting as tutor in some noble family, or in the humbler capacity of body-servant to a gentleman, or, it may be, filling a pulpit in the Church of England. He may be a Protestant schoolmaster in America, a dictator in Paraguay, a travelling companion in France and Switzerland, a Liberal or a Conservative--as best suits his purpose--in Germany, a Brahmin in India, a Mandarin in China. He can be anything and everything,--a believer in every creed, and a worshipper of every god,--to serve his Church. Rome has hundreds of thousands of such men spread over all the countries of the world. With the ring of Gyges, they walk to and fro over the earth, seeing all, yet themselves unseen. They can unlock the cabinets of statesmen, and enter unobserved the closets of princes. They can take their seat in synods and assemblies, and dive into the secrets of families. Their grand work is to sow the seeds of heresies in Churches and of dissensions in States, that, when the harvest of strife and division is fully matured, Rome may come in and reap the fruits. CHAPTER XXIX. SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC CUSTOMS OF THE ROMANS.[10] A Roman House--Wretched Dwellings of Working-Classes--How Working Men spend their Leisure Hours--Roman mode of reckoning Time--Handicrafts and Trades in Rome--Meals--Breakfast, Dinner, &c.--Games--Amusements--Marriages--Deaths and Funerals--Wills tampered with--Popular regard to Omens--Superstitions connected with the Pope's Name--Terrors of the Priesthood--Weather, and Journey Homeward. I shall now endeavour to bring before my readers, in a short chapter, the daily inner life of Rome. First of all, let us take a peep into a Roman dwelling. The mansions of the nobility and the houses of the wealthier classes are built on the plan of the ancient Romans. There is a portal in front, a paved court in the middle, a quadrangle enclosing it, with suites of apartments running all round, tier on tier, to perhaps four or five stories. The palaces want nothing but cleanliness to make them sumptuous. They are of marble, lofty in style, and chaste though ornate in design. The pictures of the great masters that once adorned them are now scattered over northern Europe, and the frames are filled with copies. For this the poverty or extravagance of their owners is to blame. The best pictures in Rome are those in the churches, and these are sadly dimmed and obscured by the smoke of the incense. A fire-place in a Roman house is a sort of phenomenon; and yet the climate of Rome, unless at certain times, is not that balmy, intoxicating element which we imagine it to be. During my stay there, I had to encounter alternate deluges of rain, with lightning, and cutting blasts of the Tramontana. The comfort of an Italian house, especially in winter, depends more on its exposure to the sun than on any arrangement for heating it. Some few, however, have fire-places in the rooms. The kitchen is placed on the top of the house,--the very reverse of its position with us. The ends sought hereby are safety, and the convenience of discharging the culinary effluvia into the atmosphere. The fire-place is unique, and not unlike that of a smithy. There is a cap for sparks; and about three feet above the floor stands a stone sole, in which holes are cut for the _fornelli_, which are square cast-iron grated boxes for holding the wood char, upon which the culinary utensils are placed. These are but ill adapted for preparing a roast. John Bull would look with sovereign contempt, or downright despair, according to the state of his stomach, on the thing called a roast in Rome. There it is seldom seen beyond the size of a beef-steak. Much small fry is roasted with a ratchet-wheel and spit. This is wound up with a weight, and revolves over the fire, which is strewed upon the hearth. The working classes generally purchase their meals cooked in the _Osteria Cucinante_, where food and wine are to be had. These are numerous in Rome. They may be fairly called the homes of the working classes, for there they lounge so long as their baiocchi last. The houses of the working classes are comfortless in the extreme. They are of stone, and roomy, but unfurnished. A couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a bed make up generally the entire furnishings of a Roman house. Indeed, the latter article appears to be the only reason for having a house at all. So soon as the day's labour is over, the working men resort to the wine and eating shops and coffeehouses, where they remain till the time of shutting, which is two and three hours of the night. The Roman reckoning of the day begins at Ave Maria, which is a quarter of an hour after sunset. The first hour of the night is consequently an hour after Ave Maria, from which the Romans reckon consecutively till the twenty-fourth hour. As the sun sets earlier or later, according to the season of the year, the hours vary of course, and the same period of the day that is indicated by the twelfth hour at the time of equinox, is indicated by the eleventh hour in midsummer, and the thirteenth hour in midwinter. This is very annoying to travellers from the north of Europe. "What o'clock is it?" you ask; and are told in reply, "It is the eighteenth hour and three quarters." To find the time of day from this answer, you must calculate from Ave Maria, with reference to the time of sunset at that particular season of the year. Mid-day is announced in Rome by the firing of a cannon from the castle of St Angelo. The French reckon time as we do, and may possibly, before they leave Rome, teach the Romans to adopt the same mode of reckoning. When I stated in a former chapter that trade there is not in Rome, my readers, of course, understood me to mean that it was comparatively annihilated, not totally extinguished. The Romans must have houses, however poor; clothes, however homely; and food, however plain; and the supply of these wants necessitates the existence, to a certain extent, of the various trades and handicrafts. But in Rome these exist in an embryotic state, and are carried on after the most antiquated modes,--much as in Britain five hundred years ago. The principal public works,--for by this name must we dignify the little quiet concerns in the Eternal City,--are situated in the neighbourhood of Trastevere, the decidedly plebeian quarter of Rome, although it would not do to say so to a Trasteverian. There are woollen manufactories and candle manufactories. The chief customer of the latter is the Church. The armoury and mint are contiguously situated to St Peter's. The tanning of hides is extensively carried on along the banks of the Tiber, whose classic "gold" is not unfrequently streaked with oozy streams of a dirty white. Flour-mills are numerous. Amid the brawls which disturb the Trastevere, the ear can catch the ring of the shuttle, for there a few hand-loom weavers pursue their calling. There is a tobacco manufactory in the same quarter; and I must state, for truth compels me, that most of the Roman women take snuff. From the windows of the Vatican Museum one can see the tile and brick maker busy at his trade behind the palace. Extensive potteries exist near to Ripa Grande, where the most of the kitchen and chamber utensils for city and country are made. I may here note, that most of the cooking utensils of the working man are of earthenware, and stand the fire remarkably well. There are about a score of soap-works in Rome, but the soap manufactured in these establishments is abominable. My friend Mr Stewart informed me that he brought a soap-boiler from Glasgow, who understood his business thoroughly, and had soap made in Rome as we have it in this country, but without the palm-oil. This ingredient was not used, because, not being in the tariff, it was thought that, should it be imported, it would in all probability be classed under "perfumeries," and charged an exorbitant duty. The soap being a new thing in Rome, and unlike the nauseous stuff there in use, a clamour was raised against it, to the effect that it produced sickness, and caused headache and vomiting. The Roman ladies, in certain circumstances, are most fastidious about smells, though why they should in Rome, of all places in Europe, is most unaccountable. The Government, compassionating their sufferings, seized a parcel of the soap, and caused it to be analyzed by a chemist. The chemist's report was not unfavourable; nevertheless, owing to the strong prejudice against the article, the sale was so limited, that its manufacture had to be discontinued as unremunerative. Besides the trades already enumerated, there are in the Eternal City marble-cutters, mosaics and cameo workers, sculptors and painters, vine-dressers, olive-dressers, vegetable cultivators, silk-worm rearers, and a few manufacturers of silk scarfs. There are, too, in a feeble state, the trades connected with the making and mending of clothes, the building and repairing of houses. And to feel how feeble these trades are, it is only necessary to see the garments of the Romans, how coarse in material and how uncourtly in cut. The peasant throws a sheep's skin over him, and is clad; the lower classes of the towns look as if they fabricated their own garments, from the spinning upwards. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one house being built in all Rome when I was there; and that was rising on an old foundation near the Capitol. The makers of votive offerings and wax-candles for the saints are a more numerous class than the masons in Rome. Washer-women form a numerous body, as do lodging-house keepers,--a class that includes many of the nobles. The clerks are numberless, and very ill paid, having in many cases to attend two or three employers to eke out a living. Men are invariably employed as house-servants in Rome. They cook, clean the chambers, make up the beds, in short, do everything that is necessary to be done in a house. The workman begins his day's labour at six or seven, as the season of the year may be. He breakfasts on coffee, or on coffee and milk in equal proportions, or on warm milk alone. Bread is used, which he soaks in his tumbler of coffee. Few take butter; fewer still eggs or ham, for pecuniary reasons. Many of the working classes take soup of bread paste; others take salad and olive-oil with bread. The peasantry cut up their coarse bread, saturate it with olive-oil, dust it over with pepper, and eat it along with _finocchio_ (fennel), the vegetable being unboiled. Roasted or boiled chestnuts are extensively used at all times of the day. They are to be had on the streets; many making a living by roasting and selling these fruits. Mid-day is the common dining hour. The meal generally consists of soup of bread, herbs, paste, or macaroni, butcher-meat, fowls, snails (white, fed on grass), frogs, entrails of fowls and young birds, omelettes, sausages, salad with olive-oil, dried olives, fruit, and wine, according to the circumstances of the person. The country people during harvest make their dinner of coarse bread, to which they add a few cloves of garlic, a little goat's-milk cheese, and sour wine diluted with water. Many live on bread alone, with wine. Supper is generally a substantial meal, consisting more or less of the same materials as are used for dinner, salad and wine never failing. Tomatoes are extensively used, ate alone, or serving for all kinds of dinner and supper stews. Green figs are much used. Polenda is a universal article of food amongst the peasantry. It is Indian corn ground and boiled, and made to take the place that _porridge_ does in Scotland, with this difference, that it is boiled in pork fat. The amusements of the working classes are not numerous. Moro and the bowls are their two principal games. The first is generally played at in twos, and is not unlike our schoolboy game of _odds_ or _evens_. The Romans, at this game, however, put themselves into the attitude of gladiators,--each naming a number, and extending at the same time so many fingers; and the party that names the number corresponding with the number of fingers extended by both is the victor. So many _guesses_ constitute the game. The attitude and airs of the combatants in this simple game,--which seems fitter for children than for men,--are very ridiculous. The other chief amusement of the Romans is bowls. These are made of wood. So many hands are ranged on this side, and an equal number on that; and the game proceeds more or less after the fashion of curling. The feast days,--which are numerous in Rome,--on which labour is interdicted under a heavy penalty, are mostly passed at bowls; as the Sabbaths, on which labour is also forbidden, though under a much smaller penalty, are generally with the drawing of the lottery. All places of rendezvous beyond the walls have the sign of the balls, along with the accompanying intimation, _Vino, Bianco e Rosso_. Encircling the courtyard adjoining the house is a broad straw-shed or canopy, beneath which the crowd assembles, young and old, male and female, gathering round small tables, and discussing the _fiasci_ of Orvieto and toast. The game is proceeding all the while in their neighbourhood, the stakes being so many more flasks of the choice wine of Orvieto. This continues till Ave Maria, when the crowd break up, withdraw to the city, and, after a visit to the wine-shops within the walls, go home, and (as I was naïvely told by a Scotch lady resident in Rome) beat their wives as much as they do in England. In the coffeehouses the grand sources of amusement are dice and drafts, along with backgammon and billiards. The latter two games are confined to the upper and middle classes. Most of the upper classes, I believe, have billiard-rooms at home, for family use and conversazione-party amusement. In the absence of newspapers, journals, and books, it would be impossible, without these expedients, to get through the evening. All who can afford to attend the theatre (more properly opera), do so as regularly as the night comes; and the scenes and acts which they there witness form the basis of Italian conversation. It is at least a safe subject. No Roman who has the fear of a prison before him would discuss politics in a mixed company. In Rome there is an utter dearth of employment for young men. They dare not travel; they cannot visit a neighbouring town without the permission of Government, which is only sometimes to be had; they have nothing to read; and one can imagine, in these circumstances, the utter waste of mental and moral energies which must ensue among this class in Rome. These young men have a sore battle to keep up appearances. They do their utmost absolutely for a cigar and cane; but their success is not always such as so great ingenuity and patience deserve. You may see them in half-dozens, lounging for hours about the coffeehouses, without, in many cases, spending more than a single baiocchi on coffee, and sometimes not even that. Marriage is negotiated, not by the young persons, but by the parents. The mother charges herself with everything appertaining to the making of the match, conducting even the correspondence. Of course, to address a billet doux to the young lady would be to infringe upon the prerogatives of mamma, which must ever be held inviolate if success is seriously aimed at. The mother receives all such epistles, and answers them in the daughter's behalf. The young lady is closely watched, and is never left a moment in the society of her intended partner previous to marriage, unless in the presence of a third party. The Romans thus marry by sight, and have no means, so far at least as regards personal intercourse, of ascertaining the dispositions, tastes, intelligence, and habits of each other. After marriage the lady is free. She may visit and receive visitors; and has now an opportunity for like and dislike; and may be tempted possibly to use it all the more that she had no such opportunity before. From marriages I pass to deaths and funerals. The usages customary on the last illness of a Roman I cannot better describe than by referring to a case which my friend Mr Stewart had occasion to witness. It was that of a clerk in the Roman savings bank, an acquaintance of his, and a young man of some means. In 1846 he caught fever, and, after lingering for three weeks, died. Relatives he had none; and my friend never met any one with the patient save the priest, whose duty it was to administer the last sacrament, and to do so in time. The sick man's chamber was curiously arranged. On the bed-cover were laid three crucifixes: one was four feet in length; the other two were of smaller size. This safeguard against the demons was further reinforced by the addition of a palm-branch, and a few trifling pictures of the Virgin and saints. On the wall, above the bed, hung a frame, containing a picture of the Virgin Mary, executed in the ordinary style, with lighted candles beside it. Two were placed on each side, and to these was added _una mazza di fiori_. Notwithstanding all this he died. The body was then carried to church for the last services, preparatory to consignment to the burying-ground of Saint Lorenzo. A single word pointing to that blood that cleanseth from all sin would have been of more avail than all this idle array; but that word was not spoken. Towards the close of life, especially if the person be wealthy, the priests and monks grow very assiduous in their attentions, and the relatives become in proportion uneasy. I was introduced at Rome to a Signor Bondini, who had a wealthy relative in the _Regno di Napoli_, on the verge of eighty, and very infirm. There was a monastery in his immediate neighbourhood, and the monks of that establishment were in daily attendance upon him. His friends in Rome felt much anxiety regarding the disposal of his property. How the matter ended I know not; but I trust, for the sake of my acquaintance, that all went well. Nor do friends feel quite safe even after the "will" has been ratified by the testator's death. There is a tribunal, as I have formerly stated, for revising wills,--the S. Visita,--which assumes large powers. Of this a curious instance occurred recently. A Signor Galli, cousin of the minister of that name already mentioned, died in the July of 1854, and left his whole property, amounting to about fifty thousand pounds, to neither relatives nor priests, but to works of benevolence for the relief of the poor. The trustee under the deed was proceeding to plan a workhouse or an asylum for infirm old men, when the Chapter of St Peter's claimed the money, on the ground that, as the works of benevolence were not specified in the will, the funds were the property of St Peter's. Some hundreds of old men are employed in the repairs continually going on about that church, and the Chapter meant to spend the money in that way. Meanwhile the S. Visita put in its claim in opposition to the Chapter, and awarded the property for masses for the soul of the departed; deeming, doubtless, that the whole would be little enough to expiate the well-known liberal opinions of the deceased. So stands the matter at present. It is impossible to say whether the money will be spent in paving the Piazza San Pietro, or in masses; as to the relief of the poor, that is now out of the question. It is customary for Roman families to desert the dead, that is, to leave the body in the hands of the priests and monks, who perform the necessary offices to the corpse, conduct the funeral, and sing masses for the soul of the departed. The pomp and display of the one, and the length and number of the other, are regulated entirely by the circumstances of the deceased's family. A more ghastly procession than the funeral one cannot imagine. Instead of a company of grave men, carrying with decorous sorrow to its final resting-place the body of their departed brother, you meet what you take to be a procession of ghouls. The coffin, borne shoulder-high, comes along the street, followed by a long line of figures, enveloped from head to foot in black serge gowns, with holes for the eyes. They march along, carrying large black crosses and tallow candles, and using their voices in something which is betwixt a chant and a howl. The sight suggests only the most dismal associations. But it has its uses, and that is, to move the living to be liberal in masses to rescue the soul from the power of the demons, of which no feeble representation is exhibited in this ghostly and unearthly procession. The modern Italians pay great regard to omens; and, in the important affairs of life, are guided rather by considerations of lucky and unlucky than the maxims of wisdom. The name of the present Pope the Romans hold to be decidedly of evil omen; so much so, that to affix it anywhere is to make the person or thing a mark for calamity. And I was told a curious list of instances corroborative of this opinion. The first year of the reign of Pius was marked by an unprecedented and disastrous flood. The Tiber rose so high in Rome, that it drowned the stone lions in the Piazza del Popolo, flooded the city, and filled the Corso to a depth that compelled the citizens to have recourse to boats. The Government had a great cannon named after the Pope, which was used in the war of independence sanctioned by Pius in 1848. The cannon Pio was taken by the Austrians, although it was afterwards restored. There was a famous steamer, the property of the Papal Government, named "Pia," which plied on the Adriatic. That steamer shared the fate of all that bears the Pope's name. It was taken, too, by the Austrians, but not returned; though, for a reason I shall afterwards state, better it had been sent back. I was wandering one afternoon amid the desolate mounds outside the walls on the east, when I saw a cloud of frightful blackness gather over Rome, and several intensely vivid bolts shoot downward. When I entered the city, I found that the "Porta Pia" had been laid in ruins, and that the occurrence had revived all the former impressions of the Romans regarding the evil significancy of the Pope's name. All who came to his aid in his reforming times, they say, were smitten with disaster or sudden death. He never raises his hands to bless but down there comes a curse. I was not a little struck, in the winter following my return from Rome, to read in the newspapers, that this same steamer Pia, of which I had heard mention made in Rome as having about it a magnet of evil in the Pope's name, had gone down in the Adriatic, with all on board. It was one of the two vessels which carried the suite of the Russian Grand Dukes when they visited Venice in the winter of 1852, and, encountering a tempest on its return, perished, with some two hundred persons, consisting of crew and soldiers. As regards the affection which the Romans bear to Pope and Papacy, I was assured by Mr Freeborn, our consul in Rome, that there is not a priest in that city who had two hours to live when the last French soldier shall have marched out at the gate. All who had resided for some time in Rome, and knew the state of feeling in the population, shuddered to think of what would certainly happen should the French be withdrawn. I have been told by those who visited Rome more recently, that the Romans now do not ask for so much as two hours. "Give us but half an hour," say they, "and we undertake that the Papacy shall never again trouble the world." No true Protestant can wish, or even hope, to put down the system in this way; nevertheless it is a fact, that the Romans have been goaded to this pitch of exasperation, and the slightest change in the political relations of Europe might precipitate on Rome and the Papal States an avalanche of vengeance. The November of 1851 was a time of almost unendurable apprehension to the priests. With reference to France, then on the eve of the _coup d'etat_, though not known to be so save in Rome,--where I am satisfied it was well known,--the priests, I was told by those who had access to know, said, "We tremble, we tremble, for we know not how we shall finish!" They were said to have their pantaloons, et cetera, all ready, to escape in a laic dress. Assuredly the curse has taken effect upon the occupants of the Vatican not less than on the inhabitants of the Ghetto. "Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee, and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life." Among other things that did not realize my expectations in Italy was the weather. During my stay in Rome there were dull and dispiriting days, with the Alban hills white to their bottom. Others were clear, with the piercingly cold Tramontana sweeping the streets; but more frequently the sirocco was blowing, accompanied with deluges of rain, and flashes of lightning that made the night luminous as the day, and peals that rocked the city on its foundations. One Sabbath evening we had a slight shock of earthquake; and I began to think that I had come to see the volcanic covering of the Campagna crack, and the old hulk which has been stranded on it so long sink into the abyss. My homeward journey was accomplished so far in the most dismal weather I have ever seen. I started from Rome on a Monday afternoon, in a Veturino carriage, with two Roman gentlemen as my companions. It was the Civita Vecchia road, for my purpose was to go by sea to France. We reached the half-way house some hours after dark; and, having supped, we were required to conform to the rule of the house, which was to retire, not to bed, but to our vehicle, which stood drawn up on the highway, and pass the night as best we could. I awoke at day-break, and found the postilion yoking the horses in a perfect hurricane of wind and rain. We reached Civita Vecchia at breakfast-time, and found the Mediterranean one roughened expanse of breakers, with the white waves leaping over the mole, and violently rocking the vessels in the harbour. The steamers from Naples to Marseilles were a week over due, and the agents could not say when one might arrive. Time pressed; and after wandering all day about the town,--one of the most wretched on earth,--and seeing the fiery sun find his bed in the weltering ocean, I took my seat in the _diligence_ for Rome. This was the third time I had passed through that land of death the Campagna; and that night in especial I shall never forget. My companions in the _interieur_ were two Dutch gentlemen, and a lady, the wife of one of them. The rain fell in deluges; the frequent gleams showed us each other's faces; and the bellowing thunder completely drowned the rattle of our vehicle. The long weary night wore through, and about four of the morning we came to the old gate. My passport had been viséd with reference to a sea-voyage; and to explain my change of route to the officials in Civita Vecchia and at the gate of Rome, and persuade them to make the corresponding alterations, cost me some little trouble, and a good many paulos into the bargain. I succeeded, fortunately, for otherwise I should have had to submit to a detention of several days. How to make the homeward journey had now become a serious question. The weather had made the sea unnavigable; and the Alps, now covered to a great depth with ice and snow, could be crossed only on sledges. I resolved on going by land to Leghorn,--a wearisome and expensive route, but one that would show me the old Etruria, with several cities of note in Italian history. The _diligence_ for Florence was to start in an hour. I hurried to the office, and engaged the only seat that remained unbespoke, in the coupé happily, with a Russian and Italian gentleman as companions. I made my final exit by the Flaminian gate; and as I crossed the swollen Tiber, and began to climb the height beyond, the first rays of the morning sun were slanting across the Campagna, and tinging with angry light the troubled masses of cloud that hung above the many-domed city. For a few hours the ride was pleasant. All around lay the neglected land, thinly besprinkled with forlorn olives, but without signs of man, save where a crumbling village might be seen crowning the summit of the little conical hills that form so striking a feature in the Etrurian landscape. When we had reached the spurs of the Apennines the storm fell. The air was thickened with alternate showers of sleet and snow. We had to encounter torrents in the valleys, and drifted wreaths on the heights; in short, the journey was to the full as dreary as one through the Grampians would have been at the same season. There was little to tempt us to leave our vehicle at the few villages and towns where we halted, for they seemed half-drowned in rain and mud. Late in the afternoon we reached Viterbo, and stopped to eat a wretched dinner. We found in the hotel but little of that abundance of which the magnificent vine-stocks in the adjoining fields gave so goodly promise. Starting again at dusk, the ladies of the party inquired where the patrol was that used to accompany travellers through the brigand-haunted country of Radicofani, on which we were about to enter; but could get no satisfactory answer. We skirted the lake of Bolsena, with its rich but deserted shores, and its fine mountains of oak. Soon thereafter darkness hid from us the country; but the frequent gleams of lightning showed that it was wild and desolate as ever traveller passed through. It was naked, and torn, and scathed, as if fire had acted upon it, which, indeed, it had, for our way now lay amidst extinct volcanoes. Towards midnight the _diligence_ suddenly stopped. "Here are the brigands at last," said I to myself. I jumped out; and, stretched on the road, pallid and motionless, lay the foremost postilion. Had he been shot, or what had happened? He was a raw-boned lad of some eighteen, wretchedly clad, and worse fed; and he had swooned through fatigue and cold. We brought him round with a little brandy; and, setting him again on his nags, we continued our journey. I recollect of awaking at times from troubled sleep, to find that we were zig-zagging up the sides of mountains tall and precipitous as a sugar-loaf, and entering beneath the portals of towns old and crumbling, perched upon their very summit. A more desolate sight than that which met the eye when day broke I never saw. Every particle of soil seemed torn from the face of the country; and, as far as the eye could reach, plain and hill-side lay under a covering of marl, which was grooved and furrowed by torrents. "Is this Italy?" I asked myself in astonishment. As the day rose, both weather and scenery improved. Towards mid-day, the green beauteous mount on which Sienna, with its white buildings and its cathedral towers, is situated, rose in the far distance; and, after many hours winding and climbing, we entered its walls. At Sienna we exchanged the _diligence_ for the railway, the course of which lay through a series of ravines and valleys of the most magnificent description, and thoroughly Tuscan in their character. We had torrents below, crags crowned with castles above, vines, chestnuts, and noble oaks clothing the steep, and purple shadows, such as Italy only can show, enrobing all. I reached Pisa late in the evening; and there a substantial supper, followed by yet more grateful sleep, made amends for the four previous days' fasting, sleeplessness, and endurance. I passed the Sabbath at Leghorn; and, starting again on Monday _via_ Marseilles, and prosecuting my journey day and night without intermission, save for an hour at a time, came on Saturday evening to the capital of happy England, where I rested on the morrow, "according to the commandment." CHAPTER XXX. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE WHOLE, OR, ROME HER OWN WITNESS. When one goes to Rome, it is not unreasonable that he should there look for some proofs of the vaunted excellence of the Roman faith. Rome is the seat of Christ's Vicar, and the centre of Christianity, as Romanists maintain; and there surely, if anywhere, may he expect to find those personal and social virtues which have ever flourished in the wake of Christianity. To what region has she gone where barbarism and vice have not disappeared? and in what age has she flourished in which she has not moulded the hearts of men and the institutions of society into conformity with the purity of her own precepts, and the benevolence of her own spirit? She has been no teacher of villany and cruelty,--no patron of lust,--no champion of oppression. She has known only "whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report." Her great Founder demanded that she should be tried by her fruits; and why should Rome be unwilling to submit to this test? If the Pope be Christ's Vicar, his deeds cannot be evil. If Romanism be Christianity, or rather, if it alone be Christianity, as its champions maintain, Rome must be the most Christian city on the earth, and the Romans examples to the whole human race, of industry, of sobriety, of the love of truth, and, in short, of whatever tends to dignify and exalt human character. On the assumption that the Christianity of the Seven Hills is the Christianity of the New Testament, Rome ought to be the seat of just laws, of inflexibly upright and impartial tribunals, and of wise, paternal, and incorruptible rulers. Is it so? Is Christ's Vicar a model to all governors? and is the region over which he bears sway renowned throughout the earth as the most virtuous, the most happy, and the most prosperous region in it? Alas! the very opposite of all this is the fact. There is not on the face of the earth a region more barren of everything Christian, and of everything that ought to spring from Christianity, than is the region of the Seven Hills. And not only do we there find the absence of all that reminds us of Christianity, or that could indicate her presence; but we find there the presence, on a most gigantic scale, and in most intense activity, of all the elements and forms of evil. When the infidel would select the very strongest proofs that Christianity cannot possibly be Divine, and that its influence on individual and national character is most disastrous, he goes to the banks of the Tiber. The weapons which Voltaire and his compeers wielded with such terrible effect in the end of last century were borrowed from Rome. Now, why is this? Either Christianity is to a most extraordinary degree destructive of all the temporal interests of man, or Romanism is not Christianity. The first part of the alternative cannot in reason be maintained. Christianity, like man, was made in the image of Him who created her; and, like her great Maker, is essentially and supremely benevolent. She is as much the fountain of good as the sun is the fountain of light; and the good that is in the minor institutions which exist around her comes from her, just as the mild effulgence of the planets radiates from the great orb of day. She cherishes man in all the extent of his diversified faculties, and throughout the vast range of his interests, temporal and eternal. But Romanism is as universal in her evil as Christianity is in her good. She is as omnipotent to overthrow as Christianity is to build up. Man, in his intellectual powers and his moral affections,--in his social relations and his national interests,--she converts into a wreck; and where Christianity creates an angel, Romanism produces a fiend. Accordingly, the region where Romanism has fixed its seat is a mighty and appalling ruin. Like some Indian divinity seated amidst the blood, and skulls, and mangled limbs of its victims, Romanism is grimly seated amidst the mangled remains of liberty, and civilization, and humanity. Her throne is a graveyard,--a graveyard that covers, not the mortal bodies of men, but the fruits and acquisitions, alas! of man's immortal genius. Thither have gone down the labours, the achievements, the hopes, of innumerable ages; and in this gulph they have all perished. Italy, glorious once with the light of intelligence and of liberty on her brow, and crowned with the laurel of conquest, is now naked and manacled. Who converted Italy into a barbarian and a slave? The Papacy. The growth of that foul superstition and the decay of the country have gone on by equal stages. In the territory blessed with the pontifical government there is--as the previous chapters show--no trade, no industry, no justice, no patriotism; there is neither personal worth nor public virtue; there is nothing but corruption and ruin. In fine, the Papal States are a physical, social, political, and moral wreck; and from whatever quarter that _religion_ has come which has created this wreck, it is undeniable that it has not come from the New Testament. If it be true that "a tree is known by its fruits," the tree of Romanism was never planted by the Saviour. With such evidence before him as Italy furnishes, can any man doubt what the consequence would be of admitting this system into Britain? If there be any truth in the maxim, that like causes produce like effects, the consequences are as manifest as they are inevitable. There is a force of genius, a versatility and buoyancy, about the Italians, which fit them better than most to resist longer and surmount sooner the influence of a system like the Papacy; and yet, if that system has wrought such terrible havoc among them,--if it has put them down and keeps them down,--where is the nation or people who may think to embrace Romanism, and yet escape being destroyed by it? Assuredly, should it ever gain the ascendancy in this country, it will inflict, and in far shorter time, the same dire ruin upon us which it has inflicted on Italy. Let no man delude himself with the idea that it is simply a _religion_ which he is admitting, and that the only change that would ensue would be merely the substitution of a Romanist for a Protestant creed. It is a _scheme of Government_; and its introduction would be followed by a complete and universal change in the political constitution and government of the country. The Romanists themselves have put this matter beyond dispute. Why did the Papists divide _territorially_ the country? Why did they assume _territorial_ titles? and why do they so pertinaciously cling to these titles? Why, because their chief aim is to erect a territorial and political system, and they wish to secure, by fair means or foul, a pretest or basis on which they may afterwards enforce that system by political and physical means. Have we forgotten the famous declaration of Wiseman, that his grand end in the papal aggression was to introduce canon law? And what is canon law? The previous chapters show what canon law is. It is a code which, though founded on a religious dogma, namely, that the Pope is God's Vicar, is nevertheless mainly temporal in its character. It claims a temporal jurisdiction; it employs temporal power in its support,--the _sbirri_, Swiss guards, and French troops at Rome, for instance; and it visits offences with temporal punishment,--banishment, the galleys, the carabine, and guillotine. In its most modified form, and as viewed under the glosses of the most dexterous of its modern commentators and apologists, it vests the Pope in a DIRECTING POWER, according to which he can declare _null_ all constitutions, laws, tribunals, decisions, oaths, and causes contrary to good morals, in other words, contrary to the interests of the Church, of which he is the sole and infallible judge; and all resistance is punishable by deprivation of civil rights, by confiscation of goods, by imprisonment, and, in the last resort, by death. In short, it vests in the Pope's hands all power on earth, whether spiritual or temporal, and puts all persons, ecclesiastical and secular, under his foot. A more overwhelming tyranny it is impossible to imagine; for it is a tyranny that unites the voice with the arm of Deity. We challenge the Romanist to show how he can inaugurate his system in Britain,--set up canon law, as he proposes,--without changing the constitution of the country. We affirm, on the grounds we have stated, that he cannot. This, then, is no battle merely of churches and creeds; it is a battle between two kingdoms and two kings,--the Pope on one side, and Queen Victoria on the other; and no one can become an abettor of the pontiff without being thereby a traitor to the sovereign. And with the fall of our religion and liberty will come all the demoralizing and pauperizing effects which have followed the Papacy in Italy. Mind will be systematically cramped and crushed; and everything that could stimulate thought, or inspire a love for independence, or recall the memory of a former liberty, will be proscribed. We cannot have the Papacy and open tribunals. We cannot have the Papacy and free trade: our factories will be closed, as well as our schools and churches; our forges silenced, as well as our printing presses. Motion even will be forbidden; or, should our railways be spared, they will convey, in lack of merchandise, bulls, palls, dead men's bones, and other such precious stuff. Our electric telegraph will be used for the pious purpose of transmitting absolutions and pardons, and our express trains for carrying the host to some dying penitent. The passport system will very speedily cure our people of their propensity to travel; and, instead of gadding about, and learning things which they ought not, they will be told to stay at home and count their beads. The _Index_ will effectually purge our libraries, and give us but tens where we have now thousands. Alas for the great masters of British literature and song! The censorship will make fine work with our periodic literature, pruning the exuberance and taming the boldness of many a now free pen. Our clubs, from Parliament downwards, will have their labours diminished, by having their sphere contracted to matters only on which the Church has not spoken; and our thinkers will be taught to think aright, by being taught not to think at all. We must contract a liking for consecrated wafers and holy water; and provide a confessor for ourselves, our wives, and daughters. We must eat only fish on Friday, and keep the Church's holidays, however we may spend the Sabbath. We must vote at the bidding of the priest; and, above all, take ghostly direction as regards our last will and testament. The Papacy will overhaul all our political rights, all our social privileges, all our domestic and private affairs; and will alter or abrogate as it may find it for our and the Church's good. In short, it will dig a grave, in which to bury all our privileges and rights together, rolling to that grave's mouth the great stone of Infallibility. Nor let us commit the error of under-estimating the foe, or of thinking, in an age when intelligence and liberty are so diffused, that it is impossible that we can be overcome by such a system as the Papacy. We have not, like the early Christians, to oppose a rude, unwieldy, and gross paganism; we are called to confront an idolatry, subtle, refined, perfected. We encounter error wielding the artillery of truth. We wrestle with the powers of darkness clothed in the armour of light. We are called to combat the instincts of the wolf and tiger in the form of the messenger of peace,--the Satanic principle in the angelic costume. Have we considered the infinite degradation of defeat? Have we thought of the prison-house where we will be compelled to grind for our conqueror's sport,--the chains and stakes which await ourselves and our posterity? And, even should our lives be spared, they will be spared to what?--to see freedom banished, knowledge extinguished, science put under anathema, the world rolled backwards, and the universe become a vast whispering gallery, to re-echo only the accents of papal blasphemy. This atrocious and perfidious system is at this hour triumphant on the Continent of Europe. Britain only stands erect. How long she may do so is known only to God; but of this I am assured, that if we shall be able to keep our own, it will be, not by entering into any compromise, but by assuming an attitude of determined defiance to the papal system. There must be no truckling to foreign despots and foreign priests: the bold Protestant policy of the country must be maintained. In this way alone can we escape the immense hazards which at present threaten us. And what a warning do the nations of the Continent hold out to us! They teach how easily liberty may be lost, but how infinite the sacrifices it takes to recover it. A moment's weakness may cost an age of suffering. If we let go the liberty we at present enjoy, none of us will live to see it regained. Look at the past history of the Papacy, and mark how it has retained its vulpine instincts in every age, and transmitted from father to son, and from generation to generation, its inextinguishable hatred of man and of man's liberties. Look at it in the Low Countries, and see it overwhelming them under an inundation of armies and scaffolds. Look at it in Spain, and see it extinguishing, amid the fires of innumerable _autos da fe_, the genius, the chivalry, and the power of that great nation. Look at it in France, whose history it has converted into an ever-recurring cycle of revolutions, massacres, and tyrannies. Look at it in the blood-written annals of the Waldensian valleys, against which it launched crusade after crusade, ravaging their soil with fire and sword, and ceasing its rage only when nothing remained but the crimson stains of its fearful cruelty. And now, after creating this wide wreck,--after glutting the axe,--after flooding the scaffold, and deluging the earth itself with human blood,--it turns to you, ye men of England and Scotland! It menaces you across the narrow channel that divides your country from the Continent, and dares to set its foul print on your free shore! Will you permit it? Will you tamely sit still till it has put its foot on your neck, and its fetter on your arm? Oh! if you do, the Bruce who conquered at Bannockburn will disown you! The Knox who achieved a yet more glorious victory will disown you! Cranmer, and all the martyrs whose blood cries to heaven against it, while their happy spirits look down from their thrones of light to watch the part you are prepared to play in this great struggle, will disown you! Your children yet unborn, whose faith you will thus surrender, and whose liberty you will thus betray, will curse your very names. But I know you will not. You are men, and will die as men, if die you must, nobly fighting for your faith and your liberties. You will not wait till you are drawn out and slaughtered as sheep, as you assuredly will be if you permit this system to become dominant. But if you are prepared to die, rather than to live the slaves of a detestable and ferocious tyranny like this, I know that you shall not die; for I firmly believe, from the aspects of Providence, and the revelations of the Divine Word, that, menacing as the Papacy at present looks, its grave is dug, and that even now it totters on the brink of that burning abyss into which it is destined to be cast; and if we do but unite, and strike a blow worthy of our cause, we shall achieve our liberties, and not only these, but the liberties of nations that stretch their arms in chains to us, under God their last hope, and the liberties of generations unborn, who shall arise and call us blessed. THE END. EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY MILLER AND FAIRLY. FOOTNOTES: [1] See the Antiquity of the Waldenses treated of at length in Leger's "Histoire de l'Eglise Vaudoise;" and Dr Gilly's "Waldensian Researches." [2] The author would soften his strictures on this head by a reference to the truly interesting volume on the "Ladies of the Reformation," by his talented friend the Rev. James Anderson. [3] I have before me a list of prices current (Prezzo Corrente Legale de generi venduti nella piazza di Roma dal di 28 Febbraro al di 5 Marzo 1852), from which it appears, that sculpture, paintings, tallow, bones, skins, rags, and pozzolano, comprise all the exports from the Papal States. What a beggarly list, compared with the natural riches of the country! In fact, vessels return oftener _without_ than _with_ lading from that shore. [4] It was so when the author was in Rome. The enterprising company of Fox & Henderson have since succeeded in overcoming the pontifical scruples, and bringing gas into the Eternal City; Cardinal Antonelli remarking, that he would accept of _their_ light in return for the light _he_ had sent to England. [5] As illustrative of our subject, we may here quote what Mr Whiteside, M.P., in his interesting volumes, "Italy in the Nineteenth Century," says of the estimation in which all concerned with the administration of justice are held at Rome:-- "The profession of the law is considered by the higher classes to be a base pursuit: no man of family would degrade himself by engaging in it. A younger son of the poorest noble would famish rather than earn his livelihood in an employment considered vile. The advocate is seldom if ever admitted into high society in Rome; nor can the princes (so called) or nobles comprehend the position of a barrister in England. They would as soon permit a _facchino_ as an advocate to enter their palaces; and they have been known to ask with disdain (when accidentally apprised that a younger son of an English nobleman had embraced the profession of the law), what could induce his family to suffer the degradation? Priests, bishops, and cardinals, the poor nobles or their impoverished descendants, will become,--advocates or judges, never. The solution of this apparent inconsistency is to be found in the fact, that in most despotic countries the profession of the law is contemptible. In Rome it is particularly so, because no person places confidence in the administration of the law, the salaries of the judges are small, the remuneration of the advocate miserable, and all the great offices grasped by the ecclesiastics. Pure justice not existing, everybody concerned in the administration of what is substituted for it is despised, often most unjustly, as being a participator in the imposture." [6] See book vii., chap. x. [7] Monsignor Marini, who was head of the police under Gregory XVI., and the infamous tool in all the arrests and cruelties of Lambruschini, was made a cardinal by the present Pope. All Rome said, let the next cardinal be the public executioner. Talent, certainly, has fair play at Rome, when a policeman, and even the hangman, may aspire to the chair of Peter. [8] WHAT THE ROMAN RELIGION COSTS. The following statistics of the wealth of the clergy in the Roman States are taken from the American _Crusader_:-- "The clergy in the Roman States realize from the funds a clear income of two millions two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. From the cattle they have another income of one hundred thousand dollars; from the canons, three hundred thousand dollars; from the public debt another income of one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; from the priests' individual estates, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; from the portions assigned by law to nuns, five hundred thousand dollars; from the celebration of masses, two millions one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; from taxes on baptisms, forty-five thousand dollars; from the tax on the Sacrament of Confirmation, eighteen thousand dollars; from the celebration of marriages, twenty-five thousand dollars; from the attestations of births, nine thousand dollars; from other attestations, such as births, marriages, deaths, &c. &c., nine thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars; from funerals, six hundred thousand dollars; from the gifts to begging-orders, one million eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars; from the gifts for motives of benevolence or festivities, or maintenance of altars and lights, or for celebrating mass for the souls in purgatory, two hundred thousand dollars; from the tithes exacted in several parts of the Roman States according to the ancient rigour, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; from preaching and panegyrics, according to the regular taxes, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; from seminaries for entrance taxes and other rights belonging to the students, besides the boarding, fifteen thousand dollars; from the chancery for ecclesiastical provisions, for matrimonial licenses, for sanatives, &c. &c., fifty thousand dollars; from benedictions during Easter, thirty thousand dollars; from offerings to the miraculous images of Virgin Marys and Saints, seventy-five thousand dollars; from _triduums_ for the sick, or for prayers, five hundred thousand dollars; from benedictions to fields, cattle, nuptial-beds, &c. &c., nine thousand dollars. "All these incomes, which amount to _ten million five hundred and ten thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars_, are realized and enjoyed by the secular and regular clergy, composed in all of sixty thousand individuals, including nuns, without mentioning the incomes allowed them from foreign countries, for the chancery and other cosmopolite congregations. "It is further to be observed, that in this calculation are not comprised the portions which the Romans call _passatore_, which the laity pay to the clergy; such as purchase, permutation, resignation, and ordination taxes; patents for confessions, preaching, holy oils, privileged altars, professors' chairs, and the like, which will make up another amount of a million of dollars; nor those other taxes called _pretatico_, which are paid by the Jews to the parish priest for permission to dwell without the Jews' quarter; nor those for the ringing of bells for dying persons, or those who are in agony; nor those which cripples pay for receiving in Rome the visit of the wooden child of the _celestial altar_, who must always go out in a carriage, accompanied by friars called _minori observanti_, Franciscan friars, whose incomes they collect and govern. The value of charitable edifices (which are not registered, being exempt from all dative) is not comprised either; and the same exemption is extended to churches; although all these buildings cost the inhabitants of the State several millions of expense for provisional possession, and displays of ceremonies and feasts which are celebrated in them." WHAT THE ROMAN RELIGION YIELDS. A distinguished English gentleman, who has spent many years as a resident or in travelling in various papal countries in Europe, in a recent speech in London has presented some deeply interesting facts concerning vice and crime in Papal and Protestant countries. He possessed himself of the Government returns of every Romanist Government on the Continent. We have condensed and will state its results. In England, four persons for a million, on the average, are committed for murder per year. In Ireland there are nineteen to the million. In Belgium, a Catholic country, there are eighteen murders to the million. In France there are thirty-one. Passing into Austria, we find thirty-six. In Bavaria, also Catholic, sixty-eight to the million; or, if homicides are struck out, there will be thirty. Going into Italy, where Catholic influence is the strongest of any country on earth, and taking first the kingdom of Sardinia, we find twenty murders to the million. In the Venetian and Milanese provinces there is the enormous result of forty-five to the million. In Tuscany, forty-two, though that land is claimed as a kind of earthly paradise; and in the Papal States not less than one hundred murders for the million of people. There are ninety in Sicily; and in Naples the result is more appalling still, where public documents show there are _two hundred_ murders per year to the million of people! The above facts are all drawn from the civil and criminal records of the respective countries named. Now, taking the whole of these countries together, we have seventy-five cases of murder for every million of people. In Protestant countries,--England, for example,--we have but four for every million. Aside from various other demoralizing influences of Popery, the fact now to be named beyond doubt operates with great power in cheapening human life in Catholic countries. The Protestant criminal believes he is sending his victim, if not a Christian, at once to a miserable eternity; and this awful consideration gives a terrible aspect to the crime of murder. But the Papist only sends his victim to purgatory, whence he can be rescued by the masses the priest can be hired to say for his soul; or his own bloody hand and heart will not hinder him from doing that office himself. We think the above facts in regard to vice and crime in the two great departments of Christendom worthy the most serious pondering of every friend of morality and virtue. [9] Martinus Scriblerus says, that "the Pope's band, though the finest in the world, would not divert the English from burning his Holiness in effigy on the streets of London on a Guy Fawkes' day;" nor, I may add, the Romans from burning him in person on the streets of Rome any day, were the French away. [10] For much of the information contained in this chapter I am indebted to my intelligent friend Mr Stewart. 
39806	----	[Illustration: _Frontispiece--Dear Little Couple Abroad_ "Polly drew her stockings and shoes on." _See p. 6_] HOW "A DEAR LITTLE COUPLE" WENT ABROAD BY MARY D. BRINE AUTHOR OF "THE DOINGS OF A DEAR LITTLE COUPLE" WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS PHILADELPHIA HENRY ALTEMUS COMPANY DEDICATION. To my little friends who have known and loved our "Dear Little Couple" (Polly and Teddy) I herewith dedicate this story, which tells of _more_ of the Doings of the Little Couple, and am lovingly the friend of all my little readers, MARY D. BRINE. COPYRIGHT, 1903. BY HENRY ALTEMUS. HOW "A DEAR LITTLE COUPLE" WENT ABROAD. CHAPTER I. POLLY THINKS OVER HER "SURPRISE." [Illustration] Polly opened her blue eyes one lovely morning in May, and found the "sun fairies"--as she called them--dancing all about her wee bed-chamber, and telling her in their own bright way that it was high time little girls were up and dressing for breakfast. At first she was sure she had been having a beautiful dream, for what else could make her feel so happy and "sort of all-overish," as if something very nice and unusual had come upon her? She was sure she had dreamed that a splendid surprise had happened, and it was something about going away, too! Polly lay still in her little white nest of a bed, and thought over her dream, and lo! on a sudden, as she grew more and more awake, the real cause of her new and glad sensations came into her curly head, and she bounced, like a little rubber ball, right out of bed, and danced a wee lively jig on the floor. Why, of course it wasn't a dream! No, indeed! it was as real--oh! as real as Polly Darling herself, and no wonder she had felt so "all-overish" and so "glad all inside of her"! She sat down on the soft carpet and drew her stockings and shoes on, but it was slow work, because Polly was thinking, and she had a great deal to think about, you see. [Illustration] First--oh! how it all came back to her now!--first she remembered that last night after supper Papa had taken her on his knee and whispered in her ear: "Pollybus, how would you like to go with Mamma and Papa across the sea for a little trip?" And while she was squeezing him almost to pieces by way of answer, Mamma had come along, and had shaken her finger at Papa, as she said: "Oh, naughty Papa! the idea of telling Polly that _just when she's going to bed_! She won't sleep a wink for thinking of it." And Polly remembered jumping down from Papa's knee, and going to Mamma's side, saying very earnestly: "Oh, yes, I will! I truly will, Mamma! I'll shut my eyes and think 'bout little lambs jumping over a fence, 'cause Cook says that's the best way to get sleepy, and it's worked be-yewtifully on _her_ lots of times! Oh, true and true, black and blue, I'll go right to sleep! And oh, I'm so happy!" And pretty soon after that the bed-time for little girls had come, and Polly had been kissed and petted a little, as was usual after she had snuggled down in bed, and had a little while alone with her dear Mamma, and then she had tried very hard to keep her promise, and "go right to sleep." But oh, dear, it had been such hard work to keep those blue eyes shut! No matter how much she thought of the lambs jumping, one after the other, over the imaginary fence, it did not make her the least bit sleepy, and the lambs all seemed to scamper off to Europe as soon as they had jumped the fence, and of course Polly's thoughts had to go flying after them. So, you see, it had really been a long while before the little tired lids had closed over those dear soft blue eyes, and sleep had really come. But when it did come you may be sure it was a very sound, sweet sleep, and so when Polly awakened in the morning it could hardly be wondered at that she thought she had been having a beautiful dream. She knew now that it was no dream, but a most delightful reality, and oh, how happy she was! [Illustration] She came to the end of her long "think" at last, and turned her attention to her dressing, and just then Mamma came in to put the finishing touches to the process, and Polly's tongue wagged so fast all the while that it really seemed as though it were hung in the middle, like a little sweet-toned bell, and able to swing both ways. However, Mamma patiently answered all the rapid questions, and explained that Papa, having to go abroad on business, had decided that it would do Mamma and Polly good to go also, and be the best thing to keep _him_ from being lonely, of course. And she told Polly something else that had not been told the night before, but kept for an added "surprise" this morning, and that was that Teddy's Mamma and Papa had given permission for _Teddy_ to go with Polly to Europe, as a great and wonderful treat for both little folks. But Teddy didn't know it yet, because both Mammas thought Polly would enjoy telling him herself and giving him a delightful surprise. "So you may run over right after breakfast," added Mamma, "and tell him the good news." This additional beautiful "surprise" was more than Polly could bear in an ordinary way, so she just simply _cried_ for joy (you've heard of people doing that?), and in the midst of her tears she began to laugh, and then she cried a little more, and it seemed a long time before the little happy Polly settled down and was able to eat her breakfast. CHAPTER II. TEDDY'S SURPRISE. PERHAPS before I go any farther I ought to explain to those of my little friends who have not chanced to read the first book about "The Doings of a Dear Little Couple" that Polly and Teddy were next-door neighbors in the pretty village which was their home, and that they had been, during all their acquaintance with each other, most loving and devoted little chums. They were each seven years old at the time of my last writing, but at the time of this story had become eight-year-olders, and Teddy insisted that because their birthdays came together they were "real truly twinses." Now I will return to my story. When Polly finished her breakfast and was excused from the table, she scampered off as fast as she could down the garden till she came to the little gap in the fence of which my first book told you, you remember, and called: "Teddy! Ted-dee! Oh! Teddy Terry!" as loud as she could all the while she was running. Now, it happened that Teddy Terry was eating _his_ breakfast at that time, and he was just putting a piece of potato into his rosy mouth when he heard Polly's eager voice. He swallowed that piece of potato so fast that it nearly choked him, and when he had finally gotten it out of the way, he said: "Please 'scuse me, Mamma, Papa!" and, slipping from his chair, was off in a jiffy to meet his little chum, Polly. "Oh, Teddy, come up in our tree!" cried Polly, as Teddy's curly brown head pushed through the low gap in the dividing hedge fence. "Come quick, quick, quick! I've got the goodest news in the world to tell you 'bout!" She danced about on her little toes while speaking, and, Teddy's plump body having speedily followed his head, he left the fence, and with his little companion ran for the old apple-tree which--as you remember I told you in the first book--was the "consultation office" of our dear little couple whenever they had any especially private conversation with each other. So up into the stout branches of the old tree they clambered, and settled comfortably down in a safe fork of limbs amid a thicket of green leaves, and then, after Teddy had followed his usual loving habit of kissing Polly on her soft little cheek, and receiving the same sweet greeting from her, she proceeded to tell her secret. "I'd ask you to _guess_ it first," she said, "but oh, Teddy Terry, you never could in the world! It's this: You 'n' I are going to Europe with my Papa 'n' Mamma! There! what do you think of _that_, Teddy Terry? Oh, isn't it the very bestest news we could have? Aren't you s'prised most to pieces?" Teddy's brown eyes opened so wide that it is a wonder they did not stretch out of shape. Surprised? well, indeed he was, and when Polly had told him more about the matter he gave the loudest _whoop-la_! he could, and then a funny thing happened--he slid off that tree and disappeared in the wood-shed near by, and--I don't know surely--but I think it likely he went in there to hide the tears that came to his eyes, the tears of joy which Polly had had, you know, only Teddy didn't want her to see him turn "cry-baby," and so he had run quickly away. But Polly soon found him there, and together they went to see his Mother, and then he learned more fully all about the pleasure in store for him, and that Mamma and Papa had consented to let him go because _they_ had been called unexpectedly away a long distance to see a sick relative, and it made them glad to know that their little son would be safe and happy with Polly and her Mother and Father during that time. Afterwards, when Teddy and Polly were again together, they talked the coming trip over as children do, and were greatly excited and delighted. "I promised Mamma solermy, oh, jus' as solermy as could be, that I'd be the goodest behaving boy your Mamma ever saw!" said Teddy, when he and Polly, tired of jumping about and shouting "whoop!" at last sat down on the grass to talk it over, "and--and--she said she wasn't 'fraid to trus' me at all." "Course not," responded Polly; "you're the best that ever could be to keep promises, and if you forget 'bout 'em, it's jus' 'cause you couldn't truly help it." The more they talked over the wonderful new surprise, the more excited the dear little couple were growing, and the number of times Teddy put soft kisses on his Polly's cheek (one of his sweet little ways of expressing his joy, at any time, over pleasures they were to share together) I cannot tell, but you may be sure he did not limit his kisses in the least, dear loving little chum as he was! [Illustration] CHAPTER III. "STARTING DAY." AS the days went by, the children grew very restless, wishing the "starting day" would come. Ted's Mamma had packed his little trunk, and marked it "T. T.," and finally, when only one more day remained of the "between days," as the children called them, Mr. and Mrs. Terry had bidden their little son good-bye and started off on their own journey. So Teddy was all the more glad when the "great day" came at last. "Hurrah, hurrah, Polly! This is our starting day! Polly, why don't you halloo?" "I'm _going_ to halloo," replied Polly: "listen!" And her voice rang out in a clear shout which reached even down to the gate. "Once more," cried Teddy, and this time his voice joined hers, and Mamma, coming to the hall door, looked out to see what was going on. [Illustration: "Teddy's Mamma had packed his little trunk."] "It's 'cause we're so glad, Mamma dearie," replied Polly to the question asked, "and it's our starting day, you know." She was perched upon the piazza rail nearest the piazza of Teddy's house, and Teddy was to have breakfast with her presently. Just now he was having his jacket well brushed by Bridget, as he stood on his own piazza, and he was so impatient to get over to Polly that he could hardly stand still long enough for the brushing. "Goin' inter the dirty wudshed just to see 'bout that tricircle," said Bridget, grumbling as she brushed, "an' s'ilin' this bran' new suit yer Ma bought for yer trav'lin'! I told yer I'd put it safe away!" "Well, I wanted to see if you hadn't only _thought_ you'd put it safe," explained Teddy, who had considered it a very manly thing to investigate his affairs himself, and had consequently gotten his new clothes into disgrace. "There now, yer clane and swate as a rose, an' it's ould Bridgie who'll be missin' the trouble of yersel', an' for sure'll be wantin' some more of that same!" said the good woman, giving him a parting hug and pat before he was off to join Polly. At half-past nine the carriage was to come for them and their trunks, and they would catch the ten a. m. train for New York, and say good-bye to their pretty village home for a long time. It was truly a very exciting morning, and Polly's mood for rhyming was so strong that she finally accomplished this wonderful couplet, which Teddy admired as much as she did herself. It ran this way:-- "Oh, Teddy Terry! we're going away! For this--this--this is our _starting_ day!" So Ted caught the rhyme, and joined in the singing of it, and if it was sung once, it certainly was sung twenty times, till at last Papa put his head out of the window and asked "if they would mind giving him and the neighbors something _new_?" Breakfast over, the little couple sat down on the sofa in the hall and watched the clock, and at last the little hammer inside lifted itself and struck against the bell waiting beside it, and lo and behold! there came the carriage, driving up the road, and through the big gate, and up to the door. Then the trunks were put on the rack behind (while Teddy watched closely to see that the man did not forget to go and get the "T. T." little trunk). [Illustration] Bridget and Ann were on hand to say the last good-byes, Mamma gave a few last directions, and entered the carriage, Papa poked the small couple in, topsy-turvy style, got in himself, called out good-bye to the servants, who were wiping their eyes with the corners of their aprons, and--the long-anticipated "start" had taken place. Polly was radiant. She hugged Papa, squeezed Mamma, threw her arms around Teddy, and kissed him over and over (getting as many kisses from him as she gave, you may be sure), and finally settled down with a long sigh of deep, pure content, and said "she was so happy she felt crowded inside of her, right up to her throat!" And Teddy, not willing to feel different from Polly, said: "So do I!" I won't be able to tell you very much of the short journey to the city of New York, for I've neither time nor space for it. But you know Polly and Teddy were just like you, my dear little girls and boys, and they enjoyed the few hours of train ride past fields and villages, hills and meadows, and all the various kinds of landscape views, they watched from the windows of their car, just as much as you have enjoyed such little trips; and, moreover, they were just as restless and fidgety--when feeling that they wanted to have a good run about, and couldn't "because they were shut up in a railroad car so long!"--as all little folks (who are real _live_ little folks) are apt to get under such circumstances. But the cars sped on and on, and after a while they rushed pell-mell into a long dark tunnel, which Polly at once recognized as the "beginning of the end" of their journey to New York City. "Now, jus' as soon as we get into the light again, and under a big high roof, and the cars stop, that will be New York! Oh, Teddy Terry, aren't you glad we're almost there?" In his excitement Teddy forgot where he was, and, jumping to his feet, he shouted: "Whoop!" as loudly as if he had been standing in his own garden at home. Then, with an immediate sense of his mistake, the little boy dropped again into his seat, and covered his mouth with both hands, while his little crimson face was a pitiful sight to see. "Oh, I forgot!" said he. "I truly did forget; but I did feel so full of halloo, I--I--it came right out 'fore I guessed it would!" He looked very penitent, but whispered to Polly: "Don't you wish you could halloo, Polly darling? I should think you would!" "Teddy Terry, I'm just _bursting_ to halloo as loud as I can, but I s'pose we'll have to keep on wanting to and never doing it while we're European travelers. It'll be hard holding in, Teddy; but we've truly got to, else Mamma and Papa'll be 'shamed of our queerness again, don't you see?" Teddy saw, and made up his mind to crowd his "hallooing feelings" as deeply down inside of him as possible in future; and just then the train gave a jerk, and began to move again very slowly, and at last New York was reached. CHAPTER IV. ON THE VOYAGE. IT was a very fine morning when our party of four went on board the steamship (which we will call the _Funda_, though that isn't the real name) bound for the sunny Italian town of Naples. The water sparkled in the sunshine, and the harbor was gay with the many kinds of ships and vessels in port. The dock was crowded with people going away and the friends who had come down to see them off, as is always the case. Teddy and Polly clung to Mamma's hands, while Papa attended to the baggage, and at last they were safely on the steamer's deck, watching the crowd below and the handkerchiefs constantly waved from dock to deck and from deck to dock. Of course there was a great crowd of people on the ship also who were not going away, but were taking a look at the steamer's handsome saloons and state-rooms, and chatting with their departing friends or relatives until the warning cry: "All ashore!" would be heard. As Teddy and Polly presently went with Mamma down the grand staircase from the deck to the dining-saloon, and along the corridor to the two state-rooms reserved for their use, they noticed with great delight the quantities of beautiful flowers arranged on the dining-tables awaiting the passengers to whom they had been sent by friends as a "_Bon voyage_" and "send-off." (You know, perhaps, without my telling, that "_Bon voyage_" means "good voyage"--"pleasant journey" in other words.) There were a quantity of letters also waiting to be claimed, and presently Mamma found several for herself, and oh! joy for Teddy! one little letter addressed to him. How surprised he was! and how Polly rejoiced with him! "Why, how did Mamma get it here all right on this ship, Auntie?" he asked, as Mrs. Darling opened it to read it to him. "Oh, she knew just when the ship was to sail from here, and sent it along in the good old mail-bag, and so here it is, all full of surprise for her boy, and full of love and kisses." Then she read it to him, sitting--they three--in a quiet corner of the saloon, and Teddy's brown eyes filled with loving tears, and just a little bit of homesick longing for a sight of his dearly loved Mother's face. But the letter made him very happy, and after "Auntie" had finished reading he laid his soft little lips and then his cheek against it for a minute and handed it to her again for safe keeping. Then they went to the state-rooms--Polly was to share with Mamma, and Teddy and Mr. Darling were to have the room connecting--and Mamma put everything in order for the voyage, and then they went back to the deck to watch the preparations for casting off from the dock. The trunks were rapidly being lowered into the hold, and Teddy screamed with pleasure and excitement when he chanced to see his little trunk borne along on the shoulders of a big sailor who handled it as though it were only a feather. The letters "T. T." stood out proudly enough on the end of the trunk, as though they felt the great importance of belonging to a boy who was being a "European traveler" for the first time in his life. "And see, Teddy, see!" cried Polly, pointing eagerly to a man following next. "There's Mamma's trunk! I see the big red 'D' on the top. But Papa's isn't there! Oh, Teddy Terry, do you s'pose they're forgetting 'bout Papa's trunk? Don't you think I ought to find Papa and tell him 'bout it?" "Hi! man!" began Teddy, in his zeal for the trunk's safety, but Mamma caught his little arm as he was waving it about frantically to attract the sailor's attention, and stopped further proceedings on the spot, explaining that nothing would be forgotten, and that they surely would find the trunk all safe and sound on arrival at Naples. Just then Papa came along, and they moved to the rail of the deck to watch the people obey the warning shout of "All on shore!" while the hoarse whistle of the steamer's "blow-pipe" and the hurried orders given by the ship's officers made a sort of confusion which was intensely interesting to our dear and wonder-struck little couple. Impulsive Teddy, after his usual fashion when overcome with delight or deep feeling of any kind, threw his arm about Polly's neck and repeatedly kissed her fair little cheek, nor cared how many strangers were looking on. Indeed, I don't believe he even gave them a thought, as he was entirely absorbed in his joy, and his _Polly_; and as for Polly herself, she was so used to being kissed and loved by her little comrade that the presence of strangers did not trouble her at all, and she calmly kissed Teddy back again, greatly to the amusement of her Father and Mother, as also of some people standing near, who asked Mrs. Darling if the children were twins. Mamma laughingly explained about them, and told of their devotion to each other, and how Teddy happened to be with them on the trip. [Illustration] "Well," said one of the group, "_I_ certainly think they are the dearest little couple I ever met." And Mamma smiled when she heard the usual title again given to her young charges. So you will readily believe me when I tell you that it wasn't long before Teddy and Polly were prime favorites on board with all with whom they came in contact. [Illustration] But we must return to our little ones, who, you know, were watching the dock and the preparations for the start. They didn't know anybody on the dock, but wished all the same to do as much handkerchief-waving as anybody else, so they went at it heart and soul; and, though the breezes didn't play tricks on any of the "grown-ups," yet they certainly did with Polly and Teddy, for presently there were two small handkerchiefs floating in the air, and far beyond the reach of the surprised little owners, whose eyes were following their property hopelessly enough. But the little couple didn't care. "Let's play they're little white birds," laughed Polly, secretly wishing they had some more to float off. You see, they were too happy to mind any sort of mishap not serious. The little handkerchiefs floated farther on, and finally landed around the corner of the dock. While the children were pulling Mamma's gown to call her attention to it, and tell her about the mishap, there came a last shout of "Good-bye! good-bye!" from those on deck and on shore, and the gang planks were hauled in, and with a slow, very gentle movement, as the mooring-ropes were cast off and pulled on board, the big steamship moved away from the pier, and the distance gradually widened between her stern and the watchers on the dock, who were still waving hats, handkerchiefs, and canes with handkerchiefs fastened to their heads, so that the farewell signals might reach as high and as far as possible. CHAPTER V. ON THE VOYAGE. THE morning slipped away rapidly, and by the time the bugle blew its summons for luncheon the little couple had explored the steamer, under Papa's guidance, pretty thoroughly. You know children like to explore, and go scampering about to see all that can be seen, in a new place and amid strange surroundings, and Polly and Teddy made no exception to the rule, you may be sure. They had looked wonderingly down from the first-cabin deck upon the steerage deck, and had taken note of the funny and the too often sad scenes to be found in the steerage of a ship. It was all very interesting and very wonderful to see the emigrants of different nationalities all gathered on the deck: some stretched out in the sun, some eating out of dishes which Polly and Teddy thought looked "very dirty and horrid"; some resting their tired heads on their hands, supporting their elbows on their knees; crowds of little bits of children, babies, and untidy-looking men and women, mingling with others who were far more respectable in appearance, but too poor to be able to pay more than the low steerage fare. Our children took everything in with their bright, attentive eyes, and felt very sorry for those poor passengers below their own clean, comfortable deck. They had made friends with several of the sailors, and the "_little_ sailor" (the captain's boy), and had been stopped by so many of the passengers who wanted to have a chat with the dear little couple that they felt quite well acquainted with everybody. They had--after the easy fashion of all little people--scraped acquaintance with the few other children on board, and had finally gotten tired of racing about, and were really quite as hungry as little bears when luncheon was ready. The luncheon in the beautiful flower-decked dining-saloon was, I will add, another most interesting event for them; and though they felt a little shy at first, and afraid of the attentive stewards, and of so many strangers at a time all about them, yet I can assure you they behaved like a little prince and princess, and nobody even guessed how shy they were (though everybody near them did notice, I will say just here, what cultivated little _table manners_ "that dear little couple" possessed). Well, it was some time since luncheon was done with, and while Papa and Mamma were lolling back in their steamer chairs reading, Teddy and Polly were standing close by, looking over the rail. The wind had arisen greatly during the afternoon, and big rolling waves were chasing each other over the water, making "soap-suds" white and foamy as Bridget and Ann at home used to make on washing-days. Teddy wore a little velvet traveling-cap, black, of course, to match his velvet knickerbockers and the little jacket he wore over his white frilled shirt with its broad white collar. Just now the wind had blown his cap almost off his head (fortunately it couldn't blow it out to sea, for wise Mamma had secured it with a cord to a buttonhole in his jacket), and it was tilted a little on one side of his brown, soft curls, and was giving his pretty face a very roguish expression. Polly was wearing a dainty grey dress and little jacket, and a grey "Tam o' Shanter" cap upon her sunny head. The wind had a fine time blowing her long wavy hair about her shoulders, but her cap was as safely secured as Ted's, so they didn't mind the pranks of the wind, which seemed to blow harder every minute. Although Teddy's face looked, as I have said, quite roguish, and although Polly was chattering away, seemingly as merrily as possible, yet neither of them _felt_ very roguish or merry, and pretty soon Teddy said, in a sort of subdued tone: "I--I don't really think decks are nice as gardens, do you, Polly?" [Illustration: "Polly and Teddy made friends with the captain's little boy."] "Why, Teddy Terry!" was the surprised reply, "you said your own self, jus' a teenty time ago, that you liked decks lots better'n our gardens!" "Well, gar--gardens don't make you feel so--so sort of queer right here!" said Ted, laying his chubby hand on his chest. "Don't you feel something funny inside?" "Well, I don't feel _real_ good, Teddy, but--let's--oh, let's--I must go and ask Mamma what makes me feel so queer." And suddenly turning from the rail, the little girl, who had never before had such strange sensations, staggered over to her mother's side, and with pale face begged to go and lie down. Teddy followed her, equally white and fearful, and Mamma and Papa at once led them down the stairs to the state-rooms. "Poor little tots!" said Papa; "you're only having your first experience of sea-sickness! It won't last long." Teddy and Polly didn't care how long or how short things might last, if only they could _just that minute_ feel better. But the "funny feeling" relieved itself in the usual way very soon, and our little couple were put into their berths and comforted and petted until they fell asleep, and as they slept poor Papa and Mamma had their little turn at the same kind of discomfort, and, when they were relieved, followed the children's example and took a long nap. They didn't care for dinner that night, either of the party, and in fact very few of the passengers went to the dining-saloon, for the steamer was having such a wild frolic and dance on the waves that things were hardly comfortable on deck or in the saloons, and the stewardesses and stewards were very busy all night, and for all the next day, because the gale lasted so long and made so much seasickness on board that nobody felt very happy, you see. [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. NAPLES IS CLOSE AT HAND. THE discomforts of the voyage, however, were very few; and after the strong winds died away, and the sky got rid of the wind clouds, and brought forth its merry sunshine again, the passengers crowded the decks, and took their ease in their comfortable steamer chairs, reading, writing, or just being lazy awhile, and the children played the game of "shuffle-board," and "tag," and "hide-and-seek," and such games as little people when they get together whether on land or shipboard, enjoy with all their might and main. Polly and Teddy laughed as loud and as often as the rest of the children, and bumped with the "grown-ups" during "tag" quite as frequently, but they always said: "Excuse me!" when they did so, and if it was a lady they ran against Teddy's cap was off in an instant while he made his little polite apology. I regret to say the other little ones were apt to forget that small act of politeness; they were so fearful of being "tagged," perhaps they hadn't time for apologies for unintentional rudeness. But after awhile, in some way, they caught the trick from Polly and Teddy, and surely that was a good thing, wasn't it? (I only mention this to show you that even little people--no matter how little they are--can influence each other for good or bad, and it is so much better to choose the "good," you know). And now I come to the day--or rather the early morning of the day--when the good ship steamed into the beautiful Bay of Naples with her colors flying, her band playing, and a crowd of excited and early risers amongst the passengers at the deck railings. Amongst them, of course, were our little couple and Mamma and Papa, and the children were wild with delight over the novelty of the scenes before them: the swarms of small native boats, which hung around under the steamship's sides, at her bow, and under her stern; the natives themselves, calling out in their whining tones for "_Monie, monie!_" (money); the little Italian lads who were constantly diving for the pennies some of the laughing passengers were tossing into the water. You would not believe they could possibly have found those pennies (they were not "_pennies_" as _we_ call our coppers, but small coin of not even the value of one of our pennies, and which were called "_centesimi_") in the water; but then you must know the water in the Bay of Naples is very blue--oh! a beautiful blue--and very transparent, and those small imps of divers would dart head-first down below the surface, and catch the coin in their teeth, and come up laughing, ready for more. Our children had, during the voyage, seen porpoises jumping out of the water, and had seen the signalling of the few passing ships, and had thought those sights great fun. Think, then, how "all-overish with gladness" they felt here in Naples harbor, watching these foreign scenes, and so happy with the novelty of their position that they fairly longed to open their rosy mouths and _whoop_ after their usual fashion at home. They looked ahead of them and saw the pretty city of Naples gleaming in the shine of the early rising sun, with its terraced gardens rising one above the other in masses of green foliage, through which the gaily-colored roofs of houses and other buildings could be seen. It made a charming and picturesque sight for everybody; and even those who had seen it all many times before, perhaps, felt the same thrill of delight as our dear little couple were feeling as they beheld it all for the very first time. "It makes me feel so full in here!" said Polly, to her mother, while her blue eyes shone like stars. [Illustration] "Me, too!" echoed Master Teddy, placing his hand as Polly did, on his heart, and drawing a long breath. But we must hurry on with our story. (Don't blame _me_, children, for hurrying, and leaving out much you would like to know, but blame the _Publishers_, for it is all their fault, I'll tell you privately.) When, at last, our party found themselves on the dock, and were waiting for Papa to finish attending to the baggage, Polly saw something which made her cry out: "Oh! look!" It was a little bower all decorated with large yellow lemons, larger than any lemons the children had ever seen before. The bower was coming straight towards them, and they couldn't see what made it move. From the top of the little arch (the _inside_ of the arch, which was just like a tiny summer-house) more big lemons were hanging, and also some little glasses, which were hanging by handles. As the queer thing came nearer, the children discovered that the small bower was built upon a little hand-cart, and that a brown-faced Italian lad, no older than Teddy, was drawing it between shafts, as though he had been a little pony. He was so nearly hidden by vines and lemon boughs that it was no wonder he had not at first been seen by Teddy and Polly, whose bright eyes were seeing so much. Nestling amongst vines on the bottom of the cart was a bright tin pail, and that was full of lemonade, which looked very clean and nice because it had just been freshly made. The little lemonade vendor came close to our party, and began a low, bird-like beautiful whistle. It sounded like a flute at first, then like a bird, then like a sweet Eolian harp, and even Mamma was delighted to hear it. After he had finished, his black eyes twinkled, and he said in broken English which Italian children readily pick up: "Buy limonade! ze signorina buy limonade? vera chip" (cheap), "on'y fiva centa glass!" He filled a glass and handed it to Polly--"_ze little mees!_" "We're very fond of lemonade, Auntie Darling," said Teddy, casting wistful eyes upon the cool drink. "Well, you shall have some then," laughed Mamma, and Teddy and Polly took their first refreshment on Italian shores. The little Beppo grinned at them, pulled a ragged cap from a mass of black, close curling hair, and, dropping his _centesimi_ (with which Mrs. Darling had provided herself before leaving the steamer, at the purser's office) into his pocket, he began a merry whistle again and moved off in search of more custom. CHAPTER VII. THE DRIVE TO THE HOTEL. AS the hotel to which the Darlings wished to go was located on one of the city heights, commanding a fine view of the bay and famous old Mount Vesuvius (about which our little couple had been told by Papa), the drive there from the dock was of course long enough to let them see a great many funny sights on the way, and you may be sure they were greatly impressed by them all. They saw men and women in queer costumes of gay colors--the women without hats or bonnets--going about the streets, and sunning themselves in the doorways, combing their children's heads or their own untidy locks; they saw them hanging out their washing on the backs of chairs right out in the street; they saw a _woman and a cow_ together pulling a big wagon; they saw a wee bit of a _donkey_ harnessed with an _ox_, and both tugging at a cart as placidly as though they weren't a funny pair; they saw a cow, a horse, and a donkey, all three harnessed before a vegetable-cart, on which sat a driver "not even as old as Teddy," the children were sure, though he may have been older than he looked, as so many of the poorer class of children in Naples are stunted in growth; they saw a wee little bony donkey pulling a wagon which carried six big men and women in it, and they didn't think it was a bit cruel to put so heavy a burden on such a little beast. But our dear little tender-hearted couple thought it so cruel that they could not even look at it after the first glance. They saw lots of little children in the street going about with great beautiful bunches of flowers--red, red roses and Italian violets in their dirty little hands, running after carriages, and holding their fragrant wares up to the ladies and gentlemen who were driving about to see the city. Polly wondered why the people didn't want to keep the flowers, but kept shaking their heads _no_ all the time. She knew _she_ would keep them and say: "Thank you," very politely if any little girl or boy offered her any. And presently a small boy ran up to the carriage and held up his roses. Now, it chanced that Mamma and Papa were very busy at that moment searching for certain information in their guide-books, and so they did not notice the little flower-boy, nor hear Miss Polly's delighted thanks as she took the flowers in her eager hands. The carriage was going very slowly, and the expectant little Italian trotted alongside waiting for the coin which in her dear innocent heart Polly had no idea was wanted, for she was whispering to Teddy: "I think these Napelers are very kind and polite to us, don't you?" And she gravely proceed to divide her gift with her "chum." "_Una lira! una lira!_" whined the impatient lad outside, and at that Mamma looked up and discovered Polly's funny mistake. How she laughed, and Papa too! How red Polly's cheeks grew! Redder than her roses, which she thought had been a polite gift to her. "What does he mean?" Teddy asked, "saying all the time '_ooner-leerer_'?" "He means that he wants _one lira_ (which means twenty cents of our money) for his roses," replied Mamma, "and I will let you give him the money, dear," passing it to Teddy, who felt very much like a grown-up man as he leaned over and dropped the price of Polly's beautiful roses in the outstretched and very dirty little hand of the Italian. "I don't think Napelers are so polite and kind as I did," said Polly somewhat crossly, for, you see, she felt so astonished and so ashamed of her mistake that it did make her a little cross with herself and the circumstances. [Illustration: "A small boy ran up to the carriage, and held up his roses."] However, when Teddy sweetly and with great gallantry pinned one of his share of the roses to Polly's jacket, she smiled her crossness out of sight, and everything was cheerful again. As they drove along the children saw many other curious things, and stored them away in their memories to talk over together and tell to their little friends at home. Finally they arrived at the hotel, and were shown to their rooms, which overlooked the bay. Old Vesuvius, which had been through a state of fierce eruption (you all know about volcanos, of course, and must have heard about Mount Vesuvius, so that you will know what a volcanic eruption means, and I need not explain it here) some time before this, was now settling down into quite a calm state again, but that night after the sky had grown dark our little couple noticed the dull red glow on the crater's head, and saw little thin streaks of fire down upon the side of the mountain nearest the bay; and Papa told them all about the famous old mountain and its bad habits, and promised to take them to the ruins of the once beautiful and ancient city of Pompeii (I shouldn't wonder if my little readers had studied about it in their geographies), and tell them of the way old Vesuvius went to work, long, _long, long_ ago to destroy the city and its inhabitants by throwing lava and hot ashes down upon it, on a day when everybody was happy, and careless, and little dreaming what was coming to them all. After looking out upon the shining waters of the bay, and seeing the pretty reflection of the stars in them by-and-by, and listening to the twinkling music of mandolins and the tuneful voices of the Italian street-singers awhile, our little Teddy and Polly went sleepily to bed, and never even had a dream, their slumber was so sound. CHAPTER VIII. AN EXCURSION. MANY a nice walk about the streets of Naples did our dear happy little couple take with Mamma and Papa, and into many a shop did they go, completely fascinated with the pretty goods displayed there. They longed to buy up everything they saw, and, if they had been allowed a larger portion of coin than Papa good-naturedly gave them each day, I don't know how many wonderful things they would have purchased. They enjoyed the street scenes, too, as they walked along. The long-eared donkeys, which carried on either side of their short round backs such enormous and heavily loaded paniers that sometimes all you could see of the little animals were their slender legs, their long wagging ears, and their tails. But they didn't seem to mind their burdens at all, and plodded along thinking their own donkey thoughts, and no doubt wondering what Teddy and Polly were laughing at them for! And then there were the little shops where fruits were sold, and over the doorways of which were hanging great branches full of oranges and lemons, just as the boughs were broken from the trees (as we in our country, you know, like to break a bough hanging full of cherries from our cherry-trees). It was wonderful to Polly and Teddy to see such a sight, and to see, as they had seen at their meals in the hotel, those large oval lemons and the golden round oranges served to the hotel guests on the stems, with the clustering leaves adorning them. (You don't see such things as those in New York, do you?) Well, and then there were the beautiful gardens, rising one above the other in a bewildering mass of foliage of orange, lemon, and olive trees rich in fruit. Those gardens belonged to the wealthy class of Neapolitans, and their pretty dwelling-houses stood amongst the gardens on their terraces, overlooking the city like sentinels on the hills. There were queer streets--_side_ streets they were--which consisted only of a series of stone steps running straight up hill, like steps dug out of a steep cliff-side; and along the sides of those "step-streets," as Teddy called them, were little bits of houses and shops scooped out of the walls of the terraces and made comfortable, after a fashion, for those who lived in them, and who kept their tiny stores. Polly and Teddy looked up at them as they passed, and noticed that the stone steps--from top to bottom--were swarming with children, men, and women, and nearly all of them, even the wee little people, carried baskets and various burdens as easily on their _heads_ as in their hands; and the strange part was that some of those bundles, which were poised so safely on the heads, would have made a fair load for a horse, so large were they. Another funny thing the little couple were greatly interested in was the sight of those peculiar decorations each horse, donkey, and cow, and even the oxen were wearing when in harness. It consisted of a long feather, as though from a rooster's tail, which was stuck securely over the animal's forehead, and waved and waggled to and fro as the animal walked along. When there was no feather to be seen, there was always a _tuft of hair_ or a _tuft of fur_ fastened in place either between the animal's ears or on the harness, and it was considered a very wrong thing if either of those peculiar decorations was forgotten when harnessing. Why? Well, because, unfortunately, the lower classes of Italians have many foolish superstitions, and that is one of them, for they fancy that "_ill luck_" is kept off and the "_evil eye_" of misfortune turned aside by the use of the feathers, the hair, or the fur in the manner I have described. Polly and Teddy agreed that it was a very silly idea, and I'm afraid they didn't have much respect for the drivers of the animals they saw decorated in that absurd style. One day Papa and Mamma took the children to the island of Capri. They had seen the island from their windows rising out of the bay in the distance, and the guide-book told them that it would be a fine excursion on a fair day. So they started off one lovely morning in the little excursion boat that takes passengers to and fro between Naples and the island of Capri and other points of interest in the bay. [Illustration] I cannot take time to give all the particulars of the _boat_ trip and its delights, but must tell you about the famous "_Blue Grotto_," which they reached before arriving at Capri. The "Blue Grotto" is a cave in the rocks of one of the cliffs, and when the water is smooth a row-boat can be paddled through the low opening which makes the mouth of the cave; but in rough weather no boat can make the passage, as the opening is so very small. The rock on one side of the cave does not go to the bottom, but is only sunken a little way below the water. So the sunlight strikes down under the rock, as well as under the entrance hole, and is reflected upwards again through the water in the cave, which causes a wonderful silvery light, and a beautiful pale blue tint to the water and the roof of the cave. Visitors to Capri always stop at the "Blue Grotto" on the way, and when the big boat--the excursion boat--stops at that part of the cliff there are a crowd of men in little row-boats, waiting to take passengers who wish to go into the cave and show them the wonders of it, for a small coin each passenger. So of course our little couple must see it, and so must Mamma. Papa, who had seen it all once before (when he and Mamma had taken a trip alone, before _Polly_ could remember), did not go, for the boatman would only carry three passengers on the trip. You may imagine how they enjoyed it, and when they saw a boatman from another boat jump over into the water and splash about to show his passengers how like a silver blue water-sprite he could look the children gave one of their delighted whoops right there, and then nearly fell out of their own boat with fright at the loud strange echo the cave gave back at their shout. Well, after the passengers returned from the cave, the steamboat went on its way, and in due time the landing at Capri was made, and the passengers were told that they would have two hours of time in which to see everything of interest on the beautiful island, before the boat should start on to _Sorrento_ (which is another charming resort not far from Capri). Such a crowd of donkey boys and donkey girls as were on the dock when the steamboat stopped! They were all yelling at one time, trying to coax passengers to use their donkeys or their cabs, and pay them so much per hour. [Illustration: "The Blue Grotto of Capri."] Now, you see, Capri is a funny sort of island, for it is "taller than it is broad," as people say. It rises right out of the bay in a lot of terraced cliffs, and as far up as you can see it is just a mass of green gardens and woods. At the base of the island are the village streets, and odd little houses, and shops and hotels, and at one of the hotels our party of four ate a good dinner, before taking a carriage up the mountain road to Anacapri, a funny little bit of a village right at the very top of the island. When the dinner was finished Mamma and Papa took the back seat in the open little "victoria" (as the carriage was called, though it was very small and crampy in its proportions), and the little couple, gay as larks, and wide-eyed with wonder, sat close together on the small footstool of a seat in front of the "grown-ups," and with a crack of the whip (which the horse didn't even jump at, because he is so used to it, and best of all, because the "crack" is only in the air and not against his bony sides) they all started off for "Anacapri." I could tell you of a great many things they saw on the way, and of the natives they passed, who bobbed and curtsied to the travelers, and showed their white teeth, and held up their little brown babies, hoping for the gift of a coin or two. And I would like to describe the magnificent sight of the olive-gardens, and of the trees hanging full of lemons and oranges, and of the beautiful flowering vines which grew by the roadside, and the shade trees, and particularly of the _grand_ sight which greeted their eyes with every turn of the winding road which brought the Bay of Naples (stretching itself far and wide and dotted all over with odd little ships and boats) into view. But I must skip all those things, and get you at last with the dear little couple to the mite of a village mentioned as "Anacapri." From there our friends looked right down upon the bay and over at Naples, and if they had been little birds they would have spread their wings and taken a good fly into the blue sunny space before them--at least, that is what Teddy whispered in Polly's ear he would _like_ to do. CHAPTER IX. WHAT THEY SAW AT ANACAPRI, AND HOW THEY WENT ON TO SORRENTO AND POMPEII. [Illustration] WHEN the carriage stopped in the midst of the small houses at Anacapri, instantly a swarm of little boys and girls surrounded it. While the horse was resting, the small natives stared at our friends, and gazed especially hard and long upon Polly and Teddy, who felt quite shy and uncomfortable over the matter. They finally decided to give a few stares back again, and little bashful Polly ventured to smile, though she didn't have anything in particular to smile about. Teddy, seeing Polly smile, thought _he_ ought to, and in a few moments every little Italian face was on the broad grin also. Mamma and Papa had been talking with the driver, who could speak a little broken English, but they were ready to notice the pretty brown faces of the children who stood beside the carriage, and now decided that Anacapri could boast of the good looks of its "small fry" with good reason. There was only one ugly-featured little boy in the crowd, and he was very ugly indeed, and not only that, but his hair was red, and his eyes _very blue_, and he was so fair of skin that his face was covered with freckles. He spoke Italian, however, like a native, and Papa wondered what sort of little red-haired native he might be. So he spoke to him in English, to see if the boy would comprehend. To his surprise he answered with a merry smile, and then, another surprise, a little fellow beside him spoke up also in English, and explained that, though _he_ was dark in complexion, and Italian all over, yet he was _brother_ to the red-haired boy, who was _Scotch_; and that Jim's father was a Scotchman, and when he died his mother married an Italian whom she met in England, and when _he_ died she was left poor, and through some friends in Anacapri had come there to live only seven months before. He told all this in good, though of course childish and broken English, for he was only nine years old. Then Jim, the little Scotchman, put in his word, and when asked how they happened--in only a few months--to speak Italian like natives, when they had lived in other countries all their lives before, he replied, tossing his head proudly: "Oh, _that_ ain't anythin'. _We got it off the boys_ here!" Of course all this was deeply interesting to Polly and Teddy, and they took a great fancy to the little brothers. But presently a boy who had not spoken before, not knowing English, put his hand inside his shirt and pulled out a little brown bird. Holding it by both wee feet, he held it up, while its poor little heart was beating and its tiny wings fluttering with fear. "_Monie!_" he said, and it was the only English word he cared to know--"monie!" and he pointed to the bird and then to the sky. The little couple looked wonderingly at him, and the Scotch boy explained that if Polly gave the boy a coin he would let the poor birdie fly away in safety. If he didn't get the coin, then he would take it home and his family would cook it for supper. That made our little couple indignant, and vexed also the Mamma and kind-hearted Papa. So he paid over a coin, and up, up, up into the sunny space above flew little birdie, and the children--_our_ children--shouted with pleasure to see the poor captive free. But--what do you think came next? Why, that cruel boy put his hand inside his shirt again, and out came another bird, and with it the same request for "monie." Of course, he was frowned upon, and not another coin was given him, for Papa found he had a "bunch of birds" hidden there to earn their freedom by coin-giving, at every chance offered, and as those same birds, after being freed, would be caught again in time, the outlook was discouraging, wasn't it? And now, the horse being rested, the party turned about to go back to the steamboat landing below, and to the small Scotchie and his Italian brother only did Mr. Darling give a farewell gift of coin, as they drove away and finally left the little village behind them. When they reached Sorrento a little while after, it was late in the afternoon, and Papa said they must spend the night there and go on by carriage to see the ruins of Pompeii the next day. It was a delightful experience to our little European travelers when they saw that the steamboat did not go close up beside the landing dock, as at Capri, but that the passengers were to be taken off in small boats and rowed ashore. They could hardly wait their turn for it, but finally the blissful moment arrived, and the children were seated in the stern of the little boat, gliding over the blue waters. Oh! you have no idea how very blue and clear the water there really is. It is like beautiful azure blue ribbon, satin ribbon, and you feel as if you'd like to carry home bottles of it. But as it is the sunshine and the condition of the depths of water and bottom of the bay all combined which produce that _color_ there--you would not be able to bottle it, would you? Well, when the landing was reached, the children had to lift their eyes to a height on top of a steep cliff wall before they could see the hotel in which the night was to be spent. "I never in the world, Teddy Terry, can climb up there!" said puzzled little Polly. But Ted thought it would be real fun to climb it, and was quite disappointed when Papa pointed to a narrow railroad which ran up, up, up the cliff through a tunnel beginning not far from where they had left the boat. "It is called a '_funicular_,' or, as the Italians call it, a '_funicolare_,'" explained Papa, "and the little car we are to enter presently is drawn up to the top of the cliff by a cable, a strong wire rope, very thick and quite able to do its work safely, so you needn't look so frightened, little goosey," to Polly, for her eyes were full of anxious wonderment, and she took tight hold of her Father's hand. "I'm not a bit frightened," declared Teddy, but I really think he was a tiny bit afraid, for he grasped the tail of Papa's coat pretty closely as they followed Mamma into the little car, which seemed to be standing almost on end, and looked as though at any moment it might roll backwards down the incline. However, they arrived in good condition at the top before long, and were able to rest themselves and by-and-by eat a good dinner in the fine hotel, which was located in the midst of a wonderful garden right there on top of the cliff. Next morning they visited the little shops where beautiful olive-wood articles were sold, and Papa bought a fine ruler for Ted, and a dainty little clothes-brush (both of carved olive-wood) for Polly. Then it was time to drive to Pompeii, and after a long, rather dusty drive down the mountain road, they found themselves amongst the ruins of that ancient city at last. Of course such little folks as Polly and Teddy couldn't take quite as much interest in the old city as grown-up visitors were taking, but they were quick to observe everything especially interesting: the ruts in the paved streets worn deeply by the wheels of the chariots used in those days (something like the chariots you have seen, no doubt, when Barnum's big circus comes along, and all little folks go to see it, of course); the big flat stepping-stones in the streets, which were placed there so that people could have a clean, dry, and raised crossing from one side to the other (very nice for rainy, muddy weather, wasn't it?); the bake ovens where loaves of bread were baking at the very moment the flood of hot cinders and lava came thickly down upon the city and destroyed it so suddenly and so soon; the old drinking-fountains still bearing the worn impressions and dents made by the hands which used to rest upon the fountain basins so long ago. Papa explained that according to history the city was seven hundred years old when destroyed, and it lay over a thousand years under twenty feet of ashes. You see, the ashes cooled, and the lava hardened, and there was no sign of any city there till all those many years had passed, and then by accident, history tells us, it was discovered that there was a city away down under all that earth (grass had grown over it in all that long time, and it looked like meadows). Then people set to work digging, and lo and behold! uncovered so much of it that everybody flocked to see it. So that is how Polly and Teddy at last got there, and people are still digging away, clearing more and more of the big city from the earth over it. Papa made it all very interesting to our little couple (and when they got home what did Teddy do but bury away down deep in his garden, in the deepest hole he could dig with his little spade, a whole toy village of Polly's, and cover it up, and pound the earth and grass over it again, and by-and-by play he was "discovering Pompeii" and set to work to excavate the little city again). CHAPTER X. BACK TO NAPLES, AND "HOMEWARD BOUND." WELL, after they had seen Pompeii, and looked at the curiosities in the little museum of the office and station building near by, our little couple felt very tired, and begged Papa to take them home. Polly's little golden head ached, and Teddy's stocking had gotten into a wrinkle on his heel, and it hurt him to walk, and they both agreed that they didn't care one bit if "_Vesulivus_" did cover old "Pompawy" all over with ashes and dirt. They wanted to go home and rest Polly's head and Teddy's lame heel, and so Papa and Mamma confessed to being pretty tired also, and soon they were in the train, speeding rapidly towards Naples, having had two days of "round trip excursion," and a "jolly good time," as the children expressed it. I would like to tell you about all the little couple did and all they saw while there for four happy weeks, but I must leave it all to your lively imagination, dear little readers, and whatever beautiful times you imagine for the children you may be sure they had. [Illustration: "I have almost kept my promise to my Mamma and tried to be a good boy."] Papa was obliged to return to his business at home after a month of good times abroad, and so the day came when the trunks were packed again, and the clock was being watched, and the hotel "bus" being listened for, etc., and our little couple again in haste to go on board the steamship, for, much as they had enjoyed themselves, they confided secretly to each other the grand truth that--"After all, they liked their own gardens and playtimes at home lots better'n European things, and that Bridgie and Ann made things taste nicer to eat than the queer cooks in Naples; and 'sides all that, they hadn't seen any tree at all that was half so nice as their own apple-tree where they could sit in amongst the leaves together, and--and--they guessed 'Merican things were nicer for little boys and girls, _any_ way!" Teddy had put into a snug corner of his small trunk a few little gifts for "dear own Mamma and Papa," and a nice present for his Bridget and Polly's Ann. And Polly had carefully stowed away in Mamma's trunk also some pretty gifts for "Auntie Terry and Uncle Terry," and a present each for her Ann and Teddy's Bridgie; and the things they planned to do and the good times they planned to have when once more at their own pretty cottage homes, where the _old apple-tree_ and the much-loved _gap in the fence_ near it were waiting for them I can't begin to tell you. We see them now--as they stand together with Teddy's loving arm about Polly, and her soft cheek pressed close to his--at the railing in the stern of the ocean liner, taking a farewell look at sunny Naples and Italian shores, and waving handkerchiefs to the men, women, and children in the small row-boats which were skipping about in the bay in the wake of the steamship, while shrill Italian voices were shouting: "_Addio! addio!_" "We've had the beautifullest time that ever could be, and we've liked being European travelers ever so much, haven't we, Teddy Terry?" remarked Polly at last, as the children followed Mr. Darling to their steamer chairs; "and I must say," she added quite proudly, "that I think we've been such good children that some day maybe Papa'll take us to some other places. Won't that be fun?" Teddy thought it would, but he could not be so conscientiously sure of having been as "good" as Polly fancied, for he had a distinct remembrance of certain occasions (of which I haven't had the heart to tell my little readers) when Mamma Darling had had to scold pretty severely, and he had been more humiliated about it than Polly, on account of his promise to his own Mamma. Thinking it all over now, as he sat in his chair beside Mrs. Darling on deck, he suddenly drew her head down to him and earnestly whispered: "Say, Auntie, I have almost kept my promise to my Mamma and tried to be a good boy, haven't I? You see, I wouldn't like her to say I broke my word after she'd been and trusted me, you know, Auntie!" Mrs. Darling put a tender kiss on the soft little tanned forehead, and whispered back: "I'm going to tell Mamma Terry that her boy was the best-behaved little traveler I ever saw, so cheer up, Teddy boy!" It was a very happy little laddie who settled back in that big steamer chair and slipped his hand into Polly's after "Auntie" had made her whispered speech. And now we must say good-bye to them, as the steamship speeds on towards America's shores, and I hope this story of _more_ of the doings of our dear little couple will have given as much pleasure as your first account of them. The world is full of "Dear Little Couples," isn't it? * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Page 16, "city" changed to "City" (York City) Page 21, repeated line of text was deleted. Original read: blew its summons for luncheon the little couple had explored the steamer, under Papa's guidance, pretty thoroughly. You know the steamer, under Papa's guidance, pretty thoroughly. You know children like to explore, and go scampering about to see all that can 
28614	----	AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME BY FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1899 _All rights reserved_ Copyright, 1898, By The Macmillan Company. Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November, December, 1898. _Norwood Press_ _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_ _Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._ TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME I PAGE THE MAKING OF THE CITY 1 THE EMPIRE 22 THE CITY OF AUGUSTUS 57 THE MIDDLE AGE 78 THE FOURTEEN REGIONS 100 REGION I MONTI 106 REGION II TREVI 155 REGION III COLONNA 190 REGION IV CAMPO MARZO 243 REGION V PONTE 274 REGION VI PARIONE 297 LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES VOLUME I Map of Rome _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE The Wall of Romulus 4 Palace of the Cæsars 30 The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct 50 Temple of Castor and Pollux 70 Basilica Constantine 90 Basilica of Saint John Lateran 114 Baths of Diocletian 140 Fountain of Trevi 158 Piazza Barberini 188 Porta San Lorenzo 214 Villa Borghese 230 Piazza del Popolo 256 Island in the Tiber 280 Palazzo Massimo alle Colonna 306 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT VOLUME I PAGE Palatine Hill and Mouth of the Cloaca Maxima 1 Ruins of the Servian Wall 8 Etruscan Bridge at Veii 16 Tombs on the Appian Way 22 Brass of Tiberius, showing the Temple of Concord 24 The Tarpeian Rock 28 Caius Julius Cæsar 36 Octavius Augustus Cæsar 45 Brass of Trajan, showing the Circus Maximus 56 Brass of Antoninus Pius, in Honour of Faustina, with Reverse showing Vesta bearing the Palladium 57 Ponte Rotto, now destroyed 67 Atrium of Vesta 72 Brass of Gordian, showing the Colosseum 78 The Colosseum 87 Ruins of the Temple of Saturn 92 Brass of Gordian, showing Roman Games 99 Ruins of the Julian Basilica 100 Brass of Titus, showing the Colosseum 105 Region I Monti, Device of 106 Santa Francesca Romana 111 San Giovanni in Laterano 116 Piazza Colonna 119 Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 126 Santa Maria Maggiore 134 Porta Maggiore, supporting the Channels of the Aqueduct of Claudius and the Anio Novus 145 Interior of the Colosseum 152 Region II Trevi, Device of 155 Grand Hall of the Colonna Palace 162 Interior of the Mausoleum of Augustus 169 Forum of Trajan 171 Ruins of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli 180 Palazzo del Quirinale 185 Region III Colonna, Device of 190 Arch of Titus 191 Twin Churches at the Entrance of the Corso 197 San Lorenzo in Lucina 204 Palazzo Doria-Pamfili 208 Palazzo di Monte Citorio 223 Palazzo di Venezia 234 Region IV Campo Marzo, Device of 248 Piazza di Spagna 251 Trinità de Monti 257 Villa Medici 265 Region V Ponte 274 Bridge of Sant' Angelo 285 Villa Negroni 292 Region VI Parione, Device of 297 Piazza Navona 303 Ponte Sisto 307 The Cancelleria 316 WORKS CONSULTED NOT INCLUDING CLASSIC WRITERS NOR ENCYCLOPÆDIAS 1. AMPÈRE--Histoire Romaine à Rome. AMPÈRE--L'Empire Remain à Rome. 2. BARACCONI--I Rioni di Roma. 3. BOISSIER--Promenades Archéologiques. 4. BRYCE--The Holy Roman Empire. 5. CELLINI--Memoirs. 6. COPPI--Memoire Colonnesi. 7. FORTUNATO--Storia delle vite delle Imperatrici Romane. 8. GIBBON--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 9. GNOLI--Vittoria Accoramboni. 10. GREGOROVIUS--Geschichte der Stadt Rom. 11. HARE--Walks in Rome. 12. JOSEPHUS--Life of. 13. LANCIANI--Ancient Rome. 14. LETI--Vita di Sisto V. 15. MURATORI--Scriptores Rerum Italicarum. MURATORI--Annali d'Italia. MURATORI--Antichità Italiane. 16. RAMSAY AND LANCIANI--A Manual of Roman Antiquities. 17. SCHNEIDER--Das Alte Rom. 18. SILVAGNI--La Corte e la Società Romana. [Illustration: PALATINE HILL AND MOUTH OF THE CLOACA MAXIMA] Ave Roma Immortalis I The story of Rome is the most splendid romance in all history. A few shepherds tend their flocks among volcanic hills, listening by day and night to the awful warnings of the subterranean voice,--born in danger, reared in peril, living their lives under perpetual menace of destruction, from generation to generation. Then, at last, the deep voice swells to thunder, roaring up from the earth's heart, the lightning shoots madly round the mountain top, the ground rocks, and the air is darkened with ashes. The moment has come. One man is a leader, but not all will follow him. He leads his small band swiftly down from the heights, and they drive a flock and a little herd before them, while each man carries his few belongings as best he can, and there are few women in the company. The rest would not be saved, and they perish among their huts before another day is over. Down, always downwards, march the wanderers, rough, rugged, young with the terrible youth of those days, and wise only with the wisdom of nature. Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River, the Man of the Village by the River; and to our own time the twenty-first of April is kept and remembered, and even now honoured, for the very day on which the shepherds began to dig their trench on the Palatine, the date of the Foundation of Rome, from which seven hundred and fifty-four years were reckoned to the birth of Christ. And the shepherds called their leader King, though his kingship was over but few men. Yet they were such men as begin history, and in the scant company there were all the seeds of empire. First the profound faith of natural mankind, unquestioning, immovable, inseparable from every daily thought and action; then fierce strength, and courage, and love of life and of possession; last, obedience to the chosen leader, in clear liberty, when one should fail, to choose another. So the Romans began to win the world, and won it in about six hundred years. By their camp-fires, by their firesides in their little huts, they told old tales of their race, and round the truth grew up romantic legend, ever dear to the fighting man and to the husbandman alike, with strange tales of their first leader's birth, fit for poets, and woven to stir young hearts to daring, and young hands to smiting. Truth there was under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of Alba Longa slew his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars, mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus, father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears for her royal adept, and his earthen cup, jealously guarded, was worshipped for more than a thousand years; legends of the first Arval brotherhood, dim as the story of Melchisedec, King and priest, but lasting as Rome itself. Tales of King Tullus, when the three Horatii fought for Rome against the three Curiatii, who smote for Alba and lost the day--Tullus Hostilius, grandson of that first Hostus who had fought against the Sabines; and always more legend, and more, and more, sometimes misty, sometimes clear and direct in action as a Greek tragedy. They hover upon the threshold of history, with faces of beauty or of terror, sublime, ridiculous, insignificant, some born of desperate, real deeds, many another, perhaps, first told by some black-haired shepherd mother to her wondering boys at evening, when the brazen pot simmered on the smouldering fire, and the father had not yet come home. But down beneath the legend lies the fact, in hewn stones already far in the third thousand of their years. Digging for truth, searchers have come here and there upon the first walls and gates of the Palatine village, straight, strong and deeply founded. The men who made them meant to hold their own, and their own was whatsoever they were able to take from others by force. They built their walls round a four-sided space, wide enough for them, scarcely big enough a thousand years later for the houses of their children's rulers, the palaces of the Cæsars of which so much still stands today. Then came the man who built the first bridge across the river, of wooden piles and beams, bolted with bronze, because the Romans had no iron yet, and ever afterwards repaired with wood and bronze, for its sanctity, in perpetual veneration of Ancus Martius, fourth King of Rome. That was the bridge Horatius kept against Porsena of Clusium, while the fathers hewed it down behind him. [Illustration: WALL OF ROMULUS] Tarquin the first came next, a stranger of Greek blood, chosen, perhaps, because the factions in Rome could not agree. Then Servius, great and good, built his tremendous fortification, and the King of Italy today, driving through the streets in his carriage, may look upon the wall of the King who reigned in Rome more than two thousand and four hundred years ago. Under those six rulers, from Romulus to Servius, from the man of the River Village to the man of walls, Rome had grown from a sheepfold to a town, from a town to a walled city, from a city to a little nation, matched against all mankind, to win or die, inch by inch, sword in hand. She was a kingdom now, and her men were subjects; and still the third law of great races was strong and waking. Romans obeyed their leader so long as he could lead them well--no longer. The twilight of the Kings gathered suddenly, and their names were darkened, and their sun went down in shame and hate. In the confusion, tragic legend rises to tell the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history, turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the Republic was born. While father, husband and friend were stunned with grief, Brutus held up the dripping knife before their eyes. 'By this most chaste blood, I swear--Gods be my witnesses--that I will hunt down Tarquin the Proud, himself, his infamous wife and every child of his, with fire and sword, and with all my might, and neither he nor any other man shall ever again be King in Rome.' So they all swore, and bore the dead woman out into the market-place, and called on all men to stand by them. They kept their word, and the tale tells how the Tarquins were driven out to a perpetual exile, and by and by allied themselves with Porsena, and marched on Rome, and were stopped only at the Sublician bridge by brave Horatius. Chaos next. Then all at once the Republic stands out, born full grown and ready armed, stern, organized and grasping, but having already within itself the quickened opposites that were to fight for power so long and so fiercely,--the rich and the poor, the patrician and the plebeian, the might and the right. There is a wonder in that quick change from Kingdom to Commonwealth, which nothing can make clear, except, perhaps, modern history. Say that two thousand or more years hereafter men shall read of what our grandfathers, our fathers and ourselves have seen done in France within a hundred years, out of two or three old books founded mostly on tradition; they may be confused by the sudden disappearance of kings, by the chaos, the wild wars and the unforeseen birth of a lasting republic, just as we are puzzled when we read of the same sequence in ancient Rome. Men who come after us will have more documents, too. It is not possible that all books and traces of written history should be destroyed throughout the world, as the Gauls burned everything in Rome, except the Capitol itself, held by the handful of men who had taken refuge there. So the Kingdom fell with a woman's death, and the Commonwealth was made by her avengers. Take the story as you will, for truth or truth's legend, it is for ever humanly true, and such deeds would rouse a nation today as they did then and as they set Rome on fire once more nearly sixty years later. But all the time Rome was growing as if the very stones had life to put out shoots and blossoms and bear fruit. Round about the city the great Servian wall had wound like a vast finger, in and out, grasping the seven hills, and taking in what would be a fair-sized city even in our day. They were the last defences Rome built for herself, for nearly nine hundred years. Nothing can give a larger idea of Rome's greatness than that; not all the temples, monuments, palaces, public buildings of later years can tell half the certainty of her power expressed by that one fact--Rome needed no walls when once she had won the world. But it is very hard to guess at what the city was, in those grim times of the early fight for life. We know the walls, and there were nineteen gates in all, and there were paved roads; the wooden bridge, the Capitol with its first temple and first fortress, the first Forum with the Sacred Way, were all there, and the public fountain, called the Tullianum, and a few other sites are certain. The rest must be imagined. [Illustration: RUINS OF THE SERVIAN WALL] Rome was a brown city in those days, when there was no marble and little stucco: a brown city teeming with men and women clothed mostly in grey and brown and black woollen cloaks, like those the hill shepherds wear today, caught up under one arm and thrown far over the shoulder in dark folds. The low houses without any outer windows, entered by one rough door, were built close together, and those near the Forum had shops outside them, low-browed places, dark but not deep, where the cloaked keeper sat behind a stone counter among his wares, waiting for custom, watching all that happened in the market-place, gathering in gossip from one buyer to exchange it for more with the next, altogether not unlike the small Eastern merchant of today. Yet during more than half the time, there were few young men, or men in prime, in the streets of Rome. They were fighting more than half the year, while their fathers and their children stayed behind with the women. The women sat spinning and weaving wool in their little brown houses; the boys played, fought, ran races naked in the streets; the small girls had their quiet games and, surely, their dolls, made of rags, stuffed with the soft wool waste from their mothers' spindles and looms. The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons, fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more possession. Meanwhile the maidens went in pairs to the springs to fetch water, or down to the river in small companies to wash the woollen clothes and dry them in the shade of the old wild trees, lest in the sun they should shrink and thicken; black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned maids, all of them, strong and light of foot, fit to be mothers of more soldiers, to slay more enemies, and bring back more spoil. Then, as in our own times, the flocks of goats were driven in from the pastures at early morning and milked from door to door, for each household, and driven out again to the grass before the sun was high. In the old wall there was the Cattle Gate, the Porta Mugonia, named, as the learned say, from the lowing of the herds. Then, as in the hill towns not long ago, the serving women, who were slaves, sat cross-legged on the ground in the narrow court within the house, with the hand-mill of two stones between them, and ground the wheat to flour for the day's meal. There have been wonderful survivals of the first age even to our own time. But that which has not come down to us is the huge vitality of those men and women. The world's holders have never risen suddenly in hordes; they have always grown by degrees out of little nations, that could live through more than their neighbours. Calling up the vision of the first Rome, one must see, too, such human faces and figures of men as are hardly to be found among us nowadays,--the big features, the great, square, devouring jaws, the steadily bright eyes, the strongly built brows, coarse, shagged hair, big bones, iron muscles and starting sinews. There are savage countries that still breed such men. They may have their turn next, when we are worn out. Browning has made John the Smith a memorable type. Rome was a clean city in those days. One of the Tarquins had built the great arched drain which still stands unshaken and in use, and smaller ones led to it, draining the Forum and all the low part of the town. The people were clean, far beyond our ordinary idea of them, as is plain enough from the contemptuous way in which the Latin authors use their strong words for uncleanliness. A dirty man was an object of pity, and men sometimes went about in soiled clothes to excite the public sympathy, as beggars do today in all countries. Dirt meant abject poverty, and in a grasping, getting race, poverty was the exception, even while simplicity was the rule. For all was simple with them, their dress, their homes, their lives, their motives, and if one could see the Rome of Tarquin the Proud, this simplicity would be of all characteristics the most striking, compared with what we know of later Rome, and with what we see about us in our own times. Simplicity is not strength, but the condition in which strength is least hampered in its full action. It was easy to live simply in such a place and in such a climate, under a wise King. The check in the first straight run of Rome's history brought the Romans suddenly face to face with the first great complication of their career, which was the struggle between the rich and the poor; and again the half truth rises up to explain the fact. Men whose first instinct was to take and hold took from one another in peace when they could not take from their enemies in war, since they must needs be always taking from some one. So the few strong took all from the many weak, till the weak banded themselves together to resist the strong, and the struggle for life took a new direction. The grim figure of Lucius Junius Brutus rises as the incarnation of that character which, at great times, made history, but in peace made trouble. The man who avenged Lucretia, who drove out the Tarquins, and founded the Republic, is most often remembered as the father who sat unmoved in judgment on his two traitor sons, and looked on with stony eyes while they paid the price of their treason in torment and death. That one deed stands out, and we forget how he himself fell fighting for Rome's freedom. But still the evil grew at home, and the hideous law of creditor and debtor, which only fiercest avarice could have devised, ground the poor, who were obliged to borrow to pay the tax-gatherer, and made slaves of them almost to the ruin of the state. Just then Etruria wakes, shadowy, half Greek, the central power of Italy, between Rome and Gaul. Porsena, the Lar of Clusium, comes against the city with a great host in gilded arms. Terror descends like a dark mist over the young nation. The rich fear for their riches, the poor for their lives. In haste the fathers gather great supplies of corn against a siege; credit and debt are forgotten; patrician and plebeian join hands as Porsena reaches Janiculum, and three heroic figures of romance stand forth from a host of heroes. Horatius keeps the bridge, first with two comrades, then, at the last, alone in the glory of single-handed fight against an army, sure of immortality whether he live or die. Scævola, sworn with the three hundred to slay the Lar, stabs the wrong man, and burns his hand to the wrist to show what tortures he can bear unmoved. Cloelia, the maiden hostage, rides her young steed at the yellow torrent, and swims the raging flood back to the Palatine. Cloelia and Horatius get statues in the Forum; Scævola is endowed with great lands, which his race holds for centuries, and leaves a name so great that two thousand years later, Sforza, greatest leader of the Middle Age, coveting long ancestry, makes himself descend from the man who burned off his own hand. They are great figures, the two men and the noble girl, and real to us, in a way, because we can stand on the very ground they trod, where Horatius fought, where Scævola suffered and where Cloelia took the river. They are nearer to us than Romulus, nearer even than Lucretia, as each figure, following the city's quick life, has more of reality about it, and not less of heroism. For two hundred years the Romans strove with each other in law making; the fathers for exclusive power and wealth, the plebeians for freedom, first, and then for office in the state; a time of fighting abroad for land, and of contention at home about its division. In fifty years the poor had their Tribunes, but it took them nearly three times as long, after that, to make themselves almost the fathers' equals in power. Once they tried a new kind of government by a board of ten, and it held for a while, till again a woman's life turned the tide of Roman history, and fair young Virginia, stabbed by her father in the Forum, left a name as lasting as any of that day. Romance again, but the true romance, above doubt, at last; not at all mythical, but full of fate's unanswerable logic, which makes dim stories clear to living eyes. You may see the actors in the Forum, where it all happened,--the lovely girl with frightened, wondering eyes; the father, desperate, white-lipped, shaking with the thing not yet done; Appius Claudius smiling among his friends and clients; the sullen crowd of strong plebeians, and the something in the chill autumn air that was a warning of fate and fateful change. Then the deed. A shriek at the edge of the throng; a long, thin knife, high in air, trembling before a thousand eyes; a harsh, heartbroken, vengeful voice; a confusion and a swaying of the multitude, and then the rising yell of men overlaid, ringing high in the air from the Capitol right across the Forum to the Palatine, and echoing back the doom of the Ten. The deed is vivid still, and then there is sudden darkness. One thinks of how that man lived afterwards. Had Virginius a home, a wife, other children to mourn the dead one? Or was he a lonely man, ten times alone after that day, with the memory of one flashing moment always undimmed in a bright horror? Who knows? Did anyone care? Rome's story changed its course, turning aside at the river of Virginia's blood, and going on swiftly in another way. To defeat this time, straight to Rome's first and greatest humiliation; to the coming of the Gauls, sweeping everything before them, Etruscans, Italians, Romans, up to the gates of the city and over the great moat and wall of Servius, burning, destroying, killing everything, to the foot of the central rock; baffled at the last stronghold on a dark night by a flock of cackling geese, but not caring for so small a thing when they had swallowed up the rest, or not liking the Latin land, perhaps, and so, taking ransom for peace and marching away northwards again through the starved and harried hills and valleys of Etruria to their own country. And six centuries passed away before an enemy entered Rome again. But the Gauls left wreck and ruin and scarcely one stone upon another in the great desolation; they swept away all records of history, then and there, and the general destruction was absolute, so that the Rome of the Republic and of the Empire, the centre and capital of the world, began to exist from that day. Unwillingly the people bore back Juno's image from Veii, where they had taken refuge and would have stayed, and built houses, and would have called that place Rome. But the nobles had their own way, and the great construction began, of which there was to be no end for many hundreds of years, in peace and war, mostly while hard fighting was going on abroad. [Illustration: ETRUSCAN BRIDGE AT VEII] They built hurriedly at first, for shelter, and as best they could, crowding their little houses in narrow streets with small care for symmetry or adornment. The second Rome must have seemed but a poor village compared with the solidly built city which the Gauls had burnt, and it was long before the present could compare with the past. In haste men seized on fragments of all sorts, blocks of stone, cracked and defaced in the flames, charred beams that could still serve, a door here, a window there, and such bits of metal as they could pick up. An irregular, crowded town sprang up, and a few rough temples, no doubt as pied and meanly pieced as many of those early churches built of odds and ends of ruin, which stand to this day. It is not impossible that the motley character of Rome, of which all writers speak in one way or another, had its first cause in that second building of the city. Rome without ruins would hardly seem Rome at all, and all was ruined in that first inroad of the savage Gauls,--houses, temples, public places. When the Romans came back from Veii they must have found the Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner air of Veii. Their little houses were lost and untraceable in the universal chaos. But the rich man's ruins stood out in bolder relief; he had his lands still; he still had slaves; he could rebuild his home; and he had his way. But ever afterwards, though the Republic and the Empire spent the wealth of nations in beautifying the city, the trace of that first defeat remained. Dark and narrow lanes wound in and out, round the great public squares, and within earshot of the broad white streets, and the time-blackened houses of the poor stood huddled out of sight behind the palaces of the rich, making perpetual contrast of wealth and poverty, splendour and squalor, just as one may see today in Rome, in London, in Paris, in Constantinople, in all the mistress cities of the world that have long histories of triumph and defeat behind them. The first Rome sprang from the ashes of the Alban volcano, the second Rome rose from the ashes of herself, as she has risen again and again since then. But the Gauls had done Rome a service, too. In crushing her to the earth, they had crushed many of her enemies out of existence; and when she stood up to face the world once more, she fought not to beat the Æquians or the Etruscans at her gates, but to conquer Italy. And by steady fighting she won it all, and brought home the spoils and divided the lands; here and there a battle lost, as in the bloody Caudine pass, but always more battles won, and more, and more, sternly relentless to revolt. Brutus had seen his own sons' heads fall at his own word; should Caius Pontius, the Samnite, be spared, because he was the bravest of the brave? To her faithful friends Rome was just, and now and then half-contemptuously generous. The idle Greek fine gentlemen of Tarentum sat in their theatre one day, overlooking the sea, shaded by dyed awnings from the afternoon sun, listening entranced to some grand play,--the Oedipus King, perhaps, or Alcestis, or Medea. Ten Roman trading ships came sailing round the point; and the wind failed, and they lay there with drooping sails, waiting for the land breeze that springs up at night. Perhaps some rough Latin sailor, as is the way today in calm weather when there is no work to be done, began to howl out one of those strange, endless songs which have been sung down to us, from ear to ear, out of the primeval Aryan darkness,--loud, long drawn out, exasperating in its unfinished cadence, jarring on the refined Greek ear, discordant with the actor's finely measured tones. In sudden rage at the noise--so it must have been--those delicate idlers sprang up and ran down to the harbour, and took the boats that lay there, and overwhelmed the unarmed Roman traders, slaying many of them. Foolish, cruel, almost comic. So a sensitive musician, driven half mad by a street organ, longs to rush out and break the thing to pieces, and kill the poor grinder for his barbarous noise. But when there was blood in the harbour of Tarentum, and some of the ships had escaped on their oars, the Greeks were afraid; and when the message of war came swiftly down to them from inexorable Rome, their terror grew, and they sent to Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had set up to be a conqueror, to come and conquer Rome for the sake of certain æsthetic fine gentlemen who could not bear to be disturbed at a good play on a spring afternoon. He came with all the pomp and splendour of Eastern warfare; he won a battle, and a battle, and half a battle, and then the Romans beat him at Beneventum, famous again and again, and utterly destroyed his army, and took back with them his gold and his jewels, and the tusks of his elephants, and the mastery of all Italy to boot, but not yet beyond dispute. Creeping down into Sicily, Rome met Carthage, both giants in those days, and the greatest and last struggle began, with half the known world and all the known sea for a battle-ground. Round and round the Mediterranean, by water and land, they fought for a hundred and eighteen years, through four generations of men, as we should reckon it, both grasping and strong, both relentless, both sworn to win or perish for ever, both doing great deeds that are remembered still. The mere name of Regulus is a legion of legends in itself; the name of Hannibal is in itself a history, that of Fabius Maximus a lesson; and while history lasts, Cornelius Scipio and Scipio the African will not be forgotten. It is the story of many and terrible defeats, from each of which Rome rose, fiercely young, to win a dozen terrible little victories. It is strange that we remember the lost days best; misty Thrasymene and Cannæ's fearful slaughter rise first in the memory. Then all at once, within ten years, the scale turns, and Caius Claudius Nero hurls Hasdrubal's disfigured head high over ditch and palisade into his brother's camp, right to his brother's feet. And five years later, the battle of Zama, won almost at the gates of Carthage; and then, almost the end, as great heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ruined and exiled, drinks up the poison and rests at last, some forty years after he led his first army to victory. But he had been dead nearly forty years, when another Scipio at last tore down the walls of Carthage, and utterly destroyed the city to the foundations, for ever. And a dozen years later than that, Rome had conquered all the civilized world round about the Mediterranean sea, from Spain to Asia. [Illustration: TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY] II There was a mother in Rome, not rich, but of great race, for she was daughter to Scipio of Africa; and she called her sons her jewels when other women showed their golden ornaments and their precious stones and boasted of their husbands' wealth. Cornelia's two sons, Tiberius and Caius, lost their lives successively in a struggle against the avarice of the rich men who ruled Rome, Italy and the world; against that grasping avarice which far surpassed the greed of any other race before the Romans, or after them, and which had suddenly taken new growth as the spoils of the East and South and West poured into the city. Yet the vast booty men could see was but an earnest of the wide lands which had fallen to Rome, called 'Public Lands' almost as if in derision, while they fell into the power of the few and strong, by the hundred thousand acres at a time. Three hundred and fifty years before the Gracchi, when little conquests still seemed great, Spurius Cassius had died in defence of his Agrarian Law, at the hands of the savage rich who accused him of conspiring for a crown. Tiberius Gracchus set up the rights of the people to the public land, and perished. He fell within a stone's throw of the spot on which the great tribune, Nicholas Rienzi, died. The strong, small band of nobles, armed with staves and clubs, and with that supremacy of contemptuous bearing that cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng, murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the body into the Tiber lest the people should make a revolution of its funeral. Next came Caius, a boy of six and twenty, fighting the same fight for a few years. On his head the nobles set a price--its weight in gold. He hides on the Aventine, and the Aventine is stormed. He escapes by the Sublician bridge and the bridge is held behind him by one friend, almost as Horatius held it against an army. Yet the nobles and their hired Cretan bowmen force the way and pursue him into Furina's grove. There a Greek slave ends him, and to get more gold fills the poor head with metal--and is paid in full. Three hundred died with Tiberius, three thousand were put to death for his brother's sake. With the goods of the slain and the dowries of their wives, Opimius built the Temple of Concord on the spot where the later one still stands in part, between the Comitium and the Capitol. The poor of Rome, and Cornelia, and the widows and children of the murdered men, knew what that 'Concord' meant. [Illustration: BRASS OF TIBERIUS, SHOWING THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD] Then followed revolution, war with runaway slaves, war with the immediate allies, then civil war, while wealth and love of wealth grew side by side, the one, insatiate, devouring the other. First the slaves made for Sicily, wild, mountainous, half-governed then as it is today, and they held much of it against their masters for five years. Within short memory, almost yesterday, a handful of outlaws has defied a powerful nation's best soldiers in the same mountains. It is small wonder that many thousand men, fighting for liberty and life, should have held out so long. And meanwhile Jugurtha of Numidia had for long years bought every Roman general sent against him, had come to Rome himself and bought the laws, and had gone back to his country with contemptuous leave-taking--'Thou city where all is sold!' And still he bought, till Caius Marius, high-hearted plebeian and great soldier, brought him back to die in the Mamertine prison. Then against wealth arose the last and greatest power of Rome, her terrible armies that set up whom they would, to have their will of Senate and fathers and people. First Marius, then Sylla whom he had taught to fight, and taught to beat him in the end, after Cinna had been murdered for his sake at Ancona. Marius and Sylla, the plebeian and the patrician, were matched at first as leader and lieutenant, then both as conquerors, then as alternate despots of Rome and mortal foes, till their long duel wrecked what had been and opened ways for what was to be. First, Sylla claims that he, and not Marius, took Jugurtha, when the Numidian ally betrayed him, though the King and his two sons marched in the train of the plebeian's triumph. Marius answers by a stupendous victory over the Cimbrians and Teutons, slays a hundred thousand in one battle, comes home, triumphs again, sets up his trophies in the city and builds a temple to Honour and Courage. Next, in greed of popular power, he perjures himself to support a pair of murderous demagogues, betrays them in turn to the patricians, and Saturninus is pounded to death with roof tiles in the Capitol. Then, being made leader in the war with the allies, already old for fighting, he fails at the outset, and his rival Sylla is General in his stead. Then riot on riot in the Forum, violence after violence in the struggle for the consulship, murder after murder, blood upon blood not yet dry. Sylla gets the expedition against Mithridates; Marius, at home, undermines his enemy's influence and forces the tribes to give him the command, and sends out his lieutenants to the East. Sylla's soldiers murder them, and Sylla marches back against Rome with six legions. Marius is unprepared; Sylla breaks into the city, torch in hand, at the head of his troops, burning and slaying; the rivals meet face to face in the Esquiline market-place, Roman fights Roman, and the plebeian loses the day and escapes to the sea. The reign of terror begins, and a great slaying. Sylla declares his rival an enemy of Rome, and Marius is found hiding in the marshes of Minturnæ, is dragged out naked, covered with mud, a rope about his neck, and led into a little house of the town to be slain by a slave. 'Darest thou kill Caius Marius?' asks the old man with flashing eyes, and the slave executioner trembles before the unarmed prisoner. They let him go. He wanders to Africa and sits alone among the ruins of Carthage, while Sylla fights victoriously in the East. Rome, momentarily free of both, is torn by dissensions about the voting of the newly enfranchised. Instead of the greater rivals, Cinna and Octavius are matched for plebs and nobles. Knife-armed the parties fight it out in the Forum, the bodies of citizens lie in heaps, and the gutters are gorged with free blood, and again the patricians win the day. Cinna, fleeing from wrath, is deposed from office. Marius sees his chance again. Unshaven and unshorn since he left Rome last, he joins Cinna, leading six thousand fugitives, seizes and plunders the towns about Rome, while Cinna encamps beneath the walls. Together they enter Rome and nail Octavius' head to the Rostra. Then the vengeance of wholesale slaying, in another reign of terror, and Marius is despot of the city for a while, as Sylla had been before, till spent with age, his life goes out amid drunkenness and blood. The people tear down Sylla's house, burn his villa and drive out his wife and his children. Back he comes after four years, victorious, fighting his way right and left, against Lucanians and Samnites, back to Rome still fighting them, almost loses the battle, is saved by Crassus to take vengeance again, and again the long lists of the proscribed are written out and hung up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber. [Illustration: THE TARPEIAN ROCK] Sylla, cold, aristocratic, sublimely ironical monster, was Rome's first absolute and undisputed military lord. Tired of blood, he tried reform, invented an aristocratic constitution, saw that it must fail, and then, to the amazement of his friends and enemies, abdicated and withdrew to private life, protected by a hundred thousand veterans of his army, and many thousands of freedmen, to die at the last without violence. Of the chaos he left behind him, Cæsar made the Roman Empire. The Gracchi, champions of the people, were foully done to death. Marius and Sylla, tearing the proud Republic to pieces for their own greatness, both died in their beds, the one of old age, the other of disease. There is no irony like that which often ended the lives of great Romans. Marcus Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls, was hurled to his death from the same rock, by the tribunes of the people, and Rome's citadel and sanctuary was desecrated by the blood of its preserver. Scipio of Africa breathed his last in exile, but Appius Claudius, the Decemvir, died rich and honoured. One asks, naturally enough, how Rome could hold the civilized nations in subjection while she was fighting out a civil war that lasted fifty years. We have but little idea of her great military organization, after arms became a profession and a career. We can but call up scattered pictures to show us rags and fragments of the immense host that patrolled the world with measured tread and matchless precision of serried rank, in tens and scores and hundreds of thousands, for centuries, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank, learning its own strength by degrees, till it suddenly grasped all power, gave it to one man, and made Caius Julius Cæsar Dictator of the earth. The greatest figure in all history suddenly springs out of the dim chaos and shines in undying glory, the figure of a man so great that the office he held means Empire, and the mere name he bore means Emperor today in four empires,--Cæsar, Kaiser, Czar, Kaisár,--a man of so vast power that the history of humanity for centuries after him was the history of those who were chosen to fill his place--the history of nearly half the twelve centuries foretold by the augur Attus, from Romulus, first King, to Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor. He was a man whose deeds and laws have marked out the life of the world even to this far day. Before him and with him comes Pompey, with him and after him Mark Antony, next to him in line and greatness, Augustus--all dwarfs compared with him, while two of them were failures outright, and the third could never have reached power but in his steps. [Illustration: PALACE OF THE CÆSARS] In that long tempest of parties wherein the Republic went down for ever, it is hard to trace the truth, or number the slain, or reckon up account of gain and loss. But when Cæsar rises in the centre of the storm the end is sure and there can be no other, for he drives it before him like a captive whirlwind, to do his bidding and clear the earth for his coming. Other men, and great men, too, are overwhelmed by it, dashed down and stunned out of all sense and judgment, to be lost and forgotten like leaves in autumn, whirled away before the gale. Pompey, great general and great statesman, conqueror in Spain, subduer of Spartacus and the Gladiators, destroyer of pirates and final victor over Mithridates, comes back and lives as a simple citizen. Noble of birth, but not trusted by his peers, he joins with Cæsar, leader of all the people, and with Crassus, for more power, and loses the world by giving Cæsar an army, and Gaul to conquer. Crassus, brave general, too, is slain in battle in far Parthia, and Pompey steals a march by getting a long term in Spain. Cæsar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's friends. Then the storm breaks and Cæsar comes back from Gaul to cross the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious, ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Cæsar stands alone, master of Rome and of the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them that struck him died a natural death. Creation presupposes chaos, and it is the divine prerogative of genius to evolve order from confusion. Julius Cæsar found the world of his day consisting of disordered elements of strength, all at strife with each other in a central turmoil, skirted and surrounded by the relative peace of an ancient and long undisturbed barbarism. It was out of these elements that he created what has become modern Europe, and the direction which he gave to the evolution of mankind has never wholly changed since his day. Of all great conquerors he was the least cruel, for he never sacrificed human life without the direct intention of benefiting mankind by an increased social stability. Of all great lawgivers, he was the most wise and just, and the truths he set down in the Julian Code are the foundation of modern justice. Of all great men who have leaped upon the world as upon an unbroken horse, who have guided it with relentless hands, and ridden it breathless to the goal of glory, Cæsar is the only one who turned the race into the track of civilization and, dying, left mankind a future in the memory of his past. He is the one great man of all, without whom it is impossible to imagine history. We cannot take him away and yet leave anything of what we have. The world could have been as it is without Alexander, without Charlemagne, without Napoleon; it could not have been the world we know without Caius Julius Cæsar. That fact alone places him at the head of mankind. In Cæsar's life there is the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century to be the world's conqueror, lawgiver and civilizer. The daily miracle of genius is the incalculable speed at which it simultaneously thinks and acts. Nothing is so logical as creation, and creation is the first sign as well as the only proof that genius is present. Hitherto the life of Cæsar has not been logically presented. His youth appears almost always to be totally disconnected from his maturity. The first success, the conquest of Gaul, comes as a surprise, because its preparation is not described. After it everything seems natural, and conquest follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing clearly, or we find Cæsar an insignificant unit in a general disorder, as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the lives of the so-called 'great,'--those born, not to power, but in power,--there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be called the Hour of Fate--the time when in the suddenly loosed play of many circumstances, strained like springs and held back upon themselves, a man who has been known to a few thousands finds himself the chief of millions and the despot of a nation. Things which are only steps to great men are magnified to attainments in ordinary lives, and remembered with pride. The man of genius is sure of the great result, if he can but get a fulcrum for his lever. What strikes one most in the careers of such men as Cæsar and Napoleon is the tremendous advance realized at the first step--the difference between Napoleon's half-subordinate position before the first campaign in Italy and his dominion of France immediately after it, or the distance which separated Cæsar, the impeached Consul, from Cæsar, the conqueror of Gaul. It must not be forgotten that Cæsar came of a family that had held great positions, and which, though impoverished, still had credit, subsequently stretched by Cæsar to the extreme limit of its borrowing power. At sixteen, an age when Bonaparte was still an unknown student, Cæsar was Flamen Dialis, or high priest of Jupiter, and at one and twenty, the 'ill-girt boy,' as Sylla called him from his way of wearing his toga, was important enough to be driven from Rome, a fugitive. His first attempt at a larger notoriety had failed, and Dolabella, whom he had impeached, had been acquitted through the influence of friends. Yet the young lawyer had found the opportunity of showing what he could do, and it was not without reason that Sylla said of him, 'You will find many a Marius in this one Cæsar.' Twenty years passed before the prophecy began to be realized with the commencement of Cæsar's career in Gaul, and more than once during that time his life seemed a failure in his own eyes, and he said scornfully and sadly of himself that he had done nothing to be remembered at an age when Alexander had already conquered the world. Those twenty years which, to the thoughtful man, are by far the most interesting of all, appear in history as a confused and shapeless medley of political, military and forensic activity, strongly coloured by social scandals, which rested upon a foundation of truth, and darkened by accusations of worse kind, for which there is no sort of evidence, and which may be safely attributed to the jealousy of unscrupulous adversaries. The first account of him, which we have in the seventeenth year of his age, evokes a picture of youthful beauty. The boy who is to win the world is appointed high priest of Jove in Rome,--by what strong influence we know not,--and we fancy the splendid youth with his tall figure, full of elastic endurance, the brilliant face, the piercing, bold, black eyes; we see him with the small mitre set back upon the dark and curling locks that grow low on the forehead, as hair often does that is to fall early, clad in the purple robe of his high office, summoning all his young dignity to lend importance to his youthful grace as he moves up to Jove's high altar to perform his first solemn sacrifice with his young consort; for the high priesthood of Jove was held jointly by man and wife, and if the wife died the husband lost his office. He was about twenty when he cast his lot with the people, and within the year he fled from Sylla's persecution. The life of sudden changes and contrasts had begun. Straight from the sacred office, with all its pomp, and splendour, and solemnity, Cæsar is a fugitive in the Sabine hills, homeless, wifeless, fever-stricken, a price on his head. Such quick chances of evil fell to many in the days of the great struggle between Marius and Sylla, between the people and the nobles. Then as Sylla yielded to the insistence of the young 'populist' nobleman's many friends, the quick reverse is turned to us. Cæsar has a military command, sees some fighting and much idleness by the shores of the Bosphorus, in Bithynia--then in a fit of sudden energy, the soldier's spirit rises; he dashes to the attack on Mytilene, and shows himself a man. [Illustration: CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR After a statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori] One or two unimportant campaigns, as a subordinate officer, a civic crown won for personal bravery, an unsuccessful action brought against a citizen of high rank in the hope of forcing himself into notice, a trip to Rhodes made to escape the disgrace of failure, and an adventure with pirates--there, in a few words, is the story of Julius Cæsar's youth, as history tells it. But then suddenly, when his projected studies in quiet Rhodes were hardly begun, he crosses to the mainland, raises troops, seizes cities, drives Mithridates' governor out of the province, returns to Rome and is elected military tribune. The change is too quick, and one does not understand it. Truth should tell that those early years had been spent in the profound study of philosophy, history, biography, languages and mankind, of the genesis of events from the germ to the branching tree, of that chemistry of fate which brews effect out of cause, and distils the imperishable essence of glory from the rougher liquor of vulgar success. What strikes one most in the lives of the very great is that every action has a cumulative force beyond what it ever has in the existence of ordinary men. Success moves onward, passing through events on the same plane, as it were, and often losing brilliancy till it fades away, leaving those who have had it to outlive it in sorrow and weakness. Genius moves upward, treading events under its feet, scaling Olympus, making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really great man gathers power in action, the average successful man expends it. And so it must be understood that Cæsar, in his early youth, was not wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous, half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact, exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own, learning everything simultaneously, forgetting nothing he learned till he could use all he knew to the extreme limit of its value. There is something mysterious in the almost unlimited credit which Cæsar seems to have enjoyed when still a very young man; and if the control of enormous sums of money by which he made himself beloved among the people explains, in a measure, his rapid rise from office to office, it is, on the other hand, hard to account for the trust which his creditors placed in his promises, and to explain why, when he was taken by pirates, the cities of Asia Minor should have voluntarily contributed money to make up the ransom demanded, seeing that he had never served in Asia, except as a subordinate. The only possible explanation is that while there, his real energies were devoted to the attainment of the greatest possible popularity in the shortest possible time, and that he was making himself beloved by the Asiatic cities, while his enemies said of him that he was wasting his time in idleness and dissipation. In any case, it was the control of money that most helped him in obtaining high offices in Rome, and from the very first he seems to have acted on the principle that in great enterprises economy spells ruin, and that to check expenditure is to trip up success. And this is explained, if not justified, by his close association with the people, from his very childhood. Until he was made Pontifex Maximus he seems to have lived in a small house in the Suburra, in one of the most crowded and least fashionable quarters of Rome; and as a mere boy, it was his influence with the common people that roused Sylla's anxiety. To live with the people, to take their part against the nobles, to give them of all he had and of all he could borrow, were the chief rules of his conduct, and the fact that he obtained such enormous loans proves that there were rich lenders who were ready to risk fortunes upon his success. And it was in dealing with the Roman plebeian that he learned to command the Roman soldier, with the tact of a demagogue and the firmness of an autocrat. He knew that a man must give largely, even recklessly, to be beloved, and that in order to be respected he must be able to refuse coldly and without condition, and that in all ages the people are but as little children before genius, though they may rise against talent like wild beasts and tear it to death. He knew also that in youth ten failures are nothing compared with one success, while in the full meridian of power one failure undoes a score of victories; hence his recklessness at first, his magnificent caution in his latter days; his daring resistance of Sylla's power before he was twenty, and his mildness towards the ringleaders of popular conspiracies against him when he was near his end; his violence upon the son of King Juba, whom he seized by the beard in open court when he himself was but a young lawyer, and his moderation in bearing the most atrocious libels, to punish which might have only increased their force. Cæsar's career divides itself not unnaturally into three periods, corresponding with his youth, his manhood and his maturity; with the absorption of force in gaining experience, the lavish expenditure of force in conquest, the calm employment of force in final supremacy. The man who never lost a battle in which he commanded in person, began life by failing in everything he attempted, and ended it as the foremost man of all humanity, past and to come, the greatest general, the greatest speaker, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest writer of Latin prose whom the great Roman people ever produced, and also the bravest man of his day, as he was the kindest. In an age when torture was a legitimate part of justice, he caused the pirates who had taken him, and whom he took in turn, to be mercifully put to death before he crucified their dead bodies for his oath's sake, and when his long-trusted servant tried to poison him he would not allow the wretch to be hurt save by the sudden stroke of instant death; nor ever in a long career of conquest did he inflict unnecessary pain. Never was man loved of women as he was, and his sins were many even for those days, yet in them we find no unkindness, and when his own wife should have been condemned for her love of Clodius, Cæsar would not testify against her. He divorced her, he said, not because he knew anything, but because his family should be above suspicion. He plundered the world, but he gave it back its gold in splendid gifts and public works, keeping its glory alone for himself. He was hated by the few because he was beloved by the many, and it was not revenge, but envy, that slew the benefactor of mankind. The weaknesses of the supreme conqueror were love of woman and trust of man, and as the first Brutus made his name glorious by setting his people free, the second disgraced it and blackened the name of friendship with a stain that will outlast time, and by a deed second only in infamy to that of Judas Iscariot. The last cry of the murdered master was the cry of a broken heart--'And thou, too, Brutus, my son!' Alexander left chaos behind him; Cæsar left Europe, and it may be truly said that the crowning manifestation of his sublime wisdom was his choice of Octavius--of the young Augustus--to complete the carving of a world which he himself had sketched and blocked out in the rough. The first period of his life ended with his election to the military tribuneship on his return to Rome after his Asian adventures, and his first acts were directed towards the reconstruction of what Sylla had destroyed, by reëstablishing the authority of tribunes and recalling some of Sylla's victims from their political exile. From that time onward, in his second period, he was more or less continually in office. Successively a tribune, a quæstor, governor of Farther Spain, ædile, pontifex maximus, prætor, governor of Spain again, and consul with the insignificant Bibulus, a man of so small importance that people used to date documents, by way of a jest, 'in the Consulship of Julius and Cæsar.' Then he obtained Gaul for his province, and lived the life of a soldier for nine years, during which he created the army that gave him at last the mastery of Rome. And in the tenth year Rome was afraid, and his enemies tried to deprive him of his power and passed bills against him, and drove out the tribunes of the people who took his part; and if he had returned to Rome then, yielding up his province and his legions, as he was called upon to do, he would have been judged and destroyed by his enemies. But he knew that the people loved him, and he crossed the Rubicon in arms. This second period of his life closed with the last triumph decreed to him for his victories in Spain. The third and final period had covered but one year when his assassins cut it short. Nothing demonstrates Cæsar's greatness so satisfactorily as this, that at his death Rome relapsed at once into civil war and strife as violent as that to which Cæsar had put an end, and that the man who brought lasting peace and unity into the distracted state, was the man of Cæsar's choice. But in endeavouring to realize his supreme wisdom, nothing helps us more than the pettiness of the accusations brought against him by such historians as Suetonius--that he once remained seated to receive the whole body of Conscript fathers, that he had a gilded chair in the Senate house, and appointed magistrates at his own pleasure to hold office for terms of years, that he laughed at an unfavourable omen and made himself dictator for life; and such things, says the historian, 'are of so much more importance than all his good qualities that he is considered to have abused his power and to have been justly assassinated.' But it is the people, not the historian, who make history, and when Caius Julius Cæsar was dead, the people called him God. Beardless Octavius, his sister's daughter's son, barely eighteen years old, brings in by force the golden age of Rome. As Triumvir, with Antony and Lepidus, he hunts down the murderers first, then his rebellious colleagues, and wins the Empire back in thirteen years. He rules long and well, and very simply, as commanding general of the army and by no other power, taking all into his hands besides, the Senate, the chief priesthood, and the Majesty of Rome over the whole earth, for which he was called Augustus, the 'Majestic.' And his strength lay in this, that by the army, he was master of Senate and people alike, so that they could no longer strive with each other in perpetual bloodshed, and the everlasting wars of Rome were fought against barbarians far away, while Rome at home was prosperous and calm and peaceful. Then Virgil sang, and Horace gave Latin life to Grecian verse, and smiled and laughed, and wept and dallied with love, while Livy wrote the story of greatness for us all to this day, and Ovid touched another note still unforgotten. Then temple rose by temple, and grand basilicas reared their height by the Sacred Way; the gold of the earth poured in and Art was queen and mistress of the age. Julius Cæsar was master in Rome for one year. Augustus ruled nearly half a century. Four and forty years he was sole monarch after Antony's fall at Actium. About the thirtieth year of his reign, Christ was born. All men have an original claim to be judged by the standard of their own time. Counting one by one the victims of the proscription proclaimed by the triumvirate in which Augustus was the chief power, some historians have brought down his greatness in quick declination to the level of a cold-blooded and cruel selfishness; and they account for his subsequent just and merciful conduct on the ground that he foresaw political advantage in clemency, and extension of power in the exercise of justice. The death of Cicero, sacrificed to Antony's not unreasonable vengeance, is magnified into a crime that belittles the Augustan age. Yet compared with the wholesale murders done by Marius and Sylla, and by the patricians themselves in their struggles with the people, the few political executions ordered by Augustus sink into comparative insignificance, and it will generally be seen that those who most find fault with him are ready to extol the murderers of Julius Cæsar as devoted patriots, if not as glorious martyrs to the divine cause of liberty. [Illustration: OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS CÆSAR After a bust in the British Museum] It is easier, perhaps, to describe the growth of Rome from the early Kings to Augustus, than to account for the change from the Rome of the Empire at the beginning of our era to the Rome of the Popes in the year eight hundred. Probably the easiest and truest way of looking at the transition is to regard it according to the periods of supremacy, decadence and ultimate disappearance from Rome of the Roman Army. For the Army made the Emperors, and the Emperors made the times. The great military organization had in it the elements of long life, together with all sudden and terrible possibilities. The Army made Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, the Julian Emperors; then destroyed Nero and set up Vespasian after one or two experiments. The Army chose such men as Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and such monsters as Domitian and Commodus; the Army conquered the world, held the world and gave the world to whomsoever it pleased. The Army and the Emperor, each the other's tool, governed Rome for good and ill, for ill and good, by fear and bounty and largely by amusement, but ultimately to their own and Rome's destruction. For all the time the two great adversaries of the Empire, the spiritual and material, the Christian and the men of the North, were gaining strength and unity. Under Augustus, Christ was born. Under Augustus, Hermann the German chieftain destroyed Varus and his legions. By sheer strength and endurance, the Army widened and broadened the Empire, forcing back the Northmen upon themselves like a spring that gathers force by tension. Unnoticed, at first, Christianity quietly grew to power. Between Christians and Northmen, the Empire of Rome went down at last, leaving the Empire of Constantinople behind it. The great change was wrought in about five hundred years, by the Empire, from the City of the Republic to what had become the City of the Middle Age; between the reign of Augustus, first Emperor, and the deposition of the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, Rome's hired Pomeranian general. In that time Rome was transubstantiated in all its elements, in population, in language, in religion and in customs. To all intents and purposes, the original Latin race utterly disappeared, and the Latin tongue became the broken dialect of a mixed people, out of which the modern Italian speech was to grow, decadent in form, degenerate in strength but renascent in a grace and beauty which the Latin never possessed. First the vast population of slaves brought in their civilized and their barbarous words--Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, or Celtic, German and Slav; then came the Goth, and filled all Italy with himself and his rough language for a hundred years. The Latin of the Roman Mass is the Latin of slaves in Rome between the first and fifth centuries, from the time of the Apostles to that of Pope Gelasius, whose prayer for peace and rest is the last known addition to the Canon, according to most authorities. Compare it with the Latin of Livy and Tacitus; it is not the same language, for to read the one by no means implies an understanding of the other. Or take the dress. It is told of Augustus, as a strange and almost unknown thing, that he wore breeches and stockings, or leg swathings, because he suffered continually with cold. Men went barelegged and wrapped themselves in the huge toga which came down to their feet. In the days of Augustulus the toga was almost forgotten; men wore leggings, tunics and the short Greek cloak. In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household, with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present time. In the lives of men, the terror of one man, as each despot lost power, began to give way to the fear of half-defined institutions, of the distant government in Constantinople and of the Church as a secular power, till the time came when the title of Emperor raised a smile, whereas the name of the Pope--of the 'Father-Bishop'--was spoken with reverence by Christians and with respect even by unbelievers. The time came when the army that had made Emperors and unmade them at its pleasure became a mere band of foreign mercenaries, who fought for wages and plunder when they could be induced to fight for Rome at all. So the change came. But in the long five hundred years of the Western Empire Rome had filled the world with the results of her own life and had founded modern Europe, from the Danube to England and from the Rhine to Gibraltar; so that when the tide set towards the south again, the Northmen brought back to Italy some of the spirit and some of the institutions which Rome had carried northwards to them in the days of conquest; and they came not altogether as strangers and barbarians, as the Huns had come, to ravage and destroy, and be themselves destroyed and scattered and forgotten, but, in a measure, as Europeans against Europeans, hoping to grasp the remnants of a civilized power. Theodoric tried to make a real kingdom, Totila and Teias fell fighting for one; the Franks established one in Gaul, and at last it was a Frank who gave the Empire life again, and conquests and laws, and was crowned by the Christian Pontifex Maximus in Rome when Julius Cæsar had been dead more than eight hundred years. One of the greatest of the world's historians has told the story of the change, calling it the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire,' and describing it in some three thousand pages, of which scarcely one can be spared for the understanding of the whole. Thereby its magnitude may be gauged, but neither fairly judged nor accurately measured. The man who would grasp the whole meaning of Rome's name, must spend a lifetime in study and look forward to disappointment in the end. It was Ampère, I believe, who told a young student that he might get a superficial impression of the city in ten years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital of the Empire to the mediæval seat of ecclesiastic domination. And, indeed, nothing in all history is more extraordinary than the rise of Rome's second power under the Popes. In the ordinary course of human events, great nations appear to have had but one life. When that was lived out, and when they had passed through the artistic period so often coincident with early decadence, they were either swept away, or they sank to the insignificance of mere commercial prosperity, thereafter deriving their fashions, arts, tastes, and in fact almost everything except their wealth, from nations far gone in decay. [Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA And Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct] But in Rome it was otherwise. The growth of the faith which subjected the civilized world was a matter of first importance to civilization, and Rome was the centre of that growing. Moreover, that development and that faith had one head, chosen by election, and the headship itself became an object of the highest ambition, whereby the strength and genius of individuals and families were constantly called into activity, and both families and isolated individuals of foreign race were attracted to Rome. It was no small thing to hold the kings of the earth in spiritual subjection, to be the arbiter of the new Empire founded by Charlemagne, the director of the kingdoms built up in France and England, and, almost literally, the feudal lord over all other temporal powers. The force of a predominant idea gave Rome new life, vivifying new elements with the vitality of new ambitions. The theatre was the same. The actors and the play had changed. The world was no longer governed by one man as monarch; it was directed by one man, who was the chief personage in the vast and intricate feudal system by which strong men agreed to live, and to which they forced the weak to submit. The Barons came into existence, and Rome was a city of fortresses and towers, as well as churches. Orsini and Colonna, Caetani and Vitelleschi, Savelli and Frangipani, fought with each other for centuries among ruins, built strongholds of the stones of temples, and burned the marble treasures of the world to make lime. And fiercely they held their own. Nicholas Rienzi wanders amid the deserted places, deciphers the broken inscriptions, gathers a little crowd of plebeians about him and tells them of ancient Rome, and of the rights of the people in old times. All at once he rises, a grand shadow of a Roman, a true tribune, brave, impulsive, eloquent. A little while longer and he is half mad with vanity and ambition, a public fool in a high place, decking himself in silks and satins, and ornaments of gold, and the angry nobles slay him on the steps of the Aracoeli, as other nobles long ago slew Tiberius Gracchus, a greater and a better man, almost on the same spot. Meanwhile the great schism of the Church rages, before and after Rienzi. The Empire and its Kingdoms join issue with each other and with the Barons for the lordship of Christendom; there are two Popes, waging war with nations on both sides, and Rome is reduced to a town of barely twenty thousand souls. Then comes Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, friend of the Great Countess, humbler of the Emperor, a restorer of things, the Julius Cæsar of the Church, and from his day there is stability again, as Urban the Second follows, like an Augustus; Nicholas the Fifth, the next great Pontiff, comes in with the Renascence. Last of destroyers Charles, the wild Constable of Bourbon, marches in open rebellion against King, State and Church, friend to the Emperor, straight to his death at the walls, his work of destruction carried out to the terrible end by revengeful Spaniards who spare only the churches and the convents. Out of those ashes Rome rose again, for the last time, the Rome of Sixtus the Fifth, which is, substantially, the Rome we see today; less powerful in the world after that time, but more beautiful as she grew more peaceful by degrees; flourishing in a strange, motley way, like no other city in the world, as the Empire of the Hapsburgs and the Kingdoms of Europe learned to live apart from her, and she was concentrated again upon herself, still and always a factor among nations, and ever to be. But even in latter days, Napoleon could not do without her, and Francis the Second of Austria had to resign the Empire, in order that Pius the Seventh might call the self-crowned Corsican soldier, girt with Charlemagne's huge sword, the anointed Emperor of Christendom. Once more a new idea gives life to fragments hewn in pieces and scattered in confusion. A dream of unity disturbs Italy's sleep. Never, in truth, in all history, has Italy been united save by violence. By the sword the Republic brought Latins, Samnites and Etruscans into subjection; by sheer strength she crushed the rebellion of the slaves and then forced the Italian allies to a second submission; by terror Marius and Sylla ruled Rome and Italy; and it was the overwhelming power of a paid army that held the Italians in check under the Empire, till they broke away from each other as soon as the pressure was removed, to live in separate kingdoms and principalities for thirteen or fourteen hundred years, from Romulus Augustulus--or at least from Justinian--to Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, in whose veins ran not one drop of Italian blood. One asks whence came the idea of unity which has had such power to move these Italians, in modern times. The answer is plain and simple. Unity is the word; the interpretation of it is the name of Rome. The desire is for all the romance and the legends and the visions of supreme greatness which no other name can ever call up. What will be called hereafter the madness of the Italian people took possession of them on the day when Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations, by captives and slaves of subject races. The Rome we see today owes its mystery, its sadness and its charm to six and twenty centuries of history, mostly filled with battle, murder and sudden death, deeds horrible in that long-past present which we try to call up, but alternately grand, fascinating and touching now, as we shape our scant knowledge into visions and fill out our broken dreams with the stuff of fancy. In most men's minds, perhaps, the charm lies in that very confusion of suggestions, for few indeed know Rome so well as to divide clearly the truth from the legend in her composition. Such knowledge is perhaps altogether unattainable in any history; it is most surely so here, where city is built on city, monument upon monument, road upon road, from the heart of the soil upwards--the hardened lava left by many eruptions of life; where the tablets of Clio have been shattered again and again, where fire has eaten, and sword has hacked, and hammer has bruised ages of records out of existence, where even the race and type of humanity have changed and have been forgotten twice and three times over. Therefore, unless one have half a lifetime to spend in patient study and deep research, it is better, if one come to Rome, to feel much than to try and know a little, for in much feeling there is more human truth than in that dangerous little knowledge which dulls the heart and hampers the clear instincts of natural thought. Let him who comes hither be satisfied with a little history and much legend, with rough warp of fact and rich woof of old-time fancy, and not look too closely for the perfect sum of all, where more than half the parts have perished for ever. It matters not much whether we know the exact site of Virgil's Laurentum; it is more interesting to remember how Commodus, cruel, cowardly and selfish, fled thither from the great plague, caring not at all that his people perished by tens of thousands in the city, since he himself was safe, with the famous Galen to take care of him. We can leave the task of tracing the enclosures of Nero's golden house to learned archælogists, and let our imagination find wonder and delight in their accounts of its porticos three thousand feet long, its game park, its baths, its thousands of columns with their gilded capitals, and its walls encrusted with mother-of-pearl. And we may realize the depth of Rome's abhorrence for the dead tyrant, as we think of how Vespasian and his son Titus pulled down the enchanted palace for the people's sake, and built the Colosseum where the artificial lake had been, and their great baths on the very foundations of Nero's gorgeous dwelling. [Illustration: BRASS OF TRAJAN, SHOWING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS] [Illustration: BRASS OF ANTONINUS PIUS, IN HONOUR OF FAUSTINA, WITH REVERSE SHOWING VESTA BEARING THE PALLADIUM] III It is impossible to conceive of the Augustan age without Horace, nor to imagine a possible Horace without Greece and Greek influence. At the same time Horace is in many ways the prototype of the old-fashioned, cultivated, gifted, idle, sarcastic, middle-class Roman official, making the most of life on a small salary and the friendship of a great personage; praising poverty, but making the most of the good things that fell in his way; extolling pristine austerity of life and yielding with a smile to every agreeable temptation; painting the idyllic life of a small gentleman farmer as the highest state of happiness, but secretly preferring the town; prudently avoiding marriage, but far too human to care for an existence in which woman had no share; more sensible in theory than in practice, and more religious in manner than in heart; full of quaint superstitions, queer odds and ends of knowledge, amusing anecdotes and pictures of personal experience; the whole compound permeated with a sort of indolent sadness at the unfulfilled promises of younger years, in which there had been more of impulse than of ambition, and more of ambition than real strength. The early struggles for Italian unity left many such half-disappointed patriots, and many less fortunate in their subsequent lives than Horace. Born in the far South, and the son of a freed slave, brought to Rome as a boy and carefully taught, then sent to Athens to study Greek, he was barely twenty years of age when he joined Brutus after Cæsar's death, was with him in Asia, and, in the lack of educated officers perhaps, found himself one day, still a mere boy, tribune of a Legion--or, as we should say, in command of a brigade of six thousand men, fighting for what he believed to be the liberty of Rome, in the disastrous battle of Philippi. Brutus being dead, the dream of glory ended, after the amnesty, in a scribe's office under one of the quæstors, and the would-be liberator of his country became a humble clerk in the Treasury, eking out his meagre salary with the sale of a few verses. Many an old soldier of Garibaldi's early republican dreams has ended in much the same way in our own times under the monarchy. But Horace was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek, acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses that ever lived; and his character, by its eminently Italian combination of prim respectability and elastic morality, gave him a two-sided view of men and things that has left us representations of life in three dimensions instead of the flat, though often violent, pictures which prejudice loves best to paint. In his admiration of Greek poetry, Horace was not a discoverer; he was rather the highest expression of Rome's artistic want. If Scipio of Africa had never conquered the Carthaginians at Zama, he would be notable still as one of the first and most sincere lovers of Hellenic literature, and as one of the earliest imitators of Athenian manners. The great conqueror is remembered also as the first man in Rome who shaved every day, more than a hundred and fifty years before Horace's time. He was laughed at by some, despised by others and disliked by the majority for his cultivated tastes and his refined manners. The Romans had most gifts excepting those we call creative. Instead of creating, therefore, Rome took her art whole, and by force, from the most artistic nation the world ever produced. Sculptors, architects, painters and even poets, such as there were, came captive to Rome in gangs, were sold at auction as slaves, and became the property of the rich, to work all their lives at their several arts for their master's pleasure; and the State rifled Greece and Asia, and even the Greek Italy of the south, and brought back the masterpieces of an age to adorn Rome's public places. The Roman was the engineer, the maker of roads, of aqueducts, of fortifications, the layer out of cities, and the planner of harbours. In a word, the Roman made the solid and practical foundation, and then set the Greek slave to beautify it. When he had watched the slave at work for a century or two, he occasionally attempted to imitate him. That was as far as Rome ever went in original art. But her love of the beautiful, though often indiscriminating and lacking in taste, was profound and sincere. It does not appear that in all her conquests her armies ever wantonly destroyed beautiful things. On the contrary, her generals brought home all they could with uncommon care, and the consequence was that in Horace's day the public places of the city were vast open-air museums, and the great temples picture galleries of which we have not the like now in the whole world. And with those things came all the rest; the manners, the household life, the necessaries and the fancies of a conquering and already decadent nation, the thousands of slaves whose only duty was to amuse their owners and the public; the countless men and women and girls and boys, whose souls and bodies went to feed the corruption of the gorgeous capital, or to minister to its enormous luxuries; the companies of flute-players and dancing-girls, the sharp-tongued jesters, the coarse buffoons, the play-actors and the singers. And then, the endless small commerce of an idle and pleasure-seeking people, easily attracted by bright colours, new fashions and new toys; the drug-sellers and distillers of perfumes, the venders of Eastern silks and linens and lace, the barbers and hairdressers, the jewellers and tailors, the pastry cooks and makers of honey-sweetmeats; and everywhere the poor rabble of failures, like scum in the wake of a great ship; the beggars everywhere, and the pickpockets and the petty thieves. It is no wonder that Horace was fond of strolling in Rome. In contrast, the great and wonderful things of the Augustan city stand out in high relief, above the varied crowd that fills the streets, with all the dignity that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted, half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed, untainted, the incarnation of purity in an age of vice. And the old Senator in his white cloak with its broad purple hem, his smooth-faced clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, making the price of short loans for the day, and discussing the assets of a famous spendthrift, as their yellow-turbaned, bearded fathers had talked over the chances of Julius Cæsar when he was as yet but a fashionable young lawyer of doubtful fortune, with an unlimited gift of persuasion and an equally unbounded talent for amusement. Between the contrasts lived men of such position as Horace occupied, but not many. For the great middle element of society is a growth of later centuries, and even Horace himself, as time went on, became attached to Mæcenas and then, more or less, to the person of the Emperor, by a process of natural attraction, just as his butt, Tigellius, gravitated to the common herd that mourned his death. The 'golden mean' of which Horace wrote was a mere expression, taught him, perhaps, by his father, a part of his stock of maxims. Where there were only great people on the one side, and a rabble on the other, the man of genius necessarily rose to the level of the high, by his own instinct and their liking. What was best of Greek was for them, what was worst was for the populace. But the Greek was everywhere, with his keen weak face, his sly look and his skilful fingers. Scipio and Paulus Emilius had brought him, and he stayed in Rome till the Goth came, and afterwards. Greek poetry, Greek philosophy, Greek sculpture, Greek painting, Greek music everywhere--to succeed at all in such society, Virgil and Horace and Ovid must needs make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail, with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total failure of complete disappearance when they had been dead awhile. Supreme of them all, for his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil, appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened into night, and Ovid's tales of them and their goddesses move us by their own beauty rather than by our sympathy for them, though we feel the tender touch of the exiled man whose life was more than half love, in the marvellous Letters of Heroes' Sweethearts--in the complaint of Briseïs to Achilles, in the passionately sad appeal of Hermione to Orestes. Whoever has not read these things does not know the extreme limit of man's understanding of woman. Yet Horace, with little or nothing of such tenderness, has outdone Ovid and Virgil in this later age. He strolled through life, and all life was a play of which he became the easy-going but unforgetful critic. There was something good-natured even in his occasional outbursts of contempt and hatred for the things and the people he did not like. There was something at once caressing and good-humouredly sceptical in his way of addressing the gods, something charitable in his attacks on all that was ridiculous,--men, manners and fashions. He strolled wherever he would, alone; in the market, looking at everything and asking the price of what he saw, of vegetables and grain and the like; in the Forum, or the Circus, at evening, when 'society' was dining, and the poor people and slaves thronged the open places for rest and air, and there he used to listen to the fortune-tellers, and among them, no doubt, was that old hag, Canidia, immortalized in the huge joke of his comic resentment. He goes home to sup on lupins and fritters and leeks,--or says so,--though his stomach abhorred garlic; and his three slaves--the fewest a man could have--wait on him as he lies before the clean white marble table, leaning on his elbow. He does not forget the household gods, and pours a few drops upon the cement floor in libation to them, out of the little earthen saucer filled from the slim-necked bottle of Campanian earthenware. Then to sleep, careless of getting up early or late, just as he might feel, to stay at home and read or write, or to wander about the city, or to play the favourite left-handed game of ball in the Campus Marius before his bath and his light midday meal. With a little change here and there, it is the life of the idle middle-class Italian today, which will always be much the same, let the world wag and change as it will, with all its extravagances, its fashions and its madnesses. Now and then he exclaims that there is no average common sense left in the world, no half-way stopping-place between extremes. One man wears his tunic to his heels, another is girt up as if for a race; Rufillus smells of perfumery, Gargonius of anything but scent; and so on--and he cries out that when a fool tries to avoid a mistake he will run to any length in the opposite direction. And Horace had a most particular dislike for fools and bores, and has left us the most famous description of the latter ever set down by an accomplished observer. By chance, he says, he was walking one morning along the Sacred Street with one slave behind him, thinking of some trifle and altogether absorbed in it, when a man whom he barely knew by name came up with him in a great hurry and grasped his hand. 'How do you do, sweet friend?' asks the Bore. 'Pretty well, as times go,' answers Horace, stopping politely for a moment; and then beginning to move on, he sees to his horror that the Bore walks by his side. 'Can I do anything for you?' asks the poet, still civil, but hinting that he prefers his own company. The Bore plunges into the important business of praising himself, with a frankness not yet forgotten in his species, and Horace tries to get rid of him, walking very fast, then very slowly, then turning to whisper a word to his slave, and in his anxiety he feels the perspiration breaking out all over him, while his Tormentor chatters on, as they skirt the splendid Julian Basilica, gleaming in the morning sun. Horace looks nervously and eagerly to right and left, hoping to catch sight of a friend and deliverer. Not a friendly face was in sight, and the Bore knew it, and was pitilessly frank. 'Oh, I know you would like to get away from me!' he exclaimed. 'I shall not let you go so easily! Where are you going?' 'Across the Tiber,' answered Horace, inventing a distant visit. 'I am going to see someone who lives far off, in Cæsar's gardens--a man you do not know. He is ill.' 'Very well,' said the other; 'I have nothing to do, and am far from lazy. I will go all the way with you.' Horace hung his head, as a poor little Italian donkey does when a heavy load is piled upon his back, for he was fairly caught, and he thought of the long road before him, and he had moreover the unpleasant consciousness that the Bore was laughing at his imaginary errand, since they were walking in a direction exactly opposite from the Tiber, and would have to go all the way round the Palatine by the Triumphal Road and the Circus Maximus and then cross by the Sublician bridge, instead of turning back towards the Velabrum, the Provision Market and the Bridge of Æmilius, which we have known and crossed as the Ponte Rotto, but of which only one arch is left now, in midstream. [Illustration: PONTE ROTTO, NOW DESTROYED After an engraving made about 1850] Then, pressing his advantage, the Bore began again. 'If I am any judge of myself,' he observed, 'you will make me one of your most intimate friends. I am sure nobody can write such good verses as fast as I can. As for my singing, I know it for a fact that Hermogenes is decidedly jealous of me!' 'Have you a mother, Sir?' asked Horace, gravely. 'Have you any relations to whom your safety is a matter of importance?' 'No,' answered the other, 'no one. I have buried them all!' 'Lucky people!' said the poet to himself, and he wished he were dead, too, at that moment, and he thought of all the deaths he might have died. It was evidently not written that he should die of poison nor in battle, nor of a cough, nor of the liver, nor even of gout. He was to be slowly talked to death by a bore. By this time they were before the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the great Twin Brethren bathed their horses at Juturna's spring. The temple of Vesta was before them, and the Sacred Street turned at right angles to the left, crossing over between a row of shops on one side and the Julian Rostra on the other, to the Courts of Law. The Bore suddenly remembered that he was to appear in answer to an action on that very morning, and as it was already nine o'clock, he could not possibly walk all the way to Cæsar's gardens and be back before noon, and if he was late, he must forfeit his bail, and the suit would go against him by default. On the other hand, he had succeeded in catching the great poet alone, after a hundred fruitless attempts, and the action was not a very important one, after all. He stopped short. 'If you have the slightest regard for me,' he said, 'you will just go across with me to the Courts for a moment.' Horace looked at him curiously, seeing a chance of escape. 'You know where I am going,' he answered with a smile; 'and as for law, I do not know the first thing about it.' The Bore hesitated, considered what the loss of the suit must cost him, and what he might gain by pushing his acquaintance with the friend of Mæcenas and Augustus. 'I am not sure,' he said doubtfully, 'whether I had better give up your company, or my case,' 'My company, by all means!' cried Horace, with alacrity. 'No!' answered the other, looking at his victim thoughtfully, 'I think not!' And he began to move on again by the Nova Via towards the House of the Vestals. Having made up his mind to sacrifice his money, however, he lost no time before trying to get an equivalent for it. 'How do you stand with Mæcenas?' he asked suddenly, fixing his small eyes on Horace's weary profile, and without waiting for an answer he ran on to praise the great man. 'He is keen and sensible,' he continued, 'and has not many intimate friends. No one knows how to take advantage of luck as he does. You would find me a valuable ally, if you would introduce me. I believe you might drive everybody else out of the field--with my help, of course.' 'You are quite mistaken there!' answered Horace, rather indignantly. 'He is not at all that kind of man! There is not a house in Rome where any sort of intrigue would be more utterly useless!' 'Really, I can hardly believe it!' 'It is a fact, nevertheless,' retorted Horace, stoutly. 'Well,' said the Bore, 'if it is, I am of course all the more anxious to know such a man!' Horace smiled quietly. 'You have only to wish it, my dear Sir,' he answered, with the faintest modulation of polite irony in his tone. 'With such gifts at your command, you will certainly charm him. Why, the very reason of his keeping most people at arm's length is that he knows how easily he yields!' 'In that case, I will show you what I can do,' replied the Bore, delighted. 'I shall bribe the slaves; I will not give it up, if I am not received at first! I will bide my time and catch him in the street, and follow him about. One gets nothing in life without taking trouble!' As the man was chattering on, Horace's quick eyes caught sight of an old friend at last, coming towards him from the corner of the Triumphal Road, for they had already almost passed the Palatine. Aristius, sauntering along and enjoying the morning air, with a couple of slaves at his heels, saw Horace's trouble in a moment, for he knew the Bore well enough, and realized at once that if he delivered his friend, he himself would be the next victim. He was far too clever for that, and with a cold-blooded smile pretended not to understand Horace's signals of distress. 'I forget what it was you wished to speak about with me so particularly, my dear Aristius,' said the poet, in despair. 'It was something very important, was it not?' 'Yes,' answered the other, with another grin, 'I remember very well; but this is an unlucky day, and I shall choose another time. Today is the thirtieth Sabbath,' he continued, inventing a purely imaginary Hebrew feast, 'and you surely would not risk a Jew's curse for a few moments of conversation, would you?' 'I have no religion!' exclaimed Horace, eagerly. 'No superstition! Nothing!' 'But I have,' retorted Aristius, still smiling. 'My health is not good--perhaps you did not know? I will tell you about it some other time.' And he turned on his heel, with a laugh, leaving Horace to his awful fate. Even the sunshine looked black. But salvation came suddenly in the shape of the man who had brought the action against the Bore, and who, on his way to the Court, saw his adversary going off in the opposite direction. 'Coward! Villain!' yelled the man, springing forward and catching the poet's tormentor by his cloak. 'Where are you going now? You are witness, Sir, that I am in my right,' he added, turning to look for Horace. But Horace had disappeared in the crowd that had collected to see the quarrel, and his gods had saved him after all. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX] A part of the life of the times is in the little story, and anyone may stroll today along the Sacred Street, past the Basilica and the sharp turn that leads to the block of old houses where the Court House stood, between St. Adrian's and San Lorenzo in Miranda. Anyone may see just how it happened, and many know exactly how Horace felt from the moment when the Bore buttonholed him at the corner of the Julian Basilica till his final deliverance near the corner of the Triumphal Road, which is now the Via di San Gregorio. [Illustration: ATRIUM OF VESTA] There was much more resemblance to our modern life than one might think at first sight. Perhaps, after his timely escape, Horace turned back along the Sacred Street, followed by his single slave, and retraced his steps, past the temple of Vesta, the temple of Julius Cæsar, skirting the Roman Forum to the Golden Milestone at the foot of the ascent to the Capitol, from which landmark all the distances in the Roman Empire were reckoned, the very centre of the known world. Thence, perhaps, he turned up towards the Argiletum, with something of that instinct which takes a modern man of letters to his publisher's when he is in the neighbourhood. There the 'Brothers Sosii' had their publishing establishment, among many others of the same nature, and employed a great staff of copyists in preparing volumes for sale. All the year round the skilled scribes sat within in rows, with pen and ink, working at the manufacture of books. The Sosii Brothers were rich, and probably owned their workmen as slaves, both the writers and those who prepared the delicate materials, the wonderful ink, of which we have not the like today, the fine sheets of papyrus,--Pliny tells how they were sometimes too rough, and how they sometimes soaked up the ink like a cloth, as happens with our own paper,--and the carefully cut pens of Egyptian reed on which so much of the neatness in writing depended, though Cicero says somewhere that he could write with any pen he chanced to take up. It was natural enough that Horace should look in to ask how his latest book was selling, or more probably his first, for he had written but a few Epodes and not many Satires at the time when he met the immortal Bore. Later in his life, his books were published in editions of a thousand, as is the modern custom in Paris, and were sold all over the Empire, like those of other famous authors. The Satires did him little credit, and probably brought him but little money at their first publication. It seems certain that they have come down to us through a single copy. The Greek form of the Odes pleased people better. Moreover, some of the early Satires made distinguished people shy of his acquaintance, and when he told the Bore that Mæcenas was difficult of access he remembered that nine months had elapsed from the time of his own introduction to the great man until he had received the latter's first invitation to dinner. More than once he went almost too far in his attacks on men and things and then tried to remove the disagreeable impression he had produced, and wrote again of the same subject in a different spirit--notably when he attacked the works of the dead poet Lucilius and was afterwards obliged to explain himself. No doubt he often idled away a whole morning at his publisher's, looking over new books of other authors, and very probably borrowing them to take home with him, because he was poor, and he assuredly must have talked over with the Sosii the impression produced on the public by his latest poems. He was undoubtedly a quæstor's scribe, but it is more than doubtful whether he ever went near the Treasury or did any kind of clerk's work. If he ever did, it is odd that he should never speak of it, nor take anecdotes from such an occupation and from the clerks with whom he must have been thrown, for he certainly used every other sort of social material in the Satires. Among the few allusions to anything of the kind in his works are his ridicule of the over-dressed prætor of the town of Fundi, who had been a government clerk in Rome, and in the same story, his jest at one of Mæcenas' parasites, a freedman, and nominally a Treasury clerk, as Horace had been. In another Satire, the clerks in a body wish him to be present at one of their meetings. Perhaps what strikes one most in the study of Horace, which means the study of the Augustan age, is the vivid contrast between the man who composed the Carmen Sæculare, the sacred hymn sung on the Tenth anniversary of Augustus' accession to the imperial power, besides many odes that breathe a pristine reverence for the gods, and, on the other hand, the writer of satirical, playfully sceptical verses, who comments on the story of the incense melting without fire at the temple of Egnatia, with the famous and often-quoted 'Credat Judæus'! The original Romans had been a believing people, most careful in all ceremonies and observances, visiting anything like sacrilege with a cool ferocity worthy of the Christian religious wars in later days. Horace, at one time or another, laughs at almost every god and goddess in the heathen calendar, and publishes his jests, in editions of a thousand copies, with perfect indifference and complete immunity from censorship, while apparently bestowing a certain amount of care on household sacrifices and the like. The fact is that the Romans were a religious people, whereas the Italians were not. It is a singular fact that Rome, when left long to herself, has always shown a tendency to become systematically devout, whereas most of the other Italian states have exhibited an equally strong inclination to a scepticism not unfrequently mixed with the grossest superstition. It must be left to more profound students of humanity to decide whether certain places have a permanent influence in one determined direction upon the successive races that inhabit them; but it is quite undeniably true that the Romans of all ages have tended to religion of some sort in the most marked manner. In Roman history there is a succession of religious epochs not to be found in the annals of any other city. First, the early faith of the Kings, interrupted by the irruption of Greek influences which began approximately with Scipio Africanus; next, the wild Bacchic worship that produced the secret orgies on the Aventine, the discovery of which led to a religious persecution and the execution of thousands of persons on religious grounds; then the worship of the Egyptian deities, brought over to Rome in a new fit of belief, and at the same time, or soon afterwards, the mysterious adoration of the Persian Mithras, a gross and ignorant form of mysticism which, nevertheless, took hold of the people, at a time when other religions were almost reduced to a matter of form. Then, as all these many faiths lost vitality, Christianity arose, the terribly simple and earnest Christianity of the early centuries, sown first under the Cæsars, in Rome's secure days, developing to a power when Rome was left to herself by the transference of the Empire to the East, culminating for the first time in the crowning of Charlemagne, again in the Crusades, sinking under the revival of mythology and Hellenism during the Renascence, rising again, by slow degrees, to the extreme level of devotion under Pius the Ninth and the French protectorate, sinking suddenly with the movement of Italian unity, and the coming of the Italians in 1870, then rising again, as we see it now, with undying energy, under Leo the Thirteenth, and showing itself in the building of new churches, in the magnificent restoration of old ones, and in the vast second growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which are once more turning Rome into a clerical city, now that she is again at peace with herself, under a constitutional monarchy, but threatened only too plainly by an impending anarchic revolution. It would be hard to find in the history of any other city a parallel to such periodical recurrences of religious domination. Nor, in times when belief has been at its lowest ebb, have outward religious practices anywhere continued to hold so important a place in men's lives as they have always held in Rome. Of all Rome's mad tyrants, Elagabalus alone dared to break into the temple of Vesta and carry out the sacred Palladium. During more than eleven hundred years, six Vestal Virgins guarded the sacred fire and the Holy Things of Rome, in peace and war, through kingdom, republic, revolution and empire. For fifteen hundred years since then, the bones of Saint Peter have been respected by the Emperors, by Goths, by Kings, revolutions and short-lived republics. [Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM] IV There was a surprising strength in those early institutions of which the fragmentary survival has made Rome what it is. Strongest of all, perhaps, was the patriarchal mode of life which the shepherds of Alba Longa brought with them when they fled from the volcano, and of which the most distinct traces remain to the present day, while its origin goes back to the original Aryan home. Upon that principle all the household life ultimately turned in Rome's greatest times. The Senators were Patres, conscript fathers, heads of strong houses; the Patricians were those who had known 'fathers,' that is, a known and noble descent. Horace called Senators simply 'Conscripts,' and the Roman nobles of today call themselves the 'Conscript' families. The chain of tradition is unbroken from Romulus to our own time, while everything else has changed in greater or less degree. It is hard for Anglo-Saxons to believe that, for more than a thousand years, a Roman father possessed the absolute legal right to try, condemn and execute any of his children, without witnesses, in his own house and without consulting anyone. Yet nothing is more certain. 'From the most remote ages,' says Professor Lanciani, the highest existing authority, 'the power of a Roman father over his children, including those by adoption as well as by blood, was unlimited. A father might, without violating any law, scourge or imprison his son, or sell him for a slave, or put him to death, even after that son had risen to the highest honours in the state.' During the life of the father, a child, no matter of what age, could own no property independently, nor keep any private accounts, nor dispose of any little belongings, no matter how insignificant, without the father's consent, which was never anything more than an act of favour, and was revocable at any moment, without notice. If a son became a public magistrate, the power was suspended, but was again in force as soon as the period of office terminated. A man who had been Dictator of Rome became his father's slave and property again, as soon as his dictatorship ended. But if the son married with his father's consent, he was partly free, and became a 'father' in his turn, and absolute despot of his own household. So, if a daughter married, she passed from her father's dominion to that of her husband. A Priest of Jupiter for life was free. So was a Vestal Virgin. There was a complicated legal trick by which the father could liberate his son if he wished to do so for any reason, but he had no power to set any of his children free by a mere act of will, without legal formality. The bare fact that the men of a people should be not only trusted with such power, but that it should be forcibly thrust upon them, gives an idea of the Roman character, and it is natural enough that the condition of family life imposed by such laws should have had pronounced effects that may still be felt. As the Romans were a hardy race and long-lived, when they were not killed in battle, the majority of men were under the absolute control of their fathers till the age of forty or fifty years, unless they married with their parents' consent, in which case they advanced one step towards liberty, and at all events, could not be sold as slaves by their fathers, though they still had no right to buy or sell property nor to make a will. There are few instances of the law being abused, even in the most ferocious times. Brutus had the right to execute his sons, who conspired for the Tarquins, without any public trial. He preferred the latter. Titus Manlius caused his son to be publicly beheaded for disobeying a military order in challenging an enemy to single combat, slaying him, and bringing back the spoils. He might have cut off his head in private, so far as the law was concerned, for any reason whatsoever, great or small. As for the condition of real slaves, it was not so bad in early times as it became later, but the master's power was absolute to inflict torture and death in any shape. In slave-owning communities, barbarity has always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be supposed. A perfectly ignorant labourer of sound body was worth from eighty to a hundred dollars of our money, which meant much more in those days, though in later times twice that sum was sometimes paid for a single fine fish. The money value of the slave was, nevertheless, always a sort of guarantee of safety to himself; but men who had right of life and death over their own children, and who occasionally exercised it, were probably not, as a rule, very considerate to creatures who were bought and sold like cattle. Nevertheless, the number of slaves who were freed and enriched by their masters is really surprising. The point of all this, however, is that the head of a Roman family was, under protection of all laws and traditions, an absolute tyrant over his wife, his children, and his servants; and the Roman Senate was a chosen association of such tyrants. It is astonishing that they should have held so long to the forms of a republican government, and should never have completely lost their republican traditions. In this household tyranny, existing side by side with certain general ideas of liberty and constitutional government, under the ultimate domination of the Emperors' despotism as introduced by Augustus, is to be found the keynote of Rome's subsequent social life. Without those things, the condition of society in the Middle Age would be inexplicable, and the feudal system could never have developed. The old Roman principle that 'order should have precedence over order, not man over man,' rules most of Europe at the present day, though in Rome and Italy it is now completely eclipsed by a form of government which can only be defined as a monarchic democracy. The mere fact that under Augustus no man was eligible to the Senate who possessed less than a sum equal to a quarter of a million dollars, shows plainly enough what one of the most skilful despots who ever ruled mankind wisely, thought of the institution. It was intended to balance, by its solidity, the ever-unsettled instincts of the people, to prevent as far as possible the unwise passage of laws by popular acclamation, and, so to say, to regulate the pulse of the nation. It has been imitated, in one way or another, by all the nations we call civilized. But the father of the family was in his own person the despot, the senate, the magistrate and the executive of the law; his wife, his children and his slaves represented the people, constantly and eternally in real or theoretical opposition, while he was protected by all the force of the most ferocious laws. A father could behead his son with impunity; but the son who killed his father was condemned to be all but beaten to death, and then to be sewn up in a leathern sack and drowned. The father could take everything from the son; but if the son took the smallest thing from his father he was a common thief and malefactor, and liable to be treated as one, at his father's pleasure. The conception of justice in Rome never rested upon any equality, but always upon the precedence of one order over another, from the highest to the lowest. There were orders even among the slaves, and one who had been allowed to save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on him, if he chose. Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the mediæval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan, and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race. One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their new dwelling, if they build at all. The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's development or decadence at the time when the work was done. It is only by doing something of that sort that we can at all realize the connection between the settlement of the shepherds, the Rome of the Cæsars, and the desolate and scantily populated fighting ground of the Barons, upon which, with the Renascence, the city of the later Popes began to rise under Nicholas the Fifth. And lastly, without a little of such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those primeval times. Read Cæsar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his conquests. Read Horace, and attempt to see a little of what he describes in his good-natured, easy way. Read the correspondence of the younger Pliny when proconsul in Bithynia under Trajan, and follow the extraordinary details of administration which, with ten thousand others, the Spanish Emperor of Rome carried in his memory, and directed and decided. Take Petronius Arbiter's 'novel' next, the Satyricon, if you be not over-delicate in taste, and glance at the daily journal of a dissolute wretch wandering from one scene of incredible vice to another. And so on, through the later writers; and from among the vast annals of the industrious Muratori pick out bits of Roman life at different periods, and try to piece them together. At first sight it seems utterly impossible that one and the same people should have passed through such social changes and vicissitudes. Every educated man knows the main points through which the chain ran. Scholars have spent their lives in the attempt to restore even a few of the links and, for the most part, have lost their way in the dry quicksands that have swallowed up so much. 'I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze!' exclaimed Horace, in one of his rare moments of pardonable vanity. The expression meant much more then than it does now. The golden age of Rome was an age of brazen statues apparently destined to last as long as history. Yet the marble outlasted the gilded metal, and Horace's verse outlived both, and the names of the artists of that day are mostly forgotten, while his is a household word. In conquering races, literature has generally attained higher excellence than painting or sculpture, or architecture, for the arts are the expression of a people's tastes, often incomprehensible to men who live a thousand years later; but literature, if it expresses anything, either by poetry, history, or fiction, shows the feeling of humanity; and the human being, as such, changes very little in twenty or thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely Briseïs, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives us the real man, and after all, men are more important than stones. Yet the work of men's hands explains the working of men's hearts, telling us not what they felt, but how the feelings which ever belong to all men more particularly affected the actors at one time or another during the action of the world's long play. Little things sometimes tell the longest stories. [Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM] Pliny, suffering from sore eyes, going about in a closed carriage, or lying in the darkened basement portico of his house, obliged to dictate his letters, and unable to read, sends his thanks--by dictation--to his friend and colleague, Cornutus, for a fowl sent him, and says that although he is half blind, his eyes are sharp enough to see that it is a very fat one. The touch of human nature makes the whole picture live. Horace, journeying to Brindisi, and trying to sleep a little on a canal boat, is kept awake by mosquitoes and croaking frogs, and by the long-drawn-out, tipsy singing of a drunken sailor, who at last turns off the towing mule to graze, and goes to sleep till daylight. It is easier to see all this than to call up one instant of a chariot race in the great circus, or one of the ten thousand fights in the Colosseum, wherein gladiators fought and died, and left no word of themselves. Yet, without the setting, the play is imperfect, and we must have some of the one to understand the other. For human art is, in the first place, a progressive commentary on human nature, and again, in quick reaction, stimulates it with a suggestive force. Little as we really know of the imperial times, we cannot conceive of Rome without the Romans, nor of the Romans without Rome. They belonged together; when the seat of Empire became cosmopolitan, the great dominion began to be weakened; and when a homogeneous power dwelt in the city again, a new domination had its beginning, and was built up on the ruins of the old. Napoleon is believed to have said that the object of art is to create and foster agreeable illusions. Admitting the general truth of the definition, it appears perfectly natural that since the Romans had little or no art of their own, they should have begun to import Greek art just when they did, after the successful issue of the Second Punic War. Up to that time the great struggle had lasted. When it was over, the rest was almost a foregone conclusion. Rome and Carthage had made a great part of the known world their fighting ground in the duel that lasted a hundred and eighteen years; and the known world was the portion of the victor. Spoil first, for spoil's sake, he brought home; then spoil for the sake of art; then art for what itself could give him. In the fight for Empire, as in each man's struggle for life, success means leisure, and therefore civilization, which is the growth of people who have time at their disposal--time to 'create and foster agreeable illusions.' When the Romans conquered the Samnites they were the least artistic people in the world; when Augustus Cæsar died, they possessed and valued the greater part of the world's artistic treasures, many of these already centuries old, and they owned literally, and as slaves, a majority of the best living artists. Augustus had been educated in Athens; he determined that Rome should be as Athens, magnified a hundred times. Athens had her thousand statues, Rome should have her ten thousand; Rome should have state libraries holding a score of volumes for every one that Greece could boast; Rome's temples should be galleries of rare paintings, ten for each that Athens had. Rome should be so great, so rich, so gorgeous, that Greece should be as nothing beside her; Egypt should dwindle to littleness, and the memory of Babylon should be forgotten. Greece had her Homer, her Sophocles, her Anacreon; Rome should have her immortals also. Greatly Augustus laboured for his thought, and grandly he carried out his plan. He became the greatest 'art-collector' in all history, and the men of his time imitated him. Domitius Tullus, a Roman gentleman, had collected so much, that he was able to adorn certain extensive gardens, on the very day of the purchase, with an immense number of genuine ancient statues, which had been lying, half neglected, in a barn--or, as some read the passage, in other gardens of his. [Illustration: BASILICA CONSTANTINE] Augustus succeeded in one way. Possibly he was successful in his own estimation. 'Have I not acted the play well?' they say he asked, just before he died. The keynote is there, whether he spoke the words or not. He did all from calculation, nothing from conviction. The artist, active and creative or passive and appreciative, calculates nothing except the means of expressing his conviction. And in the over-calculating of effects by Augustus and his successors, one of the most singular weaknesses of the Latin race was thrust forward; namely, that giantism or megalomania, which has so often stamped the principal works of the Latins in all ages--that effort to express greatness by size, which is so conspicuously absent from all that the Greeks have left us. Agrippa builds a threefold temple and Hadrian rears the Pantheon upon its charred ruins; Constantine builds his Basilica; Michelangelo says, 'I will set the Pantheon upon the Basilica of Constantine.' He does it, and the result is Saint Peter's, which covers more ground than that other piece of giantism, the Colosseum; in Rome's last and modern revival, the Palazzo delle Finanze is built, the Treasury of the poorest of the Powers, which, incredible as it may seem, fills a far greater area than either the Colosseum or the Church of Saint Peter's. What else is such constructive enormity but 'giantism'? For the great Cathedral of Christendom, it may be said, at least, that it has more than once in history been nearly filled by devout multitudes, numbering fifty or sixty thousand people; in the days of public baths, nearly sixty-three thousand Romans could bathe daily with every luxury of service; when bread and games were free, a hundred thousand men and women often sat down in the Flavian Amphitheatre to see men tear each other to pieces; of the modern Ministry of Finance there is nothing to be said. The Roman curses it for the millions it cost; but the stranger looks, smiles and passes by a blank and hideous building three hundred yards long. There is no reason why a nation should not wish to be great, but there is every reason why a small nation should not try to look big; and the enormous follies of modern Italy must be charitably attributed to a defect of judgment which has existed in the Latin peoples from the beginning, and has by no means disappeared today. The younger Gordian began a portico which was to cover forty-four thousand square yards, and intended to raise a statue of himself two hundred and nineteen feet high. The modern Treasury building covers about thirty thousand square yards, and goes far to rival the foolish Emperor's insane scheme. [Illustration: RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN] Great contrasts lie in the past, between his age and ours. One must guess at them at least, if one have but little knowledge, in order to understand at all the city of the Middle Age and the Rome we see today. Imagine it at its greatest, a capital inhabited by more than two millions of souls, filling all that is left to be seen within and without the walls, and half the Campagna besides, spreading out in a vast disc of seething life from the central Golden Milestone at the corner of the temple of Saturn--the god of remote ages, and of earth's dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid roads, where to right and left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from Rome to Ostia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to Tivoli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere business of supply to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great harbour with its thousand vessels--and some of those that brought grain from Egypt were four hundred feet long; remember its vast granaries and store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola Sacra as a lovely garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an imperial palace and park; reckon up roughly what all that meant of life, of power, of incalculable wealth. Mark Antony squandered, in his short lifetime, eight hundred millions of pounds sterling, four thousand millions of dollars. Guess, if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast city. Then let twelve hundred years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of Rienzi. Some twenty thousand souls, the remnant and the one hundredth part of the two millions, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the strongest men have fortified bits here and there. The walls of Aurelian, broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move; broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to drink the muddy water of the Tiber because not a single channel remained whole to feed a single fountain, from the distant springs that had once filled baths for sixty thousand people every day. And round about all, the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by fever-stricken peasants to yield the little grain that so few men could need. The villas gone, the trees burned or cut down, the terraces slipped away into the rivers, the tombs of the Appian Way broken and falling to pieces, or transformed into rude fortresses held by wild-looking men in rusty armour, who sallied out to fight each other or, at rare intervals, to rob some train of wretched merchants, riding horses as rough and wild as themselves. Law gone, and order gone with it; wealth departed, and self-respect forgotten in abject poverty; each man defending his little with his own hand against the many who coveted it; Rome a den of robbers and thieves; the Pope, when there was one,--there was none in the year of Rienzi's birth,--either defended by one baron against another, or forced to fly for his life. Men brawling in the streets, ill clad, savage, ready with sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a tribune's power, of the humiliation of the Barons, of a resurrection for Italy and of her sudden return to the dominion of the world. Rome, then, was like a field long fallow, of rich soil, but long unploughed. Scarcely below the surface lay the treasures of ages, undreamt of by the few descendants of those who had brought them thither. Above ground, overgrown with wild creepers and flowers, there still stood some such monuments of magnificence as we find it hard to recall by mere words, not yet voluntarily destroyed, but already falling to pieces under the slow destruction of grinding time, when violence had spared them. Robert Guiscard had burned the city in 1084, but he had not destroyed everything. The Emperors of the East had plundered Rome long before that, carrying off works of art without end to adorn their city of Constantinople. Builders had burned a thousand marble statues to lime for their cement, for the statues were ready to hand and easily broken up to be thrown into the kiln, so that it seemed a waste of time and tools to quarry out the blocks from the temples. The Barbarians of Genseric and the Jews of Trastevere had seized upon such of the four thousand bronze statues as the Emperors had left, and had melted many of them down for metal, often hiding them in strange places while waiting for an opportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found, here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the first. Much of the old was still standing, but nothing of the old was whole. The Colosseum had not yet been turned into a quarry. The Septizonium of Septimius Severus, with its seven stories of columns and its lofty terrace, nearly half as high as the dome of Saint Peter's, though beginning to crumble, still crowned the south end of the Palatine; Minerva's temple was almost entire, and its huge architrave had not been taken to make the high altar of Saint Peter's; and the triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius was standing in what was perhaps not yet called the Corso in those days, but the Via Lata--'Broad Street.' The things that had not yet fallen, nor been torn down, were the more sadly grand by contrast with the chaos around them. There was also the difference between ruins then, and ruins now, which there is between a king just dead in his greatness, in whose features lingers the smile of a life so near that it seems ready to come back, and a dried mummy set up in a museum and carefully dusted for critics to study. In even stronger and rougher contrast, in the wreck of all that had been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in Rome's latent power to rule the world again. That was the beginning of the new story, for the old one was ended, the race of men who had lived it was gone, and their works were following them, to the universal dust. Out of the memories they left and the departed glory of the places wherein they had dwelt, the magic of the Middle Age was to weave another long romance, less grand but more stirring, less glorious but infinitely more human. Perhaps it is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to say that Rome was masculine from Romulus to the dark age, and that with the first dawn of the Renascence she began to be feminine. As in old days the Republic and the Empire fought for power and conquest and got both by force, endurance and hardness of character, so, in her second life, others fought for Rome, and courted her, and coveted her, and sometimes oppressed her and treated her cruelly, and sometimes cherished her and adorned her, and gave her all they had. In a way, too, the elder patriots reverenced their city as a father, and those of after-times loved her as a woman, with a tender and romantic love. Be that as it may, for it matters little how we explain what we feel. And assuredly we all feel that what we call the 'charm,' the feminine charm, of Rome, proceeds first from that misty time between two greatnesses, when her humanity was driven back upon itself, and simple passions, good and evil, suddenly felt and violently expressed, made up the whole life of a people that had ceased to rule by force, and had not yet reached power by diplomacy. It is fair, moreover, to dwell a little on that time, that we may not judge too hardly the men who came afterwards. If we have any virtues ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden, Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them, and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the hardship of having done right at all against such odds. [Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING ROMAN GAMES] [Illustration: RUINS OF THE JULIAN BASILICA] V Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in the escutcheon, and it would naturally occur to the stranger that the small marble shields, still visible here and there at the corners of old streets, must be the coats of arms of Roman families that held property in that particular neighbourhood. But this is not the case. They are the distinctive devices of the Fourteen Rioni, or wards, into which the city was divided, with occasional modifications, from the time of Augustus to the coming of Victor Emmanuel, and which with some further changes survive to the present day. The tablets themselves were put up by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth, who reigned from 1740 to 1758, and who finally brought them up to the ancient number of fourteen; but from the dark ages the devices themselves were borne upon flags on all public occasions by the people of the different Regions. For 'Rione' is only a corruption of the Latin 'Regio,' the same with our 'Region,' by which English word it will be convenient to speak of these divisions that played so large a part in the history of the city during many successive centuries. For the sake of clearness, it is as well to enumerate them in their order and with the numbers that have always belonged to each. They are: I. Monti, II. Trevi, III. Colonna, IV. Campo Marzo, V. Ponte VI. Parione, VII. Regola, VIII. Sant' Eustachio, IX. Pigna, X. Campitelli, XI. Sant' Angelo, XII. Ripa, XIII. Trastevere, XIV. Borgo. Five of these names, that is to say, Ponte, Parione, Regola, Pigna and Sant' Angelo, indicate in a general way the part of the city designated by each. Ponte, the Bridge, is the Region about the Bridge of Sant' Angelo, on the left bank at the sharp bend of the river seen from that point; but the original bridge which gave the name was the Pons Triumphalis, of which the foundations are still sometimes visible a little below the Ælian bridge leading to the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Parione, the Sixth ward, is the next division to the preceding one, towards the interior of the city, on both sides of the modern Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, taking in the ancient palace of the Massimo family, the Cancelleria, famous as the most consistent piece of architecture in Rome, and the Piazza Navona. Regola is next, towards the river, comprising the Theatre of Pompey and the Palazzo Farnese. Pigna takes in the Pantheon, the Collegio Romano and the Palazzo di Venezia. Sant' Angelo has nothing to do with the castle or the bridge, but takes its name from the little church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and includes the old Ghetto with some neighbouring streets. The rest explain themselves well enough to anyone who has even a very slight acquaintance with the city. At first sight these more or less arbitrary divisions may seem of little importance. It was, of course, necessary, even in early times, to divide the population and classify it for political and municipal purposes. There is no modern city in the world that is not thus managed by wards and districts, and the consideration of such management and of its means might appear to be a very flat and unprofitable study, tiresome alike to the reader and to the writer. And so it would be, if it were not true that the Fourteen Regions of Rome were fourteen elements of romance, each playing its part in due season, while all were frequently the stage at once, under the collective name of the people, in their ever-latent opposition and in their occasional violent outbreaks against the nobles and the popes, who alternately oppressed and spoiled them for private and public ends. In other words, the Regions with their elected captains under one chief captain were the survival of the Roman People, for ever at odds with the Roman Senate. In times when there was no government, in any reasonable sense of the word, the people tried to govern themselves, or at least to protect themselves as best they could by a rough system which was all that remained of the elaborate municipality of the Empire. Without the Regions the struggles of the Barons would probably have destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John the Thirteenth a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorized the Barons, and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not have made himself dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the Pope and the cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of mediæval Rome could not have found a place in history. It is no wonder that to men born and bred in the city the Regions seem even now to be an integral factor in its existence. There were two other elements of power, namely, the Pope and the Barons. The three are almost perpetually at war, two on a side, against the third. Philippe de Commines, ambassador of Lewis the Eleventh in Rome, said that without the Orsini and the Colonna, the States of the Church would be the happiest country in the world. He forgot the People, and was doubtless too politic to speak of the Popes to his extremely devout sovereign. Take away the three elements of discord, and there would certainly have been peace in Rome, for there would have been no one to disturb the bats and the owls, when everybody was gone. The excellent advice of Ampère, already quoted, is by no means easy to follow, since there are not many who have the time and the inclination to acquire a 'superficial knowledge' of Rome by a ten years' visit. If, therefore, we merely presuppose an average knowledge of history and a guide-book acquaintance with the chief points in the city, the simplest and most direct way of learning more about it is to take the Regions in their ancient order, as the learned Baracconi has done in his invaluable little work, and to try as far as possible to make past deeds live again where they were done, with such description of the places themselves as may serve the main purpose best. To follow any other plan would be either to attempt a new history of the city of Rome, or to piece together a new archæological manual. In either case, even supposing that one could be successful where so much has already been done by the most learned, the end aimed at would be defeated, for romance would be stiffened to a record, and beauty would be dissected to an anatomical preparation. [Illustration: BRASS OF TITUS, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM] [Illustration] REGION I MONTI 'Monti' means 'The Hills,' and the device of the Region represents three, figuring those enclosed within the boundaries of this district; namely, the Quirinal, the Esquiline and the Coelian. The line encircling them includes the most hilly part of the mediæval city; beginning at the Porta Salaria, it runs through the new quarter, formerly Villa Ludovisi, to the Piazza Barberini, thence by the Tritone to the Corso, by the Via Marforio, skirting the eastern side of the Capitoline Hill and the eastern side of the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, which it does not include; on almost to the Lateran, back again, so as to include the Basilica, by San Stefano Rotondo, and out by the Navicella to the now closed Porta Metronia. The remainder of the circuit is completed by the Aurelian wall, which is the present wall of the city, though the modern Electoral Wards extend in some places beyond it. The modern gates included in this portion are the Porta Salaria, the Porta Pia, the new gate at the end of the Via Montebello, the next, an unnamed opening through which passes the Viale Castro Pretorio, then the Porta Tiburtina, the Porta San Lorenzo, the exit of the railway, Porta Maggiore, and lastly the Porta San Giovanni. The Region of the Hills takes in by far the largest area of the fourteen districts, but also that portion which in later times has been the least thickly populated, the wildest districts of mediæval and recent Rome, great open spaces now partially covered by new though hardly inhabited buildings, but which were very lately either fallow land or ploughed fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruins rose here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the midst of which towered the enormous basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and Saint John Lateran, the half-utilized, half-consecrated remains of the Baths of Diocletian, the Baths of Titus, and over against the latter, just beyond the southwestern boundary, the gloomy Colosseum, and on the west the tall square tower of the Capitol with its deep-toned bell, the 'Patarina,' which at last was sounded only when the Pope was dead, and when Carnival was over on Shrove Tuesday night. It must first be remembered that each Region had a small independent existence, with night watchmen of its own, who dared not step beyond the limits of their beat; defined by parishes, there were separate charities for each Region, separate funds for giving dowries to poor girls, separate 'Confraternite' or pious societies to which laymen belonged, and, in a small way, a sort of distinct nationality. There was rivalry between each Region and its neighbours, and when the one encroached upon the other there was strife and bloodshed in the streets. In the public races, of which the last survived in the running of riderless horses through the Corso in Carnival, each Region had its colours, its right of place, and its separate triumph if it won in the contest. There was all that intricate opposition of small parties which arose in every mediæval city, when children followed their fathers' trades from generation to generation, and lived in their fathers' houses from one century to another; and there was all the individuality and the local tradition which never really hindered civilization, but were always an insurmountable barrier against progress. Some one has called democracy Rome's 'Original Sin.' It would be more just and true to say that most of Rome's misfortunes, and Italy's too, have been the result of the instinct to oppose all that is, whether good or bad, as soon as it has existed for a while; in short, the original sin of Italians is an original detestation of that unity of which the empty name has been a fetish for ages. Rome, thrown back upon herself in the dark times, when she was shorn of her possessions, was a true picture of what Italy was before Rome's iron hand had bound the Italian peoples together by force, of what she became again as soon as that force was relaxed, of what she has grown to be once more, now that the delight of revolution has disappeared in the dismal swamp of financial disappointment, of what she will be to all time, because, from all time, she has been populated by races of different descent, who hated each other as only neighbours can. The redeeming feature of a factional life has sometimes been found in a readiness to unite against foreign oppression; it has often shown itself in an equal willingness to submit to one foreign ruler in order to get rid of another. Circumstances have made the result good or bad. In the year 799, the Romans attacked and wounded Pope Leo the Third in a solemn procession, almost killed him and drove him to flight, because he had sent the keys of the city to Charles the Great, in self-protection against the splendid, beautiful, gifted, black-hearted Irene, Empress of the East, who had put out her own son's eyes and taken the throne by force. Two years later the people of Rome shouted "Life and Victory to Charles the Emperor," when the same Pope Leo, his scars still fresh, crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter's. One remembers, for that matter, that Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned in French Paris by another Pope, girt on the very sword of that same Frankish Charles, whose bones the French had scattered to the elements at Aix. Savonarola, of more than doubtful patriotism, to whom Saint Philip Neri prayed, but whom the English historian, Roscoe, flatly calls a traitor, would have taken Florence from the Italian Medici and given it to the French king. Dante was for German Emperors against Italian Popes. Modern Italy has driven out Bourbons and Austrians and given the crown of her Unity to a house of Kings, brave and honourable, but in whose veins there is no drop of Italian blood, any more than their old Dukedom of Savoy was ever Italian in any sense. The glory of history is rarely the glory of any ideal; it is more often the glory of success. The Roman Republic was the result of internal opposition, and the instinct to oppose power, often rightly, sometimes wrongly, will be the last to survive in the Latin race. In the Middle Age, when Rome had shrunk from the boundaries of civilization to the narrow limits of the Aurelian walls, it produced the hatred between the Barons and the people, and within the people themselves, the less harmful rivalry of the Regions and their Captains. [Illustration: SANTA FRANCESCA ROMANA] These Captains held office for three months only. At the expiration of the term, they and the people of their Region proceeded in procession, all bearing olive branches, to the temple of Venus and Rome, of which a part was early converted into the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, now known as Santa Francesca Romana, between the Forum and the Colosseum, and just within the limits of 'Monti.' Down from the hills on the one side the crowd came; up from the regions of the Tiber, round the Capitol from Colonna, and Trevi, and Campo Marzo, as ages before them the people had thronged to the Comitium, only a few hundred yards away. There, before the church in the ruins, each Region dropped the names of its own two candidates into the ballot box, and chance decided which of the two should be Captain next. In procession, then, all round the Capitol, they went to Aracoeli, and the single Senator, the lone shadow of the Conscript Fathers, ratified each choice. Lastly, among themselves, they used to choose the Prior, or Chief Captain, until it became the custom that the captain of the First Region, Monti, should of right be head of all the rest, and in reality one of the principal powers in the city. And the principal church of Monti also held preëminence over others. The Basilica of Saint John Lateran was entitled 'Mother and Head of all Churches of the City and of the World'; and it took its distinctive name from a rich Roman family, whose splendid house stood on the same spot as far back as the early days of the Empire. Even Juvenal speaks of it. Overthrown by earthquake, erected again at once, twice burned and immediately rebuilt, five times the seat of Councils of the Church, enlarged even in our day at enormous cost, it seems destined to stand on the same spot for ages, and to perpetuate the memory of the Laterans to all time, playing monument to an obscure family of rich citizens, whose name should have been almost lost, but can never be forgotten now. Constantine, sentimental before he was great, and great before he was a Christian, gave the house of the Roman gentleman to Pope Sylvester. He bought it, or it fell to the crown at the extinction of the family, for he was not the man to confiscate property for a whim; and within the palace he made a church, which was called by more than one name, till after nearly six hundred years it was finally dedicated to Saint John the Baptist; until then it had been generally called the church 'in the Lateran house,' and to this day it is San Giovanni in Laterano. Close by it, in the palace of the Annii, Marcus Aurelius, last of the so-called Antonines, and last of the great emperors, was born and educated; and in his honour was made the famous statue of him on horseback, which now stands in the square of the Capitol. The learned say that it was set up before the house where he was born, and so found itself also before the Lateran in later times, with the older Wolf, at the place of public justice and execution. In the wild days of the tenth century, when the world was boiling with faction, and trembling at the prospect of the Last Judgment, clearly predicted to overtake mankind in the thousandth year of the Christian era, the whole Roman people, without sanction of the Emperor and without precedent, chose John the Thirteenth to be their Pope. The Regions with their Captains had their way, and the new Pontiff was enthroned by their acclamation. Then came their disappointment, then their anger. Pope John, strong, high-handed, a man of order in days of chaos, ruled from the Lateran for one short year, with such wisdom as he possessed, such law as he chanced to have learnt, and all the strength he had. Neither Barons nor people wanted justice, much less learning. The Latin chronicle is brief: 'At that time, Count Roffredo and Peter the Prefect,'--he was the Prior of the Regions' Captains,--'with certain other Romans, seized Pope John, and first threw him into the Castle of Sant' Angelo, but at last drove him into exile in Campania for more than ten months. But when the Count had been murdered by one of the Crescenzi,'--in whose house Rienzi afterwards lived,--'the Pope was released and returned to his See.' Back came Otto the Great, Saxon Emperor, at Christmas time, as he came more than once, to put down revolution with a strong hand and avenge the wrongs of Pope John by executing all but one of the Captains of the Regions. Twelve of them he hanged. Peter the Prefect, or Prior, was bound naked upon an ass with an earthen jar over his head, flogged through the city, and cruelly put to death; and at last his torn body was hung by the hair to the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator. And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that, and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, his rule was more gentle, and when he was dead he was spoken of as 'that most worthy Pontiff.' Who Count Roffredo was no one can tell surely, but his name belongs to the great house of Caetani. [Illustration: BASILICA OF ST JOHN LATERAN] It is hard to see past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his frightened priests cower together within, expecting death. Down goes the oak with a crash like artillery, that booms along the empty corridors; a moment's pause, and silence, and then the rush, headed by the Knight and the leaders who mean no murder, but mean to have their way, once and for ever, and buffet back their furious followers when they have reached the Pope's room, lest he should be torn in pieces. Then, the subsidence of the din, and the old man and his priests bound and dragged out and forced to go on foot by all the long dark way through the city to the black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river. [Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO] It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces, and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and there was a smell of blood in the air. But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week, towards evening at the Tenebræ, the divine tenor voice of Padre Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man. Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air--one of those voices which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which, perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times. Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in Rome even such as they might condescend to the romantic for an hour, because in Rome such deeds have been dared, such loves have been loved, such deaths have been died, that any romance, no matter how wild, has larger probability in the light of what has actually been the lot of real men and women. So going alone through the winding moonlit ways about Tor de' Conti, Santa Maria dei Monti and San Pietro in Vincoli, a man need take no account of modern fashions in sensation; and if he will but let himself be charmed, the enchantment will take hold of him and lead him on through a city of dreams and visions, and memories strange and great, without end. Ever since Rome began there must have been just such silvery nights; just such a voice rang through the same air ages ago; just as now the velvet shadows fell pall-like and unrolled themselves along the grey pavement under the lofty columns of Mars the Avenger and beneath the wall of the Forum of Augustus. [Illustration: PIAZZA COLONNA] Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each other--one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone, which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street, which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough, booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits; even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of the Holy Roman Empire pushes past a troop of dirty school children, and is almost driven into an open barrel of salt codfish, in the door of a poor shop, by a black-faced charcoal man carrying a sack on his head more than half as high as himself. A party of jolly young German tourists in loose clothes, with red books in their hands, and their field-glasses hanging by straps across their shoulders, try to rid themselves of the flower-girls dressed in sham Sabine costumes, and utter exclamations of astonishment and admiration when they themselves are almost run down by a couple of the giant Royal Grenadiers, each six feet five or thereabouts, besides nine inches, or so, of crested helmet aloft, gorgeous, gigantic and spotless. Clerks by the dozen and liveried messengers of the ministries struggle in the press; ladies gather their skirts closely, and try to pick a dainty way where, indeed, there is nothing 'dain' (a word which Doctor Johnson confesses that he could not find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful); servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests, friars, venders of boot-laces and thread, vegetable sellers pushing hand-carts of green things in and out among the horses and vehicles with amazing dexterity, and yelling their cries in super-humanly high voices--there is no end to the multitude. If the day is showery, it is a sight to see the confusion in the Tritone when umbrellas of every age, material and colour are all opened at once, while the people who have none crowd into the codfish shop and the liquor seller's and the tobacconist's, with traditional 'con permesso' of excuse for entering when they do not mean to buy anything; for the Romans are mostly civil people and fairly good-natured. But rain or shine, at the busy hours, the place is always crowded to overflowing with every description of vehicle and every type of humanity. Out of Babel--a horizontal Babel--you may turn into the little church, dedicated to the 'Holy Guardian Angel.' It stands on the south side of the Tritone, in that part which is broader, and which a little while ago was still called the Via dell' Angelo Custode--Guardian Angel Street. It is an altogether insignificant little church, and strangers scarcely ever visit it. But going down the Tritone, when your ears are splitting, and your eyes are confused with the kaleidoscopic figures of the scurrying crowd, you may lift the heavy leathern curtain, and leave the hurly-burly outside, and find yourself all alone in the quiet presence of death, the end of all hurly-burly and confusion. It is quite possible that under the high, still light in the round church, with its four niche-like chapels, you may see, draped in black, that thing which no one ever mistakes for anything else; and round about the coffin a dozen tall wax candles may be burning with a steady yellow flame. Possibly, at the sound of the leathern curtain slapping the stone door-posts, as it falls behind you, a sad-looking sacristan may shuffle out of a dark corner to see who has come in; possibly not. He may be asleep, or he may be busy folding vestments in the sacristy. The dead need little protection from the living, nor does a sacristan readily put himself out for nothing. You may stand there undisturbed as long as you please, and see what all the world's noise comes to in the end. Or it may be, if the departed person belonged to a pious confraternity, that you chance upon the brothers of the society--clad in dark hoods with only holes for their eyes, and no man recognized by his neighbour--chanting penitential psalms and hymns for the one whom they all know because he is dead, and they are living. Such contrasts are not lacking in Rome. There are plenty of them everywhere in the world, perhaps, but they are more striking here, in proportion as the outward forms of religious practice are more ancient, unchanging and impressive. For there is nothing very impressive or unchanging about the daily outside world, especially in Rome. Rome, the worldly, is the capital of one of the smaller kingdoms of the world, which those who rule it are anxious to force into the position of a great power. One need not criticise their action too hardly; their motives can hardly be anything but patriotic, considering the fearful sacrifices they impose upon their country. But they are not the men who brought about Italian unity. They are the successors of those men; they are not satisfied with that unification, and they have dreamed a dream of ambition, beside which, considering the means at their disposal, the projects of Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon sink into comparative insignificance. At all events, the worldly, modern, outward Italian Rome is very far behind the great European capitals in development, not to say wealth and magnificence. 'Lay' Rome, if one may use the expression, is not in the least a remarkable city. 'Ecclesiastic' Rome is the stronghold of a most tremendous fact, from whatever point of view Christianity may be considered. If one could, in imagination, detach the head of the Catholic Church from the Church, one would be obliged to admit that no single living man possesses the far-reaching and lasting power which in each succeeding papal reign belongs to the Pope. Behind the Pope stands the fact which confers, maintains and extends that power from century to century; a power which is one of the hugest elements of the world's moral activity, both in its own direct action and in the counteraction and antagonism which it calls forth continually. It is the all-pervading presence of this greatest fact in Christendom which has carried on Rome's importance from the days of the Cæsars, across the chasm of the dark ages, to the days of the modern popes; and its really enormous importance continually throws forward into cruel relief the puerilities and inanities of the daily outward world. It is the consciousness of that importance which makes old Roman society what it is, with its virtues, its vices, its prejudices and its strange, old-fashioned, close-fisted kindliness; which makes the contrast between the Saturnalia of Shrove Tuesday night and the cross signed with ashes upon the forehead on Ash Wednesday morning, between the careless laughter of the Roman beauty in Carnival, and the tragic earnestness of the same lovely face when the great lady kneels in Lent, before the confessional, to receive upon her bent head the light touch of the penitentiary's wand, taking her turn, perhaps, with a score of women of the people. It is the knowledge of an always present power, active throughout the whole world, which throws deep, straight shadows, as it were, through the Roman character, just as in certain ancient families there is a secret that makes grave the lives of those who know it. The Roman Forum and the land between it and the Colosseum, though strictly within the limits of Monti, were in reality a neutral ground, the chosen place for all struggles of rivalry between the Regions. The final destruction of its monuments dates from the sacking of Rome by Robert Guiscard with his Normans and Saracens in the year one thousand and eighty-four, when the great Duke of Apulia came in arms to succour Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, against the Emperor Henry the Fourth, smarting under the bitter humiliation of Canossa; and against his Antipope Clement, more than a hundred years after Otto had come back in anger to avenge Pope John. There is no more striking picture of the fearful contest between the Church and the Empire. [Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO] Alexis, Emperor of the East, had sent Henry, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, one hundred and forty-four thousand pieces of gold, and one hundred pieces of woven scarlet, as an inducement to make war upon the Norman Duke, the Pope's friend. But the Romans feared Henry and sent ambassadors to him, and on the twenty-first of March, being the Thursday before Palm Sunday, the Lateran gate was opened for him to enter in triumph. The city was divided against itself, the nobles were for Hildebrand, the people were against him. The Emperor seized the Lateran palace and all the bridges. The Pope fled to the Castle of Sant' Angelo, an impregnable fortress in those times, ever ready and ever provisioned for a siege. Of the nobles Henry required fifty hostages as earnest of their neutrality. On the next day he threw his gold to the rabble and they elected his Antipope Gilbert, who called himself Clement the Third, and certain bishops from North Italy consecrated him in the Lateran on Palm Sunday. Meanwhile Hildebrand secretly sent swift riders to Apulia, calling on Robert Guiscard for help, and still the nobles were faithful to him, and though Henry held the bridges, they were strong in Trastevere and the Borgo, which is the region between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and Saint Peter's. So it turned out that when Henry tried to bring his Antipope in solemn procession to enthrone him in the Pontifical chair, on Easter day, he found mailed knights and footmen waiting for him, and had to fight his way to the Vatican, and forty of his men were killed and wounded in the fray, while the armed nobles lost not one. Yet he reached the Vatican at last, and there he was crowned by the false Pope he had made, with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The chronicler apologizes for calling him an emperor at all. Then he set to work to destroy the dwellings of the faithful nobles, and laid siege to the wonderful Septizonium of Severus, in which the true Pope's nephew had fortified himself, and began to batter it down with catapults and battering-rams. Presently came the message of vengeance, brought by one man outriding a host, while the rabble were still building a great wall to encircle Sant' Angelo and starve Hildebrand to death or submission, working day and night like madmen, tearing down everything at hand to pile the great stones one upon another. Swiftly came the terrible Norman from the south, with his six thousand horse, Normans and Saracens, and thirty thousand foot, forcing his march and hungry for the Emperor. But Henry fled, making pretext of great affairs in Lombardy, promising great and wonderful gifts to the Roman rabble, and entrusting to their care his imperial city. Like a destroying whirlwind of fire and steel Robert swept on to the gates and into Rome, burning and slaying as he rode, and sparing neither man, nor woman, nor child, till the red blood ran in rivers between walls of yellow flame. And he took Hildebrand from Sant' Angelo, and brought him back to the Lateran through the reeking ruins of the city in grim and fearful triumph of carnage and destruction. That was the end of the Roman Forum, and afterwards, when the blood-soaked ashes and heaps of red-hot rubbish had sunk down and hardened to a level surface, the place where the shepherd fathers of Alba Longa had pastured their flocks was called the Campo Vaccino, the Cattle Field, because it was turned into the market for beeves, and rows of trees were planted, and on one side there was a walk where ropes were made, even to our own time. It became also the fighting ground of the Regions. Among the strangest scenes in the story of the city are those regular encounters between the Regions of Monti and Trastevere which for centuries took place on feast days, by appointment, on the site of the Forum, or occasionally on the wide ground before the Baths of Diocletian. They were battles fought with stones, and far from bloodless. Monti was traditionally of the Imperial or Ghibelline party; Trastevere was Guelph and for the Popes. The enmity was natural and lasting, on a small scale, as it was throughout Italy. The challenge to the fray was regularly sent out by young boys as messengers, and the place and hour were named and the word passed in secret from mouth to mouth. It was even determined by agreement whether the stones were to be thrown by hand or whether the more deadly sling was to be used. At the appointed time, the combatants appear in the arena, sometimes as many as a hundred on a side, and the tournament begins, as in Homeric times, with taunts and abuse, which presently end in skirmishes between the boys who have come to look on. Scouts are placed at distant points to cry 'Fire' at the approach of the dreaded Bargello and his men, who are the only representatives of order in the city and not, indeed, anxious to face two hundred infuriated slingers for the sake of making peace. One boy throws a stone and runs away, followed by the rest, all prudently retiring to a safe distance. The real combatants wrap their long cloaks about their left arms, as the old Romans used their togas on the same ground, to shield their heads from the blows; a sling whirls half a dozen times like lightning, and a smooth round stone flies like a bullet straight at an enemy's face, followed by a hundred more in a deadly hail, thick and fast. Men fall, blood flows, short deep curses ring through the sunny air, the fighters creep up to one another, dodging behind trees and broken ruins, till they are at cruelly short range; faster and faster fly the stones, and scores are lying prostrate, bleeding, groaning and cursing. Strength, courage, fierce endurance and luck have it at last, as in every battle. Down goes the leader of Trastevere, half dead, with an eye gone, down goes the next man to him, his teeth broken under his torn lips, down half a dozen more, dead or wounded, and the day is lost. Trastevere flies towards the bridge, pursued by Monti with hoots and yells and catcalls, and the thousands who have seen the fight go howling after them, women and children screaming, dogs racing and barking and biting at their heels. And far behind on the deserted Campo Vaccino, as the sun goes down, women weep and frightened children sob beside the young dead. But the next feast day would come, and a counter-victory and vengeance. That has always been the temper of the Romans; but few know how fiercely it used to show itself in those days. It would have been natural enough that men should meet in sudden anger and kill each other with such weapons as they chanced to have or could pick up, clubs, knives, stones, anything, when fighting was half the life of every grown man. It is harder to understand the murderous stone throwing by agreement and appointment. In principle, indeed, it approached the tournament, and the combat of champions representing two parties is an expression of the ancient instinct of the Latin peoples; so the Horatii and Curiatii fought for Rome and Alba--so Francis the First of France offered to fight the Emperor Charles the Fifth for settlement of all quarrels between the Kingdom and the Empire--and so the modern Frenchman and Italian are accustomed to settle their differences by an appeal to what they still call 'arms,' for the sake of what modern society is pleased to dignify by the name of 'honour.' But in the stone-throwing combats of Campo Vaccino there was something else. The games of the circus and the bloody shows of the amphitheatre were not forgotten. As will be seen hereafter, bull-fighting was a favourite sport in Rome as it is in Spain today, and the hand-to-hand fights between champions of the Regions were as much more exciting and delightful to the crowd as the blood of men is of more price than the blood of beasts. The habit of fighting for its own sake, with dangerous weapons, made the Roman rabble terrible when the fray turned quite to earnest; the deadly hail of stones, well aimed by sling and hand, was familiar to every Roman from his childhood, and the sight of naked steel at arm's length inspired no sudden, keen and unaccustomed terror, when men had little but life to lose and set small value on that, throwing it into the balance for a word, rising in arms for a name, doing deeds of blood and flame for a handful of gold or a day of power. Monti was both the battlefield of the Regions and also, in times early and late, the scene of the most splendid pageants of Church and State. There is a strange passage in the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan Roman of Greek birth, contemporary with Pope Damasus in the latter part of the fourth century. Muratori quotes it, as showing what the Bishopric of Rome meant even in those days. It is worth reading, for a heathen's view of things under Valens and Valentinian, before the coming of the Huns and the breaking up of the Roman Empire, and, indeed, before the official disestablishment, as we should say, of the heathen religion; while the High Priest of Jupiter still offered sacrifices on the Capitol, and the six Vestal Virgins still guarded the Seven Holy Things of Rome, and held their vast lands and dwelt in their splendid palace in all freedom of high privilege, as of old. 'For my part,' says Ammianus, 'when I see the magnificence in which the Bishops live in Rome, I am not surprised that those who covet the dignity should use force and cunning to obtain it. For if they succeed, they are sure of becoming enormously rich by the gifts of the devout Roman matrons; they will drive about Rome in their carriages, as they please, gorgeously dressed, and they will not only keep an abundant table, but will give banquets so sumptuous as to outdo those of kings and emperors. They do not see that they could be truly happy if instead of making the greatness of Rome an excuse for their excesses, they would live as some of the Bishops of the Provinces do, who are sparing and frugal, poorly clad and modest, but who make the humility of their manners and the purity of their lives at once acceptable to their God and to their fellow worshippers.' So much Ammianus says. And Saint Jerome tells how Prætextatus, Prefect of the City, when Pope Damasus tried to convert him, answered with a laugh, 'I will become a Christian if you will make me Bishop of Rome.' Yet Damasus, famous for the good Latin and beautiful carving of the many inscriptions he composed and set up, was undeniably also a good man in the evil days which foreshadowed the great schism. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE] And here, in the year 366, in the Region of Monti, in the church where now stands Santa Maria Maggiore, a great and terrible name stands out for the first time in history. Orsino, Deacon of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, rouses a party of the people, declares the election of Damasus invalid, proclaims himself Pope in his stead, and officiates as Pontiff in the Basilica of Sicininus. Up from the deep city comes the roaring crowd, furious and hungry for fight; the great doors are closed and Orsino's followers gather round him as he stands on the steps of the altar; but they are few, and those for Damasus are many; down go the doors, burst inward with battering-rams, up shoot the flames to the roof, and the short, wild fray lasts while one may count five score, and is over. Orsino and a hundred and thirty-six of his men lie dead on the pavement, the fire licks the rafters, the crowd press outward, and the great roof falls crashing down into wide pools of blood. And after that Damasus reigns eighteen years in peace and splendour. No one knows whether the daring Deacon was of the race that made and unmade popes afterwards, and held half Italy with its fortresses, giving its daughters to kings and taking kings' daughters for its sons, till Vittoria Accoramboni of bad memory began to bring down a name that is yet great. But Orsino he was called, and he had in him much of the lawless strength of those namesakes of his who outfought all other barons but the Colonna, for centuries; and romance may well make him one of them. Three hundred years later, and a little nearer to us in the dim perspective of the dark ages, another scene is enacted in the same cathedral. Martin the First was afterwards canonized as Saint Martin for the persecutions he suffered at the hands of Constans, who feared and hated him and set up an antipope in his stead, and at last sent him prisoner to die a miserable death in the Crimea. Olympius, Exarch of Italy, was the chosen tool of the Emperor, sent again and again to Rome to destroy the brave Bishop and make way for the impostor. At last, says the greatest of Italian chroniclers, fearing the Roman people and their soldiers, he attempted to murder the Pope foully, in hideous sacrilege. To that end he pretended penitence, and begged to be allowed to receive the Eucharist from the Pope himself at solemn high Mass, secretly instructing one of his body-guards to stab the Bishop at the very moment when he should present Olympius with the consecrated bread. Up to the basilica they went, in grave and splendid procession. One may guess the picture, with its deep colour, with the strong faces of those men, the Eastern guards, the gorgeous robes, the gilded arms, the high sunlight crossing the low nave and falling through the yellow clouds of incense upon the venerable bearded head of the holy man whose death was purposed in the sacred office. First, the measured tread of the Exarch's band moving in order; then, the silence over all the kneeling throng, and upon it the bursting unison of the 'Gloria in Excelsis' from the choir. Chant upon chant as the Pontiff and his Ministers intone the Epistle and the Gospel and are taken up by the singers in chorus at the first words of the Creed. By and by, the Pope's voice alone, still clear and brave in the Preface. 'Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and all the company of Heaven,' he chants, and again the harmony of many voices singing 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.' Silence then, at the Consecration, and the dark-browed Exarch bowing to the pavement, beside the paid murderer whose hand is already on his dagger's hilt. 'O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,' sings the choir in its sad, high chant, and Saint Martin bows, standing, over the altar, himself communicating, while the Exarch holds his breath, and the slayer fixes his small, keen eyes on the embroidered vestments and guesses how they will look with a red splash upon them. As the soldier looks, the sunlight falls more brightly on the gold, the incense curls in mystic spiral wreaths, its strong perfume penetrates and dims his senses; little by little, his thoughts wander till they are strangely fixed on something far away, and he no longer sees Pope nor altar nor altar-piece beyond, and is wrapped in a sort of waking sleep that is blindness. Olympius kneels at the steps within the rail, and his heart beats loud as the grand figure of the Bishop bends over him, and the thin old hand with its strong blue veins offers the sacred bread to his open lips. He trembles, and tries to glance sideways to his left with downcast eyes, for the moment has come, and the blow must be struck then or never. Not a breath, not a movement in the church, not the faintest clink of all those gilded arms, as the Saint pronounces the few solemn words, then gravely and slowly turns, with his deacons to right and left of him, and ascends the altar steps once more, unhurt. A miracle, says the chronicler. A miracle, says the amazed soldier, and repeats it upon solemn oath. A miracle, says Olympius himself, penitent and converted from error, and ready to save the Pope by all means he has, as he was ready to slay him before. But he only, and the hired assassin beside him, had known what was to be, and the people say that the Exarch and the Pope were already reconciled and agreed against the Emperor. The vast church has had many names. It seems at one time to have been known as the Basilica of Sicininus, for so Ammianus Marcellinus still speaks of it. But just before that, there is the lovely legend of Pope Liberius' dream. To him and to the Roman patrician, John, came the Blessed Virgin in a dream, one night in high summer, commanding them to build her a church wheresoever they should find snow on the morrow. And together they found it, glistening in the morning sun, and they traced, on the white, the plan of the foundation, and together built the first church, calling it 'Our Lady of Snows,' for Damasus to burn when Orsino seized it,--but the people spoke of it as the Basilica of Liberius. It was called also 'Our Lady of the Manger,' from the relic held holy there; and Sixtus the Third named it 'Our Lady, Mother of God'; and under many popes it was rebuilt and grew, until at last, for its size, it was called, as it is today, 'The Greater Saint Mary's.' At one time, the popes lived near it, and in our own century, when the palace had long been transferred to the Quirinal, a mile to northward of the basilica, Papal Bulls were dated 'From Santa Maria Maggiore.' It is too gorgeous now, too overladen, too rich; and yet it is imposing. The first gold brought from South America gilds the profusely decorated roof, the dark red polished porphyry pillars of the high altar gleam in the warm haze of light, the endless marble columns rise in shining ranks, all is gold, marble and colour. Many dead lie there, great men and good; and one over whom a sort of mystery hangs, for he was Bartolommeo Sacchi, Cardinal Platina, historian of the Church, a chief member of the famous Roman Academy of the fifteenth century, and a mediæval pagan, accused with Pomponius Letus and others of worshipping false gods; tried, acquitted for lack of evidence; dead in the odour of sanctity; proved at last ten times a heathen, and a bad one, today, by inscriptions found in the remotest part of the Catacombs, where he and his companions met in darkest secret to perform their extravagant rites. He lies beneath the chapel of Sixtus the Fifth, but the stone that marked the spot is gone. Strange survivals of ideas and customs cling to some places like ghosts, and will not be driven away. The Esquiline was long ago the haunt of witches, who chanted their nightly incantations over the shallow graves where slaves were buried, and under the hideous crosses whereon dead malefactors had groaned away their last hours of life. Mæcenas cleared the land and beautified it with gardens, but still the witches came by stealth to their old haunts. The popes built churches and palaces on it, but the dark memories never vanished in the light; and even in our own days, on Saint John's Eve, which is the witches' night of the Latin race, as the Eve of May-day is the Walpurgis of the Northmen, the people went out in thousands, with torches and lights, and laughing tricks of exorcism, to scare away the powers of evil for the year. On that night the vast open spaces around the Lateran were thronged with men and women and children; against the witches' dreaded influence they carried each an onion, torn up by the roots with stalk and flower; all about, on the outskirts of the place, were kitchen booths, set up with boughs and bits of awnings, yellow with the glare of earthen and iron oil lamps, where snails--great counter-charms against spells--were fried and baked in oil, and sold with bread and wine, and eaten with more or less appetite, according to the strength of men's stomachs. All night, till the early summer dawn, the people came and went, and wandered round and round, and in and out, in parties and by families, to go laughing homeward at last, scarce knowing why they had gone there at all, unless it were because their fathers and mothers had done as they did for generations unnumbered. [Illustration: BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN] And the Lateran once had another half-heathen festival, on the Saturday after Easter, in memory of the ancient Floralia of the Romans, which had formerly been celebrated on the 28th of April. It was a most strange festival, now long forgotten, in which Christianity and paganism were blended together. Baracconi, from whom the following account is taken, quotes three sober writers as authority for his description. Yet there is a doubt about the very name of the feast, which is variously called the 'Coromania' and the 'Cornomania.' On the afternoon of the Saturday in Easter week, say these writers, the priests of the eighteen principal 'deaconries'--an ecclesiastical division of the city long ago abolished and now somewhat obscure--caused the bells to be rung, and the people assembled at their parish churches, where they were received by a 'mansionarius,'--probably meaning here 'a visitor of houses,'--and a layman, who was arrayed in a tunic, and crowned with the flowers of the cornel cherry. In his hand he carried a concave musical instrument of copper, by which hung many little bells. One of these mysterious personages, who evidently represented the pagan element in the ceremony, preceded each parish procession, being followed immediately by the parish priest, wearing the cope. From all parts of the city they went up to the Lateran, and waited before the palace of the Pope till all were assembled. The Pope descended the steps to receive the homage of the people. Immediately, those of each parish formed themselves into wide circles round their respective 'visitors' and priests, and the strange rite began. In the midst the priest stood still. Round and round him the lay 'visitor' moved in a solemn dance, striking his copper bells rhythmically to his steps, while all the circle followed his gyrations, chanting a barbarous invocation, half Latin and half Greek: 'Hail, divinity of this spot! Receive our prayers in fortunate hour!' and many verses more to the same purpose, and quite beyond being construed grammatically. The dance is over with the song. One of the parish priests mounts upon an ass, backwards, facing the beast's tail, and a papal chamberlain leads the animal, holding over its head a basin containing twenty pieces of copper money. When they have passed three rows of benches--which benches, by the bye?--the priest leans back, puts his hand behind him into the basin, and pockets the coins. Then all the priests lay garlands at the feet of the Pope. But the priest of Santa Maria in Via Lata also lets a live fox out of a bag, and the little creature suddenly let loose flies for its life, through the parting crowd, out to the open country, seeking cover. It is like the Hebrew scapegoat. In return each priest receives a golden coin from the Pontiff's hand. The rite being finished, all return to their respective parishes, the dancing 'visitor' still leading the procession. Each priest is accompanied then by acolytes who bear holy water, branches of laurel, and baskets of little rolls, or of those big, sweet wafers, rolled into a cylinder and baked, which are called 'cialdoni,' and are eaten to this day by Romans with ice cream. From house to house they go; the priest blesses each dwelling, sprinkling water about with the laurel, and then burning the branch on the hearth and giving some of the rolls to the children. And all the time the dancer slowly dances and chants the strange words made up of some Hebrew, a little Chaldean and a leavening of nonsense. Jaritan, jaritan, iarariasti Raphaym, akrhoin, azariasti! One may leave the interpretation of the jargon to curious scholars. As for the rite itself, were it not attested by trustworthy writers, one would be inclined to treat it as a mere invention, no more to be believed than the legend of Pope Joan, who was supposed to have been stoned to death near San Clemente, on the way to the Lateran. An extraordinary number of traditions cling to the Region of Monti, and considering that in later times a great part of this quarter was a wilderness, the fact would seem strange. As for the 'Coromania' it seems to have disappeared after the devastation of Monti by Robert Guiscard in 1084, and the general destruction of the city from the Lateran to the Capitol is attributed to the Saracens who were with him. But a more logical cause of depopulation is found in the disappearance of water from the upper Region by the breaking of the aqueducts, from which alone it was derived. The consequence of this, in the Middle Age, was that the only obtainable water came from the river, and was naturally taken from it up-stream, towards the Piazza del Popolo, in the neighbourhood of which it was collected in tanks and kept until the mud sank to the bottom and it was approximately fit to drink. In Imperial times the greater number of the public baths were situated in the Monti. The great Piazza di Termini, now re-named Piazza delle Terme, before the railway station, took its name from the Baths of Diocletian--'Thermæ,' 'Terme,' 'Termini.' The Baths of Titus, the Baths of Constantine, of Philippus, Novatus and others were all in Monti, supplied by the aqueduct of Claudius, the Anio Novus, the Aqua Marcia, Tepula, Julia, Marcia Nova and Anio Vetus. No people in the world were such bathers as the old Romans; yet few cities have ever suffered so much or so long from lack of good water as Rome in the Middle Age. The supply cut off, the whole use of the vast institutions was instantly gone, and the huge halls and porticos and playgrounds fell to ruin and base uses. Owing to their peculiar construction and being purposely made easy of access on all sides, like the temples, the buildings could not even be turned to account by the Barons for purposes of fortification, except as quarries for material with which to build their towers and bastions. The inner chambers became hiding-places for thieves, herdsmen in winter penned their flocks in the shelter of the great halls, grooms used the old playground as a track for breaking horses, and round and about the ruins, on feast days, the men of Monti and Trastevere chased one another in their murderous tournaments of stone throwing. A fanatic Sicilian priest saved the great hall of Diocletian's Baths from destruction in Michelangelo's time. [Illustration: PORTA MAGGIORE, SUPPORTING THE CHANNELS OF THE AQUEDUCT OF CLAUDIUS AND THE ANIO NOVUS] The story is worth telling, for it is little known. In a little church in Palermo, in which the humble priest Antonio Del Duca officiated, he discovered under the wall-plaster a beautiful fresco or mosaic of the Seven Archangels, with their names and attributes. Day after day he looked at the fair figures till they took possession of his mind and heart and soul, and inspired him with the apparently hopeless desire to erect a church in Rome in their honour. To Rome he came, persuaded of his righteous mission, to fail of course, after seven years of indefatigable effort. Back to Palermo then, to the contemplation of his beloved angels. And again they seemed to drive him to Rome. Scarcely had he returned when in a dream he seemed to see his ideal church among the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, which had been built, as tradition said, by thousands of condemned Christians. To dream was to wake with new enthusiasm, to wake was to act. In an hour, in the early dawn, he was in the great hall which is now the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, 'Saint Mary of the Angels.' But it was long before his purpose was finally accomplished. Thirty years of his life he spent in unremitting labour for his purpose, and an accident at last determined his success. He had brought a nephew with him from Sicily, a certain Giacomo Del Duca, a sculptor, who was employed by Michelangelo to carve the great mask over the Porta Pia. Pope Pius the Fourth, for whom the gate was named, praised the stone face to Michelangelo, who told him who had made it. The name recalled the sculptor's uncle and his mad project, which appealed to Michelangelo's love of the gigantic. Even the coincidence of appellation pleased the Pope, for he himself had been christened Angelo, and his great architect and sculptor bore an archangel's name. So the work was done in short time, the great church was consecrated, and one of the noblest of Roman buildings was saved from ruin by the poor Sicilian,--and there, in 1896, the heir to the throne of Italy was married with great magnificence, that particular church being chosen because, as a historical monument, it is regarded as the property of the Italian State, and is therefore not under the immediate management of the Vatican. Probably not one in a thousand of the splendid throng that filled the church had heard the name of Antonio Del Duca, who lies buried before the high altar without a line to tell of all he did. So lies Bernini, somewhere in Santa Maria Maggiore, so lies Platina,--he, at least, the better for no epitaph,--and Beatrice Cenci and many others, rest unforgotten in nameless graves. From the church to the railway station stretch the ruins, continuous, massive, almost useless, yet dear to all who love old Rome. On the south side, there used to be a long row of buildings, ending in a tall old mansion of good architecture, which was the 'Casino' of the great old Villa Negroni. In that house, but recently gone, Thomas Crawford, sculptor, lived for many years, and in the long, low studio that stood before what is now the station, but was then a field, he modelled the great statue of Liberty that crowns the Capitol in Washington, and Washington's own monument which stands in Richmond, and many of his other works. My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now. Beyond, a wild waste of field and broken land led up to Santa Maria Maggiore; and the grand old bells sent their far voices ringing in deep harmony to our windows; and on the Eve of Saint Peter's day, when Saint Peter's was a dream of stars in the distance and the gorgeous fireworks gleamed in the dark sky above the Pincio, we used to climb the high tower above the house and watch the still illumination and the soaring rockets through a grated window, till the last one had burst and spent itself, and we crept down the steep stone steps, half frightened at the sound of our own voices in the ghostly place. And in that same villa once lived Vittoria Accoramboni, married to Francesco Peretti, nephew of Cardinal Montalto, who built the house, and was afterwards Sixtus the Fifth, and filled Rome with his works in the five years of his stirring reign. Hers also is a story worth telling, for few know it, even among Romans, and it is a tale of bloodshed, and of murder, and of all crimes against God and man, and of the fall of the great house of Orsini. But it may better be told in another place, when we reach the Region where they lived and fought and ruled, by terror and the sword. Near the Baths of Diocletian, and most probably on the site of that same Villa Negroni, too, was that vineyard, or 'villa' as we should say, where Cæsar Borgia and his elder brother, the Duke of Gandia, supped together for the last time with their mother Vanozza, on the night of the 14th of June, in the year 1497. There has always been a dark mystery about what followed. Many say that Cæsar feared his brother's power and influence with the Pope. Not a few others suggest that the cause of the mutual hatred was a jealousy so horrible to think of that one may hardly find words for it, for its object was their own sister Lucrezia. However that may be, they supped together with their mother in her villa, after the manner of Romans in those times, and long before then, and long since. In the first days of summer heat, when the freshness of spring is gone and June grows sultry, the people of the city have ever loved to breathe a cooler air. In the Region of Monti there were a score of villas, and there were wide vineyards and little groves of trees, such as could grow where there was not much water, or none at all perhaps, saving what was collected in cisterns from the roofs of the few scattered houses, when it rained. In the long June twilight the three met together, the mother and her two sons, and sat down under an arbour in the garden, for the air was dry with the south wind and there was no fear of fever. Screened lamps and wax torches shed changing tints of gold and yellow on the fine linen, and the deep-chiselled dishes and vessels of silver, and the tall glasses and beakers of many hues. Fruit was piled up in the midst, such as the season afforded, cherries and strawberries, and bright oranges from the south. One may fancy the dark-browed woman of forty years, in the beauty of maturity almost too ripe, with her black eyes and hair of auburn, her jewelled cap, her gold laces just open at her marble throat, her gleaming earrings, her sleeves slashed to show gauze-fine linen, her white, ring-laden fingers that delicately took the finely carved meats in her plate--before forks were used in Rome--and dabbled themselves clean from each touch in the scented water the little page poured over them. On her right, her eldest, Gandia, fair, weak-mouthed, sensually beautiful, splendid in velvet, and chain of gold, and deep-red silk, his blue eyes glancing now and then, half scornfully, half anxiously at his strong brother. And he, Cæsar, the man of infamous memory, sitting there the very incarnation of bodily strength and mental daring; square as a gladiator, dark as a Moor, with deep and fiery eyes, now black, now red in the lamplight, the marvellous smile wreathing his thin lips now and then, and showing white, wolfish teeth, his sinewy brown hands direct in every little action, his soft voice the very music of a lie to those who knew the terrible brief tones it had in wrath. Long they sat, sipping the strong iced wine, toying with fruits and nuts, talking of State affairs, of the Pope, of Maximilian, the jousting Emperor,--discussing, perhaps, with a smile, his love of dress and the beautiful fluted armour which he first invented;--of Lewis the Eleventh of France, tottering to his grave, strangest compound of devotion, avarice and fear that ever filled a throne; of Frederick of Naples, to whom Cæsar was to bear the crown within a few days; of Lucrezia's quarrel with her husband, which had brought her to Rome; and at her name Cæsar's eyes blazed once and looked down at the strawberries on the silver dish, and Gandia turned pale, and felt the chill of the night air, and stately Vanozza rose slowly in the silence, and bade her evil sons good-night, for it was late. Two hours later, Gandia's thrice-stabbed corpse lay rolling and bobbing at the Tiber's edge, as dead things do in the water, caught by its silks and velvets in wild branches that dipped in the muddy stream; and the waning moon rose as the dawn forelightened. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE COLOSSEUM] If the secrets of old Rome could be known and told, they would fill the world with books. Every stone has tasted blood, every house has had its tragedy, every shrub and tree and blade of grass and wild flower has sucked life from death, and blossoms on a grave. There is no end of memories, in this one Region, as in all the rest. Far up by Porta Pia, over against the new Treasury, under a modern street, lie the bones of guilty Vestals, buried living, each in a little vault two fathoms deep, with the small dish and crust and the earthen lamp that soon flickered out in the close damp air; and there lies that innocent one, Domitian's victim, who shrank from the foul help of the headsman's hand, as her foot slipped on the fatal ladder, and fixed her pure eyes once upon the rabble, and turned and went down alone into the deadly darkness. Down by the Colosseum, where the ruins of Titus' Baths still stand in part, stood Nero's dwelling palace, above the artificial lake in which the Colosseum itself was built, and whose waters reflected the flames of the great fire. To northward, in a contrast that leaps ages, rise the huge walls of the Tor de' Conti, greatest of mediæval fortresses built within the city, the stronghold of a dim, great house, long passed away, kinsmen of Innocent the Third. What is left of it helps to enclose a peaceful nunnery. There were other towers, too, and fortresses, though none so strong as that, when it faced the Colosseum, filled then by the armed thousands of the great Frangipani. The desolate wastes of land in the Monti were ever good battlefields for the nobles and the people. But the stronger and wiser and greater Orsini fortified themselves in the town, in Pompey's theatre, while the Colonna held the midst, and the popes dwelt far aloof on the boundary, with the open country behind them for ready escape, and the changing, factious, fighting city before. The everlasting struggle, the furious jealousy, the always ready knife, kept the Regions distinct and individual and often at enmity with each other, most of all Monti and Trastevere, hereditary adversaries, Ghibelline and Guelph. Trastevere has something of that proud and violent character still. Monti lost it in the short eruption of 'progress' and 'development.' In the wild rage of speculation which culminated in 1889, its desolate open lands, its ancient villas and its strange old houses were the natural prey of a foolish greediness the like of which has never been seen before. Progress ate up romance, and hundreds of acres of wretched, cheaply built, hideous, unsafe buildings sprang up like the unhealthy growth of a foul disease, between the Lateran gate and the old inhabited districts. They are destined to a graceless and ignoble ruin. Ugly cracks in the miserable stucco show where the masonry is already parting, as the hollow foundations subside, and walls on which the paint is still almost fresh are shored up with dusty beams lest they should fall and crush the few paupers who dwell within. Filthy, half-washed clothes of beggars hang down from the windows, drying in the sun as they flap and flutter against pretentious moulded masks of empty plaster. Miserable children loiter in the high-arched gates, under which smart carriages were meant to drive, and gnaw their dirty fingers, or fight for a cold boiled chestnut one of them has saved. Squalor, misery, ruin and vile stucco, with a sprinkling of half-desperate humanity,--those are the elements of the modern picture,--that is what the 'great development' of modern Rome brought forth and left behind it. Peace to the past, and to its ashes of romance and beauty. [Illustration] REGION II TREVI In Imperial times, the street now called the Tritone, from the Triton on the fountain in Piazza Barberini, led up from the Portico of Vipsanius Agrippa's sister in the modern Corso to the temple of Flora at the beginning of the Quattro Fontane. It was met at right angles by a long street leading straight from the Forum of Trajan, and which struck it close to the Arch of Claudius. Then, as now, this point was the meeting of two principal thoroughfares, and it was called Trivium, or the 'crossroads.' Trivium turned itself into the Italian 'Trevi,' called in some chronicles 'the Cross of Trevi.' The Arch of Claudius carried the Aqua Virgo, still officially called the Acqua Vergine, across the highway; the water, itself, came to be called the water 'of the crossroads' or 'of Trevi,' and 'Trevi' gave its name at last to the Region, long before the splendid fountain was built in the early part of the last century. The device of the Region seems to have nothing to do with the water, except, perhaps, that the idea of a triplicity is preserved in the three horizontally disposed rapiers. The legend that tells how the water was discovered gave it the first name it bore. A detachment of Roman soldiers, marching down from Præneste, or Palestrina, in the summer heat, were overcome by thirst, and could find neither stream nor well. A little girl, passing that way, led them aside from the high-road and brought them to a welling spring, clear and icy cold, known only to shepherds and peasants. They drank their fill and called it Aqua Virgo, the Maiden Water. And so it has remained for all ages. But it is commonly called 'Trevi' in Rome, by the people and by strangers, and the name has a ring of poetry, by its associations. For they say that whoever will go to the great fountain, when the high moon rays dance upon the rippling water, and drink, and toss a coin far out into the middle, in offering to the genius of the place, shall surely come back to Rome again, old or young, sooner or later. Many have performed the rite, some secretly, sadly, heartbroken, for love of Rome and what it holds, and others gayly, many together, laughing, while they half believe, and sometimes believing altogether while they laugh. And some who loved, and could meet only in Rome, have gone there together, and women's tears have sometimes dropped upon the silvered water that reflected the sad faces of grave men. The foremost memories of the past in Trevi centre about the ancient family of the Colonna, still numerous, distinguished and flourishing after a career of nearly a thousand years--longer than that, it may be, if one take into account the traditions of them that go back beyond the earliest authentic mention of their greatness; a race of singular independence and energy, which has given popes to Rome, and great patriots, and great generals as well, and neither least nor last, Vittoria, princess and poetess, whose name calls up the gentlest memories of Michelangelo's elder years. The Colonna were originally hill men. The earliest record of them tells that their great lands towards Palestrina were confiscated by the Church, in the eleventh century. The oldest of their titles is that of Duke of Paliano, a town still belonging to them, rising on an eminence out of the plain beyond the Alban hills. The greatest of their early fortresses was Palestrina, still the seat and title estate of the Barberini branch of the family. Their original stronghold in Rome was almost on the site of their present palace, being then situated on the opposite side of the Basilica of the Santi Apostoli, where the headquarters of the Dominicans now are, and running upwards and backwards, thence, to the Piazza della Pilotta; but they held Rome by a chain of towers and fortifications, from the Quirinal to the Mausoleum of Augustus, now hidden among the later buildings, between the Corso, the Tiber, the Via de' Pontefici and the Via de' Schiavoni. The present palace and the basilica stood partly upon the site of the ancient quarters occupied by the first Cohort of the Vigiles, or city police, of whom about seven thousand preserved order when the population of ancient Rome exceeded two millions. The 'column,' from which the Colonna take their name, is generally supposed to have stood in the market-place of the village of that name in the higher part of the Campagna, between the Alban and the Samnite hills, on the way to Palestrina. It is a peaceful and vine-clad country, now. South of it rise the low heights of Tusculum, and it is more than probable that the Colonna were originally descended from the great counts who tyrannized over Rome from that strong point of vantage and, through them, from Theodora Senatrix. Be that as it may, their arms consist of a simple column, used on a shield, or as a crest, or as the badge of the family, and it is found in many a threadbare tapestry, in many a painting, in the frescos and carved ornaments of many a dim old church in Rome. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI] In their history, the first fact that stands out is their adherence to the Emperors, as Ghibellines, whereas their rivals, the Orsini, were Guelphs and supporters of the Church in most of the great contests of the Middle Age. The exceptions to the rule are found when the Colonna had a Pope of their own, or one who, like Nicholas the Fourth, was of their own making. 'That Pope,' says Muratori, 'had so boundlessly favoured the aggrandizement of the Colonna that his actions depended entirely upon their dictates, and a libel was published upon him, entitled the Source of Evil, illustrated by a caricature, in which the mitred head of the Pontiff was seen issuing from a tall column between two smaller ones, the latter intended to represent the two living cardinals of the house, Jacopo and Pietro.' Yet in the next reign, when they impeached the election of Boniface the Eighth, they found themselves in opposition to the Holy See, and they and theirs were almost utterly destroyed by the Pope's partisans and kinsmen, the powerful Caetani. Just before him, after the Holy See had been vacant for two years and nearly four months, because the Conclave of Perugia could not agree upon a Pope, a humble southern hermit of the Abruzzi, Pietro da Morrone, had been suddenly elevated to the Pontificate, to his own inexpressible surprise and confusion, and after a few months of honest, but utterly fruitless, effort to understand and do what was required of him, he had taken the wholly unprecedented step of abdicating the papacy. He was succeeded by Benedict Caetani, Boniface the Eighth, keen, learned, brave, unforgiving and the mortal foe of the Colonna; 'the magnanimous sinner,' as Gibbon quotes from a chronicle, 'who entered like a fox, reigned like a lion and died like a dog.' Yet the judgment is harsh, for though his sins were great, the expiation was fearful, and he was brave as few men have been. Samson slew a lion with his hands, and the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass. Men have always accepted the Bible's account of the slaughter. But when an ass, without the aid of any Samson, killed a lion in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Priori, in Florence, the event was looked upon as of evil portent, exceeding the laws of nature. For Pope Boniface had presented the Commonwealth of Florence with a young and handsome lion, which was chained up and kept in the court of the palace aforesaid. A donkey laden with firewood was driven in, and 'either from fear, or by a miracle,' as the chronicle says, at once assailed the lion with the utmost ferocity, and kicked him to death, in spite of the efforts of a number of men to drag the beast of burden off. Of the two hypotheses, the wise men of the day preferred the supernatural explanation, and one of them found an ancient Sibylline prophecy to the effect that 'when the tame beast should kill the king of beasts, the dissolution of the Church should begin.' Which saying, adds Villani, was presently fulfilled in Pope Boniface. For the Pope had a mortal quarrel with Philip the Fair of France whom he had promised to make Emperor, and had then passed over in favour of Albert, son of Rudolph of Hapsburg; and Philip made a friend and ally of Stephen Colonna, the head of the great house, who was then in France, and drove Boniface's legate out of his kingdom, and allowed the Count of Artois to burn the papal letters. The Pope retorted by a Major Excommunication, and the quarrel became furious. The Colonna being under his hand, Boniface vented his anger upon them, drove them from Rome, destroyed their houses, levelled Palestrina to the ground, and ploughed up the land where it had stood. The six brothers of the house were exiles and wanderers. Old Stephen, the idol of Petrarch, alone and wretched, was surrounded by highwaymen, who asked who he was. 'Stephen Colonna,' he answered, 'a Roman citizen.' And the thieves fell back at the sound of the great name. Again, someone asked him with a sneer where all his strongholds were, since Palestrina was gone. 'Here,' he answered, unmoved, and laying his hand upon his heart. Of such stuff were the Pope's enemies. Nor could he crush them. Boniface was of Anagni, a city of prehistoric walls and ancient memories which belonged to the Caetani; and there, in the late summer, he was sojourning for rest and country air, with his cardinals and his court and his kinsmen about him. Among the cardinals was Napoleon Orsini. [Illustration: GRAND HALL OF THE COLONNA PALACE] Then came William of Nogaret, sent by the King of France, and Sciarra Colonna, the boldest man of his day, and many other nobles, with three hundred knights and many footmen. For a long time they had secretly plotted a master-stroke of violence, spending money freely among the people, and using all persuasion to bring the country to their side, yet with such skill and caution that not the slightest warning reached the Pope's ears. In calm security he rose early on the morning of the seventh of September. He believed his position assured, his friends loyal and the Colonna ruined for ever; and Colonna was at the gate. Suddenly, from below the walls, a cry of words came up to the palace windows; long drawn out, distinct in the still mountain air. 'Long live the King of France! Death to Pope Boniface!' It was taken up by hundreds of voices, and repeated, loud, long and terrible, by the people of the town, by men going out to their work in the hills, by women loitering on their doorsteps, by children peering out, half frightened, from behind their mothers' scarlet woollen skirts, to see the armed men ride up the stony way. Cardinals, chamberlains, secretaries, men-at-arms, fled like sheep; and when Colonna reached the palace wall, only the Pope's own kinsmen remained within to help him as they could, barring the great doors and posting themselves with crossbows at the grated window. For the Caetani were always brave men. But Boniface knew that he was lost, and calmly, courageously, even grandly, he prepared to face death. 'Since I am betrayed,' he said, 'and am to die, I will at least die as a Pope should!' So he put on the great pontifical chasuble, and set the tiara of Constantine upon his head, and, taking the keys and the crosier in his hands, sat down on the papal throne to await death. The palace gates were broken down, and then there was no more resistance, for the defenders were few. In a moment Colonna in his armour stood before the Pontiff in his robes; but he saw only the enemy of his race, who had driven out his great kinsmen, beggars and wanderers on the earth, and he lifted his visor and looked long at his victim, and then at last found words for his wrath, and bitter reproaches and taunts without end and savage curses in the broad-spoken Roman tongue. And William of Nogaret began to speak, too, and threatened to take Boniface to Lyons where a council of the Church should depose him and condemn him to ignominy. Boniface answered that he should expect nothing better than to be deposed and condemned by a man whose father and mother had been publicly burned for their crimes. And this was true of Nogaret, who was no gentleman. A legend says that Colonna struck the Pope in the face, and that he afterwards made him ride on an ass, sitting backwards, after the manner of the times. But no trustworthy chronicle tells of this. On the contrary, no one laid hands upon him while he was kept a prisoner under strict watch for three days, refusing to touch food; for even if he could have eaten he feared poison. And Colonna tried to force him to abdicate, as Pope Celestin had done before him, but he refused stoutly; and when the three days were over, Colonna went away, driven out, some say, by the people of Anagni who turned against him. But that is absurd, for Anagni is a little place and Colonna had a strong force of good soldiers with him. Possibly, seeing that the old man refused to eat, Sciarra feared lest he should be said to have starved the Pope to death. They went away and left him, carrying off his treasures with them, and he returned to Rome, half mad with anger, and fell into the hands of the Orsini cardinals, who judged him not sane and kept him a prisoner at the Vatican, where he died soon afterwards, consumed by his wrath. And before long the Colonna had their own again and rebuilt Palestrina and their palace in Rome. Twenty-five years later they were divided against each other, in the wild days when Lewis the Bavarian, excommunicated and at war with the Pope, was crowned and consecrated Emperor, by the efforts of an extraordinary man of genius, Castruccio degli Interminelli, known better as Castruccio Castracane, the Ghibelline lord of Lucca who made Italy ring with his deeds for twenty years, and died of a fever, in the height of his success and glory, at the age of forty-seven years. Sciarra Colonna was for him and for Lewis. Stephen, head of the house, was against them, and in those days when Rome was frantic for an Emperor, Stephen's son Jacopo had the quiet courage to bring out the Bull of Excommunication against the chosen Emperor and nail it to the door of San Marcello, in the Corso, in the heart of Rome and in the sight of a thousand angry men, in protest against what they meant to do--against what was doing even at that moment. And he reached Palestrina in safety, shaking the dust of Rome from his feet. But on that bright winter's day, Lewis of Bavaria and his queen rode down from Santa Maria Maggiore by the long and winding ways towards Saint Peter's. The streets were all swept and strewn with yellow sand and box leaves and myrtle that made the air fragrant, and from every window and balcony gorgeous silks and tapestries were hung, and even ornaments of gold and silver and jewels. Before the procession rode standard-bearers, four for each Region, on horses most richly caparisoned. There rode Sciarra Colonna, and beside him, for once in history, Orsino Orsini, and others, all dressed in cloth of gold, and Castruccio Castracane, wearing that famous sword which in our own times was offered by Italy to King Victor Emmanuel; and many other Barons rode there in splendid array, and there was great concourse of the people. So they came to Saint Peter's; and because the Count of the Lateran should by right have been the Emperor's sponsor at the anointing, and had left Rome in anger and disdain, Lewis made Castruccio a knight of the Empire and Count of the Lateran in his stead, and sponsor; and two excommunicated Bishops consecrated the Emperor, and anointed him, and Sciarra Colonna crowned him and his queen. After which they feasted in the evening at the Aracoeli, and slept in the Capitol, because they were all weary with the long ceremony, and it was too late to go home. The chronicler's comment is curious. 'Note,' he says, 'what presumption was this, of the aforesaid damned Bavarian, such as thou shalt not find in any ancient or recent history; for never did any Christian Emperor cause himself to be crowned save by the Pope or his legate, even though opposed to the Church, neither before then nor since, except this Bavarian.' But Sciarra and Castruccio had their way, and Lewis did what even Napoleon, master of the world by violent chance, would not do. And twenty years later, in the same chronicle, it is told how 'Lewis of Bavaria, who called himself Emperor, fell with his horse, and was killed suddenly, without penitence, excommunicated and damned by Holy Church.' It is a curious coincidence that Boniface the Eighth, Sciarra's prisoner, and Lewis the Bavarian, whom he crowned Emperor, both died on the eleventh of October, according to most authorities. The Senate of Rome had dwindled to a pitiable office, held by one man. At or about this time, the Colonna and the Orsini agreed by a compromise that there should be two, chosen from their two houses. The Popes were in Avignon, and men who could make Emperors were more than able to do as they pleased with a town of twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, so long as the latter had no leader. One may judge of what Rome was, when even pilgrims did not dare to go thither and visit the tomb of Saint Peter. The discord of the great houses made Rienzi's life a career; the defection of the Orsini from the Pope's party led to his flight; their battles suggested to the exiled Pope the idea of sending him back to Rome to break their power and restore a republic by which the Pope might restore himself; and the rage of their retainers expended itself in his violent death. For it was their retainers who fought for their masters, till the younger Stephen Colonna killed Bertoldo Orsini, the bravest man of his day, in an ambush, and the Orsini basely murdered a boy of the Colonna on the steps of a church. But Rienzi was of another Region, of the Regola by the Tiber, and it is not yet time to tell his story. And by and by, as the power of the Popes rose and they became again as the Cæsars had been, Colonna and Orsini forgot their feuds, and were glad to stand on the Pope's right and left as hereditary 'Assistants of the Holy See.' In the petty ending of all old greatnesses in modern times, the result of the greatest feud that ever made two races mortal foes is merely that no prudent host dare ask the heads of the two houses to dinner together, lest a question of precedence should arise, such as no master of ceremonies would presume to settle. That is what it has come to. Once upon a time an Orsini quarrelled with a Colonna in the Corso, just where Aragno's café is now situated, and ran him through with his rapier, wounding him almost to death. He was carried into the palace of the Theodoli, close by, and the records of that family tell that within the hour eight hundred of the Colonna's retainers were in the house to guard him. In as short space, the Orsini called out three thousand men in arms, when Cæsar Borgia's henchman claimed the payment of a tax. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MAUSOLEUM OF AUGUSTUS From a print of the last century] Times have changed since then. The Mausoleum of Augustus, once a fortress, has been an open air theatre in our time, and there the great Salvini and Ristori often acted in their early youth; it is a circus now. And in less violent contrast, but with change as great from what it was, the palace of the Colonna suggests no thought of defence nowadays, and the wide gates and courtyard recall rather the splendours of the Constable and of his wife, Maria Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, than the fiercer days when Castracane was Sciarra's guest on the other side of the church. The Basilica of the Apostles is said to have been built by Pelagius the First, who was made Pope in the year 555, and who dedicated it to Saint Philip and Saint James. Recent advances in the study of archæology make it seem more than probable that he adapted for the purpose a part of the ancient barracks of the Vigiles, of which the central portion appears almost to coincide with the present church, at a somewhat different angle; and in the same way it is likely that the remains of the north wing were rebuilt at a later period by the Colonna as a fortified palace. In those times men would not have neglected to utilize the massive substructures and walls. However that may be, the Colonna dwelt there at a very early date, and in eight hundred years or more have only removed their headquarters from one side of the church to the other. The latter has been changed and rebuilt, and altered again, like most of the great Roman sanctuaries, till it bears no resemblance to the original building. The present church is distinctly ugly, with the worst defects of the early eighteenth century; and that age was as deficient in cultivated taste as it was abhorrent of natural beauty. Some fragments of the original frescos that adorned the apse are now preserved in a hall behind the main Sacristy of Saint Peter's. Against the flat walls, under the inquisition of the crudest daylight, the fragments of Melozzo da Forli's masterpiece are masterpieces still; the angelic faces, imprisoned in a place not theirs, reflect the sadness of art's captivity; and the irretrievable destruction of an inimitable past excites the pity and resentment of thoughtful men. The attempt to outdo the works of the great has exhibited the contemptible imbecility of the little, and the coarse-grained vanity of Clement the Eleventh has parodied the poetry of art in the bombastic prose of a vulgar tongue. Pope Pelagius took for his church the pillars and marbles of Trajan's Forum, in the belief that his acts were acceptable to God; but Clement had no such excuse, and the edifice which was a monument of faith has given place to the temple of a monumental vanity. [Illustration: FORUM OF TRAJAN] It is remarkable that the Colonna rarely laid their dead in the Church of the Apostles, for it was virtually theirs by right of immediate neighbourhood, and during their domination they could easily have assumed actual possession of it as a private property. A very curious custom, which survived in the sixteenth century, and perhaps much later, bears witness to the close connection between their family and the church. At that time a gallery existed, accessible from the palace and looking down into the basilica, so that the family could assist at Mass without leaving their dwelling. On the afternoon of the first of May, which is the traditional feast of this church, the poor of the neighbourhood assembled within. The windows of the palace gallery were then thrown open and a great number of fat fowls were thrown alive to the crowd, turkeys, geese and the like, to flutter down to the pavement and be caught by the luckiest of the people in a tumultuous scramble. When this was over, a young pig was swung out and lowered in slings by a purchase of which the block was seized to a roof beam. When just out of reach the rope was made fast, and the most active of the men jumped for the animal from below, till one was fortunate enough to catch it with his hands, when the rope was let go, and he carried off the prize. The custom was evidently similar to that of climbing the May-pole, which was set up on the same day in the Campo Vaccino. May-day was one of the oldest festivals of the Romans, for it was sacred to the tutelary Lares, or spirits of ancestors, and was kept holy, both publicly by the whole city as the habitation of the Roman people, and by each family in its private dwelling. It is of Aryan origin and is remembered in one way or another by all Aryan races in our own time, and it is not surprising that in the general conversion of Paganism to Christianity a new feast should have been intentionally made to coincide with an old one; but it is hard to understand the lack of all reverence for sacred places which could admit such a scene as the scrambling for live fowls and pigs in honour of the twelve Apostles, a pious exercise which is perhaps paralleled, though assuredly not equalled, in crudeness, by the old Highland custom of smoking tobacco in kirk throughout the sermon. At the very time when we have historical record of a Pope's presence as an amused spectator of the proceedings, Michelangelo had lately painted the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, and had not yet begun his Last Judgment; and 'Diva' Vittoria Colonna, not yet the friend of his later years, was perhaps even then composing those strangely passionate spiritual sonnets which appeal to the soul through the heart, by the womanly pride that strove to make the heart subject to the soul. The commonplace romance which has represented Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo as in love with each other is as unworthy of both as it is wholly without foundation. They first met nine years before her death, when she was almost fifty and he was already sixty-four. She had then been widowed twelve years, and it was long since she had refused in Naples the princely suitors who made overtures for her hand. The true romance of her life was simpler, nobler and more enduring, for it began when she was a child, and it ended when she breathed her last in the house of Giuliano Cesarini, the kinsman of her people, whose descendant married her namesake in our own time. At the age of four, Vittoria was formally betrothed to Francesco d'Avalos, heir of Pescara, one of that fated race whose family history has furnished matter for more than one stirring tale. Vittoria was born in Marino, the Roman town and duchy which still gives its title to Prince Colonna's eldest son, and she was brought up in Rome and Naples, of which latter city her father was Grand Constable. Long before she was married, she saw her future husband and loved him at first sight, as she loved him to her dying day, so that although even greater offers were made for her, she steadfastly refused to marry any other man. They were united when she was seventeen years old, he loved her devotedly, and they spent many months together almost without other society in the island of Ischia. The Emperor Charles the Fifth was fighting his lifelong fight with Francis the First of France. Colonna and Pescara were for the Empire, and Francesco d'Avalos joined the imperial army; he was taken prisoner at Ravenna and carried captive to France; released, he again fought for Charles, who offered him the crown of the kingdom of Naples; but he refused it, and still he fought on, to fall at last at Pavia, in the strength of his mature manhood, and to die of his wounds in Milan when Vittoria was barely five and thirty years of age, still young, surpassingly beautiful, and gifted as few women have ever been. What their love was, their long correspondence tells,--a love passionate as youth and enduring as age, mutual, whole and faithful. For many years the heartbroken woman lived in Naples, where she had been most happy, feeding her soul with fire and tears. At last she returned to Rome, to her own people, in her forty-ninth year. There she was visited by the old Emperor for whom her husband had given his life, and there she met Michelangelo. It was natural enough that they should be friends. It is monstrous to suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together, and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great princess in her perpetual sorrow the greatest of creative minds was a solace and a constant intellectual delight. Their friendship was mutual, fitting and beautiful, which last is more than can be said for the absurd stories about their intercourse which are extant in print and have been made the subject of imaginary pictures by more than one painter. The tradition that they used to meet often in the little Church of Saint Sylvester, behind the Colonna gardens, rests upon the fact that they once held a consultation there in the presence of Francesco d'Olanda, a Portuguese artist, when Vittoria was planning the Convent of Saint Catherine, which she afterwards built not very far away. The truth is that she did not live in the palace of her kinsfolk after her return to Rome, but most probably in the convent attached to the other and greater Church of Saint Sylvester which stands in the square of that name not far from the Corso. The convent itself is said to have been originally built for the ladies of the Colonna who took the veil, and was only recently destroyed to make room for the modern Post-office, the church itself having passed into the hands of the English. The coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal, laid at her feet the homage of a sexagenarian's friendship. In the battle of the archæologists the opposing forces traverse and break ground, and rush upon each other again, 'hurtling together like wild boars,'--as Mallory describes the duels of his knights,--and when learned doctors disagree it is not the province of a searcher after romance to attempt a definition of exact truths. 'Some romances entertain the genius,' quotes Johnson, 'and strengthen it by the noble ideas which they give of things; but they corrupt the truth of history.' Professor Lanciani, who is probably the greatest authority, living or dead, on Roman antiquities, places the site of the temple of the Sun in the Colonna gardens, and another writer compares the latter to the hanging gardens of Babylon, supported entirely on ancient arches and substructures rising high above the natural soil below. But before Aurelian erected the splendid building to record his conquest of Palmyra, the same spot was the site of the 'Little Senate,' instituted by Elagabalus in mirthful humour, between an attack of sacrilegious folly and a fit of cruelty. The 'Little Senate' was a woman's senate; in other words, it was a regular assembly of the fashionable Roman matrons of the day, who met there in hours of idleness under the presidency of the Emperor's mother, Semiamira. Ælius Lampridius, quoted by Baracconi, has a passage about it. 'From this Senate,' he says, 'issued the absurd laws for the matrons, entitled Semiamiran Senatorial Decrees, which determined for each matron how she might dress, to whom she must yield precedence, by whom she might be kissed, deciding which ladies might drive in chariots, and which in carts, and whether the latter should be drawn by caparisoned horses, or by asses, or by mules, or oxen; who should be allowed to be carried in a litter or a chair, which might be of leather or of bone with fittings of ivory or of silver, as the case might be; and it was even determined which ladies might wear shoes adorned only with gold, and which might have gems set in their boots.' Considering how little human nature has changed in eighteen hundred years it is easy enough to imagine what the debates in the 'Little Senate' must have been with Semiamira in the chair ruling everything 'out of order' which did not please her capricious fancy: the shrill discussions about a fashionable head-dress, the whispered intrigues for a jewel-studded slipper, the stormy divisions on the question of gold hairpins, and the atmosphere of beauty, perfumes, gossip, vanity and all feminine dissension. But the 'Little Senate' was short-lived. Some fifty years after Elagabalus, Aurelian triumphed over Zenobia of Palmyra, and built his temple of the Sun. That triumph was the finest sight, perhaps, ever seen in imperial Rome. Twenty richly caparisoned elephants and two hundred captive wild beasts led the immense procession; eight hundred pairs of gladiators came next, the glory and strength of fighting manhood, with all their gleaming arms and accoutrements, marching by the huge Flavian Amphitheatre, where sooner or later they must fight each other to the death; then countless captives of the East and South and West and North, Syrian nobles, Gothic warriors, Persian dignitaries beside Frankish chieftains, and Tetricus, the great Gallic usurper, in the attire of his nation, with his young son whom he had dared to make a Senator in defiance of the Empire. Three royal equipages followed, rich with silver, gold and precious stones, one of them Zenobia's own, and she herself seated therein, young, beautiful, proud and vanquished, loaded from head to foot with gems, most bitterly against her will, her hands and feet bound with a golden chain, and about her neck another, long and heavy, of which the end was held by a Persian captive who walked beside the chariot and seemed to lead her. Then Aurelian, the untiring conqueror, in the car of the Gothic king, drawn by four great stags, which he himself was to sacrifice to Jove that day according to his vow, and a long line of wagons loaded down and groaning under the weight of the vast spoil; the Roman army, horse and foot, the Senate and the people, a million, perhaps, all following the indescribable magnificence of the great triumph, along the Sacred Way, that was yellow with fresh strewn sand and sweet with box and myrtle. [Illustration: RUINS OF HADRIAN'S VILLA AT TIVOLI] But when it was over, Aurelian, who was generous when he was not violent, honoured Zenobia and endowed her with great fortune, and she lived for many years as a Roman Matron in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. And the Emperor made light of the 'Little Senate' and built his Sun temple on the spot, with singular magnificence, enriching its decoration with pearls and precious stones and with fifteen thousand pounds in weight of pure gold. Much of that temple was still standing in the seventeenth century and was destroyed by Urban the Eighth, the Pope who built the heavy round tower on the south side of the Quirinal palace, facing Monte Cavallo. Monte Cavallo itself was a part of the Colonna villa, and its name, only recently changed to Piazza del Quirinale, was given to it by the great horses that stand on each side of the fountain, and which were found long ago, according to tradition, between the Palazzo Rospigliosi and the Palazzo della Consulta. In the times of Sixtus the Fifth, they were in a pitiable state, their forelegs and tails gone, their necks broken, their heads propped up by bits of masonry. When he finished the Quirinal palace he restored them and set them up, side by side, before the entrance, and when Pius the Sixth changed their position and turned them round, the ever conservative and ever discontented Roman people were disgusted by the change. On the pedestal of one of them are the words, 'Opus Phidiae,' 'the work of Phidias,' A punning placard was at once stuck upon the inscription with the legend, 'Opus Perfidiae Pii Sexti'--'the work of perfidy of Pius the Sixth.' The Quirinal palace cannot be said to have played a part in the history of Rome. Its existence is largely due to the common sense of Sixtus the Fifth, and to his love of good air. He was a shepherd by birth, and it is recorded that the first of his bitter disappointments was that the farmer whom he served set him to feed the pigs because he could not learn how to drive sheep to pasture; a disgrace which ultimately made him run away, when he fell in with a monk whose face he liked. He informed the astonished father that he meant to follow him everywhere, 'to Hell, if he chose,'--which was a forcible if not a pious resolution,--and explained that the pigs would find their way home alone. Later, when he had quarrelled with all the monks in Naples, including his superiors, he came to Rome, and, being by that time very learned, he was employed to expound the 'Formalities' of Scotus to the 'Signor' Marcantonio Colonna, abbot of the Monastery of the Apostles; and there he resided as a guest for a long time till his brilliant pupil was himself master of the subject, as well as a firm friend of the quarrelsome monk; and in their intercourse the seeds were no doubt sown of that implacable hatred against the Orsini which, under the great and just provocation of a kinsman's murder, ended in the exile and temporary ruin of the Colonna's rivals. No doubt, also, the abbot and the monk often strolled together in the Colonna gardens, and the future Pope breathed the high air of the Quirinal hill with a sense of relief, and dreamed of living up there, far above the city, literally in an atmosphere of his own. Therefore, when he was Pope, he made the great palace that crowns the eminence, completing and extending a much smaller building planned by the wise Gregory the Thirteenth, and ever since then, until 1870, the Popes lived there during some part of the year. It is modern, as age is reckoned in Rome, and it has modern associations in the memory of living men. It was from the great balcony of the Quirinal that Pius the Ninth pronounced his famous benediction to an enthusiastic and patriotic multitude in 1846. It will be remembered that a month after his election, Pius proclaimed a general amnesty in favour of all persons imprisoned for political crimes, and a decree by which all criminal prosecutions for political offences should be immediately discontinued, unless the persons accused were ecclesiastics, soldiers, or servants of the government, or criminals in the universal sense of the word. The announcement was received with a frenzy of enthusiasm, and Rome went mad with delight. Instinctively, the people began to move towards the Quirinal from all parts of the city, as soon as the proclamation was published; the stragglers became a band, and swelled to a crowd; music was heard, flags appeared and the crowd swelled to a multitude that thronged the streets, singing, cheering and shouting for joy as they pushed their way up to the palace, filling the square, the streets that led to it and the Via della Dateria below it, to overflowing. In answer to this popular demonstration the Pope appeared upon the great balcony above the main entrance; a shout louder than all the rest burst from below, the long drawn 'Viva!' of the southern races; he lifted his hand, and there was silence; and in the calm summer air his quiet eyes were raised towards the sky as he imparted his benediction to the people of Rome. Twenty-four years later, when the Italians had taken Rome, a detachment of soldiers accompanied by a smith and his assistants marched up to the same gate. Not a soul was within, and they had instructions to enter and take possession of the palace. In the presence of a small and silent crowd of sullen-looking men of the people, the doors were forced. The difference between Unity under Augustus and Unity under Victor Emmanuel is that under the Empire the Romans took Italy, whereas under the Kingdom the Italians have taken Rome. Without pretending that there can be any moral distinction between the two, one may safely admit that there is a great and vital one between the two conditions of Rome, at the two periods of history, a distinction no less than that which separates the conqueror from the conquered, and the fruits of conquest from the consequences of subjection. But thinking men do not forget that they look at the past in one way and at the present in another; and that while the actions of a nation are dictated by the impulses of contagious sentiment, the judgments of history are too often based upon an all but commercial reckoning and balancing of profit and loss. When Sixtus the Fifth was building the Quirinal palace, he was not working in a wilderness resembling the deserted fields of the outlying Monti. The hill was covered with gardens and villas. Ippolito d'Este, the son of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and of Lucrezia Borgia, had built himself a residence on the west side of the hill, surrounded by gardens. It was in the manner of his magnificent palace at Tivoli, that Villa d'Este of which the melancholy charm had such a mysterious attraction for Liszt, where the dark cypresses reflect their solemn beauty in the stagnant water, and a weed-grown terrace mourns the dead artist in the silence of decay. [Illustration: PALAZZO DEL QUIRINALE] Further on, along the Via Venti Settembre, stretched the pleasure grounds of Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, who is remembered as the man who first recognized the merits of the beautiful mutilated group subsequently known as 'Pasquino,' and set it upon the pedestal which made it famous, and gave its name a place in all languages, by the witty lampoons and stinging satires almost daily affixed to the block of stone. Many other villas followed in the same direction, and in those insecure days not a few Romans, when the summer days grew hot, were content to move up from their palaces in the lower parts of the city to breathe the somewhat better air of the Quirinal and the Esquiline, instead of risking a journey to the country. Sixtus the Fifth died in the Quirinal palace, and twenty-one other Popes have died there since, all following the curious custom of bequeathing their hearts and viscera to the parish Church of the Saints Vincent and Anastasius, which is known as the Church of Cardinal Mazarin, because the tasteless front was built by him, though the rest existed much earlier. It stands opposite the fountain of Trevi, at one corner of the little square; the vault in which the urns were placed is just behind and below the high altar; but Benedict the Fourteenth built a special monument for them on the left of the apse, and a tablet on the right records the names of the Popes who left these strange legacies to the church. In passing, one may remember that Mazarin himself was born in the Region of Trevi, the son of a Sicilian,--like Crispi and Rudinì. His father was employed at first as a butler and then as a steward by the Colonna, married an illegitimate daughter of the family, and lived to see his granddaughter, Maria Mancini, married to the head of the house, and his son a cardinal and despot of France, and himself, after the death of his first wife, the honoured husband of Porzia Orsini, so that he was the only man in history who was married both to an Orsini and to a Colonna. In the light of his father's extraordinary good fortune, the success of the son, though not less great, is at least less astonishing. The magnificent Rospigliosi palace, often ascribed by a mistake to Cardinal Scipio Borghese, was the Palazzo Mazarini and Mazarin's father died there; it was inherited by the Dukes of Nevers, through another niece of the Cardinal's, and was bought from them between 1667 and 1670, by Prince Rospigliosi, brother of Pope Clement the Ninth, then reigning. Urban the Eighth, the Barberini Pope, had already left his mark on the Quirinal hill. The great Barberini palace was built by him, it is said, of stones taken from the Colosseum, whereupon a Pasquinade announced that 'the Barberini had done what the Barbarians had not.' The Barbarians did not pull down the Colosseum, it is true, but they could assuredly not have built as Urban did, and in that particular instance, without wishing to justify the vandalisms of the centuries succeeding the Renascence, it may well be asked whether the Amphitheatre is not more picturesque in its half-ruined state, as it stands, and whether the city is not richer by a great work of art in the princely dwelling which faces the street of the Four Fountains. Among the many memories of the Quirinal there is one more mysterious than the rest. The great Baths of Constantine extended over the site of the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and the ruins were in part standing at the end of the sixteenth century. It is related by a writer of those days and an eye-witness of the fact, that a vault was discovered beneath the old baths, about eighty feet long by twenty wide, closed at one end by a wall thrown up with evident haste and lack of skill, and completely filled with human bodies that fell to dust at the first touch, evidently laid there all at the same time, just after death, and probably numbering at least a thousand. In vain one conjectures the reason of such wholesale burial--one of Nero's massacres, perhaps, or a plague. No one can tell. The invaluable Baracconi, often quoted, recalls the fact that Tasso, when a child, lived with his father in some house on the Monte Cavallo, when the execrable Carafa cardinal and his brother had temporarily succeeded in seizing all the Colonna property; and he gives a letter of Bernardo, the poet's father, written in July to his wife, who was away just then. [Illustration: PIAZZA BARBERINI] 'I do not wish the children to go to the vineyard because they get too hot, and the air is bad there this summer, but in order that they may have a change, I took steps to have the use of the Boccaccio Vineyard [Villa Colonna], and the Duke of Paliano [then a Carafa, for the latter had stolen the title as well as the lands] has let me have it, and we have been here a week and shall stay all summer in this good air.' The words call up a picture of Tasso, a small boy, pale with the heat of a Roman summer, but restless and for ever running about, overheated and catching cold like all delicate children, which brings the unhappy poet a little nearer to us. Of those great villas and gardens there remain the Colonna, the Rospigliosi and the Quirinal, by far the largest of the three, and enclosing between four walls an area almost, if not quite, equal to the Pincio. The great palace where twenty-two popes died is inhabited by the royal family of Italy and crowns the height, as the Vatican, far away across the Tiber, is also on an eminence of its own. They face each other, like two principles in natural and eternal opposition,--Rome the conqueror of the world, and Italy the conqueror of Rome. And he who loves the land for its own sake can only pray that if they must oppose each other for ever in heart, they may abide in that state of civilized though unreconciled peace, which is the nation's last and only hope of prosperity. [Illustration] REGION III COLONNA When the present Queen of Italy first came to Rome as Princess Margaret, and drove through the city to obtain a general impression of it, she reached the Piazza Colonna and asked what the column might be which is the most conspicuous landmark in that part of Rome and gives a name to the square, and to the whole Region. The answer of the elderly officer who accompanied the Princess and her ladies is historical. 'That column,' he answered, 'is the Column of Piazza Colonna'--'the Column of Column Square,' as we might say--and that was all he could tell concerning it, for his business was not archæology, but soldiering. The column was erected by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose equestrian statue stands on the Capitol, to commemorate his victory over the Marcomanni. [Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS] It is remarkable that so many of the monuments still preserved comparatively intact should have been set up by the adoptive line of the so-called Antonines, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, and that the two monster columns, the one in Piazza Colonna and the one in Trajan's Forum, should be the work of the last and the first of those emperors, respectively. Among other memorials of them are the Colosseum, the Arch of Titus and the statue mentioned above. The lofty Septizonium is levelled to the ground, the Palaces of the Cæsars are a mountain of ruins, the triumphal arches of Marcus Aurelius and of Domitian have disappeared with those of Gratian, of Valens, of Arcadius and of many others; but the two gigantic columns still stand erect with their sculptured tales of victory and triumph almost unbroken, surmounted by the statues of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, whose memory was sacred to all Christians long before the monuments were erected, and to whom, respectively, they have been dedicated by a later age. There may have been a connection, too, in the minds of the people, between the 'Column of Piazza Colonna' and the Column of the Colonna family, since a great part of this Region had fallen under the domination of the noble house, and was held by them with a chain of towers and fortifications; but the pillar which is the device of the Region terminates in the statue of the Apostle Peter, whereas the one which figures in the shield of Colonna is crowned with a royal crown, in memory of the coronation of Lewis the Bavarian by Sciarra, who himself generally lived in a palace facing the small square which bears his name, and which is only a widening of the Corso just north of San Marcello, the scene of Jacopo Colonna's brave protest against his kinsman's mistaken imperialism. The straight Corso itself, or what is the most important part of it to Romans, runs through the Region from San Lorenzo in Lucina to Piazza di Sciarra, and beyond that, southwards, it forms the western boundary of Trevi as far as the Palazzo di Venezia, and the Ripresa de' Barberi--the 'Catching of the Racers.' West of the Corso, the Region takes in the Monte Citorio and the Piazza of the Pantheon, but not the Pantheon itself, and eastwards it embraces the new quarter which was formerly the Villa Ludovisi, and follows the Aurelian wall, from Porta Salaria to Porta Pinciana. Corso means a 'course,' and the Venetian Paul the Second, who found Rome dull compared with Venice, gave it the name when he made it a race-course for the Carnival, towards the close of the fifteenth century. Before that it was Via Lata,--'Broad Street,'--and was a straight continuation of the Via Flaminia, the main northern highway from the city. For centuries it has been the chief playground of the Roman Carnival, a festival of which, perhaps, nothing but the memory will remain in a few years, when the world will wonder how it could be possible that the population of the grave old city should have gone mad each year for ten days and behaved itself by day and night like a crowd of schoolboys let loose. 'Carnival' is supposed to be derived from 'Carnelevamen,' a 'solace for the flesh.' Byron alone is responsible for the barbarous derivation 'Carne Vale,' farewell meat--a philological impossibility. In the minds of the people it is probably most often translated as 'Meat Time,' a name which had full meaning in times when occasional strict fasting and frequent abstinence were imposed on Romans almost by law. Its beginnings are lost in the dawnless night of time--of Time, who was Kronos, of Kronos who was Saturn, of Saturn who gave his mysterious name to the Saturnalia in which Carnival had its origin. His temple stood at the foot of the Capitol hill, facing the corner of the Forum, and there are remains of it today, tall columns in a row, with architrave and frieze and cornice; from the golden milestone close at hand, as from the beginning of time, were measured the ways of the world to the ends of the earth; and the rites performed within it were older than any others, and different, for here the pious Roman worshipped with uncovered head, whereas in all other temples he drew up his robes as a veil lest any sight of evil omen should meet his eyes, and here waxen tapers were first burned in Rome in honour of a god. And those same tapers played a part, to the end, on the last night of Carnival. But in the coincidence of old feasts with new ones, the festival of Lupercus falls nearer to the time of Ash Wednesday, for the Lupercalia were celebrated on the fifteenth of February, whereas the Carnival of Saturn began on the seventeenth of December. Lupercus was but a little god, yet he was great among the shepherds in Rome's pastoral beginnings, for he was the driver away of wolves, and on his day the early settlers ran round and round their sheepfold on the Palatine, all dressed in skins of fresh-slain goats, praising the Faun god, and calling upon him to protect their flocks. And in truth, as the winter, when wolves are hungry and daring, was over, his protection was a foregone conclusion till the cold days came again. The grotto dedicated to him was on the northwest slope of the Palatine, nearly opposite the Church of Saint George in Velabro, across the Via di San Teodoro; and all that remains of the great festival in which Mark Antony and the rest ran like wild men through the streets of Rome, smiting men and women with the purifying leathern thong, and offering at last that crown which Cæsar thrice refused, is merged and forgotten, with the Saturnalia, in the ten days' feasting and rioting that change to the ashes and sadness of Lent, as the darkest night follows the brightest day. For the Romans always loved strong contrasts. Carnival, in the wider sense, begins at Christmas and ends when Lent begins; but to most people it means but the last ten days of the season, when festivities crowd upon each other till pleasure fights for minutes as for jewels; when tables are spread all night and lights are put out at dawn; when society dances itself into distraction and poor men make such feasting as they can; when no one works who can help it, and no work done is worth having, because it is done for double price and half its value; when affairs of love are hastened to solution or catastrophe, and affairs of state are treated with the scorn they merit in the eyes of youth, because the only sense is laughter, and the only wisdom, folly. That is Carnival, personified by the people as a riotous old red-cheeked, bottle-nosed hunchback, animated by the spirit of fun. In a still closer sense, Carnival is the Carnival in the Corso, or was; for it is dead beyond resuscitation, and such efforts as are made to give it life again are but foolish incantations that call up sad ghosts of joy, spiritless and witless. But within living memory, it was very different. In those days which can never come back, the Corso was a sight to see and not to be forgotten. The small citizens who had small houses in the street let every window to the topmost story for the whole ten days; the rich whose palaces faced the favoured line threw open their doors to their friends; every window was decorated, from every balcony gorgeous hangings, or rich carpets, or even richer tapestries hung down; the street was strewn thick with yellow sand, and wheresoever there was an open space wooden seats were built up, row above row, where one might hire a place to see the show and join in throwing flowers, and the lime-covered 'confetti' that stung like small shot and whitened everything like meal, and forced everyone in the street or within reach of it to wear a shield of thin wire netting to guard the face, and thick gloves to shield the hands; or, in older times, a mask, black, white, or red, or modelled and painted with extravagant features, like evil beings in a dream. [Illustration: TWIN CHURCHES AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE CORSO From a print of the last century] In the early afternoon of each day except Sunday it all began, day after day the same, save that the fun grew wilder and often rougher as the doom of Ash Wednesday drew near. First when the people had gathered in their places, high and low, and already thronged the street from side to side, there was a distant rattle of scabbards and a thunder of hoofs, and all fell back, crowding and climbing upon one another, to let a score of cavalrymen trot through, clearing the way for the carriages of the 'Senator' and Municipality, which drove from end to end of the Corso with their scarlet and yellow liveries, before any other vehicles were allowed to pass, or any pelting with 'confetti' began. But on the instant when they had gone by, the showers began, right, left, upwards, downwards, like little storms of flowers and snow in the afternoon sunshine, and the whole air was filled with the laughter and laughing chatter of twenty thousand men and women and children--such a sound as could be heard nowhere else in the world. Many have heard a great host cheer, many have heard the battle-cries of armies, many have heard the terrible deep yell that goes up from an angry multitude in times of revolution; but only those who remember the Carnival as it used to be have heard a whole city laugh, and the memory is worth having, for it is like no other. The sound used to flow along in great waves, following the sights that passed, and swelling with them to a peal that was like a cheer, and ebbing then to a steady, even ripple of enjoyment that never ceased till it rose again in sheer joy of something new to see. Nothing can give an idea of the picture in times when Rome was still Roman; no power of description can call up the crowd that thronged and jammed the long, narrow street, till the slowly moving carriages and cars seemed to force their way through the stiffly packed mass of humanity as a strong vessel ploughs her course up-stream through packed ice in winter. Yet no one was hurt, and an order reigned which could never have been produced by any means except the most thorough good temper and the determination of each individual to do no harm to his neighbour, though all respect of individuals was as completely gone as in any anarchy of revolution. The more respectable a man looked who ventured into the press in ordinary clothes, the more certainly he became at once the general mark for hail-storms of 'confetti.' No uniform nor distinguishing badge was respected, excepting those of the squad of cavalrymen who cleared the way, and the liveries of the Municipality's coaches. Men and women were travestied and disguised in every conceivable way, as Punch and Judy, as judges and lawyers with enormous square black caps, black robes and bands, or in dresses of the eighteenth century, or as Harlequins, or even as bears and monkeys, singly, or in twos and threes, or in little companies of fifteen or twenty, all dressed precisely alike and performing comic evolutions with military exactness. Everyone carried a capacious pouch, or a fishing-basket, or some receptacle of the kind for the white 'confetti,' and arms and hands were ceaselessly swung in air, flinging vast quantities of the snowy stuff at long range and short. At every corner and in every side street, men sold it out of huge baskets, by the five, and ten, and twenty pounds, weighing it out with the ancient steelyard balance. Every balcony was lined with long troughs of it, constantly replenished by the house servants; every carriage and car had a full supply. And through all the air the odd, clean odour of the fresh plaster mingled with the fragrance of the box-leaves and the perfume of countless flowers. For flowers were thrown, too, in every way, loose and scattered, or in hard little bunches, the 'mazzetti,' that almost hurt when they struck the mark, and in beautiful nosegays, rarely flung at random when a pretty face was within sight at a window. The cars, often charmingly decorated, were filled with men and women representing some period of fashion, or some incident in history, or some allegorical subject, and were sometimes two or three stories high, and covered all over with garlands of flowers and box and myrtle. In the intervals between them endless open carriages moved along, lined with white, filled with white dominos, drawn by horses all protected and covered with white cotton robes, against the whiter 'confetti'--everyone fighting mock battles with everyone else, till it seemed impossible that anything could be left to throw, and the long perspective of the narrow street grew dim between the high palaces, and misty and purple in the evening light. A gun fired somewhere far away as a signal warned the carriages to turn out, and make way for the race that was to follow. The last moments were the hottest and the wildest, as flowers, 'confetti,' sugar plums with comet-like tails, wreaths, garlands, everything, went flying through the air in a final and reckless profusion, and as the last car rolled away the laughter and shouting ceased, and all was hushed in the expectation of the day's last sight. Again, the clatter of hoofs and scabbards, as the dragoons cleared the way; twenty thousand heads and necks craning to look northward, as the people pushed back to the side pavements; silence, and the inevitable yellow dog that haunts all race-courses, scampering over the white street, scared by the shouts, and catcalls, and bursts of spasmodic laughter; then a far sound of flying hoofs, a dead silence, and the quick breathing of suppressed excitement; louder and louder the hoofs, deader the hush; and then, in the dash of a second, in the scud of a storm, in a whirlwind of light and colour and sparkling gold leaf, with straining necks, and flashing eyes, and wide red nostrils flecked with foam, the racing colts flew by as fleet as darting lightning, riderless and swift as rock-swallows by the sea. Then, if it were the last night of Carnival, as the purple air grew brown in the dusk, myriads of those wax tapers first used in Saturn's temple of old lit up the street like magic and the last game of all began, for every man and woman and child strove to put out another's candle, and the long, laughing cry, 'No taper! No taper! Senza moccolo!' went ringing up to the darkling sky. Long canes with cloths or damp sponges or extinguishers fixed to them started up from nowhere, down from everywhere, from window and balcony to the street below, and from the street to the low balconies above. Put out at every instant, the little candles were instantly relighted, till they were consumed down to the hand; and as they burned low, another cry went up, 'Carnival is dead! Carnival is dead!' But he was not really dead till midnight, when the last play of the season had been acted in the playhouses, the last dance danced, the last feast eaten amid song and laughter, and the solemn Patarina of the Capitol tolled out the midnight warning like a funeral knell. That was the end. The riderless race was at least four hundred years old when it was given up. The horses were always called Bárberi, with the accent on the first syllable, and there has been much discussion about the origin of the name. Some say that it meant horses from Barbary, but then it should be pronounced Barbéri, accented on the penultimate. Others think it stood for Bárbari--barbarian, that is, unridden. The Romans never misplace an accent, and rarely mistake the proper quantity of a syllable long or short. For my own part, though no scholar has as yet suggested it, I believe that the common people, always fond of easy witticisms and catchwords, coined the appellation, with an eye to the meaning of both the other derivations, out of Barbo, the family name of Pope Paul the Second, who first instituted the Carnival races, and set the winning post under the balcony of the huge Palazzo di Venezia, which he had built beside the Church of Saint Mark, to the honour and glory of his native city. He made men run foot-races, too: men, youths and boys, of all ages; and the poor Jews, in heavy cloth garments, were first fed and stuffed with cakes and then made to run, too. The jests of the Middle Age were savage compared with the roughest play of later times. The pictures of old Rome are fading fast. I can remember, when a little boy, seeing the great Carnival of 1859, when the Prince of Wales was in Rome, and the masks which had been forbidden since the revolution were allowed again in his honour; and before the flower throwing began, I saw Liszt, the pianist, not yet in orders, but dressed in a close-fitting and very fashionable grey frock-coat, with a grey high hat, young then, tall, athletic and erect; he came out suddenly from a doorway, looked to the right and left in evident fear of being made a mark for 'confetti,' crossed the street hurriedly and disappeared--not at all the silver-haired, priestly figure the world knew so well in later days. And by and by the Prince of Wales came by in a simple open carriage, a thin young man in a black coat, with a pale, face and a quiet smile, looking all about him with an almost boyish interest, and bowing to the right and left. Then in deep contrast of sadness, out of the past years comes a great funeral by night, down the Corso; hundreds of brown, white-bearded friars, two and two with huge wax candles, singing the ancient chant of the penitential psalms; hundreds of hooded lay brethren of the Confraternities, some in black, some in white, with round holes for their eyes that flashed through, now and then, in the yellow glare of the flaming tapers; hundreds of little street boys beside them in the shadow, holding up big horns of grocers' paper to catch the dripping wax; and then, among priests in cotta and stole, the open bier carried on men's shoulders, and on it the peaceful figure of a dead girl, white-robed, blossom crowned, delicate as a frozen flower in the cold winter air. She had died of an innocent love, they said, and she was borne in through the gates of the Santi Apostoli to her rest in the solemn darkness. Nor has anyone been buried in that way since then. [Illustration: SAN LORENZO IN LUCINA] In the days of Paul the Second, what might be called living Rome, taken in the direction of the Corso, began at the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, long attributed to Domitian, which stood at the corner of the small square called after San Lorenzo in Lucina. Beyond that point, northwards and eastwards, the city was a mere desert, and on the west side the dwelling-houses fell away towards the Mausoleum of Augustus, the fortress of the Colonna. The arch itself used to be called the Arch of Portugal, because a Portuguese Cardinal, Giovanni da Costa, lived in the Fiano palace at the corner of the Corso. No one would suppose that very modern-looking building, with its smooth front and conventional balconies, to be six hundred years old, the ancient habitation of all the successive Cardinals of Saint Lawrence. Its only other interest, perhaps, lies in the fact that it formed part of the great estates bestowed by Sixtus the Fifth on his nephews, and was nevertheless sold over their children's heads for debt, fifty-five years after his death. The swineherd's race was prodigal, excepting the 'Great Friar' himself, and, like the Prodigal Son, it was not long before the Peretti were reduced to eating the husks. It was natural that the palaces of the Renascence should rise along the only straight street of any length in what was then the inhabited part of the city, and that the great old Roman Barons, the Colonna, the Orsini, the Caetani, should continue to live in their strongholds, where they had always dwelt. The Caetani, indeed, once bought from a Florentine banker what is now the Ruspoli palace, and Sciarra Colonna had lived far down the Corso; but with these two exceptions, the princely habitations between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Venezia are almost all the property of families once thought foreigners in Rome. The greatest, the most magnificent private dwelling in the world is the Doria Pamfili palace, as the Doria themselves were the most famous, and became the most powerful of those many nobles who, in the course of centuries, settled in the capital and became Romans, not only in name but in fact--Doria, Borghese, Rospigliosi, Pallavicini and others of less enduring fame or reputation, who came in the train or alliance of a Pope, and remained in virtue of accumulated riches and acquired honour. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since a council of learned doctors and casuists decided for Pope Innocent the Tenth the precise limit of his just power to enrich his nephews and relations, the Pamfili, by an alliance with whom the original Doria of Genoa added another name to their own, and inherited the vast estates. But nearly four hundred years before Innocent, the Doria had been high admirals and almost despots of Genoa. For they were a race of seamen from the first, in a republic where seamanship was the first essential to distinction. Albert Doria overcame the Pisans off Meloria in 1284, slaying five thousand, and taking eleven thousand prisoners. Conrad, his son, was 'Captain of the Genoese Freedom,' and 'Captain of the People.' Lamba Doria vanquished the Venetians under the brave Andrea Dandolo, and Paganino Doria conquered them again under another Andrea Dandolo; and then an Andrea Doria took service with the Pope, and became the greatest sailor in Europe, the hero of a hundred sea-fights, at one time the ally of Francis the First of France, and the most dangerous opponent of Gonzalvo da Cordova, then high admiral of the Empire under Charles the Fifth, a destroyer of pirates, by turns the idol, the enemy and the despot of his own city, Genoa, and altogether such a type of a soldier-sailor of fortune as the world has not seen before or since. And there were others after him, notably Gian Andrea Doria, remembered by the great victory over the Turks at Lepanto, whence he brought home those gorgeous Eastern spoils of tapestry and embroideries which hang in the Doria palace today. [Illustration: PALAZZO DORIA PAMFILI] The history of the palace itself is not without interest, for it shows how property, which was not in the possession of the original Barons, sometimes passed from hand to hand, changing names with each new owner, in the rise and fall of fortunes in those times. The first building seems to have belonged to the Chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, which somehow ceded it to Cardinal Santorio, who spent an immense sum in rebuilding, extending and beautifying it. When it was almost finished, Julius the Second came to see it, and after expressing the highest admiration for the work, observed that such a habitation was less fitting for a prince of the church than for a secular duke--meaning, by the latter, his own nephew, Francesco della Rovere, then Duke of Urbino; and the unfortunate Santorio, who had succeeded in preserving his possessions under the domination of the Borgia, was forced to offer the most splendid palace in Rome as a gift to the person designated by his master. He died of a broken heart within the year. A hundred years later, the Florentine Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement the Eighth, bought it from the Dukes of Urbino for twelve thousand measures of grain, furnished them for the purpose by their uncle, and finally, when it had fallen in inheritance to Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, Innocent the Tenth married her to his nephew, Camillo Pamfili, from whom, by the fusion of the two families, it at last came into the hands of the Doria-Pamfili. The Doria palace is almost two-thirds of the size of Saint Peter's, and within the ground plan of Saint Peter's the Colosseum could stand. It used to be said that a thousand persons lived under the roof outside of the gallery and the private apartments, which alone surpass in extent the majority of royal residences. Without some such comparison mere words can convey nothing to a mind unaccustomed to such size and space, and when the idea is grasped, one asks, naturally enough, how the people lived who built such houses--the people whose heirs, far reduced in splendour, if not in fortune, are driven to let four-fifths of their family mansion, because they find it impossible to occupy more rooms than suffice the Emperor of Germany or the Queen of England. One often hears foreign visitors, ignorant of the real size of palaces in Rome, observe, with contempt, that the Roman princes 'let their palaces.' It would be more reasonable to inquire what use could be made of such buildings, if they were not let, or how any family could be expected to inhabit a thousand rooms, and, ultimately, for what purpose such monstrous residences were ever built at all. The first thing that suggests itself in answer to the latter question as the cause of such boundless extravagance is the inherited giantism of the Latins, to which reference has been more than once made in these pages, and to which the existence of many of the principal buildings in Rome must be ascribed. Next, we may consider that at one time or another, each of the greater Roman palaces has been, in all essentials, the court of a pope or of a reigning feudal prince. Lastly, it must be remembered that each palace was the seat of management of all its owner's estates, and that such administration in those times required a number of scribes and an amount of labour altogether out of proportion with the income derived from the land. At first sight the study of Italian life in the Middle Age does not seem very difficult, because it is so interesting. But when one has read the old chronicles that have survived, and the histories of those times, one is amazed to see how much we are told about people and their actions, and how very little about the way in which people lived. It is easier to learn the habits of the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the ancient Romans, or the Assyrians, than to get at the daily life of an Italian family between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, from such books as we have. There are two reasons for this. One is the scarcity of literature, excepting historical chronicles, until the time of Boccaccio and the Italian storytellers. The other is the fact that what we call the Middle Age was an age of transition from barbarism to the civilization of the Renascence, and the Renascence was reached by sweeping away all the barbarous things that had gone before it. One must have lived a lifetime in Italy to be able to call up a fairly vivid picture of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. One must have actually seen the grand old castles and gloomy monasteries, and feudal villages of Calabria and Sicily, where all things are least changed from what they were, and one should understand something of the nature of the Italian people, where the original people have survived; one must try also to realize the violence of those passions which are ugly excrescences on Italian character even now, and which were once the main movers of that character. There are extant many inventories of lordly residences of earlier times in Italy, for the inventory was taken every time the property changed hands by inheritance or sale. Everyone of these inventories begins at the main gate of the stronghold, and the first item is 'Rope for giving the cord.' Now 'to give the cord' was a torture, and all feudal lords had the right to inflict it. The victim's hands were tied behind his back, the rope was made fast to his bound wrists, and he was hoisted some twenty feet or so to the heavy iron ring which is fixed in the middle of the arch of every old Italian castle gateway; he was then allowed to drop suddenly till his feet, to which heavy weights were sometimes attached, were a few inches from the ground, so that the strain of his whole weight fell upon his arms, twisted them backwards, and generally dislocated them at the shoulders. And this was usually done three times, and sometimes twenty times, in succession, to the same prisoner, either as a punishment or by way of examination, to extract a confession of the truth. As the rope of torture was permanently rove through the pulley over the front door, it must have been impossible not to see it and remember what it meant every time one went in or out. And such quick reminders of danger and torture, and sudden, painful death, give the pitch and key of daily existence in the Middle Age. Every man's life was in his hand until it was in his enemy's. Every man might be forced, at a moment's notice, to defend not only his honour, and his belongings, and his life, but his women and children, too,--not against public enemies only, but far more often against private spite and personal hatred. Nowadays, when most men only stake their money on their convictions, it is hard to realize how men reasoned who staked their lives at every turn; or to guess, for instance, at what women felt whose husbands and sons, going out for a stroll of an afternoon, in the streets of Rome, might as likely as not be brought home dead of a dozen sword-wounds before evening. A husband, a father, was stabbed in the dark by treachery; try and imagine the daily and year-long sensations of the widowed mother, bringing up her only son deliberately to kill her husband's murderer; teaching him to look upon vengeance as the first, most real and most honourable aim of life, from the time he was old enough to speak, to the time when he should be strong enough to kill. Everything was earnest then. One should remember that most of the stories told by Boccaccio, Sacchetti and Bandello--the stories from which Shakespeare got his Italian plays, his Romeo and Juliet, his Merchant of Venice--were not inventions, but were founded on the truth. Everyone has read about Cæsar Borgia, his murders, his treacheries and his end, and he is held up to us as a type of monstrous wickedness. But a learned Frenchman, Émile Gebhart, has recently written a rather convincing treatise, to show that Cæsar Borgia was not a monster at all, nor even much of an exception to the general rule among the Italian despots of his day, and his day was civilized compared with that of Rienzi, of Boniface the Eighth, of Sciarra Colonna. In order to understand anything about the real life of the Middle Age, one should begin at the beginning; one should see the dwellings, the castles, and the palaces with their furniture and arrangements, one should realize the stern necessities as well as the few luxuries of that time. And one should make acquaintance with the people themselves, from the grey-haired old baron, the head of the house, down to the scullery man and the cellarer's boy and the stable lads. And then, knowing something of the people and their homes, one might begin to learn something about their household occupations, their tremendously tragic interests and their few and simple amusements. [Illustration: PORTA SAN LORENZO] The first thing that strikes one about the dwellings is the enormous strength of those that remain. The main idea, in those days, when a man built a house, was to fortify himself and his belongings against attacks from the outside, and every other consideration was secondary to that. That is true not only of the Barons' castles in the country and of their fortified palaces in town,--which were castles, too, for that matter,--but of the dwellings of all classes of people who could afford to live independently, that is, who were not serfs and retainers of the rich. We talk of fire-proof buildings nowadays, which are mere shells of iron and brick and stone that shrivel up like writing-paper in a great fire. The only really fire-proof buildings were those of the Middle Age, which consisted of nothing but stone and mortar throughout, stone walls, stone vaults, stone floors, and often stone tables and stone seats. I once visited the ancient castle of Muro, in the Basilicata, one of the southern provinces in Italy, where Queen Joanna the First paid her life for her sins at last, and died under the feather pillow that was forced down upon her face by two Hungarian soldiers. It is as wild and lonely a place as you will meet with in Europe, and yet the great castle has never been a ruin, nor at any time uninhabited, since it was built in the eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight feet thick--comparatively flimsy for such a place! Nine-tenths of it was built for strength--the small remainder for comfort; there is not a single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved space, barely big enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea caves to the tramp of armed men. And so it was in the cities, too. In Rome, bits of the old strongholds survive still. There were more of them thirty years ago. Even the more modern palaces of the late Renascence are built in such a way that they must have afforded a safe refuge against everything except artillery. The strong iron-studded doors and the heavily grated windows of the ground floor would stand a siege from the street. The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief dwelling of the Orsini, is built in the midst of the city like a great fortification, with escarpments and buttresses and loop-holes; and at the main gate there is still a portcullis which sinks into the ground by a system of chains and balance weights and is kept in working order even now. In the Middle Age, each town palace had one or more towers, tall, square and solid, which were used as lookouts and as a refuge in case the rest of the palace should be taken by an enemy. The general principle of all mediæval towers was that they were entered through a small window at a great height above the ground, by means of a jointed wooden ladder. Once inside, the people drew the ladder up after them and took it in with them, in separate pieces. When that was done, they were comparatively safe, before the age of gunpowder. There were no windows to break, it was impossible to get in, and the besieged party could easily keep anyone from scaling the tower, by pouring boiling oil or melted lead from above, or with stones and missiles, so that as long as provisions and water held out, the besiegers could do nothing. As for water, the great rainwater cistern was always in the foundations of the tower itself, immediately under the prison, which got neither light nor air excepting from a hole in the floor above. Walls from fifteen to twenty feet thick could not be battered down with any engines then in existence. Altogether, the tower was a safe place in times of danger. It is said that at one time there were over four hundred of these in Rome, belonging to the nobles, great and small. The small class of well-to-do commoners, the merchants and goldsmiths, such as they were, who stood between the nobles and the poor people, imitated the nobles as much as they could, and strengthened their houses by every means. For their dwellings were their warehouses, and in times of disturbance the first instinct of the people was to rob the merchants, unless they chanced to be strong enough to rob the nobles, as sometimes happened. But in Rome the merchants were few, and were very generally retainers or dependants of the great houses. It is frequent in the chronicles to find a man mentioned as the 'merchant' of the Colonna family, or of the Orsini, or of one of the independent Italian princes, like the Duke of Urbino. Such a man acted as agent to sell the produce of a great estate; part of his business was to lend money to the owner, and he also imported from abroad the scanty merchandise which could be imported at all. About half of it usually fell into the hands of highwaymen before it reached the city, and the price of luxuries was proportionately high. Such men, of course, lived well, though there was a wide difference between their mode of life and that of the nobles, not so much in matters of abundance and luxury, as in principle. The chief rule was that the wives and daughters of the middle class did a certain amount of housekeeping work, whereas the wives and daughters of the nobles did not. The burgher's wife kept house herself, overlooked the cooking, and sometimes cooked a choice dish with her own hands, and taught her daughters to do so. A merchant might have a considerable retinue of men, for his service and protection, and they carried staves when they accompanied their master abroad, and lanterns at night. But the baron's men were men-at-arms,--practically soldiers,--who wore his colours, and carried swords and pikes, and lit the way for their lord at night with torches, always the privilege of the nobles. As a matter of fact, they were generally the most dangerous cutthroats whom the nobleman was able to engage, highwaymen, brigands and outlaws, whom he protected against the semblance of the law; whereas the merchant's train consisted of honest men who worked for him in his warehouse, or they were countrymen from his farms, if he had any. It is not easy to give any adequate idea of those great mediæval establishments, except by their analogy with the later ones that came after them. They were enormous in extent, and singularly uncomfortable in their internal arrangement. A curious book, published in 1543, and therefore at the first culmination of the Renascence, has lately been reprinted. It is entitled 'Concerning the management of a Roman Nobleman's Court,' and was dedicated to 'The magnificent and Honourable Messer Cola da Benevento,' forty years after the death of the Borgia Pope and during the reign of Paul the Third, Farnese, who granted the writer a copyright for ten years. The little volume is full of interesting details, and the attendant gentlemen and servants enumerated give some idea of what according to the author was not considered extravagant for a nobleman of the sixteenth century. There were to be two chief chamberlains, a general controller of the estates, a chief steward, four chaplains, a master of the horse, a private secretary and an assistant secretary, an auditor, a lawyer and four literary personages, 'Letterati,' who, among them, must know 'the four principal languages of the world, namely, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Italian.' The omission of every other living language but the latter, when Francis the First, Charles the Fifth and Henry the Eighth were reigning, is pristinely Roman in its contempt of 'barbarians.' There were also to be six gentlemen of the chambers, a private master of the table, a chief carver and ten waiting men, a butler of the pantry with an assistant, a butler of the wines, six head grooms, a marketer with an assistant, a storekeeper, a cellarer, a carver for the serving gentlemen, a chief cook, an under cook and assistant, a chief scullery man, a water carrier, a sweeper,--and last in the list, a physician, whom the author puts at the end of the list, 'not because a doctor is not worthy of honour, but in order not to seem to expect any infirmity for his lordship or his household.' This was considered a 'sufficient household' for a nobleman, but by no means an extravagant one, and many of the officials enumerated were provided with one or more servants, while no mention is made of any ladies in the establishment nor of the numerous retinue they required. But one remembers the six thousand servants of Augustus, all honourably buried in one place, and the six hundred who waited on Livia alone; and the modest one hundred and seven which were reckoned 'sufficient' for the Lord Cola of Benevento sink into comparative insignificance. For Livia, besides endless keepers of her robes and folders of her clothes--a special office--and hairdressers, perfumers, jewellers and shoe keepers, had a special adorner of her ears, a keeper of her chair and a governess for her favourite lap-dog. The little book contains the most complete details concerning daily expenditure for food and drink for the head of the house and his numerous gentlemen, which amounted in a year to the really not extravagant sum of four thousand scudi, or dollars, over fourteen hundred being spent on wine alone. The allowance was a jug--rather more than a quart--of pure wine daily to each of the 'gentlemen,' and the same measure diluted with one-third of water to all the rest. Sixteen ounces of beef, mutton, or veal were reckoned for every person, and each received twenty ounces of bread of more or less fine quality, according to his station; and an average of twenty scudi was allowed daily as given away in charity,--which was not ungenerous, either, for such a household. The olive oil used for the table and for lamps was the same, and was measured together, and the household received each a pound of cheese, monthly, besides a multitude of other eatables, all of which are carefully enumerated and valued. Among other items of a different nature are 'four or five large wax candles daily, for his lordship,' and wax for torches 'to accompany the dishes brought to his table, and to accompany his lordship and the gentlemen out of doors at night,' and 'candles for the altar,' and tallow candles for use about the house. As for salaries and wages, the controller and chief steward received ten scudi, each month, whereas the chaplain only got two, and the 'literary men,' who were expected to know Hebrew, Greek and Latin, were each paid one hundred scudi yearly. The physician was required to be not only 'learned, faithful, diligent and affectionate,' but also 'fortunate' in his profession. Considering the medical practices of those days, a doctor could certainly not hope to heal his patients without the element of luck. The old-fashioned Roman character is careful, if not avaricious, with occasional flashes of astonishing extravagance, and its idea of riches is so closely associated with that of power as to make the display of a numerous retinue its first and most congenial means of exhibiting great wealth; so that to this day a Roman in reduced fortune will live very poorly before he will consent to exist without the two or three superfluous footmen who loiter all day in his hall, or the handsome equipage in which his wife and daughters are accustomed to take the daily drive, called from ancient times the 'trottata,' or 'trot,' in the Villa Borghese, or the Corso, or on the Pincio, and gravely provided for in the terms of the marriage contract. At a period when servants were necessary, not only for show but also for personal protection, it is not surprising that the nobles should have kept an extravagant number of them. [Illustration: PALAZZO DI MONTE CITORIO From a print of the last century] Then also, to account for the size of Roman palaces, there was the patriarchal system of life, now rapidly falling into disuse. The so-called 'noble floor' of every mansion is supposed to be reserved exclusively for the father and mother of the family, and the order of arranging the rooms is as much a matter of rigid rule as in the houses of the ancient Romans, where the vestibule preceded the atrium, the atrium the peristyle, and the latter the last rooms which looked upon the garden. So in the later palace, the door from the first landing of the grand staircase opens upon an outer hall, uncarpeted, but crossed by a strip of matting, and furnished only with a huge table and old-fashioned chests, made with high backs, on which are painted or carved the arms of the family. Here, at least two or three footmen are supposed to be in perpetual readiness to answer the door, the lineally descended representatives of the armed footmen who lounged there four hundred years ago. Next to the hall comes the antechamber, sometimes followed by a second, and here is erected the 'baldacchino,' the coloured canopy which marks the privilege of the sixty 'conscript families' of Rome, who rank as princes. It recalls the times when, having powers of justice, and of life and death, the lords sat in state under the overhanging silks, embroidered with their coats of arms, to administer the law. Beyond the antechamber comes the long succession of state apartments, lofty, ponderously decorated, heavily furnished with old-fashioned gilt or carved chairs that stand symmetrically against the walls, and on the latter are hung pictures, priceless works of old masters beside crude portraits of the last century, often arranged much more with regard to the frames than to the paintings. Stiff-legged pier-tables of marble and alabaster face the windows or are placed between them; thick curtains that can be drawn quite back cover the doors; strips of hemp carpet lead straight from one door to another; the light is dim and cold, half shut out by the window curtains, and gets a peculiar quality of sadness and chilliness, which is essentially characteristic of every old Roman house, where the reception rooms are only intended to be used at night, and the sunny side is exclusively appropriated to the more intimate life of the owners. There may be three, four, six, ten of those big drawing-rooms in succession, each covering about as much space as a small house in New York or London, before one comes to the closed door that gives access to the princess' boudoir, beyond which, generally returning in a direction parallel with the reception rooms, is her bedroom, and the prince's, and the latter's study, and then the private dining-room, the state dining-room, the great ballroom, with clear-story windows, and as many more rooms as the size of the apartment will admit. In the great palaces, the picture gallery takes a whole wing and sometimes two, the library being generally situated on a higher story. The patriarchal system required that all the married sons, with their wives and children and servants, should be lodged in the same building with their parents. The eldest invariably lived on the second floor, the second son on the third, which is the highest, though there is generally a low rambling attic, occupied by servants, and sometimes by the chaplain, the librarian and the steward, in better rooms. When there were more than two married sons, which hardly ever happened under the old system of primogeniture, they divided the apartments between them as best they could. The unmarried younger children had to put up with what was left. Moreover, in the greatest houses, where there was usually a cardinal of the name, one wing of the first floor was entirely given up to him; and instead of the canopy in the antechamber, flanked by the hereditary coloured umbrellas carried on state occasions by two lackeys behind the family coach, the prince of the Church was entitled to a throne room, as all cardinals are. The eldest son's apartment was generally more or less a repetition of the state one below, but the rooms were lower, the decorations less elaborate, though seldom less stiff in character, and a large part of the available space was given up to the children. It is clear from all this that even in modern times a large family might take up a great deal of room. Looking back across two or three centuries, therefore, to the days when every princely household was a court, and was called a court, it is easier to understand the existence of such phenomenally vast mansions as the Doria palace, or those of the Borghese, the Altieri, the Barberini and others, who lived in almost royal state, and lodged hundreds upon hundreds of retainers in their homes. And not only did all the members of the family live under one roof, as a few of them still live, but the custom of dining together at one huge table was universal. A daily dinner of twenty persons--grandparents, parents and children, down to the youngest that is old enough to sit up to its plate in a high chair, would be a serious matter to most European households. But in Rome it was looked upon as a matter of course, and was managed through the steward by a contract with the cook, who was bound to provide a certain number of dishes daily for the fixed meals, but nothing else--not so much as an egg or a slice of toast beyond that. This system still prevails in many households, and as it is to be expected that meals at unusual hours may sometimes be required, an elaborate system of accounts is kept by the steward and his clerks, and the smallest things ordered by any of the sons or daughters are charged against an allowance usually made them, while separate reckonings are kept for the daughters-in-law, for whom certain regular pin-money is provided out of their own dowries at the marriage settlement, all of which goes through the steward's hands. The same settlement, even in recent years, stipulated for a fixed number of dishes of meat daily, generally only two, I believe, for a certain number of new gowns and other clothes, and for a great variety of details, besides the use of a carriage every day, to be harnessed not more than twice, that is, either in the morning and afternoon, or once in the daytime and once at night. Everything,--a cup of tea, a glass of lemonade,--if not mentioned in the marriage settlement, had to be paid for separately. The justice of such an arrangement--for it is just--is only equalled by its inconvenience, for it requires the machinery of a hotel, combined with an honesty not usual in hotels. Undoubtedly, the whole system is directly descended from the practice of the ancients, which made every father of a family the absolute despot of his household, and made it impossible for a son to hold property or have any individual independence during his father's life, and it has not been perceptibly much modified since the Middle Age, until the last few years. Its existence shows in the strongest light the main difference between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races, in the marked tendency of the one to submit to despotic government, and of the other to govern itself; of the one to stay at home under paternal authority, and of the other to leave the father's house and plunder the world for itself; of the sons of the one to accept wives given them, and of the other's children to marry as they please. Roman family life, from Romulus to the year 1870, was centred in the head of the house, whose position was altogether unassailable, whose requirements were necessities, and whose word was law. Next to him in place came the heir, who was brought up with a view to his exercising the same powers in his turn. After him, but far behind him in importance, if he promised to be strong, came the other sons, who, if they took wives at all, were expected to marry heiresses, and one of whom, almost as a matter of course, was brought up to be a churchman. The rest, if there were any, generally followed the career of arms, and remained unmarried; for heiresses of noble birth were few, and their guardians married them to eldest sons of great houses whenever possible, while the strength of caste prejudice made alliances of nobles with the daughters of rich plebeians extremely unusual. It is possible to trace the daily life of a Roman family in the Middle Age from its regular routine of today, as out of what anyone may see in Italy the habits of the ancients can be reconstructed with more than approximate exactness. And yet it is out of the question to fix the period of the general transformation which ultimately turned the Rome of the Barons into the Rome of Napoleon's time, and converted the high-handed men of Sciarra Colonna's age into the effeminate fops of 1800, when a gentleman of noble lineage, having received a box on the ear from another at high noon in the Corso, willingly followed the advice of his confessor, who counselled him to bear the affront with Christian meekness and present his other cheek to the smiter. Customs have remained, fashions have altogether changed; the outward forms of early living have survived, the spirit of life is quite another; and though some families still follow the patriarchal mode of existence, the patriarchs are gone, the law no longer lends itself to support household tyranny, and the subdivision of estates under the Napoleonic code is guiding an already existing democracy to the untried issue of a problematic socialism. Without attempting to establish a comparison upon the basis of a single cause, where so many are at work, it is permissible to note that while in England and Germany a more or less voluntary system of primogeniture is admitted and largely followed from choice, and while in the United States men are almost everywhere entirely free to dispose of their property as they please, and while the population and wealth of those countries are rapidly increasing, France, enforcing the division of estates among children, though she is accumulating riches, is faced by the terrible fact of a steadily diminishing census; and Italy, under the same laws, is not only rapidly approaching national bankruptcy, but is in parts already depopulated by an emigration so extensive that it can only be compared with the westward migration of the Aryan tribes. The forced subdivision of property from generation to generation is undeniably a socialistic measure, since it must, in the end, destroy both aristocracy and plutocracy; and it is surely a notable point that the two great European nations which have adopted it as a fundamental principle of good government should both be on the road to certain destruction, while those powers that have wholly and entirely rejected any such measure are filling the world with themselves and absorbing its wealth at an enormous and alarming rate. [Illustration: VILLA BORGHESE] The art of the Renascence has left us splendid pictures of mediæval public life, which are naturally accepted as equally faithful representations of the life of every day. Princes and knights, in gorgeous robes and highly polished armour, ride on faultlessly caparisoned milk-white steeds; wondrous ladies wear not less wonderful gowns, fitted with a perfection which women seek in vain today, and embroidered with pearls and precious stones that might ransom a rajah; young pages, with glorious golden hair, stand ready at the elbows of their lords and ladies, or kneel in graceful attitude to deliver a letter, or stoop to bear a silken train, clad in garments which the modern costumer strives in vain to copy. After three or four centuries, the colours of those painted silks and satins are still richer than anything the loom can weave. In the great fresco, each individual of the multitude that fills a public place, or defiles in open procession under the noonday light, is not only a masterpiece of fashion, but a model of neatness; linen, delicate as woven gossamer, falls into folds as finely exact as an engraver's point could draw; velvet shoes tread without speck or spot upon the well-scoured pavement of a public street; men-at-arms grasp weapons and hold bridles with hands as carefully tended as any idle fine gentleman's, and there is neither fleck nor breath of dimness on the mirror-like steel of their armour; the very flowers, the roses and lilies that strew the way, are the perfection of fresh-cut hothouse blossoms; and when birds and beasts chance to be necessary to the composition of the picture, they are represented with no less care for a more than possible neatness, their coats are combed and curled, their attitudes are studied and graceful, they wear carefully made collars, ornamented with chased silver and gold. Centuries have dimmed the wall-painting, sunshine has faded it, mould has mottled the broad surfaces of red and blue and green, and a later age has done away with the dresses represented; yet, when the frescos in the library of the Cathedral at Siena, for instance, were newly finished, they were the fashion-plates of the year and month, executed by a great artist, it is true, grouped with matchless skill and drawn with supreme mastery of art, but as far from representing the ordinary scenes of daily life as those terrible coloured prints published nowadays for tailors, in which a number of beautiful young gentlemen, in perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the æsthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective relations of the great artist's masterpiece and of the poor modern lithograph to the realities of each period, there is the clue to the daily life of the Middle Age. Living was outwardly rough as compared with the representations of it, though it was far more refined than in any other part of Europe, and Italy long set the fashion to the world in habits and manners. People kept their fine clothes for great occasions, there was a keeper of robes in every large household, and there were rooms set apart for the purpose. In every-day life, the Barons wore patched hose and leathern jerkins, stained and rusted by the joints of the armour that was so often buckled over them, or they went about their dwellings in long dressing-gowns which hid many shortcomings. When gowns, and hose, and jerkins were well worn, they were cut down for the boys of the family, and the fine dresses, only put on for great days, were preserved as heirlooms from generation to generation, whether they fitted the successive wearers or not. The beautiful tight-fitting hose which, in the paintings of the time, seem to fit like theatrical tights, were neither woven nor knitted, but were made of stout cloth, and must often have been baggy at the knees in spite of the most skilful cutting; and the party-coloured hose, having one leg of one piece of stuff and one of another, and sometimes each leg of two or more colours, were very likely first invented from motives of economy, to use up cuttings and leavings. Clothes were looked upon as permanent and very desirable property, and kings did not despise a gift of fine scarlet cloth, in the piece, to make them a gown or a cloak. As for linen, as late as the sixteenth century, the English thought the French nobles very extravagant because they put on a clean shirt once a fortnight and changed their ruffles once a week. [Illustration: PALAZZO DI VENEZIA] The mediæval Roman nobles were most of them great farmers as well as fighters. Then, as now, land was the ultimate form of property, and its produce the usual form of wealth; and then, as now, many families were 'land-poor,' in the sense of owning tracts of country which yielded little or no income but represented considerable power, and furnished the owners with most of the necessaries of life, such rents as were collected being usually paid in kind, in oil and wine, in grain, fruit and vegetables, and even in salt meat, and horses, cattle for slaughtering and beasts of burden, not to speak of wool, hemp and flax, as well as firewood. But money was scarce and, consequently, all the things which only money could buy, so that a gown was a possession, and a corselet or a good sword a treasure. The small farmer of our times knows what it means to have plenty to eat and little to wear. His position is not essentially different from that of the average landed gentry in the Middle Age, not only in Italy, but all over Europe. In times when superiority lay in physical strength, courage, horsemanship and skill in the use of arms, the so-called gentleman was not distinguished from the plebeian by the newness or neatness of his clothes so much as by the nature and quality of the weapons he wore when he went abroad in peace or war, and very generally by being mounted on a good horse. In his home he was simple, even primitive. He desired space more than comfort, and comfort more than luxury. His furniture consisted almost entirely of beds, chests and benches, with few tables except such as were needed for eating. Beds were supported by boards laid on trestles, raised very high above the floor to be beyond the reach of rats, mice and other creatures. The lower mattress was filled with the dried leaves of the maize, and the upper one contained wool, with which the pillows also were stuffed. The floors of dwelling rooms were generally either paved with bricks or made of a sort of cement, composed of lime, sand and crushed brick, the whole being beaten down with iron pounders, while in the moist state, during three days. There were no carpets, and fresh rushes were strewn everywhere on the floors, which in summer were first watered, like a garden path, to lay the dust. There was no glass in the windows of ordinary rooms, and the consequence was that during the daytime people lived almost in the open air, in winter as well as summer; sunshine was a necessity of existence, and sheltered courts and cloistered walks were built like reservoirs for the light and heat. In the rooms, ark-shaped chests stood against the walls, to contain the ordinary clothes not kept in the general 'guardaroba.' In the deep embrasures of the windows there were stone seats, but there were few chairs, or none at all, in the bedrooms. At the head of each bed hung a rough little cross of dark wood--later, as carving became more general, a crucifix--and a bit of an olive branch preserved from Palm Sunday throughout the year. The walls themselves were scrupulously whitewashed; the ceilings were of heavy beams, supporting lighter cross-beams, on which in turn thick boards were laid to carry the cement floor of the room overhead. Many hundred men-at-arms could be drawn up in the courtyards, and their horses stalled in the spacious stables. The kitchens, usually situated on the ground floor, were large enough to provide meals for half a thousand retainers, if necessary; and the cellars and underground prisons were a vast labyrinth of vaulted chambers, which not unfrequently communicated with the Tiber by secret passages. In restoring the palace of the Santacroce, a few years ago, a number of skeletons were discovered, some still wearing armour, and all most evidently the remains of men who had died violent deaths. One of them was found with a dagger driven through the skull and helmet. The hand that drove it must have been strong beyond the hands of common men. The grand staircase led up from the sunny court to the state apartments, such as they were in those days. There, at least, there were sometimes carpets, luxuries of enormous value, and even before the Renascence the white walls were hung with tapestries, at least in part. In those times, too, there were large fireplaces in almost every room, for fuel was still plentiful in the Campagna and in the near mountains; and where the houses were practically open to the air all day, fires were an absolute necessity. Even in ancient times it is recorded that the Roman Senate, amidst the derisive jests of the plebeians, once had to adjourn on account of the extreme cold. People rose early in the Middle Age, dined at noon, slept in the afternoon when the weather was warm, and supped, as a rule, at 'one hour of the night,' that is to say an hour after 'Ave Maria,' which was rung half an hour after sunset, and was the end of the day of twenty-four hours. Noon was taken from the sun, but did not fall at a regular hour of the clock, and never fell at twelve. In winter, for instance, if the Ave Maria bell rang at half-past five of our modern time, the noon of the following day fell at 'half-past eighteen o'clock' by the mediæval clocks. In summer, it might fall as early as three quarters past fifteen; and this manner of reckoning time was common in Rome thirty-five years ago, and is not wholly unpractised in some parts of Italy still. It was always an Italian habit, and a very healthy one, to get out of doors immediately on rising, and to put off making anything like a careful toilet till a much later hour. Breakfast, as we understand it, is an unknown meal in Italy, even now. Most people drink a cup of black coffee, standing; many eat a morsel of bread or biscuit with it and get out of doors as soon as they can; but the greediness of an Anglo-Saxon breakfast disgusts all Latins alike, and two set meals daily are thought to be enough for anyone, as indeed they are. The hard-working Italian hill peasant will sometimes toast himself a piece of corn bread before going to work, and eat it with a few drops of olive oil; and in the absence of tea or coffee, the people of the Middle Age often drank a mouthful of wine on rising to 'move the blood,' as they said. But that was all. Every mediæval palace had its chapel, which was sometimes an adjacent church communicating with the house, and in many families it is even now the custom to hear the short low Mass at a very early hour. But probably nothing can give an adequate idea of the idleness of the Middle Age, when the day was once begun. Before the Renascence, there was no such thing as study, and there were hardly any pastimes except gambling and chess, both of which the girls and youths of the Decameron seem to have included in one contemptuous condemnation when they elected to spend their time in telling stories. The younger men of the household, of course, when not actually fighting, passed a certain number of hours in the practice of horsemanship and arms; but the only real excitement they knew was in love and war, the latter including everything between the battles of the Popes and Emperors, and the street brawls of private enemies, which generally drew blood and often ended in a death. It does not appear that the idea of 'housekeeping' as the chief occupation of the Baron's wife ever entered into the Roman mind. In northern countries there has always been more equality between men and women, more respect for woman as an intelligent being, and less care for her as a valuable possession to be guarded against possible attacks from without. In Rome and the south of Italy the women in a great household were carefully separated from the men, and beyond the outer halls in which visitors were received, business transacted and politics discussed, there were closed doors, securely locked, leading to the women's apartments beyond. In every Roman palace and fortress there was a revolving 'dumb-waiter' between the women's quarters and the men's, called the 'wheel,' and used as a means of communication. Through this the household supplies were daily handed in, for the cooking was very generally done by women, and through the same machine the prepared food was passed out to the men, the wheel being so arranged that men and women could not see each other, though they might hear each other speak. To all intents and purposes the system was oriental and the women were shut up in a harem. The use of the dumb-waiter survived the revolution in manners under the Renascence, and the wheel itself remains as a curiosity of past times in more than one Roman dwelling today. It had its uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle, where such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing but fear of the Baron himself, of his sons, when they were grown up, and of his poorer kinsmen who lived with him. There were no crimes which such malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen, brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally married to respectable retainers. The position of twenty or thirty women and girls under the same roof with several hundreds of the most atrocious cutthroats of any age was undeniably such as to justify the most tyrannical measures for their protection. There are traces, even now, of the enforced privacy in which they lived. For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby the men and women occupy different parts of the house. One must try to call up the pictures of one day, to get any idea of those times; one must try and see the grey dawn stealing down the dark, unwindowed lower walls of the fortress that flanks the Church of the Holy Apostles,--the narrow and murky street below, the broad, dim space beyond, the mystery of the winding distances whence comes the first sound of the day, the far, high cry of the waterman driving his little donkey with its heavy load of water-casks. The beast stumbles along in the foul gloom, through the muddy ruts, over heaps of garbage at the corners, picking its way as best it can, till it starts with a snort and almost falls with its knees upon a dead man, whose thrice-stabbed body lies right across the way. The waterman, ragged, sandal-shod, stops, crosses himself, and drags his beast back hurriedly with a muttered exclamation of mingled horror, disgust and fear for himself, and makes for the nearest corner, stumbling along in his haste lest he should be found with the corpse and taken for the murderer. As the dawn forelightens, and the cries go up from the city, the black-hooded Brothers of Prayer and Death come in a little troop, their lantern still burning as they carry their empty stretcher, seeking for dead men; and they take up the poor nameless body and bear it away quickly from the sight of the coming day. Then, as they disappear, the great bell of the Apostles' Church begins to toll the morning Angelus, half an hour before sunrise,--three strokes, then four, then five, then one, according to ancient custom, and then after a moment's silence, the swinging peal rings out, taken up and answered from end to end of the half-wasted city. A troop of men-at-arms ride up to the great closed gate 'in rusty armour marvellous ill-favoured,' as Shakespeare's stage direction has it, mud-splashed, their brown cloaks half concealing their dark and war-worn mail, their long swords hanging down and clanking against their huge stirrups, their beasts jaded and worn and filthy from the night raid in the Campagna, or the long gallop from Palestrina. The leader pounds three times at the iron-studded door with the hilt of his dagger, a sleepy porter, grey-bearded and cloaked, slowly swings back one half of the gate and the ruffians troop in, followed by the waterman who has gone round the fortress to avoid the dead body. The gate shuts again, with a long thundering rumble. High up, wooden shutters, behind which there is no glass, are thrown open upon the courtyard, and one window after another is opened to the morning air; on one side, girls and women look out, muffled in dark shawls; from the other grim, unwashed, bearded men call down to their companions, who have dismounted and are unsaddling their weary horses, and measuring out a little water to them, where water is a thing of price. The leader goes up into the house to his master, to tell him of the night's doings, and while he speaks the Baron sits in a great wooden chair, in his long gown of heavy cloth, edged with coarse fox's fur, his feet in fur slippers, and a shabby cap upon his head, but a manly and stern figure, all the same, slowly munching a piece of toasted bread and sipping a few drops of old white wine from a battered silver cup. Then Mass in the church, the Baron, his kinsmen, the ladies and the women kneeling in the high gallery above the altar, the men-at-arms and men-servants and retainers crouching below on the stone pavement; a dusky multitude, with a gleam of steel here and there, and red flashing eyes turned up with greedy longing towards the half-veiled faces of the women, met perhaps, now and then, by a furtive answering glance from under a veil or hoodlike shawl, for every woman's head is covered, but of the men only the old lord wears his cap, which he devoutly lifts at 'Gloria Patri' and 'Verbum Caro,' and at 'Sanctus' and at the consecration. It is soon over, and the day is begun, for the sun is fully risen and streams through the open unglazed windows as the maids sprinkle water on the brick floors, and sweep and strew fresh rushes, and roll back the mattresses on the trestle beds, which are not made again till evening. In the great courtyard, the men lead out the horses and mount them bareback and ride out in a troop, each with his sword by his side, to water them at the river, half a mile away, for not a single public fountain is left in Rome; and the grooms clean out the stables, while the peasants come in from the country, driving mules laden with provisions for the great household, and far away, behind barred doors, the women light the fires in the big kitchen. Later again, the children of the noble house are taught to ride and fence in the open court; splendid boys with flowing hair, bright as gold or dark as night, dressed in rough hose and leathern jerkin, bright-eyed, fearless, masterful already in their play as a lion's whelps, watched from an upper window by their lady mother and their little sisters, and not soon tired of saddle or sword--familiar with the grooms and men by the great common instinct of fighting, but as far from vulgar as Polonius bade Laertes learn to be. So morning warms to broad noon, and hunger makes it dinner-time, and the young kinsmen who have strolled abroad come home, one of them with his hand bound up in a white rag that has drops of blood on it, for he has picked a quarrel in the street and steel has been out, as usual, though no one has been killed, because the 'bargello' and his men were in sight, down there near the Orsini's theatre-fortress. And at dinner when the priest has blessed the table, the young men laugh about the scrimmage, while the Baron himself, who has killed a dozen men in battle, with his own hand, rebukes his sons and nephews with all the useless austerity which worn-out age wears in the face of unbroken youth. The meal is long, and they eat much, for there will be nothing more till night; they eat meat broth, thick with many vegetables and broken bread and lumps of boiled meat, and there are roasted meats and huge earthen bowls of salad, and there is cheese in great blocks, and vast quantities of bread, with wine in abundance, poured for each man by the butler into little earthen jugs from big earthenware flagons. They eat from trenchers of wood, well scoured with ashes; forks they have none, and most of the men use their own knives or daggers when they are not satisfied with the carving done for them by the carver. Each man, when he has picked a bone, throws it under the table to the house-dogs lying in wait on the floor, and from time to time a basin is passed and a little water poured upon the fingers. The Baron has a napkin of his own; there is one napkin for all the other men; the women generally eat by themselves in their own apartments, the so-called 'gentlemen' in the 'tinello,' and the men-at-arms and grooms, and all the rest, in the big lower halls near the kitchens, whence their food is passed out to them through the wheel. After dinner, if it be summer and the weather hot, the gates are barred, the windows shut, and the whole household sleeps. Early or late, as the case may be, the lords and ladies and children take the air, guarded by scores of mounted men, riding towards that part of the city where they may neither meet their enemies nor catch a fever in the warm months. In rainy weather they pass the time as they can, with telling of many tales, short, dramatic and strong as the framework of a good play, with music, sometimes, and with songs, and with discussing of such news as there may be in such times. And at dusk the great bells ring to even-song, the oil lamp is swung up in the great staircase, the windows and gates are shut again, the torches and candles and little lamps are lit for supper, and at last, with rushlights, each finds the way along the ghostly corridors to bed and sleep. That was the day's round, and there was little to vary it in more peaceful times. Over all life there was the hopeless, resentful dulness that oppressed men and women till it drove them half mad, to the doing of desperate things in love and war; there was the everlasting restraint of danger without and of forced idleness within--danger so constant that it ceased to be exciting and grew tiresome, idleness so oppressive that battle, murder and sudden death were a relief from the inactivity of sluggish peace; a state in which the mind was no longer a moving power in man, but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to slash and burn the world with a history of unimaginable horror. That was the Middle Age in Italy. A poorer race would have gone down therein to a bloody destruction; but it was out of the Middle Age that the Italians were born again in the Renascence. It deserved the name. [Illustration] REGION IV CAMPO MARZO It was harvest time when the Romans at last freed themselves from the very name of Tarquin. In all the great field, between the Tiber and the City, the corn stood high and ripe, waiting for the sickle, while Brutus did justice upon his two sons, and upon the sons of his sister, and upon those 'very noble youths,' still the Tarquins' friends, who laid down their lives for their mistaken loyalty and friendship, and for whose devotion no historian has ever been brave enough, or generous enough, to say a word. It has been said that revolution is patriotism when it succeeds, treason when it fails, and in the converse, more than one brave man has died a traitor's death for keeping faith with a fallen king. Successful revolution denied those young royalists the charitable handful of earth and the four words of peace--'sit eis terra levis'--that should have laid their unquiet ghosts, and the brutal cynicism of history has handed down their names to the perpetual execration of mankind. The corn stood high in the broad field which the Tarquins had taken from Mars and had ploughed and tilled for generations. The people went out and reaped the crop, and bound it in sheaves to be threshed for the public bread, but their new masters told them that it would be impious to eat what had been meant for kings, and they did as was commanded to them, meekly, and threw all into the river. Sheaf upon sheaf, load upon load, the yellow stream swept away the yellow ears and stalks, down to the shallows, where the whole mass stuck fast, and the seeds took root in the watery mud, and the stalks rotted in great heaps, and the island of the Tiber was first raised above the level of the water. Then the people burned the stubble and gave back the land to Mars, calling it the Campus Martius, after him. There the young Romans learned the use of arms, and were taught to ride; and under sheds there stood those rows of wooden horses, upon which youths learned to vault, without step or stirrup, in their armour and sword in hand. There they ran foot-races in the clouds of dust whirled up from the dry ground, and threw the discus by the twisted thong as the young men of the hills do today, and the one who could reach the goal with the smallest number of throws was the winner,--there, under the summer sun and in the biting wind of winter, half naked, and tough as wolves, the boys of Rome laboured to grow up and be Roman men. There, also, the great assemblies were held, the public meetings and the elections, when the people voted by passing into the wooden lists that were called 'Sheepfolds,' till Julius Cæsar planned the great marble portico for voting, and Agrippa finished it, making it nearly a mile round; and behind it, on the west side, a huge space was kept open for centuries, called the Villa Publica, where the censors numbered the people. The ancient Campus took in a wide extent of land, for it included everything outside the Servian wall, from the Colline Gate to the river. All that visibly bears its name today is a narrow street that runs southward from the western end of San Lorenzo in Lucina. The Region of Campo Marzo, however, is still one of the largest in the city, including all that lies within the walls from Porta Pinciana, by Capo le Case, Via Frattina, Via di Campo Marzo and Via della Stelletta, past the Church of the Portuguese and the Palazzo Moroni,--known by Hawthorne's novel as 'Hilda's Tower,'--and thence to the banks of the Tiber. [Illustration: PIAZZA DI SPAGNA] From the Renascence until the recent extension of the city on the south and southeast, this Region was the more modern part of Rome. In the Middle Age it was held by the Colonna, who had fortified the tomb of Augustus and one or two other ruins. Later it became the strangers' quarter. The Lombards established themselves near the Church of Saint Charles, in the Corso; the English, near Saint Ives, the little church with the strange spiral tower, built against the University of the Sapienza; the Greeks lived in the Via de' Greci; the Burgundians in the Via Borgognona, and thence to San Claudio, where they had their Hospice; and so on, almost every nationality being established in a colony of its own; and the English visitors of today are still inclined to think the Piazza di Spagna the most central point of Rome, whereas to Romans it seems to be very much out of the way. The tomb of Augustus, which served as the model for the greater Mausoleum of Hadrian, dominated the Campus Martius, and its main walls are still standing, though hidden by many modern houses. The tomb of the Julian Cæsars rose on white marble foundations, a series of concentric terraces, planted with cypress trees, to the great bronze statue of Augustus that crowned the summit. Here rested the ashes of Augustus, of the young Marcellus, of Livia, of Tiberius, of Caligula, and of many others whose bodies were burned in the family Ustrinum near the tomb itself. Plundered by Alaric, and finally ruined by Robert Guiscard, when he burnt the city, it became a fortress under the Colonna, and is included, with the fortress of Monte Citorio, in a transfer of property made by one member of the family to another in the year 1252. Ruined at last, it became a bull ring in the last century and in the beginning of this one, when Leo the Twelfth forbade bull-fighting. Then it was a theatre, the scene of Salvini's early triumphs. Today it is a circus, dignified by the name of the reigning sovereign. Few people know that bull-fights were common in Rome eighty years ago. The indefatigable Baracconi once talked with the son of the last bull-fighter. So far as one may judge, it appears that during the Middle Age, and much later, it was the practice of butchers to bait animals in their own yards, before slaughtering them, in the belief that the cruel treatment made the meat more tender, and they admitted the people to see the sport. From this to a regular arena was but a step, and no more suitable place than the tomb of the Cæsars could be found for the purpose. A regular manager took possession of it, provided the victims, both bulls and Roman buffaloes, and hired the fighters. It does not appear that the beasts were killed during the entertainment, and one of the principal attractions was the riding of the maddened bull three times round the circus; savage dogs were also introduced, but in all other respects the affair was much like a Spanish bull-fight, and quite as popular; when the chosen bulls were led in from the Campagna, the Roman princes used to ride far out to meet them with long files of mounted servants in gala liveries, coming back at night in torchlight procession. And again, after the fight was over, the circus was illuminated, and there was a small display of Bengal lights, while the fashionable world of Rome met and gossiped away the evening in the arena, happily thoughtless and forgetful of all the spot had been and had meant in history. The new Rome sinks out of sight below the level of the old, as one climbs the heights of the Janiculum on the west of the city, or the gardens of the Pincio on the east. The old monuments and the old churches still rise above the dreary wastes of modern streets, and from the spot whence Messalina looked down upon the cypresses of the first Emperor's mausoleum, the traveller of today descries the cheap metallic roof which makes a circus of the ancient tomb. For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls up a tragedy of shades. Less than thirty years after Augustus had breathed out his old age in peace, Rome was ruled again by terror and blood, and the triumph of a woman's sins was the beginning of the end of the Julian race. The great historian who writes of her guesses that posterity may call the truth a fable, and tells the tale so tersely and soberly from first to last, that the strength of his words suggests a whole mystery of evil. Without Tiberius, there could have been no Messalina, nor, without her, could Nero have been possible; and the worst of the three is the woman--the archpriestess of all conceivable crime. Tacitus gives Tiberius one redeeming touch. Often the old Emperor came almost to Rome, even to the gardens by the Tiber, and then turned back to the rocks of Capri and the solitude of the sea, in mortal shame of his monstrous deeds, as if not daring to show himself in the city. With Nero, the measure was full, and the world rose and destroyed him. Messalina knew no shame, and the Romans submitted to her, and but for a court intrigue and a frightened favourite she might have lived out her life unhurt. In the eyes of the historian and of the people of her time her greatest misdeed was that while her husband Claudius, the Emperor, was alive she publicly celebrated her marriage with the handsome Silius, using all outward legal forms. Our modern laws of divorce have so far accustomed our minds to such deeds that, although we miss the legal formalities which would necessarily precede such an act in our time, we secretly wonder at the effect it produced upon the men of that day, and are inclined to smile at the epithets of 'impious' and 'sacrilegious' which it called down upon Messalina, whose many other frightful crimes had elicited much more moderate condemnation. Claudius, himself no novice or beginner in horrors, hesitated long after he knew the truth, and it was the favourite Narcissus who took upon himself to order the Empress' death. Euodus, his freedman, and a tribune of the guard were sent to make an end of her. Swiftly they went up to the gardens--the gardens of the Pincian--and there they found her, beautiful, dark, dishevelled, stretched upon the marble floor, her mother Lepida crouching beside her, her mother, who in the bloom of her daughter's evil life had turned from her, but in her extreme need was overcome with pity. There knelt Domitia Lepida, urging the terror-mad woman not to wait the executioner, since life was over and nothing remained but to lend death the dignity of suicide. But the dishonoured self was empty of courage, and long-drawn weeping choked her useless lamentations. Then suddenly the doors were flung open with a crash, and the stern tribune stood silent in the hall, while the freedman Euodus screamed out curses, after the way of triumphant slaves. From her mother's hand the lost Empress took the knife at last and trembling laid it to her breast and throat, with weakly frantic fingers that could not hurt herself; the silent tribune killed her with one straight thrust, and when they brought the news to Claudius sitting at supper, and told him that Messalina had perished, his face did not change, and he said nothing as he held out his cup to be filled. [Illustration: PIAZZA DEL POPOLO] She died somewhere on the Pincian hill. Romance would choose the spot exactly where the nunnery of the Sacred Heart stands, at the Trinità de' Monti, looking down De Sanctis' imposing 'Spanish' steps; and the house in which the noble girls of modern Rome are sent to school may have risen upon the foundations of Messalina's last abode. Or it may be that the place was further west, in the high grounds of the French Academy, or on the site of the academy itself, at the gates of the public garden, just where the old stone fountain bubbles and murmurs under the shade of the thick ilex trees. Most of that land once belonged to Lucullus, the conqueror of Mithridates, the Academic philosopher, the arch feaster, and the man who first brought cherries to Italy. [Illustration: TRINITÀ DE' MONTI] The last descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a woman who had loved him. And during ten centuries the people believed that his terrible ghost haunted the hill, attended and served by thousands of demon crows that rested in the branches of the trees about his tomb, and flew forth to do evil at his bidding, till at last Pope Paschal the Second cut down with his own hands the walnut trees which crowned the summit, and commanded that the mausoleum should be destroyed, and the ashes of Nero scattered to the winds, that he might build a parish church on the spot and dedicate it to Saint Mary. It is said, too, that the Romans took the marble urn in which the ashes had been, and used it as a public measure for salt in the old market-place of the Capitol. A number of the rich Romans of the Renascence afterwards contributed money to the restoration of the church and built themselves chapels within it, as tombs for their descendants, so that it is the burial-place of many of those wealthy families that settled in Rome and took possession of the Corso when the Barons still held the less central parts of the city with their mediæval fortresses. Sixtus the Fourth and Julius the Second are buried in Saint Peter's, but their chapel was here, and here lie others of the della Rovere race, and many of the Chigi and Pallavicini and Theodoli; and here, in strange coincidence, Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the Popes, erected a high altar on the very spot where the worst of the Emperors had been buried. It is gone now, but the strange fact is not forgotten. Far across the beautiful square, at the entrance to the Corso, twin churches seem to guard the way like sentinels, built, it is said, to replace two chapels which once stood at the head of the bridge of Sant' Angelo; demolished because, when Rome was sacked by the Constable of Bourbon, they had been held as important points by the Spanish soldiers in besieging the Castle, and it was not thought wise to leave such useful outworks for any possible enemy in the future. Alexander the Seventh, the Chigi Pope, died, and left the work unfinished; and a folk story tells how a poor old woman who lived near by saved what she could for many years, and, dying, left one hundred and fifty scudi to help the completion of the buildings; and Cardinal Gastaldi, who had been refused the privilege of placing his arms upon a church which he had desired to build in Bologna, and was looking about for an opportunity of perpetuating his name, finished the two churches, his attention having been first called to them by the old woman's humble bequest. As for the Pincio itself, and the ascent to it from the Piazza del Popolo, all that land was but a grass-grown hillside, crowned by a few small and scattered villas and scantily furnished with trees, until the beginning of the present century; and the public gardens of the earlier time were those of the famous and beautiful Villa Medici, which Napoleon the First bestowed upon the French Academy. It was there that the fashionable Romans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used to meet, and walk, and be carried about in gilded sedan-chairs, and flirt, and gossip, and exchange views on politics and opinions about the latest scandal. That was indeed a very strange society, further from us in many ways than the world of the Renascence, or even of the Crusades; for the Middle Age was strong in the sincerity of its beliefs, as we are powerful in the cynicism of our single-hearted faith in riches; but the fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was founded upon the abuse of an already declining power; it was built up in the most extraordinary and elaborate affectation, and it was guarded by a system of dissimulation which outdid that of our own day by many degrees, and possibly surpassed the hypocrisy of any preceding age. No one, indeed, can successfully uphold the idea that the high development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong growth of religion or moral conviction. Perugino made no secret of being an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation, lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result of a faith that has been, since although it is possible to conceive of religion without art, it is out of the question to think of art as a whole, without a religious origin; and as the majority of writers find it easier to describe scenes and emotions, when a certain lapse of time has given them what painters call atmospheric perspective, so the Renascence began when memory already clothed the ferocious realism of mediæval Christianity in the softer tones of gentle chivalry and tender romance. It is often said, half in jest, that, in order to have intellectual culture, a man must at least have forgotten Latin, if he cannot remember it, because the fact of having learned it leaves something behind that cannot be acquired in any other way. Similarly, I think that art of all sorts has reached its highest level in successive ages when it has aimed at recalling, by an illusion, a once vivid reality from a not too distant past. And so when it gives itself up to the realism of the present, it impresses the senses rather than the thoughts, and misses its object, which is to bring within our mental reach what is beyond our physical grasp; and when, on the other hand, it goes back too far, it fails in execution, because its models are not only out of sight, but out of mind, and it cannot touch us because we can no longer feel even a romantic interest in the real or imaginary events which it attempts to describe. The subject is too high to be lightly touched, and too wide to be touched more than lightly here; but in this view of it may perhaps be found some explanation of the miserable poverty of Italian art in the eighteenth century, foreshadowed by the decadence of the seventeenth, which again is traceable to the dissipation of force and the disappearance of individuality that followed the Renascence, as inevitably as old age follows youth. Besides all necessary gifts of genius, the development of art seems to require that a race should not only have leisure for remembering, but should also have something to remember which may be worthy of being recalled and perhaps of being imitated. Progress may be the road to wealth and health, and to such happiness as may be derived from both; but the advance of civilization is the path of thought, and its landmarks are not inventions nor discoveries, but those very great creations of the mind which ennoble the heart in all ages; and as the idea of progress is inseparable from that of growing riches, so is the true conception of civilization indivisible from thoughts of beauty and nobility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy had almost altogether lost sight of these; art was execrable, fashion was hideous, morality meant hypocrisy; the surest way to power lay in the most despicable sort of intrigue, and inward and spiritual faith was as rare as outward and visible devoutness was general. That was the society which frequented the Villa Medici on fine afternoons, and it is hard to see wherein its charm lay, if, indeed, it had any. Instead of originality, its conversation teemed with artificial conventionalisms; instead of nature, it exhibited itself in the disguise of fashions more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly nonsensical 'pastoral' verses which we find too silly to read; and in place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical austerity which marked England's ascent, from the death of Edward the Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her long struggle for life. It had little which we are accustomed to respect in men and women, and yet it had something which we lack today, and which we unconsciously envy--it had a colour of its own. Wandering under the ancient ilexes of those sad and beautiful gardens, meeting here and there a few silent and soberly clad strangers, one cannot but long for the brilliancy of two centuries ago, when the walks were gay with brilliant dresses, and gilded chairs, and servants in liveries of scarlet and green and gold, and noble ladies, tottering a few steps on their ridiculous high heels, and men bewigged and becurled, their useless little hats under their arms, and their embroidered coat tails flapping against their padded, silk-stockinged calves; and red-legged, unpriestly Cardinals who were not priests even in name, but only the lay life-peers of the Church; and grave Bishops with their secretaries; and laughing abbés, whose clerical dress was the accustomed uniform of government office, which they still wore when they were married, and were fathers of families. There is little besides colour to recommend the picture, but at least there is that. The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward, and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the Trinità de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged. Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there, calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle, full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the abbé's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that extinct world. [Illustration: VILLA MEDICI] Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be. Ignorance, tradition, imagination, romance,--call it what you will,--has chosen the long-closed Pincian Gate for the last station of blind Belisarius. There, says the tale, the ancient conqueror, the banisher and maker of Popes, the favourite and the instrument of imperial Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened the gates of Rome to Belisarius; and how he was led into the great hall where the warrior's wife, Theodora's friend, the beautiful and evil Antonina, lay with half-closed eyes upon her splendid couch, while Belisarius sat beside her feet, toying with her jewels. There the husband and wife accused the Pope, and judged him without hearing, and condemned him without right; and they caused him to be stripped of his robes, and clad as a poor monk and driven out to far exile, that they might set up the Empress Theodora's Pope in his place; and with him they drove out many Roman nobles. And it is said that when Silverius was dead of a broken heart in the little island of Palmaria, Belisarius repented of his deeds and built the small Church of Santa Maria de' Crociferi, behind the fountain of Trevi, in partial expiation of his fault, and there, to prove the truth of the story, the tablet that tells of his repentance has stood nearly fourteen hundred years and may be read today, on the east wall, towards the Via de' Poli. The man who conquered Africa for Justinian, seized Sicily, took Rome, defended it successfully against the Goths, reduced Ravenna, took Rome from the Goths again, and finally rescued Constantinople, was disgraced more than once; but he was not blinded, nor did he die in exile or in prison, for at the end he breathed his last in the enjoyment of his freedom and his honours; and the story of his blindness is the fabrication of an ignorant Greek monk who lived six hundred years later and confounded Justinian's great general with the romantic and unhappy John of Cappadocia, who lived at the same time, was a general at the same time, and incurred the displeasure of that same pious, proud, avaricious Theodora, actress, penitent and Empress, whose paramount beauty held the Emperor in thrall for life, and whose surpassing cruelty imprinted an indelible seal of horror upon his glorious reign--of her who, when she delivered a man to death, admonished the executioner with an oath, saying, 'By Him who liveth for ever, if thou failest, I will cause thee to be flayed alive.' Another figure rises at the window of the Tuscan Ambassador's great villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance have wrongly crowned as a martyr--Galileo Galilei. Tradition represents him as languishing, laden with chains, in the more or less mythical prisons of the Inquisition; history tells very plainly that his first confinement consisted in being the honoured guest of the Tuscan Ambassador in the latter's splendid residence in Rome, and that his last imprisonment was a relegation to the beautiful castle of the Piccolomini near Siena, than which the heart of man could hardly desire a more lovely home. History affirms beyond doubt, moreover, that Galileo was the personal friend of that learned and not illiberal Barberini, Pope Urban the Eighth, under whose long reign the Copernican system was put on trial, who believed in that system as Galileo did, who read his books and talked with him; and who, when the stupid technicalities of the ecclesiastic courts declared the laws of the universe to be nonsense, gave his voice against the decision, though he could not officially annul it without scandal. 'It was not my intention,' said the Pope in the presence of witnesses, 'to condemn Galileo. If the matter had depended upon me, the decree of the Index which condemned his doctrines should never have been pronounced.' That Galileo's life was saddened by the result of the absurd trial, and that he was nominally a prisoner for a long time, is not to be denied. But that he suffered the indignities and torments recorded in legend is no more true than that Belisarius begged his bread at the Porta Pinciana. He lived in comfort and in honour with the Ambassador in the Villa Medici, and many a time from those lofty windows, unchanged since before his day, he must have watched the earth turning with him from the sun at evening, and meditated upon the emptiness of the ancient phrase that makes the sun 'set' when the day is done--thinking of the world, perhaps, as turning upon its other side, with tired eyes, and ready for rest and darkness and refreshment, after long toil and heat. * * * * * One may stand under those old trees before the Villa Medici, beside the ancient fountain facing Saint Peter's distant dome, and dream the great review of history, and call up a vast, changing picture at one's feet between the heights and the yellow river. First, the broad corn-field of the Tarquin Kings, rich and ripe under the evening breeze of summer that runs along swiftly, bending the golden surface in soft moving waves from the Tiber's edge to the foot of the wooded slope. Then, the hurried harvesting, the sheaves cast into the river, the dry, stiff stubble baking in the sun, and presently the men of Rome coming forth in procession from the dark Servian wall on the left to dedicate the field to the War God with prayer and chant and smoking sacrifice. By and by the stubble trodden down under horses' hoofs, the dusty plain the exercising ground of young conquerors, the voting place, later, of a strong Republic, whither the centuries went out to choose their consuls, to decide upon peace or war, to declare the voice of the people in grave matters, while the great signal flag waved on the Janiculum, well in sight though far away, to fall suddenly at the approach of any foe and suspend the 'comitia' on the instant. And in the flat and dusty plain, buildings begin to rise; first, the Altar of Mars and the holy place of the infernal gods, Dis and Proserpine; later, the great 'Sheepfold,' the lists and hustings for the voting, and, encroaching a little upon the training ground, the temple of Venus Victorious and the huge theatre of Pompey, wherein the Orsini held their own so long; but in the times of Lucullus, when his gardens and his marvellous villa covered the Pincian hill, the plain was still a wide field, and still the field of Mars, without the walls, broken by few landmarks, and trodden to deep white dust by the scampering hoofs of half-drilled cavalry. Under the Emperors, then, first beautified in part, as Cæsar traces the great Septa for the voting, and Augustus erects the Altar of Peace and builds up his cypress-clad tomb, crowned by his own image, and Agrippa raises his triple temple, and Hadrian builds the Pantheon upon its ruins, while the obelisk that now stands on Monte Citorio before the House of Parliament points out the brass-figured hours on the broad marble floor of the first Emperor's sun-clock and marks the high noon of Rome's glory--and the Portico of Neptune and many other splendid works spring up. Isis and Serapis have a temple next, and Domitian's race-course appears behind Agrippa's Baths, straight and white. By and by the Antonines raise columns and triumphal arches, but always to southward, leaving the field of Mars a field still, for its old uses, and the tired recruits, sweating from exercise, gather under the high shade of Augustus' tomb at midday for an hour's rest. Last of all, the great temple of the Sun, with its vast portico, and the Mithræum at the other end, and when the walls of Aurelian are built, and when ruin comes upon Rome from the north, the Campus Martius is still almost an open stretch of dusty earth on which soldiers have learned their trade through a thousand years of hard training. Not till the poor days when the waterless, ruined city sends its people down from the heights to drink of the muddy stream does Campo Marzo become a town, and then, around the castle-tomb of the Colonna and the castle-theatre of the Orsini the wretched houses begin to rise here and there, thickening to a low, dark forest of miserable dwellings threaded through and through, up and down and crosswise, by narrow and crooked streets, out of which by degrees the lofty churches and palaces of the later age are to spring up. From a training ground it has become a fighting ground, a labyrinth of often barricaded ways and lanes, deeper and darker towards the water-gates cut in the wall that runs along the Tiber, from Porta del Popolo nearly to the island of Saint Bartholomew, and almost all that is left of Rome is crowded and huddled into the narrow pen overshadowed and dominated here and there by black fortresses and brown brick towers. The man who then might have looked down from the Pincian hill would have seen that sight; houses little better than those of the poorest mountain village in the Southern Italy of today, black with smoke, black with dirt, blacker with patches made by shadowy windows that had no glass. A silent town, too, surly and defensive; now and then the call of the water-carrier disturbs the stillness, more rarely, the cry of a wandering peddler; and sometimes a distant sound of hoofs, a far clash of iron and steel, and the echoing yell of furious fighting men--'Orsini!' 'Colonna!'--the long-drawn syllables coming up distinct through the evening air to the garden where Messalina died, while the sun sets red behind the spire of old Saint Peter's across the river, and gilds the huge girth of dark Sant' Angelo to a rusty red, like battered iron bathed in blood. Back come the Popes from Avignon, and streets grow wider and houses cleaner and men richer--all for the Bourbon's Spaniards to sack, and burn, and destroy before the last city grows up, and the rounded domes raise their helmet-like heads out of the chaos, and the broad Piazza del Popolo is cleared, and old Saint Peter's goes down in dust to make way for the Cathedral of all Christendom as it stands. Then far away, on Saint Peter's evening, when it is dusk, the great dome, and the small domes, and the colonnades, and the broad façade are traced in silver lights that shine out quietly as the air darkens. The solemn bells toll the first hour of the June night; the city is hushed, and all at once the silver lines are turned to gold, as the red flame runs in magic change from the topmost cross down the dome, in rivers, to the roof, and the pillars and the columns of the square below--the grandest illumination of the grandest church the world has ever seen. [Illustration] REGION V PONTE The Region of Ponte, 'the Bridge,' takes its name from the ancient Triumphal Bridge which led from the city to the Vatican Fields, and at low water some fragments of the original piers may be seen in the river at the bend just below Ponte Sant' Angelo, between the Church of Saint John of the Florentines on the one bank, and the Hospital of Santo Spirito on the other. In the Middle Age, according to Baracconi and others, the broken arches still extended into the stream, and upon them was built a small fortress, the outpost of the Orsini on that side. The device, however, appears to represent a portion of the later Bridge of Sant' Angelo, built upon the foundations of the Ælian Bridge of Hadrian, which connected his tomb with the Campus Martius. The Region consists of the northwest point of the city, bounded by the Tiber, from Monte Brianzo round the bend, and down stream to the new Lungara bridge, and on the land side by a very irregular line running across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, close to the Chiesa Nuova, and then eastward and northward in a zigzag, so as to take in most of the fortresses of the Orsini family, Monte Giordano, Tor Millina, Tor Sanguigna, and the now demolished Torre di Nona. The Sixth and Seventh Regions adjacent to the Fifth and to each other would have to be included in order to take in all that part of Rome once held by the only family that rivalled, and sometimes surpassed, the Colonna in power. As has been said before, the original difference between the two was that the Colonna were Ghibellines and for the Emperors, while the Orsini were Guelphs and generally adhered to the Popes. In the violent changes of the Middle Age, it happened indeed that the Colonna had at least one Pope of their own, and that more than one, such as Nicholas the Fourth, favoured their race to the point of exciting popular indignation. But, on the whole, they kept to their parties. When Lewis the Bavarian was to be crowned by force, Sciarra Colonna crowned him; when Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg had come to Rome for the same purpose, a few years earlier, the Orsini had been obliged to be satisfied with a sort of second-rate coronation at Saint John Lateran's; and when the struggle between the two families was at its height, nearly two centuries later, and Sixtus the Fourth 'assumed the part of mediator,' as the chronicle expresses it, one of his first acts of mediation was to cut off the head of a Colonna, and his next was to lay regular siege to the strongholds of the family in the Roman hills; but before he had brought this singular process of mediation to an issue he suddenly died, the Colonna returned to their dwellings in Rome 'with great clamour and triumph,' got the better of the Orsini, and proceeded to elect a Pope after their own hearts, in the person of Cardinal Cibo, of Genoa, known as Innocent the Eighth. He it is who lies under the beautiful bronze monument in the inner left aisle of Saint Peter's, which shows him holding in his hand a model of the spear-head that pierced Christ's side, a relic believed to have been sent to the Pope as a gift by Sultan Bajazet the Second. The origin of the hatred between Colonna and Orsini is unknown, for the archives of the former have as yet thrown no light upon the subject, and those of the latter were almost entirely destroyed by fire in the last century. In the year 1305, Pope Clement the Fifth was elected Pope at Perugia. He was a Frenchman, and was Archbishop of Bordeaux, the candidate of Philip the Fair, whose tutor had been a Colonna, and he was chosen by the opposing factions of two Orsini cardinals because the people of Perugia were tired of a quarrel that had lasted eleven months, and had adopted the practical and always infallible expedient of deliberately starving the conclave to a vote. Muratori calls it a scandalous and illicit election, which brought about the ruin of Italy and struck a memorable blow at the power of the Holy See. Though not a great man, Philip the Fair was one of the cleverest that ever lived. Before the election he had made his bishop swear upon the Sacred Host to accept his conditions, without expressing them all; and the most important proved to be the transference of the Papal See to France. The new Pope obeyed his master, established himself in Avignon, and the King to all intents and purposes had taken the Pontificate captive and lost no time in using it for his own ends against the Empire, his hereditary foe. Such, in a few words, is the history of that memorable transaction; and but for the previous quarrels of Colonna, Caetani and Orsini, it could never have taken place. The Orsini repented bitterly of what they had done, for one of Clement the Fifth's first acts was to 'annul altogether all sentences whatsoever pronounced against the Colonna.' But the Pope being gone, the Barons had Rome in their power and used it for a battlefield. Four years later, we find in Villani the first record of a skirmish fought between Orsini and Colonna. In the month of October, 1309, says the chronicler, certain of the Orsini and of the Colonna met outside the walls of Rome with their followers, to the number of four hundred horse, and fought together, and the Colonna won; and there died the Count of Anguillara, and six of the Orsini were taken, and Messer Riccardo degli Annibaleschi who was in their company. Three years afterwards, Henry of Luxemburg alternately feasted and fought his way to Rome to be crowned Emperor in spite of Philip the Fair, the Tuscan league and Robert, King of Naples, who sent a thousand horsemen out of the south to hinder the coronation. In a day Rome was divided into two great camps. Colonna held for the Emperor the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, the Colosseum, the Torre delle Milizie,--the brick tower on the lower part of the modern Via Nazionale,--the Pantheon, as an advanced post in one direction, and Santa Sabina, a church that was almost a fortress, on the south, by the Tiber,--a chain of fortresses which would be formidable in any modern revolution. Against Henry, however, the Orsini held the Vatican and Saint Peter's, the Castle of Sant' Angelo and all Trastevere, their fortresses in the Region of Ponte, and, moreover, the Capitol itself. The parties were well matched, for, though Henry entered Rome on the seventh of May, the struggle lasted till the twenty-ninth of June. Those who have seen revolutions can guess at the desperate fighting in the barricaded streets, and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment. Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it all again--the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, nobles and bishops, with visors down, and long swords and maces in their hands, the high, fierce cries of the light-armed footmen, the bowmen and the slingers, the roar of the rabble rout behind, the shrill voices of women at upper windows, peering down for the face of brother, husband, or lover in the dashing press below,--the dust, the heat, the fierce June sunshine blazing on broad steel, and the deep, black shadows putting out all light as the bands rush past. Then, on a sudden, the answering shout of the Orsini, the standard of the Bear, the Bourbon lilies of Anjou, the scarlet and white colours of the Guelph house, the great black horses, and the dark mail--the enemies surging together in the street like swift rivers of loose iron meeting in a stone channel, with a rending crash and the quick hammering of steel raining desperate blows on steel--horses rearing their height, footmen crushed, knights reeling in the saddle, sparks flying, steel-clad arms and long swords whirling in great circles through the air. Foremost of all in fight the Bishop of Liège, his purple mantle flying back from his corselet, trampling down everything, sworn to win the barricade or die, riding at it like a madman, forcing his horse up to it over the heaps of quivering bodies that made a causeway, leaping it alone at last, like a demon in air, and standing in the thick of the Orsini, slaying to right and left. In an instant they had him down and bound and prisoner, one man against a thousand; and they fastened him behind a man-at-arms, on the crupper, to take him into Sant' Angelo alive. But a soldier, whose brother he had slain a moment earlier, followed stealthily on foot and sought the joint in the back of the armour, and ran in his pike quickly, and killed him--'whereof,' says the chronicle, 'was great pity, for the Bishop was a man of high courage and authority.' But on the other side of the barricade, those who had followed him so far, and lost him, felt their hearts sink, for not one of them could do what he had done; and after that, though they fought a whole month longer, they had but little hope of ever getting to the Vatican. So the Colonna took Henry up to the Lateran, where they were masters, and he was crowned there by three cardinals in the Pope's stead, while the Orsini remained grimly intrenched in their own quarter, and each party held its own, even after Henry had prudently retired to Tivoli, in the hills. [Illustration: ISLAND IN THE TIBER] At last the great houses made a truce and a compromise, by which they attempted to govern Rome jointly, and chose Sciarra--the same who had taken Pope Boniface prisoner in Anagni--and Matteo Orsini of Monte Giordano, to be Senators together; and there was peace between them for a time, in the year in which Rienzi was born. But in that very year, as though foreshadowing his destiny, the rabble of Rome rose up, and chose a dictator; and somehow, by surprise or treachery, he got possession of the Barons' chief fortresses, and of Sant' Angelo, and set up the standard of terror against the nobles. In a few days he sacked and burned their strongholds, and the high and mighty lords who had made the reigning Pope, and had fought to an issue for the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, were conquered, humiliated and imprisoned by an upstart plebeian of Trastevere. The portcullis of Monte Giordano was lifted, and the mysterious gates were thrown wide to the curiosity of a populace drunk with victory; Giovanni degli Stefaneschi issued edicts of sovereign power from the sacred precincts of the Capitol; and the vagabond thieves of Rome feasted in the lordly halls of the Colonna palace. But though the tribune and the people could seize Rome, outnumbering the nobles as ten to one, they had neither the means nor the organization to besiege the fortified towns of the great houses, which hemmed in the city and the Campagna on every side. Thither the nobles retired to recruit fresh armies among their retainers, to forge new swords in their own smithies, and to concert new plans for recovering their ancient domination; and thence they returned in their strength, from their towers and their towns and fortresses, from Palestrina and Subiaco, Genazzano, San Vito and Paliano on the south, and from Bracciano and Galera and Anguillara, and all the Orsini castles on the north, to teach the people of Rome the great truth of those days, that 'aristocracy' meant not the careless supremacy of the nobly born, but the power of the strongest hands and the coolest heads to take and hold. Back came Colonna and Orsini, and the people, who a few months earlier had acclaimed their dictator in a fit of justifiable ill-temper against their masters, opened the gates for the nobles again, and no man lifted a hand to help Giovanni degli Stefaneschi, when the men-at-arms bound him and dragged him off to prison. Strange to say, no further vengeance was taken upon him, and for once in their history, the nobles shed no blood in revenge for a mortal injury. No man could count the tragedies that swept over the Region of Ponte from the first outbreak of war between the Orsini and the Colonna, till Paolo Giordano Orsini, the last of the elder branch, breathed out his life in exile under the ban of Sixtus the Fifth, three hundred years later. There was no end of them till then, and there was little interruption of them while they lasted; there is no stone left standing from those days in that great quarter that may not have been splashed with their fierce blood, nor is there, perhaps, a church or chapel within their old holding into which an Orsini has not been borne dead or dying from some deadly fight. Even today it is gloomy, and the broad modern street, which swept down a straight harvest of memories through the quarter to the very Bridge of Sant' Angelo, has left the mediæval shadows on each side as dark as ever. Of the three parts of the city, which still recall the Middle Age most vividly, namely, the neighbourhood of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the first Region, the by-ways of Trastevere and the Region of Ponte, the latter is by far the most interesting. It was the abode of the Orsini; it was also the chief place of business for the bankers and money-changers who congregated there under the comparatively secure protection of the Guelph lords; and it was the quarter of prisons, of tortures, and of executions both secret and public. The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the 'Church of the Gallows'; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other words, the Executioner himself. Before the Castle of Sant' Angelo stood the permanent gallows, rarely long unoccupied, and from an upper window of the dark Torre di Nona, on the hither side of the bridge, a rope hung swinging slowly in the wind, sometimes with a human body at the end of it, sometimes without. It was the place, and that was the manner, of executions that took place in the night. In Via di Monserrato stood the old fortress of the Savelli, long ago converted into a prison, and called the Corte Savella, the most terrible of all Roman dungeons for the horror of damp darkness, for ever associated with Beatrice Cenci's trial and death. Through those very streets she was taken in the cart to the little open space before the bridge, where she laid down her life upon the scaffold three hundred years ago, and left her story of offended innocence, of revenge and of expiation, which will not be forgotten while Rome is remembered. Beatrice Cenci's story has been often told, but nowhere more clearly and justly than in Shelley's famous letter, written to explain his play. There are several manuscript accounts of the last scene at the Ponte Sant' Angelo, and I myself have lately read one, written by a contemporary and not elsewhere mentioned, but differing only from the rest in the horrible realism with which the picture is presented. The truth is plain enough; the unspeakable crimes of Francesco Cenci, his more than inhuman cruelty to his children and his wives, his monstrous lust and devilish nature, outdo anything to be found in any history of the world, not excepting the private lives of Tiberius, Nero, or Commodus. His daughter and his second wife killed him in his sleep. His death was merciful and swift, in an age when far less crimes were visited with tortures at the very name of which we shudder. They were driven to absolute desperation, and the world has forgiven them their one quick blow, struck for freedom, for woman's honour and for life itself in the dim castle of Petrella. Tormented with rack and cord they all confessed the deed, save Beatrice, whom no bodily pain could move; and if Paolo Santacroce had not murdered his mother for her money before their death was determined, Clement the Eighth would have pardoned them. But the times were evil, an example was called for, Santacroce had escaped to Brescia, and the Pope's heart was hardened against the Cenci. [Illustration: BRIDGE OF SANT' ANGELO] They died bravely, there at the head of the bridge, in the calm May morning, in the midst of a vast and restless crowd, among whom more than one person was killed by accident, as by the falling of a pot of flowers from a high window, and by the breaking down of a balcony over a shop, where too many had crowded in to see. The old house opposite looked down upon the scene, and the people watched Beatrice Cenci die from those same arched windows. Above the sea of faces, high on the wooden scaffold, rises the tall figure of a lovely girl, her hair gleaming in the sunshine like threads of dazzling gold, her marvellous blue eyes turned up to Heaven, her fresh young dimpled face not pale with fear, her exquisite lips moving softly as she repeats the De Profundis of her last appeal to God. Let the axe not fall. Let her stand there for ever in the spotless purity that cost her life on earth and set her name for ever among the high constellated stars of maidenly romance. Close by the bridge, just opposite the Torre di Nona, stood the 'Lion Inn,' once kept by the beautiful Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Rodrigo Borgia's children, of Cæsar, and Gandia, and Lucrezia, and the place was her property still when she was nominally married to her second husband, Carlo Canale, the keeper of the prison across the way. In the changing vicissitudes of the city, the Torre di Nona made way for the once famous Apollo Theatre, built upon the lower dungeons and foundations, and Faust's demon companion rose to the stage out of the depths that had heard the groans of tortured criminals; the theatre itself disappeared a few years ago in the works for improving the Tiber's banks, and a name is all that remains of a fact that made men tremble. In the late destruction, the old houses opposite were not altogether pulled down, but were sliced, as it were, through their roofs and rooms, at a safe angle; and there, no doubt, are still standing portions of Vanozza's inn, while far below, the cellars where she kept her wine free of excise, by papal privilege, are still as cool and silent as ever. Not far beyond her hostelry stands another Inn, famous from early days and still open to such travellers as deign to accept its poor hospitality. It is an inn for the people now, for wine carters, and the better sort of hill peasants; it was once the best and most fashionable in Rome, and there the great Montaigne once dwelt, and is believed to have written at least a part of his famous Essay on Vanity. It is the Albergo dell' Orso, the 'Bear Inn,' and perhaps it is not a coincidence that Vanozza's sign of the Lion should have faced the approach to the Leonine City beyond the Tiber, and that the sign of the Bear, 'The Orsini Arms,' as an English innkeeper would christen it, should have been the principal resort of the kind in a quarter which was three-fourths the property and altogether the possession of the great house that overshadowed it, from Monte Giordano on the one side, and from Pompey's Theatre on the other. The temporary fall of the Orsini at the end of the sixteenth century came about by one of the most extraordinary concatenations of events to be found in the chronicles. The story has filled more than one volume and is nevertheless very far from complete; nor is it possible, since the destruction of the Orsini archives, to reconstruct it with absolute accuracy. Briefly told, it is this. Felice Peretti, monk and Cardinal of Montalto, and still nominally one of the so-called 'poor cardinals' who received from the Pope a daily allowance known as 'the Dish,' had nevertheless accumulated a good deal of property before he became Pope under the name of Sixtus the Fifth, and had brought some of his relatives to Rome. Among these was his well beloved nephew, Francesco Peretti, for whom he naturally sought an advantageous marriage. There was at that time in Rome a notary, named Accoramboni, a native of the Marches of Ancona and a man of some wealth and of good repute. He had one daughter, Vittoria, a girl of excessive vanity, as ambitious as she was vain and as singularly beautiful as she was ambitious. But she was also clever in a remarkable degree, and seems to have had no difficulty in hiding her bad qualities. Francesco Peretti fell in love with her, the Cardinal approved the match, though he was a man not easily deceived, and the two were married and settled in the Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal, devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having been deceived in his judgment of a girl's character. So far, there is nothing not commonplace about the tale. At that time Paolo Giordano Orsini, the head of the house, Duke of Bracciano and lord of a hundred domains, was one of the greatest personages in Italy. No longer young and already enormously fat, he was married to Isabella de' Medici, the daughter of Cosimo, reigning in Florence. She was a beautiful and evil woman, and those who have endeavoured to make a martyr of her forget the nameless doings of her youth. Giordano was weak and extravagant, and paid little attention to his wife. She consoled herself with his kinsman, the young and handsome Troilo Orsini, who was as constantly at her side as an official 'cavalier servente' of later days. But the fat Giordano, indolent and pleasure seeking, saw nothing. Nor is there anything much more than vulgar and commonplace in all this. Paolo Giordano meets Vittoria Peretti in Rome, and the two commonplaces begin the tragedy. On his part, love at first sight; ridiculous, at first, when one thinks of his vast bulk and advancing years, terrible, by and by, as the hereditary passions of his fierce race could be, backed by the almost boundless power which a great Italian lord possessed in his surroundings. Vittoria, tired of her dull and virtuous husband and of the lectures and parsimony of his uncle, and not dreaming that the latter was soon to be Pope, saw herself in a dream of glory controlling every mood and action of the greatest noble in the land. And she met Giordano again and again, and he pleaded and implored, and was alternately ridiculous and almost pathetic in his hopeless passion for the notary's daughter. But she had no thought of yielding to his entreaties. She would have marriage, or nothing. Neither words nor gifts could move her. She had a husband, he had a wife; and she demanded that he should marry her, and was grimly silent as to the means. Until she was married to him he should not so much as touch the tips of her jewelled fingers, nor have a lock of her hair to wear in his bosom. He was blindly in love, and he was Paolo Giordano Orsini. It was not likely that he should hesitate. He who had seen nothing of his wife's doings, suddenly saw his kinsman, Troilo, and Isabella was doomed. Troilo fled to Paris, and Orsini took Isabella from Bracciano to the lonely castle of Galera. There he told her his mind and strangled her, as was his right, being feudal lord and master with powers of life and death. Then from Bracciano he sent messengers to kill Francesco Peretti. One of them had a slight acquaintance with the Cardinal's nephew. They came to the Villa Negroni by night, and called him out, saying that his best friend was in need of him, and was waiting for him at Monte Cavallo. He hesitated, for it was very late. They had torches and weapons, and would protect him, they said. Still he wavered. Then Vittoria, his wife, scoffed at him, and called him coward, and thrust him out to die; for she knew. The men walked beside him with their torches, talking as they went. They passed the deserted land in the Baths of Diocletian, and turned at Saint Bernard's Church to go towards the Quirinal. Then they put out the lights and killed him quickly in the dark. His body lay there all night, and when it was told the next day that Montalto's nephew had been murdered, the two men said that they had left him at Monte Cavallo and that he must have been killed as he came home alone. The Cardinal buried him without a word, and though he guessed the truth he asked neither vengeance nor justice of the Pope. [Illustration: VILLA NEGRONI From a print of the last century] Gregory the Thirteenth guessed it, too, and when Orsini would have married Vittoria, the Pope forbade the banns and interdicted their union for ever. That much he dared to do against the greatest peer in the country. To this, Orsini replied by plighting his faith to Vittoria with a ring, in the presence of a serving woman, an irregular ceremony which he afterwards described as a marriage, and he thereupon took his bride and her mother under his protection. The Pope retorted by a determined effort to arrest the murderers of Francesco; the Bargello and his men went in the evening to the Orsini palace at Pompey's Theatre and demanded that Giordano should give up the criminals; the porter replied that the Duke was asleep; the Orsini men-at-arms lunged out with their weapons, looked on during the interview, and considering the presence of the Bargello derogatory to their master, drove him away, killing one of his men and wounding several others. Thereupon Pope Gregory forbade the Duke from seeing Vittoria or communicating with her by messengers, on pain of a fine of ten thousand gold ducats, an order to which Orsini would have paid no attention but which Vittoria was too prudent to disregard, and she retired to her brother's house, leaving the Duke in a state of frenzied rage that threatened insanity. Then the Pope seemed to waver again, and then again learning that the lovers saw each other constantly in spite of his commands, he suddenly had Vittoria seized and imprisoned in Sant' Angelo. It is impossible to follow the long struggle that ensued. It lasted four years, at the end of which time the Duke and Vittoria were living at Bracciano, where the Orsini was absolute lord and master and beyond the jurisdiction of the Church--two hours' ride from the gates of Rome. But no further formality of marriage had taken place and Vittoria was not satisfied. Then Gregory the Thirteenth died. During the vacancy of the Holy See, all interdictions of the late Pope were suspended. Instantly Giordano determined to be married, and came to Rome with Vittoria. They believed that the Conclave would last some time and were making their arrangements without haste, living in Pompey's Theatre, when a messenger brought word that Cardinal Montalto would surely be elected Pope within a few hours. In the fortress is the small family church of Santa Maria di Grotta Pinta. The Duke sent down word to his chaplain that the latter must marry him at once. That night a retainer of the house had been found murdered at the gate; his body lay on a trestle bier before the altar of the chapel when the Duke's message came; the Duke himself and Vittoria were already in the little winding stair that leads down from the apartments; there was not a moment to be lost; the frightened chaplain and the messenger hurriedly raised a marble slab which closed an unused vault, dropped the murdered man's body into the chasm, and had scarcely replaced the stone when the ducal pair entered the church. The priest married them before the altar in fear and trembling, and when they were gone entered the whole story in the little register in the sacristy. The leaf is extant. Within a few hours, Montalto was Pope, the humble cardinal was changed in a moment to the despotic pontiff, whose nephew's murder was unavenged; instead of the vacillating Gregory, Orsini had to face the terrible Sixtus, and his defeat and exile were foregone conclusions. He could no longer hold his own and he took refuge in the States of Venice, where his kinsman, Ludovico, was a fortunate general. He made a will which divided his personal estate between Vittoria and his son, Virginio, greatly to the woman's advantage; and overcome by the infirmity of his monstrous size, spent by the terrible passions of his later years, and broken in heart by an edict of exile which he could no longer defy, he died at Salò within seven months of his great enemy's coronation, in the forty-ninth year of his age. Vittoria retired to Padua, and the authorities declared the inheritance valid, but Ludovico Orsini's long standing hatred of her was inflamed to madness by the conditions of the will. Six weeks after the Duke's death, at evening, Vittoria was in her chamber; her boy brother, Flaminio, was singing a Miserere to his lute by the fire in the great hall. A sound of quick feet, the glare of torches, and Ludovico's masked men filled the house. Vittoria died bravely with one deep stab in her heart. The boy, Flaminio, was torn to pieces with seventy-four wounds. But Venice would permit no such outrageous deeds. Ludovico was besieged in his house, by horse and foot and artillery, and was taken alive with many of his men and swiftly conveyed to Venice; and a week had not passed from the day of the murder before he was strangled by the Bargello in the latter's own room, with the red silk cord by which it was a noble's privilege to die. The first one broke, and they had to take another, but Ludovico Orsini did not wince. An hour later his body was borne out with forty torches, in solemn procession, to lie in state in Saint Mark's Church. His men were done to death with hideous tortures in the public square. So ended the story of Vittoria Accoramboni. [Illustration] REGION VI PARIONE The principal point of this Region is Piazza Navona, which exactly coincides with Domitian's race-course, and the Region consists of an irregular triangle of which the huge square is at the northern angle, the western one being the Piazza della Chiesa Nuova and the southern extremity the theatre of Pompey, so often referred to in these pages as one of the Orsini's strongholds and containing the little church in which Paolo Giordano married Vittoria Accoramboni, close to the Campo dei Fiori which was the place of public executions by fire. The name Parione is said to be derived from the Latin 'Paries,' a wall, applied to a massive remnant of ancient masonry which once stood somewhere in the Via di Parione. It matters little; nor can we find any satisfactory explanation of the gryphon which serves as a device for the whole quarter, included during the Middle Age, with Ponte and Regola, in the large portion of the city dominated by the Orsini. The Befana, which is a corruption of Epifania, the Feast of the Epiphany, is and always has been the season of giving presents in Rome, corresponding with our Christmas; and the Befana is personated as a gruff old woman who brings gifts to little children after the manner of our Saint Nicholas. But in the minds of Romans, from earliest childhood, the name is associated with the night fair, opened on the eve of the Epiphany in Piazza Navona, and which was certainly one of the most extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and make children of grown people, a sort of foreshadowing of Carnival, but having at the same time a flavour and a colour of its own, unlike anything else in the world. During the days after Christmas a regular line of booths is erected, encircling the whole circus-shaped space. It is a peculiarity of Roman festivals that all the material for adornment is kept together from year to year, ready for use at a moment's notice, and when one sees the enormous amount of lumber required for the Carnival, for the fireworks on the Pincio, or for the Befana, one cannot help wondering where it is all kept. From year to year it lies somewhere, in those vast subterranean places and great empty houses used for that especial purpose, of which only Romans guess the extent. When needed, it is suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, ready to be put together and regilt or repainted, or hung with the acres of draperies which Latins know so well how to display in everything approaching to public pageantry. At dark, on the Eve of the Epiphany, the Befana begins. The hundreds of booths are choked with toys and gleam with thousands of little lights, the open spaces are thronged by a moving crowd, the air splits with the infernal din of ten thousand whistles and tin trumpets. Noise is the first consideration for a successful befana, noise of any kind, shrill, gruff, high, low--any sort of noise; and the first purchase of everyone who comes must be a tin horn, a pipe, or one of those grotesque little figures of painted earthenware, representing some characteristic type of Roman life and having a whistle attached to it, so cleverly modelled in the clay as to produce the most hideous noises without even the addition of a wooden plug. But anything will do. On a memorable night nearly thirty years ago, the whole cornopean stop of an organ was sold in the fair, amounting to seventy or eighty pipes with their reeds. The instrument in the old English Protestant Church outside of Porta del Popolo had been improved, and the organist, who was a practical Anglo-Saxon, conceived the original and economical idea of selling the useless pipes at the night fair for the benefit of the church. The braying of the high, cracked reeds was frightful and never to be forgotten. Round and round the square, three generations of families, children, parents and even grandparents, move in a regular stream, closer and closer towards midnight and supper-time; nor is the place deserted till three o'clock in the morning. Toys everywhere, original with an attractive ugliness, nine-tenths of them made of earthenware dashed with a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers the taste for life; and old and young and middle-aged all blow their whistles and horns with solemnly ridiculous pertinacity, pausing only to make some little purchase at the booths, or to exchange a greeting with passing friends, followed by an especially vigorous burst of noise as the whistles are brought close to each other's ears, and the party that can make the more atrocious din drives the other half deafened from the field. And the old women who help to keep the booths sit warming their skinny hands over earthen pots of coals and looking on without a smile on their Sibylline faces, while their sons and daughters sell clay hunchbacks and little old women of clay, the counterparts of their mothers, to the passing customers. Thousands upon thousands of people throng the place, and it is warm with the presence of so much humanity, even under the clear winter sky. And there is no confusion, no accident, no trouble, there are no drunken men and no pickpockets. But Romans are not like other people. In a few days all is cleared away again, and Bernini's great fountain faces Borromini's big Church of Saint Agnes, in the silence; and the officious guide tells the credulous foreigner how the figure of the Nile in the group is veiling his head to hide the sight of the hideous architecture, and how the face of the Danube expresses the River God's terror lest the tower should fall upon him; and how the architect retorted upon the sculptor by placing Saint Agnes on the summit of the church, in the act of reassuring the Romans as to the safety of her shrine; and again, how Bernini's enemies said that the obelisk of the fountain was tottering, till he came alone on foot and tied four lengths of twine to the four corners of the pedestal, and fastened the strings to the nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at that time that he modelled four grinning masks for the corners of his sedan-chair, so that they seemed to be making scornful grimaces at his detractors as he was carried along. He could afford to laugh. He had been the favourite of Urban the Eighth who, when Cardinal Barberini, had actually held the looking-glass by the aid of which the handsome young sculptor modelled his own portrait in the figure of David with the sling, now in the Museum of Villa Borghese. After a brief period of disgrace under the next reign, brought about by the sharpness of his Neapolitan tongue, Bernini was restored to the favour of Innocent the Tenth, the Pamfili Pope, to please whose economical tastes he executed the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo's universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan's universal facility. He could do something of everything, circumstances gave him enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not attempt, from classic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint Peter's and the fortifications of Sant' Angelo. He was afflicted by the hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the sculptor's prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century. Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art. [Illustration: PIAZZA NAVONA] The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in concealing to the end. A brass candlestick with a single burning taper stood beside him in his last moments, and before he was quite dead, a servant stole it and put a wooden one in its place. When he was dead at the Quirinal, his body was carried to Saint Peter's in a bier so short that the poor Pope's feet stuck out over the end, and three days later, no one could be found to pay for the burial. Olimpia declared that she was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the workmen, out of charity or superstition, lit a tallow candle beside it. In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni gave five scudi--an English pound--to have the body taken away and buried. It was slung between two mules and taken by night to the Church of Saint Agnes, where in the changing course of human and domestic events, it ultimately got an expensive monument in the worst possible taste. The learned and sometimes witty Baracconi, who has set down the story, notes the fact that Leo the Tenth, Pius the Fourth and Gregory the Sixteenth fared little better in their obsequies, and he comments upon the democratic spirit of a city in which such things can happen. Close to the Piazza Navona stands the famous mutilated group, known as Pasquino, of which the mere name conveys a better idea of the Roman character than volumes of description, for it was here that the pasquinades were published, by affixing them to a pedestal at the corner of the Palazzo Braschi. And one of Pasquino's bitterest jests was directed against Olimpia Maldachini. Her name was cut in two, to make a good Latin pun: 'Olim pia, nunc impia,' 'once pious, now impious,' or 'Olimpia, now impious,' as one chose to join or separate the syllables. Whole books have been filled with the short and pithy imaginary conversations between Marforio, the statue of a river god which used to stand in the Monti, and Pasquino, beneath whom the Roman children used to be told that the book of all wisdom was buried for ever. In the Region of Parione stands the famous Cancelleria, a masterpiece of Bramante's architecture, celebrated for many events in the later history of Rome, and successively the princely residence of several cardinals, chief of whom was that strong Pompeo Colonna, the ally of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, who was responsible for the sacking of Rome by the Constable of Bourbon, who ultimately ruined the Holy League, and imposed his terrible terms of peace upon Clement the Seventh, a prisoner in Sant' Angelo. Considering the devastation and the horrors which were the result of that contest, and its importance in Rome's history, it is worth while to tell the story again. Connected with it was the last great struggle between Orsini and Colonna, Orsini, as usual, siding for the Pope, and therefore for the Holy League, and Colonna for the Emperor. Charles the Fifth had vanquished Francis the First at Pavia, in the year 1525, and had taken the French King prisoner. A year later the Holy League was formed, between Pope Clement the Seventh, the King of France, the Republics of Venice and Florence, and Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. Its object was to fight the Emperor, to sustain Sforza, and to seize the Kingdom of Naples by force. Immediately upon the proclamation of the League, the Emperor's ambassadors left Rome, the Colonna retired to their strongholds, and the Emperor made preparations to send Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the disgraced relative of King Francis, to storm Rome and reduce the imprisoned Pope to submission. The latter's first and nearest source of fear lay in the Colonna, who held the fortresses and passes between Rome and the Neapolitan frontier, and his first instinct was to attack them with the help of the Orsini. But neither side was ready for the fight, and the timid Pontiff eagerly accepted the promise of peace made by the Colonna in order to gain time, and he dismissed the forces he had hastily raised against them. [Illustration: PALAZZO MASSIMO ALLE COLONNA] [Illustration: PONTE SISTO From a print of the last century] They, in the mean time, treated with Moncada, Regent of Naples for the Emperor, and at once seized Anagni, put several thousand men in the field, marched upon Rome with incredible speed, seized three gates in the night, and entered the city in triumph on the following morning. The Pope and the Orsini, completely taken by surprise, offered little or no resistance. According to some writers, it was Pompeo Colonna's daring plan to murder the Pope, force his own election to the Pontificate by arms, destroy the Orsini, and open Rome to Charles the Fifth; and when the Colonna advanced on the same day, by Ponte Sisto, to Trastevere, and threatened to attack Saint Peter's and the Vatican, Clement the Seventh, remembering Sciarra and Pope Boniface, was on the point of imitating the latter and arraying himself in his Pontifical robes to await his enemy with such dignity as he could command. But the remonstrances of the more prudent cardinals prevailed, and about noon they conveyed him safely to Sant' Angelo by the secret covered passage, leaving the Colonna to sack Trastevere and even Saint Peter's itself, though they dared not come too near to Sant' Angelo for fear of its cannons. The tumult over at last, Don Ugo de Moncada, in the Emperor's name, took possession of the Pope's two nephews as hostages for his own safety, entered Sant' Angelo under a truce, and stated the Emperor's conditions of peace. These were, to all intents and purposes, that the Pope should withdraw his troops, wherever he had any, and that the Emperor should be free to advance wherever he pleased, except through the Papal States, that the Pope should give hostages for his good faith, and that he should grant a free pardon to all the Colonna, who vaguely agreed to withdraw their forces into the Kingdom of Naples. To this humiliating peace, or armistice, for it was nothing more, the Pope was forced by the prospect of starvation, and he would even have agreed to sail to Barcelona in order to confer with the Emperor; but from this he was ultimately dissuaded by Henry the Eighth of England and the King of France, 'who sent him certain sums of money and promised him their support.' The consequence was that he broke the truce as soon as he dared, deprived the Cardinal of his hat, and, with the help of the Orsini, attacked the Colonna by surprise on their estates, giving orders to burn their castles and raze their fortresses to the ground. Four villages were burned before the surprised party could recover itself; but with some assistance from the imperial troops they were soon able to face their enemies on equal terms, and the little war raged fiercely during several months, with varying success and all possible cruelty on both sides. Meanwhile Charles, Duke of Bourbon, known as the Constable, and more or less in the pay of the Emperor, had gathered an army in Lombardy. His force consisted of the most atrocious ruffians of the time,--Lutheran Germans, superstitious Spaniards, revolutionary Italians, and such other nondescripts as would join his standard,--all fellows who had in reality neither country nor conscience, and were ready to serve any soldier of fortune who promised them plunder and license. The predominating element was Spanish, but there was not much to choose among them all so far as their instincts were concerned. Charles was penniless, as usual; he offered his horde of cutthroats the rich spoils of Tuscany and Rome, they swore to follow him to death and perdition, and he began his southward march. The Emperor looked on with an approving eye, and the Pope was overcome by abject terror. In the vain hope of saving himself and the city he concluded a truce with the Viceroy of Naples, agreeing to pay sixty thousand ducats, to give back everything taken from the Colonna, and to restore Pompeo to the honours of the cardinalate. The conditions of the armistice were forthwith carried out, by the disbanding of the Pope's hired soldiers and the payment of the indemnity, and Clement the Seventh enjoyed during a few weeks the pleasant illusion of fancied safety. He awoke from the dream, in horror and fear, to find that the Constable considered himself in no way bound by a peace concluded with the Emperor's Viceroy, and was advancing rapidly upon Rome, ravaging and burning everything in his way. Hasty preparations for defence were made; a certain Renzo da Ceri armed such men as he could enlist with such weapons as he could find, and sent out a little force of grooms and artificers to face the Constable's ruthless Spaniards and the fierce Germans of his companion freebooter, George of Fransperg, or Franzberg, who carried about a silken cord by which he swore to strangle the Pope with his own hands. The enemy reached the walls of Rome on the night of the fifth of May; devastation and famine lay behind them in their track, the plunder of the Church was behind the walls, and far from northward came rumours of the army of the League on its way to cut off their retreat. They resolved to win the spoil or die, and at dawn the Constable, clad in a white cloak, led the assault and set up the first scaling ladder, close to the Porta San Spirito. In the very act a bullet struck him in a vital part and he fell headlong to the earth. Benvenuto Cellini claimed the credit of the shot, but it is more than probable that it sped from another hand, that of Bernardino Passeri; it matters little now, it mattered less then, as the infuriated Spaniards stormed the walls in the face of Camillo Orsini's desperate and hopeless resistance, yelling 'Blood and the Bourbon,' for a war-cry. Once more the wretched Pope fled along the secret corridor with his cardinals, his prelates and his servants; for although he might yet have escaped from the doomed city, messengers had brought word that Cardinal Pompeo Colonna had ten thousand men-at-arms in the Campagna, ready to cut off his flight, and he was condemned to be a terrified spectator of Rome's destruction from the summit of a fortress which he dared not surrender and could hardly hope to defend. Seven thousand Romans were slaughtered in the storming of the walls; the enemy gained all Trastevere at a blow and the sack began; the torrent of fury poured across Ponte Sisto into Rome itself, thousands upon thousands of steel-clad madmen, drunk with blood and mad with the glitter of gold, a storm of unimaginable terror. Cardinals, Princes and Ambassadors were dragged from their palaces, and when greedy hands had gathered up all that could be taken away, fire consumed the rest, and the miserable captives were tortured into promising fabulous ransoms for life and limb. Abbots, priors and heads of religious orders were treated with like barbarity, and the few who escaped the clutches of the bloodthirsty Spanish soldiers fell into the reeking hands of the brutal German adventurers. The enormous sum of six million ducats was gathered together in value of gold and silver bullion and of precious things, and as much more was extorted as promised ransom from the gentlemen and churchmen and merchants of Rome by the savage tortures of the lash, the iron boot and the rack. The churches were stripped of all consecrated vessels, the Sacred Wafers were scattered abroad by the Catholic Spaniards and trampled in the bloody ooze that filled the ways, the convents were stormed by a rabble in arms and the nuns were distributed as booty among their fiendish captors, mothers and children were slaughtered in the streets and drunken Spaniards played dice for the daughters of honourable citizens. From the surrounding Campagna the Colonna entered the city in arms, orderly, silent and sober, and from their well-guarded fortresses they contemplated the ruin they had brought upon Rome. Cardinal Pompeo installed himself in his palace of the Cancelleria in the Region of Parione, and gave shelter to such of his friends as might be useful to him thereafter. In revenge upon John de' Medici, the Captain of the Black Bands, whose assistance the Pope had invoked, the Cardinal caused the Villa Medici on Monte Mario to be burned to the ground, and Clement the Seventh watched the flames from the ramparts of Sant' Angelo. One good action is recorded of the savage churchman. He ransomed and protected in his house the wife and the daughter of that Giorgio Santacroce who had murdered the Cardinal's father by night, when the Cardinal himself was an infant in arms, more than forty years earlier; and he helped some of his friends to escape by a chimney from the room in which they had been confined and tortured into promising a ransom they could not pay. But beyond those few acts he did little to mitigate the horrors of the month-long sack, and nothing to relieve the city from the yoke of its terrible captors. The Holy League sent a small force to the Pope's assistance and it reached the gates of Rome; but the Spaniards were in possession of immense stores of ammunition and provisions, they had more horses than they needed and more arms than they could bear; the forces of the League had traversed a country in which not a blade of grass had been left undevoured nor a measure of corn uneaten; and the avengers of the dead Constable, securely fortified within the walls, looked down with contempt upon an army already decimated by sickness and starvation. At this juncture, Clement the Seventh resolved to abandon further resistance and sue for peace. The guns of Sant' Angelo had all but fired their last shot, and the supply of food was nearly exhausted, when the Pope sent for Cardinal Colonna; the churchman consented to a parley, and the man who had suffered confiscation and disgrace entered the castle as the arbiter of destiny. He was received as the mediator of peace and a benefactor of humanity, and when he stated his terms they were not refused. The Pope and the thirteen Cardinals who were with him were to remain prisoners until the payment of four hundred thousand ducats of gold, after which they were to be conducted to Naples to await the further pleasure of the Emperor; the Colonna were to be absolutely and freely pardoned for all they had done; in the hope of some subsequent assistance the Pope promised to make Cardinal Colonna the Legate of the Marches. As a hostage for the performance of these and other conditions, Cardinal Orsini was delivered over to his enemy, who conducted him as his prisoner to the Castle of Grottaferrata, and the Colonna secretly agreed to allow the Pope to go free from Sant' Angelo. On the night of December the ninth, seven months after the storming of the city, the head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church fled from the castle in the humble garb of a market gardener, and made good his escape to Orvieto and to the protection of the Holy League. Meanwhile a pestilence had broken out in Rome, and the spectre of a mysterious and mortal sickness distracted those who had survived the terrors of sword and flame. The Spanish and German soldiery either fell victims to the plague or deserted in haste and fear; and though Cardinal Pompeo's peace contained no promise that the city should be evacuated, it was afterwards stated upon credible authority that, within two years from their coming, not one of the barbarous horde was left alive within the walls. When all was over the city was little more than a heap of ruins, but the Colonna had been victorious, and were sated with revenge. This, in brief, is the history of the storming and sacking of Rome which took place in the year 1527, at the highest development of the Renascence, in the youth of Benvenuto Cellini, when Michelangelo had not yet painted the Last Judgment, when Titian was just fifty years old, and when Raphael and Lionardo da Vinci were but lately dead; and the contrast between the sublimity of art and the barbarity of human nature in that day is only paralleled in the annals of our own century, at once the bloodiest and the most civilized in the history of the world. The Cancelleria, wherein Pompeo Colonna sheltered the wife and daughter of his father's murderer, is remembered for some modern political events: for the opening of the first representative parliament under Pius the Ninth, in 1848, for the assassination of the Pope's minister, Pellegrino Rossi, on the steps of the entrance in the same year, and as the place where the so-called Roman Republic was proclaimed in 1849. But it is most of all interesting for the nobility of its proportions and the simplicity of its architecture. It is undeniably, and almost undeniedly, the best building in Rome today, though that may not be saying much in a city which has been more exclusively the prey of the Barocco than any other. [Illustration: THE CANCELLERIA From a print of the last century] The Palace of the Massimo, once built to follow the curve of a narrow winding street, but now facing the same great thoroughfare as the Cancelleria, has something of the same quality, with a wholly different character. It is smaller and more gloomy, and its columns are almost black with age; it was here, in 1455, that Pannartz and Schweinheim, two of those nomadic German scholars who have not yet forgotten the road to Italy, established their printing-press in the house of Pietro de' Massimi, and here took place one of those many romantic tragedies which darkened the end of the sixteenth century. For a certain Signore Massimo, in the year 1585, had been married and had eight sons, mostly grown men, when he fell in love with a light-hearted lady of more wit than virtue, and announced that he would make her his wife, though his sons warned him that they would not bear the slight upon their mother's memory. The old man, infatuated and beside himself with love, would not listen to them, but published the banns, married the woman, and brought her home for his wife. One of the sons, the youngest, was too timid to join the rest; but on the next morning the seven others went to the bridal apartment, and killed their step-mother when their father was away. But he came back before she was quite dead, and he took the Crucifix from the wall by the bed and cursed his children. And the curse was fulfilled upon them. Parione is the heart of Mediæval Rome, the very centre of that black cloud of mystery which hangs over the city of the Middle Age. A history might be composed out of Pasquin's sayings, volumes have been written about Cardinal Pompeo Colonna and the ruin he wrought, whole books have been filled with the life and teachings and miracles of Saint Philip Neri, who belonged to this quarter, erected here his great oratory, and is believed to have recalled from the dead a youth of the house of Massimo in that same gloomy palace. The story of Rome is a tale of murder and sudden death, varied, changing, never repeated in the same way; there is blood on every threshold; a tragedy lies buried in every church and chapel; and again we ask in vain wherein lies the magic of the city that has fed on terror and grown old in carnage, the charm that draws men to her, the power that holds, the magic that enthralls men soul and body, as Lady Venus cast her spells upon Tannhäuser in her mountain of old. Yet none deny it, and as centuries roll on, the poets, the men of letters, the musicians, the artists of all ages, have come to her from far countries and have dwelt here while they might, some for long years, some for the few months they could spare; and all of them have left something, a verse, a line, a sketch, a song that breathes the threefold mystery of love, eternity and death. Index A Abruzzi, i. 159; ii. 230 Accoramboni, Flaminio, i. 296 Vittoria, i. 135, 148, 289-296, 297 Agrarian Law, i. 23 Agrippa, i. 90, 271; ii. 102 the Younger, ii. 103 Alaric, i. 252; ii. 297 Alba Longa, i. 3, 78, 130 Albergo dell' Orso, i. 288 Alberic, ii. 29 Albornoz, ii. 19, 20, 74 Aldobrandini, i. 209; ii. 149 Olimpia, i. 209 Alfonso, i. 185 Aliturius, ii. 103 Altieri, i. 226; ii. 45 Ammianus Marcellinus, i. 132, 133, 138 Amphitheatre, Flavian, i. 91, 179 Amulius, i. 3 Anacletus, ii. 295, 296, 304 Anagni, i. 161, 165, 307; ii. 4, 5 Ancus Martius, i. 4 Angelico, Beato, ii. 158, 169, 190-192, 195, 285 Anguillara, i. 278; ii. 138 Titta della, ii. 138, 139 Anio, the, i. 93 Novus, i. 144 Vetus, i. 144 Annibaleschi, Riccardo degli, i. 278 Antiochus, ii. 120 Antipope-- Anacletus, ii. 84 Boniface, ii. 28 Clement, i. 126 Gilbert, i. 127 John of Calabria, ii. 33-37 Antonelli, Cardinal, ii. 217, 223, 224 Antonina, i. 266 Antonines, the, i. 113, 191, 271 Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, i. 46, 96, 113, 114, 190, 191 Appian Way, i. 22, 94 Appius Claudius, i. 14, 29 Apulia, Duke of, i. 126, 127; ii. 77 Aqua Virgo, i. 155 Aqueduct of Claudius, i. 144 Arbiter, Petronius, i. 85 Arch of-- Arcadius, i. 192 Claudius, i. 155 Domitian, i. 191, 205 Gratian, i. 191 Marcus Aurelius, i. 96, 191, 205 Portugal, i. 205 Septimius Severus, ii. 93 Valens, i. 191 Archive House, ii. 75 Argiletum, the, i. 72 Ariosto, ii. 149, 174 Aristius, i. 70, 71 Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73, 76-89 Arnulf, ii. 41 Art, i. 87; ii 152 and morality, i. 260, 261; ii. 178, 179 religion, i. 260, 261 Barocco, i. 303, 316 Byzantine in Italy, ii. 155, 184, 185 development of taste in, ii. 198 factors in the progress of art, ii. 181 engraving, ii. 186 improved tools, ii. 181 individuality, i. 262; ii. 175-177 Greek influence on, i. 57-63 modes of expression of, ii. 181 fresco, ii. 181-183 oil painting, ii. 184-186 of the Renascence, i. 231, 262; ii. 154 phases of, in Italy, ii. 188 progress of, during the Middle Age, ii. 166, 180 transition from handicraft to, ii. 153 Artois, Count of, i. 161 Augustan Age, i. 57-77 Augustulus, i. 30, 47, 53; ii. 64 Augustus, i. 30, 43-48, 69, 82, 89, 90, 184, 219, 251, 252, 254, 270; ii. 64, 75, 95,102, 291 Aurelian, i. 177, 179, 180; ii. 150 Avalos, Francesco, d', i. 174, 175 Aventine, the, i. 23, 76; ii. 10, 40, 85, 119-121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 302 Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 6, 9 B Bacchanalia, ii. 122 Bacchic worship, i. 76; ii. 120 Bajazet the Second, Sultan, i. 276 Baracconi, i. 104, 141, 178, 188, 252, 264, 274, 304; ii. 41, 45, 128, 130, 138, 323 Barberi, i. 202 Barberini, the, i. 157, 187, 226, 268, 301; ii. 7 Barbo, i. 202; ii. 45 Barcelona, i. 308 Bargello, the, i. 129, 293, 296; ii. 42 Basil and Constantine, ii. 33 Basilica (Pagan)-- Julia, i. 66, 71, 106; ii. 92 Basilicas (Christian) of-- Constantine, i. 90; ii. 292, 297 Liberius, i. 138 Philip and Saint James, i. 170 Saint John Lateran, i. 107, 112, 117, 278, 281 Santa Maria Maggiore, i. 107, 135, 139, 147, 148, 166, 208, 278; ii. 118 Santi Apostoli, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213 Sicininus, i. 134, 138 Baths, i. 91 of Agrippa, i. 271 of Caracalla, ii. 119 of Constantine, i. 144, 188 of Diocletian, i. 107, 129, 145-147, 149, 289, 292 of Novatus, i. 145 of Philippus, i. 145 of public, i. 144 of Severus Alexander, ii. 28 of Titus, i. 55, 107, 152 Befana, the, i. 298, 299, 300; ii. 25 Belisarius, i. 266, 267, 269 Benediction of 1846, the, i. 183 Benevento, Cola da, i. 219, 220 Bernard, ii. 77-80 Bernardi, Gianbattista, ii. 54 Bernini, i. 147, 301, 302, 303; ii. 24 Bibbiena, Cardinal, ii. 146, 285 Maria, ii. 146 Bismarck, ii. 224, 232, 236, 237 Boccaccio, i. 211, 213 Vineyard, the, i. 189 Bologna, i. 259; ii. 58 Borghese, the, i. 206, 226 Scipio, i. 187 Borgia, the, i. 209 Cæsar, i. 149, 151, 169, 213, 287; ii. 150, 171, 282, 283 Gandia, i. 149, 150, 151, 287 Lucrezia, i. 149, 177, 185, 287; ii. 129, 151, 174 Rodrigo, i. 287; ii. 242, 265, 282 Vanozza, i. 149, 151, 287 Borgo, the Region, i. 101, 127; ii. 132, 147, 202-214, 269 Borroinini, i. 301, 302; ii. 24 Botticelli, ii. 188, 190, 195, 200, 276 Bracci, ii. 318 Bracciano, i. 282, 291, 292, 294 Duke of, i. 289 Bramante, i. 305; ii. 144, 145, 274, 298, 322 Brescia, i. 286 Bridge. See _Ponte_ Ælian, the, i. 274 Cestian, ii. 105 Fabrician, ii. 105 Sublician, i. 6, 23, 67; ii. 127, 294. Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded, ii. 129, 131 Brothers of Prayer and Death, i. 123, 204, 242 Brunelli, ii. 244 Brutus, i. 6, 12, 18, 41, 58, 80; ii. 96 Buffalmacco, ii. 196 Bull-fights, i. 252 Burgundians, i. 251 C Cæsar, Julius, i. 29-33, 35-41, 250; ii. 102, 224, 297 Cæsars, the, i. 44-46, 125, 249, 252, 253; ii. 224 Julian, i. 252 Palaces of, i. 4, 191; ii. 95 Caetani, i. 51, 115, 159, 161, 163, 206, 277 Benedict, i. 160 Caligula, i. 46, 252, ii. 96 Campagna, the, i. 92, 94, 158, 237, 243, 253, 282, 312; ii. 88, 107, 120 Campitelli, the Region, i. 101; ii. 64 Campo-- dei Fiori, i. 297 Marzo (Campus Martius), i. 65, 112, 271 the Region, i. 101, 248, 250, 275; ii. 6, 44 Vaccino, i. 128-131, 173 Canale, Carle, i. 287 Cancelleria, i. 102, 305, 312, 315, 316; ii. 223 Canidia, i. 64; ii. 293 Canossa, i. 126; ii. 307 Canova, ii. 320 Capet, Hugh, ii. 29 Capitol, the, i. 8, 14, 24, 29, 72, 107, 112, 167, 190, 204, 278, 282; ii. 12, 13, 21, 22, 52, 64, 65, 67-75, 84, 121, 148, 302 Capitoline hill, i. 106, 194 Captains of the Regions, i. 110, 112, 114 Election of, i. 112 Caracci, the, i. 264 Carafa, the, ii. 46, 49, 50, 56, 111 Cardinal, i. 186, 188; ii. 56, 204 Carnival, i. 107, 193-203, 241, 298; ii. 113 of Saturn, i. 194 Carpineto, ii. 229, 230, 232, 239, 287 Carthage, i. 20, 26, 88 Castagno, Andrea, ii. 89, 185 Castle of-- Grottaferrata, i. 314 Petrella, i. 286 the Piccolomini, i. 268 Sant' Angelo, i. 114, 116, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 259, 278, 284, 308, 314; ii. 17, 28, 37, 40, 56, 59, 60, 109, 152, 202-214, 216, 269 Castracane, Castruccio, i. 165, 166, 170 Catacombs, the, i. 139 of Saint Petronilla, ii. 125 Sebastian, ii. 296 Catanei, Vanossa de, i. 287 Catharine, Queen of Cyprus, ii. 305 Cathedral of Siena, i. 232 Catiline, i. 27; ii. 96, 294 Cato, ii. 121 Catullus, i. 86 Cavour, Count, ii. 90, 224, 228, 237 Cellini, Benvenuto, i. 311, 315; ii. 157, 195 Cenci, the, ii. 1 Beatrice, i. 147, 285-287; ii. 2, 129, 151 Francesco, i, 285; ii. 2 Centra Pio, ii. 238, 239 Ceri, Renzo da, i. 310 Cesarini, Giuliano, i. 174; ii. 54, 89 Chapel, Sixtine. See under _Vatican_ Charlemagne, i. 32, 49, 51, 53, 76, 109; ii. 297 Charles of Anjou, i. ii. 160 Albert of Sardinia, ii. 221 the Fifth, i. 131, 174, 206, 220, 305, 306; ii. 138 Chiesa. See _Church_ Nuova, i. 275 Chigi, the, i. 258 Agostino, ii. 144, 146 Fabio, ii. 146 Christianity in Rome, i. 176 Christina, Queen of Sweden, ii. 150, 151, 304, 308 Chrysostom, ii. 104, 105. Churches of,-- the Apostles, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213 Aracoeli, i. 52, 112, 167; ii. 57, 70, 75 Cardinal Mazarin, i. 186 the Gallows, i. 284 Holy Guardian Angel, i. 122 the Minerva, ii. 55 the Penitentiaries, ii. 216 the Portuguese, i. 250 Saint Adrian, i. 71 Agnes, i. 301, 304 Augustine, ii. 207 Bernard, i. 291 Callixtus, ii. 125 Charles, i. 251 Eustace, ii. 23, 24, 26, 39 George in Velabro, i. 195; ii. 10 Gregory on the Aventine, ii. 129 Ives, i. 251; ii. 23, 24 John of the Florentines, i. 273 Pine Cone, ii. 56 Peter's on the Janiculum, ii. 129 Sylvester, i. 176 Saints Nereus and Achillæus, ii. 125 Vincent and Anastasius, i. 186 San Clemente, i. 143 Giovanni in Laterano, i. 113 Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192 Miranda, i. 71 Marcello, i. 165, 192 Pietro in Montorio, ii. 151 Vincoli, i. 118, 283; ii. 322 Salvatore in Cacaberis, i. 112 Stefano Rotondo, i. 106 Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, i. 102; ii. 3, 10, 110 Santa Francesca Romana, i. 111 Maria de Crociferi, i. 267 degli Angeli, i. 146, 258, 259 dei Monti, i. 118 del Pianto, i. 113 di Grotto Pinta, i. 294 in Campo Marzo, ii. 23 in Via Lata, i. 142 Nuova, i. 111, 273 Transpontina, ii. 212 della Vittoria, i. 302 Prisca, ii. 124 Sabina, i. 278; ii. 40 Trinità dei Pellegrini, ii. 110 Cicero, i. 45, 73; ii. 96, 294 Cimabue, ii. 156, 157, 162, 163, 169, 188, 189 Cinna, i. 25, 27 Circolo, ii. 245 Circus, the, i. 64, 253 Maximus, i. 64, 66; ii. 84, 119 City of Augustus, i. 57-77 Making of the, i. 1-21 of Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 of the Empire, i. 22-56 of the Middle Age, i. 47, 78-99, 92 of the Republic, i. 47 today, i. 55, 92 Civilization, ii. 177 and bloodshed, ii. 218 morality, ii. 178 progress, ii. 177-180 Claudius, i. 46, 255, 256; ii. 102 Cloelia, i. 13 Coelian hill, i. 106 Collegio Romano, i. 102; ii. 45, 61 Colonna, the, i. 51, 94, 104, 135, 153, 157-170, 172, 176, 187, 206, 217, 251, 252, 271, 272, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 37, 51, 54, 60, 106, 107, 126, 204 Giovanni, i. 104 Jacopo, i. 159, 165, 192 Lorenzo, ii. 126, 204-213 Marcantonio, i. 182; ii. 54 Pietro, i. 159 Pompeo, i. 305, 310-317; ii. 205 Prospero, ii. 205 Sciarra, i. 162-166, 192, 206, 213, 229, 279, 275, 281, 307 Stephen, i. 161, 165; ii. 13, 16 the Younger, i. 168 Vittoria, i. 157, 173-177; ii. 174 the Region, i. 101, 190-192; ii. 209 War between Orsini and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 12, 18, 126, 204-211 Colosseum, i. 56, 86, 90, 96, 106, 107, 111, 125, 152, 153, 187, 191, 209, 278; ii. 25, 64, 66, 84, 97, 202, 203, 301 Column of Piazza Colonna i. 190, 192 Comitium, i. 112, 257, 268 Commodus, i. 46, 55; ii. 97, 285 Confraternities, i. 108, 204 Conscript Fathers, i. 78, 112 Constable of Bourbon, i. 52, 259, 273, 304, 309-311; ii. 308 Constans, i. 135, 136 Constantine, i. 90, 113, 163 Constantinople, i. 95, 119 Contests in the Forum, i. 27, 130 Convent of Saint Catharine, i. 176 Convent of Saint Sylvester, i. 176 Corneto, Cardinal of, ii. 282, 283 Cornomania, i. 141 Cornutis, i. 87 Coromania, i. 141, 144 Corsini, the, ii. 150 Corso, i. 96, 106, 108, 192, 196, 205, 206, 229, 251 Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275 Corte Savella, i. 284; ii. 52 Cosmas, the, ii. 156, 157 Costa, Giovanni da, i. 205 Court House, i. 71 Crassus, i. 27, 31; ii. 128 Crawford, Thomas, i. 147 Crescentius, ii. 40, 41 Crescenzi, i. 114; ii. 27, 40, 209 Crescenzio, ii. 28-40 Stefana, ii. 39 Crispi, i. 116, 187 Crusade, the Second, ii. 86, 105 Crusades, the, i. 76 Curatii, i. 3, 131 Customs of early Rome, i. 9, 48 in dress, i. 48 religion, i. 48 D Dante, i. 110; ii. 164, 175, 244 Decameron, i. 239 Decemvirs, i. 14; ii. 120 Decrees, Semiamiran, i. 178 Democracy, i. 108 Development of Rome, i. 7, 18 some results of, i. 154 under Barons, i. 51 Decemvirs, i. 14 the Empire, i. 29, 30 Gallic invasion, i. 15-18 Kings, i. 2-7, 14-45 Middle Age, i. 47, 92, 210-247 Papal rule, i. 46-50 Republic, i. 7-14 Tribunes, i. 14 Dictator of Rome, i. 29, 79 Dietrich of Bern, ii. 297 Dionysus, ii. 121 Dolabella, i. 34 Domenichino, ii. 147 Domestic life in Rome, i. 9 Dominicans, i. 158; ii. 45, 46, 49, 50, 60, 61 Domitian, i. 45, 152, 205; ii. 104, 114, 124, 295 Doria, the, i. 206; ii. 45 Albert, i. 207 Andrea, i. 207 Conrad, i. 207 Gian Andrea, i. 207 Lamba, i. 207 Paganino, i. 207 Doria-Pamfili, i. 206-209 Dress in early Rome, i. 48 Drusus, ii. 102 Duca, Antonio del, i. 146, 147 Giacomo del, i. 146 Dürer, Albert, ii. 198 E Education, ii. 179 Egnatia, i. 75 Elagabalus, i. 77, 177, 179; ii. 296, 297 Election of the Pope, ii. 41, 42, 277 Electoral Wards, i. 107 Elizabeth, Queen of England, ii. 47 Emperors, Roman, i. 46 of the East, i. 95, 126 Empire of Constantinople, i. 46 of Rome, i. 15, 17, 22-28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 72, 99 Encyclicals, ii. 244 Erasmus, ii. 151 Esquiline, the, i. 26, 106, 139, 186; ii. 95, 131, 193 Este, Ippolito d', i. 185 Etruria, i. 12, 15 Euodus, i. 255, 256 Eustace, Saint, ii. 24, 25 square of, ii. 25, 42 Eustachio. See _Sant' Eustachio_ Eutichianus, ii. 296 Eve of Saint John, i. 140 the Epiphany, 299 F Fabius, i. 20 Fabatosta, ii. 64, 84 Farnese, the, ii. 151 Julia, ii. 324 Farnesina, the, ii. 144, 149, 151 Fathers, Roman, i. 13, 78, 79-84 Ferdinand, ii. 205 Ferrara, Duke of, i. 185 Festivals, i. 193, 298 Aryan in origin, i. 173 Befana, i. 299-301 Carnival, i. 193-203 Church of the Apostle, i. 172, 173 Coromania, i. 141 Epifania, i. 298-301 Floralia, i. 141 Lupercalia, i. 194 May-day in the Campo Vaccino, i. 173 Saturnalia, i. 194 Saint John's Eve, i. 140 Festus, ii. 128 Feuds, family, i. 168 Field of Mars. See _Campo Marzo_ Finiguerra, Maso, ii. 186-188 Flamen Dialis, i. 34 Floralia. See _Festivals_ Florence, i. 160 Forli, Melozzo da, i. 171 Fornarina, the, ii. 144, 146 Forum, i, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 64, 72, 111, 126, 129, 194; ii. 64, 92-94, 97, 102, 294, 295 of Augustus, i. 119 Trajan, i. 155, 171, 172, 191 Fountains (Fontane) of-- Egeria, ii. 124 Trevi, i. 155, 156, 186, 267 Tullianum, i. 8 Franconia, Duke of, ii. 36, 53 Francis the First, i. 131, 174, 206, 219, 304 Frangipani, i. 50, 94, 153; ii. 77, 79, 84, 85 Frederick, Barbarossa, ii. 34, 85, 87 of Naples, i. 151 the Second, ii. 34 Fulvius, ii. 121 G Gabrini, Lawrence, ii. 4 Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308 Gaeta, ii. 36 Galba, ii. 295 Galen, i. 55 Galera, i. 282, 291 Galileo, i. 268 Gardens, i. 93 Cæsar's, i. 66, 68 of Lucullus, i. 254, 270 of the Pigna, ii. 273 Pincian, i. 255 the Vatican, ii. 243, 271, 287 Gargonius, i. 65 Garibaldi, ii. 90, 219, 220, 228, 237 Gastaldi, Cardinal, i. 259 Gate. See _Porta_ the Colline, i. 250 Lateran, i. 126, 154 Septimian, ii. 144, 147 Gebhardt, Émile, i. 213 Gemonian Steps, ii. 67, 294 Genseric, i. 96; ii. 70 George of Franzburg, i. 310 Gherardesca, Ugolino della, ii. 160 Ghetto, i. 102; ii. 2, 101, 110-118 Ghibellines, the, i. 129, 153, 158; ii. 6 Ghiberti, ii. 157. Ghirlandajo, ii. 157, 172, 276 Giantism, i. 90-92, 210, 302 Gibbon, i. 160 Giotto, ii. 157, 160-165, 169, 188, 189, 200 Gladstone, ii. 231, 232 Golden Milestone, i. 72, 92, 194 Goldoni, i. 265 Goldsmithing, ii. 156, 157, 186, 187 "Good Estate" of Rienzi, ii. 10-12 Gordian, i. 91 Goths, ii. 297, 307. Gozzoli, Benozzo, ii. 190, 195 Gracchi, the, i. 22, 28 Caius, i. 23; ii. 84 Cornelia, i. 22, 24 Tiberius, i. 23; ii. 102 Gratidianus, i. 27 Guards, Noble, ii. 241, 243, 247, 248, 309, 310, 312 Palatine, ii. 247, 248 Swiss, ii. 246, 247, 310 Guelphs, i. 159; ii. 42, 126, 138 and Ghibellines, i. 129, 153, 275; ii. 160, 162, 173 Guiscard, Robert, i. 95, 126, 127, 129, 144, 252; ii. 70 H Hadrian, i. 90, 180; i. 25, 202, 203 Hannibal, i. 20 Hasdrubal, i. 21 Henry the Second, ii. 47 Fourth, i. 126, 127; ii. 307 Fifth, ii. 307 Seventh of Luxemburg, i. 273, 276-279; ii. 5 Eighth, i. 219; ii. 47, 274 Hermann, i. 46 Hermes of Olympia, i. 86 Hermogenes, i. 67 Hilda's Tower, i. 250 Hildebrand, i. 52, 126-129; ii. Honorius, ii. 323, 324 Horace, i. 44, 57-75, 85, 87; ii. 293 and the Bore, i. 65-71 Camen Seculare of, i. 75 the Satires of, i. 73, 74 Horatii, i. 3, 131 Horatius, i. 5, 6, 13, 23; ii. 127 Horses of Monte Cavallo, i. 181 Hospice of San Claudio, i. 251 Hospital of-- Santo Spirito, i. 274; ii. 214, 215 House of Parliament, i. 271 Hugh of Burgundy, ii. 30 of Tuscany, ii. 30 Huns' invasion, i. 15, 49, 132 Huxley, ii. 225, 226 I Imperia, ii. 144 Infessura, Stephen, ii. 59, 60, 204-213 Inn of-- The Bear, i. 288 Falcone, ii. 26 Lion, i. 287 Vanossa, i. 288 Inquisition, i. 286; ii. 46, 49, 52, 53, 54 Interminelli, Castruccio degli, i. 165 Irene, Empress, i. 109 Ischia, i. 175 Island of Saint Bartholomew, i. 272; ii. 1 Isola Sacra, i. 93 Italian life during the Middle Age, i. 210, 247 from 17th to 18th centuries, i. 260, 263, 264 J Janiculum, the, i. 15, 253, 270; ii. 268, 293, 294, 295 Jesuit College, ii. 61 Jesuits, ii. 45, 46, 61-63 Jews, i. 96; ii. 101-119 John of Cappadocia, i. 267, 268 Josephus, ii. 103 Juba, i. 40 Jugurtha, i. 25 Jupiter Capitolinus, ii. 324, 325 priest of, i. 80, 133 Justinian, i. 267 Juvenal, i. 112; ii. 105, 107, 124 K Kings of Rome, i. 2-7 L Lampridius, Ælius, i. 178 Lanciani, i. 79, 177 Lateran, the, i. 106, 112-114, 129, 140-142 Count of, i. 166 Latin language, i. 47 Latini Brunetto, ii. 163 Laurentum, i. 55, 93 Lazaret of Saint Martha, ii. 245 League, Holy, i. 305, 306, 313, 314 Lentulus, ii. 128 Lepida, Domitia, i. 255, 256 Letus, Pomponius, i. 139; ii. 210 Lewis of Bavaria, i. 165, 167, 192, 275 the Seventh, ii. 86, 105 Eleventh, i. 104, 151 Fourteenth, i. 253 Library of-- Collegio Romano, ii. 45 Vatican, ii. 275, 276, 282 Victor Emmanuel, ii. 45, 61 Lieges, Bishop of, i. 280 Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 231, 236 Lippi, Filippo, ii. 190, 191, 192-195, 200 Liszt, i. 185, 203; ii. 176 Livia, i. 220, 252 Livy, i. 44, 47 Lombards, the, i. 251 Lombardy, i. 309 Lorrain, i. 264 Loyola, Ignatius, ii. 46, 62 Lucilius, i. 74 Lucretia, i. 5, 12, 13 Lucullus, i. 257, 270 Lupercalia, i. 194 Lupercus, i. 194 M Macchiavelli, ii. 174 Mæcenas, i. 62, 69, 74, 140; ii. 293 Mænads, ii. 122 Maldachini, Olimpia, i. 304, 305 Mamertine Prison, i. 25; ii. 72, 293 Mancini, Maria, i. 170, 187 Mancino, Paul, ii. 210 Manlius, Cnæus, ii. 121 Marcus, i. 29; ii. 71, 84 Titus, i. 80 Mantegna, Andrea, ii. 157, 169, 188, 196-198 Marcomanni, i. 190 Marforio, i. 305 Marino, i. 174 Marius, Caius, i. 25, 29 Marius and Sylla, i. 25, 29, 36, 45, 53; ii. 69 Mark Antony, i. 30, 93, 195, 254 Marozia, ii. 27, 28 Marriage Laws, i. 79, 80 Mary, Queen of Scots, ii. 47 Masaccio, ii. 190 Massimi, Pietro de', i. 317 Massimo, i. 102, 317 Mattei, the, ii. 137, 139, 140, 143 Alessandro, ii. 140-143 Curzio, ii. 140-143 Girolamo, ii. 141-143 Marcantonio, ii. 140, 141 Olimpia, ii. 141, 142 Piero, ii. 140, 141 Matilda, Countess, ii. 307 Mausoleum of-- Augustus, i. 158, 169, 205, 251, 252, 270, 271 Hadrian, i. 102, 252; ii. 28, 202, 270. See _Castle of Sant' Angelo_ Maximilian, i. 151 Mazarin, i. 170, 187 Mazzini, ii. 219, 220 Mediævalism, death of, ii. 225 Medici, the, i. 110; ii. 276 Cosimo de', i. 289; ii. 194 Isabella de', i. 290, 291 John de', i. 313 Messalina, i. 254, 272; ii. 255, 256, 257 Michelangelo, i. 90, 146, 147, 173, 175, 177, 302, 303, 315; ii. 129, 130, 157, 159, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 188, 200, 276-281, 284, 317-319, 322 "Last Judgment" by, i. 173; ii. 171, 276, 280, 315 "Moses" by, ii. 278, 286 "Pietà" by, ii. 286 Middle Age, the, i. 47, 92, 210-247, 274; ii. 163, 166, 172-175, 180, 196 Migliorati, Ludovico, i. 103 Milan, i. 175 Duke of, i. 306 Milestone, golden, i. 72 Mithræum, i. 271 Mithras, i. 76 Mithridates, i. 26, 30, 37, 358 Mocenni, Mario, ii. 249 Monaldeschi, ii. 308 Monastery of-- the Apostles, i. 182 Dominicans, ii. 45, 61 Grottaferrata, ii. 37 Saint Anastasia, ii. 38 Gregory, ii. 85 Sant' Onofrio, ii. 147 Moncada, Ugo de, i. 307, 308 Mons Vaticanus, ii. 268 Montaigne, i. 288 Montalto. See _Felice Peretti_ Monte Briano, i. 274 Cavallo, i. 181, 188, 292, 293; ii. 205, 209 Citorio, i. 193, 252, 271 Giordano, i. 274, 281, 282, 288; ii. 206 Mario, i. 313; ii. 268 Montefeltro, Guido da, ii. 160 Monti-- the Region, i. 101, 106, 107, 111, 112, 125, 133, 134, 144, 150, 185, 305; ii. 133, 209 and Trastevere, i. 129, 145, 153; ii. 133, 209 by moonlight, i. 117 Morrone, Pietro da, i. 159 Muratori, i. 85, 132, 159, 277; ii. 40, 48, 76, 126, 324 Museums of Rome, i. 66 Vatican, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287 Villa Borghese, i. 301 Mustafa, ii. 247 N Naples, i. 175, 182, 307, 308 Napoleon, i. 32, 34, 53, 88, 109, 258; ii. 218, 221, 298 Louis, ii. 221, 223, 237 Narcissus, i. 255 Navicella, i. 106 Nelson, i. 253 Neri, Saint Philip, i. 318 Nero, i. 46, 56, 188, 254, 257, 285; ii. 163, 211, 291 Nilus, Saint, ii. 36, 37, 40 Nogaret, i. 162, 164 Northmen, i. 46, 49 Numa, i. 3; ii. 268 Nunnery of the Sacred Heart, i. 256 O Octavius, i. 27, 30, 43, 89; ii. 291 Odoacer, i. 47; ii. 297 Olanda, Francesco d', i. 176 Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, i. 186, 188 Olympius, i. 136, 137, 138 Opimius, i. 24 Orgies of Bacchus, i. 76; ii. 120 Orgies of the Mænads, ii. 121 on the Aventine, i. 76; ii. 121 Orsini, the, i. 94, 149, 153, 159, 167-169, 183, 216, 217, 271, 274, 306-314; ii. 16, 126, 138, 204 Bertoldo, i. 168 Camillo, i. 311 Isabella, i. 291 Ludovico, i. 295 Matteo, i. 281 Napoleon, i. 161 Orsino, i. 166 Paolo Giordano, i. 283, 290-295 Porzia, i. 187 Troilo, i. 290, 291 Virginio, i. 295 war between Colonna and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 18, 126, 204 Orsino, Deacon, i. 134, 135 Orvieto, i. 314 Otho, ii. 295 the Second, ii. 304 Otto, the Great, i. 114; ii. 28, 30 Second, ii. 28 Third, ii. 29-37 Ovid, i. 44, 63 P Painting, ii. 181 in fresco, ii. 181-183 oil, ii. 184-186 Palace (Palazzo)-- Annii, i. 113 Barberini, i. 106, 187 Borromeo, ii. 61 Braschi, i. 305 Cæsars, i. 4, 191; ii. 64 Colonna, i. 169, 189; ii. 205 Consulta, i. 181 Corsini, ii. 149, 308 Doria, i. 207, 226 Pamfili, i. 206, 208 Farnese, i. 102 Fiano, i. 205 della Finanze, i. 91 Gabrielli, i. 216 the Lateran, i. 127; ii. 30 Massimo alle Colonna, i. 316, 317 Mattei, ii. 140 Mazarini, i. 187 of Nero, i. 152 della Pilotta, i. 158 Priori, i. 160 Quirinale, i. 139, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 304 of the Renascence, i. 205 Rospigliosi, i. 181, 187, 188, 189 Ruspoli, i. 206 Santacroce, i. 237; ii. 23 of the Senator, i. 114 Serristori, ii. 214, 216 Theodoli, i. 169 di Venezia, i. 102, 192, 202 Palatine, the, i. 2, 13, 67, 69, 194, 195; ii. 64, 119 Palermo, i. 146 Palestrina, i. 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 243, 282; ii. 13, 315 Paliano, i. 282 Duke of, i. 157, 189 Palladium, i. 77 Pallavicini, i. 206, 258 Palmaria, i. 267 Pamfili, the, i. 206 Pannartz, i. 317 Pantheon, i. 90, 102, 195, 271, 278; ii. 44, 45, 146 Parione, the Region, i. 101, 297, 312, 317; ii. 42 Square of, ii. 42 Pasquino, the, i. 186, 305, 317 Passavant, ii. 285 Passeri, Bernardino, i. 313; ii. 308 Patarina, i. 107, 202 Patriarchal System, i. 223-228 Pavia, i. 175 Pecci, the, ii. 229 Joachim Vincent, ii. 229, 230. Peretti, the, i. 205 Felice, i. 149, 289-295 Francesco, i. 149, 289, 292 Vittoria. See _Accoramboni_ Perugia, i. 159, 276, 277 Perugino, ii. 157, 260, 276 Pescara, i. 174 Peter the Prefect, i. 114; ii. 230 Petrarch, i. 161 Petrella, i. 286 Philip the Fair, i. 160, 276, 278 Second of Spain, ii. 47 Phocas, column of, ii. 93. Piazza-- Barberini, i. 155 della Berlina Vecchia, i. 283 Chiesa Nuova, i. 155 del Colonna, i. 119, 190 Gesù, ii. 45 della Minerva, ii. 45 Moroni, i. 250 Navona, i. 102, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305; ii. 25, 46, 57 Pigna, ii. 55 of the Pantheon, i. 193; ii. 26 Pilotta, i. 158 del Popolo, i. 144, 206, 259, 273 Quirinale, i. 181 Romana, ii. 136 Sant' Eustachio, ii. 25 San Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192, 205, 250 Saint Peter's, ii. 251, 309 di Sciarra, i. 192 Spagna, i. 251; ii. 42 delle Terme, i. 144 di Termini, i. 144 Venezia, i. 206 Pierleoni, the, ii. 77, 79, 82, 101, 105, 106, 109, 114 Pigna, ii. 45 the Region, i, 101, 102; ii. 44 Pilgrimages, ii. 245 Pincian (hill), i. 119, 270, 272 Pincio, the, i. 121, 189, 223, 253, 255, 256, 259, 264, 272 Pintelli, Baccio, ii. 278, 279 Pinturicchio, ii. 147 Pliny, the Younger, i. 85, 87 Pompey, i. 30 Pons Æmilius, i. 67 Cestius, ii. 102, 105 Fabricius, ii. 105 Triumphalis, i. 102, 274 Ponte. See also _Bridge_ Garibaldi, ii. 138 Rotto, i. 67 Sant' Angelo, i. 274, 283, 284, 287; ii. 42, 55, 270 Sisto, i. 307, 311; ii. 136 the Region, i. 274, 275 Pontifex Maximus, i. 39, 48 Pontiff, origin of title, ii. 127 Pope-- Adrian the Fourth, ii. 87 Alexander the Sixth, i. 258; ii. 269, 282 Seventh, i. 259 Anastasius, ii. 88 Benedict the Sixth, ii. 28-30 Fourteenth, i. 186 Boniface the Eighth, i. 159, 160, 167, 213, 280, 306; ii. 304 Celestin the First, i. 164 Second, ii. 83 Clement the Fifth, i. 275, 276 Sixth, ii. 9, 17-19 Seventh, i. 306, 307, 310, 313, 314; ii. 308 Eighth, i. 286 Ninth, i. 187; ii. 110 Eleventh, i. 171 Thirteenth, ii. 320 Damascus, i. 133, 135, 136 Eugenius the Third, ii. 85 Fourth, ii. 7, 56 Ghisleri, ii. 52, 53 Gregory the Fifth, ii. 32-37 Seventh, i. 52, 126; ii. 307 Thirteenth, i. 183, 293 Sixteenth, i. 305; ii. 221, 223 Honorius the Third, ii. 126 Fourth, ii. 126 Innocent the Second, ii. 77, 79, 82, 105 Third, i. 153; ii. 6 Sixth, ii. 19 Eighth, i. 275 Tenth, i. 206, 209,302,303 Joan, i. 143 John the Twelfth, ii. 282 Thirteenth, i. 113 Fifteenth, ii. 29 Twenty-third, ii. 269 Julius the Second, i. 208, 258; ii. 276, 298, 304 Leo the Third, i. 109; ii. 146, 297 Fourth, ii. 242 Tenth, i. 304; ii. 276, 304 Twelfth, i. 202; ii. 111 Thirteenth, i. 77; ii. 218-267, 282, 287, 308, 312, 313 Liberius, i. 138 Lucius the Second, ii. 84, 85 Martin the First, i. 136 Nicholas the Fourth, i. 159, 274 Fifth, i. 52; ii. 58, 268, 269, 298, 304 Paschal the Second, i. 258; ii. 307 Paul the Second, i. 202, 205 Third, i. 219; ii. 41, 130, 304, 323, 324 Fourth, ii. 46, 47, 48-51, 111, 112 Fifth, ii. 289 Pelagius the First, i. 170, 171; ii. 307 Pius the Fourth, i. 147, 305 Sixth, i. 181, 182 Seventh, i. 53; ii. 221 Ninth, i. 76, 183, 315; ii. 66, 110, 111, 216, 221-225, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258, 265, 298, 308, 311 Silverius, i. 266 Sixtus the Fourth, i. 258, 275; ii. 127, 204-213, 274, 278, 321 Fifth, i. 52, 139, 149, 181, 184, 186, 205, 283; ii. 43, 157, 241, 304, 323 Sylvester, i. 113; ii. 297, 298 Symmachus, ii. 44 Urban the Second, i. 52 Sixth, ii. 322, 323 Eighth, i. 181, 187, 268, 301; ii. 132, 203, 298 Vigilius, ii. 307 Popes, the, i. 125, 142, 273 at Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 9 among sovereigns, ii. 228 election of, ii. 41, 42 hatred for, ii. 262-264 temporal power of, i. 168; ii. 255-259 Poppæa, i. 103 Porcari, the, ii. 56 Stephen, ii. 56-60, 204 Porsena of Clusium, i. 5, 6, 12 Porta. See also _Gate_-- Angelica, i. 120 Maggiore, i. 107 Metronia, i. 106 Mugonia, i. 10 Pia, i. 107, 147, 152; ii. 224 Pinciana, i. 193, 250, 264, 266, 269 del Popolo, i. 272, 299 Portese, ii. 132 Salaria, i. 106, 107, 193 San Giovanni, i. 107, 120 Lorenzo, i. 107 Sebastiano, ii. 119, 125 Spirito, i. 311; ii. 132, 152 Tiburtina, i. 107 Portico of Neptune, i. 271 Octavia, ii. 3, 105 Poussin, Nicholas, i. 264 Præneste, i. 156 Prætextatus, i. 134 Prefect of Rome, i. 103, 114, 134 Presepi, ii. 139 Prince of Wales, i. 203 Prior of the Regions, i. 112, 114 Processions of-- the Brotherhood of Saint John, ii. 130 Captains of Regions, i. 112 Coromania, i. 141 Coronation of Lewis of Bavaria, i. 166, 167 Ides of May, ii. 127-129 the Triumph of Aurelian, i. 179 Progress and civilization, i. 262; ii. 177-180 romance, i. 154 Prosper of Cicigliano, ii. 213 Q Quæstor, i. 58 Quirinal, the (hill), i. 106, 119, 158, 182, 184, 186, 187; ii. 205 R Rabble, Roman, i. 115, 128, 132, 153, 281; ii. 131 Race course of Domitian, i. 270, 297 Races, Carnival, i. 108, 202, 203 Raimondi, ii. 315 Rampolla, ii. 239, 249, 250 Raphael, i. 260, 315; ii. 159, 169, 175, 188, 200, 281, 285, 322 in Trastevere, ii. 144-147 the "Transfiguration" by, ii. 146, 281 Ravenna, i. 175 Regions (Rioni), i. 100-105, 110-114, 166 Captains of, i. 110 devices of, i. 100 fighting ground of, i. 129 Prior, i. 112, 114 rivalry of, i. 108, 110, 125 Regola, the Region, i. 101, 168; ii. 1-3 Regulus, i. 20 Religion, i. 48, 50, 75 Religious epochs in Roman history, i. 76 Renascence in Italy, i. 52, 77, 84, 98, 99, 188, 237, 240, 250, 258, 261, 262, 303; ii. 152-201, 280 art of, i. 231 frescoes of, i. 232 highest development of, i. 303, 315 leaders of, ii. 152, 157-159 manifestation of, ii. 197 palaces of, i. 205, 216 represented in "The Last Judgment," ii. 280 results of development of, ii. 199 Reni, Guido, i. 264; ii. 317 Republic, the, i. 6, 12, 15, 53, 110; ii. 291 and Arnold of Brescia, ii. 86 Porcari, ii. 56-60 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 modern ideas of, ii. 219 Revolts in Rome-- against the nobles, ii. 73 of the army, i. 25 Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73-89 Marius and Sylla, i. 25 Porcari, ii. 56-60 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8, 73 slaves, i. 24 Stefaneschi, i. 281-283; ii. 219-222 Revolutionary idea, the, ii. 219-222 Riario, the, ii. 149, 150, 151 Jerome, ii. 205 Rienzi, Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308 Rioni. See _Regions_ Ripa, the Region, i. 101; ii. 118 Ripa Grande, ii. 127 Ripetta, ii. 52 Ristori, Mme., i. 169 Robert of Naples, i. 278 Roffredo, Count, i. 114, 115 Rome-- a day in mediæval, i. 241-247 Bishop of, i. 133 charm of, i. 54, 98, 318 ecclesiastic, i. 124 lay, i. 124 a modern Capital, i. 123, 124 foundation of, i. 2 of the Augustan Age, i. 60-62 Barons, i. 50, 84, 104, 229-247; ii. 75 Cæsars, i. 84 Empire, i. 15, 17, 28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 99 Kings, i. 2-7, 10, 11 Middle Age, i. 110, 210-247, 274; ii. 172-175 Napoleonic era, i. 229 Popes, i. 50, 77, 84, 104 Republic, i. 6, 12, 16, 53, 110 Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8 today, i. 55 sack of, by Constable of Bourbon, i. 259, 273, 309-315 sack of, by Gauls, i. 15, 49, 252 Guiscard, i. 95, 126-129, 252 seen from dome of Saint Peter's, ii. 302 under Tribunes, i. 14 Decemvirs, i. 14 Dictator, i. 28 Romulus, i. 2, 5, 30, 78, 228 Rospigliosi, i. 206 Rossi, Pellegrino, i. 316 Count, ii. 223 Rostra, i. 27; ii. 93 Julia, i. 68; ii. 93 Rota, ii. 215 Rovere, the, i. 258; ii. 276, 279, 321 Rudinì, i. 187 Rudolph of Hapsburg, i. 161 Rufillus, i. 65 S Sacchi, Bartolommeo, i. 139, 147 Saint Peter's Church, i. 166, 278; ii. 202, 212, 243, 246, 268, 289, 294, 295, 326 altar of, i. 96 architects of, ii. 304 bronze doors of, ii. 299, 300 builders of, ii. 304 Chapel of the Choir, ii. 310, 313, 314 Chapel of the Sacrament, ii. 274, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313 Choir of, ii. 313-316 Colonna Santa, ii. 319 dome of, i. 96; ii. 302 Piazza of, ii. 251 Sacristy of, i. 171 Salvini, i. 169, 252 Giorgio, i. 313 Santacroce Paolo, i. 286 Sant' Angelo the Region, i. 101; ii. 101 Santorio, Cardinal, i. 208 San Vito, i. 282 Saracens, i. 128, 144 Sarto, Andrea del, ii. 157, 169 Saturnalia, i. 125, 194, 195 Saturninus, i. 25 Satyricon, the, i. 85 Savelli, the, i. 284; ii. 1, 16, 126, 206 John Philip, ii. 207-210 Savonarola, i. 110 Savoy, house of, i. 110; ii. 219, 220, 224 Scævola, i. 13 Schweinheim, i. 317 Scipio, Cornelius, i. 20 of Africa, i. 20, 22, 29, 59, 76; ii. 121 Asia, i. 21; ii. 120 Scotus, i. 182 See, Holy, i. 159, 168; ii. 264-267, 277, 294 Segni, Monseignor, i. 304 Sejanuo, ii. 294 Semiamira, i. 178 Senate, Roman, i. 167, 168, 257 the Little, i. 177, 180 Senators, i. 78, 112, 167 Servius, i. 5, 15 Severus-- Arch of, ii. 92 Septizonium of, i. 96, 127 Sforza, i. 13; ii. 89 Sforza, Catharine, i. 177; ii. 150 Francesco, i. 306 Siena, i. 232, 268; ii. 229 Signorelli, ii. 277 Slaves, i. 81, 24 Sosii Brothers, i. 72, 73 Spencer, Herbert, ii. 225, 226 Stefaneschi, Giovanni degli, i. 103, 282 Stilicho, ii. 323 Stradella, Alessandro, ii. 315 Streets, See _Via_ Subiaco, i. 282 Suburra, i. 39; ii. 95 Suetonius, i. 43 Sylla, ii. 25-29, 36-42 T Tacitus, i. 46, 254; ii. 103 Tarentum, i. 18, 19 Tarpeia, i. 29; ii. 68, 69 Tarpeian Rock, ii. 67 Tarquins, the, i. 6, 11, 12, 80, 248, 249, 269; ii. 69 Sextus, i. 5, 11 Tasso, i. 188, 189; ii. 147-149 Bernardo, i. 188 Tatius, i. 68, 69 Tempietto, the, i. 264 Temple of-- Castor, i. 27 Castor and Pollux, i. 68; ii. 92, 94 Ceres, ii. 119 Concord, i. 24; ii. 92 Flora, i. 155 Hercules, ii. 40 Isis and Serapis, i. 271 Julius Cæsar, i. 72 Minerva, i. 96 Saturn, i. 194, 201; ii. 94 the Sun, i. 177, 179, 180, 271 Venus and Rome, i. 110 Venus Victorius, i. 270 Vesta, i. 68 Tenebræ, i. 117 Tetricius, i. 179 Theatre of-- Apollo, i. 286 Balbus, ii. 1 Marcellus, ii. 1, 101, 105, 106, 119 Pompey, i. 103, 153 Thedoric of Verona, ii. 297 Theodoli, the, i. 258 Theodora Senatrix, i. 158, 266, 267; ii. 27-29, 203, 282 Tiber, i. 23, 27, 66, 93, 94, 151, 158, 168, 189, 237, 248, 249, 254, 269, 272, 288 Tiberius, i. 254, 287; ii. 102 Titian, i. 315; ii. 165, 166, 175, 188, 278 Titus, i. 56, 86; ii. 102, 295 Tivoli, i. 180, 185; ii. 76, 85 Torre (Tower)-- Anguillara, ii. 138, 139, 140 Borgia, ii. 269, 285 dei Conti, i. 118, 153 Milizie, i. 277 Millina, i. 274 di Nona, i. 274, 284, 287; ii. 52, 54, 72 Sanguigna, i. 274 Torrione, ii. 241, 242 Trajan, i. 85, 192; ii. 206 Trastevere, the Region, i. 101, 127, 129, 278, 307, 311; ii. 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 151 Trevi, the Fountain, i. 155, 186 the Region, i. 155, 187; ii. 209 Tribunes, i. 14 Trinità de' Monti, i. 256, 264 dei Pellegrini, ii. 110 Triumph, the, of Aurelian, i. 179 Triumphal Road, i. 66, 69, 70, 71 Tullianum, i. 8 Tullus, i. 3 Domitius, i. 90 Tuscany, Duke of, ii. 30 Tusculum, i. 158 U Unity, of Italy, i. 53, 77, 123, 184; ii. 224 under Augustus, i. 184 Victor Emmanuel, i. 184 University, Gregorian, the, ii. 61 of the Sapienza, i. 251; ii. 24, 25 Urbino, Duke of, i. 208, 217 V Valens, i. 133 Valentinian, i. 133 Varus, i. 46 Vatican, the, i. 127, 128, 147, 165, 189, 278, 281, 307; ii. 44, 202, 207, 228, 243, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, 269, 271 barracks of the Swiss Guard, ii. 275 chapels in, Pauline, ii. Nicholas, ii. 285 Sixtine, ii. 246, 274, 275, 276, 278-281, 285 fields, i. 274 Court of the Belvedere, ii. 269 Saint Damasus, ii. 273 finances of, ii. 253 gardens of, ii. 243, 271, 287 of the Pigna, ii. 273 library, ii. 275, 276, 282 Borgia apartments of, ii. 282 Loggia of the Beatification, ii. 245 Raphael, ii. 273, 274, 276, 285 Maestro di Camera, ii. 239, 248, 250 museums of, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287 picture galleries, ii. 273-284 Pontifical residence, ii. 249 private apartments, ii. 249 Sala Clementina, ii. 248 del Concistoro, ii. 246 Ducale, ii. 245, 247 Regia, ii. 246 throne room, ii. 247 Torre Borgia, ii. 269, 285 Veii, i. 16, 17 Velabrum, i. 67 Veneziano, Domenico, ii. 185 Venice, i. 193, 296, 306; ii. 35, 205 Vercingetorix, ii. 294 Vespasian, i. 46, 56; ii. 295 Vespignani, ii. 241, 242 Vesta, i. 57 temple of, i. 71, 77 Vestals, i. 77, 80, 133, 152; ii. 99 house of, i. 69 Via-- della Angelo Custode, i. 122 Appia, i. 22, 94 Arenula, ii. 45 Borgognona, i. 251 Campo Marzo, i. 150 di Caravita, ii. 45 del Corso, i. 155, 158, 192, 193, 251; ii. 45 della Dateria, i. 183 Dogana Vecchia, ii. 26 Flaminia, i. 193 Florida, ii. 45 Frattina, i. 250 de' Greci, i. 251 Lata, i. 193 Lungara, i. 274; ii. 144, 145, 147 Lungaretta, ii. 140 della Maestro, i. 283 Marforio, i. 106 di Monserrato, i. 283 Montebello, i. 107 Nazionale, i. 277 Nova, i. 69 di Parione, i. 297 de' Poli, i. 267 de Pontefici, i. 158 de Prefetti, ii. 6 Quattro Fontane, i. 155, 187 Sacra, i. 65, 71, 180 San Gregorio, i. 71 San Teodoro, i. 195 de' Schiavoni, i. 158 Sistina, i. 260 della Stelleta, i. 250 della Tritone, i. 106, 119-122, 155 Triumphalis, i. 66, 70, 71 Venti Settembre, i. 186 Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275 Viale Castro Pretorio, i. 107 Vicolo della Corda, i. 283 Victor Emmanuel, i. 53, 166, 184; ii. 90, 221, 224, 225, 238 monument to, ii. 90 Victoria, Queen of England, ii. 263 Vigiles, cohort of the, i. 158, 170 Villa Borghese, i. 223 Colonna, i. 181, 189 d'Este, i. 185 of Hadrian, i. 180 Ludovisi, i. 106, 193 Medici, i. 259, 262, 264, 265, 269, 313 Negroni, i. 148, 149, 289, 292 Publica, i. 250 Villani, i. 160, 277; ii. 164 Villas, in the Region of Monti, i. 149, 150 Vinci, Lionardo da, i. 260, 315; ii. 147, 159, 169, 171, 175, 184, 188, 195, 200 "The Last Supper," by, ii. 171, 184 Virgil, i. 44, 56, 63 Virginia, i. 14 Virginius, i. 15 Volscians, ii. 230 W Walls-- Aurelian, i. 93, 106, 110, 193, 271; ii. 119, 144 Servian, i. 5, 7, 15, 250, 270 of Urban the Eighth, ii. 132 Water supply, i. 145 William the Silent, ii. 263 Witches on the Æsquiline, i. 140 Women's life in Rome, i. 9 Z Zama, i. 21, 59 Zenobia of Palmyra, i. 179; ii. 150. Zouaves, the, ii. 216 
39629	----	IRMA IN ITALY [Illustration: PERUGIA. _Frontispiece_ (_See page 205._)] IRMA IN ITALY A TRAVEL STORY BY HELEN LEAH REED AUTHOR OF "THE BRENDA BOOKS," "IRMA AND NAP," "NAPOLEON'S YOUNG NEIGHBOR," ETC. ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND FROM DRAWINGS BY WILLIAM A. MCCULLOUGH BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1908 _Copyright_, 1908, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. _All rights reserved_ The Tudor Press BOSTON, U. S. A. To M. E. F. A TRUE TRAVELLER CONTENTS PAGE I. THE START 1 II. THE WESTERN ISLANDS 19 III. TOWARD THE CONTINENT 39 IV. AWAY FROM GIBRALTAR 60 V. ON SHORE 80 VI. NAPLES AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD 98 VII. CAVA AND BEYOND 111 VIII. PAESTUM AND POMPEII 125 IX. ROMAN DAYS 146 X. A QUEEN AND OTHER SIGHTS 169 XI. TIVOLI--AND HADRIAN'S VILLA 187 XII. AN ANCIENT TOWN 203 XIII. OLD SIENA--AND NEW FRIENDS 215 XIV. NAP--AND OTHER THINGS 232 XV. A LETTER FROM FLORENCE 251 XVI. A CHANGE IN MARION 270 XVII. IN VENICE 288 XVIII. EXPLANATIONS 312 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Perugia _Frontispiece_ "I wish I could take them all," she said 6 Naples. A Street View 84 "With one girl clutching her dress, she could not move fast" 132 Pompeii 144 Near La Trinità, Rome 170 Rome. Group on Spanish Steps 170 Cascades at Tivoli 188 Wall of Orvieto 188 Spires of Florence 262 San Marco, Florence 262 Siena. General View with Campanile 292 Ravenna. Theodoric's Tomb 292 "As Irma approached, the girl looked up" 296 Venice. The Grand Canal 308 Venice. A Gondolier 308 IRMA IN ITALY CHAPTER I THE START "OF course it's great to go to Europe; any one would jump at the chance, but still----" As the speaker, a bright-eyed girl of sixteen, paused, her companion, slightly younger, continued: "Yes, I know what you mean--it doesn't seem just like Irma to go away before school closes. Why, if she misses the finals, she may have to drop from the class next year." "Probably she expects Italy to help her in her history and Latin." "Travelling is all very well," responded the other, "but there's nothing better than regular study. Why, here's Irma coming," she concluded hastily; "she can speak for herself." "You are surely gossiping about me," cried Irma pleasantly, as she approached her two friends seated on the front steps of Gertrude's house. "You have surely been gossiping, for you stopped talking as soon as you saw me, and Lucy looks almost guilty." "Listeners sometimes hear good of themselves," replied Lucy, "but we'll admit we have been wondering how you made up your mind to run away from school. I shouldn't have dared." "My father and mother decided for me, when Aunt Caroline said she must know at once. There was some one else she would invite, if I couldn't go. I simply could not give up so good a chance to see Europe. But of course I am sorry to leave school." "Now, Irma, no crocodile tears." Gertrude pinched her friend's arm as she spoke. "Fond as I am--or ought to be--of school, I wouldn't think twice about leaving it all, if I had a chance to shorten this horrid winter." "Winter! And here we are sitting in the open air. In six weeks it will be May, and you won't find a pleasanter month in Europe than our May," protested Lucy. "We intend to have some fine picnics this spring; you'll lose them if you go," added Gertrude. "One can't have everything," sighed Irma. "I know that I must lose some good things if I go away." "Examinations, for instance," cried George Belman, who had joined the group. "And promotions, perhaps," added John. "But still," continued George, "I say Irma deserves a change for her unselfishness in having whooping-cough last summer, just to keep Tessie company." "Well, it was considerate in Irma to get over it before school opened; stand up, dear, and let yourself be counted." "Oh, Gertrude, how silly you are!" but even while protesting Irma rose slowly to her feet, and her friends, looking at her, noticed that she was paler and thinner than she had been a year earlier. "Come, now," said Lucy, rising, and affectionately slipping her arm around Irma's waist, "tell us your plans. Gertrude knows them, but I have heard only rumors." "I am not quite sure myself about it all. Only I am to sail with Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim to Naples by the southern route, and, after going through Italy, we shall be home in July--and a niece of Aunt Caroline's, or rather of Uncle Jim's, is going with us." "You didn't tell _me_ that," interposed Gertrude. "You won't miss us half as much if you have another girl with you. I begin to be jealous." "If there were ten other girls in our party I'd miss my friends just as much," said Irma. "Besides, I'll be too busy to take an interest in mere girls." "Busy!" It was George who said this, with a little, mocking laugh. "Yes, busy; busy sightseeing and reading, and perhaps studying a little. For you know I must take a special examination in September. How mortifying if I had to stay behind next year!" "Then I shall drop behind, too, or at least I should wish to," said George gallantly. "Did some one speak of summer?" asked Lucy, rising. "Now that the sun is low I am half frozen. Come, Irma, I will walk to your door with you," and, after a word of farewell to the others, the two friends walked away together. Irma, now in her second year in the High School, had really enjoyed her studies, and she was sure that her ancient history was to be made much more vivid by her journey, and even the dry hours she had spent on Cæsar would count for much when she reached Italy. It was well, perhaps, that Irma herself had little to do in preparing for her journey. As it was, it was hard enough to keep her mind on lessons those last weeks, when there was so much besides to think of. Still, the March days flew by swiftly. Irma was to sail from New York the Saturday before Easter, which this year came very early. A week before she was to start a steamer trunk arrived from New York, accompanied by a letter from Aunt Caroline. "Your mother must have so much to do that I wish to save her a little of the trouble of shopping," wrote Aunt Caroline, "and I do hope that these will fit you." "I can't see that the steamer rug is a very close fit," said Rudolph, laughing, as Irma held up the warm-looking square of blue and green plaid. "But the Panama hat's all right,--only the rug and the hat will look rather queer together." Into the steamer trunk during the week Irma put many little things that the girls at school--and indeed some of the boys--gave her as parting gifts. "I wish I could take them all," she said, as she stood beside the trunk. "But there are so many duplicates. I suppose I could use two pinballs and two brush-holders, but I don't need three needlebooks and half a dozen toothbrush cases. Oh, dear, and all have been so kind that I wish they had compared notes first, so that I needn't have so many things I can't use." [Illustration: "I WISH I COULD TAKE THEM ALL," SHE SAID. (_Page 6._)] "It's better to have too many than too few," said Tessie sagely. "Tessie," however, only occasionally, since the ten year old maiden scorned the diminutive of her earlier years, and insisted that now she was old enough to be known as "Theresa." "It's better for you, Theresa," responded Irma, "for some of these things may find their way to your room. Lucy might let me give you this needlebook, or at least lend it, for perhaps it wouldn't do to give a present away." "Well, I'll borrow it now, to help me remember you when you are gone," and Tessie, delighted with her treasure, ran off to her room with it. During her last days at home Irma realized that Nap was not happy. He followed her from room to room, and, so far as he could, kept her always in sight. When she sat down, he lay at her feet with his nose touching her dress. When she moved she almost stumbled over him; and once, when she went to close the steamer trunk, there he was inside! He might have suffered Ginevra's fate, had not Irma happened to look within. "He truly knows just what you are going to do, and he meant to hide until the trunk was opened on the ship, so you'd have to take him with you," cried Tessie. "Yes," added Chris, "perhaps he thinks that's his only chance of finding Katie Grimston again. She's still in Europe, isn't she?" "Well, Katie Grimston shall never have him." "But she did not give him to you; she wrote she would claim him on her return." "Yes, but she isn't here to claim him, and possession is nine points of the law." Then Irma picked the little creature up and ran away with him. The boys were very philosophical about their sister's departure. "If I should stay home they'd be grievously disappointed," Irma confided to Gertrude. "They are calculating so on the stamps and post cards I am to collect for them, that I wouldn't dare change my mind." Mahala's interest, however, made up for the indifference of the boys to their sister's departure. "We shall miss you dreadfully," and Mahala sighed heavily, "though it's a great thing for a person to have the advantage of foreign travel; not that I'd cross the ocean myself, for what with the danger of meeting icebergs," she continued cheerfully, "and bursting boilers and all the other perils of the sea--dear me, I'd feel as if I was taking my life in my hands to embark on an ocean liner. But I'm glad you're going, Irma. One of the family ought to have the experience----" "Of icebergs and bursting boilers," cried Irma. "O Mahala, I am surprised at you." "Going to Europe has seemed to me like a dream," continued Irma, turning to her mother, "but Mahala would change it to a nightmare," and the help from Aroostook, Maine, withdrew in confusion to the kitchen. If Irma had thought going to Europe a dream, the dream seemed pretty nearly true one Saturday morning, when from the deck of the great steamship she watched the receding dock, until in the crowd she could barely discern the figure of her father as he stood there waving his handkerchief. At this moment there were real tears in her eyes, though she had fully made up her mind not to cry. For the moment a great many thoughts crowded upon her,--memories of her mother looking from the window as the coach drove off to the station, of the boys and Tessie standing at the gate, and Mahala on the steps with Nap in her arms, held tightly, lest his continued wriggling should at last result in his running after the carriage. "It's really very selfish in me to go so far when none of the others can go," Irma mused, and as the ship moved seaward, she was so lost in sad thoughts that she hardly heeded Aunt Caroline's "Come, dear. Here is Marion, whom you haven't met yet." Turning about, Irma experienced one of the greatest surprises of her life. Instead of the girl in long skirts whom she expected to see, there stood by her aunt's side a tall boy, apparently a little older than John Wall or George Belman. Who could he be? And where was Marian? The boy had pleasant, brown eyes, but a fretful line about his lips interfered with the attractiveness of his face. There was no time for questions. Before Irma could speak, Aunt Caroline continued, "I do hope you two young people will like each other. Marion, this is Irma, about whom I have told you so much." The boy and the girl looked at each other for a moment in silence. Irma was the first to speak. "Why--why I thought from your letter that Marion was a girl," she said awkwardly. This speech did not better matters. Marion was still silent as he extended his hand to meet the one that Irma offered him. Then, acknowledging the introduction with a touch of his hat, he turned on his heel and walked off. "Poor boy!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline, as he passed out of sight. "We must be patient. We must do what we can for him. Had things been different, he could hardly have come with us. But why did you think Marion a girl?" "I never heard of a boy named Marian." "Oh--it's after General Marion. Perhaps my wretched writing made the 'o' look an 'a'. I didn't refer to our nephew?" "No, you only said you hoped I'd like Marian, who was the same relation to Uncle Jim that I am to you," and Irma smiled, remembering that Aunt Caroline was only an aunt by courtesy,--in other words, an intimate friend of her mother's. "Well, we are very fond of Marion--even if he isn't a real nephew--only we must all make allowances for him," then Aunt Caroline flitted off, while Irma wondered why allowances must be made for a tall, good-looking boy, who seemed well able to take care of himself. Meanwhile, Marion, leaning against a rail at some distance from Irma, was on the verge of a fit of the blues. "Thought I was a girl. Oh, yes, I suppose they have told her everything. Aunt Caroline ought to have had more sense. Anyway, I hate girls, and I'll try not to see much of this one." Then Marion, to whom New York Harbor was no novelty, went within, while Uncle Jim joined Irma, and pointed out many interesting things. The great city they were leaving looked picturesque to Irma, as she gave its spires and high buildings a backward glance. The mammoth Liberty, standing on its little island, held her attention for a moment. Past the closely built shore of Long Island and the forts on the Westchester side, they were getting into deeper water, and Irma was straining her eyes in the direction of Sandy Hook, toward which Uncle Jim was pointing, when Aunt Caroline hurried up to her: "If you come in now, you can write a short letter to your mother." "To my mother?" "Yes, to send back by the pilot. But you must be quick." Following her aunt, Irma was soon in the small saloon, where twenty or thirty persons were writing at small tables or on improvised lap-tablets. In one corner a ship's officer was tying up bundles of letters and putting them in the large mail bag that lay beside him. Irma quickly finished her brief home letter. It was only a word to let them know she was thinking of them. As she approached the mail steward, "No, sir, we 'aven't a stamp left," she heard him say, "heverybody's been writing. The stamps are hall gone--hat least the Hamerican." "Oh, don't we need English stamps?" Irma turned to her aunt. "No, dear. I am sorry he has no American stamps. I can enclose your letter with my own to Cousin Fannie, and she'll remail it." "Oh, but I have stamps. I brought half a dozen with me." An old gentleman who had vainly asked the steward for a stamp stood near Irma. She had heard him express annoyance that he must entrust his letter to the pilot unstamped. "One can seldom trust a friend to put a stamp on a letter--still less a complete stranger--and this is very important." "Excuse me," interposed Irma, stepping up to him. She wondered afterwards how she had dared. "Will you not take one of my stamps?" she said. A broad smile brightened the old gentleman's face. "You certainly are long on stamps, and I am obliged to you for letting me share your prosperity." Then, stamping his letter, he dropped it into the mail bag. "I'll take two," said a lady abruptly, approaching Irma, and without so much as "by your leave," she detached two from Irma's strip of four, and dropping a nickel into her hand, walked off with a murmured "Thank you." A second and younger lady then approached. "Could you let me have two stamps?" she asked politely. "I overheard you say that you had some." "Certainly," said Irma, and after thanking her, this applicant, with a pleasant "Fair exchange is no robbery," slipped into Irma's hand two Italian stamps. This seemed a much more gracious payment than the nickel. Later she recalled that the old gentleman had paid her nothing--and this, she decided, was the most courteous way of all. The steward had fastened the bag when Marion rushed up to him. "Oh, say, steward, give me a stamp." "'Aven't hany, sir." "Well, you ought to have some." "Mine are all gone, too," said Irma. "I had half a dozen a few minutes ago." "You might have saved some for me," snapped Marion; "why should a girl write so many letters?" "I wrote only one," began Irma. "You can give your letter to the pilot." But Marion's only answer was to tear his letter into fragments. Then he followed the steward with the bag, and Irma was almost alone in the deserted saloon. The letter she had just written was the last word she could send home for a week. It would be twice as long before she could hear from any of the family. She began to wish that she had gone back on the pilot boat. Why, indeed, had she ever left home? She should have waited until they could all visit Europe together. Now all kinds of things might happen to Chris or Rudolph or Tessie--or even to her father and mother--and it might all be over before she could hear a word. She began to be really unhappy, and again her eyes filled in a desperate feeling of homesickness. After this first attack, Irma was, for a time, able to put the family out of her mind. At the first luncheon on shipboard, which she hardly tasted, her place at table was between Aunt Caroline and Marion. But at dinner when Marion appeared he dropped into the seat next to Uncle Jim, leaving his former place vacant. "It's only one of Marion's notions," whispered Aunt Caroline. "I fear he is shy, and doesn't know what to say to you." Irma was not comfortable in learning that Marion regarded her as a person to be avoided. "If only Marion had been a friendly girl how much pleasanter our party would be," she thought. At first Irma felt she could hardly manage to live in her small stateroom. But when she had fastened to the wall the linen hold-all her mother had made, filled with various little things, and had stowed other small possessions in the drawer under the mirror, she saw the possibility of adapting herself to her cramped quarters. She soon had a regular program. She rose with the first morning bugle, and after her early bath, while Aunt Caroline dozed, dressed quickly. Then she had a brisk walk on deck before breakfast, which Uncle Jim's party had at the second table. Sunday morning--her second day at sea--Irma found a letter by her plate at breakfast. "It's from Lucy," she cried, turning it over and over. "A steamer letter," explained Uncle Jim. "Are you such a landlubber as not to know that in these days letters follow you regularly on your voyage?" A moment later she discerned in a corner, "Care the Purser," and then she broke the seal. "What news?" asked Uncle Jim, as she finished. "All you'd expect from a letter written before I left home. I wonder how far we are now," she concluded with a sigh. "Too far for you to swim back," answered Aunt Caroline, reading her thoughts. Among the letters that Irma received daily after this, Mahala's was especially entertaining. "To dream of a horse," she began, "is a sign of a letter, so I'm writing because I dreamt of a horse last night, though that isn't the way it's generally meant to work. Tessie's beginning to live up to many of the signs I've taught her, and when I told her I hoped your voyage wouldn't be unlucky because you were leaving Cranston Friday--just after you started she ran out of the room, and when I went on the steps to see if she'd gone over to the Flynns', well, just at that very minute something struck me on the head, and such a mess, all down my face and over my apron. When I got hold of Tessie she explained that she'd heard me say that if any one wished on an egg dropped from a second story window, the wish would come true--if the egg didn't break--but this egg certainly broke, and I hope it won't cause you ill luck. This wouldn't require mentioning, only I thought it might make you laugh if you happen to feel peaked the day you read this letter. We didn't punish Tessie, because she's feeling kind of bad about you, and she got scared enough when the egg broke on my head." CHAPTER II THE WESTERN ISLANDS The first day or so of the voyage seemed long to Irma. She could not lie in a steamer chair, and pretend to read, as Aunt Caroline did. She had more than a suspicion that her aunt seldom turned the leaves of her book, and that left to herself she was apt to doze, although each morning Uncle Jim placed beside her chair a large basket containing books and magazines. "Lean back, Irma," Uncle Jim would say, "you are not a real bird that you need perch on the arm of your chair. Lean back; I will fix your cushions--as Marion is not here to do this for you," he concluded mischievously. "I wonder what Marion does with himself," interposed Aunt Caroline. "We see him only at meals, and I thought he would be such company for Irma." "Irma doesn't need him," responded Uncle Jim. "Come, my dear, let us look at the steerage." "Don't go below," protested Aunt Caroline. "You don't know what frightful disease you might catch." "We'll only look over the railing," and Uncle Jim led Irma to a spot where she could look down at the steerage passengers, sitting in the sun on the deck below. "It's not very crowded," explained Uncle Jim, "on the passage to Europe at this season. Most of those you see have a free passage because the authorities fear they may become public charges." "How hard!" "No, my dear. Many of them have better food and quarters here than they ever have on shore." "Are there many sick among them?" "The doctor told me of one poor woman who may not live until she reaches the Azores. She has been working in New Bedford, but when the doctors told her she could not live long, she was sure the air of the Western Islands would cure her. So her friends had a raffle, and raised enough for her passage, and a little more for her to live on after her arrival here, at least, that's what Marion told me." "Marion!" "Yes, he takes a great interest in the steerage. I dare say he knows those three ferocious-looking desperadoes in the corner." "Desperadoes!" "Well, they might be brigands, might they not? at least judging from their appearance. Most men returning at this season--and not a few of the women, too--are sent back by our Government because undesirable for citizenship." "Oh!" exclaimed Irma. "That explains why so many wear strange clothes. They are really foreigners." "Yes. The majority of them have probably never even landed." As Irma turned away, her interest in the steerage increased rather than lessened. But when she asked Uncle Jim questions, she found he knew little about individuals. She wished that Marion would talk to her. She believed that he could tell her what she wished to know. But as the days passed Marion did not thaw out. It is true he usually reported the day's run to Irma, a little ahead of the time when it was marked on the ship's chart, and if she was not near Aunt Caroline when the steward passed around with his tea and cakes, he would usually hunt her up. But if she began to talk to him, he answered in the briefest words, and did not encourage further conversation. One day, when he came to the table rather more animated than usual, she could not help overhearing him describe a visit he had made to the lower regions of the ship, where he had seen the inner workings of things. She listened eagerly to his description of the stoking hole with the flames weirdly lighting up the figures of the busy stokers. This interested her more than what he told of the machinery and the huge refrigerating plant. "The doctor might have asked me, too. It's different from the steerage. Marion is very selfish, never to think of me. If there were more girls of my age, I wouldn't care. There isn't a boy in Cranston who would be so mean." Soon after this, the day before they reached the Azores, Irma made the acquaintance of the one girl on board, near her own age. Hitherto Muriel had looked at her wistfully, not venturing to leave her governess, who talked French endlessly, as they paced the deck. But now, as Irma was watching a game of shuffleboard, played by older persons, Muriel approached and began a conversation, and soon the two were comparing their present impressions and their future plans. "I'm awfully tired of Europe," said Muriel. "We go every year, but this time it may not be so bad, as we are to motor through Italy." The most of this day the two new friends were together, separating only to finish the letters that they wished to mail at St. Michael's. After dinner, when Irma went back to the dining saloon, the mail steward sat at a table with a scale before him, receiving money for the stamps he was to put on letters at Ponta Delgada. "Why, here's my little lady of the stamps," cried a voice in Irma's ear, and turning, she recognized the little old gentleman, whom she had not seen since the first day. Irma returned his greeting, and he went up with her toward the deck. "It's so mild," she explained, "that my aunt said I might sit outside. I am so anxious to see land." "Even if we were nearer shore, there's not moon enough to show an outline. Why are you so anxious to see land?" "Because it will be my first foreign country. Except when we sailed from New York, I had never been out of New England." "There are worse places to spend one's life in than New England," and the old gentleman sighed, as he added, "yet in the fifty years since I left it, I have been back only half a dozen times." "I suppose you know the Azores," ventured Irma. "Oh, yes, the country was very primitive in the old days. The interior, they tell me, has changed little, but the cities are more up to date." "Cities?" "Not large cities like ours in America, though Ponta Delgada is the third largest in Portugal. But there, young ladies of your age dislike guidebook information, at least out of school." "Oh, please go on," begged Irma, and for half an hour her new friend talked delightfully about the Azores and other places. "Ah, there's Uncle Jim," she exclaimed, as she saw her uncle approaching under one of the electric lights. "I never thought of finding you out here alone," cried her uncle. "Not alone," rejoined Irma, turning to introduce her new friend. But he had mysteriously disappeared. "It is high time to come in, if the night air makes you see double," said Uncle Jim dryly. But Irma gave no explanations. How could she have introduced the old gentleman, when she did not know his name? "Aunt Caroline says please hurry. They are in sight." Thus Marion's voice and repeated rappings waked Irma the next morning. "Who are in sight?" she asked sleepily. "The Azores, of course." "Oh, dear," cried Irma, forgetting to thank Marion for his trouble. "Why," she wondered, "did I take this particular morning to oversleep?" Dressing at lightning speed, after a hurried repast she was soon on deck. Then, to her disappointment, there was nothing to see. The islands, wherever they might be, were veiled by a soft mist. "They have been in sight for hours," some one said. Irma wished she had asked her steward to call her at dawn. Not until they were well upon Ponta Delgada did they have their first glimpse of St. Michael's toward noon, and the warmth of the sun was modified by the thin veil of mist. Gradually the mist dissolved, and not far away was the green shore, and behind, a line of low, conical mountains parallel with the coast. Then a white village appeared, and soon the spires and red roofs of Ponta Delgada. Luncheon had been served early, and towards one o'clock the boat stopped, when still some distance from land. Large rowboats were pushing out from shore, and one or two tugs carrying the Portuguese flag. "The tugs are bringing health and customs officers. We can't land until they have made their examination," Uncle Jim explained. "How tedious to wait when we shall have so little time at the best!" "Are we to go in those dreadful little boats?" "Oh, it's a smooth sea; we'll get there safely enough." "The town looks decidedly Spanish." These and many similar remarks floated to Irma's ears. What impressed her most was the fact that she must descend the steep steps that the sailors were letting down from the side, and go ashore in a boat. "It's safe enough," said Aunt Caroline. "Any one is foolish who remains on the ship. But I am willing to stay here myself." So Aunt Caroline remained on the boat, and Irma, with Uncle Jim ahead and Marion behind, went down the long steps cautiously. When she had taken her seat in the large rowboat, she found herself near Muriel and her governess. The two girls were soon deep in conversation, while Marion, some distance away, sat listless and silent. "Your brother isn't cheerful to-day," said Muriel, as the boat neared shore. "He isn't my brother,--far from it," responded Irma, and unluckily at that moment Marion, rising to be of assistance to the ladies on landing, was near enough to hear both Muriel's remark and Irma's answer. "Well, I am very glad not to be her brother," he thought, "and as to that other girl, she's exactly the kind I don't like." And in this mood Marion jumped hastily off when the boat pulled up, and running up the short steps, walked along the quay in solitary sulkiness, with his hands in his pockets. "Your cavalier seems to have left you," said Uncle Jim mischievously, as he helped Irma ashore. "I wonder if he will condescend to join us on our tour of the town." When they had pushed their way among the loungers at the wharf, however, they saw Marion standing near an open carriage, drawn by two underfed horses. "How would this suit?" he asked. "The best carriages have been taken. You know our boat was almost the last." "Over there are a couple of good automobiles looking for passengers." For the instant Marion's face clouded. "Oh, of course," added Uncle Jim hastily. "I had forgotten. That wouldn't do. These horses may prove better than they look, and as we have no time to lose, let us start." Before setting off, Uncle Jim turned about to see whether Muriel and Mademoiselle Potin had found a vehicle. Already they were seated in a carriage much like the one he had chosen, with horses that looked equally meek and hungry. Then Uncle Jim's driver flourished and snapped his whip, and the horses went off at a lively pace. Irma, indeed, wished they would go more slowly, that she could get a better idea of the narrow streets. Yet even as they drove rapidly along she had a definite impression of clean pavements and small houses, many of them painted in bright colors. After they had left the little crowd near the wharf, the streets seemed deserted. Here and there an old man hobbled along, or a woman with a shawl over her head, or a girl with a large basket of fruit. They met oddly constructed carts, drawn by donkeys, and once they stopped to buy fruit from a man who bore a long pole on his shoulders, from one end of which hung a string of bananas, while from the other dangled a dozen pineapples. "Fortunately," said Uncle Jim, "as our time is limited, there are not many important things to see in Ponta Delgada. We shall be obliged to look at so many churches in Italy that we can neglect those here." "I'd like to see the church where Columbus and his sailors gave thanks, when they landed there after the storm." "Santa Maria! Miles away!" cried Marion. "Well," said Irma, slightly snubbed, "even if this isn't the place, it is interesting to remember that some of these islands had been settled years and years before America was discovered." Soon they reached the famous garden, one of the two or three things best worth seeing in the town. When they walked through the great iron gates opened by a respectful servitor, at once Irma felt she was in a region of mystery. The three went along in silence under tall trees whose branches arched over the broad path. Turning aside an instant, they gazed down a deep ravine, with banks moss-grown and covered with ferns. Far below was a little stream, and here and there the ravine was spanned by rustic bridges. Irma caught a glimpse of a dark grotto and a carved stone seat. "It is rather musty here; let us hurry on," suggested Uncle Jim. "Musty!" protested Irma. "It is like poetry." "Well, poetry is rather musty sometimes." Irma could not tell whether or not Marion was in earnest. Farther in the garden they saw more flowers--waxlike camellias and some brilliant blossoms that neither she nor her companions could name. But there were other favorites--fuschias, geraniums, roses, in size and beauty surpassing anything Irma had ever seen. "It reminds me of California," said Marion. "Yes, there is the same soft air combined with the moisture that plants love. Europe has no finer gardens than one or two of these on St. Michael's. We'll have no time for another that belonged to José de Cantos. The owner died a few years ago and left it to the public, with enough money to keep it up. It has bamboo trees and palm trees and mammoth ferns and the greenhouses are filled with orchids. But we'll have to leave that for another visit. It is better now to go where we can get a general view of this part of the island." In the course of their walk they had met groups of sightseers from the ship. But when they were ready to go back they had to turn to a group of old men and women at work on a garden bed, who, with gesticulations, directed them to the right path. "Every one seems old here," said Irma, "even the men sweeping leaves from the paths with their twig brooms look nearly a hundred." "The young and strong probably emigrate," said Uncle Jim. On leaving the garden the coachman took them to the "buena vista," a hill where they had a lovely view of land and water. Far, far as they could see, stretched fertile farms with comfortable houses and outbuildings. "Small farms," explained Uncle Jim, "ought to mean that a good many people are very well off, and yet it is said that most of the people here are poor." When they were in the center of the town again, they sent their carriage away, and then Irma and Marion hastened to one of the little shops on the square, where the former bought post cards and the latter some small silver souvenirs. They rejoined Uncle Jim at the Cathedral door, but a glance at its tawdry interior contented them. Uncle Jim filled Irma's arms with flowers bought from one of the young flower sellers, and when at last they reached the wharf, they were among the last to embark for the ship. Muriel and Mademoiselle Potin were waiting for the same boat, and when they compared notes, the two girls found that they had seen practically the same things, though in a different order. During their two or three hours on shore a fresh breeze had sprung up, and the waves were high. The boat, making her way with difficulty, sometimes did not seem perfectly under the control of the stalwart oarsmen. This at least was Irma's opinion, as she sat there trembling. Even Muriel, the experienced traveller, looked pale, and Irma wondered how Marion felt, seated near the bow with his face turned resolutely away from his friends. "How huge the ship is," exclaimed Muriel, as they drew near the _Ariadne_, a great black hulk whose keel seemed to touch bottom. For a moment Irma had a spasm of fear. What if this great, black thing should tip over some night! How could she make up her mind to live in it for another week! Their rowers rested on their oars a few minutes, while other boats just ahead were putting passengers aboard. Looking to the decks so far above, Irma recognized Aunt Caroline waving her handkerchief. If only she could fly up there without any further battling with the waves! "Come, Irma," said Uncle Jim. "There isn't the least danger. I will stay on the boat until the last, and you can step just ahead of me." All the others, even Muriel and Mademoiselle, had gone up the stairs before Marion. He was just ahead of Irma, and when he had his footing, he stood a step or two from the bottom, to help Irma. The men had difficulty in steadying the boat. But one of them held Irma firmly, until her feet were on a dry step. Then, as Marion extended his hand to her, she put out hers when, it was hard to tell how it really happened, Marion's foot slipped, and instead of helping Irma he fell against her, almost throwing her into the tossing waves. Irma, however, fortunately kept her presence of mind. Not only did she grasp the guard rope quickly, but with her other arm she held Marion firmly. Their feet were wet by the dashing waves, but there was no further damage. They had had a great fright, though Marion seemed to suffer the most. When Irma relaxed her hold, she could walk up to the deck unaided, but Marion had to be supported by a boatman, until Uncle Jim, closely following, drew his arm through his, and so helped him to the deck. Not even Aunt Caroline realized what had happened, when Irma said she must go to her room to change her wet shoes. This she did quickly, as she wished to see all she could of the coast of beautiful St. Michael's. "Tell me now," said Aunt Caroline, from the depths of her chair, "was going ashore really worth while?" "Yes, indeed, you shouldn't have missed it." "Ah, well, I was there years ago, visiting cousins who lived there. But they are now dead, and everything would be so changed. I am told they have electric lights, not only in Ponta Delgada, but in the villages near by, and I don't suppose you met a single woman in the long capote, with its queer hood, nor even one man in a dark carpuccia." "Why, yes," responded Irma, smiling, "I met them on some post cards, but nowhere else." Irma hastened through her dinner that evening. Marion did not appear, but the old gentleman came to her, and placed himself in Aunt Caroline's vacant chair. He entered into a long conversation--or rather a monologue, since in answer to Irma's brief questions he did most of the talking. He told Irma how isolated the islanders were from one another, so that on Corvo, and one or two of the others, if the crops fail, or there is any disaster, they signal for help by means of bonfires. Some of them have mails to Portugal only once in two or three months. Ponta Delgada is much better off, with boats at least twice a month to Lisbon, and fairly good communication with other places. "But if I had time," continued the old gentleman, "I could find nothing more healthful and pleasant than a cruise around these nine Western Islands." "How large are they?" asked Irma abruptly. "Well, they cover more water than land. St. Mary, St. Michael's nearest neighbor, is fifty miles away, and Terceira, the next neighbor, is ninety miles off. But St. Michael's, the largest of them all, is only thirty-seven miles long by nine broad, and Corvo, the smallest, you could almost put in your pocket with its four and a half miles of length and three of breadth. But what they lack in size they make up in climate." "Then I don't see why the men are so ready to leave the islands." "To make money, my child. If Portugal were better off, the islands would share her prosperity. But they share the political troubles of the mother country. Many farms produce barely enough for the tenants, who have to deal with exacting landlords. But some of the large landowners, especially those who raise pineapples, grow rich. The oranges and bananas that they send to Lisbon, and their butter and cheese, too, make money for the producers. But the islands won't be really prosperous until they have more manufactures." In his soliloquy, the old gentleman seemed to have forgotten Irma, and she was on the point of calling his attention to the particularly high and rugged aspect of the coast they were then passing, when he continued, "St. Michael's, I believe, has made a good beginning with carriages and furniture for its own use, and soap and potato alcohol for export, and in time--but, my dear child, I am boring you to death----" "Oh, no, but isn't the coast beautiful, with that veil of mist around the tops of those mountains; what a pity it grows dark." "What a pity it has grown so damp that I must order you in," said the old gentleman kindly, and though he was neither uncle nor aunt, and no real authority, Irma found herself following him within, as she turned her back to the Western Islands. CHAPTER III TOWARD THE CONTINENT "Aren't you tired of hearing people wonder when we shall arrive at Gibraltar?" "They needn't wonder. This is a slow boat, but we have averaged about three hundred and twenty-five miles every day, so we must get in early Tuesday unless something unusual happens. A high wind may spring up, but even then we are pretty certain to come in sight of Gibraltar before night." "Oh, I can hardly wait until then," began Irma. "I hope we can go up on top of the Rock, and down in the dungeons, and everywhere." Muriel, who was walking with Irma and Marion, looked surprised at her friend's enthusiasm, and even a trifle bored. "Don't talk like a school book," she whispered, and Irma, reddening, glanced up at Marion, to see if he shared Muriel's strange distaste for history. But he gave no sign. Since leaving the Azores, Muriel's frank friendliness for Irma had added much to the pleasure of the two girls. Though they had been brought up so differently, they had much in common. Muriel's winters were usually spent there, but she had also travelled widely. She had been educated by governesses, and yet Irma could but notice that she was less well informed in history and had less interest in books than many of her own friends at home. Irma did not compare her own knowledge with Muriel's, but an impartial critic would probably have decided that, whatever might be the real merits of the two systems, Irma had profited the more from the education given her. In modern French and German, however, Muriel certainly was proficient, and when she complained of Mademoiselle Potin, Irma would tell her to be thankful that she had so good a chance to practice French. Since the day at St. Michael's, Marion had ceased to avoid Irma, and though he spent little time with her, he was evidently trying to be friendly. He never referred to his misadventure coming on board. Aunt Caroline had brought Irma his thanks. "He is very nervous, as you must have noticed," she said, "and he may be unable to talk to you about this. For he feels that he has disgraced himself again; and though he is incorrect in this, still I appreciate his feelings, and hope you will accept his thanks." "Why, there's really nothing to thank me for," began Irma. "Oh, yes, my dear, we all think differently. You certainly have great presence of mind. Poor Marion." In spite of Aunt Caroline's sympathetic tones, Irma did not pity Marion. He was a fine, manly-looking boy, and the sea air had brought color to his face, while his fretful expression had almost gone. After the first day or two at sea Irma had begun to make new acquaintances. Among them was a little girl who greatly reminded her of Tessie as she had been a few years earlier. So one day she called her to listen to the steamer letter from Tessie, that she had found under her plate that morning. "Dear Irma, when you read this--for I hope Uncle Jim will give my letter to you--you will be far out on the ocean, where it is very deep, with no islands or peninsulas in sight, and I hope you will be careful not to fall overboard. But please look over the edge of the boat once in a while to see if there are any whales about. Of course, I hope they won't be large enough to upset your steamboat, but if you see one, please take a photograph and send it to me, for I never saw a photograph of a truly, live whale. "I can't tell you any news, because I am writing this before you leave home, so you'll be sure to get it. I would feel too badly to write after you get started. "From your loving Tessie." The letter interested little Jean very much. She had already heard about Tessie and Nap, and now she rushed to the edge of the deck, and when Irma followed her, the child upturned to her a disappointed face. "I can't see one." "One what?" "A whale--and Tessie will be so disappointed. I know she wants that photograph." "No matter, I can take your photograph, only you must smile." So Jean smiled, and the photograph was taken with the camera that Uncle Jim had given Irma. "It will be more fun to look for Gibraltar than for whales. To-morrow we must all have our eyes open." "What's Gibraltar?" "The great big rock where we are going to land." "I don't want to land on a rock," pouted Jean. "I want to go ashore." "Oh, we'll go ashore, too." That evening there was a dance on the ship. The upper deck was covered with canvas, and canvas enclosed the sides. Gay bunting and English and American flags brightened the improvised ballroom, and most of the younger passengers, as well as not a few of the elder, spent at least part of the evening there. "Hasn't Marion been here?" asked Aunt Caroline, when she and Uncle Jim appeared on the scene. "I haven't seen him," responded Irma. "What a goose he is!" exclaimed Uncle Jim. "He's very grumpy, isn't he?" commented Muriel, but Irma made no reply. On Tuesday Irma was on deck early. In the distance a thin dark line after a time took on height and breadth. "Cape Trafalgar!" some one exclaimed. "Europe at last!" thought Irma. "What do you think of Spain?" asked Uncle Jim, standing beside her. "It seems to be chiefly brown cliffs. And so few villages! Where are the cities?" "You'll find seaports only where there are harbors. They are not generally found on rocky promontories." Irma turned about. Yes, the speaker was indeed Marion, whose approach she had not observed. "Oh, Cadiz is not so very far to the north there," interposed Uncle Jim, in an effort to throw oil on the troubled waters, "and we cannot tell just what lies behind those heights. What is there, Marion? You've been in Spain." But Marion had disappeared. After passing Trafalgar, the _Ariadne_ kept nearer shore. Now there was a house in sight, again a little white hamlet lying low at the base of the brown, bare cliffs. Far ahead the clouds took on new shapes, and did not change. Could that be the huge bulk of Gibraltar, seen through a mist? Uncle Jim laughed when Irma put the question to him. "You are looking in the wrong direction." "Then it must be Africa. Oh, I wish we might go nearer." "In that case you might miss the Rock altogether, and take the chance, too, of being wrecked on a savage coast." But the Spanish shore gained in interest. Here and there small fishing boats pushed out. Sometimes steamboats were in sight, smaller than the _Ariadne_ yet of good size, traders along the coast from London, perhaps, to Spanish or French ports. Muriel and Irma amused themselves guessing their nationality, with Uncle Jim as referee. Strange birds flew overhead. Then a town, grayish rather than white, and a lighthouse on the height above. "Tarifa," some one explained, and those who knew said that Gibraltar could not be far away. Soon Irma, who had kept her face toward the African shore, was startled by a voice in her ear. "The Pillars of Hercules are near; people are so busy gathering up their things to go ashore that I was afraid you might go to your stateroom for something, and so miss them." "You are very kind to think of me," said Irma, turning toward Marion, for it was he who had spoken. "How I wish we were to land at some of those strange African places." "Tangiers might be worth while, but I love this distant view of the mountains." "Do you know the name of the African pillar?" "Yes--Abyla! and Gibraltar, formerly known as Calpé, was the other. It's a pity we won't have time to go to the top of the Rock. The Carthaginians used to go up there to watch for the Roman ships. The British officer on guard at the top of the Rock must have a wonderful view. Some one told me you can see from the Sierra Nevadas in Spain to the Atlas in Africa. Just think of being perched up there, fourteen hundred feet above the sea. If only we could have a whole day at Gibraltar, we might see something, but now----" and the old expression of discontent settled on Marion's lips. "Oh, well, we can probably go around the fortifications," responded Irma, trying to console him. "The fortifications! Oh, no, there are miles of them, and the galleries are closed at sundown, so that we couldn't get into them, even if we had a pass,--I suppose that's what they call it." "Well, at least we'll see the town itself, and we can't help running upon some of the garrison, for there are several thousand soldiers and officers." "Oh, I dare say, but it isn't the same thing as visiting Gibraltar decently. Uncle Jim ought to have planned a trip through Spain. It would be three times more interesting than Italy." Irma, who had visited neither country, did not contradict Marion. Enough for her even a short stay at one of the most famous places in the world, the wonderful fortress that the British had defended and held so bravely during a four years' siege more than a century ago. "Marion is a strange boy," thought Irma. "I wonder why he tries to make himself miserable." After passing the jagged and mysterious Pillars of Hercules, Irma soon saw the huge bulk of Gibraltar not far off, and then it seemed but a short run until they had gained the harbor. Her heart sank when she found they were to anchor some distance from shore, for though the water was still and calm, she did not like the small boats. But Uncle Jim laughed at her fears, assuring her that they would be taken off in a comfortable tender. The tender was slow in coming, and during the time of waiting some passengers fretted and fumed. "If they don't get us in by sunset they may not let us land at all. There is such a rule." When others asserted that there was no such rule, some still fretted, because after five there would be no chance to visit the fortifications. "Come, Irma," said Uncle Jim, "these lamentations have some foundation in fact. But Gibraltar's a small town, and we'll improve our two shining hours, which surely shine with much heat, by getting our bearings here." "There's plenty to see," responded Irma. "I suppose those are English warships in their gray coats, and there's a German flag on that great ocean liner. It seems to be crowded with men, immigrants, I suppose, for they are packed on the decks like--like----" "Yes, like flies on flypaper." And Irma smiled at the comparison. Not far from a great mole that stretched out, hot and bare in the sun, two clumsy colliers were anchored; here and there little sailboats darted in and out, and the small steam ferries plied backward and forward to the distant wooded shore, which Uncle Jim said was Algeciras. But it was the gray mass of Gibraltar itself that held Irma's attention. The town side, seen from the harbor, though less steep than the outline usually seen in pictures, was yet most imposing. Along its great breadth, lines of fortifications could be discerned, and barracks, grayish in color, like the rock itself. There were lines of pale brown houses that some one said were officers' quarters, and an old ruin, the remains of an ancient Moorish castle. A number of passengers were to land at Gibraltar to make a tour of Spain, among them little Jean. Irma had turned for a last good-by to them, when Aunt Caroline, joining her, told her that people were already going on board the tender. "What are your exact sensations, Irma?" whispered Uncle Jim, mischievously, "on touching your foot to the soil of Europe? You know you'll wish to be accurate when you record this in your diary. Excuse me for reminding you." "Come, come," remonstrated Aunt Caroline. "Irma may have to record her feelings on finding that every conveyance into the town has been secured by other passengers, while a frivolous uncle had forgotten his duty." But even as she spoke, Marion approached them, walking beside a carriage, to whose driver he was talking. "Well done, Marion; so you jumped off ahead, and though it's a queer-looking outfit, it will probably have to suit your critical aunt." "It's much better than most carriages here," replied Marion, a trifle indignantly; "some of them have only one horse." "You are very thoughtful, Marion," said Aunt Caroline, as they took their places in the brown, canopied phaeton. "No, not now, not now," she cried, as a tall, dignified Spaniard thrust a basket of flowers toward her. "Orange blossoms and pansies are almost irresistible, but it is wiser to wait until we are on our way back to the boat." Marion's face had brightened at Aunt Caroline's praise, and thus, in good humor, he chatted pleasantly with Irma as they drove on. So long was the procession of vehicles ahead of them that their own carriage went slowly through the narrow street. A Moor in flowing white robes and huge turban attracted Irma's attention, as she observed him seated in the doorway of a warehouse on the dock. Farther on they saw a boy of perhaps seventeen, similarly arrayed, pushing a baby carriage. "The servant of an English officer," Uncle Jim explained. "Look your hardest at him, for we shall not see many of his kind after this. It is now past the hour when the Moorish market closes. After that all Moors must be out of the town in their homes outside the gates, except those employed in private families." As the carriage turned into the long, crooked thoroughfare that is the chief business street of Gibraltar, the driver pulled up before a small shop that had a sign "New York Newspapers." "He knows what we need; run, Marion, and get us the latest news." "Yes, Aunt Caroline." But there was disappointment on Marion's face when he returned a few moments later. "There was another liner in early this morning, and all the latest papers are gone. They have only the European editions of New York papers, and the two I could get are a week old." "No matter, son, you did the best you could." "These are two or three days later than the last we saw in New York, and as they have no bad news, or I might say no news at all, we may be thankful. But we must move on. In this bustling town there's no time to stand still." "What interesting shops!" began Irma. "Oh, they're ugly and dingy," said Marion. "In Europe we're almost bound to admire the dingy, if not the ugly," returned Uncle Jim. "Where are we going?" asked Aunt Caroline. "Out to the jumping-off place," said Marion. "That won't take long. After that we can go shopping, or at least you can." "There's a great deal I can enjoy," said Irma pleasantly. Then they drove on past a park where boys were romping on a gravelled playground, while in another portion officers played cricket. They passed many soldiers in khaki, and here and there a red coat. A sloping road led up to a set of officers' quarters, detached houses, shaded by tropical trees. Here they noticed a girl on horseback, a young girl of about Irma's age, with her hair hanging in a long braid beneath her broad, felt hat, and not far from her two or three girls driving. At the little Trafalgar burying-ground their driver paused a moment that they might read the inscriptions on some of the monuments, marking the burial places of many brave English patriots. They had time for a bare glance at the old Moorish garden across the road. "This is the jumping-off place," cried Marion, as they came in sight of the water. At one side was a pool where the soldiers bathed, and near by the officers' bathing-houses. "I know that I should be turning back," said Aunt Caroline. "My special shop is up Gunners' Lane, and when I have been left there, you others may inspect the town. At the most there isn't much time." Marion, however, insisted on staying with Aunt Caroline. "Very well, then. After we have spent all our money on antiques, we'll meet you in front of the post office. I noticed it as we came along; and you must surely be there at half past seven." "Yes, yes," promised Uncle Jim. "Now, my dear," he said, as he and Irma returned to the main street, "we can let the carriage go, as we shall probably spend our time passing in and out of these shops." It was now after six, and the street was thronged. Many were evidently working people on their way home from their day's labors, but some were shoppers with baskets on their arms, and others were evidently tourists, loitering or running in and out of the shops. It was a good-natured crowd that pushed and jostled and overflowed into the middle of the street. Among the throng were many sailors from the ships of war. For some time Uncle Jim with Irma gazed in the windows, and wandered in and out of the most promising shops. In his shopping he had one invariable method. No matter what the object, or its cost, he always offered half the price asked. "Is it fair," asked Irma timidly, "to beat them down?" "It's fair to me," he replied. "In this way I stand a chance of getting things at something near their value." "How much is that?" "Usually one half the asking price. Listen." So Irma listened while a lady near by was bargaining with the Hindu salesman. "Never in my life has such a price been known," he protested, as the lady held up for inspection a spangled Egyptian scarf. The lady advanced reasons for her price. "I cannot make my bread," cried the man, "if I throw my goods away." Yet he thrust the scarf into the lady's hand, and then sold her a second at the same price, without a word of argument. "These men are Orientals," explained Uncle Jim, "and this is their way of doing business. They mark a thing double or treble what they expect to get, and would be surprised if you should buy without bargaining. This man probably goes through this process a dozen times a day after an ocean liner has come into port, and doubtless congratulates himself on the extent of his trade." Uncle Jim further explained that things made in India and Egypt were brought to Gibraltar at small expense, and could be sold for much less than in America or France or even Spain. So he bought spangled scarfs and silver belt buckles, and a number of other little things that he said would exactly suit Aunt Caroline. But Irma bought nothing, tempting though many things were. Realizing that all Italy lay before her, she did not care to draw yet on the little hoard that she was saving for presents for those at home. After they had visited a number of shops, Irma remembered that she had several letters to post. "You can't buy stamps at the post office," said Uncle Jim. "That's one of the peculiarities of Europe. Stamps are sold where you least expect to find them, usually in a tobacconist's. I will go to the shop over there and get some." A moment later, when Uncle Jim returned with the stamps, a gentleman whom Irma did not know was with him. "This is my old friend, Gregory," he said, presenting him to Irma. "If we had not that appointment to meet your aunt and Marion here, I would take you to the hotel to see Mrs. Gregory. It is impossible for her to come out, and I am sorry to miss her." "Yes, and she will be disappointed at not seeing you. But she is extremely tired, as we arrived on the German liner this morning, and to-morrow we start on a fatiguing trip through Spain." "If it would not take more than a quarter of an hour, there is no reason why you should not go back to the hotel, Uncle Jim. I can wait here, for Aunt Caroline and Marion may come along at any minute." After a little thought, Uncle Jim decided that Irma's plan was practicable. But he wished her to wait in a phaeton, to whose driver he gave explicit directions not to go more than a block from the post-office door. But when after a quarter of an hour neither Uncle Jim nor Aunt Caroline had appeared, Irma was greatly disturbed. "I wouldn't make a good Casabianca," she thought. Some of her friends from the _Ariadne_ passed her, and one or two stopped to advise her. "They would have been here ten minutes ago, had they expected to meet you here." "No, they are probably waiting for you at the landing." Even the driver shared this view, and at a quarter of eight Irma drove down to the boat escorted by the carriage in which sat Muriel and her mother and governess. "You must stay with us," said Muriel, "until you find your aunt. She's probably on the tender." But just at this moment a hand was laid on Irma's arm. Turning about, she saw that the little old gentleman was beside her. "Excuse me," he said, "but your aunt is over there. She has not yet gone aboard the tender." As he pointed to the left, Irma saw Aunt Caroline and Marion under the electric light near the waiting-room. When she had reached them the old gentleman was nowhere in sight. "We forgot that we had agreed on the post office," explained Aunt Caroline, "at least I thought it was the landing. Then we were afraid to go back, for fear of making matters worse. But what has become of your uncle?" Irma's explanation was not particularly soothing to her aunt. "If he isn't here soon, he will lose his passage on the _Ariadne_. We must go on, even without him. Some other boat for Naples will come soon. We can better spend extra time at Naples than wait here." "But suppose something has happened to him!" suggested Marion. "I am not afraid. This isn't the first time he has missed boats--but still----" Aunt Caroline seemed to waver. The last whistle had been blown when a figure was seen making flying leaps towards the boat. It was Uncle Jim, who later explained that he had forgotten to look at his watch until his friend suddenly reminded him that he had but five minutes in which to reach the boat. Thereupon he had decided that his only way was to run as if for his life. Almost exhausted, he was evidently not a fit subject for reproof, and Aunt Caroline merely expressed her thankfulness that he had not been detained at Gibraltar. CHAPTER IV AWAY FROM GIBRALTAR As the _Ariadne_ steamed away from Gibraltar, the harbor looked very unlike that of the afternoon. It was now cool, and dark except when lit by flashes from the searchlights. The warships that had looked so sombre in the afternoon were now outlined by rows of tiny electric lights, and myriads of lights twinkled from the town lying along the face of the Rock. With so much beauty outside, Irma could not leave the deck of the _Ariadne_. As she stood there alone, the little old gentleman approached. "There is to be a sham fight in the harbor to-night. That accounts for the unusual illumination." "It is too beautiful for words. I must stay until we see the other face of the Rock--the picture side." "I wish I could stay, but I came only to bring you this. It may be of use to you, as you can have no dinner." "No dinner! But I wish none." "Some of your friends, however, may need something more substantial than the view. The company is saving an honest penny by allowing those who went ashore to abstain from dinner. It would have been served as usual, it was ready, the stewards say, if there had been passengers here to eat it." "But they were all ashore." "The passengers coming on at Gibraltar were here. Others could have been, but they preferred sightseeing at Gibraltar. Consequently they were punished." The company's meanness seemed absurd, but as the old gentleman departed, Irma thanked him warmly for his gift,--a good-sized basket filled with fruit and cakes. For some time Irma strained her eyes for a glimpse of the other side of the Rock. At length, against the sky rose a huge bulk that might have escaped a less keen vision. Almost instantly a passing cloud darkened the sky, and the giant became invisible. When Irma went inside she found a discontented crowd gathered in passageways and in the library. Loud were the complaints that greeted her of the company's cruelty in omitting dinner. "We went ashore without even our usual afternoon tea, and no one had time to think of food at Gibraltar." Irma held out her basket. "A fairy godfather visited me," she said, "but I really do not know just what he gave me. Come, share it with me." Aunt Caroline looked surprised; Uncle Jim gave an expressive whistle, while even on Marion's face was an expression of curiosity. "I do not even know what is in the basket," repeated Irma, "though the fairy godfather said it held fruit and cakes." "I should say so," exclaimed Uncle Jim lifting the cover. "What fruit! And that cake looks as if it had been made in Paris. Just now these are much more attractive than those spangled scarfs I wrestled for with that Hindu. By the way, Irma, are these for show or use? They look too good to eat." "Try them and see," answered Irma. "I'd be more eager to eat if I knew the name of the fairy godfather." "I don't know it myself," said Irma. "This feast will dull our appetites for the nine o'clock rarebit," interposed Uncle Jim, who had made a test of the basket's contents. "I am sure a fairy godfather wouldn't use poison," and Aunt Caroline followed Uncle Jim's example. When Irma turned to offer the basket to Marion, he had left the group. "Poor boy," exclaimed Aunt Caroline. "He told me he felt very faint. It seems he had little luncheon. Perhaps we shall find him in the dining saloon." But when they descended to the dining saloon, Marion was not there, nor did they see him again that night. Yet, if she could not share the old gentleman's gift with Marion, Irma found Muriel most grateful for a portion. For some time the two girls sat together at one end of the long table, comparing notes about Gibraltar. They stayed together so late, indeed, that just before the lights were put out Aunt Caroline appeared. "Why, Irma, my dear, after this exciting day I should think you would need rest earlier than usual." "Perhaps so, Aunt Caroline. But the day has been so exciting that I cannot feel sleepy." "It has grown foggy," said Aunt Caroline, as they went to their room. "I do not like fog, and I am glad that we have but two or three more nights at sea." Once in her berth Irma soon slept. She thought indeed that she had been asleep for hours, when suddenly she woke. It must be morning! But as she opened her eyes, not a glimmer of light came through the porthole. What had wakened her? Then she realized that the boat was still. What had happened? She was conscious of persons walking on the decks above, of voices far away, even of an occasional shout. Ought she to waken Aunt Caroline? While her thoughts were running thus, she had jumped from her berth, and a moment later, in wrapper and moccasins, had made her way to the deck. A few other passengers were moving about, and a group of stewards and stewardesses stood at the head of the stairs, as if awaiting orders. "What is it?" she cried anxiously. Before her question had been answered, some one shoved her arm rather roughly. Looking up she saw that Marion had come up behind her. "What are you doing here?" he said brusquely. "You will get your death. It is very cold." Irma shivered. In spite of her long cape she was half frozen. The night air was chilly, and it was on this account that Marion pulled her from the open door. "Are we in danger? I thought I wouldn't wake Aunt Caroline until I knew." At this moment Marion, unfortunately, smiled. He was fully dressed and wore a long overcoat. With his well-brushed hair he presented a strong contrast to poor, dishevelled Irma. Naturally, then, she resented his smile, occasioned, she thought, by her untidy appearance. "You are a very disagreeable boy," she cried angrily. "I wish I had told you so long ago." Thereupon Irma turned toward the stewards, among whom she recognized the man who took care of her stateroom. "No, Miss, we're not in danger," he answered. "It's foggy, and there was something wrong about signals, but we stopped just in time to get clear of a man-of-war. It would have been pretty bad if she had run into us. So go back to your bed, Miss; it's all right now, and we're starting up again." Marion was unhappy as he watched Irma walking downstairs. Evidently he had in some way offended her; but how? She was an amiable girl; he was sure of this. Therefore his own offence must have been very serious. "It is no use," said Marion bitterly, "I cannot expect people to like me. Of course, she started with a prejudice, and she will never get over it." Now Irma, when she returned to her berth, though reassured by what the steward had said, did not at once fall asleep. For a long time she lay with eyes wide open listening to many strange sounds, some real, some imaginary. But at last, when a metallic hammering had continued for hours, as it seemed to her, she was quite sure something had happened to the boilers, and she drowsily hoped the _Ariadne_ would keep afloat until morning. It would be so much easier to get off in the lifeboats by daylight. Then she must have fallen asleep. At least the next thing of which she was aware was Aunt Caroline's loud whisper to the stewardess. "We won't disturb her. She can sleep until luncheon." Aunt Caroline laughed, when Irma, looking through the curtains of her berth, asked the time. "Past breakfast time, my dear, but the stewardess will bring you hot coffee and toast. You will have only a short hour to wait for luncheon." Thus Irma broke her record of never missing a meal in the dining-room, and shortened a day that otherwise would have seemed very long, as the fog did not clear until late afternoon. All this day Marion spent in a corner of the library. The ship's collection of books contained nothing very recent, but in it were one or two old favorites, whom for the time he preferred as companions to any of his fellow passengers. As to Irma, he tried to put her out of his mind. The world for him again became a dull, stupid place, and most of its inhabitants were his enemies. Strange as it may seem, Irma had soon forgotten her pettishness of the night before. Her fright, the noises from the boiler room, all had seemed a kind of nightmare. So on Thursday, which might be their last full day at sea, she wondered that Marion, who had seemed so friendly at Gibraltar, should now be so unsocial. She and Muriel spent much time together. Though they had not been fortunate enough to see any whales, they did catch sight of a few porpoises, spouting in the water not far away, and as the day was particularly sunny, Irma used her camera to advantage. Not only had she photographed little Jean and her black nurse earlier, and several passengers whom she best knew, but she caught the captain and several of the officers going the rounds at morning inspection, and some of the crew at fire drill. She even leaned over the railing and turned her camera toward the steerage. As she steadied her camera, many turned their eyes toward her. Two or three smiled and waved their hands in a friendly manner. Altogether there was not a large number. In the spring, the captain had told her, not many immigrants returned to Europe. Those now going back to Italy were chiefly those whom the Government had forbidden to land. Some others, who had been in America a short time, were also sent back at the public expense, because likely to become public charges. Muriel and Irma had frequently speculated about the character of several whom they had seen on the third cabin deck from day to day. One group of rough men with bright handkerchiefs twisted about their necks, and caps pulled over their eyes, they called anarchists, and they had theories about most of the others. Both girls had a strong desire to make a tour of the steerage quarters, under the guidance of the ship's doctor. He assured Aunt Caroline that there was no contagious disease. One poor woman had consumption, and might not live to reach Italy, and two or three others were in a decline, but there would be no danger for the young ladies. But neither Muriel's mother nor Aunt Caroline would consent to let the girls see more of the third cabin than they could observe from their own deck. "I really believe," said Irma, "that Aunt Caroline thinks I will catch something from these negatives of the steerage. She is so nervous about it." "Then I should think she would be unwilling to have Marion spend so much time there." "Marion! oh, she doesn't care to have him down there. I remember what she said when he asked her one day." "Well, he goes just the same. I heard my mother and Mademoiselle talking about it only yesterday." This so surprised Irma that she closed her camera and took no more pictures. "I wonder," she said, as if to change the subject, "why that old woman sits there in the corner with her hands over her face. Those little girls, I think, must be her grandchildren. Generally she has the baby in her arms, but the two older girls seem to be taking care of it to-day, and the oldest isn't here at all. She's about my age. Why, there she is, sitting by herself, and her eyes are very red, as if she had been crying." Later in the day, after Muriel had left her, Irma sat down on a settee at the uncovered end of the deck where a number of people, old and young, were playing shuffleboard. Just then the ship's doctor passed, and she thought it a good time to ask him about the old woman in the steerage. "The old woman is downhearted. Her daughter, the mother of the four girls, died a couple of days ago. She was longing to live until she reached Italy, was sure, in fact, that once there she would recover. But from the first I knew her case was hopeless, and we buried her at sea the night before we touched at Gibraltar." "Oh," sighed Irma, "it must be hard for the children." "Yes, very hard. You see it's only a short time since they went out from Italy. The father had a trade, but a week or two after landing he was taken ill, and in another week or two had died. Charitable societies looked after them for a while. They came under the law that requires those likely to become a public charge to be sent back. They have no friends in America." "I suppose they have in Italy." "Yes, and though probably they, too, are poor, still the family will be better off there. With no real wage-earner I do not see what they could do in your country." "I can't see what they will do in Italy, if they have no money." "Oh, they have enough to take them up to Fiesole. That is where they live. But there, you must know something about it; some of the passengers are taking up a collection for them." "Why, no! I have heard nothing of it." "That's strange, for that young man in your party, Marion Horton, is interested. He's been very good, too, to another steerage passenger, a young fellow from Bologna, who is paying his own way back. He has taken Italian lessons from him, I believe." "You surprise me," said Irma, as the doctor moved away. Could it be that Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim knew nothing of Marion's doings? Later others spoke to her about the death of the Italian woman and the needs of her family, and then Muriel came to say that she had given five dollars to the fund a Mrs. Brown was gathering, "and do you know that Marion Horton has charge of it? Isn't it funny he never told you?" The more Irma thought about it the more certain she became that Marion hesitated about letting Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim know that he was in the habit of visiting the steerage. While they had no right, perhaps, to dictate to a boy of seventeen, still Aunt Caroline had expressed herself strongly against his going to the third cabin. Evidently he did not wish her to know that he had disregarded her wishes. What he was unwilling to tell Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim, he would hardly confide to Irma. It happened, however, that at dinner that evening Marion himself told the story of the old grandmother and her young charges. But though he spoke of the little fund that had been raised, he did not mention his own interest in it. "Some one came to me yesterday," said Uncle Jim, when Marion had finished, "and I made a contribution. I did not know the exact need, but you have made it now quite clear." She approached him as he was starting out on deck. "Here is a dollar; please add it to the fund," said Irma to Marion after dinner. Marion glanced at her in astonishment. But he did not take her money. Instead he waved his hand as if to push it away. "No, no," he replied. "No, we do not need it. We have enough." Then, without another glance at Irma, he walked away. "Does he think I offer too little, or does he dislike me so much that he won't take my money?" But there was no one to answer her question. It was now Irma's turn to feel hurt. Small as her offering was, the dollar meant some sacrifice. At least she had taken it from the little sum she had set aside for presents for the family and Lucy and Gertrude and other friends. From her it was a larger sum than twenty dollars from Muriel. So it was trying to have her intended gift treated disdainfully. That evening, as she sat on deck, wondering if this would really be her last night at sea, some one dropped into the empty chair beside hers. "Why so quiet, god-daughter?" It was the voice of the old gentleman, but how had he learned that she sometimes called him the "fairy godfather?" She was glad now to see him. She might not have many more of those pleasant talks with him, unless, perhaps, their paths should cross in Italy. But she had never ventured to ask him just where he was going. Now, contrary to his habit, the old gentleman talked less of the countries he had visited in the past. In some way, before she realized it, he had turned the conversation in the direction of Marion, and after he had left her, Irma was conscious that she had given him much more information than she ought to have given a stranger. "Yes, yes," he had exclaimed, "I can see just what he is like. Willful as ever," and with an abrupt "good night" he had hurried away. "It isn't quite fair that we should all be so pleased at the prospect of landing," said Uncle Jim Friday morning. "Every one seems to think the sooner we are in Naples the better. But we've had a fine trip, no accidents, few seasick, few homesick. Yet here we are with our steamer trunks packed, almost ready to swim ashore, rather than stay longer on the _Ariadne_." "It's human nature, always longing for change. But we might as well possess our souls in patience. Those who know say it will be late afternoon before we even catch a glimpse of the Bay of Naples." "Oh, Aunt Caroline!" "There, Irma, you are as impatient as the rest of us. It is really true that we may not land until evening." Evidently Aunt Caroline spoke with good authority. It was late afternoon before they saw the rugged heights of Ischia in the distance. They were at dinner when they actually passed it, and when they entered the lovely Bay of Naples, the sun had set, and it was too dark to see its actual beauties clearly. When at last they were anchored, it was as if they were in fairyland. The city was a semicircle of brilliant lights curving in front of them. They were surrounded by boats of every size, all of them carrying lights. "Must we land again in tenders?" sighed Irma. "Are there no wharves in Europe?" A fine mist was falling. "Before we go ashore it may be a heavy rain," said Uncle Jim. "If you agree, we can do as the larger number here intend to do. We can sleep on shipboard, and in the morning make a fresh start." The others agreed with Uncle Jim, and remained out on deck to watch the embarkation of those who were going ashore. While they waited, many little boats pushed near the _Ariadne_. In one a quartette sang the sweet Neapolitan songs. In another some stringed instruments played a soft melody. Sometimes the music stopped, while players or singers scrambled for the coppers thrown to the boats by passengers on deck. Then, when the music was resumed, the sound of laughter was mingled with it. Presently a procession of immigrants passed along the deck, carrying bundles and baskets. They made their way slowly to the gangway to descend to the tender. "I wonder if they are glad to be coming home," whispered Irma to Uncle Jim. "No, I fancy most of them prefer America." Just then, at the sound of laughter behind them, Irma and her uncle turned about to see a tall Italian stooping to pick some bananas from the deck. Over his shoulder was a long string of bananas, bought probably in the Azores. Some that were overripe had fallen to the deck. Hardly had he picked these up, when two or three others fell--then others. The poor fellow was in despair. He did not wish to leave them. But he had no way of carrying them. For besides the string of bananas he had to take care of his bundle of clothing carried clumsily under the other arm. While he stood there half dazed, as a companion stooped to help him, suddenly there was a movement in the group of bystanders. A brown linen bag was thrown down at his feet, and a voice cried in Italian, "There, put your bananas in the bag, put them all in and take the bag home with you." "Well done, Marion," cried Uncle Jim, for he and Irma had instantly recognized Marion's voice. "Come here and tell us how you happened to think of it." "Oh, it was easy enough to think of the bag. It was the last thing I put in the tray of my trunk. I was only afraid I couldn't get back with it in time. I dare say the poor wretch meant to sell those bananas at a profit when he lands, and I didn't wish to have his trade spoiled." "But where in the world did you learn the Italian you hurled at him? He seemed to understand it, too." "Oh, I knew a few words before I left home, and here on shipboard I have managed to pick up a few more." Did Marion speak with embarrassment, or did Irma imagine this because she had heard of his going to the steerage for lessons? "_Addio, addio_," cried the owner of the bananas, who had completed his task of packing the fruit in Marion's bag. "_Addio, addio_," responded Marion, while the man, as he passed on to the gangway, poured forth a flood of thanks. When the tender had steamed off, Irma went below. She needed a good night's rest, for breakfast was to be at half past seven. In the misty morning the tender made a quick run to the dock. Just as they pushed away from the _Ariadne_ Irma heard a voice crying, "Good-by, god-daughter." It was the little old gentleman. Since evening she had not seen him, and now she was ashamed that she had not tried to find him for a word of farewell. "Good-by, good-by," she cried, waving her handkerchief. But already he had slipped back out of sight. "To whom were you calling?" asked Aunt Caroline. "To the fairy godfather." "If you were not generally so sensible, sometimes I should think you quite out of your mind," rejoined Aunt Caroline. "Except for that fruit at Gibraltar, your fairy godfather would seem a myth. For neither your uncle nor I ever saw such a person on the _Ariadne_. Did you, Marion?" "Of course not," replied Marion shortly. But Irma only smiled. She knew there was such a person. CHAPTER V ON SHORE The arrival at Naples was much less terrible than many persons had pictured it to Irma and Aunt Caroline. No one attempted to tear their chatelaine bags from them; the officers of the _dogana_ were perfectly civil; no one tried to abstract their trunks. It is true there was a long and apparently needless delay before their trunks were examined and marked, but they made light of this when once they were in the carriage on their way to the hotel. The busy streets through which they first passed were broad and clean. Electric cars, hardly different from the American type, ran through them. The men and women on the sidewalks stepped along briskly. Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim made constant contrasts between the Naples of the present and the past. "The cholera of '84 had one good result; it enabled the city fathers here to do away with many old slums, and put these new streets in their place." Their way eventually led up a broad avenue that mounted to the heights above the old city. Once or twice, at a turn of the road, they had a view of the bay, and of Vesuvius in the distance. "There, there, Irma," cried Uncle Jim, when they first saw the mountain. "Let your heart beat as rapidly as it will; you now look on one of the wonders of the world." Their hotel was on ground so high that they entered it by a subway, and thence by elevator to the summit of a rock whereon stood the hotel. While Uncle Jim was securing rooms, the others, by a common impulse, rushed out on a balcony, of which they had caught a glimpse. "Yes, this is Naples!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline, looking down on the lovely bay, clear and blue. "But," she continued, "Vesuvius is certainly changed--I did not realize that losing the top would so alter him, or her. What do you call volcanoes, Irma?" "Them," responded Irma, and even Marion smiled at her promptness. While they were still looking at the bay and the distant shores of Sorrento and Amalfi, Irma suddenly felt two hands clasp themselves over her eyes. "Don't forget your friends just because you have a volcano to look at," and then, unclasping her hands from Irma's eyes, Muriel stepped in front, where Irma could see her. Muriel was one of those who had left the _Ariadne_ the night before, and as she had not mentioned where she should stay in Naples, Irma and her party were surprised to see her. "Isn't it great that we should be here together?" continued Muriel, after the others had said a word or two of greeting. "The only disagreeable thing is that I am going on to-morrow, for our motor is here, and mamma does not wish to wait longer in Naples." So it happened that though they planned to spend part of the next morning together, this was the last time that Muriel and Irma saw each other for several weeks. "It's well we didn't make plans over night," said Irma, when she joined the others at _déjeuner_ on the morning of her arrival in Naples. "There seems to be a fine mist in the air; and probably that means rain." "Then we won't plan a long drive. You can come shopping with me, Irma," said Aunt Caroline. "I wish to look for coral." "I did not know there was so much coral in the world," said Irma, after they had been out some time. "Where do they get it?" "From Japan and Sardinia and--oh--several other places." "But why should it all come here?" "Because in Naples they know how to cut coral and cameos better than elsewhere in the world." "It is beautiful, of course, and there are so many shades of pink, I shall never know what is meant when any one calls a thing coral colored." "You must choose something for yourself," urged Aunt Caroline, "a little souvenir of Naples;" and when Irma hesitated she selected for her a string of pale red beads. "The very light pink are the most valuable," said Aunt Caroline, "but I will not suggest a change." From the shops near the water front they drove over to the Galleria Umberto I, a huge structure with a glass dome that gave plenty of light to the shops in the arcades on the street level. Here Irma bought two or three little gifts for some of her friends at home,--just whom does not matter now. The afternoon passed quickly, and Irma was pleased when Aunt Caroline said it would be wiser to get afternoon tea in a restaurant down town. Irma herself would have enjoyed the open-air restaurants which she had noted as they drove around, but in the more conventional place that her aunt chose, they managed to find a few novelties on the menu. [Illustration: NAPLES. A STREET VIEW.] Later, they took a drive through some narrow streets, where Irma saw many of the peculiarities of Neapolitan street life, of which she had read a little. There were whole families sitting in front of their dwellings. In some cases mothers were combing the hair of little children, or changing their clothes, or bending over what Irma called "cooking-stands," for they certainly could hardly be considered stoves. "I wonder what they are cooking," she said, "in those queer copper kettles or pans. I should not know what to call them." "Snail soup, perhaps," replied Aunt Caroline, "or more probably macaroni." The word "macaroni" seemed to catch their coachman's ear, and turning toward them, he said some words in Italian so rapidly that Aunt Caroline hardly understood, and then, urging his horse, drove straight on. "He said something about 'old men,' and 'eating macaroni,' but I have no idea what he really means, and I do not like the region where he is taking us." Finally, after many windings, they passed up a street on which the houses were poor, but of a rather better type than those they had seen a short time earlier. "There must be an institution near by," said Aunt Caroline, after they had met, one after the other, several old men wearing a blue uniform. This conjecture proved correct, for at the end of the street they came upon a large building, evidently a home for old men. "Why is the driver so anxious to have us go inside? We really must make him understand. No, no. No, no!" continued Aunt Caroline, and finally, by repeating "No, no," and using gesticulations more emphatic than his own, she made him turn about. But he still continued his pantomime of carrying his hand to his mouth, as if in the act of eating. This he varied by occasionally pointing toward the windows of the houses he was passing, where, as their eyes followed the direction of his finger, Irma and Aunt Caroline saw other blue-coated old men eating at tables close to the window. "I begin to understand," said Aunt Caroline, "he wished us to give these old men money that they could eat macaroni for us. Now we will let him do what he will. He has some plan." A moment later he had driven them to an open space at the junction of two streets, where a man was cooking macaroni in a large copper vessel. Two or three little boys who had been following the carriage now stepped up beside the horses, and they, too, made the gesture in imitation of eating, at the same time crying, "_Soldi, soldi_." "Oh, yes, I recall it all now," said Aunt Caroline, laughing. "It was the same when we were here before." Then she threw some coppers to the little boys, who immediately handed them over to the man at the cooking stall. He, in his turn, gave each a heaped-up plate of macaroni cooked with tomato. "It would be worth three times the price, though I don't know just what you gave them, Aunt Caroline, to see those boys eat such a quantity, and it all disappeared in an instant." "It is one of the accomplishments of the Neapolitan street boy to devour at lightning speed great plates of macaroni, in return for the _soldi_ of the stranger. Their manner of conveying the macaroni to their mouths with the sole use of their fingers is indeed a regular circus trick." "If the same boys repeat the trick many times a day, I should think they might have indigestion." "They are willing to suffer, for they love macaroni. The poorest Neapolitans eat much uncooked food, not only fruits, but fish and raw vegetables. But the macaroni with _pomo d'oro_ is a real delicacy. Some of those old men would probably have done the trick as adroitly as the boys." The driver, smiling broadly on account of his success, as he turned about drove again through squalid narrow streets. Those in the carriage could here look through open doors into the one untidy room, the _basso_ that formed the abiding place often for a large family. "In warm weather the men of the family usually sleep in the street," said Aunt Caroline, "and when you see the dark, windowless room that is the only home that many thousands can call their own, you cannot wonder that day and night so many Neapolitans prefer the streets." Sometimes a wretched beggar would run after the carriage. "We must make it a rule in Italy to take no notice of these poor creatures. Fortunately, I am told, they are far less numerous than they used to be, and the only way to stop begging is for each to refuse alms. Gradually they are finding other ways of helping the poor here." "I feel sorrier for the horses here than for the people," responded Irma. "There are so many of them, and most look half starved, as well as ill treated." "The cruelty of the cab men of Naples is known the world over. Cabs are cheap, and every one drives, and the cabmen not only snap their long whips freely, but use them viciously, if so inclined. But some one I was talking with says that a S. P. C. A. has been started here, and already has accomplished much good." "But the donkeys here seem much better cared for. I have noticed several that look almost fat, and they have pompons of bright wool, and some metal decorations shining on their harness, and altogether they are quite gay." "Those queer-shaped bits of metal," said her aunt, "are devices, sometimes pagan, and sometimes Christian, that the superstitious Italian wishes his animals to wear to guard against the evil eye or other ills. But here we are at the hotel." "Where do you suppose we have been?" asked Uncle Jim, greeting Irma and her aunt, as they entered their sitting-room. "And what will you give for what I have for you?" "Letters, letters! Give them to us quickly." "Yes, letters. I found them at our bankers, and also obliged him to honor my letter of credit, but just now I dare say you would rather have the letters than the money." The letters, written so soon after their departure, contained little news. Yet Irma found hers particularly cheering, because they brought her so closely in touch with the family at home. "Napoleon," her mother wrote, "was very low spirited the day you left home, but with the fickleness of his kind, he now wags his tail hopefully as if he expected you to-morrow. Mahala's grief is mitigated by her expectation of post cards from strange places, and Tessie is wondering about presents. The boys, I am sorry to say, do not let your absence weigh upon them. Baseball is now the one important thing." Then followed some directions about taking care of herself, and making the most of her opportunities. A short letter from Lucy gave her school news, but Irma sighed, because there was no word from Gertrude. That evening, as Irma sat on the balcony after dinner, Marion came near her. "You were very good to go with Uncle Jim for our letters. It makes home seem so much nearer, to know that letters can reach me." "Yes," said Marion, "I suppose so." "Was there good news in yours, too?" continued Irma, after a moment of silence. Without answering, Marion walked forward to the edge of the balcony. "Shall I ever learn to practice what mother always preaches," thought Irma, conscience-stricken lest she had disturbed Marion, "not to ask direct personal questions?" Marion continued to walk up and down with his hands in his pockets. Then he stopped directly in front of Irma. "Tell me what was in your letters," he said abruptly. "I had none." So surprised was Irma by Marion's interest, that at first she could hardly reply. "Yes," he continued, dropping into a chair beside her, "I should like to hear about some one else's relations." Then Irma found her voice, and prefacing her remarks with, "There really was not much news in the letters I had to-day," she soon found herself telling Marion all about home, about her father and mother, about Tessie and the boys and Mahala, and last, but not least, about Nap. Marion listened attentively, occasionally making some comment that showed he was really interested in what Irma said. Then, after perhaps half an hour, he rose as abruptly as he had sat down, and with a hasty "good night," went indoors. "Yet after all I have told him, he didn't say a word about his own family. How queer he is!" thought Irma. "As we have been better than most travellers in going to morning service," said Uncle Jim, on Sunday, "we will do as they do by driving this afternoon. I, for one, wish to see the Cathedral, and there are other churches worth visiting." Toward the middle of the afternoon, therefore, the four travellers set forth for the Cathedral dedicated to San Gennaro (St. Januarius), the patron saint of Naples. In a cross street, on their way, their carriage drew up to let a funeral procession pass. It was a typically Neapolitan procession, yet uncommonly gorgeous, with its white, open-sided hearse, showing a coffin covered with beautiful flowers. The hearse was drawn by eight horses, their heads decorated with yellow, and saddlecloths trimmed with gilt. Close to the horses were a number of priests carrying lighted candles, and after them two or three carriages heaped with wreaths. Irma's attention, however, was most attracted by a dozen weird-looking men in long, loose garments, with dominoes over their faces, with holes cut out for eyes, that made them almost ghostly. "Who are they?" she whispered to Aunt Caroline. "Professional mourners, my dear, and those men in uniform in the last carriages are probably family servants." "Oh, yes," interposed Marion, "that is the way the Romans did. It's one of their old customs handed down--to have a whole retinue of retainers in the funeral procession." As they turned into the broad street toward the Cathedral, the sidewalks were thronged, and in the distance they heard the music of a band. Aunt Caroline translated briefly the succession of rapid sentences with which the driver answered her. "He says there was a special service in the Cathedral to-day. But the music goes the other way, and we cannot see the procession." Inside the church, persons of all ages and conditions were walking about, boys and girls, young men and women, some of whom carried a baby in arms, bent old men and women, too, and as there was no service then, when acquaintances met, they stopped for a chat, as if on a street corner. "The Cathedral," explained Aunt Caroline, "is dedicated to St. Januarius, Naples's patron saint, Bishop of Beneventum, whom Diocletian put to death. Some of his blood, gathered up by a Christian woman, is preserved in a vessel in his chapel here. The precious relic is locked up in boxes within boxes, but twice a year it is brought out with great ceremony. If the blood liquefies quickly, the superstitious people believe it a favorable omen for the city; if it does not, they are downcast at the prospect of great misfortunes for the next six months." At this moment a sacristan swinging his keys offered to lead them to the Chapel of St. Januarius, and there they saw the tabernacle with the relics, and the silver bust of the saint and of thirty other saints. Though the Chapel contained some fine paintings by Domenichino, its decorations were rather more florid than beautiful. The crypt under the church was much more interesting, with its great bronze doors, and marble columns from a Temple of Apollo that once stood near the site. But neither Marion nor Irma cared to linger long in the Cathedral. "Don't sigh," protested Uncle Jim, as Irma took her place in the carriage. "This is but the first of scores of churches you'll have to visit in Italy. Luckily Naples has fewer noteworthy pictures than Rome or Florence, and your aunt cannot help dealing leniently with us here." "The only church I wish to see in Naples," said Irma, "is the one where Conradin is buried." Marion looked up quickly. "Is Conradin one of your heroes, too?" "His whole story is so sad," replied Irma, "that I have always been interested in it. Though he was only seventeen when he died, if he had lived to be old enough, he would probably have become a real hero." "Can't a boy of seventeen be a real hero?" asked Marion anxiously. "I did not mean that he couldn't." "But you said----" began Marion. "Stop, children. You'll find yourselves quarrelling," interposed Aunt Caroline. Then she spoke a word or two to the coachman. "I have asked him," she said, "to drive us to the Conradin monument." Within the church all admired the beautiful reliefs from Thorwaldsen's designs, and the statue itself realized all Irma's ideals of a hero. In the Piazza del Mercato, they saw two fountains marking the spot where Conradin and Frederic of Baden were beheaded, by order of Charles of Anjou. On their way home, as their carriage skirted the poorer section, where goats and fowls wandered about as freely as the children who were playing with them, Uncle Jim told amusing stories of goats he had seen going intelligently from door to door to be milked by regular customers, in some cases even walking up several pairs of stairs to the right apartment. "I have read those very stories myself," said Irma, "so if you wish to astonish me, please think of something new." That evening as she sat on the balcony, Marion approached Irma with an expression even more serious than usual. "What is your idea of a hero?" he asked abruptly, as he slipped into the chair beside her. "Why, the same as everybody's," responded Irma, after a moment's hesitation. "A man who does a brave thing, without fear of danger, and without thinking what he will gain from it." "Can't a boy be a hero?" "Yes, indeed--and a girl also," she replied. "But I noticed to-day that you said Conradin, if he had lived, might have been a hero, but he was seventeen--just my age." "I was not thinking especially of his age," said Irma. "I only meant that thus far Conradin had had no chance to show what great things he could do. But he might have had chances had he lived longer." "Oh! Then a hero must do great things." For the moment Irma was puzzled, not understanding the drift of Marion's questions. Fortunately she was saved the need of replying by the appearance of Aunt Caroline, and at the same moment Marion, rising from his chair, walked off without another word. Together Aunt Caroline and Irma stood for a few minutes, looking from the bay, where almost opposite them Vesuvius loomed up against the dull sky, toward the city at their feet, with its square roofs and occasional towers, with here and there a few palm trees giving a tropical touch. The long white road wound like a thread up the hill, and for a moment Irma felt a returning throb of homesickness. She realized how far she was from home. CHAPTER VI NAPLES AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD At Naples Irma saw that if she attempted to record half that interested her, no diary would be large enough, and if she tried to describe things at length, there would be time for little else. So she made rather brief notes, which, when she reached home would recall what she had seen, so that she could then describe at greater length to the family. A more experienced traveller might have been less interested in the Royal Palace, but, since it was her first palace, Irma found in it an air of romance that Uncle Jim was inclined to scoff at. It was a long, imposing building, with eight statues on the façade, representing the different dynasties that had governed Naples: Roger the Norman, Frederic II of Hohenstaufen, Charles I of Anjou, Alphonse I, Charles V, Charles III of Bourbon, Joachim Murat, and Victor Emanuel. "Poor Neapolitans!" exclaimed Uncle Jim. "No wonder they are restless, so often changing rulers, and until now seldom having kings who cared a farthing for them. Even before these Normans there were Greeks, Oscans, Romans, Goths, and Byzantines, all to take their turn here in Southern Italy. Neapolitans are naturally turbulent and troublesome in America. It will take them some time to learn to govern themselves." "We are not out to listen to history lectures. We simply wish to see things," said Aunt Caroline. "But this palace is in such bad taste. I am trying to divert your minds from its hideous furnishings." Though in her secret heart Irma admired the throne room, with its gold embroidered, crimson velvet furniture, enormous Sèvres and Dresden vases, and its more artistic bronze busts, later, perhaps, what she remembered best of this visit was the magnificent terrace view of the harbor and the Arsenal. "Do the Neapolitans get their love of noise from all those ancestors you were talking about, Uncle Jim?" she asked, as they drove along the broad Toledo, where the crack of whips, the braying of donkeys, and the shouts of hawkers prevented conversation. Uncle Jim raised his hand deprecatingly, as if an adequate reply were then impossible. "There," cried Aunt Caroline. "I understand why the people of Naples use gestures so largely. You know they can carry on long conversations without a word. By use of their hands they can make themselves understood above the din of the streets." "A good theory, if gesture were not as common in the country districts as in Naples." Here Marion interrupted. "We might stop at the Catacombs to-day, if you wish." "I don't wish," cried Irma decidedly. Marion looked at her with surprise. "No Catacombs to-day, only Capo di Monte," returned Aunt Caroline. Then they drove swiftly past one or two squares containing statues, one a monument to Dante, and at last, at the Bosco, they showed their permits. They felt the charm of the gardens around Capo di Monte, laid out in English style, but they did not linger in the Palace itself; Marion said the Sword of Scandberg was the one thing he had come to see, and though he spent a few minutes in the armory, he gave but a passing glance at the high colored Capo di Monte ware. "My mother has some of that," he said, as Aunt Caroline called his attention to a particularly beautiful piece. "Isn't it very valuable?" asked Irma. He made no reply. Perhaps he did not hear her. But Irma remembered that she had never before heard Marion refer to his mother. That very afternoon, while the others rested, Marion explored the city by himself, and came back in great spirits. He had been up in the _lanterna_, or lighthouse, where he had had a magnificent view of the town, and in the Villa del Popolo, a great open square, he had come upon one of the public readers who daily gather there at a certain hour, and read aloud from some of the great poets to a circle of auditors; each of whom had paid a small price for the privilege of listening. He had glanced also at the University, which has four thousand students and one hundred professors. Of the whole party, Marion, indeed, saw the most of Naples. He went among the fishermen at the wharves; he inspected the old mediæval forts, Castello St. Elmo, so magnificently situated on the heights, Castello dell' Ovo by the water, and the others. He brought home many little bits of amusing folklore, gathered from the boatmen, especially regarding their belief in the evil eye. In his new, friendly mood, he shared the results of his wanderings, until Irma began to think him a decidedly entertaining boy. The visit to the Museum took a whole day, and tired though she was at the end, Irma declared she would gladly spend another day there. For now, for the first time, she saw many a fine statue that she had seen before only in pictures, and she was surprised to learn that many of these had been dug up from the ruins of Pompeii; the boy with the dolphin, the boy with the goose, and the charming Narcissus pleased her more than the colossal Farnese Hercules and the group of the Farnese bull. "Our sculptors cannot get ahead of those old fellows," said Uncle Jim, "though I can't give the same praise to their painters." And Irma agreed with him, as she looked at the Pompeian frescoes. But neither paintings nor sculptures interested her as did the household utensils, the ornaments, and the jewels from Pompeii and Herculaneum. "Designers of jewelry and other beautiful things to-day get some of their best ideas from these treasures of Pompeii," explained Uncle Jim, after Irma had told him that she had seen Gertrude's mother wear a bracelet the counterpart of one they were looking at. Yet as they passed from case to case, and from room to room, Irma thought less of the beauty, or even of the usefulness of these things, than of the unhappy people to whom they had belonged who had been buried under the hot ashes of Vesuvius. In glass vessels she saw grains and fruits that the lava had preserved from decay, and in the cases there were loaves of much the same appearance as when the baker took them from the oven. These homely things brought the sufferings of the Pompeians much nearer than did the great treasure chests, or some of the more valuable objects in the collection. "I feel as if I had been at a funeral," she murmured to Aunt Caroline, and she was not sorry that the closing hour had come. "I'll show you something more cheerful to-morrow," suggested Marion. "They have the most wonderful Aquarium here. It can't be better than ours in New York, even if it is more famous. So I wish you would come with me to-morrow and tell me what you think." "But I have never seen the New York Aquarium," ventured Irma. "Then you must believe what I tell you about it." The next morning Irma set off with Marion. She had learned from Uncle Jim that this Aquarium in Naples, founded by Dr. Dohrn, a German, was really a scientific institution where students from all parts of the world could study the lowest forms of marine life, the finest examples of which are found in the Bay of Naples. Marion and Irma found that the larger part of the white Aquarium building was given to rooms for students and to the library. The fish were in the lower part, underground it seemed to her. As she walked about from cave to cave, for so she called the glass-fronted caverns where the fish were swimming about, she began to shiver. "Are you cold?" asked Marion, anxiously. "No, but these fish seem more disagreeable than the things from Pompeii." "They are certainly different," responded Marion, successfully resisting a desire to smile. "I rather like the living coral," continued Irma, "though it seems queer to see coral branches waving to and fro as if they were getting ready to swim, and some of the fish are funny, but some are really gruesome. I shall be haunted for a long time by this horrible thing," pointing to a jellylike mass that suddenly hurled itself through the water, and sent out innumerable legs, or arms, ready to grasp and destroy everything within reach. After inspecting all the cases, Marion and Irma went out the door behind two girls who were talking rather loudly. "How foolish you are, Katie Grimston," cried one of them, and at the sound of this name Irma looked toward Marion as if expecting some word from him. Though he made no comment, he, too, looked with some interest at the girls, as they stood outside awaiting their carriage. "Oh, dear," exclaimed Irma, as the two drove away, "I wish I had spoken to them." "Do you know them?" "No, but still I might have spoken, for one called the other 'Katie Grimston,' and that is the name of the girl that Nap used to belong to. I wish I had spoken to her." "One thing may console you: when you once run across people in Europe, you are sure to meet them again. You know we've been meeting some one from the ship every day since we landed. But I'll keep my eye open for your friend, Katie Grimston." "I shouldn't exactly call her a friend." "She's a friend until she proves an enemy. But in any case I'll watch for her. Perhaps she's a friend of mine. I'm sure I know one of those girls, and, by the way, wouldn't you prefer the New York Aquarium?" "Yes," responded Irma, "as I have seen only this one, I am sure I'd prefer the other." When they returned to the hotel, Marion and Irma found Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim enthusiastic over their excursion to Posilipo, declined by the young people in favor of the Aquarium. "You missed it, Marion," said Uncle Jim, "the region where we have been is just filled with classical memories. The Posilipo was a favorite stamping ground of Virgil's. He wrote the Georgics and the Æneid there, and you can have as long an argument as you wish with the guides as to whether the tomb they show is really his or some other fellow's. If you say it is, Petrarch and Bocaccio, who used to go there, are on your side. Not far off, between Puteoli and Baiae, Caligula performed some foolish stunt of his on a bridge of boats. Or, if that doesn't content you, you can remember that Augustus was fond of the Posilipo. You can also hunt for the ruins of the villa of Lucullus. Our friends, the Roman patricians, loved this region. Instead of digging up ruins, your aunt and I just sat in front of one of the little cafés and incidentally had a magnificent view." "Yes, we didn't try to go on to Solfaterra," continued Aunt Caroline, "though some one who had been there told a tale of fissures from which gas was exuding, and of remarkable sounds of water boiling violently not far beneath the surface when you put your ear to the ground." "Isn't Puteoli the place where St. Paul landed?" asked Irma timidly. "Yes, my dear, and he found a number of Christians there to welcome him. Indeed, all the region of the Posilipo and beyond, has so many associations that we ought to spend a week here." "Come," said Uncle Jim, "we must all agree to be true philosophers. The rapid flight of time and the shortness of human life in general compel us to let many delightful places go unvisited. Like everything in life, it's a question of choices. While we try to see the most important things along our route, we must still neglect other things and places that are not unimportant." "Capri, for example," murmured Marion. "Nothing could induce me to repeat that odious trip," and Aunt Caroline shuddered at the remembrance. "Bad landings, and boats so overcrowded, combined with rough water, make it positively dangerous, at least to one's nerves. If I could fly, I'd go there gladly." "But isn't Capri very beautiful?" queried Irma. "And the blue grotto something no one should miss?" added Marion. "You children can go there, if you prefer it to Paestum." "What is Paestum?" asked Irma. "Not to know Paestum--and you a school girl fitting for college. Now I shall insist on your going with me. For certainly, you have one thing to learn, 'What is Paestum!'" and Uncle Jim walked away, as if quite in despair at Irma's ignorance. "Capri really is beautiful," continued Aunt Caroline, turning to Marion and Irma. "Its men and women are fine types. As I remember there were quantities of flowers around the pretty little white cottages, and charming scenery at every turn. I don't know whether the people still wear their picturesque costumes, and make soft, high-colored ribbons and weave beautiful white woolen materials. But I imagine it is less changed than some other parts of Italy, and if you should go there five years from now, you would probably find it just the same. They still give a wonderful fête in July or August to ward off the grape disease. They have celebrated it for centuries with dancing and sports, but, as they carry a cross at the head of the procession, they fancy it's religious." "It sounds great," said Marion, "but we can't wait until midsummer. If I should go, I'd hunt up the ruins of Tiberius's villas. This was his favorite resort, and so terribly cruel was he that mothers still threaten bad children that 'Timberio' will get them. I believe a steep rock is shown from which he used to throw his victims into the sea below." "Well done, Marion. If we have time perhaps we'll go to Capri in spite of the wretched boats. But failing that we'll visit Vedder's studio in Rome. He has a summer villa at Capri, and if he has not used Capri types in his pictures, he can tell us about the people." CHAPTER VII CAVA AND BEYOND Uncle Jim had volunteered no explanation about Paestum, neither Aunt Caroline nor Marion had spoken on the subject, and Irma had been too busy packing to study her guidebook. So as they left Naples, as she looked from the railway carriage, she could but wonder what was before her. Soon passing the thickly settled environs of Naples they were in a region of small farms. The season had been late, and the vines were not far advanced, but there were many workers in the fields and some of the vines trained on poles showed a certain amount of leafage. After a while, they had passed the slopes of Vesuvius, and then began to realize, by the panting of their engine, that they were going up hill. "We stay at Cava for the night, and to-morrow go to Paestum. Of course you know about Paestum," said Uncle Jim teasingly. "I am contented with Cava," replied Irma. At dusk the little Cava station gave no hint of what the place was. A group of _facchini_ fell upon their baggage, the four were hurried into a carriage, and after driving through a long, quiet street, they reached the outskirts. Here, at the entrance of a house in a garden, a fat landlady welcomed them with many bows. A _facchino_ with a green apron took some bags, a diminutive _cameriera_, in scarlet skirt and pink blouse, seized others, and soon Irma found herself in a small room filled with massive inlaid furniture. Curtesying low, the little _cameriera_ quickly returned with a can of hot water. Left to herself, Irma was a trifle lonely, and she was glad when the little maid returned to guide her to the dining-room. There she heard a strange mixture of accents, as she entered the room. Her uncle came forward and led her to a seat. As she watched and listened, she found that her opposite neighbors were Germans, while beside her was an Italian lady. Now indeed she was in a foreign country. The dinner, too, was different from the conventional table d'hôte of their Naples hotel. Irma refused an elaborate dish of macaroni, remembering the curtains of yellow macaroni drying in untidy places, that she had noticed from the train. "If you don't eat macaroni," said Uncle Jim, understanding her reluctance, "you will often have to go hungry." In the morning Irma woke to the depressing sound of rain. "No Paestum, to-day!" exclaimed Uncle Jim, as she took her seat at breakfast. "Paestum! What is Paestum?" she asked, and after that he permitted her to eat in peace. All the morning the rain poured in torrents, to the discouragement of two or three parties of automobilists, who had planned a trip to Paestum, and a return to Naples by the Amalfi road. Most of the men wandered about the huge house aimlessly, dropping occasionally into a chair in the sitting-room, trying vainly to help time pass more quickly by reading the month-old newspapers and magazines on the little center table. A few wrote letters, and a number of men and women gathered in little groups to compare notes about past or future travels. Marion held himself aloof from the three or four other young people in the house. He sat in the furthest corner of the long drawing-room, buried in a book, and he said not a word to Irma during the whole morning. As for Irma, she spent perhaps an hour on her diary that she had neglected for a day or two. Opposite her, at the center table, was a girl of about her own age. Often the two paused from their labors--for the girl was also writing--at about the same moment. Finally the other girl broke the rather oppressive silence by asking Irma if she was on her way to or from Naples. Learning that Irma had been in Italy hardly a week, she informed her that she had been there all winter, and with her parents was now on her way to Naples. She questioned Irma about the best shops in Naples, and Irma was able to give her some addresses she wished. She in turn told Irma of many shops and other things of interest in Rome and Florence. Those Irma entered carefully in her notebook. While the two were thus occupied, Marion rose and passed them on his way to the door. When he had left the room the other girl leaned toward Irma. "Isn't that Marion Horton?" "Why, yes; do you know him?" "No. But I have heard a great deal about him, as he visits cousins of mine. It is strange to see him in Europe. I should think he would be at home now." "Why shouldn't he be in Europe?" "Surely you must have heard the story if you left New York only a few weeks ago." "I don't know what story you refer to," responded Irma with dignity. "Marion is travelling with my uncle and aunt. He is a relation of theirs." "He is in your party? Then you must have heard----" But at that moment the porter brought a message summoning Madge Gregg to get ready at once for a train that would start in half an hour for Naples. This unexpected departure put all thoughts of Marion Horton out of Madge's mind. She gathered up her writing materials, bade Irma good-by, expressing the hope that they might meet again. "What can the story be?" thought Irma. "Marion is sometimes queer, and yet--I do not believe he has done anything wrong." Still she felt that for the present it would be wiser not to question her uncle and aunt about Marion. Sometime they would tell her what they wished her to know. After _déjeuner_ the rain ceased, and by three o'clock the sun was shining. "This was a fortunate storm that kept us here, for they say that up there on the hills there's an interesting old monastery, such as we may not see again. The carriage will be here in ten minutes, so run and get your bonnet and shawl, as they used to say in old novels," said Uncle Jim. Soon they were on their way to the monastery, Uncle Jim, Aunt Caroline, and Irma. "Aren't you coming with us?" Aunt Caroline had asked Marion, as they started. "Oh, I'll follow; I have arranged with a donkey boy to take me." "Is it possible that he's going to ride?" asked Aunt Caroline. "I'm sure I don't know. There are times when it's best not to question Marion. Haven't you found that out, Irma?" said Uncle Jim. "I do not know Marion very well," replied Irma. "But you ought to be great friends, you are so near of an age, and almost cousins." The country through which they drove for a quarter of an hour was very pretty, with many trees and shrubs that looked particularly green and fresh after the recent rain, and the hilly roads were far less muddy than they had expected. From one high point they had a delightful view of the village they had just left, circled by hills. On one was a ruined castle, on another the remains of an old monastery where a hermit monk was said to live. Irma felt that now she was indeed in the old world. On two or three hills she noted slender, gray stone towers, and through Aunt Caroline the driver explained that they were used for snaring pigeons. "From those little openings, like portholes, small white stones are thrown out, which the pigeons mistake for food, and as they swoop down upon it they are snared in nets cleverly contrived for their capture." "That seems cruel," cried Irma. "But it would be still more cruel to deprive a lot of hungry people of their pigeon pie," said Uncle Jim. Now turning their backs on the lovely view, the carriage went up a higher hill. It passed an occasional simple cottage, and they met two or three groups of people evidently returning from a visit to the monastery. They stopped for a moment at a church in front of which was a stone on which the driver said Pope Urban II had dismounted more than nine hundred years ago. A few minutes later they were at their goal, the old Benedictine Monastery, La Trinità della Cava. "Ought we to go in before Marion arrives?" Aunt Caroline's tone implied that she thought they should wait. "Marion is too uncertain, and the hours for visiting the monastery are limited!" Soon the door opened, showing a pleasant-faced monk standing there to welcome them. Before they went within he halted at the entrance, explaining that a handful of churchmen had established themselves here in the very early days because on these remote heights they could be comparatively safe from marauders. "It is certainly a natural fortress," responded Uncle Jim, looking from the steep cliff on which they stood to the narrow river bed, far, far below. "And a few sharp-shooting bowmen up here on the heights could keep off any number of the enemy. Come, Irma. Can't you imagine the venturesome Lombards creeping up the ravine, only to be held back by the storm of arrows?" "But it could only be for a little time. In the end I am sure that the bold Northerners won. I don't know how it was in this particular case, as all traces of the Lombards in this region have now passed away. They were so few compared with the native races, and now the people here are Italians pure and simple." "Your theories are interesting," said Aunt Caroline, as they followed the monk inside, "but unfortunately for them the convent here was founded by a member of an old Lombard family. The site was chosen for defence, probably against marauding nobles." Their guide spoke clearly and slowly and Aunt Caroline easily translated what he said. He told them that the convent gave a school and college training to boys of good family, and that these large and attractive halls had been provided for them. In the library were some good old pictures, but the most valuable treasures were the ancient manuscripts, among them the laws of the Lombards on parchment of the early eleventh century, and a Bible of the early eighth century. But for all this there was time for only a passing impression, and Uncle Jim was rather amused by the awe with which Irma regarded them. On their way out they saw a number of boys walking up and down the cloisters, arrayed in long surpliced coats that made them look like very youthful priests. "They are intended for the Church," explained Aunt Caroline, "but those smaller boys in ordinary clothes will go into other professions. I am sorry," she added a moment later, as they stood in an ancient room, built into the solid rock,--almost the only thing remaining of the original abbey, "that Marion will miss this. It is too late, our guide tells me, for us to get admission to the church, and we must bid him good-by here." So, after their monk had dropped their visitor's fee in a collection box near the door, they went down the hills toward Cava di Tirreni. They did not meet Marion on the way, nor in the course of their drive along the one-mile, narrow street of the little town. The arcaded shops were dingy and the houses unattractive. "In Italy you must get used to these squalid, rather dirty towns in the heart of a lovely country. The Italians love to herd together, clinging closely to a habit no longer necessary for defence against enemies, as it was in the ancient times. Even in America they prefer city to country life," said Uncle Jim. The soup plates had been removed when Marion appeared at dinner. He greeted his friends pleasantly without explaining what had detained him. Though Aunt Caroline gave a glowing account of their afternoon's trip, he made no comments beyond a mere "I wish I had been with you." After dinner he turned to his book, and soon went to his own room on the plea that he must repack his valise and get to bed early in preparation for their morning start. During the evening Irma and Aunt Caroline joined their landlady in the deserted dining-room to look at some of the antiques in glass cases along the wall intended for sale. After picking them over carefully, Aunt Caroline bought one or two old iron knockers and a piece of glass that she felt sure was Murano. The landlady's husband appeared at just the right moment to fix the price, and from a secret drawer produced a bit of old brocade that Aunt Caroline pounced on with exclamations of delight. "It won't last until you reach Rome!" "Oh, indeed it will. But it is for ornament and not use, and the kind of thing I never _can_ pass by." After this Aunt Caroline added several other things to her collection--an old key and lock, and a fine bit of carved wood. "If only it wouldn't crack and split in our dry atmosphere I would take some of this inlaid furniture home with me," she said. "Everything in the house is seemingly for sale even to the bed that Madame our hostess sleeps on. Although she is married to an Italian, I observe that she prefers 'Madame' to 'Signora.'" At this moment the landlady approaching, invited them into the garden. "As Madame the American lady admired old things she might like to examine the lion's head at the door. It had belonged to the great Filangeri family, as indeed did the hotel in the ancient days. Naturally Madame had observed that this was no ordinary hotel, but a veritable palace with ancient traditions and legends, and----" Finally Aunt Caroline stopped her flow of words to show Irma that the massive lion's head with its open mouth was but a flambeau holder to light the path of guests at night. "You will need more than one flambeau to light your path to-night," said Uncle Jim, joining them, as they stood there reading a tablet with an interesting inscription. "Remember that we take an early train for Paestum." "Paestum--what is Paestum?" rejoined Irma mockingly, as she hurried ahead of Uncle Jim up the long marble staircase that led to her room. In the morning, however, long before their train reached Paestum, Irma knew all about it. The country through which they began to pass, soon after leaving Salerno, was not closely settled. Farther on there were great stretches of marshes where cattle roamed about. Marion was surprised to discover that the so-called buffaloes were quite unlike the bison, resembling large grayish oxen with a slight hump. They are the chief beasts of burden for the country people of this region. Uncle Jim explained that the whole country here was malarious. It had a bad reputation even in the time of Augustus, and on this account the name of ancient Poseidonia had been changed to "Pesto," and if you doubt me, you may look on the map. There, indeed, Irma did find "Pesto" instead of the more classic name, yet she continued to doubt Uncle Jim's account of its origin--"Paestum" was evidently from "Poseidonia." CHAPTER VIII PAESTUM AND POMPEII "There is said to be one vehicle in Paestum," remarked Uncle Jim, as they reached the little station, "and as we are not the only passengers on this train we might as well make up our minds in advance whether we shall fight for it or walk." "Walk," was the unanimous response, and after checking their luggage they started up a long, dusty road. Some distance from the station an arch spanned the roadway. "It must have been part of an old town wall," said Marion, and at the same moment a tall, short-skirted woman came toward them, carrying a large stone water jar on her head. In an instant Irma had focussed her camera, aiming it just as the woman was in the center of the arch. "She doesn't seem to object," murmured Aunt Caroline. The woman was now close to them, and as she passed them she did not even deign to smile or to look at them directly. "The Temples! The Temples!" A few minutes later Irma gave an exclamation of delight. "How beautiful--with the view of the sea beyond," added Aunt Caroline. Then all stood still. Before them, with a background of blue sea and bluer sky, rose the two great temples, the largest of the three edifices that are now practically the sole remains of a once great city--Poseidonia--founded six hundred years before Christ, by colonists from Sybaris in Greece. "Outside of Athens, there are no finer temples left standing in the world!" said Uncle Jim. "Until I read it in my guidebook to-day, I thought one had to go to Greece to see Greek temples," added Irma. "Oh, there are several in Sicily," rejoined Marion, in what Irma to herself called his "high and mighty tone," a tone that always made her feel that he despised her lack of knowledge. "Yes," said Aunt Caroline, "but for those of us who are not going now to Greece or Sicily, these are worth printing on our memories. I dare say, Marion, with your exactness, you would like to walk around them and measure them to see whether they are what they are represented to be. Irma and I will content ourselves with general impressions." "I might verify the fact that the Temple of Neptune is one hundred and ninety-six feet long and seventy-nine feet wide, but it would be harder for me to prove without a ladder that each of the thirty-six columns is twenty-eight feet high," responded Marion good naturedly. "No, no," cried Aunt Caroline, "no such uninteresting facts! All I wish to remember is the soft, mellow brown of the whole structure and its noble proportions." Then, looking to the slightly smaller structure at the left, she added, "The Basilica is less complete and less imposing. It has something of the attractiveness of a younger sister." "I don't like its color as well, but I suppose both are faded." "Undoubtedly, though originally they were both covered with stucco to imitate marble; the pediment was adorned with sculptures, and the temple held other works of art." They were now crossing the rough field between them and the Temple of Neptune. Some of those who had come with them in the train were wandering about the interior--if a roofless space without walls may be called an interior--and a larger group had gone with the uniformed guide toward the more distant Temple of Ceres. "That pinkish flower over there must be asphodel," said Uncle Jim. "Now don't rush to gather it, Irma. It would be far wiser to sit here and test the luncheon the padrone provided for us. Here is a good place, and Marion will open the box." As Uncle Jim made room at the base of a great Doric column, Irma gave a little scream. "Oh, it's only a little lizard--no, two little lizards, and you can't blame them for showing alarm at a party of American invaders. Why, even Marion doesn't object to them." A deep flush rose on Marion's cheek. Irma was looking at him as Uncle Jim spoke, and saw that he pressed his lips tightly, as if to suppress an angry reply. "Before he opens the box," continued Uncle Jim, whose spirits were rising, "I can tell exactly what that pasteboard receptacle contains,--two hard-boiled eggs for each of us, a fine assortment of chicken legs and wings, some butter, some salt, several unbuttered rolls almost too hard to eat, and an orange apiece." "You must have prepared the menu yourself," said Irma, laughing; "for things are absolutely what you said, except," and she opened a little package, "here is a piece of cheese." "Oh, yes, I forgot the cheese. But I have opened too many Italian luncheon boxes not to know what to expect, and in ten years they haven't changed." "_Muore di fame, muore di fame_," whined a small voice in their ears. Looking about, Irma saw a girl of twelve or fourteen, with a shawl over her head, carrying her hand to her mouth in the well-known gesture of hunger. "_Muore di fame_ (I am dying of hunger)," she repeated, standing in front of the four picnickers, while at the same time she turned her head from side to side as if fearing some one's approach. "It is the _custode_," exclaimed Uncle Jim; "begging here on Government property is probably against the rules, and she fears he will return before we have given her all our luncheon." "No, no," he cried, but the girl reached out her hand as if to snatch. "Oh, give her something," cried Marion, "or at least I will; the poor thing may be starving." "_Muore di fame, muore di fame_," repeated the girl, catching the sympathetic note in his voice. Then, just as he had given her a roll and a chicken leg she took to her heels, disappearing over a hedge of bushes between the temple enclosure and a partly ploughed field that stretched between them and the sea. A moment later the _custode_ came around the corner of the temple, thus explaining the girl's sudden flight. At the same time two dogs appeared, sniffing for their share of the luncheon. More polite than the girl, however, when told to go away, they went off some distance, sitting on their haunches and still eyeing the party hungrily. It was now Irma's turn to be sympathetic. "That little one makes me think of Nap, and I just can't help giving him a wing with something on it." "Just wait until we have finished." Obedient to this suggestion, Irma waited, and at last there was a good heap of bones as well as some scraps of bread on which the two little creatures fell greedily. Later, making her way with difficulty over the brambles, Irma reached the grass beyond the strip of ploughed land. She carried a little package containing rolls, an orange or two, and a little chicken. She had gone ahead of the others to get a photograph from this point of view. She had already taken nearer views of portions of the columns and base with Aunt Caroline posed for comparative size, looking a veritable pigmy. The temples, with the background of hills, were less imposing from the other side. The eye could not help seeing not only the temple, but a lot of ugly little houses in the far background near the station. "_Muore di fame, muore di fame_," cried two voices, one after the other. The girl with the shawl had crept up behind Irma, and a larger girl stood beside her. The first girl was a pitiable object, yet Irma knew that she had lately had something to keep her from starvation. The other was fairly well dressed, and for her Irma felt no sympathy. In fact the two had a manner so impertinent that she took no notice of the oft-repeated monotonous "_Muore di fame_." But she cast anxious glances toward the temples. Why did her uncle and aunt delay coming! Then she caught a glimpse of them just entering the Basilica. One of her tormentors now jerked her skirt, the other shook her hand in her face. Irma waved them back, crying, "_Andate, andate_" (go away, go away), in Aunt Caroline's most effective tone. The girls grew bolder and dashed at Irma as if to take both her camera and her package. Yet Irma, though frightened, was determined not to surrender either. At last, when she attempted to call for help, she could not make a sound loud enough to be heard by her uncle or aunt. Of course she had not stood still all this time, but with one girl clutching her dress she could not move fast, especially as she was now in the ploughed ground, into which her feet sank deeper with every step. There was no occasion to fear, as the girls could accomplish no very desperate deed before help came, but Irma's spirit was up, and her nerves irritated by the constant "_Muore di fame_." So she held the package of food more closely than the camera, and the older girl, watching her chance, rushed off with it, while the other, making a dash at Irma's head, tore off her hat. [Illustration: "WITH ONE GIRL CLUTCHING HER DRESS, SHE COULD NOT MOVE FAST." (_Page 132._)] "Help, help," cried Irma, finding her voice as the amateur brigands ran toward the road. Then, almost at the same moment, something flew past her so quickly that she could hardly tell what it was. A minute later he had reached the two girls, who were unaware of the avenger's presence until too late to escape. When the flying figure stood still Irma recognized Marion, and a moment later he was back at her side, holding triumphantly aloft the hat and the camera. "Did they hurt you?" "Is it ruined?" The two young people spoke in one breath. "No, of course they didn't hurt me," responded Marion, with some indignation, while Irma wondered why a little stream of blood trickled down his cheek. "No," said Irma, in the same tone, "of course my hat isn't ruined," and she smoothed out the crushed ribbon bows, and plucked off one of the wings that had been broken in the tussle. Then Marion wiping his face discovered a scratch. "I thought one of those girls had mighty sharp claws," he said, and Irma, opening her bag, presented him with a strip of thin court-plaster from the case John Wall had given her as a parting present, and then they retraced their steps toward the Basilica, where their elders were awaiting them. "You haven't explored the temples," said Aunt Caroline. "You can get a very good idea of the interior by examining the stones that show the position of the altar, and----" "Oh, I don't care about temples now, not until I have studied more. I just like to look about and wonder what the town was like with all its people moving here, when these fields were streets, or----" "There, there," interposed Aunt Caroline. "When I look about, I can only think that in a solitary place like this I should hate to be attacked by brigands. At the present moment we are monarchs of all we survey. Even the _custode_ is lost to sight, though perhaps he'd appear if we were in real danger." "I didn't find him of much use," she began, but at a warning glance from Marion, she was silent. "I wish we had time to go down by the sea, where the Greeks originally landed. As it's much lower land, the temples must show up wonderfully well." "You must give up the seashore this time. We can barely catch the train, after visiting the Temple of Ceres. Come, children." But Irma and Marion remained seated. "Oh, Aunt Caroline, we'd rather wait a while; we'll go back part way by the town wall, and meet you under the Siren's Arch, that would be much more fun. You can dig for the Roman remains that they say lie hidden in that field over there. You know this is one of the towns that remained faithful to Rome in Hannibal's time. Ugh," concluded Marion suddenly, wincing, as if in pain. "Oh, it's nothing," he replied to Irma's inquiries. "Perhaps I ran too hard in the field over there. You were a brick not to tell Aunt Caroline about it; she would have come down on me mighty hard." Though Irma did not understand Marion's meaning, she thanked him for recovering her camera. "It was nothing at all; the little wretches were probably more than half in fun and wouldn't have dared keep it long, with the _custode_ likely to pounce on them, for I suppose one of them, at least, lives in that miserable little house beyond the fence. But it's strange that Uncle Jim didn't ask about the court-plaster on my face. His eyes are generally so sharp. But see what I've found for you," he concluded, picking up something near the base of the great, weather-beaten column beside which they sat. Irma gave an exclamation of delight as he put in her hand a small piece of the travertine that in some way had been broken off from the column, inside which was a tiny shell,--a shell now exposed to the light for the first time in the more than two thousand years since the temples were built. When she had tied this up in a corner of her handkerchief, and had pressed two of the pink blossoms that Uncle Jim called "asphodel" between the leaves of her notebook, Irma felt that she indeed had begun to collect classical trophies. From the old town wall, several sections of which are still in fair condition, Marion and Irma took their last view of Paestum and the surrounding plain. "I suppose the old Poseidonians used to go up in that corner tower and watch for their enemies," said Marion. "Well, Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim are not enemies, yet we can watch for them. Ah, there we are! And if we return to the road now we can reach the station ten minutes ahead of them and have time to select post cards before train time." "It will be dusk," said Aunt Caroline, as they took their places in the crowded train, "before we reach Pompeii. I am sorry we have to give up the beautiful Amalfi drive on the high, rocky road above the sea. But that rainy day at Cava was a lost day, and the telegram your uncle received as we left Naples requires him to hurry to Rome to keep a business engagement. To-morrow, Pompeii, and the morning after we leave Naples for Rome." Of the Amalfi drive Irma caught a glimpse from a curve in the road above picturesque Salerno, and even away from the sea, looking toward the mountains they had glimpses of snow-clad peaks in strange contrast with the summer-like aspect of the country nearer them. But the people she saw at the stations along the way interested Irma almost more than the scenery. At Salerno station, especially, there were peasants of a very strange type. One man with a beard of long growth, in coat and trousers of sacking, carried a long axe, as if bound for the woods. Another brigandish creature with khaki trousers and a slouched hat wore a long black cloak, an end of which was thrown over his shoulders. Two girls setting out on a journey wept bitterly, as an old gray-headed woman kissed them good-by. One carried her belongings in two fairly large baskets, and the other had a white sacking bag for hers, with a few extra things tied up in a black handkerchief. The girls wore no hats, but like all the other women at the station they had their hair elaborately bedecked with combs, front, back, and side combs, until Irma wondered how their heads could bear the weight. _Carbonieri_, with their picturesque cocked hats, strutted across the platform. A railroad official with red pipings on his hat and gilt buttons on his coat also added to the gaiety of the scene. "What are we waiting for?" at last Marion cried impatiently. "The horn man doesn't dare blow until every one in Salerno visits this train." At this moment the little man with brass buttons on his coat blew his small brass trumpet, and the train set off for Pompeii, still a couple of hours away. From Pompeii Irma wrote her first long letter to Gertrude, long in comparison with the one sent from the ship. But she had plenty of time that evening after dinner, and though tired after her hours of strolling in the ruined city, she felt in the mood for writing. Moreover, Gertrude had especially asked her to describe Pompeii, and having promised, Irma knew that the most sensible thing was to make good her promise promptly. "My dear Gertrude," she began. "After all I am not to see Herculaneum, although you hoped I would. But a man we met to-day said we need not be sorry we have no time for Herculaneum. It gave him a kind of smothered feeling, and he did not stay there long. They have not yet dug out enough to make it really interesting, and all the fine statues have been taken to the Naples Museum, so there isn't so much to see yet, and it is all underground. "But Pompeii is different. In one way it is cheerful, though at times I had an awfully melancholy feeling when I looked about at those roofless buildings and remembered how they had been destroyed, with thousands of people, all in an instant. Our hotel is close to the entrance, in fact my bedroom window looks out on the gate, and when I went to bed it seemed uncanny to be sleeping near so gruesome a place. But in the morning, when I saw two or three carriages standing there and loafers lounging about and tourists going in and out of the little curiosity shop next door, I forgot everything, except that I was a sightseer, too. "There is nothing shut up about Pompeii, and I am glad I left the Museum until the last, for that took away some of my cheerful feeling. "I was surprised when we first began to move about, to see such enormous paving-stones in their narrow streets, and you can hardly believe that the chariot wheels could wear such deep ruts. The horses' feet must sometimes have slipped down between the stones. "The houses have no roofs, and from the street they are so small that I could think of nothing but playhouses. Some of them open out when you go inside and have more than one court. They all have at least one court, with rooms opening off it, and some have little fountains in the center, and sometimes the white marble basins are beautifully carved and there is grass growing around the margin, and even bright plants and vines are trained here and there, just as in the time of the live Pompeians. "As you walk about you can tell which room was a kitchen and which a bathroom, for they used lead pipes just like ours. In the smaller houses the family used to spend most of their time in the atrium. The sleeping rooms were generally tiny, and the poor slaves were put in little cubby-holes upstairs. "The frescoes on some walls are bright, but I think our taste has changed, for Marion and I did not admire them so very much. In one lovely house I saw where the Young Narcissus had been found. The original is in the Naples Museum, but a copy is here in its old place. Another interesting house is where they found the graceful statue of a dancing faun. I saw the house that Bulwer calls the house of Glaucus, in the 'Last Days of Pompeii,' and there in front of it is the inscription in mosaics, _Cave canem_, which I needn't translate for you. They are always uncovering new houses, and one of the newest, the 'House of the Vetii,' is the most beautiful, partly because they have left most of the things in the places where they found them, instead of sending them off to museums. The frescoes here are the most fascinating little Cupids playing games and amusing themselves. Of course one carries away only a general impression of these houses. There are traces of bright color everywhere inside, chiefly red and yellow. The bases of many of the columns in the houses were one of these colors. Some streets were full of shops--_tabernae_. Would you have known what that meant? You can see the marble-covered counters, and the earthen jars for oil and wine and other things. One market has paintings on the walls, showing that various kinds of provisions were sold there, and in a large pit in the center quantities of fish scales were found. Probably that was where the fish were kept. Instead of quart measures like ours, I saw a set of marble basins side by side, with holes in the bottom to let the liquid run out into the buyer's jars. Most of the shops are labelled, so you can tell what was sold there. On some walls are notices scratched, that take the place of our posters, though Uncle Jim says they have more to do with politics than with buying and selling. "The great baths astonished me, for they had hot and cold water and different rooms for people to pass through, like a Turkish bath. You can't say it's a good thing that Pompeii was destroyed, but as long as it _had_ to be, it's fine that they have excavated it. To see for yourself how these people lived is better than a hundred lessons in history. Of course it gives you an awful feeling when you stand by the villa of Diomedes and hear that the bodies of eighteen women and children were found there. They had fled to the cellar and had food enough with them to last some time, but the ashes sifted in and they were found with wraps over their heads and hands out trying to shield themselves. "Diomedes, with keys in his hand, was at the door, and a slave carrying money and valuables. I haven't time to tell you about the Forum and the Basilica and the theatre. Just imagine the fifty or sixty gladiators, whose bodies were found in the gladiators' barracks! Most of them wore heavy manacles, and what they must have suffered when they found they could not escape! "When I walked up the street of Tombs, where you get the best view of Vesuvius, I could not help thinking that in spite of its calm appearance the mountain is a very dangerous neighbor, and I am rather glad that we have decided not to make the ascent. "Afterwards when I stood on a small hill, it was hard to believe that under the green slopes in front of us there lay perhaps as large a part of Pompeii as they have yet uncovered. Who knows what wonderful things may yet be found, though it may take more than fifty years to finish the work? It was up here that I dared pick a few tiny buttercups, that I send you as a souvenir of Pompeii. [Illustration: POMPEII.] "The town has a bricky look as you see it from the hill, that's one reason, I suppose, why it seems so modern. After all, the greater part of the inhabitants of Pompeii escaped alive. They fled at the first warning. When the eruption stopped for a while, many went back for their valuables, or because they thought it was all over, and there were some old and sick who, perhaps, couldn't be moved at first. All these two thousand were caught in the second fearful eruption. Casts of some of the bodies are in the little museum on the grounds, but I hardly looked at them, and, in fact, we spent very little time there because we had seen the same kind of things at Naples. This is a fearfully long letter, but I hope I shall find a longer one from you at Rome, where we go from Naples by the morning express to-morrow." CHAPTER IX ROMAN DAYS When Irma awoke on her first morning in Rome, she felt that one of her real desires was gratified. She was in the city she most wished to see. Looking at her watch she found it was too early for breakfast, and she did not care to go down ahead of the others in this new, strange hotel. So, seated in an easy-chair, she tried to recall some of the incidents of her journey of the day before, the five hours' ride that had seemed long, on account of the heat. The country through which they passed had been interesting, though she had seen few of the picturesque peasants working in the fields that she expected to see on every side. In the distance, however, she had had glimpses of snow-clad mountains, and occasionally on a hill a monastery or castle, or even a small walled town. Then across a vast plain to the right was the unmistakable dome of St. Peter's. Yes, she could write home that at the first sight of Rome her heart had beaten quicker. After the sunny ride from the station through crowded streets all, even the indefatigable Uncle Jim, had been tired, too tired, after unpacking, to do anything but rest, until at five o'clock they had gone to the large hotel near by for afternoon tea. "This isn't Rome," Aunt Caroline had said, as they sat there over their tea and cakes, listening to the music. "It is the Waldorf-Astoria, and these people moving about are largely Americans. To-morrow we shall see Rome." "To-day is to-morrow," murmured Irma, in her easy-chair, "and I wonder what we shall see first in Rome. I am sure I should never know where to begin." Aunt Caroline decided for her. Then when they first set out, she would not tell her just what they were to see until they had mounted the steps of an old casino; after passing through a little courtyard,--all that remained of the once fine Rospigliosi garden. "Look up," cried Aunt Caroline, as they stood in the large salon hung with pictures, and there on the ceiling, more beautiful than any reproduction, Irma saw the familiar Aurora, the godlike auburn-haired vision and the spirited horses: Apollo seen in a strong yellowish light, and the attendant hours in robes shading from blue to white, and from green to white, with reddish browns in the draperies of the nymph nearest him, and Aurora herself, a lovely figure, scattering flowers in his path. In the beautiful gallery, with its carvings and paintings, there were other fine pictures, but as she went away Irma still remembered only the Aurora. The warm sun beat on their heads as they re-entered their carriage. "The Roman summer has begun," said Aunt Caroline, "though it is only May. We must accustom ourselves now to a daily siesta and save our strength; but first for letters." A rapid drive brought them to their bankers, opposite the Spanish Steps. Irma recognized the place immediately from pictures she had seen, and while Aunt Caroline went inside for letters, she ran across the piazza to buy a bunch of roses from one of the picturesque flower girls gathered on the lower steps. But when, on the house at the right-hand corner, she read an inscription stating that in this house John Keats had died, she immediately unfolded her camera. She was so interested in her photograph, that when she saw her aunt standing by the carriage she recrossed the street without the flowers. "Here are letters for all of us," said Aunt Caroline, "even for Marion; two for him, the first he has had, poor boy!" "Aunt Caroline," asked Irma, for the first time since they sailed venturing to put the question, "why do you say 'poor boy' when you speak of Marion?" Aunt Caroline, who usually answered questions so quickly, was silent for so long that Irma wondered if her audacity had offended her. Then she replied gravely, "Marion has had a most unhappy experience. It is hard to say yet whether he is to be blamed or pitied. Until he is ready to talk about it, your uncle and I prefer not to speak on the subject, even with Marion himself. But when the right time comes, you shall know all about it." With this Irma, for the present, had to be content. But she realized that the idle remarks of her acquaintance at Cava had some foundation in fact. At _déjeuner_ Aunt Caroline gave Marion his letters, and Irma noticed that his face reddened as he looked at the envelopes, and that then he put them unopened in his pocket. This she thought a strange way of treating his first home letters. But then Marion was a strange boy. Irma herself had impatiently torn open her own letters even while in the carriage, and had partly read Gertrude's before reaching her hotel. "We miss you awfully," she wrote, "and Lucy and I hope you won't be so taken up with that other girl that you'll forget all about us." "She hadn't received my Azores letter about Marion," mused Irma, "when she wrote that. I am sure I wish that Marion were a girl instead of such a queer kind of boy." "You remember," continued Gertrude, "how jealous you used to be of Sally? Yes, you were, though you wouldn't admit it; well that's the way I feel about your Marian. But even if I am jealous, I do hope that you look better than when you left home, and that you are having a perfectly stunning time. I suppose you will be in Rome when you get this, and I wonder if you have seen the Queen--I mean Margherita. I have a photograph of her that I love, so don't dare come back without seeing her so you can tell me if she is like it. No matter if she hasn't invited you to call, just leave your card, and perhaps they will let you in accidentally. We miss you terribly at school. Until we are called up to recite we never know whether our translations are right. I wonder if you find the old inscriptions in Rome more fun than Cæsar. We've just had a week of early warm weather, and we girls have decided to let John Wall and George Belman fight for the head of the class." "The letter sounds just like Gertrude," said Irma, as she finished, "and though it has no news, it makes home seem much nearer." "Yet you sighed when you finished it; you mustn't let us think you are homesick," and Aunt Caroline patted Irma's shoulder, as they entered the house together. "There's only one thing for to-day," said Uncle Jim, after _déjeuner_, as they waited for the carriage. "There are said to be three hundred and sixty-five churches in Rome, and if you intend to see them all, you must begin at once with the largest and most important." "But I don't intend to see them all," expostulated Irma, "nor a tenth of them." "Then you must begin with St. Peter's just the same. You have been in the Eternal City now nearly twenty-four hours without visiting St. Peter's. Such a thing is unheard of and will bring disgrace on us all. Ah, here's the carriage, and your reform will begin." "Talk of floods in the Tiber," cried Irma, as they drove along the bank of the historic stream. "A little river like that could never do any damage. It could not be energetic enough to overflow its banks, especially when it's so fenced in." "Even in modern times the embankment has sometimes failed to keep it in place," said Uncle Jim, "and in its three miles of wanderings the yellow Tiber is sometimes hard to manage. There, there, doesn't that please you?" and Irma answered with an exclamation of delight, glancing beyond the bridge to the other side, where she had her first view of the Castle St. Angelo, Hadrian's tomb, the antique circular structure around which clusters so much history. But their horses were quick, and their driver did not stop for a long view; and after a turn or two they were soon crossing the sunny, paved piazza in front of St. Peter's, with its obelisk and fountain. "This is to be only the most general view. You must come again some day when there is a great ceremony, when you can see various dignitaries; now you are merely to get a first impression." "A first impression!" cried Irma. "Can I put it into words? It's a tremendous building; I shall never see another as large, and yet, it doesn't seem too large. What a great man the architect was!" "I have been reading up a little to-day," said Marion, "so things are fresh in my mind. I won't pretend I'll remember them to-morrow, but it's true that this is not the first church on the spot. In the beginning there was a circus of Nero's here, where that beautiful emperor was in the habit of torturing Christians to death. There's a tradition that St. Peter himself was burned here, and so Constantine built the first St. Peter's over the spot. Perhaps we can go down into the tomb to-day." "But this isn't Constantine's church?" There was a decided note of interrogation in Irma's voice. Perhaps it would have been better for her not to ask the question, for Marion's reply was in the nature of a snub. "Any one can see that this St. Peter's is comparatively new. It was begun by Julius II in the first part of the sixteenth century, and Bramante probably made the original plans." "Why, I thought Michelangelo----" "Yes, my dear," interposed Uncle Jim, "in the end Michelangelo did come to the rescue of the first plan. For after Bramante died, leaving the building far from completed, some of his successors made changes that affected the beauty of the building. I believe the dome was largely the result of Michelangelo's skill." "It took long enough to finish it!" exclaimed Marion, who had been looking at his guidebook. "It was not consecrated until 1626, more than a hundred years after Bramante's death." "Just six years after the landing of the Pilgrims," added Irma. "To compare small things with great," said Uncle Jim, with a laugh. "Which is which?" asked Irma, and for the moment no one answered. "Perhaps you don't care for guidebook information. But up to the end of the seventeenth century, St. Peter's had cost about fifty million dollars, and it now takes about eighteen thousand dollars a year to maintain it." "The salary of one of our ambassadors for a year," interpolated Irma. "Don't laugh," she cried, "that's the way I always try to remember things." "Then," continued Marion, "perhaps you will remember the height of the dome, four hundred and thirty-five feet from the cross to the pavement, is twice that of Bunker Hill Monument." "We are getting into the realm of useless knowledge," protested Uncle Jim, "and as this is but a bird's-eye view, we need only remember the beautiful proportions of the dome and the grandeur of the whole. Yet there are one or two things to see now. I must point out Canova's tomb of Clement XIII, and over there, by the door leading to the dome, you'll find Canova's monument to the last of the Stuarts. You ought to go over there and shed a tear or two, Irma, for you doubtless have the usual school girl sentimentality for the Stuarts. There are busts of the Old Pretender and his two sons." "Guidebook information would probably be as useful as that of a misguided guide," said Irma, refusing to express herself about the Stuarts. "Twenty-nine altars and one hundred and forty-eight columns," read Marion. "Come," said Uncle Jim, "don't listen to him. I can show you something better worth seeing," and he led her to the nave, where he showed her in the pavement the round slab of porphyry on which the emperors were formerly crowned. "Why, Charlemagne, of course," began Irma, and then she reddened. For Marion was standing near, and she suddenly realized that Charlemagne had been dead eight hundred years before St. Peter's was consecrated. "Oh, it was in Constantine's church that Charlemagne was crowned, but though this slab is older than the present St. Peter's, I doubt that he or his earlier successors stood on it, and best of all, I doubt that Marion can inform us," he concluded in a whisper. When at last the four turned toward the door, Irma noticed the people about her more than she had on entering. Bareheaded peasants were walking about in groups; laboring men, who had stolen an hour from work, bowed before various altars. Tourists of all nations were studying mosaic pictures, sculptured tombs, or were gazing at the priests in rich vestments and the altar boys in one of the chapels where there was a service. Here an old woman hobbled along, and there was a mother with two or three awestruck children. There were two or three soldiers in uniform, and several long-coated priests, visitors evidently from outside Rome. "It is the People's Church," said Aunt Caroline, "the church of the people of the whole world," she added. "There may not be as many languages as there are people in this large building, but I'll warrant a dozen nations are represented here." The fifteenth century bronze doors of St. Peter's amused Irma, with their curious mingling of Christian and pagan subjects, Europa and the bull, Ganymede, as well as scenes directly from the scriptures. She had a chance to admire her favorite Charlemagne, whose statue on horseback and one of Constantine were on either side of the entrance. "Over there," and Uncle Jim pointed to the left, "is the German cemetery, which Constantine originally filled with earth from Mt. Calvary, and made the first Christian burying ground. We have as little time for that to-day as for the sacristy with its treasures, or the chapels with their pictures and sculptures. There is just one other important thing to see before we reach our hotel. Wake up, _cocchiere_, here we are." As they drove between the colonnades away from St. Peter's and then along the Tiber bank, Uncle Jim called their attention to the new Rome rising on every side. "It is the Rome of the masses," he said. "Many of these tall apartment houses are occupied by people of very moderate means. And see that great public building across the river! It is as ugly as some of our own city halls." Their coachman now took a turn through narrow streets, crowded with people, to Aunt Caroline's disgust. "There may be all kinds of diseases floating about here." But hardly had her protest been heard, when they drove up in front of a portico that Marion recognized at once. "The Pantheon! We were thinking so much of the narrow streets that we did not see where we were." "Yes," responded Uncle Jim, "the Pantheon. He brought us the shortest way. I suppose you know this is the only ancient building in Rome. Walls and vaulting are the same as in the time of Hadrian. It goes back even farther than Hadrian, for Augustus's son in law, Agrippa, founded the temple, dedicated probably to the gods of the seven planets. When paganism died, it had no use for many years until Phocas the Tyrant presented it to the Pope, and it was dedicated to the Christian religion in 604." "You can't mention anything happening in our country just then," said Aunt Caroline, turning to Irma. "I might, but I won't, though I do remember that this was several hundred years earlier than our Leif Ericson," she retorted. "Uncle Jim, you did very well, even though you had to turn to your notebook." "I'll admit that I had read up a few figures for this occasion, you and Marion sometimes put me so to the blush. But what do you think of it?" For a full minute Irma was silent as she looked around the vast interior. "I am afraid," she began, "I am afraid that I like it better than St. Peter's. In some way it seems grander." "You needn't be afraid; older and wiser persons have been heard to say the same thing. A circular building is always impressive, and no interior in the world has finer proportions than this. In some ways it isn't what it once was. The bronze casings of part of the walls one of the popes once stripped off to make cannon for St. Angelo, and in the eighteenth century the beautiful marbles of the attic story above were covered with whitewash, but nothing can destroy the beautiful proportions." "Don't tell us what they are," urged Aunt Caroline. "It would destroy half the effect to hear what it is in feet and inches." "There's just one thing Irma ought to know, since she quite scorns a guidebook now. That open aperture in the centre of the dome that looks like a small hole is thirty feet across. It is the only way of lighting the building." "What do they do when it rains?" asked Irma. "Why, they let it rain." "Marion," exclaimed Aunt Caroline, "if you are willing to repeat so aged and infirm a joke as that, you must be feeling better." Marion glanced toward Irma, but she made no sign as to whether or not she, too, scorned the joke. "Twenty-eight wagon loads of bones," she was saying. "Yes, my dear, it was dedicated to Santa Maria ad Martyres, and naturally this was regarded as a more fitting place than the Catacombs for their final interment. Yet the sacredness of the place didn't prevent Constans II from stripping the gilt tiles from the dome to use in Constantinople. But now you are to look at only two tombs on your way out, this of Victor Emanuel, which is always covered with wreaths, and over there Raphael's tomb--only a passing glance at each--and notice the wonderfully beautiful marbles of the pavement. It would repay you sometime to study them, and the--run, my dear, ask your aunt to hurry," he concluded hastily. "We shall have time for the Corso," said Uncle Jim, as they drove off. But the Corso proved disappointing to Marion and Irma. "It is neither wide nor long, and why people with fine carriages and footmen should enjoy driving here at the end of a pleasant spring afternoon I can't understand," complained Marion. "Why, it's so crowded that there's no particular pleasure in being here." "That's why most people are driving here, to see and be seen; that's part of the fun of living for the idler Italians, and as they can't sit about in piazzas like their countrymen and women a few grades below them, exchanging nods from a carriage is the next best thing. And you can't deny that the shop windows are attractive." "It's almost like driving for pleasure on Washington Street, in Boston," said Irma, scornfully, "only it's a little less crowded, and there are no surface cars." "Though you speak sarcastically, young lady, just now I won't attempt to stand up for Il Corso," retorted Uncle Jim. "It doesn't begin to compare with Fifth Avenue," said Marion. "It doesn't pretend to, young patriot. I simply brought you here to do as the Romans do fine afternoons. Some day you'll drive on the Pincian at the fashionable hour, and after that I'd like to hear your American comparisons." "But where in the world can you find a street short as Il Corso with more associations with great men? Over there's the house where Shelley wrote 'The Cenci,' and Goethe's home in Rome is not far away. A little off at one side you'll find Donizetti's house, and on the other Sir Walter Scott's, and just ahead of us is the Bonaparte Palace, where Madame Letitia spent her sad later years. You hardly have to turn out of your way to find the remains of old temples, and there in the Piazza is the Marcus Aurelius Column." "Oh, it's inter--," but with the word unfinished, Marion put his hand to his hat as if to bow to some one in a passing carriage. He did not really bow, however, and the others noticed that he reddened deeply. "That looked like the fairy godfather!" cried Irma. "Whom I consider a myth," responded Uncle Jim. But Marion said nothing. Irma's first week in Rome seemed to pass almost as quickly as her first day. Though she had been sightseeing constantly, she still had not seen the Colosseum, the Forum, or the Vatican treasures. Each day was not long enough. In the morning she usually visited some gallery with her aunt. But in the warmer hours, from twelve to three, they rested. Some object of interest and a drive took the later afternoon, and by evening all were too tired to do anything but sit about and compare experiences with one another or with their hotel acquaintances. "I haven't forgotten your advice," wrote Irma in a long letter to her mother, "to remember clearly at least one or two things from each gallery. In the Borghese there is Canova's beautiful statue of Pauline, Napoleon's sister, and Titian's Holy and Profane Love, and in the Colonna that enormous ceiling painting--I almost broke my neck looking up at it--of the Battle of Lepanto, where some Prince Colonna fought, and some wonderful ivory carvings, one of them, in a few square inches, shows all the figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Then in the Doria is Velasquez' Pope Julius X, in his red robes, and some Claude Lorraines that I liked. "Then I loved Domenichino's Sybil, in the Borghese, and I can never forget the Saint Sebastians I have seen. It may be wicked to laugh at a martyr, but it is almost wickeder for artists to make a good man look like a pincushion stuck full of arrows. The Doria Palace is the handsomest of all, with its gilded furniture and fine ceilings and polished floors. How gorgeous it must have looked when a ball was given there in the old days. I'd like to have seen the private apartments and the Colonna gardens. They say it was from a building in the Colonna Gardens that Nero watched Rome burning. On certain days these galleries are free, but generally you pay admission to a regular ticket taker in a gilt-banded cap. I wonder if the princes who own these palaces make money by showing their pictures, or if public spirit leads them to open their houses. "One day Marion and I went to the Lateran where the popes lived before they had the Vatican, and please tell Tessie that the first thing we looked at was the Scala Sancta, or Holy Stairs, that they say were in Pontius Pilate's house in Jerusalem, over which Christ once walked. On this account people must go up and down them on their knees. But it is only on Holy Week that many do this. There are twenty-eight marble steps, although all you can see, as you look through the narrow door, is the wooden covering that protects them. The Empress Helena, Constantine's mother, brought them here. Tessie used to be interested in these Holy Stairs on account of a picture in one of her Sunday-school books, and she will be glad to know I have seen them. "Everything around the Lateran reminds one of Constantine. St. John Lateran has the site of a church he founded, and near it is the Baptistery where he was baptized. The font is green basalt, and there are beautiful porphyry columns and lovely gold mosaics on a blue ground. "Opposite, in the piazza, is an obelisk Constantine brought from the Temple of the Sun at Thebes, and set up in the Circus Maximus. Three or four hundred years ago they found it in three pieces buried under ruins, and decided to place it here. Uncle Jim says there are more obelisks here than in all the rest of the world, and people who study hieroglyphs find Rome a better place than Egypt. "Marion is good company, and often wishes to see just the same thing that I do, and then sometimes he doesn't; and I must say he always seems to suit himself. He knows a great deal. He has usually studied with private tutors and he has read everything. But he won't talk about his family. I don't even know whether he has any brothers or sisters. "He was splendid the other day when we went to the Capitoline Museum, from the minute we began to walk up the broad stairs toward the statue of Marcus Aurelius. He pointed out the places where Tiberius Gracchus was slain, and not far away, though so long afterwards, Rienzi, too. "Then he explained that though most of the buildings now on the Campodoglio were by Michelangelo, this had been a centre for public offices even under the first emperors. The Tabularium, where all old records were kept, is under the palace of the Senators. We had not time for it, but Marion had been there before, and he says it is almost the only building now left of the time of the Republic. Then we walked through the Capitoline Museum and I recognized many statues,--the Dying Gladiator and Hawthorne's Marble Faun and the busts of the Emperors. Marion says nearly all have been identified from coins, and are truer than the heads of philosophers and poets that we saw. Then there is the famous mosaic picture of the doves that shows even the shadows, which came from Hadrian's villa, like so many things in marble and porphyry I have seen this week. "There are many relics from the ancient graves, gold bracelets and other ornaments, and old inscriptions. They are not always easy to read, but here is one to amuse the boys that Marion translated for me. I can't give the exact words, but it was the epitaph of a boy eleven and a half years old who had worked himself to death in a competition to recite Greek verses. After we had seen all we wished in the museums, Marion took me through a narrow way, the Via Tarpeia, and past the German Embassy and then through a garden, where we paid an old lady a fee, and then, but of course you have guessed it, we were standing on the famous Tarpeian Rock. We looked down from the rock into a rather poor and commonplace street, and I tried to imagine what it was like in the old, old times when this was the edge of Rome, and Tarpeia was killed there for betraying the city to the invaders. "Without Marion I never could have found the Rock, and I don't believe Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline would have taken the trouble to go there." CHAPTER X A QUEEN--AND OTHER SIGHTS Irma was descending the Spanish Steps one morning on her way to the piazza when she heard Marion calling her. Turning her head, she saw him hastening toward her. "What's your hurry?" he cried. "I can't hurry going down these steps. I am on my way to return a book for Aunt Caroline. Then----" "Well, what then?" "I haven't decided." "Then come with me to Rag Fair, and after that I have something else for the afternoon. Aunt Caroline says she won't try to go out to-day, her cold is worse and Uncle Jim intends to stay in to read to her, and I, well, she said I must look out for you." Marion said the last a trifle sheepishly, adding, "Of course I will do whatever you wish. But I am sure you will like my plan." "Yes, provided you haven't the Catacombs in mind, or that awful church with bones and skulls for decorations." "The Cappuccini; no, we won't go there." "And you won't ask me to ride around Aurelian's wall on a bicycle?" "No, though you'd find it great fun! I don't know anything I have enjoyed better. The towers are so picturesque and they were useful, too. I went up in one to see the little rooms inside the walls that the soldiers occupied, and the guard-rooms, up there more than forty feet. They certainly had a good chance to see the enemy at a long distance. If you and Aunt Caroline would drive some day, I'd point things out to you." "Perhaps we will, but now--" Irma had taken out her camera. "Oh, I wish I could get a photograph, but I suppose they will run when they see what I want." "They" made a picturesque group, slowly mounting the steps, a mother with babe in arms, a shawl thrown over her head, a half-grown girl in a faded pink gingham, and a little boy in a shabby velveteen suit and felt hat with a feather over his curls. [Illustration: NEAR LA TRINITÀ, ROME.] [Illustration: ROME. A GROUP ON SPANISH STEPS.] "The boy is probably an artist's model, dressed for effect. I am not sure about the others, but I can make them stand for you." "Oh! Please!" Whereupon Marion stepped up to the woman, spoke a few words in Italian, and lo, they at once grouped themselves picturesquely in a spot where the sun fell in just the right way for a photograph. Irma took her place, snapped her camera, turned the key, took a second snap, in case anything should go wrong with the first and murmured, "_Grazie, grazie_," one of her few Italian words. "_Niente, niente, signorina_," said the girl, who seemed to be the spokesman of the party, looking inquiringly at Marion. Then almost instantly Marion dropped a small piece of silver in her hand. "That's the way to get them to stand," he said laughing; "generally the smallest copper will fetch them." "But you gave more." "Oh, this was a group of four. I have noticed that little chap before, selling flowers. He's very amusing." Soon Irma had returned her library book, and by various short cuts Marion led her to the Palazzo Cancelleria, near which the so-called Rag Fair is held every Wednesday. They found a series of canvas booths, where a great variety of things was displayed. The sellers, more numerous than the buyers, praised their wares at the tops of their voices, if Irma or Marion even glanced toward them. "I should call it a rummage sale, and things are rather rubbishy," said Irma. At this moment a man thrust a pair of silver-mounted opera glasses in Marion's face, naming a ridiculously low price. With some difficulty, Marion shook him off. "Nothing would induce me to buy them." "But they seemed very cheap." "Yes, but that's the reason. I believe they were stolen." "Oh, but would the police allow it?" "Not if they knew it, but these people keep such things hidden. Perhaps other goods are stolen, too. There are some pretty things here." "Aunt Caroline might find some old lace or embroidery that she'd like, but for my own part I am disappointed. However, we've seen the Rag Fair, and we can cross that off our list of sights." Leaving the Fair and the voluble merchants, after a walk of a block or two Marion suggested that they go home by trolley. This pleased Irma, who had not yet ridden in the Roman cars. When the conductor came for their fare, Marion gave a cry of surprise. "What is it?" asked Irma. "Well, it's worse than ridiculous. I have lost my purse. My last small piece of money was the silver bit I gave to the girl on the Spanish Steps. I know I had my purse then." While they were talking Irma put her own little purse in Marion's hand, and he paid their fare. "Let us go back to the Rag Fair," she said. "Some one there must have taken it. You know how they were jostling us." "There'd be no good in going back. The person who took it would hardly return it. Besides there wasn't much in it, not more than two hundred _liri_." "Two hundred _liri_, forty dollars." Irma rapidly transferred the sum to American money. Why, that was more than she had brought from home as extra spending money and for little gifts, and Marion could say it was nothing. "It is worth trying to find," she suggested mildly. "If there was any chance of finding it, but we'd only waste time. It's too near luncheon, and I'm anxious to carry out my afternoon plan." "How strange Marion is!" thought Irma. "It doesn't disturb him in the least to lose money, and yet some little thing that no one can account for will give him a fit of blues for two or three days." At three in the afternoon Irma came down to the hotel office, looking cool and comfortable in her simple pongee suit. "I am awfully curious," she said, as Marion helped her into the carriage. "Aunt Caroline says she knows where we're going, but she wouldn't spoil your fun." Marion only smiled, as he directed the coachman, "To the Villa Corsini," and the words conveyed little to Irma, beyond the fact that a villa was Italian for "park" and not for "country house," as in English. After a quarter of an hour through a part of Rome she did not know, at last they came to some rather poor streets, where people were lounging about their doors as if expecting something. "I suppose they're not turning out just to see us pass." "Who knows? Perhaps they have heard that we are distinguished American visitors." Soon they turned in toward a park, before whose gate stood a number of carriages and automobiles. "We shall be here an hour," said Marion in Italian, and the driver bowed comprehendingly. Showing their tickets, they went up a broad avenue past fine trees and occasional flower-beds. "It's a garden party for some kind of a charity," Marion explained, "and I thought it would be fun to see some of the princesses and marchionesses who are running it. There was a long list of them in the newspapers yesterday." "Yes, it will be fun," responded Irma, really surprised that Marion should willingly waste an hour on what might be called a society affair. That wasn't the way with most boys, and from what she had seen of Marion, she had not thought him fond of society. Soon they came in sight of a long table, where many men and women were drinking and serving tea. Near it was a large marquee into which they looked as they passed, with a table handsomely spread and decorated with flowers and bright streamers. At one end of the apartment several handsome chairs were placed. "Some special guest must be coming," said Irma, "but the lawn is good enough for me. Let us go toward those chairs under the trees." For a minute or two they watched the gay scene at the long table. "It is evidently a family affair," said Marion. "Every one seems to know every one else. Those men are not bad looking, for Italians," he concluded. "Many of the ladies are beautiful," responded Irma, "and what lovely gowns! I suppose they are in the height of fashion, but I should think they'd hate to trail them over the ground." Presently a most attractive lady, whom Irma had especially noticed, approached them. "Will you have your tea now?" she asked in English, with the slightest accent that showed it was not her native language. "I will have it sent you at once," she continued, "and some cakes." Without waiting for a reply, in a moment she had returned to the table, from which a young girl soon came bringing a tray with cups of tea and a plate of tiny cakes. "Yes, she is expected at once," the young girl replied to some question of Marion's that Irma had not heard. "The Queen, the Queen Margherita," cried Irma. "You are expecting to see the Queen." "You are a good guesser," retorted Marion. "For when I read that Margherita had promised to attend this fête I thought it would be fun for you to come. I know your friend Gertrude has been anxious to have you see her, and there may not be another chance unless you should make up your mind to ask an audience." "Hardly," replied Irma smiling, "and I do hope she will come." Before the two had finished their tea, the groups at the large table moved forward, forming a semicircle near the marquee. The other strangers, who like themselves were at little tables under the trees, rose and moved toward the crowd. In a few minutes a little group came up the avenue from the gate. Irma's whole attention was fastened on the gracious lady in the centre, who leaned a trifle on her parasol handle, as she bowed to those who greeted her on each side. "I should know her anywhere," cried Irma; "her face is as sweet as in the photographs I have seen. Look, they are kissing her hand." Margherita paused a moment, as if to take in the whole scene before her. Irma noticed that although she was scarcely above middle height, in her soft black gown and wide black hat she had an air of grace and elegance that would have distinguished her, even among those who did not know that she was the widow of King Humberto. "How pleased Gertrude will be that I have seen her!" she exclaimed, as Queen Margherita entered the marquee, attended by a number of those who had been in attendance upon the tables, "and it is all owing to you," she added, turning to thank Marion for his thoughtfulness. "As King Victor Emanuel and Queen Elena have gone to their country place, we are not likely to see any other royalties in Italy. But _now_ I can write home that I have seen Queen Margherita." A little later, as Irma and Marion passed the marquee on their way to the carriage, they paused to glance within, where Margherita sat, talking with much animation, the centre of a circle of ladies. "Well, young people," said Uncle Jim at dinner that evening, "you have had a giddy day, with rag fairs and fêtes and things of that kind. To-morrow we return to hard, earnest sightseeing, the Borgia apartments at the Vatican and the Vatican Library. Your aunt wishes you to go while her cold lasts, so she has a reasonable excuse for not travelling the several miles necessary to see these things." "Fortunately I am strong," said Marion, "and Irma seems equal to any amount of walking." "I'm not sure," Irma protested, "that I wish to see more in the Vatican. I enjoyed the sculptures the other day, and the paintings in Raphael's Stanze. Perhaps I am wrong, but I would almost like to leave Rome without seeing the rest of the Pope's palace. Just now I recall clearly all the frescoes: the School of Athens and the Borgo, and Parnassus and the others, and then the Ascension in the gallery, with that wonderful yellowish light. I am contented to remember nothing else of the Vatican." "Oh, that will never do, the largest palace in the world, with a thousand different apartments, covering thirteen and a half acres, and you wish to remember it by a few frescoes and one large painting!" "The greatest frescoes in the world. I've heard you say that yourself." "Oh, yes, but the treasures of the Vatican are all great, and you must have a chance to judge between what you've seen of Raphael and what you will see of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Those popes of the Middle Ages were wise in their day, especially after Nicholas V, in 1450, who decided to make the Vatican the most imposing palace in the world by bringing under one roof all the papal offices. Since then the building has been constantly enlarged and improved. But now only a small part is occupied by the Papal Court. Certain days and hours most of the Vatican treasures are shown to visitors. If you could spend all your time there for a week, you would not have seen half." Next day Uncle Jim decided not to go with the young people to the Vatican, and so again Marion was Irma's guide. "I am less afraid of the Swiss guards than I was the first day," said Irma, as they passed the Pope's soldiers in their brilliant red and yellow uniforms, on their way to the Scala Regia. "Oh," responded Marion, "they wouldn't dare touch a visitor. Just wait a moment, I've forgotten exactly where we go first." So they waited, while Marion turned the leaves of his guidebook, and then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard in Italian a very positive "Move on." He looked into the frowning face of a Swiss guard, and without further ado he moved rapidly up the broad staircase. "There," said Irma, when out of hearing of the soldiers. "What did I tell you? They might have done something terrible. You know we are not in Italy now. The Vatican is the Pope's country." "And the Pope is one of the best-hearted men in the world. Why, actually you are trembling! I suppose they have rules to keep people moving, but they wouldn't dare harm an American." Irma, however, was disturbed by this incident, and was not sorry a few minutes later to find herself one of several in an anteroom waiting the guide to take them through the library. "A library!" she exclaimed, when they had entered the vast hall, "but where are the books?" "In these glass cases--listen to the guide." Not until the end of their tour of the great hall did they learn that the library, in the ordinary sense of books and manuscripts available for students, was not open to ordinary visitors. The so-called library through which the guide led them was high vaulted, and more than two hundred feet long, with painted ceiling, floors of marble mosaics from ancient temples and baths, and exquisite marble columns also from ancient buildings. In the end they saw some books worth seeing: the oldest Bible in existence, a manuscript of the fourth century, and an old second century Virgil. Of later times there was a volume of Henry VIII's love letters to Anne Boleyn, and many exquisitely illustrated manuscripts, among them a Natural History illuminated by Raphael and his pupils. "I wish he'd cut it short," said Marion, as the guide gave long descriptions of each manuscript that he pointed out in its case, or in the drawers that he sometimes unlocked. "I rather enjoy what he says about the manuscripts as you translate it for me," responded Irma, "but he need not describe every present given to every pope. Vases are vases, and we know all these things were presents to one pope or another. They are all costly and some are beautiful. But I am getting tired." It would not have been possible, even had they dared try to hurry the loquacious guide. Before they left the hall Irma almost forgot her fatigue in looking at the ancient paintings, inscriptions, and other relics of early Christians. Again, as at the Lateran, she sighed deeply at the pathos of the little things brought from the Catacombs, combs and small toilet articles, little brooches, and other pieces of simple jewelry. "You are really tired!" exclaimed Marion, as they passed through the glass door out of the hall. "But in the Sistine Chapel you can sit down." So it happened that after Irma had looked into a mirror held under the ceiling, on which are painted Michelangelo's frescoes--the sibyls and the prophets, and the well-known Adam and Eve, Irma from a bench along the side looked with more or less interest at the paintings opposite her by Pinturicchio and other masters. A girl of sixteen, however, is not expected to have the interest of her elders in old masters, as Irma frankly acknowledged. "Of course I know the Last Judgment of Michelangelo's is a great altarpiece, but I do not care to look at it longer. I'm very glad, though, that you brought me to the Sistine Chapel. When I read about the great church ceremonies in which the Pope takes part, I can imagine the crowd here, and the Pope in the centre and----" Before Irma had finished speaking, from behind a wooden partition that screened some men repairing the mosaic pavement, one of the workers stepped out, and with a finger of one hand on his lips, lifted the other on high with one finger significantly extended. When he saw that he had gained Marion's attention, he held up a small object, as if he wished Marion to examine it. Then Marion went forward, and the man put the object in his hand. "Cheap enough for a franc," said Marion, displaying a small octagon of mosaics, green, red, and white. "Why it's the same pattern as the pavement there." "Of course, that's why I bought it," he replied, "as a souvenir of the Sistine Chapel." "But ought you to take it?" asked Irma. "Had he the right to sell it?" An expression of anger crossed Marion's face. "Do you think I would do what is not right? Come," he continued, "we ought to be on our way out." Then he strode on, keeping far enough ahead of Irma to prevent conversation. "He is certainly like a spoiled child!" she thought, "and I fancied we were getting on so well together." The drive back to the hotel was rather silent, as well as hot. "In our hottest weather it is never like this," thought poor Irma. She was glad enough to reach the shelter of the cool hotel. "Did you see where the papal dominions end and Italy begins?" asked Uncle Jim at _déjeuner_. "No? Then you didn't look in the right place. There is one window from which the guide could have shown you a soldier of the Pope's on guard, while at a short distance a sentry from the Italian army is pacing up and down." "From one or two windows I caught sight of the beautiful Vatican gardens," Irma replied, "and even if the Pope is a prisoner, he must find a great deal to enjoy in his walks." "_If_ he is a prisoner," began Uncle Jim. "He is certainly a voluntary prisoner," said Aunt Caroline, "but the subject is too large a one to discuss now." Marion was silent, evidently sulking. But Aunt Caroline understood him, for when he left the table without a word she made no comment. CHAPTER XI TIVOLI--AND HADRIAN'S VILLA "Tivoli," said Irma, as they sat at luncheon in a pleasant garden not far from the cascades, "has disappointed me." "In what way?" asked Uncle Jim. "Oh, the name sounds so bright and frivolous that you expect it to be very gay here, and it isn't." "The cataracts are lively." "Yes, they foam and roar like the falls of Lodore, when you reach them, but Tivoli itself is a crowded little town, and the people seem solemn. Even the Temple of the Sibyl is shabby and dirty, without looking old." "Irma turning pessimist," cried Uncle Jim. "But the town isn't the whole of Tivoli. Villa d'Este is charming enough, unless it has changed since my day, and then there's the road to Hadrian's villa!" Marion took neither one side nor the other in the discussion. He had talked to Irma little enough since their Vatican visit a day or two before. Yet he was always polite, and she judged from the past that his sulkiness would not last long. The drive to the Villa d'Este was short, and as she stood on the terrace looking over the tops of the pointed cypresses, Irma admitted that this view alone was worth seeing. "Ligorio, whom Cardinal Ippolito d'Este employed to construct this villa, was certainly an artist," said Aunt Caroline, "and I am sure it is true that there are few finer Renaissance villas in Italy." [Illustration: WALL OF ORVIETO. (_See page 211._)] [Illustration: CASCADES AT TIVOLI.] "If only it were not going to ruin so fast. Broken statuary and moss-grown fountains are not very cheerful. But perhaps there are some amusing stories connected with the place. What has the guide been saying to you?" said Uncle Jim. "Oh, he has been telling me that he is one of the most remarkable guides in Europe, with government certificates and letters of recommendation from innumerable tourists. The German Emperor depended on him, so he says, on his visit two or three years ago, and, ah, yes--" The guide had brought the party to a stop as he pointed to a stone bench at the end of a path. "Yes," continued Aunt Caroline, "let us sit down, one by one, for this is the bench on which the Kaiser rested to get full enjoyment of the vista of the house on the terrace at the end of the long avenue of pointed cypresses. But come, he says he has even a finer view to show." A few minutes' walk brought the party to a wall bounding one side of the garden, whence they had a wide outlook over a flourishing country. "He says," interpreted Aunt Caroline, "that where that large factory stands was Maecenas's villa, and that Horace also had a farm not far away." "I could contradict him if it were worth while," said Uncle Jim, "although it is true enough that many eminent Romans, including Augustus himself, had villas in this neighborhood. But there are few sites of which we are sure, except that of Hadrian's villa a hundred years later." The guide continued to pour out information and misinformation until the party returned to the carriage, and he was even anxious to go with them to Hadrian's villa. "No, there we shall not need him," said Uncle Jim decidedly. "I have studied the plans, and as we shall not attempt to explore a very large part of the one hundred and seventy-nine acres, I believe I am equal to my task of guide." Leaving their carriage at the entrance, the party was soon at the custodian's house. Here Aunt Caroline and Irma lingered to compare pictures of Hadrian's villa as it is, with sketches showing the artist's ideal of its original splendor. Other tourists were wandering about the vast ruins, and the custodian was occupied with the first comers. "Whether a palace or a collection of palaces, it is the most surprising ruin I have ever seen," said Aunt Caroline. "Imagine what it must have been in Hadrian's day! Many of the finest statues now in Rome were unearthed here a few centuries ago, and these mosaic pavements and broken columns give us an idea of the whole. It was really, I suppose, a collection of magnificent buildings with baths and great halls and even quarters for the imperial troops." Irma, walking about, had a strange feeling of loneliness; she had never seen a building so vast. It brought before her more vividly than anything else she had seen the greatness of the Roman emperors. She wished to be by herself, undisturbed by Aunt Caroline's continuous explanations and Uncle Jim's facetious comments. "Over there," said Marion, whom she met unexpectedly at a turn, "an opening in the trees gives a fine view of the valley, with Tivoli on the hills beyond." As Marion did not offer to accompany her to the spot toward which he pointed, Irma went on alone. Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline were not far away, and would doubtless follow soon enough. "It was very good in Marion to tell me of this view," thought Irma, as she looked over the valley. "He is getting over his sulkiness." After waiting a few minutes, longer perhaps than she realized, Irma turned back to the place where Marion had spoken to her. But now there was no one in sight but a distant custodian, who was engrossed by a tourist. "Where is Marion?" thought Irma, "and why did Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline turn about so quickly?" At this moment she saw a small cube of green marble in her path. Though it was very like the marble of the pavement on which she stood, she could see no broken place. "What a perfect paperweight it would make!" she thought. "I couldn't have a finer souvenir from Hadrian's villa." But as she was about to pick it up, the custodian suddenly turned his head. She wondered if she were doing wrong. Yet the little green cube still fascinated her and she waited until the custodian and the tourist had moved out of sight. While she waited Irma made a few notes in her book, and when she at last felt that she could safely do it, she picked up the little piece of marble and dropped it in her bag. But now where should she go? She had a vague idea of the general direction, yet she knew that a wrong turn might lead her far from the entrance. How foolish she had been not to consult the custodian, and all for a wretched piece of marble! For the moment she felt like throwing it away. The feeling of melancholy she had had since first entering the villa now increased. The sun was low, and as she looked at her watch she saw it was but ten minutes of train time. "If, by any chance, we should become separated, you and Marion must surely be at the station five minutes before train time," Uncle Jim had said, while they were still in the carriage, pointing out the little structure, where the steam tram for Rome made a stop. "That is why they went on," thought Irma, "they supposed Marion was with me, and now what _will_ they think?" Now, strange though it may seem, when the tram pulled away from the little station, Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline did not realize Irma's absence. After a hurried cup of tea, they had rushed for the cars with a number of other passengers. "Where's Irma?" Aunt Caroline had asked anxiously, as she took her own seat. "Oh, she's in the next car; I saw Marion helping her on." This was Uncle Jim's honest opinion. But the girl whom Marion was assisting politely, happened not to be Irma, but another girl of her general appearance, as it seemed to near-sighted Uncle Jim. Meanwhile Marion, quite unconscious that Irma was not with his uncle and aunt in the forward car, surrendered himself to a book. Poor Irma! She was not ashamed of the tears that began to fall, when after several minutes' walk she found herself back at a point near where she had found the unlucky bit of marble. It was far from a pleasant prospect that she might spend the night at Hadrian's villa, twenty-five miles from Rome. She had no intention, naturally, of sitting still, and she felt sure that eventually, probably even before dark, she might find her way out to the custodian's house. The last tram for the day had returned to Rome, and she wondered who would give her shelter for the night. "Crying won't help," and she wiped away what she meant should be her last tear. "I am sure I know the general direction, and if----" "Hello, hello," cried a cheerful voice behind her, "a lady in distress, and no one but me to rescue her. This is _remarkable_." Irma started to her feet, almost ready to throw her arms around the speaker, whom she had instantly recognized. Before her stood the fairy godfather. It did not take long to explain the situation, though the old gentleman was rather outspoken in his words of blame for Marion and Uncle Jim. "Your uncle evidently thought the boy was looking after you, and I must say he deserves punishment, if he has gone back to Rome without you." "Oh, it is my fault for not staying with the others." "Well, well, that can be settled later; meanwhile, if you have really seen all you wish of Hadrian's villa, I will conduct you outside, where I have a carriage and pair. We can soon reach Tivoli, where I can send a telegram that will meet your friends when they reach the end of the route." "But when shall I go back to Rome?" "On the regular railroad from Tivoli. Fortunately it has an evening train. Ah, here we are!" As Irma waited at the little building at the entrance to the grounds, where post cards and other relics were sold, she saw a piece of marble, almost the counterpart of the one that had made her lose her way. She did not buy it, in spite of her first impulse. "I believe it's not wrong for me to keep the other piece," she thought. "In one way it has taught me a lesson." On their way to Tivoli the old gentleman seemed more inclined to get Irma's impressions of Rome, rather than to talk freely himself. She did not, therefore, venture to ask where he had been since their landing at Naples, nor even whether he had been long in Rome. This last question seemed unnecessary, as the old gentleman's conversation showed a wide acquaintance with modern as well as ancient Rome. Irma had begun, however, to ask him one or two questions about Roman school children, when without replying he said abruptly, "Now, tell me, don't you think there are too many churches in Rome?" "There _are_ a great many," replied Irma, smiling, "and I shall not have seen more than a tenth of them, even if I stay here a month longer." "Then you do not care for them?" "Oh, I simply haven't time. Indeed, I care for some of them. I used to think church legends rather hard to believe, but now they mean much more to me. Perhaps I did not like San Pietro in Montorio as well as some others when I first saw it the other day, but it meant more when I found they believe it is built on the very spot where the apostle was martyred, and so, while the church of San Paolo seems too large and splendid, still it is beautiful to have a church to mark St. Paul's burial place." "Yes, Rome constantly reminds us what the martyrs suffered. You came out the San Lorenzo gate to-day?" "Yes." "Well, the church of San Lorenzo just beyond honors St. Lawrence, whose story is one of the most pathetic. He was assistant to the Bishop Sextus II, and when the latter was condemned to death he begged that he might die with him. 'In three days you shall follow me,' said Sextus. St. Lawrence was a young man of great personal beauty, and he had been a devoted friend to the poor. Sextus directed him to distribute the treasure of the Church among the poor, and when he was asked by the Tyrant to show the treasure, he gathered about him those he had helped. His bravery and piety converted his jailer, Hippolytus, and he met his death--roasting on a gridiron--with the greatest bravery. Whether the story is wholly true, there was certainly a brave martyr named Lawrence. St. Cecilia, too, is another martyr who ought to interest you. Ah, Rome is full of such memories! But this is not a cheerful subject for a girl who has lost her relatives." In an instant the old gentleman had turned the subject, giving Irma an entertaining account of Easter week celebrations that he had once seen in Rome. As a result of the despatch from Tivoli, Uncle Jim was at the station to meet Irma. "You gave us a great fright," he said reproachfully. "We did not discover that you were missing until we had almost reached Rome." "Don't scold the young lady," said the fairy godfather. "It was the fault of that boy." He spoke so sternly that Irma was glad Marion was not present. Yet Uncle Jim did not resent this speech. It almost seemed as if he had met the old gentleman before. Then, with a bare acknowledgment of the thanks that Uncle Jim showered on him for his care of Irma and his thoughtfulness in telegraphing, the old gentleman jumped into a carriage and drove rapidly away. "Do you know him, Uncle Jim?" asked Irma. "I must have seen him on the _Ariadne_," he replied. "My dear Chris and Rudolph," wrote Irma a few days later. "This is to be a long letter, because we have a rainy day and I can spare the time. For my trunk is packed, and to-morrow we leave Rome. "In the first place, you wish to know about the seven hills. Well, I believe they are all here, only they have been so built upon or so levelled that they are hard to find. Even in old times the Palatine and the Aventine were the only hills worth speaking of, and they are still fairly steep. Not so long ago they showed a small hut on the Palatine called Romulus's house that had been preserved since the earliest days. So it seems certain that Romulus and Remus were real people, and if we needed more proof, not long since they discovered an old tomb in the Forum which they are quite sure was the grave of Romulus. I have looked down into it, and am willing to believe this, too. On the Palatine now are the ruins of the enormous palaces of the emperors. Generally only parts of the high walls are standing, but from these you get an idea of the grandeur of ancient Rome. On the walls of one house (The House of the Pages it is supposed to be) they found a rough little drawing, such as a boy might scratch on a blackboard to-day, the picture of a donkey, and under it: 'Work, little ass, as I have worked, and may it profit thee.' "Besides the palaces they have unearthed the small house of Germanicus, in which we saw some good wall paintings, and what would interest you more, lead pipes for carrying water, almost like those we use in our houses. "We spent one day in the Forum with a special guide, who made everything so plain! I saw the place where Cæsar fell at the foot of Pompey's statue. They are constantly unearthing new things in the Forum, and Aunt Caroline says it is really twice as large as it was when she was last here. The beautiful House of the Vestals interested me the most. "The Colosseum is some distance from the Forum, and you know it from photographs. Only no picture can really give you a good idea of its size. When you stand inside you feel as if you were hardly larger than a fly. "Rome, for the first few days, seemed like a big, new city, with bright shops and rushing trolley cars and _carabinieri_ in cocked hats sauntering about. But I soon began to see old Rome everywhere. You have to patch it together as you go about. Pavements and columns from ancient temples are found in the Middle Age churches. Alabaster and colored marbles from all over the world were brought to Rome, and as late as the fifth century there were thirty-six marble arches, hundreds of temples, and many great baths, circuses, and fine private houses, besides the rows of tall houses arranged in flats in which ordinary people lived. There were also a great many fine statues, nearly all of which have disappeared. In the Middle Ages, when people wished to build new houses and churches, they simply pulled down some fine old Roman temple or palace and so got building materials without any expense. But there is enough of ancient Rome left to help form a picture of what it was. Sometime I hope you will see it all, the old wall with its towers, the Appian Way with its tombs and monuments. "But old Rome is only a part of what we enjoy. The streets are bright and gay with so many people driving about, and soldiers in uniforms sometimes marching, sometimes walking along the sidewalks like ordinary people. Then often we meet twenty or thirty school children dressed just alike, taking exercise in the care of sisters, or priests in their church dress. Then there are a great many theological students studying in Rome, and some of them wear broad red or broad blue sashes, or have other colored trimmings on their long black robes. "I dare say you are disappointed that we have not seen the king and queen--I wrote mother about Margherita--but I have been all through the royal palace, the Quirinal, and will tell you about it when I come home." CHAPTER XII AN ANCIENT TOWN "I feel sorrier even than I expected," said Irma, as their train drew out of the station at Rome. "No other city can be half as interesting." "Just wait, my dear," replied Uncle Jim; "wherever you go in Italy you will find more churches and pictures than you can properly grasp. You are a pretty good sightseer, but in another month you will have had enough." "It isn't antiquities and pictures that I mind leaving," responded Irma smiling; "but I was only beginning to realize how many pleasant people there are in Rome." "You and your aunt were certainly getting rather frivolous; teas and calls and that kind of thing are a great waste of time in a city full of churches. Remember, to improve your mind is your chief object in coming abroad." Uncle Jim had assumed a mock-serious manner. "To improve her health," interposed Aunt Caroline; "and I have written her mother that she has gained six pounds and has recovered her red cheeks." "So you attribute this improvement to teas, and not to churches!" "Our little bit of social life the past week or two has been good for us both. Americans away from home often seem unexpectedly interesting, and we have enjoyed hearing little things about the Roman winter that we might not have heard if I had not met so many New York and Philadelphia acquaintances. Then we have seen some of our artist friends at work in their studios, and this has been entertaining." "Don't forget the shops, Aunt Caroline. Even if I haven't had much money to spend I have enjoyed shopping, and I think I have done very well with Roman souvenirs. Sometimes I have wished I could spend just a little more, and yet I have done very well." If Irma had been looking at Marion, she might have seen that he was observing her more closely than the pages of the book that earlier had seemed to absorb him. As they journeyed, Uncle Jim reminded Irma that they were travelling toward the sources of the Tiber, and at one station he told her that here she might go off to Perugia, the home of Perugino and Raphael. "Orvieto," he added, "is a town set on a small mountain by itself, and I hope you will like the funicular." "By funicular!" cried Marion, in a tone of disgust; "that's the kind of thing I particularly hate." "You might go around by carriage. There is a winding road, as I remember, but it takes much longer." When they arrived at Orvieto, Marion, however, entered the strange little train that was to be pulled up the steep ascent by underneath cable. "Look back at the view," urged Aunt Caroline, when they were almost at the top. Turning her head Irma beheld a beautiful sight, the broad valley lying far beneath and the distant hills. Then glancing toward Marion she saw that he was leaning upon the seat in front and steadying himself as if to brace himself against disaster. "Sit up straight," called Uncle Jim, mischievously. "You cannot possibly fall out, and if the car slips we shall all perish together." Then Irma noticed that Marion bit his lip, as if angry, and made no effort to look at the view. A short drive from the end of the funicular brought them to an old-fashioned hotel. "A little rest, a little _déjeuner_, and then the cathedral!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline. "I can hardly wait to see it. That is the only thing that brings people to this queer little town." "It is surely a queer little hotel, and we are the only Americans here," thought Irma, observing the guests at the other tables, a stout, long-frocked priest, a uniformed officer, and two or three swarthy Italians, apparently prosperous business men. Soon after _déjeuner_ they set out, and a turn or two brought them to the piazza of the Duomo, or cathedral. For a moment all stood silent, as the sun shining full on the façade showed them an enormous picture. "Isn't it the most wonderful thing you ever saw?" cried Aunt Caroline, and Irma thought it too beautiful for words. For those who had planned and those who had carried out the plans had managed to give to the little hill town a church that any city in the world might envy. Beautiful pictures in mosaic in rich tones and gold backgrounds occupy the upper part of the front. The marble pillars are exquisitely carved, and around the large rose window are marble statues of apostles and saints, while fine bronze emblems also form part of the decorations. "I would really rather not go inside," said Irma, when Uncle Jim proposed their seeing the interior. "I should like to sit here for an hour and simply look at this beautiful, enormous picture," and she raised her eyes to the high, pointed gables of the cathedral, far, so far above her. While she was speaking Uncle Jim had crossed the street to a group of boys gathered on the cathedral steps. "Yes," he said, as he returned, "they are actually playing cards, and they didn't show the slightest signs of guilt when I looked over their shoulders." "Just think of being so intimate with this cathedral that you could play games on its steps without thinking of the front." "And those bareheaded women repairing the pavement never glance at the church." "Oh, Marion," protested Aunt Caroline, "don't give her a penny. Here are two more old women hobbling along, and if you give to one you will have the whole hospital at your back. I am sure there is some kind of an institution there at the corner of the piazza." Marion smiled good humoredly, and took his hand from his pocket, without producing the bit of silver that the old woman evidently expected. Two other old women came along, one leaning heavily on a crutch, the other with a heavy woollen shawl over her head in spite of the heat of the day. "But just think what a fine time they could have with my half franc to spend." "You will find some more worthy cause, if you need a cause on which to waste your money. There--there--go--go," cried Aunt Caroline to the three old women, who had now come close up to her, mumbling and making signs of hunger. "Come, Irma, inside the cathedral," and laying her hand on Irma's arm, Aunt Caroline crossed the street, while Uncle Jim and Marion followed: and if the truth be told, as soon as Aunt Caroline's back was turned, the very coin that had been burning Marion's pocket quickly transferred itself to the hand of the most importunate of the old women. This, at least, was Irma's impression, as she looked around before entering the cathedral door, attracted by the rather peculiar striking of a clock. Looking in the direction of the sound she gave an exclamation of surprise that led Aunt Caroline to turn also. There on a building at the corner stood a life size figure of a small man hitting a bell with a hammer, and thus informing the town of the hours and quarter hours without the need of a clock face. The cool, white interior of the cathedral was a pleasant change from the hot piazza. The pillars were of marble, striped black and white like the outside. The young people admired some of the old frescoes by Fra Angelico and Signorelli, and watched the priest copying the head of Virgil, one of several poets of the future life chosen to decorate one chapel. But when Aunt Caroline drew out her book to sketch some architectural details Irma sighed audibly. Only Marion, however, heard and understood the sigh. "Aunt Caroline," he said, "while you are drawing, Irma and I might ramble around the town. The streets are so narrow that there would be no fun driving, and you never care to walk in the sun." "Certainly, children. Run off by yourselves. You needn't apologize for tiring of the society of your elders. As we have so little time here I intend to devote myself to the cathedral inside and out. Only remember what you see, and please don't get lost." So Irma and Marion set off by themselves. Although they had been informed that the little Municipal Museum contained many interesting vases and ornaments found in the ancient Etruscan tombs so numerous in this neighborhood, they decided to omit the museum. "We saw so many of those things in the National Museum at Rome," sighed Irma, "and these cannot be any finer. Aren't you tired of museums? There must be much to see here, for Orvieto is such an old, old town." "Yes," assented Marion, "and we might as well begin to set ourselves against museums, for Uncle Jim says that all the Italian towns, no matter how small, are stuffed full of local pride, and have municipal museums, and even art galleries that they tax the poor people heavily to support. If no one should visit them then taxes would be lighter, and the poor Italians would be happier, and not so many would be driven to emigrate to America." While Irma laughed at the absurdity of his reasoning she also thought that Marion was a very clever boy. Then they wandered through the narrow streets of Orvieto, passing under stone arches, looking in at various shops, where shoemakers or tinsmiths or tailors were working in rather primitive fashion. Irma photographed one or two old churches, and at last they came to a wall that seemed to hold the town from tumbling down the high hill. There they had a wide view across a lovely valley. While they stood there, three or four well-dressed children surrounded them, asking for money, and going through the usual form of speech, "We are dying of hunger." Far from sympathizing, Marion and Irma only laughed as they drove the children away, and finally the children, too, burst into loud laughter as they retreated. "I never imagined an Italian town as clean as this," said Irma, as they walked over the big cobblestones of a sidewalkless thoroughfare. "It looks as if it had been swept and scrubbed, and yet I am sorry for the people so near the beautiful country, who yet must live in a closely built town." "Oh, many probably work in the fields below there, young as well as old. Though they don't need the protection of a fortified town, as they did in the Middle Ages, they still love to huddle together." Before returning to the hotel, the two went to another edge of the town. A public garden covered the site of the old fortress, but from a ruin of the ancient castle they formed an idea of what it had been in its days of usefulness. "Give me your camera for a moment," cried Marion, as Irma leaned against the wall looking over the Valley of the Tiber, toward the Umbrian hills. "Now, stand still, just as you are," and when she heard the click she turned to thank Marion. "You must be a thought reader. I was wishing I might have a picture taken here to send home, but----" "You weren't afraid to ask me?" "Well--you might have thought I was vain--or something. It always seems so silly to wish to have one's own picture taken. But this is for Gertrude. She tried to make me promise to have one taken in every town we visited." "I really believe you'd rather please Gertrude than any one else. I am almost sorry I took the photograph." Marion turned away half angrily, and Irma could not tell whether or not he was in earnest, as they followed the custodian of the garden, who had been insisting that they must see the _pozzo_, or old well. When they had looked down into its gloomy depths of a couple of hundred feet the man seemed rather disappointed that neither of them would descend part way. "The remarkable thing about it is that the spiral staircase is so built that donkeys with buckets went down on one side, and came up on the other with water." "But who cares about that now?" cried Irma impatiently. As they turned away from the well, they saw a hotel omnibus approaching, and a moment later Aunt Caroline was calling to them. "We were so afraid we might miss you. They insisted on bringing us down early for the funicular, and here are your bags. But this is better than being late, and it will give your uncle and me a chance to visit the famous well." Whereat Irma and Marion exchanged smiles, though it did not seem worth while to dissuade their elders from seeing one of the few sights of the old town. "It will be a quarter of an hour before the train starts for Siena, and they ought to have some way of killing time." "By the way," continued Marion, as they waited for the train, "you may be glad to hear that you were right and I was wrong, the other day about my purse." "The one that was stolen?" "Yes. I ought to have reported it, as you said. It contained a piece of--well--something that I wouldn't have lost for anything. I only found it out when I came to pack this morning. I had thought it was in its box. But when to-day I found the box empty, I remembered that I had it in my purse to take to a jeweler's to repair." "Can't you report it now?" "Oh, it's absolutely too late, now that we have left Rome." At this moment the train came in. CHAPTER XIII OLD SIENA--AND NEW FRIENDS When Irma looked out of her window before breakfast her first morning at Siena, she was surprised to see before her not a town street, but what seemed a section of farming country, with vegetable gardens and occasional small cottages. She saw men and women at work in the fields, and she wondered whether she were awake or asleep. For her impression of Siena, as they had driven through the streets the night before, was of a closely built town. When she had dressed, she hastened from her room to see what impression she would get from a front window. It seemed to be a morning of surprises, for as she passed a sitting-room at the head of the stairs, she heard Marion laughing, yes, actually laughing, and other voices were mingled with his in conversation and laughter, too. So surprised was Irma that she paused, with her hand on the banister, and a moment later Marion stood beside her. "Come in, there is some one here you ought to meet," he said, and almost before she realized it he had led her into the room. The faces of the two girls who stood near the window were certainly not exactly the faces of strangers, and yet she could not tell where she had previously seen them. "Miss Grimston, Miss Sanford, this is Irma Derrington." At these words of Marion's she realized who the strangers were, the two girls she had seen at the Naples Aquarium. "Don't I come in for an introduction, too?" said a boy's voice, almost before Irma had a chance to say a word to the two girls, and at the same moment a tall, blue-eyed boy came forward with a smile. "I am Richard Sanford," he said pleasantly. "Come, children, come to breakfast," cried Uncle Jim, now appearing at the door; "your aunt will have her coffee upstairs." Then he started back. "Excuse me," he said, "I did not realize that Siena was so full of young Americans," and then Marion repeated the introductions. In the breakfast room a table was found where all the young people could sit together, under the vigilant eye of Uncle Jim, "a chaperon _pro tem_," as he called himself, whose chief duty it was to see that they did not let their conversation interfere with their appetites. Before the meal ended he had made them admit that he had done his duty. "We have seen all the most important things in Siena," Katie Grimston explained, "but we had arranged to be here a week, and that gives us two days more. Mrs. Sanford happens to be rather tired to-day, and while she is resting we can go about with you if you'd like to have us." "Indeed we should," responded Uncle Jim, "for if you have been over the ground, you can probably save us many steps." "Of course we won't promise to go everywhere, but we can save you time at first." A little later Irma was at the door, ready to start. The street in front of the house looked like the street of some pleasant New England suburb. The houses seemed comparatively modern. But not so very far away she caught glimpses of roofs crowded together, and of the tower of a large church. Marion and Katie and Uncle Jim had gone off a little ahead of the others, and Irma found herself with Richard Sanford and his sister. "Let us take a short cut to the Duomo," said Richard. "We've always driven, but it would really be more fun to walk." The girls assented, and the three set off in good spirits. But Richard, although he asked his way once or twice, did not pay close attention to directions, and they quickly found themselves going down a steep, narrow street that had no sidewalk, and was paved with large stones that made walking difficult. The street was full of people, chiefly women and little children, and some of the children gathered around the Americans as they passed along. "The only thing I know about the cathedral," protested Irma, when they found themselves at the bottom of the long street, "is that it occupies the highest land in Siena, which I am sure we shall never reach if we keep going down hill." "Patience, patience," cried Richard pleasantly. "I'll show you that I am a regular Duke of York," and he stepped aside to talk with an intelligent-looking woman in a doorway, who gesticulated while she talked. "Her gestures tell me more than her words," said Richard, "and all we have to do, evidently, is to turn a corner or two and go up hill again." "Oh, Richard, you are so heedless. You should have thought twice before bringing us down here," cried his sister. "But think what fun to go up those queer little stepping-stones," and with a long stride Richard was soon so far ahead of them that again the only sensible thing was to follow. For a moment he was out of sight around a corner, and when they came upon him, he was on the steps of a building that was at a considerably lower level than the cathedral towering above. Then they followed him within, and Ellen fortunately withheld her word of reproof, which might otherwise have seemed an interruption to a service that was going on. "A christening," she whispered to Irma; "this must be the baptistery." "See, there are two of them. I believe they are twins." Both girls now drew nearer to the font. There were several persons besides the priest, and two of the women wore cloaks with bright linings, one blue, one pink. The lady of the pink-lined cloak held in her arms a baby with a cloak of the same color, and a baby in a blue cloak was held by the wearer of the blue-lined cloak. "I wish we could look at them," whispered Ellen, as the children and their train turned away from the font. "I do so love to see twins," and then, to the surprise of both girls, the baby in the blue cloak was carried out of the baptistery, followed by her parents and grandparents, without a farewell to the baby in the pink cloak; while the parents of the other child sat down for a minute or two before taking him away. "They are not twins. They are not even brother and sister," cried Ellen, in a tone of great dejection. "As if that made any difference!" exclaimed Richard, overhearing her. "Oh, Ellen, you can be such a goose. But come, after you have admired Donatello's stunning St. John, we must go outside and take a few more steps up to the cathedral." From the piazza the black and white striped marble, the gabled front and its fine sculptures, reminded Irma of the Orvieto Duomo. But it had not the rich color of the other. On each side of the door were columns surmounted by a marble wolf. "Oh, you must get used to _La Lupa_ in Siena. You know the story goes that Siena was founded by Senus, son of Remus, hence the Sienese claim the wolf as their especial emblem. You'll see it everywhere. Now follow me and listen attentively, young ladies, and you'll find you can 'do' this vast Duomo in the shortest time on record. No, no." The last was said to a guide who was following them closely, a half-grown boy, who was not easily shaken off. "Richard really is a very good guide," whispered Ellen. "He knows so many stories about everything, and when he doesn't remember he can make up something just as interesting." In consequence of this remark of Ellen's, Irma was not always sure how much was truth and how much imagination, in the legends that Richard rapidly told of saints and church dignitaries, painted on the walls, or done in graffito in the marble pavement. But of one thing she was certain, she had never seen a building so complete in its carvings, whether of wood or marble, its paintings and gildings. She admired the tall flagstaffs captured at Montaperti, though they seemed out of place in a church. She stood long, studying the details of the exquisite marble pulpit by Nicholas Pisano, when Richard exclaimed, "The most beautiful pulpit in Europe. He worked on it for three years, and then received for it--about thirty dollars." "Is that the truth or a legend?" she asked, smiling. "The real true truth," he answered. "I saw it in a book of accounts in the Municipal building. They have a great many interesting manuscripts there. The letters of Catherine of Siena, and many other autographs would fetch their weight in gold in our country." "An autograph wouldn't weigh very much," suggested Irma. But Richard took no notice of the interruption. "Well, I made a particular note about Nicholas Pisano. So I am sure I am right. But come, if you wish to do the cathedral in the shortest known time, we must go at once to the library." "I am not in so tremendous a hurry." "Ah, that's because you have no idea how much there is in Siena. See, there's the librarian letting one group of victims go. We can easily slip in." The room they now entered, though small, was beautifully decorated. Above the rich woodwork were ten frescoes on the walls, each a complete scene from the life of some hero. "He is Enio Sylvio Piccolomini," explained their self-appointed guide, "who became Pope Pius II, and isn't that a funny scene where he is trying to persuade the king of Scotland to harry the border so that Henry VI of England may have so much to do at home that he won't interfere with the affairs on the continent?" "Oh, but the colors are so rich, and Enio Sylvio, if he looked like that, must have been a very interesting person." Richard laughed at Irma's seriousness. "Pinturicchio knew how to please Pope Pius III, the nephew of Enio Sylvio, who engaged him to paint these pictures. But still, on the whole, I imagine that the Piccolomini were rather interesting. For generations they held the chief offices in the church here in Siena, and in the years they were fighting with the Tolmei, they kept things pretty lively. But in Enio Sylvio's time the worst of the Civil Wars were over. But now come," and Richard looked at his watch. "You can have only five minutes for all these illuminated books." "Oh, more than that," cried Ellen. "No, my dear, that is enough for a general impression, which is all you would retain if you were to spend an hour here." The five minutes, however, lengthened into ten before Ellen and Irma were ready to leave the fascinating folios in their leather bindings. They were all books of devotion, some of them music books, with the chants of the church, and all of them illustrated with tiny paintings rich in color. "It is all very well to hurry us," said Ellen, as they walked toward the door of the Duomo, "but you spent a whole morning here, and this is my first visit, as well as Miss Derrington's." "You have a good enough general impression," replied Richard, with a laugh; "and what more can any one expect, on a first visit?" "Evidently," thought Irma, "Richard Sanford looks on sightseeing much as Uncle Jim does." A little later, at the great door, Irma and her friends almost ran into Uncle Jim, behind whom walked Katie Grimston and Marion. "Well, you must have taken the longest way round; where in the world have you been, Katie?" asked Ellen. "Oh, we came through the town, and there were so many nice little shops there that I had to stop, as I always do," replied Katie, whose hands were full of little bundles. "Besides, none of us were in a great hurry for the cathedral. You know I have been all through it," and she glanced coquettishly at Richard. "If you wish us to go on with you now, we can as well as not," she added. "You must suit yourself, but as Marion and his uncle have not been here, I should think you'd like to give them the advantage of your superior knowledge." Then Uncle Jim spoke for himself. "I really think Marion and I ought to take a turn around inside, if nothing more. But Miss Grimston----" "Oh, of course I'd rather do what you do," said Katie, turning her back to Richard, who thereupon went outside. Then after Irma had had a word or two with Uncle Jim, she and Ellen found Richard near a carriage. "It is too warm to walk, and I am going to take you down to the Campo. It is the most interesting spot here in Siena and I wish to be the first to show it to you." "Oh, not more interesting than St. Catherine's house," said Ellen. "More interesting to me, and I believe it will be to Miss Derrington," said Richard. As they drove along, Irma realized that it was indeed strange that she should be so contented in the company of Ellen and Richard, two persons of whom she had not even heard until this very morning. As if he read her thoughts, Richard said rather abruptly, "I suppose Marion hasn't had a chance to tell you that he and I used to go to school together in New York. That was years ago, when we were first out of the kindergarten. Lately he has studied at home, and I've been off at boarding school, so I have seen him only occasionally in my holidays. You must have seen more of him, Ellen." "Oh, no," responded his sister. "Until to-day, I had hardly even seen him since he was a small boy. Of course I felt very sorry for him this winter." "Ah, here we are!" and Richard signalled the driver to pull up, as they reached the end of a narrow street. "Oh, it is picturesque!" cried Irma, looking at the square before her. The great open space was hardly a square, but a piazza tending toward a semicircle, and slightly lower than the street. On the side farthest from them were several fine buildings, from one of which rose a high, square tower, of which Irma remembered to have seen many pictures. Then she recalled something she had just read. Surely Richard would know. "Yes," responded Richard. "This is the very tower they are copying for the Provincetown monument. What a genuine Yankee you are to remember. There," continued Richard, "this is the famous Campo. It is in a hollow, where the three hills of Siena meet. How I should like to have seen it five or six hundred years ago, on one of those days when a fisticuff game was going on, or one of the more exciting donkey races. Oh, it makes our sports to-day seem tame, when we read what these old Sienese used to do. You see," he continued, without waiting for the girls to ask questions, "at one of these fisticuff fights one Sunday before Carnival, the fighters on one side grew so excited when driven off the ground that they fell upon their opponents with sticks and stones, and then with lances and darts, and all of Siena crowded to the neighborhood. The soldiers, the greatest men of the city, too, tried in vain to stop them, and some of the soldiers were killed. Then people who lived in the very palaces we're looking at threw stones out of their windows, but the mob only threatened to set fire to the houses." "Well, how did it end?" asked Ellen impatiently. "Oh, the fight would probably have continued to this day, if some one, after several soldiers had been killed, had not thought of getting the Bishop of Siena, and all the Friars here to come down to the Campo, and when they began to march in a solemn procession right through the thick of the fight, carrying the cross and other religious emblems, of course the fighting stopped. But naturally their games were not often as exciting as this." "What were the donkey races like?" "Oh, quite different. The city was divided into _contrade_, or districts, and on the days of the races each district appeared with its captain and other officers, with its special banner, and a donkey painted in its colors. The game was to get the donkeys to go twice around the Campo. No one on the field was permitted to have a weapon of any kind, not even a finger ring, but they could fight and push and do all in their power to prevent any donkey's winning, except that of their own district. After the donkey races died out they used to have buffalo races; you know," in a tone of contempt, "the kind of buffaloes they have in Italy, and later horse races, which they still have." "Here on the Campo? How I should like to see them." "Then you must come here the second of July or the middle of August. The _Palio_ is the name given to the race, and as the city is still divided into _contrade_, these horses are mounted by representatives of the different ones. But I have a friend who came here one summer, and he says that in spite of the crowds and the display of rich banners and colors these races are now rather tame affairs." "Nothing is what it used to be," said Ellen, half mockingly. "My brother," she explained, turning to Irma, "is romantic, and always longing for the past, in spite of which I don't believe he would have cared to live in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries." "Well, they did some things better than we can, the men of those days. Just come for a moment to the Palazzo Municipio, and I'll show you some pictures that will make you envy the Sienese." As the girls followed he marched them rapidly from room to room, decorated with enormous frescoes, in which were shown the victories of the Sienese over their neighbors, especially over their chief rival, Florence. From the great Council Hall they passed to the Hall of the Nine, who at one time were supreme in the Government of Siena. After one or two efforts Irma ceased trying to understand the allegorical figures that had almost as large a place in the pictures as the historical. But the color was so beautiful, and generally the paintings were so pleasing that she restrained the laugh that was often on her lips, when something appeared to her particularly absurd. But Richard, who had been here before, had the meanings of the allegories, as well as the historical incidents, at his tongue's end. In one room, he told them, a treacherous leader of the Sienese forces had been entrapped and stabbed to death by The Fifteen, who then were the rulers of Siena, and he would have described fully these blood-curdling events, if Ellen had permitted. Finally, as they drove towards home, Richard pointed out several old palaces in which leading families had lived, and in almost every case he had a tale of Salimbeni or Tolomei or Saraceni in the days when the followers of one great house would kill hundreds of the followers of the other. "When," said Richard, "these narrow streets literally ran blood in those old days of Guelph and Ghibelline." "Thank you," said Irma faintly, as they reached their hotel, "I feel as if I had swallowed a whole history." "Well," responded Richard, "I thought it was well for you to accomplish all you could this morning, for I don't see why you shouldn't make quick work with Siena, and go on with us to-morrow or the next day to San Gimignano." "I don't know, I am sure, what Aunt Caroline's plans are," said Irma, "but I can ask her." Yet she realized that she could not repeat Richard's strange name. "San--what?" CHAPTER XIV NAP--AND OTHER THINGS A whole day as strenuous as the morning Richard had provided would have been too much for Irma's strength. Fortunately Aunt Caroline came to her rescue, and insisted on a rest during the early afternoon, and prescribed a drive later. But after driving a short time, Aunt Caroline herself suggested visiting the Oratory of San Bernardino, and one or two other churches where certain masterpieces of Sodoma and other great artists were to be seen. In the evening, after dinner, Uncle Jim brought in a number of letters, forwarded from Rome. There were three for Marion, whose face brightened perceptibly as he glanced at the envelopes. "Here are two from Cranston," added Uncle Jim, as he gave Irma hers. "Cranston," exclaimed Katie, "is there any one here from Cranston? That is where my grandmother lives." "I know it," rejoined Irma, whereupon Katie tossed her head with a little air of exaggerated surprise, as if to say, "And how does it happen that you know anything about my grandmother?" "But I do not know your grandmother," continued Irma. "She has been away ever since I lived there. It is only Nap,--the little dog----" She could not bring herself to say "your little dog," even if she had been willing to admit Katie's ownership. Instantly Katie comprehended. "Oh, you are the girl," she said, "who found my little Pat." "Rescued him," began Aunt Caroline, who well knew the story. "Whereby hangs a tale," added Uncle Jim. "A dog's tail?" queried Richard, with a boy's desire to make a joke, although he didn't yet understand the story of this particular Nap. "I am sure I am very much obliged to you for taking care of my dog," said Katie, "though my relations would have kept him for me." "They didn't seem able to," thought Irma. "Well, he's Irma's dog now," said Uncle Jim decidedly. "You would be quite sure he knows to whom he belongs if you could see him follow Irma about, as I saw him last summer." "Nap, as you call him, 'Pat' as I say, is still my dog. I have never given him away. Every one knows that," and Katie looked in defiance at Irma. "As the bone of contention is so far away, by which I do not mean that Pat is unduly thin, it seems as if we might leave the subject in peace for the present." "Of course," continued Katie, "I did not expect to be in Europe so long. But I am to join grandma in Paris next month, and a week or two later we shall sail. I shall be glad enough to see Pat again." There was no more just then for Irma to say. She wondered if Katie really meant what she said. Later, when they were alone, she would ask her. Soon Katie left the sitting-room, and Marion and Irma and one or two others for whom letters had come proceeded to read them. Richard, who had been politely silent for some time, now turned to Irma, when he saw she was at leisure. "Would you mind telling us about the little dog. All I could understand was that Katie intends to have her own way about something, and when that is the case, it is very hard to make her change her mind." "I should like to hear about it, too," said Marion. "I know just a little about Nap." "I'll tell you what," cried the resourceful Richard. "There's a little balcony outside, at the end of the hall, just large enough for four. If we go there, Ellen, Marion, and Miss Derrington, we can have the whole story, without disturbing any one else." "There's really little enough to tell," began Irma, as they seated themselves outside. "Only, about three years ago, a little less, perhaps, when I first went to Cranston to live, one morning I met a boy with a small dog. He asked me to buy it to save it from being shot. The lady who owned it was going abroad, he said, and had ordered it shot. But he thought it cruel, and was willing to sell it. Well, I took a great fancy to the little creature, he had such lovely brown eyes; and while I was wondering whether I could buy him, Gertrude came along, and between us we bought him. Gertrude is always so generous." For a moment Irma was silent, as her mind went back to that memorable October day, and to the way in which the little dog had helped settle the misunderstanding between her and Gertrude. "Then we had to name him, and happened to choose Nap, which sounds so much like his original 'Pat' that he must have felt pleased." "But where does Katie come in?" asked Richard. "That's the strange part of it. We took Nap with us on an excursion to Concord, and there we ran across Ada Amesbury, who is old Mrs. Grimston's granddaughter. Nap and she recognized each other at once, because, you see, he really belonged to Katie Grimston, whose home, you know, is in Concord." "Well, if Mrs. Grimston or Katie wished to have the dog shot, just because they were going to Europe, I can't see why they should object to your having him!" "Oh, naturally that story of the boy's was only made up. He saw a chance to get a little money by selling the dog, and Katie's family thought Pat was lost. Ada Amesbury was to have taken care of him in Katie's absence. When I first heard about it I thought I ought to give Nap up, but Mrs. Amesbury said it was fair for me to keep him until Katie's return." "I should say so!" interpolated Richard. "But now Katie has stayed away so long it will be very hard for us to part with Nap, especially for my little sister Tessie,--Theresa, I mean." "Oh, you and Katie can surely settle the matter now," said Ellen. "She should be glad enough to let you keep him. A dog is a great trouble to any one who travels much." "I suppose Katie will stay at home for some time after she returns. Perhaps I oughtn't to say Katie behind her back, but I know so many who speak of her in that way. She has quantities of friends in Cranston." "Ellen," said Richard, "even though Katie is our cousin, don't you know her well enough to be sure that if she has once said she would claim Nap, she is not likely to give in, or give up, or whatever you call it?" "That's the worst of it," said Ellen; "she isn't easy to influence." "Oh, well," sighed Irma, "I suppose if she is so fond of Nap, she has a right to him. Of course we have written to Mrs. Grimston and Ada has written to Katie, but she has always said she expected to have the dog on her return." "You could easily get another pet dog," interposed Marion, who thus far had taken no part in the discussion. "It couldn't possibly be the same," and Marion knew that Irma was despondent. "It is cold," cried Ellen. "Let us go back to the sitting-room," and as they passed through the dimly lit hall, Marion saw Irma wipe away a tear. Had she known that he noticed this, and had she thought the matter worth explaining, she might have told him that Nap was not alone responsible for the tear, but that behind it was the feeling of homesickness, her very strong desire to see Tessie and the boys and her parents, and yes, even Mahala and Gertrude, and in fact every one in Cranston. Marion this evening was more sympathetic than usual, because he had received a letter with better news than any he had had since leaving home. Yet such was his reticence that he could not talk of it, even to Aunt Caroline. On their return to the sitting-room, when Irma was introduced for the first time to Mrs. Sanford, she partly understood the reason for Richard's extreme energy. Mrs. Sanford was pale and delicate in appearance, and as Richard's father had long been dead, she could see that he not unnaturally had to take great responsibility, and had had to make plans that under other conditions would have been first proposed by his mother. "It seems a great pity," he was saying to Aunt Caroline, "that you should not go on with us to San Gimignano. It's a fine drive, right through the heart of Tuscany, to the queerest old town. You may never have such a chance again." "Richard!" exclaimed his mother, smiling, even while her tone held more or less reproof. "A chance, I mean, to go with us." "One carriage would hardly hold seven persons." "No, there would be two carriages, and each would have a pair of these fine Sienese horses. I have never seen stronger or better kept beasts in Europe, and one carriage shall be driven by that rosy-cheeked _cocchiere_, who has been so devoted to you, mother, and we'll find his twin for the other carriage, and when any two in one carriage grow tired of any other two, why they will change places with the others. And we'll have two huge luncheon baskets for supper on the way, for of course to avoid the heat we must leave late in the afternoon. Oh, it will be great; and it's only twenty-five miles, and if you wished you couldn't go by train, nearer than Poggibonsi." "You seem to have it so well arranged that the rest of us need not say or do anything," said Uncle Jim, with an attempt at sarcasm that could not cut very deep. "Well, what do the others say? You, Marion, for example?" "Oh, it might be worth trying," responded Marion, and when no one really disagreed with Richard, he felt that the matter was settled as he wished. The next day Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim devoted themselves to the Accademia. With Ellen and Marion, Irma did walk through the Accademia, with its countless pictures, a complete exhibition of the renowned Sienese school, but there were very few paintings before which she cared to linger. "You won't go shopping with me?" asked Aunt Caroline, as she turned away. "They make fine old furniture here and beautiful carved frames." "Yes, and genuine old masters,--madonnas, bambinos, and all the saints," said Marion. "Some one has been telling me about them." "Ah, but I am not looking for an old master," said Aunt Caroline, "and I shall like the furniture all the better if it isn't old." The rest of this morning the young people strolled along the narrow picturesque streets, occasionally going inside some old building where Richard knew there was something to see, or standing at a corner, he would give them the details of some bloody street combat between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Once he took them up into a high building, from which they viewed the old city wall, and from the same window he pointed toward the field of Montaperto where the Sienese completely routed their great enemies, the Florentines. "The battlefield is six miles away," he explained. "I am only pointing in its general direction. It's hard to believe that the Sienese killed twelve thousand Florentines and made six thousand prisoners, though that was when Siena had a hundred thousand inhabitants, instead of twenty-five thousand, as now." Richard took them to the Litza, the pretty park that is thronged with Sienese, old and young, every afternoon, and he explained the nearness of the farms that Irma had noticed between the Litza and the back of their hotel. Finally in the afternoon she went with Richard and Marion to visit the house of the famous Saint Catherine, in the street of the dyers, for Catherine's father, Bernincasa, had been a dyer, and in this small house Catherine was born in 1347. Every room of the small house on this steep street had been turned into a chapel or oratory. Life-size paintings of St. Catherine were on the wall. The pavement she had trodden was covered with wooden slats. The rooms where, as a little girl, she had helped her mother in her humble household tasks were now richly decorated with paintings. There was a certain solemnity in all the rooms, in the smaller oratories, as in the larger lower church. The pictures on the walls spoke of the saint's good deeds, and Richard told stories he had read of her kindness to the poor, of her comfort to prisoners, in one case staying by young Niccolo di Toldo, holding his head even while the executioners were severing it. One of her missions was to the pope at Avignon, another to Rome, where she went with a band of her disciples, and her influence made itself felt wherever she was. "She must have been a wonderful woman. Her memory is as fresh in Siena as if she had lived but last year, and the reverence for her began even before her death, more than six hundred years ago." The rest of the afternoon passed quickly, and all the young people spent the evening pleasantly together. Although Irma was aware of a slight unfriendliness on Katie's part, the two girls talked and laughed about Cranston people, some of whom Katie knew better than Irma, as she had made many visits at her grandmother's in Cranston. When the day dawned when Mrs. Sanford and her party were to drive to San Gimignano, it was clear that Richard had carried his point. Aunt Caroline at breakfast announced that she had decided to shorten her stay at Siena. "Our trunks have already gone on to Florence, and there is nothing to prevent our driving to San Gimignano with the Sanfords." The plan pleased Irma, who was really anxious to see the strange town that Richard had described. Uncle Jim professed to be resigned to anything that suited Aunt Caroline; and Marion, although he said nothing, was evidently interested in what promised to be a novel experience. Accordingly, toward four o'clock, two large comfortable carriages drove up to the door of the _pension_, each drawn by a pair of sturdy horses, with a young, red-cheeked, amiable driver. All the employes of the house, down to the cook and a little scullion, lined up beside the door, with hands extended for the centimes and francs that Uncle Jim and Richard doled out, some of the boarders waved a good-by from the little balcony--and then they were off. At first Marion and Aunt Caroline were in the carriage with Mrs. Sanford and Katie. "Families do get so bored by one another travelling," said Richard. "That's one reason I hoped we might take this trip together. Any one who grows particularly tired of any one else has only to ask to exchange to the other carriage. Ellen and I usually get on very well together, but Katie----" "Hush, Richard," and Ellen laid a warning finger on her brother's lips. The road over which they travelled was hard and smooth, and although houses were few, there was much of interest on every side. Richard invented many tales by the way, about noble Florentines riding this road, only to be waylaid and killed by Sienese rivals. In his stories the Sienese were always as successful as they were in the paintings on the walls of the public buildings in Siena. Once they stopped to look back, and the coachman chose the most favorable point for a last view of the city wall, with one of the old gates. Richard and Ellen both understood Italian, and spoke it fairly well. "I have just been complimenting the _cocchiere_ on his accent," said Richard, "and he took it quite as a matter of course. He says that every one knows that only in Siena can one hear the true Italian, and that the strangers who wish to speak Tuscan properly come to Siena to study." "I thought that it was Florence where one must go," said Ellen. "Hush, hush," whispered Richard; "if our coachman should understand you, I should fear for our lives. The very horses might run away and dash us into a ditch. Florence and Siena forsooth!" The coachman himself did his part in entertaining them. He pointed out the entrance to one estate, and told a story or two about its owner, whose house was set far back and hidden from the road by extensive woods. "Where do the working people live who cultivate these great farms?" asked Ellen, and the man answered by pointing to a large house in the distance. "Sometimes twenty or thirty people live in one of the houses of the _contadino_, or farmer. Their real home is in some town, but they stay with the farmer while he needs them." Even with the best of company a long ride on a warm afternoon becomes tiresome. After a time Irma found herself counting the milestones, or kilometre stones, and she saw that instead of being perfectly plain blocks, most of them had some little carved ornament. On one hill they saw a wall that enclosed an old town, and the coachman could hardly find words to express the rapidity with which the population was diminishing. "Why in the world should any one wish to live on the top of a hill?" asked Uncle Jim. "It was all very well when war was their occupation, but in these piping days of peace it would be too much like work to have to mount that hill daily for the protection of that old castle wall." After a while the party came to a place where they could draw up by the side of the road and examine their lunch baskets. "The first hotel luncheon I ever saw," exclaimed Uncle Jim, "without chicken legs and butterless rolls." "You never before had me to order for you," said Richard. "I know their tricks and their manners, and so I did a little shopping on my own account. At this time of day I knew we would need nothing very substantial, and now you may praise the Sienese fruit and pastry to your heart's content, for that luncheon came chiefly from the little shops, and not from the landlady's larder." "We can show appreciation without mere words." And soon the luncheon was finished to the last crumb, with due appreciation. The air was cooler, and shortly they were passing through a factory town at the foot of a hill. As working hours were just over, people were sitting at their open doors, or going in and out of the little shops, much as they would in a New England village. Indeed, Uncle Jim said it made him think of a certain New Hampshire town that he knew well, until, as the horses clattered up the hilly street, suddenly at one side were the high substantial walls of a mediæval town. Through an open gate they could see the old, narrow streets and high houses. In the beginning there had been but a castle here, around which the town had grown. Now, in modern times, it had spread all over the hill, or perhaps had spread up from the little mill that had had its first humble beginning on the stream below. "I seem to be looking at history as it is made," said Irma. "That's a fine way of putting it," cried Richard. "Irma sees things exactly as they are," added Uncle Jim. Soon they had descended the other side of the high hill they had so lately mounted. Ahead of them, and still a good distance away, was another hill with a coronet of slender towers. "San Gimignano!" exclaimed Richard. "I have never seen it before, but I know it from the pictures. Isn't it picturesque? I wanted to surprise you, Ellen, so I have said hardly anything to you about it. But you all know," and he included Uncle Jim and Irma in his remarks, "that you are soon to be inside of the one town in Italy that has kept its old mediæval towers. If the whole town is as quaint as the towers, you will thank me for bringing you here." "We thank you now," said Uncle Jim. "Why is the carriage ahead waiting for us?" asked Ellen. "Katie thought you might like to come in here for the rest of the journey." "Probably Katie herself wishes to change," whispered Richard. Whereupon Ellen jumped lightly from the carriage, and a moment later she and Katie had exchanged places. San Gimignano lost none of its picturesqueness as they drew near it, passing olive orchards and vineyards as they went up the hill. "What a beautiful country!" cried Irma. "The people up there must be very happy if it is all as pretty." It was now growing dusk, and the horses took the last turn very quickly. Irma noticed that Katie was quiet. Could it be that she and Marion had had some disagreement? The driver hurried on through an arched gateway. "Oh, a narrow, city street," cried Irma, in a tone of disappointment. "No matter," responded Richard, as their horse clattered along. "We'll get some fun out of it to-morrow. Now, in the dusk, I'll admit it does look rather like a tenement district." After their long, warm drive, it wasn't a pleasing prospect to find their hotel on this narrow street instead of in a pleasant garden, as Katie said she had pictured it. "At least it is different from any other hotel we have seen," said Ellen, philosophically, "and we hoped San Gimignano would be rather queer." "But not this kind of queerness," Katie continued to protest. CHAPTER XV A LETTER FROM FLORENCE Irma had been two or three days in Florence before she had time to write the long letter to Tessie that for some time she had been planning. "Dear Tessie," she began: "Though I have sent you messages and post cards, this is my first letter. I know you do not care to hear much about pictures and churches, of which I have seen almost too many, so I will tell you about other things. I can't say much about foreign children, only that they all seem shy, except the little girls who beg, and the little boys who wish to be our guides, and I am sorry to say that sometimes, just to get rid of them, we give them the penny that we know is not good for them. They want all the money they can get from _forestieri_, for we are _forestieri_ here. "The Italian children seem to have long school hours, and that is one reason we do not see many of them about. When we do see a group together it troubles Aunt Caroline that they are not playing, but simply standing about solemnly. Sometimes, when we pass a station in the middle of the day, we see a little boy with a loaf of bread under his arm, cutting off a slice with a jack-knife. That probably is all he has for breakfast, and perhaps his dinner will be nothing but a dish of macaroni. "Well, all we have ourselves for breakfast is chocolate and some rolls and butter. Older people take coffee. If we ask for a boiled egg we can have it, but we are trying to live as the Italians do. After breakfast we go sightseeing, and we are always half starved by one o'clock, when we have _déjeuner_. Everything then is served in courses, and if you are late you simply have to go without the things that were served before you sat down. In the middle of the day we rest, for it is as hot as our hottest summer from twelve to three. After that we drive, or visit some church or museum, ending with afternoon tea. If you happen to have friends at some hotel, it is fun to drop in there. But over all the pastry shops, that are almost like restaurants, you see the sign 'afternoon tea.' It is the one English expression most Italians seem to know. "Dinner is served in courses like _déjeuner_. But whatever else they give us, we are sure of one thing, a course of chicken and salad. By the time the chicken comes to me, it is generally all wings, which I never eat. None of us ever eat salad, because we are suspicious of the water it is washed in. "You have not had many railroad journeys, and so the little cars and engines might not seem as funny to you as they do to us. Each car is divided into little compartments, with room for five persons on each side, and there you have to sit and stare at the persons opposite. But we have generally been fortunate enough to have a carriage to ourselves. "When we arrive at a station, we always find a row of men in blue cotton blouses and conductors' caps lined up waiting to carry our bags. They are the _facchini_, or porters, and each one tries to carry several bags, for it is the law that he shall be paid ten centimes, or two cents, for each piece of luggage he carries. "We got rid of crowded railway carriages and _facchini_, when we went from Siena to Florence. For we drove all the way, staying one day at San Gimignano, the most curious place we have seen. We wouldn't have thought of going there but for Richard Sanford, whose family we met in Siena. Just think! His cousin, Katie Grimston, is travelling with him and his mother. Katie Grimston, who says that Nap still belongs to her; and I am afraid she really will take him away from us. But to return to San Gimignano. It is on the top of a high hill, and has a wall going completely around it, with handsome great arches, or gates. "There are eight tall towers in the town, and five on the walls. But none of them are considered safe now for visitors to climb, though we had all we could do to keep Marion and Richard from trying one or two of them. The people of San Gimignano were divided into two great parties, Guelph for the pope and Ghibelline for the emperor. From the towers, belonging to the leading families in the town, they could do any amount of harm to their enemies in the streets below, and also keep a lookout for outside enemies on their way from Siena. "Next to the towers (which, to be honest, look a great deal like factory chimneys of gray stone) you would like the pictures in the cathedral that tell all the old Bible stories, especially the one where they are building the Ark, with Noah and his family and all the animals standing about and looking on. "In another church some beautiful frescoes by Gozzoli tell the story of St. Augustine's life. One, where he is shown going to school with his books under his arm, is very entertaining. "All the young people seem to have left San Gimignano. There are none but middle-aged and old, and I never in one place saw so many bent old men and women. The town itself is so gray and old and poor that we were glad to leave it. We had enjoyed our drive from Siena so much that Aunt Caroline and Mrs. Sanford thought we might as well drive to Florence. This was forty miles, and we all got rather tired. But the country was beautiful, and after our sixty miles of it by carriage, we feel that we know just what Tuscany is. The farmers use great white oxen for their work, white and large and smooth skinned. They made more impression on us than anything else we saw. "Now we feel quite at home in Florence. My room looks out on the Arno, the river that runs through the centre of the city. Not far away I see the famous Ponte Vecchio, or old bridge. Give my love to every one, especially Mahala and Nap. "Your affectionate sister, "Irma." Hardly had Irma signed her letter, when Ellen Sanford came into the room. "The door was half open, and you did not hear my knock. But what a long letter. My family never gets anything but post cards from me when I am travelling." "Well, this is to my little sister. I promised her one long letter." "I am glad it's finished, for now you can go out with me. Katie went off in great spirits, because she had managed to get Marion and Richard both to go shopping with her; the boys hate shops, too. Your uncle and aunt have taken mother driving, and so what shall we do?" "Let us go to the Medici Chapel. I am tired of galleries. I shall need a week to digest what I saw yesterday at the Uffizi." "What suits you will suit me," said Ellen, and soon the girls were driving toward San Lorenzo. "These booths remind me of the Rag Fair at Rome," said Irma, glancing at the display of trinkets and small household articles on canvas-shaded tables, in an open space near the church. "Only these things are much cheaper. But what a crowd. Italians seem to like open-air shopping." Within the lofty church the girls saw much to admire, especially the sculptures by Thorwaldsen, Donatello, and Verocchio. But the tomb of Cosimo de Medici, "the father of his country," was a plain porphyry slab. "The great monument must be somewhere else." And Irma followed Ellen to the old sacristy, where, though they saw other Medici tombs, they knew these were not what they sought. In the new sacristy were Michelangelo's famous statues of Lorenzo, with the figures of Dawn and Twilight at the base, and of Guiliano, with Day and Night. But beautiful as these were, they knew they must search further. At last some one directed them to a door outside, at the other end of the church, and then with tickets they entered the mausoleum. "Ah," said Irma, "it is really all I expected. Some one told me it was not in good taste, and it is not really completed. But a building like this is more impressive than if decorated with paintings. The pavement is beautiful, and the walls of exquisite marbles seem built to last forever." "There are not many statues," said Ellen. "No, but I dare say they meant to have more. It is because the grandeur of the Medicis didn't last that this interests me, Ellen. In the Palazzo Vecchio and the Riccardi Palace we have seen them painted as conquering heroes, and every one of them holds his head as if he owned the world." "They did own a good bit of their little world in their own day." "That is just what I mean. We have the paintings and the statues, and we know all that Cosimo the first and Lorenzo the Magnificent did for Florence by encouraging art and establishing museums and libraries. But the later men who were not so great built this chapel, and when I look on these magnificent tombs, and remember what harm came to Savonarola through a de Medici, and what harm Catherine de Medici did----" "Oh, Irma, I believe they did more good than harm in the world, and this tomb is a splendid memorial." "Yes, it is; only the effect it has on me is different from its effect on you." "Now for the library," said Irma, as they turned away from the tomb, "and after that I will try to show you something quite different." "This isn't at all like a library," exclaimed Ellen, as they stood in the high-roofed hall of the Laurentian Library. "There are no bookcases, and why are these pews here?" Before Irma could reply, an attendant explained that Irma's pews were stands for the valuable manuscripts, and he added that Michelangelo had designed them as well as the fine wooden ceiling of the great room. He permitted the girls to look at the manuscripts in substantial covers chained to the stands. Many of them were Greek and Latin classics of great age. Others were in Italian, and exquisitely illuminated, like the _Canzone_ of Petrarch, with portraits of Petrarch and Laura. Ellen bought large copies of these portraits, with the delicate coloring exquisitely reproduced, and Irma sighed, as she realized how seldom she herself could spend money on things she liked. "Ask him the way to the cloisters," she whispered, as they bade the librarian good-by; and Ellen, when she had interpreted his reply, asked, "But why should we go to the cloisters?" "Oh, you will see," and Irma looked at her watch. "We are in good time. It is only quarter of twelve." "In good time for what?" persisted Ellen, as they entered the cloistered enclosure at one side of San Lorenzo, and walked along the arcades to read the many memorial tablets on wall and pavement. "I will tell you," said Irma. "This is a kind of Animal Rescue League, a refuge for stray cats. Persons anxious to get rid of their cats bring them here, and those who wish to adopt cats come here for them. They say that the stray cats of Florence hide here in corners and on roofs." "Well, if I needed a cat I shouldn't know how to find it here. There certainly isn't one in sight." "Well, that's why twelve o'clock is the important hour. Exactly on the stroke of twelve the cats are fed with meat. They seem to know the time, and come rushing down from roofs and chimneys, and after they are fed people choose the cats they want." "Hark! Isn't twelve striking now?" asked Ellen, as the bells of many churches began to peal loudly. "It is certainly striking twelve; but I see no cats." "I don't understand it," said Irma. "I read a long account the other day, in a book that described Florence." "Here is the custodian; I will ask him." After talking for several minutes with the custodian, Ellen turned with a smile to Irma. "This is the place where the cats used to be fed, and it was a very ancient custom to let stray cats have refuge here. But many of them refused to be adopted and became so wild that now they are all given over to a society, I suppose like the prevention of cruelty. Your book was not up to date, though it is not very long since the feeding of the cats was given up." "Well, I am glad that we have seen the place where they used to feed them. I can at least describe it to Tessie. I am always trying to see things that will entertain her when I go home." At _déjeuner_ Katie was in great spirits; she had bought a number of pretty things, and had kept the two boys with her all the morning, on the pretext that she was in great need of their advice. Among her purchases a long double necklace of large amber beads was especially beautiful, and Irma praised it generously. "I would rather have them than anything I have seen in Florence; any piece of jewelry," she added quickly. Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline exchanged significant glances. After _déjeuner_ Richard and Ellen invited Irma to go with them to San Marco. "Mother and Katie say they wish simply to drive, and Marion, I believe, is going with them to San Miniato, and your aunt thinks you might not care for the Accademia to-day," said Ellen, as she gave Irma her own invitation. "But Richard is sure you would enjoy San Marco and Savonarola." [Illustration: SPIRES OF FLORENCE.] [Illustration: SAN MARCO, FLORENCE.] So in the early afternoon the three friends found themselves wandering in the beautiful cloisters of the old monastery, with its little flower garden in the centre, and its great pine, whose trunk was wreathed with ivy. They walked around a second cloistered garden whose rosebeds were fenced in by a row of pointed bricks. Seated on a bench, they looked up at the tiny windows of the second story, and wondered if the garden that Savonarola had looked on was much like this. "We must not sit here long," and, as he spoke, Richard walked over to one of the frescoes painted on the brick walls under the arches. He called Irma's attention to those by Fra Angelico, representing scenes in the life of Christ. "The monastery," he explained, "was suppressed forty years ago, and the whole building is now a museum. There are some beautiful paintings in the chapter house and the refectory, but I am most anxious to see the cells upstairs, nearly all of which are decorated with paintings by Fra Angelico and his pupils." "Richard," said Ellen, "I see that this is to be one of the occasions when you are going to appear terribly wise and talk like a book. Sometimes, when you are particularly pleased with things in general, you are so frivolous that I feel that I ought to explain you to some one, but to-day I believe that you are going to the opposite extreme." "No matter," interposed Irma. "You know all about San Marco, but I am less wise." "Well spoken, young lady," said Richard, in the tone which Irma already had learned to associate with his fun-making mood. "But I cannot pretend to have any knowledge about San Marco, or Savonarola or Fra Angelico that you and my sister might not already possess, if you have read your books carefully. First, as to Savonarola; he became Prior of San Marco in 1490, and when he preached in the church here, the whole piazza in front was crowded hours before the doors opened, and shopkeepers did not think it worth while to open their shops until the great preacher's sermon was over. He made religion seem a simple thing, within the reach of all who tried to live pure lives. He addressed himself to the poor and to the young; and he especially blamed the love of luxury that was spreading in Florence, though he encouraged artists to use their talents on religious pictures." "Well, we all know that," said Ellen, mildly. "Then you remember how on the last day of Carnival, 1497, his followers went from house to house collecting books and pictures and musical instruments and other things that they thought had an evil influence, and burned them all in a great fire in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. I will point out the place later." "I should like to see it," responded Irma, to whom Richard had turned. "Savonarola had made many enemies by his plain speaking, and though for a time Florence seemed to have had a change of heart, when the Pope Alexander VI excommunicated him, the supporters of the de Medici power went against him, and at last San Marco was stormed, and Savonarola was carried away to death." "Yes--yes--it is a very sad story. It is pleasanter to go into these cells and remember how Savonarola encouraged art. Let us look at these frescoes carefully," and the three walked on slowly, stopping a moment at the entrance to each cell, where, on the whitewashed walls, were exquisite paintings by Fra Angelico, his brother Fra Benedetto, and Fra Bartolommeo. At last, after a turn or two at the end of the corridor, they came to the Prior's Cell, with Fra Bartolommeo's frescoes on the wall. "Of course you recognize Savonarola," said Richard, "and that other is his friend Benievieni, and look at these smaller cells inside; here is his hair shirt and his rosary and this bit of old wood, as the inscription says, is from the pile on which he was burnt." "Ugh!" cried Irma, "I don't like it"; and she turned to look at Savonarola's sermons and his crucifix. The three were silent as they left the dormitories of the good brothers of San Marco, especially when they remembered the great prior, whose terrible death the fickle Florentines in time repented. "Time is so precious to-day," said Richard, as they left San Marco. "And why, pray?" asked Ellen. "Because you have me with you, dear sister. You cannot be sure when I shall be ready to go with you again." "Indeed!" responded Ellen. "We are not sure that we shall need you again." "Well, then, since time is precious, we will drive for a moment to S. Annunziata to see something fine and something funny." Soon they were in the little courtyard of the church, and after leaving them for a moment Richard returned with a sacristan, carrying keys. He unlocked the doors of the corridor surrounding the court, in which were some fine frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and two or three other great painters. After they had admired these paintings, while their guide moved off toward some other visitors, Richard said, "Here is the 'something funny,'" and he pointed to a number of small, crude paintings at the end of the corridor. "They _are_ funny; what in the world are they?" asked Irma. "You mustn't laugh, even though they seem funny. Come here, and I will explain," and Richard pointed to one that showed a man falling headlong down a steep flight of stairs. "This man, you see, escaped death from a broken neck, on the date put above the picture, and this one, on the deck of the ship tossing about so wildly on the ocean, was saved from shipwreck, and this other in the carriage with two wildly prancing horses was evidently not fatally injured, and this woman in bed, surrounded by her weeping family, was apparently at the point of death, when her patron saint saved her." "Oh," exclaimed Ellen. "Then these are pious offerings, and I won't laugh at them. It is rather a pretty idea to show thankfulness in this way, and we oughtn't to laugh, even if they could not have Del Sartos or Botticellis for their artists." On their way home, they looked at the spot in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, now marked by a stone, where Savonarola was burned, and his two chief followers, Fra Domenico and Fra Silvestro. "When I leave Florence," said Irma, "I shall remember the Palazzo Vecchio more because it was the prison of Savonarola than for anything else." "But you haven't forgotten the wonderful great halls, and the gildings and paintings. There are no halls more splendid in Florence." "No, I haven't forgotten them, and I remember Uncle Jim told us the Hall of the Five Hundred was built from the plans of Savonarola for his great Council, and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But the return of the de Medici changed all this, and instead, every inch of space records the greatness of the de Medici and their victories over the enemies of Florence. But the great statue of Savonarola is there, and I believe his memory will last the longest." "You are right," responded Richard absentmindedly. He had just seen a flower girl with a basket of exquisite roses. "Oh, Richard, you are extravagant," cried Ellen, as the girl emptied her basket. "One can't be extravagant with flowers in Florence," he replied. Katie and Marion were standing at the door when they reached the hotel. "Where did you get those roses?" Katie asked, as they descended from the carriage with their arms full. "Gathered them, of course," replied Richard promptly, although the question had not been addressed to him. "Richard gathered them for us," added Ellen. "He is a brother worth having." "Marion and I didn't see any like them," said Katie. CHAPTER XVI A CHANGE IN MARION It was the evening of Constitution Day, the Italian Fourth of July. Aunt Caroline and Irma, seated in the doorway of the hotel, watched the passing crowd. On the Arno in front of the house, not far from the Ponte Vecchio, were several boats decorated with flags and paper lanterns. There was also a large float, and the voluble porter explained that a chorus was to be stationed there during the evening to sing. "Where is Marion?" asked Uncle Jim. "He has walked to the Cascine with Katie and Richard and Ellen. I wished to stay with Aunt Caroline," replied Irma. "I am afraid Katie has cut you out with Marion," exclaimed Uncle Jim. "How foolish!" protested Aunt Caroline. "Irma has no such ideas. Marion has never exerted himself for Irma, and she has always been too busy to think of him." "When it's quite dark," continued Uncle Jim, "we must walk over to the Piazza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. They say the illumination of the tower is the thing best worth seeing, better even than the fireworks these crowds are waiting for." A little later the three stood in front of the tall gray tower of the old palace, whose outlines were wonderfully beautiful, set in a frame of fire made up of countless tiny lamps. "Hello," cried a voice, "we didn't expect to see you here." Richard was the speaker, and with him were Marion and Ellen. "Where is Katie?" asked Aunt Caroline. "Oh, she and Marion have had some kind of a spat, and she insisted on our leaving her at the hotel." "Spat! Nonsense!" interposed Ellen. "Well, a quarrel by any other name will do just as well. I'm glad she can stay with mother. One of us ought to be with her." Marion made no reply to Richard. But he walked beside Ellen on their way back to the hotel, while Richard helped Irma find a way through the throng. "What a quiet, orderly crowd!" cried Aunt Caroline, "and to-day their Fourth of July!" "It's only after they have crossed the Atlantic that foreigners grow uproarious. There seems to be more law and order over here." The Lungarno was packed with people when they reached the hotel, so all went upstairs to Aunt Caroline's room, that overlooked the river and the boat from which the fireworks were sent off. There were one or two set pieces, the chorus on the large float sang several part songs, and at intervals showers of stars of all colors fell from the Roman candles and rockets sent up from the boats. It was late when they began to separate. "Where is Marion?" asked Aunt Caroline, when the lights were turned on, and the others came to bid her good night. "He must have gone to his room," said Uncle Jim. "I noticed half an hour ago that he was not here." "Perhaps he didn't like the noise," said Richard, with what sounded like a slight shade of sarcasm. "His nerves are not very strong." The next morning, when Irma went to breakfast, none of the older members of her party were at the table, and Marion, too, was missing. "Of course Marion didn't give it to me," she heard Katie say, as she took her seat. "It's certainly very strange that it should be the same device as his small seal." "Probably they wouldn't look at all alike, if you should bring them together and compare them." "Can mine eyes deceive me?" Richard assumed a tragic tone. "It's the ring that Katie has around her scarf." Ellen explained to Irma. "Richard is sure that Marion gave it to her. But he ought to believe Katie when she says this is not so." Irma looked closely at the ring through which Katie had pulled the end of her silk necktie. The dragon carved on the agate stone certainly seemed familiar. Yes, she recalled the same dragon on an old-fashioned seal that Marion had shown her one day; at least it looked the same, though of course the dragon was by no means an uncommon device. But after all, this was no affair of hers. If Katie said Marion had not given the ring to her there seemed to be no reason for Richard to doubt Katie's word. Suppose even that he had loaned it to her, why should her cousin concern himself about it? After breakfast Katie and Ellen drove to their dressmaker's, and just as Irma had finished a home letter Marion appeared in the reading-room. "I had an early breakfast," he explained, "and have been out walking. Now I wish some one would take a trolley ride with me. Will _you_ go?" At first Irma could hardly believe the invitation was meant for her; she had been so little with Marion the past fortnight. But when she saw that he undoubtedly meant her, she accepted gladly. "It does not matter where we go," he cried, as the car started. "I simply wish to see what the suburbs are like out this way." Soon they had passed beyond the old narrow streets, and were running through a broad avenue of the newer Florence that has begun to drive the old city out of sight. After a word or two to the conductor, "Why, this is a car for Fiesole," said Marion. "I had meant to drive out there some day, but now----" He did not finish the sentence, but later in the morning Irma realized what he had had in mind when he spoke. "Fiesole," Marion began to explain, "the old Faesulae, was an important place long before Florence. I believe there are imposing Etruscan fortifications still to be seen up there on the hill. But Fiesole was conquered and destroyed in the early part of the twelfth century, and Florence soon became rich. Many English and Americans have country villas at Fiesole. It is not so damp there as in Florence. There are several people I know living out there, if I cared to see them." "Oh, we don't come to Europe to see Americans," said Irma, noticing a severe expression on Marion's face, such as she had seen before, when Americans were spoken of. After leaving the car they rambled around the pleasant, shady roads of Fiesole for an hour or more, visiting the piazza and the old church. At the terminus they had to wait a little time for the car by which they were to return. While standing near a little shop where they had made some purchases, a tall girl rushed up to Marion, and, seizing his hand, first raised it to her lips, and then poured out a flood of words. Marion reddened, pulled his hand away, and looked puzzled, as the girl began to talk. But before she had finished her long, long sentence, his face cleared, and he turned toward Irma. "She was on the _Ariadne_; her mother died. Perhaps you remember." Of course Irma remembered. This was the girl upon whom she had so often looked from the deck above the steerage, the girl for whose family Marion had raised the subscription. When the girl's words at last came to an end, Marion tore a leaf from his notebook and gave it to her, after he had written something upon it. "_Grazie, grazie_," she cried, and then, when he shook his head to some request of hers, "_A rivederci_, signor and signorina," she cried, as they stepped toward the approaching car on which they were to return to the city. "Now, I will explain," said Marion, as they rode toward Florence. "Luisa hopes some time to return to America, and I have given her my mother's address, in case she should need advice from us." ("The second time," Irma thought, "I have heard Marion speak of his mother.") "She was greatly disappointed," continued Marion, "that we could not go up to see the family. They have a little house back there on the hills, and with the subscription raised on the ship they could lease it for five years, and they have a little besides to keep them going until their garden is grown. The grandmother hopes to sell enough flowers and vegetables in Florence to pay for clothes and things they can't raise on the farm. It's surprising, though, how little it takes for people to live on over here. Luisa says she earns something by working for a cousin who has one of those little shops at the terminus, two days in the week." While Marion talked, Irma longed to ask why he had been unwilling to add her little gift to the money he had raised for Luisa's family on the _Ariadne_. But, in spite of his being so friendly now, she did not quite dare question him. Later in the day, however, when alone with Aunt Caroline, she told her about Luisa, and brought up the matter of the subscription. "Oh," said Aunt Caroline, "I can partly explain that subscription to you. Marion told me little at the time, but since then we have had a talk. Indeed he is much more inclined to confide in me than when we first left New York. He says that he spent more or less time among the steerage passengers coming over, and when he found money did not come in readily for Luisa's family, he decided to make up the whole amount himself. "He seldom changes his mind, when once he has decided upon a certain thing, and so when you offered your money he did not think it right to take it. You know Marion has a great deal of money of his own, and he could afford to do all that was necessary for this poor Italian family. I am sorry, however, that he hurt your feelings, for really Marion is goodhearted. Of course he has had a particularly hard time this year, and has not yet got over the effects of all he has been through." "Now," thought Irma, "I will ask Aunt Caroline to tell me all about Marion. Every one else seems to know, and I hate mysteries." But before she had a chance to ask the question, Marion and Uncle Jim appeared on the scene, and the opportunity was lost. After this the days at Florence passed swiftly. Aunt Caroline was absorbed in the galleries, and Uncle Jim or Mrs. Sanford spent much time there with her. The young people did their sightseeing by themselves, Richard, Ellen, Irma, and Marion, at least. Katie seemed, as Richard put it, "disaffected." She said she had been in Europe too long to care to spend much time over galleries and historical places. "Shopping is much more necessary now, as I am to sail so soon, and grandmamma is willing to pay duty on any amount of things." So, while Katie bought embroidered dresses, and spent hours over fittings, the others made what Ellen called "pilgrimages." Once it was to the old palace that had been Michelangelo's home, lately presented to Florence by a descendant of his brother. There they saw furniture and smaller belongings of the great man, manuscripts and sketches and plans of some of his great works, and on the walls of one room a series of paintings representing dramatic incidents in his life. "And yet he died almost a century before Plymouth was settled," said Irma, returning to the historical comparisons of the first part of her trip. Again, one day, rambling through a narrow street, they came to the so-called "house of Dante," a tiny dwelling with small rooms and steep stairs, and though Marion tried to throw cold water on the enthusiasm of the girls by telling them that no one now really believed this to be the house where Dante had lived, they only laughed at him. "No one can prove that it is _not_ the house where he was born; and every one knows that it belonged to his father. But at any rate it's a charming little museum, and since I have seen all the interesting manuscripts and books there, I am more anxious than ever to read Dante," and Ellen patted her brother's arm, adding, "No, Richard, what we wish to believe we will believe, especially when it's true." "Just like a girl," responded Richard, smiling. One other day they made a pilgrimage to the Protestant cemetery, chiefly to please Ellen, who wished to see the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They found it without trouble, a plain marble sarcophagus on Corinthian columns, with no inscription except the initials of the poet and the date of her death. Near the sarcophagus a few pink roses were in bloom. "How I wish I dared pick one," sighed Ellen. "Why not?" asked Richard. "There's no one but us to see, and we won't tell." Irma was not sure how much in earnest Richard was, but she believed he was only in fun, for he made no reply to Ellen's, "Oh, I think there's nothing worse than carrying away flowers and stones as souvenirs. I have known people to do such silly things. Surely you remember Hadrian's villa." Now Irma, although she had no clue to Ellen's reference, at once recalled her own success in securing a fragment of marble from this same villa of Hadrian's, and what it had almost cost her. Even while she recalled it, it seemed to her that Marion glanced significantly toward her, yet she was sure she had never told him what had caused her to miss her train on that eventful evening. One never to be forgotten day, Irma, Uncle Jim, and Aunt Caroline went down to Perugia. Mrs. Sanford and her party had been there before their arrival in Siena, and Marion, who said he hadn't time for both, preferred a trip to Pisa. But to Irma, the railway journey itself, through tunnels, past mountain towns, around the lovely shores of Lake Thrasymene, was something long to be remembered. "If I hadn't come to Perugia," she said to Uncle Jim, "I suppose I shouldn't have known what I had missed, but now it seems as if I shouldn't have really known Italy without coming here. It is so much larger than Orvieto, and brighter, and yet it is a hill town with streets that tumble into one another, and picturesque arches, and though it hasn't an Orvieto Cathedral, it has more beautiful churches than one expects to find in a place of its size. Then that perfect little Merchants' Exchange! One could spend a day there studying the frescoes. There are more quaint carvings on the outside of the buildings than in most places we have seen, and in spite of this broad main street, with the trolley cars running through it, it seems still a mediæval town, a cheerful one, not a melancholy one like San Gimignano. Then I shall be very proud when I go home to say that I have actually been in the house where Raphael lived and taught before the world knew how great he really was." "A long speech for a little girl," said Uncle Jim, "but it doesn't explain your unwillingness to stay with your aunt this morning while she makes a careful study of the exhibition of Umbrian art." "Why, I think it _does_ explain it. I was there long enough to learn Perugino by heart, his funny little bodyless angels, and his young men with thin, graceful legs and small skull caps, and of course his beautiful color." Uncle Jim laughed at Irma's characterization of Perugino. "And is that all you remember of that great building with its treasures of art, as the books might say?" "Of course not," said Irma indignantly. "I remember quantities of other things. Raphael, and all those strange, pious Umbrian painters, and the beautiful silver chalices from the churches, and all the carved crucifixes. On the ship going home Aunt Caroline will be able to talk to us for hours about these things, describing them exactly. Isn't it much better for a girl of my age to enjoy this lovely view? Come, let us sit down on a bench in the little piazza in front of the hotel. As we look off to the valley, so far below, we seem to be on the edge of a high mountain. Every one in Perugia seems to enjoy the view. See, there are two soldiers strolling about; a group of priests; well to do children riding around in that donkey cart; half a dozen others who are almost in rags watching them; several strangers besides ourselves; two or three dignitaries of the town. So it's a very popular place." Again Uncle Jim smiled at Irma's astuteness. Then he left her to enjoy the view still longer, while he went down to the Municipal Building, to "rescue" Aunt Caroline, as he expressed it, from too long a stay at the exhibition of Umbrian art. On her return to Florence the next evening, Irma wrote Lucy about her visit to Assisi. She had promised this before she left home, as Lucy had especially asked her to see for herself the thornless roses growing in St. Francis's Garden. "I have seen the garden," she wrote, "in the cloister back of the church, and here is a leaf from the thornless rosebushes. The good brothers have these leaves already pressed on little cards, as souvenirs of the visit to St. Mary of the Angels, St. Francis's church. Inside the great church they have preserved the tiny church in which St. Francis preached, and also the cell in which he died. The great church of San Francesco on the hill above where St. Francis was buried was built in his memory. His body was finally buried there. It is an enormous building, and I will try to tell you here about the beautiful frescoes describing his life. But I have some photographs for you, and they show all his great deeds told in pictures. "I wish I had time to tell you about Florence. But in six weeks I shall be at home again, and then how much I shall have to say! It seems to me that all the paintings you and I like best are here, and in color they are so beautiful. The Pitti Gallery is wonderful. It is in a great palace where the de Medicis (of course) once lived. It now belongs to the king, and his rooms are most beautiful. But the gallery is quite apart from the rest of the palace, and filled with the greatest paintings, Titian and Raphael and Andrea del Sarto and Botticelli and Bronzino, and some time, when I am older, I hope to come back and study them and criticise them just as I hear people doing now. Now I simply enjoy them. "There are always many people copying in the galleries, especially in the Uffizi, and the other day we saw two sisters in their convent dress at work at easels. I suppose they were painting for their convents. There are so many things in Florence I wish we could look at together, the cathedral and Giotto's tower, and the wonderful della Robbia reliefs; you know the small cast of the singing boys that your mother gave you Christmas. Then, though this is different, I wish you could see the green, pointed hills that are outside of Florence on two sides. When I first saw them they seemed like old friends, I had seen them in so many paintings by the old painters who worked in Florence. I thought they put them in just for ornament, but now I know they couldn't help it. This was the background they were most used to here. "But there! I have seen so many things besides pictures--the old palaces, like fortresses, and the people who seem so gentle, though they are descendants of all those old fighters who thought nothing of killing one another when they had had the slightest disagreement (or often when they hadn't had any) just because their ancestors were enemies. Yet in some ways they were very good to one another. Yesterday we met a queer-looking procession, hardly a procession, for there were not more than a dozen men, but they wore long black robes, with hoods, and black masks over their faces, and holes cut for their eyes, and, really, they were terrifying. "Uncle Jim explained that they were the Misericordia, or Brothers of Mercy. Rich and poor belong to it, and have for centuries, and when a man is on duty, when he hears a certain bell ring--I think it's in the Campanile--he stops whatever he is doing and goes to the headquarters of the brothers to learn whether he is to watch with some sick man, or help bury some dead person with no friends to follow him to the grave. "I have been disappointed not to see more picturesque costumes here, but in the cities they are never seen, and seldom in the country. The apprentice boys in different trades wear big aprons, and the nursemaids have great caps with long, colored streamers, but that is all. "I feel rather mean, sometimes, when I think how hard you all are working now, and I am just amusing myself. When you get this, examinations will be about over, and I do wonder if George Belman will be at the head of the class. "Well, even if I am idle now, I may have to study hard enough in August. I won't be able to make the excuse that I am not well. "Hastily, "Irma." CHAPTER XVII IN VENICE "I wouldn't have missed Bologna for anything," said Ellen, one very warm June morning, as Mrs. Sanford and Mr. and Mrs. Curtin and the young people in their care found themselves on the train between Bologna and Ravenna. "If every Italian city would have arcades over the sidewalks like those in almost every street of Bologna, life would be better worth living." "So the arcades made the most impression on you," said Uncle Jim smiling. "And what have you to say of Bologna, Mrs. Sanford?" "Well I am glad to have found that it is really true that there were learned women in Italy in the Middle Ages. I certainly cannot forget that I have seen a statue to a woman professor of the fourteenth century, who used to lecture in this university at Bologna. If there were women professors, there must have been women students." "Ellen thinks the little tombs on pillars outside the churches were the strangest things she saw," cried Katie. "Not stranger than the leaning towers," interposed Irma. "I suppose the people of Bologna must be terribly afraid of earthquakes. I hated even to drive near the leaning towers." "I did not know we were to tell only strange things we had seen," said Aunt Caroline. "I was most impressed by the Accademia. You others did not stay long enough in the gallery. Besides Raphael's St. Cecilia, there are very many pictures worth seeing; no one can really have a good idea of Guido Reni without coming to Bologna." "Well, I enjoyed the drive through the park, and our glimpse of Carducci's house on the way back. It was all so restful after the noise of the streets," said Uncle Jim. "There are certainly many beautiful churches in Bologna, and more homelike-looking palaces than I have seen anywhere else in Italy," said Mrs. Sanford. "We might have enjoyed a longer stay there." "I didn't think much of the shops," interposed Katie. "There was hardly a thing I wanted to buy." Whereat the others smiled, as shopping was Katie's favorite pastime. "You'll find them worse in Ravenna, for that is not only a decaying, but a decayed city, from all the accounts I've heard." "I almost wish we were not going there," added Aunt Caroline. "They say it's full of malaria." "Oh, in one short day and night we can keep out of the way of germs." It was noon when they reached Ravenna, tired enough after a warm journey. "Dante's tomb is only a step from here," said Marion to Irma, as they finished _déjeuner_. "Bring your camera and we'll go out and take a shot at it." Irma posed herself in front of the door of the domed building containing the remains of the great poet, while Marion took a snapshot. They stopped for a minute to read an inscription on an opposite house, where Garibaldi had been entertained, and turning another corner, with some little trouble, Marion found the simple dwelling where Lord Byron had lived during his year or two in Ravenna. "Now," began Marion, "if you can get Ellen to come, I move that we three drive about the town. I am tired of too large a crowd, or perhaps it is the weather. But this is one of the days when more than three would spoil all the fun of looking at things." As the suggestion pleased Ellen, the three started out in their carriage ahead of the others. There were no trolley cars; few people were moving around in the long, dusty streets; and many of the larger houses, or palaces, were indeed deserted mansions, with no signs of life about them. "First to Theodoric's tomb," Marion had announced, as they started, and as they drove along he talked entertainingly about old Ravenna, especially in the last days of the Roman Empire, when the Emperor Honorius held court there, believing the place to be safe against the barbarians. Later, after the fall of Rome, Theodoric made this his city, and tried to revive the Western Empire. "Ravenna used to be a great seaport," said Marion, "with a harbor for a large fleet, but the sea has been gradually receding until now it is five miles away." "These marshes and this little creek, I suppose, are all that the sea has left Ravenna as a reminder of those days," said Irma. "Yes," responded Marion, "but Theodoric's tomb is a thing we shall remember better." And the girls agreed with him a few minutes later, when they stood in the garden in front of the gray walls of the impressive circular mausoleum. "Oh, please stand still a moment," cried Marion, as they leaned over a particularly beautiful rosebush; then a click came from the camera. "I hate to have my picture taken when I am not expecting it," cried Ellen. "Don't worry! Theodoric's tomb will quite overshadow us," responded Irma, in mock consolation. After this the three drove from one church to another to see the splendid mosaics that are Ravenna's chief treasures. Saints and emperors and other great personages were there in all the glory of rich color, and scriptural truths were taught in the symbols of the early Church. "Although the figures are sometimes out of drawing and the designs rather queer, it is just the same in these mosaics as in some of the old frescoes; they were put on the church walls to teach truth to the mass of people who could not read, and that is why I do not laugh at them." [Illustration: SIENA. GENERAL VIEW, WITH CAMPANILE. (_See page 227._)] [Illustration: RAVENNA. THEODORIC'S TOMB.] It seemed to Irma, when the whole party met at dinner that evening, that Katie was displeased with somebody or something. Had Richard been teasing her? For teasing was a cousinly privilege which he often exercised. Was she annoyed that she had not been asked to join Marion's particular group of three? For the present there seemed to be no answer. The next day, after a warm journey of several hours, the whole party stood on the steps of the railway station at Venice, waiting to see their luggage put aboard the gondola. "How strange it seems to wait for a boat instead of a cab to take one from the station to a hotel," and Irma watched the water of the canal break with a slight wavelike motion against the steps. "Yes," responded Richard, who happened to be standing next her, "and here we part for the present. I wish our rooms were in the same hotel, but since that cannot be, Ellen and I, at least, will try to give you all we can of our society." "Please do," said Irma. "Ellen says you will be only a few doors away. Good-by, good-by," she concluded, as Richard helped his mother and Ellen and Katie into a gondola, where they sat rather stiffly with their bags piled up behind them in the stern. "Is it what you expected?" asked Aunt Caroline, as they glided in their own gondola over the Grand Canal. "Yes," sighed Irma; "it's more than I expected. I know that I shall be perfectly happy in Venice." But although Venice did not disappoint Irma, many things in this Queen of the Adriatic were different from her expectations. She soon discovered that it was possible to walk almost as far in Venice as in any other large city, provided you did not object to threading your way sometimes through narrow passages and over curving bridges. "Has any one ever counted the bridges in Venice?" she asked one day. "There must be hundreds of them," she said on the second day of her stay there, when she and Marion had had a long walk that had ended in the great Piazza in front of San Marco. "Some one has counted them, of course, but I can only guess that there are several hundred. But here we are at the heart of Venice. Isn't it great?" "Yes, this is just what I expected; it is almost too beautiful to be real," and Irma stood in front of the great church with its gilded domes, its mosaic pictures, and the four bronze horses from Constantinople, over the main entrance, forming, as a whole, a picture of which the eye could never weary. "Let us not go inside to-day," said Marion. "Oh, I would rather get a general impression of the piazza. That beautiful building, white and yellow, must be the Doge's Palace. Ah, yes, and there is the Lion of St. Mark's on his column. But who is that odd-looking saint on the other column, standing on a crocodile?" "St. Theodore, I believe. It's a wonder that he can continue to look so pleasant, since he was quite cut out by St. Mark." "I don't understand." "Oh, St. Theodore was the patron saint of Venice. He was a Byzantine saint, by the way, until some Venetian sea captains at Alexandria, where St. Mark was buried, took offence at the way the relics of the saint were treated by the sultan. They got the priests in charge to view the matter as they did, and so the body was secretly delivered to their care. On the voyage to Venice the saint saved the vessel from shipwreck, and after their arrival St. Mark threw all others into the shade. Nevertheless, St. Theodore smiles on, as if he had nothing to forgive." "It is an interesting story; and is it perfectly true?" queried Irma. "As true as any Richard would tell you," replied Marion. "Oh, the pigeons, the pigeons!" cried Irma, turning about and walking toward a spot where scores of pigeons were gathering around a girl who was scattering handfuls of peas from a little basket. As Irma approached, the girl looked up, and then---- "Why, Irma Derrington!" she cried, and she let her basket fall to the ground as she rushed toward Irma. [Illustration: "AS IRMA APPROACHED, THE GIRL LOOKED UP." (_Page 296._)] "It really is Muriel," said Irma, as she hastened toward her friend. "Why haven't you written in all these weeks?" cried Muriel reproachfully, after the first exchange of greetings. "How could I without your address?" "Didn't I give you our banker's?" "Indeed you did not; but you might have written to me." "Indeed I hadn't the slightest idea how to reach you. But no matter, I hope you will be in Venice a week at least." "Yes, indeed; and here is Marion Horton. You remember him." At this moment Mademoiselle Potin came forward from the shade of one of the arcades in front of the shops, where she had been watching Muriel, and while Marion talked with her politely for a few minutes, Muriel, speaking in an undertone, said, "How much brighter Marion Horton looks. And is it possible that he goes about with you? He was generally so glum and unsocial on the ship. He looks stronger now, too." "Oh, Aunt Caroline says he has gained in every way, and lately we have been travelling with a Mrs. Sanford and her son and daughter and----" "Richard and Ellen? Oh, I know them quite well." "Then you know how lively Richard is, and I think their being with us has made Marion come out of his shell." "When he's pleasant I should think he might be very good company. But Mademoiselle Potin has been telling me about him, and I should think he has had good reason to feel a little melancholy." "There," thought Irma, "I won't let another day pass without finding out from Aunt Caroline what it is that every one else knows about Marion, that makes him seem an object of sympathy." Meanwhile Marion had approached the girls. "Of course you both have some story to account for the pigeons, and each story is probably different." "I have no story, except that they are regarded as almost sacred, and it would be a great sin for any one to kill them." "To be _caught_ killing them," interposed Marion, "but I have an idea that many a pigeon pie in Venice is indebted to these same pigeons of St. Mark's. But if you have nothing better, I will tell my story. It is simply that some carrier pigeons brought good news to Enrico Dandolo, the Crusader, when he was besieging Candia, and since that time these pigeons and their descendants have been under the special protection of the city." "It is certainly great fun to feed them," said Muriel, "and if you come here often, you'll see all kinds of people doing it,--old and young, rich and poor. Why, I have seen a man sit for an hour by that pillar, feeding them." "As your basket quite emptied itself when you let it fall, let us go over to one of those little tables outside the restaurant and have some tea. We may, may we not, Mademoiselle Potin? And you will join us?" During the pleasant half hour spent over the tea and cakes, pigeon after pigeon approached them, looking, evidently, for stray crumbs. One was even so bold as to hop up on the table, and would not be driven away until Muriel had fed it. "It is all delightful," said Irma, "only I must write to Tessie about these pigeons, and I have so much to do. I am growing selfish. The air of Venice makes me wish to do nothing but enjoy myself." Later, when they went to the spot where the gondolas were waiting, they found that Muriel's hotel was in a different direction from theirs. "Please come to see me to-morrow," she cried, as she glided away. "You know I cannot always do what I wish to." "That means that perhaps her mother may not let her come to call on you," commented Marion. "Nonsense," cried Irma. Katie was on the balcony of the hotel, as they made their landing. She seemed surprised to see them. "I thought you were going to walk back," she said. As she spoke, she put her hand to her collar. This attracted the attention of both Irma and Marion, and Irma saw that Katie wore around her tie the circlet with the dragon's head, and she could not help noticing a strange expression on Marion's face as he too observed it. That very evening, when she and Aunt Caroline were alone, Irma remembered the question she had so often meant to ask about Marion. "When we first left home," responded her aunt, "I could not have answered you. What I said might have prejudiced you against Marion. But things have changed, and even he could not object to my telling you now. "It is not a complicated story. Marion's father died when he was a little boy. He has no sisters, and his only brother is a few years older than he. Herbert, I am afraid, has always been his mother's favorite, because he is much livelier than Marion, and fonder of people. But though most persons would call Herbert the more amiable, he has a terrible temper, and all who have seen him under its influence know how unreasonable he can be. One day, last winter, both boys were out in Herbert's motor. While going very fast it seriously injured a child. There were no witnesses to the accident, and the motor did not stop. But a mile farther on, when they had begun to slow down, Marion signalled a mounted policeman, told him there had been an accident, and obliged Herbert to turn back. By this time the child's parents had come out, and a crowd had collected. The boys were arrested, but soon had bail. At the trial Marion refused to utter a word against his brother, for I will say this for Herbert, he did admit that he was acting chauffeur. At last Marion had to admit that Herbert was going much faster than the law permits. Herbert's lawyer tried to show that the child's carelessness caused the accident. But further testimony of Marion's changed this. As Herbert was of age, the judge decided to make an example of him, and he was sentenced to jail for a short period, and in addition had a fine to pay. The child by this time was almost well, and many persons thought the punishment excessive." "I should think it was his brother who should be pitied, and not Marion." "Ah, many persons thought that Marion by a word might have put Herbert in a better light. His mother took the view that it was Marion, and not Herbert, who had disgraced the family. Some newspapers wrote articles criticising him, and one published his photograph, labelled "An unbrotherly brother." Now Marion himself had had a nervous breakdown during the winter after an attack of measles. When he had given his testimony at the trial he fainted and had to be carried from the room. The strain had been too much. Your Uncle Jim and I at once invited him to go abroad with us (for his father was an intimate friend and classmate of your uncle's) when we heard that his mother would not even speak to him. The strange thing was that while other relatives were so bitter toward Marion, Herbert did not blame him. Yet in all these weeks Marion had no letter from Herbert until we reached Siena. Even now I think his mother has not written him." "He has been very badly treated," said Irma. "I cannot see that Marion did anything wrong." "I will say this. Marion himself is partly to blame for being so cut off from his relatives. He, too, has a temper. When he found that several blamed him, he wrote a disrespectful letter to an uncle of his father's, who is really very fond of him, saying that he hoped never to speak to one of the family again, or something to that effect. Mr. Skerritt is joint guardian of Marion with your uncle--and----" Here Aunt Caroline paused. Then she added, "When Marion is twenty-five he will have a large income. Even now he has more money to spend than would be wise for most boys. But fortunately he is not a spendthrift." "Thank you," said Irma, when her aunt had finished. "I understand Marion better than I did. If he should speak to me about this, I suppose I can say that I sympathize with him." "Certainly, and I hope that he will be more inclined to talk now, since Herbert has forgiven him." "I don't see what he had to forgive." "I am only speaking from the family's point of view." The next morning, as Irma sat in her favorite corner of the little balcony overhanging the Grand Canal, Marion approached her. On a small round table that a waiter had moved out for her, she had set a pasteboard box containing most of her souvenirs for the family at home. There was nothing very valuable, though these pretty trifles had taken all the money Irma had brought from home; cameo pins from Naples, one or two mosaics from Rome, some strings of Roman pearls, an amber necklace from Florence, a leather cover stamped in gilt for books, and a couple of strings of Venetian beads, so dainty and fine that in her inmost heart she rather begrudged giving them away. "What is this?" asked Marion, holding up an envelope. "That? Oh, that has the asphodel you gathered at Paestum, and in that small box is the fossil shell you gave me the day you rescued my camera from that foolish little girl." "How long ago that seems," responded Marion. "We have seen so many places since then that Paestum is ancient history, and yet it is little more than a month away." "I haven't forgotten," said Irma. "I thought you were very brave." "Brave!" Marion colored. "I should think you'd call me a regular duffer when you remember what a fool I made of myself getting on board the _Ariadne_ at St. Michael's. I can tell you I felt awfully ashamed to think that a girl had saved me from a tumble into the water. I haven't forgotten what I owe you, though I haven't been able to get even yet." "Oh, yes, you have. You saw that I wasn't any too brave the night I thought we were going to sink." "Ah, that was natural. For you know we had barely escaped collision with a man of war. But what's this?" While talking, Irma had opened a small package, and Marion, fumbling with things on the table, had come across the piece of green marble from Hadrian's villa. For a moment Irma hesitated, then she plunged into the story of the way she had missed the train that memorable afternoon. "Aha!" exclaimed Marion, "and you were the girl who disapproved of my buying that tile from the Sistine Chapel." Then he started as if to go into the house. "Excuse me," he said. "I'll be back in a minute." When Marion returned he had the octagonal tile in his hand. "Fair exchange is always a good thing," he said, "and if you will take this, I would like to have the Hadrian marble. It will be a good reminder to me of something I can't explain just now." "Yes, you may exchange," said Irma, hesitatingly. For in her inmost heart she preferred her own marble. Yet, this was almost the first favor Marion had ever asked of her. "Thank you," said Marion. "I was altogether too ugly about that tile, but to tell you the truth I have had so much nagging this year, before I left home, that I've been too ready to defend myself." "I know," responded Irma. Marion looked up suddenly, as if he wondered how much she knew. But Irma said nothing. Not far from the hotel some gondolas were tied to the poles that marked their station. Marion leaned forward and signalled, and the nearest gondolier glided up. "Put these trinkets away. I will leave the box in the office," said Marion, "and we can go out for an hour." Irma accepted the invitation gladly enough, and the two were on the point of starting when Richard and Ellen appeared. Marion invited them also, and soon the four young people were gliding past S. Maria della Salute up toward the railway station. "There," said Richard, as they passed one beautiful palace after another. "If this were not Marion's party, I could tell you all kinds of wonderful stories as we go along. But as it is, I must content myself with saying, 'This is the Palace where Robert Browning spent so much time, and where he finally died. There, on that corner, lives Don Carlos. He and the parrot are not visible to-day, but you can almost look into the kitchen windows and see the most wonderful collection of copper kettles. When Lord Byron lived in that gray-fronted edifice, he was in the habit of taking a daily swim in the waters of the Grand Canal. I would like to tell you about the Dandolos and Foscari, and all the others, including the Falieri. Some of them were beheaded; some had their eyes put out, and----" "Don't, Richard," cried Ellen. "The Venetians were almost as bloodthirsty as the Florentines and Romans, and I wonder at their cruel deeds when I look about at all the beauty here." "Oh, there are also highly romantic stories, if I only had time to tell them, not bloodthirsty, but full of sentiment," continued Richard, in the tone that always meant he was only half in earnest. "The Merchant of Venice, for instance, and here we are at the Rialto, which of course makes you think of Shylock, though it was the section back there, and not the bridge, that Shakespeare had in mind." "I walked through the Merceria the other day," said Ellen. "You know it's the street that runs from this bridge to the clock tower opposite St. Mark's." "Did you find many bargains?" asked Marion suddenly. "A few, though we were not out to shop. But it was great fun to see the real Venetians hurrying along almost like Americans." At this moment one of the little steamboats that constantly ply up and down the Grand Canal seemed to be bearing down upon them. Irma gave a little scream, but already the gondolier had pushed his craft away so adroitly that they barely felt the swash. [Illustration: VENICE. THE GRAND CANAL.] [Illustration: VENICE. A GONDOLIER.] Once or twice they pulled up at some landing to have a better view of an old building or Campo, and always an aged man arose from some corner, boathook in hand, to help them ashore, waiting until their return to receive the small fee that custom has decreed. At last, as they glided homeward, and came in sight of their hotel, Irma discerned Katie standing on the balcony. "Irma," said Marion, in an undertone, for evidently he, too, had seen Katie, "has Katie said anything to you about Nap lately?" "No, not for some time." "Well, I hoped she would say you could keep Nap." "Aha, Marion," cried Richard, "I believe I understand why you have spent so much time with Katie lately, escorting her around to places I wouldn't have taken the trouble to go. I see why you did it." "Why?" asked Ellen; "why should he need a special reason?" "Perhaps he didn't need it. But I believe he has set out to make Katie give up Nap to Irma, but," and he turned toward Marion with a flourish of his hat, "I'll bet you almost anything that you don't succeed. Katie is my cousin, and I know." As they landed at the steps of the hotel, Katie greeted them pleasantly. "The rest of us have had a splendid afternoon. We've been shopping." "Of course," interposed Richard. "Oh, this time we went to such interesting palaces, full of wonderful old furniture and pictures, collectors' places; and your aunt, Irma, has bought any amount of lovely things. And then, over across the way, we saw them making mosaics, and I have bought some beautiful long slender iridescent glass vases." "You can buy the same in New York," murmured Richard, "and we'll have all the trouble of carrying these vases home. Probably they'll be put in a basket for _me_ to carry." Then in a sudden spirit of mischief: "Katie," cried Richard, "did Marion give you that arrangement for your scarf? I don't know whether to call it a pin or a ring." "Nobody gave it to me," she replied, in a tone of annoyance. "Then _where_ did you get it?" It was Marion who spoke sharply. Katie made no answer. "Did you advertise it?" asked Marion. Even to Katie this question seemed as puzzling as to the others. "I don't know what you mean," she replied. "I bought it at Rome." "Oh," said Marion, and it was quite evident that he did not believe her. "Well," said Katie, "if you must know, I bought it at the Rag Fair, and very cheap it was. Every one tells me that I have a great bargain, for the carving on the stone is very fine, and I wouldn't part with it for anything." Marion made no comment after Katie's speech, and instantly Irma understood the whole thing. This was the "something else" that Marion had lost with the two hundred liri in his purse. It had probably been stolen by some one at the fair. Certainly it was easy now to account for Katie's bargain. CHAPTER XVIII EXPLANATIONS "I am sorry," Aunt Caroline was saying, as she and Irma and Uncle Jim drifted along in a gondola, "that you will lose Milan. Perhaps you might have gone up with your uncle on his trip last week, but it seemed hot." "It was hot," interposed Uncle Jim. "And I had so much business that I could have given no time to showing Irma around. She could have seen the Cathedral, of course, which, after all, is one of the most beautiful in the world, and different from the others you have seen in Italy; and she could have visited one or two delightful galleries. But I doubt that your head will retain an impression of half those you've already visited. If you will accept my impression of Milan, you will know just what it is, a busy, bustling city, full of energetic people who are making their way upward. If the rest of Italy could catch the spirit of Milan, the whole country would soon be prosperous. In fact the spirit of independence is so strong that car conductors, policemen, and shopkeepers, as well as cabmen, are insolent, and inclined to look down on the _forestieri_. Sometime, when you return to Italy in cooler weather, you can visit Milan; but be thankful you didn't go there with me last week." "We shall have a warm journey back to Naples, and if your business were not so pressing, I should be inclined to go to Switzerland. While she is over here, Irma ought to see----" "Oh, no, no," interrupted Irma, without waiting for Aunt Caroline to finish the sentence. "Really I do not need to see more. I ought, that is, I _must_ go home." "Why, my dear child," cried Aunt Caroline, "I had no idea you were getting homesick. I thought you were enjoying everything." "Yes, I am enjoying everything," replied Irma, "and that is why I feel as if I can hardly wait to see them all at home. I just long to tell them about everything, and I don't want Tessie to grow up before I see her again. And if Katie gets to Cranston before I do, she will take Nap away, and perhaps I may never see him again. Oh, I am glad we are going home." Irma's voice now broke completely, and she made no attempt to hide her tears. "There, my dear, it is the warm weather. The climate of Venice is too relaxing----" "We'd get home sooner, Irma, if we should give up our Mediterranean passage and take a boat from Havre or Cherbourg. Perhaps you would like to start to-morrow with Mrs. Sanford's party. You wouldn't lose sight of Katie then," said Uncle Jim mischievously. "Nonsense," rejoined Aunt Caroline. "A few days more or less will be nothing to Irma, when once her face is turned toward the United States." "I feel better now," cried Irma. "Those were only makebelieve tears, but I do feel better to be going home. I am glad that we are not to be away three months more, and, if you please, I would rather not go to the Bridge of Sighs to-day." "You can look at it without any qualms," said Uncle Jim, "for our matter of fact historians say that since that bridge was built more than two hundred years ago, only one prisoner has been sent across to the _pozzi_, under sentence of death." "_Pozzi?_" asked Irma. "Yes, _pozzi_, or wells, is a good name for those dungeons across from the palace. The water used to rise two feet in them, and the poor wretch had to spend his time on a kind of trestle. I went through the _pozzi_ the other day, but I shouldn't care to have you or your aunt there; they are too depressing for tender-hearted people." "Why not take a last look at the Doge's Palace to-day; that would be more cheerful," suggested Aunt Caroline. "Certainly," and in a short time their gondola was at the steps near St. Mark's, the usual old man rose from his slumbers and steadied the gondola with his hook, and the three, after getting their tickets, wandered through the immense halls of the Doge's Palace. "When I was here the other day," said Irma, "the carvings and gildings and the enormous paintings dazzled me. Yes, I feel it is the same now, and I believe, after all, I care more for the general impression. I cannot remember each separate painting." "Why should you try to?" asked Uncle Jim. "These gray-bearded doges in their caps and ermine-trimmed cloaks are much alike, whether Titian or Veronese, or some other one of the great masters painted them." "Doesn't it seem as if those old doges were pretty conceited," said Irma, "to have themselves painted in sacred pictures with the Madonna and Christ?" "But you will notice that they are generally in an attitude of humility, and perhaps in that way they meant to attribute their greatness to something besides themselves." "A Doge could not do whatever he wished. Weren't they something like our presidents, simply elected to be the executive officer of the state?" asked Aunt Caroline. "Yes, it was the Great Council, and not the Doge, that held the supreme power, at least until the time of the Council of Ten. But the Doge, although at first chosen for only a year, was often re-elected term after term, and with his councillors he often had great power." "Yet the Venetians didn't like him to have too great power?" "Oh, no. You noticed the black tablet in the great hall in place of the portrait of Marino Faliero, beheaded for his ambition." "Yes, I have read about him, but I feel almost sorrier for Ludovico Manin, the last Doge. You know the French made him abdicate in 1797, and they burnt his Doge's bonnet, and the Libro d'oro--the Golden Book of Venetian nobility under the Liberty-tree, and they say this nearly broke his heart, although he lived a number of years longer. When he died he left all his fortune to some charity." "The history of Italy is full of tragedies," responded Uncle Jim. "So don't waste your sorrow on any one man, even though he is the last of the doges." A little later the three were in front of St. Mark's. "I must look my last at the Piazza," said Irma. "But I thought you were coming down this evening to hear the band play." "Oh, yes, but there will be such a crowd that we shall only sit at the little tables." "Yes, and sip lemonade." "Of course. It is Muriel's party. It is singular that we have seen her so little. But the music and the lemonade and all we shall have to say to each other--for she goes away to-morrow--will prevent my thinking much of the Piazza. Just now," and Irma half closed her eyes, "I am imagining the day when the Venetians gathered here to decide whether or not they should help the Crusaders. What a grand sight it must have been; and now, I open my eyes and see nothing but pigeons." "Aunt Caroline," said Irma, as they glided homeward, "I like Venice better than any other place. There seem to be more really old buildings here than anywhere else. I have not tried to remember the great pictures as I did in Rome and Florence. I have a general impression of Bellini and the Vivarini, Titian and Veronese and Tintoretto, they are the great Venetian painters, but I cannot describe any one picture." "We hardly expect a girl of your age to care for artistic details," responded Aunt Caroline, smiling. "You could probably tell more about the palaces." "I am not sure that I could describe a single one of them, so that any one would recognize it. It is the effect of Venice as a whole that pleases me, even if it isn't just what artists paint it. The palaces are really much grayer than they look in pictures, and there are never many sails on the canal, and even down toward the Lido there is seldom one of those bright painted sails." "Is there any other thing that falls below your expectations?" "Oh, some things are different, but I like them all the better. I used to think that only gondolas and small pleasure boats went on the Grand Canal. But there are so many other things--these little steamboats that pass constantly up and down, and take people so quickly and cheaply, and those large _barche_ that are like express wagons. Why, the other morning I sat at my window before breakfast, and first a large gondola passed, loaded with vegetables; and then a larger one piled high with bricks for building; and then it really looked so funny--some family was moving, and there was a boat full of furniture, with the mother and children sitting at one end, while the father and eldest son were pushing it on with their long sticks. Then the gondolas, too! I thought they were only pleasure boats; but the other day, when I saw a funeral procession going across to the island where the cemetery is, I realized they took the place of horses and carriages for everything." "I believe there isn't a horse in all Venice," said Uncle Jim, "and only two or three at the Lido. But here we are," and a moment later they had landed at the hotel. That evening, in spite of the charm of the music on the Piazza, and the evident gaiety of the crowd of listeners, the young people of the Sanford and Curtin parties were less gay than usual. Muriel, the next morning, was to start for the Dolomites, and later in the day Mrs. Sanford and her party were to begin their journey to Paris, allowing a few days for Switzerland on the way. "Irma," whispered Richard, in one of the pauses of the music, "I must tell you that I think Marion and Katie have struck a bargain about Nap. It seems Marion was able to prove that that ring we have seen Katie wear around her scarf really belongs to him. He showed her his initials inside. They were very small, but could be seen under a glass. He lost a purse one day when he visited the Rag Fair in Rome." "Yes, I was with him," said Irma. "Well, the same day Katie and a friend whom we met at our hotel in Rome also went to the fair. The ring was offered for sale at one of the booths, and Katie took a great fancy to it. She ought to have known it was stolen; for she got it for almost nothing." "Then she can afford to give it back to Marion; for of course she ought to do so." "That's just the point. Katie hates to give it up; I heard her talking to Marion about it. She said she'd like to buy it, but he wouldn't listen to that. Then he began to talk about your little dog, and I am pretty sure it ended in Katie's promising to give up all claim to the dog if Marion would let her keep the ring. Rather it was just the other way. Marion made the offer and Katie agreed, but it amounts to the same thing, and as soon as Katie is out of the way Marion will tell you." It happened, however, that after all the good-byes had been said to Muriel and her mother and Mademoiselle Potin, the other young people and their elders walked home to their hotel. It chanced that Katie was near Irma part of the way, and thus had a chance to announce her decision about Nap. "After all," she said, "a dog is a great trouble, and Nap is so much better acquainted with your family that I think I will let him stay with them." "Oh, thank you," replied Irma, wishing she felt free to tell Katie what she had heard about Marion's offer. "Thank you," she repeated. "It would break my little sister's heart to give him up, and I should feel very badly myself." At this moment they reached a bridge where they went single file. When they were on the level road again, Irma found herself beside Aunt Caroline, and she had no chance to discuss Nap either with Katie or Marion. "Our last evening together!" exclaimed Richard, as they reached the hotel. "There's a faint moon, and if so young a thing as that can sit up late, why not we?" and before Aunt Caroline and Mrs. Sanford had time to protest, four young people were seated around the little table on the balcony overlooking the Canal, and Richard had sent the waiter for what he called "a last lemonade." Marion had not joined the others. He stood with his hand on the railing. The water was lapping the steps just below him. "Don't fall in," cried Richard, from his seat at the table. "You look as if you were meditating a bath. But it's late, and in spite of the moon the water is cold." As Richard spoke the girls turned their heads in Marion's direction, and there, under their very eyes, Marion was hurling his coat from him. With his hand on the railing a moment later he had sprung into the Grand Canal. The others jumped to their feet; Katie screamed, and in an instant Richard might have plunged after Marion, had he not seen a reason for Marion's act. Some one had fallen into the water, and Marion had made his wild leap to rescue him. It all happened very quickly, and when, a few minutes later, rescuer and rescued stood on the balcony some distance from where Marion had gone in, the latter was seen to be a boy of about ten. He was evidently more frightened than hurt, and he whimpered a little as the crowd gathered around him. "I don't see how it could have happened," cried Katie. "No one _ever_ falls from a gondola," and her tone implied that this particular boy could not possibly have been in need of rescuing. "But he _did_ fall in; you can see that for yourself; a small boy can always get into impossible mischief." There was certainly no doubt that this particular small boy had managed to elude both his mother and the gondolier. Sitting on the prow, he had been screened for the moment by the cabin. Then a sudden impulse had led him to creep to the very end, where he raised himself to shake his hand in defiance at the gondolier. At this moment a passing steamboat gave a new motion to the gondola and threw the little fellow into the water. "Oh, but really it was nothing," cried Marion. "The water was not deep, and the gondolier would have been in almost as soon as I--and----" "Nonsense, nonsense, boy; when you do a brave thing take the credit that is your due." Irma started at the voice. She was one of the crowd that had drawn nearer to Marion. "I saw the whole thing," continued the voice. "You acted without a shadow of fear, but this chill may be bad for you." "Come, Marion, I will go with you to your room," and Richard led the unresisting Marion away, only too glad to escape the eyes of the curious who had come from the numerous reading and reception rooms on the first floor, at the rumor of an accident. "Billy," said the mother of the boy, who had caused all the excitement, "this is the last time I'll let you sit up after eight o'clock, no matter how you tease." "Madame," interposed the voice that a few moments earlier had praised Marion, "I would advise you to take your little boy at once to his room. His escapade might have cost him his life, and might have had serious results for my nephew, who is only recovering from the effects of a shock to his nerves. Put your little boy to bed at once, Madame." Then the mother and the little boy and a number of sympathizing friends walked off, while the fairy godfather, for of course it was he whose voice Irma had recognized, took Irma's hand in his. "Well, my child, we haven't met since I brought you back from Hadrian's villa. I found I couldn't safely keep so near Marion without really explaining myself. But the time hadn't come. He wrote me a pretty savage letter before he left New York. He thought I was one of those who had accused him of cowardice. This was a mistake on his part. But in the mood he was in three months ago, it would have been useless to try to change his mind. I had occasion to come to Italy myself, and there seemed to be no reason why I should not come on the ship with him. I knew that in the company of your aunt and uncle and yourself," and the old gentleman smiled at Irma, "he would have influences that ought to lift him out of his depression." "Did Uncle Jim and Aunt Caroline know?" asked Irma. "Yes, they knew after a while that I was hovering near. But I did not mean to dog Marion's steps, especially after I had seen at Rome that he was beginning to be himself again. At first Marion was unaware that I had come to Europe, but when a letter of apology was forwarded from him to me, I thought the time had come to tell him. So I had written him that I would see him soon. "He is really a fine, manly fellow, and it hurt him very much that he should have been so unjustly blamed. But I know that you, as well as your uncle and aunt, have been very patient with him, and now, well, now I must have a little talk with him before he falls asleep. I am to sail with you from Naples. Good night." Irma thought it quite the natural thing for the fairy godfather to disappear in this sudden fashion. When she had answered the questions that Richard showered upon her, she ran up to Aunt Caroline's room. "So you have always known about the fairy godfather." "I had never known him by that name until you gave it to him," said Aunt Caroline, smiling. "But as Mr. Skerritt, I have always felt that he was one of Marion's best friends. I spoke of him to you the other day when I told you Marion's story. Perhaps he mentioned that he is going back on the ship with us. Do you realize that in three days you will be sailing away from Italy?" "It is hard to realize it." "But you are glad to go home?" queried Aunt Caroline. "I am a little more homesick than when I left home," responded Irma, "but I have enjoyed every minute in Italy." The evening before leaving Venice Irma made a long entry in her diary: "No one knows how glad I am to be going home. Four months is a long time to be away from one's own country, and especially from one's family. Of course I have enjoyed everything, and I have learned even more than I expected, and I am so grateful for the trip. But there's no place I would rather see now than Cranston. "To-night I had such a surprise. Aunt Caroline came to my room, carrying a large pasteboard box. Then she opened it and showed me a lovely amber necklace, just like one I had admired in Florence. 'This is a present for you from Marion,' she said, 'and these other little things he hopes you will give to Tessie and the boys and Mahala. You will know how to divide them.' "I won't attempt to describe them, only I know Tessie will be delighted with the little flock of bronze pigeons, because I have written her about the pigeons of St. Mark's. There was even a silver-mounted leather collar for Nap. 'You may wonder at Marion's thoughtfulness,' explained Aunt Caroline, 'but he says you have taught him to think of others besides himself, and he appreciates your patience with him when he was so unamiable.' "It is true that Marion _did_ seem rather disagreeable at first, and perhaps I didn't try to like him because I was so disappointed that he was not a girl. But now--well, I only hope Chris and Rudolph will know as much as he does when they are his age. So I told Aunt Caroline that the whole trouble had been that I didn't try to understand him at first. Then she smiled, and added, 'Marion is sure that he has learned a great deal from you, especially how to govern his temper. But he says particularly, that no one is to thank him for these things. It is as if you had bought them yourself, for everything in the box is something he heard you admire, when you and he were out together. I believe there's something from every city we have been in. He says the money part doesn't count at all for everything there represents your taste.' "But I think I shall find some way of thanking him, if not now, sometime when our trip is over, and really, if it hadn't been for Marion, I am sure that I should not have had half as much fun." _A Story for Younger Girls_ IRMA AND NAP By HELEN LEAH REED Author of "Amy in Acadia," The "Brenda" Books, etc. Illustrated by Clara E. Atwood. 12mo. $1.25 [Illustration] A brightly written story about children from eleven to thirteen years of age, who live in a suburban town, and attend a public grammar school. The book is full of incident of school and home life. The story deals with real life, and is told in the simple and natural style which characterized Miss Reed's popular "Brenda" stories.--_Washington Post._ There are little people in this sweetly written story with whom all will feel at once that they have been long acquainted, so real do they seem, as well as their plans, their play, and their school and home and everyday life.--_Boston Courier._ Her children are real; her style also is natural and pleasing.--_The Outlook_, New York. Miss Reed's children are perfectly natural and act as real girls would under the same circumstances. Nap is a lively little dog, who takes an important part in the development of the story.--_Christian Register_, Boston. A clever story, not a bit preachy, but with much influence for right living in evidence throughout.--_Chicago Evening Post._ LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 254 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON HELEN LEAH REED'S "BRENDA" BOOKS The author is one of the best equipped of our writers for girls of larger growth. Her stories are strong, intelligent, and wholesome.--_The Outlook_, New York. Miss Reed's girls have all the impulses and likes of real girls as their characters are developing, and her record of their thoughts and actions reads like a chapter snatched from the page of life.--_Boston Herald._ BRENDA, HER SCHOOL AND HER CLUB Illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith. 12mo. $1.50. One of the most natural books for girls. It is a careful study of schoolgirl life in a large city, somewhat unique in its way.--_Minneapolis Journal._ BRENDA'S SUMMER AT ROCKLEY Illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith. 12mo. $1.50. It is a wholesome book, telling of a merry and healthy vacation.--_Dial_, Chicago. BRENDA'S COUSIN AT RADCLIFFE Illustrated by Alice Barber Stephens. 12mo. $1.50. No better college story has been written.--_Providence News._ BRENDA'S BARGAIN Illustrated by Ellen Bernard Thompson. 12mo. $1.50. The story deals with social settlement work, under conditions with which the author is familiar.--_The Bookman_, New York. AMY IN ACADIA Illustrated by Katherine Pyle. 12mo. $1.50. A splendid tale for girls, carefully written, interesting and full of information concerning the romantic region made famous by the vicissitudes of Evangeline.--_Toronto Globe._ BRENDA'S WARD Illustrated by Frank T. Merrill. 12mo. $1.50. The story details the experience of a Chicago girl at school in Boston, and very absorbing those experiences are--full of action and diversity.--_Chicago Post._ LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY, _Publishers_ 254 WASHINGTON ST., BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS NAPOLEON'S YOUNG NEIGHBOR By HELEN LEAH REED _Illustrated, 12mo. $1.50_ Mrs. Abell's story, retold and made vivid with a true story-teller's art, forms the theme of the present book, which combines singularly well the veracity of history and the attractiveness of fiction.--_Living Age_, Boston. It should have a very wide circulation, since it puts Napoleon, for the first time, before the minds of children as a playmate and a friend; and they will go back to him in later reading as one whom they enjoyed in childhood. It should be in every public library, without fail, and you describe it well as a captivating story.--COL. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. [Illustration] A most beautiful story of the great Napoleon's exile on the island of St. Helena, and his friendship for a little English girl. A book of interest to children and grown-ups, magnificently written.--_Chicago Advance._ In this readable and delightful volume the author portrays in story form the character and doings of Napoleon Bonaparte in his days of exile at St. Helena.--_Journal of Education_, Boston. It has the advantage of being probably the only book for the young on its subject in existence.--_New York Commercial._ The author understands the art of telling stories for young people in a very entertaining manner. Her style is simple and natural, and even historic facts are transmuted by her into entertaining tales.--_New York Sun._ LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., _Publishers_, BOSTON New Illustrated Edition of The Spinning-Wheel Series THE SPINNING-WHEEL SERIES BY LOUISA M. ALCOTT. New Illustrated Edition. Uniform in size with the Illustrated Edition of The Little Women Series, printed from entirely new plates, with new and attractive cover design. 4 vols. 12mo. Decorated cloth, in box, $6.00. Separately, $1.50. 1. SPINNING-WHEEL STORIES With 8 full-page pictures and vignette on titlepage by Wm. A. McCullough. $1.50. 2. SILVER PITCHERS With 8 full-page pictures and vignette on titlepage by J. W. F. Kennedy. $1.50. 3. PROVERB STORIES With 8 full-page pictures and vignette on titlepage by Ethel Pennewill Brown. $1.50. 4. A GARLAND FOR GIRLS With 12 full-page pictures and vignette on titlepage by Clara E. Atwood and other artists. $1.50. Four volumes of healthy and hearty stories so told as to fascinate the young people, while inculcating sturdy courage and kindness to the weak in the boys, and in the girls those virtues which fit them for filling a woman's place in the home. The several artists have caught the spirit of the author and have provided capital illustrations for these new editions. It is not rash to say that Miss Alcott's stories were never more appealing to young readers than at the present moment. In spite of a profusion of juvenile fiction, they have steadily held their own; and they persistently refuse, through their inherent merits, to be elbowed aside by pretentious modern stories of unnatural and unreal childhood life. The very genuineness of character and incident, the homely appeal to all that is best in young womanhood and young manhood, have made "Little Men," "Little Women," and their successors classics in their kind.--_Boston Transcript._ LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY _Publishers_, 254 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, MASS. [Transcriber's Notes Italic typeface in the original book is indicated with _underscores_. Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent. Page 16, added the word "to" ("the seat next to Uncle Jim"). Page 74, changed "Wilful" to "Willful" ("Willful as ever"). Page 82, changed "dejeuner" to "déjeuner" ("at déjeuner on the morning") Page 159, changed "Lief" to "Leif" ("earlier than our Leif Ericson"). Page 165, changed "Domenchino" to "Domenichino" ("I loved Domenichino's Sybil"). Page 202, changed "see" to "seen" ("you are disappointed that we have not seen") Page 234, added the word "in" ("Katie looked in defiance at Irma"). Page 257, changed "Guiliano" to "Giuliano" ("and of Giuliano, with Day and Night").] 
42998	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. BY THE SAME AUTHOR BEAUTIFUL BOOKS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR PRICE =20S.= NET EACH JAPAN WORLD'S CHILDREN WORLD PICTURES VENICE BRITTANY THE THAMES A. & C. BLACK . 4 SOHO SQUARE . LONDON VENICE [Illustration: CROSSING THE PIAZZA] VENICE : BY MORTIMER MENPES : TEXT BY DOROTHY MENPES PUBLISHED BY ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK·LONDON·W Published May 1904 Reprinted 1906, 1912 CONTENTS PAGE ARRIVAL AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 3 HISTORY 17 A GLIMPSE INTO BOHEMIA 39 ARCHITECTURE 55 ST. MARK'S 77 PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 91 STREETS, SHOPS, AND COURTYARDS 125 THE ISLANDS OF THE LAGOON 149 SOCIAL UPS AND DOWNS 173 GONDOLAS AND GONDOLIERS 193 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Crossing the Piazza _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE 2. Grand Canal, showing Tower of St. Geremia 2 3. A Pink Palace 4 4. Palazzo Pisani 6 5. The Salute at Sunset 8 6. A Ruined Palazzo 12 7. Palazzi on the Canal 14 8. Giudecca 16 9. San Giorgio Maggiore 20 10. Off the Giudecca 22 11. St. Maria delle Misericordia 26 12. The Custom House and Church of Santa Maria della Salute 28 13. At Chioggia 30 14. Church of San Geremia 32 15. The Bridge of Sighs and Straw Bridge 34 16. On the Grand Canal 36 17. The Bridge of Sighs 38 18. Palace in a By-Canal 42 19. The Orange Door 44 20. An Unfrequented Canal 50 21. St. Mark's Basin 52 22. Hotel Danieli 54 23. Porta della Carta 56 24. Grand Canal looking towards the Dogana 58 25. A Famous Palazzo 60 26. Entrance to the Grand Canal 62 27. Panorama seen from St. Mark's Basin 64 28. The Dogana and Salute 66 29. Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni 68 30. Santa Maria della Salute 72 31. Palazzo Mengaldo 74 32. Ospedale Civile 76 33. St. Mark's 78 34. Palazzo Danieli 80 35. Francesca 82 36. St. Mark's Piazza 86 37. Scuola di San Marco 88 38. A Quiet Waterway 90 39. Canal Priuli 94 40. Osmarin Canal 98 41. A Sotto Portico 102 42. A Narrow Canal 108 43. Bridge near the Palazzo Labia 110 44. The House with the Blue Door 112 45. Canal in Giudecca Island 114 46. The Orange Sail 118 47. A Quiet Rio 120 48. Humble Quarter 122 49. Rio di San Marina 124 50. A Squero or Boat-building Yard 126 51. The Weekly Wash 128 52. A Back Street 130 53. The Wooden Spoon Seller 138 54. Work Girls 142 55. Chioggia Fish Market 150 56. Chioggia 154 57. In Murano 158 58. Mrs Eden's Garden in Venice 160 59. Timber Boats from the Shores of the Adriatic 162 60. By a Squero or Boat-building Yard 164 61. In a Side Street, Chioggia 166 62. Santa Maria della Salute 168 63. Rio e Chiesa degli Ognissanti 174 64. A Campiello 176 65. Fishing Boats from Chioggia 178 66. A Woman of the People 180 67. Chioggia 184 68. The Fish Market 190 69. Midday on the Lagoon 196 70. A Traghetto 200 71. Marietta 204 72. Bambino 208 73. A Squero or Boat-building Yard in Venice 212 74. Under the Midday Sun 214 75. The Rialto 218 [Illustration: GRAND CANAL, SHOWING TOWER OF ST. GEREMIA] ARRIVAL AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS There is no city more written about, more painted, and more misrepresented, than Venice. Students, poets, and painters have combined in reproducing her many charms. Usually, however, Venice is described in a hurried, careless way: the subject is seldom gone deeply into, and studied as it should be, before attempting to compile a book. It is only one who has been there, and observed the life and characteristics of the people for years, who can gain any true perception of their character. Those who have not been to Venice must needs know by heart her attractions, which have been so persistently thrust before the public; but unless half a dozen really excellent books have been read concerning her, the city of their imaginations must be a theatrical Venice, unreal and altogether false. Normally one feels that the last word about Venice has been said--the last chord struck upon her keyboard, the last harmony brought out. But this is by no means the case. There are chords still to be struck, and harmonies still to be brought out: her charm can never be exhausted. The last chord struck, no matter how poorly executed it may be, goes on vibrating in our ears, and all unconsciously we are listening for another. How strange this is! Why should it be so? What other cities impress us in the same way? Oxford perhaps, and Rome certainly. These are the only two which come to my mind at the moment. They are the cities of the soul, round which endless romantic histories cling, endless dear and glorious associations. Perhaps the reason why one never tires of books on Venice, or of pictures of Venice, is that they none of them fulfil one's desires and expectations--they never express just what one feels about her--there is always something left unsaid, something uninterpreted; and one is always waiting for that. It is impossible to express all one feels with regard to Venice. One feels one's own incompetence terribly. Try as you may, you can only give one day, one hour, one aspect of sea and sky, only the four seasons, not all the myriad changes between;--only four times of the day--dawn, mid-day, twilight, and night--not the thousand melting changes, not the continual variations. It is not a panorama, not a magnificent view permanent before one's gaze. The cloud forms will never be quite the same as you see them at a certain moment; the water will never be again of that particular shade of green; the reflection of a pink palace, with the black barge at its base laden with golden fruit, will never again be thrown upon the water quite in that same way; there will not always be that warm golden light bathing sea and sky and palace; that particular pearly-grey mist in the early morning will never recur, never quite that deep blue-black of night with the orange lights and the steely water. [Illustration: A PINK PALACE] When one lives in Venice one becomes absolutely in sympathy with the place. One feels her beautiful colour; but it is quite another story when one comes to reproduce it. Words cannot describe nor brush portray it. Thousands have attempted to paint Venice; but few have succeeded. The Venetians themselves, loving their country, painted her continually; but even they could only give one aspect of her. The pictures of Venice by Venetian masters are chiefly of her pomp and glory, her State functions and her water fêtes. However, one finds marvellous glimpses of landscape work in some of the great masterpieces--sweeps of sky above the heads of some of the Madonnas, skies in which one can feel the shimmer of light so characteristic of Venice, the blending of the tones and the flaming glory of the sunset sky. Turner, too, caught the radiant, shimmering, bright and opalescent qualities of the lagoon scenery; but even his palette could not cope with the ever-changing colour. One must be either hot or cold with regard to Venice. You cannot be lukewarm. The magic of her spell begins to work upon you immediately you arrive. Most of us imagine what the place will be like before we reach it. We people it in our dreams, and visualise it for ourselves--canals, palaces, streets, the general appearance of things. This imaginary city has no foundations save those which are supplied by pictures and stories. [Illustration: PALAZZO PISANI] One's first impressions are always those which one remembers longest, and one's first impressions of Venice are surpassingly beautiful. In the train, arriving, you catch glimpses of flashes of light in the darkness, more strangely fantastic than anything you could imagine; you traverse a long causeway stretching over the lagoon; you see the water on either side of you, jet black, stretching on indefinitely; the train seems to float on air; you cannot see the bridge--nothing but sky and water. You arrive at a large terminal station, and step into the gondola which is to take you into Venice. Into most cities one arrives in a whirl and shriek of engines amid smoke and bustle; but Venice is different. One arrives in a gondola. The water is of a clear pale green; the banks are scrubby grass and mud. One watches the silver prow of the gondola as it shoots forward, the sea air blowing keen and salt. You realise that you are in a wide canal, and that there are buildings on either side of you, looming up white and gaunt, with here and there a lantern glimmering at their base. It is strange to see a city rising thus out of the sea. Venice seems double: one sees it in the substance and in the reflections on the water. After gliding along for some time you turn up narrow water lanes, devious and branching, running by low stonework, very complicated in their turnings. There are doors with water creeping up their steps, striped posts looking like spectres, and arches everywhere. Strange figures, like phantoms in a dream, appear in the gloom; black gondolas, like funeral biers, lie silently at the base of the houses; and the water laps dully at the steps. The silence of the waterways is deathlike after the rush and noise of a long journey; each shape that passes looks ghostly in the dim light; it is like a city of eternal sleep, a city of death. What a perfect background it would make for melodrama or for tragedy! No crime or intrigue could be too terrible to happen within those unfathomable shadows! A brigand might pass within that heavy half-opened oak door silently and unnoticed. A corpse with a stiletto buried in its breast might be gliding by in that black gondola. One would be quite surprised and somewhat shocked on lifting the felce to discover a fat and florid tradesman returning from supper with a friend. Venice is not a fitting background for such a sordid everyday scene. She is much better suited to the romances of Maturin, Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe; to the Great Bandit, the stories of the Three Inquisitors, the Council of Ten, masked spies, and pitfalls. [Illustration: THE SALUTE AT SUNSET] In the daytime one recognises Venice as the Venice of Canaletto, of Bonington, and of Wild. There is that same vague, luminous atmosphere, full of rays and mists; the coming and going of gondolas or galiots; the landing-place of the Piazzetta, with its Gothic lanterns ornamented by figures of the saints, fixed on poles and sunk into the sea; the vermilion façade of the Ducal Palace, lozenged with white and rose marble, its massive pillars supporting a gallery of small columns. With all this one has been familiar through the pictures of the masters whom I have mentioned; but the real Venice is still more beautiful, still more wonderful, still more fantastic. If you climb up on any height and look down upon the lagoon, you will see a sight never to be forgotten. You will imagine that it is a dream which has taken shape, a vision of fairy-land. The sea is dotted with craft of all kinds. There is a continuous movement of boats--gondolas, sailing vessels, and steam-boats pouring forth volumes of black smoke and making a disturbance on the peaceful lagoon. The water is limpid, the light radiant; a row of stakes on the lagoon marks the channels which are navigable for ships. There is the island of San Giorgio, with its red steeple, its white basilica, surrounded by a girdle of boats, and looking like a sheet of burnished silver. There is the Giudecca, a maritime suburb of Venice, turning towards the city a row of houses and towards the sea a belt of gardens; it has two churches, Santa Maria and the Redentore. There is San Clemate, at the back of the Giudecca, a place of penitence and of detention for priests under discipline; Poreglia, where the vessels are quarantined; and the little island of St. Peter, almost invisible in the distance. The only black cupola is that of St. Simeon the Less. Those of the other churches are silvery. The clouds and the islands seem to mingle one with the other, and are as baffling as the mirage in a desert. On a fine day in Venice there is a certain brilliant crystalline clearness sharpening every outline; every tower and dome stands out sharp and clear against the sky, making the colours burn. There is colour everywhere: even the islands in the distance are blue and distinct. There is colour in the groups that saunter by, in the sapphire water, and in the cloudless heavens. The air is warm and still; the streets are full of people, walking and loitering at the doors of the shops; sunbeams dance on the rippling water; spring is everywhere. As evening comes on the colours grow richer and deeper; scarlet clouds float across the amber sky; the canal takes on the hues of the upper air, and is a rippling mass of liquid topaz and molten gold, in rapid succession changing from gold to orange, and from orange to deepest crimson. In the soft hazy light, against the rose tone of the sky, the cupolas of the islands and the palaces seem to float, shimmering with the hues of mother-of-pearl, mysterious, dream-like, not like solid stone. The soft lap of the water breaks the silence; the vaporous mists float upwards. Across the light drifts a line of fishing boats, their great brown sails set. A streak of flame-colour strikes on the windows of Venice, a flush of orange and rose. Then in a second the sun is gone, and a brief space of doubt ensues, when day hangs trembling in the balance; then night settles on the lagoon. A hundred bells ring out over the city, clashing and clamouring together in one brazen peal. Soon the peal subsides. The evening breeze springs up mild and sweet from the sea, and the soft and mellow cry of "Stali! Ah Stali!" is heard everywhere. It is the hour when all that is poor and unlovely melts into ethereal beauty. The water is a deep blue-black, save for rippling trails of light from the lamps, which shine like golden stars from the prows of the gondolas. The moon rises, nearly full, and is veiled by hazy clouds; the outlines of the bell towers of the palaces are pale and delicate in the soft light. The stillness of the water streets is soothing, and the prattle of the city falls gently on the ears. No matter how prosaic or how unimpressionable one may be, one soon grows into sympathy with the atmosphere of Venice. It is almost impossible to avoid becoming sentimental as one floats in one's gondola at night, with the twinkling stars above and the twinkling splashes below. One almost unconsciously builds romances round the palaces tottering to decay. Venice is always ready to charm and allure you. It is hard to believe that somewhere there is a working, active, busy life going on. But indeed no one in Venice seems to be in earnest. It is as if the present time does not count, as if it were but an echo of what passed long years ago. People work without aim or energy, and when they suffer it seems as if they were but mumming. A sweetness and a docility steal into one's soul, and one feels that one can do nothing but drift on for ever in this pleasant idleness. Harsh voices become modulated; cross-grained, querulous natures are sweetened; even the flat-faced, spectacled tourists, when they step from the railway station into a gondola and glide into the mystic water city, alive with a myriad glistening lights, develop unconsciously, and despite themselves, into delightful people. [Illustration: A RUINED PALAZZO] On the day when I arrived in Venice, as I was wandering down a lane beyond the Canareggio Canal, I found myself in the Jewish part of the city. It is a fetid and pestilential place. There is about it nothing pleasant, or wholesome, or attractive. The stonework is cracked and rotten. The houses, streaked with dirt, bend over into the water with the weight of years. Most of them are nine stories high, grimy and dirty, and speckled with green spots. There is not a straight line anywhere, and not a whole pane of glass--paper is the substitute. Now and then one sees a patch of plaster on a house; but for the most part the plaster has fallen away, revealing the crumbly red bricks beneath. It gives one a sickening feeling--this terrible poverty, solitude, and neglect. Everything is strange, sullen, mysterious. Men and women with curved noses and eyes set like burning coals in their pale faces glide noiselessly along with furtive glances. The children are half naked, and play about on benches in the streets. I have seen poverty-stricken Jewish quarters before, but never anything so sad as this. The sordidness and terrible despair of it make one's heart ache. There are no green fields and trees to alleviate the misery of the people. Yet, I suppose, the condition of the Jew was worse in the old days. Certainly the injustices and insults which once were prevalent do not occur now. The Christian to-day is on more or less friendly terms with the Jew. They meet one another on the exchange; they talk together, and partake of each other's hospitality. [Illustration: PALAZZI ON THE CANAL] The Christian may despise the Jew; but he has the grace to keep the feeling to himself, for the Jew possesses a great part of the trade of the city, and in money matters has ever the upper hand. He is educated, intellectual, patriotic, and calls himself a Venetian. If he is rich he lives in a fine new house on the Grand Canal and is owner of other houses. An instinct of the poorer class of Jews in Venice is to set up pawnshops and lend money to tradesmen in times of necessity. The Jews are decidedly useful. In the old days they were driven into exile; but they were soon called back. They were made to wear a yellow badge, distinguishing them from Christians. They were not allowed to buy houses or lands, or to exercise any trade or profession excepting that of medicine. They were given a dwelling-place in the dirtiest, unhealthiest part of the city, and called it a Ghetto, meaning a congregation. It was walled in. The gates were kept by Christian guards, who were paid by the Jews, and opened the doors at dawn, closing them at sunset. The Jews were not allowed to emerge on holidays or feast days, and two barges full of armed men watched them night and day. A special magistracy had charge of their affairs. Their dead were buried in the sand on the seashore. Thither the baser of the Venetians made it a habit to go on Mondays in September, to dance and make merry on the graves. The Jews were made to pay tribute to Venice every third year. In spite of all hardships and deprivations, they flourished. As the Christians became poor, the Jews waxed rich. They were not again expelled from the city. They were never disturbed in their Ghetto by actual ill-treatment and violence, excepting on one occasion, when a charge was brought against them of child murder. So the Jews lived peacefully in their own quarter until, with the advent of modern civilisation, their prison walls crumbled away, and some of them went forth from the Ghetto and fixed their habitations in different parts of the city. Many Jewish families, however, cling to the spot made sacred for them by so much suffering and humiliation. Even to this day, although the Jews are distributed everywhere throughout the length and breadth of Venice, never a Christian comes to dwell in the Ghetto. Very many Jews still live there. Some of the women are handsome, with Oriental grace, delicate, sensitive, highly bred. The only time when the Ghetto has at all a picturesque appearance is the autumn. Then the air is filled with white floating particles, feathers of geese, which seem to be plucked by the whole force of the populace. You see on every doorstep groups of Hebrew youths plucking geese, and on looking into the interior you will observe strings of the birds suspended from the rafters, while an odour of roast goose greets your nostrils wherever you may go. [Illustration: GIUDECCA] HISTORY With her pomp and pageantry, her wealth of art, her learned academies, her schools of painting, and her sumptuous style, Venice at the prime of her life was great, dazzling, splendid. Her navy was supreme. Her nobles were the richest in Europe. This opulence and this pride led to her downfall. She was unable to resist the temptation of building herself an empire on the mainland, thereby causing jealousy among the other Italian States. Rome became fearful of her own safety, and, with the intention of crushing the Republic, formed the League of Cambray. Rome did not achieve her object; but Venice was weakened by the blow, and misfortune after misfortune fell upon her. The passage round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered; which took commercial trade with the East out of her hands, and left her no longer the mart of Europe. Then came the great battles with the Turk, in which both blood and money of Venice flowed in vain. Europe was either powerless or too indifferent to help. Gradually the strength of Venice was broken. She declined and sank. Still, the rigidity and the power of endurance of the Venetian constitution were marvellous. She kept a semblance of life long after the heart had ceased to beat. The constitution of the State was the most elaborate imaginable, and not easily brought to nothing. Nevertheless, although there were occasional flashes of the old brilliancy of Venice, her day was over. The last of her Doges yielded the State to Napoleon without a blow. Laying the ducal biretta on the table, he called to his servants, "Take it away: I shall not use it more." [Illustration: SAN GIORGIO MAGGIORE] When the first refugees came from the mainland and started life on the islands of the Archipelago, the mud-banks of Torcello and Rivoalto, they little thought that they were founding a city which was to be the admiration of the whole world, that her navy would ride supreme in all known waters, that Venice was to be the pride of the Adriatic. When those early people, the Veneti, from whom the Venetians take their name, drove in their first stakes and built their wattled walls, they could not have foretold that this was to be the greatest of mediæval republics, the centre of the commerce of Europe. Nature helped Venice handsomely. Had the channels been deeper, men-of-war might have entered and conquered the city. Had the waves been stronger, the airy structure that we know as Venice would have been supplanted by the ordinary commercial seaport. Had there been no tide, for sanitary reasons the city would have been uninhabitable. Had the tide risen any higher than it rose, there would have been no water entrances to the palaces, the by-canals would have been filled up, and the character of the place spoiled. One's imagination is inclined to run riot in Venice. One gilds, and romances, and fills the city with pomp and pageantry, ornamenting the canals with State barges, the piazza with noble men and fair women, and the Ducal Palace with illustrious Doges. But far more interesting is it to see Venice as she really is, in her own simple strength. Think of the more rugged Venice, that city built by strong and patient men against such terrible odds, and in so wild and solitary a spot. In order to gain some idea of Venice as she was in those early days, it is well to go out in a gondola at low tide, when the canal is a plain of seaweed. As your gondola makes its way down a narrow channel, you have some conception of the difficulties with which the founders of Venice had to contend. To the narrow strips of land, long ridges guarding the lagoon from the sea, ill sheltered from the waves, the few hundred stragglers came. Their capital, Padua, had been destroyed by the northern hordes, and they took shelter in the islands of the lagoon. So desolate and wind-swept were these islands that one can scarcely imagine men disputing possession of them with the flocks of sea-birds. They were impelled by no whim, however: they were exiles driven by necessity. Here they looked for a temporary home, lived much as the sea-birds lived, and were quite fearless. The soil, composed chiefly of dust, ashes, and bitumen, with here and there a layer of salt, was rich and fertile. This was in the fifth century of our era, of which period there are but few Venetian records. [Illustration: OFF THE GIUDECCA] Still, one thing is certain: the Veneti were not a primitive or barbarous people. Fugitives as they were, they were for the most part of high birth and associations. They had character and intelligence. In their mud huts they possessed a social distinction and a political training such as would have graced the most sumptuous of palaces. In quite early days they began to put their heads together and to form a definite system of polity. Year by year the little community was added to. Battle and bloodshed continued on the mainland, and men and women flocked to the islands. It is curious to notice how rank and social distinction assert themselves. Blood will out. Wherever human beings are gathered together, whether on the islands of the Adriatic or on those of the South Seas, and however sorry their plight or great their general misfortune, different grades will become visible. Men and women will place themselves one above the other, the master and the man, the mistress and the maid--such is the law of humanity all the world over. Calamity did not in the long run have much effect upon the higher class of refugees, and the position of the lower classes was not bettered. Sympathy had levelled social distinctions for a time; but that was not for long. Soon, in the natural course of events, when the little colony grew into a city, and the origin of the Veneti had faded almost into a tradition, the various ranks became distinct. True, they lived as sea-birds live, one kind of food common to both, and one kind of house sheltering both; but the poor man and the rich did not live in equality. As the community grew in importance they began to cultivate their islands and to build unto themselves ships. By force of necessity, they became expert in all matters of navigation, as agile on the water as on land, fearless. They acquired a better means of navigation and a wider knowledge of the lagoons than any other State possessed. Then they began to be attacked. With great courage and determination, Venice resisted all her foes--Gothic, Lombard, Byzantine, and Frank. Her position was peculiar, vague. She acknowledged a certain allegiance to the Court of Byzantium; yet by her acts she recognised the supremacy of the kingdoms on the mainland. Neither Byzantium nor Ravenna, and not Padua, could claim the lagoons. Venice was marvellously diplomatic. She drew from East and West exactly what she wanted to make her a nation by herself. While she pretended allegiance to several empires, she was in reality struggling for independence. In the stillness of the lagoon and the freedom of the sea air, the germs of individuality grew and flourished. They had a congenial soil and fitting nutriment. It is wonderfully interesting to watch the progress of the little State--the diplomatic way she went to work: how when she was weak and unable to stand alone she feigned allegiance to a stronger Power, yet never bound herself by written word; how she played one Power against the other; and how in the end, when sufficiently strong, under the shelter of her various foster-mothers, she struck out for freedom boldly. There is a letter from Cassiodorus, Prefect of Theodoric the Great, which throws light upon the relations of Venice with the Goths. Theodoric endeavoured to veil his power over Venice under the guise of alliance or of hospitality. At the time of the famine in 520 he came to their rescue with provisions. This gave him a certain hold over the Venetian people. It imposed upon them a debt which was not to be easily discharged. A letter written by Cassiodorus in 523 is neither more nor less than a demand to the Venetians to bring supplies of oil, wine, and honey, which the islands possessed, to the Goths. The letter, which is of florid style, is one long sneer veiled in delicate flattery. Cassiodorus explains that the Venetians own certain ships, that they are well built, that the sea is an easy path to them; and he begs that the vessels will transport the tributes of Istria to the shores of his country. By this letter one realises that the Venetians had already a reputation as pilots and mariners, and knew well how to thread in and out the channels of the lagoons. Theodoric was a generous and powerful neighbour, and the only homage the Venetians could give the Goths in return was their water service; but they felt their weakness and dependence deeply, and were continually waiting for an opportunity to better their position. Consequently, when the war broke out, after Theodoric's death, between his successors and the Greek Emperor, the Venetians struggled to make themselves of value, and took an active share in the operations. They sided with the Lombards, and conveyed a large reinforcement of Lombard mercenaries to their destination. That was the beginning of their intimate connection with Constantinople. Two churches were erected in commemoration of the services of the islanders. These were built of costly materials, probably obtained from buildings on the mainland which were partially destroyed by the invaders. The Venetians were enabled to transport these treasures in their ships. [Illustration: ST. MARIA DELLA MISERICORDIA] Much to the anger of the Paduans, Venice was growing very rapidly, and was gradually, by sheer competence, absorbing all the coast and river trade. Longinus paid a visit to Venice, begging that she would procure means of transport for his people. This was granted; but he endeavoured to force the Venetians to accept the suzerainty of his master, which was immediately refused in a grand and sovereign manner. The Venetians declared that, amid much toil and labour, and in the face of many hardships from Hun, Vandal, Goth, and Lombard, God had helped and protected them in order that they might continue to live in the watery marshes. They proudly stated that this group of islands was an ideal habitation, and that no power of emperor or prince should take it from them. It was impossible to attack them, they maintained, unless by the sea; and of that they were assured masters. This reception must have impressed Longinus. In place of a weak little State requiring the protection of his country, he found the Venetians a fierce and self-reliant people. He could obtain only a very vague promise from the diplomatic Venetians. They would acknowledge the Emperor as overlord, they said, but only on their word of honour: they would take no oath of fealty. Still, the rule of the Lombard over Venice was of longer duration than that of any other State. A great trouble beset Venice at about this period. When the first settlers began work on the islands, each little group had a separate life, its people retaining as far as possible the customs, the religion, and the constitution of their ruined homes on the mainland. The largest townships which sprang up on the Lido were Heraclea, Jesolo, and Malamocco. These gradually grew together into a federation of twelve communes, each governed by its own tribune; and the tribunes had regularly a general assembly for the settlement of such business as affected the common interests of the lagoon. Jealousy and civil feuds, however, sprang up among the islanders, as one after another endeavoured to acquire supremacy. Heraclea tried to take the lead, and to destroy Jesolo; but she in her turn was attacked, and razed to the ground, by Malamocco. The civil trouble well-nigh caused the destruction of Venice. The tribunes intrigued; family rose against family, clan against clan; and there was terrible bloodshed. For nearly two years and a half the Republic was in anarchy. The constitutional evil sapped the general prosperity, obstructed trade and industries, and brought property to havoc. Had it continued much longer, the people would have frittered their strength away in private quarrels, and the State of Venice might never have emerged; but pressure from the mainland was brought to bear on Venice, and it became necessary for the various committees to consolidate as one body and sweep away the perils that were confronting them. The Lombards were becoming bolder and bolder. The Monarchy grew and grew, and at last the Republic of Venice feared that it might desire to add the islands of the Adriatic to its dominions. [Illustration: THE CUSTOM HOUSE AND CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE] This awoke Venice from lethargy. It was the peril of the sea that formed and completed her. The pressure was very severe. East and West were beginning to ask her very plainly to choose on which side and under whose protection she intended to place herself, and they did not intend to wait long for an answer. Venice, subtle and diplomatic, put off the evil hour as long as she possibly could; but her policy became obvious soon. She could no longer feign fealty first to one Empire and then to another, and meanwhile struggle for independence. The time had come for action. The critical moment was at hand. Either she must put herself under protection of the East or of the West, or declare her independence. Any course was dangerous, perhaps fatal. Out of the three possible issues, Venice chose the most perilous, severing herself from both East and West. The result was fortunate. Thrown upon her own resources, she saved herself by energy. King Pippin invited Venice to join in a war. Venice refused, and prepared to defend herself, trusting in the courage of her men and the intricacy of the lagoon. From north and south King Pippin could concentrate his forces upon Venice, and victory seemed easy; but he had forgotten the natural defences of the sea-bound city. He did not know the shoals and deeps of the sea home. A life's study would scarcely have taught him. A certain noble assumed the lead of the Venetian people. He commanded them to remove their wives, children, and goods to a little island in mid lagoon--Rialto, impregnable from land or sea. This done, the fighting men took up positions on the outlying islands, and awaited the attack of the Franks. Pippin seized on Brondolo, Chioggia, and Palestrina, and tried to press his squadron on to the capital; but the shoals stopped him. His ships ran aground; his pilots missed the channels; and the Venetians pelted them with darts and stones. For six months Pippin struggled; but the Venetians kept him at bay by their network of canals and their oozy mud-banks. They shook off every assault. In the summer there came a rumour that an Eastern fleet was approaching. Pippin tried one more appeal to the Venetians, begging them to own themselves his subjects. "For are you not within the borders of my kingdom?" he said. "We are resolved to be the subjects of the Roman Emperor," they answered, "and not of you." The King was forced to retire. This great victory seemed to have the effect of consolidating the Venetians effectively. They agreed thenceforward to work together for the common cause. War had completed the union of Venice. She had emerged from her trial an independent State. There was no more internal discord. Venetian men and Venetian lagoons had made and saved the State. The spirit of the waters, free, vigorous, and pungent, had passed during the strife into the being of the people. [Illustration: AT CHIOGGIA] This triumph was really the birth hour of Venice, and the people look back upon it with joy. The victory over King Pippin is cherished to this day as one of the finest events in history. The Venetians realised the peril of the sea from this attack. Also they realised the peril of the mainland from the Hunnish invasion. They then effected a compromise, and chose as the future home of their State a group of islands mid-way between the sea and the land, then known as Rialto, but thenceforth to bear the proud name of Venice. Venice in this union of her people declared her nature, so infinitely various, rich, pliant, and free, that to this day she awakens and in some measure satisfies a passion such as we feel for some person deeply beloved. Her people then struggled to attain from infancy to manhood. For the first time they had learned their own power, and union gave them strength. They began to create their Constitution, that singular monument of rigidity and durability which endured, with hardly a break in its structure, for ten centuries. They built with vigour and enthusiasm that incomparably lovely city of the sea. The aristocracy of Venice emerged. Her empire extended, following the lines of her commerce, in the East. St. Mark was substituted for St. Theodore as patron saint. The crusades were used as a means to conquer Dalmatia, and to plant the lion in the Greek Archipelago. Venice clashed with Genoa, and emerged victorious. Wealth flowed into her State coffers and her private banks. The island of Rialto proved the advantage of its situation, and established a claim for gratitude as the asylum of Venice in her hour of need. The Venetians had seen that the mainland was unsafe, and the attack of Pippin showed that there was danger on the sea. Thus, experience leading to the choice of the middle point, in 810 the seat of the Government was removed to Rialto under Angelo Badoer as Doge. Rialto became a sacrament of reconciliation between Heraclea and Malamocco. It was the glory of Venice that of all parts of Italy she alone remained unscathed by the foreign ravages of the fifth century and the conquest of the eighth. Venice alone was left out of all Italy's ruin. She alone escaped pure and undefiled. [Illustration: CHURCH OF SAN GEREMIA] This marvellous period of her history--the repulses of the Franks and the creation of her State--requires no embellishments; yet the Venetians loved to gather a mythology of persons and events. Cannon-balls of bread, they say, were fired into the Frankish camp in mockery of Pippin's hope of strong Rialto surrendering. Then, again, there are the stories of the old woman who lured the invader to his final effort when half his forces were lost; of the canal Orfano, which ran with foreign blood, and won its name from the countless Frankish hordes that day made desolate; of the sword of Charles, which was flung into the sea when the Emperor acknowledged his repulse and cried, "As this my brand sinks out of sight, nor ever shall rise again, so let all thoughts of conquering Venice fade from out men's hearts, or they will feel, as I have felt, the heavy displeasure of God." All these stories were absolutely untrue; but they were born of a pardonable pride. The Venetians held their country in a singularly powerful devotion. Possibly this was because they were so closely shut in on these few little islands, precious morsels of land snatched from the devouring sea. Certain it is that they toiled for the State as no other nation has toiled before or since. They were determined that Venice should be great, that she should be beautiful; and century after century of Venetians devoted their lives to this work, sinking their own interests in hers. The Republic was before everything. Wherever one goes in Florence, one finds traces of great and famous men of all periods and of all crafts--painters, poets, writers, statesmen,--in every square, in every street, you are reminded of them; their spirits and their works live with you wherever you may go. But in Venice, where are they? There is the city--yes: there is that; and there are the archives, the annals of the city, histories without number, marvellous histories;--but the familiar figures, the great men that we honour and look for,--they are not here. Venice herself was the centre of all their aspirations, all their affections. She was erected as would be a treasure-heap: all the choicest and all the best were there. One knows but little, for example, of the great painters--the men, with beautiful thoughts, who filled the churches and the palaces with untold splendour, glowing sunshine. Their works are left, and their names; but no more. It seems as if they must have kept one another down, that Venice alone might shine. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS AND STRAW BRIDGE] If one wishes to study the history of Venice, there is no difficulty. Historic documents without number are accessible. Every period, every vogue, every year, is carefully studied and commented upon by keen observers, men of the greatest talents. These records glow with life and energy. In quite early days, when the Republic was in its infancy,--when there was no aristocracy, no great and powerful State,--even the fishermen and the merchants and the salt manufacturers had a longing to chronicle the doings of the community. The palaces which were being built, and the churches,--all these they wished to have chronicled for ever. Numberless historians there were, and all nameless--men of extraordinary skill and genius. Embellishments and fables abound; but on the whole these histories, written with great realism, bring back a vivid picture of the State. No Venetian ever tires, ever did tire, of the history of his country. It is the one subject that is of endless interest to him. The trade of Venice, her ceremonies, her treaties, her money, the speeches of her orators--all are chronicled. [Illustration: ON THE GRAND CANAL] Venice was looked upon by Italy very much as we look upon America. She had no long and glorious history--at least, no history of anything beyond handicraft--no literature, no ancient manuscripts. The Florentines, on the other hand, had a great enthusiasm for ancient history. They were proud of their descent, and gloried in looking back to a long Etruscan civilisation. When one visits Florence, there is no difficulty in gathering knowledge concerning her great men of any period. Their shadows walk in her streets; their memories will never fade. You meet them everywhere--the painters, the monks, the gallants, the statesmen,--the individualities of the men who were the makers of Florence. The Venetians had no sympathy with the Florentines. They could not understand the Florentine desire to live with the past rather than the present. There are very few names which stand out prominently in the history of Venice, names concerning which a great deal is known; but there are one or two stories that are picturesque and popular, stories which are ever fresh to the Venetians. One is of a prince, the beheaded Doge Marino Faliero,--not at all an important incident in Venetian history, but one that is very dear to the hearts of the people, because of its melancholy. The prince was a man of hasty temper and haughty nature, and could brook no slight to his dignity. Once a bishop kept him waiting, and that worthy, for his misdemeanour, received, to the astonishment of everyone, a sound box on the ear. Before he came to the throne, Faliero was of great service to the State. He was offered the throne of Venice at the age of seventy-six, and married a young and beautiful woman. The story runs that a young gallant called Michele Steno, having been turned out of her presence, insulted the lady and her husband by pinning an impudent message to the chair of the Doge. The young man was brought before the "Forty," excused on the plea of his age and impetuosity, condemned to prison for two months, and banished from Venice for a year afterwards. This slight punishment for so grave an offence stung Faliero to the quick. He felt that, though he occupied the Venetian throne, he had scarcely more power than the beggar at his gate. All his life he had been an active, energetic man, a ruler of men; his word had been law, and his counsels listened to with respect and acted upon. Now he was powerless. He was insulted by the young nobles, and had no power to punish them; his authority was entirely disregarded. This state of things grew worse and worse. Two of his old friends also were insulted by noblemen. At last Faliero's temper could endure no longer. In the April of 1355 he formed a conspiracy, and tried to assert his supremacy. Six months after his triumphant arrival in Venice as Doge, an old man and friendless, enraged at the insults offered to him, he struck one mad and foolish blow for freedom. The plot was betrayed on the eve of the catastrophe. The conspirators were strung up in one long ghastly line on the piazza. Faliero himself was beheaded at the foot of the stairs where a few short months before he had sworn the _promissione_ on assuming the office of Doge. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS] A GLIMPSE INTO BOHEMIA On one occasion we arrived at Venice early in the morning. I was frightened at the darkness and the stillness, and the tall black houses looming high above us: it seemed that brigands must be lurking there, ready to murder us. Absolute silence reigned, except for mysterious sounds as if melodious voices were calling a refractory dog--"Puppy," "Puppy," "Puppy," we heard on every side. It was the warning of the gondoliers as they passed one another in the darkness. I longed for some accustomed natural noise. If only something would fall and make a splash! The silence set one's nerves on edge. We hired a gondola, and glided swiftly and silently out into the darkness, our gondolier's ringing voice joining the chorus of "Puppy." And so dexterously did he handle his dainty craft that, even as we turned corners and passed other gondolas in the pitch-black darkness, not a sound was made, not a splash. I felt like beating the water with the palms of my hands to make a disturbance. This silent gliding went on for about twenty minutes, until suddenly we drew up by an enormous silver-grey palace down a side canal, one of the largest palaces in Venice, with broad marble steps and badly-made deal doors. After some time the doors were opened, and an old lady appeared, bowing and talking in rapid Italian. She led us up the steps and through a colossal hall of marble, all marble, with staircases on either side leading on to spacious landings, into a suite of rooms that seemed more like the state apartments of a king than those of an ordinary hotel. One of the first things I did when I awoke in the morning was to get out on to the roof of the palace and look about me. I always ask to be directed on to the roof when I arrive at a new place. And there I remained the whole morning, painting, deaf to the pleadings of my friends that I should come down and eat. It was the chimneys that fascinated me! From the decorative standpoint they were quite startling. Chimneys, chimneys, everywhere, and such chimneys--grouped into pictures in every direction! There were clusters of twos, and clusters of threes; and wherever there were spaces that could be used for decoration they were used to the full. Each one of these chimneys seemed to have its own particular character. Some bulged out at the top in graceful lines; some were square and stolid; others were light and airy. At the base of some bloomed a blaze of flowers from the roof gardens. Each one was different. When I learned that a book had been published on the chimneys of Venice I was not in the least surprised. [Illustration: PALACE IN A BY-CANAL] When my friends were able to tear me away from chimneys we got into our gondola and allowed the gondolier to take us where he pleased, to drift about in the by-canals. I wanted my impressions of Venice to be quite haphazard. We glided in the gondola past marble palaces--green palaces, pink palaces, blue palaces, all toned and variegated with age. Venice struck me as being a highly-coloured city, the most brilliantly coloured I had ever seen. It was not, as most cities are, merely a background for brightly-dressed figures: the buildings themselves were coloured, and the gondolas and the figures were black and sombre. Every wall, every doorway, was coloured. We glided past a series of crazy old doorways of blues, greens, and vermilions. Each door was broken with many changes of colour, and the red, rusty ironwork above, just where it caught the sun, was of a rich golden sienna. Certainly Venice is the most highly-coloured city in the world. How different from the impressions one finds in Bond Street--the vicious water-colours in which the artist always insists on orange and vermilion sails and crisp, flowing reflections that have been painted on slanting tables: the water-colours that are so sought after and so saleable! That Venice is vividly coloured I admit; but there is a scumble over the city. Age has toned it. The pink palace reflected in the green water is totally unlike the pink palace of the blobby water-colours. There are blues, and violets, and old-rose tones, and a certain bloom in it that these artists never seem to give. And to a certain extent these pictures handicap one: one feels annoyed to think that Venice should be so caricatured. You see the Bridge of Sighs at daybreak; you see the Salute by moonlight; and somehow you cannot forget these eternal water-colours. There is a certain resemblance, sufficient to irritate. [Illustration: THE ORANGE DOOR] Indolence was upon us. Already we were becoming apathetic. There was something about the atmosphere that encouraged a delightful languor. The residents said it was the sirocco. The sirocco seemed answerable for many deficiencies: it was always being blamed. Later, when we came in touch with the artists, we found that it was the normal excuse for not working. We discovered groups of them sitting about in the square drinking, and when we asked them if they had done any work they all said, "No: there is a sirocco on now: of course, we can't work." Venice is overrun with artists; yet how few you see at work! Here and there you will find a stray one in a gondola painting, but very rarely. We were drifting about idly. Our gondolier was quite a part of the picture--young, very handsome, with a musical voice. And I began in a dreamy way to muse as I watched him. My thoughts went back for the moment to the Thames--to an old gentleman toiling in a punt. He was once a handsome young gondolier like this one, gracefully piloting a gondola through the canals of Venice; but now he had grown old on the Thames. There is no doubt that the gondola is made for Venice: it is futile to try it elsewhere. And then the colour is right. The gondola ought to be black. It became so naturally and as a matter of economy. People used to spend too much money on their gondolas, and colours had to be forbidden. I was in a dreamy mood, and I began to wonder what became of the handsome young gondoliers--they were all handsome and all young. They could not remain so for ever. What became of the old ones? I soon learnt. When gondoliers grew to be too old for their tasks they drifted on to the landing-stages. There we saw them, with marvellous crooks, catching the gondolas and drawing them into the proper places. I examined these sticks, and was surprised to find that some of them were of very great value. The gondolier prizes and decorates his stick just as a bootblack tends his stand: only, where the bootblack has coppers and bits of tinsel, the Venetian has pure gold coins dating back to the time of the Doges. This love of collecting and cherishing beautiful things is characteristic of the peasant people of Venice. Women will spend their savings in inches of gold chain, which they join together into long strings, and sometimes a woman will have festoons of gold chain collected for two or three generations. It is their way of investing money. We drifted along all the afternoon through the canals, being hooked on to different landing-stages by these old gentlemen; and we came to the conclusion that this was really the end of our handsome gondolier. We were anxious to meet the artists of Venice, and had been told of a certain restaurant, the Panada, where they generally congregated. In the evening, then, we landed, and went thither to dine. The artists who went to the Panada, we had been told, were those who had "let themselves go" more or less--who had been taken hold of by the sirocco and had settled down to loafing. When they first arrived in Venice they went to wine-shops, little dark places, and dined off macaroni and harsh drink. The Panada was more or less organised for the convenience of artists. In the first place, you were not bored by having to tip waiters--a duty that is always trying to an artist who is in between two exhibitions. And nearly all the Panada artists were in that condition. They had nearly all had exhibitions in Bond Street which had been "great artistic successes"--in other words, they hadn't sold any pictures. Another point about the Panada that appealed to the artist was that his bills could run on indefinitely. The bills did run: in fact, the only things that seemed to be at all active in Venice, in spite of the sirocco, were the bills. The Panada was a paradise! Who could resist it? The cooking was excellent, as cooking must always be where painters are, for they are very particular people. The Panada was perfect; the Panada had a sanded floor; the Panada was the noisiest restaurant in Italy. It was our first experience of Bohemia, the painter's world, in Venice; and we sat there, over our untouched dinner, fascinated--fascinated by the general noise and confusion, fascinated even by the unsavoury smells. It was not clean; there was a great deal of smoke, and so much talk! The guests seemed to be screaming and talking at once in all the languages of the world. Two words I heard continually--"breadth" and "simplicity." Here and there was a little talk of "mediums" and "technique," but not much. It was generally broad principles that were discussed. There was no mistaking these groups of men. They were artists to their finger-tips in everything save work. They dressed like artists, talked like artists, and behaved like the artists one reads about in novels: the Ouida artists. They wore neckties reaching down to their waists, collars two sizes too large and cut very low; their hands were always a little soiled, and their finger-nails never quite clean. The waiters also were soiled. They were very toney indeed, and very apathetic--toes turned inwards, heads bent slightly forward. They were dejected from want of variety: there was no uncertainty in the Panada as to tips. They came in on the aggregate and received lump sums; but there was a general depression about the people that waited. All were soiled at the Panada--the waiters, the artists, and the linen. But we very soon began to talk of this dirt as tone, and then it didn't seem to matter so much. Everything seemed to be worked on more or less artistic principles. There were quaint decorative dishes. The puddings were pink; the butter was stained; and altogether it required great habits to enjoy food at the Panada. By perseverance, I was told, it was possible to acquire an appetite. There were tables of different sizes, and groups of artists belonging to different sects--some antagonistic, some sympathetic: Dottists, and Spottists, and Stripists. Sometimes when the Dottists and Spottists happened to be friends for the minute they would join their tables together and make one long one. But this was only now and then. Usually the groups in the Panada were formed of twos. Often genius sat alone. Now and then, when a big picture was sold, the restaurant was very festive: the artist had a dinner-party, to which everyone had been invited. But generally it was a small water-colour that was sold, and the party went off to a small café down by a side canal. There was one man who got himself up to look like King Charles, and he was King Charles to the life! Long hair rested on his shoulders, and an enormous tie adorned his neck; his trousers and waistcoat were fringed, and his boots and beard were pointed. He had a coat of velvet that through age had become marked with an opalescent mottle. If he stood in front of an age-toned palace you never knew which was coat and which was palace. He possessed no earthly goods, but paid his way all over the world by painting portraits. He would either cut you out in black paper for fivepence or draw an elaborate portrait in pastel for one franc fifty. This celebrated man came up to us, and began to paint our portraits. Before we knew where we were he had cut out, dry-pointed, and stippled us; and melted away, leaving behind him a whole tableful of works of art, side by side with his bill. Then another man introduced himself to us, and explained that this was quite the usual thing for "King Charles" to do. He pointed out how romantic and interesting it all was: he seemed quite convinced that the place was full of romance. [Illustration: AN UNFREQUENTED CANAL] For us Bohemia had lost its romance. We felt that we had been green, grass-green, and that (to use a vulgarism) the gilt was off the gingerbread. The room was becoming stuffy; the Bohemians were noisy and dishonest; and the waiters, no longer toney, were dirty. So we paid our own bill and "King Charles's," and left the Panada and romance for the open air. In the piazza the band was playing the popular music that one knows so well from the barrel organs. Instinctively one thought of London, Soho, and performing monkeys. But this impression was swept away when I saw the picture that presented itself before me in St. Mark's. What an extraordinary change had come over the piazza since dinner! A swarm of locusts might have settled upon Venice--a dark, seething mass, clustering round the walls of St. Mark's and filling up every inch of space. They were pilgrims from Russia, thousands of them--men, women, and children--on their way to Rome--poor peasants who had saved up for this pilgrimage during their whole lifetime, sleeping the sleep of the righteous, their bodies pressed close against the holy walls of St. Mark's as though for sympathy. It was a dark-coloured crowd, all dressed in black, with big capes and long boots and little astrachan caps,--a strong silhouette of black against the brilliant background of St. Mark's. It was a marvellous picture, and pathetic. These peasants seemed to be waiting for a greater, deeper joy, when they would be transformed to new creatures and fly back to their native land on the wings of a beautiful faith. The moon herself shone down upon them caressingly, lighting up many a weary, travel-worn face, turning their sombre hues to silvers, and greens, and violets. St. Mark's, with this dark mass of people at her base, seemed almost flippant by contrast. [Illustration: ST. MARK'S BASIN] This was a night of contrasts! The dirt and filth of the little restaurant, with its noisy Bohemians: and then the quiet night, a clear, bright, silvery blue night such as one only sees in Venice; the weary pilgrims and the sumptuous cathedral; the dainty lightness and gracefulness of St. Mark's and the broad, simple, strong tower rearing her head into the sky--the Campanile, now, alas! no more than a memory. It was a picture such as you see but once in a lifetime. This building of precious stones, one of the most beautiful in the world, so rich with gold and mosaic, jewels, marbles, and lapis lazuli, that even in the cold blue light of the moon and a few dim gas-lamps it seemed to be dancing and sparkling with colour,--this, and the sleeping peasants in their rags--what a contrast! Then, again, what a contrast suddenly to turn from these dark groups to the jewellers' shops and the huge windows full of glittering Venetian glass! To see the gaily-dressed crowds sipping their coffee outside Florian's famous café that had never been closed during three hundred years! Here was nothing but brightness and gaiety. An excellent band played in the middle of the piazza. Smartly-dressed young men and military officers in pale blue uniform strolled about the square, quite conscious that they were being regarded favourably by girls and their mothers sitting at the coffee-tables. Florian's was an ideal place for the artist. It was never shut. It was quite the fashionable thing to drink coffee there after dinner, and one had the chance of talking to one's friends and acquaintances. Fascinating fruits were brought round to us--grapes, and figs, and almonds dipped in caramel sugar and stuck on to sticks. The men smoked cigars as long as those smoked in Burma. So capacious were they that they put them on little stoves in the way a woman heats her curling-tongs, and by the time they had drunk their coffee the cigars were probably alight. When the band had stopped playing we went to Bauer's to drink beer. And so ended a typical day in the life of an artist in that most fascinating city on the waters. [Illustration: HOTEL DANIELI] Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Bozzi, the manager of the well-known Danieli's Hotel, who often piloted me about the intricate network of streets, I became familiar with many of the unfrequented quarters, which, as a rule, remain absolutely unknown to the tourist. [Illustration: PORTA DELLA CARTA] ARCHITECTURE In architecture one finds a history of Venice. It is the most definite expression, the most faithful embodiment, of the local genius. It presents realistically the daily life and thought and work of a bygone race. The intense love of the early Venetians for colour shows itself in the gleaming gold, the veined marble, and the white sculpture. Another of their affections is symbolised by the frequent introduction of children in the sculptured works. There are children of all periods, of all appearances, illustrating various of the changes in thought and in ideals that were continually coming to pass. Those of the earlier time are sturdy, strapping youngsters, with a purposeful look about them; whereas the children of the fifteenth century are fat, chubby, and uninteresting. In the early stage of her history Venice was a Greek rather than an Italian city, and her buildings were of Byzantine type. That is easily explained. During her first great period Venice was connected by sea with Constantinople and the East, but cut off by the lagoons and marshes from Lombardy and the rest of Italy. Only a few of the Byzantine buildings remain. The period is principally marked by the precious stones and coloured marbles encrusted in the brickwork, and by the ancient reliefs inserted in the blank walls of churches and houses. Among Byzantine buildings St. Mark's comes first. The existing building began to be constructed at the close of the tenth century; and Byzantine architects worked at it for nearly a hundred years. It was largely remodelled afterwards, and was altered in decoration during the different reactions of architecture; but the bulk of it belongs to the early period, and is in the pure Byzantine style. Parts of it remind one greatly of St. Sophia in Constantinople, on the lines of which, I believe, St. Mark's was partially modelled. There were many Gothic additions in the shape of pinnacles and pointed gables above the chief arches, just sufficient intrusion of the Gothic element to add a touch of bizarre extravagance; and in the sixteenth century many of the old mosaics were superseded by jejeune Renaissance compositions, of no decorative value, incongruous with the general scheme. Nevertheless, the church as a whole, as I have said, still remains essentially Byzantine. The main fabric of the façade represents the original Byzantine Romanesque building, and is in almost every particular similar to the picture of the church given in the thirteenth-century mosaic. The turreted pinnacles and the false gables are Gothic additions of the fifteenth century--merely screens of decoration with no roof behind. The building is truly Oriental. In the shape of a Greek cross with four equal arms, it faces west, and has a high altar and a presbytery at the east end. It was first of all the domestic chapel of the Doge's Palace, and then the shrine of the body of St. Mark the Evangelist. Everywhere one sees the motto, "Pax tibi, Marce, Evangelista mea" ("Peace to thee, Mark, my Evangelist"). There are the symbols of all the four evangelists,--Luke, a bull; Mark, a lion; John, an eagle; Matthew, an angel. There are scenes from the life of Christ--the Adoration of the Magi and Annunciation to the shepherds. [Illustration: GRAND CANAL LOOKING TOWARDS THE DOGANA] Venice in the Byzantine period must have been a city of great architectural wealth and splendour,--far in advance of other Italian towns, although, of course, destitute of the engineering glories of France and Germany. One can tell this by the few remaining Byzantine palaces,--very few of them are purely Byzantine. There is the magnificent Palazzo Loredan, one of the most beautiful of all the palaces on the Grand Canal, and a splendid example of the Byzantine Romanesque period. It has about it a distinct tinge of Oriental feeling; the capitals of some of the columns are exquisitely beautiful, and there are not many Gothic alterations. Next to this palace comes the Palazzo Farsetti, Romanesque of the twelfth century, simpler in style and with less ornamentation. It is really more nearly pure Romanesque than Byzantine, and shows no Oriental influence whatever. It is graceful and dignified. The "Fondaco dei Turchi," a very early Byzantine Romanesque palace, assumed its name in the seventeenth century, when it was let to the Turkish merchants of Venice. Originally a twelfth-century palace, it has recently been so much restored as to have lost all its air of antiquity and the greater part of its earlier interest, although it still represents symbolically the splendid homes of the Byzantine period. It is much like St. Mark's, and is the only surviving example of a building all in one style. The arches, the capitals, the shafts, the parapets and decorative plaques, are modernised, to be sure; but they are typical if not original, and give one a very good idea of what the Grand Canal must have been like before the invasion of the Gothic style and the Renaissance. [Illustration: A FAMOUS PALAZZO] One gleans a very good idea by means of these palaces of how extremely civilised and peaceful Venice must have been at that early period. In northern Europe the homes of mediæval nobles were dark and gloomy castles built mainly for defence, having single heavy oak doors studded with nails, and great iron gates and drawbridges; there were no openings in the ground floors, and the windows above were small and grated. For Venice such fortifications were unnecessary. Her palaces were airy and graceful; for she was protected from the outside by her moat of lagoons, and from the inside by her strong internal Government. These ancient buildings, the "Fondaco dei Turchi" and the rest, were even then gentlemen's palaces, always open and undefended, the homes of pleasure, with free means of access, broad arcades, plenty of light, and presenting a general air of peace and security. It is interesting to notice the later Venetian architecture (as exhibited in the Libreria and the Procuratie Vecchie), developed from this early open and airy style. The native Venetian ideal seems to have traversed all styles, and persisted through them all in spite of endless architectural changes. The Grand Canal was the street of the nobles--the finest street in the world, in the way of architectural beauties. From end to end there are palaces of all periods, from the Byzantine time to the eighteenth century, and all are palaces of the ancient Venetian nobility. The Grand Canal is to Venice what the Strand is to London and the Rue St. Honoré to Paris. It is the most wonderful street in the world. There is nothing so bizarre, so fairy-like, to be seen in any other city through the length and breadth of the globe. It is a marvellous book wherein every family of the Venetian nobility has signed its name. Every wall tells a story; every house is a palace; each was erected by some well-known architect. Pietro Lombardo, Scamozzi, Sansovino, Sammichele (the Veronese), Selva, Vissenti--these were the men who drew the plans and directed the construction of the houses; but unknown architects of the Middle Ages built some of the most picturesque. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE GRAND CANAL] There were palaces of all styles. After a palace of the Renaissance comes one belonging to the Middle Ages in Gothic Arab style, much like the Ducal Palace, with balconies, lancet windows, and trefoils. Then there will be a palace adorned with great plaques or medallions of differently coloured marbles; anon a great bare sweep of rose-toned wall. All styles are here--Byzantine, Saracen, Lombard, Gothic, Roman, Greek, and Rococo--fanciful capitals, Greek cupolas, mosaic and bas-relief, classic severity combined with the elegant fantasy of the Renaissance. It is a gallery open to the sky, full of the art of seven or eight centuries. Think of the genius and money and talent expended on this one street by brilliant artists and munificent patrons! The Grand Canal was originally one of the navigable channels by whose aid the waters found their way, through the mud-banks, past the mouth of the Lido to the open sea. It is the original deep water which first created Venice. Up this canal the commerce of all countries used to reach the city in the days of her splendour. The Rialto, the most beautiful bridge in Venice, bestrides the canal in a single span. It was built by Antonio da Ponte. There are two rows of shops upon it; and one of the most picturesque scenes in the Grand Canal lies round about it--old houses with platformed roofs, bulging balconies, and stairways with disjointed steps. It is interesting to watch how Byzantine architecture gave place to Gothic when Venice began to conquer on the Italian mainland. Thus Gothic architecture came in, and the conquest of Padua and Verona completed it. The term "Gothic" is very elastic; but there are certain points by which one can tell whether a building is Gothic or not. It is Gothic if the roof rises in a steep gable high above the walls; if the principal windows and doors have pointed arches and gables; if it has a steep roof; if the arches are foliated--that is to say, if the shapes of different leaves are cut into the stone to form a species of delicate tracery like lacework, letting in the daylight. Foliation is especially characteristic of Gothic architecture; some of the windows in Westminster Abbey are foliated. Gothic architecture is very rough and loose and irregular; yet it has a wonderful tenderness and variation of design. Changeableness and variety are the great requirements of perfect architecture. One should be enabled to derive just as much pleasure and instruction from looking at a perfect piece of architecture as from reading one of the finest of classic books. Gothic architecture is essentially truthful and naturalistic. The architects of this period were peculiarly fond of vegetation, which is a sign of gentleness and refinement of mind. Gothic is principally independent. It juts out continually with many pinnacles; there is nothing broad, or uniform, or smooth, about a Gothic building; it is variable, rough, and jutting, though, nevertheless, graceful in the extreme. The materials were rougher then than in the time of the Byzantine architecture, and to atone for this it was necessary to introduce much workmanship. [Illustration: PANORAMA SEEN FROM ST. MARK'S BASIN] The artists were enthusiastic in their love of Nature, and felt deeply all her changing and complex moods. For example, you may see the difference between a Renaissance and a Gothic palace by imagining the surroundings of the former, its background, gone. It would then be deprived of its charm; whereas if you took a Gothic palace and placed it anywhere, it would still be beautiful. The Ducal Palace expresses the Gothic spirit to perfection. It was the great work of Venice at this period. The best architects, the best labourers, and the best painters were employed in beautifying it. At one time the palace fell into decay, and it was obvious to everyone that it should be rebuilt and enlarged. But the alteration would be extremely expensive. Therefore a law was passed preventing anyone suggesting such alterations unless he had previously paid one thousand ducats to the State. At last a man arose who cared not for the thousand ducats, and suggested the necessary alterations. The palace was then rebuilt. It was palace, prison, senate-house, and office of public business, all in one. There were thirty-six great pillars supporting the lower stories alone, all decorated in the richest possible manner. There was no end to the fantasies of the sculptors at that period--exquisite curves, studied outlines, graceful but complex, solid and strong and beautifully proportioned braided work; lilies and flowers of all kinds intertwined. Much of the sculpture is snow-white, with gold as a background; some of it has glass mosaic let into the hollows. The cross is used a good deal; also the peacock, the vine, the dove. [Illustration: THE DOGANA AND SALUTE] The palace of Semitecolo has some beautiful early-Gothic windows, having false cusps in the arches, so as to make the head a trefoil. One sees here the gradual growth of the arch until it culminates in the Doge's Palace type. There are beautiful balustrades to the balconies, original and belonging to the period. In the early-Gothic palaces one notices a certain softening of the angles--that is to say, in the fine fourteenth-century Gothic buildings. The early Gothic architecture has no cusps to the arches; it shows a transitional form between Venetian Romanesque and Venetian Gothic. There are first-floor arcades early-Gothic, with a somewhat Oriental curve in the arch derived by the early Venetian Gothics from Alexandria or Cairo. The capitals of the columns are characteristic of the period: there are dainty balconies with graceful, slender columns, and cusps to the arches. These Gothic palaces were built by a people who were laborious, brave, practical, and prudent; yet they had great ideas of the refinement of domestic life, and the Gothic palaces remain to-day much the same as when they were newly built--marble balconies, great strong sweeps of delicate-looking tracery, clustered arches. It is the Gothic window that is so perfect, so strong,--built, too, with material that was by no means good. There is so much rivalry, vanity, dishonesty, in the present day, that houses are badly and cheaply built; even in the best of them, bad iron and inferior plaster are used. How many of them, I should like to know, will be standing fifty years hence? Mr. Ruskin is much against our modern windows and the manner in which they are quickly constructed out of bad materials, and the bricks all placed one on top of the other slanting anyhow. The doors of Gothic palaces are all semicircular above. At one time the name of the family was placed over the entrance, and a prayer inserted for their safety and prosperity,--also a blessing for the stranger who should pass the threshold. Inside the houses there is always a large court round which all the various rooms circle, with a beautiful outside staircase supported on pointed arches with coned parapets and projecting landing-places. In the court there is always a well of marble superbly sculptured. [Illustration: PALAZZO CONTARINI DEGLI SCRIGNI] The centres of the early Renaissance architecture were Florence, Milan, and Venice. Venice is the only city in which important examples of all three periods of the Renaissance are to be found--the early period, the culminating period, and the period of decay. The Renaissance found better expression in Venice than elsewhere in Italy. In fact, when Florence and Rome had entered upon quite another period, Venice continued it for fully twenty-five years longer. The Venetians were ambitious, exceedingly so; and this ambition was a source of great trouble to the rest of Italy. The balance of power seemed, in their opinion, to be weighing too heavily in the direction of the Queen of the Adriatic; and the peace of the peninsula, they felt, was not by any means assured. The greatest period for Venice was at the end of the fifteenth century, when she had conquered all the land about her from Padua nearly to Milan, and seawards to Dalmatia and Crete. In the market-places of Padua, Vicenza, Verona, and Brescia, the Lion of St. Mark was set up as a sign of the subjugation. Even now one can trace the influence of Venice upon the art of these various places. But the Venetians certainly learnt a great deal from the people whom they conquered. Other influences were brought to bear upon Venetian architecture--as, for example, the Lombardi family, who probably belonged to some part of Lombardy. Venice seems at this time to have gathered unto herself many fine suggestions from the rest of Italy. In fact, Venice absorbed talent from the rest of the world. In quite early days she adopted Byzantine and Arabic architecture; then, in the sixteenth century, she took unto herself the art of the Milanese, who enriched the city with their work. A truly Renaissance building did not appear in Venice until sixty years after the first was erected in Florence, and then, strangely, it had little of the Florentine character. This, after all, is not extraordinary when one comes to think of the bitter war between Florence and Venice in 1467. She took her style of architecture from the countries which she had conquered and naturalised, such as the district of Lombardy; and in her turn she influenced them. The adoption of the Greek forms of Roman architecture which originated in Florence gradually spread and reached Venice; but the Venetians did not struggle, as did the Florentines, to revive and purify Roman architecture. Simply the tendency of the general taste inclined in that direction, and gave to their own Venetian forms of architecture a certain classic air. In the general form of the work of this period one cannot detect the classical influence; but, if you examine into it carefully, you will notice in small details, such as a capital, that some classical subject has been introduced in place of the usual symbolical one. You will also detect in purely Gothic composition signs of the new art influence. For example, in the mouldings there is an introduction of cupids among the foliage, and all the strange fables and gods of the heathen are represented there. This was the period when people were becoming more learned. Later, buildings were erected on purely classical lines; yet they still kept to the Gothic arch. Bartolomeo Buono of Bergamo was one of the greatest architects of his time. In 1520 the work of another architect was noticeable--that of Guglielmo Bergamasco. The question of the church exterior was one of the most difficult problems of the early-Renaissance architect, and he never solved it quite. The churches of Venice nearly all belong to the Renaissance; there were many of them rebuilt under the influence of either Palladian or Jesuit style. Palladio was a great architect; but he had nothing of the Catholic feeling. He was really more suited to build a pagan temple than to build a Christian church. The Jesuit style, moreover, is horrible, with its stumpy columns, bloated cherubs, unhealthy affectations, and fiery ornaments. It is a display without beauty or grace, merely overloaded and heavy. The church of the Scalzi is of extravagant richness. The walls are encrusted with coloured marble; there are frescoed ceilings by Tiepolo and Sansovino; bright tones prevail--more appropriate to a ballroom than to a house of prayer. One can quite imagine a minuet under such a ceiling. Many of the churches in Italy are built in this style, and are compensated only by the number and interest of the valuable objects which they contain. Almost every church has a museum such as would honour the palace of a king. There one sees Titians, Paul Veroneses, Tintorettos, Palmas, Giovanni Bellinis, Bonifazios. The church of the Scalzi has a broad staircase in red brocatelle of Verona, with truncated columns in marble, gigantic prophets, stone balustrades, and doors of mosaic. The Romanesque churches are really beautiful, with their pillars of porphyry, antique capitals, images standing out upon a glitter of gold, Byzantine mosaics, slender columns, and carved trefoils. The church of Santa Maria della Salute has been made famous by the picture of her by Canaletto in the Louvre. One of the most beautiful things within is a ceiling by Titian. Venetian arabesque ornament of the Quattri cento is tenderly sculptured, and the friezes are undercut in a reverent and delicate manner. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE] One of the most beautiful palaces of the Grand Canal is the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli. It is especially noticeable because of the number of windows in the basement,--there is no observable order in the placing of them. Then, again, there are contrasts in the shape of balconies. Some are small and curved inwards; others are long and straight. In 1481 the palaces became of a more advanced character. The central windows were grouped together; but this last feature is characteristic of Venetian architecture of all periods. One of Sammichele's finest works is the Palazzo Grimani, on the Grand Canal. It was carried out by others after Sammichele's death; nevertheless, it is very fine. It has great dignity and majesty, and is a composition such as will be found in Venice alone. Venice is, architecturally, the most interesting city in Italy. It contains works of all periods, from the early Christian foundation to the eighteenth century; and perhaps the best examples of each are there. First there was the school of the Lombardi; next, that of Sammichele and Sansovino, quite distinct, an influence direct from Rome. Then came, closely following, the schools of Palladio and Scamozzi; and a fourth is that of the seventeenth-century artists, who did good work in Venice, but on different lines. The best example of this late period in Venice is Santa Maria della Salute, erected in token of the cessation of the plague. It is situated at the sea gate to the presence-chamber of the Queen of the Adriatic. Few churches of any age can rival it architecturally. The composition is mainly pyramidal. The barocco style is nowhere so appalling as in Venice. It is most untruthful and unprincipled in character. There is a great deal of ostentation and bombastic pomp about it. A terrible example of this can be seen in Doge Valiero's tomb, where the marble is made to imitate silk and cloth wherever possible. The Palazzo Pesaro was built, rich and gross, typical of the domestic Renaissance, when architecture tended to decay. Technically it is a most inferior building. The figures in the sculpture are spasmodic in action, and restless; there is a projecting, diamond-like rustication, far too bold in treatment. The angles are an exaggeration of the style of Sansovino. [Illustration: PALAZZO MENGALDO] There are three great causes of the decadence of Venetian architecture. First of all, it was started by purists who were bound too firmly to ancient usages, too much regulated by precedent, coldness, and formality. Secondly, a more disastrous influence was brought to bear--that of Michael Angelo, the example of freedom to the verge of licence. This revolution was brought about partly by the revolt of the public feeling against the restrictions of the purists, partly by real want of knowledge and failure to understand traditional weaknesses and systems of design with regard to construction. The purpose and use of features was misunderstood; uncontrolled freedom was allowed; ornament was added for its own sake, instead of being bound up in architectural lines. By such freaks and caprices almost every building at this time, though not ignoble in composition, was completely disfigured. Thirdly, the architects made the fatal mistake of using the excrescences of a weakness of the great masters and endeavouring to raise them to the dignity of features of design. Thus Venetian architecture withered and decayed, fading out into a pale shadow of what it had once been. That glorious art, which had once been so superb in the hands of the masters, sank into the execution of feigned architecture, false perspective, and fictitious grand façades, with bad statues in unreal relief. [Illustration: OSPEDALE CIVILE] [Illustration: ST. MARK'S] ST. MARK'S When you arrive before the Church of St. Mark's you realise that at last, after all your travels throughout the length and breadth of the globe, you have before you a building in which colour and design unite in forming perfection. Here stands without a shadow of doubt the finest building in the world, flawless. It is impossible to imagine that St. Mark's has been built stone by stone, that the brains of mere men have designed it, and that the hands of mere men have set it up. It must, you think, have been there from all time just as it is,--formed as the bubble is formed, and the opal. It is a revelation to look upon such perfect symmetry, such glorious colouring. Like an opal, St. Mark's shows no sign of age. It glitters like a new jewel, and might have been built but yesterday. Unlike most churches, it has no sombre, frowning air. Its spires do not launch themselves into the sky. It does not bristle with towers and arched buttresses. Rather the building seems to stoop and crouch. It is surmounted by domes, as is a Mohammedan mosque, and is a strange mixture of Oriental ornamentation and Christian symbolism. Horses take the place of angels; grace and splendour, the place of austerity and mystery. Who ever heard of gold, alabaster, amber, ivory, enamel, and mosaic being used in the construction of a Christian church? Who ever heard of dolphins, tridents, marine shells, trefoils, cupolas, marble plaques, backgrounds of vividly coloured mosaics and of gold? It is more like a fairy palace, or an Alcazar, or a mosque, than a Catholic church; more like an altar to Neptune than one to the Christian God. [Illustration: PALAZZO DANIELI] The ultimate result of this apparent incoherence is a harmonious whole. Reverence and Christianity are here--an absolute and living faith. Even the most devout Catholic has no cause for complaint. With all its pagan art, St. Mark's preserves the character of primitive Christianity. The exterior is extremely complicated. There are many porticoes, each with columns of marble, jasper, and other precious materials; many mosaics on grounds of gold over each doorway; many historic stories and legends that these mosaics represent; many fantastic forms of angelic beasts, saints, Byzantine and Middle-Ages bas-reliefs, magnificent bronze doors, arcades, lamps, peacocks--so many that it is impossible to attempt to describe them in detail. Even to tell of the delicate structure and the subtle, ever-changing, iridescent colour is beyond me. It is almost bewildering when one thinks that at the time St. Mark's was built every house in every side street had much of the same extravagant richness, beauty of colouring, and superb architecture. As Mr. Ruskin says, it is absurd to imagine that churches were designed in a style particularly different from that of other buildings. There is nothing specially sacred in what we call ecclesiastical architecture. All the houses were built much in the same way. Only, while the houses have fallen into decay, the church has been preserved by a devoted populace. It is not often that one sees a coloured building, a building teeming with colour; but St. Mark's vibrates with colour. There are no blank spaces of grey stone. Every square inch is beautiful. When one enters from the bright sun, St. Mark's appears dim and dark; but you must not judge by that. To appreciate its beauties, the student should visit the church day after day. Gradually they will unfold themselves. That is what constitutes one of the charms of St. Mark's. It is as though one were in a carved-out cave of gold and purple, on a voyage of discovery all by oneself. At first you can see nothing; but as your eyes become accustomed to the darkness, colours begin to grow upon you out of the gloom. Some minutes must elapse before you realise that the floor, which at first you took to be of a deep-toned grey stone, is a mosaic composed of thousands of differently coloured marbles--that you are walking on precious marbles of peacock hues. Golden gleams above your head attract you to the domed ceiling, and, to your delight and amazement, you discover that it is formed entirely of gold mosaic. You are passing a dim recess, and you see a blurred mass of rich colour; after a time you realise that you are looking at a famous masterpiece by one of the great Italian painters. You sit there as in a dream; and one by one the pictures and the mosaics, the Gothic images, the cupolas, the arches, the marbles, the alabaster, the porphyry, and the jasper appear to you--until what was darkness and gloom appears to be teeming and vibrating with colour. [Illustration: FRANCESCA] St. Mark's carries one away from the everyday world. On the ignorant and the uninitiated it has a marvellous effect. Men and women and children flock to it by the thousands daily. Many and fervent are the worshippers one sees praying before some special saint or beloved Madonna. Some are weeping, and others kneel for hours on the cold stones. The unhappy people of Venice have many sins and sorrows, and there is much that is comforting to them in this rich, majestic church. The fainting spirit is revived and the most desperate person stimulated as he looks about him at the sparkling mosaic roof, the rich walls, and the dimly burning lamps. There is much in precious stones, music, sculptured figures, in pictures of heaven and hell, that appeals to these people. An infinite and pitiful God somewhere about them, these peasants of poor imaginations cannot understand. They want a faith that they can cling to--almost something that they can finger and touch. St. Mark's is to the poor of Venice like a beautifully illustrated Bible. There, in the cupolas, the story of the Old Testament is presented in mosaic, plainly for every eye to see, for the youngest and least educated to understand. It touches them, and appeals to them, and keeps their faith burning bright and clear. There they have the seven days of creation represented,--mysterious, weird, and primitive,--discs of gold and silver representing the sun and the moon. There are the Tree of Knowledge, the Temptation, the Fall, and the Expulsion from Paradise. Then comes the slaying of Abel by Cain, Adam and Eve tilling the ground. There is a strange mosaic of the Ark, with the animals going in two by two on a background of gold; there are the stories of Abraham, of Joseph, and of Moses, all quaintly executed, full of detail and without regard to anatomy. There is no struggle to imitate Nature, and the colouring is good. In the time when St. Mark's was built there were no cheap Bibles, and, if there had been any, the poorer classes could not have read them. Thus the great Church was an endless boon to them, one which could never be quite exhausted. Many and splendid are the lessons these mosaics and pictures taught and continue to teach. The mysteries and beauties of the Bible are impressed upon the mind in a manner that cannot be effaced. All the virtues are there--Temperance quenching fire with water; Charity, mother of the virtues, and the last attained in human life; Patience; Modesty; Chastity; Prudence; Lowliness of Thought, Kindness, and Compassion; and Love which is Stronger than Death. These lessons the Venetians have continually before them, to help them to bear the troubles of this world, and giving them hope for the peace of another. Most of the pictures in mosaic are typically Byzantine, mainly symbolical and of the first school of design in Venice. Upon these pictures the people of Venice live and thrive spiritually: the pleasure is real and pure. Colour has a great influence upon the emotions, just as music has; and colour was used in the earliest times to stimulate devotion and repentance. There are pictures in which the most profound emotion is expressed. When one sees the pictures of Christ's life and passion, one cannot but be touched. By the medium of paintings in the churches, people began to understand and appreciate art, and to feel the need of it in their homes. Not only is St. Mark's an education to the poor and the ignorant: it is also an education to the student and to the artist. Here you have pictures of the nation of fishermen at their greatest period; also you find legends splendidly told, such as the story of the two merchants who brought the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria under cover of pork, crying "Swine! swine!" You see the priests, the Doge, and the people of Venice as they were in the days of her power. In one of the dim corners of St. Mark's is a statue of an old man on crutches with a finger on his lip. This is a Byzantine architect who was sent to Pietro Orseolo from Constantinople, as the cleverest Eastern builder of his time, to construct St. Mark's Church. He was a bow-legged dwarf, and undertook to build this marvellous edifice, unequalled in its beauty, on condition that a statue of himself should be placed in a conspicuous position in the Church. This was arranged. One day the Doge overheard the architect say that he could not execute the work in the way he had intended. "Then," said Orseolo, "I am absolved from my promise"; and he merely erected a small statue of the architect in a corner of the Church. [Illustration: ST. MARK'S PIAZZA] Think of the makers of St. Mark's--the great men who worked together with brains and hands to make her what she is! The army of artists, painting, designing, sculpturing, one after the other from generation to generation in this great cathedral! Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, Pilotto, Salviati, and Sebastian were among the painters whose designs were used for the mosaics; Bozza, Vincenzo, Bianchini, and Passerini, among the master mosaicists; Pietro Lombardo, Alberghetti, and Massegna, among the sculptors. Then, the other thousands, all men of extraordinary talent, of whom astonishingly little is known, fervent workers! Throughout eight centuries they worked, and with what care and skill and patience! At what a cost, too, these masterpieces must have been achieved! Think of the temples and the quarries that have been robbed of their gold, and of the marbles, the alabaster, and the porphyry. All the saints and prophets and martyrs are there; the stories of the Virgin, of the Passion, and of Calvary; all the scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The early Venetians seem to have revelled in colour and in rich materials. The builders laid on the richest colour and the most brilliant jewels they could find. They were exiles from ancient and beautiful cities, and when they succeeded in war their first thought was to bring home shiploads of precious materials. Just as the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Arabs had an intense love of colour, so had the early Venetians, who used precious stones in great abundance, even in their own private houses. A most extraordinary thing is that there is nothing vulgar about the costliness of St. Mark's. Although both inside and out it is rich beyond words, rich in precious stones, rich in every way, the building is full of reserve. There is no ostentation, no vulgarity. The jewels used in its construction do not for one moment interfere with one's sense of the beautiful, or with reverence and religion. They simply give a rare luxurious feeling to the place, and in the ignorant inspire respect for a Church thus encased and honoured with the richest in the land. Then, again, the jewels do not form a principal part of the ornamentation. One looks first at the exquisite workmanship; and afterwards are noticed the precious materials, which form a subordinate part and do not interfere with the design. It is almost as though a veil had been swept over the whole building, both inside and out, bringing together this wealth of colour and forming it into a complete whole. It has the effect of a marvellous glaze--of a picture that has had a thin glaze swept over it. Wherever you look, the Church teems with colour; but it seems to be piercing through a veil. It is not vivid positive colour, but colour breaking through a skin. In the East I have seen millions of pounds' worth of jewels in one heap, with the sun shining on them, and I was overpowered with this wealth, I was inspired with their costliness;--but St. Mark's does not affect you at all in this way. Rich man and peasant are alike in this respect: they are elevated and stimulated in that building, not because of its costliness, but because of its extreme beauty. The technique is marvellous, but not obvious: the moment you are conscious of technique you may be sure that the work is poor. You never wonder how St. Mark's was built; and that is the highest tribute to the marvellous arts which it expresses. [Illustration: SCUOLA DI SAN MARCO] [Illustration: A QUIET WATERWAY] PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE One of the chief characteristics of the Venetian school of painters, and one of the most attractive to all art lovers, is their great appreciation of colour. In most of their work colour seems to be the chief motive. Pictures by Venetian painters never suggest drawings. They strike you not as having been coloured afterwards, but as having been painted essentially for the colour. One sees this throughout the whole school. And in their paintings they do not go to extremes. There is no exaggeration in their colouring. They do not err, as do so many schools, either on the foxy-red side or on the cold steely colouring. Unfortunately, much of the beautiful colouring of these pictures is lost by age. One has to become accustomed to that ugly brown skin which has formed upon the surface before one can realise what great colourists these early Venetians really were. The pictures somehow cause one to resent oil as a medium. One realises how different they must have looked when fresh from the easel, and wishes that these great masters could have painted with a medium more lasting--as did the Chinese, whose works are as young and fresh now as if they had been painted yesterday: the years have left no trace whatever: the simple colouring is the same to-day as it was a hundred years ago. Many of the earlier paintings, those of the Gothic Venetians, the less-known men, are a good deal better preserved. Their canvasses have not turned black; the glazings have not departed; and there is no smoky film upon them, as in the case of the works of the great masters, such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Giovanni Bellini, men who came a hundred years afterwards. It may very possibly be that the pigment which painters used then was purer and less adulterated. Certainly one sees in the various schools all over the world that the older the pictures are the better preserved they are. Age never improves a picture--unless, indeed, it is an extremely bad one, when time serves as a thin veil. [Illustration: CANAL PRIULI] Undoubtedly these great colourists, the Venetians, influenced the various schools of painters all over the world, and are still influencing them. Originally they worked for the churches, and colour was used exactly as music was used--to appeal to the senses, to the emotions: to influence the people, to teach them biblical stories and parables. It also educated the people to understand painting and to feel the need of it in their daily lives. At about this time the Renaissance began to express itself, not only in poetry and other literature, but also in paintings; and it found clearer utterance in Venice than elsewhere. The conditions at this time were perfect for the development of art. Venice at that period lent herself to art. She was at peace with the whole world, and she was prosperous. The people were joyous, gay, and light-hearted. They longed for everything that made life pleasant. Naturally, they wanted colour. And Venice was not affected by that wave of science which swept over the rest of Italy. The Venetians were not at all absorbed in literature and archæology. They wanted merely to be joyous. This was an ideal atmosphere for the painter. Such a condition of things could not but create a fine artistic period. The painter is not concerned with science and learning, or should not be. Such a condition of mind would result in feeble, academical work--in struggling to tell a story with his medium, instead of producing a beautiful design. That is partly why the Venetian school has had such a strong influence on art, even until the present day. The conditions were perfect for the development of art, because the patrons were capable of appreciating beautiful form and beautiful colour. Because the public would have it, this new school of painters appeared. The demand was created, and the supply came. There was undoubtedly great friction among the painters of this period, exactly as there has been lately with the modern impressionists and the academic painters. Some of the old Venetians resented the new school that was springing up; but they had eventually to bend and try to paint in sympathy with the senses and emotion of their patrons. You find this new mode of thought expressed strongly even in the churches and in the treatment of religious subjects. The old ideals were altered. Men no longer painted saints and Madonnas as mild, attenuated people. The figures were lifelike and full of actuality. The women were Venetian women of the period dressed in splendid robes and dignified; the men were healthy, full-blooded, and joyous. Florence, however, at this particular period was undergoing quite a different mood. The Florentines preferred to express themselves in poetry and in prose. That was the language the masses understood. Painting was not popular. There has always been a literary atmosphere about Florence, and one feels it there to this day; it is essentially the city for the student. When painting became so much a vogue in Venice, painters began to try and perfect the art in every possible way. They struggled for actuality. Art began to develop in the direction of realism. The Venetians wanted form and colour in their pictures; but they wanted also a suggestion of distance and atmosphere. In those early pictures you find that painters smeared their distance to give it a blurred look. That was the beginning of perspective. Painters of this period seem to have been marvellously modern. They were quite in the movement. There has never been any attempt at harking back to earlier periods. Venice was very wealthy at this time, and Venetian people never missed an opportunity of parading wealth. They loved glory where the State was concerned, and encouraged pageantry by both land and sea. They loved to see Doge and senators in their gorgeous robes, either on the piazza or on the Grand Canal. Then there came a demand for painted records of these processions and ceremonials. All this was encouraged by the State for political reasons. Pageantry entertained the people, and at the same time made them less inquisitive. Much better, these great officials argued, that the people should be enjoying things in this way than that they should begin to inquire into the doings of the State. Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio were the first pageant painters of the period. Paolo Veronese, who came much later, also loved pageantry, elevated it to the height of serious art, and idealised prosaic magnificence. He painted great banquets, and combined ceremony, splendour, and worldliness with childlike naturalness and simplicity. [Illustration: OSMARIN CANAL] First of all, as has been shown, it was the Church that called for pictures--to represent their saints and to enforce biblical legends. Painting became more and more popular. People became more and more educated to understand painting, until at last they wanted their domestic and social lives depicted. Also they wanted to hang these pictures in their homes. Pictures were neither so rare nor so expensive in those days as they are now, and people could afford to buy them--even the lower and the middle classes. Immediately there sprang up painters who satisfied the demand. In those days there were no academies and no salons wherein artists fought to outdo one another as to the size and eccentricity of their pictures; there were no vulgar struggles of that kind. Painters simply supplied to the best of their ability the wants of the people. Naturally, the public required small pictures, suitable to the size of their houses. Therefore, they needed gay and beautiful colour, and pictures in which the subjects did not obtrude themselves forcibly. Thus, in the natural course of events pageantry found less favour, and pictures of social and domestic life found more. Religious subjects were rather deserted. By the aid of books people could learn all the stories of the Bible. Besides, they were not at that period in a devotional or contrite mood. They were too happy and full of life to feel any pressing need for religion. Painting took much the same position with the Venetians as music has with us now. The fashion for triumphal marches and the clashing of cymbals in processional pictures had died out, and the vogue of symphonies and sonatas had come in. No one at that time seemed quite capable of satisfying the public taste. Carpaccio, whose subtle yet brilliant colouring would have exactly suited it, never undertook these subjects. Giovanni Bellini attempted them; but his style was too severe for the gaiety of the period. However, there was not long to wait. Soon appeared a man who told the public what they wanted and gave it to them. He swept away conventions and revolutionised art all over the world. He was a genius--Giorgione. Pupil of Bellini and Carpaccio, he combined the qualities of both. When he was quite a youth painters all over the world followed his methods. Curiously enough, there are not a dozen of this great master's works preserved at the present day. The bulk of them were frescoes which long ago disappeared. The few that remain are quite enough to make one realise what a great master he was. The picture which most appeals to me is an altar-piece of the Virgin and Child at Castelfranco. It is painted in the pure Giorgione spirit. St. George in armour is at one side, resting on a spear which seems to be coming right out of the picture; while on the other side there is a monk, and in the background are a banner of rich brocade and a small landscape. The Renaissance, the rejuvenation of art, seems to have slowly developed until at length it culminated in Giorgione. He was the man who opened the door, the one great modern genius of his period, whose influence remains and is felt to this day. Velasquez would never have been known but for Giorgione. Imagine this young man with his new ideas and his sweeps of golden colouring suddenly appearing in a studio full of men, all painting in the correct severe style established at the period. Such a man must needs influence all his fellows. Even Giovanni Bellini, the Watts of his day, acknowledged the young man's genius, and almost unconsciously began to mingle Giorgione's style with his own. We cannot realise what they meant at that period--these new ideas of Giorgione. He created just as much of a "furore" as when Benvenuto Cellini, in his sculpture, allowed a limb to hang over the edge of a pedestal. He needed this to complete his design. Since then almost everyone that has modelled has hung a limb over a pedestal. But Benvenuto Cellini started this new era. So, in much the same sort of way, did Giorgione. He cut away from convention, and introduced landscape as backgrounds to his figure subjects. He was the first to get actuality and movement in the arrangement of drapery. The Venetian public had long been waiting, though unconsciously, for this work; and Giorgione was so well in touch with the needs of the people that the moment he gave them what they wanted they would take nothing else. In the work of Giorgione the Renaissance finds its most genuine expression. It is the Renaissance at its height. Both Giorgione and Titian were village boys brought to Venice by their parents and placed under the care of Giovanni Bellini to learn art. They must have been of very much the same age. It is interesting to watch the career of these boys--the two different natures--the impulsiveness of the one and the plodding perseverance of the other. Giorgione shot like a meteor early and bright into the world of art, scattering the clouds in the firmament, bold, crowding the work and the pleasure of a lifetime in a few short years. His work was a delight to him, and life itself was full of everything that was beautiful. He was surrounded always by a multitude of admiring comrades, imitating him and urging him on. Giorgione was ever restless and impetuous by nature. When commissions flagged and he had no particular work in hand, he took to painting the outside of his own house. He cared not a whit for convention. He followed his own tastes and his own feelings. He converted his home into a glow of crimson and gold,--great forms starting up along the walls, sweet cherub boys, fables of Greece and Rome,--a dazzling confusion of brilliant tints and images. Think how this palace must have appeared reflected in the waters of the Canal! Unfortunately, the sun and the wind fought with this masterly canvas, conquered, and bore all these beautiful things away. Indeed, many of Giorgione's works were frescoes, and the sea air swept away much of the glory of his life. His career was brief but gay, full of work and full of colour. This impetuous painter died in the very heyday of his success. Some say he died of grief at being deserted by a lady whom he loved; others that he caught the plague. [Illustration: A SOTTO PORTICO] Of what a different nature was Titian! He studied in the same bottega as Giorgione, and was brought up under much the same conditions. But he was a patient worker, absorbing the knowledge of everyone about him, ever learning and experimenting; never completing. He did not think of striking off on a new line, of executing bold and original work. He wanted to master not one side of painting but all sides. He waited until his knowledge should be complete before he declared himself, before he really accomplished anything. He absorbed the new principles of his comrade Giorgione, as he absorbed everything else that was good, with unerring instinct and steady power. Titian was never led away in any one direction. He was always open to any new suggestion. As it happened, it was just as well that Titian worked thus at his leisure, and Giorgione with haste and fever. Titian had ninety-nine years to live; Giorgione had but thirty-four. There is an interesting anecdote told by Vasari with regard to these two young men. They were both at work on the painting of a large building, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; Titian painting the wall facing the street, and Giorgione the side towards the canal. Several gentlemen, not knowing which was the particular work of either artist, went one day to inspect the building, and declared that the wall facing the Merceria far excelled in beauty that of the river front. Giorgione was so indignant at this slight that he declared that he would neither see nor speak to Titian again. Titian does not seem to have been very much appreciated by his patrons at the beginning of his career. He inspired no affection. He was acknowledged as the greatest of all the young painters; but the Republic, it would seem, was never very proud of the man who did her so much credit and added so greatly to her fame. Even although the noise of his genius was echoed all over the world,--although the great Emperor himself stooped to pick up his brush, declaring that a Titian might well be served by a Cæsar,--although Charles the Fifth sat to him repeatedly, and maintained that he was the only painter whom he would care to honour,--the Venetians do not seem to have been greatly enamoured of him. Perhaps it was that they missed the soul, the purity and grace and devotion, of the pictures of Bellini and Carpaccio. Certainly, as far as one can judge, he did not have a prepossessing nature. He was shifty in his dealings with his patrons and unfaithful in his promises. He seems to have belonged to a corrupt and luxurious society. Pietro Aretino had a very bad influence on Titian. He taught him to intrigue, to flatter, to betray. Aretino was a base-born adventurer for whom no historian seems to have a good word. He was, however, a man of wit and dazzling cleverness, with a touch of real genius. Aretino corresponded with all the most cultured men of his time, and he had the power of making those whom he chose famous. It was he who introduced Titian to Charles the Fifth. Titian's pictures were much more saleable in foreign courts than in his own country. Abroad they did not seem to have the lack of soul which the Venetians so greatly deplored. It was the old case of the prophet having no honour in his own country. Certainly in the art of portraiture Titian has never been surpassed. At that period he had the field completely to himself. Nothing could have been more magnificent than Titian's portraits. They help to record the history of the age. It was in Titian's power to confer upon his subjects the splendour that they loved, handing them down to posterity as heroes and learned persons. His men were all noble, worthy to be senators and emperors, no coxcombs or foolish gallants. Titian was more at home in pictures of this kind than in religious subjects. His Madonnas are without significance; his Holy Families give no message of blessing to the world. In the prime of his life he moved from his workshops to a noble and luxurious palace in San Cassiano, facing the wide lagoon and the islands. All trace of it has disappeared, and homes of the poor cover the garden where the best company of Venice was once entertained. It is said that Titian gave the gayest parties and suppers--that he entertained the most regal guests. Nevertheless, although made a knight and a count, and a favourite at most of the courts in Europe, he was greatly disliked by the Venetian Signoria, who in the midst of his famous supper-parties called upon him to demand that he should execute a certain work for which he had received the money long before. He seems to have been exceedingly grasping--a strange trait in the character of a painter. One sees throughout his correspondence, until the end of his life, a certain desire and demand for money. Undoubtedly he often painted merely for money alone, turning out a sacred picture one day and a Venus the next with equal impartiality. Anything, it was said, could have been got out of Titian for money. The Venetians never loved Titian's works, though foreign princes adored them. He seems to have laboured, until the end of his life, more from love of gain than from necessity. He was buried at the Frari, carried thither in great haste by order of the Signoria,--for it was at the time of the plague, when other victims were taken to the outlying islands and put in the earth unnamed. Somehow, in reading the life of Titian one is brought right away to the twentieth century. Here is the painter with the attendant journalist, Pietro Aretino, the boomer. Aretino was a journalist, the first. He took Titian in hand and "ran" him for all he was worth. Had it not been for this system of booming, Titian would probably not have been well known during his lifetime. In the Academy of the Fine Arts one can trace by his pictures a splendid historical record of Titian's life, and can see plainly the changes in popular feeling and their effect upon his work. For very many years he lived and painted constantly, and then was killed by the plague! There is a picture painted by him when he was fourteen years of age--a picture which contains all the qualities, in the germ, of his later work: marvellous architecture, pomp, yet great simplicity and luminous colour. Here also is the last picture he ever painted--at the age of ninety-nine. Think of the interval between the two! It is sombre, pious. There is something pathetic about it. This great painter, whose work showed such fury, audacity, vehemence,--the man who had always the sun on his palette--was now painting mildly, carefully, obviously with the shadow of approaching death upon him. [Illustration: A NARROW CANAL] A marvellous picture by Titian hangs in the Academy of the Fine Arts. It is considered to be one of his finest pictures--the masterpiece of all his masterpieces--the eye of the peacock, as it were. This picture was neglected for many years, hidden away in an obscure portion of a church, and covered with a thick layer of cobwebs and dust. The custodian had almost forgotten the subject of the picture and the name of the painter. One day a certain Count Cicogna happened to visit the church. Being a great connoisseur and lover of art, he noticed this picture, and could not resist moistening his finger and rubbing it over a portion of the canvas. To his amazement, this portion emerged young and fresh, and as highly coloured as when it left the painter's hands--a picture bearing upon it the unmistakable stamp of Titian's genius! The delight of the Count can be imagined. He suggested to the custodian, with great care and tact, that he would present to the church a bran-new glossy picture, very large, of some religious subject; and mentioned in a casual way that they might give him the dilapidated old picture as a slight return. This was the Assunta. It was painted for the church of the Frari. Fra Marco Jerman, the head of the convent, ordered it at his own expense. Many a time when the work was in progress he and all the ignorant brethren visited the painter's studio and criticised his picture, grumbling and shaking their heads, and wondering whether it would be good enough to be accepted, whether it would be sneered at when uncovered before all Venice. They undoubtedly thought that they had done a rash thing in engaging him. Think of the agony of Titian, hindered by these ignorant men, being forced to explain elaborately that the figures were not too large, that they must needs be in proportion to the space! It was not until the envoy of the Emperor had seen the picture and declared it to be a masterpiece, offering a large sum of money for its purchase, that the Frari understood its value, and decided that, as the buying and selling of pictures was not in their profession, they had better keep it. [Illustration: BRIDGE NEAR THE PALAZZO LABIA] Tintoretto painted, according to the popular feeling of his period, for the good of mankind. This we certainly owe to the Renaissance--the desire to benefit mankind, and not only men individually. Tintoretto felt this strongly. One sees not only the effect of this new era of thought in his work: one sees also human life at the base of it. Tintoretto worked for the good of mankind, and his work throbs with humanity. There was atmosphere, reality, in it. He was, it is true, a pupil of Titian; but it was Michael Angelo whose works had the greatest attraction for him. He loved Angelo's overwhelming power and gigantic force. Tintoretto's pictures seem to possess much of the glowing colour of Titian; but he paid greater attention to chiaroscuro. He seems to have had the power of lowering the tone of a sky to suit his composition of light and shade. His conception of the human form was colossal. His work showed a wide sweep and power. He turned to religion, not because it was a duty, but because it answered the needs of the human heart--because it helped him to forget the mean and sordid side of life, braced him to his work, and consoled him in his days of despair. The Bible was not to him a cut-and-dried document concerning the Christian religion, but a series of beautiful parables pointing to a finer life. Then, Tintoretto asked himself, Why keep to the old forms and the old ideals? Why should the saints and biblical people be represented as Romans, walking in a Roman background? He himself thought of them as people of his own kind, and painted them as such. Thus, he argued, people became more familiar with the Bible, more readily understood it. Tintoretto painted portraits not only of Venetians, but also of foreign princes. Although he painted with tremendous rapidity, the demand was greater than the supply. His paintings were popular. They gave pleasure to the eye, and stimulated the emotions. He painted people at their best, in glowing health and full of life. Under his marvellous brush old men became vigorous and full-blooded. His pictures give the same sort of pleasure as one finds in looking upon a casket of jewels--they are just as deathless in their brilliancy. The portrait that the popular taste called forth in Titian's day was just about as unlike the typical modern portrait as you could possibly imagine,--the colourless, cold, unsympathetic portrait of the fish-eyed mayor in his robes. [Illustration: THE HOUSE WITH THE BLUE DOOR] At the age of fifteen, Jacopo Robusti--tintoretto, the little dyer--was brought by his father, Battista Robusti, to the studio of the great painter Titian. There he stayed for a little while, until one day Titian came across, in his bottega, some drawings that showed promise. On discovering that they were from the hand of Jacopo, he sent the boy away. Young as he was, Tintoretto had all the arrogance of the well-to-do citizen. He would brook no man's No, and would not yield his own pretensions for the greatest genius in Christendom. He did not need money: he was independent: and he started boldly to teach himself. Boiling with rage at the affront Titian had put upon him, he was determined to make a career for himself. He studied the works of Michael Angelo and of Titian, and inscribed upon his studio wall, so that his ambition might always be before his eyes, "Il desegno di Michael Angelo, e' il colorito di Titiano." He studied casts of ancient marbles, and made designs of them by the light of a lamp, in order to gain a strong effect of shadow. Also, he copied the pictures of Titian. Seeking, by every means in his power, to educate himself, he modelled figures of wax and plaster, upon which he hung his drapery. And always, whether painting by night or by day, he arranged his lights so as to have everything in high relief. Tintoretto's inventions for teaching himself were endless. Often he visited the painters' benches in the piazza of St. Mark's, where the poor men of the profession worked at painting chests and furniture of all kinds. In those days there were too many painters. The profession was overdone. Many young men who had real genius worked at the benches. Titian was the great man at the moment, and Palma Vecchio. But Tintoretto did not care. He forced his work down men's throats--gave it to them for nothing if they would not pay for it. He was always ready with his brush, and would paint anything from an organ to an altar-piece. He worked like a giant, with tremendous sweep and power; no subject was too great or too laborious; and always he had a desire to do his best. Tintoretto would not be trifled with or condescended to. He would not have his work under-valued, and would allow no patrician, not even a prince, to play the patron to him. He was determined not to be set aside. He flung his pictures at people's heads, and insisted on undertaking any great piece of work there was to do. Thus, Tintoretto's pictures are to be seen everywhere in Venice--in almost every church, every council-hall, every humble chapel, every parish church, every sacristy. He neglected no opportunity to make his work known. He worked with extraordinary rapidity. Whenever Tintoretto came across a fine fair wall he prevailed upon the master-mason to allow him to paint it. A fifty-foot space he would cover with avidity, asking nothing for his work but the cost of the material, giving his time and labour as a gift. [Illustration: CANAL IN GIUDECCA ISLAND] Portraiture was the outcome of realism, and one of the most important discoveries of the Renaissance. People began to feel that they wanted not only their affluence in possessions, but also their own individual faces and features, handed down to posterity. Thus portraiture began to creep in. At first it appeared in the churches under cover of saints and Madonnas; gradually it became possible to distinguish one from another--it was not always the same face. Painters took models from life as their saints. But portraiture in painting was very slow in reaching perfection. Sculpture had accomplished that long before; now that the latest craze was for portraiture, it was the sculptors who were the most prepared to take it up, and stepped forward to execute commissions. They had plenty of material in the way of old Roman coins and busts. Donatello and Vittore Pisano were the two men who first offered to satisfy the new want. Donatello executed marvellous studies of character, and Pisano medals such as have never been seen before or since. But even these men, fine as their work undoubtedly was, felt that the public could not long remain satisfied merely with the sculptured portrait. They must have colour. Donatello, therefore, began to stain and colour his busts, showing that painting, not sculpture, was to be the portrait art of the Renaissance. Vittore Pisano also gave up his sculpture, and turned his attention to portrait-painting; but he was only an amateur in this direction, and did not meet with much success. No portrait-painter of any merit was produced in that generation. The idea was entirely new. Men had not had sufficient time in which to study the human face. The next generation ushered in Mantegna, who painted a marvellous portrait of Cardinal Sciramo; but he went too far in the other direction. He painted his man as he was--as he saw him, line for line. He painted the soul and heart of him--and the soul and the heart were black. Venice was revolted with such a portrait. It seemed indeed indecent that a man's character should be laid bare in such a way. It was a picture they did not care to hang in the Council Chamber, a picture that was unpleasant to live with. The Cardinal belonged to the State. His honour was their honour, and it must not be defiled. The Venetians came to the conclusion that portraits must be painted not in full-face but in profile. Thus the characteristics of a man, if they be not pleasant, do not come out clearly. This accounts for the number of profile portraits. The age wanted an agreeable portrait. This Giorgione provided. He realised that the treatment must always be bright, joyous, romantic. His followers trod in his footsteps: the master's style was too strong and pronounced to be much deviated from. Giorgione seems to have reached the topmost height of art at that period. Even Titian, for a generation after his death, followed in Giorgione's lines; only, Titian's work was a little more sober, a little less sunny. He had the sense to see that Giorgione had expanded the old rule and done something worth adopting, and for a time he simply followed this joyful outburst. His early years fell at a time when life was glowing, radiant, almost intoxicating in its vigour. But youth and joy cannot last; nor could the Renaissance spirit. Gradually the trouble and the strife from which the whole of Italy was suffering filtered into Venice, and cast a serious aspect over art and social life. Venice, of all the states in Italy, was the last to feel this sobering influence. She had been defeated both in battle and in commerce; and, although she was not totally crushed under the heel of Spain, life was not the endless holiday it promised to be. Men took themselves more seriously, and the quieter pleasures of friendship and affection began to be more sought after. Religion revived in importance. Men clung to it, as they always do in time of trouble, for comfort and support. It was no longer a political sentiment, but a personal one. Art declined as the sunshine and the gaiety that had fed and nourished it ebbed away. When men began to feel that individually they were of no avail, that they were subject to the powers round about and above them, the death-blow of great art fell. Titian was influenced by his environment, and his painting changed completely. He produced pictures that would have been looked upon with scorn in his earlier days. The faces of his men are no longer smooth and free from care. One saw there struggle and suffering, and all that life had done for them. But Titian was not a pessimist at heart. The joy and gaiety in which he had been brought up formed part of his character. Whatever changes may have happened to his country politically, nothing could alter that entirely. And it was no doubt this early training and the atmosphere in which he was brought up that made his pictures the masterpieces they were. You notice the men who came after Titian--how they began to decline. For example, Lorenzo Lotto had been brought up in the heyday of the Renaissance; but the new order of things, the change from national virility to national decadence, enfeebled him. Then, again, the coming in touch with poets and men of letters, victims flying from the fury of Spain, was a new stimulant to art. It did not exactly improve it; but it certainly changed it. [Illustration: THE ORANGE SAIL] A fine period of painting does not come in a day, nor does it end in a day; and, although the universal interest in the Venetian school dies with Titian and Tintoretto, it does not die unnoticed. The torch of art flickered up many times in Venice before it was finally extinguished. The men who came immediately after Tintoretto had not the strength to start off on any new lines. They simply fell back on variations of the earlier masters, showing much of the masters' weaknesses, but few of their great qualities. Some even were so inartistic as to attempt to pass off their pictures, on ignorant people, as Titians and Giorgiones. However, before the Republic disappeared there were two or three men who took the first rank among the painters of the period, provincial artists, men whose art was sufficiently like her own to be readily understood, such as Paul Veronese. The provinces were not declining so rapidly as Venice was. They were less troubled by the approaching storm. Men there led simple, healthy lives; Spanish manners were long in reaching the provinces, and, when they did, the people were slow to succumb. Men in the provinces had stamina, simplicity, and courage with which to meet the new order of things. They combined ceremony and splendour with childlike naturalness. Consequently, the works of Paul Veronese delighted the Venetians. The more fashionable and ceremonious private life in the city became, the more were the people charmed with his simple rendering. [Illustration: A QUIET RIO] Gradually the taste of the Venetians turned towards pictures in humble quarters--in the provincial towns and in the country. In the Middle Ages the country was so upset that it was not safe for people to venture out of the city; but with the advance of civilisation this state of affairs was altered. People began to delight in country life. The aristocracy took villas in the provinces, and the poorer people wanted representations of them in their houses. The painters of the period, Palma and Bonifacio, began to add pastoral backgrounds to their works. But the first great landscape painter was Jacopo Bassano. His treatment of light and atmosphere was masterly, and his colouring was jewel-like and brilliant. It was Bassano who started that great Spanish school which was to culminate in Velasquez. Venice did not produce many great painters in the eighteenth century--only three or four. The city itself remained unchanged: it was just as beautiful, still the most beautiful and luxurious city in the world: it was the people who changed. They became apathetic, placid, and drifting, perfectly contented with one another and with their lots in life, never trying to better themselves in any way. There were no difficulties, no problems to be solved. People were just as gay as they were serious, just as much interested in paintings as they were in politics. This was a vegetable period. It is strange that such a demoralising time should have seen the rise of a great master; but it certainly saw him in Canaletto. That artist differed from nearly all the Venetian painters in that he had complete mastery of technique. His work is just as fine technically as that of Velasquez or that of Rembrandt. It shows marvellous dexterity and power. He understood his materials better than any other Venetian painter--better even than Giorgione. Guardi and Tiepolo followed Canaletto. In Tiepolo's work especially you realise the character of these eighteenth-century people. At that time Venice was sliding downhill rapidly. Her people were aping dignity. They dressed extravagantly, not so much for the love of colour and splendour as for swagger. They were degenerating rapidly. Here and there lesser masters appeared; but Venetian art became poorer and poorer, until it reached the condition of the present day, when in Venice there is no art at all. The kind of work which the people appreciate sickens and saddens you--those sunlit photographs glazed with blue to counterfeit moonlight, and tricky, vicious water-colours,--brutal pictures with metallic reflections and cobalt skies,--all wonderfully alike, all with the same orange sail, and all equally untrue. [Illustration: HUMBLE QUARTERS] Year by year painters continue to paint Venice without the public showing signs of weariness. Perhaps the failure of the artists to reproduce the undying charm of that dazzling jewel of cities is both the excuse and the reason for the pertinacity of the tribe. Womanlike, she eludes them; manlike, they pursue. Few have seen the real Venice, the Venice of Ruskin and Turner and Whistler. Venice is not for the cold-blooded spectator, for the amateur or the art dabbler: she is for the enthusiastic colourist and painter, the man who sees, and does not merely look. Sir Edward Burne-Jones was wont to declare that to paint Venice as she should be painted one must needs live for three thousand years: the first thousand should be devoted to experiments in various media; the second to producing works and destroying them; the third to completing slowly the labour of centuries. He would never have dreamed of spending a painting holiday beyond Italy--that is, unless he had been permitted to live for over five thousand years; and even then, it was his firm opinion, no man could paint St. Mark's, which was unpaintable--mere pigment could not suggest it. [Illustration: RIO DI SAN MARINA] [Illustration: A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD] STREETS, SHOPS, AND COURTYARDS In the crooked and bewildering streets of Venice, which open out from the great piazza and lead all over the city, one sees the true life of the people. It is there that the poor congregate. The houses teem with humanity. There the true Venetians are harboured. One comes to know them well, and the manner of life they lead; and so gay and light-hearted are they, it is strange if one does not like them in spite of all their faults. Was there ever more irregularity than in the streets of Venice? All the houses seem to be differently constructed. Some are lofty; others are squat; some have balconies and chimney-pieces thrust out into the street so as almost to touch the houses opposite. Nearly every house has at one time been a palace, and each is in a different stage of decay--houses that have once been the homes of merchant princes, palaces in which perhaps even Petrarch may have feasted,--inhabited now by the poorest of Venetians. The weekly wash flutters from the balconies (the linen of Venice is famed for its whiteness), and frowsy heads appear at Gothic windows. Worms have eaten and rust has corrupted everything destructible. Yet now and then one is astonished at the preservation of certain portions of the buildings. In that labyrinth of streets one never knows what surprise may be in store. You will come across beautiful early-Gothic gateways covered with sculptured relief and inlaid designs of leaves; a fourteenth-century palace with the faint remains of the paintings of some artist with which at one time it must have been covered; lovely remnants of crosses let into the walls; Renaissance wells of the sixteenth century; delicately-carved parapets; a great stone angel standing guardian at some calle head; irregularly twisted staircases of the fifteenth century; a Gothic door with terra-cotta mouldings; and churches without number. Some of the finest architectural gems in Europe are here, and almost every house is invested with a strange history. The place seems inexhaustible. As you walk in those old streets the shadows of the mighty dead go with you--those great men who lived glorious lives for Venice and for art. There is an old-world atmosphere about the streets. They twist and turn, and sometimes are so narrow that there is scarcely room for two people to pass each other; at times they are so dark and still that the scuttling of a rat into the water makes one start. Venice is full of contrasts, full of the unexpected. It is as if Providence, seeing fit that one's eyes should not become satiated with beauty unalloyed, throws in little marring touches--shocks to your feelings, cold douches of water, as it were--in order to give value to the marvellous colouring and antiquity of the water city. For example, from the world of Desdemona, where one can fancy one sees her lean from a traceried window and catch a distant echo of a mellow voice out on the water singing a serenade, it is rather a shock suddenly to find yourself in the piazza of St. Mark. It is easy to lose oneself in the streets of Venice. In a minute you can step from the past to the present, and find yourself among the marbles of St. Mark's and the arcades of the Ducal Palace--in the tourist's Venice, amid glittering shops full of modern atrocities, mosaic jewellery, wood-carving, imitation glass, and what not--Americans and other globe-trotters staring up at St. Mark's, laughing and reading their guide-books. [Illustration: THE WEEKLY WASH] For all artists and lovers of the picturesque the side streets of Venice--_calle_, as they are called--are fascinating beyond words. Every house has a character peculiarly its own. Each is in a way unique and totally dissimilar to its fellows; each is proud in the possession of relics of architectural beauties. Every street is made up of magnificent palaces and churches, fine examples of architecture in such rich and varied wealth and diversity of styles that one is almost overpowered. There are old Gothic palaces, venerable specimens of Renaissance or Venetian period. Time indeed has laid heavy hands upon them; but it seems to have augmented their charm. This homely aspect of Venice interests. The old houses and the rickety archways appeal to the observer, if he be not too keen of smell. Here are marvellous and varied combinations of rich colouring--weather-worn bricks, grated windows, and brilliant shutters picturesque and shabby by the lapse of time, and shops half lost in gloom. Most of the houses are of distempered rose-colour at the top and moss-green at the bottom. The sun shines on the roof, and the water laps at the base. There are land-gates and water-gates to most of the houses--one opening upon a canal, the other upon a courtyard. [Illustration: A BACK STREET] I lived for six months in Venice, and have seen these streets under every possible aspect. I have seen them in the early morning, at mid-day, in the evening, at night, in the rain, in the sun; and I can never decide at what time of the day they appear most fascinating. Perhaps it is after a rain-shower, when every tone upon the old walls is brought out and accentuated--greys and pale sea-greens and the old Venetian red with which so many of the houses used to be distempered. The shops in Venice are very thickly set. Most of them open right down to the ground, and the wares, which are varied, appear to ooze out into the street. Here is a corn-dealer's shop with open sacks of polenta flour of every shade of yellow; there a green-grocer's shop where vegetables are sold--such a wealth of colour in the piles of tomatoes, vegetable marrows, and great pumpkins cut down the middle to display their orange cores. The richer shops, however, are blocked up several feet high, and have latticed windows. I love to wander through these streets at night, when the squalor and the misery of Venetian life are hidden by the darkness, and one sees only beauty. Here are subjects for the etcher, for Rembrandt and Frans Hals,--marvellous effects of light and shade. The streets are pitch-dark; there is nothing to mar the lovely fair blue nights of Venice--no vicious shaft of electric light to bleach the colour from the sky. These side streets are lit by the candle and the lamp. Perhaps the most picturesque of all the shops at night are the wine-shops. There one sees, beneath some low blackened doorway, a rich golden-brown interior. In the midst of this golden gloom one dim oil-lamp is burning--the most perfect light possible from the painter's standpoint: by it, the dark faces and gesticulating hands of the men gathered round a table are turned to deep orange. This is all one sees growing from out the encircling gloom--faces, hands, and a few flecks of ruby light, as the glasses are raised. Every shop down these narrow streets has its shrine to the Virgin Mary, with its statuette, its fringes, and its flowers; and at night these shrines are illuminated according to the poverty or the wealth of the proprietor--some have only a tiny dip, others have a candle or a group of candles, while well-to-do folk boast a row of oil-lamps. Rich or poor, each has its offering, its tiny beacon. The children may go without bread, and the mother may lack warm clothing; but the Holy Mother must not be robbed of her due. There is certainly a wonderful simplicity of faith about these people. The cook-shops are fascinating by night. There are innumerable stalls; in fact, nearly all the shopping seems to be done from stalls; even the butchers have open-air stalls. At night chestnut-roasters, toffee-vendors, pumpkin-and-hot-pear men hold full sway. These are generally surrounded by groups of open-mouthed children gazing with delight at the long twisted strings of toffee in the hands of the operator. Almost a still greater attraction to the young folk of Venice is the chestnut-roaster; he generally takes up his position in the courtyards, as does the coffee-roaster. Courtyards seem to be the favourite haunts of the coffee-roasters,--partly, I suppose, because all the doors of the houses round about open into them, and housewives can be easily supplied. They seem to be constantly roasting coffee berries night and day; the whole place reeks with the fragrant odour. They are picturesque by day, these busy workers, but far more picturesque by night, when the gleam of their ovens shows orange in the purple gloom, and the leaping flames light up the faces of the children round about, handsome little faces with a certain grandeur in them--boys with bronze cheeks, dark hair, olive complexions, black eyes, and sometimes a touch of colour in their red flannel caps and their multicoloured patches of garments. There is something barbaric and fine and graceful about them, half-encircled, as they are, by the filmy blue smoke from the ovens. A Venetian Good Friday celebrated in a poor and populous part of Venice at night is most picturesque. The people of the quarter--the coffee-roasters, the cook-shop men, the footmen, and the wine-sellers--arrange to sing a chant in twenty-four verses, a grave and sombre chant following the life of our Lord in His Passion. Each verse takes about five minutes to sing, and there is a pause of equal length between each two verses. During every interval the crowd, who have been quiet, begin to chatter, the men smoke, and the boys rush and tumble. Directly the precentor begins, silence falls upon them once more. Most of the people in that particular quarter subscribe to the erection of a shrine with plenty of candles and little glass lamps. It is a picturesque sight--the yellow light from the altar lamps falling on the group of men and women gathered round the singers and the many heads thrust out of windows and balconies, on the fair, devout, and serious faces of the children, on the handsome women and the bronze-faced men. All the world in Venice lives out of doors: they breakfast and lunch and dine, all in the open air. All of them live in lodgings or hotels, and principally in the bedrooms, which are for the most part comfortless and dreary,--their only merits are a frescoed ceiling, sometimes really fine and old, and a balcony. One can procure a marvel of a palace in Venice for the cost of a garret in London. There is no real home-life in Venice. Rich and poor, mothers, fathers, children, and servants,--all take their food in the open air. There are restaurants and cafés for the well-to-do, endless eating-houses for the poorer classes, and sausage-makers for the gondoliers. Cookshops swarm. There you see great piles of fish and garlic, bowls of broth, polenta, and stewed snails, roast apples, boiled beans, cabbages, and potatoes. Every holiday, every saint's day, has its special dish. Carnival time sets the fashion for beaten cream or panamonlata; at San Martino gingerbread soldiers are popular; and for Christmas time there is candy made with honey and almonds. A certain broth consumed by the very humblest is made from scraps of meat which even the sausage-makers will not use: as may be imagined, the soup is highly flavoured. In the midst of all these stalls and eating-houses it is extraordinary how little there is eaten in Venice,--merely a mouthful here and there,--a kind of light running meal. A Venetian, no matter how rich he might be, would never dream of inviting you to a set meal. There is no heavy food, no cut from the joint. If a Venetian invites you to an entertainment, he will give you a cup of coffee perhaps, or a glass of wine and a biscuit,--rarely more. He will never invite you to eat a great meal; he never takes it himself. The eating-house and the stall appear to be more or less of an excuse for gossip and the meeting of neighbours. If the streets of Venice are bewitching by night, they are certainly delightful in the early morning. It is then that one receives the most vivid impressions. There is a certain freshness in one's perceptions at the dawn. The poor wretches who make their beds in the streets, or on the steps, or at the base of columns, shake themselves and shamble off. Troops of ragged "facchini" fill the streets, and quarrel noisily over their work. The great cisterns in the market-place are open, and the water is brought round to your house by dealers, stout young girls with broad backs and rosy cheeks; they carry it in two brass buckets attached to a pole, and empty it into large earthenware pots placed ready for its reception in the kitchen. These girls, called "bigolanti," supply the place of water-works. At this hour you see the shops opening like so many flowers before the sun. Butchers set forth their meat; fruit shops, crockery shops, bakers', cheap-clothing, and felt-hat shops, show their various wares. You see peasants at work among vegetables, building cabbages and carrots into picturesque piles, and decorating them with garlic and onions, while their masters are still sleeping on sacks of potatoes. Great barges arrive from Mestre, Chioggia, and Torcello, laden with vegetables and fruit. Eating-houses begin their trade. You see men and women taking their breakfast, and a savoury smell of spaghettis and eels on gridirons fills the air. Gondoliers begin to wash their gondolas, brush their felces, polish the iron of their prows, shake their cushions, and put everything in order for business. Picturesque old women, carrying milk in fat squat bottles, make the round of the hotels and restaurants at this early hour. They are good to look at, with their dark nut-brown faces and dangling gold earrings under their large straw hats. Their figures are much the shape of their bottles; and they bring a pleasant atmosphere into Venice, an atmosphere of fields and clover-scented earth, and milk drawn from the cream-coloured cows. Fishermen, a handsome class, with weather-beaten faces, in blue clothing, come striding down the calle, shallow baskets of fish on their heads. They set up their stalls and display their soles and mackerel, chopping up their eels into sections and crying, "Beautiful, and all alive!" At this hour everyone is making bargains, and the result is a continual buzz; but there is nothing discordant about the street cries of Venice. A peculiarly beautiful cry is that of the man who comes round every morning with wood for your kitchen fire. The fuel-men cut their wood on the shores of the Adriatic, and anchor their barges at the Custom House, leaving them in charge of mongrel yellow dogs, who guard so vigilantly and are so extremely aggressive that never a splinter is taken from the barges. [Illustration: THE WOODEN SPOON SELLER] The street cries are full of individuality, and the tradesman brings a little art to bear on the description of his wares. The song of the sweep, exquisitely sad, quite befits the warning, "Beware of your chimney!" There is nothing gay about the sweep: he is a very melancholy person, and his expression is in sympathy with his music. The pumpkin-vendor is coy, and his cry has a winning pathos; his is not an easy vegetable to launch on the market, and he has developed into a very bashful person. His cry is cooing and subtle: he almost caresses you into buying, which is necessary, as no one in his right senses really desires a pumpkin. The fruiterer is different. He is handsome, fat-cheeked, and has scarlet lips, strong black hair curling in ringlets, and gold rings in his ears. His adjuration is a round, full, resonant roar, like a triumphant hymn; and there is altogether a certain Oriental splendour about his demeanour. It is not necessary for him to be subtle: there is always a sale for melons and pears, chestnuts and pomegranates. He uses colour as a stimulant to his customers, and dwells upon the hue of his fruit. "Melons with hearts of fire!" he cries. Also he flatters. To a dear old gentleman passing by he will hold up a clump of melons, some of them sliced, or a group of richly coloured pomegranates, and say, "Now, you as a man of taste will appreciate this marvellous colour; you are young enough to understand the fire and beauty of these melons"; and the old gentleman will go on his way feeling quite pleased and youthful. Some of the cries are quaint. I once heard a man say, "Juicy pears that bathe your beard!" and another said his peaches were "ugly but good,"--they certainly were not beautiful to look upon. Almost the most melodious salesmen are the countrymen who pace the streets with larks and finches in cages, and roses and pinks in pots. At mid-day the streets are enveloped in a warm golden light; there are rich old browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas--all the tints of a gorgeous wall-flower. A ray of sun in a bric-à-brac shop attracts your attention; and you get a peep through a window with cobwebbed panes, high up in a flesh-coloured wall, at some of the objects within,--brass pots and pans gleam from the walls, bits of china and porcelain, strings of glass beads, some quaint old bookcases with saints carved in ivory, fragments of old brocade woven with gold and gorgeous,--all kinds of strange curiosities, looking crisp and brilliant in the sunlight. Suddenly you are blinded by a patch of golden yellow. It is an orange-stall placed before a pink palace flecked with the delicate tracery of luminous violet shadow. Away down in the interior of the stall, where the sun does not shine, it appears almost purple by contrast to the brilliant mass of golden fruit. The background of all these shops is neutral: the objects for sale form the only brilliant and positive colour. The palaces and houses are mostly pink and white. There are pinks, and greys, and blues, and so on. It is not the painted, coloured city that one had imagined it to be: Venice is very grey. But its greyness is that of the opal and the pearl. I have often heard people say how strange it is that the colours always seem brighter in Venice than in any other city--the shutters and the doors and the shops. The answer is not far to seek. It is because the background and the general colouring is neutral. There are no large patches of positive colour: even St. Mark's, choke-full of colour as it is, has no positive colour in its composition. Take a peep into a carpenter's shop. Through the iron grating, rusty and red with age, you see the quaint old craftsman at work, his flesh tone very much the colour of the wood he is planing; piercing black eyes look through and over the large bone-framed glasses that he wears; he suggests the carpenter of Japan; and, judging from the amount of shavings you see about the floor, you gather that he is a dignified, not what may be called a feverish, worker. He is, however, evidently an artist: you see dainty specimens of wood-carving hung round on the walls. Most of the carpenters of Venice seem to be old men. There appear to be very few middle-aged people at all. They seem to be either young boys and girls or ancient men and women. Whether it is that Venetians age quickly, I do not know. The old women are extraordinary. You can scarcely imagine how anything so crooked and foul and old and frowsy, with so little hair, so few teeth, so many protruding bones, and such parchment-like skin, can be human. Their faces seem to be shrunken like old fruit: I have seen women with noses shrivelled and with dents in them like strawberries. It is extraordinary to watch these women on their shopping excursions. How they bargain! They think nothing of starting the day before to buy a piece of steak, and sometimes spend a whole day haggling over it. Some of the shopmen are swindlers,--fat, greasy men, very fresh and brisk, who have reduced cheating to a fine art. [Illustration: WORK GIRLS] It is only after living in Venice for some months that one begins to understand the bargaining in the streets. You will see two men talking--one the shopman, the other the purchaser--and if you know anything of the language, and watch carefully, you will find it the most marvellous bit of acting imaginable. They bargain; the customer turns in scorn, and goes; he is called back; the goods are displayed once more, and their merits expatiated upon. The customer laughs incredulously and moves away. The seller then tries other tactics to fog his client. Eventually he makes a low offer, which is accepted; but even then the shopman gets the best of it, for he has a whole battery of the arts of measurement in reserve. There is really no end to the various possibilities of "doing" a man out of a halfpenny. Beggars are a great trial in the streets. The lame, the halt, and the blind breathe woe and pestilence under your window, and long monotonous whines of sorrow. Fat friars in spectacles and bare feet come round once a month begging bread and fuel for the convents. Old troubadours serenade you with zithers, strumming feebly with fingers that seem to be all bone, and in thin quavering voices pipe out old ditties of youth and love. There are lottery offices everywhere. Around them there is always a great excitement. The missing number, printed on a card framed in flowers and ribands, is placed in the windows daily. Some say that the system of lottery should be done away with; but it might be cruel to deprive the poor wretches of hope. The lottery brings joy to many despairing people. Venetian women are good-looking. One sees them continually about the streets. Nothing can surpass the grace of the shawl-clad figures seen down the perspective of the long streets, or about some old stone well in a campiello. They are for the most part smart and clean. You see them coming home from the factories, nearly always dressed in black, simple and well-behaved. Their hair is of a crisp black, and well tended; their manner is sedate and demure. There is no boisterousness about the Venetian girls, no turning round in the streets, no coarseness. Many of them are very beautiful. You see a woman crossing an open space with the sunlight gleaming on the amber beads about her throat and making the rich colour glow brighter beneath her olive skin. A shawl is thrown round her shoulders, and her jet-black hair is fastened by a silver pin. She wears a deep crimson bodice. The choice of colour of these women is unerring in taste. Their shawls are seldom gaudy, generally of blue or pale mauve; vivid colours are reserved for the bodices. Then, there are the bead-stringers. You see them everywhere: handsome girls with a richness of southern colour flushing beneath warm-toned skins, eyes large and dark, with heavy black lashes, the hair twisted in knots low on their necks, and swept back in large waves from square foreheads, a string of coloured beads round their necks, and flowered linen blouses with open collars. You see them with their wooden trays full of beads. The bead-stringers are nearly always gay. They laugh and chat as they run the beads on the strings. They often form a very pretty picture, as they bend over their work and thread turquoise beads from wooden trays. In the courtyards, some women are hanging white clothes on a line before a yellow wall; others are leaning out of their windows, gossiping with neighbours. Never was there a more gossiping set of women: every window, every balcony, seems to be thronged with heads thrust out to chatter. Venice is divided up into campi or squares. Each campo has a church, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick-maker, and everything else that is necessary to life, including a café and a market. Venetian children, as a rule, are very badly reared, and many of them die at an early age. It is a belief and a consolation that the little ones go straight to heaven, there to plead their parents' cause and to arrange for their reception. May is the best month in which to see the streets. The intoxication of spring is in the air, and in the bright sunlight the colours burn and glow. Although you cannot see them, you are constantly reminded that there are gardens in Venice. Suddenly over the red brickwork of a high wall you will see clumps of tamarisk, hanging mauve wisteria, or the scarlet buds of a pomegranate, while the scent of syringa and banksia roses fills the air, the birds sing in the enclosure, and the perfume of honeysuckle trails over the wall of a garden of a foreign prince. Few crowds are more cheerful or better ordered than a Venetian crowd. There is a light-heartedness about these people that is very engaging; they have a marvellous frankness of manner, a sublime indifference to truth. The smallest Venetian child is a born flatterer, and will tell you, not what he thinks, but what he imagines you wish to hear. The people are the most engaging in the world, free from care or doubt as to right or wrong. This carelessness is characteristic of the whole Italian race. Venetians give the impression of being always determined to enjoy life to the full. They are continually coming together, for the purpose of pleasure, on one pretence or another, and the flashes of wit in the street are sometimes very amusing. The Venetians have always been, and still are, a great festa-loving people. When the Republic fell, the brave ceremonies came to an end; but the original passion is still kept alive. The festa in Venice are chiefly of religious character. For example, once a year each parish church honours the feast of its patron saint by processions to all shrines within that particular parish. Very picturesque are the streams of priests and people crossing the bridges and passing along the fondanta of some small canal,--a brilliant ribbon of vermilion and gold winding through the grey-toned city: porters of the church (in blouses of white, red, and blue) bearing candles, pictures, and banners; bands playing the gayest operatic tunes; priests and the parocco carrying the Host under a canopy of cloth of gold; long files of the devout holding candles; and boys with crackers and guns. At night there is dancing in the largest campo of the parish. On Good Friday the streets resemble a feast rather than a fast. The people are in their best and gaudiest clothes; children are rushing and romping and turning somersaults, whirling their rattles, fitting up shrines and then appealing to the crowd for coppers,--human mites of six or seven constructing "Santo Sepolcro," or Holy Graves, from old bottles, sprigs of bay stuck in, and odd candle-ends. One may witness touches of sentiment in a Venetian crowd; but the depths are seldom stirred. Sometimes sentiment finds expression in the rilotti--popular Venetian songs. [Illustration: CHIOGGIA FISH MARKET] THE ISLANDS OF THE LAGOON There is no piece of water more extraordinary than the lagoons of Venice. They cover an area of 184 square miles of water, shut off from the sea by a narrow strip of sandy islands, which are called the Lidi. The form of the lagoons is, roughly, that of a bent bow. How did they happen to be formed thus? That is a difficult question, and there are various opinions. Certainly the lagoons are a great feature of the city. They gave shelter to the founders flying from the Huns on the mainland, and the health of the community depends on their regular ebb and flow. A lagoon is not a lake; neither is it a swamp, nor open sea. It is a strange piece of natural engineering. There are really, although we cannot see them at high tide, four distinct water systems, with separate watersheds and confluent streams. The sea comes in once a day as from a great heart, pulsing in through the four breaks in the Lido barrier, cleaning and purifying the lagoon, and afterwards bearing away the refuse of the city. At low tide one can see these channels distinctly winding in and out of the mud-banks. In the spring they are bare, with long trails of sea-grass. In autumn they are brown and bare, and at high tide the whole surface is flooded. On the mainland shore of the lagoon there is a certain territory, called Laguna Morta, where the sea and the land fight a continual battle. It is the home of the wildfowl. Here salt sea-grasses grow, tamarisk, samphire, and, in the autumn, sea lavender. Farther, the ground becomes solid, and the Venetian plain begins, with its villas, poplars, vineyards, and mulberry groves. Nothing is more delightful than to spend a whole long day upon the lagoon when the air is sweet and the breeze is fresh from the Lido. There are fishing-boats coming in from their long night, with spoil for the Rialto market, crossing and recrossing one another as they tack. The bows are painted, and the nets are hung mast-high to be mended and dried in the sun. Their sails are folded close together, like the wings of great vermilion moths. These sails, which are picturesque in the Venetian landscape, are of the deepest oranges and reds, rich red browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas, contrasting strangely with the cool grey waters of the lagoon upon which they float. One can wander for miles along the Lido on the Adriatic side. The lizards bask in the hot sand; the delicate, pale sea-holly mingles with the yellow of the evening primrose. From the Lido you can see right away to the south-east, and in the horizon can discern the faint blue hills above Trieste and the top of Monte Maggiore. From there the city looks well: one sees the Ducal Palace, faintly pink, the green woods of the public gardens, and the vast blue Venetian sky. The true native seems to have a strange affection for the Lido. One cannot tell why or wherefore; but it is so--"Lido" has ever been a name to conjure with. One cannot tell what associations and sensations of pleasure and charm are connected with it. At the present day it is a flat piece of somewhat marshy ground, with large gardens intersected by canals. The woods of the Favorita, on the shore of San Elizabetta, are delightful, with their groves of acacia and catalpas, where the ground is carpeted with wild flowers, and the grass is greener than elsewhere in Venice, and the nodding violets grow. Behind the acacia grove there is a Protestant burial-ground where rest the bones of many Englishmen who came to Venice for pleasure and stayed to die. The tomb of our ambassador, Sir Francis Vincent, is here. A beautiful walk is towards the ramparts of San Nicolo, where the blackbirds sing in the old convent garden, and in summer crimson poppies, purple salvias, and vivid green grass are luxuriant. San Nicolo di Bari is the patron saint of sailors. They have erected a magnificent church dedicated to his memory on the most beautiful point of the Lido. Here the crews of the merchantmen and warships of the Republic would linger for a while before sailing, to ask a blessing on their voyage. The saint's remains do not really rest here. Venice failed in her endeavour to obtain them by force from the people of Bari; but she spread the fiction among the people. To this day the sailors of the lagoon firmly believe that San Nicolo still watches over and protects them, and when in doubt or danger are enabled by the campanile of his church to find the direct course to the Lido port. At the Lido is the cemetery of the Jews. The graves are covered with sand and vegetation, and children never hesitate to dance on them,--in fact, to do so is a favourite pastime. If one remonstrates, they will look at you with wide-open eyes, and explain that these are only graves of Jews,--a Jew with the Venetians being no better than a dog. The grave of a Christian is treated with the greatest reverence: even the children and the gondoliers salute it as they pass. There is something pathetic about the Jewish graves, from the stones over which the inscriptions have been effaced. [Illustration: CHIOGGIA] Chioggia is one of the greater islands. It has a large town with an immensely broad street and a wide canal. Here is the most famous and most picturesque fish-market of all suburban Venice. In it one comes across the finest Venetian types, magnificent models for painters, bronzed Giorgione figures and black-eyed swarthy women. Their dialect is beautiful, far more so than that of Venice proper; and at night Ariosto is read publicly in the streets by a musical sweet-voiced Chiozzotto. Here the dramatist Goldoni lived, and the painter Rosalba Carrera, and the composer Giuseppe Zarlino. Chioggia reminds one of the Jewish quarter in the east end of London. The people, mostly fishermen, are extremely poor. This is the place for colour. There is colour everywhere--in the sails of the boats, in the costume of the people, and even in the red cotton curtains of the churches. Unfortunately, one's stay there was brief--because of the insects. A fisherman in Chioggia took us for a sail. We had bargained for an hour's journey; but we had not been out for more than ten minutes before he landed us on the rocks and demanded five francs. We were entirely at his mercy, and were forced to concede; but his action struck us as being high-handed. Sometimes the fishermen of Chioggia, if they are so inclined, will tell you tales of Angelica and Orlando, and the pageant of the Carolingian myth. Torcello is one of the most interesting islands of the lagoon. It is seven miles from Venice, and a pathway is made to it through the sea by stakes. The island is for the most part a waste of wild sea moor. Grey and lifeless in colour, it is a desolate place, and you feel as if you were at the end of the world. At one time it was extremely populous; but now it is impossible to live there, because the marshes breed malaria. Any count whose title and estates the Venetians deem improbable they call "the count from Torcello." One passes six miles of the most beautiful scenery on the way thither. The entrance is by a canal, and the banks on either side are covered with dwarf bushes and lilac trees. Thirteen hundred years ago the grey moorland looked much as it does now--except that where a city stood the cattle feed, what was once the piazza of the city is a grassy meadow, and a narrow pathway is the only street. Two hundred years after the invasion of Attila, the inhabitants of Aquileia and Altinum, with their most precious possessions, flew from their houses to the island of Torcello. Now there is scarcely a sign of human habitation; and only the ruins of an old quay, an ancient well, foundations of marble buildings, a great church, and a campanile, are left to show what at one time was a populous city, which was called the mother of Venice. By the remains of these buildings one can see that they were constructed by men in great distress, seeking a shelter, yet not wishing to attract the eyes of their enemies by their splendour. The church of Torcello shows force and simplicity of character, and a certain reverent religious feeling on the part of its founders. Everything is on a small and humble scale. The columns which support the roof are no higher than a man. Yet these columns are of pure Greek marble, and the capitals are enriched with delicate sculpture. One sees everywhere in this church an earnest and simple desire to do honour to God in the temple they were erecting, and that it should not form too great a contrast to the churches they had loved and seen destroyed. Torcello is equally delightful in springtime and in autumn. In spring the orchards are in full bloom, and the hedges throw their pink and white sprays of thorn against the sky. In autumn the water meadows are a shimmer of purple and red from the masses of feathery lavender that grow there. It has much the same colour and feeling as a Scotch moor. Torcello is interesting from its venerable traditions, its desolation, its wildness, and its profound silence. There are many expeditions on which one could go if one had the time to spare. For example, there is an island near Torcello called San Francisco in Deserto. The name is well applied: St. Francis' island certainly stands in a desert. There is still an islet monastery of the Franciscan order. The brethren show you with much enthusiasm a stone coffin in which the founder of the convent was in the habit of lying in order to acclimatise himself to the sensation of death. Also there is pointed out a penitential cell which was once inhabited by the saint, and a tree (said to have sprung from his staff) which he planted. This legend may sound mythical; but perhaps it may not be so. It is quite possible for a staff, even if it has lain by for some time, to shoot out in several places in green sprigs; and one of these, cut in proper manner, might easily take root and grow into a tree. The real charm of the island lies in the garden of the monastery, where narcissus are abundant and there is a great avenue of cypresses, the finest in Venice. [Illustration: IN MURANO] Triporti is different: in fact, no other island of the lagoon is quite like it. Here are great sweeps of sandy land covered with coarse grass and heather and pools of brackish water. The island is more or less uncultivated, and the air is full of strange aromatic odours from the sea. It is a marvellous place to bathe in: the sand is fine and soft and yellow, and the sea lies wide open before you, warm and limpid. If you have any doubt as to where Murano is, look for a great black cloud hovering over an island; and you may be sure that there are the glass factories of Murano. Glass-making is the only industry now practised in the lagoon. The factories are no longer numerous, Murano having declined from her ancient splendour. The secret of the magician is exposed; and Murano has no longer the monopoly of bevelled mirrors, great glasses, and crystal balls. Such work is executed in Birmingham quite as well as in Murano. The old art is lost. Still, Murano is interesting. There is perhaps more life in it than in any other of the islands. Workmen sift glass upon the pavement; women, at the doors, sit busily knitting, or stringing beads; fishermen, clothed in a dark greenish grey, are disentangling their nets, which hang over the boats in apparently inextricable confusion; there are street vendors of all kinds, calling out the nature of their wares to the passerby. There are five thousand inhabitants in the city of Murano. Its grand canal is almost as broad as that of Venice. The beautiful palaces, with their doors and windows of marble,--some of red Verona marble, some deeply enriched with mouldings, others with arcades of a singular grace and delicacy--are now inhabited by the very poorest of the poor. The church of San Donato, the Matrice or mother church of Murano, stands in a field of fresh green grass. It is said that a virgin appeared in a vision to its founder, Otho the Great, showing him this very meadow overgrown with scarlet lilies, and bidding him erect a church there in her honour. Murano, on the whole, is a dreary little town. Wealth, beauty, and elegance have passed away; the country is devoted to cabbages and potato patches. Still, it has charm even in its decay. How beautiful Murano must have been at the time when Cardinal Bembo and so many famous literati lived there! It must have been an earthly paradise, with its luxurious vegetation, lordly palaces, and magnificent gardens. In this city the horse is a quaint and unexpected animal. He is not wanted. He is quite as ridiculous and useless as a unicorn would be in the streets of London. He annoys one, this strange beast,--making one think of mountains, valleys, fields, trees, streets, and carriages, at a time when one is eager to be satisfied with sparkling lagoons, gondolas, and a palace for hotel. [Illustration: MRS. EDEN'S GARDEN IN VENICE] The gardens in Venice have a character all their own. They are highly prized, for space is scarce. The soil is rich, formed of lagoon mud; but only certain plants will grow freely in it--because of the salt air. The variety that will bloom, however, is quite enough to make a good show--flowering and aromatic shrubs, roses (especially banksia), most bulbs, and (blooming the finest and happiest of all in Venetian soil) carnations, the "garofoli" which play so large a part in Italian love-stories. On the Giudecca there are two gardens, each quite different from the other in character and appearance, but both illustrating what a Venetian garden may be like. In one all the resources of art and wealth have been brought to bear, and there is a succession of brilliant beds of colour. In the middle is a green oasis, a kind of English orchard, where the turf is as fine and as velvety, as deep and green, as that of any English lawn, and the orchard trees throw a delicate tracery of flickering shadows. There are beds of splendid colour, varying with the seasons. In fact, there is almost an Oriental lavishness about this garden: the scent of the flowers is almost oppressive. The other garden is not less beautiful; but it is set apart for profit rather than for pleasure. There are aisles upon aisles of vine-covered pergolas, crossing one another; and one can saunter down these cool promenades for hours, absolutely bareheaded. A narrow strip is divided from the rest of this garden by a thick hedge. Here, in one glorious mass, are all the flowers that will grow freely in Venice--the flame-coloured trumpets of the bigonici, by bowers of roses over-arching walks, banksias festooning the walls, and one corner completely filled by a splendid _Daphne odorifera_ which by her perfume draws the butterflies. However, one cannot quite understand the spirit that prompted Alfred de Musset to write those verses the last of which runs:-- À Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca, Dans les prés fleuris cuellir la verveine; À Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca, Vivre et mourrir là. [Illustration: TIMBER BOATS FROM THE SHORES OF THE ADRIATIC] There are now at Saint Blaise no pastoral and poetic places where lovers could stroll hand in hand by the pale moonlight: the gardens, somewhat marshy, are cultivated principally for market purposes. The Giudecca Canal is the commercial harbour of Venice. The churches of Redentore and Maggiore lie on the farther side of it. In this canal a group of small vessels lie all day long at anchor--twenty or thirty of them, laden with wood brought from the Istrian coast, and sold in Venice. When it has been disposed of, the captain calls his crew from the distant cafés and wine-shops, releases the watch-dog from his post on deck, weighs anchor, and creeps down the Adriatic to reload again with fuel. This is all the Venetian commerce of to-day--this and a few beads, glass, wood-carving, lace, and bric-à-brac, such as would scarcely load a modern trading-ship. Nine hundred years ago the trade of Venice was important. By the close of the eleventh century, the city was commercially supreme in Europe. Yet she manufactured nothing. She was supreme simply by the exercise of the merchant's calling. She was Europe's greatest ship-owning power and commercial head. Her merchants, conveying cloth, velvet, serge, canvas, various precious and commercial metals, glass beads, and other goods, received in return drugs, spices, dyes, precious stones, rugs, silks, brocades, cotton, and perfumes, which were sold at a high rate of profit. The population of Venice was then two hundred thousand; the annual exports were valued at ten million ducats; there were three hundred sea-going vessels, eight thousand sailing vessels, three thousand smaller craft, seventeen thousand mercantile sailors, and a powerful navy with eleven thousand able-bodied seamen. San Giorgio is of note as the place for red mullet from the Adriatic. Nothing equals the fish: none other is so appetising, so red and fresh in colour--one would feel inclined to eat of it if only for its hue. The best place to procure mullet is in a certain tavern where gondoliers and sailors mostly congregate: here they can drink wine free of duty. The tavern is invariably filled with such men, all stretched out on benches round the table. San Giorgio is the place for sunsets also: from nowhere else in the lagoon can one see such a marvellous variety, such changes of sea and sky. The church possesses a wonderful Entombment by Tintoretto. [Illustration: BY A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD] San Servolo is a very small island beyond San Giorgio, yet one of the brightest jewels in the coronet of the lagoon--almost entirely covered with buildings. Burano has a population of some nine thousand. The people are chiefly engaged in fishing and in towing. One sees boatfuls of them returning from the sea; and lines of them towing heavy mud-filled barges on the way to Pordenone, all the men stepping in time with one another and bending to the rope with a will. There is something statuesque about these toilers. With their long, cleanly-moulded limbs, they remind one of ancient Egyptian bronzes. The sculptor would find plenty of scope in Burano. The people, however, are of evil repute by heredity. They are the scapegoats of the lagoon. If anything goes wrong, the blame is always laid upon them. They work harder and receive less pay than the inhabitants of any other island. In the old days terrible quarrels used to arise among the women, either in the market-place or when they sat in their doorways making that exquisite lace for which the town is famous. To the present day lace is made at Burano, and even now the women quarrel over their work. If one did not know the language, one would not imagine that they were quarrelling--the dialect is so soft and sweet, the words dying away in a kind of sigh. Mazzorbo is connected with Burano by a long wooden bridge. There are very few houses here, and very few inhabitants. The island is given up to flower gardens and the cultivation of fruit. Every day boats laden with fruit, to be sold at the Rialto, are sent to Venice. Most of the inhabitants of Mazzorbo are extraordinarily beautiful and sweet of nature. These characteristics are very often found among those whose business is chiefly connected with mother earth. Gardeners of all nationalities are generally gentle and charming persons. San Lazzaro is where the Armenian monks spend their quiet lives, happy in the study and culture of their gardens. This convent of theirs is a gem of colour set on the lagoon, painted a deep crimson and looking like some gorgeous tropical flower. There is a terraced walk in the garden, and the cloister is rich in flowers and planted with cypress and oleander trees. It is a place in which to bask in the sun, and watch the crabs fighting with one another on the sloping wall. One can see the sun setting behind the Euganian hills, and watch the first stars appear and the piazza lights shine out. [Illustration: IN A SIDE STREET, CHIOGGIA] Malamocco is not often visited by strangers; yet there is much that is beautiful in the place, and a certain old-world air that fascinates one. It is a good deal older than Venice; and its people, friendly and clean persons, are always careful to explain to you that they are not Venetians. The famous white asparagus, for which the evil-smelling mud makes excellent soil, grows plentifully in Malamocco. San Elena was once an exceedingly lovely island. It lies near to the city, and is only a short distance from the public gardens. The grave of Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, at once an empress and a saint, is said to have been here. There was also a very beautiful Gothic cloister. Now the old monastery walls have been pulled down, and a hideous iron factory has been erected; the quiet convent cemetery has been dug up, and the crosses have been thrown aside to make way for iron-girded workshops. For expeditions on the lagoons it is always well to choose a pearly, silvery-grey day, when everything is delicate in colour and mellowed by a semi-transparent haze. The lagoons are not always grey and calm. They have their moods. I have seen a fair green sea grow black beneath a sudden storm. Sometimes Venice will appear blue and rosy, the smooth sea as green as in Canaletto's pictures, the white cupolas of Santa Maria della Salute and the silver domes of St. Mark's standing out as on an azure background. Then great masses of grey clouds will come up, the sea is festooned with foam, and black gondolas skim over the water like swallows flying before a storm. Sometimes the sky is clear and the light vivid, the water shines like silver, and one cannot tell the horizon from the sea; the islands appear like brown specks, and the ships seem to be sailing in the sky. At others the sea, under an east wind, is cold and hard as steel. In winter the lagoons are wrapped in damp mists, so thick that, however good a navigator you may be, you must needs lose your way; steamers and gondolas loom out and then disappear, swallowed up by the dense wall of vapour, and the shipping looks ghostly, tall and gaunt. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE] Away out in the remote and unfrequented regions of the lagoon are small isolated huts, mud-plastered, single-roomed cabins, built on piles, which guard certain valli, to which the fish are driven in the spring, to spawn. These consist of deep ditches surrounded by palisades of wattled cane. Here the men stay sometimes for days, fishing with nets, or standing upright in the long light boats waiting for their prey. Some of the valli have the most uncanny names: one is "The Val dell' Inferno," and another "The Val dei Sette Morte." Of this last there is a terrible story, which has taken deep root in the imagination of the people. Six fishermen were living in a valle. They had with them a boy, who, when they went out on the lagoon, stayed at home to cook for the men. One day, when they were returning with their boatload, they found the body of a drowned man floating out to sea. They picked the body up and laid it on the prow. The boy came to meet them, crying that breakfast was ready. When they were seated at their meal he asked why they had not brought the man who was lying in the prow. The fishermen said, jokingly, that he had better go and call him. This the child did, but soon returned with the news that he had shouted to the man in the prow, who had neither moved nor answered him. "Go again," said the men. "He is a deaf old fool. You must shout and swear at him." The child went once more to the boat, and shouted and swore at the man; but still he would not wake. "Go out again and shake him by the leg, and tell him that we can't wait until doomsday for him," said the fishermen. So the boy went, climbed into the boat, and shook the man by the leg. This time the man in the prow sat up and said, "What do you want?" "Why don't you come?" asked the boy. "They can't wait until doomsday for you." "Go back," he said, "and tell them I am coming." The boy went back to the hut, and told the men, who were laughing and joking over their meal, that it was all right: the man in the prow was coming. At this the fishermen turned very pale and laughed no more. Then they heard heavy footsteps coming slowly up the path; the door was pushed open; the dead man came in, and sat down in the boy's place, making seven at the table. The eyes of the other six were fixed on the seventh, their guest. They could neither move nor speak. The blood grew colder and colder in their veins. When the sun rose and shone in at the window, it shone on seven dead men sitting round the table in the valle. Despite this tale, Venetian people are bright and essentially practical. They are not deeply imaginative. Horrors, weird fancies, and love of the preternatural are quite foreign to the Italian temperament. [Illustration: RIO E CHIESA DEGLI OGNISSANTI] SOCIAL UPS AND DOWNS A great change came over society in Venice early in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The people were dull, and sullen, and poor. They resented their political position bitterly. The feeling with which they were possessed was their great hatred of the Austrians. They did not hate the Austrians individually; but they did politically, and therefore socially. If you wanted to know the Austrians, you could not know the Venetians: if you were friendly with either, you must cold-shoulder the others. Society in Venice was divided into two distinct sections. Once gone over to a side, you had no withdrawal. If a girl intermarried she was cut off for life from her family. Whatever the Venetian can or cannot do, he can certainly hate, and that well. He may be dull and dispirited; but he is fiercely patriotic, and his hatred of the Austrian was very strong. Most of the nobility were exiled. The rest kept severely to themselves. They never attended popular festivities, and even among the poorer classes of Venetians very few old customs were kept up. The people felt keenly the contrast of what had been and what was. A bridge of boats was still built over the water to the church of the Redentore; but it was very little used. The carnival, which was wont to last for six weeks, was kept up but a single night; and then it was a farcical show. Only a few dressed-up beggars tore through the streets, singing songs at the cafés for drinks, and they were looked upon by the crowd with melancholy scorn. Venetian people of good family seldom went to the play or to the opera. Austrian bands played there. The places of entertainment were mostly kept up by foreigners, and were consequently not what they might have been. To find good Italian opera one had to go to London or to Paris. Still, the Venetians love music. It is born in them: they have a passion for the art which nothing can subdue. Even the veriest street urchin sings his gutter song with a fervour such as we do not know of in the north. Despite the ban from which they suffered, the theatres were not uninteresting. Scarcely any Italian can act badly. Practically in every case he has the dramatic instinct. But there was no gay buzz in the audience, no flitting from box to box. The theatres were filled with Austrians, who took their pleasure quietly. The artisans and other poor Venetians, who saved up their money to go to the play, certainly did enjoy it. They cheered and hissed with vehemence, and between the acts drank aniseed and water, and ate candied fruits on sticks fashioned at the ends into toothpicks. [Illustration: A CAMPIELLO] Marionette shows were very popular. The theatre was tiny, and the stage was tiny; everything was arranged in accordance with the small dimensions of the actors. The marionettes talked very volubly, so much so that it was sometimes difficult to follow them. The plays, written expressly for the marionettes, were of all descriptions, from melodrama to farce. Sometimes there were ballets. The audience was generally amusing. It consisted principally of boys. The hat was passed round, and if the proprietor considered that there was not sufficient money collected he would shout, "O you sons of dogs!" and close the theatre. If any Venetian of good family gave a ball or a party, he was looked upon with suspicion by the poor, who had no holidays, no tips, small trade, and large taxes. The Austrians gave balls and parties occasionally, but not very often. They hated Venice, where they were regarded as a pestilence, and shunned by all save their own countrymen. This strange antagonism continued for a few years, until the Austrian occupation ceased and Venice was united to the rest of Italy. The Emperor of Austria's birthday afforded a good example of the inter-racial bitterness. All night long Austrian bands paraded the streets, cannons were fired at intervals, and fireworks let off. It seemed as though by unnecessary ostentation of artillery the Austrians were endeavouring to reach the throne in Vienna. But a dead silence reigned in Venice. Not a single Venetian was abroad. The Austrians had their celebrations all to themselves. It was rather pathetic to see them trying to work up joy and enthusiasm. Next morning the celebrations were continued. Service was held in St. Mark's Church; and the soldiers stood outside in the square in long rows, drawn to attention, the sun shining on their resplendent uniforms and handsome faces--a gallant array! Not a single Venetian showed himself. Not a blind was drawn. Not one curious woman's face appeared at a window. Even a Venetian servant girl would not have exchanged a civility with an Austrian officer that day. There was a dreadful hush everywhere. Venice was like a dead city. One felt that the people were stuffing their ears, and covering their eyes, behind drawn blinds. The Austrians tried hard to be jubilant and gay; but very obviously they did not succeed. In the evening they went to the opera, endeavouring to spread out and make more of themselves; but the large house was practically empty. The day after that, Venetian life flowed back again into its accustomed channels. The people were laughing and chatting and filling all the eating-houses, as though making up for lost time. One wondered what the antagonism would all end in. [Illustration: FISHING BOATS FROM CHIOGGIA] There was in Venice a committee which looked after Venetian interests. On all the public anniversaries bombs were fired and flags were flown. In all the Government Departments the committee placed spies, who were so clever that they were seldom detected by the Austrians. Even in the cathedrals those men would sometimes explode bombs. The antagonism between the Venetian and the Austrian was shown in the piazza, perhaps, more than elsewhere. The military band played there three times a week, winter and summer,--played gloriously all the best Italian airs. Much as they loved music, the Venetians walked up and down the quay, or in the arcades. They would not enter the square until the music was finished. Such was their pride! The cafés had no longer their gay and lively reputation. Only at Florian's did the Austrians and the Venetians sometimes intermingle--and that was because of the foreigners. Usually the Venetians had their separate cafés, and the Austrians theirs--the Quadri and the Specchi. The piazza of St. Mark's seems to be the very heart of Venice, the very core, from which everything radiates, only to return. If you lose yourself in Venice, and go on walking, you will be sure to find your way back to the piazza sooner or later. At eight o'clock the piazza was at its very gayest. Nothing could be more lively, more amusing. It was lined with cafés--the cafés "Suttil," "Quadri," "Costanza," and "Florian"; which last reminds one very much of the "Café Royal" in Paris, and was certainly quite as famous. The old proprietor of this restaurant was greatly patronised by the Venetian nobility, who were loud in their praises both of himself and of his viands. The first Florian lived in the time of the Empire. There is a charming story told of him and the artist Canova. The old hotel-keeper was very much troubled with gout, and Canova, to whom Florian had rendered many services, modelled the affected leg in plaster, in order that he might have a shoe made which would fit exactly, and so ease the pain. No doubt (but this is pure surmise) Florian favoured the artist, in return for his kindness, with a dish of his famous "sorbet au raisins." [Illustration: A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE] Street vendors of all kinds swarmed in the piazza at night--flower-girls of the most obliging natures, who, if you would not buy their wares, would thrust a bouquet into your hand gratis (you were, of course, supposed to repay them at some other time). There were musicians of every sort and kind--some with guitars; others with mandolines; some playing selections from the operas; others singing "Funiculi" and "Santa Lucia" in high tenor voices; deep-chested, bronze-faced men who explained that they were once operatic stars, but were now reduced, by the injustice of managers and the villainous tempers of the prima donnas, to street singing. There were men who went about selling frosted fruits on long sticks, crying "Caramel, caramel!" and giving descriptions of their wares in almost every European language. People of all races were there--red-faced Englishmen and fair women, with their rosy daughters in sailor hats, on the way from Switzerland, the respectable English father explaining St. Mark's with a comprehensive wave of the hand. There were Frenchmen, Americans, Austrians, Italians, either talking volubly or deadly quiet; Greeks, with long bluish-black hair floating out behind them, and caps with silk top-knots (these were captains of small vessels coming from Cyprus and Syria, and they went to the Café della Costanza, where they could procure mocha and the pipe they loved best); and young Venetian gentlemen who spent their lives for the most part in drifting from one café to another, generally handsome, well-dressed men with immaculate linen and pointed beards carefully cut, carrying long canes, and the lightest of kid gloves (their main object seemed to be to stare at all the pretty women); and Austrians, smart, good-natured people, who frequented their own cafés, with much talk and laughter and rattling of swords. Now and then one saw Venetian women of the upper classes on the piazza, but very rarely. They were extremely indolent and lazy, and seldom went out. The weather, they would tell you, was never sufficiently fine: there was too much sun, or a sirocco was coming, or a cloud threatened rain: the slightest thing deterred them. Often the utmost exertion a Venetian woman would allow herself in the day was to pass from her sofa to her balcony to breathe the freshness of the flowers. Consequently, she had a complexion which was extremely delicate, a sort of pearly whiteness. Sometimes she would take a turn or two in the piazza with her husband or brother as cavalier, and languidly sip anise and water at the Café Florian. For the most part the ancient aristocracy of Venice lived in retirement and were very poor. They dwelt in palaces whose walls were covered with priceless paintings by great masters, with which they would not part. They dined off a dish of polenta or fried fish, which a valet brought from a tavern near by. Their poverty and the fear of spies and informers combined in making society in Venice extremely reserved. It was impossible for a stranger to penetrate into the midst. In summer, in the months of the dog-star, those few among the patricians who were well-to-do flew to their villas on the banks of the Brenta, on the mainland. They returned to Venice in winter, only because, they said, the odours from the lagoons at that time were unhealthy and caused fever. Those who had no country houses, and could not afford to travel, shut themselves up in their palaces and drew down their blinds until it was the fashionable time to appear. In the dead season there were no lamps lit in the great entrances, and the palaces were silent. The family lived in the back rooms on the top story. The rest of the house was let. Most of the palaces were built round courtyards, and the contessa might go thither as often as she pleased to interview tradesmen and bargain for fish--there at least she would be free from espionage. As a matter of fact, it was pleasant to be in Venice at that season. The heat was less: the sun did not bake the ground as it did on the mainland. Owing to the sirocco which blew across the water, the air was cool and sweet. Human beings, however, are ever the slaves of custom, and it was the fashion for Venetian noblemen to spend the summer months on the Brenta. The river scenery had a fascination for them, just as the Thames has for Londoners. All along the banks were rows of little, bright, stuccoed villas, somewhat flimsy, each with its patch of garden and its shrubbery at the back, where the family sat all day. Now and then one saw a nobleman's palace breaking the line of somewhat uninteresting houses. Such was the magnificent villa at Stra, belonging to a princely Venetian family, with its great sweeps of green lawns, its orangeries, its alleys, and quaintly cut yews. Venetians love nature when it has been trimmed by man. Certainly the banks of the Brenta are very beautiful, especially in spring, when the water is covered with lilies of yellow and white, and the banks are lined with scented flags, and the larks tip the surface of the water with violet wings and sing as they mount against the sun. It is not unlike the scenery of some quiet English stream. [Illustration: CHIOGGIA] This custom of spending the summer months in the suburbs of Venice was called "villeggiatura." It was one of the gayest times of the year for the Venetians. They lived by night. All day long they lay behind closed blinds, while the sun parched and baked the ground. Only from five o'clock in the afternoon until four in the morning could they be said to live. Then they held dances, card-parties, and flirtations. During these hours, when the temperature was low, amusement and pleasure reigned supreme; but no sooner did the sun begin to rise than, as surely as Cinderella disappeared at the stroke of twelve, the gay society of the Brenta vanished, and the place lay dead and silent once more under the intolerable glare. How different society in Venice was in the early days! Then the houses were marvels of luxury; the finest wit, the most brilliant conversation, and the most delightful music were to be heard in Venice. It was not in the houses of the old aristocracy that the most brilliant people--painters, writers, poets, and politicians--assembled. It was in the houses of women who were looked upon as more or less shady persons, whom no Venetian gentleman would dream of introducing to his wife. The wives of the aristocracy were seldom seen except at public functions. They took much the same position in society as the "honoured interior" takes in Japan at the present day. (The geisha, although she is infinitely more entertaining, has no social status whatever.) The Venetian lady of quality, unlike the "honoured interior," dressed in the most magnificent style. In the estimate of her husband nothing was too gorgeous or too costly for her to wear. Among all those of the larger towns of northern Italy, Venetian women of the sixteenth century were the first to wear needle-point. Although the ideal woman of that time had to be tall, a Venetian mother never troubled herself about the height of her daughter. At any moment she could transform the girl's dwarfish stature to that of a splendid giantess by the use of a pair of high pattens, which were unnoticed beneath the long stiff dress. Neither was the colour of the hair a source of inconvenience. Should a girl's locks be of a mousey nondescript shade, her mother, instead of using injurious dyes, made her daughter sit every day for three hours in the front balcony where the sun shone the brightest, dressed in a crownless hat, so that her tresses might be pulled through it, and a very broad brim, in order that her face should not be tanned. Then the damsel's maid would sit and comb her mistress's hair, bleaching in the sun. Girls were never dressed so richly as their mothers. In fact, the uniform dress was very simple, generally plain black or white. When they went to church they wore long white veils, or falzulo, and on ordinary occasions long gauzy silk ones, through which they could see, yet not be seen. On her marriage day the girl was first introduced into society, and saw the bridegroom for the first time. After marriage the rules which ordered her life were not nearly so restricting. In 1614 certain regulations were passed with regard to dress and household extravagances--the amount of money to be spent on dress, liveries, gondolas, jewellery, feasts and entertainments, gold and silver plate, and even the dishes and the menus of dinner-parties. All these were limited. The earliest nobility consisted of twenty-four families who ruled as tribunes over the twelve islands of the lagoons that formed the Venetian State. Some of these families are still represented in Venice. In the year 1296 a rigid and definite aristocracy was formed. Those who held chief places in the management of the State, whether they were noble or they had gained importance through their riches, determined to establish themselves as the permanent rulers of Venice, and to close the doors of office against all parvenus. Thenceforward only near relations of those who sat in the Great Council could be recognised as members of the caste. The twenty-four families, nevertheless, had distinction, and were called the "old houses." Admission to the Venetian nobility was rarely conferred on anyone save foreign princes or distinguished generals. Now and then, when the State was sorely in need of money, a Venetian family was ennobled; but for the most part the aristocracy guarded their privileges most zealously. In the days of her decadence, in the eighteenth century, the tightly-laced, lackadaisical men and the hooped and brocaded women of Venetian society lived a curious, aimless, artificial life. Their greatest pleasure seems to have lain in gossiping, eating, drinking, and generally struggling to kill time. It was an inane life, frigid, without freedom, without heart, without strong emotion. All pleasures seem to have been carried out by rule. Even the laughter and the jokes were artificial. There can be but small wonder that society fell into broken fortunes. The ideal nobleman of to-day is a stronger, more active, finer person altogether than his senatorial ancestor. His character is healthier. He adopts more or less a country life. He owns property on the mainland, and is very much occupied in trying to make it pay. He rears cattle, grows crops, makes wine on his own premises, is interested in silk-growing and in model farms, and competes for agricultural prizes offered by the Government. His Venetian palace does not interest him greatly. He spends a few months there in the season, gives one or two large entertainments, and is constantly making alterations and improvements; but his heart is in the country, and he leaves Venice for his rural palazzo on the slightest pretext. This Venetian noble of to-day thinks a great deal of himself. His temper is haughty, and there is no softness or geniality about him. Nevertheless, he is a decided improvement. What society there is still to be found in Venice is constituted by foreigners, mainly English and American. One of the great things to be done is to take a gondola and go to the Canal of the Slaves, beyond the public gardens on the island of St. Peter--to the home of an old fisherman celebrated for his fish dinners. This fisherman's cottage is just as celebrated in Venice as the Trafalgar Hotel in London, or the Ship Tavern at Greenwich, or La Rapée in Paris. Here, however, is a more picturesque environment--boats drawn up on the yellow sand, nets stretched to dry in the sun, planks forming a landing-place in front of the houses--all is very simple. One eats the fish dinner in a garden, under an arbour shaded by vines, where flowers and edible vegetables grow in charming but ill-kept confusion. The host is jovial; his wife, a great authority, is the cheerful mother of many children. [Illustration: THE FISH MARKET] One finds on one's travels that each city has its local and peculiar dish--Marseilles its "bouille à baisse"; Venice its "soupe au pidocchi"--mussels, gathered in the lagoons and canals, flavoured with spices and aromatic herbs. Personally, I would rather this Venetian viand were not so classical; but you would touch the people to the quick if you refused their offering. After it come oysters from the arsenal, eels and mullet from Chioggia, fried sardines, white wine of Policella, and fruits from the hills of Este, Marselice, and Montagnana. At the end of the repast one is presented with a bouquet from the garden. GONDOLAS AND GONDOLIERS No conveyance in this world is more delightful than the gondola. In appearance it is undoubtedly the most beautiful vessel in the world. Like most characteristic objects appertaining to Venice, it is suitable to the place: in fact, it is the outcome of the place. There is nothing strange or unnatural about Venice. Everything there seems to have come about through force of necessity, and is therefore perfectly beautiful. Even as the hansom cab suits London, or the 'rickshaw suits Japan, or the jaunting-car suits Ireland, so the gondola is the vessel for Venice. You cannot separate the lagoon from the gondola. One completes the other. Without either Venice would be impossible. The gondola alone can wend its way through the intricate water-streets of the Queen of the Adriatic. There is no indication of movement whatever in a gondola. The craft has no springs, no cogs, no jarring wheels or oily machinery, no vibration. Simply one sees the palaces glide by in front of one, and hears the water making a lapping noise under the bows. The gondolier is out of sight. Nothing blocks your view of sea and sky, save the slender steel ferro at the prow. The gondola is built for leisure: one cannot quite imagine it, let us say, in America. It is a historic vessel, with a flavour of sentiment and antiquity about it, built by a leisured people for idleness, not for business or for hurry. It is long and slender, flat-bottomed, and tapers towards each end, where it rises considerably above the water. It draws but little water, and has much the form of a skate. The felce (cabin), placed somewhat astern, is draped with black cloth, which can be removed in the summer-time to make room for a striped awning. This, however, the true Venetian loathes: rather than use it, I am sure, he would be willing to swelter under the felce. On each side of the cabin there is a window, which can be closed in three separate ways--by a bevelled Venetian glass let down; by a blind with movable blades; by a strip of cloth dropped over. [Illustration: MIDDAY ON THE LAGOON] The gondola is made to hold four people. There are morocco cushions on either side. As the seats are very low, you are supplied with two silken cords with handles, to assist you to rise. As the cabin is too small to turn in, one must enter a gondola backwards. The woodwork is carved according to the wealth of the owner or the taste of the gondolier. Sometimes it is very elaborate. Above the door is generally a copper shield on which the coat-of-arms of the owner is engraved, surmounted by a crown; on the felce there hangs, in a small frame, an image of the Holy Virgin, or of St. Mark, or of St. Theodore, or of St. George, or of some saint for whom the gondolier has a special devotion. The lantern also hangs here--a custom which, as the gondolas sometimes run without the star in front, is gradually dying out. On account of the coat-of-arms, the saint, and the lantern, the left is the place of honour: there the ladies are placed, or any aged or distinguished person. There is in the felce a sliding panel, through which one can communicate with the gondolier on emergency. At the prow there is a halberd-like piece of iron, smooth and polished, called "the ferro," much like the finger-board of a violin. This serves for decoration, for defence, for counterpoise to the rower in the stern, and to test the height of the bridges. It is the pride of the gondolier to keep this always as bright as silver. Often when a crowd of gondolas are moored thickly about the landing-stage, the ferro is used as a wedge, by the aid of which boats can be divided. The rower plies his oar standing on a small platform on the poop, not far behind the cabin, and facing the direction in which the gondola is to move. The skill with which the gondolier manages his graceful craft is extraordinary. He stands quite upright on the poop, one foot placed firmly in front of him, and throws the weight of his body forward on his oar to such an extent that one fears he may follow it into the water. It is only by long habit that he can procure the necessary balance. The gondola is sensitive to the least impression, and the downward stroke has the effect of sending the boat round. It is only by turning the blade in the water, and raising it gradually upward, that the gondola can be kept straight. The oar rests in a fork, beautifully designed to allow free movement. The gondolier, sole director of his craft, uses the oar sometimes as a paddle, and sometimes as a boathook. He rows always on one side. Under the hands of an efficient man, the gondola glides over the water like a living thing, turning the corners of canals with great precision. Sometimes on festa days the gondoliers practise feats, such as setting the vessel full-tilt and with all their might against the stone wall of a quay, going with such rapidity that you expect man and boat to be dashed to pieces. Just at the last moment, with a powerful turn of the oar that is interesting to watch, he stops dead at the base of the quay, sometimes nearly grazing it. In much the same way, in the At Maidan of Constantinople, long ago, Arab and Turkish horsemen charged against stone walls and suddenly pulled up. Very different is the gondola in the hands of an amateur. Many are the duckings that ensue. Some of the young patricians, however, occasionally don the traditional jacket, cap, and girdle of a gondolier, and guide their own craft in a remarkably graceful manner. Few people have any knowledge of the real meanings of the gondoliers' cries, some of which are peculiarly sweet and characteristic. When a man wants to pass on the left, and does not intend to use the backward stroke, he cries, "Premi!" If, on the other hand, he wishes to pass on the right, he cries, "Stali!" Sometimes, if when turning a dangerous corner he wishes to be especially emphatic, he cries, "Premi! Premi!" and "Stali! ah, Stali!" The gondola can be stopped immediately, however great the rate at which it is travelling, by placing the blade in front of the fork. If a man is really expert he stops his gondola very suddenly, making a great deal of foam with his oar. When stopping a gondola thus the gondolier cries, "Sciar!" As you approach the landing-stage a crowd of ragamuffins, old and young, called "crab-catchers," come forward, holding in their hands staffs, with bent nails attached, with which to secure your gondola as you place your foot on shore. The gondolier is a voluble, gossiping person. He loves to have a chat at the top of his voice with another of his kind, and to scream repartee across the water. He enjoys nothing more than a quarrel, especially with a man who is across the canal. Invariably they pass from pertinent observations on their personal appearances to defamation of their women. If such language were used at close quarters on either bank they would come to blows. I once saw two gondolas hook on to each other by mistake with their iron axes, and I shall never forget the discussion that ensued. It made one's blood literally curdle! The men looked like two angry sea-birds pecking at each other as they pulled and pulled in their endeavour to release themselves. When this had been accomplished they stood upright, each on his own poop, brandishing their oars as though they longed to kill. As a matter of fact, there is rarely any violence among Venetians except in language. "Body of Bacchus!" one shouts. "Blood of David!" the adversary answers. These mythological oaths being not sufficiently comforting, they continue: "Low crab!" "Sea-lion!" "Dog!" "Son of a cow!" "Ass!" "Son of a sow!" "Assassin!" "Ruffian!" "Spy!" Having reached the worst taunt in their vocabulary, they take to cursing the rival saints. "The Madonna of thy landing is a street-walker who is not worth two candles!" one will cry. "Thy saint is a rascal who does not know how to make a decent miracle!" the other will rejoin. The profanity becomes more terrible as the distance between them increases. Possibly next time they meet they will drink a glass of wine together without remembering the quarrel. [Illustration: A TRAGHETTO] The gondolier is a more intelligent person than the ordinary hackman. He knows all the histories of the different places of interest, and relates them for the benefit of foreigners. He has a few words of French and English. Of course, he is a rogue by nature, and will cheat you on every possible occasion; but that conduct is common to the carriers of all countries. And there is something very frank and amusing about the way in which they commit their petty thefts. A gondolier likes to serve Englishmen or Americans, who pay good prices; but a German is beyond his comprehension. The Teuton either goes by the tariff or walks--an eminently foolish act, in the gondolier's opinion. Every gondolier belongs to a traghetto (ferry-boat station), from which gondolas cross over to Venice from various points on the Giudecca. These traghette have been established for centuries--no one knows exactly how long; but certainly they were in existence in the fourteenth century. To a gondolier a traghetto is, as it were, a club. There are sixteen traghette. Each is governed by its own laws and constitutions, which are still strictly kept; each has its own history, archives, and parchment documents. By this society are regulated the gondolier's wages, the limits of his obedience, his holidays, everything appertaining to his welfare. There is at each traghetto a little house in which the gondoliers can sit and gossip and mend their boats. One sees some of the finest types there. Years ago they used to sing there on moonlight nights, in their beautiful broken Venetian patois, verses from Tasso. It is long since they have done this as a habit; but they will do it sometimes if you pay them sufficiently well. One often hears them singing on the lagoon to the accompaniment of an Englishman's golden coins. You can almost imagine on such occasions that you are living away back in the Middle Ages--except that now the Venetians drink a good deal, as they certainly never did then, and sing in thick, guttural voices, somewhat hoarse, but on the whole beautiful, as the musical Venetian dialect must always be. The songs that they sing are all about lovely maidens and romantic excursions on the water. The singing is very fine from a distance, the melody of a human voice floating out on the calm and silence of the night. The gondoliers are proud of their talent, and value it highly. Nearly every gondolier belongs to a bank. He is a capable financier. In company with twenty-nine other men, he deposits 10 lire, and pledges to pay a weekly sum of 1 lira throughout the year. On his failing to pay up once a week, 10 per cent. on each lira is charged. Gondoliers are supposed to borrow a certain amount, for which 10 per cent. is charged, every year. The accounts of the bank are settled in September, and then a new venture is started. The gondolier is an inflammable person. He is much taken up with pretty women getting in and out of gondolas. Love-making with him begins on the bridges in the narrow canals, or at the windows. One fine day, generally very early in life, when propelling his boat slowly down a side canal, he sees at an iron grated window the face of a girl. Instantly becoming enamoured, boldly he takes up his position every day underneath her casement, waiting for a look, sighing for a smile. If by chance the maiden should appear and return his salute, he takes himself off with great joy; and at the end of the day, when his work is done, he and a friend in whom he has confided dress themselves in their best, and call upon the father of the girl, formally to ask her hand. He states his family, his profession, the amount of his income, and the extent of his love. Two or three months are allowed to elapse. Then there will be more gazing at the window and meeting in the calle. If by the end of that time their affection has declared itself sincere, the lover and his parents are invited to supper at the girl's home. Every stage in a Venetian's love affair is marked by feasts, generally suppers. On this occasion the young man again asks the father's consent. This is accorded him, and the pair are blessed. The ceremony is called the "dimanda." A little later comes the betrothal ("segno"), when the lover presents the girl with her wedding ring, and, if he can afford it, other rings as well. There is a sumptuous supper, and thenceforward they are called respectively "novizza" and "spoza." During the time of the betrothal the poor gondolier is kept very busy buying and giving presents to the lady of his choice. He must give the proper things at the proper times, and never by any chance make the mistake of purchasing a comb or scissors, for one is an emblem of the witch, and the other signify a cutting tongue. He must remember to present to her at Christmas a confitura of fruit and raw mustard-seed, and a box of mandolato; on All Souls' Day a box of fare; at the Feast of St. Mark a boccolo or button-hole of rosebuds; at Easter a fugazza or cake; at Martinmas roast chestnuts. The thing for the girl to give in return is a silk handkerchief: it is not considered etiquette to present her lover with a gift of great value. [Illustration: MARIETTA] In Venice everything is ruled by custom. The most important acts in a Venetian's life are bound and fettered by it, and he would never dream of breaking through. He will sacrifice anything for custom, and never count the cost. For example, if one saw a gondolier at a festa, or at a baptism, or at a wedding, you might take him for either a rich man or a spendthrift. As a matter of fact, he is neither the one nor the other. Only, he is bound by custom to do certain things and spend a certain amount of money at a festa, and he does it regally. He may have to pinch and scrape at home afterwards; but that is another matter. The gondoliers are a very conservative people. They are the slaves of custom. Custom is to them a religion. They much prefer their ancient customs to any new order of comfort or convenience. Their lives are simple, bright, and easy; their wants are very few and moderate. House-rent is cheap: they can procure a fallen palace in moderately good repair for half a franc a day. They are frugal and easily pleased; their constitutions are sound; their climate is fine, and the air they breathe is pure. Consequently, the gondolier can live happily, with his wife, on a franc and a half a day. His meals, to be sure, are always the same--coffee and bread in the morning, polenta and fish at mid-day, a soup of shell-fish or artichokes at night. When the family begins to be large, the gondolier's life is not ideal; still, in spite of the hunger and poverty and crowding in Venetian houses, a great deal of joy manages to find room. If a baby lives, he grows up into a fine healthy man, robust and happy; but usually he dies, especially if he is one of many. Venetian women seem to have naturally not the slightest idea how to bring up a baby. It is only after constant habit and practice, and the loss of lives, that a mother seems to grasp the first principles of a baby's upbringing. Before that she will feed it, at two months old, on black coffee, sour apples, and wine; allow it to swallow all kinds of lotions and concoctions prepared by the doting old crones of the quarter. As the child grows older she lets it wear during winter the clothes which it wore in summer. Then she wonders why out of eight children only four are living. It is a beautiful sight to see a great gondolier nursing his little child. He may be harsh and bullying to his fellows; but he treats Baby with the utmost tenderness and gentleness. The child is a good deal safer in his arms than in those of the mother. The chief amusements of the gondolier are to go to the opera or to see marionettes, to make up a party and spend the day in the country, to compete in a rowing match, and to give a little supper at a wine-shop. It is on such days as these that the true freshness and warmth of his nature appear, and one sees the gondolier as he is--mirthful, pungent, gay. There are two things about which the gondolier is particular. One is his bread, and the other is his wine. One seldom finds good wine in Venice. It is only when the red wine arrives fresh from Padua and Verona that it is good. Then everyone rushes to the wine-shops; for nothing spreads quicker than the reputation of a good wine, and everyone clamours for it. Very soon it becomes watery and sour. The white wine the gondoliers do not like at all. Of bread there are all kinds. One is expected to have a preference for a certain make, and there are many different makes. There are the Chioggian bread, the "pane Commune," the "pane col agid," and many others. [Illustration: BAMBINO] Men of the gondolier class do not think a great deal of religion. That is reserved for women. Church-going is no longer a habit with the men. Still, whenever matters of ancient custom step in they invariably do their duty--as in events of domestic life, such as confirmations,--and the little chapel to the Madonna at each traghetto has always its flowers and its few candles placed there by the reverent hands of the gondoliers. Times were good for the gondoliers when Venice was rich and prosperous. Nowadays their gains are meagre, and they number hundreds where they numbered thousands in the old days. Noblemen kept six or seven gondolas, with attendant gondoliers, and, besides paying them an ample salary, on festa days allowed them to exact any payment they chose. If you are staying in Venice for any length of time, it is better to hire a gondola and gondolier by the month than by the day. One only pays five francs a day, and when off duty the youth makes an excellent servant in the house. He comes and knocks at your water-gate at a certain time every day; also he will wait at table, act as footman, take care of the children; in fact, he will do everything one wishes; and he pays the proprietor of the gondola, out of his own pocket, one franc a day. It is the ambition of every gondolier to serve an "Inglese." They say that Venice is always silent; but I can vouch that it is not so. At night, if your lodgings are anywhere near a landing-place, you will find that it is very noisy indeed. The gondoliers sleep at their posts on the pedestals of the two columns as they sit waiting for a job, and they love their repose in the sunshine; but at night they become extremely lively, and keep up a perpetual disturbance of laughter, shouts, and songs until two o'clock in the morning. They sit on the marble steps, or on the ends of their gondolas; or they eat shell-fish and drink wine under the light of the lamps in the niches of the Madonnas at street corners; vagabonds from their beds in the street arise and join them. One sees on the lagoons gondolas of all kinds, carrying passengers of all kinds, and it is sometimes interesting to peep inside as they pass. There are official gondolas, with the Italian banner floating at their sterns, carrying some cold, stiff functionary in full-dress uniform, his breast covered with decorations. Another carries English people, phlegmatic tourists, to Chioggia; another, with lowered felce, hides lovers who are going to breakfast somewhere on the lagoon; yet another, a larger gondola, takes a family to the sea baths at the Lido. There is a red craft waiting at the foot of some steps; a red bier is brought out of a church by a red cortege,--it is a corpse, to be buried in a cemetery on an island on the way to Murano. (When anyone dies in Venice a notice is posted up on his house, and on the houses round about, stating the age, place of birth, and the illness of which he died; also saying that he has received the Sacrament and died a good Christian; prayers are asked for his soul.) There are gondolas in which are musical instruments of all kinds--violins of Cremona, cornets, mandolines, tambourines,--a complete orchestra. Quite a large flotilla of gondolas follow in its wake. One has fastened to the side a bluish monster splashing and making the water foam. That is a dolphin, a marine curiosity which is displayed by the proud possessors under all the balconies as they pass, collecting money in a hat. In order that it may be seen to advantage, the animal is kept half in the water and half out. If one is at all interested in gondolas--that is to say, in the making of them,--nothing could be more fascinating than to spend a few hours in a squero (building yard). Any gondolier will be pleased to take you there, for he is inordinately proud of his craft. The squeri are picturesque; but somehow one always associates them with pitch. The place reeks with it. Always in one corner there stands the pitch-pot, sending a stream of thick black smoke up into the air. Small boys prance around, looking like young imps among the smoke and blaze, and wave smearing brushes in their hands. Long lines of boats, like some strange fish out of water, are drawn up, waiting to be cleaned or mended. The bottom of a gondola has to be dried thoroughly and quickly before receiving its coat of melted tallow. This is done by lighting a blazing fire of reeds under the boat, the flames leaping high into the air. Volumes of smoke arise, roll up over the house-tops, and are swept away by the breeze. Boys dance a kind of war-dance round the flames. The art of gondola-building is exacting. Three qualities are absolutely necessary to the formation of a perfect craft. It must draw but little water; it must turn easily; and it must be rowable by one oarsman only. To secure this, the hull is built of light thin boards, and only a portion of the flat bottom rests upon the water. Thus the boat swings as on a pivot. Then, the gondola is not equally divided by a line drawn from stern to bow: in order that the rower may be balanced, there is more bottom on one side than on the other. The various woods of which a gondola is made must be chosen with great care. They must be well seasoned and without knots, for the planks are liable to warp and the knots to start. Once every twenty days in summer the gondolier forfeits his four lire and takes his gondola to the squero to be cleaned and scraped. Weeds rapidly collect at the bottom when the water is warm, and the deadly toredo bores holes through the planking. The gondola is hauled up high and dry, and a fire burnt underneath it. A whole day's earnings in the summer season is a great loss to the gondolier; but if he keeps his gondola in good condition it will last him for a considerable time, perhaps for five years, and, besides, when the bottom of the boat is kept clear of weeds and well greased the speed is greater. When a gondolier sells his craft it becomes a ferry-boat for five years, the woodwork slowly bowing and bending until it becomes a gobbo half buried in the water. Later it is sold for five lire, broken up, and burnt in the glass manufactories of Murano. [Illustration: A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD IN VENICE] The natural history of these objects and their gradual development through centuries would form a fascinating chapter. To gain some idea of what the gondola once was, it is as well to study the pictures of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio in the Academy. There you will see Venetian nobles in their gondolas with their light Eastern rugs. The ferro was not then hatchet-shaped, with six teeth, as it is now, but a round club of metal. The rower was tall and graceful, standing on the poop in his parti-coloured hose and slashed doublet. One can see by these pictures what a great change the gondola has undergone. Those who have not been to Venice, and wish to know something of a gondola in its later stage, would do well to study the pictures of Guardi and Canaletto. Therein the gondola has not its old brilliant colouring; but what it has lost in colour it has gained in grace. Some of the gondoliers are most skilful in managing without either keel or rudder; like the Vikings of old, steering with an oar behind. A good man is devotedly attached to his gondola. He knows its character and peculiarities. To the initiated every gondola differs in a hundred details from its fellow, although they may all have apparently been built on the same model. A gondolier's skill in rowing depends largely upon his knowledge of his craft. One can generally gauge the efficiency of a man by the brightness of his ferro. The slightest spot of dew or rain upon it produces a spot of rust which takes weeks of constant rubbing to efface. There is a good deal of brass-work which has to be kept clean; the cushions must be brushed, and the paint scrubbed; and altogether a gondolier spends quite an hour and a half a day on the toilet of his craft, polishing, oiling, and scrubbing. His own person does not occupy nearly so much of his attention. [Illustration: UNDER THE MIDDAY SUN] The gondola is so closely connected with the life of the sea city that most of one's impressions of Venice are wound round and about it. It is not always safe out on the lagoon in a gondola. Often in summer or in autumn a gale will suddenly arise. Great masses of cloud will gather in the east, and gain upon you; they are curved into an arc by the pressure of the wind from behind, although upon the water there is scarcely enough breeze to fill a sail. These great billowy battalions, dark and angry, advance slowly, steadily; the water changes from a pale transparent to a pale sea-green as thick as jade. A feeling of oppression fills the air, a brooding stillness, for five minutes, while the storm-clouds gradually overtake you. Then comes a low humming noise like that of a threshing machine: it is the wind on the nearest island. You down sail and make for the first port in view. The hurricane leaps out from the city, striking the water and tearing it into foam, flinging the spray high in air. There is hurry and confusion in the sky; the thundery clouds are rent and riven; and through the gaps of dull-coloured vapour you see the steely blue of the storm-clouds boiling as in a cauldron; and far above all is blue sky and sunlight; a rainbow spans the lagoon. Then the whole tornado sweeps away south-westward. The sun sets, leaving the sky dark, but with flaming streamers; then night falls over all. There is lightning and storm away in the distance. The heavens assume their customary deep blue, and the breeze is fresh and cool. These summer storms are sometimes almost tropical in their fury; but they are quickly over. Their path is narrow--usually confined to one line on the lagoon;--but where they strike they leave devastation in their track. The Venetians love festas, and in the days of the city's wealth and pride the State lavished great sums and much care upon its entertainments. Certainly the natural capacities of the city gave splendid scope for great spectacles. It was a magnificent background, and seemed to invite display. The pictures of Bellini, Carpaccio, Veronese, and all the rest of the old Venetian masters, prove how deeply the people must have loved the pageants and State processions. With the collapse of the State these customs fell into disuse. For example, there was that wonderful old sport--how picturesque it must have been!--the battle on the bridge between the Nicolotti and the Castellani, rival factions of black and red. There also was the regatta (I am not sure if it continues)--a great spectacle that could not be surpassed by any in Europe. A race was rowed in light gondolas, smaller than those of ordinary use. The Grand Canal was crowded with boats of all sizes--sandolas, barche, barchette, tipos, cavaline, vigieri, bissoni,--there is no end to the variety of Venetian craft. The façades of the palaces fluttered with flags, tapestries, carpets, and curtains,--anything that would add to the general mass of colour. The balconies were filled with people; every window had its bevy of heads. Down below on the water the scene was brilliant. The course was kept by large twelve-oared boats, all decorated symbolically. One represented the Arctic regions, the rowers being dressed as polar bears, with blocks of ice for seats; another the tropical regions, with palms and gorgeous flowers. In the evening there was a serenade, starting from a point above the Rialto. The singers and the orchestra were placed on a barge decorated and lighted by many coloured lamps, and the music of Donizetti's "A te, o cara" filled the air. The object of every gondolier on an occasion of this kind was to get his padrone as near to the music as possible, whether he wanted it or not. The singers' barge, therefore, was surrounded by a solid mass of gondolas, which floated slowly down the canal together, getting denser as the canal narrowed to pass under the Rialto bridge. It was a fantastic scene--with the masses of Bengal lights, the rising moon, the gondolas swaying gently to the rhythm of the song and the sea, and the statuesque gondoliers, creatures of the sea, standing upright on the stern of their vessels, or, oars in hand and hair blown by the breeze, silhouetted against a background of deep-blue sky. [Illustration: THE RIALTO] The gondolier in Venice is an important person to the stranger. Half one's comfort depends on his worthiness or unworthiness. He is like the girl of childhood's fame "who, if she was good, was very very good, but, if she was bad, was horrid." If you are the employer of an ideal gondolier you will find him thorough, ready-handed, and versatile. In passing rapidly through Venice one does not properly appreciate his worth. You must own him for some months before you discover that he will attach himself to you and identify himself with your interests in an almost feudal manner. He will save you an infinity of trouble, and repay your confidence with honesty. The gondolier usually prefers to have a foreigner for a master. The foreigner pays well, never grumbling at the full tariff of five lire a day: also, as the foreigner does not know the language or the place, the gondolier becomes of some importance in the eyes of his neighbours, who bid for his patronage. With a Venetian master he would be paid from three to five lire a day; the work would be harder, and the hours later. When the squerariola (gondola builders) have finished their work, the vessel will probably have cost three hundred lire. Even then the craft is not by any means complete. There are the steel ornaments and many other details to be bought and bargained for,--things not procurable at the squero. For the steel prow (ferro), which must have the edges of its teeth in one straight line, and in these days of hurried workmanship is not always to be found, one must seek in all the smithies in Venice. A good gondolier, however, will often possess a ferro, an heirloom, made of hand-wrought iron, not cast in mould, heavy and brittle, as are the new ferri, but light and pliant. A ferro of the good and ancient make, if properly cared for and not allowed to rust, will outlive many a gondola. For the sea-horses, the rude carvings, the pictured Madonnas, the rugs and the covering for the felce,--all, in fact, that helps to make the gondola the picturesque craft it is,--one must go to the various shops in Venice. Modern progress and modern ideas are rapidly sweeping away the ancient and hereditary profession of the gondolier. One feels that his life and that of the traghetto are drawing to a close--that soon they will be things of the past. What would the Grand Canal be like without its swiftly gliding gondola, black-hulled, black-roofed,--its most characteristic feature? What a terrible thing it will be when that exquisite art is forgotten,--when the Venetian can no longer judge the turn of a corner or balance himself on the poop,--when for the picturesque cries "Stali!" and "Premi!" will be substituted the clank and thud of the steamers' screws! When a company first began to run steamers from Venice to the railway station and public gardens, the gondoliers struck. For three whole days there were no gondolas running in Venice; the canals were full of tightly packed vessels, while their owners hung together in groups at the wine-shops, talking. A strange and scratch fleet of nondescript boats plied between Venice and the islands, and the expression of the gondoliers, as they leaned over the bridges and watched the amateur watermen struggling with their oars, was quite unique. On the second day a notice was posted up in every traghetto begging the men to return to their work, and not to bring dishonour on a profession which had always been such a source of pride to Venice. This had no effect. The gondoliers merely enlisted the services of a barrister, getting him to take a copy of their demand to the Company--that the offending steamers should be removed. That was impossible. The steamers were cheap and useful, and the gondoliers could not be allowed to dictate to the State. However, they were told that if they returned peaceably to their work something might be done for them. They persisted in their strike, until suddenly--no one ever knew why, or whence it came--a single gondola started running from one of the ferries. That broke the ice. The gondoliers rushed to their crafts and untied them. The strike was forgotten. The men's first thought was to find good custom. I have always felt that there was something touching in this hopeless struggle of the gondoliers against the modernity that is fast settling on and demoralising Venice. PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, EDINBURGH. 
43754	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. The book consistently refers to "El Poverello", perhaps a typographical error for "Il Poverello". PICTURES IN UMBRIA * * * * * TRAVEL BOOKS BY THE SAME WRITER. THROUGH NORMANDY. THROUGH BRITTANY. PICTURES AND LEGENDS FROM NORMANDY AND BRITTANY. IN THE ARDENNES. ABOUT YORKSHIRE. IN THE VOLCANIC EIFEL WITH GILBERT S. MACQUOID. IN PARIS WITH GILBERT S. MACQUOID. ILLUSTRATED BY THOMAS R. MACQUOID, R.I. * * * * * [Illustration: VIA APPIA Frontispiece.] PICTURES IN UMBRIA by KATHARINE S. MACQUOID With Fifty Original Illustrations by Thomas R. Macquoid, R.I. [Illustration] New York: Charles Scribner's Sons London: T. Werner Laurie MDCCCCV Fertile costa d'alto monte pende, Onde Perugia sente freddo e caldo Da Porta Sole, ... Di quella costa là, dov'ella frange Più sua rattezza, nacque al mondo un Sole, Come fa questo tal volta di Gange. Però chi d'esso loco fa parole, Non dica Ascesi, chè direbbe corto, Ma Oriente, se proprio dir vuole. Non era ancor molto lontan dall'orto, Chè cominciò a far sentir la terra Della sua gran virtude alcun conforto. "Del Paradiso," Canto XI. To ARCHIBALD EARL OF ROSEBERY, K.G. WHO HAS KINDLY PERMITTED US TO OFFER HIM THE DEDICATION OF THIS BOOK THOMAS R. AND KATHARINE S. MACQUOID April 1905 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. AN ANCIENT HILL-CITY 1 II. MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA 13 III. FONTE DI PERUGIA 32 IV. COLLEGIO DEL CAMBIO AND THE PINACOTECA 69 V. SPELLO 76 VI. THE HEAVENLY CHOIR OF PERUGIA 97 VII. SAN PIETRO DE' CASINENSI 119 VIII. THE SEPULCHRE OF THE VOLUMNII 130 IX. THE VIA APPIA 138 X. THE WAY TO ASSISI 165 XI. SAN FRANCESCO 179 XII. IN THE TOWN, ASSISI 230 XIII. SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI 260 XIV. ADDIO PERUGIA 295 XV. LAKE THRASYMENE AND CORTONA 299 INDEX 317 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS R. MACQUOID, R.I. PAGE VIA APPIA Frontispiece ALOES IN BLOOM 12 INITIAL--RAFFAELLE 13 SAN DOMENICO Facing 16 SAN DOMENICO FOUNTAIN 21 PIAZZA SOPRA MURA 25 THE GREAT FOUNTAIN Facing 32 INITIAL--NICOLO PISANO 32 STATUE OF POPE JULIUS III 36 INITIAL--PERUGINO 69 DOORWAY OF PALAZZO PUBBLICO Facing 70 A BYEWAY TO THE STATION 78 FONTANA BORGHESE Facing 78 PORTA VENERIS--SPELLO 85 HEAD OF PINTURICCHIO 88 PORTA AUGUSTA--SPELLO 93 INITIAL--POTS IN BANDS AT WINDOW 97 VIA SANT' AGATA 99 MADONNA DI LUCE 103 FAÇADE OF SAN BERNARDINO 105 FLOATING ANGEL 106 HEADS OF CHERUBIM 107 ANGELS PLAYING ON INSTRUMENT 109 ANGEL PLAYING 110 LA VEDUTA 121 INITIAL--GIRL'S HEAD 130 PORTA SUSANNA Facing 138 PORTA EBURNEA " 142 OUTSIDE PERUGIA 143 VIA APPIA AND THE TOWN 145 ARCO DELLA CONCA 149 PORTA AUGUSTA--PERUGIA 153 PORTA BULIGAIA 156 PORTA SAN ANGELO 159 INITIAL--GIOTTO 165 CONVENT AND CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCO 172 ENTRANCE TO ASSISI 177 STATUE OF ST. FRANCIS 179 CHURCH TOWER 181 ENTRANCE TO LOWER CHURCH 185 THE SMALL CLOISTER 199 THE GARDEN OF CLOISTER 203 THE UPPER CHURCH, SAN FRANCESCO 227 OUTSIDE SAN FRANCESCO Facing 224 INITIAL 260 INITIAL--OLIVE BRANCH 299 LAKE THRASYMENE 301 PALAZZO COMUNALE, CORTONA 305 ETRUSCAN CANDELABRUM 308 NOTE Our book treats of a few of the Hill-cities of Umbria, but it does not attempt exhaustive detail in regard to Perugia, Assisi, or any other. Several old contemporary writers have greatly helped the book, notably the delightful chronicler Matarazzo, and some of his fellows; besides the "Legend of the Three Companions," and the very quaint "Fioretti di San Francesco." "The Life of San Bernardino of Siena," by Pierre Clément, was also very useful. In the book itself I speak of the great enjoyment I found in Monsieur Paul Sabatier's thoughtful "Vie de Saint François d'Assisi," and in Miss Lina Duff Gordon's charming "Story of Assisi." KATHARINE S. MACQUOID. THE EDGE, TOOTING COMMON April 1905 PICTURES IN UMBRIA CHAPTER I AN ANCIENT HILL-CITY It has been said that the face which exercises most permanent charm is the face whose attractions defy analysis; one in which beauty is subtle, compounded of many and varied qualities, so that, gazing at the harmonious whole, it is impossible to specialise its fascination. Such a face will not, at first, reveal its charm, for much of this does not lie only in regularity of feature, or in beauty of colouring, nor even in the trick of a smile; the spell is so potent, that when one at last tries to find out its secret, the mind refuses to dispel the sweet illusion by any such work-a-day process, and agrees with the hasheesh smoker, "to enjoy the sweet dream while it lasts." Places, as well as faces, exert this undefined attraction, but in the former, association often intrudes itself, a conscious ingredient in the witchery they possess for us. I am just now thinking of a city where much of the historic association is repulsive, even horrible; looking at the old grey walls of Perugia, the mind strays backward, to times when these ancient palaces with barred lower windows were gloomy fortresses, in which ghastly tragedies were acted over and over again. In some of the old houses dissolute sons plotted how to murder their fathers and brothers, how to commit every sort of crime; blood has run like water in the grass-grown streets and piazzas,--and not only with the blood of an Oddi, shed by a fierce Baglione, the two leading families always fighting for power in their city: the one party being Guelph, and the other Ghibelline. There was even worse strife than this: at times near and dear kinsmen fought hand to hand in the constant brawls of Perugia; murder was done in the churches, even before the high altar of the cathedral. Softer, quainter memories, however, linger in this hill-throned and hill-girdled city, and permeate the atmosphere, in spite of the "reek of blood" which, a poet once told me, "taints Perugia." Up the brick-stepped way, beneath a tall dark arch, came, even in those years of rapine and murder, the grave Urbino painter, Giovanni Sanzio, with his fair-haired son, Raffaelle. Giovanni came to Perugia to place the lad with the illiterate genius of Città del Pieve, Pietro Vannucci, whose praise was in every one's mouth, and who had already set up a school and was ranked a great painter. The Perugians still fondly call him "il nostro Perugino." It is said that Pietro was born in the ancient hill-city. One feels sure that Raffaelle must have been petted and tenderly loved. The father and son made a striking picture as they came from the dark archway into the sunlight,--Raffaelle mounted on his mule, his dainty locks falling over his shoulders in glossy waves of brightness. Years before he came, the sun saw a very different picture, when poor, roughly clad, coarse-featured Cristoforo Vannucci came trudging along on foot from Città del Pieve, holding the red fist of his little son, Pietro. The square-faced, square-headed boy was only eleven years old, yet his father already firmly believed in his genius, and had brought him all the way from Città del Pieve to present him to the great Umbrian master, Benedetto Bonfigli, who was then at work on the famous frescoes still to be seen in the Palazzo Pubblico of Perugia. There are, both in the Sala del Cambio and elsewhere in the city, proofs that Raffaelle actually worked here, and that he studied under Perugino with Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna, Eusebio di San Giorgio, and the great master's other pupils. One learns in Perugia how the student from Città del Pieve raised the tone and widened the scope of the existing Umbrian school, and gave to it a grace and ease, to say nothing of higher qualities, which have rarely been excelled. Yet, except in the frescoes of the beautiful Sala del Cambio, much of Perugino's best work is to be found elsewhere, rather than in the town wherein he established his academy, and from which he took his name as a painter. The southern side of the city holds a still more absorbing association in the gate near the old church and convent of San Pietro de Casinensi; for by this gate is the way to Assisi, and it has often been trodden by Francesco Bernardone and his disciples. But I am straying from my text: the mysterious fascination which the grey old city on the hill has for those who linger in it. I have been told that some travellers "do" Perugia in six hours, or between trains; I have heard the Via Appia compared with the Holborn Viaduct; but these travellers do not come under the spell of the place; they see only an old city, part Etruscan, part Roman, chiefly mediæval, perched on top of a hill, girt with massive walls which look down thirteen hundred feet and more, to the fertile valley of the Tiber. The steep slopes as they descend are in summer-time silver with olive-groves, golden with plots of maize; later on they are studies of golden-green and yellow, with richly festooned vines laden with fruit. These rapid travellers may, perhaps, admire the triple ranges of purple Apennines that on every side form a varied background to this picturesque fertility, and to the lesser hills below them, spurs projecting boldly forward into the deep valley, above which the old city shows her towers and massive walls; they will, perhaps, notice, as they go downhill again, how quaintly the wall is carried in and out, starwise, as it follows the indentations of the hills, and how boldly at each projecting angle a warmly tinted tower stands out against the sky. They can hardly fail to observe these salient features; but they will not have time to study the varied form of each hill, or to watch the sun set opposite grand old Monte Subasio. That is a sight worth going far to see; the intense glow dyes the white houses of Assisi as they cling to the mountain-side, a pale rose against the flame-like orange tint that seems to burn in the very heart of Subasio, rather than to be reflected from the opposite side of the horizon. And the hurrying travellers will not have time to enjoy the charming drives among the olives in the valley, or to visit the many places of interest which can be reached from Perugia. They go home, and say, "Oh yes, we saw Perugia,--a dull old city, without a shop worth looking into." A part of the indescribable fascination of the place is felt in long wanderings through the narrow streets, often deeply shadowed by tall palaces with grated windows and bricked-up doorways. Come with me under a lofty archway, made with uncemented stones on either side, so huge that surely giants must have placed them in position. Now we are in a vaulted way, beneath ancient houses built over the street; these archways are frequent, sometimes low-browed and round-headed, mere tunnels through which one almost gropes one's way, and finds at the farther end a sudden descent down a flight of half-ruined brick steps, which turn so quickly that a keen interest insists they must be followed to the end. Sometimes the arch is Etruscan, tall and pointed, and instead of a descent, steps go upwards to another lofty archway with a darkness beyond it that still beckons on the explorer. Day after day I have wandered up and down those twisting, hilly streets, often losing my way, and as often stumbling upon some fresh interest; some portion of Etruscan wall, or some exquisite point of view; a vista at the far-off end of a street, and often when this is arrived at, a grander and more varied picture, with part of Perugia for foreground. One may easily lose one's way in Perugia. At first the city seemed to us a hopeless maze of twisting streets; but after a little we succeeded in realising the peculiarity of its form. It is said to be that of a star; but it is more like a lobster, with its head on one side, and outstretched tail and claws; or it is like a comet with star-shaped sides, the head on its long neck inclined westward, and a longer tail pointing south-east. A great charm for those who stay in this city is the comfortable, home-like resting-place to be found in the Hotel Brufani. On our first visit this hotel was in progress of erection, but its predecessor existed in the house on the spur of the hill, outside the city gates. We have been told that the Albergo di Belle Arti is both very comfortable and moderate. I shall not soon forget the delight of that first arrival. The heat was so intense in Tuscany that we could not travel in daytime, so we left Florence at night, and had a dull, sleepy journey, arriving at Perugia towards morning. As we came into the hall and the long corridor of the hotel, the dim light fell mysteriously on plants and flowers, showing curios on the wall behind them; to our joy, when we reached our charming cool room and opened the persiennes, we saw the exquisite light of early morning crowning the dim, far-off hills. The day dawned golden with sunshine, the air breathed a delightful freshness. We strolled into the garden, which had at one end two majestic aloes in full bloom and a group of sun-flowers. Oleanders, covered with rosy blossoms, stood at the garden entrance; beyond was a bower of golden-green acacias, wreathed to their topmost branches with blue and white morning glories; below us we saw a varied landscape, the distant hills tinted with delicate morning light. We found our quarters delightful, and our host and hostess full of attentive kindness. This was continued when the hotel removed to its present quarters in the large house at the beginning of the city. The views from the Brufani Hotel terrace and windows are superb; they command both the Val di Tevere and several points of the town itself. Alas! both our good hosts, Signor and Madame Brufani, have passed away, but the well-arranged house remains, and is said to be very comfortable still. [Illustration: ALOES IN BLOOM.] CHAPTER II MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA [Illustration: RAFFAELLE.] The day after our arrival we went up some steps near the hotel, bordered by aloes not yet in bloom, and gemmed with brilliant-eyed lizards darting in and out in the sunshine; presently we found ourselves under the lofty walls that once supported the fortress built by command of Pope Paul III., on the site of the Baglioni palaces. In this wall is bricked up an ancient Etruscan gate--the Porta Marzia, which came in the way of this erection. One is glad, for the sake of freedom, to think that not so many years ago the citizens of Perugia pulled down and utterly destroyed this hated fortress, set up by the tyrant Pope when the hill-city submitted to his dominion. From a picturesque point of view, the fortress was probably more in harmony with the old streets behind it, especially with the frowning walls, than are the modern buildings that now border the new Piazza Vittor Emanuele, and take off the charm of approach on this side. One need not, however, enter Perugia by way of Piazza Vittor Emanuele. Keeping below the huge wall, beside an avenue of green acacias, we climbed by a wide flight of shallow brick steps past the picturesque church of San Ercolano, then went through a lofty archway, with huge projecting imposts, into a street with tall, grey houses on either side. One of these was evidently the back of a palace, and indeed it forms part of the Palazzo Baglione which fronts the next street, Via Riario; the very name Baglione made one shiver, remembering the chronicles of that bloodthirsty race. We halted here before a shop, to its owner, a well-to-do merchant of Perugia, we had been given an introduction; he most courteously offered to show us his wine cellar, in which is a portion of the veritable Etruscan wall of Perugia, in excellent preservation. Some of the stones are about thirteen feet long and eighteen inches thick, huge uncemented blocks of travertine. The floor of the cellar is formed by the ancient way, so that one actually treads the road used by Etruscans before Rome was thought of! The amount of forced labour represented by these walls of Perugia is painful to think of, for the stones in the merchant's cellar must have been brought from a very great distance. The blocks of travertine are certainly the finest specimens we saw in the city. The old wall went on from them by way of the Porta Marzia to the Porta Eburnea, then northwards (there are visible fragments of it in the Rione Eburnea) till it reached the famous arch near the Piazza Grimani, and so on eastward to Monte Sole, where it took a southern course again, to join the remains in Signor Betti's cellar. The house stands on the edge of the hill, and from its back windows there is an extended view over the country on that side, and, looking south, over the garden of San Pietro de Casinensi, then kept in order by the boys of the reformatory. The fine old machicolated spire of San Pietro and the quaint campanile of San Domenico are striking landmarks from the high road winding out to the Tiber and Ponte San Giovanni. We discovered one secret in the charm of Perugia when we turned from this lovely and varied landscape to the vivid contrast offered by the old grey street. [Illustration: SAN DOMENICO _PERUGIA_] Near to Signor Betti's house is a little curiosity shop, and in its window was a proof that the belief in "mal occhio" still exists among the peasants. Hanging from a rough brass watch chain, much the worse for wear, was a little bunch of hairs from a horse's tail, set as a charm, and considered to be a specific against "mal occhio," or any spell cast on horses, cows, etc. Near it was an irregular, stumpy bit of coral, a man's safeguard against a like disaster. During our stay in Perugia we made acquaintance with Signor Bellucci, a very learned and courteous professor of the university, who most kindly showed us in his rooms, not only a very interesting and valuable collection of implements and other articles, beginning at the Stone Age, but also a collection of amulets and charms. Some of these, especially those for protection from lightning, are bits of prehistoric stones, and exhibit a grotesque mingling of pagan and mediæval superstition. A little case embroidered with the Agnus Dei contained a triangular stone arrow-head, and this, the Professor said, used to be hung at the bed-head of the owner, between pictures of saints; on the occasion of a storm, candles were lighted, and prayers were offered before the amulet. This collection of charms amounts to nearly two hundred specimens; it is full of interest, and it would require many pages to do it justice. A very curious amulet was the fragment of a human skull enclosed in a little brass reliquary, considered to be a sovereign protection against epilepsy and kindred disorders. Tradition said that this bit of bone had belonged to the skull of a person, dead some two hundred years before, who had worked so many wonderful cures by his skill in medicine, and had lived such a long and saintly life, that he had been loved and venerated by all. The Professor told us it was not uncommon, when a body was dug up in the course of excavations, to find a bit of the skull missing, and this amulet doubtless explained the use that had been made of such lost fragments. Another charm was a little cross of holly-wood carved by Capuchin friars; it had been found hanging at an old woman's bed-head, to protect her from the spells of a witch. She would only part from it on condition that she might reserve some splinters of the wood, so as to prevent the witch from visiting her, and tormenting her for having parted from her safeguard. In Brittany we often saw a branch of holly hanging beside the bed for the same purpose. There were corals in this Perugian collection of various shapes, for women and children, for safety in teething, for protection against "mal occhio," to stop bleeding, and above all, for the cure of melancholy. The dark stone with red spots, which I have heard called in England bloodstone, is said to be infallible in checking bleeding; it must be useful in a country where blood-letting and leeching are still common and frequent remedies. One of the most amusing of the charms was a heart-shaped agate with a hole through the top. This was found in a house not far from Perugia, where from time immemorial it had been held in reverence, and in which its influence was supposed to have maintained perfect harmony among the inmates of the house. Professor Bellucci did not tell us why its possessors were willing to give it up: did they want a little change from this perpetual harmony? Belief in witches is still very prevalent in Umbria. They are said to haunt cross-roads persistently at night-time, it is also said that he who walks late in the environs of Perugia will do well to carry a few small coins in his pocket, and to fling them abroad as an offering when he comes near to a cross-road, for assuredly a witch lies there in ambush, ready to work him harm. Also, when the traveller sees in some unfrequented by-road a heap of stones beside the way, he must at once add another stone to this cairn, so that he may keep down the phantom of the murdered traveller, whose unblessed body has been hastily put underground in the lonely spot. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OUTSIDE SAN DOMENICO.] Among these ciottoli, however, I did not see any of the charming little coral hands to be found farther south, with the forefinger and little finger, the other fingers closed, pointed in defence against "mal occhio." It is possible that this belief in the virtue of coral may have originated the custom of the long coral necklace so frequently worn by the peasant women of Umbria. San Domenico is near the Professor's house; a flight of steps leads up to the church, and before it is a fountain bearing on its side the Griffin of Perugia. The lofty campanile makes this church conspicuous from every part of the city. It must have been tall, indeed, before the tyrannical Pope ordered its two upper storeys to be demolished. The original church is said to have been built early in the fourteenth century, from the designs of Giovanni Pisano; it was, however, almost all rebuilt three centuries later. The very large and richly coloured east window, and the beautiful tomb with its remarkable canopy, were both in the first church. The tomb, that of Pope Benedict XI., who died in Perugia from eating poisoned figs, is the work of Giovanni Pisano. Some intarsia work in the choir stalls is very good, but with this exception, and the Pope's monument, San Domenico is not nearly so interesting as San Pietro de' Casinensi. Past the little Gothic church of San Ercolano, and a line of acacias with exquisite yellow-green foliage, the tender greys of the city seemed suddenly galvanised into vivacious colour, for Piazza Sopra Mura was thronged with merry chattering crowds of market buyers and sellers; many of the handsome peasant women standing or sitting behind their wares wore a necklace of coral beads. [Illustration: PIAZZA SOPRA MURA.] This long Piazza is built on substructures which connect the two hills on which Perugia stands; these substructures are said to be in some places built on the foundation of the Etruscan wall. The Piazza itself is full of infinite variety: on the right are two quaint grey mediæval palaces, with balconies and windows; the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo or del Podestà, and the ancient university, are now used as Law Courts. One can fancy the sometimes inflammatory, sometimes soothing discourses that have been pronounced from the ringhiera of the ancient Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo. Nearly opposite this building stands a fountain. The laughing, gesticulating, ever-moving crowd in the market-place, and the brilliant hues of tomatoes, melons, and vegetables, made one's eyes ache. There was a certain sobriety in the colour of the women's gowns, for the most part pale lilac or yellow cotton prints, with sometimes white jackets enlivened by the favourite necklace of coral beads. The dark eyes, brilliant skins, and the red-gold hair of many of these women actually seemed to burn under the gay flower-like headkerchiefs, which looked at a little distance like some huge tulip-bed, so bright was the orange, chocolate, scarlet, and rose colour mingled with white and green. The laughing women mostly showed white, even teeth. The buzz of talk and laughter was so gay and animated that one wondered they could manage the buying and selling in such a hubbub. We especially noticed an old dame, her white hair showing under a gay kerchief with a sea-green border, and a bunch of roses in the corner hanging behind her head. She too had a long string of coral, that set off the orange-brown of her skin and her clear blue eyes. Her features were regular; she had not lost her teeth, so that the form of her mouth was still good. She had been bargaining and gesticulating with a dark lustrous-eyed girl, with blue-black hair, for a pair of snowy struggling pigeons, and when she went back to her place behind a basket of ripe figs she moved like an old Juno. Some of the young women were singularly handsome. Among these peasants and the people of Perugia we noticed two distinct types of face: regular features and deeply set eyes, like the faces in the old tomb of the Volumni, were frequent; some of these faces had blue eyes and beautiful red-gold hair, and were set on round pillar-like throats and well-developed figures. Others--and perhaps the greater number of the town shop-keeping class--had a far less refined type of face, turned-up noses and sensual mouths; though many of them were very attractive, especially when they wore the graceful black lace mantilla, so well suited to their brilliant complexions, dark shining eyes, and full red lips. Some of the men were also handsome, but not so well grown as the women were. Probably the custom of carrying a huge basket or a tall pitcher on her head, up and down the hills and hilly streets, gives to the peasant woman in Umbria the stately grace that distinguishes her movements. These peasants seem to take an interest in foreigners, and are much pleased to be spoken to by them. One girl who kept a handkerchief stall greatly amused us. I had been trying to bargain with her for some of her gaily-coloured wares, but she asked such a price that I turned away; she came after me, almost crying: "If the signora will explain her ideas on the subject, we may be able to arrange," she said. I am bound to say that we met with much courtesy and fair dealing in Perugia. Even at the fruit-stalls, where we stood studying heaps of lemons, full of colour from bluish green to most golden of yellows, the owner left us in peace, and seemed pleased that we should take our fill of gazing. But the market is soon over; the baskets empty quickly; the unhappy turkeys and cocks and hens, tied by the feet, are soon handed over head downwards to fresh owners; the lemon heaps, some exquisitely green, with a leaf or so hanging from the fruit stalks, have dwindled till the remaining fruit lies flat on the large board near the fountain; of the scarlet army of tomatoes not one is left, and all the cool, pink-fleshed slices of water melon, sown with black seeds, have disappeared. CHAPTER III FONTE DI PERUGIA The next morning we took our way up a side turning into the Corso, the handsomest street in Perugia. The shop windows had the day before been made extra gay, to attract the market-sellers; they still showed long strings of cut coral beads. [Illustration: NICOLO PISANO.] There is a mass of fine, as well as interesting, fourteenth century building on the left of the Corso: the Collegio del Cambio, and the Palazzo del Pubblico, or, as it is also called, Palazzo Comunale. This has a richly-sculptured doorway, and ends on the Piazza del Duomo; it has quaint iron lamps. On this Piazza, and facing us, we saw the unfinished stone and brick work of the Cathedral, San Lorenzo, with its outside pulpit, from which St. Bernardino preached to the people. [Illustration: THE GREAT FOUNTAIN _PIAZZA DEL DUOMO_] On the left stands the Palace called the Canonica or Seminary, with its cloisters. This belonged to the clergy, and was the dwelling of those Popes who stayed in Perugia during their visits to the city, so greatly beloved and coveted by the Holy See. In the centre of the Piazza stands the famous fountain usually ascribed to Nicolo Pisano, but said to have been designed by Fra Bevignate, a native of the city. However, the great Pisan sculptor and his son Giovanni made the two large marble basins, and sculptured the panels which decorate them. Nicolo, whose quaint costume is given in the initial, is said to have sculptured the twenty-four statues, now dark with age, but remarkable for the sharpness of their exquisite carving; two of the statues are, however, restorations. The delicate bas-reliefs of the second basin are ascribed to Giovanni Pisano, and are full of variety; the upper basin, with nymphs and lions and the inevitable griffin of Perugia, is supposed to have been cast in bronze by Rossi; water no longer plays from this fountain. It is very beautiful, but it wears a sad and desolate aspect, in perfect harmony with the terrible tragedies which have been so often enacted on this square. The finest side of the Palazzo Pubblico is that which faces the Cathedral; it has a charming loggia and a grand double flight of steps guarded by the Guelphic lion and the Perugian griffin. There are still traces on this fine old wall showing where the keys of two cities, Siena and Assisi, were hung in chains by the arrogant Perugians, till, in one of the attacks on the city, some mercenary soldiers wrenched them away. The griffin, the quaint emblem of Perugia, is to be found repeated in all the decorative work of the city. The Palazzo Pubblico was built early in the fourteenth century from the design of the Benedictine, Fra Bevignate. The heads of criminals used to be fixed on the steel lances which project from it. When the criminals had been guilty of treason their heads were hung downwards. It was a custom in Perugia to confine criminals in an iron cage hung on this old wall, the miserable creatures being left to starve to death in the cage! The horrible dungeons below can still be seen; they give one some idea of the cruelties enacted in the Middle Ages. The cathedral of San Lorenzo, on the Piazza del Duomo, is spacious rather than interesting, except for its associations: three Popes who died in Perugia are buried in one tomb in a transept, and in a chapel is preserved the marriage-ring of the Blessed Virgin. We noticed some good wood carving in the stalls. On the right, beyond the cathedral and its square, is the little Piazza del Papa. On this a bronze statue, vivid green in colour, is raised high on a pedestal. An inscription tells that the statue represents Pope Julius III., and is the work of Vincenzo Danti. [Illustration: BRONZE STATUE OF POPE JULIUS III.] The grand old Pope has been sitting enthroned outside the cathedral doors for more than three hundred years, with hand outstretched, in the act of blessing. It almost seems that during these long years the golden sunshine, mingled with the intense blue of the sky, has created the brilliant colour of the bronze, this vivid green which rivals that of the lizards as they dart in and out of the grey old wall behind the Duomo. Looking at the old Pope under different aspects,--in the sparkle of morning sunshine, in its full meridian glow, or in the gloom that comes to Perugia so swiftly at the heels of day,--one gets to see a different expression in the Pontiff's immovable face. In the morning it beams on the crowd of crockery sellers, and their wares spread out on the stones around its pedestal, and points proudly to the grand group presented by the fountain and the Palazzo Comunale; at midday the expression is harder; but at eventide a pensive cast comes over the face, more in keeping with the grass-grown street behind the statue, and the ancient grey palaces. This bronze Pope, Julius III., was not sitting here at the time of the famous preaching of San Bernardino of Siena, on the Piazza del Duomo, when the Perugians flung their grandest vanities into a heap and burned them as a proof of penitence, as the Tuscans did at Florence in the days of Savonarola. This preaching of San Bernardino is commemorated in an old but restored window in the cathedral. Behind the adjoining Piazza dei Gigli, an open square in front of the Sorbello Palazzo, is a way going steeply upwards to the right; it has bricked steps in the middle, but at the side of these is a long strip of ascending slope, so irregularly paved that it might serve as a specimen pattern of the variously paved streets in the town. Tufts of grass between the stones show that this way is not much used. Its right side is walled by the church of Santa Maria Nuova, and high above it on the left are some quaint houses. This road leads to San Severo, a little chapel containing what is called Raffaelle's first fresco, unhappily very much restored. The view of the country between the houses near it is more interesting than the painting. This is a very old part of the town; presently, through a tunnel under a low-browed arch, we came out on the Piazza of Monte Sole, surrounded by old palaces. This Piazza marks the summit of one of the two hills on which ancient Perugia was built by the Etruscans; the other hill, Colle Landone, is crowned by Palazzo Donnini, and till the time of wise and valiant Forte Braccio, who, though cruel, seems to have been the best ruler the Perugians can boast of, the valley between these two hills existed. Forte Braccio caused it to be filled up, and the Piazza Sopra Mura, where the weekly market is held, takes its name from the levelling and sub-structures then effected. It was from Piazza Monte Sole that the despotic Abbot Monmaggiore fled along the covered way he had made to connect his citadel of Monte Sole with his palaces at Porta San Antonio. On this occasion the nobles joined hands with the citizens against the conspiring French priest, drove the foreigners out of the city, and for the time freed Perugia from the hated Papal yoke. Going on from the Piazza Monte Sole, a few steps bring us to a tree-shaded terrace with benches placed along it. There is a grand view from the wall that bounds the terrace, and seems to go straight down into the valley. Just below is the red cupola-topped church of Santa Maria Nuova, while the houses of the town lay thickly clustered below. The ancient wall from which we now gaze runs out northward on the right, and on the left goes on till it reaches the famous Etruscan arch near the Piazza Grimani. Beyond are the heights, on one of which stands the convent of San Francesco, outside the extreme northern point marked by the gate of San Angelo; from this we get a glimpse of Subasio. Going out behind the terrace we see the Duomo close by, and soon find our way back to the Corso. Perugia was never weak; rather she was in all things powerful, and she produced a race of the most renowned Condottieri of Italy, the bloodthirsty Baglioni. Had the brutal nobles and the proud citizens been able to control their passions, and to discipline their ambition; had they been able to behave, in fact, like Christians, Perugia might have held sovereign sway in Umbria. Instead of this, though nominally governed by the Podestà, or chief magistrate and the Priori, she was frequently forced to defend herself against Papal plots and aggression; almost constantly against the tyranny of her rival nobles, and the mischiefs caused by their brawls between themselves, and with the Raspanti, among whom were the richest and most powerful of the citizens. Through these centuries, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, the Piazza del Duomo often ran with blood. It was the chief scene of the fierce struggles which make the eventful history of the hill-city; for until the time of Paul the Third, Perugia never entirely submitted to the personal sway of an alien ruler, though she frequently banished both nobles and Raspanti. There was a short period of comparative peace when, in the fourteenth century, the Condottiere Biordo Michelotti entered the city at the head of the banished Raspanti, and became supreme ruler in the name of the people. Broils were still frequent between the nobles and the plebs, but Biordo was the first of the brigand despots who tried to free Perugia from Papal encroachments. Warlike, wicked Guidalotti, Abbot of San Pietro, jealously watched the Captain's success, and justly estimated his power; he resolved to end it, and to restore the influence of the Holy See in Perugia. Biordo, a valiant, hard-working ruler, had asked in marriage the beautiful Lucrezia Orsini, with whom he hoped, now that the city enjoyed comparative quiet, to end his days in peace. The Abbot thought that these bridal festivities would give him the opportunity he sought. A few days after the marriage the wily priest rode up from San Pietro on horseback to the higher part of the town. He here collected his bravi together, and rode on to Michelotti's palace on Monte Sole. As soon as Michelotti came down to greet his visitor the Abbot put his arm round him and kissed him. At this signal the other ruffians at once attacked the unarmed governor, and killed him with their poisoned daggers. After Biordo Michelotti, came early in the next century the valiant and wise Forte Braccio, who greatly improved the condition of the city, and repressed licence and disorder. But this brave (though cruel) soldier and sagacious ruler was defeated in battle, and died from the wounds he received. This was a terrible loss; it alarmed the Perugians, for though Forte Braccio was of noble birth, being Conte di Montone, he had protected the city against the outrages of the fierce and brutal Oddi, Baglioni, Corgna, and others. The citizens, in their despair at the loss of their ruler, made overtures to Pope Martin, who received them with open arms. At this the nobles felt all their power restored; they knew the Pope would side with them against the people, and, quitting their houses in the country around the city, they established themselves in palaces chiefly in the vicinity of Porta Marzia, whence it was easy to overawe the town. After Forte Braccio's death, one of his soldiers, a singularly brave and capable man, named Nicola Piccinino, tried to wrest supreme power both from the Pope and the nobles. The Perugians suffered terribly, for, while the long struggle lasted, the Pope, the nobles, and Piccinino, who was liked by the people and idolised by the army, all levied taxes on them; Nicola at last ceased his efforts to attain supreme power, and accepted from the Pope the post of Gonfalionere, chief magistrate of the city, in the pontiff's name. The nobles at this period were left unhindered to brawl as they pleased. The Baglioni, a race of men so renowned for crime, strength, bravery, and beauty, that they recall the heroes of the _Iliad_, and one wonders whether the old pagans were not better men than those so-called Christians, were always at war with the Oddi, till at last they worsted their rivals, and drove them out of Perugia; then they fell out among themselves. During their last struggle with the Oddi they took possession of the cathedral and fortified it. After the banishment of the Oddi the power of the Baglioni greatly increased; it became almost supreme. The Pope had given them the lordship of Spello; they also owned Spoleto, and some others of the hill-cities of Umbria. These possessions brought them great wealth. They were cruel and tyrannical despots; they appointed civic officials; it was even said that no legate ventured to visit the city unless he was a friend of the Baglioni. Towards the close of the fifteenth century some of the poorer and more obscure members of this powerful clan, or, as the old chronicler Matarazzo terms them, "beautiful Baglioni," murmured loudly against their richer kinsfolk. They were just as indolent, just as brutal and licentious, and in proportion to their means fully as arrogant and prodigal. But people were not afraid of them; they had neither wealth to keep bravi with, nor influence to support and further their pretensions. These poor relations could no longer endure their dependent position; they saw that if the sons of the elder house were disposed of, they should have a chance of coming to their own. At present they were completely shadowed by the wealth and haughty self-assertion of their cousins; they also coveted their possessions, and longed to divide them among themselves. The heads of the Baglione house were the two brothers, Guido and Ridolfo. Guido had five stalwart sons, as much noted for their prowess and heroic bravery, as for their good looks; these were Astorre, Adriano (usually called Morgante, because of his wonderful strength), Marcantonio, Gismondo, and Gentile. Ridolfo's sons were Troilo, Gianpaolo, and Simonetto. Besides the splendid sons of Guido and Ridolfo, there was yet another very wealthy and distinguished scion of the Baglione family, their young cousin Grifonetto. He was happily married to a young and beautiful wife, and was on friendly terms with all his cousins. His father, Grifone, had died young in battle; his still young and lovely mother, Atalanta Baglione, was extremely rich. She so greatly loved Grifonetto, her only child, that she remained a widow for his sake, and gave up her own home to live with him and his fair young wife, Zenobia Sforza, in the splendid palace he had built near Porta Marzia. A few years before the end of the fifteenth century, the banished Oddi faction thought fit to attack the city; they rode suddenly in through the gates, and began to strike at the chains stretched across the street for defence against sudden attacks. The first to give the alarm was Simonetto Baglione, a young and beardless youth, who, though of a fierce and cruel nature, was heroically brave. He rushed forth in his shirt, armed only with sword and shield, and held the squadron of advancing Oddi at bay before the barrier that defended the Piazza. Soon ten of his adversaries lay dead at his feet. Till he had killed many more he persevered in attacking the foe with intense fury, until he had received twenty-two wounds. Then his cousin Astorre rode forth to help him. "Go and tend your wounds, Simonetto," he cried, and dashed at the common enemy; a falcon flashed on his gilded helmet, with the griffin's tail sweeping behind it. At once he became a target for the Oddi, their blows fell so thick and fast that each hindered the other from striking truly; nothing could be heard above the din of the strokes made by lances, partizans, crossbow quarries, and other weapons falling on Astorre's body; the sound of those great blows overbore the noise and shouting of the combatants. But the noble Astorre was undismayed by the horrid clamour, he rode his horse into the thickest of the fight, and trampled the Oddi under foot; while his horse, being a most fierce animal, gave the enemy what trouble it could, for so soon as they were jostled and overthrown by his rider, the beast trampled on them. By the time that the other Baglioni heroes sallied forth to help him, Astorre and his war-horse were overdone, they could scarce breathe. The Oddi were again driven from the city, but a war followed which devastated the fertile country between Perugia and Assisi. * * * * * All through these fearful times of strife and bloodshed Art was progressing quietly and surely in Perugia. Raffaelle was at this time working in the atelier of Perugino, and it is thought that he must have witnessed this splendid defence of Astorre Baglione, and that he afterwards reproduced the young warrior, his helmet crowned by a falcon and tail of griffin, in the St. George of the Louvre, and the trampling horseman in the Heliodorus Stanza of the Vatican. After this achievement the Baglioni seem to have had a short time of family peace. This was soon interrupted. Grifonetto's wealth, the splendid palace in which he lived with his lovely mother and Zenobia Sforza, his beautiful wife, helped to make him, young though he was, the most powerful member of the family. He and his wife dearly loved each other, and the chronicler says, "No wonder, for they were as beautiful as angels." But for evil counsellors, and the restless ambition of the Baglioni, this state of affairs might have lasted. Three of the evil and disappointed relatives clung to Grifonetto like limpets; these were his uncle Filippo, his cousin Carlo Baciglia Baglione, and a scandalously dissolute scoundrel named Jeronimo della Penna or Arciprete. They took counsel together as to how the sons of Guido and Ridolfo Baglione could be easiest put out of the way, so that their wealth and power might be divided among the conspirators. Too poor and of too ill-repute to act alone, they saw that their patron Grifonetto had all they lacked, and they resolved to persuade him to head their conspiracy. At first they strove to win him by the offer of supreme power in Perugia; he could revolt, they said, against the Papal yoke, and become sovereign ruler in the city. Grifonetto was not ambitious; he had all he wanted,--their proposals did not tempt him. Astorre was about to wed a Roman bride, Lavinia, the daughter of a Colonna father and an Orsini mother, and the malcontent Baglioni decided that this marriage, which was to happen at the end of July, would be a great opportunity for ridding themselves of their hated kindred, as it would assemble every member of the family in Perugia, except Marcantonio, who, being out of health, was taking baths at Naples. The conspirators took fresh counsel together; the time fixed for the marriage was now close at hand, they must at once win over Grifonetto to their schemes. They therefore told him that Zenobia, the beautiful wife he so adored, was unfaithful to him, with his cousin Gianpaolo, one of the sons of Ridolfo Baglione. Grifonetto was furious; in his mad jealousy he believed this story, and thirsted for vengeance: he consented to head the conspiracy, and to rid the city of the elder branch of his family by a wholesale murder. Among the conspirators were Jeronimo della Staffa, three members of the Corgna family and others; only two of those who engaged in this bloodthirsty scheme were over thirty years old. The Baglioni were chiefly lodged in houses on or near the Porta Marzia; Astorre and his bride, on the night of the murder, were lodged in the beautiful palace of Grifonetto, which was the wonder of Perugia, and always pointed out to strangers as a marvel of magnificence both inside and out. Among his other treasures, Grifonetto possessed a lion; Astorre and Gianpaolo, the sons of Guido and Ridolfo Baglione, each owned one of the royal beasts, and their fearful roaring at night struck terror to the hearts of belated Perugians on their way home. It had been arranged that as soon as the proposed victims were asleep the signal should be given; this was to be a stone thrown from the loggia of the Magnifico Guido's palace, into the court below. Banquets, jousts, all kinds of magnificent festivities had gone on for days past. That night a great supper was given, at which the conspirators were present; they appeared to be on the most friendly terms with the others, and were even affectionate and caressing to all,--yet the traitors had decided who was to be the murderer of each victim, and the number of bravi by which each murderer should be accompanied in case of resistance. At last the time arrived. The victims, heavy with wine, had retired to rest, they slept undisturbed by the roaring of the lions. Then the signal was given; each assassin stood ready at the appointed door. Carlo Baglione, who seems to have been the mainspring of "el gran tradimento," as the chronicler Matarazzo calls it, made first for the sleeping-chamber of the head of the family, the "Magnifico Guido," but he turned aside to that of young Simonetto. Jeronimo della Penna forced open the door of the noble Gismondo; while Grifonetto himself attacked Gianpaolo, Filippo di Braccio and one of the Corgna family unlocked the door of valiant Astorre, who, asleep with his newly-married wife, was thus murderously awakened; the young fellow opened the door, and, seeing his murderers, he guessed the truth. As they attacked him he cried out, "Wretched Astorre, who dies like a coward." His young wife rushed up to him, and flung her arms round him, trying to make her body a shield between him and his assailants, but they had already stabbed him with many more blows than would have sufficed to kill him, and she too received a wound. Then the brutal Filippo di Braccio, seeing how large a wound was in Astorre's breast, thrust in his hand, tore out his heart, and savagely bit it. After this he and his accomplice flung the body of Astorre down the stairs and into the street, where presently the murdered Simonetto lay beside it. He had wakened, and, seeing the murderers kill the companion who lay in his chamber, armed himself, and fought his way through the villainous crowd of bravi, till he reached the foot of the stairs; here fresh assailants despatched him. Simonetto's uncle Guido had also time to snatch up his sword; but, powerful though he was, he was killed. Grifonetto was less successful than his fellow-conspirators. Gianpaolo, the most daring of the elder branch of the Baglioni, had taken alarm, and so had his squire. But Gianpaolo was sagacious as well as brave, and, not knowing who were his assailants, he bade his squire guard the staircase which led from his chamber to the roof, while he tried to escape over the tops of the other palaces. The squire fought valiantly, and held his post for some time,--the staircase turned, and gave him a point of vantage over his assailants from below. Gianpaolo reached the roof, and crawled over it till, coming to the skylight of his cousin Grifonetto's palace, he had a mind, in his ignorance as to the conspirators, to seek shelter there; but he gave up the idea, and climbed through a window into another house, owned by one of the citizens; the good man within was so terrified at the sight of Baglione, that, in his fear, he refused to harbour the great noble. Gianpaolo, going back to the roof, found his way into the atelier of some foreign artists, who were also greatly alarmed at his appearance among them. One of them, however, named Achille de la Mandola, seems to have greatly helped the fugitive. Gianpaolo finally made his way out into the street; and soon after out of the city. Seeing a mule grazing by the wayside, he at once mounted it, though he was greatly disturbed to quit Perugia without having either discovered the meaning of this night attack, or taken vengeance on the unknown assassins. In the meantime day had broken, and Gentile Baglione, who lived some way from his father's house, had been also attacked by the conspirators; he escaped them at once, by mounting his horse and riding away. Just as he reached the bridge beyond the plain, he was amazed to recognise his elder cousin Gianpaolo, riding in the same direction on a mule. When Atalanta, Grifonetto's beautiful young mother, heard of the tragedy that had been acted so close to her, she rose up, wrapped herself in a large cloak, and, taking with her the two little sons of Gianpaolo and her daughter-in-law, Zenobia Sforza, she quitted her son's house (she loved Grifonetto so dearly that she had always lived with him, having been widowed before she was twenty) and took refuge in her own dwelling on the Colle Landone. She had nothing with her but the cloak she wore, and when she learned in detail the events of the night she solemnly vowed she would never again cross her son's threshold. Grifonetto had quickly repented his crime. His eyes had opened to the wickedness into which his mad jealousy had betrayed him. As soon as he learned his mother's departure he followed her, but he was refused admittance; he, however, forced his way into her presence. She stayed his approach with outstretched hands, and delivered her solemn curse on his guilty head as the murderer of his nearest kindred. The young fellow fled horror-stricken from her presence, but soon returned; he could not find peace, he said, till his beloved, beautiful mother forgave him, and removed the curse she had laid on him. Atalanta had, however, taken her precautions, and though the unhappy Grifonetto went again and again from his Palazzo to that on the Colle Landone, Atalanta refused to see or listen to him. With the exception of his complicity in this fearful tragedy, Grifonetto seems to have had more human feeling than some of his cousins of the elder branch. His suffering under his mother's curse, and his penitence for his crime, had completely unnerved him. When Gianpaolo, who by the death of his uncle Guido was now the head of the Baglioni, returned to Perugia with the troops he and his brothers had rallied round them, they were met at the city gate by an excited crowd of citizens; for though some of the Perugians still sided with their favourite Grifonetto, the larger portion abhorred his foul treason, and longed to see it avenged. Gianpaolo, seeing the concourse and hearing the cries of welcome, asked graciously that the ladies present in the crowd would be good enough to pray for his success. They did so, and sent out, besides, wine to refresh him and his soldiers after their journey, before they began to revenge themselves on their enemies. Grifonetto had come towards the gate with intent to guard it, gnashing his teeth and weeping, for he had made another attempt to see his mother. He presently met Gianpaolo on the Piazza, where some of the conspirators had already been slain,--Carlo Baglione and Jeronimo della Penna had a narrow escape by climbing the city wall. Gianpaolo gazed with pitying contempt at his young cousin, who, still overwhelmed with remorse for his share in the unnatural crime, and heart-broken by his mother's curse, was taken aback at thus suddenly meeting his enemy within the city. Gianpaolo rode up, and, pointing his sword at Grifonetto's throat, cried out; "Farewell, thou traitor Grifonetto; thou art"--Then he added, "Go, in God's name, for I will not kill you; I will not dip my hands in your blood, as you have dipped yours in the blood of your kindred." He turned away, making a sign to his guards, they fell on the stricken Grifonetto, and wounded him so that his "graceful limbs" could no longer support him; he fell in a pool of blood on the ground. The terrible news was at once carried to his mother Atalanta, and his sorrowful wife Zenobia; they hurried down to the Piazza, and found their dearly loved Grifonetto not yet dead, but bleeding from every wound. His mother fell on her knees beside him; she assured him of her forgiveness, and gave him her blessing in place of the curse she had laid on him. She implored him to pardon his murderers, and to give her a sign that he did so. At this the dying youth clasped the white hand of his young mother, whom he so dearly loved, and, pressing it, he expired. "No words," adds the chronicler, "can paint the grief of the wife who had so dearly loved him, or of the mother who had remained a widow because of her great love for this adored son. At last they rose, stained with the blood that streamed from him, and ordered his body to be carried to the hospital." By this time Gianpaolo and his troops had returned to the Piazza, bent on taking a complete revenge on the conspirators and all enemies of the Baglione family in Perugia. A fierce battle was fought on the Piazza, and in the cathedral itself, for Gianpaolo had caused a large fire to be kindled before the door, so as to gain access to the interior; even those who took refuge at the high altar were slain there. More than a hundred persons were murdered by Gianpaolo's order; the dead bodies lay where they fell, till the cathedral was bloodstained from one end to the other. Then the Magnifico Gianpaolo, being now the head of the family, took possession of Grifonetto's palace and of all the Baglione dwellings which, as has been said, were near the Porta Marzia. He gave command that all should be solemnly hung with black, as a token of mourning for the victims of "el gran tradimento,"--a term which Matarazzo constantly repeats. Gianpaolo also gave command that the cathedral of San Lorenzo should be washed with wine from one end to the other, and then re-consecrated, to purge it from the blood shed there during his vengeance on the slayers of his kindred, and on all who were in any way unfriendly to the house of Baglione. Even Matarazzo, the enthusiastic admirer of Gian,--or, as he frequently calls him, Giovanpaolo,--bursts into lamentation over the continued excesses committed in Perugia till the death of his hero. The chronicler tells us that from the time the Oddi were banished there was no rule in the city, except that of might against right; every man who was powerful enough took the law in his own hands: rapine, murder, plunder, reigned unchecked. When the Popes, aware of the persistent excesses, sent now and again a legate to control and modify disorder, and to restore some amount of security to the dismayed and outraged citizens, the envoys rarely remained long enough to interfere, even if they ventured within the gates of Perugia, lest they should give offence to the Baglioni, and be either stabbed or at best flung out of window. At last Gianpaolo submitted himself to the power of the Pope, and though the Perugians detested Papal government, they had suffered so severely under the Baglioni tyranny that they hailed the prospect of change, especially as the terms granted them promised moderation. Leo the Tenth, however, had little faith in Gianpaolo Baglione; he therefore lured him to Rome by sending him a safe-conduct. On his arrival the Pope caused him to be imprisoned in the castle of San Angelo; where he was soon after beheaded. Gianpaolo's descendants went from bad to worse. They were powerful in other states besides Perugia; captains of Condottieri in Venice, in Florence, also in the States of the Church. One of them, Malatesta Baglione, proved himself a most infamous traitor; he sold himself to Pope Clement VII., and, for his dastardly treason to Florence, was held up to public execration. The last male member of this terrible family died in the middle of the sixteenth century. * * * * * With the accession to the popedom of Paul the Third came the deathblow to the freedom of Perugia. He broke all the treaties as to municipal rights and privileges, etc., granted by his predecessors, and built a huge citadel to overawe the town, actually removing one of the Etruscan gates, the Porta Marzia (now restored to its original site), to make room for his tyrannical construction. The military despotism of Pope Paul must have been heartbreaking to a free, proud people like the Perugians. There seems to have been less bloodshed under the Papal tyranny, but this little incident at its beginning, taken from an old record in the Public Library, was a savage sort of portent: "While the Duke Pietro Aloigi stayed with his troops in Perugia, to order the new government, Agostino de' Pistoia and Antonio Romano, two of his soldiers, asked the Duke's permission to fight out their quarrel in his presence on the Piazza of Perugia. The Duke gave consent, and ordered that they should fight before the chapel of the Cambio. There, surrounded by the populace, the Duke being at one of the windows of the palace, they fought in their shirts with swords and daggers. "Both men showed much courage and daring, but at last Agostino, of Pistoia, who was both handsome and tall of stature, fell on the ground dead. "Victory was at once cried for Antonio Romano, who, by his father's side, was of Perugia; but from the many and grievous wounds the Pistonian had given him, Antonio was considered by many as good as dead, and was carried home by his friends. However, by the great care taken of him, he after a while recovered his strength." CHAPTER IV THE COLLEGIO DEL CAMBIO AND THE PINACOTECA The Corso was on the left near the Fonte grand range of ancient buildings, in which is the entrance to the chapel of the Cambio; beside this is the Sala, adorned with Perugino's famous frescoes. A little farther on is the richly-sculptured doorway of the Palazzo Pubblico, and within this is the Pinacoteca, containing a very interesting collection of art treasures. Here are marvellous frescoes by Bonfigli; and pictures by him and by Piero della Francesca, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and other famous old painters. [Illustration: PERUGINO.] It would be difficult to say too much in praise of the Sala del Cambio: the harmony preserved throughout it, in the rich and artistic decoration of its walls and ceiling, is most soothing, and adds greatly to the enjoyment one feels in the beautiful little place. The lower part of the walls is wainscotted with dark wood, inlaid with tarsiatura by Domenico del Tasso; the doors have the date 1483. Near the entrance is the raised throne for the judge; below this are desks and seats for the money-changers, and these are exquisitely carved. One account says that the intarsia designs were furnished by Raffaelle; another tells us that Domenico del Tasso was both designer and executor of this beautiful work. In the record of the agreement between the authorities at Perugia and Pietro Vannucci the painter, he writes, "My intention in the frescoes which cover the upper part of the walls is to recommend the merchants and magistrates therein assembled never to forsake the path of duty, but to remain faithful to the dictates of wisdom, of natural reason, and of religion." [Illustration: DOORWAY OF PALAZZO PUBBLICO] Faith and Love are emphasised by two large frescoes facing the entrance, the Transfiguration and the Adoration of the Magi; Hope of an eternal future, by the prophets and sibyls on the wall to the right. On the left wall the frescoes depict moral qualities,--Justice and Prudence, illustrated below by the figures of Fabius Maximus, Socrates, Numa, Camillus, Pittacus, and Trajan. On a lower level still is a portrait in oil of Perugino, painted by himself; while the remaining half of the upper wall has figures representing Courage and Temperance. Below them are Licinius Leonidas and Horatius Cocles; Scipio Africanus, Pericles, and Cincinnatus. There is not any attempt at grouping in these frescoes: the figures stand severe and stately, as if they were on the look-out to rebuke any cheating or covetous practices going on in the Hall below. It is remarkable that the painter should have been accused of greed in the pursuit of his calling, when he considered it necessary to call up on the walls of the Sala so many witnesses to protest against the love of money in others. The ceiling is divided into bays, on which are the planets. In the centre is the sun, represented by Apollo in his chariot; the spaces between are filled with ornament and figures, some of which are attributed to Raffaelle. On a bright morning, when the sun is pouring light and warmth into the little Sala, the rich tone of these frescoes is marvellous, and, so far as one can see, they have not greatly suffered by restoration. In the adjoining Cappella del Cambio are some sibyls and children, said to be Raffaelle's, but the work in these has evidently been much retouched. Perugino is at his best in the frescoes of the Sala; they form a striking contrast to the monotony of style which, in spite of their individual beauty, wearies one in his Perugian oil pictures. The gallery devoted to his work upstairs in the Pinacoteca is, on the whole, disappointing. The pictures are calm and sweet and refined, but one longs for variety of feeling; a few, however, show marked superiority over the rest. It is very curious to remember that these peaceful saintly pictures were painted when daily brawls were taking place in the city, even while her chief Piazza streamed with the blood of nobles and Raspanti. The most interesting Umbrian pictures are those, only a few, by a rare and early painter, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who with Piero della Francesca, from Borgo del Sepolcro, and Benedetto Bonfigli, had established a school of art in Perugia. The lovely head of a Madonna by this rarely found painter, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, is over a doorway in the Palazzo Pubblico, and upstairs in one of the galleries are two very remarkable pictures, the Adoration of the Magi is especially beautiful. The three kings stand on the left,--one of them is said to be a portrait, when young, of Perugino; on the ground, in the centre, lies the Holy Child; the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph kneel on either side of Him. Opposite the magi are the ox, and a very wise-looking ass; while a large group of angels fills up the background, and forms the most interesting part of the picture; the angels are so altogether original and graceful. The painting of detail is marvellously finished, though the similarity of faces and of costume make it probable that the same model was used for most of the angels. They and smaller figures, the shepherds and others, seen at the openings which reveal landscape on either side of the stable, are singularly full of grace and charm. There is admirable colour in all the pictures by this painter. We find paintings by Niccolo Alunno of Foligno, another contemporary, pictures too by some old Sienese masters; a room is filled with small easel pictures by Fra Angelico. The student of early Italian art will find in these galleries abundant material of a most interesting kind. The pictures were formerly scattered in the various churches of Perugia, for which they had been painted; the government has now collected and placed them in the Pinacoteca. One of the rooms leads on to a terrace. Here is a beautiful view over the surrounding country. The old cicerone took much interest in showing us where Siena and Orvieto and Rome lay, all three hidden among ranges of blue hills. CHAPTER V SPELLO The pleasantest and shortest road to the railway is by Porta Eburnea. I started one day from this gate with a friend, by a steep path which leaves the road just outside the Porta, and curves along the side of the hill below the old wall. The bank, this fine morning, was gay with butterflies and wild flowers, and wreathed with a luxuriant growth of wild gourd, full of pale blossoms and small furry fruit; all was so wild, it seemed impossible we had only just left a busy city behind us. At the turn of the path we came into a delightful lane, between bramble-covered banks; on one side was the dry bed of a little rill, and overhead branches of quaint trees met each other. From the Italian custom of constantly stripping the leaves to provide fodder, the foliage was scanty, yet we went down the steep path in cool and checkered shadow; lizards, darting across the way before us, gleamed as they passed in and out of the light. This practice of stripping leaves from the trees for fodder, gives a quaint appearance to many of them; in this lane the gnarled and twisted branches looked grotesque. A man high up in one of the trees sang as gaily as a bird, while he filled with leaves a sack fastened to one of the branches. Now and again the rich transparent purple of the shadows was traversed by a bar of golden light; this sometimes came in irregular flecks from spaces between the twisted trunks and crossing branches. A woman coming up from the station, with a heavy basket on her head, said, "Buon Giorno," and smiled pleasantly as she passed; then a countryman, a fine, handsome fellow with glowing black eyes, wished us a good journey. He was going at such a pace that he must have been bound for the station; usually the easy, leisureful movements of its people seem to me one of the charms of Italy, so entirely in harmony with the burning, palpitating blue of its skies and the careless luxuriance of its vegetation. [Illustration: THE WAY TO THE STATION, PERUGIA.] Near the end of the descent is a washing place, and here a woman on her knees was hard at work, scrubbing and soaping linen. Looking back up the lane we saw the grey town peeping at us through the trees,--the tower of a house on the Piazza a prominent feature in the view. [Illustration: FONTANA BORGHESE _outside PERUGIA_] At the foot of the lane we crossed the dusty highroad, and again followed the short way, here very steep and rugged. At the end we came out at a cross-road where the Fontana Borghese, at one angle, made a striking feature; partly shadowed by tall cypresses, it glowed red in the sunshine. The date is 1615; its basin is green with age, and from the constant drip, drip of the water. To-day the fountain was surrounded with wine carts, each drawn by a pair of huge white oxen. It is fortunate these beautiful creatures are so gentle, for their wide-spreading, sharply pointed horns make them formidable; indeed, when the wine season began, during our stay in Perugia, we had sometimes to take refuge in a shop while they passed, for the horns of a pair of these splendid beasts stretched from one side of a narrow street to the other. Inside a little wine-shop opposite the Fontana Borghese we heard shouts of "Dieci," "otto," "sette," etc., from the players at morra. One of the charms of Perugia is the genial courtesy of the people. My companion on this excursion had stayed several times in the town, and to-day when she appeared at the station all the officials were at her service, full of little friendly attentions, especially one giant-like porter called "Lungo." The railway takes its course to Foligno through the valley of the Tiber, with mountain views on each side. Perugia stands grandly on the top of her hills, while on one side rises like an advanced guard the spire of San Pietro, and on a spur to the west Santa Giuliana; but the city is not so picturesque from this point, because one sees the modern buildings on the great Piazza Vittor Emanuele. On the left we saw the outside of the famous Etruscan tomb of the Volumnii, and soon after passed the pretty village of Ponte San Giovanni, getting a glimpse of the Tiber. From the railway one has a good view of Assisi, clinging to the side of Monte Subasio, and the station is close to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli; but we were bound for Foligno, and did not stop here to-day. As the railway circles round it we noted the splendid mass made by Subasio in this chain of mountains. We passed by Spello, perched on a spur of the great hill, but it was disappointing to find that, after this, the valley broadened out into a plain, so that Foligno stands tamely on level ground. It does not seem to be much visited, though it is a quaint little town, and has, we heard, a tolerable inn. On our arrival we were attacked by vociferous drivers and guides, so we took one of the dirty little carriages and drove up an avenue past the huge statue of Niccolo Alunno, a native of Foligno, to the Piazza. We were hardly out of our vehicle when up rushed a wretched-looking man, his bare chest showing red and hairy through the opening of his dirty shirt, while a huge piece of green oilskin covered his shoulders. "Ecco, Ecco, it is not possible the Signorine can find their way," he shouted. "I only can show them Foligno." As he continued to persecute us, and our time was short, we submitted, and followed his guidance. The outside of the cathedral fronting the Piazza is curious. Two monsters, lions in red granite, guard the portal; one of these creatures has an eagle in its mouth. Above the doorway is a curious sort of arcade; the door-heading itself has been recently restored with the emblems of the evangelists. There is nothing to see inside this church. Opposite it is a quaint old building, and on the right is the Tribunale del Commune. We had to wait some time here while the keys were fetched; we then followed the custode up an old stone staircase to an ante-chapel to see the frescoes of Ottaviano Nelli. We went on into the little chapel; here the frescoes have been restored. They represent the life of the Blessed Virgin, from her birth to her Assumption, and are full of interest. Coming out, we followed our ragged, repulsive-looking guide down a street close by, and saw the Palazzo Deli, a handsome building, designed, it is said, by Baccio d'Agnolo. There are three other churches; in one of them, San Niccolo, is a Nativity by Alunno; the figure of San Joseph is very fine. One of the statues in front of the choir, a female saint, has her feet bound with brass; the sacristan told us that this had been done to preserve them from the devotion of worshippers who had already kissed away the ends of the saint's toes. The frescoes in Santa Maria infra Portas, a very old church, are mostly ancient, but completely faded. Raphael's beautiful Madonna di Foligno, now in the Vatican, was once in the church of Santa Anna in this town. We greatly regretted that we could not drive on to Montefalco, a picturesquely placed little town, with many good pictures by Umbrian painters; there are several also said to be by Benozzo Gozzoli. We took another little carriage, standing in a side street, and had a very pleasant drive back to Spello, between vineyards and olive groves, eating our luncheon on the way. Spello looked very attractive as we approached it, its white houses gleaming in the sunlight against the green hill on the side of which it stands. We entered the town under a quaint and ancient gateway, the Porta Veneris of Hispellum, for Spello is an old Roman town, and the ancient walls and some of the gates have been preserved. This gate has three figures outside it, a picturesque fountain stands near, and to-day beside it sat a group of handsome peasants, eating and drinking in the sunshine. [Illustration: PORTA VENERIS, SPELLO.] We thought the steep old street was full of pictures for a sketcher as we drove up to the Piazza, on which is the Cathedral Santa Maria Maggiore. Entering, we were at once struck with the remarkable early fifteenth-century canopy, the work of an Umbrian sculptor, Rocca di Vicenza; it is made of the stone of the country called Cacciolfo, and has a polished surface. The four pillars are in pairs; in front of two of them the artist has introduced portraits of himself and his wife; beyond, right and left, are Madonnas by Perugino. The sacristan told us that there is a still finer specimen of the sculptor Rocca di Vicenza's work at Trevi. On the opposite side of the church is the Capella del Sacramento, the work of Pinturicchio; three of the walls and the ceiling here are covered with beautiful frescoes in delightful harmony of colour. On one side is the Annunciation, with the name and portrait of the painter, on the other walls are the Adoration and the Disputa; this last is a very interesting picture, and is also signed. On the ceiling are painted the sibyls, and the spaces between are filled with rich, harmonious colour. [Illustration: PINTURICCHIO, SPELLO.] We could gladly have stayed much longer in this chapel, for the frescoes seemed to us finer specimens of Pinturicchio's work than anything we had seen at Perugia. In the sacristy is a beautiful Madonna by this painter. The mortuary chapel has a quaint pair of doors in perforated wood-work; near the west door we saw a curious square bas-relief of ancient work, on two sides of it is carved an olive-tree, and on another side a man on horseback. It looked like an old burial urn. The way was so steep for driving, that from the cathedral we walked on in search of the woman who had the keys of the church of San Andrea. She, however, being busy, handed us over to a young fellow with a face as lovely as Raffaelle's, and with those wonderful blue eyes, which have in them the glow of an Italian sky, not to be seen in more northern regions. But at San Andrea, while we were looking at the Pinturicchio behind the high altar, a very courteous and intelligent priest came into the church. Seeing us, he kindly removed the cross which obstructed our view of the best part of the altar picture, the child San John the Baptist, who sits writing on his scroll at the feet of the Blessed Virgin. This figure is supposed to be Raffaelle's work. St. Francis and St. Lawrence are on one side, St. Andrew and St. Gregory on the other; the embroidery on St. Lawrence's vestments is wonderfully painted, but as a whole this picture is not nearly so good as the frescoes by the same master in the cathedral. The priest pointed out to us a graceful arcade surrounding the front and ends of an altar. This was discovered some years ago, concealed beneath a much larger altar which had been placed above the chest containing the bones of San Andrea; he told as that when the bones were sought for, in order to remove them, the arcade was brought to light. The priest also showed us a fresco on the wall of the nave, and graphically related how he himself, only a few months before, had discovered it under the whitewash when the church was being cleaned for a festa. Who knows how many treasures still lie concealed on the church walls of these out-of-the-way towns; it must be owned, however, that the newly found fresco at Spello is not artistically a treasure, nor nearly as interesting as was the story of its discovery owing to its graphic telling. From San Andrea our blue-eyed, gentle-spoken young guide led us to the top of the town, crowned by the deserted Capuchin convent. "They have sent all the brothers away," he said sadly; "there is but one left, and he may not live in the convent, he may only come up in the afternoon, and see the schoolboys play in the garden." There is a pathetic look about the deserted, peaceful old place. From the platform in front of it we enjoyed a splendid view; before us on one side was the ever-present Subasio, towering over all, and on the top of the hill behind stood Perugia, looking at this distance like some giant castle. At our feet in the green valley was the amphitheatre of Spello; not so perfect as that at Fiesole, but with clearly defined tiers of grassed seats rising one above another. Porta Augusta is another interesting gateway. We came slowly down the steep street, getting constant peeps, between tall, grey houses, of the blue mountains around us. At one of these breaks in the wall a group of peasants sat, some spinning, some idling, beneath a vine that stretched on a trellis from house to house, the light filtering through the leaves became a golden green before it fell on the merry souls in the by-street below. The men of Spello look fine, robust fellows, and the women are very tall and erect. One handsome grey-haired dame met us as we came down the ladder-like street; she was spinning from a distaff in her hand. "Dio," she held it out to my companion, "che brutta lavoro!" "Would that I could do it," was the prompt answer, and the old dame went off chuckling with delight. [Illustration: PORTA AUGUSTA, SPELLO.] The little town is like an eyrie high up in the air, the houses nestling here and there for shelter behind the grey walls. We saw so many bits by the way in Spello, that it seemed as if one might spend some pleasant days in such an exquisitely placed spot; but we could not spy out any possible lodging; and, after all, it is an easy distance by rail or carriage from Assisi or Foligno. Coming home by train to Perugia, we travelled with a pleasant-looking Italian lady and her sad-faced husband. She also seemed sad, and constantly put her handkerchief to her eyes; we fancied she was affected by some deep sorrow, and felt sympathy for her. The train presently stopped at a station; her distress increased, she clasped her hands, and entreated her husband to get out of the carriage and see after the poor little "angiolo." He gently refused, and at this she sobbed, and almost howled with anguish; then, burying her face in her handkerchief, she leaned back and refused to be comforted. At the next station we heard the sharp yelping of a little dog, and then she cried out so loudly for the "povera bestia" that we began to understand. Seeing we were interested, she sat up, pocketed her handkerchief, and explained. "The officials have taken my dog from me, and have shut it up. Dio! the sweet angel would not hurt a soul," she said, with a fresh flow of tears; "its cries break my heart. It is a cruelty beyond belief." At this her husband left the carriage, looking much ashamed of himself. When he came back he tried to pacify his still weeping wife. "The dog is all right, cara mia," he said. "Cara mia," however, would not listen, and she actually sobbed and cried all the way to Perugia, where we left her on the platform with her pocket-handkerchief rolled into a ball, and pressed close to her eyes. CHAPTER VI THE HEAVENLY CHOIR OF PERUGIA [Illustration: POTS AT WINDOW.] We had greatly desired to see the façade of the Oratory built in honour of San Bernardino of Siena, and we went in search of it. Going past the cloisters of the cathedral, we traversed the street beyond them: on one side is a fragment of an old palace, on the other a quaint series of ancient arches, one within the other, full of striking effects of light and shade. A street descends steeply from this portal. We noted here, and in many of the old house-fronts, carved brackets, for holding flower-pots, built out from the walls, their grey stone making a pleasant contrast to the brilliant red and orange of the flowers blossoming in pots placed within these hoary receptacles. We sometimes saw metal rings instead of stone brackets fastened into the wall, so as to hold a flower-pot. A wealthy Englishman, staying in our hotel, became so enamoured of the quaint effect created by these stone brackets, that he told us he was resolved to transport some of them to the front wall of his newly-built London dwelling. He went to the owner of a house possessing several of the brackets, and offered him a round sum for a couple of them. The owner professed himself delighted with the offer; he would most willingly gratify the English Signor's fancy. [Illustration: VIA SANT' AGATA.] "The Signore Inglese must, however, understand," he said, with a twinkle in his heavy-lidded dark eyes, "that these articles are not individual,--they are the same as the nose on the face, fixtures. To possess the brackets, the Signore Inglese must purchase the entire front of the Palazzo, it is built all in one piece." This was too much for even an English collector; he was obliged to quit Perugia without acquiring even one of the much-desired brackets. As we went along, we saw, outside the door of an old grey house, a pretty, ragged, fair-haired child, jumping and dancing on her little bare feet, chattering, as it seemed, to the doorpost. She was trying to reach the knocker, and was talking merrily to the flies on the wall, by way of amusement while she waited. Near the Church of S. Agata we inquired for the house of Perugino, but this Via de' Priori so winds and twists that we were told we were too far north, so we turned at a sharp angle, and after a little came to a silent open space in front of a church, the Chiesa Nuova. Down an arched passage close by, and up a side street on the right, we reached Via Deliziosa; in this Perugino's house is marked by a tablet. There is nothing special in the appearance of the dwelling; the hilly street in which it stands is grass-grown, and weirdly silent. We went back again to seek for San Bernardino, and descended into a very old quarter of the city, the projecting claw which on this side overlooks the deep valley below Porta Susanna, and forms one point of the Cupa. We had to pass by the last remaining fortress of the nobles, the tall brick Torre degli Scalzi; behind this are remains of the Etruscan wall. Close by we saw another church, Madonna di Luce, a good example of Renaissance work, gay with a scarlet and gold curtain, in readiness for to-morrow's festa; then, by a quaint little street with flights of brick steps leading down into most picturesque side-turnings, we came in sight of a small house, its grey stone balcony screened from the sunshine by a vine-wreathed pergola. [Illustration: MADONNA DI LUCE.] In a few minutes we reached the convent of San Francesco, beside which is the matchless façade of the chapel or oratory of San Bernardino of Siena. [Illustration: FAÇADE OF SAN BERNARDINO.] The detail of this façade is even more beautiful than we had expected; the colour of its rosy marbles and terra-cotta adds warmth to the exquisite sculptures. These seemed to us finer, both in design and execution, than any Della Robbia work we had seen. We were glad to find this opinion endorsed by Mr. Perkins in his Tuscan Sculptors. The façade is the work of Agostino Ducci or Gucci, of Florence. [Illustration: ANGEL, SAN BERNARDINO.] A circular arch, almost as wide as the façade, surmounts two square-headed entrance doors; these are surrounded by delicately carved ornament in low relief. Above the door is a frieze, on which are represented events in the life of San Bernardino; over it, in the centre of the tympanum, which is deeply recessed within the arch, is a Vesica, formed by tongues of flame containing a figure of the saint, said to be the best existing likeness of him. Four flying angels placed diagonally on either side of the Vesica seem to float as they offer their musical sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Six of them are playing various instruments; the expression in each countenance is varied. Some of the faces are very lovely, especially the two praying with uplifted heads; the others seem to be chanting hymns of praise to the music of their respective instruments. The disposition of the angels' robes is perfect; its studied grace reminded us of Lord Leighton's drapery, the whole effect being as artistic as it is original. [Illustration: HEADS OF CHERUBIM, SAN BERNARDINO.] [Illustration: ANGELS, SAN BERNARDINO.] Filling up the rest of the tympanum, so as to make a background to the angels, there are the quaintest heads of cherubs cradled in lovely wings, carved in full relief. Some of these heads are missing, but those which remain are exquisite studies of baby faces, each with its own special expression, some roguish, others sweet and loving; one of them seems to suppress a sob. There is infinite variety among them; and all are so very human that they are doubtless transcripts from fifteenth-century Perugian babies. Winged creatures are carved in the spandrels of the arch; and slightly below on either side is an angel within an arched niche, over which is a pediment, the mouldings and soffits showing delicately sculptured ornament; they are repeated below, and there are still other angels of the Heavenly Choir, playing musical instruments; these are on the broad pilasters that support the arch; some are in pairs, with very beautiful faces. The arrangement of their draperies is especially remarkable. [Illustration: ANGEL PLAYING, SAN BERNARDINO.] In all these figures and faces, besides the beauty of expression, there is a marvellous mingling of quaintness and grace; they are so life-like that one almost listens for the sound of their instruments, in meet accompaniment to their chants, or to the hymns of the cherubs, who above and beside them are singing a chorus of praise. The Oratory is surmounted by a pediment, and in its tympanum we again find angels and cherubs. On the fringe of the pediment are the carved words-- AUGUSTA PERUSIA MCCCCLXI. The illustrations help the reader's appreciation of this gem of Perugia; mere words can only sketch, without giving an adequate idea of its beauty. The authorities of the city were eager to show their appreciation of the wonderful reformation effected in its morals by the preaching of San Bernardino; only a few years after his death, the building of this beautiful memorial was begun, and seems to have been completed about 1462. Bernardino's father was governor of Massa; in the year 1380, when Saint Catherine died in Siena, the future preacher was born in the little town. Early left an orphan, he was tenderly reared by three aunts, all excellent women. He, unlike his great prototype, seems not to have shared the fashionable vices of other youths of the period; he was from an early age bent on following, so far as he could, the example left him two hundred years earlier by Saint Francis of Assisi. He spent some time in that convent of Fiesole which educated Fra Angelico and others, ardent to revive in their generation the work of St. Francis, which had suffered eclipse. Various reasons have been given for this, chief among them being the pagan tendency of the Renaissance teaching, and also the frequent visitations of plague, which seem almost to have emptied the convents, sweeping off the monks and nuns who gave up their lives to tend the sick in hospitals. In most of the Italian states and cities the descendants of devout Christians had become fierce and brutal, as unrestrained in appetite as they were murderous and lawless in deeds. Some of these have already been narrated. Princes and nobles strove to surpass the citizens in evil-doing by the hideous tragedies they enacted. This had been especially the case for many years in Perugia, whose inhabitants had come to be designated by the epithet "ferocious": they were so given up to every sort of crime. Bernardino was deeply stirred by the evil report that reached him from all parts of the country; he had already been received into the Minor Conventual Order of San Francis, and had signalised his courage by nursing and ministering to the plague-stricken inmates of the hospital in Siena. This had injured his health, but he gladly obeyed the commission given by his superior, to journey through a certain part of Italy, preaching as he went. Already the evangelising movement was in the air: in France, a Spaniard, San Vincent Ferrier, had reaped a bountiful harvest of souls. Bernardino determined by God's help to evangelise his country, and to rescue souls from evil by the winning power of love. He decided to begin his crusade in Umbria, in the powerful city of Perugia, so notorious for the crimes of its bloodstained nobles and the frivolity and vanity of their women. Bernardino lodged in a convent outside the city gate, and went every morning to preach in the Piazza Pubblico. Crowds had flocked to hear his first sermon, but he had a consciousness that this was mere excitement, and that the souls of his listeners were yet to be won. One day he told his congregation that he proposed before long to show them the Evil One. This announcement sent the multitude crazy with excitement; the throngs of his listeners were doubled. But for some days after Bernardino preached only in an ordinary fashion. Still the people believed he would keep faith with them, and each day brought a larger crowd of expectant listeners. At last, one morning, Bernardino said, "I am now going to fulfil my promise; I will show you not one devil only, for there are several here." Then, raising his voice, "Look at one another, you will each see Satan in your neighbour's face; every one of you does that Evil One's bidding." He then pointed out seriously, and with much pathos, the sins that reigned among them, and implored his hearers to renounce their evil practices. The effect of his words was wonder-striking. Families who had lived in hatred of their fellow-citizens for more than a generation, hurried forward, and, clasping the hands of their once-detested foes, begged forgiveness for wrongs committed; in more than one instance, with halters round their necks, they besought pardon for the evil they had wrought. Bernardino saw that the devotion of the city was roused, and, turning to the women, he commanded them to cause two huge fires to be lighted on the Piazza. "Set a pattern to your men," he exclaimed; "prove the reality of your penitence; cast into the flames the gauds by which Satan tempts you to ensnare mankind to their ruin; bring hither your cosmetics, your perfumes, your false tresses, and the garlands with which you deck them, your sumptuous robes, all the vanities you possess, and cast them into the flames." Sobbing and weeping, the women rushed off to obey him; they soon returned laden with the vanities denounced by the preacher, and, like the Florentines many years later, they cast their prized adornments into the huge fires. An old chronicler relates that one noble dame cherished a long false tress of singular beauty, which had always commanded admiration; she felt that this would prove a worthy offering. Taking it from its casket, she was about to hurry with it to the Piazza; she again looked at it. No, she could not make the sacrifice, the tress was too lustrous, too lovely; more than all, it became her so rarely. Her heart failed her. She put it back in the casket, with a smile of contempt at her own superstition; she was closing the lid, when suddenly the beauteous tress sprang up and struck her violently on the cheekbone. She cried out with pain and terror; then, forcing the temptation into the casket and closing the lid, she fled back to the Piazza, and flung the treasured lock into the flames. For a while after this famous preaching, peace and devotion returned to the hill-city; then came sad outbreaks and dissensions, and Bernardino, hearing the disturbing news, returned to Perugia. He exhorted his former penitents to seek after the grace and the love which had once been granted them, and at the close of the year 1425 he once more left them in peace one with another; while he went to preach elsewhere in Umbria, and finally to Gubbio, to Viterbo, and to Orvieto. Two years later, when preaching in Siena, he held up the conversion of the people of Perugia as an example to be followed by the Sienese. CHAPTER VII SAN PIETRO DE' CASINENSI The most remarkable church in Perugia is the church, at the end of the southern point of the city, attached to the convent of San Pietro; below it is the gate named after San Costanzo, said to have been the first Bishop of Perugia. On the opposite side of the way from the convent wall is a pleasant public resort, shaded by trees, called Passeggiata Pubblica. From this point, looking down the steep road, one gets a delightful view of the near valley and distant Apennines, framed in by the arch of Porta Costanzo. This view goes by the name of La Veduta. La Veduta and a lovely country walk beyond the gate are associated with the memory of that accomplished artist and delightful companion, Lord Leighton. He dearly loved the old hill-city; in its delightful quiet he used to write his lecture for the Royal Academy students. One of his favourite walks was to go out by the Porta Costanzo, and along the lovely lanes beyond it, grown over with honeysuckle, wild gourd, and an abundance of wild myrtle. The ancient church of San Pietro, with its very picturesque exterior and campanile, serves as a conspicuous landmark in the country over which it gazes. It is said to be the oldest church in Perugia, and to be built on the site of an Etruscan temple; it was certainly in old days the first cathedral. Built by Pietro, a saintly abbot of the monastery in the tenth century, it seems to have remained for a long period almost untouched; in the fourteenth century the campanile was considered one of the wonders of Italy. A century later it was restored and decorated with rich Renaissance work, some of which is very fascinating and interesting. Then came a warlike abbot, resolved to convert the very salient tower of San Pietro into a fortress to overawe the surrounding country; and also to use it as a means of defence against the ever-turbulent people of Perugia, and the despots who were always quarrelling among themselves in order to attain supreme power in the city. [Illustration: LA VEDUTA, PERUGIA.] The campanile was still further injured by Pope Boniface the Ninth, who also wished to construct an ordinary fortress on the site of the beautiful tower. Finally, the monks rebuilt it at a great cost. It was then struck by lightning, and severely damaged. For a long period of time the injuries caused by lightning were so frequent that it was feared the entire building would suffer ruin; then at last the idea of a lightning conductor suggested itself. This saved the campanile, and it has since remained in its present condition. We went up the steps in the convent wall, and entered the old church of San Pietro from the courtyard, by a doorway with a deeply carved heading in marble. The interior is at once rich and fascinating, and every subsequent visit we made to it revealed many treasures. Some of the Perugino pictures in the sacristy are worth examination, but the large altar-piece he painted for this church was carried away to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte. The choir books can be seen here, illuminated by the monks of San Miniato, near Florence. There are several pictures in the church; in one of the aisles is a painting by the early Umbrian master, Benedetto Bonfigli. The ancient, dark grey columns on either side of the nave are much older than the church, having been brought here from the curious old church at Porta San Angelo, near the most northern gate of Perugia. We had already seen sixteen of these columns in the ancient round church; they are supposed to date from a very early period. The altar tomb of the Baglioni, by Fieado, is in San Pietro; but the most remarkable feature of this church is its choir. The stalls and their seats are full of exquisitely carved wood-work, and the doors at the east end are marvellous specimens of intarsia work. The sacristan shows them with great pride, and then opens the doors which lead on to the balcony behind. Below us we see a very lovely picture: the fertile valley and its surroundings of richly-tinted hills, while in front is Assisi, clinging to the side of rugged Monte Subasio. It is said that three citizens of Perugia escaped by means of this balcony from the Pope's Swiss guards, when, less than fifty years ago, the Swiss forcibly took possession of the convent. The delicate work of the eastern doors was executed by Fra Damiano of Bergamo; it is singularly beautiful; perhaps the finding of Moses in the bulrushes is one of the most curious subjects depicted. The choir seats and stalls were done by Damiano's brother, Stefano da Bergamo. They are worth a very careful examination, for, besides the intarsia on the backs and seats, and the fine carving of the poppy-heads, notable both for subject and execution, there are, between each stall, wonderful and beautifully-modelled creatures. Now we see a beast like a crocodile, and next it a harpy; then an elephant, a dolphin, a sphinx, and so on; an infinite variety, almost every creature is different, and the carving of each is most artistic. We saw many treasures in the church, before we went out into the cypress-bordered garden of the convent, and again enjoyed the lovely view from the top of its high wall,--the view which wearied Popes and other great and jaded personages have taken pleasure in gazing at when they came to Perugia for refreshment. An intelligent-looking priest showed us the garden. He said it was kept in order by the boys belonging to the convent. This formerly sheltered a reformatory for lads sentenced to prison for their first offence. It is now, I believe, used as an Agricultural College. We had previously noticed the reformatory boys at work on the olive fields outside the town gates, and had admired the picturesque effect of their blue uniforms and straw hats against the silver grey of the leafy background. They had then come trooping into the cloisters, and on close inspection they did not look so interesting as we had thought them; some of them, however, had simple, honest faces, and as they passed into the cloister they smiled and raised their hats to the Fra. Most of the bigger fellows had an ugly scowl, and went in with bent heads, without any greeting. The Fra told us the lads behaved fairly well; his trouble was to find suitable employment for them when they were discharged from the reformatory. He said he greatly approved of English laws, especially in regard to the working class. "The English are so good to foreigners," he said. He asked us what would be the cost in London of a working-man's board and lodging. We told him that we had in England already too many boys of this sort, for whom it was difficult to find employment; we, however, gave him an average of the expenses he inquired about. This seemed to alarm the good Padre; with lifted hands he said, "Such a plan would prove far too costly, it would teach the lads expensive habits of living." But he thanked us courteously for our information. When we left the convent garden we stood again enjoying the view over the lovely valley, under a glorious sunset which glowed on the distant hills. It seemed to us that splendid sunsets were another and special charm of Perugia. We had meant this evening to visit the Etruscan sepulchres of the Volumnii, discovered only about sixty years ago, and within a walk of the San Costanzo gate; but San Pietro, even in this short visit, had proved such an interesting study, that we saw we must defer our walk to the ancient tomb. We were, however, told that, without much adding to the length of our walk, we should considerably increase its charm, if, instead of passing out by the Porta Costanzo, we turned aside by the Porta San Pietro, or Romana, as it is called, and quitted the city by the little gate at the bottom of the descent. This is indeed a delightful walk under the old grey walls, and from it one has a perfect view over the lovely country and the purple hills. CHAPTER VIII THE TOMBS OF THE VOLUMNII [Illustration: GIRL'S HEAD.] A few days later, as we went along a lane, with grassy flower-pied banks, and with purple hills as background to the sunlit glory which surrounded us, we recognised the delightful landscape so frequently used by Perugino. The way was rather long, but there was more in it to interest than to tire us. We at last arrived at the dark descent beside the road, which forms the entrance to the sepulchre of the Volumnii. Many years ago there was supposed to be a necropolis existing in this hill, and on excavation several small cells were discovered. In more recent years an ox was seen suddenly to stumble on the hill above, and to be unable to rise. Going to help it, beneath the hole into which the creature had thrust its foot a subterranean arch was revealed, and subsequent excavation brought to light the wonderful, long-closed tombs of the Etruscan Volumnii. We went down some rugged steps to the mouth of the gloomy cavern, and found ourselves in a dark passage-way, with stone benches on either side. The weird, mysterious atmosphere of the Etruscan vault is indescribable. Several chambers or cells, in this underground house of the departed, branch out on either side of the dark vaulted passage, but we saw them in such semi-darkness, that by the light of a single torch it was very difficult to make out details. As we went along the dark vault, our guide raised his torch on high. In a moment we seemed to be in an enchanted cavern, where the silent inhabitants were guarded by strange forms; gorgon heads, owls, and serpents stared at us from roof and walls. We could fancy that, as we passed by, the snake heads seemed to dart from the walls, to bristle and hiss; and the grand Medusa-faces overhead looked down on us full of dire warning, when at the end of the passage we entered the tomb of the Etruscan family. Here are the Volumnii sitting in a group, realistic terra-cotta figures guarding their urns, just as they have been guarding them for perhaps two thousand years. Aruns Volumni, the father, reclines on his sarcophagus, which is guarded by two furies; on his left his daughter sits on her urn, and on his right is his son. Their faces look dull and uninteresting, but they seem aware of their own importance. The fourth figure of the group, seated next the son of Aruns, is Veilia, his fair young wife. She has an exquisite face, and one is not surprised to learn that she died young; she must have felt isolated among such unsympathetic family surroundings. Her face and those of the majestic solemn-eyed Medusas are the most interesting treasures of the tomb. All the faces and figures of the Volumnii are intensely life-like; Aruns himself has a purse-proud expression. Coming out into welcome fresh air and daylight, we saw that the entrance to the tomb was fringed by a profusion of maidenhair fern, growing between the blocks of travertine. A weird-faced child, with dark eyes shining through a tangle of dusky hair, showed a brilliant gleam of white teeth as she offered us tufts of this fern ruthlessly torn out by its roots. She seemed the uncanny guardian of the place. * * * * * Another walk with an outlook less splendid than that of the Veduta and others, yet with a special charm of its own, was a great favourite with us. To reach it one has to go past the interesting old church of San Ercolano, instead of turning up beside it, till some iron gates are arrived at; outside these, the way was blocked on the right, so we turned leftwards, and followed the course of the picturesque old wall; ancient houses rise above it, and the wall itself is crowned with flowers in pots and stone vases. Here and there we saw vine-wreathed loggias; then, at the far end of a sudden turn, there came into view Monte Luce, with its old church and convent, and grand blue hills rising beyond. I believe the church is really called Santa Maria Assunta; it is the bourne of a yearly pilgrimage at the time of the great cattle fair, which takes place on the green down across the road. We passed through the open convent gate into a quaint and peaceful scene, a small grassed quadrangle closed in by a wall and the sacristan's house; facing us was the west front of the church, with a large window under its low gable. The church wall itself is checkered with squares of red and white stone. The two green doors, under a double arch, were almost as vivid in colour as the lizards basking between the stones. On the right was a low and singularly massive campanile; its huge blue and white clock-face giving a peculiar quaintness to the place. There is a projecting side chapel below, with slit-like windows; beyond this is a cloister walk, its low tiled roof supported by solid white-washed piers. This cloister goes on to the angle where the convent buildings adjoin the church, and extends from this angle along the southern and eastern sides of the little green square to the entrance gates; on one side is an upper storey, reached by a flight of bricked steps. A woman, sad and quiet-looking, but with a sweet expression on her olive-hued face, showed us the church, and the little choir of the Sisters behind the high altar. She told us how the nuns from the suppressed and desecrated convent of Santa Giuliana "had been driven to take refuge in this blessed house of Santa Maria Assunta." She added with a deep sigh, "Who knows what will happen next?" It seemed sad that such a peaceful home as this should be threatened. A few steps beyond this church brought us to a low wall; here we sat and enjoyed the distant view framed in by tall trees. It differs from any other point in Perugia, in having a more varied foreground. This is broken up by green hills, with bright-looking country houses nestling among gardens and orchards, and surrounded by dark trees; behind are the ever-beautiful Apennines; between, in mid distance, is that mingling of colour created by the luxuriant vegetation of this fertile valley. It was varied on this evening by cloud-shadows cast on its mellowed sunny glow. While we sit enjoying all this beauty, the Angelus sounds in sweet harmony with the scene; three, four, five, then one long drawn-out solemn note. From the frequent campaniles the bells call one to another, and give deep-toned musical response across the green hollows that vandyke themselves up the walled hillside into the town; the brilliant sunset showing in bold relief the salient balconies of a Palazzo not far away. We came back into the city by another gate, and lost our way. Finally, however, we turned up a very steep street, and then down flights of steps by the church of San Fiorenzo. There is here a curious old wall with a garden above it; a workman told us it was the curate's garden. In the lingering gleams of sunlight, oleander blossoms overhead were glowing masses of colour against the grey stone wall. CHAPTER IX THE VIA APPIA The Oratory of San Bernardino is near to gardens, orchards, and drying grounds. Beyond the convent of San Francesco the ancient wall goes northward, and then turns east towards the Porta Augusta, but this afternoon we went southwards. A short walk down a steep narrow street beneath an archway led us out of the low-browed passage of the Etruscan Porta Susanna on to the wall itself. This rises up directly from La Cupa, as the indentation which the valley here makes is called. The wall follows the curves of the hills, always keeping close to the edge of the descent, and, as I have already said, where an angle is sharply turned a bold round tower stands out sentinel-wise against the blue sky. [Illustration: PORTA SUSANNA] Below the wall the fertile dell was literally covered with vines, olives, fig and mulberry trees; plots of blue-green cabbage and shining lettuce covered bare spaces of brown earth. In winter a torrent flows through the Cupa. To-day the long range of hill on the left looked red-brown, variegated with green and grey; behind its shoulder a more distant mountain showed opal; tall regular houses of the ancient city rose one behind another on the right, and the last brick tower, that of the Scalzi, rose above them all. The wall makes here an inward angle before it goes out far away westward to another point of the star-shaped hill, and here the view becomes more beautiful. The outlines of the mountains cross, and reveal through the openings yet another ridge behind, and this farther ridge looks a delicate opal, while the sunbeams become less powerful. On the right the hills stretched in two purple undulating lines, between them a rosy vapour moved slowly, deepening in tint as it rose towards the orange-coloured clouds. Masses of grey now sent up warnings from below, and partly obscured the rosy vapour; southward the grey took a lurid tinge, and across it floated pale phantom-like cloudlets. The far-off hill, as we looked southward, had become a purple-blue, while the town in the space between climbed upwards in terraces, the houses bowered in vines and garden blossoms. This is not so extended a prospect as some others that are to be had from the walls of Perugia, but I am inclined to consider it one of the most interesting, from the double view it offers of the town and of the quaint formation of the steep-sided, triangular valley, with its mysterious depth of vegetation below. We kept along the wall for some distance, then our road led us away from it between old stone garden walls, supports for vines and figs, and brilliant orange begonia blossoms which peep above them. Quaint side-streets looked tempting on our left. Going up one of these, we found a portion of Etruscan wall with an opening in it of the same period of stone-work. The street beyond mounted steeply to where a brick arch spanned it: on one side a flight of broken steps led up to a tall house above the wall; a loggia, corbelled out from between the house and the grey pointed arch, was filled with charming foliage and flowers; an iron crane projected from the balcony over a brick water-tank beside the broken steps. The variety of form and colour was most vivid against the shadow within the arch; its two projecting imposts were massive slabs of travertine, and beside one of these, gleaming out of the shadow, was a little shrine with a nosegay of freshly-gathered flowers. In and out of narrow streets, up and down quaint steps, we reached at last the Ivory Gate, the Etruscan Porta Eburnea,--that very quaintly-placed old gate, from which a steep road goes down into the country. We had here an extended view of the wall, curving grandly forward to a projecting point, and completely obscuring all view of La Cupa; the point itself crowned by a most picturesque round tower, standing out vividly from its background of purple hills. [Illustration: PORTA EBURNEA] The road from Porta Eburnea looked attractive. On this special day it was thronged with peasants going home from market. Some of the women stopped outside the gate; taking off their boots, they slung them over their shoulders, or put them in their baskets; then, with brown bare feet and legs, they went down the steep dusty road with rapid, swinging steps. Most of these bare-footed women wore handsome coral necklaces; and yet shopkeepers asked from eighty to three hundred francs for a string of these beads. Just outside the gate a man and several boys were playing some game with walnuts. [Illustration: OUTSIDE PERUGIA.] Coming home one evening from the twisting way behind the cathedral, we reached a lofty arched opening with "Via Appia" printed on one side. The arch itself has a house above it; a second arch within, with grey projecting imposts, shows a broad steep descent,--a long flight of shallow brick steps, so undecided as to the course they shall take that they curve first one way and then another, before they reach the bottom of the descent. Some way down, a viaduct supported by three broad arches comes out beside the stone-edged brick steps, while transversely right and left are stone walls; that on the right is high and massive, and from its grey-green stones were hanging long garlands of white-blossomed caper plant. Beyond, just before the wall joins some old stone houses, we saw a little pergola covered with the tender green of the vine. From the deep hollow into which the steps descend the town rises up in front, and as we go down, the old houses on our left, with gardens and orchards, stand at a great height above us, looking black against the glowing sky. [Illustration: VIA APPIA AND TOWN.] From this viaduct is an extended view over many curious roofs covered with semicircular tiles, frosted with gold and silver lichens and patches of green moss. First comes a series of gardens, green with vines and fig-trees; beyond these, among the grey houses and trees, appears the great modern building of the University. Beyond it is the silk factory of Count Faina; behind all are the purple hills. Instead of crossing the viaduct we went down to the bottom of the seemingly interminable brick staircase, catching sight through the viaduct arches on the left of a succession of pictures: cottages backed by trees with children in front at play, all in a vivid effect of light and shade, framed in by the low, broad arches. This brought us finally on to a road leading back into the town, spanned on the left by another broad arch of the viaduct. Through this a group of feathered acacias glowed golden-green in the sunshine against picturesque houses backed by the hills. The pointed arch on the right looks quaint, from the contrast of its huge grey stones and small many-shaped windows, mostly open; some of them gay with scarlet flowers; one window had a faded green curtain, drawn half across; a bird-cage hung outside it. Behind the curtain the olive-hued face of a woman peeped out. Through the arch was a strong effect of golden light and blue-purple shadow; while we looked behind, there came a donkey, driven by a merry-eyed, bare-footed lad, dragging a cart heaped with brushwood. A little way on along the road is the mosaic pavement discovered several years ago in some Roman baths. The pavement is in singularly good preservation, and the design is very remarkable. Orpheus, a colossal black figure on a white ground, sits with outstretched arm, while a lion, a tiger, an elephant, a hippopotamus, stags, a rhinoceros, a horse, birds of various kinds, a snail, a monkey, a tortoise, and other creatures are drawn towards him from all sides. [Illustration: ARCO DELLA CONCA, PERUGIA.] A handsome dark-eyed girl kept on sweeping dust from the mosaic, and was eager to point out that the brick-work on one side has not been examined, and probably hides a good deal more of the pavement, as yet unexcavated. The girl was so bright and good to look at, that she seemed quite a part of the show. Turning through the arch, we very soon reached Piazza Grimani, which has on one side the Palazzo Antinori. Close by is the wonder of Perugia--the Etruscan gateway, or, as it is called from the inscription set over it by the Romans when they took the city, the Porta Augusta. It was growing dusk, and the effect of this grand mass of stone-work was stupendous. On each side of the arched gateway are massive towers,--the upper part of the structure is less ancient than the towers are; one of them is surmounted by a loggia. Some of the blocks of stone in the Etruscan part of the wall are enormous, many of them four feet long, and within the gloom of the arch is the wall, built on the same gigantic scale. As we went home through the narrow, dark Via Vecchia, we saw a very quaint scene. In a long, dark room, dimly lighted by two oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling, a man and woman were selling soup and cold meat at a sort of counter. The brown characteristic faces and shining eyes of their ragged customers told out wonderfully as occasional gleams from the lamps above singled them from the semi-darkness. In this street we saw many examples of the walled-up doors by which the dead had been formerly carried out, closed up, so that the living might never pass by the same way. [Illustration: PORTA AUGUSTA, PERUGIA.] Our next view of Porta Augusta was by daylight. We had been told by some one staying in Perugia where to seek a special point of view from the old walls near this arch. The Porta Augusta is even finer in full light, which reveals the immense strength of its construction. When one considers that these great blocks of stone must have been brought from a long distance, it is sad to think of the poor slaves whose labour brought them and set them in their places for their Etruscan masters. Near here must have been the house of that chief citizen who, seeing the Romans, headed by Octavius Cæsar, masters of his native city, and that there was no longer a hope of freedom from the detested yoke, set fire to his dwelling, and burned himself and his whole family therein, heedless that the blaze spreading in all directions destroyed the chief part of Etruscan Perugia. Instead of following the Via Lungari, or Garibaldi, on this occasion, our instructions sent us down a narrow street in a parallel direction, until we were stopped by the inward curve of the city wall. Just before we reached this, our way was blocked by two wine carts laden with barrels of new-made wine, and drawn by a pair of huge cream-coloured oxen, with soft dark eyes and long horns reaching from one side of the street to the other. I delight in these splendid creatures; they look so gentle, and though so huge they seem unconscious of their power. They moved on at last, and permitted us to reach our bourne. The Porta Buligaia was certainly the most beautiful point we had yet seen, and we felt very grateful to the great artist who, knowing every street of Perugia, had so kindly told us how to take this walk; for the little narrow street opposite the Porta Augusta had hitherto escaped our notice, although we had spent so many weeks in Perugia. [Illustration: PORTA BULIGAIA.] Just before the old wall reaches the Porta it curves into a trefoil, and goes down steeply to the fertile valley. Through the open, green doors of the gate the road winds beside the grand wall, which, covered with greenery, strikes forward to the north, tall grass atop waving like pennons among the trees above it. The inner wall sends out a long flank to reach the gate, and above, level with its top, is a vine-covered pergola with quaint gabled houses behind it; these command a grand view over the hills which circle round in shades of exquisite blue, fading at last to opal. Plots of maize glow through a grey mist of olives; the vines, swinging from tree to tree, are golden-green. As the road goes down beside the wall beyond the gate, it passes a white-walled cottage nestled in trees. The view tempted us along this road, and soon a path, bordered by a black handrail, mounted on the left beside a caper-wreathed wall of stones: following it, we crossed a sort of farmyard, where an enormous gourd vine lay atop a brick wall; huge pumpkins were sunning themselves among enormous leaves. Beyond this, towards Perugia, the land was richly cultivated; maize and vegetables, fruit-trees and vines, covered every scrap of ground. Here and there a tangled bit of hedge served to prop the luxuriant vines; there was no primness anywhere, and yet the ground seemed well cultivated. Going on, the way curved, and the view became still more extended; at last we found ourselves in the road again, and went on till we reached the extreme northern point of Perugia--Porta San Angelo. [Illustration: PORTA SAN ANGELO.] Some little way outside is the convent of San Francesco, and just within the gate, from which, up a side path, there is another delightful view, we came to the round church of San Angelo, or San Michele. This is very ancient, and is said to have been formerly a pagan temple dedicated to Vesta. The lower part is round, the upper eight-sided, but the interior is circular. The upper portion is supported by a circle of sixteen dark-grey columns; anciently there were three circles of these columns. All but one of the two outer circles have been taken away to other parts of Perugia: we had already seen some in San Pietro, and there are two in one of the palaces on the market-place; one still remains in the second circle at San Angelo. This interior is very interesting. In it is a well-preserved sacrificial altar, and the woman who guided us explained with much unction how the victims were formerly sacrificed. She also showed us some horrible instruments of torture, and another altar, said to be Roman. There is a curious bas-relief on the wall near the sacristy. We had already seen this church on a festa, when, the altar blazing with candles, the gaily-dressed people kneeling in front of it and between the surrounding circle of pillars, had a very picturesque effect,--marred, it is true, by the presence of sundry dogs among the worshippers, and the extremely cracked and untuneful sounds proceeding from the music gallery. Our brown-faced, withered guide was full of talk; when we got into the sacristy, she confided to me she had been foolish enough to marry late in life; then, her man had managed so badly that he died and left her to take care of herself. "Ah, yes," she said, "and there is more than myself, there is a boy, and he is nine years old; he eats well,--the Signora knows how a boy eats at nine? Dio! he is voracious; then he must be taught, and school costs money, much money! and yet, Dio! what a thing it is to have schooling! I can neither read nor write, and can earn but little; I wish my son to do better than I, and yet, Signora, I am not sure if it is wise." Her keen black eyes twinkled at me. I suggested that she must be right in giving her son some schooling. She sighed heavily, and darted another keen glance at me out of her hungry dark eyes. "Yes, the Signora is right; but if I spend money in teaching my son I can have none for myself. Dio! what can become of me when these"--she stretched out her brown, capable-looking hands--"can no longer work for me? Holy Virgin! I know not." She gave another heavy sigh, and again she looked wistfully at me. I said that if she did her duty by her son he would be sure to take care of her hereafter, but at this her face showed me that we took different views. She shook her head. "It ought to be so, Signora," she said, "but it is not; Dio, I have lived in the world many years, and I have not found that men are what they ought to be. No! not one.--Pardon me, Signore," she looked deprecatingly towards my companion. "The Signora has as much money as she wants, and she does not hear the truth; she sees the best side of people, they show the worst to us poor ones." Poor woman! I hastened to assure her that I was not in the happy state she fancied. I felt ashamed at giving her my modest fee, and said I wished it could have been larger; but evidently she was not greedy, she clasped both her brown hands round my arm and squeezed it, while she poured forth effusive thanks. Then she went back to the heap of stones near the entrance of the cave where I had found her, sitting like a hungry spider in wait for an inquiring fly, in the shape of a traveller. CHAPTER X THE WAY TO ASSISI We had for years desired to make a pilgrimage to Assisi, and now, across the lovely valley the sight of the little white town clinging to Monte Subasio, veiled by grey and purple vapour, was a daily reminder of our wish. Some places stamp themselves into the heart, and while life lasts the longing to revisit them increases, till realisation quenches desire. A visit to such a haunt of delightful memories as Assisi requires time, so we waited till a few days could be spared. [Illustration: GIOTTO.] It was very early morning when we drove down from Perugia along the Assisi road, a road bordered by the silver and gold of olive-groves and vineyards. Fragrant, dewy freshness lay on everything; even when the sun rose higher, and blazed fiercely down on us, we had become so absorbed by the surrounding scenery and its associations that we did not seem to feel the brilliant heat. Now and then, between the leafy trees on our right, we had glimpses of yellow Tiber on its way to Rome. Francis Bernardone must also have enjoyed these glimpses as he walked to and from Assisi with some favourite disciple, perhaps along this very road. St. Francis did a far greater work for his contemporaries than any reformer of the later Renaissance period. He did not attack popes and bishops, or find fault with everything and everybody who differed from his special ideas: he used the most powerful means by which to influence mankind,--he lived the life he preached. He had been accustomed to luxury and every form of self-pleasing,--he gave up all to follow the way of the Cross, from love to his Saviour. In that brutal and licentious age, the beginning of the thirteenth century, his example seems to have been irresistible. The life of poverty, obedience, and chastity enjoined by his rule sounded utter folly when first proclaimed to the multitude; but it says something in favour of those times that, when the first outcry ceased, and his fellow-citizens witnessed the harmony that existed between his life and his teaching, he was left comparatively unmolested, and his work was not materially interfered with. Though he died at forty-four, he lived long enough to see his Order recognised by Holy Church and by secular potentates, and to know that its widely spread communities were firmly established wherever they had planted themselves. It may be said of St. Bernard and St. Dominick, that they also practised all they preached, but one feature peculiar to St. Francis is not chronicled of those other revivalists,--his idea of life was a very happy one. In the century that followed, Boccaccio did not teach joy as a duty one whit more strenuously than the Poverello did, although the two men's ideas of the source of joy were so opposite. One remembers the recorded talk about joy, of that which fails to make, and of that which _is_ the true root of happiness, between Francis and Fra Leone,--a talk which continued for two miles, while the master and his disciple walked out from Perugia to Assisi. At last Fra Leo, called by Francis "the little sheep of God," cried out: "Father, tell me, I pray thee, wherein can perfect happiness be found?" Whereupon Francis made his well-known answer, recorded in the eighth chapter of _I Fioretti_ ("The Little Flowers of St. Francis"). As we drove along we remembered that the hills looking down on us, now varied by exquisite cloud-shadows, had listened to cheerful lays, improvised in the Provençal tongue by Francis as he trudged along this road. He did not have his hymns rendered into Italian verse, so that they might be understood by the people, until he needed them to help his teachings; his sympathy with human nature taught him the power of music in creating fervent devotion. Reading the _Fioretti_, one learns that, in spite of the severe rule he followed, Francis enjoyed his life; there must have been a singular power of fascination in the man, who could always, wherever he went, change sorrow into joy. He rejoiced in the beauty of nature, and went singing along the dusty way, between the olive-trees and the grape-laden vines, which then, as now, probably bordered the road on either hand; he rejoiced in every trial laid on him, as a fresh offering he could make to his God. Francis sang till the birds came fluttering round him to share his gladness, mingling their songs with his. At Bevagna, a place south of Spello, he preached his famous sermon to these winged disciples, and bade the swallows cease their disturbing twitter. He loved all dumb creatures, and strove to care for them, calling them his brothers and sisters; at Gubbio he tamed a wolf, till then the terror of the place. Once, meeting a peasant who had an armful of wild turtle-doves, he took them from the man, lest they should be killed or ill-treated, and, bringing them home to La Portioncula, he caused little nests to be made for the gentle birds, bade them live peacefully, and increase and multiply according to the will of God. As we drove along the lovely valley, filled now with golden light varied by purple shadow, its glorious background of hills in every delicate shade of blue, with spaces between, an opal gauze in the sunshine, and villages nestling beside the tree-shaded Tiber, we saw, hard by, the grey-peaked bridge, so ancient looking, that Francis may one time or another have gone singing across it; and we felt that such a mind could not have lived amid so much beauty without becoming interpenetrated by it. He is so entirely incorporated with Assisi and its surroundings, that one cannot describe the old town without now and again referring to the timeworn tale, so beautifully told by Monsieur Paul Sabatier. Our two hours' drive between vines and olive-trees backed by grand purple hills had been lovely. The grapes were almost ripe, pale gold in colour, thickly hanging from tender green garlands, which stretched from one tree to another and linked them together. In some fields long-horned oxen were ploughing the stiff lumpy land between the vines; here and there golden stalks of maize lay on the rich brown soil. The sun-touched summits of Subasio and his brethren looked like radiant clouds; the pure invigorating air was delightful. [Illustration: CONVENT AND CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCO.] As one nears Assisi, the two salient points in the view are, on the left, high up the mountain side, the great convent of San Francesco, with its double churches; on the right, at the foot of the ascent to the town, is seen the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The body of this church was built in the sixteenth century over the original chapel, the Portioncula, in which St. Francis and his disciples worshipped, and in which Santa Chiara and so many others took the vows of the Order, and devoted themselves to lead lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Huge Subasio had been in front of us all the way, but we could now distinguish clearly the long stretch of white houses clinging midway to the side of the mountain; and above the houses, the campaniles and spires of Assisi, while towering high over the road, supported by a double row of lofty arches, are the convent, and the two churches of San Francesco. In a picture it would be difficult to give an adequate idea of the approach to Assisi,--certainly word-painting cannot describe it. Probably the thrill caused by the associations and surroundings of the town intensifies the charm. The varied colour of the hills on either side of us had become more exquisite. Now we had in full view the scene described by Dante as the birthplace of San Francesco, for the town seems a part of the "Rich slope of mountain high, whence heat and cold Are wafted through Perugia's eastern gate, Upon that side where it doth break its steepness most, arose A sun upon the world"-- Cary's Translation of _Il Paradiso_. For miles round, this building of San Francesco makes a striking landmark, and as long as it stands it bears witness to the strange and beautiful story of the youth who gave up all that seemed to make life worth living, to save not only his own soul, but those of others. There was no tardy justice in the recognition given to his holy life, and the benefits worked by his discipline. In 1228, two years after his death, Francesco Bernardone was canonised by Pope Gregory IX.--the tried friend who knew the life as well as the work of El Poverello--as St. Francis of Assisi was called, and the building of the Lower Church was begun. Before the century ended this church and the upper one had become a great centre of art-workers; in a sense, we may look on Francis of Assisi as a source of inspiration to both Giotto and Dante; they were all three originators and purifiers. Dante's description in the _Paradiso_, or rather the story which he makes St. Thomas Aquinas relate concerning Saint Francis, shows that a lapse of centuries has not in any way altered the high esteem in which he was held less than a century after his death. Dante was born only thirty-nine years later; and as he certainly visited Assisi, he must have been well acquainted with all the details of the saint's history. It may have been in his exultation at the triumphs achieved by his friend Giotto's frescoes at Assisi that the poet writes, after mentioning Cimabue, "And now the cry is Giotto's." Our driver stopped at the foot of the hill, and told us we had better begin our pilgrimage at the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. We had, however, planned to begin the wonderful story at its first chapter, and to visit the saint's birthplace, also the scene of his final renunciation of the world. So we bade honest Checco drive us on to the Hotel Subasio beside the hill, where we dismissed our carriage, and looked at the room allotted to us. We then climbed the bit of ascent, and feasted our eyes on the outside of the churches of San Francesco. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE TOWN, ASSISI.] CHAPTER XI ASSISI--SAN FRANCESCO As we mounted the hill the great shrine had seemed to rise higher and higher above us; in the flaming sunshine the olives looked a pale silver against the deep blue sky. When at last we took the way to the monastery, we seemed to have reached a deserted town. Assisi was still and lifeless; the very inn was asleep. Flies and gnats, however, made us sharply feel that the heat gave them extra thirst, and that we were a boon in this absence of human life. [Illustration: STATUE OF ST. FRANCIS.] We had been told that the Lower Church of the monastery is best seen in morning light, so, instead of beginning our pilgrimage with the first chapter of the saint's story, in Chiesa Nuova, at the top of the town, we turned to the cloister of San Francesco, and passed along it to the terrace, on to which the beautiful porch opens. To-day this porch was full of exquisite effects of light and shadow; near it is Fra Filippo's massive and finely proportioned campanile. The name of the architect of the church is unknown; but it seems fairly attested that the campanile was built by Fra Filippo Campello, who later on became the architect of the church erected by the Assisans, on the site of San Giorgio, in honour of Santa Chiara, or Clara, the first female convert of St. Francis, the foundress of the "Poor Clares." [Illustration: THE TOWER, SAN FRANCESCO.] It is strange that the name of the great architect who designed this beautiful church and monastery should be doubtful, especially as San Francesco is said to be almost the first Gothic church built in Italy, and remains to this day one of the purest and most beautiful in style, free from that admixture of Renaissance work which robs so many Italian churches of the reverence and religious inspiration created by our English and so many French cathedrals. At San Francesco the very walls are sermons in stone; while, especially in the Lower Church, the rich beauty of colour calls out a perpetual hymn of praise. The offerings made by pilgrims from all parts of Italy at the tomb of Francis in San Giorgio had, in the space of two years, amounted to a sum large enough to defray the expense of building this Lower Church. We went in by the porch to the atrium; coming from the brilliant sunshine outside, all seemed so dim that we feared we should not make out the frescoes that cover, with mellow, delicious colour, the walls and low vaults of nave and side chapels. One seems to breathe colour in the atmosphere of this Lower Church; the very air is painted, as light comes in through the stained glass windows, most of which are worth a careful study. There are interesting tombs in this first part of the church, before one enters the nave; one of the tombs resembles in its arrangement Giovanni Pisano's beautiful monument to Pope Benedict XI. at San Domenico, Perugia, but the Assisan tomb is wholly inferior in execution. As we stood looking up the nave, we realised how truly this church embodies the life and work of Francis Bernardone; it is a house of prayer and praise. Its exquisite beauty, both of architecture and colour, inspires the joy so continually preached by Francis, in which he lived, despite his ascetic privations and self-denying labour for the good of souls. It is impossible to describe, or even to name, except generally, the numberless frescoes which enrich the walls and the vaultings of the transepts and chapels; the golden-starred, blue roof of the nave absorbs the light, but it adds to the mysterious beauty of the church. [Illustration: ENTRANCE DOOR TO LOWER CHURCH, ASSISI.] Perhaps the first thing that one admires on entering the nave is the richly-coloured cross-vaulting above the high altar, and that between the choir and transepts. There are four chapels on the right, and only two on the left side of the nave; between these two are the sacristies. There can be no doubt that in the original plan these chapels did not exist. The foundation of the church was laid in 1228; evidently the walls when completed were covered with frescoes by some very early painters, who failed to satisfy the taste of the Franciscans; for one can make out portions of old fresco work near the entrances to the chapels, the wall here having been removed when these additions were made to the original building. This took place before Cimabue and Giunta Pisano and then Giotto and his pupils came from Florence; followed by the Lorenzetti and Simone Martino, from Siena, to make the basilica the burnished jewel it is to-day. A harmony of blue and scarlet, of green and gold, fills one's sight as one looks onward to the high altar. We went up to the right transept; here is the famous Madonna of Cimabue. Above the arch of the chapel within the transept is a beautiful fresco by Giotto, of the Annunciation, part of a series by that painter of the Infant Life of our Lord, from the Annunciation to the Finding the Holy Child in the Temple; the figures in these frescoes all tell their own story, and are full of beauty and dignity. The Annunciation over the arch leading to the chapel is especially lovely. There is also another series of Giotto frescoes on the wall of this transept; in one a child is falling from a window; there are sweet faces among the women who kneel in front. St. Francis meets the child as its body is being taken to burial, and restores it to life. The other two frescoes also deal with restoration to life. Our guide said that one of the faces in these was a likeness of Giotto Bondone. In this Lower Church are many frescoes by Giotto's pupils, notably by Taddeo Gaddi and by Giottino, who have done very fine work on its walls. Within the chapel, beyond the Annunciation, is an interesting series of frescoes, which represent the story of St. Nicholas; these are said to be the work of Giotto's best pupil, name unknown, some of whose work is also in the Upper Church. The truth to nature in the conception, and the simplicity of this master's work, make the study of it most fascinating; its breadth of treatment gives it a peace and dignity which the solemn stiffness of Cimabue fails to inspire. Giotto must have been young when the Franciscans summoned him to adorn the walls of their basilica, for his work there is supposed to have been completed in the early years of the fourteenth century, and he was not born till 1265. It is well known how the great artist Cimabue, on his way from Vespignano, a village some miles north of Florence, found among the hills a shepherd lad of ten years old, named Giotto Bondone, sketching on a bit of stone, and how the great Florentine was, on close inspection of the sketch, so impressed by the truth to nature shown in the boy's likeness of one of his sheep, that he thenceforth adopted Giotto as his pupil, and took him to Florence, where for ten years the youth worked in Cimabue's atelier. It is strange that the painter should have so greatly admired the simple love for and the truthful rendering of nature which characterises his protégé's work, for Cimabue himself clung to the stiff drawing and unlovely ideals of Byzantine art, overlaid with gold and jewels. The most striking feature in Giotto's work is the life-likeness of his figures and faces and their surroundings; and the natural and simple way in which he portrays action. The faces are seldom as lovely as those of the Sienese painters in this church, but there is no exaggeration about Giotto. Ruskin says "his imagination was exhaustive without extravagance." At Assisi one seems to trace his progress from these early paintings in the right transept, to the very excellent series on the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church. Time has probably lent its mellowing help, but the rich yet soft harmony of colour is beyond the power of word-painting,--it takes complete possession of the gazer. The left-hand transept contains the chapel of San Giovanni. The Franciscans confided its adornment to Pietro Lorenzetti of Siena, who covered the walls with scenes from the Passion. The colour is rich and remarkable, but the design is frequently exaggerated. In the fresco of the Crucifixion, however, the figures beneath the cross are beautiful, especially those of the Madonna, of St. John the Evangelist, and St. Francis. Another very interesting chapel, also on left side of nave below the grille, which at great functions is closed, dividing the nave from the transept and the high altar, is that dedicated to St. Martin, filled with lovely frescoes by Simone Martini of Siena, representing the life and miracles of Martin of Tours. The faces and figures are delightful, so is the colour; the story of the saint is admirably told. There are also beautiful frescoes by Simone Martini, or Simone Memmi, as this Sienese painter is often called, between the entrances to the chapels of the Sacrament and that of St. Mary Magdalene. Many others by Giotto and his pupils are in the various chapels. When we had looked at some of these, we went back to the high altar, and, standing there, beneath that glorious vaulting overhead, we found it difficult to realise that we were actually on the place so filled with memories of the three great revivalists of purity, for in their respective generations Francis Bernardone, Dante, and Giotto strove to regenerate Italy. After a while, as one stands gazing at the great lunettes overhead, one can picture the two friends, Dante and Giotto, on the space now occupied by the high altar,--the imagination of the poet aiding the skill of the painter to perpetuate the teaching of the Spouse of Poverty. The tomb of St. Francis is in an open crypt below the high altar; this crypt is called by the Assisans the Third Church; the neighbouring peasants frequently attend the early mass celebrated here. Owing to the care with which Brother Elias, who succeeded Francis as Vicar-general of the Order, secreted the urn containing the remains of the saint, they were not discovered till the year 1818. A tradition had been circulated, and was firmly believed in, that a third very beautiful church had been built underground, and contained the body of the founder. This successor of Francis, Fra Elia, was doubtless proud and ambitious; his grasping worldliness and irreligion greatly injured the repute of the Franciscan community, but in this special case he acted wisely. Perugia had determined to possess herself of the precious body, which drew pilgrims from all parts of Europe to make offerings at its shrine; Elias knew this, and therefore, when the basilica was completed, and the saint's remains were removed from their tomb at San Giorgio to the new church, he buried them secretly, and surrounded them by a strongly cemented underground wall of masonry, which effectually baffled all attempts to discover them, though the Perugians made several attacks on Assisi for that sole purpose. In 1818 the Assisans made a more skilful and sustained excavation. At the end of two months, spent in piercing the rock on which the church is built, and the solid wall of masonry which seemed part of the rock itself, the urn was discovered. The excuse for Elias is that he considered the presence of the saint's body to be the honour and glory of the city of Assisi, to say nothing of the wealth accumulated by offerings at the shrine. Overhead is the culminating glory of the church, the frescoes on the four central lunettes of the vault, sometimes considered to be Giotto's finest work at Assisi. They represent, in allegory, the poverty, the obedience, and the chastity enjoined by the saint, and embodied by him in the rule of his Order. The fourth spandrel represents St. Francis in Glory. Probably the poet and the painter stood together on this very spot. Tradition says that Dante aided his friend in the conception of these grand designs. The marriage of Francis to the Lady Poverty seems to prefigure the lines in the _Paradiso_, for Giotto had finished his work at Assisi before those lines were written. In the next compartment, a monk, a nun, and a lay-brother of the Order are seen taking the vow of chastity; they are supposed to represent Bernard di Quintavalle, the wealthy noble who became the first disciple of St. Francis; Santa Chiara, who wears the robe of the Second Franciscan Order; the lay-brother, in a Florentine garb, is thought to be Dante. The Virtue, guarded by angels, looks out from a tower above. There are many other figures, mortals, angels, and demons, who indicate in various ways the constant struggle and mortification attendant on the Franciscan calling. Some of the angels with beautiful faces are busily engaged repelling the spirits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, who strive to tempt the neophyte, a naked youth who is being baptized by two angels in a font in middle distance. The good angels hurl the devils over the rocks into depths far below. The third fresco, Obedience, is also full of allegorical figures, and the Virtue wears the Franciscan robe. The fourth fresco shows St. Francis in Glory, surrounded by throngs of fair-haired angels, who sing hymns of perpetual praise. The truth to nature in these figures is remarkable, some of the faces are beautiful. One might fill many pages with detailed descriptions of the frescoes on the walls and vaulting of this gemlike church. It takes several days even to see them, and therefore it is wiser to spend some time in Assisi, so as to examine them in their best light. So wonderfully picturesque is every part of this Lower Church, that it is very difficult to give any idea of such a storehouse of early Italian art, for both Upper and Lower Churches seem to have been a rallying-ground for Giotto and his pupils, for the early Sienese masters, and for others following after Cimabue, Giunta Pisano, and the very early painters of Italy. Fra Antonio, the sacristan, was a most kind and intelligent guide: pointing out to us the portrait of Francis, attributed to Giunta da Pisano, he took us into the sacristy, and let us see strips of old embroidery mounted on frames. The faces in this embroidery were beautifully rendered, and the colour was delightful. The Fra told us that some English ladies from Perugia had so greatly admired the old lace in the vestiary that he felt sure we should also like to see it; among it was some very fine point de Venise, used to trim surplices. I forget how old he said it was; some of the vestments were exquisitely embroidered. [Illustration: THE SMALL CLOISTER, SAN FRANCESCO.] Then he opened a door, and we saw the quaintest little cloister, surrounded by the grey convent walls; the garden, in its grass-grown quadrangle, was seemingly left to itself. We spied out rosy cyclamen blossoms dotted among the grassed hollows of the rough ground, and our kind Fra, tucking up the skirts of his cassock, for at San Francesco the Franciscan habit is not worn, the conventual garb takes its place, stepped into the quad, and gathered a bunch of blossoms, which he presented to me, with tufts of maidenhair fern from the low wall of the cloistered garden. He asked my companions to come and dig up roots of both cyclamen and maidenhair. "The Signori may as well have them," he said, with a sigh, "as those who set no store by them." He was very kind, but we wondered what St. Francis would have thought about the change of costume and the comparative comfort of these guardians of his burial-place. We went back into the basilica, and up a staircase which led to the east end of the Upper Church, built some twenty-one years after the Lower one. It is a beautiful and graceful example of early Gothic. The Pope's chair, near which we entered, is in red marble; the high altar at that time was surrounded by a screen, mass being no longer said there. [Illustration: CLOISTER-GARDEN, SAN FRANCESCO.] Cimabue and other old painters have covered the walls in this part of the Upper Church with frescoes, many of them grand and impressive in design, though they have greatly suffered from so-called restoration by unskilful hands, while damp has damaged others. Some of the subjects are from the Old Testament, others from events in the life of our Lord; the general effect is, however, rich and harmonious. The long series taken from the life of St. Francis, along the lower part of the nave, is very interesting. There are twenty-eight subjects, chiefly painted by Giotto; the rest are said to be executed by that pupil of the Florentine master who painted the legend of St. Nicholas in the Lower Church. Giotto's fine series in this Upper Church portrays the saint's history, and contains, I believe, the best work executed by the artist in the basilica; it is much later in date than some of his other Franciscan frescoes. The painter is said to have taken as his guide Father Bonaventura's Life of St. Francis. As this writer was born during the lifetime of Francis, and was later on commissioned to write the saint's Life, his narrative may be considered reliable. The painting of the various scenes is masterly, and the detail in the interesting events here depicted, the architecture especially, is rendered in a very striking manner. These frescoes are so lifelike, that they stamp yet more strongly into the mind the impression created by a visit to Assisi, the truth of the wonderful conversion and subsequent life of Francesco Bernardone. One of the most striking incidents in this conversion is illustrated in the fourth fresco of the series, in which the saint is shown praying before the crucifix in San Damiano. Those who have read the beautiful _Vie de Saint François d'Assise_, by Monsieur Paul Sabatier, will understand the meaning of this fresco, though it has been so sadly injured by damp. For those who have not enjoyed this privilege a short sketch of the saint's life is here added. * * * * * Francis Bernardone was born at Assisi in 1182, his father being a rich merchant called Pietro Bernardone. His mother, Madonna Pica, is said to have been better born than her wealthy husband, who travelled, according to the custom of the time, from one city and castle to another, journeying sometimes as far as France, with his company, and the goods he had to sell. He does not seem to have taken Francis with him; he preferred that the youth should remain at home, and use his singular power of making friends among the wild and dissolute young nobles of Assisi. Now and again Pietro would ask for his son's help in his warehouse, but this was seldom. He wished the young fellow to distinguish himself among these prodigals, and therefore gave him liberal means, so that he might join in all their sports and amusements, in their banquets and night revelries. The whole world of this period seems to have abandoned itself to every form of sin and pleasure. There was no discipline, no self-restraint to be found; might meant right. Self was everywhere worshipped, especially among the nobles and the wealthy. Francis and his companions did not lack bravery. They joined the Assisan troops in resisting an attack made by the rival and far more powerful city of Perugia; the Assisans were defeated, and Francis, with some of his friends, was for months imprisoned in a Perugian dungeon. This gave him leisure for reflection. Soon after being liberated, he fell ill of a fever, and could not return to his former life. He had already begun to see it with new eyes, and during his slow recovery fell into a strange melancholy; rousing from this, he decided to lead a military life. He would, he told himself, perform daring feats of valour; so, when a very distinguished knight asked him to take service with the Pope's troops, then warring in Apulia, Francis eagerly accepted the proposal. The night before the two friends started, Francis dreamed that he saw his father's warehouse, usually stored with bales of silk, and gold and silver stuffs, filled with lances and military accoutrements both for men and horses. He awoke in great delight. He considered this dream a good omen for the success of his expedition, and rode joyfully next day to Spoleto. A version of this dream is given on fresco No. 2, by Giotto, in the Upper Church. At Spoleto his fever returned, and he heard a voice telling him he had completely mistaken the meaning of his dream, and that he must at once return to his father's house. Francis obeyed, but on his return his father and his fellow-citizens were disgusted by his apparent cowardice in turning back. Francis had always been charitable to the poor, flinging liberal largesses to them as he rode about the country, sumptuously dressed and with his horse richly caparisoned; he now awoke to the conviction that the poor and suffering were his fellow-creatures, and merited a more personal and tender treatment than he had bestowed on them. Hitherto he had so dearly loved his gay companions, that he grudged every moment spent away from them; he even hurried over meals with his father and mother, so that he might the more speedily rejoin his frivolous friends. Now, after his return from Spoleto, he often went to a grotto, in a wood near Assisi, and prayed there; he saw less and less of his companions, he even sold some of his rich clothing that he might have more to give to the poor. In his father's absence he would clear the table of all food left on it, and give it among his poor friends. He had always been extremely dainty and fastidious in his habits and tastes, and he especially shrank from contact with any of the numerous lepers who, since the return of the Crusaders, had become a plague along the high-roads of Europe. One day he met a leper, and, after giving him an alms, turned abruptly away; on reflection, this seemed to him cruel and uncharitable. Soon afterwards he paid a visit to the lazar-house, spoke kindly to the inmates, and gave each leper a special alms, kissing their hands as he did so. More than once, when he met a poor man and had not a coin with him, he would bestow an article of his own clothing on the beggar. His gay friends became greatly troubled at his changed behaviour. They dearly loved his sweet, fearless nature, and his winning charm of manner. They could not spare him from among them, for they looked on him as their leader. They reproached him with his absence, and implored him to return to them. Francis announced that he was going to give them a banquet, and did so; there was every possible luxury, the table was magnificently decked, and he was chosen lord of the feast. But though he was cheerful, he was quieter, less full of wild revelry than he had formerly been, and when they all left the feast, instead of leading his companions into the streets of Assisi, as he had formerly done, he lingered behind, till they had to retrace their steps so as to join him. They asked what ailed him;--was he thinking of marriage? He remained silent awhile, then he said: "You have guessed rightly: I intend to espouse that most beautiful of brides, the Lady Poverty. No longer will I waste my time and dissipate my substance on follies." They stared in unbelief, then they treated it as a jest, but when they found he was in earnest, they jeered at their idolised leader. When Pietro Bernardone learned that Francis had broken with his former associates, he became furious. Already greatly angered by the report of his son's visits to the lazar-house, and by other instances of the young fellow's charity, he could not pardon this public act of folly. So long as his son shared the pursuits of the dissolute nobles who had so greatly admired him, so long as he was to be found in their company, the arrogant, purse-proud merchant, keenly desirous to better, as he considered, his son's position in the world, had been lavish of his money to the spendthrift; though even in those wild days instances are recorded of the younger Bernardone's goodness to the poor and suffering. He therefore sent for Francis. "You are welcome," he said, "to spend my money as you please, even to the half of it, provided you spend it in the company of noble lords, so as to bring you, in return, praise and honour. I covet for you distinction, and you well know that it can only be gained from the world; not one soldo will I give you to bestow on vile lepers, or on churches and priests. You are idle, I hear; you spend all your time in praying." This tyranny greatly troubled Francis, though it seems to have helped his inward convictions by turning him more and more from the temptations to worldliness. From this time forth the young fellow's domestic life became a daily martyrdom, except when his father was absent for weeks together in pursuit of business. But on Pietro's return he always began to persecute his son. This, joined to the mental suffering endured by Francis in his struggle after truth, had greatly affected the young convert's health. Outside the Porta Nuova, in the midst of a wood, was the little ruined church of San Damiano, served by one poor priest, who dwelt in a miserable hermitage beside it. Francis had made acquaintance with this priest, who, on his side, was hospitable to the friendless youth, for not only his former companions, but the Assisan citizens sided with his father in condemning Francis's behaviour. Frequently the younger Bernardone would spend all night on his knees in the old church of San Damiano. He was one day kneeling here in prayer when he heard a voice calling him. He listened, and heard it distinctly bid him seek a closer walk with God; it told him henceforth to devote himself to the restoration of God's ruined houses in Umbria. At that time, owing partly to the continual warfare and brigandage under which the country groaned; also to the frequent visitations of the plague, which carried off so many monks who tended the stricken hospital patients, some religious houses were almost bereft of their inmates, very few monks were left to repair and keep in order the churches and chapels of Umbria, and many of these were therefore sadly dilapidated. Francis felt transported out of himself, his doubts and difficulties seemed to vanish before this direct call from heaven. In his religious fervour he resolved to quit his father's house, now a scene of daily persecution. He would in future devote himself to the building up of ruined shrines, and he would begin with the chapel of San Damiano. In a fresco by Giotto in the Upper Church, Francis is seen kneeling before the crucifix listening to the voice. The crucifix still exists, but it has been removed from San Damiano to Santa Chiara. A part of this fresco is almost obliterated by damp. Perhaps the most interesting fresco of the series is that in which Francis renounces the world before the bishop and the people of Assisi. After he had vowed at San Damiano to devote himself to the reparation of ruined churches and shrines, he remembered that he had no money wherewith to begin his labours. The remarkable gift he possessed, decision of character, now impelled him to put his resolve into instant action. He hastened back to Assisi, made into a bundle some rich stuffs, his own property (not, as has been said, goods belonging to his father), then, bent on speedily repairing the fabric of San Damiano, Francis rode off along the valley, to the thriving commercial town of Foligno, only a few miles away. In the market of Foligno he sold all he possessed, even the horse he rode, with its trappings, and joyfully returned on foot to San Damiano, with a bag full of money. The arrogance and avarice of Pietro Bernardone were known throughout the country-side, his quarrels, too, with his son's new ideas were by this time public property; so that, when Francis toiled joyfully up the hill to the chapel, and offered his bag of money to the priest, the good man refused to accept it, warning the young enthusiast that such a gift would greatly anger the rich merchant, his father. At this refusal Francis flung his purse into the window nook of the chapel, and, turning to the priest, begged him to feed and lodge him in his humble dwelling. Pietro was at home, and after a while became anxious at his son's continued absence; he went to look for him at San Damiano. Francis, however, guessing at his father's anger, had already found a safe hiding-place in the wood. When he heard Pietro's fierce reproaches, he trembled; he then termed himself a coward to prove thus unworthy of the call he had received. He resolved to go back to Assisi, and announce to his father his choice of a vocation. His long mental struggle, his nights spent in prayer and fasting, his weeks of severe discipline, had greatly changed his appearance; his clothing was soiled and torn, his face pale and emaciated. When he trudged into Assisi, the town children failed to recognise him, and, excited by the sight of this strange beggar, they surrounded him, crying out, "A madman, a madman!" throwing stones at him. The outcry called his father to his house door; he saw and recognised his son. The furious merchant seized Francis by the collar, dragged him into the house, which stood on the site of Chiesa Nuova, and, after a severe flogging, flung him into a cellar. Here the young ascetic was rigorously imprisoned till Pietro again left home for one of his business journeys. He had no sooner gone than Madonna Pica released and tried to comfort the son she so dearly loved. Francis soon bade her adieu, and returned to San Damiano. But when Pietro came home again, and found his son absent, it is said that he gave his wife a beating before he hurried off to the ruined chapel in the wood. This time Francis did not try to hide himself; but when his father, in a torrent of reproaches, told him he must quit the country, because he had brought such disgrace on his family, the young fellow respectfully answered: "Henceforth God is my only Father; I cannot obey any other." Pietro again broke into furious accusation. He had lavished a fortune on Francis, he said, and this was the return he got for it. For answer, his son pointed to the bag of money which still lay in the window nook. Bernardone eagerly seized it. He swore that he would appeal to the justice of the law to punish his son. He did appeal. Francis was cited to appear before the magistrate. He refused to obey the summons; he had put himself, he said, under the protection of the Church. When Bernardone heard of this answer he appealed to the Ecclesiastical Court; but the Bishop's answer to the angry father was a warning. He said that if Pietro really wished to punish his son for being good and pious, his only resource was to persuade Francis to give up all claim to his patrimony, or he could, if he chose, disinherit him. Francis was summoned to the Bishop's palace, on the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore. He found the place thronged by the excited citizens of Assisi. The Bishop, at that time well disposed towards the young fellow, advised him to end the quarrel with his father by renouncing all claim to his inheritance. When Francis heard this counsel, his face beamed with joy. He stripped off his clothing, rolled it into a bundle, and laid it and the few coins he still possessed at the feet of the Bishop. He then turned to the wonder-struck citizens of Assisi: "Mark all of you," he said, "I have given back my possessions to Pietro Bernardone; I once called him father, hereafter I address myself altogether to our Father which is in Heaven." Pietro pushed forward; he snatched up the money and the clothing. This drew a loud murmur from the Assisans, for the rich merchant's arrogance and avarice had alienated his fellow-townsmen; he had grown to be unpopular. The compassionate Bishop at once flung his own cloak over the youth's shivering shoulders; his charity drew forth a pitying chorus of approval. The people, who had hitherto despised Francis as a fool, saw him suddenly in a new light; they marvelled at this singular proof of self-abnegation. Thus the first-fruits of his mission were reaped from the impression created in many of these bystanders, who during the past two years had scornfully witnessed and mocked at his good deeds and his devout life. The reality of the scene represented in this fresco is marvellous; it at once tells its own story. The compassionate Bishop puts his cloak round the naked youth, who holds up his hands in the act of renunciation, while the stern-looking Pietro bustles forward to snatch at the money and clothing, and also apparently to strike a blow at his son, but is held back by a wealthy-looking fellow-citizen in an ermine-lined cloak and tippet. In another fresco Francis is preaching to the birds at Bevagna; in another we see the arid summit of La Vernia above the Casentino valley, where, in his later years, he is said to have received the Stigmata. Another fresco full of beauty and interest is called "The Mourning of the Nuns of San Damiano." It shows how, after the saint's death, his body was carried past the convent of San Damiano, on its way to sepulture at San Giorgio; the saintly Clara had been for some years Abbess of the little convent in the wood, and she and the Poor Clares, her Sisters, wept over the body of their beloved founder. These frescoes, and the thoughts they recall, are deeply interesting, and yet the Upper Church is not so delightful as the Lower one is,--at least, we did not find it so fascinating, although, in addition to the frescoes, the painted windows are full of beauty; there is rather too much light; one misses the rich mellowness of atmosphere which fills the Lower Church with a dim mystery of splendid colour, especially one misses the work of the Sienese painters. The way to La Vernia, judging by the fresco, must have been terribly rugged. The favourite resort of St. Francis, when he retired from the distractions of life at La Portioncula, to give himself more fully to prayer and contemplation, was Le Carceri; the cells are still to be seen in a ravine on the side of rugged Monte Subasio, some way north of San Damiano. Le Carceri is a series of caves in the solid rock, containing the monks' cells; it is backed by a wood, and has the hill torrent before it. The walk there from Assisi is full of beauty, and it is not a very long way from Piazza Nuova, leaving Assisi by Porta Cappucini. Here the saint had frequent talk with the birds in the woods near Le Carceri; the ilex tree is still shown on which the winged disciples perched while Saint Francis talked with them. [Illustration: OUTSIDE SAN FRANCESCO] It was at Le Carceri that he invited the nightingale to try which could sing longest to the praise and glory of God. Brother Leo declined to join in this trial, but the saint and the nightingale sang on through the night, till Francis, completely exhausted, had to yield victory to the bird. While we stood gazing at the frescoes, thinking of all these things, Fra Antonio said softly: "The Signora and the Signori have now seen all I can to-day show them." We longed to linger, but already the kind man had given us much of his time; he quaintly added, "It is, moreover, my dinner-hour." Then we took leave of the kind Fra, and said we would come again. We went out by the west door under the fine window, and rejoiced in the very lovely view before us. We wished our guide a good appetite, and he stood watching us as we went down one flight of the double range of steps leading from the Piazza of the Upper Church to the Lower one. We were tired when we came out into the sunshine, and we sat down in the shade opposite a fountain, at the foot of the steps. A girl came presently up the hill behind us, her bare feet white with dust. She carried on her red-kerchiefed head a tall copper pitcher with dinges which bespoke it the worse for wear; her skirt was short and dark, and the light blue bodice laced up behind showed a white undervest. In a minute she began to run fast, deftly balancing the tall pitcher. Then we saw behind her a long-legged lad, evidently bent on arriving first at the fountain. The two figures seemed to fly along the dusty road; the lad outran the girl, and, when she reached him, panting and choking with laughter, he had the courtesy to fill her pitcher for her, and helped her in raising it to her head. [Illustration: SAN FRANCESCO, THE UPPER CHURCH.] It is wonderful how these women can so surely support the loads they carry on their heads; the burden is sometimes a huge round basket, three feet across, full of grapes or heavy vegetables. We rarely saw a man thus burdened; he seems to content himself in Italy, as he does in France, with looking on and admiring, while the women do the work. CHAPTER XII ASSISI--IN THE TOWN Our little hotel, the Albergo Subasio, is close to San Francesco, and from its windows commands a most exquisite view of the valley and the richly-tinted hills. If time served, one could spend hours in enjoying the beauty of this landscape, so full of colour and of variety. We passed by San Francesco, and up the long, solemn street which it seems to guard. Grass grows freely between the stones that pave the street, which mounts very steeply; farther up were shops, but all were full of silence. No one seemed to be alive within the dark openings on either side, though from the wares displayed it was evident that inhabitants were not far off; doubtless all sound asleep at this time of day. At the top of the street on either side are tall old grey palaces; one of these, on the right, has a projecting roof, supported by long and beautifully-carved brackets. This is the Ospedale, with its curious door. On the left is the Palazzo Allemanni; over every door and window is the legend, _In Domino confido_. The blue mountains, each range paler and more exquisite in tint as it rose behind another, were seen through a glimmering veil of sparsely-planted olives, and seemingly ended the street we were mounting; but, going on, we presently came out on the Piazza di Minerva. Here is a fine, very ancient portico, supported by five columns of travertine, once the front of a temple to Minerva. Behind it is the more modern church of Santa Maria della Minerva. We were now on the site of old Roman Assisi, for the Forum lies below the Piazza, and one goes down steps to it. Formerly a flight of steps in front of the temple led to the Forum, and the effect must have been very fine; now the artificially raised ground of the Piazza takes away from the apparent height of the portico, which has no longer so lofty a position in the general view as of old. It seems a pity that the space round it is not clearer. Up a turning not far from the Temple of Minerva we came to the cathedral of Assisi, San Rufino, built by Giovanni da Gubbio in twelfth and early part of thirteenth century. It has an interesting brown façade and a picturesque campanile; its three fine doorways and rose windows are full of beauty, but the interior is comparatively modernised, although a triptych by Niccolo da Foligno is worth seeing. There are many frescoes and pictures in Assisi, by Matteo da Gualdo, Tiberio di Assisi, l'Ingegno, and one at least by that rarely found master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. There are some in the small church of San Paolo, near the Temple of Minerva, some in the Palazzo Pubblico, and elsewhere. Beyond the Piazza Grande is the house wherein Metastasio was born. But we found it difficult to detach our interest from Francis Bernardone, who is truly the moving spirit of Assisi, and, turning downwards to the right, we were soon in the little square of Chiesa Nuova. We knocked at the church door, and, after some delay, a very old monk, wearing the Franciscan habit, opened it. He only nodded or shook his head in answer to our questions. The interest attaching to Chiesa Nuova lies wholly in the fact that it stands on the site of the Bernardone house. The shop of El Poverello's father is still preserved in the Via Portici. The high altar in Chiesa Nuova is supposed to occupy the place of the saint's bedchamber; a side-chapel on the right is an unaltered room of the house, that in which his mother, Madonna Pica, dreamed her wonderful dream. The door is still standing at which, in her vision, the angel appeared to her, with the tidings that her expected child would be born in a stable; this is said to be a later invention of the Franciscans. There is a dark cave in the church, said to be part of the cellar in which his father imprisoned Francis to cure him of his so-called fanatical follies. It looked dismayingly dismal. He was probably flung in here on his return from San Damiano. The little Piazza before the church was not that which witnessed the young saint's renunciation of the world, and heard his memorable vow. That scene took place in front of the now decayed romanesque church of Santa Maria Maggiore, near the Bishop's palace. This was one of the churches partly restored by St. Francis, who rebuilt its eastern end. It was probably on the Piazza here that Francis flung down money and clothing, and, sheltered only by the Bishop's mantle, borrowed the serge garment of a rough countryman, and began his new life. Francis, when he left the Piazza, was free. He at once set to work to repair San Damiano, begging bricks and other needful materials from the more charitable of the citizens. He next restored another chapel in the neighbourhood; this completed, he fell to work on the wayside shrine to which his mother had often taken him as a child, the well-known chapel of the Little Portion of St. Mary, or, as it is to this day called, La Portioncula. It belonged to the Benedictine abbey on the heights of Subasio, whence a priest occasionally came down the mountain to celebrate mass for worshippers. Francis found much comfort in this service, and it was a delight to him to restore with his own hands the little building to a weather-proof condition. One day the Gospel read by the officiating priest greatly impressed Francis; it seemed to him that the life he was leading could not be altogether pleasing to God, because its aim was only the saving of his own soul: he ought surely to incite others to share the light he had received. From this time there began in him that intense hunger after souls which was, next to his love of God, the chief motive-power of his life. He had once been pre-eminent in folly, and by his vainglorious and prodigal example had led many souls to sin: he was bound, he decided, not only to submit himself joyfully to every trial, as a means sent to subdue his will and his self-pleasing nature, but he must try to prevail on others to follow the same discipline. His character seems to have developed with every fresh demand on his exertions, a development caused not so much by impulse, as by a humble feeling that he had not done nearly enough to prove his penitence. He walked to Assisi, and began to preach in its streets. He at once attracted listeners; disciples soon followed. The first of these was a wealthy noble, called in the _Fioretti_ and elsewhere in connection with Francis, Bernard di Quintavalle. This nobleman, also called in the _Fioretti_, "Bernard of Assisi, who was of the noblest and richest and wisest in the city," wisely began to take heed unto St. Francis,--how exceeding strong must be his contempt of the world, how great his patience in the midst of wrongs, because albeit abominated and despised for two whole years by everyone, he seemed yet more patient; Bernard began to think and to say to himself, "This could not be, unless the Brother has the fulness of God's grace." He invited the preacher that evening to sup and lodge with him, and St. Francis consented thereto.... Thereat Bernard set it in his heart to watch his sanctity, wherefore he let make ready for him a bed in his own proper chamber, in the which, at night-time, ever a lamp did burn. And St. Francis, for to hide his sanctity, when he was come into the chamber, incontinent did throw himself upon the bed, and made as though he slept; and likewise Bernard, after some short space, did lie him down, and fell to snoring loudly.... St. Francis, thinking truly that Bernard slept, rose up from his bed, and set himself to pray ... "My God, my God" at intervals through the night. When morning came, Bernard professed himself ready to become a follower of the new teaching. Francis, though overjoyed in his heart, told his convert that this was a task so great and difficult that it behoved them to seek for Divine guidance in the matter. He proposed that they should go together to the Bishop's house, and find there a good priest he knew; and, after mass had been said for them, that the priest, at the request of Francis, should open the missal thrice and read each time the words at which it opened. At the first opening the words were, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast," etc. At the second opening the words were, "Take nothing for your journey," etc. At the third, "If any one will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me." Bernard at once obeyed Christ's words: he sold all his possessions, distributed his money among the poor and suffering, and went to live with El Poverello, as Francis was called, in a small hut not far from the lazar-house. The house of Bernard still stands, also the room in which the friends talked; it is now called Palazzo Sbaraglini, and is in the same street as the home of Clara Scifi. The next convert who came to seek Francis in the hut, to ask leave to share his labours in tending the lepers, was the learned Pietro di Cataneo, a canon of the cathedral of San Rufino. The third was Fra or Fratello Egidio, called in English "Brother Giles," a poor labourer, who proved to be one of the most remarkable of the group termed by Francis his "Knights of the Round Table." Egidio seems to have been willing as well as able to set his hand to any work he was asked to do. Besides helping to tend the lepers, these men begged their daily bread in the streets of Assisi, and Francis preached constantly, sometimes in several adjacent villages the same day, so fervently that crowds flocked to listen. The number of penitents soon increased, and, seeing this, Bishop Guido of Assisi, at first so kind, grew jealous of the new power of the penitent brothers. He advised Francis to join either the Dominican community, or the Benedictines, a branch of whom had already established themselves on the heights of Subasio. "Your present life," the Bishop said, "is impracticable." Francis answered that, "as the Bishop knows, money is at the root of all quarrels, therefore I and my brother penitents, wishing to live in peace, prefer to be without it." As time went on the number of penitents increased. Francis was perplexed how to dispose of them; he felt also that if he could gain the Papal sanction the power of his mission would be strengthened. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Rome, in order to ask Pope Innocent the Third to consider his Rule, and to give it his approval. Eleven of the brothers went with him cheerfully to the Imperial City, singing hymns of praise as they walked. They were received very coldly: it was considered that such a dusty, travel-soiled handful of men, with so small and insignificant a leader, could not have the capacity to found a new Order, and that its Rule of Poverty, Obedience, and Chastity was unseemly and preposterous. But when at length Francis was admitted to the Pope's presence, Innocent saw in the face of his suppliant something that pleaded too powerfully to be resisted, and, after a little more delay, against the advice of his worldly, pleasure-loving cardinals, he gave his sanction to the objectionable Rule, and named the new community, The Order of Brothers Minor. They quitted Rome as soon as they could; they seem to have suffered much privation on their homeward journey, so that they were glad, as they approached Assisi, to find and take refuge in a small, empty dwelling at Rivo Torto, near the leper-house. They established themselves here, but their number increased so rapidly that they soon outgrew their quarters, and were shown that they were unwelcome guests. When he found that he and his followers could no longer live by themselves at Rivo Torto, Francis went to Guido, the Bishop of Assisi, and begged to be allowed the use of an oratory, or of any chapel, in which he and his brethren could say the Hours of Prayer. He was told that no such building could be allotted him; and, almost weeping with earnestness and baffled hope, Francis climbed the side of Subasio till he reached, near the top, the abbey of the Benedictines. As this side of the great hill belonged to the Abbot, the kindly man, who seems to have fully sympathised with Francis, granted him the chapel of "the Little Portion of St. Mary," to have and to hold for his own. At once the overjoyed Francis and his disciples, as has been said, set to work and built themselves huts to dwell in, near their place of worship. Next to the rapidity with which the new Order made its way, its most remarkable feature was its social aspect. In those days, when the haughty nobles and the still more haughty Church dignitaries seem to have ignored the existence of the peasantry, we find in the Franciscan brotherhood, from its beginning, a complete union of all classes. Its first four members were a canon, a nobleman, a rich merchant's son, and a labourer. The Palazzo Scifi, in which the future Santa Chiara (the first member of the Second Order founded by St. Francis) was born, is only a very short distance from the church, afterwards built on the site of the old San Giorgio, and called, in memory of the Abbess of the Poor Clares, Santa Chiara. On his return from Rome, when it became public talk that he had received tonsure, with the Pope's sanction to his Rule for the Order of Brothers Minor,--Frati Minori, as they were called,--Francis found himself in much higher favour with the Assisans. Instead of the street preaching he and his Brothers had daily practised, he was offered the pulpit of San Giorgio; but that church was found too small for the multitudes who flocked to hear El Poverello, he was therefore invited to preach in the cathedral of San Rufino. This was considered a great honour, and it fixed public attention on the founder of the new brotherhood. It was in San Rufino that this beautiful young girl, named Clara Scifi, daughter of the powerful Count Favorini Scifi, as despotic as he was powerful, heard the new preacher. Listening with rapt attention to these new doctrines of Poverty, Obedience, and Chastity for the love and glory of God, and in imitation of his life, the girl contrasted this teaching with the life lived around her. This new way, the way of the Cross, opened out to her a new revelation. At that time, her father, a cruel and violent despot, had just laid his commands on her, his elder daughter, to wed a young noble of Assisi. While the girl listened to the saintly preacher, her heart and mind were deeply stirred; she determined to ask the Poverello's advice in her trouble. How could she follow out the purpose that had formed in her heart, that of leading the life he pictured, if she wedded the husband destined for her by her father. Her mother, the Lady Ortolana del Fiume, a daughter of the Fiumi, those hated enemies of the Baglioni of Perugia, and rivals of the Nepi of Assisi, was a devout and good woman. But Clara shrank from consulting her on this subject, lest she might breed discord between her parents; she therefore opened her heart to her aunt, Bianca Guelfucci, who seems fully to have sympathised with her niece's perplexity. Francis was sorely troubled when the trembling girl sought him out at the Portioncula, and begged him to advise her. He said she must not act rashly, she must prove the reality of her vocation before he could counsel her to take the veil, and thus withdraw herself from her parents' guardianship. He bade her wrap herself in a sackcloth robe, with a hood drawn over her head so as to conceal her face, and thus, clad like a mendicant, beg her bread from door to door through the town of Assisi. Clara did this secretly; but it only added to the fervent strength of her vocation, and finally Francis consented to her wish. On the night of Palm Sunday the girl quitted the Scifi Palace, and, accompanied by her aunt Bianca Guelfucci and a waiting-maid, went rapidly out by the Porta Nuova, and across the starlit plain. As they drew near the little brown chapel, surrounded by a thick wood, they heard the Brothers of the Poor chanting a Psalm, and, waiting till this had ceased, the trembling Clara knocked on the door and asked leave to enter. Francis bade her come in, and he questioned her a little, then bade her kneel; she obeyed, and took the vows he prescribed, after which he cut off all her golden hair and laid it as an offering on the altar. When her companion had wrapped her in the veil and sackcloth garment of the Order, El Poverello led her and her aunt, through the dark night, to the way they had to follow to reach the convent of the nuns of San Paolo, about an hour's distance from Assisi. He told her that she would there be safe from persecution. This Second Order of Franciscans was called, when Clara had established herself at San Damiano, the Sisterhood of "the Poor Clares." Her sister Agnes soon joined Clara, provoking the stormy displeasure of her father and her uncle, who was savagely cruel in his treatment of this young girl. The church of Santa Chiara was built after Clara's death by Fra Campello, in red and cream-coloured marble. It has a graceful campanile, and the flying buttresses are very remarkable; they spring completely across the pathway beside the church. The building was begun in the year after Santa Clara's death, but the nuns remained at San Damiano for fifteen years longer; then the body of their foundress was removed to Santa Chiara, and they took up their abode in the convent adjoining the church. There are interesting pictures in this fine building, especially in the chapel of San Giorgio, and by this date the chapel probably contains the famous and very ancient crucifix brought here from San Damiano, before which Francis was kneeling when he heard the voice bidding him rebuild the ruined houses of God. This crucifix was, I think, when we saw it, in the convent of Santa Chiara, but we heard that it would be placed by the altar of the chapel. Santa Chiara was built on the site of the old church, San Giorgio, the first burial-place of Francis, but it is not clear how much of the original edifice was spared by Fra Campello when he designed the new building; there is much mention of the older church in the _Life of Francis Bernardone_. Clara was buried in the chapel of San Giorgio, but her tomb there was not discovered till 1850. There was great rejoicing in the town at this discovery; her remains were carried through Assisi with much splendour of ceremonial, and were followed by an immense procession. The coffin was reburied in a crypt made to receive it in front of the high altar, reached by a double flight of steps. The public are permitted to go down to view the body of the saint in a glass case; candles are ever burning before it. We did not, however, visit the crypt, and our gentle-faced conductress seemed surprised by our lack of devotion. When we set out to visit San Damiano, and again passed by the church of Santa Chiara, we noticed the contrast of colour between the rose-tinted church and the brown convent walls. We followed the road till it reached a gate on the brow of the hill. Here is a lovely view over rugged hill and fertile valley, wilder and more picturesque than any we saw from Perugia. A breeze had sprung up; now and again a light purple cloud-shadow varied the rosy tint of Subasio, already darkened in places by ravines that gaped in his rugged side, while the glint of a mountain rill showed here and there like a stray gem on the grassy tufts that helped to mark its course. Leaving the gate, we went down the steep descent on the right, between silvery veils, the deep valleys being clothed with olive-groves; their pale leaves gleamed in the sunshine against bright green berries, and ancient trunks so gnarled and shrunken that we wondered at the abundant crop of fruit overhead. Huge brown patches glowed like velvet on these grey trunks; and through the silver veil we saw ranges of hills in varied shades of blue, a more delicate tint indicating the valleys that lay between them. There was not anywhere a hope of shade, unless we climbed the bank and walked on the rough ground under the olive-trees, but these did not grow closely enough to give shelter worth having, and the road under foot being fairly smooth, we trudged downhill in the sunshine. The way proved longer than we expected. At last, concealed among trees, we found San Damiano. We rang a bell beside the entrance; after a long pause, our summons was answered by a beautiful young Franciscan, who showed us about very courteously. He first took us into the quaint little chapel, and pointed out an ancient crucifix; he told us how an angel had come during the night, and had carved the unfinished head of the figure. He showed us on the right of the entrance the hole below the window into which St. Francis flung the money gained at Foligno by the sale of his possessions; also, he showed the little cracked bell with which Santa Chiara summoned her Sisters to prayer. It is interesting to learn that, though she ran away from her father's house at night to adopt a religious life, Clara's mother, the Lady Ortolana, after Count Scifi's death, was received into the Second Order, and joined the community under her daughter's rule, then called the Poor Ladies of San Damiano. Behind the little chapel is the choir of the nuns, left just as it was when Santa Chiara died. The refectory on the other side of the cloisters is also unaltered, and above it is the dormitory of the nuns; at the end is Clara's cell. Every step makes the poetic history more real. There is still the little garden in which this sweet, brave woman took daily exercise, and tended the flowers she so dearly loved. When we came out we found the artist of our party sketching. Beside him was a small boy about seven years old, a curiosity as to clothing. He had on part of some ragged knee-breeches, the remains of a shirt, and a portion of a straw hat; he seemed a bright, intelligent little fellow. He was very much interested in the sketch, and delighted to be talked to in his own language. Between his praises he held out a grimy little hand, in a saucy, smiling way. Said the artist, "How much would you like, my man,--would a hundred lire suit you?" The urchin grinned all over. "Si, Signore, I should much like a hundred lire, but I would take less!" We went back up the olive-bordered hills to the pleasant little inn, which seems to hang over the lovely valley behind the house. Just before reaching Hotel Subasio there is a picturesque view looking upwards, the great convent and churches of San Francesco towering above us. Even apart from the touching interest with which the story of St. Francis invests the little town, Assisi is delightful, so many churches and religious houses exist there, full of picturesque charm is the exquisite setting of landscape beyond and around them. Wherever one looks between the old grey houses, one sees the valley full of rich colour, and the far-off, softened outlines of the hills. The town on market-days is very bright and cheerful. It is a steep climb up to the old grey castle, the Rocca di Assisi; it sits there crowning the hill like a falcon in its eyrie, the little town beneath its feet; and what a wonderful prospect it dominates! To the west is Perugia, on its group of hills; eastward glistens many another town, sometimes sheltered in a hollow of the hills, sometimes standing out as Foligno does on the plain beyond. Behind the castle there is the wildest of ravines; Monte Subasio is full of strange nooks and glens, of which the most interesting is that of Le Carceri, the group of cells built in the mountain caves by Francis and his brethren. He retired here for prayer and penance when he found his life at the Portioncula distracting. Close by is the little mountain stream of the Tescio, and the ilex-wood in which Francis held discourse with the nightingale. In thinking and writing about St. Francis, one forgets the history of Assisi. Till the Roman invasion of Umbria, this history seems chiefly traditional. Dardanus is said to have built Assisi before he built Troy; in consequence of a dream that came to him while he lay sleeping on the slope of Subasio, he founded the famous Temple of Minerva, and the city grew up round it. Goethe greatly displeased the Assisans by journeying to their city only to see this temple; he passed by San Francesco without so much as entering the church. The number of subterranean passages leading to the Rocca from all parts of the town seems to prove that the little city greatly needed shelter from surrounding foes. From the time that the Etruscans possessed themselves of a large part of Umbria, and built the city of Perugia, Assisi was constantly persecuted by this powerful neighbour, till the Romans overspread the country, conquering the Etruscans, and the grim, hitherto unconquered city of Perugia, burning most of it to the ground. In the Middle Ages, Assisi had frequently to submit to the despotism of great leaders of Condottieri and others who bore rule in Perugia,--Galeazzo Visconti, Biordo Michelotti, Forte Braccio of Montone, Nicola Piccinino, Sforza, and others. Before these, however, Charlemagne is said to have taken the city and utterly destroyed it. After its destruction, the citizens built walls around their new town, they also built the castle on the hilltop. This was at one time occupied by Frederick Barbarossa, and then by Conrad of Suabia and other despots. The two noble houses of the Fiumi and the Nepi, one being Guelph and the other Ghibelline, though less bloodthirsty than the Baglioni and the Oddi of Perugia, seem to have been constantly at strife till the advent of St. Francis, who prevailed on them to live more peaceably. Later on there was again terrible strife and carnage in Assisi, and when his lordship the Magnifico Gianpaolo Baglione took upon himself to settle matters, famine and misery almost destroyed the inhabitants of the brave little city. Miss Lina Duff Gordon, in the chapter called "War and Strife" of her charming _Story of Assisi_, gives a vivid account of this siege. CHAPTER XIII ASSISI--SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI It is better, perhaps, after visiting Chiesa Nuova, to go next to St. Mary of the Angels at the foot of the hill, instead of visiting San Francesco, the saint's memorial church; for at the Portioncula, within the walls of Santa Maria, Francis lived and worked and died. Most of the Brothers whose names have come down to us were received into the Order within the walls of the little chapel. The vast baldness of Santa Maria's nave, rebuilt less than a hundred years ago, in consequence of the damage caused by an earthquake, was very uninteresting, but at the east end is the brown Portioncula, the home of Francis and of his first followers; for the little chapel remained uninjured when the earthquake shattered the walls of the outer church. The dark walls of the Portioncula are covered with votive offerings, and over the entrance is a fresco by Overbeck. Looking within, it is difficult to imagine how the events recorded in the _Fioretti_ could have found room to happen in the tiny place. On the right is a chapel, the site of the cell of St. Francis; his portrait is over the altar, and there are frescoes of his companions. Our guide, a Franciscan, looked as if he had come direct from the thirteenth century, but he had not brought thence the warm, loving glow that must have radiated from the founder of his Order. The great interest of the place is its story. The Portioncula was a well-known shrine, and had existed for years before Francis restored it from its ruinous condition. It has been told how, when he was a child, the saint was often taken by his mother to the little chapel, and prayed there beside her. Two years after he renounced his home and his father, Francis was kneeling here in prayer when he received his second inspiration. According to his biographers, he hastily rose, and, taking up a bit of cord near at hand, tied it round his waist, as the outward badge of the Order of Poor Brethren. Our guide's scanty hair stood erect, and his red-veined blue eyes stared at us, as the Gorgons did in the Etruscan tomb. At first he would scarcely speak. He may have thought heretics would not appreciate his information. When we came to the little rose-garden outside the Chapel of the Roses, and talked to him about flowers, he thawed; he told us how an unbelieving English traveller had begged a rose-tree, so that he might try it in English soil, and how next year the Englishman had written to say that the rose-tree was covered with thorns; whereas at Santa Maria degli Angeli, these roses, brought here from St. Benedict's monastery near Subiaco, have been thornless ever since the day when St. Francis carried the original bushes from the Benedictine garden at Il Sacro Speco, and planted them here. Our guide said we ought to pay our next visit when the roses were in blossom, "a sight to be met with in no other place." He took us into a chapel, where, under the altar, is the den into which the saint retired for penance--a most wretched hole; then we went into the sacristy, to see a Perugino. In another little chapel is the portrait of El Poverello, a very remarkable face, painted on a plank which once formed part of the saint's bed. There is a terra-cotta statue of him by Andrea della Robbia. We went back to the church, and looked again at the Portioncula. In it Clara, or Chiara, took the vows, and here her beautiful hair was shorn from her head by St. Francis. Other memories of Santa Chiara cling about this church of Santa Maria. Perhaps the Third, or universal, Order was here determined on. The space outside has never been built on, because it was here that the memorable meeting took place between Clara and St. Francis, in answer to her repeated petitions that they might eat bread together. The meeting is very quaintly described in _I Fioretti_. Clara had often asked for this privilege; this time the Brothers seconded her request, and Francis granted it. He had, as soon as was possible, obtained for her the little church of San Damiano, and had built up little huts beside it for her and the poor ladies, who so soon joined her community. Clara passed the rest of her life among the Sisters, and died Abbess of the "Poor Clares" of San Damiano. The community of Brethren met on the open space twice yearly; the great chapter of the Order convened by St. Francis eleven years after its beginning, recorded in the _Fioretti_, took place on this vacant ground. The number of the brethren must have increased very rapidly, for several thousands came over the hills and along the valleys from far-off parts of Italy to look their founder in the face, and to receive his instructions and his blessing. Among others came San Dominic, with some of his followers, and the Bishop of Ostia, Cardinal Ugolino, afterwards Pope Gregory IX. The space occupied by Santa Maria must have been covered by the village of huts built by St. Francis and his Brothers. In an old map, these huts are shown built at regular distances on three sides of the Portioncula; among them is one larger than the rest, probably the Refectory or the Infirmary of the Brothers. Doubtless they lived here a happy family life, though Francis began early to send them out to found branches of the Order in other directions. The first sent away from the nest-like home was Bernard of Quintavalle, to Bologna; here he had to suffer insult and persecution, but he soon won many converts by his preaching, and established a community of Brothers Minor in that city, over which Francis appointed him guardian. This enterprise was repeated over and over again, with success, till, in his hunger after souls, several years later, El Poverello set forth with a couple of Brothers to Damietta to convert the Soldan, who is said to have permitted him to visit the Holy Sepulchre. His visit failed in its object, but it is spoken of by Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, as a fact. He was never tired of exhorting his brethren to live joyfully, so as to make others happy. Their cares and the sorrow for sin which would from time to time beset them, they should, he told them, pour out to God in their prayers; he also exhorted them to live always according to the Rule of the Order. The Popes seem to have troubled him by their persistent efforts to persuade him to alter the extreme simplicity of this Rule, and to assimilate his teaching with that of the other Orders. But St. Francis, always most humble and gentle in his denials, pleaded so earnestly and so sweetly for the original lines on which he had begun, that he succeeded in gaining his point both with Innocent the Third, and his successor Honorius. Even his dear friend Ugolino, the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, tried hard, when he succeeded to the Papacy as Pope Gregory the Ninth, to convince El Poverello that union with the Dominican Order would be a gain to the Church, but the saint's sweet humility at last conquered Ugolino. These discussions, however, which made needful journeys to and from Rome, involved much loss of time, as well as mental weariness, and wore out his decreasing strength. He was, after a time, constantly suffering, but always cheerful and uncomplaining. His greatest trial seems to have been the tendency he saw, especially in the more recent converts, to relax the strictness of the Rule in regard to Poverty; when he heard, during a journey which would take him past Bologna, that larger and more comfortable houses had been built for the Brethren there, he at once showed his displeasure by passing by the city without stopping to greet the Franciscans therein. He always returned with fresh joy to the Portioncula, and his life there with his dear sons; a hard life, supported by the work of their own hands. The gentle saint seems to have had plenty of dignity when called on to rebuke a wrongful act; we see this in his dealings with one of his early converts, Brother Juniper, that delightfully simple but most indiscreet of the Minor Brothers, yet of whom Francis said, after pondering on his simplicity and patience in the hour of trial: "Would to God that I had a whole forest of such Junipers." Indeed, on that day Brother Juniper was in sad disgrace with the other monks. He was visiting a sick Brother, and, being afire with the love of God, asked the sick man with much compassion, "Can I do thee any service?" Replied the sick man: "Much comfort would it give me if thou couldst get me a pig's trotter." Straightway cried Brother Juniper: "Leave that to me; you shall have one directly." So he went and took a knife from the kitchen, and in fervour of spirit ran through the wood in which certain pigs were feeding; he threw himself on one of them, cut off its foot and ran away. Returning to the house, he washed and dressed and cooked the foot; and when, with much diligence, he had prepared it, he brought the foot right lovingly to the sick man. And the sick man ate it up greedily, to the great comfort and delight of Brother Juniper, who with glee told his invalid how he had made assault upon the pig. Meanwhile the swineherd, who saw Brother Juniper cut off the foot, went and told all the story to his lord, who, when he was ware of it, came to the house of the Brothers, crying out that they were hypocrites and thieves and knaves. "Why have ye cut off my pig's foot?" he shouted. At the noise he made, St. Francis and the Brothers came out, and with all humility the saint made excuses, and promised to make reparation for the outrage. But for all that he was no whit appeased, but with much insult and threats went away from the Brothers, full of anger. And St. Francis bethought him, and said within his heart, "Can Brother Juniper in his indiscreet zeal have done this thing?" He called Juniper to him secretly, and said: "Didst thou cut off the foot of a pig in the wood?" Whereat Brother Juniper, not as if he had committed a crime, but as if he had done a deed of charity, answered cheerfully: "It is true, dear Father, I cut off that pig's foot. Touching the reason why, I went out of charity to visit a sick Brother." He then narrated the facts, and added, "I tell thee, Father, that, considering the comfort given by the said foot to our Brother, if I had cut off the feet of a hundred pigs as I did of one, in very sooth methinks God would have said, 'Well done.'" Whereat St. Francis said very severely, and with righteous zeal: "Brother Juniper, why hast thou caused so great a scandal? Not without reason doth this man complain of us; he is perhaps already noising it in the city. Wherefore I command thee, by thy obedience, that thou run after him till thou come up with him, and throw thyself on the ground, and confess thy fault, promising to make such satisfaction that he may have no cause to complain of us, for of a truth this has been too grievous an offence." Brother Juniper marvelled much at the words, being surprised that anyone should be angry at so charitable a deed. He answered: "Doubt not, Father, that I will straightway pacify him; why should he be so disquieted, seeing that this pig was rather God's than his, and that great charity hath been done thereby?" Francis was constantly journeying about, preaching in all the villages through which they passed, as well as in the castles which frowned down on them, founding new houses of the Order in and near the larger towns; he travelled great distances, and carried everywhere with him the element of joy, showing it forth in the lovely hymns which he and his Brothers carolled along the high-road to lighten the fatigue of their journeys. Reading the _Fioretti_, one feels intimately acquainted with several of the Brothers Minor,--with gentle Fra Leone, "the little sheep of God"; with Fra Rufino, styled by Francis "one of the three most holy souls in the world"; with Fra Masseo, who seems, in one recorded instance, to have affected incredulity in regard to the saint's humility. In those days the Portioncula and its village were surrounded by a wood, and St. Francis often said his prayers therein; one day as he came from them, he was met at the entrance of the wood by Fra Masseo of Marignano, a man of much sanctity, discretion, and grace, for the which cause St. Francis loved him much. Said Masseo, "Why to thee? Why to thee? Why to thee?" Quoth Francis, "What is thy meaning?" Brother Masseo answered: "I say, why doth all the world come straight to thee? and why do all men long to see thee, to hear thee, and obey thee? Thou art not a man comely to look at, thou hast not much learning, thou art not noble: whence is it, then, that to thee the whole world comes?" Hearing this, St. Francis, all overjoyed in spirit, lifting up his face to Heaven, stood for a great while wrapped in meditation. Anon returning to himself again, he knelt him down, and rendered thanks and praises unto God; and then with great fervour of spirit he turned him to Brother Masseo, and said: "Wilt thou know why to me? Wilt thou know why to me? Wilt thou know why to me the whole world doth run? This cometh unto me from the eyes of the most High God, which behold in every place the evil and the good: for those most holy eyes have seen among sinners none more vile, none more lacking, no worse sinner than I.... Therefore hath He chosen me to confound the nobleness and the strength and the greatness and the beauty and wisdom of the world, to the intent that men may know that all virtue and all goodness come from Him, and not from the creature, and that no man may glory in himself; but whoso will glory may glory in the Lord." He often told his Brothers they must never forsake the Portioncula, which he and they also so dearly loved. But his strength was almost spent, and when he was only forty-two, two years before his death, he appointed Brother Bernard vicar-general of the Order, so that he might give himself up more completely to meditation and prayer before the end came. He had founded a community near Rome, and appointed a good and discreet Guardian thereto; but this Brother seems to have had some difficulty in controlling the outbreaks of Brother Juniper, who had been sent to this Roman home. There came a time when all the other Brethren had to go out. Quoth the Guardian, "Brother Juniper, we are all going out; see to it that when we return you have cooked a little food for the refreshment of the Brothers." Replied Brother Juniper, "Right willingly; leave that to me." Said Brother Juniper to himself, "It is a pity that one Brother should always have to be in the kitchen, instead of saying prayers with the rest. Of a surety, now that I am left behind to cook, I will make ready so much food that all the Brothers will have enough for a fortnight, and the cook will have less to do." So he went with all diligence into the country, and begged several large cooking pots; he got also meat, fowls, eggs, vegetables, and firewood in plenty; then he put all the eatables in the pots to cook, to wit, the fowls with their feathers on, the eggs in their shells, and so with the rest. After a while the Brothers came back to the home, and one of them going to the kitchen, saw many great pots on an enormous fire; he sat him down and looked on with amazement, but said nothing, watching the care with which Brother Juniper did his cooking, and how he hurried from one pot to the other. Having watched it all with great delight, the Brother left the kitchen, and, finding the other Friars, said to them: "I have to tell you Brother Juniper is making a marriage feast." But the Brothers took his word as a jest. Presently Brother Juniper lifted the pots from the fire, and rang the dinner bell. The Brothers sat down to table, and he came into the refectory with his dishes, red-faced with his exertions. Quoth he, "Eat well, and then let us all go and pray: no one need think of the kitchen for a while; I have cooked enough food for a fortnight." And Brother Juniper set his stew on the table. But there is not a pig in the whole countryside that would have partaken of it. Then Juniper, seeing that the Brothers did not eat thereof, said: "These fowls are strengthening for the brain, and this stew is so good it will refresh the body." But while the Brothers were full of wonder at his simplicity, the Guardian was wroth with the waste of so much good food, and reproved him roughly. Then Brother Juniper threw himself on the ground and humbly confessed his fault, saying, "I am the worst of men." After this he went sorrowfully out of the refectory. The Guardian, touched by his humility, asked the Brethren to be kind to Juniper, who had, with good intentions, erred through ignorance. Such pity had Brother Juniper for the poor, that when he saw anyone ill-clad or naked he would at once take off his tunic, and the cowl of his cloak, and give it to the beggar. Wherefore the Guardian commanded him that he should give to no poor person his tunic or any part of his habit. Now it happened that a few days after, he met a poor man half-naked, who asked alms for the love of God. "I have nothing," quoth he, "I could give thee save my tunic, and my Superior hath enjoined me not to give it to anyone, but if thou take it off my back I will not say thee nay." He spoke not to the deaf, for straightway the poor man pulled his tunic off his back and went away with it. And when Brother Juniper returned to the house, and was asked what had become of his tunic, he answered-- "A poor man took it off my back and went away with it." His charity had become incessant. More than once our gentle saint had visited La Vernia, a bleak and rugged mountain some four thousand feet above the Casentino valley. On these occasions, his friend the Count Orlando Cattani of Chiusi, had caused a hut to be built for him near the hilltop. On this last visit, Francis felt a pressing need of solitude, so that he might more entirely give himself to prayer. He took with him the three men who are said to have written the charming sketch of him, called, in the French version of it, _La Légende des trois Compagnons_, Fra Leone, Fra Masseo, and Fra Angelo. When they had travelled for two days, Francis became so weak he could go no farther, so the Brothers found a peasant with an ass, and persuaded him to lend it to their teacher. In doing this they gave his name, Francis of Assisi. The peasant was greatly impressed, for, throughout Italy and beyond, this name was a name of power; some way up the mountain of La Vernia, or, as it is also called, Alvernia, the peasant leading the ass said to its rider: "I hear that you are Francis of Assisi; well, then, I will give you a bit of advice: Try to be as good as people say you are, and then they will not be deceived in you." For answer Francis scrambled down from the ass's back, and, kneeling before the amazed peasant, he thanked him with all his heart and soul for his counsel. There is a plateau at the hilltop surrounded by pines and huge beech-trees, but before reaching this the whole party was so exhausted by the long climb in the heat of August sunshine, that they sat down to rest beneath the spreading branches of an oak-tree. The birds, accustomed to live in solitude, came fluttering round them, and settled especially on the shoulders and head of St. Francis. When they reached the top, Francis bade his companions stay in their customary refuge while he went on by himself. He seems to have stayed alone, in a shelter contrived by the Brothers, for forty days, during which Fra Leone brought every night and morning some bread and water, which he left at the door of the refuge. A falcon used to tap at the door at dawn to awaken St. Francis. He is said to have received the vision of the Stigmata here on Michaelmas Day, and soon afterwards, leaving two of the Brothers in charge of the retreat on the mount, he took a touching leave of them, and of the place itself. He thanked the birds who had so lovingly welcomed his arrival, and especially Brother Falcon, as he termed it, for his daily summons. He then took his way, on horseback this time, with as little delay as possible, accompanied by his devoted Leo, till he reached the Portioncula, sorely exhausted and full of pain. Still he was bent on starting at once for the south, and seeking to win fresh souls for Christ. His strength rapidly decreased, and his sight had begun to fail him. He was advised to make a journey to Rieti, where Pope Honorius, being driven out of Rome, was then staying, The Pope had with him a famous doctor, who it was hoped might cure St. Francis. But he had not much faith in earthly remedies, and declined to go to Rieti; when, however, St. Clare and some of the Brethren pressed him to spend a little time of rest and refreshment at San Damiano, he was glad to go there. Though he was in constant suffering, he seems really to have enjoyed this visit. Saint Clare had caused a willow hut to be built for him in her garden, and though at night rats and mice tormented him, his joyousness and his poetic power returned with their early vigour; for it was during these weeks of peaceful outer life, though blind, and suffering from hæmorrhage of the lungs, that he composed his famous Canticle. It happened that one day, while seated at table in the refectory of San Damiano, before the meal began, Francis seemed all at once to be wrapped in a kind of ecstasy. When he roused from this, and became fully conscious, he exclaimed, "May God be praised!" He had just composed the Canticle of the Sun. "Altissimu, onnipotente, bon signore, tue so le laude, la gloria, e l'onore et onne benedictione. Ad te solo, altissimo, se konfano et nullu homo ene dignu te mentovare. Laudate sie, mi signore, cum tucte le tue creature specialmente messor lo frate sole, lo quale jorna, et illumini per lui; Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore; de te, altissimo, porta significatione. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora luna e le stelle, in celu l'ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle. Laudate si, mi signore, per frate vento et per aere et nubilo et sereno et onne tempo, per le quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento. Laudato si, mi signore, per sor acqua, la quale è multo utile et humele et pretiosa et casta. Laudato si, mi signore, per frate focu, per lo quale enallumini la nocte, ed ello é bello et jucundo et robustoso et forte. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra matre terra, la quale ne sustenta et governa et produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba. Laudato si, mi signore, per quilli ke perdonano per lo tuo amore et sostegno infirmitate et tribulatione, beati quilli ke sosterrano in pace, ka da te, altissimo, sirano incoronati. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo vivente po skappare; guai a quilli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali; beata quilli ke se trovarà ne, le tue sanctissime voluntali, ka la morte secunda nol farrà male. Laudate et benedicete mi signore, et rengratiate et serviteli cum grande humilitate." The following is the almost literal rendering by Matthew Arnold:-- "O most High, almighty, good Lord God, to Thee belong praise, glory, honour, and all blessing! Praised be my Lord God, with all His creatures; and specially our brother the Sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light; fair is he, and shining with a very great splendour: O Lord, he signifies to us Thee! Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, which He has set clear and lovely in heaven. Praised be our Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which Thou upholdest in life all creatures. Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and clean. Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom Thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright, and pleasant, and very mighty and strong. Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us, and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and grass. Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for His love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for Thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a crown! Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking in Thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto Him, and serve Him with great humility." He lingered many weeks at San Damiano, being greatly refreshed by the sweet peace he found there, and his gentle and sympathetic talks with his early convert, St. Clare, who seems to have been as capable and practical as she was good and holy. After a while she persuaded him to journey to Rieti, and take the advice of the doctors. At Rieti all those who had previously known him were greatly shocked by the change in his health. The doctors seem to have tormented him by their efforts to restore his sight, even branding his forehead with red-hot irons; Francis bore all with the utmost patience and sweetness, striving to conform himself to the pattern set by his Divine example. When he at last set forth to return home, he could go no farther than Assisi; Bishop Guido had sent him a pressing invitation to stay in his palace, while a strong guard was appointed to protect him on the way, the fame of his sanctity having made him so precious that it was feared an attempt might be made to capture his poor suffering body. His four most devoted followers nursed him through the weeks that followed, these were Leo, Angelo, Masseo, and Rufino. He remained some months at Assisi, and amid his worst sufferings poured out such hymns of joy and thankfulness, that Fra Elia, who doubtless was already coveting the power that would so soon be in his grasp, remonstrated with the dying saint. Sick persons, Elia said, were expected to edify others by their resigned and saintly demeanour, not by singing so loud that they could be heard outside the palace walls. Francis had often asked his companions to join in his songs; his own sweet voice had become feeble. He had more than ever need of joy, for with the best intentions one of his most saintly companions was troubling his peace by recounting the changes worked in the simplicity of the Rule which Francis so dearly cherished: how larger monasteries were erected for the increasing communities, instead of the small, roughly built houses which he had always prescribed as suited for the abodes of begging friars; friars vowed to possess nothing of their own. Francis listened, but he had already seen these changes: he bade the Brother have faith and trust in God, and never to forsake the Rule or the Portioncula. Soon after this he expressed a wish to return to the little shrine if he had power to make the journey, adding quaintly: "I cannot go so far afoot, my Brothers; you must be good enough to carry me." Half-way to the Portioncula he bade his bearers stop. Raising his hand, he gave his last blessing to the town of Assisi, which he could no longer see because of his blindness. Soon after his arrival he asked Fra Leo to summon by letter the Lady Jacoba dei Settesoli, a widow who lived in Rome, being the mother of two Roman senators. He knew her devotion to him, and to the Franciscan Orders, and he feared she would grieve if he did not bid her farewell. Just as the letter was finished, a trampling of horses was heard outside, and Madonna Jacoba appeared; she had felt anxious about her beloved teacher, and had set forth of her own accord to see him. She was only just in time; very soon afterwards, having dictated his testament and received the last rites, he passed away. All Italy mourned him, but the grief of the people of Assisi was indescribable. On the way to his burial place in San Giorgio the procession stopped outside San Damiano, so that Clare and her Sisters might come forth and take a last farewell of their revered Father. The death of St. Francis has been well told by Miss Lina Duff Gordon in _The Story of Assisi_. The more one studies the life of this gentle saint, who lived and worked for the love and glory of God; the devotion shown in his ardour to save souls; the practical help he gave to all; his complete abnegation of self, and the happiness which he showed to be the duty of every one, the more one wonders at the frequent persecution of Franciscans. They seem to be best off at La Vernia. When we at last drove away from Assisi, along the dusty roads, which, to those who read the _Fioretti_, are full of flower-like memories of the sweet-natured saint and his favourite companions, Fra Leone, Fra Egidio, Fra Masseo, and others, the sun was setting gloriously; Subasio glowed like a carbuncle as it reflected the gold and scarlet splendour opposite, and while this glow faded slowly into purple, the long line of the houses of Assisi blushed like a rose beside the mountain. We watched till the purple became a rich grey, painted with pale brown tints, while the sky just above the ridge of hills was palest green, changing into yellow above. Long lines of purple barred these delicate tints, and on the bluer, now cool, sky opposite lay rounded masses of white cloud with grey under-edges. It was dark before we drove up the steep road into Perugia, and reached our comfortable quarters in the Hotel Brufani. CHAPTER XIV ADDIO PERUGIA September had nearly fled, yet the leaves in the Tronto garden had hardly begun to change colour; the air, however, was now extremely cold as soon as the sun had departed. The wine-carts which daily thronged the streets warned us that the vintage would soon be over. Day after day, as we looked from our windows in early morning, we saw flocks of sheep with their attendant shepherds, and herds of goats coming down in great numbers from the mountains. They trooped past our windows, and took their way along the dusty road towards the Maremma. The poor, tired herdmen looked picturesque in ragged thin trousers and patched coats; they wore high-peaked hats, and had a sort of make-believe appearance as they trudged along on foot behind their beasts. Every now and then came a padrone mounted on a mule, sometimes on a horse, with quaint trappings; he always carried a long pole and a huge roll of green baize in front of him. We did not see any women or children, but we were told that the shepherds take their families along with them in these spring and autumn migrations, for they will go back to the hills as soon as winter is over. As we watched them we felt sadly that we too must soon say goodbye to Perugia. One of our last walks was to Monte Luce; and, coming back towards Perugia, we stopped and watched the sun set; as it sank behind the purple, bleak hills the sky above them was blood-red; higher up, stretched in long broad lines, was a mass of greenish slate-coloured clouds. On the right these were reft, and showed a sea of golden glory; while, still higher, clouds of paler grey sailed over a rosy veil that stretched itself across a sky of luminous green. As we went on, the blood-red tint paled and faded; the clouds above took a darker hue, and loomed, with storm-laden, broken edges, over the deep valley that lay between where we stood and the projecting bastion, a view crowned by the weird tower of San Domenico. This stood up in startling vividness against the almost appalling gloom that had so quickly gathered. Around us the view opened widely, the triple range of hills showed a sullen grey of differing tints; on some of them, where the light was lurid with a tawny tinge, it was plainly raining; yet, although thunder seemed imminent in the humid clouds that hung lower and lower over the valley, we were told that probably there would not be a storm at Perugia. Certainly, we had perfect atmosphere and perfect weather. The hill-city seemed to us in all ways very healthy--a place where winter and spring, summer and autumn, might alike be spent with charm and profit by those travellers who love the nature and art of Italy. CHAPTER XV LAKE THRASYMENE AND CORTONA The most interesting part of the journey to Cortona is the view of Lake Thrasymene, with its reedy shores and islands, near the picturesque little town of Passignano. [Illustration: OLIVE BRANCH.] As one leaves the station below Cortona, and mounts the hill to the grandly placed town, Thrasymene comes in sight again, and adds much to the beauty of the landscape. It is almost worth while to go to Cortona for the sake of the drive up from the station, and the exquisite view from the city walls, ponderous marvels of stone-work. But Cortona is not a desirable place to sleep in. The inn, when we stayed there, was not at all comfortable, and although the town is placed at such a height, the moss growing outside the houses tells how damp is the atmosphere. If Perugia had seemed ancient, Cortona appeared antediluvian. According to the old historians, Perugia sent soldiers to fight against Troy, but Cortona boasts of having given birth to Dardanus, the founder of Assisi. It was late afternoon when we reached the top of the hill, and when we took our way from the inn through the hilly, twisting streets to the Porta Colonia, the sun had already set, although the sky still glowed. Lake Thrasymene looked pale and weird against the olive landscape. Before us was a deep valley backed by a warm, purple mountain ridge; behind us was the stupendous Etruscan wall. We followed the course of this down the steep descent, for Cortona is built on the side of a rocky hill which yet towers above it. The blocks of travertine in the wall are even larger than those at Perugia. Nestling between them, we found a wealth of ferns; ceterach and several delicate aspleniums growing freely among these grim records of past ages. [Illustration: OLIVE-TREES, LAKE THRASYMENE.] Suddenly, while we were stooping to look closely at the ferns in the fading light, there came to us, as if from the clouds, a full-voiced chant; deep organ notes swelled above the sweet tones of treble voices. We looked up and saw that a convent is built above the walls. We stood for some time on this side of the hill listening to the aerial music. Behind us was the deep purple of the valley,--the vast plain below was changing into a brown olive, a wild, desolate-looking expanse; but there was overhead a peculiar clearness of atmosphere. The young moon hung high above the convent towers; its light helped us to find our way over the rough ground, till at last we reached one of the city gates, and went back through the dark streets to our inn. There was not a deserted or sleepy look about the place. People were gossiping and trafficking in the streets, and there were plenty of customers in the shop we went into. Our bedroom at the inn looked alarmingly dismal; large and lofty, it contained an enormous four-poster with a heavy, dark green canopy and curtains. Everything looked and smelt damp; but when we asked to have the bed aired, our host said, "Such a thing is impossible at this time of year." Next morning we found a busy market on the hilly Piazza. The town hall is here, and some women spreading out orange and scarlet handkerchiefs in the loggia above gave colour to the scene; but the people looked somewhat squalid and dirty after our bright Perugians; moreover, Cortona folk are indifferent and sometimes uncourteous to strangers. [Illustration: PALAZZO COMUNALE, CORTONA.] We turned into a side street to see a fine palazzo; then, crossing the market-place, went on to the Palazzo Pretoria. The walls of this building, both in the street and those round the inner quadrangle, are curiously decorated with small shields bearing the arms of ancient magistrates; they reminded us of the Bargello walls in Florence. We went upstairs, and were told that the custode of the museum was not in, but if we waited he would be sure to come soon. We had, however, to send more than one messenger in search of him before he appeared. There are many Etruscan and some Roman antiquities in this museum, but its chief treasure is the famous candelabrum. This holds sixteen lamps; between each lamp is a head of Bacchus, while eight satyrs and eight sirens, placed alternately, form a marvellously rich border. Within this circle is represented a fight with wild animals, then waves and fish, with a Medusa's head as centre. The colour of the candelabrum, an exquisite mingling of blue and bronze, is beautiful. Near it is a painting on stone--a female--said to be very ancient. [Illustration: BRONZE CANDELABRUM.] After the museum we went into the cathedral; the pictures painted by Luca Signorelli for his native town are here. Luca was born at Cortona, and was a pupil of Piero della Francesca. Near the choir is a beautifully carved marble tomb, in which the people believe the Consul Flaminius was buried after the battle of Thrasymene. We had not time to visit the baptistery opposite, which also contains pictures by Luca and by Fra Angelico. We were anxious to see the view from the church of Santa Margherita, above the town. Her statue stands just outside the cathedral; a little dog crouches at her feet. Margherita was not a native of Cortona; she lived for pleasure only; on her repentance she entered a Franciscan convent here, and passed a life of charity and holy penitence for her sins. Her conversion is said to have taken place on the sudden death of one of her lovers. As he left her house, accompanied by his little dog, he was assassinated. The little dog came back to Margherita's house, and by its cries attracted her notice; it then pulled at her gown, till it induced her to follow to where her lover lay dead. For this reason Santa Margherita is always represented with a little dog beside her. We went along the road past the platform, where there is a fine view over the Chiana valley, and turned in to old San Domenico to see the pictures. The campanile of this church is a picturesque feature of Cortona. We could only see two of the pictures, neither of them very remarkable. Another was being restored, the custode said. The walk from this point up to Santa Margherita was delightful. The sunshine was brilliant, and the air had a delicious touch of autumn crispness. The way beside the wall is steep, but there are constant views over the country, and gradually, as we mounted, Lake Thrasymene revealed itself in pale blue-green loveliness; a projecting hill, however, partly blocks the view, and only allows about half of the lake's grand expanse to be seen. The yellow turf was gay with wild flowers, some of them rare specimens. When we at last reached the church, we were rewarded for our climb. Santa Margherita was designed and probably built by Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, but it has been very much restored; the view from its platform is magnificent. In front is a screen of tall cypresses, between which the purple hills show exquisitely. The spacious church originally designed by Niccolo Pisano has been re-modelled, but there is a beautiful monument to Santa Margherita by Giovanni Pisano. Santa Margherita's tomb reminded us of Pope Benedict's at Perugia. The saint lies sleeping with her little dog at her feet; in a bas-relief she yields her soul to angels, who bear it to Heaven. The Fortezza behind the church is said to command a still finer view, but we were quite satisfied to sit on the flowery turf enjoying the surpassing loveliness below us. Hills and valleys, far-reaching plains, the still lake, and the sky overhead, seemed to vie with one another in beauty, yet to blend into such perfect harmony that the sensation of gazing was one of complete repose. Down a long, long flight of irregular steps we found our way to the quaint little church of St. Nicholas. While we sat gazing we had watched a woman go down these steps, so we felt sure they would lead us somewhere; they took us to the queerest little up-and-down village imaginable, a village of mendicants; every one begged of us, the children being very pertinacious. One bright-eyed monkey of a boy, with bare brown legs and feet, and a red cap stuck over one eye, followed us down the broken way, dancing and chattering as he came. All at once he stopped and pointed to three younger children, sitting in a mud pool outside a cottage door, even more ragged and dirty, but quite as bright-looking as he was. I asked him if he had a father or a mother, but he shook his head. "Oimè, Signora!--io son padre di famiglia," he said, with a merry laugh, and he pointed again to the black-eyed urchins. We joined in his laugh; his face and his tiny outstretched hand were irresistible. He shouted for joy when we dropped a coin into it; after this, at the end of every turning we passed, there was our bright-eyed, dirty little beggar, with outstretched brown hand and the sauciest of smiles. When we shook our heads at him he capered away, the soles of his slender brown feet almost as high as his head. The little church of San Nicola is hidden away among the houses, with a quaint little grassed cloister court in front of it, and a row of ancient cypresses. On one side is a little cloister walk; a vine-covered pergola supported itself by filling up the small space inclosed. In the church is an altar picture, painted on both sides, this is said to be one of the last works of Luca Signorelli. The fresco, said also to be his, has been much restored. This little church belonged to a confraternity, and the seats still remain along the sides of the front court in which the Brethren have sat in council, or from which they have enjoyed the view over the wall that borders this quiet cloister. * * * * * As we drove rapidly downhill to the station, we looked at the country through a silver veil, for the olive-trees are larger here than at Perugia, and they literally cover the first part of the steep descent,--so steep that the road has to descend by terraces zig-zagged along the side of the hill. We had told our red-haired, blue-eyed driver to take us to the Etruscan grotto, and he presently stopped at a rough break, with large stones placed so as to form irregular steps. The man was in fear lest the horse should run away, and was greatly excited. He went on chattering patois to that effect; but though I told him I was quite able to climb up by myself, he would stand at the top of the steps hauling me up with one hand and flourishing his whip with the other, as if he were performing a circus feat. We left him there, and presently entered a solemn grassed avenue of gigantic cypresses, their pale grey stems gleaming in the sunlight. This avenue slopes upward, and at the end the ruined grotto shows between the lines of tall dark trees; it is very curious, circular in form, with neatly finished compartments in it for the urns. These have all been taken away; only part of the circular top of the sepulchre remains, lying near the ruined stone; but even in its fractured state it is very impressive; alone on the hillside, screened from the immense prospect before it by a surrounding of olive-trees. As we drove down to the railway, far below us, it seemed to us it had been quite worth while to stay at Cortona for the sake of this wonderful drive down the steep hillside; but the town is probably safer from damp in August than we found it in October. INDEX Alunno, Niccolo, 75. Statue of, 81. Angelus, the, 136. Apennines, 7. Assisi, way to, 165. Albergo Subasio, 176. Carceri, le, 224. Chiara Scifi, or S. Clare, conversion of, 244. Churches-- S. Chiara, 249. S. Damiano, 214-216, 252, 283. S. Francesco, campanile, 180. Lower church, 179. Cloister garden, 201. Upper church, 202. S. Giorgio, 233. S. Maria degli Angeli, 172, 260. Rose garden, 262. S. Maria Maggiore, 234. Nuova, 233. S. Paolo, 233. Cathedral of S. Rufino, 232. Fra Egidio, 240. Elia, 194. Leone, 168. Masseo, 273. S. Francis, birth and parentage, 206; dream of, 208; visits lazar house, 210; breaks with his friends, 211; his father's anger, 213; goes to S. Damiano, 214; conversion of, 215; markets at Foligno, 215; renounces the world, 221; converts Bernard and others, 237; goes to Rome, 241; gains Pope's sanction to Order of Brothers Minor, 242; lives at Rivo Torto, 242; preaches in S. Rufino, 245; founds second Order the Poor Clares, 248; visits the Soldan, 266; his last visit to La Vernia, 280; vision of the Stigmata, 282; visits S. Chiara, 283; composes Canticle of the Sun, 284; visits Bishop Guido, 289; returns to the Portioncula, 291; Madonna Jacoba di Settesoli visits him, 291; he dies, 292. Brother Juniper, 268, 276, 279. Palazzo Sbaraglini, 239. Scifi, 244. Piazza S. Maria Maggiore, 221. Porta Cappucini, 224. Nuova, 214. La Portioncula, 235, 243, 247, 260, 265, 268. Rocca di Assisi, 255. Roman Assisi, 232. Temple of Minerva, 231. Tomb of S. Francis, 193. Baglione, Astorre, 48, 49, 52, 53. Atalanta, 47, 58, 59, 62. Gianpaolo, 56-58, 60, 61, 63, 65. Grifonetto, 50-53, 55, 59, 61, 62. Simonetto, 48. Baglioni, the, 45-47. Bergamo, Damiano and Stefano da, intarsia by, 126. S. Bernardino of Siena, 33, 37. Bevignate, Fra, 33. Bonfigli, Benedetto, 5, 73. Cacciolfo, 87. Cimabue, 190. Frescoes by, 202. Cortona, 299. Candelabrum, 307. Cathedral, 308. Church of S. Domenico, 310. S. Margherita, 310. S. Nicholas, 313. Etruscan grotto, 315. Palazzo Pretoria, 307. Dante's mention of Assisi and of S. Francis, 175. Ducci, Agostino, 105. Foligno, 81. Cathedral, 82. S. Maria infra Portas, 83. S. Niccolo, 83. Palazzo Deli, 83. Tribunale del Commune, 82. Forte Braccio, 39, 43, 44. Fra Angelico, 75, 112. Giotto, 188. Frescoes by, 188, 192, 195, 205. Guidalotti, Abbot of S. Pietro de' Casinensi, 42. Keys of Assisi and Siena, 34. Lorenzetti, Pietro, of Siena, 191. Lorenzo, Fiorenzo di, 73, 74, 233. S. Margherita, 309. Martini, or Memmi, Simone, of Siena, 192. Matarazzo, 46, 54, 64. Michelotti, Biordo, 42, 43. Montefalco, 83. Nelli, Ottaviano, frescoes by, 82. Perugia, 1. Belle arti Albergo, 10. Bellucci, Signor, 17. S. Bernardino of Siena, 111-118. Oratory of, 97, 105, 111. Betti, Signor, 15, 16. Brufani hotel, 10. Cappella del Cambio, 72. Charms, 17-20. Churches-- S. Agata, 101. S. Angelo, 158. S. Bernardino, 105. S. Domenico, 23. S. Ercolano, 14, 133. S. Lorenzo, 35. Madonna di Luce, 102. S. Maria Assunta, 134. S. Maria Nuova, 40. S. Pietro de' Casinensi, 119. S. Severo, 38. Corso, 32. Cupa, La, 138. Daybreak at, 11. El gran tradimento, 54-57. Etruscan wall, 15. Fontana Borghese, 79. Fonte Maggiore, 33. Griffin, 34. Market, 24. Monte Luce, 134. Mosaic pavement, 148. Palazzo Antinori, 151. Baglione, 14. Canonica, 33. del Capitano del Popolo, 27. Pubblico, or Comunale, 32, 34, 35. Passeggiata Pubblica, 119. Perugino, 4, 5, 73. House of, 101. Piazza del Duomo, 32, 35, 41. dei Gigli, 38. Grimani, 16. Monte Sole, 38. del Papa, 36. Sopra Mura, 24. Vittor Emanuele, 14. Pinacoteca, 69, 75. Pope Benedict XI., statue of, 24. Boniface, 123. Julius III., statue of, 36. Paul III., 13, 66. Porta Augusta, 151, 152. Buligaia, 156. Costanzo, 119, 129. Eburnea, 142. Marzia, 13, 15. S. Pietro, 129. S. Angelo, 158. Susanna, 13. Sala del Cambio, 69, 70. Tombs of the Volumnii, 130. Via Appia, 143. Women, 28, 29, 30. Piccinino, Nicola, 44. Piero della Francesca, 69, 73. Pinturicchio, 87-89. Pisano, Giovanni, 33, 34, 184. Pisano, Nicolo, 33. Ponte San Giovanni, 80. Sunsets, 128. Veduta, La, 119. Raffaelle, 3, 4. Rocca di Vicenza, 87. Rossi, 34. Sabatier, Monsieur Paul, 171, 206. Sanzio, Giovanni, 3. Savonarola, 37. Spello, 84. Amphitheatre, 91. Capuchin Convent, 91. Churches-- Santa Maria Maggiore, 87. Capella del Sacramento, 87. Frescoes in, 87. San Andrea, 89. Porta Augusta, 92. Porta Veneris of Hispellum, 84. Spoleto, 43, 200, 209. Subasio, Monte, 7, 80, 81. Tasso, Domenico del, intarsia by, 70. Thrasymene, Lake of, 300. Trevi, 87. Ugolino, Bishop of Ostia, 265. Vannucci, Cristoforo, 4. Vannucci, Pietro, 4, 70. La Vernia, 224. S. Vincent Ferrier, 113. Witches, belief, in, 20. Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED Edinburgh 
36817	----	Transcriber's note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. [Illustration: MARBLE RELIEF OF THE AMBARVALIA SACRIFICE, IN THE FORUM The sacrifice of the _suovetaurilia_ took place at the confines of Rome and Alba Longa after the perlustration of the Roman _ager_. See pages 15, 70.] ROME · PAINTED BY ALBERTO PISA · TEXT BY M. A. R. TUKER AND HOPE MALLESON PUBLISHED BY ADAM & CHARLES BLACK · SOHO SQUARE · LONDON · W. _Published April 1905_ The twelve chapters in this book were all written for the present volume, but Chapters III., V., VIII., part of XI., and IX. have already been published in the _Monthly Review_, _Broad Views_, _Macmillan's Magazine_, and the _Hibbert Journal_. So much has been written about Rome and Roman subjects within the last decade, good bad and indifferent, that the task of avoiding as far as possible hackneyed ground is not an easy one. We have attempted to present some aspects of Rome as we have ourselves seen it, and we have drawn on our long acquaintance with the city and above all with its inhabitants of the old school and the new. Each chapter is the work of one writer. ROME, 1905. Contents PAGE CHAPTER I ROME 1 CHAPTER II ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION 17 CHAPTER III THE ROMAN CATACOMBS 41 CHAPTER IV ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS 52 CHAPTER V THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA 69 CHAPTER VI THE ROMAN MÉNAGE 93 CHAPTER VII THE ROMAN PEOPLE-- I. The Italians 112 II. The Romans 125 CHAPTER VIII ROMAN PRINCELY FAMILIES 159 CHAPTER IX ROMAN RELIGION 180 CHAPTER X THE ROMAN CARDINAL 200 CHAPTER XI ROME BEFORE 1870 212 CHAPTER XII THE ROMAN QUESTION-- I. Before 1870 235 II. Since 1870 245 List of Illustrations 1. Marble relief of the Ambarvalia Sacrifice, in the Forum _Frontispiece_ TO FACE PAGE 2. The Forum from the Arch of Septimius Severus 4 3. The Forum, looking towards the Capitol 8 4. Temple of Saturn from the Basilica Julia in the Forum 12 5. S. Peter's and Castel Sant' Angelo from the Tiber 16 6. Temple of Saturn from the Portico of the Dii Consentes 18 7. A Corner of the Forum from the base of the Temple of Saturn 20 8. Temple of Mars Ultor 24 9. Temple of Vespasian from the Portico of the Dii Consentes 26 10. The Colosseum on a Spring Day 30 11. The Colosseum at Sunset 34 12. Arch of Titus 38 13. A Procession in the Catacomb of Callistus 42 14. Flavian Basilica on the Palatine 44 15. Library of the House of Domitian on the Palatine 50 16. Forum of Nerva 54 17. Fountain of Trevi 56 18. Column of Marcus Aurelius, Piazza Colonna 58 19. Pantheon, a flank view 62 20. Silversmiths' Arch in the Velabrum 64 21. Convent Garden of San Cosimato, Vicovaro 68 22. A Tract of the Claudian Aqueduct outside the City 72 23. Campagna Romana, from Tivoli 76 24. Subiaco from the Monastery of S. Benedict 78 25. Garden of the Monastery of Santa Scholastica, Subiaco 82 26. Holy Stairs at the Sagro Speco 86 27. Little Gleaner in the Campagna 90 28. Sea-horse Fountain in the Villa Borghese 94 29. Ornamental Water, Villa Borghese 98 30. Village Street at Anticoli, in the Sabine Hills 100 31. Villa d'Este, Tivoli 106 32. In Villa Borghese 110 33. The "Spanish Steps," Piazza di Spagna 114 34. At the Foot of the Spanish Steps, Piazza di Spagna, on a Wet Day 118 35. Roman Peasant carrying Copper Water Pot 122 36. Chapel of the Passion in the Church of San Clemente 126 37. A Rustic Dwelling in the Roman Campagna 128 38. Procession with the Host at Subiaco 130 39. Girl selling Birds in the Via del Campidoglio 134 40. Entrance to Ara Coeli from the Forum 138 41. In the Church of Ara Coeli 142 42. Doorway of the Monastery of S. Benedict (Sagro Speco) at Subiaco 146 43. Chapel of San Lorenzo Loricato at S. Benedict's, Subiaco 150 44. Steps of the Dominican Nuns' Church of SS. Domenico and Sisto 154 45. Porta San Paolo 158 46. The Colosseum in a Storm 162 47. Arch of Titus from the Arch of Constantine 166 48. Mediaeval House at Tivoli 170 49. Ilex Avenue and Fountain (_Fontana scura_) Villa Borghese 174 50. "House of Cola di Rienzo," by Ponte Rotto 178 51. San Clemente, Choir and Tribune of Upper Church 182 52. Santa Maria in Cosmedin 186 53. Chapel of San Zeno (called _orto del paradiso_) in S. Prassede 190 54. Cloisters of S. Paul's-without-the-Walls 192 55. Cloisters in Santa Scholastica, Subiaco 196 56. Santa Maria sopra Minerva 198 57. Saint Peter's 200 58. Interior of S. Peter's, the Bronze Statue of S. Peter 204 59. A Cardinal in Villa d'Este 208 60. Villa d'Este--Path of the Hundred Fountains 210 61. Theatre of Marcellus 212 62. Island of the Tiber--the Isola Sacra 216 63. The Steps of Ara Coeli 220 64. Steps of the Church of SS. Domenico and Sisto 224 65. Santa Maria Maggiore 230 66. Arch of Constantine 234 67. Castel and Ponte Sant' Angelo 238 68. Bronze Statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol 240 69. S. Peter's from the Pincian Gardens 244 70. From the Terrace of the House of Domitian 252 _The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved by the Hentschel Colourtype Process._ ROME CHAPTER I ROME About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became the Roman people. Where did they come from? Had they come across what was later to be known as the _ager romanus_ from the Latin stronghold of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In the confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see Latins in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter to a special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three tribes into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an Etruscan chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of her six kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the political institutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil. However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of Rome--the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of Troy bringing with him the _Palladium_, the sacred image of Pallas. His descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are cast adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the shepherd community already established there. In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine--the original _Roma Quadrata_--and we see that the nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the Italian shepherds' god, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This cave was just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia; here grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their foster-father. The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the arts of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the arts of the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the unity of purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the destinies of the known world. The story is aptly figured in the person of the god Mars, who was the reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman god was at first an agricultural divinity--the "spears of Mars" were the rods with which the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence of Greece, Mars became the god of battles, the boundary marker of the fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword to the plough. The one was never far from the other--they put him in possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never died out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of victory, when the relics of the _hastae martis_ were shown to the triumphant followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the Roman the image of the father of Romulus covering the land with gigantic strides to strike these same _hastae_ into the soil as a sign of possession, the emblem of primitive law. Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the one hill were the Latins--or let us call them the Roman people--the site of _Roma Quadrata_ the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces of the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the Sabine arx, that _Capitolium_ so-called, says Montfaucon, "because it was the head of the world, from which the consuls and senators governed the universe." Whenever the marshy ground between them was passable, the Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of their hills and transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these early days they felt the need of a _comitium_ where the rival chiefs could meet to decide upon terms; and in no long space this battle-ground became the nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome. For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of the common meeting ground--the common sentiments and needs--of human beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life--its common but its noblest business, civic, "civilised," pursuits. It is the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the common necessities to force upon him an ignoble peace. The battle-ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition that the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed to the interests for which men should co-operate. Through the symbolic _trait d'union_ of the Forum, two fortresses of barbarians became the nucleus of the city which ruled the world, and their people the imperial people of history. [Illustration: THE FORUM FROM THE ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS In the left corner is the _lapis niger_, the traditional tomb of Romulus. Facing us is the Arch of Titus, and to the right is the Palatine.] The city on the Palatine had been extended so as to include the town of the Sabines or Quirites on the neighbouring Quirinal hill, before the first king, who was born in the Sabine country, was called to rule the Romans. The Capitol at this time was a spur of the Quirinal, and so remained until Trajan dug away a part of the latter to lay the foundations of his forum. The Etruscans lived on the Caelian and the two horns of the Esquiline hills; the former was incorporated in the primitive city, but the Esquiline and Viminal were not enclosed until the time of Servius Tullius when Rome first became "the city on Seven Hills." The Aventine where Remus had wished to build the city was colonised by the conquered Latin towns in the reign of Ancus Martius, and this isolated hill, overlooking the Tiber on one side and the campagna on the other, still haunts the imagination with its melancholy beauty, its pariah history, as though it embodied the undying protest of Remus, an unceasing claim upon Roman justice. The varied and interesting Christian memories here, which begin with the _titulus_ of Priscilla and Aquila, are continued in the Priory of the once international Order of the Knights of Malta, recording the noblest effort of the lay world during the middle ages--the institution of chivalry; and in the modern Benedictine house of Saint Anselm--our English Anselm. The Janiculum, the site of a fortress built by Ancus Martius against the Etruscans, was not enclosed within the city walls till the time of Aurelian; the Vatican hill was only enclosed in the ninth century by Leo IV. All these hills were once steep defences against enemies in the surrounding country; now that there are no longer any enemies the Romans appear bent on abolishing the hills, and the mania for planing and razing is carried to an extent which must seem nothing less than childish to the visitor. The Viminal has become almost indistinguishable since the Villa Massimo was pulled down, and only the name _Via Viminale_, which replaces the older Via Strozzi, indicates the hill which lay between the Quirinal and the Esquiline. Some idea may be gained of the original steepness of the hills when we realise that in the memory of the Romans the road past Palazzo Aldobrandini--on a slope of the Quirinal--used to be at the level of the top of the high wall which now surrounds it. The Capitol was only approachable from the Forum, and was never connected with the city on the hither side until the construction of the historic steps of Ara Coeli, one of the rare works undertaken by the Romans during the absence of the popes in Avignon. The Tiber is now but a narrow stream in the midst of its ancient bed. The Romans had never embanked the swift-flowing river, and the enormous deposits of the yellow sand which give it its traditional colour, and which threaten to completely dam the river by the island of the Tiber, may afford the explanation. The inundations of 1900 in fact reached the same level as those of 1872, as we may see recorded in the neighbouring church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Few spots in Rome exceed in varied interest the _isola sacra_ which with its two historic bridges the _pons Fabricius_ and the _pons Cestius_ spans the Tiber at the heart of the city. Here was the temple to Aesculapius, whose worship had been introduced into Rome during a time of pestilence in obedience to the Sibylline oracles. The island itself thereafter assumed the form of a huge stone ship, faced with travertine, the prow with the sculptured staff and serpent of the god being still clearly visible; and here Greece and Rome met a civilisation and an art still older than their own, for the mast of this great ship is formed by an Egyptian obelisk. Hard by is the district where the Romans, who had borrowed from them their gods and their cult, compelled the "_turba impia_" ("the impious crowd") of Etruscans to dwell; while the walled enclosure in which, from the eleventh century onwards, Christian Rome obliged the Jews to live, is approached by the Fabrician bridge, as we may gather from the inscription in Hebrew and Latin on the little church of San Giovanni Calibita, beneath a painting of the Crucifixion, which says: "I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not good." In the early twelfth century Otho III. brought, as he believed, the body of the Hebrew apostle Saint Bartholomew to this island, as 1400 years earlier the cult of Aesculapius had been brought there from Greece. The city of Beneventum had, however, it is supposed, palmed off on the emperor the body of Saint Paulinus of Nola which rests in the church dedicated to the apostle by the side of that of Saint Adelbert the apostle of the Slavs. The Franciscans came to the _isola sacra_ in the sixteenth century, and one of the friars of Saint Bartholomew's is the popular dentist of the poor from all quarters. Here, then, in the midst of the river which determined the site of the cosmopolitan city, is a spot to whose history Egypt, Greece, Etruria, Palestine have contributed--Aesculapius, "one of the Twelve," the Christian Slavs, the Saxon Otho, Francis of Assisi. In Paulinus of Nola we are reminded of the earliest Western monasteries, and the Franciscan friars represent for us the thirteenth-century revival of the religious spirit in Italy. What more? In the red-gowned confraternity of the island we are put in touch with an institution which seems to be as old as human history, with those burial guilds, sanctioned by Roman law, under shelter of which the first Christians obtained a legal footing for themselves and their cemeteries long before their religion was tolerated. [Illustration: THE FORUM, LOOKING TOWARDS THE CAPITOL The Palatine is to the left. See pages 4, 5, 61.] The vicissitudes of the city have made certain features of its life as eternal as itself. Through the middle ages it was the sanctuary and since the renascence of classical learning it has been the museum of Europe. Long before there were any kind of facilities for travelling every one came to Rome. A procession of people from every race under heaven, in every variety--every excess and defect--of costume, has passed along the streets under the observant but unastonished eyes of the _blasé_ Roman; and when a lay pilgrim in a brown tunic, hung with rosaries, and carrying a crucifix taller than himself, walked last year out of Saint Peter's among the Easter crowd, no one noticed him. The modern city in becoming the hostess of the other provinces of Italy is approximating in size to the Rome of the early empire; but the Rome of the popes made no sort of provision for the influx of Europe. The Inn of the Bear, in the street of that name leading to Ponte Sant' Angelo, provided the best accommodation; and here, it is said, Dante himself had lodged. It is but a hundred years ago that a pavement was placed for pedestrians, and then only one side of the Corso boasted a narrow footpath. The streets were encumbered with hucksters' stalls, with refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark as pitch, and hygiene was only hinted at in the marble _affiches_ which may still be seen at certain old street corners announcing that _monsignore_ the way warden would visit with a fine of 25 _scudi_ and divers bodily pains the practice of emptying every kind of refuse into the side streets. Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages the cry of "Vandals!" goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right to be called "the eternal city" than her survival of the material ruin to which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth and Vandal have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and popes is recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who stripped the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of Saint Peter's:--_Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini_. It is a curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of as "barbarians," should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace in Rome. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._ One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of Rome--barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders, internecine brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each brought the opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of destruction must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from the time of the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings are doomed on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor Emmanuel II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway system--while the House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is dishonoured--the Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those who killed the prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres. But when "new Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given us what the learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never compassed--an excavated Forum. There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the Ghetto and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence. This brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life--the beggars. Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always had troops of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the Antonines as in that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the latest of the sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced beggar who was licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint Peter lived to the closing years of the century and gave a dowry of 200,000 francs to his daughter on her marriage. The difficulties which met the Roman of the era of Gregory the Great when pest and the transition to the agricultural system of _coloni_ threw the serfs upon the streets, met the government of Italy when after September 1870 the whole motley crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian system of alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the streets of the city. Those who remember the "seventies" or the "eighties" in Rome remember the menacing manner in which "alms" were "asked," how near together were blessing and cursing, and how unfrequented roads and hills were beset by sturdy beggars, lineal descendants of the brigand who placing his hat in the roadway levelled his gun at you as he proffered the request: "For the love of God put something in that hat." Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on wet days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum; doles of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising members of their congregations. The men women and children who had passed their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viaticum and funeral processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions, were suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern spirit--hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the restaurants, these latest recruits to the commercial spirit exchanged the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade without ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and simple. Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging. The great and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to the excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding--in the _San Lorenzo_ quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with five, six, and even seven families living _in one room_. The mania for building in the "eighties" led to the "building crisis"; streets of unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the "improvements" of the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help; they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies and dowries come their way. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE BASILICA JULIA IN THE FORUM The Capitol is to the left. The temple is built at the foot of the Capitol hill. See pages 3, 13, 30, 91.] The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The maximum was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors--2 millions, but even in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered 1,300,000. A period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us to the date of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this number by more than a million (A.D. 335). After a thousand years of Christian domination the population of the city had sunk to its minimum, 17,000 (A.D. 1377). Even in the reign of the magnificent Leo X. it was not more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of the seventeenth century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily increased, till in 1800 the population numbered 153,000. But during the "empire," 1812, it fell to 118,000. Ten years after "the Italians" entered Rome it had increased by 79,000, to 305,000. The last census, 1900, shows a resident population of 450,000--not a third of its classical total--and Naples is still the most densely populated city of Italy. * * * * * The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of "Pallas"; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune--those liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the _gentes_ and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth century; but the life of the Capitol has never been intermitted; it has never ceased to represent all the moments in the life of the Roman people. This distinction is sharply drawn to-day: the Palatine is a hill of majestic ruins visited only by the tourist, the Capitol is still the seat of the municipality of Rome, ascended by every couple for the celebration of their marriage, and its registers signalise every young life born to the city. The municipal franchises of Italy have played a large part in her history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of Rome, the heads of each _gens_ from among the original settlers, and the _Populus_, who be it remembered were the _gentes_ and were never synonymous with the _plebs_, represented two constant facts and factors--a free Senate and free municipal government by the _Populus Romanus_. These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished in the classical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to restore them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal letters to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the Senate and people of Rome--a custom which influenced the early government of the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other Christian Churches were written in the name of "the Roman Church," even when, as in the case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual handiwork of the then head of the Christian community. Again, when Pepin obliged the Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to the emperor but to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church and the Roman Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III. the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the Romans again tired of their Senate--as tradition says they had done when they made Numa king--they created in its place a supreme magistrate who was designated "the Senator," one of whose duties was to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps all that now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman people. The municipality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is conterminous with the whole Roman _agro_, so that its history is inseparably linked with that of the Roman boundaries as well as with the life of the Roman people. The outward and visible sign of these primæval Roman liberties is the tetragram S.P.Q.R.--_Senatus Populus Que Romanus_ (the Roman Senate and People), which took the place of the earlier formula _Populus Romanus et Quirites_, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. All down the centuries we may recognise those four letters--surmounted in imperial times by an eagle--crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the earth, but in that religious perlustration of the _ager_ when the ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which separated Rome from Alba Longa, the site of the combat between the Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of the finest remains in the Forum is the marble relief which represents the _suovetaurilia_, the sow, sheep, and bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman greatness which came to be synonymous with confines as large as the known world, had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which still define the Roman municipality--the symbol of Roman liberties. The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into _Si Peu Que Rien_ must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism"--it points to an ecclesiastical not a political _diminutio capitis_. The tract of the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations--the Etruscan, the Roman, the Christian--resulted in the foundation of two world empires. Rome is now entering on a third existence, its existence as the capital of Italy, but has it suffered thereby no _diminutio capitis_? Is it not a fact that the classical and the ecclesiastical represented her only world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome which penetrated as truly beyond the city as within its classic confines? Has not the papacy, with all its faults, been the actual link connecting ancient and modern Rome, preserving unbroken the tradition which gave her, beyond her ritual boundaries, the government of the world without? [Illustration: S. PETER'S AND CASTEL SANT' ANGELO FROM THE TIBER See pages 16, 32, 239, 242.] CHAPTER II ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION Shepherds' huts clustered upon a hill top whose base is washed by a swift yellow river rushing to the sea not far distant. This is the first faint foreshadowing of the existence of Rome which reaches us dimly across the centuries. These shepherd settlers had chosen a site propitious for the foundation of the great city which was to be raised upon those grouped hills by the skilful hands of their descendants, for the necessary building materials lay close at hand in lavish profusion. One of the neighbouring hills, known later as the Janiculum, and parts of another, the Pincian, yielded a fine yellow sand. Beneath the surface soil was volcanic rock, which, in a prehistoric age when the campagna was a sea-bed and waves lapped against Monte Cavo, had been poured out in great liquid streams from volcanoes amongst the Alban hills and at Bracciano. Close at hand in the plain lay immense beds of a chocolate-brown earth with which later builders were to manufacture cement. The makers of Rome therefore had only to quarry their building stone on the very site of their city, and we can still recognise in the few fragments that have come down to us the rectangular blocks of brown tufa used in the first period of her history. These earliest monuments, the walls of Servius Tullius and the vaults of the Mamertine prisons, were the direct outcome of a period of Etruscan dominion, and one of the first great works undertaken in the growing city, the draining of the swamps of the Forum, Campus Martius and Velabrum, was due to Tarquinius Priscus, the immense _cloacae_ built for the purpose being still in use, and their masonry as strong as when they were constructed about 603 B.C. The two Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, built the first triple shrine on the Capitol dedicated to the three Etruscan gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and the primitive Roman temples, consisting of a simple _cella_ with a peristyle, were doubtless Etruscan in character and were decorated with terra-cotta and bronze in the Etruscan manner. The Romans were born builders and engineers, and in these branches they quickly outstripped their predecessors and instructors. If they were deficient in artistic originality, they evinced a readiness to imitate and a power of appreciating skill and proficiency in the arts wherever they met with them, and their practical and utilitarian spirit taught them how to adopt and improve upon experience and guided them in the choice of right materials. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES One of the earliest monuments of Rome; originally built in the reign of the last of the Tarquins or the first years of the Republic, but twice reconstructed during the Empire. It served as the Treasury of Rome. The granite columns with marble capitals are of the Ionic order. See pages 30, 181.] A period when the influence of Greece predominated succeeded the first epoch in the building of Rome, and to this time must be ascribed the adoption of the Greek models for public buildings, for circuses, baths, and basilicas. Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric columns were imported into Rome, the latter undergoing some modification to suit the Romans' more florid taste. The temples became Hellenic in style. The small _cella_ was built within an open court surrounded by arcades from which the people assisted at the sacrifices. The altar stood in the open court. Later, windows were introduced into the building, and the openings were filled in with a bronze grating similar to that still in perfect preservation over the door of the Pantheon, or with a perforated marble screen, fragments of coloured glass being inserted in the interstices of the pattern. By the third century there were 400 temples in Rome, but the simple form of the early buildings was hidden with excessive ornamentation, and frieze and cornice were loaded with carving and figures. The basilica, or kingly hall of justice, was a rectangular building divided into a central portion or nave and side aisles by rows of columns under a horizontal architrave. The columns were in two tiers, the upper one enclosing a gallery which was reached by a flight of stairs springing either within or without the building. The entrances were at the sides, and one extremity, and in some cases both were extended to form a semicircular apse or tribune where stood the judge's seat. A marble screen, the _cancellum_, separated this portion from the rest of the building, and this constituted the bar to which the accused were brought; just beyond stood the altar, where incense burned; and here, during the persecutions, Christians were arraigned and bidden to throw incense on the fire as a sign of recantation. These great buildings served as courts of justice and for the transaction of business, and those which stood upon the _fora_ were in some instances so large that several cases could be conducted in them at once. Before the Empire the nave was probably unroofed or covered only with an awning, and the upper galleries were entirely open so that their occupants could at will attend to the proceedings within the basilica or watch the games and events without. Similarly a single rail or low partition only separated the open colonnades below from the Forum. Curtains could be drawn across these to shut out importunate onlookers and to muffle the sounds of street traffic, but it is evident that the basilica precincts were regarded as a place of familiar _rendezvous_ by the idlers in the Forum, as the gaming tables scratched in the flooring of the Julian basilica testify. [Illustration: A CORNER OF THE FORUM FROM THE BASE OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN The column of Phocas, erected in honour of the Byzantine emperor who was the contemporary of Gregory the Great, faces us, and to the right are the columns of the temple to Antoninus Pius and Faustina, now the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. The columns are of _cippolino_ marble. See page 32.] The era of _thermae_ or public baths began with Agrippa in 27 B.C., and by the end of the third century eleven such existed in Rome exclusive of the smaller baths or _balnae_, of which there were 850. Nero, Titus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Diocletian, were all builders of _thermae_. These huge edifices were a great deal more than public baths. They were a Roman form of the _gymnasia_ of the Greeks, and the colossal ruins that remain can give but the barest idea of what they must have been at their best. They included immense halls and courts for athletic displays, vestibules, concert rooms, picture galleries and libraries, pleasure grounds decorated with statues fountains and shrubs and surrounded by open porticoes. Feasts, concerts, and entertainments were provided, and pleasant hours could be whiled away within their walls by the gilded youth of Rome. The baths of Diocletian, of which the church of S. Maria degli Angeli is a magnificent fragment, could accommodate 3600 bathers at a time, those of Caracalla 2000. An army of slaves and attendants waited upon the bathers and sped upon their errands along underground passages from one end of the building to the other. Ruins of the _thermae_ of Caracalla and of Titus are still standing. Out of the colossal vaults and walls of Diocletian's baths have been constructed two churches, a monastery, a large museum, and a variety of storehouses, warehouses, stables, and cellars. Equally remarkable was the Roman system for supplying their city, their _thermae_, and their 1350 street fountains with pure water. Appius Claudius was the first to collect the water from springs amongst the mountains in the neighbourhood of Rome and to bring it across the campagna. This was in 313 B.C., up to which date the inhabitants of the city had depended for their water supply upon the Tiber and upon sunken wells. Following in the steps of Claudius, fourteen aqueducts whose united length measured 360 miles were built at various times. They varied in length from 11 to 59 miles and their course lay sometimes under ground and sometimes 100 feet above it, while the amount of water they poured daily into Rome has been estimated at 54,000,000 cubic feet. Four of these ancient aqueducts are still in use. The Virgo, built by Agrippa in 27 B.C., and now known as the Trevi; the Alexandrina, constructed by Alexander Severus (222-235), probably to supply his own baths, and now known as the _acqua Felice_; the ancient Trajana, now Paola, and the Marcian, restored by Pius IX. The Marcian was always considered the best drinking water, and the Trevi being a softer water was preferred for bathing purposes. The amphitheatre alone was, perhaps characteristically, a building of purely Roman origin. Intended for shows and fights of gladiators and wild beasts, these were at first temporary wooden structures. The only stone predecessor to the great Flavian amphitheatre was a smaller building in the Campus Martius, the work of Statilius Taurus in 30 B.C. The Colosseum was begun by Vespasian in A.D. 72, was dedicated eight years later by Titus, and was completed by Domitian. It stands upon the site of Nero's artificial lake, is one-third of a mile in circumference, covers some 6 acres of ground, and is 160 feet in height. It could seat 87,000 spectators, and its staircases, galleries, and entrances are so admirably planned that this crowd of sight-seers must have found their seats and filed out when the show was finished with little delay and difficulty. The numbers of the entrances, cut in stone, can still be seen over each of the arches. The Colosseum is built entirely of travertine, the blocks are fitted together without mortar and are studded with holes from which the greedy despoilers of the middle ages wrenched the metal clamps. In spite of its having been used as a fortress and served as a stone quarry for centuries, it is still one of the most magnificent of the monuments of Rome. The solidity of the public buildings seems to have been in marked contrast to the flimsy nature of the common dwellings or _insulae_. In the time of Augustus these numbered 46,600, the _domui_, or houses of the rich, 1790. The former were roofed with timber or thatch. As land was dear, they were often of several stories and perilously high; many of them were built of unbaked bricks with projecting upper floors, and they were constructed with wooden framing filled in with rush and plaster, so that when a fire broke out in the city whole regions were laid waste in a few hours. As a measure of safety Augustus limited the height of the _insulae_ to 70 feet, and Trajan reduced this again to 60 feet, while a distance of 5 feet between each house was prescribed by the law of the Twelve Tables. The volcanic tufa used by the earliest Roman builders was discarded gradually in favour of better materials. _Peperino_, a grey-green volcanic stone from the Alban hills, began to take its place, and was used for the construction of the Tabularium in 78 B.C. and for Hadrian's mausoleum. It was cut in the same way in large rectangular blocks, clamped together during the Republican and early Imperial periods with iron. Mortar was not used till later, and at first served only to level the surfaces of the stones; it came into use for binding bricks together only at a later and degenerate period of architecture. Travertine was adopted towards the first century B.C. It is a cream-coloured stone hard and durable though easily calcined by fire, formed by deposit in running water. It was quarried at Tivoli and on the banks of the river Anio, where it is still plentiful. To the present day the quarries are worked at Tivoli, and the stone is brought to Rome on waggons drawn by immense white oxen which pace majestically along the dusty roads beneath the goad of their wild-looking drivers. The chocolate-brown earth imported from Pozzuoli or dug from beds in the campagna, is known as _pozzolana_, and early in the history of Rome her builders discovered that when mixed with lime it made a remarkably strong cement. As such they used it for foundations, for the lining of walls and ceilings. With pieces of brick and stone a concrete was formed which was poured in a liquid state between wooden casings, and when set proved to be one of the hardest and most durable of the materials used. It was the strength of this concrete which enabled the Roman builders to give the vaults of their baths and basilicas such an enormous span; and it could be used for the flooring of upper stories without beams or supports. When especial lightness was required, the concrete was made with broken pumice stone. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF MARS ULTOR The temple erected by Augustus in his Forum to the God of War under the title of Mars the Avenger. Only the upper part of the ancient arch of the Forum, now known as _Arco de' Pantani_, is visible. This represents the first imperial building in Rome. See pages 3, 30.] After the first century B.C. concrete became a favourite building material. The walls so made were lined with stucco and faced without in various fashions, the variety of the facing determining with considerable accuracy the date of the fabric. The earliest facing, of the first and second century B.C., was of irregular blocks of tufa set in cement, and is known as the _opus incertum_. This was replaced in the middle of the first century B.C. by tufa blocks cut in squares and set diagonally giving the appearance of a network and hence known as _opus reticulatum_. In or after the first century A.D. this fashion was superseded by a facing of triangular bricks set point inwards, and by the end of the third century bricks were mixed with the _opus reticulatum_, a style known as _opus mixtum_. To the casual observer the narrow brown bricks of the ruined buildings of ancient Rome seem to play an important part, but, with few exceptions, they are merely a brick facing upon concrete. Up to the first century B.C. there was little or no splendour or decoration introduced into the buildings of Rome, and the city of Augustus' inheritance was a city of sober-hued, volcanic rock. When marble was first sparingly used, Livy reprobates it as too showy and extravagant. Notwithstanding, the fashion rapidly spread, first in the embellishment of public buildings, then for private houses as well until in the first century of the Empire it became a common building stone. For nearly three centuries it was imported into the city in a continuous flow from the quarries of Greece and Egypt. The native Luna marble, the modern Carrara, was not at first worked, but thousands of slaves and convicts toiled in the quarries of the Roman provinces. The great blocks were numbered and stamped with the name of the reigning emperor and shipped off in the great triremes across the Mediterranean to Ostia. Thence the trading vessels were towed by oxen up the river to Rome, their slow progress ceasing with nightfall, when they were drawn up and moored to the banks till next morning, bands of _vigiles_ watching over the safety of their cargoes and restraining their lawless crews from acts of brigandage. At their journey's end, the cargoes were unloaded upon the marble wharf beneath the Aventine; here unused blocks still lie upon the site of the once busy _Marmoratum_, now a deserted quay beside a deserted river; and the harbour of Ostia, built by King Ancus Martius at the river's mouth, is now four miles inland. Occasionally a granite obelisk was brought from Thebes or Heliopolis to adorn an imperial circus. That now in the Lateran Piazza is 108 feet in height and weighs 400 tons. Ships had to be built on purpose for the task, and one of these was so enormous that after safely conveying the Vatican obelisk to Rome, it was sunk by the Emperor Claudius to serve as a breakwater for the harbour at Porto. When the laden ships arrived at the _Marmoratum_ the obelisks were hauled on shore by men and horses and then dragged and pushed on rollers along the streets by gangs of workmen. Forty-eight obelisks were once erected in Rome, of which thirty have disappeared and left no trace. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF VESPASIAN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES Built in honour of the first Flavian Emperor by his sons Titus and Domitian. The three remaining Corinthian columns are of Carrara marble. The Arch of Septimius Severus to the right was dedicated to the emperor and his sons Caracalla and Geta in A.D. 203, to commemorate their Parthian victories. It is of Pentelic marble. The church of Santa Martina in the background is near the site of the Senate House. See pages 31, 32.] While the fashion for marble lasted, no material was considered too rare or too costly. Parian marble, the most beautiful of all white marbles, from the island of Paros; Pentelic marble from Pentelicus; Hymettan marble from the mountains of Attica; rich yellow _giallo antico_ from Numidia; _cippolino_ with its beautiful green waves from Carystos; purple _pavonazzo_ from Phrygia; black marble from Cape Matapan; green and red porphyries from Egypt; alabaster from Thebes; serpentine from Sparta; jasper and fluor-spar from Asia Minor; _lapis lazuli_, with which Titus paved a chamber in his baths, from Persia, besides countless varieties of the so-called _Lumachella_ marbles and rare and beautiful _breccias_. There arose in Rome an army of marble workers, cutters and sawyers, polishers and cleaners, carvers of simple mouldings and of inscriptions, and more skilled sculptors of ornament and of statues and busts. Coloured marbles were first used in small pieces for making mosaic pavements. This art was introduced from Greece some time in the first century B.C., and in its simplest form was an arrangement of smooth pebbles in a rough pattern on a bed of cement. As the art developed, cubes, lozenges, and hexagons of travertine and grey lava were cut and fitted together in simple patterns. Then cubes of coloured marble were used, and the designs, of figures and flowers, became more elaborate. The floors were prepared with a bed of concrete, covered with several layers of cement; the last layer was carefully smoothed and levelled, and in this the cubes were fitted according to the pattern, and finally liquid cement was poured over the whole to fill in the cracks. When dry and hard the surface was polished with sand and water rubbed on with little marble blocks. Pavements of the best building period can be recognised by the size of the cubes, about three to the inch, and by the neatness and finish of the work. Two varieties of mosaic can be distinguished, that in which marbles, stones, and coloured glass are cut into cubes only and the so-called _sectile_ mosaic in which elaborate scenes and groups of figures are represented, the coloured pieces being sawn into shapes to fit in with the design. The _Tablinum_ in the house of the vestals and the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol were paved with sectile mosaic. The most brilliant mosaic which came into use during the Empire for the decoration of walls and vaults was made of fragments of coloured marble and glass, the latter specially prepared with acids to make it opaque and to give it a brilliant appearance. The art of mosaic work has never died out entirely in Rome. The Roman mosaic pavements and mosaic wall decoration were copied by the builders of mediæval churches, and even now a mosaic factory is kept up at the Vatican. Although first used in this way, coloured marbles were gradually employed for the interior decoration of houses, for columns, dados, and friezes. Lucius Crassus, the consul (176 B.C.), was the first so to adorn his house, and Lucullus (151 B.C.) paved his hall with black marble. Later, entire rooms were lined with thin slabs clamped to the concrete wall with iron. Sometimes such marble walls were given a thin coat of stucco and painted. As the passion for sumptuous interiors grew all the decorative arts were put into requisition. Walls were painted in fresco, as we can still see at Pompeii and in the house of Germanicus on the Palatine. Ceilings, walls, and cornices were ornamented in stucco in shallow relief. An extremely hard stucco was made with lime and powdered marble--it was nearly as durable as marble and could take almost as high a polish. It was even used for floors; for internal decoration, plaster of Paris was mixed with it. Mouldings, figures, arabesques, groups and scenes were worked in this stucco and delicately coloured. Examples have been preserved in the Diocletian museum and can be seen _in situ_ in the Latin tombs. The greatest plans for the building of Rome were conceived by Julius Caesar and Nero. Of Nero's buildings nothing remains except some ruins of his Golden House beneath the baths of Titus, while the designs of Caesar were destined to be carried out by his great successor Augustus. Justly could this emperor boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The republican period succeeding the expulsion of the Tarquins, and which his accession brought to a close, had not been so fruitful in public buildings as the epoch immediately following. Of the former, the Tabularium, the tombs of Bibulus and Cecilia Metella, the temple of Fortuna Virilis, and the ruins of the Fabrician bridge, the modern Ponte Quattro Capi, have come down to us. The city, however, was beginning to assume a more majestic appearance. On the accession of Augustus, the Capitol was crowned by the Tarquins' temple to Jupiter, which was to be restored by Domitian. The valley between the Palatine and the Aventine was occupied by the enormous Circus Maximus, built by Tarquinius Priscus and decorated by Julius Caesar, and which has so entirely disappeared that we can only trace its site along the present Via dei Cerchi. The temples of Concord and Castor and Pollux stood upon the Forum Romanum, while the temple of Saturn bounding the steep _Clivus Capitolinus_ which led upwards to the Capitol--the ancient _Mons Saturninus_--recorded the golden age when Saturn reigned in Italy. The streets of the city were paved, and beyond the walls the immense Appian causeway crossed the Pontine marshes and stretched onwards towards Brindisi and the east. In the forty years following Rome was transformed. There arose in the Campus Martius, the Pantheon with the baths and aqueduct of Agrippa, the portico of Octavia dedicated by Augustus to his sister, the theatre of Marcellus and the great mausoleum where the emperor and his kindred were to lie, and which, almost smothered in poor houses, has in modern times served the ignoble offices of a bull-ring and a third-rate theatre. Temples were restored, the Basilica Julia was completed, another Forum built with the temple of Mars Ultor in its midst. Upon the site of Augustus' birthplace on the Palatine hill a great palace was raised by himself and Tiberius, and this district of Rome became henceforth the abode of the Caesars. [Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM ON A SPRING DAY The Flavian amphitheatre, called Colosseum from the _colossus_ or colossal statue of Nero which stood on the _velia_ before it. The picture is taken from an _orto_ belonging to the Barberini on the Palatine, looking across the Arch of Constantine. See pages 22, 23, 31.] Augustus and his immediate successors were to witness the golden age of Roman building. After Hadrian came the period of decadence characterised by florid ornamentation, bad taste and workmanship, which culminated under Constantine and his sons. Following in the steps of Augustus, Caligula and Nero erected palaces on the Palatine. Caligula connected the hill with the Forum, and Nero opened up an entrance towards the Caelian. Vespasian built there the Flavian house which his son Domitian was to dedicate as the _Aedes Publica_, a gift to the people. Septimius Severus extended the Palatine towards the south by the construction of his Septizonium. Of the buildings of Tiberius, the columns of the temple of Ceres built into the church of S. Maria in Cosmedin remain to us; of those of Claudius, the beautiful ruined arches of his aqueduct. The Flavian emperors were great builders, and to this period belong the arch of Titus, built in A.D. 70 to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem, a monument of Rome's best period, the ruined baths erected by this same emperor, and the great amphitheatre and ruins of the temple of Vespasian. Trajan's great buildings--his forum and triumphal arch, his basilica and library--are represented by a very small excavated portion of the basilica, and the column whose summit marks the height of the hill cut away by this emperor to make a roadway between the Quirinal and Capitol and thus relieve the congested traffic of the city. The only fragments left of the work of Hadrian are the ruins of a villa near Tivoli, the mausoleum and _Pons Aelius_, now the castle and bridge of S. Angelo; and behind the church of S. Francesca Romana in the Forum the ruins of the _Templum Urbis_, the temple of Venus and Rome, with its twin niches for the gods, one turned towards the convent the other looking outwards towards the Colosseum. The gilt bronze tiles from the roof of this temple were removed by Pope Honorius I. to deck the Christian _Templum Urbis_ S. Peter's. During the following 140 years there arose in Rome, amongst other monuments that have perished, the temple of Antoninus and Faustina built by Antoninus Pius in memory of his wife and now transformed into the church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda, the column of Marcus Aurelius, the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus dedicated to his sons Caracalla and Geta, the baths which bear this eldest son's name, although only begun by him and completed by Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus, the walls of Aurelian which still encompass the city and the _thermae_ of Diocletian. The latest of the imperial buildings were the temple built by Maxentius to his son Romulus, now the church of SS. Cosma and Damian in the Forum, and the baths, basilica, and triumphal arch of Constantine. A visitor to this city of the Cæsars must have been almost bewildered by what he saw. As he passes through the town great buildings meet his glance on every side, their gilded tiles and white marble walls glistening in the sun and clear atmosphere. Crowds jostle him in the narrow paved roads. He crosses one Forum after another, six in all, and finally reaches the Campus Martius. He pauses upon the steps of temples and basilicas which seem on all sides to surround these busy centres of Roman life. Open spaces are crowded with trees and shrubs, fountains and statues. He can count thirty-six triumphal arches and eight bridges that span the yellow Tiber. He passes theatres and _stadia_ for races and games, columns and obelisks. Occasionally he comes across a giant building, a colossus even in that city of marvels, the amphitheatre of Vespasian or the _thermae_ of Diocletian, or an immense circus where 285,000 spectators are seated waiting for the chariot races to begin; he has noticed groups of charioteers in their distinctive colours, and heavy betting is going on. He has walked from one end of the city to the other sheltered from sun and rain, along covered porticoes, their pavements rich mosaics, and their length decorated throughout with a continuous series of statues and pictures. He has gazed upon the stupendous palaces of the Palatine, and has noticed the streams of people passing in and out of the city gates on their way to the suburbs which extend to Veii Tivoli and Ostia, or to the villas, parks and gardens, villages and farms, which cover the outskirts of Rome to a distance of 15 miles, amongst which great roads lined by marble tombs radiate outwards towards the hills. With the decay of this mighty city began the era of church building. The origin of the Christian basilica is still a matter of controversy, but the results of careful and recent research[1] go to confirm the view that it was modelled not upon its Pagan namesake the forensic basilica, but upon the private hall found in many of the dwellings of rich Romans of consular or senatorial rank which served for those domestic tribunals for the adjudication of family disputes sanctioned by Roman law. This conclusion has been overlooked from a mistaken belief that the first Christians were recruited from the slaves and poorer classes of the population, but it is now proved that noble Romans and even members of Imperial families early embraced Christianity, and it was more than probable that the domestic basilicas in their houses should be utilised as places of assembly by members of their faith, the gathering of a large body of persons being concealed during times of persecution, by the use of the many entrances common to the Roman house. [1] _Le Basiliche Cristiane._ Mons. Pietro Crostarosa. Rome. The domestic basilica dedicated as a place of Christian assembly, became with the development of the ecclesiastical system, the Roman _titulus_, the church in the house, and as no public hall was built until after the Peace of the church, these were multiplied as the Christian population grew and numbered 40 by the second century. The Christian basilica was thus in existence and perfected in all its liturgical parts in the first three centuries, and when Constantine built his great extramural churches, he only amplified a type familiar to every Christian. S. Maria Maggiore probably existed as a domestic basilica at a time anterior to that of its reputed founders Liberius and Sixtus, and we know that S. Croce and the Lateran were constructed within the Sessorian palace and the house of the Laterani of which they probably formed the halls. [Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM AT SUNSET Taken from the _Mons Oppius_, one of the two spurs of the Esquiline hill. See pages 5, 11.] Architecturally also the earliest churches resembled more nearly the domestic hall than the public basilica. The latter were little more than a covered portion of the Forum upon which they stood. They were entered from either side through the open ambulatories which as we have seen were free to all. The extremities were walled up later and prolonged into an apse to increase the space available for legal purposes. The domestic basilica on the other hand was a rectangular building roofed and closed on all sides, its single apse at one extremity facing the main entrance. The central space was surrounded on three sides by porticoes dividing it into portions which became the aisles for the worshippers and the narthex for the use of catechumens. The domestic judge's seat standing in the apse was replaced by the bishop's throne, and the _cancellum_ became the chancel rail dividing this portion, the presbytery of the church, from the rest of the building. The ruins of the Flavian basilica in Domitian's house on the Palatine (81-96) affords us a ground plan of such a domestic hall, in this instance placed close to the _triclinium_ of the house and not in a direct line with the _vestibulum_ or entrance as was generally the case. Here a fragment of the _cancellum_ can still be seen _in situ_. The Christian altar of the earliest churches placed in front of the apse, faced the congregation, and a space before it, beyond the depressed portion or _confessio_, was reserved for the choir and was surrounded by a marble balustrade. The columns supported a horizontal architrave, above it a flat wall pierced with windows and the plain roof of cedar-wood beams. The floors were paved with a fine mosaic of marble and green serpentine alternating with slabs of white marble or discs of red porphyry. Tribune, arch, and vault, and sometimes other portions of the walls, were decorated with brilliant mosaics and examples of this work, of the fourth, sixth, ninth, and twelfth centuries, and possibly of the second or third, have happily escaped the ravishing hand of the restorer. In the twelfth century the art of marble working underwent a temporary revival under the influence of a talented family of artists, the Cosmati; and a good deal of their work and that of their school is still to be found in Rome, the carved marble and an inlay of mosaic upon marble being easily recognisable in the decoration of the cloisters of the Lateran and of S. Paul's outside the walls, upon ambones, candelabra, and tombs scattered throughout the churches. The straight architectural lines of the Christian basilicas and their subdued colouring of floor and apse produce a delicate and harmonious effect, but they were erected during a debased building period and were not designed for strength, and only a few have weathered the storms of the middle ages and escaped destruction beneath the tasteless restorations of the Renaissance. The new building epoch born in Rome was to be nourished entirely at the expense of the old. Columns and mouldings were transferred bodily from the nearest basilica to furnish the Christian church, and were there arranged haphazard. Simpler still, walls of ancient bricks were quickly run up between the solid columns of a temple; marble casings were torn off to be used as common building stone; statues, carved cornices, and friezes were thrust into lime-kilns which sprang up all over the city wherever the ancient monuments stood thickest; priceless marbles were ground into fragments for making mosaics or were mixed with cement and made into concrete. When Constantine left Rome to found his new capital the city had already degenerated into a squalid provincial town, and fifty years later Jerome could refer to its gilded squalor and its temples lined with cobweb. Already the seal had been put upon the old order when Gratian in 383 abolished the privileges of the pagan places of worship, and quickly disaster followed upon the heels of destruction. Twice Alaric despoiled the city and carried off priceless booty. Vitiges tore the marble from the mausoleum of Hadrian and destroyed the aqueducts; Genseric dismantled the temple of Jupiter; Robert Guiscard laid waste the Campus Martius and other parts of the city by fire. Sieges, sacks, earthquakes, fires, and inundations succeeded each other until the old level of the city was in places buried 50 feet beneath accumulated ruin and rubbish. The scene shifts once more; centuries have slipped by and the city of Rome has become a desolation. Marble columns and granite obelisks lie prone upon the ground, and many more have found graves beneath the soil. Enormous mounds of earth and masonry, disfigured with rude battlements, represent all that is left of the great monuments; crumbling ruins and waste land stretch away to the walls, and without the campagna has become a fever-stricken wilderness. Military fortresses, watch-towers on the walls, and bell-towers of churches are the only buildings kept in repair. Gaunt wolves snarl and fight over the refuse heaps under the walls of S. Peter's. A gibbet crowns the bare summit of the Capitol, goatherds pasture their flocks on its sides and along the green slopes of the Forum, and thus the hill and the tract of land at its foot have returned once more to their primitive pastoral state and their pastoral names, the "hill of goats" and the "field of cows." Over all broods the ominous silence of terror, bloodshed, and pestilence. Upon this scene of ruin the Renaissance and modern city of Rome was to come into being, and the mediaeval buildings were in their turn to be destroyed or overlaid with a modern garb, leaving only a few churches and convents, a few towers and palaces, a few cloisters to mark the passing of the centuries. The remains of the imperial city are described by a modern writer[2] lying like a skeleton beneath the modern town, beneath streets, villas, and public buildings; and from the fifteenth century, when Rome, which had only just escaped an extinction as complete as that of her neighbour and ancient rival Tusculum, began once more to rise from the dust, to modern times, all the building materials have been furnished by her ruins. The few monuments that have been preserved owe their safety to their consecration as churches. [2] Gabelli, _Roma e i Romani_. [Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS Erected to commemorate this Emperor's destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. It is decorated with reliefs of the seven-branched candlestick and other spoils of the Temple which were carried through the city in the Emperor's triumph. See page 31.] Of all the despoilers to which Rome has fallen a victim, none have been so assiduous in their destruction as her own rulers and people. Streets have been paved with building stone, churches and palaces built with ancient materials. Monuments of the utmost artistic and historic value have been destroyed for the purpose, the Colosseum alone being robbed of 2522 cart-loads of travertine in the fifteenth century. The inadequate prohibitions issued at rare intervals proved impotent in presence of a practice so deep rooted and time honoured. Every villa garden and palace staircase is peopled with ancient statues. Fragments of inscriptions, of carved mouldings and cornices, marble pillars and antique fountains, are met with in every courtyard. Even a humble house or shop will have a marble step or a marble lintel to the front door. To the present day no piece of work is ever undertaken in Rome, no house foundation dug or gas-pipe laid, but the workmen come across some ancient masonry, an aqueduct whose underground course is unknown and unexplored, a branch of one of the great _cloacae_, or the immense concrete vault of a bath or temple whose destruction gives as much trouble as if it were solid rock. Fortunately for the student and the archaeologist a government official, a "custodian of excavations," now watches all such operations, and all "finds" of importance, fragments of inscriptions and statues, earthenware lamps, bronze or glass vessels, fragments of mosaic, and gold ornaments, are collected and reported. CHAPTER III THE ROMAN CATACOMBS From the catacombs, the subterranean burial-places of the first Roman Christians, to the basilica of S. Peter's, the greatest ecclesiastical building on earth, there is no break in the drama of history. When you come out from the cemetery of Callistus, on to the fields bordering the Appian Way, and look across to the dome of the great church commemorating Peter, you say to yourself "That is the interpretation of this": this may see in its own humble features the lineaments of that; the church which dominates the Roman country--in imperial possession of Rome--may recognise that the silent underground galleries of the Appia had already taken as effective a possession of the capital of the world. The Roman Church is founded upon three events: the apostolic preaching, the constancy of its martyrs, its position as the heir of Imperial Rome--a position early figured and represented in the persons of its bishops. All these things have their monument in the catacombs; which bear indisputable traces of the sojourn and the preaching of the Apostles, which are the earliest shrines of the Roman martyrs, and which preserve for us in the crypt in the cemetery of Callistus, set apart for the leaders of the Roman Church from Antheros to Eutychian (A.D. 235-275),[3] the veritable nucleus of papal domination. It was the successors of these men who were to fill the rôle left vacant by Constantine's departure for Byzantium; to be forced into a position of overlordship through the uncertainty of the emperor's government by lieutenants--first in Rome and then in Italy; to consolidate this power by constant accretions of Italian territory, and, finally, to acquire by spiritual conquest a universal suzerainty as real as that of the Roman emperor. If those who inscribed the proud words round the dome of S. Peter's had known that hidden in the catacombs there were frescoes representing Peter as the new Moses striking the rock from which flow forth the saving waters of Christ--the name _Petrus_ clearly written above him--even they must have thrilled with wonder and awe: the upholders of Petrine primacy could not have imagined or devised a parable of the first centuries better fitted to their hand. [3] The popes from the time of Zephyrinus, the predecessor of Callistus, to Miltiades, who lived on the eve of the "Peace," rest in this great cemetery. The burial-places of the first Christians in Rome were their only certain property. The law allowed to every corporation its _religiosus locus_, its God's acre, property seldom confiscated even in the worst hours of the great persecutions. It was thus that the Christians, though they never lived in the catacombs, came to regard them as retreats, as places where it was safe to meet for prayer, for mutual encouragement, even for the catechising of neophytes and children. Round them were their dead, their loved ones, nay, round them were their martyrs, the men and women who were to prove that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"; whose heroic deaths had been witnessed by many; the memory of whose heroism was to prove almost as potent as ocular witness when their burial-places became the nuclei of the first Christian churches, and the abounding reverence felt for them inaugurated the Christian cult of the saints. [Illustration: A PROCESSION IN THE CATACOMB OF CALLISTUS The nucleus of the great catacomb on the Via Appia was formed by the crypts of Lucina and the _hypogaeum_ of the family of the _Caecilii_, both pagan and Christian members of which had their burial places on the Appian Way. S. Cecilia was buried here. See pages 42, 45, 46, 29.] The catacombs lie for the most part within a three mile radius of the wall of Aurelian. They number forty-five, and it is calculated that the passages, galleries, and chambers of which they consist cover several hundred miles, forming a vast underground city--"subterranean Rome." For the first 300 years, until "the Peace of the Church," this was the ordinary place of burial, certain catacombs being affiliated, from the third century, to the ecclesiastical regions in the city. Even after the "Peace" Christians were sometimes buried here, until the fifth century, after which the catacombs were visited as places of pilgrimage for another 400 years. From the ninth century they fell into complete neglect; no one visited these sanctuaries of the sufferings, these monuments of the human affections and religious beliefs of the first Christians. Visitors heard that Rome was built upon terrible underground chasms, filled with snakes, some part of which was every now and then revealed to the terrified inhabitants. No one penetrated till the fifteenth century--the first pioneer belongs to the sixteenth--and it was not till the second half of the nineteenth that a new world was laid bare to the student by the excavations of De Rossi, who rediscovered the great cemetery of Callistus, containing the now famous "papal crypt," and whose labours have resulted in restoring to us nearly twenty catacombs. The terrible underground chasms filled with snakes were found to be galleries of tombs, crypts of all sizes, lighted by shafts, some with seats for catechists, some adapted as miniature basilicas, decorated with frescoes recording biblical scenes, New Testament parables and symbolical representations of New Testament events--(in which the "apocrypha" is not distinguished from the "canon," and the history of Susanna and the Elders sustained the faith and comforted the courage of Christians by the side of the scene of Moses striking the rock or Christ feeding His disciples); eloquent with inscriptions in the epigraphy of the first four centuries, recorded in moments of simple human emotion, intended only for the dead and those who survived them sorrowing; and lastly, covered with _graffiti_, with prayers, names, acclamations, scratched on the walls of galleries leading to some favourite crypt by pilgrim visitors in later centuries. [Illustration: FLAVIAN BASILICA ON THE PALATINE See pages 31, 35, 45, and fly-leaf, page 252.] In this hidden and quiet place of the dead there is recorded a revolution parallel to a volcanic upheaval of nature. Here we have a permanent record of the meeting of classical Rome with Judaea and Christianity; here the graceful art of Pompeii meets the imagery of the Hebrew bible; here the Flavii met the Jews of the Dispersion; here as in a Titanic workshop, Rome, taking its religion from the Jew, moulded the faith which the Chosen People had discarded into the greatest religious organisation on earth--Catholic Christianity. The two arch-cemeteries are those of Callistus on the Via Appia and Priscilla on the Salaria. They are arch-cemeteries because their origin and the part they played in the early years of Roman Christianity gave them a pre-eminent importance, and having been bestowed upon the Church by their owners they became the official catacombs of the Christian community. Each bears in its bosom the record of the first Roman converts; each is rich in frescoes and inscriptions; each bears testimony to the fact that from the beginning the Roman Christians counted among them many of patrician and senatorial rank; we meet with the names of the _Aurelii_, _Caecilii_, _Maximi Caecilii_, of _Praetextatus Caecilianus_ and _Pomponius Grecinus_, and of _Cornelius_, the first bishop to belong to a Roman _gens_, in the catacomb of Callistus; and with those of the _Prisci_, _Ulpii_, and _Acilii Glabriones_ in that of Priscilla. Priscilla, with her son the Senator Pudens, is the reputed hostess of Peter on his visit to Rome, and in the catacomb which bears her name there occurs repeatedly the Apostle's name--unknown in classical nomenclature--both in its Greek and Latin forms, _Petros_, _Petrus_. It is a region of this catacomb which preserves the tradition of the _Fons sancti Petri_, "the well or font of S. Peter," "the cemetery where Peter baptized" or "where Peter first sat," still unconsciously recorded in the Roman feast of "the Chair of S. Peter" on January 18. Here too was buried the philosopher Justin, martyred under Aurelius in A.D. 165, who lived in the house of Pudens, and here, when Justin was describing the rite itself in his Apology to the emperors, was frescoed the earliest representation of the solemn moment of the breaking of bread at the Eucharist. The mystical number of the guests, seven, the fish on the table, archaic symbol of Christ, the "seven baskets full" in allusion to the miracle of the loaves, and the fact that the _agapê_ was already dissociated from the Eucharist in the time of Justin, mark this out as a typical example of that symbolical treatment of real events which is characteristic of early Christian art. The celebrant stands at one corner of the crescent-shaped table breaking the bread; five men and women sit at the table, the only other standing figure being that of a woman wearing the Jewish married woman's bonnet, filling, apparently, the office of _vidua_ or woman-elder. The catacomb of Callistus--an agglomeration of separate _hypogaea_, which originated in the _crypts of Lucina_ and the cemetery of those _Caecilii_ who were among the earliest Roman families to embrace Christianity--is no less interesting. The unique interest of these monuments lies in the fact that they are the incorruptible record of the sentiments, affections, and beliefs of the first Christians. In these frescoes and inscriptions no forgeries or interpolations could creep, no P1 and P2, no "Elohist" or "Jahvist" could confuse the issues and mystify the interpretation. The untouched story appeals to us in mute eloquence. To what side does the testimony of the Roman catacombs lean? The critical method in history has destroyed the foundations of historical Protestantism: has it laid bare the foundations of historical Catholicism? The people who frequented the catacombs did not feel or think or believe like the men who reformed Christianity in the sixteenth century, but it is as true to say that they did not think or believe like the men of the Catholic reaction. The catacombs record a period when Christian life and Christian discipline still seemed more important than Christian dogma, when this last was not yet fixed, when it was still true that "what can be prayed is the rule of what may be believed"--_lex orandi lex credendi_; and here in the place of the dead "what could be prayed" became a veritable norm of what Christians were to formulate as precious dogma later. In the first place then, the frescoes and inscriptions frequently bring before us the notions of rebirth by baptism, and of eternal life by participation in Christ through the mystical commerce of the Eucharist--the Johannine conception; new birth and new life are the keynote ideas in this place of the dead. Sacraments, conceived as material channels conveying grace, already form an integral part of the Christian consciousness; but the assumption that "the seven sacraments" are to be found in the catacombs shows as little knowledge of the history of the Church for the first twelve centuries as of the habits of belief of the Christians of the first, second, and third. If there had ever been an age of the Church before controversy, we might say that the catacombs recorded it. But there never was such an age: what can be found here, however, are the spontaneous Judaic-Gentile beliefs of Christians who learnt their faith through terrible and comforting experiences almost as much as through the first apostolic preaching or the later ministrations of those visitors between Church and Church called in the New Testament "apostles and prophets." The religion of the catacombs was partly formed in the living; it is the faith, formulated, gauged, and tested by the faithful. Hence there is not only spontaneousness, but boldness, liberty of spirit, the absence of all fear of being misunderstood, misconstrued. They did not think as we do, and centuries were to elapse before the minimisers or the maximisers would torture what they said and did with meanings they would not bear. Of these bold spontaneous doctrines none is more conspicuous than that of the intercourse between all the members of Christ, "those who have gone before us with the sign of faith" and those "who wait till their change comes, till this corruptible puts on incorruption." A Christian called upon his dead to pray for him in the realms of light, he called upon God to give to his beloved a place of light and refreshment, he besought the confessors gone to their reward to pray for both them and him. So strong was this belief in a holy and indissoluble union between the members of the one Church and the one Body of Christ, that at every celebration of the liturgy the whole body of the faithful were understood to be present--either really or mystically; and thus the Commemoration of the Living in the mass speaks of those (present) who offer and those (absent) for whom they offer the sacrifice of praise, as all equally "standing round about." And as they offered and prayed for those who were with them in the same town, so they offered and prayed for those who were already with Christ--_in bono in Christo_. The three commemorations of the Roman Canon, the _Memento Domine ... omnium circumstantium_ of the living, the _Communicantes et memoriam venerantes_ of the martyrs, and the _Memento ... qui nos praecesserunt_ of the dead, may be thought of as liturgical features crystallised in the catacombs. It is easy to see too how the funeral celebrations of the liturgy--given this initial idea of intercommunion and intercession among all Christians living and dead--extended the idea of eucharistic sacrifice. How easily the oblation of Christ--the Christian's one offering--became the means of intercessory prayer for all men and all occasions, and gave rise to the requiem mass, the mass for some special grace, the mass of thanksgiving, the mass in commemoration of a saint. Bold treatment of sacred things belongs naturally to an age when the _sentiments_ of the faith, aspiration and hope, outrun dogma--before unfaithfulness in doctrine urged upon the early Church and its leaders the necessity for stricter definition, or unfaithfulness in life had made it easier to substitute a hard and fast creed for "the weightier matters of the law." The symbolism and inscriptions of the catacombs testify how freely such elements were at work there. Take as an instance the fresco representing Christ on a throne giving a book to Peter, with the legend, _Dominus legem dat_, "the Lord gives the law." In other examples of this subject Peter is replaced by some simple but faithful disciple--"the Lord gives the law to Alexander--to Valerius." The allusion is to the "tradition of the Gospel" in baptism; it is not hierarchical. The catacombs influenced the Roman Church in another way. There are none but martyrs' names among the liturgic commemorations of the confessors of the faith (whom we now call "saints"); and these names loudly proclaimed in the _Canon_--in the solemn portion--of the eucharistic services which were held at their graves, not only on the day of deposition but on many other stated days besides, were the nucleus of that long line of "_canonised_" saints which figures in the modern calendar. When, after the "Peace," churches began to cover the city, the very grave of the confessor became the nucleus of the Christian edifice--that confession or sunk tomb which is the central point of the Roman basilica. And as the liturgy had been celebrated on the stone slab which closed the grave so when churches were built the altar was placed over the confessor's tomb: "I saw under the altar the souls of those that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held." [Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN ON THE PALATINE Painted on a stormy day. The sombre scene of the ruined Library in the Palace of the Flavian Emperors suggests the ruin of classical learning which followed on the introduction of Christianity. The mother of Domitian's two nephews, whom he had intended to designate as his heirs, was martyred as a Christian, and their cousin of the same name--Flavia Domitilla--founded the catacomb of the Flavian House.] Thus subterranean Rome prepared, as in the hidden working of a mine, not only many affirmations of the faith which was to assert itself in the light and replace the religion of classical Rome, but also the sanctuary of those great basilicas which were to spread over the surface of the city as soon as the Christians, in no real but nevertheless in a highly suggestive sense, "came up from the catacombs." The catacombs are the link between pagan Rome "drunk with the blood of the saints" and the Christian Rome which arose in the imperial city from the ashes of her martyrs. The pagan city on the seven hills as truly sunk into the grave with the bodies of the Roman martyrs as Christian Rome eventually took possession of the same _urbs septicollis_ by carrying her dead into it. CHAPTER IV ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS The regions and the guilds of Rome illustrate two contradictory tendencies running parallel throughout the administrative history of the city, the one towards division and separation as first principles of organisation, the other towards union and centralisation as measures of strength. These antagonistic elements which we find at the very dawn of Roman history were at once utilised as factors in the new commonwealth. It is the tradition that King Numa organised nine guilds of handicrafts amongst the Roman people that they might sink their race animosities in an identity of interests. Similarly one of the first great works for the young community, the city wall projected by Tarquinius Priscus and built by Servius Tullius, was intended to produce a fusion of the tribes which inhabited the seven hills he thus physically linked together, and which he had already united under a common government. Another enterprise, the draining of the marshes and pools which made impassable barriers of the valleys between the hills, had the same aim and result--it was a levelling process, moral as well as physical, to minimise the separation between hill and hill, race and race. On the other hand, Servius' division of the city into four regions, and these again into six parishes or _vici_, laid the seeds of an internal disunion which lasted throughout the centuries. These four regions (1) the Suburra or Caelian, (2) the Esquiline and its spurs, (3) the Collina, comprising the Viminal and Quirinal, which were called _colles_ in distinction to the other hills, the _montes_, and (4) the Palatine, persisted until the reign of Augustus. By that time the city had grown beyond its primitive limits, a thickly populated region had sprung up on the Esquiline beyond the walls and Augustus found a new division necessary. He increased the original number of regions to fourteen, and each of these he subdivided as before into parishes, the number in each region varying from seven to twenty-eight, making 265 in all. A magistrate or curator with a set of officials under him presided over each region. Each parish had its magistrate, its officers, its chapel built upon the boundary road for the public worship of the _lares compitales_, the protecting spirits of the district. At this period the poorer quarters of the city--a network of narrow streets with high houses built of inflammable materials--had been again and again devastated by fire. At night the densest darkness descended upon the city, street lighting was unknown, shop doors were shut and barred, and it was unsafe to walk abroad; those who ventured carried lights, or were preceded by servants with staves and torches. The ubiquitous beggars haunted the byways, and brigands raided the outskirts of the town. As a remedy against these evils Augustus created a force of 7000 men who were to act both as police and firemen. The whole body he placed under the command of a prefect, who acted in conjunction with the curator of the regions in keeping order, and divided it into seven battalions or cohorts, each under a tribune, and so disposed in the city that one battalion watched over the safety of two regions. The cohorts were again subdivided into seven companies under a captain or centurion. The force was distributed over the town in seven different barracks, with outlying detached quarters or _excubitoria_. The firemen's duty was to inspect public furnaces and private kitchens, the heating apparatus and the offices where the wardrobes were kept and warmed in the public baths. If a fire broke out in the town it was the subject of an official inquiry, just as it is to-day, and if arson or willful neglect were suspected, punishment was meted out by the proper authorities. Like the modern policeman in Rome, Augustus' _vigiles_ were not a popular force, and to make it more palatable he gradually increased its privileges. He built large and luxurious stations and _excubitoria_ which were beautifully decorated with precious marbles and statues. Members of the force were granted the coveted Roman citizenship, and the captains were permitted to serve _ex officio_ in the Praetorian guard. [Illustration: FORUM OF NERVA The picture represents a portion of the ornamental enclosure of the Forum built by Nerva, near Domitian's Temple of Pallas; she is represented on the entablature. This fragment is popularly known as _Le Colonacce_. See page 33.] At a later period, perhaps sometime in the third century, the regions of Rome were reorganised on an ecclesiastical basis, and seven were formed out of the fourteen by the amalgamation of two into one, each being placed under one of the seven deacons of the city. It is not known at what precise date their number was again increased to fourteen, nor when they assumed their present names and distribution, but probably early in the middle ages. By the thirteenth century only thirteen regions are recorded, and it was not till the year 1586 that the conservators and senators of Rome and the captains of the regions consulted together and decided to include the Leonine city as a fourteenth region, granting it at the same time a captain, a standard, and an heraldic device of a lion upon a red field, his paw planted upon the three mounds of the coat of Sixtus V. These fourteen regions do not correspond in position, name, or extent with those of Augustus except that the present thirteenth, Trastevere, is identical with the ancient fourteenth, Transtiburtina. The names that they bear to-day represent either their position or some characteristic feature within their limits. Thus the first and largest region, the _Monti_, formed from the union of the fifth and sixth of Augustus, the _Esquilina_ and the _Alta Semita_, is so called from the hills, the Esquilina Viminal and Caelian, within its boundaries; the second the _Trevi_, derives its name from the famous fountain in its midst; the third, _Colonna_, from the column of Marcus Aurelius; the fourth, _Campo Marzo_, covers this historic ground; the fifth, _Ponte_, is named from the old _Pons Triumphalis_, that united Rome with the Vatican region; the sixth or _Parione_ comprises the ground of which the Chiesa Nuova is the centre, and the name was derived from the ancient wall and tower which stood close to it; the seventh, _Regola_, inhabited by some of the most wretched of the population, is a corruption of Arenula, the drift sand of the river near which this region lies; the eighth, _S. Eustachio_, behind the university, takes its name from a parish church; the ninth, _Pigna_, from the bronze pine cone now at the Vatican and which was once supposed to adorn the Pantheon (this region corresponds to a certain extent with the ancient Via Lata); the tenth region, _Campitelli_, includes the Capitol and Palatine hills and the Forum; the eleventh, the _S. Angelo_ district, a region inhabited by the very poor, by tanners, and formerly the Jews' quarter, is named after the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria; the twelfth is the _Ripa_ or river bank; and the thirteenth and fourteenth, as we have seen, are _Trastevere_ beyond the river and the Leonine city or _Borgo_. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI One of the numberless fountains of the city; built by Clement XII. in 1735. The red house is the _palazzo_ of the celebrated art jeweller Castellani. Visitors leaving Rome who throw a _sou_ into this fountain are sure to return to the eternal city. See pages 22, 55, 227.] Each region became a little civic and social centre complete in itself. Each had its captain, its sub-officers, its religious organisations, its separate funds for charities and dowries, its separate police and militia recruits. And the importance that accrued to these regions lay in the fact that they represented the _plebs_, the democracy of Rome. With a people so incapable of co-operation for a common end as the Roman, the spark of their civic liberties would have been trodden out or have remained for ever dormant but for this administrative setting which kept it alive and through which, given the opportunity, it could become once more a living force. The heads of the regions, the _caporioni_, heirs to the position of Augustus' tribunes but without their discipline, were the people's leaders and spokesmen, their representatives and the guardians of their liberties. They were elected by ballot and the ballot urn was carried in procession to the Capitol, where the chosen captains received their investiture at the hands of the Senate. In times of difficulty they assembled for consultation in that council chamber of the people, the church of Ara Coeli, but their counsels seldom led to measures of conciliation which were uncongenial to their fierce independence and to the arbitrary authority they assumed. In peace or in war, in sanguinary insurrections or in national rejoicings, the _caporioni_ were always to the front, their banners with the regional device upon a coloured field fluttering in the breeze. It was to them that Cola di Rienzo looked for assistance and support. When a royal visitor or one of the German Emperors of Rome entered the city in state, the _caporioni_ were amongst the officials who received them, their banners carried by their pages on horseback, and themselves clad in their gala tunics of crimson velvet, cloaks of cloth of gold, white stockings and shoes, and black bonnets jewelled and feathered. When Pope Gregory XI. returned to Rome, restoring the papacy to the land of its birth after an exile of seventy years, the _caporioni_ rode in procession to give him welcome, and at his death they hurried to the cardinals assembling in conclave at the Vatican to implore them at all costs to elect a Roman pope, and they emphasised their petition with a fierce menace which would assuredly have been carried through to its sanguinary end but for the intervention of the Colonna forces. In the carnival processions of the fifteenth century which issued from the Capitol to perambulate the city, the _caporioni_, surrounded by fifty mounted grooms wearing their distinctive livery, preceded the Senators. Representatives from each region marched with them in the order of their precedence carrying halberds, banners, and lances, and shields emblazoned with their arms, and escorted by grooms on horseback. In the same procession, in front of the regions, were delegates from all the handicraft and trade guilds in the city, shoe-makers, hatters, apothecaries, tavern keepers, and many others, each with their banners captains and sergeants; the guild of ironworkers alone numbered 300, in the midst of whom a team of horses were harnessed to a cannon of their own making. The procession was headed by municipal officers and soldiers, and as an emblem of law and justice a wretched criminal was driven along with blows. After the Renaissance the _caporioni_ degenerated into mere regional captains, retaining only a shadow of their former power and jurisdiction, and the present government has abolished the office altogether. The organisation and the spirit of the regions are, however, by no means dead. [Illustration: COLUMN OF MARCUS AURELIUS, PIAZZA COLONNA The only work of the time of the emperor-philosopher which has come down to us. The column is now crowned by a colossal bronze statue of S. Paul. See pages 32, 55.] Until the racing of riderless horses down the Corso was forbidden, each region entered a horse for the race which was decked in the regional colour, and its success or failure aroused a perfect passion of rivalry between region and region--an antagonism as old as the age of Plutarch, who relates that in the month of October chariot races were run in the Campus Martius; the victorious horse was sacrificed to the god Mars, but its head was borne in procession to the Forum, all the regions fighting for possession of the trophy until nothing was left of it, and the combatants themselves were wounded and disabled. To this day, on occasions of popular rejoicing or in patriotic demonstrations, representatives from each region form into procession, the regional banner carried by _vigili_, who march surrounded by a group of the so-called _fedeli_, inhabitants of the little town of Viturcchino, who for good services rendered to Rome in the past have earned special consideration at the hands of the Roman municipality. Such processions are headed by the standard of the Commune, S.P.Q.R. upon a red and yellow ground, and immediately behind follows the banner of the Monti, the first region, three green hills on a white field. The different devices of the regions, carved upon marble shields, were affixed to house walls in many parts of the city to mark the boundaries, by order of Benedict XIV., and can still be seen in position. All those who know Rome at all are probably familiar with the Monti escutcheon upon the wall of the Aldobrandini palace, and with the Campo Marzo crescent on a house wall at Capo le Case. The passage of time has not wholly wiped out the fierce and hereditary enmity between the inhabitants of one portion of the city and another, which has been always fostered and encouraged, though unintentionally, by the regional system. The Monticiani and the Trasteverini were the most irreconcilable of foes. The Monti was the first region to be inhabited after the barbarian invasions, but it was left in comparative isolation and neglect when the Campo Marzo became the busy centre of papal Rome, and its people have retained something of their untamed native independence. They are proud and passionate, are the quickest with the knife in a quarrel, and will not stoop to domestic service or to menial trades. They choose husbands and wives amongst their own people--they believe S. Maria Maggiore to be the most beautiful church in the world, and will brook no dissent on the subject. Even to-day they will not speak willingly to a Trasteverino. The enmity between these two may have had a Guelph and Ghibelline origin. Certainly Trastevere was a stronghold of the Ghibellines as is shown by an episode which occurred on the day of Pope Callistus III.'s coronation in 1445. A groom in the employ of the Orsinis came to words about a girl with a groom of a rival house, the Anguillara. From words they came to blows, and quickly the quarrel became general, until in a few hours 3000 men were under arms ready to fight in an Orsini cause. The inhabitants of Trastevere, separated from the rest of Rome by the river and comparatively far from its centre, have retained to the present day much of their individuality, their habits, character, and appearance. The sight of a Monticiano arouses in them all the evil passions. Even as late as the year 1838, it was their habit on every holiday to meet the Monticiani for a stoning match on the green swards of the Forum--"the field of cows" as it was then called--the historic fragments lying about serving as missiles of war. Such matches were not to revenge any particular wrong but merely for honour and glory, the victorious region bearing off the palm in triumph until the next occasion. Sometimes they met at the Navicella, sometimes in the ruined courts of Diocletian's baths; sometimes a champion from each side came forward for the contest, sometimes it was a general scrimmage, members of other regions looking on and encouraging their allies. Sometimes when the matches fell upon a market day--a market was held once a week in the Campo Vaccino--the crockery stalls were requisitioned for ammunition, and earthenware pans and pipkins flew across the Forum in company with fragments of classic statues and marble friezes. Only when heads were broken in plenty, and blood poured from wounded faces and limbs, did these fighters desist, or when the cry "al fuoco" warned them of the tardy arrival of the _sbirri_. Even these agents of law and order were powerless to separate the combatants unless they had had enough, and during Napoleon's occupation of Rome the cavalry had to be called out to disperse them, the gendarmes having entirely failed to do so. These stoning matches between Monticiani and Trasteverini were so recognised an institution in Rome, that the poet Berneri writing two centuries ago, sums up the Forum Romanum in the words: Campo Vaccino Luogo dove s'impara a fare a sassi. Field of cows The place where one learns to throw stones. The movement towards association between members of a craft or of persons of identical interests, seems to be, as we have seen, as old as Rome herself. Whether or no King Numa gave it its first impulse, it is certain that throughout the first years of the Republic trade corporations were multiplied in the city without let or hindrance, and only when their number and importance seemed to menace the tranquillity of the State were measures taken for their control. The wave of prosperity which spread over the Roman provinces during the early Empire gave a further impetus to trade in every branch, and an industrial class which had been long in the making amongst the people of Rome, awoke to its own interests and claimed if not sympathy at least recognition from the aristocratic ruling caste which held all _plebs_ in contempt. [Illustration: PANTHEON, A FLANK VIEW Designed as a Hall of the Baths of Agrippa the contemporary of Augustus, but appears to have been at once dedicated as a temple. The Black Confraternity of S. John Beheaded are seen passing the building, their cross bearer preceding them. See pages 30, 56, 67, 86; [see also pp. 8, 77, 143].] The only response given however was to prohibit the formation of trade guilds, exception only being made in favour of a few of the most ancient, and those devoted to purposes of religion and burial. They continued nevertheless to multiply under cover of this latter clause until under Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus they received final encouragement and recognition. At this time they had increased enormously in number wealth and importance throughout Rome and the provinces. Every group of merchants and all those engaged in handicrafts banded themselves together to form a _college_ or _university_ as they were called in Rome, as much for the social pleasures to be derived from such association as for the mutual support and protection afforded against the impositions and aggressions of outsiders. Charioteers, gladiators, disbanded soldiers, itinerant merchants, seamen, Tiber boatmen, grain weighers at Ostia, palace servants, carters and coachmen founded corporations equally with the bakers and innkeepers, dyers weavers and tanners. Every young community sought a rich patron willing to give a plot of land or the funds necessary for the building of a club-room, promising in return certain anniversary banquets in his honour, or commemorative reunions to keep his memory green after death. Each corporation placed itself under the protection of a god whose name it adopted, and as its wealth and importance increased, by members' testamentary bequests or by gifts from patrons, the club premises were increased, and shrines and chapels were built in honour of the titular deity. Some of the corporations rose to such a position of importance that senatorial and consular families sprang from them; they supported colleges of doctors sculptors and painters of their own, they contributed to the building of public monuments and made loans to the State, while on special occasions the emperor's retinue was increased by a hundred standards and five hundred lances contributed by the trade colleges of Rome from amongst their own retainers. Although democratic in constitution, in so far as every member, however humble, could serve as one of its officers, the college was founded on the civic pattern, with president, curators, fiscal officer and all the grades of rank down to its slave members. Thus each unit represented in miniature the Roman commune and contributed to its consolidation. Unlike some of the guilds of the North however which became the nurseries of civic freedom, the Roman Colleges were too ready to subject their individuality to the spirit of civil discipline which was characteristic of Roman organisations and we find them submitting to one Imperial decree after another, losing one after another of their rights until they fell altogether under State patronage and became a mere portion of State machinery, a petrifying slavery being thus imposed upon their members whose liberties they were founded to safeguard. As an integral portion of the administrative life of the State, they proved of the greatest use, not only as adding to its stability and prosperity but as affording a sort of scaffolding upon which to build its complicated daily life. To them was given the collection of taxes, the superintendence of public buildings, the development of the military system, the clothing of the militia, the provisioning of the citizens and the supplying of all their daily necessities. [Illustration: SILVERSMITHS' ARCH IN THE VELABRUM This arch stands against the Arch of Janus, and was erected to the Emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Pia, and his sons, by the guilds of silversmiths and cattle merchants. When Caracalla murdered his brother the name of the murdered prince was removed from the inscription. The arch, as the inscription proves, is on the site of the _Forum Boarium_.] In return for these services they were exempt from all other obligations to the State. The livelihood and wellbeing of members of colleges were thus ensured but at the cost of their liberty. Every member was obliged to sink a portion of his estate in the funds of the college, and to contribute another to its expenses. He was forbidden to will away the remainder except to his sons or nephews who in their turn were bound to enter the same trade; no member could change his own trade for any other, the priesthood alone excepted, in which case he must furnish a substitute. The goods of the corporations were thus inalienable, and whole families were bound to the same occupation in perpetuity. During the civil wars, barbarian invasions and general disunion following upon the decadence of the Empire, the Roman colleges are lost sight of, but there seems little doubt that their privileges were left intact by the foreign conquerors of Rome and that it was their direct descendants that we find flourishing once more as trade corporations in the middle ages. As early as the eighth century, the Lombards, Saxons and Franks had formed _scholae_ for members of these nationalities resident in Rome, and a little later trade guilds, founded for the mutual support and protection of their members against oppression, had already grown prosperous and strong enough to take an active part in insurrections and civil wars. We find history repeating herself. The guilds placed under the protection of a Christian saint were constituted with the obligations to bury their dead, to succour the widows and orphans of poorer members, to lend them funds in case of need and to offer masses for their benefactors. All members swore to the articles of enrolment, the statutes were formally drawn up, and many of them are preserved to this day. As funds increased, hospitals were built for sick brethren, and schools for the children; dowries were given to the daughters, and the guild standard-bearers and men-at-arms swelled the ranks of mediæval processions just as those of their pagan predecessors had done. The colleges kept great feasts and festivals, and their messengers paraded the streets two and two bidding householders deck their windows with bunting for the coming festivities. They endowed convents and hospices and built churches, many of which still bear the name of their founders. S. Giuseppe _de' Falegnami_ was built by the carpenters' guild; S. Caterina _de' Funari_ by the ropemakers'; S. Lorenzo in Miranda in the Forum belonged to the apothecaries; S. Maria dell' Orto to the fruiterers and cheesemongers; S. Barbara to the librarians; S. Tommaso a' Cenci to the coachmen. Streets called after the cloakmakers, the ropemakers, the watchmakers and other craftsmen still mark the districts given over to these different industries. The regulations imposed within the guilds pressed heavily upon the poorer members. The chief of each guild, the _Capo d'arte_ exacted implicit obedience. He was the sole arbiter on all trade questions, on the opening of every new shop, and the examination of every new worker, and played the part of a petty tyrant. An arduous apprenticeship of seven years from the age of thirteen was followed by two or three years as worker, and the payment of heavy fees, before the position of master-worker was reached. These powerful guilds hampered the development of trade by the establishment of monopolies, and they were more than once suppressed, and finally abolished in the seventeenth century. Many of them, however, survived, taking on the form of religious confraternities. These had coexisted with the trade guilds throughout the later middle ages. They were founded with a purely religious object, were a more spontaneous creation and were not under any State control. One confraternity was founded for succouring the sick, another for feeding pilgrims three days gratuitously, a third begged about the town for the benefit of prisoners, and a fourth prayed with condemned malefactors. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, this confraternity had the right to liberate one prisoner each year, who was afterwards taken in triumph round the town. Another gave dowries to deserving girls, and to this day the chapter of S. Peter's conducts a procession of the _zitelle_ or maidens round the basilica on the octave of Corpus Christi. At the head of the procession the capitular umbrella is carried; those girls who are destined to a convent life wear a crown of flowers, and those to be married are accompanied each by her _fiancé_. The confraternity of blacksmiths had the privilege of blessing animals on S. Antony's day (January 17) and the space before their church of S. Eligio, patron of blacksmiths, used to be crowded with horses, mules, dogs, sheep and oxen brought for the purpose. The owners paid large sums to the confraternity, and the Pope's horses and the equipages of Roman patricians arrived decked in flowers, the Piombino and Doria coachmen driving eighteen pairs in hand to the admiration of the crowds. Since 1870 the confraternities have lost their importance and much of their amassed wealth, while such of the trade guilds as have not become purely religious confraternities, have resolved themselves into the modern trades unions and beneficent clubs. [Illustration: CONVENT GARDEN OF SAN COSIMATO, VICOVARO This convent in the Sabine hills stands on a plateau between the river _Digentia_ (now Licenza) and the Anio. Near it is the site of Horace's Sabine farm. See page 169.] CHAPTER V THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA Rome is set in the _campagna romana_. The strange beauty of this "Roman country," the birth country of the Latin League, assails the very doors of the Roman citizen, intruding its poetry, its stillness, from point after point of vantage, causing the beholder to lead every now and then a sort of dual existence, to lose his sense of time and place and personality, and with his feet planted in the city which was once the hub of the world to find himself dreaming in a cloister garden. The atmosphere, the combination of colour and light, is characteristically Roman, it suggests what is mystic but never fails in perfect clearness. With its mystic blues, its blue-greens, its silence, its vastness, the campagna presents none of the features of the _pays riant_ of Florence where little olive-crowned hills, so cared for, so laughing, convey a message like its history definite, homogeneous, cultured, charming. But here a dead city has been besieged day and night by a dead campagna, big with its speech of silence, untilled yet a cradle of civilisation, with the complex language suited to a more difficult message, not entering into your humour but taking you into its secret, beautiful, austere, massive and careless of little things, yet yielding you out of its rich secular treasure details of beauty in abundance--here before you lies a history, a power, heedless of your judgment, but century after century looking back at you [Greek: meidiasais' athanatô prosôpô], as one of the finest lines in Greek verse says of Aphrodite, and recreating your universe for you. _Latium_ was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium--as though it were wide and spacious, suggesting the civilisation which was to spread from here, with its largeness, its spaciousness, its contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The _ager antiquus_, the Roman _ager_, however, was of much smaller extent, bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the _Massa Festi_ between the seventh and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate--the so-called _gentes_. The extension of the campagna beyond the _ager antiquus_ to form the _ager publicus_ was the result of conquest, the territory thus acquired being let or assigned to private persons as tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and towns, the _castelli romani_, are so-called not as is popularly supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were colonised by Romans from the _ager_ under the protection of the great feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus _castello_, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village which clustered round it. Something of the dualism which possesses the soul of the Roman, which has I think always conveyed a message to his eyes, his ears, his heart, is derived from the scene before him. Life and death, the _va et vient_ of the world's masters, "the desolation of Tyre and Sidon"--the Roman campagna has looked on both. Chateaubriand describes it as a desolate land, "with roads where no one passes," with "tombs and aqueducts for foliage" usurping the place of trees and life and movement; the stillness is broken by no happy country sounds, the eye sees no smoke ascend from the few ruined farmsteads. No nation it would seem has ventured to succeed the world's masters on their native soil, and the fields of Latium lie "as they were left by the iron spade of Cincinnatus or the last Roman plough." Decimated by plague and pest and deserted by man, malarial, fever-bound, the smiling country-seats of the world's conquerors have given place to tiny scattered colonies--as at Veii--haunted by a people emaciated by fever, where lads of eighteen, looking like boys of twelve, are certified by the parish priest as unable to bear arms. Along the world-famous roads lined by the Romans on either hand with the monuments of their dead, that they might retain a constant place in the thoughts of the living who journeyed on these most frequented ways, the ruined tombs are left in possession of the dead alone. The tombs, the _hypogaea_ and _mausolea_ of the great families who dwelt there, often remain standing when all trace of the villas to which they belonged have disappeared, as though one further proof were needed that this is indeed the land of the dead. [Illustration: A TRACT OF THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT OUTSIDE THE CITY The Sabine hills are in the distance. See pages 21-22.] Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life--some seventy cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators, made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these villas met the _rheda_ outside the gates, drawn by its pair of fast-stepping horses. These light carriages were gaily painted with some classical subject, as the peasants' carts still are in Naples, and a leather hood with purple hangings protected the owner from the heat. At all the cross-roads are fountains for the use of man and beast, near which a seat shaded by ilex or olive awaits the tired traveller, as we may see it still awaiting him for example at the Porta Furba on the way to Frascati. Excellent roads kept in excellent repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, trees, shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme, but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained English box hedge. The shrubs are tortured into the semblance of beasts and snakes, the name of the owner being sometimes cut in the foliage, a device which may still be seen in the modern grounds of the Villa Pamfili-Doria. The most conspicuous features of the campagna from classical times are the aqueducts, stretching right across the _agro_ to the walls of Rome; gigantic remains of the Claudian aqueduct extend for six miles, and the ancient _peperino_ arches of the favourite _acqua Marcia_, which cross the Claudian aqueduct at Porta Furba, still bring water to the city. As classic Rome is represented by the aqueducts and mausolea, so feudal Rome is represented by the towers which rose in the campagna between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries--the early semaphores on the coast-line to give warning of the approach of Saracen or Corsair, the vedette towers which figured in the baronial wars, and the later fortified towers of the baron's castle. Last but not least Christianity has strewed the campagna with chapels and shrines, the earliest of which supplanted the cult of the local pagan divinity in the ages when Christianity was gradually driving the religion of imperial Rome into the villages and hill retreats. So S. Sylvester replaced the woodland deities, Michael supplanted the god of war, S. George became the Christian protector against the depredations of ferocious beasts, S. Caesarius replaced the genius of the imperial Caesars. Of the same period are the basilicas erected over the _sepulcretum_ of a martyr at the mouth of a catacomb. Several causes led to the abandonment of the _agro romano_. The neglect of the roads and the ruin of the aqueducts, which cut off the water supply, the poverty of the despoiled landlords, and the general insecurity following the incursions of the barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought about a rapid depopulation and gradually turned the _agro_ into a pest-bound desert. It would seem that malarial fever is virtually indigenous to the soil of the _agro_, besetting every region as soon as man deserts it. It did not make its appearance, we may suppose, in the inhabited towns of the classical period, but that it existed before the middle ages, the popular date for its appearance, is shown by the allusions of classical writers since the time of Augustus and by the existence of several temples to the goddess Fever. In Rome itself it is the persistent belief, which appears to be abundantly confirmed by statistics, that the more building is extended and the horribly noisy paved streets are multiplied, the faster the evil diminishes; for the malarial miasma is held to be an exhalation of the soil, and where earth is freshly turned there is danger. As we all know, it has been quite recently shown that the microbe of malaria is carried by mosquitoes, mosquitoes abound where water abounds, and one of the reasons for the unhealthiness of the _agro_, one of the greatest obstacles to its reclamation, is that there are not less than ten thousand little water-courses which filter down to the valleys, creating marsh and stagnant pools. The evil may really date from the last years of the republic, which saw the displacement of the small freeholders by the large landowners, of the old free labour by slave labour, and the consequent fatal depopulation of the _agro_. But during the middle ages, from the sixth century onwards, all the causes were intensified, and the difficulties which now beset the secular problem of the restoration of agriculture in the Roman campagna and the expulsion of malaria, resolve themselves "into a vicious circle"; for men cannot live there until the malaria is exorcised, and until men live there the malaria will remain in possession. No less than seventy-nine measures for what is known in Italy as the _bonifica dell' agro romano_ have from time to time been projected; and whether Italy will succeed where the popes failed is still doubtful. The initial necessity, the drainage of the campagna, seems in itself to be a task too great for Hercules. For the last four years the military _Croce Rossa_ has perambulated the campagna during the summer and autumn months, combating the malaria with doctors and medicines. It is hoped that this will be followed by the establishment of a larger number of permanent sanitary stations. Since 1870 millions of eucalyptus trees have been planted as air purifiers especially at the little railway stations and other inhabited sites. It is not forgotten that the agricultural colonies of the classical age were once the saving of Rome, and within the last few years similar schemes have been devised in the hope that the birth-land of the Roman people may become once more the home of agriculture. Such a _colonia agricola_ for Roman lads, outside the Flaminian gate, was founded by a visitor who has since become the wife of an Italian well known for similar enterprise in Italian Africa. The moral wants of the _agro_ have appealed to the sympathies and occupied the attention of the excellent society of young Catholics, the _Circolo San Pietro_, which has opened and furnished thirty-four of the closed and neglected churches and chapels of the _agro_ for the use of the scattered population; mass is also said in the hayfields on Sunday for the haymakers, on a wain drawn by oxen, and a very charming little picture of this scene has been prepared under the auspices of the President, Prince Barberini. There are within the city many hundreds of extra-parochial clergy--monks, friars, clerks regular, missionaries, and members of the various ecclesiastical congregations, with scores of churches and chapels where hundreds of masses are daily celebrated, and where expositions of the Sacrament, novenas, and benedictions are multiplied. But just outside the walls there are people who never hear mass, who live and die without the consolation of religion, "without a priest." When the _Circolo San Pietro_ set their hand to the good work of opening the churches and chapels of the _agro_ their difficulty consisted in finding priests to minister in them without payment. "Your Indies are here" said the Pope of his day when S. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, wished to go abroad as a missionary, and Pius X. has recently echoed the saying. There is only one confraternity in the city which imposes on itself the duty of seeking and burying the bodies of those who die from sudden illness or from violence in the campagna. This well-known black "Confraternity of Prayer and Death" accompanies the funerals of the poor gratuitously. It is affiliated to the Florentine _Misericordia_. [Illustration: CAMPAGNA ROMANA, FROM TIVOLI See page 78.] The _agro romano_ is divided into nearly 400 farms owned by half as many proprietors. The largest of these farms comprise between 8 and 18,000 acres, the two smallest 5 acres each. About half remains ecclesiastical property, while a third belongs to the great Roman families, one-sixth being still owned by peasant holders. The proprietors allow the big estates to be farmed by the so-called _mercanti di campagna_, who take them on a three or nine years' tenure. These large merchants of country produce keep a _fattore_ on the farm who is the actual manager; he is both farmer and bailiff. The cattle of the _agro_ are, Signor Tomassetti tells us, its most considerable inhabitants. There are 32,000 sheep, 18,000 cows, 10,000 goats, 7000 horses and mules, 6000 oxen, and 1800 buffaloes. The oxen were brought by Trajan from the basin of the Danube, the buffaloes came with the Lombards and were originally natives of India. Beyond the _agro_ are the _castelli romani_, the hill towns of the Alban and Sabine district. There above Frascati lies the site of Tusculum, the mighty rival of Rome; to the right is Monte Cavo the highest peak in the Alban range where stood the temple of the "Latian Jupiter," sanctuary and rallying point of the Latin League. Below lies Albano of which See the English Pope, Hadrian IV., was Cardinal Bishop. In the Sabine range is the famous city of Tibur (Tivoli), the villa of Hadrian, and S. Benedict's town of Subiaco. To the east is the rock Soracte, "the pyramid of the campagna" and the meeting place of Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins; while a score of little townships in both ranges of hills record the feudal families of Rome, and harbour the descendants of the Latin rural _plebs_. The life led here is not the village life of England, but the life of small, primitive townships, with a mayor, a commune, and the customs of the middle ages. There are no manufactories and no crafts, and there are no cottages, the dwellings being divided into floors as in the big towns. [Illustration: SUBIACO FROM THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT] The great business of the year is the vintage, which takes place in the Roman campagna in October; in land held under manorial rights, however, the tenants must await the lord's pleasure. The vines are trained round short canes set close together, and the grapes are collected in wooden receptacles narrowing towards the base: these are emptied into the _tino_, whence they are pressed, by the old biblical method of treading with the feet, into an enormous cask below called the _botte_. Here the grapes are left for several days to ferment, the skins rising to the top. In the little yards of filthy houses one may see the grapes being boiled in a cauldron, an illegitimate substitute for fermentation. The wine of the _castelli romani_ is famous; every district makes both red and white, the latter being generally preferred in Rome itself; the white "Frascati" and white "Genzano" are famous; Albano wine is praised by Horace, and excellent "Marino" is still made in the vineyards of the Scotch college which has its summer quarters there. The Sabines yield the "Velletri," a good red wine but difficult to find pure; Genazzano and Olevano also produce an excellent grape, but the difficulty in some of these small towns is to find a vine grower to take sufficient pains with his wine making. Colouring matter is usually employed for the red wines, the least noxious resource being a plentiful admixture of elderberry. The wine made one year is not as a rule drunk till the next; it is not prepared for exportation, but is kept, or sent to Rome, in barrels, from which it is decanted for retail commerce into flasks where the wine is protected with a few drops of oil in lieu of a cork. The wine is also sold by the _barile_ (sixty litres), _mezzo barile_, and _quartarolo_ (fifteen litres), the usual price given in Roman households being about seven francs the _quartarolo_. Every _trattoria_ and restaurant, however, sells wine by the Roman half-litre measure--the _fojetta_--and the prices 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 may be seen chalked up outside the wine-shops. Outside vineyards and rural _trattorie_, where wine is sold, a bough is hung out as a sign, reminding one of the origin of the proverb "Good wine needs no bush." The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "_L'olio si sente_" (One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "_Ojo è sempre ojo, ma strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sarà?_" (Oil is always oil, but who knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most beautiful things in the Italian country--and its grey-green colour, with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be over after the middle of February. The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same Latin _plebs_, except that they no longer serve the world's masters and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great classical civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the general outlines the same people--but more not less barbarous than of yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised, by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("_è il destino_" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and coarse as the cruel are coarse. The inhabitants of the _castelli romani_ were described by a compatriot as "_pieni di superbia, debiti, e pidocchi_" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to hear mass in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house, there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised his gun and calmly shot his brother _in the presence of their mother_. The mother and son were punctual in their obligations to church and convent, and the _arciprete_ of the parish journeyed to Rome to bear witness at the trial that the murderer was "il fior del paese," (the flower of the flock). When the man was acquitted, the priest had no better lesson to inculcate for the community of which this was the "pearl," than to accompany the local band which went forth to welcome the fratricide back to the village which held the still fresh grave of the brother he had treacherously murdered. [Illustration: GARDEN OF THE MONASTERY OF SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO This fifth-century monastery (restored five hundred years later) was dedicated to the sister of S. Benedict, the founder of Western Monasticism. The first printing press in Italy was established here.] It is commonly believed, even by the educated, that "things" happen in the campagna which happen nowhere else, possession, obsession, "overlooking," witchery. Hysterical manifestations are indeed common at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical. Some sixteen years ago the government determined to check this source of hysteria, and directed the rural clergy to perform no more exorcisms. I visited a friary in the Sabines at this time and saw the work of the evil spirits in the shape of a packet of hairpins (complete with its sample pin), tresses of hair, or a good fat nail which had been swallowed by the energumen and which under the emotional stress attending the exorcism--the dim light, the monotonous droning of the _frati_ who are saying their office behind the high altar--are brought up again. I enquired of the Father Guardian what happened now that exorcism was forbidden? Well, a woman had been there only the day before, and he had explained to her that he could only pronounce "a simple benediction," which had resulted after a quarter of an hour before the altar in the ejectment of the objects shown me. Such an end to an ancient Christian ministry destined to free poor human beings from the toils of Satan gives food for reflection. The secular conflict between religion and science has set foot even in the Roman campagna. If in England we have our Christian scientists, in Italy the authorities have to cope with a people whose remedy for the bite of a rabid animal is a mass said at the shrine of some special madonna--both put faith before a trust in "dry powder," and there has never yet been an age of the world in which there have not been those who thought them right. The popular sanctuaries in Italy, indeed, help to keep up much that is undesirable. At the April festa at Genazzano a peasant will kneel down before the miraculous image of the Madonna which hangs, like Mohammad's coffin, without visible support, and having made his prayer will rise and shake his fist at the picture, exclaiming "_Bada, Maria!_" (Beware, Mary!) Many things, thin silver hearts, candles, and other dainties have been promised if the desired favour be granted, but if the Madonna be not tempted by these to accede to the wishes of her worshipper, she must look out for herself. Wax images can be laid out to melt in the sun, there to learn how agreeable is a continued drought, statuettes can be stood in the corner with their faces to the wall, a rival patron saint can be pitched into the river, by the same hand which brings gifts. "See how you like it!" Does not the primitive man create his god by looking into himself? and Caliban with his "So he!" inaugurates theology. Another Roman picture is afforded us by the lottery. It is to be found, indeed, all over Italy, but we are only concerned with its influence in Roman life, where it has always flourished, first under the popes when a prelate presided to bless the opening of the lottery and now under the State, for the Romans are born gamblers. Seventeen millions a year are raised in this way out of the pockets of the poorest of the poor. The excuse made is that as the people will gamble the only safeguard against gigantic frauds on the gamblers is to make the lottery a department of the State. Certainly it would be absolutely impossible to trust to fair play if the choice of the numbers depended on any private persons; even if they were honest, no Italian would believe it. The "Book of the Art," with its rough hideous drawings of the things represented by the lottery numbers--one to ninety--is the only book which the unlettered Italian can read. Every event national or domestic becomes the subject of play. You "play" the assassination of the King or the death of the Pope, the accident which has happened to your neighbour your master or your mistress, and you play the death of your kinsfolk. In order to get the money the people have recourse to the _monte di pietà_--the pawnshop--and the women will pawn the mattress off the bed. Sometimes the choice lies between the two chief pleasures of the Roman, eating and the lottery, and it is the best proof of the fascination of the latter that it is so often preferred to the joys of the table. In every tiny village as in every great city throughout Italy there is a _banco dell lotto_, and the winning numbers are exhibited over its doors every Saturday. Five numbers--for example, 5, 9, 27, 36, 50--appear each week. This is called the _cinquina_. But you can win the _ambo_ (two correct numbers), the _terno_ (the most usual of all), or the _quaterna_. Not more than five numbers can be played, but if you "plump" for the _cinquina_ you gain a big sum; or you can declare your intention to play for all four possible combinations. In this case you gain little if the _cinquina_ comes out. It is the same with the _terno_, if you plump for it you gain much more. But the gain also depends on the amount you put into the lottery, and any sum from six _centimes_ can be played. When Pius IX. died a Roman jeweller won 40,000 scudi (£8000). How can one expect the gambling of the poor to cease when even twelve _centimes_ (less than five farthings) may bring fifty francs? The Roman goes to the lottery with all the paraphernalia and a good deal of the sentiment of devotion. "Se ci aiuti Iddio e la Madonna," they exclaim--If God and the Madonna will help us--we shall win the _terno_. There are several "tips" for winning. One which is as awesome as it is efficacious consists in starting the _kyrie eleison_--hardly recognisable in its popular dress as _crielleisonne_--and then say on your knees thirteen _ave marias_ to as many madonnas. Having invoked Baldassare, Gasper, and _Marchionne_ (Melchoir)--though what the three wise kings have to do in that _galère_ is not very obvious--you go out of the house, taking care to answer nothing if any one calls you. You go straight to the church of S. John Beheaded, where those who suffered capital punishment used to be interred, and then whatever you see or hear inside or out, look it up in the "Book of the Art" and you are safe to win. Another _bella divozione_ for the same end is to go up the steps of Ara Coeli on your knees reciting a _requiem aeternum_ or a _de profundis_ on each step. A large number of the people praying so devoutly to the Madonna di Sant' Agostino (whose other principal care is the safety of childbirth) are praying for luck in the lottery--praying or threatening, for the one is very kin to the other in the primitive mind as it is in the magic of all primitive peoples. Some of these may have been conducting a solitary nocturnal vigil, having risen from their beds, kindled two candles, and proceeded to carry through one or other of the _belle divozioni_. [Illustration: HOLY STAIRS AT THE SAGRO SPECO The ravine (above the monastery of S. Scholastica) where S. Benedict took refuge from the corruption of Rome, became the site of the _Sagro Speco_, the sacred cavern, with the ninth-century monastery of _San Benedetto_. The peasants of Subiaco ascend the stairs here represented on their knees, as the _Scala Santa_ in Rome is ascended, and, occasionally, even the numerous stairs of _Ara Coeli_. See page 86.] In the country-places the great stand-by is the Capuchin, who has a reputation for suggesting lucky numbers. When he comes collecting alms in village or city the poor man asks him for a likely _terno_. He is not supposed to suggest these numbers, but he and the people understand each other, and every word, every allusion, which falls from his lips is thereupon eagerly noted. If he mentions a recent assassination, you "play" number _72 morto assassinato_, then the numbers indicating the day or some special circumstance, "a quarrel," "the knife" with which it was done, "jealousy," "a man," or "a woman." The element of chance, the ineradicable belief in luck, makes a man sure to play if three numbers come unbidden into his head. No pious person dreams of the "numbers of the Madonna"--6, 8, and 15--without at once "playing" them. The Madonna evidently intends "to do something" for you; indeed "if the Madonna suggests numbers" it is a safe thing, you can put five francs on it. It is popularly said that 2, 3, 5, 6 are numbers which always come out, these and their combinations. Fifty-eight is the number indicating the Pope, and 52, _morta che parla_, is played by good simple women who have dreamt of their dead mother. The industrious working middle classes and even the better classes "play," though the latter play _sub rosa_. On Saturday the people collect round the little lottery offices--some of them have waited to pay their bills until they ascertained their luck. On the appearance of the fateful numbers there is a general talk, a general lamentation: "If I had only done so-and-so." "If I had only played _morto_ instead of _ferito_" ("dead" instead of only "wounded.") For the Roman the whole known world sacred or profane is absorbed in the business of the lottery. Thus one of the popular sonnets in the Roman dialect describes how the flight into Egypt came about. On the 27th of December the Patriarch Joseph is snoring in bed, dreaming of lottery numbers, when an angel appears to him and says: "See here, old man, what a fine _festa_ there is going to be over number 28" (the 28th of December commemorates the massacre of the Innocents). Thereupon S. Joseph wakes like one crazy, hires a young donkey, and takes the Madonna and her child off to Egypt. Many English travellers to this favoured country of the gods since the days when Vulcan and Minerva vied with each other as to which should bestow the best gift on Italy, must have wished that nothing more sensitive than the olive had been placed in the hands of its countrymen. Signor Gabelli has described the burly Roman carter beating his horses or mules, the red cap which hangs over one ear matching his flaming face, afire with triumphant pride in this exercise of brute force and dominion. No one rebukes him. On the contrary the clergy delight to dwell on the distinction between the duties owed to men and the absence of all obligation towards the brutes. The distinction, of course, works no better in modern than in ancient times, and means nothing less than the systematic brutalisation of the Italian people. The doctrine that animals (like "the sun and moon") were "made for man" is held to justify all mishandling of them, all domineering and callousness. This is frankly immoral; and until priests overcome their reluctance to set forth ethics in a way that does not involve a break with the order and march of all human civilisation, theology will continue to accommodate itself to racial characteristics, and specious theological propositions will still serve as a cloak for bluntness of moral perception. Only this year a _marchese_ told me that he "could not admit that animals feel." The effect of such sentiments in a squire among an illiterate tenantry may be readily imagined; the ignorant Italian gentleman justifies theology by the astounding proposition that all sentient creatures below man have been provided with a set of non-sensitive nerves; the rustic finds in the pleasure which it affords him to know that this proposition is untrue an ampler justification of the ways of Providence. The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming assistance against them from the government. One of the best known Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi. In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the brigands are the chief herdsmen called _butteri_, in blue jacket and brass buttons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A primitive and classical feature of campagna labour is the singing with which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the accompaniment--the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights which pass these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour, protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful species known as the _lupetto romano_--the Roman wolfling--balances himself on the cargo and constitutes himself the protector and companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across the sunburnt plain of the _agro_ the men drop asleep, and it is then easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer salutes as he passes, still exist in some of the untouched parts of Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the _butteri_ and the wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country" but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly reminded, when figures like these with their pastoral divinities took possession of the Palatine hill. [Illustration: LITTLE GLEANER IN THE CAMPAGNA] Italy has always been the land of Saturn, the nature god. Her festivals were the festivals of the doings and events of nature, the Lupercalia of Lupercus, the Palilia of Pales; she was and she remains pagan, if pagan is to mean the natural as opposed to the supernatural attitude towards life--natural and humanistic as opposed to mystic and ideal. Under the new names lie concealed the old gods. The true Latin goddess is Pales, the earth mother, the source of grace, the real giver of gifts to her devotees--enshrined, dedicated to the gospel under a hundred aspects of what Bonghi has happily called that "gentilissimo fiore del cattolicismo," the cult of the Madonna. Some unseemly tracts and pictures have represented Christ as turning away from the leprosy of the sinner's sin, and it is Mary whose compassion for the prodigal never wavers, who persuades the Christ to have pity. That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the Italian mind. The nature goddess, the mother, the earth and its fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never parted with it. It is the hour of the god Pan, that midday hour which Pan alone can withstand. The sun is high in the heavens, the earth exhales heat, round about are the great silences. Nothing else stirs, nothing moves, nothing breathes. The great repose is indeed tense with a great activity, but a hush of nature greets this supreme hour of the sun in its glory--the world lies dead at the feet of the giver of life. The hour of the god Pan is the mystery which is daily renewed for the Italian; what has remained constant amid all changes is the nature-myth, and the secrets it is always whispering to the children of its soil. CHAPTER VI THE ROMAN MÉNAGE As in other European towns, the custom in Rome is to live in flats. The houses are high, of no particular style of architecture, and in the older portions of the city they overshadow a labyrinth of narrow streets paved with large uneven slabs of stone. Here are no side walks for pedestrians who with an indifference born of long practice walk habitually in the middle of the roadway, moving leisurely to one side in obedience to the warning cries of the drivers, or patiently waiting and flattening themselves against the shop doors if two vehicles desire to pass one another. Long ragged grooves scraped along the house walls and at street corners by the hubs of heavy cart-wheels, testify to centuries of clumsy driving. There have always existed in Rome, however, a certain number of villas within the walls, and their timbered parks and terraced gardens ornamented with fountains and statues, have been one of the characteristic features of the city. Their wealthy owners probably possessed a sombre palace as well along the Corso, but the villas were pleasant in the warm weather, and two centuries ago wonderful Arcadian entertainments were given beneath the shade of their ilex groves. Some of these villas still exist in their original state or as public property, many have been crowded out and demolished and their gardens have been cut up into building plots. The taste for villa-building is, however, not yet dead, and of late years small dwellings in a Baroque style have been springing up like mushrooms in the new quarters, and immense rents are asked for them. Roman flats or apartments as they are called, vary from magnificent suites of thirty or forty rooms to a small domain of three or four. They can be leased even in the most princely of palaces which are so much too large for the requirements of modern life that their owners are glad to let what they cannot use. [Illustration: SEA-HORSE FOUNTAIN IN THE VILLA BORGHESE The glades of Roman villas offer us some of the rare green effects, the colouring which prevails being that in picture 27. See page 46.] The single entrance-gateway, which is locked at night, is under the charge of a porter whose appearance varies according to the social standing of his employer from an imposing figure in gold lace and a cocked hat, to a surly fellow out at heels and elbows who ekes out a precarious livelihood by cobbling or carpentering while he keeps a vigilant but no friendly eye upon the incomings and outgoings of the inhabitants of the wretched tenement under his care. Often, even in good houses, a single room by the side of the gateway serves the porter with his wife and family for bedroom, kitchen, living room, and workshop, and sometimes the same number of human beings are stowed away at night in a mere hole, windowless and doorless, under the stairs. Yet this employment is so sought after that a cabinet minister's portfolio is said to be easier to obtain than a position as house-porter. One or more public staircases lead up from the central courtyard. Before 1870 it was not obligatory to light these, and many a crime has been committed on a long dark flight, the only witness the dwindling oil-lamp before an image of the Madonna. Even now a front door will seldom be opened at once in answer to your ring; a little shutter is pushed back, and you are first inspected through a grating. Or you are greeted with a shrill _chi è_, and only when you have given the reassuring reply, _amici_, "friends," will you be admitted. A middle-class Italian household is not very approachable in the morning. Although extremely early risers--no hour seems too early in Rome for people to be up and about--the house remains _en déshabillé_ till the afternoon. The beds are unmade, the mistress shuffles about in dressing-gown and slippers, adjuring her maid-of-all-work in shrill tones; she even goes out to shop unwashed, in an old skirt and jacket. At first sight all the rooms appear to be bedrooms which are used indifferently to sit in. Nevertheless one room, generally the smallest and least attractive, is set aside as the "reception room." The family never sit in it, and never enter it except to receive their visitors. It is kept carefully closed and shuttered, and if you arrive unexpectedly the maid lets in some light for you with pretty apologies while you wait in the doorway afraid of falling in the dark over the innumerable objects, what-nots and small tables, which crowd the room. A jute-covered sofa of the most uncomfortable pattern, with a strip of carpet before it, is _de rigueur_, and a visitor would consider herself slighted if she were not ushered to this post of honour. There are no carpets on any of the stone floors, and no stoves or fireplaces. If there happens to be a chimney, it is considered unwholesome and is blocked up. There are no comfortable sofas and no lounge chairs. If the weather is fine and warm all is well with such a household. But Rome knows fog, frost, and snow, and though none last for long, wintry days may succeed each other and bitter winds blow down upon the city from the snow-capped Sabine mountains, and then the Romans, forced to stay at home, uncomplainingly wear their coats and jackets within doors to keep body and soul together, and sit warming their fingers over little pans of glowing wood-ash. Like cats, they have a constitutional horror of rain, and will prefer to remain indoors than risk a wetting in search of some place of amusement, or to keep an engagement. Every carter, every beggar, every peasant carries an umbrella; horses and draught oxen are swathed in flannel and mackintosh in the wet, and the drivers of the little open cabs cower beneath leathern aprons and enormous umbrellas, under the dripping edges of which their "fares" creep in and out as best they can. Brigands only, so it is popularly believed, carry no umbrellas, and by this you may know them. The Romans' cheerful acquiescence in what we should consider considerable hardship is nothing less than admirable. After long working hours spent in government offices for example, which are for the most part despoiled monasteries and always bitterly cold, they return to their homes where creature comforts as we understand them are unknown, not because they cannot be afforded, but because they are not desired or missed; and their gaiety or their enjoyment of one another's society is in nowise diminished because they spend the evening sitting at a dining-room table on straight-backed chairs. On the other hand much attention is devoted to the preparation of the meals. Food is daintily prepared and cooked, well flavoured and seasoned. Meat and vegetables are generally cooked in oil- or bacon-fat, and no Roman would look at a dish of food plainly boiled or roasted. Even the poor are skilful in concocting a savoury dish with _polenta_ (ground Indian corn) bread and potatoes flavoured with a dash of onion or tomatoes. All cooking and eating utensils are kept scrupulously clean, and the dirtiest _contadino_ will wipe out his glass carefully before he is satisfied as to its fitness for his use. Romans break their fast with a cup of black coffee and bread without butter, but it is quite usual for them to eat nothing at all until twelve or one o'clock. Their midday dinner begins with either soup or macaroni (_minestra_ or _minestra ascuitta_). If with the soup, then the meat which has been boiled to make it is served next with vegetable garnishings. The macaroni is served with butter, cheese, and tomatoes and there are numberless tasty ways of preparing it. Half a kilogram (eighteen ounces) is considered the portion for each person. If the meal begins with macaroni, this dish would be followed by meat _in umido_, a favourite Roman dressing of tomatoes and onions. People who live quite simply will never touch stale bread, and it is no unusual thing for a fresh batch to be delivered at the door three times a day. Salad, cheese, and eggs done in a variety of ways form the staple of the Roman's evening meal. It is a perpetual wonder to the foreigner what elaborate and excellently cooked dinners can be produced in the unpromising Roman kitchens. Larders and sculleries are almost unknown. A white marble sink--marble fills the lowliest offices in Rome--and a tap in a corner do duty for the latter. The kitchen is often a slip of a room, and the "range" is little more than a table of brick and tiles fitted with small holes for holding charcoal, and with a shaft above for carrying away the unwholesome fumes. Upon these small holes all the cooking is done; the charcoal is fanned into a glow with a feather fan, and if there are many pots and saucepans they must take their turn upon the tiny fires. Scuttles do not exist, and the stock of charcoal for use is kept on the floor beneath the range. [Illustration: ORNAMENTAL WATER, VILLA BORGHESE] Italians of all classes are very fastidious about the cleanliness of their beds, and in this particular their habits contrast favourably with the antediluvian practices prevalent in England, for not only is every article of bedding aired at the window daily, but all the mattresses are picked to pieces and the wool pulled out and beaten every year. This process is carried on generally on the flat house-roofs when the weather is sunny; a mattress-maker with his assistant, his bench and his combs, coming round to do it for you for the modest fee of one lira and a half the mattress. Beyond this the Roman's standard of cleanliness fails altogether. Floors are never washed; they serve to tramp about on in thick boots, to spit upon, and to receive matches and cigar-ash. Doors, painted woodwork, walls, are always soiled; if there is a terrace it becomes at once unsightly and the receptacle for hideous refuse. There is complete indifference to cleanliness as a first condition of hygiene, and it is not unusual to find fowls kept in the kitchen of a good bourgeois house, which take their walks abroad on the balcony and pick up their living under the table. Even in the houses of the great, where many servants are kept, there is often the same Spartan indifference to comfort. Great halls are kept unwarmed except for a brazier of glowing wood-ash, and fireplaces, if they exist, are only sparingly used in the sitting-rooms. Bathrooms are rare, and the habit of the daily bath is almost unknown in a city which once boasted the finest baths the world has seen. If the Roman does not know how to make himself comfortable indoors, no one knows better how to enjoy himself in the open air. The ragged loafer suns himself in the public squares, the workman dozes away his dinner hour at full length under the shelter of a wall; it is in the streets that a Roman holiday is spent. Parents and children of the working classes, the father carrying the baby, stroll about happily for hours, or they walk out beyond the city gates to rest and refresh themselves at one of the wayside _osterie_. Here they gather round the rude tables under a shelter of bamboo canes and eat and drink according to their means. The most forbidding country eating-house can rise to the requirements of better-class customers, and at a pinch can furnish a cleanly cooked and quite palatable dish of macaroni or eggs and vegetable fried in oil for forty or fifty centimes the plate, which is abundant for two. All day long on _festa_ in warm spring weather, chairs and benches outside every wine-shop and eating-house are crowded with a changing throng of holiday makers enjoying themselves simply and harmlessly; and on such days, at a likely corner, you may come across a country man or woman in charge of a huge wild boar roasted whole, stuffed with meat and sage and garlanded with green, from which a succulent morsel will be cut for you, then and there should you desire it, for a trifling sum. [Illustration: VILLAGE STREET AT ANTICOLI, IN THE SABINE HILLS] Out-of-door pleasures appeal no less to the better classes. Fashionable Rome drives daily in the afternoon along the Corso and round the Pincio, the carriages drawing up at intervals near the bandstand. So dear to the Roman heart is the possession of smart clothes and a showy carriage and horses, that entire families will live with parsimony within doors that they may afford these luxuries. During long afternoon hours men will congregate outside the Parliament House and along the Corso to meet and chat with their friends, and chairs and tables with their fashionable occupants block the pavements outside the cafés and restaurants, obliging the passer-by to step out into the roadway. The Roman of the poorer class carries on as much of his domestic life also as he can in the open air. Chairs, kitchen tables, and wash-tubs are dragged out into the streets. Food is prepared and eaten, clothes are washed, and the occupations of sewing, knitting, cobbling, and carpentering are conducted in the open, subject to a lively attention to what is going on in the street. Occasionally a basket attached to a string comes bobbing down from an upper window accompanied by a shrill message: Would Sor' Annunziata have the kindness to buy a copy of the _Messagero_ just being cried in the street? she will find a soldo in the basket. Or would she tell that good-for-nothing vagabond Mark Antony or Hannibal (the raggedest urchins always rejoice in some such name), who is playing _morra_ round the corner, to run at once and buy a ha'porth of white beans. The errand accomplished, the basket is drawn up with its burden, and then blissful hours of leisure slip by in desultory talk with neighbours at their doors and windows opposite, chairs tilted back comfortably against the house wall in the mellow Roman sunlight. In the quiet piazzas, and in shady nooks by the city gates, humble folk can be shaved for a small sum by barbers who ply their trade in the open and pay no shop rent. It is even quite usual in the hot weather for fashionable coiffeurs to move their client's chair outside the door and continue shaving operations there without exciting any comment. Before reading and writing were made obligatory, public letter-writers were common, and they still can be met with in Via Tor de' Specchi, in the shelter of the Salarian gate, and in other quiet places, the group of anxious clients waiting their turn round the table testifying to the inefficiency of a compulsory education Act. Girls used to dictate their love-letters to these scribes, and perhaps still do so, and even the boys did and do write to San Luigi for his _festa_ on 21st June--the letters, tied up with blue ribbon, being subsequently deposited on his altar. The fashion of open-air washing tanks, once universal, is gradually passing away. Outside the walls, the women wash their clothes in the streams and rivers, and inside the city, by the new Ponte Margherita, one of the old public washing-places may still be seen, protected only by a roof and surrounded by a crowd of women in bright-coloured cotton bodices and skirts, washing clothes in the cold turbid water and scrubbing them vigorously on the stone slabs in order that what is left of them after this heroic treatment may at least be clean. Owing to the smallness and darkness of all Roman provision shops, most of the inspection of wares and all the talking, bargaining, and quarrelling is perforce done upon the pavement. Many of the Roman shops still consist of a narrow vault, with no outlet of any sort at the further end, the whole front being closed with a shutter at night. In the early morning all the cooks in Rome and all the general servants are afoot in the streets buying provisions, and they crowd around the temporary market stalls set up in the small piazzas under gay umbrellas, filling the air with their noisy disputes. The curb-stones are occupied by peasant women and their baskets of country produce, which from this central position they extol to the passers-by. These women have walked into the city at dawn carrying their baskets on their heads, and at the gates their poor little merchandise has been overhauled with no gentle hand by the Customs officers, every egg and turnip has been counted, and its _octroi_ duty paid. It takes the foreign resident some time to grasp the idiosyncrasies of Roman shops. A linen draper looks at you with kindly pity if you ask him for ribbons or haberdashery, which can only be obtained at a mercer's devoted to this trade. A grocer only sells dry goods, the numerous shops entitled _pizzicherie_ deal exclusively with cheese, lard, butter, bacon, salted fish, and preserves. Your fishmonger will only sell fish, your butcher closes most inconveniently between twelve and five, and will seldom sell mutton and never lamb, which must be sought at a poulterer's. Macaroni is provided by your baker, or it can be bought in one of the numerous small shops licensed to sell salt and tobacco, where you may also obtain postage stamps, soap, tin tacks, china plates, and mineral waters. All the transactions of daily life have to be conducted in Rome, as every householder soon learns, at the cost of a continuous and exasperating conflict with a class to whom it is second nature to cheat and deceive, to falsify weights and measures, who have no standard of honesty in small things, and who will always say what will please you or themselves rather than what is. The visitor naturally is their peculiar prey. To exploit him is traditional in Rome. In a town with no resources of its own, there is the foreigner and his purse to look to; and he falls an easy victim to people whose language he imperfectly understands, and who are past-masters of all the deceitful arts. The seasons are short and a plentiful harvest must be raked in while they last. Shops in the best quarters will raise the value of their goods a hundred per cent at the sight of a foreign face. Unless the legend "fixed prices" appears in the window for the benefit of the customer, the shopmen will expect you to bargain over every purchase--to haggle for half an hour over a question of six sous or ten is indeed the only commercial instinct they possess. They will generally ask about twice as much as they mean ultimately to accept, and, to their credit be it said, it is not only for the sake of the francs more or less, but quite as much for the excitement of the sport. "I say 200 lire, now it is for you to say something;" or, "The price is so-and-so, what will you give?" are the preludes to some really enjoyable quarters of an hour. The foreigner who pays unquestioningly what he is asked is a poor-spirited creature not worth fleecing. Romans still reckon up their rent or their wages in the old papal currency of a _scudo_ (five francs), and food is cried about the streets at so much the _paolo_ (half a franc). Half a _paolo_ (or _giulio_) the _grosso_, two _paoli_ the _papetto_, three _paoli_ a _testone_, and the halfpenny or _baioccho_ are still the familiar names which come most easily to the tongue. The difference between the old weights and the new, the papal scales and the decimal system of united Italy, is a fruitful source of gain to the tradesman. He clings, partly from sentiment and partly from self-interest, to the old unit of weight, the pound of twelve ounces, and as it appears nowhere on the official scales, he reckons it at one-third of the kilogram (330 grams) or, if you do not watch him carefully, at 300 grams, thus profiting from 1/100 to 1/10 on every kilo (1000 grams) sold. Similarly the Roman measure for firewood is a tightly packed cart-load, but the wood-seller is an adept at making a cart look full when it is not, and your only resource is to buy wood by the weight. Even then, if you desire to receive the quantity you order and pay for, you must not only see it weighed but you must keep an eye upon it on its journey to your house, or it will become beautifully less for the benefit of the carter. The charcoal for kitchen use you buy in a measured sack of a given weight. The first time you bestow your custom you are delighted with quality and quantity, but with each order the sack shrinks in size, and when you expostulate the coal-seller will answer you unblushing that if you insist upon having the coal weighed he cannot supply it at the price! There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept there is no alternative. The _donna di servizio_ or maid-of-all-work goes out each morning to spend an enjoyable half-hour or more, meeting her friends and making shrill bargains at the shop doors. An Italian's servant will buy a halfpenny worth of bacon-fat or lard or preserved tomato, and as such small quantities cannot be weighed she receives a spoonful of lard or a dab of butter wrapped up in a leaf, and the whole is tied up and carried home in a brilliant cotton handkerchief. The man-cook will not condescend to one of these shopping handkerchiefs. He will carry a few parcels, but he generally returns, a small boy in his wake bearing a basket on his head wherein all his purchases are displayed. The prevalent custom in Rome is for the servant to give the least possible price for all she buys, and to charge her mistress a higher one, the balance going into her own pocket. Servants of unimpeachable honesty in every other respect will succumb to this temptation. If serving foreigners, they can often double their wages, and so well is the practice recognised that the mistress who is too watchful to permit it is spoken of as giving only a _mesata secca_, a dry wage. [Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI Built in 1549 for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Alfonso II., Duke of Ferrara. It passed thence to the heir of this family, the Duke of Modena. See pages 172, 174.] Rome used to be one of the cheapest of European cities to live in; rents were low and food was cheap; meat was three sous the pound, and when it rose to four the Romans were indignant. Heavy taxation under the Italian Government has now changed all this. Beef is seventeen sous the pound, and rents have been almost doubled in the past twenty years. Wages are still very moderate. A woman servant gets from eighteen to thirty francs a month, a man thirty to sixty. If an English mistress engages an Italian servant, even if he or she is said to know their work, she must begin from the rudiments and even then there comes a point beyond which instruction fails to produce any result. The refinements of English service are looked upon as so many curious rites without meaning, and our standard of cleanliness and our fastidiousness are a perpetual source of wonder. The pride of the Roman prevents her, as a rule, from undertaking domestic service. When she does, she makes the roughest and worst of maids. The natural instinct of every ordinary Italian servant is to throw all refuse out of the window, as she still does in the towns of the campagna, or where her kitchen window gives upon an unfrequented courtyard, and the rest of her service is in keeping with this standard, the restrictions laid upon her by the demands of civilisation being the very thinnest veneer. She will never clean a floor on her own initiative, and very seldom on yours, and is quite capable of giving you notice should you expect it. Nevertheless if you can bring yourself to compromise with your own standard and put up with some of hers, you will find her on the whole a genial creature to deal with. She is blessed with abundant leisure, and has always time to carry on protracted conversations and even flirtations out of the kitchen window. No event in the street or in the courtyard beneath escapes her attention, yet she manages to do the housework, cook the meals, wait at table, clean the boots, iron and mend the clothes, and buy the provisions. She will, moreover, think nothing of sleeping in a mere cupboard without air or light, only fit to store boxes in, or in one of the passages on a sofa-bed which is folded up in the daytime, such plans being quite usual in a Roman household. The Italian man-servant is the most domestic of beings and is on the whole the most teachable and efficient; but he also is accustomed to lay a table by placing a knife, fork, and spoon in a bunch before each person, adding a glass, and _voilà tout_, and a higher ideal than this is a severe tax on memory and intelligence. "He certainly knew how to lay a cloth when he left me," an American lady said of her man-servant who had been with her nine years, "but perhaps he has forgotten"; and he certainly had, though he had only been out of her situation a year. A so-called finished servant, who had been years in a prince's establishment, thought nothing of receiving a basket of linen from the French laundress and depositing it on our dining-room table pending further instructions, and our disapproval only grieved without enlightening him. And no instruction will impress upon an Italian the impropriety of announcing English callers by a description rather than attempting to pronounce their foreign names: "The gentleman from the hotel," or "The young lady who married that old man!" But their charming manners and easy grace disarm criticism and win forgiveness for many shortcomings. In military households the master's orderly is often turned into a domestic drudge. Yet such situations are eagerly sought by young soldiers, for though they receive no extra pay they are excused military duty after the first ten months of their enrolment, and they compound their rations for a weekly government allowance. It is no uncommon thing to see a young man in uniform doing the whole work of an officer's house, cooking, cleaning, marketing, waiting at table, taking the children to school, wheeling the perambulator, and even doing the family washing and ironing. A measure of magnificence and pomp still obtains in the great Roman households, but it is combined with a simplicity of life and an informality of relation between employer and employed which rob it of its stiffness. The servants of a great house are not a caste apart, they are part of the family establishment. Their masters give them the familiar _tu_, and they are treated with far more intimacy and friendliness than is ever the case with us. In return the servants identify themselves with their employers' concerns, and take the greatest interest in all their doings, an interest no doubt fostered by the utter indifference to privacy existing in most households, where conversations on all subjects are carried on with widely open doors regardless of listeners. Servants and others of the same class will generally abide by an agreement clearly made, though foreigners are always advised to have even the conditions of service in black and white, and it is never safe to trust to precedent or to general rules in one's dealings with them. They are quite unfettered by the existing laws and unwritten obligations which make up their English counterpart's code of respectability, and they will be faithful to you only so long as their interest does not clash with yours. Instances to the contrary are rare. An Italian servant is quite capable of giving you instant notice for a mere whim, and departing the same day without the slightest compunction for the inconvenience he causes. Woe to the foreigner who seeks redress for conduct of this kind, or who is involved in any dispute however righteous his cause. Such cases are brought up in the district courts before magistrates who are appointed to act in each division of the city as conciliators (save the mark!). No solicitor of any standing likes to appear in these courts, they are beneath the dignity of his position, and he will only do so as a favour. An attorney of an inferior order, who is as often as not a layman masquerading as such, can be hired on the spot like a porter to see you through. Your opponent will certainly engage the services of one of these individuals, and when the case comes on to your no small amazement he will rise and make a fluent speech in favour of his client having little or no reference to the events as they occurred. If considered needful, he will also call several false witnesses who will swear entire falsehoods with perfect _sangfroid_. When your solicitor attempts to state your case the attorney on the other side interrupts him with indignant denials, and the conciliator joins in with the most injudicial display of temper. The comedy ends by all three talking at once in loud excited voices, without listening to one another, and the conciliator announces the close of the sitting. He then proceeds to give his verdict which is invariably in favour of the servant, and his socialistic tendencies in this particular are assisted by his not having paid the least attention to the evidence before him. [Illustration: IN VILLA BORGHESE A priest and one of the Austrian Seminarists, whose red dress has bestowed on them the popular nickname of "_boiled prawns_," are here seen conversing in the shade of the villa; the spring sunshine glints through the trees.] CHAPTER VII THE ROMAN PEOPLE I. _The Italians._ There are four great movements which moulded the political intellectual and moral life of other European countries without leaving their impress on Italy. Feudalism and scholasticism took less hold there than in Germany England or France; the spirit of chivalry never touched the Italian, and Puritanism, of course, left him scatheless. Feudalism had little affinity with a people democratic to the core, scholasticism had little attraction for the most open-minded and the least didactic nation on earth, and neither the chivalry of the Frank nor the Puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon awoke echoes in a people whose self-interestedness and lack of the sense of personal responsibility are only equalled by the absence of all illusions, and whose hatred of shams is as radical as their freedom from hypocrisy. Compared with the non-Latin peoples the lines of Italian development have been intellectual rather than on the side of character and conduct. The intellect of Italy has constantly spread a banquet before the spirit of Europe, as the beauty of the land from north to south has offered a feast of material beauty to every generation. Italian quickness in appropriating an idea is matched by Italian open-mindedness; you never meet in Italy the wall of thick-headed self-righteous prejudice--that array of pre-judgments which an Italian has aptly called _idols_--which the Englishman never fails to brandish when confronted by a new idea. Perhaps it is the fact that the Italians are the least prejudiced people on the face of the earth which makes living in their country delightful to Northerners. Some of our countrymen have certainly reason to be pleased that this is so; but the Italian illimitable tolerance of the foibles and eccentricities of others does not mean that they acquit us of bad manners and provincialism. Italian intellect, the familiarity with and the play of ideas in the Italian, is not the same thing as a lofty idealism; and when a Dane recently wrote that the Italians possess the highest humanistic qualities and therefore are also nearer the supernatural than other people, he made, I think, this mistake. He confused ideas with idealism. The Italian gift _par excellence_ is _le sens très vif des réalités_,[4] a vivid hold on the real; and this realism is the source at once of their qualities and their defects. The Italian has only one use for an idea, he must see it as it is. Hence he strips everything, tears away its drapery, exposes it to the garish pitiless light of fact. There is nothing which deserves in itself and always reverence--for him a spade is a spade, a fiasco a fiasco, a corpse a corpse. There is none of that prevenient idealism which in the north draws a veil over the crudities of sense, and helps to illuminate the half-truths they reveal. It is easy to see that such a quality as this is intellectually valuable, but morally disastrous. The special loveliness of the nature formed in the north is the persuasion that there are things one is not to see, not to hear. That northern "custody of the senses" which is not an ascetical exercise, but an inner illumination thrown upon them. [4] Gebhart, _L'Italie Mystique_. The intellectual limitation "thus far shalt thou go and no farther," which the Englishman willingly imposes on himself, is impossible to the Italian, whose moral qualities have to reckon with the intellectual liberty which is proper to his genius. The passionate love of intellectual truth for its own sake is one of these moral qualities, and the people who do not possess it inevitably contract certain moral defects. These are not the defects of the Italian; he is not a hypocrite in his moral relations, not a snob in social concerns, not a prig in matters of intellect, and has no faculty for the mystical self-deceptions of the Northerner. His complete democracy of sentiment is shown in many pleasant ways. It is difficult for the average Englishman to imagine that rank should make no difference, to understand the dignified and simple relations which subsist between classes in Italy. A man in a good coat is not ashamed to be seen talking with a friend in fustian; people of entirely different walks in life may be seen buttonholing each other; and a Roman prince arm in arm with a man of the lower bourgeoisie is no infrequent spectacle. "We are all people of consideration in this house," said a Roman to me--"on the floor below there is a Senator, upstairs there is a teacher of languages, and I am a shopkeeper." Sovereignty too, in spite of the heavy etiquette of the House of Savoy, is democratic in Italy. The King does not live in inaccessible _penetralia_, and the man of the people when he comes across the man to whom he invariably refers as _sua maestà_ will speak his mind to him. King Humbert assisted at the inauguration of Bocconi's big shop in the Corso and congratulated him on this new piece of commercial enterprise in the city; which is as though King Edward VII. should pay an inaugural visit to Whiteley's. Queen Margaret has always attended some Sunday lectures given in Rome by the association for the higher education of women--no Englishman could have imagined Queen Victoria attending, say, a university extension lecture at Bedford College. The Latin believes much more than we do in the principle of authority, and cares infinitely less about its representatives. [Illustration: THE "SPANISH STEPS," PIAZZA DI SPAGNA Erected for the Romans at the expense of a Frenchman in the eighteenth century. The _Piazza_ takes its name from the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican which has its residence here. At the Sacred Heart Convent attached to the church of the Trinità de' Monti, at the top of the steps, generations of girls of Roman families have been educated. The Egyptian obelisk came from the gardens of Sallust and was placed here by Pius VI. See page 141.] Italian civilisation is imperialistic and social, not individualistic. There is a greater sense of public decorum (as distinguished, however, from private decency) than among us, and more sacrifice of the individual to the society. One consequence of this is that there is less of that eccentricity, which is the individualism of the poorly endowed, less personal initiative, less enterprise, and nothing of that spirit of adventure which is the Anglo-Saxon's romance. The Italian would always, in spite of loud complainings to a just heaven, rather "bear the ills he has than fly to others that he knows not of." Just now it is the fashion in Italy to regard the "individualism" of modern Italians as the reason for their failure to co-operate. But a want of cohesion (mental and moral) is mistaken for individualism. It is certain that the Englishman is an "individualist" yet he achieves everything by co-operation; it is certain that he possesses that sign-manual of individualism--initiative, and certain that the Italian does not. Italy is not suffering from an orgy of individualism in her people but from an orgy of egotism--which is quite a different matter. It is a fact worth noting that every nation believes its own family life to be the purest and most solid. The truth is that family life plays a more important part in Italy than in England, and Latin parents everywhere sacrifice themselves more for their children than we do. So strong is the blood tie that it has been said that there is nothing at the back of the Italian character but the love of family. Children make far more difference in the life of an Italian than in the life of an Englishman; and when love and devotion and obedience are required of them, they have already seen in their parents as in a mirror how life and personal comfort and personal ambition can be squandered for love. An English parent can leave all he has away from his children, and he frequently leaves the elder provided for and the younger not provided for at all. A Latin parent cannot do this, and it is a signal witness to the sense of obligation towards those they bring into the world which subsists among the Latin races. If the blood tie is strong in Italy, friendship is very rare. As in the family relations so here it is the lack of marked individualism which is the determinant. It requires little effort to come up to the family standard; such effort, too, while it may lead to self-repression seldom brings about self-development. To come up to the standard of your peers outside the home requires on the contrary an exercise of all the individual powers; and friendship belongs to the individualistic peoples, those who prize personal rather than tribal and family character; to a people with no moral indolence, with the initiative and the power to become something on their own account, and to stand by themselves. The one "provincialism" of the Italian is--perhaps--his suspicion of all who stand without the blood tie: the adventurous spirit of the Anglo-Saxon which has colonised three continents has led him to a very different estimate of reliance on and co-operation with his fellow-men, and the capacity for genuine friendship outside the blood tie may claim to have always acted as an anti-barbaric note in Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The Italians have another strongly distinctive feature. They are a more passionate but a less sentimental people than we. I suppose the Germans are the most sentimental people of Europe, and we come next. But in Italy the Englishman is not credited with sentiment. According to the Italian press, for example, he has "the patriotism of the pound sterling." For my part I regard the Italian as the least sentimental man in Europe; we, on the contrary, both as individuals and as crowds, are governed by our sentimentality. The whole British middle class would make war to-morrow to satisfy a sentimentalism which the Latin peoples regard as exclusively their own. Those who recollect that the reception accorded to Garibaldi put into the shade the entry into London of the bride of our future King, ought not to accuse the English of lack of disinterested sentiment. The Italians have the sentiment of the beautiful the grandiose and the fit--but they are the last people in the world to be put out of their course by a scruple or an _élan_. On the other hand there is a real sense in which the Englishman is devoid of a quality which is allied to the Latin graciousness. England shows a want of pride in and sentiment towards dependencies like the Channel Islands or Ireland which we should not find in France or Italy. She forgets, neglects, has no grip, and takes no hold on the imagination. Other nations have exploited their colonies and dependencies and the British suzerain is not appealed to in vain for protection under his flag--but something lacks, and so it comes about that the foreigner frequently likes our justice but not ourselves. [Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF THE SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ON A WET DAY] That sentiment which comes of a certain noble graciousness in peoples is shown in other ways in Italy. It is a moving thing to see the sons bear the coffin of father or mother, to see men of all classes follow the dead _on foot_; and then there is the Latin gracious treatment of birthdays and anniversaries, the Latin power of making a fête, of "fêteing you," surrounding you with the feeling that you are of importance for the moment, that content is really reigning round you; the many ways in which the sentiments of piety to the hearth and piety to the dead are expressed; the power of handling life lightly and of expressing feeling appropriately. The Italian though he is not so "intense," in the slang sense, as we, and gives way to less emotional sentiment, is far more impressionable. On the other hand he is not ashamed to betray emotion, or to speak of his _agitazione_; and it will astonish the Englishman to be told that although the Italian is so quick of feeling that one may think he is at the death grip with a man in the street to whom he is only narrating his unexpected meeting with a relative from the country, he studiously avoids those sentimental "scenes" which are so dear to the Anglo-Saxon. The hot-blooded Italian speaks of the "_furor francese_"--that unmatched capacity for summing the intellectual points of a case and exhausting its emotional possibilities in one lightning moment,--and it is a fact that they judge the French people to be far more mobile and inconstant than themselves. In common with other Latins, they have more vanity than we, but less self-consciousness, more simplicity, and none of that _mauvaise honte_ which betrays that the Englishman has not got his emotions under control. But there is in the best Englishman an excellent sort of simplicity which frees him from attending to the _personal point_ which is always present to the Italian whether he is dealing with matters public or private. On the other hand the Italians are completely free of the French _bête noir_, _chauvinisme_. And they have another great moral superiority: in America every one brags on his own account; in England we plump for national brag--there is a howling blast of the national trumpet always chilling the air round an Englishman. But the Italians do not brag; they have, indeed, no reason at all to act as _parvenus_. Their scepticism applies to themselves even more than to others, and no people are so ready for self-depreciation. According to them A, B, and C--the other nations of the earth--can accomplish this or that, while "_un italiano non è buono a niente_." In nothing, I believe, would Italians achieve greater distinction than in medicine, where a distinguished tradition of the art of healing goes hand in hand not only with the intellectual gifts of the people, but with an unrivalled delicacy of intuition. In no country are there better doctors, men armed at all points with the science of their age; yet as an Italian has remarked "Among us the physician counts as less than nothing while in France he takes rank as a scientific authority." The Italian and the Irishman are the only amiable men in Europe--we must go as far as Japan to find their equals. Both people have the desire to please--or is it a mark of ancient breeding?--the self-effacement, the courteous absence of self-assertion so difficult to the Englishman. The Italian will offer you the reins of his horses, and any and all of those privileges and advantages which the English owner regards as inalienably his. The traditional hospitality of cold climates is indeed nowhere greater than in England, but there is no more entirely hospitable host than the Italian when he admits you to his house. Nowhere are crowds so good-natured or so well-behaved. Yet the Italians complain louder than any other people, and have not French buoyancy in the troubles and tragedies of life. Who will believe it if we add that they have an admirable patience? The Englishman makes his holiday miserable by his indignation if the train is late, if some one steps on his toes, if he has to wait an hour while his dinner is cooking. The Italian takes all these things as part of the day's work or play, and finds his amusement in them besides. That is another great distinction--he cares for life for its own sake. The Englishman cares for it for some end he has in view, and the end may be noble or mean. With quicker sympathy and much quicker response than ours, they are a less kindly people; and what is it in the Italians that allows you to find them all at once in undress, the veneer gone, and the raw material left? The Englishman would find it hard, too, to understand a certain terrible outsideness, something callous and pitiless in the uneducated Italian: self-interest looms too large, and an apparent want of power of self-sacrifice--outside the blood tie--I take to be the great moral weakness of the Italian character. We shall already have understood that the Italian does not wait to be told these things by others--he is the first to judge himself; he has no illusions. In England we are fond of throwing a veil over our national defects or of calling them by some fine name, but the Italian of all ranks has put the defects of his qualities over and over again in the crucible of his terrible love of reality with its quick perception of shams; and to understand the defects of Italians one has only to read their own masterly appreciations of national character. [Illustration: ROMAN PEASANT CARRYING COPPER WATER POT] The Italian race is, I believe, prepotent in mixed marriages. In marriages between German and Italian or English and Italian the child shares indeed some of the mental characteristics of Angle or Teuton, but the _personality_ is an Italian personality. This prepotence of the Latin people I take to be the effect of what some one has called "a great temperament"--the one quality which we may be quite sure has belonged to every remarkable man. Of all the great races the men of modern Germany leave least trace of themselves. It is noteworthy that the instances of mixed marriages are nearly all instances of women of the English German and American races intermarrying with Italian men; but whichever way it is, it remains as true of Italy as of France that "the _ménage_ is always in the country of the Latin partner." The Italians say: "_inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato_," and this is also true of Americans and may be true of Teutons. Two Italian girls who spent a season in London described to me their attempts to imitate what they called "_lo stiff_," the stiff reserved manner of the Englishman of breeding. They failed, it seems, woefully, for they could not acquire "_lo stiff_" and they lost their own pretty manners. So it is with the Anglo-Saxon in Italy. We have not their _finesse_, or the mental and temperamental qualities which balance their moral defects; the Englishman adopts these with interest and his national virtues are shed like a garment. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that Italian women give Englishmen small encouragement to turn themselves into _diavoli incarnati_; for it must be recorded that the English and American wife in Italy runs no such risk: she remains herself, the national character does not wear off like a poor veneer, she does not outrage native susceptibilities without acquiring native graces, and distinguished women of our race have for the past two hundred years brought their native virtues to Italy while adopting Italian causes with an enthusiasm which did not yield even to that of Italians themselves. In Rome the English wife of General La Marmora, the two Talbots who became Gwendoline Borghese and Mary Doria, the American wife of Garibaldi, and the Scotch wife of the triumvir Aurelio Saffi (still alive), all played a conspicuous Italian rôle. There are more people with great temperaments among the Latin races than among ourselves; and as it is "plenty of temperament" which is wanted for the creations of art it is not difficult to understand why the Italians are artistic and we are not. And the Italians are a people of artists. In England where one man in a thousand may possess the artistic temperament it is difficult to realise the keen observation, the appreciation of technique for its own sake, the intuitive way of gauging and grouping the data of the senses, the balance and proportion implied in a race where one man in ten judges as an artist. Wagner expresses, in a letter to Boïto, his admiration of the Italian attitude to art--the open-mindedness and delicate feeling in artistic questions which make him "understand again," after a visit there, "the matchlessly productive spirit to which the new world owes all its art since the Renaissance." When Edward VII. visited Rome the _Times_ and other English newspapers compared the consummate yet simple scheme of decoration with the tasteless and meaningless banner and bunting displays which London witnesses on similar occasions. The love of beauty--the Greek horror of deformity--is so strong with this people that its imperatives take precedence of moral considerations--of pity, delicacy, kindliness. The uneducated Italian shows his instinctive disgust at what is ugly or horrible and, as we have seen, no prevenient idealism checks the impulse. It is an important truth that Italians learn from the outside and that Northern peoples get from without only what they bring from within; that Italians have, perhaps, as little ethical awareness as they have signal and abiding æsthetical awareness. But that uninterrupted vision of reality which has relegated moral vision to the second place has bestowed on Europe not what is crude and naked and bare, but another mode of seeing, of feeling, of being--one of the great modes of human expression--art. This people who have been called "prodigals of themselves" have been so prodigal of their gifts that the hand which stripped the veil from the objects of sense is also the hand which clothed them, returning them to us with the crudity gone, replaced with new meaning, by new vision--expressed for ever in higher terms. The ruthless vision which saw so much, and suffered no illusion, saw also something which we did not see; and revealing to us what lay beyond our sight held up a mirror in which the real looks back at us as the ideal. The imagination of the Kelt, said Matthew Arnold, "with its passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact" has never succeeded in producing a masterpiece of art. Here we have a clue to the truth--which the Greek had already taught us--that _interpretation_ is not left only to the peoples whose vision is turned inwards; that when, for such, the external seems bared of all meaning, the realist may restore it to us with the new vision in it. II. _The Romans._ In no European country has the secular conflict between race and race, province and province, been keener than in Italy--Lombards, Venetians, Tuscans, Romans, and Neapolitans have formed not only politically but morally antagonistic communities; and Italy has yet to create that moral unity which is no more a tradition of her past than is the civil unity she has already achieved. Nowhere, during the era of the _Risorgimento_, was this antagonism more keenly felt than in Rome and by the Romans who have always divided the inhabitants of that "geographical expression," Italy, into "Romans" and "Italians." To this day the difficulties of moral union are fed by the incompatibilities and the jealousies of "north" and "south." To the warm Southerner, Lombards and Piedmontese are a nation of shopkeepers; to the Northerner, the Neapolitan, the Calabrese, and the Sicilian are as brilliant impossible and mediæval Irishmen. Midway between these two, neither north nor south, stands and always has stood the Roman: by sympathy, proclivity, and geographical position a little more south than north; but by history achievement and tradition independent of either. Florence represents the fine flower of the Italian spirit, the South its poetry, Venice and the North its civil greatness. What is notable everywhere is an incomparable productiveness in all activities of the human intellect, all fineness of the human spirit. But Rome has not produced. After that one act of creation, the Roman polity, Rome has been sterile; its function has been not to create but to criticise. Like the great Church which has developed within its borders, Rome has been the lawgiver, the critic of other men's gifts, but has laid no claim--when once we cede her initial gift of an infallible _magisterium_--to _charismata_. And so the Roman possesses in its highest terms the gift of _criterion_. Some witty person--a Frenchman of course--said that England was an island and every Englishman was an island; and so we may say that Rome was arbiter of the world and every Roman possesses that keen vivid abounding gift of _arbitrament_. [Illustration: CHAPEL OF THE PASSION IN THE CHURCH OF SAN CLEMENTE The church, which is in the street leading from the Lateran to the Colosseum, belongs to the Irish Dominicans.] Rome therefore is not Italy for taste, art, delicacies of sentiment, for the great creations of the intellect the spirit and the imagination--Rome is the ancient mistress of the world; and the rôle the function and the influence of Rome must all be viewed in relation to her gift of infallible criterion, of world dominance. The Roman of to-day not only lives in the city of the Roman who gave laws to the known world, he thinks his thoughts and to a great extent lives his life. He is the result of the grandiose memories of the past playing upon such a temperament as his. He lives surrounded by vague memories, understanding that it was something exceedingly great which fell, leaving him in the midst of these ruins. And the Roman has a supreme indifference--he looks upon every event with the same tolerance, the same sentiment of Emerson's "fine Oxford gentleman" that "there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter." One procession passes him by to honour Giordano Bruno, victim of theological bigotry; another passes to the Vatican to render homage to the power which crushed Bruno: the Roman looks out upon both with the same eyes, the same indifferent dignity. "The Roman apathy," say some; but others call it a superiority, Roman largeness of outlook, the Roman freedom from what is petty and intolerant. Who are the modern Roman people? Are they the genuine survivors of the rulers of the world? That there has been an immense influx of alien blood since the fifth century is certain. The incredible depletion of the Roman population in some periods was repaired by immigration from other parts of Italy; but Roman characteristics at the present day are too well marked to allow us to suppose that Rome has been at any time swamped by foreign admixture, or that the persistence of these characteristics can be accounted for merely by the continuity of Roman civilisation and the Roman _milieu_. The Romans of to-day, therefore, are the same people as the Romans of the great epoch--but with a difference. They are Romans with the energy sapped out; with the power of self-sacrifice for a public good gone, and with it the power to impose themselves on the nations, on their fellows. Romans with no heroes and no martyrs. [Illustration: A RUSTIC DWELLING IN THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA] Nowhere, in fact, can the Italian character be seen so unspoiled as in Rome, where fewer outside influences and neither education nor social polish have conspired to modify the characteristics of the nation who were once the _buontemponi_ of Europe. The people of classic Rome had always been men of a certain roughness, whose heroic qualities were formed at the expense of delicacy of sentiment. This rudeness of mind, of sentiment, of taste showed itself in every part of the Roman life. While Athenians watched the tragedies of Sophocles in theatres which could only hold a select audience, the Romans crowded into huge amphitheatres where a hundred thousand men and women gloated over the sufferings of sentient creatures--animals or men, it made no difference; the same hideous "practical jokes," as Walter Pater notes, being impartially meted out to both. Centuries after Athens met to applaud the periods of Pericles, the Roman ladies were turning down their thumbs that they might be sated with the spectacle of the last agony of the vanquished in the arena. The refined symposia of Greece became in Rome barbaric banquetings where the guests prolonged the pleasures of the table by vomiting what they had already eaten. The stern self-repression, the admirable power of devotion in a public cause, the contempt of pleasure and of life, the _animus lucis contemptor_ of the early Republic, were qualities which did not descend to the Romans of the Empire. _The Roman Type_ Not only Roman characteristics but the Roman type also have descended. The large round massive Roman head still contrasts with the narrow pointed head of the Tuscan. The type still admired in women is the _tipo giunonico_, the type of Juno and of the Roman matron--large massive and imposing. The Roman has a ruddy fresh complexion, the swarthy southern skin being comparatively rare; he has black hair, is burly and tends to obesity. His expression is tranquil and contented, and Signor Aristide Gabelli in his essay on Rome and the Romans bids us observe that the type has improved, that we no longer see the hard, bitter, threatening expression of the busts in the Capitol and Vatican, the prominent jaw and cheek bones have been softened; and the Roman of the city, at any rate, wears a more genial and humane expression than his classic ancestor. At a church function, among the Roman peasants--though I fear the type was more frequent in the "eighties"--one may see a face which might serve as the model for Jove, for a Roman poet or philosopher. It is such a face as could never be met with even among the best specimens of our peasantry. Muffled in his great fur-collared cloak, dirty and ragged, with eyes which seem to look from a soul that harbours every noble aspiration, our old peasant who can certainly neither read nor write, is probably cogitating why Checco refused to give him the wine at three sous the measure, or whether he would have done better to put the franc the _forastiero_ gave him into shoes, instead of following Peppe's suggestion as to lottery numbers. So much for the wonders which an old civilisation can confer without any effort or any preparation. [Illustration: PROCESSION WITH THE HOST AT SUBIACO] Many assert that the _Trasteverini_ are the only lineal descendants of the Romans. The legend is that Trastevere was colonised by the Greeks brought by Aeneas, and the Greco-Roman type may frequently be seen there in absolute perfection--women of the people having the classic features and the noble bearing of empresses. They are a more robust race than the Romans on the other side of the Tiber, the black hair of the women is still more luxuriant, the character more passionate and vindictive, the language coarser, the reputation of the women not so fair. In common with all Italians the Romans are more graceful than English men and women. The simple dignity and grace of the pose and carriage, with no stiffness or awkwardness, makes it easy to distinguish an Italian among Englishmen Germans or Americans whether he is sitting or standing. They have the small Latin bones and small hands and feet; the foot, however, is flatter than ours, and every one from the children to the soldiers drags his feet along the ground. But the walk is so unstilted that Italians form a natural procession, whereas a procession in England is achieved with much difficulty and is not really pleasing to the eye when it is achieved. Have you ever noticed the _mesquin_ gesture--the fear to let himself go which is so closely allied to the knowledge that he cannot do it gracefully--with which one commonplace Englishman bids good-bye to another? You will see nothing like this in Italy. The ample Roman gesture--that Italian gesture of reassurance which seems to the Englishman quite sacerdotal--is the property of every one; and a woman of the people will hail an omnibus with the classic gesture that her ancestor might have used when bidding Olympian Jove stay his thunderbolt. The Italians have the Latin eye and eyebrow; one never sees the unmodelled elementary eye, with its gaze _bon enfant_, of our younger civilisation. Naturally resonant, the voices of Italians are in all classes harsh and unmodulated; and there is no better evidence of the general ignorance in Rome than the uneducated speaking voices which make it impossible to distinguish a princess from a peasant at her prayers. The possession of a strong natural organ, quite untutored, is here joined to the Roman love of noise and racket; and the result is that the people scream at each other as if they were deaf, and you can only be sorry they are not also mute. It is an odd thing to hear the deep bass voice of some of the women alternating with the high thin tenor of many of the men; one may often mistake in this way the sex of unseen speakers. The deep voices of the women remind one that the contralto, and even the _contro tenore_, have been cultivated _con amore_ in Italy: on the other hand a labourer in the fields or your servant-man in the kitchen region can be heard singing in high falsetto like a girl. What one will never hear in Italy are the affected speaking voices cultivated by Englishmen: the Italian does not "put on side" either in his voice or his manners, and nothing is more noticeable perhaps on one's return to England than the absurdly affected voice of the men. There is no Roman dialect in the sense in which there is a Venetian a Piedmontese and a Neapolitan dialect--habitually spoken by all classes among themselves. The _Romanesco_ spoken in Rome by the people is a debased Italian, not a real dialect. The purest Italian is, as we all know, spoken in Tuscany, where there is no dialect, and the best pronunciation is the Roman. Hence the proverb: "The Tuscan language in the Roman mouth," _Lingua toscana in bocca romana_. _The Roman's Character_ The pride of the Roman is his chief characteristic; it keeps him from some of the pettinesses of his neighbours and is occasionally the idol to which self-interest is sacrificed. But the same people who are too proud to work are not too proud to beg. This kind of pride, indeed, is to be found a little everywhere in Italy, and I have known a distinguished Italian with a starving family who would consent to give lessons in "Italian literature" but not in "Italian grammar." In France where there is the maximum of self-respect this kind of pride is unknown. The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed, is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as an Italian from another province might do. But the Roman pride is a disease; it clamours for its own license and respects no one else's liberty; it plays into the hands of the Latin lawlessness, and the Roman spirit of revolt has tormented the popes ever since Constantine deserted the capital of the West. The Roman resents what he calls _prepotenza_, but a self-disciplined law-abiding people can hardly understand the stupid _prepotenza_ say of the cabmen in Rome--a majority of whom are Romans. The Roman lad or the Roman man takes it into his head to make a bee-line in your direction, to walk over that particular piece of road or pavement, and the feeble sense of righteous indignation he possesses is only kindled if you attempt to thwart him. The satyr-like--half-childish, half-malignant--cult of the _dispetto_, the miserable pleasure taken in deliberately inconveniencing you, are so many proofs of an undisciplined nature--and where shall we see so many undisciplined faces as in Rome?--albeit that here it masquerades as the just _orgoglio_ of a people descended from gods and heroes. _"Non me lo dica, perchè io sono romano"_ (Do not say it to me, for I am a Roman), is a warning phrase repeated in perfect good faith, as who should say: "Do not provoke this son of a god." [Illustration: GIRL SELLING BIRDS IN THE VIA DEL CAMPIDOGLIO The Forum in the background. The road marks the old _Clivus Capitolinus_. See page 30.] The Roman's most pleasing characteristic is his genuineness; that, and a certain magnanimity, a certain nobleness of mind. The Roman has no "jesuitry," and he will not say behind your back what he dare not say to your face. In contrast to other Italians is his roughness--a legacy of old Rome--a rudeness of spirit which is a curious compound of pride in the past, of age-long absence of mental cultivation--of a moral quality, brutal sincerity, and of a mental quality, a terrific realism. They are also, perhaps, the best hearted people in Italy; and a dear old Roman friend used to declare that the Romans and the English were the kindest hearted people in the world. Intellectually, no people in Italy have more talent: it is a key which opens many doors to say that the Roman is talented but not cultured. There is no real culture in any class, but there is a facility unmatched even in this land of natural gifts. The one exception to the general ignorance which exists by the side of an extraordinary quickness is an interesting one: every Roman is an archaeologist; to be unable to take your part in an archaeological discussion would be to write yourself down as an impossible ignoramus. On this subject every Roman is alert, and I was present when the foundations for the first houses which now lead to Porta Salara were being dug, and a marble relief was found which the workmen at once told me was "the rape of Lucretia." Imagine a bricklayer in London proffering a similar observation! With the general ignorance there is also in the upper class a widespread intellectual apathy; many of the Roman aristocracy have never visited the Palatine, and when it was suggested to a young Roman that she had never seen the Capitol, she answered: "Oh yes, I saw it the day I was married." Part of the Capitol buildings are the registry offices of Rome where the obligatory civil marriage takes place. The drive on the _Pincio_, which is not larger than the tract of the park from Hyde Park corner to the Marble Arch, satisfies the most exacting ambition; and the fussy foreigner who spends his time in museums and galleries is regarded as a harmless and well-meaning lunatic. Every human being is the product of contrasts; but the Roman is more so than other men: to explain, not what he is, but what he is not we have, I think, only to look at the contradictions, the inconsequence of a character which in the expressive Italian phrase is _sconclusionato_, it comes to no conclusion. For the Roman though he is turbulent is easily led; he is at once obstinate and teachable; he is not _fin_ but he throws a terrible light on all things; without being "_finto_" (feigned) he puts self-interest first. He is both ingenuous and suspicious; to his overweening pride he joins considerable diffidence; and the tongue which babbles of his personal affairs is the tongue of a man who has a profound distrust of his neighbour. A fine critic with a child's simplicity, he is sceptical and superstitious, credulous and incredulous, seeing the works of the oracle but allowing it to deceive him. Joined to his indifference is a faculty for staking his all on some absurd punctilio: his interest in ideas is greater than in many parts of Italy, his ambitions and pleasures more materialist. The changes which the Roman has witnessed in unchanging Rome are met in himself by changeableness and fickleness of purpose, though the conception of the majestic, the grandiose, the eternal is always there. What are we to say of a people who can unite the pettiest spite with a magnanimous tolerance? The denizen of the eternal city is proverbially _campanilista_, which may be translated "attached to the village pump"; and while on the other hand he has a sense of public decorum unequalled in Europe, the _blasé_ Roman fritters time and talents in petty preoccupations, in distractions which are neither dignified nor stately, and eats and gambles to show his distrust of human effort in general, of all human achievement since the incomparable days when his heroes walked the earth. The Roman does not merge in you, and he no longer imposes himself on you. He is not free of obsequiousness; and such customs as the _baciamano_ (hand-kissing) are said to derive from the fact that the Romans have been "the hosts of Europe" and have learnt to depend on its bounty. A readier explanation is certainly afforded in that aspect of Catholic Christianity which has always encouraged personal humiliations and servilism in the inferior clergy and the laity: but perhaps the real explanation is to be found in the fact that the present day Roman is the descendant of the Empire, not of the Republic, and Christianity, as we know, easily adopted as its own the servilisms of the later Empire, with those Byzantine proclivities for despotism and adulation which at last led the independent Roman to burn his incense before the "genius" of the most infamous of the Caesars. _The Romans and the "Italians"_ It is said that the Roman belittles things, that he is an easy despiser. Perhaps the gift of _criterion_ nourished among the grandeurs of classical and Christian Rome is a sorry preparation for enthusiasm over the sights to be seen in other men's cities. The fact too that his pride sometimes forbids his stooping to means which ensure the success of his "Italian" brother who comes fortune-seeking to Rome, joined to his sincerity and hatred of humbug are, he thinks, the reasons why as a rule he is cordially detested by other Italians. The "clericals" have another explanation; the Romans are hated, according to them, because they would take no part in the doings which led to the union of Italy and the invasion of Rome. We may give a little weight to all these reasons and yet understand that the Roman is disliked on other counts. His pride, so think other Italians, is altogether too immoderate for his achievements; and when they entered Rome they found a people devoid of the mental and moral qualities which make fine manners--a certain amount of self-forgetting and graciousness of mind. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ARA COELI FROM THE FORUM The ever-open door of the popular Franciscan Church on the Capitol hill, which became in the middle ages the centre of the civic life of the Roman people. See pages 6, 57.] After "the Italians" entered the city, these provincial animosities waxed fast and furious. Men from the north were dubbed _buzzuri_, Neapolitans got nicknamed _cafoni_, and to this day a residence of twenty or thirty years does not preserve the hapless "_forestiere_" and his family from such epithets as _buzzuri_ and _villani_ if they presume to come to words with "a Roman of Rome." On the other hand "the Italians" returned these compliments with interest: the Romans were unlicked cubs, _maleaucati_, lazy, ignorant--the proud tetragram S.P.Q.R. was rendered by the Neapolitans _Sono Porci Questi Romani_ "these Romans are pigs"; while the Roman, finding in the Neapolitan a man still dirtier than himself, retorted that the "Neapolitans' sky is beautiful, and it is clean, because they can't reach it" ("Il cielo di Napoli è bello, ed è pulito, perchè non arrivano a sporcarlo"). At the same time it is an indubitable fact that Italians who live among the Romans come to prefer them to their other compatriots; and I have heard this preference expressed by people so far apart as an educated Piedmontese and an uneducated Calabrese. Perhaps they learn from the Romans tolerance, the smallness of small things, and the greatness of great ones. Perhaps they realise that the Roman has learnt with an admirable patience and teachableness the new lessons that have been put before him. Thrown from easy circumstances into the vortex of the struggling life of the new capital--overtaxed and underfed--he has suffered as much as the newcomers for a political change which he demanded less loudly than they; and it is to his fair credit that a revolution has taken place in Rome without bloodshed, without violence, without undue bitterness, and that the element of crime and lawlessness has not been supplied by him. The Roman is not a hero, and not a saint, but neither is he a _Camorrista_ and _mafioso_ like the men of the South, nor a _teppista_[5] like the men of the North. [5] The _Teppa_ and the _Camorra_ are respectively institutions of the north and south of the peninsula. The former is recruited exclusively from the lowest classes, and is nothing less than a league of the ill-conditioned bent on every sort of evil deed. The _Camorra_--like the _Mafia_--is more akin to a secret society, and to those factionist practices which are eminently characteristic of Italy. In this sense the _Camorra_ is a national institution, which infects every Italian enterprise, and functions in every Italian theatre. The _Mafia_, like the _Camorra_, is widespread in Naples and Sicily and counts men of all ranks among its members. None of these were ever Roman institutions; and the _teppisti_ who now afflict Rome are an importation from the north. _Roman Customs and Roman Satire_ The customs of the Romans have been depicted by the inimitable art of Pinelli, their ways of thinking and feeling by Belli in his sonnets and in the modern sonnets of Pascarella. Here the satire, the cynicism, the rude intellect, the ignorance, the self-interest, meet us in every picture. Nothing and nobody have ever escaped the Roman satire, which turns everything into ridicule and burlesque. From the end of the fifteenth century the torso called after the tailor Pasquino, and the statue of Marforio kept up a running fire of wit and mockery. When Pope Sixtus V. who was of the humblest origin made his sisters countesses, Pasquin appeared in a dirty shirt. Asked by Marforio the reason, he replied the next day, "_Perchè la mia lavandaia è diventata contessa_," "because my washerwoman has become a countess." Pius VI. encumbered Rome with inscriptions recording his "munificence"; when bread became dear Pasquin seized the occasion to exhibit a tiny loaf with the legend _munificentia Pii Sexti_; and when Urban VIII. died the following epitaph alluding to the bees in his coat of arms, recorded his nepotism: How well he fed his bees How ill he fed his sheep. All this is very unlike the ideas held by some Catholics who cry "outrage" at the least criticism, and would consider the jests of Pasquin and Marforio sufficient to keep the Pope a prisoner in the Vatican. The popes thought differently; and preserved what face they could under the stinging satire of the Romans. Pasquin gave place to the _capo-comico_ Cassandrino, who was delighting every class in Rome at Palazzo Fiano in the Corso when the Italians broke upon the scene. It must be remembered that the Roman would never accept servile occupations; the industries he chose were perforce those which required no plant and no capital, but also those which left him independent--such were the making of Roman pearls and mosaics, watchmaking, the favourite crafts of butcher, tanner, and carter, or the river industries of fisherman, boatman, and wharf porter. The most picturesque of his amusements were the dance, the mandoline, the lute, the song and serenade, and that improvisation for which he was always famous. One may still see the _tarantella_ danced on the "Spanish steps" in May by the artists' models, dressed in the old Roman costume which persisted till Napoleonic times--the half Spanish dress of the girls and the short velvet jacket, feathered hat, and knee-breeches of the youths. When the Roman railway was built, things were conducted in truly homely fashion; the train which was timed to leave at 10.30 was still in the station at 11. When at length it got under way, it might be put back again to land two peasants who had got into the wrong train. If you fumed and fretted, you were told to remember how long the journey would have taken before the day of railways. The Roman indeed had then and has now no sense of time--least of all has he learnt the proverb which he supposes is ever on the lips of our countrymen "_times_ is money." If you enquire of a Roman the hour of mass he replies "About ten, or half-past, or eleven--thereabouts." The shopkeeper, the waiter in a café, used to take no notice whatever of you when you entered his premises; he continued tranquilly to read his paper or finish his cigar, and only marvelled that there could in your opinion be any reason sufficiently urgent to warrant your disturbing these occupations. The Roman's time is as eternal as his city, and one of the lessons he has yet to learn is its value for other things than money-making. No one answers a letter; your lawyer or your banker think themselves as unobliged to satisfy your curiosity as to the fate of your cheque or your business as the butcher and the baker. The Roman learns on his moral side, but remains so obtuse on the material side as to be a perpetual illustration of the reputation he has for strong-headedness, for "putting Trajan's column in his head," and refusing to budge like a mule. The Romans indeed are haunted by the past, and they are perhaps the people of Europe who have least grip on the present. [Illustration: IN THE CHURCH OF ARA COELI See pages 57, 230-31, and interleaf, page 138.] It is in their folklore, the popular rhymes and tales, the customs and amusements of the people, that we realise that no loyalty or reverence can exist by the side of that passion for laying bare; and understand the coarseness which waits on the wide-eyed gaze of the Roman, unsparing and gross, because it is the result of what Ricasoli has called "the real poverty of the poor"--a moral poverty. The Roman goes to see some tight-rope dancers and describes the treat it was for him: Above all there's the great pleasure of the height, For if any one of them were to fall, Nothing in the world could save him. He goes to the play. This is his impression of the tragedy: The last act when he kills himself and her I can tell you was just satisfying (_M' ha proprio soddisfatto_). Or take his summary of the problems life presents: ... _a sto paese tutto er busilli_ _Sta ner magnà allo scrocco e ddì orazione._ "The whole difficulty in this life is how to eat without paying for it, and to get your prayers said." But the scene may change, and the same Roman is called upon to go forth into the campagna with the beneficent _confraternità dell' Orazione e Morte_ in search of the body of some victim of violence. He is found _pancia all' aria_ and brought back to his family; but amidst the keen observation of all that happens, of the situation, there is not a pitiful or generous sentiment; the scenes suggest nothing of interest but the faithful gross record of purely external impressions. Yet these men have trudged along the heavy roads, up and down, stumbling and struggling through the dark night to perform the act of pity which teaches them, apparently, so little. Tragedy, comedy, a funeral, a marriage, the visit to your dead, the game of hazard, the incidents of an assassination, all these things come under the same clear, coarse, unintimate, unloving observation of a people who hold, wisely enough, that "L'occhi so' fatti pe' guardà"--the eyes are made for looking--but who care as little how they look as they trouble to select what shall be looked upon. "_Che bella giornata; che peccato che non s' impicchi nessuno_" is the traditional greeting to a fine day, repeated even now with a modern humorous sense of its ghastliness. "What a fine day! what a pity no one is going to be hanged!" And the Roman's liking for distraction and noise is not sated even when he goes to bed. Before 1870 serenaders waked, and charmed, the sleeping city; but the Roman who is supposed to have been "killed between a policeman and official red tape," still reminds us that he is not so very dead after all, or that the _guardia "non s' è fatto viva,"_ for he now roars down the thoroughfares in the small hours of the night, thus procuring for himself the pleasure of disturbing you--a form of recreation with which even the police have too much sympathy to interfere. For the Roman tolerates other men's lawlessness but has no respect for their liberty. _The "Coltello" and Crime_ As with children who cannot "play the game," his games of chance degenerate into quarrelling and killing. The terrible habit of carrying, stowed away in a pocket at the back of the trousers, or up the sleeve, what the Romans call "the instrument" gives them a ready means of converting hot blood into hot deed. The _coltello_ used to be, and still is at times, the favourite gift of a girl to her lover--to have used it with deadly effect is in her eyes a necessary sign of prowess, and to feel it always ready is in his sight the welcome earnest of power to assert his virility. Italian crime is committed in hot blood; sudden rage or "love" supply the motive, and there is very little of the premeditated cold-blooded crime of which Dickens gives us an example in the details of Nancy's murder in _Oliver Twist_. The worst crimes of violence, however, are brought about from motives so futile as to seem incredible when they are mirrored in some ghastly assassination. It is enough to disagree with your comrade, to win a litre of wine from him, to refuse to withstand the police--to find yourself on the way to _Sant' Antonio_ or the _Consolazione_ with three inches of steel in your stomach, nay not unfrequently in your back. Primitive, terrible, childish, barbaric, this love of blood, this power of "seeing red" in a quarrel, has made the Italian the bravo of Europe, and makes the total of Italian homicides at the present day exceed those in England, Germany, Belgium, France, and Austria put together. Ninety-five homicides for every million of the population contrast in Italy with six for every million in England. In the time of the Venetian pope Clement XIII., in the middle of the eighteenth century, the proportion of homicides in Rome was twenty-five times higher than this. Is the Italian more cruel, more brutal, more wanton than his fellows? To the first two questions I should answer No, to the last, Yes. The cruelties of the French Revolution, the coarse brutalities of England even down to the century just passed, the horrors recently revealed in the German army, would at no time have found their counterpart in Italy. But the Italian--the Roman--is wanton, he is an egoist who sates his impulses without any reference at all to the other people and the other interests involved. He is wanton, for he lacks the sense of personal responsibility; wanton, for he carries on life and government with no regard to justice. The Italian is a child of nature, a combination of his own two conceptions of "faun"-like irresponsible grace and "satyr"-like animality; an undisciplined creature living in the conditions of modern civilisation. But although the Italians are a vital people, a people alert on the side of the self-protecting instincts, and with the egoism of the vital temperament, they are not an inhumane people: they have in abundance the imaginative sympathy which instructs and softens, and if they lack the sense of justice they are in some ways more merciful than we. [Illustration: DOORWAY OF THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT (SAGRO SPECO) AT SUBIACO See interleaf, pages 82 and 86.] No one can understand the disposition of the Italian in any part of the peninsula who does not appreciate in it a certain mildness--something expressed by the Italian _mitezza_ but not by our English _meekness_--which preserves him from excesses from which other peoples are not free. The Romans of antiquity boasted no such sentiments; from that cruel period there has come down to us one story of humanity--the humanity of a dog; the compassion shown by a dog for one of a group of victims executed in the neighbouring Mamertine prison, and callously thrown out upon the steps of the highway of civilisation--the Roman Forum. But as a population the Romans of the modern city are not cruel. If you look in upon the Roman as he watches the public torture of prisoners in the first part of last century you will have the story in brief of his irresponsibility, his unstrenuous attitude towards all such matters. He shrieks with delight at the writhings of the victims, but will shout with pleasure if one of them succeeds in making good his escape. Little has been done to instruct the spirit of the ignorant Roman, yet few such scenes of repulsive cruelty to animals as Naples and Florence present are to be laid at his door; and the best of the population need fear no competitors in human and merciful sentiment. What the country cries out for is for these better sentiments to have the force of a public opinion--a civilising agent as yet completely absent in Italy. No force in the country helps the Italian to that "self-reverence" the lack of which Mrs. Barrett Browning discerned in him. Nowhere in Europe is callousness to human life so great;[6] nowhere in Europe, writes an enlightened Italian priest, is there so much cruelty to animals as here; yet so unaccustomed are the people to that best form of moral education--moral suasion--a gradual civilising of spirit, that they are incapable of putting two and two together, and still urge the ignorant argument that if you inculcate humanity to animals while there is so much to be done for men, you are somehow wronging the latter; they suggest, apparently, that by kicking a dog you are somehow helping a baby. It is to be hoped that the thesis of the priest above quoted, that the protection of animals is a real means of education, may be accepted boldly by the better clergy now that Leo. XIII. has called such protection _altamente umano e cristiano_. Visitors are outraged by the disgusting cruelties which even the children in Italy are the first to practise, and no amount of sophistry will make them believe that such conduct is decent in the superior animal. That secular Italy will be obliged to take up the subject is certain, and one hopes that then the clergy will return to the simpler spontaneous religious feeling of the country--marred by scholastic dogmas--which gave a patron saint to the lesser creation, and which still places in every stable and cattle-shed of Umbria the image of "S. Antony, protector of animals." [6] The zone which supplies the maximum of crimes of violence is Lazio (Latium). _Law and Justice_ Those who know what it is to feel "righteous indignation" must suffer in a country where justice is not understood and not appreciated by any one. The Italians still know how to make laws, and legislation here is ahead not only of the sentiment of the country but of the laws of most European peoples--what they have forgotten is how to administer them. It is no exaggeration to say that at present Italian tribunals exist for the sake of the criminal; absurd "extenuating circumstances," which can hardly be taken seriously, are always forthcoming, and as a distinguished Italian declared in the Senate the guilty man here must indeed be an unfortunate wretch (_un povero disgraziato_) if he cannot manage to escape a condemnation. In place of the inexorable penalty which would alone meet the case in a land where lawlessness has prescriptive rights and where capital punishment does not exist, there is a pleasing uncertainty about all penalties. With a poor sense of humour as conspicuous as the poor sense of justice, a bench of judges will gravely listen to a succession of false witnesses, vulgar perjurers, mere play-actors, who spring up hydra-headed in support of every villain or rascal, be the matter a murder or an affair of two francs. The terrorisation exercised by the knife and the _vendetta_ has caused the Roman for centuries to enter into a shell of reserve; if an assassination takes place--in broad daylight or in the dark, it does not matter--no one sees it; the _guardia_ arrives round the corner in time to make the "legal verifications" as soon as the misdeed is safely accomplished, and if the victim shrieked first neither he nor any one else happened to hear it. The desire to live in peace, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, making no enemies, has affected a whole people--with the result that the protected person is the malefactor. The more audacious he is, the more he affects in the city the _allures_ of the brigand, the more successful he will be in evading the law, in gaining the support rendered by the silence or the false witness of all who encounter him. The people, writes Aristide Gabelli, "seek by silence and dissimulation their own safety rather than the public safety at their own proper peril." The consequence is, of course, that there is not the least co-operation with the law. The Roman, indeed, feels humiliated by the necessity for seeking its aid; government and law are abhorrent to him, and he alludes to the former as "_questo porco di governo_"--if you are unable to defend yourself the alternative is not the arm of the law but to stop at home. The police service of Rome includes three corps--the carabineers, who hunt in couples, in three-cornered hat and cloak and sword; the municipal guard who wear a cocked hat, with cocks' feathers on feast days, and a black uniform turned up with orange; the _Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza_, in black piped with blue, and a _capote_. These last, called _questurini_ because they depend from the _Questura_, are disliked by all Romans who call them "_avanzi di galera_," gaolbirds and assassins. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find men of civil condition to enter the corps; such work is eminently distasteful to a Roman, and "set a thief to catch a thief" is the principle on which he supposes the _governo_ acts. [Illustration: CHAPEL OF SAN LORENZO LORICATO AT S. BENEDICT'S, SUBIACO See interleaf, page 86.] Crispi tried to form one police force for the city; at present if you apply to a _guardia di P.S._ your business is sure to concern the absent municipal guard, while the carabineers do nothing but support each other in the arduous task of standing at street corners watching the follies of men, criminals and victims.[7] To the municipal guard--the popular force, called _pizzardoni_--is entrusted the maintenance of decency and order in the city, and they often brave the wrath of their fellow citizens in its accomplishment. All matters not connected with municipal legislation pertain to the State police, who arrest thieves and act in criminal affairs. Soldiers, too, have certain civil duties; they are frequently called upon to act as police, they are called out to help if a house falls down, to form the _cordon_ in case of a fire, and may in certain circumstances arrest a malefactor. [7] Very different is their rôle in the country districts, which they police entirely, and with courage and devotion. The soldiers form the most respectable and the only disciplined part of the male population in a city like Rome. One often sees, of course, battalions of men from all the Italian provinces, youths of twenty just enrolled, and among them there is seldom a vicious face. For these are the mothers' sons, and they compare very favourably with our "Tommies." The same cannot be said of the other youths who throng the city. Perhaps seven-tenths of the crime is committed by lads in their teens and early twenties; I have heard a Senator declare that there are boys of twelve in the prisons who are already _perfetti criminali_; and surely nowhere in Europe are boys and youths worse trained. The most appalling phenomenon, however, is the existence of a degraded type, of all and every age, usually belonging to the decently-clothed classes, whose outrages on decency were described by an Italian in a Roman newspaper as "enough to sicken the coarsest navvy." These practices, according to some old Romans, are one of the results of the French occupation, but such an explanation of occurrences which are to be met with nowhere else in Europe or out of it, must be taken with all reserve. Gaolbirds like these molest women with impunity; and the _amor proprio_ of the vile nature awakes just in time to heap further outrage when this molestation is resented. Women have always been hustled in the Roman streets, and as Italian ladies are only now beginning to walk unaccompanied, the foreign visitors bear the brunt of the amiable practice still in vogue of not moving on the narrow pavements, but leaving the lady to take the gutter. Such conduct from men to women contrasts strangely with the courtesy so often extended even to beggars; and a woman of the people, a servant or a porteress, will invite the beggar who is interrupting your conversation to desist, with such phrases as: "Move aside a little; Do me this pleasure." _Courtship and Marriage_ It will be astonishing to many, no doubt, to hear that courtship in Italy is a prosaic affair. Of passion there is plenty and to spare, but the tragic element does not enter every day, and then no sentiment comes in to disturb matters. After the first _etiquette_ of the situation is over, and the letters vowing that you have _il paradiso nel cuor_--which are duly discounted by the peasant _fiancée_--have been written, things run uneventfully enough. A young Abruzzese servant--from the most saving population of Italy--became enthusiastic when recounting the virtues of his proposed bride to his mistress, which culminated with: "Signorina mia, _è piena di biancheria_"--"she is full of house linen." There is among all Italian women more dignity in their relations with men than there is among English women. The Italian woman has a noble reticence, a power of self-protection, which imposes itself on lover and husband. She is not accustomed, as we are in modern times, to walking abroad unaccompanied, and there is no doubt that here the Englishwoman shows a self-respecting demeanour which is everywhere recognised as entitling her to all the respect she feels for herself. What I speak of is the Italian woman's attitude towards the man to whom she is engaged or married, in comparison with the Englishwoman's. The former will not serve her husband as an English or German _frau_ will; nor, before marriage, will she lay herself out to keep the man at any cost as the English girl of the servant class will do. Here Italian self-respect is greater than English. The Roman woman of the lowest class habitually displays this personal dignity and reticence in the streets; and nowhere in Rome will you see such scenes as are to be witnessed on any bank holiday at a seaside place in England, on Saturday evenings in London, or in country towns after dark, among men and women of the lower middle class. The Italian woman will avoid scandal to herself and hers at whatever cost; she will suffer any deprivation or loss to compass this, to keep her trouble from the eyes of the curious world. There is none of that vulgarity of soul--consummated in modern times among Anglo-Saxon peoples--which hastens to wash dirty linen in public. This is one reason why divorce is so distasteful in Italy, and especially to the women, who would one and all suffer individually in order to bind the man, to preserve the family and its honour, in preference to the enjoyment of the personal freedom which the looser bond implies. [Illustration: STEPS OF THE DOMINICAN NUNS' CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO This and the church of Santa Caterina da Siena form a Dominican corner of Rome on a spur of the Quirinal. The garden of Palazzo Aldobrandini is seen in the background. See pages 6, 171.] A traditional characteristic of the Roman is that he has always given a fairer share of life to women than other Italians. Since the day when Romulus called the Roman _curiae_ after the thirty Sabine women who had thrown themselves into the breach for the Romans, and conferred on them special privileges, the Roman woman has played a dignified part in the life of the city. As priestesses the vestals possessed privileges shared by none but the emperor; and the idea of the Roman matron, the wife not "in the hand" of her husband, was a Roman contribution to social ethics two thousand years before the idea occurred to Englishmen. There is nothing that antiquity has handed down to us more dignified than the seated female figures in Roman museums. These views of women ceased, naturally enough, when Rome which had been the greatest political became the greatest clerical city in the world; but the Roman tradition was handed on in the Italian universities outside Rome, which admitted women five hundred years before they were allowed to share in the benefits of those colleges of Cambridge and Oxford which their money and influence had done so much to endow. The women of the people still, however, enjoy in Rome "an almost unlimited liberty." The Roman man shares his recreations with his wife, and the wife-kicking which is such a plague spot in the life of the common people in England, is not one of them. English fair-play to women is indeed merely a matter of class; it has never penetrated to the lower strata, and in the English middle as in the English lower class the men are still "the lords of creation." This conjugal relation in fact remains a bulwark of a certain coarseness which no one can deny to the Englishman, and which is registered in the Italian's firm opinion that English wives are bought and sold in open market. In other parts of Italy, however, in Calabria and the Abruzzi (even Piedmont is conspicuous for want of gallantry), the wife is regarded simply as a chattel, and the brutal husband aims his blow at his wife's face in order that the neighbours may recognise _il segno del marito_. The sufficient explanation _è suo_ (it is his own) is the same which will be given you if a youth maltreats a dog; and in both cases the moral quality of the argument is as ignoble as it can be. Socially, the talents of the Romans are not higher than our own. The Italian people have not the social gifts which are the _privilegium_ of their Latin neighbour. On the society of ancient Rome was superimposed clerical Rome--a city where the sex which makes society was nowhere, where the _pezzo grosso_ in every drawing-room was a Roman cardinal, not a great lady; and there can be little doubt that this has not proved a civilising influence on the Roman. But in natural gifts of disposition the Italian greatly excels us; and in no English gathering can the charm be approached which Italians will impart to an _alfresco_ party, an impromptu _festa_--often including a great mixture of classes--when the simplicity, the unfailing good humour, and the successful efforts to please are a lesson to the Englishman. The Italians by gathering together make a natural _festa_, as by walking they make a natural procession--something that is graceful and unselfconscious, absolutely simple without missing stateliness. _The Romans and Art_ The art history of Rome is as distinct from that of the rest of Italy as is its social, its religious, or its political history. We look in vain to Rome for a first-rate picture, a first-rate poem, even--with the exception of Palestrina--for a first-rate composer.[8] The fatal facility which hampers all Italians, who can achieve with little labour what less gifted peoples travail to attain, meets in the Roman that curious inconclusiveness, that strange universal sterility, which begins with the character itself. Nevertheless the Roman has not failed to give us what it is his function to give--he has always been a fine-art critic; every great thing has come before him, and of all he has been an incorruptible judge, seldom deceived, using all the powers of _finezza_, of ridicule, of satire, and of fine judgment at his command, to raise or to create a standard of fine work. If there is one art which may be said to be not only the gift of Italy but to have remained Italian, it is singing; and here the Roman has kept in the forefront both as critic and executant. The Italian really _loves a voice_--the Englishman loves the sentimental rendering of a theme; and the criterion of vocal sound which the Italian possesses, he finds, perhaps, in his own throat. "Roman throats and chests must, in some particular way, be differently constructed from those of other people" wrote Walter Pater; and the resonant voices of Italians may be due to the absence of the protruding German and English chin which captures and muffles so many of our vocal tones. [8] _Clementi_, indeed, was a Roman, and a Roman buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. The classical Roman had no taste: we wonder to-day that the Roman, dazzled with rich marbles, should adopt the expedient of painted columns in a scheme of decoration; but he did the same in the house of Germanicus on the Palatine. That there is a distinction between taste and artistic sensibility there can be no doubt whatever, and it is equally true that the former is often mistaken for the latter. The subject is an interesting one; but here we can only record the two facts--that the Roman all through the centuries has been a sensitive to artistic impressions, and a fine judge of the arts, and that he has never possessed that gift of a certain refinement of sentiment--taste. After all that has been said of the Romans, it is sad to have to record that it will soon be difficult to find genuine Roman families. The old "_Romano de Roma_"--the man whose ancestors, like himself, were born _all' ombra del Cupolone_, under the shadow of the great cupola--is disappearing, giving place to more successful, more industrious, and 'cuter men--preserving up to the last moment of his life those habits and customs which cause him and his house to suggest Noah and his ark to the more modern Italian; but also learning up to the last hour of his life new ideas, such as must also have importuned the patriarch and his family when the waters receded leaving him and the ark high and dry on Ararat, and the daughters of men began to weave their toils round the sons of God. [Illustration: PORTA SAN PAOLO Gate in the Aurelian wall rebuilt by Belisarius. This is the gate of the Ostian Way leading to the basilica of S. Paul's--one of the seven great pilgrimage churches--of which the Kings of England were Protectors.] CHAPTER VIII ROMAN PRINCELY FAMILIES To be a patrician of Rome is to possess one of the proudest of titles, and from the senator of the ancient city to the prince of to-day the aristocracy of Rome has been one of its most vital and characteristic institutions. Though the Roman cardinal as a prince of the Church has always been admitted, whatever his origin, within the pale, the Roman nobility with the rarest exceptions has never swelled its ranks with newcomers owing their tides to acquired wealth or successful public life, but, conservative and exclusive, preserves the traditions of the past and forms a society unlike any other in Europe. The greater number of the princely families whose names are familiar to every sojourner in Rome date their connection with the city from the fifteenth century and onwards, when the popes ceased to be chosen from among the Romans, and a new aristocracy grew up, the creation of successive pontiffs, who, themselves reigning but not hereditary sovereigns, wished to raise their relatives to a rank second only to their own. Others trace their descent from some mediæval chieftain, or are feudal in origin, and these alone are indigenous to the city and its surroundings, and their history is indissolubly woven into the records of Rome's past. For many dark centuries, during a barbarous period of bloodshed crime and cruelty, the history of Rome was what her great nobles made it; and they in their turn rose to fame and power or sank into oblivion, leaving no traces or but the scantiest records of their fate. The great mediæval family of Conti, Counts of Segni, whose race gave four popes to Rome, among them the great Innocent III., have disappeared from history, leaving as a magnificent monument to their greatness the huge tower which bears their name. In the twelfth century, the Sabine Savelli and the Jewish Pierleoni were great and prominent. Streets and piazzas called after them in the region near the crowded little Piazza Montanara testify to their importance. The Savelli dwelt in a castle in the Via di Monserrato. It was afterwards turned into a prison, the _Corte Savella_, and here for a time the unhappy Beatrice Cenci and her accomplices were confined. Both Savelli and Pierleoni successively occupied a stronghold erected within the ancient walls of the theatre of Marcellus, and a fortified palace which stood against it, now Orsini property. One of the Savelli popes, Honorius IV., built himself a castle on the Aventine, and at one period the whole of the hill was entrenched and fortified, the ancient temple of _Libertas_ on its summit being transformed into a citadel. These immense buildings have crumbled away, and the sole monuments that remain to record the past greatness of this family are the tombs of Pope Honorius, of his father and mother, and of other Savellis in their chapel in the church of Ara Coeli on the Capitol. The Pierleoni, a rich and prolific race, descendants of a learned Jew convert of the time of Pope Leo IX., filled important posts and made alliances with the great houses of Rome, and in 1130 a member of this Jewish family was elected and reigned several years in the Vatican as the antipope Anacletus--an event unparalleled in history. After the thirteenth century this name also slips out of historical records and is heard of no more. The ancient consular race of the Frangipani have left to Rome some fine monuments in the church of San Marcello in the Corso, and the name is still borne by a Marquess in Udine, but they are no longer numbered amongst the princely houses. They earned their appellation of _bread-breakers_ from having distributed bread in a great famine, but in the middle ages their name spelt terror rather than benevolence. They were a power not lightly to be reckoned with. Great allies of the papal party, they more than once gave sanctuary to fugitive popes in their strong _Turris Cartularia_, the ruins of which can still be seen near the church of S. Gregory. In the thirteenth century this tower fell into the hands of the Imperialists, and was utterly destroyed with all the archives which had been stored there for safety. It formed an outpost in a chain of fortifications with which the Frangipani and their allies the Corsi enclosed a large portion of the city. Their main stronghold was built amongst the ruins of the Palatine, with flanking towers on the Colosseum and on the triumphal arches of Constantine, Titus, and Janus. From this dominating position they could take the field or rush upon their foes in the city at the head of hundreds of armed retainers. Another mediæval family, the Anguillara, has been merged in the Orsini, leaving a solitary tower in Trastevere to commemorate a once great and powerful race. [Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM IN A STORM] But of all the feudal princes of Rome none played so conspicuous a part as the Orsini and Colonna, and this not alone in the history of their own city, for their names were famous throughout Europe for many centuries. These two great families were hereditary enemies and belonged to rival factions. The Colonna were Ghibellines, Imperialists, the Orsini Guelphs, supporters of the papacy, and when they were not fighting in support of their political parties they were engaged in private feuds on their own account. While in other cities of Italy feudal tyranny was gradually giving way before the more enlightened government of independent republics, Rome was too weak to struggle against her oppressors. Deserted and neglected for nearly a century by her lawful sovereigns the popes, at best ruled by a vacillating and disorderly government, the city lay at the mercy of her great barons who scorned all law and authority and asserted and maintained their complete personal independence at the point of the sword, while they swelled the ranks of their retainers with bandits and cut-throats to whom they gave sanctuary in return for military service. Great and prosperous Rome had become a small forsaken town within a desolate waste, surrounded by a girdle of ancient walls far too large for the city it protected. Amphitheatres, mausoleums of Roman Emperors, temples, theatres, were converted into strongholds. Such of the churches as were not fortified were crumbling into ruin, and everywhere bristled loop-holed towers from which the nobles could defy one another, and which commanded the entrances to dark filthy and winding streets. At frequent intervals the despondent apathy of the citizens would be rudely disturbed by a call to arms, and to the sound of hoarse battle-cries, the clashing of weapons upon steel corslet and helmet, and the waving of banners with the rival Ghibelline and Guelph devices of eagle and keys, bands of Orsini and Colonna would rush fighting through the narrow streets and across the waste spaces of the city, would fall back and advance to fight again until, with the darkness, they would retire behind their barred gateways, leaving their dead as so much carrion in the streets. These two families divided the greater part of Rome between them. The Orsini held the field of Mars and the Vatican district from their fortress in the ruins of the theatre of Pompey and their castle on Monte Giordano. This is now Palazzo Gabrielli, and it retains its portcullis and much of its mediæval appearance. Tor di Nona and Tor Sanguigna were flanking towers to the Orsini stronghold. The Quirinal hill was occupied by the Colonna, their great castle standing almost on the same ground as their present palazzo, and they had an outlying fortress in the mausoleum of Augustus near the river. Occasionally a truce was patched up between the two families that they might unite against a common enemy, and for a period they agreed that two senators, one from each family, should be appointed to govern Rome in the pope's absence. But these peaceful intervals were short lived. On the slightest provocation, barricades would be run up, new entrenchments dug, and civil war would break out afresh. Again and again in their conflict with the Church the Colonna were worsted in the struggle, their estates confiscated, and themselves, root and branch, beggared and exiled; but there was a strength and vitality about the race that no adversity could subdue. Pope Boniface VIII., whose displeasure they had incurred, oppressed them for a while. Six Colonna brothers were exiled, and their ancestral town of Palestrina was razed to the ground by the Caetani, Boniface's relatives and adherents, and a plough was driven over the site to typify its permanent devastation. But a few years later the reckless Sciarra Colonna broke into the Pope's castle at Anagni, and made him prisoner with bitter taunts and reproaches. Later, Sciarra played a conspicuous part in the coronation of Lewis the Bavarian, and in gratitude for his services the Emperor allowed the single column of the family coat of arms to be surmounted by a golden crown. Greatest amongst the six brothers of this period was Stephen, Petrarch's friend, an able man and good soldier who met prosperity and adversity, poverty banishment and danger, throughout a long troubled life, with the same calm resolution and intrepid courage. This Stephen survived the last of his line--his two sons Stephen and Peter with two grandsons being massacred after an unsuccessful skirmish against Rienzo. After Boniface's death, the Colonna came into their own again and received one hundred thousand gold florins in compensation for their losses, but Palestrina, which was later rebuilt, suffered again the same fate and was torn down by order of Eugenius IV. within one hundred and fifty years. In the reign of Sixtus IV. Rome was again distracted by faction feuds. The Pope, aided by the ever-ready Orsini, pursued the Colonna with relentless hatred. Protonotary Lorenzo Colonna fell through treachery into the hands of his enemy, and his friend Savelli was captured and murdered on the spot for refusing to rejoice with the captors. Lorenzo was tortured and beheaded, and the Orsini sacked and burnt all the Colonna property in the town. Other distinguished members of this distinguished family of a later epoch were Vittoria Colonna, the poet-friend of Michael Angelo, and Marc' Antonio, who commanded the papal fleet at Lepanto, and who was given a triumphal entry into Rome after his victory. Nothing is known of the origin of this famous race though it is believed to have come originally from the banks of the Rhine. It first appears in history in 1104, when the Lords of Colonna and Zagarolo characteristically incurred the displeasure of Pope Paschal II. They also owned part of Tusculum and were probably related to the Counts of that place. Later, Palestrina became their principal stronghold and they possessed Marino, Grotta Ferrata, Genazzano, and Paliano in the Sabines, the last giving them their princely title. The family produced many distinguished churchmen, but only one pope, Martin V. Many daughters of the house took the veil, and in the year 1318 as many as twelve had entered the convent of S. Silvestro in Capite, which had been founded by the cardinal members of the family. In 1490 a Colonna was appointed for the first time to be constable of the kingdom of Naples, and it was popularly believed in Rome that the Pope excommunicated the King of Naples every vigil of S. Peter (28th June) because he had failed to proffer the tribute of his investiture. The formula ran: "I curse and bless you," and as the curse was uttered the Colonna palace trembled. This palace stands on the slopes of the Quirinal; it is entered from the Piazza dei SS. Apostoli, but the gardens cover the slopes of the hill as far as the Via del Quirinale, bridges connecting palace and gardens crossing the Via della Pilotta at frequent intervals. It was built by Martin V. for his personal use, and contains a fine picture gallery and magnificent suite of state rooms. After nearly eight centuries of life this family is still among the greatest and most distinguished in Rome. One prince of the name is now Syndic of the city, another shares the peaceful office of Prince Assistant at the Pontifical throne with the descendant of his ancient enemies, Filippo Orsini. [Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS FROM THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE The arch which records the plenitude and the arch which records the decadence of Roman power. See page 162, interleaf, pages 38, 234, and pictures 12 and 66.] The career of the Orsini race has been no less eventful, but this family has now died out in many of its branches. In a metrical account of the coronation of Boniface VIII., written by Cardinal St. George and quoted by Gibbon, the Orsini are said to come from Spoleto. Other writers believe them to have been of French origin, but at an early date they became identified with the history of Rome, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries two members of the family became popes, Celestin III. in 1191, and Nicholas III. in 1277. The last Orsini pope was the Benedictine monk Benedict XIII. (1724). In the sixteenth century the Orsini fell under the Pope's displeasure, the head of the family was banished and his estates were confiscated. This individual, Giordano Orsini Duke of Bracciano, became enamoured of Vittoria Accoramboni, wife of Francesco Peretti, Sixtus V.'s nephew. Vittoria was beautiful fascinating and unscrupulous, and Giordano, no less unscrupulous, did not hesitate to rid himself of the obstacles to his desires. His own wife he strangled in his castle at Bracciano, and Francesco was set upon and murdered in the streets of Rome by his orders and with the connivance of Vittoria and her brother. Orsini and Vittoria were married, but their union was of short duration. Sixtus V. had been meanwhile elected to the papacy, and he lost no time in disgracing and banishing Giordano whose end in exile is shrouded in mystery. Vittoria was shortly afterwards surprised and brutally killed by her husband's relatives for the sake of the Orsini inheritance. The Orsini estates were at Bracciano, Anguillara, and Galera, but the Bracciano property with the ducal title that went with it now belongs to the Odescalchi. In Rome the Orsini still own and inhabit their great palace near the portico of Octavia. It was designed by Baldassare Peruzzi and was built within the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, the high ground upon which it stands being merely a heap of fallen débris. It is approached through a gateway flanked by stone bears, the emblem of the Orsini race. Another mediæval family, the Gaetani or Caetani, Dukes of Sermoneta and Princes of Caserta and Teano, is of Neapolitan origin. One of its members became pope as Gelasius II. in 1118 and the first of the name was military prefect under Manfred, King of Sicily, but the close union of this family with Rome only dates from the reign of the Gaetani pope, Boniface VIII. It was at this period also that the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way was disguised with turrets and battlements to serve the Gaetani as an outlying stronghold against their enemies. Of all the princely names which figure in the records of mediæval Rome, none can claim a more venerable antiquity than the Annibaldi, the Massimo, and the Cenci. The first, of the race of the great Hannibal, are no longer extant. The Massimi, who derive their name from the ancient family of Maximus, are Dukes of Rignano, Princes of Roviano, and heirs to many other titles; they are still amongst the greatest of Rome. The present prince lives in the family palace in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele familiar to every tourist from its curved façade and rows of columns, and still keeps up much of the princely state and ceremony of a past age. The Cenci have become extinct in the male line and the name is carried on by a distant branch as Cenci-Bolognetti. This family is first heard of in the person of Marcus Cencius, Prefect of Pisa in the year 457 of Rome; and in 914 Johannes Cencius was elected Pope as John X. In 1692 the Cenci were created Princes of Vicovaro, a little mountain town in the Sabines, and in 1723 they acquired the title and estates of Bolognetti by the marriage of Virginius with an heiress of that name. With her came into the family the dower-house, the graceful Palazzo Bolognetti-Cenci still standing in the Piazza Pantaleone. The Bolognetti palace in the Piazza di Venezia was sold to Prince Torlonia, and has just been destroyed to make way for the colossal monument to Victor Emmanuel which is to preside over Rome from the Capitol hill. The old Cenci palace, a few years ago empty and deserted, but now government property, stands in what was once the Jews' quarter of Rome, a forbidding pile eloquent of its owner's tragic history. The family chapel close to it, San Tommaso a' Cenci, dates from 1113 and was built by a Cenci who was Bishop of Sabina at that time. As these old families, "pure Romans of Rome," have died out, their place has been taken by the aristocracy of papal origin, and though as a rule natives of northern provinces, these newcomers have become Roman in sympathies and have inherited the privileges and traditions of the Roman patrician. Not only did each new pope bring his own relatives to Rome in his train and grant them titles, but he also gathered round him followers from his own province among whom he distributed the great papal offices. Sometimes the period of greatness thus bestowed was short-lived, in other cases a permanent aristocracy was created and the papal offices became hereditary. Thus the Ruspoli from father to son are Masters of the Sacred Hospice; the Colonna are Assistant Princes; the Serlupi are Marshals of the Pope's Horse; the Sforza have the hereditary right to appoint the standard-bearer of the Roman people; the Chigi are Marshals of Conclave, replacing the Savelli in this office who had held it for nearly five centuries. Some of these families were nobles in their own province. The Boncompagni were a noble family of Bologna. Coming to Rome with Gregory XIII. in 1572, they were created Dukes of Sora and later Princes of Piombino and of Venosa. [Illustration: MEDIÆVAL HOUSE AT TIVOLI] The Ludovisi were nobles of Pisa, the Borghese patricians of Siena. This great family came to Rome with Paul V. in the early seventeenth century, and was granted princely rank with the title of Sulmona. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Marc' Antonio Borghese married a Salviati heiress and at that period was owner of the beautiful Villa Borghese with its museum and priceless collection of statues, of the great palace by the Tiber, of the villas Mondragone and Aldobrandini at Frascati, and of thirty-six estates in the campagna, building and endowing at the same period the rich Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At a later date, Camillo Borghese married Pauline Bonaparte and was appointed governor of Piedmont by Napoleon I. Of late years this family has been almost ruined by reckless building speculations, and the greater portion of their magnificent possessions has been sold and alienated. The Aldobrandini and Salviati are both off-shoots from this family. The Barberini and Corsini are Florentines, and came to Rome with Urban VIII. and Clement XII. The Barberini villa at Castel Gandolfo and the palace in Rome are familiar to all visitors. The grounds of the Corsini villa on the Janiculum have been recently converted into a public drive; the Corsini palace in Trastevere on the river bank is famous for its library and picture galleries. Opposite to it is the Farnesina palace built in the sixteenth century by the rich banker Agostino Chigi. Here it was that he gave a famous banquet and, desiring to make a display of his enormous wealth, bade his lackeys throw the silver dishes into the river at the end of each course under the eyes of his astonished guests who did not guess that nets had been cunningly laid to catch them as they sank. The Albani kinsmen of Clement XI. came from Urbino; the Rospigliosi from Pistoja with Clement IX.; the Odescalchi from Como with Innocent XI.; the Doria Pamphili from Genoa. This papal aristocracy occupied a unique position. Relatives of popes, who were at the same time reigning princes, they assumed royal rank and lived with a magnificence and luxury unsurpassed in Europe. In addition to the titles of Roman nobility bestowed upon them with a lavish hand, many of them became grandees of Spain and their names were inscribed in the "golden book" of the Capitol. They bought country estates and suburban villas and built great palaces in the town. These stately Renaissance buildings, some of them larger than many royal dwellings, are grouped at the base of the Capitol and along the Corso, the most important and at one period the only great street in Rome. The Palazzo di Venezia, the home of the Venetian Paul II., the Altieri, the Grazioli, and the Bonaparte palaces, the latter originally the property of the Rinuccini, stand, a stately group, on the Piazza di Venezia and the Via del Plebiscito. The series is continued along the Piazza dei SS. Apostoli with the Colonna, the Balestra, the Odescalchi, and the Ruffo palaces. Greatest among those in the Corso is the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. Here also are the Ruspoli, Fiano, Chigi, Sciarra, Salviati, Ferraioli, and Theodoli palaces, and before its demolition to enlarge the Piazza Colonna, the Piombino. The Costaguti in the Piazza Tartaruga, the Antici-Mattei, the Longhi and the Gaetani palaces, the latter in the _Via delle Botteghe Oscure_, "the street of dark shops," are grouped at the foot of a further slope of the Capitol. More to the west, stand the huge Farnese palace the present seat of the French embassy and the Cancelleria built by Cardinal Riario nephew of Sixtus IV. and still papal property. The Simonetti and Falconieri palaces are built upon the banks of the Tiber close by, and face Via Giulia. Latest of all the great papal families to settle in Rome were the Braschi, Pius VI.'s kinsmen, and they built a palace in the Piazza Navona. Not far off are the Patrizi and Giustiniani palaces near the French church of San Luigi in the street of the same name. The Giustiniani are Earls of Newburgh in the peerage of Scotland through the marriage in 1757 of the heiress of the title and estates to the Prince Giustiniani of that date. Great was the opulence and magnificence of the Roman princes. When they issued forth into the city they were attended by mounted grooms with staves while running footmen cleared a way before them. An army of servants waited upon their needs, their stables were filled with horses, and their coaches were wonderful equipages of gilding glass and painting, costing thousands of francs. Powdered flunkeys in silk stockings stood behind on the foot board, three on a prince's coach, two on a cardinal's. One of these men carried an umbrella and a cushion. For if during his drive the prince chanced to meet his Holiness the Pope or a religious procession in which the Host was carried, he would instantly stop his coach, and alighting would kneel upon the ground, the cushion being placed by his servants under his knees and the umbrella held over his bared head to protect it from the sun. Many of the Roman nobles had private theatres in their houses; they were great collectors of books, bronzes, tapestries, and mosaics, and the Roman private galleries of pictures and statues are unsurpassed. The Borghese alone possessed four Raphaels as well as their famous collection of statues. At the same time they were generous to the city of their adoption. They threw open their beautiful parks and villas to the people, they admitted the public to their galleries museums and libraries, and they endowed hospitals asylums and orphanages. The Roman ladies had always patronised and promoted works of charity. Nevertheless the later custom, which persists to this day, of personally visiting the poor and the hospitals began with Gwendoline Talbot, the daughter of the last Catholic Earl of Shrewsbury, who as the wife of Prince Borghese was the first of the Roman ladies to walk alone at all hours, intent on her errands of mercy. The wit which made her present a gold coin to a man who on one occasion followed her, was the talk of the city. Her name is still a household word in Roman mouths, and her tragic death when only twenty-four years old, leaving four little children, one only of whom, the present Princess Piombino, survived the infection which killed their mother, moved an entire population. [Illustration: ILEX AVENUE AND FOUNTAIN (_Fontana scura_), VILLA BORGHESE] Many of the Roman palaces are as big as barracks. The Palazzo Pamphili-Doria can accommodate a thousand persons; but this was none too large for a patriarchal style of living which in a modified form survives to the present day. Much space was taken up by the great libraries, museums, picture galleries and reception and state banqueting halls. A small army of officials were housed within the walls--steward, bailiff, major-domo, secretaries, accountants, all the underlings necessary to the management of great and distant estates. A wing would be set entirely apart for the Prince Cardinal, a cadet of the house; the domestic chaplain would require a set of rooms; he would say the daily mass in the private chapel of the palace but would not dine with the family. The sons of the house would require tutors, the daughters governesses and companions. The great double gates of every Roman palace which are securely locked and barred at night, lead into a central court. Round it are open colonnades, sometimes in two stories, and in the centre a fountain splashes amidst ferns and palms. A porter presides over the palace gates, magnificent in a cocked hat knee breeches and long coat trimmed with coloured braid into which are worked the heraldic devices of the family. His rod of office is a long staff twisted with cord and crowned with an immense silver knob. This personage is the descendant of the janitor who in ancient Rome watched the house door day and night and whose fidelity was ensured when necessary by chaining him to his post. A grand staircase leads to the first floor and this, the _piano nobile_, was and still is occupied in Roman houses by the head of the family whose rule is more or less absolute and tyrannical. The second floor is given up to the eldest son upon his marriage for his own use, and similarly the second son is given the one above, while beneath the roof accommodation is found for an immense retinue of servants and attendants. It is still the custom for the whole family, married sons and their families included, to dine together, and elaborate accounts are kept of the allowances given to each son, of the quota contributed by each to the general expenses, of the dowry of each daughter-in-law, as to whether she is enjoying the number of dishes of meat per meal and the number of horses and carriages stipulated for in her marriage settlement. In the case of an English wife, a carpet used to be among the stipulations. Though the state coaches, the running footmen, much of the pomp and ceremony have disappeared, some curious relics remain of an order of things fast passing away. Every Roman prince has the right, should he wish it, to be received at the foot of the great staircase of any house he honours with his presence by two lackeys bearing lighted torches; and these should escort him to the threshold of his hostess's reception room. This ceremony is still observed for cardinals on state occasions. Again every prince has the right to, and in fact still has, a throne room and throne in his palace. This is not for his own use, but for that of the Pope should he elect to pay him a visit. In the hall of a Roman palace a shield emblazoned with the family arms may be seen affixed to the wall. In a prince's house it will be surmounted by a canopy, beside it should stand the historic umbrella and cushion. Four marquesses and these only the marquesses Patrizi, Theodoli, Costaguti and Cavalieri enjoy the princes' right to the canopy above their shield and are hence called the _marchesi di baldacchino_. A good deal of natural confusion exists in the mind of the foreigner with regard to the different ranks and the distribution of titles in the Italian peerage. These in fact follow no general rule but depend in each case upon the patent of creation. Princely titles conferred by the Holy Roman Empire affect every member of the family equally; titles conferred by the Pope, on the other hand, are as a rule restricted to the head of the family only. Thus in the Colonna family every member is a prince or princess; amongst the Ruspoli, a papal creation, only the head of the eldest branch is legally a prince. In these latter cases however it is usual to give the eldest son one of the other family titles upon his marriage, and the same with the second son. Such an act is in the father's option, but he is obliged to notify the assumption of the title to the civil authorities. In the same way a certain amount of latitude is allowed him as to the title he uses himself or grants to his sons. Prince Gaetani, for example, prefers to be known by the older title in his family, that of Duke of Sermoneta, bestowing that of Prince di Caserta upon his eldest son. The titles _Don_ and _Donna_ are only correct for the sons and daughters of princes and of the four _marchesi di baldacchino_, though they are often used for all the children of marquesses. In the same way, the distribution of the other titles of Marquess, Count or Baron amongst the various members of the family depends upon the terms of the original patent. In some cases every member bears the title, in others the head of the family only. Collaterals of a house often take the style _Giovanni dei Principi N----_, or _dei Conti N----_ as the case might be; "John of the Princes So-and-so," or "of the Counts So-and-so." The distinction again between the patrician and the noble is one that is not understood by the foreigner. A patrician belongs by ancestral prescriptive right to the governing class of his province. The names of the patricians are balloted annually, and one of the number is chosen as Prior or Governor of the province. He is in fact and history of senatorial rank. Among the districts of Italy some have and some have not a patriciate. Spoleto possesses one, but Todi, next to it, has never had one. In Rome the patrician families are called "_Coscritti_" in allusion to the _Patres conscripti_ or senators of the city. Their number was limited and defined by a constitution of Benedict XIV. but later popes have added new names. There are now sixty patrician families. [Illustration: "HOUSE OF COLA DI RIENZO," BY PONTE ROTTO The architecture of this supposed dwelling of the last of the Roman Tribunes is a _bizarre_ mixture of styles and epochs. It has been suggested that a series of initial letters which surmount a doggerel inscription are those of the many titles which Rienzo bestowed upon himself. The people know the house as that "of Pontius Pilate."] The nobles, on the other hand, often owed their titles not only to the Pope but to their respective Communes, which, until the one fount of honour was defined to be the sovereign, frequently bestowed titles on their citizens. This privilege was enjoyed by the abbots of Monte Cassino in the thirteenth century. The popes have always conferred titles of nobility, as did the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir in this matter the Pope claims to be. At present an Heraldic Commission is sitting in Rome to regulate the use of titles, many of which have been assumed for generations without any warrant. Henceforth every one will be called upon to prove his right to the title he bears, and it will be illegal for the Communes to describe any one who has not done so with "a handle to his name." Foreign titles, and among them papal titles, will in all cases have to be ratified and allowed by the sovereign of Italy. CHAPTER IX ROMAN RELIGION When we think of Rome as the cradle of more than one civilisation, we should also recollect that the Roman has matured two great religions: the religion of ancient Rome and the religion of Western Christendom. Not that we can think of the Roman as a religious people, in the sense in which the Asiatic has always been and remains to this day religious, the sense in which the Hebrew or the sense in which the Egyptian was religious. The Roman never had either the imaginative philosophy which produced the religion of Greece, nor the metaphysical mysticism which made the Hindu faiths. He had in fact in common with the Hebrew, whom he was so totally unlike, a complete absence of the metaphysical temper, of mysticism, of asceticism; and like the Hebrew he did not apply any richness of imagination to religion. What he had was a genius for bringing the other world to the support of this, and what he created was the conception of religion as _piety to the State_; and it is in this form that it survives in the sympathies and the sentiment of the Roman people. In the pagan world this State was secular, in the Christian world this State is the Catholic Church; but in both cases the spiritual came to the support of the temporal--ancient Rome deified the State by making it the subject of the Roman piety; Christian Rome moulded religion into a citizenship, and the Church became a _civitas_. _Civis romanus sum_, "I am a Roman citizen," has never ceased to be the all-embracing formula of Roman orthodoxy. The original Roman theogony was Etruscan. Behind the veil were the three great gods, the shrouded gods, answering to the Jove, Juno, and Minerva (_Menerva_) of later times. Round them were their "Senate," the twelve gods and goddesses known to the Romans as the _Dii Consentes_; and everywhere was the great Latin cult of Vesta, the cult of the hearth. But when Rome was built its first king made of these elements the Roman religion: Numa as a matter of fact appears to have been the Roman Moses, and to have led his people forth not to the worship of their one tribal god who was above all gods, God and Lord, the unique divine realisation of the Hebrew people, to become the root of the monotheism of the Western world, but to the worship of a unit which made of the State the family, of the commonwealth the family's hearth. It was, perhaps, his genius which made the hearth-divinity preside over the little polity and confuse and identify for ever the pieties of the home with the pieties of citizenship. It is these two elements--the theological unit of Judæa and the political unit of Latium--which meeting in Rome in the age of Claudius created the religion of the West. Not once but twice had the Romans come and wrested the sceptre from Judaea; under Titus, and again in the Roman organisation of Christianity _venerunt Romani et tulerunt eorum locum et gentem_. We see then that the Roman religion was never a great imaginative creation, but was always a great statecraft, and that Roman religion began to be Roman statecraft when Numa identified the affections and the piety of the hearth with the affections and the piety of the _res publica_, and made the State the social unit. The original ingredients of Roman religion however had nothing to do with statecraft; they were the ingredients of nature worship, the ingredients brought by a pastoral people. At the source was a reverence for natural things; and old Latin paganism had the peace which belongs to the pastoral life, and to the religion which is founded on the careful observance of potent rites disturbed as yet by no speculative questionings. But it was not free of the gloom of nature-worship--the obverse side of nature-cult--fearful, suspicious, weighted with destiny, as one imagines the religion of Etruria to have been. [Illustration: SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the fourth. See pages 35-36, 183, 186-7.] It is much later in its history that Rome was captivated by Greek religion and transferred to its crude impersonal gods the brilliant divine personifications of an imaginative people. The Latin had never been familiar with his gods, perhaps because they always remained impersonal abstractions, gods who did not use human speech, but whose language was the lightning-bolt of Jupiter and the wave-lashing triad of Neptune. Into what had really always been impersonal, the Greek came infusing warm human life, making the gods speak the language of men, and inviting men to speak to them in their own tongue. Greek religion was subtler, more individual, freer, more joyous than Latin. The pious customs which constituted the earlier Latin religion had begotten a sense of obligation in the worshipper, but it was conscience as the response to an external stimulus; and the peace it brought was a formal peace, _ex opere operato_, not a peace brought home to the individual conscience face to face with the Divine. It is because conscience implies more of individualism than ever entered into Roman religion that Roman religion has always remained without it. It was only in the jaded period of the later empire that the Romans turned altogether from the simple, natural, large elements of the religion of their soil to the fantastic, emotional, and complex cults of Isis and Mithras. The simple religion of the field and the hearth, of natural law, of orderliness and decorum, of a piety provoking and sustaining a sense of _what was owed_ to the gods, to the dead, to that State which incarnated the religion of the gods, fell away on the eve of Christianity before the foreign novelties of Greece and Egypt, better suited to the luxuriousness of mind and the growing introspection of a people who had undergone the influence of Greek thought as something indeed always alien to their nature, yet necessary to their place in the world. When Peter's successors planted a Judaic sect on the ruins of this paganism they had only to follow the genius of Numa's religion in the creation of the Catholic Church--the _civitas Dei_. Here, we may feel, an essential element of the new religion--the idea of the Kingdom of God--came naturally to supplant the older State religion; and the conception of the nation as a family was eminently germane to the fraternal maxims which grouped round the idea of the _ecclesia_. But old Rome as it had not stopped to inquire concerning small things, so it had never penetrated to interior things, and the Kingdom of God translated into the language of Rome lost in the process all its interior characters. What was delicate and subtle had never entered into Roman religion, but neither had what was petty, extravagant, or indecorous. Religion was no delicate aroma, but a concrete duty; not an individual choice, nor an individual necessity, nor an individual attraction, but a public rite, a public piety, a public decorum: and these characteristics, as we shall see, inhere in Roman religion to-day. It is in its liturgy that the mind, or if one may call it so, the temperament of the Roman Church found an ample and worthy expression; and it is in what it lacked as much as in what it put forward that the genius of the Roman rite is seen to differ entirely from that which presided at the making of the mass in every other part of Christendom. The effusion the imagery and the gracious parts added from Gaul, the mysticism of the Oriental, the philosophy of Greece, the Northern inwardness and intimacy, contributed nothing to it. Like Roman religion itself it was not a creation of the imagination or the intellect, nor the outcome of devotional sentiment; it was the creation of the Christian polity clothing its religious data, its religious certitudes, in a becoming garment--giving them a form, expression, a public characterisation. If there was no effusion there was largeness; in place of tenderness there was disengaged from the formal stately public act a perfect liberty of spirit. All through it was the public act itself which justified and consecrated, which was the sanction of the reality the criterion of the fitness of worship. Here besides, _sacramenta_ were not mere signs nor _symbola_ mere figures--they were stately vehicles of universal realities, always and everywhere adequate, worthy, co-ordinating, effectual. Roman ritual was quite bare of those things which in England and France are thought ritualistic; its only ritual consisted in the so-called "manual acts," that is, in the things which had to be done; those very things which the Eastern Church removed from the sight of the congregation, creating a "ritual" as a superfluous symbolism to engage the attention of the people. But the Roman dealt in real things, not imagery; nakedly setting forth his _sancta_ in the dry light of a realism which had no reticence joined to a great reticence of the emotions. This was the temperament of all Roman religion, pagan and Christian, a persistent rejection of all that could be described as unctuous, a setting forth of worship as a great public piety which justified itself. Unlike the Greek whose god must be behind a curtain, the Roman required the divine to be recognised, always and everywhere, in the _res publica_, in the act which had public sanction, public significance, public utility. The deacons came to the holy table bearing a cloth; one stood at one end and threw the roll across to the deacon at the other end; the oblations of the people were manipulated before the assembly; the wine collected in small phials is poured into a large chalice, repoured into a bowl; the pontiff collects the oblation bread, so do the priests, while acolytes stand at the side holding cloths to receive it; and the same things, not rites but familiar usages, are repeated at the Communion, when bishop and deacons again pour, mix, distribute, wash and put away the holy things and the sacred vessels in the presence and with the assistance of the people of God. Here was nothing "common or unclean"; it was the wisdom of Roman ritual justified of her children. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN A very early Christian basilica, in the historic part of Rome by Ponte Rotto and the round temple of Hercules, and on the site of the temple of Ceres and Proserpine. In the sixth century it is enumerated among diaconal churches. It belonged to the Greek colony in this quarter, and its name is derived from the word _kosmos_. Pavement, ambones, choir, and canopy are of the twelfth century. It has been recently restored to its ancient basilica form, and its many closed windows have been reopened. See pages 28, 31, 35-36, 186.] It will be seen at once how widely different was such a conception of worship from that elaborated in the East or which we owe to the vague awe, the dreadful sense of mystery, of the middle age. If we compare the Roman basilica with a Greek or Gothic church this difference is immediately sensible. The former owed nothing to mystery, to dimness. The celebrant faced the people, as he still faces them in all true basilicas; he did not turn his back on them. No early building, indeed, was flooded with light while glazing was in a crude state and wind and weather had to be kept at bay; but the Christian basilica was not darker than other buildings, there was no religious twilight. And as we see it to-day, in _Santa Sabina_, _Santa Maria in Cosmedin_, _Santa Maria in Domnica_, _SS. Nereo e Achilleo_, _Santa Maria Maggiore_, or in the ruined basilicas of _Santa Domitilla_ and _San Stefano_, so it was centuries ago--flooding the mysteries with what light there was because it was the church of a people who cared for no mysteries which could not bear the light. Nevertheless, the simple realism of the Roman ritual by no means meant, for him who could see, the absence of mysticity. Rather it recalled one to the suggestive and sane mysticity which inheres in all common things, in all common uses. Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small matters and to the unobvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; but though it is certain he had not set himself to create this mysticity it is equally certain that he could not banish it from his churches. Italian religion is not the same thing as Roman religion. Rome has not been "the most religious city in the world" because it felt religion more than those nations and provinces whose religious character differed so profoundly from its own, but because it was able to institute it on a scale as universal as its own imperialism. The Neapolitan has the superstition and poetry, the emotional impressionism, of the genuine South; but such a repulsive scene as the peasant, upheld by his friends, licking his way to the altar along the filthy church floor could not be witnessed in Rome. It would be difficult to imagine a Roman wishing to be exorcised after putting his head into the English or American church to see the stained glass windows. The "Roman of Rome" leaves such things together with the swallowing of pious-text pills to the unrestrained fervour of some of our English Catholics. The Roman has less religious passion and also much less abandonment to the external than the Southerner or even the Englishman. Rome has had--with one illustrious exception--no great saints since the sixth century; she has been evangelised by saintly visitors from Sweden, from Tuscany, from Siena, as the primitive Church had been edified by the itinerant Gospel visitors called "prophets." From Lombardy, Venice and Umbria, from Parma, Ancona, Florence, Pisa, Naples and the Abruzzi, saints, seers, missioners, mystics, reformers, have brought her their message: but the terrible proverb _Roma veduta fede perduta_ records the impression she has often made on visitors less elect than these. Not Rome but Venice counts as the "devout city" of Italy, and the well-known story of the Jew who became a Christian on the ground that no religion could have survived Roman corruption unless it were divine, was told me in Rome by a prelate as an encouraging episode. It was said by Matthew Arnold that the Latin people never cared enough for Christianity to reform it; they never thought it worth while, it is true, to break with the Church to find Christianity. The Italian, moreover, had none of the things which made the Puritan--not his fierce dogmatism, the Judaic strain of his piety, his dread of the external, his contentment with doctrinal formulas. Joined to an indubitable attachment to Catholicism--the magic of which inspired the art even of men who did not believe it--the Italian had also too keen an intuition of the real religious issues (as we understand them to-day) to exchange ecclesiastical tradition for biblical dogmatism. Christianity was for him much more of a self-justifying religious tradition and much less of a dogmatism than it was for the Protestant. The Christianity which the Italian would have liked was the Christianity of S. Francis, familiar, meek, tolerant, a genuine discipleship; and it did not irk him to add to this the forms of Catholicism. Like the Reformers, the Italian of the sixteenth century knew little of Church history, but his instinct was on the side of reintegration rather than disintegration of the religious forces enshrining the Christian revelation. The earlier Italian religious movements were almost entirely, like that of the seraphic _frate_, on the side of informing historical Christianity with the new spirit of Christ. A great horror of the ways of Rome, never echoed by the Romans, did, nevertheless, penetrate religious Italy, and few people realise that it was among the Franciscans not among the Reformers that papal Rome was first branded as the "scarlet woman," the unclean Babylon of the Apocalypse. Has Protestantism the evangelic marks which the Italian, consciously or unconsciously, lays down for Christianity, and what chance would it have in Italy? It will bear repeating that the Puritan's definition of Christianity would never at any time have found acceptance with the Italian; he never could have cared for reform in doctrine and discipline which did not necessarily, did not primarily, involve a real evangelic reform. When one remembers how very little Protestantism was, in its inception, on the side of dogmatic freedom, and that it put a theological formula before all other matters of the law, one may admit that the Italian though he did not reform may yet have loved true Christianity. In the next place the intense individualism of Protestant worship is distasteful to the Italian who, as we have already realised, does not ask or require that subordination of the society to the individual which religious subdivisions imply, and he would always be repelled by the phenomena of revivalism. It is instructive for us to realise that such things are stigmatised as "buffoonery" by the Italians, whose own elaborate ritual often appears to suggest that description to the Protestant. In the third place, he dislikes the _réclame_ of Protestantism, its self-advertisement, the distribution of tracts at church doors and in the public streets. To his mind no religion worthy of the name can have need of such support. The Sister of Charity and the _frate_, indeed, appear familiarly among them in their strange dress, not as they, yet part of themselves, reminding the people of the great ideals of their religion, tracts in their own persons but making no _réclame_. [Illustration: CHAPEL OF SAN ZENO (called _orto del paradiso_) IN S. PRASSEDE This mosaic chapel was erected by Paschal I. in 822. Its great beauty gave it the name of "Garden of Paradise." The church is near the house of Pudens, and is dedicated to Praxedis his daughter. See pages 45, 46, 240.] Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable, for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony. The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity--as the catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"--he will always require gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to assist his imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense, to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence, and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service conceived in the spirit of the mass, with its mystical renewal enacted before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate; but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal element. The visitor to Rome must be struck with the fact that the Italians are a more religious people than we. They take more trouble about it. Every morning, day after day, in scores of churches people are going in and out of the heavy leathern door hangings, up and down the steps of the façades; such a spectacle as the visit to the sepulchres on Holy Thursday could not be witnessed in England from one year's end to another. At the street corners, on the stairs, in the shops and the porters' lodges, oil lamps burn before images and shrines; and the deepest curse in the Italian vocabulary is to say _La mala Pasqua_--"a bad Easter to you." "In all things I perceive that ye are somewhat superstitious," said S. Paul, taking as the pretext of his appeal to the Athenians the trouble and care which he saw everywhere bestowed on the unseen world and the claims of worship: and he could make the same appeal to the Romans to-day with perhaps a greater chance of converting them than the missionary from America. For there is no "provincialism" in Italian religion; the Sunday joys of discussing the anthem, the sermon, the preacher, the details of the service and the congregation, the half mystical half sentimental joy of chewing the cud of sacred things which is so Northern, offer no attractions to the man of the South. He has endless time in the South but no long twilights. In religion as elsewhere the Roman harbours no illusions. The things--petty or precious--which are possible to a people who can maintain illusions, and have no inconvenient quickness of mind, are not to be expected from him. Chadbands in Rome would have no success and no dupes; and your transcendental emotional sentiments about the Pope are perhaps as little understood as your rejection of him. The Roman dreads death, and he refers to the anointing oil as "_quella cosa più peggio del viatico_"--"that thing which is still worse than the Viaticum." He lives familiarly with his religion and in a sort of child-like simplicity; yet he is sceptical, and we are not, he has no talent for meditative devotion, and we have. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF S. PAUL'S-WITHOUT-THE-WALLS Erected between 1193 and 1208. The most beautiful cloisters in Rome. See interleaf, page 158, and page 36.] Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as little tolerated as the _réclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible "respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the mass; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas midnight mass to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival. These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human interest, the brotherhood of class, oppose themselves here to English self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the attitude which the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to assume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked and distrusted, in either sex, when met. The Roman peasant trudging into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in the Via Nazionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once points out to him his place in the house of God--for this is the American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic. These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example, Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal, the priests are quæstors and their vergers are lictors. Such things certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same title, the house of the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis, that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral, in both cases women and Catholics, were assaulted by the beadle in charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does not easily feel that desire to assault which possesses the Teutonic official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of a Cologne beadle in their souls. The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation. [Illustration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.] The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races, who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the catacombs to a solemn mass in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its primitive counterpart in the shepherds' god Lupercus "driver away of wolves," whose worship was celebrated in _Roma Quadrata_ by the original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a libation. But he who said _Ego sum pastor bonus_ is gathering the sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman religion was capable of assimilating; but the moral implications of this personality--after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist--were never really appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal mass prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too officiated as _pontifex maximus_. The very chairs of the bishops in Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his titular church sits on a throne) are the _curule_ chairs of the Roman magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions were vested in the _Lucomones_. Though Greek theology twice enriched Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been. There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose there as elsewhere among the "Jews of the dispersion," and certain Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at once took their place in its public worship. But Rome has, here also, preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element. At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--"the voice of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew history. The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his Kingdom of God on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience. Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral considerations connected with Abel. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called "S. Mary above Minerva" because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the goddess, was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the Roman basilica is manifest.] It is the _pax romana_, the peace of the Roman empire, which was actually established as "the Peace of the Church." The peace, juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the _civis romanus_. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of earthly entities--to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox strangers dying in Rome record--_in pace_. The Roman citizenship becomes the Catholic citizenship through the mediation of the Apostle who could say "But I am a Roman born," while setting forth imperially a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates that new _imperium_ where Rome may claim that all homage is paid _et mihi et Petro_, confounds those two things which the master of the Gospel "of the Kingdom" had set apart, the things of Cæsar and the things of God. CHAPTER X THE ROMAN CARDINAL What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests, because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by Peter, at whose instance "the seven" were first instituted (Acts vi. 3). To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of the Roman district who came in time to assist the Pope at the great ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find "bishops" presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans. [Illustration: SAINT PETER'S] As the Church grew these presbyters of the original "titles" or parish churches of Rome, together with the regional deacons of the city, and the suburban bishops, took rank as the cardinal or principal Roman clergy, and in time the privilege of forming part, even in only a titular sense, of this body of presbyters and deacons of the great See of Rome, was coveted by other than Romans, and the Pope would create the metropolitan of a foreign See or some distinguished foreign ecclesiastic cardinal priest or cardinal deacon of the Holy Roman Church. By the eleventh century the cardinals of the Roman Church are a recognised body, the Senate of the Pope, whose election is being gradually confined to their hands alone. In the next century the popular vote--the vote of the clergy and people of Rome--is altogether abolished, and thenceforth the election of a pope is exclusively vested in the College of Cardinals, whose privileges and dignity were further enhanced at the close of the thirteenth century by Boniface VIII. Cardinals therefore are the honorary parish clergy of Rome, nominally holding the place of the presbyters of the Roman _titles_ and of the deacons of the Roman regions; and though a foreign cardinal cannot of course be also a local parish priest in Rome, he is bound to appoint a "vicar" to represent him. The six suburban Sees are always held by six of the senior cardinals _di curia_, that is the cardinals resident in Rome, among whom is always the Pope's cardinal-vicar, and they are called the cardinal bishops. Cardinal priests are usually in episcopal orders, and cardinal deacons are usually in priest's orders. Each cardinal priest or deacon takes his title from one of the Roman churches, and is styled _John Cardinal Priest_ (or deacon) _of the title of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian_. The oldest presbyteral titles are to be found in the outlying districts--as SS. Andrea and Gregorio, Archbishop Manning's title, S. Clemente, S. Prisca, SS. Bonifacio and Alessio, or S. Eusebio, on the Caelian Aventine and Esquiline, or among the old ecclesiastical foundations in Trastevere. The diaconal titles, on the contrary, are to be found in the centre, corresponding to the ancient regions--S. Maria in Aquiro behind Piazza Colonna, S. Adriano on the Forum, or S. Giorgio the title of John Henry Newman in the ancient quarter of the Velabrum. The Pope was chosen from among the deacons of Rome for eight hundred years, and was consecrated bishop on his election; later on the Pope was chosen from the bishops, but if, as has happened, a layman were elected he proceeded at once to receive the three major orders. A man in deacon's orders or a layman may similarly have the Hat conferred on him, but in this case he may remain in deacon's orders, or if a layman may take simple minor orders. The last deacon in the College of Cardinals was created by Pius IX. He had been a member of the High Council in the "forties," and as such formed one of the deputation sent by the Romans after the flight to Gaeta to beg Pius IX. to return to Rome. The deputation was not even received. Antonelli, this Pope's Secretary of State, was another cardinal who was never in priest's orders. A cardinal is called the Pope's _creatura_; at the time of Leo XIII.'s death the only surviving cardinal of Pius IX.'s creation was the Cardinal Chamberlain Oreglia di Santo Stefano, so that Leo could all but declare in the words of one of his predecessors, with an allusion to S. John xv. 16, "You have not elected me, but I have elected you." The full number of the Roman cardinals is seventy. About twenty-five of these are always resident in Rome, and form the papal _Curia_, or administrative council of the Church, with the _entrée_ at all times to the Vatican. They are the chief members of the Roman Congregations, the Congregation of Rites, of the Inquisition, the Index, the Bishops and Regulars, etc., through which all ecclesiastical affairs are administered. Cardinals _di curia_ receive a sum of twenty-four thousand francs a year, or less than one thousand pounds. A special stipend is also added for the work done as members of the various congregations. Their position before 1870 was however a very different one. Then they enjoyed large incomes and their comings and goings were attended with a certain measure of regal state; and in the preceding centuries when the Hat was often conferred, like any other secular distinction, on mere youths and on laymen, their wealth and the luxury and magnificence of their style of living was unsurpassed in Rome, while the power and position of some cardinal nephew or relative of the Pope was second only to his own. Cardinals are created--and the process is long and elaborate--in a special assembly of the Pope and his Council of Cardinals known as Consistory. In a preliminary and secret meeting, the Pope proposes the names of those he wishes to honour to his assembled councillors, and as a relic of the ancient custom of asking the consent of the people to the election of their bishop or deacon, the question: "quid quis videtur?" is put as each name is announced. No opportunity of dissent is however afforded the cardinals, and all they are expected to do is to rise, take off their _berrettas_ or stiff caps, and bow as a sign of assent. The Pope may, and often does, keep back "in his breast," _in petto_, the name of some candidate if he thinks it expedient. But this candidate comes forward nevertheless at a future consistory for the subsequent formalities. At another secret consistory, the Pope first closes the mouths of the newly created cardinals and then pronounces them open with the words: "I open your mouth that in consistory, in congregations, and in other ecclesiastical functions, you may be heard in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost." Most important of all these ceremonies is the public consistory held in one of the great halls of the Vatican, and before 1870 this was a "festa" of the first magnitude. The new _porporati_, wearers of purple, rode in triumph through the streets upon gaily decked horses, wearing their scarlet robes and hats; bands of ecclesiastics, grooms on foot and on horseback, papal guards and attendants escorted them; cannon were fired and church bells rung, and the Roman people never so happy as when a procession is afoot, crowded into the streets. On reaching the Vatican, the cardinals-elect take their oaths in the Sistine chapel and then accompanied by two cardinal deacons as sponsors, one walking on each side, they are led into the presence of the Pope. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF S. PETER'S, THE BRONZE STATUE OF S. PETER The statue, the origin of which is uncertain, is near the shrine of the apostle, and peasants and seminarists kiss the outstretched foot, and then touch it with their foreheads. See page 11.] The Pope sits enthroned in full state, surrounded by his court, all his cardinals in a great semicircle around him, cardinal bishops and priests on his right, cardinal deacons on his left--the train bearers sitting on foot-stools at their feet. Kneeling on the steps of the throne, the new cardinals kiss the Pontiff's foot, hand, and cheek; they then rise and embrace the whole college in the order of their precedence, and as a final ceremony, they kneel again before the Pope, the hoods of their cloaks are drawn over their heads by two masters of ceremonies, and a cardinal's hat is held over them while the Pope addresses a few words to each. The new cardinals now take their seats according to the rank just conferred upon them, and the proceedings close with an address of thanksgiving to the Pope made upon his return to his apartments, and a _Te Deum_ in the Sistine chapel. In the afternoon of the same day, couriers and messengers hurry through the streets of Rome. The new red hat is carried to the happy recipient by a "monsignore of the papal wardrobe," the rochet and the scarlet _berretta_ are conveyed by less important functionaries, and all and each have to be thanked and entertained and recompensed when possible. The Secretary of State, all the cardinals and papal officials, as well as personal friends and private individuals hasten to pay congratulatory visits (_visite di calore_) upon the new cardinals; and royal fashion, the state calls have to be immediately returned. If the cardinal is a foreigner and out of Rome, his hat is carried to him by a papal messenger especially appointed, and in Catholic states is presented with considerable ceremony by his sovereign. The cardinal's hat, at one time an article of attire, is now only a symbol. It is of red cloth with a wide brim and shallow crown, and on either side hang fifteen red tassels, the number denoting the ecclesiastical rank of the wearer. From the day of its presentation the hat is put by until its owner's death, when it is brought out once more to be hung up in some side chapel of his titular church, where it remains until it falls to pieces with age. One of the first duties of a new cardinal is to take possession of his titular church, and in old days this was another occasion for pomp and display, and the Pope's guards attended in full dress uniform. Now the cardinal drives quietly in his sombre closed carriage. At the church door he is divested of his cloth cloak and hat, and in flowing scarlet silk he walks up the nave bestowing benedictions on all sides. He seats himself on his throne in the chancel and the vicar of the parish reads to him an address in Latin to which he replies, he is then saluted by all the clergy of the parish in the order of their precedence ending with the acolytes, and the "taking possession" is over. He must however present the church with his portrait painted in oils which is hung with that of the reigning pope in the nave; and with a large escutcheon of his heraldic coat, emblazoned in colour and surmounted by the red hat and tassels, which is placed over the main entrance to the building, and which side by side with the papal arms is the outward and visible sign of a titular church. As princes of the Church, cardinals enjoy the princely distinction of displaying their coats of arms in the halls of their houses, affixed to the wall and sheltered beneath a silken canopy. Further they must have a throne and throne room, but unlike the secular princes of Rome who are entitled to the same privilege, their thrones are turned towards the wall, and are only reversed during a vacancy of the Holy See, when they may be used by their owners, who, for the time, become sovereigns and rulers of the Church. No great church ceremony is complete without a cardinal, who by his very presence makes a function, but except for such occasions as these little is seen of the Roman cardinals by the casual visitor to the city. Their heavy carriages, painted black, drawn by black horses their harness unrelieved by brass or plating, pass unnoticed in the streets. Only occasionally on the Janiculum or outside the city gates on fine afternoons, a cardinal may be seen taking a walk, his servant at a discreet distance behind him, and his carriage following at a foot's pace. Before 1870 the streets of Rome were enlivened by the cardinals' brilliant equipages. A cardinal possessed two or three coaches to be used according to the degree of state required. He drove to the Vatican on grand occasions with all three to convey himself and his retinue of attendants, and his gala carriage drawn by six horses with postilions and standing footmen was of brilliant scarlet and was so magnificently gilded and painted that it cost over a thousand scudi. During the period of their greatest splendour, it was no uncommon thing for a cardinal to have a household of several hundred persons, and though this number was later greatly reduced, a considerable retinue of servants, secretaries, domestic chaplains, and attendants of all sorts was always considered necessary to his princely state. Chief among these was his _gentiluomo_. This gentleman was indeed his constant "guide, philosopher and friend"; he drove with him, paid visits for him, entertained his friends, and in a wonderful Elizabethan dress of black velvet, with silk stockings, lace ruffles and a rapier, he was by his side at all state and church functions. Cardinal Wiseman's _gentiluomo_ still lives in Rome where he received the guests of the new cardinal in the palace of the Consulta opposite the Quirinal, then occupied by Pius IX., and he remembers the cardinal taking the official costume with him to England for his English substitute. At the present day when the temporal rôle of cardinals is shorn of its significance, nothing better illustrates the unworthy subordination of the civil career to the clerical than the position of a cardinal's _gentiluomo_. Dressed in his knee breeches, a sword by his side, this attendant who belongs to the good _bourgeoisie_ and may be an architect or engineer, is to be seen at every cardinal's high mass, waiting with the minor clerks, and presenting himself on one or two occasions during the ceremony with a ewer and basin which he offers kneeling on one knee while the cardinal washes the tips of his fingers. [Illustration: A CARDINAL IN VILLA D'ESTE Villa d'Este at Tivoli was the residence of the late Prince-Cardinal Hohenlohe. See interleaf, page 106.] It is fondly believed by the tourist, who will go any distance as a rule, and push through any crowd for a sight of the scarlet clothes, that a cardinal habitually lives in robes of red silk, with a white fur tippet round his shoulders. As a matter of fact his red robes are for state occasions only--either for attendance at the papal court or for great church functions. He wears a plain black cassock in ordinary life with a red sash and red buttons and silk pipings, and thus cannot be easily distinguished from other prelates whose silk trimmings vary with every shade from crimson to purple. The state robes of scarlet are very splendid indeed. The soutane of light scarlet cloth has a train; over this is worn the white rochet trimmed with deep lace and over this again the _cappa magna_ a voluminous circular cloak of red watered silk, with a single opening for the head. It is gathered up to the elbows in front and floats behind into an ample train which is carried by pages or acolytes. The stockings, gloves, skull cap and _berretta_ are of scarlet. The _cappa magna_ has a hood pointed behind and forming a sort of shoulder cape in front, which in the winter months is covered with white ermine. Canons of the Roman basilicas wear a _cappa magna_ of purple cloth, but they are not permitted to spread it out, it must be tightly coiled into a long rope and slipped through a loop at the side. At social receptions a cardinal wears his black soutane and red sash, and over it a flowing scarlet silk cloak from the shoulder. If the occasion is an important one he is received at the palace gates by two servants with lighted torches, and these accompany him up the stairs to the door of the _salon_ and there await his departure, when they escort him to his carriage again. When in this gala attire, a cardinal wears as an out-door wrap a gorgeous cloth cloak with many capes of purple and deep red, and a red priest's hat around which is twisted a red and gold cord finished with minute tassels the requisite fifteen in number. The most responsible and arduous duty of the College of Cardinals is the conclave when the election of the future head of the Church depends upon their united vote. With the death of a pope their position changes on the instant from that of subject to ruler, and for the time being the destinies of the Church lie in their hands. They receive deputations and state visits seated upon their thrones, they drive in their carriages alone upon the principal seat, no companion being of sufficiently exalted rank to sit beside them, and the first among them, the Cardinal Chamberlain, is attended by a detachment of the Swiss guard and affixes his own seal to papal documents. [Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE--PATH OF THE HUNDRED FOUNTAINS] Scarcely in accordance with this regal state are the rules still in force for conclave, which are, to say the least, antiquated. The incarceration to which the cardinals are obliged to submit is of the strictest, and for its maintenance the secular arm is called in in the shape of the Marshal of Conclave, a Roman nobleman who with his officers and subordinates assumes complete control outside the building. Accustomed to spacious rooms and numerous domestics, the cardinals are now forced to lodge in a tiny apartment of two rooms in a circumscribed portion of the Vatican palace--the rules prescribe one cell--one valet and one secretary each are allowed them, while two barbers and one confessor are considered sufficient to shave and shrive the whole college. From sumptuous living they are reduced to meals brought to their cells by their servants, and the rules permit a gradual reduction of the _menu_ to an ultimate diet of bread and water, as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon the voters and so precipitating their agreement. This rigorous treatment has been often tried in the past with various results. When assembled for the scrutiny in the Sistine chapel each cardinal is provided with a throne before which stands a small table with ink and paper. Over the throne is a canopy or _baldacchino_ the emblem of sovereignty. These are ingeniously fitted with a hinge and when the election of the new pope is announced all the canopies fold up except one, leaving the elected member of the college alone sitting enthroned beneath his _baldacchino_, a sovereign amongst his subjects. CHAPTER XI ROME BEFORE 1870 A stranger who had found himself in Rome the week before September 20, 1870 would have noticed the strange expectation, and also the strange apathy in the Romans. "The Italians" were besieging their city, and when it pleased them to enter they would enter. The Pope would not resist them, and no one in his city thought it his business to die a martyr to such a cause. Some workmen who had had orders to make a barricade had got themselves under way with much difficulty and not without many complaints, declaring as they prepared their tools and tramped along the hot road in the September sun: "_ci vuole molto vino per queste cose, molto vino_." At five o'clock on the morning of the 20th the bombardment began and at ten the white flag was hoisted in Rome. Then a great silence succeeded in the city, every one stayed within doors, and the papal brigand corps patrolled the streets. Thus ingloriously the "Patrimony of Peter," the historical sway of the popes, came to an end. [Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS Begun by Julius Caesar, and completed by Augustus who dedicated it to his sister's son. See pages 30, 160, 168, 228.] Did the Romans welcome or reprobate the entry of "the Italians"? To answer this question for ourselves we must bear in mind the political events which preceded 1870 and the various elements represented in the city. In September 1870 when the Italians entered, Rome was already won for Italy, the Pope could not have offered any effective resistance to Italian arms, Italian unity was already an accepted fact; it only remained to take possession of Rome as the centre and capital of this political unity, Victor Emmanuel having, out of consideration to the Pontiff, fixed his capital first at Turin and afterwards at Florence. And the events which led up to this result had not spelt harmony between the Pope and his subjects or been years of peace in the papal states. When Pius mounted the throne in 1846 people were tired of Gregory XVI.'s old world methods, and Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti was no sooner elected than the Romans asked him for a constitution, a parliament, the substitution of laymen for clerks in various departments of the executive. Pius IX. accorded a constitution and a parliament of laymen. He did more. Against the suffrages of his cardinals he granted a general amnesty to political offenders, and the story runs that when he saw the rows of forbidding black balls which the cardinals had cast, he lifted his little white skull cap and covering the balls with it, said "I will make them all white," and so the amnesty was granted. It is often said that the liberal impulses of Pius IX. and his ready response to popular clamour were repaid by outrageous ingratitude, and that his Romans made him fly from Rome at the risk of his life to ponder in solitude at Gaeta the futility of liberal pretences on the part of popes. But the Romans were not simply ungrateful, they wanted more, they thought they had a right to more--and what they wanted was more than any pope could concede. They asked for modern civilisation and the papacy represented ancient civilisation. The original demands had not been demands made in _bona fides_ of a prince who has power to give and to withhold what is asked. They were part of a political campaign, the end of which was to be the destruction of the temporal power. Mazzini's instructions to Young Italy to make one demonstration after another under the windows of the Quirinal, when one liberty was accorded to return the next day and demand another, until the Pope's position was rendered intolerable and impossible, are not pleasant reading; what is to be said in their favour is that the revolutionary annals of no other people afford any better. The time had come when men who lived in contact with the Italy outside the walls of Rome, in contact with the ideas which were the conquest of the nineteenth century, could not admit that the governed had only duties and the ruler only rights, or reconcile with the modern ideal of civil life the notion of a prince-bishop governing a subject people in virtue of a theocratic idea, the abstract idea that certain temporal rights fell--_mal gré bon gré_ of all concerned--to the vicar of Jehovah on earth. The time will come when the existence of such a pretension, the existence of such a government one moment after it responded to the universal sentiment, will appear the strangest fable. Will they be better or worse times? The future alone knows what it has in store, but we can only say that they cannot ever be worse times than some of those which the papacy created for the Romans. This consideration would have sufficed at any time to make the tenure of temporal power on the part of the Roman bishops, precarious--but it did not by any means stand alone. We have to add to it the rise of Italian patriotism, the passionate call for a united Italy, for the country to issue once and for all from the tyrannies, the immoralities, the crushing canker of pettiness which clung to the princely and ducal governments, and rise to its place among the nations. Thus in September 1870 the feeling was very mixed in Rome. A large part of the population had helped to prepare the _dénouement_, knew its advent was only a question of time; others, members of faithful Roman houses, had used voice and influence to induce the Pope to institute necessary reforms and had fallen into despondency when Pius on his return from Gaeta issued his _non possumus_ and settled down to a morose implacable reactionism. There remained the large army of priests, of papal functionaries and retainers, the cardinals and their numerous personnel, the religious orders and congregations of both sexes and the hundreds upon hundreds of persons dependent on them, the papal police and soldiery with their families. There were the great families which owed their titles and their fortunes to the popes, those whom common gratitude or honour kept at his side. And lastly there was the _popolino_, the ignorant poor, untouched by modern aspirations, by socialistic theories, living from day to day, from hand to mouth in the strictest sense, with no ambitions, no "standard of comfort" or of human dignity--ready to fall on their knees at any hour of the day when the Pope "_Dio in terra_" passed, agape at the latest royal visitor to the palace of their pontiff, content to encounter injustice with cunning fraud, to sweeten the hard buffets of life by the _finesse_ required for some small scheme of peculation, some dastardly scheme of revenge. Such human passions as lay outside the gratification of hunger and the greed for spectacles were satisfied by the periodical uprising and savage disloyalty habitual to the turbulent Roman people. And what applied to the populace applied in some sense also to the small _bourgeoisie_. There are always those who find it easier and pleasanter to keep within the pale of small joys and small miseries, small achievements and small risks. There were thousands of such people who stood well with the papacy, and who could only lose by a competition with the outsider for which they were, by training and talent, unprepared. [Illustration: ISLAND OF THE TIBER--THE ISOLA SACRA To the right is the Fabrician bridge, to the left the _pons Cestius_ which joins the island to Trastevere. See pages 7, 229, 240.] These then were "for the Pope." Not because he had a divine right to be in Rome but because they individually and collectively flourished under his rule. They flourished because there was no hunger, because though there were unsanitary hovels there were no haunts of starving people who could obtain neither bread nor work--if any were in need of bread they threw a _supplica_ into the Pope's carriage and he sent it to them when he got home. They flourished, because "where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise" and no wave of unrest, few of the ignobilities and none of the nobilities of a more strenuous life had passed over them. The papal government compared to a modern European government was like a blunderbuss in a modern arsenal, but though it was entirely ineffectual, though the people under its care merely lived out their lives with enough to eat and generation succeeded generation neither better nor worse than the men who went before them--it was an honest government in the financial sense. The people were not taxed, prices indeed were kept low as a means of humouring them, and the Pope's subjects were not exploited to fill his exchequer. In the strange medley of Roman ideas it seemed better to accomplish this end by the methods of the Jubilee year which exploited the soul of the foreigner. The papal government did not peculate, but the hated _sbirri_--the papal police--were often responsible for a missing bale of cloth or a burglary, and a child who had been left a fortune by her aunt only learnt when she was grown up that the _curato_ of the Pantheon who had been made _erede fiduciario_ (trustee) and executor of the testament had not thereby been constituted sole beneficiary. The administration in all departments was simpler than now, and the evils of the present bureaucracy were not known, but it was a government of privilege and patronage; "one under which a gentleman could live" said an Irishman, but the unprivileged person might find himself in prison for not kneeling when the Pope passed. A resident English sculptor who remembered the days of Gregory XVI. told me that Rome was the paradise of artists, who in their velvet jackets and squash felt hats did what seemed good in their own eyes, no man hindering them. The curious traveller of family and fortune--it was before the day of Cook's tourists--enjoyed every liberty under the hospitable papal government save only the liberty to speak or write about politics and religion, and suffered nothing save the occasional loss of a newspaper or book which the paternal government stopped at the frontier as likely to imperil the peace of mind of the Romans. They lived in a picturesque world, which recalled the middle ages at every step, where the prosaic dead level to which justice and civilisation had reduced the rest of Europe, did not penetrate, and they admired in Rome and for the Romans what they would have exposed in Parliament or the _Times_ as intolerable abuses in their own country. From 1848 onwards political rigours unworthy of the Holy See were resorted to, though these were relaxed before 1870. Some art students who had prepared Bengal fireworks to celebrate the anniversary of the victory over the French at Porta San Pancrazio, were sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. A similar sentence was passed on a "non-smoker" (not to smoke was a protest against the papacy at the expense of its tobacco trade) who came to words with a "smoker" and this barbarous sentence was enthusiastically upheld by such a journal as the _Civiltà Cattolica_. Commendatore Silvagni who cites these and similar instances in his _Corte e Società romana_ writes indeed like a man too sore at what he has seen and too near to what he describes to present it in perspective, and he seems to the present writer a prejudiced guide to Rome before 1870. Sedition and conspiracy have met with scant ceremony at the hands of every nation and every prince in turn, and the way in which Pius IX. treated "the patriots" does not differ from that which may be read of in the history of any other country. What was peculiar to the papal states was the confusion of the spiritual and the temporal; the special scandal came from the union of these two powers in one authority, the temporal being used to enforce the "spiritual" and the spiritual being abused to assist the temporal. The spectacle of priests, your "fathers in God," your spiritual directors, ordering the public floggings, nay the public torture, of men and women could hardly edify or civilise; Gregory XVI. had abolished these public castigations which used to be suffered in the _Campo de' fiori_ (under an archway which may still be seen), but Antonelli strove to revive them in the _Piazza del Popolo_ in 1856. Other mediæval barbarisms ceased the day the Italians entered Rome, among them the _Ghetto_. The people as we see were not taxed, but neither were they taught. Some subjects were altogether taboo--modern history was among them. Obscurantism reigned supreme. Girls were taught to read in order that they might read their prayers, but they did not learn to write lest they should indite love letters. This was typical of the papal system. You took away the light lest the child should ever happen to burn itself, and you pursued the same policy with the adult. No instruction was vouchsafed, no information given, no education whatever of the intellectual or moral man. Girls were often destined from birth to the nunnery, and the veil was the never-failing remedy against a marriage distasteful to the parents or even the brothers, grand-parents, or uncles of the victim. No one denies that this compulsory enclosure was commonly practised in Rome. "Are you not ashamed to be reading, go and knit stockings" shouted a Jesuit to a poor lady who sat reading in her carriage in the Corso as the worthy father, who had been preaching a retreat to women, crossed the street. Many of the poor ladies in convents became imbecile so void were their minds, so vacuous their lives, and in our own day a Roman community of thirty nuns required the services of no fewer than thirty-one confessors. The education received by the boys of good families sent them home with the airs and gestures of so many little _abbés_. The children's games were tarred with the same brush, the same universal insipidity. The little boys dressed up as priests and said sham masses or moved about pieces of white cardboard which represented the host; explaining to their little sisters that such solemn fooling was not for "wicked girls." Occasionally, the natural talent, the natural wit and moral courage of a girl might provide her with a rôle and allow her to dominate instead of being the sport of circumstances. But the young men as a rule fell victims to that weak-kneedness which makes them the prey of the fear of derision in their school-days, intensified by a training which made self-dependence and self-development impossible. Thus one of the Doria, a family which had given heroes to its country, the younger brother of that Doria whose English wife's name _Mary_ is cut in a box hedge in the Villa Pamfili, broke the heart of the noble Vittoria Savorelli because his uncle, of whom he was independent, objected to their engagement. A Roman _marchese_ having been struck in the face by another Roman in the middle of the Corso at midday rushed off to consult his confessor as to what steps he should take, and we are not surprised to learn that he was able to follow the advice proffered, and "bear it patiently." There is a story of a _frate_ who could have taught him differently. As he was crossing a bridge a man struck him on the cheek; the good _frate_ immediately turned the other, then he picked up his man and pitched him into the river; for, as he explained, the Gospel bid him turn the other cheek to the smiter, but it did not tell him what he was to do afterwards. [Illustration: THE STEPS OF ARA COELI The church which occupies the site of the Sabine arx. See pages 6, 86, 230-31.] The fierce light of publicity has transformed the lives of the Roman clergy and religious since 1870. Those Roman priests who live without reproach themselves, confess that "the revolution" has brought about this signal benefit. The _Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici_ which received impoverished nobles, ordained them, and sent them _at twenty-five years old_ to rule as prefects over the papal provinces was the fertile nursing-ground of a corrupt prelacy. The proud and affectionate interest with which the Romans, despite many lapses, regarded the popes, was not extended to the great papal officers who from the _Governatore di Roma_ downwards did not cease to provide a scandalous example to the people until the moment when "the Italians" entered the city. It will be said: these people at least were taught their religion? They were taught their religion as they were taught everything else--that is, not at all. They knew that you must obey the pope and obey the priest, that you would be damned if you did not go to confession and hear mass. But they thought one Madonna would hear their petitions better than another ("_Non andate da quella, non vale niente_" "don't go to that one, she is no good") and that exorcism was a surer remedy for a plague of bugs than cleanliness. They never heard a single verse of the Gospel explained to them, and young men of the higher _bourgeoisie_ learnt their religion if they learnt it at all, after 1870, when they were grown up and thought and read for themselves. Such men, many of whom belong to the _Circolo San Pietro_, are to-day the mainstay of intelligent and faithful religion in the city. Before 1870 there was in Rome a real ignorance of the doctrines, the beauties, and the duties, of Christianity. The one moment chosen for a great religious impression was of course the first Communion. Boys and girls were then enclosed and eight days were spent in pious exercises and instruction. The sons of the poor went to the _Cappellette di San Luigi_ at Ponte Rotto, the well to do to the same institution near Santa Maria Maggiore. On the other side of the basilica the girls of well to do families were prepared at the Bambin Gesù, the poor at San Pasquale. I am assured that at Ponte Rotto the effect of these eight days shut up in a religious house frequently changed the lives of boys with vicious tendencies. In other classes the appeal to unreal emotions was not always so successful, and the girls at the Bambin Gesù, dressed up in the stiff unaccustomed habit of the religious, often communicated with the one dread filling their minds that they might inadvertently commit "the sin" of touching the host with their teeth. Not less mistaken was the custom of the "Six Sundays," the girls and boys alike for the next six weeks communicating "in honour of the chastity of S. Lewis Gonzaga." And then _buon viaggio_, as the Italians say; they probably never communicated again except as "paschal lambs" at Easter. They communicated then of course. At the rails, the moment they had received the host, a ticket was handed to them with the name of the parish and some pious Latin verse inscribed on it. To this the communicant appended his name and address, and no succour was given, no "grazia" accorded except to those provided with this ticket. The names of those who had not communicated were posted at the church doors. Thus not only did all who could in conscience do so communicate once a year, but those who could not and would not procured the services of some woman who made it her business to communicate every day, or several times a day, during Easter tide, selling the tickets thus received for a franc or two francs each. Here was one of the inevitable degradations of a theocracy. Another was this--people found working at their trade, in their back shop, in their private room, on _festas_ were arrested and imprisoned sometimes for several days. Respectable citizens who found themselves compelled to finish a piece of work, behind closed doors, in this way, were subjected to the ignominious and futile punishment, which was certainly not calculated to educate their own religious sense or that of their families and children. Spies, under such a government, were always easy to find, and this and similar laws gave fine scope to the purveyors of private revenge. You could not ostentatiously abstain from going to mass, if you were poor you could not abstain at all, for the Roman parish priests were so many civil magistrates with definite powers, and if the answers to their numerous questions were not satisfactory it was the worse for the householder and his prospects. One means of finding out people's private affairs was through the servants who acted as spies reporting everything to the _parocco_. Pinelli the famous designer and engraver, whose bust to-day adorns the Pincio, who had never been pious or even respectable, repaid the old woman who reported his habitual absence from mass by ringing up the neighbourhood between half past four and five every morning, and in reply to the usual "_Chi è?_" calling out "_è Pinelli che va a messa_"; nor did he desist ringing at his enemy's door till she got out of bed to hear his announcement. The carabineers of the theocracy also had a mixed service. A room had to be set apart for the temerarious folk who required meat on a Friday or a fast day, and the carabineers entered the restaurants and eating houses, sequestrating the dish which smoked before the customer if this regulation was not observed. Moreover, at the head of every department was a cardinal; the Roman wife of a political exile once described to me what a _via crucis_ it was for a young woman to run the gauntlet of these clerical departments if she had to ask some favour for the exiled husband. [Illustration: STEPS OF THE CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO Above the steps of _Magnanapoli_ which lead from the Forum of Trajan to the Quirinal hill. Their architect was Bernini. See page 231.] But if they were unlettered and superstitious were the people in those days better than now? The comparisons we sometimes hear urged are not really fair for two reasons. There is to be found in Rome to-day among the lower and the half educated classes all that want of moral equilibrium which a revolution of ideas brings with it. Moral Italy has yet to be made, as the moral unity of Italy is also as yet only in the making. Before 1870, on the other hand, those who were faithful to the standard then put before them, were faithful to what was never better than a poor and low ideal of conduct, sentiment, and religious duty. The papal standard required no refinement of feeling, no education of the conscience: no one was scandalised that a shop should display the barbarous notice "_Qui si castrono per la cappella papale_," or that the popular story ran that when Guido Reni was painting his picture of the Crucifixion before a living model attached to a cross, he killed him at the last moment in his frenzy to see and seize the death struggle, and fled the city; but that the holy father had absolved him because, as you who go may see, it is a _capo d'opera_. And the poor man killed to make a fine picture of Him who endured death to teach us pity for each other? _Ebbene, poveretto_.... The pope is like Nemesis, like the blind forces of nature, like an avalanche, a falling mountain, or an earthquake--not a moral force, but a weight of authority. As you can see for yourself if you go to San Lorenzo in Lucina the work is a _capo d'opera_ and the pope knows better than you. Moral judgment is silent before the weight of authority. My narrator, who only wished to magnify a great picture, not to raise a moral problem, always carried with him a paper blest by the pope, and of extraordinary efficacy, that is it was Spanish and was covered with writing, every corner had something pious in it, and no one who carried it could die unabsolved. The proof was set forth in the blest paper itself, for one man _did_ die unabsolved, they cut off his head in fact; but the head was not to be brow-beaten, it simply went off to the nearest town--and in these cases, as the witty Marquise du Deffand said to Gibbon, _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte_--and found a priest (what priest ever shows himself the least _dérouté_ in such circumstances?) who at once confessed the head, and there the matter ended. Rome before 1870 was not even externally what we see it now. An old world city of tall palaces, the windows in the lower story grated, of monasteries and churches, of ruins in unconscious beauty, of fountains of waters, of cabbage gardens and _orti_, of orange and lemon gardens which at every turn surprised and delighted the eye. The main streets straight as Roman roads, the piazzas, in contrast to these, full of sun, intolerable from May onwards at noonday. A city of narrow squalid streets huddled together, in which the domesticities are carried on unrebuked and unabashed--in the poorer quarters every third house appeared to be a washerwoman's, the linen hung across the road on lines stretched from window to window. And everywhere an unpromising door, an open gate, may reveal a little picture, a cool garden and fountain, orange and lemon trees, a bend of the river, a view of the Janiculum or the Aventine. A Roman smell pervading everything and sufficiently characteristic to make you sure, if you were suddenly set down in any part of the town, that you were in Rome: and at night another smell, the smell of the ages, unwholesome, penetrating, coming up from the soil, or the freshly turned earth, and making one shut the windows hastily on the loveliest of moonlit evenings. A wealth of street cries, varying with the season, and the nocturnal serenades, assist that atmosphere of noise for noise' sake and movement which are essential to the Italian, the noise of the shabby two-horsed carriages grinding along on the paved streets and driven by the bad Roman drivers with a continual cracking of the whip and a constant application of the squeaking break, of wine carts lazily winding their way across the streets of the eternal city with that sense of infinite time and space born of long colloquies with the sun by day and the moon by night across a deserted _campagna_, a score of little brazen bells, perhaps, clanging and jingling at the driver's ear--the constant noise by day and night of a life-loving, loquacious, complaining, gesticulating, rebellious and keenly observant people. A city of priests and dependents of priests, here there are no industries, no great machines are set in motion every day, no factories open with daylight to give employment to hundreds of skilled workmen. Every one who is not a priest works for priests or for the monasteries. The little workshops may be seen in the Borgo of S. Peter's, in Campo Marzo, in the arches of the theatre of Marcellus--every little doorway contains a cobbler, the _piazze_ which lead to the big churches are crowded on _festas_ with vendors of religious pictures and rosaries. The convents of women make their own habits, but there is a great industry for providing the thousands of priests, the seminarists, canons, monsignori, cardinals and cardinals' retainers, and Vatican functionaries with cassocks, robes, uniforms, hats, berrettas, stocks and pumps. In the centre of this life, which is ecclesiastical even for the layman, it seems right that when we notice a stir and turn round with the rest, we should see the papal _cortège_ and the Pope round whom all this life revolves; the centre of this city of churches and cassocks, because he is the centre of a far larger world. For Rome is what it is because its sovereign bishop is the cynosure for the eyes of that Christendom which counts the largest number of adherents on the face of the globe, and their Mecca is his city, Rome. Let us follow a pedestrian who is starting on his afternoon walk, one bright day in April, from the neighbourhood of Santa Maria dell' Orto on the other side of the Tiber, and see Rome before 1870 with his eyes. Like all good Italians he is curious, and he crosses the street when he sees a man with a large oblong box covered with some black waterproof stuff ring at what is apparently a convent door--and the meanest door in Rome may give access to the scene of busiest monastic life. The door is opened by the convent porteress, and when the lid is removed our friend sees the _ostie_, the hosts for the use of the convent, which are brought round every week or every fortnight to the monasteries and churches, a hundred here, twenty there, according to the need. As he passes the convent of Santa Maria in Capella he gets a glimpse of the beautiful cool cloister garden with its lemon trees and sees the _cornette_ of the "Daughter of France" whose application for permission to remain and work on French soil was immediately granted at a time when so many companies of priests monks and friars applied in vain. While crossing the river by the island of the Tiber, he meets a procession from the church hard by with its Franciscan friars who walk next after the confraternity of the quarter in their well-known red "sacks" or gowns; the priest in his short surplice and stole is followed by the men bearing the bier, all carry lighted torches and chant the _Miserere_ or the Gradual psalms. Leaving the Ghetto well to the left he takes the street which passes the famous Roman house of the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, and crosses in front of the Capitol and the steps of Ara Coeli. He meets many priests, monks, and friars, but the numerous _suore_ to be seen in the modern city are conspicuous by their absence. The nuns, of course, are never seen, the Oblates occasionally drive in large closed landaus like those in which the cardinals progress to-day; but new communities of women find it difficult to obtain authorisation, and a constant supervision, no longer feasible, checks the mushroom growth of "active" congregations. Just beyond he hears a bell and guesses, rightly enough, that the Viaticum is being brought from the neighbouring parish church of San Marco to some sick or dying parishioner--in a moment he sees the little familiar procession, the acolytes with incense and bell, the priest carrying the host enveloped in the humeral veil under the _ombrellino_, the women and men who were in or near the church at the time following with lighted candles, and stopping beneath the windows of the sick man while his Lord visits him--if it were wet a little dark knot of people under umbrellas would be waiting, and would accompany the host with candle and umbrella just the same. Is it for the same sick person, he wonders, that the gala carriage of Duca Torlonia next passes him carrying the _Bambin Gesù_, the little wooden painted doll from Ara Coeli. If the person whom it visits is to live the _Bambino_ will turn red, if he is to die he will turn pale. Our pedestrian crosses the Forum of Trajan and as he mounts the steps he encounters a man of the people who tells him as he hurries breathless along that he is going to fetch Monsignor B., one of the episcopal canons of Santa Maria Maggiore, to _cresimare_ his baby, three weeks old, who is dying. He and the mother are bent on their baby going to paradise with all the glory of the added sacrament. A baby of three weeks old "confirmed" will sound strange in English ears. It must be borne in mind therefore that the rite of confirmation in the English Church is a new rite unlike that in use in any ancient Christian Communion. In the Roman Church the rite of chrism is the ancient sacramental rite complementary to baptism, which always included the imposition by the bishop of the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized, "for a type of the spiritual baptism." As such it is not properly a separate ceremony at all from the baptism with water. Our friend turns to the left and as he reaches the piazza before the Quirinal palace he sees the papal _cortège_ approach. The Pope (it is Pius IX.) is coming--not in his state carriage with the gilt angels, which we may still see at the papal stables on the way to the Vatican museum of sculpture or the papal garden--but in the carriage he uses every day. Every one kneels, and a mother who holds up her baby for the apostolic blessing secretly "makes the horns" with her free hand, for Pius IX. is reputed to have the evil eye and to cast the _jettatura_. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE The great façade of the Liberian basilica, the first church in the city to be dedicated to the Madonna. To the right is the Military Hospital of Sant' Antonio. The house was until 1870 the residence of the Camaldolese nuns, and here S. Francis of Assisi was received when he first arrived in Rome. The site is presumed to be that of the Temple of Diana. The column facing the basilica is one of the eight Corinthian columns which supported the vault of the basilica of Constantine. See pages 34, 60, 145, 231, and interleaf, page 252.] But it is drawing towards the _Ave Maria_, the sunset hour, and it is rather free and easy even in a monsignore's servant to be abroad after that late hour. We will therefore leave our pedestrian in the Via del Quirinale, first noticing with him a group of seminarists on their way to pay their evening visit at the church of the _Santi Apostoli_; they raise their hats as they pass the door of the _Sacramentate_, opposite the palace, where the host is constantly exposed, and then hurry on to see the Pope and receive his paternal blessing. We, however, will turn down at the Four Fountains, and follow a priest who mounts a narrow staircase to the apartment occupied by a canon of the basilica of _Santa Maria in Trastevere_ in an old granary of Palazzo Barberini, which has been converted into dwellings for faithful retainers of the princely house. It contains all that is necessary for his wants--a chapel where he says his daily mass, the kitchen regions and some slips of rooms where his food is prepared and eaten in company with the two orphan relatives who, at his invitation, arrived at his door hand in hand one winter's evening many years ago, two little girls of ten and fifteen, who had come alone all the way from a northern town. They communicate at his daily mass, but their generous guardian, who sees to their moral training, carefully hides away his copy of the Scriptures as a perilous work for two young souls. The sisters enjoy an incredible distinction among their _commari_ and _compari_--their neighbours and gossips--for in the canon's chapel there is a _corpo di santo sano_. Besides the chapel he has a bedroom and sitting-room, communicating--they are decorated with full length Magdalenes grasping skulls in evident deprecation of their want of apparel, of crucifixes painted on canvas, and of pictorial compositions consisting of a crucifix hung with a rosary, flanked by a couple of guttering church candles and enlivened with a book, a death's head, or an hour glass. These are his own handiwork, and no intimacy with the works of art in the eternal city enlighten him as to their relative merits. The priest enters the sitting-room first, and finds six or seven men, all priests, on their knees, in the various corners of the room. Presently the door beyond opens, and a priest comes in and kneels down by a vacant chair. Another rises enters the bedroom and shuts the door carefully behind him. Our canon is a favourite confessor among his brother clergy, and it is the general custom for priests to be confessed at the houses of the religious or secular clergy they select as confessors, the rule about the use of the public confessionals in the churches applying especially to the confessions of women. The men kneeling in the first room are preparing for their weekly confession or making their thanksgiving after it. When the poor canon died, leaving his orphan kinswomen unprovided for, the _corpo di santo sano_, which might have fetched something, was taken away at once because it was against ecclesiastical rules for them to keep it, but the pictures, which could fetch nothing, continued to gaze on the struggles of the little sisters, reminding them of the poor canon and also of the fickleness of the public taste in _articles de virtu_--for during his lifetime these pictures had received their full meed of respectful admiration. As our pedestrian enters his own house door, which is covered with _immagini_ and texts serving as charms--among which S. Anna the mother of the Madonna is not absent as a house-patron, and the faded rose brought from the festa of the _Divin Amore_ figures conspicuously--he may indeed have a vague sense that the _annus Domini_ will soon be too strong for the life he has just been witnessing, but he will hardly be disturbed by any speculation as to the elements which have conspired to form the atmosphere surrounding the first Bishop of Christendom in this his capital once the capital of the world. He will not think of the apotheosis of the emperor in ancient Rome, of the orientalism which crept into Western Christendom through Byzantium, imposing things which especially here in Rome were alien to its religious genius; he will scarcely remember that the Pope's temporal sovereignty added a diadem to his tiara, for he has never distinguished the temporal from the spiritual arm, or discerned the part which the former has played in determining the manifestations of the latter. [Illustration: ARCH OF CONSTANTINE Erected by the Senate in his honour A.D. 312. Eighteen years later he retired to Byzantium, leaving the Roman Bishops in virtual possession of the eternal city. See pages 32, 42, 237.] CHAPTER XII THE ROMAN QUESTION I. _Before 1870_ The "Roman Question" represents the only "religious" question in Italy. The problems which agitate other lands leave the Italian unaffected, uninterested. He has no genius for reforming, and no genius for sect-making, he is as tolerant of abuses as of diversities. So it comes about that the one and only "religious" question in Italy is a political question--the rights and wrongs of the situation created for the papacy when it was despoiled of its temporalities. It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great future for Italy were not confined in the "forties" to the Italian _unità_ men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's "_Speranze d'Italia_" and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by Gioberti's "_Primato morale e civile degli Italiani_" in which "the majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy" were set forth as mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil. There he read that "Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world," and there he gained his notion of an Italian federation under the civil headship of the Pope. That this idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist. He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of the _Syllabus_. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the "forties" and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the civil headship of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and has not been undertaken since. Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of God on earth--self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception does not correspond to facts. We all know that the "Donation" of Rome to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the great European states with the absorption of the small principalities and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their rights--efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the "pre-eminent domain" which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed between the final destruction of all "home rule" in the papal states and the loss of the temporal power. When we speak of the servitude of the Pope in the King of Italy's dominions, we forget that Catholic princes have always found themselves obliged to restrain the papal arm, and to propound from time to time laws protecting the minor against the major clergy, the prelates against the pretensions of the papacy, the people against the publication of obnoxious Bulls, and the public peace by subjecting the correspondence between the Pope and the bishops to scrutiny. Thus the disciplinary canons of the Council of Trent were not published--and were never accepted--in many Catholic states. Canon law has been the constant butt of civil legislation which has denied one by one the immunities of ecclesiastics and abolished the existence of ecclesiastical courts for the trial of clerical offenders. The abstract question of the popes' relation to civil rights and to temporal power cannot be viewed apart from the sober teaching of history. [Illustration: CASTEL AND PONTE SANT' ANGELO The castle of S. Angelo, fortified in the time of the popes, was built by Hadrian as his mausoleum. The bridge is the ancient _pons Aelius_ of which the parapet is modern, and the statues of SS. Peter and Paul and of angels bearing the instruments of the Passion were added by Clements VII. and IX. It was built by Hadrian to reach his mausoleum. In the middle ages it was lined by a double row of booths, and two hundred people were crushed to death here in the Jubilee of 1450. See pages 32, 239, 242.] Already in the reign of Pius VI. the Romans had imbibed from the French some of the doctrines of the Revolution, among them that of the sovereignty of the people. From that time onwards the papal power could never have been upheld except by foreign arms; and the spirit in which the great Napoleon offered his services should be sufficient evidence that the task of preserving the patrimony of Peter was not undertaken by those whom we ought to regard as having understood better than the Italians the things which belonged to Catholic peace. Every one will admit that the pontifical states were not really independent during these foreign occupations: what appears to be less clear is that a pope-king is not necessarily more free to exercise his high office than a pope who does not rule or who may even be the subject of another government. There is a covered way from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo which is itself a parable of the history of the Roman popes. It was constructed as a means of fleeing in secrecy and safety from the Vatican when the turbulent Romans or foreign invaders made the pope's life insecure and placed his city at the mercy of vandals. The "Pope's own city of Rome" should never be thought of without a mental picture of the covered passage from the episcopal palace to the fortified castle, along which popes young and old, bad and good, have hurried praying or cursing. Let us look upon some of these fugitive popes, and realise from their trembling steps, their impotent objurgations, the hunted look in their eyes, how much of dignity and liberty the possession of Rome secured to them in the exercise of their divine mission. There is a type of Catholic whose favourite theme is Canossa, as his adversary's favourite theme is the Copernican system. An emperor standing outside the Pope's castle in a penitent's shirt through weary days and icy nights beseeching him to withdraw the decree of excommunication strikes the imagination to the exclusion of the sequel of the story. Four years after the experience of Canossa, the "penitent" emperor, accompanied by his antipope, brought an army to Rome and made Gregory fly to Castel Sant' Angelo. The people abandoned the cause of the great Hildebrand, betrayed Rome to the enemy at its gates and deposed their lawful pope. But imperial vengeance for a humiliation which had been undertaken to satisfy the superstition of the vulgar did not end there. Henry V. exacted from Paschal II. a further penalty, and while Europe looked on in apathy, the Pope and his cardinals were made prisoners and a number of priests were drawn through the mud at the horses' tails as the imperial troops rode off. Gelasius II. was seized in the conclave which elected him, trampled underfoot and chained in a tower belonging to the Frangipani. Rescued by the Romans of Trastevere and the Island, he is next found hiding in the _Borgo_ from the emperor, who pursued him in his flight to Gaeta, annulled his election and proclaimed an antipope. On the Pope's return to Rome he was entrapped at a mass in S. Prassede, but escaping to the meadows by S. Paul's where he was found weeping with the women of the neighbourhood, he died an exile in a Cluniac convent in France. [Illustration: BRONZE STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS ON THE CAPITOL Placed here by Michael Angelo in 1538, who removed it from the Lateran Piazza. It owed its preservation to the belief that it represented Constantine. To the right and left are the museums of the Capitol. In the rear is the Palace of the Senator overlooking the Forum. See pages 13-15, 57, 58, 241.] In 1144 the Romans determined to restore their free Senate and demanded, under Arnold of Brescia's influence, the abolition of the temporal power. Lucius II. stormed the Capitol and died defending his rights, but his successor was forced to fly the eternal city. Our one English Pope, who possessed the fine old English sounding name of Nicholas Breakspear, declared on his death bed that the Pope of Rome must find means to content the sordid soul of the Roman people or quit his throne and his city a fugitive. Indeed nothing is more noticeable than the strict impartiality with which the Romans meted out violence to popes good and bad; and exactly a century before they were deposing the great Hildebrand, they could have been seen outraging the body of the infamous Boniface VII., surnamed "Francone," whose bleeding corpse was kicked and rolled down the streets of Rome to the foot of the statue of the good Marcus Aurelius. In the same century which saw the English Hadrian IV. reigning in Rome, two German archbishops led troops against a pope. The Romans, as usual, required the vanquished pope to abdicate, and accepted Barbarossa as their ruler, who gave them an antipope. Of one emperor at this time it could be truthfully said that he had "the whole College of Cardinals in his pay" which affords some notion of the spiritual dignity of conclaves, while the ups and downs to which the papal rulers of Rome were subject is illustrated in the case of Pope Alexander who in the same twelfth century was received with open arms after ten years' exile by the fickle people, who however duly stoned his coffin when he died. Clement III., himself a Roman, was obliged to sanction once more the powers of the Roman Senate, and to hand over to the people part of the tolls. Innocent IV. fled to Genoa, this time from fear of the emperor, who afterwards kept him a prisoner in his own Lateran palace. Even a Boniface VIII. narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the French King and died most miserably in the Vatican. Benedict XI., the saintly Venetian pope, attempted to punish the perpetrators of this outrage, but had to withdraw his Bulls, and retire himself to Perugia. The election of his successor the French Pope Clement V. was followed by the exile of the popes in Avignon, and since their return to Rome in 1377 the popes have not belied their character for alternately inspiring and flying from violence foreign and internecine. That mute but eloquent parable in stone is the real synthesis of the history of the papacy--the episcopal palace by the tomb of the Apostle, in the first Christian church, at one end, and at the other the fortress which was once a pagan emperor's mausoleum, with its dungeons and its history, secret and open, of crime and bloodshed; and between these the covered way along which the popes pass and repass from one to the other, symbol not of the separation but of the fateful conjunction of spiritual and temporal which has haunted their history. It would, indeed, be strange if ages of barbarism could have secured to the first Christian bishop the honour and safety which can now be assured to him by that civilisation and tolerance which we have substituted for "the ages of faith"; and United Italy must have a long future ahead of it before it can have heaped on the popes one hundredth part of the indignities and sufferings which they underwent when nominally masters of Rome. But such modern conditions have not always prevailed, and those who in all ages have waged war against the theory of the temporal power--saints and philosophers--ought to have recognised that at one period of European history territorial lordship, feudal rank and power, were a necessity. The Church did not create and did not choose the feudal system, which was indeed opposed in principle to the spirit and teaching of Christ's Gospel, and the days have long since gone by when "secular grandeur guaranteed to the Church her religious integrity"--nevertheless these days once existed, and then the Catholic Church was as a strong man armed _cap à pie_ fighting for life, and leaving to the individual--the saintly bishop, the saintly clerk or layman--the task of softening the rigours and planing the roughnesses of a Christian system which was also at war with itself. Although it is true that no form of the popes' temporal sway has at any time secured to the papacy the benefits that have been alleged for it by ultramontane writers since 1870, and conversely true that the events of 1870 did not deprive the pope of those benefits, yet it is also perfectly true that the papacy has been, through the centuries, the means of preserving for Italy its ancient character of a world power, and of preserving for Rome, abandoned by Constantine and his successors to the fate of a small provincial town, cowering in its own ruins and filth, the prestige and significance of the city which ruled the world. It is the successors of Peter who have perpetuated the meaning of its title "the Eternal City," and have carried on, through fine weather and foul, the immortality of Augustus. This surely constitutes the papacy's chief claim on Italy's consideration. There is, moreover, a curious and subtile, but perfectly comprehensible, tie between Italy and the popes, to which expression was given by the priest-philosopher Gioberti in his book on "The Primacy" already quoted. The Italian who never goes to church, nay the Italian who believes in no Church--and in Italy he is not at all necessarily the same person--contemplates the papal primacy with pleasure and pride, and considers with approval the phenomenon which brings the rest of Europe to kiss the foot of an Italian. He is perfectly aware, on the one side, that the Christian primacy--which is an Italian primacy--adds lustre and a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the city and the land which was the cradle of modern civilisation; and in some undefinable, yet I think definite, way he sees in it a compensation for the glory which has departed from his land of glories, a tangible pledge and earnest of that world-mastery whose sceptre is now wrenched from his hands. [Illustration: S. PETER'S FROM THE PINCIAN GARDENS See pages 16, 100, 135.] The modern ultramontane has accustomed the modern simple faithful to an historical picture which has had, as we see, no existence in fact: the Vatican standing solemn and decorous, at its Bronze Gate the Swiss Guard; the papal sovereignty and the papal troops--disbanded, these latter, by evil men in 1870--guaranteeing to pope and cardinal the freedom of their sacred ministry both within and without the papal confines. It is only since 1870 that such a picture can be seen, in miniature, and within the walls of the Vatican, under the respectful tutelage of a united Italy which now surrounds the solemn and decorous palace, certainly not the least turbulent centre of Europe before 1870. II. _Since 1870_ The pretension of the popes to wield "the two swords" had ever been a fruitful cause of friction in Europe; but in Rome the immense spiritual claims of the papacy joined to the claim that the Pope was _de jure divino_ monarch of monarchs, and could command the sword of princes in carrying out his ecclesiastical behests, wore a unique aspect, for here the Pope was in actual possession of the temporal sword, and ruled the bodies as well as the souls of men. The civil supremacy of the State is, indeed, a permanent conquest of the age in which we live, and the last European stronghold of the opposing theory was to be seen in Rome itself. It is interesting therefore to notice that it was for internal civil reform that the Romans were agitating during the last years before 1870. The interference of the clergy in municipal administration was an intolerable grievance, and municipal reforms were still being urged on the Pope in 1857. The agitators were chiefly to be found among the lawyers and doctors, the educated _bourgeoisie_--always a minority in Rome--who were joined by a few heads and scions of great families. But in the previous pontificate "demonstrations" in favour of the falling papacy had still been engineered in Rome. Incited by a cardinal the people would take the horses out of Gregory XVI.'s carriage, and drag the Pope in procession; but the venal demonstrators had each his own personal petition to present, and when, shortly afterwards, one of the principal demonstrators assassinated his wife and aggravated the murder by brutally locking her in a room so that she might expire without assistance, the tender conscience of his comrades was outraged to find that Gregory sent him to the gallows without hesitation. The mercenary troops--the recruited refuse of all nations--described by an eye witness as "a drunken rabble," were also a thorn in the side of the Romans. The character of these papal supporters was in general so infamous that _soldato del papa_ was a proverbial contumely: they were the defenders of Rome in September 1870, under a German Swiss colonel, appointed general for the occasion, whose opponent, Cadorna, an officer of very different standing, wrote the history of the siege. In the thirty-four years that have since elapsed, the millennium has certainly not come in Italy, nor is everything better than it was before. But at least everything has a chance of being better. Some of the things which the popes were asked to concede, especially as regards penal procedure, are not bettered to-day, for the Italian laws though in certain departments they are ideal schemes of legislation are in practice very frequently dead letters--and some of the crimes which made old Rome hideous have ceased owing to the very simple expedient of lighting the streets at night. The _Statuto_, the constitution of united Italy, begins with a declaration that the religion of the State is the Catholic religion. The Pope's relation to the State was defined by "the Law of Guarantees" in 1871. His status is not that of a subject, but of a sovereign, though of a sovereign without territorial possessions. He is, however, sovereign in his palaces of the Vatican, Lateran, and Cancelleria, which with the papal country seat of Castel Gandolfo still belong to him. Within the Vatican he can and does maintain certain companies of soldiers and guards, and _extraterritorialisation_ applies to the Vatican precinct, no Italian official having any right to enter there unless invited to do so. Foreign nations can accredit ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary to the Pope's court, and he can maintain ambassadors, or nunzios, at foreign courts. The archbasilicas of S. Peter's, S. John Lateran, and S. Maria Maggiore, also belong to the Pope, and their possession enabled Leo XIII. to refuse any one of the great basilicas for the marriage of the present King of Italy. The palace of Santa Maria Maggiore was confirmed to the popes in compensation for the loss of the Quirinal, and this territory, like all the other palaces churches and villas named, is _papal_ territory, not Italian territory. In addition, the Law of Guarantees provides that a sum of £130,000 (three and a quarter million francs) should be paid annually to the popes as a compensation for their revenue. This has never been accepted. The Law was intended to secure the Pope's complete independence of the Italian Crown, a matter which it was felt would be jealously watched over by other Catholic States; it guarantees his complete personal and administrative independence in the government of the Church, and in his and his agents' communication with countries outside Italy. That the popes have never been satisfied with it their continued protest and invocation of the liberty and dignity of temporal sovereignty amply proves. The relation of Church and State in Italy is like that in other Catholic countries. The entire revenue of the papal States passed of course into the hands of the Italian Government, which also took over the revenues of such institutions as _Propaganda Fide_. A _Fondo Culto_ was created, and the nation continued to administer the ecclesiastical revenues of the country for the same objects as did the Pope. It pays the stipends of the parish priests, and a project has just been matured for increasing these in parishes where they are less than 1000 francs (£40) a year. Only in May of last year (1904) the _Camera_ had under discussion the relief of the lower and unbeneficed clergy, and of the poorer provincial seminaries for training priests. Bishops and canons cannot become possessed of their "temporalities" without the royal _exequatur_, and all public religious fabrics throughout the country belong to the State. Where the ecclesiastical face of Italy has been changed is in the suppression and expropriation of its monasteries and religious houses--the historical sites (with their treasures) have been declared national monuments, the gradual suppression of the communities which inhabited them has been provided for by a law forbidding the profession of new members, and the monastic revenues have been partly converted into insignificant pensions--varying from two francs to fifty centimes a day--paid to each individual of the suppressed communities. That the law has not been pressed with great severity by the tolerant Italian Government is evidenced in the fact that communities still exist who have escaped final confiscation for thirty-eight years by silently adding to their number so that it might never fall below the fatal six which spelt dissolution. At the end of the century there were still 13,875 religious who under this law were in receipt of 176,000 pounds. As to Rome itself, the Religious Congregations have proved that it has not been made an insupportable place of residence for them. The historic houses are national monuments, and the ancient communities are only recruited _sub rosa_, but new "Mother Houses" of all the great orders are taking possession of commanding sites in Rome, the illegal "professions" take place every day, and the number of monks, friars, and religious of both sexes is considerably larger than it was before 1870. So true is it that no district, hardly a street, in Rome is without its convent, that it has been wittily declared that the "temporal power" is in fact returning in this way--and Rome is again in roods and acres becoming ecclesiastical property. It is difficult to suppose that we are near a conciliation between the Pope and Italy, or that there is still time for a satisfactory coalition between the conservative forces of law and order in the country and the moral forces of Catholicism against the inrush of the subversive forces of socialism and political radicalism. Many of the best men on the Italian side would indeed deplore any reconciliation with the Pope at present on the ground that it would involve a check to the civil progress of the Italian people. Meanwhile the Italians are certainly not becoming more religious under a system which assumes that if you are a good citizen you cannot be "a good Catholic," and it is for the popes to determine whether the irreligion of the people is or is not too heavy a price to pay for the upkeep of their protest against the events of 1870. The consequent alienation of some of the better religious elements in the country is, at least, doing serious harm in that it makes the abler men outside doubt whether the religious elements which remain are worthy to be regarded as in any sense a moral force which could be invoked to co-operate with the best modern secular forces. Meanwhile the opposing factions have been face to face for thirty-four years. How have they behaved, and how have they altered since then? The official Vatican behaviour never varied until Pius X. ascended the Chair of Peter. Pius IX. had set the example of violent public utterances, and had permitted the subsidised clerical newspapers to attack Victor Emmanuel both in his private and public character. On the other hand he would never tolerate in his presence a word against the King, and his own letters to him were not only friendly but affectionate. This little comedy scandalised the Italian's sense of decorum, and as a policy has succeeded in alienating Italian sympathy. The general tendency on the secular side has been conciliatory; the Italians, indeed, began with a farce on the morrow of their entry into Rome, a farce duly recorded in the name of the street which runs past the church of the _Gesù_. The _plébiscite_ registered the will of the "whites" but not the will of the "blacks," none of whom voted; and the forty-six votes against the new _régime_ which appeared in the total, had been cast by the "whites" themselves. Nevertheless the Catholics in Rome who do not make a _politica_ of their religion, willingly allow that they enjoy a large measure of liberty. Not long since at the request of the visiting chaplain the authorities arranged for a man to be brought back to the prison where his wife was still undergoing sentence, in order that their civil marriage might be completed with the religious rite. For some years past the present Cardinal Vicar of Rome has administered the Easter Communion to the inmates of the _Regina Coeli_ prison to the joy of the prison officials and the reciprocal consolation of the cardinal and the black sheep whom he that day bears home on his shoulder rejoicing. It is well known that the officers encourage the men to attend to their religious duties at Easter, and remind them of these as the seasons come round. Every soldier may then have leave of absence for confession and communion, and a rule is made requiring all men out on leave in this way to bring back with them the Communion ticket which is given at the rails to each Easter communicant. Many of the soldiers choose to go to S. Peter's, and the carabineers in their sober black uniforms may always be seen there during Holy Week. It will readily be understood that both incongruities and accommodations are rife in such a condition of affairs as the existence of a State Church by the side of a hostile papacy. The King wants a regimental banner blest, or the Pope wants to have the roads kept while fifty thousand pilgrims flock to S. Peter's. During the latter years of Leo XIII.'s pontificate the Italian police were invited into the basilica, and headed a procession with all the decorum of its traditional vergers, the _Sampietrini_. These reciprocal interests even require telephonic communication between the Quirinal and the Vatican. In theory, the House of Savoy, the members of the Government and every person in its pay down to the _custodi_ of the ruins and museums of Rome with their families are excommunicated. In practice the Pope provides a chaplain for the Royal palace, the parish priest has of late years entered the Quirinal and penetrated to the royal bedrooms for the customary blessing of houses on Easter eve, Italian officials and their families receive absolution like any one else, and the irony of history required that the "excommunicated" Queen Margaret of Savoy was the only princely personage to fulfil the conditions of the last Jubilee year in Rome. [Illustration: FROM THE TERRACE OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN Before us is the church built on the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome and dedicated to S. Francesca Romana, the greatest of Roman saints. To the left the huge ruins of the basilica of the first Christian emperor, while to the right is the Arch of Titus, commemorating the fall of Jerusalem, and the road with its _via crucis_ which leads to the church of S. Bonaventura, the biographer of S. Francis, built against the Stadium of Domitian. The view is taken from the terrace outside that domestic basilica of the Flavian House which still retains more of the form of a Christian basilica than any other pagan building. Here are brought together the old and the new, Christian and pagan, papal and imperial--the shock of the two world empires. See interleaf, pages 44, 50.] And the "blacks and the whites"? In the "eighties" the distinction between those who clung to the old _régime_ and those who adopted the new was still sufficiently marked, but in the last decade of the century the "blacks" became "gray" or as they themselves liked to express it _caffè-latte_, neither black nor white. The acceptance of invitations to the Quirinal has, up to now, entailed the forfeiture of those official invitations to the Vatican which are extended to the Roman aristocracy for every great papal function. Many of its older members still absent themselves from all official "white" receptions, and a daughter is still presented not at the Court but to the Pope, with her _fiancé_, on her engagement. But in private society the great "black" ladies now know and meet the "white" society with which many of the Roman families are related by marriage; and it is not infrequently the case that one branch of an old Roman house clings to the Pope while another attaches itself to the King. But everywhere, even where the parents absent themselves from official "white" society, their children now go to the Quirinal. Thus we are very far from the time when no member of the Roman aristocracy met the King or Queen, when the Court was entirely composed of new men, or the Piedmontese whom the King brought with him. The day has gone by when even in a ball-room the "blacks" took care to label themselves by wearing a yellow (papal) rose, and only priests and the English converts still make a point of not saluting the sovereign. One Roman prince, however, has kept up a picturesque protest--and the great door of Prince Lancellotti's palace has never been opened since the day the King of Italy entered the Pope's capital. Even when, quite recently, invitations to a ball were issued from the great silent house, all the guests crowded through the postern door. When one asks any of the old school now whether the old Government did well or ill, the best, and the wisest, answer that they can give us is "They were _altri tempi_, other times." And this is the reason why it is impossible that the two parties should continue to exist after the present generation. The cleavage has really been due to the fact that the Vatican and Quirinal parties live in two different epochs; they live in different worlds and speak a different language. The old fashioned "blacks" can only think in a circle of ideas and sentiments, political and moral, to which they were born but which has no present point of contact with reality, with the living world around them, with "things as they are." The old has its beauty and the new has its uglinesses, as always; but also they frequently change these positions. Fifteen years ago one of the most distinguished Italian diocesans wrote a pamphlet entitled "_Roma e l'Italia, e la realtà delle cose, pensieri di un prelato italiano_"--"Rome, Italy, and things as they are; thoughts of an Italian Prelate." As soon as his name was discovered, he was told to withdraw the pamphlet, publicly from his own pulpit. This was not encouraging to others who thought as he in a country where secular public opinion still counts for so little, the individual "courage of your opinions" counts for still less, and where a public opinion among ecclesiastics is simply non-existent. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a Cardinal Secretary of State had the courage of his opinions as the following passages from his Memoirs will prove. He is known for his protection of the Jesuits against the Jansenists during his sojourn in Paris as papal Envoy Extraordinary, and by the Pacca law, which is called after him, prohibiting private owners from disposing of great works of art out of Italy. "Providence," he writes, "has taken away the temporal power from the Holy See and prepared those changes in States and Governments which shall once more render it possible for the Pope, although a subject, to rule over and govern the whole body of the faithful." "The popes, relieved from the burden of the temporal power which obliged them to devote a great part of their time to secular affairs, may now turn all their attention and all their care to the spiritual government of the Church; and when the Roman Church lacks the pomp and magnificence which temporal sovereignty has given her, then there will be numbered among her clergy only those who _bonum opus desiderant_." That pathetic combatant for papal rights in the twelfth century Gelasius II., exclaimed to his cardinals "We must leave Rome, where it is impossible to stay." That plaintive cry need, we trust, have no further echo: the ages of which Gregorovius writes that popes "were obliged to leave Rome to realise in foreign countries that they were still actually reverenced as representatives of Christ" closed, we hope, with the entry of the Italians into Rome and the consequent creation--in lieu of the elusive "_Roma intangibile_"--of what Bismarck happily called an "intangible Vatican." Index Abruzzi, Abruzzese, 153, 155, 188 Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, 221 Accoramboni, Vittoria, 167 Acilii Glabriones, 45 Adelbert, S., 8 Adonis, 90 _Aedes publica_, 31 Aeneas, 2, 130 Aesculapius, 7, 8 Agapê, 46 Ager (agro), 1, 15, 70-1, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90 Agricultural colonies, 11, 76 Agrippa, 20, 22, 30 Alabaster, 27 Alaric, 37 Alba Longa, 1, 2, 15 Alban hills, 17, 23, 70, 78 Albani, 171 Alexander III., 241 Alexander Severus, 22, 32, 63 _Alta Semita_, 55 Altar, 19, 20, 35, 186; position of priest at, 36, 186 Altieri, 172 _Ambarvalia_, 15 Amphitheatre, 22, 31, 33, 163 Anacletus II., 161 Ancus Martius, 5, 26 Anguillara, 60, 162, 168 Animals, cruelty to, 81, 88, 129, 147-8, 155; Leo XIII. and, 148 Anio, 24 Annibaldi, 168 Anselm, S., 5 Antonelli, Cardinal, 202, 219 Antonines, 11 Antoninus Pius, 32, 197 Antony, S., 68, 148 Apostles, 42, 48, 199 Appian Way, 30, 41, 45, 70, 168 Appius Claudius, 21 Apprentice, 67 Apse, 19, 35, 36 Aqueducts, 21, 22, 30, 31, 37, 39, 73 Arabesques, 29 Arcadians, 2 Arch, 36; of Janus, 162 Arches, triumphal, 33; of Constantine, 32, 162; of Septimius Severus, 32; of Titus, 31, 162; of Trajan, 31 Architraves, 19, 36 Arenula, 56 Aristocracy, 94, 99, 109, 132, 135, 159, 160, 170, 172, 173, 174, 178, 215, 221, 245, 253 Arnold of Brescia, 240 Augustus, 4, 10, 12, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 53, 54, 55, 57, 74, 164, 243; house of, 10, 30; mausoleum of, 30, 164, 242 Aurelian, Emperor, 6, 32; wall, 32, 38, 43, 163 Aurelii, 45 Aurelius, Marcus, 32, 46, 55, 63, 197, 241 _Ave Maria_, 232 Aventine, 26, 30, 160, 202, 227 Avignon, exile in, 6, 14, 57, 242 _Baioccho_, 105 Balbo, Cesare, 235 _Baldacchino_, 10, 177, 211 _Balnae_, 20 Bambin Gesù, image in Ara Coeli, 230; convent of the, 223 Banners, regional, 55, 57, 58, 59 Baptism, 231 Barbarossa, 241 Barberini, 9, 10, 171 Barbers, street, 101 Baronial towers. _See_ Towers Bartholomew, S., 7 Basilica, Christian, 33, 34, 36, 50, 67, 186, 209; domestic, 34, 35; Flavian, 35; forensic, 19, 20, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37; Julia, 20, 30; Ulpian, 31 Baths, public, 19-21, 24, 30, 31, 39, 54, 61, 99 Beggars, 11-12, 54, 99 Belli, Gioacchino, 140 Bell towers. _See_ Towers Benedict XI., 241 Benedict XIII., 167 Benedict XIV., 59, 178 Benedict, S., 78 Beneficent clubs, 68 Beneventum, 7 _Berretta_, 204, 205, 209 Bibulus, 29 Bismarck, 255 "Blacks" and "Whites," 252-4 Boatmen's guild, 63 Bombardment of Rome, 212 Bonaparte, 171 Boncompagni, 170 Boniface VII., 241 Boniface VIII., 164, 165, 167, 168, 201, 241 "Book of the Art," 84, 86 Borghese, 123, 170, 171, 174 Borgo, 55, 90, 228, 240 Bracciano, 17, 168; duke of, 167 Braschi, 173 Breakspear, Nicholas, 240 _Breccias_, 27 Bricks, 23, 25, 37 Brigands, 11, 54, 89, 96, 150 Buffalo Bill, 89 Building crisis, 12 Burial guilds, 8, 42, 63, 77 _Butteri_, 89, 90 _Buzzuri_, 138 Byzantium, Byzantine, 42, 137, 234 Cadorna, General, 246 Caecilia Metella, 29, 168 Caecilii, 45, 46 Caelian hill, 5, 31, 53, 202 Caesar, Julius, 29, 30 Caesarius, S., 74 Caetani, 164, 168, 177 Café, 101, 142 _Cafoni_, 138 Calabria, Calabrese, 126, 139, 155 Caligula, 31 Callistus, catacomb of, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46; Pope, 42 _n._; Callistus III. 60 _Camorra_, 139, 139 _n._ Campagna, 17, 21, 38, 69-80, 83, 89-92, 107, 228; cattle in, 77; cities, ancient, of, 72; deaths in the, 77, 90, 143; malaria in, 74-5; towns of, 78, 107 Campitelli, _rione_, 56 Campo de' Fiori, 219 Campo Marzo (Campus Martius), 18, 22, 30, 33, 37, 55, 59, 60, 163, 228 Campo Vaccino, 61, 62 _Cancellum_, 19, 35 Candelabra, 36 Canon law, 238 Canon, a, of S. M. in Trastevere, 232 Canonisation, 50 Canossa, 239 Capitol, 4, 18, 28, 30, 31, 38, 56, 57, 58, 130, 135, 161, 169, 172, 173, 240 _Capo d'arte_, 66 _Capo rione_, 57, 58 _Cappa magna_, 209 Captains, regional, 54, 55, 56, 58 Carabineers, 150, 151, 151 _n._, 225 Caracalla, 20, 21, 32 Cardinal, Bishops, 201, 205; Chamberlain, 210; deacons, 201, 202, 205; priests, 201, 202, 205; vicar, 201, 251 Cardinal's dress, 204, 206, 209, 210; hat, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209; vicar, 201 Cardinals, 15, 58, 159, 175, 200-211, 225, 228, 240, 241 Cardinals, College of, 15, 201, 202, 205, 210, 241, 252 Carnival, 58 Carrara marble, 25 Carters, carts, 63, 72, 88, 90, 96, 228 Caserta, 168, 177 Cassandrino, 141 Castel Gandolfo, 171, 247 Castel Sant' Angelo, 56, 239, 242 _Castelli Romani_, 71, 78, 79 Catacombs, 196; art in 46; number of, 43; prayers for dead in, 48-9; testimony of the, 47-8 Catholicism and the Catholic Church, 45, 47, 137, 181, 184, 195, 199, 236, 243; and Catholic clergy, 137, 248, 254 Celestine III., 167 _Cella_, 18, 19 Cement, use of, 24, 27, 37 Cenci, Cencius, 168, 169; Beatrice, 160; Bolognetti, 169; Johannes, 169; Marcus, 169; Virginius, 169 Centurion, 54 Cestian bridge. _See pons_ Chapter of S. Peter's, 67, 209 Charioteers, 33, 63 Charities, Roman, 11, 56, 66, 174, 217, 223 Charlemagne, 14, 237 Chigi, 170; Agostino, 171 Chivalry, 5, 112 Chrism ("confirmation"), 231 Christians, early, 34, 42, 47 Church and State, 248 Churches-- S. Adriano, 202; S. Anastasia, 2; SS. Andrea and Gregorio, 161, 202; S. Angelo in Pescheria, 56; SS. Apostoli, 232; Ara Coeli, 57, 86, 161, 230; S. Barbara, 66; S. Bartholomew, 8; SS. Bonifacio and Alessio, 202; S. Caterina de' Funari, 66; Chiesa Nuova, 56; S. Clemente, 202; SS. Cosma and Damiano, 32; S. Croce, 35; S. Domitilla (catacomb), 187; S. Eligio dei Ferrai, 68; S. Eusebio, 202; S. Eustachio, 56; S. Francesca Romana, 32; S. Giorgio in Velabro, 202; S. Giovanni Calibita, 7; S. Giuseppe degli Falegnami, 66; S. John Beheaded, 86; S. John Lateran, 35, 36, 247; S. Lorenzo in Lucina, 226; S. Lorenzo in Miranda, 32, 66; S. Luigi, 173; S. Marcello, 161; S. Marco, 230; S. Maria degli Angeli, 21; S. Maria in Aquiro, 202; S. Maria Aventinense (_see_ Priory of Malta); S. Maria in Cosmedin, 7, 31, 186; S. Maria in Capella, 229; S. Maria in Domnica, 187; S. Maria Maggiore, 23, 34, 60, 171, 187, 223, 231, 247; S. Maria dell' Orto, 66, 229; SS. Nereo and Achilleo, 187; S. Paul's-without-the-Walls, 36, 240; S. Peter's, 10, 16, 32, 38, 41, 42, 67, 196, 247, 251, 252; S. Prassede, 240; S. Prisca, 202; S. Sabina, 186; S. Silvestro in Capite, 166; S. Stefano, Via Latina, 187; S. Tommaso a' Cenci, 66, 169 Cippolino, 27 Circolo San Pietro, 76, 222 Circus, 19, 26, 33; Maximus, 30 _Civis romanus_, 181, 199 Claudius, 26, 31, 181 Clement, Pope, 14 Clement III., 241 Clement V., 242 Clement IX., 172 Clement XI., 171 Clement XII., 171 Clement XIII., 146 Clementi, 156 _n._ _Clivus capitolinus_, 30 _Cloacae_, 18, 39 Cloisters, 36, 38 Cluilian Ditch, 15 Coaches, bambino's, 230; pope's, 217, 231, 245; cardinal's and prince's, 173, 207, 208, 210 Cohorts, 54 _Collegio_, 63, 64, 65, 66 _Colles_, 53 _Collina_, 53 Colonies, agricultural, 11, 76 Colonna, 55, 162, 163, 164-7, 170, 172; Lorenzo, 165; Marc' Antonio, 165; Sciarra, 164; Stephen, 165; Vittoria, 165 Colosseum, 11, 22, 32, 39, 162 Coltello, 145 Columns, 33, 38; of Marcus Aurelius, 32; of Trajan, 31, 142 _Comitium_, 4 Commemorative banquets, 63 Communes, Roman, 13, 59, 64; Italian, 14, 179 Communion, Easter, 223, 251; first, 222, 223; tickets, 223, 224, 251 Conciliation. _See_ Pope and Italy _Conciliatore_, 110-111 Conclave, 58, 210-11, 241 Concrete, use of, 24, 25, 27, 28, 37 _Confessio_, 36, 50 Confession, 222, 223, 251 Confraternities, 67, 68 Confraternity of Prayer and Death, 67, 143; red, 8, 229 Congregations, Roman, 203, 249; of women in Rome, 220, 228, 230 Consistory, secret, 204; public, 204 Constantine, 31, 32, 34, 37, 42, 162, 237, 243 Consular families, 13, 34, 63 Conti, 160 Corinthian pillars, 19 Cornelius, pope, 45 Corporations, 62, 63 Corte Savella, 160 Corsi, 161 Corsini, 171 Corso, 9, 59, 93, 100, 101, 115, 141, 161, 172, 220, 221; Vittorio Emanuele, 169 Cosmati, 36 Courtship, 152-3 Crime, 81, 139, 145-6, 149, 246 _Croce Rossa_, 75 Crostarosa, Mons., 34 _n._ Curatii and Horatii, 15 Curator, regional, 53, 54, 64 Curia, 201, 203 _Curiae_, 154 Curule chairs, 197 Customs officers, 64, 103 Dante, 9 Deacons of Rome, 55, 200, 201, 202 Decimal system, 105 Decoration, 25, 28, 29 Deffand, Marquise du, 226 Democracy, 114, 115, 194 De Rossi, 44 Destruction of city. _See_ Rome Diaconate, the, 200 Diocletian, 20, 21, 32, 33, 61; museum, 29 _Dio in terra_, 216 _Dispetto_, 134 District courts, 110 _Divin amore_ festa, 234 Doctors, guild of, 63 Dogma, 47, 50, 56, 64 Domitian, 30, 31; house of, 31, 35 _Domui_, 23 Donation of Constantine, 237 Don, 178 Donna, 178 Door charms, 234 Doria Pamphili, 68, 172, 221 Doric columns, 19 Dowries, 12, 56, 66, 67 Dress of Romans, 141 Dyers, guild of, 63 Easter. _See_ Communion Egypt, 7, 25, 180, 183 Esquilina, 55 Esquiline, 5, 53, 55, 202 Etruscans, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 18, 70, 181, 182, 197 Eucharist, 46, 47, 49, 196, 197 Eugenius IV., 165 Evander, 2 Evil eye, 231 Exarchate, 13, 14, 42 _Excubitoria_, 56 _Exequatur_, 248 Exorcism, 81, 82-3, 187, 222 Extraterritorialisation, 247 Extreme unction, 192 Fabrician bridge. _See pons_ Family life in Italy, 116-17, 155; Rome, 97, 154, 155 Farms in the campagna, 33, 71, 72, 73, 77 Fattore, 77 Faustulus, 2 _Fedeli_, 59 _Festa_, 100, 102, 156, 204, 224, 228 Feudalism, 112, 160, 162, 243 Fever, goddess, 74 "Field of Cows," 38, 61, 62 Firemen, 54 Flavian house, 12, 31, 35, 45 Florence. _See_ Tuscany Fluor-spar, 27 _Fondo culto_, 248 Fortress, military, 23, 38 _Fortuna Virilis_. _See_ Temples Forum, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 56, 59, 61, 66, 147, 231 _Forum Romanum_, 4, 15, 18, 20, 30, 31, 147 Fountains, street, 21, 33, 39, 93, 175 Francis, S., 8, 189, 195 Franciscans, 8, 189, 229 Frangipani, 161, 240 Franks, 65 Frascati, 171 French kings, 14, 241; Revolution, 146, 238 Fresco painting, 29, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47 Friezes, 19, 28, 37, 61 Gaeta, 202, 214, 215, 236 Gaetani, 164, 168, 177 Galera, 168 Gardens, 33, 39, 93 Garibaldi, 118, 123 Gates of Rome, 100, 207 Gelasius II., 168, 240, 255 Genazzano, 79, 83, 166; madonna of, 83 Genseric, 37 _Gentes_, 13, 14, 45, 70 _Gentiluomo_, 208, 209 Genzano, 79 George, S., 74 Germanicus, house of, 29, 157 Geta, 32 Ghetto, 7, 11, 56, 219, 230 Ghibellines, 60, 162, 163 _Giallo Antico_, 27 Gioberti, 235, 236, 244 _Giulio_, 105 Giustiniani, 173 Gladiators, 22, 63 Goat herd, 38 Goatskin breeches, 90 "Golden book," 172 Golden house of Nero, 29 Governor of Rome, 222 _Graffiti_, 44 Gratian, 37 Grazioli, 172 Greece, 3, 7, 8, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, 45, 129, 130, 182, 183, 186, 197 Gregory the Great, 11 Gregory VII., 239 Gregory XI., 57 Gregory XIII., 170 Gregory XVI., 213, 218, 219, 245 _Grosso_, 105 Grotta Ferrata, 166 Grotto of Lupercus, 2 _Guardia_, 144, 149, 150, 151 Guelphs, 60, 162, 163 Guilds, trade, 52, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68; conditions of membership, 64, 66; funds, 65; patrons, 63, 64; religious, 63; under State control, 64; statutes, 66 Guiscard, Robert, 37 Gymnasia, Greek, 20 Hadrian, Emperor, 23, 31, 32, 37 Hadrian's mausoleum, 23, 32, 37 Hadrian IV., pope, 78, 240, 241 Handicrafts, 52, 58, 63 Hannibal, 168 Heliogabalus, 32 Henry IV., 239 Henry V., 240 Heraldic Commission, 179 Hildebrand, 240, 241 "Hill of goats," 38 Hill villages, 71, 78 Holidays, Roman, 100 Holy See, the, 201, 207, 218, 255; vacancy of, 210 Honorius I., 32 Honorius IV., 160, 161 Horatii and Curatii, 15 House of Savoy, 115, 252 Humbert, King, 115 Hymettan marble, 27 Industrial classes, 62, 63, 66, 141, 228 Innkeepers, guild of the, 63 Innocent III., 160 Innocent IV., 241 Innocent XI., 172 Inn of the Bear, 9 _In petto_, 204 _Insulae_, 23 Ionic columns, 19 Ironworkers' guild, 58, 68 Isis, 183 Island of the Tiber, 240 _Isola sacra_, 240 Italian art, 123-5, 127, 191; Catholicism, 81, 91, 188-196; characteristics, 112-122; crowds, 121; cruelty, 81, 146-7, 155; democracy, 114, 115, 193-5; garden, 73; "individualism," 115-116, 183; women, 153-55 Italians and English, 112-124, 132, 145, 146, 151, 153-155, 157, 190, 191, 194-196; and French, 112, 119-122, 133, 145, 146; and Germans, 112, 117, 122, 123, 131, 145, 146, 153, 157, 190, 196; and Irish, 120, 126 Janiculum, the, 5, 16, 17, 171, 207, 227 Jasper, 27 Jerome, S., 37, 200 _Jettatura_, 231 Jews, in Rome, 5, 7, 45, 46, 160, 161, 180, 181-2, 183, 188, 198, 199; bonnet, 46; of the dispersion, 45; quarter, 7, 56, 169 John X., 168 Jubilee year, 217, 252 Jupiter (Jove), 18, 28, 30, 37, 78, 130, 131, 181, 182 Justin Martyr, 46 Kitchens, Roman, 54, 94, 98, 99, 101, 108 Kitchen range, 98 La Marmora, General, 123 Lancellotti, Prince, 253 _Lapis lazuli_, 27 _Lares compitales_, 53 Larva, 27 Latin league, 69, 78; religion, 91, 92, 181, 182, 183, 193, 194, 196, 197 Latium, 1, 2, 70, 71, 146, 147 _n._, 181, 196 Law of guarantees, 247 Laws, Italian, 149, 246 Leo IV., 6 Leo IX., 161 Leo X., 13 Leo XIII., 148, 203, 247, 248, 252 Leonine city, 55, 56 Letter-writers, public, 102 Lewis Gonzaga, S., 102, 223 Lewis the Bavarian, 164 Libraries, 21, 31, 35, 174, 175 Lime-kilns, 37 Livy, 25 Lombardy, Lombards, 14, 65, 77, 125, 126, 188 Lottery, the, 84-87 Lucina, crypts of, 46 Lucius Crassus, 28 Lucius II., 240 _Lucomones_, 197 Lucullus, 28 Ludovisi, 170 _Lumachella_ marble, 27 Luna marble, 25 Lupercus, 2, 91, 196 _Lupetto Romano_, 90 Macaroni, 97, 98, 100, 103 Madonna di S. Agostino, 86 Madonna, cult of the, 83, 87, 89, 91, 99 _Mafia_, 139, 139 _n._ Magistrates, 53, 110 Malaria, 74 Malta, order of, 5 Mamertine prisons, 18, 147 Manfred, 168 Marbles, 25, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 54, 61, 98; workers, 27, 36, 37, 39 Marcellus, theatre of, 30, 160, 168, 228 _Marchesi di baldacchino_, 177, 178 Marcia, acqua, 22, 73 Marcus Aurelius, 32, 46, 55, 63, 197, 241 Marforio, 140 Margherita, queen, 115, 252 Marino, 166 _Marmoratum_, 26 Mars, 3, 59, 74; spears of, 3; Ultor, 30 Marshall of Conclave, 170, 211; of the Pope's Horse, 170 Martin V., 166 Martyrs, 41, 42, 43, 51 Mass, 3, 184, 191, 224, 232; in the Campagna, 76; commemorations in the, 49 Massimo family, 168 Master of Ceremonies, 205; of Sant'Ospizio, 170; workers, 67 Mausolea. _See_ Tombs Maxentius, 32 Maximi Caecilii, 45 Mazzini, 214 Meals, Roman, 97 Ménage, Roman, 93 Merchants, 63 _Mercanti di Campagna_, 77 _Mesata secca_, 106 Michael Angelo, 165 Michael, S., 74 Middle ages, 23, 36, 55, 65, 67, 161 Militia, Roman, 56, 64 Minerva, 18, 80, 181 Misericordia, 77 Mithras, 183 Mixed marriages, 122 Monasteries, 38, 66, 67, 96; number of, 249; suppression of, 248-9 Monastic professions, 249 Monks and nuns, 215, 220, 228, 229, 230, 249 Monopolies, 67 Monsignore of the papal wardrobe, 205; of roads and streets, 9 _Mons Saturninus_, 30 Monte Cassino, 179 Monte Cavo, 17, 78 Monte Giordano, 163 _Montes_, 53 Monti, 55, 59, 60 Monticiani, 60, 61, 62 _Morra_, 101 Mortar, 22, 23, 24 Mosaic, 36, 37, 39, 174; pavement, 27, 28, 33; sectile, 28 Moses, 45, 181; and Peter, 42 Mother houses, 249 Municipalities, Italian, 14, 15 Municipality, Roman, 13-16, 59 Municipal liberties, 14-16, 56, 64, 237, 245 Naples (Neapolitans), 72, 89, 126, 132, 138-9, 147, 166, 168, 187, 188, 237 Napoleon, 61, 141, 171, 238 Navicella, 61 Nero, 20, 22, 29, 31 Nicholas III., 167 Nobility, Roman, 63, 159, 160, 172, 173, 174, 178, 253 Numa, King, 52, 62, 181 Numidia, 27 Obelisks, 26, 28, 33, 38 Obsession, 82 _Octroi_, 103 Odescalchi, 168, 172 Olevano, 79 Olive, 80 Olive harvest, 80 _Ombrellino_, 230 Opus incertum, 25; mixtum, 25; reticulatum, 25 Orderlies, 107 Oreglia, Cardinal, 203 Orsini family, 60, 160, 162, 163, 165; Filippo, 167-168; Giordino, 167, 168 Osteria, 100 Ostia, 26, 33, 63 Ostian Way, 70 Ostie, 229 Otho III., 7, 8 Oxen, 24, 26, 68, 77, 96 Pacca, Cardinal, 255 Pacca law, 255 Palaces of Caesars, 30, 33 Palaces, 38, 39, 93, 94, 172, 174, 175; Aldobrandini, 6, 50; Antici Mattei, 172; Balestra, 172; Barberini, 171, 232; Bolognetti-Cenci, 169; Bolognetti, 169; Bonaparte, 172; Borghese, 172; Braschi, 173; Cancelleria, 173, 247; Cenci, 169; Chigi, 172; Colonna, 166, 172; Corsini, 171; Costaguti, 172; Doria Pamphili, 172, 175; Falconieri, 173; Farnese, 173; Farnesina, 171; Ferraiolo, 172; Fiano, 140, 172; Gabrielli, 163; Gaetani, 172; Giustiniani, 173; Grazioli, 173; Lancellotti, 253; Lateran, 36, 247; Longhi, 172; Massimo, 169; Odescalchi, 172; Orsini, 168; Patrizi, 173; Piombino, 172; Quirinale, 208, 214, 231, 247, 251, 252, 253, 254; Ruffo, 172; Ruspoli, 172; Rinuccini, 172; Salviati, 172; Sciarra, 172; Simonetti, 173; Theodoli, 172; Venezia, 172 Palatine, 2, 4, 5, 13, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 53, 56, 135, 157, 162 Pales, 91 Palestrina, 164, 165, 166 Palestrina, Pier-Luigi, 156 Paliano, 166 _Palladium_, 2 Pallas, 2, 13 Pamphili-Doria, 172 Pan, 2, 91, 92 Pantheon, 10, 19, 30, 56 Paola aqueduct, 22 _Paolo_, 105 Papacy, 16, 57, 162, 167 Papal government and theocracy, 214, 217, 218, 219, 224, 225, 236, 245, 254 Papal titles, 177, 179 _Papetto_, 105 Parian marble, 26 Parione, 56 Parishes, Roman, 53, 56, 200, 201, 206 Parliament House, 101 Paros, 27 Paschal II., 166, 240 "Paschal lambs," 223 Pasquale, convent of S., 223 Pasquinades, 140 _Pastor Bonus_, 197 _Patres conscripti_, 178 Patriarchal ménage, 175, 176 Patricians, Roman, 45, 70, 159, 170, 178 Patrimony of Peter, 237, 238; extent, 257 Patrizi, 177 Paul II., 172 Paul V., 170 Paul, S., 192, 199 Paulinus of Nola, S., 8 Pavements, mosaic, 27, 28, 33 _Pavonazzo_, 27 _Pax Romana_, 198 "Peace of the Church," the, 12, 34, 43, 198 Pensions of monks and nuns, 248-249 Pentelic marble, 27 _Peperino_, 23, 73 Pepin, 14 Peretti Francesco, 167 Peruzzi, B., 168 Persecutions, 20, 42, 51 Peter, S., 16, 42, 50, 166, 199, 200, 243; chair of, 46; and Moses, 42; primacy of, 42; statue of, 11 Petrarch, 164 Philip Neri, S., 77 _Piano nobile_, 175 Piazza SS. Apostoli, 166, 172; Colonna, 172, 202; Lateran, 26; Montanara, 90, 160; Navona, 173; Pantaleoni, 169; del Popolo, 219; Tartaruga, 172; di Venezia, 169, 172 Piedmont, Piedmontese, 126, 132, 139, 155, 171, 253 Pierleoni, 160, 161 Pigna, _rione_, 56 Pilgrims in Rome, 9, 67 Pincian hill, 16, 17, 100, 135, 224, 244 Pinelli, 140, 226 Piombino, 68, 170, 174 Pius VI., 140, 173, 238 Pius IX., 11, 22, 85, 202, 203, 208, 213, 215, 219, 231, 238; and Italy, 214, 215, 219, 235, 236; liberal impulses, 213; and the _non possumus_, 215; and the people, 222, 245; and the syllabus, 236; and Victor Emmanuel, 250 Pius X., 77, 250 Pizzardoni, 151 Plebiscite, the, 251 Plebs, the, 14, 56, 62, 78, 81 Police, 54, 55, 144, 149-151, 215 Pompeii, 29, 45 Pompey, theatre of, 163 Pomponius Grecinus, 45 Pons Aelius, 32; Fabricius, 7, 29; Cestius, 7; Triumphalis, 55 Ponte Margherita, 102; Quattro Capi, 29; Rotto, 223; S. Angelo, 9, 32 Ponte, _rione_, 55 _Pontifex Maximus_, 197 Pontine marshes, 30 Pope, 201, 202, 205; court of the, 173; presentation at, 253; and conciliation, 249; and the Catholic princes, 237, 238; election of, 202; and Italy, 246-250, 252 Popes, fugitive, 239; Senate of the, 201 Population of Rome, 12, 34 _Populus_, 14 Porphyry, 27, 36 _Porporati_, 204 _Porta Furba_, 72, 73 Porter, house, 94, 95, 110, 175 Porticoes, 33, 35 Portico of Octavia, 30, 168 Porto, 26 Possession, 82 _Pozzolana_, 24 Praetextatus, 45 Praetorian guard, 54 Prelate, Italian, pamphlet by, 254 Prefect, 54, 169 _Prepotenza_, 134 Presbyters, 200, 201 Primacy, papal, 42, 235, 244 Princes, Roman, 108, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 207 Prince Assistant, 167, 170 Priory of the Knights of Malta, 5 Priscilla and Aquila, 5 Processions, 58, 66, 67, 205, 252 _Propaganda Fide_, 248 Prophets, 48, 188 Protestantism in Rome, 47, 189, 190, 193 Provisioning of the city, 65, 103, 105 Pudens, 45, 46 Pumice stone, 24 Puritanism, 112, 188, 189, 194, 196 Quarries, 23, 24, 25 _Questura_, 150 _Questurini_, 150 Quirinal hill, 5, 6, 31, 53, 163, 166, 208 Quirites, 4, 5, 15 Regional devices, 57, 59 Regions, 43, 52-61, 201-2 Regola, _rione_, 56 Religion. _See_ Roman, and Catholicism, Italian Religious fabrics, laws about, 248 Remus, 5 Renaissance, 36, 38, 58, 124, 172, 237 Republic. _See_ Rome _Res publica_, the Roman, 180-186 Rhea Silvia, 2 _Rheda_, 72 Rienzo, Cola di, 14, 57 Rignano, duca, 168 _Rioni_. _See_ Regions Ripa, _rione_, 56 _Roma Quadrata_, 2, 4, 197 Roman art, 18, 127, 156-8, 190, 191; characteristics, 8, 9, 10, 11, 107, 126-8, 133-7, 146, 147, 150, 156, 183-5, 187, 194, 229, 240, 241; Church, 14, 41, 42, 50, 126, 184-7, 198-9, 201, 255; customs, 82-7, 99-103, 140-144, 230, 231; dialect, 132; imperialism, 64, 115, 198-9; marriage, 153-5; realism, 113-14, 124-5, 185; religion, 180-88, 192, 196-8; type, 129-132; voices, 132, 157 Romans, and agriculture 2-3, 17, 76, 91, 128-9, 147; ancient, 3-4, 78, 128-9; and English, 123, 131, 135, 174, 185, 192, 193; and French, 152, 184, 185, 238; and Greeks, 129, 130, 180, 182-4, 185, 197; and Italians, 126, 137-9, 188; and Jews, _see_ Jews; modern, 128, 130, 134, 136-7, 138-9, 225, 252-4; a pastoral people, 3, 17, 91, 182 Rome, bombardment of, 212; and Byzantium, _see_ Byzantium; destruction of city, 9, 11, 37, 39; and Greece, _see_ Greece; origin of, 1-5; imperial, 23, 25, 28, 41, 62, 65, 129, 137; kingly, 1, 2, 3, 5, 18, 52, 53; republican, 14, 23, 29, 62, 129, 137, 182, 186; world empire of, 15, 16, 42, 127, 198-9, 236 Rome before 1870, appearance of city, 9, 227 _et seq._; artists in, 210; clergy in, 217, 219, 221, 224, 245; education in, 220; government of, 213-15, 217, 219, 224-5, 246; moral notions in, 83, 87, 220, 222, 225-6, 230; people in, 11-12, 215-16, 217; spies in, 224 Romulus, 1, 2, 3, 32, 154, 198; and Remus, 2, 3, 198 Rospigliosi, 172 Roviano, _duca_, 168 Ruspoli, 169, 177 Sabine hills, 70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 96, 166, 169, 170; people, 2, 4, 5, 15, 154 _Sacramentate_, 232 Sacred College, 15 Sacrifices, 19 Sacrifice, eucharistic, 49 Saints, cult of, 43 Salaria, 45; _porta_, 102, 135 Salviati, 171 Sanctuary of a church, 51 Sanctuaries. _See_ Shrines Saturn, 30, 91; hill of, 13 Savelli, 160, 161, 165, 170 Savorelli, Vittoria, 221 Saxons, 65 _Sbirri_, 61, 217 _Schola_, 65 Scholasticism, 112 _Scudo_, 105 Sculptors, guild of, 64 Seamen, guild of, 63 See of Rome. _See_ Holy See Sees, suburban, 201 Senate, 13-15, 34, 45, 57, 70, 149, 159, 164, 240, 241 Senate and People of Rome, 13, 14, 15 "Senator, the," 14 Senators, 45, 58, 63, 159, 178; and conservators, 55 September 20th, 11, 212, 213, 215 Septimius Severus, 20, 31, 32 Septizonium, 31 Serenade, the, 141, 144 Serlupi, 170 Sermoneta, _duca_, 168, 177 Serpentine, 27 Servants, 94, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109-111, 224 Servius Tullius, 5, 18, 52, 53 Seven hills, 5, 51, 52, 53 Seven sacraments, 48 Sforza, 170 Shops, Roman, 39, 53, 67, 93, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106 Shrines and sanctuaries, 63, 73, 83, 90 Sibylline oracles, 7 Sicily (Sicilians), 126 Sistine chapel, 205, 211 Sixtus I., 35 Sixtus IV., 165, 173 Sixtus V., 55, 140, 167 Slaves, 11, 21, 25, 34, 64, 75 Soldiers, 151; papal, 215, 244, 246, 247 _Soldo_, 101, 104, 107 Sora, _duca_, 170 Spoleto, 167, 178 S.P.Q.R., 15, 59, 138 _Stadia_, 33 Staircases, 95, 176 Standard of Rome, 15 Standard-bearer, 55, 64, 66, 170 Statilius Taurus, 22 Statues of women, 154 Statutes of guilds, 66 _Statuto_, 246 Streets, Roman, 93, 105, 152; refuse in, 9 Stucco, 24, 28, 29 Subiaco, 78 Subterranean Rome. _See_ Catacombs Suburra, _rione_, 53 Sulmona, _principe_, 170 _Suovetaurilia_, 15 Superstition, 81, 83, 136, 187, 196, 222, 226, 231 Susanna and the Elders, 45 Swiss guard, 210, 244 Sylvester, S., 74 Syndic, 166 _Tablinum_, 28 _Tabularium_, 23, 29 Talbot, Gwendoline, 123, 174 Talbots in Rome, 123 Tanners, guild of, 63 _Tarantella_, 140 Tarquinius Priscus, 18, 30, 52; Superbus, 18 Tarquins, 29, 30 Taste and art, 157 Taxes, 64, 107, 139, 217, 219 Teano, _principe_, 168 Temples, 18, 19, 30, 33, 37, 39, 163; of Antoninus and Faustina, 32; Castor and Pollux, 30; Ceres, 31; Concord, 30; Dii Consentes (portico of), 181; Fortuna Virilis, 29; Libertas, 160; Mars Ultor, 30; Romulus, 198; Saturn, 30; Templum Urbis, 32; Venus and Rome, 32; Vespasian, 31 Temporal power, 42, 214, 215, 219, 235-9, 240, 242-3, 245, 255 _Teppa_, 139, 139 _n._ _Terno_, 85, 86 _Testone_, 105 Theodoli, 177 _Thermae_, 20, 21, 32, 33 Throne room, 176, 207 Tiber, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 21, 33, 63, 70, 131, 171, 173 Tiberius, 30 Titles, patrician, 177 _Titulus_, 5, 34, 201, 202 Titus, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 31, 182 Tivoli, 24, 32, 33, 78 Tombs, 33, 36, 72; Bibulus, 29; Cecilia Metella, 29, 168; Latin, 29; of S. Peter, 16 Tor de' Conti, 160; di Nona, 163 Tor Sanguigna, 163; de' Specchi, 102, 230 Torlonia, 169, 230 Towers, 56, 163; baronial, 23, 38; bell, 38; semaphores, 73; vedette, 38, 73 Trades unions, 68 Tradesmen, 103, 104, 105 Trajan, 5, 20, 22, 31, 77, 142, 231 Transtiburtina, 55 Trastevere, 55, 56, 61, 62, 130, 162, 171, 240 Trasteverini, 60, 130 _Trattoria_, 79 Travertine, 22, 24, 27, 39 Trent, Council of, 238 Trevi, _rione_, 55 Tribune, 19, 36 Tribunes, 54 _Triclinium_, 35 Triumvirate, 123 Troy, 2 Tufa, 18, 23 _Turris Cartularia_, 161 Tuscans (Tuscany), 69, 125, 126, 129, 133, 188, 237 Tusculum, 39, 78, 166 Twelve Tables, 23 Ulpii, 45 Umbria, 148, 188 Unction, extreme, 192 Universities. _See_ Guilds and women, 155 Urban VIII., 9, 140, 171 Vandals, 9 Vatican, 28, 56, 58, 161, 163, 203, 205, 208, 211, 228, 230, 239, 241, 244, 247, 252, 254 Veii, 33, 72 Velabrum, 18 _Vendetta_, 149 Venice, Venetians, 125, 126, 132, 188 Venosa, _principe_, 170 Vespasian, 22, 28, 31, 33, 72, 154 Vesta, 181 Vestals, 2, 72, 154 Vestibulum, 35 Via Botteghe Oscure, 173; Julia, 173; Lata, 56; Monserrato, 160; Nazionale, 194, 160; dell' Orso, 9; Pilotta, 166; Plebiscito, 172; Quattro Fontane, 232; Quirinale, 166; Strozzi, 6; Viminale, 6 Viaticum, 12, 193, 230 _Vici_, 53 Vicovaro, 169 Victor Emmanuel II., 10, 169 _Vidua_, 46 _Vigiles_, 26, 54, 59 Villa Aldobrandini 171; Borghese, 171; Corsini, 171; Hadrian's, 32; Massimo, 6; Mondragone, 171; Pamfili-Doria, 73, 231 Villas, 33, 38, 39, 93, 94, 172, 174 Viminal hill, 5, 6, 53, 55 Vintage, 78 _Virgo, aqua_, 22 Vitiges, 37 Voices. _See_ Roman Volcanic rock, 17, 23, 25 Volcanoes, 17 Vulcan, 80, 88 Wagner and Germans, 190; and Italians, 124 Walls, 32, 38, 56, 93, 102, 163 Washing tubs, 102 Weavers, Guild of, 63 Windows in temples and churches, 19, 186 Wines, Roman, 79 Wiseman, Cardinal, 208 Wolf, the, 2 Women, Italian, 153, 155 Young Italy, 214, 215, 235, 242, 244, 246 Zagarolo, 166 Zitelle, 67 THE END _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. 
37206	----	SEA AND SARDINIA BY D. H. LAWRENCE WITH EIGHT PICTURES IN COLOR BY Jan Juta [Illustration] NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1921 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THOMAS SELTZER, INC. _All rights reserved_ _Printed in the United States of America_ [Illustration: OROSEI] CONTENTS I. AS FAR AS PALERMO 11 II. THE SEA 44 III. CAGLIARI 99 IV. MANDAS 127 V. TO SORGONO 154 VI. TO NUORO 212 VII. TO TERRANOVA AND THE STEAMER 260 VIII. BACK 312 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS OROSEI _Frontispiece_ MAP--BY D. H. LAWRENCE 44 ISILI 100 TONARA 148 SORGONO 180 FONNI 204 GAVOI 236 NUORO 268 TERRANOVA 300 SEA AND SARDINIA I. AS FAR AS PALERMO. Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither. Why can't one sit still? Here in Sicily it is so pleasant: the sunny Ionian sea, the changing jewel of Calabria, like a fire-opal moved in the light; Italy and the panorama of Christmas clouds, night with the dog-star laying a long, luminous gleam across the sea, as if baying at us, Orion marching above; how the dog-star Sirius looks at one, looks at one! he is the hound of heaven, green, glamorous and fierce!--and then oh regal evening star, hung westward flaring over the jagged dark precipices of tall Sicily: then Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-coloured smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical, flexible line from the sea's edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better, oh awe and wizardy! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with us. The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited lemon groves, Etna's skirts and skirt-bottoms, these still are our world, our own world. Even the high villages among the oaks, on Etna. But Etna herself, Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, she is beyond a crystal wall. When I look at her, low, white, witch-like under heaven, slowly rolling her orange smoke and giving sometimes a breath of rose-red flame, then I must look away from earth, into the ether, into the low empyrean. And there, in that remote region, Etna is alone. If you would see her, you must slowly take off your eyes from the world and go a naked seer to the strange chamber of the empyrean. Pedestal of heaven! The Greeks had a sense of the magic truth of things. Thank goodness one still knows enough about them to find one's kinship at last. There are so many photographs, there are so infinitely many water-colour drawings and oil paintings which purport to render Etna. But pedestal of heaven! You must cross the invisible border. Between the foreground, which is our own, and Etna, pivot of winds in lower heaven, there is a dividing line. You must change your state of mind. A metempsychosis. It is no use thinking you can see and behold Etna and the foreground both at once. Never. One or the other. Foreground and a transcribed Etna. Or Etna, pedestal of heaven. Why, then, must one go? Why not stay? Ah, what a mistress, this Etna! with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe's panthers, some black, some white. With her strange, remote communications and her terrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terrible vibrations of wicked and beautiful electricity she throws about her, like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current of her demon magnetism seize one's living tissue and change the peaceful life of one's active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm and a new adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness. This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely, so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without losing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons, and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls. Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at once. After having come back only at the end of October, already one must dash away. And it is only the third of January. And one cannot afford to move. Yet there you are: at the Etna bidding one goes. * * * * * Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis at hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples, to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its great quarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet. Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then? Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it is Italian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is an uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn't landed yet. And the net is getting old and tattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the old European civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probably even Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia. * * * * * There is a fortnightly boat sailing from Palermo--next Wednesday, three days ahead. Let us go, then. Away from abhorred Etna, and the Ionian sea, and these great stars in the water, and the almond trees in bud, and the orange trees heavy with red fruit, and these maddening, exasperating, impossible Sicilians, who never knew what truth was and have long lost all notion of what a human being is. A sort of sulphureous demons. _Andiamo!_ But let me confess, in parenthesis, that I am not at all sure whether I don't really prefer these demons to our sanctified humanity. Why does one create such discomfort for oneself! To have to get up in the middle of the night--half past one--to go and look at the clock. Of course this fraud of an American watch has stopped, with its impudent phosphorescent face. Half past one! Half past one, and a dark January night. Ah, well! Half past one! And an uneasy sleep till at last it is five o'clock. Then light a candle and get up. The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house looking night-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one's pleasure. So light the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shivering round half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle. "It's fun," she says, shuddering. "Great," say I, grim as death. First fill the thermos with hot tea. Then fry bacon--good English bacon from Malta, a god-send, indeed--and make bacon sandwiches. Make also sandwiches of scrambled eggs. Make also bread and butter. Also a little toast for breakfast--and more tea. But ugh, who wants to eat at this unearthly hour, especially when one is escaping from bewitched Sicily. Fill the little bag we call the kitchenino. Methylated spirit, a small aluminium saucepan, a spirit-lamp, two spoons, two forks, a knife, two aluminium plates, salt, sugar, tea--what else? The thermos flask, the various sandwiches, four apples, and a little tin of butter. So much for the kitchenino, for myself and the queen bee. Then my knapsack and the q-b's handbag. Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of the Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup of tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the house decent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace and go down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast. The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape. Looking across from the veranda at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house, we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it. Fasten the door-windows of the lower veranda. One won't fasten at all. The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of autumn rain warped it another. Put a chair against it. Lock the last door and hide the key. Sling the knapsack on one's back, take the kitchenino in one's hand and look round. The dawn-red widening, between the purpling sea and the troubled sky. A light in the capucin convent across there. Cocks crowing and the long, howling, hiccuping, melancholy bray of an ass. "All females are dead, all females--och! och! och!--hoooo! Ahaa!--there's one left." So he ends on a moaning grunt of consolation. This is what the Arabs tell us an ass is howling when he brays. * * * * * Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far. * * * * * It is full dawn--dawn, not morning, the sun will not have risen. The village is nearly all dark in the red light, and asleep still. No one at the fountain by the capucin gate: too dark still. One man leading a horse round the corner of the Palazzo Corvaia. One or two dark men along the Corso. And so over the brow, down the steep cobble-stone street between the houses, and out to the naked hill front. This is the dawn-coast of Sicily. Nay, the dawn-coast of Europe. Steep, like a vast cliff, dawn-forward. A red dawn, with mingled curdling dark clouds, and some gold. It must be seven o'clock. The station down below, by the sea. And noise of a train. Yes, a train. And we still high on the steep track, winding downwards. But it is the train from Messina to Catania, half an hour before ours, which is from Catania to Messina. * * * * * So jolt, and drop, and jolt down the old road that winds on the cliff face. Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a dense puther of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt. The dawn is angry red, and yellow above, the sea takes strange colors. I hate the station, pigmy, drawn out there beside the sea. On this steep face, especially in the windless nooks, the almond blossom is already out. In little puffs and specks and stars, it looks very like bits of snow scattered by winter. Bits of snow, bits of blossom, fourth day of the year 1921. Only blossom. And Etna indescribably cloaked and secretive in her dense black clouds. She has wrapped them quite round her, quite low round her skirts. * * * * * At last we are down. We pass the pits where men are burning lime--red-hot, round pits--and are out on the high-way. Nothing can be more depressing than an Italian high-road. From Syracuse to Airolo it is the same: horrible, dreary, slummy high-roads the moment you approach a village or any human habitation. Here there is an acrid smell of lemon juice. There is a factory for making citrate. The houses flush on the road, under the great lime-stone face of the hill, open their slummy doors, and throw out dirty water and coffee dregs. We walk over the dirty water and coffee dregs. Mules rattle past with carts. Other people are going to the station. We pass the Dazio and are there. * * * * * Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are insuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the people on the station: like a line of caricatures between oneself and the naked sea and the uneasy, clouding dawn. You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerner of romance. It might, as far as features are concerned, be an early morning crowd waiting for the train on a north London suburb station. As far as features go. For some are fair and some colorless and none racially typical. The only one that is absolutely like a race caricature is a tall stout elderly fellow with spectacles and a short nose and a bristling moustache, and he is the German of the comic papers of twenty years ago. But he is pure Sicilian. They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to their job: not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so like any other clerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much less _socially_ self-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms round one another's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has had earache, so a black kerchief is tied round his face, and his black hat is perched above, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems to think so, however. Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack on my back with cold disapprobation, as unseemly as if I had arrived riding on a pig. I ought to be in a carriage, and the knapsack ought to be a new suit-case. I know it, but am inflexible. That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as Adonis, and as "fetching" as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the same time, all flesh is grass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing or if a black hat perches above a thick black face-muffle and a long excruciated face, it is all in the course of nature. They seize the black-edged one by the arm, and in profound commiseration: "Do you suffer? Are you suffering?" they ask. And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face. Never in the world have I seen such melting gay tenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms, whether they be young lean-cheeked Sicilians or huge stout Sicilians. There must be something curious about the proximity of a volcano. Naples and Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with great macaroni paunches, they are expansive and in a perfect drip of casual affection and love. But the Sicilians are even more wildly exuberant and fat and all over one another than the Neapolitans. They never leave off being amorously friendly with almost everybody, emitting a relentless physical familiarity that is quite bewildering to one not brought up near a volcano. This is more true of the middle classes than of the lower. The working men are perforce thinner and less exuberant. But they hang together in clusters, and can never be physically near enough. * * * * * It is only thirty miles to Messina, but the train takes two hours. It winds and hurries and stops beside the lavender grey morning sea. A flock of goats trail over the beach near the lapping wave's edge, dismally. Great wide deserts of stony river-beds run down to the sea, and men on asses are picking their way across, and women are kneeling by the small stream-channel washing clothes. The lemons hang pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solid forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and the sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchard under-shadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea. There are heaps of pale yellow lemons under the trees. They look like pale, primrose-smouldering fires. Curious how like fires the heaps of lemons look, under the shadow of foliage, seeming to give off a pallid burning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes a cluster of orange trees, the oranges are red like coals among the darker leaves. But lemons, lemons, innumerable, speckled like innumerable tiny stars in the green firmament of leaves. So many lemons! Think of all the lemonade crystals they will be reduced to! Think of America drinking them up next summer. * * * * * I always wonder why such vast wide river-beds of pale boulders come out of the heart of the high-rearing, dramatic stone mountains, a few miles to the sea. A few miles only: and never more than a few threading water-trickles in river-beds wide enough for the Rhine. But that is how it is. The landscape is ancient, and classic--romantic, as if it had known far-off days and fiercer rivers and more verdure. Steep, craggy, wild, the land goes up to its points and precipices, a tangle of heights. But all jammed on top of one another. And in old landscapes, as in old people, the flesh wears away, and the bones become prominent. Rock sticks up fantastically. The jungle of peaks in this old Sicily. * * * * * The sky is all grey. The Straits are grey. Reggio, just across the water, is white looking, under the great dark toe of Calabria, the toe of Italy. On Aspromonte there is grey cloud. It is going to rain. After such marvelous ringing blue days, it is going to rain. What luck! * * * * * Aspromonte! Garibaldi! I could always cover my face when I see it, Aspromonte. I wish Garibaldi had been prouder. Why did he go off so humbly, with his bag of seed-corn and a flea in his ear, when His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel arrived with his little short legs on the scene. Poor Garibaldi! He wanted to be a hero and a dictator of free Sicily. Well, one can't be a dictator and humble at the same time. One must be a hero, which he was, and proud, which he wasn't. Besides people don't nowadays choose proud heroes for governors. Anything but. They prefer constitutional monarchs, who are paid servants and who know it. That is democracy. Democracy admires its own servants and nothing else. And you couldn't make a real servant even of Garibaldi. Only of His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel. So Italy chose Victor Emmanuel, and Garibaldi went off with a corn bag and a whack on the behind like a humble ass. * * * * * It is raining--dismally, dismally raining. And this is Messina coming. Oh horrible Messina, earthquake-shattered and renewing your youth like a vast mining settlement, with rows and streets and miles of concrete shanties, squalor and a big street with shops and gaps and broken houses still, just back of the tram-lines, and a dreary squalid earthquake-hopeless port in a lovely harbor. People don't forget and don't recover. The people of Messina seem to be today what they were nearly twenty years ago, after the earthquake: people who have had a terrible shock, and for whom all life's institutions are really nothing, neither civilization nor purpose. The meaning of everything all came down with a smash in that shuddering earthquake, and nothing remains but money and the throes of some sort of sensation. Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness. * * * * * Raining, raining hard. Clambering down on to the wet platform and walking across the wet lines to the cover. Many human beings scurrying across the wet lines, among the wet trains, to get out into the ghastly town beyond. Thank heaven one need not go out into the town. Two convicts chained together among the crowd--and two soldiers. The prisoners wear fawny homespun clothes, of cloth such as the peasants weave, with irregularly occurring brown stripes. Rather nice handmade rough stuff. But linked together, dear God! And those horrid caps on their hairless foreheads. No hair. Probably they are going to a convict station on the Lipari islands. The people take no notice. No, but convicts are horrible creatures: at least, the old one is, with his long, nasty face: his long, clean-shaven, horrible face, without emotions, or with emotions one cannot follow. Something cold, sightless. A sightless, ugly look. I should loathe to have to touch him. Of the other I am not so sure. He is younger, and with dark eyebrows. But a roundish, softish face, with a sort of leer. No, evil is horrible. I used to think there was no absolute evil. Now I know there is a great deal. So much that it threatens life altogether. That ghastly abstractness of criminals. They don't _know_ any more what other people feel. Yet some horrible force drives them. It is a great mistake to abolish the death penalty. If I were dictator, I should order the old one to be hung at once. I should have judges with sensitive, living hearts: not abstract intellects. And because the instinctive heart recognised a man as evil, I would have that man destroyed. Quickly. Because good warm life is now in danger. * * * * * Standing on Messina station--dreary, dreary hole--and watching the winter rain and seeing the pair of convicts, I must remember again Oscar Wilde on Reading platform, a convict. What a terrible mistake, to let oneself be martyred by a lot of canaille. A man must say his say. But _noli me tangere_. Curious these people are. Up and down, up and down go a pair of officials. The young one in a black gold-laced cap talks to the elder in a scarlet gold-laced cap. And he walks, the young one, with a mad little hop, and his fingers fly as if he wanted to scatter them to the four winds of heaven, and his words go off like fireworks, with more than Sicilian speed. On and on, up and down, and his eye is dark and excited and unseeing, like the eye of a fleeing rabbit. Strange and beside itself is humanity. * * * * * What a lot of officials! You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall long-nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors. As far as I can see, there are three scarlet station-masters, five black-and-gold substation-masters, and a countless number of principalities and powers in more or less broken boots and official caps. They are like bees round a hive, humming in an important _conversazione_, and occasionally looking at some paper or other, and extracting a little official honey. But the _conversazione_ is the affair of affairs. To an Italian official, life seems to be one long and animated conversation--the Italian word is better--interrupted by casual trains and telephones. And besides the angels of heaven's gates, there are the mere ministers, porters, lamp-cleaners, etc. These stand in groups and talk socialism. A lamp-man slashes along, swinging a couple of lamps. Bashes one against a barrow. Smash goes the glass. Looks down as if to say, What do you mean by it? Glances over his shoulder to see if any member of the higher hierarchies is looking. Seven members of higher hierarchies are assiduously not looking. On goes the minister with the lamp, blithely. Another pane or two gone. _Vogue la galère._ Passengers have gathered again, some in hoods, some in nothing. Youths in thin, paltry clothes stand out in the pouring rain as if they did not know it was raining. One sees their coat-shoulders soaked. And yet they do not trouble to keep under shelter. Two large station dogs run about and trot through the standing trains, just like officials. They climb up the footboard, hop into a train and hop out casually when they feel like it. Two or three port-porters, in canvas hats as big as umbrellas, literally, spreading like huge fins over their shoulders, are looking into more empty trains. More and more people appear. More and more official caps stand about. It rains and rains. The train for Palermo and the train for Syracuse are both an hour late already, coming from the port. Flea-bite. Though these are the great connections from Rome. Loose locomotives trundle back and forth, vaguely, like black dogs running and turning back. The port is only four minutes' walk. If it were not raining so hard, we would go down, walk along the lines and get into the waiting train down there. Anybody may please himself. There is the funnel of the great unwieldy ferry-object--she is just edging in. That means the connection from the mainland at last. But it is cold, standing here. We eat a bit of bread and butter from the kitchenino in resignation. After all, what is an hour and a half? It might just as easily be five hours, as it was the last time we came down from Rome. And the _wagon-lit_, booked to Syracuse, calmly left stranded in the station of Messina, to go no further. All get out and find yourselves rooms for the night in vile Messina. Syracuse or no Syracuse, Malta boat or no Malta boat. We are the _Ferrovia dello Stato_. But there, why grumble. Noi Italiani siamo così buoni. Take it from their own mouth. * * * * * Ecco! Finalmente! The crowd is quite joyful as the two express trains surge proudly in, after their half-a-mile creep. Plenty of room, for once. Though the carriage floor is a puddle, and the roof leaks. This is second class. * * * * * Slowly, with two engines, we grunt and chuff and twist to get over the break-neck heights that shut Messina in from the north coast. The windows are opaque with steam and drops of rain. No matter--tea from the thermos flask, to the great interest of the other two passengers who had nervously contemplated the unknown object. "Ha!" says he with joy, seeing the hot tea come out. "It has the appearance of a bomb." "Beautiful hot!" says she, with real admiration. All apprehension at once dissipated, peace reigns in the wet, mist-hidden compartment. We run through miles and miles of tunnel. The Italians have made wonderful roads and railways. * * * * * If one rubs the window and looks out, lemon groves with many wet-white lemons, earthquake-broken houses, new shanties, a grey weary sea on the right hand, and on the left the dim, grey complication of steep heights from which issue stone river-beds of inordinate width, and sometimes a road, a man on a mule. Sometimes near at hand, long-haired, melancholy goats leaning sideways like tilted ships under the eaves of some scabby house. They call the house-eaves the dogs' umbrellas. In town you see the dogs trotting close under the wall out of the wet. Here the goats lean like rock, listing inwards to the plaster wall. Why look out? Sicilian railways are all single line. Hence, the _coincidenza_. A _coincidenza_ is where two trains meet in a loop. You sit in a world of rain and waiting until some silly engine with four trucks puffs alongside. Ecco la coincidenza! Then after a brief _conversazione_ between the two trains, _diretto_ and _merce_, express and goods, the tin horn sounds and away we go, happily, towards the next coincidence. Clerks away ahead joyfully chalk up our hours of lateness on the announcement slate. All adds to the adventurous flavour of the journey, dear heart. We come to a station where we find the other diretto, the express from the other direction, awaiting our coincidential arrival. The two trains run alongside one another, like two dogs meeting in the street and snuffing one another. Every official rushes to greet every other official, as if they were all David and Jonathan meeting after a crisis. They rush into each other's arms and exchange cigarettes. And the trains can't bear to part. And the station can't bear to part with us. The officials tease themselves and us with the word _pronto_, meaning _ready!_ Pronto! And again Pronto! And shrill whistles. Anywhere else a train would go off its tormented head. But no! Here only that angel's trump of an official little horn will do the business. And get them to blow that horn if you can. They can't bear to part. * * * * * Rain, continual rain, a level grey wet sky, a level grey wet sea, a wet and misty train winding round and round the little bays, diving through tunnels. Ghosts of the unpleasant-looking Lipari islands standing a little way out to sea, heaps of shadow deposited like rubbish heaps in the universal greyness. * * * * * Enter more passengers. An enormously large woman with an extraordinarily handsome face: an extraordinarily large man, quite young: and a diminutive servant, a little girl-child of about thirteen, with a beautiful face.--But the Juno--it is she who takes my breath away. She is quite young, in her thirties still. She has that queenly stupid beauty of a classic Hera: a pure brow with level dark brows, large, dark, bridling eyes, a straight nose, a chiselled mouth, an air of remote self-consciousness. She sends one's heart straight back to pagan days. And--and--she is simply enormous, like a house. She wears a black toque with sticking-up wings, and a black rabbit fur spread on her shoulders. She edges her way in carefully: and once seated, is terrified to rise to her feet. She sits with that motionlessness of her type, closed lips, face muted and expressionless. And she expects me to admire her: I can see that. She expects me to pay homage to her beauty: just to that: not homage to herself, but to her as a _bel pezzo_. She casts little aloof glances at me under her eyelids. It is evident she is a country beauty become a _bourgeoise_. She speaks unwillingly to the other squint-eyed passenger, a young woman who also wears a black-rabbit fur, but without pretensions. The husband of Juno is a fresh-faced bourgeois young fellow, and he also is simply huge. His waistcoat would almost make the overcoat of the fourth passenger, the unshaven companion of the squinting young woman. The young Jupiter wears kid gloves: a significant fact here. He, too, has pretensions. But he is quite affable with the unshaven one, and speaks Italian unaffectedly. Whereas Juno speaks the dialect with affectation. No one takes any notice of the little maid. She has a gentle, virgin moon-face, and those lovely grey Sicilian eyes that are translucent, and into which the light sinks and becomes black sometimes, sometimes dark blue. She carries the bag and the extra coat of the huge Juno, and sits on the edge of the seat between me and the unshaven, Juno having motioned her there with a regal inclination of the head. The little maid is rather frightened. Perhaps she is an orphan child--probably. Her nut-brown hair is smoothly parted and done in two pigtails. She wears no hat, as is proper for her class. On her shoulders one of those little knitted grey shoulder-capes that one associates with orphanages. Her stuff dress is dark grey, her boots are strong. The smooth, moon-like, expressionless virgin face, rather pale and touching, rather frightened, of the girl-child. A perfect face from a mediaeval picture. It moves one strangely. Why? It is so unconscious, as we are conscious. Like a little muted animal it sits there, in distress. She is going to be sick. She goes into the corridor and is sick--very sick, leaning her head like a sick dog on the window-ledge. Jupiter towers above her--not unkind, and apparently feeling no repugnance. The physical convulsion of the girl does not affect him as it affects us. He looks on unmoved, merely venturing to remark that she had eaten too much before coming on to the train. An obviously true remark. After which he comes and talks a few common-places to me. By and by the girl-child creeps in again and sits on the edge of the seat facing Juno. But no, says Juno, if she is sick she will be sick over me. So Jupiter accommodatingly changes places with the girl-child, who is thus next to me. She sits on the edge of the seat with folded little red hands, her face pale and expressionless. Beautiful the thin line of her nut-brown eyebrows, the dark lashes of the silent, pellucid dark eyes. Silent, motionless, like a sick animal. But Juno tells her to wipe her splashed boots. The child gropes for a piece of paper. Juno tells her to take her pocket handkerchief. Feebly the sick girl-child wipes her boots, then leans back. But no good. She has to go in the corridor and be sick again. After a while they all get out. Queer to see people so natural. Neither Juno nor Jupiter is in the least unkind. He even seems kind. But they are just not upset. Not half as upset as we are--the q-b wanting to administer tea, and so on. We should have to hold the child's head. They just quite naturally leave it alone to its convulsions, and are neither distressed nor repelled. It just is so. Their naturalness seems unnatural to us. Yet I am sure it is best. Sympathy would only complicate matters, and spoil that strange, remote virginal quality. The q-b says it is largely stupidity. * * * * * Nobody washes out the corner of the corridor, though we stop at stations long enough, and there are two more hours journey. Train officials go by and stare, passengers step over and stare, new-comers stare and step over. Somebody asks _who_? Nobody thinks of just throwing a pail of water. Why should they? It is all in the course of nature.--One begins to be a bit chary of this same "nature", in the south. * * * * * Enter two fresh passengers: a black-eyed, round-faced, bright-sharp man in corduroys and with a gun, and a long-faced, fresh-colored man with thick snowy hair, and a new hat and a long black overcoat of smooth black cloth, lined with rather ancient, once expensive fur. He is extremely proud of this long black coat and ancient fur lining. Childishly proud he wraps it again over his knee, and gloats. The beady black-eyes of the hunter look round with pleased alertness. He sits facing the one in the overcoat, who looks like the last sprout of some Norman blood. The hunter in corduroys beams abroad, with beady black eyes in a round red face, curious. And the other tucks his fur-lined long coat between his legs and gloats to himself: all to himself gloating, and looking as if he were deaf. But no, he's not. He wears muddy high-low boots. At Termini it is already lamp-light. Business men crowd in. We get five business men: all stout, respected Palermitans. The one opposite me has whiskers, and a many-colored, patched traveling rug over his fat knees. Queer how they bring that feeling of physical intimacy with them. You are never surprised if they begin to take off their boots, or their collar-and-tie. The whole world is a sort of bedroom to them. One shrinks, but in vain. There is some conversation between the black-eyed, beady hunter and the business men. Also the young white-haired one, the aristocrat, tries to stammer out, at great length, a few words. As far as I can gather the young one is mad--or deranged--and the other, the hunter, is his keeper. They are traveling over Europe together. There is some talk of "the Count". And the hunter says the unfortunate "has had an accident." But that is a southern gentleness presumably, a form of speech. Anyhow it is queer: and the hunter in his corduroys, with his round, ruddy face and strange black-bright eyes and thin black hair is a puzzle to me, even more than the albino, long-coated, long-faced, fresh-complexioned, queer last remnant of a baron as he is. They are both muddy from the land, and pleased in a little mad way of their own. But it is half-past six. We are at Palermo, capital of Sicily. The hunter slings his gun over his shoulder, I my knapsack, and in the throng we all disappear, into the Via Maqueda. * * * * * Palermo has two great streets, the Via Maqueda, and the Corso, which cross each other at right-angles. The Via Maqueda is narrow, with narrow little pavements, and is always choked with carriages and foot-passengers. It had ceased raining. But the narrow road was paved with large, convex slabs of hard stone, inexpressibly greasy. To cross the Via Maqueda therefore was a feat. However, once accomplished, it was done. The near end of the street was rather dark, and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables--piles of white-and-green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-colored artichokes, nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and bluey purple, carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colors and vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black-purple cauliflowers, like niggers' heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables, all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops, and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps. The q-b at once wants to buy vegetables. "Look! Look at the snow-white broccoli. Look at the huge finocchi. Why don't we get them? I _must_ have some. Look at those great clusters of dates--ten francs a kilo, and we pay sixteen. It's monstrous. Our place is simply monstrous." For all that, one doesn't buy vegetables to take to Sardinia. Cross the Corso at that decorated maelstrom and death-trap of the Quattro Canti. I, of course, am nearly knocked down and killed. Somebody is nearly knocked down and killed every two minutes. But there--the carriages are light, and the horses curiously aware creatures. They would never tread on one. The second part of the Via Maqueda is the swell part: silks and plumes, and an infinite number of shirts and ties and cuff-links and mufflers and men's fancies. One realises here that man-drapery and man-underwear is quite as important as woman's, if not more. I, of course, in a rage. The q-b stares at every rag and stitch, and crosses and re-crosses this infernal dark stream of a Via Maqueda, which, as I have said, is choked solid with strollers and carriages. Be it remembered that I have on my back the brown knapsack, and the q-b carries the kitchenino. This is enough to make a travelling menagerie of us. If I had my shirt sticking out behind, and if the q-b had happened merely to catch up the table-cloth and wrap it round her as she came out, all well and good. But a big brown knapsack! And a basket with thermos flask, etc! No, one could not expect such things to pass in a southern capital. But I am case-hardened. And I am sick of shops. True, we have not been in a town for three months. But _can_ I care for the innumerable _fantasias_ in the drapery line? Every wretched bit of would-be-extra chic is called a fantasia. The word goes lugubriously to my bowels. Suddenly I am aware of the q-b darting past me like a storm. Suddenly I see her pouncing on three giggling young hussies just in front--the inevitable black velveteen tam, the inevitable white curly muffler, the inevitable lower-class flappers. "Did you want something? Have you something to say? Is there something that amuses you? Oh-h! You must laugh, must you? Oh--laugh! Oh-h! Why? Why? You ask why? Haven't I heard you! Oh--you spik Ingleesh! You spik Ingleesh! Yes--why! That's why! Yes, that's why." The three giggling young hussies shrink together as if they would all hide behind one another, after a vain uprearing and a demand why? Madam tells them why. So they uncomfortably squeeze together under the unexpected strokes of the q-b's sledge-hammer Italian and more than sledge-hammer retaliation, there full in the Via Maqueda. They edge round one another, each attempting to get back of the other, away from the looming q-b. I perceive that this rotary motion is equivalent to a standstill, so feel called upon to say something in the manly line. "Beastly Palermo bad-manners," I say, and throw a nonchalant "Ignoranti" at the end, in a tone of dismissal. Which does it. Off they go down-stream, still huddling and shrinking like boats that are taking sails in, and peeping to see if we are coming. Yes, my dears, we are coming. "Why do you bother?" say I to the q-b, who is towering with rage. "They've followed us the whole length of the street--with their _sacco militario_ and their _parlano inglese_ and their _you spik Ingleesh_, and their jeering insolence. But the English are fools. They always put up with this Italian impudence." Which is perhaps true.--But this knapsack! It might be full of bronze-roaring geese, it would not attract more attention! However, and however, it is seven o'clock, and the shops are beginning to shut. No more shop-gazing. Only one lovely place: raw ham, boiled ham, chickens in aspic, chicken vol-au-vents, sweet curds, curd-cheese, rustic cheese-cake, smoked sausages, beautiful fresh mortadella, huge Mediterranean red lobsters, and those lobsters without claws. "So good! So good!" We stand and cry it aloud. But this shop too is shutting. I ask a man for the Hotel Pantechnico. And treating me in that gentle, strangely tender southern manner, he takes me and shows me. He makes me feel such a poor, frail, helpless leaf. A foreigner, you know. A bit of an imbecile, poor dear. Hold his hand and show him the way. * * * * * To sit in the room of this young American woman, with its blue hangings, and talk and drink tea till midnght! Ah these naïve Americans--they are a good deal older and shrewder than we, once it nears the point. And they all seem to feel as if the world were coming to an end. And they are so truly generous of their hospitality, in this cold world. II. THE SEA. The fat old porter knocks. Ah me, once more it is dark. Get up again before dawn. A dark sky outside, cloudy. The thrilling tinkle of innumerable goat-bells as the first flock enters the city, such a rippling sound. Well, it must be morning, even if one shivers at it. And at least it does not rain. * * * * * That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn. And a cold wind. We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve of the harbour Panormus. That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea out there. And here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse. The American girl is with us, wrapped in her sweater. A coarse, cold, black-slimy world, she seems as if she would melt away before it. But these frail creatures, what a lot they can go through! [Illustration: MAP FOR SEA AND SARDINIA] Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road of the quay side, and to the sea. There lies our steamer, over there in the dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible. "That one who is smoking her cigarette," says the porter. She looks little, beside the huge _City of Trieste_ who is lying up next her. * * * * * Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the side of the quay. She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice. We are on the open basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him. He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay. The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows. The wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette--meaning the funnel-smoke--across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water. Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on the left, on the undarkening sky. * * * * * Climb up, climb up, this is our ship. Up we go, up the ladder. "Oh but!" says the American girl. "Isn't she small! Isn't she impossibly small! Oh my, will you go in such a little thing? Oh dear! Thirty two hours in such a little boat? Why no, I wouldn't care for it at all." A bunch of stewards, cooks, waiters, engineers, pan-cleaners and what-not, mostly in black canvas jackets. Nobody else on the ship. A little black bunch of loutish crew with nothing to do, and we the first passengers served up to be jeered at. There you are, in the grey light. "Who is going?" "We two--the signorina is not going." "Tickets!" These are casual proletarian manners. We are taken into the one long room with a long table and many maple-golden doors, alternate panels having a wedge-wood blue-and-white picture inserted--a would-be Goddess of white marble on a blue ground, like a health-salts Hygeia advertisement. One of the plain panels opens--our cabin. "Oh dear! Why it isn't as big as a china-closet. However will you get in!" cries the American girl. "One at a time," say I. "But it's the tiniest place I _ever_ saw." It really was tiny. One had to get into a bunk to shut the door. That did not matter to me, I am no Titanic American. I pitched the knapsack on one bunk, the kitchenino on the other, and we shut the door. The cabin disappeared into a maple-wood panel of the long, subterranean state-room. "Why, is this the only place you've got to sit in?" cried the American girl. "But how perfectly awful! No air, and so dark, and smelly. Why I never saw such a boat! Will you really go? Will you really!" The state-room was truly rather subterranean and stuffy, with nothing but a long table and an uncanny company of screw-pin chairs seated thereat, and no outlet to the air at all, but it was not so bad otherwise, to me who have never been out of Europe. Those maple-wood panels and ebony curves--and those Hygeias! They went all round, even round the curve at the dim, distant end, and back up the near side. Yet how beautiful old, gold-coloured maple-wood is! how very lovely, with the ebony curves of the door arch! There was a wonderful old-fashioned, Victorian glow in it, and a certain splendour. Even one could bear the Hygeias let in under glass--the colour was right, that wedge-wood and white, in such lovely gold lustre. There was a certain homely grandeur still in the days when this ship was built: a richness of choice material. And health-salts Hygeias, wedge-wood Greek goddesses on advertisement placards! Yet they _weren't_ advertisements. That was what really worried me. They never had been. Perhaps Weego's Health Salts stole her later. * * * * * We have no coffee--that goes without saying. Nothing doing so early. The crew still stands in a gang, exactly like a gang of louts at a street-corner. And they've got the street all to themselves--this ship. We climb to the upper deck. * * * * * She is a long, slender, old steamer with one little funnel. And she seems so deserted, now that one can't see the street-corner gang of the casual crew. They are just below. Our ship is deserted. The dawn is wanly blueing. The sky is a curdle of cloud, there is a bit of pale gold eastwards, beyond Monte Pellegrino. The wind blows across the harbour. The hills behind Palermo prick up their ears on the sky-line. The city lies unseen, near us and level. There--a big ship is coming in: the Naples boat. And the little boats keep putting off from the near quay, and coming to us. We watch. A stout officer, cavalry, in grayey-green, with a big dark-blue cloak lined with scarlet. The scarlet lining keeps flashing. He has a little beard, and his uniform is not quite clean. He has big wooden chests, tied with rope, for luggage. Poor and of no class. Yet that scarlet, splendid lining, and the spurs. It seems a pity they must go second-class. Yet so it is, he goes forward when the dock porter has hoisted those wooden boxes. No fellow-passenger yet. Boats still keep coming. Ha-ha! Here is the commissariat! Various sides of kid, ready for roasting: various chickens: fennel like celery: wine in a bottiglione: new bread: packages! Hand them up, hand them up. "Good food!" cries the q-b in anticipation. It must be getting near time to go. Two more passengers--young thick men in black broad-cloth standing up in the stern of a little boat, their hands in their pockets, looking a little cold about the chin. Not quite Italian, too sturdy and manly. Sardinians from Cagliari, as a matter of fact. * * * * * We go down from the chill upper-deck. It is growing full day. Bits of pale gold are flying among delicate but cold flakes of cloud from the east, over Monte Pellegrino, bits of very new turquoise sky come out. Palermo on the left crouches upon her all-harbour--a little desolate, disorderly, end-of-the-world, end-of-the-sea, along her quay front. Even from here we can see the yellow carts rattling slowly, the mules nodding their high weird plumes of scarlet along the broad weary harbour-side. Oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your panels! * * * * * Arrives an individual at our side. "The captain fears it will not be possible to start. There is much wind outside. Much wind!" How they _love_ to come up with alarming, disquieting, or annoying news! The joy it gives them. What satisfaction on all the faces: of course all the other loafers are watching us, the street-corner loungers of this deck. But we have been many times bitten. "Ah ma!" say I, looking at the sky, "not so much wind as all that." An air of quiet, shrugging indifference is most effectual: as if you knew all about it, a good deal more than they knew. "Ah si! Molto vento! Molto vento! Outside! Outside!" With a long face and a dramatic gesture he points out of the harbour, to the grey sea. I too look out of the harbour at the pale line of sea beyond the mole. But I do not trouble to answer, and my eye is calm. So he goes away, only half triumphant. * * * * * "Things seem to get worse and worse!" cries the American friend. "What will you do on such a boat if you have an awful time out in the Mediterranean here? Oh no--will you risk it, really? Won't you go from Cività Vecchia?" "How awful it will be!" cries the q-b, looking round the grey harbour, the many masts clustering in the grey sky on the right: the big Naples boat turning her posterior to the quay-side a little way off, and cautiously budging backwards: the almost entirely shut-in harbour: the bits of blue and flying white cloud overhead: the little boats like beetles scuttling hither and thither across the basin: the thick crowd on the quay come to meet the Naples boat. * * * * * Time! Time! The American friend must go. She bids us goodbye, more than sympathetically. "I shall be awfully interested to hear how you get on." So down the side she goes. The boatman wants twenty francs--wants more--but doesn't get it. He gets ten, which is five too much. And so, sitting rather small and pinched and cold-looking, huddled in her sweater, she bibbles over the ripply water to the distant stone steps. We wave farewell. But other traffic comes between us. And the q-b, feeling nervous, is rather cross because the American friend's ideas of luxury have put us in such a poor light. We feel like the poorest of poor sea-faring relations. * * * * * Our ship is hooting for all she's worth. An important last-minuter comes surging up. The rope hawsers are being wound clankily in. Seagulls--they are never very many in the Mediterranean--seagulls whirl like a few flakes of snow in the upper chill air. Clouds spin. And without knowing it we are evaporating away from the shore, from our mooring, between the great _City of Trieste_ and another big black steamer that lies like a wall. We breathe towards this second black wall of steamer: distinctly. And of course an individual in an official cap is standing on the bottom of our departure ladder just above the water, yelling Barca! Barca!--shouting for a boat. And an old man on the sea stands up to his oars and comes pushing his clumsy boat with gathering speed between us and the other black wall. There he stands away below there, small, firing his clumsy boat along, remote as if in a picture on the dark green water. And our black side insidiously and evilly aspires to the other huge black wall. He rows in the canyon between, and is nearly here. When lo, the individual on the bottom step turns in the other direction. Another boat from the open basin is sweeping up: it is a race: she is near, she is nearer, she is up. With a curvet the boat from the open rounds up at the ladder. The boat between the gulf backs its oars. The official individual shouts and waves, the old man backing his oars in the gulf below yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle-puddle-puddle, working her screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life--we are floating into the open basin. Slowly, slowly we turn round: and as the ship turns, our hearts turn. Palermo fades from our consciousness: the Naples boat, the disembarking crowds, the rattling carriages to the land--the great _City of Trieste_--all fades from our heart. We see only the open gap of the harbour entrance, and the level, pale-grey void of the sea beyond. There are wisps of gleamy light--out there. And out there our heart watches--though Palermo is near us, just behind. We look round, and see it all behind us--but already it is gone, gone from our heart. The fresh wind, the gleamy wisps of light, the running, open sea beyond the harbour bars. * * * * * And so we steam out. And almost at once the ship begins to take a long, slow, dizzy dip, and a fainting swoon upwards, and a long, slow, dizzy dip, slipping away from beneath one. The q-b turns pale. Up comes the deck in that fainting swoon backwards--then down it fades in that indescribable slither forwards. It is all quite gentle--quite, quite gentle. But oh, so long, and so slow, and so dizzy. "Rather pleasant!" say I to the q-b. "Yes. Rather lovely _really_," she answers wistfully. To tell the truth there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy. It is the motion of freedom. To feel her come up--then slide slowly forward, with a sound of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the magic gallop of elemental space. That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul. One is free at last--and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards. Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life--the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. The agony which a train is to me, really. And the long-drawn-out agony of a life among tense, resistant people on land. And then to feel the long, slow lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters. Ah God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty. I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even. * * * * * The ship was almost empty--save of course for the street-corner louts who hung about just below, on the deck itself. We stood alone on the weather-faded little promenade deck, which has old oak seats with old, carved little lions at the ends, for arm-rests--and a little cabin mysteriously shut, which much peeping determined as the wireless office and the operator's little curtained bed-niche. * * * * * Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea. Strangely large in mass and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks: and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and old-looking. These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific, fortifying the interior. And again one gets the feeling that age has worn them bare: as if old, old civilisations had worn away and exhausted the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in plateaus, and here in a great mass. * * * * * There seems hardly any one on board but ourselves: we alone on the little promenade deck. Strangely lonely, floating on a bare old ship past the great bare shores, on a rolling sea, stooping and rising in the wind. The wood of the fittings is all bare and weather-silvered, the cabin, the seats, even the little lions of the seats. The paint wore away long ago: and this timber will never see paint any more. Strange to put one's hand on the old oaken wood, so sea-fibred. Good old delicate-threaded oak: I swear it grew in England. And everything so carefully done, so solidly and everlastingly. I look at the lions, with the perfect-fitting oaken pins through their paws clinching them down, and their little mouths open. They are as solid as they were in Victorian days, as immovable. They will never wear away. What a joy in the careful, thorough, manly, everlasting work put into a ship: at least into this sixty-year-old vessel. Every bit of this old oak wood so sound, so beautiful: and the whole welded together with joints and wooden pins far more beautifully and livingly than iron welds. Rustless, life-born, living-tissued old wood: rustless as flesh is rustless, and happy-seeming as iron never can be. She rides so well, she takes the sea so beautifully, as a matter of course. * * * * * Various members of the crew wander past to look at us. This little promenade deck is over the first-class quarters, full in the stern. So we see first one head then another come up the ladder--mostly bare heads: and one figure after another slouches past, smoking a cigarette. All crew. At last the q-b stops one of them--it is what they are all waiting for, an opportunity to talk--and asks if the weird object on the top of Pellegrino is a ruin. Could there be a more touristy question! No, it is the semaphore station. Slap in the eye for the q-b! She doesn't mind, however, and the member of the crew proceeds to converse. He is a weedy, hollow-cheeked town-product: a Palermitan. He wears faded blue over-alls and informs us he is the ship's carpenter: happily unemployed for the rest of his life, apparently, and taking it as rather less than his dues. The ship once did the Naples-Palermo course--a very important course--in the old days of the General Navigation Company. The General Navigation Company sold her for eighty thousand liras years ago, and now she was worth two million. We pretend to believe: but I make a poor show. I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras. No man can overhear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like venomous mosquitoes round his ears. Liras--liras--liras--nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable Lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog. Behind this greasy fog some people may still see the Italian sun. I find it hard work. Through this murk of Liras you peer at Michael Angelo and at Botticelli and the rest, and see them all as through a glass, darkly. For heavy around you is Italy's after-the-war atmosphere, darkly pressing you, squeezing you, milling you into dirty paper notes. King Harry was lucky that they only wanted to coin him into gold. Italy wants to mill you into filthy paper Liras. * * * * * Another head--and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time--to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too. We go down into the subterranean state-room and sit on the screw-pin chairs, while the ship does the slide-and-slope trot under us, and we drink a couple of cups of coffee-and-milk, and eat a piece of bread and butter. At least one of the innumerable members of the crew gives me one cup, then casts me off. It is most obviously his intention that I shall get no more: because of course the innumerable members of the crew could all just do with another coffee and milk. However, though the ship heaves and the alpaca coats cluster menacingly in the doorway, I balance my way to the tin buffet and seize the coffee pot and the milk pot, and am quite successful in administering to the q-b and myself. Having restored the said vessels to their tin altar, I resume my spin chair at the long and desert board. The q-b and I are alone--save that in the distance a very fat back with gold-braid collar sits sideways and a fat hand disposes of various papers--he is part of the one-and-only table, of course. The tall lean alpaca jacket, with a face of yellow stone and a big black moustache moves from the outer doorway, glowers at our filled cups, and goes to the tin altar and touches the handles of the two vessels: just touches them to an arrangement: as one who should say: These are mine. What dirty foreigner dares help himself! * * * * * As quickly as possible we stagger up from the long dungeon where the alpaca jackets are swooping like blue-bottles upon the coffee pots, into the air. There the carpenter is waiting for us, like a spider. "Isn't the sea a little quieter?" says the q-b wistfully. She is growing paler. "No, Signora--how should it be?" says the gaunt-faced carpenter. "The wind is waiting for us behind Cape Gallo. You see that cape?" he points to a tall black cliff-front in the sea ahead. "When we get to that cape we get the wind and the sea. Here--" he makes a gesture--"it is moderate." "Ugh!" says the q-b, turning paler. "I'm going to lie down." She disappears. The carpenter, finding me stony ground, goes forward, and I see him melting into the crowd of the innumerable crew, that hovers on the lower-deck passage by the kitchen and the engines. * * * * * The clouds are flying fast overhead: and sharp and isolated come drops of rain, so that one thinks it must be spray. But no, it is a handful of rain. The ship swishes and sinks forward, gives a hollow thudding and rears slowly backward, along this pinkish lofty coast of Sicily that is just retreating into a bay. From the open sea comes the rain, come the long waves. * * * * * No shelter. One must go down. The q-b lies quietly in her bunk. The state-room is stale like a passage on the underground railway. No shelter, save near the kitchen and the engines, where there is a bit of warmth. The cook is busy cleaning fish, making the whiting bite their tails venomously at a little board just outside his kitchen-hole. A slow stream of kitchen-filth swilkers back and forth along the ship's side. A gang of the crew leans near me--a larger gang further down. Heaven knows what they can all be--but they never do anything but stand in gangs and talk and eat and smoke cigarettes. They are mostly young--mostly Palermitan--with a couple of unmistakable Neapolitans, having the peculiar Neapolitan hang-dog good looks, the chiselled cheek, the little black moustache, the large eyes. But they chew with their cheeks bulged out, and laugh with their fine, semi-sarcastic noses. The whole gang looks continually sideways. Nobody ever commands them--there seems to be absolutely no control. Only the fat engineer in grey linen looks as clean and as competent as his own machinery. Queer how machine-control puts the pride and self-respect into a man. * * * * * The rain over, I go and squat against the canvas that is spread over the arched sky-lights on the small promenade deck, sitting on the seat that is fixed to the sky-light sides. The wind is cold: there are snatches of sun and spits of rain. The big cape has come and is being left behind: we are heading for a far-off cape like a cloud in the grey air. A dimness comes over one's mind: a sort of stupefaction owing to the wind and the relentless slither-and-rearing of the ship. Not a sickness, but a sort of dim faintness. So much motion, such moving, powerful air. And withal a constant triumph in the long, slow sea-gallop of the ship. * * * * * A great loud bell: midday and the crew going to eat, rushing to eat. After some time we are summoned. "The Signora isn't eating?" asks the waiter eagerly: hoping she is not. "Yes, she is eating," say I. I fetch the q-b from her berth. Rather wanly she comes and gets into her spin chair. Bash comes a huge plate of thick, oily cabbage soup, very full, swilkering over the sides. We do what we can with it. So does the third passenger: a young woman who never wears a hat, thereby admitting herself simply as one of "the people," but who has an expensive complicated dress, nigger-coloured thin silk stockings, and suede high-heeled shoes. She is handsome, sturdy, with large dark eyes and a robust, frank manner: far too robustly downright for Italy. She is from Cagliari--and can't do much with the cabbage soup: and tells the waiter so, in her deep, hail-fellow-well-met voice. In the doorway hovers a little cloud of alpaca jackets grinning faintly with malignant anticipation of food, hoping, like blow-flies, we shall be too ill to eat. Away goes the soup and appears a massive yellow omelette, like some log of bilious wood. It is hard, and heavy, and cooked in the usual rank-tasting olive oil. The young woman doesn't have much truck with it: neither do we. To the triumph of the blow-flies, who see the yellow monster borne to their altar. After which a long long slab of the inevitable meat cut into innumerable slices, tasting of dead nothingness and having a thick sauce of brown neutrality: sufficient for twelve people at least. This, with masses of strong-tasting greenish cauliflower liberally weighted with oil, on a ship that was already heaving its heart out, made up the dinner. Accumulating malevolent triumph among the blow-flies in the passage. So on to a dessert of oranges, pears with wooden hearts and thick yellowish wash-leather flesh, and apples. Then coffee. And we had sat through it, which is something. The alpaca blue-bottles buzzed over the masses of food that went back on the dishes to the tin altar. Surely it had been made deliberately so that we should not eat it! The Cagliarese young woman talked to us. Yes, she broke into that awful language which the Italians--the quite ordinary ones--call French, and which they insist on speaking for their own glorification: yea, when they get to heaven's gate they will ask St. Peter for: "OOn bigliay pour ung--trozzième classe." Fortunately or unfortunately her inquisitiveness got the better of her, and she fell into her native Italian. What were we, where did we come from, where were we going, _why_ were we going, had we any children, did we want any, etc. After every answer she nodded her head and said Ahu! and watched us with energetic dark eyes. Then she ruminated over our nationalities and said, to the unseeing witnesses: Una bella coppia, a fine couple. As at the moment we felt neither beautiful nor coupled, we only looked greener. The grim man-at-arms coming up to ask us again if we weren't going to have a little wine, she lapsed into her ten-pounder French, which was most difficult to follow. And she said that on a sea-voyage one must eat, one must eat, if only a little. But--and she lapsed into Italian--one must by no means drink wine--no--no! One didn't want to, said I sadly. Whereupon the grim man-at-arms, whom, of course, we had cheated out of the bottle we refused to have opened for us, said with a lost sarcasm that wine made a man of a man, etc., etc. I was too weary of that underground, however. All I knew was that he wanted wine, wine, wine, and we hadn't ordered any. He didn't care for food. The Cagliarese told us she came now from Naples, and her husband was following in a few days. He was doing business in Naples. I nearly asked if he was a little dog-fish--this being the Italian for profiteer, but refrained in time. So the two ladies retired to lie down, I went and sat under my tarpaulin. * * * * * I felt very dim, and only a bit of myself. And I dozed blankly. The afternoon grew more sunny. The ship turned southwards, and with the wind and waves behind, it became much warmer, much smoother. The sun had the lovely strong winey warmth, golden over the dark-blue sea. The old oak-wood looked almost white, the afternoon was sweet upon the sea. And in the sunshine and the swishing of the sea, the speedier running of the empty ship, I slept a warm, sweet hour away, and awoke new. To see ahead pale, uplooming islands upon the right: the windy Egades: and on the right a mountain or high conical hill, with buildings on the summit: and in front against the sea, still rather far away, buildings rising upon a quay, within a harbor: and a mole, and a castle forward to sea, all small and far away, like a view. The buildings were square and fine. There was something impressive--magical under the far sunshine and the keen wind, the square and well-proportioned buildings waiting far off, waiting like a lost city in a story, a Rip van Winkle city. I knew it was Trapani, the western port of Sicily, under the western sun. * * * * * And the hill near us was Mount Eryx. I had never seen it before. So I had imagined a mountain in the sky. But it was only a hill, with undistinguishable cluster of a village on the summit, where even now cold wisps of vapour caught. They say it is 2,500 feet high. Still it looks only a hill. But why in the name of heaven should my heart stand still as I watch that hill which rises above the sea? It is the Etna of the west: but only a town-crowned hill. To men it must have had a magic almost greater than Etna's. Watching Africa! Africa, showing her coast on clear days. Africa the dreaded. And the great watch-temple of the summit, world-sacred, world-mystic in the world that was. Venus of the aborigines, older than Greek Aphrodite. Venus of the aborigines, from her watch-temple looking at Africa, beyond the Egatian isles. The world-mystery, the smiling Astarte. This, one of the world centres, older than old! and the woman-goddess watching Africa! _Erycina ridens._ Laughing, the woman-goddess, at this centre of an ancient, quite-lost world. I confess my heart stood still. But is mere historical fact so strong, that what one learns in bits from books can move one so? Or does the very word call an echo out of the dark blood? It seems so to me. It seems to me from the darkest recesses of my blood comes a terrible echo at the name of Mount Eryx: something quite unaccountable. The name of Athens hardly moves me. At Eryx--my darkness quivers. Eryx, looking west into Africa's sunset. _Erycina ridens._ There is a tick-tocking in the little cabin against which I lean. The wireless operator is busy communicating with Trapani, no doubt. He is a fat young man with fairish curly hair and an important bearing. Give a man control of some machine, and at once his air of importance and more-than-human dignity develops. One of the unaccountable members of the crew lounges in the little doorway, like a chicken on one foot, having nothing to do. The girl from Cagliari comes up with two young men--also Sardinians by their thick-set, independent look, and the touch of pride in their dark eyes. She has no wraps at all: just her elegant fine-cloth dress, her bare head from which the wisps of hair blow across her brow, and the transparent "nigger" silk stockings. Yet she does not seem cold. She talks with great animation, sitting between the two young men. And she holds the hand of the one in the overcoat affectionately. She is always holding the hand of one or other of the two young men: and wiping wisps of wind-blown hair from her brow: and talking in her strong, nonchalant voice, rapidly, ceaselessly, with massive energy. Heaven knows if the two young men--they are third-class passengers--were previous acquaintances. But they hold her hand like brothers--quite simply and nicely, not at all sticky and libidinous. It all has an air of "Why not?" She shouts at me as I pass, in her powerful, extraordinary French: "Madame votre femme, elle est au lit?" I say she is lying down. "Ah!" she nods. "Elle a le mal de mer?" No, she is not sea-sick, just lying down. The two young men, between whom she is sitting as between two pillows, watch with the curious Sardinian dark eyes that seem alert and show the white all round. They are pleasant--a bit like seals. And they have a numb look for the moment, impressed by this strange language. She proceeds energetically to translate into Sardinian, as I pass on. We do not seem to be going to Trapani. There lies the town on the left, under the hill, the square buildings that suggest to me the factories of the East India Company shining in the sun along the curious, closed-in harbour, beyond the running, dark blue sea. We seem to be making for the island bulk of Levanzo. Perhaps we shall steer away to Sardinia without putting in to Trapani. On and on we run--and always as if we were going to steer between the pale blue, heaped-up islands, leaving Trapani behind us on our left. The town has been in sight for an hour or more: and still we run out to sea towards Levanzo. And the wireless-operator busily tick-tocks and throbs in his little cabin on this upper deck. Peeping in, one sees his bed and chair behind a curtain, screened off from his little office. And all so tidy and pleased-looking. From the islands one of the Mediterranean sailing ships is beating her way, across our track, to Trapani. I don't know the name of ships but the carpenter says she is a schooner: he says it with that Italian misgiving which doesn't really know but which can't bear not to know. Anyhow on she comes, with her tall ladder of square sails white in the afternoon light, and her lovely prow, curved in with a perfect hollow, running like a wild animal on a scent across the waters. There--the scent leads her north again. She changes her tack from the harbour mouth, and goes coursing away, passing behind us. Lovely she is, nimble and quick and palpitating, with all her sails white and bright and eager. We are changing our course. We have all the time been heading for the south of Levanzo. Now I see the island slowly edging back, as if clearing out of the way for us, like a man in the street. The island edges and turns aside: and walks away. And clearly we are making for the harbour mouth. We have all this time been running, out at sea, round the back of the harbour. Now I see the fortress-castle, an old thing, out forward to sea: and a little lighthouse and the way in. And beyond, the town-front with great palm trees and other curious dark trees, and behind these the large square buildings of the south rising imposingly, as if severe, big palaces upon the promenade. It all has a stately, southern, imposing appearance, withal remote from our modern centuries: standing back from the tides of our industrial life. I remember the Crusaders, how they called here so often on their way to the East. And Trapani seems waiting for them still, with its palm trees and its silence, full in the afternoon sun. It has not much to do but wait, apparently. The q-b emerges into the sun, crying out how lovely! And the sea is quieter: we are already in the lea of the harbour-curve. From the north the many-sailed ship from the islands is running down towards us, with the wind. And away on the south, on the sea-level, numerous short windmills are turning their sails briskly, windmill after windmill, rather stumpy, spinning gaily in the blue, silent afternoon, among the salt-lagoons stretching away towards Marsala. But there is a whole legion of windmills, and Don Quixote would have gone off his head. There they spin, hither and thither, upon the pale-blue sea-levels. And perhaps one catches a glitter of white salt-heaps. For these are the great salt-lagoons which make Trapani rich. * * * * * We are entering the harbour-basin, however, past the old castle out on the spit, past the little lighthouse, then through the entrance, slipping quietly on the now tranquil water. Oh, and how pleasant the fulness of the afternoon sun flooding this round, fast-sleeping harbour, along whose side the tall palms drowse, and whose waters are fast asleep. It seems quite a small, cosy harbour, with the great buildings warm-colored in the sun behind the dark tree-avenue of the marina. The same silent, sleeping, endlessly sun-warmed stateliness. In the midst of this tranquillity we slowly turn round upon the shining water, and in a few moments are moored. There are other ships moored away to the right: all asleep, apparently, in the flooding of the afternoon sun. Beyond the harbour entrance runs the great sea and the wind. Here all is still and hot and forgotten. "Vous descendez en terre?" shouts the young woman, in her energetic French--she leaves off holding the young men's hands for the moment. We are not quite sure: and we don't want her to come with us, anyhow, for her French is not our French. The land sleeps on: nobody takes any notice of us: but just one boat paddles out the dozen yards to our side. We decide to set foot on shore. * * * * * One should not, and we knew it. One should never enter into these southern towns that look so nice, so lovely, from the outside. However, we thought we would buy some cakes. So we crossed the avenue which looks so beautiful from the sea, and which, when you get into it, is a cross between an outside place where you throw rubbish and a humpy unmade road in a raw suburb, with a few iron seats, and litter of old straw and rag. Indescribably dreary in itself: yet with noble trees, and lovely sunshine, and the sea and the islands gleaming magic beyond the harbour mouth, and the sun, the eternal sun full focussed. A few mangy, nothing-to-do people stand disconsolately about, in southern fashion, as if they had been left there, water-logged, by the last flood, and were waiting for the next flood to wash them further. Round the corner along the quay a Norwegian steamer dreams that she is being loaded, in the muddle of the small port. * * * * * We looked at the cakes--heavy and wan they appeared to our sea-rolled stomachs. So we strolled into a main street, dark and dank like a sewer. A tram bumped to a standstill, as if now at last was the end of the world. Children coming from school ecstatically ran at our heels, with bated breath, to hear the vocal horrors of our foreign speech. We turned down a dark side alley, about forty paces deep: and were on the northern bay, and on a black stench that seemed like the perpetual sewer, a bank of mud. So we got to the end of the black main street, and turned in haste to the sun. Ah--in a moment we were in it. There rose the palms, there lay our ship in the shining, curving basin--and there focussed the sun, so that in a moment we were drunk or dazed by it. Dazed. We sat on an iron seat in the rubbish-desolate, sun-stricken avenue. A ragged and dirty girl was nursing a fat and moist and immovable baby and tending to a grimy fat infant boy. She stood a yard away and gazed at us as one would gaze at a pig one was going to buy. She came nearer, and examined the q-b. I had my big hat down over my eyes. But no, she had taken her seat at my side, and poked her face right under my hat brim, so that her towzled hair touched me, and I thought she would kiss me. But again no. With her breath on my cheek she only gazed on my face as if it were a wax mystery. I got up hastily. "Too much for me," said I to the q-b. She laughed, and asked what the baby was called. The baby was called Beppina, as most babies are. Driven forth, we wandered down the desolate avenue of shade and sun towards the ship, and turned once more into the town. We had not been on shore more than ten minutes. This time we went to the right, and found more shops. The streets were dark and sunless and cold. And Trapani seemed to me to sell only two commodities: cured rabbit skins and cat-skins, and great, hideous, modern bed-spread arrangements of heavy flowered silk and fabulous price. They seem to think nothing of thousands of liras, in Trapani. But most remarkable was bunny and pussy. Bunny and pussy, flattened out like pressed leaves, dangling in clusters everywhere. Furs! white bunny, black bunny in great abundance, piebald bunny, grey bunny:--then pussy, tabby pussy, and tortoiseshell pussy, but mostly black pussy, in a ghastly semblance of life, all flat, of course. Just single furs. Clusters, bunches, heaps, and dangling arrays of plain-superficies puss and bun-bun! Puss and bun by the dozen and the twenty, like dried leaves, for your choice. If a cat from a ship should chance to find itself in Trapani streets, it would give a mortal yell, and go mad, I am sure. We strolled for ten more minutes in this narrow, tortuous, unreal town, that seemed to have plenty of flourishing inhabitants, and a fair number of Socialists, if one was to judge by the great scrawlings on the walls: W. LENIN and ABASSO LA BORGHESIA. Don't imagine, by the way, that Lenin is another Wille on the list. The apparent initial stands for _Evviva_, the double V. * * * * * Cakes one dared not buy, after looking at them. But we found macaroon biscuits, and a sort of flat plaster-casts of the Infant Jesus under a dove, of which we bought two. The q-b ate her macaroon biscuits all through the streets, and we went towards the ship. The fat boatman hailed us to take us back. It was just about eight yards of water to row, the ship being moored on the quay: one could have jumped it. I gave the fat boatman two liras, two francs. He immediately put on the socialist-workman indignation, and thrust the note back at me. Sixty centimes more! The fee was thirteen sous each way! In Venice or Syracuse it would be two sous. I looked at him and gave him the money and said: "Per Dio, we are in Trapani!" He muttered back something about foreigners. But the hateful, unmanly insolence of these lords of toil, now they have their various "unions" behind them and their "rights" as working men, sends my blood black. They are ordinary men no more: the human, happy Italian is most marvellously vanished. New honors come upon them, etc. The dignity of human labour is on its hind legs, busy giving every poor innocent who isn't ready for it a kick in the mouth. * * * * * But, once more in parenthesis, let me remind myself that it is our own English fault. We have slobbered about the nobility of toil, till at last the nobles naturally insist on eating the cake. And more than that, we have set forth, politically, on such a high and Galahad quest of holy liberty, and been caught so shamelessly filling our pockets, that no wonder the naïve and idealistic south turns us down with a bang. * * * * * Well, we are back on the ship. And we want tea. On the list by the door it says we are to have coffee, milk and butter at 8.30: luncheon at 11.30: tea, coffee or chocolate at 3.00: and dinner at 6.30. And moreover: "The company will feed the passengers for the normal duration of the voyage only." Very well--very well. Then where is tea? Not any signs! and the alpaca jackets giving us a wide berth. But we find our man, and demand our rights: at least the q-b does. The tickets from Palermo to Cagliari cost, together, 583 liras. Of this, 250 liras was for the ticket, and 40 liras each for the food. This, for two tickets, would make 580 liras. The odd three for usual stamps. The voyage was supposed to last about thirty or thirty-two hours: from eight of the morning of departure to two or four of the following afternoon. Surely we pay for our tea. The other passengers have emerged: a large, pale, fat, "handsome" Palermitan who is going to be professor at Cagliari: his large, fat, but high-coloured wife: and three children, a boy of fourteen like a thin, frail, fatherly girl, a little boy in a rabbit-skin overcoat, coming rather unfluffed, and a girl-child on the mother's knee. The one-year-old girl-child being, of course, the only man in the party. They have all been sick all day, and look washed out. We sympathise. They lament the cruelties of the journey--and _senza servizio! senza servizio!_ without any maid servant. The mother asks for coffee, and a cup of milk for the children: then, seeing our tea with lemon, and knowing it by repute, she will have tea. But the rabbit-boy will have coffee--coffee and milk--and nothing else. And an orange. And the baby will have lemon, pieces of lemon. And the fatherly young "miss" of an adolescent brother laughs indulgently at all the whims of these two young ones: the father laughs and thinks it all adorable and expects us to adore. He is almost too washed-out to attend properly, to give the full body of his attention. So the mother gets her cup of tea--and puts a piece of lemon in--and then milk on top of that. The rabbit boy sucks an orange, slobbers in the tea, insists on coffee and milk, tries a piece of lemon, and gets a biscuit. The baby, with weird faces, chews pieces of lemon: and drops them in the family cup: and fishes them out with a little sugar, and dribbles them across the table to her mouth, throws them away and reaches for a new sour piece. They all think it humorous and adorable. Arrives the milk, to be treated as another loving cup, mingled with orange, lemon, sugar, tea, biscuit, chocolate, and cake. Father, mother, and elder brother partake of nothing, they haven't the stomach. But they are charmed, of course, by the pretty pranks and messes of the infants. They have extraordinary amiable patience, and find the young ones a perpetual source of charming amusement. They look at one another, the elder ones, and laugh and comment, while the two young ones mix themselves and the table into a lemon-milk-orange-tea-sugar-biscuit-cake-chocolate mess. This inordinate Italian amiable patience with their young monkeys is astonishing. It makes the monkeys more monkey-like, and self-conscious incredibly, so that a baby has all the tricks of a Babylonian harlot, making eyes and trying new pranks. Till at last one sees the southern Holy Family as an unholy triad of imbecility. Meanwhile I munched my Infant-Jesus-and-Dove arrangement, which was rather like eating thin glass, so hard and sharp. It was made of almond and white of egg presumably, and was not so bad if you could eat it at all. It was a Christmas relic.--And I watched the Holy Family across the narrow board, and tried not to look all I felt. * * * * * Going on deck as soon as possible, we watched the loading of barrels of wine into the hold--a mild and happy-go-lucky process. The ship seemed to be almost as empty of cargo as of passengers. Of the latter, we were apparently twelve adults, all told, and the three children. And as for cargo, there were the wooden chests of the officer, and these fourteen barrels of wine from Trapani. The last were at length settled more or less firm, the owner, or the responsible landsman seeing to it. No one on the ship seemed to be responsible for anything. And four of the innumerable crew were replacing the big planks over the hold. It was curious how forlorn the ship seemed to feel, now she was ready for sea again. Her innumerable crew did not succeed in making her alive. She ran her course like a lost soul across the Mid-Mediterranean. * * * * * Outside the harbour the sun was sinking, gorgeous gold and red the sky, and vast, beyond the darkening islands of the Egades group. Coming as we did from the east side of the island, where dawn beyond the Ionian sea is the day's great and familiar event: so decisive an event, that as the light appears along the sea's rim, so do my eyes invariably open and look at it, and know it is dawn, and as the night-purple is fused back, and a little scarlet thrills towards the zenith, invariably, day by day, I feel I must get up: coming from the east, shut off hermetically from the west by the steep spikes of the mountains at our back, we felt this sunset in the African sea terrible and dramatic. It seemed much more magnificent and tragic than our Ionian dawn, which has always a suggestion of a flower opening. But this great red, trumpet-flaring sunset had something African, half-sinister, upon the sea: and it seemed so far off, in an unknown land. Whereas our Ionian dawn always seems near and familiar and happy. A different goddess the Eryx Astarte, the woman Ashtaroth, _Erycina ridens_ must have been, in her prehstoric dark smiling, watching the fearful sunsets beyond the Egades, from our gold-lighted Apollo of the Ionian east. She is a strange goddess to me, this Erycina Venus, and the west is strange and unfamiliar and a little fearful, be it Africa or be it America. Slowly at sunset we moved out of the harbour. And almost as we passed the bar, away in front we saw, among the islands, the pricking of a quick pointed light. Looking back, we saw the light at the harbour entrance twitching: and the remote, lost town beginning to glimmer. And night was settling down upon the sea, through the crimsoned purple of the last afterglow. The islands loomed big as we drew nearer, dark in the thickening darkness. Overhead a magnificent evening-star blazed above the open sea, giving me a pang at the heart, for I was so used to see her hang just above the spikes of the mountains, that I felt she might fall, having the space beneath. Levanzo and the other large island were quite dark: absolutely dark, save for one beam of a lighthouse low down in the distance. The wind was again strong and cold: the ship had commenced her old slither and heave, slither and heave, which mercifully we had forgotten. Overhead were innumerable great stars active as if they were alive in the sky. I saw Orion high behind us, and the dog-star glaring. And _swish!_ went the sea as we took the waves, then after a long trough, _swish!_ This curious rhythmic swishing and hollow drumming of a steamer at sea has a narcotic, almost maddening effect on the spirit, a long, hissing burst of waters, then the hollow roll, and again the upheaval to a sudden hiss-ss-ss! A bell had clanged and we knew the crew were once more feeding. At every moment of the day and presumably of the night, feeding was going on--or coffee-drinking. * * * * * We were summoned to dinner. Our young woman was already seated: and a fat uniformed mate or purser or official of some sort was finishing off in the distance. The pale professor also appeared: and at a certain distance down the table sat a little hard-headed grey man in a long grey alpaca travelling coat. Appeared the beloved macaroni with tomato sauce: no food for the sea. I put my hopes on the fish. Had I not seen the cook making whiting bite their own tails viciously?--The fish appeared. And what was it? Fried ink-pots. A _calamaio_ is an ink-pot: also it is a polyp, a little octopus which, alas, frequents the Mediterranean and squirts ink if offended. This polyp with its tentacles is cut up and fried, and reduced to the consistency of boiled celluloid. It is esteemed a delicacy: but is tougher than indiarubber, gristly through and through. I have a peculiar aversion to these ink-pots. Once in Liguria we had a boat of our own and paddled with the peasant paddlers. Alessandro caught ink-pots: and like this. He tied up a female by a string in a cave--the string going through a convenient hole in her end. There she lived, like an Amphitrite's wire-haired terrier tied up, till Alessandro went a-fishing. Then he towed her, like a poodle behind. And thus, like a poodly-bitch, she attracted hangers-on in the briny seas. And these poor polyp inamorati were the victims. They were lifted as prey on board, where I looked with horror on their grey, translucent tentacles and large, cold, stony eyes. The she-polyp was towed behind again. But after a few days she died. And I think, even for creatures so awful-looking, this method is indescribably base, and shows how much lower than an octopus even, is lordly man. Well, we chewed a few ends of oil-fried ink-pots, and gave it up. The Cagliari girl gave up too: the professor had not even tried. Only the hard-headed grey man in the alpaca coat chewed animatedly, with bouncing jaws. Mountains of calamaio remained for the joyous blue-bottles. Arrived the inevitable meat--this long piece of completely tasteless undercut in innumerable grey-brown slices. Oh, Italy! The professor fled. Arrived the wash-leather pears, the apples, the oranges--we saved an apple for a happier hour. Arrived coffee, and, as a magnificent treat, a few well-known pastries. They all taste wearily alike. The young woman shakes her head. I shake mine, but the q-b, like a child, is pleased. Most pleased of all, however, are the blue-bottles, who dart in a black-alpaca bunch to the tin altar, and there loudly buzz, wildly, above the sallow cakes. The citron-cheeked, dry one, however, cares darkly nothing for cakes. He comes once more to twit us about wine. So much so that the Cagliari girl orders a glass of Marsala: and I must second her. So there we are, three little glasses of brown liquid. The Cagliari girl sips hers and suddenly flees. The q-b sips hers with infinite caution, and quietly retires. I finish the q-b's little glass, and my own, and the voracious blow-flies buzz derisively and excited. The yellow-cheeked one has disappeared with the bottle. From the professorial cabin faint wails, sometimes almost fierce, as one or another is going to be ill. Only a thin door is between this state-room and them. The most down-trodden frayed ancient rag of a man goes discreetly with basins, trying not to let out glimpses of the awful within. I climb up to look at the vivid, drenching stars, to breathe the cold wind, to see the dark sea sliding. Then I too go to the cabin, and watch the sea run past the porthole for a minute, and insert myself like the meat in a sandwich into the tight lower bunk. Oh, infinitesimal cabin, where we sway like two matches in a match box! Oh strange, but even yet excellent gallop of a ship at sea. * * * * * I slept not so badly through the stifled, rolling night--in fact later on slept soundly. And the day was growing bright when I peered through the porthle, the sea was much smoother. It was a brilliant clear morning. I made haste and washed myself cursorily in the saucer that dribbled into a pail in a corner: there was not space even for one chair, this saucer was by my bunk-head. And I went on deck. Ah the lovely morning! Away behind us the sun was just coming above the sea's horizon, and the sky all golden, all a joyous, fire-heated gold, and the sea was glassy bright, the wind gone still, the waves sunk into long, low undulations, the foam of the wake was pale ice-blue in the yellow air. Sweet, sweet wide morning on the sea, with the sun coming, swimming up, and a tall sailing bark, with her flat fore-ladder of sails delicately across the light, and a far-far steamer on the electric vivid morning horizon. The lovely dawn: the lovely pure, wide morning in the mid-sea, so golden-aired and delighted, with the sea like sequins shaking, and the sky far, far, far above, unfathomably clear. How glad to be on a ship! What a golden hour for the heart of man! Ah if one could sail for ever, on a small quiet, lonely ship, from land to land and isle to isle, and saunter through the spaces of this lovely world, always through the spaces of this lovely world. Sweet it would be sometimes to come to the opaque earth, to block oneself against the stiff land, to annul the vibration of one's flight against the inertia of our _terra firma!_ but life itself would be in the flight, the tremble of space. Ah the trembling of never-ended space, as one moves in flight! Space, and the frail vibration of space, the glad lonely wringing of the heart. Not to be clogged to the land any more. Not to be any more like a donkey with a log on its leg, fastened to weary earth that has no answer now. But to be off. To find three masculine, world-lost souls, and world-lost saunter, and saunter on along with them, across the dithering space, as long as life lasts! Why come to anchor? There is nothing to anchor for. Land has no answer to the soul any more. It has gone inert. Give me a little ship, kind gods, and three world-lost comrades. Hear me! And let me wander aimless across this vivid outer world, the world empty of man, where space flies happily. * * * * * The lovely, celandine-yellow morning of the open sea, paling towards a rare, sweet blue! The sun stood above the horizon, like the great burning stigma of the sacred flower of day. Mediterranean sailing-ships, so mediaeval, hovered on the faint morning wind, as if uncertain which way to go, curious, odd-winged insects of the flower. The steamer, hull-down, was sinking towards Spain. Space rang clear about us: the level sea! Appeared the Cagliari young woman and her two friends. She was looking handsome and restored now the sea was easy. Her two male friends stood touching her, one at either shoulder. "Bonjour, Monsieur!" she barked across at me. "Vous avez pris le café?" "Pas encore. Et vous?" "Non! Madame votre femme...." She roared like a mastiff dog: and then translated with unction to her two uninitiated friends. How it was they did not understand her French I do not know, it was so like travestied Italian. I went below to find the q-b. * * * * * When we came up, the faint shape of land appeared ahead, more transparent than thin pearl. Already Sardinia. Magic are high lands seen from the sea, when they are far, far off, and ghostly translucent like ice-bergs. This was Sardinia, looming like fascinating shadows in mid-sea. And the sailing ships, as if cut out of frailest pearl translucency, were wafting away towards Naples. I wanted to count their sails--five square ones which I call the ladder, one above the other--but how many wing-blades? That remained yet to be seen. * * * * * Our friend the carpenter spied us out: at least, he was not my friend. He didn't find me _simpatico_, I am sure. But up he came, and proceeded to entertain us with weary banality. Again the young woman called, had we had coffee? We said we were just going down. And then she said that whatever we had today we had to pay for: our food ended with the one day. At which the q-b was angry, feeling swindled. But I had known before. * * * * * We went down and had our coffee notwithstanding. The young woman came down, and made eyes at one of the alpaca blue-bottles. After which we saw a cup of coffee and milk and two biscuits being taken to her into her cabin, discreetly. When Italians are being discreet and on the sly, the very air about them becomes tell-tale, and seems to shout with a thousand tongues. So with a thousand invisible tongues clamouring the fact, the young woman had her coffee secretly and _gratis_, in her cabin. * * * * * But the morning was lovely. The q-b and I crept round the bench at the very stern of the ship and sat out of the wind and out of sight, just above the foaming of the wake. Before us was the open morning--and the glisten of our ship's track, like a snail's path, trailing across the sea: straight for a little while, then giving a bend to the left, always a bend towards the left: and coming at us from the pure horizon, like a bright snail-path. Happy it was to sit there in the stillness, with nothing but the humanless sea to shine about us. But no, we were found out. Arrived the carpenter. "Ah, you have found a fine place--!" "Molto bello!" This from the q-b. I could not bear the irruption. He proceeded to talk--and as is inevitable, the war. Ah, the war--it was a terrible thing. He had become ill--very ill. Because, you see, not only do you go without proper food, without proper rest and warmth, but, you see, you are in an agony of fear for your life all the time. An agony of fear for your life. And that's what does it. Six months in hospital--! The q-b, of course, was sympathetic. The Sicilians are quite simple about it. They just tell you they were frightened to death, and it made them ill. The q-b, woman-like, loves them for being so simple about it. I feel angry somewhere. For they _expect_ a full-blown sympathy. And however the great god Mars may have shrunk and gone wizened in the world, it still annoys me to hear him _so_ blasphemed. * * * * * Near us the automatic log was spinning, the thin rope trailing behind us in the sea. Erratically it jerked and spun, with spasmodic torsion. He explained that the little screw at the end of the line spun to the speed of travelling. We were going from ten to twelve Italian miles to the hour. Ah, yes, we _could_ go twenty. But we went no faster than ten or twelve, to save the coal. The coal--il carbone! I knew we were in for it. England--l'Inghilterra she has the coal. And what does she do? She sells it very dear. Particularly to Italy. Italy won the war and now can't even have coal. Because why! The price. The exchange! _Il cambio._ Now I am doubly in for it. Two countries had been able to keep their money high--England and America. The English sovereign--la sterlina--and the American dollar--_sa_, these were money. The English and the Americans flocked to Italy, with their _sterline_ and their _dollari_, and they bought what they wanted for nothing, for nothing. Ecco! Whereas we poor Italians--we are in a state of ruination--proper ruination. The allies, etc., etc. I am so used to it--I am so wearily used to it. I can't walk a stride without having this wretched _cambio_, the exchange, thrown at my head. And this with an injured petulant spitefulness which turns my blood. For I assure them, whatever I have in Italy I pay for: and I am not England. I am not the British Isles on two legs. Germany--La Germania--she did wrong to make the war. But--there you are, that was war. Italy and Germany--l'Italia e la Germania--they had always been friends. In Palermo.... My God, I felt I could not stand it another second. To sit above the foam and have this miserable creature stuffing wads of chewed newspaper into my ear--no, I could not bear it. In Italy, there is no escape. Say two words, and the individual starts chewing old newspaper and stuffing it into you. No escape. You become--if you are English--_l'Inghilterra_, _il carbone_, and _il cambio_; and as England, coal and exchange you are treated. It is more than useless to try to be human about it. You are a State usury system, a coal fiend and an exchange thief. Every Englishman has disappeared into this triple abstraction, in the eyes of the Italian, of the proletariat particularly. Try and get them to be human, try and get them to see that you are simply an individual, if you can. After all, I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years. But no--to an Italian I am a perfected abstraction, England--coal--exchange. The Germans were once devils for inhuman theoretic abstracting of living beings. But now the Italians beat them. I am a walking column of statistics, which adds up badly for Italy. Only this and nothing more. Which being so, I shut my mouth and walk away. * * * * * For the moment the carpenter is shaken off. But I am in a rage, fool that I am. It is like being pestered by their mosquitoes. The sailing ships are near--and I count fifteen sails. Beautiful they look! Yet if I were on board somebody would be chewing newspaper at me, and addressing me as England--coal--exchange. The mosquito hovers--and hovers. But the stony blank of the side of my cheek keeps him away. Yet he hovers. And the q-b feels sympathetic towards him: quite sympathetic. Because of course he treats her--a _bel pezzo_--as if he would lick her boots, or anything else that she would let him lick. * * * * * Meanwhile we eat the apples from yesterday's dessert, and the remains of the q-b's Infant-Jesus-and-dove cake. The land is drawing nearer--we can see the shape of the end promontory and peninsula--and a white speck like a church. The bulk of the land is forlorn and rather shapeless, coming towards us: but attractive. Looking ahead towards the land gives us away. The mosquito swoops on us. Yes--he is not sure--he thinks the white speck is a church--or a lighthouse. When you pass the cape on the right, and enter the wide bay between Cape Spartivento and Cape Carbonara, then you have two hours sail to Cagliari. We shall arrive between two and three o'clock. It is now eleven. Yes, the sailing ships are probably going to Naples. There is not much wind for them now. When there is wind they go fast, faster than our steamer. Ah Naples--bella, bella, eh? A little dirty, say I. But what do you want? says he. A great city! Palermo of course is better. Ah--the Neapolitan women--he says, à propos or not. They do their hair so fine, so neat and beautiful--but underneath--sotto--sotto--they are dirty. This being received in cold silence, he continues: _Noi giriamo il mondo! Noi, chi giriamo, conosciamo il mondo._ _We_ travel about, and _we_ know the world. Who _we_ are, I do not know: his highness the Palermitan carpenter lout, no doubt. But _we_, who travel, know the world. He is preparing his shot. The Neapolitan women, and the English women, in this are equal: that they are dirty underneath. Underneath, they are dirty. The women of London-- But it is getting too much for me. "You who look for dirty women," say I, "find dirty women everywhere." He stops short and watches me. "No! No! You have not understood me. No! I don't mean that. I mean that the Neapolitan women and the English women have dirty underclothing--" To which he gets no answer but a cold look and a cold cheek. Whereupon he turns to the q-b, and proceeds to be _simpatica_. And after a few moments he turns again to me: "Il signore is offended! He is offended with me." But I turn the other way. And at last he clears out: in triumph, I must admit: like a mosquito that has bitten one in the neck. As a matter of fact one should _never_ let these fellows get into conversation nowadays. They are no longer human beings. They hate one's Englishness, and leave out the individual. * * * * * We walk forward, towards the fore-deck, where the captain's lookout cabin is. The captain is an elderly man, silent and crushed: with the look of a gentleman. But he looks beaten down. Another, still another member of the tray-carrying department is just creeping up his ladder with a cup of black coffee. Returning, we peep down the sky-light into the kitchen. And there we see roast chicken and sausages--roast chicken and sausages! Ah, this is where the sides of kid and the chickens and the good things go: all down the throats of the crew. There is no more food for us, until we land. * * * * * We have passed the cape--and the white thing is a lighthouse. And the fattish, handsome professor has come up carrying the little girl-child, while the femalish elder brother leads the rabbit-fluffy small boy by the hand. So _en famille_: so terribly _en famille_. They deposit themselves near us, and it threatens another conversation. But not for anything, my dears! The sailors--not sailors, some of the street-corner loafers, are hoisting the flag, the red-white-and-green Italian tricolor. It floats at the mast-head, and the femalish brother, in a fine burst of feeling, takes off his funny hat with a flourish and cries: "Ecco la bandiera italiana!" Ach, the hateful sentimentalism of these days. The land passes slowly, very slowly. It is hilly, but barren looking, with few trees. And it is not spikey and rather splendid, like Sicily. Sicily has style. We keep along the east side of the bay--away in the west is Cape Spartivento. And still no sight of Cagliari. "Two hours yet!" cries the Cagliari girl. "Two hours before we eat. Ah, when I get on land, what a good meal I shall eat." The men haul in the automatic log. The sky is clouding over with that icy curd which comes after midday when the bitter north wind is blowing. It is no longer warm. * * * * * Slowly, slowly we creep along the formless shore. An hour passes. We see a little fort ahead, done in enormous black-and-white checks, like a fragment of gigantic chess-board. It stands at the end of a long spit of land--a long, barish peninsula that has no houses and looks as if it might be golf-links. But it is not golf-links. And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever got there. And it seems like Spain--or Malta: not Italy. It is a steep and lonely city, treeless, as in some old illumination. Yet withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowing bleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen, but not entered. It is like some vision, some memory, something that has passed away. Impossible that one can actually _walk_ in that city: set foot there and eat and laugh there. Ah, no! Yet the ship drifts nearer, nearer, and we are looking for the actual harbour. * * * * * The usual sea-front with dark trees for a promenade and palatial buildings behind, but here not so pink and gay, more reticent, more sombre of yellow stone. The harbour itself a little basin of water, into which we are slipping carefully, while three salt-barges laden with salt as white as snow creep round from the left, drawn by an infinitesimal tug. There are only two other forlorn ships in the basin. It is cold on deck. The ship turns slowly round, and is being hauled to the quay side. I go down for the knapsack, and a fat blue-bottle pounces at me. "You pay nine francs fifty." I pay them, and we get off that ship. III. CAGLIARI. There is a very little crowd waiting on the quay: mostly men with their hands in their pockets. But, thank Heaven, they have a certain aloofness and reserve. They are not like the tourist-parasites of these post-war days, who move to the attack with a terrifying cold vindictiveness the moment one emerges from any vehicle. And some of these men look really poor. There are no poor Italians any more: at least, loafers. Strange the feeling round the harbour: as if everybody had gone away. Yet there are people about. It is "festa" however, Epiphany. But it is so different from Sicily: none of the suave Greek-Italian charms, none of the airs and graces, none of the glamour. Rather bare, rather stark, rather cold and yellow--somehow like Malta, without Malta's foreign liveliness. Thank Goodness no one wants to carry my knapsack. Thank Goodness no one has a fit at the sight of it. Thank Heaven no one takes any notice. They stand cold and aloof, and don't move. We make our way through the Customs: then through the Dazio, the City Customs-house. Then we are free. We set off up a steep, new, broad road, with little trees on either side. But stone, arid, new, wide stone, yellowish under the cold sky--and abandoned-seeming. Though, of course, there are people about. The north wind blows bitingly. We climb a broad flight of steps, always upwards, up the wide, precipitous, dreary boulevard with sprouts of trees. Looking for the Hotel, and dying with hunger. * * * * * At last we find it, the Scala di Ferro: through a courtyard with green plants. And at last a little man with lank, black hair, like an esquimo, comes smiling. He is one brand of Sardinian--esquimo looking. There is no room with two beds: only single rooms. And thus we are led off, if you please, to the "bagnio": the bathing-establishment wing, on the dank ground floor. Cubicles on either side a stone passage, and in every cubicle a dark stone bath, and a little bed. We can have each a little bath cubicle. If there's nothing else for it, there isn't: but it seems dank and cold and horrid, underground. And one thinks of all the unsavory "assignations" at these old bagnio places. True, at the end of the passage are seated two carabinieri. But whether to ensure respectibility or not, Heaven knows. We are in the baths, that's all. [Illustration: ISILI] The esquimo returns after five minutes, however. There _is_ a bedroom in the house. He is pleased, because he didn't like putting us into the bagnio. Where he found the bedroom I don't know. But there it was, large, sombre, cold, and over the kitchen fumes of a small inner court like a well. But perfectly clean and all right. And the people seemed warm and good-natured, like human beings. One has got so used to the non-human ancient-souled Sicilians, who are suave and so completely callous. * * * * * After a really good meal we went out to see the town. It was after three o'clock and everywhere was shut up like an English Sunday. Cold, stony Cagliari: in summer you must be sizzling hot, Cagliari, like a kiln. The men stood about in groups, but without the intimate Italian watchfulness that never leaves a passer-by alone. Strange, stony Cagliari. We climbed up a street like a corkscrew stairway. And we saw announcements of a children's fancy-dress ball. Cagliari is very steep. Half-way up there is a strange place called the bastions, a large, level space like a drill-ground with trees, curiously suspended over the town, and sending off a long shoot like a wide viaduct, across above the corkscrew street that comes climbing up. Above this bastion place the town still rises steeply to the Cathedral and the fort. What is so curious is that this terrace or bastion is so large, like some big recreation ground, that it is almost dreary, and one cannot understand its being suspended in mid-air. Down below is the little circle of the harbour. To the left a low, malarial-looking sea plain, with tufts of palm trees and Arab-looking houses. From this runs out the long spit of land towards that black-and-white watch-fort, the white road trailing forth. On the right, most curiously, a long strange spit of sand runs in a causeway far across the shallows of the bay, with the open sea on one hand, and vast, end-of-the-world lagoons on the other. There are peaky, dark mountains beyond this--just as across the vast bay are gloomy hills. It is a strange, strange landscape: as if here the world left off. The bay is vast in itself; and all these curious things happening at its head: this curious, craggy-studded town, like a great stud of house-covered rock jutting up out of the bay flats: around it on one side the weary, Arab-looking palm-desolated malarial plain, and on the other side great salt lagoons, dead beyond the sand-bar: these backed again by serried, clustered mountains, suddenly, while away beyond the plain, hills rise to sea again. Land and sea both seem to give out, exhausted, at the bay head: the world's end. And into this world's end starts up Cagliari, and on either side, sudden, serpent-crest hills. But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history. The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens, and all that we think the real thing will go off with a pop, and we shall be left staring. * * * * * On the great parapet above the Municipal Hall and above the corkscrew high-street a thick fringe of people is hanging, looking down. We go to look too: and behold, below there is the entrance to the ball. Yes, there is a china shepherdess in pale blue and powdered hair, crook, ribbons, Marie Antoinette satin daintiness and all, slowly and haughtily walking up the road, and gazing superbly round. She is not more than twelve years old, moreover. Two servants accompany her. She gazes supremely from right to left as she goes, mincingly, and I would give her the prize for haughtiness. She is perfect--a little too haughty for Watteau, but "marquise" to a T. The people watch in silence. There is no yelling and screaming and running. They watch in a suitable silence. Comes a carriage with two fat bay horses slithering, almost swimming up the corkscrew high-street. That in itself is a "tour-de-force": for Cagliari doesn't have carriages. Imagine a street like a corkscrew stair, paved with slippery stone. And imagine two bay horses rowing their way up it: they did not walk a single stride. But they arrived. And there fluttered out three strangely exquisite children, two frail, white satin Pierrots and a white satin Pierrette. They were like fragile winter butterflies with black spots. They had a curious, indefinable remote elegance, something conventional and "fin-de-siècle". But not our century. The wonderful artificial delicacy of the eighteenth. The boys had big, perfect ruffs round their necks: and behind were slung old, cream-colored Spanish shawls, for warmth. They were frail as tobacco flowers, and with remote, cold elegance they fluttered by the carriage, from which emerged a large black-satin Mama. Fluttering their queer little butterfly feet on the pavement, hovering round the large Mama like three frail-tissued ghosts, they found their way past the solid, seated Carabinieri into the hall. Arrived a primrose-brocade beau, with ruffles, and his hat under his arm: about twelve years old. Walking statelily, without a qualm up the steep twist of the street. Or perhaps so perfect in his self-consciousness that it became an elegant "aplomb" in him. He was a genuine eighteenth-century exquisite, rather stiffer than the French, maybe, but completely in the spirit. Curious, curious children! They had a certain stand-offish superbness, and not a single trace of misgiving. For them, their "noblesse" was indisputable. For the first time in my life I recognized the true cold superbness of the old "noblesse". They had not a single qualm about their own perfect representing of the higher order of being. Followed another white satin "marquise", with a maid-servant. They are strong on the eighteenth century in Cagliari. Perhaps it is the last bright reality to them. The nineteenth hardly counts. * * * * * Curious the children in Cagliari. The poor seem thoroughly poor-bare-footed urchins, gay and wild in the narrow dark streets. But the more well-to-do children are so fine: so extraordinarily elegantly dressed. It quite strikes one of a heap. Not so much the grown-ups. The children. All the "chic," all the fashion, all the originality is expended on the children. And with a great deal of success. Better than Kensington Gardens very often. And they promenade with Papa and Mama with such alert assurance, having quite brought it off, their fashionable get-up. Who would have expected it? * * * * * Oh narrow, dark, and humid streets going up to the Cathedral, like crevices. I narrowly miss a huge pail of slop-water which comes crashing down from heaven. A small boy who was playing in the street, and whose miss is not quite a clean miss, looks up with that naïve, impersonal wonder with which children stare at a star or a lamp-lighter. The Cathedral must have been a fine old pagan stone fortress once. Now it has come, as it were, through the mincing machine of the ages, and oozed out baroque and sausagey, a bit like the horrible baldachins in St. Peter's at Rome. None the less it is homely and hole-and-cornery, with a rather ragged high mass trailing across the pavement towards the high altar, since it is almost sunset, and Epiphany. It feels as if one might squat in a corner and play marbles and eat bread and cheese and be at home: a comfortable old-time churchey feel. There is some striking filet lace on the various altar-cloths. And St. Joseph must be a prime saint. He has an altar and a verse of invocation praying for the dying. "Oh, St. Joseph, true potential father of Our Lord." What can it profit a man, I wonder, to be the potential father of anybody! For the rest I am not Baedeker. * * * * * The top of Cagliari is the fortress: the old gate, the old ramparts, of honey-combed, fine yellowish sandstone. Up in a great sweep goes the rampart wall, Spanish and splendid, dizzy. And the road creeping down again at the foot, down the back of the hill. There lies the country: that dead plain with its bunch of palms and a fainting sea, and inland again, hills. Cagliari must be on a single, loose, lost bluff of rock. From the terrace just below the fortress, above the town, not behind it, we stand and look at the sunset. It is all terrible, taking place beyond the knotted, serpent-crested hills that lie, bluey and velvety, beyond the waste lagoons. Dark, sultry, heavy crimson the west is, hanging sinisterly, with those gloomy blue cloud-bars and cloud-banks drawn across. All behind the blue-gloomy peaks stretches the curtain of sinister, smouldering red, and away to the sea. Deep below lie the sea-meres. They seem miles and miles, and utterly waste. But the sand-bar crosses like a bridge, and has a road. All the air is dark, a sombre bluish tone. The great west burns inwardly, sullenly, and gives no glow, yet a deep red. It is cold. We go down the steep streets, smelly, dark, dank, and very cold. No wheeled vehicle can scramble up them, presumably. People live in one room. Men are combing their hair or fastening their collars in the doorways. Evening is here, and it is a feast day. * * * * * At the bottom of the street we come to a little bunch of masked youths, one in a long yellow frock and a frilled bonnet, another like an old woman, another in red twill. They are arm in arm and are accosting the passers-by. The q-b gives a cry, and looks for escape. She has a terror of maskers, a terror that comes from childhood. To say the truth, so have I. We hasten invisibly down the far side of the street, and come out under the bastions. Then we go down our own familiar wide, short, cold boulevard to the sea. At the bottom, again, is a carriage with more maskers. Carnival is beginning. A man dressed as a peasant woman in native costume is clambering with his great wide skirts and wide strides on to the box, and, flourishing his ribboned whip, is addressing a little crowd of listeners. He opens his mouth wide and goes on with a long yelling harangue of taking a drive with his mother--another man in old-woman's gaudy finery and wig who sits already bobbing on the box. The would-be daughter flourishes, yells, and prances up there on the box of the carriage. The crowd listens attentively and mildly smiles. It all seems real to them. The q-b hovers in the distance, half-fascinated, and watches. With a great flourish of whip and legs--showing his frilled drawers--the masker pulls round to drive along the boulevard by the sea--the only place where one can drive. * * * * * The big street by the sea is the Via Roma. It has the cafés on one side and across the road the thick tufts of trees intervening between the sea and us. Among these thick tufts of sea-front trees the little steam tram, like a little train, bumps to rest, after having wound round the back of the town. The Via Roma is all social Cagliari. Including the cafés with their outdoor tables on the one side of the road, and the avenue strand on the other, it is very wide, and at evening it contains the whole town. Here, and here alone carriages can spank along, very slowly, officers can ride, and the people can promenade "en masse." We were amazed at the sudden crowd we found ourselves amongst--like a short, dense river of people streaming slowly in a mass. There is practically no vehicular traffic--only the steady dense streams of human beings of all sorts, all on a human footing. It must have been something like this in the streets of imperial Rome, where no chariots might drive and humanity was all on foot. Little bunches of maskers, and single maskers danced and strutted along in the thick flow under the trees. If you are a mask you don't walk like a human being: you dance and prance along extraordinarily like the life-size marionettes, conducted by wires from above. That is how you go: with that odd jauntiness as if lifted and propelled by wires from the shoulders. In front of me went a charming coloured harlequin, all in diamond-shaped colours, and beautiful as a piece of china. He tripped with the light, fantastic trip, quite alone in the thick crowd, and quite blithe. Came two little children hand in hand in brilliant scarlet and white costumes, sauntering calmly. They did not do the mask trip. After a while a sky-blue girl with a high hat and full skirts, very short, that went flip-flip-flip, as a ballet dancer's, whilst she strutted; after her a Spanish grandee capering like a monkey. They threaded among the slow stream of the crowd. Appeared Dante and Beatrice, in Paradise apparently, all in white sheet-robes, and with silver wreaths on their heads, arm in arm, and prancing very slowly and majestically, yet with the long lilt as if hitched along by wires from above. They were very good: all the well-known vision come to life, Dante incorporate, and white as a shroud, with his tow-haired, silver-crowned, immortal Beatrice on his arm, strutting the dark avenues. He had the nose and cheek-bones and banded cheek, and the stupid wooden look, and offered a modern criticism on the Inferno. * * * * * It had become quite dark, the lamps were lighted. We crossed the road to the Café Roma, and found a table on the pavement among the crowd. In a moment we had our tea. The evening was cold, with ice in the wind. But the crowd surged on, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. At the tables were seated mostly men, taking coffee or vermouth or aqua vitae, all familiar and easy, without the modern self-consciousness. There was a certain pleasant, natural robustness of spirit, and something of a feudal free-and-easiness. Then arrived a family, with children, and nurse in her native costume. They all sat at table together, perfectly easy with one another, though the marvellous nurse seemed to be seated below the salt. She was bright as a poppy, in a rose-scarlet dress of fine cloth, with a curious little waistcoat of emerald green and purple, and a bodice of soft, homespun linen with great full sleeves. On her head she had a rose-scarlet and white head-dress, and she wore great studs of gold filigree, and similar ear-rings. The feudal-bourgeois family drank its syrup-drinks and watched the crowd. Most remarkable is the complete absence of self-consciousness. They all have a perfect natural "sang-froid," the nurse in her marvellous native costume is as thoroughly at her ease as if she were in her own village street. She moves and speaks and calls to a passer-by without the slightest constraint, and much more, without the slightest presumption. She is below the invisible salt, the invisible but insuperable salt. And it strikes me the salt-barrier is a fine thing for both parties: they both remain natural and human on either side of it, instead of becoming devilish, scrambling and pushing at the barricade. * * * * * The crowd is across the road, under the trees near the sea. On this side stroll occasional pedestrians. And I see my first peasant in costume. He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks out a short kilt or frill, of the same black frieze, a band of which goes between the legs, between the full loose drawers of coarse linen. The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters. On his head he has the long black stocking cap, hanging down behind. How handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap--what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.--How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.--And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes. There is another peasant too, a young one with a swift eye and hard cheek and hard, dangerous thighs. He has folded his stocking cap, so that it comes forward to his brow like a phrygian cap. He wears close knee breeches and close sleeved waistcoat of thick brownish stuff that looks like leather. Over the waistcoat a sort of cuirass of black, rusty sheepskin, the curly wool outside. So he strides, talking to a comrade. How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old fierceness in them still. One realises, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable. But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me--to my past, perhaps. I don't know. But the uneasy sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I _know_ I have known it before. It is something of the same uneasiness I feel before Mount Eryx: but without the awe this time. * * * * * In the morning the sun was shining from a blue, blue sky, but the shadows were deadly cold, and the wind like a flat blade of ice. We went out running to the sun. The hotel could not give us coffee and milk: only a little black coffee. So we descended to the sea-front again, to the Via Roma, and to our café. It was Friday: people seemed to be bustling in from the country with huge baskets. The Café Roma had coffee and milk, but no butter. We sat and watched the movement outside. Tiny Sardinian donkeys, the tiniest things ever seen, trotted their infinitesimal little paws along the road, drawing little wagons like handcarts. Their proportion is so small, that they make a boy walking at their side look like a tall man, while a natural man looks like a Cyclops stalking hugely and cruelly. It is ridiculous for a grown man to have one of these little creatures, hardly bigger than a fly, hauling his load for him. One is pulling a chest of drawers on a cart, and it seems to have a whole house behind it. Nevertheless it plods bravely, away beneath the load, a wee thing. They tell me there used to be flocks of these donkeys, feeding half wild on the wild, moor-like hills of Sardinia. But the war--and also the imbecile wantonness of the war-masters--consumed these flocks too, so that few are left. The same with the cattle. Sardinia, home of cattle, hilly little Argentine of the Mediterranean, is now almost deserted. It is war, say the Italiana.--And also the wanton, imbecile, foul lavishness of the war-masters. It was not alone the war which exhausted the world. It was the deliberate evil wastefulness of the war-makers in their own countries. Italy ruined Italy. * * * * * Two peasants in black-and-white are strolling in the sun, flashing. And my dream of last evening was not a dream. And my nostalgia for something I know not what was not an illusion. I feel it again, at once, at the sight of the men in frieze and linen, a heart yearning for something I have known, and which I want back again. It is market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo-Felice, the second wide gap of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something. Cagliari is like that: all bits and bobs. And by the side of the pavement are many stalls, stalls selling combs and collar-studs, cheap mirrors, handkerchiefs, shoddy Manchester goods, bed-ticking, boot-paste, poor crockery, and so on. But we see also Madame of Cagliari going marketing, with a servant accompanying her, carrying a huge grass-woven basket: or returning from marketing, followed by a small boy supporting one of these huge grass-woven baskets--like huge dishes--on his head, piled with bread, eggs, vegetables, a chicken, and so forth. Therefore we follow Madame going marketing, and find ourselves in the vast market house, and it fairly glows with eggs: eggs in these great round dish-baskets of golden grass: but eggs in piles, in mounds, in heaps, a Sierra Nevada of eggs, glowing warm white. How they glow! I have never noticed it before. But they give off a warm, pearly effulgence into the air, almost a warmth. A pearly-gold heat seems to come out of them. Myriads of eggs, glowing avenues of eggs. And they are marked--60 centimes, 65 centimes. Ah, cries the q-b, I must live in Cagliari--For in Sicily the eggs cost 1.50 each. This is the meat and poultry and bread market. There are stalls of new, various-shaped bread, brown and bright: there are tiny stalls of marvellous native cakes, which I want to taste, there is a great deal of meat and kid: and there are stalls of cheese, all cheeses, all shapes, all whitenesses, all the cream-colours, on into daffodil yellow. Goat cheese, sheeps cheese, Swiss cheese, Parmegiano, stracchino, caciocavallo, torolone, how many cheeses I don't know the names of! But they cost about the same as in Sicily, eighteen francs, twenty francs, twenty-five francs the kilo. And there is lovely ham--thirty and thirty-five francs the kilo. There is a little fresh butter too--thirty or thirty-two francs the kilo. Most of the butter, however, is tinned in Milan. It costs the same as the fresh. There are splendid piles of salted black olives, and huge bowls of green salted olives. There are chickens and ducks and wild-fowl: at eleven and twelve and fourteen francs a kilo. There is mortadella, the enormous Bologna sausage, thick as a church pillar: 16 francs: and there are various sorts of smaller sausage, salami, to be eaten in slices. A wonderful abundance of food, glowing and shining. We are rather late for fish, especially on Friday. But a barefooted man offers us two weird objects from the Mediterranean, which teems with marine monsters. The peasant women sit behind their wares, their home-woven linen skirts, hugely full, and of various colours, ballooning round them. The yellow baskets give off a glow of light. There is a sense of profusion once more. But alas no sense of cheapness: save the eggs. Every month, up goes the price of everything. "I must come and live in Cagliari, to do my shopping here," says the q-b. "I must have one of those big grass baskets." We went down to the little street--but saw more baskets emerging from a broad flight of stone stairs, enclosed. So up we went-and found ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still. Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips, in piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine orange with their green-black leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo. "Oh!" cried the q-b, "If I don't live at Cagliari and come and do my shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled." * * * * * But out of the sun it was cold, nevertheless. We went into the streets to try and get warm. The sun was powerful. But alas, as in southern towns generally, the streets are sunless as wells. So the q-b and I creep slowly along the sunny bits, and then perforce are swallowed by shadow. We look at the shops. But there is not much to see. Little, frowsy provincial shops, on the whole. But a fair number of peasants in the streets, and peasant women in rather ordinary costume: tight-bodiced, volume-skirted dresses of hand-woven linen or thickish cotton. The prettiest is of dark-blue-and-red, stripes-and-lines, intermingled, so made that the dark-blue gathers round the waist into one colour, the myriad pleats hiding all the rosy red. But when she walks, the full-petticoated peasant woman, then the red goes flash-flash-flash, like a bird showing its colours. Pretty that looks in the sombre street. She has a plain, light bodice with a peak: sometimes a little vest, and great full white sleeves, and usually a handkerchief or shawl loose knotted. It is charming the way they walk, with quick, short steps. When all is said and done, the most attractive costume for women in my eye, is the tight little bodice and the many-pleated skirt, full and vibrating with movement. It has a charm which modern elegance lacks completely--a bird-like play in movement. * * * * * They are amusing, these peasant girls and women: so brisk and defiant. They have straight backs, like little walls, and decided, well-drawn brows. And they are amusingly on the alert. There is no eastern creeping. Like sharp, brisk birds they dart along the streets, and you feel they would fetch you a bang over the head as leave as look at you. Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be a Sardinian quality. Italy is so tender--like cooked macaroni--yards and yards of soft tenderness ravelled round everything. Here men don't idealise women, by the looks of things. Here they don't make these great leering eyes, the inevitable yours-to-command look of Italian males. When the men from the country look at these women, then it is Mind-yourself, my lady. I should think the grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature. These women have to look out for themselves, keep their own back-bone stiff and their knuckles hard. Man is going to be male Lord if he can. And woman isn't going to give him too much of his own way, either. So there you have it, the fine old martial split between the sexes. It is tonic and splendid, really, after so much sticky intermingling and backboneless Madonna-worship. The Sardinian isn't looking for the "noble woman nobly planned." No, thank you. He wants that young madam over there, a young stiff-necked generation that she is. Far better sport than with the nobly-planned sort: hollow frauds that they are. Better sport too than with a Carmen, who gives herself away too much, In these women there is something shy and defiant and un-get-atable. The defiant, splendid split between the sexes, each absolutely determined to defend his side, her side, from assault. So the meeting has a certain wild, salty savour, each the deadly unknown to the other. And at the same time, each his own, her own native pride and courage, taking the dangerous leap and scrambling back. Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated with sentiment and nobility, the macaroni slithery-slobbery mess of modern adorations. * * * * * One sees a few fascinating faces in Cagliari: those great dark unlighted eyes. There are fascinating dark eyes in Sicily, bright, big, with an impudent point of light, and a curious roll, and long lashes: the eyes of old Greece, surely. But here one sees eyes of soft, blank darkness, all velvet, with no imp looking out of them. And they strike a stranger, older note: before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality of Greece appeared in the world. Remote, always remote, as if the intelligence lay deep within the cave, and never came forward. One searches into the gloom for one second, while the glance lasts. But without being able to penetrate to the reality. It recedes, like some unknown creature deeper into its lair. There is a creature, dark and potent. But what? Sometimes Velasquez, and sometimes Goya gives us a suggestion of these large, dark, unlighted eyes. And they go with fine, fleecy black hair--almost as fine as fur. I have not seen them north of Cagliari. * * * * * The q-b spies some of the blue-and-red stripe-and-line cotton stuff of which the peasants make their dress: a large roll in the doorway of a dark shop. In we go, and begin to feel it. It is just soft, thickish cotton stuff--twelve francs a metre. Like most peasant patterns, it is much more complicated and subtle than appears: the curious placing of the stripes, the subtle proportion, and a white thread left down one side only of each broad blue block. The stripes, moreover, run _across_ the cloth, not lengthwise with it. But the width would be just long enough for a skirt--though the peasant skirts have almost all a band at the bottom with the stripes running round-ways. The man--he is the esquimo type, simple, frank and aimiable--says the stuff is made in France, and this the first roll since the war. It is the old, old pattern, quite correct--but the material not _quite_ so good. The q-b takes enough for a dress. He shows us also cashmeres, orange, scarlet, sky-blue, royal blue: good, pure-wool cashmeres that were being sent to India, and were captured from a German mercantile sub-marine. So he says. Fifty francs a metre--very, very wide. But they are too much trouble to carry in a knapsack, though their brilliance fascinates. * * * * * So we stroll and look at the shops, at the filigree gold jewelling of the peasants, at a good bookshop. But there is little to see and therefore the question is, shall we go on? Shall we go forward? There are two ways of leaving Cagliari for the north: the State railway that runs up the west side of the island, and the narrow-gauge secondary railway that pierces the centre. But we are too late for the big trains. So we will go by the secondary railway, wherever it goes. There is a train at 2.30, and we can get as far as Mandas, some fifty miles in the interior. When we tell the queer little waiter at the hotel, he says he comes from Mandas, and there are two inns. So after lunch--a strictly fish menu--we pay our bill. It comes to sixty odd francs--for three good meals each, with wine, and the night's lodging, this is cheap, as prices now are in Italy. Pleased with the simple and friendly Scala di Ferre, I shoulder my sack and we walk off to the second station. The sun is shining hot this afternoon--burning hot, by the sea. The road and the buildings look dry and desiccated, the harbour rather weary and end of the world. There is a great crowd of peasants at the little station. And almost every man has a pair of woven saddle-bags--a great flat strip of coarse-woven wool, with flat pockets at either end, stuffed with purchases. These are almost the only carrying bags. The men sling them over their shoulder, so that one great pocket hangs in front, one behind. These saddle bags are most fascinating. They are coarsely woven in bands of raw black-rusty wool, with varying bands of raw white wool or hemp or cotton--the bands and stripes of varying widths going cross-wise. And on the pale bands are woven sometimes flowers in most lovely colours, rose-red and blue and green, peasant patterns--and sometimes fantastic animals, beasts, in dark wool again. So that these striped zebra bags, some wonderful gay with flowery colours on their stripes, some weird with fantastic, griffin-like animals, are a whole landscape in themselves. The train has only first and third class. It costs about thirty francs for the two of us, third class to Mandas, which is some sixty miles. In we crowd with the joyful saddle-bags, into the wooden carriage with its many seats. And, wonder of wonders, punctually to the second, off we go, out of Cagliari. En route again. IV. MANDAS. The coach was fairly full of people, returning from market. On these railways the third class coaches are not divided into compartments. They are left open, so that one sees everybody, as down a room. The attractive saddle-bags, _bercole_, were disposed anywhere, and the bulk of the people settled down to a lively _conversazione_. It is much nicest, on the whole, to travel third class on the railway. There is space, there is air, and it is like being in a lively inn, everybody in good spirits. At our end was plenty of room. Just across the gangway was an elderly couple, like two children, coming home very happily. He was fat, fat all over, with a white moustache and a little not-unamiable frown. She was a tall lean, brown woman, in a brown full-skirted dress and black apron, with huge pocket. She wore no head covering, and her iron grey hair was parted smoothly. They were rather pleased and excited being in the train. She took all her money out of her big pocket, and counted it and gave it to him: all the ten Lira notes, and the five Lira and the two and the one, peering at the dirty scraps of pink-backed one-lira notes to see if they were good. Then she gave him her half-pennies. And he stowed them away in the trouser pocket, standing up to push them down his fat leg. And then one saw, to one's amazement, that the whole of his shirt-tail was left out behind, like a sort of apron worn backwards. Why--a mystery. He was one of those fat, good-natured, unheeding men with a little masterful frown, such as usually have tall, lean, hard-faced, obedient wives. They were very happy. With amazement he watched us taking hot tea from the Thermos flask. I think he too had suspected it might be a bomb. He had blue eyes and standing-up white eyebrows. "Beautiful hot--!" he said, seeing the tea steam. It is the inevitable exclamation. "Does it do you good?" "Yes," said the q-b. "Much good." And they both nodded complacently. They were going home. * * * * * The train was running over the malarial-looking sea-plain--past the down-at-heel palm trees, past the mosque-looking buildings. At a level crossing the woman crossing-keeper darted out vigorously with her red flag. And we rambled into the first village. It was built of sun-dried brick-adobe houses, thick adobe garden-walls, with tile ridges to keep off the rain. In the enclosures were dark orange trees. But the clay-coloured villages, clay-dry, looked foreign: the next thing to mere earth they seem, like fox-holes or coyote colonies. Looking back, one sees Cagliari bluff on her rock, rather fine, with the thin edge of the sea's blade curving round. It is rather hard to believe in the real sea, on this sort of clay-pale plain. * * * * * But soon we begin to climb to the hills. And soon the cultivation begins to be intermittent. Extraordinary how the heathy, moor-like hills come near the sea: extraordinary how scrubby and uninhabited the great spaces of Sardinia are. It is wild, with heath and arbutus scrub and a sort of myrtle, breast-high. Sometimes one sees a few head of cattle. And then again come the greyish arable-patches, where the corn is grown. It is like Cornwall, like the Land's End region. Here and there, in the distance, are peasants working on the lonely landscape. Sometimes it is one man alone in the distance, showing so vividly in his black-and-white costume, small and far-off like a solitary magpie, and curiously distinct. All the strange magic of Sardinia is in this sight. Among the low, moor-like hills, away in a hollow of the wide landscape one solitary figure, small but vivid black-and-white, working alone, as if eternally. There are patches and hollows of grey arable land, good for corn. Sardinia was once a great granary. Usually, however, the peasants of the South have left off the costume. Usually it is the invisible soldiers' grey-green cloth, the Italian khaki. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you see this khaki, this grey-green war-clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick, excellent, but hateful material the Italian government must have provided I don't know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh democracy! Oh khaki democracy! * * * * * This is very different from Italian landscape. Italy is almost always dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is drama in the plains of Lombardy, and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is the natural floridity of lime-stone formations. But Italian landscape is really eighteenth-century landscape, to be represented in that romantic-classic manner which makes everything rather marvelous and very topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy ravines and Wilhelm Meister water-falls: all up and down. Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic peaks on the southwest. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking in Italy. Lovely space about one, and traveling distances--nothing finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky confinement of Sicily. Room--give me room--give me room for my spirit: and you can have all the toppling crags of romance. So we ran on through the gold of the afternoon, across a wide, almost Celtic landscape of hills, our little train winding and puffing away very nimbly. Only the heath and scrub, breast-high, man-high, is too big and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wild-looking cattle show sometimes. After a long pull, we come to a station after a stretch of loneliness. Each time, it looks as if there were nothing beyond--no more habitations. And each time we come to a station. Most of the people have left the train. And as with men driving in a gig, who get down at every public-house, so the passengers usually alight for an airing at each station. Our old fat friend stands up and tucks his shirt-tail comfortably in his trousers, which trousers all the time make one hold one's breath, for they seem at each very moment to be just dropping right down: and he clambers out, followed by the long, brown stalk of a wife. So the train sits comfortably for five or ten minutes, in the way the trains have. At last we hear whistles and horns, and our old fat friend running and clinging like a fat crab to the very end of the train as it sets off. At the same instant a loud shriek and a bunch of shouts from outside. We all jump up. There, down the line, is the long brown stork of a wife. She had just walked back to a house some hundred yards off, for a few words, and has now seen the train moving. Now behold her with her hands thrown to heaven, and hear the wild shriek "Madonna!" through all the hubbub. But she picks up her two skirt-knees, and with her thin legs in grey stockings starts with a mad rush after the train. In vain. The train inexorably pursues its course. Prancing, she reaches one end of the platform as we leave the other end. Then she realizes it is not going to stop for her. And then, oh horror, her long arms thrown out in wild supplication after the retreating train: then flung aloft to God: then brought down in absolute despair on her head. And this is the last sight we have of her, clutching her poor head in agony and doubling forward. She is left--she is abandoned. The poor fat husband has been all the time on the little outside platform at the end of the carriage, holding out his hand to her and shouting frenzied scolding to her and frenzied yells for the train to stop. And the train has not stopped. And she is left--left on that God-forsaken station in the waning light. So, his face all bright, his eyes round and bright as two stars, absolutely transfigured by dismay, chagrin, anger and distress, he comes and sits in his seat, ablaze, stiff, speechless. His face is almost beautiful in its blaze of conflicting emotions. For some time he is as if unconscious in the midst of his feelings. Then anger and resentment crop out of his consternation. He turns with a flash to the long-nosed, insidious, Phoenician-looking guard. Why couldn't they stop the train for her! And immediately, as if someone had set fire to him, off flares the guard. Heh!--the train can't stop for every person's convenience! The train is a train--the time-table is a time-table. What did the old woman want to take her trips down the line for? Heh! She pays the penalty for her own inconsiderateness. Had _she_ paid for the train--heh? And the fat man all the time firing off his unheeding and unheeded answers. One minute--only one minute--if he, the conductor had told the driver! if he, the conductor, had shouted! A poor woman! Not another train! What was she going to do! Her ticket? And no money. A poor woman-- There was a train back to Cagliari that night, said the conductor, at which the fat man nearly burst out of his clothing like a bursting seed-pod. He bounced on his seat. What good was that? What good was a train back to Cagliari, when their home was in Snelli! Making matters worse-- So they bounced and jerked and argued at one another, to their hearts' content. Then the conductor retired, smiling subtly, in a way they have. Our fat friend looked at us with hot, angry, ashamed, grieved eyes and said it was a shame. Yes, we chimed, it _was_ a shame. Whereupon a self-important miss who said she came from some Collegio at Cagliari advanced and asked a number of impertinent questions in a tone of pert sympathy. After which our fat friend, left alone, covered his clouded face with his hand, turned his back on the world, and gloomed. It had all been so dramatic that in spite of ourselves we laughed, even while the q-b shed a few tears. * * * * * Well, the journey lasted hours. We came to a station, and the conductor said we must get out: these coaches went no further. Only two coaches would proceed to Mandas. So we climbed out with our traps, and our fat friend with his saddle-bag, the picture of misery. The one coach into which we clambered was rather crowded. The only other coach was most of it first-class. And the rest of the train was freight. We were two insignificant passenger wagons at the end of a long string of freight-vans and trucks. There was an empty seat, so we sat on it: only to realize after about five minutes, that a thin old woman with two children--her grandchildren--was chuntering her head off because it was _her_ seat--why she had left it she didn't say. And under my legs was her bundle of bread. She nearly went off her head. And over my head, on the little rack, was her bercola, her saddle-bag. Fat soldiers laughed at her good-naturedly, but she fluttered and flipped like a tart, featherless old hen. Since she had another seat and was quite comfortable, we smiled and let her chunter. So she clawed her bread bundle from under my legs, and, clutching it and a fat child, sat tense. * * * * * It was getting quite dark. The conductor came and said that there was no more paraffin. If what there was in the lamps gave out, we should have to sit in the dark. There was no more paraffin all along the line.--So he climbed on the seats, and after a long struggle, with various boys striking matches for him, he managed to obtain a light as big as a pea. We sat in this _clair-obscur_, and looked at the sombre-shadowed faces round us: the fat soldier with a gun, the handsome soldier with huge saddle-bags, the weird, dark little man who kept exchanging a baby with a solid woman who had a white cloth tied round her head, a tall peasant-woman in costume, who darted out at a dark station and returned triumphant with a piece of chocolate: a young and interested young man, who told us every station. And the man who spat: there is always one. Gradually the crowd thinned. At a station we saw our fat friend go by, bitterly, like a betrayed soul, his bulging saddle-bag hanging before and after, but no comfort in it now--no comfort. The pea of light from the paraffin lamp grew smaller. We sat in incredible dimness, and the smell of sheeps-wool and peasant, with only our fat and stoic young man to tell us where we were. The other dusky faces began to sink into a dead, gloomy silence. Some took to sleep. And the little train ran on and on, through unknown Sardinian darkness. In despair we drained the last drop of tea and ate the last crusts of bread. We knew we must arrive some time. * * * * * It was not much after seven when we came to Mandas. Mandas is a junction where these little trains sit and have a long happy chat after their arduous scramble over the downs. It had taken us somewhere about five hours to do our fifty miles. No wonder then that when the junction at last heaves in sight everybody bursts out of the train like seeds from an exploding pod, and rushes somewhere for something. To the station restaurant, of course. Hence there is a little station restaurant that does a brisk trade, and where one can have a bed. A quite pleasant woman behind the little bar: a brown woman with brown parted hair and brownish eyes and brownish, tanned complexion and tight brown velveteen bodice. She led us up a narrow winding stone stair, as up a fortress, leading on with her candle, and ushered us into the bedroom. It smelled horrid and sourish, as shutup bedrooms do. We threw open the window. There were big frosty stars snapping ferociously in heaven. The room contained a huge bed, big enough for eight people, and quite clean. And the table on which stood the candle actually had a cloth. But imagine that cloth! I think it had been originally white: now, however, it was such a web of time-eaten holes and mournful black inkstains and poor dead wine stains that it was like some 2000 B.C. mummy-cloth. I wonder if it could have been lifted from that table: or if it was mummified on to it! I for one made no attempt to try. But that table-cover impressed me, as showing degrees I had not imagined.--A table-cloth. We went down the fortress-stair to the eating-room. Here was a long table with soup-plates upside down and a lamp burning an uncanny naked acetylene flame. We sat at the cold table, and the lamp immediately began to wane. The room--in fact the whole of Sardinia--was stone cold, stone, stone cold. Outside the earth was freezing. Inside there was no thought of any sort of warmth: dungeon stone floors, dungeon stone walls and a dead, corpse-like atmosphere, too heavy and icy to move. The lamp went quite out, and the q-b gave a cry. The brown woman poked her head through a hole in the wall. Beyond her we saw the flames of the cooking, and two devil-figures stirring the pots. The brown woman came and shook the lamp--it was like a stodgy porcelain mantelpiece vase--shook it well and stirred up its innards, and started it going once more. Then she appeared with a bowl of smoking cabbage soup, in which were bits of macaroni: and would we have wine? I shuddered at the thought of death-cold red wine of the country, so asked what else there was. There was malvagia--malvoisie, the same old malmsey that did for the Duke of Clarence. So we had a pint of malvagia, and were comforted. At least we were being so, when the lamp went out again. The brown woman came and shook and smacked it, and started it off again. But as if to say "Shan't for you", it whipped out again. Then came the host with a candle and a pin, a large, genial Sicilian with pendulous mustaches. And he thoroughly pricked the wretch with the pin, shook it, and turned little screws. So up flared the flame. We were a little nervous. He asked us where we came from, etc. And suddenly he asked us, with an excited gleam, were we Socialists. Aha, he was going to hail us as citizens and comrades. He thought we were a pair of Bolshevist agents: I could see it. And as such he was prepared to embrace us. But no, the q-b disclaimed the honor. I merely smiled and shook my head. It is a pity to rob people of their exciting illusions. "Ah, there is too much socialism everywhere!" cried the q-b. "Ma--perhaps, perhaps--" said the discreet Sicilian. She saw which way the land lay, and added: "Si vuole un _pocchetino_ di Socialismo: one wants a tiny bit of socialism in the world, a tiny bit. But not much. Not much. At present there is too much." Our host, twinkling at this speech which treated of the sacred creed as if it were a pinch of salt in the broth, believing the q-b was throwing dust in his eyes, and thoroughly intrigued by us as a pair of deep ones, retired. No sooner had he gone than the lamp-flame stood up at its full length, and started to whistle. The q-b drew back. Not satisfied by this, another flame suddenly began to whip round the bottom of the burner, like a lion lashing its tail. Unnerved, we made room: the q-b cried again: in came the host with a subtle smile and a pin and an air of benevolence, and tamed the brute. What else was there to eat? There was a piece of fried pork for me, and boiled eggs for the q-b. As we were proceeding with these, in came the remainder of the night's entertainment: three station officials, two in scarlet peaked caps, one in a black-and-gold peaked cap. They sat down with a clamour, in their caps, as if there was a sort of invisible screen between us and them. They were young. The black cap had a lean and sardonic look: one of the red-caps was little and ruddy, very young, with a little mustache: we called him the _maialino_, the gay little black pig, he was so plump and food-nourished and frisky. The third was rather puffy and pale and had spectacles. They all seemed to present us the blank side of their cheek, and to intimate that no, they were not going to take their hats off, even if it were dinner-table and a strange _signora_. And they made rough quips with one another, still as if we were on the other side of the invisible screen. Determined however, to remove this invisible screen, I said Good-evening, and it was very cold. They muttered Good-evening, and yes, it was fresh. An Italian never says it is cold: it is never more than _fresco_. But this hint that it was cold they took as a hint at their caps, and they became very silent, till the woman came in with the soup-bowl. Then they clamoured at her, particularly the _maialino_, what was there to eat. She told them--beef-steaks of pork. Whereat they pulled faces. Or bits of boiled pork. They sighed, looked gloomy, cheered up, and said beef-steaks, then. And they fell on their soup. And never, from among the steam, have I heard a more joyful trio of soup-swilkering. They sucked it in from their spoons with long, gusto-rich sucks. The _maialino_ was the treble--he trilled his soup into his mouth with a swift, sucking vibration, interrupted by bits of cabbage, which made the lamp start to dither again. Black-cap was the baritone; good, rolling spoon-sucks. And the one in spectacles was the bass: he gave sudden deep gulps. All was led by the long trilling of the _maialino_. Then suddenly, to vary matters, he cocked up his spoon in one hand, chewed a huge mouthful of bread, and swallowed it down with a smack-smack-smack! of his tongue against his palate. As children we used to call this "clapping". "Mother, she's clapping!" I would yell with anger, against my sister. The German word is schmatzen. So the _maialino_ clapped like a pair of cymbals, while baritone and bass rolled on. Then in chimed the swift bright treble. At this rate however, the soup did not last long. Arrived the beef-steaks of pork. And now the trio was a trio of castanet smacks and cymbal claps. Triumphantly the _maialino_ looked around. He out-smacked all. The bread of the country is rather coarse and brown, with a hard, hard crust. A large rock of this is perched on every damp serviette. The _maialino_ tore his rock asunder, and grumbled at the black-cap, who had got a weird sort of three-cornered loaf-roll of pure white bread--starch white. He was a swell with this white bread. Suddenly black-cap turned to me. Where had we come from, where were we going, what for? But in laconic, sardonic tone. "I _like_ Sardinia," cried the q-b. "Why?" he asked sarcastically. And she tried to find out. "Yes, the Sardinians please me more than the Sicilians," said I. "Why?" he asked sarcastically. "They are more open--more honest." He seemed to turn his nose down. "The padrone is a Sicilian," said the _maialino_, stuffing a huge block of bread into his mouth, and rolling his insouciant eyes of a gay, well-fed little black pig towards the background. We weren't making much headway. "You've seen Cagliari?" the black-cap said to me, like a threat. "Yes! oh Cagliari pleases me--Cagliari is beautiful!" cried the q-b, who travels with a vial of melted butter ready for her parsnips. "Yes--Cagliari is _so-so_--Cagliari is very fair," said the black cap. "_Cagliari è discreto._" He was evidently proud of it. "And is Mandas nice?" asked the q-b. "In what way nice?" they asked, with immense sarcasm. "Is there anything to see?" "Hens," said the _maialino_ briefly. They all bristled when one asked if Mandas was nice. "What does one do here?" asked the q-b. "_Niente!_ At Mandas one does _nothing_. At Mandas one goes to bed when it's dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig that is going nowhere. At Mandas a goat understands more than the inhabitants understand. At Mandas one needs socialism...." They all cried out at once. Evidently Mandas was more than flesh and blood could bear for another minute to these three conspirators. "Then you are very bored here?" say I. "Yes." And the quiet intensity of that naked yes spoke more than volumes. "You would like to be in Cagliari?" "Yes." Silence, intense, sardonic silence had intervened. The three looked at one another and made a sour joke about Mandas. Then the black-cap turned to me. "Can you understand Sardinian?" he said. "Somewhat. More than Sicilian, anyhow." "But Sardinian is more difficult than Sicilian. It is full of words utterly unknown to Italian--" "Yes, but," say I, "it is spoken openly, in plain words, and Sicilian is spoken all stuck together, none of the words there at all." He looks at me as if I were an imposter. Yet it is true. I find it quite easy to understand Sardinian. As a matter of fact, it is more a question of human approach than of sound. Sardinian seems open and manly and downright. Sicilian is gluey and evasive, as if the Sicilian didn't want to speak straight to you. As a matter of fact, he doesn't. He is an over-cultured, sensitive, ancient soul, and he has so many sides to his mind that he hasn't got any definite one mind at all. He's got a dozen minds, and uneasily he's aware of it, and to commit himself to anyone of them is merely playing a trick on himself and his interlocutor. The Sardinian, on the other hand, still seems to have one downright mind. I bump up against a downright, smack-out belief in Socialism, for example. The Sicilian is much too old in our culture to swallow Socialism whole: much too ancient and rusé not to be sophisticated about any and every belief. He'll go off like a squib: and then he'll smoulder acridly and sceptically even against his own fire. One sympathizes with him in retrospect. But in daily life it is unbearable. "Where do you find such white bread?" say I to the black cap, because he is proud of it. "It comes from my home." And then he asks about the bread of Sicily. Is it any whiter than _this_--the Mandas rock. Yes, it is a little whiter. At which they gloom again. For it is a very sore point, this bread. Bread means a great deal to an Italian: it is verily his staff of life. He practically lives on bread. And instead of going by taste, he now, like all the world, goes by eye. He has got it into his head that bread should be white, so that every time he fancies a darker shade in the loaf a shadow falls on his soul. Nor is he altogether wrong. For although, personally, I don't like white bread any more, yet I do like my brown bread to be made of pure, unmixed flour. The peasants in Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and _clean_ their loaf seems, so perfumed as home-bread used all to be before the war. Whereas the bread of the commune, the regulation supply, is hard, and rather coarse and rough, so rough and harsh on the palate. One gets tired to death of it. I suspect myself the maize meal mixed in. But I don't know. And finally the bread varies immensely from town to town, from commune to commune. The so-called just and equal distribution is all my-eye. One place has abundance of good sweet bread, another scrapes along, always stinted, on an allowance of harsh coarse stuff. And the poor suffer bitterly, really, from the bread-stinting, because they depend so on this one food. They say the inequality and the injustice of distribution comes from the Camorra--la grande Camorra--which is no more nowadays than a profiteering combine, which the poor hate. But for myself, I don't know. I only know that one town--Venice, for example--seems to have an endless supply of pure bread, of sugar, of tobacco, of salt--while Florence is in one continual ferment of irritation over the stinting of these supplies--which are all government monopoly, doled out accordingly. We said Good-night to our three railway friends, and went up to bed. We had only been in the room a minute or two, when the brown woman tapped: and if you please, the black-cap had sent us one of his little white loaves. We were really touched. Such delicate little generosities have almost disappeared from the world. It was a queer little bread--three-cornered, and almost as hard as ships biscuit, made of starch flour. Not strictly bread at all. * * * * * The night was cold, the blankets flat and heavy, but one slept quite well till dawn. At seven o'clock it was a clear, cold morning, the sun not yet up. Standing at the bedroom window looking out, I could hardly believe my eyes it was so like England, like Cornwall in the bleak parts, or Derbyshire uplands. There was a little paddock-garden at the back of the Station, rather tumble-down, with two sheep in it. There were several forlorn-looking out-buildings, very like Cornwall. And then the wide, forlorn country road stretched away between borders of grass and low, drystone walls, towards a grey stone farm with a tuft of trees, and a naked stone village in the distance. The sun came up yellow, the bleak country glimmered bluish and reluctant. The low, green hill-slopes were divided into fields, with low drystone walls and ditches. Here and there a stone barn rose alone, or with a few bare, windy trees attached. Two rough-coated winter horses pastured on the rough grass, a boy came along the naked, wide, grass-bordered high-road with a couple of milk cans, drifting in from nowhere: and it was all so like Cornwall, or a part of Ireland, that the old nostalgia for the Celtic regions began to spring up in me. Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields--pale and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece. Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like this--this Celtic bareness and sombreness and _air_. But perhaps it is not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. I believe there never were any Celts, as a race.--As for the Iberians--! [Illustration: TONARA] Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad, on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk on the little ridge of grass, the little bank on which the wall is built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings: and it is all so familiar to my _feet_, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if I had made a discovery. And I realize that I hate lime-stone, to live on lime-stone or marble or any of those limey rocks. I hate them. They are dead rocks, they have no life--thrills for the feet. Even sandstone is much better. But granite! Granite is my favorite. It is so live under the feet, it has a deep sparkle of its own. I like its roundnesses--and I hate the jaggy dryness of lime-stone, that burns in the sun, and withers. * * * * * After coming to a deep well in a grassy plot in a wide space of the road, I go back, across the sunny naked upland country, towards the pink station and its out-buildings. An engine is steaming its white clouds in the new light. Away to the left there is even a row of small houses, like a row of railway-mens' dwellings. Strange and familiar sight. And the station precincts are disorderly and rather dilapidated. I think of our Sicilian host. The brown woman gives us coffee, and very strong, rich goats' milk, and bread. After which the q-b and I set off once more along the road to the village. She too is thrilled. She too breathes deep. She too feels _space_ around her, and freedom to move the limbs: such as one does not feel in Italy and Sicily, where all is so classic and fixed. The village itself is just a long, winding, darkish street, in shadow, of houses and shops and a smithy. It might almost be Cornwall: not quite. Something, I don't know what, suggests the stark burning glare of summer. And then, of course, there is none of the cosiness which climbing roses and lilac trees and cottage shops and haystacks would give to an English scene. This is harder, barer, starker, more dreary. An ancient man in the black-and-white costume comes out of a hovel of a cottage. The butcher carries a huge side of meat. The women peer at us--but more furtive and reticent than the howling stares of Italy. So we go on, down the rough-cobbled street through the whole length of the village. And emerging on the other side, past the last cottage, we find ourselves again facing the open country, on the gentle down-slope of the rolling hill. The landscape continues the same: low, rolling upland hills, dim under the yellow sun of the January morning: stone fences, fields, grey-arable land: a man slowly, slowly ploughing with a pony and a dark-red cow: the road trailing empty across the distance: and then, the one violently unfamiliar note, the enclosed cemetery lying outside on the gentle hill-side, closed in all round, very compact, with high walls: and on the inside face of the enclosure wall the marble slabs, like shut drawers of the sepulchres, shining white, the wall being like a chest of drawers, or pigeon holes to hold the dead. Tufts of dark and plumy cypresses rise among the flat graves of the enclosure. In the south, cemeteries are walled off and isolated very tight. The dead, as it were, are kept fast in pound. There is no spreading of graves over the face of the country. They are penned in a tight fold, with cypresses to fatten on the bones. This is the one thoroughly strange note in the landscape. But all-pervading there is a strangeness, that strange feeling as if the _depths_ were barren, which comes in the south and the east, sun-stricken. Sun-stricken, and the heart eaten out by the dryness. "I like it! I like it!" cries the q-b. "But could you live here?" She would like to say yes, but daren't. We stray back. The q-b wants to buy one of those saddle-bag arrangements. I say what for? She says to keep things in. Ach! but peeping in the shops, we see one and go in and examine it. It is quite a sound one, properly made: but plain, quite plain. On the white cross-stripes there are no lovely colored flowers of rose and green and magenta: the three favorite Sardinian colors: nor are there any of the fantastic and griffin-like beasts. So it won't do. How much does it cost? Forty-five francs. There is nothing to do in Mandas. So we will take the morning train and go to the terminus, to Sorgono. Thus, we shall cross the lower slopes of the great central knot of Sardinia, the mountain knot called Gennargentu. And Sorgono we feel will be lovely. Back at the station we make tea on the spirit lamp, fill the thermos, pack the knapsack and the kitchenino, and come out into the sun of the platform. The q-b goes to thank the black-cap for the white bread, whilst I settle the bill and ask for food for the journey. The brown woman fishes out from a huge black pot in the background sundry hunks of coarse boiled pork, and gives me two of these, hot, with bread and salt. This is the luncheon. I pay the bill: which amounts to twenty-four francs, for everything. (One says francs or liras, irrespective, in Italy.) At that moment arrives the train from Cagliari, and men rush in, roaring for the soup--or rather, for the broth. "Ready, ready!" she cries, going to the black pot. V. TO SORGONO. The various trains in the junction squatted side by side and had long, long talks before at last we were off. It was wonderful to be running in the bright morning towards the heart of Sardinia, in the little train that seemed so familiar. We were still going third class, rather to the disgust of the railway officials at Mandas. At first the country was rather open: always the long spurs of hills, steep-sided, but not high. And from our little train we looked across the country, across hill and dale. In the distance was a little town, on a low slope. But for its compact, fortified look it might have been a town on the English downs. A man in the carriage leaned out of the window holding out a white cloth, as a signal to someone in the far off town that he was coming. The wind blew the white cloth, the town in the distance glimmered small and alone in its hollow. And the little train pelted along. It was rather comical to see it. We were always climbing. And the line curved in great loops. So that as one looked out of the window, time and again one started, seeing a little train running in front of us, in a diverging direction, making big puffs of steam. But lo, it was our own little engine pelting off around a loop away ahead. We were quite a long train, but all trucks in front, only our two passenger coaches hitched on behind. And for this reason our own engine was always running fussily into sight, like some dog scampering in front and swerving about us, while we followed at the tail end of the thin string of trucks. I was surprised how well the small engine took the continuous steep slopes, how bravely it emerged on the sky-line. It is a queer railway. I would like to know who made it. It pelts up hill and down dale and round sudden bends in the most unconcerned fashion, not as proper big railways do, grunting inside deep cuttings and stinking their way through tunnels, but running up the hill like a panting, small dog, and having a look round, and starting off in another direction, whisking us behind unconcernedly. This is much more fun than the tunnel-and-cutting system. They told me that Sardinia mines her own coal: and quite enough for her own needs: but very soft, not fit for steam-purposes. I saw heaps of it: small, dull, dirty-looking stuff. Truck-loads of it too. And truck-loads of grain. At every station we were left ignominiously planted, while the little engines--they had gay gold names on their black little bodies--strolled about along the side-lines, and snuffed at the various trucks. There we sat, at every station, while some truck was discarded and some other sorted out like a branded sheep, from the sidings and hitched on to us. It took a long time, this did. * * * * * All the stations so far had had wire netting over the windows. This means malaria-mosquitoes. The malaria climbs very high in Sardinia. The shallow upland valleys, moorland with their intense summer sun and the riverless, boggy behaviour of the water breed the pest inevitably. But not very terribly, as far as one can make out: August and September being the danger months. The natives don't like to admit there is any malaria: a tiny bit, they say, a tiny bit. As soon as you come to the _trees_ there is no more. So they say. For many miles the landscape is moorland and down-like, with no trees. But wait for the trees. Ah, the woods and forests of Gennargentu: the woods and forests higher up: no malaria there! The little engine whisks up and up, around its loopy curves as if it were going to bite its own tail: we being the tail: then suddenly dives over the sky-line out of sight. And the landscape changes. The famous woods begin to appear. At first it is only hazel-thickets, miles of hazel-thickets, all wild, with a few black cattle trying to peep at us out of the green myrtle and arbutus scrub which forms the undergrowth; and a couple of rare, wild peasants peering at the train. They wear the black sheepskin tunic, with the wool outside, and the long stocking caps. Like cattle they too peer out from between deep bushes. The myrtle scrub here rises man-high, and cattle and men are smothered in it. The big hazels rise bare above. It must be difficult getting about in these parts. Sometimes, in the distance one sees a black-and-white peasant riding lonely across a more open place, a tiny vivid figure. I like so much the proud instinct which makes a living creature distinguish itself from its background. I hate the rabbity khaki protection-colouration. A black-and-white peasant on his pony, only a dot in the distance beyond the foliage, still flashes and dominates the landscape. Ha-ha! proud mankind! There you ride! But alas, most of the men are still khaki-muffled, rabbit-indistinguishable, ignominious. The Italians look curiously rabbity in the grey-green uniform: just as our sand-colored khaki men look doggy. They seem to scuffle rather abased, ignominious on the earth. Give us back the scarlet and gold, and devil take the hindmost. * * * * * The landscape really begins to change. The hillsides tilt sharper and sharper. A man is ploughing with two small red cattle on a craggy, tree-hanging slope as sharp as a roof-side. He stoops at the small wooden plough, and jerks the ploughlines. The oxen lift their noses to heaven, with a strange and beseeching snake-like movement, and taking tiny little steps with their frail feet, move slantingly across the slope-face, between rocks and tree-roots. Little, frail, jerky steps the bullocks take, and again they put their horns back and lift their muzzles snakily to heaven, as the man pulls the line. And he skids his wooden plough round another scoop of earth. It is marvellous how they hang upon that steep, craggy slope. An English labourer's eyes would bolt out of his head at the sight. There is a stream: actually a long tress of a water-fall pouring into a little gorge, and a stream-bed that opens a little, and shows a marvellous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like ghosts. They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness in the shadow of the valley, by the stream of water. If not phosphorescent, then incandescent: a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of naked limbs and myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. If I were a painter I would paint them: for they seem to have living, sentient flesh. And the shadow envelopes them. Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver fig, which burns its cold incandescence, tangled, like some sensitive creature emerged from the rock. A fig tree come forth in its nudity gleaming over the dark winter-earth is a sight to behold. Like some white, tangled sea anemone. Ah, if it could but answer! or if we had tree-speech! * * * * * Yes, the steep valley sides become almost gorges, and there are trees. Not forests such as I had imagined, but scattered, grey, smallish oaks, and some lithe chestnuts. Chestnuts with their long whips, and oaks with their stubby boughs, scattered on steep hillsides where rocks crop out. The train perilously winding round, half way up. Then suddenly bolting over a bridge and into a completely unexpected station. What is more, men crowd in--the station is connected with the main railway by a post motor-omnibus. An unexpected irruption of men--they may be miners or navvies or land-workers. They all have huge sacks: some lovely saddle-bags with rose-coloured flowers across the darkness. One old man is in full black-and-white costume, but very dirty and coming to pieces. The others wear the tight madder-brown breeches and sleeved waistcoats. Some have the sheepskin tunic, and all wear the long stocking cap. And how they smell! of sheep-wool and of men and goat. A rank scent fills the carriage. They talk and are very lively. And they have mediaeval faces, _rusé_, never really abandoning their defences for a moment, as a badger or a pole-cat never abandons its defences. There is none of the brotherliness and civilised simplicity. Each man knows he must guard himself and his own: each man knows the devil is behind the next bush. They have never known the post-Renaissance Jesus. Which is rather an eye-opener. Not that they are suspicious or uneasy. On the contrary, noisy, assertive, vigorous presences. But with none of that implicit belief that everybody will be and ought to be good to them, which is the mark of our era. They don't expect people to be good to them: they don't want it. They remind me of half-wild dogs that will love and obey, but which won't be handled. They won't have their heads touched. And they won't be fondled. One can almost hear the half-savage growl. The long stocking caps they wear as a sort of crest, as a lizard wears his crest at mating time. They are always moving them, settling them on their heads. One fat fellow, young, with sly brown eyes and a young beard round his face folds his stocking-foot in three, so that it rises over his brow martial and handsome. The old boy brings his stocking-foot over the left ear. A handsome fellow with a jaw of massive teeth pushes his cap back and lets it hang a long way down his back. Then he shifts it forward over his nose, and makes it have two sticking-out points, like fox-ears, above his temples. It is marvellous how much expression these caps can take on. They say that only those born to them can wear them. They seem to be just long bags, nearly a yard long, of black stockinette stuff. The conductor comes to issue them their tickets. And they all take out rolls of paper money. Even a little mothy rat of a man who sits opposite me has quite a pad of ten-franc notes. Nobody seems short of a hundred francs nowadays: nobody. They shout and expostulate with the conductor. Full of coarse life they are: but so coarse! The handsome fellow has his sleeved waistcoat open, and his shirt-breast has come unbuttoned. Not looking, it seems as if he wears a black undervest. Then suddenly, one sees it is his own hair. He is quite black inside his shirt, like a black goat. But there is a gulf between oneself and them. They have no inkling of our crucifixion, our universal consciousness. Each of them is pivoted and limited to himself, as the wild animals are. They look out, and they see other objects, objects to ridicule or mistrust or to sniff curiously at. But "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" has never entered their souls at all, not even the thin end of it. They might love their neighbour, with a hot, dark, unquestioning love. But the love would probably leave off abruptly. The fascination of what is beyond them has not seized on them. Their neighbour is a mere external. Their life is centripetal, pivoted inside itself, and does not run out towards others and mankind. One feels for the first time the real old mediaeval life, which is enclosed in itself and has no interest in the world outside. And so they lie about on the seats, play a game, shout, and sleep, and settle their long stocking-caps: and spit. It is wonderful in them that at this time of day they still wear the long stocking-caps as part of their inevitable selves. It is a sign of obstinate and powerful tenacity. They are not going to be broken in upon by world-consciousness. They are not going into the world's common clothes. Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened hell. Their hell is their own hell, they prefer it unenlightened. And one cannot help wondering whether Sardinia will resist right through. Will the last waves of enlightenment and world-unity break over them and wash away the stocking-caps? Or is the tide of enlightenment and world-unity already receding fast enough? Certainly a reaction is setting in, away from the old universality, back, away from cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Russia, with her Third International, is at the same time reacting most violently away from all other contact, back, recoiling on herself, into a fierce, unapproachable Russianism. Which motion will conquer? The workman's International, or the centripetal movement into national isolation? Are we going to merge into one grey proletarian homogeneity?--or are we going to swing back into more-or-less isolated, separate, defiant communities? Probably both. The workman's International movement will finally break the flow towards cosmopolitanism and world-assimilation, and suddenly in a crash the world will fly back into intense separations. The moment has come when America, that extremist in world-assimilation and world-oneness, is reacting into violent egocentricity, a truly Amerindian egocentricity. As sure as fate we are on the brink of American empire. For myself, I am glad. I am glad that the era of love and oneness is over: hateful homogeneous world-oneness. I am glad that Russia flies back into savage Russianism, Scythism, savagely self-pivoting. I am glad that America is doing the same. I shall be glad when men hate their common, world-alike clothes, when they tear them up and clothe themselves fiercely for distinction, savage distinction, savage distinction against the rest of the creeping world: when America kicks the billy-cock and the collar-and-tie into limbo, and takes to her own national costume: when men fiercely react against looking all alike and being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or nation-distinctions. The era of love and oneness is over. The era of world-alike should be at an end. The other tide has set in. Men will set their bonnets at one another now, and fight themselves into separation and sharp distinction. The day of peace and oneness is over, the day of the great fight into multifariousness is at hand. Hasten the day, and save us from proletarian homogeneity and khaki all-alikeness. I love my indomitable coarse men from mountain Sardinia, for their stocking-caps and their splendid, animal-bright stupidity. If only the last wave of all-alikeness won't wash those superb crests, those caps, away. * * * * * We are struggling now among the Gennargentu spurs. There is no single peak--no Etna of Sardinia. The train, like the plough, balances on the steep, steep sides of the hill-spurs, and winds around and around. Above and below the steep slopes are all bosky. These are the woods of Gennargentu. But they aren't woods in my sense of the word. They are thin sprinkles of oaks and chestnuts and cork-trees over steep hill-slopes. And cork-trees! I see curious slim oaky-looking trees that are stripped quite naked below the boughs, standing brown-ruddy, curiously distinct among the bluey grey pallor of the others. They remind me, again and again, of glowing, coffee-brown, naked aborigines of the South Seas. They have the naked suavity, skin-bare, and an intense coffee-red colour of unclothed savages. And these are the stripped cork-trees. Some are much stripped, some little. Some have the whole trunk and part of the lower limbs ruddy naked, some only a small part of the trunk. * * * * * It is well on in the afternoon. A peasant in black and white, and his young, handsome woman in rose-red costume, with gorgeous apron bordered deep with grass-green, and a little, dark-purple waistcoat over her white, full bodice, are sitting behind me talking. The workmen peasants are subsiding into sleep. It is well on in the afternoon, we have long ago eaten the meat. Now we finish the white loaf, the gift, and the tea. Suddenly looking out of the window, we see Gennargentu's mass behind us, a thick snow-deep knot-summit, beautiful beyond the long, steep spurs among which we are engaged. We lose the white mountain mass for half an hour: when suddenly it emerges unexpectedly almost in front, the great, snow-heaved shoulder. How different it is from Etna, that lonely, self-conscious wonder of Sicily! This is much more human and knowable, with a deep breast and massive limbs, a powerful mountain-body. It is like the peasants. * * * * * The stations are far between--an hour from one to another. Ah, how weary one gets of these journeys, they last so long. We look across a valley--a stone's throw. But alas, the little train has no wings, and can't jump. So back turns the line, back and back towards Gennargentu, a long rocky way, till it comes at length to the poor valley-head. This it skirts fussily, and sets off to pelt down on its traces again, gaily. And a man who was looking at us doing our round-about has climbed down and crossed the valley in five minutes. The peasants nearly all wear costumes now, even the women in the fields: the little fields in the half-populated valleys. These Gennargentu valleys are all half-populated, more than the moors further south. It is past three o'clock, and cold where there is no sun. At last only one more station before the terminus. And here the peasants wake up, sling the bulging sacks over their shoulders, and get down. We see Tonara away above. We see our old grimy black-and-white peasant greeted by his two women who have come to meet him with the pony--daughters handsome in vivid rose and green costume. Peasants, men in black and white, men in madder-brown, with the close breeches on their compact thighs, women in rose-and-white, ponies with saddle-bags, all begin to trail up the hill-road in silhouette, very handsome, towards the far-off, perched, sun-bright village of Tonara, a big village, shining like a New Jerusalem. * * * * * The train as usual leaves us standing, and shuffles with trucks--water sounds in the valley: there are stacks of cork on the station, and coal. An idiot girl in a great full skirt entirely made of coloured patches mops and mows. Her little waistcoat thing is also incredibly old, and shows faint signs of having once been a lovely purple and black brocade. The valley and steep slopes are open about us. An old shepherd has a lovely flock of delicate merino sheep. And at last we move. In one hour we shall be there. As we travel among the tree slopes, many brown cork-trees, we come upon a flock of sheep. Two peasants in our carriage looking out, give the most weird, unnatural, high-pitched shrieks, entirely unproduceable by any ordinary being. The sheep know, however, and scatter. And after ten minutes the shrieks start again, for three young cattle. Whether the peasants do it for love, I don't know. But it is the wildest and weirdest inhuman shepherd noise I have ever heard. * * * * * It is Saturday afternoon and four o'clock. The country is wild and uninhabited, the train almost empty, yet there is the leaving-off-work feeling in the atmosphere. Oh twisty, wooded, steep slopes, oh glimpses of Gennargentu, oh nigger-stripped cork-trees, oh smell of peasants, oh wooden, wearisome railway carriage, we are so sick of you! Nearly seven hours of this journey already: and a distance of sixty miles. But we are almost there--look, look, Sorgono, nestling beautifully among the wooded slopes in front. Oh magic little town. Ah, you terminus and ganglion of the inland roads, we hope in you for a pleasant inn and happy company. Perhaps we will stay a day or two at Sorgono. The train gives a last sigh, and draws to a last standstill in the tiny terminus station. An old fellow fluttering with rags as a hen in the wind flutters, asked me if I wanted the _Albergo_, the inn. I said yes, and let him take my knapsack. Pretty Sorgono! As we went down the brief muddy lane between hedges, to the village high-road, we seemed almost to have come to some little town in the English west-country, or in Hardy's country. There were glades of stripling oaks, and big slopes with oak trees, and on the right a saw-mill buzzing, and on the left the town, white and close, nestling round a baroque church-tower. And the little lane was muddy. Three minutes brought us to the high-road, and a great, pink-washed building blank on the road facing the station lane, and labelled in huge letters: RISTORANTE RISVEGLIO: the letter N being printed backwards. _Risveglio_ if you please: which means waking up or rousing, like the word _reveille_. Into the doorway of the Risveglio bolted the flutterer. "Half a minute," said I. "Where is the Albergo d'Italia?" I was relying on Baedeker. "Non c'è più," replied my rag-feather. "There isn't it any more." This answer, being very frequent nowadays, is always most disconcerting. "Well then, what other hotel?" "There is no other." Risveglio or nothing. In we go. We pass into a big, dreary bar, where are innumerable bottles behind a tin counter. Flutter-jack yells: and at length appears mine host, a youngish fellow of the Esquimo type, but rather bigger, in a dreary black suit and a cutaway waistcoat suggesting a dinner-waistcoat, and innumerable wine-stains on his shirt front. I instantly hated him for the filthy appearance he made. He wore a battered hat and his face was long unwashed. Was there a bedroom? Yes. And he led the way down the passage, just as dirty as the road outside, up the hollow, wooden stairs also just as clean as the passage, along a hollow, drum-rearing dirty corridor, and into a bedroom. Well, it contained a large bed, thin and flat with a grey-white counterpane, like a large, poor, marble-slabbed tomb in the room's sordid emptiness; one dilapidated chair on which stood the miserablest weed of a candle I have ever seen: a broken wash-saucer in a wire ring: and for the rest, an expanse of wooden floor as dirty-grey-black as it could be, and an expanse of wall charted with the bloody deaths of mosquitoes. The window was about two feet above the level of a sort of stable-yard outside, with a fowl-house just by the sash. There, at the window flew lousy feathers and dirty straw, the ground was thick with chicken-droppings. An ass and two oxen comfortably chewed hay in an open shed just across, and plump in the middle of the yard lay a bristly black pig taking the last of the sun. Smells of course were varied. The knapsack and the kitchenino were dropped on the repulsive floor, which I hated to touch with my boots even. I turned back the sheets and looked at other people's stains. "There is nothing else?" "Niente," said he of the lank, low forehead and beastly shirt-breast. And he sullenly departed. I gave the flutterer his tip and he too ducked and fled. Then the queen-bee and I took a few mere sniffs. "Dirty, disgusting swine!" said I, and I was in a rage. I could have forgiven him anything, I think, except his horrible shirt-breast, his personal shamelessness. We strolled round--saw various other bedrooms, some worse, one really better. But this showed signs of being occupied. All the doors were open: the place was quite deserted, and open to the road. The one thing that seemed definite was honesty. It must be a very honest place, for every footed beast, man or animal, could walk in at random and nobody to take the slightest regard. So we went downstairs. The only other apartment was the open public bar, which seemed like part of the road. A muleteer, leaving his mules at the corner of the Risveglio, was drinking at the counter. * * * * * This famous inn was at the end of the village. We strolled along the road between the houses, down-hill. A dreary hole! a cold, hopeless, lifeless, Saturday afternoon-weary village, rather sordid, with nothing to say for itself. No real shops at all. A weary-looking church, and a clutch of disconsolate houses. We walked right through the village. In the middle was a sort of open space where stood a great, grey motor-omnibus. And a bus-driver looking rather weary. Where did the bus go? It went to join the main railway. When? At half-past seven in the morning. Only then? Only then. "Thank God we can get out, anyhow," said I. We passed on, and emerged beyond the village, still on the descending great high-road that was mended with loose stones pitched on it. This wasn't good enough. Besides, we were out of the sun, and the place being at a considerable elevation, it was very cold. So we turned back, to climb quickly uphill into the sun. * * * * * We went up a little side-turning past a bunch of poor houses towards a steep little lane between banks. And before we knew where we were, we were in the thick of the public lavatory. In these villages, as I knew, there are no sanitary arrangements of any sort whatever. Every villager and villageress just betook himself at need to one of the side-roads. It is the immemorial Italian custom. Why bother about privacy? The most socially-constituted people on earth, they even like to relieve themselves in company. We found ourselves in the full thick of one of these meeting-places. To get out at any price! So we scrambled up the steep earthen banks to a stubble field above. And by this time I was in a greater rage. * * * * * Evening was falling, the sun declining. Below us clustered the Sodom-apple of this vile village. Around were fair, tree-clad hills and dales, already bluish with the frost-shadows. The air bit cold and strong. In a very little time the sun would be down. We were at an elevation of about 2,500 feet above the sea. No denying it was beautiful, with the oak-slopes and the wistfulness and the far-off feeling of loneliness and evening. But I was in too great a temper to admit it. We clambered frenziedly to get warm. And the sun immediately went right down, and the ice-heavy blue shadow fell over us all. The village began to send forth blue wood-smoke, and it seemed more than ever like the twilit West Country. But thank you--we had to get back. And run the gauntlet of that stinking, stinking lane? Never. Towering with fury--quite unreasonable, but there you are--I marched the q-b down a declivity through a wood, over a ploughed field, along a cart-track, and so to the great high-road above the village and above the inn. It was cold, and evening was falling into dusk. Down the high-road came wild half-ragged men on ponies, in all degrees of costume and not-costume: came four wide-eyed cows stepping down-hill round the corner, and three delicate, beautiful merino sheep which stared at us with their prominent, gold-curious eyes: came an ancient, ancient man with a stick: came a stout-chested peasant carrying a long wood-pole: came a straggle of alert and triumphant goats, long-horned, long-haired, jingling their bells. Everybody greeted us hesitatingly. And everything came to a halt at the Risveglio corner, while the men had a nip. I attacked the spotty-breast again. Could I have milk? No. Perhaps in an hour there would be milk. Perhaps not. Was there anything to eat? No--at half past seven there would be something to eat. Was there a fire? No--the man hadn't made the fire. Nothing to do but to go to that foul bedroom or walk the high-road. We turned up the high-road again. Animals stood about the road in the frost-heavy air, with heads sunk passively, waiting for the men to finish their drinks in the beastly bar--we walked slowly up the hill. In a field on the right a flock of merino sheep moved mistily, uneasily, climbing at the gaps in the broken road bank, and sounding their innumerable small fine bells with a frosty ripple of sound. A figure which in the dusk I had really thought was something inanimate broke into movement in the field. It was an old shepherd, very old, in very ragged dirty black-and-white, who had been standing like a stone there in the open field-end for heaven knows how long, utterly motionless, leaning on his stick. Now he broke into a dream-motion and hobbled after the wistful, feminine, inquisitive sheep. The red was fading from the far-off west. At the corner, climbing slowly and wearily, we almost ran into a grey and lonely bull, who came stepping down-hill in his measured fashion like some god. He swerved his head and went round us. We reached a place which we couldn't make out: then saw it was a cork-shed. There were stacks and stacks of cork-bark in the dusk, like crumpled hides. "Now I'm going back," said the q-b flatly, and she swung round. The last red was smouldering beyond the lost, thin-wooded hills of this interior. A fleece of blue, half-luminous smoke floated over the obscure village. The high-way wound down-hill at our feet, pale and blue. And the q-b was angry with me for my fury. "Why are you so indignant! Anyone would think your moral self had been outraged! Why take it morally? You petrify that man at the inn by the very way you speak to him, _such_ condemnation! Why don't you take it as it comes? It's all life." But no, my rage is black, black, black. Why, heaven knows. But I think it was because Sorgono had seemed so fascinating to me, when I imagined it beforehand. Oh so fascinating! If I had expected nothing I should not have been so hit. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed. I cursed the degenerate aborigines, the dirty-breasted host who _dared_ to keep such an inn, the sordid villagers who had the baseness to squat their beastly human nastiness in this upland valley. All my praise of the long stocking-cap--you remember?--vanished from my mouth. I cursed them all, and the q-b for an interfering female.... * * * * * In the bar a wretched candle was weeping light--uneasy, gloomy men were drinking their Saturday-evening-home-coming dram. Cattle lay down in the road, in the cold air as if hopeless. Had the milk come? No. When would it come. He didn't know. Well, what were we to do? Was there no room? Was there nowhere where we could sit? Yes, there was the _stanza_ now. _Now!_ Taking the only weed of a candle, and leaving the drinkers in the dark, he led us down a dark and stumbly earthen passage, over loose stones and an odd plank, as it would seem underground, to the stanza: the room. The stanza! It was pitch dark--But suddenly I saw a big fire of oak-root, a brilliant, flamy, rich fire, and my rage in that second disappeared. The host, and the candle, forsook us at the door. The stanza would have been in complete darkness, save for that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney, like fresh flowers. By this firelight we saw the room. It was like a dungeon, absolutely empty, with an uneven, earthen floor, quite dry, and high bare walls, gloomy, with a handbreadth of window high up. There was no furniture at all, save a little wooden bench, a foot high, before the fire, and several home-made-looking rush mats rolled up and leaning against the walls. Furthermore a chair before the fire on which hung wet table-napkins. Apart from this, it was a high, dark, naked prison-dungeon. But it was quite dry, it had an open chimney, and a gorgeous new fire rushing like a water-fall upwards among the craggy stubs of a pile of dry oak roots. I hastily put the chair and the wet corpse-cloths to one side. We sat on the low bench side by side in the dark, in front of this rippling rich fire, in front of the cavern of the open chimney, and we did not care any more about the dungeon and the darkness. Man can live without food, but he can't live without fire. It is an Italian proverb. We had found the fire, like new gold. And we sat in front of it, a little way back, side by side on the low form, our feet on the uneven earthen floor, and felt the flame-light rippling upwards over our faces, as if we were bathing in some gorgeous stream of fieriness. I forgave the dirty-breasted host everything and was as glad as if I had come into a kingdom. So we sat alone for half an hour, smiling into the flames, bathing our faces in the glow. From time to time I was aware of steps in the tunnel-like passage outside, and of presences peering. But no one came. I was aware too of the faint steaming of the beastly table-napkins, the only other occupants of the room. * * * * * In dithers a candle, and an elderly, bearded man in gold-coloured corduroys, and an amazing object on a long, long spear. He put the candle on the mantel-ledge, and crouched at the side of the fire, arranging the oak-roots. He peered strangely and fixedly in the fire. And he held up the speared object before our faces. It was a kid that he had come to roast. But it was a kid opened out, made quite flat, and speared like a flat fan on a long iron stalk. It was a really curious sight. And it must have taken some doing. The whole of the skinned kid was there, the head curled in against a shoulder, the stubby cut ears, the eyes, the teeth, the few hairs of the nostrils: and the feet curled curiously round, like an animal that puts its fore-paw over its ducked head: and the hind-legs twisted indescribably up: and all skewered flat-wise upon the long iron rod, so that it was a complete flat pattern. It reminded me intensely of those distorted, slim-limbed, dog-like animals which figure on the old Lombard ornaments, distorted and curiously infolded upon themselves. Celtic illuminations also have these distorted, involuted creatures. The old man flourished the flat kid like a bannerette, whilst he arranged the fire. Then, in one side of the fire-place wall he poked the point of the rod. He himself crouched on the hearth-end, in the half-shadow at the other side of the fire-place, holding the further end of the long iron rod. The kid was thus extended before the fire, like a hand-screen. And he could spin it round at will. [Illustration: SORONGO] But the hole in the masonry of the chimney-piece was not satisfactory. The point of the rod kept slipping, and the kid came down against the fire. He muttered and muttered to himself, and tried again. Then at length he reared up the kid-banner whilst he got large stones from a dark corner. He arranged these stones so that the iron point rested on them. He himself sat away on the opposite side of the fire-place, on the shadowy hearth-end, and with queer, spell-bound black eyes and completely immovable face, he watched the flames and the kid, and held the handle end of the rod. We asked him if the kid was for the evening meal--and he said it was. It would be good! And he said yes, and looked with chagrin at the bit of ash on the meat, where it had slipped. It is a point of honour that it should never touch the ash. Did they do all their meat this way? He said they did. And wasn't it difficult to put the kid thus on the iron rod? He said it was not easy, and he eyed the joint closely, and felt one of the forelegs, and muttered that was not fixed properly. He spoke with a very soft mutter, hard to catch, and sideways, never to us direct. But his manner was gentle, soft, muttering, reticent, sensitive. He asked us where we came from, and where we were going: always in his soft mutter. And what nation were we, were we French? Then he went on to say there was a war--but he thought it was finished. There was a war because the Austrians wanted to come into Italy again. But the French and the English came to help Italy. A lot of Sardinians had gone to it. But let us hope it is all finished. He thought it was--young men of Sorgono had been killed. He hoped it was finished. Then he reached for the candle and peered at the kid. It was evident he was the born roaster. He held the candle and looked for a long time at the sizzling side of the meat, as if he would read portents. Then he held his spit to the fire again. And it was as if time immemorial were roasting itself another meal. I sat holding the candle. * * * * * A young woman appeared, hearing voices. Her head was swathed in a shawl, one side of which was brought across, right over the mouth, so that only her two eyes and her nose showed. The q-b thought she must have toothache--but she laughed and said no. As a matter of fact that is the way a head-dress is worn in Sardinia, even by both sexes. It is something like the folding of the Arab's burnoose. The point seems to be that the mouth and chin are thickly covered, also the ears and brow, leaving only the nose and eyes exposed. They say it keeps off the malaria. The men swathe shawls round their heads in the same way. It seems to me they want to keep their heads warm, dark and hidden: they feel secure inside. She wore the workaday costume: a full, dark-brown skirt, the full white bodice, and a little waistcoat or corset. This little waistcoat in her case had become no more than a shaped belt, sending up graceful, stiffened points under the breasts, like long leaves standing up. It was pretty--but all dirty. She too was pretty, but with an impudent, not quite pleasant manner. She fiddled with the wet napkins, asked us various questions, and addressed herself rather jerkily to the old man, who answered hardly at all--Then she departed again. The women are self-conscious in a rather smirky way, bouncy. When she was gone I asked the old man if she was his daughter. He said very brusquely, in his soft mutter, No. She came from a village some miles away. He did not belong to the inn. He was, as far as I understood, the postman. But I may have been mistaken about the word. But he seemed laconic, unwilling to speak about the inn and its keepers. There seemed to be something queer. And again he asked where we were going. He told me there were now two motor-buses: a new one which ran over the mountains to Nuoro. Much better go to Nuoro than to Abbasanta. Nuoro was evidently the town towards which these villages looked, as a sort of capital. * * * * * The kid-roasting proceeded very slowly, the meat never being very near the fire. From time to time the roaster arranged the cavern of red-hot roots. Then he threw on more roots. It was very hot. And he turned the long spit, and still I held the candle. Other people came strolling in, to look at us. But they hovered behind us in the dark, so I could not make out at all clearly. They strolled in the gloom of the dungeon-like room, and watched us. One came forward--a fat, fat young soldier in uniform. I made place for him on the bench--but he put out his hand and disclaimed the attention. Then he went away again. The old man propped up the roast, and then he too disappeared for a time. The thin candle guttered, the fire was no longer flamy but red. The roaster reappeared with a new, shorter spear, thinner, and a great lump of raw hog-fat spitted on it. This he thrust into the red fire. It sizzled and smoked and spit fat, and I wondered. He told me he wanted it to catch fire. It refused. He groped in the hearth for the bits of twigs with which the fire had been started. These twig-stumps he stuck in the fat, like an orange stuck with cloves, then he held it in the fire again. Now at last it caught, and it was a flaming torch running downwards with a thin shower of flaming fat. And now he was satisfied. He held the fat-torch with its yellow flares over the browning kid, which he turned horizontal for the occasion. All over the roast fell the flaming drops, till the meat was all shiny and browny. He put it to the fire again, holding the diminishing fat, still burning bluish, over it all the time in the upper air. * * * * * While this was in process a man entered with a loud _Good evening_. We replied Good-evening--and evidently he caught a strange note. He came and bent down and peered under my hat-brim, then under the q-b's hat-brim, we still wore hats and overcoats, as did everybody. Then he stood up suddenly and touched his cap and said _Scusi_--excuse me. I said _Niente_, which one always says, and he addressed a few jovial words to the crouching roaster: who again would hardly answer him. The omnibus was arrived from Oristano, I made out--with few passengers. This man brought with him a new breezy atmosphere, which the roaster did not like. However, I made place on the low bench, and the attention this time was accepted. Sitting down at the extreme end, he came into the light, and I saw a burly man in the prime of life, dressed in dark brown velvet, with a blond little moustache and twinkling blue eyes and a tipsy look. I thought he might be some local tradesman or farmer. He asked a few questions, in a boisterous familiar fashion, then went out again. He appeared with a small iron spit, a slim rod, in one hand, and in the other hand two joints of kid and a handful of sausages. He stuck his joints on his rod. But our roaster still held the interminable flat kid before the now red, flameless fire. The fat-torch was burnt out, the cinder pushed in the fire. A moment's spurt of flame, then red, intense redness again, and our kid before it like a big, dark hand. "Eh," said the newcomer, whom I will call the girovago, "it's done. The kid's done. It's done." The roaster slowly shook his head, but did not answer. He sat like time and eternity at the hearth-end, his face flame-flushed, his dark eyes still fire-abstract, still sacredly intent on the roast. "Na-na-na!" said the girovago. "Let another body see the fire." And with his pieces of meat awkwardly skewered on his iron stick he tried to poke under the authorised kid and get at the fire. In his soft mutter, the old man bade him wait for the fire till the fire was ready for him. But the girovago poked impudently and good humouredly, and said testily that the authorised kid was done. "Yes, surely it is done," said I, for it was already a quarter to eight. The old roasting priest muttered, and took out his knife from his pocket. He pressed the blade slowly, slowly deep into the meat: as far as a knife will go in a piece of kid. He seemed to be feeling the meat inwardly. And he said it was not done. He shook his head, and remained there like time and eternity at the end of the rod. The girovago said _Sangue di Dio_, but couldn't roast his meat! And he tried to poke his skewer near the coals. So doing his pieces fell off into the ashes, and the invisible onlookers behind raised a shout of laughter. However, he raked it out and wiped it with his hand and said No matter, nothing lost. Then he turned to me and asked the usual whence and whither questions. These answered, he said wasn't I German. I said No, I was English. He looked at me many times, shrewdly, as if he wanted to make out something. Then he asked, where were we domiciled--and I said Sicily. And then, very pertinently, why had we come to Sardinia. I said for pleasure, and to see the island. "Ah, per divertimento!" he repeated, half-musingly, not believing me in the least. Various men had now come into the room, though they all remained indistinct in the background. The girovago talked and jested abroad in the company, and the half-visible men laughed in a rather hostile manner. At last the old roaster decided the kid was done. He lifted it from the fire and scrutinised it thoroughly, holding the candle to it, as if it were some wonderful epistle from the flames. To be sure it looked marvellous, and smelled so good: brown, and crisp, and hot, and savoury, not burnt in any place whatever. It was eight o'clock. "It's done! It's done! Go away with it! Go," said the girovago, pushing the old roaster with his hand. And at last the old man consented to depart, holding the kid like a banner. "It looks so _good_!" cried the q-b. "And I am so hungry." "Ha-ha! It makes one hungry to see good meat, Signora. Now it is my turn. Heh--Gino--" the girovago flourished his arm. And a handsome, unwashed man with a black moustache came forward rather sheepishly. He was dressed in soldier's clothes, neutral grey, and was a big, robust, handsome fellow with dark eyes and Mediterranean sheepishness. "Here, take it thou," said the girovago, pressing the long spit into his hand. "It is thy business, cook the supper, thou art the woman.--But I'll keep the sausages and do them." The so-called woman sat at the end of the hearth, where the old roaster had sat, and with his brown, nervous hand piled the remaining coals together. The fire was no longer flamy: and it was sinking. The dark-browed man arranged it so that he could cook the meat. He held the spit negligently over the red mass. A joint fell off. The men laughed. "It's lost nothing," said the dark-browed man, as the girovago had said before, and he skewered it on again and thrust it to the fire. But meanwhile he was looking up from under his dark lashes at the girovago and at us. The girovago talked continually. He turned to me, holding the handful of sausages. "This makes the tasty bit," he said. "Oh yes--good salsiccia," said I. "You are eating the kid? You are eating at the inn?" he said. I replied that I was. "No," he said. "You stay and eat with me. You eat with me. The sausage is good, the kid will soon be done, the fire is grateful." I laughed, not quite understanding him. He was certainly a bit tipsy. "Signora," he said, turning to the q-b. She did not like him, he was impudent, and she shut a deaf ear to him as far as she could. "Signora," he said, "do you understand me what I say?" She replied that she did. "Signora," he said, "I sell things to the women. I sell them things." "What do you sell?" she asked in astonishment. "Saints," he said. "Saints!" she cried in more astonishment. "Yes, saints," he said with tipsy gravity. She turned in confusion to the company in the background. The fat soldier came forward, he was the chief of the carabinieri. "Also combs and bits of soap and little mirrors," he explained sarcastically. "Saints!" said the girovago once more. "And also _ragazzini_--also youngsters--Wherever I go there is a little one comes running calling Babbo! Babbo! Daddy! Daddy! Wherever I go--youngsters. And I'm the babbo." All this was received with a kind of silent sneer from the invisible assembly in the background. The candle was burning low, the fire was sinking too. In vain the dark-browed man tried to build it up. The q-b became impatient for the food. She got up wrathfully and stumbled into the dark passage, exclaiming--"Don't we eat yet?" "Eh--Patience! Patience, Signora. It takes time in this house," said the man in the background. The dark-browed man looked up at the girovago and said: "Are you going to cook the sausages with your fingers?" He too was trying to be assertive and jesting, but he was the kind of person no one takes any notice of. The girovago rattled on in dialect, poking fun at us and at our being there in this inn. I did not quite follow. "Signora!" said the girovago. "Do you understand Sardinian?" "I understand Italian--and some Sardinian," she replied rather hotly. "And I know that you are trying to laugh at us--to make fun of us." He laughed fatly and comfortably. "Ah Signora," he said. "We have a language that you wouldn't understand--not one word. Nobody here would understand it but me and him--" he pointed to the black-browed one. "Everybody would want an interpreter--everybody." But he did not say interpreter--he said _intreprete_, with the accent on the penultimate, as if it were some sort of priest. "A what?" said I. He repeated with tipsy unction, and I saw what he meant. "Why?" said I. "Is it a dialect? What is your dialect?" "My dialect," he said, "is Sassari. I come from Sassari. If I spoke my dialect they would understand something. But if I speak this language they would want an interpreter." "What language is it then?" He leaned up to me, laughing. "It is the language we use when the women are buying things and we don't want them to know what we say: me and him--" "Oh," said I. "I know. We have that language in England. It is called thieves Latin--_Latino dei furbi_." The men at the back suddenly laughed, glad to turn the joke against the forward girovago. He looked down his nose at me. But seeing I was laughing without malice, he leaned to me and said softly, secretly: "What is your affair then? What affair is it, yours?" "How? What?" I exclaimed, not understanding. "_Che genere di affari?_ What sort of business?" "How--_affari_?" said I, still not grasping. "What do you _sell_?" he said, flatly and rather spitefully. "What goods?" "I don't sell anything," replied I, laughing to think he took us for some sort of strolling quacks or commercial travellers. "Cloth--or something," he said cajolingly, slyly, as if to worm my secret out of me. "But nothing at all. Nothing at all," said I. "We have come to Sardinia to see the peasant costumes--" I thought that might sound satisfactory. "Ah, the costumes!" he said, evidently thinking I was a deep one. And he turned bandying words with his dark-browed mate, who was still poking the meat at the embers and crouching on the hearth. The room was almost quite dark. The mate answered him back, and tried to seem witty too. But the girovago was the commanding personality! rather too much so: too impudent for the q-b, though rather after my own secret heart. The mate was one of those handsome, passive, stupid men. "Him!" said the girovago, turning suddenly to me and pointing at the mate. "He's my wife." "Your wife!" said I. "Yes. He's my wife, because we're always together." There had become a sudden dead silence in the background. In spite of it the mate looked up under his black lashes and said, with a half smile: "Don't talk, or I shall give thee a good _bacio_ to-night." There was an instant's fatal pause, then the girovago continued: "Tomorrow is festa of Sant 'Antonio at Tonara. Tomorrow we are going to Tonara. Where are you going?" "To Abbasanta," said I. "Ah Abbasanta! You should come to Tonara. At Tonara there is a brisk trade--and there are costumes. You should come to Tonara. Come with him and me to Tonara tomorrow, and we will do business together." I laughed, but did not answer. "Come," said he. "You will like Tonara! Ah, Tonara is a fine place. There is an inn: you can eat well, sleep well. I tell you, because to you ten francs don't matter. Isn't that so? Ten francs don't matter to you. Well, then come to Tonara. What? What do you say?" I shook my head and laughed, but did not answer. To tell the truth I should have liked to go to Tonara with him and his mate and do the brisk trade: if only I knew what trade it would be. "You are sleeping upstairs?" he said to me. I nodded. "This is my bed," he said, taking one of the home-made rush mats from against the wall. I did not take him seriously at any point. "Do they make those in Sorgono?" I said. "Yes, in Sorgono--they are the beds, you see! And you roll up this end a bit--so! and that is the pillow." He laid his cheek sideways. "Not really," said I. He came and sat down again next to me, and my attention wandered. The q-b was raging for her dinner. It must be quite half-past eight. The kid, the perfect kid would be cold and ruined. Both fire and candle were burning low. Someone had been out for a new candle, but there was evidently no means of replenishing the fire. The mate still crouched on the hearth, the dull red fire-glow on his handsome face, patiently trying to roast the kid and poking it against the embers. He had heavy, strong limbs in his khaki clothes, but his hand that held the spit was brown and tender and sensitive, a real Mediterranean hand. The girovago, blond, round-faced, mature and aggressive with all his liveliness, was more like a northerner. In the background were four or five other men, of whom I had distinguished none but a stout soldier, probably chief carabiniere. * * * * * Just as the q-b was working up to the rage I had at last calmed down from, appeared the shawl-swathed girl announcing "Pronto!" "Pronto! Pronto!" said everybody. "High time, too," said the q-b, springing from the low bench before the fire. "Where do we eat? Is there another room?" "There is another room, Signora," said the carabiniere. So we trooped out of the fire-warmed dungeon, leaving the girovago and his mate and two other men, muleteers from the road, behind us. I could see that it irked my girovago to be left behind. He was by far the strongest personality in the place, and he had the keenest intelligence. So he hated having to fall into the background, when he had been dragging all the lime-light on to himself all the evening. To me, too, he was something of a kindred soul that night. But there we are: fate, in the guise of that mysterious division between a respectable life and a scamp's life divided us. There was a gulf between me and him, between my way and his. He was a kindred spirit--but with a hopeless difference. There was something a bit sordid about him--and he knew it. That is why he was always tipsy. Yet I like the lone wolf souls best--better than the sheep. If only they didn't feel mongrel inside themselves. Presumably a scamp is bound to be mongrel. It is a pity the untamable, lone-wolf souls should always become pariahs, almost of choice: mere scamps. Top and bottom of it is, I regretted my girovago, though I knew it was no good thinking of him. His way was _not_ my way. Yet I regretted him, I did. * * * * * We found ourselves in a dining room with a long white table and inverted soup-plates, tomb-cold, lighted by an acetylene flare. Three men had accompanied us: the carabiniere, a little dark youth with a small black moustache, in a soldier's short, wool-lined great-coat: and a young man who looked tired round his blue eyes, and who wore a dark-blue overcoat, quite smart. The be-shawled damsel came in with the inevitable bowl of minestrone, soup with cabbage and cauliflower and other things. We helped ourselves, and the fat carabiniere started the conversation with the usual questions--and where were we going tomorrow? I asked about buses. Then the responsible-looking, tired-eyed youth told me he was the bus-driver. He had come from Oristano, on the main line, that day. It is a distance of some forty miles. Next morning he was going on over the mountains to Nuoro--about the same distance again. The youth with the little black moustache and the Greek, large eyes, was his mate, the conductor. This was their run, from Oristano to Nuoro--a course of ninety miles or more. And every day on, on, on. No wonder he looked nerve-tired. Yet he had that kind of dignity, the wistful seriousness and pride of a man in machine control: the only god-like ones today, those who pull the iron levers and are the gods in the machine. They repeated what the old roaster said: much nicer for us to go to Nuoro than to Abbasanta. So to Nuoro we decided to go, leaving at half-past nine in the morning. * * * * * Every other night the driver and his mate spent in this benighted Risveglio inn. It must have been their bedroom we saw, clean and tidy. I said was the food always so late, was everything always as bad as today. Always--if not worse, they said, making light of it, with sarcastic humor against the Risveglio. You spent your whole life at the Risveglio sitting, waiting, and going block-cold: unless you were content to drink _aqua vitae_, like those in there. The driver jerked his head towards the dungeon. "Who were those in there?" said I. The one who did all the talking was a mercante, a mercante girovago, a wandering peddler. This was my girovago: a wandering peddler selling saints and youngsters! The other was his mate, who helped carry the pack. They went about together. Oh, my girovago was a known figure all over the country.--And where would they sleep? There, in the room where the fire was dying. They would unroll the mats and lie with their feet to the hearth. For this they paid threepence, or at most fourpence. And they had the privilege of cooking their own food. The Risveglio supplied them with nothing but the fire, the roof, and the rush mat.--And, of course, the drink. Oh, we need have no sympathy with the girovago and his sort. _They_ lacked for nothing. They had everything they wanted: everything: and money in abundance. _They_ lived for the _aqua vitae_ they drank. That was all they wanted: their continual allowance of _aqua vitae_. And they got it. Ah, they were not cold. If the room became cold during the night: if they had no coverings at all: pah, they waited for morning, and as soon as it was light they drank a large glass of _aqua vitae_. That was their fire, their hearth and their home: drink. _Aqua vitae_, was hearth and home to them. I was surprised at the contempt, tolerant and yet profound, with which these three men in the dining-room spoke of the others in the _stanza_. How contemptuous, almost bitter, the driver was against alcohol. It was evident he hated it. And though we all had our bottles of dead-cold dark wine, and though we all drank: still, the feeling of the three youths against actual intoxication was deep and hostile, with a certain burning _moral_ dislike that is more northern than Italian. And they curled their lip with real dislike of the girovago: his forwardness, his impudent aggressiveness. * * * * * As for the inn, yes, it was very bad. It had been quite good under the previous proprietors. But now--they shrugged their shoulders. The dirty-breast and the shawled girl were not the owners. They were merely conductors of the hotel: here a sarcastic curl of the lip. The owner was a man in the village--a young man. A week or two back, at Christmas time, there had been a roomful of men sitting drinking and roistering at this very table. When in had come the proprietor, mad-drunk, swinging a litre bottle round his head and yelling: "Out! Out! Out, all of you! Out every one of you! I am proprietor here. And when I want to clear my house I clear my house. Every man obeys--who doesn't obey has his brains knocked out with this bottle. Out, out, I say--Out, everyone!" And the men all cleared out. "But," said the bus-driver, "I told him that when I had paid for my bed I was going to sleep in it. I was not going to be turned out by him or anybody. And so he came down." * * * * * There was a little silence from everybody after this story. Evidently there was more to it, that we were not to be told. Especially the carabiniere was silent. He was a fat, not very brave fellow, though quite nice. Ah, but--said the little dark bus-conductor, with his small-featured swarthy Greek face--you must not be angry with them. True the inn was very bad. Very bad--but you must pity them, for they are only ignorant. Poor things, they are _ignoranti_! Why be angry? The other two men nodded their heads in agreement and repeated _ignoranti_. They are _ignoranti_. It is true. Why be angry? And here the modern Italian spirit came out: the endless pity for the ignorant. It is only slackness. The pity makes the ignorant more ignorant, and makes the Risveglio daily more impossible. If somebody let a bottle buzz round the ears of the dirty-breast, and whipped the shawl from the head of the pert young madam and sent her flying down the tunnel with a flea in her ear, we might get some attention and they might find a little self-respect. But no: pity them, poor _ignoranti_, while they pull life down and devour it like vermin. Pity them! What they need is not pity but prods: they and all their myriad of likes. * * * * * The be-shawled appeared with a dish of kid. Needless to say, the _ignoranti_ had kept all the best portions for themselves. What arrived was five pieces of cold roast, one for each of us. Mine was a sort of large comb of ribs with a thin web of meat: perhaps an ounce. That was all we got, after watching the whole process. There was moreover a dish of strong boiled cauliflower, which one ate, with the coarse bread, out of sheer hunger. After this a bilious orange. Simply one is not _fed_ nowadays. In the good hotels and in the bad, one is given paltry portions of unnourishing food, and one goes unfed. * * * * * The bus-driver, the only one with an earnest soul, was talking of the Sardinians. Ah, the Sardinians! They were hopeless. Why--because they did not know how to strike. They, too, were _ignoranti_. But this form of ignorance he found more annoying. They simply did not know what a strike was. If you offered them one day ten francs a stint--he was speaking now of the miners of the Iglesias region.--No, no, no, they would not take it, they wanted twelve francs. Go to them the next day and offer them four francs for half a stint, and yes, yes, yes, they would take it. And there they were: ignorant: ignorant Sardinians. They absolutely did not know how to strike. He was quite sarcastically hot about it. The whole tone of these three young men was the tone of sceptical irony common to the young people of our day the world over. Only they had--or at least the driver had--some little fervour for his strikes and his socialism. But it was a pathetic fervour: a _pis-aller_ fervour. * * * * * We talked about the land. The war has practically gutted Sardinia of her cattle: so they said. And now the land is being deserted, the arable land is going back to fallow. Why? Why, says the driver, because the owners of the land won't spend any capital. They have got the capital locked up, and the land is dead. They find it cheaper to let all the arable go back to fallow, and raise a few head of cattle, rather than to pay high wages, grow corn, and get small returns. Yes, and also, chimes in the carabiniere, the peasants don't want to work the land. They hate the land. They'll do anything to get off the land. They want regular wages, short hours, and devil take the rest. So they will go into France as navvies, by the hundred. They flock to Rome, they besiege the Labor bureaus, they will do the artificial Government navvy-work at a miserable five francs a day--a railway shunter having at least eighteen francs a day--anything, anything rather than work the land. Yes, and what does the Government do! replies the bus-driver. They pull the roads to pieces in order to find work for the unemployed, remaking them, across the campagna. But in Sardinia, where roads and bridges are absolutely wanting, will they do anything? No! There it is, however. The bus-driver, with dark shadows under his eyes, represents the intelligent portion of the conversation. The carabiniere is soft and will go any way, though always with some interest. The little Greek-looking conductor just does not care. * * * * * Enters another belated traveller, and takes a seat at the end of the table. The be-shawled brings him soup and a skinny bit of kid. He eyes this last with contempt, and fetches out of his bag a large hunk of roast pork, and bread, and black olives, thus proceeding to make a proper meal. [Illustration: FONNI] We being without cigarettes, the bus-driver and his companion press them on us: their beloved Macedonia cigarettes. The driver says they are _squisitissimi_--most, most exquisite--so exquisite that all foreigners want them. In truth I believe they are exported to Germany now. And they are quite good, when they really have tobacco in them. Usually they are hollow tubes of paper which just flare away under one's nose and are done. We decide to have a round drink: they choose the precious _aqua vitae_: the white sort I think. At last it arrives--when the little dark-eyed one has fetched it. And it tastes rather like sweetened petroleum, with a dash of aniseed: filthy. Most Italian liquors are now sweet and filthy. At length we rise to go to bed. We shall all meet in the morning. And this room is dead cold, with frost outside. Going out, we glance into the famous stanza. One figure alone lies stretched on the floor in the almost complete darkness. A few embers still glow. The other men no doubt are in the bar. Ah, the filthy bedroom. The q-b ties up her head in a large, clean white kerchief, to avoid contact with the unsavory pillow. It is a cold, hard, flat bed, with two cold, hard, flat blankets. But we are very tired. Just as we are going to sleep, however, weird, high-pitched singing starts below, very uncanny--with a refrain that is a yelp-yelp-yelp! almost like a dog in angry pain. Weird, almost gruesome this singing goes on, first one voice and then another and then a tangle of voices. Again we are roused by the pounding of heavy feet on the corridor outside, which is as hollow and resonant as a drum. And then in the infernal crew-yard outside a cock crows. Throughout the night--yea, through all the black and frosty hours this demoniac bird screams its demon griefs. * * * * * However, it is morning. I gingerly wash a bit of myself in the broken basin, and dry that bit on a muslin veil which masquerades upon the chair as a towel. The q-b contents herself with a dry wipe. And we go downstairs in hopes of the last-night's milk. There is no one to be seen. It is a cold, frost-strong, clear morning. There is no one in the bar. We stumble down the dark tunnel passage. The stanza is as if no man had ever set foot in it: very dark, the mats against the wall, the fire-place grey with a handful of long dead ash. Just like a dungeon. The dining-room has the same long table and eternal table-cloth--and our serviettes, still wet, lying where we shovelled them aside. So back again to the bar. And this time a man is drinking _aqua vitae_, and the dirty-shirt is officiating. He has no hat on: and extraordinary, he has no brow at all: just flat, straight black hair slanting to his eyebrows, no forehead at all. Is there coffee? No, there is no coffee. Why? Because they can't get sugar. Ho! laughs the peasant drinking _aqua vitae_. You make coffee with sugar! Here, say I, they make it with nothing.--Is there milk? No. No milk at all? No. Why not? Nobody brings it. Yes, yes--there is milk if they like to get it, puts in the peasant. But they want you to drink _aqua vitae_. I see myself drinking _aqua vitae_. My yesterday's rage towers up again suddenly, till it quite suffocates me. There is something in this unsavoury, black, wine-dabbled, thick, greasy young man that does for me. "Why," say I, lapsing into the Italian rhetorical manner, "why do you keep an inn? Why do you write the word Ristorante so large, when you have nothing to offer people, and don't intend to have anything. Why do you have the impudence to take in travellers? What does it mean, that this is an inn? What, say, what does it mean? Say then--what does it mean? What does it mean, your Ristorante Risveglio, written so large?" Getting all this out in one breath, my indignation now stifled me. Him of the shirt said nothing at all. The peasant laughed. I demanded the bill. It was twenty-five francs odd. I picked up every farthing of the change. "Won't you leave any tip at all?" asks the q-b. "Tip!" say I, speechless. So we march upstairs and make tea to fill the thermos flask. Then, with sack over my shoulder, I make my way out of the Risveglio. * * * * * It is Sunday morning. The frozen village street is almost empty. We march down to the wider space where the bus stands: I hope they haven't the impudence to call it a Piazza. "Is this the Nuoro bus?" I ask of a bunch of urchins. And even they begin to jeer. But my sudden up-starting flare quenches them at once. One answers yes, and they edge away. I stow the sack and the kitchenino in the first-class part. The first-class is in front: we shall see better. There are men standing about, with their hands in their pockets,--those who are not in costume. Some wear the black-and-white. All wear the stocking caps. And all have the wide shirt-breasts, white, their waistcoats being just like evening dress waistcoats. Imagine one of these soft white shirt fronts well slobbered, and you have mine host of the Risveglio. But these lounging, static, white-breasted men are snowily clean, this being Sunday morning. They smoke their pipes on the frosty air, and are none too friendly. * * * * * The bus starts at half-past nine. The campanile is clanging nine. Two or three girls go down the road in their Sunday costume of purplish brown. We go up the road, into the clear, ringing frosty air, to find the lane. And again, from above, how beautiful it is in the sharp morning! The whole village lies in bluish shadow, the hills with their thin pale oak trees are in bluish shadow still, only in the distance the frost-glowing sun makes a wonderful, jewel-like radiance on the pleasant hills, wild and thinly-wooded, of this interior region. Real fresh wonder-beauty all around. And such humanity. Returning to the village we find a little shop and get biscuits and cigarettes. And we find our friends the bus-men. They are shy this morning. They are ready for us when we are ready. So in we get, joyfully, to leave Sorgono. One thing I say for it, it must be an honest place. For people leave their sacks about without a qualm. * * * * * Up we go, up the road. Only to stop, alas, at the Risveglio. The little conductor goes down the lane towards the station. The driver goes and has a little drink with a comrade. There is quite a crowd round the dreary entrances of the inn. And quite a little bunch of people to clamber up into the second class, behind us. We wait and wait. Then in climbs an old peasant, in full black-and-white costume, smiling in the pleased, naïve way of the old. After him climbs a fresh-faced young man with a suit-case. "Na!" said the young man. "Now you are in the automobile." And the old man gazes round with the wondering, vacant, naïve smile. "One is all right here, eh?" the young citizen persists, patronizing. But the old man is too excited to answer. He gazes hither and thither. Then he suddenly remembers he had a parcel, and looks for it in fear. The bright-faced young man picks it from the floor and hands it him. Ah, it is all right. I see the little conductor in his dashing, sheep-lined, short military overcoat striding briskly down the little lane with the post-bag. The driver climbs to his seat in front of me. He has a muffler round his neck and his hat pulled down to his ears. He pips at the horn, and our old peasant cranes forward to look how he does it. And so, with a jerk and a spurt, we start uphill. "Eh--what's that?" said the peasant, frightened. "We're starting," explained the bright-faced young man. "Starting! Didn't we start before?" The bright face laughs pleasedly. "No," he said. "Did you think we had been going ever since you got in?" "Yes," says the old man, simply, "since the door was shut." The young citizen looks at us for our joyful approval. VI. TO NUORO. These automobiles in Italy are splendid. They take the steep, looping roads so easily, they seem to run so naturally. And this one was comfortable, too. The roads of Italy always impress me. They run undaunted over the most precipitous regions, and with curious ease. In England almost any such road, among the mountains at least, would be labelled three times dangerous and would be famous throughout the land as an impossible climb. Here it is nothing. Up and down they go, swinging about with complete sang-froid. There seems to have been no effort in their construction. They are so good, naturally, that one hardly notices what splendid gestures they represent. Of course, the surface is now often intolerably bad. And they are most of them roads which, with ten years' neglect, will become ruins. For they are cut through overhanging rock and scooped out of the sides of hills. But I think it is marvellous how the Italians have penetrated all their inaccessible regions, of which they have so many, with great high-roads: and how along these high-roads the omnibuses now keep up a perfect communication. The precipitous and craggily-involved land is threaded through and through with roads. There seems to be a passion for high-roads and for constant communication. In this the Italians have a real Roman instinct, _now_. For the roads are new. The railways too go piercing through rock for miles and miles, and nobody thinks anything of it. The coast railway of Calabria, down to Reggio, would make us stand on our heads if we had it in England. Here it is a matter of course. In the same way I always have a profound admiration for their driving--whether of a great omnibus or of a motor-car. It all seems so easy, as if the man were part of the car. There is none of that beastly grinding, uneasy feeling one has in the north. A car behaves like a smooth, live thing, sensibly. All the peasants have a passion for a high-road. They want their land opening out, opening out. They seem to hate the ancient Italian remoteness. They all want to be able to get out at a moment's notice, to get away--quick, quick. A village which is two miles off the high-road, even if it is perched like a hawk's nest on a peak, still chafes and chafes for the great road to come to it, chafes and chafes for the daily motor-bus connection with the railway. There is no placidity, no rest in the heart of the land. There is a fever of restless irritation all the time. And yet the permanent way of almost every railway is falling into bad disrepair, the roads are shocking. And nothing seems to be done. Is our marvellous, mechanical era going to have so short a bloom? Is the marvellous openness, the opened-out wonder of the land going to collapse quite soon, and the remote places lapse back into inaccessibility again? Who knows! I rather hope so. * * * * * The automobile took us rushing and winding up the hill, sometimes through cold, solid-seeming shadow, sometimes across a patch of sun. There was thin, bright ice in the ruts, and deep grey hoar-frost on the grass. I cannot tell how the sight of the grass and bushes heavy with frost, and wild--in their own primitive wildness charmed me. The slopes of the steep wild hills came down shaggy and bushy, with a few berries lingering, and the long grass-stalks sere with the frost. Again the dark valley sank below like a ravine, but shaggy, bosky, unbroken. It came upon me how I loved the sight of the blue-shadowed, tawny-tangled winter with its frosty standstill. The young oaks keep their brown leaves. And doing so, surely they are best with a thin edge of rime. One begins to realize how old the real Italy is, how man-gripped, and how withered. England is far more wild and savage and lonely, in her country parts. Here since endless centuries man has tamed the impossible mountain side into terraces, he has quarried the rock, he has fed his sheep among the thin woods, he has cut his boughs and burnt his charcoal, he has been half domesticated even among the wildest fastnesses. This is what is so attractive about the remote places, the Abruzzi, for example. Life is so primitive, so pagan, so strangely heathen and half-savage. And yet it is human life. And the wildest country is half humanized, half brought under. It is all conscious. Wherever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or of the mediaeval influences, or of the far, mysterious gods of the early Mediterranean. Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even the strange "shrouded gods" of the Etruscans or the Sikels, none the less it is an expression. The land has been humanised, through and through: and we in our own tissued consciousness bear the results of this humanisation. So that for us to go to Italy and to _penetrate_ into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery--back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness. And then--and then--there is a final feeling of sterility. It is all worked out. It is all known: _connu, connu!_ This Sunday morning, seeing the frost among the tangled, still savage bushes of Sardinia, my soul thrilled again. This was not all known. This was not all worked out. Life was not only a process of rediscovering backwards. It is that, also: and it is that intensely. Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: like a restored Osiris. But this morning in the omnibus I realize that, apart from the great rediscovery backwards, which one _must_ make before one can be whole at all, there is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has not lost its savour. But one must have perfected oneself in the great past first. * * * * * If one travels one eats. We immediately began to munch biscuits, and the old peasant in his white, baggy breeches and black cuirass, his old face smiling wonderingly under his old stocking cap, although he was only going to Tonara, some seven or eight miles, began to peel himself a hard-boiled egg, which he got out of his parcel. With calm wastefulness he peeled away the biggest part of the white of the egg with the shell--because it came away so. The citizen of Nuoro, for such the bright-faced young man was, said to him--"But see how you waste it."--"Ha!" said the old peasant, with a reckless indifferent wave of the hand. What did he care how much he wasted, since he was _en voyage_ and riding for the first time in his life in an automobile. The citizen of Nuoro told us he had some sort of business in Sorgono, so he came back and forth constantly. The peasant did some work or other for him--or brought him something down from Tonara. He was a pleasant, bright-eyed young man, and he made nothing of eight hours in a motor-bus. He told us there was still game among these hills: wild boars which were hunted in big hunts, and many hares. It was a curious and beautiful sight, he said, to see a hare at night fascinated by the flare of the lamps of the automobile, racing ahead with its ears back, always keeping in front, inside the beam, and flying like mad, on and on ahead, till at some hill it gathered speed and melted into the dark. * * * * * We descended into a deep, narrow valley to the road-junction and the canteen-house, then up again, up and up sharp to Tonara, our village we had seen in the sun yesterday. But we were approaching it from the back. As we swerved into the sunlight, the road took a long curve on to the open ridge between two valleys. And there in front we saw a glitter of scarlet and white. It was in slow motion. It was a far-off procession, scarlet figures of women, and a tall image moving away from us, slowly, in the Sunday morning. It was passing along the level sunlit ridge above a deep, hollow valley. A close procession of women glittering in scarlet, white and black, moving slowly in the distance beneath the grey-yellow buildings of the village on the crest, towards an isolated old church: and all along this narrow upland saddle as on a bridge of sunshine itself. Were we not going to see any more? The bus turned again and rushed along the now level road and then veered. And there beyond, a little below, we saw the procession _coming_. The bus faded to a standstill, and we climbed out. Above us, old and mellowed among the smooth rocks and the bits of flat grass was the church, tanging its bell. Just in front, above, were old, half-broken houses of stone. The road came gently winding up to us, from what was evidently two villages ledged one above the other upon the steep summit of the south slope. Far below was the south valley, with a white puff of engine steam. And slowly chanting in the near distance, curving slowly up to us on the white road between the grass came the procession. The high morning was still. We stood all on this ridge above the world, with the deeps of silence below on the right. And in a strange, brief, staccato monody chanted the men, and in quick, light rustle of women's voices came the responses. Again the men's voices! The white was mostly men, not women. The priest in his robes, his boys near him, was leading the chanting. Immediately behind him came a small cluster of bare-headed, tall, sunburnt men, all in golden-velveteen corduroy, mountain-peasants, bowing beneath a great life-size seated image of Saint Anthony of Padua. After these a number of men in the costume, but with the white linen breeches hanging wide and loose almost to the ankles, instead of being tucked into the black gaiters. So they seemed very white beneath the back kilt frill. The black frieze body-vest was cut low, like an evening suit, and the stocking caps were variously perched. The men chanted in low, hollow, melodic tones. Then came the rustling chime of the women. And the procession crept slowly, aimlessly forward in time with the chant. The great image rode rigid, and rather foolish. After the men was a little gap--and then the brilliant wedge of the women. They were packed two by two, close on each other's heels, chanting inadvertently when their turn came, and all in brilliant, beautiful costume. In front were the little girl-children, two by two, immediately following the tall men in peasant black-and-white. Children, demure and conventional, in vermilion, white and green--little girl-children with long skirts of scarlet cloth down to their feet, green-banded near the bottom: with white aprons bordered with vivid green and mingled colour: having little scarlet, purple-bound, open boleros over the full white shirts: and black head-cloths folded across their little chins, just leaving the lips clear, the face framed in black. Wonderful little girl-children, perfect and demure in the stiffish, brilliant costume, with black head-dress! Stiff as Velasquez princesses! The bigger girls followed, and then the mature women, a close procession. The long vermilion skirts with their green bands at the bottom flashed a solid moving mass of colour, softly swinging, and the white aprons with their band of brilliant mingled green seemed to gleam. At the throat the full-bosomed white shirts were fastened with big studs of gold filigree, two linked filigree globes: and the great white sleeves billowed from the scarlet, purplish-and-green-edged boleros. The faces came nearer to us, framed all round in the dark cloths. All the lips still sang responses, but all the eyes watched us. So the softly-swaying coloured body of the procession came up to us. The poppy-scarlet smooth cloth rocked in fusion, the bands and bars of emerald green seemed to burn across the red and the showy white, the dark eyes peered and stared at us from under the black snood, gazed back at us with raging curiosity, while the lips moved automatically in chant. The bus had run into the inner side of the road, and the procession had to press round it, towards the sky-line, the great valley lying below. The priest stared, hideous St. Anthony cockled a bit as he passed the butt end of the big grey automobile, the peasant men in gold-coloured corduroy, old, washed soft, were sweating under the load and still singing with opened lips, the loose white breeches of the men waggled as they walked on with their hands behind their backs, turning again, to look at us. The big, hard hands, folded behind black kilt-frill! The women, too, shuffled slowly past, rocking the scarlet and the bars of green, and all twisting as they sang, to look at us still more. And so the procession edged past the bus, and was trailing upwards, curved solid against the sky-line towards the old church. From behind, the geranium scarlet was intense, one saw the careful, curiously cut backs of the shapen boleros, poppy-red, edged with mauve-purple and green, and the white of the shirt just showing at the waist. The full sleeves billowed out, the black head-cloths hung down to a point. The pleated skirts swing slowly, the broad band of green accentuating the motion. Indeed that is what it must be for, this thick, rich band of jewel green, to throw the wonderful horizontal motion back and forth, back and forth, of the suave vermilion, and give that static, Demeta splendor to a peasant motion, so magnificent in colour, geranium and malachite. All the costumes were not exactly alike. Some had more green, some had less. In some the sleeveless boleros were of a darker red, and some had poorer aprons, without such gorgeous bands at the bottom. And some were evidently old: probably thirty years old: still perfect and in keeping, reserved for Sunday and high holidays. A few were darker, ruddier than the true vermilion. This varying of the tone intensified the beauty of the shuffling woman-host. * * * * * When they had filed into the grey, forlorn little church on the ridge-top just above us, the bus started silently to run on to the rest-point below, whilst we climbed back up the little rock-track to the church. When we came to the side-door we found the church quite full. Level with us as we stood in the open side doorway, we saw kneeling on the bare stoneflags the little girl-children, and behind them all the women clustered kneeling upon their aprons, with hands negligently folded, filling the church to the further doorway, where the sun shone: the bigger west-end doorway. In the shadow of the whitewashed, bare church all these kneeling women with their colour and their black head-cloths looked like some thick bed of flowers, geranium, black hooded above. They all knelt on the naked, solid stone of the pavement. There was a space in front of the geranium little girl-children, then the men in corduroys, gold-soft, with dark round heads, kneeling awkwardly in reverence; and then the queer, black cuirasses and full white sleeves of grey-headed peasant men, many bearded. Then just in front of them the priest in his white vestment, standing exposed, and just baldly beginning an address. At the side of the altar was seated large and important the modern, simpering, black-gowned Anthony of Padua, nursing a boy-child. He looked a sort of male Madonna. "Now," the priest was saying, "blessed Saint Anthony shows you in what way you can be Christians. It is not enough that you are not Turks. Some think they are Christians because they are not Turks. It is true you are none of you Turks. But you have still to learn how to be good Christians. And this you can learn from our blessed Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony, etc., etc...." The contrast between Turks and Christians is still forceful in the Mediterranean, where the Mohammedans have left such a mark. But how the word _cristiani_, _cristiani_, spoken with a peculiar priestly unction, gets on my nerves. The voice is barren in its homily. And the women are all intensely watching the q-b and me in the doorway, their folded hands are very negligently held together. "Come away!" say I. "Come away, and let them listen." * * * * * We left the church crowded with its kneeling host, and dropped down past the broken houses towards the omnibus, which stood on a sort of level out-look place, a levelled terrace with a few trees, standing silent over the valley. It should be picketed with soldiers having arquebuses. And I should have welcomed a few thorough-paced infidels, as a leaven to this dreary Christianity of ours. But it was a wonderful place. Usually, the life-level is reckoned as sea-level. But here, in the heart of Sardinia, the life-level is high as the golden-lit plateau, and the sea-level is somewhere far away, below, in the gloom, it does not signify. The life-level is high up, high and sun-sweetened and among rocks. We stood and looked below, at the puff of steam, far down the wooded valley where we had come yesterday. There was an old, low house on this eagle-perching piazza. I would like to live there. The real village--or rather two villages, like an ear-ring and its pendant--lay still beyond, in front, ledging near the summit of the long, long, steep wooded slope, that never ended till it ran flush to the depths away below there in shadow. And yesterday, up this slope the old peasant had come with his two brilliant daughters and the pack-pony. And somewhere in those ledging, pearly villages in front must be my girovago and his "wife". I wish I could see their stall and drink aqua vitae with them. "How beautiful the procession!" says the q-b to the driver. "Ah yes--one of the most beautiful costumes of Sardinia, this of Tonara," he replied wistfully. * * * * * The bus sets off again--minus the old peasant. We retrace our road. A woman is leading a bay pony past the church, striding with long strides, so that her maroon skirt swings like a fan, and hauling the halter rope. Apparently the geranium red costume is Sunday only, the week-day is this maroon, or puce, or madder-brown. Quickly and easily the bus slips down the hill into the valley. Wild, narrow valleys, with trees, and brown-legged cork trees. Across the other side a black and white peasant is working alone on a tiny terrace of the hill-side, a small, solitary figure, for all the world like a magpie in the distance. These people like being alone--solitary--one sees a single creature so often isolated among the wilds. This is different from Sicily and Italy, where the people simply cannot be alone. They _must_ be in twos and threes. But it is Sunday morning, and the worker is exceptional. Along the road we pass various pedestrians, men in their black sheepskins, boys in their soldiers' remains. They are trudging from one village to another, across the wild valleys. And there is a sense of Sunday morning freedom, of roving, as in an English countryside. Only the one old peasant works alone: and a goatherd watching his long-haired, white goats. Beautiful the goats are: and so swift. They fly like white shadows along the road from us, then dart down-hill. I see one standing on a bough of an oak-tree, right in the tree, an enormous white tree-creature complacently munching up aloft, then rearing on her hind legs, so lengthy, and putting her slim paws far away on an upper, forward branch. * * * * * Whenever we come to a village we stop and get down, and our little conductor disappears into the post-office for the post-bag. This last is usually a limp affair, containing about three letters. The people crowd round--and many of them in very ragged costume. They look poor, and not attractive: perhaps a bit degenerate. It would seem as if the Italian instinct to get into rapid touch with the world were the healthy instinct after all. For in these isolated villages, which have been since time began far from any life-centre, there is an almost sordid look on the faces of the people. We must remember that the motor-bus is a great innovation. It has been running for five weeks only. I wonder for how many months it will continue. For I am sure it cannot pay. Our first-class tickets cost, I believe, about twenty-seven francs each. The second class costs about three-quarters the first. Some parts of the journey we were very few passengers. The distance covered is so great, the population so thin, that even granted the passion for getting out of their own villages, which possesses all people now, still the bus cannot earn much more than an average of two hundred to three hundred francs a day. Which, with two men's wages, and petrol at its enormous price, and the cost of wear-and-tear, cannot possibly pay. I asked the driver. He did not tell me what his wages were: I did not ask him. But he said the company paid for the keep and lodging for himself and mate at the stopping-places. This being Sunday, fewer people were travelling: a statement hard to believe. Once he had carried fifty people all the way from Tonara to Nuoro. Once! But it was in vain he protested. Ah well, he said, the bus carried the post, and the government paid a subsidy of so many thousands of lire a year: a goodly number. Apparently then the government was the loser, as usual. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of these omnibuses running the lonely districts of Italy and Sicily--Sardinia had a network of systems. They are splendid--and they are perhaps an absolute necessity for a nervous restless population which simply cannot keep still, and which finds some relief in being whirled about even on the _autovie_, as the bus-system is called. The autovie are run by private companies, only subsidised by the government. * * * * * On we rush, through the morning--and at length see a large village, high on the summit beyond, stony on the high upland. But it has a magical look, as these tiny summit-cities have from the distance. They recall to me always my childish visions of Jerusalem, high against the air, and seeming to sparkle, and built in sharp cubes. It is curious what a difference there is between the high, fresh, proud villages and the valley villages. Those that crown the world have a bright, flashing air, as Tonara had. Those that lie down below, infolded in the shadow, have a gloomy, sordid feeling and a repellent population, like Sorgono and other places at which we had halted. The judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got. We were now at the highest point of the journey. The men we saw on the road were in their sheepskins, and some were even walking with their faces shawl-muffled. Glancing back, we saw up the valley clefts the snow of Gennargentu once more, a white mantle on broad shoulders, the very core of Sardinia. The bus slid to a standstill in a high valley, beside a stream where the road from Fonni joined ours. There was waiting a youth with a bicycle. I would like to go to Fonni. They say it is the highest village in Sardinia. * * * * * In front, on the broad summit, reared the towers of Gavoi. This was the half-way halt, where the buses had their _coincidenza_, and where we would stay for an hour and eat. We wound up and up the looping road, and at last entered the village. Women came to the doors to look. They were wearing the dark madder-brown costume. Men were hastening, smoking their pipes, towards our stopping place. We saw the other bus--a little crowd of people--and we drew up at last. We were tired and hungry. We were at the door of the inn, and we entered quickly. And in an instant, what a difference! At the clean little bar, men were drinking cheerfully. A side door led into the common room. And how charming it was. In a very wide chimney, white and stone-clean, with a lovely shallow curve above, was burning a fire of long, clean-split faggots, laid horizontally on the dogs. A clean, clear bright fire, with odd little chairs in front, very low, for us to sit on. The funny, low little chairs seem a specialty of this region. The floor of this room was paved with round dark pebbles, beautifully clean. On the walls hung brilliant copper fans, glittering against the whitewash. And under the long, horizontal window that looked on the street was a stone slab with sockets for little charcoal fires. The curve of the chimney arch was wide and shallow, the curve above the window was still wider, and of a similar delicate shallowness, the white roof rose delicately vaulted. With the glitter of copper, the expanse of dark, rose-coloured, pebbled floor, the space, the few low, clean-gleaming faggots, it was really beautiful. We sat and warmed ourselves, welcomed by a plump hostess and a pleasant daughter, both in madder-brown dress and full white shirt. People strayed in and out, through the various doors. The houses are built without any plan at all, the rooms just happening, here or there. A bitch came from an inner darkness and stood looking at the fire, then looked up at me, smiling in her bitch-like, complacent fashion. * * * * * But we were dying with hunger. What was there to eat?--and was it nearly ready? There was _cinghiale_, the pleasant, hard-cheeked girl told us, and it was nearly ready. _Cinghiale_ being wild boar, we sniffed the air. The girl kept tramping rather fecklessly back and forth, with a plate or a serviette: and at last it was served. We went through the dark inner place, which was apparently the windowless bit left over, inside, when the hap-hazard rooms were made round about, and from thence into a large, bare, darkish pebbled room with a white table and inverted soup-plates. It was deathly cold. The window looked north over the wintry landscape of the highlands, fields, stone walls, and rocks. Ah, the cold, motionless air of the room. But we were quite a party: the second bus-driver and his mate, a bearded traveller on the second bus, with his daughter, ourselves, the bright-faced citizen from Nuoro, and our driver. Our little dark-eyed conductor did not come. It dawned on me later he could not afford to pay for this meal, which was not included in his wage. The Nuoro citizen conferred with our driver--who looked tired round the eyes--and made the girl produce a tin of sardines. These were opened at table with a large pocket-knife belonging to the second conductor. He was a reckless, odd, hot-foot fellow whom I liked very much. But I was terrified at the way he carved the sardine-box with his jack-knife. However, we could eat and drink. Then came the _brodo_, the broth, in a great bowl. This was boiling hot, and very, very strong. It was perfectly plain, strong meat-stock, without vegetables. But how good and invigorating it was, and what an abundance! We drank it down, and ate the good, cold bread. Then came the boar itself. Alas, it was a bowl of hunks of dark, rather coarse boiled meat, from which the broth had been made. It was quite dry, without fat. I should have been very puzzled to know what meat it was, if I had not been told. Sad that the wild boar should have received so little culinary attention. However, we ate the hunks of hot, dry meat with bread, and were glad to get them. They were filling, at least. And there was a bowl of rather bitter green olives for a condiment. The Nuoro citizen now produced a huge bottle of wine, which he said was _finissimo_, and refused to let us go on with the dark wine on the table, of which every guest was served with a bottle. So we drank up, and were replenished with the redder, lighter, finer Sorgono wine. It was very good. The second bus-conductor also did not eat the inn meal. He produced a vast piece of bread, good, home-made bread, and at least half of a roast lamb, and a large paper of olives. This lamb he insisted on sending round the table, waving his knife and fork with dramatic gestures at every guest, insisting that every guest should take a hunk. So one by one we all helped ourselves to the extraordinarily good cold roast lamb, and to the olives. Then the bus-conductor fell to as well. There was a mass of meat still left to him. It is extraordinary how generous and, from the inside, well-bred these men were. To be sure the second conductor waved his knife and fork and made bitter faces if one of us took only a little bit of the lamb. He wanted us to take more. But the _essential_ courtesy in all of them was quite perfect, so manly and utterly simple. Just the same with the q-b. They treated her with a sensitive, manly simplicity, which one could not but be thankful for. They made none of the odious politenesses which are so detestable in well-brought-up people. They made no advances and did none of the hateful homage of the adulating male. They were quiet, and kind, and sensitive to the natural flow of life, and quite without airs. I liked them extremely. Men who can be quietly kind and simple to a woman, without wanting to show off or to make an impression, they are men still. They were neither humble nor conceited. They did not show off. And oh God, what a blessed relief, to be with people who don't bother to show off. We sat at that table quietly and naturally as if we were by ourselves, and talked or listened to their talk, just as it happened. When we did not want to talk, they took no notice of us. And that I call good manners. Middle-class, showing off people would have found them uncouth. I found them almost the only really well-bred people I have met. They did not show off in any way at all, not even a show of simplicity. They knew that in the beginning and in the end a man stands alone, his soul is alone in itself, and all attributes are nothing--and this curious final knowledge preserved them in simplicity. When we had had coffee and were going out, I found our own conductor in a little chair by the fire. He was looking a bit pathetic. I had enough sense to give him a coffee, which brightened him. But it was not till afterwards, putting things together, that I realized he had wanted to be with us all at table, but that his conductor's wages probably did not allow him to spend the money. My bill for the dinner was about fifteen francs, for the two of us. * * * * * In the bus again, we were quite crowded. A peasant girl in Nuoro costume sat facing me, and a dark-bearded, middle-aged man in a brown velveteen suit was next me and glowering at her. He was evidently her husband. I did not like him: one of the jealous, carping sort. She, in her way, was handsome: but a bit of a devil as well, in all probability. There were two village women become fine, in town dress and black silk scarves over their heads, fancying themselves. Then there was a wild scuffle, and three bouncing village lasses were pushed in, laughing and wild with excitement. There were wild farewells, and the bus rolled out of Gavoi between the desolate mountain fields and the rocks, on a sort of table-land. We rolled on for a mile or so: then stopped, and the excited lasses got down. I gathered they had been given a little ride for a Sunday treat. Delighted they were. And they set off, with other bare-headed women in costume, along a bare path between flat, out-cropping rocks and cold fields. * * * * * The girl facing me was a study. She was not more than twenty years old I should say: or was she? Did the delicate and fine complication of lines against her eyes mean thirty-five? But anyhow she was the wife of the velveteen man. He was thick-set and had white hairs in his coarse black beard, and little, irritable brown eyes under his irritable brows. He watched her all the time. Perhaps, she was after all a young, new girl-wife. She sat with that expressionless look of one who is watched and who appears not to know it. She had her back to the engine. [Illustration: GAVOI] She wore her black head-cloth from her brow and her hair was taken tight back from her rather hard, broad, well-shaped forehead. Her dark eyebrows were very finely drawn above her large, dark-grey, pellucid eyes, but they were drawn with a peculiar obstinate and irritating lift. Her nose was straight and small, her mouth well-shut. And her big, rather hostile eyes had a withheld look in them, obstinate. Yet, being newly wed and probably newly-awakened, her eyes looked sometimes at me with a provoking look, curious as to what I was in the husband line, challenging rather defiantly with her new secrets, obstinate in opposition to the male authority, and yet intrigued by the very fact that one was man. The velveteen husband--his velveteens too had gone soft and gold-faded, yet somehow they made him look ugly, common--he watched her with his irritable, yellow-brown eyes, and seemed to fume in his stiff beard. She wore the costume: the full-gathered shirt fastened at the throat with the two gold filigree globes, a little dark, braided, stiff bolero just fastened at the waist, leaving a pretty pattern of white breast, and a dark maroon skirt. As the bus rushed along she turned somewhat pale, with the obstinate pinched look of a woman who is in opposition to her man. At length she flung him a few words which I did not catch--and her forehead seemed to go harder, as she drooped her lashes occasionally over her wide, alert, obstinate, rather treacherous eyes. She must have been a difficult piece of goods to deal with. And she sat with her knees touching mine, rocking against mine as the bus swayed. * * * * * We came to a village on the road: the landscape had now become wider, much more open. At the inn door the bus stopped, and the velveteen husband and the girl got down. It was cold--but in a minute I got down too. The bus conductor came to me and asked anxiously if the q-b were ill. The q-b said no, why? Because there was a signora whom the motion of the bus made ill. This was the girl. There was a crowd and a great row at this inn. In the second dark room, which was bare of furniture, a man sat in a corner playing an accordion. Men in the close breeches were dancing together. Then they fell to wrestling wildly, crashing about among the others, with shouts and yells. Men in the black-and-white, but untidy, with the wide white drawers left hanging out over the black gaiters, surged here and there. All were rowdy with drink. This again was rather a squalid inn but roaring with violent, crude male life. The Nuoro citizen said that here was very good wine, and we must try it. I did not want it, but he insisted. So we drank little glasses of merely moderate red wine. The sky had gone all grey with the afternoon curd-clouds. It was very cold and raw. Wine is no joy, cold, dead wine, in such an atmosphere. The Nuoro citizen insisted on paying. He would let me pay, he said, when he came to England. In him, and in our bus men, the famous Sardinian hospitality and generosity still lingers. * * * * * When the bus ran on again the q-b told the peasant girl who again had the pinched look, to change places with me and sit with her face to the engine. This the young woman did, with that rather hard assurance common to these women. But at the next stop she got down, and made the conductor come with us into the compartment, whilst she sat in front between the driver and the citizen of Nuoro. That was what she wanted all the time. Now she was all right. She had her back to the velveteen husband, she sat close between two strange young men, who were condoling with her. And velveteens eyed her back, and his little eyes went littler and more pin-pointed, and his nose seemed to curl with irritation. The costumes had changed again. There was again the scarlet, but no green. The green had given place to mauve and rose. The women in one cold, stony, rather humbled broken place were most brilliant. They had the geranium skirts, but their sleeveless boleros were made to curl out strangely from the waist, and they were edged with a puckered rose-pink, a broad edge, with lines of mauve and lavender. As they went up between the houses that were dark and grisly under the blank, cold sky, it is amazing how these women of vermilion and rose-pink seemed to melt into an almost impossible blare of colour. What a risky blend of colours! Yet how superb it could look, that dangerous hard assurance of these women as they strode along so blaring. I would not like to tackle one of them. * * * * * Wider and colder the landscape grew. As we topped a hill at the end of a village, we saw a long string of wagons, each with a pair of oxen, and laden with large sacks, curving upwards in the cold, pallid Sunday afternoon. Seeing us, the procession came to a standstill at the curve of the road, and the pale oxen, the pale low wagons, the pale full sacks, all in the blenched light, each one headed by a tall man in shirt-sleeves, trailing a static procession on the hill-side, seemed like a vision: like a Doré drawing. The bus slid past, the man holding the wagon-pole, while some oxen stood like rock, some swayed their horns. The q-b asked the velveteener what they were carrying. For a long time he took no notice of the question. Then he volunteered, in a snappy voice, that it was the government grain being distributed to the communes for bread. On Sunday afternoon too. Oh this government corn! What a problem those sacks represent! * * * * * The country became wider as we dropped lower. But it was bleak and treeless once more. Stones cropped up in the wide, hollow dales. Men on ponies passed forlorn across the distances. Men with bundles waited at the cross-roads to pick up the bus. We were drawing near to Nuoro. It was past three in the afternoon, cold with a blenched light. The landscape seemed bare and stony, wide, different from any before. We came to the valley where the branch-line runs to Nuoro. I saw little pink railway-cabins at once, lonely along the valley bed. Turning sharp to the right, we ran in silence over the moor-land-seeming slopes, and saw the town beyond, clustered beyond, a little below, at the end of the long declivity, with sudden mountains rising around it. There it lay, as if at the end of the world, mountains rising sombre behind. So, we stop at the Dazio, the town's customs hut, and velveteens has to pay for some meat and cheese he is bringing in. After which we slip into the cold high-street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of Grazia Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber's shop. De Ledda. And thank heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o'clock. The bus has stopped quite close to the door of the inn: Star of Italy, was it? In we go at the open door. Nobody about, free access to anywhere and everywhere, as usual: testifying again to Sardinian honesty. We peer through a doorway to the left--through a rough little room: ah, there in a dark, biggish room beyond is a white-haired old woman with a long, ivory-coloured face standing at a large table ironing. One sees only the large whiteness of the table, and the long pallid face and the querulous pale-blue eye of the tall old woman as she looks up questioning from the gloom of the inner place. "Is there a room, Signora?" She looks at me with a pale, cold blue eye, and shouts into the dark for somebody. Then she advances into the passage and looks us up and down, the q-b and me. "Are you husband and wife?" she demands, challenge. "Yes, how shouldn't we be," say I. A tiny maid, of about thirteen, but sturdy and brisk-looking, has appeared in answer to the shout. "Take them to number seven," says the old dame, and she turns back to her gloom, and seizes the flat iron grimly. We follow up two flights of cold stone stairs, disheartening narrow staircase with a cold iron rail, and corridors opening off gloomily and rather disorderly. These houses give the effect, inside, of never having been properly finished, as if, long, long ago, the inmates had crowded in, pig-sty fashion, without waiting for anything to be brought into order, and there it had been left, dreary and chaotic. Thumbelina, the little maid, threw open the door of number seven with _eclat_. And we both exclaimed: "How fine!" It seemed to us palatial. Two good, thick white beds, a table, a chest of drawers, two mats on the tiled floor, and gorgeous oleographs on the wall--and two good wash-bowls side by side--and all perfectly clean and nice. What were we coming to! We felt we ought to be impressed. * * * * * We pulled open the latticed window doors, and looked down on the street: the only street. And it was a river of noisy life. A band was playing, rather terribly, round the corner at the end, and up and down the street jigged endless numbers of maskers in their Carnival costume, with girls and young women strolling arm-in-arm to participate. And how frisky they all were, how bubbly and unself-conscious! The maskers were nearly all women--the street was full of women: so we thought at first. Then we saw, looking closer, that most of the women were young men, dressed up. All the maskers were young men, and most of these young men, _of course_, were masquerading as women. As a rule they did not wear face-masks, only little dominoes of black cloth or green cloth or white cloth coming down to the mouth. Which is much better. For the old modelled half-masks with the lace frill, the awful proboscis sticking forward white and ghastly like the beaks of corpse-birds--such as the old Venice masks--these I think are simply horrifying. And the more modern "faces" are usually only repulsive. While the simple little pink half-masks with the end of black or green or white cloth, these just form a human disguise. It was quite a game, sorting out the real women from the false. Some were easy. They had stuffed their bosoms, and stuffed their bustles, and put on hats and very various robes, and they minced along with little jigging steps, like little dolls that dangle from elastic, and they put their heads on one side and dripped their hands, and danced up to flurry the actual young ladies, and sometimes they received a good clout on the head, when they broke into wild and violent gestures, whereat the _actual_ young ladies scuffled wildly. They were very lively and naïve.--But some were more difficult. Every conceivable sort of "woman" was there, broad shouldered and with rather large feet. The most usual was the semi-peasant, with a very full bosom and very full skirt and a very downright bearing. But one was a widow in weeds, drooping on the arm of a robust daughter. And one was an ancient crone in a crochet bed-cover. And one was in an old skirt and blouse and apron, with a broom, wildly sweeping the street from end to end. He was an animated rascal. He swept with very sarcastic assiduity in front of two town-misses in fur coats, who minced very importantly along. He swept their way very humbly, facing them and going backwards, sweeping and bowing, whilst they advanced with their noses in the air. He made his great bow, and they minced past, daughters of dog-fish, pesce-carne, no doubt. Then he skipped with a bold, gambolling flurry behind them, and with a perfectly mad frenzy began to sweep after them, as if to sweep their tracks away. He swept so madly and so blindly with his besom that he swept on to their heels and their ankles. They shrieked and glowered round, but the blind sweeper saw them not. He swept and swept and pricked their thin silk ankles. And they, scarlet with indignation and rage, gave hot skips like cats on hot bricks, and fled discomfited forwards. He bowed once more after them, and started mildly and innocently to sweep the street. A pair of lovers of fifty years ago, she in a half crinoline and poke bonnet and veil, hanging on his arm came very coyly past, oh so simpering, and it took me a long time to be sure that the "girl" was a youth. An old woman in a long nightdress prowled up and down, holding out her candle and peering in the street as if for burglars. She would approach the _real_ young women and put her candle in their faces and peer so hard, as if she suspected them of something. And they blushed and turned their faces away and protested confusedly. This old woman searched so fearfully in the face of one strapping lass in the pink and scarlet costume, who looked for all the world like a bunch of red and rose-pink geraniums, with a bit of white,--a _real_ peasant lass--that the latter in a panic began to beat him with her fist, furiously, quite aroused. And he made off, running comically in his long white nightdress. There were some really beautiful dresses of rich old brocade, and some gleaming old shawls, a shimmer of lavender and silver, or of dark, rich shot colours with deep borders of white silver and primrose gold, very lovely. I believe two of them were actual women--but the q-b says no. There was a Victorian gown of thick green silk, with a creamy blotched cross-over shawl. About her we both were doubtful. There were two wistful, drooping-lily sisters, all in white, with big feet. And there was a very successful tall miss in a narrow hobble-skirt of black satin and a toque with ospreys. The way she minced and wagged her posterior and went on her toes and peered over her shoulder and kept her elbows in was an admirable caricature. Especially the curious sagging heaving movement of "bustle" region, a movement very characteristic of modern feminism, was hit off with a bit of male exaggeration which rejoiced me. At first she even took me in. We stood outside our window, and leaned on the little balcony rail looking down at this flow of life. Directly opposite was the chemist's house: facing our window the best bedroom of the chemist, with a huge white matrimonial bed and muslin curtains. In the balcony sat the chemist's daughters, very elegant in high-heeled shoes and black hair done in the fluffy fashion with a big sweep sideways. Oh very elegant! They eyed us a little and we eyed them. But without interest. The river of life was down below. * * * * * It was very cold and the day was declining. We too were cold. We decided to go into the street and look for the café. In a moment we were out of doors, walking as inconspicuously as possible near the wall. Of course there was no pavement. These maskers were very gentle and whimsical, no touch of brutality at all. Now we were level with them, how odd and funny they were. One youth wore a thin white blouse and a pair of his sister's wide, calico knickers with needlework frills near the ankle, and white stockings. He walked artlessly, and looked almost pretty. Only the q-b winced with pain: not because of the knickers, but because of that awful length, coming well below the knee. Another young man was wound into a sheet, and heavens knows if he could ever get out of it. Another was involved in a complicated entanglement of white crochet antimacassars, very troublesome to contemplate. I did not like him at all, like a fish in a net. But he strode robustly about. We came to the end of the street, where there is a wide, desolate sort of gap. Here the little band stood braying away, there was a thick crowd of people, and on a slanting place just above, a little circle where youths and men, maskers and one or two girls were dancing, so crowded together and such a small ring that they looked like a jiggly set of upright rollers all turning rickettily against one another. They were doing a sort of intense jigging waltz. Why do they look so intense? Perhaps because they were so tight all together, like too many fish in a globe slipping through one another. There was a café in this sort of piazza--not a piazza at all, a formless gap. But young men were drinking little drinks, and I knew it would be hopeless to ask for anything but cold drinks or black coffee: which we did not want. So we continued forwards, up the slope of the village street. These towns soon come to an end. Already we were wandering into the open. On a ledge above, a peasant family was making a huge bonfire, a tower of orange-coloured, rippling flame. Little, impish boys were throwing on more rubbish. Everybody else was in town. Why were these folk at the town-end making this fire alone? We came to the end of the houses and looked over the road-wall at the hollow, deep, interesting valley below. Away on the other side rose a blue mountain, a steep but stumpy cone. High land reared up, dusky and dark-blue, all around. Somewhere far off the sun was setting with a bit of crimson. It was a wild, unusual landscape, of unusual shape. The hills seemed so untouched, dark-blue, virgin-wild, the hollow cradle of the valley was cultivated like a tapestry away below. And there seemed so little outlying life: nothing. No castles even. In Italy and Sicily castles perching everywhere. In Sardinia none--the remote, ungrappled hills rising darkly, standing outside of life. * * * * * As we went back it was growing dark, and the little band was about to leave off its brass noise. But the crowd still surged, the maskers still jigged and frisked unweariedly. Oh the good old energy of the bygone days, before men became so self-conscious. Here it was still on the hop. We found no café that looked any good. Coming to the inn, we asked if there was a fire anywhere. There wasn't. We went up to our room. The chemist-daughters had lighted up opposite, one saw their bedroom as if it were one's own. In the dusk of the street the maskers were still jigging, all the youths still joyfully being women, but a little more roughly now. Away over the house-tops the purple-red of a dying sunset. And it was very cold. There was nothing for it but just to lie in bed. The q-b made a little tea on the spirit-lamp, and we sat in bed and sipped it. Then we covered ourselves up and lay still, to get warm. Outside the noise of the street came unabated. It grew quite dark, the lights reflected into the room. There was the sound of an accordion across the hoarseness of the many voices and movements in the street: and then a solid, strong singing of men's voices, singing a soldier song. "Quando torniamo in casa nostra--" We got up to look. Under the small electric lights the narrow, cobbled street was still running with a river of people, but fewer maskers. Two maskers beating loudly at a heavy closed door. They beat and beat. At last the door opens a crack. They rush to try to get in--but in vain. It had shut the moment it saw them, they are foiled, on they go down the street. The town is full of men, many peasants come in from the outlying parts, the black and white costume now showing in the streets. We retire to bed again out of the cold. Comes a knock, and Thumbelina bursts in, in the darkness. "Siamo qua!" says the q-b. Thumbelina dashes at the window-doors and shuts them and shuts the casement. Then she dashes to my bedhead and turns on the light, looking down at me as if I were a rabbit in the grass. Then she flings a can of water against the wash-bowls--cold water, icy, alas. After which, small and explosive, she explodes her way out of the room again, and leaves us in the glaring light, having replied that it is now a little after six o'clock, and dinner is half past seven. So we lie in bed, warm and in peace, but hungry, waiting for half past seven. * * * * * When the q-b can stand it no more she flounces up, though the clock from the Campanile has struck seven only a few minutes before. Dashing downstairs to reconnoitre, she is back in a breath to say that people are eating their heads off in the long dining room. In the next breath we are downstairs too. The room was brightly lighted, and at many white tables sat diners, all men. It was quite city-like. Everyone was in convivial mood. The q-b spied men opposite having chicken and salad--and she had hopes. But they were brief. When the soup came, the girl announced that there was only bistecca: which meant a bit of fried cow. So it did: a quite, quite small bit of fried beef, a few potatoes and a bit of cauliflower. Really, it was not enough for a child of twelve. But that was the end of it. A few mandarini--tangerine oranges--rolled on a plate for dessert. And there's the long and short of these infernal dinners. Was there any cheese? No, there was no cheese. So we merely masticated bread. There came in three peasants in the black and white costume, and sat at the middle table. They kept on their stocking caps. And queer they looked, coming in with slow, deliberate tread of these elderly men, and sitting rather remote, with a gap of solitude around them. The peculiar ancient loneliness of the Sardinian hills clings to them, and something stiff, static, pre-world. * * * * * All the men at our end of the room were citizens--employees of some sort--and they were all acquaintances. A large dog, very large indeed, with a great muzzle, padded slowly from table to table, and looked at us with big wistful topaz eyes. When the meal was almost over our bus-driver and conductor came in--looking faint with hunger and cold and fatigue. They were quartered at this house. They had eaten nothing since the boar-broth at Gavoi. In a very short time they were through their portions: and was there nothing else? Nothing! But they were half starved. They ordered two eggs each, in padella. I ordered coffee--and asked them to come and take it with us, and a brandy. So they came when their eggs were finished. A diversion was now created at the other side of the room. The red wine, which is good in Sardinia, had been drunk freely. Directly facing us sat a rather stout man with pleasant blue eyes and a nicely shaped head: dressed like any other town man on a Sunday. The dog had waddled up to him and sat down statuesque in front of him. And the fat man, being mellow, began to play with the big, gentle, brindled animal. He took a piece of bread and held it before the dog's nose--and the dog tried to take it. But the man, like a boy now he was ripe with wine, put the mastiff back with a restraining finger, and told him not to snatch. Then he proceeded with a little conversation with the animal. The dog again tried to snatch, gently, and again the man started, saved the bread, and startled the dog, which backed and gave a sharp, sad yelp, as if to say: "Why do you tease me!" "Now," said the man, "you are not to snatch. Come here. Come here. Vieni qua!" And he held up the piece of bread. The animal came near. "Now," said the man, "I put this bread on your nose, and you don't move, un--Ha!!" The dog had tried to snatch the bread, the man had shouted and jerked it away, the animal had recoiled and given another expostulating yelp. The game continued. All the room was watching, smiling. The dog did not understand at all. It came forward again, troubled. The man held the bread near its nose, and held up a warning finger. The beast dropped its head mournfully, cocking up its eye at the bread with varied feelings. "Now--!" said the man, "not until I say three--_Uno--due--_" the dog could bear it no longer, the man in jerking let go the bread and yelled at the top of his voice--"_e tre!_" The dog gulped the piece of bread with a resigned pleasure, and the man pretended it had all happened properly on the word "three." So he started again. "Vieni qua! Vieni qua!" The dog, which had backed away with the bread, came hesitating, cringing forward, dropping its hind-quarters in doubt, as dogs do, advancing towards the new nugget of bread. The man preached it a little sermon. "You sit there and look at this bread. I sit here and look at you, and I hold this bread. And you stop still, and I stop still, while I count three. Now then--uno--" the dog couldn't bear these numerals, with their awful slowness. He snatched desperately. The man yelled and lost the bread, the dog, gulping, turned to creep away. Then it began again. "Come here! Come here! Didn't I tell thee I would count three? Già! I said I would count three. Not one, but three. And to count three you need three numbers. Ha! Steady! Three numbers. Uno--due E TRE!" The last syllables were yelled so that the room rang again. The dog gave a mournful howl of excitement, missed the bread, groped for it, and fled. The man was red with excitement, his eyes shining. He addressed the company at large. "I had a dog," he said, "ah, a dog! And I would put a piece of bread on his nose, and say a verse. And he looked at me so!" The man put his face sideways. "And he looked at me _so_!" He gazed up under his brows. "And he talked to me so--o: Zieu! Zieu!--But he never moved. No, he never moved. If he sat with that bread on his nose for half an hour, and if tears ran down his face, he never moved--not till I said _three_! Then--ah!" The man tossed up his face, snapped the air with his mouth, and gulped an imaginary crust. "AH, that dog was trained...." The man of forty shook his head. "Vieni qua! Come here! Tweet! Come here!" He patted his fat knee, and the dog crept forward. The man held another piece of bread. "Now," he said to the dog, "listen! Listen. I am going to tell you something. Il soldato va alla guerra-- No--no, Not yet. When I say _three_! Il soldato va alla guerra Mangia male, dorme in terra-- Listen. Be still. Quiet now. UNO--DUE--E--TRE!" It came out in one simultaneous yell from the man, the dog in sheer bewilderment opened his jaws and let the bread go down his throat, and wagged his tail in agitated misery. "Ah," said the man, "you are learning. Come! Come here! Come! Now then! Now you know. So! So! Look at me so!" The stout, good-looking man of forty bent forward. His face was flushed, the veins in his neck stood out. He talked to the dog, and imitated the dog. And very well indeed he reproduced something of the big, gentle, wistful subservience of the animal. The dog was his totem--the affectionate, self-mistrustful, warm-hearted hound. So he started the rigmarole again. We put it into English. "Listen now. Listen! Let me tell it you-- So the soldier goes to the war! His food is rotten, he sleeps on the floor-- "Now! Now! No, you are not keeping quiet. Now! Now! Il soldate va alla guerra Mangia male, dorme in terra--" The verses, known to every Italian, were sung out in a sing-song fashion. The audience listened as one man--or as one child--the rhyme chiming in every heart. They waited with excitement for the One--Two--and Three! The last two words were always ripped out with a tearing yell. I shall never forget the force of those syllables--E TRE! But the dog made a poor show--He only gobbled the bread and was uneasy. This game lasted us a full hour: a full hour by the clock sat the whole room in intense silence, watching the man and the dog. * * * * * Our friends told us the man was the bus-inspector--their inspector. But they liked him. "Un brav' uomo! Un bravo uomo! Eh si!" Perhaps they were a little uneasy, seeing him in his cups and hearing him yell so nakedly: AND THREE! We talked rather sadly, wistfully. Young people, especially nice ones like the driver, are too sad and serious these days. The little conductor made big brown eyes at us, wistful too, and sad we were going. For in the morning they were driving back again to Sorgono, over the old road, and we were going on, to Terranova, the port. But we promised to come back in the summer, when it was warmer. Then we should all meet again. "Perhaps you will find us on the same course still. Who knows!" said the driver sadly. VII. TO TERRANOVA AND THE STEAMER. The morning was very clear and blue. We were up betimes. The old dame of the inn very friendly this morning. We were going already! Oh, but we hadn't stayed long in Nuoro. Didn't we like it? Yes, we like it. We would come back in the summer when it was warmer. Ah yes, she said, artists came in the summer. Yes, she agreed, Nuoro was a nice place--_simpatico, molto simpatico_. And really it is. And really she was an awfully nice, capable, human old woman: and I had thought her a beldame when I saw her ironing. She gave us good coffee and milk and bread, and we went out into the town. There was the real Monday morning atmosphere of an old, same-as-ever provincial town: the vacant feeling of work resumed after Sunday, rather reluctantly; nobody buying anything, nobody quite at grips with anything. The doors of the old-fashioned shops stood open: in Nuoro they have hardly reached the stage of window-displays. One must go inside, into the dark caves, to see what the goods are. Near the doorways of the drapers' shops stood rolls of that fine scarlet cloth, for the women's costumes. In a large tailor's window four women sat sewing, tailoring, and looking out of the window with eyes still Sunday-emancipate and mischievous. Detached men, some in the black and white, stood at the street corners, as if obstinately avoiding the current of work. Having had a day off, the salt taste of liberty still lingering on their lips, they were not going to be dragged so easily back into harness. I always sympathise with these rather sulky, forlorn males who insist on making another day of it. It shows a spark of spirit, still holding out against our over-harnessed world. There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn't a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of. Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing. One could saunter along the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street, and see the women having a bit of a gossip, and see an old crone with a basket of bread on her head, and see the unwilling ones hanging back from work, and the whole current of industry disinclined to flow. Life is life and things are things. I am sick of gaping _things_, even Peruginos. I have had my thrills from Carpaccio and Botticelli. But now I've had enough. But I can always look at an old, grey-bearded peasant in his earthy white drawers and his black waist-frill, wearing no coat or over-garment, but just crooking along beside his little ox-wagon. I am sick of "things," even Perugino. * * * * * The sight of the woman with the basket of bread reminded us that we wanted some food. So we searched for bread. None, if you please. It was Monday morning, eaten out. There would be bread at the forno, the oven. Where was the oven? Up the road and down a passage. I thought we should smell it. But no. We wandered back. Our friends had told us to take tickets early, for perhaps the bus would be crowded. So we bought yesterday's pastry and little cakes, and slices of native sausage. And still no bread. I went and asked our old hostess. "There is no fresh bread. It hasn't come in yet," she said. "Never mind, give me stale." So she went and rummaged in a drawer. "Oh dear, Oh dear, the women have eaten it all! But perhaps over there--" she pointed down the street--"they can give you some." They couldn't. I paid the bill--about twenty-eight francs, I think--and went out to look for the bus. There it was. In a dark little hole they gave me the long ticket-strips, first-class to Terranova. They cost some seventy francs the two. The q-b was still vainly, aimlessly looking along the street for bread. "Ready when you are," said our new driver rather snappily. He was a pale, cross-looking young man with brown eyes and fair "ginger" hair. So in we clambered, waved farewell to our old friends, whose bus was ready to roll away in the opposite direction. As we bumped past the "piazza" I saw Velveteens standing there, isolate, and still, apparently, scowling with unabated irritation. I am sure he has money: why the first class, yesterday, otherwise. And I'm sure _she_ married him because he is a townsman with property. * * * * * Out we rolled, on our last Sardinian drive. The morning was of a bell-like beauty, blue and very lovely. Below on the right stretched the concave valley, tapestried with cultivation. Up into the morning light rose the high, humanless hills, with wild, treeless moor-slopes. But there was no glass in the left window of the _coupé_, and the wind came howling in, cold enough. I stretched myself on the front seat, the q-b screwed herself into a corner, and we watched the land flash by. How well this new man drove! the long-nosed, freckled one with his gloomy brown eyes. How cleverly he changed gear, so that the automobile mewed and purred comfortably, like a live thing enjoying itself. And how dead he was to the rest of the world, wrapped in his gloom like a young bus-driving Hamlet. His answers to his mate were monosyllabic--or just no answers at all. He was one of those responsible, capable, morose souls, who do their work with silent perfection and look as if they were driving along the brink of doom, say a word to them and they'll go over the edge. But gentle _au fond_, of course. Fiction used to be fond of them: a sort of ginger-haired, young, mechanic Mr. Rochester who has even lost the Jane illusion. Perhaps it was not fair to watch him so closely from behind. His mate was a bit of a bounder, with one of those rakish military caps whose soft tops cock sideways or backwards. He was in Italian khaki, riding-breeches and puttees. He smoked his cigarette bounderishly: but at the same time, with peculiar gentleness, he handed one to the ginger Hamlet. Hamlet accepted it, and his mate held him a light as the bus swung on. They were like man and wife. The mate was the alert and wide-eyed Jane Eyre whom the ginger Mr. Rochester was not going to spoil in a hurry. * * * * * The landscape was different from yesterday's. As we dropped down the shallow, winding road from Nuoro, quite quickly the moors seemed to spread on either side, treeless, bushy, rocky, desert. How hot they must be in summer! One knows from Grazia Deledda's books. A pony with a low trap was prancing unhappily in the road-side. We slowed down and slid harmlessly past. Then again, on we whizzed down the looped road, which turned back on itself as sharply as a snake that has been wounded. Hamlet darted the bus at the curves; then softly padded round like an angel: then off again for the next parabola. We came out into wide, rather desolate, moorland valley spaces, with low rocks away to the left, and steep slopes, rocky-bushy, on the right. Sometimes groups of black-and-white men were working in the forlorn distances. A woman in the madder costume led a panniered ass along the wastes. The sun shone magnificently, already it was hotter here. The landscape had quite changed. These slopes looked east and south to the sea, they were sun-wild and sea-wild. The first stop was where a wild, rough lane came down the hill to our road. At the corner stood a lonely house--and in the road-side the most battered, life-weary old carriage I have ever seen. The jaunty mate sorted out the post--the boy with the tattered-battered brown carriage and brown pony signed the book as we all stood in the roadway. There was a little wait for a man who was fetching up another parcel. The post-bag and parcels from the tattered carriage were received and stowed and signed for. We walked up and down in the sun to get warm. The landscape was wild and open round about. Pip! goes Mr. Rochester, peremptorily, at the horn. Amazing how obediently we scuffle in. Away goes the bus, rushing towards the sea. Already one felt that peculiar glare in the half-way heavens, that intensification of the light in the lower sky, which is caused by the sea to sunward. Away in front three girls in brown costume are walking along the side of the white high-road, going with panniers towards a village up a slight incline. They hear us, turn round, and instantly go off their heads, exactly like chickens in the road. They fly towards us, crossing the road, and swifter than any rabbits they scuttle, one after another, into a deep side-track, like a deep ditch at right angles to the road. There, as we roll past, they are all crouched, peering out at us fearfully, like creatures from their hole. The bus mate salutes them with a shout, and we roll on towards the village on the low summit. * * * * * It is a small, stony, hen-scratched place of poor people. We roll on to a standstill. There is a group of poor people. The women wear the dark-brown costume, and again the bolero has changed shape. It is a rather fantastic low corset, curiously shapen; and originally, apparently, made of wonderful elaborate brocade. But look at it now. There is an altercation because a man wants to get into the bus with two little black pigs, each of which is wrapped in a little sack, with its face and ears appearing like a flower from a wrapped bouquet. He is told that he must pay the fare for each pig as if it were a Christian. _Cristo del mondo!_ A pig, a little pig, and paid for as if it were a Christian. He dangles the pig-bouquets, one from each hand, and the little pigs open their black mouths and squeal with self-conscious appreciation of the excitement they are causing. _Dio benedetto!_ it is a chorus. But the bus mate is inexorable. Every animal, even if it were a mouse, must be paid for and have a ticket as if it were a Christian. The pig-master recoils stupified with indignation, a pig-bouquet under each arm. "How much do you charge for the fleas you carry?" asks a sarcastic youth. A woman sitting sewing a soldier's tunic into a little jacket for her urchin, and thus beating the sword into a ploughshare, stitches unconcernedly in the sun. Round-cheeked but rather slatternly damsels giggle. The pig-master, speechless with fury, slings the pig-bouquets, like two bottles one on either side the saddle of the ass whose halter is held by a grinning but also malevolent girl: malevolent against pig-prices, that is. The pigs, looking abroad from their new situation, squeal the eternal pig-protest against an insufferable humanity. "Andiamo! Andiamo!" says ginger Mr. Rochester in his quiet but intense voice. The bus-mate scrambles up and we charge once more into the strong light to seaward. * * * * * In we roll, into Orosei, a dilapidated, sun-smitten, god-forsaken little town not far from the sea. We descend in piazza. There is a great, false baroque façade to a church, up a wavering vast mass of steps: and at the side a wonderful jumble of roundnesses with a jumble of round tiled roofs, peaked in the centre. It must have been some sort of convent. But it is eminently what they call a "painter's bit"--that pallid, big baroque face, at the top of the slow incline, and the very curious dark building at the side of it, with its several dark-tiled round roofs, like pointed hats, at varying altitudes. The whole space has a strange Spanish look, neglected, arid, yet with a bigness and a dilapidated dignity and a stoniness which carry one back to the Middle Ages, when life was violent and Orosei was no doubt a port and a considerable place. Probably it had bishops. [Illustration: NUORO ] The sun came hot into the wide piazza; with its pallid heavy façade up on the stony incline on one side, and arches and a dark great courtyard and outer stair-ways of some unknown building away on the other, the road entering down-hill from the inland, and dropping out below to the sea-marshes, and with the impression that once some single power had had the place in grip, had given this centre an architectural unity and splendour, now lost and forgotten, Orosei was truly fascinating. But the inhabitants were churlish. We went into a sort of bar-place, very primitive, and asked for bread. "Bread alone?" said the churl. "If you please." "There isn't any," he answered. "Oh--where can we get some then?" "You can't get any." "Really!" And we couldn't. People stood about glum, not friendly. There was a second great automobile, ready to set off for Tortolì, far to the south, on the east coast. Mandas is the railway junction both for Sorgono and Tortolì. The two buses stood near and communed. We prowled about the dead, almost extinct town--or call it village. Then Mr. Rochester began to pip his horn peremptorily, so we scuffled in. The post was stowed away. A native in black broad-cloth came running and sweating, carrying an ox-blood suit-case, and said we must wait for his brother-in-law, who was a dozen yards away. Ginger Mr. Rochester sat on his driver's throne and glared in the direction whence the brother-in-law must come. His brow knitted irritably, his long, sharp nose did not promise much patience. He made the horn roar like a sea-cow. But no brother-in-law. "I'm going to wait no longer," said he. "Oh, a minute, a minute! That won't do us any harm," expostulated his mate. No answer from the long faced, long-nosed ginger Hamlet. He sat statuesque, but with black eyes looking daggers down the still void road. "_Eh va bene_", he murmured through closed lips, and leaned forward grimly for the starting handle. "Patience--patience--patience a moment--why--" cried the mate. "Per l'amor' di Dio!" cried the black broad-cloth man, simply sizzling and dancing in anguish on the road, round the suit-case, which stood in the dust. "Don't go! God's love, don't start. He's got to catch the boat. He's got to be in Rome tomorrow. He won't be a second. He's here, he's here, he's here!" This startled the fate-fixed, sharp-nosed driver. He released the handle and looked round, with dark and glowering eyes. No one in sight. The few glum natives stood round unmoved. Thunder came into the gloomy dark eyes of the Rochester. Absolutely nobody in sight. Click! went his face into a look of almost seraphic peace, as he pulled off the brakes. We were on an incline, and insidiously, oh most subtly the great bus started to lean forwards and steal into motion. "Oh _ma che!_--what a will you've got!" cried the mate, clambering in to the side of the now seraphic-looking Rochester. "Love of God--God!" yelled the broad-cloth, seeing the bus melt forwards and gather momentum. He put his hands up as if to arrest it, and yelled in a wild howl: "O Beppin'! Bepp_in_--O!" But in vain. Already we had left the little groups of onlookers behind. We were rolling downwards out of the piazza. Broad-cloth had seized the bag and was running beside us in agony. Out of the piazza we rolled, Rochester had not put on the engines and we were just simply rolling down the gentle incline by the will of God. Into the dark outlet-street we melted, towards the still invisible sea. Suddenly a yell--"OO--ahh!!" "� qua! � qua! � qua! � qua!" gasped broad-cloth four times. "He's here!" And then: "Beppin'--she's going, she's going!" Beppin' appeared, a middle-aged man also in black broad-cloth, with a very scrubby chin and a bundle, running _towards_ us on fat legs. He was perspiring, but his face was expressionless and innocent-looking. With a sardonic flicker of a grin, half of spite, half of relief, Rochester put on the brakes again, and we stopped in the street. A woman tottered up panting and holding her breast. Now for farewells. "Andiamo!" said Rochester curtly, looking over his shoulder and making his fine nose curl with malice. And instantly he took off the brakes again. The fat woman shoved Beppin' in, gasping farewells, the brother-in-law handed in the ox-blood-red suit-case, tottering behind, and the bus surged savagely out of Orosei. * * * * * Almost in a moment we had left the town on its slope, and there below us was a river winding through marshy flats to the sea, to where small white surf broke on a flat, isolated beach, a quarter of a mile away. The river ran rapidly between stones and then between belts of high sere reeds, high as a man. These tall reeds advanced almost into the slow, horizontal sea, from which stood up a white glare of light, massive light over the low Mediterranean. Quickly we came down to the river-level, and rolled over a bridge. Before us, between us and the sea rose another hill, almost like a wall with a flat top, running horizontal, perfectly flat, parallel with the sea-edge, a sort of narrow long plateau. For a moment we were in the wide scoop of the river-bed. Orosei stood on the bluff behind us. Away to the right the flat river-marshes with the thick dead reeds met the flat and shining sea, river and sea were one water, the waves rippled tiny and soft-foot into the stream. To the left there was great loveliness. The bed of the river curved upwards and inland, and there was cultivation: but particularly, there were noble almond trees in full blossom. How beautiful they were, their pure, silvery pink gleaming so nobly, like a transfiguration, tall and perfect in that strange cradled river-bed parallel with the sea. Almond trees were in flower beneath grey Orosei, almond trees came near the road, and we could see the hot eyes of the individual blossoms, almond trees stood on the upward slope before us. And they had flowered in such noble beauty there, in that trough where the sun fell magnificent and the sea-glare whitened all the air as with a sort of God-presence, they gleamed in their incandescent sky-rosiness. One could hardly see their iron trunks, in this weird valley. But already we had crossed, and were charging up the great road that was cut straight, slant-wise along the side of the sea-hill, like a stairway outside the side of the house. So the bus turned southward to run up this stairway slant, to get to the top of the sea's long table-land. So, we emerged: and there was the Mediterranean rippling against the black rocks not so very far away below on our right. For, once on the long table-land the road turned due north, a long white dead-straight road running between strips of moorland, wild and bushy. The sea was in the near distance, blue, blue, and beating with light. It seemed more light than watery. And on the left was the wide trough of the valley, where almond trees like clouds in a wind seemed to poise sky-rosy upon the pale, sun-pale land, and beyond which Orosei clustered its lost grey houses on the bluff. Oh wonderful Orosei with your almonds and your reedy river, throbbing, throbbing with light and the sea's nearness, and all so lost, in a world long gone by, lingering as legends linger on. It is hard to believe that it is real. It seems so long since life left it and memory transfigured it into pure glamour, lost away like a lost pearl on the east Sardinian coast. Yet there it is, with a few grumpy inhabitants who won't even give you a crust of bread. And probably there is malaria--almost sure. And it would be hell to have to live there for a month. Yet for a moment, that January morning, how wonderful, oh, the timeless glamour of those Middle Ages when men were lordly and violent and shadowed with death. "Timor mortis conturbat me." The road ran along by the sea, above the sea, swinging gently up and down, and running on to a sea-encroaching hilly promontory in the distance. There were no high lands. The valley was left behind, and moors surrounded us, wild, desolate, uninhabited and uninhabitable moors sweeping up gently on the left, and finishing where the land dropped low and clifflike to the sea on the right. No life was now in sight: even no ship upon the pale blue sea. The great globe of the sky was unblemished and royal in its blueness and its ringing cerulean light. Over the moors a great hawk hovered. Rocks cropped out. It was a savage, dark-bushed, sky-exposed land, forsaken to the sea and the sun. * * * * * We were alone in the _coupé_. The bus-mate had made one or two sets at us, but he rather confused us. He was young--about twenty-two or three. He was quite good-looking, with his rakish military cap and his well-knitted figure in military clothes. But he had dark eyes that seemed to ask too much, and his manner of approach was abrupt, persistent, and disconcerting. Already he had asked us where we were going, where we lived, whence we came, of what nationality we were, and was I a painter. Already he knew so much. Further we rather fought shy of him. We ate those pale Nuoro pastries--they were just flaky pastry, good, but with nothing inside but a breath of air. And we gnawed slices of very highly-flavoured Nuoro sausage. And we drank the tea. And we were very hungry, for it was past noon, and we had eaten as good as nothing. The sun was magnificent in heaven, we rushed at a great, purring speed along that moorland road just above the sea. And then the bus-mate climbed in to share the coupé with us. He put his dark, beseeching and yet persistent eyes on us, sat plumb in front of us, his knees squared, and began to shout awkward questions in a strong curious voice. Of course it was very difficult to hear, for the great rushing bus made much noise. We had to try to yell in our Italian--and he was as awkward as we were. However, although it said "Smoking Forbidden" he offered us both cigarettes, and insisted we should smoke with him. Easiest to submit. He tried to point us out features in the landscape: but there were none to point, except that, where the hill ran to sea out of the moor, and formed a cape, he said there was a house away under the cliffs where coastguards lived. Nothing else. Then, however, he launched. He asked once more was I English and was the q-b German. We said it was so. And then he started the old story. Nations popped up and down again like Punch and Judy. Italy--l'Italia--she had no quarrel with La Germania--never had had--no--no, good friends the two nations. But once the war was started, Italy had to come in. For why. Germany would beat France, occupy her lands, march down and invade Italy. Best then join the war whilst the enemy was only invading somebody else's territory. They are perfectly naïve about it. That's what I like. He went on to say that he was a soldier: he had served eight years in the Italian cavalry. Yes, he was a cavalryman, and had been all through the war. But he had not therefore any quarrel with Germany. No--war was war, and it was over. So let it be over. But France--_ma la Francia!_ Here he sat forward on his seat, with his face near ours, and his pleading-dog's eyes suddenly took a look of quite irrational blazing rage. France! There wasn't a man in Italy who wasn't dying to get at the throat of France. France! Let there be war, and every Italian would leap to arms, even the old. Even the old--_anche i vecchi_. Yes, there must be war--with France. It was coming: it was bound to come. Every Italian was waiting for it. Waiting to fly at the French throat. For why? Why? He had served two years on the French front, and he knew why. Ah, the French! For arrogance, for insolence, Dio!--they were not to be borne. The French--they thought themselves lords of the world--_signori del mondo!_ Lords of the world, and masters of the world. Yes. They thought themselves no less--and what are they? Monkeys! Monkeys! Not better than monkeys. But let there be war, and Italy would show them. Italy would give them _signori del mondo_! Italy was pining for war--all, all, pining for war. With no one, with no one but France. Ah, with no one--Italy loved everybody else--but France! France! We let him shout it all out, till he was at the end of it. The passion and energy of him was amazing. He was like one possessed. I could only wonder. And wonder again. For it is curious what fearful passions these pleading, wistful souls fall into when they feel they have been insulted. It was evident he felt he had been insulted, and he went just beside himself. But dear chap, he shouldn't speak so loudly for all Italy--even the old. The bulk of Italian men are only too anxious to beat their bayonets into cigarette-holders, and smoke the cigarette of eternal and everlasting peace, to coincide at all with our friend. Yet there he was--raging at me in the bus as we dashed along the coast. And then, after a space of silence, he became sad again, wistful, and looked at us once more with those pleading brown eyes, beseeching, beseeching--he knew not what: and I'm sure I didn't know. Perhaps what he really wants is to be back on a horse in a cavalry regiment: even at war. But no, it comes out, what he thinks he wants. When are we going to London? And are there many motor-cars in England?--many, many? In America too? Do they want men in America? I say no, they have unemployment out there: they are going to stop immigration in April: or at least cut it down. Why? he asks sharply. Because they have their own unemployment problem. And the q-b quotes how many millions of Europeans want to emigrate to the United States. His eye becomes gloomy. Are all nations of Europe going to be forbidden? he asks. Yes--and already the Italian Government will give no more passports for America--to emigrants. No passports? then you can't go? You can't go, say I. By this time his hot-souled eagerness and his hot, beseeching eyes have touched the q-b. She asks him what he wants. And from his gloomy face it comes out in a rap. "_Andare fuori dell'Italia._" To go out of Italy. To go out--away--to go away--to go away. It has become a craving, a neurasthenia with them. Where is his home? His home is at a village a few miles ahead--here on this coast. We are coming to it soon. There is his home. And a few miles inland from the village he also has a property: he also has land. But he doesn't want to work it. He doesn't want it. In fact he won't bother with it. He hates the land, he detests looking after vines. He can't even bring himself to try any more. What does he want then? He wants to leave Italy, to go abroad--as a chauffeur. Again the long beseeching look, as of a distraught, pleading animal. He would prefer to be the chauffeur of a gentleman. But he would drive a bus, he would do anything--in England. Now he has launched it. Yes, I say, but in England also we have more men than jobs. Still he looks at me with his beseeching eyes--so desperate too--and so young--and so full of energy--and so longing to _devote_ himself--to devote himself: or else to go off in an unreasonable paroxysm against the French. To my horror I feel he is believing in my goodness of heart. And as for motor-cars, it is all I can do to own a pair of boots, so how am I to set about employing a _chauffeur_? * * * * * We have all gone quiet again. So at last he climbs back and takes his seat with the driver once more. The road is still straight, swinging on through the moorland strip by the sea. And he leans to the silent, nerve-tense Mr. Rochester, pleading again. And at length Mr. Rochester edges aside, and lets him take the driving wheel. And so now we are all in the hands of our friend the bus-mate. He drives--not very well. It is evident he is learning. The bus can't quite keep in the grooves of this wild bare road. And he shuts off when we slip down a hill--and there is a great muddle on the upslope when he tries to change gear. But Mr. Rochester sits squeezed and silently attentive in his corner. He puts out his hand and swings the levers. There is no fear that he will let anything go wrong. I would trust him to drive me down the bottomless pit and up the other side. But still the beseeching mate holds the steering wheel. And on we rush, rather uncertainly and hesitatingly now. And thus we come to the bottom of a hill where the road gives a sudden curve. My heart rises an inch in my breast. I know he can't do it. And he can't, oh Lord--but the quiet hand of the freckled Rochester takes the wheel, we swerve on. And the bus-mate gives up, and the nerve-silent driver resumes control. * * * * * But the bus-mate now feels at home with us. He clambers back into the coupé, and when it is too painfully noisy to talk, he simply sits and looks at us with brown, pleading eyes. Miles and miles and miles goes this coast road, and never a village. Once or twice a sort of lonely watch-house and soldiers lying about by the road. But never a halt. Everywhere moorland and desert, uninhabited. And we are faint with fatigue and hunger and this relentless travelling. When, oh when shall we come to Siniscola, where we are due to eat our midday meal? Oh yes, says the mate. There is an inn at Siniscola where we can eat what we like. Siniscola--Siniscola! We feel we must get down, we must eat, it is past one o'clock and the glaring light and the rushing loneliness are still about us. * * * * * But it is behind the hill in front. We see the hill? Yes. Behind it is Siniscola. And down there on the beach are the Bagni di Siniscola, where many forestieri, strangers, come in the summer. Therefore we set high hopes on Siniscola. From the town to the sea, two miles, the bathers ride on asses. Sweet place. And it is coming near--really near. There are stone-fenced fields--even stretches of moor fenced off. There are vegetables in a little field with a stone wall--there is a strange white track through the moor to a forsaken sea-coast. We are near. Over the brow of the low hill--and there it is, a grey huddle of a village with two towers. There it is, we are there. Over the cobbles we bump, and pull up at the side of the street. This is Siniscola, and here we eat. We drop out of the weary bus. The mate asks a man to show us the inn--the man says he won't, muttering. So a boy is deputed--and he consents. This is the welcome. And I can't say much for Siniscola. It is just a narrow, crude, stony place, hot in the sun, cold in the shade. In a minute or two we were at the inn, where a fat, young man was just dismounting from his brown pony and fastening it to a ring beside the door. The inn did not look promising--the usual cold room opening gloomily on the gloomy street. The usual long table, with this time a foully blotched table-cloth. And two young peasant madams in charge, in the brown costume, rather sordid, and with folded white cloths on their heads. The younger was in attendance. She was a full-bosomed young hussy, and would be very queenly and cocky. She held her nose in the air, and seemed ready to jibe at any order. It takes one some time to get used to this cocky, assertive behaviour of the young damsels, the who'll-tread-on-the-tail-of-my-skirt bearing of the hussies. But it is partly a sort of crude defensiveness and shyness, partly it is barbaric _méfiance_ or mistrust, and partly, without doubt, it is a tradition with Sardinian women that they must hold their own and be ready to hit first. This young sludge-queen was all hit. She flounced her posterior round the table, planking down the lumps of bread on the foul cloth with an air of take-it-as-a-condescension-that-I-wait-on-you, a subdued grin lurking somewhere on her face. It is not meant to be offensive: yet it is so. Truly, it is just uncouthness. But when one is tired and hungry.... We were not the only feeders. There was the man off the pony, and a sort of workman or porter or dazio official with him--and a smart young man: and later our Hamlet driver. Bit by bit the young damsel planked down bread, plates, spoons, glasses, bottles of black wine, whilst we sat at the dirty table in uncouth constraint and looked at the hideous portrait of His reigning Majesty of Italy. And at length came the inevitable soup. And with it the sucking chorus. The little _maialino_ at Mandas had been a good one. But the smart young man in the country beat him. As water clutters and slavers down a choky gutter, so did his soup travel upwards into his mouth with one long sucking stream of noise, intensified as the bits of cabbage, etc., found their way through the orifice. They did all the talking--the young men. They addressed the sludge-queen curtly and disrespectfully, as if to say: "What's she up to?" Her airs were finely thrown away. Still she showed off. What else was there to eat? There was the meat that had been boiled for the soup. We knew what that meant. I had as lief eat the foot of an old worsted stocking. Nothing else, you sludge queen? No, what do you want anything else for?--Beefsteak--what's the good of asking for beefsteak or any other steak on a Monday. Go to the butcher's and see for yourself. The Hamlet, the pony rider, and the porter had the faded and tired chunks of boiled meat. The smart young man ordered eggs in padella--two eggs fried with a little butter. We asked for the same. The smart young man got his first--and of course they were warm and liquid. So he fell upon them with a fork, and once he had got hold of one end of the eggs he just sucked them up in a prolonged and violent suck, like a long, thin, ropy drink being sucked upwards from the little pan. It was a genuine exhibition. Then he fell upon the bread with loud chews. What else was there? A miserable little common orange. So much for the dinner. Was there cheese? No. But the sludge-queen--they are quite good-natured really--held a conversation in dialect with the young men, which I did not try to follow. Our pensive driver translated that there _was_ cheese, but it wasn't good, so they wouldn't offer it us. And the pony man interpolated that they didn't like to offer us anything that was not of the best. He said it in all sincerity--after such a meal. This roused my curiosity, so I asked for the cheese whether or not. And it wasn't so bad after all. This meal cost fifteen francs, for the pair of us. * * * * * We made our way back to the bus, through the uncouth men who stood about. To tell the truth, strangers are not popular nowadays--not anywhere. Everybody has a grudge against them at first sight. This grudge may or may not wear off on acquaintance. The afternoon had become hot--hot as an English June. And we had various other passengers--for one a dark-eyed, long-nosed priest who showed his teeth when he talked. There was not much room in the coupé, so the goods were stowed upon the little rack. With the strength of the sun, and the six or seven people in it, the coupé became stifling. The q-b opened her window. But the priest, one of the loudtalking sort, said that a draught was harmful, very harmful, so he put it up again. He was one of the gregarious sort, a loud talker, nervy really, very familiar with all the passengers. And everything did one harm--_fa male, fa male_. A draught _fa male, fa molto male_. _Non è vero?_ this to all the men from Siniscola. And they all said Yes--yes. The bus-mate clambered into the _coupé_, to take the tickets of the second-class passengers in the rotondo, through the little wicket. There was great squeezing and shouting and reckoning change. And then we stopped at a halt, and he dashed down with the post and the priest got down for a drink with the other men. The Hamlet driver sat stiff in his seat. He pipped the horn. He pipped again, with decision. Men came clambering in. But it looked as if the offensive priest would be left behind. The bus started venomously, the priest came running, his gown flapping, wiping his lips. He dropped into his seat with a cackling laugh, showing his long teeth. And he said that it was as well to take a drink, to fortify the stomach. To travel with the stomach uneasy did one harm: _fa male, fa male--non è vero?_ Chorus of "yes." The bus-mate resumed his taking the tickets through the little wicket, thrusting his rear amongst us. As he stood like this, down fell his sheepskin-lined military overcoat on the q-b's head. He was filled with grief. He folded it and placed it on the seat, as a sort of cushion for her, oh so gently! And how he would love to devote himself to a master and mistress. He sat beside me, facing the q-b, and offered us an acid drop. We took the acid drop. He smiled with zealous yearning at the q-b, and resumed his conversations. Then he offered us cigarettes--insisted on our taking cigarettes. The priest with the long teeth looked sideways at the q-b, seeing her smoking. Then he fished out a long cigar, bit it, and spat. He was offered a cigarette.--But no, cigarettes were harmful: _fanno male_. The paper was bad for the health: oh, very bad. A pipe or a cigar. So he lit his long cigar and spat large spits on the floor, continually. Beside me sat a big, bright-eyed, rather good-looking but foolish man. Hearing me speak to the q-b, he said in confidence to the priest: "Here are two Germans--eh? Look at them. The woman smoking. These are a couple of those that were interned here. Sardinia can do without them now." Germans in Italy at the outbreak of the war were interned in Sardinia, and as far as one hears, they were left very free and happy, and treated very well, the Sardinians having been generous as all proud people are. But now our bright-eyed fool made a great titter through the bus: quite unaware that we understood. He said nothing offensive: but that sort of tittering exultation of common people who think they have you at a disadvantage annoyed me. However, I kept still to hear what they would say. But it was only trivialities about the Germans having nearly all gone now, their being free to travel, their coming back to Sardinia because they liked it better than Germany. Oh yes--they all wanted to come back. They all wanted to come back to Sardinia. Oh yes, they knew where they were well off. They knew their own advantage. Sardinia was this, that, and the other of advantageousness, and the Sardi were decent people. It is just as well to put in a word on one's own behalf occasionally. As for La Germania--she was down, down: bassa. What did one pay for bread in Germany? Five francs a kilo, my boy. * * * * * The bus stopped again, and they trooped out into the hot sun. The priest scuffled round the corner this time. Not to go round the corner was no doubt harmful. We waited. A frown came between the bus Hamlet's brows. He looked nerve-worn and tired. It was about three o'clock. We had to wait for a man from a village, with the post. And he did not appear. "I am going! I won't wait," said the driver. "Wait--wait a minute," said the mate, pouring oil. And he went round to look. But suddenly the bus started, with a vicious lurch. The mate came flying and hung on to the footboard. He had really almost been left. The driver glanced round sardonically to see if he were there. The bus flew on. The mate shook his head in deprecation. "He's a bit _nervoso_, the driver," said the q-b. "A bit out of temper!" "Ah, poor chap!" said the good-looking young mate, leaning forward and making such beseeching eyes of hot tolerance. "One has to be sorry for him. Persons like him, they suffer so much from themselves, how should one be angry with them! _Poverino._ We must have sympathy." Never was such a language of sympathy as the Italian. _Poverino! Poverino!_ They are never happy unless they are sympathising pityingly with somebody. And I rather felt that I was thrown in with the _poverini_ who had to be pitied for being _nervosi_. Which did not improve my temper. However, the bus-mate suddenly sat on the opposite seat between the priest and the q-b. He turned over his official note book, and began to write on the back cover very carefully, in the flourishing Italian hand. Then he tore off what he had written, and with a very bright and zealous look he handed me the paper saying: "You will find me a post in England, when you go in the summer? You will find me a place in London as a chauffeur--!" "If I can," said I. "But it is not easy." He nodded his head at me with the most complete bright confidence, quite sure now that he had settled his case perfectly. On the paper he had written his name and his address, and if anyone would like him as chauffeur they have only to say so. On the back of the scrap of paper the inevitable goodwill: _Auguri infiniti e buon Viaggio_. Infinite good wishes and a good journey. I folded the paper and put it in my waistcoat pocket, feeling a trifle disconcerted by my new responsibility. He was such a dear fellow and such bright trustful eyes. * * * * * This much achieved, there was a moment of silence. And the bus-mate turned to take a ticket of a fat, comfortable man who had got in at the last stop. There was a bit of flying conversation. "Where are they from?" asked the good-looking stupid man next to me, inclining his head in our direction. "Londra," said our friend, with stern satisfaction: and they have said so often to one another that London is the greatest city in the world, that now the very word Londra conveys it all. You should have seen the blank little-boy look come over the face of the big handsome fellow on hearing that we were citizens of the greatest city in the world. "And they understand Italian?" he asked, rather nipped. "Sicuro!" said our friend scornfully. "How shouldn't they?" "Ah!" My large neighbour left his mouth open for a few moments. And then another sort of smile came on to his face. He began to peep at us sideways from his brown eyes, brightly, and was henceforth itching to get into conversation with the citizens of the world's mistress-city. His look of semi-impudence was quite gone, replaced by a look of ingratiating admiration. Now I ask you, is this to be borne? Here I sit, and he talks half-impudently and patronisingly about me. And here I sit, and he is glegging at me as if he saw signs of an aureole under my grey hat. All in ten minutes. And just because, instead of _la Germania_ I turn out to be _l'Inghilterra_. I might as well be a place on a map, or a piece of goods with a trade-mark. So little perception of the actual me! so much going by labels! I now could have kicked him harder. I would have liked to say I was ten times German, to see the fool change his smirk again. * * * * * The priest now chimed up, that he had been to America. He had been to America and hence he dreaded not the crossing from Terranuova di Sardegna to Cività Vecchia. For he had crossed the great Atlantic. Apparently, however, the natives had all heard this song of the raven before, so he spat largely on the floor. Whereupon the new fat neighbour asked him was it true that the Catholic Church was now becoming the one Church in the United States? And the priest said there was no doubt about it. * * * * * The hot afternoon wore on. The coast was rather more inhabited, but we saw practically no villages. The view was rather desolate. From time to time we stopped at a sordid-looking canteen house. From time to time we passed natives riding on their ponies, and sometimes there was an equestrian exhibition as the rough, strong little beasts reared and travelled rapidly backwards, away from the horrors of our great automobile. But the male riders sat heavy and unshakeable, with Sardinian male force. Everybody in the bus laughed, and we passed, looking back to see the pony still corkscrewing, but in vain, in the middle of the lonely, grass-bordered high-road. * * * * * The bus-mate climbed in and out, coming in to sit near us. He was like a dove which has at last found an olive bough to nest in. And we were the olive bough in this world of waste waters. Alas, I felt a broken reed. But he sat so serenely near us, now, like a dog that has found a master. The afternoon was declining, the bus pelted on at a great rate. Ahead we saw the big lump of the island of Tavolara, a magnificient mass of rock which fascinated me by its splendid, weighty form. It looks like a headland, for it apparently touches the land. There it rests at the sea's edge, in this lost afternoon world. Strange how this coast-country does not belong to our present-day world. As we rushed along we saw steamers, two steamers, steering south, and one sailing ship coming from Italy. And instantly, the steamers seemed like our own familiar world. But still this coast-country was forsaken, forgotten, not included. It just is not included. * * * * * How tired one gets of these long, long rides! It seemed we should never come up to Tavolara. But we did. We came right near to it, and saw the beach with the waves rippling undisturbed, saw the narrow waters between the rock-lump and the beach. For now the road was down at sea-level. And we were not very far from Terranova. Yet all seemed still forsaken, outside of the world's life. The sun was going down, very red and strong, away inland. In the bus all were silent, subsiding into the pale travel-sleep. We charged along the flat road, down on a plain now. And dusk was gathering heavily over the land. We saw the high-road curve flat upon the plain. It was the harbour head. We saw a magic, land-locked harbour, with masts and dark land encircling a glowing basin. We even saw a steamer lying at the end of a long, thin bank of land, in the shallow, shining, wide harbour, as if wrecked there. And this was our steamer. But no, it looked in the powerful glow of the sunset like some lonely steamer laid up in some land-locked bay away at Spitzbergen, towards the North Pole: a solemn, mysterious, blue-landed bay, lost, lost to mankind. * * * * * Our bus-mate came and told us we were to sit in the bus till the post-work was done, then we should be driven to the hotel where we could eat, and then he would accompany us on the town omnibus to the boat. We need not be on board till eight o'clock: and now it was something after five. So we sat still while the bus rushed and the road curved and the view of the weird, land-locked harbour changed, though the bare masts of ships in a bunch still pricked the upper glow, and the steamer lay away out, as if wrecked on a sand-bank, and dark, mysterious land with bunchy hills circled round, dark blue and wintry in a golden after-light, while the great, shallow-seeming bay of water shone like a mirror. In we charged, past a railway, along the flat darkening road into a flat God-lost town of dark houses, on the marshy bay-head. It felt more like a settlement than a town. But it was Terranova-Pausanias. And after bumping and rattling down a sombre uncouth, barren-seeming street, we came up with a jerk at a doorway--which was the post-office. Urchins, mudlarks, were screaming for the luggage. Everybody got out and set off towards the sea, the urchins carrying luggage. We sat still. * * * * * Till I couldn't bear it. I did not want to stay in the automobile another moment, and I did not, I did not want to be accompanied by our new-found friend to the steamer. So I burst out, and the q-b followed. She too was relieved to escape the new attachment, though she had a great _tendre_ for him. But in the end one runs away from one's _tendres_ much harder and more precipitately than from one's _durs_. The mudlarking urchins fell upon us. Had we any more luggage--were we going to the steamer? I asked how one went to the steamer--did one walk? I thought perhaps it would be necessary to row out. You go on foot, or in a carriage, or in an aeroplane, said an impudent brat. How far? Ten minutes. Could one go on board at once? Yes, certainly. So, in spite of the q-b's protests, I handed the sack to a wicked urchin, to be led. She wanted us to go alone--but I did not know the way, and am wary of stumbling into entanglements in these parts. I told the bus-Hamlet, who was abstract with nerve fatigue, please to tell his comrade that I would not forget the commission: and I tapped my waistcoat pocket, where the paper lay over my heart. He briefly promised--and we escaped. We escaped any further friendship. * * * * * I bade the mud-lark lead me to the telegraph office: which of course was quite remote from the post-office. Shouldering the sack, and clamouring for the kitchenino which the q-b stuck to, he marched forward. By his height he was ten years old: by his face with its evil mud-lark pallor and good-looks, he was forty. He wore a cut-down soldier's tunic which came nearly to his knees, was barefoot, and sprightly with that alert mudlarking quickness which has its advantages. So we went down a passage and climbed a stair and came to an office where one would expect to register births and deaths. But the urchin said it was the telegraph-office. No sign of life. Peering through the wicket I saw a fat individual seated writing in the distance. Feeble lights relieved the big, barren, official spaces--I wonder the fat official wasn't afraid to be up here alone. He made no move. I banged the shutter and demanded a telegraph blank. His shoulders went up to his ears, and he plainly intimated his intention to let us wait. But I said loudly to the urchin: "Is _that_ the telegraph official?" and the urchin said: "Si signore"--so the fat individual had to come. * * * * * After which considerable delay, we set off again. The bus, thank heaven, had gone, the savage dark street was empty of friends. We turned away to the harbour front. It was dark now. I saw a railway near at hand--a bunch of dark masts--the steamer showing a few lights, far down at the tip of a long spit of land, remote in mid-harbour. And so off we went, the barefoot urchin twinkling a few yards ahead, on the road that followed the spit of land. The spit was wide enough to carry this road, and the railway. On the right was a silent house apparently built on piles in the harbour. Away far down in front leaned our glimmering steamer, and a little train was shunting trucks among the low sheds beside it. Night had fallen, and the great stars flashed. Orion was in the air, and his dog-star after him. We followed on down the dark bar between the silent, lustrous water. The harbour was smooth as glass, and gleaming like a mirror. Hills came round encircling it entirely--dark land ridging up and lying away out, even to seaward. One was not sure which was exactly seaward. The dark encircling of the land seemed stealthy, the hills had a remoteness, guarding the waters in the silence. Perhaps the great mass away beyond was Tavolara again. It seemed like some lumpish berg guarding an arctic, locked-up bay where ships lay dead. [Illustration: TERRANOVA] On and on we followed the urchin, till the town was left behind, until it also twinkled a few meagre lights out of its low, confused blackness at the bay-head, across the waters. We lad left the ship-masts and the settlement. The urchin padded on, only turning now and again and extending a thin, eager hand toward the kitchenino. Especially when some men were advancing down the railway he wanted it: the q-b's carrying it was a slur on his prowess. So the kitchenino was relinquished, and the lark strode on satisfied. * * * * * Till at last we came to the low sheds that squatted between the steamer and the railway-end. The lark led me into one, where a red-cap was writing. The cap let me wait some minutes before informing me that this was the goods office--the ticket office was further on. The lark flew at him and said "Then you've changed it, have you?" And he led me on to another shed, which was just going to shut up. Here they finally had the condescension to give me two tickets--a hundred and fifty francs the two. So we followed the lark who strode like Scipio Africanus up the gangway with the sack. * * * * * It was quite a small ship. The steward put me in number one cabin--the q-b in number seven. Each cabin had four berths. Consequently man and woman must separate rigorously on this ship. Here was a blow for the q-b, who knows what Italian female fellow-passengers can be. However, there we were. All the cabins were down below, and all, for some mysterious reason, inside--no portholes outside. It was hot and close down below already. I pitched the sack on my berth, and there stood the lark on the red carpet at the door. I gave him three francs. He looked at it as if it were my death-warrant. He peered at the paper in the light of the lamp. Then he extended his arm with a gesture of superb insolence, flinging me back my gold without a word. "How!" said I. "Three francs are quite enough." "Three francs--two kilometers--and three pieces of luggage! No signore. No! Five francs. Cinque franchi!" And averting his pallid, old mudlarking face, and flinging his hand out at me, he stood the image of indignant repudiation. And truly, he was no taller than my upper waistcoat pocket. The brat! The brat! He was such an actor, and so impudent, that I wavered between wonder and amusement and a great inclination to kick him up the steps. I decided not to waste my energy being angry. "What a beastly little boy! What a horrid little boy! What a _horrid_ little boy! Really--a little thief. A little swindler!" I mused aloud. "Swindler!" he quavered after me. And he was beaten. "Swindler" doubled him up: that and the quiet mildness of my tone of invocation. Now he would have gone with his three francs. And now, in final contempt, I gave him the other two. He disappeared like a streak of lightning up the gangway, terrified lest the steward should come and catch him at his tricks. For later on I saw the steward send other larks flying for demanding more than one-fifty. The brat. * * * * * The question was now the cabin: for the q-b simply refused to entertain the idea of sharing a cabin with three Italian women, who would all be sick simply for the fuss of it, though the sea was smooth as glass. We hunted up the steward. He said all the first-class cabins had four berths--the second had three, but much smaller. How that was possible I don't know. However, if no one came, he would give us a cabin to ourselves. The ship was clean and civilised, though very poky. And there we were. * * * * * We went on deck. Would we eat on board, asked another person. No, we wouldn't. We went out to a fourth little shed, which was a refreshment stall, and bought bread and sardines and chocolate and apples. Then we went on the upper deck to make our meal. In a sheltered place I lit the spirit lamp, and put on water to boil. The water we had taken from the cabin. Then we sat down alone in the darkness, on a seat which had its back against the deck cabins, now appropriated by the staff. A thin, cold wind was travelling. We wrapped the one plaid round us both and snugged together, waiting for the tea to boil. I could just see the point of the spirit-flame licking up, from where we sat. * * * * * The stars were marvellous in the soundless sky, so big, that one could see them hanging orb-like and alone in their own space, yet all the myriads. Particularly bright the evening-star. And he hung flashing in the lower night with a power that made me hold my breath. Grand and powerful he sent out his flashes, so sparkling that he seemed more intense than any sun or moon. And from the dark, uprising land he sent his way of light to us across the water, a marvellous star-road. So all above us the stars soared and pulsed, over that silent, night-dark, land-locked harbour. * * * * * After a long time the water boiled, and we drank our hot tea and ate our sardines and bread and bits of remaining Nuoro sausage, sitting there alone in the intense starry darkness of that upper deck. I said alone: but no, two ghoulish ship's cats came howling at us for the bits. And even when everything was eaten, and the sardine-tin thrown in the sea, still they circled and prowled and howled. We sat on, resting under the magnificent deep heavens, wrapped together in the old shepherd's shawl for which I have blessed so often a Scottish friend, half sheltered from the cold night wind, and recovering somewhat from the sixty miles bus-ride we had done that day. As yet there was nobody on the ship--we were the very first, at least in the first class. Above, all was silent and deserted. Below, all was lit-up and deserted. But it was a little ship, with accommodation for some thirty first-class and forty second-class passengers. In the low deck forward stood two rows of cattle--eighteen cattle. They stood tied up side by side, and quite motionless, as if stupefied. Only two had lain down. The rest stood motionless, with tails dropped and heads dropped, as if drugged or gone insensible. These cattle on the ship fascinated the q-b. She insisted on going down to them, and examining them minutely. But there they were--stiff almost as Noah's Ark cows. What she could not understand was that they neither cried nor struggled. Motionless--terribly motionless. In her idea cattle are wild and indomitable creatures. She will not realise the horrid strength of passivity and inertia which is almost the preponderant force in domesticated creatures, men and beast alike. There are fowls too in various coops--flappy and agitated these. * * * * * At last, at about half past seven the train from the island arrived, and the people surged out in a mass. We stood hanging over the end of the upper deck, looking down. On they poured, in a thick mass, up the gangway, with all conceivable sorts of luggage: bundles, embroidered carry-alls, bags, saddle-bags--the q-b lamenting she had not bought one--a sudden surging mass of people and goods. There are soldiers too--but these are lined upon the bit of a quay, to wait. Our interest is to see whether there will be any more first-class passengers. Coming up the wide board which serves as gangway each individual hands a ticket to the man at the top, and is shooed away to his own region--usually second class. There are three sorts of tickets--green first-class, white second, and pink third. The second-class passengers go aft, the third class go forward, along the passage past our cabins, into the steerage. And so we watch and watch the excited people come on board and divide. Nearly all are second-class--and a great many are women. We have seen a few first-class men. But as yet no women. And every hat with ospreys gives the q-b a qualm. For a long time we are safe. The women flood to the second-class. One who is third, begs and beseeches to go with her friends in the second. I am glad to say without success. And then, alas, an elderly man with a daughter, first-class. They are very respectable and pleasant looking. But the q-b wails: "I'm sure she will be sick." * * * * * Towards the end come three convicts, chained together. They wear the brownish striped homespun, and do not look evil. They seem to be laughing together, not at all in distress. The two young soldiers who guard them, and who have guns, look nervous. So the convicts go forward to the steerage, past our cabins. * * * * * At last the soldiers are straightened up, and turned on board. There almost at once they start making a tent: drawing a huge tarpaulin over a cross rope in the mid-deck below us, between the first and second class regions. The great tarpaulin is pulled down well on either side and fastened down, and it makes a big dark tent. The soldiers creep in and place their bundles. And now it is the soldiers who fascinate the q-b. She hangs over the bar above, and peers in. The soldiers arrange themselves in two rows. They will sleep with their heads on their bundles on either side of the tent, the two rows of feet coming together inwards. But first they must eat, for it is eight o'clock and more. Out come their suppers: a whole roast fowl, hunks of kid, legs of lamb, huge breads. The fowl is dismembered with a jack-knife in a twinkling, and shared. Everything among the soldiers is shared. There they sit in their pent-house with its open ends, crowded together and happy, chewing with all their might and clapping one another on the shoulder lovingly, and taking swigs at the wine bottles. We envy them their good food. * * * * * At last all are on board--the omnibus has driven up from town and gone back. A last young lout dashes up in a carriage and scuffles aboard. The crew begins to run about. The quay-porters have trotted on board with the last bales and packages--all is stowed safely. The steamer hoots and hoots. Two men and a girl kiss their friends all round and get off the ship. The night re-echoes the steamer's hoots. The sheds have gone all dark. Far off the town twinkles very sparsely. All is night-deserted. And so the gangway is hauled up, and the rope hawsers quickly wound in. We are drifting away from the quay side. The few watchers wave their white handkerchiefs, standing diminutive and forlorn on the dark little quay, in the heart of the dark, deserted harbour. One woman cries and waves and weeps. A man makes exaggerated flag-wagging signals with his white handky, and feels important. We drift--and the engines begin to beat. We are moving in the land-locked harbour. * * * * * Everybody watches. The commander and the crew shout orders. And so, very slowly, and without any fuss at all, like a man wheeling a barrow out of a yard gate, we throb very slowly out of the harbour, past one point, then past another, away from the encircling hills, away from the great lump of Tavolara which is to southward, away from the outreaching land to the north, and over the edge of the open sea. * * * * * And now to try for a cabin to ourselves. I approach the steward. Yes, he says, he has it in mind. But there are eighty second-class passengers, in an accommodation space for forty. The transit-controller is now considering it. Most probably he will transfer some second-class women to the vacant first-class cabins. If he does not do so, then the steward will accommodate us. I know what this means--this equivocation. We decide not to bother any more. So we make a tour of the ship--to look at the soldiers, who have finished eating, sitting yarning to one another, while some are already stretched out in the shadow, for sleep. Then to look at the cattle, which stand rooted to the deck--which is now all messy. To look at the unhappy fowls in their coops. And a peep at the third-class--rather horrifying. And so to bed. Already the other three berths in my cabin are occupied, the lights are switched off. As I enter I hear one young man tenderly enquiring of the berth below: "Dost thou feel ill?" "Er--not much--not much!" says the other faintly. Yet the sea is like glass, so smooth. I am quickly rolled in my lower berth, where I feel the trembling of the machine-impelled ship, and hear the creaking of the berth above me as its occupant rolls over: I listen to the sighs of the others, the wash of dark water. And so, uneasily, rather hot and very airless, uneasy with the machine-throbbing and the sighing of my companions, and with a cock that crows shrilly from one of the coops, imagining the ship's lights to be dawn, the night goes by. One sleeps--but a bad sleep. If only there were cold air, not this lower-berth, inside cabin airlessness. VIII. BACK. The sea being steady as a level road, nobody succeeded in being violently sick. My young men rose at dawn--I was not long in following. It was a gray morning on deck, a gray sea, a gray sky, and a gray, spider-cloth, unimportant coast of Italy not far away. The q-b joined me: and quite delighted with her fellow-passenger: such a nice girl, she said! who, when she let down her ordinary-looking brown hair, it reached rippling right to her feet! Voilà! You never know your luck. The cock that had crowed all night crowed again, hoarsely, with a sore throat. The miserable cattle looked more wearily miserable, but still were motionless, as sponges that grow at the bottom of the sea. The convicts were out for air: grinning. Someone told us they were war-deserters. Considering the light in which these people look on war, desertion seemed to me the only heroism. But the q-b, brought up in a military air, gazed upon them as upon men miraculously alive within the shadow of death. According to her code they had been shot when re-captured. The soldiers had unslung the tarpaulin, their home for the night had melted with the darkness, they were mere fragments of gray transit smoking cigarettes and staring overboard. We drew near to Cività Vecchia: the old, mediaeval looking port, with its castle, and a round fortress-barracks at the entrance. Soldiers aboard shouted and waved to soldiers on the ramparts. We backed insignificantly into the rather scrubby, insignificant harbour. And in five minutes we were out, and walking along the wide, desolate boulevard to the station. The cab-men looked hard at us: but no doubt owing to the knapsack, took us for poor Germans. * * * * * Coffee and milk--and then, only about three-quarters of an hour late, the train from the north. It is the night express from Turin. There was plenty of room--so in we got, followed by half a dozen Sardinians. We found a large, heavy Torinese in the carriage, his eyes dead with fatigue. It seemed quite a new world on the mainland: and at once one breathed again the curious suspense that is in the air. Once more I read the Corriere della Sera from end to end. Once more we knew ourselves in the real active world, where the air seems like a lively wine dissolving the pearl of the old order. I hope, dear reader, you like the metaphor. Yet I cannot forbear repeating how strongly one is sensible of the solvent property of the atmosphere, suddenly arriving on the mainland again. And in an hour one changes one's psyche. The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens. I felt my sound Sardinian soul melting off me, I felt myself evaporating into the real Italian uncertainty and momentaneity. So I perused the Corriere whilst the metamorphosis took place. I like Italian newspapers because they say what they mean, and not merely what is most convenient to say. We call it naïveté--I call it manliness. Italian newspapers read as if they were written by men, and not by calculating eunuchs. * * * * * The train ran very heavily along the Maremma. It began to rain. Then we stopped at a station where we should not stop--somewhere in the Maremma country, the invisible sea not far off, the low country cultivated and yet forlorn. Oh how the Turin man sighed, and wearily shifted his feet as the train stood meaningless. There it sat--in the rain. Oh express! At last on again, till we were winding through the curious long troughs of the Roman Campagna. There the shepherds minded the sheep: the slender-footed merino sheep. In Sardinia the merinos were very white and glistening, so that one thought of the Scriptural "white as wool." And the black sheep among the flock were very black. But these Campagna were no longer white, but dingy. And though the wildness of the Campagna is a real wildness still, it is a historic wildness, familiar in its way as a fireside is familiar. So we approach the hopeless sprawling of modern Rome--over the yellow Tiber, past the famous pyramid tomb, skirting the walls of the city, till at last we plunge in, into the well-known station, out of all the chaos. We are late. It is a quarter to twelve. And I have to go out and change money, and I hope to find my two friends.--The q-b and I dash down the platform--no friends at the barrier. The station moderately empty. We bolt across to the departure platforms. The Naples train stands ready. In we pitch our bags, ask a naval man not to let anyone steal them, then I fly out into town while the q-b buys food and wine at the buffet. It no longer rains, and Rome feels as ever--rather holiday-like and not inclined to care about anything. I get a hundred and three lira for each pound note: pocket my money at two minutes past twelve, and bolt back, out of the Piazza delle Terme. Aha, there are the two missing ones, just descending vaguely from a carriage, the one gazing inquiringly through his monocle across the tram-lines, the other very tall and alert and elegant, looking as if he expected us to appear out of the air for his convenience. Which is exactly what happens. We fly into each other's arms. "Oh there you _are_! Where's the q-b? Why are you here? We've been to the arrival platform--no _sign_ of you. Of course I only got your wire half an hour ago. We _flew_ here. Well, how nice to see you.--Oh, let the man wait.--What, going on at once to Naples? But must you? Oh, but how flighty you are! Birds of passage _veramente_! Then let us find the q-b, quick!--And they won't let us on the platform. No, they're not issuing platform tickets today.--Oh, merely the guests returning from that Savoy-Bavarian wedding in the north, a few royal Duchesses about. Oh well, we must try and wangle him." At the barrier a woman trying in vain to be let on to the station. But what a Roman matron can't do, an elegant young Englishman can. So our two heroes wangle their way in, and fall into the arms of the q-b by the Naples train. Well, now, tell us all about it! So we rush into a four-branched candlestick of conversation. In my ear murmurs he of the monocle about the Sahara--he is back from the Sahara a week ago: the winter sun in the Sahara! He with the smears of paint on his elegant trousers is giving the q-b a sketchy outline of his now _grande passion_. Click goes the exchange, and him of the monocle is detailing to the q-b his trip to Japan, on which he will start in six weeks' time, while him of the paint-smears is expatiating on the thrills of the etching needle, and concocting a plan for a month in Sardinia in May, with me doing the scribbles and he the pictures. What sort of pictures? Out flies the name of Goya.--And well now, a general rush into oneness, and won't they come down to Sicily to us for the almond blossom: in about ten days' time. Yes they will--wire when the almond blossom is just stepping on the stage and making its grand bow, and they will come next day. Somebody has smitten the wheel of a coach two ringing smacks with a hammer. This is a sign to get in. The q-b is terrified the train will slip through her fingers. "I'm frightened, I must get in."--"Very well then! You're sure you have everything you want? Everything? A fiasco of vino? Oh _two_! All the better! Well then--ten days' time. All right--quite sure--how nice to have seen you, if only a _glimpse_.--Yes, yes, poor q-b! Yes, you're quite safe. Good-bye! Good-bye!" The door is shut--we are seated--the train moves out of the station. And quickly on this route Rome disappears. We are out on the wintry Campagna, where crops are going. Away on the left we see the Tivoli hills, and think of the summer that is gone, the heat, the fountains of the Villa D'Este. The train rolls heavily over the Campagna, towards the Alban Mounts, homewards. * * * * * So we fall on our food, and devour the excellent little beef-steaks and rolls and boiled eggs, apples and oranges and dates, and drink the good red wine, and wildly discuss plans and the latest news, and are altogether thrilled about things. So thrilled that we are well away among the romantic mountains of the south-centre before we realise that there are other passengers besides ourselves in the carriage. Half the journey is over. Why, there is the monastery on its high hill! In a wild moment I suggest we shall get down and spend a night up there at Montecassino, and see the other friend, the monk who knows so much about the world, being out of it. But the q-b shudders, thinking of the awful winter coldness of that massive stone monastery, which has no spark of heating apparatus. And therefore the plan subsides, and at Cassino station I only get down to procure coffee and sweet cakes. They always have good things to eat at Cassino station: in summer, big fresh ices and fruits and iced water, in winter toothsome sweet cakes which make an awfully good finish to a meal. * * * * * I count Cassino half way to Naples. After Cassino the excitement of being in the north begins quite to evaporate. The southern heaviness descends upon us. Also the sky begins to darken: and the rain falls. I think of the night before us, on the sea again. And I am vaguely troubled lest we may not get a berth. However, we may spend the night in Naples: or even sit on in this train, which goes forward, all through the long long night, to the Straits of Messina. We must decide as we near Naples. Half dozing, one becomes aware of the people about one. We are travelling second class. Opposite is a little, hold-your-own school-mistressy young person in pince-nez. Next her a hollow-cheeked white soldier with ribbons on his breast. Then a fat man in a corner. Then a naval officer of low rank. The naval officer is coming from Fiume, and is dead with sleep and perhaps mortification. D'Annunzio has just given up. Two compartments away we hear soldiers singing, martial still though bruised with fatigue, the D'Annunzio-bragging songs of Fiume. They are soldiers of the D'Annunzio legion. And one of them, I hear the sick soldier saying, is very hot and republican still. Private soldiers are not allowed, with their reduced tickets, to travel on the express trains. But these legionaries are not penniless: they have paid the excess and come along. For the moment they are sent to their homes. And with heads dropping with fatigue, we hear them still defiantly singing down the carriage for D'Annunzio. A regular officer went along--a captain of the Italian, not the Fiume army. He heard the chants and entered the carriage. The legionaries were quiet, but they lounged and ignored the entry of the officer. "On your feet!" he yelled, Italian fashion. The vehemence did it. Reluctantly as may be, they stood up in the compartment. "Salute!" And though it was bitter, up went their hands in the salute, whilst he stood and watched them. And then, very superb, he sauntered away again. They sat down glowering. Of course they were beaten. Didn't they know it. The men in our carriage smiled curiously: in slow and futile mockery of both parties. The rain was falling outside, the windows were steamed quite dense, so that we were shut in from the world. Throughout the length of the train, which was not very full, could be felt the exhausted weariness and the dispirited dejection of the poor D'Annunzio legionaries. In the afternoon silence of the mist-enclosed, half-empty train the snatches of song broke out again, and faded in sheer dispirited fatigue. We ran on blindly and heavily. But one young fellow was not to be abashed. He was well-built, and his thick black hair was brushed up, like a great fluffy crest upon his head. He came slowly and unabated down the corridor, and on every big, mist-opaque pane he scrawled with his finger W D'ANNUNZIO GABRIELE--W D'ANNUNZIO GABRIELE. The sick soldier laughed thinly, saying to the schoolmistress: "Oh yes, they are fine chaps. But it was folly. D'Annunzio is a world poet--a world wonder--but Fiume was a mistake you know. And these chaps have got to learn a lesson. They got beyond themselves. Oh, they aren't short of money. D'Annunzio had wagon-loads of money there in Fiume, and he wasn't altogether mean with it." The schoolmistress, who was one of the sharp ones, gave a little disquisition to show _why_ it was a mistake, and wherein she knew better than the world's poet and wonder. It always makes me sick to hear people chewing over newspaper pulp. The sick soldier was not a legionary. He had been wounded through the lung. But it was healed, he said. He lifted the flap of his breast pocket, and there hung a little silver medal. It was his wound-medal. He wore it concealed: and over the place of the wound. He and the schoolmistress looked at one another significantly. Then they talked pensions: and soon were on the old topic. The schoolmistress had her figures pat, as a schoolmistress should. Why, the ticket-collector, the man who punches one's tickets on the train, now had twelve thousand Lira a year: twelve thousand Lira. Monstrous! Whilst a fully-qualified _professore_, a schoolmaster who had been through all his training and had all his degrees, was given five thousand. Five thousand for a fully qualified _professore_, and twelve thousand for a ticket puncher. The soldier agreed, and quoted other figures. But the railway was the outstanding grievance. Every boy who left school now, said the schoolmistress, wanted to go on the railway. Oh but--said the soldier--the train-men--! * * * * * The naval officer, who collapsed into the most uncanny positions, blind with sleep, got down at Capua to get into a little train that would carry him back to his own station, where our train had not stopped. At Caserta the sick soldier got out. Down the great avenue of trees the rain was falling. A young man entered. Remained also the schoolmistress and the stout man. Knowing we had been listening, the schoolmistress spoke to us about the soldier. Then--she had said she was catching the night boat for Palermo--I asked her if she thought the ship would be very full. Oh yes, very full, she said. Why, hers was one of the last cabin numbers, and she had got her ticket early that morning. The fat man now joined in. He too was crossing to Palermo. The ship was sure to be quite full by now. Were we depending on booking berths at the port of Naples? We were. Whereupon he and the schoolmistress shook their heads and said it was more than doubtful--nay, it was as good as impossible. For the boat was the renowned _Città di Trieste_, that floating palace, and such was the fame of her gorgeousness that everybody wanted to travel by her. "First and second class alike?" I asked. "Oh yes, also first class," replied the school-marm rather spitefully. So I knew she had a white ticket--second. I cursed the _Città di Trieste_ and her gorgeousness, and looked down my nose. We had now two alternatives: to spend the night in Naples, or to sit on all through the night and next morning, and arrive home, with heaven's aid, in the early afternoon. Though these long-distance trains think nothing of six hours late. But we were tired already. What we should be like after another twenty-four hours' sitting, heaven knows. And yet to struggle for a bed in a Naples hotel this night, in the rain, all the hotels being at present crammed with foreigners, that was no rosy prospect. Oh dear! However, I was not going to take their discouragement so easily. One has been had that way before. They love to make the case look desperate. Were we English? asked the schoolmistress. We were. Ah, a fine thing to be English in Italy now. _Why?_--rather tart from me. Because of the _cambio_, the exchange. You English, with your money exchange, you come here and buy everything for nothing, you take the best of everything, and with your money you pay nothing for it. Whereas we poor Italians we pay heavily for everything at an exaggerated price, and we can have nothing. Ah, it is all very nice to be English in Italy now. You can travel, you go to the hotels, you can see everything and buy everything, and it costs you nothing. What is the exchange today? She whipped it out. A hundred and four, twenty. This she told me to my nose. And the fat man murmured bitterly _già! già!_--ay! ay! Her impertinence and the fat man's quiet bitterness stirred my bile. Has not this song been sung at me once too often, by these people? You are mistaken, said I to the schoolmistress. We don't by any means live in Italy for nothing. Even with the exchange at a hundred and three, we don't live for nothing. We pay, and pay through the nose, for whatever we have in Italy: and you Italians see that we pay. What! You put all the tariff you do on foreigners, and then say we live here for nothing. I tell you I could live in England just as well, on the same money--perhaps better. Compare the cost of things in England with the cost here in Italy, and even considering the exchange, Italy costs nearly as much as England. Some things are cheaper here--the railway comes a little cheaper, and is infinitely more miserable. Travelling is usually a misery. But other things, clothes of all sorts, and a good deal of food is even more expensive here than in England, exchange considered. Oh yes, she said, England had had to bring her prices down this last fortnight. In her own interests indeed. "This last fortnight! This last six months," said I. "Whereas prices rise every single day here." Here a word from the quiet young man who had got in at Caserta. "Yes," he said, "yes. I say, every nation pays in its own money, no matter what the exchange. And it works out about equal." But I felt angry. Am I always to have the exchange flung in my teeth, as if I were a personal thief? But the woman persisted. "Ah," she said, "we Italians, we are so nice, we are so good. Noi, siamo così buoni. We are so good-natured. But others, they are not buoni, they are not good-natured to us." And she nodded her head. And truly, I did not feel at all good-natured towards her: which she knew. And as for the Italian good-nature, it forms a sound and unshakeable basis nowadays for their extortion and self-justification and spite. * * * * * Darkness was falling over the rich flat plains that lie around Naples, over the tall uncanny vines with their brown thongs in the intensely cultivated black earth. It was night by the time we were in that vast and thievish station. About half-past five. We were not very late. Should we sit on in our present carriage, and go down in it to the port, along with the schoolmistress, and risk it? But first look at the coach which was going on to Sicily. So we got down and ran along the train to the Syracuse coach. Hubbub, confusion, a wedge in the corridor, and for sure no room. Certainly no room to lie down a bit. We _could_ not sit tight for twenty-four hours more. So we decided to go to the port--and to walk. Heaven knows when the railway carriage would be shunted down. Back we went therefore for the sack, told the schoolmistress our intention. "You can but try," she said frostily. * * * * * So there we are, with the sack over my shoulder and the kitchenino in the q-b's hand, bursting out of that thrice-damned and annoying station, and running through the black wet gulf of a Naples night, in a slow rain. Cabmen look at us. But my sack saved me. I am weary of that boa-constrictor, a Naples cabman after dark. By day there is more-or-less a tariff. It is about a mile from the station to the quay where the ship lies. We make our way through the deep, gulf-like streets, over the slippery black cobbles. The black houses rise massive to a great height on either side, but the streets are not in this part very narrow. We plunge forwards in the unearthly half-darkness of this great uncontrolled city. There are no lights at all from the buildings--only the small electric lamps of the streets. So we emerge on the harbour front, and hurry past the great storehouses in the rainy night, to where the actual entrances begin. The tram bangs past us. We scuffle along that pavement-ridge which lies like an isthmus down the vast black quicksands of that harbour road. One feels peril all round. But at length we come to a gate by the harbour railway. No, not that. On to the next iron gate of the railway crossing. And so we run out past the great sheds and the buildings of the port station, till we see a ship rearing in front, and the sea all black. But now where is that little hole where one gets the tickets? We are at the back of everywhere in this desert jungle of the harbour darkness. * * * * * A man directs us round the corner--and actually does not demand money. It is the sack again. So--there, I see the knot of men, soldiers chiefly, fighting in a bare room round a tiny wicket. I recognise the place where I have fought before. So while the q-b stands guard over sack and bag, I plunge into the fray. It literally is a fight. Some thirty men all at once want to get at a tiny wicket in a blank wall. There are no queue-rails, there is no order: just a hole in a blank wall, and thirty fellows, mostly military, pressing at it in a mass. But I have done this before. The way is to insert the thin end of oneself, and without any violence, by deadly pressure and pertinacity come at the goal. One hand must be kept fast over the money pocket, and one must be free to clutch the wicket-side when one gets there. And thus one is ground small in those mills of God, Demos struggling for tickets. It isn't very nice--so close, so incomparably crushed. And never for a second must one be off one's guard for one's watch and money and even hanky. When I first came to Italy after the war I was robbed twice in three weeks, floating round in the sweet old innocent confidence in mankind. Since then I have never ceased to be on my guard. Somehow or other, waking and sleeping one's spirit must be on its guard nowadays. Which is really what I prefer, now I have learnt it. Confidence in the goodness of mankind is a very thin protection indeed. _Integer vitae scelerisque purus_ will do nothing for you when it comes to humanity, however efficacious it may be with lions and wolves. Therefore, tight on my guard, like a screw biting into a bit of wood, I bite my way through that knot of fellows, to the wicket, and shout for two first-class. The clerk inside ignores me for some time, serving soldiers. But if you stand like Doomsday you get your way. Two firsts, says the clerk. Husband and wife, say I, in case there is a two-berth cabin. Jokes behind. But I get my tickets. Impossible to put my hand to my pocket. The tickets cost about a hundred and five francs each. Clutching paper change and the green slips, with a last gasp I get out of the knot. So--we've done it. As I sort my money and stow away, I hear another ask for one first-class. Nothing left, says the clerk. So you see how one must fight. I must say for these dense and struggling crowds, they are only intense, not violent, and not in the least brutal. I always feel a certain sympathy with the men in them. * * * * * Bolt through the pouring rain to the ship. And in two minutes we are aboard. And behold, each of us has a deck cabin, I one to myself, the q-b to herself next door. Palatial--not a cabin at all, but a proper little bedroom with a curtained bed under the porthole windows, a comfortable sofa, chairs, table, carpets, big wash-bowls with silver taps--a whole _de luxe_. I dropped the sack on the sofa with a gasp, drew back the yellow curtains of the bed, looked out of the porthole at the lights of Naples, and sighed with relief. One could wash thoroughly, refreshingly, and change one's linen. Wonderful! * * * * * The state-room is like a hotel lounge, many little tables with flowers and periodicals, arm-chairs, warm carpet, bright but soft lights, and people sitting about chatting. A loud group of English people in one corner, very assured: two quiet English ladies: various Italians seeming quite modest. Here one could sit in peace and rest, pretending to look at an illustrated magazine. So we rested. After about an hour there entered a young Englishman and his wife, whom we had seen on our train. So, at last the coach had been shunted down to the port. Where should we have been had we waited! * * * * * The waiters began to flap the white table-cloths and spread the tables nearest the walls. Dinner would begin at half-past seven, immediately the boat started. We sat in silence, till eight or nine tables were spread. Then we let the other people take their choice. After which we chose a table by ourselves, neither of us wanting company. So we sat before the plates and the wine-bottles and sighed in the hopes of a decent meal. Food by the way is not included in the hundred-and-five francs. Alas, we were not to be alone: two young Neapolitans, pleasant, quiet, blond, or semi-blond. They were well-bred, and evidently of northern extraction. Afterwards we found out they were jewellers. But I liked their quiet, gentle manners. The dinner began, and we were through the soup, when up pranced another young fellow, rather strapping and loud, a commercial traveller, for sure. He had those cocky assured manners of one who is not sure of his manners. He had a rather high forehead, and black hair brushed up in a showy wing, and a large ring on his finger. Not that a ring signifies anything. Here most of the men wear several, all massively jewelled. If one believed in all the jewels, why Italy would be more fabulous than fabled India. But our friend the bounder was smart, and smelled of cash. Not money, but cash. I had an inkling of what to expect when he handed the salt and said in English "Salt, thenk you." But I ignored the advance. However, he did not wait long. Through the windows across the room the q-b saw the lights of the harbour slowly moving. "Oh," she cried, "are we going?" And also in Italian: "Partiamo?" All watched the lights, the bounder screwing round. He had one of the fine, bounderish backs. "Yes," he said. "We--_going_." "Oh," cried she. "Do you speak English?" "Ye-es. Some English--I speak." As a matter of fact he spoke about forty disconnected words. But his accent was so good for these forty. He did not speak English, he imitated an English voice making sounds. And the effect was startling. He had served on the Italian front with the Scots Guards--so he told us in Italian. He was Milanese. Oh, he had had a time with the Scots Guards. Wheesky--eh? Wheesky. "Come along _bhoys_!" he shouted. And it was such a Scotch voice shouting, so loud-mouthed and actual, I nearly went under the table. It struck us both like a blow. Afterwards he rattled away without misgiving. He was a traveller for a certain type of machine, and was doing Sicily. Shortly he was going to England--and he asked largely about first-class hotels. Then he asked was the q-b French?--Was she Italian?--No, she was German. Ah--German. And immediately out he came with the German word: "Deutsch! Deutsch, eh? From Deutschland. Oh yes! Deutschland über alles! Ah, I know. No more--what? Deutschland unter alles now? Deutschland unter alles." And he bounced on his seat with gratification of the words. Of German as of English he knew half a dozen phrases. "No," said the q-b, "Not Deutschland unter alles. Not for long, anyhow." "How? Not for long? You think so? I think so too," said the bounder. Then in Italian: "La Germania won't stand under all for long. No, no. At present it is England über alles. _England über alles._ But Germany will rise up again." "Of course," said the q-b. "How shouldn't she?" "Ah," said the bounder, "while England keeps the money in her pocket, we shall none of us rise up. Italy won the war, and Germany lost it. And Italy and Germany they both are down, and England is up. They both are down, and England is up. England and France. Strange, isn't it? Ah, the allies. What are the allies for? To keep England up, and France half way, and Germany and Italy down." "Ah, they won't stay down for ever," said the q-b. "You think not? Ah! We will see. We will see how England goes on now." "England is not going on so marvellously, after all," say I. "How not? You mean Ireland?" "No, not only Ireland. Industry altogether. England is as near to ruin as other countries." "Ma! With all the money, and we others with no money? How will she be ruined?" "And what good would it be to you if she were?" "Oh well--who knows. If England were ruined--" a slow smile of anticipation spread over his face. How he would love it--how they would all love it, if England were ruined. That is, the business part of them, perhaps, would not love it. But the human part would. The human part fairly licks its lips at the thought of England's ruin. The commercial part, however, quite violently disclaims the anticipations of the human part. And there it is. The newspapers chiefly speak with the commercial voice. But individually, when you are got at in a railway carriage or as now on a ship, up speaks the human voice, and you know how they love you. This is no doubt inevitable. When the exchange stands at a hundred and six men go humanly blind, I suppose, however much they may keep the commercial eye open. And having gone humanly blind they bump into one's human self nastily: a nasty jar. You know then how they hate you. Underneath, they hate us, and as human beings we are objects of envy and malice. They hate us, with envy, and despise us, with jealousy. Which perhaps doesn't hurt commercially. Humanly it is to me unpleasant. The dinner was over, and the bounder was lavishing cigarettes--Murattis, if you please. We had all drunk two bottles of wine. Two other commercial travellers had joined the bounder at our table--two smart young fellows, one a bounder and one gentle and nice. Our two jewellers remained quiet, talking their share, but quietly and so sensitively. One could not help liking them. So we were seven people, six men. "Wheesky! Will you drink Wheesky, Mister?" said our original bounder. "Yes, one small Scotch! One Scotch Wheesky." All this in a perfect Scotty voice of a man standing at a bar calling for a drink. It was comical, one could not but laugh: and very impertinent. He called for the waiter, took him by the button-hole, and with a breast-to-breast intimacy asked if there was whisky. The waiter, with the same tone of you-and-I-are-men-who-have-the-same-feelings, said he didn't think there was whisky, but he would look. Our bounder went round the table inviting us all to whiskies, and pressing on us his expensive English cigarettes with great aplomb. The whisky came--and five persons partook. It was fiery, oily stuff from heaven knows where. The bounder rattled away, spouting his bits of English and his four words of German. He was in high feather, wriggling his large haunches on his chair and waving his hands. He had a peculiar manner of wriggling from the bottom of his back, with fussy self-assertiveness. It was my turn to offer whisky. I was able in a moment's lull to peer through the windows and see the dim lights of Capri--the glimmer of Anacapri up on the black shadow--the lighthouse. We had passed the island. In the midst of the babel I sent out a few thoughts to a few people on the island. Then I had to come back. The bounder had once more resumed his theme of l'Inghilterra, l'Italia, la Germania. He swanked England as hard as he could. Of course England was the top dog, and if he could speak some English, if he were talking to English people, and if, as he said, he was going to England in April, why he was so much the more top-doggy than his companions, who could not rise to all these heights. At the same time, my nerves had too much to bear. Where were we going and where had we been and where did we live? And ah, yes, English people lived in Italy. Thousands, thousands of English people lived in Italy. Yes, it was very nice for them. There used to be many Germans, but now the Germans were down. But the English--what could be better for them than Italy now: they had sun, they had warmth, they had abundance of everything, they had a charming people to deal with, and they had the _cambio_! Ecco! The other commercial travellers agreed. They appealed to the q-b if it was not so. And altogether I had enough of it. "Oh yes," said I, "it's very nice to be in Italy: especially if you are not living in an hotel, and you have to attend to things for yourself. It is very nice to be overcharged every time, and then insulted if you say a word. It's very nice to have the _cambio_ thrown in your teeth, if you say two words to any Italian, even a perfect stranger. It's very nice to have waiters and shop-people and railway porters sneering in a bad temper and being insulting in small, mean ways all the time. It's very nice to feel what they all feel against you. And if you understand enough Italian, it's very nice to hear what they say when you've gone by. Oh very nice. Very nice indeed!" I suppose the whisky had kindled this outburst in me. They sat dead silent. And then our bounder began, in his sugary deprecating voice. "Why no! Why no! It is not true, signore. No, it is not true. Why, England is the foremost nation in the world--" "And you want to pay her out for it." "But no, signore. But no. What makes you say so? Why, we Italians are so good-natured. Noi Italiani siamo così buoni. Siamo così buoni." It was the identical words of the schoolmistress. "Buoni," said I. "Yes--perhaps. Buoni when it's not a question of the exchange and of money. But since it is always a question of _cambio_ and _soldi_ now, one is always, in a small way, insulted." I suppose it must have been the whisky. Anyhow Italians can never bear hard bitterness. The jewellers looked distressed, the bounders looked down their noses, half exulting even now, and half sheepish, being caught. The third of the _commis voyageurs_, the gentle one, made large eyes and was terrified that he was going to be sick. He represented a certain Italian liqueur, and he modestly asked us to take a glass of it. He went with the waiter to secure the proper brand. So we drank--and it was good. But he, the giver, sat with large and haunted eyes. Then he said he would go to bed. Our bounder gave him various advice regarding seasickness. There was a mild swell on the sea. So he of the liqueur departed. * * * * * Our bounder thrummed on the table and hummed something, and asked the q-b if she knew the _Rosencavalier_. He always appealed to her. She said she did. And ah, he was passionately fond of music, said he. Then he warbled, in a head voice, a bit more. He only knew classical music, said he. And he mewed a bit of Moussorgsky. The q-b said Moussorgsky was her favourite musician, for opera. Ah, cried the bounder, if there were but a piano!--There is a piano, said his mate.--Yes, he replied, but it is locked up.--Then let us get the key, said his mate, with aplomb. The waiters, being men with the same feelings as our two, would give them anything. So the key was forthcoming. We paid our bills--mine about sixty francs. Then we went along the faintly rolling ship, up the curved staircase to the drawing room. Our bounder unlocked the door of this drawing room, and switched on the lights. It was quite a pleasant room, with deep divans upholstered in pale colours, and palm-trees standing behind little tables, and a black upright piano. Our bounder sat on the piano-stool and gave us an exhibition. He splashed out noise on the piano in splashes, like water splashing out of a pail. He lifted his head and shook his black mop of hair, and yelled out some fragments of opera. And he wriggled his large, bounder's back upon the piano stool, wriggling upon his well-filled haunches. Evidently he had a great deal of feeling for music: but very little prowess. He yelped it out, and wriggled, and splashed the piano. His friend the other bounder, a quiet one in a pale suit, with stout limbs, older than the wriggler, stood by the piano whilst the young one exhibited. Across the space of carpet sat the two brother jewellers, deep in a divan, their lean, semi-blond faces quite inscrutable. The q-b sat next to me, asking for this and that music, none of which the wriggler could supply. He knew four scraps, and a few splashes--not more. The elder bounder stood near him quietly comforting, encouraging, and admiring him, as a lover encouraging and admiring his _ingénue_ betrothed. And the q-b sat bright-eyed and excited, admiring that a man could perform so unself-consciously self-conscious, and give himself away with such generous wriggles. For my part, as you may guess, I did not admire. I had had enough. Rising, I bowed and marched off. The q-b came after me. Good-night, said I, at the head of the corridor. She turned in, and I went round the ship to look at the dark night of the sea. * * * * * Morning came sunny with pieces of cloud: and the Sicilian coast towering pale blue in the distance. How wonderful it must have been to Ulysses to venture into this Mediterranean and open his eyes on all the loveliness of the tall coasts. How marvellous to steal with his ship into these magic harbours. There is something eternally morning-glamourous about these lands as they rise from the sea. And it is always the Odyssey which comes back to one as one looks at them. All the lovely morning-wonder of this world, in Homer's day! Our bounder was dashing about on deck, in one of those rain-coats gathered in at the waist and ballooning out into skirts below the waist. He greeted me with a cry of "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." "Very long," said I. "Good-bye Piccadilly--" he continued. "Ciao," said I, as he dashed jauntily down the steps. Soon we saw the others as well. But it was morning, and I simply did not want to speak to them--except just Good-day. For my life I couldn't say two more words to any of them this morning: except to ask the mild one if he had been sick. He had not. So we waited for the great _Città di Trieste_ to float her way into Palermo harbour. It looked so near--the town there, the great circle of the port, the mass of the hills crowding round. Panormus, the All-harbour. I wished the bulky steamer would hurry up. For I hated her now. I hated her swankiness, she seemed made for commercial travellers with cash. I hated the big picture that filled one end of the state-room: an elegant and ideal peasant-girl, a sort of Italia, strolling on a lovely and ideal cliff's edge, among myriad blooms, and carrying over her arm, in a most sophisticated fashion, a bough of almond blossom and a sheaf of anemones. I hated the waiters, and the cheap elegance, the common _de luxe_. I disliked the people, who all turned their worst, cash-greasy sides outwards on this ship. Vulgar, vulgar post-war commercialism and dog-fish money-stink. I longed to get off. And the bloated boat edged her way so slowly into the port, and then more slowly still edged round her fat stern. And even then we were kept for fifteen minutes waiting for someone to put up the gangway for the first class. The second class, of course, were streaming off and melting like thawed snow into the crowds of onlookers on the quay, long before we were allowed to come off. * * * * * Glad, glad I was to get off that ship: I don't know why, for she was clean and comfortable and the attendants were perfectly civil. Glad, glad I was not to share the deck with any more commercial travellers. Glad I was to be on my own feet, independent. No, I would _not_ take a carriage. I carried my sack on my back to the hotel, looking with a jaundiced eye on the lethargic traffic of the harbour front. It was about nine o'clock. * * * * * Later on, when I had slept, I thought as I have thought before, the Italians are not to blame for their spite against us. We, England, have taken upon ourselves for so long the rôle of leading nation. And if now, in the war or after the war, we have led them all into a real old swinery--which we have, notwithstanding all Entente cant--then they have a legitimate grudge against us. If you take upon yourself to lead, you must expect the mud to be thrown at you if you lead into a nasty morass. Especially if, once in the bog, you think of nothing else but scrambling out over other poor devils' backs. Pretty behaviour of great nations! And still, for all that, I must insist that I am a single human being, an individual, not a mere national unit, a mere chip of l'Inghilterra or la Germania. I am not a chip of any nasty old block. I am myself. * * * * * In the evening the q-b insisted on going to the marionettes, for which she has a sentimental passion. So the three of us--we were with the American friend once more--chased through dark and tortuous side-streets and markets of Palermo in the night, until at last a friendly man led us to the place. The back streets of Palermo felt friendly, not huge and rather horrible, like Naples near the port. The theatre was a little hole opening simply off the street. There was no one in the little ticket box, so we walked past the door-screen. A shabby old man with a long fennel-stalk hurried up and made us places on the back benches, and hushed us when we spoke of tickets. The play was in progress. A serpent-dragon was just having a tussle with a knight in brilliant brass armour, and my heart came into my mouth. The audience consisted mostly of boys, gazing with frantic interest on the bright stage. There was a sprinkling of soldiers and elderly men. The place was packed--about fifty souls crowded on narrow little ribbons of benches, so close one behind the other that the end of the man in front of me continually encroached and sat on my knee. I saw on a notice that the price of entry was forty centimes. We had come in towards the end of the performance, and so sat rather bewildered, unable to follow. The story was the inevitable Paladins of France--one heard the names _Rinaldo!_ _Orlando!_ again and again. But the story was told in dialect, hard to follow. I was charmed by the figures. The scene was very simple, showing the interior of a castle. But the figures, which were about two-thirds of human size, were wonderful in their brilliant, glittering gold armour, and their martial prancing motions. All were knights--even the daughter of the king of Babylon. She was distinguished only by her long hair. All were in the beautiful, glittering armour, with helmets and visors that could be let down at will. I am told this armour has been handed down for many generations. It certainly is lovely. One actor alone was not in armour, the wizard Magicce, or Malvigge, the Merlin of the Paladins. He was in a long scarlet robe, edged with fur, and wore a three-cornered scarlet hat. So we watched the dragon leap and twist and get the knight by the leg: and then perish. We watched the knights burst into the castle. We watched the wonderful armour-clashing embraces of the delivered knights, Orlando and his bosom friend and the little dwarf, clashing their armoured breasts to the breasts of their brothers and deliverers. We watched the would-be tears flow.--And then the statue of the witch suddenly go up in flames, at which a roar of exultation from the boys. Then it was over. The theatre was empty in a moment, but the proprietors and the two men who sat near us would not let us go. We must wait for the next performance. My neighbour, a fat, jolly man, told me all about it. His neighbour, a handsome tipsy man, kept contradicting and saying it wasn't so. But my fat neighbour winked at me, not to take offence. This story of the Paladins of France lasted three nights. We had come on the middle night--of course. But no matter--each night was a complete story. I am sorry I have forgotten the names of the knights. But the story was, that Orlando and his friend and the little dwarf, owing to the tricks of that same dwarf, who belonged to the Paladins, had been captured and immured in the enchanted castle of the ghastly old witch who lived on the blood of Christians. It was now the business of Rinaldo and the rest of the Paladins, by the help of Magicce the _good_ wizard, to release their captured brethren from the ghoulish old witch. So much I made out of the fat man's story, while the theatre was filling. He knew every detail of the whole Paladin cycle. And it is evident the Paladin cycle has lots of versions. For the handsome tipsy neighbour kept saying he was wrong, he was wrong, and giving different stories, and shouting for a jury to come and say who was right, he or my fat friend. A jury gathered, and a storm began to rise. But the stout proprietor with a fennel-wand came and quenched the noise, telling the handsome tipsy man he knew too much and wasn't asked. Whereupon the tipsy one sulked. Ah, said my friend, couldn't I come on Friday. Friday was a great night. On Friday they were giving I Beati Paoli: The Blessed Pauls. He pointed to the walls where were the placards announcing The Blessed Pauls. These Pauls were evidently some awful secret society with masking hoods and daggers and awful eyes looking through the holes. I said were they assassins like the Black Hand. By no means, by no means. The Blessed Pauls were a society for the protection of the poor. Their business was to track down and murder the oppressive rich. Ah, they were a wonderful, a splendid society. Were they, said I, a sort of camorra? Ah, on the contrary--here he lapsed into a tense voice--they hated the camorra. These, the Blest Pauls, were the powerful and terrible enemy of the grand camorra. For the Grand Camorra oppresses the poor. And therefore the Pauls track down in secret the leaders of the Grand Camorra, and assassinate them, or bring them to the fearful hooded tribunal which utters the dread verdict of the Beati Paoli. And when once the Beati Paoli have decreed a man's death--all over. Ah bellissimo, bellissimo! Why don't I come on Friday? It seems to me a queer moral for the urchins thick-packed and gazing at the drop scene. They are all males: urchins or men. I ask my fat friend why there are no women--no girls. Ah, he says, the theatre is so small. But, I say, if there is room for all the boys and men, there is the same room for girls and women. Oh no--not in this small theatre. Besides this is nothing for women. Not that there is anything improper, he hastens to add. Not at all. But what should women and girls be doing at the marionette show? It was an affair for males. I agreed with him really, and was thankful we hadn't a lot of smirking twitching girls and lasses in the audience. This male audience was so tense and pure in its attention. But hist! the play is going to begin. A lad is grinding a broken street-piano under the stage. The padrone yells _Silenzio!_ with a roar, and reaching over, pokes obstreperous boys with his long fennel-stalk, like a beadle in church. When the curtain rises the piano stops, and there is dead silence. On swings a knight, glittering, marching with that curious hippety lilt, and gazing round with fixed and martial eyes. He begins the prologue, telling us where we are. And dramatically he waves his sword and stamps his foot, and wonderfully sounds his male, martial, rather husky voice. Then the Paladins, his companions who are to accompany him, swing one by one onto the stage, till they are five in all, handsome knights, including the Babylonian Princess and the Knight of Britain. They stand in a handsome, glittering line. And then comes Merlin in his red robe. Merlin has a bright, fair, rather chubby face and blue eyes, and seems to typify the northern intelligence. He now tells them, in many words, how to proceed and what is to be done. So then, the glittering knights are ready. Are they ready? Rinaldo flourishes his sword with the wonderful cry "Andiamo!" let us go--and the others respond: "Andiamo". Splendid word. The first enemy were the knights of Spain, in red kirtles and half turbans. With these a terrible fight. First of all rushes in the Knight of Britain. He is the boaster, who always in words, does everything. But in fact, poor knight of Britain, he falls lamed. The four Paladins have stood shoulder to shoulder, glittering, watching the fray. Forth now steps another knight, and the fight recommences. Terrible is the smacking of swords, terrible the gasps from behind the dropped visors. Till at last the knight of Spain falls--and the Paladin stands with his foot on the dead. Then loud acclamations from the Paladins, and yells of joy from the audience. "_Silenzio!_" yells the padrone, flourishing the fennel-stalk. Dead silence, and the story goes on. The Knight of Britain of course claims to have slain the foe: and the audience faintly, jeeringly hisses. "He's always the boaster, and he never does anything, the Knight of Britain," whispers my fat friend. He has forgotten my nationality. I wonder if the Knight of Britain is pure tradition, or if a political touch of today has crept in. However, this fray is over--Merlin comes to advise for the next move. And are we ready? We are ready. _Andiamo!_ Again the word is yelled out, and they set off. At first one is all engaged watching the figures: their brilliance, their blank, martial stare, their sudden, angular, gestures. There is something extremely suggestive in them. How much better they fit the old legend-tales than living people would do. Nay, if we are going to have human beings on the stage, they should be masked and disguised. For in fact drama is enacted by symbolic creatures formed out of human consciousness: puppets if you like: but not human _individuals_. Our stage is all wrong, so boring in its personality. Gradually, however, I found that my eyes were of minor importance. Gradually it was the voice that gained hold of the blood. It is a strong, rather husky, male voice that acts direct on the blood, not on the mind. Again the old male Adam began to stir at the roots of my soul. Again the old, first-hand indifference, the rich, untamed male blood rocked down my veins. What does one care? What does one care for precept and mental dictation? Is there not the massive brilliant, out-flinging recklessness in the male soul, summed up in the sudden word: _Andiamo!_ Andiamo! Let us go on. Andiamo!--let us go hell knows where, but let us go on. The splendid recklessness and passion that knows no precept and no school-teacher, whose very molten spontaneity is its own guide. I loved the voices of the Paladins--Rinaldo's voice, and Orlando's voice: the voice of men once more, men who are not to be tutored. To be sure there was Merlin making his long speeches in rather a chuntering, prosy tone. But who was he? Was he a Paladin and a splendour? Not he. A long-gowned chunterer. It is the reckless blood which achieves all, the piff-piff-piffing of the mental and moral intelligence is but a subsidiary help, a mere instrument. The dragon was splendid: I have seen dragons in Wagner, at Covent Garden and at the Prinz-Regenten Theater in Munich, and they were ridiculous. But this dragon simply frightened me, with his leaping and twisting. And when he seized the knight by the leg, my blood ran cold. With smoke and sulphur leaps in Beelzebub. But he is merely the servant of the great old witch. He is black and grinning, and he flourishes his posterior and his tail. But he is curiously inefficacious: a sort of lackey of wicked powers. The old witch with her grey hair and staring eyes succeeds in being ghastly. With just a touch, she would be a tall, benevolent old lady. But listen to her. Hear her horrible female voice with its scraping yells of evil lustfulness. Yes, she fills me with horror. And I am staggered to find how I believe in her as _the_ evil principle. Beelzebub, poor devil, is only one of her instruments. It is her old, horrible, grinning female soul which locks up the heroes, and which sends forth the awful and almost omnipotent malevolence. This old, ghastly woman-spirit is the very core of mischief. And I felt my heart getting as hot against her as the hearts of the lads in the audience were. Red, deep hate I felt of that symbolic old ghoul-female. Poor male Beelzebub is her loutish slave. And it takes all Merlin's bright-faced intelligence, and all the surging hot urgency of the Paladins, to conquer her. She will never be finally destroyed--she will never finally die, till her statue, which is immured in the vaults of the castle, is burned.--Oh, it was a very psychoanalytic performance altogether, and one could give a very good Freudian analysis of it.--But behold this image of the witch: this white, submerged _idea_ of woman which rules from the deeps of the unconscious. Behold, the reckless, untamable male knights will do for it. As the statue goes up in flame--it is only paper over wires--the audience yells! And yells again. And would God the symbolic act were really achieved. It is only little boys who yell. Men merely smile at the trick. They know well enough the white image endures. So it is over. The knights look at us once more. Orlando, hero of heroes, has a slight inward cast of the eyes. This gives him that look of almost fierce good-nature which these people adore: the look of a man who does not think, but whose heart is all the time red hot with burning, generous blood-passion. This is what they adore. So my knights go. They all have wonderful faces, and are so splendidly glittering and male. I am sorry they will be laid in a box now. There is a great gasp of relief. The piano starts its lame rattle. Somebody looking round laughs. And we all look round. And seated on the top of the ticket office is a fat, solemn urchin of two or three years, hands folded over his stomach, his forehead big and blank, like some queer little Buddha. The audience laughs with that southern sympathy: physical sympathy: that is what they love to feel and to arouse. But there is a little after-scene: in front of the drop-curtain jerks out a little fat flat caricature of a Neapolitan, and from the opposite side jerks the tall caricature of a Sicilian. They jerk towards one another and bump into one another with a smack. And smack goes the Neapolitan, down on his posterior. And the boys howl with joy. It is the eternal collision between the two peoples, Neapolitan and Sicilian. Now goes on a lot of fooling between the two clowns, in the two dialects. Alas, I can hardly understand anything at all. But it sounds comic, and looks very funny. The Neapolitan of course gets most of the knocks. And there seems to be no indecency at all--unless once.--The boys howl and rock with joy, and no one says Silenzio! But it is over. All is over. The theatre empties in a moment. And I shake hands with my fat neighbour, affectionately, and in the right spirit. Truly I loved them all in the theatre: the generous, hot southern blood, so subtle and spontaneous, that asks for blood contact, not for mental communion or spirit sympathy. I was sorry to leave them. FINIS. 
39100	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. NAPLES [Illustration: BAY OF NAPLES FROM THE VOMERO] NAPLES PAST AND PRESENT BY ARTHUR H. NORWAY AUTHOR OF "HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN DEVON AND CORNWALL" "PARSON PETER," ETC. WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY MAURICE GRIEFFENHAGEN SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON _First Published_ _May 1901_ _Second Edition_ _June 1905_ TO MY FRIENDS BARON AND BARONESS MARIO NOLLI OF NAPLES, AND OF ARI, IN THE ABRUZZI I DEDICATE THIS BOOK IN TOKEN THAT THOSE WHO ARE DIVIDED BY BOTH SEA AND LAND MAY YET BE UNITED IN THEIR LOVE FOR ITALY PREFATORY NOTE I have designed this book not as a guide, but as supplementary to a guide. The best of guide-books--even that of Murray or of Gsell-Fels--leaves a whole world of thought and knowledge untouched, being indeed of necessity so full of detail that broad, general views can scarcely be obtained from it. In this work detail has been sacrificed without hesitation. I have omitted reference to a few well-known places, usually because I could add nothing to the information given in the handbooks, but in one or two cases because the considerations which they raised lay too far from the thread of my discourse. I have thrown together in the form of an appendix such hints and suggestions as seemed likely to assist anyone who desires wider information than I have given. A. H. N. EALING, 1901 CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA 1 CHAPTER II THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRÆAN FIELDS 21 CHAPTER III THE BEAUTIES AND TRADITIONS OF THE POSILIPO, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS UPON VIRGIL, THE ENCHANTER 49 CHAPTER IV THE RIVIERA DI CHIAIA, AND SOME STRANGE THINGS WHICH OCCURRED THERE 68 CHAPTER V THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE EGG, AND THE SUCCESSION OF THE KINGS WHO HELD IT 85 CHAPTER VI THE BARBARITIES OF FERDINAND OF ARAGON, WITH CERTAIN OTHER SUBJECTS WHICH PRESENT THEMSELVES IN STROLLING ROUND THE CITY 101 CHAPTER VII CHIEFLY ABOUT CHURCHES--WITH SOME SAINTS, BUT MORE SINNERS 121 CHAPTER VIII A GREAT CHURCH AND TWO VERY NOBLE TRAGEDIES 143 CHAPTER IX VESUVIUS AND THE CITIES WHICH HE HAS DESTROYED--HERCULANEUM, POMPEII, AND STABIÆ 178 CHAPTER X CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS FOLKLORE, AND THE TALE OF THE MADONNA OF POZZANO 226 CHAPTER XI SURRIENTO GENTILE: ITS BEAUTIES AND BELIEFS 251 CHAPTER XII CAPRI 273 CHAPTER XIII LA RIVIERA D'AMALFI AND ITS LONG-DEAD GREATNESS 299 CHAPTER XIV THE ABBEY OF TRINITÀ DELLA CAVA, SALERNO, AND THE RUINED MAJESTY OF PÆSTUM 327 APPENDIX 345 INDEX 357 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Bay of Naples from the Vomero _Frontispiece_ PAGE Pozzuoli 24 Pozzuoli 32 Columns in the Serapeon Pozzuoli 35 Castle of Baiæ 44 Fishing Stage, Santa Lucia 54 Strada di Chiaia 68 Porta Mercantile 72 Boats at the Mergellina 76 Gradoni di Chiaia 78 Naples 90 Castle of St. Elmo 97 Old Town 113 Bay of Naples from San Martino 116 The Church of the Carmine 156 In the Strada di Tribunali 168 Card-players 188 A Slum 195 In the Strada di Tribunali 209 Porta Capuana 220 Roof top, Modern Naples 259 Courtyard in the Old Town 268 Unloading Boats, Bay of Naples 284 Naples: on the modern side, looking towards Capri from the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele 288 Gossip 334 NAPLES PAST AND PRESENT CHAPTER I THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA On a fine spring morning when the sun, which set last night in gold and purple behind the jagged mountain chain of Corsica, had but just climbed high enough to send out shafts and flashes of soft light across the opalescent sea, I came up on the deck of the great steamer which carried me from Genoa to watch for the first opening of the Bay of Naples. It was so early that the decks were very quiet. There was no sound but the perpetual soft rustle of the wave shed off from the bow of the steamer, which slipped on silently without sense of motion. The Ponza Islands were in sight, desolate and precipitous, showing on their dark cliffs no house nor any sign of life, save here and there a seabird winging its solitary way round the crags and caverns of the coast. Far ahead, in the direction of our course, lay one or two dim, cloudy masses, too faint and shadowy to be detached as yet from the grey skyline which bounded the crystalline sparkles of the sea. And so, having strained my eyes in vain effort to discover the high peak of Ischia, I fell to wondering why any man who is at liberty to choose his route should dream of approaching this Campanian coast otherwise than by the sea. For Naples is the city of the siren--"Parthenope," sacred to one of those sea nymphs whose marvellous sweet singing floated out across the waves and lured the ancient seamen rowing by in their strange old galleys, shaped after a fashion now long since forgotten, and carrying merchandise from cities which thirty centuries ago and more were "broken by the sea in the depths of the waters" so that "all the company in the midst of them did fail." How many generations had the line of sailors stretched among whom Parthenope wrought havoc before Ulysses sailed by her rock, and saw the heaps of whitening bones, and last of all men heard the wondrous melodies which must have lured him too, but for the tight thongs which bound him to the mast! So Parthenope and her two sisters cast themselves into the sea and perished, as the old prediction said they must when first a mariner went by their rock unscathed. But her drowned body floated over the blue sea till it reached the shore at Naples, and somewhere near the harbour the wondering people built her a shrine which was doubtless rarely lovely, and is mentioned by Strabo, the old Greek geographer, as being shown still in his day, not long after the birth of Christ. There is now but little navigation on these seas compared with the relative importance of the shipping that came hither in old days. Naples is in our day outstripped by Genoa, and hard run, even for the goods of southern Italy, by Brindisi and Taranto. The trade of Rome goes largely to Leghorn. If Ostia were ever purged of fever and rebuilt, or if the schemes for deepening the Tiber so as to allow large vessels to discharge at Rome were carried out, we might see the port of Naples decline as that of Pozzuoli did for the selfsame reason, the broad facts which govern the course of trade being the same to-day as they were three thousand years ago. Even now it is rather the convenience of passengers and mails than the necessities of merchants which take the great ocean steamers into Naples. It is not easy for men who realise these facts to remember that the waters of the Campanian coast have more than once been ploughed by the chief shipping of the world. Far back in the dawn of history, where nothing certain can be distinguished of the deeds of men or nations, the presence of traders, Phoenician and Greek, can be inferred upon these shores. The antiquity of shipping is immense and measureless. Year by year the spade, trenching on the sites of ancient civilisation, drives back by centuries the date at which man's intellect began to gather science; and no one yet can put his finger on any point of time and say, "within this space man did not understand the use of sail or oar." The earliest seamen of whom we know anything at all were doubtless the successors of many a generation like themselves. It cannot be much less than a thousand years before Christ was born when Greek ships were crossing the sea which washed their western coasts bound for Sicily and the Campanian shores. Yet how many ages must have passed between the days when the Greeks first went afloat and those in which they dared push off toward the night side of the world, where the mariners of the dead went to and fro upon the sea, where the expanse of ocean lay unbroken by the shelter of any friendly island, and both winds and currents beat against them in their course, or even by coasting up and down the Adriatic set that dreaded sea between them and their homes! Superstition, hand in hand with peril, barred their way, yet they broke through! But after what centuries of fearful longing,--curiosity, and love of salt adventure struggling in their hearts with fear of the unknown, till courage gained the mastery and the galleys braved the surf and smoke of the _planctæ_, the rocks that struck together, "where not even do birds pass by, no, not the timorous doves which carry ambrosia for Zeus, but even of them the sheer rock ever steals one away, and the father sends in another to make up the number." Then the rowers saw the rock of Scylla and her ravening heads thrust forth to prey on them, while beneath the fig tree on the opposite crag Charybdis sucked down the black seawater awfully, and cast it forth again in showers of foam and spray. These fabled dangers passed, there remained the Island of the Sirens, which legend placed near Capri, where Ulysses passed it when he sailed south again; and so the wonderful tradition of the Sirens dominates the ancient traffic of mankind upon these waters, and the harbour where the shrine of Parthenope was reflected in the blue sea claims a lofty place in the realms whether of imagination or of that scholarship which cares rather for the deeds of men than for the verbal emendations of a text. The shrine has gone. The memory remains only as a fable, whose dim meaning rests on the vast duration of the ages through which men have gone to and fro upon these waters. But here, still unchanged, is the pathway to the shrine--the Tyrrhene Sea, bearing still the selfsame aspect as in the days when the galleys of Æneas beat up the coast from Troy, and Palinurus watched the wind rise out of the blackening west. Since those old times the surface of the land has changed as often almost as the summer clouds have swept across it. Volcanic outbursts and the caprice of many masters have wrought together in destruction; so that he who now desires to see what Virgil saw must cheat his eyes at every moment and keep his imagination ever on the stretch. Even the city of mediæval days, the capital of Anjou and Aragon, is so far lost and hidden that a man must seek diligently before he cuts the network of old streets, unsavoury and crowded, in which he can discover the lanes and courtyards where Boccaccio sought Fiammetta, or the walls on which Giotto painted. But here, upon the silent sea, at every moment fresh objects are coming into sight which have lain unchanged under dawn and dusk in every generation. Already the volcanic cone of Monte Epomeo towers out of Ischia, a menace of destruction which not twenty years ago fulfilled itself and shook the town of Casamicciola in a few seconds into a mere rubble heap. It is a sad thing still to stroll round that once smiling town. Ruins project on every side. The cathedral lies shattered and untouched; there is not enough money in the island to rebuild it. The visitors, to whom most of the old prosperity was due, have not yet recovered from the attack of nerves brought on by the earthquake. But there remains wonderful beauty at Casamicciola and elsewhere on Ischia; the "Piccola Sentinella" is an excellent hotel; some day, surely, the lost ground will be recovered, and prosperity return. The new town lies gleaming on the flat at the foot of the great mountain. Far away towards my right Capri, loveliest of islands, floats upon the sea touched with blue haze; and there, stretching landwards, is the mountain promontory of Sorrento, Monte St. Angelo towering over Monte Faito, and the whole mass dropping by swift, steep slopes to the Punta di Campanella, the headland of the bell, whence in the old days of corsairs the warning toll swung out across the sea as often as the galleys of Dragut or of Barbarossa hove in sight, echoing from Torre del Greco, Torre Annunziata, and many another watchtower of that fair and wealthy coast, while the artillery of the old castle of Ischia, answering with three shots, gave warning of the coming peril. Even now I can see that ancient castle, standing nobly on a rock that seems an island, though, in fact, it is united with the land by a low causeway; and it comes into my mind how Vittoria Colonna took refuge from her sorrows there, spending her widowhood behind the battlements on which she had played with her husband as a child. Doubtless the two children listened awestruck on many a day to the cannon-shots which warned the fishers. Perhaps Vittoria may even have been pacing there when, as Brantôme writes, a party of French knights of Malta came sailing by with much treasure on their ship, and hearing the three shots took them arrogantly for a salute in honour of their flag, and so, thinking of nothing but their dignity, made a courteous salute in answer, and kept on their way. Whereupon the spider Dragut, who at that moment was sacking Castellammare, just where the peninsula joins the mainland, driving off as captive all those men or women who had not fled up into the wooded hills in time, swooped out with half a dozen galleys, and added the poor knights and their treasure to his piles of plunder. Many tales are told about that castle, so near and safe a refuge from the turbulence of Naples. But already it is dropping astern, and the lower land of Procida usurps its place, an island which in the days of Juvenal was a byword of desolation, though populous and fertile in our own. The widening strait of water between the low shore and the craggy one played its part in a tale as passionate, though not so famous, as that of Hero and Leander. For Boccaccio tells us that Gianni di Procida, nephew and namesake of a man whose loyalty popular tradition will extol until the end of time, loved one Restituta Bolgaro, daughter of a gentleman of Ischia; and often when his love for her burnt so hotly that he could not sleep, used to rise and go down to the water, and if he found no boat would plunge into the black sea, swim the channel, and lie beneath the walls of Restituta's house all night, swimming back happy in the morning if he had but seen the roof which sheltered her. But one day when Restituta was alone upon the shore she was carried off by pirates out of Sicily, who, wondering at her beauty, took her to Palermo and showed her to King Federigo, who straightway loved her, and gave her rooms in his palace, and waited till a day might come when she would love him. But Gianni armed a ship and followed swiftly on the traces of the captors, and found at last that Restituta was in Palermo. Then, led by love, he scaled the palace wall by night and crossed the garden in the dark and gained the poor girl's chamber, and might have borne her off in safety had not the King, suspecting that all was not well, come with torches in the darkness and discovered Gianni and cast him into prison, where he lay till he was sentenced to be taken out and burned at the stake in the Piazza of Palermo together with the girl who had dared to flout the affection of a king. And burned they would have been had not the great Admiral Ruggiero di Loria chanced to pass that way as they stood together at the stake and known Gianni as the nephew of that great plotter who conceived the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, whereby the crown of Sicily was set upon the head of Aragon. Straightway he hastened to the King, who forthwith released Gianni and gave him Restituta, and sent both home laden with rich gifts to Ischia, where they lived happy for many a year, till they were overcome at last by no worse fate than that which is reserved for all humanity whether glad or sorry. No man can prove this story true; but it is at least so happily conceived as to be worth credence, like others told us by the same immortal writer, who, though a Florentine, knew Naples well, and doubtless wove into the _Decameron_ many an anecdote picked up in the taverns which survives now in no other form. For there was no Brantôme to collect for us the gossip of the days when Anjou drove out Hohenstaufen from this kingdom; and if we would know what happened on the coast in those tragic and far-distant times we must take the tales set down by Boccaccio for what they may be worth. I am not sure that Gianni, the hot-passioned lad who used to swim this strait by night, does not emerge out of the darkness of the centuries more clearly than his greater uncle--that mighty plotter who, using craft and guile where he had no strength, is fabled to have built up a conspiracy and engineered a massacre which has no parallel save in the St. Bartholomew. Yet it is not to be judged without excuse like that foul act of cold-blooded treachery, but was in some measure an expiation of intolerable wrongs, as may be discovered even now by anyone who will study the plentiful traditions of that March night when eight thousand French of every age and either sex perished in two hours, slain at the signal of the vesper bell ringing in Palermo. That bloodshed split the kingdom of the two Sicilies in twain. It did more: it scored men's minds with a memory so deep that even now there is no child in Sicily who could not tell how the massacre began. To men then living it appeared a cataclysm so tremendous that they must needs date time from it, as from the birth of Christ or the foundation of the world. In documents written full four centuries later the passage of the years is reckoned thus; and in Palermo to this day the nuns of the Pietà sing a litany on the Monday after Easter in memory of the souls of the French who perished on that night of woe. So memorable was the deed ascribed by tradition to the plotter, Giovanni di Procida, lord of that little island which is already slipping past me out of sight. The steamer slips on noiselessly as ever. Procida falls away into the background, with its old brown town clinging to the seaward face of a precipitous cliff; and I can look down the Bay of Baiæ, where in old Roman days every woman who went in a Penelope came out a Helen, and almost catch a glance at Cumæ, where Dædalus put off his weary wings after that great flight from Crete which no man since has contrived to imitate. There lies the Gate of Hell down which Æneas plunged in company with the Sibyl; and round it all the land of the Phlegræan fields, heaving and steaming with volcanic fires. There too is the headland of Posilipo, where Virgil dwelt and where he wrought those enchantments concerning which I shall have much to say hereafter; for though Virgil is a poet to the world at large, he is a magician in the memory of the Neapolitans. And who shall say their tradition is not true? Next, sweeping round towards my right hand in a perfect curve, comes the shore of the Riviera di Chiaia, once a pleasant sandy beach, broken midway by the jutting rock and island on which stood the church and monastery of San Lionardo. It is long since church and island disappeared, and few of those gay Neapolitans who throng the Via Caracciolo, that fine parade which now usurps the whole seafront from horn to horn of the bay, could even point out where it stood. In these days the whole shore is embowered in trees and gardens skirting the fine roadway; and there stands the wonderful aquarium, which has no equal in the world, and where the wise will spend many afternoons and yet leave its marvels unexhausted. My eyes have travelled on to the other horn of this fine bay, and are arrested by what is surely the most picturesque object in all Naples. For at this point the spine or backbone of land which breaks the present city into two, leaving on the right the ancient town and on the left the modern, built along the pretty shore of which I have just spoken,--at this point the ridge sweeps down precipitously from the Castle of St. Elmo on the height, breaks off abruptly in the sheer cliff of the Pizzo-Falcone, "The Falcon's Beak," and then sends jutting out into the sea a small craggy island which bears an old hoary castle low down by the water's edge. On this grey morning the sea breaks heavily about the black reef on which the castle stands, and the walls, darkened almost to the colour of the rock itself, assume a curious aspect of vast age, such as disposes one to seek within their girth for some at least among the secrets of old Naples. Nor will the search be vain; for this hoary fortress is Castel dell'Uovo, "The Castle of the Egg," so called, if we may lend an ear to Neapolitan tradition, because Virgil the Enchanter built it on an egg, on which it stands unto this hour, and shall stand until the egg is broken. Others again say that the islet is egg-shaped, which it is not, unless my eyes deceive me; and of other explanations I know none at all, so that any man who can content himself with neither of these may resign himself to contemplate an unsolved puzzle for as long as he may stay in Naples. Apart, however, from the wizard Virgil and the idle tale of the enchanted egg, there is something so arresting in the sight of this ancient castle thrust out into the sea that I cannot choose but see in it the heart of the interest of Naples. It is by far the oldest castle which Naples owns, and as its day came earliest so it passed the first. Castel Nuovo robbed it of its consequence, both as a royal dwelling and a place of arms; and now the noisy, feverish tide of life that beats so restlessly from east to west through the great city finds scarce an echo on the silent battlements of the Egg Castle, where Norman monarchs met their barons and royal prisoners languished in the dungeons. Inside the walls there is nothing to attract a visitor but memories. Yet those gather thick and fast as soon as one has crossed the drawbridge, and there is scarce one other spot in Naples where a man who cares for the past of the old tragic city can lose himself more easily in dreams. But again the steamer turns her course a little, and suddenly the Castel dell'Uovo slips out of sight, the old brown city passes across my line of vision like a picture on the screen of a camera oscura when the lens is moved, and I am gazing out beyond the houses across the wide rich plain out of which the vast bulk of Vesuvius rears itself dark and tremendous, towering near the sea. There are other mountains far away, encircling the plain like the walls of some great amphitheatre, but they are beyond the range of volcanic catastrophe, and stood unmoved while the peaks of Vesuvius were piled up and blown away into a thousand shapes, sometimes green and fertile, the haunt of wild boars and grazing cattle, at others rent by fire and subterranean convulsion so as to give reality to the most awful visions which the imagination of mankind has conceived concerning the destruction which befell the sinful cities of the plain. The plain is the Campagna Felice, a happy country, notwithstanding the perpetual menace of the smoking mountain, which time after time has convulsed the fields, altered the outline of the coast, and overwhelmed cities, villages, and churches. Throughout the last eighteen hundred years a destruction like to that which befell the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii has been overtaking hamlets and buildings of less note. The country is a palimpsest. What is now written on its surface is not a tithe of what was once inscribed there. In 1861 an earthquake at Torre del Greco made a fissure in the main street. Those who dared descend it found themselves in a church, long since buried and forgotten. So it is in every direction throughout the Campagna Felice. The works of man are overwhelmed in countless numbers by the ejections from Vesuvius, and the green fields of beans and lupins which stretch so pleasantly across the wide spaces between the Sarno and the Sebeto cover the ruins of innumerable homes. It seems strange that a land exposed to such great and constant perils should be densely populated. The coast is lined with towns, all shining in the sun, and the first graceful slopes of Vesuvius itself are studded with white buildings, planted here and there in apparent oblivion of the floods of red-hot lava which have so often forced their way down the inclines towards the sea. There must be many dwellers in those towns who saw the lava break out from new vents in 1861 among the cultivated fields. Yet the fields are cultivated still, and in time of eruption the peasants will continue working in the vineyards within a few hundred yards of the crawling stream, knowing well how often its progress is arrested by the cooling of the fiery mass. There is, moreover, the power of the saints to be considered. How often has not San Gennaro arrested the outbreaks, and brought peace to the frightened city! On the Ponte della Maddalena he stands unto this day, his outstretched arm, pointing to the mountain with a gesture drawn from the mimic language of the people, bids it "Halt!" And then the fertility of the volcanic soil! Vesuvius, if a rough friend, is a kindly one. He may drive the people to their prayers from time to time, which is no great harm! but, if a balance be struck, his benefits are as many as his injuries, and the peasants, looking up, as they hoe their fields, at the coiling wreaths of copper-coloured smoke which issue from the cone, are content to take their chance that death may some day meet them too in a cloud of scorching ashes as it did those who dwelt in Pompeii so very long ago. The great steamer is already near her moorings. The western or newer half of Naples is hidden by the hill, and I have before my eyes only the densely peopled ancient city, a rabbit warren of tortuous and narrow streets, unsavoury and not too safe, yet full of interest if not of beauty, and possessing a picturesqueness which is all their own. One salient feature only arrests the eye wandering over this intricate mass of balconies and house-fronts--the handsome steeple of the Carmine, a church sorely injured and defaced, but still abounding in romance. For there lies the boy-king Conradin, slaughtered by Charles of Anjou in the market-place just outside; and there, too, the fisherman Masaniello met his end, after a trick of fortune had made him ruler of Naples for eight days. There is no church in all the city so full of tragedies as this, which was founded by hermits fleeing from Mount Carmel twelve hundred years ago, and which ever since has been close to the heart of the passionate and fierce-tempered people dwelling round its walls. I do not doubt there was a time when travellers, arriving at Naples by sea, found themselves greeted by persons of aspect more pleasing than those who accost the astonished pilgrim of to-day. There was surely an age when the lazzaroni were really picturesque, when they lay on the warm sand in the sunshine, while the bay resounded with the chant of fishermen, the light-hearted people beguiling their unbounded leisure with the tuneful strains of "Drunghe, drunghete," of "Tiritomba," or even the too familiar "Santa Lucia." It cannot be that travellers lied when they wrote of the amazing picturesqueness of the Neapolitans, that they painted brown purple, and put on their spectacles of rose as they approached the land! I wish I had those spectacles; for indeed the aspect of the quays and wharves of Naples is not attractive, while the people who throng the boats now pushing off towards the steamer are just such a crowd of expectant barterers as one may see wherever a great steamer touches. In the stern of the first stands a naked boy, brown and lithe. His accomplishment is to dive for pence, which he does with singular dexterity, cramming all the coins as he catches them into his mouth, which yet is not so full as to impede his bellowing like a bull in the effort to attract more custom. Did I complain of the lack of music? I was hasty; for there comes a second boat, carrying two nymphs whose devotion to the art has caused them to forget the use of water, unless it be internally. One has a hoarse voice, the other a shrill one; and with smiles and antics they pipe out the cheapest of modern melodies, chanting the eternal "Funicoli, Funicola," till one wishes the writer of that most paltry song could be keelhauled, or taught by some other process of similar asperity how grave is the offence of him who casts one more jingle into the hoarse throats of the street musicians of to-day. If I flee to the further side of the steamer and stop my ears from the cacophony, my face is tickled by the foliage of huge nosegays thrust up on the ends of poles from a boat so low in the water that I cannot see it. The salt air grows heavy with the scent of violets and roses. None of my senses is at peace. But in another hour the landing was happily accomplished. The recollection of the mob through which one struggled to the quay, the noise, the extortion, and the smells had faded away into the limbo of bad dreams, and I was free to go whither I would in the small portion of the day remaining and taste whichever sight of Naples pleased me first. There is nothing more bewildering to a stranger than to be turned loose in a great city with which he is imperfectly acquainted. I looked east towards the Carmine; but the handsome campanile lay far from the centre of the city. I gazed before me, up a long straight street which cleft the older city with a course as straight as any bow shot, the house fronts intricate with countless balconies and climbing plants. It is the Strada del Duomo; but I knew it to be new through all its lower length, and it leads into the very heart of the dense old town, where, lost in a maze of vicoli, I could never grasp the broad and general aspect of this metropolis of many kings. At that moment I remembered the hill on which the Castle of St. Elmo stood; and turning westwards along the street which borders the quays, I came out in no great distance on the Piazza del Municipio, bordered on the further side by the walls and towers of Castel Nuovo, that old royal castle of Anjou and Aragon, which saw so many tragedies wrought within its walls, and holds some still, as I shall tell in time, for the better persuasion of any who may be disposed to set down the accusations of history as distant and vague charges, which cannot nowadays be brought to the test of sight. Before my eyes rises the white priory of San Martino topping the hillside high above the town, and it is to that point that I am hastening ere the gold light of the afternoon fades off the bay, and the grey shades of the early dusk rob the islands of their sunset colours. It is a long climb up to the belvedere of the low white building. The Neapolitans believed in days not long distant that vast caverns of almost immeasurable extent branched out laterally from the dungeons of St. Elmo and ran down beneath the city even to Castel Nuovo, making a secret communication between the garrisons of the two fortresses on which the security of Naples most depended. The story is not true. The vaults of St. Elmo do not reach so far, and are not more extensive than the circuit of the castle. But indeed these hillsides on which Naples lies are pierced so frequently by caverns, so many tales are told of grottoes known and unknown in every spine of rock, that the wildest stories of mysterious passages have found ready credence; and there are doubtless many children, old and young, in Naples who believe that one may walk beneath the earth from St. Elmo to Castel Nuovo no less firmly than they credit the existence of vast caverns filled with gold and jewels lying underneath Castel dell'Uovo, guarded for ever from the sight of man by the chafing of the waves. Naples presents us with a strange blend of romance and common sense--the modern spirit, practical and useful, setting itself with something like the energy of the old Italian genius towards the gigantic task of acquiring the arts of government, and turning a people enslaved for centuries into one which can wield the hammer of its own great destinies. "L'Italia è fatta," said Massimo d'Azeglio, "ma chi farà ora gli Italiani?" It was the question of a patriot, and it may be that it is not wholly answered yet. The most careless of observers can see that some things still go wrong in Italy, that the Italians are not yet wholly made, and it is the easiest as it is the stupidest of tasks to demonstrate that thirty years of freedom have not taught the youngest nation what the oldest took eight centuries to learn. It galls me to hear the supercilious remarks dropped by strangers coming from a country where serious difficulties of government have not existed in the memory of man, the casual wisdom of critics who look around too carelessly to note the energy with which one by one the roots of evil are plucked up, and the refuse of the long tyranny cleared away. I am not writing a political tract; but I say once for all that the recent history of Italy can show more triumphs than its failures; and the day will surely come when the indomitable courage of her rulers shall purge the country of those cankers which for centuries ate out her manhood. "We do not serve the dead--the past is past. God lives, and lifts his glorious mornings up Before the eyes of men awake at last, Who put away the meats they used to sup, And down upon the dust of earth outcast The dregs remaining of the ancient cup, Then turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act." Dear prophetess and poet, who once from Casa Guidi sang so bravely of the future, kindling the love of Italy in many a heart where it has since grown into a passion,--it is coming true! It may be that fulfilment loiters, but Heaven does not disappoint mankind of hopes so great as these. They are of the sort with which God keeps troth. The child who went by singing "O bella libertà, o bella!" does not flute so sweetly now he is a man, but his hands have taken hold, and his heart is set on the greatness of his motherland. The sun lies thick and hot in the Toledo, that long and crowded street which is the chief thoroughfare of Naples. It is hotter still when, having toiled as far as the museum, I turn off along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, which winds along the hillside, giving at each turn grand views across the town and harbour towards Capri shining in the west. A little way down the Corso is a flight of steps, long, tortuous and steep, yet forming much the pleasantest approach to the white priory whither every visitor to Naples goes once at least towards the hour of sunset. As one mounts, the city drops away, and the long semicircle of hills behind it rises into sight, green rounded hills, bearing on their summits palms which stand out sharp and dark against the sky. With every convolution of the stairs one sees more and more of the great plain out of which Vesuvius rises,--the Campagna Felice, a purple flat, stretching from the base of the volcano as far as that mountain chain which marks the limit of its power. Out of the mountains comes a fresh cool wind, and all the city sparkles in the sun. So I went up among the housetops till at length I reached an open space bounded by a rampart whence one looked down upon the town. On the further side a gateway gave admission to a courtyard, and that again to a corridor of the old priory, through which a guide led me with vain pointings toward the chamber containing the "Presepe," a vast model of the scene of the Nativity. Mary sits upon a height under a fragment of an old Greek building; while all the valleys are filled with the procession of the kings. Their goods are being unloaded from the troops of asses which bore them. In the meadows sheep are grazing, cows are being milked; and the sky is filled with choirs of angels. It is an ingenious, theatrical toy, but not half so pretty as the sunset, which I came to see. So, with some indignation of my guide, I pressed on through an exquisitely cool arcaded courtyard of white marble, its centre occupied by a garden wherein palms and roses grew almost profuse enough to hide the ancient draw well, with its chain and bucket lying as if they waited for some brother told off by the Prior to draw water for the rest. In one corner of this courtyard a doorway gives admission to the belvedere, a little chamber with two windows, whereof one looks towards the plain behind Vesuvius, and the other gives upon Posilipo. As I stepped out on the belvedere the sun was dropping fast towards Posilipo, and wide flashes of gold were spreading over all the cup-shaped bay. Far out at sea, between the two horns of the gulf, the dark peaks of Capri caught the light, and presently the glow blazed more brightly in the west, and all the shores where Sorrento lies began to quiver softly in the sunset. Vesuvius was grim and black; a pillar of dark smoke mounted slowly from its summit, and stretched across the paling sky like a banner floating defiantly from some tall citadel. Deep down beneath me lay the white city, a forest of domes and house-fronts which seemed at first impenetrable. But ere long the royal palace detached itself from the other buildings, and I could distinguish Castel Nuovo, with its old round towers, looking very dark and grim, while on the left a forest of domes and spires rose out of the densely crowded streets which have known so many masters and have allured conquerors from lands so very far away. A faint brown haze crept down from the hilltops, the first touch of evening chilled the air, but the seaward sky was marvellously clear, and the wide bay gleamed with gold and purple lights. CHAPTER II THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRÆAN FIELDS It is a morning of alternate sun and shadow. The clouds are flying low across the city, so that now one dome and now another flashes into light and the orange groves shine green and gold among the square white houses. All the high range of the Sorrento mountains lies in shadow, but on the sea the colours are glowing warm and bright, here a tender blue, there deepening into grey, and again, nearer into shore, a marvellous rich tint which has no name, but is azure and emerald in a single moment. Away across the crescent of the gulf a crowd of fishing boats are putting forth from Torre del Greco or Torre dell' Annunziata. Even at this distance one can see how they set their huge triangular sails and scatter, some one way, some another, searching each perhaps for his favourite volcanic shoal; for the largest fish lurk always in the hollows of those lava reefs which have from time to time burst out of the bottom of the bay. Some, perhaps, are sailing for the coral fishery upon the coast of Africa, to which great numbers go still in this month of April out of all the harbours beneath Vesuvius, though the profits are not what they were, and the trade is falling upon evil days. As for the mountain, he has cleared himself of clouds, and from his summit a heavy coil of smoke uncurls itself lazily and spreads like a pennant stretching far across the sky. All these things and more I have time to notice while I trudge along above the housetops of the city, those flat roofs named _astrici_ which are such pleasant lounges on the summer evenings when the blue bay is dotted over with white sails and the shadows deepen on the flanks of Vesuvius or the distant line of the Sorrento coast. At length the road approaching the ridge of hill whose point forms the headland of Posilipo drops swiftly, and I find myself in face of a short ascent leading to the mouth of the very ancient grotto by which, these two thousand years and more, those who fared from Naples unto Pozzuoli have saved themselves the trouble of the hill. It is absolutely necessary to pause and consider this hill, to which so much of the rare beauty of Naples is to be attributed. For the moment I set aside its legends and traditions, and turn my attention to the eminence itself. It is a cliff of yellow rock, whose consistency somewhat resembles sandstone, evidently worked without much difficulty, since it has been quarried out into vast cavities. The rock is tufa. It is a volcanic product, and forms the staple not only of the headland, but also of all the site of Naples and the rising ground behind it up to the base of the blue Apennines, which are seen continually towering in the distance beyond Vesuvius. Thus at Naples one may distinguish between the eternal hills and those which have no title to the name. Of the latter is Posilipo, formed as I said out of volcanic ash. That ash was ejected underneath the sea, and having been compacted into rock by the action of the water was upreared by some convulsion long since forgotten. It is an intrusion on the landscape--a very ancient one, certainly--but it has nothing to do with the great mountain-chain which hems in the Neapolitan Campagna and ends at last in the Sorrento peninsula and Capri. All the most fertile plain which lies within that barrier was once beneath the sea, which flowed up to the bases of the mountains. There is no doubt about it. The rock of Posilipo contains shells of fish now living in the bay. From Gaeta to Castellammare stretched one wide inlet of the sea. But underneath the water volcanic ash was being cast out, as it is still at certain spots within the bay; the heaps of ash and pumice stone grew into shoals and reefs, were uplifted into hills, the sea flowed back from its uptilted bed, and the coasts of Naples and of Baiæ assumed some outline roughly similar to that which they possess at present. Of course all this is very ancient history, far beyond the ken of written records, or even the faintest whisper of tradition, unless, indeed, in the awe with which ancient writers alluded to the Phlegræan fields, fabled in old time to be the gate of hell, we may detect some lingering memory of the horrible convulsion which drove back the sea, and out of its deserted bed reared up this wilderness of ash and craters. But speculations of this kind are rather idle. We had better turn towards the grottoes, which are, at least in part, the work of men whose doings on this earth are known to history. The one, of course, is wholly modern, a construction of our own age for the accommodation of the steam tramway; but the other, through which one walks or drives, is certainly as old as the Emperor Augustus, and has sometimes been supposed to possess an antiquity far greater than that. It seems remarkable that the Romans should have esteemed it easier to bore through the cliff than to make a road across the headland. Indeed, there were villas on Posilipo, and there must surely have been a road of some sort from very early times, though it must be admitted that the founders of Naples did not go to Pozzuoli by the coast as we do. The old road climbed up directly from the city to Antignano, in the direction of Camaldoli, and kept along the ridge as far as possible. The coast road began to be used when the tunnel had been made. Still there must have been at least a track across the headland, and one wonders why the Romans did not improve it, in preference to boring underground. The ease with which the soft stone can be worked may account partially for their choice; but it is not to be forgotten that numberless caves, whether natural or artificial, exist in the cliffs at Posilipo and Pizzofalcone, giving occasion to the quick fancy of the Neapolitans to devise wild tales of buried treasure and of strange fierce beasts which guard it from the greed of men. The old legends of the Cimmerians who dwelt in dark caverns of the Phlegræan fields present themselves to mind in this connection, and without following out this mysterious subject further into the mists which envelope it, we may recognise the possibility that some among these caverns are far older than is commonly believed. Of course the preference of the Romans for tunnelling is explained at once, if we may suppose that by enlarging existing caverns they found their tunnel already partly made. [Illustration: POZZUOLI] "I do not know," cries Capaccio, an ancient topographer who may yet be read with pleasure, though the grapes have ripened three hundred times above his tomb, "I do not know whether the Posilipo is more adorned by the grotto or the grotto by Posilipo." I really cannot guess what he meant. It sounds like the despairing observation of a writer at a loss for matter. We will leave him to resolve his own puzzle and go on through the darkness of the ill-lighted grotto--no pleasanter now than when Seneca grumbled at its dust and darkness--sparing some thought for that great festival which on the 7th of September every year turns this dark highway into a pandemonium of noise and riot. The festival of Piedigrotta is held as much within the tunnel as on the open space outside, where stands the church whose Madonna furnishes a devotional pretext for all the racket. Indeed it is almost more wild and whirling within than without; for one need not become a boy again to understand that the joys of rushing up and down, wearing a fantastic paper cap, blowing shrieks upon a catcall, and brandishing a Chinese lantern, must be infinitely greater in the bowels of the hill than in the open air. Of course it is not only, nor even chiefly, a feast for children. All the lower classes rejoice at Piedigrotta, and often with the best of cause; for it happens not infrequently that the sky, which for many weeks has been pitiless and brazen, clouds and breaks about that time, the welcome rain falls, the streets grow cool again, and laughter rises from end to end of the reviving city. Of Fuorigrotta, the unpleasing village at the further end of the grotto, I have nothing to say, unless it be to express the wish that Giacomo Leopardi, who lies in the church of San Vitale, lay elsewhere. That superb poet and fine scholar whose verses upon Italy not yet reborn rank by their majesty and fire next after those of Dante, and who yet could produce a poem rendering so nobly the solitude of contemplation as that which commences-- "Che fai tu luna in ciel, dimmi, che fai, Silenziosa luna!" this man should have lain upon some mountain-top, among the scent of rosemary and of fragrant myrtle, rather than in such a reeking dirty village as Fuorigrotta. But I forget!--the compelling interest of this day's journey is not literary. A short walk from Fuorigrotta brings me to a point where the road turns slightly upward to the right, leading me to the brow of a hill, over which I look into a wooded hollow--none other than the Lago d'Agnano, once a crater, then a volcanic lake. Oddly enough, it is not mentioned as a lake by any ancient writer. Pliny describes the Grotta del Cane, which we are about to visit, but says not a word of any lake. This fact, with some others, suggests that the water appeared in this old crater only in the Middle Ages; though it really does not matter much, for it is gone now. The bottom has been reft from the fishes and converted into fertile soil. The sloping heights which wall the basin have a waste and somewhat blasted aspect; but I was not granted time to muse on these appearances before a smiling but determined brigand, belonging to the class of guides, sauntered up with a small cur running at his heels and made me aware that I had reached the entrance of the Dog Grotto. I might have known it; for, in fact, through many centuries up to that recent year when it pleased the Italians to drain the lake, the life of the small dogs dwelling in this neighbourhood has been composed of progresses from grotto to lake and back again, first held up by the heels to be stifled by the poisonous gas, then soused head over ears in the lake with instructions to recover quickly because another carriage was coming down the hill. Thus lake and grotto were twin branches of one establishment, now dissolved. Perhaps the lake was the more important of the two, since it is easier to stifle a dog or man than to revive him; and on many occasions there would have been melancholy accidents had not the cooling waters been at hand. For instance it is related by M. de Villamont, who came this way when the seventeenth century was very young indeed, that M. de Tournon, a few years before, desiring to carry off a bit of the roof of the grotto, was unhappily overcome by the fumes as he stood chipping off the piece he fancied, and tumbled on the floor, as likely to perish as could be wished by the bitterest foe of those who spoil ancient monuments. His friends promptly dragged him out and tossed him into the lake. It is true the cure found so successful with dogs proved somewhat less so with M. de Tournon, for he died a few days later. Yet had the lake been dry, as it is to-day, he would have died in the cave, which would surely have been worse. The little dog--he was hardly better than a puppy--looked at me and wagged his tail hopefully. I understood him perfectly. He had detected my nationality; and I resolved to be no less humane than a countrywoman of my own who visited this grotto no great while ago, and who, when asked by the brigand whether he should put the dog in, answered hastily, "Certainly not." "Ah!" said the guide, "you are Englees! If you had been American you would have said, 'Why, certainly.'" I made the same condition. The fellow shrugged his shoulders. He did not care, he knew another way of extorting as many francs from me; and accordingly we all went gaily down the hill, preceded by the happy cur, running on with tail erect, till we reached a gate in the wall through which we passed to the Grotta del Cane. A low entrance, hardly more than a man's height, a long tubular passage of uniform dimensions sloping backwards into the bowels of the hill--such is all one sees on approaching the Dog Grotto. A misty exhalation rises from the floor and maintains its level while the ground slopes downwards. Thus, if a man entered, the whitish vapour would cling at first about his feet. A few steps further would bring it to his knees, then waist high, and in a little more it would rise about his mouth and nostrils and become a shroud indeed; for the gas is carbonic acid, and destroys all human life. King Charles the Eighth of France, who flashed across the sky of Naples as a conqueror, came here in the short space of time before he left it as a fugitive, bringing with him a donkey, on which he tried the effects of the gas. I do not know why he selected that animal; but the poor brute died. So did two slaves, whom Don Pietro di Toledo, one of the early Spanish viceroys, used to decide the question whether any of the virtue had gone out of the gas. That question is settled more humanely now. The guide takes a torch, kindles it to a bright flame, and plunges it into the vapour. It goes out instantly; and when the act has been repeated some half-dozen times the gas, impregnated with smoke, assumes the appearance of a silver sea, flowing in rippling waves against the black walls of the cavern. With all its curiosity the Dog Grotto is a deadly little hole, in which the world takes much less interest nowadays than it does in many other objects in the neighbourhood of the Siren city, going indeed by preference to see those which are beautiful, whereas not many generations ago it rushed off hastily to see first those which are odd. For that reason many visitors to Naples neglect this region of the Phlegræan fields and are content to wait the natural occasion for visiting the mouth of Styx, over which all created beings must be ferried before they reach the nether world. It is a pity; for, judged from the point of beauty solely, there is enough in the shore of the Bay of Baiæ to content most men. The road mounts upon the ridge which parts the slope of Lago d'Agnano from the sea. One looks down from the spine over a broken land of vineyards to a curved bay, an almost perfect semicircle, bounded on the left by the height of Posilipo, with the high crag of the Island of Nisida, and on the right by Capo Miseno, the point which took its name from the old Trojan trumpeter who made the long perilous voyage with Æneas, but perished as he reached the promised land where at last the wanderers were to find rest. The headland, which, like every other eminence in sight, is purely volcanic, is a lofty mass of tufa, united with the land by a lower tongue, like a mere causeway; and on the nearer side stands the Castle of Baiæ, with the insignificant townlet which bears on its small shoulders the burden of so great a name. Midway in the bay the ancient town of Pozzuoli nestles by the water's edge, deserted this long while by all the trade which brought it into touch with Alexandria and many another city further east, filling its harbour with strange ships, crowding its quays with swarthy sailors, and with silks and spices of the Orient. All that old consequence has gone now like a dream, and no one visits the cluster of old brown houses for any other reason than to see that which is still left of its ancient greatness. But before going down the hill, I turn aside towards a gateway on my right, which admits me to a place of strange and curious interest. It is the Solfatara, and is nothing more or less than the crater of a half-extinct volcano, which, having lain torpid for full seven centuries, is now a striking proof of the fertility of volcanic soil, and the speed with which Nature will haste to spread her lushest vegetation even over a thin crust which covers seething fires. It was so once with the crater of Vesuvius, which, after five centuries of rest, filled itself with oaks and beeches, and covered its slopes with fresh grass up to the very summit. Indeed, on entering the inclosure of the Solfatara, one receives the impression of treading the winding alleys of a well-kept and lovely park. The path runs through a pretty wood. The trees are scarcely more important than a coppice; but under their green shade there grows a wealth of flowers of every colour, glowing in the soft sunshine which filters through the boughs. There is the white gum-cistus, which is so strangely like the white wild rose of English hedges, and the branching asphodel, with myriads of those exquisite anemones, lilac and purple, which make the woods of Italy in springtime a perpetual joy to us who come from colder climates; and among these, a profusion of smaller blossoms trailing on the ground, crimson, white and orange, making such a mass of colour as the most cunning gardener would seek vainly to produce. One lingers and delays among these woods, doubting whether any sight which may be shown one further on can compensate for the loss of the cool glades. But already over the green coppice bare grey hillsides have come in sight. They are the walls of the old crater, and here and there a puff of white smoke curling out of a cleft reminds me that the flowers are only here on sufferance, and that the whole hollow is in fact but waiting the moment when its hidden fires will break forth again, and vomit destruction over all the country. A few yards further on the coppice falls away. The flowers persist in carpeting the ground; but in a little way they too cease, the soil grows grey and blasted. Full in front there rises a strange scene of desolation. The wall of the crater is precipitous and black. At its base there are openings and piles of discoloured earth which suggest the débris of some factory of chemicals, an impression which is driven home by the yellow stains of sulphur which lie in every direction on the grey bottom of the crater. From one vast rent in the soil a towering pillar of white smoke pours out with a loud hissing noise, and blows away in wreaths and coils over the dark surface of the cliff. There is something curiously arresting in this quick passage from a green glade carpeted with flowers to the calcined ash and the grey desolation of this broken hillside. Of vegetation there is almost none, except a stunted heather which creeps hardily towards the blast hole. A little way off, towards the right, lies a level space sunk beneath the surrounding land, not unlike the fashion of an asphalt skating rink, so even in its surface that it resembles the work of man, and one strolls towards it to discover with what purpose anyone had dared to tamper with the soil in a spot where so thin a crust lies over bottomless pits of fire. But when one steps out upon the level flat, it reveals itself at once to be no human work. The guide stamps with his foot, and remarks that the sound is hollow. It is indeed, most unpleasantly so. He jumps upon it, and the surface quivers. You beg him to spare you further demonstrations, and walking gingerly on tiptoe, wishing at each step that you were safe in Regent Street once more, you follow him out towards the middle of this devilish crust, which rocks so easily and covers something which you hope devoutly you may never see. Midway in the expanse the fellow pauses in triumph--he has reached what he is confident will please you. He is standing by a hole, just such an opening as is made in a frozen lake in winter for the watering of animals. From it there emerges a little vapour and a curious low sound, like that which a child will make with pouting lips. The guide grins, crouching by the opening; you, on the other hand, hang back, in doubt whether the crust may not break off and suddenly enlarge the hole. You are encouraged forwards, and at last, peering nervously down the hole, you see with keen and lively interest that the crust appeared to have about the thickness of your walking-stick, at which depth there is a lake of boiling mud. The grey mud stirs and seethes in the round vent-hole, rising and falling, while on its surface the gas collects slowly into a huge bubble, which forms and bursts and then collects again. For my part I do not deny that the sight fascinated me, but it deprived me of all wish to tread further on that shaking crust, and I sped back as lightly as I might, wishing all the way for wings, to where there was at least sound, green earth for a footing, in place of pumice stone and hardened mud, which some day, surely, will fly into splinters, and leave the seething, steaming lake once more open to the heavens. [Illustration: POZZUOLI] From the hillside just beyond the gate of the Solfatara one gazes down on the town of Pozzuoli, brown and ancient, looking, I do not doubt, much the same unto this hour as when the Apostle Paul landed there from the _Castor and Pollux_, a ship of Alexandria which had wintered in the Island of Melita. But if the town itself, the very houses clustered on the hill, preserve the aspect which they bore twenty centuries ago, so much cannot be said for the sea-front, which is vastly changed. Pozzuoli in those days must have rung with the noise of ships entering or departing. Its quays were clamorous with all the speeches of the East; its great trade in corn needed long warehouses near the water's edge; its amphitheatre was built for the games of a people numbering many thousands. But now the little boats which come and go are too few to break the long silence of the city, and there are scarce any other noises in the place than the shout of children at their games, or the loud crack of the vetturino's whip as the strangers rattle through the streets on their way to Baiæ. It was the fall of Capua which made the trade of Pozzuoli, and it was the rise of Ostia that destroyed it. Capua, long the first town of Italy by reason of its commerce and its luxury, lost that pre-eminence in the year 211 B.C., when the Romans avenged the adhesion of the city to the cause of Hannibal. That act of punishment made Rome the chief mart of merchants from the East, and the nearest port to the Eternal City being Pozzuoli, the trade flowed thither naturally. Naples no doubt had a finer harbour; but Naples was not in Roman hands, while Pozzuoli was. Ostia, before the days of the Emperor Claudius, who carried out great works there, was a port of smallest consequence. Thus the harbour of Pozzuoli was continually full of ships. They came from Spain, from Sardinia, from Elba, bringing iron, which was wrought into fine tools by cunning workmen of the town; from Africa, from Cyprus, and all the trading ports of Asia Minor and the isles of the Ægean. Thither came also the merchants of Phoenicia, bringing with them all those gorgeous wares which moved the prophet Ezekiel to utter so great a chant of glory and its doom. "Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs.... These were thy merchants in all sorts of things, in blue clothes and broidered work and in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords and made of cedar among thy merchandise. The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market. Thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the seas." All that most noble description of the commerce of Tyre returns irresistibly upon the mind when one looks back on the greatness of Pozzuoli, where the Tyrians themselves had a mighty factory and all the nations of the East brought their wares for sale. Most of all the town rejoiced when the great fleet hove in sight which came each year from Egypt in the spring. Seneca has left us a description of the stir. The fleet of traders was preceded some way in advance by light, swift sailing ships which heralded its coming. They could be known a long way off, for they sailed through the narrow strait between Capri and the mainland with topsails flying, a privilege allowed to none but ships of Alexandria. Then all the town made ready to hasten to the water's edge, to watch the sailors dancing on the quays, or to gloat over the wonders which had travelled thither from Arabia, India, and perhaps even far Cathay. Well, all this is an old story now--too old, perhaps, to be of any striking interest--yet here upon the shore is still the vast old Temple of Serapis, the Egyptian deity whom the strangers worshipped. One knows not by what slow stages the Egyptians departed and the ancient temple was deserted. The only certain fact is that at some period the whole inclosure was buried deep beneath the sea, and after long centuries raised up again by some fresh movement of the swaying shore. [Illustration: COLUMNS IN THE SERAPEON, POZZUOLI] Strange as this seems to those who have not watched the perpetual heavings and subsidences of a volcanic land, the testimony of the fact is unmistakably in sight of all. For the sacred inclosure once hallowed to the rite of Serapis is still not allotted to any other purpose; and the visitor who enters it finds many of the ancient columns still erect. It is a vast quadrangle, once paved with squares of marble. There was a covered peristyle, and in the centre another smaller temple. Many of the columns of fine marble which once adorned the abode of the goddess were reft from her in the last century, when the spot was cleared of all the soil and brushwood which had grown up about it; but three huge pillars of cipollino, once forming part of the pronaos, are still erect; and what is singular about them is that, beginning at a height of some twelve feet from the ground and extending some nine feet further up, the marble is honeycombed with holes, drilled in countless numbers deep into the round surface of the columns. There is no animal in earth or air which will attack stone in this destructive manner; but in the sea there is a little bivalve, called by naturalists "lithodomus," whose only happiness lies in boring. This animal is still found plentifully in the Bay of Baiæ. His shells still lie in the perforations of the columns; and it is thus demonstrated that the ancient temple must have been plunged beneath the sea, that it lay there long ages, till at length some fresh convulsion reared it up once more out of the reach of fish. Surely few buildings have sustained so strange a fate! The holes drilled by the patient lithodomus, as I have said, do not extend through the whole height of the column, but have a range of about nine feet only, which is thus the measure of the space left for the operations of the busy spoiler. Above the ring of perforations one sees the indications of ordinary weathering, so that the upper edge of the holes doubtless marks the level of high water, and the summit of the columns stood up above the waves. But one does not see readily what protected the lower portion of the marble. Possibly, before the land swayed downwards something fell which covered them. In the twelfth century the Solfatara broke forth into eruption for the last time. The scoriæ and stones fell thick in Pozzuoli, and they filled the court of the Serapeon to the height of some twelve feet. Probably the sea had then already stolen into the courtyard; and it may be that the earthquakes attending the eruption caused the subsidence which left the lithodomus free to crawl and bore upon the stones which saw the ancient mysteries of Serapis. At any rate it was another volcanic outburst which raised the dripping columns from the sea in 1538, since which time the land has been swaying slowly down once more, so that now if anyone cares to scratch the gravel in the courtyard he will find he has constructed a pool of clear sea water. It is a strange and terrible thing to realise the existence of hidden forces which can sway the solid earth as lightly as a puff of wind disturbs an awning; none the less terrible because the ground has risen and fallen so very gently that the pillars stand erect upon their bases. Once more, as at the Solfatara, one has the sense of treading over some vast chasm filled with a sleeping power which may awake at any moment. Let us go on beyond the city and see what has happened elsewhere upon this bay, so beautiful and yet so deadly, a strange dwelling-place for men who have but one life to pass on the surface of this earth. In passing out of Pozzuoli one sees upon the right the vine-clad slopes of Monte Barbaro. That also is a crater, the loftiest in the Phlegræan fields, but long at rest. The peasants believe the mountain to contain vast treasures--statues of kings and queens, all cast of solid gold, with heaps of coin and jewels so immense that great ships would be needed to carry them away. These tales are very old. I sometimes wonder whether they may not have had their source in dim memory of the great hoard of treasure which the Goths stored in the citadel of Cumæ, and which, when their power was utterly broken, they were supposed to have surrendered to the imperial general Narses. Perhaps they did not; perhaps--but what is the use of suppositions? Petrarch heard the stories when he climbed Monte Barbaro in 1343. Many men, his guides told him, had set out to seek the treasure, but had not returned, lost in some horrible abyss in the heart of the mountain. They must have neglected the conditions of success. They should have watched the moon, and learnt how to catch and prison down the ghosts which guard the precious heaps, otherwise the whole mass, even if found, will turn to lumps of coal! What a wilderness of craters! Small wonder if wild tales exist yet in a district which in old days, and even modern ones, has been encompassed with fear. One volcano is enough to fill the country east of Naples with terror. But here are many--active, doubtless, in very different ages--Monte Barbaro, Monte Cigliano, Monte Campana, Monte Grillo, which hems in the more recent crater of Avernus much as Somma encircles the eruptive crater of Vesuvius. What terrible sights must have been witnessed here in those far-distant days when these and other craters were in action!--"affliction such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created" until then! But a few miles away across the sea is Monte Epomeo, towering out of Ischia. That was the chief vent of the volcanic forces in Roman times; and then the Phlegræan fields were still. Epomeo has been silent for five centuries; but that proves nothing, and there are people who suggest that the awful earthquake which destroyed Casamicciola may be just such a prelude to the awakening of Epomeo as was the convulsion which shook Pompeii to its foundations sixteen years before its final destruction. _Dî avertite omen!_ We need not, however, go back five centuries for facts that bid men heed what may be passing underground about the shores of this blue bay. Here is one too large to be overlooked, immediately in front of us--no other than the green slope of Monte Nuovo, a hill of aspect both innocent and ancient, ridged with a few pine trees by whose aid the mountain contrives to look as if it had stood there beside the Lucrine Lake as long as any eminence in sight. This is a false pretension. There was no such mountain when Petrarch climbed the neighbouring height, nor for full two centuries afterwards. What Petrarch saw exists no longer. He looked down upon the Lucrine Lake connected with the sea by a deep channel, and formed with Lake Avernus into one wide inlet fit for shipping. This was the Portus Julius, a harbour so large that the whole Roman fleet could manoeuvre in it. The canals and piers were in existence less than four centuries ago; and this great work, so remarkable a witness to the sea power of the Romans, would doubtless have lasted unto our day had it not been for the intrusion of Monte Nuovo, which destroyed the channels and reduced the Lucrine Lake to the dimensions of a sedgy duck pond. The catastrophe is worth describing, for no other in historic times has so greatly changed the aspect of this coast or robbed it of so large a portion of its beauty. For full two years there had been constant earthquakes throughout Campania. Some imprisoned force was heaving and struggling to release itself, and all men began to fear a great convulsion. On the 27th of September, 1538, the earth tremors seemed to concentrate themselves around the town of Pozzuoli. More than twenty shocks struck the town in rapid succession. By noon upon the 28th the sea was retreating visibly from the pleasant shore beside the Lucrine Lake, where stood the ruined villa of the Empress Agrippina, and a more modern villa of the Anjou kings, who were used, like all their predecessors in Campania, to take their ease in summer among the luxuriant vegetation of the hills whose volcanic forces were believed to be lulled in a perpetual sleep. For three hundred yards the sea fell back, its bottom was exposed, and the peasants came with carts and carried off the fish left dry upon the strand. The whole of the flat ground between Lake Avernus and the sea had been heaved upwards; but at eight o'clock on the following morning it began to sink again, though not as yet with any violence. It fell apparently at one spot only, and to a depth of about thirteen feet, while from the hollow thus formed there burst out a stream of very cold water, which was investigated cautiously by several persons, some of whom found it by no means cold, but tepid and sulphurous. Ere long those who were examining the new spring perceived that the sunken ground was rising awfully. It was upreared so rapidly that by noon the hollow had become a hill, and as the new slopes swelled and rose where never yet had there been a rising ground, the crest burst and fire broke out from the summit. "About this time," says one Francesco del Nero, who dwelt at Pozzuoli, "about this time fire issued forth and formed the great gulf with such a force, noise, and shining light that I, who was standing in my garden, was seized with great terror. Forty minutes afterwards, though unwell, I got upon a neighbouring height, and by my troth it was a splendid fire, that threw up for a long time much earth and many stones. They fell back again all round the gulf, so that towards the sea they formed a heap in the shape of a crossbow, the bow being a mile and a half and the arrow two-thirds of a mile in dimensions. Towards Pozzuoli it has formed a hill nearly of the height of Monte Morello, and for a distance of seventy miles the earth and trees are covered with ashes. On my own estate I have neither a leaf on the trees nor a blade of grass.... The ashes that fell were soft, sulphurous, and heavy. They not only threw down the trees, but an immense number of birds, hares, and other animals were killed." Amid such throes and pangs Monte Nuovo was born, and the events of that natal day suggest hesitation before we label any crater of the Phlegræan fields with the word "extinct." It is granted that in the course of geologic ages volcanic forces do expend themselves. The British Isles, for instance, contain many dead volcanoes, once at least as formidable as any in the world. But the exhaustion has been the work of countless ages, and many generations of mankind will come and go upon this planet before the coasts of Baiæ and Misenum are as safe as those of Cumberland. While speaking of these terrors, I have been halting by the wayside at a point, not far beyond the outskirts of Pozzuoli, where two roads unite, the one going inland beneath the slope of Monte Barbaro, the other following the outline of the curved shore on which Baiæ stands. The inland road is the one which goes to Cumæ, and is entitled to respect, if not to veneration, as being among the oldest of Italian highways, the approach to the most ancient Greek settlement in Italy, mother city of Pozzuoli and of Naples, not to mention the mysterious Palæopolis, whose very existence has been disputed by some scholars. Some say it was more than ten centuries before Christ's birth that the bold Greeks of Euboea came up this coast, where already their kinsmen were known as traders, and having settled first on Ischia moved to the opposite mainland, and built their acropolis upon a crag of trachyte which overhung the sea. Their life was a long warfare. More than once they owed salvation to the aid of their kinsmen from Sicilian cities, yet they made their foundation a mighty power in Italy. With one hand they held back the fierce Samnite mountaineers who coveted their wealth, and gave out with the other more and more freely that noble culture which has had no rival yet. One must wonder why these strangers coming from the south passed by so many gulfs and harbours shaped out of the enduring rock only to choose a site for their new city at the foot of all these craters. It may be that chance had its part in the matter; in some slight indication of wind or wave they may have seen the guidance of a deity. Indeed, an ancient legend says their ships were guided by Apollo, who sent a dove flying over sea to lead them. But again, the fires of the district were sacred in their eyes. The subterranean gods were near at hand, and on the dark shore of Lake Avernus they recognised the path by which Ulysses sought the shades. The mysteries of religion drew them there, and the cave of the Cumæan sibyl became the most venerated shrine in Italy. Lastly, one may perceive that the volcanic tract, full of terrors for the Etruscan or Samnite mountaineer who looked down upon its fires from afar, must have made attack difficult from the land. Greek cities, such as Cumæ, studded the coast of southern Italy. "Magna Græcia" they called the country; and Greek it was, in blood, in art, and language. How powerful and how rich is better understood at Pæstum than it can be now at Cumæ, where, with the single exception of the Arco Felice, there remains no dignity of ruin, nothing but waste, crumbling fragments, half buried in the turf of vineyards. Such shattered scraps of masonry may aid a skilful archæologist to imagine what the city was; but in the path of untrained men they are nothing but a hindrance, and anyone who has already in his mind a picture of the greatness of Euboean Cumæ had better leave it there without attempt to verify its accuracy on the spot. Observations similar to these apply justly to most of the remaining sights in this much-vaunted district. The guides are perfectly untrustworthy. They give high-sounding names to every broken wall, and there is not a burrow in the ground which they cannot connect with some name that has rung round the world. It is absolutely futile to hope to recapture the magic with which Virgil clothed this country. The cave of the Sibyl under the Acropolis of Cumæ was destroyed by the imperial general Narses when he besieged the Goths. The dark, wet passage on the shore of Lake Avernus, to which the name of the Sibyl is given by the guides, is probably part of an old subterranean road, not devoid of interest, but is certainly not worth the discomfort of a visit. The Lake of Avernus has lost its terrors. It is no longer dark and menacing, and anyone may satisfy himself by a cursory inspection that birds by no means shun it now. The truth is that this region compares ill in attractions with that upon the other side of Naples. In days not far distant, when brigands still invested all the roads and byways of the Sorrento peninsula, strangers found upon the Bay of Baiæ almost the only excursion which they could make in safety; and imbued as every traveller was with classical tradition, they still discovered on this shore that fabled beauty which it may once have possessed. There is now little to suggest the aspect of the coast when Roman fashion turned it into the most voluptuous abode of pleasure known in any age, and when the shore was fringed with marble palaces whose immense beauty is certainly not to be imagined by contemplating any one of the fragments that stud the hillside, though it may perhaps be realised in some dim way by anyone who will stand within the atrium of some great house at Pompeii, say the house of Pansa, who will note the splendour of the vista through the colonnaded peristyle, and will then remember that the Pompeiian houses were not famed for beauty, while the palaces of Baiæ were. Baiæ, like Cumæ, is lost beyond recall. Fairyland is shattered into fragments; and the guides who baptise them with ridiculous names know no more than any one of us what it is they say. Really, since the tragedy of that first great outbreak of Vesuvius did, as Goethe said, create more pleasure for posterity than any other which has struck mankind, one is disposed to wish that it had been more widespread. If only the ashes had rained down a trifle harder at Misenum and at Baiæ, what noble Roman buildings might have survived unto this day, conserved by the kind wisdom of the mountain! What matter if more of that generation had been left houseless? It nearly happened, if Pliny's letter is not exaggerated. "The ashes now began to fall on us," he says, of his escape with his mother from the palace at Misenum, "though in no great quantity. I turned my head, and observed behind us a thick smoke which came rolling after us like a torrent. We had scarce stepped out of the path when darkness overspread us, not like the darkness of a cloudy night, nor that when there is no moon, but that of a closed room when all the lights are out. Nothing was to be heard but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the cries of men, some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and only distinguishing each other by their voices.... At length a glimmering light appeared, which we imagined to be rather the forerunner of an approaching burst of flames, as in truth it was, than the return of day. However, the fire fell at some distance from us. Then again we were immersed in thick darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us, which we were obliged every now and then to shake off, otherwise we should have been crushed and buried in the heap...." It is an awful tale. Anyone can see how nearly all this region escaped the fate of Pompeii, and how narrowly the modern world lost a greater joy than that of contemplating the city by the Sarno. [Illustration: CASTLE OF BAIÆ] However, it did not happen so, and there is comparatively little satisfaction in describing all the melancholy scraps of what was marvellously beautiful. I have nothing to say about them which is not said as fully in the guide-books. There is, however, something which more piques my interest in the narrow tongue of land parting the Lucrine Lake from the sea. There is, or was, a causeway here so ancient that even the Greeks, who settled at Cumæ so many centuries before our era, did not know who built it; and being in the dark about the matter, put down the construction to no less a person than the god Hercules, who made it, they declared, for the passage of the oxen which he had taken from Geryon, the monster whom he slew in Gades. It was no small work, even for Hercules. The dam was eight stadia long, nearly a mile, made of large stone slabs laid with such skill that they withstood the sea for many centuries. Who could have been the builders of this dam in days so ancient that even the Greek settlers did not know its origin? Rome was not in those days. There were factories and traders on the coast,--Phoenicians perhaps. But why guess about a question so impossible to solve? The curiosity of the thing is worth noting; for the age of civilisation on these coasts is very great. At this spot beside the Lucrine Lake, where the sea is lapping slowly, almost stealthily, on the one hand, and the diminished waters of the lake lie still and reedy on the other, one memory, more than any other, haunts my mind. It cannot have been far from this very spot, certainly in sight of it, that there stood in old Roman days the villa of the Empress Agrippina, mother of the Emperor Nero, and it was at Baiæ, lying just across the blue curved bay, that he planned her murder, as soon as he discovered that she loved power, like himself, and stood in the way of certain schemes on which he set great store. The fleet which lay at Capo Miseno, the great naval station of those days, was commanded by one Anicetus, a freedman, who, being of an ingenious mechanical turn of mind, devised a ship of a sort likely to prove useful to any tyrant anxious to speed his friends into the nether world without suspicion. It had much the same aspect as other ships when viewed from without; but a careful observer of its inward parts might notice that the usual tight boltings were replaced by movable ones, which could be shot back at will, so that on a given signal the whole ship would fall to pieces. This pretty toy was of course not designed to make long voyages--it was enough if it would reach deep water. Nero was delighted. He saw now how to avoid all scandal. The Empress was at that moment on the sea, homeward bound from Antium, and designed to land at Bauli, which lay near Baiæ on the bay. The ship was prepared, the bolts were shot, and the pretty pinnace lay waiting on the beach at Bauli when the Empress disembarked. And there too was Nero, come from Baiæ on purpose to pay duty to his mother and invite her to spend the Feast of Minerva with him at Baiæ, whither he hoped she would cross over in the boat which he had had the pleasure of fitting up with the splendour which was proper to her rank. Agrippina knew her son, and was suspicious. She would go to Baiæ, but preferred to follow the road in a litter. That night, however, when the festivities at Baiæ were over, her fears vanished. Nero had been affectionate and dutiful. He had assured her of his love. It would be churlish to refuse to enter the boat which he had fitted out for her, and which having been brought over from Bauli now lay waiting for her on the sands. It was a bright night, brilliant with stars. The bay must have looked incomparably peaceful and lovely. On the shore there were crowds of bathers, all the fashionable world of Rome, drawn thither by the presence of the Emperor, and attracted out by the beauty of the night. At such a time and place nothing surely could be planned against her. She went on board with her attendants. The rowers put off from land. They had gone but a little way when the canopy under which Agrippina lay crashed down on her and killed one of her waiting women. A moment's examination showed that it had been weighted with pigs of lead. Almost at the same moment the murderers on board withdrew the bolts. The machinery, however, refused to act. The planks still held together; and the sailors despairing of their bloodmoney, rushed to the side of the ship and tried to capsize it. They succeeded so far as to throw the Empress and her attendants into the sea. Agrippina retained sufficient presence of mind to lie silent on the water, supporting herself as best she could, while the sailors thrashed the sea with oars, hoping thus to make an end of their victim, and one poor girl who thought to save herself by crying out that she was the Empress had her brains beaten out for her pains. At last the shore boats, whose owners could not know that they were interrupting the Emperor's dearest wish, arrived upon the scene, picked up the Empress, and carried her to her villa on this Lucrine lake. It would have been wiser to flee to a greater distance, if indeed there was safety in any Roman territory for the mother of the Emperor when he desired to slay her. That night, as she lay bruised and weak, deserted by her attendants, a band of murderers rushed in, headed by Anicetus, who thus redeemed his credit with his master when his more ingenious scheme had failed. "Strike the womb that bore this monster!" cried the Empress, and so died. "Then," says Merivale, from whose most vivid story this is but an outline, "began the torments which never ceased to gnaw the heart strings of the matricide. Agrippina's spectre flitted before him.... The trumpet heard at her midnight obsequies still blared with ghostly music from the hill of Misenum." CHAPTER III THE BEAUTIES AND TRADITIONS OF THE POSILIPO WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS UPON VIRGIL THE ENCHANTER It was setting towards evening when I turned my back on Baiæ and drove through Pozzuoli along the dusty road which runs beside the sea in the direction of Posilipo. All day I had seen the blunt headland of tufa lying like a cloud on the further side of the blue bay; and from hour to hour as I plodded through the blasted country, my thoughts turned pleasantly to the great rampart which stood solid when all the region further west was shaken like a cornfield by the wind, and beyond which lies the city, with its endless human tragedies and its fatal beauty unimpaired by the possession of many masters. "Bocca baciata non perde ventura...," the scandalous old proverb has a sweet application to the city, and the mouth which has been kissed by conquerors and tyrants is still as fresh and rosy as when first uplifted for the delight of man. I think this angle of the bay more beautiful than Baiæ or Misenum. In Roman times the opposite shore may have excelled it; but one does not know the precise form of the ancient coastline. As I advanced towards the headland, leaving behind the bathing-place of Bagnoli, and passing out on the wide green flats which at that point occupy the valley mouth, the lofty crag of Nisida began to detach itself from the mainland, and a channel of blue sea shining between the two glowed sweetly in the increasing warmth of evening light. The island is a crater, a finely broken mass of volcanic rock and verdure, flecked here with light and there with shadow. One side of the crater lacks half of its rim, so that there is a little port. Down by the edge of the many-coloured water is a pier, where half a dozen boats lie rocking; and from a similar landing-place upon the shingly beach of the mainland a fisherman is hailing some comrade on the island. The answering shout floats back faint and distant through the clear air, and a boat pushes off, sculled slowly by a man standing erect and facing towards the bow, in the ancient fashion of the Mediterranean. At this point I dismiss my carriage, for I have many things to think about, and do not want the company of the chattering, extortionate vetturino. Having seen him go off up the hill, cracking his whip like pistol shots, and urging on his eager pony in the full hope of a fare at the Punta di Posilipo, I stroll on up the long ascent towards the shoulder of the hill, stopping often to watch the gold light grow warmer on the sea, tinging the volcanic crags of Ischia, until my enjoyment of the view is broken by an uninvited companion, who thrusts himself upon me with a reminder that I have reached the opening of the Grotto of Sejanus. I had forgotten all about the grotto, though indeed it was the point for which I should have made, and but for the interruption of the lively little Tuscan who acts as custodian, I might have walked by without going in. I accepted gratefully the voluble assurances that this is indeed the most wonderful and authentic grotto on the Posilipo, far surpassing those twin tunnels through which one goes from Naples to Pozzuoli; and the guide, having caught up a torch of smouldering tow, and vented a few hearty curses on the Neapolitans, who lie, he says, without recollection of eternity, conducted me into a long passage of utter and palpable darkness. "Nè femmena nè tela a lume di cannela," say the Neapolitans--You must not judge either a woman or a weft by candlelight. This is very true, and many a man has suffered from forgetting it. But when it is a case of grottoes, there is no choice; and accordingly I delivered myself over to the chatter of the Tuscan. The lively little man was extolling the superior character of his own countrymen of Tuscany; and when his torch flickered out with no warning, leaving us in sudden blackness in the bowels of the earth, his indignation blazed out fiercely against the worthless knaves who sold such tow in Naples. I paid little heed to him, for the grandeur and the silence of the place appeal to the imagination. I was treading on a smooth and even floor, between walls of tufa which had been chiselled out so straight that whenever I looked back the entrance shone behind me like a star across a vast dark sky. The air was sweet and fresh, filtering through some hidden openings of the rock. The relighted torch flashed now on Roman brickwork, now on arches of massive stone built to increase the strength of the vault, and fit it the better for those great processions of chariots and horsemen which came and went to the villa at the further end, returning from a hunting party with dogs which had wearied out the game on the hills of Astroni, or escorting the gladiators landed at Pozzuoli for some combat in the theatre which now lies so waste and desolate amid the vineyards. How this passage must have rung with shouts and laughter in old Roman days! But now it is as silent as the tomb; and one passes on a full half-mile in darkness, to emerge at length with heated fancy and high memories of Roman splendour, on nothing but a ruinous cottage, a starved vineyard, and a paltry garden-ground of common vegetables! It is not possible, one thinks impatiently, that this trumpery of vines and cabbages can be all there is to see at the further end of a passage so ancient and hewn with such vast labour through the solid rock; and indeed, when one's eyes are used to the sunshine, one perceives that the garden plot lies like a dust heap on the ruins of a splendid palace. Treading across a patch of vegetables, covering I know not what remains of marble portico or colonnade, I peered down through the trails of budding vines into a hollow where some fragments of old masonry project still from the earth, and after much gazing perceived that the sides of the hollow rise in tiers, one bank above another, to the height of seventeen rows. So that here, on this now lonely creek of the Posilipo, in face of Nisida and all the blue reach of the Bay of Baiæ, there was once a theatre, ringing with shouts and applause, and by it all the other buildings of a noble mansion. It is a poor ruin now, stripped of the marbles which once made it splendid. There are vast structures on the slopes and in the sea itself: an Odeon, another building seated like a theatre, and relics innumerable of one of the greatest of all Roman villas, which must have been incomparably lovely. If only one such might have lasted to our day! The long darkness of the grotto, the exit on the hillside, where the ancient splendour is so shattered, combine to create a sense of mystery which one never loses on the Posilipo. The sea frets and chafes about the jagged reefs at the base of the headland, echoing and resounding in caves of vast antiquity, where broken marbles and defaced inscriptions give substance to the tales of treasure which the fishers say lies hidden in them to this hour. The dullest of mankind would be smitten with some touch of fancy on this spot, much more the quick-witted Neapolitans, whose rich imagination has run riot among the relics of a splendid past. The impression of this lonely cliff is characteristic of all the headland. I send away my guide, who can do nothing more for me, and perch myself upon a scrap of ancient wall, whence I can look past the green island of Nisida, full in the warm light of the westering sun, over the wide bay to where the black peak of Ischia, towering into the clear sky, begins to shine as if some goddess had brushed it with liquid gold. There is a cavern in the cliff at no great distance which the fishermen call "La Grotta dei Tuoni" (The Cave of Thunders); I scarcely know why, unless it be because the sea bellows so loudly when it is driven by the storm wind round the vaults and hollows of the rock. The cave is accessible only by boat; and, like many another cleft in the soft tufa of this headland, it is believed to hide immeasurable riches, left there since the days when every cliff bore its white Roman villa, and all the shady caverns were the cool arbours of their pleasure grounds. From the creek of Marechiano, which cleaves the Posilipo in half, up to the very spot on which I sit, there is no break in the succession of the ruins. Ancient cisterns lie upon the beaches, the green tide washes over shattered colonnades, the boatmen peering down through the translucent water as they sink their nets see the light waver round the foundations of old palaces, and the seaweeds stir fantastically on the walls. It is little wonder if no one of them can rid himself of the belief in spirits wandering yet about the wreck of so much splendour, or shake off the fear "Lest the dead should, from their sleep Bursting o'er the starlit deep, Lead a rapid masque of death O'er the waters of his path." As for this cave of the thunders, the story goes that one day certain Englishmen presented themselves before a boatman who was lounging on the quay of Santa Lucia at Naples and demanded whether he would take them on his skiff into the grotto. Pepino had seen the cavern many times, and did not fear it. "Why not?" he said, and the bargain was struck. As they rowed across the crescent bay of the Chiaia, past the Palazzo di Donna Anna, and under the hillside where the whispering pines grow down the high cliff faces, and golden lemons glow in the shade of marble terraces, the Englishmen were very silent; and Pepino, who loved chatter, began to feel oppressed. He did not quite like the zeal with which they sat studying a huge volume; for he knew that great books were of more use to magicians than to honest people, who were quite content with little ones, or better still with none at all. So he looked askance at the English students as he guided his boat to the mouth of the grotto of the thunders, and ran in out of the sunshine to the cool green shades and wavering lights among which the old treasure of the Romans lies concealed. [Illustration: FISHING STAGE, SANTA LUCIA, NAPLES.] The Englishmen rose up, and one of them, taking the book in both hands, began to read aloud. Who can tell what were the words? They were strange and very potent; for as they rolled and echoed round the sea-cave it seemed as if the vaulted roof rose higher, and Pepino, glancing this way and that in terror, saw that the level of the water was sinking. Shelf by shelf the sea sank down the rock, leaving dripping walls of which no living man had ever seen the shape before; and Pepino, keeping the boat steady with his oars, shook with fear as he saw the top of a marble staircase rear itself erect and shiny out of the depths of the ocean. Still the English student rolled out the sonorous words, which rang triumphantly through the cave, and still the water sank stair by stair, till suddenly it paused--the readers voice had stopped, and slowly, steadily the sea began to rise again. The spell was broken. A page was missing from the book! The Englishman in despair clutched at the pages as if he would tear them piecemeal. Instantly the crash of thunder rang through the cave, the sea surged back to its old level, the marble staircase leading to the treasure was engulfed, and the boatman, screaming on the name of the Madonna, was whirled out of the cavern into the light of day again. Close below me is a little reef or island of yellow pozzolano stone, jutting out from the Punta di Coroglio, which is the name of the most westerly cliff of the Posilipo, that through which the tunnel runs. Under the island there is a tiny creek with a beach of yellow sand; the spot is so silent that I can hear the ripple plashing on the beach. That rock is a famous one. It is the "Scoglio di Virgilio," the Rock of Virgil, by all tradition a favourite haunt of the great poet, and the spot in which he practised his enchantments. Petrarch said he did not believe in those enchantments. But then King Robert questioned him about them at a moment when both were riding with a gallant party, and the joy of life was surging high enough to make men doubt all achievements but those of battle or of love. Had Petrarch sat alone watching the sunset bathe the Scoglio di Virgilio with gold, he might have judged the matter differently. At any rate twenty generations of Neapolitans since his day have accepted the beliefs of thirty more who went before them, and set down Virgil as a magician. Why must we be wiser than fifty generations of mankind? To be a wizard is not to be wicked! Virgil's fair fame is in no danger. There was no malignity in any of the spells wrought out on that little headland. Each of them conferred a benefit on the city which the poet loved. One by one the woes of Naples were assuaged by the beneficent enchanter; its flies, its serpents, the fatal tendency of butcher's meat to go bad, exposure to volcanic fires, all were held in check by the power of the enchanter. A stranger visiting Naples ten centuries ago would have found it studded with the ingenious inventions of the wizard. Perhaps the device for bridling the audacity of Vesuvius might be the first to strike him. It was nothing less than a horse of bronze bestridden by an archer, whose notched arrow was ever on the string, its point directed at the summit of the mountain. This menace sufficed to hold the unruly demons of the fire in check, and might do so to this hour were it not that one day a countryman coming into Naples from the Campagna, and looking at the statue for the hundredth time felt bored by seeing the archer had not fired off his arrow yet, and so did it for him. The shaft sped through the air, striking the rim of the crater, which straightway boiled over and spouted fire, and from that day to this no man has found the means of placing another arrow on the string. It is a thousand pities. San Gennaro has taken up the duty now, and stands pointing imperiously with outstretched hand bidding the volcano halt. He had some success too. In 1707, when the fires of the volcano turned night into day, and its smoke converted day into night, San Gennaro was carried in procession as far as the Porta Capuana, and had no sooner come in sight of the mountain than the thunders ceased, the smoke was scattered, the stars appeared, and Naples was at peace. But as a rule the holiness of the saint impresses the demons less than the menace of the arrow, and the mountain goes on burning. As for the bronze fly which the good poet made and set high on one of the city gates, where it banished every other insect from the town, it certainly is not in Naples now. Many people must have wished it were. The story runs that the young Marcellus was intercepted by Virgil one day as he was going fowling, and desired to decide whether he would rather have a bird which would catch all other birds, or a fly which would drive away all flies. Nobody who knows Naples can doubt the answer. Marcellus, it is true, thought fit to consult the Emperor Augustus before replying; but that fact only adds to the weight of his decision. He decided on the fly, and many a man listening in the midnight to the deadly humming outside his mosquito curtains will lament the loss of Virgil's fly. It is an Englishman, one John of Salisbury, who collects these pretty tales for us; and he has another which, as it supplies a reason for an historical fact which must have puzzled many people in the history of Naples, is the better worth recording, and may indeed have the luck to please both clever and stupid people in one moment. The puzzling fact is to discover how on earth it happened that the city which in Middle Ages bore a somewhat evil reputation for surrendering itself light-heartedly at the first summons of any conqueror, yet held such a different repute in earlier days, having remained faithful to the Greek Empire in Constantinople when Amalfi had fallen and Salerno received a stranger garrison, which resisted heroically every attack of Lombard or of Norman, and saw army after army retire baffled from before its walls. Whither had all that stout-heartedness fled in the days when French, Spanish, and German conquerors found no more resistance in the Siren city than in a beautiful woman to whom one man's love is as much as any other's? How came that old glory to sink into shame, to accept slavery and to forget faith? The answer is that in the old days the city was kept by a spell of the enchanter Virgil. Virgil, it seems, musing on this point of rock throughout long moonlight nights, had constructed a palladium. It consisted of a model of the city, inclosed in a glass bottle, and as long as this fragile article remained intact the hosts of besiegers encamped in vain beneath the walls. The Emperor Henry the Sixth was the first who managed to break in. The city fathers rushed to their palladium to discover why for the first time it had failed to protect them. The reason was but too plain. There was a small crack in the glass! Through that crack all the virtue went out of the palladium, and until the great upstirring of heroic hearts which the world owes to France at the close of the eighteenth century, Naples was never credited again with any marked disposition to resist attack or to strike courageously for freedom. I am not sure whether those who know best the inner heart of Naples would claim that the great deeds wrought since then are to be attributed to any new palladium; but, for my part, if spells are to be spoken of, I prefer to hold that the long age of sloth and slavery is that which needs the explanation of black magic, and that neither the loyal Naples of old days nor the free Naples of the present time owes any debt to other sources than its own high spirit and its natural stout heart, which slept for centuries, but are now awake again. The setting sun has dropped so far towards the sea that the tide begins to wash in grey and gold around the yellow cliffs. The bay is covered with dark shades falling from the sky in masses, and a little wind rising from the west ruffles the water constantly. Only the ridge of Ischia yet holds the light, and there it seems as if a river of soft gold flowed along the mountain-top, vivid and pure, turning all the peak of Epomeo to a liquid reflection, impalpable as the sky itself. But the glow fades even as I watch it; and the approach of chilly evening warns me not to loiter on the lonely hillside. I wander down across the hollow, passing near the broken theatre, and so strike a path which climbs up the further hill between high walls and hedges, where it is already almost dark, bringing me out at length on the main road which crosses the headland, just where a row of booths is set to catch the soldi of those Neapolitans who have strayed out here in search of evening freshness. There is a clear, sharp air upon this high ground; and the young moon climbing up the sky sends a faint, silvery light upon the sea. The road winds on as beautifully as a man need wish. On the left hand rises the hill, on the right the ground drops in sharp, swift slopes, cleft with deep ravines where the cliff is sometimes sheer and sometimes passable for men. All these hollows are filled with vegetation of surpassing beauty--here a belt of dark green pines, there a grove of oranges thatched over to protect them from the sun. Golden lemons gleam out of the rich foliage, hanging thick and numberless upon the trees. The bare stems of fig trees are bursting out into their first yellow leaf; and the hedges of red roses and abutilon fill every nook with masses of bright colour unknown except in lands where spring comes with gentle touch and warm, sweet days of sunny weather. Far down amid the depths of this luxuriance of fruit and flowers the sea washes round some creek or curved white beach, and there built out with terraces and balconies of pure white stone are villas which repeat the splendour of those Roman homes over whose ruins they are built and whose altars lie still in the innumerable caverns which pierce the base of the old legendary headland. In the silvery dusk of this spring evening the beauty of these ravines brimming over with fruits and flowers is quite magical. I pause beside a low wall, over which a man may lean breast high, and gaze down through the shadows spreading fast among the trellised paths below. The fading light has robbed the lemons of their colour; but the crimson roses are flaming still against a heavy background of dark firs, and beyond them the path winds out upon a little beach, where the tide breaks at the foot of yellow cliffs, and a boat is rocking at her moorings. Beyond the outline of the wooded cliff the grey sea lies darkening like a steely mirror; and lifting my eyes I can see the spit of rock on which stands the enchanted Castle of the Egg, black and grim as ever, and higher still Vesuvius towering amid the pale sky and the stars, its slowly coiling pillar of dark smoke suffused with a rosy glow, the reflection of the raging furnace hidden in its cone. Already one or two lamps are flashing on the shore. The day is nearly gone, and the beautiful Southern night is come. Many people had wandered up from Naples to enjoy the taste of approaching summer on this height, where surely the scent of roses is more poignant than elsewhere and the outlook over land and sea is of incomparable beauty. As I walked on slowly down the road my ears caught the tremulous shrill melody of a mandolin, and a man's voice near at hand trolled forth the pretty air of "La vera sorrentina." I stopped to listen. The voice was sweet enough, and some passion was in the singer. "Ma la sgrata sorrentina Non ha maje di me pietà!" The music came from a little roadside restaurant, half open to the sky, where a few people sat at tables overlooking the sea. I strolled in, and sat sipping my vino di Posilipo while the mandolin thrummed till the singer grew tired, took his fees, and went off to some other café. The wine is not what it was in Capaccio's days. "Semper Pausilypi vigeat poculum!" cries the jolly topographer, "and may Jupiter himself lead the toasts!" By all means, if he will; but I fear the son of Saturn will not be tempted from Olympus by the contents of the purple beaker set before me at the price of three soldi. "It is pure, it is fragrant, it is delicious," Capaccio goes on, waxing more eloquent with every glass. "In the fiercest heat it is grateful to the stomach, it goeth down easily, it promoteth moisture, it molesteth neither the liver nor the reins, nor doth it even obfuscate the head! Its virtue is not of those that pass away; for whether of this year, last year, or of God knows when, it hath still the scent of flowers, and lyeth sweetly on the tongue." I think Capaccio must have had a vineyard here, and sold his wines by auction. Far beneath me I could hear the washing of the sea, and the moon climbing up the sky scattered a gleam of silver here and there upon the water. Naples stretched darkly round the curving shore, while high upon the ridge the Castle of St. Elmo stood out black and solid against the night sky, with the low priory in front, sword and cowl dominating the city, as ever through her history, whether for good or ill. In dusk or sunshine no man who looks upon this view will need to ask why Virgil loved it, and desired to be buried near the spot whence he had been used to watch it. Not far away upon my left, above the grotto which leads to Pozzuoli, is the tomb traditionally known as his. There are many who believe and some who doubt; but there is a mediæval tale about the matter which is well worth telling. It was commonly reported in the days of Hohenstaufen and Anjou that the bones of Virgil were buried in a castle surrounded by the sea. There is no other fortress to which this could apply than the Castle of the Egg. In the reign of Roger, King of Sicily, a certain scholar--they are always English, in these legends!--who had wandered far in quest of learning, came into the royal presence with a petition. The King, who found him wise and grave, and took pleasure in his conversation, was willing to grant his wish, whatever it might be; whereon the Englishman replied that he would not abuse the royal favour, nor beg for any mere ephemeral pleasure, but would ask a thing which in the eyes of men must seem but small, namely, that he might have the bones of Virgil, wheresoever he might find them in the realm of Sicily. It was even then long since forgotten in what spot precisely the body of the great poet had been laid; and it seemed to the King little likely that a stranger from the north should be able to discover what had remained hidden from the Neapolitans. So he gave consent, and the Englishman set forth for Naples, armed with letters to the Duke, giving him full power to search wherever he would. The citizens themselves had no fear of his success in a quest where they had often failed, and so made no effort to restrain him. The scholar searched and dug, guiding his operations by the power of magic. At last he broke into the centre of a mountain, where not one cleft betrayed the existence of any cavity or tomb. There lay the body of the mighty poet, unchanged and calm as if he slept. Full eleven centuries he had lain silently in a rest unbroken by the long-resounding tread of barbarous armies from the north, flooding and desolating the fair empire which must have seemed to him likely to outlast the world. I wish that some one of those who broke into the sepulchre, and shed the light of day once more upon those features which had slept so long in darkness, had told us with what feelings he looked upon them and saw the very lips that had spoken to Augustus, and the cheek which Horace kissed. I think the men who found themselves in the sudden presence of so much greatness must have stood there with a certain tremor, as those others did who not long afterwards disturbed the bones of Arthur and of Guenevere at Glastonbury, daring to lift and touch the long fair tresses which brought Lancelot to shame. These men who found the tomb of Virgil would have done well if they had sealed it up again and lost the secret, so that the bones might lie unto this hour on the spot where the spirit is so well remembered. But the English scholar had the King's warrant, and claimed at least the books on which the wizard's head was propped. Those the Duke of Naples gave him, but the bones he refused, and had them taken for greater safety to Castel dell'Uovo, where they lay behind an iron grating and were shown to anyone who desired to see them. But if they were at any time disturbed, the air would darken suddenly, high gusts of storm would roar around the battlements of the castle, and the sea beating heavily about the rocks would rage as if demanding vengeance for the insult. Such is the tale told by Gervasius of Tilbury, who has been dead almost half as long as Virgil. It may be true or untrue. I am not fond of climbing up into the judgment seat, or attempting to recognise white-robed truth in the midst of the throng of less worthy, though more amusing, characters which throng Italian legend. Least of all on such a night as this, when the soft wind blowing over the sea from the enchanted Castle of the Egg fills the air with whispering suggestions of old dead things and calls back many a tale of inimitable tragedy wrought out upon the shore of the gulf which lies before me--a furnace in all ages of hot passions and sensuous delights such as leave deep marks upon the memory of man. That most wilful quality is not unlike the echo in the hollow of some overhanging rock. It will repeat the sounds that please it, but no others, while even those it will distort, adding something wild or unearthly to every one, however ordinary. So the memory of the people selects capriciously those circumstances which it cherishes; and even while it hands them on from generation to generation it is ever adding fact to fact with the cunning of him who writes a fairy tale, casting glamour round the sordid details, struggling towards the beautiful or terrible--even not seldom towards the scandalous. A little lower on the slope of the hill, well in sight from the point at which I sit, there is a vast and ruined building on the very margin of the sea. In the dusk light I can clearly see its two huge wings thrust out into the water, and the broken outline of its roof breaking the pale sky. The tide washes round its foundations. The whole mass lies black and silent, except at one point where a restaurant has intruded itself into the shell of a once splendid hall, and lights flicker round the empty windows which were built for the pleasure of a court. Three hundred years ago this palace was begun for the wife of a Spanish viceroy, Donna Anna Carafa. It was never finished, and has been put to a number of degrading uses, being at one time a quarantine station, at another a stable for the horses of the tramway, while a few fishermen have always housed their wives and children in its old ruined chambers, undeterred by the tales which associate the ruin with the spirit of the Queen Giovanna. Queen Giovanna is so great a personage in Naples that it is worth while to consider her particularly. There are few spots within thirty miles of Naples where one does not hear of her too amorous life and her tragic death. I doubt if there are half a dozen guides or vetturini in all the city who, if asked the name of this great building, will not answer that it is "Il Palazzo della Regina Giovanna," and on being further questioned will not tell a doleful story of how she was strangled in one of the deserted chambers. The stranger, ignorant of Naples, will perhaps set down this fact, pleased to discover a trace of history yet lingering in the recollection of the people, and will cherish it carefully until he is told the same tale at Castel Capuano, on the other side of the city, with the addition of certain particulars which, by our narrow northern way of thinking, are damaging to Queen Giovanna's character. For instance, it is said of her that she was in those early days so convinced a democrat as to choose her lovers freely from among the sovereign people. They were doubtless gratified by her choice; but the pleasure faded when they discovered in due course of time that each favourite in turn, after the fickle Queen grew tired of him, was expected or compelled to leap from the top of a high tower, thus carrying all his knowledge of the secret scandals of a court by a short cut into the next world. A cruel Queen, it is true; but how prudent! Any one of us might leave a marvellous sweet memory of himself in the world, if only he could stop the mouths of--But that has nothing to do with Queen Giovanna. This sweet memory, however, this fruit of prudence, is precisely what the Queen has attained in Naples and in all the surrounding country. I have questioned many peasants who spoke to me about her, and received the invariable answer that she was a good Queen, a very good Queen--in fact, of the best. Now history, listening to this declaration, sighs and shakes her head despairingly. There were two queens named Giovanna--leaving out several others who, for various reasons, do not come into the reckoning. The first was certainly a better woman than the second, but she is credibly believed to have begun her reign when quite a girl by murdering her first husband, after which she departed in various ways from the ideal of Sunday-schools. The second was an atrocious woman, concerning whose ways of life it is better to say as little as possible. The first was strangled, though not in Naples, or its neighbourhood, but at the Castle of Muro, far down in Apulia. The second had innumerable lovers, and was, perhaps, one of the worst women ever born. The Queen Giovanna of tradition seems to be a blend of these two sovereigns, laden with the infirmities of both, and loved the more for the burden of the scandals which she bears. It is a charming trait, this disposition of poor humanity to glorify dead sinners! Conscious of their own imperfections, mindful of the condescension of a queen who steps down to the moral level of her people, the Neapolitans welcome her with outstretched hands, and love her for her peccadilloes. Legend confers a pleasanter immortality than history, earned less painfully, bestowed more charitably, and quite as durable. CHAPTER IV THE RIVIERA DI CHIAIA AND SOME STRANGE THINGS WHICH OCCURRED THERE In bright sunshine I came down the last slopes of the Posilipo, wending towards the Riviera di Chiaia. The bay sparkled with innumerable colours; the hills lay in morning shadow; Vesuvius was dark and sullen, and the twin peaks of Capri rested on the horizon like the softest cloud. The sun fell very sweetly among the oranges in the villa gardens, lighting up their dark and glossy leaves with quick-changing gleams which moved and went as lightly as if reflected from the restless waters of the bay. Out on the sea there was a swarm of fishing boats, each provided with a rod of monstrous length; while as I reached the level of the sea, and entered on the winding road that goes to Naples, I found myself skirting a long, narrow beach, of which the reeking odours proclaimed it to be a landing-place of fishers. There, under the shadow of the towering cliff, boats were hauled up, nets were drying, fish frails were piled in heaps, and close to a small stone pier which jutted out into the water a couple of fishing-wives were scolding each other much in the same way as two dames of Brixham or of Newlyn, while a small urchin prone upon the sand, watched the encounter of wits with eager curiosity to know whether more was to come of it or not. [Illustration: STRADA DI CHIAIA, NAPLES.] More did not come of it. The strife sank into silence, and as I paced along the margin of the little beach, glancing now at the wide curve of the bay, now at the dark fortress of the enchanted Castle of the Egg upon its further horn, I found myself in a strange medley of ancient thoughts and modern ones, the old world wrestling with the new, tales of the kings of Aragon mingling with the cries of cabmen and the whirring noises of the tramways. This little beach by which I stand is all that is now left of the Marina di Chiaia, which once ran round the bay up to the rocks and caverns of the Chiatamone, where the Egg Castle juts out into the sea. It was all a sandy foreshore, with boats hauled up and nets set out to dry, just as one may see them on this scrap which still remains. It was renowned as a place of ineffable odours. Indeed, an ancient writer, seeking a simile for a certain very evil smell, could think of none more striking than "that which one smells on the Marina di Chiaia in the evening." It is to be gathered that the women were in large measure responsible for this--as for most other things that go wrong in Naples. "Tutt'e' peccate murtali so' femmene," says the proverb--All the mortal sins are feminine; and if those, why not the smells also? But it is not to be supposed that the women of the Chiaia were the less attractive. Far from that. We have the word of the poet del Tufo that they were so gracious and charming that even a dead man would not remain insensible to the desire of loving them. What can have become of these houris? I did much desire to see them, but I searched in vain. I found none but heavy, wide-mouthed women, owning no charm but dirt, and no attractions save a raucous tongue. Perhaps the disappearance of the smells involved the loss of the beauty also. If so, another grudge is to be cherished against the sanitary reformers, who so often in the history of mankind have proved that they know not what they do. But I was about to speak of King Alfonso of Aragon, a monarch whose story can be forgotten by no one who has given himself the pleasure of reading the superb work in which Guicciardini has told the story of his times, a tale of greatness and of woe immeasurable, having in itself every element of tragedy, with a human interest which throbs even painfully from page to page. Macaulay, by giving currency to a stupid tale about a galley slave who chose the hulks rather than the history, has contrived to rob many of us of a pleasure far greater than can be derived from the antitheses in which he himself delights; and has spread abroad the impression that this prince among historians, this dignified and simple writer, this unsurpassed judge of men whom he himself in a wiser moment compared to Tacitus, was dull! It is but one more injustice done by Macaulay's hasty fancy, serving well to prove what mischief may be wrought by a man who cannot deny himself the pleasure of a quirk until he has reflected what injury it may do to another's reputation. Alfonso of Aragon was King of Naples when the French, led by their King Charles the Eighth, were advancing through Italy to the attack of Naples. The old title of the House of Anjou which reigned in Naples for near two centuries, was in the French judgment not extinct; and Charles, called into Italy by Ludovic the Moor, Duke of Milan, and one of the greatest scoundrels of all ages, was pressing on through the peninsula faster and with more success than either his friends wished or his enemies had feared. One by one the obstacles which were to have detained him in northern Italy crumbled at his approach. Florence was betrayed by Piero di Medici; the Neapolitan armies in the Romagna were driven back; the winter was mild, offering no obstacle to campaigning; the Pope was overawed; and at length Alfonso, seeing the enemy victorious everywhere, and now almost at his gates, fell into a strange state of nerves. The first warrior of his age broke down like a panic-stricken girl. The strong, proud King fell a prey to fear. He could not sleep, for the night was full of haunting terrors, and out of the dark there came to visit him the spectres of men whom he had slain by treachery, each one seeming to rejoice at the vengeance of which Heaven had made the French King the instrument. Yet Alfonso had large and well-trained armies at his command, and the passes of the kingdom were easily defended. The French were no nearer than at Rome; and anyone who has travelled between the Eternal City and Naples must see how easily even in our own days a hostile army could be held among the mountains. Had there been a resolute defence, many a month might yet have passed before a single Frenchman reached the Siren city. But Alfonso could give no orders; and his terrors were completed by a vision which appeared to one of his courtiers in a dream repeated on three successive nights. It was the spirit of the old King Ferdinand which appeared to the affrighted Jacopo, grave and dignified as when all trembled before him in his life, and commanded, first in gentle words and afterwards with terrifying threats, that he should go forthwith to King Alfonso, telling him that it was vain to hope to stem the French invasion; that fate had declared their house was to be troubled with infinite calamities, and at length to be stamped out in punishment for the many deeds of enormous cruelty which the two had committed, but above all for that one wrought, at the persuasion of Alfonso, in the Church of San Lionardo in the Chiaia when he was returning home from Pozzuoli. The spirit gave no details of this crime. There was no need. The mere reference to it completed Alfonso's overthrow. Whatever the secret may have been, it scored the King's heart with recollections which he could not face when conjured up in this strange and awful manner. There was no longer any resource for him. His life was broken once for all, and hastily abdicating his kingdom in favour of his son Ferdinand, whose clean youth was unstained by any crimes, he carried his remorse and all his sinful memories to a monastery in Sicily, where he died, perhaps in peace. No man who reads this tale can refrain from wondering where was this Church of San Lionardo on the Chiaia, and what it was that King Alfonso did there. The first question is easier than the last to answer, yet there are some materials for satisfying curiosity in regard to both. [Illustration: NAPLES--PORTA MERCANTILE] It is useless to seek for the Church of San Lionardo now. It was swept away when the fine roadway was made which skirts the whole sea-front from the Piazza di Vittoria to the Torretta. But in old days it must have been a rarely picturesque addition to the beauty of the bay. It stood upon a little island rock, jutting out into the sea about the middle of the curve, near the spot where the aquarium now stands. It was connected with the land by a low causeway, not unlike that by which the Castle of the Egg is now approached; and it was a place of peculiar interest and sanctity, apart from its conspicuous and beautiful position, because from the days of its first foundation it had claimed a special power of protection over those who were tormented by the fear of shipwreck or captivity, both common cases in the lives of the dwellers on a shore haunted by pirates and often vexed by storms. The foundation was due to the piety of a Castilian gentleman, Lionardo d'Oria, who, being in peril of wreck so long ago as the year 1028, vowed a church in honour of his patron saint upon the spot, wherever it might be, at which he came safely to land. The waves drove him ashore upon this beach, midway between Virgil's Tomb and the enchanted Castle of the Egg; and here his church stood for seven hundred years and more upon its rocky islet--a refuge and a shrine for all such as went in peril by land or sea. Naturally enough, the thoughts of Neapolitans turned easily in days of trouble to the saint whose special care it was to extricate them. Many a fugitive slipped out of Naples in the dark and sped furtively along the sandy beach to the island church, whence, as he knew perfectly, he could embark on board a fishing-boat with far better hope of getting clear away than if he attempted to escape from Naples. Thus at all moments of disturbance in the city the chance was good that important persons were in hiding in the Church of San Lionardo waiting the favourable moment of escape. King Alfonso must have known this perfectly. One may even surmise that his journey to Pozzuoli was undertaken with the object of tempting out rebellious barons and their followers from the city, where they might be difficult to find, into this solitary spot, where he could scarcely miss them. If so, he doubtless gloated over the first sight of the island church as he came riding down from the Posilipo and out upon the beach towards it, knowing that the trap was closed and the game his own. Alfonso was a man who never knew mercy. Who the fugitives were whom he found hidden in the church, or in what manner they met their death, is, so far as I know, recorded nowhere. But this we know, that it was no ordinary death, no mere strangling or beheading of rebellious subjects that the King sanctioned and perhaps watched in this lonely church which was built as a refuge for troubled men. Of such deeds there were so many scored up to the account of both kings that the spirit of the elder could hardly have reproached his son with any one of them. What was done in the Church of San Lionardo was something passing the common cruelty of even Spaniards in those ages, and it is perhaps a merciful thing that oblivion has descended on the details. I shall return again to King Alfonso and his family, for the city is full of memories of them, and in the vaults of the Castel Nuovo there are things once animate which throw a terrible light upon the practices of the House of Aragon. But for the time this may be enough of horrors; and I turn with pleasure to the long sea-front against which the tide is breaking fresh and pleasantly, surging white and foaming over the black rocks which skirt the foot of the sea-wall. The wind comes freshly out of the east. Capri is growing into a wonderful clearness. Even the little town upon the saddle of the island begins to glow white and sparkling, and the limestone precipices show their clefts and shadows in the increasing light. The soft wind blows in little sunny gusts, which shake the blossoms of wistaria on the house-fronts, mingling the salt and fishy odours of the beach with the scent of flowers in the villa gardens. There is scarce a sign of cloud in the warm sky, and all the crescent bay between me and the city takes colours which are perpetually changing into deeper tints of liquid blue and rare soft green, with flashes here and there of brown, and exquisite reflections which are but half seen before they yield to others no less beautiful. The long white sea-wall gleams like the setting of a gem, and the warm air trembles slightly in the distance, so that the Castle of the Egg looks as if it were indeed enchanted, and might be near the doom predicted for it when its frail foundations shall be broken. I had meant to spend an hour this morning in the Church of Sannazzaro, on the slope of the hill, at no great distance from this spot. He who does not see churches betimes in Naples may chance to miss them altogether, and will waste much temper during the hot afternoon in hammering on barred doors with vain effort to rouse sleepy sacristans. Heaven knows I am not indifferent to church architecture, and had the morning been less beautiful I should certainly have described learnedly enough, the building preserving the memory of the quaint and artificial poet whom Bembo, as frigid and unnatural as himself, declared to be next to Virgil in fame, as he was also next in sepulture. I often wonder whether Bembo really meant anything at all by this judgment, except an elegant turn of verse. If he did--But I am straying away from the lights and shadows of this magic morning, which are far more delightful than the arcadian rhapsodies of Sannazzaro and of Bembo. Let me put them both aside. Or stay, one observation of the former comes into mind. He said the Mergellina was "Un pezzo di cielo caduto in terra"--a scrap of heaven fallen down on earth. He had blood in him, then, this worshipper of nymphs and classicism; let us go and see his Mergellina. It will not take us far from the sea-front, to which it once lay open, in the days when there were no grand hotels nor ugly boarding-houses blocking out the sweet colours and the clean air of the sea. As I turn inland, my eye is caught by a tablet on a house-front to the left, which has a melancholy interest for all Englishmen:-- "IN QUESTA CASA NACQUE FRANCESCO CARACCIOLI AMMIRAGLIO IL 18 GUIGNO 1752 STRANGOLATO AL 29 GUIGNO 1799" "Strangolato"--ay, hung at Nelson's yardarm, while his flagship lay off Naples, and sunk afterwards in the sea, whence his naked body was washed up on shore. It is a tragic tale; but to use it as an imputation on Nelson's honour is unjust. Caraccioli was a rebel, and paid the penalty of unsuccessful revolution. He was brave and unfortunate, he resisted manfully an evil government; but he was not unfairly slain. In a few yards further the whole charming length of Sannazzaro's bit of heaven lies spread out before me. A wide, straight street, a paradise of yellow stucco, stained and peeling off, a wilderness of sordid shops and dirty children running wild, a solitary tramcar spinning on its way to Naples, a creaking cart with vegetables, a huckster bawling fish--I have not patience to catalogue the delights of the Mergellina of to-day, but turn my back on them and flee to the sea-front again, where I can look out on what is still unspoiled, because man has no dominion over it. [Illustration: BOATS AT THE MERGELLINA--NAPLES] A short stroll towards the city within reach of the lapping waves restored my temper, and I remembered that as I fled from the Mergellina I saw over my shoulder a halting-place for tramcars, well known to all who visit Naples by the name of the "Torretta." I hardly know how many of those visitors have asked themselves what this Torretta was, to which they have so often paid their fares of twenty-five centimes, or have connected it in memory with the other towers of which they hear upon the further side of Naples. But since Naples is a seaborn city, and a wealthy city by the shore of ocean attracts pirates as naturally as flies flock to honey, it may be as well to explain why the Torretta was built. The tale goes back as far as the days of Don Fernando Afan de Rivera, Duca d'Alcala, who did Naples the honour of condescending to govern it as Viceroy to His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain from the year 1629 to 1631. He was an old and gouty viceroy, but not lacking in energy or courage. Those were times in which infinite numbers of Turkish pirates hovered round the coasts of Italy; and week by week the warning cannon roared out from Ischia, and the heavy toll of the alarm bells rolled along the shore from Campanella and Castellammare to the harbours beneath Vesuvius, waking all the fishermen to watchfulness and rousing the guards within the city walls. "All'arme! all'arme! la Campana sona Li Turche so' arrivati a la marina!" The terror-stricken refrain is still on the lips of the peasants in the coasts which were harried by Dragut and Ucchiali. One night a band of these bold corsairs struck suddenly in the darkness, and landed on the western end of the Chiaia, well outside the limits of the city. There were among their numbers certain renegades of Naples, and using the local knowledge of these scoundrels, they had conceived the design of capturing the Marchesa del Vasto, whose palace stood in this somewhat unprotected region, and whom they intended to surprise in her sleep. So rich a prisoner would have brought them a vast ransom; but the scheme turned out disappointing. The Marchesa had gone to take the waters, over the hills at Agnano, whither greedy Turks could not pursue her. Nothing remained but to bag as many people of inferior consequence as time permitted; and the renegades, turning to their advantage the alarm which was already spreading among the inhabitants, rushed about knocking at every door and imploring the people in anguished tones to come out at once and save themselves from the Turks, who were landing at that moment. Some poor frightened souls were simple enough to accept this invitation, and were made prisoners for their pains the moment they crossed the threshold. Others, more wisely, suspecting the trick, made rude replies, and barred their doors and shutters, knowing that at dawn, if not before, help must surely come from the neighbouring city. [Illustration: NAPLES--GRADONI DI CHIAIA.] They were not mistaken in their faith. Naples was astir, and the guards were mustering by torchlight in the streets. The Duca d'Alcala was at the Palazzo Stigliano, near the Porta di Chiaia. Old and gouty as he was, he had set himself at the head of his men, the city gate was flung open, and in the grey light of morning the Turks saw a considerable force advancing on them. They did not stay to fight, but pushed off their ships, carrying with them twenty-four prisoners, whom next day they signified that they were willing to ransom. Accordingly parleys were held upon the Island of Nisida; the Viceroy himself paid part of the sum demanded, while the rest was contributed by the Society for the Redemption of Captives, a useful public institution whose income was heavily drawn upon in those days. Probably neither one nor the other was entirely pleased at having to pay out a large sum for the redemption of people living almost under the walls of the city. It was to guard against such mishaps in future that the Torretta was built, and garrisoned as strongly as its size permitted. What old tales these seem, and how changed is all the aspect of this bay! San Lionardo gone as completely as the shadow of a drifting cloud! The Torretta degraded to a halting-place of tramcars! The Mergellina stripped of all that made the poet Sannazzaro love it! Only on the sea-front the same beauty of heavenly blue still shimmers on the waters, breaking into bubbles of pure gold where the soft tide washes up amid the rocks. The fishing boats slip to and fro under their large three-cornered sails. There is more wind out there upon the bay; it strikes in sharp puffs on the bellying canvas, and the light craft heel towards the land. One of them has put in beside the stairs not far from where I am loitering. The bottom of his boat is alive with silvery fish; and on the cool stones of the landing-place, just awash with clear green water, stand the barelegged fishermen, stooping over the still living fish, cleansing their burnished scales from the soil of the dirty skiff, laughing and chattering like children, as they are. Suddenly one of them snatches at a little object which the others had not noticed, and holds it up to me in gleeful expectation of a few soldi. "Cavallo di mare!" A tiny sea-horse, already stiff and rigid, a clammy and uncomfortable curiosity. My good man, if I desire to look at sea-horses I have but to cross the road to the aquarium, where I can watch them in the grace and wonder of their life and shall not be asked to cumber myself with their dead bodies. Salvatore shrugs his shoulders. If I am mad enough to miss this chance, it is my own affair; the Madonna will scarce send me another. In the midst of the diatribe I stroll across to the aquarium. Rarely, if ever, have I passed by this storehouse of great marvels without regretting it, for indeed it has no equal in the world. Tanks of fish are kept in many cities; the only aquarium is at Naples. There alone can one stand and watch the actual stress and movement of the life which passes in the sea, that animal life of myriad shapes and colours which is so like the plants and which while rooted to a rock, and spreading long translucent tendrils like a frond of seaweed, will yet curl and uncurl, swaying this way and that in search of food, or in the effort to escape some enemy it fears. For the depths of the sea are full of enemies, and every sense of those which dwell beneath it is alert. There one may see the tube-dwelling worms, thrust out from the mouth of their tall cylinders like a feathery tuft of tendrils, a revolving fan, which spins and spins until some sea-horse floating up erect and graceful comes too close, and instantly the fan closes, the tendrils disappear and lie hidden till the danger has gone by. Far along the rock clefts, high and low throughout the pools, there is a perpetual watchfulness and motion, a constant stir and trembling; and the provision which the lowest animal possesses for the protection of its life is in quick and momentary use, laying open such a revelation of the infinite resources of nature as itself makes this cool chamber one of the most interesting places in the world. But if a man go there for beauty only, in what profusion he will find it! The green depths of the tanks are all aglow with soft rich colour. The sea beneath the cliffs at Vico is not more blue on the softest day in spring than the fish which glide by among these shadows; nor are the lights seen from Castellammare when the sun drops down behind Ischia and the rosy flushes spread along the coast, more exquisite than the soft pink scales which glance through the arches of the rocks. Turquoise and pearl, emerald and jacinth, the gleams caught from the hidden sun above reflect the hues of every gem. The strange, dense vegetation, the quick flash of moving gold and purple, reveal a world of marvellous rich beauty; and if it be indeed the case that those bold divers of past days who dared to plunge out of the bright sun into the dusk and dimness of the ocean depths saw there the orange sponges, the waving forests of crimson weed, and all the myriad colours of the moving fishes glinting through them, it is no wonder that they came back into the world of men spreading tales of countless jewels, and unnumbered treasures, which lie buried in the caves and grottoes of the sea. Naples is alive with stories of this sort; and not Naples only, but all Sicily and southern Italy share the tales of the great diver, Nicolò Pesce, who is sometimes a Sicilian and sometimes a dweller on the mainland, but is claimed by Naples with good reason, as I shall show presently. The mere sight of things so like those which Nicolò must have seen calls up all the rare stories told of him; and I go up into the Villa Garden, which skirts the long sea-front, and having found a seat beneath a shady palm tree, whence I can watch the blue sea lying motionless around the dark battlements of Castel dell'Uovo, while the wind makes light noises in the feathery boughs above me, I fall to thinking of the diver who, at the bidding of the king, searched the caverns underneath the castle, which no man has ever found but he, and came back with his arms full of jewels. Any child in Naples knows that heaps of gems are lying in those caverns still. Who was Nicolò Pesce? Ah! what is the use of asking such questions about a myth? He was once, like all of us, a thing which crept about the earth--it matters little when, _nei tempi antichi_! But now he is a butterfly fluttering in the world of romance, a theme for poets, and cherished in the heart of children. If you must know more about his actual existence, catch a child and give him a few soldi to escort you to the foot of the Vico Mezzocannone, away on the further side of the city, where the lanes drop steeply to the harbour. There, built into the front of a house, you will see an ancient stone, on which is carved the figure of a shaggy man grasping a knife in his right hand, while his left is clenched in the air. That is Nicolò Pesce, so called because he was at home in the water as a fish is; and the knife is that which he used to cut himself out from the bellies of the fish when he had done the long swift journeys which he was wont to make in the manner of which no other man had experience but Jonah. You may get much more than this from the child, though confidence is hard to gain, and soldi will not always buy it. One day the King bade Nicolò find out what the bottom of the sea is like. The diver plunged, and when he came up gasping he said he had seen gardens of coral and large spaces of ribbed sand strewn with precious stones, and piled here and there with heaps of treasure, mouldering weapons, the ribs of sunken ships and the whitening skeletons of drowned mariners. I well believe it! Ave Maria, Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, be gracious to poor sailors in their peril! But another time the King bade Nicolò dive down and find out how Sicily floated on the sea, and the man brought up a fearful tale. For he said that groping to and fro in the dim abysses he saw that Sicily had rested on three pillars, whereof one had fallen, one was split and like to fall, and one only stood erect and sound! The years have gone by in many hundreds since that plunge; but no man knows whether the shattered pillar is erect. Now the King desired to be sure that Nicolò did actually reach the bottom of the sea, and accordingly took him to the summit of a rock where the water was deepest, and there, surrounded by his courtiers, hurled a gold cup far out from the shore. The goblet flashed and sank, and the King bade Nicolò dive and bring it back. The diver plunged, and the King waited, watching long before the surface of the sea was broken. At last Nicolò rose, brandishing the cup as he swam, and when he had reached shore and won his breath again he cried, "Oh, King, if I had known what I should see, neither this cup nor half your kingdom would have tempted me to dive." "What did you see?" the King demanded, and the diver answered that he found on the floor of the ocean four impenetrable things. First the great rush of a river which streams out of the bowels of the earth, sweeping all things away before the might of its resistless current; and next a labyrinth of rocks, whose crags overhung the winding ways between them. Then he was beaten hither and thither by the flux and reflux of the waters out of the lowest parts of ocean; and lastly, he dared not pass the monsters which stretched out long tentacles as if to clutch him and draw him into the caverns of the rocks. So he groped and wandered in mortal fear, till at last he saw the gleam of gold upon a shelf of rock and grasped the cup and came up into the world again. Now the King pondered long upon this story, and then taking the cup flung it into the sea once more, and bade Nicolò dive again. The fellow begged hard that he might not go, but the King was ruthless, and the waters closed over the diver. The day waned, the night came on, and still the King waited on the crag beside the sea. But Nicolò Pesce the diver was never seen again. Many a child has thrilled over this story as told in Schiller's verse,--"Wer wagt es, Rittersman oder Knapp...." You ask--What is the truth of these old stories? I answer that they have neither truth nor falsity, and that is enough for most of us in this dull world, of which so much has to be purged away before the beauty can appear. The flower-laden boughs in this Villa garden go on rustling in the sunny wind; the Judas trees are gay with purple blossoms, and from the long, straight avenue, where white marble statues gleam in the cool shades, the cries and laughter of the children ring out merrily. Tell a child these tales and he will doubt nothing, reason over nothing, but accept the beauty and talk of it with quickened breath and glowing cheeks. That is the wisdom of the babes. Let us be content to copy it. CHAPTER V THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE EGG AND THE SUCCESSION OF THE KINGS WHO HELD IT In Naples one is never very far from history, and when I arose from my pleasant seat beneath the palm tree, plodding on down the long and beautiful avenue of the Villa garden I came out at no great distance on the sunny Piazza della Vittoria--a name which, I suspect, connects itself in the fancy of many visitors with some of the wild triumphs of Garibaldi. But the piazza has an older history than that. It commemorates the sea battle of Lepanto, in which Don John of Austria, the youthful son of the great Emperor Charles the Fifth and of Barbara Blomberg, washerwoman of Ratisbon, led the united fleets of Venice, Spain, and Rome into the Gulf of Lepanto as the Turks were coming out and administered a drubbing under which the throne of the Caliph rocked and tottered, all so long ago as the year 1576. Naples had the best of reasons, as I have said already, for rejoicing over any event which reduced the sea power of the Turks, and I do not doubt that the child of Kaiser and of washerwoman had an intoxicating triumph on this spot which has so long forgotten him. At this point I hesitate, as the ass did between two bundles, a dilemma often thrust on one in Naples. For if I turn towards my left and mount the hill, I reach the Piazza dei Martiri and the pleasant strangers' quarter. But since my aim is not to describe things known easily to all who visit Naples, but rather to talk at large of what the guide-books do not mention, I take the other way and move out on the sea-front again, just where the Via Partenope, a new road, runs towards the ancient castle at the point. As I approach the centre of this ancient city, scene of so many bitter conflicts, it becomes the more needful to select those epochs which are most worthy to be remembered, to let all the ghosts of great names flutter by except a few, and those the few whose memories rise oftenest. The choice is easy. All the deepest tragedy of Naples closes round the fall of the House of Hohenstaufen and the fall of that of Aragon. I must explain briefly how these houses held the throne of Naples and of Sicily. The Normans founded that kingdom in the year 1130. They won it by conquest from Lombards and from Saracens; and they placed their capital at Palermo, where their rule on the whole was just and splendid, and their throne gained lustre from Arab art and Arab learning, so that those were happy days for Italy and Sicily, held by strong sovereigns who kept in check all dangers from without. But even in the good times the seed of trouble was sprouting fast; for the first Normans, superstitious in their piety, and anxious to obtain a legal title to the lands their swords had won, accepted the feudal lordship of the Pope; and thus originated the papal claim to alter the succession of the realm at will. The male line of the Normans failed. Constance, the heiress of the house, carried the throne to the Emperor Henry VI., son of the great Barbarossa, and as resolved as he to turn into realities the shadowy claims of the Emperors to the overlordship of all Italy. But the Popes already claimed the universal spiritual dominion, as the Emperors claimed the temporal; and since in the rough-thinking minds of men there was but little comprehension of the theoretical distinction between the dominions of spirit and of matter, it happened often that even in the understanding of Pope and Kaiser themselves the difference was lost, and the two claims worked out to rivalry and the clash of interests which wrought much bloodshed. There was not room in Italy for two universal rulers, both holding of God, even though one ruled spiritual things and the other temporal. The theory was clear, but who could interpret the practice on all occasions? Every Pope was greedy for temporalities; and no Kaiser, unless wholly occupied in taming rebellious barons beyond the Alps, could refrain from meddling with spiritual affairs. Thus arose two parties throughout Italy, and all the land was cleft with the feuds of Guelf and Ghibelline, the former holding to the Pope, the latter dreaming, as Dante did, of the days when the Emperor should descend from the Alps again brandishing the sword of judgment, and purge away the foulness from the lovely cities which stood oppressed and mourning. Day and night, in the fancy of the great Florentine, Rome lay weeping, widowed and alone, calling constantly, "Cesare mio, why hast thou deserted me?" More often than not the Emperors did not come, and the Pope grew ever stronger. But when the successor of St. Peter saw his great rival established by natural inheritance in the territory which was not only the fairest of all Italy, but also the one over which he claimed feudal rights, it was certain that there could be no peace; and the conflict might have broken out at once had not the Emperor died and his widow granted the Church great power over her young son, whom the Pope might naturally hope to mould into what he would. But the lad grew up strong and self-reliant, a noble and a splendid monarch, worthy of the fame which clings to this day about the name of the Emperor Frederick the Second. Alone of all the line of Western Emperors this one lived by choice in Italy. He loved the blue sea and the purple mountains which guard the land of Sicily. His heart was in the white coast towns of Apulia and the ranges of long low hills which look towards the Adriatic over the flat plains of Foggia, where the hawks wheel screaming in the clear air and the great mountain shrine of Monte Gargano towers blue and dim above the heel of Italy. He loved the Arab art and learning. He was no mean poet--a troubadour, moreover; and withal a just and upright ruler, with aims far greater than those of the age in which he lived, a monarch born for the happiness of nations, had only the Pope been able to bate a little of his pride and tolerate the rival at his gates. But those were days in which the Popes would endure no compromise; and from the hour in which he entered man's estate to that in which he laid down his weary life in an Apulian castle, Frederick was in continual warfare with the Church. Had he lived, who knows how that struggle might have ended, or by what devices the prince who was Emperor as well as King, and had the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire at his back, might have met the dangers gathering round his kingdom? For the Pope was negotiating with other princes, offering them the inheritance of Naples if they would but turn the Hohenstaufen out; and at length, after an English prince had refused the enterprise, Charles of Anjou took it up, brother of St. Louis, and a man accounted the first warrior of his age. By this time the kingdom of the Two Sicilies had passed to Manfred, the favourite child of Frederick the Second, though born of an unlawful union. There was a child in Germany of lawful blood, one Conradin; but he was still playing with his mother, and of no age to stem the troubles of the kingdom. Moreover, he was reported dead, and Manfred seized the throne with the goodwill of the people, who loved him well, and keep his memory unto this day; for he was handsome and gallant, "Bello e biondo" the Apulians call him still, a king whom a man might follow and a woman love, and, but for the Pope and his restless enmity, Manfred also, like his father, might have made the happiness of a whole people. But Charles of Anjou descended suddenly and met Manfred in battle outside Benevento. It was the 26th of February, in the year 1266. Manfred, watching the battle from a hillock, saw his troops waver; and suspecting treachery, which was indeed abroad that day, he rushed into the thickest of the fight, and was slain by an unknown hand as he strove to rally his Apulians. That day there fell before the French spears not only a noble king, but the peace and happiness of southern Italy. Charles of Anjou was a grim and ruthless tyrant, whose conceptions of mercy and justice were those of a hawk hovering above a hen-coop. He denied burial to the body of his enemy, and caused it to be flung naked on the banks of the river, where every soldier as he passed cast a stone at it. He seized Manfred's luckless queen, Helena, and kept her prisoner with her children until death released them. He overthrew good laws and set up bad ones. He sought to stamp out loyalty to the old kings by exile and the sword. In Sicily he wrought unutterable woe, such as in the end turned the blood of every islander to fire and his heart to stone, and produced a massacre from which no Frenchman escaped. All the world knows that great act of retribution by the name of the Sicilian Vespers. But in the meantime Conradin had grown up to tall boyhood, and his heart was already brave enough to rage when he saw his kingdom in the hands of a cruel conqueror, and his own subjects slain and banished because they loved his house. His mother wept, but the boy did what any brave boy of kingly blood would do. I will tell the tale of that great tragedy later, when I reach the square outside the Carmine where the last scene was played out, and the boy-king lost the game, but carried all the honours with him from the world, leaving eternal infamy for a heritage to the foe who slew him. So Charles of Anjou possessed the kingdom. But it brought no happiness to him or to his race. His own days were tortured by the loss of Sicily, and every one of those who followed him reigned uneasily. Even his grandson Robert, called "The Wise," is suspected of having won the throne by murder. Robert's granddaughter, Queen Giovanna, whose sweet memory we found on the slopes of the Posilipo, was privy to the murder of her husband, and was herself smothered with a pillow. The other Joanna, who followed her, was the most profligate woman of her age, and in her ended, meanly and sordidly, the line of Anjou sovereigns. [Illustration: NAPLES] Then came the House of Aragon, which had reigned in Sicily ever since the Vespers, and now expelled the last scion of Anjou and established a kingdom which seemed likely to be stable. But the claims of the royal house of France were only dormant; and before the end of the century they started up again, eager and adventurous, in the heart of the young King, Charles the Eighth. It was the wily Duke of Milan, Ludovic Sforza, named the Moor, who incited this young man to lead the French chivalry through the passes of the Alps. He was the warder of Italy, and he betrayed her. It would be hard to name any one act of man since God divided light from darkness which has let loose upon the world such tremendous consequences of woe. It is not my duty here to describe those consequences, nor to tell how the French invasion resulted very shortly in riveting on Naples the long Spanish slavery, which in the middle of the last century became a monarchy again, and in 1860 was torn from the hold of the Bourbons, and made free at last, by the grace of God and the valour of true heroes, each one of whom dared all for Italy. "Blessed is he of all men, being in one As father to her and son, Blessed of all men living, that he found Her weak limbs bared and bound, And in his arms and in his bosom bore, And as a garment wore Her weight of want, and as a royal dress Put on her weariness. "Praise him, O storm and summer, shore and wave, O skies, and every grave; O weeping hopes, O memories beyond tears, O many and murmuring years." I will quote no more, even of these immortal verses. Since it was given to an English singer to voice the rapture with which all good men hailed the salvation of Italy, it is but just that every visitor should read the "Song of Italy" himself. I would that everyone among them had it by heart and could catch some thrill from the noble passion of the verses. This has been a long discourse. But if certain things happened a great while ago, is it my fault? Or again, am I to blame for the strange neglect of Italian history in schools? The lesson is done now, and the sun is still bright and hot on the Via Partenope. Even the enchanted Castle of the Egg, black and grim as it usually looks, has caught the glow, and is steeped and drowned in warm light. A quiver of haze hangs over the sea, tremulous and burning. The wind has dropped, and a midday silence has descended upon Naples. It is the hour when sacristans bar the church doors and seek the solace of slumber, when the vetturini congregate on the shady side of the piazza and cease to crack their whips at the sight of strangers. On the castle bridge a sentry paces to and fro. There are one or two restaurants below him in the shadow, neither good nor bad, but good enough; and I order my colazione in one which looks towards the sheer cliff of the Pizzofalcone, and from which towards my right I can look out upon the harbour, can catch a glimpse of the Castel Nuovo, the old royal dwelling of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon, and see beyond it the old city bathed in sunshine sloping to the curving sea. The Pizzofalcone is the Falcon's Beak. If it were not too hot to think much about anything, I might perhaps detect the resemblance. But at this hour, in this city, and in face of this sun, one does not think; one sits and lets half realised ideas drift past as they will. The Pizzofalcone looks to me much like any other cliff, rather dangerously near the castle, which could easily be dominated from the height by even the smallest modern guns. There was once a villa of the Roman Lucullus on that height. Statesman and epicure, he had another on this island; or perhaps the two formed part of a single domain, which must have been rarely lovely in those days when waving pine trees filled the hollows of the cliff and the sea broke white and creamy on the strand of Santa Lucia. It was not this handsome quay stretching on beyond the castle which set the Neapolitans singing-- "Oh, dolce Napoli, Oh, suol beato." For the truth is that modern works of engineering have not yet proved as prolific in poetry as the abuses they replace, and the Neapolitans have not written about their sea-wall any song one half so sweet as that which was inspired by the pretty, solitary creek outside the city bounds, bad as it is understood to have been in morals. There were, and are still, caverns all along the cliffs of Santa Lucia which were sad places in the old day, full of riotous and evil people who resorted thither for the worst of ends. For this reason Don Pietro di Toledo, when he was Viceroy, ruined some and closed others, by which act he at once improved the morals of Naples and enriched its folklore, for nothing stimulated the imagination of the people so much as the idea that their caverns were lying empty and silent. They believe now that some are the haunt of witches, while others are filled with treasure. One or two are worth seeing still if a guide can be found to show them. But I sat down here to talk of tragedies connected with this castle. Some people may think it would be better to do so within and not without the walls, and they are welcome to their opinion; but I have tried both courses and think not. The interior of the castle is badly modernised. The custodian is stupid and knows nothing. The old chapel is a kitchen, and when I went to see the spot where the spirit of Queen Helena wrote the word "revenge" upon the altar I found it full of soldier cooks washing potatoes for the garrison. The prisons are either forgotten or not shown. Inside the walls there is nothing but disillusion and regret. Queen Helena was the young wife of Manfred, who, as I said above, was slain at Benevento, defending his kingdom against the butcher, Charles of Anjou. The poor girl was at Lucera with her children, when they brought her news that her husband, kingdom, and home were all lost; and her first natural impulse was to flee to the protection of her father, the Greek Emperor in Constantinople. So she took to horse, and rode down out of the hill country through the coast plains of Apulia, where but a few weeks earlier she had hunted and feasted with her lord, and so came to the port of Trani, where she had touched land and met the King in all the splendour of his retinue when she came from the east a happy bride. One can fancy with what fearfulness this little band of fugitives rode towards the sea, carrying with them the children of the slain King, and how often they must have turned their heads to watch lest they might see the spearpoints of Anjou flashing among the defiles of the mountains. At Trani surely they would find servants loyal enough to speed them on board ship before they cast themselves at the feet of the conqueror; and as she rode beneath the gateway of the white-walled town and saw the green Adriatic stretching far towards the shores of Greece, the Queen's heart must have leapt amidst its sorrow at the thought that she had brought her dead lord's boys in sight of safety and of freedom. Alas, poor Queen! The whole land was turning like a flower to the sun! The Castellan of Trani spoke her fair. A month before he would have given all he had to gain her favour, and now--he did but beg her rest until a ship could be got ready, and instantly sent off tidings to the French. Ere morning mother and children were riding once more across the plain, their horses' heads turned from the sea, and their bridles guided by French hands. Neither the sorrow of the Queen nor the youth of the children touched the heart of Charles. He would have none of the blood of Manfred left in freedom, and Queen and children died after many years in prison. Queen Helena was shut up in this castle for some years. Men say it was at Nocera that she died, but it must have been here that her noble spirit fretted most sorely against fate, bruising itself like a poor lark flapping against its prison bars. For in the corridors of this old castle her spirit used to walk on the eve of Ascension every year, pacing slowly from her cell to the chapel of the castle, where she wrote upon the altar the word "revenge" with finger dipped in blood. Nothing could erase those letters till the night of the Sicilian Vespers, when the French were hunted and slain in every street and alley of Palermo. After that dread act of vengeance wrought in her own capital city, the spirit of Queen Helena was never seen again. It is in sight of these grey walls, which stood here before Naples was a kingdom, certainly in the year 1140, that every pageant and almost every tragedy in the long story of the city has passed by. In those days when dukes ruled Naples, and the age of Greek dominion was but just over, the castle was called "Castello del Salvatore," the Castle of the Saviour, with the addition of the words "near Naples," for the old walled city which made such valorous defences lay beyond the ridge. Sometimes, again, it is spoken of as "Castello Marino," a name which sufficiently explains itself; but nowhere is its present designation used in ancient documents until the year 1352, when it appears in the rules of the Order of the Holy Spirit, founded by Louis of Anjou, and appears, moreover, not only as "the Castle of the Egg," but as "the Castle of the Enchanted Egg," thus showing that the legend concerning the magical foundation of the fortress had gained strength enough to displace one, if not two, ancient titles, and attach itself inseparably to the spot. There is in this fact something very singular; and one would willingly ask the dead centuries why they left us the heritage of this mysterious name. Of itself, the ancient castle must remain in all men's minds as the chief interest in Naples, the most marked object on its beautiful shore, and the central point of its romantic story. But beyond the beauty and the interest, one is piqued with curiosity; and the sense of mystery clinging to the castle lends it a charm to which no one can remain insensible. There are few points near Naples, whether on hillside or in valley, from which one does not see the enchanted castle low down by the water's edge, swept by cloud and sunshine, or wet with spray, when the storm wind drives along the shore, a witness of past ages, the one thing in Naples which has not changed, except only the blue sea and the contours of the everlasting hills. [Illustration: NAPLES--CASTLE OF ST. ELMO] No castle builder of the days when artillery had come into use would have set this fortress on the shore beneath the Pizzofalcone, whence it could be so easily bombarded. It is rather curious to sit under these old walls, and turn one's eyes in succession to the three castles of the city. This is much the oldest, and the least defensible. Then came Castel Nuovo, a little higher in the town; Charles of Anjou founded it; and lastly St. Elmo, high upon the hillside, in a perfect situation, of all others best suited to be the _arx_, or citadel. Why, one wonders, did not the first builders use it, and let the city grow around it? or at least, why did they not place their keep and fortress on the Pizzofalcone? an eminence well suited for defence. Surely those first Greek settlers who came across the hills from Cumæ could not have overlooked the merits of this site! Perhaps, as some scholars hold, Neapolis, "the new city," could not be built upon the Pizzofalcone because Palæopolis, "the old city," was already there. I cannot tell. There are no answers to these questions, which recur again and again as one wanders round these coasts, none the less absorbing because one must speculate on them in vain. But in Naples one must not spend time in chasing shadows. I have still to speak about the French bombardment of the enchanted castle; but first I will take up the tale of the fall of the House of Aragon where I left it in my last chapter, when King Alfonso, terrified and broken by nameless fear, leapt down shuddering from his throne, and fled from royalty and kingdom, to die a penitent monk in a monastery in Sicily. It was a well-nigh hopeless task for his son Ferdinand to maintain the sceptre thus hastily thrust into his hands. The French were already over the borders of his kingdom. They had stormed and sacked the Castle of Monte di San Giovanni, putting the garrison to the sword. "This," says Guicciardini with scornful bitterness, "was the sum of the opposition and trouble which the King of France met with in the conquest of a realm so noble and so splendid; in the defence of which there was shown neither skill, nor courage, nor good counsel, no desire for honour, no strength, no loyalty." The Neapolitans were strongly posted at San Germano, the River Garigliano flowing like a moat in front, and their flanks guarded by lofty mountains; but they fled without a blow, before they even saw the French, leaving their guns behind, and falling back on Capua. At Capua, that ancient city of delights, which turned the strong Carthaginian invaders into feeble voluptuaries, cowardice was fitly followed up by treachery. The troops were under command of Gianjacopo Triulzi, a captain of repute, "accustomed to make profession of honour," observes Guicciardini, in his dry, contemptuous way. This honourable captain seized the moment when his young master had been called back to Naples by disorders in the city, to deliver over his whole command to the French. Ferdinand hurried back; but arrived too late. He returned with a few followers to Naples. The whole city was in an uproar, the mob was already sacking the stables of the Castel Nuovo. There was no more hope of stemming the tide. The young king, brave, just, and personally popular, was overwhelmed by the misdeeds of his house. The very guards of his palace were inclined to seize his person; but he distracted their attention by admitting them to sack the castle, and while they were quarrelling over their booty, he left the castle by the secret postern towards the sea, and embarked on a light galley bound for Ischia. There as he stood in the stern, and through the black smoke of the burning ships, destroyed by his orders, saw home and kingdom lost by the sins and dishonour of other men, he repeated over and over, as long as he could still see Naples, those words in which the psalmist tells us that except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. But the Castle of the Egg still held out for him, and the French, having seized a little tower on the height of Pizzofalcone, bombarded the fortress from that eminence. King Charles the Eighth himself was there watching the practice of his gunners, when two light galleys ran across from Ischia, touching shore at the old mole, and from one of them landed Don Federigo of Aragon, uncle of the King, who had dwelt at the French Court, and knew both Charles and his barons. They took him up to the height, and when the French King saw him coming, says Passaro, that most gossipy of chroniclers, "he leapt down from his horse and bowed down to the ground, and embraced Don Federigo with the greatest pleasure, and took him by the hand and led him apart to a spot beneath an olive tree, where they began to talk together, but of what they said I know nothing, though many supposed that King Charles was trying to treat with King Ferdinand, offering him great lordships in France, but he would not, and Don Federigo left him and went back to his ships." A strange interview, surely, between King and Prince, while the French gunners stood waiting with their matches burning, and the standard of Aragon still flew over the enchanted castle. It fell ere long, and the whole kingdom was in the hands of Charles. It is true he had not the wit to keep it. But anyone who wants to know that story must seek it in Guicciardini, and may live to thank me for referring him to one of the greatest and most interesting writers whom the world can show. CHAPTER VI THE BARBARITIES OF FERDINAND OF ARAGON WITH CERTAIN OTHER SUBJECTS WHICH PRESENT THEMSELVES IN STROLLING ROUND THE CITY It is not possible to stroll along the sea-front much further than the Castle of the Enchanted Egg, because the inclosures of the arsenal occupy the foreshore. Thus the only course open is to turn inland, and, retracing one's steps a little, to pass up beneath the shadow of the great cliff of the Pizzofalcone into the Strada Santa Lucia, which has always borne the fame of exhibiting at a glance more of the highly coloured, if uncleanly, life of the poorer Neapolitans than any other district of the city. I suspect its proximity to the hotels had something to do with this high reputation, for crowded as the winding roadway is at times with fishermen and peasant women, there is, I maintain, incomparably more of uncivilised and ancient Naples to be seen in the Strada de' Tribunali, or around Castel Capuano, than is now presented to the eyes of the astonished visitor in Santa Lucia. However, the wide pavement on the side of that highway which opens towards the sea--for the famous creek is filled up now--is at all times a standing-place for booths, chiefly for the sale of the "frutti del mare," edible or not; and there one may see both young girls and ancient hags proffering their wares with clamorous pertinacity, making use of a vocabulary which is piquant, if not sweet, and soaring up into howls such as only a Neapolitan throat can execute. The charm of Santa Lucia is largely of the past. Naples is suffering a change; and at this point one realises for the first time that the old city of dirt and laughter is being swept and garnished. The "piano di risanamento," that much-needed scheme of resanitation which was conceived in Naples after the dread outbreak of cholera had scourged the narrow alleys in a way to make the most careless people think--that great conception of broad streets to be driven through the crowded quarters, letting the sweet and healing sea air course to and fro between the houses, has brought health and may bring cleanliness, but it seems to be expelling gaiety and picturesqueness with the mephitic vapours which have wrought such woe. Naples may be an idle city still, but it is not so idle. It is disorderly and not too safe, yet is more reputable than it was. The rake is contemplating better things, and by-and-by may actually achieve them--an anticipation over which good men must rejoice. But visitors who come to play may lament the increase of seriousness and the vanishing faith that life begins and ends with laughter. A traveller approaching Naples from this side must needs be struck by the narrowness of the close alleys which pierce the houses of Santa Lucia. Standing in the middle of any one of these vicoli, a man might almost touch both house-fronts, while the walls tower up so high on either hand that only a mere strip of sky is visible, and that with effort. No breeze but one which blew directly on the mouth of these alleys could reach the windows of the dense population which inhabits them. Disease stalks unimpeded, beyond the power of science to restrain. The reason for building these lines of houses so close together was, of course, to secure shade, that priceless blessing throughout the burning dog days in southern Italy. No man can have strolled about Italian towns even in fine spring weather without feeling grateful for the shadows which fall on him from some overhanging house-front. Under shelter from the sun the very smells seem less; and in August scarce any price in health may appear too high to pay for a patch of shade which lasts throughout the day. The curved roadway of Santa Lucia mounts the hill on which the kings of Anjou, having resolved to take up their residence in Naples rather than in Palermo, which was the former capital of the Two Sicilies, built their new castle--Castel Nuovo--still a fortress, though untenable in modern war. This eminence lay outside the city then. Centuries later the town had not absorbed it, and the castle on the knoll remained surrounded by vineyards and the palaces of those princes of the blood who were entitled to dwell in the immediate neighbourhood of the King. Eastwards lay the city, much as one may see it now, filling the hollow of the coast and stretching some way up a hill. The royal palace, which stands now upon the right, hiding the front of the Castel Nuovo, is of course a modern building. It has no beauty, and I have naught to say concerning it. The handsome piazza laid out before the palace is a pleasant place to stroll in, especially on warm evenings when the lights are glittering and there is music at Gambrinus' Café at the corner. But it has no special interest, and I go on therefore round the corner of the piazza past the halting-place of tramcars, past the little garden of the palace and the colonnade of the San Carlo Theatre, till I reach the Piazza del Municipio, where a gateway in the long wall admits to the castle precinct. Admission is free. The sentry at the gate merely nods when I declare my business to be curiosity and nothing more, and leaves me to stroll unchecked up the ascending causeway till I enter the quadrangle of the castle, where a squad of soldiers are drilling awkwardly. It is strange that many visitors to Naples omit this castle from the sights they see. It is well to spend hours and days in the museum and aquarium, or in wandering from church to church, spoilt as is almost every one among those sacred buildings by the corrupt taste of the eighteenth century, which daubed over noble gothic arches with unmeaning Barocco ornament, and left Naples degraded among Italian cities by the loss of almost all that was once done nobly within her walls in stone or marble. But here is the very fount and centre of the sovereignty of Naples, the home of all its kings since Manfred, the Palace of Anjou and Aragon. In these walls their secrets were deposited, and some to this day remain open to the curious. Here was the chief theatre of their pomp, and here, on the knoll above the shore among the olive groves and orchards that fringed the city walls, unnumbered tragedies occurred. The castle has two courtyards. The portal leading from the outer to the inner is dignified by what is probably the finest piece of building now left in Naples, the triumphal arch erected by Alfonso of Aragon--first of the two kings who bore that name--to celebrate his conquest of the city and the downfall of the last adherents of the old House of Anjou. "Pious, merciful, unconquered": such were the terms in which his character was described upon the arch beneath which he rode in and out in triumph. Mercy was an attribute uncommon in his family; of that all men can judge unto this day. Piety is estimated differently from age to age. In monarchs, at least of mediæval times, it was a virtue of outward observance, and in this Alfonso did perhaps excel. As for the third merit which he claimed, it is not on record that anyone tried to conquer him, except the barons of the kingdom, who were suppressed with a ruthless cruelty which forecast the tyranny of his son and grandson, who wrought the deed of terror in the Church of San Lionardo on the Chiaia. The archway is chiefly the work of Pietro di Martino of Milan, though it is said that Giuliano da Majano also laboured on it, if not others also. It possesses a noble pair of bronze doors of even greater interest than the archway; for not only is their workmanship extremely fine, but also the figures possess the interest of portraiture. The scenes depicted are the triumphs of King Ferdinand, second of the five monarchs of Aragon, over his revolting barons. There is Ferdinand upon his war-horse talking to the Duke of Taranto, his thin, cruel face recognisable at a glance by the high nose which he derived from his father, King Alfonso, builder of the arch. In the medallions of the door the same sharp face appears; while his son, afterwards Alfonso the Second, bears a shorter, thicker face, which is suggestive, though very falsely, of more kindness. Let us go into the castle and see what remains there to explain the reputation of inhuman cruelty which history has conferred on these kings. A small boy armed with keys is already hovering about expectant; and though it is his purpose to show only the Chapel of Santa Barbara, the slightest hint of a desire to see the subterranean chamber will cause him to lead you through the sacristy, where he will produce a couple of candle ends, and throw open a small doorway hidden in the wall. A winding stair of perhaps twenty steps conducts to a little chamber, faintly lighted by a deep-set window. At first the room seems empty, but as one's eyes adjust themselves to the dim light four coffins become visible, each lying on a shelf, two open and two closed. Surely, one thinks, this must be a place of private sepulture for the Royal Family or for their servants, and the stair giving access from the chapel was built for the convenience of mourners who wished to stand beside their dead. But the boy, with a chuckle of amusement, lifts the lid of one of the closed coffins. Within lies the mummy of a man, fearfully distorted by his agony, his cramped hands clutched desperately, as if fighting with all his strength against those who held him down. His mouth is contorted, his whole body heaving with a last struggle for life and breath. The man was strangled, there can be no doubt of it; and there he lies to this hour, fully clothed in the garments which he wore when he came down that little winding stair, hose, buttons, and doublet still intact. Each of the other coffins contains the body of a man slain in his clothes, the head separated, and lying by the shoulders. Who were these men, and how has it happened that they lie here all together? What made mummies of them, and with what object were their bodies preserved? The answer must be sought in history. The _Diario Ferrarese_, printed by Muratori, tells us that "it was the constant habit of King Ferdinand and King Alfonso, when their enemies, whether barons or people, had fallen into their hands, to cut off their heads and keep them salted in chambers underneath their palace." Not content with having dismissed the spirits of their foes to another world, these kingly Aragons must needs have, close by the scene of their continual sports and labours, so many secret pleasure chambers into which they could withdraw at leisure moments and gaze in rapture on the very features of the enemy whose turbulence was stilled and whose wits would never be turned against his king again. Doubtless these visits renewed the joy of killing! So in this chamber where King Alfonso or his father stood and gloated, one may stand to-day and look down on the same bodies still unmoved--a strange step back into the Middle Ages, and a more revealing glimpse than any other known to me of what Naples was in old days, when its kings--yes, even the best of them!--were tigers, and the seeds were sown of that contempt for life which is to this hour a chief difficulty of those who govern Naples. Who were these men? Surely, one thinks, their rank and importance must be measured by the care with which the King bestowed their bodies in such close neighbourhood to the royal chapel and to his own apartments! Probably we shall not miss the truth by very much if we conclude them to be some among those barons of the kingdom who, incensed by the harsh government of Ferdinand, and furious beyond all measure with his more hateful son, gave rein to their old affection for the House of Anjou, and conspired with the Pope to confer the realm on a prince of that royal house. It seems strange that even under the afflictions of the Aragon sovereignty men should have looked back on the days of Anjou with affection. But the fact is that Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, whose power as the eldest son of the aged King grew stronger daily, was such a ruler as must needs rouse regrets for other days even in a patient generation, much more in one so proud and turbulent as the Neapolitans. Harshness and cruelty they understood; but Alfonso did what no nation will endure. He took the women, even of the noblest houses, at his will. Of this came unquenchable hatred, and in the end the ruin of his house. The conspiracy was a terrible one. Half the great officers of the kingdom were involved in it, and King Ferdinand knew not where to look for loyalty. The Prince of Salerno, Lord High Admiral of the realm, and the Prince of Bisignano were among the leaders--members both of that great family of San Severino, whose palace is known to every visitor as the Church of the Gesù Nuovo. The Grand Constable, the Grand Seneschal, the King's Secretary--there was no end to the men of note and consequence who joined in the appeal to the Pope to dethrone the tyrants of the House of Aragon, and give the kingdom to René of Lorraine, last descendant of the ancient kings. Ferdinand was a prince whose sagacity is extolled by all men. He was wise as is the serpent. His statesmanship was of the type made widely known twenty years later by Cæsar Borgia, and in this emergency he practised the same arts as enabled that accomplished dissimulator to strangle his four chief enemies at once. The two occasions deserve close study from those who would understand the statecraft of the fifteenth century. Each was indeed a masterpiece of that art which Machiavelli calls "virtù," and it is difficult to decide where to award the palm. Ferdinand negotiated. It was indeed his only course, for time must be gained at any cost. This was in the regular routine of kings in difficulty. De Comines, in a memorable passage, explains how useful it is to send ambassadors to meet one's enemies; they see so much even while they are treating. Ferdinand negotiated with such skill, such open frankness and goodwill, showed such a broad and merciful spirit, and was so ready to forgive, that the conspirators, who had waited in vain for their new king, accepted the accord and returned sullenly to their castles, doubting and fearing sorely. "Let no man think that present kindnesses lead to the forgetting of past injuries," says Machiavelli, laying bare the roots of human nature in his incisive way. To do them justice, the barons supposed no such thing. The Prince of Salerno was missing one fine morning. On the gateway of his palace was a card, on which were inscribed the mystic words--"Passero vecchio non entra in caggiola" (An old sparrow does not go into the cage). He is said to have got out of the city disguised as a muleteer. Other sparrows were less prudent or more unfortunate. The cage doors were wide open, and the King and Duke sat piping so prettily that any bird might have thought it safe to flutter in. Towards the Count of Sarno Ferdinand showed particular affection. His son Marco Coppola was betrothed to the daughter of the Duke of Amalfi, the King's nephew. The wedding was at hand. It must be held in the Royal Palace, in Castel Nuovo, if only to mark the royal favour. There were great festivities. The pomp of the Court was boundless. But the wedding garments which the King was preparing were not of this world. Midway in the feastings and the music, when all men were confident and careless, the stroke fell. How, one wonders, did Ferdinand and Alfonso look at that moment when, sitting at the head of the tables, gazing down upon their guests, bridegroom and bride and relatives trusting in the royal honour, they gave the signal and called in the soldiers who turned that feast to terror? How did the guests look when the guard went round arresting every man of mark or consequence within the hall? Surely since Belshazzar was King in Babylon no feast has been broken up more awfully! The craft and treachery of this great stroke fixed once for all the reputation of Ferdinand and Alfonso. The nice taste of Renaissance Italy revolted, giving voice to loud condemnation. King and Prince, surprised at the outcry, paused, and held back the secret executioner. It would be safer to have a show of justice; so a court was nominated, the prisoners were tried, and when they had been despatched from the world in this unexceptionable manner, one by one the other dukes and barons were caught and led into the secret pleasure chambers, whence they never more emerged. The Prince of Bisignano, the Duke of Melfi, the Duke of Nardo, counts and knights innumerable disappeared. Their children and their wives were treated in like manner. Few escaped; but for many a day Neapolitans told the tale how Bandella Gaetano, Princess of Bisignano, a woman of high courage and resource, fled with her young children to the Church of San Lionardo in the Chiaia; and there, profiting by the old fame of the saint as the guardian of fugitives, bribed a boatman to take her on to Terracina, and so sought refuge with the Colonnas. Ferdinand would have given much to stamp out the brood; and had he been able to turn the pages of the book of fate he would have given even more. What happened to the prisoners was never known. For some time the fiction was kept up that they were alive, and food was even sent daily to their cells, set down perhaps beside the salted bodies in mockery. But the executioner was seen wearing a gold chain which had belonged to the Prince of Bisignano; and ere long it was known that every one was dead. There is no doubt that in these awful days the Church of San Lionardo was filled with fugitives. It was there that Alfonso wrought that nameless deed of terror which dwelt so heavily upon his conscience as to destroy his nerves and send him fleeing from the kingdom. We have seen what things his conscience would endure; perhaps it is as well we remain in ignorance of what it would not. But if we argue from the known to the unknown we may form a surmise of the nature of that act which is enough to banish sleep, and may well make us grateful that the walls of that old sanctuary which concealed so terrible a secret stand no longer on the smiling shore which is the chosen parade of Neapolitan society of our own day. There are two chapels in the castle, one opening from the other; but both lost whatever beauty they once had by the deplorable passion for Barocco, which wrought such evil in Naples. Two great beauties still remain, though not inside the chapels. One is the doorway, a lovely work of Giuliano da Majano, mercifully left untouched, I know not by what happy chance; the other is a winding staircase behind the choir, consisting of a hundred and fifty-eight steps, each formed of a single block of travertine, and so arranged that their inward edges form a perfect cylinder. There is no end to the scenes of history and tragedy which are recalled by these old walls and chambers, in which the hottest passions of life in Naples have spent themselves so often, even from the first coming of Charles of Anjou down to the creation of the Parthenopean Republic, when Nelson received the surrender of the Revolutionists, driven to despair by the arrival of his fleet. But these are tales which visitors must find out for themselves. If they will not go to Castel Nuovo on the inducement which I have given them, neither will they if I should write a volume. [Illustration: NAPLES--OLD TOWN] When I emerge from the old palace fortress I hesitate, being, in truth, half inclined to turn directly to the Carmine, the strongest point of interest in Naples. But a man will fail to comprehend the relation of the Carmine to ancient Naples if he goes to it by the broad street along the quays which lay outside the mediæval city. It is better to plunge into the maze of narrow ways which still, unto this hour, retain the general aspect of the city wherein Boccaccio rambled, picking up in I know not what haunt of roysterers those sad tales which beguile one yet in the pages of the _Decameron_. Who has not read of the nocturnal adventures of Andreuccio, who came from Pisa to Naples to buy horses with twenty gold florins in his pocket? Who would not wish to see the very lanes through which he wandered naked in the night? Who has not felt the charm of that naïve irresponsibility which pervades the tales of Naples in old days? Does it still exist? Are the narrow lanes athrob even now on summer nights with the thrumming of the lute, with the patter of girls' feet, made musical by wafts of song blown down from lofty windows? "Flower of the rose, If I've been merry, what matter who knows?" Well, let us go and see; and first we will turn up the Toledo, now rechristened "Via Roma," that long straight street which the Viceroy Don Pietro di Toledo made without the city wall, and which is still the chief artery of life and fashion. The narrow vista, made picturesque by hanging balconies and green shutters, is bathed in sunshine--not the fierce glare which even in early summer brings out the awnings used to convert the footways into shaded corridors, but the pleasant golden glow of an April Eastertide, carrying with it the reek of violets and early roses. It is no wonder that the street is odorous of flowers; for at any corner a few soldi will buy them by the handful, fresh and dewy, redolent of summer, though indeed summer never flees far from this sunny coast, and even in midwinter she will slip back for a while, bringing golden days. It is on the stroke of noon, noon of Holy Thursday, and in another hour the roadway will be closed to vehicles. For on this day, by custom old enough to be respectable, the Neapolitans go on foot to visit the sepulchres of Christ in the churches, combining this exercise of devotion with the more worldly solaces of friendship and social intercourse. There was a time when princesses came down and mingled with the throng, the royal ladies of the House of Bourbon going to and fro on foot; while the rustling of their long dresses of black silk gave the ceremony its picturesque title of "Lu Struscio." There being no princesses in Naples now, the old ceremony has lost some of its attractions for the nobly born; but it is still honoured, and already the carriages are growing thin, while in every part of the long street men armed with long brooms are reducing the whole width to the same state of cleanliness as the footpaths. With the disappearance of the vetturino a blessed peace steals down upon the air. This is, I should suppose, the one day in the year on which a man can hear himself speak in the Via Roma. But Naples, passionate for noise, is never long without it. Fast as the vetturini go the hawkers come, hoarse and raucous; men with strings of chestnuts, boys holding tiny Java sparrows on their finger-tips, women thrusting at you trays of "pastiere," without which no good citizen of Naples would dream of passing Easter, any more than he would go through Christmas without "capitoni." It is rarely wise to apply to local delicacies any other test than that of sight. The women push past me with their trays, knowing well that their market does not lie among the strangers. Meantime the Via Santa Brigida, which crosses the Via Roma, has broken out into a jungle of standing booths, on which are displayed proudly cheap playthings for the children, sweetmeats and other paschal joys, mingled with combs, shirtings, and suchlike useful articles, to which attention is drawn by huge placards. OCCASIONE! FERMATEVI! TASTATE! GIUDICATE! while the seething crowd which hustles round the stalls is animated by any but a feeling of devotion. So the throng gathers, till by-and-by the Via Roma is a sea of moving heads. The church doors stand wide open, of itself an unusual sight in Naples, where the churches are closed at noon, and reopen only for an hour in the evening. Their doorways are curtained heavily in black, and beneath the hanging folds a ceaseless stream of people are passing in and out, pressing forward to where the recumbent figure of our Lord lies at the foot of a blazing trophy of flowers and wax lights, kissing the contorted limbs fervently, then hurrying away. A large proportion of these devotees are dressed in black, especially the older women, but among them are many who seem more anxious to display their bright spring toilettes, and the crowded street assumes the aspect of a drawing-room, in which greetings and laughing salutations fly freely on all hands. It is all picturesque enough, and a relic of old life in Naples which is worth seeing. In the absence of the usual street noises, in the solemn trappings of the churches, and yet more in the tramp of crowds so largely clad in mourning, there is not wanting a suggestion of funeral pomp; and as I stand apart and watch the throng go by, there comes into my mind the memory of a solemn procession which once came down this famous highway, bearing to the grave the body of a lad whom the city, by the strangest freak, had raised in one day from the lowest to the highest station, and cast down as suddenly into a bloody grave, one who had enough heroism in his ignorant mind to resent oppression, and might--who knows?--have proved an earlier Garibaldi, had he been supported by the nobles. It was Mas'aniello who was thus borne dead down the slope of the Toledo, honoured by the weeping people who were little likely to find another leader bold enough to head them, honoured even by the Church, which rarely refuses outward show of honour to the men she has destroyed. First came a hundred boys of the conservatorio of Loreto, then all the brothers of the monasteries, to the number of four hundred, and then the body of the fisherman dictator, wrapped in a white shroud folded so that all might see the head--I hope it had not that hideous look of death and anguish from which one shrinks on seeing the wooden model in the museum of San Martino! After the bier walked great crowds of Mas'aniello's followers, those ragamuffin soldiers who but a few days earlier had stormed down this street in triumph, sacking and destroying where they pleased. Now they walked mournfully and slow, as well they might, for liberty lay upon the bier they followed, and the Spanish tyranny was about to close over them again. Behind them trailed their flags, and they marched to the soft beat of muted drums all hung with crape. But last of all came those who made this great procession memorable beyond all others. The soldiers were followed by a countless throng of women of the people. Out of every lane and alley of the swarming city they had come to bid farewell to their defender, to the one man who in many generations had dared to show them that they were not worms. Many of them carried lighted candles, weeping bitterly as they went slowly by; while others sang in tearful voices the "Santissimo Rosario," in trust that the brave soul of the departed might find peace. [Illustration: BAY OF NAPLES FROM SAN MARTINO] So through this outskirt of the city the funeral train of Mas'aniello came from the Carmine and went back to that centre of the life and tragedy of Naples. We too will go there presently, and then will talk the more about Mas'aniello. But first we must walk through the ancient city, and that is now quite close at hand. I have traversed almost half the length of the Toledo--the ancient name comes more readily than the modern--passing by the little Largo della Carità, where in the shadow of the tramcars green bays hang around the tablet that protests against forgetfulness of Felice Cavallotti. I am in sight of the Piazza Dante, and a little more would show me the red walls of the museum, when I halt beneath the vast and heavy front of the Palazzo Maddaloni, and turning round into the shadow of the Strada Quercia, I see the fine courtyard and loggia of the palace, eloquent of pomps and ceremonies which find no match in the Naples of to-day. Some hundred and fifty yards beyond the palace the old line of the city walls crossed the street at right angles. There is not a sign of walls or towers now. The ancient quadrangle of streets and alleys, the old Greek city which held out so stoutly generation after generation when besieged by Lombard or Imperialist, lies open now to strangers of every nation. On entering its precinct one appears to have found a new world, albeit an unsavoury one. For here, in place of the irregular and curved vistas in which the builders of modern Naples have delighted, is a long narrow street of exceeding straightness, cleaving like an arrow-flight through the close-packed houses. Irresistibly it brings to mind the long straight streets of Pompeii, so far as a thoroughfare seething with crowded life can recall one which lies silent and open under the winds of heaven. It is a just comparison; for indeed Pompeii still retains the very aspect which Naples must have borne. In size, in manner of construction, in defences, the two towns were closely similar, and this long street which under several names pierces the ancient city from side to side, was one of the three Decuman ways which every visitor to the buried city traces out and follows. A little higher up the hill is the Decumanus Major, now called the Strada de' Tribunali, and still by far the most interesting street in Naples, while higher yet upon the slope the third of the Decuman streets runs parallel to the other two under the name of Strada Anticaglia, and in it stood the ancient theatre, some remnants of which still exist between the Vico di S. Paolo and the Vico de' Giganti. These three Decuman streets are the arteries of ancient Naples. In them, and in the countless alleys which unite them, are to be found almost all the relics of the mediæval city; and indeed a man wandering about beneath those unmodernised house-fronts, elbowing his way through crowds of ragged peasants and of burly priests, might well doubt in what century he found himself, so unlike the scene is to the trim world which he has known elsewhere. But these are quarters in which it is not prudent to wander when the night is falling. Naples is not a safe city, and travellers would do wisely to realise the fact. Even in broad daylight caution and good sense are needed more than in most other cities. Ladies will show it by removing from their dress all ornaments of the slightest value, and men by refusing absolutely all inducements to enter houses, whether offered by small boys professing to find sacristans--a not uncommon trick--or by any other person not known and vouched for. After dark, if a man must walk alone, he should walk carefully on the light side of the street and restrain any curiosity he may feel to see the effect of moonlight on the houses until he can watch it safely from his own window. These are not unnecessary cautions. Neapolitans themselves do not neglect them, though strangers do; and many have found cause to regret it. I myself, while walking with a lady in the immediate neighbourhood of the cathedral, have seen her caught by the waist by a burly brute and shaken as a terrier shakes a rat in the effort to unclasp a handsome silver buckle which she wore. The rascal failed, and was gone again before he could be seized. But the experience is one which few men would desire their wives or sisters to undergo. Complaint is useless. It is even doubtful whether, in a city where almost every robber has a knife, worse things may not happen to those who meet such attacks in the customary English manner. But the remedy is simple. Carry nothing which is of any obvious value. Avoid unnecessary conversation with poor boys, who are not safe guides. Go home while it is still light. With these plain rules men and women equally may explore the recesses of old Naples with pleasure and with almost perfect safety. It is out of these teeming quarters, packed with a population as dense and fetid as that of Seven Dials, that the Camorra, the great secret society of Naples, drew the strength and vigour which enables it still to defy the law. There would be no exaggeration in saying that hardly a full generation has passed by since in all the lower quarters of the city the Camorra ruled with an audacity so high that there was neither man nor woman, boy nor girl, who did not know he must obey it rather than the law. The law was blind and deaf. The Camorra had eyes and ears in every vicolo and every cellar. It discovered all things; it struck heavily and secretly at those who tried to thwart it. A fruitseller who resisted payment of dues to the Camorrist would find his custom disappear. Accident upon accident would happen to his goods. Ere long he would be a ruined man. The Camorra might accept his submission, if proffered humbly and accompanied by a fine; but any active resistance, any communication with the police, would be repaid by a knife-thrust in the stomach some dark night. Fishermen, street hawkers, vetturini, guides--all were under the thrall of the ruthless organisation, all paid tribute in return for its protection, and executed its orders without remorse. So far as is known to outsiders, the aims of the Camorra--which still exists, and wields considerable power yet--were not mainly political, though it was certainly at one time a powerful engine in the hands of those who desired the return of the Bourbons. That desire, once passionate in Naples, has almost died away. Francis the Second is dead, and there is none who can breathe life into the dry bones of his party. If the devotion to the old Royal House exists, it is kept alive by the exertions of the priests, who would make a hero of Apollyon if he came down on earth and showed a disposition to unseat the present king. The lower orders are still as clerical as in the days of Mas'aniello. Turbulent and fierce as are their passions, they are capable of high devotion; and a spiritual ruler who exerted the whole influence of the Church might turn them into a great people. But here too, as at every turn in Italy, the task of government is checked and hampered by the hostility of Church and Crown. No foreigner can appreciate the chances of this struggle, or even apportion fairly blame between the combatants. It is enough for those of us who love Italy to sit and watch the unrolling of the future, lamenting that from the outset of her career as a united nation she has been wrestling with a Church whose traditions lie in the humbling of emperors and kings. CHAPTER VII CHIEFLY ABOUT CHURCHES WITH SOME SAINTS, BUT MORE SINNERS He who will see the churches of Naples must rise betimes, since ancient custom closes them, for unknown reasons, from eleven o'clock till four. Some say the poor man will get nothing for his pains. But this is not so. It is indeed impossible that sacred buildings in a city so old and famous as Naples should be devoid of interest. Here, as elsewhere, they reflect the strong emotions of the citizens, their sorrows and their aspirations; and though it is true that many a once noble building has been daubed over with unmeaning ornament so freely that one has trouble in discovering the pure taste with which the builders wrought it, yet there is not a church in Naples which does not set vibrating some chord either of beauty or poignant association. No man can know the city or its people if he neglect the churches. Past and present jostle each other perpetually there, and the effigies of kings look down with fine grave eyes on the filthy peasant women lifting up their children to kiss the feet of the dead Christ. I have paused in the Strada Quercia opposite the Gesù Nuovo, once, as I have said before, the palace of the San Severini, Princes of Salerno. It was on that fine doorway that the Prince affixed the inscription "An old sparrow does not enter into the cage," as he stood beneath his ancestral gateway listening for the mule team with its jingling bells which gave him his chance of life and safety. Perhaps he waited under this old archway till he saw the beasts with high-piled burdens coming up this way from the Mercato, and slipped in silently among the swarthy knaves who led them, and so forth from the city and away to France, where he hatched a scheme of vengeance which destroyed the King, his enemy. The tinkling of those mule-bells as they went up this narrow street in the night fell on no ears that heeded them, yet in truth and earnest they were ringing the dirge of the House of Aragon. The interior of the Gesù is among those which arouse the citizens of Naples to enthusiasm. It is not without grandeur, but over-decorated, and on my mind it leaves but little sense of pleasure. But from this archway where I stand I can see a church far older and more interesting, one indeed which yields in fame to none in Naples. It is Santa Chiara, whose dignified façade rears itself with twin towers in the cool shadow of the courtyard, a name famous not only in the ecclesiastical history of Naples, but in the legal also, having given its title to a great body of state councillors which once met here. It was the royal chapel of King Robert the Wise, third among the monarchs of his house, and the only prosperous one out of the whole number, though even he was pursued by sorrows, and by remorse too, unless the constant suspicions of the centuries have erred. For the tale goes that Robert knew better than any other the cause of that sudden illness which carried off his elder brother, Charles Martel, King of Hungary, when, towards the close of their father's life, he came to Naples to arrange for the succession. Stories of mediæval poisonings are to be received with caution. No man who glances round Naples to-day, swept and garnished as it has been by advancing science, will find it hard to understand how swiftly disease may--nay, must have struck in those crowded dirty streets six centuries ago. Yet Robert was believed to have seized the throne by fratricide. This Church of Santa Chiara was his atonement for the crime, and by its high altar he sleeps for ever, robed as a monk and throned as a king, beneath a monument of rare beauty, on which Petrarch wrote the jingling epitaph, "Cernite Robertum, regem virtute refertum." "Chock full of virtue." Such was Petrarch's judgment on King Robert dead, and doubtless he believed it, for the King's Court was splendid, poets and scholars were held in honour, and Florentines especially. Innocent or guilty, Robert ruled with a magnificence which makes his reign the one bright spot in the troubled history of the Anjou sovereigns; and posterity, which has little good to say of any of them, remembers gratefully that he procured the laurel crown for Petrarch, and gave his protection to that rake Boccaccio. Let us go in and see his church. It is rectangular, and has no aisles, while a long range of chapels upon either hand recall irresistibly the quirk recorded of King Robert's son, when his father, proud of the progress which the church was making, brought him in to admire its fair proportions. The graceless lad gazed round, and it struck him that the chapels were not unlike so many mangers. So when the King pressed him for his opinion he remarked airily that the church reminded him of a stable, whereupon the King said angrily, "God grant, my son, that you be not the first to eat in those stalls!" It was a prophetic speech, and one which must have returned many times on the King's memory, for the historian Giannone assures us that the first train of royal mourners who entered the new church were following the coffin of this very lad, King Robert's firstborn, and the hope of the realm. The chief artist selected to adorn Santa Chiara with frescoes was no other than the great Florentine, Giotto. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto! How the best brains of Tuscany flocked to Naples in those days! The explanation of it was, apart from the natural attractions of a splendid Court, that when Charles of Anjou defeated and slew Manfred, he cast down by that act, and ruined throughout Italy, the party of Ghibellines, the Emperor's men, of whom Manfred, son of a great emperor, was naturally head. The Guelfs, the Pope's men, returned to Florence, whence they had been banished, and straightway the closest ties sprang up between the city on the Arno and the city of the Siren, so close that the money-bags of Florence saved Charles from ruin at least once. So Tuscan poets and artists making the weary ten days' journey were assured that on the shores of the blue gulf they would find compatriots. Giotto came most gladly, and in the chapels of Santa Chiara he painted many scenes of Bible story, all of which were daubed over with whitewash by order of a Spanish officer a century and a half ago. He complained that they made the church dark. There is indeed one fresco left in the old refectory, now a shop. But Crowe and Cavalcaselle do not accept it as the work of the same hand. So here, in the large, cool church, Giotto painted for many a day, alternating his labours perhaps with visits to Castel dell'Uovo, where he painted the chapel, now a smoky, useful kitchen! King Robert loved the man, so shrewd and cogent was his talk, and often came to chat with him in one place or the other. "If I were you, Giotto, I should stop painting now it is so hot," observed the King. "So should I, if I were you," returned the artist dryly. And one day, wishing perhaps to warn Robert by how frail a tenure he held his throne, he painted an ass stooping under one pack saddle and looking greedily towards another lying at his feet. Both saddles were adorned with crowns, and the explanation was that the ass typified the Neapolitans, who thought any other saddle better than the one they bore. The most beautiful works of art in Santa Chiara, if not indeed in the whole city, are the eleven small reliefs which run as a frieze along the organ gallery. The scenes are from the life of St. Katherine, martyr as well as saint. Dignified and tender, wrought with the rarest delicacy, yet inspired with astonishing vigour, the graceful figures are in white relief upon a ground of black. Very memorable and lovely they appear, rebuking the corrupt taste which has begotten so much base ornament in Naples. Next to this frieze the interest of Santa Chiara lies in its monuments, for in this Royal Chapel of Anjou many children of that house were buried. The King himself assumed the frock of a Franciscan monk before his death, craving for a peace which he did not find upon his throne, and lies recumbent therefore, attired humbly in his habit, while on a higher story of the monument he sits enthroned in all his earthly splendour, gazing down upon his church with those keen features which were characteristic of his house, the thin hooked nose, not unlike a vulture's beak, so strangely like that which one sees on the coins of his grandfather, murderer of Conradin. Uneasy were the lives of all the monarchs of that house; their throne was set in blood, and in blood it was perpetually slipping. I left Santa Chiara by the northern door, which opens on a handsome double staircase descending to the courtyard. In this wide space there is fine shadow, and, by contrast with the noisy street outside, the square is almost silent--a wondrous thing in Naples! Across the court, beside the archway by which I entered, rises the noble campanile, once planned on Gothic lines, but interrupted by the death of King Robert, and finished two centuries and a half later by an architect who transformed it into the classic style. There are mean houses all around, occupied by people who care not one jot for King Robert or his lost design. Down the incline of the courtyard, where Boccaccio may well have whispered guilty secrets to his Anjou princess, there loafs a hawker with his donkey, his head thrown back, his brown hat tilted picturesquely, bawling with iron throat the praises of his leeks and cabbages, while the donkey creeps on cautiously over the broken stones. In the Neapolitan speech he is the "padulano"--the man who comes from the swamp, by which is meant the low plain of the Sebeto, that muddy river which the railway to Castellammare crosses on the outskirts of the city. On this marshy ground grow quantities of early vegetables, and these it is which the padulano goes vaunting in his brazen voice. He needs his strength of lung, for see! on the highest story a woman has heard his bawling and comes out upon her balcony. At that height they do not bargain in words, but in signs, the universal language of the people. A few rapid passes of the hands and the business is done. The woman lets down a basket by a rope; a few soldi are jingling in the bottom; the basket goes up packed with green stuff, and the padulano loafs on beside his patient donkey. It is in these crowded quarters of the ancient city, these streets through which the noisy, swarthy, dirty people were seething just as they are now when Pompeii was a peopled town and the hawkers went up and down the streets of Herculaneum,--it is here that one can grasp most easily those peculiarities which fence off life in southern Italy from that of other regions in the peninsula. Here is neither the dignity of Rome nor the gracious charm of Tuscany, but another world, a life more hot and passionate, more noisy and more sensuous, a character strangely blended out of the blood of many nations--Greek, Saracen, Norman, Spaniard--each of which contributed some burning drop to the quick glow of the Campanian nature, making it both fierce and languid, keen and subtle beyond measure when its interests are engaged, capable of labour, but not loving it, easily depressed, and when thwarted turning swiftly to the thought of blood. Here is difficult material for the statesman. Never yet, in all its vicissitudes of government, have these volcanic, elemental passions been concentrated on any one great object. In the War of Independence Milan had its "Cinque Giorni"; Venice, led by Manin, struck a glorious blow at the oppressor; but Naples effected nothing till Garibaldi came with armies from without. How the street swarms with curious figures! I stand aside in the opening of a side lane, and there goes past me a man carrying in one hand a pail of steaming water, while on his other arm he has a flat basket, containing the sliced feelers of an octopus, and a tray of rusks. At the low price of a soldo you may choose your own portion of the hideous dainty, warm it in the water and devour it on the spot. Close upon his heels, bawling out his contribution to the deafening noises of the streets, comes the "pizzajuolo," purveyor of a dainty which for centuries has been unknown elsewhere. "Pizza" may be seen in every street in Naples. It is a kind of biscuit, crisp and flavoured with cheese, recognisable at a glance by the little fish, like whitebait, which are embedded in its brown surface, dusted over with green chopped herbs. I cannot recommend the dainty from personal knowledge, but Neapolitan tradition is strongly in its favour. The pizzajuolo goes off chanting down a sideway, and I, moving on a little, still away from the Toledo and towards the older quarter of the town, find that the street has widened out into a small square, the Largo San Domenico, on the left of which stands the famous Church of San Domenico Maggiore, second in beauty to none in Naples, and perhaps less spoilt than many others by the hand of the restorer. The bronze statue of the saint stands on a pillar in the square, looking down on the palaces which were once the homes of Neapolitan nobles, dwelling gladly in this centre point of the great city. Neither cavaliers nor ladies live here now. The world of trade and civic institutions has slipped into their abandoned palaces, and enjoys the spacious rooms and frescoed ceilings which were designed for the splendour of great entertainments. On the southern side of the Largo, sloping towards the sea, runs the Via Mezzocannone, which, if antiquaries are to be believed, was the ditch skirting the city wall upon the western side in Greco-Roman days. It is a lane worth following, though narrow and somewhat fetid, for by it one may reach not only a certain very ancient fountain, the Fontana Mezzocannone, which is of itself worth seeing, but also the Church of San Giovanni Pappacoda, and by careful search may even find the bas-relief of Niccolo Pesce, of whom I spoke at length in a former chapter. But my course is eastwards. I turn up the steps, and enter the Church of San Domenico Maggiore by a door admitting to its southern transept. The cool and silent chapel into which one steps is the most ancient part of the church, massive and severe. The first glance reveals that the building must have been in a high degree esteemed a place of sepulture. The tombs are very numerous, and names of mark in the history of Naples appear on every side. Through the vaulted doorway leading to the main body of the church there stream long rolling melodies, the crash of a fine organ played triumphantly, and the grand music of a pure tenor voice, ringing high among the arches. The church is full of kneeling figures, among which others stroll about with little care for their devotions; while children, infinitely dirty, waddle up and down untended, as if the show were for their amusement only. The chanting ceases, and the priests in their gorgeous vestments stream down the altar steps towards the sacristy. I have come at an unlucky moment! The sacristy at least will be closed till the priests have done unrobing! But no! The hawk-eyed sacristan has marked down the stranger, and hurries up obsequious and eager to detain me. I cannot think of leaving without seeing the most interesting sight in Naples--the coffins? "Si, sicuro! The very sarcophagi of all the princes of the House of Aragon." "But they are in the sacristy," I object, "and that is full of priests unrobing!" "Oh, you English, you odd people," hints the sacristan, with a shrug. "What does that matter?" If he does not care, why should I? And in another moment we are in the sacristy. Clearly the sacristan knew his ground, and has committed no breach of manners; for among the crowd of ecclesiastics, young and old, which fills the long panelled chamber, some jovial, some ascetic, many chatting pleasantly, others resting on long seats, not one betrays the least surprise at the intrusion of a tourist bent on sightseeing. High dignitaries, arrayed like Solomon in his glory, make way courteously as the sacristan draws me forward, and standing in the centre of the vast apartment points out that the panelling ceases at half the height of the walls, leaving a kind of shelf, on which lie, shrouded in red velvet, to the number of five-and-forty, the coffins of the family of Aragon, and the chief adherents of their house. Here, taking what rest remorse allows him, is that Ferdinand who trapped the barons in Castel Nuovo. His son Alfonso, who shared in that and other infamies, is not here. He lies in Sicily, whither he fled at the bidding of the furies who pursued him. But close by is his son, the young King Ferdinand, whose chance of redeeming the fame of his house was lost by death. And here is that luckless Isabella, Duchess of Milan and of Bari, whose husband, Duke Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza, was robbed of throne and life by his uncle Ludovic the Moor, the man who, more than any other, was accountable for all the woes and slavery of Italy. What bitter tragedies were closed when the scarlet palls were flung over those old coffins! Here, too, is the dust of the base scoundrel Pescara, archetype of treachery for all ages, at least of public treachery. In private life his heart may have been true enough, else how could his wife Vittoria Colonna have loved and mourned him as she did? It is no new sight to see a woman lay great love at the feet of a man who, on one view, is quite unworthy of it. Her knowledge is the wider, and the account as she cast it may be the truer. Why need we be puzzled that we cannot make our balance agree with hers? How is it possible that we should? On leaving San Domenico Maggiore, my desire is to pass into the Strada Tribunali, the largest and most important of the three streets which still cleave the city as they did in ancient days. The cross ways turning up by San Domenico are devious and narrow, evil alleys darkened sometimes by the high dead wall of a church or convent, at others bristling with life, from the foul "bassi," the cellars which are the despair of Neapolitan reformers, where ragged women crouch over a chafing-dish of bronze, their only fire, and all the refuse is flung out in the gutter, up to the high garrets where the week's wash is hung out on a pole to dry. Not the freshest wind which blows across the sea from Ischia can bring sweetness to these alleys, or expel the wandering fever which on small inducement blazes to an epidemic and slays ruthlessly. There were high hopes of Naples when the "risanamento" was begun, that great scheme of clearance which was to let in fresh air and sunshine among the rookeries. But already the new tenements begin to be as crowded and as filthy as the old ones, and the better era is soiled at its very outset. One cannot make a people clean against its will. And then the sunshine! Week after week it is a curse in Naples. The old narrow streets made shadow, the new wide ones do not. Who knows whether the city will escape more lightly when the next epidemic comes? God grant it may! For the days of cholera in 1884 were more awful than one cares to think about. Among these devious lanes lies the Chapel of San Severo, a shrine which everyone should visit, but one concerning which I have nothing to say that is not set forth in the guide-books. Had it been the Church of San Severo and San Sosio indeed, I could have told a grisly tale of poisonings; but that lies far down towards the harbour and we shall not pass it. At length I emerge in the narrow Street of Tribunals, and turning eastwards behold it running straight and crowded further than the eye will reach, a wilderness of bustling figures, a maze of balconies and garrets, bright shops high piled with fruit and vegetables, and butchers' stalls dressed with green boughs to keep off the flies. At a corner stands the booth of a lemonade seller, one of the most picturesque of all street merchants in this busy city. His golden fruit is heaped up underneath a canopy which shades it from the sun. Brown water-jars are reared among the fruit and a jet of water sparkling up sheds a cool dewy spray over oranges and lemons, dripping off their dark green leaves like dew. Many a passer-by stops to look at the pretty sight, and the vendor's tongue is never still, "A quatto, a cinque, a sei a sordo, 'e purtualle 'e Palermo." In another month or two his stall will be far gayer, for the figs and melons will come in, and the "mellonaro" will pass the day in shouting "Castiellamare! che maraviglia! so' di Castiellamare! mellune verace! cu' 'no sordo vevo e me lavo 'a faccia!" With a water-melon one may drink and wash one's face at once! Who has not seen the street urchins gnawing at a slice of crimson melon, while the water streams out from among the black seeds, and does in truth make streaks of cleanliness at least upon their faces; for not the widest mouth can catch all the dripping juice. In this ancient street one is at the heart of Naples. This strong pulse of life, this eager, abounding vitality has throbbed along this thoroughfare for more ages than one can count; and the sight on which we look to-day, the seething crowd, the straight house-fronts, the long street dropping to the east, is different in no essential from that which has been seen by every ruler of the city--Spaniard, Angevin, or Norman, yes, even by Greek and Roman governors--from days when the fires of Vesuvius were a forgotten terror, and the streets of Pompeii surged with just such another crowd as this. It is here, in this most ancient Strada Tribunali, that the traveller should pause before he visits the old buried cities. Here and here only will he learn to comprehend how they were peopled; and only when he carries with him in the eyes of memory the aspect of the cellars and the shops, the crowded side streets and the pandemonium of noise, will he succeed in discovering at Pompeii more than a heap of ruins, out of which the interest dies quickly because his imagination has not gained materials out of which to reconstruct the living city. Neapolis, the old Greek city, was similar to Pompeii both in size and construction. Its situation, too, was not dissimilar. It stood near the sea, yet did not touch it, having a clear space of open ground between its strand and walls, perhaps because the sea was an open gateway into every town which stood upon it, though the nature of the ground partly dictated the arrangement. There is no building, even in the Strada Tribunali, which was standing when Pompeii was a city. The oldest left is near the point at which we entered the street--to be exact, it is at the angle of the Strada Tribunali and the Vico di Francesco del Giudice--a tall brick campanile of graceful outline which, in the confusion of the narrow street, one might most easily pass unobserved. That is the only portion still remaining of the church built by Bishop Pomponio, between the years 514 and 532; and not only is it almost, if not quite the most ancient building now extant in Naples, but it was the first of Neapolitan churches known to have been dedicated to the Virgin, and it is thus especially sacred in the eyes of the citizens. Going eastwards still along this most interesting street I come ere long to a great church upon my right where I must pause, for there are associated with it closely the memories both of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Now of these two men I confess to a strong preference for the rake. He was a sinner, and a great one. But for that matter he was a penitent in the end, and had he not found grace, it is for no man to scorn him. Iniquitous though they be, I prefer the record of his warm human passions to the dry spirituality of Petrarch; and to me one tale out of the _Decameron_, with its high beat of joyous and exultant life, is worth all the sonnets in which the poet of Avignon bewailed the fact that the moon would not come down out of heaven. No one who has turned over the works of Boccaccio is unacquainted with the name of Fiammetta. She was of course not least among the seven ladies of noble birth who met in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence on that Tuesday morning when the tales of the _Decameron_ begin. She, too, it was whose amorous musings Boccaccio published in a book which bore her name. In fact her warm-blooded personality pervades the writings of her lover; and it was in this Church of San Lorenzo that he saw her first, as he tells us himself in the _Filocopo_. The passage is well known to be autobiographical, though occurring in a tale of pure, or rather impure imagination. "I found myself," he says, "in a fine church of Naples, named after him who endured to be offered as a sacrifice upon the gridiron. And in it there was a singing compact of sweetest melody. I was listening to the Holy Mass celebrated by a priest, successor to him who first girt himself humbly with the cord, exalting poverty and adopting it. Now while I stood there, the fourth hour of the day, according to my reckoning, having already passed down the Eastern sky, there appeared to my eyes the wondrous beauty of a young woman, come hither to hear what I too heard attentively. I had no sooner seen her than my heart began to throb so strongly that I felt it in my slightest pulses; and not knowing why, nor yet perceiving what had happened, I began to say, 'Oimè, what is this?'... But at length, being unable to sate myself with gazing, I said, 'Oh, Love, most noble lord, whose strength not even the gods were able to resist, I thank thee for setting happiness before my eyes!'... I had no sooner said these words than the flashing eyes of the lovely lady fixed themselves on mine with a piercing light." There was sin in that look, though not perhaps by the standard of those days. It was an Anjou princess who won immortality in the Church of San Lorenzo on that Holy Thursday when she was dreaming of nothing but a lover--perhaps not even of so much as that. She was the Princess Maria, natural daughter of King Robert the Wise, he whose tomb we saw in the Church of Santa Chiara. She had a husband; but no one asks or remembers his name. It is with Boccaccio that her memory is linked for evermore. She was certainly of rare beauty. Her lover, than whom no man ever wrote more delicately, tries to fix it for all time. "Hair so blonde that the world holds nothing like it shadows a white forehead of noble width, beneath which are the curves of two black and most slender eyebrows ... and under these two wandering and roguish eyes ... cheeks of no other colour than milk." Item two lips, indifferent red! Why, what a shiver it gives one to realise that not Boccaccio himself can convey to us any real picture of his love! Even the magic of his style, informed by all the passion of his burning heart, can give us nothing better than a catalogue of charms such as any village lover of to-day might write! The dead are dead; and no wizard can set them before us as they lived. Yet granting that, it is still the spirits of these lovers which haunt the Church of San Lorenzo, filling the large old temple with a throb of human passion to this hour. I saunter round endeavouring to fix my mind on the details of the architecture, which are worth more notice than they commonly receive from all save students. But it is useless. Every time I raise my eyes I seem to see the subtle radiance of sympathy flash across the church from the eyes of the princess, stirring strange, uneasy feelings, born of young hot blood, and the sensuous essence of the chanting heard in the restless days of spring. The architecture may wait the coming of some cooler head. I stroll out into the courtyard, full of memories of kings and poets and of Anjou Courts, when the world was splendid, and life was full of colour, and the city not more unhappy than it is to-day. Among the letters of Petrarch is one written from the monastery attached to this church. The poet lodged there during a visit to Naples in 1342, after the death of King Robert, and gives a vivid description of a great hurricane which struck the city on the 25th of November in that year. The storm had been predicted by a preacher, whose denunciation struck such terror into the Neapolitans, easily stirred to religious apprehensions, that ere dark a troop of women stripped half naked and clasping their children to their breasts were rushing through the streets from church to church, flinging themselves prostrate before the altars, bathing the sacred images with tears, and crying aloud to the Saviour to have mercy on mankind. The panic spread from house to house. The city was alive with fear. Petrarch, not untroubled by the general consternation, went early to his chamber, and remained at his window till near midnight watching the moon sail down a ragged angry sky until her light was blotted out by the hills, and all the dome of heaven lay black. "I was just falling asleep," he says, "when I was rudely awakened by the horrible noise made by the windows of my room. The very wall rocked to its foundation under the buffet of the gust. My lamp, which burns all night, went out; in place of sleep the fear of death came into the chamber. Every soul in the monastery rose, and those who found each other in the turmoil of the night, exhorted one another to meet death bravely. "The monks who had been astir thus early for chanting Matins, terrified by the trembling of the earth, came to my room brandishing crosses and relics of the saints. At their head strode a prior named David, a saint indeed, and the sight of them gave us a little courage. We all descended to the church, which we found full of people, and there passed the rest of the night, expecting every moment that the city would be swallowed up, as foretold by the preacher. "It would be impossible to depict the horror of that night in which all the elements seemed to be unchained. Nothing can describe the appalling crash of the storm wind, rain and thunder in one moment, the roar of the furious sea, the swaying of the ground, the shrieks of the people, who thought death here at every instant. Never was night so long. As soon as day came near the altars were made ready, and the priests attired themselves for Mass. At last the morning came. The upper part of the town had grown more calm, but from the seafront came frightful shrieks. Our fear turned into boldness, and we mounted on horseback, curious to see what was going on. "Gods! What a scene! Ships had been wrecked in the harbour, and the shore was strewn with still breathing bodies, horribly mangled by being dashed against the rocks--the sea had burst the bounds which God set for it--all the lower town was under water. It was impossible to enter the streets without risk of drowning. Around us we found more than a thousand Neapolitan gentlemen who had come to assist, as it were at the obsequies of their country. 'If I die,' I said to myself, 'I shall die in good company.'" If we may trust the story told by Wading, a great historical authority upon the deeds of the Franciscan Order, to which the monks of San Lorenzo belonged, this same prior David, whose aspect Petrarch found so comforting, was the instrument of a notable miracle on this occasion, having kept the impious sea out of at least some part of the city by boldly thrusting the relics of the saints in its track. Petrarch does not mention this, and indeed if Prior David could do so much he is to blame for not having done more, since he might as easily have prevented all the damage done while he was chanting in his church. As for Petrarch, the storm impressed him so deeply that he told Cardinal Colonna he had resolved never to go afloat again, even at the Pope's bidding. "I will leave the air to birds, and the sea to fishes," he observed very sagely; "I know that learned men say there is no more danger on sea than on land, but I prefer to render up my life where I received it. That is a good saying of the ancient writer, 'He who suffers shipwreck a second time has no right to blame Neptune.'" Are we not growing a little tired of churches? There are so many in this city, and in the next chapter I shall have to dwell long upon the Carmine, or rather on its manifold associations. Well, no great harm will be done if we pass by a good many of these temples; but one must not be left unmentioned, namely the cathedral, which we have almost reached. A few yards from San Lorenzo, the Strada del Duomo cuts across the old Decumanus Major at right angles, and if we descend it a little way towards the sea we have before us the fine front of the cathedral. It will be expected of me here that in lieu of copying from Gsell-Fels all the interesting facts about the date of the building, describing the ancient fane of Santa Restituta which has already witnessed fourteen centuries, or detailing the arrangement of the chapels where so much of the noblest ever born in Naples lies mouldering into dust,--it is expected of me, I suppose, that I shall repeat once more the oft-told tale of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, that miracle and portent which brings luck to the city if it happens speedily, and is a presage of woe when it is delayed. We have heard the story all our lives. But no book on Naples is complete without it, and I will therefore take the description by Fucini, which has at any rate the advantage of being little known in England, to which I may add that it is the work of one who might very truly say what he did not know of Naples, at least in his own day, was not knowledge. "In the church," says Fucini, "the crowd was dense. Around the altar crowded pilgrims, male and female, shouting, laughing, weeping, chewing prayers and oranges.... In the midst of deep silence begins the moving function. The officiating priest holding up to the people the vase, not unlike a carriage lamp, inspects it carefully, and beginning to twirl it in his hands, cries out with a stentorian voice, 'It is hard, the blood is hard!' At that fatal announcement the people break out into cries most pitiful. The pilgrims weep, some even are like to faint. The saint is slow. The miracle delays, the cries and tears redouble. A group of peasant women who stand near me pour out these prayers, 'Faccela, faccela, la grazia, San Gennarino mio bello!' And if the priest still shook his head they broke out again, 'It is hard! O, quanto ci mette stamattina, San Gennarino mio benedetto. Ah faccela, faccela, questa divina grazia, faccela, faccela, San Gennarino bello, bello, bello!' "The pilgrims went on chanting, the people crowded round the chapel. In the nave a powerful preacher was relating the life and glories of the saint. The noise of voices rose or fell as the priest signified that the commencement of the miracle was still far off, or gave hopes of its speedy consummation. "At last, when the suspense had lasted nine-and-twenty minutes, we saw the priests and those spectators who were nearest to them fix their eyes more intently on the vase, with beckonings and signs, as if to say, 'Perhaps--a minute more--I almost think--who knows?' Then followed a moment of great anxiety, a short interval of silence, broken only by sobs and stifled sighs. The emotion spread, tearful faces and trembling hands undulated in a kneeling crowd. Then suddenly all arms were flung in air, all hands were clapped, the priest waved a white veil joyfully, and like the outbursts of a hurricane the organs pealed out in crashing harmonies, the bells clanged and clamoured through the air, and the high roof of the cathedral rang with the triumph of the voices of the vast crowd chanting the Ambrosian hymn." If the Duomo had no other interest, the emotion of this oft-repeated scene would create a fascination to which everyone must yield. But it teems with interest. It abounds in relics out of every age of Naples. I cannot convey its charm to any other man. For me the church is full of presences and shadows of the past, kings and cardinals, noble gentlemen and lovely ladies, hopes and aspirations, and feverish ambitions mouldering together beneath marble cenotaphs and stately wealth of gilding and of fresco. I stand before the monument of Innocent the Fourth, he who had no other word than "adder" to bestow on the great emperor whom he opposed and crushed; and straightway all the tragedy of that terrific strife absorbs my memory, and I am devoured by pity for the fair land of Italy which became the battlefield of two such powers, and which by the victory of the Church and the ruin of the Empire lost a family of rulers more apt for the creation of her happiness than any which has governed the Peninsula from the destruction of the Goths until our own day. To one who looks back across the years, desiring more the welfare of this queen among the lands than the triumph of any principle, it seems a base deed that was wrought by this fine-featured old man, lying here so peacefully in the contemplation of the centuries, his judges. One wonders if he ever saw as we do the rare and precious value of the thing he was destroying, whether the true nobility of Frederick, his culture, his wide humanity, his strong firm government were really worse than nothing in the judgment of the active brain which throbbed beneath that placid brow. The ruin of the Empire, the concentration of all power in the papacy, the expulsion of the Emperor and all his brood from Italy, it was nothing less than this that Innocent contrived. Not the great Hildebrand himself, whose tomb we shall visit at Salerno, did more service to the Church. The pity is that one should find it so hard to see how that service helped mankind, to whom no consequences seem to have come that were not dire and woeful. But whether good or evil, it was great. There was nothing paltry about Innocent. He was not of double heart. He found a great thing to do, and did it with all his might. In this world of futilities that is much, and very much, perhaps all that can be asked of man with his dim vision. The consequences must be left unto the care of those who see them. CHAPTER VIII A GREAT CHURCH AND TWO VERY NOBLE TRAGEDIES There can be no question that the interest of Naples deepens as one goes through the ancient quarter in the direction of the east. In modern times the centre of the city is on the western side, but of old it was not so. Castel Nuovo stood outside the city among groves and gardens. The further one goes back in history, the more frequently the court is found at Castel Capuano, which fronts the bottom of this most picturesque of streets by which we have come almost the whole distance from the Via Roma. In an irregular space, shapeless and crowded with stalls and booths, stands the ancient fortress, long since rebuilt and handed over to the law. The very name of the street in whose narrow entrance we still stand recalls the tribunals. They were all brought together in this castle by Don Pietro di Toledo, that active viceroy who stamped his memory on so many parts of Naples. But there was a place of judgment on this ground long before his day; and the thing is worth mention. Opposite the gate of the castle, and within a stone's-throw of the spot on which we have halted, stood in former days a pillar of white marble on a squared base of stone. It marked the ground on which debtors were compelled to declare their absolute insolvency. The wretched men were stripped stark naked in proof of their inability to pay, and stood there exposed to the insults of their creditors. This custom, which existed in many Italian towns, was doubtless of great antiquity. The pillar was taken down in 1856, and is now in the museum of San Martino. The people called it "La Colonna della Vicaria." Similarly the Castel Capuano is spoken of as "La Vicaria," a name which gained a frightful notoriety in the days of the last Bourbon kings, by reason of the barbarity of the treatment shown to political prisoners confined there, and the infamous condition of the dens in which innocent and cultured gentlemen were shut up. So many streets radiate from the Largo della Vicaria that numberless streams of passengers unite and separate there, while all day long a market goes on beneath the walls of the Place of Lamentations whose secrets Mr. Gladstone laid bare before the eyes of Europe. Nothing rich or rare or curious is sold. Old keys, rusty padlocks, shapeless lumps of battered iron, cheap hats and tawdry bedsteads, with the inevitable apparatus of the lemonade seller, brown jars, golden fruit, and dark green leaves, all dripping in the shade--such are the wares set out to attract the seething crowd which saunters to and fro. If the truth must be confessed the crowd looks villainous. The Neapolitans of the lower classes have not as a rule engaging faces. They are keen and often humorous, intensely eager and alive, eyes and lips responsive to the quickest flashes of emotion. But candid or inviting trust they are not; and as many scowls as smiles are to be seen on the faces of old or young alike. They have their virtues, it is true. They have boundless family affection. When misfortune strikes their friends, they are helpful even to self-sacrifice. They respect the old profoundly, and serve or tend them willingly. They are industrious and very patient in their poverty, devout towards the Church, especially to the Madonna, who from time to time writes them a letter, which sells in the streets faster even than the "pizza." There is perhaps in these and other qualities the foundation of a character which may some day place Naples high among the cities of the world; but before that day dawns, many things will have to be both learnt and unlearnt. In this region of the Porta Capuana one sees the people in what Charles Lamb would have called its quiddity. There are low taverns in the house-fronts, haunts of the Camorra and the vilest of the poor. Each has its few chairs set out upon the pavement, and its large shady room inside, with great casks standing in the background. Here and there a barber hovers in his doorway, chatting with a neighbour. At morn and even the tinkling bell announces the coming of the goats, and children hurry out with tumblers to the wayside where the bleating herd is stopped and milked as custom goes, while all day long the steps of Santa Catarina a Formello are crowded with dirty women sitting in the shade. High against the church towers the great archway of the Porta Capuana, a fit gateway for the approach of kings. What pageants it has seen! The great Emperor Charles the Fifth rode in beneath it on his return from the Tunis expedition, by which he drove out the corsair Barbarossa from the kingdom he had seized, freed no less than twenty thousand slaves, and dealt the pirates one of the few heavy blows ever levelled at their force by Europe until Lord Exmouth three hundred years later smoked out the hornets' nest at Algiers. The Castel Capuano did not stand directly on the street in those days when it was the home of kings. It had its gardens, which must almost have touched those of another royal palace, the Duchescha, of which all traces have been swallowed up by the growth of squalor which has claimed this region for its own. The gardens of the Duchescha were large and beautiful. It was the pleasure-house of Alfonso of Aragon, while yet he was Duke of Calabria, heir to the throne from which he fled in terror so short a time after he ascended it. It was no mere archæological musing which brought this blood-stained tyrant back to my memory, but rather the trivial inconvenience of being trundled roughly towards the gutter by a half-grown lad who was hurrying along the causeway with a bundle of pamphlets, one of which, thrust into a cleft stick, he was brandishing high in the air with an alluring placard announcing that it was to be had by anybody for the price of one soldo. I pursued the boy, caught him under the Porta Capuana, and bought his pamphlet. The miscellaneous literature of the Neapolitan streets is not as a rule of a kind that makes for righteousness, but my ear had caught the sound of the word "martiri," and I had been half expecting some sign of public interest in martyrs on this spot. The pamphlet gave a fairly accurate account of the massacre of Christians by the Turks who landed at Otranto in the heel of Italy in the year 1480. So old a tale has of course much interest for educated people still; but what, one asks in wonder, makes it worth while to hawk the story round the squalid streets surrounding the Vicaria, where it evidently commands a sale as brisk as if it were "Vendetta di Tigre" or any other highly peppered work about the social vices of the rich. The matter will become a little clearer if we push past the half-clad women who sit suckling babes on the steps of Santa Caterina a Formello, and go into that uninteresting church. At the altar rails a priest is preaching vehemently to a languid congregation, while in the empty nave four fat laughing children are toddling round the benches, playing games and calling to each other merrily. There are gaudy paintings and high silk curtains; but the only object that excites my interest is a printed card hung on the closed railings of the second chapel on the left of the nave, which appeals for "Elemosina pel culto dei bb, martiri di Otranto, dei quali 240 corpi si venerano sotto questo altare." Alms for the worship of the blessed martyrs of Otranto! So some of those twelve thousand who were put to the sword by the Turks in cold blood on a hillside near the city have been brought to this small church in Naples. But why? The answer doubtless is that the Duke of Calabria, who led the mingled hosts of Naples and of Europe against the Turks, brought back these bones as a religious trophy, and placed them in Santa Caterina because it lay near to his own palace. He may have been the more eager about the pious trophy since he brought no military ones. It was the death of the Turkish Sultan, not the sword of Alfonso, which drove the warriors of the Crescent out of Italy. It is thus clear why the boy was hawking his pamphlets outside Santa Caterina. But what gains a ready sale for them? Well, partly the strong clerical feeling among the lower orders of the Neapolitans, and partly the skill with which the priests play upon this feeling for political ends. I open the pamphlet, and in its second paragraph I find these words:-- "By this story we shall show that the Catholics are the real friends of the country, that the true martyrs are not found outside the Church, that Catholicism is the true glory of Italy, and that the great days worthy to be commemorated are not those of Milan, nor those of Brescia in 1848, nor those of Turin in 1864, but the days of Otranto in August, 1480. May the tribute which we pay to-day to our true martyrs atone for the frequent sacrilege of giving that name to felons--" No words could prove more clearly by what untraversable distance the Church of Rome is parted from all sympathy with the unity of Italy. That is why I have told this incident at length. I venture to say that in the length and breadth of Britain, where, if bravery is loved, right and justice are loved too, and felons are not exalted, there is scarce one man who can read the tale of the five days of Milan without feeling that there is one of the bright spots in the history of all mankind, one of those rare occasions when what is noblest leapt to the front, and a ray of true hope and sunshine fell on Italy. But in the eyes of the priests this light and glory were mere crime and darkness. Those who fought the Austrians were criminals. It is a hopeless difference of view, hopeless equally if sincere, and if not. I went on a little sick at heart, as any lover of Italy may well be when he contemplates the enmity of State and Church, and that Church the Papacy. If I were not so eager to reach the Carmine, I should certainly retrace my steps a little and go up the Strada Carbonara to the Church of San Giovanni Carbonara, which contains much that is interesting, and leads one straight to the tragic days of Queen Giovanna. But that age of lust and murder, that perplexed period of woe and strife, does not allure me when I have the Carmine almost in sight; and I turn away past the railway station, and down the Corso Garibaldi till I come to the round towers of the Porta Nolana, the only one of the old city gates which still serves its ancient purpose and recalls the days of fortification. Its twin towers are named "Faith" and "Hope," "Cara Fè" and "Speranza," and when one passes in betwixt those virtues one plunges into a throng which is as animated as the Strada Tribunali, and considerably dirtier. The life of the people in this Vico Sopramuro is elemental. It has but few conventions and disdains restraints. A tattered shirt, gaping to the waist, admits the free play of air round the bodies of boys and girls alike; the breeches or the gown which complete the costume recall the aspect of a stormy night sky when the rent clouds are scattered by the wind and the stars peep through. It is as well not to loiter among this engaging people. "The Neapolitans," said Von Räumer airily, "were invented before the fuss about the seven deadly sins." I have no wish to make a fuss about those or any other sins so long as they are practised upon other people, and I feel completely charitable to the human anthill when I emerge safe and sound in the wide square of the Mercato. In this wide market-place, this bare spot of open ground which to-day lies cumbered with iron bedsteads, and piled with empty cases, the débris of last market day, the bitterest tragedy of Naples was played out, and a scene enacted of which the infamy rang through all the world. There is no spot in the whole city less beautiful or more interesting than the Mercato; and in the hot afternoon, while the churches are closed, and half the city sits drowsy in the shady spots, I know no better way of passing time than in recalling some of the poignant memories which haunt this place of blood and tears. In an earlier chapter of this book, when I gave a rapid sketch of the succession of Hohenstaufen, Anjou, and Aragon to the throne of the Two Sicilies, I passed on without pausing on the story of the boy-king Corradino, little Conrad, as the Italians have always called him. It is time now to tell the tale, for it was on this spot that the lad was murdered. I need not go back on what I have already said so far as to repeat how Charles of Anjou defeated Manfred and slew him outside the walls of Benevento, nor how utterly the party of the Ghibellines, the Emperor's men, were cast down throughout Italy by that great triumph of the Guelf. When Manfred fell and his wife, Queen Helena, passed with her children into lifelong captivity, the House of Hohenstaufen was not extinct. There remained in Germany the true heir of Naples, a king with a better title than Manfred had possessed, Corradino, a boy of five, who grew up in the keeping of his mother, Elizabeth of Bavaria; and as year after year went by found his pride and fancy stimulated by many a tale of the rich heritage beyond the mountains which was his by every right, but was reft from him by an usurper, and lay groaning under the rule of an alien and an oppressor. Tales such as these must have had for the child all the fascination of a fairy story; but as his years increased, and he came to the comprehension of what wrong and injury meant, they touched him far more nearly, and all the courage of his high race, all the spirit which he derived from the blood of emperors and kings, urged him on to strike one stout blow at least for the recovery of that land which was his father's, that sunny kingdom where the blue sea kissed the very feet of the orange groves, and marble palaces gleamed out of the shade of gardens such as the boy had never seen except in dreams. His mother did her best to scatter these dreams, and bring him back to the plain prose of life. Italy, she said, had always sucked the blood and strength of the Hohenstaufen, and if she could, she would stop the drain ere it robbed her of her only child. But the task was too great for her. Not from Naples only, which was really full of nobles ready to revolt against the tyrant of Anjou and return to their old allegiance, but from a dozen other cities in northern Italy, where the Ghibellines waited for the coming of a leader, the growth of Conradin to manhood was watched impatiently; and when he was turned fifteen, strong, handsome, and kingly in every act, the hopes of his partisans could be restrained no longer. Pisa sent her embassies to bid him hasten. Verona, ancient home of the Ghibellines, assured him of support. Siena, Pavia, implored him to come and free his people. The task they said was easy, and the glory great. More than that, it was a righteous duty to resume what was his own. Many a burning tale of wrong committed by the French was poured into the lad's ears; and the end was that little Conrad broke away from his mother's prayers and tears, and crossed the Alps in the autumn of the year 1267 at the head of 10,000 men, being then fifteen, and by the universal consent of all who saw him both handsome in his person and by his breeding worthy to be the son of many kings. At first all went well with him. At Verona he was received with the honours of a conqueror. The mere news that his standard had been seen coming down from the high Alpine valleys drew the exiles of Ferrara, Bergamo, Brescia, and many another city in crowds to welcome him. Padua and Vicenza sent him greeting; and in January he moved on to Pisa, where the same joy awaited him. The Pisan fleet was of high power in those days, and it was sent at once to ravage the coasts of Apulia and Sicily, where it inflicted a sound drubbing on the French. Near Florence, too, Conradin's army gained a victory, and when he moved on to Rome, where Henry of Castile, who ruled the city in the absence of the Pope, had joined his party, the hopes of every Ghibelline in Italy were high and proud, while Charles of Anjou was seriously anxious for his throne. It was on the 18th of August of the year 1268 that Conradin left Rome. Charles expected him by the ordinary route of travellers which lies through Ceperano, San Germano, and Capua. That route was studded with fortresses and was easy to defend--for which sufficient reason Conradin did not take it. His aim was not to make for Naples by the shortest way, but rather to get through the mountains, if he could without a battle, and to raise Apulia, where he was certain of support, not only from the Saracens of Lucera, but from many other quarters also. So he struck off from Tivoli towards the high valleys of the Abruzzi, through which he found a way not only unguarded, but cool, well watered and fresh, considerations of vast moment to the leader of an army through southern Italy in August. It was the line of the ancient Roman road, the "Via Valeria," and he followed it until on the 22nd of August as his troops came down from the hills of Alba, debouching on the plain of Tagliacozzo, some five miles in front, they saw the lances of Anjou gleaming on the heights of Antrosciano, drawn up in a position which was too strong for attack. Conradin's army lay across the road to Tagliacozzo, offering battle to the king, who looked down upon the host of the invaders, and liked not what he saw. He had pressed on from Aquila, and was uneasy about the loyalty of that stronghold in his rear. Night fell; but before dusk hid the long line of foes upon the plain, Charles had seen an embassy ride into their ranks, and men said it came from Aquila, offering the town to Conradin. This was what Charles chiefly feared. He would trust no man but himself to learn the truth; and spurring his horse across plain and mountain through the night, he rode back headlong till he drew rein beneath the walls of Aquila, and shouted to the warder on the walls, "For what king are you?" Sharp and quick the answer came, "For King Charles"; and the King, reassured, rode back wearily towards his camp sleeping round the fires on the mountains. He slept long that night, notwithstanding the hazard which lay upon the cast of battle; and when at length he woke, the host of the invaders was already marshalled along the bank of the River Salto, which formed their front. Charles scanned their line, and his heart sank, so great was their multitude. In something like despair he turned for counsel to a famous warrior who had but just landed from Palestine, where he had won world-wide renown, Alard de St. Valery. The wary Frenchman did not question that the chances of the coming fight were against Anjou. "If you conquer," he said, "it must be by cunning rather than by strength." Charles allowed him to make those dispositions which he pleased; and thereupon St. Valery placed a strong force of lances, with the King himself at their head, in a hollow of the hills, where they could not be seen. Then he hurled against Conradin two successive attacks, both of which were repulsed with heavy loss. Charles wept with rage to see his knights so broken, and strove to break out to rescue them, but St. Valery held him back, and Conradin, seeing no more enemies, thought the battle won. His men unhelmed themselves. Some went to bathe in the cool river. Others, after the fashion of the day, plundered the fallen knights. One large body under Henry of Castile had pursued the fleeing French far over plain and mountain. All this St. Valery lay watching in dead silence from his hiding in the hollow of the hills. At last the moment came, and the serried ranks of the fresh warriors rode down upon their unarmed and unsuspecting enemies. No time was given to arm or form up the troops. Some perished in the water. Others died struggling bravely against the shock of that horrible surprise. The trap was perfect. All either died or fled; and in one brief hour Conradin, who had thought himself the conqueror of his father's throne, was fleeing for his life across the hills, a fugitive devoid of hope. Never, surely, was there so sudden or terrible a change of fortune. With Conradin fled Frederick of Baden, his close friend, not long before his playmate; and these two princely lads were accompanied by a few faithful followers, the last remnant of what so short a time before was a noble army. All that night they sped across the mountains in the direction of the coast, where they hoped to find some craft which would carry them to Pisa, a safe haven for them all. They struck the sea near Astura in the Pontine marshes. On the shore they found a little fishing boat; and having sought out the men who owned it, they offered large reward for the voyage up the coast. The fellows demurred that they must have provisions for the trip; and Conradin, taking a ring from his finger, gave it to one of them and told him to buy bread at the nearest place he could. It was a fatal imprudence. The sailor pledged the ring at a tavern in exchange for bread. The host saw the value of the jewel, and took it instantly to the lord of the castle near at hand. Now this noble was of the Frangipani family, on which honours had been heaped by the grandfather of the boy-king, thus cast up a fugitive and in peril of his life in his domain. The only gratitude which honour demanded of him was to let the lad pass by and escape in his own way; but even this was too much for Frangipani. He saw at once that the ring must belong to some man of mark escaping from the fight, and he bade his servants launch a boat, and bring back the fugitive whoever he might be. When Frangipani's boat overtook the other, Conradin was not much dismayed. He knew how greatly the Frangipani were indebted to his house, and he did not doubt they would show due gratitude. The poor lad did not know the world. Frangipani foresaw that no boon he could ask of Charles would be too great if he handed him his enemy; and thus not many days had passed when Conradin and Frederick were brought into Naples, and carried through the streets where they had hoped to ride as conquerors. Even Charles, bloodthirsty as he was, shrank from taking his prisoners' life without some legal warrant. It was so plain that they had played no part but that of gallant gentlemen, striking a blow for what was in fact their right, however much the Pope might question it, or assert his title to bestow the kingdom where he would. He convoked an assembly of jurists, but found only one among the number obsequious enough to tax Conradin or his followers with any crime. Thus driven back on his own murderous will as ultimate sanction for the act he meditated, Charles himself pronounced the death sentence on the whole number of his prisoners. On the 29th of October a scaffold was raised in the Mercato. The chronicles say that it was by the stream which ran past the Church of the Carmine, a humbler building than that which we see now, but standing on the same spot. They add also that it was near the sea, from which we may conclude that few, if any, houses parted the market-place from the beach in those days, and that the whole of the most exquisite coast-line of his father's kingdom stretched blue and fair before Conradin's eyes as he mounted the scaffold. Side by side with him came his true comrade, Frederick of Baden. The united ages of the boys scarce turned thirty. There was no nobler blood in Europe than theirs, and among the great crowd of citizens there were few who did not weep when they saw the fair-haired lads embrace each other beside the block. The demeanour of both was high and bold. Of Conradin, no less than of another king more than thrice his age, it can be said-- "He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene." [Illustration: NAPLES--THE CHURCH OF THE CARMINE] He turned to the people, and avowed he had defended his right. "Before God," he said, "I have earned death as a sinner, but not for this!" Then he flung his glove far out among the crowd, thus with his last defiant gesture handing on the right of vengeance and the succession of his kingdom to those who could wrestle for it with the French. The glove was caught up by a German knight, Heinrich von Waldburg, who did in fact convey it to Queen Constance of Aragon, last of the Hohenstaufen blood, of which bequest came many consequences. Having flung down his gage, Conradin was ready to depart. He kissed his comrades, took off his shirt, and then raising his eyes to heaven, said aloud, "Jesus Christ, Lord of all creation, king of honour, if this cup of sorrow may not pass by me, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." Then he knelt and laid down his head; but at the last moment earthly sorrows returned upon him, and starting half up he cried, "Oh, mother, what a sorrow I am making for you!" Having said this he spoke no more, but received the stroke. As it fell, Frederick of Baden gave a scream so pitiful that all men wept. A moment later he had travelled the same path, and the two lads were together once more. So died these brave German boys, and so perished the last hope of happiness for Naples. For if anything in history is sure, it is as clear as day that Naples never afterwards was ruled by kings so strong and just as those whose blood was shed in the Mercato on that October day. As for the slayer, he has left a name at which men spit. Six centuries already have execrated his memory. It may well be that sixty more will execrate it. Yet even while he lived he ate the bread of tears, and the day came when in the anguish of his heart he was heard to pray aloud that God who had raised him to such a height of fortune might cast him down by gentler steps. There are countless traditions connected with the death of Conradin. Men say that as his head fell an eagle swooped down from the sky, dipped its wing in the blood, and flew off again across the city. Another and more constant tale is that the poor boy's mother, when she heard of his captivity, gathered a great sum of money to ransom him, and came herself to Naples, but was too late, and landed in deep mourning from her ship, and came into the Church of the Carmine, poor and mean in those days, and gave the monks all the money she had brought to sing Masses for ever for her son's soul. These may be fables. But to pass to truth, it is a fact that in the year 1631, when the pavement of the Church of the Carmine was being lowered, a leaden coffin was found behind the high altar. The letters R. C. C. were roughly cut on it, and were interpreted to mean "Regis Corradini Corpus," the body of King Conradin. The coffin was opened. It contained the skeleton of a lad, the head severed and lying on the breast. There were some fragments of linen, which turned to dust immediately, and by the side lay a sword unsheathed, as bright and speckless as if it had but just come from the maker's hands. One would give much to know that the boy-king still slept there with his sword beside him, but when the coffin was next opened, at the wish of one of his own family in 1832, the sword had gone. The Church of the Carmine is, as I have said already, a vastly different building from that into which the body of Conradin was carried. Whether the tradition speaks truly of the benefaction of the unhappy mother or no, the fact remains that a splendid reconstruction of the church took place about that time. The origin of the church is curious. The records of the monks declare that towards the middle of the seventh century the hermits of the Mount Carmel, fleeing from the persecution of Saracens, came to Italy, some to one city, some to another. A handful of them rested at Naples, bringing with them an antique picture of the Madonna, said to have been painted by St. Luke, and established themselves in this spot close outside the city walls, near a hospital for sick sailors of which in later days they obtained the site. There they built a humble church, and either found or excavated a grotto underneath it, in which they placed their picture. The image became famous, and to this day is known amongst the people as "La Madonna della Grotticella," or more commonly as "La Bruna." Indeed there was no similitude of Our Lady of Sorrows in all south Italy which wrought more wondrous miracles or better earned her sanctity; and when the jubilee came round in the year 1500 the Neapolitans could think of no better deed than to take La Bruna out of her grotto and carry her in procession to Rome, which they did accordingly, and many were the marvels which she wrought upon the long journey through the mountains. But in Rome La Bruna was not well received by the Vicegerent of God. That intelligent and subtle man Rodrigo Borgia was Pope, and his equally keen-witted son Cæsar Borgia was in fact, though not in name, chief counsellor. Both had schemes for which much money was needed, and that money they looked to make out of the jubilee. They looked about them with their practical clear sight, and took note of the fact that La Bruna was very active, working miracles in fact on every side. Had the proceeds fallen into their pockets this would have been well, but as they did not it was ill. Madonnas from other cities must not come emptying the pockets of the pilgrims in that style, or what would be left for the Holy Father and the ex-Cardinal, his son? So La Bruna was packed off home, and the procession went back through the mountains. I should think the Madonna was glad enough to get out of the Roman stews of the Borgia days, and the Fathers who accompanied her had cause for thankfulness that they escaped without tasting those chalices with which the Pope and Cæsar removed all such as stood in their way. The wonders of the Carmine do not begin or end with La Bruna. There is another miraculous image in the church, a large figure of the dead Christ extended on the cross. Now in the year 1439, when the House of Anjou was tottering to its fall, sustained only by the feeble hands of René, last sovereign of his house, Alfonso of Aragon was besieging Naples, pounding the city without much care for considerations other than mere military ones. His brother, Don Pietro of Aragon, seems to have suspected that the Carmine was a sort of fort, and indeed its conspicuous steeple was used as a battery. Accordingly he turned his guns upon it, and a ball flew straight towards the head of our Lord, which lay back slightly raised as if communing with heaven. The ball carried away the crown of thorns, and would certainly have destroyed the head also of the sacred figure had it not bowed suddenly, as if it were alive, and let the shot go by. But the miracle did not end there. The ball, though having struck nothing but the light tracery of the crown of thorns, was checked in midair, hung there for an instant, and then dropped within the altar rails. This very striking miracle is famous yet in Naples. Brantôme records it, but in his careless way sets down the wonder as having happened in the days of Lautrec, and attributes it to a statue of the Madonna. King Alfonso when he took the city made a careful examination of the neck of the figure, to discover whether there were not some hidden mechanism, but found none, and became convinced that human agency had naught to do with it. From every point of view this Church of the Carmine is to me the most interesting of all Naples, not by reason of its architecture, though even that, as I suspect and guess, was beautiful before the hideous Barocco passion ruined it. Every nook and corner of it has been filled with vulgar and unmeaning ornament, so that the old graceful outlines are lost for ever. But it is for the abounding richness of its life, both past and present, that I visit it again and again. Standing in the poorest quarter of the city, within sight of the swarming population which crowds the streets and alleys around the Porta Nolana and the ancient rookeries which abut upon the Church of St. Eligio, endeared to the people by the miracles of which I have just spoken, there is no feast or saint's day on which the popolane do not visit it in thousands. I go to see it in its Easter glory. The wide vestibule is packed with women of the people, vilely dirty; and inside the church one can scarcely move through the swarming crowd, surging this way and that, now pressing forwards to the altar rails, where a priest is chanting in a loud monotone, now clustering thick about the image of the Madonna, holding on her knees the lifeless bleeding body of the Christ. The women press forward, kissing her robe with passion and holding up the babies to do the like. The chairs are packed with men staring vacantly before them, as if they wondered what had brought them there, and over the feverish bustle of the throng the fine grave figure of Conradin rises carved in snowy marble. The sanctity of this great and ancient church, its propinquity to the Mercato and to the teeming populations of the old alleys of the city, has made it in all ages a central point of that turbulent hot life which fills the history of Naples with tales of blood and terror. The associations of the place are infinite, and would in themselves fill a portly volume were they all set down with the detail which their rich interest demands. One tale there is which must be told in full, for its tragedy is too great to be forgotten, and has indeed rung round all the world. In the year 1647, when England was convulsed by civil war, Naples had lain for near a century and a half beneath the Spanish yoke, governed by viceroys, some good, others saturated with the greed and covetousness which have made the name of Proconsul odious since Verres drained the lifeblood out of Sicily. Naples was rich, but not rich enough for Spanish greed. The huge, unwieldy Spanish Empire began to fall on troublous days. The old rivalry with France was pressing hard on the statesmen of Madrid. Europe was unsettled, and war was constant. Fleets and armies are the most expensive toys of nations, and all viceroys were given to understand that the only road to royal favour was to remit more and still more money. Unhappily at Naples the effect of this hint on the Duke of Arcos, who then ruled in the palace often occupied by wiser men, was to set him angling in a well of which his predecessors had fished out the bottom. It was really very difficult to see how another penny could be got out of Naples, but nothing was more certain than that the penny must be found. So the Viceroy, having called a Parliament which met, after the custom of that time, in the convent attached to the Church of San Lorenzo, persuaded that august body to announce a fresh gabelle, to be levied on all the fruit brought into Naples. Nobody who has visited Naples in the summer, and noted the abounding plenty of the fruit stalls at every corner of the ancient streets--the ruddy grapes, the vast piles of blackening figs, the immense water melons, sliced so as to show their black seeds and their brimming juice, so cool and tempting when the August sun burns down upon the houses,--nobody who has seen how the Neapolitans feed on fruit throughout the scorching dogdays can doubt that to tax it must be dangerous. If the risk was not self-evident, there was example of it to be found in the memory of men then living. Not fifty years before the same expedient had resulted in riot. A prudent governor would have been warned; the more so as the people were already oppressed and sullen, restless and indignant under the unending exactions of the farmers of the taxes, and divided by the memory of many bitter outrages from the nobles of native birth who should have been their natural leaders and protectors. Naples was full of a sullen, dangerous temper; but those who were responsible for the safety of the city had not wit enough to understand its state. The gabelle on fruit was imposed early in the year; and on many days of spring, even before the burden of the tax was felt, crowds ran beside the Viceroy's coach demanding angrily that the duty should be repealed. As the warm days drew on, the angry temper rose. Every market day whipped it up to fever heat and set the people thinking of their miseries. It is said--and the thing is probable enough--that many days before the actual outbreak of revolt a rising was being planned by several agents, of whom one was a Carmelite monk. The day selected for its commencement was carefully chosen in such a manner as to secure the patronage and protection of the most popular Madonna of the crowded city; but before it came an accident precipitated the disturbance. It was the custom in those days to hold a kind of popular game in the Piazza del Mercato, a few days before the Festival of the Madonna of the Carmine. The ragged population chose a captain, under whom they attacked and stormed a wooden castle reared in the centre of the piazza. In this year the lot of the people had fallen on Tommaso Anello, who in their contracted and musical dialect was known as "Mas'aniello," a native of Amalfi, by origin, if not by birth, driven perhaps into the city by fear of the constant incursions of the Turks, which went near to depopulate the coasts from Salerno to Castellammare. By one account Mas'aniello was thirsting to revenge an insult offered to his wife by one of the collectors. Other writers assert that chance alone thrust him into the foremost position in what followed. On Sunday the 7th of July the Mercato was seething with life. Out of all the rookeries around the Porta Nolana, and behind the Church of Sant' Eligio, the people poured out intent on frolic. Festivity was in the air--that joyousness which in southern Italy is very apt to smear itself with blood ere night. The women crowded in and out of the churches. The bells chimed. From all the towns and villages on either side of Naples the peasant women had brought in their fruit, and the thirsty people bought it greedily. Among the crowd Mas'aniello and his army of ragamuffins were going up and down armed with canes; when suddenly there arose a loud and angry bawling, and everyone pressed forward to see what had happened. It was a dispute between the peasants who brought in the fruit and the keepers of the stalls who sold it. They could not agree which should bear the burden of the new tax. The people's magistrate was called in and decided in favour of the stall men; on which a fellow who had brought in figs from Pozzuoli flung down his baskets on the ground, and trampled on them in a fit of rage. The guard, insulted by the act, and still more by the words which accompanied it, seized the fellow and beat him. His cries gathered more and more people. So did the figs, which rolled about in every direction, while the boys scrambled for them, and some laughed, while others shouted angrily, "Take off the gabelle!" The guard tried to disperse the crowd; but scattering in one place, it reassembled in another. Soon sticks and stones began to fly--even the fruit upon the stalls was used for missiles. The guard gave way. The magistrate fled to the beach, with a gang of angry ruffians at his heels, and got off with difficulty in a boat; while Mas'aniello, reuniting his forces, led them against the office of the Gabelle in the Mercato, wrecked it, and burnt the books. By this time all the turbulence of the city was aroused; its suppressed passions had found a rallying point, and from every quarter there poured forth an army, ragged and dangerous, carrying for the most part no other weapons than sticks and stones, but roaring with a single voice for the abolition of the gabelle. Mas'aniello seized rapidly on these raw levies, ordered them into bands, and sent them in various directions through the city with orders to break down the stalls of the collectors wherever they found them; while he himself, at the head of a mighty crowd, marched up to the Toledo and down that famous street towards the palace of the Viceroy. That feeble ruler had come out upon the balcony of his palace to behold the sight. As far as he could see there stretched a forest of angry men and women, a sight most terrible and menacing in the eyes of any ruler. The Spaniard's inclination would have been to soothe and quiet them with pikes; but he had not men enough at his command, and so tried cooing at them, professing his immediate willingness to do everything they wished. It is uncertain what the result of this accommodating policy might have been if only the people could have heard him or would have waited to attend to the written messages he sent them out. Unluckily neither words nor notes were heeded. The mob broke into the palace and swarmed up the stairs, sweeping away the guards. The Viceroy, impelled by prudence, slipped out down the secret stair, and entering a private coach, attempted to pass through the mob towards the Castel dell'Uovo. His carriage had not travelled far before he met a crowd which recognised him and threatened to drag him out of his carriage. A few handfuls of gold scattered in the air opened a lane through the dense ranks of the rioters, and the Viceroy, taking advantage of the momentary diversion, slipped into the Church of San Luigi and took refuge there. Meantime the mob went on to sack his palace. It must appear passing strange that no effort was made by the Spanish soldiery in Naples to defend the authority of the Viceroy. There was a garrison in each of the three castles, and in the length and breadth of Naples there must have been a sufficient number of well-disposed persons to furnish valuable accessions of strength to any central body of trained soldiery. But whether it was that the strength of the garrison had been so far drained off for the wars in Tuscany and elsewhere that the remnant possessed no fighting power, or whether, as seems also possible, the very suddenness of the revolt had paralysed the regular troops, dreading as all soldiers do a conflict with an undisciplined and ardent enemy in the streets of a great city--whichever reason may be the true one, the fact remains that throughout the ten days of this revolt the mob was not attacked, and its disposition to excess was restrained by little else than by its own moderation, which by all accounts was conspicuous and wonderful. If, however, the Viceroy took no steps to repress the rising by force of arms, it is not to be supposed that he lay idle in the Church of San Luigi grasping the horns of the altar. By no means. On the contrary, Don Gabriele Tontoli, an eye-witness of these disasters, assures us that the great man in this crisis, while the mob were battering and howling at the doors of the church, forgot nothing which was due to his exalted position, but climbed out nobly on the roof of the church and addressed the people in affectionate accents, seeking to draw them back to the duteous loyalty which they seemed for the moment to have forgotten. Oddly enough these paternal admonitions were little heeded by the mob, who, if they spared a look for the pleading Viceroy on the roof, only roared the louder and battered at the door the harder. Indeed, there can be little doubt that they would have battered down the door ere long, and the Viceroy's position was growing so perilous that Don Gabriele compares it aptly with that of the innocent Andromeda bound to the rock and awaiting the onset of the sea monster. But Perseus arrived, as in the classical tale, just in the nick of time, wearing the odd garb of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, he was no other than the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Ascanio Filamarino, a man destined to play a considerable part in the coming troubles. Perseus took in the situation at a glance, and being unluckily unprovided with a Gorgon's head with which to turn the monster into stone, he saw no other way of saving the rhetorical Andromeda discanting eloquently on the roof than by translating some of his promises into actions. Taking his stand, therefore, on the steps of the church, he sent up word through the grid that the Viceroy must instantly make out an order for the abolition of the gabelle and send it down to him. The Viceroy sent it without delay, and the Cardinal, who appears to have been one of the very few men of mark in Naples possessing any credit with the mob, produced an instant sensation by waving the paper in the air. With a singular good judgment he allowed no one to see it on that spot, but getting into his coach, still waving the document high above his head, he drew off the people from the church, and so opened a way for the escape of the Viceroy. It was perhaps hoped that the remission of the duty on fruit would quiet the city; but greater purposes were already taking shape in the minds of those who led the people. The Spanish tyranny had bitten deep into their hearts, and the very promptitude of their success made them hope the moment had arrived to end many things. The Convent of San Lorenzo in the Strada Tribunali was an armoury well stored with pikes and harquebusses. The crowd, led by a Sicilian who had played a foremost part in a revolt upon his native island, attacked the convent, and fierce fighting took place between the citizens and the small body of defenders who had thrown themselves into the convent. The Sicilian was shot in the forehead, but the attacks continued, and a day or two later the arsenal became untenable, and was surrendered with the cannon and munitions which it contained. [Illustration: IN THE STRADA DI TRIBUNALI, NAPLES] The night of Sunday was full of terror. Throughout the hours of darkness mobs raged through the city; and the excellent Don Gabriele, after vainly endeavouring to sleep, tells us that he got up and looked out to see what they were doing. They were going by in gangs, brandishing torches which flared and dripped with pitch. For standards they bore a loaf stuck on the point of a pike in derision of its tiny size, the result of the gabelle on flour. Of opposition from the guardians of order there was none at all, and had the mob elected to burn the city to the ground it is not clear what force could have restrained them. The strange thing was that the ragamuffins made so little use of their opportunities. It was as if already, in these first moments of the insurrection, the rule of the leaders was respected. Mas'aniello was busy throughout the night in the Mercato and the piazza of the Carmine, organising, directing, and restraining. He must have had some rare quality of command, some spark of that divine faculty for swaying men which is recognised and honoured instinctively in moments of sharp crisis. Otherwise it could not have happened that the mob, unbridled and passionate, would have gone through the streets by night chanting "Viva, viva il re di Spagna," and abstaining from gross outrages as they did. Even Don Gabriele, whose mouth is full of fulsome praises of the powers that were, asserts that among the rabble, needy and starving as many of them were, none plundered for himself without being repressed by his companions, while one who did so was instantly tossed into the flames of a burning house, in punishment for an offence which could but bring disgrace on the whole movement. So Don Gabriele watched the crowds go by, and consoled himself amid his natural fears of what might happen next by the sage reflection that the whole disturbance had been foretold as long ago as in the days when the Book of Ecclesiastes was written. It may probably puzzle even well-read men to discover any reference to Mas'aniello in that sacred book; but Don Gabriele was convinced of the fact, and anyone who desires to verify his references will find the passages on which he relied in the tenth chapter. When morning came all Naples was in arms, and the authority of Mas'aniello was supreme. In the Piazza di Mercato, opposite the house in which he lived, some rope dancers had erected a platform for their exhibition, and on this throne sat the fisherman's boy, in trousers and shirt, both torn and dirty, girded with a rusty sword, and delivering his orders like a conqueror, calm and confident in the knowledge of his strength. The business which chiefly occupied his mind was the discovery of fresh arms and munitions. Early in the day, by the secret help of a woman, the rioters had discovered five cannon hidden in the city. Powder they also found, flooded by the Spaniards, but not beyond the possibility of being dried. Meantime most of the prisons were flung open. Hour by hour the forces mustering in the Carmine increased, and already bands were told off to destroy the houses and property of those nobles who were hated by the people. As for the Viceroy, he saw no resource but in sending messages of peace. For this purpose he released from prison the Duke of Maddaloni, head of the Carafa family, who had incurred the displeasure of the Crown, and despatched him to the Mercato, with instructions to use his influence in any way which seemed to him most likely to disperse the people to their homes. But, as Don Gabriele remarks quaintly, the people obstinately refused to taste the perfect liquor out of this caraffe, esteeming it indeed rank poison. Nor was their refusal merely passive. On the contrary, they hunted the Duke through the piazza till he fled for his life to the shelter of the Carmine, convinced that he was sent to play them false and delude them with worthless promises, in place of the restoration of the privileges bestowed on Naples by the great Emperor Charles the Fifth, which charter they were resolved to obtain and re-establish. It is quite clear that the nobles of Naples had no real sympathy with the mob in the most reasonable of their grievances. Had any one among them come forward to support and to restrain them, the issue of the revolt might have been very different. Indeed, the part played by the nobles rankled in the minds of the citizens for many a year; and when, in the next century, the nobles themselves sought to organise a rising, an old man who had been out with Mas'aniello cast it in their teeth and called upon the people to go to their homes, which they did. But finding that the rioters would have naught to say to nobles, the Cardinal Filamarino went himself to the Mercato. He was received with deference, if not with enthusiasm. The Cardinal was a cunning statesman. "Like a skilful hunter," says Don Gabriele, who is lost in admiration of his wisdom, "he knew well how to whistle the birds into his net." A churchman trained at Rome was scarcely likely to be baffled by the rough sincerity of fishermen and fruitsellers, ignorant of all the niceties which salve the conscience of diplomatists. The Cardinal spoke as one of themselves, as a father to his dear and faithful children. He sympathised with their complaints. He admitted their grievances, even exaggerating them. He commended their courage, and assured them of entire success if only they would be guided by his advice. He showed no horror at the steps taken by the rioters, watching bands told off to destroy houses, or erect fortifications without remonstrance. All his efforts were exerted to gain dominion over Mas'aniello and his followers. To this end he took up his quarters in the Carmine, and admitted the fisher's boy to audience at all hours. He was aided by the natural piety of Mas'aniello, who looked up to him as little less than divine, and always fell upon his knees before he spoke to him, seeking counsel in every difficulty, with absolute confidence that the church in which he trusted could not delude or trick him. It cost the cunning Cardinal but little pains to win over a man so reverential and so humble. At the Cardinal's bidding Mas'aniello laid aside his scheme of punishing the nobles by still further destruction of their property, and in reward for this mark of obedience the Cardinal produced the much-desired charter of Charles the Fifth, with an order of the Viceroy giving it validity. On the next day Mas'aniello was to go in state to the palace to receive confirmation of these privileges, and the night of Tuesday fell upon a pleasing scene, the good Cardinal receiving the thanks and blessings of his grateful flock. During that night, however, somebody, vaguely described as "a personage," was devising an elaborate scheme of murder. Don Gabriele is sure it could not have been the Cardinal, but he does not tell us who it was. Perhaps some enemy of the worthy Cardinal, designing to filch his credit while he slept, posted the murderers in the very Church of the Carmine, without the knowledge of either the good Fathers or their excellent Archbishop! There at any rate they were, and in the morning Mas'aniello, going into the church, was greeted by a salvo of balls, every one of which, by a miracle naturally set down to the credit of the Madonna della Carmine, flew past him harmlessly. The people, having wreaked summary vengeance on the would-be murderers, were unreasonable enough to suspect the Cardinal of complicity in the crime. But that good man had abundant evidence that it was not so, and Mas'aniello, yielding to reverence again, publicly declared his contrition for the unworthy suspicion he had formed. Whereupon the Cardinal, who was too great to harbour resentment, mounted the steeple of the Carmine and blessed the crowd. But still the identity of the personage is not revealed. Don Gabriele is contemptuous of his folly in thinking to kill the hydra by a premature and badly devised attack. When the personage tried next his scheme was better laid. Meantime all went on wheels. An audience with the Viceroy was appointed, and Mas'aniello, having with great difficulty been persuaded to array himself in garments of silver cloth, which splendour he considered quite unsuited to his humble origin, mounted a richly caparisoned steed and rode towards the palace at the head of an innumerable crowd of people. What a change of state was there! On Sunday morning this fellow was among the basest of a great city, not even a fish-seller, but the ragged attendant who provided scraps of paper in which to wrap up the fish. On Wednesday, clothed like an emperor and followed by a crowd which adored him, he rode in triumph to meet the Viceroy of the proudest monarchy on earth. Surely never, save in the wild fantasy of Eastern fairy tales, has fortune turned her wheel so swiftly, or given more lightly what she caught no less rapidly away. Mas'aniello cast himself humbly at the feet of the Viceroy, who raised him in the sight of all the people and embraced him with tears of affection. Don Gabriele makes no reference to Judas at this point, which is odd, seeing how well equipped he was with apt references to Scripture. The crowd roared with pleasure at the great man's condescension, making such a noise that no one of the gracious words used by the Duke of Arcos could be heard. On this--and the fact was noted as a striking proof of the ease with which the people could be swayed by one they trusted--Mas'aniello turned towards them and laid his finger on his lip. Instantly the roars ceased, and all the vast crowd stood as mute as carven statues. He waved his hand, in sign that they should go, and as if by magic the wide piazza, crowded to suffocation only a moment previously, stood bare and empty. The Viceroy offered him a rich jewel, but he refused it, declaring that it was his set purpose to go back to his lowly station: and indeed, having obtained decrees which confirmed the ordinances of the previous day, Mas'aniello returned to the Piazza del Mercato, doffed his splendid raiment, and put on once more the rags he had been used to wear when he followed humbly in the rear of his master who sold fish. The work of quieting the city was almost done. During Thursday and Friday the tumults were steadily repressed; and on Saturday the Cardinal, leaving his temporary quarters at the Carmine, returned to his own palace in solemn procession, followed by Mas'aniello upon horseback. The streets were decorated. The people thanked and blessed their saviours. But already the strain of his position was telling on Mas'aniello. It was noticed that he did not sleep, but was possessed by a feverish activity which kept him sitting all day long in the scorching summer sun, organising, judging, and directing. The constant apprehension of murder weighed upon him; and even on the Wednesday, after discovering the plot to kill him, he was disposed to credit a wild story that the Viceroy had caused the fountains to be poisoned, a belief which could only be dissipated when the Cardinal, sending for a great beaker of fresh water from the fountain of the Carmine, drank it off in full sight of the crowd. Fatigue, excitement, some natural fear of death--there was nothing more the matter with the lad than a day's rest with some peace of mind would have repaired. But fate gave him the opportunity for neither; and indeed, if one calculates the possibilities before him, the power of the forces which he had offended, and the treacherous nature of the popular favour which was his only strength, one may well ask whether fate, kinder to mankind than they ever realise, did not show charity and love when she gave him death as the meed of his unselfish service to the people. It is certain that ere the week was over Mas'aniello began to show signs of unsettled brain, infirmity of temper, extravagance of manner. The people began to be impatient of him, turning rapidly as ever against those who serve them best. "Amor di padrone, e vino di fiasco, La sera è buono e la mattina è guasto." The people were Mas'aniello's "padrone," and like the wine in the flask, their favour was sweet at night but sour in the morning. There is no need to tell the history of the next two days in full, or to drag out the obscure conspiracy which culminated on the Tuesday morning. The poor lad knew well what was in store for him, and the knowledge may have completed his mental agitation. The Feast of the Madonna del Carmine came at last, and Mas'aniello went early to the church to await the Cardinal. When he saw the great man coming he ran to meet him and broke out, "Eminence and Lord, I see already that my people are abandoning me and betraying me. Now for my consolation I beg that there may be public procession to this most holy Lady of the Carmine, headed by the Viceroy, and I desire that your Eminence will also join it." The Cardinal embraced the agitated lad, and praised his devotion, assuring him that all should happen as he wished. The Mass began. The church was packed with people so close that one could scarcely breathe. In the face of this vast crowd Mas'aniello mounted into the pulpit, and in burning words reproached the people for their inclination to desert him, reminding them of all that he had achieved, not for himself, but for them. Then turning on his past life, with some passionate remembrance of the holy character of the day on which he spoke, he laid bare his sins, calling loudly on the people to do the like, confessing them humbly before God. Then as his passion and delirium increased, he lost control utterly of himself, stripped off his clothes, and threatened to dash himself down from the pulpit on the floor of the church. By sheer force he was restrained, and being led away into the cloister of the convent, leaned out of an open window which looked towards the sea, seeking to cool his head with the fresh breeze that blew from Capri or from Ischia. But for the second time the murderers were hidden in the Carmine. In the cloister they lurked waiting for the order of the Viceroy. The order arrived. The murderers came out openly and went along the corridor, calling "Signor Mas'aniello." The lad heard them, and went towards them saying, "What is it, my people?" on which they shot him, and he fell, crying "Ah, traitors and unjust!" Such was the end of Mas'aniello, a death which at the moment it occurred seems to have caused no sort of sorrow to the people. In fact, when the head of the prince-fisherman was cut off and carried through the streets on a pike there were few found who did not curse it, while the headless trunk was dragged about the Mercato by children in derision. But not many days passed before the instable people discovered how great a loss he was to them. The gabelles were reimposed, bread grew dear again. There was no longer any protector for the people; and by a quick revulsion of feeling, when it was too late, the corpse was dug up, the head reunited to the body, and those funeral pomps accorded which I spoke of in a former chapter. And so the Viceroy and the Cardinal won the game, as rulers often win it in this world when they cast aside both faith and honour. But for all such crimes history reserves its chastisement. She speaks without fear or favour, and declares that these two princes cut a sorry figure beside the fisher boy whom they betrayed and slew. Both alike, whether spiritual or temporal, are of that poor scum of humanity which merits nothing but contempt; whereas Mas'aniello is heroic, stained by no unworthy action, and bearing himself right nobly in a crisis as wondrous as any in the whole history of man. CHAPTER IX VESUVIUS AND THE CITIES WHICH HE HAS DESTROYED--HERCULANEUM, POMPEII, AND STABIÆ It is to most strangers approaching Naples for the first time a matter of surprise to discover that Vesuvius has two peaks rising out of the same base, and that far removed from all the range of Apennines which, dim and distant, hedge in the wide fertile plain. When viewed from Naples, Monte Somma, the landward peak, appears scarcely less conical than its neighbour, which contains the crater; but from the other side it has a wholly different aspect, and if one looks at it from the Sorrento cliffs one perceives that it is no peak, but a long ridge, the segment of a circle which, if completed, would enfold the present eruptive cone. The fact is important, for not only is it the key to all the topography of the mountain, but it is essential to the comprehension of what happened on that August day of the year 79 A.D., when the dead volcano woke to life. The broken circle of Monte Somma was complete in those days; and men looking up from Pompeii or Herculaneum saw a mountain vastly different from that which we behold, yet one which, from the part before us, can be reconstructed by an easy use of the imagination. If a man will take his stand on the lower heights of the hills behind Castellammare, he will find that he looks over Pompeii, over Bosco Reale lying on the first slopes which swell upward from the plain, into the mouth of the gap which parts Vesuvius from Somma. Even from that distance he will obtain a forcible impression of the black cliff of Somma, towering almost sheer to the height of a thousand feet above the bottom of the gap, while the outer face of the same rock wall slopes towards the sunny plain and the woods of Ottajano with an incline so gentle as to be comparatively easy of ascent. Clearly the two faces of Somma have been differently formed. The sheer one was, at least in part, the actual wall of the prehistoric crater, that caldron in which the volcanic forces raged in days so ancient that they had been clean forgotten when the Romans ruled the land. The present cone did not exist. The circuit of Monte Somma was unbroken, and lay clothed with green meadows up to the very summit. But where, then, is the rest of that gigantic wall? It was blown away by the eruption that destroyed Pompeii. This is the first tremendous fact which the visitor to Naples has to realise; and it is well worth while to absorb it thoroughly before setting foot upon the mountain, for nothing else seen there carries with it the same impression of overwhelming, cataclysmal awe. It is from a distance that the terror of the thing can be appreciated best. When one goes forward from the observatory on the mountain-side, skirting the flank of the eruptive cone, into that portion of the gap which is called the Atrio del Cavallo--though it would at certain times be found as safe to stable a steed in the Kelpie's flow as in this wilderness of burnt rock--the sight of the steep wall towering on one's left is infinitely striking. But at so close a distance, and in the immediate neighbourhood of so many other sights, it is scarcely possible to concentrate one's thoughts on the girth of the ancient crater. To comprehend the extent of the wall which has been blown away one must go further off, till one can distinguish the shape of Somma's wall, till one's eye can measure the vast size of the crater which would be formed by its completion, even allowing for the doubts which have been raised whether the circuit could have been so vast as this measurement would imply. There are some shattered fragments of the wall to be seen upon the south or seaward side of the volcano. The ridge where the white observatory building stands is one; another, named the "pedementina," appears as a shoulder of the mountain, clearly distinguishable from Naples. But these scattered remnants help little towards the general impression. It is by contemplating Somma that one learns to comprehend the appalling nature of the convulsion which, with little warning, blasted away so immense a portion of the mountain regarded by those who dwelt beneath it as one of the eternal hills. Far from having any title to immortality Vesuvius is among the youngest and most mutable of mountains. The present cone is, as I said, the creation of the last eighteen centuries, piled up by successive eruptions to something more than the height of Somma, which once, as its name implies, towered far above it. Even though the antiquity of the mountain be reckoned by the age of Somma, or of some earlier cone, on the ruins of which Somma may have reared itself, it is as nothing when set beside the great wall of mountains which sweeps round the plain and ends in the great crags of St. Angelo and the cliffs of Capri. Those hills may be termed "eternal" by as true a warrant as any on the earth. But long after they were shaped and fashioned the sea flowed over the Campagna Felice and the site of Naples. Vesuvius was a volcanic vent-hole underneath the water, like many another which now seethes and hisses deep down in the blue bay, forming lava reefs about which the best fish always cluster. Then came the upheaval of the sea floor, and Vesuvius stood on dry land, no longer a sea-drenched reef or islet, but a hill of ashes and of lava piled over a crack in the earth's crust, which belched forth fiery torrents for unnumbered years, and sank at last to rest after an outburst which, if one may judge by the hugeness of the crater it scooped out, must have been terrible almost beyond conception. Yet it was completely forgotten! How many centuries of rest must it not have needed to erase from the minds of men all memory of a cataclysm so tremendous! In the days when doom was drawing near to the cities of the Campagna, an old tradition was current that fire had once been seen coming out of the summit of Vesuvius. Doubtless many people looking up at the green mountain pastures shrugged their shoulders at the tale. Yet Strabo, the geographer, remarked that the rocks upon the surface of the mountain looked as if they had been subjected to fire. It is difficult for us to detach the idea of terror from Vesuvius, and to contemplate it with thoughts at all resembling those which the dwellers in the buried cities bestowed upon it. There has, however, been one period when the summit of the mountain presented an aspect probably not far unlike that which a Pompeiian would have seen, had curiosity led him to the top after visiting his vineyards or his pastures on the lower slopes. That time was in the years immediately preceding the eruption of 1631. Vesuvius had been almost at rest for near five centuries, and there were many who believed its fires to be extinct. The Abate Braccini ascended the mountain in 1612, nineteen years before the outbreak. Vesuvius was then, as it is now, somewhat higher than Somma, though the comparative level has been changed more than once in the last three centuries. On the summit Braccini found a profound chasm, a mile in circuit, surrounded by a bulwark of calcined stones, on which no vegetation grew. Having crossed it, he descended to a little plain, where he found plants of divers kinds, though in no profusion. But from that point there was a gulf of verdure. One could descend it by tortuous paths, which led to the very bottom of the abyss, and were used not only by woodcutters plying their trade among the dense forest trees which had grown up to maturity on the lava soil, but also by animals which strayed down to browse on the succulent, rich grass. Neither men nor cattle retained any fear of the green crater depths. Only the rim of calcined stones at the summit seems to have betrayed the volcanic fire of old days, except that here and there a wreath of smoke coiled away across the elms and oaks and the pleasant scrub of broom and other underwood. About the same time a Neapolitan descended to the bottom of the crater. He found there a flat plain with two small lakes, the crater walls all pierced with caverns, through some of which the wind whistled with a noise which sounded awfully on that dim, lonely spot. There were tales of treasure hidden in the caves, but no man had dared explore them. The crater was so deep that the descent and ascent occupied three hours. Such was the aspect of the mountain in days when it had certainly rested for a shorter space than in the great age of Pompeii and Herculaneum. All men must have known what none remembered in either of those doomed cities. The tales of terror spreading from the mountain were still fresh, yet they inspired no more fear than there is in Ischia to-day of Monte Epomeo; and the herdsmen sat and whistled all day long upon the slopes as they do now within an hour's climb of Casamicciola. To this false security must be ascribed the fact that those who dwelt about the mountain paid little heed to the indications of an approaching break in its long rest. Profound changes were taking place within the abyss which Braccini has described; and on the 1st or 2nd of December, 1631, an inhabitant of Ottajano, visiting the summit, found the woods gone, the chasm filled up to the brim. A level plain had replaced the yawning gulf. The bold Ottajanese walked across from one side to the other, surprised, no doubt, to see what had occurred, but, so far as we can judge from Braccini's narrative, by no means afflicted with any sense of awe at the magnitude of the event, still less inclined to see in it a foretaste of danger for the country. A few nights later the peasants of Torre del Greco and of Massa di Somma began to complain that the growlings of the demons confined within the mountain disturbed their rest. Religious ceremonies were carried out, but the growls continued. On the night of the 15th, the air being extraordinarily clear, there hung in the sky above the mountain a star of strange size and brilliance. Dusk fell upon that day, and still there was no alarm; but somewhat later in the evening, a servant crossing the Ponte della Maddalena, on his way home from Portici, saw a flash of lightning strike the mountain; while at Resina a deep red glow appearing on the summit perplexed the villagers, for no such sight had been seen within the memory of living man. As night passed and day approached, the reports of those who had ventured up the slopes grew more awful. Peasants between Torre del Greco and Torre dell'Annunziata had seen smoke pour in volumes out of the Atrio del Cavallo. A herdsman on the mountain saw the pastures rent, and the sweet herbage turned into a raging blast furnace. Santolo di Simone ventured some way up to ascertain the truth. He saw the ground cleft in divers places, out of which poured smoke and flame, while all the air was filled with thunderous reports, and great stones cast out of the fiery gulfs were hurled about the slopes. Meantime dawn in Naples was at hand; and as the light increased, men going about the common affairs of their existence began to take note of an extraordinary cloud which hung above Vesuvius, having the precise shape of a gigantic pine tree. Some wondered and some feared, but none understood what was the terror which had come upon them, till Braccini, going into his library and taking down his Pliny, read them that vivid passage which describes the sight young Pliny saw when he looked towards Vesuvius from Misenum. "There," said Braccini, as he closed the book, "there, in the words of sixteen centuries ago, is depicted what you see to-day." That pine tree has become awfully familiar to most Neapolitans now alive; and to some of those who visit the city during an eruption it seems as if familiarity had bred contempt, and caused the occasion to be regarded as one for merriment, since it draws strangers there in countless numbers, and enriches every trader on the coast. But there is terror also in the streets when the shocks come rapidly, when doors and windows rattle with continuous concussions, and all the city reeks with sulphurous stenches coming one knows not whence. To this natural and human fear there was added, in the days of which Braccini wrote, the shock of a horrible surprise. The people were not dreaming of eruptions. They thought of them as little as did their far-distant kinsmen, who occupied the lovely shore when Pompeii was a city of the quick, not of the dead. That is what makes Braccini's tale so interesting. It reproduces for us, as nearly as is possible, a picture of what must have happened in the city streets on that morning when Pliny came sailing from Misenum at the urgent cry of Herculaneum for help, only to find his ships beaten off the coast by a hail of fiery stones. The Cardinal Archbishop of Naples was at Torre del Greco on that fateful morning. He hurried back to the city, and having celebrated the Sacrament, and given orders for the rite to be solemnised throughout the city, he went up to the treasury where the relics of the saints were kept, intending to arrange a solemn procession. The blood of San Gennaro was found already liquefied and boiling! Great crowds accompanied the procession, the superstitious Neapolitans turned to their priests and saints at the first sign of danger, and marched behind the relics with effusion of piety, the men scourging themselves till the blood ran from their shoulders, the women dishevelled and weeping, while crowds of boys chanted the Litany with extraordinary tenderness. The shops were shut. Naples had become a city of devotees. But San Gennaro, though his blood had boiled, was not ready to disperse the peril. The shocks of earthquake grew louder. The concussions rattled faster from the mountain. Towards noon thick darkness stole down upon the city, as it had upon Misenum sixteen hundred years before. The smell of sulphur in the streets was choking. Men asked themselves if so strong a reek could possibly travel from Vesuvius, and whether some vent had not opened close at hand. The houses, says Braccini, were swaying like ships at sea, and in the air there was a horrible roaring sound like the blast of many furnaces. The darkness grew more dense, and tongues of lightning flashed continuously out of the mirk sky. The crashes became quite appalling. Naples went wild with terror. The Viceroy sent drummers round the city appealing to the people to live cleanly in that which appeared to be the supreme moment of the created world. Men and women utterly unknown to each other ran up and embraced, seeking comfort, and crying, "Gesù, misericordia !" So passed the first day of the reawakened activity of Vesuvius. The night brought no abatement of terror. Early in the morning the crashes redoubled. The whole mountain seemed to be springing into the air, and all the surface of the earth rocked like water in a vessel which is violently shaken. At the same moment the sea retreated for near half a mile, and then swept back to a point far above its level. At Naples nothing more than that was seen, but the miserable inhabitants of Resina perceived that those mighty birth throes had ended in the ejection of a vast flood of lava, which was pouring down the mountain on the seaward side. The fiery torrent came on with such speed that it had reached the sea in less than an hour from the outbreak. As it advanced it split into seven streams, each one of which took a different course of devastation. One flowed in the direction of San Jorio, which it destroyed, engulfing, it is said, no less than three thousand persons, including a religious procession. A second arm of the flood destroyed Bosco Reale and Torre dell'Annunziata, running out more than two hundred yards into the sea, where it formed a reef so hot that the water round about it boiled for days. A third wrecked Torre del Greco, a fourth poured over Resina, and a fifth, passing westwards, ruined San Giorgio a Cremano, and touched Barra and San Giovanni. Meantime a sixth stream, after filling the valleys divided by the ridge on which the observatory stands now, swept down on Massa di Somma, and reached San Sebastiano. In this point the eruption of 1631 differed from that which destroyed Pompeii. In the latter there was no lava, but only falling stone and ash, either dry, or compacted into mud by storms of rain and showers of water thrown out of the crater. But it was not by lava only that the country was devastated three centuries and a half ago. Ashes fell also in such masses that near Vesuvius they were heaped up twelve feet deep, and great quantities of them drifting across southern Italy fell upon the shores of that lovely bay where Taranto looks across to the snow-topped mountains of Calabria. Stones fell also of astounding weight. One which was thrown into Massa di Somma is reported to have weighed 50,000 pounds; while another, which fell as far away as Nola, was of such dimensions that a team of twenty oxen could not stir it. When this great eruption ended, the relative heights of Vesuvius and Somma were reversed, and the eruptive cone, which had risen 50 feet above its neighbour, stood nearly 200 feet below it. It is almost the rule that in great eruptions Vesuvius suffers loss of height, while the cone is piled up by smaller ones. Such is the country in which a teeming population elects to live. It is said that no less than 80,000 persons have their homes on the slopes of the mountain--a fact which appears inexplicable to those who do not know by experience how small the loss of life may be in the greatest eruption. It is true that in 1631 a vast number of persons perished. But this was due probably in some measure to the fact that they did not know their danger and took no proper measures to avoid it. The men then living had seen nothing like the sudden peril which beset them. But every peasant of our day is well aware what lava floods may do, and how their course will lie. All have their little images of San Gennaro, which they set up in their cottages, and many can tell how the good saint has averted from his vineyard a fiery torrent which crawled on to the point when it seemed as if not even heavenly power could avert destruction, yet twisted off to one side and left him scatheless. At times, of course, the velocity of the lava is so great that no man can do aught but flee. In 1766 Sir William Hamilton saw a stream which ran in the first mile with a velocity "equal to that of the River Severn at the passage near Bristol," while in 1794 the lava ran through Torre del Greco at the rate of one foot in a second. Yet the loss of life was small. "Napoli fa i peccati," say the people, "e Torre li paga !"--Naples commits the sins and Torre pays for them. It is true enough; yet the toll is taken more in property than life. Moreover, the after-fruits of an eruption are worth rubies to the people, so fertile is the soil created by the decaying lava. [Illustration: CARDPLAYERS--NAPLES] That the loss of life remains so small is the more surprising in view of the fact that Vesuvius can by no means be trusted to discharge itself on all occasions by the main crater. In fact, the flanks of the mountain, strengthened and compacted as they are by the outflow of countless lava streams, are yet seamed and fissured by the rupture of the surface to form other vents. Occasionally these "bocche" mouths, as the Italians call them, have opened far down the slopes among the cultivated fields and vineyards. It was so in 1861, not fortunately one of the greatest of eruptions. The bocche of that year are on the hillside no great way above Torre del Greco. Nothing, in fact, is certain about the operation of volcanic forces, and this is a fact which may be borne in mind by those who elect to ascend the mountain during an eruption. Sir William Hamilton in 1767 had a narrow escape. "I was making my observations," he says, "upon the lava, which had already from the spot where it first broke out reached the valley"--that is, the Atrio del Cavallo--"when on a sudden, about noon, I heard a violent noise within the mountain, and at a spot about a quarter of a mile off the place where I stood, the mountain split, and with much noise from this new mouth a fountain of liquid fire shot up many feet high, and then like a torrent rolled on directly towards us. The earth shook, and at the same time a volley of stones fell thick upon us; in an instant clouds of black smoke and ashes caused almost a total darkness; the explosions from the top of the mountain were much louder than any thunder I ever heard, and the smell of the sulphur was very offensive. My guide, alarmed, took to his heels; and I must confess I was not at my ease. I followed close, and we ran near three miles without stopping." To run three miles over the broken and uneven lava reefs of the Piano, with a fiery torrent hunting close behind, is not an experience which would be relished by the ordinary tourist, however far it might be sweetened in the retrospect to the adventurous man of science. Yet happy is the man who in such a case gets off with a sharp run. In 1872 a party of tourists were less happy. The terrible eruption of that year deserves attention, being certainly the greatest within the present generation, and fortunately it has been described with knowledge and precision by Professor Palmieri who, with noble devotion to the cause of science, had spent so many years in the observatory planted on the barren ridge of trachyte which divides the two valley-arms which the Atrio del Cavallo projects towards Naples. Those valleys receive the streams of lava which are ejected into the Atrio, and when the volume of the flow is large, it has happened that the observatory has been almost engirdled with the red-hot torrents--a position of which, if the danger may be exaggerated, the awe certainly cannot, and which must fill all men with admiration for the illustrious scientists who endure it. Palmieri regarded the eruption as the last phase of a series of disturbances which began at the end of January, 1871. From November, 1868, until the end of December, 1870, the mountain had been almost quiet. Only a few fumaroles discharging smoke bore witness to the need for watchfulness. "Early in 1871 the delicate instruments of the observatory which register earth tremors were observed to be slightly agitated, and the crater discharged a few incandescent projectiles, detonating at the same time, but not remarkably. On the 13th of January an aperture appeared on the northern edge of the upper plain of the Vesuvian cone; at first a little lava issued from it, then a small cone arose which threw out incandescent projectiles and much smoke of a reddish colour, whilst the central crater continued to detonate more loudly and frequently. The lava flow continued to increase until the beginning of March, without extending much beyond the base of the cone, although it had great mobility. In March the little cone appeared not only to subside but even partly to give way, as almost always happens with eccentric cones when their activity is at an end.... A little smoke issued from the small crater, and a loud hissing from the interior was audible. By lying along the edge I could see a cavity of cylindrical form about ten metres deep.... The bottom of the crater was level, but in the centre a small cone of about two metres had formed, pointed in such a manner that it possessed but a very narrow opening at the apex, from which smoke issued with a hissing sound, and from which were spurted a few very small incandescent stones and scoriæ. This little cone increased in size as well as in activity until it filled the crater and rose four or five metres above the brim. New and more abundant lavas appeared near the base of this cone, and pouring continually into the 'Atrio del Cavallo' rushed into the 'Fossa della Vetrana' in the direction of the observatory, and towards the Crocella, where they accumulated to such an extent as to cover the hillside for a distance of about three hundred metres.... For many months the lava descended from the cone and traversed the 'Atrio del Cavallo.'... On the 3rd and 4th of November a copious and splendid stream coursed down the principal cone on its western side, but was soon exhausted. The new small cone appeared again at rest, but did not cease to emit smoke...." In the beginning of January, 1872, the little cone again became active, the crater of the preceding October resumed strength, there were bellowings, projectiles, and copious outflows of lava. In February the action of the hidden forces abated somewhat; but in March, at the full moon, the cone opened on the north-western side, the cleavage being marked out by a line of fumaroles, and a lava stream issued from the lowest part without any noise and with very little smoke, pouring down into the Atrio del Cavallo as far as the precipices of Monte Somma. This lava ceased flowing after a week, but the fumaroles still pointed out the clefts, and between the small re-made cone and the central crater a new crater of small dimensions and interrupted activity opened. On the 23rd of April, another full moon, the observatory instruments were agitated, the activity of the craters increased, and on the evening of the 24th splendid lavas descended the cone in many directions. The spectacle was of superb beauty. There was clear moonshine, and from Naples the outline of a vast fiery tree was seen to be traced on the black side of the mountain. Strangers poured into the city. The long period of activity without destruction disposed them to regard the show as a display of fireworks. Half Naples set its heart on ascending the mountain by night, and little wonder, for the moonlit bay reddened by the wide reflection from the burning breast of the volcano made a sight on which no man could look without the sense of witnessing a thing which was absolutely unearthly in the splendour of its beauty. But on the following morning the flow was nearly spent. One stream only continued to flow from the base of the cone. And this one was almost inaccessible, by reason of the roughness of the ground. As night fell the visitors began to arrive. No less than 120 carriages are said to have passed the hermitage by dusk. Palmieri tried to dissuade the sightseers from going on, but in vain. The display of the previous night had been too splendid. They hoped continually that the show might be repeated. It was, but in a manner which they little looked for. The crater was casting out huge stones, with detonations resembling the discharge of whole parks of artillery at once. From time to time the din ceased absolutely, then low and softly it began again, and gained force quickly till it crashed as loudly as before. When midnight was past, immense clouds of smoke began to pour out of all the craters, and lava broke out simultaneously from many points upon the slopes. Out of the chief crater rose the awful pine tree. The detonations grew more constant. There was still time to flee; but the spectacle was growing grander every moment, and inexperienced guides led forward a large party into the Atrio, where they stood watching such a sight as living men have rarely seen. At half-past three came the catastrophe. The whole of the great cone rent itself from top to bottom with an appalling crash, casting out a huge stream of fiery lava. At the same moment two large craters formed upon the summit, discharging showers of red-hot scoriæ, while the pillar of the pine tree rose up to many times more than even the vast height which it then stretched across the sky. A cloud of choking blinding smoke enveloped the visitors, a fiery hail rained down on them, the lava broke out immediately by them, and barred their retreat to the observatory. Eight medical students were engulfed by the fire, with others who were not known. Eleven more were grievously injured; and when the survivors were able to reach the observatory, it was in several cases but to die. The lava flow from this grand fissure was restrained for some time within the Atrio; but issuing thence at last divided, one branch threatening Resina, but stopping happily almost as soon as it reached the cultivated ground, while the larger branch ran through the Fossa della Vetrana, traversing its whole length of 1,300 metres in three hours. It dashed into the Fossa della Faraone, then again divided, one arm of the diminished stream destroying a great part of the villages of Massa and San Sebastiano, and flowing on so far in the direction of Naples that had it continued but for four-and-twenty hours longer it must have flowed into the city streets. It may be supposed that whilst this awful eruption was proceeding, the position of the courageous men of science in the observatory was rather glorious than safe. Nothing can exceed the value of the services rendered to science by these gentlemen who elect to spend their lives upon a spot which is always dreary and exposed to constant danger. They are of the outposts of mankind. I take my cap off to their stout hearts and their keen intellects. To them their danger is a little thing, and they would not thank me if I were to dwell too long on it. But I will take Professor Palmieri's own words, and beg those who read to ponder over what is involved in them. "On the night of the 26th of April the observatory lay between two torrents of fire. The heat was insufferable. The glass of the windows was hot and crackling, especially on the side of the Fossa della Vetrana. In all the rooms there was a smell of scorching." [Illustration: NAPLES--A SLUM.] Meantime the spectacle of the mountain must have been bewilderingly grand. The cone was seamed and perforated on every side, and the fiery lava issuing from the vents covered it so completely that, in Palmieri's picturesque expression, Vesuvius "sweated fire." On the 27th of April the igneous period of the eruption was over, though the rain of ashes and projectiles became more abundant, the crashes were louder than ever, the pine tree was of a darker colour, and was continually furrowed by flashes of lightning; while on the 29th stones fell at the observatory of such size that the glass of the unshuttered windows was broken. By midnight, of that day, however, there was a marked improvement, and on the 1st of May the eruption was at an end. * * * * * The visitor who strolls to-day through the main street of Portici sees nothing but a continuation of the squalid life and poverty of building which have followed him continuously from the eastern quarters of the city. The mean aspect of the town is unexpected. One had not looked for any striving after the dream of classical beauty, once so frequent and so great upon the Campanian shore. But this was the chosen pleasure resort of the Bourbon kings; and some greater dignity might have been expected in the close neighbourhood of a palace. The palace is there still. The noisy street runs through its courtyard. Poor deserted palace! It has lost its royalty of aspect, and for all one sees in passing by the discoloured walls and shuttered windows it might be any poverty-stricken crowded palazzo in Naples. But turn in beneath the archway on the right, and go by the large cool staircase, across the clanking stones, until you emerge into the hot spring sun again. There is a noble semicircular expanse, flanked on either hand by a terrace, adorned with busts and vases, and with stairs descending to the garden, which stretches down to a belt of pine trees, cut away a little in the centre to reveal that band of heavenly blue which is the sea. The young trees standing by the pine are in fresh leaf; the grass is full of poppies; white butterflies are skimming to and fro across it; all is silent and deserted. A bare-armed stable-boy comes out to train a skinny pony round the terrace. The stucco of the walls is peeling off; the long rows of windows are shuttered; the sentry boxes stand empty. It is forty years since any courtier came out to taste the evening freshness on this spot where Sir William Hamilton talked of the wonders of the buried cities so long and eagerly that he forgot to watch the wife and friend whose sins the world forbears to reckon when it remembers the beauty of the one and the valour and wisdom of the other. It is but a little way beyond the palace to the spot where the Prince d'Elboeuf is said, while sinking a well in the year 1709, to have chanced on things of which he did not know the meaning. This is one of the fables which demonstrate the extreme difficulty of speaking the truth, even about important and world-famous matters. Nothing is more certain than that the prince sank his "well" with the hope and intention of drawing up not water, but antiquities. The fact is, that in the year just mentioned he bought a country house, which stood near the site of the present railway station. It was perfectly well known that Herculaneum lay buried underneath Portici or Resina, and the prince began excavating of set purpose. It was mere chance which guided him to a spot where his first shaft came right down on the benches of the theatre, thus letting in to Herculaneum the first gleam of daylight which had entered there for more than sixteen centuries. Not much more than that stray glimmer has enlightened the old academic city even now; for none of the energy and learned patience lavished daily on Pompeii has been expended here. Herculaneum as it lies to-day, awaiting its turn for excavation, creates in one respect an impression which Pompeii excites in a far less degree. It retains the visible aspect of a buried city. The sense of overwhelming tragedy is never lost. Pompeii stands free and open under the clear sky; so large, so perfect, that in the fascination of its archæology one is somewhat led away from the disaster. It is a deserted city. One knows what it was that drove the people out, but it is easy to forget. Perhaps one cares more to gloat over the rich old life laid bare so freely than to burden one's mind with memory of that day when the glow of August sunshine turned to darkness "as of a room shut up," and death came down from the mountain into the crowded streets. At Herculaneum the mere fragment of a street, the few half-buried houses, the pit in which they lie, the cavernous darkness which hides the amphitheatre, stimulate the imagination till it leaps to a sudden comprehension of what it was that happened on that day of woe. One passes from the dirty street of Resina into a building of no dignity, somewhat like the entrance to the public baths of some small English town. A guide appears and guides one down a flight of steps which are at first palpably modern. But ere long the tread changes. One is on an ancient stair, and almost immediately the guide pauses in a vaulted corridor running right and left through perfect darkness. The height is hardly more than permits a tall man to walk upright. Here and there an arched opening in the corridor goes one sees not whither. Passing under such an arch one may descend four steps, beyond which rises another wall. That wall is tufa; it is no part of the structure. It flowed or fell here when it was half liquid; it came out from Vesuvius, and it is what overwhelmed the city. The steps, thus interrupted by the intrusion of what are now stone walls, are the upper tier of seats in the amphitheatre. A gleam of daylight breaks the darkness: it comes from the Prince d'Elboeuf's shaft, which pierces the stone steps and goes down far below them. One looks up the tubular wet boring and then plunges forward to the bottom of the theatre through blackness barely scattered by the candles which the guide carries. A short descent of nineteen steps in all brings one to the floor of the theatre, at the spot appropriated to the orchestra. The stage is a low platform, approached on either hand by steps. It is deprived of some part of its original depth by pillars and barriers hardened out of that choking mud which poured down from the mountain. Such barriers present themselves on every side; they leave the theatre formless; they create gangways where none existed, walls where the spectators had clear line of vision, darkness where the sun shone freely eighteen centuries ago. In one of these gangways behind the stage the clear impression of human features looks down from the rough wet ceiling; it is the impression of a player's mask. There were doubtless many in the theatre when the seething flood rolled in. Among this darkness and these sights the sense of tragedy tightens on the imagination. The cruelty of the ruin stands before one and is not to be set aside. There are remains of frescoes here and there; but they are almost destroyed, and serve only to increase the pity that a theatre which once rang with laughter and glowed so richly with soft light and colour should lie wet, buried and forsaken in the darkness. It is sometimes said that Herculaneum was destroyed by lava--the guides use the word to this day. But Vesuvius threw out no lava in the great eruption which destroyed the cities. It ejected much in prehistoric times. Pompeii itself is built upon a lava ridge, which in the old days was quarried for millstones, thus giving rise to an important industry. But in historic times lava did not flow--if we may trust geologists--till the year 1036 A.D. Herculaneum was destroyed by fragments of pumice stone and ashes, scarcely distinguishable from those which one may see raked away from the half-uncovered walls of some new house at Pompeii. With this storm of falling cinders--how dense and thick one may picture dimly by remembering once more that all the seaward wall of the vast old crater was being blown away--with this crushing, choking shower, came torrents of rain, enough to turn the falling ashes to a sort of mud, which hardened into tufa. Indeed, just as the yellow tufa of Posilipo is composed of volcanic ash ejected underneath the sea, and is thus formed of ash and water, such precisely is the crust which hardened over Herculaneum, and holds the city in its clutch unto this hour. Perhaps the mud formed on the mountain slopes, and came rolling down upon the town. Professor Phillips thought it formed within the crater. Some obvious warning of great peril there must have been, and that quite early on the fatal 24th of August; for it was not long past noon when a message reached Pliny at Misenum, begging for his ships, since escape was even then impossible except by sea. Already Pliny, looking from Misenum, saw the mountain topped by that vast and awful cloud shaped like a pine tree, out of which ashes were raining down on the three cities. His ships, approaching the coast towards evening, ran into a hail of pumice stone. The ashes fell hotter and hotter on the decks, and in continually larger masses. The sea ebbed suddenly. Ruins were tumbling from the mountain. There was no possibility of giving help to the doomed city, and Pliny gave orders to steer off the coast. No eye has seen Herculaneum from that day to this. What became of the citizens is not known. Comparatively few bodies have been found; but the excavations were too imperfect to prove that somewhere in the city bounds they do not lie in heaps. Such was the end of Herculaneum, by ashes, not by lava. It is true that lava beds lie above the city now. Probably the lava of 1631 passed over it. Sir William Hamilton distinguished the débris of no less than six eruptions besides that which destroyed it. Sir Charles Lyell also thought that a large part of the covering of the city was subsequent to its first destruction. At Herculaneum all that is most interesting lies underground, and nearly all is still invisible. But little effort has been made at any time to disinter the city. The searchers who dug there at the command of Charles of Bourbon between the years 1750 and 1761--to which period we must refer nearly all the most precious discoveries--contented themselves with sinking shafts in likely spots, from which they mined and tunnelled as far as seemed possible to them, and then filled up the shaft again and sank another. Thus the notices of what they found, and still more of how they found it, are imperfect. They have, moreover, been carelessly preserved. Some were even wantonly destroyed in the last century by men who did not appreciate their value. Yet enough has been retained to stimulate the highest interest in Herculaneum, if not indeed to justify the belief that whenever it shall be possible to overcome the obvious difficulties of excavation, treasures will be found which may far exceed in quantity and beauty those which Pompeii has yielded. This will be better understood by considering what has been written by Signor Comparetti and Signor de Petra concerning a single villa of Herculaneum, now, alas! buried up once more in darkness. It stood between the "new diggings" and the royal palace of Portici. I will preface my abstract of the treatise of the two scholars by some passages taken from the letters of Camillo Paderni, director of the excavations, to Mr. Thomas Hollis, in 1754. "This route," says Paderni, "led us towards a palace, which lay near the garden. But before they arrived at a palace they came to a square ... which was adorned throughout with columns of stucco. At the several angles of the square was a terminus of marble, and on every one of these stood a bust of bronze of Greek workmanship, one of which had on it the name of the artist. A small fountain was placed before each terminus, which was constructed in the following manner. Level with the pavement was a vase to receive the water which fell from above. In the middle of this vase was a stand of balustrade work, to support another marble vase. This second vase was square on the outside and circular within, where it had the appearance of a scallop shell; in the centre whereof was the spout which threw up the water that was supplied by leaden pipes within the balustrade. Among the columns ... were alternately placed a statue[1] of bronze and a bust of the same material, at the equal distance of a certain number of palms.... The statues taken out from April 15 to September 30 are in number seven, near the height of six Neapolitan palms, except one of them, which is much larger, and of excellent expression. This represents a faun lying down, who appears to be drunk, resting upon the goatskin in which they anciently put wine.... September 27.--I went myself to take out a head in bronze, which proved to be that of Seneca, and the finest that has hitherto appeared.... Our greatest hopes are from the palace itself, which is of a very large extent. As yet we have only entered into one room, the floor of which is formed of mosaic work, not inelegant. It appears to have been a library, adorned with presses inlaid with different sorts of wood, disposed in rows. I was buried in this spot more than twelve days, to carry off the volumes found there, many of which were so perished that it was impossible to remove them. Those which I took away amounted to the number of 337, all of them at present incapable of being opened. These are all in Greek characters. While I was busy in this work I observed a large bundle, which from the size I imagined must contain more than a single volume. I tried with the utmost care to get it out, but could not, from the damp and weight of it. However, I perceived that it consisted of about eighteen volumes.... They were wrapped about with the bark of a tree, and covered at each end with a piece of wood. "November 27th.--We discovered the figure of an old faun, or rather a Silenus, represented as sitting on a bank, with a tiger lying on his left side, on which his hand rested. Both these figures served to adorn a fountain, and from the mouth of the tiger had flowed water. From the same spot were taken out, November 29th, three little boys of bronze of a good manner. Two of them are young fauns, having the horns and ears of a goat. They have likewise silver eyes, and each of them the goatskin on his shoulder, wherein anciently they put wine, and through which here the water issued. The third boy is also of bronze, has silver eyes, is of the same size with the two former, and in a standing posture like them, but is not a faun. On one side of this last stood a small column, upon the top of which was a comic mask that served as a capital to it and discharged water from its mouth. December 16th.--In the same place were discovered another boy with a mask and three other fauns.... Besides these we met with two little boys in bronze, somewhat less than the former. These likewise were in a standing posture, had silver eyes, and had each a vase upon his shoulder whence the water flowed. We also dug out an old faun, crowned with ivy, having a long beard, a hairy body, and sandals on his feet. He sat astride upon a goatskin, holding it at the feet with both his hands...." Thus far Paderni; and I have made this long extract to little purpose if the reader has not already recognised some among the finest objects in the great museum at Naples. This villa, with its garden full of statues, its cool peristyle all humming with the plash of falling water, its shadowy colonnade sheltering the marvellous bronzes, must have been a place of wonderful beauty. He was a rare collector who dwelt there. He had twenty-three large bronze busts and eight small ones, thirteen large bronze statues and eighteen small ones. In his garden stood not less than nine marble statues, and of marble busts he had certainly seven and probably seven more. Among these not one is of mean workmanship. The greater part are famous all round the world for beauty. They are unsurpassed, and they all came from a single villa just beyond the walls of this buried city. Who was the man who made himself a home so splendid? The style of the decorations points to the latter years of the Republic. It is in marked distinction from the more ornate style which prevailed under the Empire, and of great mythological pictures there was none. One thing only enables us to guess with something like assurance who among the patricians of those days owned the villa--namely the library. The mode of inference is curious. It was no small library which was lifted by Paderni from the presses where it had lain for seventeen centuries. The papyri numbered 1,806, though by no means all were separate treatises, while some were mere scraps. All were charred and damaged to such a degree as to render their examination a work whose difficulty baffled many men of science. At length the task was accomplished by an ingenious arrangement of silk threads, which unfolded the papyrus upon a false back made partly of onion skins, and laid it open to investigation. The results are curious. Indeed, they are something more than curious; and making due allowance for the fact that wise men do not permit themselves to be ruffled by the tricksy mockeries of time, it must be admitted that the story of this library is exasperating. All the world knows how small a space the treasures of Greek and Latin literature occupy upon our shelves compared with that which they would fill were they intact. What melancholy gaps! How much pure delight has not been reft from us! Where is the scholar who in moments of low spirits has not roamed round his library reckoning up his losses? Livy shorn of more than half his bulk, Terence mangled, Cicero lacking heaven knows how many of his finest compositions! Petrarch had the treatise of the great orator "De Gloria," but nobody has seen it since. It is a painful subject--the canker at the heart of learned men, the skeleton at the feasts of all academies. So much the greater, then, was the joy when the news ran round Europe that a library, formed in the best age of Latin literature, was discovered at Herculaneum. Now, surely, some of the lost treasures would be restored! All the universities chuckled and stood on tiptoe. Humanity, with the help of a volcano, had scored a point against time at last. But the rolls of papyri were sadly like mere lumps of charcoal. Paderni saw a letter here, a letter there, but on the whole could make nothing of them. The smile died on the faces of the scholars. The trick was not won yet. Who would unroll these charred manuscripts, and who could possibly read them when unrolled? Many people tried and failed, Sir Humphry Davy among the number. Learned hearts sank, and hope flickered almost to extinction. At length Padre Piaggi invented an ingenious arrangement of silk threads, whereby the charred and brittle rolls were unwrapped in the manner described above. It was a slow and weary process, but the wit of man has devised no better. One by one the treasures of the past were read. It took a century and a half, but we know the contents of some three hundred and fifty of them now. Broadly stated, the outcome of all the pother has been to restore to an unthankful world what is probably a complete set of the works of Philodemus! "Philodemus!" gasp the scholars. "Who wanted him?" A fifth-rate Greek philosopher and a fourth-rate poet, who lived at Rome in the days of Cicero, better esteemed for his verses than his reasoning, and not much for either. But no Livy? No Terence? No Cicero? Not one line; hardly anything but the prose treatises of Philodemus, concerning which Signor Comparetti observes with emphasis that the oblivion they lay in was anything but undeserved. Such is the greatest practical joke played on us by the Time Spirit in the present age. But now, laying aside our disappointment and bad temper, let us see what can be made out of this curious, if worthless, discovery. Who could have cared to collect the works of Philodemus, large and small, even to the notes he made from other books? The philosophy was Epicurean, but the chief works of the leaders of that school are with few exceptions not there. Who could it be but Philodemus himself, the only man, surely, for whom such a collection would have value? But what, then, was the library doing in this splendid and costly villa at Herculaneum? Philodemus was a poor Greek scholar, the last man who could have afforded to collect fine marbles or to house them nobly. The villa must have belonged to his patron and protector. Cicero names for us the patrician who enjoyed the privilege of hearing Philodemus reason when he would. It was Piso, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cæsoninus, attacked by Cicero in one of the greatest of his orations. Piso had known this poor scholar from a boy, learnt the philosophy of Epicurus from him, and gave him rooms in his own house. To Piso, probably, belonged this villa. Here he may have ended his stormy life in the society of Philodemus; and when that learned man ascended to Parnassus, his books remained in what had been his study, preserved perhaps by some lingering attachment to his memory, perhaps by such a superstitious pride in what is never read as may be seen in certain country houses of to-day, where the squire believes the dusty volumes collected by his grandfather are a credit to the house, and chides the housemaid if he ever finds a cobweb on the peaceful shelves. It will also be remembered that, unless you want the space very much, it is easier to leave books alone than to destroy them. On the whole, I do not think the discovery of this library affords any evidence of the prevalence of cultivated taste in Herculaneum. Rather the opposite, indeed, for whatever value the owners of the house may have attached to the library the fact remains that they added to it nothing in the hundred years which followed the decease of Philodemus. As for the statues and the bronzes, the finest were doubtless part of the spoils of Piso's proconsulate in Macedonia. Cicero taunted him with having stripped Greece of its treasures, as Verres ransacked those of Sicily. The conduct of both men was barbarous perhaps; but the candid visitor will look many times at the Sleeping Faun, or the Mercury in repose, before daring to ask himself whether he would have come home from Macedonia without them. If he discover that he would, he may yet find cause to rejoice that Piso was less virtuous; for a very short reflection on the state of Greece during the last twenty centuries suggests that if a moralist had been proconsul we should have lacked many pleasures which we now enjoy. The "Scavi Nuovi" lie at a little distance from the theatre. One goes down a steep street sloping to the sea, the Vico di Mare. A gate in the wall gives admission to what seems at first a quarry, but a second glance shows one a short street of roofless houses, emerging from the hillside and running straight in the direction of the shore until stopped by the opposite bank. Beneath and behind these walls, bright with mesembryanthemums and wild roses, lies all the city save this little fragment, this portion of a street, this poor two dozen houses, with the remnants of four insulæ, of which three are occupied by private houses and the fourth by some rooms belonging to the baths, of which the greater part are buried still. The houses of the south-west insula are the most interesting. At the corner is a shop with marble counter, and close to that is a dwelling of rare beauty, the so-called "Casa d'Argo." At the door there are four pillars, and on either side a bench. Out of this entrance one passes through a larger room into the xystos, colonnaded on three sides. A row of rooms open from it, all frescoed in the architectural style of which we shall see much at Pompeii, and giving on the garden. Beyond these rooms there is a second peristyle, all very beautiful--clearly the dwelling of a man of taste and means. But in all this there is no source of pleasure which cannot be enjoyed far better at Pompeii. It is there and not to Herculaneum that the traveller goes to see the results of excavation. On this spot, I say again, it is the tragedy that counts; and as I turn in the warm sunshine and look up the broken street, where rose bushes bloom profusely in the untended gardens and the brown lizards slip in and out among the cold and empty hearths, I see above the houses of the dirty modern town the huge cone of Vesuvius fronting me directly. So he stands, looking down upon the ruin he has made, while the long train of sulky smoke which stains the clear blueness of the April sky flaunts itself like a warning to mankind that it is vain to set human forces against his, and that what he wills to hide shall lie lost and hidden in the earth for ever. [Illustration: NAPLES--IN THE STRADA DI TRIBUNALI.] A man willing to go on foot from Resina to Pompeii might find much to amuse him by the way, especially if he have any care for tracing out the ravages of eruptions. The seashore is not unpleasant. The lava reefs that fringe it are curious, and the ports of Torre del Greco and Torre dell'Annunziata have their share of interest and picturesqueness. But the crumbs of knowledge to be picked up during such a walk seem insignificant beside the banquet which lies waiting at Pompeii; and only those who have already tasted the last dish of that banquet will care to loiter on the way. I do not propose to add one more to the countless unscholarly rhapsodies which have been produced by visitors to Pompeii. Certain tragic feelings strike every one who enters the old grey streets. They are too obvious to need description. All else belongs to the domain of the guide-book or of the expert--to the latter more than to the former, since the best of guide-books is a sorry companion to a man who has neglected the works of Helbig or August Mau. It is not to be expected that the detailed descriptions of Murray or of Gsell-Fels can supply the broad principles and the general ideas which would have been a constant delight if acquired in advance. Many of the best intellects in Europe have been engaged in estimating the significance of the objects found from day to day in Pompeii. It is in their works that knowledge should be sought; for there is scarce any subject on which so much has been written, both so badly and so well, as on this lost city of the Campanian Plain. It is, as I have said already, by wandering up and down the Strada Tribunali in Naples that one may prepare oneself to picture what would have struck a stranger on first entering Pompeii. A man passing to-day beneath the vault of the Porta Marina sees a grey street, its house-fronts perfect, but empty, and startlingly silent. This street runs into the Forum, and is in easy hearing distance of the babel of noise which issued constantly from that centre of the city. Under the colonnade of the Forum tinkers mended pots with clatter and din of hammers. Women hawked fruit and vegetables up and down, chanting their praises doubtless as loudly as the "padulani" of to-day in Naples. Ladies met their shoemakers under the cool shadows of the great arcade; and there, too, children chased each other up and down, screaming at their games like any urchins of to-day upon the steps of San Giovanni Maggiore. We know it, for they are all depicted in paintings found in neighbouring houses. There is the seller of hot food with his caldron, not unlike the stall at which the workman stops to-day in the Piazza Cavour and pays a soldo to have his hunch of bread dipped into hot tomato broth. What cheerful sounds must have risen up from all these occupations! How shall one picture them, except in the streets of some other crowded city? On the left, abutting on the south-west angle of the Forum, is the Basilica, a broad hall used as an extension of the market-place, and containing at the rear the tribunals of justice; while at the opposite, or north-east corner of the Forum, is the market proper, the Macellum, where the fish were sold. Certainly they were brought in by this Porta Marina, far nearer to the shore in those days than now. The scales scraped off the fish in the Macellum were found there in great numbers. Close by were pens for living sheep and counters for the butchers. What a reek of odours, what a hum of eager voices, must have risen up from this dense quarter of the busy, active town! The Pompeiians traded with their very hearts. "Lucrum gaudium!" "Oh, joyous gain!" such were the exclamations which they painted on their walls. And gain they did! Transmitting over the seas the commerce from Nola and Nocera, trading doubtless with ships of Alexandria, as Pozzuoli did; harbouring at their piers upon the Sarno, round which a suburb had sprung up, galleys of many a seaport city, Greek or Barbarian, carrying the industries, and not a few among the vices of the East. Both found a ready welcome in this full-blooded city, intensely alive to all delights and interests, whether pure or impure. Venus was protectress of the city, and was worshipped without stint. There were some within the city whom loathing of its wickedness had impelled to prophecy, so at least one must infer from the fact that the words "Sodoma Gomora" are scratched in large letters on one of the house-fronts. To whom in that pagan city could Hebrew history have suggested so apt and terrible a foreboding? A Jew, perhaps, of whom there were multitudes in Rome; even possibly a Christian, but there is scant evidence of that. Doubtless the Pompeiians read those words without comprehending their horrible significance, and went their way to theatre or to wineshop, a laughing people, a gay, light-hearted nation, a mixed race, the blood of Oscans and of Samnite mountaineers mingling with the languid graces of the degenerating Greeks, loving easily, forgetting lightly, careless, passionate, and intensely human. Such was Pompeii, a seething, noisy, eager city, filled with the reek of dense humanity. But now it is swept clean by winds and sunlight. Its very stews are fragrant. In the morning sweet air blows in from the sea; at night it steals down no less sweetly from the mountains. In all the city there is not one stench. The freshness and the silence of the long streets weigh upon the nerves. There is so little evidence of ruin, not an ash left, not a bank of earth in all the wide district which one enters first, nothing to remind us by the evidence of sight what it was that drove out the people from these once crowded streets and left the houses and the colonnades open to the whispering sea wind. It was not so before the great director Fiorelli came. He it was who stopped haphazard digging, and cleared each quarter completely before beginning work upon another. Since, then, his methods have in great measure freed the city already of its débris, and set its inanimate life before us as it was, the wiser part at Pompeii is to try to grasp the arrangements of a Roman city, leaving the necessary musings on the tragedy to be got through elsewhere. It is beyond my scope, as I have said already, to assume the authority of an expert on Pompeii. More experts are not wanted. The lack, at least in England, is of readers for those who exist. A man intending a tour in Italy will lay out ungrudgingly ten pounds upon his travelling gear, but he will scout the idea of spending the price of a new hat-box on August Mau's treatise, _Pompeii, its Life and Art_, though it would increase his pleasure tenfold more. Still less will he buy any book in a foreign tongue. I must, therefore, in my unlearned way, set down some few facts which will with difficulty be discovered in the guide-books or from the guides. And firstly as to the houses. It will occur to any man that a town so large as Pompeii must have been built in many fashions, old and new. New types grew popular, while old ones still persisted. There is no town in the world in which many manners cannot be traced. At Pompeii, where building was arrested eighteen hundred years ago, the changes of taste are plain and interesting. Indeed, while the houses all possess the atrium, that is the large square or oblong hall in front, open to the sky, with chambers surrounding it on every side, and most have also the peristyle, the colonnaded court behind; yet there are some which are built without the peristyle, and which by other points in their construction give witness of belonging to an earlier and simpler age. One of these antique houses is easily found by passing through the Forum, across the Strada delle Terme and up the Strada Consolare, almost to the Herculaneum gate. It is called the House of the Surgeon; and as in all the city there is no other which retains so largely the aspect and arrangements of the earlier time, before Greek influence was paramount, it should certainly be visited first. It appears at once on entering the house that the peristyle is lacking. One may stand within the courtyard of the atrium, and, looking through the house, see no such vista of colonnaded quadrangle, of fountains, busts, and splendid distances, as gratified the eye within the larger and more modern houses. Those beauties were the contribution of the Greeks to the old simple Latin life. This was the abode of a "laudator temporis acti," a lover of the old homely times, when the single courtyard of the atrium sufficed alike for the master, his family and clients, when the wife sat spinning with her maidens by the scanty light, as in Ovid's immortal description of Lucretia, and the slaves came and went about the household duties close at hand. A colonnade there is certainly, but of only one arcade, and giving on the garden. There was but little splendour in such a dwelling. Only when Greek influence destroyed the simplicity of earlier life was the family quarter distinguished from that of slaves and clients and relegated to the peristyle, the inner courtyard. There is no trace in the Surgeon's house of the rich ornament which became so popular in Pompeii, neither mosaics nor wall paintings. The very building stone differs from that used in later years; for the house is built of large square limestone blocks, while the immense majority of houses in the city are constructed of tufa, quarried chiefly from the ridge on which the city stands. All these facts mark the Surgeon's house as belonging to the earliest Pompeiian age of which traces still exist. It is certainly older than the year 200 B.C., and we may picture the city, while still untouched by the rare sense of beauty which was flowering in the Greek coast towns, as consisting largely of houses on this model, with others of a fashion older and more humble, of which we now know nothing. From the House of the Surgeon it is but a little way to that of Sallust, a larger residence, and one of later date, when tufa had displaced limestone as a building material. It belongs, therefore, to the same period as the vast majority of houses in the city, yet in that period it is of the most antique, the work of a day when Greek influence was not yet paramount in architecture or in private life. It has no peristyle, if a late Roman addition be excepted; the family life was not yet divided. From the atrium one looked through to colonnade and garden, much as in the Surgeon's house. The only paintings are in imitation of slabs of marble on the walls. To reach the House of the Faun we must return to the Strada delle Terme and follow it towards the north-east until it merges in the Strada della Fortuna, in which, upon the left, stands the once magnificent dwelling which takes its name from the beautiful bronze of the Dancing Faun now in the Naples museum. It is much to be wished that the treasures of this noble house could have been left in it. It may in part be older than the house of Sallust, though belonging like it to the Tufa period, and possessing the additional apartments prescribed by the influx of Greek taste. Indeed the added rooms, like all the other portions of the house, were planned with magnificence; and as there are two atria, so there are two peristyles, each of singular beauty and built in the purest taste. There is no house in Pompeii in which a man should pause so long, or to which he should come back so often; for this is the most perfect specimen of the best age of building in the city. It is the fruit of a long age of peace, during which the people drank in thirstily the exquisite sense of beauty diffused from the Greek coast towns. It is not difficult to understand how these rough townsmen, bred of sturdy mountaineers, and inheriting no tradition of fine culture, must have been affected when they went across the sea to Cumæ or to Pæstum, saw the austere glory of the temples rising near the shore, talked with the men whose brains schemed out that splendour and whose hands learnt how to fashion it, craftsmen who wrought nothing destitute of loveliness, whose coins were as noble as their temples, whose hearts must have been afire to spread more widely their own perception of line and form, and who were doubtless no less eager to teach than the Pompeiians were to learn. There is nothing in the world to-day comparable to the magic of that influence which spread like sunshine out of the Greek cities on the Campanian coast, no teachers so noble, no scholars so devoted and receptive, no people who surrender themselves so absolutely to the dominion of beauty, and will have it pure, and none but it. Under the first passion of this enthusiasm Pompeii was transformed. Almost all the public buildings received their present shape from this wave of pure Greek art. Almost every one is graceful and lovely, the columns and architraves were white, the ornament not overloaded, the decorations simple. The artists who tinted the walls confined themselves to producing masses of colour. Wall pictures there were none; but the mosaics of the floors were wrought with curious beauty, and reproduced the first compositions of great painters. The House of the Faun is beautified by no wall pictures, but it contained on the floor of the room which divided the two peristyles one of the finest mosaics ever found, that which depicts the battle of Alexander the Great upon the Issos. The stream of Greek influence ran pure for some four generations. After that it was contaminated. Man can keep no beauty in his hands for long unspoilt. The change is manifest in Pompeii. The Roman influence stole in. A muddy taste obscured the simple grace of the Greek lines, tortured the architecture, piled up unmeaning ornament, and degraded all the city. There were many stages between the first step and the last, not a few still beautiful, though the downward tendency is plain. The house of the Vettii is the finest of the later period. There one may see wall-paintings of rare charm, mingled with others of far inferior taste, as if the gallery of some fine connoisseur had fallen by mischance into the hands of men who did not understand its worth, and placed the compositions of degraded artists side by side with the masterpieces of an olden time. Exact descriptions of these houses are the business of the guide-book. But there are certain observations which I think it necessary to make about the paintings--though if anyone would read the work of Helbig on the subject, it would be much better. No one who visits Pompeii, no one who has seen in the most hasty way the collections of the Naples Museum, can fail to be impressed, first with the worth of the pictures, their dramatic force, their exquisite grace, their rich and tender fancy; and next by their vast profusion. What manner of city was this which worshipped art so devoutly that scarce a single house is without pictures more beautiful than any save a few collectors can obtain to-day? Helbig, writing more than twenty years ago, described and classified two thousand. Others perished on the walls where they were found. More still are being dug up day by day. No ancient writer has told us that Pompeii was renowned for the multitude of its paintings. The city bore almost certainly no such reputation. It was a provincial town of little note, remarkable for nothing in the eyes of those who visited it. Yet what a world of beauty must have existed on the earth when these were the common decorations of a fourth-rate town, excelled by those of Rome, or even Ostia, in proportion to the higher wealth and dignity of those imperial haunts! What were the decorations to be seen at Baiæ, when Pompeii was adorned so finely! That group of palaces must surely have drawn more noble craftsmen, and in greater numbers, than ever visited the town of trade and pleasure on the Sarno. As in a great museum we stand before the gigantic bone of some lost animal, striving to picture in our minds the creature as he lived, getting now a dim conception of great strength and bulk which is lost again by the weakness of our fancy ere half realised, so in presence of these pictures at Pompeii we are tormented by flashing visions of the grace and splendour of the ancient world which so many centuries ago was shattered into fragments, and which it may be that no human intellect will ever reconstruct before the earth grows cold and man fails from off its surface. Whence came these pictures, these noble visions of Greek myth, austere and restrained, these warriors, these satyrs, these happy, laughing loves? Is it possible that one small city can have bred the artists who dreamed all these dreams and yet have left no mark in history of such great achievement? Clearly not. The artists cannot have been Pompeian. The elder Pliny tells us that in his day painting was at the point of death, while Petronius declares roundly that it was absolutely dead. One walks round the Naples Museum and recalls these judgments with astonishment. Can this art be really moribund, this Iphigenia, spreading her arms wide to receive the stroke, this Calchas, finger on lip, watching for the fated moment, this Perseus, this Ariadne! If this is dying art, Heaven grant that English art may ere long die of the same death. But it is not. No man can judge it so. Pliny and Petronius meant something else, and the key to their despondency is produced by the discovery that many of these Pompeian pictures are replicas. The same subjects recur, with almost the same treatment. Sometimes the figures are identical. Sometimes the painter has elected to reduce the composition. The painting of Argos watching Io occurs four times in Pompeii. It has been found also in Rome!--the same picture, but containing figures which the Campanian artist thought proper to omit. There is evidence, too, that the picture was diffused over an area far wider than that lying between Rome and Pompeii. It appears on reliefs, on medals, and on cameos. Lucian had it in his mind when he wrote a famous passage in his poem, and it suggested an epigram by Antiphilos. The case is similar with the fresco of Perseus and Andromeda. Both were world-known pictures, the composition of a great artist--Helbig suggests that it was the Athenian Nikias--and both were copied far and wide by craftsmen who could merely reproduce. This is what Pliny and Petronius meant. They looked about them and found only copyists. The great school of painting was dead, and those who reproduced its works did so without heart or understanding. This was sorrowful enough for them; but we may regard their woeful faces cheerfully. Time and the volcano have done us the good service of preserving to our day copies of some masterpieces of ancient painting. The copyists were often treacherous. There is a fresco of Medea at Pompeii in which the figure of the mother brooding over the thought of murdering her children is weak and unconvincing. But at Herculaneum was found a Medea who is terrible indeed, wild-eyed and murderous, such a figure as none but the greatest artist could conceive and few copyists could reproduce. Set this Medea in her place in the Pompeian fresco and the result may well be the Medea of Timomachus, one of the most famous pictures of all antiquity. The school in which these artists, Pompeians or travelling painters, found their models was Hellenist, Greek art of the period subsequent to Alexander the Great. They did not draw by preference upon its highest compositions. Serious treatment of the ancient myths, that treatment which revealed the great and elemental facts from which they sprang, was not popular in Pompeii, where the citizens appear to have preferred a lighter and more artificial view of life--love without its passion, the comedy of manners rather than the tragedy. These gay feasters desired to see no skeletons among their roses and their winecups. They preferred light laughing cupids, kind towards the human frailties of both men and women. It was a joyous, light-hearted, unreflecting society on which this terrible destruction fell, luxurious and vicious. The realisation of that fact tightens the sense of tragedy, as the sudden annihilation of a group of children playing with their flowers seems more pitiful than the death of men. There are a thousand things still to say of Pompeii, but they are beyond my scope. The westering sun has turned all the hills above Castellammare into purple clouds. The heat lies among the broken city walls. It is enough. I turn away, and take up anew the course of my journey. It is no long way from the turfed ridges which conceal Pompeii to the first rises of the Castellammare Mountains. The road crosses the Sarno, and cuts straight and dusty through wide fields of beans and lupins, with here and there a gaunt farmhouse, or massaria, bare of all attempt to make it pleasant to the eye. The bitter lupins are almost, if not quite, the cheapest food that can be bought in Naples, and are accordingly sold principally to the very poor by the "lupinaria," who may be seen any day in the precinct of the Porta Capuana, or in the byways round about the Mercato. Does anyone ask how the beans became so bitter? It was by the curse of our Lord, who was fleeing from the Pharisees, and hid Himself in a field of lupins. The beans were dry, and betrayed His movements by their rustling; whereupon He cursed them, and they have been bitter ever since. [Illustration: PORTA CAPUANA--NAPLES] There is no doubt that the Sarno was navigable when Pompeii was a living city, but these many centuries it has been a rather dirty ditch, unapproachable by shipping. Its chief interest for me lies in the fact that along its bank, and across all the fertile country up to the base of the great mountains, was fought the last great battle of the Goths, those brave Teutons out of whom, as Mr. Hodgkin says, "so noble a people might have been made to cultivate and to defend the Italian peninsula." Heaven had been very kind to Italy in this sixth century after Christ. It had sent down upon her from the north a race of conquerors, barbarian, it is true, but brave, honourable, sincere, and possessing every capability for government. They conquered Italy from end to end. No province, no city, held out against them. From the Alps to Sicily they were supreme, and their genius, humane and not disdainful either of the arts or Christianity, was rapidly fusing every warring element of the peninsula into a mighty nation--Germanic earnestness infused with Latin wit--when the lord of the world, the Roman Emperor in distant Constantinople, resolved to put forth his strength and drive out these strangers, these builders of a nation, who were tending what he had neglected, defending what he had left open to attack, and reaping harvests of which he, out of all men, was least entitled to proclaim himself the sower. So the Emperor sent first Belisarius, and then Narses, and long and bitter was the war which followed. Mr. Hodgkin, in his fourth volume, has told it in a style which is beyond all praise. Upon these plains was fought out the last battle of the Goths. Here Narses brought them to bay. For two months they lay along the line of the Sarno, while Narses, baffled by the river, plotted how to take them in the rear. At last he won over some traitor of an admiral, who surrendered to him the Gothic fleet, lying, perhaps, at Castellammare; and the Goths, finding that the port was no longer theirs, fell back upon the hills, entrenching themselves upon the spot where the ruined castle of Lettere now stands. But their supplies were cut off--it was impossible to feed an army on the barren mountains--and adopting counsels of despair, they descended to the plain and gave battle to the Imperial troops. It was a great and terrible fight. Goths and Romans fought on foot. Teias the king fell after bearing himself right nobly; but the Goths fought on, and when darkness interrupted the engagement they did but pause in order to renew it with no less desperation when the light returned. When both armies were nearly wearied out the Goths sent a messenger to Narses. They perceived, they said, that God had declared against them, and that the strife was hopeless. If terms were granted they would depart from Italy. The Imperial general accepted their proposals, and the Goths, the noblest invaders who ever entered Italy, turned their backs for ever on the fertile land where they had made their homes, crossed the Alps in order, and were never heard of in Italy again. So perished, until our day, the last hope of unity for Italy, and for full thirteen centuries that unhappy land was drenched in constant blood--the prey of conquerors who could not conquer, and the sport of statesmen who never learnt to govern. For the Roman Emperor could build no state comparable to the one he had destroyed, and what Italy owes to him is forty generations of unhappiness. In travelling through this country one is haunted by the perpetual desire to look back into past ages, and admonished almost as often that as yet one cannot do so. Indeed, one looks forward almost as often, anticipating that day when scholars will combine to assist in the excavation of all the buried regions, when every villa shall be disinterred, and the secrets hidden underneath the vineyards be exposed to the light of day again. Here on the first slopes of the hills around Castellammare lay the groups of country villas which formed ancient Stabiæ, and every man who goes this way longs to see them disinterred. For what is seen at Pompeii is but half the life of Roman days--a city stripped of its country villas and all its rustic intercourse. Pompeii stood in the heart of the country. Its citizens must have had farms upon the mountain slopes; they must have had concern in husbandry as well as trade; there must have been hourly comings and goings between the crowded streets and the sweet hillsides of Varano, where the grapes ripened and the wine-vats gathered the crushed juice, where the oil dripped slowly from the olive-presses, and the jars stood waiting for the mountain honey. The day will come when all this great life of Roman husbandry will be disclosed to us, and we shall know it as we now know the city streets; for it is here still upon the mountain slopes, buried safe beneath the vineyards, waiting only till its vast interest is comprehended by people in sufficient numbers to provide the funds to excavate it. Stabiæ was by no means another Pompeii. It was no city, but a group of farms and country villas, and has countless things to teach us which cannot be seen or learnt beside the Sarno. The very houses were of other shapes and plans; for the Romans did not reproduce town houses in the country, but designed them for different uses, and embodied apartments which had no matches in the city. There are the residences of wealthy men, adorned with noble peristyles, mosaics, and fine statues, and side by side with them the home farms--if one may use a modern term--the chambers of the husbandmen, and the courts in which they worked. There, too, are buildings far too large for any family and differing in arrangement from any private dwelling yet discovered. The use of these great buildings can only be conjectured. Ruggiero, whose self-denying labour has collected in one monumental work all the information now obtainable upon the subject, suggests that they may have been hospitals, a supposition probable enough when we remember that the Romans must have been no less aware than we ourselves how potent a tonic is the mountain air for patients suffering from the fevers bred upon the plains. In Ruggiero's pages one may see the scanty and imperfect plans sketched out by those who dug upon the site more than a century ago. Posterity owes those hasty workers but little gratitude. They were inspired by hardly more than a mean kind of curiosity. They were treasure-seekers, pure and simple; and what they judged to be of little value they broke up with their pickaxes. Swinburne, the traveller, watched a portion of the excavations, but without intelligence, and has nothing to tell us of much interest. "When opened," he says, speaking evidently of a villa on Varano, it may be the very one in which Pliny passed the last night of his life, "the apartment presented us with the shattered walls, daubed rather than painted with gaudy colours in compartments, and some birds and animals in the cornices, but in a coarse style, as indeed are all the paintings of Stabiæ. In a corner we found the brass hinges and lock of a trunk; near them part of the contents, viz. ivory flutes in pieces, some coins, brass rings, scales, steelyards, and a very elegant silver statue of Bacchus about twelve inches high, represented with a crown of vine leaves, buskins, and the horn of plenty." With this perfunctory account we must rest content, until some millionaire shall conceive the notion of delighting all the world instead of building a palace for himself. But the camel will have gone through the needle's eye before that happens. FOOTNOTE: [1] Paderni is wrong here. Signor de Petra shows us that the busts only were in the peristyle. The statues were all in the garden. CHAPTER X. CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS FOLKLORE AND THE TALE OF THE MADONNA OF POZZANO "Marzo è pazzo" ("March is mad") say the Neapolitans, contemptuous of his inconstancies. God forbid that I should try to prove the sanity of March; but it is long odds if April is one whit the better. His moon is in its first quarter, and still sirocco blows up out of the sea day by day. The grey clouds drift in banks across Vesuvius and hide the pillar of his smoke, dropping down at whiles even to the level of the plain. From time to time it is as if the mountain stirred and shook himself, flinging off the weight of vapour from his flanks and crest, so that again one can see the rolling column of dense smoke, stained and discoloured by the reflection of the fires far down within the cone, now rosy, now a menacing dull brown which is easily distinguishable from the watery clouds that gather in the heavens. Yet slowly, steadily the veil of mist returns, while mine host murmurs ruefully, "Sette Aprilanti, giorni quaranta!" But it is not the seventh of April yet, so we may still be spared the sight of dripping trees for forty days. An hour ago, when I ventured up the hill towards the woods, a tattered, copper-coloured varlet of a boy looked out of the cellar where his mother was stooping over the smoking coals in her brass chafing-dish. "Aprile chiuove, chiuove," he bawled, as if it were the greatest news in the world. He thinks the harvest will be mended by the April rains; though if he and others in this region knew whence their true harvest comes, they would humbly supplicate our Lady of Pozzano to give fine weather to the visitors. To be stayed at the gate of the Sorrento peninsula by doubtful weather is by no means an unmixed misfortune. It may be that our Lady of Pozzano sometimes employs the showers to bring hasty travellers to a better way of thinking. Certainly many people hurry past Castellammare to their own hurt. The town is unattractive, and may, moreover, be reproached with wickedness, though it suffers, as is said, from the low morality of Greek sailors, rather than from any crookedness of its homeborn citizens. But the mountain slopes behind it are immensely beautiful. No woods elsewhere in the peninsula are comparable to these. No other drives show views so wide and exquisite framed in such a setting of fresh spring foliage, nor is there upon these shores an hotel more comfortable or more homelike than the "Quisisana," which stands near the entrance of the woods; and this I say with confidence, though not unaware that the judgments of travellers upon hotels are as various as their verdicts on a pretty woman, who at one hour of the day is ten times prettier than at another, and may now and then look positively plain. Castellammare possesses an excellent sea-front, which would have made a pleasant promenade had not a selfish little tramway seized upon the side next the shore, guarding itself by a high railing from the intrusion of strangers in search of cool fresh air. Thus cast back on a line of dead walls, house-fronts as mean as only a fourth-rate Italian town can boast, one has no other amusement than gazing at the mountains, which in truth are beautiful enough for anyone. Very steep and high they tower above Castellammare; not brown and purple, as when I looked up at them across the broken walls of Pompeii, but clad in their true colours of green of every shade, dark and sombre where ravines are chiselled out upon the slopes, or where the pines lie wet and heavy in the morning shadow. Higher up, the flanks of the mountains are rough with brushwood, while on the summits the clear air blows about bare grass deepening into brown. Sometimes sloping swiftly to the sea, but more often dropping in sheer cliffs of immense height, this dark and shadowy mountain wall thrusts itself out across the blue waters, while here and there a village gleams white upon some broken hillside, or a monastery rears its red walls among the soft grey of the olive woods. There lies Vico, on its promontory rock, showing at this distance only the shade of its great beauty; and beyond the next lofty headland is Sorrento, at the foot of a mountain country so exquisite, so odorous with myrtle and with rosemary, so fragrant of tradition and romance, that it is, as I said, a good fortune which checks the traveller coming from the plain at the first entrance of the hills and gives him time to realise the nature of the land which lies before him. It needs no long puzzling to discover whence the importance of Castellammare has been derived in all the centuries. The port offers a safe shelter for shipping, which of itself counts for much upon a coast possessing few such anchorages; and it lies near the entrance of that valley road across the neck of the Sorrento peninsula, which is the natural route of trade between Naples and Salerno. The road is of much historical interest, as any highway must be which has been followed by so many generations of travellers, both illustrious and obscure; and any man who chooses to recollect by what various masters Salerno has been held will be able to people this ancient track with figures as picturesque as any in the history of mankind. He will observe, moreover, the importance of the Castle of Nocera, which dominates this route of traders. I confess to being somewhat puzzled as to the exact course by which the commerce of Amalfi extricated itself from the mountains and dispersed itself over the mainland. Doubtless the merchants of La Scala and Ravello followed the still existing road from Ravello to Lettere, and thence to Gragnano, whence comes the ancient punning jest, "L'Asene de Gragnano Sapevano Lettere." This road is certainly ancient, and early in the present century it was the usual approach to Amalfi, whither travellers were carried in litters across the mountains. The little handbook of Ravello, based on notes left by the late Mr. Reid, seems to account this road more recent than the age of Ravello's commercial greatness. Probably a recency of form rather than of course is meant; but in any case, I cannot believe that the merchants of Amalfi sent out their trade by a route which began for them with an ascent so very long and arduous. Possibly they approached Gragnano by a road running up the valley from Minori or Majori. Of course the traders of old days were very patient of rough mountain tracks, and did not look for the wide beaten turnpikes which we have taught ourselves to regard as essential to commerce. Doubtless, therefore, many a team of mules from Amalfi, laden with silks and spices from the East, came down through Lettere, where it would scarce get by the castle of the great counts who held that former stronghold of the Goths without paying toll or tribute for its safety on the mountain roads. And so, passing through Gragnano and beneath the hillsides where the palaces of ancient Stabiæ lie buried, the wearied teams would come down at last to Castellammare, where they would need rest ere beginning the hot journey by the coast road into Naples. Both the roads which diverge from Castellammare, the one heading straight across the plains towards the high valley of La Cava, the other clinging to the fresh mountain slopes, are therefore full of interest. Of Nocera, indeed, its castle full of memories of Pope Urban VI., and its fine church Santa Maria Maggiore, some two miles out, any man with ease might write a volume. But we stayed long scorching on the plains among the buried cities; and the hill route is the more inviting now. The weather is disposed to break. A gleam of sun sparkles here and there upon the water. Let us see what the hillsides have to show us. Castellammare is a dirty and ill-odorous town. As I hurry through its crowded streets, brushed by women hawking beans and dodging others who are performing certain necessary acts of cleanliness at their house doors, I occupy myself in wondering whether there is in all southern Italy a city without smells. From Taranto to Naples I can recall none save Pompeii. It is, doubtless, an unattainable ideal to bring Castellammare to the state of that sweet-smelling habitation of the dead; though it would be unwise to prophesy what the volcano may not yet achieve on the scene of his old conquests. There are so many things lost and forgotten upon this coast. I see that Schulz, whose great work still remains by far the best guide through the south of Italy, describes vast catacombs in the hillside at Castellammare. I must admit that I do not know where these catacombs are. Schulz, who visited them before 1860, found in them pictures not older than the twelfth century, and resembling in many details those which are seen in the catacombs of Naples. Certainly the old grave chambers are no longer among the sights of this summer city. But the whole region impresses one with the constant sense that the keenest interest and the longest knowledge spent upon this ground which is strewn with the dust of so many generations, will leave behind countless undiscovered things. The world seems older here than elsewhere. And so it is, if age be counted by lives and passions rather than by geologic courses. As one goes on up the ascent, the narrow alleys break out into wider spaces, and here and there a breath of mountain air steals down between the houses, or the ripe fruit of an orange lights up a shadowy courtyard with a flash of colour; till at last the houses fall away, and one climbs out on a fresh hillside, where a double row of trees gives protection from the sun. Two sharp turns of the steep road bring one into a small village, of which the first house is the Hotel Quisisana. But I have nothing to say to hotels at this hour of the morning, and accordingly trudge on a little further up the hill, till I come to the Vico San Matteo, a lane branching off along the hillside on my right, which brings me to a shady terrace road, rising and falling on the hillside just below the level of the woods. At this height the air blown down from sea and mountain is sweet and pure. The banks are glowing with crimson cyclamen and large anemones, both lavender and purple, while the hillside on the right, dropping rapidly towards the town, is thick-set with orchards, through whose falling blossoms the sea shines blue and green, while across the bay Vesuvius pours out its rosy vapour coil by coil. It is a wide and noble view, one of those which have made Castellammare famous in all ages, as the first slopes of the cool wooded mountains must needs be among all the cities of the scorching plains. In Roman days, just as in our own, men looked up from Naples long before the grapes changed colour or the figs turned black, pining for the sweet breezes of Monte Sant'Angelo, and the whispering woods of Monte Coppola, where the shadows lie for half the day, and the only sounds are made by the busy hacking of the woodcutters. There is no caprice of fashion in this straining to the hills, but a natural impulse as strong as that which stops a hot and weary man beside a roadside well. Every generation of Neapolitans has come hither in the summer; everyone will do so to the end of time. I shall go up this evening to the Bourbon pleasure-house; and here, set before me at the turning of the road, is the ancient castle of the Hohenstaufen, built by the great Emperor Frederick the Second, and added to by the foe who seized his kingdom and slew his son, yet came to take his pleasure on the same spot. Underneath the round towers of the crumbling ruin an old broken staircase descends towards the town, skirting the castle wall. It is from this ancient ladder, ruinous and long disused, that Castellammare looks its best. The harbour lies below, and a fishing boat running in furls its large triangular sail and drops its anchor. The long quay is a mass of moving figures. The tinkle of hammers rings through the quiet air. Here in the shadow of the woods time seems to pause, and one sees the hillside, the staircase, and the old town below much as they must have looked when Boccaccio came out hither in his hot youth, inflamed with love for Marie of Anjou, and heard, perhaps, on some summer night within the woods the story which he tells us of the base passion which beset the fierce King Charles in his old age, and how he overcame it. The tale, though possibly not true, is worth recalling, if only because not many kingly actions are recorded of the monarch who slew Conradin. An exile from Florence had come to end his days among these mountains, one Messer Neri Degli Uberti. He was rich, and bought himself an estate a bowshot distant from the houses of the town, and on it made a shady garden, in the midst of which he set a fishpond, clear and cool, and stocked it well with fish. So he went on adding beauty upon beauty to his garden, till it chanced that King Charles heard of it, when in the hot summer days he came out to his castle by the sea for rest, and desiring to see the pleasaunce sent a messenger to Messer Neri to say that he would sup with him next evening. The Florentine, bred among the merchant princes, received the King nobly; and Charles, having seen all the beauties of the garden, sat down to sup beside the fishpond, placing Messer Neri on one side and on the other his own courtier, Count Guido di Monforte. The dishes were excellent, the wines beyond praise, the garden exquisite and still. The King's worn heart thrilled with pleasure. Cares and remorse fled away, and the charm of the soft summer evening reigned unbroken. At that moment two girls came into the garden, daughters of Messer Neri, not more than fifteen. Their hair hung loose like threads of spun gold. A garland of blue flowers crowned it, and their faces wore the look of angels rather than of sinful humankind, so delicate and lovely were their features. They were clad in white, and a servant followed them carrying nets, while another had a stove and a lighted torch. Now the King wondered when he saw these things; and as he sat watching the girls came and did reverence to the old, grim monarch, and then walking breast deep into the fishpond, swept the waters with their nets in those places where they knew the fish were lurking. Meanwhile one of the servants blew the live coals of the stove, while his fellow took the fish; and by-and-by the girls began to toss the fish out on the bank towards the King, and he, snatching them up with jest and laughter, threw them back; and so they sported like gay children till the broil was ready. Then the girls came out of the water, their thin dresses clinging round them; and presently returning, dressed in silk, brought to the King silver dishes heaped up high with fruit, and then sang together some old song with pure childlike voices, so sweet that as the weary tyrant sat and listened it seemed to him as if some choir of angels were chanting in the evening sky. Now as the old King rode homeward to his castle, the gentle beauty of these girls stole deeper and deeper into his heart, and one of them especially, named Ginevra, stirred him into love, so that at last he opened his heart to Count Guido, and asked him how he might gain the girl. But the Count had the courage of a noble friend, and set the truth before him, showing how base a deed he meditated. "This," he said, "is not the action of a great king, but of a cowardly boy. You plot to steal his daughter from the poor knight who did you all the honour in his power, and brought his daughters to aid him in the task, showing thereby how great is the faith which he has in you, and how firmly he holds you as a true king, and not a cowardly wolf." Now these words stung the King the more since he knew them to be true; and he vowed he would prove before many days were over that he could conquer his lusts, even as he had trodden down his enemies. So, not long afterwards, he went back to Naples; and there he made splendid marriages for both the girls, heaping them with honours, and having seen them in the charge of noble husbands, he went sorrowfully away into Apulia, where with great labours he overcame his passion. "Some may say," adds Fiammetta, who told the tale on the tenth day of the _Decameron_, "that it was a little thing for a king to give two girls in marriage; but I call it a great thing, ay, the greatest, that a king in love should give the woman whom he loves unto another." Fiammetta should have known of what she spoke--none better. I wonder why Boccaccio chose to put an impossible circumstance into this story. If the tale be true of anyone, it cannot be one of the Uberti family who settled in the territory and near the castle of the great Guelf king. For the Uberti were all Ghibellines, supporters of the empire and deadly enemies of him who slew Manfred. Not one of them ever asked or obtained mercy from Charles, who was the butcher of their family. Boccaccio certainly did not forget this. No Florentine could have been ignorant even momentarily of circumstances so terrible, affecting so great a family. No carelessness of narrative could account for the introduction of one of the Uberti into the story. It must have been deliberate, though I do not see the reason. It may have been that he desired only to accentuate the magnanimity of Charles, to whose grandson, King Robert, he owed much, and chose the circumstances, whether true or false, which made that magnanimity most striking. I can find no more probable explanation. The road which goes on past the castle undulates beneath an arch of beech trees, just unfurling their young leaves of tender green, and in half a mile or so comes out at the ancient monastery of Pozzano, a red building of no great intrinsic interest, but recalling the name of Gonsalvo di Cordova, "il gran capitano," to whose piety the foundation of the convent is frequently ascribed, though in truth there had been an ecclesiastical foundation on the spot for three centuries before Gonsalvo's time, and all he did was to restore it from decay. I doubt if many people remember the great soldier now. The peasants who go up and down the slope before the convent doors know far better the tale of the mysterious picture of the Madonna which was found buried in a well, but is now hung up in glory in the church. It is worth while to stop and hear the story of this picture. Long before the present convent was built, when the hillside at this spot lay waste and covered with dense herbage, through which the mules going to Sorrento forced their way with labour, the people of Castellammare noticed a flame which sprang up night by night like a signal fire lit to warn ships off the coast. The people looked and trembled, for there were strange beings on the mountain, dwarfs, and what not! No mortal man would make a fire there. So the signal blazed, but none went near it, till at length some fishers casting their nets in the bay, and wondering among themselves what could be the meaning of the flame which was then burning on the hill, saw the Madonna come to them across the sea, all clothed in light. The radiant virgin stood looking down upon them kindly as they sat huddled in their fear, and bade them tell their Bishop to search the ground over which the fire hovered, for he would there find an image of herself. The poor men took no heed of what they thought a vision of the night; nor did they obey the Virgin when she came again. But when on the third night the Queen of Heaven descended to this murky world, she towered above their boat incensed and awful, denouncing against them all the pains of hell and outer darkness if they dared neglect her bidding. The fear-struck fishers hastened to their Bishop on the first light of morning and told him their tale. He too had seen a celestial vision, warning him of the coming of the sailors. There was no room for doubt or hesitation. He put himself at the head of a long penitent procession, went up the hill, discovered a well just where the flame had burnt, and in the well the marvellous picture which now adorns the church. How came the picture there? If one could answer that question some light would be thrown on the age of the relic. The country people when they see any work of ancient art are disposed to say, "San Luca l'ha pittato"! ("St. Luke painted it"), as he did the Madonna of the Carmine in Naples; and accordingly this picture also has been ascribed to the brush of the Evangelist. The priests themselves do not claim an origin so sacred for their canvas, but maintain that it is an early Greek work, buried for safety in the days when, at the bidding of the iconoclastic Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, an attempt was made to root out image worship from the land. I do not know whether any competent expert has pronounced the painting to be of an age which renders the story probable. Ecclesiastical traditions are frequently inspired rather by piety than truth, and for my part, when I remember what ravages the Turks committed along these coasts up to the boyhood of men not long dead, I can find no reason for going back to the eighth century to discover facts which may have led either priests or laymen to bury sacred things. In these days the Madonna of Pozzano walks no more upon the sea. Yet she remains, in a particular degree, the protectress of all sailors; and one may very well suspect that the priestly tale of the miraculous light, the hidden well, and the long-forgotten picture, does but conceal some record of kindness done to mariners which we heretics might prize more highly. For in old days, when ships approaching Naples may have found it hard to set their course after the light faded, and harder still to anchor off a lee shore, a beacon fire on the monastery roof would have been a noble aid, such as must have saved many a tall ship and brought many a sailor home to his wife in safety. Surely in some such facts as these lies the explanation of the traditional attachment of the sailors to the Madonna of Pozzano. "Ave Maria, Stella Maris!"--a star of the sea indeed, if it was the beacon kindled by her servants by which poor mariners steered back to port. It needs not much faith to believe some portion of this pretty story. Incredulity is generally stupid; but he who most sincerely desires to be wise must needs ponder when he finds that almost every town throughout the peninsula possesses a Madonna found in some wondrous way. At Casarlano, for example, Maria Palumbo was feeding a heifer when she heard a voice issuing from the bushes, which said, "Maria, tell your father to come and dig here, and he will find an image of me." Maria, seeing no one, did not understand, but the same thing happened on the next day and the next, while at length her comprehension was quickened by a light box on the ear, which might have changed into a heavy one had she waited for another day. But, growing prudent by experience, she told her father all; and he, knowing that it was not for him to reason concerning heavenly monitions, went and dug in the spot indicated, and there found an image which has been of peculiar sanctity ever since. In fact its sensibilities were so keen, that when the Turks ravaged the country in 1538 it wept tears mingled with drops of blood. When speaking of these Madonnas it would be wrong to omit the one most honoured in Nocera, and in many other places round about. She is known as "La Madonna delle Galline"--the Madonna of the cocks and hens--and her image was found, according to one version of the tale, by the scratching of hens in the loose soil which covered it. Her feast is on Low Sunday, or rather on the three days of which that Sunday is the centre; and most visitors who stay at Castellammare in the spring must have seen some trace of the festa. The procession starts from Nocera, and as the crowds of chanting priests and pious laity go by, every good peasant woman looses a hen, or else a pigeon, which she has previously stained bright purple. The purple hens perch on the base of the Madonna's statue, made broad and large for their accommodation, and are then collected by the master of the ceremonies, who sells them to devout persons. In many a village from Gragnano to La Cava the purple hens may be occasionally seen pecking in the dust, a marvel and astonishment to English visitors, who, being unaware how much their plumage owes to the dye-bag, are disposed to barter at a high price for animals so certain to create sensation at the next poultry show. At the foot of the slope which drops from Pozzano into the highway from Castellammare to Sorrento is a little roadside shrine, set deeply in the rock, over which pious hands have inscribed one of those pathetically appealing calls to wayfarers which seem to penetrate so rarely the hearts to which they are addressed-- "Non sit tibi grave Dicere Mater ave." "Let it not be a burden to say, Hail, Mother!" It is a gentle appeal, a light act of devotion, yet few there are who care to claim the blessing. The peasants, men and women, go by without an instant's pause in their chatter, or the slightest glance towards the shrine. They do not want even the human love which is offered to them so simply. In Naples, on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, is another Madonna, who has put on even more passionately the accents of a human mother brooding over sorrow-stricken children, and all the strong feeling is expressed in verses, of which the burden runs-- "... C'è un'allegrìa Incontrar la Madonna in sulla via"-- "It is a joy to meet the Mother of mankind beside the way." In the last verse the pleading becomes more eager, giving utterance to the cry of a lost and frightened child seeking the protection which will never fail it-- "... O mamma mia Venite incontrarmi in sulla via!" But neither does this call find a ready answer, and I think the appeal of the verses falls more often on the hearts of strangers and aliens in creed than on those which it seeks to comfort. The steep slope before the convent at Pozzano was the end of the ancient mule track from Sorrento, the same, I imagine, by which St. Peter travelled after landing at Sorrento, as I shall tell in the next chapter. Anyone who cares to penetrate behind the convent can trace it still meandering up hill and down dale with a pleasant indifference to gradients which is characteristic of highways of measureless antiquity. Over the crest of Capo d'Orlando and many another headland it climbs, as if its main object were to take one up into the clear, silent air, over the sweet-smelling brushwood, where myrtle and rosemary scent the air, and the white gum-cistus grows like a weed. No one follows that lonely track in these days, yet it is worth while to walk along it, if only that one may see how easy it made the respectable, but now decadent, trade of brigandage, which in days not yet far distant was the sweet solace of all the men and most of the women in the towns, and yet more in the mountain villages of the peninsula. Castellammare, placed so as to command the highway from Naples to Salerno, as well as those coast roads which were more frequented by wealthy tourists of all nations, was in high favour with men who practised the gentle art of stopping travellers, and many a heavy purse was eased of its burden upon the lonely roads. Fra Diavolo was well known here; in fact, it was among the mountains above this very road to Sorrento that he tried his 'prentice hand at the profession in which he afterwards became so great a master. The Convent of Santa Marta lies towards Vico Equense, high up in the olive woods, in a lonely situation, guarded by its sanctity. That had been quite enough, until Fra Diavolo came into the world, to keep safe not only the nuns, but even their gold statue of the Madonna, which is perhaps more wonderful, though both are sterling proofs of the excellent and reverential morals of the people. One Scarpi dwelt in the woods above Castellammare, with a faithful band of followers who loved him. I fear he is forgotten now, which is scarcely just, for he was a bold and bloodthirsty bandit. But as is said in the _Purgatorio_ on a similar occasion-- "... Credette Cimabue nella pintura Tener lo Campo! ed ora ha Giotto il grido." In Brigantaggio it is just the same, and Scarpi's just celebrity is obscured by the greater fame of Fra Diavolo. Scarpi was torn two ways; cupidity reminded him that the golden statue was easily obtained, piety interposed that it would be a shocking crime. Nothing worse was set down against him than the usual tricks on travellers, slitting their ears, and dismissing them upon occasion to a better world. It was a pity to spoil so fair a record. But Fra Diavolo, boy as he was when he joined Scarpi's band, possessed the great advantage of a single heart. Cupidity was not thwarted by any opposing force of piety, and craft came to make the weak arm strong. He dressed himself like a novice, and going up boldly to the gate of the convent proclaimed himself a penitent, and sought admission to the Order. I doubt not he had an innocent face. The mother superior welcomed him, and straightway shut him up in solitude for the usual three days' communing with heavenly powers, which was to prepare him for the spiritual life to which he aspired. The boy naturally wished to make this intercourse as direct as possible, and making his way unobserved into the chapel he seized the golden Madonna and hid her under some straw in a cart belonging to a peasant whom some lawful occasion had brought up to the convent. Having done this, he presented himself before the Mother Superior, telling her reflection had convinced him he was not fitted for a heavenly life--which was indeed no more than the truth--and so departed with her approval. The poor peasant driving down among the olive woods somewhat later, all unconscious of the riches in his creaking cart, was probably at a loss to understand why Scarpi's faithful followers should stop him, and insist on rummaging in the straw. His emotions when he saw what they fished out would be a fit subject for a dramatic monologue. Horror at the sacrilege must have struggled with regret that he had not himself thought of fumbling in the straw. Had he done so, would he not have driven off the other way, and melted down the Madonna in his own cottage? To be made the tool by which sinners acquire wealth is surely bitter, and often in after life the poor man must have cursed the fate which did not whisper in his ear what it was he carried in the cart. But Scarpi's bandits carried off the statue, and Fra Diavolo gained great honour with them. This early fame he never lost. And the common people, holding that priests and devils are, however opposite in all their qualities, the only classes of mankind who are uniformly cunning and successful in all they undertake, combined the titles into one cognomen, no whit too glorious for the chieftain, who in his untutored youth had proved greater than all the restraints which hamper greedy men, and had laid hands on the Madonna. So Fra Diavolo became a mighty leader, and woeful are the tales which travellers told of him. Yet I should be unjust if I did not mention that his most brutal outrages were sometimes capable of being dignified by the name of politics, if not of loyalty to an exiled king. For Ferdinand of Bourbon when he fled from his throne of Naples at the end of the last century, skulking from revolutionary outblasts and the coming of the French, was not so far untrue to the traditions of his race as to despise the help of any agents, however rascally. It might have seemed incongruous if we had found the inheritor of the name of the constable Bourbon who led Frundsberg's Lanzknechts down on Rome in 1527, and cast the treasures of ages as a prey to the scum of Europe, if we had found this monarch saying to himself "Non tali auxilio," and indulging in the luxury of scruples. But Ferdinand despised no man who would help him; and so Fra Diavolo, the murderer and bandit, became a secret agent of the exiled king, working hand in hand with that even more atrocious scoundrel Mammone, whose habit it was to dine with a newly severed human head upon the table, and whose cold-blooded assassinations were more in number than any man could count. So these murderous devils cut off French couriers on the mountain roads, attacked small parties in overwhelming numbers, and performed other gallant deeds in the service of their king, who was not ungrateful, but rewarded them after his kind and theirs. I can find but little in the streets of Castellammare which invites me to linger in them. There are mineral baths just outside the town, but Providence gave me no occasion for visiting them, and I dislike the apparatus of ill-health. I went past the baths, therefore, and strolled on through the crowded, evil-smelling streets till I came out again at the foot of the hill leading to the woods of Quisisana, and went up once more beneath the green arches of the budding leaves, till I saw from time to time a snatch of sea above the houses and the wide sunlit plain revealed itself stretching far and distant round the base of the great volcano. As I went through the little village of which I spoke before, I noticed hanging on a wire which crosses the road a doll made in the likeness of an old grey-haired woman, adorned with a tuft of feathers growing somewhat bare. As it swung to and fro in the light wind it had the aspect of a child's plaything which had fallen there by chance; but I had seen a similar doll hanging from a balcony in Castellammare, and knew the thing to be no toy. Such dolls are seen commonly hanging in the air at this season in the Sorrento peninsula. The old woman is Quaresima, or Lent, and she is provided with as many hen's feathers as there are weeks in that period of fasting. Every Sunday one feather is plucked out; and when the last is gone Quaresima is torn down with rejoicing. On the first Sunday of her exaltation a playful diversion is carried on at the cost of poor Quaresima. A boy or girl, chosen by lot, is blindfolded and armed with a long stick, with which he strikes in the air, groping after the swinging figure. At last he finds it, and a sharp blow breaks a concealed bottle, letting out a red fluid--the blood of Lent; the ceremony is diversified by a good deal of horseplay. I know not how ancient these superstitious ceremonies may be. Italy, perhaps southern Italy in particular, is crowded with usages handed down from days so old that it sometimes causes me a shudder to remember how many ages of mankind have passed by them in procession off the earth. The toy, the trivial folly persisting still, more than half meaningless, century after century, while the bright eyes and laughing lips, all that we call life, pass on like shadows when the sun goes in. It is the doll, the grotesque Quaresima, which has life and endures, not we, however distasteful it may be to realise it. But if our time be shorter, and we shall see fewer springs than the absurd Quaresima, we may at least rejoice in the beauty of this one. For as unsettled weather brings the loveliest days, so the country has put on its rarest beauty. The blue sky hangs like a tent overhead, the clouds are driven back behind the mountains and lie there piled in heavy ranks of tower and column; while through the brown trunks of the trees and the green mist of their lower twigs I can see all the mountains behind Nola and towards Caserta rise one above the other into the far blue distance. For from the clouds of heaven there dropped light on some peaks and shadows on the others, purple lights and dark brown shadow deepening into indigo, so that some looked near and others far away, and some were sulphurous and others green, while all the Campagna laughed in the sunshine, and the houses white and pink flashed on the margin of the turquoise sea. There are lovely villas on these fringes of the wood, stately houses with terraced gardens occupying the high slopes. The road twists upwards by sharp inclines, catching at each turn more of the freshness of the mountain, till at length it runs into the gateway of the old royal villa, a refuge used when heat or pestilence made Naples unendurable by almost every sovereign since the days of Charles the Second of Anjou. It was once the property of that shocking scoundrel, Pierluigi Farnese, most unsavoury and least respectable even among Popes' children, who do so little credit to St. Peter's chair. But it was associated more particularly with Ferdinand of Bourbon, who rebuilt the place. He is said to have given it the name "Quisisana" ("Here one gets well"); but I think that name, or at least as much of it as "Casa sana," is found in records much older than his time. The villa is no longer royal, but it retains the aspect of old splendour. In these spring days it is empty and silent, lying with barred windows in expectation of those guests who will climb up the hill in crowds when the figs ripen and the sultry weather comes, and all Italy begins to dream of cool, green shades. For three summer months the place is an hotel, the "Margherita"; but now, when I walk round towards the wide terrace which overhangs the grass-grown courtyard, the sound of my steps echoes through the still air, and the red walls are eloquent of vanished royalty. A formal air of ceremonial stiffness clings about the garden walks, suggestive of hoops and powder, of polished courtliness, and the old, stately manners which vanished from the earth in the crash of the Revolution. I pass out through the gate by which the courtiers entered the woods, and have hardly gone a hundred yards beneath the tender green of the young beech trees when I come to a shady fountain set round with stone seats, a pleasant spot in which the court used to linger on hot summer days, greeting the riders who mounted at the moss-grown block, so long disused except by peasants going to and fro with their rough carts. There were lovely roads laid out for those royal pleasure parties; but as I plunge further into the woods courts and kings are driven out of my mind by a sharp whirring sound breaking the silence of the treetops. Across an island of blue sky, in an ocean of green boughs, a bundle of faggots was flying like a huge brown bird. I watched it going with extraordinary speed. Hard on its heels came another, and then a third, while by watching closely I perceived that slanting downwards through the woods from the height of the next mountain there ran a stout wire, to which the faggots were slung by hooked sticks cut on those high uplands where the woodmen were working. Presently a sharp turn of the path brought me out at the last station of the wire. The faggots were piled high in stacks, the air was full of the scent of fresh-sawn wood, and a fire burning by the wayside sent up coils of thin blue smoke among the trees. Half a dozen men were piling cut staves upon a cart; and from time to time there was a jangling of bells as the mules tossed their heads or shivered, and all the brass contrivances set upon the harness to keep off the evil eye clashed together in the sunlight. Far away across dipping woods the logs came whirring down from Monte Pendolo. All the mountain tops are connected by these wires, and in every direction as one wanders through the silent woods the strange and not unmusical humming of the flying faggots is the only sound audible. A little further wandering brings me to a glen, whose steep slopes are brown with fallen leaves and green with budding brushwood. A stream runs down through the ravine, and a stone bridge is flung across it. Here the road divides, one branch going more directly to those uplands whence the faggots start upon their journey, and by this route bare-legged children hurry up carrying baskets of the forked sticks by which the bundles hang. But I go onwards by the other road, winding upwards by slow inclines, now deep in glades where large blue anemones glow in the long grass, and bee orchids hide among the shadows, now emerging in full sight of the wide blue gulf and the smoking volcano which towers over it, till at last I reach the top of Monte Coppola, where once more seats and tables set beneath the trees mark a spot at which the Bourbon court used to revel in the mountain breezes. I lean over the low breastwork, and enjoy the splendour of the prospect. It is late afternoon, and the westering sun leaves the great bulk of Monte Faito in deep shadow, casting only here and there a fleck of warm gold light on the pines that clothe some shoulder, and throwing into deeper shade the ravines and scars which are chiselled out of his grey flanks. Yet even in the dark clefts there are gleams of yellow broom or cytisus; for the cuckoo is calling all over the sunny country, the trees are in their brightest leaf, and all the slopes of oak and chestnut that sweep down to the margin of the bay are like a cataract of vivid green tumbling down the mountain. Here, on the summit, it is very still. The silence of the mountains holds the air, and scarce a bird twitters in the gold light. The ridge of Faito, like a gigantic buttress, cuts off all the western promontory towards Sorrento, and falls into the sea across the peak of Ischia. As the sun sank lower, and the warm light grew deeper and more golden, a great bar of cloud formed across the western sky. The sun was now above and now below it. Ischia grew shadowy, and then caught the most delicate light imaginable, swimming like an impalpable fairy island on a sea of darkest blue. Then, at some unseen change in the order of the heavens, suddenly the craggy island lost its colour, and Monte Epomeo stood out sharp and black against the flushed sky. So one saw it for a few brief moments. But all the while a rosy glow was spreading over Cape Miseno, it ran along the coast of Baiæ, and caught Posilipo with a delicate radiance. Then all at once Ischia sprang again into light, quivering with every shade of rose and purple, till the sun sank down behind its blackening peak, and the stars hung large and luminous in a space of clear green sky. CHAPTER XI SURRIENTO GENTILE: ITS BEAUTIES AND BELIEFS I suppose I need remind no one that the coast roads between Castellammare and Salerno are famous round all the world for beauty. No great while ago there were but two. A third has placed herself between them now, and many are the disputes as to which bears off the palm. In these bickerings it is to be feared that the way from Castellammare to Sorrento must needs go to the wall; for indeed it does not possess the grandeur of the others. The northern face of the peninsula has an aspect wholly different from that of the precipices which look towards Pæstum and the islands of the Sirens. It is softer, more exquisitely wooded; its hillsides sink more often into valleys and ravines; its cliffs are certainly not awful; its mountain slopes are sweet and homely, clad with olive groves and pastures, studded with villas and with monasteries. It is a land which lies in the cool shadow of the mountains for full half the day, so that the scorching sun does not strike it until he is well past the middle of his course towards the Tyrrhene Sea. I left Castellammare on an uncertain morning. Large grey clouds had sunk far down over the green slopes of Monte Faito; even the wooded cone of Monte Coppola had caught a wreath of vapour which lay drifting across the trees with menace of rain and mist. But here and there a gleam quivered on the woods; and presently far-distant Ischia was all a-glimmer, while the dark sea in between flashed into tender shades of blue. Then came the sunlight, warm and soft, casting sharp shadows in the gloomy town, while out on the low road beyond the arsenal the colour of the waves was glorious, and all the long beaches of the curving shore shone like silver. A heavy shower in the night had clogged the level road with white mud. Out of the quarry, half a mile beyond the town, came five men pushing a cart of stones through the slush--swarthy ruffians, clad in blue trousers, with coloured handkerchiefs knotted on their heads. And there, descending by a rocky path from the Monastery of Pozzano, was a solitary monk, with flapping hat, a grey old man with a bleached, sunken face, the very opposite of the bright, lusty day. It is thus, so slow and lonely, that "'O Munaciello" comes, that ghostly monk whom all the children hope and fear to see; for if they can but snatch his hat from off his head, it will bring a fortune with it. But "'O Munaciello" does not come down the mountain paths in this bright daylight; nor is there time to think of spirits at this moment. For the beauty of the road is growing strangely. Round the shoulder of a sheer grey cliff which overtops the road, there is suddenly thrust out into the sea a craggy precipice, in which one recognises the familiar face of Capri, unseen since we passed Torre dell'Annunziata. A moment later a long, sharp promontory like a tooth emerges in the nearer distance. That is "Capo di Sorrento," but one has scarce time to identify it when the far loftier cliff of "Punta di Scutola" appears, dropping from a vast height almost sheer into the sea, while on a nearer and a lower cliff rests the white town of Vico, flashing in the sun. Among the pleasures of the road it is not the least that the traveller coming from Castellammare, as long as this most lovely scene extends before his eyes, is compelled to saunter. No man may hurry, for the road winds continually upwards, and one pauses, now to look down upon a little beach, where the blue tide washes in over white gravel, now to notice how the slopes are cut in terraces of vines; while in every sheltered cleft the golden fruit of orange trees hangs in the shadow of the brown screens put up to guard them from the sun. The vegetation is extraordinarily rich; as well it may be, for the limestone mountain is overlaid with volcanic tufa for full half its height--though Heaven only knows where the tufa came from. A hundred yards beyond the beach there is once more deep water, dark and unruffled, up to the very base of the high cliff; and further out the sea is stained with turquoise changing into green that recalls in some dim way the colour of a field of flax when the blue flowers are just appearing. But this is fresher, alive with light and sparkles, flashing with the soft radiance of the sky, while the olive woods upon the lofty headland behind the town change from grey to dusk as the shadows of the clouds are flung upon them or dispersed by the returning sun. Vico, no less than Pozzano, has its miraculous Madonna. She was found long ago by one Catherine, a poor crippled girl, to whom the Virgin appeared in a dream, saying, "Go, Catherine, to the Cave of Villanto, and there, before my image, you will be healed." Now the Cave of Villanto was occupied by cows, and seemed a most unlikely place to contain even the least sacred statue. But Catherine did not stay to reason; she went and found it, was healed according to the promise, and now on the third Sunday in October the image is borne in solemn procession from the Church of Santa Maria del Toro through the streets of Vico, in glorious memory of this striking miracle. There is no end to these marvels of Madonnas. At Meta, just where the road drops into the plain of Sorrento, an old woman, attending on her cow, was amazed to see the beast drop on its knees in front of a laurel tree. She kicked and poked the creature, but in vain; Colley continued her devotions with placid piety, and the natural amazement of her mistress was increased when she saw a flame spring up at the foot of the tree, in which flame presently appeared not only a statue of the Madonna, but a hen and chickens of pure gold! It may be mere accident that, while the legend goes on to describe fully what became of the statue, it says nothing more about the golden hen and chickens--worthless dross, of course, yet surely not without some interest for the finder! Perhaps the silence hides a tragedy. It had been prudent if the old woman had allowed no mention of those gewgaws to be made. She was probably a gossip, and could not hold her tongue in season. These are fruitless speculations, and yet I think some charm is added to the loveliest of countries by the knowledge that such gauds as a hen and chickens of pure gold are to be picked up there by the piously observant. But to return to Vico. I should do that townlet too much honour if I left it to be supposed that its only traditions are concerned with heavenly presences. The truth is otherwise, and it would be improper to conceal it. Vico, indeed, shares with no few other townlets on the peninsula the discredit of having been afflicted sorely by witches. Once upon a time the nuisance grew unbearable. A farm close to the town had long been the centre of uncanny noises, such as terrified the peasants almost to death, and might have gone near to depopulate the neighbourhood had not some very bold people gone over to inspect. There were the witches sure enough. They had bells tied to their heels, and were leaping like monkeys from one tree to another, while the bells tinkled and the air was full of weird noises. Fortunately the investigators carried guns, and the witches, seeing that their enemies were ready to shoot, decided to come down, whereupon they received such a trouncing with sticks that they learnt better manners and left the neighbourhood at peace. If one is so defenceless, is it worth while to be a witch in Italy at all? The point is arguable, and it is important to be right on it; for many children of both sexes become witches without knowing it, by the mere fact of being born on Christmas night, or on the day of the conversion of St. Paul. If, therefore, the parents do not wish the bairns to retain the _entrée_ of the witches' Sabbath--held always at Benevento--it behoves them to take prompt action. The remedy is simple. You cut a slip of the vine, set fire to one end, and pass it over the child's arm in the shape of a cross. The flame burns out, and Satan's spell is broken. I do not find anyone who can tell me why the witches have bells on their heels. Bells throughout the peninsula are sacred to Sant'Antuono, called Antonio elsewhere. In old times the bell of Sant' Antuono was carried round from house to house, and mothers would bring out their sucking children to sip water from it, in the hope that they might learn to speak the sooner. Even now a little bell is often hung round a baby's neck, where it serves the purpose of the horn, the half-moon, or the hand with outstretched fingers; that is to say, it keeps off the evil eye. What can there be in common between the babies and the sinful witches that both should be followed by the same tinklings? Vico, as I have said, lies on a plateau, and when the road has traversed the clean town--how different from the foulness of Castellammare or Nocera!--it drops into a ravine of very singular beauty, a winding cleft which issues from the folds of Faito and St. Angelo, brimming over with vineyards and orange groves, and opening at last upon the sea, where through the soft grey foliage one looks to Ischia, far away across the blue. Having traversed the bridge which spans this shadowy valley, the road mounts again, rising through dense woods of olive, till at last the summit of Punta di Scutola is won, and all the plain of Sorrento lies below. There is no hour of dawn or dusk in which this view is otherwise than exquisite. In the morning light the plain is full of shadows, for the sun has not yet travelled westwards of St. Angelo, and the mighty mountain towers dark over the whole peninsula. It is the evening sun which shines most beautifully here, and no one who has climbed up this road when the plain is full of soft, gold light, when Ischia turns rosy and the jagged peak of Vico Alvano soars up dark against the pale green sky, is likely to forget it when he thinks of Paradise. Sorrento lies upon the western side of the plain, almost touching the rim of the mountains that inclose it, so that one has hardly left the streets before the mountains close in and the plain is lost. A little way beyond the houses the hill upon one's left is already high and sheer, a broken outline of sharp limestone jags, clothed with cytisus and broom and slopes of sweet short grass, out of which rings the plashing of a stream, for there has been rain upon the mountains, and all the clefts and runnels are brimming over with fresh fallen water. So one goes on among the whispering sounds of tree and brook until a mightier noise surpasses them, and one pauses at the foot of the ravine of Conca to behold the waterfall. So high and dark is this ravine that though the sun is almost exactly above it, its light catches only the bushes at the very top, and penetrates not at all into the sheer funnel down which the water plunges, scattered into spray by the force of the descent, until a hundred feet below it drops upon a jut of rock and so pours down in a succession of quick leaps from pool to pool. It is a wild and beautiful sight to watch the downpour of this water on the days succeeding rain. But in the warm weather the ravine is dry, and an active climber might go up it without much trouble. There is some temptation to the feat; for men say a treasure lies hidden in a cave which opens out of the sheer walls, and the gold is enough to make a whole village rich. If any doubt it, let him go there on the stroke of midnight. As the hour sounds, he will see the guardian of the hoard appear at the top of the ravine, a dark mailed warrior, mounted on a sable steed, who leaps into the gulf and vanishes when mortal men accost him. There was once a wizard living at no great distance from Sorrento whose dreams were haunted by the craving for this treasure. He must have been a half-educated wizard, for he knew no spell potent enough to help him towards his object. One day there came to him three lads who had possessed themselves, I know not how, of a magic book, a work of power such as might have been compiled by the great enchanter, Michael Scot, who toiled in Apulia for the welfare of the Emperor, reading the secrets of the stars with little thought of the pranks that would one day be played on him by William of Deloraine in Melrose Abbey. It is rather odd that though our generation turns out so many kinds of books, both good and bad, it seems unable to produce the magic sort. But the three lads got one, and they brought it to the wizard of Sorrento; and all together one May night, casting a rope ladder into the ravine of Conca, climbed down until they reached the entrance of the cave. They found it buried in black darkness, and waited there trembling till the grey dawn stole down the rocks, and a gold beam from the rising sun quivered into the mouth of the grotto. As the light shot through the opening, all the treasure-seekers shouted together; for walls and roof were crusted over with gold and gems, and marvellous flashes of soft colour glowed in the heart of rubies and of emeralds. They stood and stared awhile, then one of them tried to break off a mass of jewels, but had no sooner touched it than the rocks rang with a crash of thunder, the magic book whirled away in a livid flame, wizard and lads fled trembling up the ladder. It was a melancholy rout. I fear the party was too large for prudence. The local proverb says, "When there are too many cocks to crow, it never will be day." A little further up the road a stair ascends the fresh and sunny hillside. It winds upwards through green grasses and grey rocks till it attains a level plateau, where a few olives grow detached and scattered. At that point I turn to look down upon the plain and the long line of cliff which holds the sea in check, so black and sheer, so strangely even in its height. It is still early on this bright mid-April morning, but the sun has force and power, and all the sea is radiantly blue. Immediately below me is a little beach, the Marina Grande, the opening of the westerly ravine, small, yet much the largest which the town possesses, and there most of the boats lie hauled up on the black sand. Another fringe of lava sand runs under the dark cliff below the great hotels. Sometimes in the early morning the traveller, waking not long after dawn, may hear a low monotone of chanting down beneath his window, and flinging it open to the clean salt wind that breathes so freshly over the grey sea dimpling into green, ere yet the sun does more than sparkle on the water, he will see far down below him the barefooted women tugging in the nets, while the fish glitter silvery on the red planking of the boat that rocks on the translucent water twenty yards from shore. [Illustration: ROOF TOP--MODERN NAPLES] Beyond these beaches the straight sheer cliff sweeps on with what looks like an unbroken wall, though in truth it is gashed by creeks and inlets, while one beach, the Marina di Cassano, has in its time done yeoman's service to the trade of all the plain. There clings to it a tale of witches too. But really, I must turn aside less readily at these beckonings of Satan. Let the witches wait. It is the lava which attracts me now. Anybody else would have noticed it long since, and turned his mind to the wonders of creation first. Most people expect to have done with volcanoes and their products when they climb up out of the Campagna Felice on to the hillsides of Castellammare. Yet we heard of lava soil at Vico; and here are the lava cliff, the lava sand, and the abounding vegetation just as lush as if Vesuvius, or some other like him, were close behind the hilltop. Was I not told that the peninsula is built of limestone, showing no trace of fire, shaped and chiselled as it stands to-day before the earth's crust broke at any spot in all Campania, or fire burst forth from any fissure? It is limestone too! What other rock could so ridge its precipices, or give so vivid a freshness to the green pastures on its slopes? Whence, then, came the lava? Well, that is in some degree a mystery. Swinburne, to whose travels I have referred already, thought he had solved it, and declared that the Isles of the Sirens, commonly known as "I Galli," for reasons which we shall come to in good time,--he declared these islands to be nothing but the relics of a crater. The rocks were visited so seldom a century ago that no one could contradict him at the moment. But in Naples a geologist lay waiting disdainfully to demolish him. It was no other than Scipione Breislak, a formidable man of science, and an authority even now, which is something more than can be said of Swinburne. Breislak got a boat and went himself to the Galli to see what nonsense it was that the Englishman had been talking. Alas! he found no trace of fires or crater! Thus one more nail was driven into the coffin of English scholarship, and since that day no one has even guessed where the lava came from. What may be regarded as fairly certain, however, is that it was not ejected on this spot. The Piano di Sorrento, sweet country of perpetual summer, of which more truly than of many parts of Italy, the poet might have written-- "Hic ver assiduum, atque alienis mensibus aestas," is in no danger of being blown to fragments. Perhaps the lava came from some volcanic outburst under the sea, from some islet formed and washed away again--it matters little. Somewhere underneath the soil lies the clean, firm limestone, and the volcanic matter, whencesoever it came, did no more than fill a hollow of the hills, and turn it into the loveliest valley in the world. Sorrento, the very name whispers of smiles and laughter, and the people, softening it still with the incomparable music of their speech, modulate it into "Surriento," just as they turn "cento" into "ciento," and drop a liquid vowel into the harshness of Castellammare, calling it "Castiellammare." "Surriento!" How it trembles on the air! Had ever any town a name so fit for love! And was any ever set in a fairer country? It is a plain, yet no monotony of level, for a spine of the encircling hills tilts the gardens to the evening sun, while the shadow of the mountains wards off the fierce glare of the heat till long past noon. And what fertility! Is there on the surface of the earth such a lush wild glade of orange groves, three generations, "father, son, and grandson," as the Sorrentines say, hanging on a single tree; while as they hang and ripen, the scented flowers are continually budding in the shadow of the dark green leaves, and every waft of air is sweetened by the fragrance of the blossom. But at Surriento all the airs are sweet. If they do not blow across the orange groves they carry down the scent of rosemary and myrtle from the mountains, which are knee-deep in delicious scrub; or they come off the sea in sharp, cool breezes, bringing the gladness and fresh movement of the deep, scattering the stagnant heats and making all the plain laugh with pleasure in the joy of life. How long the lovely summer lasts at Surriento, and how short are the bad winter days! "A Cannelora," say the peasants, "state rinto e vierno fora!" What is "Cannelora"? It is the second day of February, when England still has full three months of winter! Then it is that summer returns to the Piano di Sorrento and chases winter away across the hills. Is it true? "Chi lo sa." Perhaps not quite, but what of that? The Sorrentines themselves have another saying, which runs thus: "A neve 'e Marzo nu' fa male,"--that is, "Snow does no harm in March." So the summer which comes at Cannelora is not incompatible with snow! Yet even in fibs there must be probability, or where would be the use of them? To declare that an English summer began at Cannelora would be simply dull. The plain, I say, is not one unbroken level, nor is it wide enough to be monotonous. One cannot look out far in any direction over the olive woods which like a soft grey flood surge over the fertile country, without being checked by the cool, shadowy mountains, St. Angelo vast and lovely, Vico Alvano thrusting up an almost perfect cone; and many another peak showing towards Sorrento a slope of crag and pasture-land which on its other face drops in sheer precipices to the Gulf of Salerno. One knows that from the summit of the ridge there is an outlook over both the gulfs; and from my post, here on the hillside known as Capo di Monte, I can see the red monastery called the Deserto, because it was indeed erected in a solitary waste, where the soul of man might hope to tread down underfoot him who, in the language of the place, is rarely spoken of by name, but indicated more gently as "Chillo che sta sotto San Michele"--"He who lies beneath St. Michael." The pleasantest way to the Deserto is on foot. One goes on up the stairs from Capo di Monte, stopping gladly enough to chaffer with the children who offer flowers or early fruits, and are contented with so very little coin in exchange, then climbing on past hillside cottages and orange groves within high walls, which only now and then admit a glance across the sea to Vesuvius smoking, or the blue hills beyond Nola so far away, until at last the stairs are left behind and one passes on through vineyards into a wood which occupies the higher slopes of the open hillside, a mossy, fragrant wood, whose spring foliage is not yet so dense as to bar the sunlight from the anemones, lilac and purple, which grow in profusion out of the trailing ivy and the dead leaves of last year's fall. After the wood, the gate of the Deserto is close at hand: it gives access to a straight, steep drive, at the end of which stands a tower overtopping a red group of buildings, and on it the words-- "Ego vox clamantis In Deserto Tempus breve est." An old monk admitted me, and without waste of words, pointed out the staircase which gave access to the upper story. He did not offer to accompany me, but went back along the silent corridor like a man contemptuous of earthly things, even of the immeasurable beauty which lay stretched out on every side of that high eminence. So I went up the stairs alone, listening to the echoes of my feet, until I came to a doorway whence I passed out on the wall which surrounds the garden quadrangle; and here I turned instinctively to seek for Capri, unseen since the glimpse I caught of its high precipices on approaching Vico Equense. Looking northward from the monastery wall I had the island on my left, the sheer cliff called the Salto turned towards me, the island rocks of the Faraglioni standing out distinctly, the little marina sparkling in the sun, while high above it, like an eagle's nest, towered the crags of Anacapri and Barbarossa's castle. The morning sun had transformed the island wondrously. Grey and green by nature, some suffusion out of the warm sky had showered down deep purple on it, and from end to end it lay glowing with the colour of an evening cloud. Whence that light came was a marvel that I could not guess; for the nearer slopes of Punta di Campanella caught not a trace of it, but ravine and mountain pasture lay there in the sunlight grey and green as ever, while across the narrow strait Capri had all the tremulous beauty of the coasts of fairyland. Far away northwards, across a space of the loveliest sea imaginable, lay the craggy peak of Ischia, the low reef of Procida, and the mountains of the Campanian coast; while on the hither side of that blue land of cloudy peaks the sun had flung a heavy shadow over Monte Sant'Angelo, and all his towering slopes lay black and lurid. The southward view is scarcely so fine. For the Deserto is built on the Sorrento side of the ridge, so that even from its roof one surveys a part only of the vast waters which owned the domination of Salerno, of Amalfi, and in far older days submitted to the rule of that great city Pæstum, whose shattered temples are still, unto this day, a prouder relic than any left by the commonwealths which rose in later times upon the gulf. One looks across the blue moving waters towards the flat where Pæstum stood. Behind it rise the mountain peaks in long succession, flashing here and there with fields of snow, while further off, scarce seen by reason of its distance, the headland of Licosia marks the limit of the bay. Such is the Deserto, a solitude among the mountains. When I came down once more into the cool corridors, the old monk acknowledged my benefaction with a solemn bow, but let me go without a word. Silence hung over the building like a spell. It played its part in the great charm and beauty of the spot; and I was well content that nothing broke it. It was past noon, and the sun was dropping westwards. All the hillsides were glowing in gold light. The budding woods, so shadowy as I climbed up, were full of glimmering radiance; and as I descended further, and all the plain lay before me, its olive woods, its orange groves, and the long line of white villas cresting the black cliff were suffused in one wide glory of warm colour. As I went across the bridge into the city, I turned off from the main street, and found what is left of the old wall, guarding the ancient ducal domain, though indeed one might have thought the deep ravines had fenced it sufficiently on three sides, while on the fourth the sea protects it strong and well. The gates have gone, under which in the old days of festival, when Carnival pranced up and down the streets, the grisly figure of death, "la morte di Sorrento," used to lurk, waiting to mow down the rioter as the hour struck which marked the approach of Lent. But there is still enough left of the massive fortifications to show that a rich city once occupied this site. It is a pleasant spot at this hour of evening shadows. The deep ravine is filled with the whispering echoes of a stream, which does not fill the bottom of the hollow, but leaves space for orange groves, deep thatched with boughs. Cottages are built out on jutting rocks, overhanging the precipice with strange indifference to the probable results of even little earthquakes; and the lanes are alive with brown, half-naked children. The sheer rocky chasms, the swarming population, the ancient walls, recall memories of an older Sorrento than one can recover easily upon the sea-front, or in the tortuous streets which skirt it. One sees here the system of defence, and can believe that in its day Sorrento was a fortress, though its great days of independence passed so early, and its dukes were tributaries long ere the Normans came and coveted these shores. Yet the ducal days, the "Giorni Ducheschi," are by no means forgotten in Sorrento. Indeed, if their natural glories had passed out of mind, the nocturnal ramblings of Mirichicchiu would serve to refresh the memory of every man and child, terror being, as Machiavelli puts it, a better remembrancer than love. Mirichicchiu, "the little physician," was a dwarf. He lived in the time of the dukes, and was unwise enough to conspire against his lord, who promptly cut his head off and caused the body to be thrown into the fields outside the castle walls, where its several parts appear to have been dispersed by the operations of husbandry, since Mirichicchiu to this day has not been able to recover them. Night by night he goes searching up and down the fields, stooping with a lantern over the clods, until the cock-crow frights him back to the place from whence he came. Sometimes the lonely little dwarf will go up to a cottage and tap at the door. When that light knocking rings through the startled house the inmates know that Mirichicchiu is hungry, and they prepare his breakfast. The dish must be cooked specially for him, and no one else must taste it. If he finds it to his mind he leaves coins in the plate. There can, I think, be few districts in which the folklore is richer or more romantic than in this region of Sorrento. The peasants are soaked in superstition. The higher classes are scarce more free from it. Those who loiter at midnight near the Capo di Sorrento, whither every tourist goes to see the ruins of the Villa Pollio and the great cool reservoir of sea-water known as "Il Bagno della Regina Giovanna," may see a maiden clad in white robes rise out of the sea and glide over the water towards the Marina di Puolo, the little beach which lies between the Punta della Calcarella and the Portiglione. She has scarce touched land when she is pursued by a dark rider on a winged horse, who comes from the direction of Sorrento, and hunts her shrieking all along the shore. There are spectres on every cliff and hillside, witches on the way to their unhallowed gatherings at Benevento, and wizards prowling up and down in the shape of goats or dogs. At night the peasants keep their doors and windows closed; if they do not, the Janara may come in and cripple the babies. You may sometimes keep out evil spirits by setting a basin full of water near the door; the fiends will stop to count the drops, which takes a long time, probably enough to occupy them until day drives them home. If anyone be out after dark it is better not to look round. The risk is that one may be turned into stone. Here and there one may see ruined churches in the country, but no peasant will go near them after nightfall; for he knows that spectral Masses are celebrated there, solemn services chanted by dead priests, who are thus punished for neglect of their offices in life, and whose congregation is made up of worshippers who forgot their religion while they lived. The Italian fancy begets things terrible more easily than it conceives a lovely dream. Even the tales of fairies turn more readily on fear than on the merry pranks with which our northern legends associate the dwellers in the foxglove bells. But on a fine spring evening, when the sun is glowing over the plain, there are pleasanter things to think of in Sorrento than the spirits of the other world. I turn gladly away from the ravines into the broad main street, and passing by the cathedral, pause in the piazza, where the life of the pleasant little town is busiest and gayest. It is here that one should call to mind the poet Tasso, whose tragedy was cast into noble verse by Goethe; for his statue stands in the square, looking down gravely on the rows of vetturini cracking whips, the children coming or going to the fountain, the babble of strange tongues from lands which never dreamt of Surriento when he dwelt on earth. But I think the days are gone in which English people can delight in the sixteenth-century poets of which Italy was once so proud. Tasso and Ariosto may have every merit save sincerity; but that is lacking, and Italy has so many noble poets who possess it! I care little for the memories of Tasso, save in Goethe's verse, and as I go down to the marina it is of older visitors, welcome and unwelcome, that my mind is full--St. Peter, for example. There is a constant legend that he came this way after the death of Christ, landing perhaps from some galley of Alexandria that touched here on its way to Pozzuoli, and set down the apostle to win what souls he could among the rough dwellers in the mountains. The saint preached his first sermon by the roadside near Sant'Agnello, a village between Sorrento and the Marina di Cassano; and then went over the hills towards Castellammare, where he rewarded the hospitality of the dwellers at Mojano, near the roots of Faito, by making springs of water gush out of the thirsty rock. [Illustration: NAPLES--COURTYARD IN THE OLD TOWN] Doubtless the apostle was on his way to Rome. I know no reason why we should distrust the tale that he did indeed pass through this country. The water-way from the East around the coasts of southern Italy is of mysterious antiquity. Pæstum was a mighty trading city many centuries before St. Peter lived, and its sailors may well have inherited traditions of navigation as much older than their day as they are older than our own. I do not know whether it was indeed upon the islands under the Punta di Campanella that Ulysses, lashed to the mast, heard the singing of the Sirens, but the tradition is not doubted in Sorrento; and without leaning on it as a fact, one may recognise at least that the tale suggests the vast antiquity of trade upon these waters. Else whence came the heaps of whitening bones of lost sailors, among which the Sirens sat and sang? Here year by year we learn more of the age of man, and of the countless centuries he has dwelt by the shore of the great deep. We cannot tell when he first adventured round the promontories with sail and oar; but it is safe to believe that those early voyages were made unnumbered centuries before any people lived whose records have come down to us, and that those sailors whom we discern when the mists are first lifted from the face of history were no pioneers, but followed in a well-worn track of trade, beaten out who knows how long before their time. It is said that in old days the city of Sorrento stretched farther out to sea than it does now. The fishers say they could once go dryfoot from one marina to the other. There are ruins underneath the water. The two small beaches have but cramped accommodation now, and if trade settled there, as it did in the days of Tiberius, a harbour of some sort must have existed. A city on the coast may last without a harbour which has once brought it consequence; but would it have grown without one to a place of power? It is profitless speculation, perhaps. But no one wandering along these coasts, which played so great a part in early maritime adventure, can easily refrain from wondering at the tricks of destiny which brought the stream of commerce now to one spot, now to another; and then, wresting away the riches it had given, left the busy quays to silence, and made one more city of the dead. The hotels which line the summit of the cliff conceal the remnants of great Roman villas. The Hotel Vittoria is built over one of the finest. On that spot, in 1855, were found the remains of a small theatre, destroyed to make the terrace of the hotel. The tunnel by which one goes down to the sea is the same by which the Roman lord of the mansion descended to his boat. Beneath the Hotel Sirena there are large chambers which once formed part of such another villa. I cannot tell how many other traces of old days may be left scooped out of the black rock. As the dusk descends upon Sorrento, and the sea turns grey, the narrow, tortuous streets resume an appearance of vast age. They are very silent at this hour; the shops are mostly closed; the children hawking woodwork have gone home. One's footsteps echo all down the winding alleys, and the tall houses look mysterious and gloomy. Such was the aspect of the town on the evening of Good Friday, when I took my stand in the garden of the Hotel Tramontano to see the procession of our Lady of Sorrows, who, having gone out at daybreak to seek the body of the Lord, has now found it, and is bearing it in solemn mourning through the city streets. Along the narrow lane which passes the hotel a row of lamps has been set, and little knots of people are moving up and down, laughing and jesting, with little outward recognition of the nature of the rite. The procession has already started; it is in a church at the further end of the long alley, and every ear is strained to catch the first sound of the chanting which will herald its approach. Wherever the houses fall back a little the space is banked up with curious spectators. Some devout inhabitant hangs out a string of coloured lamps, and is rewarded by a shower of applause and laughter, which has scarcely died away when a distant strain of mournful music casts a hush over the throng. Far down the alley one sees the glittering of torches, and a slow, sobbing march, indescribably weird and majestic, resounds through the blue night, with soft beat of drum and now and then a clash of cymbals. Very slow is the approach of the mourners, but now there is no movement in the crowd. Men and children stand like ranks of statues, watching the slow coming of the torches and the dark waving banners which are borne behind them. So the heavy rhythm of the funeral march goes up into the still air, knocking at every heart; and after the players, treading slow and sadly, come the young men of Sorrento, two and two, at wide intervals, hooded in deep black, their eyes gleaming through holes in the crape masks which conceal their faces. Each bears some one among the instruments of the divine passion--the nails, the scourge, and scourging pillar, the pincers--while in their midst rise the heavy folds of a huge crape banner, drooping mournfully from its staff. Next comes a silver crucifix raised high above the throng, and then, as the head of the procession winds away among the houses, the throbbing note of the march changes to a sweeter and more plaintive melody, while from the other hand there rises the sound of voices chanting "Domine, exaudi." In a double choir come the clergy of the city and the country round, all robed in solemn vestments, and between the two bodies the naked figure of our Lord is borne recumbent on a bier, limbs drawn in agony, head falling on one side, pitiful and terrible, while last of all Our Lady of Sorrows closes the long line of mourners. When she has passed, silence drops once more upon the dusky alleys. Far off, the sound of chanting rings faintly across the houses, and the slow music of the march sighs through the air. Then even that dies away, and on the spot where Tasso opened his eyes upon a troubled world there is no sound but the wind stirring among the orange blossoms, or the perpetual soft washing of the sea about the base of the black cliffs. CHAPTER XII CAPRI It is a common observation among those who visit Capri that the first close view of the island is disappointing. The distant lights and colours are all gone. The cliffs look barren. The island has a stony aspect, inaccessible and wild. The steamer coming from Sorrento reaches first the cliff of the Salto, concerning which I shall have more to say hereafter, and only when that tremendous precipice has been rounded does one see the saddle of the island, a neck of land which unites the two mountain peaks so long watched from the mainland, a continuous garden, at the head of which stands the town of Capri, while the Marina is at its foot. It must be admitted that the landing-place of Capri is on the way to lose its quaintness, and is even in some danger of taking on the aspect of an excursionists' tea-garden. Hotels and restaurants spring up on every side, and a broad, winding road has been carried in long convolutions from the sea up to the town. Capri is striving hard to provide conveniences for her visitors, and no longer conducts them up the hill by the ancient staircase, which was good enough for friends and enemies alike in all ages till our own, and is still so broad and easy that a donkey can go up it with less distress than it will experience on the hot and dusty road. However, the staircase is still there, and as it is my odd whim to care nothing for the nice new road, but to prefer entering Capri by the old front door, I consign my luggage to the strapping, stout-armed sirens who pounced upon it as soon as the landing-boat touched shore, and go up the cool and shadowy steps between walls of ivy and deep-rooted creepers, over which the budding vines project their tendrils, and blossoming fruit trees send a drift of petals falling on the stair. From time to time I cross the noisy road, and go on in peace again with greater thankfulness, till, after some twenty minutes' climb, I emerge beneath an old vaulted gateway, from the summit of which defence unnumbered generations of Capriotes must have parleyed with their enemies, fierce Algerines, followers of Dragut or of Barbarossa, merciless sea-wolves who descended on this luckless island again and again, attracted, no doubt, by its proximity to the wealthy cities of the mainland and the streams of commerce which were ever going by its shores. The gate is flung wide open now, and the group of women sitting in its shadow eye the coming stranger with a friendly smile. I step out of the archway on to the Piazza, the prettiest and tiniest of squares, bordered with shops on two sides. On the third side stand the cathedral and the post office, while the fourth is occupied by a wall breast high, over which one may look out across the fertile slopes bounded by the huge cliffs of Monte Solaro all burning in the midday sun. From the Piazza two or three arched openings give access to narrow, shady lanes. One of these is the main street of the town, and meanders down the opposite side of the saddle, passing Pagano's Hotel and the "Quisisana," whereof the former is as old as the fame of the island among tourists; for they, although the great interest and beauty of Capri were well known, came here rarely before the discovery of the Blue Grotto caught the fancy of all Europe. I shall not go to see that marvel of the world to-day, for the hour of its greatest beauty is past already; and I will therefore spend the hours of heat in setting down how the grotto was recalled to memory some seventy years ago by August Kopisch. The story is sold everywhere in Capri, but as it happens to be written in German, hardly any English visitors take the trouble to look at it. There can be no doubt that when Kopisch landed in Capri during the summer of 1826 the blue grotto was practically unknown. There are, it is true, one or two vague passages in the writings of early topographers--Capaccio, Parrino--which appear to be based upon some knowledge of it; and it is said that in 1822 a fisherman of Capri had dared to enter the low archway. If so, he kept his knowledge to himself; for when Kopisch landed, and went up the old staircase to Pagano's Hotel--a humble hostelry it was in those days!--he knew nothing of the grotto, and his host, though very ready to talk about the wonders of the island, required some pressing before he would explain the hints he dropped of an enchanted cave below the tower of Damecuta, a place which boatmen were afraid to visit in broad day, and which they believed to be the habitation of the devil. "But I," went on Pagano, "do not believe that. Many times, when I was a lad, I begged friends of mine, who were strong swimmers, to swim into the cavern with me, but in vain; the fear of the devil was too strong in them! But listen! I once learned from a very aged fisher that two hundred years ago a priest swam with one of his colleagues a little way into the cave, but turned and came out at once in a terrible fright; the legend says that the priests found the entrance widen out into a vast temple, with high altar, set round with statues of the gods." Pagano's story fell on the enthusiastic fancy of the young German artist like flint on steel, and the Capriote, catching his guest's excitement, went on to say that he himself believed the tower of Damecuta to be a relic of one of the palaces built by the Emperor Tiberius, who constructed no pleasure-house without a secret exit. Might not the hidden way go through the grotto? And if so, what strange things might they not find if they dared explore it! Perhaps a temple of Nereus, the shrine of some sea deity, left unworshipped and forgotten through all the ages since the Roman Empire fell! Both men had heart for the adventure, undismayed by prophecies of mischief from devils, mermen, or sea monsters, though quaking secretly at the recollection of the sharks, which, however, rarely come close into shore. Wondrous tales were told them of things seen near the fabled grotto. Sometimes the frightened fishers had watched the glow of fire from within trembling on the waves. Beasts like crocodiles were seen to look in and out; seven times a day the entrance changed its shape and windings; at night the Sirens sang there among dead men's bones; the screams of little children in agony rang often round the rocks, and it was no uncommon thing for young fishermen to disappear in the neighbourhood of the ill-famed cavern. Many an instance could be quoted, and one tale in particular was brought up to show how mad they were who loitered on that sea. A fisherman went out to spear fish near the grotto. It was a lovely morning, and he could distinguish the shellfish creeping on the bottom, though the water was ten fathoms deep. Suddenly he saw all the fish scurry away into hiding, and just underneath his boat came swimming in concentric circles a vast sea monster, rising at each turn nearer and nearer to the surface. The fisher was uneasy, but instead of calling on the Madonna as a Christian would, he trusted in his own strength, and hurled his spear at the monster in the devil's name. He saw it strike the creature's neck, but from the wound there came such a gush of blood as clouded all the water so that he could see nothing. He thought joyfully that he had killed the fish; but the thong of his spear hung slack, and when he pulled it in the point of the harpoon was gone--not broken off, but fused, as if it had been thrust into a furnace! The poor fisherman, terrified to death, dropped the spear and seized his oars, longing only to get away from that accursed place. But row as he might he could not progress. His boat went round in circles, as the sea monster had swum, and finally stood still as if anchored, while out of the reddened water rose a bloodstained man, with the spear sticking in his breast, and threatened the fisher with his fist. The poor man sank down fainting, and when he came to life again he was being tended by his friends at the Marina of Capri. For three days he was dumb. When he could speak and tell what had befallen him he began to shrivel up. First his right hand withered, then his arms and legs, till finally, when he died, he had lost the aspect of a man, and was like nothing but a bundle of dried herbs in an apothecary's shop. Such were the tales with which the Capriotes sought to dissuade Kopisch from paying heed to the suggestions of Pagano, but in vain. Early in the morning the party started, having with them Angelo Ferraro, a boatman, with a second boat in which they had packed a small stove, with all the materials necessary for kindling a fire. When they came to the low entrance of the cave not one of them was quite at ease, and Kopisch, who was in the water first, begged Angelo, the boatman, for a fresh assurance that sharks never came between the rocks. Angelo was labouring to kindle his fire, and gave a hasty confident reply, which provoked the German to the natural reflection, "It's all very well for him to be sure. His legs are in the boat!" But when the resinous wood shavings caught and blazed up brightly all fear was gone. Angelo pulled in under the low archway, pushing the smaller boat with the lighted stove before him. Close behind came Kopisch, Pagano, and a second German traveller, half blinded by the smoke which blew back in their faces, and full of natural excitement and anxiety concerning what might befall them in this bold quest. For a time they could see nothing save a dim, high vault; but when Kopisch turned to look for his companions he, first of all men of our age and knowledge, saw that sight which for absolute beauty and wonder has no superior in all the world. "What a panic seized me," he says himself, "when I saw the water under me like blue flames of burning spirits of wine! I leapt upwards, for, half blinded as I was by the fire in the boat, I thought first of a volcanic eruption. But when I felt the water cold I looked up at the roof, thinking the blue light must come from above. But the roof was closed.... The water was wonderful, and when the waves were still, it seemed as if I were swimming in the invisible blue sky...." I have told this adventure at some length because, in mere justice, Kopisch and Pagano ought not to be forgotten by the crowds of pleasure seekers who visit Capri, and for whom, however much or little they may take pleasure in the other immense beauties of the island, the Blue Grotto still remains the chief delight. It may not be necessary to claim for Kopisch that he was indeed first of all men to see its marvellous beauty; nor even that, but for his bold adventure, its low gateway would have remained closed to all the world. Discoveries such as this are made at their appointed time, and Kopisch may perhaps have had precursors. But it remains true that his audacity first threw wide the gate for us; and for my part I acknowledge gladly a deep debt of gratitude. No wise man goes to the Blue Grotto from the steamer by which he travels from Naples or Sorrento. When one has crossed the ocean, and journeyed thousands of miles, to see a sight so wonderful, why should one be content to hurry round it in the few minutes given by a boatman eager for other fares? There is but one way to see the Blue Grotto, and that is by hiring a boat at the Marina on a still, sunny morning, bargaining carefully that there shall be no compulsion to leave before one wishes. Then as the boatman rows on slowly beneath the luxuriant vineyards and the green slopes of the saddle of the island, he will point out the baths of the Emperor Tiberius, low down by the shore, indeed, partly covered by the clear green water, and will go on to talk of the strange life led by the imperial recluse, who studded the island with palaces and left it teeming with unsolved mysteries. Twelve villas he built, so says Tacitus, upon this narrow space, and in these solitary palaces by cliff and shore he lived a life of nameless tyranny and wickedness. Who can tell the uses of the strange masses of broken masonry which one finds in climbing up and down the lonely cliff paths? With what object did he build tower and arched vault in spots where only sea-birds could have the fancy for alighting? What secret chambers may not still be hidden in these ruins! What passages leading deep into caverns of the hillside! What mysteries! What treasures for those who have the heart and courage of the German artist! Such are the suggestions of the brown-faced boatman bending towards me across his oars, while in a hushed whisper he points out now one and now another chasm of the limestone which gives access, so he tells me, to a cavern of unmeasured size. And still, as he talks eagerly and low, the sheer cliff rises higher and darker overhead; for the saddle of the island is long past, the towering precipices of Monte Solaro are above me, and high up on some eyrie which the sight straining from the water cannot reach is the white mountain town of Anacapri. Presently the coast-line sinks to a more moderate height. The tower of Damecuta is seen ahead, and below it a stair, cut in the face of the rock, leads down to a low arched opening, through which the blue sea is washing in and out. A couple of women in gay dresses are sitting in the shade upon the stair. A few boats are rocking on the blue water, strangely, intensely blue, even in the morning shadow which the cliffs fling out across the sea. It was not the rich, royal colour which one may see about the shores of western England, nor yet the exquisite soft turquoise which glows by all the bays and headlands of this coast, but a darker and more watery blue, verging on indigo rather than on any other single colour. The boat approached the opening. The boatman, warning me to lie flat in the stern, shipped his oars, grasped a chain which was fastened to the rock, and, at the lowest point of the wet, winding entrance, flung himself backward on my body, while the boat shot into what for an instant seemed a moonlit darkness. But on struggling up erect I became conscious of a strange, milky radiance, which grew and brightened as the sight adjusted itself, until I saw that the waves washing round the boat were of a silvery blue, which is like nothing else, lambent, incandescent, flashing with the softest glow imaginable. One thinks of the shimmering flashes in the heart of an opal, of the flame of phosphorus, of the most delicate colour on a blue bird's throat--there is no similitude for that which has no match, nothing else upon the earth which is not gross when set beside these waves of purest light, impalpable, unsubstantial, and radiantly clear. "Che colore?" I asked in wonder; and the boatman, no less awed by the strange beauty, answered very low, "Il cielo," and sat silent, stirring his oar gently, so as to make spouts of light among the blue reflections. The roof of the Blue Grotto, low-spreading near the entrance, rises at the centre into a domed vault. It is not dark--nowhere in the grotto is it dark--it is neither light nor dark, but blue; blue pervades the air, and plays about the crannies of the roof like flame, far paler than the sea, yet quick and living. Far back in the cave, where the blue shades are deepest, is a shelf of rock, the only place within the grotto at which one can land. It is usually occupied by a boy who pesters visitors by offering to dive in return for as many francs as he can extort. The sight of his body in the silvery water has excited various writers to high flights of eloquence, one of them indeed assuring us that here alone we can realise what we shall look like in heaven, when the grossness of our bodies has been purged away into the radiance of ethereal light. If this is so one should rejoice, though on more human grounds I regret the presence of the boy, whose avarice detracts from the charm of the grotto. The aspect of his body in the water is less wonderful than he believes. Moreover, the shelf which he has turned into a bathing board has a higher interest than any which it derives from him. For at this spot, and this only, is conclusive evidence that other eyes, in ages far distant from our own, have beheld this grotto, though, for reasons to be given presently, it is practically certain that those eyes saw a different sight. It is easy to discern a squared opening, like a door or window, in the rock above the ledge. Probably such visitors as notice it regard this as a modern contrivance to serve some purpose of the guides; but it is not so. It stands untouched since Kopisch saw it when he swam in half blinded by the smoke. When he, first of all men of our age, climbed up on the rock ledge and peered through the opening he felt confident that he had found the secret exit from the palace of Tiberius at Damecuta; and nothing has yet been discovered which disproves the possibility of this. The boatmen will have it that the passage goes to Anacapri. Mine was positive upon the subject, and though constrained to admit that his conclusion had not been proved, yet did not regard it as open to discussion. Tradition has a certain value where proof is not available; and as the passage is blocked at no great distance from the grotto, it may be long before the boatman's faith is shaken. Kopisch followed it as far as possible. He describes several corridors radiating in different directions through the hillside, forming a sort of labyrinth in which his party almost lost themselves, and in which they were finally checked by the presence of mephitic vapours. Now, whatever may be the secret of these passages, it scarcely admits of doubt that they were designed for an entrance to the grotto from the island. Capri is so thickly studded with Roman works of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and possesses so few others, that there is little risk in attributing the construction of this passage to Roman hands. But what did the Imperial courtiers see, if they did indeed come down those winding passages and stand on the rock shelf where the greedy boy now bargains loudly for francs? Was it the same blue wonder that we see? The answer is certain. The miracle of colour depends directly on the level of the water, and in Roman days the arch was far too high to permit the necessary refraction or colouration of the rays of sunlight. This is proved in two ways. Firstly, there is unanswerable evidence in the hands of geologists and naturalists that the level of the sea in Roman days was many feet lower than at present. Secondly, the fact that there was more of the archway to be uncovered has been proved by Colonel MackOwen, who explored it by diving, and who found not only that the original height of the entrance was six feet and a half, of which three feet are under water, but also that the base of the opening is formed by a flat, projecting sill, which appeared to have been set there by human hands. Moreover, this archway, which is now the sole entrance to the grotto, is but a poor substitute for a more ancient and incomparably larger doorway still existing, but now submerged, and measuring as much as fifty feet by forty feet, which must have let white sunlight into the cavern as long as it stood above the water. There is thus not much reason for supposing that Roman eyes ever beheld this wonder of the world. Whether seen or not seen by an occasional bold intruder, this unique marvel lay silent and unvisited through all the Middle Ages, accounted even by our grandfathers as a haunt of fiends and a centre of mysterious terrors. It is not easy now to catch a moment in which the cave is silent. Only early in the morning one may find its charm completely undisturbed, and carry away a recollection of unearthly mystery and beauty which will remain a precious possession throughout life. There is much in Capri that is unparalleled. If I have set the Blue Grotto first, that is not because more beauty is found there than exists elsewhere upon the island. It may be beauty of a rarer kind; I do not know. All Capri is a gem, and that which one sees from the island is lovelier still than anything upon its shores. Only one driving road exists in Capri, yet that one serves the purpose of a score, so rich is it in a charm that perpetually changes. It leads to Anacapri, and is cut along the precipices of Monte Solaro, doing violence to the face of those solitary cliffs on which the winding staircase offered until recently the only mode of approach. Here and there one may find a few yards of the stair still clinging to the front of the abyss, and by its narrow steepness it is possible to gauge the desperate courage of those Turkish rovers who, coming up this way, stormed and destroyed the castle overhead. Perhaps, however, what we should measure by the dangers of the approach is the faint spirit of the defenders, who could not even keep a path by which every enemy was under full arrowshot a dozen times while toiling up the cliff. One ought to visit Anacapri on a clear morning, early, because the sunshine is then softer; and having seen what is of interest in that whitewashed hamlet, leaving Monte Solaro for another day, it is well to loiter down the road on foot--the way is far too beautiful to drive. [Illustration: UNLOADING BOATS, BAY OF NAPLES.] First, in coming down, one's eye is caught by the incomparable loveliness of the channel that parts the island from the peninsula. High on the right hand towers the dark headland named "Lo Capo," and when one has dropped upon the hillside to the point at which the strait appears about to close, and the height of Capri seems almost to touch the tower on the Punta di Campanella, just so much of the coast towards Amalfi has disclosed itself as looks like the shores of fairyland skirting a magic sea. Behind the green slope of the Campanella, with its humps close to the water's edge, drops the purple ridge of the St. Angelo, with an islet at its base, shadowy and having the colour of an amethyst. Upon the great slopes of St. Angelo one can see every jag and cleft, while further off lie the blue mountains, vague, soft, melting imperceptibly into the pale sky. Away beyond Salerno, where the mountains join the purple sea, a solitary snow-capped cone towers up radiant and flashing, while as one watches the changes of the light, now one peak and now another is lit up, and disappears again under the returning shadow. But if I turn in the direction of the north, there lies extended the whole length of the Sorrento peninsula, the little town of Massalubrense exactly opposite, with the low point of Sorrento jutting like a tooth, while further off the Punta di Scutola rises out of the sea, all purple in the warm sun, with the further cliff that hides Castellammare--Capo d'Orlando the people call it talking still of a great sea fight that occurred there six hundred years ago, when the Admiral Roger di Loria shattered the fleet of Sicily, which in other days he had led to victory. There is all the curving strand of the Campagna Felice, backed by its mountains, brown and blue, ridged here and there with snow; and then one sees Vesuvius with his smoky pillar, the reflection of which lies across the bay, discolouring the water, and Somma, wonderfully shadowed by the clouds; while further north again, gleaming so splendidly, rising so pure and white into the heavens that one has to look more than once to make sure they are not piles of cumulus, stretches the snowy line of Apennines, peak rising over peak till the gleam upon their summits dissolves in the great distance. Lower down in the vast prospect is the chain of Campanian mountains, which seem so lofty when one cannot look beyond them; and at their feet lies Naples, that queenly city with the long sweep of coast from Posilipo to Miseno, where the flames rose from the pyre of the Trojan trumpeter. Further off again is craggy Ischia, while blue and infinitely vague upon the skyline one can see the mountains behind Gæta. There is surely in the whole world scarce any other view at once so wide, so beautiful, and so steeped in the associations of romance. The sun climbs higher, the light increases, the coast towards Amalfi is as purple as a violet. The sea, unruffled by the lightest breeze, is of that nameless blue which seems to have been refined and purified from the colour of a turquoise. Far as one can see, from the headland which hides Cumæ to the farthest point of the Lucanian coast, scarcely one vessel is in sight. The ancient waterway is deserted by which Æneas came, which through so many centuries was ploughed by the galleys of Alexandria, and which in later days, when the power of Amalfi rose to its height, was crowded with the wealth of furthest India. From side to side of the great Bay of Salerno there is now no port of consequence. The coast is silent which once rang with the busy noise of arsenals; trade has departed; and the boats which slip in and out beneath the Islands of the Sirens are so few that Parthenope would have disdained them, not caring to uplift her song for so mean a booty. This decay happened long ago. It was partly the work of pirates, who, as I have often said, swarmed upon these coasts up to that year of grace in which Lord Exmouth destroyed Algiers. The nest being dinged down, the crows flew away, or rather learnt better manners. But for many generations they hunted at their will along the coasts of Italy, counting the people theirs, as often as they chose to come for them--the men to slay, the women and children to be carried off. The corsairs in all generations had a rendezvous at Capri, which served them much the same useful purpose as Lundy, at the entrance of the Bristol Channel, did to others of their breed. It was a turnpike placed across the track of shipping, and heavy tolls were taken there from the luckless sailors. Barbarossa has stamped his memory on the island more permanently than any other rover. Dragut was, perhaps, as terrible in life, and Occhialy can have met few men who did not fear him. But tradition makes less of them than of the red-bearded scoundrel who assumed the cognomen of an emperor. Barbarossa was indeed often at Capri. His armaments were colossal. One gasps in reading of a pirate who descended on Capri with a fleet of 150 sail! Yet such were the numbers with which Barbarossa arrived about St. Johns Day in the year 1543. Happily we do not know the exact details of the woe he wrought upon the midsummer seas; but on this lofty road it is well to recollect him, for it was up the now fragmentary stair to Anacapri that his warriors swarmed, perhaps on this, perhaps on some other visit, and stormed the ancient castle overhead. It is worth while to climb up this last flight of the old broken stair. One has free access to it from the modern road, and turning away from the sea-wall, over which one can distinguish the boats far down below on their way to the Blue Grotto, looking as small as beetles from this vast height, one may climb cautiously up the shattered steps, gaining continually wider outlooks until at last a level platform is attained, where the path winds round the face of the precipice. Sweet-scented shrubs and flowering plants are rooted in the crannies of the limestone, and next the path leads under an old gatehouse, spanning the whole width of the ground between precipice above and abyss below. How, one asks, did the Turks get past this point? There is no way round, save for the birds. They must have stormed it, coming on in twos and threes--which is another way of saying that the defenders were either fools or cowards. The mere sight of a Turk turned men's hearts to water, it would seem. When the corsairs had won the gatehouse, they were still at some distance from the castle, which towers on a crag several hundred feet higher, strengthened with towers, and having guardrooms for a substantial number of defenders. It is not often that a castle wins and keeps the name of the enemy who stormed it. One may surmise that Barbarossa committed some atrocious deed when the fight was over. There is a dizzy precipice on the higher side of the castle. Probably all the garrison went over it who had not fallen by the sword. It is a grand and beautiful spot. There is no end to the pleasures of these mountain slopes; one may wander over Monte Solaro for many days, and yet remain in doubt from what point or in what light its wondrous views are finest. [Illustration: NAPLES--ON THE MODERN SIDE--LOOKING TOWARDS CAPRI FROM THE CORSO VITTORIO EMMANUELE] As one comes down the winding road, in the shadow of the high grey scars, discoloured with patches of black brushwood, the saddle of the island looks picturesque and homely. The white town nestles on the ridge between two conical hills, the Telegrafo and the Castiglione, the latter crowned by a small fort, the modern representative of an ancient stronghold which was the last defence of the Capriotes in the days of piracy. It is a good and defensible position, but the stranger, remembering the almost inaccessible plateau of Anacapri, may wonder not unnaturally why all the inhabitants of the island did not retreat thither on the approach of danger. The answer is that on the small island there are two nations, despising each other like most other neighbours. To the undiscerning eye of the stranger the Capriotes are a pleasant, friendly race; but any child in Anacapri will declare them to be full of malice and deceit, unworthy neighbours of those who look down on them from a moral elevation no less remarkable than the physical. The Capriotes, on their part, would not have dreamt of taking refuge in Anacapri, knowing that here, as elsewhere, only bad men dwell in lofty places. They had a refuge of their own in times of danger--a vast cavern in the hill of Castiglione, where the women and children used to crowd together when the pirates came. It could tell woeful stories, but has not been examined with the care that its past history demands. As for the streets of Capri, they are always gay and charming, but to my mind they are most pleasing when the dusk descends, bringing not only cool fresh breezes from the sea, but also imparting a sense of space to vistas which under the garish sunlight seem a trifle cramped. Therefore I go on through the town towards the opposite height, where the villa of Tiberius crowns the hill; and here it is necessary to discourse of Carolina and Carmelina, the two sirens who lie in wait for travellers on the ascent. These words are not a warning. It is no calamity for a traveller to fall into the hands of either nymph. It is a thirsty walk, and she will bring him wine. It is not a very beautiful walk; and she--yes, both of her!--is charming, attired in blue and scarlet, like the Capriote maidens of an olden day. She will, moreover, dance the tarantella gracefully and well, and talk even about archæology when she has done explaining volubly what a cheat the other girl is, and how false is her pretence to be custodian of anything worth seeing. The whole of the weary climb is beguiled by the pretty rivalries and antics of these dancers. I have scarcely commenced the ascent, when a boy, starting up from the cover of a rock, thrusts upon me a notice gracefully written in three languages. It advertises the attractions of the restaurant of the Salto and Faro of Tiberio, and contains the following emphatic caution: "Visitors are requested to take careful note that certain unscrupolous (_sic_) persons do their best to misguide visitors in misnominating the real and authenticated position of the Tiberius Leap. Visitors are therefore warned not to be misguided by these unscrupolous persons who, for their own ends, falsely indicate an historical fact, etc., etc." I hardly know what weighty accusations may lurk beneath the words "etc.," but I have hardly done reading this kindly caution when, at a turn of the path, I am confronted by the chief among the "unscrupolous persons" who debase historical truth. It is no other, indeed, than Carmelina herself, smiling all over her handsome face so pleasantly that I could forgive her a worse crime. She is unabashed by the knowledge that I have been put upon my guard as to her true character. She has a Salto, she informs me; and when I point out that it is not the true one, but a fraud, she directs my attention, with a charming shrug, to her own particular notice-board, whereon is printed in large characters a judicial statement to the effect that it is quite impossible for anyone to say precisely over which precipice Tiberius threw his victims. Thus, one being as good as another, it is the part of a wise man, without labouring further up the hill, to take the first which comes, at which, moreover, the Capri wine is of unequalled quality, and so forth. I do not propose to discuss the rival merits of Carmelina and Carolina. No chart avails the mariner in danger of wreck upon the reefs of woman's beauty. Nothing will help him but a good stout anchor, and that I cannot give him, nor even indicate where he should cast it out. But if a man pass safely by these perils he will ere long attain the summit of the rock, whence he will find much the same view exposed before him as he saw from Anacapri, and thus may give his attention the more freely to the ruins of the "Villa di Tiberio." None but an archæologist can derive much pleasure from these ruins. Eighteen hundred winters and the delvings of many investigators, whether pirates or men of science, have so shattered the buildings that a trained intelligence is required to comprehend their arrangement. Other eyes can see nothing but broken walls, grass-grown corridors, and vaulted basement chambers, which suggest but little splendour. Yet here, on the summit of the headland, stood beyond any doubt the largest and most magnificent of the palaces in which Tiberius secluded himself during the long years he spent in Capri; and with this spot most of the stories told by the guides are associated. These tales are grim and terrible. Tiberius, in the days he spent in Capri, was a tyrant and a debauchee. His palaces, which are now washed and blown clean by the pure rain and wind, were stews of lust and murder while he lived. It is not strange that he is well remembered in the island. His life was wicked enough to beget tradition--the surest way of earning long remembrance! When he saw Capri first it was occupied by a simple, laughing people, gracious and friendly as they are to-day. He left it full of agony and tears. No wonder that after eighteen centuries he is not yet forgotten! Tiberius came first with the Emperor Augustus, an old man near his end, but joyous and frank, as was his nature. It happened that a ship from Alexandria was lying at the Marina, bound for Pozzuoli; and the shipmen, desiring to do honour to Augustus, clad themselves in white, put garlands on their heads, and came to give him hail. The simple ceremony, the frank reverence of the sailors, pleased the Emperor beyond measure. He mixed freely with them, gave his attendants money to buy merchandise from the ship, put himself at the head of the revels; and left behind him when he went away a kingly memory. Perhaps the Capriotes hoped that when Tiberius came back those good days would return. But Tiberius was made of other clay, and brought only deepening terror to the island. Timberio, the islanders call him, and they believe that deep down in the bowels of this hill, where now his crumbled villa is slowly yielding to the weather, the Emperor sits to this hour upon his steed, both carved in bronze, and having eyes of diamond. Years ago,--no one can say how many!--a boy, creeping through some crevice of the rock, saw that sight, and lived to tell of it, but could never find his way into the vault again. Such tales of mystery are common all the world over; but there are few places in which, whether true or untrue, they have more excuse. It is impossible to wander round the remnants of this gigantic building without suspecting that the hillside underneath it must be honeycombed with vaults and secret chambers, natural caverns, perhaps, which are so plentiful in Capri, adapted to the uses of the villa. There is a constant tradition among the peasants that from this palace as from all the others, Tiberius had a secret passage to the sea. The tremendous height of the cliff seems almost to forbid belief in the tale; but if it be true, corridors and stairs must exist in the hill upon a scale sufficient to warrant even stranger stories than those which circulate. There is in the face of the Salto a cavern which, from its proximity to the ruins of the palace, has sometimes been regarded as a possible exit of the secret passage. In 1883 a gentleman of Capri named Canale, together with three peasants, climbed up to this grotto from the sea. It was a hardy feat; and the searchers were rewarded by the discovery of two chambers hewn by hand in the solid rock. Beyond them was an opening closed with fallen stones and earth; and having cleared away the rubbish, they penetrated into a large and lofty natural grotto, hung with stalactites; but found no exit from it. There was no trace of a staircase. The issue of the search seems unsatisfactory, and one can only wish that it may be resumed. Clearly there must have been some approach to these chambers otherwise than by climbing from the sea. The day may come when on this spot, as elsewhere in Capri, more careful excavations and researches will be set on foot and continued until Time has either been compelled to yield up his secrets, or has been convicted of possessing none. At that day the archæologist will rejoice; but I think the unlearned man may rather grieve. For the abounding mystery of Capri is so inextricably woven with its extraordinary beauty that to touch either must be to reduce the strange fascination which conquers every visitor, which wakes enthusiasm even in those who do not love Italy, and makes this little island the one spot which no one sees without longing to return. How shall one explain this feeling? It would be as easy to analyse a caress. Not alone the mystery, the beauty, the aloofness from the world, the balmy air or the odorous vegetation of the hillsides,--all these elements exist upon the mainland, yet there is no town, not even Sorrento, which wins such instant or such enduring love. It is partly in the people that the secret lies. They have charm. They are simple, friendly, gracious; they accost the stranger from the outset as a kindly friend, who must mean well, and whom they are disposed to like. If they beg, which is but rarely, they ask without importunity, and accept refusal with good temper. The children run up as you cross the piazza, say "Buon Giorno," and run away smiling out of pure delight. The women sitting in their doorways, clean and industrious, look up and smile but ask for nothing. They are indifferently honest, paragons of every solid virtue, when compared with the denizens of Naples. But were it otherwise, were they unblushing rogues and knaves, I think one would love them still for their abundant charm and grace. In Capri it is rare to see a plain girl; it is perhaps not very common to see a beautiful one. But between the two extremes lies something more attractive than regularity of feature, a thing without a name--charm, vivacity, a gracious radiance of manner which is lacking in scarce any girl or woman of the island. Their features are small and delicate, their heads well poised, their faces brown as berries, their large and lustrous eyes are sometimes pensive, but oftener sparkling with goodwill and merriment. They toil at heavy weights like men, yet do not grow coarse. They will work from dawn to dusk without complaining, without even dreaming that constant labour is a grievance; and at any moment they will return a pleasant word with one still pleasanter, not only responsive to kindness, but arousing it with all the frankness of a child who feels sure all people are as full of goodwill as he is himself. It is this sense of simplicity and friendliness which, more than any other of Capri's rare attractions, wins the heart of every visitor. On the mainland no such sense exists, save perhaps in some degree on the Piano di Sorrento. Naples, even in broad daylight, is none too safe, and at night the citizens themselves walk cautiously. Castellammare is a wicked city. Amalfi puts the stranger on his guard instinctively. In Capri, from the very hour of landing, one drops precautions. Suspicions are cast off like bad dreams in this isle of laughter and goodwill; the women on the roads want nothing but a greeting, the men believe you when you say you do not need a carriage. If you lose your purse the loss is cried in church, and the odds are the purse comes back that day. Crimes of violence are very rare; and never has it been taught in Capri, as it is even in Sorrento, that he who licks the warm blood on his knife will not be troubled by remorse. There is a hermit on the summit of the hill among the ruins of the villa. He is not poor, but prosperous. He keeps a visitors' book, a tap of wine, moreover, and though he has a chapel he did not interest me. Escaping him with some dexterity, I wandered along the cliff past the lighthouse, climbing over boulders, sometimes knee-deep in tuft grass and scrub, until I reached the brow of the valley on the hither side of the Telegrafo, and climbed down into it by a break-neck path. Having reached the bottom, I was in the main way from the town to the Arco Naturale, and a few turns of the path brought me to the verge of the cliff. The sun had sloped far westwards, so that all this, the eastern face of the island, was in shade. The first steps of the rock staircase by which the gorge is descended lay in grateful shadow. There is a fine path along the northern slope, but it is better to plunge down the stair towards the level of the sea. After many flights had been descended I came out under a great arch, where cavernous vaults lined with Roman masonry awake once more the sense of mystery which is never far distant in this island. At the foot I found a rough path leading to the south, by which I clambered on until by backward glances I was assured that the Arco Naturale had freed itself from the labyrinth of spires and splintered jags of limestone over which it rises, and stood out clear and sharp against the sky. The setting sun shone warm and soft on the top of the great cliffs, but all their vast height was covered with cool grey and brown, with here and there a green tuft of grass or trailing herbs. There is no end to the fantastic wonder of the crags rising out of the cliff slopes. The great loophole of the Arco Naturale is the loftiest and most striking, but there are countless others. The whole line of the cliff is pierced with cavities and grottoes, with many a sheer, smooth precipice, dropping steep and awful to the sea. Immediately opposite lay the bare headland of the Bell, bathed in golden sunlight, and the rocky coast towards Amalfi, purple and brown beneath the paling sky. Then a bar of cloud came and drew its wisps of vapour slowly across the sunset slope of the Campanella. Whence it came I know not; for the sky was clear, and the hill, both above and below the bank of mist, was bright. The ravines of St. Angelo grew sharper and the glow more purple. The sea was paling fast. One or two rosy clouds floated in the east, catching all the reflections of the sunset. Night was at hand; but as I climbed up the stair I turned often to look again upon that channel through which the Greek ships steered their way three thousand years ago, as they came or went between Euboean Cumæ and the far-distant cities of the East. Well, it is growing dusk in Capri, and the time has gone by in which one can see sights. The sea has turned grey and the colour has gone out of the coast. I turn back towards the town, and as I loiter down the steep hill paths I perceive by a growing brightness in the sky that the full moon is rising behind the Telegrafo. The April night has all the fine warm scents of summer. The blue darkness is dropping fast across both town and sea, while in the soft sky the small gold stars are trembling as they do in June in England. Ere long the silvery light begins to drive the shadows back; the bright disc climbs above the pointed hill, and floods all the Valley of Tragara. From hill to hill the old white town lies glowing softly. The sea is all a-shimmer, "Splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus"; the deserted cloister of the Certosa has the colour of old carved ivory; the Castiglione on the hilltop shines like steel. The tremendous precipice of Monte Solaro, a cliff wall severing the island in twain, is transformed most wonderfully. In the clear morning sun the heights are red and grey, chiselled into infinite crevices and clefts, awful and magnificent. But when the full moon sails clear of the Telegrafo all the rock face turns light and silvery, almost impalpable, towering up among the stars like a mountain of frosted silver rising out of fairyland. The small piazza is silent and empty, streaked with hard shadows flung by the rising moon. As I step out on it and pause in wonder at the beauty of the scene, the striking of the clock falls on the still air with a strange theatrical effect. Away over the houses comes a drift of music; for Schiano, the coiffeur, is giving a concert in his salon, and all the world has crowded down the street to hear it. At this distance the voices are softened, and blend insensibly with the magic of the summer night, across which, trembling like a star fallen out of the blue sky, shines the light hung over the great figure of the Madonna set in a cleft of the rock on the road to Anacapri. CHAPTER XIII RIVIERA D'AMALFI, AND ITS LONG-DEAD GREATNESS Loath as every traveller must be to turn his back on Capri and lose sight of Sorrento lying on its black cliff by the sea, yet it is a rare moment when first one tops the mountain barrier and sees the Gulf of Salerno far spreading at one's feet, with the Islands of the Sirens just below, and away over the blue distance the plain of Pæstum, once a rose garden, now a fever-stricken flat, hemmed in between the mountains and the sea. The road, traversing the plain as far as Meta, in the shadow of St. Angelo, commences to ascend by long convolutions, winding perpetually through orange groves and orchards of amazing richness and fertility, mounting continually, gaining every moment wider views over plain and mountain. Directly in the path rises the sharp cone of Vico Alvano, precipitous and rugged. It seems to block the way, but suddenly the road sweeps towards the right, the ridge is gained at last, and all the Gulf of Salerno lies spread out below. "So I turned to the sea, and there slumbered As greenly as ever Those Isles of the Sirens, your Galli; No ages can sever The three, nor enable the sister To join them--half-way On the voyage, she looked at Ulysses." There is no escaping the spell of this ancient legend. At every turn it confronts one, testifying to the passage of unnumbered years since the first ships sailed upon this lovely gulf which in its time has seen such mighty armaments. It was shipping which made the power of the cities on the gulf. By the sea they rose, and by the sea the noblest of them fell. For Amalfi has been torn away yard by yard; wharf and palace have been alike engulfed; and now there remains so little of the ancient city that one must guess and guess again before discovering where its splendour lay. Its greatness has departed as utterly as that of Pæstum, and though it still teems with people, while the city of Neptune is desolate and silent, there seems no more chance for one than for the other that the spirit of old days will return to animate the present, or set the modern energies towards a goal which fits their past. What is it, in Heaven's name, which filches from so many splendid cities the desire to excel, and leaves them content to see the weeds grow over their past achievements? I have said already that the mountains of the peninsula show their sternest face towards Salerno. The road which is carried along these precipices is of astonishing grandeur. From the very summit of the mountains the cliffs fall by wide steep slopes to the deep water washing round their feet. Farms or cottages scarcely exist; the ravines seem inaccessible. Beaches there are none, save at three or four points in the long distance to Amalfi; few fishermen dwell on this barren coast. Only at one or two points are the tunny nets spread upon the sea; and one may trudge for miles without meeting any soul but travellers whisked along by their quick-trotting ponies, or here and there a knot of soldiers lounging, rifle in hand, outside a guardhouse. The cliff is red and yellow; the grass slopes and the jutting crags which break them are odorous with rosemary. The road follows a course meant only for the sea-birds, now buttressed out over the very face of the abyss, guarded only by a low, crumbling wall, now driven through the flank of some great headland which could not be turned. Every yard reminds one that the road is modern, that no trodden way led along the faces of these cliffs in mediæval times, and when one comes at last to the ravine of Positano and looks down on the old brown town, clinging like a hawk's nest to the steep sides of the gulley which gives access to the sea, the first thought which occurs is that here was a site of wondrous strength, secure from all attack save that which came across the ocean, and faced the perils of a landing on the narrow beach. Positano feared nothing from the ocean so long as the banner of Amalfi flew. For this strange cluster of half abandoned houses, looking now as if some giant had gone through the streets poking holes in the baked clay of the walls, was a member of that group of towns and havens which to the world outside the gulf called itself Amalfi. Positano, Prajano, Conca, Pontone, Scala, Ravello, Minori, Majori, Cetara--all these and other communes supplied the hardy sailors and keen merchants who packed the city with the silks and spices of the East, who, though traders, retained their nobility, like the gentlemen of Venice, and whose regard for discipline and social obligations was so keen that the sea laws they had evolved in their two centuries of admiralty became the wonder and the pattern of the world. The standing puzzle on the Riviera d'Amalfi is to discover the original impulse which gave birth to this commonalty. Whence came the high spirit and the desire of greatness which burnt so brightly, and flickered out so utterly, these many centuries ago? If the belief of some historians be true, Positano, which originally was a monks' town, a mere cluster of houses in the shadow of a monastery, was made populous by an influx of refugees from Pæstum, fleeing across the gulf from the pirates who, in the ninth century, gave the _coup de grâce_ to that dying city. The tale is not improbable, and it may be that men born in the shadow of the splendid ruins which we see to-day carried with them to their new settlement some tradition of past greatness, which was stung to life again by the shock of their misfortunes. But the virile energy which made Pæstum feared upon the sea must have been almost a forgotten memory even then, and doubtless one should search elsewhere for the spirit which breathed life into the growing state. Whencesoever it came, there was once a high audacity among the seamen of this small port, little as it counts among the harbours of Italy to-day. It is here that Flavio Gioja dwelt, by whom, as is boasted at Amalfi, the mariner's compass was given to the world. It is quite certain that the polarity of the magnet was known before Gioja lived, if live he did; but though he was assuredly not the first of mankind to observe the properties of the needle, it may well be that he did bring back the knowledge from some trading voyage to the East, and make it known in his own portion of the earth. If so, was he not entitled to the honour which his country claims for him? At the end of the thirteenth century, to which his lifetime is ascribed, discoveries of science were not noised about the world as they are to-day. The knowledge of one man radiated only a short distance round his birthplace. Those strangers who had the wit to appreciate it and carry it elsewhere earned scarcely less honour, and by as just a title. The priests have their own legend in explanation of the name which the town bears. Over the high altar of the church is a picture of the Virgin and Child painted on a panel of cedar wood. This picture was rescued--so the story goes--from the fury of the Iconoclasts; and when the ship which bore it from Greece was nearing Positano, on its way, I suppose, to Rome, a miraculous voice was heard upon the sea, saying over and over again, "Posa, posa!" till at last the sailors heeded, and brought the ship to land, and called the place Positano in memory of the event. The road goes down the ravine beside the town of Positano, yet the old houses go on lower still, to the very edge of the blue sea, where the water laps in shadow on the beach. There is a fine cascade rushing down the hillside opposite the town, and high up on the towering skyline the crag of rock is pierced by a natural arch. The road, always grand and beautiful, becomes still wilder when the town is passed, and for a great way it hangs like a ridge of swallows' nests midway on the face of such precipices as defy description. The villages come rarely, and the jutting headlands which cut off all prospect of the different towns increase the solitude of this wilderness of mountains. When one has passed Vettica Maggiore, where the women sit plying distaff and spindle in their doorways, one comes in contact with the degraded and persistent beggary which makes the peasants of this coast abhorred of strangers; and having rounded the great cliff of Capo Sottile, one sees far down in a beautiful gorge the small beach of Prajano, where two or three boats hauled up on the gravel, with a cottage under the cliff, make a picture of homely industry which is indescribably refreshing after the savage grandeur through which one has come for hours. Ere long one sees the beautiful headland of Conca, with its castle on the cliff. That point is one of the boundaries of the Bay of Amalfi; and when it has been rounded one comes ere long to a bridge thrown across the deep gulley of Furore, so named, it is said, from the wild surging of the waves through its rocky hollow in rough weather; and so, passing by many a grotto and overhanging rock, which seems to totter to its fall, one attains at last to the ancient city of Amalfi. A long beach of white and grey gravel, facing full south, lies sparkling in the sunshine. Here and there the strand is littered by great boulders which have fallen from the cliff, and the sea washes in among them, cool and translucent. Long lines of net, brown and red, are extended on the gravel, and here and there a man sits patching it, while great numbers more sprawl idle on the warm stones. The main road, descending the hill through a long tunnel in the cliffs, crosses the Marina. Half the width between the houses and the beach is occupied by sheets of sacking, on which yellow rice and macaroni are spread out to bleach. A couple of brown-legged boys in brilliant scarlet caps sprawl over the half-dried goods, spreading them to catch the sun more freely; while all the throng of sailors, women going to the fountain, children pestering visitors for alms, carriages rattling at quick pace across the stones, crowd up and down the narrow remnant of the way as best they can. The mountains drop so steeply on either side of the ravine, and form with the sea-front a triangle so narrow, that there is but little space left for the city. The houses are crowded in strange confusion. It is a town of long vaulted staircases, branching into dark alleys, out of which the houses are approached by flights of steps. For several hundred feet one may climb up these eyries, now tasting the fresh air and catching a glimpse of the blue sea or the many-coloured campanile rising out of the huddled town below, now dodging to avoid the refuse flung from some high window on the stair, till at last a breastwork is attained which sweeps round a corner of the ravine, lined with houses and protected by a low wall. On a level space below are orange trees, growing freely among the housetops; and over all tower the vast mountains, cramping the space on every hand. Where, one asks oneself, is old Amalfi? In what region of this dirty, squalid town of idlers are we to seek the relics of that proud city for the accommodation of whose Oriental trade, brought out of Asia by the ancient trade route up the Volga and down the Don, a whole quarter of Constantinople was an emporium not too large. The banner of Amalfi floated over hospitals for pilgrims in Jerusalem long ere any other Christian power was able to protect them, and for the better defence of the sacred places she called into life the noblest of all military orders, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who first at Acre, then at Rhodes, and lastly on the rocks of Malta, sustained the cause of Europe against the Turk with a passionate devotion which might well have shamed the monarchs into imitation. Where are the palaces of those senators and doges, the council halls, the exchanges, the noble colonnades such as one sees in other cities not more famous? What has happened to the churches, and the monasteries? And where in this small harbour, fit only for the accommodation of a few coasting schooners, could anchorage have been found for the fleets which sought out the furthest corner of the East, and flaunted the banner of Amalfi in every port from Alexandria to Trebizond? There is no doubt about the answer. All those splendours, all the apparatus of this once great city, lie beneath the sea. That which we look upon to-day is not Amalfi, but a shred of it, only the small segment which the sea has not yet taken, and the crumbling cliff has spared from the ruin of its landslips. Look at the western point of the small harbour. There is just room for the road to climb round between the mountain and the sea. When one stands at the curve of the highway, underneath the ancient watchtower that guards the entrance, one sees the deep creek of Atrani, a town continuous in these days with Amalfi; and beyond the limits of that creek a wider, broader indent into the mountain wall, making an open valley, on the further side of which the town of Majori lies under the vast shadow of the Monte dell'Avvocato. Such is the aspect of the coast to-day, and one watches the boats plying in deep water from one point to another of the cliff. But the chronicle of Minori tells us there was once a beach from Amalfi to Majori! If that be so, if an alteration so immense has occurred in the aspect of the coast-line, of what use is it for us to marvel where the argosies lay, or to guess what may have been reft from us by the encroaching sea? It is futile to ponder over what is lost. That which remains is rarely beautiful, a miracle of colour, and of noisy, seething life. Under the watchtower of which I spoke there is a broad stone seat, which makes a pleasant resting-place, if only the greedy beggars of the town will be content to hunt their prey at the Marina, where the crowd is thickest, and to leave a moment's peace to the traveller who desires nothing less than their obtrusive help in discovering what it is worth while to see. From this point one looks across the beach from hill to hill, and sidewards up the ravine to the brown mountain-tops. In the very centre of the town rises the campanile of the cathedral, having a small cupola roofed with green tiles; and on the hill which closes down on the further side of the town, approached by a stair of many flights, stand the long, low buildings of the Cappuccini convent, now a home for saints no longer, but for sinful tourists, a noisy hostelry alive with the tongues of many nations, all caring more for cookery than heaven. The convent was the work of Cardinal Capuano, a noted ecclesiastic of Amalfi, on whose name one may pause awhile, if only to recall the fact that it was he who found the body of St. Andrew the apostle, and brought it from the East to the cathedral, where it rests beneath a gorgeous shrine--for ever, we may hope, since the days are past in which even dead cities are rifled of the bones of saints. It is a strange fate which gives tombs to two apostles on this coast at so short a distance from each other as Amalfi and Salerno! The good Cardinal was at Constantinople shortly after the Crusaders sacked it. All his life he had been eager to find the body of St. Andrew, patron saint of his native city. He knew it rested in the city on the Bosphorus, whither it had been carried from Patras centuries before; but where the shrine lay no man could tell him. At length, after many fruitless searches, going one day to the Church of the Holy Apostles to pray, he was approached by an old priest, who revealed himself to be his fellow-townsman, and declared the treasure which he sought was in that very church. At this point the historian Pansa, from whose learned work I extract this pious tale, is less precise than could be wished. The Cardinal, he tells us, watched his opportunity, and got the body of the saint, with several other bodies, more or less complete in their several parts. But how? Churches rarely give up relics willingly, and it must have cost much trouble to abstract so many bones. Some interesting act of theft is here glossed over. One would like to be quite sure, moreover, that the relics were authentic, though after all there cannot really be much doubt of that, for St. Andrew had lain at Amalfi scarce three centuries and a half when he did the town most signal service. The corsair Barbarossa, often mentioned in these pages, having been driven off from Pozzuoli by the Viceroy of Naples, conceived the idea of revenging himself at Amalfi; and would certainly have accomplished his fell purpose, the sea power of the city being long since dead, had not St. Andrew, out of a clear summer sky, raised such a tempest as taught the pirate once for all that he could not flout a saint with safety. I wish that the powers which scattered Barbarossa's ships had been exerted to hold back the ruin which crashed down on the end of the long buildings of the Cappuccini some six months ago. As I sit looking across the harbour to the hillside where the convent stands, my sight is drawn continually by a ghastly scar in the rock at the further end of the buildings, and beyond it, down to the very level of the sea, is a hideous ruin--a wild confusion of gigantic boulders projecting from steep slopes of rubble and débris. One might look at the wreck of this evident convulsion a hundred times without guessing what was there six months ago--indeed, what lies there still, crushed and hidden by the fall of the overhanging cliff. Just at the entrance of the town the road passes through the Grotto of St. Christopher. At the mouth of the grotto is a signboard, bearing the words, "Hotel e Pensione Santa Caterina," with an arrow pointing to a narrow path cut round the cliff towards the face of the projecting headland. The path goes nowhere now; after a few yards it ends in nothing. At that point one can see no more; but from this seat on the opposite side of the harbour one looks towards the headland, formerly most beautiful. For the overhanging cliff was topped with brushwood; it was chiselled into slopes and hollows, where the shadows lay superbly. Midway up its height stood the white buildings of the Pensione Caterina, with its terraced garden; and a winding footway cut below the Pensione was the access for sailors to a quay and a pretty strip of beach, where a few boats were hauled up and the larger barks of fishermen lay moored in safety. So it looked on that December morning, when, with little warning, all the face of the headland slipped away and crashed down upon the shore, carrying with it nearly a third part of the Cappuccini Convent, and burying the whole of the "Santa Caterina" as completely as if it had never been. Since that awful catastrophe, in which two ladies and several fishermen lost their lives, the ruin has lain untouched. Probably it will continue so, until time has covered up the scars with moss and lichen, and softened the piteous tale of the two lost ladies with all the grace and charm of folklore. Landslips and encroachments of the sea have dealt hardly with Amalfi. Perhaps it is scarcely strange that a people so buffeted by fate should lose their hope of greatness, and conceive no interest save the pillage of their guests. Returning to the centre of the town, I turn off from the marina by the first archway leading to the piazza, just where a tablet on the wall calls on Mary by the name of Stella Maris, "Star of the Sea," to aid all sailors in peril of the deep; and ere quitting the shadow for the sunlight, I stand in wonder at the beauty of the prospect. The piazza is irregular in shape, roughly triangular, following the conformation of the ground. In its midst is an ancient statue round whose base the pavement is stacked high with vegetables, piles of lettuces and carrots lighting up the grey shadowy space, round which stand the high, irregular houses, with quaint alcoves and dark stairs climbing to the higher stories. There is a deafening babble of tongues, swarthy, broad-browed women kneeling by their baskets and screaming ceaselessly at the purchasers, who themselves are no less voluble, while the confusion is increased by bawling children, of whom some one is every moment at the traveller's elbow, pestering him with "Signurì, u' sold'," and clinging like a leech, in spite of the angriest "Vattèn" which stranger-lips can speak. It is a striking, many-coloured scene of full and vivid life, material, not to say degraded, in its aspect. But beyond this crowd of unaspiring humanity, passionate of gain rather than of any unsubstantial thing, rises the splendid front of the cathedral, set upon a height, as the temple of the Lord should be. A long and noble flight of steps, the haunt of squalid beggar children, gives access to a portico of many arches, rebuilt in recent years, but resting still on some of its antique pillars; while on the left rises the many-coloured campanile, its four small turrets clustered about the central lantern like the apostles standing round the Incarnate Word, so Volpicella puts it. Ruined and restored, altered by hands of men who could not comprehend the strivings of the ancient builders, this lovely structure still bears witness to the spirituality which dwelt here, as elsewhere in Italy, seven centuries ago. High over the babble of the degraded town it towers in its old majesty of form and colour; while higher still the mountain-slopes behind it rise in terrace beyond terrace into the silent regions of pure sunlight and fresh, untainted air. It is the only spot in Amalfi where soul still triumphs over sense. The interior has been badly modernised, and is less striking. The sub-church, as happens so often in south Italy, is but little changed, and its five apses suggest tolerably clearly that the upper church must at one time have had double aisles. Indeed, one of those aisles exists still on the north side, though walled off so as to form a distinct church. There are many things worth notice in this church, but I shall speak chiefly of the doors of the main entrance, the great bronze doors of workmanship so fine that the most careless visitor cannot pass them by unnoticed. These doors were given to the cathedral by the great family of Pantaleone, before the year 1066. They are not of Italian workmanship, but were wrought in Constantinople, with which town, as I have said before, Amalfi traders held a constant intercourse. It is not a bad way of realising the extent and importance of that trade to stand in front of these very beautiful doors, to consider what their value must have been, and then to reflect that the family of Pantaleone gave to Italian churches no less than five pairs of similar doors. These were their first gift. Others were presented to the Church of San Salvatore a Bireta at Atrani, where the doges of Amalfi were elected. It is interesting to compare them with these of the cathedral. Another set went to Rome, but do not now exist; another to Monte Cassino; while for another benefaction still the Pantaleoni reached across the peninsula to the Adriatic shore, and presented bronze doors to the Church of the Archangel upon Monte Gargano, that great and solitary mountain shrine which in mediæval days was all and more than all that Monte Cassino and Monte Vergine are to-day, visited with at least as much rapture of devotion and far more famous in the remotest parts of Christian Europe, being indeed the mother church of Mont St. Michel and our own St. Michael's Mount. Monte Gargano looks down on the Apulian coast towns, Trani, Bari, Barletta, and half a dozen more, all of which, by their situation facing to the east, are and have always been the chief gates of Oriental trade passing into Italy. Travellers of to-day are apt to forget the importance of the Adriatic coast throughout Italian history. It may well be that a great part of the trade between Amalfi and Constantinople was conducted by sea; but certainly also much traffic must have passed across the country from coast to coast; and it is certain that Ravello and Scala traded chiefly with the Apulian coast towns, maintaining important settlements in every one, and so securing a share in the Eastern trade at second hand. Thus it is not surprising to see in the cathedral at Ravello another pair of bronze gates, about which there is this interesting fact to be noted, namely that they are not of Constantinople workmanship, though of that school, but were wrought by Barisanus of Trani, who also made a similar pair of gates for the cathedral of his own city, and another for that of Monreale. Thus the art practised in Constantinople had passed over sea to one of the most important of the Apulian towns, and in its passage it had gained nobility. For the work of the Apulian craftsman is finer and more dignified than that of his Greek master, and indeed Schulz, who was no mean critic, declared roundly that the Ravello gates were unmatched save only by those which, by a miracle of craft, Ghiberti wrought for the baptistery of Florence. Upon the summit of the mountain which rises behind the cathedral stands a very noticeable tower. It is of well-authenticated history, and the guide-books will give all the truth about it. Thus I need concern myself only with the fable, which I do the more gladly since it brings on the scene an old acquaintance, no other, indeed, than "La Regina Giovanna," whom we left behind on the Posilipo. I do not know of any historical warrant for connecting either Queen Joanna with Amalfi, though doubtless both visited a city so important in their day. But the peasants, intent as ever on localising their folklore, repeat upon this spot all the legends of the luckless Queen, her lovers and the fate which she reserved for them. I wish some traveller of leisure would make it his business to collect out of all southern Italy the various traces of this myth. It has bitten deeply into the heart of the people from Sicily to Naples, if not further, and in Provence, which was included in the dominions of the first Joanna, the tradition is said also to exist. "Si' comme 'a Regina Giuvanna!" is a taunt which strips the last rag from a woman's character. In Sicily it is said that the Queen visited her stables nightly and chose her lovers from her grooms. There is in existence the strangest possible dialogue in Latin between the Queen and an enchanter, who conjures up a spirit to foretell her end. It dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, and embodies what were doubtless the current traditions when the dissolute life of the second Joanna had revived and deepened the memory of the failings of the first. The way to the mountain fastness of Ravello is wild and beautiful. It turns up across the hill beyond Atrani, and having surmounted the ridge, drops down again into the valley of the mills, a silent, shadowy ravine, between the brooding mountains, through which a pretty brook splashes down from leap to leap. The road winds upwards steadily till at last the old brown town of Scala is seen on the further side of the ravine, and a little later the towers of Ravello face it on the nearer hill. Both are inland villages, deserted in these days by almost all save peasants. But when Amalfi was great these mountain cities were great also; and of Ravello a tale is set down by Boccaccio, which sheds a flood of light on the pursuits of the dwellers on this coast five centuries ago. "Near Salerno," says the prince of storytellers, "is a hill country looking on the sea, named by its inhabitants 'La Costa d'Amalfi,' full of little cities, of gardens and of fountains, as well as of rich men, eager in the pursuit of commerce. Among these cities is one named Ravello, wherein, just as there are rich men in it now, once dwelt Landolfo Rufolo, who was more than rich, but, not content with his wealth, tried to double it, and went near to lose the whole." Landolfo, it appears, had conceived the idea that a large market lay open in Cyprus for certain kinds of wares, and accordingly he realised all the capital he could command, bought a large ship, laded it deep with goods, and set sail from home, but when he reached Cyprus he found the markets glutted. Prices fell to almost nothing, and he had almost to give the goods away. Thus he was cast down in a single day from wealth to poverty, and saw no course open to him but to die or to turn corsair. Of these alternatives the natural man would choose the last, and Landolfo was frankly natural in all his acts. He sold his heavy ship, bought a light one, fitted it with all things needful for the trade of piracy, and set sail once more, intent on pillage,--of Turks especially, but by no means only those, for pirates must be practical. In this vocation Heaven helped him who helped himself, so that within a year he had not only regained what Boccaccio quaintly calls "his own," but much more also; and being minded not to push his luck too far, set sail for home, where he meant to live in peace. He had got as far as the Greek archipelago when he met a storm, and put into a small creek for shelter. In that creek two Genoese ships were lying, and the Genoese, being of like profession to Landolfo, made a prize of him, sacked his ship, and scuttled it. These Genoese were God-fearing men, and having got Landolfo's goods, by no means desired to deprive him of his life. Thus when the storm abated the citizen of Ravello, now once more a beggar, set sail for Genoa on his captors' ship. For a whole day the sea was kind and smooth; but the storm came back, the two ships were driven far apart, and the one in which Landolfo was a prisoner, driving on a reef off the island of Cephalonia, was shattered like a glass bottle flung at a wall. The ship was gone; it was dark night; the sea was strewn with floating wreckage; and Landolfo, who had been calling all day for death to relieve his sorrows, saw the grisly shape awaiting him and did not like it. Accordingly he caught at a table which went swimming by, and getting astride of it as best he could, held on with a grip of desperation. So he went on, up and down the hills and valleys of the sea, till at last he became aware of a huge chest floating near him, which threatened every moment to surge up against his frail raft and sink it utterly. He fended the chest off with his hand as best he could, but presently there came a mighty squall of wind, raising a sea so great that the chest drove down and over the luckless merchant, tore him from his perch, and sank him in the sea. When he came up, gasping and half drowned, his raft was so far off that he feared to make for it. But the chest was close at hand, and across it he cast himself, and so was tossed up and down all that day and the next night. But when the light returned, either the will of God or the force of the wind drove him to the shore of the Island of Gurfo, where a poor woman happened to be polishing her household pots among the sand; and she, seeing a shapeless thing tossing up and down in the surf a little way from shore, waded out and dragged it ashore. Much warm water and judicious rubbing brought back the departing life to Landolfo's body, and in a day or two he thought himself well enough to go. The old woman thought so too, and gave him a broad hint to be off. So the ruined merchant gathered up his rags, and being in no want of the chest, thought of giving it to his hostess in return for her Christian care of him. But like a prudent merchant he first took the precaution of opening it when alone, and found it filled with precious stones, set and unset, of great value. Landolfo, though somewhat stunned by this fresh caprice of fortune, yet saw clearly how improper it would be to give all this wealth to the old woman. So he packed the whole of it about his person, gave her the empty chest, and departed with tears and blessings. On some fisherman's boat he got across to Brindisi, and so up the coast to Trani, where he found merchants of his own town. Note once more the close relations between Ravello and the Apulian cities. These friendly merchants clothed him, gave him a horse, and sent him home, where he realised his wealth and lived in honour all his days. This Rufolo family of Amalfi was one of the greatest in all Italy, though unhappily it has been extinct these many centuries. So far as can be ascertained, the name of Landolfo does not occur among their records. But Boccaccio's story has the marks of truth. It is all quite possible, and its incidents entirely in keeping with the manners of the age. One writer, I see, calls it a "brutta storia," but we need not use hard names about what we ourselves should certainly have done had we lived in the twelfth century. The greedy vulture Charles of Anjou was often indebted to the wealth of the Rufoli for loans. In 1275 Matteo Rufolo and fifteen other nobles of this neighbourhood held the royal crown in pledge! What wealth there must have been in the decaying palaces of these hillsides! The Rufoli had a villa on the seashore at a spot called "La Marmorata," set by a stream which flows down through groves of oranges and lemons to the sea. In this villa they feasted the monarchs of the House of Anjou right royally; and the peasants still say that at the end of every course the silver dishes were flung out of the window into the sea, to show how little the wealthy Rufoli recked even of such precious wares as those. But it is added that the canny nobles did not really lose the dishes, for nets had been laid carefully beneath the sea, into which the silver fell, and out of which it was recovered when the guests had gone. This tale sounds too remarkable to be invented. Yet it is in fact only a variant of a myth localised also in Sicily, and doubtless in many other places. The Palermo version is worth noting. It is a pendant, of course quite unhistorical, to one of the traditions of the Sicilian Vespers. After the massacre, the Pope laid an interdict on Sicily. The churches were closed and the bells silent. The people could not live so; something must be done. So they built a ship, and a group of gentlemen went on board, carrying with them all the silver cups and dishes which they possessed. They sailed to Rome, and having reached the Tiber, they feigned the speech and manners of some strange country, and on the deck of their ship they sat banqueting, while as each precious vessel served its turn they flung it overboard, where it fell into a net concealed about the vessel's keel. The fame of these reckless strangers soon reached the Pope, who came down to see the marvel, and, being very curious about the matter, was easily induced to step on board. Whereupon the strangers shot out their oars and, rowing quickly off, carried the Pope to Palermo, where he was soon persuaded to relieve Sicily of the interdict. Such tales as these blow about the world like balls of thistledown, lighting now here, now there, and securing at each resting-place a passionate belief. What is the truth of the fact common to both these tales, and in what age and place are we to seek for it? The age of Mediterranean folklore is past guessing, and the variety of races which have dwelt upon the shores of the great inland sea should make it the richest in the world. Whilst we have been discoursing of the Rufoli the road, having climbed over the shoulder of the hill above Atrani, has been slowly mounting the valley of the Dragone, and at last it emerges on the small piazza fronting the Cathedral of Ravello. By the time he attains this plateau on the mountain-top the traveller will have seen enough of the approach to set him pondering by what fact it happened that Ravello ever grew into an important city. For nothing is more certain than that the course of trade is not determined by caprice. Chance has no part in it, and any man who wishes to understand the causes of the rise or fall of cities must ask himself in every case what convenience brought trade thither, or what inconvenience checked it. Now the inconvenience of the situation in which Ravello lies is manifest, and as the existing road was made out of a rough muletrack only in the present generation, the difficulty of access either to Ravello or La Scala must have been immense. Yet that difficulty did not deflect the trade. Both cities were undoubtedly rich. La Scala is said to have possessed one hundred and thirty churches, a statement which seems incredible to-day, even if the outlying towns of Pontone and Minuto be included in the number. D'Engenio enumerates no less than twenty-five families of undoubted nobility at Ravello, and adds to his list the words "et alii." At Scala he mentions only twelve. All abandoned these hilltops centuries ago, leaving their palaces to decay. That is scarcely strange. It is easy to understand why trade left this half-inaccessible eyrie. The wonder is what brought it here. The city had a great reputation for the dyeing of stuffs. Why did not the dyers establish their vats at the foot of the hill, profiting by the constant intercourse of Amalfi with other cities? I can see no other reason for the growth of Ravello and La Scala than the paramount necessity in the early Middle Ages of safety from sea rovers. It will be impossible to verify this guess until some really scholarly man, probably a German, elects to spend his learning in elucidating the dim and tangled history of this most interesting coast. It would be a noble task, and it is strange that some fine scholar has not been attracted to the work ere now. Probably the visitor who has just arrived in the cathedral piazza may not immediately see with how great beauty Ravello has been adorned. It is certainly no more than the wreck of what it once was. But this can be said of so many Italian towns that the point may be scarcely worth making. The cathedral once possessed a beautiful porch, approached from the piazza by a double flight of seventeen white marble steps. It has none now. Within is a lamentable scene of desolation, a church once filled with glorious works of art among which rather more than a century ago a bishop was allowed to work his will. An Anglican rector with a passion for encaustic tiles could not have wrought more mischief. The bishop's conception of beauty lay in the whitewash pot. This simple ideal he worked out with such thoroughness that in all the church only two half-figures remain of the noble frescoes which were once its pride. The bishop looked round, saw that it was well, and began on the mosaics, which were priceless and beyond all praise. The most beautiful of these was probably the baldacchino which surmounted the high altar. This the energetic bishop got rid of altogether, unless it be the fact, as some suppose, that a few scraps of it are embedded in the bishops throne. There were fifty-two choir stalls of carved walnut wood. They dated from the year 1320, and anyone who surveys the relics of the great beauty with which the founders of the church equipped it may guess that the choir stalls were rarely lovely. Not one chip remains of them. By the time he had done all this the bishop had made much progress towards bringing his lovely cathedral to the condition of some Bible Christian chapel in a country village. But the church was full of marbles. Out they went, no one knows where. The pulpit was among the most exquisite of man's works. He began to deface it, but something stayed his hand, I cannot guess what, for such a man must have been impenetrable to remorse. The man who did us this intolerable wrong was called Tafuri, and I hope visitors to Ravello will not forget him. By some providential accident the pulpit remains but little hurt. Its western end is carried on six slender spiral pillars, each a twist of exquisite mosaic, and supported on the backs of lions and lionesses of strong, fine workmanship. The body of the pulpit is a marvel, a superb blend of rich soft colour with the purest carving in white marble. It is wrought with the most delicate fancy and restraint. It lights up the whole desolated church, and makes one's heart burn for the rare beauty which was shattered and destroyed by the ignorant Bishop Tafuri. And, more than that, this pulpit is an object which sets one pondering whether southern Italy in the great age of the Hohenstaufen, or their first successors, can have been so destitute of great artists as is maintained by certain critics, among the rest by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. It is true that scarce any paintings in Naples can be attributed to the native artists of that period save those which have been retouched so often as to be of no value to the argument. But granting this, it is surely fair to say that the existence of this pulpit proves the possession of a sense of form and colour so noble that it must have produced fine painters. The craftsman was Nicolo di Foggia, again an Apulian town, unless it be the fact, as I see some say, that a family named De Foggia was settled in Ravello. But art so beautiful as this is begotten of a long tradition; it is an inheritance from many predecessors of less merit. It does not leap into existence in the full blossom of its beauty. The ideals of Nicolo, and in some measure his attainments also, must have been those of others in his day, and it cannot be that some of them did not express their conceptions with the brush. The last four centuries have wrought almost as much mischief in southern Italy as a barbarian invasion, yet the cathedral at Ravello remains one of the spots at which we can best perceive the greatness of that which once was; and few men who ponder on the grandeur of the doors and the soft wealth of colour on the pulpit, the ambo, and the bishop's throne, will be disposed to deny that there was once a tribe of artists in these regions who earned immortality of fame, though destiny has snatched away their crown. It is but a stone's-throw from the cathedral to the gate of the Palazzo Rufolo, which, by the unselfish courtesy of the late Mr. Reid and his widow, is freely opened to the inspection of any stranger anxious to examine its rare beauty. The palace, though lovingly repaired and tended by Mr. Reid, is but the wreck of itself, having suffered sorely not only by the waste of time, but also by cruel barbarity in the last century. Yet it remains a most important example of the Saracenic taste which crept into this country from the middle of the ninth century, affecting profoundly both its life and art, and perhaps carrying with it the seed of ultimate destruction. It is true, at all events, that the rulers of this coast began in the eleventh or twelfth century to lay such stress on purity of blood as to suggest that they discovered peril in the blending of Italian blood with Moorish. It is not easy to realise in what degree Saracens dwelt freely in the land. It was in the year 842 that a rival claimant for the great Lombard Duchy of Benevento called in the aid of Saracens. Not long afterwards the followers of the Crescent established themselves at Bari. They pillaged Sant'Angelo, the sacred city on Monte Gargano, both in 869 and 952, while before the ninth century closed the Dukes of Naples, Amalfi and Salerno were in league with them for the plunder of Roman territory. The Norman kings, when they founded the realm of Naples, made no effort to exterminate them. Frederick the Second loved their art and science, spoke their language, and was often taunted with adopting their religion and manners. Clearly, then, there is no ground for surprise at finding on this spot traces of Saracenic influence on architecture. Doubtless, if we had records of the life led by the founders of this palace, we should find that it also was largely Saracenic, and that from Bari, Lucera, Salerno, and elsewhere, many a turbaned scholar or merchant brought the grace and luxury of the East, and fired the latent sense of beauty in Italian hearts much as in olden days the Greeks had touched the selfsame strings. Many parts of the Palazzo Rufolo show the lovely fancy of the Saracen builders, but more than elsewhere it is displayed in the remnants of the courtyard, where one arcade is still intact of arches so delicate and graceful as make one wish that the same principles of building might have permeated all the country and transformed the palaces of other nobles also into dwellings as beautiful as the Palazzo Rufolo once was. From the court one passes to the terrace garden, which lies on the very brow of the mountain, commanding what is surely among the loveliest views of the whole world. The curious penetrating charm of this terrace garden, the marvel of its view across the fabled sea which was cleft by the galleys of Ulysses and Æneas, appealed so strongly to the most romantic spirit of our generation that Richard Wagner, signing his name in the visitors' book of the Hotel Palumbo, added the words, "Klingsor's Zaubergarten ist gefunden." Destiny is sometimes overkind, or she would not have added to a spot so rich in memories all the associations which are called up by those four words,--the lovely songs of the flower maidens, most exquisite of all our age; the strange passionate seduction of the enchantress Kundry, plucking chord after chord of memory; the wild ecstasy of spiritual purity reasserting its dominion over the guileless fool, the magic spear hurled at him from the battlements and caught harmless in mid air, the crumbling of the castle walls like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision. Many an age will go by before what is noblest in the heart of man will cease to be uplifted by this great fable. And it is to Ravello that our thoughts must turn whenever _Parsifal_ exalts them. It is on this mountain-top that the great temptation was trodden underfoot. Beyond the Palazzo Rufolo the old mountain city prolongs itself into what was once its most exclusive quarter, the "Toro." The nobles of this privileged spot held themselves aloof from their fellow-townsmen, and assumed the privileges of a ruling caste. On the Piazza in the centre of this quarter stands the Church of San Giovanni del Toro, of which Pansa said that it was the most beautiful seen in many hours' journey along this coast. Like the cathedral, it has been sorely used; yet of late years something has been done for its preservation. The crypt with its interesting frescoes was ruined and inaccessible when Schulz visited Ravello, but is in tolerable order now. There is a mosaic pulpit, less beautiful than that of the cathedral, but still magnificent, and traces of fine frescoes remain to show how the keepers of the church interpreted their obligations to posterity. More than one of the old palaces in this quarter retains some of its old splendour. Among them is the Hotel Palumbo, to which I have referred already--a quiet, comfortable resting-place, in which a kindly hostess not only speaks English, but understands the habits of the English far enough to make her house a charming memory with all who stay there. I do not know of any more beautiful or pleasant spot, even in Capri, and certainly there can be none healthier than this mountain town, perched high above the exhalations which strangers dread, though indeed less justly than they should fear their own prudence. The hotel was formerly the bishop's palace. Its comfortable salon was once the chapel, and a little door opening from one corner gives access to a narrow stair by which the bishop descended to his meditation chamber. The holier men are, the more the foul fiend plagues them; and that is doubtless how it comes to pass that in this meditation chamber there are ladies painted on the walls, temptations which no doubt the bishop caused to be depicted there in everlasting memory of his triumphant victory over the intrusive fiend. The terrace of the hotel commands what is practically the same view which is seen from the garden of the Palazzo Rufolo. The light is failing, and the great bulk of the Monte dell'Avvocata is growing black. I know not how many ages have passed since the Virgin, clothed in light, appeared to a simple shepherd on the mountain-side, saying to him, "If thou wilt stay here and pray, I will be thine advocate." The man did stay to pray, and on the spot where the mother of mankind became his advocate he built a hermitage which these many years has lain in ruins. But still the mountain retains its name, for faith lingers yet upon these heights, where life is simple, and forces up no problems. My friend Mr. Ferard, staying at the Hotel Palumbo about the time when the autumn evening darkens down early over hill and valley, was called out by his hostess to the terrace to listen to the bell of Sant'Antonio chiming from the ancient convent near the town. It was the first hour of the night, an hour after Angelus; and as the peal of Sant'Antonio floated across the steep hillside, it was met by the answering chimes from the cathedral churches of Majori and Minori, lying far down by the base of the mountain near the sea. Presently a number of small lights began to glimmer in the valley. They were the lamps and candles set outside their houses by the peasants when they hear the chiming of the bells, and kept there till the ringing ceases. But why, or with what object? It is because every Thursday evening, at the first hour of the night, our Lord who redeemed the world comes down out of heaven and passes through the street. He must not pass in darkness, and the lamps are set out to light Him by. The chiming of the bell through the brown autumn air, the lights twinkling like little stars out of the deep valley, the simple act of faith and reverence, leave a deep impression on the hearts of those who witness a ceremony so little tainted with the modern spirit. One is carried back into an earlier age, when many a lovely vision occupied men's minds which left the world the poorer when it fled from the earth. And so I leave Ravello, while the lamps are set outside the windows still and the chiming of the bells announces that on this mountain-side faith is not dead, nor the homes of the peasants yet left comfortless. CHAPTER XIV THE ABBEY OF TRINITÀ DELLA CAVA, SALERNO, AND THE RUINED MAJESTY OF PÆSTUM The arms of the ancient city of Majori are the most apt that could possibly be devised. Upon an azure field the city bears a sprig of marjoram--in token, surely it must have been in token, of the rare and memorable beauty of its mountain-sides, where a sea so blue that nothing out of heaven can surpass it laps about the base of cliffs which in spring-time are from top to bottom and from end to end one fragrant field of aromatic and delicious odours. The scented myrtle is knee-deep. The rosemary and marjoram root themselves in every cleft, and a thousand other herbs growing rank along the mountain-side catch every breeze that blows and fill the air, especially in the morning when the shadows are still wet and the day has not yet grown languorous, with thymy fragrances blown out of every hollow and ravine. Meantime among the grass and herbage of the cliffs the flowers glow like an Eastern carpet. The white gum-cistus stars the hillside thickly, and the anemones cluster in soft banks of colour, while up and down the banks crimson cyclamens burn little tongues of flame, and over all waves the graceful asphodel. It is when one climbs the hill on the Salerno road beyond Majori that these sweet sights and odours are encountered. But first the way passes through Minori, dipping down to the sea-level at the marina of that little town, which now has no industry but fishing, yet once harboured ships and traders from the East. No one of these townlets is devoid of interest, yet when a man travels by this road he is afire to reach the greater beauty further on, and will not tarry to collect the broken fragments of an old tradition at this point. The road emerges from the houses, and in a little way it frees itself from the hills and enters the wider valley of Majori, running out on a wide, pleasant beach, where an avenue of trees gives shelter from the sun. On the right-hand the fishers are drawing up their nets, women hauling with the men, while on the left the ancient town lies open in a broad, straight street, surmounted by the castle which in old days could not save it from the Pisan onslaught, and in modern ones has nothing left to guard. It is not, however, this landward castle which lingers in the memory of the traveller as he turns his memory back upon this beautiful and breezy beach. It is rather the tower, not near so ancient, which juts out to the sea at the very point of the cliff formed by the downward slope of the Monte dell'Avvocata. That vast mountain wall descends so steeply that it seems to forbid access to this pleasant valley from the outer world; and just where the dark and shadowy rock touches the blue sea the castle is approached by three high and slender arches carrying a bridge. It is one of the coast towers erected as a refuge from the incursions of sea-rovers, belonging to the same group of fortifications as the Castello di Conca, or the Torre dello Ziro at Atrani. The castle stands out finely in the shadow of the hill. The blue sea is warm and soft. Far away towards Salerno a dim gleam from time to time betrays the mountains of Cilento, snow-capped and wreathed in clouds. The road climbs upward from the beach, winding round the headland with continually growing beauty. The rock forms are superb; and as the way rises on the flank of the sweet-scented mountain it passes ravine upon ravine, each one cleft down to the blue water's edge, a shadowy precipice fringed by the soft spring sunshine. The road mounts. The ravines grow deeper. The washing of the sea dies away to a pleasant far-off murmur; and at last one attains the summit of the Capo d'Orso, and pauses to absorb the immense beauty of the prospect. As one stands upon this height one perceives that the creek upon which Amalfi is built has receded into its true position as no more than a single inlet in a wide bay which extends from Capo di Conca to Capo d'Orso, at least five miles as the crow flies, and includes other indentations of no less size. It is by the size and importance of this bay that the old consequence of Amalfi should be measured rather than by what stood upon the city site itself. The historian Hallam, when he visited this coast, doubted the tradition of commercial greatness, remarking that the nature of the ground and the proximity of the mountains to the sea can never have admitted the growth of a city whose transactions were really vast. He does not seem to have realised that Amalfi was a group of cities, of which, perhaps, no one was very large, but each had its own vigorous life, each one contributed some distinct element to the strength and valour of the commonwealth. Doubtless, also, all vied together to promote the glory of the whole. After crossing Capo d'Orso the road descends, and its beauty decreases, until one sees Cetara, the old cliff town which was the limit of the Duchy of Amalfi, and for many years a nest of Saracens; and further on Vietri, standing quaint and beautiful upon the sea. At Vietri we must turn inland, for though the greater beauty of the sea coast has led us away from the high valley of La Cava, yet the ancient abbey on the mountain-side above that summer resort is famous by too many titles for us to pass it by. A pleasant road leads inland from the pretty little port. Ere long the highway up the valley is abandoned for a winding lane, which climbs and climbs till it comes out at last on a small white village, nestling under the slopes of higher hills. The air is keen upon this lofty ground. Spring has not yet advanced so far as on the coast, but all the brown coppice on the mountain slopes is flushing into green, and the serrated ridge that jags the skyline is lit and obscured by flying light and shadow. All the air is musical with streams and fragrant with the scent of fresh-sawn wood. Plodding cautiously along the mountain path come the mules laden with sawn boughs for vine-poles; and on a stair which mounts to the level of the abbey out of the deep valley-bottom children are carrying up long bundles of fresh-smelling laths. The abbey stands half-way down the narrow valley, a solitude of wood and mountain. The church is of the period when piety proved its zeal by destroying fine building which it was unable to replace, but beneath it are many remnants of the ancient beauty, and even in the church itself, glittering with gold and undistinguished paintings, one may see in the south-east chapel a fragment of primæval rock covered with rough frescoes, which recalls strangely the memory of an age in which the monks sought heaven by a ruder path than that which they tread now. If one descends into the crypt, that austere impression grows the deeper. Here is nothing splendid, but construction which is simple, solid, and severe. There is a noble courtyard and a cavernous crypt, in which lie the bones of Lombard princes loosely stacked with those of others of less note, all equal now, the greater undistinguished from the less. Some came hither humbly clad as pilgrims; and indeed in early days, when faith impelled men forth on pilgrimage from every land, this great abbey, lying so near both to Amalfi and Salerno, must have heard the orisons of those who spoke in many tongues. Pilgrims who sought the Holy Land travelled very frequently on ships belonging to this coast. They came sometimes in penance and sometimes in love. Some travelled laden with fetters made of the steel with which they had slain a neighbour, some bore no other burden than the staff and scrip; but both alike came over the Alps from northern countries in astonishing numbers, and all were cared for as they came or went by that abounding charity which is the great glory of the Middle Ages. "In richer places," declared an ordinance of the Emperor Lewis the Pious in the year 816, "two-thirds of the wealth given to the clergy shall be set aside for the poor; in poorer places one-half." Out of these funds hospitals to shelter pilgrims were placed on every lonely tract where they might be stayed by the necessities of travel, on mountain roads where night might overtake them far from hospitable dwellings, by bridgeless rivers which might be made impassable by flood. Churchmen and laity vied with each other to ease the way of these wanderers of God, and the care with which edicts were issued relating to the maintenance of the hospices testifies to the greatness of the numbers which, but for the piety of the faithful, must have perished in the wilderness. In this passionate devotion to the sacred places originated the kingdom of the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily. For a band of Normans returning from the Holy Land on a ship of Salerno were still in that city, then a Lombard duchy, when the Saracens landed to exact the tribute which they extorted at certain or uncertain intervals. The proud pilgrims resented the insolent demand, and at the permission of the duke attacked the followers of Mahomet and drove them off. Then followed the usual tale of profuse gratitude, territorial concessions, and ultimate subjection to the stranger. Thus it is not for nothing that Norman pilgrims are recalled to our memory at La Cava. The abbey has rendered to the world priceless services by the careful preservation of its records. Manuscripts of inestimable value lie stored in the long presses of its library; and for the last two centuries have formed the chief resource of historians of southern Italy. Lying as La Cava does on the edge of the ground over which Lombards, Saracens, and Normans wrestled for dominion, her records have an absolutely vital interest, and many a scholar turns his mind towards that quiet library among the mountains with reverence almost as deep as the ancient pilgrims felt for the abbey church. There is not very much of interest upon the way from the abbey to Salerno, saving only the exquisite beauty of the sea, which grows bluer as the day increases. But in approaching the old city, which was once so famed among physicians, one passes by the arches of an ancient aqueduct, which reminds me that I undertook to explain why the Isles of the Sirens are called "I Galli." You think the moment has gone by for speaking of the islets? By no means. This is the proper place, for in this city of Salerno dwelt an enchanter who knew more about their origin than any other man. This enchanter was called Pietro Bajalardo--there are other forms of his name, but we need not be exact. The aqueduct reminded me of him because he is said to have built it by his magic powers just as Virgil with the same black art constructed the Grotto of Posilipo. It may have been the success of this great feat which inspired him with the idea of rendering to Salerno a service even more important, and providing it with a good safe harbour. This is a thing which all Salernitans have desired ardently from very early days, and on the possible construction of which they have based such hopes of eminence that, as they say-- "Si Salierno avesse 'o puorte Napule sarria muorte!" This neighbourly aspiration it was which Pietro set himself to encourage; and he asked of the eager townsmen one thing only, namely, that they should forthwith slaughter all the cocks in the city, so that when his legions of fiends were engaged in their gigantic task they might not be disturbed and frightened by that sound which all sinners have loathed since the days of the Apostle Peter. So light a condition was complied with gladly. All day Salerno was filled with the sound of expiring cackles; and night descended with the comfortable belief that for once her stillness would reign unbroken by the officious trumpeting which bade her go. Pietro was at work in the window of his high tower. Through the dark air legions of devils came and went to do his bidding. Fast they sped over the silent sea, carrying huge blocks of limestone from the Punta di Campanella. The sky was crossed and recrossed thickly with wondrous potencies and powers, while all the city lay and held its breath. All, that is to say, save one old woman, who loved her cock too much to slaughter him. The harbour was very little to her, the cock was much. So she hid him under an old pan, and went to bed hoping he would be discreet. But the bird smelt the approach of dawn in his confinement, and announced it with an indignant screech. Away flew the demons, tumbling over each other in their fright. In their haste to be gone they let drop into the sea the big blocks they were carrying, and never by any art could be induced to take up their task again. The blocks they dropped are now the islands of "I Galli," that is to say, "The Cocks," and if any man is so incredulous as to doubt this tale, he may very fairly be asked to keep his incredulity to himself until he has found another explanation of the name. In the cathedral of Salerno many men will be interested in many things. Some will delight in its beautiful forecourt, arcaded with antique pillars and adorned with marbles brought from Pæstum. Some will marvel at the fine mosaic of the pulpit, others at the ancient chest of ivory kept in the sacristy, while some will even take pleasure in the gorgeous decoration of the lower church, with its huge statue of St. Matthew, or rather its two statues set back to back, so that the apostle turns a face toward either altar, thus giving point to the local gibe, "He is double faced (tene doje facce) like San Matteo." But I set aside these things and others with a passing glance, and go straight up to a chapel in the eastern end of the great church, on the south side of the choir, where, slumbering in a peace which rarely blessed him while he lived, lies the greatest of all popes, Gregory the Seventh. [Illustration: GOSSIP--NAPLES.] In the Duomo at Naples we paused before the tomb of Innocent the Fourth, who fought and won the last battle between Papacy and Empire, the last, that is to say, which really counted in that long and awful rivalry. Never after the victory of Innocent did the Emperor, the great world Sovereign, occupy the same pinnacle in men's minds again. The theory of his position was not altered; but in practice the Pope had demonstrated its futility, and set himself, Christ's Vicar upon earth, supreme at the head of all mankind. Once or twice the Empire flickered into life, but the issue was unchanged. This overthrow of the Empire by the Pope is one of those events which have profoundly modified the history of Europe and the world. If Innocent completed it, Gregory began it. He, first of all popes, dared to initiate the fight. His clear brain, his high, stern courage, planned the complete release of the Papacy from dependence upon the Empire. With a quick perception of the legal weakness of his cause, he linked the support of privilege with that of chastity, and thus appealing to that which mediæval men esteemed the loftiest and most saintly of all virtues, gave his attitude a moral greatness which it did not derive from inherent principle. He attacked the Empire while it was still near its highest power, clothed in the traditions of Charlemagne and Otho the Great. He did not fear to question the prerogative of the lord of the world, the King of the Romans, who made or unmade popes. When the Emperor resisted, he dared to declare him dethroned; and ere long after the issue of that declaration the great Cæsar had crossed the Alps a suppliant for pardon, and stood bareheaded, clothed in the woollen garment of a penitent, in the courtyard of the castle at Canossa, waiting humbly till the Pope should admit him to his presence. There, prostrate in the snow, lay the only power which could measure itself against the Pope. There fell, once and for all, the supreme dominion of the Empire. Three days and nights the Emperor waited upon Gregory's will. It was an awful victory, the humiliation of the lord of kings, the temporal head of all mankind became the footstool of his spiritual brother. In vain that very Emperor ere long abandoned his humility, and drove Gregory to exile in Salerno, where he died. In vain many another Emperor fought and struggled for the old supremacy. The world had seen the Emperor a suppliant waiting in the snow, and could not forget it. This, for good or evil, was the deed of Gregory who sleeps here at Salerno. "I have loved justice and hated iniquity," he said in dying, "therefore I die in exile." Did he in truth act only from those pure motives? It may be so, for indeed he and other popes of the same age were great idealists. He died in exile thinking his cause lost, when in fact it was absolutely won. There are those among us who look on the Papacy with fear, and some with hope; but all alike, if they think at all, regard it as big with destiny, and charged with most potent influences on the future of mankind. Therefore this tomb in the Duomo of Salerno is one of the most interesting upon earth. In days far distant from our own the bones of him who first lifted St. Peter's chair to world-wide supremacy may be cursed or blessed, but forgotten they can never be. We men and women of to-day, regardful only of the accomplished fact, contemptuous of the power of ideals, and profoundly careless of the teachings of history, dismiss these matters very lightly from our minds as having been settled in the "Settanta" when the Italians entered Rome. This is a mere error bred of ignorance. The old strife of Guelf and Ghibelline is raging still. Once again the Papacy is at war with a monarchy, with one, moreover, which is by no means founded on the rock of Christ, as was the Holy Roman Empire, nor supported by the prescriptive glories of Charlemagne or of the Cæsars. The rival which possessed those vast advantages was brought to stand humbly in the snow at Canossa. What will be the issue of the present contest? It is idle to speculate. Faith and asceticism, two strong weapons of the mediæval popes, no longer stir mankind to action. We can only sit and watch, remembering that thirty years are but as a day in the judgment of the oldest of all human institutions. Kingdoms rise and fall. They change their form and develop into other constitutions. The Church of Rome is the only organism on earth which neither changes nor develops. How should it do either, when it claims to be a mere expression of eternal law? It was a weary journey which one made in old days from Salerno through Battipaglia to Pæstum. The plain which in Greek hands overflowed with fertility has long been but roughly cultivated, and fever has wrought its fatal work with little check among the dwellers on the neglected flats. It was an unsafe journey too, for the main road through the lonely country was infested by brigands who, though they practised chiefly among the native proprietors, yet rejoiced greatly when they met a wealthy stranger unattended by carabineers. The years following the expulsion of the Bourbons in 1860 witnessed a terrible recrudescence of the scourge. Manzi was the most ferocious of the bandits in this region. He haunted chiefly the oak forest of Persano, on the further side of Pæstum, and on any alarm his band used to disperse to hiding-places which they only knew among the mountains. But now the brigands have been hunted down, and the land sleeps in peace. The fever, too, is less, thanks to the eucalyptus, whose red stems and glossy foliage spread far and wide across the swampy ground beside the milky rivers. The time may yet come when Pæstum will be a rose garden again, though never more, so far as human intelligence can make a forecast, will the crafts or eager life of a crowded city displace the husbandmen from the wide plains between the mountains and the sea. The Italian races, compact into one strong people, have fixed the centre of their life on other spots, and the day of Pæstum will no more return. How great a day it was! Time, which has dealt so hardly with the cities of the Italian mainland, has preserved here, in solitary grandeur, the evidence of splendours which elsewhere are but a dream. Cumæ is a rubbish heap, Sybaris and Croton have perished everlastingly. Taranto is overbuilt into the semblance of a mediæval if not a modern city. Brindisi is paltry and Otranto dead. At Pæstum only on the mainland, thanks to the expulsion of the last handful of its citizens eleven centuries ago, three temples stand erect out of the waste of herbage which has strewn itself over the ruined streets and market-places. There alone we can comprehend the lost greatness of that Hellenic people whose submersion by barbaric onslaught must be counted as the greatest misfortune which has befallen the human race. It is no great wonder that the Greeks, having once overcome the terrors of the ocean on the night side of the world, crossed over in large numbers to the fair coasts which are in sight from the Albanian mountains. So short a ferry must have been constantly at work. There are still Greeks in Italy--not Greeks by descent alone, nor of Greek origin mixed with other elements, but Greeks of pure blood and speech. No less than twenty thousand of them dwell in two colonies in southern Italy, one in the Terra d'Otranto, the other some twenty miles south-east of Reggio. Neither maintains communications with the other, nor does either possess traditions of its origin. Both maintain themselves apart from the surrounding people, whom they call "Latinoi." Their language is unwritten. It differs from modern Romaic, and is apparently not derived from the Greek spoken in the cities of Magna Grecia. The colonists are probably descendants of immigrants who came from Greece not later than the eleventh century, or perhaps in those earlier days when refugees crowded into Italy for shelter from the fury of the iconoclasts. But whencesoever these mysterious colonies came, they have shown not a trace of the great heart and spirit which animated the earliest settlers of their race upon Italian shores. Pæstum, or rather Poseidonia, to give it its Greek name, was a city less ancient than Cumæ. It was not founded by settlers direct from Greece. It was a colony thrown off by Sybaris, that great city of Calabria which became a byword of luxury while Rome was young and counted for little in the Italian land. Five centuries before Christ was born that mighty city was destroyed by its rival Croton, destroyed so utterly that the River Krathis was led over the ruins; yet Poseidonia, its distant colony, still remembered the greatness of her origin, and grew and flourished splendidly, till she became the mightiest town of all this coast, powerful upon sea, potent to thrust back the swarming tribes which looked down enviously from the mountains on her wealth. All the city's life is lost and forgotten. What we know of her greatness and her beauty is revealed by no records, but by the tangible evidence of indestructible things. Her coins are numerous exceedingly and of the purest beauty. They prove her abounding wealth. Whence that wealth came is suggested by the fact that the city gave her name to the whole gulf, which could scarcely have happened had she not been great upon the sea. Poseidon was the tutelary deity of the city, and on her coins he appears brandishing his trident, a mighty emblem of sea empire. These coins prove, too, the perfection of the art for which the city was renowned. When Phocæan Greeks founded the once famous city of Velia, some twenty miles away, it was to Poseidonia that they came for instruction in the art of building, drawn doubtless by the desire to match the superb temples which we see to-day, the envy of our builders as of theirs, though we, less fortunate, can summon no citizen of Poseidonia to teach us what our hearts and minds cannot of themselves design. It must have been a proud and splendid life which throbbed itself out upon this spot. At last the savage mountaineers stormed the city. Greek aid from Epirus gave back its liberty, but to no purpose. The mountain warriors returned and were quelled at last only by the onward march of Rome, which imposed on Poseidonia another servitude and changed its name to Pæstum. Thenceforwards nothing was left to the Greek citizens but their regrets, which they wept out yearly in a mournful festival, telling over the greatness of the days that had been. Even the mourning has been done these twelve centuries and more, yet still the temples stand there silent and deserted, and the walls mark out the empty circuit of the city. Virgil, when he came near the end of his poem upon husbandry, and, perceiving the limits of his space, sketched out briefly what other subjects he might have treated, spoke of the twice-flowering roses of Pæstum as if the gardens where they bloomed were the loveliest he knew. There are none now. Only such flowers grow at Pæstum still as flourish in a rough, coarse soil, or can exist in the scant foothold of mould which has collected on the friezes of the temples. High up, where the shattered reddish stone seems to touch the cloudless sky, the blossoming weeds run riot. The mallow flaunts its blood-red flowers on the architrave, and the ruddy snap-dragon looks down into the inmost places of the temple. Over all there is a constant twittering of little birds. The lizards, green and brown, flash in and out among the vast shadows of the columns. They will stop and listen if you whistle to them, raising their heads and peering round in delight with any noise which breaks the long, deathly silence of the city. Beyond the shadow white oxen are ploughing languidly in the thick heat, and across two fields the sea is breaking on a shore as lonely as it was when the Greeks from Sybaris first beached their galleys there. Perhaps they found a city there already. Lenormant was inclined to think so; and it is certainly strange that the Greek name was so completely driven out by the Roman, unless the latter be an older name revived. But though all men use the Latin appellation, and though their scanty knowledge of the city is largely gained from Latin writers, yet the glory of the place is Greek, and neither Roman nor barbarian added to its lustre. Some day men will excavate upon this ground, of which the surface has been barely scratched. They will unearth the tombs outside the city gate, in some of which remarkable paintings have been found already. They will lay bare the foundations of all the crowded city, houses, streets, and temples, and declare once more in the clear sunlight how great and splendid was this city of Neptune, which the course of time has reduced to three vast temples standing in a lonely waste. The grandest of the three temples is that assigned, probably enough, to Poseidon. It cannot be much less ancient than the city itself, and out of Athens there is not a nobler example of Greek architecture, unless it be at Girgenti, where the Temple of Concord is perhaps as fine and somewhat more perfect. It is Doric in style. Its fluted pillars, somewhat short in proportion to their mass, give the building an aspect of gigantic bulk; its heavy architrave, the austerity of its design, the dull red hues with which rain and storm have stained the travertine, all combine to leave a rare impression on the mind. The space within seems strangely narrow. One realises why the early Christians rejected the Greek form of temple, designed for acts of worship paid by individuals singly, and took the model of their churches from the Basilica, in whose spacious hall the congregation which professed to be a brotherhood might assemble at its ease. No congregation could have met in this vast Neptune temple. From the busy market-place outside, the central spot of all the crowded city, worshippers slipped in one by one beneath the shadowy colonnade. There is a so-called Basilica here, but the name is of no authority, and the building is probably a temple. Wide differences of opinion exist about its date, but none about its beauty. The third temple shows marks of differing styles, and while in part it may be coeval with the foundation of the city, it was probably retouched during the period of Roman rule. Such are the visible remains of Pæstum. In all Italy there is no more interesting spot. Not Rome itself, which ruled the habitable world, has cast over mankind a spell so mighty as these Greek cities, which scarcely aimed at rule beyond their walls, and cared nothing for the lust of wide dominion. Conquest was not in their hearts, but the desire of beauty burned there more passionately than ever before or after, creating loveliness which has gone on breeding loveliness and wisdom which has not ceased begetting wisdom, while kingdoms have crumbled into dust and conquerors have earned no better guerdon than forgetfulness; so that still men look back on the life of the Greek cities as the very flower of human culture, the finest expression of what may be achieved by heart and soul and brain aspiring together. The cities perished, but the heritage to mankind remains, kindling still the desire for that beauty in form, thought, and word which was attained upon these coasts more than twenty centuries ago. And if the heritage was for mankind, it was first of all for Italy, that noble land which has been the scene of every kind of greatness, which has been burdened with every shame and sorrow that can afflict mankind, yet is rising once more into strength which will surely dismay her slanderers and shame those who seek to work her ruin. And so I lay down my pen, with a faith in the future which turns ever back to the noblest song yet sung of Italy:-- "Salve magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, Magna virûm; tibi res antiquæ laudis et artis Ingredior...." APPENDIX _Page 6._ The story of the French knights who misunderstood the warning shots from Ischia is told in Brantôme's Life of Dragut, No. 37 of the "Vies des Hommes Illustres." Concerning Vittoria Colonna there is, of course, a considerable literature. A pleasant and readable account of her life is contained in _A Decade of Italian Women_, by T. A. Trollope (Chapman and Hall, 1859). _Page 7._ The tale of Gianni di Procida is Novella VI. of the fifth day of the _Decameron_. _Page 9._ The common tale about the origin of the Sicilian Vespers is that Gianni di Procida, who is sometimes spoken of as having suffered in his own family from the lustful dealings of the French soldiery, and sometimes only as sympathising with the islanders in their intolerable wrongs, went through the island in disguise, beating a drum and capering up to whomsoever he met. If it were a Frenchman, he screamed some mad jest in his ear; if a Sicilian, he whispered some information about the projected rising, which was to take place at the signal of the Vesper bell ringing in Palermo. But for this tale there is no historical authority. Procida had certainly some connection with the revolt; but so far as can be discovered, the actual outbreak was unpremeditated, and the name of the Sicilian Vespers is applied to the massacre by no writer earlier than the latter part of the fifteenth century. The great authority on this subject is of course Amari, _La Guerra del Vespro Siciliano_. _Page 9._ Virgil the enchanter. See note on p. 55. _Page 21._ It is impossible to give separate references to all the authorities which I have consulted in writing this chapter. The work which I have found most valuable--incomparably so--is the _Campanien_ of Beloch, which outstrips both in learning and in judgment all works known to me upon the Phlegræan Fields. It may be said, once for all, that with hardly one exception, the best works upon the region of Naples are by Germans. English scholarship does not appear to advantage. If a man will not read German, he may seek information usefully from Breislak, _Topograpia Fisica della Campania_ (Firenze, 1798). Other useful works are:--Phillips, J., _Vesuvius_ (Oxford, 1869); Daubeny, C. G. B., _A Description of Volcanoes_ (London, 1848); Logan Lobley, _Mount Vesuvius_ (London, 1889); to which should be added the "Physical Notices of the Bay of Naples," by Professor Forbes, in Brewster's _Edinburgh Journal of Science_, vol. x. All these works treat of the Phlegræan Fields, as well as of Vesuvius. _Page 24._ The treatise of Capaccio will be found in the collection of chronicles which bears the name of Grævius, but was, in fact, completed after the death of that great scholar by Peter Burmann. The collection is an honour to Leyden, where it was published full half a century before Muratori commenced his work. _Page 26._ This gossip about the Grotta del Cane is derived chiefly from a small guide to the locality, published early in the present century. _Page 37._ Petrarch's account of his visit to the Phlegræan Fields will be found among his Latin verse epistles (_Carm._ lib. ii. epist. 7). _Page 41._ Upon the theory that Cumæ was founded so early as a thousand years before Christ, I translate as follows from Holm (_Geschichte Griechenlands_, vol. i. p. 340), the most recent of authorities, and perhaps the most judicious:--"It is scarcely credible that an organised Greek city existed in these regions in such early times. But it need not be questioned that scattered settlements of Greeks were already established on the Campanian coast a thousand years before Christ; and it cannot be doubted that Cumæ is the earliest Greek colony, recognised as such, in the West.... Cumæ also became the mother city of Naples, but at what precise date cannot be determined." _Page 45._ The dyke of Hercules. See Beloch, _Campanien_. _Page 52._ For the Villa of Vedius Pollio, as well as for all the other antiquities of this region, see Beloch, _Campanien_. _Page 53._ The story of the Grotta dei Tuoni is one of the interesting pieces of folklore collected by Signor Gaetano Amalfi, to whose unwearied labours I acknowledge gratefully many debts. It was published in the periodical called _Napoli Nobilissima_ in 1895. _Page 55._ For the stories of the enchanter Virgil, see Comparetti, _Virgilio nel Mediævo_. The tale of the plundering of Virgil's tomb in the reign of Roger of Sicily is taken from the same work, where it is told on the authority of Gervasius of Tilbury. It was a widely credited tale, and will be found also in Marin Sanudo, _Vite dei Dogi_, p. 232 of the fine new edition of Muratori, now (1901) being issued under the direction of Giosuè Carducci, an enterprise which is remarkable both for scholarship and beauty, and deserves the more praise since it emanates from no great city, but from the printing house of Scipione Lapi at Città di Castello, on the upper valley of the Tiber. _Page 65._ The traditions of Queen Joanna are well set out by Signor Amalfi in _La Regina Giovanna nella Tradizione_ (Naples, 1892), a little work which, though no other exists upon the subject, the British Museum disdains to purchase. Mr. Nutt procured me a copy, though with some difficulty. The book is not as complete as it might be; it contains, for example, no reference to the traditions of the Queen at Amalfi. _Page 71._ For Alfonso of Aragon, see Guicciardini, _Istoria d'Italia_, lib. i. cap. 4. Most of my history is taken from this writer. _Page 72._ For an account of San Lionardo, as well as for the subsequent tale of the Torretta, see _Napoli Nobilissima_ (1892). _Page 81._ Niccolò Pesce. See _Nap. Nob._ (1896). Schiller's ballad, "Der Taucher," will of course be found in any collection of his works. _Page 88._ The best book on the Hohenstaufen is Von Räumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_, a very fine and interesting work. Frederick loved more than Arab art, unless history is unjust. Amari speaks of him and his grandfather, King Roger, as "i due Sultani battezzati di Sicilia." _Page 97._ Upon the vexed question where Palæopolis stood, or if it stood anywhere at all, Beloch seems a little wilful, arguing stoutly that there never was such a city. "But," says Mr. Hodgkin, "in the face of Livy's clear statement (viii. 22) as to the situation of the two cities, and the record in the Triumphal Fasti of the victory of Publilius over the 'Samnites Palæopolitanei,' this seems too bold a stroke of historical scepticism" (_Italy and Her Invaders_, vol. iv. p. 53). _Page 108 et seq._ See Camillo Porzio, _La Congiura de' Baroni_. _Page 121._ Upon the churches of Naples there are two works which surpass all others--namely, _Documenti per la storia, le arti e le industrie_, by Prince Gaetano Filangieri, a monument of vast learning; and _Denkmaeler der Kunst des Mittelalters in Unter Italien_, by H. W. Schulz, whose work forms the basis of almost every guide-book published on southern Italy. _Page 123._ This tale of the graceless Duke of Calabria is in Giannone, _Storia di Napoli_, lib. xxii. _ad init._ _Page 126._ Those who desire more information on the everyday life of Naples will do well to seek it in Kellner's work, _Alltägliches aus Neapel_, the tenth volume of the well-known series, "Kennst du das Land," which is sold everywhere in Italy. _Page 137._ The account of this storm is in book v. epist. 5, of Petrarch's letters. The storm may, or may not, be the one which destroyed Amalfi. I know of no evidence pointing either way, save the improbability that two tempests should have wrought such devastation. _Page 140._ Fucini's work is called _Napoli a Occhio Nudo_. _Page 141._ Any history of Naples will give the facts of the struggle between Frederick the Second and Innocent. See especially von Räumer or Giannone. _Page 143._ La Colonna della Vicaria. Signor Amalfi quotes from Voltero, _Dizionario filosofico_, _s.v._ "Banqueroute," the following passage:--"Le négociant _fallito_ pouvait dans certaines villes d'Italie garder tous ses biens et frustrer ses créanciers, pourvu qu'il s'assit le derrière nu sur une pierre en présence de tous les marchands. C'était une dérivation douce de l'ancien proverbe romain, _Solvere aut in aere, aut in cute_, payer de son argent ou de sa peau" (_Tradizioni ed usi_, p. 123). _Page 146._ The facts about the descent of the Turks upon Otranto in 1480 will be found stated briefly in all the histories. But they are sufficiently curious to make it worth while to consult the admirable and detailed report made to Ludovic Sforza, Il Moro, by the commissary who served him in his capacity as Duke of Bari. As ruler of the chief Apulian coast town, Il Moro was of course painfully anxious for exact information about the proceedings of the Turks. The report will be found in volume vi. of the _Archivio Storico_, published by the "Società di Storia Patria," of Naples. _Page 150 et seq._ The story of Conradin's expedition and death is told best in von Räumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_. It will be found also in Amari, _La Guerra del Vespro_. The two historians report the circumstances of Conradin's death with some differences of detail, having relied on different chronicles. The variations are not essential. _Page 158._ Details concerning the examination of Conradin's tomb will be found in Filangieri, _op. cit._ _Page 161._ For the story of Mas'aniello's revolt I have followed Sign. Gabriele Tontoli, _Il Masaniello, overo Discorsi Narrativi, La Sollevatione di Napoli_, printed at Naples in 1648. I selected this work (1) because it is rare; (2) because it is full of detail; (3) because it is the narrative of an eye-witness. _Page 178._ The literature of Vesuvius is immense. As general references, I can only indicate again the works named in the note on page 21. _Page 182._ Braccini's narrative was published at Naples in 1632 under the title _Dell'Incendio fattosi nel Vesuvio_. _Page 190._ Palmieri's account has been translated. _The Eruption of Vesuvius in 1872_ (London, 1873). _Page 196._ Herculaneum. Once more it is well to refer to Beloch, _Campanien_. _Page 201 et seq._ The work of Signori Comparetti and de Petra was published at Turin in 1883, under the title _La Villa Ercolanense dei Pisoni_. It is one of those monuments of patient, well-directed learning and research which fill one with high hopes for the future of Italian scholarship. I presume the British Museum acquired its copy shortly after publication. I may add that I cut its pages in July, 1900--a fact that says worlds about British scholarship. _Page 209._ The translation of Mau's _Pompeii, its Life and Art_, was published at New York in 1899. _Page 217._ The only works worth mentioning about the pictures at Pompeii are those of Helbig, _Untersuchungen über die Campanische Wandmalerei_ (Leipzig, 1873), and his earlier _Wandgemälde_ (Leipzig, 1868). A summary of Helbig's conclusions will be found in _Promenades Archéologiques_, by Gaston Boissier (Paris, 1895). _Page 223._ On Stabiæ a work comparable only to that cited above on Piso's villa has been written by Signor Michele Ruggiero, _Degli Scavi di Stabia_ (Naples, 1881). In connection with the Roman country life, I might have mentioned the recent excavations at Bosco-reale, where the villas were doubtless similar to those upon Varano. The first discoveries on that spot are set down by the superstitious peasants to the credit of a priest, who is said to have indicated a place where treasure would be found by digging. The real fact is that about the year 1868 a small proprietor named Pulzella discovered, while hoeing his field, the entrance to a buried chamber. He enlarged the aperture, and found a second room; but could not penetrate further without entering a neighbouring property, which belonged to Signor de Prisco. Of this discovery he said nothing for twenty years. In 1888 the ground passed into the possession of the de Prisco family, who, learning what had occurred, continued the excavation, found in 1894 all the apartments of a bath, and in one of them a great treasure of money and silver plate of exquisite workmanship, which was bought by Baron Rothschild and presented to the Louvre. A full account of the villa then unearthed is given by August Mau. Six years passed, and recently the excavations have been resumed. A larger villa has been unearthed, near the former one. No treasure was found in it, nor any portable articles. Possibly the owners had been able to return and recover their property, or more probably they had fled on earlier warning. But the interest of this new house lies in its frescoes, which are of great beauty, both architectural and figure pieces. There can be no doubt that we are on the verge of a great expansion of our knowledge of Roman life; and it is to be hoped that the works at Bosco-reale will be vigorously pushed and carefully supervised. An interesting account of the discoveries, with illustrations, will be found in the Italian magazine _Emporium_ for December, 1900. _Page 229._ Trade routes in the Sorrento peninsula. I cannot discover that anyone has written with scholarship on this most interesting subject. There is none more important to a clear comprehension of history, nor any more generally neglected. _Page 230._ Santa Maria Maggiore. Gsell-Fels gives a good account of this remarkable church, based on that of Schulz. _Page 231._ Catacombs at Castellammare. I regret that the passage in Schulz, _Denkmaeler der Kunst des Mittelalters in Unter Italien_, vol. ii. p. 224, referring to these catacombs, did not come under my notice in time to admit of my making a personal examination of them. They appear to be so completely forgotten that several well-informed persons to whom I applied denied their existence. They do exist, however, upon the road to La Cava. I cannot indicate the spot exactly, nor does Schulz do so. I translate from him as follows:--"To the largest grotto one goes by a broad passage hewn in the rock, in whose sides are squared niches, apparently designed for flasks, lamps, inscriptions or children's coffins. The uncertain line between ancient and modern alterations makes decision difficult. Then one goes through a sort of rock gateway of more modern construction.... In the background of the grotto, which has five niches on either of its longer sides, there are more graves under a vault. The greater number of the pictures are on the left as one enters. In the first recess stands a woman's figure in the Norman-Greek style of painting, badly damaged. Near her is a smaller figure of a saint holding a book. Higher up, in a disc set with white pearls, hovers the figure of Christ with a nimbus; and by it are other circles, with busts of angels. Over the upper one is written 'RAFA' (Raphael), above another 'MICAH, SCS VRVS' (?). The painting is in the ancient style with black, white, and red--that peculiar dark brown-red of early Christian pictures, as in the lower church at Assisi, the catacombs of Syracuse and Naples, etc.... The inscriptions, mostly white on a green ground, are in characters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or yet later times," etc., etc. I cannot too emphatically express my sense of the great value of Schulz' work. Much is changed since 1860, when he wrote; yet still his survey must be the starting-point for every other writer. _Page 236._ La Madonna di Pozzano. I take this legend from _Storia dell'Immagine di S. Maria di Pozzano_, written by Padre Serafino de Ruggieri. It was published at Valle di Pompeii in 1893. _Page 237._ The facts about the Iconoclasts will be found in any Church history; _e.g._ Milman, _Hist. of Latin Christianity_, bk. iv. chap. 7. _Page 238._ My chief authority for the stories of madonnas in this chapter and the next is Signor Gaetano Amalfi, whose invaluable work, _Tradizioni ed Usi nella Penisola Sorrentina_, forms volume viii. of the "Curiosità Popolari Tradizioniali," published by Signor Pitrè at Palermo. Those who are acquainted with the bookshops in Naples will not be surprised to hear that I searched them vainly for a copy of this work, great as its interest should be for all visitors to the city. The book is largely written in the local dialects, and would be of little use to those who cannot read them. _Page 241._ The old road from Castellammare towards Sorrento. Breislak, who wrote so recently as in 1800, says, "Le chemin est le plus mauvais possible, et ne peut se faire avec sureté qu'à pied." _Page 245._ Quaresima. I refer once more to Signor Amalfi, _op. cit._ _Page 255._ These various scraps of folklore are from the same work, as are also the legends in this chapter. _Page 260._ For the tufa of Sorrento, see Breislak, _Voyages physiques_. _Page 270._ On the archæology of Sorrento the best work known to me is that of Beloch, _Campanien_. _Page 273._ Not much has been written well on Capri. _Storia dell'Isola di Capri_, by Mons. A. Canale, is sold throughout the town, but has little value. _Die Insel Capri_, by Ferdinand Gregorovius, is a book of great beauty and merit; the reputation of Gregorovius stands in no need of praise. Kopisch' narrative, _Die Entdeckung der blauen Grotte_, is volume 2,907 of Reclam's "Universal Bibliothek." _Page 301._ It is much to be desired that some German or Italian scholar--I fear none other would have the necessary patience--might undertake to elucidate the history of that collection of communes which passed by the name of Amalfi. Two histories exist--a modern one by Camera, an ancient one by Pansa. Both comprise interesting facts, but neither attempts to solve the puzzles which beset the traveller on every side. Nor will it be of any use for other writers to attempt solutions without long study; yet for one who might be willing to bestow the labour, there will certainly be reserved a rich reward of fame. Probably there is scarce any spot where thorough investigation might teach us so much of the tangled yet splendid history of Italy in the Middle Ages. _Page 305._ The Knights Hospitallers of St. John were settled at Cyprus for a time after their expulsion from Acre; but were not long contented to remain vassals of the king of that island, and accordingly obtained the Pope's permission to turn their arms against the Greek Empire, from which they took Rhodes on 15th August, 1310. Finlay, _History of Greece_, vol. iii. p. 410. _Page 306._ No one need concern himself with the works of Volpicella. They belong to the bad period of archæology, when sentiment overcame both reason and sense. Schulz remains the safe and trusty guide; it being remembered always that changes have occurred since he wrote. _Page 311._ The bronze doors at Amalfi and Ravello. Schulz remains the chief authority on this very interesting subject; but there is a good article on the subject in Lenormant, _À travers l'Apulie et la Lucanie_, under the heading "Monte Sant'Angelo." _Page 312._ Monte Gargano, one of the most picturesque and interesting spots in Italy. There was a shrine for pagan pilgrims on this mountain in Strabo's time. He describes the crowd who came to consult the demi-god in his cavern, and lay sleeping in the open air around the cave, resting on skins of the black sheep they had slaughtered. In due course the heathen demi-god was replaced by a miraculous apparition of the archangel Michael, and Christian pilgrims came in crowds. It was the common process. The priests recognised a tradition of pilgrimage which they could not check, and legalised it by a Christian legend. See Lenormant, _À travers l'Apulie et la Lucanie_ (Paris, 1883). _Page 330._ Vietri is of great age. Strabo, quoted by Camera, indicates it under the name Marcinna as the only city between the rocks of the Sirens and Pæstum. Possibly he looked on Salerno and Vietri as one. _Page 331._ The facts about pilgrims are from Ducange, _s.v._ "Peregrinatio," and Muratori, Dissertation 37. _Page 338._ The best account of Pæstum known to me is in Lenormant, _op. cit._ INDEX A Agnano, Lake, 26, 78 Agrippina, Empress, her murder, 45 _et seq._ Alcala, Duke of, 77 Alfonso of Aragon, first king of that name, 104, 160; second king of that name, 70, 72, 107 _et seq._, 130, 146 Amalfi, 58; its trade, 229, 295, 297, 299 _et seq._ Anacapri, 282, 284, 288, 289, 298 Angelo, Monte Sant', 6, 181, 232, 256, 285, 297 Anicetus, 46, 47 Anjou, Charles, King. See "Charles" Anjou, House of, 8, 70, 91, 103 Anna, Palazzo di Donna, 54, 65 Aragon, House of, 8, 16, 86, 91, 97, 108, 122, 130 Arco Naturale, 296, 297 Arcos, Duke of, 162 _et seq._ Augustus, Emperor, 57, 292 Avernus, Lake of, 37, 38, 43 B Baiæ, 23, 40, 43, 44, 217 Barbaro, Monte, its legend, 37 Barbarossa, Corsair, 6, 145, 274, 287, 288, 308 Bauli, 46 Beloch quoted, 346 (App.), 353 (App.) Bembo, Pietro, epitaph on Sannazzaro, 75 Bisignano, Prince of, 110, 111; Princess of, her escape, 110 Blue Grotto, 275 _et seq._ Boccaccio, 5, 7, 112, 123, 124, 134, 233, 235, 317 Bolgaro, Restituta, 7 Bosco Reale, 179, 187, 350 (App.) Braccini, Abate, 182, 184 _et seq._, 350 (App.) Brantôme quoted, 8, 160 Breislak quoted, 346 (App.), 353 (App.) C Calabria, Duke of, 123, 348 (App.); Alfonso, Duke of. See "Alfonso of Aragon." Camorra, The, 119, 145 Campagna Felice, 12, 18, 181, 286 Campana, Monte, 37 Campanella, Punta di, 6, 77, 264 Cane, Grotta del, 26-8, 346 (App.) Capaccio quoted, 24, 61, 346 (App.) Cappuccini Convent, Hotel, 307 _et seq._ Capri, 5, 18, 68, 273 _et seq._ Capuana, Porta, 57, 145, 146, 220 Capuano, Cardinal, 307 Capuano, Castel, 66, 101, 143, 145 Caraccioli, Francesco, 76 Carmine, Church of, 13, 112, 116, 156, 158, 160, 170 _et seq._ Carmine, Madonna del, 158 Casamicciola, 5, 38, 183 Castellammare, 6, 81, 126, 179, 220, 226 _et seq._; its catacombs, 231, 295, 352 (App.) Castles. See "Elmo," "Nuovo," "Uovo," etc. Charles of Anjou, King, 89, 90, 94, 97, 112, 124, 152 Chiaia, Riviera di, 10, 68, 69, 78 Churches: Carmine, see above; Cathedral, 140 _et seq._; Gesù Nuovo, 108, 121; Santa Caterina a Formello, 147; Santa Chiara, 123-5, 135; San Domenico Maggiore, 128, 129; San Lionardo, 10, 72-4, 79, 105, 110, 111, 168; San Lorenzo, 135, 136, 138, 162 Cigliano, Monte, 37 Colonna, Vittoria, 6, 131, 345 (App.) Conca, Ravine of, its legend, 257 _et seq._ Conca, Capo di, 304, 329 Conradin, 89, 90, 126, 150-8, 161, 349 (App.) Coppola, Monte, 232, 249; family of, 109 Cumæ, 41, 45, 97, 215, 346 (App.) D Damecuta, Tower of, 275, 276, 280, 282 Decuman ways in Naples, 117, 118 Deserto, The, 262 _et seq._ Dragut, Corsair, 6, 77, 274, 287, 345 (App.) E Elmo, St., Castle, 10, 16, 17, 62, 97 Epomeo, Monte di, 5, 59, 183, 250 F Faito, Monte, 6, 249, 251 Ferdinand First of Aragon, King, 71, 72, 105, 107-11; the Second, 98 Fiammetta (Princess Marie of Anjou), 5, 134, 135, 235 Filamarino, Cardinal Ascanio, 167 _et seq._ Fiorelli, director of excavations at Pompeii, 212 Folklore. See "Galli," "Giovanna," "Madonnas," "Nicolo Pesce," "Rufolo," "Sorrento," "Vico," "Virgil," etc. Fra Diavolo, bandit, 242 _et seq._ Frangipani betrays Conradin, 155 Frederick the Second, Emperor, 88, 89; his struggle with the Papacy, 141, 142, 348 (App.) Frederick of Baden, comrade of Conradin, 154, 156, 157 Fucini, Renato, quoted, 140, 349 (App.) G Galli, I, Legend of, 333 Gargano, Monte, 88, 312, 354 (App.) Garibaldi, 127 Gennaro, San, 13, 57; his miracle, 140, 185, 188 Gioja, Flavio, 302 Giotto, 5, his residence in Naples, 124, 125 Giovanna, Queen, Traditions of, 65-7, 90, 148, 313, 347 (App.) Gregorovius, F., 353 (App.) Grillo, Monte, 37 Guicciardini quoted, 70, 98, 100 H Helena, Queen, wife of Manfred, 90, 94, 95 Herculaneum, 178, 183, 185; how discovered, 196; amphitheatre, 197; how destroyed, 199; how searched, 200; Piso's villa, 201 _et seq._; the library, 204; new excavations, 207 Hodgkin, T., quoted, 221, 348 (App.) I Iconoclasts, The, 237 Ischia, 1, 5, 6, 8, 50, 53, 59, 81, 99, 176, 183, 286 K Kopisch, August, discoverer of Blue Grotto, 275 _et seq._ L La Cava, Valley of, 230; Abbey, 330 Lakes: Agnano, 26, 78; Avernus, 37, 38, 43; Lucrine, 45, 47 Leopardi, Giacomo, 25 Lionardo d'Oria, 73 Lionardo, San, 10, 72-4, 79, 105, 110, 111, 348 (App.) Loria, Roger di, Admiral, 7, 286 Lucia, Santa, 54, 93, 101-3 Lucrine, Lake, 45, 47 Luigi, San, Church of, 166 M Machiavelli quoted, 108, 109 Maddaloni, Duke of, 170 Maddaloni Palace, 117 Madonnas, Legends of: della Carmine (La Bruna), 159, 163; di Casarlano, 238; delle Galline, 239; di Meta, 254; di Positano, 303; di Pozzano, 236; di Sorrento, carried in procession, 270; di Villanto, 253; authority, 353 (App.) Majori, 229, 301, 306, 327, 328 Mammone, bandit, 244 Manfred, King, 89, 94, 95, 104, 124, 150 Marcellus, 57 Martino, San, 16, 116 Mas'aniello, 115, 116, 120, 164 _et seq._, 350 (App.) Mercato of Naples, 122, 149, 157, 161, 163 _et seq._, 220 Mergellina, 76, 79 Minori, 229, 301, 306, 328 Mirichicchiu, Apparition of, 266 Misenum, 29, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 185, 199, 286 Monforte, Count, 233 Munaciello, 'O, Apparition of, 252 N Nero, Emperor, 45, 46 Nisida, Island of, 50, 52, 53, 79 Nocera, 95; dominates trade route, 229, 230 Nuovo, Castel, 11, 16, 17, 20, 74; its age, 97, 98; described, 104; vault of, 106; cruelties wrought there, 108, etc. Nuovo, Monte, 40 O Otranto, Martyrs of, 146-8, 349 (App). P Paderni, C., report on Herculaneum, 201 _et seq._ Padulano, The, 126 Pæstum, 215, 251, 299, 302, 337 _et seq._ Pagano, host at Capri, 275 _et seq._ Palæopolis, 97, 348 (App.) Palermo, 7 Palmieri, of Vesuvius Observatory, 190, 194 Pantaleoni, Family of, 311 Parthenope, 2, 4 Pesce, Nicolo, Legends of, 81, 348 (App.) Petrarch visits Phlegræan Fields, 37, 346 (App.); 56, 124; at San Lorenzo, 134, 205 Petronius quoted, 218 Philodemus, his library at Herculaneum, 205 _et seq._ Phlegræan Fields, 9, 23, 37; authorities on, 346 (App.) Piedigrotta, 25 Piso, his villa at Herculaneum, 201 _et seq._, 350 (App.) Pizzofalcone, 10, 92, 93, 97, 99, 101 Pliny quoted, 44, 199, 200, 218 Pompeii, 13, 44; its plan, 133, 178, 179, 183, 197, 199; general aspect, 210; houses, 213-7; pictures, 217-20; authorities, 350 (App.) Portici, 195 Poseidon, Temple of, 342 Posilipo, 9, 19; how formed, 22; its caverns, 24, 53, 60; described, 49 _et seq._, 199 Pozzano, Convent and Madonna of, 236-8, 352 (App.) Pozzuoli, 3, 24, 29; its trade and fall, 32, 33; Serapeon, 34; Greek origin, 41, 62 Prajano, 301, 303 Procida, Gianni, 7, 8; Giovanni, 9, 345 (App.) Q Quaresima, Figure of, 245 R Ravello, 229, 301, 312 _et seq._ Resina, 186, 194, 197, 209 Robert, King, 122, 123, 126, 135, 137 Rufolo, Landolfo, Tale of, 314 Rufolo, Palazzo, 322 Ruggiero, work on Stabiæ, 223, 350 (App.) S Salerno, City, 58, 229, 251, 299, 300, 332 _et seq._ Salerno, Prince of, his escape, 109, 121, 122 Salto di Tiberio, 273, 292, 293 Sannazzaro, 75, 76, 79 San Severino, family of, 108, 121 Sarno, River, 221 Scala, 319 Scarpi, bandit, 242 _et seq._ Schulz, H. W., quoted, 231, 348, 352 Sejanus, Grotto of, 50 Serapis, Temple of, 34, 35 Severo, San, Chapel of, 132 Sicilian Vespers, 8, 9, 90, 95 Sicily, 7, 8; how it floats on the sea, 83 Sirens, The, 4, 269, 299 Solaro, Monte, 274, 284, 285, 289, 298 Solfatara, The, 29, 32, 36 Somma, Monte, 37, 178 _et seq._, 286 Sorrento, 5, 22, 229, 251 _et seq._; its folklore, 266, 267; Good Friday procession, 270 Stabiæ, 223 _et seq._, 230, 350 (App.) St. John, Knights of, 305, 354 (App.) Strabo quoted, 181, 355 (App.) Struscio, Lu, 113 Styx, 29 T Tiberius, Emperor, 279, 283, 291; Villa of, 290 Toledo (Via Roma), 18, 113, 115, 116, 165 Tontoli, don Gabriele, quoted, 167 _et seq._ Torre dell'Annunziata, 21, 184, 187, 209 Torre del Greco, 21, 183-5, 187, 188, 209 Torretta, la, 77, 79 Tribunali, Strada di, 101, 117, 131, 133, 149, 168, 209 Tuoni, Grotta dei, legend of, 53 U Uberti, Messer Neri degli, Tale of, 233 _et seq._ Ulysses, 4 Uovo, Castel dell', 10, 17, 61, 62, 64, 69; its caverns, 82; its name, 96; besieged, 99, 125, 166 V Vasto, Marchesa del, 78 Vesuvius, 12, 18, 21, 22, 30, 37; held in check by Virgil, 56; by San Gennaro, 13, 57, 68, 185, 188; how formed, 178-81; Eruptions of, 79 A.D., 44; 1631, 182 _et seq._; 1707, 57; 1767, 189; 1861, 189; 1872, 190 _et seq._; authorities on, 346 (App.) Via Roma (see Toledo) Vicaria, La, 143, 349 (App.) Vico Equense, 81, 228, 253 _et seq._ Vietri, 330, 355 (App.) Virgil, 5, 9; founder of Castel dell'Uovo, 10; his enchantments, 56-9; legend of his tomb, 62, 347 (App.) Virgilio, Scoglio di, 55 Vittoria, Piazza di, 85 Volpicella quoted, 306, 354 (App.) PLYMOUTH WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS 
49831	----	from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) [Illustration: "ASPETTI!" _Page 172._] TWO PILGRIMS' PROGRESS BY JOSEPH AND ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL AUTHORS OF "_A CANTERBURY PILGRIMAGE_" BOSTON ROBERTS BROTHERS LONDON SEELEY & CO. 1887 _Copyright, 1886_, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. TWO Pilgrims' Progress FROM FAIR FLORENCE, TO The eternal City of ROME: Delivered under the Similitude of a RIDE Wherein is Discovered, The manner of their setting out, Their Dangerous Journey; And safe Arrival at the Desired City. _And Behold they wrought a Work on the Wheels._ _IER.18.3_ By _Joseph & Elizabeth Robins Pennell_. Licensed and Entred according to Order. _And_ _Published By_ ROBERTS BROS. BOSTON MDCCCLXXXVI _A FRIEND'S Apology_ _For this Booke._ _By CHARLES G. LELAND._ _Loe! what is this which Ime to sett before ye? It is, I ween, a very pleasant Story, How two young_ Pilgrimes _who the World would see, Did Wheele themselves all over Italy. One meant to write on't, whence it may be said That for the Nonce hers was the Wheelwright's trade; Which is a clever Crafte, for yee have heard What flits about as a familiar Word Which in a Workshopp often meets the Eare, "Bad Wheelwright maketh a good Carpentere," If of a bad one such a Saying's true, Oh what, I pray, may not a good one do? For by Experience I do declare 'Tis easier to make Books than build a Chaire._ Experto crede--I _have tried them Both, And sweare a Book is easier--on my Oathe!_ _He who with her a Pilgriming did go,--_ That was her Husband. As this Book doth show, _Rare skill he had when he would Sketches take, And from those Sketches prittie Pictures make. She with the Pen could well illuminate, He with the Pencil Nature illustrate. Oh, is't not strange that what they did so well In the Pen way meets in the Name Pen-nell? By which the Proverb doth approved appeare,_ Nomen est Omen,--_as is plain and cleere. Which means to say that every Soule doth Bear A Name well suited to his charactere._ _Now, when this Couple unto Mee did come, And askt me iff I'de write a little Pome, That Tale and Picture as they rouled along Might have some small Accomp'niment of Song, I set my Pen to Paper with Delighte, And quickly had my Thoughts in Black and White. Even as_ JOHN BUNYAN _said he did of yore, So I, because I'd done the like before. Since I was the first man of modern time Who on the bycicle e'er wrote a Rime, How I a Lady in a Vision saw Upon a Wheel like that of Budda's Law, Which kept the Path and went exceeding fast; Loe! now my Vision is fulfilled at last, In this brave writer who with ready Hand Hath guided well the Wheel ore many a Land, Showing the World by her adventurous Course How one may travel fast as any Horse, Without a Steed, and stop where'er ye will, And have for oats or stable nere a Bill._ _Now, for the Book I something have to say (Pray mark Mee well, good Reader, while_ you _may)._ They _say that in the Publick some there bee Who'll take it ill 'cause it doth Parody_ JOHN BUNYAN'S Progress. _That can ne'er be said By any who_ JOHN BUNYAN'S _Booke have read, Since he himself protests against the Whim Of those who said the selfsame thing of him, And thought he lightly treated solemn Things. List the Defence which to this Charge he brings: "This Book will make a Traveler of_ Thee, _If by its Councill_ thou _wilt guided be. And it is writ in such a Dialect As may the Minds of listless Men affect. It seems a_ NOVELTY, _and yet contains Nothing but sound and honest Gospel Strains."_ _Now I can make no more Apologie Than Honest_ JOHN _did make for himself, d'ye see; As for the Rest--if you but cast your Eye Upon the Pictures ere the Booke ye buy, And if of Art you are a clever Judge, The Price for it you'll surely not begrudge. Now, Reader, I have praysed this Booke to Thee, I trust that Thou wilt scan Itt carefullie; 'T will set before thee Portraiture of Townes, Castles and Towres, antient Villes and Downs, How rowling Rivers to y^e Ocean hast, Of Roadside Inns and many a faire Palast, Served up, I ween, with so much gentle Mirthe, Thoulte fairly own thou'st gott_ thy _Money's Worth. If thou art Cheated Mine shall bee the Sinn,-- Turn o'er the Page, my Lady, and Begin!_ * * * * * _Loe! Vanity Faire!--the Worlde is there, Hee and his Wife beside. Ye may see it afoot, or from the Traine, Or if on a Wheel you ride._ _To CHARLES GODFREY LELAND, Who is responsible for our First Work Together, & Who has been the Great-Heart of many a Pilgrimage taken in his Company, We dedicate this Book._ CONTENTS. PAGE THE START 11 IN THE VAL D'ARNO 14 AT EMPOLI 22 THE ROAD TO FAIR AND SOFT SIENA 25 AT POGGIBONSI 34 IN THE MOUNTAINS 36 FAIR AND SOFT SIENA 45 AN ITALIAN BY-ROAD 61 MONTE OLIVETO 81 THROUGH THE WILDERNESS TO A GARDEN 94 WE ARE DETAINED IN MONTEPULCIANO 101 IN THE VAL DI CHIANA 109 LUCA SIGNORELLI'S TOWN 118 TO PERUGIA: BY TRAIN AND TRICYCLE 122 AT PERUGIA 128 ACROSS THE TIBER TO ASSISI 134 AT ASSISI 138 VIRGIL'S COUNTRY 142 TERNI AND ITS FALLS 155 IN THE LAND OF BRIGANDS 157 A MIDDLING INN 164 ACROSS THE CAMPAGNA 166 THE FINISH 173 * * * APPENDIX 175 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. * * * PAGE OVER THE PONTE VECCHIO 14 IN THE SUNLIGHT 18 LASTRA 20 A PERUGINO LANDSCAPE 24 ON THE ARNO--NEAR EMPOLI 36 A SLIGHT OBSTRUCTION 40 NOONTIME 42 BY THE RIVER 50 CHIUSURE 68 MONTE OLIVETO 84 AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS 96 LEAVING MONTEPULCIANO 106 CORTONA 118 ON THE HILL 126 THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION, PERUGIA 134 A FROWN OF DISAPPROVAL, ASSISI 136 GATHERING LEAVES 146 "PIPING DOWN THE VALLEY" 160 FROM VIA FLAMINIA, NEAR PONTE MOLLE 170 "ASPETTO!" 172 TWO PILGRIMS' PROGRESS. TWO PILGRIMS' PROGRESS. THE START. "_They are a couple of far-country men, and, after their mode, are going on Pilgrimage._" We stayed in Florence three days before we started on our pilgrimage to Rome. We needed a short rest. The railway journey straight through from London had been unusually tiresome because of our tricycle. From the first mention of our proposed pilgrimage, kind friends in England had warned us that on the way to Italy the machine would be a burden worse than the Old Man of the Sea; porters, guards, and custom-house officials would look upon it as lawful prey, and we should pay more to get it to Italy than it had cost in the beginning. It is wonderful how clever one's friends are to discover the disagreeable, and then how eager to point it out! Our first experience at the station at Holborn Viaduct seemed to confirm their warnings. We paid eight shillings to have the tricycle carried to Dover, porters amiably remarking it would take a pile of money to get such a machine to Italy. Crossing the Channel, we paid five-and-sixpence more, and the sailors told us condolingly we should have an awful time of it in the custom-house at Calais. This, however, turned out a genuine seaman's yarn. The tricycle was examined carefully, but to be admired, not valued. "That's well made, that!" one guard declared with appreciation, and others playfully urged him to mount it. To make a long story short, our friends proved false prophets. From Calais to Florence we paid only nine francs freight and thirty-five francs duty at Chiasso. But unfortunately we never knew what might be about to happen. We escaped in one place only to be sure the worst would befall us in the next. It was not until the cause of our anxiety was safe in Florence that our mental burden was taken away. But here were more friends who called our pilgrimage a desperate journey, and asked if we had considered what we might meet with in the way we were going. There was the cholera. But we represented that to get to Rome we should not go near the stricken provinces. Then they persisted that our road lay through valleys reeking with malaria until November at least. We should not reach these valleys before November, was our reply. Well, then, did we know we must pass through lonely districts where escaped convicts roamed abroad; and in and out of villages where fleas were like unto a plague of Egypt, and good food as scarce as in the wilderness? In a word, ours was a fool's errand. Perhaps it was because so little had come of the earlier prophecies that we gave slight heed to these. They certainly made no difference in our plans. On October 16, the third morning after our arrival, we rode forth _sans_ flea-powder or brandy, _sans_ quinine or beef-extract, _sans_ everything our friends counselled us to take,--and hence, according to them, right into the jaws of death. IN THE VAL D'ARNO. "_Now their way lay just upon the bank of the river; here, therefore, Christian and his companion walked with great delight._" The _padrone_ who helped to strap our portfolio and two bags to the luggage-carrier, our coats to the handle-bars, and the knapsack to J.'s back, and Mr. Mead, the one friend who foretold pleasure, stood at the door of the Hotel Minerva to see us off. The sunlight streamed over the Piazza of Santa Maria Novella and the beggars on the church-steps and the cabmen who good-naturedly cried "No carriage for you," as we wheeled slowly on, over to the Via Tornabuoni, past Doni's, by Viesseux's, up the Lung' Arno to the crowded Ponte Vecchio where for this once at least we were not attacked by the little shopmen, by the Via de' Bardi, then back through the Borgo San Jacopo, again along the Lung' Arno, and then around with the twisting street-car tracks, through the Porta San Frediano, and out on the broad white road which leads to Pisa. [Illustration: OVER THE PONTE VECCHIO. _Page 14._] But even before we left Florence we met with our first accident. The luggage-carrier swung around from the middle to the side of the backbone. The one evil consequence, however, was a half-hour's delay. Beyond the gate we stopped at the first blacksmith's. Had either of us known the Italian word for "wire," the delay might have been shorter. It was only by elaborate pantomime we could make our meaning clear. Then the blacksmith took the matter in his own hands, unstrapped the bags, and went to work with screw-driver and wire, while the entire neighborhood, backed by passing pedlers and street-car drivers and citizens, pronounced the tricycle "beautiful!" "a new horse!" "a tramway!" When the luggage-carrier was fastened securely and loaded again, the blacksmith was so proud of his success that he declared "nothing" was his charge. But he was easily persuaded to take something to drink the _Signore's_ health. After this there were no further stops. Our road for some distance went over streets laid with the great stones of the old Tuscan pavement,--and for tricyclers these streets are not very bad going,--between tall gray houses, with shrines built in them, and those high walls which radiate from Florence in every direction, and keep one from seeing the gardens and green places within. Women plaiting straw, great yellow bunches of which hung at their waists, and children greeted us with shouts. Shirtless bakers, their hands white with flour, and barbers holding their razors, men with faces half shaved and still lathered, and others with wine-glasses to their lips, rushed to look at this new folly of the foreigner,--for ours was the first tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy. At Signa, on the steep up-grade just outside the town, we had a lively spurt with a dummy engine, the engineer apparently trying to run us down as we were about to cross the track. After this we rode between olives and vineyards where there were fewer people. There was not a cloud in the sky, so blue overhead and so white above the far hill-tops on the horizon. The wind in the trees rustled gently in friendliness. Solemn, white-faced, broad-horned oxen stared at us sympathetically over the hedges. One young peasant even stopped his cart to say how beautiful he thought it must be to travel in Italy after our fashion. All day we passed gray olive-gardens and green terraced hillsides, narrow Tuscan-walled streams dry at this season, and long rows of slim straight poplars,--"white trees," a woman told us was their name. Every here and there was a shrine with lamp burning before the Madonna, or a wayside cross bearing spear and scourge and crown of thorns. Now we rode by the fair river of Arno, where reeds grew tall and close by the water's edge, and where the gray-green mountains rising almost from its banks were barren of all trees save dark stone-pines and towering cypresses, like so many mountains in Raphael's or Perugino's pictures. Now we came to where the plain broadened and the mountains were blue and distant. Mulberries the peasants had stripped of their leaves before their time, but not bare because of the vines festooned about them, broke with their even ranks the monotony of gray and brown ploughed fields. Here on a hill was a white villa or monastery, with long, lofty avenue of cypresses; there, the stanch unshaken walls and gates of castle or fortress, which, however, had long since disappeared. It is true, all these things are to be seen hastily from the windows of the railway train; but it is only by following the windings and straight ways of the road as we did that its beauty can be worthily realized. Later in the afternoon, with a turn of the road, we came suddenly in view of Capraia, high up above, and far to the other side of the river,--so far, indeed, that all detail was lost, and we could only see the outline of its houses and towers and campanile washed into the whitish-blue sky. And all the time we were working just hard enough to feel that joy of mere living which comes with healthy out-of-door exercise, and, I think, with nothing else. Sometimes we rode seeing no one, and hearing no other sound than the low cries of a cricket in the hedge and the loud calls of an unseen ploughman in a neighboring field; then an old woman went by, complimenting us on going so fast without a horse; and then a baker's boy in white shirt and bare legs, carrying a lamb on his shoulders. But then, again, we met wagon after wagon, piled with boxes and baskets, poultry and vegetables, and sleeping men and women, and with lanterns swinging between the wheels,--for the next day would be Friday and market-day, and peasants were already on their way to Florence. There were pedlers, too, walking from village to village, selling straw fans and gorgeous handkerchiefs. Would not the _Signora_ have a handkerchief? one asked, showing me the gayest of his stock. For answer I pointed to the bags on the luggage-carrier and the knapsack on J.'s back. "Of course," he said; we already had enough to carry; would the _Signora_ forgive him for troubling her? And with a polite bow he went on his way. [Illustration: IN THE SUNLIGHT. _Page 18._] We came to several villages and towns,--some small, where pots and bowls, fresh from the potter's wheel, were set out to dry; others large, like Lastra, with heavy walls and gates and old archways, and steps leading up to crooked, steep streets, so narrow the sun never shines into them; or like Montelupo, where for a while we sat on the bridge without the farther gate, looking at the houses which climb up the hillside to the cypress-encircled monastery at the top. Women were washing in the stream below, and under the poplars on the bank a priest in black robes and broad-brimmed hat walked with a young lady. But whenever we stopped, children from far and near collected around us. There were little old-fashioned girls, with handkerchiefs tied over their heads in womanly fashion, who kept on plaiting straw, and small boys nursing big babies, their hands and mouths full of bread and grapes. If, however, in their youthful curiosity they pressed upon us too closely, polite men and women, who had also come to look, drove them back with terrible cries of _Via, ragazzi!_ ("Go away, children!") before which they retreated with the same speed with which they had advanced. [Illustration: LASTRA. _Page 20._] Just beyond Montelupo, when a tedious up-grade brought us to a broad plateau, a cart suddenly came out a little way in front of us from a side road. A man was driving, and on the seat behind, and facing us, were two nuns, who wore wide straw hats which flapped slowly up and down with the motion of the cart. When they saw us, the younger of the two covered her face with her hands, as if she thought us a device of the Devil. But the other, who looked the Lady Abbess, met the danger bravely, and sternly examined us. This close scrutiny reassured her. When we drew nearer she wished us good-evening, and then her companion turned and looked. We told them we were pilgrims bound for Rome. At this they took courage, and the spokeswoman begged for the babies they cared for in Florence. We gave her a few sous. She counted them quite greedily, and then--but not till then--benevolently blessed us. They were going at jog-trot pace, so that we soon left them behind. "_Buon viaggio_," the Abbess cried; and the silent sister smiled, showing all her pretty white teeth, for we now represented a temptation overcome. AT EMPOLI. "_The pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose window opened towards the sunrising; the name of the chamber was Peace; where he slept till break of day._" We put up that night at Empoli. The Albergo Maggiore was fair enough, and, like all large Italian inns, had a clean spacious stable in which to shelter the tricycle. The only drawback to our comfort was the misery at dinner of the black-eyed, blue-shirted waiter at our refusal to eat a dish of birds we had not ordered. He was very eager to dispose of them. He served them with every course, setting them on the table with a triumphant "_Ecco!_" as if he had prepared a delicious surprise. It was not until he brought our coffee that he despaired. Then he retired mournfully to the kitchen, where his loud talk with the _padrona_ made us fear their wrath would fall upon us or the tricycle. But later they gave us candles, and said good-night with such gracious smiles that we slept the sleep which knows neither care nor fear. The next morning their temper was as unclouded as the sky. They both watched the loading of the tricycle with smiling interest. He had seen velocipedes with two wheels, the waiter said, but never one with three. And that a _Signora_ should ride, the _padrona_ added, ah! that indeed was strange! Then she grew confidential. Only occasionally I caught her meaning, for my knowledge of Italian was small. She had had seven children, she said, and all were dead but one. And I, had I any? And where had I bought my dress? She liked it so much; and she took it in her hand and felt it. Should we stay long in Italy? and sometime we would come back to Empoli? Her son, a little fellow, was there too. He had been hanging about the machine when we came down to breakfast, and ever since. He stood speechless while J. was by, but when the latter went away for a few minutes,--less shy with me, I suppose, because he knew I could not understand him as well,--he asked what might such a velocipede cost? as much perhaps as a hundred francs? But J. coming back he was silent as before. They all followed us out to the street, the _padrona_ shaking hands with us both, and the boy standing by the tricycle to the very last. [Illustration: A PERUGINO LANDSCAPE. _Page 24._] THE ROAD TO FAIR AND SOFT SIENA. "_They went till they came into a certain country whose air naturally tended to make one drowsy._" "_Let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober._" It was good to be in the open country again, warming ourselves in the hot sunshine. The second morning of our ride was better than the first. We knew beforehand how beautiful the day would be, and how white and smooth was the road that lay before us. The white oxen behind the ploughs, and the mules in their gay trappings and shining harness seemed like old acquaintances. The pleasant good-morning given us by every peasant we met made us forget we were strangers in the land. A little way from Empoli we crossed the Ponte d'Elsa, and then after a sharp turn to the right we were on the road to "fair and soft Siena." It led on through vineyards and wide fields lying open to the sun, by sloping hillsides and narrow winding rivers, by villas and gardens where roses were blooming. In places they hung over the wall into the road. We asked a little boy to give us one,--for the _Signora_, J. added. But the child shook his head. How could he? The roses were not his, he said. Once we passed a wayside cross on which loving hands had laid a bunch of the fresh blossoms. Sometimes we heard from the far-away mountains the loud blasting of rocks, and then the soft bells of a monastery; sometimes even the cracking of the whip of a peasant behind us, driving an unwilling donkey. Then we would pass from the stillness of the country into the noise and clamor of small villages, to hear the wondering cries of the women to which we were already growing accustomed, the piercing yells of babies, who well secured in basket go-carts could not get to us quickly enough, and the sing-song repetition of older children saying their lesson in school, and whom we could see at their work through the low windows. About noon we rode into Certaldo,--Boccaccio's town. I know nothing that interferes so seriously with hero-worship as hunger. I confess that if some one had said, "You can go either to see Boccaccio's house or to lunch at a _trattoria_, but both these things you cannot do," our answer would have been an immediate order for lunch. We went at once to a _trattoria_ on the piazza where Boccaccio's statue stands. I doubt if that great man himself ever gathered such numbers about him as we did. Excited citizens, when the tricycle was put away, stood on the threshold and stared at us until the door was shut upon them. Then they pressed their faces against the windows and peered over piles of red and yellow pears; and every now and then one, bolder than the rest, stealthily thrust his head in and then scampered off before he could be captured. This gave a spice of novelty and excitement to our midday meal. We ordered a very simple lunch,--soup, bread and cheese, coffee and vermouth. But the _padrona_ had to send out for everything. Her sister, a young girl as fair as an Englishwoman, was her messenger. We were scarcely seated before she came back with coffee and a large bottle that she set before us. This, of course, was the vermouth, and we half filled our glasses and at once drank a little. The two women stared with a surprise we could not understand. The fair girl now disappeared on a second foraging expedition, and stayed away until we had finished our soup. "_Ecco_, vermouth!" she said on her return, putting another bottle in front of us. Then we knew the reason of their wonder. We had swallowed, like so much water, the not over-strong cognac intended only to flavor our coffee. Presently the _padrona_ entered into conversation with us. We were English, she supposed. No; Americans, we told her. At this there was great rejoicing. They had a brother in America. He lived in a large town called Buenos Ayres, where he kept a _trattoria_. Like theirs it was the _Trattoria_ Boccaccio. They were glad to see any one from the same country, whether from north or south. Was it not all America? The _padrona_ went upstairs to bring down his picture that we might see it. Her sister pointed to the purple woollen jersey she wore, and said with pride her brother had sent it to her. It too was American. They even called in their old mother, that she might see her son's fellow-countrymen. We spent an hour wandering through the old town, on top of the hill, in which Boccaccio really lived. The sun was shining right down into the streets, in which the gay kerchiefs of the women, the bunches of straw at their waists, and their cornstalk distaffs made bright bits of color. Though we left the tricycle at the _trattoria_, our coming made a stir in the little place. Our clothes were not like unto those of the natives, and J.'s knee-breeches and long black stockings made them wonder what manner of priest he might be. As we stood looking at the _loggia_ and tower and arched doorway of Boccaccio's house, the custodian, with a heavy bunch of keys, came to take us through it. But we declined his services. We cared more for the old streets and walls and palaces, which, though their greatness has gone, have not been changed since mediæval times, than for an interior, however fine, whose mediævalism dates from to-day. The old man turned rather sulkily. J., seeing there had been some mistake, explained we had not sent for him. Then his face cleared. The women had said we wanted him, else he would never have disturbed us; and he took off his hat, and this time went away with a friendly _à rivederle_. The Palazzo Communale, at the highest point of the town, is still covered with the arms and insignia of other years, of the Medici and Piccolomini, of the Orsini and Baglioni. Its vaulted doorway is still decorated with frescos of the Madonna, and saints and angels. But everywhere the plaster is falling away, and in the courtyard grass grows between the bricks of the pavement; and instead of pages and men-at-arms, we there saw only a little brown-faced ragged child climbing cat-like over the roofs, and a woman scolding him from below. We left the town by the frescoed gateway, through which we saw the near hills, gray, bare, and furrowed, the long lines of cypresses, the stretches of gray olives, the valley below with its vineyards, and the far mountains, purple and shadowy, the highest topped with many-towered San Gimignano. It is better not to be jocund with the fruitful grape in the middle of the day when one is tricycling. The cognac we had taken at lunch, weak as it was, and the vermouth made us sleepy and our feet heavy. I sympathized with the men who lay in sound slumbers in every cart we met. But their drowsiness forced us into wakefulness. Of the ride from Certaldo to Poggibonsi, I remember best the loud inarticulate cries of J. and his calls of "_Eccomi!_" as if he were lord of the land, to sleeping drivers. The Italian cry of the roads, rising to a high note and then suddenly falling and ending in a low prolonged one, which is indispensable to travellers, is not easy to learn. J.'s proficiency in it, however, made him pass for a native when he limited himself to howling. But often donkeys darted into ditches and oxen plunged across the road before the peasants behind them awoke. Like Sancho Panza they had a talent for sleeping. Once, after we had climbed a short but steep hill and had passed by several wagons in rapid succession, we stopped under the shade to rest. It was a pleasant place. We looked over the broad valley, where the vines were festooned, not as Virgil saw them, from elm to elm, but from mulberry to mulberry, and up to San Gimignano, beginning to take more definite shape on its mountain-top. A peasant in peaked hat and blue shirt, with trousers rolled up high above his bare knees, crossed the road and silently examined the tricycle. "You have a good horse," he then said; "it eats nothing." We asked him if they were at work in his vineyard. No, he answered; but would we like to look in the wine-press opposite? And then he took us through the dark windowless building, where on one side the grape-juice was fermenting in large butts, and on the other fresh grapes had been laid on sets of shelves to dry. He picked out two of the finest bunches and gave them to me. When I offered to pay him he refused. The _Signora_ must accept them, he said. As the road was now a dead level and lumpy into the bargain, we were glad when Poggibonsi was in sight. We drew up on a bridge where a man was standing, to ask him if he knew of a good inn. He recommended the Albergo dell' Aquila. "It is good," he went on, "and not too dear. This is not a town where they take one by the neck," and he clutched his own throat. So to the Albergo dell'Aquila we went. We had only to ride through the wide avenue of shady trees, past a row of houses, out of one of which a brown-robed monk came, to rush back at sight of us, past a washing-place surrounded by busy chattering women, and we were at the door of the inn. AT POGGIBONSI. "_Then she asked him whence he was come and whither he was going; and he told her. She asked him also how he got into the way; and he told her. And last she asked his name._" The Albergo dell' Aquila was even more comfortable than the Maggiore in Empoli. We dined in a room from whose walls King Humbert and his Queen smiled upon us, while opposite were two sensational and suggestive brigands in lonely mountain passes. The _padrona_ came up with the salad, and she and the waiter in a cheerful duet catechised us after the friendly Italian fashion, and then told us about the visit to their house of the American consul from Florence; of the hard times the cholera had brought with it for all Italy; of the bad roads to San Gimignano and the steep ones to Siena, along which peasants never travelled without bearing in mind the old saying, _All' ingiù tutti i santi ajutano; ma all' insú ci vuol Gesù_,--"Going down hill, call upon the saints; but going up, one needs Jesus." Before long J. joined in the talk, and the duet became a trio. Never had I been so impressed with his fluent Italian. Even the _padrona_ was not readier with her words than he with his. When I spoke to him about it afterwards, he said he supposed it was wonderful; he had not understood half of it himself. After dinner and in the twilight we walked through the lively crowded streets and into the church, where service was just over. A priest in white surplice left the altar, and another began to put the lights out when we entered. But in the unlit nave many of the faithful still knelt in prayer. The town grew quieter as night came on. But just as we were going to sleep some men went along the street below our window singing. One in a loud clear tenor sang the tune, the others the accompaniment like a part song, and the effect was that of a great guitar. Their song was a fitting good-night to a day to whose beauty there had been not a cloud. IN THE MOUNTAINS. "_He saw a most pleasant mountainous country, beautified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also with springs and fountains, very delectable to behold._" Though we left Poggibonsi in the beginning of the morning, a large crowd waited for us at the door of the inn. The _padrona_ said farewell with many good wishes; men and women we had never seen before called out pleasantly _à rivederle_, two _carabinieri_ watched us from the other side of the piazza, the railroad officials at the station cried "_Partenza! Partenza!_" and then we were off and out of the town. It would be _su_, _su_, _su_, all the way they told us at the inn, but for several miles we went fast enough, so that I felt sure the peasants we passed were still only calling on the saints. The ascent at first was very gradual, while the road was excellent. There were down as well as up grades, and for every steep climb we had a short coast. Now we came out on villas which but a little before had been above us, and now we reached the very summit of hills from which we looked forth upon mountain rising beyond mountain,--some treeless and ashen gray, others thickly wooded and glowing with golden greens and russets, and still others white and mist-like, and seeming to melt into the soft white clouds resting on their highest peaks. All along, the hedges were covered with clusters of red rose-berries and the orange berries of the pyracanthus. The grass by the roadside was gay with brilliant crimson pinks, yellow snapdragons and dandelions, and violet daisies. Once we came to a vineyard where the ripe fruit still hung in purple clusters from the vines, and where men and women, some on foot and others on ladders, were gathering and filling with them large buckets and baskets. At the far end of the field white oxen, their great heads decorated with red ribbons, stood in waiting. Boys with buckets slung on long poles were coming and going between the vines. In all the other vineyards we had passed the vintage was over, so we waited to watch the peasants as, laughing and singing, they worked away. But when they saw us, they too stopped and looked, and one man came down from his ladder and to the hedge to offer us a bunch of grapes. [Illustration: ON THE ARNO--NEAR EMPOLI. _Page 36._] The only town through which we rode was Staggia, where workmen were busy restoring the old tower and making it a greater ruin than it had ever been before. One town gate has gone, but from the battlements of the other grass and weeds still wave with the wind, while houses have been built into the broken walls. It is a degenerate little town, and its degeneracy, paradoxical as it may sound, is the result of its activity. For its inhabitants have not rested content like those of Lastra with the mediævalism that surrounds them. They have striven to make what is old new by painting their church and many of their houses in that scene-painting style which to-day seems to represent the art of the people in Italy. Often during our journey we saw specimens of this vile fashion,--houses with sham windows and shutters, churches with make-believe curtains and cords,--but nowhere was it so prominent as in Staggia. Beyond Monteriggione, whose towers alone showed above its high walls, the road began to wind upward on the mountain-side. It was such a long, steady pull that although the surface was perfect we gave up riding and walked. Our machine was heavily loaded, and not too easy to work over prolonged up-grades. Besides, we were not time nor record makers, nor perambulating advertisements, and we had the day before us. We were now closed in with woods. On either side were chestnuts and dwarf-oaks and bushes, their leaves all "yellow and black and pale and hectic red." And occasional openings showed near mountain-tops covered with downy gray grass and a low growth like heather, and here and there were groups of dark pines. For an hour at least we were alone with the sounds and silence of the mountains. The wandering wind whispered in the wood and black swine rooted in the fallen leaves, but of human life there was no sign. Then there came from afar a regular tap-tap, low at first, but growing louder and louder, until, as we drew closer to it, we knew it to be the steady hammering of stone-breakers. There were two men at work in this lonely pass, and as we stood talking to them two more came from under the chestnuts. These had guns on their shoulders, and wore high boots and the high-crowned conventional brigand hats. Ever since we left Florence we had seen at intervals in the fields and woods a notice with the words, "_� vietata la bandita_," which we interpreted as a warning against the bandits or convicts for whom our Florentine friends had prepared us. And now we seemed to have come face to face with two of these brigands. But it turned out that there was little of the bandit about them save their appearance. Their guns were for birds, and later on we learned that the alarming signs were merely to forbid the trespassing of these very gentlemen. [Illustration: A SLIGHT OBSTRUCTION.] A mile or two farther on, the road began to go down again. We were both glad to be on the machine after our walk. We could see to the bottom of the hill, and there was no one in sight. J. let go the brake. None but cyclers know the delight of a five-minutes coast after hours of up-hill toiling. They, however, will sympathize with our pleasure in the mountains near Siena. But when it was at its fullest, and the machine was going at the rate of about twenty miles an hour, and neither brake nor back-pedalling could bring it to a sudden halt, a man (or the foul fiend himself) drove a flock of sheep out from the woods a few feet in front of us. When we reached them only the first had crossed the road; of course, all the rest had to follow. They tried to go on right through the wheels, but only succeeded in getting under them, setting the machine to pitching like a ship in a heavy sea. But I held on fast; J. stood on the pedals and screwed the brake down; the little wheel scattered the sheep like the cow-catcher of an engine, and we brought up in the gutter. Before we stopped, J. began a moral lecture to the shepherd, and was showing him how, if the machine had gone over, the consequences would have been worse for us than for his flock. The lecture ended rather _im_morally with _accidente voi_, and _imbecile_, the deadliest of all Italian maledictions, punishable in places by imprisonment. The shepherd looked as if he was ready to curse us in return, but before he had time we were out of hearing, though we first made sure that no sheep were injured. We were none the worse for the accident, and the tricycle was unhurt, save for a deep dent in the dress guard. The rest of our way was divided between walking and riding. The woods with their solitude and wildness, but not the good road, came to an end. Once beyond them, we wheeled out by fields where men and women were at work, their oxen whiter than any we had yet seen, by contrast with the rich red of the upturned earth. In olive-gardens peasants were eating their midday meal; men with white aprons, women with enormous Sienese hats, and dogs and oxen were all resting sociably together. By the roadside others were making rope, the men twisting and forever walking backwards, a small boy always turning at the wheel. Scattered on the hill-tops and by the road were large red-brick farm-houses, instead of the white ones we had seen near Florence. [Illustration: NOONTIME. _Page 42._] At one, where there was a well on the other side of the wall, we asked for a glass of water. A man brought it to the gate, where he was joined by three or four others. They stared inquiringly at the tricycle, at the bags, and at us, while J. squeezed lemon-juice into the water. Then one opened his mouth very wide and pointed to his teeth: "The little sir," he asked, "is he a dentist?" It was noon when we first saw Siena, and we were then at the very walls. In the old days it was always said, "More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you!" But the heart of him who sat in office by the city gate was shut against us. When we rode past him he bade us descend. To our "_Perchè?_" he said it was the law. Oh the vanity of these Sienese! Through the streets of Florence and over the crowded Ponte Vecchio we had ridden undisturbed; but in this mountain town, which boasts of but two hacks, and where donkeys and oxen are the only beasts to be frightened, we were forced to get down. The dignity of the law-makers of the city must be respected. So we two weary pilgrims had to walk along the narrow streets, between the tall palaces, while tanners in red caps, and women in flowered, white-ribboned _festa_ hats, and priests and soldiers stared, and one man, with a long push-cart, kept close to us like an evil genius in a dream. He was now on one side, and now on the other, examining the wheels, asking endless questions, and always getting in the way. At all the street corners he hurried on before, and with loud shouts called the people to come and see. Then he was at our heels again, shrieking his loud, shrill trade-cry into our very ears. J. as a rule is not ill-tempered; but there is a limit to all things. The stupid sheep, the watchful guard, and now this plague of a flower-pedler brought his patience to an end, and on our way through the town he said much in good plain English which it was well the citizens could not understand. FAIR AND SOFT SIENA. "_For there where I go is enough and to spare._" "_Read it so, if you will, in my Book._" Even pilgrims of old on their way to Rome sometimes tarried in castle or village. We could not pass through Siena, discourteous though her first welcome had been, as we had through smaller and less fair towns. So for a day or two we put away our tricycle and the "cockle-shells and sandal shoon" of our pilgrimage. We went to a _pension_, one at which J. had stayed before, and which he liked. I admit it was better in many ways than the inns in which hitherto we had slept and eaten. There was carpet on the floor of our room, and in it easy-chairs and a lounge. There were elaborate breakfasts at one, and still more elaborate dinners at six, and there was always a great plenty,--as the Englishwoman who sat next me, and who I fear had not always fared so well, said when she urged me to eat and drink more of the fruit and wine set before me. "You can have all you want in this house," she finished with a sigh, as if her crown of sorrow was in remembering unhappier things. But we both thought regretfully of the dining-rooms with the bad prints on the walls, and the more modest dinners of our own ordering. I think too we had found more pleasure in the half-understood talk of _padroni_ and waiters than we did now in the elegant and learned conversation of our fellow-boarders, for they were all, it seemed, persons of learning and refinement. There was the retired English major-general who sat opposite and who had written a book, as he very soon let us know. He recognized us as Americans before we opened our mouths to speak, which fact he also let us know by his reminiscences, addressed not to us but to our neighbors. He had travelled in Spain with Mr. Fillmore, the ex-President, "the most courteous of gentlemen;" he said he well knew Mr. Marion Crawford, the talented novelist, and his uncle, "dear old Sam Ward;" he had counted among his best friends _Bay_ard Taylor, "as you remember I have said in my book." This same book which made the major so communicative appeared to have crushed the spirit out of his wife; she sat silent during dinner, fortifying herself at intervals with weak whiskey and water. Then there was the elderly English lady travelling abroad with her daughter "who has just taken up architecture;" she informed us, "she has always painted heads till now, but she is fascinated by her architectural work. Then I, you know, am _so_ fond of water-colors." And there was the Swedish lady, who could talk all languages, speaking to us in something supposed to be English, and who was as eager in her pursuit of food for the body as for the mind. I count the way in which she greedily swallowed the _vino santo_ in her glass, when our host passed round the table the second time with his precious bottle, one of the wonders of our visit to Siena. It was pathetic too to see her disappointment when he turned away, just before he reached her, his bottle empty. And there were still others who knew much about pictures and palaces, statues and studios, and no doubt we might greatly have profited thereby. But we liked it better upstairs, where we were alone and there was less culture. Our window overlooked a high terrace in which marigolds and many-colored chrysanthemums were blooming, the gardens of the Piccolomini Palace full of broad-leaved fig-trees and pale olives, and the wide waste of mountain and moorland stretching from the red city walls to the high, snow-capped Apennines on the horizon. All the morning the sun shone in our windows, and every hour and even oftener we heard the church bells, and the loud, clear bugle-calls from the barracks, once a monastery, whose mass of red and gray walls rose from the near olives. They say it snows in Siena in the winter-time, and that it is cold and bleak and dreary; but I shall always think of it as a place of flowers and sunshine and sweet sounds. But best of all were the hours when we wandered through the town, up and down dark alley-ways and flights of steps, under brick arches, along precipitate narrow streets where we had to press close to the houses, or retreat into an open door, to let the wide-horned oxen pass by with their load; now coming out at the very foot of La Mangia, on the broad, sunny piazza; now by the tanneries where little streams of brown water trickled down towards the washing-place at the foot of the hill, and where the walls were hung with dripping brown skins, probably just as they were when the little Catherine--her visions already beginning--and Stefano walked by them and towards home in the fading evening light, from a visit to the older and married sister Bonaventura. One hour we were with the past in the shadowy aisles of the Duomo, where Moses and Trismegistus, Solomon and Socrates, Sibyls and Angels looked up at us from the pavement, and rows of popes kept watch from above the tall black and white pillars, while in the choir beyond priests chanted their solemn psalms. Next we were with the present in the gay Lizza, under the acacias and yellow chestnuts, by flower-beds full of roses and scarlet sage, and walls now covered with brilliant Virginia creepers; and out on the fort above to see a golden sky, and the sun disappearing behind banks of purple, golden-edged, and red clouds, and pale, misty hills, and to look back across the hollow to the red town climbing up from low olive-gardens towards the Duomo on its hill-top, and tall La Mangia towering aloft from its own little hollow beyond. From every side came the voices of many people,--of soldiers in the barracks, of women and children under the trees, of ball-players in the old court below, and of applauding lookers-on lounging on the marble benches. [Illustration: BY THE RIVER. _Page 50._] The tall unfinished arch of the Duomo that rises above houses and churches, and indeed above everything but the lofty La Mangia and the Campanile, tells the story of greatness and power and wealth suddenly checked. But the deadly plague, which carried off so many citizens that not even enough were left to make their city beautiful as they meant it should be, could not take away the great beauty it already had, nor kill the joyousness of its people. There are no Spendthrift Clubs in Siena now, nor any gay Lanos like him Dante met in the _Inferno_. But there are still laughter and song loving Sienese who in their own simple fashion go through life gathering rosebuds while they may. It seemed to me a very pretty fashion when I saw them holiday-making on Sunday afternoon, peasants, priests, officers, townspeople, all out in their Sunday best, and when on the Via Cavour, near the _Loggia_, we met two wandering minstrels singing love-songs through the town. One played on a mandolin which hung from his neck by a wide red ribbon, and as he played he sang. His voice was loud and strong and very sweet, and like another Orpheus he drew after him all who heard his music. His companion sold copies of the song, printed on pink paper, gay as the words. He went bowing and smiling in and out of the crowd,--from the women whose broad hats waved as they kept time to the singing, to the men who had stuck feathers in their soft felts worn jauntily on one side; from demure little girls holding their nurses' hands, to swaggering soldiers. Then when the first singer rested he, in his turn, sang a verse. There was with them a small boy who every now and then broke in in a high treble, so that there was no pause in the singing. Wherever we went that afternoon, whether by the Duomo or out by the Porta Romana, on the Lizza or near San Domenico, we saw large written posters, announcing that at six in the evening there would be, at No. 17 Via Ricasoli, a great marionette performance of the _Ponte dei Sospiri_. Apparently this was to be the event of the day, and to it we determined to go. When a little before the appointed hour we came to the Via Ricasoli, we half expected to see a theatre ablaze with light. What we did find after much difficulty was a low doorway on the ground floor of a many-storied palace, and before it a woman by a table, lighting a very small lamp, to the evident satisfaction of half a dozen youngsters. Over the open doorway was a chintz curtain; behind it, darkness. This was not encouraging. But presently a woman with a child came to buy tickets. One of the groups of youthful admirers was then sent up and a second down the street, and after they had come back with mysterious bundles another lamp was produced, lit, and carried inside, and the first two of the audience followed. It was now five minutes of six, so we also bought our tickets, three _soldi_, or cents, for each, and the curtain was drawn for us. A low crypt-like room with vaulted ceiling; at one end two screens covered with white sheets; between them a stage somewhat larger than that of a street Punch, with a curtain representing a characteristic Sienese brick wall enclosing a fountain; several rows of rough wooden benches, and one of chairs,--this was what we saw by the dim light of one lamp. We sat on the last bench. The audience probably would be more entertaining than the play. But the humble shall be exalted. The woman on the front row bade us come up higher. The small boy who acted as usher told us we might have two of the chairs for two _soldi_ more. The ticket-seller even came in, and in soft pleading tones said that we might have any places we wanted; why then should we choose the worst? But we refused the exaltation. The audience now began to arrive in good earnest. Five ragged boys of the _gamin_ species, one of a neater order with his little sister by the hand, two soldiers, a lady with a blue feather in her bonnet, and her child and nurse, two young girls,--and the benches were almost filled. Our friend the ticket-seller became very active as business grew brisk. She was always running in and out, now giving this one a seat, now rearranging the reserved chairs, and now keeping the younger members of the audience in order. _Ragazzini_, she called the unruly boys who stood up on the benches and whistled and sang, so that I wondered what diminutive she gave the swells on the front row. This was amusing enough, but our dinner-hour was half-past six. J. looked at his watch; it was a quarter past. The ever-watchful keeper of the show saw him. "Ah, the _Signore_ must not be impatient. _Ecco!_ the music was about to begin." Begin it did indeed, to be continued with a persistency which made us fear it would never end. The musicians were two. A young man in velveteen coat and long yellow necktie played the clarionet, and another the cornet. They knew only one tune,--a waltz I think it was meant to be,--but that they gave without stint, playing it over and over again, even while the ticket-seller made them move from their chairs to a long, high box by the wall; and when a third arrived with a trombone they let him join in when and as it best pleased him. When we had heard at least the twenty-fifth repetition of the waltz, had looked at the scuffling of the _ragazzini_ until even that pleasure palled, had seen the soldiers smoke _sigaro Cavour_ after _sigaro Cavour_ so that the air grew heavy, and had watched the gradual growth of the audience until every place was filled, our patience was exhausted. Behold! we said to the woman with the gentle voice, it was now seven. The play was announced for six. Was this right? In a house not far off every one was eating, and two covers were laid for us. But here we were in this dark room in our hunger, waiting for marionettes whose wires for aught we knew were broken. She became penitent. The _signorini_ must forgive her. The wires were not broken, but he who pulled them had not arrived. There was yet time. Would we not go and dine and then come back? She would admit us on our return. And so we went and had our dinner, well seasoned with polite conversation. The ticket-agent was true to her word. When we reappeared at her door, the curtain was pulled at once. In the mean time the musicians had been suppressed, not only out of hearing but out of sight. The room was so crowded that many who had arrived during our absence were standing. Indeed, there must have been by this time fully five francs in the house. All were watching with entranced eyes the movements of four or five puppets. The scene represented an interior, which I suppose, was that of the prison to one side of the Bridge of Sighs. That it was intended for a cell also seemed evident, because the one portable piece of furniture on the stage was a low, flat couch of a shape which as every one who has been to the theatre, but never to prison, knows is peculiar to the latter. It was impossible to lose sight of it, as the _dramatis personæ_ made their exits and entrances over it. It was rather funny to see the villain of the piece after an outbreak of passion, or an elegant long-haired page in crimson clad, after a gentlemanly speech, suddenly vault over it. We could not discover what the play was about. Besides the two above-mentioned characters there was a puppet with a large red face and green coat and trousers who gave moral tone to the dialogue, and another with heavy black beard and turban-like head-dress, and much velvet and lace whom we took to be a person of rank. As they came in and out by turn, it was impossible to decide which was the prisoner. With the exception of the jumps over the couch, there was little action in the performance. Its only two noticeable features were--first, the fact that villain, page, moralist, and magnate spoke in exactly the same voice and with the same expression; and, secondly, that they had an irrepressible tendency to stand in the air rather than on the floor, as if they had borrowed Mr. Stockton's negative-gravity machine. The applause and laughter and rapt attention of the audience proved the play to be much to their liking. But for us inappreciative foreigners a little of it went a great way. As nothing but talk came of all the villany and moralizing and grandeur and prettiness,--which may have been a clever bit of realism of which the English drama is not yet capable,--and as there was no apparent reason why the dialogue should ever come to an end, we went away after the next act. The ticket-seller was surprised at our sudden change from eagerness to indifference, but not offended. She thanked us for our patronage and wished us a _felice notte_. With the darkness the gayety of the town had increased. In the large theatre a play was being performed by a company of amateurs. Having had tickets given us, we looked in for a few minutes, but found it as wordy as that of the puppets. In a neighboring piazza the proprietor of a large van, like those to be seen at country fairs at home, was exhibiting a man, arrayed in a suit of rubber, with a large brass helmet-like arrangement on his head, who, it seemed, could live at the bottom of the sea, along with Neptune and the Naiads, as comfortably as on dry shore. _Ecco!_ There was the tank within, where this marvel could be seen,--a human being living under the water and none the worse for it! Admission was four _soldi_, but _per militari e ragazzi_ ("for the military and children") it was but two! So it seems that the soldiers who abroad are to strike terror into the enemy, at home are ranked with the young of the land, since like them their name is legion! There were about a dozen in the crowd, and, all unconscious of the sarcasm, they hurried up the steps and into the show, while an old man ground out of a hand-organ the appropriate tune of "_O, que j'aime les militaires!_" But dramas and shows were not the only Sunday-evening amusements. The _caffès_ were crowded. Judging from the glimpses we had into little black, cavern-like wine-shops, another Saint Bernardino is needed to set makers of gaming-tools in Siena to the manufacture of holier articles. And more than once, as we walked homewards in the starlight, we heard the voices of the three minstrels singing of human passion in the streets where Catherine so often preached the rapture of divine love. If swans were now seen in visions by fond Sienese matrons, they would wing their way earthward and not heavenward, as in the days when Blessed Bernardo's mother dreamed dreams. AN ITALIAN BY-ROAD. "_And the name of the going up the side of the hill is called Difficulty._" "_Is not the place dangerous? Hath it not hindered many in their pilgrimage?_" We left Siena the morning after the marionette exhibition. The major, when he heard at breakfast that we were going, asked us point blank several questions about Boston publishers, his book probably being still uppermost in his thoughts. Later he sent his card to our room to know at what hour we started; he wished to see us off. The young lady of architectural proclivities shook hands and bade us good-by, saying she had often ridden a sociable with her cousin in England. After all, there was not much for the major to see. We could not ride through the streets, and so could not mount the machine for his benefit. But he was interested in watching us strap the bags to the luggage-carrier, and pleased because of this opportunity to entertain us with more American reminiscences. I am afraid his amusement in Siena was small. In return for the little we gave him he asked us to come and see him in Rome, where he would spend the winter, and added that if we expected to pass through Cortona he would like to write a card of introduction for us to a friend of his there, an Italian who had married an English lady. Cortona was a rough place, and we might be glad to have it. He had forgotten his friend's name, but he would run upstairs and his wife could tell him. In a minute he returned with the written card. We have had many letters of introduction, but never one as singular as the major-general's. As he knew our names even less well than that of his Cortona friends, he introduced us as "an American lady and gentleman riding a _bicycle_!" Only fancy! as the English say. Our parting with him was friendly. Then he stood with Luigi and Zara until we disappeared around the corner of the street. What a ride we had from Siena to Buonconvento! This time the road was all _giù_, _giù_, _giù_. It was one long coast almost all the way, and we made the most of it. We flew by milestone after milestone. Once we timed ourselves: we made a mile in four minutes. The country through which we rode was sad and desolate. On either side were low rolling hills, bare as the English moors, and of every shade of gray and brown and purple. Here rose a hill steeper than the others, with a black cross on its summit; and here, one crowned with a group of four grim cypresses. Down the hillsides were deep ruts and gullies, with only an occasional patch of green, where women were watching sheep and swine. Once we came to where three or four houses were gathered around a small church, but they were as desolate as the land. We heard voices in the distance, but there was no one in sight. When on a short stretch of level road we stopped to look at this strange gray land, the grayer because dark clouds covered the sky, we saw that above the barrenness the sun shone on Siena, and that all her houses, overtowered by the graceful La Mangia and the tall Duomo Campanile, glistened in the bright light. About five miles from the city the desolation was somewhat relieved, for there were hedges by the roadside, and beyond sloping olive-gardens and vineyards. Poplars grew by little streams and sometimes we rode under oaks. On the top of every gray hill, giving it color, was a farm-house, rows of brilliant pumpkins laid on its red walls, ears of yellow corn hung in its _loggia_, and gigantic haystacks standing close by. There were monasteries too, great square brick buildings with tall towers, and below spire-like cypresses. But between the farms and fertile fields were deep ravines and dry beds of streams. The road was lonely. Now and then flocks of birds flew down in front of the tricycle, or large white geese came out from under the hedge and hissed at us. For a few minutes a man driving a donkey-cart made the way not a little lively. He did not see us until we wheeled by him. Then he jumped as if he had been shot. "_Dio!_" he exclaimed, "but you frightened me!" He laughed, however, and whipping up his donkey rattled after us as if eager for a race, talking and shouting all the while until we were out of hearing. One or two peasants passed in straw chariot-shaped wagons, and once from a farm-house a woman in red blouse and yellow apron, with a basket on her head and a dog at her heels, came towards us. It was in this same farm-house we met a Didymus. We stopped, as we had a way of doing when anything pleased us, and he came out to have a better look at the _tramway_. And how far did we expect to go to-day? he asked. To Monte Oliveto, we told him, for, like pious pilgrims, we thought to make a day's retreat with the monks there. "To Monte Oliveto! and in a day, and on that machine!" and he laughed us to scorn. "In a week, the _Signore_ had better say." Later a stone-breaker's belief in us made some amends for the farmer's contempt. We were riding then. "_Addio!_" he cried, even before we reached him. I shall always remember a little village through which we rode that morning, because it was there we saw the first large stone-pine growing by the roadside, which showed we were getting farther south, and because of the friendliness of a peasant. It was a poor place. The people were ragged and squalid and sickly, as if the gloom of the hills had fallen upon them. We asked at a shop for a lemon, but there was not one to be had. "Wait," cried a woman standing close by, and she disappeared. She returned almost immediately with a lemon on whose stem there were still fresh green leaves. "_Ecco!_" she said, "it is from my garden." "How much?" asked J., as she handed it to him. "Oh, nothing, sir," and she put her hands behind her back. We made her take a few coppers, for the children we told her. As far as it lay in her power I think she was as courteous as those men in a certain Italian town who, in days long past, fought together for the stranger who came within their gates, so eager were they all, not to cheat him, as is the way with modern landlords, but to lodge him at their own expense, so that there were no inns in that town. Before we reached Buonconvento the sun came out and the clouds rolled away. It had rained here earlier in the morning. The roads were sticky and the machine ran heavily, and trees and hedges were wet with sparkling raindrops. There is an imposing entrance to the little town, a pointed bridge over a narrow stream, with a Madonna and Child in marble relief at the highest point, an avenue of tall poplars with marble benches set between, and then the heavy brick walls blackened with age, and the gateway, its high Gothic arch decorated with the old Sienese wolf and a more recent crop of weeds. We rode from one end to the other,--a two minutes' ride,--without finding a _trattoria_. At length we appealed to the crowd. Where was the _trattoria_? No one understood; and yet that very morning J. had been asked if he were not a Florentine! Perhaps _monsieur_ speaks French? and a little Frenchman in seedy clothes jauntily worn, and with an indescribable swagger, came forward, hat in hand. The effect of his coming was magical. For unknown reasons, when it was found that J. could speak French after a fashion, his Italian was all-sufficient. The inn was here; we were directly in front of it, and the _padrone_, who had been at our elbows all the time, led the way into it. The Frenchman gallantly saw us through the crowd to the room where we were to dine. It was the best _trattoria_ in the place, but poor enough, he said. Such bread and cheese! horrible! and he shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to heaven in testimony thereof. He did not live in Buonconvento, not he. He came from Paris. Then he complimented J. on his Italian, to make up in some measure for the failure of the people to appreciate it, and with a bow that might have won him favor at court, and a "I salute you, _monsieur_ and _madame_," he politely left us before our dinner was served. He was a strolling actor, the _padrone_ said; he and his troupe would give a performance in the evening. [Illustration: CHIUSURE. _Page 68._] The fact that we were going to Monte Oliveto annoyed the _padrone_. The monastery is a too successful rival to his inn. Few travellers, except those who are on their way to Monte Oliveto, pass through his town, and few who can help it stay there over night. His list of the evils we should have to endure was the sauce with which he served our beefsteak and potatoes. We must leave the post road for one that was stony and steep. Our velocipede could not be worked over it. It would take hours to reach the monastery, and we had better not be out after dark, for there were dangers untold by the way. But when he had said the worst he became cheerful, and even seemed pleased when we admired his kitchen, where brass and copper pots and pans hung on the walls, and where in one corner was a large fireplace with comfortable seats above and a pigeon-house underneath. But when we complimented him on the walls of his town, Bah! he exclaimed, of what use were they? They were half destroyed. They would be no defence in war-times. He was right. The walls, strong by the gate, have in parts entirely disappeared, and in others, houses and stables have been made of them. It is on the open space by these houses that the men have their playground. They were all there when we arrived, and still there when we left. Young men, others old enough to be their fathers, and boys were, each in turn, holding up balls to their noses, and then, with a long slide and backward twist of the arm, rolling them along the ground, which is the way Italians play bowls. Before the afternoon was over we cursed in our hearts the Tuscan politeness we had heretofore praised. About a mile from Buonconvento the road to Monte Oliveto divided. We turned to the right. But two peasants with ox-teams called out from below that we must not go that way. It was all bad. But to the left it was good, and _piano_, ascending but gently, and we had much better take it. In an evil moment we did. That it ill behooves a wise man to seek counsel in every word spoken to him, we found to our cost. In the first place the ascent was not gentle,--we had not then learned that an Italian calls every hill that is not as straight up and down as the side of a house, _piano_,--and in the second place the road was not good, but vilely bad. Unfortunately, for half a mile or perhaps more it was fair enough. But when we had gone just so far that we were unwilling to turn back we discovered our mistake. The road we had not taken was that built by the monks hundreds of years ago; we had chosen the new and not yet finished by-way. It was heavy with dust and dirt, and full of ruts and loose stones. Over it we could not ride or even push the tricycle without difficulty. It was in keeping, however, with the abomination of desolation lying to each side. For we were now in a veritable wilderness, a land of deserts and of pits, where few men dwell. All around us were naked, colorless chalk-hills, abrupt precipices and ravines. A few chestnut-trees, a rose-bush covered with red berries growing from the gray earth, were the only green things we passed for miles. It was weary and slow work, and the sun was low on the hill-tops before we came to the point where the two roads met. At some distance above us we saw a large red building surrounded by cypresses, and we knew this must be Monte Oliveto Maggiore. So we took heart again. But our trouble was not over. The road was better only by comparison, and it was still impossible to ride, and hard work to push or pull the tricycle. It was built of bricks, which lay as if they had been carelessly shot out of a cart and left where and how they fell. A little farther on it divided again. A woman was walking towards us, and J. asked her which was the road to the convent (_il convento_). "You must go back," she said; "it lies miles below,--Buonconvento." "These peasants are fools," said J. in angry English to her very face; but she, all unconscious, smiled upon us. We went to the left, which fortunately was just what we ought to have done. But it was provoking that instead of getting nearer to the monastery, we seemed to be going farther from it. With one turn of the road it appeared to be above, and with the next below us. Now it was on one side and now on the other, until I began to feel as if we were the answer to the riddle I had so often been asked in my childhood, the mysterious "What is it that goes round and round the house and never gets in?" Soon the sun set behind the hills, and the sky grew soft and golden. We met several peasants bearing large bundles of twigs on their heads. There were one or two shrines, a chapel, and a farm-house in front of which a priest stood talking to a woman. But on we went without resting, J. pushing the machine and I walking behind, womanlike shirking my share of the work. The road grew worse until it became nothing but a mass of ruts and gullies washed out by the rain, and led to a hill from which even Christian would have turned and fled. But we struggled up, reaching the top to see the gate of the monastery some sixty or seventy feet below. Finally we came to the great brick gateway which in the dull light--for by this time the color had faded from the sky--rose before us a heavy black pile, beyond whose archway we saw only shadow and mystery. As we walked under it our voices, when we spoke, sounded unnatural and hollow. On the other side the road wound through a gloomy grove of cypresses, growing so close together that they hedged us about with impenetrable darkness. Once several silent figures, moving noiselessly, passed by. Had we, by mischance, wandered into a Valley of the Shadow of Death? The cypress grove, after several windings, brought us face to face with the building at which we had already so often looked from the distance. Even in the semi-darkness we could see the outline distinctly enough to know we were standing in front of the church, and that the detached building a little to our left was a barn or stable. But not a light shone in a window, not a doorway was in sight. I recalled my convent experience of bygone years, and remembered that after eight o'clock in the evening no one was admitted within its walls. Was there a rule like this at Monte Oliveto, and was six the hour when its bolts and bars were fastened against the stranger? As we hesitated where to go or what to do next, three or four workmen came from the stable. J. spoke to them, and one offered to show him the entrance to the monastery while I waited by the tricycle. It was strange to stand in the late evening and in the wilderness alone, with men whose speech I barely understood and whose faces I could not see. For fully five minutes I waited thus while they talked together in low voices. But at last I heard one cry, _Ecco!_ here was the _padrone_; and they all took off their hats. A dog ran up and examined me, and then a man, who I could just make out in the gloom, wore a cassock and the broad-brimmed priestly hat, joined the group. "_Buona sera_," he said to me. Could I speak to him in French, I asked. Yes, he assented, what was it I wanted? When I told him we wished to stay in the monastery, he said he had not expected us. We had not written. "But," I exclaimed, "we thought strangers were allowed to stay here." "Yes," he answered; "there is a _pension_ in the monastery, but it is for artists." "And my husband is an artist," I interrupted eagerly, for from his manner I feared he would refuse us admission. After all, what did he know about us except that, vagrant-like, we were wandering in the mountains at a most unseasonable hour? Indeed, when later I reflected on the situation, I realized that we must have seemed suspicious characters. At this critical moment J. returned. His guide had led him to a small side-door beyond the church. There he rang and rang again. The bell was loud and clear, and roused many echoes within, but nothing else. The guide, perplexed, then led him back. I told him with whom I was speaking, and he continued the conversation with the _padrone_. Had they talked in Italian only, or in French, they might have understood each other; but instead they used a strange mixture of the two, to their mutual bewilderment. If this kept on much longer we should undoubtedly spend the night in the open air. In despair I broke in in French: "But, my father, cannot we stay this one night?" "Certainly," he said, fortunately dropping all Italian. "That is what I was explaining to _monsieur_. You can stay, but of course we have nothing prepared. We will do our best." If he had said he would do his worst, provided we were rid of the tricycle for the night, and were ourselves taken indoors where we might sit down, we should have been thankful. The bags were unstrapped and given into the care of one of the men, a place was made for the machine in the stable, and then we followed the _padrone_ or _Abate_--for this was his real title--to the door where J. had rung in vain, and which he opened with his key. Within it was so dark that we groped our way through a hall and a small cloister. Then we came to a flight of steps, where at the bidding of the _Abate_, as if to reassure us that we were not being led to secret cells or torture-chambers, the man carrying our bags struck a solitary match. By this feeble light we walked up the broad stone stairs and through many passage-ways, not a sound breaking the stillness but our foot-falls and their loud echoes, to a door where the _Abate_ left us, and at the same time the match burnt out. But the next minute he reappeared with a lighted taper, and at the end of the hall opened another door, lit a lamp on a table within, and showed us four rooms, which he said were at our disposal. The beds were not made, but they would be attended to immediately. He had now to say Office, but at nine supper would be served. Here was a very comfortable solution to the mystery into which the massive gateway seemed to lead. The Valley of the Shadow of Death had turned out to be a Delectable Land! It was still more comfortable later, when, his Office said, the _Abate_ came back and sat and talked with us. Now he could examine us by a better light I think he concluded we were not dangerous characters, probably only harmless lunatics. However that may be, after half an hour, when the supper-bell rang and we started off for the refectory, again by the light of his taper, we were the best of friends. The long corridor, thus dimly seen, seemed interminable. We went down one stairway to find the door locked against us, then up and down another. Here the light went out, leaving us in a darkness like unto that of Egypt. The _Abate_ laughed as if it were the best of jokes. He took J.'s hand and J. took mine, and thus like three children we went laughing down the stairway and along more passages, and at last into a long refectory, at the farther end of which was a lamp, while a door to one side of that by which we entered opened, and a second monk in white robes, holding a lighted taper, came in, and when he saw us made a low bow. As there were no other visitors, we were to eat with him and his brother monk, the _Abate_ said; and then he gave me the head of the table, asking me if I were willing to be the Lady Abbess. If we had been two prodigals he could not have been kinder than he was now he had given us shelter. If we had been starving like the hero of the parable, he could not have been more anxious to set before us a feast of plenty. Nor would any fatted calf have been more to our taste than the substantial supper prepared for us. We must eat, he said; we needed it. He had seen us coming up the hill as he talked with a peasant by the roadside; but _monsieur_ was push-pushing the velocipede and looking at nothing else, and _madame_ was panting and swinging her arms, staring straight in front of her, and before he had time, we had passed. We must drink too; the wine was good for us. We must not mix water with it; it was Christian, why then should it be baptized? The white-robed brother spoke little, but he never allowed J.'s plate to remain empty. When the meat was brought in we were joined by Pirro, a good-sized dog with no tail to speak of, and Lupo, an unusually large cat, and his numerous family, who all had to be fed at intervals. But even while Pirro jumped nimbly into the air after pieces of bread thrown to him, and Lupo scratched, and his progeny made mournful appeals to be remembered, and we talked, I looked every now and then down the long narrow table to where it was lost in deep shadow. The cloth was laid its entire length, as if in readiness for the banished brothers whenever they might return. I should not have been surprised then to see the door open to admit a procession of white-robed monks, all with tapers in their hands. The _Abate_ must have realized that to a stranger there was something uncanny in his dark, silent, deserted monastery, and his last word as he bade us good-night was, that we were to fear nothing, and sleep in peace. _To_ _THE ABATE DI NEGRO,_ _Of Monte Oliveto Maggiore,_ _We would say a Word of Thanks for the Golden Days passed in his House Beautiful, and for The Great Kindnesses shown us in our farther Journeying._ MONTE OLIVETO. "_But, oh, what a favor is this to me, that yet I am admitted entrance here!_" "_But they are to me golden hours in which such things happen to me._" The days we spent at Monte Oliveto were golden days. For we not only slept there one, but several nights, and the _Abate_ declared we could remain as long as we might care to. Nothing could be more melancholy and wild than the country into which we had come. It is the most desolate part of all that strange desolation which lies to the southeast of Siena. The mountain on which the monastery is built is surrounded on every side but one by deep, abrupt ravines. Behind it rise higher mountains, bare and bleak and gray, like gigantic ash-piles, and on the very highest peak is the wretched little village of Chiusure. The other hills around are lower, and from the road by the convent gateway one can see Siena, pale and blue on the horizon, and southward, over the barren hill-tops, Monte Amiata. But Monte Oliveto, with its gardens and orchards and vineyards, is a green place in the midst of the barrenness. The mountain-sides are terraced, and olives and vines grow almost to the bottom of the ravine. It was said in old times that the Bishop of Arezzo was commanded in a vision to call the monastery after the Mount in Jerusalem. Now-a-days sceptics say the trees on the terraces explain the name, forgetting that in its beginning this hill was as bare as the others. Why cannot it be believed, for the legend's sake, that the olives were planted afterwards because of the name? The first morning, the _Abate_ took us to see the frescos representing the life of Saint Benedict, painted on the walls of the large cloister. I will be honest, and confess that they disappointed us. I doubt whether the artists were very proud of them. Luca Signorelli, before he had finished the first side of the cloister, gave up the work, as it is not likely he would have done had he cared much for it. Sodoma, when he took his place, was at first so careless that the then abbot took him to task, but the artist calmly told him more could not be expected for the price that was paid him. Certainly with neither were these frescos a labor of love, and this one feels at once. One wonders if this could have been the same Sodoma who painted the Saint Sebastian in Florence, and yet there is more charm in his pictures than in those of Signorelli. But what we cared for most were his portraits of himself, with heavy hair hanging about his face, and wearing the cloak the Milanese gentleman, turned monk, had given him, and of his wife and child; and the pictures of the raven and the other pets he brought with him to the monastery, to the wonder of the good monks. It is a pity every one cannot look at these frescos with such loving, reverential eyes as the _Abate_. He had shown them probably to hundreds of visitors; he had seen them almost every day for the many years he had been at Monte Oliveto; but his pleasure in them was as fresh as if it dated but from yesterday. He told the story of each in turn,--of how in this one the great Saint Benedict had set the devil to flight, and how in that he had by a miracle recalled an erring brother; and once he pointed to a palm-tree in a background. Sodoma, he said, had seen and admired a palm in the garden of the monastery, and so, after his realistic fashion, had painted it in just as he had his pets. That very tree was in the garden still; he would show it to us if we liked. [Illustration: MONTE OLIVETO. _Page 84._] There never was such another garden! It is close to the large brick house or palace by the gateway, where in old times lay visitors were lodged, and beyond which no woman was ever allowed to pass. It is small, but in it the monks only raised the rarest trees and plants. Here grew the precious herbs out of which in the pharmacy, whose windows overlook the quiet green enclosure, they prepared the healing draughts for which people came from far and near. The pharmacy is closed now. There is dust in the corners and on the quaint old chairs. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling. But brass scales are still on the heavy wooden counter, and pestle and mortar behind it, and glass retorts of strange shapes in the corners and above the doors. Majolica jars all marked with the three mountains, the cross, and the olive-branch,--the _stemma_ of the monastic order,--are ranged on the brown shelves, many of the large ones carefully sealed, while from the smaller come forth strange odors of myrrh and incense and rare ointments. As in the refectory, everything here is in order for the monks when they return. But they will find more change in the garden below. The rare plants, the ebony and the hyssop, the cactuses and the palm (which made us think less of Sodoma's frescos than we had before), the pomegranates and the artichokes, are all there. But weeds grow in the paths, and by the old gray well, and in among the herbs; roses have run riot in the centre of the garden and turned it into a wild tangled growth. To us it seemed the loveliest spot in Monte Oliveto. The hours spent in it were like a beautiful idyl of Theocritus or Shelley. The sun shone and the air was filled with sweet spicy scents. To one side was the gray mountain, to the other dense cypresses, and above a blue, cloudless sky. The roses were still in bloom, and as we lingered there, the _Abate_ went from bush to bush and picked for me a large bunch of fragrant buds. I hope if the monks ever do come back that, while they throw open the windows of the pharmacy and let the light in again upon the majolica and the dark woodwork, they will leave the gates of the garden locked. It is fairer in its confusion than it ever could be with weeded paths and well-clipped bushes. The _Abate_ took us everywhere,--through the empty guest-chambers of the palace to the tower, now a home for pigeons, from the top of which one has a wide view of the country, which with its squares of olives and its gray hills and fields marked by deep furrows, as if by boundary lines, looks like a large map or geological chart,--through the monastery, with its three hundred rooms with now but three monks to occupy them; its cloisters, for there are two besides the large frescoed one; its _loggie_, where geraniums and other green plants were growing; its great refectory, beyond the door of which fowl or flesh meat never passed, and which is now used no longer; and its library, at the very top of the house, where rows of white vellum volumes are ready for the students who so seldom come. Then he led us to the church, where there are more altars than monks to pray before them, and a wonderful choir with inlaid stalls; and in and out of little chapels, one of which contains the grotto where blessed Bernardo Tolomei, the founder of the order, lived for many years after he came to the wilderness, while another was the first church used by the brotherhood, and the Virgin with angels playing to her on harps and mandolins, above the altar, was painted long before Signorelli and Sodoma began their work. Then there was the lemon-grove to be seen, where the _Abate_ filled our pockets with the ripe fruit which we were to keep, he said, in case we might be thirsty on the road some day when there was no wine or water near by to drink. And after that there was still to be visited the wine-press, with its deep shadows and dark corners and long subterranean passage to the room below, where men were filling small casks from large butts, and then carrying them off on their shoulders to be weighed and stored above. We had to taste the wine, and I think it, together with the sunshine and the flowers, must have gone to our heads that morning and stayed there so long as we were at Monte Oliveto, for everything about us seemed to belong less to the actual world than to a dreamland full of wonder and beauty, and sometimes of pathos. It was the same in the afternoon, when the _Abate_ had gone about his work,--for he is a busy man, like the centurion with many under him,--and J. and I wandered alone over the gray hills up to Chiusure. Life with its hardships must be real enough to the people of this little village, in which seeds of pestilence sown hundreds of years ago still bear the bitter fruit of wretchedness. It seems as if the brick walls which could not keep out the plague have ever since successfully barred the way to all prosperity, for generation after generation is born within them but to live and die in poverty. We saw melancholy figures there,--old hags of women, with thin white hair and bent almost double under heavy bundles of wood, toiling up steep stony streets with bare feet, and others crouching in the gloom opposite open doorways. Even the little priest, who, in his knee-breeches and long frock-coat and braided smoking-cap with tassels dangling in his eyes, was humorous enough to look at, was pathetic in his way. For after he had shown us his church with its decorations, poor as the people who worship in it, and offered us a glass of wine in his own parlor, he spread on the table before us some broken pieces of glass easily put together, on which a picture was painted. Was it of value? he asked, so eagerly that he told without further words the story of wants but ill supplied. He was willing to sell it, but he did not know what it was worth. Could we tell him? No, we could not, we said, for we really knew nothing about it, though we feared the hopes he had set upon it would never be realized. And then sadly he gathered together the pieces and put them away again in their newspaper wrapping. It was more cheerful outside the gateway. There, in the late afternoon, the gray olives by the way were more clearly defined against the sky, and the gray ravines below more indistinct. Beyond, the hills, now all purple and soft, rolled away to the horizon and to the brilliant red sky above. One or two lights were lit in distant farm-houses, and once we heard a far-off bell. Before us the white road led by one green hill on whose top was a circle of cypresses, and in its centre a black cross, as in so many old pictures. But the strangest part of this dream-life was the friendship that sprung up between us and the monks. I should not have been more surprised if Saint Benedict and Blessed Bernardo had come back to earth to make friends with us. It was not only that the _Abate_ acted as our guide through the monastery,--this he does for every visitor who comes, since the Government took possession of it and turned it into a public art-gallery and _pension_ for artists,--but he came to our room early in the morning to drink his coffee with us, and in the evening, after he had said his Office, for a little talk. And when we had finished our supper we sat together long over our wine, talking now in French, now in English, now in Italian, and occasionally understanding each other. Like all good fellows, we too had our jokes. But the _Abate's_ favorite was to tell how he had seen us coming up the mountain, _monsieur_ push-pushing the velocipede and _madame_ puff-puffing behind him. Even Dom Giuseppe, the other monk,--the third was away,--relaxed from the dignity with which he had first met us, and took part in the talk and the laughter. Unreal as seemed these late suppers in the long refectory in the dim light, with Pirro forever jumping after choice morsels, while Lupo and his family growled with rage and envy from under the table, we strayed even farther into Wonderland the second day after our arrival, when both monks went out for a ride on the tricycle along the mulberry walk and by Blessed Bernardo's grotto. The last day of our stay a number of visitors arrived,--a priest from Perugia, two nuns, and two English ladies. They were not expected, and dinner had to be prepared for them. The _Abate_ is never pleased when guests come without giving him warning. When we met him in the refectory a little after twelve, we could see his patience had been tried. We must pardon him for being late, he said, but he had had to find something to eat for all these people. Were they to dine with us? we asked. No, indeed, was his answer; they were not members of the community. This confirmed our doubts as to whether we might not be monks without knowing it; for the first morning the _Abate_ had given us a key of the great front door by which we could let ourselves in at all hours, without any ringing of bells or calling of porters; so that we felt as if we belonged to the convent. These visitors were the thorns in his present life, the _Abate_ continued, and we were his roses. Then he brought out a bottle of the _vino santo_ which he makes himself and prizes so highly that he never sells it as he does the other wines, and a plate of grapes for which he had sent a great distance. And when dinner was over he bade the servant put all that was left of grapes and wine away. They were for the community, and not for common folk. He introduced us to the Perugian priest, who might possibly, he said, be of use to us in Perugia. The latter almost embraced J. in his protestations of good-will, and came running back several times to press his hand, and say in a French of his own invention that we must call often during our stay in his city. THROUGH THE WILDERNESS TO A GARDEN. "_Now he bethought himself of setting forward._" "_Here, also, they had the city itself in view, and they thought they heard all the bells therein to ring to welcome them thereto._" We left the monastery the next morning. It took courage on our part; but we knew it was best to go quickly. Every day we fell more under the dreamy influence of the place and became less willing for action. We must hasten from Monte Oliveto for the very reason which led Blessed Bernardo to it,--to flee temptation. The _Abate_ was in our room by half-past seven. Dom Giuseppe was in the church saying Mass, but had sent his farewells. He himself had not yet said Mass, so he could not drink his coffee with us, but he sat by while we had ours. We should not reach San Quirico till noon, he feared, and we must have something in our pockets to eat in the mean time; and he went to his room and came back with two cakes. He brought besides two letters he had written introducing us to monks at San Pietro in Perugia. Then he came downstairs and out to the stable, though he was fasting, and the morning was wet and cloudy and cold. We did not get on the tricycle at once. We remembered the road too well. The _Abate_ walked by our side, now and then patting J. on the back and calling him affectionately "Giuseppe, Giuseppe;" and he kept with us until, at some little distance from the gateway, we mounted the machine. After he had said good-by, he stood quietly watching us. Then there came a turn in the road which hid him from us, and when we saw him again he was walking on the footpath below the cypresses, with two little boys who had come out with him. He was on his way to take Dom Giuseppe's place at the altar. And then we went on sadly, for we knew we should not come to another resting-place where there was such perfect relief for pilgrims that are weary and faint in the way. As the road was difficult going up, so was it dangerous coming down, and again we had to walk. To add to our discomfort, before long it began to rain, and it was so cold we had to blow on our fingers to keep them warm. During the night it had snowed on the far mountain-ranges. Beyond Buonconvento, when we returned to the post-road we went fast enough; but only for a while. There were more mountains to cross, up which J. could not go very fast because of the burden, or knapsack, that was on his back. Out of very shame I took my share in pushing and pulling the tricycle. Once or twice we had long coasts; but in places the road was sandy, and in descending wound as often as a small St. Gothard railway. Coasting would have been too great a risk, especially as I never could back-pedal going down hill, though on upgrades J. but too often complained that, like Dante on the hillside, my firm foot ever was the lower. [Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS. _Page 96._] The way still lay between and over hills of chalk, and we rode for miles through monotonous barrenness. It rained at intervals, but at times the sun almost broke through the clouds that followed it in long gray sweeps from the white masses on the snow-capped mountains bounding the horizon. To our right, Monte Amiata, bare and rugged, and with white top, was always in sight; and once above it the clouds rolled away leaving a broad stretch of greenish blue sky. There were many crosses by the wayside, and they were different from any we had yet seen. On each, over spear and sponge and crown of thorns, was a black cock, rudely carved to look as if it crowed. Just before we came to San Quirico, and towards noon, we saw at the foot of one of these crosses an old weary-looking peasant, with head bowed as if he listened for the Angelus. We were prepossessed against San Quirico before we reached it. Olives with vines hanging from them in defiance of Virgil, brown fields, and red and yellow trees, could not reconcile us to the long climb up the mountain. It was worth our trouble, however, if only to see the cathedral. We left the tricycle at the _trattoria_, and at our leisure looked at the portal and its pillars, with quaintly carved capitals of animals and birds, and at those others, joined together with a Celtic-like twist and resting on leopards, and then at the two sea-monsters above. And while we wondered at the grotesque gargoyles on the walls, and the two figures for columns, and the lions on the south doorway, two _carabinieri_ from a neighboring window examined us as if we were equal curiosities. This fine building is an incongruity in San Quirico, which--for our first impressions proved right--is at best but a poor place. We were cheated in it as we had never been before. When we went back to the _trattoria_ four men were eating their dinner inside the fireplace in the kitchen. But we were ushered into what I suppose was the best room. It was dining-room and bed-chamber combined. On one side was a long table, on the other the bed. The dressing-table served as buffet, and the _padrona_ brought from its drawers the cheese and apples for our dessert. In the garden below--for we were in the second story--weeds like corn grew so tall that they shaded the window. What happened in that room, and the difference that arose between the _padrona_ and ourselves, are facts too unpleasant to recall. But I am sure the next foreigners who went to San Quirico heard woful tales of the evil doings of the two _Inglesi_ who came on a velocipede. After San Quirico there was the same barrenness, and only indifferent roads over rolling country. Until within half a mile of Pienza, where the hedges began again, not a tree grew by the roadside, and the only signs of vegetation were the reeds in the little dark pools dotting the gray fields. It was still bitterly cold, and my fingers tingled on the handles. Once we passed a farm-house where a solitary woman watched a herd of black swine, and once we met the diligence; that was all. We rode into Pienza, though our way lay to one side of it. But we were curious to see the cathedrals and palaces Pius II. built there in the vain hope of turning his native village into an important town. Of all the follies of proud popes, I think this was the greatest. As well might he have hoped by his single effort to cover the _creta_, or chalk, with roses, as to raise a prosperous city in its midst. We saw the great brown buildings marked with the fine crescents of the Piccolomini and the papal tiara and keys, as out of place in Pienza as the cathedral seemed in San Quirico; we looked closer at the old stone well and its beautiful wrought-iron work. J. made a sketch of a fine courtyard, and then we were on the road again. Near Montepulciano we came to a thickly wooded country, riding for several miles between chestnuts and oaks. There were open places, too, from which we saw far below the fair Val di Chiana, and in the distance Lake Thrasymene, pale and silvery, and close by olive-gardens, through whose gray branches we looked at the purple mountains and their snowy summits. Above were broad spaces of bright sky, for the dark clouds were rolling away beyond the lake, and those that floated around Monte Amiata were now glistening and white. We had left the wilderness for a garden. All the bells rang out as if in welcome when, after working up the long road, so winding that at times the city was completely hidden, we wheeled into the now dark and cold streets of Montepulciano. WE ARE DETAINED IN MONTEPULCIANO. "_They were therefore here in evil case, and were far from friends and acquaintances._" "_Why, truly, I do not know what had become of me there, had not Evangelist happily met me._" It was in this high hill town that one of the pilgrims fell by the way. For two days J. was too ill to ride, and we feared our pilgrimage had come to an end. We stayed at the Albergo Marzocco. It was on the fifth floor of an old palace, and the entrance was through the kitchen. The _padrone_ and his family were very sociable. Almost immediately his wife wanted to know the trade of the _Signore_. "Ah! an artist. _Ecco me!_ I am a washerwoman!" She was also cook. From the dining-room we could watch her as she prepared our meals. When she kept us waiting too long we had only to step into the kitchen and stand over her until the dish we had ordered was ready. We could look too into an adjacent room where during our stay one daughter of the house forever ironed table-cloths, while a second added up endless accounts. But friendly as these people were, they were stupid. The _padrone_ had a _pizzicheria_, or pork-shop, across the street. When anything was wanted at the Albergo it was brought from the shop. Every time I went to my window I saw messengers on their way between the two establishments. But no man can serve two masters; the _pizzicheria_ drove a more thriving trade, and the Albergo suffered in consequence. It was left in the charge of a youth of unparalleled stupidity, who seldom understood what we asked for, and when he did, declared it something not to be had. But a friend was sent to us in our need. It happened in this way. The first morning we went out for a walk. As we started, and were passing the palace with the Etruscan inscriptions on the heavy stones of its lower wall, a Harlequin newly painted in red and white struck nine from a house-top near by. In the Via dell' Erbe women, their heads covered with gay handkerchiefs or wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hats, were selling vegetables and fruit. Just in front of us, walking hand in hand, were three beggars, two blind and one lame, and an old brown monk with a wine-cask on his shoulder. At almost every turn we saw through an archway the three far-away lakes of Montepulciano, Chiusi, and Thrasymene. But it was now J. began to feel ill, and we went to a _caffè_ and called for cognac. As we sat there the door opened and a young Italian dressed _à l'Anglaise_, even to his silver-headed cane, came in. He took a seat at the table next to us. When his coffee was brought he asked the waiter if he had seen the English lady and gentleman who arrived the evening before on a velocipede. No, the waiter had not; he knew nothing of these foreigners. There was a pause, while the young Italian sipped his coffee. But presently he turned to us and said in good English, but with a marked accent:-- "I beg pardon, sare, but was it not you who came to Montepulciano on a tricycle?" "Yes," said J., but rather curtly, for he was just then very miserably. "Ah, I thought so!" continued the Italian, well satisfied with the answer. "I have seen it,--a Humber. It is a beautiful machine. I myself do ride a bicycle,--the _Speecial Cloob_. You know it? I do belong to the Cyclists' _Touring Cloob_ and to the _Speedvell Cloob_. All the English champions do belong to that _Cloob_. I did propose some one for director at the last meeting; you will see my name on that account in the papers. Here is my card, but in the country around Montepulciano all call me Sandro or Sandrino. I have ridden from Florence to Montepulciano in one day. I have what you call the wheel fever,"--and he smiled apologetically and stopped, but only to take breath. We were fellow-cyclers, and that was enough. He was at once our friend, though our greeting in return was not enthusiastic, and our record would have disgusted the _Speedvell Cloob_. He could sympathize. He was feeling _vary bad_ himself, because the day before he had gone on his bicycle as far as Montalcino with a gun to _keel the leetle birds_. It was too far even for a champion. But he had taken the waters--Janos: he had great faith in the waters. The cognac by this time had made J. better, and we started to leave the _caffè_. Sandrino, to give him his Montepulciano name, insisted on paying for everything. We must let him have that favor, he said, and also another. He was not a native of the town,--he was a Roman, as he supposed we could see by his nose,--but still he would like to do us the honors of the place. He would take us to see so fine a church we could not but be pleased with it; it was only a step. Foolishly we went. The step was a long one. It took us half-way down the mountain-side to the Madonna di San Biagio. But J. was now really too wretched to look at anything, and we turned back at once. As we walked slowly up again, Sandrino explained that he had lived in England several years; and it turned out that he had the English as well as the wheel fever. All his clothes were from London, he said, even his flannels; and he pulled down his sleeve that we might see. He smoked English tobacco,--a friend sent it to him; and he showed us the small paper box tied with a string in which he kept it. And most of his news was English, too. His friends wrote him. He had just had a letter--see--and he opened it. There had been fearful riots in England. He cared much for the politics of the country. But the refrain of all he said was praise of cycling. He offered to ride with us when we left Montepulciano. He could go any day but the next, which was his twenty-first birthday, when he was to have a great dinner and many friends and much wine. He would call, if we would allow him; and with profession of great friendship he left us at the door of the Albergo. [Illustration: LEAVING MONTEPULCIANO. _Page 106._] He was true to his word. Indeed, I do not know what had become of us but for his kindness. After our return from our walk, J. was unable to leave his room. We were both depressed by this unlooked-for delay, and Sandrino not only helped to amuse, but was of practical use to us. He came twice the following day. The first time he stopped, he said, to tell us he did hear from friends in Castiglione del Lago, who, if we should ride to-morrow, would be glad to see us at lunch. "There will be nothing much," he concluded; "they will make no preparations. It will be some _leetle_ thing." Though in the first glory of his twenty-one years, he went with me to a druggist's to act as interpreter. But I think he was repaid by his pleasure in carrying back a bottle of his favorite waters. The boy, when he saw it, with his usual cleverness followed into the room bringing three glasses. If we had asked for three he doubtless would have brought one. Sandrino's second visit was in the evening after he had eaten his great dinner and drunk much wine, which had again made him feel _vary bad_. Had we ever tasted the famous Montepulciano, "king of all wine"? he asked. No? Well, then, we must before leaving the town. It was not to be had anywhere else, and indeed even in Montepulciano could not be bought in the _caffè_ or shops. He had been presented with many bottles. He repeated his invitation to lunch in Castiglione, and it seemed that other friends in a villa near Cortona would also be charmed to see us, and to give us wine if we were tired. IN THE VAL DI CHIANA. "_Thy company, O sweet Evangelist, how desirable it is to us poor pilgrims._" "_Then I saw in my dream they went very lovingly on together._" The next morning J. was much better, and we decided to ride. Sandrino arrived at half-past seven and breakfasted with us. In the uniform of the _Speedvell Cloob_, its monogram in silver on his cap, he was even more English than he had been the day before. Our last experience at the Albergo was characteristic. The waiter, overcome by Sandrino's appearance, became incapable of action. We called for our coffee and rolls in vain. Finally we all, our guest included, made a descent upon the kitchen and forced him to bestir himself. It was Sunday morning, and the news of our going had been noised abroad. The aristocracy as well as the people turned out to see us off. Many of Sandrino's friends lingered in the barber-shop across the street; others waited just without the city gate with his mother and sister. When Sandrino saw the crowd here, he sprang upon his _Speecial Cloob_, worked with one foot and waved the other in the air, rode to the little park beyond and back, and then jumped off, hat in hand, at his mother's side, with the complacent smile of a champion. Indeed, the whole ride that day savored of the circus. He went down hills with his legs stretched straight out on either side. On level places he made circles and fancy figures in the road. Whenever we passed peasants,--and there were many going to church,--he shrieked a warning shrill as a steam-engine whistle. No wonder he said he had no use for a bell! He spoke to all the women, calling them his "beautiful cousins." And in villages the noise he made was so great that frightened people, staring at him, could not look behind, so that several times we all but rode over men and women who walked backward right into our wheels. And all the while J., like the ring-master, kept calling and shrieking, and no one paid the least attention to him. Our way was through the beautiful Val di Chiana, no longer pestilential and full of stenches as in Dante's day, but fresh and fair, and in places sweet with clematis. There were no fences or hedges, and it stretched from mountains to mountains, one wide lovely park. About half-way to Castiglione we came to the boundary line between Tuscany and Umbria,--a canal with tall poplars on its banks, throwing long reflections into the water below, where a boat lay by the reeds. We stopped there some little time. Sandrino was polite, but I could see he did not approve. What would the _Speedvell Cloob_ have thought? Farther on, when we waited again near a low farm-house under the oaks, he wheeled quickly on. But presently he came back. "Oh," he said, "I thought you must have had an accident!" There could be no lovelier lake town than Castiglione del Lago. The high hill on which it stands projects far into Lake Thrasymene. The olives which grow from its walls down the hillside into the very water are larger and finer, with more strangely twisted trunks, than any I have ever seen. As we came near the town we rode between them, looking beneath their silvery-gray branches out to the pale blue lake beyond. A woman came from under their shade with a bundle of long reeds on her head; a priest passed us on a donkey. We left our machines in a stable at the foot of the hill and walked through the streets. Here Sandrino's invitation came to nought; his friends were away. Whatever _leetle thing_ we had must be found elsewhere. So we went to a _trattoria_, where another of his friends, a serious, polite young man who, we learned afterwards, owns the town and all the country thereabout, sat and talked with us while we ate our lunch. Poor Sandrino! He had to pay for his English clothes and foreign friends! The _padrona_, backed by her husband from the kitchen below, asked him no less than five francs for our macaroni and wine. A dispute, loud because of the distance between the disputants, followed; but in the end Sandrino paid four francs, though half that sum would have been enough. It was some consolation for us to know that, _forestieri_ as we were, we had never been cheated so outrageously, not even in San Quirico. It was pleasant wandering through the town, with the grave young man as guide, to the Palazzo Communale, where the red and white flag of the Duke of Cornia waving outside was the same as that painted in the old frescos within, and where councilmen holding council bowed to us as we passed; and then to the old deserted castle which, with its gray battlemented walls and towers, was not unlike an English ruin. But it was pleasanter when, Sandrino having kissed his friend, we were on the road again, riding between yellow mulberries by the side of the lake. Sheep were grazing on the grassy banks; donkeys and oxen were at rest in the meadows. But the peasants, Mass heard, were at work again. Women on ladders were stripping the mulberries of their leaves; men on their knees were digging in the fields. At the villa, Sandrino's friends were at home. At the gate the gay bicycler gave his war-cry. A young lady ran out between the roses and chrysanthemums in the garden and by the red wall where yellow pumpkins were sunning, to welcome him. Then her mother and sister came and also gave him greeting. They received us with courtesy. We were led into the drawing-room, a bare, barn-like place with cold brick floor, where there were three or four chairs, a table, an old piano, faded cretonne curtains hung on rough sticks at the windows, and small drawings pinned on the walls. A man in blue coat and trousers, such as the peasants wear, followed us in and sat down by the young ladies. He was one of her men, the _Signora_ explained. Then we had the wine Sandrino promised, and we became very friendly. One of the daughters knew a little English, but when we spoke to her she hid her face in her hands and laughed and blushed. She never, never would dare to say a word before us, she declared. She was very arch and girlish. One minute she played a waltz on the piano; the next she teased Sandrino, and there was much pleasantry between them. The mother spoke French after a fashion, but when she had anything to say she relapsed into Italian. She lived in Rome, she said. We must come and see her there. But would we not now stay at her villa all night, instead of in Cortona? Then she squeezed my hand. "_Vous êtes bien sympathique_," she said, and I think she meant to compliment me. Her husband, it seems, was a banker in Rome, and would be pleased, so she told us through Sandrino's interpretation, to do anything and everything for us. Mother and daughters, men and maids, all walking amiably together, came to the garden gate with us. The _Signora_ here squeezed my hand a second time. The skittish young lady said "good-by" and then hid behind a bush, and her sister gave us each some roses. It was here too we were to part with Sandrino. He must be back in Montepulciano by six; more friends were coming. Would we write him postal cards to tell him of the distance and time we made? And that map of Tuscany we said we would give him, would we not remember it? He was going to take some great rides, and it would help him. Then we turned one way, and he, riding his best for the young ladies, the other, to be seen by us no more. It was roses all the way to Cortona. They grew in villa gardens and along the road up the mountain; there were a few even among the olives, on the terraces whose stone embankments make the city from below look as if it were surrounded by many walls instead of one only. Near the town we met two young lovers, their arms around each other's waists, and a group of men who directed us in our search for the inn up a short steep hill leading away from the main road. Above, inside the city gate, several other citizens told us we must go down again, for the road we had left led right by the door. Clearly the Albergo della Stella--for that was its name--was not well known in Cortona. After a climb of three miles it was provoking to go even a foot out of our way, and we turned back in no cheerful mood. It was more disheartening when, having finally come to the Albergo, we found the lower floor, by which we entered, the home of pigs and donkeys and oxen. The major was right, I thought; Cortona was a rough place. The contrast when on the third floor of this establishment we were shown into a large, clean, really well-furnished room with window overlooking the valley, made us neglect to drive a close bargain with the _padrona_,--a neglect for which we suffered later. LUCA SIGNORELLI'S TOWN. "_By this time the pilgrims had a desire to go forward._" The principal event of our stay in Cortona was a hunt for Luca Signorelli's house. Why we were so anxious to find it I did not know then, nor do I now; but we were very earnest about it. At the start a youth pursued us with the persistence of a government spy. It was useless to try and dodge him. No matter how long we were in churches or by what door we came out, he was always waiting in exactly the right place. In our indignation we would not ask him the way, but we did of some other boys, who forthwith led us such a wild-goose chase that I think before it was over there was not a street or corner of the town unvisited by us. [Illustration: CORTONA.] We next employed an old man as guide. Of course he knew all about Luca Signorelli. He could show us all his frescos and pictures in Cortona. Some of them were bad enough, as he supposed the _Signore_ knew; they were painted in the artist's youth. But we wanted to see his house? Ah! we had but to follow him, and he led us in triumph to that of Pietro da Cortona. As this would not do, he consulted with an old woman, who recommended a visit to a certain _padre_. The _padre_ was in his kitchen. He had never heard of Signorelli's house, and honestly admitted his ignorance. But could he show us some fine frescos or sell us antiquities? This failing, our guide hunted for some friends who, he declared, knew everything. But they were not in their shop, nor in the _caffè_, nor on the piazza, and in despair he took us to see another priest. The latter wore a jockey-cap and goggles, and was a learned man. He had heard of a life of Signorelli by a German. He had never read it, nor indeed could he say where it was to be had; but he knew there was such a book. He was certain our hunt was useless, since Signorelli had lived in so many houses the city could not afford to put tablets on them all, and so not one was marked. He himself was a professional letter-writer, and if the _Signore_ had any letters he wished written--? We then gave up the search and dismissed the old man with a franc, though he declared himself still willing to continue it. It was in this way we saw Cortona. For the last few days we had begun to be haunted by the fear of the autumn rains. If they were as bad as Virgil says, and were to fall in dense sheets, tearing the crops up by the roots, while black whirlwinds set the stubble flying, and vast torrents filled ditches and raised rivers, the roads must certainly be made unridable. Since the morning we left Monte Oliveto the weather had been threatening, and now in Cortona there were heavy showers. As we sat in our room at the Albergo after our long tramp, and J. made a sketch from the window, we saw dark clouds gradually cover the sky. The lake, so blue yesterday, was gray and dull. The valley and the mountains were in shadow, save where the sun breaking through the clouds shone on a small square of olives and spread a golden mist over Monte Amiata. Before J. had finished, the gold faded into white and then deepened into purple, and we determined to be off early in the morning. TO PERUGIA: BY TRAIN AND TRICYCLE. "_Now you must note that the City stood upon a mighty hill, but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease._" The next day I was tired and in no humor for riding. J. wanted once to try the tricycle without luggage over the Italian roads. It was settled then between us that I should go alone by train to Perugia, where we should meet. Before seven we had our breakfast and the _padrona_ brought us her bill. Because we had not bargained in the beginning she overcharged us for everything; but we refused to pay more than we knew was her due. There was the inevitable war of words, more unpleasant than usual because her voice was loud and harsh and asthmatic. She grew tearful before it was over, but finally thanked us for what we gave her, and asked us to come again so gently that we mistrusted her. I thought it wise to wait with the bags at the station, though my train would not start till eleven. It was a beautiful coast down the mountain between the olives, four miles with feet up. The clouds had rolled away during the night, and it was bright and warm at the station when J. left me to go on his way. It was quiet too, and for some time I was alone with the porters. But presently a young woman with a child in her arms came by. She stopped and looked at me sympathetically. I spoke to her, and then she came nearer and patted me on the shoulder and said, "_Poverina!_" It seems she had seen J. bring me to the station and then turn back by himself. I do not know what she thought was the trouble, but she felt sorry for me. She was the wife of the telegraph operator, and lived in rooms above the station. She took me to them, and then she brought me an illustrated translation of "Gil Blas" to look at while she made me a cup of coffee. Every few minutes she sighed and said again, "_Poverina!_" She gave me her card,--Elena Olas, _nata_ Bocci, was her name. I wrote mine on a slip of paper, and when the train, only an hour late, came, we parted with great friendship. A regiment of soldiers was on its way to Perugia and made the journey very lively. Peasants who had somehow heard of its coming were in wait at every station with apples and chestnuts and wine, over which there was much noisy bargaining. At other times the soldiers sang. As the train carried us by the lake from which the mountains in the distance rose white and shadowy and phantom-like, and by Passignano,--built right in the water, with reeds instead of flowers around the houses, where fishermen were out in their boats near the weirs,--and then by Maggiore and Ellora on their hill-tops, I heard the constant refrain of the soldiers' song, and it reminded me of my friend at Cortona, for it was a plaintive regret for "_Poverina mia!_" Then there came a pause in the singing, and a voice called out, "_Ecco_, Perugia!" I looked from the carriage window, and there, far above on the mountain, I saw it, white and shining, like a beautiful city of the sun. At the station J. met me. He had been waiting an hour, having made the thirty-six miles between Cortona and Perugia in three hours and a half. He too had had his adventures. Beyond Passignano he met a man on foot who spoke to him, and to whom he said, "_Buon Giorno_." "Good-morning," cried the man in good cockney English, and J. in sheer astonishment stopped the tricycle. The tramp--for tramp he was--explained that he was an Englishman and in a bad way. He had been at Perugia with a circus which had little or no success, and the rascally Frenchman who managed it had broken up and made off, leaving him with nothing. He was now on his way to Florence, where he wanted to be taken on by Prince Strozzi, who kept English jockeys. But in the mean time he was hungry and had no money, and must tramp it all the way. J. bethought him of the card to the gentleman of Cortona who had married an English wife. We had not used it, and it seemed a pity to waste it. The English lady doubtless would be glad of an opportunity to help a countryman. So he gave it to the tramp, together with a franc for his immediate wants. The latter looked at the money. He supposed he could do something with it, he grumbled. He really was grateful, however, for he offered to push the machine up a hill down which he had just walked. But J. telling him to hurry on, engaged instead the services of a small boy who was going his way. For pay, he gave the child a coast down the other side into his native village, than which _soldi_ could not have been sweeter. Did not all his playmates see him ride by in his pride? Arriving in Perugia, J. himself was a hero for a time. Many officers with their wives were in the station, and in their curiosity so far forgot their usual dignity as to surround him and pester him with questions as to his whence and whither and what speed he could make. [Illustration: ON THE HILL. _Page 126._] It is a long way from the station up the mountain to the town, but we went faster than we ever climbed mountain before, for we tied the tricycle to the back of the diligence. J. rode and steered it, but I sat inside, ending my day's journey as I had begun it, in commonplace fashion. The driver was full of admiration. We must go to Terni on our velocipede, he said; in the mountains beyond Spoleto we should go down-hill for seven miles. _Ecco!_ no need of a diligence then! AT PERUGIA. "_And did see such things there, the remembrance of which will stick by me as long as I live._" The _padrone_ of the Albergo at Perugia was a man of parts. He could speak English. When we complimented him on a black cat which was always in his office, he answered, with eyes fixed on vacancy, and pausing between each word like a child saying its lesson: "Yes-it-is-a-good-cat. I-have-one-dog-and-four-cats. This-cat-is-the-fath-er-of-the-oth-er-cats. One-are-red-and-three-is-white." And when we had occasion to thank him, he knew enough to tell us we were very much obliged. But we gave him small chance to display his powers. There was little to keep us in the Albergo, when, after a few minutes' walk we could be in the piazza, where the sun shone on Pisano's fountain, and on the Palazzo of the Baglioni and the Duomo opposite. But what a fall was there! A couple of _gendarmes_, priests walking two by two, a few beggars, were the only people we saw in this broad piazza, where at one time men and women, driven to frenzy by the words of Saint Bernardino, spoken from the pulpit by the Duomo door, almost fell into the fire they had kindled to burn their false hair and ornaments, their dice and cards; and where at another Baglioni fought, with the young Raphael looking on to paint later one at least of the combatants; and where the beautiful Grifonetto lay in death agony, the avengers of his murdered kinsmen waiting to see him die, the heads of his fellow-assassins looking grimly down from the Palazzo walls, and Atalanta, his mother, giving him forgiveness for the deed, for which but yesterday she had cursed him. In the aisles of the Duomo, once so stained with the blood of the Baglioni that they had to be purified with wine before prayers could again be offered in them, a procession of white-robed priests and acolytes, bearing cross and censer, passed from one chapel to another before a congregation of two or three old women. It was the same in the narrow streets; all is now still and peaceful where of old Baglioni, single-handed, kept back the forces of Oddi, their mortal foes. Only the memory of their fierceness remains; though I have two friends who say that in the dark street behind the Palazzo, where brave Simonetto and Astore fought the enemy until corpses lay in piles around them, they one night heard voices singing sadly, as if in lamentation; and these voices led them onwards under one archway and then another until suddenly the sounds ceased. But when they turned to go homewards, lo! they had lost their way. The next morning they returned that they might by daylight see whence the music could have come. But all along the street was a dead wall. None but spirits could have sung there; and what spirits would dare to lift their voices in this famous street but those of Baglioni? It must be the degeneracy of modern warriors that sets these heroes of the old school to singing lamentations. The Grifonettos and Astores who feasted on blood, could they come back to life and their native town, would have little sympathy with the captains and colonels who now drink tamarind-water in the _caffè_, booted and spurred though the latter be. The _caffè_ is everywhere the lounging-place of Italian officers, but in Perugia it seemed to be their headquarters. There was one on the Corso, a few doors from the Palazzo, which they specially patronized. They were there in the morning even before the shops were opened, and again at noon, and yet again in the evening, while at other times they walked to and fro in front of it, as if on guard. But though the youngest as well as the oldest patronized it, the distinctions of rank between them were observed as scrupulously as Dickens says they are with the Chatham and Rochester aristocracy. The colonel associated with nothing lower than a major, the latter in turn drawing the line at the captain, and so it went down to the third lieutenant, who lorded it only over the common soldier. On the whole, I think the lesser officers had the best of it; for whether they eat cakes and drank sweet drinks, or played cards, they were always sociable and merry. Whereas, sometimes the colonel sat solitary in his grandeur, silent except for the few words with the boy selling matches as he hunted through the stock to find a box with a pretty picture. We were long enough in Perugia to carry the _Abate's_ letters to San Pietro. The monks to whom they were written were away, but a third came in their place and gave us welcome. He showed J. the inner cloister, to which I could not go: women were not allowed there. It was because of my skirts, he said; and yet he too wore skirts, and he spread out his cassock on each side. While they were gone I waited in the church. I wonder if ghostly voices are never heard within it. The monks, long dead, whose love and even life it was to make it beautiful until its walls and ceilings were rich and glowing, its choir a miracle of carving, and its sacristy hung with prayer-inspiring pictures, have, like the Baglioni, cause to bewail the degenerate latter day. The beauty they created now lives but for the benefit of a handful of monks whose monastery is turned into a Boys' Agricultural School, and for the occasional tourist. Later from the high terrace of the park opposite San Pietro we saw the boys in their blue blouses digging and hoeing in the fields under the olives, where probably the monks themselves once worked. There is in this little park an amphitheatre with archway, bearing the Perugian griffin in the centre. It is shaded by dense ilex-trees, from whose branches a raven must once have croaked; for evil has come upon the place, as it has upon the gray monastery so near. Instead of nobles and men-at-arms and councillors of state, two or three poor women with their babies sat on the stone benches gossiping. And as we lingered there in the late afternoon there came from San Pietro the sound, not of monks chanting vespers, but of some one playing the "Blue Danube" on an old jingling piano. Only the valley below, and the Tiber winding through it, and the mountains beyond are unchanged. ACROSS THE TIBER TO ASSISI. "_And I slept and dreamed again and saw the same two pilgrims going down the mountains along the highway towards the city._" When we left Perugia in the early morning we passed first by the statue of Julius II., thus receiving, we said to each other, the bronze pontiff's benediction. We imagined this to be an original idea; but it is useless to try to be original. Since then we have remembered the same thought came to Miriam and Donatello when they made the statue their trysting-place. Then we rode through the piazza, where a market was being held, and where at one end a long row of women holding baskets of eggs stood erect, though all around other women and even men, selling fruits and vegetables, sat comfortably on low stools. [Illustration: THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION, PERUGIA. _Page 134._] On the other side of the Porta Romana we saw that while Perugia was bright and clear in the sunlight, a thick white mist covered the valley, so that it looked as if a great lake, bounded by the mountains, lay below. The chrysanthemums and marigolds, hanging over high garden walls, and the grass by the road-side glistened with dew. Shining silver cobwebs hung on the hedges. Before many minutes, so fast did we go, we were riding right into the mist. We could see but a few feet in front of us, and the olives on either side, through the heavy white veil, looked like spectres. We passed no one but a man carrying a lantern and a cage of owls. It seemed but natural that so uncanny a ride should lead to a home of shadows. And when we came to the tomb of the Volumnii at the foot of the mountain we left the tricycle without, and went down for a while into its darkness and damp. When we came out the mist had disappeared and the road lay through sunshine. A little farther on we had our first near view of the Tiber. We crossed it by the old Ponte San Giovanni, so narrow that there was not room for us to pass a boy and a donkey just in front. J. called, and the boy pushed his donkey close to the stone wall; but for all that we could not pass. Even as J. called he was stopped by a sudden sharp pain in his side, the result probably of his descent into the tomb while he was still warm; for he had back-pedalled coming down the mountain. And so we waited for many minutes on the bridge to see, not the yellow Tiber one always hears about, but a river blue in mid-stream, white where it came running over the mill-wheel and down the dam, and red and yellow and green where it reflected the poplars and oaks, and the skirts and handkerchiefs of the women washing on its banks. But after the bridge we left the river, for we were bound for Assisi. We had a quiet, peaceful ride for several miles on the Umbrian plain, where in the old times no one dared to go without the permission of the Baglioni, between vineyards and fields where men were ploughing, and through insignificant little villages, until we came out upon the large piazza in front of Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was crowded with peasants, for market was just over, and there came from every side the sound of many voices. When we rode by we were surrounded at once, two or three men keeping close to our side to sing the praises of the hotels at Assisi and shower their cards upon us. They pursued us even into the church, and as far as the little hermitage beneath the dome, to tell us that each and all could speak English. [Illustration: A FROWN OF DISAPPROVAL, ASSISI. _Page 136._] If the Umbrians about Assisi were always like this, Saint Francis was a wise man to hide himself in the woods and make friends with beasts and birds. Over the sunny roads beyond Santa Maria, where he and Fra Egidio walked singing and exhorting men and women to repentance, we wheeled imploring, or rather commanding, them to get out of the way. It was a hard pull up the mountain-side, the harder because the great monastery on its high foundations seemed always so far above us. When almost at the city gate a monk in brown robes, the knotted cord about his waist, passed. He stopped to look, but it was with a frown of disapproval; I think Saint Francis would have smiled. AT ASSISI. "_Methought these things did ravish my heart; I would have stayed at that man's house a twelvemonth but that I knew I had farther to go._" It was just noon when we reached Assisi, but we rode no more that day. We spent the afternoon in the town of Saint Francis. The Albergo we selected from the many recommended was without the large cloisters of the monastery. The waiter at once remembered that J. had been there before, though eighteen months had passed since his first visit. The _Signore_ had two ladies with him then, he said. He was delighted with the velocipede. It was the first time in all his life he had seen one with three wheels. Nothing would do but he must show us the finest road to Rome. He spread our map on the table as we eat our dinner, and put on his glasses,--for he was a little bad in the eyes, he explained,--and then he pointed out the very route we had already decided upon. _Ecco!_ here, between Spoleto and Terni, we should have a long climb up the mountain, but then there would be seven miles down the other side. Ah! that would be fine! This long coast to Terni was clearly to make up for the hardships we already had endured on toilsome up-grades. After dinner we went to the church. Goethe, when he was in Assisi, saw the old Roman Temple of Minerva,--and then, that his pleasure in it might not be disturbed, refused to look at anything else in the town, and went quickly on his way. But when I passed out of the sunlight into the dark lower church and under the low rounded arches to the altar with Giotto's angels and saints above, it seemed to me he was the loser by his great love for classic beauty. Many who have been to this wonderful church have written descriptions of it, but none have really told, and indeed no one can ever tell, how wonderful it is. The upper church, with its great lofty nave and many windows through which the light streams in on the bright frescoed walls, is beautiful. But this lower one, with its dark, subdued color and dim light, and the odor of incense which always lingers in it, is like the embodiment of the mystery and love that inspired the saint in whose honor it was built. In it one understands, for the first time perhaps, what it is for which the followers of Saint Francis gave up life and action. Whoever was long under the influence of this place must, I thought, always stay,--like the old gray-haired monk we saw kneeling before a side altar rapt in contemplation. And yet on the very threshold we found three or four brothers laughing and joking with two women,--Italian Dr. Mary Walkers they must have been, for they wore men's collars and cravats and coats, with field-glasses slung over their shoulders, and stiff gray hats, and they were smoking long _sigare Cavour_. They were artists, and had been painting, oh, so badly! in the church all the morning. The sun was setting when we left the monastery and walked through the streets, now silent and deserted, where Francis in his gay youth wandered with boon companions, singing not hymns but love-songs. A small boy came and walked with us, and, unbidden, acted as our guide. Here was the Duomo, he said, and here the Church of Santa Chiara; and, when we were on the road without the city gate, _Ecco!_ below, Santa Maria degli Angeli! For from where we stood we looked down upon the huge church rising from the plain, where even now there are scarcely more houses than in the days when Franciscans, coming from far and near to hold counsel with their founder, built their straw huts upon it. Our self-appointed guide was a bright little fellow, and never once begged like the other children who followed us. So when he showed us the road to Foligno where we must ride on the morrow, J. gave him a _sou_. At the door of the Albergo he said he must go home, but not to supper; he never had any. He asked at what time we should leave in the morning, when he would like to come and say good-by. _Felice notte_--"a happy night"--were his last words as he turned away. VIRGIL'S COUNTRY. "_If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect betwixt this and our journey's end!_" The next morning, with a select company of ragged boys, our young guide arrived in time to see us start. When I came out he nodded in a friendly way, as if to an old acquaintance, to the wonder and admiration of the other youngsters. The waiter, his glasses on, came to the gate with us. Two monks standing there asked how far we were going on our velocipede. "To Rome?" they cried. "Why, then, here are two pilgrims and two priests!" Our guide and his friend ran down the mountain-side after us until we gave the former another _sou_, when they at once disappeared. It seemed a little ungrateful; but I did not give him much thought, for just then J. bade me back-pedal with all my might. The machine went very fast, despite my hard work, and to my surprise J. suddenly steered into a stone-pile by the roadside. "The brake is broken!" was his explanation as we slowly upset. Fortunately, however, the upright connecting the band of the brake with the handle had only slipped out of place, and though we could not fix it in again securely, J. could still manage to use it. This, so far as we could see, was the one defect in our tricycle, but defect it was. A nut on the end of the upright would have prevented such an accident. But this is one of the minor particulars in which tricycle-makers--and we have tried many--are careless. We had the rest of the coast without interruption. Half-way down, our little friend and his followers ran out from under the olives; he had taken a short cut that he might see us again. From Assisi to Terni was a long day's ride by towns and villages, through fair valleys and over rough mountains. From the foot of the mountain at Assisi, past Monte Subasio, which, bare and rocky, towered above the lower olive-covered hills, the road was level until we rode by Spello with its old Roman gateway and ruined amphitheatre. But the hill here was not steep, and then again there came a level stretch into Foligno, the first lowland town to which we had come since we left Poggibonsi, and which, with its mass of roofs and lofty dome rising high above the city walls, looked little like the Foligno in Raphael's picture. Already in our short ride--for it is but ten miles from Assisi to Foligno--we noticed a great difference in the people. It was not only that many of the women wore bodices and long earrings, and turned their handkerchiefs up on top of their heads, but they, and the men as well, were less polite and more stupid than the Tuscans or Umbrians about Perugia. Few spoke to us, and one woman to whom we said good-morning was so startled that she thanked us in return, as if unused to such civilities. For all J.'s shouts of _a destra_--to the right--and _Eccomi!_ they would not make room for us; and now in Foligno one woman, in her stupidity or obstinacy, walked directly in front of the machine, and when the little wheel caught her dress, through no fault of ours, cried "_Accidente voi!_"--the _voi_, instead of _le_, being a far greater insult than the wishing us an accident. Then she walked on, cursing in loud voice, down the street, by the little stream that runs through the centre of the town, and into the market-place where Saint Francis, in mistaken obedience to words heard in ecstasy, sold the cloth he had taken from his father that he might have money to rebuild the church of San Damiano. Even the beasts we met were stupid as the people. At our coming, horses, donkeys, and oxen tried to run. We therefore looked for at least a skirmish when, beyond Foligno, a regiment of cavalry in marching order advanced upon us. But the soldiers stood our charge bravely. Only the officer was routed and retreated into the gutter. Then, forgetting military discipline, he turned his back upon his men to see us ride. We were now on the old Via Flaminia and in the valley of the Clitumnus,--Virgil's country. The poet's smiling fields and tall, stiff oaks, his white oxen and peasants behind the plough or enjoying the cool shade, were on either side. Crossing the fields were many stony beds of streams, dry at this season, lined with oaks and chestnuts, under whose shade women were filling large baskets with acorns and leaves. The upturned earth was rich and brown. Through the trees or over them we saw the whitish-blue sky, the purple mountains, some pointed like pyramids, and the gray olive hills with little villages in their hollows, and before long Trevi on its high hill-top. And then we came to the temple of the river god Clitumnus, of which Pliny writes, and where the little river, in which Virgil says the white flocks for the sacrifice bathed, runs below, an old mill on its bank and one willow bending over it. [Illustration: GATHERING LEAVES. _Page 146._] At the village of Le Vene, near the source of the stream, we stopped at a wine-shop to eat some bread and cheese. There was no one there but the _padrone_ and a dwarf who wore a decent suit of black clothes and had a medallion of the Pope on his watch-chain. He had come in a carriage which waited for him at the door. I think he was a drummer. He drank much wine, and spoke to us in a vile patois. Indeed, the people thereabout all spoke in dialects worse, I am sure, than any Dante heard at the mouth of Hell. The dwarf had travelled, and had been in Florence, where he had seen a velocipede, but not like ours. It was finer, or perhaps he should say more commodious. The seats were side by side, and it had an umbrella attached, and it was worked by the hands. It went, oh, so fast! and he intimated that we could not hope to rival its speed. I suppose our machine without an umbrella seemed to him like a ship without a sail. But I think he had another tale to tell when, ten minutes later, he having started before we did, we passed him on the road. We were going so fast I only had time to see that in his wonder the reins fell from his hands. Then came the small, wretched village of San Giacomo, with its old castle built up with the houses of the poor, and then Spoleto, where we lunched in a _trattoria_ of the people which was much troubled by a plague of flies. A company of Bersaglieri, red caps on the backs of their heads and blue tassels dangling down their backs, sat at one table, ordering with much merriment their soup and meat and macaroni to be cooked _à la Bersagliere_; at another, two young men were evidently enjoying an unwonted feast; and at the table with us were three peasants, one of whom had brought his bread in his pocket: he eat his soup for dessert, and throughout the meal used his own knife in preference to the knife and fork laid at his place. Two dogs, a cat, and a hen wandered in from the piazza and dined on the bits of macaroni dropped by the not over-careful soldiers. The waiter greeted us cordially. He too had a machine, he said, but had never heard of velocipedes with three wheels. His had but two; the _Signore_ must see it. And before he would listen to our order for lunch, he showed J. his bicycle,--a bone-shaker. He was very proud of it. He had ridden as far as Terni. Ah! what a beautiful time we should have before the afternoon was over! Seven miles down the mountain! The thought of this coast made us leave Spoleto with light hearts, though we knew that first must come a hard climb. But if the road was as perfect as it had been all the morning, there was not much to dread. It was half-past two when we started from the _trattoria_, but we were fifteen minutes in walking to the other end of the town. There was no use riding. The streets were narrow and steep, and crowded with stupid men and women and donkeys, and with officers who instead of controlling were controlled by their horses. Beyond the gate the ascent at first was gradual and we rode easily, even as we worked looking back to the famous old aqueduct and the shadowy heights of Norcia. For some distance we went by the dried-up bed of a wide stream, meeting many priests on foot and peasants on donkeys. But as the way became steeper we left the stream far below, and came into a desolate country, where the mountains were covered with scrub-oaks, and priests and peasants disappeared; only one old man kept before us, making short cuts up the mountain-side, but after a while he too rode out of sight. We soon gave up riding. J. tied a rope to the tricycle and pulled while I pushed. The sun was now hidden behind the mountain and the way was shady. But still it was warm work and wearisome; for before long the road became almost perpendicular and was full of loose stones. How much more of this was there, we asked a woman watching swine on the hillside? "A mile," was her answer; and yet she must have known there were at least three. Finally, after what seemed hours of toiling, we asked another peasant standing in front of a lonely farm-house how much farther it still was to the top. "You are here now," she said. She at least was truthful. A few feet more, and we looked down a road as precipitous as that up which we had come, and so winding that we could see short stretches of it, like so many terraces, all the way down the mountain. We walked for about a hundred yards, and it was as hard to hold back the machine as before it had been to push it. Then we began to ride, but the strain on the brake loosened the handle a second time. We dismounted, and J. tried to push it back into place: it snapped in two pieces in his hands. Here we were, eight miles from Terni, in a lonely mountain road in the evening,--the sun had already set,--with a brakeless machine, which, if allowed to start down-hill with its heavy load of two riders and much baggage, would soon be more unmanageable than a runaway horse. The seven miles' coast to which we had looked forward for days, was to be a walk after all. Like the King of France and his twenty thousand men, we had marched up the mountain that we might march down again. Is it any wonder that we both lost our tempers, and that an accident was the smallest evil we wished the manufacturers of our tricycle? Because they cared more for lightness than for strength,--since record-making is as yet the chief end of the cycling,--the necks of people who ride for pleasure are forsooth to be risked with impunity! However, there was nothing to do but to walk into Terni. It was very cold, and we had to put on our heavy coats. Presently the moon rose above the mountains on our left. By its light we could see the white road,--now provokingly good, but steep and winding and all unknown,--the hills that shut us in on every side, and, far below, the stream making its way through the narrow pass. The way was unpleasantly lonely and silent. Now for an hour or more we went wearily on without hearing a sound but our steady tramp; and now we passed a farm-house within which many voices were raised in anger, while from the barn a dog barked savagely upon our coming. At times we thought we saw in the distance a castle with tall towers or an old ruin, but when we drew near we found in its place great rocks and cliffs of tufa. Once we went through a small village. The way here was not so steep, and for a few minutes we rode. Just beyond the houses three men, driving home a large white bull, walked in the middle of the road. J. shouted, that they might give us more space to pass; but they only laughed, and tried to set the bull on us with loud cries of _Via!_ Before the last died away we were walking again. On and on we walked, all the time holding back the tricycle. But at last we began to meet more people. Men with carts and donkeys went by at long intervals, but they spake never a word, and we too were silent. Now and then we heard the near tinkling of cow-bells, and came to olive-gardens, where in the moonlight the black twisted trunks took grotesque goblin shapes, and the branches threw a network of shadows across our path. Then we came to a railroad, and we knew we were at the foot of the mountains, and that Terni was not far off. We were at the end of the seven miles' coast and could ride again. Two men just then coming our way, J. asked them how far we were from the town; but they stood still and stared for answer. A second time he asked, and still they were speechless. "_Imbecile!_" he cried, and we left them there dumb and motionless. Not far beyond the road divided, and on either side were a few houses. A woman (or a fiend in female form) sat in front of one. "Which is the way to Terni?" we asked. She was silent. Once more we asked. _Chi lo sa?_--"Who knows?"--she answered. This was more than tired human nature could endure; J. turned upon her with a volley of choice Italian abuse. It conquered her as the prayers of Saint Anthony vanquished her sister demons. She arose and meekly showed us the way. In another minute the lights of Terni were in sight. Then we wheeled by a foundry with great furnace in full blast, by a broad avenue with rows of gas-jets, to the gates of the city, to find them shut. There was a second of despair, but J. was now not to be trifled with, and he gave a yell of command which was an effectual "open-sesame." And so we rode on through lively streets and piazza to the hotel, to supper, and to bed! TERNI AND ITS FALLS. "_Well, keep all things so in thy mind, that they may be as a goad in thy sides to prick thee forward in the way thou must go._" "_What thing so deserving as to turn us out of the way to see it?_" I know little of Terni, except that in the month of October the hotel is so cold that the waiter comes into the dining-room in the morning with hat on, and wrapped in overcoat and muffler, and that there is an excellent blacksmith in the town; for the next morning, as soon as J. had had the brake mended, he paid the bill and loaded the tricycle. The _padrone_ was surprised at the shortness of our stay. Did we not know there were waterfalls, and famous ones too, but three miles distant? We could not take the time to visit them? Well, then, at least we must look at their picture; and he showed us a chromo pasted on the hotel omnibus. I am afraid he took us for sad Philistines; but the fear of another kind of waterfall was still a goad to hurry us onward. Now we were so near our journey's end, no wonder, however great, could have led us from the straight path. IN THE LAND OF BRIGANDS. "_But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered_." There was a great _festa_ that day, and all along the street and out on the country road we met men and women in holiday dress carrying baskets and bunches and wreaths of pink chrysanthemums. In Narni, on the heights which Martial called inaccessible, men were lounging in the piazza or playing cards in the _caffè_. For the shepherds alone there was no rest from every-day work. Before we reached even Narni, but ten miles across the valley from Terni, we saw several driving their sheep and goats into the broad meadows. They wore goat-skin breeches, and by that sign alone we should have known we were nearing Rome. We lunched at Narni on coffee and cakes, for it was the last town through which we should pass on that day's ride. It was here that Quintus, in its Roman prosperity, stayed so long that Martial reproached him for his wearisome delay. Could he come to it now, I doubt if his friend would have the same reason for complaint. It did not seem an attractive place, and when we asked a man about the country beyond, he said it was "_bruto_." We did not learn till afterwards that this applied to the people, and not to the country, and that here we ought to have been briganded. We were now high up on the mountain,--on one side steep rocks, on the other a deep precipice. Far below in a narrow valley ran the little river Nar, and on the bank above it the railroad. It was not an easy road to travel, and often the hills were too steep to coast or to climb. The few farm-houses by the way were closed, for the peasants had gone to church. We saw an occasional little gray town crowning the top of sheer gray cliffs, like those in Albert Dürer's pictures, or an old castle either deserted or else with farm-house built in its ruins, where peasants leaned over the battlemented walls. But the only villages through which we rode were Otricoli, just before we descended to the valley of the Tiber, where we created so great a sensation that an old woman selling chestnuts--cooked, I think, by a previous generation--was at first too frightened to wait on us, and Borghetto, on the other side of the valley, where we saw in the piazza the stage from Cività Castellana, in which town we were to spend the night. There were a few people abroad. In the loneliest part of the mountain an old man in a donkey-cart kept in front of us on a long upgrade. Interested in the tricycle, he forgot the donkey, which gave up a straight for a spiral course, and monopolized the road. J. angrily asked its driver which side he meant to take. But the old man heaped coals of fire on his head by offering to carry us up in his wagon. After we left him far behind, we passed two travellers resting by the wayside. Their bags lay on the ground, and they looked weary and worn. They gave us good-day, and where we were going they of course wanted to know. They too were bound for Rome, it turned out, and had come from Bologna. After the two gentlemen of Bologna, we overtook a group of merry peasants, coats slung over their shoulders for no possible reason but the sake of picturesqueness, and hats adorned with gay pompons of colored paper and tinsel. One carried branches of green leaves and red fruit like cherries, and as we went by he gave us a branch and wished us a good journey. Next went by an old woman, who said with a smile that we could go without horse or donkey,--a witticism heard so often it could no longer make us laugh. And then a little boy all alone came "piping down the valley wild." [Illustration: "PIPING DOWN THE VALLEY."] We went with much content over the plain by the Tiber, where there were broad grassy stretches full of sheep and horses, and here and there the shepherds' gypsy-looking huts. It was such easy work now, that we eat our chestnuts as we rode; but beyond the bridge, on which Sixtus V. and Clement VIII. and Gregory XIII., in true papal fashion, have left their names, the hills began again. On we toiled, beneath shady oaks and by rocky places, until we came out on a wide upland. From the treeless road the meadows rolled far beyond to high mountains, on whose sloping side the blue smoke of charcoal-burners curled upward. The moon already had risen, and in the west the setting sun filled the sky with glowing amber light, against which the tired peasants going home were sharply silhouetted. We were glad to see Cività Castellana. One or two men in answer to our questions had told us we were close to it, but we did not believe them. The fields seemed to stretch for miles before us, and there was not a house or tower in sight. But suddenly the road turned and went down-hill, and there below was the city perched on tufa cliffs, a deep ravine surrounding it. Two _carabinieri_, in cocked hats and folded cloaks like the famous two solitary horsemen, were setting out on their night patrol. Vespers were just over in the church near the bridge, and along the way where happy little Etruscan schoolboys once whipped homewards their treacherous schoolmaster, little Italian boys and girls, let loose from church, ran after us, torturing us with their shrill cries. Soon their elders joined them, and we were closely beset with admirers. The town too was in a hubbub about us, and in the streets through which we wheeled, men and women came from their houses to follow in our train. At the door of the Albergo, where we were detained for several minutes, the entire population collected. We had difficulty in getting a room. The _festa_, the _padrone_ said, had brought many country people into the town, and the inns were full to overflowing. If J. would go with him he would see what could be done for us. The search led them through three houses. In the mean time I kept guard over the machine. It was well I did, for once J. had gone the natives closed upon me. Toddling infants and gray-haired men, ragged peasants and gorgeous officers pushed and struggled together in their desire to see. Every now and then a stealthy hand was thrust through the crowd and felt the tire or tried the brake. I turned from left to right crying, "_Guarda! Guarda!_" I lifted exploring hands from the wheels. But in vain. What was one against so many? A man sitting in the doorway took pity on my sad plight. He came out, and with a stick mowed the people back. Then J. returned, having found a room in the first house, which the _padrone_ had thought fit to conceal until the last. A MIDDLING INN. "_The good of the place is before you._" "_But here they tarried and slept._" The Albergo of Cività Castellana was but a middling inn. The _padrone_, in English tweed, high boots, and Derby hat, looked half cockney, half brigand. His wife wore an elaborate false front, and much lace about her neck. But they were far finer than their house. We were lodged in the garret, in a room the size of a large closet. The way to it led through another bed-chamber, long and low, in which four cots were ranged in a row along the wall. When we crossed it on the way downstairs to dinner I devoutly prayed that on our return four nightcaps would not be nodding on the pillows. Later in the evening, when we had dined, we strolled out to the piazza. To see the life of an Italian town you have only to go to the _caffè_. We went to one near the Albergo. There were two tables in it. We sat at the smaller, and at the other were four ragged boys playing cards! Fortunately we were the first to go to bed in the garret. All through the night, however,--for the mattress was hard and I slept little,--I heard loud snores and groans, and the sound of much tossing to and fro. We rose early in the morning, but when we opened our door the cots were empty, though they had not been so long. ACROSS THE CAMPAGNA. "_They compassed them round on every side; some went before, some behind, and some on the right, some on the left._" "_Here they were within sight of the city they were going to, also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof ... and drawing near the city they had yet a more perfect view thereof._" Early as we were, the whole town was stirring when we came downstairs. But who ever knew the hour when the people of an Italian town were not up and abroad? No sooner did J. bring the tricycle from the stable, where it had been kept all night, to the Albergo, than the piazza was again crowded. On they all came with us, men, women, and children, hooting and shouting, jumping and dancing through the vilely paved streets, and finally sprawling over the walls and on the rocks beyond the gate. There they stayed until we had gone down the hill over the bridge, crossing the stream at its foot, and up the hill on the opposite side, passing from their sight around the first curve. Soon we were on an upland and now really at the beginning of the Campagna. The morning was cold. For many miles we rode through a champaign gleaming white with frost. But as the sun rose higher in the heavens, and the yellow light, which at first was spread over the sky, faded and left a clear blue expanse above, the air grew warmer and the frost disappeared. The road wound on and on between oak woods and wide cultivated fields, and green grassy plains which gradually changed into great sweeps of rolling treeless country, like the moors. By the roadside were thick bushes of low green sage and tangled blackberries, and in places the broad flagstones of the old Flaminian Way, with weeds and dandelions and pretty purple flowers growing from the crevices. Sometimes a paving of smaller stones stretched all across the road, so that for a minute or two we were badly shaken, or else, coming on them suddenly at the foot of a hill, all but upset. Truly, as has been said, it could have been no joke for the old Romans to ride. To our left rose the great height of Soracte, not snow-covered as Horace saw it, but bare and brown save where purple shadows lay. At first we met numbers of peasants all astride of donkeys, going towards Cività Castellana, families riding together and eating as they went. Later, however, no one passed but an occasional lonely rider (who in his long cloak and high-pointed hat looked a genuine Fra Diavolo), or else sportsmen and their dogs. It was strange that though we saw many of the latter, we never once heard the singing or chirping of birds. There were hillsides and fields full of large black cattle, or herds of horses, or flocks of sheep and goats. There were shepherds, too, sleeping in the shade or by the roadside, leaning on their staffs or ruling their flock with rod and rustic word, as in the days when Poliziano sung. And if there was no bird's song to break the silence of the Campagna, there was instead a loud baaing of sheep, led by the shrill piercing notes of the lambs. If it was to such an accompaniment that Corydon and Thyrsis sang in rivalry, their song could have been poetical only in Virgil's verse. How hard we worked now that our pilgrimage was almost ended! We scarcely looked at the little village through which we wheeled, and where a White Brother was going from door to door, nor at the ruins which rose here and there in the hollows and on the slopes of the hills; and when at last we saw on the horizon the dome coming up out of the broad undulating plain, we gave it but a short greeting, and then hurried on faster than ever. We would not even go to Castel Nuovo, which lies a quarter of a mile or so from the road, but eat our hasty lunch in a _trattoria_ by the wayside, while a man--an engineer he said he was--showed us drawings he had made on his travels, and asked about our ride. How brave it was of the _Signora_ to work! he exclaimed, and how brave of the _Signore_ to sketch from his velocipede! And after this "the hills their heights began to lower," and with feet up we went like the wind, and every time we looked at the dome it seemed larger and more clearly defined against the sky. But about six miles from Rome our feet were on the pedals again and we were working with all our might. Sand and loose stones covered the road, which grew worse until, in front of the staring pink quarantine building, the stones were so many that in steering out of the way of one we ran over another, and the jar it gave us loosened the screw of the luggage-carrier. We were so near Rome we let it go. This was a mistake. But a little farther, and the whole thing gave way, and bags and knapsack rolled in the dust. It took some fifteen minutes to set it to rights again; and all the time we stood in the shadeless road, under a burning sun, for the heat in the lower plains of the Campagna was as great as if it were still summer. As the luggage-carrier was slightly broken, we were afraid to put too great a strain upon it, and for the rest of the journey the knapsack went like a small boy swinging on behind. [Illustration: FROM VIA FLAMINIA, NEAR PONTE MOLLE. _Page 170._] Like those other pilgrims, we were much discouraged because of the way. But at last, wheeling by pink and white _trattorie_, whose walls were covered with illustrated bills of fare, and coming to an open place where street-cars were coming and going, the Ponte Molle, over a now yellow Tiber, lay before us, and we were under the shadow of the dome we from afar had watched for many hours. Over the bridge we went with cars and carts, between houses and gardens and wine-shops, where there was a discord of many hurdy-gurdies, to the Porta del Popolo, and so into Rome. _Carabinieri_ were lounging about the gate, and carriages were driving to the Pincian; but we rode on and up the street on the right of the piazza. When we had gone a short distance we asked a man at a corner our way to the Piazza di Spagna. We should have taken the street to our left, he said, but now we could reach it by crossing the Corso diagonally. As we did so we heard a loud _sst_, _sst_ behind us, and we saw a _gendarme_ running up the street; but we went on. When we wheeled into the Piazza di Spagna, however, a second, almost breathless, ran out in front of us, and cried, _Aspetti!_ ("Wait!") But still we rode. _Aspetti!_ he cried again, and half drew his sword. In a minute we were surrounded. Models came flying from the Spanish steps; an old countryman carrying a fish affectionately under his arm, bootblacks, clerks from the near shops, young Roman swells,--all these and many more gathered about us. "_Aspetti!_" the _gendarme_ still cried. "_Perchè?_" we asked. And then his fellow-officer, whom we had seen on the Corso, came up. "Get down!" he said, in fierce tones of command. "_Perchè?_" we asked again. "_Per Christo!_" was his only answer. The crowd laughed with glee. Hackmen shouted their applause. It was ignominious, perhaps, but the wisest policy, to get down and walk to our hotel. THE FINISH. "_It pities me much for this poor man: it will certainly go ill with him at the last._" What pilgrim of old times thought his pilgrimage really over until he gave either out of his plenty or nothing in alms? Two months later we too gave our mite, not to the church or to the poor, but to the Government; for we were then summoned before a police magistrate and fined ten francs for "_furious_ riding on the Corso, and refusing to descend when ordered." And so our pilgrimage ended. APPENDIX. VETTURINO _versus_ TRICYCLE. BY JOSEPH PENNELL. _From "Outing."_ Who has not journeyed through a country with his favorite author long before he makes the actual trip himself? and who, when he comes to see with his own eyes that at which he has hitherto looked through some one else's, does not find himself his best guide? Long before I came to Italy I had travelled along its highways and by-ways with many authors, more especially with Hawthorne in his "Italian Note-Book," and Mr. Howells in his "Italian Journeys" and "Venetian Life." When it was finally my good fortune to make the journey myself, I was at first lucky enough to have for a companion, not his books, but Mr. Howells himself; and I frankly confess I found him far more delightful and satisfactory in person than in print. A year later I started for the same country, this time encumbered with a wife and a tricycle. Mr. Howells could no longer be my _cicerone_: in the first place he was back in Boston,--I might add, as if in parenthesis, calling me "lucky dog" for being able to go so soon again over the well-known ground; and, in the second place, because the route I now intended to take is not described in his books. But it is in Hawthorne's "Note-Book," a volume which, as I have just said, I had frequently studied. But of course I forgot to put it in my knapsack, and so had not a chance to see it until I arrived in Rome. When I there looked into it, naturally in a more critical spirit--inspired by personal knowledge of the subject--than I ever had before, the first thing that struck me was the advantage I had had over my old master in travelling by tricycle instead of by diligence. From the little village of Passignano to Rome we had followed exactly the same road, and though we began our rides at its opposite ends, I could still easily compare the time we had made, and the comfort and convenience and pleasure we had enjoyed by the way. As this comparison may be interesting to many who intend some day to make the cycling tour of Italy, I will here briefly indicate Hawthorne's experience, principally as to time and roads, and then mine:-- HAWTHORNE'S JOURNEY TO FLORENCE. MY NOTES. FIRST DAY OF TRIP. LAST DAY OF TRIP. We passed through the Porta del We left Cività Castellana at a Popolo at about 8 o'clock, and quarter of eight. Road so rough, ... began our journey along the had to walk down-hill and up Flaminian Way.... The road was again. (So did Hawthorne's not particularly picturesque. The party.) Road very picturesque, country undulated, but _scarcely and, before long, a distant rose into hills_.... Finally came glimpse of St. Peter's. Began to to the village of Castel Nuovo di see, and occasionally to feel, Porta ... between 12 and 1.... the paving of the old Flaminian Afternoon, Soracte rose before Way, which is abominable. Made of us.... The road kept trending flagstones thrown roughly towards the mountain, following together, or else little blocks, the line of the old Flaminian like the Roman pavement. Coming Way, which we could see at on a stretch of it, at the foot frequent intervals close beside of a hill, and hidden with dust, the modern track. It is paved smashed our luggage-carrier, and with large flagstones, laid so loosened the machine,--more than accurately together that it is the whole trip had done. Passed still, in some places, as smooth Rignano,--usual sensation,--good and even as the floor of a _café_. Under Soracte all church, and everywhere the tufts morning. Reached Castel Nuovo di of grass found it difficult to Porta at 11. (Distance to this root themselves into the village from Cività Castellana interstices.... Its course is much farther than from it to straighter than that of the road Rome, yet we reached it one hour of to-day.... I forget where we sooner than Hawthorne did, finally lost it.... Passed starting out from Rome.) Road got through the town of Rignano--road worse and worse. Finally nothing still grew more and more but ruts and stones. Hills not to picturesque.... Came in sight of be laughed at (though Hawthorne the high, flat table-land, on thought them scarcely which stands Cività perceptible). Arrived at the Castellana.... After passing over Porta del Popolo about half-past the bridge, I alighted with J. one. (About three and a half and R. and made the ascent on hours' better time than foot.... At the top our vetturino Hawthorne.) Distance, thirty-five took us into the carriage again, Italian miles. and quickly brought us to what appears to be a very good hotel.... After a splendid dinner we walked out into the little town, etc. SECOND DAY. OUR SECOND DAY FROM ROME. Roused at 4 o'clock this morning; (We never got up at any such ... ready to start between 5 and unearthly hours as Hawthorne 6.... Remember nothing indulged in.) Left Terni at 11 particularly till we came to o'clock, having been obliged to Borghetto.... After leaving get a new brake made. Terni, dead Borghetto, we crossed the broad level, in low valley,--straight, valley of the Tiber.... Otricoli wide road, ten miles across the by and by appeared.... As the valley,--surface of the road road kept ascending, and as the good. Just outside of Narni road hills grew to be mountainous, we climbs up a steep hill into the had taken on two additional town. (There must have been an horses, making six in all, with a earthquake since Hawthorne's man and boy ... to keep them in time, as Terni, which he saw in a motion.... Murray's guide-book is high and commanding position, now exceedingly vague and stands in the lowest part of the unsatisfactory along this valley, with mountains all route.... Farther on [we saw] the around.) From Narni up nearly all gray tower of Narni.... A long, the way to Otricoli, with the winding street passes through exception of here and there such Narni, broadening at one point a steep descent that we had to into a market-place; ... came out hold the machine back with all from it on the other side.... The our might, riding for several road went winding down into the hours was almost impossible. peaceful vale.... From Narni to (Wish we had had six horses, a Terni I remember nothing that man, and a boy to pull us on.) need be recorded. Terni, like so From Otricoli, down and all many other towns in the across the valley, excellent neighborhood, stands in a high riding to Borghetto; then big and commanding position.... We hill up, out on to the Campagna, reached it between 11 and 12.... and up and down--good road--all It is worth while to record, as the way to Cività Castellana, history of _vetturino_ commissary which we reached between 6 and 7. customs, that for breakfast we Terrible sensation!!! (This day had coffee, eggs, and bread and Hawthorne came in two hours butter; for lunch, an omelette, ahead; but he had six horses and stewed veal, figs and grapes, and the hills in his favor.) We eat two decanters of wine; for dinner every day coffee, bread and an excellent vermicelli soup, two butter, and rolls in the morning; young fowls fricasseed, and a for lunch, a beefsteak, or hind-quarter of roast lamb, with macaroni, and fruit, _no wine_, fritters, oranges, and figs, and but fresh lemons and water; for two more decanters of wine. dinner, soup, two meats, fruit, and a _fiasco_ of wine. Distance about thirty-three Italian miles. (We carried Baedeker, and not Murray, and found it not unsatisfactory.) THIRD DAY. THIRD DAY. At 6 o'clock this morning ... we Left Assisi about 8. Splendid drove out of the city gate of coast down into the valley. Terni.... Our way was now through Beautiful ride over the the vale of Terni.... Soon began undulating road, past Spello to to wind among steep and lofty Foligno, not stopping in the hills.... Wretched villages.... latter place, excepting to have At Strettura we added two oxen to accidents wished us by an old our horses, and began to ascend woman we almost ran over. Then the Monte Somma, which ... is through the beautiful valley of nearly four thousand feet high the Clitumnus--grand road--lovely where we crossed it. When we came day and wonderfully fair country. to the steepest part of the (We saw no beggars.) Rode by the ascent, Gaetano _allowed us to little temple spoken of by Pliny. walk_.... We arrived at Spoleto Ate some bread and cheese at Le before noon.... After lunch ... Vene. Reached Spoleto at one; we found our way up a steep and lunched; then rode up the steep narrow street that led us to the street, through the gate at the city gate.... Resumed our other end of the city, and then journey, emerging from the city began a tremendous climb of six into the classic valley of the miles over Monte Somma, most of Clitumnus.... After passing Le which we had to walk. At last had Vene, we came to the little hard work to push. Coming finally temple ... immortalized by to the top, found the descent on Pliny.... I remember nothing else the other side even steeper. of the valley of Clitumnus, Where it was a little less steep, except that the beggars ... were we got on the machine, put on the well-nigh profane in the urgency brake, which came off in my hand. of their petitions. The city of Bad brake was the one defect in Terni seems completely to cover a our tandem. Had to walk the rest high peaked hill.... We reached of the way. In Strettura, men set Foligno in good season _yesterday bull on us. (Not quite so afternoon_. [This passage really pleasant as Hawthorne's belongs to his fourth day of experience.) Arrived in Terni at travel, but as it shows at what 8 o'clock, having walked the last time of the third day he reached few miles by moonlight,--about Foligno, I have included it with forty miles all together, of the third.] which we walked fully the last fourteen. (Made in one day what Hawthorne did in a day and a half.) FOURTH DAY. FOURTH DAY. I have already remarked that it (Expenses of this trip about five is still possible to live well in francs a day each.) Rode from Italy at no great expense, and Perugia to Assisi, a distance of that the high prices charged to fourteen miles, in about two _forestieri_ are artificial, and hours. Splendid coast down the ought to be abated.... We left hill outside of Perugia (up which Foligno betimes in the morning; Hawthorne walked). Crossed the ... soon passed the old town of Tiber. Visited Santa Maria degli Spello.... By and by we reached Angeli. Awful stitch in my side. Assisi. We ate our _déjeûner_, Climbed up into Assisi, where we and resumed our journey.... We stayed all afternoon, to recover, soon reached the Church of St. and to see the church. Mary of the Angels.... By and by came to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up.... The coach lagged far behind us. FIFTH DAY. FIFTH DAY. Left Perugia about 3 o'clock I covered their fifth and sixth to-day, and went down a pretty days' ride, this time by myself on steep descent.... The road began to the tricycle, in three hours and a ascend before reaching the village half actual riding time, and was of Mugione; ... between 5 and 6 we pulled up the long hill into came in sight of the Lake of Perugia, in a most easy and Thrasymene, ... then reached the delightful way, behind the town of Passignano. (He stayed diligence. there all night. SIXTH DAY. We started at 6 o'clock ... [for Arezzo]. We saw Cortona, like so many other cities in this region, on its hill, and arrived about noon at Arezzo. From Arezzo, Hawthorne went directly to Florence in one day, over a road which Italian cyclers have told me is excellent, and which is the post-road to Rome. We went by way of Montepulciano and Siena, being between two and three weeks on the way. I hope this short account of about one third of our ride will convince other people that cycling is far quicker than the old posting system, far pleasanter than riding in a stuffy railway-carriage, which whirls you through tunnels, and far the best way in which to see Italy,--a country which abounds in magnificent roads, and which should be thoroughly explored by all cyclers who care for something beside record-making. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Transcriber Notes: Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_. Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS. Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is. In three instances there were cases where the word "eat" appeared one expect the word "ate". No change was made. The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs and so that they are next to the text they illustrate. In the Appendix, the pages were reformatted to to make it easier to read in an electronic form. Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted. 
52619	----	THE MEDICI BALLS [Illustration: BENOZZO GOZZOLI PINX ANDERSON PH. Lorenzo de' Medici ] The Medici Balls SEVEN LITTLE JOURNEYS IN TUSCANY ANNA R. SHELDON M. MOYCA NEWELL _OVER ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS_ CHARTERHOUSE PRESS NEW YORK 1904 COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY M. M. NEWELL _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_ SCHLUETER PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK _To_ Frances Cecilia Newell WE DEDICATE THIS BOOK PREFATORY NOTE [Illustration] Why the Medici family assumed the well-known device of red balls on a field of gold, is one of the vexed questions of heraldic history. Some hold that as the saints, Cosmo and Damian, who appear so often in the votive pictures of the Medici, were also patron saints of medicine and surgery, and because the name of the family signifies physicians, the balls may suggest pills (_palle_). Others think that a cluster of balls, formerly the sign of money-lenders, was adopted as a device by Giovanni de' Medici, founder of the greater branch of the illustrious house, who as a banker attained great wealth and influence. As the Medici identified themselves with the trading interests and government of Florence, and were connected with several noble Florentine families, their coat of arms became familiar throughout all that extensive territory subject to Florence in the fifteenth century. With its varied number of balls, or quartered with other arms, as charged with the royal lily of France, or surmounted by the keys of St. Peter and a pontiff's tiara, it greets the traveller at every turn, not only on palaces and city gates, but on illuminated manuscripts and choir books, on the covers of mediæval ledgers, and terra-cotta wine jars. Thus the title of "Medici Balls" has been given to the following record of seven little journeys in Tuscany by the authors, who in all their travels, even in lanes and modest farm-houses, have found themselves under the ægis of the powerful banker-princes of Florence. The shield, bearing seven red balls on a field of gold, represents the arms of Piero de' Medici, and the period when Medicean supremacy was at its height; in the sequence of balls employed by the various members of the family, it serves to connect the eight balls displayed on the arms of Cosimo, Pater Patriæ, the munificent financier, with the six balls of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in whom the glory and renown of the family culminated. CONTENTS PAGE THE MUGELLO 3 PRATO: A MEDIÆVAL JOURNEY 45 CHIANTI AND THE IMPRUNETA 73 CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANE, LORD OF LUCCA 101 PISTOJA, "CITY OF CINO" 123 A SUNDAY AMONG THE HILLS OF BRANCOLI 163 BARGA AND THE VALLEY OF GARFAGNANA 199 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Lorenzo de' Medici. _Photogravure_ _Frontispiece_ From "Procession of the Magi," Riccardi Palace, Florence. By Benozzo Gozzoli. PAGE Della Robbia Frieze 3 Badia a Settimo 4 Straw Plaiters, Mugnone Valley 7 A Loggia, Piero a Sieve 9 Palazzo Pubblico, Scarperia 11 The Main Street, Scarperia 13 Madonna and Child, Chapel of the Sacred Girdle, Duomo, Prato. By Giovanni Pisano 15 Ancient Campanile della Pieve, Borgo San Lorenzo 20 Torraccia Romanelli, Borgo San Lorenzo 21 A Farm-house, Mugello 22 Ponte d'Elsa, Mugello 23 Hill of Vespignano, Mugello 24 Round Tower of Vespignano, Mugello 26 Joachim Returning to the Sheepfold, Arena Chapel, Padua. By Giotto 29 From the Walls of Scarperia 31 A Country Road, Scarperia 32 Detail of Bronze Grille. Chapel of the Sacred Girdle, Prato 33 Portrait of Bianca Cappello, Uffizi, Florence. By Alessandro Allori 37 Coats of Arms of the Ubaldini and Vichio 40 The Procession of the Magi, Riccardi Palace, Florence. By Benozzo Gozzoli 43 Ornamental Band, Della Robbia 45 The Campanile, Prato. By Giovanni Pisano 46 Detail, Procession of the Magi, Riccardi Palace, Florence. By Benozzo Gozzoli 47 Arcades "Where Hang the Copper and Woolen Goods," Prato 50 The Fortress, Prato 51 The Cathedral of Prato 53 Garden Belonging to Lorenzo's Favorite Villa, Poggio a Caiano 56 Erroneously entitled in the book as "Villa of Petraia." External Pulpit, Cathedral, Prato. By Donatello 57 Madonna and Child, with Saints, Lunette Over Central Door, Duomo, Prato. By Andrea Della Robbia 61 Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Wife of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. Wearing the Marsyas Jewel of the Medici. By Botticelli 65 Coat of Arms of Prato 68 Detail of Frieze. S. Maria Delle Carceri, Prato. By Andrea Della Robbia 69 The Piazza, Greve, Chianti 73 Ponte Falciano, Chianti 74 Ponte Capello, River Greve 75 Vitigliano, Chianti 76 Old Watch-Tower, Chianti 77 Panzano from a Distance, Chianti 78 S. Leolino a Flacciano, Pieve di Panzano, Chianti 79 A Villa in Panzano, Chianti 81 Old Wine Jar, Chianti 83 A Peasant of Chianti 85 The Stately Cypress 87 A Country Road, Chianti 89 Piazza, Impruneta 90 A Street, Impruneta 91 Predella to Tabernacle, Chapel of the Holy Cross, Impruneta. By Luca della Robbia 93 Adoring Angels, Impruneta. By Luca della Robbia 95 Coat of Arms, Courtyard, Palazzo Cenami, Lucca 99 Della Robbia Ornament 101 Apse End and Campanile, San Andrea, Serravalle 103 The Rocca of Castruccio, Serravalle 104 Olive Trees 105 Iron Lantern, Palazzo Baroni, Lucca 107 Monument of General Bartolommeo Colleoni, Venice. By A. Verrocchio 108 Moat of Castle Sarzanella, Sarzana 109 Monument of General Gattamelata, Padua. By Donatello 111 Statue of John Hawkwood, Cathedral, Florence. By Paolo Uccello 112 Madonna and Child, with Two Saints, Castelfranco. By Giorgione 115 Portrait of a Young Florentine, Royal Gallery, Berlin. By Botticelli 116 Stemma of Serravalle 118 Medici Shield, Ospedale del Ceppo, Pistoja. Della Robbia 121 Viale dell'Arcadia, Pistoja 123 Shield of Pistoja, Supported by Bears 124 Piazza del Duomo, Pistoja 125 Coat of Arms, Pistoja. By Verrocchio 129 Bronze Candelabra, Duomo, Pistoja 132 Head of Filippo Tedici, Pistoja 133 Campanile, from Via Ripa del Sale, Pistoja 137 Loggia, Ospedale del Ceppo, Pistoja 141 Coat of Arms of Hospital, Pistoja. Della Robbia 145 Healing the Sick, Detail of Frieze, Ospedale del Ceppo, Pistoja. By Giovanni della Robbia 149 Via Abbi Pazienza 152 Coronation of the Virgin, Ospedale del Ceppo, Pistoja. By Benedetto Buglione 153 Adoration of the Magi, S. Andrea, Pistoja 155 Monument of Cardinal Forteguerra, S. Cecilia, Rome. By Mino da Fiesole 157 Virgin and Child, with Saints, Cathedral, Lucca. By Fra Bartolommeo 161 Bastions of San Colombo, Lucca 163 Old City Wall and Moat, Lucca 164 Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, Cathedral, Lucca. By Jacopo della Quercia 165 On the Ramparts, Lucca 168 San Frediano, Lucca 169 S. Frediano, from the Guinigi Tower, Lucca 171 A "Grey Tower" 173 Ponte a Moriano, Serchio River 175 An Old Stone Bridge 177 Bridge Over the Serchio 178 Church of Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 179 San Lorenzo, Brancoli 181 Interior of Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 183 Holy-water Stoup, Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 186 Baptismal Font, Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 187 Detail of Pulpit, Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 189 Detail of Pulpit, Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 190 Pulpit, Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli 191 Three Coats of Arms, Lucca 194 St. George and the Dragon, Brancoli. By Andrea and Giovanni della Robbia 195 Sarzanella 199 Bridge at Vinchiana 200 "The Devil's Bridge," Borgo a Mozzano 201 Bagni di Lucca 203 Parish Church, Loppia 204 The Cathedral, Barga 205 Door of the Cathedral, Barga 208 Interior of the Cathedral, Barga 211 Pulpit in Cathedral, Barga 215 Adoration of the Magi, Pulpit, Cathedral, Barga 219 Tabernacle in Cathedral, Barga, Della Robbia School 223 Assumption of the Virgin, Church of the Capuchins, Barga. By Giovanni della Robbia 227 "Violet-eyed Tuscan Oxen" 229 Trappings on Horse of Lorenzo de' Medici 230 THE MUGELLO [Illustration] THE MUGELLO [Illustration] Every year Italy is thronged with thousands of travellers who are thoroughly familiar with the larger cities of Tuscany: Florence, Lucca, Siena, and Leghorn are crowded with visitors, while Florence has practically become the Italian home of English and American wanderers; they not only fill hotels, pensions, and apartments, but occupy many of the villas on neighbouring hillsides. Fiesole's terraces are converted into tea-gardens, and resound with Anglo-Saxon chaffer for straw fans and baskets. San Miniato, with its incomparable view of the city, also caters to the universal cry for "the cup that cheers," which outrivals in popularity the noble old Tuscan-Romanesque church hard by. Trim Americans are met at every turn; Settignano, Bello-Sguardo, Marignano, Badia a Settimo, and the rest, are frequent haunts; and the padrona of the vine-covered terrace at Majano, where stone-cutters are wont to sit about rude stone tables and drink their wine, has learned the "afternoon tea" secret for the _gentili forestieri_, who walk out from Florence to enjoy the charming view. Convenient tram lines run to the more distant and choicest places, and whoever demands more retired ways may board one of those nondescript vehicles, by courtesy called "diligence," which are seen on every country road leading from Florence, making their way through pretty valleys and hill towns. The Tuscan diligence is an institution in its way, though not always inviting in appearance; usually covered with dust, its brown canvas curtains strapped down, excluding all air and views, and "full up" to bursting with all sorts and conditions of humanity and luggage. However, one is always sure of the most respectful and obliging driver, smiling and kindly travelling companions, and no end of interesting chat and story at the cost of a few centesimi. Thus the country distant from the usual railway lines is every year becoming more and more familiar and appreciated, although there are still many delightful "untrodden ways" known but to the few, who are good pedestrians or devoted lovers of nature and "dear country places." Follow up any of the Tuscan rivers--through the Val d'Ema, Val di Pesa, Val d'Elsa, or the valleys of the Mugnone, Sieve, Bisenzio, and Ombrone, every one an affluent of the Arno--and you will find a pathway of delight, a real progress through a world of exquisite colour, form, and fragrance. Yet it is not easy to turn away from Florence and wander off in pastures new; like a siren, she holds us in willing thraldom by the infinite variety of charms so potent that all the world beyond her warm, grey walls becomes vague and unreal. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ BADIA A SETTIMO] But suddenly, on a crisp spring morning, a quick turn from a narrow street gives us a vision of the hills, olive-grey, brown, and purple--hills with the Apennine heights beyond. The spell is broken, our hearts burn for the "spring running," and, as in old Chaucer's day, "Then longen folk to go on pilgrimage." We have the old poet's authority that England's Spring came in April, but to us in Tuscany this year she appeared by the middle of January, and has never for a day turned her face, coming safely through the "ides of March," even to the end of April in almost continuous sunshine and ever-increasing bloom. Blackthorn, almond, and fruit trees, daisies and daffodils, violets and roses, rival each other in bewildering loveliness wherever the eye may turn; out of city gates the paths lie luringly open to hillsides clad with ilex and magnolia, to hidden valleys, and the snow-clad Apennines beyond Vallombrosa. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ STRAW PLAITERS IN THE MUGNONE] We yearn for unbroken space with no dome but the blue above, no tower but the stately cypress; our resolution is quickly taken to climb out of Val d'Arno, and slip over yonder delectable heights into the Mugello. Diligence and tram are too slow for our patience; therefore, at the easy hour of nine, on a clear, sunny morning, we leave the city by the Florence and Faenza railway, run through the pretty valley of the Mugnone, pass the stone-quarries close under the northern flank of steep Fiesole, discover a world of beauty unknown to us before, dash in and out of tunnels, catching flying glimpses of a broken countryside, grey-walled towns, and bosky slopes; thus pushing northward for half a dozen miles, where the line loops back toward the south, and gives us once more, and from a greater height, the charming view of Fiesole's northern slope. Now the railroad rises rapidly by well-built viaducts, galleries, and tunnels to Vaglia, only nine miles from Florence, as the crow flies, then passes swiftly over the ridge which separates the valleys of the Arno and Mugnone from the Mugello region. There are no more views of populous Fiesole; we are in a new world, over which Mr. Ruskin feels justified in making lament. After expanding with his customary word-painting upon the view from Fiesole over Val d'Arno, he continues thus: "The traveller passes the Fiesolan ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden lonely. Here and there, indeed, are scattered houses of a farm grouped gracefully upon the hillsides; here and there the fragment of a tower upon a distant rock; but neither gardens nor flowers nor glittering palaces exist." To us, however, the scene is charming; the still distant valley spreads out broad and fertile to the sun, well-watered by the Sieve and its many tributaries, or _torrenti_, all of which hasten to lose themselves later in the Arno, just within the western boundary of the Casentino. Surrounding the happy valley rises a cordon of mountains belonging to the Central Apennine range--among them Monte Giove, 3,255 feet above sea-level, and Monte Morello, 3,065 feet. The latter peak is clearly seen from Florence, and in its varied moods is regarded as a natural weather bureau by the people, who are fond of repeating the old saying, "Take your umbrella when Monte Morello puts on his cap." [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ A LOGGIA, PIERO A SIEVE] Descending the narrow pass of Carza, the train reaches Piero a Sieve, where we leave it to pursue its way through a most picturesque country, over the mountains to Faenza, while we explore the quaint little hamlet of Piero a Sieve, which clings by grey walls and terraces to the side of a steep hill, crowning which are the massive fortifications of San Martino. We climb to the fortress, take a snap-shot at one of the loggias, where the group of ever-busy women in bright skirts and kerchiefs would make a delightful picture in water-colour, have a look at the parish church, with its so-called Della Robbia font, and then proceed on our way to Scarperia, three miles to the northwest, which is our destination. [Illustration: _Alinari_ PALAZZO PUBBLICO, SCARPERIA] After judicious bargaining at the station with drivers of a varied assortment of country vehicles, we are cleverly packed into two small, rattling, rather clumsy but very comfortable carts, one drawn by a phenomenally brisk donkey, and away we bowl toward the towers of Scarperia. Somehow the sunshine and exhilarating air incites us into rebellion against Mr. Ruskin's opinion that the scene is "only a grey extent of mountain ground, tufted irregularly with ilex and olive, a scene not sublime, for its forms are subdued and low; not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown fields and tended pastures; not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and sorrowful." [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE MAIN STREET, SCARPERIA] For us a golden touch is laid on everything; we love the plain of olive orchards and vineyards and peaceful fields; the large, white, violet-eyed Tuscan oxen driven by kindly faced peasants; even the donkey is a nonesuch, and we wax poetic over the greenest of green patches of grain in vineyards, the rows of lopped elm-trees married to the vines, which are festooned from trunk to trunk. Along the way we meet the country doctor, riding madly in his cart drawn by a quick-stepping pony. Another Dr. Antonio, we say, ready in case of accident to invent and furnish us anything from bathing-machines and coffee-pots, instruction in botany and art, to a serenade, or making butter to accompany the good bread of Scarperia, unbaked loaves of which we see carried into the town on a long board over a man's shoulder. But now we are rattling up the main street of Scarperia, the donkey trying his best to get ahead, and it is high time to speak like a guide-book, though no account we have found condescends to give the population of the place, which is the way every well-regulated book should begin. Murray's description is summed up in half a dozen lines, as follows: "Scarperia was built in 1306 by the Commune of Florence to curb the pride of the Ubaldini and other rebels of the Mugello. The parish church has some fine cloisters. In the Palazzo Vecchio there are interesting frescoes. There is a large industry of scissors." This is all. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Giovanni Pisano_ MADONNA AND CHILD OF THE SACRED GIRDLE DUOMO, PRATO] We hasten to buy scissors, also the ubiquitous postal card, visit the cloisters, which are really good, and then hang about the old Palazzo, which would alone make the town interesting. Its tower, or campanile, is remarkably fine, simpler and a thought more serious, perhaps, but hardly less beautiful, than its more famous sister of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; and the good people of Scarperia proudly declare that it was at least designed by the same master hand--that of Arnolfo di Cambio. It rises gracefully as a lily on its grey stalk, dominating the clustering red roofs below and peering at us over the cloister roof, as if to say, "We belonged together in those stirring mediæval days when municipal life had two centres: the Palazzo Pubblico and the Duomo--Civil Government and the Church." The façade of the old palace is a mad eruption of various coats of arms, or _stemmi_, carved in stone or formed in reliefs of glazed terra-cotta, and no less than fourteen of these are products of the Della Robbia atelier, bearing the devices of great families of Tuscany; and here, if we were wise in heraldry, might the whole history of the Mugello be set forth as it transpired in those adventurous days before its rebels had been curbed! Prominent and oft-repeated among these _stemmi_ is the Medici shield emblazoned with its balls, or pills, suggesting the traditional origin of that famous house and proud device. The story runs that, when Charlemagne made his historic descent upon Italy, among his followers was a certain brave and noble knight named Avérard Medici, who, amid the Apennines, encountered and challenged to mortal combat a mighty giant called Mugello, who ruled with a high and cruel hand all this portion of Italy. After a long and furious battle the giant was done to death, and Avérard, as victor, took possession, not only of his arms and personal goods, but all the lands under his sway--that is, the territory bearing his name to this day. What is more, the six dents on Avérard's golden buckler, which had been made by the furious blows of Mugello's iron-spiked club, became the Medici device. There is historical evidence that an early Medici settled in this region and possessed great estates and castles, to which he very shrewdly retired whenever his enemies in Florence became too troublesome. There is also proof that while Cosimo, "father of his country," beautified Florence with noble villas, palaces, and churches, he did not neglect the cradle of his race, but built in the Mugello the two convents of the Bosco and of St. Francis. We enter the old palace through a stately atrium, or vestibule; the walls are covered with coats of arms and faded frescoes, and beyond is a pleasant little court open to the sky, but serving the municipality to-day no further than as a chicken enclosure. Then we ascend the broad stone stairway to the municipal offices; the faded frescoes of Our Lady and saints in the anteroom are doubtless good, and deserve more attention than we give them; but our eyes are enthralled by the superb view from the window of the river-laced plain and encircling mountains. After lunch at the modest _albergo_, where kindly faces and willing service more than compensate for an indifferent cuisine, we set forth for a long drive of exploration through the Mugello. Our carriage, "the calash," is apparently an institution of Scarperia, and is such a pleasant surprise that we heartily commend it to all fellow travellers. It is a rather light, well-hung, smart-looking vehicle, something between a victoria and landau in shape, with comfortable seats which easily accommodate our party of five. It is drawn by a pair of glossy chestnut roadsters unvexed by checking-straps or throat-chains, and stepping off freely at a brisk, even trot, which they maintain steadily during the entire drive of thirty miles. Our handsome young driver is in keeping with his equipage--kind and skilful with his horses, and courteous in answering our many questions. Thus we drive all the sunny afternoon through the fertile and well-tilled valley, over the best of roads, passing comfortable farm-houses, orchards, and vineyards, where the peasants are busy trimming and tying the vines or turning the earth with awkward, primitive spades. We cross and recross the river Sieve over picturesque stone bridges half hidden by birches and elms. [Illustration: ANCIENT CAMPANILE DELLA PIEVE BORGO S. LORENZO] Our first halt is at Borgo San Lorenzo, chief town, or capital, of the Mugello, situated on the Sieve, also on the direct railway line to Faenza, and containing about three thousand inhabitants. While lacking, one cannot tell why, the charm of Scarperia, the town has its attractions, notably two noble and well-preserved gateways, several towers, and many a cluster of rich-coloured, irregular roofs. Especially interesting is the lofty Antico Campanile della Pieve--a battered veteran keeping its time-honoured watch and ward over the Sieve valley, its sides showing many a scar and patch, and its simple, conical roof, like an old cap pulled low over its sleepless eyes. [Illustration: TORRACCIA ROMANELLI, BORGO S. LORENZO] We enter the town through the fifteenth century gateway, its battered watch-tower speaking volumes of that olden time when Mugello's rebels worked their stark will along these narrow thoroughfares. The substantial, old Palazzo del Podestà, minus a tower, looks somewhat meekly forth on its ancient square, or piazza, as it has done for centuries. Its façade is hung thick with the shields of turbulent lords, ten of whom called on the Della Robbia art to set forth their emblems here, also to fashion glazed terra-cotta Madonnas for the churches of St. Catherine and St. Stephen, hard by. [Illustration: A FARM-HOUSE, MUGELLO] [Illustration: PONTE D'ELSA, MUGELLO] We can stop but a few moments at Borgo San Lorenzo, and soon drive on, past a little shrine at the street corner and under the battlemented tower called Torraccia Romanelli, to our country roads once more. Outside the walls the country assumes a more broken and hilly appearance, fewer cultivated fields, and more pasture where a few sheep graze; irregular farm-houses of rough, grey stone, with loggias and sloping roofs of red tiles, set amidst scattering trees, many of them cypress, dark and rusty as an outworn mourning coat. The accompanying picture shows a representative house of the country, and we are told that this one had its little romance and love's young dream. It is a wrinkled old woman you see trudging down the hillside to fill her copper bucket at the stream; but in yonder corner loggia is a sparkling-eyed young _contadina_, some pretty Tessa, who as she spins her flax is thinking of a handsome and dashing young Florentine who often finds his way to the farm-house, which belongs to his uncle's country villa hard by. A bit farther on we reach the pretty double-arched bridge Ponte d'Elsa, the very one, our driver says, where Cimabue met the shepherd boy Giotto; and here too, nibbling the scanty grass along the roadside, are surely the descendants of Giotto's sheep, even the new-born lamb looking quite mediæval. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ HILL OF VESPIGNANO, MUCELLO] The hill of Vespignano, Giotto's birthplace, is much too steep for the chestnuts and calash; moreover, we are only too glad of an excuse for walking up the pretty path cut into the hillside, bordered by trees hung with ivy, and leading to a serried rank of young cypresses, ranged together like a black watch on the crest of the hill, as if to guard the modest stone building, which tradition says is the very house where the artist Giotto was born. Even for a shepherd's dwelling, the house is small and uninteresting, which naturally flings a suspicion over its verity; nevertheless, the spirit which actuates the preservation of all historical sites and relics by the Italian government cannot be too highly commended. The house is converted into a meagre museum, and kept in good order on estates at present belonging to the Villa Capriani-Cateni, the various buildings of which cover the crest of a considerable height and possess a noble outlook into the near hills, which are now taking on a hazy blue mystery in the afternoon light. A large portion of the villa is of modern architecture, plain and dignified, but the massive, square battlemented tower at one corner is of quite an early date, perhaps the thirteenth century, while not far away is the ruined prison-house of ruddy grey stones and brickwork, with a picturesque round tower, presumably of a still earlier time, and reminding one of the ancient towers still found in parts of Ireland. The whole pile speaks eloquently of a long residence on this hilltop of a people whose wants were few, their tastes stern and simple as the mighty Apennines which encircled them. A fine-looking old man is weaving an osier basket as he sits on the terrace in the shadow of the old tower. He answers all our questions with quiet courtesy; but upon our offering him a fee, as we have learned is generally expected, it is gently but firmly declined, and we walk away somewhat abashed, thinking of the varied influences which surrounded young Giotto amid such pastoral scenes and such kindly, self-respecting people. He certainly must have carried much of the experience and knowledge of his shepherd life into his art. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ ROUND TOWER, VESPIGNANO] In the Arena Chapel, Padua, one of the finest of the frescoes is that of Joachim returning to the sheepfold, where Giotto shows his intimate knowledge of a shepherd's surroundings and animal forms, but particularly of the characteristics of sheep, giving to each one an individuality which only a close observer could have done. There is the same quality in one of the sculptures on his tower in Florence, where the puppy, with an absurd expression of anxious responsibility, is guarding the sheep. As the shadows lengthen and the mountains are gleaming in purple and gold, we return to Scarperia for the night, and enjoy such sleep in the clean, coarse, homespun linen on our beds, as only a day in the brisk open air can give. The morrow is Sunday, and the old Piazza, between church and palace, is filled with the people coming and going to mass, and to chaffer with the pedlar displaying his wares on a little cart, consisting of a slender stock of kerchiefs, stuffs, bright toys, and various homely utensils, which he cries as lustily as another Autolycus: "Will you buy any tape, Or lace for your cape, My dainty duck, my dear-a? Come, buy of me! come buy, come buy!" Both men and women have good faces, with that kindly responsive and patient expression characteristic of the Italian peasants; they are interested in everything, particularly in the _forestieri_, who in their turn enjoy the groups of women and children in gay kerchiefs and gowns, making a pretty picture in the old grey square. We walk through the narrow streets, sit on the city walls which still partially surround the town, and look down on the pretty road overhung with trees, where the trailing-footed, white oxen slowly come and go, placid and restful. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Giotto_ JOACHIM RETURNING TO THE SHEEPFOLD, ARENA CHAPEL, PADUA] We follow the _contadini_ out of the old city gate on the road to St. Agatha's Church, lying between vineyards where the young grain is now pushing its green spears through the brown earth--for spring is later here than in Val d'Arno--and olive orchards, where clouds of silver-grey leaves quiver and shine in the light. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell._ FROM THE WALLS OF SCARPERIA] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ A COUNTRY ROAD, SCARPERIA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ DETAIL OF THE GRILLE CHAPEL OF THE SACRED GIRDLE, CATHEDRAL, PRATO] Taking another road, we saunter on a mile or so to the Villa Tolomei, belonging to an old Tuscan family, whose arms are a gold band with three green vine leaves on a blue field, and above a red label with the three gold lilies of Anjou. The grounds are pleasant, though somewhat neglected, but the prospect looking toward the mountains is entrancing; and the walk back toward Scarperia gives us a continual view of the fine campanile. By this time all the rebel blood of the Mugello is burning in our veins, and we demand a drive back to Florence; no railroads and tunnels for us if we must leave these "dear country places." We long to push eastward, only three paltry miles away, up to the very crests of the Apennines, where all the rivers hasten joyfully to the Adriatic. But not to-day may we follow fancy's lead eastward along curving Ronco's flowing stream, but again, with chestnuts and calash, are constrained to hold our way along the river bank, returning over the road to Piero a Sieve--was it only yesterday that we first knew it?--and strike at once into the famous old highway leading from Bologna to Florence, as it has done almost since the beginning of the Christian era. What a thoroughfare it has been! What mighty personages have trod this path with high hopes, burning spirits, and breaking hearts! "There is a joy in every spot made known in times of old, New to the feet, although each tale a hundred times be told." What hordes of barbarians and armies of haughty kings have swept this way; what great pageants and devout pilgrimages! We remember that one of Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan in 1471, when, accompanied by his wife, Bona of Savoy, in accomplishment of a vow, he made a pilgrimage to Florence in unparalleled splendour. There were twelve palanquins of cloth of gold borne on the backs of mules over the Apennines, preceded by fifty palfreys for the Duchess and her ladies when they preferred the saddle; fifty horses for the Duke and his gentlemen; five hundred foot-soldiers, one hundred mounted men-at-arms; fifty body-servants in livery of silk and silver, fifty huntsmen holding dogs in leash, fifty with falcon on wrist, each bird valued at two hundred golden florins, etc., etc. With all this pomp the train descended into the Val d'Arno, proceeded to Florence, and were received at the Medici palace in Via Larga, now the Cavour. When we reach Vaglia, again we struggle with the temptation to turn aside for the delightful walk of five miles to Bivigliano and find the Della Robbia Madonna and Saints (from the atelier) at the parish church of St. Romola, thence a mile farther to the foot of Monte Senario, 2,700 feet high, which overlooks us all the way. But we hold to our course, and after a few miles and a stiff walk of half an hour we mount to Pratolino, 1,512 feet, the highest point we touch, lying just below Monte Senario, and commanding an extensive view on every side. Near the village is the celebrated Villa of Pratolino, built originally in 1570 by Duke Francesco de' Medici for the reception of his wife, the beautiful and notorious Bianca Cappello. It was surrounded by noble gardens and terraces, and because of its superb situation became the favorite residence of the luxury-loving Duchess. The property is now owned by the Prince Demidoff, but nothing remains of the original villa except a colossal crouching figure, personifying the Apennines, which is ascribed to John of Bologna. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Alessandro Allori_ PORTRAIT OF BIANCA CAPPELLO UFFIZI, FLORENCE] Our Mugello excursion is over; we are slipping through the Mugnone and down into Val d'Arno. First Fiesole welcomes us; then the dear, familiar towers of Florence, the fairest city in the world; only a poet can convey the charm of this exquisite scene. "Few travellers can forget," says Mr. Ruskin, "the peculiar landscape of this district of the Apennines. As they ascend the hill which rises from Florence to the lowest peak in the ridge of Fiesole they pass continually beneath the walls of villas bright in perfect luxury and beside cypress hedges inclosing fair terraced gardens, where masses of oleander and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a picture, inlay alternately upon the blue sky their branching lightness of pale-rose color and deep-green breadth of shade, studded with walls of gleaming silver; and shining at intervals through the framework of rich leaf and rubied flower the far-away bends of the Arno beneath its slopes of olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains tossing themselves against the western distance, where the streak of motionless clouds hover over the Pisan sea." [Illustration: UBALDINI] [Illustration: VICCHIO] PRATO: A MEDIÆVAL JOURNEY [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Benozzo Gozzoli_ THE PROCESSION OF THE MAGI CHAPEL OF THE RICCARDI PALACE, FLORENCE] [Illustration] PRATO: A MEDIÆVAL JOURNEY [Illustration] Thrice had we been in Florence and never seen Prato, only twelve miles away. Many times had we noted in passing where the waters of her little river, the Bisenzio, join the Arno, and wished to follow its banks through the plain to the city whose fortunes and history are so identified with those of Florence. There was no good reason for not going to Prato; there are several ways of doing it--by diligence, tram, or steam; and Murray declares that half a day will suffice to see the town. So one hot day we took the plunge, boarded the tram, first having provided a bountiful luncheon, for of course the inns would be impossible. We can not recommend that tram ride. The line passes through a flat, dusty country, the service is unpardonably slow and tedious, and we were smothered in dust and very cross. But let us hasten to say that the journey itself was our only disappointment; all discomfort vanished with our arrival. We were charmed with our first glimpse of the city, and found the Albergo Giardino so good that we were obliged to apologize for bringing a luncheon and supplement it generously from the hotel _menu_. Temper restored and at peace with all the world, we set forth to prove Herr Baedeker's statement that a visit to Prato is "indispensable to those who desire to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the early Renaissance style of Florence;" for which same thorough acquaintance we had allowed ourselves four hours, forsooth! The Prato of to-day has, of course, its praiseworthy modern enterprise and industries: the women are picturesquely busy at every street corner with straw plaiting, there is a good trade in woolen cloths, and the bright red caps (_calabarsi_), made here are greatly demanded in the Levant; in side streets we come upon shops hung with gleaming copper vessels of every sort and shape, and the sound of the coppersmith's hammer rings out merrily on the clear air. It is said that the people have a reputation for rudeness and turbulence, but what can you expect from a town which, having made the good fight for freedom, lost its independence and its identity in that of another city, that was once captured by the redoubtable Castruccio, and, to crown all disaster, was from 1512, for twenty-two years, made to suffer all the atrocities that Spanish cruelty could devise? After all, the City of the Meadow (_prato_) is in no sense a modern town; its ancient walls are still intact; the castle, if fallen from its high estate as a citadel, is still a delight to all the snap-shotting fraternity; and if the streets are no longer gay with ruffling _bravos_ in their fine attire, the ancient palaces of the Commune and Pretorio still hold their own in point of noble architecture and as venerable centres of justice and good government. [Illustration: _M.M. Newell_ _Giov. Pisano_ THE CAMPANILE, PRATO] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Benozzo Gozzoli_ DETAIL OF THE PROCESSION OF THE MAGI CHAPEL OF THE RICCARDI PALACE, FLORENCE] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ ARCADES WHERE HANG THE COPPER AND WOOLEN GOODS] Very different, indeed, must it have been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Prato was in the zenith of her wealth and pride, when Donatello and Fra Lippo Lippi, Mino da Fiesole, and the Pisani were busy there, and all the world was running to see their work; crowned heads and critics, humble aspirants and cavalcades of brilliantly attired Florentines were arriving daily to admire and criticize the new art. The jaded tourist of to-day, if a true lover of nature and history, thinks yearningly of the mediæval journeyings over these roads; of the humble enthusiast making his way on foot, and of gay trains of mounted nobles riding leisurely through these regions of delight. Benozzo Gozzoli has shown us how it was done in his noble fresco "Procession of the Magi," painted on the walls of the Riccardi Palace to commemorate the visit of the Eastern Emperor, John Palæologos, in 1439, who, according to an inscription in the Duomo of Prato, made an excursion thither from Florence accompanied by the illustrious Bessarion and a suite of six hundred cavaliers magnificently appointed. The "three kings" in the fresco are represented by the Emperor, the patriarch Joseph, and the young Lorenzo de' Medici, who are surrounded by theologians and scribes, attended by a train of cardinals, bishops, and nobles, with their servants and horses, in splendid array. The painted scene is full of the vigour and freshness of spring--of that spring when men awoke to the force and meaning of human existence, "freedom of thought, beauty of the world, and goodness of youth and strength and love and life." Those gay young cavaliers prancing over the plain, exuberant with their new joy in nature, colour, and splendour of dress, are equally keen in their intellectual freshness; every man is a poet, Lorenzo de' Medici himself the "most typical poet of his century," and their every verse rings with the burden, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE FORTRESS] "I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. Violets and lilies grew on every side Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful, Golden and white and red and azure-eyed; Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful, To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay. I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May." [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE CATHEDRAL OF PRATO] Like Benozzo Gozzoli's train, we would sweep gaily from the court of the old Medicean palace into Via Larga, pass through the Piazza del Duomo, invoking the protection of Santa Maria del Fiore, cross the ample square of Santa Maria Novella, and so come to Porta al Prato, leading out to the plain, blue at this time of the year with the small Tuscan lily which gave Florence her device. Then, as now, we would pass through a busy suburb, or _borgo_, clustering about the gate, and take our way over the plain, thick set with little hamlets, vineyards, and orchards, and having always at our right hand the fair Tuscan hills, hung with blooming gardens and starred with shining villas. There is many a shrine or church along the way well worth a brief halt, and such a leisurely ride may easily include a short visit and refreshment at many of the Medici villas in the vicinity--at Careggi, finest of them all, first occupied by Cosimo, Pater Patriæ, rebuilt by Michelozzo, and where Lorenzo would, at a later day, gather about him the scholars, artists, and singers of that rich time; here also tradition places that improbable scene between Savonarola and Lorenzo at the time of his death. The grand old tower of Petraia next lifts its crown above a bosky hillside; this villa, now the Royal Villa, was the work of Brunelleschi, and may well be visited for the sake of its noble gardens and rare trees--among them an oak four hundred years old. It is said that Poggio a Caiano, somewhat farther on, was Lorenzo's favorite villa; earlier it belonged to the notorious Pistojese family, the Cancellieri, who boasted among their members eighteen knights with golden spurs, and whose quarrels originated the widespread feuds of the _Bianchi_ and _Neri_. Lorenzo loved the place, and called his favorite architect, Giuliano Giamberti, whom he had fondly nicknamed "San Gallo," to build his villa; the plain exterior is broken only by a fine classic portico, while the pride of the villa is the great hall with its beautiful barrel roof--a creation which Lorenzo had declared San Gallo could never accomplish. Later this architect built the little church of the Madonna delle Carceri[1] at Prato--"perhaps," says our critic, "the gem of the Laurentian age of architecture," and certainly "classical principles have never been employed with more sympathy and more originality." [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ GARDEN BELONGING TO THE ROYAL VILLA OF PETRAIA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Donatello_ EXTERNAL PULPIT, CATHEDRAL, PRATO] [Illustration: _Alinari_ Andrea della Robbia, 1489 MADONNA AND CHILD, WITH SAINTS LUNETTE OVER CENTRAL DOOR OF THE DUOMO, PRATO] Thus filling a memorable day, we should come at eventide, as the setting sun sifts its gold on olive-clad hills, to Prato on the Bisenzio, where even an emperor might study with interest the civilization of the West during the "age of the despots," and its reawakening in learning and art. He would also enjoy the hospitality, for which the city was noted when Florentine nobles made Prato their frequent residence and enriched their palaces there with every form of art and luxury, for which that time was celebrated. Prato, we find, has her tradition honouring her above all other cities in the world, and about which centres much of her importance in art. The story runs something like this: When the Blessed Virgin disappeared from earth, it seems that St. Thomas, father of skeptics, could not believe that she had been caught up into heaven, as everybody knows who looks at Italian paintings. The Virgin, to convince him, dropped from the clouds her girdle (_cintola_), which St. Thomas faithfully cherished while he lived. After his death the holy relic descended in course of time to a Greek priest. All this happened in the Holy Land, to which, in 1096, journeyed a certain Michael of Prato, who, being an Italian, was presumably a handsome man with a silver tongue, won the love of the aforesaid Greek priest's daughter, who brought the _sacra cintola_ as part of her dowry. Michael returned with his bride to Prato, where they lived the rest of their lives, and treasured the precious relic with the greatest reverence and care. Eventually it was transferred to the cathedral, where it is kept in a chest sculptured by Giovanni Pisano, and the keys thereof jealously guarded by the Bishop of the Diocese and worshipful Syndic of the City of Prato. The people hold the relic in the profoundest reverence; five times during the year it is, with great ceremony, publicly exhibited, until about the tradition has gathered a religious cult, to which many of the noblest works of art in the Duomo directly refer. The Duomo alone stands for seven centuries of art (though little remains of the earliest church, built in the eighth century), and, like its noble campanile, is the work of Giovanni Pisano. It is built of alternate bands of fine limestone and the dark green serpentine from neighboring Monte Ferrato.[2] On the northwest corner of the church is the external pulpit of Donatello, "Prince of Humanists," supported by Michelozzo's bronze capital. The pulpit is adorned with seven reliefs of dancing figures, "half-childish and half-mythical," with musical instruments. From this pulpit, if it chance to be May Day or Easter, we may witness the picturesque ceremony of exhibiting the _sacra cintola_ to the devout people in gala dress, kneeling in the piazza below. We enter the Duomo under Andrea della Robbia's lunette of the Madonna and Child, attended by St. Stephen and St. Laurence, the whole surrounded by a wreath of cherubs' heads; this relief, among the many Della Robbias in various churches and oratories of Prato, is the only one executed by Andrea's hand, and is a beautiful and serious work in the master's late manner. The interior of the church is in the form of a Latin cross, its roof supported by columns of serpentine; at the left is the chapel of the Sacra Cintola, surrounded by a fine bronze grille or screen, wrought by Bruno di Ser Lapo at Lorenzo's order. It is a masterpiece of graceful designs, circles, quatrefoils, wreaths, and acanthus leaves, among which appear tiny figures of cherubs supporting the arms of Prato--a shield powdered with the lilies of Anjou. Over the screen hang thirteen silver lamps of antique form, kept ever alight before the altar, where stands the charming Madonna by Giovanni Pisano and the sculptured ark or chest containing the sacred girdle. On the walls is Angelo Gaddi's painted story of the life and death of the Virgin and the gift of her girdle to St. Thomas. The same subject, splendidly painted by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, hangs over the great west door. In the nave, amid all this richness of colour, Mino da Fiesole's beautiful marble pulpit shines out with its delicately sculptured reliefs, supported on serpent-tailed sphinxes. Foremost, however, among the treasures of the Duomo, are Fra Lippo Lippi's frescoes in the choir, considered his most important work. Nothing, perhaps, puts one so fully in touch with fifteenth-century men and art as the career of this vigorous and prolific artist, a true son of the Renaissance, who, while he paints sweet-faced Madonnas, dimpled children, and holy saints on monastery walls, follows his own pleasures and trolls out his careless love song: "Who am I? Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend Three streets off--he's a certain ... how d'ye call-- Master--a ... Cosimo of the Medici, In the house that caps the corner. * * * * * * * * "And I've been three weeks shut within my mew A-painting for the great man, saints and saints And saints again. * * * * * * * * "I painted a St. Laurence six months since At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style." _Song_ "Flower o' the broom, Take away love and our earth is a tomb!" * * * * * [Illustration: _Braun, Clement et Cie._ _Botticelli_ LUCREZIA TORNABUONI, WIFE OF LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO WEARING THE MARSYAS JEWEL OF THE MEDICI] Our allotted "four hours" for Prato have come to an end, leaving many beautiful things unseen; the pleasant cloisters of San Francesco, the perfect Renaissance church of Santa Maria delle Carceri, and many others, must be left to that indefinite "next time." We hasten to the train, stopping only a moment at the shrine on the corner of Via S. Margherita, which contains Filippino Lippi's Madonna, where we murmur our thanks for a happy visit and make solemn vows to come soon again. [Illustration: STEMMA, PRATO] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _A. della Robbia_ DETAIL OF FRIEZE S. MARIA DELLE CARCERI, PRATO] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: E. Armstrong, M.A., _Lorenzo de' Medici_, p. 437. B. Berenson, _The Study and Criticism of Italian Art_. Second series. "A Word for Renaissance Churches."] [Footnote 2: The quarries of serpentine (verde di Prato) near Prato have been worked from a very early period. Their present output is valued at £1,000 per annum.--From _The British Diplomatic and Consular Report_, No. 570, 1901.] CHIANTI AND THE IMPRUNETA [Illustration] CHIANTI AND THE IMPRUNETA [Illustration] We made our first home in Florence with our good friend Signora V---- and her daughter. Our rooms were on the second _piano_, which meant three flights of uncompromising stone stairs, but once at the top our windows overlooked the piazza on one side, a pretty garden on the other, and gave us plenty of sunshine; moreover, we had a loggia, a very different matter from a balcony or gallery both in name and character, and from which we got charming views of the distant hills. Within was every creature comfort--not luxury, perhaps, but cleanliness, order, refinement, and an excellent table with two servants, merry-faced Dina and kindly Annunziatina, to serve and pet us, to identify our wants and interests as their most pleasurable duty, and teach us to say that Tuscan cookery and Tuscan servants, at their best, cannot be equaled the world over. The relation between the Italian family and servants is in many cases almost ideal: there is complete understanding and freedom of speech; the mistress talks and consults with the maid, and she, in turn, depends on her mistress as on a mother, and yet neither forgets her place or dignity. As for food, where will one find such sweet, tender vegetables, such crisp salads, and macaroni served in a dozen different ways, each better than the other? For the first month every dish brought to the table was a mystery and delightful surprise. How could one have lived half a century and never known _fritto misto_, or the changes that may be rung on rice or corn meal? What a far different object the _pomidoro_ is in Tuscany from the tomato of commerce in Boston! Then, who ever can measure the capacities of chestnuts? As for meats, if variety is limited, certainly the methods of cooking are legion, and one never seems cloyed with the Tuscan chicken; oil and cheese are delicious. For tea Italians care nothing, and their coffee leaves much to be desired; but who would drink either, or even the questionable water of Val d'Arno, when pure wine may be had for the asking? Tuscan wine certainly "needs no bush," but there are so many degrees, even of the boasted Chianti, that only the wise may be sure of the best. At our signora's we had the most delicious wine, both white and red, and, mark you, without extra charge. "It is Chianti," she said, when we asked its name. "But," we urged, "all the wine of Tuscany is Chianti, _non è vero_?" "Quite the contrary," was her answer, "it is only produced in a certain limited region on the hillsides of Chianti; we must take you some day to our vineyard in the true Chianti hills, where this wine was made." That happy day came in April, when the Tuscan spring was in its fullest bloom. We took a steam tram at the Porta Romano, which, as its name indicates, opens on the old Roman road to Siena, and at once began our climb into the hill country. Three miles from the gate, where the little rivers Ema and Greve join, we passed near the Certosa, more like a fortress than a monastery, seated so imposingly on its lofty hill; then our road led along the banks of the Greve till we reach the village of the same name, which is the chief town of the Chianti region. It was a beautiful ride, trending southeastward, and by many a turn and loop, affording views of glens, valleys, and hills, grey stone bridges, castles, villas, and churches. At Greve a carriage was waiting for those who wished to ride; others preferred the steep, breezy walk over the hills that separate Greve from Val di Pesa, from which we saw Florence in her Val d'Arno, twenty miles away. All along the road were ruins of ancient castles and piers of bridges, which once defined the marches between Siena and Florence, held only by constant war-fare; but now the crumbling towers keep watch and ward over peaceful olive groves and unmolested vineyards. [Illustration: _L. C. Dexter_ PONTE FALCIANO, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _L. C. Dexter_ PONTE CAPELLO. ALONG THE RIVER GREVE, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _M. S. Nixon_ VITIGLIANO, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ OLD WATCH-TOWER, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ PANZANO FROM A DISTANCE, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _L. C. Dexter_ S. LEOLINO A FLACCIANO. PIEVE DI PANZANO, CHIANTI] Morning wears on toward midday before we get a distant view of Panzano, a warm, grey tangle of towers and red roofs, looking calm and friendly enough in the sunshine, with groves and vineyards at its feet, but once doubtless given over to the dread clamour of war. A little farther on is the parish church, Pieve di S. Leolino, with its pleasant loggia and weather-beaten bell-tower. Within are two Della Robbias, a ciborium, and a tabernacle from the atelier, and not far away is the country villa, of Count Viviani della Robbia, the present representative of the illustrious family of artists. [Illustration: _L. C. Dexter_ A VILLA IN PANZANO, CHIANTI] Thus we approach the _podere_, or farm, in the very midst of the Chianti district, and can easily understand the charm it has for our host, and the reason he so often puts aside his books and walks over the hills from Florence to this charming spot, which has for over a century belonged in his family. "It is admirable land for the grape," we are told, "and the constituents of the soil most favourable for producing the best wine in the world, if it were only properly enriched and our methods of cultivation somewhat modernized; as it is, we must send our wine in casks to the French, who turn it into Bordeaux, and export it at very large prices." In spite of such obstacles, the fact remains that Italy is the first wine-growing country in the world, but ranks only third in wine exportation, although in the year 1902 she exported wine in casks to the value of over seven million dollars. We received a cordial welcome at our host's modest red villa, in and about which was a stir of preparation--glimpses of cheery faces and savoury odours escaping from the kitchen, all indicative of a _festa_. We were urged to taste delicious home-made cordial, and to admire our host's two treasures--the chair in which Garibaldi sat when he visited the villa, and an interesting wine-jar, or amphora, of elegant shape, with a decorated band and the Medici shield, bearing the seven _palle_, also an inscription. We then walked about the _podere_, or farm, through which runs the Roman road, and would have made advances to the noble white Tuscan watch-dog had we not been warned of danger. We visited the substantial grey stone house of the _contadino_, or farmer, hard by the villa, where it has sheltered members of the same family for generations; the grandmother, evidently mistress of the establishment, a fine, dignified-looking woman, welcomed us courteously, and gratified our curiosity by taking us over the house, which consisted of three rooms; she displayed, with evident pride, the spacious bedroom, where, probably, the whole family sleep; at all events, the bed alone would accommodate half a dozen children put crossways, and there were piles of blankets and linen, all spun and woven on the farm, furnishing an inexhaustible provision for additional couches. In the kitchen we saw the great kneading-trough for the _pane nero_ (brown bread), and the domed brick oven where it is baked; and in the loggia, or porch, stretched a long table with benches on either side, capable of seating twenty-four persons, the present census of the household. The house was clean and orderly, and suggested comfort and independence. Connected with the house, at a lower level, are the stables, where the handsome white oxen live, the ample hen-houses, and places for tools, grain, hay, etc. While we were walking about the house and sheds a peasant woman, distaff in hand and a basket on her arm, came down the Roman road, and stopped to gaze with astonishment on the group of _forestieri_, who, in their turn, gazed with interest into her good, honest face, and begged to take a photograph. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE OLD WINE JAR. CHIANTI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ A PEASANT OF THE CHIANTI] The method of letting and working farms in Tuscany is novel and peculiarly interesting to Americans, and we urged Signor G---- to enlighten our ignorance somewhat on the subject. It seems that his estates, like the majority in Tuscany, are let on the _mezzadria_ or _metayerage_ system--words indicating the halving, or equal division, of products between the proprietor and his farmer.[3] The proprietor's land in Tuscany is almost invariably divided into _poderi_ (_i.e._, small farms of about forty acres), and each farm is tilled by a single family, who must live on the land in a comfortable house (_casa colonica_), furnished by the proprietor, who also provides farming tools, cattle, etc. The system is of ancient date and has come to stand as an habitual form of contract, and in Tuscany has become legalized by almost universal usage. The contract between proprietor and _metayer_, or farmer, holds only from year to year, but is regularly renewed, and, in most cases, the same family remains on the farm for generations. Attached to the soil they cultivate, their interest is one with that of the proprietor, and they consider themselves as much owners of the land as the proprietor himself. So old is the system that language has been influenced by it; dating back to feudal times, the word _contadino_ meant "count's man," etc. There are various understood conditions attached to the contract. The _contadino_ must annually replant a certain number of shrubs and trees, keep roads and watercourses in order, and at Easter, Michaelmas, and Christmas supply the landlord with a fixed number of fowls and eggs. In his own house the _contadino_, with the title of _capoccia_ (head), represents the family in all its dealings with the outer world: assigns tasks, decides when the vintage or harvest shall begin, apportions personal expenses, and must be consulted before his children marry; also no member of the family may marry without the consent of the proprietor, and he may even require any member of the family to marry. By the father's side stands the _massaia_, the wife, who superintends all housework, governs the women, assigns tasks of weaving, spinning, and mending, presides over the poultry-yard, raising of the silk-worm, etc. The _mezzadria_ system, if not "the perfect social contract between the owner and tiller of the soil," as some claim, seems to be, in Tuscany at least, the solution of many vexed questions; it holds that labour is an absolute equivalent for capital. The _metayer_, or _contadino_, works directly for his own interests, and is generally in comfortable circumstances, has a good house, excellent food and necessary implements; he is usually shrewd, knows the capabilities of his farm, is an excellent judge of an ox, and can drive a sharp bargain; he is generally sober, self-respecting, and industrious; is seldom at a loss for money on account of the diversity of his crops; he always has something to sell; his calendar is about as follows, viz.: December to March, the olive harvest; June, the cocoons; July, the wheat harvest; September, the corn; October, the vintage. The obverse side of this picture is his hide-bound devotion to antiquated methods, and lack of educated intelligence; he knows nothing of the rotation of crops, the chemistry of plants and soil, or of modern implements and conveniences; he cuts his grain with a sickle and threshes it on the earth; the spade is his favourite tool, and an old Tuscan proverb runs, "The spade has a golden edge." As some one writes, Virgil's Georgics might practically be used in Tuscany as a "handbook of agriculture." Finally, the Tuscan farmer is satisfied with modest results; his average income for the year from his oil, wine, grain, vegetables, cattle, silk-worms, and straw plaiting is, approximately, three hundred dollars. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE STATELY CYPRESS] [Illustration: _M. S. Nixon_ A COUNTRY ROAD, CHIANTI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ PIAZZA OF THE IMPRUNETA] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ A STREET IN IMPRUNETA] The call to luncheon was certainly most welcome after our morning on the hills and lesson on agriculture; as for those superior persons who proclaim that the Italian lives principally on macaroni dried on the sidewalk, black bread, garlic, and sour wine, we only wish they might have shared our feast that day in the Chianti. There was _broda_ (soup), macaroni with _pomidoro_ sauce, home-grown chickens and fresh salad, _pane nero_, sweet and warm from the oven, with the "best butter," and a delicious, fresh goat's milk cheese, served on a flat basket of plaited green rushes, to say nothing of coffee and wine without stint--some of the Chianti made twenty years before; and now we know how the true Chianti ought to taste. It was a day never to be forgotten; and dreading its coming to an end, we said our reluctant good-bys to the hospitable family at Villa Rosso, and pursued our road homeward in a leisurely and roundabout way, stopping now to visit some wayside church, or tempted by charming country roads leading through vineyards and lines of cypresses to some hill-crowning villa in the distance. Finally we climbed the long hill clad with olive orchards to Impruneta, where, if not too much entranced with the superb view, we may remember is the famous shrine of La Madonna dell' Impruneta, one of the most important pilgrimage churches in Tuscany. The black image of the Madonna is said to have given its name to the village, but it is more probable that it is derived from the grove of stone pines crowning the hill, and is a corruption of La Pineta.[4] The tradition is that this Madonna was wrought by St. Luke the Evangelist, and, having been stolen from the church, it was sought in vain until a peasant, plowing in the field, saw his oxen fall suddenly on their knees and refuse to get up; search being made, the sacred image was found, and is said to have uttered a cry when struck by the spade. Whatever its origin, the Madonna is reverenced by the people, and Savonarola, we read, had faith in its miraculous power. On occasions of danger it is carried in solemn procession, but always closely veiled, and worshipped as the "Hidden Mother." After all, it is not so much for the black Madonna that our pilgrimage is made to Impruneta, but for the Chapel of the Madonna, which enshrines her, and the one opposite, called the Chapel of the Holy Cross, both adorned by Luca della Robbia, the head of his family and the great master of glazed terra-cotta; the Crucifixion in a chapel near the altar is also by his hand. The _predella_ of the Tabernacle of the Holy Cross is one of Luca's most beautiful creations, representing four buoyant, serious angels, ivory-tinted, against a pale blue background. Both chapels are roofed with charming designs, and about the top, as a cornice, runs a frieze of fruits and pine cones, peculiarly appropriate to the Church of La Pineta. In the centre of each frieze is a Madonna "clasping the Child in her arms, white on a blue background," and that which indubitably belongs to Luca "is one of his most human and tender conceptions both of Mother and Child," the memory of which fitly crowns and hallows our happy day in the Chianti. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Luca della Robbia_ PREDELLA TO TABERNACLE, CHAPEL OF THE HOLY CROSS, IMPRUNETA] [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: References _Consular Report on Commerce and Manufacture in Italy_, vol. xlv. _The Nation_, No. 1105. E. S. Morgan, _Time_, vol. xiv.] [Footnote 4: See Cruttwell's _Luca and Andrea Della Robbia_, chapter vii.] CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANE LORD OF LUCCA [Illustration: _Alinari_ STEMMA IN THE COURTYARD, PALAZZO CENAMI, LUCCA] [Illustration] CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANE LORD OF LUCCA [Illustration] One lucky day, as we were sauntering about Pistoja, some one said: "Let us go to Serravalle, and get more in touch with that stirring fellow, Castruccio Castracane, who seems to have filled this region with war's alarum, and left his name, if not more substantial marks, in every town in this part of Tuscany." We remember that he bribed Filippo Tedici with ten thousand golden florins, and so got possession of Pistoja and the traitor's daughter, Dialta, as his wife, and that their wedding festivities took place in the Piazza della Sala, where the Mercato is to-day; also, that when Castruccio once got within the walls he ruled the city well. Serravalle is a picturesque little town but three miles from Pistoja, on the highway to Lucca--as pretty a walk as one could wish to take. It is clustered on the top of a steep hill, and, if somewhat squalid in these later days, its ancient loggia, church, and castle are fine in colour and delightfully irregular and surprising in form. We climb up to the twelfth-century church, which contains a valuable old painting, then round the hill under an imposing loggia, and take our way up to the _rocca_, or castle, which Castruccio built early in the fourteenth century on a spur of the hill, an admirable place of defence, and which answers to its name by closing the valley (_serra valle_). From this vantage-point we have a good view of Pistoja on one side, on the other lies the fertile valley of the Nievole, so often Castruccio's battle-field. The grass is soft and green about the crumbling walls of the old castle now, and clumps of silvery-leaved olive trees, swept by Apennine breezes, brush gently against the old bastions and lofty six-sided tower, which command an outlook over the entire valley. The castle was evidently built out of ruins of earlier buildings, and probably erected in some haste to stay the progress of a dangerous enemy; but it must have been good, honest work to have lasted six hundred years, and Castruccio must have had a genius for building castles and fortresses, not only peculiarly adapted to his own needs of defence, but in such a way as to hold their own down through the centuries, and in their last ruinous state to challenge universal admiration. At Sarzana the fortress he built and named Sarzanello is very different from the one at Serravalle, but perhaps even finer, and one can easily understand why Lorenzo, Il Magnifico, should wish to possess it as a thing of beauty, even had it not been supremely necessary to the northern defences of Florence on the Ligurian coast. It is planted on the brow of a hill overlooking the sea, and is a rather low, battlemented fortress of grey stone, its bastions, towers, and ponderous arches all surrounded by a moat. [Illustration: _Alinari_ APSE END AND CAMPANILE CHURCH OF S. ANDREA, SERRAVALLE] [Illustration: _Alinari_ RUIN OF THE ROCCA OF CASTRUCCIO, SERRAVALLE] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ OLIVE TREES] From the heights of Serravalle, looking toward Lucca, we see the mediæval bell-tower of Altopascio, and remember that one of Castruccio's signal victories over the Florentines took place there in 1323. The previous spring Castruccio had dashed into the lower Val d'Arno, taken several towns, and menaced Florence herself. Clearly his victorious career must be stopped; accordingly, Florence collected the finest army she had ever put in the field, headed by the _carroccio_ and _martinella_, and marched to Pistoja, hoping to tempt Castruccio out of the city; but having spent some days insulting the garrison by games and races under the walls, the Florentines moved on toward Lucca. This was Castruccio's chance; rapidly following the great army, he surprised it at Altopascio, routed it completely, and then led the _carroccio_, with many noble prisoners, in triumphal procession through the gates of Lucca. A year later "he occupied Signa, pillaged Prato, laid siege to Montemurlo, and wasted the greater part of the Florentine _contado_."[5] But it would be impossible to follow Castruccio Castracane through all his adventurous course, and it is time to inquire what manner of man he was. Ruskin calls him "the greatest captain of his age," an estimate probably made with nice distinction, for though he must be reckoned among the Italian _condottieri_, one of the "six sorts of despots," according to Mr. Symonds' classification,[6] "raging in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," he certainly differs essentially from tyrants like the Sforzi of Milan, the Scali of Verona, the Baglioni of Perugia, and others like them, who, springing from peasant or bourgeois ranks, became powerful enough to found kingdoms, maintain splendid courts, and follow their natural tastes for arts and the new learning. The Baglioni patronized Perugino; Il Moro had his Leonardo da Vinci; Petrarch had his seat of honour at Galeazzo Visconti's table, and the Malatesti dukes of Urbino displayed a passionate zeal for philosophy and art, while "the spell of science was stronger over them than the charms of love." Castruccio was unlike these tyrants, in that we hear nothing of his taste for books, or music, or art; indeed, by his ruthless devastation of the environs of Florence, incalculable treasures, representing early Italian art, were irretrievably lost; and though we know that Castruccio had sons and other kinsmen, there was no successor to the great "soldier of fortune who had raised himself to be Duke of Lucca, Lord of Pisa, Pistoja, Volterra, and much of the Genoese Riviera."[7] Castruccio may, perhaps, be compared with that "captain of adventure," Il Medeghino, son of a certain Bernardo de' Medici, not connected with the Medicean family of Florence, who delighted in war for its own sake, and by cunning and skill became master of the region about Lake Como, where he played the rôle of Marquis of Musso and Count of Lecco, setting up his court and coining money with his own name and devices. It was when he reached this dizzy point of success that he arrogantly assumed the arms of the Florentine family and swept the lake at the head of a squadron led by his flagship, from which floated a red banner with the golden _palle_ of the Medici. When Il Medeghino died the Senate of Milan put on mourning, and in the cathedral we may see his splendid tomb, the work of Leone Lioni.[8] The services of Castruccio Castracane to the Ghibelline or Emperor's party in Italy were not recognized by such high honours. He led the simple, hardy life of a soldier, died in the harness at the beginning of a fresh campaign, and was buried at Lucca in the Church of S. Francesco, used now as a military magazine. [Illustration: _Alinari_ AN IRON LANTERN, PALAZZO BARONI, LUCCA] [Illustration: _Alinari A. Verrocchio_ MONUMENT OF GENERAL BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI CAMPO DI S. GIOVANNI E. PAOLO. VENICE] [Illustration: MOAT OF THE CASTLE SARZANELLO, SARZANA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Donatello_ MONUMENT TO GENERAL GATTAMELATA, PADUA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Paolo Uccello_ EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF JOHN HAWKWOOD CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE] In physical strength and agility, in foxlike cunning and ready audacity, and in his sense of honour and justice, Castruccio resembles Bartolommeo Colleoni, of Bergamo, who trained under the greatest _condottiere_ of his age, distinguished himself in many engagements for the Visconti, and was finally elected general-in-chief of all the Venetian forces by the Republic of St. Mark, and received his truncheon of office from the hand of the Doge before the high altar of San Marco. At Bergamo we see his chapel, built by Amadeo, as a "monument of the warrior's puissance even in the grave." There also is the equestrian statue in gilded wood voted by the town of Bergamo, and, far more noteworthy, the beautiful tomb of his favorite daughter, Medea. But the great general's rightful monument is in Venice, where the "finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except the Marcus Aurelius of the Capital," was reared in his honour. The second great equestrian statue in Italy, strange to say, is also that of a _condottiere_--Erasmo da Narni, better known as Gattamelata, a noble work of Donatello, erected in the Piazza del Santo at Padua. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Giorgione_ MADONNA AND CHILD, WITH TWO SAINTS PAROCHIAL CHURCH. CASTELFRANCO] [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl_ _Botticelli_ PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG FLORENTINE ROYAL GALLERY, BERLIN] It is impossible to compare Castruccio exactly with any other free-lance of his time. There are _condottieri_ and _condottieri_; the range is so wide and, defining lines so elastic that in the day when individuality was more marked than in any other period of the world's history, it is not strange to find in the same class such widely differing characters as Francesco Sforza, called the "great Condottiere," the brave and skillful but humane Carmagnuola, or the youthful Matteo Costanzo, who, in full armour and bearing the standard of the cross, figures as San Liberale in Giorgione's celebrated Castelfranco Madonna and Child. Matteo died young, but had been trained as _condottiere_ by his father, who gave Giorgione's Madonna to the Church, as a votive offering in memory of his lamented son. There was no bronze statue raised in Castruccio's honour, and no portrait of him is mentioned, though it is said he appears in Benozzo Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi in the Riccardi Palace, and in Orcagna's Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo of Pisa. Of his personal appearance, therefore, we are wholly ignorant, except for the tradition that he had red hair. Nor are we much more certain of his youth and training. Machiavelli's romantic account relates that he was a foundling, picked up in her vineyard by the kindly Dianora Castracane, of Lucca, who carried the infant home, and, calling her brother, a canon of San Michele, with whom she shared her house, tried to determine the child's future. After much discussion it was decided to give him the name of Castracane and educate him for the Church; but, though quick to learn, Castruccio had no taste or desire for the cloister; his one thought was for athletic sports, adventure, and the noble art of war. Playing with his fellows in the Piazza of San Michele, he attracted the attention of a nobleman of Lucca, who, when Castruccio was eighteen, adopted him, trained him to arms, and, upon his death, confided to him the care of his estates and direction of his only son. His masters in war were the most notable military leaders of the time, and "Machiavelli goes to the length of saying that, as a general, he was not inferior to Philip of Macedon, or Scipio."[9] The more sober historians hold that Castruccio was a member of the Interminelli family, who had been exiled in his youth, and gained much military experience in England when serving under Edward I. All accounts agree that he was a remarkable man, and one critic writes of him thus: "Not only as a soldier but as a statesman he was undoubtedly the foremost man in Italy, and it is not improbable that, had he lived, he would have subjugated the whole peninsula." [Illustration: STEMMA OF SERRAVALLE] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: Francis A. Hyett, B.A., _Florence_, p. 104.] [Footnote 6: J. A. Symonds, _Age of Despots_, p. 87.] [Footnote 7: Francis A. Hyett, B.A., _Florence_, p. 106.] [Footnote 8: See Symonds' Essay in _Sketches and Studies_, vol. i., p. 173.] [Footnote 9: Francis A. Hyett, B.A., _Florence_, p. 99.] PISTOJA THE "CITY OF CINO" [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Della Robbia_ MEDICI STEMMA OSPEDALE DEL CEPPO, PISTOJA] [Illustration] PISTOJA, THE "CITY OF CINO" [Illustration] A spring day comes suddenly in Val d'Arno when the air is a thought too warm and over-rich with languorous fragrance from myriad blossoms. Then thirst grows imperious for the uplands, for Tuscan hillsides clad with chestnut-trees overshadowing uncut grass, through which sweeps an eager breeze caught from the snow-capped Apennines. On such a day we recall Pistoja, once seen on our way southward from Bologna, and ever since haunting our minds like a sweet vision. We had crossed the watershed which defines the boundary between Emilia and Tuscany, and were following, by many a curve and loop, the Reno's tortuous course, when suddenly we sighted, perched loftily upon the spur of the Apennines, a city's gleaming dome and towers; another turn, and she was lost; again, from some hill-spanning gallery, or viaduct, we snatched another entrancing glance, and so, by coy circlings down the pass, we drew nearer and nearer until the train paused for a moment without the gates of Pistoja, then carried us on to Florence, twenty miles away. But we had treasured always in our mind the vision of that city, with gleaming dome and towers, that keeps her watch at the northern gate of Tuscany. Short as is the distance between Florence and Pistoja, there is a marked change in the atmosphere, which acts as a healthy tonic on the _dolce far niente_ of a Florentine spring. We enter Pistoja through the Porta Carratica, or Fiorentino, still emblazoned with the Medici shield, and find ourselves shortly in the very centre of a pleasant, busy city, its clean, wind-swept streets broad and well paved, the principal ones following the lines of the first two mediæval walls, for Pistoja, like Florence, has had three circles, the last of which, built in the fourteenth century, remains almost intact. Along this wall are pleasant walks and a boulevard called the Viale dell'Arcadia, planted with shade-trees and commanding extensive views. If now your conscience stirs actively to "do" Pistoja thoroughly, there's a stiff day's work before you. The list of churches alone is formidable, not counting those which have been diverted from original purposes. Nearly every church contains something worth seeing: paintings and sculptures, three celebrated pulpits at least, tombs, fonts, and Della Robbia reliefs; moreover, there are the libraries and the famous hospital, or Ospedale del Ceppo--altogether an outlook beyond words discouraging. It is better to stand about the Piazza del Duomo, or Cathedral Square, perhaps the most representative one in Tuscany, the centre for a thousand years of the social, civil, and religious interests of the town. Here are the cathedral and Bishop's palace, the Palazzo Pretorio, or Podestà, and the Palazzo Pubblico, or, in other words, the Court House and City Hall, representing the ancient warring powers of Church and State. Here they are on their old battle-field, temporal power jealous of spiritual aggressions. Even the weather-beaten Torre del Podestà is not wholly committed as a campanile, but stands off a little from the cathedral, remembering that it was once the city's watch-tower, its tocsin sounding alarm to Guelf and Ghibelline, blacks and whites, and all invaders. The bishop was no insignificant power when the Commune was struggling for independence. He had his many feudal castles, armed retainers, and vassals; his court dealt sternly with culprits, and his dungeons, under the palace yonder, were more feared than those of the Podestà. Not that the City Fathers were not proud of their powerful bishop and their noble cathedral, dedicated to St. Zeno, and containing the silver altar of San Jacopo, patron saint of the city, which drew crowds of pilgrims every year to worship at the famous shrine. Not a few popes journeyed from Rome to visit the bishop, and noble visitors of every land, from the Emperor of the East to Bonaparte, had filled the square with their trains and followers. But the commune of Pistoja, like many another, had a bitter struggle to keep her footing, though she began well and very early; her first municipal statutes, and good ones they were, too, being framed in 1117, immediately after the death of "the great Countess" Matilda. It was battle royal for many centuries; but now Church and Commune live peacefully side by side, forgetful of the stormy past, except when they turn over their priceless archives, preserved in the chapter of the cathedral and the Palazzo Pubblico, where one may read a thousand interesting and thrilling things concerning the history of Pistoja, of the men who built churches and palaces, and called the great artists of the Renaissance to come and fill them with paintings and sculptures, wood-carving, and metal-work. And the city grew so proud and magnificent that we read of sumptuary laws promulgated to restrain extravagance of nobles and burghers in the matters of dress, jewelry, food, and pomp at funerals. The law of 1439 forbade trimmings of gold and silver brocade, long trains to ladies' dresses, the quality of sleeve-linings, etc. Unluckily, many of the archives belonging to the cathedral were destroyed in the fires of 1108 and 1202; hence the endless discussions as to the city's origin and name. "Etruscan," says one. "Far from it," says another; "I have found a Roman house, mosaic, and coins a dozen feet under the pavement of the square, which must have been the centre of the earliest city." As for its name, some derive it from two Etruscan words, _pist_ (door) and _oros_ (mountain), referring to the position of the city at the entrance of a mountain pass; others get the name from _pistores_ (bakers), the early city having been celebrated for its excellent ovens. [Illustration: THE LITTLE BROWN BEARS AND THE SHIELD OF PISTOJA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ PIAZZA DEL DUOMO, PISTOJA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Verrocchio_ STEMMA OF PISTOJA PALAZZO PUBBLICO. PISTOJA] [Illustration: Alinari BRONZE CANDELABRA (15TH CENTURY)] The Pistoja of to-day is a prosperous and attractive city with good buildings, fine markets, and many industries; she has been noted from time immemorial for her skilled work in iron, bronze, and wood, and her ancient metal-work has been found in Germany and Athens. In her bronze foundries to-day she not only casts bells and small articles, but many statues and groups created by Italian artists are cast in Pistoja. The manufacture of carriages and fine organs is of great importance. The district has four paper-mills, and of the eleven brass foundries in the province five are situated at Pistoja, and many skilled workmen are employed in wood-carving, artistic ironwork, etc. Her trade is mainly in wine, oil, grain, _paste alimentare_, and cattle. The milk and butter of Pistoja are considered the best in Tuscany. To appreciate the varied productions and interests of the district of Pistoja you must wander about the Piazza del Duomo on market-day when it is filled with booths offering woolen, linen, and cotton stuffs, bright kerchiefs, shawls, shoes, and "notions," displayed in picturesque confusion and colour; a score of red, yellow, and green umbrellas in one corner, or a line of _contadini_ overcoats of a warm brownish-red colour, trimmed with tawny fur and lined with green, delight the eye and are much in demand. Or walk through the Mercato, old as Pistoja herself, where the ancient well indicates the very centre of the first city. Here is certainly every object man can want, and the square blooms daily with all kinds of fresh vegetables and flowers: there are grains and food of every sort; in the season there are piles of yellow cocoons on the pavement; bright-faced old women are roasting chestnuts gathered on the mountain side; pretty baskets of fragrant wild strawberries are proffered by some handsome young girl, and the stall of some descendant of the old race of _pistores_ is hung with rings of sweet, fresh _pane nero_ (brown bread), while various kinds of cheese and the "best butter" await your choice. The markets for fish and meat are in different parts of the city. [Illustration: _Alinari_ HEAD OF THE TRAITOR, FILIPPO TEDICI PALAZZO PUBBLICO. PISTOJA] By this time the exhilarating, almost heady, mountain air has created a ravenous appetite, and we clamour, above all else, for a taste of the Mercato's tempting products served in appetizing dishes known only to the true Italian chef. Our wishes may be easily gratified at the Albergo Globo e Londra, in Piazza Cino, where cooking is good and native wine excellent. If this luncheon could have been served in a pleasant garden, the only proper banquet-hall for Italy, nothing further could be desired; but it is only fair to warn the traveller who means to sleep in Pistoja that the chambers of the Globo are by no means tidy or attractive. [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE CAMPANILE FROM VIA RIPA DEL SALE, PISTOJA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE LOGGIA, OSPEDALE DEL CEPPO, PISTOJA] Now for a stroll through the quaint old streets with curious and suggestive names, and a peep into quiet courtyards of palaces deserted by their noble owners, and given over to modest householders and humble artisans. At the corner of Via Abbi Pazienza and the Via de' Rossi is the great palace of the Rossi family, blazoned with many shields of varied quarterings, and from the corner hangs one of the gruesome black heads of the traitor Filippo Tedici, like that on the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico. Many of the oldest streets of Pistoja lead from the Piazza del Duomo, and their names suggest the life of an earlier day: Via Orafi (jewelers) was once devoted to goldsmiths' shops and studios; the Via Stracceria (rags) was so called because clothing of all sizes, colours, and condition was hung to dry from windows and other "coigns of vantage;" and the Via Can Bianco was named in honour of a faithful white dog, whose barking warned his master of the approach of an enemy. Near the east end of the cathedral we may leave the square by the Via Ripa del Sale, a narrow street over-arched by a gallery connecting the Palazzo Pubblico with the duomo, convenient for the worshipful magistrates when they desired to hear mass. This street leads us, with often a backward glance at the campanile, to the Via Filippo Pacini, a broader thoroughfare following the line of the first city wall, and in two minutes we stand in the little irregular square of the Ospedale del Ceppo and before the famous Della Robbia frieze, an experience which, to one of us at least, seems almost a miracle. So many years Pistoja had been merely a dream city, a name--a curious, unreal name--standing only for this little piazza, this loggia, and the brilliant band of varied colour crossing its façade. Those imperfect guide-books of our youth had merely mentioned as important, this glazed terra-cotta frieze, wrought, it seemed to us, through some magic by the members of one family only, the secret of which vanished from the world forever upon the death, in 1529, of the last true Della Robbia, the author of this frieze. Tradition added that the formula for compounding the Della Robbia glaze was supposed to be hidden behind one of the panels, one of which was afterward found broken, the robber leaving no trace of the precious parchment. The panel, "Giving Drink to the Thirsty," was repaired, but not like the others. We can see for ourselves that it is only painted stucco and of later date. This was a story to stir youthful imagination to the highest pitch: a mystery, a secret, a theft--the very stuff that dreams are made of. Italy is full of traditions; even the origin of this self-same hospital is a pretty story, as told by a worthy canon of the cathedral, and who would wish to question it? "The Church of Santa Maria del Ceppo (meaning a dry root) was built near the little stream Brana about 1277, by the pious Theodore and his wife Bandinella, who dedicated it to the Assumption, and placed therein an alms-box for the benefit of the sick and poor. This chest increased little by little, until it became the present hospital. The _chiesetta_ (little church) was incorporated in the large building." Time and the schools have taught us the meretricious value of traditions, but even stripped of all glamour the Della Robbia frieze is unique as an architectural feature, and peculiarly appropriate to the building it adorns. It consists of seven panels, representing the temporal works of mercy as performed by the good brothers of the hospital; between them are figures representing the Virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, and Justice; below appear medallions of the arms of the city, of the hospital (the sprouting root), and the Medici shield; also the Annunciation, Visitation, and Assumption. Of all the panels, the "Sheltering of the Pilgrims," and the "Healing of the Sick," are considered the finest; the figures of the brothers in both have evidently been studied from life, especially that of the physician. More beautiful, however, than any part of the frieze is Benedetto Buglioni's "Coronation of the Virgin," a lunette over the chapel door of excellent workmanship, and in simple colours, white on blue, with crowns of pale yellow. In its modelling and glaze, its seriousness and grace, it almost rivals Luca della Robbia's masterpiece in Pistoja, "The Visitation," in the Church of St. John the Evangelist. If there is a moment to spare we may well slip round the corner for a peep at the Church and Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where a calm-faced sister--one of the good Bandinella's descendants, wearing the pretty wimpled cap of white muslin, designed, it is said, by some tasteful lady of the Medici family--will show us their perfect little Renaissance church and its great treasure, the Lorenzo di Credi Madonna, and also insist gently upon a visit to the Miraculous Bed where once the Madonna reposed. They will further offer to exhibit their store of fine vestments and robes, well worth looking at; but if once we begin looking at churches and vestments there will be no getting back to Florence for a week. But at least we must take leave of our hosts, those stately shades of forceful men belonging to Renaissance Pistoja, who worked and wrought in these streets, whose prowess and policy, wit and learning, are so vivid in men's minds to-day. Pistoja entered with characteristic zest into the spirit of the Renaissance in all its varied aspects; she espoused the new learning, her libraries were filled with Greek and Latin manuscripts; she was famed for her able jurists and historians, her singers and poets were welcome at the proudest courts of Italy. We read that Antonio da Pistoja was invited by Lodovico il Moro to Milan, "in hope of refining and polishing the rude Lombard diction," and that the charming and learned Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua, wrote to her envoy: "Find out Messer Tebaldeo (of Pistoja), and beg him to send twenty or twenty-five sonnets, as well as two or three _capitoli_, which would give us the greatest possible pleasure." [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Della Robbia School_ COAT OF ARMS OF THE HOSPITAL, PISTOJA] No more typical family can be found, perhaps, than the Forteguerri of Siena and Pistoja, which was noted for its brave and learned sons and daughters, and beloved and honoured for devotion to their country, for their benevolence, learning, and poetic genius. As early as 1179 we find a Forteguerra as consul of Pistoja; in the fifteenth century Cardinal Forteguerra was not only conspicuous in the Church, but a constant friend and benefactor to his native city, founding and endowing a college and library. His grateful city erected a monument to his memory in the Piazza del Duomo, and called Verrocchio to design and carve a fitting tomb in the cathedral; but the work was not concluded by the master's hand, nor in accordance with his clay model, which we see to-day in the South Kensington Museum; and looking at the tomb, evidently the work of many diverse hands, one can but wish that the good Cardinal might have at Pistoja at least a replica of the one, by Mino da Fiesole, in the Church of St. Cecilia, Rome. Besides Cardinal Niccolò, there was more than one bishop, many jurists and historians in the Forteguerri family, and no less than six poets. The fifteenth Forteguerra, of the Pistoja branch, was another Niccolò (1674-1735), a well-known and cultured church-man at the court of Pope Clement XI, and author of a long, satirical poem, "The Ricciardetto," besides verses called "_capitoli_," and various translations from the Latin. This Niccolò was evidently conversant with Roman society, and a close observer of men and politics; he shows himself, also, at the age of fifty, a good lover, not only singing his lady's praise in verse, but sending her frequent vivacious and friendly letters, half in jest, but often dangerously near earnest affection; and the name of some Arcadian maiden of his muse, some Daphne or Phyllis, thinly conceals the identity of the noble young Roman lady, Marianna Cenci Bolognetti. It appears that the women of the family Forteguerri were also brave and talented; at least, we have a record of one of the Siena branch, when in 1554 the city was besieged by the Spaniards and almost spent with famine; when the best men of Siena were losing courage, "women of gentle birth, leaders of society, worked at the defences, side by side with artisans and common soldiers. All the Sienese ladies divided themselves into three companies; the first was led by Signorina Forteguerra, who wore a violet uniform, as did those who followed her; ... these three squadrons were composed of 3,000 ladies of the upper and middle classes. They bore pikes and spades, panniers and hurdles; as they went to their work on the fortifications, these brave women sang a song composed by one of that numerous choir of poetesses who sang the swan song of their own country." This Signorina Forteguerra is the one whom the English diarist, Hoby, mentions. "Most of the women of Siena," he says, "are well learned and write excellentlie well in prose and verse: among whom Laodomia Forteguerra and Virginia Salvi did excell for good wittes." [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Giovanni della Robbia (?)_ HEALING OF THE SICK (DETAIL OF FRIEZE), OSPEDALE DEL CEPPO, PISTOJA] Pistoja is called the "City of Cino" because of her famous lawyer-poet, Guittoncino (always called by the fond diminutive "Cino"), of the noble house of Sinibuldi, which had given Pistoja one bishop and many gonfaloniers. Though belonging to the thirteenth century, his noble character, his ability as a jurist, the pure and graceful style of his "Comments on the Codices," his faultless letters and verse--above all, his friendships and love story--have kept his memory fresh. He enjoys even to-day a certain fame in Italy, and all the world is supposed to know his charming sonnets, addressed to his friends, among whom were Dante and Petrarch, and to the lady Selvaggia dei Vergiolesi. His monument in the cathedral, erected by the Commune, is by Cellino di Nese, and is the first of the "monuments of the professors," a class of work characteristic of the coming period; it shows Cino lecturing on law to his pupils, among whom are Baldus, commentator on Civil Law, and the "idle Petrarch;" there appears also a draped female figure, which may personify poetry, or Roman Law, or, as some will have it, the fair lady of Cino's devotion, Selvaggia dei Vergiolesi; unsentimental critics, however, are inclined to think that the figure is that of the Madonna, and was once a part of a relief of the Annunciation. Selvaggia's family was Ghibelline, and, banished from Pistoja in 1305, retired to their strong castle, where the beautiful Selvaggia died at the age of twenty, after which Cino became a wanderer in foreign lands: he crossed the Alps and took up his abode in Paris, where he pursued his studies for some time. Cino's letters to Selvaggia and to his other friends, in which he sang his love and suffering, are exquisite in their purity and elegance of diction, and place him among the great makers of the Italian language. To Dante he wrote an ode condoling with him upon the death of Beatrice in tender and musical lines. He died in his native city of Pistoja at the age of sixty-six, upon which Petrarch composed his celebrated lament, beginning: "Weep, women, and may love weep with you; Weep, lovers of all countries, * * * * * For our ever gentle Master, Cino, Is now gone far from us." * * * * * [Illustration: VIA ABBI PAZIENZA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Benedetto Buglioni_ CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN OSPEDALE DEL CEPPO, PISTOJA] [Illustration] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Mino da Fiesole_ MONUMENT OF CARDINAL NICCOLÒ FORTEGUERRA CHURCH OF S. CECILIA, ROME] A SUNDAY AMONG THE HILLS OF BRANCOLI [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Fra Bartolommeo_ THE VIRGIN AND CHILD ENTHRONED, AND SAINTS CATHEDRAL, LUCCA] [Illustration] A SUNDAY AMONG THE HILLS OF BRANCOLI "O day most calm, most bright." --HERBERT. [Illustration] On St. Patrick's Day in the morning we left Florence, had a full day's sight-seeing in Pistoja, Groppoli, and Serravalle, and pushed on to Lucca the same evening, arriving about seven o'clock. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE OLD CITY WALL AND MOAT, LUCCA] Acting on sound British advices, we drove at once to the Albergo dell'Universo, a comfortable little inn occupying the first floor of the old Palazzo Arnolfo, where we had our belated dinner, took our ease before a cheerful open fire, and congratulated ourselves that at last we were in Lucca--a hope long deferred. [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Jacopo della Quercia_ TOMB OF ILARIA DEL CARRETTO, CATHEDRAL, LUCCA] The morrow is crisp and brilliant; and, forgetful of our guide-book's express advice, to crown and finish our Lucca visit with a walk on the ramparts, we turn our backs on churches and priceless works of art and hasten at once to the old city walls. How faithfully those mediæval bricklayers did their work! Their walls, well preserved, still surround the town, no longer bristling with engines of war, but planted thick with shade-trees--elms, acacias, and limes--affording one of the most beautiful promenades in Italy. Lifted well above the city streets, they command extensive views on every side: here the broad, fertile plain, stretching to the Arno; yonder, at the north, the chain of rugged Apuans, two sharp peaks of which are now capped with glistening snow; southward rise the heights of Monte Pisani, noted in Roman days, and since, for its hot-springs. From thence comes the pure drinking-water for Lucca, conveyed by an aqueduct built by the Duchess Marie Louise, for which her grateful people erected a monument in her honour. As it crosses the sunlit plain on its four hundred and fifty-nine grey stone arches, we are reminded of the Roman Campagna, and remember that Lucca, in the day of her greatest splendour, was a favorite summer residence for the Romans, and that many traces still exist of their occupation, particularly the massive arcades of an amphitheatre in the present market-place. Standing on the old ramparts, on a rare spring morning, ten chances to one you forget all the sights awaiting you down there, in the "city of the Magnificent People and Commune of Lucca"--its palaces, towers, and picture-galleries, its chapels and churches, of which there are no less than seventy "to satisfy the wants of 22,000 souls." The fame of San Frediano's seventh century church, with its magnificent tower, its sculptured font and Madonna, has reached us over sea. For years we have yearned to look on Jacopo della Quercia's marble of that fair lady, Ilaria del Carretto, resting in the transept of St. Martin's cathedral. We know there are paintings by Fra Bartolommeo, palaces and libraries; but the fresh mountain air has driven all these things from our desire; we only long for those mountains delectable, those chestnut-crowned hills and distant grey towers. We begin to ask why we should study the churches of Lucca, and who is Matteo Civitali that he should keep us within the city walls? We consult time-tables and guide-books; there's a tram, they tell us, leading out of Porta Santa Maria in ten minutes, and if we catch it we may ride six miles, and then ... perhaps a carriage may be found, though it is early in the season. "But," importunes the handsome driver of the cab waiting to take us to the tram, and who in some way has divined our wants, "the _tramvia_ will not take the signore to the hills, and surely there is no carriage at Ponte Moriano so early in the year. _Ecco_, this _buon cavallo_ and your devoted Pepino, who will take you all the way so comfortably!" Off comes the shabby hat with inimitable native grace, and the bold, brown eyes are convincingly eloquent. You can no more resist Pepino's reasoning than that rush of mountain air on the ramparts. All preconceived plans are fast taking flight; but Prudence keeps her head and demands with thrifty caution, "How much, inclusive, there and back?" Then Pepino: "Oh, a mere bagatelle, my _illustrissime_ signore, only twelve lire." Prudence, scouting this declaration with lofty scorn inspired by a profound knowledge of tariffs and coach-men from Paris to Palermo, exclaims: "Preposterous! Ten francs it shall be, and not a centesimo more." "Ah, signorina, the roads are very steep and it will take my whole morning," returns Pepino, beseechingly; but in vain he seeks for a sign of relenting. His struggle is brief, and, with a deprecating flourish of his small, shapely hands, he mounts the box, and the air with which he says, "as you will have it, signorina," is that of a gracious conqueror dictating terms to the vanquished; he cherishes no resentment, he has no interest but ours. We never for a moment regret the tram. Pepino knows every villa and grey tower, every path through the hills, every bridge over the _torrenti_; he never intrudes his knowledge, and, above all, he is kind to his horse. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ ON THE RAMPARTS, LUCCA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ S. FREDIANO, LUCCA EAST END, WITH THE CAMPANILE (11TH AND 13TH CENTURY)] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ SAN FREDIANO FROM THE GUINIGI TOWER, LUCCA] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ A "GREY TOWER"] [Illustration: _Alinari_ PONTE A MORIANO, WITH A VIEW OF THE SERCHIO RIVER] "Yonder cross on the round, bare hill," he says, "is Brancoli," and Brancoli is the hill of our desire. Our good road at first runs over the plain following the east bank of the Serchio, principal river of the province; it rises in a northernly valley among the Apuans and fed by many a mountain stream or _torrente_, maintains a southeasterly course almost to Lucca, which it avoids by a broad loop westward, and then makes its way to the Mediterranean almost parallel with the Arno. We pass clusters of farm-houses, well-cultivated fields and vineyards, until in less than an hour we reach Ponte Moriano, which is little more than a busy street of shops and dwellings, but has a good stone church founded by San Frediano in five hundred and something. Its rather tall, square tower, of good proportions and crenellated battlements, is characteristic of all the church towers in this region. Here is the terminus of the _tramvia_, and Pepino was right, there is no appearance of a carriage; but his Italian for "I told you so," was kept under his breath with true Lucchese courtesy. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ AN OLD STONE BRIDGE] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ BRIDGE OVER THE SERCHIO RIVER] [Illustration: _Alinari_ PARISH CHURCH OF S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO (11TH CENTURY) BRANCOLI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ SAN LORENZO, BRANCOLI] A mile farther on is the little hamlet of San Giusto, situated at a point where the Lima joins the Serchio. Here we leave the main road, turn sharply to the right, and follow the windings of the little river, which is crossed by the picturesque stone bridge of Vinchiana. An old mill, half hidden by white birches, turns its moss-covered wheel close under the steep river banks, overhung with a tangle of vines and flowery shrubs. The road becoming rather steep, we now leave the carriage and proceed on foot. What an entrancing walk it is! Always ascending, we follow the turnings of the stream, now far below, and glancing like a silver thread along the valley. We round the grey shoulders of jutting cliffs, where clumps of white heather are in full bloom and the "maidenly birches" are touched with the first tender green; the air is intoxicating in its freshness, and the sky never so blue. "_Ecco!_" calls Pepino. "_Ecco!_ San Ilario!" How has the fellow guessed that we ought to study churches rather than maunder about posies! The little church of cut stone, flanked by its good tower, stands hard by the roadside, convenient and inviting to tired feet and aching hearts, as many a pilgrim in the old days knew full well. Its doors stand open wide, admitting floods of sunshine and spring fragrance. We enter unbidden, to find the little temple quiet and empty, all its pictures and sacred emblems covered, and all as clean and fresh as if waiting in reverent silence the miracle of Easter morning. We proudly boast the stern old Puritan blood running cool and inviolate in our veins, but there's a silent appeal in these modest temples and shrines of the elder faith that "must give us pause," and silence the voice of criticism. Taking the road again, we still ascend from one fold of the hill to another, whence we overlook the Serchio pursuing its lazy course far below, the views becoming more and more beautiful, until in half an hour we come upon the little stone church of San Lorenzo, close by the road. Small as it is, San Lorenzo is as complete in all its attributes, and as true to its architecture, as a full-fledged duomo, even to the little apse. The sturdy tower, square and shapely, small, round-arched windows and sides of warm, grey stone, the red-tiled roof, flecked with patches of green moss, make a charming picture, found in no country but Italy. This time the church is closed, but there are keys hanging in the north door, perhaps entering the sacristy, and we make bold to peep. It is a clean and cold room, entirely separated from the church proper, and evidently serving at present for a store-room, as a slender stock of various commodities and a few bottles of wine attest. Meantime Pepino has made our wants known at the near farm-house, and is returning, accompanied by a handsome young girl with the keys to the proper church door, which she opens, saluting us with respectful dignity, and, without questioning, draws the curtain from the Della Robbia over the altar; for well she knows that the _forestieri_ only come to see our "beautiful white San Lorenzo." The statue is small and perfect, like everything about this woodland _chiesetta_. The head is exquisitely modelled, all in white, with the finish and the ivory-tinted glaze which belongs to Andrea Della Robbia's best work, though the wise in such matters ascribe it to one of his pupils. [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE INTERIOR (11TH CENTURY), PARISH CHURCH OF S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO, BRANCOLI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ HOLY-WATER STOUP, PARISH CHURCH OF S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO BRANCOLI] [Illustration: _Alinari_ HEXAGONAL BAPTISMAL FONT (13TH CENTURY), S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO BRANCOLI] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ DETAIL OF PULPIT, PARISH CHURCH OF S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO, BRANCOLI] Saying our _buon giorno_, and pressing a small fee into the reluctant hand of the handsome _contadina_, we now turn from the carriage road and begin a short but rather difficult climb up the steep hillside by a roughly paved path, which leads us through chestnut woods to the crest of the hill and the parish church of Santa Maria e San Giorgio, belonging to the eighth century. We have seen it all the way from the plain, perched on a commanding height, surrounded by its sombre guard of stately cypresses. The tower is especially fine in its proportions and built quite apart from the church, though only a foot or so from its walls. Unusually tall, it has four orders of arched windows, and is crowned with bifurcated, or "swallow-tail," battlements, indicative of Ghibelline influence. The exterior of the church, built of squared blocks of travertine, has a plain façade, broken only by shallow pilasters and a round-headed doorway, with a bit of rude carving on the cornice, perhaps representing the vine. The south side has two rows of irregular windows, with remains of ornament, and an arched doorway, over which is a singularly grotesque figure. Both doors are wide open, the noonday sun lighting up vaulted aisles and the ancient timber roof of the nave. We enter without let or hindrance and possess the church for a good hour, uninterrupted even by a footstep on the road hard by. The interior, which gives an impression of space and dignity, is divided into nave and aisles by columns and piers with interesting sculptured capitals. The choir is raised by four steps well above the nave, the high altar, still higher, fills the apse, and over all is a good timber roof, richly coloured by time. Near the west end in the south aisle is a quaint and seemingly very ancient holy-water stoup, carved with rude but expressive figures of men and animals attacked by serpents. On the crown surmounting the principal head is inscribed "_Raitus me fecit_," but having no date. Many of the capitals of the pillars bear sculptures of rude symbolic figures, indicating early Lombardic work. The fine hexagonal baptismal font is attributed to the thirteenth century, but the carved heads and vine suggest an earlier date. The same period is accorded to the very beautiful marble pulpit standing at the entrance to the choir. It is square in shape, supported by four columns, two of which rest on the backs of grotesque Lombard lions struggling with savage beasts, symbolic of Divine power overcoming evil; the capitals are boldly sculptured in foliage and animal forms. On the front is a serious crowned figure holding the Book, above it the eagle serving as lectern. On the corner toward the altar a sculptured figure bends to support another reading-desk. Altogether this pulpit may be reckoned among the most interesting ones of Tuscany. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ DETAIL OF PULPIT, PARISH CHURCH OF BRANCOLI] [Illustration: _Alinari_ PULPIT (13TH CENTURY), S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO, BRANCOLI] Finally, added to its many attractions, the church contains a fine and unusual piece of Della Robbia terra-cotta, the work of Andrea and his son Giovanni. Miss Cruttwell writes: "This romantic scene--I had almost said painting, 'St. George Slaying the Dragon'--is one of the best pictorial works." It is probably the only instance of an attempt by Andrea to represent a horse, and it is undeniably stiff and indifferently modelled. The princess in the background also is rather heavy, but the grace and action of the youthful rider and the beauty and radiance of his expression are remarkable. The frame, probably the work of Giovanni, consists of garlands upheld by winged cherubs, with graceful candelabra and medallions characteristic of the artist. We left the church of Santa Maria e San Giorgio with regret, but with a sense of complete satisfaction with our day among the hills and temples of Brancoli. "Sundaies the pillars are On which heav'ns palace arched lies, The other days fill up the spare And hollow room with vanities." --HERBERT. [Illustration: COATS OF ARMS OF LUCCA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Andrea and Giov. della Robbia_ ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON, S. MARIA E S. GIORGIO BRANCOLI] BARGA AND THE VALLEY OF GARFAGNANA [Illustration] BARGA AND THE VALLEY OF GARFAGNANA [Illustration] Brancoli's Hill commands a view of the Serchio River and its extensive valley, called the Garfagnana, which lies between the Apennines, defining the northern boundary of Tuscany, and the Alpi Apuane range, which follows the direction of the coast, and contains several lofty peaks, the highest rising over six thousand feet. The principal town and capital of the Garfagnana region is Barga, situated thirteen hundred feet above the sea, and containing, we had learned, an interesting church and several pieces of the Della Robbia terra-cotta. As the crow flies it is but a trifling distance over the valley to Barga, but we were obliged to return the way we came and take the main road at San Giusto; a small matter, for in twenty minutes we had dropped down into the valley, passed again the pretty bridge of Vinchiana, also crossed the one over the Serchio, and were speeding along the river bank near the railroad which runs to Bagni di Lucca. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ THE BRIDGE AT VINCHIANA] [Illustration: _Alinari_ BORGO A MOZZANO, PONTE DELLA MADDALENA OVER THE SERCHIO, CALLED "THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE"] At Borgo a Mozzano we see the old bridge, Ponte della Maddalena, oftener called the Devil's Bridge, because traditionally it was built (1328) in one night by Castruccio Castracane, the "greatest war captain of his time." It is a singular structure, very high and narrow, not allowing a carriage of present date to cross, and supported on heavy piers and five arches of irregular height, one of which carries the bridge up, like a camel's hump, rendering it most curious and picturesque. At Ponte a Serraglio is a distant view of Bagni di Lucca, lying in the valley of the Lima. [Illustration: BAGNI DI LUCCA--PANORAMA] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ PARISH CHURCH, LOPPIA] By this time we have crossed the river, and taken a narrower but equally good highway, though belonging to the second class of carriage roads, every turn of which brings to view new wooded valleys and hilltops crowned with grey villages. In the distance, which is greater than it seems in the clear, luminous atmosphere, we see Ghivizziano's lofty towers, with her train of ruddy roofs and grey walls sharply outlined against the sky. At Fornaci we part company with the Serchio again, strike northward through one of the interesting mountain valleys, and pass close to the ancient parish church of Loppia, weather-beaten and neglected, but none the less a striking landmark and noble monument of mediæval power. Loppia was the capital of the Garfagnana until 1390, when, having been desolated by war and its inhabitants reduced to fifty, its jurisdiction and the title of its parish church were given to Barga, and even its one good picture transferred to the new capital. [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE CATHEDRAL OF BARGA] The whole district is well watered by many mountain streams, affluents of the Serchio, furnishing excellent water-power for various mills scattered along their banks. The soil is generally productive, the uplands covered with chestnut-trees and affording fair pasturage for sheep, which are a source of considerable revenue. On the lower levels we find the olive, maize (or _granturco_), a principal article of food, and flax, also the mulberry-tree and silk-worm culture. The region is fairly rich in minerals, stone and marble quarries, manganese, mercury, etc. Here, also, is found the fine red jasper, veined or flecked with white, which has been so effectively used in the Medici Chapel in Florence. We are now quite close upon the walls of Barga, but the long drive in the eager, exhilarating mountain air makes us quite willing to take Pepino's advice and stop for lunch at the Posta, an unpretending wayside inn, beautifully situated, with plain, comfortable rooms commanding fine views, and where, as a recommendation, we were told a Chicago gentleman had once spent seven weeks for his health. In the words of another visitor, we read that "the soup is excellent, and so is the wine;" also, there is trout when the streams are full. We found everything as had been promised, and did ample justice to the excellent food served by a pretty, smiling _contadina_, daughter of the house, who was full of chat and little airs, her young head evidently quite turned by her knowledge of the wandering _forestieri_. [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ MAIN DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL, BARGA] Hunger appeased and our modest account settled, we walk to the nearest city gate, passing an ample bowling alley, bordered with fine plane-trees. At the upper end is a raised, grassy platform of considerable breadth, in the centre of which stands a fine cedar of Lebanon. The platform is reached by two flights of steps cut into the sod, and tradition has it that here Charlemagne stood and delivered his laws and instructions to the conquered people gathered below. The well-paved street winds and turns up the hill until it terminates in the little plateau, or Piazza del Duomo. The city retains its ancient walls and three old gates, and is still further defended by two deep natural ravines, which render it altogether a striking and typical mediæval town. We enter the gate just in time to see a religious procession, consisting apparently of all the people in town, most of the men in capes of green and white, led by three important ecclesiastics in really splendid vestments; two copes were of ivory-white damasked silk, evidently old, adorned with gold; the third, of a peachy-purple tint, enriched also with designs in gold. We join the procession, and wind slowly up the steep path, noting several palaces of old-time importance, and one or two schools or institutions. We see, also, erect and pretty young girls bearing copper pails of water on their heads, lightly mounting the precipitous side streets, and remember then that this mountain region is noted for the beauty of its women. Arriving at the Piazza del Duomo, the procession enters the Church of SS. Christopher and James, to say the prayers appropriate to St. Joseph's day, while we enjoy the wide and beautiful prospect over the Garfagnana valley, held at the north by the hill-town of Fivizzano, surrounded by Castruccio's walls, its church door bearing the Medici shield. On the left, Alpi Apuane, overlooking the charming gulf of Spezia, Carrara, and Sarzana, where Castruccio Castracane built his famous castle, and the only road to which now, as then, is by the castled town of Fosdinovo. To the right are the loftiest peaks of the Apennines: Rondinaio, Monte Prado, Abetone, and the rest, owing "much of their grandeur to the precipitous slopes and fantastic profiles of the calcareous rocks which enter into their composition." The lofty and well-defended position of Barga, near the boundaries of Lucca and Florence, gave it a certain military importance in the early struggles for despotism. At present it is a busy centre of a large district, quiet and orderly, its people marked by spirit, buoyancy of temperament and good looks. To the outside world it is best known for its church, several good Della Robbias, and its fine and beautiful situation. The Church of SS. Christopher and James--is it a temple or a citadel?--built of squared blocks of travertine, unusual and irregular in shape, its watch-tower, or campanile, springing from the main wall and guarding all the country round about, possesses no dominant style of architecture, and wears such an appearance as ten centuries of weather and vicissitudes may well give a church. The grand old tower is fitting, as a human creation may ever hope to be, the prospect it overlooks. Its massive sides are pierced by three orders of double-arched windows, supported by columns and piers, and each order defined by a string course, or corbel-table, of shallow arches, which takes, perhaps, something from the height of the tower, but emphasizes the solidity of its structure. Unlike most towers in this region, it carries no battlements, but is finished by a low, plain roof. The façade of the church is strikingly plain, broken only by a single cornice, string course, and short pilasters. The main door alone retains a hint of former grandeur in its foliated arch and sculptured architrave, once guarded by two Lombardic lions, one of which has fallen from its high estate. The front and side walls are pierced irregularly with small windows of varied shape and size. [Illustration: _Alinari_ INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF BARGA] The interior is plain, resembling an ancient basilica in form, and divided into nave and aisles by piers supporting broad, semi-circular arches, and over all a good, open-timbered roof. The tribune, or choir, is raised above the nave by three steps, and separated from it by a low marble screen or _parapetto_. An ancient-looking holy-water stoup, carved with rude heads and designs, stands by a pillar on the north side of the nave, but the great treasures of the church are its choir-screen and pulpit. The screen consists of panels of pale red marble delicately veined, set in frames, or borders, of white Carrara, inlaid with black _smalto_, or enamel, in various designs and symbolic geometrical figures. That part of the screen near the pulpit is further enriched by a row of small, well-modelled heads, some of which, evidently portraits, are encircled by crowns. The pulpit must certainly be reckoned among the best ones in Tuscany; its author is unknown, but it probably belongs to the thirteenth century, about the time of the Pisani, possibly earlier. The richness of detail, dignity and expression of the rather stiff figures, suggest the work of Guido da Como. [Illustration: _Alinari_ PULPIT (13th CENTURY) IN THE CATHEDRAL OF BARGA] The pulpit is rectangular, and supported on four marble columns, two of which rest on the backs of lions, overcoming symbolic forms of evil. Another rests on the shoulders of a man, perhaps the artist, and all the capitals are elaborately sculptured in varying designs, one bearing the forms of eagles and animals' heads. On the panels of the pulpit are the sculptured scenes of the Annunciation, the Nativity, and Adoration of the Magi, treated in the usual manner. On the central plinth of the front appears a crowned figure holding the Book of Good Tidings, and supported by the appropriate symbolic animals; above this figure the eagle upholds a lectern. The figures are carved in strong relief, and though the feet and hands are stiff, the faces are serious and fairly modelled, and the drapery well disposed. Heavy as the work is, we are conscious that the artist, a man of the long ago past, was himself impressed by his subject, and put into his realistic interpretation of it a profound religious mysticism. The whole work is enriched by inlaying of black marble, or _smalto_, with the white. Crowns, the lions' manes, and coils of the writhing serpent are picked out with black, an early form of decoration. In the choir aisle is a beautiful tabernacle for the sacred oil, of glazed terra-cotta, chiefly white on blue, the work of the Della Robbia school or atelier. Though small, the work is composed of three perfect parts. On the arched top is a charming group of infantile figures, the Christ child standing upright on the Holy Chalice, one tiny hand uplifted in blessing, the other holding the crown of thorns; on either side is an adoring cherub, exquisitely modelled. Below this is the cupboard, or ciborium, for the oil, guarded by two graceful angel forms, and on each side an acolyte bearing a candelabrum. The whole work rests on a table, or ledge, supported by two cornucopiæ of various fruits in natural colors, and between them appears the head of a cherub enfolded in double wings. [Illustration: _Alinari_ ADORATION OF THE MAGI (13TH CENTURY) PULPIT IN THE CATHEDRAL OF BARGA] Well might this fortress-temple detain us longer, but there is scant time to have a look at the other Della Robbias down in the heart of the town, to which we are conducted by a courteous and handsome little man of twelve, through the narrowest and steepest of byways, which threaten at times to plunge us into doorways or ditches, until we reach the Church of the Capuchins. This contains a Nativity, two good statues of St. Andrew and St. Anthony, an Annunciation, St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, and, finest of all, an Assumption of the Virgin, by Giovanni Della Robbia. The reverent figures of four saints gaze upward to Our Lady, seated within a mandorla of cherubs' heads and surrounded by angels with musical instruments; the four trumpeters at the top are most beautiful. In the predella are other flying angels with scrolls; a wreath of exquisite heads surround the ciborium, and two kneeling saints fill the corners. The whole work is framed with clusters of various fruits in their natural colours. Reluctantly we turn from rock-throned Barga, "Half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot," and as we slip down into the valley through purpling shadows shot with crimson and gold we marvel at these people, who with one hand took their part fiercely in the cruel wars of despotism and with the other adorned churches and shrines with Della Robbia reliefs, representing a form of art so pure and cool and tranquil and, above all, infused with the deepest religious feeling. Then we suddenly remember that hereabouts is the region of the Pistojese Apennines, the favoured home of the highest Tuscan imagination, poetry and song, where the people--peasants, shepherds, and mountaineers--are not only hardy, handsome, and industrious as a class, but noted for gentleness and courtesy, love of home, and the native elegance of their common speech. It is said that "the dialect that most faithfully represents the pure Tuscan of Boccaccio's day is that of peasants of the Pistojese Apennines. It is here, round about San Marcello and Cutigliano, that the purest Tuscan is spoken--pure in its language, pure in its accent; and it is here that Manzoni and d'Azelio came--comparative foreigners both of them, the one a Lombard, the other a Piedmontese--to acquire the pure language for those romances which have delighted all Italy and all the world."[10] It is in the Pistojese mountains that we hear those "charming folk songs, in which traditions of true gentleness and elevated feeling are so well exhibited, and account for the high romantic qualities of the impassioned verse."[11] Shepherds often improvise songs, called _rispetti_ and _stornelli_, as they tend their flocks alone on the hills, and if their cadence chance to catch the popular ear they are sown on a hundred hills and meadows far and wide. Tigri records by name a little girl called Cherubina who made _rispetti_ by the dozen as she watched her sheep, and the poetry of Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani was famous through the mountains of Pistoja.[12] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Della Robbia School_ TABERNACLE FOR SACRED OIL CATHEDRAL, BARGA] Miss Alexander, in her "Road Songs of Tuscany," has given an appreciative and loving tribute to this pastoral singer, whom she calls "one of the most wonderful women" she ever saw. The daughter of a stone-mason who worked during the winter in the Maremma, Beatrice became his companion and helper, carrying on her head stones for the walls and bridges he was building. She had no education, never learning the alphabet even, but possessed a remarkable memory, and could recite long poems that she had heard. _YOU ASK ME FOR A SONG_ "You ask me for a song, then be content, With little grace, in all I sing or say; And judge me kindly, for I never went To school, and masters never came our way. The only school where ever I did go Was on the mountain, in the hail and snow. And this, alas! was all they made me learn-- To go for wood, and dig when I return." It was not till the day of her marriage that Beatrice discovered her new power "to sing poetry born in her mind," and from that day she never lost her remarkable power of improvisation, and the list of her ballads is very long and varied in theme. She had a strong religious nature, and addressed many of her songs to the Madonna. In her old age, it is said, she knew in poetic form nearly all the New Testament and much of the Old. _GIVE ME LIGHT, LADY_ "Come to the window, lady, give me light! A little light, that I may find my way For darkness deep is on my path to-night, Among the stones I fall or go astray. I cross a troubled river, lady mine; Deep is the water, and no light doth shine. And darkness found me where the waves were high; My feet have failed, so deep the waters lie! So far was I from shore when darkness came! And no one answers when I call thy name." Her eldest son inherited her poetic gift, and often when working in the fields mother and son would carry on a conversation in improvised verse, Beatrice singing one _ottava_, Beppo answering with another. Miss Alexander says that as a girl Beatrice was very handsome, with an inspired face, charming smile, and sympathetic voice. She had great physical strength and indomitable courage. She generally wore her _contadina_ dress of scarlet bodice, blue kerchief, garnet necklace, and gold earrings. On grand occasions she put on a white embroidered veil, kerchief, and apron belonging to her wedding finery. Beatrice lived over a hundred years, "much loved and honoured by her neighbours and all who knew her," and many pleasant anecdotes are told of her experiences and talent. A Boston lady told us that once, when Madame Goldschmidt (better known as Jenny Lind, or the "Swedish Nightingale,") was visiting friends in the Apennines, a meeting was arranged between the two singers, both elderly women at the time. First Beatrice, in her peasant dress, sang to the great prima-donna of the North, improvising words and music suitable to the occasion. In return Madame Goldschmidt, much gratified, sang one of the songs which has so often moved her great audiences to rapturous applause.[13] [Illustration: _Alinari_ _Giovanni della Robbia_ ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN CHURCH OF THE CAPUCHINS, BARGA] [Illustration: _M. M. Newell_ "VIOLET-EYED TUSCAN OXEN"] _THE DOVE_ "O dove with wings of silver, when you fly, The feathers shine and glisten in my view. And oh, how sweet your song is! Would that I Could learn it.... Teach me, dove, to sing like you. Your pleasant notes, and your sweet rhymes of love; The sun goes down and lights the stars above. Your pleasant notes, and your sweet rhymes of love; The sun goes down and lights the snows above." [Illustration: DETAIL OF TRAPPINGS ON THE HORSE OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: M. Carmichael, _In Tuscany_, p. 102.] [Footnote 11: J. A. Symonds, "Popular Songs in Tuscany," _Sketches and Studies_, vol. ii.] [Footnote 12: John Ruskin, ed., _Alexander's Road Songs of Tuscany_ (1884).] [Footnote 13: Alessandro Chiappelli, _Una Pastora Poetessa, Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani_ (Florence, 1902).] INDEX INDEX PAGE Abetone, 213 Afternoon tea, 4 Alexander, Miss, 225, 226 Altopascio, 106 Amadeo, sculptor, 114 Amphitheatre, Roman, Lucca, 167 Armstrong, E. (note), 59 Antonio da Pistoja, 144 Apuans, 167, 174, 199, 210 Arno, The, 5, 8, 40, 45, 167, 174 Arnolfo di Cambio, 17 Avèrard. _See_ Medici. Azelio, d', 222 Badia a Settimo, 3 Baglioni, 110 Bagni di Lucca, 200, 203 Barga, 199-230 Bartolommeo, Fra, 171 Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani, 225, 226, 229, 230 Benedetto Buglione, 143 Benozzo, Gozzoli, 50, 52, 117 Berenson, B. (note), 59 Bergamo, 113, 114 Bessarion, 51 Bianca Cappello, 39 Bianchi e Neri, 56 Bivigliano, 36 Boccaccio, 222 Bonaparte, 128 Bona of Savoy, 36 Borgo San Lorenzo, 20 Borgo a Mozzano, 200 Brancoli, 163-194, 199 Brunelleschi, 55 Bruno di Ser Lapo, 64 Calash, 19, 25, 35 Cancellieri, 56 Careggi, 55 Carmagnuola, Francesco, 114 Carmichael, M. (note), 222 Carrara, 40, 210 Carroccio, 106 Carza, 9 Casentino, 8 Castelfranco Madonna, 117 Castracane, Castruccio, Lord of Lucca, 49,101-118, 203, 210 Castracane, Dianora, 117 Cellino di Nese, 151 Certosa, 79 Chapel of the Holy Cross, 92, 95 Chapel of the Madonna, 92, 95 Charlemagne, 17, 209 Cherubina, 222 Chianti, 73-95 Chiappelli, Alessandro, 230 Choir-Screen, Barga, 14 Churches: of the Capuchins, 218, 221 of the Madonna Dell' Impruneta, 90, 95 Pieve S. Leolino, 80 S. S. Christopher and James, Barga, 210, 213, 214 San Francesco, Lucca, 113 San Francesco, Prato, 59, 67 San Frediano, Luca, 168 San Ilario, Brancoli, 181 San Lorenzo, Brancoli, 182 San Marco, Venice, 114 Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato, 59, 67 Santa Maria e San Giorgio, Brancoli, 185, 194 St. Martin, Lucca, 171 Cimabue, 24 Cino. _See_ Sinibuldi. Coats of Arms, 17, 21 Colleoni, Bartolommeo, 113 Colleoni, Medea, 114 Consular Reports (notes), 63, 84 Credi, Lorenzo di, 144 Cruttwell, Maud (note), 91, 193 Cutigliano, 222 Dante, 151, 155 Della Robbia 10, 17, 21, 36, 80, 127, 143, 185, 200, 213, 218, 221 Della Robbia, Andrea, 63, 185, 193 Della Robbia, Giovanni, 140-143,193, 194, 221 Della Robbia, Luca 92, 95 Della Robbia, Luca, The Visitation, 143 Della Robbia, Count Viviano, 81 Demidoff, Prince, 39 Diligence, Florentine, 5 Donatello, 49, 63, 114 Erasmo da Narni. _See_ Gattamelata. Este, Isabella d', 144 Faenza Railway, 6, 9, 20 Fiesole, 3, 7, 8, 39 Fivizzano, 210 Folk songs, 222 Font, Brancoli, 193 Fornaci, 207 Forteguerra, Laodomia, 148, 151 Forteguerra, Niccolò, Cardinal, 147 Forteguerra, Niccolò, Poet, 147, 148 Fosdinovo, 210 Fra Bartolommeo, 171 Gaddi, Angelo, 64 Garfagnana, Valley of the, 199, 207, 210 Garibaldi, 82 Gattamelata, 114 Ghirlandaio, R., 64 Ghivizziano, 207 Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, 35-36 Giorgione, 117 Giotto, 24, 25, 27 Giuliano Giamberti. _See_ San Gallo. Goldschmidt, Madame, or Jenny Lind, 229, 230 Greve, 79, 80 Groppoli, 163 Guido da Como, 217 Herbert, George, 163, 194 Holy-water Stoup, Barga, 214 Holy-water Stoup, Brancoli, 190, 193, 214 Hotels: Giardino, Prato, 46 Globo e Londra, Pistoja, 136 Posta, Barga, 208, 209 l'Universo, Lucca, 163 Hyett, F. A., 106 (note), 110, 118 Ilaria del Carretto (Tomb), 171 Impruneta, 90-95 Interminelli, The, 118 Jacopo della Quercia, 171 John of Bologna, 39 Joseph, Patriarch, 51 Leone Lioni, 113 Lima River, 177, 203 Lippi, Filipino, 67 Lippi, Fra Lippo, 49, 64-67 Lord of Lucca. _See_ Castruccio. Lorenzo di Credi, 144 Loppia, 207 Lucca, 3, 101, 106, 113, 117, 163-172, 213 Machiavelli, 117, 118 Majano, 3, 4 Malatesta, Duke of Urbino, 110 Manzoni, 222 Marchese of Mantua. _See_ Este. Marcus Aurelius, 114 Marie Louise, Duchess, 167 Martinella, 106 Matilda, the "Great Countess,", 128 Matteo Civitali, 172 Matteo Costanzo, 114 Medici Shield, 17, 18, 82, 124, 143, 210 Medici, Avérard, 17, 18 Medici, Bernardo de', 110 Medici, Cosimo, Pater Patræ, 18, 55 Medici, Duke Francesco de', 39 Medici, Lorenzo de', 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 64, 105 Medeghino, Il, 110, 113 Mercato, Pistoja, 101, 135, 136 Metayerage System, or Mezzadria, 84-88 Michelozzo, 55, 63 Mino da Fiesole, 49, 64, 147 Montemurlo, 106 Monte Abetone, 213 Monte Giove, 8 Monte Ferrato, 63 Monte Morello, 8, 9 Monte Pisani, 167 Monte Prado, 213 Monte Rondinaio, 213 Monte Senario, 36 Morgan, E. S., 84 Mugello, 3-40 Mugnone, 5, 7, 8, 39 Nation, The (note), 84 Nievole, 102 Orcagna, "Triumph of Death,", 117 Ospedale del Ceppo, 127, 139, 141-142, 145 Padua, 114 Padua, Arena Chapel, 27 Palazzo Pubblico, Scarperia, 14, 17 Palazzo del Podestà, Borgo San Lorenzo, 21 Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 14 Palæologos, Emperor John, 51 Panzano, 80 Perugino, 110 Petraia, Royal Villa, 55 Petrarch, 110, 151, 152, 155 Piero a Sieve, 9, 10, 35 Pisani, The, 49, 217 Pisano, Giovanni, 60, 63, 64 Pistojese Apennines, 221, 222 Pistoja, "City of Cino", 101, 102, 106, 123-155, 163 Podere (farm), 81 Poggio a Caiano, 55-56 Ponte d'Elsa, 24 Ponte della Maddalena, or Devil's Bridge, 200, 203 Ponte Moriano, 172, 174 Ponte a Serraglio, 203 Ponte Vinchiana, 177, 200 Prato, 45-67, 106 Pratolino, 36 Pratolino, Villa of, 39 Pulpit, Barga, 217 Pulpit, Brancoli, 189 Republic of S. Mark, 113 Riccardi Palace, 36, 51, 117 Ricciardetto, 148 Rispetti, 222 Ruskin, J., 8, 10, 39, 109, 225, (note) Sacra Cintola, 60, 63, 64 Salvi, Virginia, 151 San Gallo, 59 San Giusto, 177, 200 San Jacopo, 128 San Marcello, 222 San Martino, 10 San Miniato, 3 San Zeno, 128 Sarzana, 105, 210 Sarzanella, 105 Savonarola, 55, 92 Scala family, 110 Scarperia, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 27, 35 Scissors, Manufacture of, 14 Serchio River, 174, 177, 182, 199, 200, 207 Serravalle, 101, 105, 106, 163 Sforzi, The, 110 Sforza, Francesco, 114 Sforza, Lodovico, Il Moro, 110, 144 Sieve River, 5, 8, 19, 20 Signa, 106 Sinibuldi, Guittoncino dei (Cino), 151-152, 155 Spezia, 210 Stemmi. _See_ Coats of Arms. Stornelli, 222 Sumptuary Laws, 131 Symonds, J. A., 109, 113 (note), 222 (note) Tabernacle, Barga, 218 Tebaldeo, Pistoja, 144 Tedici, Dialta, 101 Tedici, Filippo, 101, 136 Tigri, 222 "Time," Review, 84 Torraccia Romanelli, 22 Torre del Podestà, 128 Tuscan Cookery, 74, 75, 76, 77, 88, 135, 136, 209 Tuscan Harvests, 87 Tuscan Road Songs, 225 Tuscan Servants, 74, 75, 77 Tuscan Speech, 222 Tuscan Wine, 77, 78, 79, 82, 88, 135, 136, 209 Ubaldini, 14 Vaglia, 8, 36 Val d'Arno, 6, 8, 31, 36, 39, 77, 80, 106, 153 Vinci, Leonardo da, 110 Vergiolesi, Selvaggia dei, 151, 152, 155 Verrocchio, 147 Vespignano, 25 Villa Capriani-Cateni, 25 Villa Tolomei, 32 Vinchiana Bridge. _See_ Ponte. Visconti, The, Dukes of Milan, 113 Visconti Galeazzo, 110 Visconti Gian Galeazzo, 35, 36 Visitation, 143 _See_ Della Robbia, Luca. Wine Jar, 82 * * * * * +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber notes: | | | | P. 56. Illustration is probably 'GARDEN BELONGING TO LORENZO'S | | P. 115. Illustration--Madonna and Child, with two Saints, | | "Alinar'" changed to "Alinari". | | VILLA POGGIO A CAIANO', not changed. | | P. 233. 'Cancelliere' changed to 'Cancellieri'. | | P. 237. 'Galleazzo' changed to 'Galeazzo'. | | Fixed various punctuation . | | | | Underscore sourrinding text implies italics, as in _See_ | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
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46092	----	Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 46092-h.htm or 46092-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46092/46092-h/46092-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46092/46092-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/littlepilgrimage00pottuoft A LITTLE PILGRIMAGE IN ITALY [Illustration: PERUGIA: LOOKING TOWARDS ASSISI.] A LITTLE PILGRIMAGE IN ITALY by OLAVE M. POTTER Author of 'The Colour of Rome.' With 8 Coloured Plates and Illustrations by Yoshio Markino Toronto The Musson Book Company Limited First Published November 1911 Cheap Re-Issue 1913 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty FOREWORD One morning of high summer three pilgrims met together in the City of Genoa to sally forth in search of sunshine and the Middle Ages. At least that was what the Poet said, for sunshine and Ancient Stones were the passions of the Poet's life. The Philosopher insisted that we went in search of Happiness. It is no matter. But in fact we did meet one July day of sweltering sunshine in Genoa, the Western Gate of Italy, which is a city of grateful shadows, whose narrow streets defy the brilliant sun. This is a book of simple delights, a chronicle of little pleasures, so I shall not talk much of Genoa, although to my mind she is the most Italian of all the great cities of Italy. Nor shall I speak of Florence, or Naples, or Venice, or Rome. Doubtless, like me, you have loved them all. [Illustration: A STREET IN GENOA.] If you come with me I shall take you away from the great cities where your feet are bruised on the stony streets and never feel the soft warm earth beneath their soles, where mountainous walls of brick limit your vision to smoke-clouded strips of sky, where you never smell the fragrance of the night. If you come with me I shall take you to the hills, the deep-bosomed rolling hills, with their valleys and their plains and with towered cities riding on their crests. You will lie with me under the olives and stone-pines, where the warm earth cushions your limbs in luxury, and the sunlight flickering in the green shadows lights on a wealth of flowers. Then, if you will, come back to your haunted streets. But I am persuaded that if you go there you will find a great content among the little cities of great memories which stand knee-deep in flowers upon the hills of Italy, or in those nobler towns,--Siena, who belongs to the Madonna, and Perugia, whose name is as a torch to light your feet into the Valleys of Romance. In their streets you are seldom shut away from the mountains and the sky; and little gracious weeds and grasses have spread a web among their stones as though an elfin world sought to entrap a monster and pull him down to ruin. Our little pilgrimage took us to many shrines, and haunts of peace and beauty. We made our discoveries, saw much, learned not a little philosophy. And, most of all, we caught a glimpse of the heart of Umbria--Umbria of the saints. We watched the gathering of the golden maize in the plain below Assisi while we walked with St. Francis among the vines and olives; we saw the vintage being brought home with song and thanksgiving at Orvieto and Viterbo. We dwelt among beautiful simple-hearted men and women, living in little farms far from the toil of the modern world, who still worship God in the gladness of their hearts and the spirit of the ardent thirteenth century; who toil and spin and bear children and lie down to die, not with the stupidity of animals or the self-satisfaction of the bourgeoisie, but full of a beautiful content, moved by a beautiful faith. We dipped into Tuscany too, into Lombardy, into the March of Ancona, into Lazio, but nowhere else was the world as perfect, as unspoiled as in Umbria. If you are travel-stained with life, if the sweat of a work-a-day world still clings about you, if you have lost your saints and almost forgotten your Gods, you will cure the sickness of your soul in Umbria. [Illustration: GENOA: THE HARBOUR.] CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE FOREWORD v I. AREZZO 1 II. CORTONA 14 III. PERUGIA 24 IV. TODI 45 V. SIENA AND THE PALIO 58 VI. SAN GIMIGNANO DELLE BELLE TORRI 88 VII. MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE 105 VIII. CHIUSI 116 IX. HANNIBAL'S THRASYMENE 129 X. ASSISI 144 XI. GUBBIO 171 XII. ANCONA 188 XIII. LORETO 201 XIV. RAVENNA 216 XV. THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO 234 XVI. URBINO 245 XVII. FOLIGNO 259 XVIII. CLITUMNUS 276 XIX. SPOLETO 280 XX. THE FALLS OF TERNI 296 XXI. NARNI 303 XXII. ORVIETO: THE CITY OF WOE 316 XXIII. VITERBO 333 XXIV. ROME 353 ILLUSTRATIONS COLOURED PLATES PERUGIA: LOOKING TOWARDS ASSISI _Frontispiece_ SIENA: TORRE DEL MANGIA _Facing page_ 62 SAN GIMIGNANO " 102 LAKE THRASYMENE " 137 ASSISI: THE LOWER CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCO " 152 ANCONA: THE FISHING FLEET " 192 SPOLETO: THE AQUEDUCT " 292 THE FALLS OF TERNI " 298 HALF-TONES GENOA: THE HARBOUR _Facing page_ viii A STREET IN AREZZO " 8 CORTONA FROM THE PORTA S. MARGHERITA " 20 PERUGIA: PIAZZA DEL MUNICIPIO " 28 PERUGIA: THE RING OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN " 30 PERUGIA: PORTA EBURNEA " 40 PERUGIA: THE TOMB OF THE VOLUMNII " 42 A STREET IN SIENA " 66 SIENA: S. DOMENICO AND THE VIA BENINCASA " 68 SIENA FROM THE CONVENTO DELL'OSSERVANZA " 72 SIENA: THE PALIO " 84 SAN GIMIGNANO: THE WASHING PLACE " 96 CHIUSI: THE PALACE OF THE BISHOP " 126 A STREET IN ASSISI " 148 THE LITTLE CLOISTER IN S. FRANCESCO D'ASSISI " 154 ASSISI: THE PORZIUNCULA " 168 GUBBIO: PIAZZA VITTORIO EMANUELE " 180 GUBBIO: VIA CARMIGNANO " 184 LORETO " 202 SAN MARINO " 236 URBINO: SAN FRANCESCO " 252 FOLIGNO: THE WASHING PLACE " 268 THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS " 278 A STREET IN SPOLETO " 288 THE CATTLE FAIR AT NARNI " 306 A STREET IN ORVIETO " 322 ORVIETO: ETRUSCAN TOMB " 330 VITERBO: MEDIAEVAL HOUSE IN THE PIAZZA S. LORENZO " 336 VITERBO: FROM A WINDOW IN THE PALACE OF THE POPES " 340 VITERBO: VIA DI S. PELLEGRINO " 346 ROME: ST. PETER'S SEEN FROM THE ARCO OSCURO " 354 ROME: A FOUNTAIN IN THE BORGHESE GARDENS " 358 LINE DRAWINGS A STREET IN GENOA _See page_ vi AREZZO: THE PRISON " 6 CORTONA FROM THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI " 16 PERUGIA: DETAIL FROM THE CHOIR OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI " 24 PERUGIA: ARCO DI AUGUSTO " 27 THE GRIFFON OF PERUGIA " 32 FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTER OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI " 36 DETAILS FROM THE APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TODI " 51 TODI: S. MARIA DELLA CONSOLAZIONE " 54 SIENA: BANNER-HOLDER " 61 SIENA: TORCH-REST " 64 SIENESE YOUTHS IN PALIO DRESS " 77 SEEN AT THE PALIO " 81 THE TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO " 89 CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE " 107 CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI " 118 ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS " 122 CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO " 133 ASSISI: S. MARIA MADDALENA AT RIVO TORTO " 159 ASSISI: THE CARCERE " 163 GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER " 173 GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO " 177 GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT " 183 PEASANTS AT LORETO " 206 PILGRIMS AT LORETO " 211 RAVENNA: THE PINETA " 218 RAVENNA: SANT'AGATA " 221 RAVENNA: THE TOMB OF DANTE " 228 RAVENNA: COLUMN OF GASTON DE FOIX " 232 THE PALACE OF THE DUKES OF URBINO " 247 FOLIGNO: SAN DOMENICO " 263 FOLIGNO: WELL IN THE CASA NOCCHI " 265 SPELLO " 273 SPOLETO: PORTA D'ANNIBALE " 282 SPOLETO: SAN GREGORIO " 285 A FOUNTAIN OF SPOLETO " 290 SPOLETO: SAN PIETRO " 294 THE LOWER FALL OF TERNI " 300 FARMERS AT THE OX " 304 FAIR OF NARNI " 308 NARNI: MARKET PEOPLE " 310 NARNI: THE PONTE D'AUGUSTO " 312 BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO " 318 ORVIETO: THE CLOCK TOWER " 320 ORVIETO: SANT'AGOSTINO " 326 ETRUSCAN NECROPOLIS BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO " 329 OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF VITERBO " 334 VITERBO: THE MOAT OUTSIDE THE PORTA SAN PIETRO " 338 VITERBO: THE STEMMA OF THE CITY " 341 VITERBO: THE PALACE OF THE POPES " 343 VITERBO: FOUNTAIN IN THE PALAZZO MUNICIPIO " 344 VITERBO: THE HOUSE OF THE BELLA GALIANA " 345 ONE OF VITERBO'S MANY FOUNTAINS " 348 THE RUINED THEATRE OF FERENTO " 351 THE ALTAR OF THE UNKNOWN GOD ON THE PALATINE " 356 THE VIA APPIA " 360 AREZZO We came to Arezzo in the cool of the evening. It had been a breathless day. Even at Genoa the air hung heavy with the sirocco. We found Pisa in a mirage, and the white hills of Carrara glistening like the lime rocks of a desert. It was good to be in Tuscany again--Tuscany with her grey farms and lichened roofs, her towered horizons, her blue hills, her vineyards, and her olive-gardens. We could hear the song of the cicalas vibrating in the sunshine above the jar of the train; near at hand the hills swelled up, clothed with the tender mist of olives or linked with vines; stone-pines floated darkly against the sky, and cypress spires climbed the hillsides in a long procession like souls on pilgrimage. Perhaps it is because Arezzo, little Arezzo, with her ancient history and her tale of great men, was the earliest of our hill-cities that we loved her at first sight. Coming from London and Genoa, with the noise and dust and heat of long train journeys still hanging about us, she seemed very cool and sweet among her vineyards and olive-gardens. She has left her hill-top now that she needs no more the walls which Sangallo built in the fighting days of the Popes, and has trailed down to the railway in the valley, leaving behind her wide piazzas which she has filled with shady trees, and benches, and statues of her great ones. Her paved streets, steep and clean, climb up the hillside between grey palaces, green-shuttered, with wide Tuscan eaves, whose fantastic outlines, seen in échelon against the sky, bring back a score of memories of other clean-swept Tuscan towns. Now that we were threading her byways, Arezzo, though she had looked imposing from the valley, dwindled to a little brown city, full of memories, and frescoed churches, and ancient houses in which the labourer dwells in his poverty to-day where the rich citizens of Arezzo once held great state. Capers and all manner of pensive creepers grew out of the rough walls; fig-trees, roses, wistarias, and oleanders in full blossom poured over them, so that the air was full of fragrance. And there were flowers in the upper windows of thirteenth-century houses, for your Tuscan is fond of flowers, and will have his _garofani_ upon his window-ledge. Through the low-browed gateways we could see women spinning in arcaded courtyards; and the shoemakers and basket-weavers worked at their humble trades as they sat on the steps of weather-beaten Gothic houses. And often as we wandered through her narrow streets we paused to look down upon the calm beauty of the Tuscan plain, which stretched from the vineyards below her walls to the blue mountains of Chianti. Nor did it require any effort of imagination, while we were walking in those mediaeval byways between the Borgunto and the Via di Pellicceria, to people the rich valley with the pageant which Dante witnessed while he was staying in Arezzo with the elder Petrarch, both exiles from Florence. 'It hath been heretofore my chance to see Horsemen with martial order shifting camp, To onset sallying, or in muster rang'd, Or in retreat sometimes outstretch'd for flight; Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers Scouring thy plains, Arezzo! have I seen, And clashing tournaments, and tilting jousts, Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells, Tabors, or signals made from castled heights.'[1] A common sight enough, heaven knows, in the Middle Ages, when every little city sought to rule itself, and the populace and the petty lords alike cloaked their ambitions under the old war-cry of Guelph and Ghibelline! There is an air of gaiety in Arezzo, a simple, almost pastoral, joy. The philosopher felt it at once. 'We are like flowers,' he said, as we sat on a bench outside the inn after our first breakfast in Tuscany. 'In London our roots spread in the ground, and they get knotted and twisted in the darkness. Here we shoot right up into the sun.' And, indeed, Arezzo is a happy place, whose charm, it may be, owes its origin to an earlier civilisation, which has left so many broken fragments of its art scattered on the neighbouring hillsides. They are garnered to-day in the museum among the relics of Arezzo's history, of which they are the chief glory now that the bronze Chimera and the magnificent Etruscan statue of Minerva have gone to swell the treasures of Florence. There is not a vase or _patera_ unbroken. The entire collection is composed of fragments, moulds and casts in low relief. But every piece is exquisitely beautiful; each one is like a shell cast by the tides of fantasy upon the shores of a work-a-day world. And though the streets of Arezzo are nearly always empty and silent, I think the flutes and lyres and dancing fauns, with which the artists of Arretium delicately graced their coral-coloured bowls and cups, are not silenced yet upon this Tuscan hill. Perhaps the spirit of the slim-limbed girls and youths, and merry little loves, whose forms are beauty, and whose fragile feet seem scarce to bruise the ground, dance still to their forgotten songs about the vineyards of Arretium. It is as though the dream of some Attic poet, for I cannot think that the heavy-eyed people of Etruria imagined such gods, lingers on in this little Tuscan town, and the echo of its ancient music vibrates in the stillness of the museum like the murmur of waves in a shell. Or perhaps it is a magic in the air, the subtle air of Tuscany, that poets sing of, which has inspired more genius than we can find in all the rest of Italy. For Arezzo, like Florence, has been the mother of great men. Michelangelo, himself born but a few miles from Arezzo, wrote to Vasari, 'Giorgio, of myself I have no power. I happened to be born in the subtle air of your _paese_.' Poets and artists, sculptors and musicians, have issued from her walls. All the world knows that she bred Maecenas and Petrarch, but only those who pause to read her chronicles know how many of her sons have walked with History in the corridors of Time--Margheritone, the Spinelli; Leonardo Bruni; Carlo Marsuppini, and a host of other humanists; the fighting bishop, Guido Tarlati; Vasari; and Guido Monaco, the Benedictine monk, born in the closing years of the eleventh century, who was the inventor of our modern system of musical notation. Whether Arezzo occupies the site of Arretium, the city of the Etruscan league, which is unlikely, or whether it rose like a phoenix from the ashes of its ancient necropolis, or grew from a Roman colony of that name near the Etruscan settlement, is not for me to say, since antiquaries are undecided. In any case there is little of either Etruscan or Roman antiquity outside the museum to-day. [Illustration: AREZZO: THE PRISON.] It is the Middle Ages which have set their crown upon Arezzo. Knowing her courage, and how it outweighed her strength so that she dared to offer battle to her great neighbour Florence through many stormy centuries, it is a marvel that anything of value should be left. And in fact Arezzo boasts few civic buildings--the palace of the Podestà or del Governo, now the prison, whose façade is covered with the _stemme_ of her many rulers, and the Palazzo Comunale or dei Priori, with its picturesque clock tower, are all that remain of the mediaeval city, except some streets of fifteenth-century dwelling-houses. But she has several noble churches--the Gothic Duomo, majestically simple within and without, which crowns her hill-top; the Pieve, Santa Maria di Gradi, with its wonderful Pisan-Romanesque façade, hoary with antiquity; the great bare church of San Francesco, enriched by Piero della Francesca's Story of the True Cross; and Santa Maria delle Grazie in the vineyards outside the walls. It is the same all over Italy. What little town is there, however broken, but has ancient churches and palaces to crown its hill and keep troth through the ages with its vanished greatness? Arezzo is particularly rich. The most expectant pilgrim to Italy's shrines of art, even though he come straight from Florence, will be thrilled by the golden church which soars from the crest of Arezzo's hill between the gracious old Palazzo Comunale and the public gardens, gay in July with the flame-coloured pennons of a flowering tree, which Mr. Markino tells me is called Urushi in Japan. For the Aretines have lavished wealth upon their cathedral, and the Ark of San Donato, which is one of the most beautiful mediaeval shrines in Italy, a rival to Orcagna's masterpiece in Or San Michele, is alone worth the long hot climb. The exquisitely wrought marble is yellowing with age; it is as finely carved as Oriental ivories; the trefoils and the edges of its panels are set with lapis lazuli. And here we have the reverence of the Trecento, with its rude handiwork redeemed by its ardent sincerity. For the sculptors saw nothing strange or irreverent in filling their scenes of the lives of Madonna and San Donato with all the incongruous details of their own day, so that we have at the same time jesters and angels, knights a-horseback and heavy-headed saints, and the queer beasts of mediaeval imaginings. Close at hand is the tomb of the splendid old fighting Bishop of Arezzo, Guido Tarlati, who crowned the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in defiance of the excommunications of John XXII., and who led his people to battle against the Pope as readily as he led their prayers to God. A great man this, who has a worthy tomb, for Agostino and Agnolo of Siena carved the history of his stirring life below his recumbent form when he was laid to rest, and have shown us incidentally the life of the Trecento in all its vigour and humour. Two angels draw back the curtains of his bier, revealing him as he lies asleep, with folded hands and an air of extreme piety and humility, belied by the long recital of his little wars, and the story of his triumphs, from his Consecration as a Bishop to the Coronation of Lewis, and his death in 1327. [Illustration: A STREET IN AREZZO.] There are many other treasures in the Duomo, besides the column upon which San Donato had his head cut off, 'without any regard for the axe,' as the custode explained, pointing out a deep gash in the marble to remove the lingering doubts of any sceptic; there is an exquisite relief by Rossellino in the Chapter House, and many Della Robbias have set their seal of piety and graciousness on altar and tomb in the Chapel of the Madonna. But it was not any of these things which claimed our thoughts the first time that we entered the dim aisles of Margheritone's soaring Gothic church. After the glare and heat of the piazza, where the sunlight reflected from the yellow walls of the cathedral dazzled our eyes, we found the darkness of the nave, illuminated by a solitary altar lamp, and threaded with shafts of jewelled light filtering through painted glass, as grateful as the shade of some primeval forest formed by the interlacing branches of giant trees. For, within, the Cathedral of Arezzo is like the Gothic churches of the north, and it may be that the grim Margheritone, whose agonised crucifixions adorn so many chapels in Tuscany and Umbria, was himself inspired by northern architecture. He returned to his native town from Florence in the train of Gregory X., fresh from the Council of Lyons; and Gregory, who left 30,000 _scudi_ to the Comune for the erection of the new cathedral, may well have made some suggestions as to the style of architecture which was to be employed. He died in the neighbourhood some months later, early in the year 1276, and his beautiful thirteenth-century tomb by Margheritone is one of the chief ornaments of the cathedral which he helped to endow. In Arezzo we were fortunate to find a real country inn; a clean, cool place, with floors and stairs of red brick, and an alfresco dining-room in the garden. I remember how gay we were, how our burdens of care slipped from our shoulders as we sat to eat below the trees on those first nights in Tuscany. Were we not on the road again, knowing nothing of the morrow, forgetful of everything but the joy of yesterday, dining when we were hungry, sleeping when we were tired, with no thought but for the beauty of the ways which opened out before us, no care but that we might pass unwittingly some of the quaint and lovely fragments of art and architecture with which our path was strewn? 'Peregrino, quasi mendicando,' said Dante, bitter in his exile, but we did not want for the luxury which money cannot buy. It is only Italy of the little towns that can make you forget the work-a-day world. Nowhere else can you be so content with what is often meagre fare, so careless of the morrow, so full of the joy of to-day, as you are in Italy. At night we sat at rough trestle tables in the little garden of the Albergo della Stella with the star-strewn canopy of night above us, and an electric light hanging like a fire-fly from the branches of an acacia tree. The level note of night crickets singing in the ilexes made an accompaniment to the distant clatter of dishes and the snatches of talk from other tables behind the tall bamboos. The food was simple--_minestre_, perfectly grilled steaks, fresh fruit, and generous _fiaschi_ of the good red Tuscan wine, for which the vineyards of Arretium were praised. And here we lingered, talking of the wide-eaved Tuscan house in the Via del Orte, where Petrarch, the first of the great Italian humanists, was born, and Dante came to visit the elder Petrarch, who had been exiled from Florence by the same turn of the political wheel as himself; of Vasari, who filled his niche as a biographer so much better than he ever filled it as an artist; of Piero della Francesca and the vigorous young world he pictured on the bare white walls of San Francesco; and of San Bernardino who, like St. Francis, purged Arezzo of its devils and laid the foundations of Santa Maria delle Grazie, that exquisite church outside the city walls which Benedetto da Maiano, Andrea della Robbia and Parri di Spinello enriched with the sister arts. For it was San Bernardino who, coming to Arezzo, and finding that the citizens were in the habit of practising pagan rites for an oracle, which they imagined dwelt in a wood outside their gates, preached such a fiery sermon from the pulpit of San Francesco that they wept before him like little children. But he, insisting that they should do penance, gave orders that on a certain day a great wooden cross should be brought to him, and that the people should come in solemn procession to exorcise the demon. That week the citizens of Arezzo went about their work with fear and trembling, and some of them cast doubtful looks down to the valley where the oracle was hid. But on the appointed day, though I doubt not that many did absent themselves, a great company followed the saint, carrying the cross, down to the hateful wood. It is not hard to picture to-day--the Mystic chanting as he walked at the head of the procession; the hot and dusty way through the vineyards below the city walls, for San Bernardino was loth to start until all the people were met together; and the fear of the crowd as they drew near and heard the music of the oracle-haunted spring. But Bernardino, whose heart was ever with the angels, caused the fountain to be cast down and the trees to be felled, lest by any chance some evil might yet lurk in the wood. And, knowing the heart of the people, that where a man has once worshipped he will worship again, even though it be to other gods, he built a little chapel to the glory of Our Lady of Mercies, and he begged Messer Spinello to paint the Virgin for an altarpiece. But not every one who comes to Arezzo visits this lovely church down in the vineyards, in spite of the marvellous beauty of Andrea della Robbia's 'cornice,' which frames Spinello's Madonna delle Grazie as she stands among the stars, like the Mother of the World, with strange, sad eyes, and shelters in her cloak the little people of Arezzo, humbly kneeling in penitence at her feet. CORTONA Cortona! Not one of us but thrilled as we drew near her. For few cities bear so fair a name or seem as full of promise as Cortona. Although the world has long since passed her by, she loiters on her hill-top between the valley and the sky like a forgotten goddess who is loth to quit her great estate. Her towering walls encompass her about, those mighty walls built for a mighty people which Virgil sings of in the _Aeneid_; she frowns as though she were still girt for war, and had forgotten how to smile; her lean grey castle, stark upon the crest of the hill, points to the heaven like an avenging sibyl. No wonder that her history is spare since the days when she and her great neighbours, Arretium and Clusium, joined the Etruscan League in 310 B.C.; for even to-day, with excellently engineered roads scaling her hill, she is difficult of approach, and her stout walls and impregnable position offered no inducement to invading armies, who were content with harrying her fertile plain, as they passed by to Umbria and Rome. We know she was a Roman colony in the time of the historian Dionysius, but scant mention is made of her under the Roman Empire; and although she was one of the earliest Episcopal sees, and is still the seat of a bishop, it was not until the thirteenth century that the chronicles of Cortona began to take a place in mediaeval history. She is still withdrawn from the world upon her mountain; her houses are still huddled together in the shelter of her great walls, built by the Unknown People; she still hides her poverty from the eyes of the careless traveller as he rushes past the foot of her hill on his way to Rome or Florence. After the motor-omnibus had deposited us in the Piazza Signorelli, and we had deposited our luggage in a rather dreary-looking inn whose only claims to notice were its exquisite views over the Tuscan plain to the inland sea of Thrasymene, we sallied out full of anticipation to see the legendary birthplace of three such widely different characters as the mythological Dardanus, founder of Troy; Brother Elias, the erring and ambitious follower of St. Francis; and Luca Signorelli, that courtly gentleman and great painter of the fifteenth century. But we were disappointed. Cortona, notwithstanding her lovely name and her ancient and picturesque site, is a dirty little place, with unsavoury streets and a baroque cathedral. She has treasures, of course. What little town in Italy has not? Her tumble-down palaces are built of warm red brick; her churches have some fine pictures; her Palazzo Pretorio is covered with the escutcheons of the princes who were her overlords, but she has no charm unless you catch her unawares before the sleep is shaken from her eyes early on a summer morning. [Illustration: CORTONA FROM THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI.] We found so little to detain us in her dingy, unkempt streets that we decided to push on the next day to Perugia. We tried our tempers in the inn, the most lethargic inn that it was our misfortune to visit, endeavouring to get some lunch, and after waiting an hour and a half we found the _gnocchi_ stale and the coarse meat uneatable. So we went out again into the siesta heat, determined at least to see the great Etruscan lamp which is the pride of Cortona's museum, and the pictures which Luca Signorelli painted for her churches. Cortona was asleep. She was as still as a lizard on a sunny wall; even the tiresome children who had followed us all the morning, agape for soldi, had vanished; the air was vibrant with the tremolo of the cicalas; the sunlight stretched like a shimmering veil across the valleys. And in a moment all our vexation vanished. Italy the Beautiful came out to meet us, smoothing away all disagreeable memories as a cool hand laid on the forehead will smooth out pain; we forgot the hatefulness which had been piling itself up all day--the dust, the smells, the too-glaring sun, the stupid inn with its bad-tempered maid-servant, the screaming children, the baroque cathedral! In the cool grey church of San Domenico, which stands in the flowery public gardens of Cortona, we found not only one of Luca's great pictures but a pageant of Quattrocento saints and Madonnas in richly gilt Gothic frames over the three altars which fill its eastern wall. In the Gesù, a little ancient church which clings to the hillside close to the cathedral, we discovered an Annunciation by Fra Angelico, almost as beautiful as that exquisite picture which he painted on the wall of his monastery-home in Florence. It is very like the fresco in the corridor of San Marco. The Madonna is sitting in the same light and airy loggia reading in some little book, as the Angel Gabriel, with his iridescent wings still poised for flight, alights at her feet, filling the air with glory. Outside, the grass is starred with the flowers which Angelico loved to paint; and far away, silhouetted against the sky, we see the Angel with a flaming sword driving Man and Woman from their Garden of Paradise, whose gates not even the coming of Christ could reopen on earth. And then, remembering the story of Filippo Brunelleschi, we went into the Duomo to see the famous sarcophagus which legend claims to be the tomb of the Consul Flaminius, and which the great architect of the dome of Florence Cathedral walked sixty miles to see. For one morning when he was discussing antique sculpture in the Piazza of Santa Maria del Fiore with Donatello and some other artists, Brunelleschi heard of a Roman sarcophagus in Cortona. Straightway he left his companions, and fired by his passion for the works of antiquity, 'just as he was, in his mantle, hood and sabots, without saying a word of where he was going,' came to Cortona and made a drawing of it, returning at last to Florence where he showed it to the astonished Donatello, who had not been able to guess where his friend had disappeared. But it was in the early morning, as I have said, that we discovered the nameless charm of Cortona--that same charm which we found in a different guise in all the little towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Our inn, though it towered more than a thousand feet above the valley, was at the bottom of the city, for Cortona in the immemorial Etruscan fashion hangs from the crest of her hill. Even the ambitious motor-bus could not climb higher than the Piazza Signorelli, because nearly all the streets above it are so steep that they are built in shallow steps. And they are so deserted that in one of them we found rabbits contentedly nibbling the grass which grew between its paving-stones. So the next morning, very early, while the day was cool, we climbed up to the great church of Santa Margherita, which stands with the ruined Fortezza on the crest of Cortona's mountain. To me it is always rather strange that this harsh Tuscan citadel should ignore the name of Brother Elias, that great and restless spirit who sought to wed Love not to Poverty, as Francis did, but to Ambition. His name is hardly spoken in Cortona, but the body of Santa Margherita, whom some call the Magdalen of the Franciscans, because they love to draw comparisons between the life of Christ and His humble follower, is enshrined upon the hill-top like the light that cannot be hid. Her church has been restored, and there is little of the ancient building left except her beautiful fourteenth-century tomb, the silver shrine which was the gift of Piero da Cortona, and the lovely rose-window which is preserved in the modern façade. In the aisle are the flags and ship-lantern of some knight of Malta, who prayed to Margherita in the hour of peril, and was saved by her intercession. Yet it was not for Santa Margherita that we climbed Cortona's hill at dawn, but to see the rich plain of Tuscany in its amphitheatre of blue hills, each with a towered city for its crown--Chiusi, Città della Pieve, Montepulciano, and a host of others to which we had not learned to give their names. It was a panorama of surpassing beauty which opened out before us. Fold on fold the mountains lifted their heads above the mists of the valley, rising always towards the mighty crest of Monte Amiata, which was to loom upon so many of our horizons while we were journeying through the heart of Italy. And far away the sunshine lightened the opal waters of Lake Thrasymene, lying like a forgotten sea in the bosom of the Umbrian hills, with the towers of Castiglione del Lago rosy in the dawn. [Illustration: CORTONA FROM THE PORTA S. MARGHERITA.] Even here the Rocca stood above us on its scarp, the key of the strong citadel which claims descent from Dardanus of Troy. On either side of Santa Margherita the mighty walls, including many courses of Cyclopean masonry, climbed down towards the peaceful plain. We passed through a gap which had once been a gate, and saw them plunging down the hillside holding the crumpled brown roofs of the little shrunken city in their elbow. So was Cortona of the Unknown People fortified; so was the city of the Etruscans girt about, and Hannibal and Flaminius have looked upon these walls as they passed by to battle upon the reedy shore of Thrasymene. Up on the hillside men and girls were reaping in the shadow of the ancient wall. 'And the reapers, reaping early,' quoth the poet softly to himself. Their laughter floated down to us. Every now and then a girl would straighten her lithe figure, stand upright curved scythe in hand, and sing, her clear notes soaring like a lark's in the crystal air. At our feet Cortona nestled in the embrace of her great wall, and far below, the plain of Tuscany rolled away to the hills where the sunlight fired the towers of other mountain cities. So in the dawn we grew to love Cortona, for the fantastic beauty which is her own, and for her aloofness. As we passed down into her steep-paved streets we paused a moment in San Francesco, where Brother Elias lies buried with his hopes and ambitions; where, too, is kept the ivory case with a fragment of the True Cross which the Patriarch of Constantinople gave to Elias when he visited that Court as Nuncio of Frederick II. And we lingered in little San Niccolò, which, with its loggia and cypress-garden, is the loveliest of Cortona's churches; and which, for all its poverty, treasures three pictures by Luca Signorelli, who belonged to its confraternity. Down in the Piazza Signorelli we found the motor-omnibus already waiting to take us to the station. The narrow streets were crowded with black-browed Tuscan peasants selling fruit and vegetables, and doing a thriving business in skinned frogs strung on wooden skewers. These looked particularly unappetising in pails of not too clean water, and the atmosphere was putrid after the freshness of the air above. Again we had the sense of stifling heat and odour, and again the swarms of dirty children who had tracked us yesterday rose, as it were, out of the earth. We were glad enough to leave Cortona, but not until we had experienced many vexatious delays. For when we had fetched our luggage from the inn and settled our account with the rather difficult landlady, the driver of the omnibus was not forthcoming. And when at last we persuaded him to leave the shelter of the cool Palazzo Comunale, a glazier took the ill-chosen opportunity of mending two of the broken windows in the omnibus. We had given up all hope of catching our train when half an hour later we swung out of the town and began our perilous descent down to the plain. After all we had some minutes to spare, though I should not care to make the journey again, for we took more than one corner of that switchback road on two wheels. But the driver was confident of our approval. 'Ecco signore, the train has not yet arrived,' he cried triumphantly. _Facilis descensus Averni!_ [Illustration: PERUGIA: DETAIL FROM THE CHOIR OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI.] PERUGIA 'For bodiless dreams through double gateways go Of horn and ivory, from night's realm forlorn; And those that through the ivory gate are borne Deceive, and what they tell is unfulfilled; But those that issue through the polished horn Fulfil themselves for mortals to whose sight They issue.' J. W. MACKAIL'S Translation of the _Odyssey_, xix. 562. 'Look!' said the chronicler, 'there is Perugia. Perugia, whom I have loved so long for her name alone.' The poet sighed. 'I could almost envy you because you do not know her. See how her loggia'd towers frame the heavens, and how she stretches out her lovely arms to welcome us!' We came to Perugia from Cortona. In an hour we slipped from that austere Tuscan citadel into the heart of an enchanted land--Umbria Mystica--the home of saints, where Beauty and Romance walk in the valleys with the gentle Gods of Arcady; where brooding peace hangs in the luminous air, and on whose aerial hills great memories dwell in the little cities full of dreams that men have built for them. We skirted the enchanted shores of Thrasymene, the spell-bound lake which lies like an opal in the bosom of the Umbrian Hills, and found ourselves among vineyards and olive-gardens, where the Madonnas of Perugino and Raphael are living their beautiful and simple lives in the fields, and the great-eyed oxen draw Virgilian ploughs below the olives, or roll along the dusty roads with scarlet fillets on their milk-white heads. Perugia is the queen of this enchanted land, the crown of Umbria. Think of her name--Perusia Augusta the Romans called her; was there ever a more lovely name, or one which History enriched with more poetic legends? For Felice Ciatti, that brilliant scholar of the seventeenth century, in summing up the Greco-Trojan tradition and the popular belief that Noah, the Patriarch, was the founder of the city, thought nothing of addressing the Perugians, in one of his Lenten sermons, in these stirring words--'No marvel is it if, to-day, ye Perugians possess the justice of the Armenians, the wisdom of the Greeks, the prosperity of Augustus, and the sanctity of Noah, for ye are descended from them all.' And if these legends leave you cold, think of the Carlovingian tradition in which such great names as Oliver the Paladin, and the puissant knight, Count Roland, 'the Falcon of Christendom,' and the tyrant Orgoglioso, play their parts with the lovely lady Prossimana. Or, if this does not stir you, would you rather learn romance from the nomenclature of her ancient gates? Here, long since vanished, was the Portal of the Sun, the gate through which blind Homer thought that dreams entered into a city from the east. It still gives its name to a whole quarter of Perugia--the Rione della Porta Sole--and though no man can point to the actual Porta Sole, when the wind blows coolly through any of Perugia's eastern gates, and you look across the valley at Assisi, it will be strange if you do not think of Dante's words: 'There hangs Rich slope of mountain high, whence heat and cold Are wafted through Perugia's eastern gate: And Nocera with Gualdo, in its rear Mourn for their heavy yoke. Upon that side, Where it doth break its steepness most, arose A sun upon this world, as duly this From Ganges doth; therefore let none, who speak Of that place, say Ascesi; for its name Were lamely so delivered; but the East, To call things rightly, be it henceforth styled.'[2] [Illustration: PERUGIA: ARCO DI AUGUSTO.] Here, at the end of a winding street of mediaeval houses, is the Porta Eburnea, the Ivory Gate through which Homer thought that False Dreams were expelled from a city; and close to Sant'Ercolano is the Porta Cornea, the Gate of Horn, whence issued all True Dreams. The Porta Eburnea was, indeed, the gate of False Dreams, for it was by that way, so Matarazzo tells us, that the Baglioni, that strange and beautiful and ungodly race who lived and died by violence, always passed out to battle. Of the others the Porta Augusta, the greatest of the Etruscan gates, once bore the proud name Porta Pulchra, because of its beauty even in a beautiful city; and another was named, and is still named, after the God of War. Is it not irony that all the rest should bear the names of saints, for Perugia, a city of turbulent desires, has ever bred more warriors than saints? Even to-day there are few monks or nuns in Perugia; it is the military who are in evidence, and not a few churches and cloisters have been despoiled to house them. In fact Perugia, notwithstanding her mediaeval monuments, is a gay and much begarrisoned city, not provincial like Siena, but really the capital of a state. I have never seen so many smart and pretty women in any Italian town of the size as I found at Perugia in high summer, nor so many soldiers. The Corso is full of them, both morning and evening. They promenade up and down, 'wearing out the pavements,' in the phrase of the immortal and energetic Fortebraccio; or they sit at cafés gossiping after their siestas. At night they become an army. It seems as though the entire population congregated then in the Corso and the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there is a band and a mushroom growth of tables and chairs. On Sundays they promenade in the cathedral in just the same gay and careless fashion, except that the boys doff their hats, and that here you see shaggy-haired and devout peasants kneeling among the beautifully-dressed Perugian ladies. [Illustration: PERUGIA: PIAZZA DEL MUNICIPIO.] Perugia is not a religious city. It is true that she furnished the most ardent disciples of the thirteenth-century Flagellants;[3] and that Fra Bernadino of Siena, preaching to her from the little pulpit outside the cathedral of San Lorenzo, brought her to such a passion of repentance that not only did she burn her vanities in the piazza before this ardent Flame of God, as the Florentines were to do later for Savonarola, but she built in his memory that exquisite oratory covered with reliefs in terra-cotta by Agostino Duccio, under the shadow of San Francesco. Yet for the rest it seems as though she has not forgiven the papacy for grinding her under its heel in the stormy sixteenth century, when Paul III. built his fortress on the ruined palaces of the Baglioni; although, on the Feast of the Ring of the Virgin, which, for all her air of cynicism, she still counts as one of her treasures, we saw the peasants who had climbed her hillside in the dawn worshipping with the simple faith of the Middle Ages. Matarazzo has told the story of this Ring, and how it was stolen from Chiusi, where it was held in great veneration, in the thirteenth century by a German priest, and brought by the intervention of the Holy Virgin to Perugia. It is shown in San Lorenzo in a finely-wrought casket thrice a year; otherwise it is kept in an iron chest, whose seven keys are in the custody of different citizens. We arrived early enough to go into the loft, where the chest is lodged, above the Altar of the Sacrament, and see the Ring being put _sans cérémonie_ into its place in the gold casket before the red silk curtains were drawn back and the holy relic lowered to the altar. A short mass was said, and the casket was placed on a table in the centre of the chapel for the people to pass one by one in front of it. It was a sacrament, a holy and beautiful thing, to watch them as they passed, these peasants with their broken dusty hats and rugged faces, who had come up from the valleys with their Madonna-like wives. They pressed their lips to the glass, and held up their rosaries and rings to touch the shrine. All had some special sign of love and reverence. [Illustration: PERUGIA: THE RING OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN.] I watched them till my eyes were filled with tears because of the beauty and the pathos and the blessedness of it all. One by one they passed. First, an old woman, her white hair hidden beneath a gold kerchief, and a smile of rare peace on her gnarled face, pressed her lips to the casket and handed up her rosary that it might touch the shrine. She passed down with bent head. Next came a girl of the splendid Umbrian type, deep-chested and straight-limbed, her head carried high. She kissed the glass and lifted up her ring, maybe her wedding ring, then crossed herself, and passed on with trembling lips. Old men there were who touched the shrine with shaking fingers, and stumbled away into the cathedral to pray. Children were lifted up to kiss it. And there were others besides the kerchiefed women and their peasant husbands--people of the town, complacent burghers and their stout wives, and the dainty white-robed girls of Perugia. And nearly all passed out with uncertain lips as if they had been strangely moved. Across the nave is the Miraculous Madonna which Giovanni Manni painted on a column. She is in a gilt frame, set about with silver hearts, which gleam in the darkness of the aisle like the smiles of those who have found joy in her. I do not wonder that the people of Perugia love this Madonna, for she is very beautiful. Her hands are raised in blessing, but to me her tender eyes are full of wonder, as though having no belief herself she marvelled at these worshippers for their faith, and loved them exceedingly because of it. We always found some poor, rough-headed peasants kneeling in the great ugly church before her, and ever she blessed them, and wondered at them, and seemed to give them peace. [Illustration: THE GRIFFON OF PERUGIA.] Perugia is a mediaeval paradox. When you stand upon her ramparts in the clear shining of the morning, and look across the hills and vales of Umbria, you wonder that the hot breath of war and the scent of blood should have reached her. For she stands at the head of two wide plains full of enchanted silence--the Valley of Spoleto with its many little cities starring the green hills, and the Valley of the Tiber which sweeps from the gates of Perugia southwards to Rome. The mountains, which close them in, are clothed with vines and olives, and swell softly like the many bosoms of Diana of the Ephesians. The valleys are a garden, and the hills roll softly to the horizon till they grow aerial in the distance and hang upon the heavens like fantastic clouds. Little white cities crown them or clamber up their slopes, and rivers wind down the valleys, with sunlight glinting on their waters, between the tall poplars swaying on their banks like girls who gather flowers by a stream. The high brown shoulder of Subasio, made sacred by its memories of Umbria's greatest saint, shuts off the bleak and hungry Appennines which clasp Gubbio and Gualdo and a hundred other little cities to their barren breasts. But here you have the landscape of the Quattrocento artists with the clear pale light and blue aerial hills which are the hall-mark of the Umbrian masters. Nor can you ever tire of watching it, for every day and every hour some subtle change sweeps over the face of this immortal loveliness; and it is always beautiful, whether you look across the sunlit mists at Assisi in a blue veil of cloud-shadow or see her smiling and rosy in the sunset, or whether you stand at night under the scented laurels of Perugia's _passeggiata_, and see the lights of distant hill-cities riding like ships upon the dim horizon of a soundless sea. It became a custom, almost an act of worship, to congregate upon the bulwarks of Perugia before the sun slipped behind the western hills, to watch the light pouring into the plain like liquid gold into a bowl of translucent glass, tinted all the colours of the prism. Even when night had drained this ancient chalice of the golden wine of the sun, and the lights of lonely farmsteads were twinkling on the hillsides, we were loth to leave it. Yet these fair valleys have been drenched with blood and scorched by fire; Hannibal and his Gauls and Africans gave battle to Flaminius, the maker of roads, by the lake of Thrasymene; they have been devastated by Goths and Lombards; the German Kings of Rome have harried them, and the history of Perugia itself has been one long tale of battle and murder. It is as though the Griffin of Perugia, the strange Etruscan beast which is to this day the device of the city, has never sheathed its talons in anything but human flesh. From the beginning Perugia fought fiercely for her freedom. Octavius wrestled for seven months outside her gates, and when he entered them was cheated of everything but honour; because a citizen, rather than yield his city to the first emperor, set fire to it, and stabbed himself in the holocaust which followed. Totila would not rest until he possessed her, and all through the Middle Ages she fought like a termagant with her neighbours; and the name of that griffin's brood, the Baglioni, was a terror throughout the Umbrian vales.[4] It was Paul III. who brought her to her knees, and forced her to build his great fortress upon the palaces of her princes, and not long since she turned and rent it stone from stone, seeking to wipe out the old insult. But it is not only in the marvellous and peaceful beauty of her setting that Perugia is a paradox, for how is it possible to reconcile the pictures of Perugino and his great pupils--Raphael, Lo Spagna, Pinturicchio, and Eusebio di San Giorgio--with the awful deeds of the Oddi and the Baglioni; or the wailing of the Flagellants with the great soldiers who ruled this turbulent city--Biordo Michelotto, foully done to death by the wicked Abbot of Mommaggiore, and Braccio Fortebraccio, the idol of the people? Paradox again! For the bones of Braccio Fortebraccio, which, to satisfy the vengeance of Martin V., were buried in unconsecrated ground, lie in a wooden box in the museum, and sigh to posterity through their melancholy inscription: Hospes lege et luge. Perusiae natum Montonium me exulem excepit, Mars patriam Umbriam et Capuam mihi subegit. Roma paruit; Italia theatrum; spectator orbis fuit. At Aquila cadentem risit quem patria lugens brevi hac urna tegit. Eheu! Mars extulit, Mors substulit. Abi. In the days when Perugino and his pupils were painting their calm-eyed Madonnas and saints with the blue Umbrian hills as the background to a world of ineffable peace, Perugia was drenched with blood daily, and every man carried his life in his hand. Yet hardly any of the artists of Perugia painted war, though here and there in their blue distances you see a little band of knights pricking out on the plain. Bonfigli, the master of Perugino, was the only one who cared to speak the truth; dear Bonfigli, who loved Perugia so well, and painted her with such naïve joy upon the walls of the Palazzo Comunale! [Illustration: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTER OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI.] Trace Perugia in his frescoes, and you will wonder that it should be so little changed to-day. There is the slender minaret of San Pietro de' Cassinensi, and the great Gothic window of San Domenico, whose cloisters are to-day a barrack, and Sant'Ercolano soaring up beneath the city walls beside the ancient Porta Marzia. Here you see the Palazzo Comunale, one of the most sublime Gothic palaces in Italy, with its curving front and delicate fourteenth-century windows and majestic portal, and the loggia which Fortebraccio built by the cathedral. It is all much the same to-day as it was when Bonfigli painted his primitive wars, except that the citizens no longer dress in scarlet and fur, and that there are fewer towers in the city, and none at all on the circuit of the walls. San Pietro de' Cassinensi is still the gracious church Bonfigli loved. We walked there one evening towards the hour of sunset. A little rainstorm, like a petulant burst of weeping, overtook us as we drew near, and we saw the yellow sunset and the cloud-shadows in the valley through a web of silver threads woven by the rain under the acacias. Inside, it was too dark to see the pictures with which the walls are covered, but we gathered an impression of space and dignity and richness. In the dim light we marvelled at the beauty of the choir-stalls, the intarsia, and the carving in which Stefano of Bergamo, and some say Raphael himself, gave free rein to fancy, and dreamed of delightful mythical beasts, and sphinxes with lovely faces, and a wealth of flowers and fruit and joyful little children. A mad world! Then the old monk, glad that we loved his treasures, opened the doors of the choir, so that we might see their exquisite workmanship in the fading light; and we looked down upon the incomparable Valley of Spoleto, with Assisi and her sister city, little Spello, on the skirts of Monte Subasio, and Foligno and Trevi rising out of rosy sunset mists. There is a small round hill below San Pietro, just such a little hill as Pinturicchio loved, encircled by a winding white road, and shadowed with slender trees. We almost looked to see his gay horsemen in red and blue and shining steel pricking down into the plain. There were still storms abroad, and the clouds drifted like great birds across the heavens, casting their shadows on the valley. 'This is the work of a great artist,' said the philosopher, with a little sigh of complete content. And indeed it was a worthy picture to be framed in those exquisite doors. Night overtook us before we reached Sant'Ercolano, which looked more like a mosque than ever with its soaring arches in the twilight. We climbed up the steps beside it, and passed into the city through the Gate of True Dreams. At night Perugia of the Middle Ages awakes. As we wandered in her dark and silent streets, ill-lit and bridged with gloomy arches, our ears were tuned to catch the voices of the past. We divided our evenings. Sometimes we took our coffee and vermouth in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there was a band or music of sorts. At other times the poet had his way, and we visited a humble café opposite the Palazzo Comunale, and afterwards plunged into the dark and mysterious alleys of the mediaeval city. These were the evenings that I loved the most. In the distance we could hear the faint beat of music, and up and down the Corso flowed the gay tide of promenaders, which always turned before it reached us. Above us loomed the great Palazzo, which is justly Perugia's pride. In the gloom its brown and bulging walls would have been as forbidding as a fortress's but for the delicate tracery of its windows and its fantastic Gothic door, with the Griffin of the City gazing down hungrily into the night. The lovely fountain on which the Pisani and Arnolfo di Cambio lavished their genius was nothing but a beautiful silhouette against the loggia which Braccio Fortebraccio put up to shield his beloved citizens from the sun; and on the steps of the gaunt cathedral the statue of Papa Giulio III., with raised hand, blessed his careless people. For Perugia is careless, beautifully and graciously careless. She has forgotten her woes, she has almost forgotten her old enemies; she has certainly forgotten to finish her cathedral. And yet when we sat at night in this romantic spot, where the art of four hundred years is garnered, we noticed a little yellow lamp flickering unsteadily above the cathedral door, no brighter than a glow-worm in comparison with the flare of electric light close at hand. The passers-by told us its history: how the people of Perugia, feeling the iron hand of the Farnese Pope, turned for help to Ridolfo, the last of the great Baglioni Princes. How Ridolfo failed them, and how in their extremity they turned to Christ, and besought Him with cries and sobs, tearing their garments and beating themselves like the Flagellants of the thirteenth century, to defend them against the terrible Paul III. They placed the crucifix above the door of San Lorenzo, where the light shines every night, and laid the keys of the city below the tortured feet of the Saviour. We know that their prayers were of no avail, yet every night in Perugia, that city of beautiful and romantic memories, they still light the little lantern over the cathedral door, where the crucifix was placed, when they crept with fear and trembling to the feet of Christ to ask for help against his Vicar, because Ridolfo Baglione, forsooth! had failed them in their necessity. [Illustration: PERUGIA: PORTA EBURNEA.] A step from here and we found ourselves in the dark and memory-laden streets of the old town, with their vaulted passages and their blocked-up Doors of the Dead--those pitiful defences against the Common Enemy, in which Japan as well as Italy put faith.[5] Of them all I loved the Via Vecchia best, with its air of mystery and its many arches linking the grim old palaces together. At night it was so gloomy there that we could barely find our way past the ancient Canonica in which so many of the Popes snatched a holiday from Rome; and as we went down the hill, always between great palaces, the darkness closed round us. Here and there a feeble light illuminated the steep path, but for the rest there was only the starlight to guide us until we came to the great Porta Augusta, which spanned the road majestically, full of the dignity of dead Etruria. Seen thus against the stars, with its graceful fifteenth-century loggia faintly illumined by a yellow light within, it was as impressive as the pylon of an Egyptian Temple. Or, if our steps took us another way, we passed the grim towers of mediaeval mansions, and presently found ourselves at the Baglioni's Gate of Dreams, or the Porta Mandola, as the Etruscan gate is called. Here, of a certainty, we would hear music, for whenever I have passed through that ancient gate at night, the silence has been broken by gay songs. Sometimes I have sat there far into the night, dreaming of the Baglioni and listening to the careless music of I knew not what laughter-loving house. For no one can live long in Perugia without being fired by the memory of those strange men whose strength and beauty was famous throughout Italy, and whose lovely names alone fit them to be the heroes of romance--Grifonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Sermonetto, Morgante. If we believe their adoring chronicler, who though he traced their downfall could not speak of them without the stately prefix 'High and Mighty Lords,' their beauty was the beauty of the ancient Gods of Greece, and their courage was the courage of the Heroes. And who of us but has wept over the Great Betrayal, and the passing of the beautiful Grifonetto, forgiven at the last by Atalanta? And who has not loved the young Astorre in his Cloth of Gold bringing his fair young bride back to his home; and thrilled to read of the Homeric death of Sermonetto, 'so strong and gallant while he lived that tongue of man cannot tell the worth of him. One, in very truth, who never in all his days knew what fear was, and till the last word died on his lips ever showed himself the greater-hearted, as though he were not vanquished, but victor of his foe.' * * * * * [Illustration: PERUGIA: THE TOMB OF THE VOLUMNII.] Early one hot and cloudless August morning, while the farmers with many cries of 'per la Madonna!' were urging their oxen up the hill to market in the shadow of the old grey University of Perugia, we drove down into the Valley of the Tiber to see the wonderful Etruscan tomb close to Ponte San Giovanni, which was the burial-place of the Volumnii. It is of special interest not only for its excellent preservation, but because it belongs to the Roman-Etruscan period, and forms the connecting link between the old Etruscan tombs and the famous Roman sepulchres a mile or two outside Rome on the Latin Way. A short descent took us into the subterranean vault at whose portal, cut out of the tufa rock, lay the ancient stone door, set aside now for a modern gate of iron. As we passed into the dark antechamber the chill damp air was cold as death after the cicala-haunted sunshine of the fields above. But while we strained our eyes to pierce the gloom the custode turned on an electric light hidden behind the cornice, and straightway we forgot everything in the wonder of the scene before us. In an inner chamber, resting upon their carved sarcophagi, we saw the inmates of the tomb grouped round the urn on which reposed the head of the house above two finely sculptured furies. On the coffered ceiling a gorgon's head, very terrible, with knotted snakes on its temples and horror in its face, stared down upon the dead. And as our eyes became accustomed to the dim light we discovered the strange symbolism of Etruria all round us. From the ceiling of the ante-chamber, on whose benches the relatives of the deceased reclined, to feast or watch beside their dead, little genii, exquisitely beautiful and light as butterflies, were hanging by the leaden chains by which they were suspended more than two thousand years ago. Over the doorway was a sun-disk, springing from the waves--fit emblem of the immortality of these Etruscans, springing from the waves of oblivion which for so many centuries washed over them. But there was none of the colour which makes beautiful the Tombs of Egypt, and there was hardly the same air of eternity. In the long corridors of the Royal Tombs of the Pharaohs there is an archaic defiance as of a life long since forgotten and lost in the dust of centuries. Here the life is of yesterday; we could almost hear the heart of Greece and Rome beating gaily in a young world, and the languid tread of the effete Etruscans, whose curious symbolism at once repels and mystifies, with its red lascivious serpents, its demons and furies, its beautiful and reluctant Medusas, and its solemn mockery of the feasting dead. TODI When I think of Todi the first things that I remember are the golden tassels of the corn against the sky, and the blue chicory which starred the dusty roadside as we drove to her from Perugia across the young Tiber. For little Todi, enthroned on her steep hill, has no railway within thirty-three miles of her gates; and if you do not wish to ravish the leagues which separate her from the world by motor, you can only reach her after many hours spent in the exquisite and touching beauty of the Umbrian Vale. She is one of those forgotten cities which are still to be found on the hills of Italy. The years have trampled lightly within her ancient walls; she has no trains, no jangling trams, very few motors except the grey automobile from Perugia which bursts noisily into the heart of her every day. She is a charmed city, whose name is painted on a signboard outside the gates lest the traveller should pass her by unwittingly. Within her walls we shook the dust of a work-a-day world from our feet, and forgot its turmoil in the music of her bells, which tell the passing hours with the loving persistence of those grown old in labour. To many people Todi is a mere horizon of towers on the crest of a distant hill. To me she is the dwelling-place of happiness. And because I am a little jealous for Todi, and would have you love her as I loved her, having watched her grow in beauty as the miles decreased between us, I beg your patience while we thread the plain between Perugia and Tuder of the Umbrians. It was a day of sun and shadow, an ideal morning for an expedition into Arcady, and we found the beauty of a young world down in the Valley of the Tiber. The jangle of harness-bells called us early from our breakfast, and the air was like wine cooled with snow as we drove down Perugia's four-mile hill, past her great churches, and on to the long white road where the vines are linked together for miles in festoons of archaic grace. The only people that we met were peasants toiling barefoot in the sun. Their olive skins were deepened to pomegranate; they had lithe figures; their finely moulded heads were set on long, slender necks; and when we saw them working under the olives, or coming towards us along the dusty road from some village fair, leading the milk-white oxen whose horns were bound with scarlet fillets, we knew that these were the ideal shepherds among whom the Gods of Greece were content to dwell. Their white homesteads rose from fields of maize and corn, and among the vineyards and olive-gardens were crops of tomatoes and hemp and pumpkins, and always figs and mulberries, for Umbria is the land of plenty, the home of Maia, and of Hermes,[6] her light-hearted son. The vines which linked the mountains to the plain had the beauty of a classic frieze, and when our eyes turned from the dappled hills we saw flowers weaving a multi-coloured web on the loom of dusty grass by the roadside--purple loosestrife and scabious, blue chicory, sugamele and rare borage, poppies and pink veronica, yellow spanocchi, dandelions, and golden broom. All the dyes of the East were woven there; and brambles and blossoming clematis stretched out long swaying arms towards the little shrines with which the fields were strewn, or twined a crown of flowers and thorns about the rust-worn symbols of the Passion on a lonely crucifix. Little cities which had been hidden in the folds of the valley grew into our horizon--Torgiano, towering on our left, Deruta and Ripa Bianca. Our road, which had run in a straight line across the plain from the foot of Perugia's hill, crossed the Tiber on a bridge with a fifteenth-century gate-tower, and turned along the banks of the river. Tall Lombard poplars lingered on its brink, and peasant women in gay kerchiefs were washing linen in its green water. Across the valley we could see Perugia, most beautiful of all hill-cities, smiling in the sunshine, already far away; and in front across a sea of lesser hills rose Todi, perched on her mountain like a city in a fairy-tale, which surely could be reached by no other way than on the wings of a genie! We rested our horses at Deruta, and clambered up into its precipitous streets. It is a mere hamlet, though a great deal of majolica has been made here for the last three hundred years, and it is extremely picturesque, perched high over the Tiber. Deruta is like a piece of its own pottery. It is built of gray stone, much the same colour as the unglazed plates which we saw drying on the walls, and its people dress in bright colours like the pigments on the finished ware. Every one goes barefoot here, and the old women toil up the steep stair-streets with their sandals slung over their arms, and huge bundles of sticks or fodder on their backs. And apart from its picturesqueness Deruta is well worth a visit for the sake of a beautiful fresco by Caporale in Sant'Antonio Abbate. After Deruta the Umbrian Valley was all vineyards and olive-groves and fig-trees and acacias. Sometimes the Tiber was close beside us like a blue ribbon dividing us from the plain as we jangled through the cicala-haunted woods on the hillside; at others we could only trace it among the vineyards by the tall reedy poplars which followed its winding course. The day grew hotter; the song of the cicalas swelled up like an anthem, and the butterflies drowsed upon the flowers. Presently we came to a wayside fountain, where a lovely girl with a jar of water poised on her head was talking to a young herdsman, beautiful as an Apollo, who was watering his oxen. There was a garden of ancient olives on the hillside above, and a welcome shade for our horses in the road. And because we had seen Todi on her hill, and that she was beautiful, we ate our lunch and took our siesta there under the olives in the scented air. Near at hand a boy was singing like a lover at his work; there were flowers at our feet, and cicalas fluting in the silver foliage overhead. The great white oxen were still drinking at the fountain, and their bells made pleasant music; sometimes a woman with a water-jar on her head came from the village, or a peasant rode by on his mule. It was a magic day. We had had so many hours of joy, so many hours of sun and wind and beautiful primitive things, that we had left care behind us. As we lay there on the soft earth and watched the cloud-shadows sweeping over the hills, we forgot the toil of life; we no longer heard the world throbbing its soul away in its great cities. The voice of the wind mingled with the shimmering music of summer--the insects, the song of the boy at work, and the bells of the oxen, in a paean of joy. For Umbria is like that garden in which Siddârtha dwelt with Yasôdara, shut off from all ugly and painful things. If you look deep enough you will assuredly find death, even as Siddârtha did--the hawk preying upon the small bird, the small bird upon the gnat, and you will see the sweat upon the oxen as they strain in the sun. You may find the world as sad a place, as full of pain and toil as he did, or you may find it just such a mirror of God's Love as did Francis, the chief of Umbrian saints. Here the butterflies seem to dance more gayly than they do elsewhere, the trees grow free, the flowers stretch upwards to the sun; no questions vex you when you see a wayside shrine. In the garden of Umbria there are only God and Nature, the Soul of Things is at ease. So, with our hearts attuned to her simplicity, we came to Todi on the top of her hill, with her towers and walls, and her winds and clouds. We caught her asleep in the siesta hour. There was no one astir when we drove into her beautiful golden piazza, where the Middle Ages have never been forgotten: even to-day it is full of mediaeval grace, with its two great palaces and its exquisite cathedral. But if we had come to her in the busy morning stir of the market we could still have found the Middle Ages there, for the peasants ride in on the old leather saddles picked out in brass and scarlet that we see in fifteenth-century frescoes; the asses bear on panniers barrels, or huge bundles of rough wood; the mules are harnessed with bells and tassels, three abreast, so that they straggle across the narrow road as they strain up the hill, and all the women carry their marketing on their heads. The cathedral of Todi is one of the gems of Umbrian architecture. It is a great golden church with beautiful and very ancient doors, and an ornate rose window; it soars above the piazza on a wide flight of steps which not even a gigantic cinematograph advertisement can rob of dignity. Below its southern wall is a row of shabby little shops where the people sit at work in their doorways, but the northern side has flying buttresses and a cornice of fantastic heads of men and birds and beasts; and there is a pleasing baroque arch with shallow, grass-grown steps leading down to the piazza. [Illustration: DETAILS FROM THE APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TODI.] Like her cathedral Todi is full of quaint and beautiful things. She is an artist's city, solitary and beautiful, unexpectedly rich and frankly poor. Once away from her stately piazza with its three great buildings, which are like three jewels in the crown of King Cophetua's Beggar Maid, we found her humble and out of elbows. Her old brown houses bulged out over the steep little streets, or towered like lean fortresses on her city wall, with all manner of green things, even fig-trees, growing out of them. From below they seemed to be piled up one on the top of the other like children's bricks. The vineyards and olive-gardens, which swept up the hillside, forced entrances at every point; and on the crest of the hill among her palaces was one slender cypress spire, soaring up as though Nature herself must climb through this clear air to heaven. She had long avenues of acacias and flowering laurels, and ancient gateways like the Porta Aurea, through which we had a vista of mediaeval towers, and a Perugino landscape of green valleys with a river winding away to the amphitheatre of blue hills. Here and there in her walls were courses of splendid masonry, Umbrian perhaps, and on the eastern side of the town were four gigantic niches of a Roman basilica. But as in most Umbrian cities, it was the Middle Ages that left Todi her chief treasures, her stately palaces and her cathedral; and further down the hillside, on a flight of earthquake-riven steps, San Fortunato, which was the home of the Antipope Nicholas v. in the days when rebellious little Todi was a thorn in the side of the papacy, and Lewis of Bavaria made her his headquarters. Fra Jacopone of Todi, the author of _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_, is said to be buried in this church, but though we looked for it we could not find his tomb. All these things count as nothing in the eyes of the Todesi, for Todi boasts a pilgrimage church; and a pilgrimage church, albeit of the sixteenth century, is an acquisition not to be despised by any city however ancient and picturesque. But in truth Santa Maria della Consolazione is a lovely church, a _capolavoro_ of architecture, and it soars up like a great golden gourd ripened to perfection on the green hillside. We came to it through the Porta Aurea along an avenue of flowering laurels, and its fair proportions gave us a complete sense of satisfaction. As we drew near, its clustered domes dwarfed the amphitheatre of hills. Inside it was airy and gracious, a bubble of light; but its sixteenth-century paganism, which is always the paganism of secular buildings rather than of temples, and its overgrown apostles in the niches that were meant for gods, spoilt its appeal, to the Protestant mind at any rate, as a house of prayer. What is it, I wonder, that makes it easy for the Protestant to worship in Gothic or Romanesque churches, and to respond to the appeal of basilicas like Santa Maria Maggiore or San Clemente in Rome, while sixteenth-century churches still remain the ideal ecclesiastical building to the majority of Roman Catholics? Is it that they all bear the image of St. Peter's and the Vatican in their minds? They argue that at least under the spacious cupolas of the renaissance they have light and space. And it is logic, for Gothic cathedrals are dim and full of shadows. But I could say my prayers more easily in the baths of Caracalla, where the sun slanting over the broken walls has a trick of making mist like floods of incense, and the birds chant all day long, than in St. Peter's, for all its fragrant services. And I doubt if any Catholics could be moved to such an ecstasy of worship in the dusk of Milan Cathedral, when the organ throbs through the aisles at Vespers, as we have seen them in many of the late pilgrimage churches of Italy, like Santa Maria of Todi or the great basilica of the Casa Santa at Loreto. [Illustration: TODI: S. MARIA DELLA CONSOLAZIONE.] Like all the hill-cities of Umbria, one of Todi's chief charms is the beauty of her views. Below my bedroom window in the Hotel Risorgimento the old brown roofs of Todi clambered so eagerly down the slope that each one was at least two stories below the one above. Here and there were little gardens full of tamarisks and oleanders and morning glories. To the left rose San Fortunato, high on its broken flight of steps, like a grim fortress; and below it was the bastion of the public garden, with its round acacia trees which were always vibrant with the song of cicalas. In the deep valley were grey-towered farms with loggias and outside stairways, and a great fortified convent with the stations of the Cross climbing up to its gates in a cypress avenue. Through the midst the Tiber wound very slowly like a ribbon, and now the sunlight caught it, and we could see the blue water, and now we could only trace it by its tall Lombard poplars. But always it turned towards the distant hills which rose the one behind the other, fold on fold, and full of changing lights, towards Rome. At night it was still and mysterious. The steep hillside was wrapped in darkness. There was no moon, and though the sky was powdered thickly with stars they gave no light to see the valley by. Far below I could hear the humming of the night crickets; they sounded sleepy too. And up above, San Fortunato loomed almost transparently in the heavens, and the Milky Way shone like a mist of stars. We found Arcady again down in the valleys as we drove back to Perugia across the Umbrian plain. There had been a fair at some neighbouring village, and the road was full of peasants coming back with cortèges of white oxen and calves, which had bells on their throats, and collars of scarlet and brass, and crimson fillets. Perugia lay before us all the way, with her towers and majestic walls and the slim campanile of San Pietro, which looks like an obelisk from the plain. As we drove along the straight white road we saw the cities of the Valley of Spoleto rising like stars upon their hills. At each turn fresh mountains were disclosed with fresh cities on their skirts, pink in the evening sun. We were tired after the heat of the day, and silent. The harness-bells and the clipping sound of hoofs made an agreeable accompaniment to our thoughts. We climbed up slowly through the sunset, looking now at the hills, now at the olive-gardens that stretched away from the road, their leaves as silver as a flight of butterflies in the sunlight; now idly watching the long-legged shadows of the horses on the flowery bank. And all the way the cicalas were singing by the roadside, and we bore the memory of fragrant sunlit hours in our hearts. Half unconsciously, and like a message from the eternal hills, St. Paul's words came into my mind: 'Whatsoever thing is good, whatsoever thing is pure, whatsoever thing is lovely, whatsoever thing is of good report, if there be any virtue or if there be any truth, think on these things.' They were like an answer to the riddle which all men ask of Fate. But indeed in this Umbrian garden they are the text of everyday life, for in its byways it is easy to catch the spirit of St. Francis as he passed, barefoot and meanly clad, singing the praise of God and all His creatures. As we drove up the last steep incline the plain was filled with light. Overhead the clouds were growing rosy. Assisi was a city of gold. And to the horizon rolled the Umbrian hills, purple and blue, and very far away like jade, airy and transparent, in the luminous space which Perugino loved to paint. SIENA AND THE PALIO It was the poet who persuaded us to go to Siena to see the Palio run in honour of Our Lady of Mid-August. We were still in Perugia enjoying the languid Umbrian summer, when he announced his intention of leaving the next day for Siena. 'What _is_ the Palio?' asked the philosopher. 'August will be very hot in Siena, and nothing could be more beautiful than this'--he waved his hand towards the white walls of Assisi, and the great dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli, floating like a lotus bud above the morning mists, which filled the valley between Perugia and Monte Subasio. 'It is so difficult to define,' said the poet. 'When you say, "What is the Palio?" you give me the wherewithal to write a book. If I told you that it was a race in honour of the Virgin Mary, ridden bareback round the chief piazza of Siena, by jockeys in mediaeval costume, who try to club each other off the course, you would probably prefer to stay here in Perugia. If I told you that it was a pageant you would be sure to say that you have seen better at Olympia.' He was silent for a moment. 'But it is more than that. Imagine a city of Gothic palaces, a little flushed hill-city, sleeping among vineyards and olive-gardens, sleeping and sleeping like a girl bewitched. And then imagine the soul of her awaking for a few hours--a day perhaps--in the summer of the year. That is Siena, dear gay Siena, with her indomitable spirit and her fickle careless heart, with her pageants and her saints, and her allegiance to Madonna. For first and foremost Siena is the city of the Virgin Mary. There they think of her not only as the Mother of God, but as their own liege sovereign; even the Standard of the City, the black and white Balzana, is emblematic "of the purity and humility of the Virgin, or of those joyful and sorrowful mysteries whereby, as she told St. Bridget, her life was ever divided between happiness and grief." 'As for the Palio, if you would appreciate it you must understand something of the religion of the Middle Ages, which was at its best an inspiration, capable of producing St. Francis and St. Catherine, and at its worst a creed of superstitions which found vent in wild orgies of penance, and countenanced the crusade against the Albigenses. You must have thrilled to stories of wild games, like the Florentine Giuoco del Calcio or Perugia's Battaglia de' Sassi, in which the players lost their limbs and not infrequently their lives. And lastly, you must appreciate the intense patriotism which the men of Siena feel for their _contrade_, or divisions of the city, which I can best describe as parishes; though it is difficult to say whether, in the first place, the boundaries were parochial or military. 'It is not merely a pageant, though as a pageant it is superlative; it is the last flicker of the spirit of the Middle Ages. And for my part I love it, because the Sienese are still so mediaeval at heart. And that is why there is no city in Italy more fitted to be illumined by the torch of the Middle Ages than Siena. For Siena, notwithstanding the fact that she bred some of the greatest Renaissance popes, was comparatively untouched by the wave of paganism which swept over Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She still has whole streets of Gothic palaces; her saints are still reverenced with the almost child-like simplicity of the Middle Ages; she still boasts the special protection of the Blessed Virgin; and in the midst of all her fervour she still nurses her old feuds, not only with her ancient enemies, the Florentines, but between her own _contrade_.' * * * * * It was dark and the heavens were full of stars when we bade good-bye to our kind host of the Perugian inn, and boarded the electric tram that was to take us down to the station. We had chosen an early train so as to avoid travelling in the heat of the day, but we found the car already full of thrifty Italians bent on making hay before the sun shone. [Illustration: SIENA: BANNER-HOLDER.] We left at dawn, in the clear pale light which floods the Umbrian plain when the world is yet a little grey, and Perugia is nothing but a lovely outline on the crest of her hill. This is the light that Perugino loved, the shadowless herald of the day, full of the mystery of the morning. The world woke slowly from her pale slumber in the arms of night; the sky deepened from beryl to gold. We found Thrasymene illumined with rosy morning fires, her hills empurpled, and the towers of her little cities aflame with sunrise. It seemed as though immortal memories, great desires, and burnt-out passions struggled for utterance there. How Hannibal's tired eyes must have ached to possess so fair a land! Yet it is likely that he never saw the passionate dawn wooing the lake with plumes of rose and gold, as we did; for we know that on the fateful day when he waited to give battle to Flaminius by the shore of Thrasymene, the mists which did him such signal service filled up the hollow like a curtain hung from one range of mountains to the other. So we came through Tuscany to Siena, and found her all agog with excitement for the Palio, with pennons flying and music echoing down her streets, and her inns already full to overflowing. Ah, Siena, with your gaunt red palaces and your lily tower, and your ineffectual walls which thread the vineyards like old men dreaming life away in memories, it is you who are the heart of Tuscany! You are not pale and beautiful like Florence, not such a great lady; nor have you the silent grace of Pisa, but how lovable, how intimate you are! Their dignity would ill become you with your stormy and undignified past, of which De Commines said: 'La Ville est de tout temps en partialité, et se gouverne plus follement qu'aucune Ville d'Italie.' [Illustration: SIENA: TORRE DEL MANGIA.] But in no other place is the traveller welcomed with such song and laughter as in Siena, when she holds high festival. I, who have only seen her in her Palio days, cannot think that life is ever dull or languid in her streets and _piazze_. I have peopled her with mediaeval ghosts since that day in mid-August when I woke and found them in possession. At every sound of music I look round for silken banners, and pretty boys in doublet and hose escorting steel-clad warriors, or the gay spendthrifts of whom Folgore of San Gimignano sang. For on that day I caught a glimpse of the Middle Ages, with their knights and pages and their companies of men-at-arms. I heard the brave music of their drums, and saw the old Siena, ruddy and black-browed, clamouring loud-voiced in the Piazza del Campo--a happy child one moment, and the next a bundle of conflicting passions, remembering century-old grievances, and raking up dead feuds to make a Tuscan holiday. [Illustration: SIENA: TORCH-REST.] It was in the Piazza del Campo, or to give it its modern name which does not please me half as much, the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, that I grew to know Siena best. Here she was the city of the Quattrocento, of which I love to dream, fantastic and beautiful, with untold possibilities lurking behind the walls of her tall red palaces. The Campo lies in the hollow where the three hills of Siena meet, and its shape is an irregular semi-circle. I can best describe it by saying that it is like an enormous cockle, slightly concave--rose-coloured, for it is paved with red brick--and with ribs or flutings of grey stone which converge towards the deepest hollow in front of the Palazzo Pubblico. Encircle this by a wide, flagged roadway, and ring it round with noble palaces, many of them of great beauty, with Gothic arch and lancet window. At the deepest hollow of the shell build up a palace for the rulers of the most unruly republic in the whole peninsula. Fashion it of exceeding beauty with a façade which follows the curve of the piazza. Build it of Siena's red brick; break its long lines with Gothic windows cloven by slender columns; grace it with magnificent arched doors; decorate it with scutcheons and crests; and high on its wall place the golden monogram of Holy Flame which Bernardino, Siena's gentlest saint, identified with his life. At its side build an arcaded chapel of white marble, stained by time, filled with the faded frescoes of Il Sodoma; and from this chapel picture yourself a tower, not like the tower of any city out of Tuscany, which springs up into the heavens with the natural grace of growing things, so that you do not think of it as brick or stone, but as some beautiful and splendid flower which grew up in one mediaeval night while Siena slept, and has blossomed ever since. Even Florence cannot show the like of this. It is so beautiful and characteristic that it is worthy of mention beside the Piazzetta of St. Mark's at Venice. And at night it is a revelation of the Middle Ages to pass from the Via Cavour, with its lighted shops and its gay streams of men and women, into the dim and romantic Campo. Night covers the passing of time. The song and laughter of modern Sienese life, flowing down to the Lizza to promenade, comes like an echo across the years. It is very still in the Campo at night, and empty except perhaps for Beppo, the seller of water-melons, whose guttering candle suffices to show his pink and succulent wares. But one evening while we stood in the shadow of the Palazzo Comunale we heard some stray musicians singing an old choir-chant in the Via del Casato. It was as though the ghosts of pilgrims were toiling up the Via dei Pellegrini, just as they used to do, past the great ruined palace of Il Magnifico, to lay their troubles at the feet of the Queen of Sorrows. Overhead the Torre del Mangia, released from the shadows of the battlemented court, soared up to the stars more like a lily than ever with the moonlight silvering its machicolations. And we remembered that in the morning we had seen it with its head in the drifting clouds, and the sunlight below. But it was not only for its mediaeval beauty that we loved the Campo. This is Siena's heart. Here she has fought and loved and hated and rejoiced, ay, and died too. And if her stones have been too often stained with blood in civil warfare she has gentler memories--here Provenzano Salvani, the victor of Monte Aperto, cast all dignity aside 'when at his glory's topmost height,' and begged for alms to ransom a friend who languished in some foreign prison; here Bernardino preached so eloquently of Divine Love that he almost moved the unregenerate young Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pius II., to repentance. And here, while the armies of Spain were beleaguering their city, and they were faint for food, the youths of Siena came to play their games till they were called back to guard the city walls, to the joy and amazement of Blaise de Montluc, the French Governor, who never tired of praising the Sienese for their chivalry and the courage and beauty of their women. Here, too, in a few days' time, came Siena and all the strangers that were within her gates to see the Palio! [Illustration: A STREET IN SIENA.] The _Prove_ were run first. Early in the week a sandtrack was prepared, and as if by magic an amphitheatre of seats sprang up round the piazza. There are six of these _prove_, or trial races, for the selection of horses for the Palio; and they are run on the evening of the 13th, the morning and evening of the two following days, and the morning of the 16th of August.[7] The Palio festivities really begin on the 13th of August, for although the Sienese do not attend the _prove_ in great numbers there are generally some thousand spectators who shout themselves hoarse with excitement; and feeling sometimes runs high when there is rivalry between ancient enemies like the _contrade_ of the Oca and the Torre. On that morning, too, the streets are full of peasants driving their white oxen in pairs before them to the annual fair, which is still held outside the Porta Camollia in honour of our Lady of Mid-August. It has dwindled considerably from the seven days' _fiera_ which marked the occasion in the Middle Ages, but it is still a picturesque sight. The peasants drive standing up, like Roman charioteers, behind their milk-white steers, whose heads are bound with scarlet fillets, and their soft dewlaps girdled by a bell. The sellers of water-melons do a thriving business with the thirsty drovers, and the piazza is a sea of tossing horns and smooth white backs from the battlemented city wall to the column which marks the spot where Leonora of Portugal met her betrothed, the Emperor Frederick III. On Sunday Siena was comparatively quiet, although there were _prove_ in the Piazza del Campo both morning and evening, and a general air of merriment throughout the city. We heard mass in the cathedral where the banners of the various _contrade_ hung from the piers of the nave; and the wonderful graffito pavement which, according to a seventeenth-century custom, is covered with boards for the rest of the year to preserve it from injury, was laid bare. And then we went down to Fontebranda to see how the _Contrada_ of the Oca, Saint Catherine's _contrada_, was preparing for the Palio. We found it delightfully confident of victory. The sacristan of Saint Catherine's house took us into the chapel which was once her father's workshop, and would not let us go until we had heard the history of the many Palii which the victorious Oca had won in past years--assisted no doubt by the prayers of Santa Caterina in heaven to the holy Mother of God. [Illustration: SIENA: S. DOMENICO AND THE VIA BENINCASA.] The philosopher loves Fontebranda. To him it is the most romantic spot in Siena. It is certainly one of the most picturesque, whether you stand at the head of the steep Via Benincasa and see San Domenico's gaunt red walls towering above its houses, or whether you look towards the city from the church. A winding road leads up through gardens from the Valley of Fontebranda to the city gate. Above the wall tall, green-shuttered palaces rise tier on tier to the cathedral, whose delicately arcaded dome and tower crown the hill. To the right the loggia'd houses of the tanners sweep down the Via Benincasa to Fontebranda's mediaeval fountain; and the keen, unpleasant smell of the tanneries, which was one of the first things we noticed in Siena, is everywhere. Fontebranda is changed but little since the days when Saint Catherine lived there with her parents. Then as now it was full of tanneries, then as now the men worked half in their dark windowless shops and half out in the street: in her day the loggia'd houses were here; the yellow skins were drying in the road; and San Domenico, up whose hill she toiled to prayer, was the same grim fortress-church as now. But I do not love Saint Catherine, her warlike spirit notwithstanding; nor do I love Sodoma's frescoes of her in the great church on the hill. And the Sienese themselves, though they give her great honour, do not seem to love her as they love the simple Bernardino. Splendid as her chapel is, magnificent as are her festas, she seems to be less in the imagination of Siena than Saint Bernardino, whose gentle life followed closely on hers as though the _genius loci_ dared not trust her unruly people through that stormy century without a guiding spirit. See on how many houses is his seal of holy Flame! And how brightly it burns on the Palazzo Pubblico, especially towards nightfall, when the setting sun gilds the façade and fires the sacred monogram. 'Respect is what we owe, love what we give.' And so I would leave the philosopher to St. Catherine and his Fontebranda, and come to San Francesco and the little chapel beside it where San Bernardino prayed. The Sienese have lavished lovely things upon this oratory of the ardent boy, who forsook all and followed Francis in the love of Christ. Sodoma, Pacchia and Beccafumi have glorified it, and peopled its walls with the beautiful and mystic-eyed women of the Renaissance. But though they have enriched it, I am glad that circumstance has kept St. Francis' great church as it was first conceived--a bare and solemn building--a church for the followers of the man who loved poverty and simplicity, because through them he saw the way to God. Even now I would have it cleared of its black and white Sienese stripings; but its wide empty nave, the noble chapels of its transepts, its ruined islands of fresco, its stillness and its great simplicity, make it beautiful. San Francesco stands on the southern spur of the city, and from the ancient Porta Ovile in the valley below, a country road leads through gardens and cypress-woods to the Convent of the Osservanza, in which Pandolfo Petrucci the Magnificent, one of Siena's great failures, lies buried. The brother who took us over the church showed us the cell of Bernardino with its ancient wooden door nibbled almost to destruction by ardent pilgrims. And from a window in the old monastery we looked across the valley of pines and cypresses to Siena, painted against a glowing sunset sky. Seen thus across the fruitful Tuscan vale she was still the City Beautiful which inspired San Bernardino to a passion of eloquence on that long-distant summer day, early in the fifteenth century, when he climbed up into a tree and addressed the astonished multitudes 'in words so inflamed with divine love, that while many wept, there were some that deemed him mad.' Then as now her towers, though there were many more in Bernardino's city, were like the hands of suppliants held up to heaven; then as now the great dome and Campanile of Santa Maria Assunta set the seal of Madonna over her troubled people. We looked long. In the church overhead the monks were intoning, and the song of the cicalas floated up from the fragrant cypress-woods as though they too were praising God. The sun went down, and little white wraiths of mist rose from the valley. The air blew chill. When we departed the monks had long ago ceased chanting, and the insects had folded their wings. But as we hastened through the vineyards where the mists fled from us like pale ghosts, the lights of the city twinkled a welcome to us through the gathering dusk. And so we came again into the warm heart of Siena. * * * * * Boom! Boom! Boom! It was different from any other sound. At first I thought it was a part of my dreams, for it vibrated over the city like an orchestra of bells. Boom! Boom! Boom! Then I remembered, and sprang out of bed. It was the 16th of August, the day of the Palio, and that deep music whose echoes were throbbing round the countryside was the voice of Siena waking from her long slumber. It was the first time that I had heard it, and my heart beat faster, for the tocsin of La Mangia is nearly always silent now, although it played such a great part in the mediaeval history of Siena when it used to call her citizens to arms in the name of God and the Virgin Mary! My window looked down on a silent street winding between tall shuttered palaces. As a rule it was empty except for the milk-woman going from door to door in her big straw hat, and a worn-out Comacine lion which grinned sardonically at me from an ancient tower opposite. But to-day peasants were pouring up the hill--the men in their black wide-awakes and Sunday clothes, and the women, old and young alike, in their silly Tuscan hats which frivol with every breath of wind, and are never as becoming as the lovely head-kerchiefs of the Umbrians. They are worn on the backs of the heads; the soft brims, which are not wired, form an aureole of pale-coloured straw, and present a deliciously incongruous effect when they frame withered faces wrinkled like walnut-shells. I love the bent old women of Siena who look as if they had forgotten to be old with their ribbons and flowers and their coquettish young hats! [Illustration: SIENA FROM THE CONVENTO DELL' OSSERVANZA.] Yes, Siena was awaking from her slumber. I even fancied that there was a glint of suppressed laughter in the eye (he had only one eye, the other was filled with lichen) of my Comacine friend across the street. Already the city was like a hive, and the sound of a distant crowd was like the humming of many insects. Every inn had been full for days, and the people were still pouring in from all directions. At nine o'clock we went to see the last of the _prove_ from the balcony which we had hired from that very agreeable haberdasher, Signor Tizzi, who has a shop almost opposite the Palazzo Comunale. It was hot, and the people down in the piazza were crowded together in the shade of the Torre del Mangia, which lay across the square like the shadow on a sundial. The whole scene was more like a dream than a real happening. In the dark cortile of the Palazzo Pubblico we could see the jockeys in fantastic parti-coloured suits, waiting for gun-fire; and the fierce white sunlight beat on the piazza, empty except for the chattering, gesticulating belt of humanity in the shadow of the Mangia. Bang! went the gun. And with a rattle of drums the _fantini_ (jockeys) came out to run their mad race, to the accompaniment of the thunder of iron hoofs on baked sand, and the ceaseless shouting of the good Sienese. After the excitement had subsided somewhat we pushed our way through the crowded streets to the cathedral. It was empty to-day, although yesterday, on the Festival of the Assumption, it had been full of glorious living colour. Then the Palio was hanging from the arch of the transept, and a great throng filled the aisle. Then, too, the miraculous Madonna delle Grazie, she to whom the distracted Sienese dedicated their city on the eve of Monte Aperto, was shown to the people; and the peasants, ever the last to lose faith, knelt at her shrine all day. As a rule I do not love the cathedral of Siena, notwithstanding its glorious pavement, and rich carving, and the Pisani's exquisite pulpit whose equal is not to be found in Italy. The great church's black and white stripings within and without make the eyes ache, and the over-elaborated façade is only beautiful by moonlight. But when High Mass is being celebrated with mediaeval splendour within its walls, and a great press throngs the aisles, it is bewilderingly rich. And we found it easy to forgive even the zebra stripings when we saw the poor people of the campagna praying to their miraculous Madonna behind the veil of sunlight which poured down from the clerestory and made a Holy of Holies of the Cappella del Voto. That morning we paid another visit to the famous Library of the Duomo, which Francesco Piccolomini commissioned Pinturicchio to paint in honour of his uncle Aeneas Sylvius, for we could think of no better preparation for the Palio than studying this Quattrocento pageantry. We are told that in his contract Cardinal Francesco inserted a special clause, insisting that the Umbrian artist should use a certain quantity of gold and ultramarine and crimson in his decorations. And truly Pinturicchio has lavished colour on this splendid monument to the glories of the Humanist Pope, who was a typical expression of his age in everything, except in his great revival of the Middle Ages, when he tried to lead a crusade against the Turks. The room is full of sunlight and the sheen of gold and precious stones, and Pinturicchio seems to have caught the world in its morning, with gay youths and maidens walking on the flower-starred grass, and swift wild-geese high on the wing through the clear blue heavens. But except in the exquisite panel where the young Emperor meets his beautiful betrothed outside the Porta Camollia, he is not such a poet here as he is in the Appartamenti Borgia at Rome, though he is much gayer. All the more suited to Siena, whose art was summed up by Lanzi as 'lieta scuola fra lieto popolo'; forgetting, so it seems, the many Massacres of the Infants scattered by Matteo di Giovanni through the Sienese churches, which are revolting in their cruelty and ugliness! By noon-time Siena was in a state of wild excitement. We had been warned that the Porcupine had a good chance of winning the race because its _contrada_ had drawn the horse which won the July Palio. So after lunch we drove down to Santa Maria dell'Istrice, which is a tiny church with a picturesque Renaissance belfry in the Via Camollia. There were flags in the Via Cavour, and the great Palazzo Salimbeni was hung with banners, and had velvet cloths embroidered with the crest of the Montone hanging from its Gothic windows. The torch-rests and banner-holders in the public squares each carried the proud silken banners of their _contrade_, and the whole city masqueraded under their different emblems--now the Giraffe, scarlet and white; further on the Caterpillar, green and yellow and blue; then the Dragon and the Wolf; and, at last, the Porcupine. [Illustration: SIENESE YOUTHS IN PALIO DRESS] In the chapel we found three men at arms and two _alfieri_ in parti-coloured hose and jerkins of magenta velvet, slashed with black and white. Orestes, the _fantino_, was padding his helmet in the little cupboard of a sacristy. He was a tall, blue-eyed man, and looked superb in his bravery of velvet and satin and lace, with long-toed velvet boots and shining helmet. He showed us the heavy wooden jockey cap with painted colours which he was to wear in the race, to protect his head from the blows of the other _fantini_; and, as he told us with a shrug, he expected some, because, thanks to Saint Anthony, his horse was undoubtedly the best, and every one expected him to win. The poor Captain who was to head the cortège was in a wretched plight. He was being girded into his armour, and it was not a dignified process. The day was hot, and the chain mail would not meet. Eventually some one lent him a boot-lace or a piece of string, I forget which, and we left him, to see the _alfieri_[8] tossing their banners out in the street. After a long delay the knight appeared, looking as dignified and composed as if he had been wrestling in the spirit rather than in the flesh before the altar of his chapel. And while the procession was forming up we drove on to San Pietro della Magione, where the Horse of the Porcupine is always blessed. The Via Camollia, although it is one of the main streets of Siena, is so narrow here that we had perforce to drive past La Magione to the city gates, where it widens out into a piazza, before we could turn and so drive back again. La Magione has a flight of steps leading up to a terrace. It is a very ancient church, brown and shabby, and many a Templar's horse has champed at the foot of these same steps while his master prayed within; and, it may be, shared his blessing before they started out on the crusade. With a rattle of drums our friends of the Porcupine came up the narrow street. Everything was done with such natural grace and pomp. First the tossing of banners round the ancient well-head before the presbytery, and then the little service which ended in the Blessing of the Horse. The animal was led to the foot of the steps, and the old priest after saying a prayer sprinkled him with Holy Water. He was a dear, intelligent beast, and behaved to the manner born. He pricked his ears at the prayer, and though he tried to walk up the steps, and sniffed inquisitively at the censer, he did not even sneeze while lie was being sprinkled. Indeed I have seen the part played worse by many a Christian. Then the cavalcade formed up again, the drummer and the _alfieri_ leading, the knight on foot with his five pages, the _fantino_ on horseback, and behind him a man leading the noble beast[9] he was to ride in the Palio. With a rattle of drums they went off to toss their banners in another piazza. By this time Siena was alive with mediaeval processions, and the music of their drums was borne in upon our ears from every side. On our way to the Piazza del Duomo, which was the rendezvous of all the _contrade_, we met many a gay company coming up the dark alleys; or heard the stirring music of their drums as they paused to fling their banners below the decorated windows of fifteenth-century palaces. But the Piazza del Duomo was the culminating point. The air was thick with silken banners, and at every moment some fresh _contrada_ came up the hill, till it seemed as though the square could hold no more. Was it by chance, or to spite the other by diminishing his glory, that the Oca swaggered up at the same moment as his ancient enemy the Torre? The _alfieri_ flung their silken banners high into the air, catching them as they fell, and made them flutter like a carpet round their feet, or between their legs, or about their necks, in honour of the Virgin. And, in faith, how could she be otherwise than pleased to see these pretty boys with beating drums and fluttering banners doing her honour so merrily in the sunshine before her house! [Illustration: SEEN AT THE PALIO.] From the Gothic windows of the Bishop's Palace the Cardinal, who yesterday had blessed the people in the cathedral, looked down upon the scene. Once, when the _alfieri_ of the Wave tossed their blue and white flags thirty feet into the air and caught them again, he clapped his jewelled hands. The press thickened, but always the silken banners clove the sunshine, and the drums sounded merrily, now in the narrow street leading up between the vescovado and the ancient hospital, now from the Via del Capitano. We saw knights on horseback mingling with the crowd, and little children of the Quattrocento, and Pinturicchio townsmen in scarlet and green and orange and blue with fur-edged tunics and peaked caps. It was the Pinturicchio of the library come to life again; or rather it was the old light-hearted Siena who, even in the horrors of the Spanish siege, would have her games, though she had no bread. The gay drummers of the different _contrade_ seemed to have caught the rhythm of her joyous heart-beats. When we reached our seats the police were already clearing the course, and the centre of the piazza was a seething crowd, with fans which fluttered like butterflies over a field of wheat. What a gay scene it was! The sunlight gilded La Mangia, and flamed from Bernardino's monogram on the Palazzo Pubblico. The amphitheatre of seats all round the course was filled, and every window and balcony was peopled, and hung with scarlet and crimson cloths. Up the steep Via Casato we could see the massed banners of the _contrade_, and hear their impatient drumming as they waited for the signal to enter. The voice of the people was like the roar of waves on a distant shore. At last every one seemed to have been driven behind the barrier except a few sellers of beer and lemonade. A patrol of horse carabinieri galloped round the course. Bang! went the gun. La Mangia gave voice. To the fanfare of trumpets and the dull roar of the people mediaeval Siena swept into the piazza. Slowly and stately they came on. First a horseman in scarlet and blue bearing the great Comunal Banner of the city, followed by trumpeters in the livery of the Palazzo, and then the companies of the ten _contrade_ who were to compete for the Palio. As each one entered the piazza the whole procession paused for them to toss their banners. Then with a blare of trumpets they passed on--knights in burnished armour with drawn swords, pages in silk and velvet with flowing cloaks and waving plumes, _alfieri_ with proud banners, _fantini_ riding slowly with their racers led behind. Victorious Montone, the winner of the July Palio, came first, waving and tossing its red and yellow banners; then came the gay Giraffe, scarlet and white; and then the Snail, who looked depressed because he had drawn a sorry white nag more fit for tilting at windmills than racing. The Tortoise followed him, yellow and blue and red; and then the Wave, in pale blue slashed with white; and next the stately Goose, St. Catherine's _contrada_, wearing the red and white and green of United Italy. Behind them marched our friends the Porcupine in their brave purple velvet and shining armour, and the splendid Golden Eagle and the Blue Men of the Nicchio, and the _Contrada_ of the Wolf. Still they came on, with many pauses while the _alfieri_ waved and tossed the silken banners, now carpeting the ground with the fluttering folds, now whirling them round necks and under arms and legs, or tossing them up before the Casa Nobile, till the course was like a bed of flowers. And still the Mangia's deep voice acclaimed, and still the trumpets blared and the drums rolled, till the procession stretched all round the Campo, and the great banner of Siena at its head was furled before the Palazzo Comunale. Then came the Palio itself, borne on the great _carroccio_ decorated with the banners of Siena and her _contrade_. How the people yelled as the enormous waggon, so splendidly mediaeval with its poles and banners and its four heraldic horses, rumbled round the square. Before it went two rows of children, little Quattrocento children in striped jerkin and hose, scarlet and green and black, linked together with long festoons of laurel. And round the car rode knights in jousting helmets, clad in velvet and cloth of gold, on richly caparisoned steeds with jewelled reins. Just so did the victorious and exultant Sienese bring back the _carroccio_ of the Florentines which they had captured in the bloody fight of Monte Aperto when they trampled the lilies of Florence into the dust. And there, below the black and white oriflamme of Siena, was a great banner of crimson velvet and gold--the colours of the famous banner of the Florentines, which was brought back to Siena more than six hundred and fifty years ago! [Illustration: SIENA: THE PALIO.] Although the tiers of seats erected for knights and pages below the Palazzo Comunale already looked like a bed of tropical flowers, more banners came fluttering down the Via Casato--the _comparse_ of the seven other _contrade_ who were not to take a part in the race. They fluttered round the course to gay mediaeval music, and joined the parterre of colour below the Palazzo beside the great _carroccio_. And now everything was ready. Two ropes were stretched across the course at the starting-point--one the whole width of the track, the other leaving a gap through which the horses could pass into line so as to get as fair a start as possible; though every one knows, and the _fantino_ as much as any one, that the start has little to do with the race. His great object is to try and place himself out of reach of the _nerbate_ of his special enemies, but even this is hopeless if two or three have come to an arrangement to hold a mutual enemy back until some outsider has carried off the prize. Down in the crowded square the man who was to give the signal of gun-fire had his fuse already lighted. In the dark courtyard of the Palazzo we could see the _fantini_, no longer in their bravery of velvet and silk and burnished steel, but clad in the colours of their _contrade_, and wearing on their heads painted wooden caps to guard their skulls from the blows of the _nerbi_. Bang! There was a rattle of drums. Out came the _fantini_. They moved slowly to the starting-point, and a great shout rent the air as Siena with one voice acclaimed them. In the crowded square, on the housetops, from the windows and the balconies, men waved their hats, and women their scarves and handkerchiefs. Even little children forgot their toy balloons, clapping their hands and shouting while their erstwhile treasures floated away unnoticed. They edged their horses between the ropes. Some blows were exchanged; a horse reared, and one _fantino_ almost lost his seat. Bang! went the _mortaletto_. Down went the ropes. They were off! From the start the Oca never had a chance. As for the Snail, the whole field passed it before it had completed one round. The Porcupine made a good effort, but the impetuous and dashing _fantino_ of the Nicchio headed him off at the difficult turning of San Martino. As they came up the hill for the last time it was a race between the Tortoise and the Nicchio. The Tortoise was leading, but the Nicchio overhauled him as they mounted towards the Via del Casato, and as they came into the straight they were neck and neck. How the people yelled! How they called upon the Virgin and St. Antony to come to the assistance of their _contrada_! There was an indescribable confusion. Bang! They had passed the post. It was the Tortoise won the race! In a flash the crowd had burst through the barriers and flooded round the horses. The carabinieri came at a double to the rescue of the Victorious Tartuca, for the men of the Oca were attempting to mob him. The horse had already been spirited away lest it should come to harm. The great mass of people swayed and roared. Rattle-tap-tap; rattle-tap-tap. Through the crowd, with an escort of stalwart troopers, came the waving banners of Tartuca with the Palio in their midst, and away they marched with it to get the blessing of Madonna. It was all over, though the Mangia was still ringing overhead, and the people were still shouting themselves hoarse. 'Or fù giammai Gente si vana com'è la sanese?'[10] SAN GIMIGNANO DELLE BELLE TORRI 'And far to the fair south-westward lightens, Girdled and sandalled and plumed with flowers, At sunset over the love-lit land, The hillside's crown where the wild hill brightens Saint Fina's town of the Beautiful towers, Hailing the sun with a hundred hands.' SWINBURNE. We left Siena to her merry-making, and stole away early in the morning to San Gimignano delle Belle Torri. From Poggibonsi we drove right into the heart of Faery-land. Were we not bound for Tuscany's most mediaeval city, which is still caught in the web of beautiful thoughts spun round her towers by poets from Messer Folgore, the thirteenth-century San Gimignanese, to our own Swinburne? Our way lay through the rich Val d'Elsa, 'smiling in the sweet air made gladsome by the sun.' Little hills ringed round with the slender conventional pine-trees which Gozzoli loved to plant in his Gardens of Paradise rose from the billowing plain. The vines were linked from tree to tree in great festoons, heavy with grapes; the plumy tassels of the maize were taller than a man; the roadside was full of flowers--bright pink cloves, crimson wild peas, chicory and Canterbury Bells. Indeed it was a veritable Paradise, a Promised Land, not flowing with milk and honey, for milk is sometimes very difficult to obtain in Tuscany where there are no pasture grounds, but heavy with wine and corn, and the manifold fruits of the earth. [Illustration: THE TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.] Long before we reached San Gimignano we saw her towers rising up above the festooned vines like those Giants in Dante's _Inferno_, which from a distance he took to be a city of many towers. He must have been thinking of San Gimignano as he had seen it more than once when he rode across the Tuscan vales from Florence, for it looks ridiculously like a city of giants striding among miniature houses. Its thirteen square towers of uneven heights massed on the top of its little hill make the most fantastic sky-line in Italy, and if the chroniclers speak truth the city to which Dante came as Ambassador in the year of grace 1300 boasted no fewer than seventy-six of these ambitious towers. San Gimignano is like the Enchanted Princess in our childhood's fairy tales. I think she must have fallen asleep one summer day, wearied with waiting on her little hill for the Prince who was to wed her. Perhaps she watched them jousting in the plain, those petty princelings who tried to win her hand and always proved themselves unworthy of her beauty and her ancient lineage, and I know she sickened to hear their battle-cries as they issued by night from their towers to plunder and slay. No laughing Tuscan princess this, but a grave-eyed dreamy girl who loved to think of saints although she blushed and trembled at a poet's tale, and dreamt of queening it over the valleys which rippled from her old brown walls to Volterra, or the fair city of Certaldo where Boccaccio was born. She fell asleep in the fourteenth century when she yielded up her keys to Florence, tired of waiting for the prince who never came; and she dreams on among her flowers, very beautiful, and happy at last with her poets and her saints, wearing the threadbare garments of her ancient glory as befits a queen, and at rest now that the faithless Salvucci and the unhappy Ardinghelli no longer wage their useless warfare under her towers. San Gimignano is a city where one could dream the world away, and count its loss as nothing compared to the fragrant memories in which she dwells. I think the people of San Gimignano do really dream. They are very gentle and grave, and occupied with simple tasks--the men working in the vineyards, and the women sitting at their spinning-wheels outside their fourteenth-century palaces, or plying their distaffs on the steps of the ancient well in the Piazza del Pozzo, whose wall is worn into grooves, the width of my hand, by the ropes of seven hundred years. Flowers and grasses grow from her ancient towers, and white doves nest in the narrow windows whence men-at-arms kept watch upon the streets. It is as though the spirit of gentle Saint Fina lingers still in the old grey town which gave her birth. The sweet-smelling flowers 'called of Saint Fina' run riot on its walls and towers, and her name is ever on the children's lips when they meet the traveller at their city gates. Let us go then to her chapel, for they will not let us rest till we have seen it: they can find no beauty in their ragged palaces, and no appeal in their gaunt grey towers or their lovely broken walls. And we soon found that we must pay our respects to Fina first if we would have peace to look elsewhere. It was Domenico Ghirlandaio, in his way as great a poet as Botticelli, whom the San Gimignanesi commissioned to paint the story of their beloved Santa Fina; and in no other picture, save his great 'Nativity' in the Accademia of Florence, did he reach such a high poetic standard. He has chosen only two scenes from the life of the little girl saint of San Gimignano--her vision of St. Gregory, who appeared to her some days before her death and warned her of her approaching end, and the miracle of the healing of her old nurse Beldia as she lay in state awaiting burial. With what simplicity and charm has he depicted the apparition of St. Gregory! The Blessed Fina lies on her wooden plank in a little white room which is empty of ornament or furniture--except for a long, low settle bearing a plate, and a dish of pomegranates, and a flask of wine covered with a napkin of fine linen. The door and window both stand open to the sun and wind, and through the casement we see the Tuscan landscape, soft with the green of early spring, with a towered city crowning a hill, and little white clouds on the clear blue sky. Two women in wimples sit beside her, the old nurse Beldia supporting the child's head on her hand, for the chronicler tells us that, notwithstanding, 'the strength of her body lessened and waned even to swooning, yet, withal, she suffered exceedingly from within her head.' The other woman, obviously a neighbour who has looked in to see the sick child, sits on a chair beside them. Her hand is raised and her head turned towards the open door, as if she has been startled in the midst of speaking, or is listening to some unwonted sound. But Saint Gregory in cope and mitre, in a glory of cherubs, has floated in at the door and is speaking to the saint, who listens with rapt attention and hands folded in the attitude of prayer. There is no reference to the horrible corruption of the Holy Fina's fair body which her hagiographers insist upon. 'She was palsied all over, and in no wise could she rise from her couch, nor yet move hand or foot. And as God willed that she should be thus afflicted she would not that her body rest upon any soft and yielding thing, rather laid she herself down to sleep upon a plank of wood; and because one side of her body was afflicted with the sickness and wearied her greatly, she slept upon the other; and during the space of five years she did so lie upon that side, neither would she allow any one to move her or yet change her raiment. For so many a long day lay this holy virgin upon her one side only, that the flesh became corrupted and the plank begat vermin which devoured her flesh. Moreover, because of the corruption of these things, the rats gathered together and devoured her flesh.' Ghirlandaio could read no poetry into this perverted moral. He forgot the rats and vermin and the sore corruption, thinking of her only as the fair maiden, so goodly to human eyes, whose claim to saintship rested on her holiness and chastity and patience. Listen once more to the words of Fra Giovanni her chronicler. 'Whilst yet a little maiden she withdrew herself from all converse that could imperil her soul, forswearing those pleasures in which her like often indulged; such as to gambol and frolic, and such-like frivolities and pleasantries, and the setting fast of their hearts and minds on fine raiment and worldly joys.... She avoided all frivolous comings and goings as being harmful to her peace of mind, and if peradventure she walked abroad, she first made treaty with her eyes that they should look always upon her feet; lest by their vain outward glance they should tempt her guileless spirit. And whilst it pleased God that she should possess a fair countenance, be of tall stature, and all things in her were goodly proportioned; yet in no fashion would she adorn her face, willing only to please God and not to gratify the sight of worldly men.... And she worked unremittingly with her hands in the calling of women folk; but all these acts she would perform, not for the great need she were in, but to eschew idleness, which the Holy Scripture saith is a snare for the feet of the Lord's servants. Likewise, when not in prayer, she laboured steadfastly, following thus in the footsteps of our Mother the Virgin Mary: as of her it is spoken in the Epistles of St. Jerome, that she earned each day the wherewithal for the sustenance of her body.' Nor does the artist give us any hint of the miraculous fragrance which pervaded her chamber and her person, and of the flowers which blossomed from the board on which she lay. Unless he meant to represent them by the sweet spring sunshine and fresh air, scented by the breath of flowers grown without, which fills her white room. On the other wall we see her lying in state on a bier of gold brocade, clad in fine silk, her poor fair head at rest on a rich cushion. Round her stand the bishop and the choristers with candles and banners, and behind them are the stolid citizens who, in the usual manner of Quattrocento burghers in frescoes, pay no attention to the little ceremony. A small, tearful child is kissing the dead saint's feet. It is the moment of the healing of Beldia, who stands grief-stricken beside the bier; and Santa Fina, 'lifting her arm as though she were yet quick,' has taken the afflicted hand in her slender fingers. The artist has forgotten nothing--in the background he has painted the towers of San Gimignano whose bells, 'each one and severally, not being pulled by hands of mortal men, were set to ring with sweetest unison and melody.' Even the little angel who set them ringing is there, flying in haste from tower to tower with the sunlight gilding his wings. It is small wonder that the people of San Gimignano are proud of their Cappella della Beata Fina, for besides the frescoes of Ghirlandaio it contains the exquisite shrine which Benedetto da Maiano wrought of white marble, finely gilt, to hold the bones of the saint. San Gimignano was the home of saints, and it is to them that she turns now in her poverty and simplicity, glad of their ancient sanctity which has survived the years, and has not vanished in memories like her dreams of glory. From the beginning she was beloved of saints. Is not her very name an echo of the legend of St. Geminianus, the Martyr of Modena, who appeared before her walls during a siege and routed the barbarians of Attila? Until that day the city had borne the enchanted name Castello della Selva--the Castle of the Wood--because of the great oak forests which clothed the hillside and the plain, where now the olive sheds its silvered shade. But when Attila, who, like Totila and the other invading barbarians, was often defrauded of legitimate victory by patriotic saints, retreated from the citadel, the people changed its name to San Gimignano in memory of the martyred Bishop's timely appearance. Putting aside this legend she had four saints: the Holy Fina; the Blessed Bartolo, whose life was spent in humble service, and who for twenty years was a victim of leprosy which he caught from the plague-stricken people to whom he devoted his life; the hermit San Vivaldo; and Saint Peter, who was one of the first in the brotherhood of St. Francis to suffer martyrdom. [Illustration: SAN GIMIGNANO: THE WASHING PLACE.] After Saint Fina it is the Blessed Bartolo, 'the Angel of Peace,' whom the San Gimignanesi venerate most. Like Santa Fina he has a noble shrine by Benedetto de Maiano; and he lies, as we are told he wished to do, in Sant'Agostino, the great bare friar's church on the hillside, which is a treasure-house of mediaeval art. If all the towers of San Gimignano were chimneys belching smoke, and all her mediaeval palaces were ugly modern houses, the world would still visit her to see Gozzoli's inimitable frescoes of the life of Saint Augustine. They are so fresh and unspoiled, so stately and human, so full of quaint imaginings. For he was a great humorist this pageant-painter of the Renaissance, and his naïve pictures are the ideal illustrations to the naïve Confessions of that very human saint, Augustine! Gozzoli came to Sant'Agostino from his work in the Riccardi Chapel at Florence. There he had slipped beyond the monastic conventionalities of his master, Fra Angelico, and adventured into the gay Florentine life of the fifteenth century with its sports and pageantry. Here he has wandered further from his gentle instructor, and does not hesitate to reproduce with genial wit the humour as well as the pageantry of the age in which he lived. For it goes without saying that his Augustine is transplanted to the Quattrocento, and his life pictured in Gothic cities where Gozzoli himself and his gay compatriots all play their parts. From the beginning, if we except perhaps the first of the series in which the saint is being spanked by his schoolmaster for some small misbehaviour, Augustine is a charming and dignified figure, whether we see him a thoughtful youth setting out in state for Milan through a typical Gozzoli landscape, or he wanders disconsolately in the monastic habit upon the shore, and is rebuked by the little child making mud-pies there, in the immemorial fashion of childhood, for trying to probe into the mysteries of the Trinity. This great church has many other treasures, frescoes and tombs, such as Gozzoli's San Sebastiano or the effigy of the Augustan brother who fell asleep in the worn pavement so many years ago; or, best of all, the tomb of Fra Domenico Strambi, the grand old monk who commissioned Benozzo Gozzoli to paint his choir, and who lies below a fresco which Mr. Gardner aptly calls 'a masterpiece of municipal sentiment.' San Gimignano is extremely rich in frescoes, considering that she had no native school of painting, but drew her artists first from Siena and later from Florence, when she had yielded her freedom to that city. The Pieve or Collegiata is like an ancient missal full of illustrations. Besides the frescoes of Ghirlandaio in the Cappella della Beata Fina, and his Annunciation in the Oratory of St. John,[11] the walls of the nave are covered with the quaint and primitive frescoes of Taddeo di Bartolo and Bartolo di Fredi; and many other painters besides Piero Pollaiolo and Benozzo Gozzoli have added their quota to this ancient scroll of art. The choir of Sant'Agostino, as I have remarked above, is a masterpiece by Gozzoli; and the museum in the Palazzo Comunale boasts a fine collection which includes two beautiful pictures by Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi. Of all the Palazzi Comunali of vanished republics San Gimignano's is the most forlorn. It seems to have fallen asleep like the rest of the city, and forgotten to do anything but flower and be beautiful. Its faded fourteenth-century courtyard has an outside stairway leading to a raftered loggia; grass grows in its brick pavement; and tall grey towers, fringed with flowers, rise above its walls. Without the Tuscan sunshine to beautify its stones it would be a little desolate, all faded fresco and broken plaster. And this, mark you, although it is the _nuovo_ palace of the Podestà. The _antico_ Palazzo, facing the Pieve, so picturesque with its loggia and tower and municipal clock under its wide Tuscan eaves, is older and more ruinous still. It is not battlemented like its neighbour, and it has no processional staircase; nor is its tower, which 'marked the limit to which noble citizens might build their private towers,' as lofty as the Torre del Comune, for this bestrides a street and is the giant of the city, a monument to the vanity of the San Gimignanesi, being built with the money contributed by magistrates who wished their arms to be fixed to it when they went out of office. We went up the steps which have seen so many municipal pageants to try and learn the history of San Gimignano from the threadbare splendour of her garments. How like they all are to each other, these little cities of United Italy, with their smug municipal dignity sitting in the midst of tatterdemalion glory! Here, in this very chamber where to-day Lippo Memmi's great fresco of the Virgin and Child, enthroned among the angels, looks down on office chairs and ink-stained tables covered with American cloth, came Dante in the year of the first jubilee, 1300, in all the splendour of Florentine embassy! Here he spake to the lords of San Gimignano, and invited them to send representatives to the election of a captain to lead the Ghibelline League of Tuscany. Here, where all the petty business of a little town is ratified, the men of San Gimignano were wont to deal with their affairs of state, to settle wars, and speak of popes and emperors. We read the story of it round the walls--Memmi's fresco with its proud baldachin of armorial bearings surmounted by the Ghibelline eagle has effaced the greater part of it, but under the timber roof are the arms of the noble families of San Gimignano; and below them jousting knights tilt at invisible combatants, long ago lost in plaster; and huntsmen chase their vanished prey; and the Guelphs and Ghibellines fight out their everlasting warfare in dim distemper. The sunset was gilding the towers of San Gimignano when we came out again, and all the bells were ringing for evensong. Already the streets were bound in shadows, so we wandered out among the olive-trees to the little ruined church of the Templars. From here we passed out of the city by an ancient gate, and down the hill to the Gothic washing-pool, where the women of San Gimignano wash and wring their linen in the cool of the evening. The delicate afterglow of Tuscany filled the sky, and the tall poplars whispered and shivered in the sunset wind. Up and down that steep and stony hill under the old Gothic gate went the women, with their snowy linen piled in baskets on their heads. The sound of their voices and laughter floated back to us, mingled with the music of bells from the city above. In the hollow below the road a little waterfall babbled to the stones as it leapt over them to the plain. Between the whispering poplars a white road wound up the hill like the roads up which Benozzo Gozzoli's stately young men rode to their Gothic cities. And below, stretching far away to the east where it was lost in rose and purple mists, billowed the vast Val d'Elsa. Seen through the magic of a summer evening--when the poplars were making music in the breeze, and the shadows were sweeping across the Tuscan plain; when the women, having folded their linen under the silver olives and piled it on their heads, climbed the steep hill into their tower-girt home--the world and all its doings were as beautiful as a sacrament. Here, at least, in these dim forgotten _paesi_, 'glory and loveliness have not passed away.' But, after all, it is at night that San Gimignano is most beautiful. Then she is a city bewitched, unspeakably lovely and romantic. Her silent streets are thronged with memories; her shuttered palaces are given back to ghosts; her proud old towers loom up against the star-lit sky like mediaeval giants. A silver moon was riding low in the heavens when we left the doorway of the Leon Bianco and passed through the Arco de' Becci, the great gateway of the ancient circuit of walls, which leads at once into the heart of San Gimignano. It was velvet-black under its ghostly tower, and the Gothic palaces of the Castello Vecchio within seemed to be holding their breath as they watched the shadows creeping over the pale stones of the piazza. How silent and deserted it was! The lovely grave-eyed children, who had been our guides all day, had vanished with their gentle mothers, whom we had seen spinning in their doorways through the sunny hours. Where had they gone? There were no lights in any of these silent palaces, and the narrow streets were empty except for the shadows of the towers, grim as bloodstains. [Illustration: SAN GIMIGNANO.] A white owl, soundless of wing, sank on to the parapet of an ancient palace. Imagination plays strange tricks in this city of ghosts, in whose streets an August moon, more than five hundred years ago, bore witness to the greatest tragedy in the vendetta of the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci. Was it a bird, or did I see a scrap of paper flutter from the window of that dark tower? No. It was only a piece of broken glass glittering among the stones--fit emblem of the broken hopes of those two hapless boys whom Benedetto Strozzi so foully did to death by the persuasion of the treacherous Salvucci. Their letter went astray, thrown from the prison tower, in the hope that a friendly breeze would carry it to the feet of an adherent of the Ardinghelli. And very soon afterwards they met their death, by the steps of the Palazzo Comunale, early on a summer morning, hurriedly, because Strozzi and the Salvucci knew that the messenger who was riding from Florence with their pardon would be delayed only a few hours by the rising of the Elsa. He came too late, as he was meant to do. The Salvucci had already reaped their bloody harvest--the heads of Primerano and Rossellino, the flowers of the noble house of Ardinghelli, had fallen to the sickle. It was late, and the sleepy porter of the White Lion yawned reproachfully as we passed him on our way to the Porta San Giovanni, whither we were bound to view the city and rid ourselves of shadows. If tragedy lurked within the narrow streets and byways of San Gimignano, we found nothing but beauty without. The moonlight, flooding her broken walls and picturesque old gates, transformed her into a city of pale jade, crowning a gloom-dark hill. Her diadem of ghostly towers seemed enamoured of the sky, and soared towards the heaven like young Endymion, stretching out his arms to his enchantress. Down the hillside poured her palaces, white as marble, rising in terraces from their dark gardens, and far away we could hear the plaintive cry of the city watchmen as they went their solitary rounds. At our feet a sheer cliff, filled to the level of the road with trees, fell into the night. From its mysterious depths ascended the fragrance of wet earth and the bell-like chant of frogs. And beyond, and all round, lay the broad fields of Tuscany, filled with a sea of moonlit mists, from which the fantastic outlines of little hills rolled up, like shadowy waves, with towered farms and slim black cypresses upon their crests. MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE Austere and terrible, barren as the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is the desert of Accona, where Bernardo Tolomei founded the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. At Asciano we left behind us the fruitful gardens of Tuscany, rippling with vines, and rich with maize and olives, and embarked upon a sea of pallid hills. It was as though a blight had fallen. The naked earth was parched and rent with gaping fissures; the tamarisks and spurges and the drab grass which fringed the roadside were old and dry. The smiling valleys fled to the north and the south as from a land accursed, 'and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness.' Our way lay along a bleached white road which seared the grey hillside and writhed among volcanic mounds and precipices. Here and there the drab monotony was broken by the clustered spires of cypresses round scattered farms; but their black foliage, like funeral plumes, only added a deeper note of melancholy. It was hot too. The August sun beat down upon us from a brazen sky, and the glare of the road made our eyes ache for cool green shadows. But when we reached the plateau a vision of surpassing beauty burst upon us. It was as though, after sojourning for many hours in the wilderness, we looked from Pisgah on the promised land. To our right, across miles of pale clay gorges and volcanic mounds, Siena lay rosy and smiling in her vineyards; on the other hand a wide valley full of precipices rolled away to the purple hills of Umbria, which hung like a mirage between earth and sky, with Monte Amiata lifting her proud head above them all. And presently, after we had passed through Chiusure, a shrunken little town in the heart of a green oasis, we caught our first glimpse of Monte Oliveto. Below the road the hill fell away in a deep ravine, whose tortured sides were torn and scarred by torrents, as though the pallid earth had bared an ancient wound. And in the midst of the grey desolation, with towering cliffs above, and wild precipices leaping down into the valley below, stood the Abbey of the Blessed Bernardo. Grim and forbidding as a fortress were its bare red walls, devoid of ornament, only redeemed from positive ugliness by their austerity and rugged strength. And yet, as we approached the monastery through the fragrant shade of cypress avenues, the scent of pine needles and the song of cicalas rose together like the voice of the wilderness and the solitary place which has been made glad. [Illustration: CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.] For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory, when all Siena was ringing with his brilliance and prodigality, he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity, building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him, and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions, and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, John XXII., received them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule. Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to 'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white, the symbol of her purity, and to give their hermitage the name of St. Mary of Mount Olivet. So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country. Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra Giovanni of Verona. But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas. It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey inferno of Childe Roland, where the grass 'grew scant as hair in leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted city. And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna, into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that barren land. Still no one came, and still the enchanted silence of the woods prevailed. We wandered round the old red walls, seeking to find an entrance, and since there was no one to say us nay, we went into the cool white monastery. How still and desolate it was! Our footsteps ringing on the flags dismayed us, and when we pealed the bell it echoed like derisive laughter down the empty corridor. Truly the spirit of the place has taken flight, now that the white-robed brethren no longer dwell in their inheritance. Not more than three monks live here to-day; and these, they told us rather sadly, as _custodes_ only, for their order is suppressed nearly everywhere, and the state has made a national monument of their treasures. So the ancient law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, is fulfilled. And I will confess at once that from the sentimental point of view my sympathies are all with the monks, for they are one of our most picturesque links with the past, and it was with their own hands that they sowed this harvest which another reaps.[12] So there are only ghosts to people the deserted cells and chapels and refectories of Mount Olivet to-day. Time and the hand of man have robbed this sanctuary. Everywhere the eye sees frescoes fading from the walls; and Napoleon, who never saw any harm in robbing Peter to pay Paul, stole some of the exquisite intarsia stalls of the convent church to enrich the cathedral of Siena. Only in the great cloister, where Signorelli and Sodoma painted the life and miracles of St. Benedict, is the imagination fired. What does it matter that the story has been often told? That we have conned it in a hundred other frescoes? It is like the magic stories of our youth, which gained an added joy by repetition, because no two people ever told them quite the same. Here we could find inhabitants for all those empty cells; here we could fill the pleasant groves with white-cowled monks who knelt in prayer below the cypresses, or paced the shady avenues in meditation; here we could picture Bernardo himself, building his abbey, and see him sitting in the old refectory with Patrizi, and Ambrogio Piccolomini, and the other nobles who followed him into the wilderness. 'The series forms, in fact, a painted _novella_ of monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles.'[13] And then, because it was long after mezzogiorno, and we were to sleep at Chiusi that night, we went back to the magic cypress-woods to eat our lunch and rest before we drove to Asciano. Our coachmen had prepared a place for us, which they explained was _molto arioso_ for so warm a day, on a terraced slope in the wide avenue of cypresses leading from the monastery church to the little chapel which contains the cell of Bernardo. The bank was carpeted with pine-needles, and the air was fragrant with the scent of crushed thyme. We lunched excellently well off wine and bread, figs and peaches; and our smiling drivers brought us a great _fiasco_ of sparkling ice-cold water--an acceptable addition to the meal, for we were thirsty, and good spring water is not found everywhere in Italy. And then we pillowed our heads on the soft bank, and lay in silence, entangled in a flickering web of sun and shadow. Surely it was an enchanted wood of cypresses that summer afternoon! As I drowsed I dreamt that I saw a boy come idly through the trees singing to his lute. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and long black love-locks lay on his shoulders. He was dressed fantastically in scarlet stockings, a silken cap, and a gay cloak, which evidently pleased him well, for at times he plucked at it and pulled it closely round him to admire its folds. A monkey with a gilded chain was on his shoulder, and a badger walked solemnly at his heels. Who could he be? I wondered. He was too gay and worldly to have thoughts of entering the Brotherhood, and as he drew nearer I could hear that his song was in the praise of love. Some poet of the Renaissance, perhaps, whose lord was resting in the monastery. He drew nearer still, till I thought he must have seen me; and then, as though he was a little weary of his song, he dropped his lute and pillowed his gracious young head upon the flowery bank and drifted into sleep, lulled by the fragrance of the warm pine-woods. It seemed to me as if he dreamed, for he stirred, and turned his face away. Was it I who dreamt the rest? I saw a lady moving towards him across the flowers as lightly as a butterfly upon the wing. Fair of face and form was she, fashioned very lightly, full of airy grace; with child-like laughter on her lips and a half-defiant, wholly-alluring challenge in her tender eyes. Her dress was blue and of so light a texture that it rippled from her rosy limbs like water, and scarce bruised the flowers. As she ventured near she laughed, and wantoned with some golden fruit. The sunshine and the breeze, greatly daring, played in her filmy yellow hair and fashioned the tender blue of her robe into little wings. Half a child was she, and half a woman, full of the joy of living and the joy of beautiful things; the very spirit of an azure butterfly who flutters through a summer day, dancing from sheer delight. Who could have dreamt that I should find her here, on this bleak hillside, in this austere old house? These baked clay cliffs and desolations should have driven her away to gay Siena long ago, even if she outstayed the bitter winds which thrash the stone-pines round the forsaken monastery in winter. She was standing by the poet now, and smiling down at him, pouting a little because he did not wake. Who could resist her, this happy butterfly fashioned so beautifully for love on a golden summer day? A pine-cone fell into my lap and startled me. I moved. And in a flash the spell was broken. They had vanished, the beauteous lady and the sleeping boy whose dreams had conjured her. The yellow sunlight was slanting in between the cypresses, and from the stables came the sound of horses being harnessed. It was already time to go. And yet they say that Benedict sent her away with harsh words and admonitions. And the youth who dreamed was not a poet but a painter; his name was Sodoma. You may see her picture in the cloister, and his own as well, in the gay clothes of which he was so proud, for they were part-payment for his work, and had belonged to a gentleman of Lombardy who took the monastic habit. But it is still a miracle to me that I should have met her on this bare hillside. CHIUSI Night had fallen when we reached Chiusi Junction. A full-blown harvest moon hung over the station-yard like a yellow lamp. It was late, and the lights of Chiusi were a twinkling bunch of fire-flies on a distant hill. We dined at the excellent station buffet, resolved not to spoil the propitious hour by arriving in an unknown city tired and hungry; and afterwards we climbed up to our mysterious destination at leisure, in the glory of a late moon, with the night insects singing by the dusky roadside. They are among the little joys of Italy these late arrivals, on breathless summer nights, at hill-towns whose features you have only glimpsed heretofore from the windows of a flying train. A fig for the discomforts that you risk! They add a touch of salt to the adventure. The inn you stumble on may be the worst of all bad inns; the dinner will of course be long-delayed; and if you have inadvertently walked in upon a festa it may be difficult to find a place whereon to lay your head. But reckon against these things the charm of mystery--the complete sense of satisfaction with which you watch the ruby tail-lights of your train slipping away into the night, and hear the lessening roar of its engine till your last link with the familiar world is severed, and you are face to face with the unknown. And lastly, remember the joy with which you discover a new world in the morning. We started in a vettura which was never meant to carry passengers as well as luggage, but before long we slipped out one by one, for we were only going at a snail's pace up the long hill which leads from Chiusi station to Chiusi town, and we could see nothing of the magic of the night, half-buried in boxes, and with the stars shut out by tarpaulin. The driver did not notice, but the horses quickened their pace with the lightened burden, and soon we were left to find our own way up the hillside. It was not difficult. The bright moonlight, which flooded the plain below, turned the road into a band of silver, whose whiteness was barred by the shadows of giant cypresses towering black against the night. The chanting of the frogs and the song of the night cricket almost drowned the jangling bells of our vettura, and high above us we could see Chiusi, no longer a bunch of fire-flies, but a ghostly grey hill-city already wrapt in slumber, with a frowning rocca, and grim old walls. Its silence was a little desolate as we drew near, and it was a relief to see the hospitable yellow lights of the Leon d'Oro outside the Porta Romana, giving us a homely welcome into the mysterious moonlit town. [Illustration: CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.] I woke early in the morning. It needed but a glance to tell me that I was back in Umbria. Nowhere else are the dimpled valleys so full of beauty, or the blue hills so softly moulded; and nowhere else is that pellucid sky, or that strange clarity of atmosphere which inspired the landscapes of the Umbrian Quattrocento artists. It was as though I looked straight into the heart of one of Perugino's sacred pictures. There was the soft green valley melting in the distance into the azure folds of mountains; there were the slender trees cleaving the luminous air; there were the towered cities crowning the hills; there was the clear pale sky, the spaciousness, the holiness which Perugino and his school immortalised. But, after all, this rich plain, from which the waters of an inland sea have long ago receded, is peculiarly the land of Perugino. Is not that rose-red city on the crest of the wooded hill which bounds the southern horizon of Chiusi, Città della Pieve, the town which gave him birth? I half expected to see a band of saints walking in the vineyards, or to find Madonna sitting by the roadside with the Infant Christ. But another artist had usurped the landscape. Below my window was a peasant ploughing in his olive-garden. He sang as he bent forward to throw his weight on the wooden shaft, and his clothes were as blue as the heavens at mid-day. Two milk-white oxen moved slowly before him under the tender grey of the olives, and as they passed they left behind them shining furrows of freshly-turned earth. It was a poem of labour, as delicate in colour as a tone-etching, an inspiration for Millet with the poetry of life in his veins, or for the subtle Corot. Chiusi, the Clusium of Lars Porsena, the great Etruscan Prince who championed the Tarquinii after they were expelled from Rome, is a little self-contained city with an affectation of placing cypresses at becoming angles. She is rather a coquette this old town. She is not unconscious of the picturesqueness of her position as she rises above the shimmering olives which veil her hillsides; she knows the value of cypress spires when they soar above the bastions of ancient walls; she deliberately sets herself out to charm the stranger by filling the gardens of her _trattorie_ with flowering gourds and purple morning-glories. Her picturesque old cathedral has been so cleverly redecorated throughout with painted mosaics, that when we first stepped down into the cool dark nave we were deceived, and gasped to see such jewels outside Ravenna; and she has built herself a delightful museum, in the form of a classic temple, to house her Etruscan treasures. I think she has never ceased to congratulate herself upon giving the lie to Dante's ill-omened prophecy, when he quoted her as an example of a city falling into decay-- 'Mark Luni, Urbisaglia mark, How they are gone, and after them how go Chiusi and Sinigaglia; and 't will seem No longer new or strange to thee to hear, That families fail when cities have their end.'[14] She may well have seemed a city doomed to him as he rode in haste through the pestilent marshes of the Val di Chiana, and saw her desolate towers above him stark against the evening sky, as he hurried from Rome to Siena to meet his fellow exiles and learn the story of his fall. For eight centuries or more Chiusi was a plague spot, and the vapours of the maremma were more powerful to guard her from invaders than the strongest walls. So she has fewer mediaeval palaces, and fewer towers than other hill-cities, and these were long ago given to neighbouring churches to hang their bells in, and the ancient Rocca is a garden with a farm-house in its keep. I have a tender spot in my heart for Chiusi. She is a happy town. In herself she is not very picturesque: her houses are the plain, white-washed, green-shuttered homes of modern Italy; there are few traces of her ancient greatness to be seen except the scanty Etruscan foundations of her mediaeval fortifications, a quantity of _cippi_ and reliefs built into walls, and the labyrinth of ancient sewers which honey-combs the hill.[15] And in comparison with the other cities of Umbria she contains nothing of the Middle Ages, certainly nothing Gothic, if we except the exquisite illuminated missals and psalters by Bindo Fiorentino and Girolamo da Cremona, which are kept in the sacristy of the cathedral, and which came originally from the monastery of Monte Oliveto. To the antiquary she is of the highest interest, for she marks the site of Clusium, one of the five Etruscan towns which combined against the first of the Tarquins, and of the earlier Camars, which may have been a city of the more ancient Umbrians. Her history shows her to have been one of the oldest and most powerful cities of the Etruscan League; and the country for miles round her walls has yielded, and still yields, a rich harvest of antiquities from scattered tombs. There is a slope to the east of the city which is called 'The Field of the Jewellers,' because so many _scarabaei_ have been discovered there by the chance furrow of a plough. [Illustration: ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS.] But I am no antiquary. It is not for me to discuss the possible site of that improbable mausoleum of Lars Porsena with its labyrinth and pyramids and windbells, which Varro described as glibly as Herodotus did the marvels of the labyrinth of Crocodilopolis. I have not seen the great necropolis of Poggio Gajella on the hill to the north of Chiusi, which Dennis tells us is a hive of tombs. To me the charm of Chiusi does not lie in her antiquity, though like every one else who visits her I have spent happy hours in her sunny museum, poring over inscriptions and sarcophagi, and cinerary urns and household implements, and all the strange paraphernalia of a vanished race which have been garnered from the fields of Clusium. Nor are the painted tombs of Etruria as much to me as the wonderful beauty of the olive-gardens through which we walked to find them, in the golden sunset or the clear cool dawn. There are many tombs scattered round the hill of Chiusi. Some of them empty caves hollowed out of the rock, half full of water, abandoned to moths and bats; and others which have been opened and closed up again because the damp and thieves have robbed them of all interest. A few of the best are kept under lock and key to preserve them from wanton destruction, but even these are slipping reluctantly back to oblivion. Such an one is the Tombe del Colle Casuccini, which is to be found in an olive-grove to the south-east of the town. It is hollowed in the rock, and is approached by a levelled path cut in the slope of the hill. The earth around is full of iris plumes and slender field flowers; there is a weather-beaten cippus over the lintel, and a solitary stone-pine which stretches out its branches as though Nature sought to render homage to the dead by yielding them a royal canopy. We had lingered so long in the silver olive-gardens that it was almost the hour of sunset when we reached the tomb. A melancholy evening wind moaned in the branches of the pine-tree, and rustled in the flowering yews which guarded the entrance of the passage. Up and down the hillside we could see the peasants returning from their work in the fields, and the whole world was caught in the sudden glory of the setting sun. A woman came towards us with the key of the tomb; she had a baby in her arms, and on her head a great mottled pitcher, green and gold, full of spring water. The sunlight wove a halo round her till she seemed as radiant as one of Pinturicchio's Madonnas. The great doors of travertine groaned as they swung slowly open on their stone pivots, and a scorpion fled from the light. Dennis says, 'There can be no doubt of the antiquity of these doors; it is manifest in their very arrangement; for the lintel is a huge mass of rock buried beneath a weight of superincumbent earth, and must have been laid _after_ the slabs were in their place.' This sepulchre, like most Etruscan tombs of importance, is divided into several chambers. Its roof is curiously coffered, and was at one time painted red and black. But it is the wall paintings which are of supreme interest here. Unlike the other tombs of Chiusi the sandstone walls have been whitened, and even so the figures are hardly distinguishable. But look close. It is worth the trouble, for as your candlelight drives the shadows back, the story of an ancient world unfolds itself. Here, to the right, three charioteers urge their archaic steeds to the winning-post; here are the wrestlers; here the musicians with their doublepipes and lutes, and here a dancing girl. On the other wall you can trace the progress of a banquet, and see the languid youths of Etruria reclining on couches, toying with wreaths and flowers, and holding out their _paterae_ for the hurrying slaves to fill with wine. But they are very faded. They are a world of shadows; they vanish with the months. Another generation will look for them in vain; then the athletes will no longer run their silent races to eternity, the music will be hushed, and the feet of the dancers stilled. And then, I suppose, the wonderful old doors will be taken away, and the angry scorpions will be left in possession. If you would see these ghosts, come soon. For if you come ten years after, perchance you will find nothing on the cold stone walls; their pictures will have gone the way of all the other antique graces which have been lost in Time's devouring maw! In Italy, especially in the small cities, you have to bow to local convention. In Chiusi it takes the form of Etruscan tombs. Every one from tiny children to the oldest inhabitant volunteers to be your guide. A stranger would say that the Tomb of the Monkey or the Deposito del Gran Duca were topics of burning interest in the town, for the people will not rest until they are assured that he has visited them. It was for this reason that the sunrise next morning found us on our way to the Tomba della Scimmia, which lies a mile or so to the north-east of Chiusi. At first we followed the highroad where the gay painted ox-carts of Clusium, with their picturesque high-curved shafts, were already rolling up the hill. But our way soon turned off into a rough path which dipped down into the chilly sweetness of the olive-gardens. The sun had not yet risen high enough to penetrate these dewy hollows, but as we re-emerged from them and breasted the little oak-clad hills beyond, it slanted between the branches and made a halo round some young peasant girls, barefoot and with uncovered heads, who were carrying great pitchers of water to their cottages from an Artesian well. We dipped into more valleys and circled other hills, plucking the ripe blackberries as we passed, and gathering the flowers which made a tangle round our feet. The only people that we met were peasants at work below their olives, and every one of them gave us a smiling _buon giorno a loro_ as we passed. Presently we came out upon a wooded cliff and saw Chiusi, with her fair white houses and her grey ivied rocca, across the valley to our right, and on our left the little lakes of Montepulciano and Chiusi, like opals in the dawn. Umbria again! The flowers at our feet, the glint of water in the wide green valley, the purple hills, the soft blue sky, the breadth and depth, the holiness and peace of mystic Umbria. [Illustration: CHIUSI: THE PALACE OF THE BISHOP.] The Tomb of the Monkey owes its name to the painted monkey chained to a tree in the midst of the athletes who wrestle and ride and box and perform their Pyrrhic dances round the walls. It is approached by a deep cut in the tufa, in the style of the mummy shafts of Egypt, but the steps which lead down to the door, and the door itself, are modern. By the help of our guttering candles we were able to decipher the solitary spectator who sits, like Nefertari in her rock-hewn tomb of Thebes, with foot on stool and umbrella over head, gazing into eternity. But we did not stay there long. It was too cold. The damp had eaten almost everything away. Down in the chill dark of the tomb we knew that the wrestlers, their naked red bodies fading into the tufa, wrestled continuously, and the chariots drove silently into the shadows before the solemn audience of one. But up above we could hear the bells of Chiusi on the warm, scented air. And there were the wind, the limpid sunlight, the song of birds, the wooded hills and valleys, the yellow earth with its flowers and its trails of bramble covered with shining fruits--everything of warmth and sweetness and pleasure to the eye and ear. In the plain below we could see the little blue lake of Chiusi, called lovingly of the people, the 'chiaro di Chiusi,' which in the olden days was yearly espoused with a ring by the chief magistrate of the town, in the same manner as the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic. And beside it the towers of Béccati Questo and Béccati Quest'altro, which were put up in the fifteenth century by the rival provinces of Siena and Perugia, still shout defiance to each other across the valley. After all, it was for her old-world charm that we loved Chiusi--the simple pastoral beauty of her _contado_, her forges glowing at night in deep caverns below her walls, her Bishop's palace with its ancient _cippi_, and its flowering agaves and cypresses. And most of all we loved the lichen-covered boy in the fountain of the Piazza del Duomo. For he was like the spirit of eternal youth, keeping the soul of things alive in this city of tombs. There were gold fish in the green shallows round his feet, the water spouted from his forehead, his arms were outstretched and his face upturned, as though he sang in rapture to the sun. For it was in such little things as these that we found the hidden secret of Italy's charm. These little towns like Chiusi, perched each one on its hill, are sometimes commonplace enough in themselves, even though their foundations are inscribed by the years that have passed; but they look across valleys of unimaginable beauty to the mountains; they have genii singing in their springs; and the lives of their people have the classic simplicity of an older, unspoilt world. HANNIBAL'S THRASYMENE 'Yea! sometimes on the instant all seems plain, The simple sun could tell us, or the rain, The world caught dreaming with a look of heaven Seems on a sudden tip-toe to explain.' 'THE RUBAIYAT,' Le Gallienne's translation. We came to Passignano from Chiusi, because we could not resist the beauty of Thrasymene. Most travellers in Italy only view it with passing admiration as they fly by in the express which takes them from Florence to Rome and Naples. It is to them merely another lovely incident in their journey through a landscape of surpassing beauty. Perchance they refer to their Baedekers, and find that it was the scene of Hannibal's great victory over Flaminius, and in a few minutes more their train is in Chiusi Junction, and the lake is lost behind the Umbrian hills. Others, who visit Perugia and Assisi, see more of its beauties, for when they leave the main line at Chiusi they have to make a semi-circular tour of the lake; and even from Terontola, the junction for Florence and Perugia, the line runs for miles along the lake-side, and crosses the actual site of Hannibal's battle-field. Twice already, in the last month, we had traversed it, on the journey from Cortona to Perugia, and again on our way to Siena. Coming back we could no more resist it. Our intention had been to go straight from Chiusi to Assisi, but at Terontola the little philosopher put in a special plea for Thrasymene. He has a passion for lakes and rivers; no landscape is complete for him without them. 'Let us go down to Thrasymene,' he said. 'Not for the sake of Hannibal, but for the pleasure of its beauty. For I am sick of the petty wars of hill-towns, and am wearied for the moment of Etruscan tombs and Gothic palaces and churches. Let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth!' So we came to Thrasymene and Passignano, which is a mere handful of brown houses pushed into the water at the foot of a rocky hill. Passignano has a flavour of its own. To begin with, its inn is different from any other albergo in Italy. It has an old-fashioned kitchen with a cowl chimney and rows of shining brass saucepans, and it opens on to the village street, where the people sit to gossip while the evening meal is cooking. Its low cottage windows look over the wide expanse of water to towered Castiglione, and the wooded islands of Thrasymene; but it is built so close into the hillside at the back that you can stretch your hand from an upper room and pluck the creepers which pour in a green cascade over the rocks. It is extremely primitive: the menu consists of soup, macaroni, eggs, fresh fish from the lake, and very lean chickens, supplemented by rough country bread, plenty of honey and fresh fruit, and cheese if the proprietor has lately been to market in Perugia. Meat there is none, at any rate in August, nor tea. But the rooms are spotlessly clean, with snowy beds, dainty white valances, curtains edged with hand-made lace, and the finest of linen towels; the daughter of the buxom landlady is as charming as she is elegant, and the serving girl is a beautiful Murillo. Passignano is full of beautiful women; they form two-thirds of the population of this little lake-side town. There are hardly any men in it except the old fishermen, and a few young lads, apprentices to bootmakers and saddlers. All the rest have drifted away to the towns, or have farms out in the _paese_. And the women, from the pretty French wife of Signor Arturo of the Albergo Balducci, with her freshly laundered cotton dresses, to the little bareheaded girls whose mothers call to them at night, bidding them bathe their dusty feet in the lake before they come to bed, are all lovely. They are noted for it. The only other visitor in Passignano that August was a young Apollo--so beautifully dressed in pale grey riding-clothes that he looked as if he must have slipped out of a George Edwards musical comedy. He was, according to the landlady, a student from the University of Perugia, spending his vacation in Passignano because the girls were so beautiful! Oh, young Italy! How natural and unaffected you are! I loved to see him strolling down the village street with a lordly air of indifference, running the gauntlet of eyes as the pretty girls, linked in groups like bouquets of flowers, passed him demurely; while their mothers, sitting on the doorsteps of their cottages, scanned the handsome boy with kindly humour. Everybody lives out of doors in Passignano. The women are always sitting outside their houses; and their children, half-naked in the summer heat, with halos of sunburned curls, pillow their heads on the rough cobbles of the hilly streets, and sleep after their play, as baby angels might sleep in paradise, tired out with singing. The stables and bakeries and workshops are open to the road, and above them the shabby brown houses clamber up the hillside to the Fortezza, which rears its shaggy head above the highest of their pagoda-like chimneys. 'If we stay here we shall prolong our lives for always,' cried the philosopher. 'Already I have forgotten the world!' And he fell to imitating the song of the cicalas. Indeed for us the world was standing still. We were caught in a mesh of beauty as in a summer daydream. The waves of Time seemed to retreat, leaving us like swimmers resting on a golden shore after struggle and turmoil. It might have been Lethe whose waters sang to the stones at our feet: for we forgot the world: its voice became a dream; we found ourselves content to watch the changing lights as the hours drifted away. [Illustration: CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.] We ate our meals in the unfinished dining-room which Signor Balducci is building out over the lake--a mere shell of white plaster with empty doors and windows through which the little breezes strayed. There were flowers on the cloth beside our plates, and a great bowl of oleanders, geraniums and white asters on the table. We breakfasted off golden bread and honey, and the pretty waiting girl brought tuberoses with our coffee. Outside, the lake was a tender morning blue; its surface rippled to the cool breath of the mountains, and sparkled in the sunlight. The bent and twisted sticks of the fishermen cast fantastic reflections in the water, and were beautified, as all humble and work-a-day things are beautified in Italy, by the magic of the sun. Further out two men in a rickety sampan were hauling in their nets. It was a scene of infinite romance. The towers of Castiglione shone like ivory out of the violet mists, and many of the hills which rose above them bore turreted towns upon their crests. Behind them we knew lay Siena, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and to the right Cortona and Arezzo, and there Perugia, and Assisi there. History swept down upon us too. Thrasymene and its vine-clad slopes are full of memories of Hannibal, the stormy petrel who beat his wings round Rome in vain. Nor does it lack for gentler associations, for Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been preaching in one of the lake-side towns, was inspired, according to the author of the _Fioretti_, to spend Lent on an island in its midst. Which he did, in solitary prayer and meditation, eating only the half of one small loaf of bread, 'from reverence for the fast of Christ the blessed one, Who fasted forty days and forty nights without partaking any earthly food; but in this manner, with that half a loaf, chased far the venom of vain glory from him.' Towards the hour of sunset, when the shadowed hills grew blue and misty, and the lake was a mirror of pale gold, we walked along the reedy shore of Thrasymene. The wind rustled in the silken leaves of the maize, and made a music like far-off singing in the emerald reeds. We went down to the edge of the water where the gardens sloped to the lake, and we found flowers there and herbs--mint and thyme and rosemary that scented the air, and purple vetches and clover, and the beautiful cow-parsley whose blossoms float like butterflies over every hedge and waste ground. And there we waited while the sky glowed from gold to rose, and Thrasymene seemed aflame with Hannibal's desire for Rome. We dined in our alfresco dining-room, and afterwards we walked again by the still waters, where the frogs were shrilling a chorus to the night-crickets, whose song in the grass is like the sound of a curb-chain being rubbed in the hand. Except for these the world was still. There were no lights along that mysterious country road except the stars, and rarely have I seen them brighter, even in Africa. 'In a town we never see such stars as these,' said the philosopher. We never do. The Milky Way stretched like a girdle across the heavens, and was reflected in the lake like a pale moon. We stayed to watch it, and to listen to the voices of the night. A train glared out of the tunnel which pierces the hill below Passignano, and tore along in the darkness beside the road, lightening our starlit gloom for a moment before its meteoric tail of windows was swallowed up by the night. Then we saw a glow-worm in a hole below the wall, and because in Italy you are pleased with little things, we stopped to look at it, and watch it turn round like a light-house lamp, now glowing clear as a star, now an indistinguishable mass of phosphorescence. And all the time the sky was growing lighter, and the mountains darker in the east. It was the moon. Slowly it rose. The Milky Way grew pale in the lake, and one great star which had twinkled like a will-o'-the-wisp among the reeds went out. The light grew and gathered behind the hills, and at last the miracle of moonrise came to us as we waited in the scented darkness of Thrasymene's shore, as it came to the young world on the eve of its creation. First the rim, and then the pulsing globe leaping from the shadows. For a moment it hung upon the hillside while two fantastic stone-pines, a fraction of an inch in height, swayed within its circle like neophytes bowing before Diana; then it rose into the heavens,--a stately ship steering among the stars. [Illustration: LAKE THRASYMENE.] A miracle no less because our darkness has been lightened thus since the beginning of the world. There are so many miracles every day, if we but knew them,--the scent of flowers, the webs of spiders, the subtle fragrance of the earth, a wayside weed, and, most beautiful of all, the sunrise and the moon. For sunsets, though they may fill a grey world with rose and gold, and though they are always so magnificent that words are pallid pictures and artists' colours impotent, never have the beauty of the dawn. A sunset may turn our joy to melancholy, so tender is it, so pregnant with regret for the vanished day, so full of splendours. But we are always happy in the dawn. What of the night? It is over and gone. A new world lies at our feet; a new beauty fills our eyes; the breath of the morning in our nostrils is as a flower after rain. For in the dawn we step from the valley of the Shadow of Death on to the rosy mountains of Hope. And because you are in Italy you have time to notice these miracles of every day, time to be happy, time to watch things grow. The hours do not matter, for to-morrow is as yesterday, and to-day is but a little minute in a garden. If it should rain the butterflies will only seek their shelter, the cicalas will be still, and the pores of the thirsty earth will open. To-morrow the sun will shine again. Or the day after that. Nor is Passignano devoid of interest for the sightseer whose pleasure is not to be found in green pastures or beside still waters. Magione, with its three mediaeval castles and its memory of the Baglioni, is within a drive. Picturesque Castiglione del Lago is well worth a visit. There is the island of St. Francis, with its ruined convent, now the villeggiatura of an Italian nobleman, and its exquisite views of Montepulciano. And lastly, there is the battle-field where Hannibal, the 'furious youth' of Publius Cornelius Scipio, defeated Flaminius, the maker of roads. We did not go to Magione, but we let two old men of Passignano row us to St. Francis' Island in their weather-beaten fishing-boats. In an acacia grove down by the water's edge they showed us the block of stone whose surface was worn into two hollows by the knees of St. Francis. So they would have us believe. '_Ma, è vero!_' they exclaimed, as though they feared that we should doubt them; and we could but smile as they told us an old legend of the saint sailing miraculously across Thrasymene on his mantle, bearing a lighted candle in his hand, because the boatmen dared not put out in the tramontana which was lashing the waters to fury. We almost missed seeing the battle-field of Hannibal, because we had left it to our last afternoon, and discovered too late that the only carriage in Passignano had been already commandeered. It was Fortunato Rosso who came to our rescue, dear old man, with his dilapidated vehicle, which was no larger than a riksha, and so broken down that we expected the back to fall away every minute. The step did break when we tried to use it, and the axle bar was tied up with string. Fortunato Rosso is one of the characters of Passignano. He is a veteran of the Venti Settembre. As he has lost his teeth his conversation is difficult to follow, though he is an intelligent guide, having a soldier's eye for the possibilities of the land: his clothes are almost as dilapidated as his carriage, but he has a string of medal ribbons sewn across his scrupulously clean white waistcoat. The medals themselves are kept in a dirty scrap of paper in his pocket. He persisted in showing them to us before we started, and the villagers stood round and laughed indulgently. While he was eagerly pulling them out a cheap crucifix fell to the ground. A small boy picked it up, and pressed it to his lips as he handed it back, and Rosso himself gave it a resounding kiss before he put it into his pocket. The spot where Hannibal entrapped the Roman army is as distinct as stage scenery. There is a semi-circle of mountains coming down to the lake at each end. Passignano clambers into the water at the southern extremity; and on the northern spur, close to the lake, there is an ancient road climbing between bluffs in an olive-garden. It is below the modern strada; and Fortunato Rosso, who takes a delight in propounding the stratagems of Hannibal, insists that Flaminius must have entered the plain through this pass. Half-way between the semi-circle and the lake is the hill of Tuoro, on which Hannibal's centre was conspicuously drawn up. For the Punic general with his genius for guerilla warfare no better place for an ambuscade could be imagined. The Consul Flaminius lay at Arretium some miles to the north; and Hannibal, knowing his impetuous temper, determined to draw him out by laying waste the countryside from Cortona to Thrasymene under the very eyes of the Roman legions. As he anticipated, Flaminius, exasperated beyond endurance, left Arezzo and marched down to Thrasymene, paying no heed to the ill-omens which attended his setting forth. As a consequence his army had no enthusiasm. The name of Hannibal had turned even the heart of Rome to water, so that she spent her days in making sacrifices to the gods and consulting the oracles, but the fiery Flaminius would not allow his legions to make propitiation. 'Nay, rather,' said he with bitter sarcasm, 'let us lie before the walls of Arretium, for here is our country, here our household gods. Let Hannibal, slipping through our fingers, waste Italy through and through; and, ravaging and burning everything, let him arrive at the walls of Rome; nor let us move hence till the fathers shall have summoned Flaminius from Arretium, as they did Camillus of old from Veii.'[16] Everything befell as Hannibal desired. Flaminius entered the pass. Seeing the Carthaginian army on the hill of Tuoro he advanced to give battle, not noticing the Baliares and light troops posted round the mountains, and unconscious of the fact that the Numidian cavalry had blocked his retreat by holding the pass when the last detachment of his army had come through. To add to his discomfiture a mist rose up from the lake and enveloped the lowlands, while the hills were in the sunlight above, and the enemy could watch for the preconcerted signal of attack. It was given, and they poured down upon the Romans from all sides, taking them by surprise, and terrifying them by the unexpectedness of the assault. Even so the day might not have been lost if Flaminius had not fallen early in the engagement. After that it was a slaughter. There was no order. Each man fought for his own life, and when the legions attempted to escape by water, the only way left open to them, they were either drowned, or cut to pieces by the Carthaginian cavalry which followed them into the shallows. A band of some six thousand did indeed force their way to the hills, where they waited for the mist to rise, not being able to see how the day was going. And when at last the sun pierced through to the plain, and they could view the slaughter, they fled, taking their standards with them, only to fall prisoners on 'the following day when, Maharbal, who had followed them during the night with the whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them depart with single garments if they would deliver up their arms, they surrendered themselves: which promise was kept by Hannibal with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains' (Livy, xxii. 6). So much for the battle, but the old tragedy that was enacted on these vine-clad plains has been forgotten. Many of the peasants have not even heard of the name of Hannibal, nor dream that where they gather their purple vintage to-day the earth was reddened once by Roman blood. The broad smooth road led us between ancient olives. White oxen yoked to clumsy wooden tumbrils rolled on and on towards us in a mist of sunlit dust; peasants in gay kerchiefs and skirts were working in the bearded corn which rose higher than their heads, so that we looked at them through a veil of stalks; a herd of black swine were nosing the yellow earth under the olives, with a little girl-child to keep them. And when we reached the summit of the pass above the turquoise lake we could see the road to Arezzo in a gap of the mountains, across a sea of vines. There was nothing to disturb the air of peace; the mediaeval towers and castles which crowned the hills were farms; and the Sanguinetto, whose sinister name is the one memento of that day of slaughter, was a river of stones agape for the September rains. 'Far other scene is Thrasymene now; Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough; Her aged trees rise thick as once the slain Lay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en-- A little rill of scanty stream and bed-- A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain; And Sanguinetto tells you where the dead Made the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.' CHILDE HAROLD. ASSISI Almost the first thing we noticed in Assisi was the Biblical simplicity of life. This little city, rose and white, upon the lower slopes of Subasio would be like a picture out of the Bible if it were not so Gothic. Its steep and rough-paved streets have grasses growing in between their stones; its grim and silent houses, built of Subasian rock, are as unresponsive as the East; at their barred gates stand mules and asses tethered, with clumsy wooden saddles on their backs, or sacks of grain thrown pannier-wise. It is not only Francis and his companions that you might see walking in this poor and humble town, but Jesus of Nazareth. For Assisi still wears the thread-bare garment of her poverty, notwithstanding the great basilica on the hillside, which is rich out of all comparison with the poor little city of St. Francis. Long, long ago in the thirteenth century she dedicated her life to him, giving up her worldly vanities and espousing Lady Poverty, 'that Dame to whom none openeth pleasure's gate.' So that the story of the splendid young men of Assisi, whose magnificent equipages drew the eyes of Rome in the seventeenth century, comes as an echo of another place. I think she loved him from the first, when he was still gay Cecco of the midnight revels, Lord of Love, the boon companion of her merry youths. She listened to his songs--the soft Provençal songs which he had learnt from the lips of Madonna Pica, his mother--and smiled at his caprices, pleading his youth when others shook their heads. Later, when the world made a jest of the penitent, and his friends scorned him, and the hand of the people was against him, she wept for him, and gazed with wistful eyes down to the valleys where he ministered to her outcasts, and garnered in his soul that Peace of the Lord which passeth all understanding. She is like the bride of whom the poet of the Israelites sang, looking and listening for the voice of her beloved. 'The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like the roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice. My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.' But if there had been no Saint Francis to raise her to the foremost rank of shrines, and sanctify her with a special crown of holiness, Assisi would still be one of the most lovely cities in the garden of Umbria. She has grown like a fair white flower upon the brown slope of Monte Subasio, whose shoulder is a bulwark between the ragged Appennines and the soft valleys of Umbria. It is a sudden revelation, as though the landscape foreshadowed the history of Assisi, to stand on the windy height of her Rocca, and first to look down on the rolling Umbrian hills, clothed with the tender green of vines and olives, which have gentle streams meandering at their feet, and then to turn to the eastern slope of Subasio and see the brown and barren mountains ravening away to the horizon, like an angry sea, now towering into broken peaks, now falling back with steep, scarred sides, red as wounds where the ruddy limestone has been torn from them. On the one hand there is that Peace of God which St. Francis scattered through the turbulent thirteenth century, and which has lingered in the grass-grown streets of his native city; and, on the other, the bloody wars and revolutions which racked Assisi from the day that Rome first put its yoke upon her, to the sixteenth century, when she surrendered a second time to the Imperial city, and yielded up her keys to Paul III. For her history is one long tale of disasters. She fell a victim to so many conquerors--Totila, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and the condottieri of her enemy Perugia--Biordo Michelotti, Braccio Fortebraccio, and Niccolò Piccinino. And from the sack of the terrible little man, Niccolò, Assisi never recovered: to this day there is a spacious olive-garden between the Rocca and the town itself, on which the disheartened Assisans had not the spirit to rebuild their ravished homes. Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness. Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus of Troy. Be that as it may, this temple of the Goddess of Wisdom, which was long ago dedicated to the Mother of Christ, and on whose steps St. Francis often stood to preach, is one of the most perfect Roman temple-façades extant, notwithstanding the mass of mediaeval buildings which crowd in upon it, or the foreshortening of its pronaos, half sunk below the pavement of the piazza. It would be difficult to find a more completely Gothic place than Assisi. Except for the great hotels near San Francesco, the sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the palaces of the Via Superba, in which the spendthrift nobles of the seventeenth century entertained Queen Christina of Sweden, there is hardly anything in Assisi that is not of the Gothic age. If all the bricked-up loggias and windows of Assisi were opened out, she would look like a city frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli. And she has many treasures which the hurried traveller does not dream of. Who, for instance, ever remembers the ancient cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Bishop's Palace, where Saint Francis renounced his earthly heritage; or climbs the hill to see the cathedral of San Rufino, with its wonderful Romanesque façade, mystic with strange carvings, and its font in which not only Francis, but the great Emperor Frederick II., was baptized? How many people have lingered to look at the little loggia of the Comacine masters at the foot of one of the stair-streets of Assisi, which seem to have been created by the imagination of Albrecht Dürer? Or the sunken loggia of the Monte Frumentario, one of the most ancient municipal buildings in Assisi, which still carries on its original business and makes loans of money and seed to the peasantry, so that they shall not be ruined in the lean years of agriculture? How many have seen the little Chapel of the Pilgrims, founded by the Confraternity of St. Anthony in honour of their saint as a hospice for poor pilgrims, though it is frescoed by Matteo de Gualdo and Mesastris of Foligno? [Illustration: A STREET IN ASSISI.] There are few even who have visited the minor relics of St. Francis,--the Carcere; the cell in the garden of San Rufino in which the Miracle of the Fiery Chariot took place; the little parish church of San Giorgio; and the chapels scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed. It is San Francesco which most people come to see; San Francesco, one of the most inspired Gothic buildings in Italy, made sacrosanct with the body of Francis, illuminated with all that Tuscany could yield of art in the far-back thirteenth century. So all those dreams of poverty and humility which were the moving spirit of the Early Companions have come to naught. It avails nothing that when the hand of death lay heavy upon Francis, he yielded up even the coarse rough robe, his last possession, and but for his hair-shirt lay naked upon the ground, until a brother covered him with another garment, given 'as to one who has made himself poor for the love of God.' Nor does his humility count for anything, for though his petition to be buried on the Collis Inferni among the criminals and malefactors was granted, he was not given the humble grave he sought; and it is probable that Pope Gregory, who changed the name of the hill from that day to Collis Paradisi, only yielded to the saint's request because there was no other spot near the city walls suitable for the huge monument which he and Brother Elias were preparing to build. There is a story that the irresponsible Leo, the constant friend and companion of Francis, whom he so lovingly called 'the little sheep of God,' broke the porphyry vase for alms and collections which Brother Elias placed outside the church that all might contribute to its building. But it needed more than the simple Leo's protest to stem the flood of innovations which the ambitious Vicar-General was introducing into the Order. Even in his life-time St. Francis could not hold it back. Who, knowing the pathetic story of his home-coming from the East, and his disappointment at seeing the sumptuous Convent of the Brothers Minor in Bologna, can think that this splendid basilica does not weigh heavily upon the bones of the little poor man of Assisi? But it was inevitable. He had more to combat than the ambitions of individuals; there was the papacy to reckon with, the luxurious and effete Court of Rome, which saw well enough the moral of the Rule of Francis, but had no mind to make a bride of Poverty. 'Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves. And, as ye go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Thus, literally, did Francis, the splendid Idealist of the Middle Ages, whose faith in human nature was second only to his faith in God, follow the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Only once in a hundred ages does such a star arise in the East to illumine the darkness of the world and oppose the primeval laws of disaster. We know how much he achieved, what a vista of purity and love he opened to the thirteenth century, and how signally even this fervent age failed to respond to the voice of the Herald of God who preached repentance, and sang the praises of his Maker through the sunlit fields and gardens of Italy. So that there is much pathos in this mighty temple on the western rock of Assisi, which is the mausoleum of all the beautiful impracticable dreams of Francis as well as the shrine on which devotion, art and wealth have lavished every resource to make it a worthy resting-place for the Messiah of the Middle Ages. It was the hour of sunset when we first climbed up the slope of Monte Subasio, and Assisi and her great church were rose-red, as though they glowed with inward fires. We left our vettura at the city gates, telling the driver to take our luggage to the inn, and we ourselves turned up the hill to San Francesco. As we approached it through the long arcades of the lower piazza the great golden church with its towers and gables, its buttressed sides, its jewelled windows and gracious portico, and the noble steps which lead up to the Chiesa Superiore, had something of the eternal beauty of St. Mark's at Venice. We passed through a group of the clamorous beggars who besiege the pilgrim at the door of San Francesco, like a canker at the heart of a perfect fruit, and plunged into the gloom of the Lower Church. After the gold splendour of the sunset our eyes could distinguish little except the royal tombs which line the vestibule, and the great barrel arches which span the vault. But as we groped our way through the vast dim nave the world of Giotto, Cimabue and the Lorenzetti loomed on us through the shadows like a memory. The walls of chapel and transept were held in the bondage of shadow, but here and there some sweet familiar face looked down upon us with its golden halo fired by the last light of day. It was very dark. Vespers were over. One little lamp hanging in the Cappella San Martino only emphasised the gloom, but our footsteps were lighted by a faint glare radiating from the lowest tier of the altar. We could not imagine whence it came, shining so low in our path, until we drew near and beheld through the grille a lamp, suspended below the floor above the tomb of Francis. It was as though the luminous presence of the saint himself was guiding our feet through the shadows. [Illustration: ASSISI: THE LOWER CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCO.] I have been many times to see San Francesco since the first night I climbed Assisi's hill, but I have never passed from the sunlight, which the little Poor Brother loved so well, into that shadowy vault without feeling something pulling at my heart-strings, for there is an atmosphere of sadness in San Francesco. Below all this splendour Francis is crushed out of thought just as his body is crushed out of sight by his massive tomb. It is Brother Elias, not Francis, whom we meet in these dim rich chapels; and the fabric of the great church and convent is a monument to human frailty rather than to individual holiness. But it is so completely lovely, so full of memories, with its unbroken chain of faith and prayer to link it to the thirteenth century, that I would not have one jot or tittle of it altered. It is one of the chief gems in Italy's crown of beauty, an inexhaustible treasure-house. Every day, although we were living at the other end of Assisi, our feet wandered down the hillside to San Francesco. Now it was to hear Mass in the dim Lower Church when clouds of incense veiled Giotto's canopy of allegories above the High Altar, and the peasants knelt humbly round the shrine of the little Poor One, who having nothing gained the whole world. Now to gaze upon the pitiful relics of the saint housed in the magnificent carved presses of the sacristy--the fragments of his death-clothes; the original register of Honorius III.; the Blessing of St. Leo in Francis' handwriting; and, most touching of all, the rough sandals which Saint Clare made with her own hands for the beloved Father, when his poor weary feet, with their sacred wounds, could no longer tread the stony Umbrian roads. Now we would wander through the chapels spelling out the frescoes of Martini and the lesser Tuscans, pausing awhile before the tomb of that forgotten Queen of Cyprus, who is only remembered for her priceless gift of ultramarine, presented in the porphyry vase which is still to be seen in the east transept; or by the shadowy tomb of Madonna Giacobba di Settisoli, the Roman lady who loved Francis, and ministered to him at the last, bringing him his shroud and the candles for his burying, and, pitiful and human touch, the little comfits which had pleased him when he lay sick in Rome. Nor did we ever weary of the small cloister of San Francesco with its faded grey of bricks and mortar, its cypresses and lichens, and the _stemme_ of the nobles who lie below its pavement. It is a veritable home of peace. The walls are veiled in hanging creepers; there is a little box-hedge and a shower of sun-flecked acacias and lilacs from which the grey trunks of giant cypresses soar like the columns of a mighty temple. Dragon-flies flash through the warm, pine-scented air, and in the heart of it there is a crucifix to turn the thoughts of the brothers to holiness, lest they should be distracted by the sight of so much beauty, as they walk in the garden before their Mass. [Illustration: THE LITTLE CLOISTER IN S. FRANCESCO D'ASSISI.] And many a golden afternoon did we while away in the beautiful Gothic Chiesa Superiore, whose walls Giotto has illumined with the story of St. Francis. It would be hard to find two buildings in such strong contrast as the Upper and Lower churches of San Francesco. The Chiesa Inferiore, with its great barrel arches, its shadows and its dim frescoes, moves the world most, for it is full of the suggestion of beautiful unseen things; but the Upper Church has blossomed like the flowers of the field above the tomb of Francis. It is a miracle of light and spaciousness and colour, with rich stained windows and soaring arches; and the white cities of Giotto's frescoes, and the exquisite blues of his many heavens encircle the walls like a gay ribbon below the faded reds and yellows of Cimabue. Here at least we cannot but feel grateful to Brother Elias, for from the beginning the Franciscans were patrons of the art of painting, and they were among the first to encourage the independent school of art as distinct from the work of Byzantium. Giunto da Pisa clothed the walls of the transept, and Cimabue and his pupils were called in to complete the decorations of the Upper Church. Thus it befell that, while Cimabue was painting some of his masterpieces on the walls above, Giotto, serving his apprenticeship and working with the other pupils of his Master's atelier, stretched out his hand to snatch the greater laurel. 'Cimabue thought To lord it over painting's field; and now The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'[17] Many years later, when his fame was assured, Giotto came back to paint his allegories in the place of honour over the High Altar of the Lower Church. What did he think of it all, I wonder, this Florentine, this lover of beautiful things, this shepherd who left his sheep and his poverty and lighted the difficult path of art by the torch of his genius? Did he too love the memory of Francis? Or was it beyond his understanding that a man should dream of giving up all the world to follow a vision of eternal life? Perhaps he shrugged his shoulders over the whole thing, and painted on, with little thought for the saint, but all his heart in his ambitions, and in the beautiful church which he was helping to adorn. Truly it is a temple of Art this Franciscan Holy of Holies, but pilgrims who are questing for the gentle spirit of St. Francis should come away, nor hope to find it in the other great shrine of Assisi, Santa Chiara, the resting-place of Clare. Santa Chiara is inside the eastern gate of Assisi, close to the ancient palace of the Scifi in which the saint was born. It is a bare and empty church whose frescoes, according to the sacristan, were white-washed by a seventeenth-century bishop, because so many strangers came to disturb the nuns! But this Goth, who is said to have been of German extraction, left untouched some exquisite gold pictures of virgin saints over the High Altar, nor did he deem it worth while to destroy the frescoes which cover the walls of the ancient parish church of San Giorgio. For which we should be grateful, because half-hidden behind the gaudy trappings of its altar are two expressive and beautiful pictures of the Madonna and Saint Clare. In this humble chapel where they keep the miraculous crucifix of San Damiano, we seem to draw a little nearer to Francis, who must have come here often to the old priest who gave him lessons in his childhood. Later, when the Assisans had begun to listen to him, he preached here until the press became so great that he was given permission to deliver his sermons in the then unfinished cathedral of San Rufino. Here, too, he lay in state while the people of Assisi wept and gloried over him, just as many years after they wept and gloried over St. Clare. It would have been a gentle thought if these two who had prayed and laboured together in life could have been sheltered by the same roof in death. Madonna Giacobba, who had the privilege of coming to St. Francis in his last illness, lies in San Francesco; but Clare, the Poor Lady of San Damiano, who had so humbly begged that she might once break bread with Francis, lies on the hillside far away from him. We went down to see her tomb, the rock-hewn vault in which until fifty years ago she lay, just as the world had left her seven centuries before, with sprigs of wild thyme scattered by her mourning sisters still clinging to her robe. To-day she lies in a gilt and crystal chest, decked with flowers and jewels and elaborate velvet cushions. Her strong and rather austere face with its delicate aquiline nose is outlined against her snowy wimple, and in the midst of the incongruous splendour of her resting-place she is clad in the coarse brown robe and black veil of penitence for which she cast aside the luxurious garments of her youth. Candles burn at her head and at her feet, and a phantom-like nun with a lighted taper in her hand glides from behind a veil to draw the curtains. It was so quiet that suddenly I could hear the ticking of my watch out of the stillness, as though time tried to mark the moments in that silent chamber where it had been as nothing for so long. But how grotesque the wreath of flowers, the thin halo, the gilded bed! Why not have left that sunken figure resting on such hard stones as it chose for comfort in life? It is only by going out into the highways and hedges as he did that we can find the real Francis;--in the little convent of San Damiano, in the Hermitage of the Carcere, that retreat on Monte Subasio beloved of the early Franciscans, and in the holy places scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed. [Illustration: ASSISI: S. MARIA MADDALENA AT RIVO TORTO] A faint odour of romance clings round the ancient stones of San Damiano, for there St. Francis laboured with his own hands to build a habitation of apostolical simplicity which was to be the spiritual home of Clare. This humble place, a mere chapel in the olive-gardens below Assisi, is pregnant with memories of the simple Francis and the saintly Clare. For it was here, as he knelt before a crucifix in the little ruined church, that Francis, the gay merchant-prince of Assisi, heard the voice of Jesus saying, 'Francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me.' It was just what he needed, this troubled boy. Here was an obvious work for his hands, and in the doing of it he might find relief from the fears and doubtings that had assailed him since he rose from his weary sick-bed and looked upon an altered world. With no premonition of his life-work, truly the rock on which the Catholic Church built up its power when it was in danger of being swept away in tidal waves of lust and avarice during the stormy Middle Ages, the ever-literal Francis bethought him of the letter of his miraculous command. It is such an old story that it is not worth retelling, how he sold the bales of cloth from his father's warehouse in the market of Foligno and brought the money to the priest of San Damiano; how the good man refused it, being fearful of Pietro Bernardone's wrath; how Francis flung it into the corner of a little window and would not touch it either; how his angry father renounced him; and how St. Francis, having yielded up his earthly goods, begged through the streets of Assisi for the stones with which to accomplish his work. There was no more fitting spot in all Umbria to be the home of the Second Order than San Damiano. But I think that Clare in her long life within its walls must have often wept, seeing the rough stones which Francis, with his tender unaccustomed hands, had fashioned into a house of God and a shelter for the Poor Ladies who had renounced the world to serve his Master. I remember well coming upon it one evening, breathless with sirocco, when all the world was gray and silver. In the little cloister-garden the flowers were yielding up their fragrance to the night in perfumed sighs, and in the tiny vaulted chapel two brothers and a priest were singing vespers with a few peasants who had wandered in from the fields. A flight of steps led down into the dark chapel, so little altered from the church which Francis built. And here I rested. Every moment the shadows below the olives crept nearer, shutting out the distance. At my feet in San Damiano the altar lights grew brighter in the dusk, and the swinging censer glowed like a live coal in the dark choir. So I waited, thinking of another Clare, in England, who was lying sick unto death, but with peace in my heart, for it was very sweet to hear Vespers in this holy place while the curious shadows of night crept up under the olives. Presently the chanting ceased. The priest went away, and the peasants passed out into the soft dusk. I went down then into the silent chapel and saw the relics of Saint Clare; the little sacristy with ancient wooden seats, such hard uncomfortable planks, where she and the sisters heard Mass; the room she died in; the hollow in the wall through which she received her spiritual food; her yard of garden overlooking the wide Umbrian plain and Rivo Torto. How often as she stood here upon the convent roof must she have thought of the Seraphic Father toiling down in the valley, for I doubt not she loved him, even as Madonna Pica, his mother, and Giacobba di Settisoli loved him, and hungered over him, and grieved for his poor weary feet, and exulted in the purity of his soul. What memories of Francis and Clare, the true type of the brother and sister in Christ, are here! Francis indeed came seldom to the convent after the Poor Ladies were installed, for as he was not ordained, he had not the right to hear their confessions or administer the Holy Sacrament. But we know that he often sent to ask advice of the saintly abbess; and he stayed here before his journey to Rieti, when he was worn-out and sick, and almost blind, and took much comfort in her sympathy. Here, too, his body was brought, so that the sisters might look their last upon it before it was borne in triumph to Assisi. But Clare, whose cry of grief still has the power to stir our hearts to pain, lived on through bitter years to see the ideals of the little lover of Poverty shattered by Brother Elias and the Papacy before she followed him up the hill to rest. The way up to the Carcere is steep and long. The path is a mere track of broken stones which radiates heat, and there is no shade to mitigate the pitiless August glare. And yet I would not have forgone that toil up the side of Subasio, if only for the pleasures of the way. Assisi lay behind us like a city of the Middle Ages, with Gothic towers and palaces grouped in échelon below her fantastic castle. On our right the hillside, veiled in the tender grey of olives, sloped away to the Valley of Spoleto, which was a vision of pure beauty, with mists clinging about the banks of its streams, and its many little cities, Spello, Foligno, Bevagna, tall Trevi and Spoleto, rising from the green folds of encircling hills. Above Subasio was barren except for some scanty oaks, but the bushes by the roadside were heavy with fruit, blackberries, and shiny red and yellow hips and crimson haws. Out of the parched stony earth grew clumps of broom, long-stemmed and slender, with a crest of golden blossoms like a flight of butterflies; and scabious, white and purple, rosettes for a fairy's shoe; and little Morning Glories smiling at the sky; and sugamele, and that wonderful blue thistle, which looks as though it had been soaked, leaves and all, in the rare dye of mountain mists at dawn. [Illustration: ASSISI: THE CARCERE.] We did not see the Carcere until we were actually upon it. It is completely hidden in a ravine of ilexes, in a fold, as it were, of the brown skirts of Subasio. Small wonder that the Poverello loved this place; it is so humble, so silent, so restful. Often and often while he toiled down in the valley, ministering to the lepers of Rivo Torto, or preaching to the hard of heart, himself beset with doubts and fears, he must have lifted his eyes unto the hills, and longed for the Peace of God, which he knew dwelt in this solitude. Far away on the spur of the mountain is Assisi, where he laboured to bring love; and further away still, beyond the peaceful vales of Umbria, are great cities in which men worked, and hated, and struggled, ay, and loved unceasingly. But here in this leafy ilex grove, in these tiny cells and chapels, there is a little world of dreams and tender memories. It is so small that a few minutes suffice to see everything--the courtyard with its miraculous well; the narrow cell and chapel of St. Francis, which is polished by the feet and shoulders of a multitude of pilgrims; the hole through which the exasperated devil vanished when he found that his temptations were of no avail; the lonely caves of the Early Companions in the hillside. It is a mere cluster of cells overhanging a mountain torrent; but it has a peculiar beauty as of a place set apart, dedicate to holiness. And there is peace in the shadowy ilex wood in which St. Francis loved to walk, holding converse with his little sisters, the birds. Myrtle and cyclamens grow among the grey rocks, and the sunlight flickers across the mossy path. In the silence we could hear the song of Brother Wind down in the glen, the humming of an insect near at hand, and, far away, a bird calling to his mate. And all the time the brother, who walked beside us, prated of the miracles of the saint. I hardly listened, for like an echo down the years I seemed to hear Francis, the troubadour of God, singing his canticle of the sun as he toiled up the barren hillside from Assisi. 'Laudato sia Dio mio Signore Cum tutte le tue creature, Specialmente messer lo frate sole, Il quale giorna et illumina nui per lui, Et ello è bello et radiante cum grande splendore, De te Signore porta significatione.' * * * * * On a day of never-to-be-forgotten beauty we went down into the fields below Assisi, and wandered in the footsteps of Francis and his brother saints. Our way led out of the town by the old Roman road below the ancient Porta Moiana, and there among the olives we came upon Gothic farms, tended by beautiful Umbrian peasants, and many a humble half-forgotten shrine, made holy in the thirteenth century, and fallen now into disuse. There are many such places round Assisi, within whose walls Mass is only said once a year, leaving them for the rest of the days to be store-houses or granaries or sheds in which to keep the wooden plough of the country-side. Everywhere were snow-white butterflies dancing in pairs before us as we passed, or swinging on the slender flowers that starred the hedges. White doves bowed and sidled in the golden wheat, and wayside shrines rose from a tangle of flowers where the cross roads met. And here, as though it was a custom oft repeated, the milk-white oxen, which once were deemed a fitting sacrifice for Roman gods, paused in their rolling gait while their masters laid down their whips, and doffed their hats and knelt a moment in the dust before the symbol of the suffering Christ. It was a world of great simplicity and faith in which we walked. For here in Umbria, down in these fields where Francis' 'Camp of the Lord' set up their wattle huts, faith is a real and potent thing. They do not doubt, these people, these rugged-faced men, these Madonna-like women--they never will doubt. To them the mysteries of the Incarnation and Ascension are accepted facts. In simplicity and faith they rise up in the morning and lie down again at night, never fearing that their prayers at dawn and evening, their hastily uttered petitions at a roadside cross, have not winged their way straight to heaven. I too would fain believe it when I am walking in their olive-groves and vineyards, for it is a lovely thing, as dreams are lovely, and young ambitions and young hope. And it is here perhaps that the secret of the intangible beauty of Assisi may be found--because it is a shrine; no matter of St. Francis, or of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the older gods. Out of the wreck of time the flame of worship and faith has been kept burning; the stones upon this altar have never darkened and grown cold. It was the season of the husking of the maize, and a happy harvest air hung over everything. Each farm had its pile of fragrant white husks outside its door ready to replenish the mattresses of the household, and the corn was spread out on the threshing-floors like a golden carpet. Sometimes we saw the family gathered there to shell the cobs, and sometimes we came upon them sitting below their olive-trees, separating the yellow corn from its white sheaths, and heaping them up on either side the gold and silver largesse of the Great Mother. It was in the midst of all this pastoral loveliness that we came to Rivo Torto, which is so bare and ugly and un-Franciscan in feeling. Poor and humble, but far richer in the spirit of St. Francis than the great church of Rivo Torto, are the two chapels of Santa Maria Maddalena and San Rufino d'Arce, which may mark the approximate site of the hut in which the saint dwelt while he was ministering to the lepers. We found Santa Maria Maddalena in a field of hemp, whose tall slender stalks and green tassels veiled the ancient apse and narrow lancet windows. Golden pumpkins were piled shoulder-high outside its wall, drying in the sun; and the interior, when at last it was unlocked, proved to be a potato store. Even more dilapidated is San Rufino d'Arce, which stands further from the road near the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farm. Nor could the lovely peasant woman, who brought its key and walked like a queen barefoot among her golden corn-cobs, tell us anything of its miraculous well in which, tradition says, a young boy saint was drowned. [Illustration: ASSISI: THE PORZIUNCULA.] But now, as we drew near it, along the dusty white road which links Perugia to Rome, the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli towered above the plain. This is the holiest place in Umbria, the Little Portion, beloved of St. Francis and his brethren, in which they lived and worked, and from which they issued forth to preach the gospel of love and repentance to the world. It is sanctified by miracles and the frequent presence of the saint, and is pregnant with the romance of the Franciscan order, which the writer of the _Fioretti_ has set forth so admirably. But overmuch devotion has robbed it of simplicity and nullified many of its gentler associations. It is a pathetic sight to see the little church, consecrated by centuries of prayer, in the centre of the sixteenth-century Leviathan. It looks like an imprisoned thing, a dim unspoken reproach. I wish they could have left it in its fields, where the wild sweet wind would have sung praises through door and window, and the ardent sun have shamed the candles on the altar. But just as the papacy swept away Francis himself, so this great church has swallowed up the Little Portion which was all-sufficing for so many saints. A gentle, white-haired friar took us round the church. 'Here by this pier,' he said, 'Francis dined with Clare. And this is where he died. You know he wished to die here. He loved the Porziuncula better than any other place in the world.' And then we saw the thornless roses of St. Francis, and his cell, and the garden where he bade the brothers put cabbages into the earth upside down to test their obedience, and the fig-tree which the brothers lately planted at the request of two Englishwomen, to take the place of the tree wherein the cicala praised God continuously with Francis until the saint begged him to rest because he had edified him enough. He was a simple, dear old man, our guide, who told his stories smilingly and yet with reverence and faith, very different from the unkempt and cynical monk at Rivo Torto. And when he had finished he took us into the sacristy and gave us a little book he had written about Saint Mary of the Angels, and a rose sprig from the bush which lost its thorns when St. Francis threw himself into it. And so we parted, he to his prayers, we to climb up through the fields to Assisi. GUBBIO I shall always think of Gubbio as I saw her first, in the magic sunset of a cold grey day, on which summer had been hidden by the jealous clouds, and the wind blew bleakly from the Appennines. September had come in the night before with storm and wind. When we left Assisi the sky was clear and rain-swept, blue as the heavens of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, and there was a glint of sunshine lighting her Gothic towers between the racing cumuli. But all day the mountains of Nocera and Gualdo 'mourned for their heavy yoke,' hiding their crests in wind-blown veils of cloud; and the rocky stream-beds at their feet, which had lain mute and parched since the last rains of spring, gave voice in swirling torrents. So we came to the heart of the Appennines, to the broad Valley of the Chiaggio, which is so rich with maize and vineyards. Here in the north three mountains lift their great heads to the sky, and in the hollow where their three slopes meet lies Gubbio, a fairy citadel such as poets dream of. Indeed, Gubbio might well be the home of dreams, for I can think of no place where their gossamer threads could be so lightly spun as in the long, fantastic arcade of the Mercato Vecchio, in the shadow of her Gothic palaces. As we drew near, the sun slipped from below her mantle of cloud, and in a seeming passion of desire bathed the whole world in flame. Seen by the ruddy torch of this wild sunset Gubbio was all rose, a city of fair dreams, unforgettably lovely. Her towers, palaces and loggias were illuminated, and the bare slopes of Monte Calvo were flooded with roseate light save where the folds of the hill made cobalt shadows. Even the peasants walking in the Piazza del Mercato were caught in the same radiance, which made a glory round the humblest implements of toil. It was so fair a sight that I stood as one enchanted and feared to take my eyes away from it, lest it should vanish like the fairy cities of our childhood, and I should find myself once more upon the bleak hillside of life. O little town, with the name whose quaintness has made it familiar, do you still sleep at the foot of your mountains under the shadow of your holy houses? Can it be that I have dreamt of you, seeing some picture of a mediaeval city in a psalter? Or does your lamp-lighter still light your ancient swing-lamps in the dusk, with old-world grace and disregard of time, setting out on his slow rounds long before the sunset glow has faded from your brow? I must come back to see if it is true; if your barren hills have really blossomed into shrines and monasteries; if you have still the wistful charm that I remember; if you will greet me after the long journey with that same rosy blush at eve! [Illustration: GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER.] And yet, I do not know why I should question, for I have many gentle memories of Gubbio--of steep, quiet streets whose ends are closed by solemn mountains; of Gothic palaces and loggias; of ancient churches full of faded pictures; of saints and Madonnas brooding over city gates; of peasants streaming into Mass of a morning; of women in black mantillas or the graceful fringed shawls of Venice and the March. Nor have I forgotten the hospitality that she extended to us. Gubbio was always famous for her hospitality. There is a story that in the olden days the nobles of Gubbio fought so fiercely for the right of entertaining visitors to their town that to avoid the really serious conflicts which resulted from this rivalry a pillar was erected in the Mercato with rings attached to it, 'each belonging to some separate aristocratic house, and to whosesoever ring a traveller chanced to fasten his horse, to him belonged the right of entertainment.'[18] Though our inn was humble, even rough, we were lodged in the ancient convent of San Marco, and we took our meals in a vine arbour full of hanging grapes, where the sunlight piercing the leafy roof flecked the snowy table-cloth with silver, and made the floor an arabesque of dappled light and shade. A few yards away among the vines the Carmignano foamed along its rocky bed. And here we were content with simple fare, but of the best--macaroni spread with pomidoro, _misto fritto_, golden eggs, fruit and honey, washed down with amber-coloured _vino del paese_. Whatever may be the facts about the grandson of Noah, to whom local tradition loves to assign the foundation of Gubbio, there can be no doubt that she is of Umbrian antiquity. Unlike most of the so-called Umbrian cities Gubbio has ample proof of her importance as a city of the older race, which was displaced by the Etruscans; for besides the number of prehistoric utensils discovered in the caves of her mountains, and a short course of Cyclopean wall on Monte Calvo, which point to a remote civilisation, there are certain pieces of money in existence bearing the Umbrian name Ikuvini; and, most conclusive evidence of all, there are the world-famous Eugubian Tables. These tables of bronze, which have been of such inestimable value to the student of ancient languages, are Gubbio's greatest treasure. They are housed in her Palazzo Pubblico, in her little shrunken museum, which has so few precious things left to-day, except a solitary tazza by the immortal Maestro Giorgio. It would be useless for me to write of them at length, for it is impossible to treat of them scientifically in a short chapter, and only those who come to see them can gauge the romance and mystery which hang about them. There are seven tables in all, four written in Etruscan characters, two in Latin, and one partly in Etruscan and partly in Latin characters. Yet the language that they have immortalised is neither Latin nor Etruscan, but the tongue of that mysterious people, the Umbrians, who have left us so few traces of their civilisation, whose origin is lost in the misty ages. Since the discovery of these tables in 1444 students and scholars have sought to read their riddle, and it is by the fruit of their labours that we know what an interesting clue they afford to the character of Gubbio. For these fine letters traced by the scribes of long ago are sacerdotal inscriptions, dealing with the religious rites of the Attidian brethren, who paid homage to a strange pantheon of gods--Umbrian, Roman and Greek--and whose headquarters, according to many students, were in the temple of Jupiter Appenninus, eight miles away, at Scheggia, on the old Flaminian way. M. Bréal, however, does not hold this theory, claiming that Jupiter Appenninus is not mentioned in the text; and urging the plea that as the tablets were discovered in a subterranean vault, near the ancient theatre of Iguvium, the college of the confraternity was likely to be found within the city itself. It would be difficult to say, for necessarily the reading of the tablets is but vague; the only point we can be certain of is that this ghostly echo of a vanished city is one of prayer and invocation, occupied with sacrifices and propitiations rather than with laws or ceremonies, as the inscriptions of Rome and Etruria have been. And this is typical of the city, for the real characteristic of Gubbio to-day is her gentle air of sanctity, just as the most vivid memories of her Middle Ages are concerned with saints and bishops. For the bishops of Gubbio, the saintly Ubaldo, whose name the people of Gubbio venerate in the yearly festival of the Ceri on the 15th of May, the blessed Teobaldo who succeeded him, and Villano, that man 'of pure and saintly life who was, besides, the friend of St. Francis of Assisi,' are only a few of the many holy men who steered her helm through the stormy waves of Time. [Illustration: GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO.] And here, as you remember, St. Francis came with song and thanksgiving, although he had been but a short time before stripped naked to the world, to see his friend Giacomello Spada, who clothed him and sheltered him, and whose garden covered the ground where the picturesque Gothic church of San Francesco stands to-day. Nor is there any more familiar story told by their nurses to the breathless children of the Latin countries than the legend of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which is commemorated to this day in the little chapel of S. Francesco della Pace; built, so it is said, on the site of the cave wherein the wolf dwelt after he had been tamed by the brotherly love of Francis. It was to Gubbio Francis came in the first glow of his renunciation, for we read that he was confident of finding shelter and the bare necessaries of clothing with his friends there, but I think there was another reason. Perhaps as he lay on the bleak side of Subasio he thought with longing of the gentle city of Ubaldo, cradled at the foot of its bare mountain, which soared towards the heavens, offering, as it were, upon an altar, the body of its saintly bishop. Gubbio is a city of vanished splendours, a ghost of her old glory. So that we were amazed on entering Santa Maria Nuova to see anything so brilliant and full of vivid beauty as the Madonna della Belvedere, which Ottaviano Nelli painted there. Like Sant'Agostino and San Pietro, Santa Maria has her share of faded fresco; but this Madonna in her splendid robes, in the midst of her gracious court of angels and saints and kneeling donors, is a vision of the glories of that Gubbio which once raised a proud head among the principalities of the Quattrocento. Yet not even Nelli has succeeded in colouring the past of Gubbio. For nearly all her treasures have been stolen from her, and her tired old walls toppling to their decay enclose more gardens and smiling vineyards than streets and squares. If she had not been so poor and so ready to sell herself for a few _soldi_ to the passing stranger she might have been a museum of lovely things. As it is she has been stripped of everything which could be carried away, from the exquisite majolica of Maestro Giorgio (whose ruby glaze made him as much the glory of sixteenth-century Gubbio as Oderigi was of the city visited by Dante) to the intarsia cabinets in the Palace of Federigo of Urbino. How typical of Gubbio, the shrunken city, is the ruined palace full of lovely crumbling stones, where Federigo and his beloved wife Battista lived. It is fallen into decay; it has become a mere barrack; a more desolate spot could not well be imagined. And yet it is a fitting symbol of the house of Montefeltro; for Guidobaldo, the weakling son of the great condottiere, was born here, in the house which Federigo built so proudly in his birthplace among the loyal people of Gubbio. And it was the scene of a great tragedy. For here Battista died. After her death Federigo came here less often, for we read that he loved Battista very dearly. She had inherited the wit and ready sympathy of her great grandmother, Battista da Montefeltro; she was a scholar, and a woman of resource and courage, capable of defending the duchy while Federigo was absent on his long campaigns. And withal she loved him. It was for this reason, knowing his disappointment because she had given him no heir to succeed to his hard-won estate, that this great woman, the grandmother of Vittoria Colonna, listened for her lord's sake to an old wife's tale, and making a pilgrimage to Gubbio vowed to Saint Ubaldo that if a son was vouchsafed to her she would be willing to die for his sake. A curious story. But she did bear a son, here at Gubbio, whither she had come to be under the special protection of the saint. Federigo was away in Tuscany, gaining more laurels by his great victory over the Volterrans. He came back to her as soon as he could, riding swiftly through the Appennines with his honours fresh upon him. And here is the strangest part of the story. For when he was but a few hours away Battista, who had been progressing so well, fell ill, and died soon after his arrival, thus expiating her vow. Federigo's heartbroken letters to the Senate of Siena and the Pope testify his grief. Nor did her love and sacrifice avail him anything, for Guidobaldo was the last of his race to sit upon the throne of Urbino. [Illustration: GUBBIO: PIAZZA VITTORIO EMANUELE.] But neither Time, nor the wanton hand of strangers, can rob Gubbio of her beauty. She is a dream-city within whose walls we grew forgetful of the world. It is not the imperishable grandeur of her mountains or her monuments which constitute her special charm so much as her Gothic grace and her gentle blending of art and nature. See what a fraction of old Iguvium is left--a theatre, with its memories of vanished pomps and vanities, and some broken tombs standing in the corn-fields, with twisted vines veiling their ragged cores, and brambles tossing wide arms over their crests. And yet I carry with me the memory of a golden hour in that ancient Umbro-Roman theatre of Iguvium, not so much for its importance as a monument as for its beauty; although the vandalism of the last century, which allowed the people of Gubbio to strip it of its marble columns, has left it many interesting fragments, such as a perfect doorway with its jambs complete, and the unspoilt sloping pavement of the wings by which the actors entered the stage. For we approached it through a vineyard below the city walls: its auditorium was a deep semi-circle of grassy steps, broidered with little flowers, and in its proscenium the apples dropped from neighbouring orchards. We stepped through the vineyard gate on to the raised platform of the stage, denuded of everything except some stumps of masonry and some few feet of pavement. Three blocks of marble served as rough steps from the proscenium to the orchestra, and here a lizard sunned himself, and a happy golden butterfly fluttered, as though these old worn stones were their familiar playground. As we climbed up the seats where once the Romans sat, and perhaps the Umbri, for the theatre was repaired in the lifetime of Augustus, the scent of crushed thyme filled the air. It was very quiet. There were not even cicalas, only the distant bells of Gubbio calling her people to prayer. We sat on the highest circle of the mossy steps, and looked across the vineyards to the little city, asleep in the golden noon below her arid hills. The poet was deep in _opus reticulatum_ and cornices and friezes, but I could only love the silence and the scented air, the little flowers which starred the ground, the grasses pencilled lightly against the sky on the chain of arches, the lizards sunning themselves on broken marbles, the butterflies dancing above them. And when I raised my eyes Gubbio lay before me with olive-gardens enclosed in her broken walls, and her old grey houses piled one above the other round her lovely Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli, which soars above the lesser roofs, arcaded and battlemented, a crown of beauty on the hillside. Behind rose her three mountains, Monte Calvo, Monte Ingino, and Monte S. Girolamo, barren of everything but lonely cypresses pointing the way to monasteries on high. [Illustration: GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT.] Gubbio has the indefinably wistful charm of a city built in the shadow of great mountains, for though she has conquered the three giants which hem her in, and left her monasteries as out-posts on their slopes, and solemn crucifixes as her ensign on their brows, she has not tamed their wildness. It needs only a few steps through the picturesque old Porta Metauro to prove this, for out in that rugged pass which leads to Scheggia, and the Old Flaminian Road, and Cagli, and Urbino we were hemmed in between the hungry mountains, whose sides are scarred by torrents, curiously seamed, and richly coloured. Along this road the Dukes of Urbino rode in splendid state. How little it is altered from their day! Here you are face to face with Nature, who changes slowly. The strata on the frowning cliffs are a little worn; the road is a little better, though it is a poor _strada_ even now for motors; perhaps there was no wall then between the road and the deep gully where the green Carmignano stirs up its sandy bed. But the peasants rode up the hilly pass then as now with their women riding astride and a-pillion on mules or donkeys, and the traveller in that day would hear as we did the forlorn music of their bells still floating back, long after they were out of sight. On the hillside above was one of Gubbio's wonders--the mediaeval aqueduct which creeps perilously round the shoulder of Monte Calvo, and dips down the hillside to the Bottaccione, which I can best describe by saying that it is a thick wall which joins Monte Calvo to Monte Ingino, and dams the Carmignano, making a reservoir from which water can flow at will into the town for use in mills and fountains. If the Eugubian Tablets testify to the importance of ancient Iguvium, these vast engineering feats testify to her mediaeval greatness. For though they are not as imposing as Roman Monuments, and are built of small poor stones, they are a splendid testimony of the energy of this little hill-girt city in the twelfth and fourteenth[19] centuries, when most principalities were too occupied in petty wars to think of such stupendous work. [Illustration: GUBBIO: VIA CARMIGNANO.] It would be unfair to Gubbio to take leave of her without saying one word about the Via Carmignano, which is not only one of the most picturesque streets to be seen anywhere in Italy, but which represents a sphere of life in which Gubbio was extremely active from the twelfth century to comparatively recent years--her woollen industry. It is rather astonishing that Gubbio, who had so many trades and arts, should be so poor to-day. Her school of painting which was mainly of the miniature type--for Ottaviano Nelli was as much a miniature-painter as the mysterious Oderisi, whose name, like Francesca da Rimini's, has been handed down to posterity by Dante--was famous throughout Italy. I have already spoken of her renown as the home of Master George, the great majolica-maker; she sheltered a school of mosaic-workers from early times; and her wood-carvers, who have left splendid work in her old Church of San Pietro, were reckoned so important that a certain Niccolò was commissioned to carve the great doors of San Francesco at Assisi. But it was by her wool industry that Gubbio built up her wealth; and it was to turn their wool mills that the Eugubians built the Bottaccione out in the pass between Scheggia and Gubbio, and diverted the course of the Carmignano, which till the twelfth century had been a moat round the city walls. To-day this little mountain torrent still runs through the heart of Gubbio, but the mills are silent. For the woollen trade, which was so prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the nobles passed a law forbidding any of their class to enter its ranks under penalty of forfeiting his title, has been slowly killed by the suppression of the monasteries, which has robbed it of its staple support, the making of habits for religious houses. The Via Carmignano is a little Venice which loses itself in a mountain torrent as it approaches the Porta Metauro. Behind the arcaded loggia del Mercato, where it runs at the foot of the cypress garden of San Giovanni Battista, a picturesque and ancient church on the site of the early cathedral, the ravine is spanned by as many bridges as a Venetian waterway, mediaeval erections of the maddest shapes, full of fantastic angles, which sometimes only lead to the barred doors of some Merchant of Gubbio's private house. Here are Gothic palaces with gardens pouring over their walls, and coats of arms by their doors like the house near the Via dei Consoli, which has the Lamb of the Templars over its portal. But as the road creeps up towards the Porta Metauro they are replaced by thirteenth-century houses, mere cottages of rough grey stone such as you might find in any mountain village--only these were built in the time of St. Francis. Between the street and the deep river gully is a breast-high parapet with wide-eaved shrines whose hanging lamps are always lit at night; and beyond and above are the everlasting hills, towering overhead, blocking every vista with their rocks and gullies and stony water-courses, lifting their tawny heads up to the soft sky and crowned with giant crucifixes, as though they shouted in triumph to an unheeding world the old war-cry of the Lord, '_In hoc signo vinces!_' ANCONA We caught our first glimpse of the shimmering Adriatic across a richly-farmed plain full of the fruit-trees which Horace and Juvenal extolled; and soon afterwards we saw the Eastern Gate of Italy, beautiful Ancona, rising like a city of white marble above its blue, sickle-shaped bay. The history of the origin of Ancona is unique among the cities of the Adriatic, for she was founded by a colony of Sicilian Greeks who came to the shores of Picenum about 380 B.C., seeking refuge from the tyrant Dionysius. Ancona is a typical Greek site, a natural harbour well adapted to the use of commerce, with a steep hill overhanging the 'elbow' bay. From the earliest times she was rich and prosperous, for besides being the only port on the eastern coast before the growth of Venice and Ravenna she was situated in the fertile fields of Picenum, which were noted for the excellence of their olives and fruits, as well as for their wine and corn. She also had a wonderful purple dye which was said to equal that of Phoenicia, whence came the garments immortalised by Macaulay. 'Woven in the land of sunrise By Syria's dark-browed daughters, And by the sails of Carthage brought Far o'er the southern waters.' She was one of the first cities to hold out friendly hands to Caesar after he had crossed the Rubicon on his march on Rome, and in the life-time of Pliny she was raised to the rank of a Roman colony. Later when the Emperors and after them the Exarchs held their courts at Ravenna, Ancona was of even more importance than Ravenna as the natural trading port with the Byzantine Empire. To-day she is a large and prosperous city, with broad streets and boulevards given over to the tyranny of electric trams. She is like Alexandria, or Marseilles, with her busy wharf life on the one hand and her _piazze_ with their fountains and bandstands and their alfresco cafés under avenues of plane trees on the other. Her restaurants are dear, and her inns bad; her inhabitants are the most disagreeable people we met in Italy--with all the taciturnity of the Venetians and none of their picturesqueness; but we were able to forgive her everything for the beauty of her cathedral, and for the first view of her wide bay with the pictured sails of her fishing-boats poised like a flight of butterflies on its mirroring waters. In Ancona, while I am down in the noisy streets, my heart is always up on the grassy hill above the Mole of Trajan, where the Cathedral of San Ciriaco is set like a jewel on the crest of Monte Guasco. Truly it is on their hills that you may know the cities of Italy. For up there, far removed from the unlovely bustle of her streets with their clanging tramways, their painted kiosks, their matter-of-fact commercialism, we seemed to creep unawares right into the heart of Ancona. Coming straight from the peace and breadth and quiet of Umbria we had found her peculiarly unattractive. We had pictured a city of romance, for Ancona has ever been Italy's link with the Orient; the wealth of Byzantium has been unloaded in her harbour; the merchandise of the East has stood upon her quays. And in the first flush of our arrival, when we stood upon the wharf and saw the brilliant wings of her fishing-boats drifting in from the Adriatic, she seemed for a moment to be the city of our imaginings--a fleeting fancy, not easily recaptured on the boulevards of the modern city. But on the hill of San Ciriaco, far above the noisy town, with the Adriatic filling the horizon, and the soft bells of the incomparably lovely church of the first bishop of Ancona wafting a benediction to the fishing fleet as it sailed into the sunset, she became once more our Port of Romance, true sister to Venice, the beautiful bride of Italy's Eastern Waters. There was nothing to prepare us for the exquisite vista which unfolded itself before us on the crest of Monte Guasco as we toiled up the steep stair-streets which scale the Cathedral hill. The houses were old but undistinguished, the homes of the very poor, who do not even have windows in Italy, but live behind stable doors in _bassi_. Nor did we realise the moment at which we emerged from them, for our eyes were blocked by the bell-tower of age unknown which stands like a sentinel before Ancona's Cathedral. There is no church in Christendom so enthroned. It is built between two tideless seas on a wind-swept hill, which was once the seat of the white temple of the laughing Goddess of Eryx--Aphrodite, who was born of the foam. Beside it is the old Episcopal Palace in which Aeneas Sylvius, the last of the crusaders, waited for the false Patriarch of Venice to set sail with him against the Turks. Poor Pius II., with his quixotic and splendid dream of reconquering Jerusalem for the Papacy, how often must he have stood on the bulwark of San Ciriaco's hill watching for the galleys of the Venetian to come into sight. And when at last they did sweep down upon Ancona he was no longer waiting; he had embarked alone upon a longer journey; the last and most incomprehensible of the crusades had failed! We, too, stood upon the crest of Monte Guasco behind its bulwark of acacia trees, on our first evening by the Adriatic, and looked down upon the busy wharf, with the long arm of Trajan's Mole encircling the harbour, and the white crescent of Ancona stretching round the bay to Monte Astagno. It was nearing the hour of sunset. Across the sunlit water we could see the great Appennines towering towards heaven, aerial as clouds upon the horizon. There Rimini lay, on that fair coast, and Venice and Ravenna, the homes of Poetry and Romance. But near at hand Ancona's fleet of bright-winged boats was spread across the bay. We stood and watched them sailing out into the west, slowly, for there was little wind to fill their gold and copper sails. They looked like argosies of Love journeying into a land of sunset mists across a painted sea. Surely they must come back to-morrow with dreams below their wings, and little lovely treasures from the land whither they were sailing to-night! Slowly they crossed the bar--now a crimson wing tapering to gold with a black griffin rampant; now an orange Gonfalon bearing a lion and anchor; now one of black and gold, now one of Venetian brown. We watched them drifting out, and always the west grew more golden and the distant mountains more aerial until the sea was a path of flame from the far-off coast to Trajan's Mole, where the sunset gilded the black hulks of the coal-ships in the harbour. Ere the last of those fantastic birds had winged its way out to the deep waters, the lights of Ancona had begun to twinkle in the dusk, and the bells of San Ciriaco were stilled. [Illustration: ANCONA: THE FISHING FLEET.] San Ciriaco is worthy of its site. Begun a thousand years ago in the form of the earliest Christian temples, half Byzantine, half Romanesque, it preserves the original Greek cross of nave and transept, and is crowned by an antique dome, one of the oldest in Italy, which time and the salt breath of the Adriatic have painted a wonderful green, the despair of artists. The exterior of San Ciriaco is of almost Eastern simplicity, but sun and wind have mellowed the dazzling white marbles of its walls to such gracious tints that it is like a perfect fruit ripened slowly to perfection through the centuries. Its chief glory is the Gothic portico of rose-red Verona marble which tradition and Vasari assign to the hand of Margheritone d'Arezzo, the sombre painter of crucifixes, who was so jealous of Giotto that he died of spleen. Two couchant lions at the head of a flight of steps support its outer columns, and within it is blush-hued, with slender columns, alternate rose and white, wrought with a delicate frieze of the heads of saints and the grotesques of mediaeval fancy. Nor has the interior of this noble church suffered much from the hands of the restorer. It is a granary of rare and interesting Byzantine fragments, and its choir is graced by ten of the marble columns which once stood in the temple of Aphrodite. Ancona of to-day is a garden where the beautiful flowers of an ancient architecture are still flourishing among the energetic weeds and herbs of everyday life. Between the two horns of her crescent bay, Monte Astagno, crowned by the Spanish bastions of the Fortezza, and Monte Guasco, which enthrones the lovely church of San Ciriaco, there is a network of streets. Let us for the sake of the metaphor suppose that these streets are paths in the garden of Ancona; and let us walk in them, searching in the tangle of hardy commercial upshoots for the delicate blossoms which graced the pleasances of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More than this, for down in the crowded port we shall discover the ancient growths of the Roman city in many a broken arch on whose blackened stones a Gothic spandril has been grafted, and in the glorious Triumphal Arch which the Imperial Plotina and her sister-in-law raised in honour of Trajan. Between the shrieking railway station and the Porta Pia there is nothing to detain us; this is more or less a modern suburb which has sprung up since the foundation of the railway; but at the Porta Pia, which stands at the foot of Monte Astagno, we enter the old harbour. To our left is the picturesque Lazzaretto built by Clement XII. in 1732, now used as a sugar refinery; and in front we see before us the curving bay of Ancona, with its grand new quay or Banchina, of which the Anconans are so proud. The Via Ventinove Settembre, whose name like the ubiquitous Venti Settembre commemorates the expulsion of the Papal troops in 1860, takes us into the heart of the modern city; but it is not in her wide Corso Giuseppe Mazzini, or Vittorio Emanuele, or Piazza Cavour that we shall find anything of the old Ancona. Here she is as modern as her names betoken, although the fruit-market in a curious uphill square and the fish-market below the picturesque sixteenth-century fountain of the Corso Giuseppe Mazzini are as picturesque and irrelevant as any market in Italy. It is in the southern wing of the city that we shall find the flowers we seek, in the steep Strada delle Scuole which runs through the centre of the graceful arcaded Court of the Prefettura, and the Via Aurelio Saffi, the most characteristic and romantic street in Ancona. In the Strada delle Scuole we see the great church of San Domenico with the colossal statue of Clement XII. upon its steps, and San Francesco with its riotous Gothic façade towering over the narrow street from its lofty stairs, and the Palazzo del Comune built by Margheritone d'Arezzo, and much restored and modernised in the seventeenth century. But it is in the Via Aurelio Saffi that Ancona flowers best; for in this centre of the busy wharf life, which has been given up to the merchants and bankers of the eastern port, we find such gracious little basilicas, enriched with carvings from Byzantine bestiaries, and Gothic porches and façades flowering into the Renaissance under the Oriental touch of Giorgio da Sebenico, the last Gothic architect of Italy. Here is the Loggia dei Mercanti, very florid and flamboyant, with its tilting knight a-horseback; and close beside it Napoleon's home in Ancona, the Palazzo Benincasa, with fifteenth-century Gothic-Renaissance windows; and here, standing a little back from the rattle of the modern port traffic, with pigeons resting on its many little arches, is Santa Maria della Piazza, with a Pisan-romanesque façade, soft and eaten by the years, encrusted with ancient sculptures and dusty majolica plaques. Opposite this ancient and beautiful church a gateway with another relief of a knight on horseback, like the splendid gilt knight of the Loggia dei Mercanti, leads into the big docks; but it is better to go down the Via Aurelio Saffi, though at the first glance it seems to be given up to shipping agents and barbers. For here, in the shadow of the old old Palazzo del Comune, which is carried up on gigantic arches to the level of the road above, we find the little church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, with its curious Renaissance portal, its one Byzantine ambo, and its elegant mosque-like interior of brick with stone cornices, pillars and groinings only thinly disguised by plaster. A little further up is a doorway of Roman masonry, and two ancient arches, with uncemented blocks up to the cornice but Gothic work above. And soon afterwards the narrow street debouches on to the wharf. Not in all Italy is there such a quay, or such a blaze of colour! A long line of mediaeval wall, of burnt red brick machicolated, runs down the Mole, and in its shadow are some low trattorie covered with Morning Glories. High above these, raised on a flight of steps, the arch of Trajan, with its marble painted grey and gold by rain and the years, is framed in the blue Italian sky. Beside it the bronze and copper sails of the fishing-boats are massed together among the black colliers, and above and behind are the green hills of Ancona, with her red-roofed houses climbing up their wide slopes, and Monte Guasco crowned by the white jewel of her cathedral. It has been said that Trajan's arch is the most beautiful and perfect Roman arch in Italy. I do not know. It is wonderfully unspoiled and graceful, extremely simple in design, plainer even than the arch of Titus on the brow of the Velian. But surely there is no other Roman monument which has so rich a setting! Though we spent a long morning down in the harbour, hemmed in by the amphitheatre of Ancona's hills, now watching the fishermen mending their big brown nets, now engrossed with the picturesque wharf life--the sailors clad in bright blue linen at work among the black hulks of the coaling ships, the oxen toiling over the stones, their snowy flanks grey with dust and dirt, the lascars of ocean-going steamers whose scarlet turbans lent a fresh note of colour to the animated scene--our first and last thoughts of Ancona were with her fishing-boats. For when we left her they fluttered after us like butterflies out of a garden as far as Falconara, just as they had come to meet us when we drew near her sickle bay. To watch the boats of Ancona drift into the little harbour at sundown, furling their sails, is to find oneself taken back to the Age of Beautiful Things when the ideal form and colour were as natural as sunlight and shadow. It was for this reason that we took rooms in the Albergo Milano, which is a bad and cheerless inn, for below our windows lay the whole fleet of graceful craft, with up-curved bows like ancient galleys, and sails emblazoned with devices, flaunting gay colours--old gold and purple, and Venetian browns and reds at dawn and sunset. Although her white temple has long since vanished from Monte Guasco, Aphrodite, the goddess of fair and prosperous journeys, still keeps watch over Ancona's bay. In these halcyon-days we forgot that the vines of Umbria were already yellowing under the autumn rains; we hardly realised that these smiling waters were of an eastern sea. Think of the coast of Norfolk in the cold wet days of an English September, when the North Sea thunders along the shore as though Poseidon shook his head in wrath! If you have stood upon the timber pier at Lowestoft, its wooden sides green with sea-wrack, and watched the deep-sea fishermen lurching out in heavy grey rollers to wrest their living from an angry sea, you will find it hard to reconcile their perilous existence with the gracious beauty of Ancona's fishing-fleet. There life is full of the grandeur and bitterness of toil, salt with the kiss of the sea and the tears of the women weeping for those who never come back; here there is song and sunshine; here you could set sail for dreamland in these painted ships upon the mirroring Adriatic. We were never weary of watching the boat-life from our windows. In the still dawn the arms of the harbour were like gold bars encircling a sapphire, and in the distance we could see the little towns along the sea-board shining rosily from their misty hills. Sometimes the bay was sown with boats, like azure embroidery with butterflies, and sometimes below the windows the cargo of a felucca with gold and bronze sails was being unloaded on the wharf. The sailors were clad in white and blue, or stripped to the waist, with scarlet sashes girding up their short white drawers. How Brangwyn could have caught that vivid colour against the pearly dawn! Then the sun rose and the fleet began to drift slowly out to sea, trailing their bright reflections in the water. But I loved them best when they came in at night, furling their yellow wings or drooping their tired pinions to the west, laden with who knows what treasures from the caves of sea-gods! Some were blended into a soft harmony of colour, copper and red and gold; others had strange devices painted on them, griffins and black dragons, elephants and mermen; some were like tiger moths, black and emblazoned. And there was one crimson sail with a white horse, a gallant beast like the fiery steeds of an ancient frieze, who sank to his knees when the fishers reached the quay, and then vanished in its rich red folds. Aeneas Sylvius must have looked upon such sails; so might the wings of the Venetian Antonio's ships have been wrought. All the gold of the East seemed to be pouring into the harbour as those boats came in. We watched them tacking into port, passing one another again and again, like the figures in a stately dance--far off at first, then nearer, then just outside the bar, then looming large below the windows as they trailed by to tie up at the quay--drooping their pennons and folding their wings like dream-ships, the fantastic heralds of the night. LORETO Loreto, the hill of laurels, which tradition has made the most sacred spot in Italy, has more than a legendary antiquity. For on its sunny slopes, overlooking the battle-field of Castelfidardo and the still Adriatic, the mysterious Picenians, contemporaries of the Umbrians and the Etruscans, left traces of a perished history in graves which have yielded the highest native art of prehistoric Italy. They are charnelled in the museum of Ancona. But the vast cathedral built over the Holy House of Loreto is of a solidity which stands well for eternity. As we approached it on the sunny autumn morning of the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, we thought we saw not a church but a castle, built with the robust towers of the fifteenth century. It is in fact a castle built to protect from the Saracens the treasures laid by the potentates and peoples of the Middle Ages on the threshold of the Holy House, which the hands of angels transported in the thirteenth century first from Palestine to Dalmatia; and then, when Dalmatia was no longer secure, to the hill above Recanati in the March of Ancona. One May morning in the year 1291 some peasants of Rauniza, a little town situated on the Dalmatian coast between Tersatto and Fiume, saw a spectacle which filled their souls with wonder as they went out to work in their fields before dawn. On a hill, which the night before had been bare and solitary, they beheld a strange building, which, even to their unaccustomed eyes, was of great antiquity. Drawing near they found that it had no foundations, although it stood miraculously upright; and while they were wondering at the phenomenon they saw a multitude approaching from Tersatto, from Rauniza, and from Fiume. Summoning up courage they entered, and discovered that it was formed of a single chamber whose ceiling was made of wood painted blue, and illumined with small gold stars. The rough walls were covered with plaster on which was frescoed the story of the life of Christ, and a large open door in one of the side walls gave access to the mysterious dwelling. To the right was a long narrow window with an altar surmounted by a painted crucifix, and near by a little cupboard contained some vases of rough pottery. On the left of this they discovered a chimney hearth, and a statue of the Holy Virgin holding the Infant Christ in her arms. [Illustration: LORETO.] In that serene and far-distant dawn all the world was spell-bound in the contemplation of the prodigy. But the explanation of the mystery was not far off, for the venerable pastor of the church of St. George, Bishop Alexander of Modruria, who had been lying on a bed of sickness, came into their midst crying out that the Blessed Virgin herself had appeared to him during the night, saying in the sweetest voice: 'My house at Nazareth is now transferred to these lands. This is the very altar erected by the apostle Peter: the statue of cedar-wood is my authentic portrait carved by Luke the evangelist. Arise from thy bed of pain! I restore you to your health because I wish that the miracle of your cure may breed faith in the crowd in what you may relate to them.' Upon which he rose up full of joy and strength and ran to render thanks. The people united their prayers night and day with the prayers of the Holy Bishop, while the Miraculous Intelligence spread rapidly, and carried by the winds, the clouds and the light, it crossed the seas and mountains to fill all western Christendom with happiness and wonder. At that time Nicholas Frangipani, the Governor of Dalmatia, was accompanying his sovereign the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg in a military expedition. Warned by a courier of the arrival of the Holy House he came to Tersatto, where he could not at first believe his eyes. However, he gave permission to four wise men to go immediately to Nazareth to examine and check the facts of this extraordinary occurrence. The mission was accomplished with danger, because the Saracens under the Sultan Khalil were in possession of the Holy Land, having driven the crusaders from their stronghold in Acre. But the evidence was altogether convincing. At Nazareth the House of the Virgin was no more to be found; a mysterious power had torn it from its foundations, which were still there to show that their dimensions and materials tallied with those of the house thus suddenly transferred to Dalmatia. Every doubt having disappeared, the facts of the translation were made public, and religion took advantage to reap a good harvest of faith from the miraculous seed which had taken root on the shores of Dalmatia. But the rejoicing was not for long. On the 10th of December 1294 the Holy House of the Virgin disappeared as suddenly as it arrived, and the pilgrims sought for it in vain on the little hill of Tersatto which had become so celebrated. One whole day the Sanctuary was upon the waters of the Adriatic. At ten o'clock at night it appeared on the other coast, in the neighbourhood of Recanati, where it deposited itself in a laurel wood (lauretum), to the terror of some shepherds who were tending their flocks, and saw the wonderful edifice approach surrounded by a halo. At Loreto the same thing happened as at Rauniza. In a few days the place became celebrated. Crowds of pilgrims flocked to it, and from dawn to sunset the echo of their prayers mingled with the song of the woodland birds. Here again there were revelations. The first was a recompense to the prayers of an aged hermit. The second was found in a prophecy of St. Francis, who had foretold the coming of the Holy House. The third was vouchsafed to St. Nicholas of Tolentino who, filled with the prophetic spirit, often walked towards the sea, and fixed his gaze on the azure distance with a presentiment that from there he would receive a precious treasure. Which he did. For it was from the Virgin, in person, that the Holy Monk had the announcement that her house was no longer to be found at Nazareth, or at Tersatto in Dalmatia, but in the fresh and whispering wood of Lauretum. Loreto the town is dependent upon Loreto the church. It is a mere growth, which has sprung up round the miraculous shrine of the Santa Casa, as the tents of the servants of God sprang up round the Holy Tabernacle in the wilderness. If by another miracle the Santa Casa, and with it the mother church and the apostolical palace, were to change its abode again, Loreto would be nothing but a cluster of peasant cottages with a mediaeval clock-tower and a picturesque city gate. It consists mainly of one long street, leading from the Porta della Città to the church, lined with humble shops, which on feast days empty themselves into the road in gaily decked booths of rosaries, medals, peasant jewellery, bright kerchiefs, and all the semi-religious paraphernalia dear to the heart of the Italian holiday-maker. [Illustration: PEASANTS AT LORETO.] Loreto is the Lourdes of Italy. The prevalence of cholera in Apulia, in the autumn of 1910, caused the Government to issue an edict forbidding the annual fair of the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, which brings more than a quarter of a million peasants from all parts of Italy; but although the festa lost much in picturesqueness by the absence of the southern Italians, we drove up the hillside, in the company of a host of pilgrims. As we went all eyes were turned towards Loreto, the little village, white as any city of the Orient, which enshrines one of the greatest treasures of the Roman Catholic Church, the humble cottage, built of rough stones, which half Christendom believes to have been the home of the Holy Family on their return from Egypt, as well as the scene of the Annunciation and the Incarnation. For in its midst loomed the towers and bastions of the Chiesa della Santa Casa, with its many apses spreading out on the crest of the hill like the petals of a flower, golden-hued, and crowned by a dome bearing aloft a gilded image of the Virgin. We approached it through an avenue of tinselled merry-go-rounds, and rifle ranges, and red and white striped theatre-booths,--the mushroom-growths of all European festas; but it was not until we passed through the city gates that the real business of the day began. Here it was impossible to hurry. The stream of pilgrims in that narrow and crowded thoroughfare, stopping at every stall to chaffer and bid, flowed but slowly towards the shrine, although the great bell was booming from the campanile like the voice of a temple, calling its devotees to prayer. It was a scene of indescribable noise and gaiety, but from the picturesque point of view it was disappointing, for the peasants of the March are not beautiful like the peasants of Umbria and Tuscany, nor do they wear the gay kerchiefs and costumes of the southern Italians, seeming to prefer white silk and wool kerchiefs to the brilliant flowered _tovagliette_ of the women of the Campagna. When at last we did emerge from the narrow, crowded thoroughfare we found ourselves in a wide piazza surrounded by elegant Renaissance arcades, and saw before us the Chiesa della Santa Casa, towering above a broad flight of steps. And straightway, although the gay stalls with their fluttering kerchiefs and strings of rosaries and images flowed down one side of the square, we forgot the noise and bustle of the street; heard only the deep-toned bell calling the world to worship on that sunny hill-top overlooking the Adriatic; saw only the pilgrims streaming up the stairs on either side of the statue of Pope Sixtus V., and into those exquisite bronze doors which are among the chief glories of Loreto's treasury of art. For here in Loreto the legend of the Holy House is told with the simple faith of the age of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the founder of the Austrian dynasty, and St. Nicholas of Tolentino, in whose life-time it took place. And whether the stranger comes to Loreto as a pilgrim or a sight-seer it is impossible for him not to be stirred by the simple piety and devotion of the multitudes which throng this shrine. When I remember that for five centuries the world has journeyed here to pray and worship, to me it makes no difference that the dimensions of the foundations of the Holy House in Nazareth do not tally with the dimensions of the Santa Casa of Loreto, or that none of the pilgrims to Nazareth between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries made mention of the house of Joseph in Palestine. It stands for so much in the history of the world. For we have all waited on the shore of the Sea of Doubt, like St. Nicholas upon the shore of the Adriatic, and searched the horizon for the treasure which we dreamt lay beyond it. And though many of us have had some message, faint and fluttering maybe, which has nevertheless grown clearer as we strained towards it, for how few of us has the miracle come safely through the breakers and blessed our eyes as the Santa Casa of Loreto blessed the eyes of the shepherds of Recanati! In comparison with its splendid fortified apses, whose fifteenth-century fighting galleries are still intact, and pierced by holes for dropping hot lead on to the heads of besiegers, the façade which Sixtus v. built for the Chiesa della Santa Casa is unimposing. But it is graced by three bronze doors worthy of comparison with Ghiberti's wonderful gates in the baptistery at Florence. They are the work of the sons of Girolamo Lombardo and his pupils; and the panels of the central door, with their story of the Creation, the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the murder of Abel, are masterpieces of the Renaissance, so godlike are the figures of Adam, as he tills the soil, and of the slayer Cain, fleeing from wrath to come. They are surrounded by a daring and frankly pagan arabesque of fauns and mermen and foliage. Nor are the side doors less beautiful, with their lives of Abraham and Moses, and their smiling cherubs holding up medallions and lockets in which are figures of Virgins and Saints, and miniature scenes in delicate low relief. While we stayed to look at those exquisite panels of the oldest story in the world, there came two shaggy-haired men, with the dust of long journeys on their hob-nailed boots, who doffed their hats and knelt there on the pavement in the midst of the shifting crowd of worshippers, praying before their Lord with unconscious grace, as Abel prayed before the God of Israel, ere they ventured to approach the holy shrine. And here we paused, for this was what we had come out to see. We had no meed of worship to offer to Madonna through that strange Byzantine doll, loaded with jewels like an Indian totem, who smiles so enigmatically, over her glittering lamps and tapers, at the kneeling people. To us the story of the Santa Casa was a legend only beautiful in the faith which can believe it. Nor were we drawn hither to see the treasures worth the ransoms of many kings which Popes and Emperors have lavished on the shrine, or the exquisite frescoes of Melozzo da Forli and Luca Signorelli in its sacristies. For greater than any of these are the humble and lowly of heart who worship in the magnificent temples which princes and prelates have built to their gods. They are indeed the salt of the earth, the shining light which cannot be hid. They are like the hills and the valleys in which they live; in their eyes are the shadows born of century-long communion with Nature; being meek they have inherited the earth; being pure in heart they have seen God. [Illustration: PILGRIMS AT LORETO.] Come in with me then to this great rich church and see these little ones at prayer. See how they press into the Santa Casa. Are not their simple faith, their gentle humility, the tears and sighs of the women, the bent heads of the men, more beautiful than the rich marble screen on which Sansovino and five other great sculptors of the fifteenth century lavished their art to make a worthy casket for the House of the Virgin? Its stair is worn into two deep furrows by pilgrims journeying round it on their knees. Do you not think that the great Mother of Pity loves this rough sculpture best? Look how they pray before the hearth, how eagerly they place their rosaries and medals in the little bowl which legend relates was found in the Holy House after its miraculous journey. They do not doubt that the hands of Madonna Mary, nay, of Christ Himself, have touched it. We, too, were borne by the crowd into the Santa Casa. It was quite full of kneeling people. The altar was ablaze with candles, and lamps were pendant all round the walls, so that we saw them as it were through a mist of light. Here we could discern the window, blocked up now, through which the Angel Gabriel entered the cottage; there the little cupboard in which were found the humble bowls, such as poor people use to-day for cooking. And on the altar, clad in the rich robe presented by Maria Teresa and valued at 4,000,000 lire, stood the little cedar-wood statue of the Madonna and Child, which the Virgin is stated to have claimed as her authentic portrait. Mass was being celebrated at the High Altar when we came out again, and the body of the church presented a charming patriarchal effect. All the men were clustered in the aisles, and the women gathered together in the nave, looking like a garden of flowers, with row after row of serious girlish faces under fair white kerchiefs, broken here by a group of black mantillas, there by the stray bright _tovagliette_ of a southern contadina. The gilt and frescoed apses were misty with incense and sunlight; and here pilgrims, fresh from their visit to the Santa Casa, were kneeling with rapt faces before the altars. And in the midst of all this piety and worship, with the organ pealing music down the aisles, we found old crones asleep, or taking snuff as they rested in confessional boxes, and children playing hide-and-seek round them. All very reverently, however, not forgetting that they were in the house of their Father; nor were the dogs which had strayed in with the crowd turned away. Later, when most of the pilgrims were enjoying a hard-earned siesta, or marketing in Loreto's single street, we sat in the cool nave and watched the people trooping in like sheep coming confidently into the fold. The great bell tolled overhead and in they streamed, all with their newly-bought treasures--now an umbrella, bright emerald or scarlet, wrapped clumsily in paper, now with some baking-pans, now with a household lamp. And all of them with some gewgaw to be blessed in the Virgin's bowl. The basins of holy water were so lofty that many of the women could not reach them, and some passing pilgrim would dip his fingers in and touch their hands. Now it was a group of barefooted girls with kerchiefed heads and sunburned faces who went up to the shrine; now an old old man who dipped his hand into the holy water and then knelt down in the middle of the nave, passing wet fingers across his tired eyes, and praying there awhile before he kissed the floor, and wearily stumbled out of those glorious bronze doors into the sunshine again. Here a whole family knelt together round their rugged-faced father, with their bright kerchiefs looking like a homely flower-garden; there a man going out with his two little sons dipped his fingers in the high bowl, and moistened the hands of first one awe-struck child and then the other. So it went on all day. Nor does it matter that the Casa is of mediaeval construction; that it is not built of the grey limestone with which all the houses of Nazareth are built, and that it does not fit its ascribed foundations in Palestine. For the gods have ever been secret. Did Ceres weep at Enna? Did the rosy feet of Aphrodite ever press the sands of Paphos? Is it the blood of Adonis which makes the stream of Carmel red? And listen to the words of the prophet: 'The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains. He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image that shall not be moved. Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? _It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth_, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in' (Isaiah xl. 19). RAVENNA Who could dream of anything but love as they drew near to Rimini and Ravenna, those cities of romance whose names are as knit with lovers' tales as Rome's with Caesar and Macedon's with Alexander! They are foremost in the troubadour land of Italy, their scroll of history is gracious with the names of knights and ladies. With the word Rimini upon the signboard of the train our thoughts leap back at once across the gulf of years, and in imagination we hear again the oft-repeated plaint of pale Francesca-- 'No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand! * * * * * One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter'd cheek. But at one point Alone we fell. When of that smile we read, The wished smile, so rapturously kiss'd By one so deep in love; then he, who ne'er From me shall separate, at once my lips All trembling kiss'd. The book and writer both Were love's purveyors. In its leaves that day We read no more.'[20] Nor is it only of Francesca whose griefs were sung by Dante that we think, but of those greater lovers of the same ill-fated house--Sigismondo and the divine Isotta; of Galla Placidia, the Cleopatra of Imperial Rome; of the poor child Honoria, who chose the terrible Attila to be her knight-errant; and of the Gothic Queens, Amalasuntha and Matasuntha, whose lives seemed as foredoomed to tragedy as those of the beautiful women of the Polentani. But the marshes of Ravenna, at once her stronghold and her weakness, seemed to have bred distemper; for almost all the stories end in sadness whether they tell of Francesca and her lovely sister Samaritana, or of the Beatrice Dante loved and lost and found again in visions, walking in the vast Pineta; or of Boccaccio's Nastagio degli Onesti; or of the weeping bride of Gaston de Foix, the flower of French chivalry, who was mown down by the scythe of war outside Ravenna's gates. There is a peculiar and vagrant charm about the Adriatic, different from the exquisite beauty of the Ligurian Riviera with its rounded bays and vine-clad hills, but worthy of a sea which washes the golden shore of Greece as well as the most romantic coast in Italy. The Appennines tower upon the horizon, and many mountain rivers rush from them to the ocean, and flood the sapphire water at their mouths with opaque gold churned from their sandy beds. Flowers grow upon the shore only separated from the sea by a strip of shingle,--tamarisks and sea-holly, mallows and yellow mulleins. And all the way from Ancona to Ravenna, save where the line runs through the famous pine-woods, are ancient cities strung like jewels along the shore of the Adriatic, with their river-harbours full of the gold and copper-coloured sails of fishing-boats--Senigallia, which Pompey devastated; Fano, Fortune's fane, linked to Rome by the Flaminian Way; Pesaro, a city of the Sikels; Gradara up on the mountains with a perfect mediaeval castle and a flight of towered walls; and Rimini, Caesar's first footing after he had crossed the Rubicon. They are all more or less blatant seaside resorts, especially Rimini, whose _plage_ rivals that of Livorno. [Illustration: RAVENNA: THE PINETA.] Of them all Ravenna only is unspoiled. She is a jewelled city where East and West, Christian and Pagan, Rome and Byzantium met and commingled and immortalised themselves in the service of Architecture. Ravenna is a place in which one is instinctively happy. _Ravenna Felix_ is the name she bears upon her ancient coins. And even to-day, notwithstanding her years of poverty, she has an air of subdued gaiety as though in spite of herself she must be happy. She is like a gentle convalescent who goes softly in recovering her strength. For, after many centuries of waiting, Ravenna, the Imperial City who proudly offered shelter both to Roman emperors and Gothic kings, and who was the handmaiden of Byzantium long after the Western Empire had ceased to exist, is beginning to live again. The spectre of fever has fled from her marshes; the people no longer wander palely through her streets; she is in fact the centre of a prosperous agricultural district; under the hand of science even Classis, long regarded as a hot-bed of malaria, is being revivified. Just as her history is of special interest to lovers of romance, because the fate of the city was so often held in balance by the lovely women who were queens within her walls, so are her monuments of special interest alike to the historian and the student of art, as representing a period little touched upon elsewhere in Italy. For almost all the ancient buildings still standing in Ravenna were raised in the centuries which saw the Fall of Rome, the Gothic Occupation of Italy, the Invasion of the Lombards, and the final administration of the Empire through the Exarchs from the court of Byzantium in Constantinople. Through all these vicissitudes Ravenna was the seat of government, from the day when Honorius fled before the barbarians to the marsh-girt city, until the coming of Pepin of France, who invested the Papacy with Temporal Power. Of the triple city of the Augustan era nothing remains. Where Aeolus once filled the sails of galleys in the vast harbour that Octavian built three miles from old Ravenna, he strays to-day like a vagrant musician singing strange songs of the sea among the stems of the Pineta. Classis, the ancient port, has vanished underground, and flowers bloom above the stones of Caesarea, the suburb which linked the seaport of Augustus to Ravenna. It is not before the period when the weakling Honorius transferred his court from Rome to Ravenna that we find any traces of the city's glorious past. But here are four treasures which by themselves are worthy of a visit to Ravenna--the little church of Sant'Agata, rebuilt in the fifteenth century, but preserving some of its outer wall intact, and containing twenty-four columns of precious marbles; the chapel of San Piero Crisologo in the Episcopal palace; the Baptistery, once the thermal chamber of some Roman bath, still lined with rare mosaics of the fifth century; and the tomb of Galla Placidia, the regent of the Western Empire. [Illustration: RAVENNA: SANT'AGATA.] The story of Galla Placidia is one long romance. We cannot doubt that she was beautiful since she was desired of so many men. Daughter of Theodosius and sister of Honorius she fell into the hands of Alaric the Goth in the Sack of Rome when she was but twenty, and was taken prisoner by him to Calabria. There she won the love of Athaulf, the brother-in-law of the Gothic king; and, after many delays caused by the hesitancy of Honorius, who would not give his assent to the marriage, she became his wife at the price of peace for Rome. Alaric was dead, and Athaulf was King of the Goths when the nuptials were celebrated with great splendour in Narbonne; but before many months had elapsed Fate once more changed the course of Placidia's life. Athaulf was assassinated; their infant child died; and the daughter of Roman Emperors found herself at the mercy of a barbarian who, to mark his ill-gained triumph, made her walk in chains through the streets of Barcelona. Within a few days, however, Singarich the murderer was slain, and the fallen Empress was restored to the Roman army, which came to meet her at the foot of the Pyrenees under the command of the greatest general of the time, Constantius the Illyrian. Constantius loved Placidia. Often before her capture by the Visigoths he had sought to win her hand and failed; but now, aided by the prayers of the people, who regarded him as a worthy successor of Honorius, he gained his desire, much against the will, it is said, of the Emperor's beautiful sister. Even so the Fates were not satisfied with their web. Constantius died and Honorius, 'credited but a short time before by evil report with criminal desires towards his sister, now turned from love to hatred, and banished the unhappy woman with her children to Byzantium.'[21] In the same year Honorius himself died; and Placidia, supported by the armies of her nephew Theodosius II., the Eastern Emperor, came back to Ravenna where she reigned with her son for twenty-five years, first as his regent, and later as his adviser. Her tomb, in the shadow of the great church of San Vitale, built many years later when the Western Empire had been absorbed by the emperors of the East, is the most perfect example of Roman-Byzantine art in Italy. It is like a rich casket of Oriental splendour encrusted with gems. It has walls of yellow marble, and alabaster windows, through which a golden light is shed upon the gleaming mosaics which cover every inch of vault and arch. And here, under a sapphire sky sown with gold stars and illumined by the gilded beasts of the evangelists, with white-robed saints walking under date-palms among the doves and lambs of Christian symbolism, are the three great sarcophagi which enclosed the bones of Galla Placidia and of her husband Constantius, and Valentinian her son.[22] Thus did the last great Empress of the Western Empire order her resting-place, and when we realise that this jewelled casket has lain open to a rapacious world for fifteen centuries, it is little short of miraculous that it has come down to us so perfect. All praise to Theodoric, the King of the Ostrogoths, the lover of ancient arts, who presented in his person the great anomaly of a Gothic king who was the protector of temples as well as the founder of some of the most lovely churches standing in the city to-day. The name of Theodoric the Ostrogoth is great in Ravenna. Notwithstanding the fact that many of his buildings, notably his palace, have almost disappeared at the hands of the Orthodox Church, which regarded him as a heretic because he professed the Arian Creed, Ravenna still possesses four of his monuments--San Teodoro, now called Santo Spirito; the Arian baptistery, its cupola still covered with sixth-century mosaics; his palace, his sepulchre, and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. The stately tomb of Theodoric, round which mediaeval imagination wove legends, as the flowers and the fruits of the earth weave a web of beauty to-day, rises at the end of a wide turf avenue enclosed in hedges of acacia. It stands in a rose-garden with a background of firs and flowering yews; round its sunken pronaos are fruit-trees laden with pomegranates and purple figs; and wistaria and yellow roses have hidden the steps which lead to its upper chamber. Externally, the tomb, which the unfortunate Amalasuntha built for her father, is as unspoiled as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia; its solid masonry of grey limestone has defied the years; and the gaping crevice in its marvellous dome, composed of one huge block of Istrian marble, only serves to give point to mediaeval legends. But inside it has been devastated by his enemies and robbed even of his sarcophagus. Mr. Symonds says, 'in spite of many trials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the pond and clear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great Goth was laid by Amalasuntha.' But on the damp September day when we visited the mausoleum its stones were dry, although the little spotted frogs, which fled below the rose-trees at our approach, were shrilling a chorus of mockery at the vanity of tombs. Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, which has changed its name twice since Theodoric dedicated it to the Saviour, is one of the most beautiful churches in Christendom. Like San Teodoro, its exterior is of the Renaissance. Beside its portico stands one of Ravenna's curious round bell-towers, probably built in the ninth century; but inside we found the riches of Rome and Byzantium gathered together to make a glorious whole. For along the architrave of the nave, supported on antique marble columns, we saw a long procession of Virgins and Martyrs leading from the western doors to the arch of the transept, where the Madonna and the Saviour were enthroned. Above them, and between the windows of the clerestory, were ranged the figures of Saints and Prophets. And above them again were scenes resembling the early mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, depicting incidents from the life of Christ. From the technical point of view these little panels indicate the highest art to be found in Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. They are the work of Roman mosaicists employed by Theodoric, whereas the lowest zones are by Byzantine artists; they are full of vigour and freedom; while the others, in spite of their magnificence, have the terrible Byzantine stiffness which held Italian art in thrall until the coming of Cimabue and the Pisani. But how rich, how decorative those jewelled garments of the honourable women, the snowy robes of the Martyrs! Just so the artist of Byzantium may have pictured them against a golden dawn, issuing from the proud city of Classis on the one hand, and from the Palace of Theodoric on the other, to lay their crowns before the Thrones of Heaven. For those Virgins are robed as daughters of the King, and they link the Mother of God in a gold and jewelled chain to the ancient town of Classis, without whose gates the galleys ride, with the wind in their billowing sails. Flowers spangle the grass at their feet, and behind them the red dates hang heavy on the palms; while in the heavenly Court the Three Kings offer their gifts, how eagerly! to the Virgin seated among the angels with the Baby Christ upon her knees. The beauties of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare in Classis are too well known to need description, even if it were possible to do any sort of homage to their magnificence in so general a chapter. They were both built by Julian the Treasurer during the reign of Justinian, and they represent the third period of Ravenna's greatness before the temporal power of Rome was eclipsed by that of the Eastern Empire. In San Vitale especially, the glory of Byzantium is reflected as in a mirror. Nowhere else in Italy is there such a perfect illustration of the Courts of the Lord towards the middle of the sixth century. In this great church, whose domed central space and retreating galleries, sustained by the gracious horse-shoe arches of the East, gave the mosque of the coming Arab conquerors its genesis, we have walls enclosed in precious marbles, and pierced and fretted capitals wrought by Oriental craftsmen. And here, below the rich encrusted vault where Christ is enthroned upon the blue orb of the heavens, in such a paradise as Dante may have dreamt of, where white-robed Saints cull flowers as they pass, we have thejewelled splendour of the Court of Byzantium, with the Emperor Justinian among his priests and soldiers, and Theodora with the ladies of her court. [Illustration: RAVENNA: THE TOMB OF DANTE.] * * * * * Side by side in the heart of Ravenna are the tomb in which the dead Dante was laid, when the secret of his sepulture had been made known to the Ravennesi, and the old palace of the Polentani in which Francesca of Rimini was born. Near by is the house of that other poet-wanderer, Byron, whose windows overlook the gallery from which it may be that Francesca, seeing the gracious form of Paolo Malatesta coming to woo her for his hunch-back brother, felt the first pangs of love, as well as the sacred tomb whence 'he had so oft, as many a verse declares, drawn inspiration.' Notwithstanding its withered wreaths, its stuccoed dome, its air of cheap and tawdry Campo Santo sentiment, the people of Ravenna really do come to pay tribute to the sepulchre of the great bard of the Risorgimento. But it is difficult to find anything of the real Dante here. For though Ravenna was his 'ultimo Rifugio,' as it has been the last refuge of many other great ones; and though he finished his Divine Comedy here in the house of Guido Novello Polenta his patron; and dreamed, poor pilgrim, when he wandered through the exquisite beauty of the pine-woods of Classis that he had found paradise, I think his spirit fled at its release to his beloved Florence, 'la bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma.' And yet there was a special fitness in our pilgrimage to the Pineta on September 14th, which is the anniversary of his death; for if the spirit of this wayfarer lingered anywhere upon the eastern shores of Italy it must have flown to the 'celestial forest' in which, in visions, he beheld his Beatrice walk amid the white-robed companies of heaven. Autumn had laid her hand upon the poet's paradise. The earth was carpeted with pine-needles, soft and rusty, and pied with flowers,--scabious and yellow thistles, veronica and cinquefoil, and Michaelmas daisies. Great bunches of scarlet fruits encarnadined the undergrowth. The bramble leaves were rose and russet; the Pilgrim-trees were hung with crimson tassels; the yews were thick with purple berries. Evening primroses grew so tall that they were reflected in the water among the blossoming reeds. And everywhere the ethereal webs of cow-parsley, those loveliest flowers of the field, were spun on slender stems as delicately as frost upon a spider's web. Moon-flowers I call them, dust o' the moon, and when they fade they fold their treasures up into a knitted purse of green and gold, swaying heavy-headed in every hedge. The air was warm and fragrant, like the scented breath of some one beautiful. Beneath our feet the timid lizard darted to the shadows; the birds made music in the pines, and all around we heard the shrill chorus of frogs and the rapturous song of the cicala. Driftwood and fallen leaves floated slowly to the sea, on just such a shadowed stream as that by which Dante beheld Matilda:-- 'A lady all alone, who, singing, went, And culling flower from flower, wherewith her way Was all o'er painted.'[23] And all was still, save where a snake made a ripple that you could hear as it swam neck-high through the water. A paradise indeed! On our way back across the rice-fields and flowery marshes, which cover the fallen city of Caesarea, we passed the mouldering column marking the spot where Gaston de Foix fell in the battle of Ravenna. It stands on a causeway above a sluggish river, in an esedra of cypresses which whisper melancholy to the wind. All the world knows his lovely broken tomb, whose effigy is one of the treasures of the Milan Museum, but in Ravenna itself there is another tomb of just such another boy--Guidarello Guidarelli. A warrior of Ravenna it is named, but there is no stone to mark the place where fell this Knight of the beautiful face, 'dear at once to Mars and to Minerva,' who followed the fortunes of Cesare Borgia, and met his death by treachery in Imola. [Illustration: RAVENNA: THE COLUMN OF GASTON DE FOIX.] Signor Corrado Ricci, himself a son of Ravenna, speaks truly when he says 'Ravenna is a city historically great and fatal, nay, the very charnel-house of history, whither destiny sends great achievements and lofty personages to decay and oblivion. Here the Caesars, the Roman Empire, Roman Captains, Barbarian Kings, the reign of the Herulians, of the Goths, of the Exarchs, all pass away. And when its importance seems to wane, lo! Dante Aligheri is here to complete the greatest of his poems, and to die. 'Cardinal Bessarion, the perfect flower of Humanist culture, is brought to die in Ravenna. Francesco Maria della Rovere slays in her streets the infamous Cardinal of Pavia, Francesco Alidosio. Hither come the armies of Julius II., of Ferdinand of Spain, of Louis of France, of Alfonso d'Este; and Gaston de Foix receives his death-wound in the great battle which reimposes a term of foreign rule. Nor can the epic of the Risorgimento develop itself without new and memorable episodes being reserved for Ravenna. Here Garibaldi's astonishing retreat from Rome terminates; amid endless dangers the hero's life is preserved, but Anita, worn out by grief and hardships, died in his arms.' THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO To the classical scholar, San Marino must always be the real Nephelococcygia--the cloud-cuckoo-town, which the Athenian satirised as built by the birds up in the clouds to cut off the Gods from all connection with mankind. That is how the Sammarinesi live, cut off from the earth in which they are the smallest and most trivial nation. The proudest too, for though the area of their Republic is only twenty-four square miles, and they have their seat of government on the crest of a perpendicular rock, with a sheer drop of nearly a thousand feet, they have preserved unbroken their tradition of independence through fourteen centuries. Not, it appears, from any particular valour on the part of the Sammarinesi, although they must often have stood ready to the call of arms, with the greedy Malatesta so near at hand in Rimini, but because they have been greatly favoured by the enemies of Republics. The Papacy, which had already brought almost all the other petty States of Italy to their knees by force or treachery, granted recognition to the smallest of them in 1631. Napoleon listened to the pleading of Antonio Onofri, called by the grateful citizens 'the father of his country,' and repealed his decree for the suppression of the Republic. And the Kings of Italy, perhaps as a reward for the courageous shelter it offered to Garibaldi and his broken army, not only recognise its independence, but have made it a present of modern cannon, with which to defend itself. San Marino was a true Nephelococcygia, on the afternoon we drove to it from Rimini. A heavy bank of cloud veiled the ragged crest of Monte Titano, that giant outpost of the Eastern Appennines, towering nearly 3000 feet above sea level, to which Marinus, the saintly stonemason of Dalmatia, fled from the persecutions of Diocletian. It was a day of storms. The sullen indigo-coloured mountains were lost in drifting clouds. Sometimes when the grey pall was rent by the wind, we glimpsed the fantastic towers of San Marino, high in the heavens on their mighty cliff; but while we pointed to them they were gone, like the city of a magician conjured out of mists. From Serravalle, which is the first village of the Republic on the road from Rimini, our way led uphill, through the vineyards and fields of corn which are the chief source of income to the diminutive state. Down in the plain of Rimini it had been warm and sultry, but as the bearded clouds swept down to meet us, the air grew cold and damp. The Philosopher had a touch of fever and was unspeakably miserable, but nothing could damp the ardour of the Poet, who sat upon the coach-box and strained his eyes towards the fairy city overhead, whose turrets every now and then loomed grey among the clouds. On the long steep climb to the Borgo, we overtook the public diligence, which had dashed past us an hour before, rattling recklessly down one hill to gain sufficient impetus to carry it up the next. It was toiling along slowly enough, behind two rolling white oxen, while its steaming horses, ridden by grooms, brought up the rear. And now the clouds rolled down the hillside and enveloped us, blotting out the distant view of Rimini and its sea-board, and crowding round us like curious ghosts. We could feel the chill breath of the mists upon our faces, and soon even the diligence with its laughing, chattering crowd of passengers was shut out of sight, and we were alone upon the grey mountain side. Just then the bells of the Borgo began to ring overhead, and their music floated down to us out of the thick fog, indescribably poetic, like the lights of an unknown harbour shining over the water. So we crept up, winding round the shoulder of the mountain towards the unseen town, which for all we knew might be one of the magic cities of our childhood. Sometimes the cliff rose sheer above us, and at others, the road faced a wall of cloud; and sometimes when, as it were, the breeze made windows in the mist, we saw the ragged, sullen crests of the Appennines lifting their heads above the drifting clouds. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a street with low stone houses, and in another minute we were in the Borgo. [Illustration: SAN MARINO.] It was all commonplace enough, not at all the city beautiful we had imagined,--a mountain village built of grey stone, with a few stuccoed houses, but it was very friendly and welcome after the unfamiliar mists. We did not stay. We still had before us the steep climb up to the Acropolis, 700 feet above the Borgo, and as we zig-zagged up the one road that for strategetical purposes San Marino possesses, we were overtaken by the rain, a cloud-burst, which, umbrellas notwithstanding, drenched us to the skin. It was as though a sluice had opened in the heavens. But our _vetturino_, who had neither overcoat nor umbrella, was unmoved. He deposited us, bag and baggage, at the city gate, telling us with many shrugs, _non posso andare de più_. It rained in torrents. We did not know which way to turn. The steep, paved street in which we found ourselves was a miniature cascade whose stream ran over the tops of our shoes, and flowed in eddies round our luggage. Our condition was pitiable, until some kindly Sammarinesi helped us and our baggage up that waterfall and into the hospitable Albergo Titano. Only then did we realise our good fortune in arriving before the public diligence, which was still lost in the mists below. For the Albergo Titano, an excellent and simple inn, where mine host in spite of his smart English tweeds is not too proud to help in the kitchen and hand the dishes at dinner, has limited accommodation. When we passed the belated travellers on the stairs after we had changed our wet clothes, we heard them expostulating indignantly because there was only one room to share between the five of them! We found San Marino a City of Grey Cloud as romantic as the City of White Cloud into which the soul of the butterfly vanished in the Japanese legend of the Holy Mountain. It was full of shadows which materialised out of the mists, grew solid as we passed, then melted into wraiths again and vanished. It was very quiet, a world of ghosts, with great grey clouds ramping through everything. We could not see more than twenty yards ahead of us, and the end of each street seemed to float in space. No sooner had we won things from the mists than they were devoured again. And so we came to the Piazza del Pianello with its statue of Liberty and its battlemented palace, which loomed up in the clouds like a ghost of the Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli at Gubbio. From the parapet where Herr Baedeker had told us to look for the view, we faced a sheet of mist on which some fantastic chimney-pots were faintly sketched. Suddenly, by a seeming miracle, Monte Titano lifted its head out of the clouds, and San Marino lay clear before us, a grey, tidy, self-respecting hamlet overlooking some of the grandest mountain scenery to be found anywhere in Italy. Down in the valley the Marecchia wound, white as a river of bleached bones, towards the Appennines, whose heads were wreathed in sullen clouds. In the west the sun struggled to look once more upon the earth before it plunged below the mountains, and the white storm-wrack behind the ragged scarp of San Leo, where Cagliostro died, was fired by the fan-shaped rays. If we had felt like Dante and his guide climbing the hill of Purgatory as we toiled up the side of Monte Titano in the blear-grey mists, we looked for a moment into his Inferno when the curtaining clouds were rent apart. '... For certain on the brink I found me of the lamentable vale, The dread abyss, that joins a thund'rous sound Of plaints innumerable. Dark and deep, And thick with clouds o'erspread ...'[24] Across the valley the fortress of San Leo stood out in black relief against the smoking clouds, until it seemed as though eternal fires were burning behind the eagle's nest in which the great necromancer of the seventeenth century was confined. And beyond it rose the crested waves of the Appennines with the torn garments of the storm shredded upon their cruel rocks. Here and there a stray beam slanting athwart their slopes illumined the towers of some little far-off town. For a few minutes the valleys were bathed in golden light, then the sun went down, and the world grew indigo with night and storms. San Marino itself has not much to offer to the stranger within its gates. Its houses are commonplace: its cathedral and its Gothic Palazzo del Governo are modern, and its palaces contain few traces of antiquity. On the other hand the manners and customs of the Republic have a refreshing quaintness not to be found elsewhere. For instance in San Marino you do not buy and sell with the coinage of the state; that is minted entirely for collectors; and in this small community, where every one knows the business of his neighbour better than he knows his own, the pretty telegraph girl goes about the town like the buttons in a hotel, asking strangers if the wire which has just been brought up from the Borgo is for them, when she does not know the name of the recipient. Unlike the cities of Italy, San Marino is early to bed: at half-past eight the streets are silent and deserted. But she is an early riser. The only public conveyance to Rimini, which also purposes to serve the Ancona-Rome express, is timed to depart from the city gates at 4 A.M. The gaoler and the police are foreigners, _i.e._ Italians, because, as the prison-keeper remarked, 'otherwise no one would ever be arrested, because the Sammarinesi would all be relations of the police.' But the army, forty strong, is recruited from the Sammarinesi themselves. Nor should the traveller be surprised if perchance he finds lop-eared rabbits making themselves at home in his bedroom, as we did in the Albergo Titano, although this peculiarity is not confined to San Marino, it being on record in Volterra that when an artist begged the hotelkeeper to sweep below his bed, she answered that it could not be done, much as she wished to oblige the signore, because her hens were sitting! But it is San Marino's incomparable views, over the wide valley of the Marecchia to the Appennines on the one hand, and over the plain of Rimini to the Adriatic and the hills of Dalmatia on the other, which make the long climb worth while. Even the Philosopher, who had rheumatism added to his other sorrows, could not help responding to the joy of waking, and finding himself high up in the clear blue sky overlooking a world washed clean by the rainstorms of the night before. The great mountains and rock-scarps which bounded the valley of the Marecchia were flecked with shadows, and snow-white cumuli, shining in the sunlight, were piled above the distant peaks. We climbed up to San Marino's second tower through a half-deserted quarry where pink cyclamens, brambles and wild flowers had woven a tangled web about the rocks. In the west the ragged hills rolled on like waves towards the gaunt peaks of the Appennines, and the highest of them all had its great solemn crest hidden in a low-hanging cloud which held it in the old embrace of sky and earth, regarded by the Greeks and Egyptians alike as a mythological sacrament. To the east the rock fell sheer to the vine-clad plain of Rimini, and far away we saw the Adriatic in a silver haze. How long we stayed up there among the flowers by that ancient tower I do not know. There was a kind of rapture in the morning. The bees were humming in the ivy as though they thought that it was still summer. The cicalas sang. Close at hand the Rocca, as fantastic as the most fantastic fortress in the whole of fairy-land, overhung its precipice. On our left rose the third tower of the Republic flaunting its feather to the wind. We forgot San Marino, that gay popinjay of a city, which is so out of keeping with its landscape, absorbed in watching the play of light and shadow down in the wild valley of the Marecchia, where the great cloud-barques which sailed across the wind-swept sky were reflected on the bosom of the hills. It was a land of great and primitive desires, with rivers rushing passionately to the sea, and inarticulate mountains travailing to reach heaven. Nor was the earth appeased until the gathering storm-clouds stooped down and rested on its hills, as the Ark of the Lord rested upon the peak of Ararat. We left at dawn in the postchaise of the Republic. Night had not yet rolled her curtains from the mountains. Eastwards the sea and sky were veiled in tremulous mists, but when we reached the Borgo the silver morning was lightened by a rose and saffron glory. We found the Borgo asleep, though when we left, after waiting half an hour for the mail and picking up a solitary passenger, the church bells on the cliff above were ringing and all the cocks were crowing. How gay and fresh it was! None of the grumblers of the world were out of bed. The _cocchiere_ with the stemma of the Republic in his hat cracked his long whip; the horses made music with their bells, tossing their heads as they smelt the breeze; even the querulous brake made merry over its discomfort as we swung down the hillside. Long after daybreak the mists lay supine in the valley and there were shadows on the mountains, as though the languid eyes of nature were not yet opened to the morning. But overhead the little clouds were pink as the wings of flamingoes, and when we reached the fields we found the vines, drunk with the magic of the morning, dancing like Bacchanals with linked hands across the valleys, bearing their gifts of purple grapes. Often at the turning of the road we looked back to San Marino, standing up like a biblical fortress with its strong watch-towers overlooking the plain, the home of liberty, where Garibaldi found sanctuary from his pursuers. When we reached Serravalle we saw it through a veil of mist, thin as gossamer spun out of the dawn. Later there were little wisps of cloud-drift hanging on the rocks below the towers. Long ere we drove into the gates of Rimini our Nephelococcygia vanished like a dream into its clouds again. URBINO We came to Urbino for the sake of Raphael, the gentle youth who conquered Death in dying, and to see the palace built by the greatest hero of the Rinascimento, Frederic of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. We stayed long after we had made our pilgrimage to the brown palace, where Giovanni Santi reared his motherless immortal, long after we had walked through the decaying splendours of that fairy castle which saw the star of Frederic's dynasty go down not ninety years after it had arisen so brightly on the slopes of Monte Ingino. For Urbino, though she is old and faded, though the grass grows in her streets and flowering weeds spring from her cracked and tottering walls, is still a city beautiful, a golden crown upon the green hillside. We came to the foot of her vine-clad slopes after three hours of journeying through a world of shadowy mountains which had moonlit gossamer resting on their peaks, and silver rivers running through their valleys. Her towers gleamed white as polished ivory against the vaporous sky; her many lights were like a diadem of jewels out-brilliancing the stars. As we climbed up the hillside in the chill night air every turn of the road revealed fresh vistas of mountain peaks rising like crested waves out of the moonlit vapours. And when we reached the summit of Urbino's hill, and found ourselves below the terrific walls of Federigo's palace, we saw above them, limned against the stars, an enchanted palace such as Perrault might have dreamed of, with its towers and esedras transmuted by the moonlight into jade. Only for a moment; in the next we were rattling over the cobbles of a wide arcaded street lit with electric lights and hung with hundreds of little coloured globes, red and white and green, for the festa of the Venti Settembre. It was so gay and homely after the moonlit silence of the mountains, and the inn we found upon that lonely hill-top was so unexpectedly good, with airy rooms and clean red tiles and snowy bed-linen, that we loved Urbino from the first hour we knew her. When we woke next morning to the music of Sabbath bells and saw the towers of Federigo's palace shutting out our horizon eastwards; and westwards, across a valley, the white houses of Urbino climbing up through their gardens towards the broken walls of her fortezza, we knew that she was to be one of our cities of happy memories. Nor were we disappointed. For in Urbino with her crisp morning air tempering the sunshine, and her vistas of wide valleys and deep-bosomed hills rolling away towards the magnificent crags of the Appennines, we spent some precious days forgetful of the world, which toils and sweats in busy marts and narrow self-made prisons, so far removed in spirit from the hills and all the sweetness that appertains thereto. [Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE DUKES OF URBINO.] We had read in books that Urbino was decayed and lifeless, the true ensample of Leopardi's tragic words:-- 'O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi, E le colonne, e i simulacri, e l'erme Torri degli avi nostri Ma la gloria non vedo.' So we went out expecting to find her a mere ghost, pathetic in her faded grandeur, like beautiful San Gimignano or the wind-swept home of Perugino. It is true that grass was growing in the climbing street which leads up the hill past the house of Giovanni Santi, and we were to find out soon enough that the great castle of Federigo, where Castiglione wrote his Golden Book, was falling to decay like his palace at Gubbio. But it was easy to forget these things on a sunny morning in September, when the Piazza Otto Settembre was filled with a crowd of stalwart men, in their national costume of wide velvet breeches and black wide-awake hats, and lovely dark-eyed women, kerchief'd or wearing the fringed mantillas of Eastern Italy,--the descendants of the brave mountaineers who made the arms of Duke Frederic respected even by the redoubtable Francesco Sforza. As it was Sunday, the day on which country people come into their hill-towns all over Italy for Mass and market, there were booths of haberdashery and flowered kerchiefs in the piazza below the ruddy old church of San Francesco, and pottery, not of Urbino, was spread out in the roadway of the two streets which descend so swiftly to the valley. The fruit and poultry market was in the little piazza full of pollard acacias behind the Franciscan church. The passive hens of Italy, which spend so much of their lives being carried head-downwards to and from market that they never give way to hysteria like the fowls of other countries, were ranged below the trees on one side of the square, and golden pears and peaches were heaped with purple grapes in the cool shade of the other. 'And may you have salvation!' cried the merry old dame from whom we bought more than we could carry of her luscious wares for a few soldi. Close by, in the very heart of the gay little city, stands the house of Giovanni Santi, a brown fifteenth-century palace, with broad eaves and bricked-up arches, which bends like an aged man over the lichened pavement of the Contrada Raffaello. A white dove was bowing on the sill of the room in which Raphael was born, and through the opened panes of another window we could see the broad plastered beams of the low-ceiling living room within. Urbino cherishes the memory of Raphael. The house in which he spent the spring of his short life is swept and garnished, empty except for framed engravings of his pictures and some antique chairs and high-backed stools old enough to have been there in his father's day. The rooms are low, with panelled ceilings and decent red-bricked floors. One of them has a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Santi which is said to be a portrait of Magia and the baby Raphael, and in the other is a bust of Morris Moore of London, who gave the money, needed to buy the house, to the Società Reale Accademia Raffaello in 1872. But to me the place was somewhat disappointing; it lacked the spirit of the happy boy who carried with him to the courts of Rome and Florence the breath of sunlight and fresh mountain air. Urbino itself is just the home one would imagine for Raphael, a city of the Renaissance, golden, full of gardens, in which the culture and refinement engendered by the Montefeltro Dukes still lingers. But there is nothing of Raphael in his father's house. Perhaps because he was there so little, for, like the lovely curly-headed children of Urbino to-day, he probably spent most of his time out in the streets when he was not working with his father, now waiting to see Duke Guidobaldo, and the knights and ladies of his court riding up the hill from their hunting and hawking, now playing with clay, as Gigi of the golden curls and petulant mouth plays still, a little higher up the Contrada Raffaello, with a world of great mountains lying below his feet. When we first saw him, Gigi was sitting on the doorstep of a house close beside the palace of Timoteo Viti, one of Raphael's greatest pupils, who for love of his aged mother left his studio in Rome and came back to his native town. Gigi was three years old, with a shock of golden hair, and grey eyes, thickly-lashed and full of dreams. He was barefoot, very dirty and happy, modelling childish fancies out of a morsel of wet clay, and he was so beautiful that we stopped to speak to him. But Gigi was adamant. He frowned and went on making unintelligible daubs with his slim brown fingers. Later, when we passed again, his mother had dressed him in boots and socks, his face and hands were washed, his clay was forfeit. But when she tried to make him beg for soldi from the _forestieri_, he wept and hid his face against the wall. Poor little Gigi! We often tried to make acquaintance with him, but he would have none of us. Nor did he play with the other children, who seemed to laugh at him. But one evening when the sun was sinking low behind the Appennines, filling the valleys with a sea of rosy mists, from which the fantastic rocks of San Marino and San Leo emerged far away to the right, and the great head of Monte Catria, Dante's asylum, to the left, Gigi crept from his hiding-place behind a bramble bush and came to stand beside the Philosopher. It was the 20th of September, the anniversary of United Italy, and all the other children had long ago fled laughing to the piazza where the police band was to celebrate the festive occasion with music. But Gigi, with his golden head thrust forward and his little arms behind his back, stood rapt in wonder before the glory of the sun. We watched them stand together, those two, both worshippers in their unconscious pose, both dreamers, till Gigi, proud and silent Gigi, who would neither smile nor beg, stretched out his hand and took the Philosopher's in silent sympathy. So they stood linked together, man and child, inarticulate before the glory of earth and sky, until night began to hang her purple veils along the valleys and Venus was shining softly in the West. 'Among other laudable actions Federigo erected on the rugged heights of Urbino a residence, by many regarded as the most beautiful in all Italy, and so amply did he provide it with every convenience that it appeared rather a palatial city than a palace.' So spake that courtly gentleman Baldassare Castiglione, friend of Raphael, honoured guest in Guidobaldo's brilliant assembly, and ambassador from Urbino to the English Court in 1503, when Henry VII. of England invested the Duke with the Order of the Garter as his father Frederic, the most distinguished soldier of his day, had been invested by Edward IV. And seen by moonlight, as we climbed Urbino's hill, it was a fairy palace, with towers and loggias soaring up to the stars above dark ilex groves, once gardens where the lovely ladies of Elisabetta's court dallied with love. [Illustration: URBINO: SAN FRANCESCO.] But if you wish to carry with you unimpaired this vision of ethereal loveliness it is wiser to let your imagination, and the flowery epithets of Castiglione, Sanzio, Baldi and Vasari, fill up the blanks, nor seek to find inspiration in the deserted halls of Federigo. Come rather, across the cleft in Urbino's hill, and climb towards the height of the Fortezza. There you will see a panorama of great hills unfold itself, Monte Catria and lovely Monte del Cavallo, Monte Nerone and Carpegna, the cradle of the Montefeltrian race. At your feet across the brown roofs of the Città Inferiore you will see the mighty walls and bastions of Urbino encircling Federigo's palace, with the dome-crowned bulk of the Cathedral on the one hand and a gracious ilex-wood upon the other; and in the midst, enshrined as it were in the panoply of war, a pleasure-house for princes, white and gold, with airy loggias opening out towards the mountains, and hanging gardens and slim tourelles, like a mediaeval castle of the Troubadour land. For the spirit of the Renaissance was in Urbino when Frederic and his Dalmatian architect Laurana built this palace. Though Italy was still racked by civil wars, though she was yet to tremble before the foreign armies, which poured through her defenceless passes from the day that Charles VIII'S. mad escapade showed that the way was open, to the invasion of Napoleon in 1796, Federigo the man of war and letters chose to build a pleasure palace for himself and his descendants upon Urbino's hill. No one else but Federigo would have dared. The Sforza trembled in the fortress they had wrested from the Visconti in the heart of Milan; many years later the Medici had need of a covered passage connecting the Pitti with the Palazzo Vecchio, as the Popes had, to cover their retreat from the Vatican to Sant'Angelo; the palace of the Dukes of Ferrara was armed at every point; even the courtly Lords of Mantua could flee at a moment's notice from their exquisite summer-house outside the city gates to their stronghold in the Castello Gonzaga. But it is not likely that Federigo, the great soldier who had led the armies of kings and Popes to victory, and whose fame had crossed the Alps and earned him laurels in the far-off Court of England, depended only on the strength of his mountain home or the loyalty of the sturdy citizens of Urbino, when he planned the first unfortified mansion which an Italian dared to build since the Villas of the Roman Empire were destroyed by the barbarian. He knew well enough that they could be trusted. Had he not left his beloved Countess Battista to their care while he was carrying on his wars in Tuscany and the Campagna, although his life-long enemy, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, was harrying his borders and seeking to inflame his people to revolt? There was another weapon in his armoury, stronger than precipices, more trustworthy than the shifting humour of a crowd. He may have learnt to use it as a boy in the brilliant Court of Mantua, where he was taught philosophy and science and literature and oratory by the famous Vittorino da Feltre, while he was becoming one of the most skilful swordsmen and military tacticians of the day. No doubt the liberality of Nicholas V., the great little man of Sarzana, and his own intercourse with Pius II. the Humanist Pope, and Lorenzo the Magnificent, augmented his enthusiasm. For the Renaissance was at hand. The lamp of learning hurled by the Saracens from the shores of the Bosphorus had thrown its beams across the Adriatic just in time. Already Petrarch and Boccaccio had kindled the sparks of their wit and humour at its flame. Manuel Chrysoloras, the Byzantine, had already filled the Greek chair in the University of Florence; Gemistos Plethon, the Platonist, had already attacked the roots of Christianity; the famous Academy of Florence had been founded by Cosimo de' Medici. And nowhere did the torch of culture burn more brightly than in Urbino, where Federigo, and after him Guidobaldo, and that exquisite lady Elisabetta Gonzaga his wife, stored up the treasures bought by Federigo's hard-earned and honourable wealth--rare translations, rarer autographs, sculpture and bronze and paintings, choicest intarsia, delicate instruments of music, all the curious and beautiful fruits of the Renaissance. This little hill town, almost unheard of until the Montefeltro dynasty raised it to dignity, became a beacon among the Appennines, a city of fair fame to which poets, philosophers, artists and musicians, humanists, scholars, knights and ladies gathered from all the courts of Italy. 'It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life.' Gone was the need for barred and shuttered gates, for secret night raids, for bravoes waiting in the narrow ill-lit streets. The doors of Federigo's palace were thrown wide open, and while the duke sat in his great hall for dinner all those who wished could come and go; or, if they sought an audience of their lord, gain easy access. It is only when we remember how, many years later, the Baglioni were to bathe the streets of Perugia in blood, and the fair cities of Tuscany,--Siena and Pisa and Lucca, were to sweat under the yoke of tyrants, that we realise how much the airy grace of this premature flower of the Renaissance stands for in the history of Italy. All this was clear to us as we looked across the valley and saw the towers of Federigo's palace golden in the late September sunshine. But as we had come so far to see its long-deserted halls, we turned back and climbed the Via Puccinotti to the piazza where Raphael, the Adonais for whom Rome wept, is immortalised in bronze between the House of God and the House of Urbino. The battered crown of Italy's Iron Duke is not a whited sepulchre. Behind its cracked walls and perishing windows are many precious carvings, doors of rich intarsia, and gracious stucchi, not plundered from other palaces but designed for the salons where the Montefeltro, and after him the Delia Rovere, held his court. But how the spirit of the place has flown! How shrunken are the glories chronicled by Santi and the philosophers and historians who were attracted to Urbino in the zenith of its glory! Here and there some trace of human use conjured up the ghostly past--a marble balustrade polished like glass by hands long since forgotten in death; the yellow stories of fireplaces where pages and men-at-arms once leant to warm themselves beside the cheery blaze; the worn-out tiles before the dais of Federigo's great hall, with its windows overlooking the piazza, where he watched his workmen building a worthy house for his God. And sometimes we caught a glimpse of the inner character of these sons of history, in the rich study lined with fine intarsia and hung with tapestry where Federigo rested from cares of state with his beloved books; or the exquisite little chapel in which the cipher of Guidobaldo is entwined with the delicate carvings and arabesques which cover vault and walls. It would be a mournful place if it were not that the Renaissance, flowering so graciously within these silent halls, has left a world of fantasy to people them, satyrs and fauns, and little laughing loves who make music with pipe and tabor, and dance along the chimneys of the Sala degli Angeli above the roses and carnations, tipped with gold, which bloom upon its panels. For almost all the treasures, which Lucrezia Borgia wondered over when she passed through Urbino on her way to wed the Marquis of Ferarra, were rifled some months later by her terrible brother Cesare, who broke into the territory by sword and treachery where she had come in peace. And what was left when the Borgia fled and Guidobaldo returned, and all that Guidobaldo and his successors, the della Roveri, garnered together, were bequeathed to the Papacy by the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., in 1624, only one hundred and fifty years after Sixtus IV. had placed the ducal cap upon the head of Federigo, creating him at the same time Knight of St. Peter and Gonfaloniere of the Holy Roman Church. FOLIGNO In Foligno it still rained. From my bed I could see the indigo clouds which had pursued us with such a mighty storm-song all the way from Urbino. Every now and then great splots of water fell from the wide eaves on the paved street, with a pleasant sound like the intermittent music of a fountain. I was in no hurry to get up. We had arrived late the night before, in such a downpour of rain that we knew nothing of Foligno except that we had driven through a wide avenue of plane trees to the city barrier, where the douane insisted on opening our luggage; and that the Albergo della Posta, whose charming host, Signor Cherubino Pinelli, had made us welcome, was one of the most comfortable hospices in Umbria. But we were back in Umbria, mystical Umbria, where ancient gods walk hand in hand with saints along the banks of gently flowing streams; where life goes slowly to the tune of bells slung round the dewlaps of snow-white oxen, bred by the waters of Clitumnus and praised by Virgil, Pliny and Propertius; where the soft beauty of the hills and sky forms worthy backgrounds for a gentle people, whose stately and unconscious grace has been immortalised by artists of the Quattrocento--an age in which, we learn from Matarazzo, the human form was worshipped with a touch of the old passion which was mother to the genius of Greece. And that was enough to take me out of bed and to the window, where I found the wings of the storm sweeping across the bleak blue hills towards Nocera as it fled back to the Appennines, and the sun already shining through the rain upon the white towers of Spoleto, while Trevi, near at hand, rose out of the plain on the top of her conical hill. In the road below, the men of the octroi, with their long blue cloaks wrapped round them, waited, rapier in hand, to prod the bags and bundles of the peasants as they entered the city gates. And along the fair white road which links the little townships of this Umbrian vale together--Perugia, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Trevi, Spoleto--I saw a stream of people flowing towards the Porta Romana. Some had burdens on their heads, and others were riding pannier-wise on mules; here they walked with free step beside their milk-white oxen, there they rode on wooden tumbrils among their heaped-up fruits and vegetables. Far away where the slim poplars rose up like banners upon the horizon I saw them, mere specks upon the long white ribbon of the road. Below my window they streamed into Foligno through the modern barrier which has taken the place of the old Porta Romana, running the gauntlet of the facetious or overbearing octroi-men, who prodded everything with their long skewers in search of illicit wares. It was a rare comedy to watch. The gay Lothario, whose cloak thrown well over his left shoulder gave him a swashbuckling appearance, lingered in conversation with the pretty kerchiefed girls, though often they carried nothing in their hands at all; and dare-devil boys fled laughing by on their bicycles, with diminutive dinner-bags tied to the handle-bars, nor slackened speed for the surly old octroi-man who bade them stop, and who, I wager, suspected every one of them. Foligno, which many people only remember as the little city low in the background of Raphael's Madonna del Foligno, is to-day as it has always been, one of the most important commercial towns in Umbria. Its position down in the plain three miles from Forum Flaminii, the junction between the great Flaminian Road from Rome to the Adriatic, and its loop branch by Interamna, Spoleto, Trevi and Foligno, made the Fulginium of Imperial Rome a city of considerable importance. The proximity of Mevania and Hispellum probably prevented its growth during the Roman Empire; but after the destruction of Forum Flaminii by the Longobards in the eighth century, its scattered inhabitants settled in the then flourishing town of Foligno, which became one of the chief communes in Umbria. Was it not in the market of Foligno that young Francesco Bernardone came to sell his father's bales of cloth before he gave the money to the old priest of San Damiano? And is it not the proud boast of Foligno that in 1472 the earliest copy of the _Divina Commedia_ was printed within her walls, a fact which her citizens claim to prove not only her industrial but her artistic energy? Standing at the junction of the railways from Rome and Florence to Ancona she is of considerable commercial importance to-day, with numerous sugar refineries and paper mills, and a large carburet factory on the banks of the Topino. But never did a city so small and compact hide the cloven foot of commercialism as well as Foligno. It is true that looking down on her from Perugia or Spoleto, she is seen, lying like a bride in the green valley, below a veil of fine white dust or smoke from the carburet factory; but outside the walls she is still the city Raphael painted for Sigismondo Conti; and in her byways she is the same town which ran with blood when the terrible Corrado Trinci paraded through her streets with the three hundred dead who were the price of his Vendetta. For when Ser Pietro da Rasiglia, the Governor of Nocera, whose wife Niccolò Trinci had dishonoured, lured Niccolò and his brother Bartolomeo to Nocera and slew them on a hunting expedition, Corrado killed three hundred 'souls' and brought them back heaped up on mules to show his vengeance to the people of Foligno. [Illustration: FOLIGNO: SAN DOMENICO.] Foligno is full of ancient churches, some with their ruddy mediaeval grace unspoiled, like beautiful Santa Maria Infra Portas, a little Romanesque building of rose-coloured Subasian stone with a gracious porch and a square bell-tower, which is a treasure-house of frescoes, and contains an interesting Byzantine chapel. And others like San Feliciano, the Cathedral, modernised within, but still one of the chief glories of Foligno with its exquisite _facciata minore_ in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, rich with the art of the Comacine Masters, and the beautiful reconstruction of the western front by the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri. [Illustration: FOLIGNO: WELL IN THE CASA NOCCHI.] But it is the fruit of her mightiest days that makes Foligno rich in monuments--the years between 1305 and 1439 in which the Trinci, having finally driven the Ghibellines out of the city, were its despots, until Eugenius IV., to whom the memory of Corrado's terrible vendetta had an evil savour, deprived him of power, and put him and his family to death. For to this period Foligno owes the vast church of San Domenico, whose picturesque campanile Mr. Markino has sketched rising over the trees of Signor Tradardi's garden; and little San Giovanni dell'Acqua with its gracious doorway; and San Francesco and San Salvatore, and the dismantled church of Santa Caterina, and many another façade of rose and white Subasian stone, on which the years have wrought a tender bloom as of fruit ripened in the sun. And not churches only, for to the Trinci she owes the stately Palazzo Trinci long since fallen to decay, but still linked to San Feliciano by a covered archway, still preserving its great processional stairway, still decorated with the frescoes which Ottaviano Nelli painted for the bloodthirsty Corrado. Foligno has many charms too often overlooked by the traveller because she is such an admirable headquarters both by rail and road for seeing Central Umbria. The courtyards of her ancient palaces have lovely well-heads of wrought iron, and many of their doors have quaint and interesting epigrams over the lintel. She has a little Venice on the banks of a canal, half dammed by docks and water weeds, crossed by a Roman bridge; and a water mill, where the women wash their linen in a long arcade of red brick overhanging the brown millstream. Her churches are full of golden pictures by the greatest exponents of the Foligno school, Niccolò d'Alunno, and Pier Antonio Mesastris, a painter little known outside his native town, whose beautiful Angels and Madonnas, combining an ideal tenderness and sweetness of conception with a real depth of feeling, have earned, in the language of the people, the name of _Maestà Bella_. Speaking of the Foligno school of painting, which was characterised by an earnestness not to be found in every branch of Umbrian art, whether it is the grace and delicate spirituality of Mesastris or the tragic intensity of Niccolò d'Alunno, brings me to Foligno's modern school of art, of which she is justly proud. It is housed in the old cloisters of San Niccolò where Canova once had his studio, and where he left many of his plaster casts. And it is under the direction of Professor Arturo Tradardi, a delightful enthusiast who never wearies of studying the glories of his native town, or seeking to recreate them. In the beautiful cloistered garden of the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri he has gathered together reproductions in plaster, toned to the exact colour of the originals, of all the most beautiful monuments in Umbria. A labour of love which may be responsible for some of the extraordinary energy to be found in Foligno, which with Viterbo leads the way among the smaller towns of Italy in the glorious work of freeing ancient monuments from the plaster prisons in which they have lain hidden from the world during the last three centuries. It goes without saying that Foligno, which lies low in the heart of Umbria, not more than ten miles from Assisi, the cradle of the Franciscan legend, should be the birthplace of a saint. But, notwithstanding the picturesque legend of the Blessed Angela, which tells us that as she walked through the fields of Umbria, wearied by her struggles, and despairing of overcoming the burden of her sins, she heard the voice of Christ bidding her be of good cheer because He loved her better than any other woman in the Valley of Spoleto, we hear more of the Blessed Angelina within Foligno than of Sant'Angela, who lies buried in the church of San Francesco. For it was the Blessed Angelina, Countess of Civitella and Montegiove, who founded the Convento delle Contesse, that quiet retreat in a forgotten corner of Foligno where noble women have continued to work and pray unceasingly since its foundation towards the end of the fourteenth century. Just as it was the Blessed Angelina's chapel in the church of the Franciscans which sweated blood seventeen years after her death because, as she related in a vision, the Christians had lost Constantinople. But it is not so much for her miracles and wonders that this saintly woman is held in veneration as for her holiness and chastity. And indeed her calm spirit seems to linger in the quiet cloisters and gardens of the Convento delle Contesse, in which she died after she had founded no less than sixteen Convents of the Tertiary Order of St. Francis. It is an oasis of peace and rest, an oasis which is too easily passed by in the maze of Foligno's streets, for its walls are high and bare, and give no hint of the gardens they enclose, unless perchance the outer gate be left unbarred, as it was when we stumbled upon it and stopped to wonder at the beauty of a picture disclosed under a wide pent-house roof within. For over the doorway of this Holy House which was the first home of that much-travelled picture, the Madonna del Foligno, Mesastris painted one of his lovely golden-haired Madonnas, enthroned among angels and virgin-saints, while in the background little Loves gather the delicate pied wind-flowers, limned against the sky, and heap them up in baskets to scatter, maybe, with song and praise upon the courts of Heaven. [Illustration: FOLIGNO: THE WASHING PLACE.] Here too, if anywhere, the liberal spirit of the Middle Ages lingers. We knocked, and the door was opened as it was wont to open in the bountiful fifteenth century before the old Order trembled. And within we saw the Lady Abbess of a bygone day ruling a little company of noble dames amid the serenest spells of art and nature, with the beauty and the holiness of their lives setting an ensample to the world instead of being lost in mortification of the flesh behind closed gateways. Signor Tradardi made us acquainted with the beautiful Mother Superior, who came with us, telling her beads and smiling at our enthusiasm as each step revealed unsuspected charms, for nowhere else in Italy had we gained such free admission to a nunnery, nowhere else had we found the ancient loveliness of fresco and Gothic loggia untouched in any convent possession as in the little courts and pleasaunces of this Garden of the Lord. Two black-robed sisters were walking among the flowers with their pupils, but when the gentle Abbess called for candles to take us to the frescoed cell of the Blessed Angelina, they were brought by a slender boy, whose curiously intense beauty made a break in the calm and holy atmosphere of this quiet retreat. He was very much at home, and evidently did not seem to think that we should feel it unnatural to find him in that _galère_. We learned that he was the nephew of the Lady Abbess--the professor of music for the convent. And that he lived in Umbria, but next week was going to Ancona. We had lately come from there? Then perhaps we had heard the opera _Thaïs_, recently produced so excellently in Ancona, which he was making the journey on purpose to hear! * * * * * We drove to Spello on a September day of vagrant sunshine, when the earth was musical with running waters and the heavens, tinted mother-o'-pearl, were spread with tearful clouds. The rugged crests of Nocera's pyramidal hills in the van of the great Appennines were shadowed with cobalt. The vines were brown, the hedges full of berries, the scent of wild mint sweetened the air. A rippling stream was singing in its rocky bed beside the road, and long grasses were still lying against the muddy banks as they were pressed by the rush of storm-rain the day before. And Spello lay before us in the sunshine like a cluster of yellowing roses on the spur of Monte Subasio. But first we drove between the vineyards to the little church of San Giovanni Profiamma which marks the site of the ancient town of Forum Flaminii, built by the Consul Flaminius on his Roman road before it left the Umbrian Vale and plunged into the passes of the Appennines. Like all the thirteenth century churches of this part of Umbria, it is built of the lovely pink limestone of Subasio which gives such a peculiar beauty to the streets of Spello and Assisi. Its ancient rose window is broken, and two white houses hem in the façade on either side. The Romanesque doorway stood wide open, because a knot of villagers were busied in putting up a gilt and paper baldacchino for a festa. Some children and a black goat had strayed in to watch; the priest was giving directions, and every now and then lending a shoulder when the whole affair threatened to fall over. But what simplicity, what unspoiled mediaeval grace we found in this tiny chapel in the fields, which is the only relic of a long-forgotten city. It has been restored, almost rebuilt, by the parish priest, who to his honour has preserved every ancient stone, and arch, and bifora; even the altar he has left in mediaeval simplicity, a slab of marble on a worn and battered fragment of granite column, all that remains of the pagan city of Flaminius. They are a splendid people, these country priests of Umbria, with their ambition to beautify their little churches, and their merry good-nature in the face of hardships. We met so many of them in Foligno,--one who had written a book about his church, and toiled to rescue the faded frescoes veiled in plaster on its walls, taking the same pleasure in their beauty as a gardener in the first blossoms of the year; another who had made a museum of his sacristy and cloisters. But the priest of San Giovanni Profiamma has preserved some precious pages in the history of art. We watched him scramble into his ramshackle cart, shouting some last instructions to his villagers before he drove off at full gallop over the rough road with a huge sack of fodder tied on behind. And we remembered another country priest whom we had seen at Todi leading his saddle horse down the hill to say Mass in some roadside chapel, singing as he went, as Brother Francis might have sung, with no thought of the morrow, but only joy in the present, and faith for the life to come. * * * * * We found Spello gay with the bells of her ox-carts, and as busy as a good housewife, her men bringing in bundles of fire-wood against the winter, or getting ready for the vintage by rolling the pipes and hogs-heads down the hill to be cleansed at the fountain below the old bell-tower; and her women washing their linen with song and laughter outside the Roman gate. Spello, the old Hispellum, which claims to have been the birthplace of Propertius, notwithstanding the stress that poet laid upon the neighbouring city of Mevania as his home, is one of the loveliest cities in the Valley of Spoleto. She is as pink as a rose. Her houses are all ancient, many of them with Gothic doors and windows; her arches are threaded with vines and Morning Glories; she clambers up the hillside in narrow streets which turn naturally into steps when they are too steep even for the nimble mule; her people dress in bright-coloured linens, and the women cover their burnished hair with the gayest of flowered kerchiefs. As we drew near we saw her Gothic gate bestriding the road as fiercely as though it feared the Trinci might still come riding from Foligno, but close behind it, on the tower of some fighting baron which has been turned into a belfry, a full-grown olive tree stretched out its arms, welcoming strangers with the branch of peace. [Illustration: SPELLO.] We went up through the ancient Porta Consolare, whose Roman statues, toga'd ghosts of old Hispellum, stare down upon the snowy flanks of the yoked oxen bringing in the fresh-picked grapes just as they did in the years before Hannibal laid waste the Valley of Spoleto on his march down to Campania. In Spello's climbing streets, though she is poor and broken, we found treasures worthy of great temples, heirlooms stranded in the shipwreck of her wealth, like Santa Maria Maggiore's rich Renaissance doorway and thirteenth-century portal, and the exquisite holy water stoup in the nave, which was once a pagan altar. But most of all Spello is Pinturicchio's city. Her peasants are the ghosts of his old people; in her streets we met the lovely fair-haired girls whom he was never weary of crowning as Madonna Mary. He painted many pictures in her churches, in San Girolamo and Sant'Andrea, and a whole chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he left his own portrait hanging from the Virgin's shelf of books in the scene of the Annunciation, as it hung perhaps from the shelf of some woman whom he loved. In this church too are many altar pictures, and an exquisite Madonna hidden away in the sacristy among the tawdry paraphernalia of saints' days, and an angel, lost for three hundred years in a dark cupboard, which, when the sacristan illuminates it with a candle, shines like a vision of the angel Gabriel coming in the dawn of day to Mary. The chapel, which was painted for one of the Baglioni of Perugia, is faded and defaced like the Borgia room in the Vatican, and needs bright sunshine to bring out its dim rich colours. But it is full of gracious Pinturicchio figures who play their parts in the drama of the birth of Christ against a luminous background in which we glimpse the life of the Quattrocento as it flows in and out of distant cities. And the floor is covered with gold and blue Deruta tiles, made for the Brothers in 1565, and so worn that we were sad to walk on them, although the sacristan dragged chairs across them with the utmost unconcern. Then it rained, and because we had seen all Spello's churches we had to seek shelter and lunch. The only inn was down the hill outside the Porta Consolare, but we found both food and refuge in a humble cottage where the family were just sitting down to their meal of steaming pottage. They gave us a plate of that, and dressed some raw tomatoes with oil and vinegar, at our suggestion, for Italians seldom eat raw tomatoes, which they do not think are healthy. And we were content with this and some good wine and excellent rough bread, although the coffee which our smiling hostess prepared so carefully was spoilt by its too liberal dash of methylated cognac. But the rain drove us from our little hill-city. We tried to brave it, as we searched in vain for the Porta Venere; nor could the old country women climbing the hill in the shelter of their enormous green umbrellas, who were the only people out in the storm beside ourselves, tell us the whereabouts of anything. CLITUMNUS We drove to Spoleto along the Roman road which threads the rich green valley of the Clitumnus, skirting the hill of Trevi and the olive-groves which crowd round the ruined fortress of Le Vene, and dipping at last into an oak wood where the crystal springs, far-famed in ancient days, leap from the rocky hillside. It is the loveliest drive in Umbria. Not only for the beauty of the way, for here all ways are beautiful, and lie through gardens, where milk-white oxen labour with wooden ploughs beneath the classic olive, and vineyards where the vines usurp the trees and clothe the valley in luxuriant festoons; not only for the loggia'd farms scattered among the fields, or for the towered castles frowning upon the road like mediaeval Sant'Eraclio; not only for the sight of Trevi, the steepest town in Italy, a queen upon her hill-top, with her face towards Spoleto and her yellow skirts trailing down into an olive-grove. All these we had seen a hundred times before from other Umbrian towns. But nowhere else had we found such unspoiled pastoral loveliness as in this soft wide valley whose glory Virgil sang, and all the ancients praised, the latest home of gods, where snowy bulls, victims for the Roman sacrifice, were bred beside the waters of a sacred stream. 'Thou, gay Clitumnus, where thy currents glide There bleating flocks thy flow'ry borders hide; There snow-white bulls, the greatest sacrifice Design'd for Jove, who rules the deities, First wash'd and sprinkled with thy sacred flood Pay for the Roman triumphs with their blood.' Though she looks like a queen on her hill-top, Trevi is at heart a simple country maid, with nothing to offer to the traveller but a few pictures by Perugino and his pupils, and an exquisite Renaissance altar by Rocco da Vicenza. She is the most disappointing of all the mountain fastnesses which have defied the assaults of change, but she stands like a sentinel before a landscape of surpassing beauty, peopled with classic memories. For here, below the crumbling walls and towers of Le Vene, at the foot of olive-wooded hills, we walked beside the crystal waters of Clitumnus, through scenes immortalised by Virgil in the Georgics. 'Unbounded plains with endless riches blest; Yet caves and living springs, and airy glades, And the soft low of kine, and sleepy shades Are never wanting ...' Here by the roadside we found the little temple which some say is one of those chapels of the god Clitumnus that Pliny wrote of to his friend Romanus when he adjured him to visit this so-lovely spot. And others, because of the Christian symbolism carved on its walls, claim to be a Christian fane built of pagan fragments in the fourth century. In any case it is deserted of its gods to-day, for if no incense is offered to old Clitumnus, neither is Mass said now before its altar, for the honour of San Salvatore. And yet I do not think the oracle, whom Caligula as well as Honorius came to consult, is far away; for the sun and rain have mellowed the old stones, giving them a rare and perfect beauty, and the birds nesting beneath its tympanum chant praises in the dawn, while from below ascends the song of the sacred stream as its flows by to mingle with the Tiber on its way to Rome. Nay, Pan himself, weary of making music in the reeds, might stray into this temple, to wonder at the faded saints who looked so coldly on him from their niches, before he leapt back again at break of day to the oak-woods on the hill above, where the goat-herds tend their flocks. A little further on we reached the source of the Clitunno, where many crystal streams gush from the hillside or bubble up from the ground, uniting in a wide lake before the river can escape along the valley. The air was full of the merry music of lapping waters and the ecstatic shrilling of the frogs. Tall poplars swayed upon the shallow banks, and giant willows trailed their branches in the stream like the long hair of water-nymphs. Little white bridges led from one green island to another, but the lush grass sloped so gradually to the clear waters that we could hardly tell where it first mingled with its own reflections. The crystal pools were underworlds of emerald waterweeds, now dark, now light, and in their mysterious depths were springs whose shafts of cyanite blue gleamed phosphorescent through the swaying plants. And here small fishes darted in and out with watchful eyes, and speckled trout swam slowly to and fro. [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS.] Surely if anywhere the old gods linger here. And when the valley is silent, but for the distant shepherd piping to his flocks, surely the naiads resting on the emerald sward call to their sisters, the Hamadryads and the Oreads, to leave their oak-woods and the hills above and dance down to join them in the clear cool water. Half unconsciously we looked and listened for them. And in a moment the youth of Arcady seemed to be born again. The babbling of the many little streams was like the echo of mocking laughter. I felt as though I had strayed into a court of water-nymphs and heard them making merry as they hid among the reeds. I could have sworn I saw one once; but it was only a darting fish. Then a kingfisher flying low took cover in the sedges just where the glinting sunshine dazzled my eyes. And I thought I heard them laugh again. SPOLETO Too few have sung the splendour and beauty of Spoleto, the proud white city whose towers breathe a message of peace to-day, where they once blazoned war down the wide green valley to Perugia. For Spoleto, like Perugia, has been a queen among cities. Like Perugia she has kept ward through the ages upon the valleys of Umbria, gazing down from her sacred ilex groves on lesser cities riding the encircling hills--towered Montefalco upon the ridge which shuts off the valley of the Tiber; Trevi on its steep olive-girt mount; Foligno and Bevagna down in the plain; little Spello; Assisi, very beautiful as she kneels before the mighty temple she has raised to San Francesco on the slopes of Monte Subasio; Santa Maria degli Angeli and Ponte San Giovanni. And in one proud memory at least she is greater even than Perugia, for she alone withstood the tidal wave of Hannibal in the second Punic War, so that he turned from her walls dismayed, nor dared to march on Rome, seeing that this small colony could hold his force in check. If she had faded out of history after that, her name would have been heroic among the Umbrian towns. But though she suffered in the civil war of Marius and Sulla, we know that she continued to flourish even in the dark years between the fall of Rome and the growth of mediaevalism. Totila destroyed her as Frederick Barbarossa was to destroy her in the middle of the twelfth century; but Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and after him Narses, the Exarch, built her up. Under the Longobards she became an independent duchy; after the fall of the Carlovingians her Dukes were for a short time Emperors of Italy. Ah! Spoleto, it is little wonder that you are proud to-day, that your bells ring so joyously down the valleys, that you hold high festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of United Italy. What does it profit Perugia that her name was splendid in the Middle Ages, and that she is still the Queen of Umbria, 'the Empress of hill-set cities'? Yours was the greatness of a more heroic day. Her lords were savage beasts, her people slaves, her streets were noisome with slaughter, her name a proverb for ferocity, while the Baglioni spread their pestilence across the valleys, seeking ignoble victories, and fighting unending little wars for self-aggrandisement. Because the Barbarossa laid you low the star of Perugia rose clear upon your horizon. Already in 1198, when you with all the other Umbrian towns paid tribute to Innocent III., she was the capital of Umbria. But you, the champion of Rome, the Knight-errant of the Papacy, had nobler ambitions. Your Dukes were heroes before the lords of Perugia were even robbers. Were they not Emperors too? Guido, with his pretentious claim to the kingship of France, and poor young Lambert, the chivalrous and beautiful Knight of Spoleto, with whose ill-timed death, on the very spot where the great battle of Marengo was fought nearly a thousand years after, perished the hope of a united and independent kingdom within the Italian[25] frontier. [Illustration: SPOLETO: PORTA D'ANNIBALE.] Spoleto was truly in a jubilant mood when we climbed up her winding streets, past the beautiful but ruined apse of San Niccolò, and the magnificent prehistoric wall below its convent. An Industrial Exhibition was being held in the Piazza Bernardino Campello, and the Merry Widow--'nuovissima per Spoleto'--was to be played that night in the Teatro Nuovo, 'con richissima messa in scena!' But at all times we found the quality of joy in Spoleto. Long long ago she wept perhaps when she waited, as Elaine for Lancelot, while her lover, the beautiful and splendid Lambert, was in the toils of his insatiable mistress, Rome. Widowed, she trimmed a lamp before his shrine and turned her eyes towards the Papacy, seeking to build up an Italian Empire, through the temporal kingdom of the Pope. But now she has opened her gates to welcome the new era, and, having doffed her mourning garments, sits enthroned at the head of her magnificent valley, welcoming the world with the gracious dignity of one who for a few short years was the mother of United Italy. Spoleto does not clamber up the hillside like rosy little Spello. She is tall and stately, pale as a lily, silent as a girl who dreams of love. More than any other of the hill-set cities of Umbria she bears the stamp of Rome, in arches and half-buried houses, in walls and ancient temples long since turned to the worship of other gods, and most of all in the inspiration of the great aqueduct which spans the ravine between her Rocca and the ilex-woods of Monte Luco. [Illustration: SPOLETO: SAN GREGORIO.] In Spoleto Rome and modernity walk hand in hand. Spoleto is not mediaeval in character like other Umbrian towns. Her hill is crowned by the imposing Castello which Cardinal Albornoz and Nicholas v. built on the site of the Rocca of Theodoric, and she has many gracious churches which flowered from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, like the cathedral and San Gregorio Maggiore; or, more ancient still, San Salvatore, that exquisite relic of the fourth century, which contains the nucleus of a Roman temple; and San Pietro, on the lower slopes of Monte Luco, which was built in the fifth century and restored in 1320, after it had been practically destroyed by the Ghibellines. It is true that the splendid roofless apse of San Niccolò soars above the main street with broken lancet windows framing the heavens, like the windows of Tintern, but it is built over the ancient circuit of the city walls; and though its slender Gothic grace beautifies the hillside, it was the rugged stones of Spoleto's prehistoric fortifications which claimed our eyes. For it was against these walls, which the Unknown People, and later the Pelasgians and the Romans, built round the foot of their city, that Hannibal threw his Punic troops in vain before he retired to the rich territory of Picenum, where he fortified his soldiers after the rigors of their journey through Northern Italy and the Alps. It is the same all through Spoleto. Here and there we wandered into steep, narrow lanes, where the strip of sky above our heads was cut by bridges leading from one tall mediaeval mansion to another, where there were shrines in the walls and Gothic doorways leading to dark and mysterious courtyards, and Doors of the Dead, and, to speak truth, unsavoury odours, which are the least pleasing reminiscences of the Middle Ages. But for the most part Spoleto is clean and modern, with wide streets and piazzas graced by hanging gardens, in which her Roman fragments are stranded like the skeletons of giants, where they are not buried beneath the soil, like the wonderful subterranean bridge outside the Porta San Gregorio; and the lower church of Sant'Ansano, on the foundations of a Temple of the Sun; and the mosaiced house which is said to have been the home of the mother of the Emperor Vespasian. Among her treasures Spoleto holds the dust of Brother Philip in a beautifully wrought casket of lapis lazuli and gold, for that was how the façade of Santa Maria Assunta appeared to us as we rounded the corner of the Episcopal Palace, and came upon it suddenly, bathed in the yellow sunlight of late afternoon. The Cathedral of Spoleto is set humbly on the hillside in the shadow of the great Rocca of Nicholas V. So that we stood, as it were, above the jewelled façade, and saw it rising in all its glory at the bottom of a wide steep slope which opened out into a green piazza between the sloping gardens of the Rocca and the little Renaissance Chiesa della Manna d'Oro. Like the Cathedral of Assisi, which its façade resembles, having the same triangular tympanum enclosing grand Gothic arches corresponding to the naves of the older building, it is externally one of the most gracious churches in Umbria. The fifteenth century loggia of its portico supports a Renaissance arabesque, and above it the central arch of the tympanum is filled with gold and blue mosaics which glow like jewels in their rich setting of mellowing stones. The glass in the beautiful rose windows is the colour of lapis lazuli; two little stone pulpits are built into the wall on either side of the portico, and in its shadow is the frescoed chapel of Francesco Eroli, Bishop of Spoleto. But why attempt to reproduce with pen and ink and dull description a picture more fitted to the golden brush of Fra Filippo Lippi, and which indeed owes much of its charm to the beauty of the Umbrian hills billowing away to the horizon, and the alchemy of sunlight changing ancient stones to gold--the complete and lovely unity of Art and Nature. I hope the sun sometimes shines in upon the tomb of Lippo Lippi, for I know he loved it, and the marble cenotaph which Lorenzo the Magnificent raised in his honour, when the Spoletani refused to let him carry away the body of the painter, because 'they were badly provided with things of note,' is rather bald in spite of its florid epitaph. But the tomb itself did not detain us long, for in the apse we had caught sight of some of Brother Philip's loveliest frescoes telling the story of the life of the Virgin, in four great chapters--the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, her Death, and in the vault above, her Coronation in the Courts of Heaven. [Illustration: A STREET IN SPOLETO.] According to Vasari, Fra Filippo, engaged as usual in a love affair, was poisoned by the family of the lady whom he had seduced while he was at work on the Cathedral. It is likely that the people of Spoleto were not so complaisant as the Florentines, who had long ago ceased even to shrug their shoulders at the amours of this son of the Renaissance, although he had refused the offer of Pius II. to legitimise his marriage with the beautiful nun Lucrezia. But later writers have dismissed the idea as one of Vasari's ill-founded scandals. In any case there were few men less worthy of painting the sacred story of Madonna Mary, and few who could have told it with such purity and tenderness, and intuition. For not even the damp which has caused them to peel and discolour in places, or the uninspired work of Fra Diamante who finished them, when Lippo Lippi, 'that vagabond and joyous mortal,' had been laid to rest, can rob these pale and sad Madonnas of their beauty, or take away the spiritual loveliness of the angels, who with the sun and the moon and all the constellations do homage to the Queen of Heaven. But these things are as nothing compared with the real glories of Spoleto--the peculiar beauty of her landscape, and the magnificence of the Ponte delle Torri, the great aqueduct of the Longobard Dukes, which links the city to the sacred ilex groves of Monte Luco. Nature has endowed Spoleto richly. She is built on the slopes of an isolated bastion of the Appennines, which closes as it were the Central Plain of Umbria. Behind her towers the broad shoulder of Monte Luco, veiled in ilex woods. To the south the wild valley of the Tessino opens a vista of rolling hills, mounting fold on fold to the horizon. And from the windows of our inn, the picturesque old Albergo Lucini, whose palatial rooms, sparsely furnished with ancient grandeur, are such a luxury in the hot summer months, we looked over the roofs of the lower town, and across the tranquil country to Perugia, more than forty miles away. [Illustration: A FOUNTAIN OF SPOLETO.] Was it perhaps because we knew this soft and gracious valley, sanctified by the footsteps of many saints, so well, that we loved it even more dearly than we had loved it as we gazed from the bulwarks of Perugia? Then these little towns sown along the hillsides or crowning their miniature peaks, like Trevi, and Montefalco, were nothing but names and points of beauty. But now after many weeks spent on the eastern coast of Italy or among the rugged Appennines, we had come back again to gentle Umbria, to find that every little town was full of smiling memories, and all the winding roads were pathways to romance. Who could forget the classic grace of Clitumnus, when he saw the clustered poplars soaring from the plain? Or the capers and the flowering rosemary, which made a garden of the ancient walls of Trevi? Or the sweetness of the olive woods below Assisi, where we wandered in the footsteps of St. Francis gathering an imperishable bouquet of holy memories? Or the subtle beauty of the Tiber, as it washed the skirts of Perugia's hill? Nor had long association lessened the miracle of the soft radiance of the heavens, or made commonplace the clarity of atmosphere, or dimmed the strange light which seems to float like an eternal benediction between the mountains of this Mystic Land. Early next morning we climbed up the hillside, past the Piazza Mercato, where a blackbird, always singing in a wicker cage, in the shadow of a Roman arch, is the personification of the joyous spirit of Spoleto. A few steps from the Rocca, through a gate in the ancient line of fortification, brought us into a small bastioned piazza overlooking the deep ravine of the Tessino, and the aqueduct which spans it. In my notes, I have said nothing of the Ponte delle Torri except to cry the wonder of it! Which is not surprising, for there are no words to fit it, no words large, or grand, or ambitious, or vigorous enough to describe this bridge of towers and colossal arches, which bestrides the valley between Monte Luco and the hill of Spoleto. It is the work of giants. It would be a worthy testimony to the grandeur that was Rome's; to the energy and the indomitable courage of the men who moulded an empire out of a handful of earth, and ruled the world from seven little hills. But the Ponte delle Torri is not the work of Rome. A mystery surrounds its origin. Theodelapius, third Duke of Spoleto, is said to have built it early in the seventh century, but it is at least reasonable to suppose that the foundations were Roman--indeed the local Guida di Spoleto claims that the actual conduits in use to-day are Roman. And it is obvious that the pointed arches are of mediaeval structure, probably contemporary with the ancient fortress, now a water-mill, which guards the head of the aqueduct on the slopes of Monte Luco. It is in fact a mosaic to which the Spoletans of all ages have contributed their stones. [Illustration: SPOLETO: THE AQUEDUCT.] But it was not only the grandeur of this Leviathan which held us spell-bound on the edge of the ravine; we were captivated by the lavish beauty of its _mise en scène_. For the ilex groves of Monte Luco, sacred to the ancients for their primeval forests, and to a younger world for the mediaeval saints who dwelt therein, were full of morning mists. Here and there some treetops illumined by the rays of the sun, lately risen above the shoulder of the mountain, stood out in clear relief against the dark hillside. The rest was held in shadow. Little blue columns of smoke ascended on the windless air from the bosky depths where charcoal-burners made their fires; the far-away bells of the Franciscan Convent on its crest were like the music of wind-bells under the roof-trees of the Gods. Every now and then the chimney of a cottage, sunk in the hillside below the level of the road on which we stood, wove a transparent veil of fragrant wood-smoke between our profane eyes and the sacred mount. We came again in the evening when the aqueduct was bathed in the declining sunlight, which threaded its great arches with slanting bars of gold. And then we crossed that magic Bridge of the Giants and plunged into the enchanted ilex woods of Monte Luco. The stony way was sown with cyclamens, and the rocks were broidered with bronze and emerald mosses. At our feet the hill sloped sharply down the ravine and the slanting sunshine wove a web of light between the trees. Above us a sea of sunlit ilexes rose to the blue heavens. As we went deeper, the cool, scented breath of oak trees came out to greet us. And across the valley we could see Spoleto and her crested Rocca, with her ancient walls striding down the hillside through her vineyards. From this point she seemed to be a city of towers and _loggie_ and hanging gardens. [Illustration: SPOLETO: SAN PIETRO.] Presently we reached the beautiful and ancient church of San Pietro, and found the strange Mediaeval carvings on its façade gilded by the last rays of the setting sun. While we were spelling out its fanciful devices the glow faded from its face, leaving it old and grey at the head of its long flight of steps, as though it had seen fear. And indeed time has dealt harshly with this shrine since it was founded in the fifth century on the fragments of a pagan building. Even the fading light sufficed to show us that it held no treasures, beyond the twelfth-century fragments from Byzantine Bestiaries on its façade, and the later reliefs dating from its restoration in the fourteenth century, after it had been wantonly destroyed by the Ghibelline wolf, seeking in vain to force an entrance to the fold of Spoleto. THE FALLS OF TERNI At Terni the marvels of Nature have been transformed into the marvels of electricity without changing the face of the landscape. For the Velino, the swift black river which has its source deep in the mountains of the Abruzzi, and hurls itself in three gigantic columns over a precipice 600 feet high, takes to the mills of Terni an electric current which does the work of 200,000 horses without speeding the placid Nar as it washes the fantastic Gothic walls of Interamna. There are few waterfalls so unspoiled as Terni. The immense power-station is almost out of sight, and though the leafy valley which excited the admiration of the younger Pliny is blocked at various points by great factories, there is not a single café or restaurant to mar the savage splendour of the Cascate delle Marmore. Early in the morning of a St. Martin's summer we set out from Terni to see the famous cascades of the Velino, which, like the falls of Tivoli, are the work of Roman hands.[26] The great mountains closing the valley of the Nar were shadowy against the sunlit mists. As we drew near, the clamour of the water grew and gathered like the exultant roar of some primeval giant. The river began to hurry in its deep channel below the road, and foam-white torrents clambered down its banks, with bursts of laughter, to find themselves escaped from the main waterfall. But still the mists clung to the green hillsides so that we only saw their crests silhouetted against the welkin. Suddenly out of the tender half-tones a sunlit cloud loomed silver in the heavens. I have seen the snowy turrets of a cumulus illuminated by a burst of sunlight on many an April noon. I seemed to see them now, shadowed against the blue Empyrean. But it was no cloud. The growing clamour told me so. That fantastic outline, clothed in the semblance of giant trees, was solid rock cleft with a flood of leaping water, which caught the sunshine, like the silver lining of a storm-cloud, as it topped the cliff, and then vanished in a mist of mounting spray. Sun and river poured together over the ilex-crested mountain, the light in solid rays athwart the belching smoke of the falls, the water like a living thing, an unchained element, which leapt again in ecstasy to the blue heavens, winnowing the air with plumes of wind-tossed spray. On either side the hills fell back before us, their forests and terraces glistening with Byron's '... unceasing shower, which round, With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain, Is an eternal April to the ground, Making it all one emerald....' And in the midst, cleaving the ilex forest on the brink of the precipice, the Velino hurled itself into the abyss with a mighty shout of laughter. Sometimes it spent itself upon the rocks in foaming passion, impotently desiring its consummation with the sea, doomed to captivity upon the way, to lie in stagnant pools chained for the service of humanity. Sometimes it trickled languidly over the moss-grown crevices, engrossed in the delicate pleasure of its own music. Sometimes it glissaded as transparently as glass, seemingly motionless in its resistless speed, over the smooth yellow boulders bearded with stalactites. [Illustration: THE FALLS OF TERNI.] It was profoundly exciting--the voice of Nature, a real and primitive thing. Only a little way up the valley great manufactories choked up the banks of the Nera; but here the clamorous voices, mad with the delirium of motion, sang to the heavens in unbridled joy. It was a great song of labour, a gigantic Wagnerian strain, in which we could distinguish the lilting song of the Rhine daughters above the thunder of the giants, telling the happy innocence of earth before her stolen gold became a passion to gods and men. Or in another mood we heard the laughter of water-gods as they leapt into the boiling chasm, and the dryads and the naiads calling to their sisters, the 'wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist,' and clapping their hands to see their great comrade come hurtling from the heavens careless, in his mad race, of the defeat to come. Only the mists, the tiger-striped mists, leapt up to warn the silver giant, and lost themselves under the melting kiss of the sun. We never could have wearied of watching these maenads dancing before their lord. But time pressed. We were to be in Narni that night, and we had yet to climb to the head of the fall, through its enchanted ilex-wood, where ferns and flowers, all wet with glancing spray, grow round the lips of overhanging caves, and dock leaves wave huge fans in the wind of rushing waters. Sometimes through an opening in the trees we caught sight of a moving curtain of white mist; sometimes the path led on to a narrow ledge overhanging the main fall, where we could stand in the shelter of a hollowed cave and watch the water leaping down in Gothic points of spume, plunging into the smoking cauldron to rise again in Iris clouds of spray. A butterfly which had ventured from the green shadows of the music-haunted wood fluttered an instant in the wild wet breath of the fall, and was drawn remorselessly into the vortex. Here, indeed, with the thunder of the Velino shaking the hillside, there was a savage and awful beauty in the scene. Here we could recognise the landscape where Virgil's Fury, leaving 'the high places of the world,' fled to the mansions of Cocytus. 'A place of high renown, and celebrated by fame in many regions ... the side of a grove, gloomy with thick boughs, hems it in on either hand, and in the midst a torrent, in hoarse murmurs and with whirling eddies, roars along the rocks....' [Illustration: THE LOWER FALL OF TERNI.] We lunched in a cottage a little way from the bottom of the fall, which seemed to be a restaurant for the humble needs of the workmen in a neighbouring carburet factory. At least its landlady was greatly distressed because she had nothing for the signori. 'Non è basta! non è basta!' she cried, although we discovered four roast chickens and some excellent potato salad as well as a huge cauldron of _minestre_ on her stove. Later, when the factory bell had rung for _mezzogiorno_, and all the employés crowded in, we found there really was not enough to go round. But the courtesy and charming manners of the workmen were a revelation. Although there was no soup for some of them, and certainly we had eaten one of their chickens, they treated the whole affair as a joke, and heaped their plates contentedly with _pasti_. But to us the biggest joke was the price of the good lunch we had so unwittingly stolen from the regular patrons of the inn. For the bill for the wine was threepence-halfpenny for all, and the potato salad was a penny each, and a plate of chicken was sixpence, and a plate of soup twopence only. Truly, as the poet said, 'Italy has everything: climate, scenery, art, antiquities, history, romance, beautiful people, fruit and wine and cheapness.' NARNI From the first moment that we saw her, a jewelled hill-top set high among the stars, there was a touch of magic about Narni. As we drove through the valley tall black cypress spires showed us our path, and the starry heavens were as luminous as though Diana had already lit her lamp below the hills. Dimly we glimpsed a battlemented gate rising gaunt above the road, and the ghostly form of the broken bridge of Augustus striding amid the reflections of the Nar. We climbed up into the hooded night between great hedges where the frogs shrilled softly to each other. The Pleiades hung low upon the mists of the horizon like the phosphorescence of a tropic sea, and above us the lights of Narni were gold against the silvered canopy of stars. The way was long although it was so beautiful, and lonely, too, when the town was hidden from us by a fold of the hill and we could see nothing but the towers of the Rocca upon its crest, a shade of the Middle Ages among the imperishable stars. So that we welcomed the cheery beams of a shepherd's lantern set by chance in the window of a white-walled farm, like a beacon on the dark hillside. And soon afterwards we passed under the beetling Trecento gate of Narni, and found ourselves in a piazza where the driver pointed out thousands of earthenware pots spread on the ground beneath the trees. 'For the festa to-morrow, Signori,' he said. And that was the first we heard of any festa. But not the last, for all the inns were crowded, and it was only by dint of a great deal of talking, and through the courtesy of a young Italian girl who had travelled by the same train as ourselves, and who volunteered to sleep in the village, that we were able to find two beds and a sofa in the Albergo del Angelo. [Illustration] We woke to find ourselves in Arcady. The smiling sunshine called me early out of bed. Below my windows came the music of passing herds and flocks--the lowing of kine and the tinkling of their bells, the clipping hoofs of mules and asses, the pattering feet of sheep, like summer rainfall on the broad-leaved trees. And, strangest sound of all, the clear high song of larks, so rarely heard in Italy, where the native, as in Dante's age, still 'throws away his days in idle chase of the diminutive birds.'[27] There were two windows in my room. The one to which the dulcet singing of the larks called my attention looked from the wall of Narni's precipice into the deep valley of the Nera, a magnificent and awe-inspiring view, for the Angelo is perched upon a crest of beetling rocks with a sheer drop of a hundred feet towards the river. But from the other I looked on one of the loveliest pastoral pageants I have ever seen in Umbria. For down the old Flaminian Way which Popes and Emperors, and Caesar with an army, trod, and up a winding pathway such as Gentile da Fabriano loved to paint, which led from the valley to the hill of Narni and joined the main road at our very door, came neat-herds driving before them snow-white oxen, and peasant women with brightly flowered kerchiefs riding a-pillion on mules and asses, or walking behind flocks of sheep with wide flat baskets of poultry and fruit and vegetables on their heads. Barefoot children helped to guide the calves; and here a shaggy farmer rode up the hill a-horseback in sheepskin trousers, with a wallet and flask of wine slung across his mediaeval wooden saddle; and there some happy youths led in their heifers with scarlet fillets hanging on their brows. [Illustration] They might have been processions of the Magi bringing their gifts to the Infant Christ in the dawn of the Nativity. Or, better still, these joyful husbandmen and shepherds bringing the first-fruits of their harvest into this little hill-town for the ox-fair of St. Michael, might have been the votaries of Apollo coming to celebrate the Pyanepsia with offerings and invocations. We dressed in haste and hurried to join them as they flowed along the streets and out through Narni's mediaeval gate to their Forum Boarium beyond the city walls. And it was Arcady we found below the silver olives. For the road looped a natural theatre, such as the Greeks loved to terrace and face with marble, where the citizens might sit gazing over the glittering stage, on which Gods and Heroes spoke the dialogues of Aeschylus and Sophocles, at one of Nature's masterpieces--Etna, rising above the Strait of Messina, or the isle-girt sea of Salamis. Here the olive-clad slopes were steep and the curves of the bay were bold, and the flat area which they enclosed was commanded on one side by the towering bastions of Narni and on the other by a great Dominican Convent with all its ancient splendour revived by the Royal House of France. And here we looked across a market in the hollow of the theatre, where thousands of white oxen, their foreheads bound with Roman fillets, scarlet and blue, stood below the twisted olives in a mist of slanting sunlight, which threw a tracery of blue-veined shadows on their snowy flanks. Beyond them in the open champaign we could see the towered bridge over the Nera, and the green pasture land characteristic of lower Umbria which makes it so different to the vine-engarlanded plains of the Valley of Spoleto. [Illustration: THE CATTLE FAIR AT NARNI.] On the hill above, the mules and asses, still bearing their wooden pack-saddles picked out in brass and scarlet cloth, were tethered in the shade of the army of olives, which swept up to the walls of the grim old Rocca. And before us lay the winding road, with its gay stalls and booths and its moving crowd of peasants, looking for all the world like a brightly-coloured ribbon threading the grey wood. [Illustration] Surely the gay Hermes, the god of markets, the beneficent patron of pastures and herds, smiled on this gracious fête champêtre, so pagan in its simplicity and lavish beauty. Perhaps he lingered down in the ox-fair where a charming patriarchal custom was observed every time a bargain was concluded, when the bystanders joined the hands of the two farmers concerned, and held them while they shook in token of good-will. Or likelier still he wandered on the causeway with Corydon and Thyrsis, or, in more jovial mood, searched among the pretty peasant girls, for Amaryllis and fair Delia, whose thoughts to-day were all for market wares, displayed by plausible auctioneers below the laurel avenue. [Illustration] There were restaurants of trestle-tables in the chequered shade, where husbandmen regaled themselves with such aesthetic fare as bread and celery and walnuts, washed down by plentiful libations of amber wine; and savoury kitchens where pigs and calves were roasted whole on spits; and stalls of peasant jewellery--strings of blood-red coral and over-chased earrings; and booths of lace and embroidery. Here boots and shoes were spread beside the road; there sun-burnt peasant women were buying stays, heaped on the ground close to a stall of fluttering kerchiefs. The majolica and copper dishes were also ranged along the roadside, as were the stalls of wooden implements, bobbins, and spoons and trays. But the cotton umbrellas, scarlet and blue and emerald green, were hung like fantastic lanterns from the branches of the avenue. What a scene it was! The lowing of the kine mingled with the distant music of the bells of Narni. Every moment fresh arrivals added their quota to the merry bustle of the market, some bearing on their heads great baskets heaped with fruit, some laden with captive turkeys and chickens, some leading in their wide-horned oxen, gay with scarlet fillets and bells slung round their silken dewlaps. The brilliant kerchiefs of the women made them look like flower-gardens as they stood in smiling groups before some alluring bargain held up to their admiring eyes by salesmen. And mingling with the crowd were fortune-tellers, and ballad-singers, and the terrible crawling beggars of Italy. Later in the day we went down the hillside and rested in the shadow of the great ruined bridge of Augustus, that splendid relic of Imperial Rome, which once carried the Flaminian Way across the waters of the Nera. Only one arch is left to stride across the ravine, and in the middle of the sulphureous stream the second pier has fallen sideways in huge blocks, as though it had been toppled over by an earthquake. But even in its ruin it is a monument of the greatness of Rome, and it frames a wonderful vista of the wooded glen of the Nar and the ancient convent of San Casciano. [Illustration: NARNI: MARKET PEOPLE.] The contadini were pouring out of the city and across the river by the mediaeval bridge that takes on its shoulders the modern traffic, which, had the years been kinder, would still have been carried by the Ponte d'Augusto. They were all laden with purchases from the fair, and they made merry as they passed along, driving before them, not without a struggle, their unwilling cattle. But we did not stay there long to watch them, notwithstanding the picturesque beauty of the scene. For the pitiable cries of the mothers, struggling to go back to their calves, resounded through the valley; and the blind unreasoning misery of their offspring, driven with blows along an unaccustomed road, was heartrending to witness. Though common sense was plausible to point out how soon the agony would pass, it was too human to be anything but tragic. So we climbed the hill back to Narni and wandered through her empty streets, astonished to find them rich in ancient grandeur. For we had grown to think of her as a pastoral queen of Arcady, forgetting her antiquity--that as Nequinum she was great among the cities of the Umbri; that under the Romans she was a fortress of importance commanding the Flaminian Way; and that in the fifteenth century she bore a famous name as the ancestral home of Gattamelata, the great Condottiere of the Venetians. Narni has good reason to be proud of her sons. One was an Emperor, one a Pope, and one a hero. And she herself has an heroic history, for so great was her defence against the Romans that when at last she fell before the Consul Fulvius in B.C. 299, he was given a Triumph 'de Samnitibus Nequinatibusque,' and in the fatal year, 1527, she offered an historic and gallant resistance to the _lanzknechts_ of the Bourbon when they retreated from the horrors of the Sack of Rome. For this the little citadel suffered the terrors of a sack in which one thousand men and women were brutally put to death by the Spanish and German mercenaries. So that there is again cause for wonder that so many of her ancient churches and palaces have been left unharmed, like the gracious little chapel of Santa Maria Impensole, the Gothic Palazzo Comunale and Palazzo dei Priori, and the beautiful cathedral, which is so rich in tombs, and counts among its treasures a Romanesque shrine of high antiquity and interest. But though the Bridge of Augustus was the glory of Nequinum in the days of Martial, it is Erasmus, called Gattamelata, who is the chief pride of Narni. A whole quarter of the city bears his name. In the Vicolo Gattamelata a humble little house is inscribed 'Narnia me genuit, Gattamelata fui,' and in the Palazzo Comunale, beside Narni's great Ghirlandajo, is a copy of that Knight of the Uffizi, which up to the last few years has been ascribed to Giorgione, and which the citizens of this little hill-town treasure as a contemporary portrait of their hero. [Illustration: NARNI: THE PONTE D'AUGUSTO.] I have another memory of Narni. One morning, very early before sunrise, we set out from that little city and made pilgrimage along the Old Flaminian Way to the altar of an unknown, quite forgotten god. It was our fancy to pay homage by the roadside where the careless feet of generations had passed by. But we had not thought to find such unexpected beauty on this ancient highway whose stones were old before the Caesars had been dreamed of by the oracles of Rome. The Via Flaminia girdled the hillside, now disappearing round the bluff of overhanging cliffs, now plunging into bosky depths of wooded slopes, now reappearing across the ravine like a white thread among the firs and ilexes which clothe the valley of the Nera; now climbing down to the open plain. The air was fragrant with the freshness of a sweet September morning, and musical with the liquid song of larks. Below the road the hill sloped sharply from our feet to where the Nera encircled the folds of its mountains; and above us to the right towered a sheer cliff, curtained with wild flowers. At last we reached the altar of the Unknown God, or so we called him, because, unlike Aius Locutius of the Palatine, we knew nothing of him save that in the distant ages, even before the coming of the Romans, men sacrificed and offered incense here before a god. It was only a rough-hewn table of stone, raised above the level of the road, overlooking the deep valley of the Nera where it pierces the wooded hills and widens out into that misty plain of the Tiber,--already a mighty river on its way to Rome. As we stood before it, gazing down the valley, Phoebus gilded the hill-tops. Our feet were on the Old Flaminian Road. And because the day was young and the air like wine, and the ancient way to Rome was as beautiful as a poem, we gathered together ferns and dried leaves, and lit a fire upon this cold altar of the God of an older world. It began in play. The Poet put a sprig of scented thyme upon the ancient stone. But as the fire leapt up, and the blue smoke ascended to the clear air like fumes of incense, our laughter died away. Just for that moment all we were slipped from us. We became as children playing in a temple who turn from their games at the solemn voice of the prayer-bell, and leave their toys unheeded for a while. Just for that moment there was only beauty, and the need of worship to the God of beautiful things. No longer can we say, 'Glory and loveliness have passed away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the east to meet the smiling day.' For standing on the steep hillside upon the Old Flaminian Way, we made a heap of scented herbs, thistles and dry mullein stalks, all that the withered bosom of the earth could yield, and made our offering to the valley and the hills and the great plain which opened out before us. So the old stone was warmed, the old god propitiated. And as the smoke curled up to the blue heavens we saw the feet of Apollo golden on the hill-tops. When we turned back we found Narni sheathed in sunlit mists, as Turner painted her, like a mediaeval saint rapt in the mystic glory of communion with nature. The Poet quoted softly:-- 'For, it may be, if still we sing And tend the shrine, Some Deity on wandering wing May there incline; And, finding all in order meet, Stay while we worship at her feet. ORVIETO: THE CITY OF WOE 'To rear me was the task of Power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon ye who enter here.' DANTE. The broad white steps of Orvieto Cathedral were strewn with thousands of dead flies, killed by the merciless glitter of its new mosaics in the eye of the sunshine. Poor little dust of life scattered at the door of Madonna Mary's temple, with your shattered wings and your sightless crawling agony, meeting your death unwittingly in the heart of this city of woe! You are the key to its desolation, you with your myriads of dead, the horrid harvest of an insatiable ghoul. For not even the shrill music of Luca Signorelli's angels, hovering above the gloomy fortresses of Orvieto with their hair streaming in the breeze of the dawn, can raise her up to life. She is a city of the dead--shrivelled and dark-browed, standing high over the plain on an island of volcanic rock, 'dark-stained with hue ferruginous,' like Malebolge within the depths of hell. Death lies around her in the valleys where the earth is riddled with the tombs of Etruria--one vast necropolis--and she herself, though she held life so dearly, as we can see by her grim Romanesque houses each with its back to the wall as it were, each armed at every point, would be almost dead to the world if it were not for the Tuscan glitter of her great Miracle Church. Even her name has a sinister ring about it--Orvieto--the Old City. To the writers of antiquity she was Urbs Vetus, but no man knows her ancient name, and although archaeologists dispute in vain as to the rival claims of Herbanum and Salpinum, it is recognised that the origin of Orvieto is plunged in mystery. Unlike the other cities of Southern Etruria, built on the extremity of a peninsula of hills, she is isolated on a volcanic rock in the heart of the melancholy valley of the Paglia, an impregnable position, as many a Pope has realised with thankfulness as he fled to it for Sanctuary from the wrath of Emperors or the malice of Cardinals, or, more often still, the vengeance of the people of Rome. For Orvieto was consistently Guelf in her sympathies, and no less than thirty-two Popes have taken refuge within her walls since Adrian IV., Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman who ever sat upon the Papal throne, held his court there in 1157, because Rome had not yet forgotten the martyrdom of the heroic Arnold of Brescia. [Illustration: BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO.] We came to Orvieto by rail and scaled her precipice on the funicular, which connects the station down on the plain with the city on the rock above. If we had come by road, only a toilsome climb of several miles would have brought us to the grim Porta Maggiore, where Boniface VIII., in his twofold tiara, keeps watch from his niche above the gateway. Does any city frown so fiercely on the traveller as Orvieto? The arch is gloomy and the road within is dark and steep. The sheer cliffs sweep to right and left like the pylons of an Egyptian temple, and above them peer fortified houses, squat and brown. This surely is the city named of Dis, which Dante had in mind, whose walls 'appeared as they were framed of iron,' upon whose gates the citizens looked down with ireful gestures! Through this gate hastened the Popes, fleeing from wrath to come, and in their footsteps we toiled up the steep street between the same houses of yellow volcanic tufa gone black, which frowned upon the turbulent successors of St. Peter, who let down their nets, not for the drawing in of souls, but for the dragging in of wealth and the entangling of the feet of the unwary. Through dark alleys we could see the gloomy depths of caves, hollowed out of the living rock behind them: in the low _bassi_ the citizens of this broken city toiled silently, and outside their doors sat hooded owls on poles driven into the stony ground. Here indeed were the Middle Ages, but not the Middle Ages of pomp and pageantry, of Gothic palaces and slim young knights in silken hose. There are some streets in Orvieto which look as though war had stalked through them only yesterday; as though the terror-stricken Ghibellines still cowered within doors, while the Monaldeschi rang bells in triumph, as they did on that fateful day in the year of grace 1312, when the Filippeschi had tried in vain to open the gate of the city to Henry VII. of Luxemburg. [Illustration: ORVIETO: THE CLOCK TOWER.] Well, that is over now. But the curse of the Prophet Isaiah seems to have fallen upon the papal City of Refuge. 'In that day shall her strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch ... and there shall be desolation.' So that it was with a kind of wonder, as though we too had assisted at a miracle, that we came suddenly upon the Duomo of Orvieto with its rare marbles and brazen beasts of the Evangelists, its glittering mosaics, and gilded pinnacles soaring to the heavens. For this great cathedral, built to commemorate the triumph of the dogma of the Roman Church over northern intelligence in the Miracle of Bolsena, is a bird of strange plumage to find nesting on the melancholy rock of Orvieto. Siena or Florence, Pisa or Lucca, any of the flowery cities of Tuscany would have been its proper setting. It is too gay for Umbria, whose hills are bathed in the serene, ineffable calm of a mystic holiness, who, remembering her many saints, still keeps the low estate of a handmaiden of the Lord. It is like a golden iris plucked from some Tuscan garden, and transplanted upon the bosom of this sombre precipice of tufa upheaved by Nature in primeval struggles. For chance and the Papacy have grafted the most exotic bloom of Italian Gothic architecture upon the rock of Orvieto. But look closer. Behind the aerial grace of the façade with its bewildering embroidery of yellowing marbles, rarely carved, its jewelled canopies of mosaic, its Lombard colonnades and soaring pinnacles, not even Time, the great artist who puts the crown of beauty upon all the works of man, can veil the ugly nudity of nave and transept. If the pride of the Orvietans had only left him a freer hand upon the façade it would have been immeasurably more beautiful. But the mosaics which should gleam from their rich setting with the subdued brilliance of a peacock's feather, have been restored so garishly by a local artist that they rob the cathedral of half her wonder. Their glitter sears like a burning glass: only on a rainy day, or by moonlight, could we look on them with equanimity. It was not for these that we stayed so long outside the portal of Santa Maria, but to study the exquisite carvings which Lorenzo Maitani or Niccolò Pisano traced on the bases of the four pilasters. When two such scholars as John Addington Symonds and Mr. Langton Douglas fall out over the authorship of these sculptures it is useless to offer any opinion on the subject. But there is a pretty legend concerning Niccolò Pisano and his work at Orvieto; and because the reading of it gave me much pleasure as I sat on the stone bench below the Opera del Duomo, marvelling over the glories of the Miracle Church, I will give it in a quotation from Mr. Symonds' delightful essay:--'Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Dante invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediaeval poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Græco-Roman sarcophagus. He studied the bas-relief of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice in the Campo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines and the dignity expressed in its figures that in all his subsequent works we trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture.'[28] [Illustration: A STREET IN ORVIETO.] And, indeed, there is a curious and unexpected beauty in these naïve reliefs telling the ancient story of the Creation and the Fall, the Old Testament up to the Birth of Christ, the life of Jesus, and the Last Judgement. For though they are a typically mediaeval expression of faith, yet they are astonishingly free from the bizarre design and crude workmanship of mediaeval imaginings. Lofty in conception, they tell the solemn history of Christianity in a series of scenes divided the one from the other by the Vine, of which it has been written, 'I am the Vine and ye are the branches.' But here for the first time in Mediaeval Art we see treatment worthy of the nobility of the Theme. For whether the sculptor did really become enamoured of the antique by the study of an ancient tomb, or whether some fire of genius within himself bade him struggle forth from the swaddling bands of Byzantium and the grotesqueries of the North, he has inscribed a new chapter in the history of Art upon the walls of the Cathedral of Orvieto. Forsaking the crowded imagery of Mediaevalism, he has made manifest the dignity and beauty of the human form. And something else as well. For looking on the reliefs of the Creation, we can almost hear the rustling wings of the two guardian angels as they hover in the silent dawn above the garden where God creates man in His own Image. And we see the germs of that poetic imagery which was later to bear fruit in the genius of Ghiberti and Donatello, even, it may be, in the frescoes of the Sixtine Chapel where Michelangelo completed the great epic of the Human Form, whose prologue we may read upon the stones of Orvieto Cathedral. Directly we pass through the portal and enter the bare, ugly church, it is apparent that although its Tuscan architects and artists began their work lightheartedly enough, and although the Popes made offer of indulgences to all who assisted them, the sullen influence of the place weighed on their spirits. See how grey and gloomy is the nave behind its gay mask; see how Niccolò in spite of his love for the human form dwelt on the grim drama of the Fall of Man; see how the tragedy of life is blazoned forth by Signorelli. Only the Umbrians, the simple-hearted artists of the countryside, called in to paint the chancel with the story of the Virgin and the Life of Christ, and the Blessed Angelico, working on the vault of the Cappella Nuova, seem to have been untroubled. But neither the frescoes of the Umbrians, among which we thought we could trace the hand of Pinturicchio, and certainly he was under commission to paint for the canons of Orvieto, when he was working in the Borgia Rooms in Rome, nor the exquisite reliquary which Ugolino Vieri of Siena wrought for the miraculous Corporal of Bolsena, detained us long. For in the southern transept we had glimpsed the Chapel of the Madonna di San Brizio, where Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli frescoed the vault, below which, many years later Luca Signorelli came to paint his great pictures of the Last Judgement. It is a strange coincidence, as though some deep emotion had moved these Tuscans to expression, that in Orvieto we see not only the beginnings of realism in sculpture but the masterpiece of the first great painter of the Quattrocento, who gave life to the human form in fresco. Every one knows that Vasari claims for his kinsman, Luca of Cortona, the honour of having inspired the Last Judgement of Michelangelo. And no one can dispute that the Florentine, his greater genius less exercised by the study of anatomy, clothed his figures with more grace and dignity; and that the Dantesque terrors of his hell, with the boatman of the Styx silhouetted against the lurid glare of the underworld, are told with more reserve than Signorelli's. But whether the confusion and morbidity of the whole, already foreshadowing Baroque, surpasses the spacious compositions of Signorelli is largely a matter for the enthusiast for technique to declare. [Illustration: ORVIETO: SANT'AGOSTINO.] It is interesting to note the discrepancy between the conditions under which these two men worked, each animated by the fire of genius, though one so far beyond the other, each rapt in contemplation of the awe-inspiring mystery of life and death. Michelangelo, with the denunciations of Savonarola fresh in his memory, worked alone and silently below the vault of the Sixtine, where he had lavished his splendid energy twenty-two years before; almost friendless, filled with gloomy imaginings. And looking on the Sixtine Judgement we feel something of the inarticulate anguish of his great spirit. But the frescoes of the Cappella della Madonna di San Brizio are the key to an unsuspected chamber in the soul of Luca Signorelli. For how reconcile these strange visions of the anti-Christ and of Life after Death with our knowledge of that courteous and stately gentleman 'who delighted in living splendidly, and loved to dress himself in beautiful garments.' Only one other time does he give us a glimpse into this secret chamber, when we read the pathetic story of how he painted the bodily loveliness of his dead son before he yielded it, dry-eyed and silently, to the tyranny of the grave. Yet here perhaps we have the clue to the meaning of his frescoes in the Cathedral of Orvieto. For he had loved exceedingly, and seen his loved one lowered to the unresponsive earth. Do not we too know what it is, in spite of all our creeds and our philosophies, to weep for the gentle voice and the dear brave eyes and the comforting hand of those others whom we shall never meet again except in dreams? And it is not only the spirit that we cry for, but the body. So, Signorelli. And we felt this, especially looking at the fresco of the Resurrection. For into the cold grey dawn of a featureless world rise men and women, struggling with the clay which seems to cling about their limbs, forcing them to make conscious efforts. Above them in the starry heavens two strong and splendid angels send forth the blast which calls them from the earth. The utter aloneness and the awful sense of space make the newly-risen dead shrink together, and some of them cling to each other, showing a pathetic human feeling of desolation in the midst of their wonderment and terror. Others are still engrossed in their struggle with the encumbering earth. But there are some who meet in this cold plain after long years of separation, and rush to hold each other. How Signorelli loved their splendid physical beauty! Even in his Paradise, where the heavenly choir makes music overhead, and the angels scatter celestial roses among the saints, he does not clothe them in gold raiment, only in their fair, strong limbs which were to him as beautiful as flowers. It was not so long a step as it appeared from Signorelli's Visions of the Future Life to the Necropolis of Etruria, below the frowning walls of the city. For Orvieto is shadowed by the Wings of the Angel of Death--the _genie_ of the ancient Etruscans, which we see faintly limned upon their sepulchres--and as the old custode at the Mancini Tombs told us with arms outspread towards the plain, 'c'è una vasta città dei morti, più grande che la città alta.' The way was strewn with flowers, like all the paths of Umbria, and it led us through the undergrowth at the foot of the rock of Orvieto to the olive garden of the Mancini Necropolis. Barren figs sprouted from the gaping crevices overhead, and sometimes the bearded ivy hung half-way down the cliff. Once we came upon two rude wooden crosses nailed to the brown tufa, with the marks of a third between them, making the desolate valley more like a Golgotha than ever. [Illustration: ETRUSCAN NECROPOLIS BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO.] The necropolis below the hanging church of Sant'Agostino is more interesting than romantic now that the tomb has been dismantled, which Signor Mancini used to show to the traveller, intact, with the inmate lying on his rough bed, surrounded by his last possessions. The sepulchres are not hollowed out of the living rock like most Etruscan tombs, but are built in a sort of honey-comb of rough masonry, back to back, with chambers about 12 ft. long by 8 ft. wide, and perhaps 10 ft. high. The round _cippi_ on the mounds which cover them make them appear curiously like Oriental villages. But it is to the student rather than to the pilgrim in the world of Beauty that this sombre burial-place of the ancients will appeal. We found more joy in the painted tombs on the hill of the Cappuccini, where in the cavernous depths of the tufa rock we caught a fleeting glimpse of Proserpine seated beside the Lord of Hades, and heard the flutings of Etruscan slaves as their princes drank libations to their own departed souls. And it is worth while crossing the valley in the early morning to see the loveliness of Orvieto, crowning her great rock in the heart of her wide pale valley, with the sunlight gilding her towers and the jewelled face of her cathedral. [Illustration: ORVIETO: ETRUSCAN TOMB.] It was very early when we emerged from the frowning gate of the city and dipped down among the dewy vineyards. Beside the road an aqueduct rose out of the earth, a crumbling mass of ancient masonry. As we climbed down into the valley it towered above us, spanning the ravine, but when we toiled over the penitential stones of the Via dei Cappuccini, thankful for its shade as we mounted, it sank again into the hillside, and the leaping green things clambered upon it, eager to drag it back to the ditch. So we went leisurely through the play of light and shade, and always as we looked back we saw Orvieto rising sheer out of the valley like a queen on her brown rock. The morning mist wove a magic beauty round the spires of her Gothic cathedral and the giant pine-tree on the edge of her precipice, until she seemed the very city Turner immortalised. And presently we came into a chestnut grove where the path was hidden under a carpet of rustling autumn leaves; and a tangle of wild flowers--harebell, cyclamen, saffron and fireweed--wove a tapestry on the loom of the grass. Here were our nameless tombs, sunk deep in the tufa rock, with over-arching trees above their gates and Canterbury bells growing on their mossy paths. Within, the damp had eaten away many of the beautiful forms about which Dennis wrote. But we could trace the shapes of the Lords and Ladies of Etruria as they sat like shadows before their eternal banquet in the halls of Elysium; we could see the slaves preparing their elaborate feast, here baking bread, there pounding meat to make it tender. And on another wall, a young warrior, attended by a winged genius, bearing in her hand a scroll inscribed with his good and evil deeds, drove in his chariot to Judgement in the Unseen World. In the midst of these wraiths there was one unspoiled fragment of plaster, the head of a youth, beautiful and Greek, who gazed sadly upon the ruin of his gods, shut from the world so fair, which he had dreamt was made for his strong youth and beauty, in whose ears even the faint, half-vanished music of the pipes will soon be silenced, if it is true that when the pictured ghosts of things have faded their soul is stilled. Their melody rang in our ears when we stood once more in the chequered shadow of the chestnut grove, already gilded with autumnal gold, and looked across the wide pale valley to Orvieto. It was the hour of Mass, a Sabbath day and wonderfully silent. Again we seemed to hear that plaintive strain. But it was only the humming of the insects, and the bells of the distant city calling her people to prayer. VITERBO Though they are sisters in name--Urbs Vetus and Vetus Urbs--and though their function in the mediaeval history of the Papacy was the same, it would be difficult to find two cities so dissimilar as Orvieto and Viterbo. The mystic sadness of Orvieto is foreshadowed in the pale valley of the Paglia, strewn with the débris of volcanic upheavals; but instinctively our spirits rose as we drew near the gay and beautiful city of Viterbo, across the rolling plains of Lazio, which have been trodden by the feet of all the armies who sought to invade the sanctuary of Rome. It is a field of history and romance, full of memories. Far away upon our left the Appennines were piled like storm-clouds on the horizon; and upon our right, over the valleys once guarded by the strongholds of Etruria, rose the splendid outline of Montefiascone, the shrine of the Goddess of the Etruscans--the Fanum Voltumnae, to which they gathered in times of doubt or danger to consult the oracles and appease the gods. Near at hand, black against the blue Sabine mountains, was the mysterious Ciminian Mount, whose terrors held the Roman legionaries in check until the Consul Fabius Maximus in B.C. 310 plunged through its forests into the great Etrurian Plain, to the terror of the Senate, whose prohibition reached him too late. [Illustration: OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF VITERBO.] The sun was sinking behind the hill of Montefiascone when we entered Viterbo. It was Sunday, and the passeggiata between the station and the Porta Fiorentina was filled with a gay crowd of citizens and soldiers. For unlike the other papal cities of refuge, Orvieto and Anagni, which have fallen upon evil days, Viterbo, always a natural centre, is becoming an important provincial capital, one of the most prosperous towns in Italy, with a rapidly increasing population. And to her honour be it said that her municipal energy is making itself felt to great advantage in the direction of stripping from her Gothic palaces and churches the baroquetries which have veiled their beauties during the last three centuries. The origin of Viterbo is as mysterious as the source of the Nile. An Etruscan city is known to have stood upon its site; it contains positions of great strength, tongues of hill, guarded by gorges, well suited to the Etruscan style of fortification; and it stands at the Etrurian gate of the Great Ciminian Forest, the chief obstacle which the Romans had to pierce for the subjugation of Etruria. So, putting aside the stupid forgeries of Annio of Viterbo, who 'claimed for his native city an antiquity greater than that of Troy,' it is curious that the Vetus Urbs is not mentioned before the eighth century, when the old chroniclers speak of an ancient castle--castrum Viterbii--standing on the present site of the cathedral. But from the year 773, when it attracted the attention of Desiderius, the last King of the Lombards, who made it the base of his intended conquest of the States of the Church, has its history been interwoven with that of the Papacy. Little is known of Viterbo in Lombard times, for all the grandeur of her Lombard walls, which were many times thrown down and built up again in her constant warfare with Rome. It was not until the beginning of the twelfth century that she sprang into importance in mediaeval history as the capital of the Patrimony, bequeathed by the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany to the occupants of the Chair of St. Peter, assuming the rôle of a fully-armed Minerva springing from the brow of Jove, because her lofty position made her a fortress for the Popes in time of peril from the sword, and a sanatorium in seasons of pestilence. In the twelfth century Eugenius III. summoned the vassals of the Church to assemble in Viterbo, and in the thirteenth century five popes were elected within her walls, and four popes died there; in 1240 Frederick II. was living in peace in Viterbo; and five years later the city inscribed the most glorious page in her annals when the great Emperor was humiliated by her heroic defence against his onslaughts and forced to retreat into Pisan territory. But her power decayed from the end of the thirteenth century, when Honorius IV., in removing the interdict which his predecessor had laid on the city for the outrages committed in the papal elections, decreed that she was to raze her fortifications, lose her jurisdiction, and yield her rectorate to Rome. Later, we find Urban V. staying in the Rocca when he returned from Avignon, the mediaeval Babylon, in answer to the exhortations of Petrarch; and here died the great soldier and statesman, Cardinal Gil d'Albornoz, before the Pope continued his unwilling journey to Rome. But it is chiefly as a city of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we regard Viterbo to-day; for in those stormy years which saw the rise and fall of the great house of Hohenstaufen, the fate of Viterbo was synonymous with that of the Papacy, and it is to this period that most of her mediaeval monuments belong. [Illustration: VITERBO: MEDIAEVAL HOUSE IN THE PIAZZA S. LORENZO.] Coming from Orvieto we found Viterbo very gay and gracious, with exquisite fountains making music in all her piazzas, and her mediaeval streets full of the merry air of vintage time. Already the great vats had been cleansed, and we had encountered enormous barrels groaning and rumbling down the hills as they were rolled to the fountains to be soused and sweetened by sun and air, or tumbled back to their accustomed cellars. All day long the yoked oxen swung slowly in through the ancient gates, drawing carts filled with barrels of fruit; and in front of more than one humble osteria we found a group of men and girls singing and laughing as they pressed the grapes with bare white feet, up and down, up and down, while the dark fluid flowed through a conduit into the vats below. This alone would have made us love Viterbo, just as we still carry gentle memories of Mantua, not so much for its great castles of the Gonzaga, as for the beautiful simplicity of the vintage which we watched being brought home to that city of arcades from the fields round Virgil's home not many autumns ago. [Illustration: VITERBO: THE MOAT OUTSIDE THE PORTA SAN PIETRO.] But Viterbo, 'the Nuremberg of Italy,' is full of charm. She is one of the most mediaeval cities in Italy; she has a whole quarter of thirteenth-century houses cheek by jowl with barons' towers and ancient churches; she has exquisite cloisters like that of Santa Maria della Verità, where the recent Camorra trial was held; and on the hill where the ancient castle of Viterbo stood she cherishes a gem of Gothic architecture--the Palazzo Vescovile, which was once the palace of the popes. This was the stage on which the chief personages in the history of Viterbo and the Papacy played their parts. Here came the Barbarossa to pay his unwilling homage to proud Adrian IV., who thought of lowering human dignity far more than any Latin would have done. Here came Frederick II. in peace, because Viterbo had departed from her loyalty to the Papacy for the time being, since the cause of Gregory IX. had been espoused by her ancient enemy, Rome. Here was elected Urban IV., the pope who never entered the Lateran or St. Peter's. Here Charles of Anjou, and King Philip III. of France, travelling from Tunis with the body of his father, Louis IX., waited for the election of Gregory X. in 1271; and the impatient Charles, seeing that the cardinals were in no hurry to choose a successor for Clement IV., took the roof from their council chamber, confident that discomfort would hasten the decision of those luxury-loving priests. That same year, in the presence of the King of Sicily and the King of France, Henry, son of Richard, Duke of Cornwall, who was on his way to England from the Tunisian crusade, was done to death by Guido di Montfort, Charles' vicar in Tuscany. 'The sight of the English prince awoke the fury of this bloodthirsty warrior, and impelled him to avenge himself on the royal house of England, by whom his great father, Simon of Leicester and Montfort, had been slain in battle, and his remains outraged in death. He stabbed the innocent Henry at the altar of a church, dragged the corpse by the hair, and threw it down the steps of the portal.'[29] It is interesting to note that the murderer was not punished by Charles, and that, as Gregorovius points out, only twelve years later he was spoken of by Martin IV., who made him General in the service of the Church, as his beloved son. But Dante places his soul in hell among the tyrants who were given to blood and rapine, where he commemorates the fact that Prince Henry's heart was exposed before the sorrowing eyes of the English nation beside the waters of the Thames. '... He in God's bosom smote the heart Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames.' But it is difficult to realise such stirring scenes in Viterbo to-day. For directly we left the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, with its cheerful provincial bustle, behind us, and crossed the sunny Piazza del Plebiscito, guarded by the lions of Viterbo, rampant on columns below their heraldic palm-trees, we found her a gentle city fallen upon sleep, full of stately mediaeval houses with outside staircases, and ancient hospices for pilgrims, Gothic and grey, with buttressed walls and cowl-like windows. [Illustration: VITERBO: FROM A WINDOW IN THE PALACE OF THE POPES.] [Illustration: VITERBO: THE STEMMA OF THE CITY.] The Palace of the Popes, where there are memories for every stone, stands with the cathedral in a sunny square beyond the Piazza della Morte and the picturesque palace where the great Farnese Pope was born. Thanks to Pedro Juliani, that most distinguished scholar, who took the name of John XXI. when he was elected to the vacant chair of St. Peter at Viterbo, the palace which was the home of so many popes in the thirteenth century is one of the most beautiful Gothic ruins in Italy. For it was the ill-fated John XXI. who built the exquisite chamber supported by a single mighty column and an arch, which is the chief glory of the Palazzo Vescovile. Legend has been busy with the name of this pope, whose scientific studies made him hated and feared by the ignorant and superstitious monks of his day, and whose untimely death increased the popular belief that he was a magician. He was killed by the falling ceiling of the very room which he had taken such pride in adding to the papal palace, and on the night of the catastrophe it is said that a monk roused his companions from sleep by crying out that he had seen a huge black man knocking with a hammer on the wall of the Pope's room--a legend quite in keeping with the general belief circulated in Rome more than two hundred years later, that the devil had called in person at the Vatican to carry away the body of the wicked Borgia Pope. At the first glance the Palazzo Vescovile seemed nothing but a gracious ruin, for the lovely Gothic chamber of John XXI. is only a shell whose loggias frame the blue heavens, and whose fountain, fallen into decay, is overgrown with weeds. It is open to the sky; but the great Council Chamber, from which that impatient Prince, Charles of Anjou, took the roof above the heads of the Papal Conclave, has been closed in again, although the wind strays at will through its beautiful trefoil windows. And here we loved to sit looking through the empty Gothic frames at the great church of the Trinità across a vine-clad slope, and the grey convents and buttressed walls of Viterbo shimmering in the opal light of an October morning, with the noble sky-line of Montefiascone upon the horizon, and the misty blue hills of Umbria beyond. For we never wearied of the mediaeval grace and the deliberate beauty of this palace of the Popes with its silent fountain and its grass-grown loggia; and one day, while we sat in the lofty Council Chamber which has been witness to so many stirring scenes, a motor drove up to the foot of its sweeping steps, oh, splendid anachronism! and from the inner palace hastened a proper dignitary to meet the ancient prelate who descended from it, and conduct him into the presence of his master, reminding us that this stately ruin is still the episcopal headquarters of Viterbo. [Illustration: VITERBO: THE PALACE OF THE POPES.] [Illustration: VITERBO: FOUNTAIN IN THE PALAZZO MUNICIPIO.] 'Città delle belle fontane e delle belle donne' was the boast of the ancient chroniclers of Viterbo, but we did not see many beautiful women in her streets, although the splendour of her fountains is still a proverb. Every little piazza, no matter how humble, is endowed with a fountain of exquisite grace, where silver floods of water pour over lichened stones, or trickle from the spouting mouths of the Guelph lions of the city; even Rome cannot boast so many gracious fantasies of the fifteenth century. They are as numerous as the beautiful outside staircases which are to be found on more mediaeval houses in Viterbo than in any other Italian city. Such an one is the Casa Poscia, half way up the Via Cavour, which is turned to a humble use to-day, like all the great palaces of Viterbo, having an osteria in its basement, but which is a perfect specimen of the local domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, still closed at night by ancient wooden doors. The Viterbesi invariably point out this house as the Casa of the bella Galiana, whose inscription in the Piazza del Plebiscito bears witness to the mortality of that Helen of the Middle Ages, who was 'flos et honor Patriae, species pulcherrima rerum.' [Illustration: VITERBO: THE HOUSE OF BELLA GALIANA.] But the chief glory of Viterbo is the romantic mediaeval city which lies between the Via Principe Umberto and the gates of the Carmine and San Pietro. Here even the names of the narrow and mysterious streets have not been changed by the rise of the House of Savoy. Would it not give a thrill even to the most unimaginative of travellers to step from the Square of the Dead into the Via di San Pellegrino with its grey thirteenth-century houses huddled on either hand, now flowering into Gothic windows and elegant outside staircases, now frowning defiance from square fighting towers with evil slits for eyes, now opening a passage down the steep hillside like the Street of a Hundred Bridges or the staircase street which leads to the Bridge of the Paradox? [Illustration: VITERBO: VIA DI S. PELLEGRINO.] Here the Middle Ages come to life again; nor are the people themselves greatly changed, for the women scrub their linen at ancient fountains, and the men work in the dark _bassi_ at their humble trades; here we saw a white-haired dame plying her distaff in a little vine arbour at the head of her balcony staircase, and there we met a man coming from the bakery with a plank of bread, three and a half feet long on his head. As in Orvieto, there were hooded owls on stands outside the doors to give another mediaeval touch, and from the upper windows women looked down with the languid curiosity of the Latin races. In the smaller streets there were dirt and squalor unimaginable, broken fruit and flies, unspeakable smells and the noise of screaming children, but in their midst were serene-eyed mothers, with the mysterious calm in their faces which has made the Italian woman the most subtle type of Madonna, who seemed in some strange fashion to be exalted above the impure atmosphere in which they lived, like the crimson garofani, or the long sprays of Morning Glory which flowered in their mediaeval windows. Though there was poverty it was the poverty of the country rather than the destitution of a city, just as the sheets and towels which fluttered from loggia and arch and balustrade were threadbare in spite of their fine embroidery and rich insertions of hand-made lace. It was through these streets that we saw the vintage coming in through the ancient Porta San Pietro under the shadow of the magnificent palace which was the home of Donna Olimpia Pamphili, the infamous sister-in-law of Innocent X., just as it was brought in the days when the Vetus Urbs was a sanctuary for the princes of the Church. [Illustration: ONE OF VITERBO'S MANY FOUNTAINS.] Una giornata di tempo bello we drove across the swelling plains of Etruria to the ruined city of Ferentinum. It was the happiest of days, the last, though we did not know it then, of our careless pilgrimages, for the next morning came autumn with cold winds and rain, and we were forced to hurry after our luggage which had already gone to Rome. But on that day there was a special beauty in the rolling plain which once was peopled by the vanished cities of Etruria, and now is so like the Campagna with its ruined tombs and scattered trees and lonely farmsteads. Here we found the same enchantment that we remembered in the fields of Rome--the silence, the gnats hanging in the air in glinting masses as though they danced in an invisible net, the larks singing in the blue distance, the song of a ploughman hidden in a fold of the plain. From our feet stretched the dusty road losing itself in the valleys and cresting the hills beyond. Far ahead rose Montefiascone with its great dome soaring above its ilex wood, and to the right, blue and mysterious in the early morning sunlight, was the dark Ciminian Mount, misty with spreading columns of smoke as though the shepherds or the woodcutters within the precincts of its haunted forest were offering incense to the Gods. And once we came upon a dozen yoke of oxen ploughing the heavy brown earth, with the sunlight shining on their smoking flanks and glistening on the freshly-turned clods of mould behind them. How little it has altered, this immemorial plain, since the days when Rome feared to plunge into the dark recesses of the Ciminian forest, and the Lucumos of Etruria rioted their energies away in the little cities below the mighty fane of Voltumna! For if mankind has changed, Nature is still the same; those rolling oxen are on the tombs of Thebes; the ancient poets have sung of these dark woods and scented plains, and the husbandmen at work! The way was long until we came, between hedges with a flower like japonica, to an outpost of Ferentinum standing over the green valley of the Acqua Rossa,--a disused tomb which had been a home for the living long after the dust of the poor forgotten dead had been scattered to the winds. Here we dismounted and climbed up a path so thickly spread with soft brown dust that our feet sank into it and made no sound. Here and there we saw the basalt _selce_, which marked the direction of the Roman road. Among the tangled brambles at the side were half-demolished tombs, now a columbarium for cinerary urns, now a niche, now merely a heap of tumbled stones. For the earth is taking this ancient city back to her heart again, and though the summer drought had withered the flowers which bloom where once the pitiful dust of humanity was laid, the empty chambers were full of golden bracken and fantastic thistles, silver with scattered seeds. Still we wound up the hillside, and presently we came upon two wind-blown oaks, the only watchers at that city's gates, beside a rough stone wall, built by some shepherd to prevent his sheep from breaking in upon the sleeping silence of Ferentinum. It was a city of the dead, deserted save for the lizards fleeing from our footsteps, and a few white butterflies dancing above the mullein stalks. At first it seemed as though no stone had been left standing on the other, but on the crest of the hill, overlooking the wooded and precipitous valley of the Acqua Rossa, and framing in its Royal Gateway the misty forest of the Ciminian Mount, we came upon the Theatre of Ferentinum, the only building in the ancient city which retains any semblance of its former grandeur. So do our vanities outlive us when our loves and homes are covered with the dust of oblivion! Behind it the purple basalt of the road was worn into deep ruts by the chariot wheels of the ancient peoples as they drove by on pleasure bent, and the ground was jewelled with mosaics and the iridescent dust of ancient glass, powdered by time. Here and there we could trace fragments of the mediaeval town grafted on to the city of Etruria, which in the days of its Roman occupation was the birthplace of the Emperor Otho--like the remains of the Byzantine church in the shadow of the Theatre--but for the most part there was only ruin in the fallen city of the Etruscan Goddess of Fortune. [Illustration: THE RUINED THEATRE OF FERENTO.] Surely the earlier Gods must wonder at the fate of this small country town, which was renowned among the ancients not so much for the greatness of its history, as for the beauty of its monuments and the art of its brass-workers, but which was destroyed in the name of Christ in the year 1014, nearly nine centuries ago! It is a strange story. How the Viterbesi, arrogant and always on the watch to increase their power as a commune, razed the little episcopal city of Ferento to the ground, because it persisted in the heresy of representing Christ upon the cross with His eyes open (after the manner of the Byzantines) instead of closed! From that day there has been no human habitation in Ferento except the hut of the shepherd-guide. But the half-vanished city of three civilisations is filled with an inexpressible charm, not desolate because the sun and wind have peopled it with flowers, and not deserted by the fleeing footsteps of the Gods. For surely they were with us in the magic beauty of that soft October morning when the little breeze across the valley fanned our hair like an invisible plume, and Earth, the wise mother of mankind, was offering incense to the heavens--the fragrance of crushed herbs, the soft hymn of insects, the silver voice of the Acqua Rossa. Even the blue threads of smoke which still ascended from the ilex groves of the dark Ciminian Mount seemed part of the mysterious sacrament. ROME It was in Foligno, seeing that fair white road which threads the rich valley of Spoleto, now skirting the Hill of Trevi, now leading through the olive gardens of Le Vene to the crystal springs of Clitumnus, that we first began to think of Rome. Up to that time we had not raised our eyes to the horizon. The beauty of the road itself had led us on, but now, though she was still far off, we felt once more the magnetism of the great Mother of Cities. Truly in Italy every road must lead to Rome. Many times we had been greeted with the words,'_E Roma? Andate ancora a Roma?_'--in little Passignano that gazes like Narcissus into the mirroring waters of Thrasymene, rapt in the contemplation of her own beauty; in far-off Gubbio, wistful and forlorn in the shadow of her great hills; in San Marino, the eagle nest where Liberty has taken refuge upon a mountain top. And when we told our simple questioners that we knew the city well, they pressed to hear what she was like, this _città bella e magnifica_, whose light shining upon their horizons they perhaps might never see. We had not dreamed that she was so beloved. But at the oft-reiterated question some flame of enthusiasm, which we had thought quenched, began to burn again, and Rome became the secret goal of our pilgrimage, until we thrilled to see that white road leading through the plain from the walls of Foligno, because it had become the symbol and expression, as it were, of our desires. We crossed the Campagna in a thunderstorm, when earth and sky were united in a mighty storm-song. Above the roar of the train we could hear the booming of the thunder and the shriek of the wind, the sibilant cry of the rain-lashed trees, and the exultant shout of rivers, which the demon of the tempest had changed from languid veins of water to brown and foaming torrents. As we drew near the Eternal City across the many-bosomed desert of the Campagna we saw St. Peter's dome hanging like a mirage on the grey thunder-clouds, more like a mountain than a church, dwarfing Monte Mario. And we thrilled at the thought of nearing Rome, feeling the contentment that human beings feel towards each other when they meet a dear friend after long years of absence, knowing that, the strangeness of the first moment over, they will find themselves settled down with few words into the old dear comradeship of yesterday. [Illustration: ROME: ST. PETER'S SEEN FROM THE ARCO OSCURO.] But perhaps it was because we came so lately from Umbria, sweet-scented, golden Umbria, where the only shadows are the heavy veils of night or the shifting reflections of sunlit clouds, that our hearts sank in Rome. We had bid our loves good-bye so lightly, looked our last upon their beauties, and shut their little voices up by miles of empty plain. Perhaps too we had caught something of the spirit of the simple country folk who clasped their hands and sighed over the splendid city of their imagination. I will own that I felt very heartsick in those first few days, notwithstanding my old love for Rome. The golden peace of Umbria, which we had garnered and stored in our hearts through the long summer months, seemed lost in the urgent business of Rome. Memory had clothed her with antique grace, had peopled her with Emperors and Popes, had filled her winding streets with mediaeval palaces, her piazzas with the gay Renaissance. But coming from Umbria, where the Middle Ages still linger, and that older, simpler life of the Beginning of the World is pictured in her vineyards and olive gardens, we found Rome little more than a modern city, full of unrest and noise. Everywhere there was scaffolding and masonry, and we feared to look for our familiar landmarks lest the great god of change should have swallowed them up. It was impossible to enjoy walking in the streets; all we could do was to pick our way along the narrow pavements, one behind the other, thinking ourselves fortunate if a screaming demon of a tram did not come upon us unawares. We crossed the roads in a meaningless sea of shouting taximen and winecarts and motor-cars and jostling people. To make matters worse our beloved Via Tritone was being enlarged, and was still undergoing the process of having tramway-lines laid down it to the Corso. And the Piazza Barberini, our own piazza, where the Triton singing in his fountain had dwelt in our memories and dreams, was the workshop of the tramway people, full of stones and unconnected lines, which seemed to fall automatically upon each other with a hideous noise all through the day. [Illustration: THE ALTAR OF THE UNKNOWN GOD ON THE PALATINE.] Can you wonder then that our Goddess, Imperial and lovely Rome, seemed to have stepped down among ordinary mortals? Another thing. We had left a great city in search of joy. And we had found it. Up there in Umbria we had culled it from the roadside as you cull flowers. We had drunk of Lethe and gathered forgetfulness beside its waters. The burden of the world had slipped from off our shoulders. Little by little our feet had grown lighter upon the hillside. Our mountainous doubts, our despairs, our days of little faith, became mere memories. All the old fears of a city 'with houses both sides of the street,' were forgotten. We no longer bruised our feet on paving stones, but felt the soft warm earth beneath our soles and smelt the fragrance of pine-needles in the woods. Life became a beautiful and simple thing. Holy too. But here in Rome old doubts came back upon us, taking us unawares. 'The poor in great cities are not like the poor in Umbria,' said the Philosopher; 'here they suffer so.' We heard more tales of pain in those first days in Rome than we had heard in all the sunny months we had been dreaming away in Umbria. And on our first night in the city a courtesan screaming hopelessly below our windows as she was dragged to prison made our new-found joys shiver away to death. We felt like the Israelites when they looked upon their manna the second day and found it full of worms, and we knew that we had gathered the food of angels in the sunlit spaces of the Umbrian plain. I am no Utopian who seeks to bring the country to the town. I know too well how soon its incorruptible beauty would be corrupted. It is only in the hills that we may find it and the open spaces. There, it seems, we must go to learn our lesson, and when we have learnt it, this A B C of beauty, we can come back to the towns and learn more difficult things, the reverence for beliefs which are no longer beliefs, as Emerson taught, the beauty of a city, and of a poor man's smile. But just as the Israelites, when the need for manna was past, returned to ordinary food and found it good, so we too drifted back to our old content and began reluctantly to worship our old gods again. And it would be childish to deny that the great Exhibition for which Rome was preparing marked her splendid prosperity under the rule of the House of Savoy; or that the magnificent memorial to Victor Emmanuel on the brow of the Capitol is the most imposing monument in the whole city; or that the Palatine has gained in picturesqueness now that the débris has been cleared away from its lower slopes. [Illustration: ROME: A FOUNTAIN IN THE BORGHESE GARDENS.] But it was not to see these things that we came to Rome, and we found their ancient charm untouched in those shrines of beauty to which we paid a special pilgrimage. For all the pictures which had given us delight upon our journeys, from the faded frescoes of Cimabue in San Francesco d'Assisi to the strange fancies of Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral of Orvieto, were only stepping stones to the vault of the Sixtine Chapel and the revelations of Michelangelo. Not any of the fountains in Viterbo or in Siena or Perugia had such a gracious setting as the moss-grown basins of the Villa Borghese, whose crystal jets, like Arachne of old, challenge Athena to spin a lovelier web below the ilexes and autumn-gilded maples. And when we came to worship at the shrine of the Unknown God on the sunny slopes of Rome's sacred hill, where the reapers were scything the fennel and thistles and tall rank weeds, which had grown higher than a man, we found the altar of the Genius of Rome fragrant with the last red roses of summer. Above it fluttered a butterfly like a soul that fain would speak, and a careless lizard was sunning himself upon the ancient inscriptions which mottled lichens seek vainly to erase. Out on the Appian Way the roadside was still full of flowers, white, purple and gold. The dry fennel and yellow thistles and tall weedy mulleins were waist-high among the tombs. Butterflies fluttered their last dances before they yielded their little bodies to the enchantment of winter sleep; birds were fluting overhead, lizards sunned themselves upon the old grey stones. For the rest we found the Ancient Way deserted, a home of sunshine and peace. If there was dust, was it not dust of the dead? Is not all the dust in the world dust of the dead? And were not the flowers, those gay brave pennons of spring and summer, the quintessence of this Roman dust? To our right Tivoli was hidden in mist, but Rocca del Papa and the Alban Mount rose like shadows to the south. The aqueducts marched across the plain, or stumbled into ruin among the flowers with which the merciful earth covered their fall. Lonely farms, towers, nameless tombs, grew out of the folds of the plain. And the early setting October sun, dipping into a haze, empurpled the fields and wove a golden halo round the sheep who bleated homewards in the melancholy of the dying sky. The little trees, like mourners, bent down towards the tombs, or seemed to shrink back to the earth. Only the stone pines with their heads to heaven were unconscious of the death around their roots. [Illustration: THE VIA APPIA.] FOOTNOTES: [1] Dante, _Inferno_, Canto xxii. [2] Dante, _Paradiso_, xi. 41. [3] The Flagellant Brotherhood originated in Perugia in 1259, and spread like wildfire through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome. [4] 'Their Highnesses the Baglioni had the livery which Count Jacomo, son of Niccolò Piccinino, gave them, ... and for their arms they bore a shield azure traversed in the middle by a bar of gold, and above for crest a griffin's head, and behind this hung down a serpent's tail.'--Matarazzo, _The Chronicles of Perugia_. [5] The mediaeval Italian apparently believed that he averted the visit of Death by blocking up the door by which the dead body was carried out, since Death was supposed to enter a house by the door through which he had already passed. But Mr. Markino gave me an interesting variant of the superstition. In Japan Doors for the Dead were used because the human body was considered not clean in comparison with the Gods; and especially after death, when the human body is only dust, it could not be allowed to pass where the Gods might come--through the chief doors of a house. [6] I adhere to the Greek names because this is a digression into Arcadia. [7] Mr. W. Heywood tells us in his admirable book, _Palio and Ponte_, that 'from the beginning of the seventeenth century the Feast of Our Lady of Provenzano became well-nigh the principal holiday of the Sienese year. It was celebrated on the 2nd of July, the day of the visitation of the Blessed Virgin.' The Palio was not actually presented to the victorious _contrada_, but the silver basin which accompanied it, or its equivalent in money. 'Not unfrequently they petitioned the Governor to permit the race to be run anew, by the other _contrade_, on the day after the Festival of our Lady of August, offering as a prize the silver basin which they had themselves won.... By degrees this practice grew to be so common that before the end of the eighteenth century the Palio of the 16th August had become as regular an event as that of July.' [8] The Alfieri are pages in the mediaeval sense. Siena is the only town in Italy which still makes a study of the mediaeval sport of banner-tossing. [9] Some of the horses which took part in the race were sorry nags, but the _contrada_ of the Porcupine had a really good animal. [10] Dante, _Inferno_, Canto xxix. 17. [11] This Annunciation is claimed to be by Sebastiano Mainardi, the friend and pupil of Ghirlandaio, with whom he worked while he was engaged on the Chapel of the Holy Fina. Mainardi, who later married Ghirlandaio's sister, and Vincenzo di B. Tamagni, a pupil of Raphael, were the only artists born in San Gimignano. [12] But I do not doubt the wisdom of the Government, for our two soldier coachmen only voiced the general opinion when they told us that the peasants of the neighbourhood had been impoverished under the rule of the monks, but that they make an ample livelihood under the rule of the state. [13] J. A. Symonds. [14] Dante, _Paradise_, xvi. 73. [15] 'It is by some pretended that these subterranean passages form part of the labyrinth of Porsena, but this opinion has no foundation. They are much more probably connected with the system of sewerage, and the subterranean chambers may have been either cellars to houses or _favissae_ to temples.'--Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, vol. ii. [16] Livy, Book xxi. [17] Dante, _Purgatory_, xi. 93. [18] Laura M'Cracken, _Gubbio Past and Present_. [19] 'Their origin has been variously assigned to the twelfth and the fourteenth century. If, as seems probable, they were designed by Gattapone, they may be placed in the middle of the fourteenth century about the time of the erection of the two municipal palaces.' Laura M'Cracken, _Gubbio Past and Present_. [20] Dante, _Inferno_, v. 118. [21] Gregorovius, _Rome in the Middle Ages_. [22] Their identity is disputed. [23] Dante, _Purgatory_, xxviii. 40. [24] Dante, _Inferno_, iv. 6. [25] 'The energetic Lambert had made a genuine peace with Rome, where he had gloriously restored the Imperial power. The Pope, though compelled by necessity, had with equal sincerity striven to secure Lambert in the Imperium. Freed from all foreign influence, it seemed now for the first time possible to form an independent kingdom within the Italian frontier.'--GREGOROVIUS, _Rome in the Middle Ages_. [26] 'This waterfall is in its present form wholly artificial. It was first formed by M'. Curius Dentatus, who opened an artificial channel for the waters of the Velinus, and thus carried off a considerable portion of the Lacus Velinus, which previously occupied a great part of the valley below Reate.'--_Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography_. [27] _Purgatory_, Canto xxiii., Cary's Translation. [28] J. A. Symonds, _Italian Studies_. [29] Gregorovius, _Rome in the Middle Ages_. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Errors in printing and punctuation were corrected. 
47213	----	BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THREE GREEK TALES. 16mo, pp. 173. Price, $1. THE GEO. M. ALLEN COMPANY. PRESS COMMENTS. REVIEW OF REVIEWS. The three tales which compose this little volume have been previously published in the _Hartford Post_. "The author frankly acknowledges himself a disciple of the romantic school," and his stories have the dreamy, remote atmosphere which he has aimed to produce. There is much beauty in these pale, pathetic creations and they have doubtless a certain affinity with the scenery of Greece, as Mr. Dodge suggests. It is the present day Greece of a modern man's imagination, however, and we must not take the title "Greek Tale," as at all applicable to the stories in the classical sense. They might in some truth be compared in style with Mr. Winter's poems. NEW YORK COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER. * * * They are, all three, quiet, unpretentious, gracefully told stories that almost all classes of readers will enjoy. NEW YORK RECORDER. * * * In method and scene alike the book is a pleasing variation from the conventional. TOWN TOPICS. There is a charm in Walter Phelps Dodge's "Three Greek Tales" wholly in keeping with the classic scenery in which they are laid and the classical associations it suggests. Of those fair isles, dear alike to the artist and the _littérateur_, story and picture each take on qualities borrowed from its rival, and these tales of modern Greek life are enjoyable largely for their picturesque setting. NEW YORK TELEGRAM. * * * A young author could hardly have a more auspicious introduction to the public than this small volume gives. If there is no realism or pretence to analysis of character, there is something far better and rarer, in these days of over-stuffed and over-seasoned "roast and boiled"--there are characters that stand out and that live and breathe by reason of a few fine outlines of suggestiveness. NEW YORK WORLD. * * * Love stories, all of them, well told in the main. AS THE CROW FLIES FROM CORSICA TO CHARING CROSS BY WALTER PHELPS DODGE AUTHOR OF "THREE GREEK TALES" [Illustration] NEW YORK GEO. M. ALLEN COMPANY 1893 COPYRIGHT, 1893 GEO. M. ALLEN COMPANY NEW YORK THE ALLEY-ALLEN PRESS, NEW YORK TO MY FATHER D. STUART DODGE _Acknowledgment is made to the Editors of the_ HARTFORD POST _and the_ HARTFORD COURANT; _in whose papers these letters first appeared_ INDEX PAGE INTRODUCTION 7 A GLIMPSE OF CORSICA 9 ALONG THE RIVIERA 17 SAN REMO 29 THE CITY OF PALACES 40 THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND 49 A DEVONSHIRE MARKET TOWN 62 OXFORD 68 THE ENGLISH LITTORAL 76 A DAY AT WINDSOR 81 SCARBOROUGH 89 CLIMBING IN LAKELAND 94 WINDERMERE 105 SANDRINGHAM HOUSE 112 THE LATTER-DAY JACOBITES 122 [Illustration] INTRODUCTION IN Summer, particularly in travelling, one is very apt to prefer a simple glass of ice-cold lemonade--not too sweet,--to a bumper of burgundy or a tankard of ale; and it has been the author's experience that the mental processes are not unlikely to follow the example of the physical, in this particular. For this reason he is encouraged to submit these slight sketches of divers persons and places to an indulgent public. He may say that the sketch entitled "Sandringham House" has been submitted to the highest authority, and that its substance is approved by the Personage with whom it is chiefly concerned. W. P. D. NEW YORK, April 1st, 1893. [Illustration] As the Crow Flies. A GLIMPSE OF CORSICA. BASTIA.--Nice is too attractive to leave without regret at any time, and we felt particularly sorry for ourselves one evening towards six o'clock when we saw the disreputable little tub of a steamer that was to take us over to Corsica; and as we penetrated the odourous mysteries of the cabin we devoutly hoped that we might see Bastia in the morning without foundering, for the berths were suspiciously like the long, narrow coffin shelves in family vaults and had been built apparently for children, so cribbed, cabined and confined were their proportions. We said little as we put away our portmanteaux and cameras and took our rugs from the strap, but our looks spoke volumes and we were careful to sprinkle plenty of Keating's powder about the place. A fine, drizzling rain soon began and we were compelled, much to our disgust, to leave the comparatively unobjectionable deck where sturdy, bare-legged sailor boys were shouting and singing and throwing ropes and chains about to no apparent end. As soon as we had reached the depths of the noisome little cabin, dinner was served, and oh, the mockery of that dinner! Everything was scented with garlic, and when the flavour of that questionable delicacy was absent it was replaced by the taste of rancid oil. We did not sit the meal out, and although it was barely nine o'clock, threw ourselves on our shelves to try and forget the too perceptible motion as the little boat quitted the sheltering harbour of Nice. Although the sea was calm enough, the small size of the boat unconsciously suggested the idea of a rough sea. Our sleep was more or less broken--generally more, and at six we were awakened by a fiendish blast of the whistle which was near our berths, to an overpowering sense of certain strange and gruesome odours. The cabin had been hermetically closed on account of the rain, and on the floor about the tables were stretched in various attitudes of _abandon_ several human forms, who proceeded to rise and shake themselves. It is needless to say we had thrown ourselves down fully dressed, and we made a sudden rush for the companion way, for if ever there was an odour that could be cut it was the one in the tightly closed little cabin of that dirty little steamer off Bastia in the rainy, chill darkness of that December morning. A hasty fee to the steward--and the next moment saw us on the quay at Bastia, holding fast to our valises, threatened by a ragged mob of urchins who would have had but little respect for the doctrine of meum and tuum. We scrambled into a musty, damp hotel 'bus and, half asleep still, were rattled over the badly-paved streets to our hotel. And what a hotel! We were received in a mouldy courtyard by an antiquated porter in undress uniform, with a farthing tallow dip, who gruffly informed us that we could get no coffee for two hours and who then ushered us upstairs to the grimy little room reserved for us. I don't know yet how high the hotel was, but it seemed as if we were never to reach the top as we struggled after that wavering candle. No wonder tourists who think nothing of a run to Colombo or Aden or a trip to New Zealand shudder at the thought of doing Corsica or Sardinia, for anything more uncivilized than the ways of getting there I have never seen. The time passed drearily on as we waited in the cold, stone-floored room, but eight o'clock finally came and we hurried down eager for coffee and eggs. The dining room was _sui generis_ and the cloth and napkins were not above reproach, but we managed to make out a fair meal with the exception of the bread, which was hard and sour; and then sallied out to do the town. Bastia is rather a decent town to the view and the architecture is solid and not altogether in the flimsy stucco of Italy. There are no handsome public buildings, except the theatre, which is built on the lines of an old Greek temple. In the square on the water front, where the raw recruits are drilled, is a huge statue of the first Napoleon in the toga and laurel wreath of a Roman Consul. It is of heroic size and dazzlingly white and seems to dominate everything in its immediate neighbourhood. Of course the Corsicans are inordinately proud of Napoleon, and one cannot converse for five minutes with an ordinary inhabitant without his remarking nonchalantly that Corsica has produced the greatest military genius of the world. The islanders are a curious cross between the French and Italian types, perhaps inclining more to the latter. The language is a _patois_ of French and Italian, with a few Spanish words, and is hard to comprehend, but anyone understanding good Italian can easily manage. It is really yet a question to what country Corsica should strictly belong, for it has tasted the rule of many nations. It knew the yoke of both the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and belonged in turn to the Republics of Genoa and Pisa in the middle ages; when the short-lived King Theodore raised the standard of revolt, too soon lowered. Then the patriot, Pasquale Paoli, ruled the island from 1755 to 1769, when the Genoese transferred their claim to the island to France, which has since annexed it. It is absurd to say that Vendetta has died out, for it is still popular in the island to an almost incredible extent, and anyone refusing to continue a blood feud when his plain duty would be to avenge his ancestor would soon have the Rimbecco sung under his windows. A thirst for blood seems ingrained in the Corsican nature, and few families in either the upper or lower classes of the island are without their hereditary feud. This custom is said to be worse now than under the Second Empire, and is particularly prevalent round about Corte. It originated when the Genoese ruled the island and male members were obliged to take the honour of their family into their own keeping. There are several strict laws in existence enacted against this barbarous practice, but they have fallen into disuse and are unregarded. I have several times been asked what the principal industry of Bastia was. The only answer that occurs to me is to say stilettoes, for really all the shops seem to have inexhaustible supplies of this keen, murderous little blade. Not only are they sold in the guise of weapons, but as charms, as brooches, as sleeve buttons, as scarf pins--in coral, lava, gold, silver and brass. Even the pawnbrokers display second-hand stilettoes in their windows, several of them covered with a rust that has been blood. To a stranger, all this gives Bastia a savage air, and when he thinks of the hotels and the food he is apt to start for the station or the dock. But Vendetta is confined strictly to local affairs, and it is very rare to find a case where strangers have been brought into family feuds. The literature of Vendetta is rich. The famous "Corsican Brothers," "Mr. Barnes of New York," Marie Corelli's "Vendetta," and Prosper Merrimée's delightful "Colomba" all dwell on the subject. But besides Vendetta, which exists only in this island; Corsica shares with Sardinia the honour of being the only place in Europe where the moufflon is now found, and so attracts numbers of English sportsmen, who, however, land usually at Ajaccio. Few tourists reach Bastia. Ajaccio is a sort of health resort, modeled after the places on the Riviera and is only a second-rate imitation at best; but Bastia is a quiet, semi-commercial little town, on the sea, with huge mountains at its back, and content to dream away its time in ignorant obscurity. All traces of the old island costumes have disappeared and one does not know whether to be amused or sad at the pathetic attempt to imitate French fashions. The older streets in Bastia are curious. They differ from those of most old Italian towns in being paved with large, flat stones and are kept scrupulously clean, showing their French origin. The old citadel, built in 1383, is worth a visit for the sake of its curious walls. In poking about among the old curiosity shops I unearthed a valuable souvenir. It was an old bronze medal, bearing on one side "Louis Napoleon Bonaparte," with his portrait, and on the other "Pour Valeur." It had evidently been given as a reward of valor by Napoleon III. in the eventful two years when he was Prince-President, before the _coup d'état_, and I have since ascertained its rarity. A drive in the country about Bastia shows a landscape rich in hills and pines, but in nothing else. A diligent search among the grocers' shops finally unearthed a tin of "picnic tongue," and we feasted on that and on some Albert biscuits to save ourselves a return to the too odourous hotel dining room. We did not regret sailing for Sardinia that night, as we hoped to find there what we had missed in Corsica--clean beds and decent food. [Illustration] [Illustration] ALONG THE RIVIERA. CANNES.--Any one with a liking for titles, that is, English titles, which are the only ones worth having, is sure to be gratified at Cannes. For Cannes is like Bournemouth, select and expensive. At the _Prince de Galles_ Hotel in Cannes the other day, when the register was brought to me to sign, I noticed that for five pages mine was the only name of a commoner. Earls were as thick as blackberries and there were Viscounts galore. This explains why so few, comparatively, are met with at the other Riviera resorts. Cannes is _par excellence_ an English resort, and woe betide the _bourgeois_ Frenchman or spectacled German who innocently happens upon one of its mammoth hotels; and many are the shivers that shake his _Jäger_-clothed frame at the numerous open windows and delightful draughts of fresh air that are so home-like to an Englishman or a civilized American. Like Bournemouth, Cannes is rich in pines and poor in shops and cabs. But here every one brings their own turn-out, and few teams are to be seen without both footman and coachman in some well-known London livery. For amusements Cannes is a poor place, that is, for theatres; but there is plenty of tennis, which one may, if properly introduced, play with Russian Grand-Duchesses or Austrian Archdukes; and the Grand Duke Michael is working up some excitement over golf links. He did me the honour to ask for my subscription, but as I am not in Cannes _en permanence_ I was not obliged to subscribe. One can go to twenty teas in an afternoon, if one is so disposed, and "_pique-niques_," dances and dinners are almost too numerous to count. At Rumpelmayer's the "_Hig-lif_" of Cannes, as the French call it, is to be met between five and six o'clock, when most of the _habitués_ of Rotten Row happen in for a cup of the delicious chocolate tempered with whipped cream of which Rumpelmayer makes a specialty. All the villa owners at Cannes (for there are very few villas rented here; if one wants a house in Cannes one must build it) send to Regent Street for whatever they want, consequently no shops at Cannes but those making a specialty of kitchen necessaries or provisions have any _raison d'être_ and they are not missed. Most of the hotels have good libraries, and one can lounge away days in the palm-shaded garden, watching the sunshine dance and sparkle upon the rich blue sea. There is a restful feeling about Cannes, an aristocratic repose and seclusion not shared by any of the other resorts on the coast, except, perhaps, in a modified degree, by San Remo; and physicians say the air here is not so stimulating as at Nice and Mentone. Of course, it is not so stimulating as at Monte Carlo, either, but that is for a different reason! No one can get a footing at Cannes unless their social record is unassailable, and as it costs a small fortune to live here for even a week, objectionable people are kept away, and one does not meet the cockney Londoner who drops his h's promiscuously or the shoddy American who speaks with a twang and is always looking for a spittoon. Even the cooking is English at Cannes, and cold "ros-bif" and pickles with a tankard of ale and a bit of apple tart (than which there is no more palatable luncheon) often forms the meal of some hearty party of Britons. One leaves Cannes with regret; and a sigh for its quiet pleasures as one is whirled into the noisy, huge station at Nice. One finds here a very different atmosphere. All is gaiety, noise and bustle. Splendid shops thrust their wonderfully arranged windows upon one's notice. Redfern's name appears in gilt with the Prince of Wales' plumes above it, and many names familiar to frequenters of the Paris jewellers' shops are met with. Strolling along the Quai Masséna one could spend hours simply looking in the shop windows at pearl pins marked at £1,000, or at some little pink emerald worth a fortune simply because it does not happen to be green. And the famous Galignani library is not to be ignored, with its fascinating display of all the latest London books and the Christmas numbers of the English papers with their half-hidden pictures of Santa Claus; nor the huge Casino and Winter Garden where one pays two francs for a ticket of admission, good for the whole day, where reading-rooms and the latest telegrams of Reuter's Agency tempt one to settle down for several hours. There, in the domed central garden, among hundreds of palms and tropical plants, one can listen to a capital band while having an ice from the Nice Bignon's. There, too, one may see a good exhibition of marionettes, a sort of glorified Punch and Judy show, where all the gilded infancy of Nice congregates to enjoy the fun. And one can waste hours over the _petits chevaux_; where, on a huge, green-clothed table, six small horses are wound up, and race around a circle, bets being made upon the colour and number of the winner. In the height of the season the management is said to make 3,000 francs per day out of this simple amusement. At the far end of this pleasant Jardin d'Hiver is the entrance to the small play-house connected with it; but the companies who perform here are not above reproach; except during Carnival, when no expense is spared to secure the best talent, and the Paris play-houses are called upon to contribute their best actors for the edification of the visitors. A stroll among the Nice shops in the evening is delightful, in the warm balmy air, with the moonlight over all and the echo of some mandolin concert in the distance. One can listen to street musicians in this sunny land without any fear of hearing "Comrades" or "Ask a P'leeceman," and may even reasonably expect something decent in the way of selections from "Carmen" or "Dinorah," both of which are prime favorites among the lower classes. Nice has long had a municipal theatre, but this is not well supported, and the most flourishing establishment of this sort in the town is a huge music hall or _café concert_, which does a roaring business. Sweet-shops abound in Nice and are a never-ending surprise to English folk, who very sensibly put them down to the increasing number of Americans who come here. A huge Casino has just been built on the end of a long pier stretching out into the sea, and they tell an amusing tale of the way in which the gambling privilege was secured. An unsuccessful appeal had been made to the Mayor, M. Henry, and the speculators were in despair until it suddenly occurred to them that their establishment was not on land, but at sea, and so they appealed to the Minister of Marine at Paris with better success. Charming drives abound in every direction around Nice, and coaches go over to Monte Carlo every few hours. There is but one drawback to Nice as a place of residence--the increased number of the descendants of Israel who are making it a seaside synagogue. Fashion has deserted it for Cannes, but it will always be the favoured resort of the gay and the bored--those who do not care for society, and for whom society does not care. The change to the small station of Monte Carlo and the gaudily-ornamented lift that slowly rises to the bluff above is marked. For pure luxury and the highest degree of comfort Monte Carlo ranks next to Paris. Take the Hôtel de Paris, next the Casino, for instance, an establishment owned and conducted by the Casino company. Soft velvet carpets into which one's foot sinks, Wedgwood toilet sets, and easy chairs that would not look out of place in Belgravia, are the distinguishing characteristics of the bedrooms; and there is not a gas lamp in the place; hundreds of little wax candles, each shaded by a deep red shade, give light; and when one is enjoying the cooking, which is a dream in itself, and drinking in all the beauty and elegance, it is hard to remember that one is in what has been called the most wicked place on earth. The Bishop of Gibraltar considers it so abandoned, in fact, that he has refused to license a Chaplain or consecrate a Church--queer logic on His Lordship's part, who seems to go on the principle that the worse the place the less necessity for a Church. And yet the villa holders of Monte Carlo form a very respectable class. The late Mr. Junius Morgan had a villa here and many other well-known names might be cited. The place is charmingly small and centres round about the immense and beautiful Casino. Ask the inhabitants of the Principality of Monaco what they think of the Casino and the gambling company. They will reply that it is an unmixed blessing. For the company pays the taxes of the little realm, keeps all the roads and public works in good repair; and poverty is almost unknown. The inhabitants are allowed to enter the gambling rooms but one day in the year--on the fête day of the Prince of Monaco. Strangers gain admission to the rooms by presentation of their visiting cards, and without them are not allowed entrance. A droll tale is told of the application of this rule to the Marquis of Salisbury. He was going to the rooms with a party and not having any visiting card with him was stopped by the gigantic doorkeeper. He was somewhat angry at this and drew himself up, saying, in very English French: "_Mais j'ai ne pas besoin d'une carte de visite. Je suis le Marquis de Salisbury, Premier d'Angleterre._" But the doorkeeper still refused and would not let him in. He afterwards explained his incredulity by saying to a friend: "How could I believe he was Milord Salisbury and the Prime Minister of England? He wore a tweed suit and had his trousers turned up." This brother evidently derived his idea of the appearance of a Marquis from the Italian article of that name, which is usually greasy, and fearfully and wonderfully attired. The Casino at Monte Carlo and its tables have been often described; but the crowds that linger three deep about the green cloth are always fascinating to watch. _Grande dames_ and _cocottes_ elbow each other, and English statesmen rub shoulders with Parisian blacklegs. The day I was there I saw the Duc de Dino (who married Mrs. Stevens, of New York,) philosophically drop £2,000, and stand it better than a young man who lost five francs at roulette. But the saddest thing of all was to see young girls of eighteen or twenty (the rule is not to admit anyone under twenty-one, but of course the officials are often hoodwinked) with "systems," pressing close to the table and pricking number after number on their cards as they eagerly follow a run on the red or the black. These people are always sure they will some day break the bank, and linger on from day to day and from week to week leaving whole fortunes in the maw of the remorseless "Administration." Each additional week seems to add to the strained, eager look in their eyes, the drawn, pinched look about the mouth, and the tell-tale wrinkles about the temples that proclaim an habitual gambler. The _croupiers_, too, are curious studies, as they whirl the ball or deal the cards that mean so much to the eager crowd; cool, calm, impassive, there is something devilish about the monotonous way in which they call "_Faites vos jeux, Messieurs_," or "_Le jeu est fait. Rien ne va plus._" Some of them, it is easy to see, have come down in the world; and one man was shown to me who had filled a high position in a crack British regiment, before he had been detected cheating at cards and had been ruined for life. I may not give his name or all the facts in the case, but it bore a striking resemblance to Sir William Gordon-Cummings' "accident." There is a peculiar class of harpies in the Casino, but very well dressed harpies, who make their living by "living up" to the table, so to speak, and grabbing the winnings of the lucky but slow players. Enormous sums are lost in this way by careless winners, for the ball (in roulette) rolls so quickly around, and the _croupiers_ toss the gold so quickly in the general direction of the winners, that a very quick eye is needed to spy one's property. The "_Série Noir_" has already begun at Monte Carlo, and two suicides have occurred. Of course the "Administration" policy is to hush up these little matters, and whenever a dead body is found in the lonely gardens surrounding the Casino (about one a fortnight is the average during the season) its pockets are pretty sure to be filled with gold and notes, placed there by the wily detectives of the Casino, to show that the poor man could not have shot himself on account of his losses at play. And rumour says that they have an admirably prompt way of getting rid of the bodies of those who are thoughtless enough to commit suicide on the company's grounds without noise or scandal. An eye witness told me the following tale of a tragedy in the rooms last year, which he vouches for: about ten o'clock at night, when everything was in full swing and the rooms were crowded with well-dressed people (no shabby-looking character is ever admitted; and the devil in this case is certainly "in society"), a shot was suddenly heard, and a handsome young fellow, pale as death, staggered from the _Trente et Quarante_ table with his hand to his bleeding side. He fell with a crash, and at once, like lightning, a crowd of the Casino detectives had closed around him, opened a window overlooking the sea, and thrown him out upon the rocks below. So quickly did this take place that not six people saw it, and the people who inquired about the disturbance were told that a lady had fainted from the heat and from the explosion in a gas pipe. The next morning the dead body of the young man was found on the rocks, with his pockets filled with gold and no trace of a wound about him. Lovely Monte Carlo! It is like a decayed lady-apple--lovely to look on, but rotten at the core. [Illustration] [Illustration] SAN REMO. SAN REMO.--There is a certain apparent similarity between Bournemouth and San Remo. Both are "winter resorts" and both are popular with invalids. But this similarity is only apparent. Frost and snow were rife at Bournemouth a month ago. Sunshine and ripe oranges on the trees are _en evidence_ at San Remo now. One shudders here, to think of Bournemouth in winter, just as in Bournemouth the idea of the Lake District out of summer was repelling. The climate of the Riviera is not perfect, by any means, but unless one goes to Honolulu or to "the Cape," it is hard to do better for the winter. And yet it is not a tropical climate--or even sub-tropical, simply one with a more or less genial warmth in the winter time. San Remo is not so "mixed" in its society as Nice, so renowned for suicides as Monte Carlo, or so vault-like as Mentone. Cannes is the only place on the coast that approaches San Remo (and, indeed, outdoes it, so far as exclusiveness in the "English Colony," which includes the small American contingent, goes); but Cannes is really a slice cut out of Belgravia and set down by the Mediterranean, and one may be in the height of the London Season all winter there. Cannes is popularly referred to as the "Dukeries," on account of the number of English Dukes spending the winter there. But to a person liking society in moderation with a few good dances sprinkled in during the winter and a fair amount of tennis, San Remo is an ideal place. Knickerbockers and cricketing flannels are frequently seen, and there is none of that striving after effect so much found at Cannes, where top hats and frock coats are _de rigeur_ most of the time. San Remo is near the French frontier and so, of course, is a queer mixture of French and Italian village life (for it has only seventeen thousand inhabitants). It is thirty-six hours from London and easily reached either by the P. L. and M. Railway, by way of Lyons and Marseilles, or by Milan and Geneva, via the Mont-Cenis tunnel. The old town, or _Citta Vecchia_, is built on a hill away from the sea, and the steep streets are crowded together pell-mell on the nearly perpendicular hillside. Bradshaw's Guide refers to them as "steep, mediæval streets"; but, although I admit the steepness, I have never discovered the mediævalism--unless the abundant dirt and endless supply of unsavoury smells may be taken to represent it. Of course, the dark, narrow lanes are garlic-haunted, and that reminds me of a story I heard here. At the old Cathedral, an English priest was talking to an Italian peasant woman about the next world. She was giving her ideas on the subject and ended up a glowing rhapsody in this way: "And, oh, our Holy Father, the Pope, will be there on a great golden throne, smiling at the faithful; with big bunches of our angelic garlic under his chair to give to each of his flock as St. Peter brings them to him." If that idea of Paradise were presented to many good Christians, I fear their faith might be shaken, for of all the sickening, clinging odours, a whiff of garlic-scented air is the worst. This old town is nearly devoid of interest. There are even no curio shops, and after one walk the average English tourist comes back to his hotel to "take a tub," and leaves its mysteries undisturbed in future. To any one, however, brave enough to pick his way through the overhanging alleys and dark streets, up to the very top of the hill, an old church presents itself, the "Madonna della Costa," where there is a wonderful picture of the Virgin which is supposed to be a certain cure for leprosy. (The method of applying the cure is an unsolved mystery.) Most people here go to Mentone to get gloves and stockings, and smuggle them back over the frontier to avoid paying the absurd prices asked in San Remo. The new town is built at the foot of the hill and consists of two streets, with a few good shops, where the tradesmen speak bad French and charge enormous prices for the necessaries of life. On each side of this new town stretch the English and German colonies, the English settling at the west end and the Teutons preferring the east. Ever since the Emperor Frederick lived in a villa here the east end has been a resort for patriotic Germans who want the warm breezes of the Riviera, but do not care to enjoy them on French territory. It is not the most pleasant part of the town, and English and Americans are very chary of settling there, as the more aristocratic west end turns the cold shoulder to the unfortunate villa holders and dwellers in hotels and _pensions_ at the east end, and has a tendency to consider them doubtful or _déclassé_. The west end has all the best hotels and _pensions_ as well as villas scattered along the pretty Promenade overlooking the sea and bordered with wide-branching date palms. The Promenade ends in lovely gardens, and both Promenade and gardens are called after the late Empress of Russia, who spent a winter here early in the seventies. The Promenade is used as a scene for "church parade" after service on Sunday mornings by the English colony, and every afternoon, from four onward, one may meet the world and his wife there. The municipal band plays twice a week in the public gardens, but the performance--a rather poor one--is attended mainly by Italians. The language of San Remo is a curious _patois_ made up of Ligurian Italian--very different to the pure _Lingua Toscana_ of Florence, and the bastard French heard in Nice and Cannes. Five days in every week are bright and sunny, one of the remaining two is usually cloudy and the other rainy. The average temperature is fifty-two degrees in winter. The winds are hardly ever troublesome, as the high chain of hills behind the town act as a natural barrier. Among the many bad shops there is one really good one: Squire's, the English chemist's, who dubs himself (but by real Letters Patent) "Court Chemist to the late German Emperor and to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales." When the late Emperor Frederick was ill here in '88 at his villa and all his affairs and correspondence were in confusion, his much-loved wife, the popular Empress Victoria (who looks so much like her mother, the Queen of England) used to have all her English letters sent to the villa enclosed in this chemist's prescription envelopes, to keep them safe from Bismarck's spies; for the relations, never very cordial, between the grim Chancellor and the Illustrious Lady were then at a dangerous tension and the friends of the Empress claimed that he did not scruple to confiscate her private letters from the English Court when he could get hold of them. The young Princesses were very fond of taking long walks in the endless olive groves about San Remo, and sketching the town from either of the two high rocks that shut in the bay on each side. A pretty peasant girl in a small fruit shop near the Emperor's villa made a small fortune by selling mouldy pears and sour oranges to enthusiastic British tourists who thronged the shop, because the Empress Victoria had made a lovely study of her in oils, which has appeared in a London exhibition. Another permanent memorial of the visit of the Royal Family to San Remo is the constant appearance of the highly-gilt arms of the Hohenzollerns over most of the shops in the new town, which, one and all, describe themselves as "Court Grocer to the Emperor Frederick"; "Court Bootmaker to the Imperial Family," when possibly the _chef_ may have bought some candles from the one and the Emperor's valet may have been measured for a pair of boots at the other. I have even seen the advertising card of one "Guiseppa Candia, Court Laundress to the German Empress." The English set in San Remo is charming and very hospitable when one comes with letters of introduction. The leading English physician, Dr. Freeman, and his wife are always ready to extend the courtesies of the place to fresh arrivals; and any visitor at the English Club will easily recall the jovial person of Mr. Benecke. But when one comes without letters or other credentials, the English colony can be very freezing; as a third-rate American author found some years since, when, with his wife, he tried to take the town by storm. The country round about San Remo is full of pleasant walks. Ospedaletti is only two miles away, and one may take a charming walk there and back in the afternoon. It is an interesting place, albeit a dreary one, for it is the monument of a great failure. Some years ago a great International Company bought up all the land along the lovely bay, built splendid hotels and shops, made good roads and put up the magnificent Casino still to be seen there. The shares were at a high premium and every one was sure the company would make a huge fortune, and so it would if it had not neglected the trifling formality of obtaining the consent of King Humbert to the establishment of a large gambling hell in his dominions. The result was that he stepped in at the last minute and intimated that while he had no objections to a Casino, he was not prepared to allow games of chance. Of course, this ruined not only the company, but the place, for Ospedaletti's only _raison d'être_ was in the Casino, and the Casino's in the roulette table. The hotels and shops are all closed now and the beautiful building is gradually falling to pieces from decay. The roads are all overgrown, and a few poor Italian families are the only representatives of the gay world that was to make Ospedaletti a successful rival of Monte Carlo. Then, beyond, is the town of Bordighera, an Anglo-Italian resort nearer the frontier and especially loved by consumptives. George McDonald, the Scotch author, has a beautiful house there and his daughters are famous in the tennis courts along the Riviera. Bordighera is a garden of palms and supplies all the churches of Rome on Palm Sunday. A more interesting walk from San Remo is to take the Corniche road as far as the Pietra Lunga on the east side of San Remo, and then to strike inland through the olive groves until one finds the dreary village of Bussana, a place totally destroyed by the earthquake of 1886. The ruins of the quaint old church are still shown (with the inevitable monogram of the Virgin on everything), where a service was being held when the first shock came on that eventful Sunday. The peasants say there are still bodies hidden under the massive masonry and swear that the place is haunted. This was the earthquake that startled Cannes early on the same morning, when walls were falling and people flying from the hotels and houses in various stages of undress. The Prince of Wales was there then on his yearly visit to the Riviera, and one of his valets rushed in to call him at five o'clock for the hotel walls had fallen at the back, and there was danger that the others might go. But the Prince only scolded the valet sleepily for waking him and refused to get up in spite of the man's entreaties, finally turning over and going to sleep again amid the noise of falling chimneys and crashing walls. It is needless to say that H. R. H. was not injured and that the other walls did not fall. The local government of San Remo is vested in the Syndic, the jovial _Cavvaliere_ Bartolomeo Aquasciati, who is practically elected for life and who has an almost despotic authority over the civil affairs of the town; while the _Sous Prefect_ is at the head of the police and ranks above the Colonel of the regiment of Bersaglieri (or sharpshooters) now here. San Remo is particularly suited, on account of its peculiarly antiseptic climate, to persons troubled with throat complaints, and several really wonderful cures have been wrought by its balmy air. Living is much cheaper than in Cannes, Nice or Mentone; there is capital medical advice available, and very pleasant society. The old rhyme that applies to Zante: "Zante, Zante, Fior di Levante," might be paraphrased to suit San Remo, for it is certainly the _fine fleur_ of the Riviera. [Illustration] [Illustration] THE CITY OF PALACES. GENOA.--Streets of palaces, dingy and dirty with the mould of ages, but with interiors adorned with all the lavish luxury of the East, such is Genoa to the cursory view. The tourist, rushing through the Cathedral and the Cemetery, his Murray in hand; hastily conning the names of old masters and then going away satisfied, does not begin to know his Genoa. It is a city to linger in, to study slowly and lovingly, to muse over, in its deserted squares and sleepy parks. Certainly it is a famous introduction to Italian art. Every one knows it was called La Superba in the old days, so there is no need for me to do anything but jot down a few random memories of the place. Genoa, of course, is chiefly interesting on account of its past, not its present, but it may be as well to say that its capacious harbour accommodates steamers sailing daily to nearly every port in the Mediterranean and that in 1888 the total tonnage entered amounted to 3,000,000 tons. The lanterna or lighthouse in the harbour is old enough to be a curiosity, for it was built in 1547, and is apparently good for another couple of centuries. Near its foot are the dockyard and arsenal, which were established in 1276. But since 1860 the Italian government has made Spezia its chief dockyard, to the disgust of the Genoese. The one wide modern street in Genoa is the Via Vittorio Emanuele, on which are all the good hotels. In every Italian city and village one meets this name, and a certain degree of monotony attaches to it after one has shopped in fifty or sixty such streets in as many towns; but it shows the popularity of the late king, _Il Re Galant'uomo_, as they still call him. The shops in this street in Genoa are Parisian in every way, and there is an indescribable air of cheerfulness and gayety as one moves along past crowds of handsome black-browed Italian women. This word comes involuntarily to one in thinking of Italian women or girls. They could never be called pretty, or even beautiful, with their dark, glowing skins, large, warm eyes, thick, perfectly-curved eyebrows, and a more or less faint down on the upper lip; but they are undeniably handsome. Then, too, their way of walking out in afternoon or evening in full toilette and with perfectly-arranged coiffures, but without hat or bonnet, is attractive and gives a cosy air to the open street. Behind our hotel is a long, glass-covered arcade about the length of two city blocks, always filled with a gay, chattering crowd of both sexes, who promenade up and down, now stopping to look at the brilliantly-lighted window of some shop rich in statues and statuettes of Parian and Carrara marble, or to sit at small tables in front of some smart café to eat ices, or the Italian equivalent, _granita_. This arcade is one of the sights of the city and forms one of the most attractive features of Genoa. One often thinks of the gay scenes enacted there nightly, when far away. A walk about the town is delightful, provided one is unfettered by that abomination, a _valet-de-place_, or local guide. Such narrow streets running in all directions past grim palaces and squalid houses (but all of stone, for wood has no part in the internal economy of Genoese building) ending frequently in some odourous _cul de sac_, or doubling on themselves, to bring the helpless wanderer back to his starting point, after an hour's walk! The Cathedral must form the objective point of a first walk in Genoa. Indeed, it would be hard to miss it, for it is built of squares of black and white marble and resembles an immense chess board on end. But there is a pathetic dignity about it, for it is very old. It was begun in the twelfth century, and it is most probable that Columbus said his _Aves_ and _Paters_ under its vaulted roof, for he was a native of the erst-while republic of Genoa, when that power ruled the Mediterranean and boasted, like Venice, of a Doge. There is a curious inscription above the arches which part the nave from the aisles, near the Doge's gallery, to the effect that the great-grandson of Noah founded Genoa and that the nave was restored in 1307. But this is only one of the curious things about this curious Cathedral, for the verger who was gorgeous in his cocked hat and wand-of-office, showed us two huge pictures on either side of the high altar, which had been taken by the great Napoleon from Genoa to Paris when he conquered Italy; which had gone thence to Vienna and had finally returned to their former resting place. They showed the effect of travel, but were wonderfully well preserved. One represented the martyrdom of St. Sebastian--that ever-present product of Italian galleries, but in this case the arrows were happily absent. We saw, too, the picture of the Madonna, painted by St. Luke and alluded to by Mark Twain. It had not grown at all clearer since he saw it twenty odd years ago. A wonderfully beautiful Byzantine tomb was shown us in John the Baptist's chapel, and was declared to contain the ashes of that saint. Certainly it must have been old, and the carving was exquisitely done. The original chains worn by John the Baptist were also shown. They were very rusty! No woman but the Queen is allowed in this little side chapel, erected to commemorate the crime of Herodias, but why Her Majesty should be excepted from the rule is not quite clear, unless we accept the theory of the divine right of Kings which Kaiser Wilhelm holds so strongly. There they also show the _sacro catina_, supposed to be made of a single emerald given by the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. This vessel formed part of the spoils of the Genoese at Cæsarea in 1101. It is brought out of the treasury three times a year for the veneration of the faithful, but no one is allowed to touch it under severe penalties. But as I was admiring this and preparing to enthuse over its associations, the verger asked if I understood Latin and immediately launched forth into the original text of the Excommunication pronounced against any female who should dare to enter that _sanctum sanctorum_ where John the Baptist reposed. But, alas, if his accent was not that I had learned at Oxford, it was still less that of Yale; and I could only guess at the meaning of most of his sonorous periods. We left the Church with this avalanche of mediæval Latin ringing in our ears. The interior, taken as a whole, is impressive. The nave and two aisles are unusually long, and standing at one end a semi-gloomy vista of respectable length is opened up. There are other Churches in Genoa, but none so rich in tradition or saintly relics. The Via Balbi is worth a visit, for there stand the famous Palazzo Rosso or Red Palace, built entirely of dark red stone; and the Galliera Palace with its magnificent collection of paintings. The Galliera family has done much for Genoa as well as for Paris. The late Duke gave £80,000 to the harbour works a few years ago, and now the city of Genoa owns the fine gallery of paintings. The Duchess, who has been dead only a short time, left her splendid house in Paris to the Austrian Emperor to be used as the permanent house of his Embassy in Paris and (as she was childless) willed her large private fortune to the clever Empress Frederick, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, in trust for deeds of charity. A description of one of these immense palace galleries may stand for all. Always there is a grand hall supported in part on columns leading to an arcade-surrounded court. Beyond comes the great staircase, in two ascents. All this is open to the public view, and the long perspective of halls, courts, columns and arcades is magnificent in the extreme. In a splendid suite of rooms on the second floor of this Palazzo Rosso is the largest collection of pictures in Genoa. The Palazzo Reale or Royal Palace is interesting, having been splendidly fitted up by King Charles Albert in 1842. There are palaces innumerable in Genoa, many rich in historical interest and full of pictures by the old masters, and if one were compiling a guide book one could write quires of description about gilding that cost a million francs in one, and mosaic floors worth several fortunes in another. But the crowning glory of Genoa is its Campo Santo or Holy Field, where the noble families of Genoa bury their dead. Imagine vast arcades surrounding an open space of several acres and these arcades crowded with wonderfully beautiful statues. Each family pays a sum (no small one) for a niche in one of these arcades with the accompanying vault beneath and then erects a life-size statue of the departed, or some symbolical figure. Some are pathetic and tender--the fairy-like child dancing on roses, for example, or the full-sized sailing boat crossing the Styx, every rope and sail wrought with wondrous grace in snowy marble. Others succeed in being only grotesque. One huge figure of Father Time sitting cross-legged on a coffin with his knee cocked up, for instance; or an unpleasantly realistic model of an old man with one foot in an open grave with his face turned over his shoulder. This was erected by an old Count, still living, when his wife died. And so on _ad infinitum_. This is a place to muse, to think grave thoughts and to reflect upon sudden death, but not a place to get up an appetite. Genoa is an attractive city, although they say that, unlike Florence and Pisa, it is not an economical town for strangers of limited means and that lodgings are scarce. The character of the inhabitants betrays little of the fiery valour that gave Genoa its proud position in the Middle Ages. Now its people are quiet, hard-working and practical; they take little interest in politics and are well content to live under a constitutional Monarchy, without showing any disturbing tendency toward an anarchistic Republic. [Illustration] [Illustration] THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND. ROME.--Prince Napoleon, the head of the Bonaparte family and _de jure_ Emperor of the French, has died at Rome after a long and serious illness, during the course of which, faithful to his declared principles, he refused to accept a drop of medicine. His has been a strange and eventful life. Nephew of the great Napoleon, born in Trieste in 1822, he has been four times in exile. He was born in exile and he has died in exile. One of the most brilliant men who ever lived, one of the most statesmanlike, his whole life has been ruined, and the great promise of his youth spoiled, by the cynical disregard of the opinion of others which has always distinguished him. He was far the superior of his cousin, the Emperor Napoleon III., and if his advice had had more weight with the Emperor, the Republic in France would still be a hopeless dream, and the mud of Panama would not have soiled France. Prince Napoleon had, of course no connection with the _coup d'état_ of the Second December that gave Napoleon III. the French Empire, for his claims were indisputably superior to those of the successful plotter; and although a reconciliation did take place between them, their relations were never very cordial, in spite of the fact that the Emperor placed great reliance upon Prince Napoleon's judgment. It may be safely said that if Prince Napoleon had been in Paris during the fatal days of 1870, the unfortunate war with Prussia would never have been declared. It is ancient history now that the Empress Eugénie was the cause of that war, and in private conversation often referred to it as "_Ma Guerre_." Not long since I met the famous Doctor Cordes of Geneva, who had been called in consultation by the Emperor before he started on the fatal campaign that culminated in Sedan; and he told me that the Emperor was simply a child in the hands of the Empress, for he was, at that time, suffering the most terrible agony from stone in the bladder. At that time, however, Prince Napoleon was traveling in Spitzbergen with his _bon amis_, Ernest Renan, the clever author of the "_Vie de Jésus_," and knew nothing of passing events. A warning dispatch was indeed sent to him, but he shrugged his shoulders on receiving it and remarked that although the members of the government in France were "_imbeciles_," still they were not all fools. But events proved that they were, and Prince Napoleon hurried back upon the declaration of war, meeting with a hostile reception on his way through Scotland, where the sympathies of the people were with Prussia. He found the French Ambassador in London, M. de la Vallette, jubilant and repeating the boomerang-like phrase, "_A Berlin_." The Prince foretold the result clearly and exactly, and after Sedan quietly devoted himself to scientific pursuits until the time for the third Empire should arrive. He had never liked the Empress Eugénie. He saw clearly the mistake the Emperor had made in not allying himself with one of the reigning houses; and in espousing the beautiful Mademoiselle de Montijo. He assumed a spiteful attitude toward the Empress whom he called "_Ni-Ni_," and once refused to drink her health in public. M. Renan says of him that his grasp of a subject was wonderful, his wit extraordinary, and his executive ability unsurpassed. His sister, the brilliant Princess Mathilde, who shares so many of his gifts, has the only _salon_ in Paris to-day, and with her brother's death and the union of his party it will become historical. Prince Napoleon was so reserved that he went through life without inspiring or receiving any real affection, and without meaning it he unconsciously repelled adherents who wished to become devoted. He had the misfortune of passing for a Republican under the Empire and for an Imperialist under the Republic, which was the more unfortunate as he despised all forms of government, and in his ambition to rule would have put up with any. A curious thing about him was the fact that his followers liked him better at a distance. Only the other day one of his staunchest friends exclaimed: "I never liked him so well as now, when I know I shall not see him again." At a distance people remembered only his brilliancy, culture, eloquence and the surprising ease with which he mastered every problem, however difficult, in public affairs. He was superior everywhere and popular nowhere, and although he had the personal magnetism which enforces admiration at first sight, he had also the unfortunate power of inducing antipathy toward him on further acquaintance. The deceased Prince's life was in all its vicissitudes an extraordinary one and is rich in anecdotes and stories. His career was a succession of false steps, and again and again the cup of power was at his lips, only to be dashed to the ground by his own mistake. A man of majestic person, high ambitions and unexcelled ability, his singular lack of tact and knack of doing the wrong thing in the right place ruined his chances of success. Prince Jerome Napoleon, or the Emperor Napoleon the Fifth--to give him his real title--was the son of Jerome Bonaparte (the brother of the great Napoleon), King of Westphalia, by his marriage with the Princess Catherine of Wurtemburg. He was brought up in Rome, Austria and Geneva, and finished his education under the supervision of his uncle, the King of Wurtemburg, at the military school of Ludwisburg, near Stuttgart. On the establishment of the Empire, under his cousin, he took rank as Heir Apparent before the Prince Imperial's birth, after which he became Heir Presumptive, and was for some time Governor-General of Algeria. The Emperor often employed him upon various diplomatic military and scientific missions. Many people may have forgotten that at one time Prince Napoleon was a prominent rival of the Emperor. When the future Napoleon III. was indulging in various little escapades that made it seem unlikely he would ever rise to any great position, fortune favoured his more youthful cousin. Prince Napoleon had every advantage. In looks he was weirdly like the first Napoleon. I saw him here last year and instinctively looked for the cocked hat and knee breeches associated forever with "_le petit caporal_." No one who saw his massive, clean-shaven, powerful face could doubt that he stood face to face with a veritable Napoleon. He seemed to hold the winning card when the Revolution of 1848 broke out, but every day he lost ground, notwithstanding his active interference in affairs, and every day Prince Louis Napoleon gained more influence in spite of his reserve. And this illustrates French nature. It prefers a man who is impenetrable rather than one who bustles about and allows his plans to be found out. After a few pitched battles Prince Napoleon allowed it to appear that he recognized his cousin as the stronger man, and attached himself to his cause. But he had no sympathy with the men who planned the _coup d'état_. He distrusted and disliked them, and they returned the compliment. But he became Heir Presumptive, was made a general and had the Palais-Royal as a residence with £40,000 a year. In 1859 he married Princess Clotilde, the daughter of King Victor Emanuel, and sister of the present King of Italy. He leaves three children, Prince Victor Napoleon--now Napoleon the Sixth,--Princess Letitia, widow of the Duke of Aosta, and Prince Louis, a colonel in the Russian Dragoons. And now we come to two mistakes generally made as to the dead Prince's character. He was not a coward and he was not an atheist. Ever since the Crimean war Prince Napoleon has been dogged with a reputation for cowardice and was given the nicknames of "_Plon Plon_" and "_Cringe Plomb_" by the Parisian mob. There is not a doubt, however, that he behaved with all the courage of his race at the battle of the Alma, and that his recall was not due to his own choosing, but to the intrigues of his enemies. The report of the Marshal Commanding confirms this. But a damning story of his ill-health was circulated at the time by the semi-official papers, and the mob was ready to put the worst construction on it. Report says the Empress Eugénie was in no small degree responsible for these rumours, for she cordially disliked him and he returned the feeling with interest. Fate was again cruel to him in the war with Prussia in 1870-'71. When he returned from Spitzbergen he was anxious to be given a responsible command in the Imperial army, but instead was sent off to Italy to keep King Victor Emanuel in a good humour. He had one more chance, before the war, of redeeming his honour, when the Duc d'Aumale challenged him to a duel, but lost it by too much conscientiousness. He hastened to the Tuilleries to ask if he ought to fight. Of course the Emperor said no, and then the Empress made her famous but ill-natured _bon mot_, "If a bullet is ever found in our cousin's body it will be that he has swallowed it." Prince Napoleon was not an atheist. This is proved by his whole life, by his friends and by his death, and will be proved by his memoirs, for in his last moments, while still conscious, he received Extreme Unction from Cardinal Bonaparte, and he has had a religious funeral. He was an anti-clerical, and while certainly not a religious man, he inclined towards the doctrines of Rousseau. The famous Good Friday dinner at which the Prince and his guests ate _charcuterie_ and drank a somewhat profane toast was the base of the belief respecting his religious opinions--a belief greatly magnified and spread by the Empress Eugénie. Prince Napoleon never knew when to speak and when to remain silent, although a magnificent orator, and his failing has been well summed up by a famous senator: "The Prince speaks well, he is the best of orators--but he says only too well what had best been left unsaid." His friends were the most famous men of the day, Victor Hugo, Edmond About, Ste. Beuve and Père Hyacinthe, who sent him his blessing as he lay dying. His relations with the Emperor show many instances of his want of tact. Having been complimented by Napoleon upon two speeches delivered in the Senate against the temporal power of the Pope, he resolved to improve upon them, and then delivered his famous anti-Papal speech at Ajaccio, a speech which drew forth the following interesting letter of remonstrance from the Emperor: "_Monsieur Mon Cousin_,--I cannot help informing you of the painful impression which I received on reading the speech you delivered at Ajaccio. When I left you in Paris with the Empress and my son and as President of the Privy Council, I hoped that you would prove yourself by your acts, conduct and speeches, worthy of the trust which I had placed in you, and that you would set the example of that unity which ever ought to exist in our family. You have raised questions which no longer concern our day. It is necessary to have borne, as I have, the responsibilities of power in order to judge how far the ideas of Napoleon I. are applicable to the present time. Before the great statue of the founder of our family, what are we but pigmies, only able to behold a part and incapable of grasping the whole? One thing, however, is certain, and that is that Napoleon exercised--first of all in his family and then in his government--that severe discipline without which all government is impossible, and without which all liberty leads to anarchy. Having said this much, my cousin, I pray God to have you in his holy keeping. NAPOLEON." This letter was written in 1866, when the Emperor was traveling in Algeria. After the fall of the Empire and the death of the Emperor, Prince Napoleon kept up a sort of armed neutrality with the Empress Eugénie and his young cousin, the Prince Imperial (then Napoleon the Fourth), after whom, he was the head of the Bonapartist party. When the Prince Imperial fell in Zululand in 1879, Prince Napoleon became the head of the family. But the Prince Imperial had made a foolish, boyish will in which he named his cousin, Prince Victor, the eldest son of Prince Napoleon, his heir and successor. The Empress Eugénie was only too glad to annoy her hated foe by pretending to accept this absurd arrangement, and unfortunately Prince Victor Napoleon fell into the hands of foolish advisers, quarreled with his father and set up a party of his own. For several years father and son have not spoken, each claiming to represent the Imperialist party in France. But it is now stated with authority that Prince Victor Napoleon was reconciled to his father on his death-bed, and this will do much towards wiping out the memory of his unfilial conduct. But he was strongly tempted. The Empress Eugénie urged him, all the old adherents of his great family urged him, to set up the Napoleonic standard, while his father seemed apathetic and indifferent. Then, of course, he commanded a divided allegiance. Now he stands at the head of a united party. Thousands of men who would not join Prince Napoleon on account of his anti-clerical opinions and who refused to support Prince Victor Napoleon against his father, are now rallying to the Imperial standard. Scoffers said the Napoleonic legend was dead when the first Napoleon died. Scoffers say so now. Yet Napoleon III. proved that it was very much alive in the fifties, and it is well on the cards that Napoleon VI. may do so in the nineties. The new Emperor _de jure_, is clever, eloquent and possesses tact, above all the _sine qua non_ of one in his position. He has few enemies and many friends and will inherit the Empress Eugénie's large fortune upon her death. And so the greatest service Prince Napoleon has ever done for his family and cause is by dying, for his death unites, while his life divided, his party. History will judge him fairly. Brilliant, clever, witty, statesmanlike, eloquent and masterful, his life has been ruined by want of tact. His last words are significant: (I quote from the London _Times_.) "He declared that he died an Emperor, adhering to the principles of the _Concordat_, and fully imbued with the religious sentiments of the Bonapartes." Such was the Emperor Napoleon the Fifth, a man misjudged by many and loved by few, but a man whose talents will one day be recognized by France. [Illustration] [Illustration] A DEVONSHIRE MARKET TOWN. NEWTON ABBOT, DEVON.--At the first blush the sudden change from the balmy breezes of the Riviera to the comparatively harsh winds that blow over Dartmoor, would seem to be a trial. But such is hardly the case. I am writing to-day in a private sitting room of the quaint Globe Inn in this little-visited town, with the windows wide open and the sun streaming in with a warmth that is almost too genial. One never hears of a tourist visiting Newton Abbot, and from all I can gather Newton Abbot is in the same position. It is a queer, quiet little market town in South Devon, about six miles from Torquay, the great southern watering place, and not far from Dartmouth and the moors. One can have hunting and fishing in the neighbourhood, for the South Devon fox hounds meet near by three times a week and the rivers Eske and Culme supply capital salmon fishing. Several big country houses are close by, and to the casual observer Newton Abbot exists simply to form a coterie of tradespeople for the benefit of the County Families in the neighbourhood. It has no society of its own, and even its Mechanics' Institute gives entertainments only by the suffrages of the "surrounding Nobility and Gentry," to quote from its programmes. And yet it is a happy, quiet little town enough, sunning itself in its own small valley, and with many of its by-streets running up the numerous hills at the back, whose brows are dotted with genteel (how popular that word is among the lower-middle class in England) semi-detached "villas." The London papers get down at mid-day, and until noon Newton Abbot gets on very well with a local print which reproduces the news from yesterday's _Times_. By the way, "The Thunderer" is too dear for the average man (it is three-pence a copy as against a penny for the other London dailies) and so it is lent out to read by the local library which advertises itself as "in connection with Mudie's." One rather wonders where the "connection" comes in when a copy of "Robert Elsmere" is handed one as the "last thing out, sir, just down from London." But Newton Abbot has some historical interest. In the midst of the town, just in front of the old ivy-covered tower of St. Leonard's, is a remarkably ugly stone surmounted by a modern lamp-post. The stone bears an inscription to the effect that in 1688 the then Mayor of the town, standing thereon, read the first proclamation made by William of Orange after landing in England. Enthusiastic Orangemen visit the stone to this day, and zealous members of the Order of the White Rose curse it heartily, as they regret King James and the Stuart dynasty; which, whatever its faults, at least inspired more romantic loyalty and personal devotion than the phlegmatic Dutch Prince ever did. I visited several houses near Newton Abbot with a view to taking one furnished for the sake of the good fishing near, and although none was found to suit I had some droll experiences. One house was very well furnished, and the family seemed in a remarkable hurry to get away while offering the place at a low rent, but it afterwards turned out that the paterfamilias--a clergyman--had just eloped with the parlourmaid. At another house I was received by a smartly-dressed person who tried hard to give me the impression that she was a lady, and who at length airily inquired: "And would you like to move in, at once, forthwith directly?" But her drawing room was decorated with wax flowers under glass shades; and mottoes done in Berlin wool, with a chromo-lithograph of the late Lord Palmerston over the mantel; so I was not exposed to much temptation. The occupant of another cottage waxed confidential as she showed me over the house, told me her name was Mrs. Mudge and that she "laundered" for a living. She looked as if she did something for a living, for her face was fiery red and she diffused an odour of gin and cloves as she slowly maundered on. Nearly every street in the town shows by its name some connection with the Courtenay family--Earls of Devon--who in the old days owned most of the property in South Devon. Now evil times have come upon them and beautiful old Powderham Castle, near Dartmouth, alone remains to them. But they are venerated still in the county and the "Courtenay interest" is a great help to the candidate for Parliamentary honours. Newton Abbot has the distinction--if it be a distinction, which is very strongly debated--of having as its representative in Parliament the only Liberal member from Devonshire. Mr. Seale-Hayne is a wealthy follower of Mr. Gladstone and is faithful to his chief, but even he owes his seat to a prudent refusal to accept Mr. Gladstone's extreme views on the subject of home rule. The sturdy farmers of Devon have ideas of their own and do not see why the efforts of a few Irish agitators should be allowed to break up an Empire. The Conservatives and Liberal-Unionists divide the representation of Devon between them, with the solitary exception of the aforesaid Mr. Seale-Hayne, and the Conservatives are working hard to defeat him at the next general election. The echoes of the great gathering at Exeter last year, when Lord Salisbury addressed an audience of several thousand working people upon the fallacies of home rule for Ireland, have not yet died away, and his speech will bear fruit at the next general election. The tactics of the Gladstonians in the rural districts are now devoted to drawing off the attention of the rural voters from home rule--an attention that, to Gladstonian minds, is too closely fixed upon the struggles of the rival Irish parties, and the probability of their following the lead of the famous Kilkenny cats--and fixing it upon co-called "rural reforms." The Conservatives and Liberal-Unionists, on the other hand, place home rule in the front and make it the main issue; so the curious spectacle is presented of the party responsible for the measure placing it in the background, and the party opposed to it making it the main issue in the campaign. Turning to sweeter subjects--who, having once tasted Devonshire clotted cream can forget it? And when to a glass dish of clotted cream is added a sunny morning, a well-laid breakfast table and a hissing tea urn, life looks at least cheerful. [Illustration] [Illustration] OXFORD--FROM A STUDENT'S NOTE BOOK. OXFORD.--Everything at Oxford is quaint and charming, but its inns are unique and it is impossible to find one that sells bad beer,--the undergrads would never stand it,--and where a better judge of bitter beer than a Christ-Church, or a Magdalen, or a "Johns" man is to be found, it is hard to say. The names even of these inns are soothing. It is such a relief to get away from the American hotel abomination, with its gilded radiator, and from its cold, stiff restaurants and pretentious name; to the sanded coffee room of the quaint, cosy "Mitre," or to the bar-parlour of the "Bell" or the "Plough." And although these small, low-built inns are old--older than New York City several of them--they are radiant with a fresh lavender-smelling cleanliness that is never found in the big American hostelries, where the befringed and be-ribboned Irish importation reigns in her pride. Rosy-cheeked country lasses serve the public here, and are shining examples of civil service, while behind the bar stands a lively, neat and pretty barmaid, who is an adept in chaffing the college men, but with too much self-respect to allow any vulgar jesting in her domain. We undergrads were not allowed to frequent every inn, but the "Clarendon" was a great favourite, and I have heard many jolly stories in its quaint old "Smoke Room," lined with prints after Hogarth. When I was "in residence" at the University, three years ago, there used to be a very pretty barmaid who officiated at the "Plough," opposite my rooms, and I noticed that she was usually at the window when Connigsby Disraeli, nephew to the great Earl of Beaconsfield, who was then a student at "New," passed by. A queer fellow, Disraeli, and sure to make his mark if he lives. I met him at the theatre constantly, where he always led the applause. He is very popular still in Oxford, for he is hail fellow well met with everyone, be it "town" or "gown"; and he is "up" on dogs and horses as well as in the classics. His kennels were famous when he was "in residence" or "up," as it is sometimes called. If his uncle had not been the first Earl, and had the title not therefore been confined to his direct line (he had no sons), Disraeli would have been "Milord"; but he is sure to make his own way. At the last general election he was elected to Parliament from the Altrincham Division of Sussex by a large majority over his Liberal opponent. The Queen is said to take a personal interest in his success, and Her Majesty's partiality for his uncle is well known. He has already begun to attract attention by active work in the Conservative cause and by clever addresses at Primrose League meetings all over England. My rooms in the college days were in Cornmarket Street, near the "High," and my landlord (who was duly licensed by the all-powerful Proctors) rejoiced in the name of Huckings. He was formerly valet to the Marquis of Queensberry, and never allowed one to forget the fact; few were the days when allusions to "His Lordship the Markis" failed to greet my ears. Huckings is very proud of his "acquaintance" with the Nobility, and often boasted that Prince Christian-Victor, a grandson of Her Majesty and a student of Magdalen, once knocked him down in the cricket field. But Huckings is eminently respectable and very civil. His furniture was usually covered with a green material stiffly starched, that crackled and rustled like an Irish-American servant out for a Sunday walk,--no English housemaid would dream of taking the liberty of allowing herself to rustle. Huckings was a capital cook and an experienced butler, and his welsh-rarebits were as light as air. There is but one theatre in Oxford, and that is directly under the supervision of the Vice-Chancellor, and no play can be performed without his sanction. The programmes are headed "By permission of the Reverend the Vice-Chancellor, and the Right-Worshipful the Mayor." For Oxford, as a 'Varsity town, is under the control of the head of the University as well as of the Mayor. The unsophisticated crowd in the gallery always hisses the villain, who is usually the best actor, and applauds the hero, who is often a poor one; but this is usual all through England, and is taken by the heavy villain of the play as a tribute to his genius. Very good entertainments are given as a rule: "The Pirates," Toole in "The Don," and the inimitable Corney Grain have appeared among others. The bar is forbidden to sell whiskey to the undergrads, so the call is for "lime-juice," which answers the same purpose! I met my old tutor, or coach for "cramming," in the street to-day, and I have just had him to dine. He is typical--a short, squat man with a heavy, unkempt beard, and with countless lines seaming his face. He has not been out of Oxford for twenty years and spends all his time in coaching backward students. He reminds one in some ways of a ripe and somewhat mouldy Stilton cheese. His rooms are musty and cobwebby, for he tells me no one has dusted them for two years, as he cannot stand having his papers disturbed. And how he smokes! His pipe rack must hold twenty pipes at least, and most of them are beautifully coloured. The walks about Oxford are charming and on returning from a long tramp it is delightful to stand on Folly Bridge at dusk and watch the punts and canoes come dropping down the "Char," or to see a college eight dash swiftly down the Isis to Iffley. The old inn at Godstow, just opposite the ruins of the famous Nunnery, is very quaint; and the fame of Mumby's cherry brandy is known to all the colleges in Oxford. The author of "Alice in Wonderland" is a Fellow of Christ Church College, and lives in two rooms looking out over the green old "Quad." He is fond of children and has them always with him. They tell a droll story of him in Oxford. The Queen enjoyed "Alice" so much that she requested the author, by letter, to send her another of his "charming books." Much flattered, he forwarded Her Majesty his "Treatise on the Differential Calculus." When I was an undergrad it was almost impossible to pay for what one bought in Oxford, for the tradespeople insist on one's taking long credits--a neat little plan by which they make a good deal in the long run, as they charge heavy interest. Oxford changes little as the years go by. It was lovely spring weather to-day and everyone wandered to the river, through the green Christ Church meadows, just as they have done for hundreds of years and will do in future centuries; and they are wise, for nothing is so delightful on a warm afternoon in June as to take a punt and slowly glide along the Cherwell, or to drop down the Isis in a canoe and take a plunge at "Parson's Pleasure." Descriptions of College life at Oxford have been done to death and it is hardly worth while to go over the well-worn ground. "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green" still give a fair idea of 'Varsity life, and "Tom Brown" is as good to-day as when it was written. The contrast between American and English college life is sharply marked. A short experience of Yale made me enjoy Oxford all the more. There is no class spirit, but the tone in the twenty-odd colleges--each a small Yale--is more athletic and more _Commencement-de-siècle_ in every way. A curious thing is the way in which cap and gown are worn here. The gown with its two short tails reaches only to the small of the back, and is only worn when absolutely necessary. There has been a good deal of amused talk "in Hall" over the report that some upper classmen at Yale actually wear a long gown reaching to the feet. It would be considered bad form for Oxford undergrads to wear such a thing, as long gowns are worn only by dons and tutors. Americans are coming in increased numbers every year; and for some unknown reason they usually go to New College, or to "Ch. Ch.," as Christ Church is familiarly called. But I found St. John's College--or "Johns,"--with its lovely gardens and long, low, time-worn buildings, a delightful place to study in or at. "Ch. Ch." is pre-eminently the "swell college." Balliol is for hard students, and Magdalen is very aristocratic; Jesus is for Welshmen, Wadham for men who want an easy time, and Brazenose and Oriel for athletes. "Johns" combines the happiest features of each. The others have no marked characteristics. The good old dons are a feature of Oxford, and it is easy to see from their rosy cheeks and well-fed look that they do not despise the famous Oxford ale, which is pure and wholesome, while the wine is bad and dear. Consequently everyone drinks beer, except a few old Deans and Masters of Colleges, whose gout confines them to toast and water. The thought of dons brings up memories of the payment of gate fines, if one happened to be out of college after the great bell of Christ Church had boomed out the hour of nine; and it was harder than may be supposed to dodge the Proctor and his "bull dogs" if one was out "in mufti," _i. e._, without cap or gown. But take it all in all, college life at Oxford is an enviable thing, and Oxford itself is a delightful place. [Illustration] [Illustration] THE ENGLISH LITTORAL. BOURNEMOUTH.--Imagine a few houses set down in the midst of a forest of pines on two great cliffs overhanging the sea; with a sandy soil, and you have Bournemouth. There are shops, indeed, and a principal street, but they are so mixed up with the pines and so divided, one from the other, that they do not give an impression of town life at all, and one easily imagines oneself to be in the depths of the country. The pines are the fetishes of Bournemouth. You breathe in their healing balsam, you bathe in pine juice and sleep on pine pillows. You walk in pine groves, and sit on furniture made exclusively of pine and, when you die, you are laid under the shade of the pines. I don't doubt the fact that pines are healthy in moderation, but they are monotonous. Bournemouth is a new place, for everything dates back only forty years. Before that there were only plantations of pines on the cliff. The name of the discoverer of Bournemouth is unknown, but the man who has "made" the place, and made it, too, with wonderful taste and skill, building all the houses in the pine woods and cutting hardly any of them down, is Sir George Meyrick, ably assisted by the Lord of the Manor who owns the half not belonging to Sir George. One cannot call Bournemouth wildly gay, but it is eminently select--so are the prices, which are high enough to frighten away any one under the rank (and income) of a Marquis. There is no theatre in the town, the aforesaid Lord of the Manor who owns most of the freehold objecting to such worldly amusements; but the inhabitants have managed to get around him by fitting up the town hall as an amateur play-house, where occasional third-rate companies perform. But people hardly come here to go to the play. They come for rest and change. Bournemouth is a good long way from London: three hours from Waterloo station, and in Hampshire, on the border line of Dorset. The climate is wonderfully dry, and milder than that of London, but not warm. Indeed, there is little difference between the climates of Geneva and Bournemouth, except that, of course, there is more snow in Geneva, and the air is less relaxing. One can easily understand how consumptives may derive benefit from it (lately many have hurried off to Berlin to place themselves in Dr. Koch's clinic), but to healthy people it is debilitating, even more so than the climate of Nice and San Remo. The scenery around is lovely. Great hollows (locally called chines) extend to the sea between the cliffs, and a drive along the coast reminds one forcibly of the drive along the Corniche road between Monte Carlo and Mentone. Indeed, this part of the Hampshire coast is beginning to be called the British Riviera, and it deserves the name, although the sea is less blue and the sky has a duller tinge than those of the Mediterranean coast can show. The neighbouring drives are full of interest. The ruins of Corfe Castle will repay a visit, and Canford Manor, Lord Wimborne's place, is well worth seeing. There are drives to Poole, a sea-port near, and to Christchurch, with which Bournemouth is incorporated for the purpose of Parliamentary representation. Boscombe Chine and Branksome Chine are lovely spots, a little way out of Bournemouth. Bournemouth is rich in churches. St. Peter's is a noble bit of architecture, and Holy Trinity is a remarkable building, whose steeple is a tower distinct from the main building. Its rector, Canon Eliot, has recently been appointed Dean of Windsor and Domestic Chaplain to the Queen; and people are lamenting his departure, for he has been here twenty years and during that time has gained for his church, by his own efforts, the sum of £40,000. The inhabitants of Bournemouth have been anxious for some time to have the place granted a charter of incorporation, so that they might rejoice in a _bona fide_ Mayor of their own instead of having to put up with a simple Chairman of Commissioners. A member of Her Majesty's Privy Council came down to inspect the town and advised the Queen to grant the charter, which she did last month. Lately political feeling has been running high over the election of the Mayor, and there have been several Richmonds in the field, one of whom put forward the fact that he had been for seven years caterer to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales and to the Guards' Club in London as a claim to the office. He came within a few votes of election, but was beaten by the leading stationer of the town. Now to celebrate this important epoch in the history of Bournemouth, Lord and Lady Portarlington, who live very near, decided to give a _conversazione_ in the Winter Garden of the Hotel Mont Doré. Of course, the Mayor and Aldermen appeared; and now the current of feeling in Bournemouth is at fever heat, for "the right worshipful, the Mayor," to give him his proper title, appeared in robes and chains of office--_hinc illæ lachrymæ_. England is divided equally on this subject; about half the Mayors of provincial towns wearing robes and badges, with cocked hats and the other half confining themselves to a simple chain of office. The Bournemouth papers are fighting the matter tooth and nail, and one worthy Alderman (an Irish-American green-grocer) has resigned office rather than submit to wear "these relics of mediævalism." It will be news to most of us that cocked hats were _en evidence_ in the middle ages. But Bournemouth is really a charming place and well worth a visit. [Illustration] [Illustration] A DAY AT WINDSOR. WINDSOR, BERKS.--"Personally conducted" parties have done Windsor to death; and the place has been described so often and so poorly that it needs a bold pen to make another attempt. My day at Windsor was passed during the cold month of January; when the Royal Borough was hung with crape, when the flags were at half mast and when everything was redolent of gloom and sadness. I saw the highest in the land weeping, and Royalty when overcome with grief; for the Heir Presumptive to the English Throne had been cut off and the nation was in mourning. The clearest memory that remains with me after the splendid ceremonial in St. George's Chapel, is the recollection of the bowed figure and grief-worn face of the Prince of Wales as he stood at the foot of his older son's coffin, between his only remaining son, Prince George, and his son-in-law, the Duke of Fife. He raised his head as Sir Albert Woods, Garter King of Arms, proclaimed the "style and title of His late Royal Highness"; and his terrible loss was evident to the most unobservant there. But the funeral has been everywhere fully described, and it would be useless to repeat a catalogue of its many and varied incidents. After it was over, I walked through the grassy stretches of Windsor Great Park with an old Oxford friend, who had known "Prince Eddie" well, both on the _Bacchante_ and afterward at York. He told me much that was new of him and several stories of his wonderful tact in social matters, by means of which he had averted serious scandal from a family well known to readers of Burke and Debrett. I parted from him that evening with a better appreciation of the dead Prince and his character than I had ever had before. His death has been a terrible blow to all the Royal Family, but in the midst of their terrible grief the Prince and Princess of Wales cannot but feel consoled by the overwhelming sympathy that has been poured out upon them not only by English hearts; but from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and from the greater England beyond the sea. There is something infinitely pathetic about the death of their eldest son, just a week after his twenty-eighth birthday and the month before his wedding. All England has wept with the Royal Family, and foreigners realize as never before the depth and strength of English loyalty. The crowds that lined the streets in front of Marlborough House when Prince Eddie lay ill, contained many work-people and clerks; and the grief and respect shown by the lower classes everywhere has been a wonder to all, and a complete refutation of Andrew Carnegie's windy diatribes as to the progress of democracy in England. There is no jarring note in the sympathy of grief, for no word has been said against the dead Prince--nothing but praise and a hearty recognition of his modesty and hard work. We shall see, when we review the history of his engagement, something of his strength of character. Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward was born at Frogmore, Windsor, on January 8, 1864, and his names were carefully chosen, representing two grandfathers (the Prince Consort, and the King of Denmark); one grandmother (the Queen); and a great-grandfather (the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father). The Queen preferred the two first names, and so, until he was created Duke of Clarence in 1890, his official designation was Prince Albert Victor of Wales. But to the great mass of the English people he was always Prince Edward, or Prince Eddie as he was affectionately called, for Edward was a name that held glorious associations for them and they looked forward to having another "Long-shanks" on the throne. The history of his life has been repeated so often that it is only necessary to recall a few incidents: his two years as naval cadet in the training ship _Britannia_ at Dartmouth with his brother; his three years' cruise around the world in the _Bacchante_; his studies at Cambridge and Heidelberg; and his tour in India. He and his brother, Prince George, had always been together until their choice of professions separated them. Prince Eddie went with all his soul into army work and Prince George chose the navy. The grief of the British army at Prince Eddie's death shows what Tommy Atkins thought of him. During the last six years in England every one has been wondering why Prince Eddie did not marry and settle the succession; and, finally, the truth leaked out last year, although long before that his attentions to his pretty cousin, Princess May of Teck, had attracted attention. Ever since they had played together as children he had been devoted to her, and his father and mother heartily approved his choice. The Queen, his royal grandmother, resolutely opposed all thoughts of this match and brought pressure to bear to get Prince Eddie to marry his cousin, Princess Margaret of Prussia, a daughter of the Empress Frederick and sister of the present Kaiser. But Prince Eddie was firm and declared if he could not marry Princess May he would not marry any one. And so matters stood for several years. But when Princess Louise of Wales (who is next in succession after Prince George) married the Duke of Fife, the necessity for the marriage of Prince Eddie grew greater, as there was a shrewd suspicion that the great English nobles would hardly care to have the children of the Duke of Fife rule over them if the other branches failed. But even yet Prince Eddie stood firm and would not yield, although at last even the Prince of Wales urged compliance with the Queen's wishes. And finally Prince Eddie's reward came. When Prince George was so ill with typhoid, popular sentiment urged Prince Eddie's marriage and then the Queen gave in and made the two young people happy. The public announcement of the engagement was received with universal joy, for Princess May was thoroughly English, and both the _fiancées_ leaped at once into great popularity. They went down to Windsor together to salute the Queen, and everything seemed to give universal satisfaction. Even Her Majesty relaxed when she saw how joyfully her subjects received the news of the royal betrothal, and the Prince of Wales declared at a public dinner his delight that his son was to marry a Princess who was English by birth, education and preference. The ground of the Queen's objection to the marriage was simple, and she was soon convinced that the English nation attached no importance to it. On her mother's side, Princess May is descended from King George III. and stands in nearly the same relationship to that monarch as her late betrothed, for the Duchess of Teck is the daughter of King George's son, the Duke of Cambridge; and Queen Victoria's father the Duke of Kent, was another son; so the Queen and the Duchess of Teck are first cousins; Princess May and the Prince of Wales second cousins; and Princess May and Prince Eddie second cousins once removed. But the Duke of Teck's pedigree was the trouble, for he is the descendant of a morganatic marriage, and but for that would now be heir to the throne of Wurtemburg. The English people found no fault with Princess May's descent, and, indeed, a sweeter, more gracious, more charming Princess it would be hard to find. The marriage was fixed for February, and soon wedding gifts began to pour in. Committees were formed all over the British Empire for the purpose of subscribing to a national gift. In Ireland it had been decided to present the royal bride and bridegroom with a castle, and Scotland and Wales were planning the same gifts. Bridesmaids were chosen and everything seemed to smile upon the national rejoicing. When Princess May went with her father and mother to pay a visit to the Prince and Princess of Wales at Sandringham early in January, huge shooting parties were organized in which Prince Eddie joined, and every morning the ladies of the Royal Family drove out to join the sportsmen at luncheon. On one of these occasions, on a rainy, misty day, Prince Eddie complained of feeling very cold, and instead of waiting to drive back with the others, walked briskly home to Sandringham with Princess May. The next day he was better and insisted upon going out with the other sportsmen. Again he was compelled to leave them, and again he walked back with Princess May. How she must value the remembrance of those two walks now! This was on the Friday. On Sunday he was ill, on Tuesday alarming bulletins were issued, and on Thursday he was dead. Oh, the pity of it! On the threshold of his career, on the eve of his marriage he was taken. One is tempted to ask _Cui bono?_ He will have his place in English History; and the memory of my day at Windsor will always linger; for I have seen what is of more interest than the Castle, with all its wealth of art--the loyalty of a people to their Royal House in its time of trial. [Illustration] [Illustration] SCARBOROUGH. SCARBOROUGH.--The seaside resorts of England are numberless, and yet there is a curious lack of similarity in their surroundings, their atmosphere and in their class of visitors. Scarborough is to the north of England what Bournemouth is to the south. It is select and exclusive, but the ultra smart London set is not found in its purlieus. It is a great place of resort for the old Yorkshire families--families who can trace their descent back to Norman William and behind him to the Saxon Thanes and Earls; and who look with ill-concealed disgust upon the _nouveaux riches_ who are so painfully to the fore just now in Belgravian drawing rooms and at crushes in Mayfair. Scarborough is not wildly gay; its visitors take their pleasures sedately, and the voice of the imitation nigger-minstrel is unheard in the land. One needs to be in rude health to enjoy Scarborough, for the sea breezes come rushing in from the lap of the Atlantic to mingle with the keen air of the downs; and if one's lungs are sound it is a delight to live. Hotel prices are fearfully and wonderfully conceived in Scarborough, but the landlords say people eat so much on account of the splendid air that they must charge high prices in self-defence. The amusements and distractions of Scarborough? If one hunts or shoots there is plenty of sport. Several packs of hounds meet on the downs near by, and although the country is a bit stiff, the going is fairly decent. It may perhaps be considered a drawback that hounds occasionally disappear over the cliffs in the ardour of the chase, and that a too-eager hunter might easily do the same--with his rider on his back; but most men who hunt here say that they enjoy the spice of danger. Scarborough has two features distinctively its own: its "Spa" and its cabs. Just why the long promenade where the band plays should be called the "Spa" no one knows, but the fact remains, and every Sunday all the world and his wife walk there for "Church Parade." The Scarborough cab is really a small Victoria, drawn by one horse, ridden by a correctly-got-up tiger, who lends a picturesque air to the trap. They go well, these small horses, and gallop up and down the long hills on which Scarborough is built, with greatest ease. The "day tripper," with his 'Arriet, is unknown here, for the simple reason that there would be nothing for him to do. There are no stands in the streets to display "s'rimps," "whilks" and other questionable marine delicacies, put up in brown paper bags at "tuppence the quart"; no merry-go-rounds; no cheap photographic studios; or one-horse circuses where the manager is clown, acrobat and owner in one, to tempt the taste and gratify the curiosity of the lower classes. And there are no Americans in Scarborough. It is too far from Paris, and too quiet for the extraordinary specimens of nasal tendencies, who make an annual descent upon the Continent and swarm from Dan to Beersheba. One never meets them at home, these painfully rich and newly varnished Yankees who travel through Great Britain in great state and pomp, and whose breeding is shamed by that of the scullery maid in the cosy little inns they so disdain. It is really trying to see the impression most Englishmen have of Americans--impressions gathered simply from these inflictions who, knowing no one but the green-grocer on their corner at home, come abroad to astonish the natives; and who succeed in doing nothing but in making the appellation of American to stink in the nostrils of the foreigner. Of course there are ruins near Scarborough, and again of course the favourite drive is to these ruins. Another excursion is to a hill overlooking the town, where tradition says that unsavoury individual yclept Oliver Cromwell, once stood, or sat or performed some other operation equally important. Politically, as becomes its staid and exclusive _clientèle_, Scarborough is Conservative; and has no sympathy with an old man's visionary plans to break up a great Empire. Irish agitators appear occasionally but not often, and they rarely carry away a full purse from the collections they invariably take up. Descriptions of places are invariably tiresome. One place is usually like another, and the best way to know a town or city is to go there; but anyone who can picture a town built up on the cliffs and down in the hollows between, with stretches of sandy beach in front, will have a fair idea of the Bournemouth of the north. The country round about Scarborough is attractive. Quaint villages quite out of the world like Symsbury, are met with at every turn; small market towns, like Yarm, where the old custom of engaging servants by the "hold fast" in the market-place on the yearly appointed day still obtains; and small seaside resorts, like Redcar and Coatbridge; with Whitby famous for its jet; all these are worth a visit. Yorkshire men are canny, and good at a bargain and no better judges of horseflesh are found anywhere. The only drawback connected with Scarborough is its distance from London, but that is really only a drawback to Londoners. The Scarborough man is rather proud of the fact. He looks with pity upon the benighted south of England man, and has no words to express his contempt for the finnicky foreigner, who comes to Scarborough and drinks sour red wine, instead of quaffing huge draughts of the glorious old Yorkshire ale. [Illustration] [Illustration] CLIMBING IN LAKELAND. ROSTHWAITE, NEAR KESWICK.--A couple of days since I started off with a barrister friend to do a days' climb in the Lake country. He promised me a good view from the top of Scafell Pike, but a rough time in getting there; and took an almost pathetic interest in my boots and "shorts," hinting darkly that certain mysterious "screes," over which the path lay, would test their strength and durability to the utmost. We travelled third class, of course, for my friend would have thought me insane to propose anything else; and, really, we were very comfortable, as all the seats were cushioned. He wore the regulation British walking costume: stout, heavy, hob-nail boots, thick woolen stockings, and loose and impossibly wide knickerbockers; while a blue serge jacket and a peaked cloth cap clothed his upper man. Of course, his short briar-wood pipe was to the fore, and on the whole, he looked comfortable. My own get-up was more ordinary, as I had started at half an hour's notice. We rushed into Darlington station before long--an immense glass-covered structure, with platforms half a mile long--and there changed for Penrith and Keswick. We began to ascend soon after leaving Darlington, passing by Barnard Castle, the "beauty spot of Yorkshire"--the tracks lying over breezy moorlands. We changed at Penrith, a dreary junction, and reached Keswick about seven o'clock in a mist of half-twilight that was very kind to the distant mountains, making them appear much bigger and grander than they were ever meant to be. Fortunately, we found the Borrowdale coach still running, and as it would take us within two miles of our destination, we were well pleased. Before it started we had time to attend a very lively meeting of the Salvation Army in the Keswick market-place, where the tall, thin man who dealt out freely sundry dismal prophecies, betrayed painful need of a bronchial trochee. The drive on the box seat of the four-in-hand was glorious. The moon came out as we reached the edge of Derwentwater and threw her soft light full on the lonely lake; and, what was of more importance, on the broad road ahead of us. The horses were fresh and the road inclining to a descent, so we rolled gaily on past the Lodore Hotel, hard-by the famous falls, until, too soon, we stopped before the Borrowdale Inn. Then, with a cheery good-night from the coachman, we started to walk the remaining two miles, our appetites forcibly reminding us that we had eaten nothing since early morning; and with a cheery feeling of expectancy for the comforts of the inn presided over by the famous Mrs. Rigg. The lights of the little hamlet of Rosthwaite soon appeared and we halted at a long, low, straggling house, buried in vines. A tall, stout lady stood in the doorway and proved herself to be _the_ Mrs. Rigg by the way in which she bustled about in all directions, calling several buxom country lasses to her aid. She sent two of them to prepare our much-wanted supper, while she herself piloted us to our quaint, low-ceilinged bed-rooms, where every bed had curtains. Now, Mrs. Rigg is a widow, and has been ever since the memory of man, and concerning the original Mr. Rigg nothing is known; but, whoever he was, people take more interest in the fact that his wife knows how to keep a good homely inn, called by Mrs. Rigg herself the "Royal Oak," but known to all the neighbourhood as "Mrs. Rigg's." Mrs. R. herself is a tall, stout old lady with a false front and an imposing cap, and when she sits in the little bar parlour behind the steaming tea kettle, reading the _Family Herald_, she presents a picture of comfort not easily surpassed. Mrs. Rigg is suspected of a leaning toward the village painter, to the regret of all concerned, and dismal are the forebodings of the aforesaid country lassies should she yield herself (and her inn) to his fascinations. We enjoyed our supper--huge chops served with mealy potatoes and foaming tankards of "bitter"--and then in the cozy smoke room (why never smoking room in England?), we proceeded to lay out the route for the next day. Our intention in coming to Rosthwaite had been to climb Scafell Pike and, possibly Glaramara; so we confidently looked forward to a fine day. But, oh, the despair when we woke up next morning, for the rain was coming down in a steady drizzle and the mist was floating gently over and about all the mountain tops within view. We met with rueful faces in the coffee room, for now Scafell was quite out of the question as well as Glaramara; for, of course, no view could be had on such a day, and the idea of wandering along the edge of precipices in the mist was hardly tempting. But an inspiration came to us. It was unanimously voted a pity to waste that day, as we should be obliged to return on the next; so, after much poring over maps and guides, we decided to go as far up Scafell as possible and then, making a circuit, to return by Sty Head Pass. This sounded easy and I began to congratulate myself--rather previously, as it afterward turned out--upon the probability of getting back in time for dinner at six. We had scraped acquaintance with an "undergrad" from Oxford--Wadham College--and we invited him to go with us. We hurried over breakfast, taking care, fortunately, to eat a hearty one; and then, with a rueful look at the cozy, firelit room we were leaving, tramped out into the rain about ten o'clock. We knew we should get wet through, so we took no overcoats and simply buttoned our jackets tight about our necks to keep our flannel shirts dry as long as possible. The road was very good for some distance, being the coach road to Buttermere, so we went gaily on. About two miles from Rosthwaite we reached the queerly-named little village of Seatollar (which our Wadham friend insisted on referring to as "Tolloller"), where we turned off into a rustic road overgrown with grass, which for some time led us among pine groves before bringing us to the famous Borrowdale yews: a group of fine old firs upon the hillside. Here our Oxonian again would have it that the name applied to the various flocks of sheep grazing near and pointed out to us some "genuine Borrowdale ewes." It got damper and damper as we went on, but I ceased to wonder when I heard we were drawing near the "wettest place in England," the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the annual rainfall is actually one hundred and fifty-six inches! There is not much of interest in Seathwaite except its moisture and the fact that it has no public house, as Sir Wilfred Lawson the great temperance advocate owns all the freehold. Here we left the road and struck up the side of the valley, having Glaramara and Great Gable in front of us, two big mountains covered with clouds; while Talyors-Gill poured its rushing, thread-like stream down the hillside opposite. Here we first began to walk on grass, and grass that had been rained on for the last hundred years without intermission, judging from its appearance. But we said little and pushed on by the side of the beck for some time, until it became necessary to go straight up the mountain by the sheep track, which was marked only by an occasional cairn or small heap of stones. It was hard work to climb over slippery rocks almost perpendicular; but we persevered and surmounted the hill, only to find ourselves struggling in a green bog at the top. The rain now came down harder than ever and as the Oxford man began to whistle "Wot Ch'er?" we felt gloomy. We pushed on in single file, each one dripping as he walked, the sound of the water swashing about inside our boots being painfully evident. We went on like this for some time. My friend suddenly broke into a shout, "Here we are, boys, thank goodness, this is Eske Hause." "Oh, then we are half way up Scafell," said the Oxonian--"hang the mist!" This last observation was timely, for a thick Scotch mist had now shut in upon the small plateau known as Eske Hause, where we stood, but as to the derivation of that name deponent sayeth not. We stopped here for a few minutes while our Oxonian produced a guide map, and with the water pouring down from the peak of his cap, proceeded to mark out our path. The rest of us wrung ourselves out and paid as much attention as we could. "We must go down by Sprinkling Tarn (good name, that) and then by Sty Head Tarn until we get to the Pass. Now, shall we lunch up here or down by the tarn?" We decided to postpone luncheon until we reached a lower and presumably warmer level, and we eagerly proceeded to make the descent. The path, or track, was steep and stony and the stones were slippery. I will draw a veil over that descent, but when we got down by Sprinkling Tarn (a small, lonely bit of water) we felt like being put through a wringer. We hurried on, not noticing that the path had merged itself imperceptibly in the surrounding turf, until our Wadham friend exclaimed: "Oh, I say, you know, this can't be right. It's quite time we were at that confounded tarn and I haven't seen a cairn this half hour." It was too true. We were off the track. There was mist all about us and the keen rain was chilling us through and through. We searched for the path in vain, until we were entirely discouraged, when some one suggested that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a bite; so we stood about in a dripping group as we got out our sandwiches and flasks. We were wet and chilled, and I doubt if Sir Wilfred himself would have objected to a taste of Scotch whisky under the circumstances. But the sandwiches! Oh, Mrs. Rigg, Mrs. Rigg, how we blessed you, there, on the steep side of Scafell as we found that the ham of which they were exclusively composed had "gone bad!" We said little, but we thought hard just then. After that we went sadly and silently on. Soon we found we were going down instead of up, which we knew to be wrong, as Sty Head Pass was above us. And now the thunders of a torrent swollen by recent rains began to be heard, and presently we came in sight of a tumbling mass of water hurrying along the bottom of the valley. We stood aghast, for this we knew must be Lingmell Beck, and the valley the one leading to Wastwater, miles away from the Pass. Night was closing in and the mist was nothing lighter, while it was really hard to carry the wet and dripping mass our clothes had become. We wandered up and down this valley for some time in bewilderment, not finding any trace of a path. But at last my friend, who had been carefully examining the mountain side, cried but: "Look, boys, there's the Pass, way above us! We must push straight up if we ever want to get back to-night." We looked doubtfully at the thin black line that might be the Pass, and which seemed miles above us, and then, with one determined look, set our teeth and went up the mountain. I say went, for we didn't walk, although we used every other means of progression, for we crawled and crept and stumbled along, sometimes on our hands and knees, frequently sliding back with great agility. I never experienced such a climb anywhere, even in Greece among the wild Theban mountains; for, dripping wet, with our clammy clothes clinging to us, we went a solid mile up that hill before we found the Sty Head Pass. That, although rough, was child's play compared with what we had come through, and when we reached the small cairn that marks the highest part of the Pass, we shuddered as we looked down the almost perpendicular mountain and wondered how on earth we ever came up. From the top of the Pass it was a fairly easy walk to Rosthwaite by Sty Head Tarn, which, owing to the encircling mist, looked like an immense ocean. Mrs. Rigg was at the door when we got down and looked so cheerful and glad to see us that we forgot to mention that ham. But we haven't got the damp of that walk out of ourselves yet; and it is doubtful if anything but the warm Italian sun is capable of removing the general mildew that enshrouds us. [Illustration] [Illustration] WINDERMERE. AMBLESIDE.--The chief peculiarity of the Lake country is the ever-present dampness. But once used to this one begins to enter into its peace and quiet. A month here away from the world would be, to a tired and overworked man, better than all "cures" or sanitoriums, for the damp is not the city pest, but that peculiar kind of moisture which makes the hard, smooth turf as green as an emerald and gives to the temporary visitor an appetite wolfish in its intensity. Ambleside is five miles from Windermere village (the nearest station) and is reached by four-horse drags running three times a day. The road is as smooth as a billiard table, the horses always fresh, and on the day it doesn't rain, a drive to Ambleside by the Lake is a thing to be remembered. Ambleside is a village of a few thousand inhabitants and primitive, to a certain degree. The Post Office, for instance, is in a stationer's shop and the drapers' and tailors' establishments are one. Ambleside is nestled at the foot of Wansfell Pike and is built on the side of a hill, consequently the streets are steep. There is but one street really, and the chemist, the butcher and the inevitable relic shop are to be found in it. The village is honeycombed with lodgings and there are many inns, for it is a great centre for excursions. The immediate neighbourhood is rich in attractions. Stock-Ghyll Force is but a short distance off--through the stable yard of the "Salutation Inn," and although a turn-stile with the sign "No Admission" appears, one may enter boldly without paying. The waterfall is not high but is wonderfully picturesque as it falls down the moss-covered rocks and dashes away through a deep ravine. The Stock-Ghyll is a favorite resort for newly-married couples and is certainly romantic enough for the purpose. Then there is a charming walk to Rydal--Wordsworth's village--by the banks of the Rothay, past Fox-How, where the noble Arnold of Rugby, beloved by all readers of "Tom Brown's School Days," lived; and Fox-Ghyll, the residence of the late Mr. Foster. Fox-How is an ideally perfect place, situate on the side of a hill, with a smooth green expanse of lawn in front, and buried in rose vines and honeysuckles. It is a low stone building with old-fashioned windows and has a cheery, hospitable look. The name is curious and a frequent one in the lake country. It comes, I believe, from the old Norwegian word "hague" (a sepulchral mound). Dr. Arnold named the three roads between Rydal and Grassmere. The highest he called Corruption Road, the middle Bit-by-Bit Reform (now called Bitbit Road), and the most level, Radical Reform. A little further on is Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's home, a charming old place, cushioned in trees. There the road goes on by Rydal Water, a small lake almost covered with rushes, and then through a gap in the mountain to Grassmere. This is all haunted ground, for Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge and De Quincy all walked and mused by the side of these lakes and on these hills, and one hardly wonders that they were inspired by the lovely scenery. Then, in another direction, one may walk from Ambleside to the quaint little village of Clappersgate, which is made up entirely of low grey stone cottages covered with vines and roses. The resources of Ambleside in providing day excursions for its visitors are really unbounded, and one of the pleasantest of these is to walk down to Waterhead, at the end of Windermere, and take passage on one of the small steamers that run several times a day. As the small vessel starts out from the pier one gets a splendid view of the mountains at the back of Ambleside, and the little village looks like a cluster of one or two houses in a vast amphitheatre. Then we turn around a wooded point and stop for a minute at Low-wood, the big hotel on the border of the lake, and then go on past hills and valleys and flocks of sheep to Bowness, passing two or three small islands, one of which, Holm Crag, is a favorite resort of birds in the winter months. Then we dart over the lake to the little island of Ferry, and then go straight on past a bewildering number of bays and islets to Lakeside at the foot of the lake where the railway station of the Midland line gives access to Ulverston and the iron country of Furness. Windermere is almost equal to Lake Geneva, and although it has become the fashion to cry down the English lakes, it is a fact that more enjoyment at an extremely moderate outlay may be obtained in the small belt of country that contains them, than in Switzerland, overrun as it is by the cockneys and _parvenues_ of every nation. I know of hardly any greater treat to a person of any artistic appreciation than that trip up and down Windermere on a clear day. Then the drives from Ambleside are charming. One may drive to Grassmere by Red Bank, a steep hill overlooking that lake and Rydal Water, and also to Hawkshead, where a very curious old church demands attention; and to High Wray, where there is an inn rejoicing in the name of "The Dun Cow." A hill outside High Wray commands a splendid view of the hills behind and about Ambleside: Loughrigg Fell, Wansfell Pike, Nab-Scar, Crinkle Crags, Coniston-Old-Man and Great Gable. On a clear day one may also see Helvellyn. The road passes Wray Castle, a modern house built to imitate perfectly a mediæval fortress. The owner is a retired M. D. of Liverpool. Another delightful drive is to Langdale Pikes and to Megeon Ghyll, a lovely waterfall rather bigger than most of the cascades in Lakeland. On this drive one may have a capital view of Red Screes, another of the high mountains. Curious names are met with all through Westmoreland. For instance, three peaks not far from here are called Harrison Stickle, Pike O'Stickle and Pike O'Blisco. There are many curious customs still extant in and about Ambleside. Christmas is celebrated in the old hospitable way. At that time the farmer and his family are away at other houses night after night and one must look for them anywhere but at home. At Christmas every Cumberland and Westmoreland farmer gives two banquets, one called "t'auld foak's neet" and the other, "t'young foak's neet;" the first of which is for those who are married and the second for those who are single. The tables groan under old-fashioned dainties: raised and mince pies, goose, caudle cup, "guid strang yell," as they call the home-brewed October, and a huge bowl of punch. Intoxication never happens at these Cumberland feasts. Among others, Mrs. Hemans once had a cottage on Windermere called "Dove's Nest," and wrote some verses on the scenery, which are well known; but she can hardly be ranked with the school of "Lake Poets." There is a queer old rhyme current in the district, in itself a significant comment on the weather of the country: "When Wansfell wears a cap of cloud The roar of Brathay will be loud; When mists come down on Loughrigg Fell, A drenching day we all foretell; When Red Screes frown on Ambleside, The rain will pour both far and wide. When Wansfell smiles and Loughrigg's bright, 'Twill surely rain before the night; If breezes blow from Bowness Bay, 'Tis certain to be wet all day; And if they blow from Grassmere Lake, You'd better an umbrella take. But if no rain should fall all day From Ambleside to Morecambe Bay, Upon that morning you will see Fishes and eels in every tree; When in the nets on Windermere Twelve pickled salmon shall appear, No rain shall fall upon that day And men may safely make their hay." [Illustration] [Illustration] SANDRINGHAM HOUSE. WOLVERTON.--The country in Norfolk is real country and the scenery is typically English. The Prince Consort could hardly have selected a more suitable spot than Sandringham for the country seat of the Heir Apparent; and the fact that the Prince and Princess of Wales make Sandringham House their headquarters for the greater part of the year has naturally given an impetus to property in the neighbourhood. Sandringham House is not a palace. It is simply large, genial, hospitable and attractive, like its master. The Prince of Wales is a much discussed man, and the ordinary American who has not travelled and who derives his knowledge of English affairs from the American daily papers--which usually give only that side of the question which is acceptable to the Liberals and Radicals of Great Britain--has little idea of his personality, and does not begin to gauge the strength of his character. The Prince is usually supposed to be a jovial, good-natured man who devotes his whole time to pleasure, and who has no ideal in life beyond the pursuit of social gayeties and field sports. This is a total and gross mistake. The Prince of Wales is one of the most hard-working men in the Kingdom, and the humblest of his future subjects has probably more time to himself than the Heir Apparent; and, I venture to say, does not spend it half so usefully as this much-abused Prince. For many years he has been King of England in everything but name, and he is far more than the figurehead of the nation. His knowledge of public affairs is remarkable; he is a master of diplomacy and his tact is famous. Like his father, he possesses a fine mind, and sometimes displays a depth of foresight astonishing even to his old friend, Mr. Gladstone. He has a happy knack of looking at all sides of a question, and his mature judgment upon matters of public import is often sought by statesmen of all shades of opinion. He has never meddled in politics, and his success in steering a straight course among the quicksands of party passion and strife is well shown by a dinner he gave in London only the other day to the King of the Belgians, at which Mr. Gladstone sat next to Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Balfour chatted pleasantly with Mr. John Morley. The Prince of Wales alone could give such a dinner. A fair estimate of the Prince is rarely found in American papers. Because he is Prince and will some day become King, they think it their duty to spatter his reputation with mud; and to show their "Republican sympathies" (I use the word in its widest sense) by ill-digested diatribes against royalty. The Conservative party, like the English Court, has hardly a representative among us, and our knowledge of important events on the other side usually comes from a "Liberal" source. It is evident that in many cases the American papers know a bitter editorial against the Prince of Wales may serve some political end of their own; and they never hesitate to sacrifice him on such occasions. It is no exaggeration to say that the most popular man in England is the Prince of Wales. Even the Radicals cheer him, for he is always ready to do anyone a good turn, while still careful of his dignity. It is interesting to note the Prince's daily life at Sandringham, his country seat, where he appears as a simple Squire. Saturday-to-Monday parties are frequent at Sandringham in the autumn when the shooting has begun; and often seven or eight gentlemen; a General, an Admiral, a Diplomat or two, with their wives, a foreign Prince or Nobleman, and possibly a Bishop, assemble on Friday evening. These with the household officers make up the party; and gathered under the rose-shaded candles around the flower-laden table in the dining room they present a varied picture of gay and stern humanity. No sooner is the substantial dinner over than McKay, the Scotch piper, emerges from a neighbouring room and intones some wild Scotch air on his bag-pipes. In the evening the Prince and Princess move from group to group in the drawing room, saying a few pleasant words to each of the guests, and then withdraw to their private apartments, while music by some famous pianist usually closes the evening. Baccarat is never played at Sandringham, and the smoking-room cohort breaks up early. Breakfast is served at half-after-nine (previous to which several gongs have sent their echoes loudly through the house) at small round tables in the dining room, and the meal must be quickly despatched, for at eleven the carriages start for the meeting-place, whether all the guests are ready or not. A four-horse drag carries eight or ten guests with their guns and game bags; and an array of dog-carts, village-carts and various traps is at the disposal of the remaining visitors. A breezy morning on the moors is followed by a merry al-fresco meal in a tent, where curries from India await the Hindoo Maharajahs, and a juicy ham sent by the King of Portugal tempts the ordinary appetite, while savoury Irish stews show the Hibernian sympathies of the Prince. The genial Host always rides a grey cob to and from the moors; at dusk the traps and drags again appear; and the party, indulging in cigars and lively chat, returns gaily to the house. After a change of garments and a "tub," they are just in the mood to enjoy the comfort of the sitting room, where the charming Princess presides behind the tea tray, looking more like a sister of her three tall daughters than anything else. No one, of course, really sits down to tea; each one takes his cup and wanders through the rooms, stopping to listen for a moment to the piano, or to admire the small green parrot who gives three very emphatic and loyal cheers for the Queen. When the guests finally leave this most hospitable and royal house they are sure to find among their luggage at the station a well-filled hamper of game. Another morning the Prince takes an early train to London, lays the corner stone of a Masonic asylum; drives to a new hospital which he opens; presides over a meeting of the British Bible Society; and then attends a meeting at the Imperial Institute, finally returning to Sandringham by a late train. The hearty cheers which meet him in London on his way to and from the station are, if anything, more cordial than those which greet his Royal Mother on her drives through the town. Very little of the Prince's time is spent in amusing himself. He is at the nation's disposal, and the nation is a hard taskmaster. His is a difficult position to fill, and in the fierce, white light that beats upon a throne, his slightest actions are distorted. The present baccarat affair is a good illustration of the way in which the Prince's affairs are twisted to suit the scandal-loving readers of the Radical press; but the storm of adverse criticism now raging around his head has already begun to create a reaction in his favour, and thoughtful people are commencing to ask themselves whether it is quite fair to shower so much abuse upon the Heir Apparent for what is admitted to be an error of judgment, but which amounts to nothing more. His attitude in this baccarat affair has been strictly honourable, although open to criticism. It may be worth while to analyze the charges against him. A slight examination will show the flimsy character of the foundation upon which they rest. In the first place, people are under the impression that the fact of his connection in any way with the affair was disgraceful. This view of the case will hardly be accepted upon mature reflection. When the Prince ran down to Tranby Croft for a few days' rest, and in the evening sat down to a friendly game of baccarat, he never dreamed that one of his oldest friends would deliberately try to cheat him. With the fact of his playing cards for money the world has nothing to do. Each man must decide for himself whether games of chance when played for money are wrong or right. It may be claimed that the Prince was not a man, but a Personage; but it is well to remember that he played cards in his private capacity and not as Heir Apparent. The jury has decided that Sir William Gordon-Cumming did cheat at cards; and to any one knowing the game, his very feeble explanation appears absurd; while the fact that five witnesses saw him push his counters over the line to add to his stake at an improper time practically places the matter beyond dispute. The only fault that the Prince of Wales committed was one of kindness. He signed the paper, prepared by Lord Coventry and General Owen Williams, promising secrecy if Sir William would agree never to touch cards again. That is: he, a Field Marshal of the British Army, tacitly agreed to allow Sir. William to remain in the Army and in his regiment while knowing that he had cheated at cards. His duty as an officer was to report Sir William's conduct at once to the Duke of Cambridge, the Commander-in-Chief. This he failed to do out of regard for his friend; and for this he has been so bitterly attacked in the press! Again, he has been criticised for his continued presence at the trial, where he came--it was suggested--for the purpose of muzzling eminent Counsel. Can any one fail to see what scorn and contempt the press would have poured out upon him had he failed to appear in person? Every one would have said he was afraid to be present. No one recognizes more fully than the Prince himself that an error of judgment was committed when he condoned Sir William's offence; and his recognition of this fact has been proved by the apology offered in his name by Mr. Stanhope, Secretary-of-State for War, in the House of Commons. All this talk and discussion in England is merely froth on the surface. The resolutions and strictures passed by various Dissenting bodies with much display of bad taste appear to be equally due to a desire on their part to condemn gambling in high places, and at the same time to draw public attention to themselves. The lower-middle class and the agricultural labourers, who compose the great bulk of the population of England, go placidly on their way, paying no attention to this noisy affair and only longing for their beef and beer. The upper-middle class is more deeply stirred; for does it not count many a Mr. Pecksniff among its members, and are not Mr. Stiggins and Mr. Chadband to be met within its chaste and highly moral circles? There is no doubt that the Prince will be decidedly more careful in future as to whom he admits to the honour of his acquaintance. This baccarat affair may cause him some slight temporary loss of popularity, but a generous fault often makes a man more popular than a miserly virtue; and the enthusiastic cheers which greeted the Prince at Ascot only a day or so ago are perhaps a better indication of what the people of England think of their future King's course in this matter. A significant fact is Mr. Gladstone's loyal adherence to his Prince, and his stern discouragement of the intention of his unruly Radical colleagues to attack the Prince in Parliament. Mr. Labouchere, too, the cynical editor of the Radical _Truth_, as well as the Liberal _Daily News_, supports the Prince; and the authors and literary men whom he has so often helped are rallying to his aid. The Prince of Wales, like every one, is mortal; but far more than his great-uncle, King George IV., does he deserve his well-earned title of "The First Gentleman in Europe." [Illustration] [Illustration] THE LATTER-DAY JACOBITES CHARING CROSS.--A few years ago Mr. Gladstone brought down upon himself a perfect hailstorm of remonstrance, reproach and denial by a statement in a public letter, to a candidate for Parliamentary honours in the Liberal interest. This statement was to the effect that no one ever now dreamed of objecting to the Revolution of 1688, and its results. Previous to this, the great majority of English and Americans had thought the cause of the Stuarts forever dead; and that a romantic interest--chiefly historical--alone remained of the intense devotion shown to that fated family in the unsuccessful risings of 1715 and 1745. But the great majority was undeceived upon the appearance of Mr. Gladstone's letter, and learned with a degree of sympathetic amazement that there existed in Great Britain two "Orders" or "Leagues," both aiming at the return and recall of the heiress of the Stuarts, to the throne of her ancestors. One of these, the "Order of the White Rose," was merely platonic and existed to gratify a passion for historical romance on the part of its members. Its principal object was to hold meetings on the anniversary of the death of Mary Queen of Scots, King Charles I., and the battle of Culloden--the battle that proved the death-blow to the cause of the gallant young "Pretender." I say its object "was," advisedly; for the stupid action of the powers that be, on a certain day in February last (1892), has changed its somewhat lukewarm hero-worship to working zeal, and has brought it into closer relations with the other association: the "Legitimist Jacobite League," This society makes no secret of the fact that it meditates treason. Its avowed purpose is to restore the Stuarts; and on its books appear the names of seven thousand people devoted to its cause. Most of these rebels in embryo hail from the Highlands, where the old loyalty to the Stuarts still exists, and where the last desperate stand was made against the bloodhounds of the butcher-Duke of Cumberland. This League always refers to Her Majesty as "The Lady Victoria" and recognizes as Queen the heiress of the Stuarts--the wife of the oldest son of the Prince Regent of Bavaria. It would be interesting to digress here and wander in the fascinating paths of the genealogy and descent of the Stuarts; but it would fill columns. However, the Order of the White Rose and the Jacobite League are satisfied with the descent of the Princess, and they are the ones chiefly concerned. Lest my information be considered apocryphal, I may say that all my statements have been verified by a member of the Order. Lately the League has turned its attention to Parliamentary matters, and although the members consider that the last legal Parliament was held when King James II. was cheated out of his throne by his Dutch son-in-law, they are not above agitating in a constitutional way, and have secured several Legitimist candidates to stand at the general election. So to sum up in a few words: Before last February there existed in Great Britain two associations each looking upon the present Royal Family as usurpers, and each devoted to the Stuart cause; one theoretically, the other practically. Both these associations had existed since the rising of 1745, but in a more or less chrysalis condition until Mr. Gladstone's letter aroused them to declare themselves, when they were amazed at the adherents that poured in from all over the United Kingdom--principally from Scotland and Ireland, many from England, but not one from Wales. Some of these recruits were animated simply by a desire for something new and were people who are never happy unless in pursuit of some interesting fad; but the majority consisted of those whose ancestors had fought either at Killiekrankie, at Culloden or at Preston Pans. There is more or less mystery as to the attitude assumed by the object of all these hopes. But she is believed to take up a position of innocuous desuetude, so to speak. That is, if the royal lightning should strike her, she would, like Barkis, "be willin';" but until the Jacobite thunderstorm gathers, and the White Rose lightning illumines the political sky, she bides her time. For Bavaria is at peace with England. A glimpse at the incident of last February before referred to and another which happened a short time before, may be instructive. Everyone knows the statue of King Charles the First, which stands at Charing Cross. The Order of the White Rose had decided to decorate this statue of the King upon the anniversary of his martyrdom, and about three o'clock in the morning a small band of zealous Jacobites, with wreaths of white roses, gathered near the statue--as on Primrose Day the Conservatives gather to cover the statue of the great Earl with primroses--but to their annoyed surprise a surly policeman was stationed there who told them gruffly to "move on"--that no decorations would be allowed on or near the statue. Many were the murmurs and loud the remonstrances, but both were unavailing, until one of the party sarcastically inquired if they might leave the wreaths at the foot of the statue of George III. hard by. No objection was made to this (mark the distinction drawn!) but the Legitimist sympathizers preferred to carry their wreaths away as souvenirs, and moved on with many muttered observations on the "Hanoverian pack," hated of their fathers. Several of the papers referred to this peculiar action of the authorities with ridicule, and blamed the Home Secretary for giving an unnecessary prominence to the lately resuscitated party. This was the first thing which quickened the lukewarm zeal of the Order while it inflamed the ardour of the League. The next blunder of the authorities was more serious, and to this may be ascribed the Stuart revival. Of this incident I was fortunate enough to be an eye witness. I had happened to see a paragraph in an obscure little evening paper on the seventh of February to the effect that as the next day was the anniversary of the death of Mary Queen of Scots, the Order of the White Rose would form a procession in Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath upon her tomb. The Jacobite League was not mentioned, but, as events proved, many of its members had learned of the purpose of the Order and had arranged to be present. Mindful of the refusal to allow the Order to decorate King Charles's statue, and yet hardly thinking that any opposition would be offered to the attempt to honour the memory of the unfortunate Queen, especially as on that day the Chapels Royal were opened to the public, I arrived early at the Abbey and as soon as I entered could see that something unusual was in the air. Small knots of people were whispering in the nave, and excited vergers bustled about, dropping their h's all over the Abbey. The daily afternoon service was to commence at half-past three, so there was some anxiety to get the function over. The Marquis de Ruvigny--a name familiar to all versed in the history of the Stuart cause--and Mr. Clifford Mellish were waiting at the door for the arrival of the wreaths, when the appearance of a score of stalwart police-constables created some surprise. The majority of the strangers present (there were about six hundred) had evidently come for the ceremony of placing the wreaths on Queen Mary's tomb and were waiting silently and reverently until everything should be ready. Fortunately, as we all thought, the day was one when the royal tombs were open to visitors; but soon an ominous murmur arose that the gates leading to the chapels where the royal tombs were had been closed. The Marquis de Ruvigny indignantly refused to believe that such a _bétise_ was possible on the part of the Dean; but a surging of the now increasing, crowd towards the chapels showed that the gates were secured. Then in no measured terms the disgust and anger of the Jacobites broke forth: "Intolerable Stupidity!" "Afraid of the consequences!" "Absurd!" "Idiotic!" were some of the expressions used. But one braw Scotchman summed up the situation in a few words: "The government has turned a romantic pilgrimage into real treason, and has raised us to the dignity of a political party." The leaders now got together near the gates and talked earnestly while waiting for the wreaths to come. I was curious as to the effect of the closing of the gates on the British public in general, and wandered through the Abbey, catching expressions here and there. "It's a perfect shame," exclaimed a rosy-cheeked vicar evidently just up from the country. "It makes me sympathize with the Jacobites--the idea of depriving Englishmen of their right of free assembly." And a stout old gentleman near him, who was evidently something in the city, turned with the plaint: "My ancestors lent King George the First money, and I have always been a staunch Hanoverian; but by Jove this is too much. Do you suppose if these people wished to decorate the tomb of George III. or of Dutch William they would be stopped?" And many more spoke to the same effect. The impression made on the general public present was evidently bad. But the sight of a well-known figure pacing up the nave suggested Archdeacon Farrar, and it was indeed he. Soon the leaders of the abortive procession spied him and entered into eager expostulation, but all to no purpose. Dean Bradley was in Algiers, and the Canon-in-residence for the time being (Canon Ainger) had decided to close the Chapels Royal. He could not interfere. But then the large wreath appeared, a beautiful affair of white roses and camellias, and it was hastily decided to affix it to the gates leading to the royal tombs. Then a short, stout man with sandy hair and beard pressed forward, eager to take it. "My grandfather, Robbie Anderson, led the way for Prince Charlie at the Battle of Preston Pans and I'll be proud to lead ye now," he said. A scarcely suppressed cheer broke forth as the wreath was placed on the gates, in which those of us who claimed a touch of the old Scotch Cavalier blood joined. A card was attached, and by general request the descendant of Robbie Anderson read it aloud. I afterwards copied it: "In memory of Mary, Queen of Great Britain, France and Scotland. Presented by the Legitimist (Jacobite) League. February 8th, 1892." Then as the inspectors from Scotland Yard drew nearer, a red-faced verger bustled through the crowd up to the gates and pointing to the wreath exclaimed, "Take that thing down!" This gave rise to murmurs of remonstrance and indignation and the Marquis de Ruvigny spoke for all: "I decline," said the Marquis, "to touch that wreath. Take it down yourself." But this the verger had no orders to do, and retreated in discomfiture. Then it was proposed to hold a meeting in Deans' Yard to protest, but Mr. Stuart Mellor very sensibly observed that it would do no good to be arrested for brawling, and that public opinion would know what to think. And as most of the Jacobites present were Catholics this exclamation of one of them was to the point and caused a quick clearance: "I say, if we don't look sharp, we shall be in a Protestant place of wash-up at time of service." And so the crowd faded gradually away, and what but for the tact of the leaders might have turned into a "demonstration" in the Abbey, was safely over. But the moral effect of the gathering and the severe measures used by the authorities has not yet died away, and many Englishmen who cared little for the Stuarts have joined the Order or the League as protest against this act of the government. The Dean, I believe, refers the matter to the Bishop of London, and he mentions the Ecclesiastical Commissioners more or less vaguely. It is difficult, therefore, to fit the blame. But there is no doubt that this incident has given renewed force to the Jacobite cause. Their Parliamentary candidates are busy, and the coming general election will afford a practical test of their strength with the common people. There is no doubt that in Ireland they could secure many seats if they tried, for the Irishmen of the south still remember the Battle of the Boyne. Sensible people all around regret the blunder of the government, and as usual H. R. H., the Prince of Wales, voiced the universal sentiment when he declared the suppression of the pilgrimage a shame. "Why," said he, "I would have gone with them myself, and would have worn a white rose, too, if they had asked me." And no doubt if the Canon-in-residence, or the Dean of Westminster, or the Bishop of London, or the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, or whoever was responsible, had acted in this sensible, unprejudiced way, the incident would have closed and people would have smiled at the archæological enthusiasm of the Jacobites, instead of thinking them hardly used, and, ergo, sympathizing with them. [Illustration] * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Page 115, "Princesss" changed to "Princess" (and Princess move from) Page 125, "inocuous" changed to "innocuous" (of innocuous desuetude) Page 129, "sympatize" changed to "sympathize" (makes me sympathize) 
29658	----	[Illustration: _Temple, Taormina_] ITALY THE MAGIC LAND BY LILIAN WHITING AUTHOR OF "THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR," "THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT," "THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL," ETC. "And, under many a yellow star, We dropped into the Magic Land!" _Illustrated from Photographs_ BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1907 _Copyright, 1907_, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. _All rights reserved_ Published November, 1907 THE GRIFFITH-STILLINGS PRESS, BOSTON, U.S.A. TO ELLA (MRS. FRANKLIN SIMMONS) WHOSE EARTHLY FORM REPOSES IN THE BEAUTIFUL ROMAN CEMETERY, WHERE POETIC ASSOCIATIONS WITH KEATS AND SHELLEY HAUNT THE AIR,--UNDER THE SCULPTURED "ANGEL OF THE RESURRECTION," WITH ITS MAJESTIC SYMBOLISM OF THE TRIUMPH OF IMMORTALITY,--BUT WHOSE RADIANT PRESENCE STILL TRANSFIGURES THE LIFE THAT HELD HER IN IMMORTAL DEVOTION,-- THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED, WITH THE UNFORGETTING LOVE OF LILIAN WHITING. ROME, ITALY, May Days, 1907. "_Nor Life is ever lord of Death, And Love can never lose its own._" PREFATORY NOTE That Florence, the "Flower City," receives only a passing allusion in this record of various impressions that gleam and glow through the days after several visits to the Magic Land, is due to the fact that in a previous volume by the writer--one entitled "The Florence of Landor"--the lovely Tuscan town with its art, its ineffable beauty, and its choice social life, formed the subject matter of that volume. Any attempt to portray Florence in the present book would savor only of the repetition of loves and enthusiasms already recorded in the previous work in which Walter Savage Landor formed the central figure. For that reason no mention of Florence, beyond some mere allusion, is attempted in these pages, which only aim to present certain fragmentary impressions of various sojourns in Italy, refracted through the prism of memory. Whatever inconveniences or discomfort attend the traveller swiftly fade, and leave to him only the precious heritage of resplendent sunset skies, of poetic association, of artistic beauty. In spirit he is again lingering through long afternoons in St. Peter's till the golden light through the far windows of the tribune is merged into the dusk of twilight in which the vast monumental groups gleam wraith-like. Again he is ascending the magnificent _Scala Regia_, and lingering in the Raphael Stanze, or in the wonderful sculpture galleries of the Vatican, or sauntering in the sunshine on the Palatine. In memory he is again spellbound by ancient and mediæval art. In the line of modern sculpture the work of Franklin Simmons in Rome is a feature of Italy that haunts the imagination. No lover of beauty would willingly miss his great studios in the Via San Nicolo da Tolentino, with their wealth of ideal creations that contribute new interest to the most divine of all the arts. "The world of art is an ideal world,-- The world I love, and that I fain would live in; So speak to me of artists and of art, Of all the painters, sculptors, and musicians That now illustrate Rome." The mystic charm of the pilgrimage to Assisi; the romance that reflects itself in the violet seas and flaming splendors of the sky on the shores of Ischia and Capri; the buried treasures of Amalfi; the magnetic impressiveness of the Eternal City,--all these enter into life as new forces to build and shape the future into undreamed-of destinies. L. W. THE BRUNSWICK, BOSTON, October Days, 1907. CONTENTS PAGE I THE PERIOD OF MODERN ART IN ROME 3 II SOCIAL LIFE IN THE ETERNAL CITY 127 III DAY-DREAMS IN NAPLES, AMALFI, AND CAPRI 227 IV A PAGE DE CONTI FROM ISCHIA 281 V VOICES OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 341 VI THE GLORY OF A VENETIAN JUNE 389 VII THE MAGIC LAND 423 INDEX 459 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Temple, Taormina _Frontispiece in Photogravure_ Angel, Church of San Andrea delle Fratte, Rome _Page_ 12 Detail from the Stuart Monument, St. Peter's, Rome " 24 Tomb of Clement XIII, St. Peter's, Rome " 32 "The Genius of Death," Detail from the Tomb of Clement XIII, St. Peter's, Rome " 43 "La Fortuna," Accadémia di San Luca, Rome " 47 Spanish Steps, Piazza Trinità dei Monti, Rome " 72 Tomb of Pio Nono, San Lorenzo (Fuori le Mura) Rome " 75 "The Dance of the Pleiades" " 92 "Grief and History," Detail from Naval Monument, Washington " 105 "The Genius of Progress Leading the Nations" " 108 "Mother of Moses" " 112 "Valley Forge" " 116 La Pieta, St. Peter's, Rome " 120 Villa Medici, Rome " 134 Entrance to Villa Pamphilia-Doria, Rome " 159 Statue of Christ, Ancient Church of San Martina, Rome " 193 Castel San Angelo and St. Peter's, Rome " 204 Porta San Paola, Pyramid of Caius Cestius, Rome " 216 Castel Sant'Elmo, Naples " 231 Ancient Temple, Baiæ " 241 Ischia, from the Sea " 282 La Rocca, Ischia " 294 Castello di Alfonso, Ischia " 306 Detail from "Parnassus," Raphael Stanze, Palazzo Vaticano, Rome " 311 Vittoria Colonna, Galleria Buonarroti, Florence " 320 San Francescan Convent-Church, Assisi " 346 St. Francis d'Assisi, The Duomo, Assisi " 366 Santa Chiara, The Duomo, Assisi " 375 Baiæ and Ischia, from Camaldoli " 382 Ruins of the Greek Theatre, Taormina, Sicily " 429 Ponte Vecchio, Florence " 434 Campo Santo, Genoa " 453 "_Rest we content if whispers from the stars In wafting of the incalculable wind Come blown at midnight through our prison-bars._" THE MAGIC LAND _By woodland belt, by ocean bar, The full south breeze our forehead fanned; And, under many a yellow star, We dropped into the Magic Land._ * * * * * _We heard, far-off, the siren's song; We caught the gleam of sea-maids' hair; The glimmering isles and rocks among We moved through sparkling purple air._ _Then Morning rose, and smote from far Her elfin harps o'er land and sea; And woodland belt, and ocean bar To one sweet note sighed--"Italy!"_ OWEN MEREDITH. ITALY, THE MAGIC LAND I THE PERIOD OF MODERN ART IN ROME But ah, that spring should vanish with the Rose! That youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close? The nightingale that in the branches sang, Oh, where and whither flown again,--who knows? OMAR KHAYYAM. ROME, as the picturesque city of the Popes in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was resplendent in local color. It was the Rome of sunny winters; the Rome of gay excursions over that haunted sea of the Campagna to pictorial points in the Alban and Sabine hills; the Rome of young artist life, which organized impromptu festas with Arcadian freedom, and utilized the shadow or the shelter of ruined temples or tombs in which to spread its picnic lunches and bring the glow of simple, friendly intercourse into the romantic lights of the poetic, historic, or tragic past. There were splendid Catholic processions and ceremonials that seemed organized as a part of the stage scenery that ensconced itself, also, with the nonchalance of easy possession, in the vast salons of historic palaces where tapestried walls and richly painted ceilings, arched high overhead, with statues dimly seen in niches here and there, and the bust of some crowned Antoninus, or radiant Juno, gleaming from a shadowy corner, all made up the _mise-en-scène_ of familiar evenings. There were lingering hours in the gardens of the Villa Medici into whose shades one strolled by that beguiling path along the parapet on Monte Pincio, through the beautiful grove with its walks and fountains. The old ilex bosquet, with its tangled growth and air of complete seclusion, had its spell of fascination. Then, as now, the elevated temple, at the end of the main path, seemed the haunt of gods and muses. In all the incidental, as well as the ceremonial social meeting and mingling, art and religion were the general themes of discussion. This idyllic life-- "Comprehending, too, the soul's And all the high necessities of art"-- has left its impress on the air as well as its record on many a page of the poet and the romancist. The names that made memorable those wonderful days touch chords of association that still vibrate in the life of the hour. For the most part the artists and their associates have gone their way--not into a Silent Land, a land of shadows and vague, wandering ghosts--but into that realm wherein is the "life more abundant," of more intense energy and of nobler achievement; the realm in which every aspiration of earth enlarges its conception and every inspiration is exalted and endowed with new purpose; the realm where, as Browning says,-- "Power comes in full play." The poet's vision recognizes the truth:-- "I know there shall dawn a day, --Is it here on homely earth? Is it yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth, That Power comes in full play?" The names of sculptor, painter, and poet throng back, imaged in that retrospective mirror which reflects a vista of the past, rich in ideal creation. Beautiful forms emerge from the marble; pictorial scenes glow from the canvas; song and story and happy, historic days are in the very air. To Italy, land of romance and song, all the artists came trooping, and "Under many a yellow Star" they dropped into the Magic Land. If the wraiths of the centuries long since dead walked the streets, they were quite welcome to revisit the glimpses of the moon and contribute their mystery to the general artistic effectiveness of the Seven-hilled City. All this group of American idealists, from Allston and Page to Crawford, Story, Randolph Rogers, Vedder, Simmons, and to the latest comer of all, Charles Walter Stetson, recognized something of the artist's native air in this Mecca of their pilgrimage. It was, indeed, quite natural, on account of the stupendous work of Michael Angelo and the unrivalled museums of the Vatican, that Rome should have become pre-eminently the artistic centre of the nineteenth century and should have attracted students and lovers of art from all parts of the world. The immortal works of the two great periods, the Greek and the Renaissance,--the art that was forever great because it was the outgrowth of profound religious conviction,--were enshrined in the churches and the galleries of Rome. The leading countries of Europe sent here their aspiring students and established permanent academies for their residence. Germany, France, and England were thus represented. Thorwaldsen came as a pensioner from the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen; and it was during his life, and that of the noble Canova, that Rome began to be recognized as the modern world-centre of art. Was it not a natural sequence that the early painters and sculptors who came to study under the stimulating influences of the great masterpieces of the past should linger on in the city whose very air became to them the breath of inspiring suggestion? Where but in Rome would have come to Crawford the vision of his "Orpheus" and of his noble Beethoven? or to Story his "Libyan Sibyl," and that exquisite group, "Into the Silent Land"? or to Vedder his marvellous creations of "The Fates Gathering in the Stars," the "Cumæan Sibyl," or the "Dance of the Pleiades"? to Simmons his triumphant "Angel of the Resurrection," and "The Genius of Progress Leading the Nations"? or to Stetson that ineffable vision of "The Child," and that wonderful group called "Music"? whose coloring Titian or Giorgione might well mistake for their own. Under the Pontifical _régime_ the general character of Rome was mediæval and religious. The perpetual festas of the church made the streets constantly picturesque with their processions of monks, and friars, and priests, and these wonderful blendings of color and scenic effect stimulated the artistic sense. The expenses of living in Rome were then only a fraction of what the cost is at the present time; and as the city was the resort of the wealthy and cultured few, the artists were surrounded by the stimulus of critical appreciation and of patronage. Their work, their dreams, were the theme of literary discussion, and focussed the attention of the polite world. Their studios were among the important interests to every visitor in the Eternal City. In those days the traveller did not land with his touring car at Naples, make "the run" to Rome in a record that distanced any possibilities of railroad trains, pass two or three days in motoring about the city and its environs, seeing the exterior of everything in a dissolving view and the interior of nothing,--as within this time, at least, he must flash on in his touring car to Florence. On the contrary, the traveller proceeded to Rome with serious deliberation, and with a more realizing sense of undertaking a journey than Walter Wellman experiences in attempting to fly in his aero-car to the North Pole and send his observations across the polar seas by wireless telegraphy. The visitor went to Rome for a winter, for a year, and gave himself up to leisurely impressions. Rome was an atmosphere, not a spectacle, and it was to be entered with the lofty and reverent appreciation of the poet's power and the artist's vision. In Rome, Thomas Cole painted some of his best pictures; and in Rome or Florence wrought a long list of painters and sculptors. Whether in the Eternal City or in the Flower City, their environment was alike Italy--the environment of the Magic Land. Among the more prominent of all these devotees of Beauty several nationalities were represented. Each might have said of his purpose, in the words of William Watson:-- "I follow Beauty; of her train am I, Beauty, whose voice is earth and sea and air; Who serveth, and her hands for all things ply; Who reigneth, and her throne is everywhere." Among these artists there flash upon memory the names of Vanderlyn, Benjamin West, Allston, Rauch, Ange, Veit, Tenerani, Overbeck, Schadow, Horace Vernet, Thorwaldsen, John Gibson, Hiram Powers, Crawford, Page, Clark Mills, Randolph Rogers, William Rinehart, Launt Thompson, Horatio and Richard Greenough, Thomas Ball, Anne Whitney, Larkin G. Mead, Paul Akers, William Wetmore Story, Harriet Hosmer, J. Rollin Tilton, and, later, Elihu Vedder, Moses Ezekiel, Franklin Simmons, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Charles Walter Stetson, the name of Mr. Stetson linking the long and interesting procession with the immediate life of to-day. Of these later artists Story, Miss Hosmer, Ezekiel, Vedder, Simmons, and Stetson are identified with Rome as being either their permanent or their prolonged residence. Mr. St. Gaudens was a transient student, returning to his own country to pursue his work; and of two young sculptors, Hendrick Christian Anderson and C. Percival Dietsch, time has not yet developed their powers beyond an experimental stage of brilliant promise. [Illustration: ANGEL, CHURCH OF SAN ANDREA DELLE FRATTE, ROME Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini _Page 32_] The Rome of the artists of clay and canvas was also the Rome of the poets and romancists, of authors in all lines of literary achievement. How the names of the procession of visitors and sojourners in the Eternal City, from Milton, Goethe, and Mme. de Staël to Henry James, Marion Crawford, Richard Bagot, and Grace Ellery Channing (Mrs. Charles Walter Stetson), gleam from that resplendent panorama of the modern past of Rome! Like the words in electric fire that flash out of the darkness in city streets at night, there shine the names of Shelley and of Keats; of Gladstone, on whom in one memorable summer day, while strolling in Italian sunshine, there fell a vision of the sacredness and the significance of life and its infinite responsibility in the fulfilment of lofty purposes. What charming associations these guests and sojourners have left behind! Hawthorne, embodying in immortal romance the spirit of the scenic greatness of the Eternal City; Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, allying herself in marriage with the country she loved, and living in Rome those troubled, mysterious years that were to close the earthly chapter of her life; Robert and Elizabeth Browning, the wedded poets, who sang of love and Italy; Harriet Beecher Stowe, finding on the enchanted Italian shores the material which she wove with such irresistible attraction into the romance of "Agnes of Sorrento;" Longfellow, with his poet's vision, transmuting every vista and impression into some exquisite lyric; Lowell, bringing his philosophic as well as his poetic insight to penetrate the untold meaning of Rome; Thomas William Parsons, making the country of Dante fairly his own; Thackeray, with his brilliant interpretation of the _comédie humaine_; Emerson, who, oblivious of all the glories of art or the joys of nature, absorbed himself in writing transcendental letters to his eccentric, but high-souled aunt, Mary Moody Emerson; Ruskin, translating Italian art to Italy herself; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poet wife, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the first flush of their bridal happiness, when Mrs. Howe's impassioned love for the Seven-hilled City inspired many a lyric that mirrors the Roman atmosphere of that day; Kate Field, with a young girl's glad enthusiasm over the marvellous loveliness of a Maytime in Rome, and her devotion to those great histrionic artists, Ristori and Salvini; George Stillman Hillard, leaving to literature the rich legacy of his "Six Months in Italy,"--a work that to this day holds precedence as a clear and comprehensive presentation of the scenic beauty, the notable monumental and architectural art, and the general life and resources of this land of painter and poet. Other names, too, throng upon memory--that of William Dean Howells, painting Italian life in his "Venetian Days," and charming all the literary world by his choice art; and among later work, the interesting interpretations of Rome and of social life in Rome, by Marion Crawford, Henry James, and Richard Bagot,--in chronicle, in romance, or in biographical record. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, indeed, the visitors to Rome--authors, artists, travellers of easy leisure--defy any numerical record. Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, poet, romancist, and delightful _raconteur_ as well, has recorded some charming impressions of her various sojourns in Rome both in her "Random Rambles" and in "Lazy Tours." Of the Palatine Hill we find her saying:-- "Sometimes we go to the Palace of the Cæsars, and look off upon the heights where the snow lingers and the warm light rests, making them shine like the Delectable Mountains. Nearer at hand are the almond trees, in flower, or the orange trees, bright at once with their white, sweet blossoms and their golden fruit." Mrs. Moulton writes of the "stately dwellers" in Rome whom time cannot change; and to whom, whenever she returns, she makes her first visit; some of whom are in the mighty palace of the Vatican and some of whom dwell in state in the Capitol. "The beautiful Antoninus still wears his crown of lotus in Villa Albani and the Juno whom Goethe worshipped reigns forever at the Ludovisi," she writes; "I can never put in words the pleasure I find in these immortals." Mrs. Moulton loved to wander in the Villa Borghese "before the place is thronged with the beauty and fashion of Rome as it is in the late afternoon. I do not wonder that Miriam and Donatello could forget their fate in these enchanted glades," she wrote, "and dance as the sunbeams danced with the shadows. Sometimes I seem to see them where the sun sifts through the young green leaves, and her beauty--her human, deep-souled beauty--and his fantastic grace are the only things here that cannot change. "The walls will crumble; the busts of kings and heroes and poets will lose their contours, the lovely Roman ladies also grow old and fade, and vanish from sight and from memory; but still these two, hopeless yet happy, will dance in these wild glades immortally beyond the reach of the effacing years." The visit to Rome of the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks--later the Bishop of Massachusetts--is immortalized in the most lifelike portrait bust of the great preacher ever modelled; a bust in which the genius of the sculptor, Franklin Simmons, found one of its noblest expressions, and has perpetuated, with masterly power, the energy of thought, at once profound and intense, in the countenance of Bishop Brooks. These, and many another whom the gods have loved and dowered with gifts, rise before any retrospective glance over the comparatively recent past of Rome. Bishop Brooks passed there the Holy Week of one Lenten season, and of the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel he wrote that it was certainly the most wonderful music to which he had ever listened; and he added:-- "The Miserere in the Sistine, the Benediction from the balcony, the solemn moment of the elevation of the Host on Easter, and the illumination of St. Peter's, these all seem to reach very remarkably the great ideal of the central religious commemoration of Christendom." It was in the winter of 1828 that Mr. Longfellow first visited Rome, which "is announced," he wrote, "by Nero's tomb," and he quotes Dupaty's lines:-- "Quoi! c'est là Rome? quoi! C'est le tombeau de Neron qui l'annonce." Mr. Longfellow expressed his love for the Eternal City, and in a personal letter[1] he said:-- "I have been so delighted with Rome that I have extended my residence much beyond my original intention. There is so much in the city to delay the stranger; the villages in the environs are so beautiful, and there is such a quiet and stillness about everything that, were it in my power, I should be induced to remain the whole year round. You can imagine nothing equal to the ruins of Rome. The Forum and the Coliseum are beyond all I had ever fancied them; and the ruined temples and the mouldering aqueducts which are scattered over the Campagna; I do not believe there is a finer view in the world than that from the eastern gate of the city, embracing the Campagna, with its ruined aqueducts diverging in long broken arcades, and terminated by the sweep of the Albanian hills, sprinkled with their white villages, and celebrated in song and story! But the great charm of the scene springs from association; and though everything in Italy is really picturesque, yet strip the country of its historic recollections,--think merely of what it is, and not of what it has been,--and you will find the dream to be fading away. "You would be shocked at the misery of the people, especially in the Pope's dominions: but their element seems to be in rags and misery; and with the ceremonials of their religion and the holidays of the church, which average nearly three a week, they are poor--and lazy and happy. I mean, happy in their way." In a later visit the poet was domiciled in an hotel on the Piazza Barberini, where the wonderful view included then the entire city "to where St. Peter's dome darkens against the sunset." Of this visit his brother, Rev. Samuel Longfellow, writes:-- "Here Mr. Longfellow became for the season the centre of the group of American visitors and resident artists, whose well-known names need not be recounted. Here he made, also, acquaintances among the Italians,--especially the Duke of Sermoneta, the Dantean scholar, and Monsignore Nardi, of the papal court. The Pope himself he did not visit. An interesting acquaintance was that made with the Abbé Liszt, who was spending the winter in Rome, having rooms in the abandoned Convent of Santa Francesca, in the Forum. Calling there one evening, in company with Mr. Healy the artist, the inner door of the apartment was opened to them by Liszt himself, holding high in his hand a candle which illuminated his fine face. The picture was so striking that Mr. Longfellow begged his companion to put it upon canvas,--which he did; and the painting now hangs in the library of Craigie House. At a morning visit, Liszt delighted the party with a performance upon his Chickering pianoforte. "To see Rome, as all travellers know, is a work for many months; and it was pursued with tolerable diligence. But Mr. Longfellow was never a good sight-seer. He was impatient of lingering in picture galleries, churches, or ruins. He saw quickly the essential points, and soon tired of any minuter examination." But long, indeed, before nineteenth-century artists and authors laid siege to the Eternal City, in the far-away years of 1638, Milton visited Rome, and there still remains the tablet, on the wall of the _casa_ in the Via delle Quattro Fontane in which he stayed, a tablet bearing an inscription giving the date of his visit; as, also, in Via Machella, there is an inscription marking the place where Scott lived during his visit to Rome. Goethe made his memorable tour to Italy in 1786--fourteen years before the dawn of the nineteenth century--and wrote: "I feel the greatest longing to read Tacitus in Rome;" and again (an observation with which every visitor to the Eternal City will sympathize) he noted:-- "It grows more and more difficult for me to render an account of my residence in Rome, for as we always find the sea deeper the further we go, so it is with me in observation of this city.... Wherever we go and wherever we stand, we see about us a finished picture,--forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins; gardens and wastes; the distant and the near houses; triumphal arches and columns,--often all so close together that they might be sketched on a single sheet. One should have a thousand points of steel with which to write, and what can a single pen do? and then in the evening one is weary and exhausted with the day of seeing and admiring. Here one reads history from within outward." Chateaubriand, who in his earliest youth had visited America as the guest of Washington, passed the winter of 1803-4 in Rome, and his pictorial transcriptions of the city and its environs are among the most exquisite things in literary record. As, for instance, this description of a sunset from Monte Mario:-- "I was never weary of seeing, from the Villa Borghese, the sun go down behind the cypresses of Monte Mario, and the pines of the Villa Pamphili planted by Le Notre. I have stood upon the Ponte Molle to enjoy the sublime spectacle of the close of day. The summits of the Sabine hills appeared of lapis lazuli and pale gold, while their bases and sides were bathed in vapors of violet or purple. Sometimes lovely clouds, like fairy cars, borne along by the evening wind with inimitable grace, recall the mythological tales of the descent of the deities of Olympus. Sometimes old Rome seems to have spread all over the west the purple of her consuls and her Cæsars, beneath the last steps of the god of day. This rich decoration does not vanish so quickly as in our climate. When we think the hues are about to disappear they revive on some other point of the horizon; one twilight follows another and the magic of sunset is prolonged." It was in the same year that Mme. de Staël visited Rome and recorded, in her glowing romance, "Corinne," the impressions she received. In the spring of 1817 Lord Byron found in Rome the inspiration that he transmitted into that wonderful line in "Childe Harold":-- "The Niobe of Nations! There she stands." It was two years later that Shelley passed the spring in the Seven-hilled City, retiring to Leghorn later, to write his tragedy of "The Cenci." In Rome the visitor follows Michael Angelo and Raphael through the various churches and museums. The celebrated sibyls of Raphael are in the Santa Maria della Pace; his "Isaiah" is in San Agostino and his "Entombment" in the Casino of the Villa Borghese. While the sublime work of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel is always one of the first things in Rome to which the traveller goes to study that incomparable work portraying the Creation--the Prophets and the Sibyls, the Angels and the Genii, that record the impassioned power of the master--yet all footsteps turn quickly, too, to the church called San Pietro in Vincoli, near the house in which Lucrezia Borgia lived, in which is the colossal Moses of Michael Angelo. As it stands, it fails to convey the first design of the great sculptor. Originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, the plan included a massive block of marble (some forty by twenty feet) surmounted by a cornice and having its niches, its columns, and its statues, of which the Moses was to have been one. It would then have been judged relatively to the entire group, while now it is seen alone, and thus out of the proportions that were in the mind of the artist. The entire conception, indeed, was to unite sculpture and architecture into one splendid combination. "Thus the statue of Moses was meant to have been raised considerably above the eye of the spectator," writes Mr. Hillard, "and to have been a single object in a colossal structure of architecture and sculpture, which would have had a foreground and a background, and been crowned with a mass at once dome-like and pyramidal. Torn, as it is, from its proper place; divorced from its proportionate companionship; stuck against the wall of a church; and brought face to face with the observer,--what wonder that so many of those who see it turn away with no other impressions than those of caricature and exaggeration!" Mr. Hillard adds:-- "But who that can appreciate the sublime in art will fail to bow down before it as embodied in this wonderful statue? The majestic character of the head, the prodigious muscles of the chest and arms, and the beard that flows like a torrent to the waist, represent a being of more than mortal port and power, speaking with the authority, and frowning with the sanctions of incarnate law. The drapery of the lower part of the figure is inferior to the anatomy of the upper part. Remarkable as the execution of the statue is, the expression is yet more so; for notwithstanding its colossal proportions, its prominent characteristic is the embodiment of intellectual power. It is the great leader and lawgiver of his people that we see, whose voice was command, and whose outstretched arm sustained a nation's infant steps. He looks as if he might control the energies of nature as well as shape the mould in which the character of his people should be formed. That any one should stand before this statue in a scoffing mood is to me perfectly inexplicable. My own emotions were more nearly akin to absolute bodily fear. At an irreverent word, I should have expected the brow to contract into a darker frown, and the marble lips to unclose in rebuke." [Illustration: DETAIL FROM STUART MONUMENT, ST. PETER'S, ROME Antonio Canova _Page 33_] William Watson condenses his impressions of this majestic sculpture in the following quatrain.-- "The captain's might, and mystery of the seer-- Remoteness of Jehovah's colloquist, Nearness of man's heaven-advocate--are here: Alone Mount Nebo's harsh foreshadow is miss'd." The impressive group of sculptures and buildings on the Campidoglio--where once the shrine of Jupiter Capitolinus stood--owes its present picturesque scheme largely to Michael Angelo. The fascination of the long flights of steps leading from the Piazza Aracöeli to the Capitoline, where the ancient bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius forever keeps guard, is indescribable. The historic statues of Castor and Pollux mark the portals; on either hand there are seen the Muses of ancient sculpture, the Palazzo Senatoriale and the Palazzo dei Conservatori. There is in the entire world no more classic ground than is found in this impressive grouping of art and architecture. The genius of Raphael has recorded itself in those brilliant and imperishable works that enthrall the student of art in the Raphael stanze in the Vatican. He was imbued with the spirit of Greek art, and while Titian is a greater colorist, while Correggio, Botticelli, Perugino, and other artists that could be named equal or exceed Raphael in certain lines, yet as the interpreter of the profoundest thought, and for his philosophic grasp and his power to endow his conceptions with the most brilliant animation, he stands alone. The religious exaltation of "The Transfiguration" reveals the supreme degree of the divine genius of Raphael. That this painting was the last work of his life, that it was placed above his body as it lay in state, and was carried in his funeral procession, invests it with peculiar interest. As a draftsman Raphael was second only to Michael Angelo, with whom he must forever share the immortality of fame. The Academy in Venice holds some of his choicest drawings, and in the Venetian sketch-book in the National Gallery in London are many of his small pictures, including that of the "Knight's Dream." It was in the autumn of 1508, when Raphael was in his twenty-fifth year, that he was called to Rome in the service of the Pope. The Pontiff at this time was Pope Julius II, whose successor was Leo X, and under their pontificates (from 1508 to 1520) Raphael produced these masterpieces which stand unrivalled in the world save by the creations of Michael Angelo in the Capella Sistina. The celebrated "Four Sibyls" of Raphael are not, however, in the stanze of the Vatican, but in the Church of San Maria della Pace. In the Palazzo Vaticano these four wonderful stanze entrance the visitor; the Stanza della Signatura, the Stanza d'Eliodoro, the Stanza dell'Incendio and the Sala di Constantino. For the decoration of these stanze several painters from Umbria had been summoned,--Perugino, Sodoma, Signorelli, and others; but when Raphael had produced the "Disputa" in the Sala della Signatura, Pope Julius II recognized the work as so transcendent that he ordered the other artists to cease and even had some of their paintings obliterated that there might be more space for the exercise of Raphael's genius. In the "Disputa" are glorified the highest expressions of the human intellect--the domain portrayed being that of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Justice. The splendor of this creation transcends all attempts of interpretation in language. Against a background of gold mosaic are portrayed these typical figures enthroned on clouds where genii flit to and fro bearing tablets with inscriptions. Theology holds in the left hand a book, while the other points to the vision of angels; Poetry, laurel-crowned, is seen seated on a throne with books and lyre; Philosophy wears a diadem, and Justice, with her balance and her sword, is also crowned. The title of this marvellous work is misleading. Its message is not that of disputation but of beatitude. At the altar are grouped the congregation; the mystic spell of heavenly enthusiasm enfolds the scene as an atmosphere, as above the heavens open and the glorified Christ, surrounded by the saints who have kept the faith, is disclosed to the devotees kneeling below, while a choir of listening angels bend over them from the distant clouds in the background. Under Poetry are grouped Apollo and the Muses, and the figures of Homer, Dante and Virgil, of Petrarcha, Anacreon and Sappho, of Pindar and of Horace are recognized. The great scholars seen in the Philosophy include Plato and Aristotle, while in the groups under Justice, Moses and Solon are seen. "Raphael seems to have never known despair," remarked Franklin Simmons of the work of this divine genius. "His paintings reveal no struggle, but seem to have been produced without effort, as if brought into existence by an enchanter's wand." No observation could more vividly interpret the wonderful effect produced on the student by Raphael, and he cannot but recall the truth expressed in these lines of Festus:-- "All aspiration is a toil; But inspiration cometh from above And is no labor." The inspiration of Raphael was of the noblest order. His genius, his kindling enthusiasm, his ecstasy of religious devotion, have left an imperishable heritage to art. By his transcendent gifts he represents the highest manifestation of the art of painting in the Renaissance. For the true note in art lies in spiritual perception. Not so brilliant a colorist as Titian, he was more the interpreter of the extension of human activity into that realm of the life more abundant, and with his extraordinary facility of execution he united exquisite refinement and unerring sense of beauty and the masterly power in composition that fairly created for the spectator the visions that his soul beheld. "I say to you," said Mr. Bryce recently in a press interview,--"I say to you, each oncoming tide of life requires and needs men of lofty thought who shall dream for it, sing for it, who shall gather up its tendencies, formulate its ideals and voice its spirit." One of those men of lofty thought who thus dream for the ages was Raphael, and his power and glory have left an ineffaceable impress upon human life. He was the divinely appointed messenger of beauty, and he was never disobedient to the heavenly vision. "Time hath no tide but must abide The servant of Thy will; Tide hath no time, for to Thy rhyme The ranging stars stand still." The decline of art after Michael Angelo and Raphael was marked. The very splendor and power of their creations, instead of inspiring those who immediately followed them, produced almost the inertia of despair. In the reverence and awe and admiration with which these transcendent masterpieces were approached any power to originate seemed futile by contrast. Imitation rather than creation became the method adopted, resulting in an increased poverty of design and feeble execution. The art of the sixteenth century deteriorated rapidly till the baroco style was in evidence. One reason, too, for the decline was in that art was no longer so exclusively dedicated to the high service of religion, but aimed, instead, to please and to procure patrons, and thus were all worthy standards lowered to pernicious levels. A sculptor who left his impress upon the sixteenth-century art was Lorenzo Bernini, a Neapolitan (born in 1598) who died in Rome in 1685. The work of Bernini has a certain fascination and airy touch that, while it sometimes degenerates into the merely fantastic and even into tawdry and puerile affectations, has at its best a refinement and grace that lend to his sculptures an enduring charm, as seen in his "Apollo and Daphne" (a work executed in his eighteenth year) which is now in the Casino of the Villa Borghese. Bernini's name is perpetuated in the colossal statues on the colonnade of St. Peter's, the great bronze angels with their draperies streaming to the winds on the Ponte San Angelo, and in the vast fountain in the Piazza Navona. In the court of the Palazzo Bernini is one of the most interesting of his works--a colossal figure, allegorical in significance, illustrating "Truth Brought to Light by Time." One of the most important works of Bernini--now placed in the Museo Nazionale--is the group of "Pluto and Proserpine." [Illustration: TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER'S, ROME Antonio Canova _Page 42_] The influence that was to reform and regenerate the art of sculpture in the sixteenth century came with the great and good Canova, with which was united that of Flaxman and of Thorwaldsen. The heavenly messengers are always sent and appear at the time they are most needed. Neither Truth nor Art is ever left without a witness. "God sends his teachers unto every age, To every clime, and every race of men, With revelations fitted to their growth And shape of mind; nor gives the realm of truth Into the selfish rule of one sole race." Canova's genius and services were widely recognized. In 1719 he was made a Senator; he was ennobled with the title of Marchese of Ischia and granted a yearly allowance of three thousand scudi; and his noble and generous enthusiasms, not less than his genius, have left their record on life as well as on art. When he died (in Venice, Oct. 3, 1822) his work included fifty-nine statues, fourteen groups, twenty-two monuments, and fifty-four busts. The statue of Pius V and the tomb of Clement XIII are his greatest works, and the latter is perhaps even increasingly held as a masterpiece of the ages. Canova, warned by the fatal influence of imitation in art in the sixteenth century, frequently counselled his pupils against copying his own style and constantly urged them to study from the Greeks. He advised them to visit frequently the studios of other artists, "and especially," he would add, "the studios of Thorwaldsen, who is a very great artist." In the early part of the nineteenth century contemporary sculpture in Rome was led by the three great artists,--Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson. In 1829 Gibson had the honor of being elected a member of the Accadémia di San Luca in place of the sculptor Massimiliano, who had then just died. Cammuccini, the historical painter, proposed Gibson, and with the ardent assistance of Thorwaldsen he was elected resident Academician of merit. "Like Canova, Thorwaldsen was most generous to young artists," says Gibson of the great Danish master, "and he freely visited all who required his advice. I profited greatly by the knowledge which this splendid sculptor had of his art. On every occasion when I was modelling a new work he came to me, and corrected whatever he thought amiss. I also often went to his studio and contemplated his glorious works, always in the noblest style, full of pure and severe simplicity. His studio was a safe school for the young, and was the resort of artists and lovers of art from all nations. The old man's person can never be forgotten by those who saw him. Tall and strong,--he never lost a tooth in his life,--he was most venerable looking. His kind countenance was marked with hard thinking, his eyes were gray, and his white locks lay upon his broad shoulders. At great assemblies his breast was covered with orders." Thorwaldsen (born in Copenhagen, Nov. 19, 1770) went to Rome in 1797--sent by the government of Denmark as a pensioner. It is said that, in his enthusiasm for Rome, Thorwaldsen dated his birth from the hour he entered the Eternal City. "Before that day," he exclaimed, "I existed; I did not live." For nearly fifty years--until his death in 1844--he lived and worked in Rome, occupying at one time the studio in Via Babuino that had formerly been that of Flaxman. John Gibson, who went to Rome in 1817,--twenty years after Thorwaldsen first arrived,--had the good fortune to be for five years a pupil of Canova, whose death in 1822 terminated this inestimable privilege. The elevation of purpose that characterized the young English student made his progress and development a matter of peculiar interest to the master. Gibson, also, bears his testimony to the stimulus of the Roman environment. "Rome above all other cities," he says, "has a peculiar influence upon and charm for the real student; he feels himself in the very university of art, where it is the one thing talked about and thought about. Constantly did I feel the presence of this influence. Every morning I rose with the sun, my soul gladdened by a new day of a happy and delightful pursuit; and as I walked to my breakfast at the Caffè Greco and watched with new pleasure the tops of the churches and palaces gilt by the morning sun, I was inspired with a sense of daily renovated youth, and fresh enthusiasm, and returned joyfully to the combat, to the invigorating strife with the difficulties of art. Nor did the worm of envy creep round my heart whenever I saw a beautiful idea skilfully executed by any of my young rivals, but constantly spurred on by the talent around me I returned to my studio with fresh resolution." Again to a friend Gibson writes:-- "I renewed my visits to the Vatican, refreshing my spirits in that Pantheon of the gods, demigods, and heroes of Hellas.... In the art of sculpture the Greeks were gods.... In the Vatican we go from statue to statue, from fragment to fragment, like the bee from flower to flower." These five years in which Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson lived and wrought together--although the youngest of this trio was still in his student life--form a definite period in the history of modern art in Rome. The dreams, the enthusiasm, the devotion to ideal beauty which characterized their work left its impress and its vitality of influence--a mystic power ready to incarnate itself again through the facility of expression of the artists yet to come. To the young men whose steps were turned toward Rome in these early years of the century just passed, how great was the privilege of coming into close range of the influence of such artists as these; to study their methods; to hear the expression of their views on art in familiar meeting and conversation! These artists were closely in touch with that "lovely and faithful dream which came with Italian Renaissance in the works of Pisani, Mino di Fiesole, Donatello, Michael Angelo, and Giovanni da Bologna--all who caught the spirit of Greek art." Artistic truth was the keynote of the hour, and it is this truth which is the basis of the highest conception of life. "Art's a service,--mark: A silver key is given to thy clasp And thou shalt stand unwearied night and day, And fix it in the hard, slow-turning wards To open, so that intermediate door Betwixt the different planes of sensuous form And form insensuous, that inferior men May learn to feel on still through these to those, And bless thy ministration. The world waits for help." In their true relation art and ethics meet in their ministry to humanity, for only in their union can they best serve man. All the nobler culture has its responsibility in service. "Many a man has a blind notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge," said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: "One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness." To the true idealist--as distinct from the mere emotionalist with æsthetic tastes--selfishness is an impossible prison. The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory of life; the supreme manifestation, the very influence of spiritual achievement. Mr. Stillman, discussing the revival of art, has questioned: "Does the world want art any longer? Has it, in the present state of human progress, any place which will justify devotion to it?" He questions as to whether man is still "Apparelled in celestial light," or whether he has lost "the glory and the freshness" of his dreams. "No one can admit," continues Mr. Stillman, "that the human intellect is weaker than it was five or twenty centuries ago; but it is certain that if we take the pains to study what was done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter trivial and 'prentice work compared with the ordinary work of men whose names are lost in the lustre of a school. "Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the technical achievement of the little men of them. There is only one living painter who can treat a portrait as a Venetian artist of 1550 A.D. would have done it, and how differently in the mastery of his material! If we go to the work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. shows us that the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael Angelo. The reason is simple, and already indicated. The early men grew up in a system in which the power of expression was taught from childhood; they acquired method as the musician does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their time was to keep them in the good method." Is this not too narrow and sweeping a judgment? The art of portraiture certainly did not die with the Venetian painters of 1550, however great their work; and if there be but "one living painter" who can treat portrait art like the early Venetians, there are scores of artists who achieve signal success by other methods of treatment. At all events, these three men, Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, worked with the conviction that art is service. With Victor Hugo, Canova could have said: "Genius is not made for genius; it is made for men.... Let him have wings for the infinite provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after having been seen flying, he is seen walking. After he has been seen an archangel, let him be still more a brother.... To be the servant of God in the march of progress--such is the law which regulates the growth of genius." They worked and taught by this creed. Thorwaldsen, on first arriving in Rome, wandered for three years, it is said, among the statues of gods and heroes, like a man in a dream. The atmosphere of the earlier day when Titian was employed by the king of Portugal and Raphael by the Pope to create works of great public importance still lingered and exerted over Thorwaldsen, and over all artists susceptible to its subtle influence, a peculiar spell. Its power was revealed in his subsequent works--the "Christ;" the sculptured groups for tombs in St. Peter's and in other churches; the poetic reliefs symbolizing "Day" and "Night;" "Ganymede Watering the Eagle;" the "Three Graces," "Hebe," and many others. Among Canova's works his immortal masterpiece is the monumental memorial group for the tomb of Pope Clement XIII in St. Peter's. The Pope is represented as kneeling in prayer. The modelling of the entire figure is instinct with expression. The fine and beautiful hands express reverence and trust. The countenance is pervaded with that peace only known to the soul that is in complete harmony with the divine power. The Holy Father has taken the tiara from his head and it lies before him on the cushion on which he kneels. Although the entire portrayal of the figure reveals that devotion expressed in the solemn and searching words of the church service, "And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,"--although it is the very utmost rendering of the soul to God, it is yet the deliberate, the joyful, the living acceptance of divine love and no mere trance of ecstasy. No more wonderful figure in all the range of sculpture has been created than the Clement XIII of Canova. [Illustration: "THE GENIUS OF DEATH," DETAIL FROM TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER'S, ROME Antonio Canova _Page 43_] The group is completed by two symbolic figures representing Religion and Death. The former is personified as a female figure holding a cross; the latter sits with his torch reversed. Grief, but not hopeless and despairing sorrow, is portrayed; it is the grief companioned by faith which ever sees "The stars shine through the cypress trees." The base of the monument represents a chapel guarded by lions. Pistolesi, the great Italian authority on the sculpture of St. Peter's and the Vatican galleries, notes that the lions typify the firmness and the force and the courage, "_la fortezza dell'anima_," that so signally characterized Clement XIII. There is probably no sacred monument in the realm of all modern art which can equal this creation in its delicacy, its lofty beauty, and the noble message that it conveys. The oldest art school, the Accadémia di San Luca, founded in 1507 by Sixtus, when he called to Rome all the leading artists of Europe to assist in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, is an organization that magically links the present with the days of Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, as it linked them, also, with the remote and historic past. The father of the present custodian of the Academy knew Thorwaldsen well. The grandfather of the gifted Italian sculptor, Tadolini (who has recently completed the tomb for Pope Leo XIII, placed in the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano), modelled the bust of Thorwaldsen, and in one gallery hangs the great Danish sculptor's portrait, painted by himself. The first director of San Luca was Federigo Zuccaro. In the early years of the nineteenth century this Academy was a vital centre of art life, and it is still a school that draws students, although the visitor who does not loiter and linger in his Rome may fail to know of this most alluring place. The San Luca is in the Via Bonella, one of the old, dark, narrow, and gloomy streets of the oldest part of Rome,--a short street of hardly more than two blocks, running between the Via Alessandra and the Forum. Hawthorne vividly pictures all this old Rome when he speaks of the "narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage; so indescribably ugly, moreover; so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs; the immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied; those staircases which ascend from a ground floor of cook shops and cobblers' stalls, stables and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists just beneath the unattainable sky: ... in which the visitor becomes sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had till then endured;" the city "crushed down in spirit by the desolation of her ruin and the hopelessness of her future;" one recalls these words when passing through the unspeakable gloom and horror and desolation and squalor of ancient Rome. In these surroundings one's cab stops at "No. 44," and ringing the bell the door is open, whether by super-normal agency or by some invisible terrestrial manipulation one is unable to determine; but in the semi-darkness of the narrow hall he discerns before him a flight of steep stairs, and, as no other vista opens, he reasons that, by the law of exclusion, this must be the appointed way. Along the wall are seen, here and there, some antique casts from Trajan's Column, and reliefs from Canova and Thorwaldsen. The galleries above hold only a small and a comparatively unimportant collection of pictures. There are marines from Vernet and Claude Lorraine; a "Venus Crowned by the Graces" from Rubens; Giulio Romano's copy of Raphael's "Galatea,"--the original of which (in the Villa Farnesina) represents Galatea surrounded by Nymphs, Cupids, and Tritons, being carried in a shell across the sea. There is a Cupid, and also the "Fortuna" of Guido Reni,--the latter a figure of ineffable grace floating in the air. One of Raphael's early works representing "St. Luke Painting the Madonna" is here. There are several works by Titian, but these have less than would be expected of the glory usually associated with his name; and a Vandyke representing the Virgin and Child, with two angels playing, the one on a lute, the other on the violin. [Illustration: "LA FORTUNA," ACCADÉMIA DI SAN LUCA, ROME Guido Reni _Page 47_] One salon filled with portraits of artists is especially interesting, and that of Thorwaldsen is so feminine in its costume and the parting of the hair, that it is almost inevitably mistaken for that of a woman. Guido's graceful "Fortuna" is represented as a female figure flying through the air, her long hair streaming in the wind, and the picture recalls to one the Greek legend of Opportunity, as told by Kainos. The legend runs:-- "'Of what town is thy sculptor?' "'Of Lukzon.' "'What is his name?' "'Lysippos.' "'And thine?' "'Opportunity, controller of all things.' "'But why standest thou on tiptoe?' "'I am always running.' "'Why, then, hast thou wings on both feet?' "'I fly like the wind.' "'But wherefore bearest thou a razor in thy right hand?' "'As a sign to men that I am sharper than any steel.' "'And why wearest thou thy hair long in front?' "'That I may be seized by him who approaches me.' "'By Zeus! And thou art bald behind?' "'Because once I have passed with my winged feet no one may seize me then.'" From one landing, on the steep narrow staircase of San Luca, opens the Biblioteca Sarti, an art library of some fifteen thousand volumes. The sculpture gallery is now closed and can only be entered by special permission. This is the more to be regretted as it contains the principal collections in Rome of the original casts of the works of Thorwaldsen and Canova. The latter-day artists who have been setting up their Lares and Penates in Rome at various periods during the early and into the later years of the nineteenth century have found the Eternal City in strong contrast with its twentieth-century aspects, however it may have differed from the Rome of the Popes. The earlier American artists to seek the Seven-hilled City were painters; and Allston, Copley, and Stuart had already distinguished themselves in pictorial art before America had produced any sculptor who could read his title clear to fame. It is to Hiram Powers (born in Vermont in 1805) that America must look as her first sculptor, chronologically considered, closely followed by Thomas Crawford, who was but eight years his junior, and by Horatio Greenough, who was also born in the same year as Powers, and who preceded him in Italy, but whose work has less artistic value. Mr. Greenough has left a colossal (if not an artistic) monument to his gifts in stately shaft marking Bunker Hill which he designed. Problematic in their claim to artistic excellence as are his "Washington"--a seated figure in the grounds of the Capitol in Washington--and his group in relief called "The Rescue" in the portico of the Capitol, his name lives by his personality as a man of liberal culture and noble character, if not by his actual rank in art. First of the American group in Italy, he was followed by Powers, who sought the ineffable beauty and enchantment of Florence in 1837. Horatio Greenough died in comparatively early life, leaving perhaps the most interesting of his works in a relief (purchased by Professor George Ticknor, the distinguished historian of Spain) "representing in touching beauty and expression a sculptor in an attitude of dejection and discouragement before his work, while a hand from above pours oil into his dying lamp, an allegory illustrative of the struggles of genius and the relief which timely patronage may extend to it." Mr. Powers passed his entire life in Florence. His work attracted great attention and inspired ardent appreciation. In portrait busts Powers was especially successful; and his "Greek Slave," his "Fisher Boy," "Il Penseroso," and "Proserpine" impressed the art-loving public of the time as marked by strong artistic power and as entitled to permanent rank in sculpture. Mr. Crawford died young; but his name lives in the majestic bronze statue of "Beethoven" which is in the beautiful white and gold interior of Symphony Hall, in Boston; and his "Orpheus" and some other works claim high appreciation. Writing of Crawford, Mr. Hillard said:-- "Crawford's career was distinguished by energy, resolution, and self-reliance. While yet a youth, he formed the determination to make himself an artist; and with this view went to Rome--alone, unfriended, and unknown--and there began a life of toil and renunciation; resisting the approaches alike of indolence and despondency. His strength of character and force of will would have earned distinction for powers inferior to his. Nothing was given to self-indulgence; nothing to vague dreams; nothing to unmanly despair. He did not wait for the work that he would have, but labored cheerfully upon that which he could have. Success came gradually, but surely; and his powers as surely proved themselves to be more than equal to the demand made upon them." On the death of Mr. Crawford, Thomas William Parsons wrote a memorial poem in which this stanza occurs:-- "O Rome! what memories awake, When Crawford's name is said, Of days and friends for whose dear sake That path of Hades unto me Will have no more of dread Than his own Orpheus felt, seeking Eurydice! O Crawford! husband, father, brother Are in that name, that little word! Let me no more my sorrow smother; Grief stirs me, and I must be stirred." Thomas Ball, who went in early manhood to Florence, where he remained until when nearly at the age of fourscore he returned to his native land, still continues, at the age of eighty-five, to pursue the art he loves. He has created works, as his equestrian statue of "Washington" in the Public Gardens and his "Lincoln Freeing the Slave" in Park Square, both in Boston; his great Washington Memorial group in Methuen, Massachusetts; his "Christ Blessing Little Children," and many other historic and ideal sculptures, that seem endowed with his beautiful and winning spirit as well as with his rare gifts. Larkin G. Mead chose Florence rather than Rome for his home and work. His noble "River God," placed at the head of the Mississippi near St. Paul, as well as other interesting creations, link his name with that of his native land. Randolph Rogers, a man of genius; Rinehart, Paul Akers, and Thompson all died before the full maturity of their powers; Akers at the early age of thirty-six, leaving, as his bride of a year, the poet, Elizabeth Akers Allen, who, under the _nom de plume_ of "Florence Percy," has endeared herself to all lovers of lyric art. In a monograph on Paul Akers, written after his death, the writer says of his studio in Rome:-- "Linked with this studio is Hawthorne's tale of 'The Marble Faun,' as Kenyon's studio was none other than Paul Akers's. Though Hawthorne in his romance saw fit to lay the scene in the rooms once occupied by Canova, it was in the Via del Crecie that he wove the thread of his Italian romance. "Paul Akers's growing reputation and increase of work ere long made it necessary for him to seek a more commodious studio, and he took rooms once occupied by the famous Canova. Here he had made under his supervision copies in marble of many of the famous works of the Vatican and the Capitol. The largest collection of these was a commission from Mr. Edward King of Newport, and among them were busts of Ariadne, Demosthenes, and Cicero, and a facsimile of the 'Dying Gladiator' which Mr. King presented to the Redwood Library of Newport. * * * * * "During his first winter in Rome he was permitted by the authorities to make a cast of a mutilated bust of Cicero which had long lain in the Vatican. A critic writing from Rome in 1857 says of this bust of Cicero: 'Mr. Akers obtained permission to take a cast from it; he then restored the eye, brow, and ears, and modelled a neck and bust for it in accordance with the temperament shown by the nervous and rather thin face. He has succeeded admirably. It is the very head of the Vatican, yet without the scars of envious time, and sits gracefully on human shoulders, instead of being rolled awkwardly back upon a shelf.' This bust is unlike the portrait which so long passed for Cicero's, but has been identified by means of a medal which was struck by the Magnesians in honor of the great orator during his consulate, and is now the authorized portrait of Cicero. The finest of Paul Akers's creations executed during his stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of Hungary,' which represents the princess at the moment the roses have fallen to the ground; 'Una and the Lion,' an illustration of the line in Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,'-- 'Still while she slept he kept both watch and ward;' the head of Milton and the 'Pearl Diver.' The 'Pearl Diver,' now owned by the city of Portland, represents a youth stretched upon a sea-worn rock and wrapped in eternal sleep. The arms are thrown above the head, and about the waist is a net containing pearl-bearing shells for which he has risked his life. There is no trace of suffering; all is subdued to beauty. It is death represented as the ancients conceived it, the act of the torch-reverting god. This youth, who has lost his life at the moment when all that for which he had dared was within his grasp, suggests Paul Akers's own untimely death on the eve of his triumph." It was from his Roman studio that Mr. Akers wrote to a friend:-- "Yesterday Browning called. He looked a long time at my Milton, and said it was Milton, the man-angel. He praised the wealth of hair which I had given the head, and then said that Mrs. Browning had a lock of Milton's hair, the only one now in existence. This was given her by Leigh Hunt, just before his death, who had the records proving it to be genuine. The hair was, he said, like mine. He invited me to visit him in Florence, where he would show me the first edition of Milton's poems, marked to indicate the peculiar accent which the poet sometimes adopted, a knowledge of which makes clear somewhat that otherwise seems discordant. Milton was so great a musician that there could have been no fault in sound in his compositions. He looked over my books; said my edition of Shelley was one which he had corrected for the press, not from a knowledge of the original MS., but from his internal evidence that so it must have been; said Poe was a wonderful man; spoke of Tennyson in the warmest terms. Took up a copy of his own poems published in the United States, and remarked that it was better than the English edition, yet had some awful blunders, and wished me to allow him to correct a copy for me. My head of the 'Drowned Girl' caught his eye and interested him. I told him that I had thought of Hood's 'Bridge of Sighs.' He then said that Hood wrote that on his deathbed, and read it to him before any one else had seen it. Hood was doubtful whether it was worth publishing. To-morrow Mrs. Browning is to come; she has been quite ill since she came to Rome, and I have seen her but once. I derive much comfort from the friendship of Charlotte Cushman. She has just gone from here. She has frequent breakfast parties; I have attended but one. Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, Wild, the painter, and myself were the guests. Fields I like much." The first works of Mr. Akers were two portrait busts, of Longfellow and of Samuel Appleton. Of his bust of Milton, Hawthorne in the "Marble Faun" has said:-- "In another style, there was the grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied and solved in the artist's mind. The bust over the tomb in Greyfriar's Church, the original miniatures and pictures wherever to be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work--wherein likewise by long perusal and deep love of 'Paradise Lost,' the 'Comus,' the 'Lycidas,' and 'L'Allegro,' the sculptor had succeeded even better than he knew in spiritualizing his marble with the poet's mighty genius. And this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man." Richard Greenough and the painter, Mr. Haseltine, were prominent figures among the early American group of the nineteenth-century artists in Rome. There came Emma Stebbins, who modelled a fine portrait bust of Charlotte Cushman; and Anne Whitney, whose statues of Samuel Adams and of Leif Ericson adorn public grounds in Boston; whose life-size statue of Harriet Martineau is the possession of Wellesley College; and whose "Chaldean Astronomer," "Lotus-Eater," and "Roma"--a figure personifying the Rome of Pio Nono--reveal her power in ideal creation. The name of Harriet Hosmer stands out in brilliant pre-eminence among those of all women who have followed the plastic art. Her infinite charm of personality seems to impart itself to her work, and she has the gift to make friends as well as to call forms out of clay--the success of friendship being one even more permanently satisfying. In her early life as a girl hardly more than twenty, she sought Rome, living with art as her chaperon. Her versatility, her picturesque individuality, and her imaginative power all combined to win sympathetic recognition. Gibson, whose guidance was particularly well adapted to develop her gifts, received her into his own studio and took a deep interest in her work. It was during the period of her early efforts that Hawthorne was in Rome, and she is graphically depicted in his notebooks in her boyish cap at work in the clay. Gibson was an artist, _con amore_, and Miss Hosmer's joyous abandon to her art captivated his sympathy. "In my art what do I find?" he questioned; "happiness; love which does not depress me; difficulties which I do not fear; resolution which never abates; flights which carry me above the ground; ambition which tramples no one down." Master and pupil were akin in their unwearied devotion to art. Of Gibson, whose absence of mind regarding all the details of life made him almost helpless in travel and affairs, Miss Hosmer used gleefully to say that he "was a god in his studio, but God help him out of it!" This glancing sprite of a girl, frightening her friends by her daring and venturous horseback riding; gravitating by instinct to offer some generous, tender aid to the sick, the destitute, or the helpless; the life and light of gay dinners and of social evenings; working from six in the morning till night in her studio, "with an absence of pretension," says Mrs. Browning, "and simplicity of manners which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with her broad forehead and high aims," had the magic gift that merged her visitors and patrons into enthusiastic friends; and Mrs. Browning has chronicled the pretty scene when Lady Marion Alford, the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, knelt before the girl artist and slipped on her finger a ring--a precious ruby set with diamonds--as a token of her devotion. Reading Miss Hosmer's life still further backward, the reader is transported, as if on some magic carpet, to St. Louis, in the United States, where a noble and lofty man, Hon. Wayman Crow,--a generous friend, a liberal patron of the arts, a man of the most refined tastes and culture, whose great qualities were always used in high service,--first aided Miss Hosmer to the preliminary studies in her art, and whose accomplished and lovely daughters (now Mrs. Lucien Carr of Boston, Mrs. Edwin Cushman of Newport and Rome, and Mrs. Emmons of Leamington, England) were as a trio of sisters to the young artist. And "the flowing conditions of life" bear on this lifelong friendship until a fair young girl, Élise (the daughter of Mrs. Emmons), catches up this sweet tie and as an accomplished and lovely young woman in Roman society, when these "flowing conditions" had come down even into the season of 1906-7, Miss Emmons cherished the fame of Harriet Hosmer and enjoyed the privilege of a constant correspondence with the distinguished artist. So the past links itself again with the present; and who can tell where any story in life begins or ends in the constant evolutionary progress? Miss Hosmer's work attracted wide attention. Her majestic statue of "Zenobia;" the winsome "Puck;" the impressive statue of "Beatrice Cenci," representing her as she lay in her cell in Castel San Angelo the night before her execution,--these and other works of hers are of an interesting character and will hold their permanent rank in sculpture. Were all the muses present at the christening of William Wetmore Story--sculptor, musician, poet and painter, jurist and man of letters, and the friend whose social relationships made life a thing of beauty-- "To winds and waterfalls, And autumn's sunlit festivals, To music and to music's thoughts Inextricably bound"? Mr. Story made his first visit to Italy in 1847; not at that time with any fixed purpose of exchanging his profession of the law for art. He loved literature, and his grace and ease in expression had already manifested his literary talent; he had an inclination toward modelling--it could hardly, at this time, have been called by a stronger name--and curiously enough with him the usual conditions were reversed and he received a commission for a statue of his father, Judge Story, before he had made any definite turning toward the art of sculpture. A young man of versatile gifts and accomplished scholarship, sculpture was to him one among the many attractive forms of art rather than the supreme attraction; and it was the stimulus of the given work that determined him as a sculptor, rather than his determination to be a sculptor that determined the work. Among the goddesses of life Destiny must, perhaps, be allowed a place. At all events, after Mr. Story's initial glance at Italy, he sought Rome again a year later, and this time it was his choice for life, however unrevealed to his eye were the resplendent years that lay before him. He had fallen under the spell of the Magic Land. In a letter to Lowell, Mr. Story had questioned how he should ever endure again "the restraint and bondage of Boston." It was the picturesque Rome of the Popes that he first knew. The years of 1848-49 were those of revolutionary activities in Italy. Pio Nono, one of the most saintly and beloved of the Popes,--whose mortal form now rests in that richly decorated chapel in old San Lorenzo, _fuori le mura_, on the site of the church that Constantine founded on the burial place of St. Lawrence,--made his flight to Gaeta and the Roman republic was established. It was a dramatic scene when Pio Nono returned (April 12, 1850), entering Rome by the Porta San Giovanni. The scene from this gate was then, as now, one of the most impressive in the Eternal City. It was in this vast Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano that Pio Nono entered that April day, leaving his carriage and walking alone to the altar, where he knelt in devotion. A splendid procession awaited without to accompany the Holy Father to the Papal Palace. The superb state carriages conveyed princes and foreign ambassadors and great nobles. From the Piazza San Giovanni to St. Peter's every house was illuminated, and the populace cheered and waved until the very air vibrated with sound and color. These were the days when the methods of government were a visible spectacle, a drama, making the life in Rome a daily illuminated missal. The Storys, on their return to Italy, located themselves for a time in Florence, where they met the Brownings, and that lifelong friendship between the poet and the sculptor was initiated. In these happy Florentine days Mr. Story worked in his studio while his wife read to him the life of Keats, then just issued, written by Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton. But the "flowing conditions" soon bore them onward to Rome, where they settled themselves in the Via Porta Pinciana, and met the Crawfords, who were domiciled in the Villa Negroni. In these Roman days, too, appeared Mr. Cropsey, of poetic landscape fame, and here, too, was Margaret Fuller. Mazzini was then a leading figure in the Chamber of Deputies,--"the prophet not only of modern Italy, but of the modern world." He found Italy "utilitarian and materialistic, permeated by French ideas, and weakened by her reliance on French initiative. He was filled with hope that Italy might not only achieve her own unity, but might once more accomplish, as she had in the Rome of the Cæsars and the Rome of the Church, the unity of the Western world. 'On my side I believe,' he says, 'that the great problem of the day was a religious problem, to which all other questions were but secondary.'" He was asserting that "we cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through collective humanity. It is not by isolated duty (which indeed the conditions of modern life render more and more impossible), nor by contemplation of mere Power as displayed in the material world, that we can develop our nature. It is rather by mingling with the universal life, and by carrying on the evolution of the never-ending work." The studios of Mr. Crawford in those days were in the Piazza delle Terme, near the Baths of Diocletian. William Page, the painter, was domiciled on the slope of the Quirinal where he painted a portrait of Charlotte Cushman which Mrs. Browning described as "a miracle"; one of Mrs. Crawford; the head of Mrs. Story, which he insisted upon presenting to her husband; and a magnificent portrait of Browning which the artist presented to Mrs. Browning. "Both of us," wrote Robert Browning of this gift, "would have fain escaped being the subjects of such princely generosity; but there was no withstanding his delicacy and noble-mindedness." Mrs. Jameson was much in Rome in the early years of the 1850-60 decade, living in the old port by the Tiber nearly opposite to the new and splendid building of the law courts. Near the Tarpeian Rock Frederika Bremer had perched, in a tiny room of which she took all the frugal care, even to washing the blue cups and plates when she invited the Hawthornes to a tea of a simplicity that suggested, indeed, the utmost degree of "light" housekeeping. Thomas Buchanan Read was one of the hosts and guests of this social group, and it was at a dinner he gave that Hawthorne met Gibson, whose conversational talents were evidently (upon that occasion) chiefly employed in contemning the pre-Raphaelite school of painters and emphasizing the need of sculptors to discover and to follow the principles of the Greeks,--"a fair doctrine, but one which Mr. Gibson fails to practise," observes Hawthorne. The Brownings were variously bestowed in Rome through succeeding winters,--in the Bocca di Leone, in the Via del Tritone and elsewhere. Mrs. Browning, as her "Casa Guida Windows" and many other poems attest, took always the deepest interest in Italian politics. American and English friends come and go, but the little group of residents and the more permanent sojourners, as the Hawthornes and the Brownings, continue their daily variations on life in the social dinners and teas, the excursions and the sight-seeing of the wonderful city. Only the magician could "call up the vanished past again" and summon into an undeniable materialization those charming figures to come forth out of the shadowy air of the rich, historic past, and stand before us in the full light of contemporary attention. Not alone this group of choice persons, but the environment of their time, the very atmosphere, are demanded of this necromancy. The figure of Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) is one of these, and the tradition still survives of a concert given in the splendid, spacious hall of the Palazzo Colonna where she was the prima donna of the occasion. There were also musicals at the house of Mrs. Sartoris, where the guests met her famous sister, Fanny Kemble. Mrs. Browning was fond of both the sisters, and said of them that their social brilliancy was their least distinction. She found them both "noble and sympathetic," and her "dear Mr. Page" and "Hatty" (Miss Hosmer) "an immense favorite with us both," she said of her husband and herself; these and the Storys made up the special circle for the Brownings in Rome. "The Sartoris house has the best society in Rome," writes Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford, "and exquisite music, of course. We met Lockhart there and my husband sees a good deal of him.... A little society," she says, "is good for soul and body, and on the Continent it is easy to get a handful of society without paying too dear for it. This is an advantage of Continental life." Mrs. Browning greatly admired the work of Mr. Page, whose portraits she found "like Titian's." But the tinted statues of Gibson seemed to her inartistic. His famous painted Venus she called "pretty," but only as a wax doll might be, not as a work of genuine art. Then Thackeray and his two daughters came; Miss Anne (now known to the world of literature as Anne Thackeray Ritchie) was a special favorite with Mrs. Browning. Coming to Rome at one time from Florence in midwinter, the Brownings found that the Storys had taken an apartment for them (in the Via Bocca di Leone), and they arrived to find lighted fires and lamps. Their journey had included a week's visit at Assisi, studying the rich art of Cimabue and Giotto in the church of the great Franciscan monastery. Mrs. Browning visited studios in Rome and found that of Mr. Crawford more interesting to her than Mr. Gibson's, but no artist is "as near" to her, as she herself says, as Mr. Page. The Storys left the Porta Pinciana to live at No. 93 in the Piazza di Spagna, and in the same house with the Brownings, in the Bocca di Leone, Mr. Page had his apartment. To Lowell, Mr. Story wrote of the Brownings:-- "The Brownings and we became great friends in Florence, and, of course, we could not become friends without liking each other. He, Emelyn says, is like you. He is of my size, but slighter, with straight black hair, small eyes, a smooth face, and manner nervous and rapid. He has great vivacity, but not the least humor; some sarcasm, considerable critical faculty, and very great frankness and friendliness of manner and mind. Mrs. Browning will sit buried up in a large easy-chair listening and talking very quietly and pleasantly. Very unaffected is she.... I have hundreds of statues in my head, but they are in the future tense. Powers I knew very well in Florence. He is a man of great mechanical talent and natural strength of perception, but with no poetry in his composition, and I think no creative power.... I have been to hear Allegri's 'Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel, with the awful and mighty figures of Michael Angelo looking down from the ceiling; to hear Guglielmi's 'Miserere' in St. Peter's, while the gloom of evening was gathering in the lofty aisles and shrouding the frescoed domes, was a deeply affecting and solemnly beautiful experience. Never can one forget the plaintive wailing of the voices that seemed to implore pity and pardon." It was in 1856 that the Storys located themselves in Palazzo Barberini, which Bernini designed and which was built "out of the quarry of the Coliseum" by Urban VIII. It is one of the wonderful old palaces of Rome,--this mass of Barberini courts, gardens, terraces, and vast apartments, with the interminable winding stairs, where on one landing Thorwaldsen's lion lies before the great doors decorated with the arms of Popes and princes. Here the old Cardinal Barberini lived his stormy life; here are the gallery and the library,--the latter stored with infinite treasures of ancient documents, old maps whose portrayal of the earth bears little resemblance to the present, and famous manuscripts and volumes in old vellum, some fifty thousand in all. In the Barberini gallery are a few noted works,--Raphael's "Fornarina," Guido's "Beatrice Cenci," a "Holy Family" by Andrea del Sarto, and others. [Illustration: SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA TRINITÀ DEI MONTI, ROME _Page 72_] The Via delle Quattro Fontane, on which the Palazzo Barberini stands, might well be known as the street of the wonderful vista. One strolls down it to the Via Sistina and to Piazza Trinità de' Monti at the head of the Spanish steps (the Scala di Spagna), pausing for the loveliness of the view. Across the city rises the opposite height of Monte Mario, and to the left the Janiculum, now crowned with the magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi, which is in evidence from almost every part of Rome. As far as the eye can see the Campagna stretches away, infinite as the sea--a very Campagna Mystica. The luminous air, the faint, misty blue of the distance, the deep purple shadows on the hills, make up a landscape of color. At the foot of the Spanish steps the flower venders spread out their wares,--great bunches of the flame-colored roses peculiar to Italy, the fragrant white hyacinths, golden jonquils, baskets of violets, and masses of lilies of the valley. On many a night of brilliant moonlit glory the artistic sojourners in Rome lingered on the parapet of the Pincian Hill watching the moonlight flood the Eternal City until churches and palaces seemed to swim in a sea of silver. Or in the morning, when the rose-red of dawn was aglow, there seemed to hover over the city that wraith of mist whose secret Claude Lorraine surprises in his landscapes. These dawn visions of mysterious, incredible beauty are a part of the very identity of Rome. There were mornings when the Hawthornes with Mrs. Jameson or some other friend would drive out to the old San Lorenzo (_fuori le mura_), the church founded by Constantine in 330 on the site where the body of St. Lawrence was buried. At various periods the church was enlarged and finally, as recently as in 1864, Pio Nono had great improvements made under the architect Vespignani. In the piazza in front was placed an immense column of red granite, some sixty feet high, with the statue of St. Lawrence, a standing figure, at the top. It is most impressive. The colonnade at the entrance of the church is decorated with frescoes and contains two immense sarcophagi, whose sides are beautifully sculptured with reliefs. The roof is supported by six Ionic columns. Entering the church one finds an interior of three aisles divided by colossal columns of Oriental granite. In the middle aisle, on both sides the galleries, are fresco paintings illustrating the martyrdom of St. Lawrence and of St. Stephen, one series on the right and the other on the left. One of these paintings, especially, of the life of St. Lawrence, is strangely haunting to the imagination. It represents the youthful, slender figure, nude, save for slight drapery, laid on the gridiron while the fire is being kindled under it and the fagots shovelled in. The physical shrinking of the flesh--of every nerve--from the torture, the spiritual strength and invincible energy of the countenance, are wonderfully depicted. The great aisle was painted by order of Pius IX by Cesare Fracassini; in it are two pulpits of marble. A double staircase of marble conducts to that part of the Basilica of Constantine which by Honorius III was converted into the presbytery. It is decorated at the upper end by twelve columns of violet marble which rise from the level of the primitive basilica beneath. At the end is the ancient pontifical seat, adorned with mosaic and precious marbles. The papal altar is under a canopy in the Byzantine style. The pavement of this presbytery is worthy of particular attention. Descending to the confessional which is under the high altar the tomb of the martyred saints, Lawrence, Stephen, and Justin, is found. [Illustration: TOMB OF PIO NONO, SAN LORENZO (FUORI LE MURA), ROME _Page 75_] It was the request of Pio Nono that his mortal body should rest here, where it is placed in a simple tomb, according to his own instructions; but the chapel is very rich in decoration which was paid for by money sent from all parts of the world. The chapel walls are entirely encrusted in mother-of-pearl, gilt bronze, and beautiful marbles. The mosaic paintings are formed of gold and precious stones of fabulous value. This interior is perhaps the richest in the world in its decoration. San Lorenzo is a patriarchal church, and one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome. Near San Lorenzo is the Campo Verano, a cemetery containing many beautiful memorial sculptures. In those days, half a century ago, the entrance most often used by visitors to Rome was through the Via Flaminia and the Porta del Popolo, opening on the Piazza del Popolo, rather the most picturesque and impressive place in all Rome. On the left is the Pincian Hill (Monte Pincio), with its rich terraces, balustrades, its beautiful porticos filled with statuary, its groves of cypress and ilex trees; a classic vision rising on the sight and enchanting the imagination. On the side opposite the Porta three roads diverge in fan shape--the Via Babuino, the Corso, and the Ripetta, with the "twin churches" side by side; one between the Babuino and the Corso, the other between the Corso and the Ripetta. The Corso (which was the ancient Flaminian Way) runs straight to the Piazza Venezia at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. This Piazza del Popolo was widened and decorated by Pius VII. It is formed by two semicircles, adorned with fountains and statues, and terminated by four symmetrical edifices. In the semicircles are colossal groups in marble, and a road opposite the Pincio leads to the Ponte Margherita and the Prati di Castello. The obelisk in the centre of the piazza was brought to Rome from Heliopolis by Cæsar Augustus and originally stood in the Circus Maximus. It was erected here by Pope Sixtus V, and it is nearly a hundred feet in height. It is formed of red granite, and while it has been broken in three places, the hieroglyphics are still legible. This obelisk was first erected in Egypt as a part of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, in a period preceding that of Rameses II. After the battle of Actium, Augustus transported it to Rome, and it was first placed in the Circus Maximus, but during the reign of Valentinian it fell from its pedestal and lay buried in the earth, until in the sixteenth century Pope Sixtus V had it placed in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo, and consecrated it to the cross. The two inscriptions are on opposite sides. One thus reads:-- "The Emperor Cæsar, son of the divine Cæsar Augustus, Sovereign Pontiff, twelve times Emperor, eleven times Consul, fourteen times Tribune, having conquered Egypt, consecrated this gift to the Sun." The other inscription is as follows:-- "Sixtus V, Sovereign Pontiff, excavated, transported, and restored this obelisk, sacrilegiously consecrated to the Sun by the great Augustus, in the great Circus, where it lay in ruins, and dedicated it to the cross triumphant in the fourth year of his pontificate." The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is built into the very wall of Monte Pincio on the site of Nero's tomb. It dates back to 1099, and consists of three naves and several chapels. In the first chapel is a "Nativity" by Pinturicchio, who also painted the lunettes. Another chapel belongs to the Cibo family, and is rich in marbles and adorned with sixteen columns of Sicilian jasper. The "Conception" is by Maratta, the "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" by Morandi, and the "St. Catherine" by Volterra. The "Visitation" was sculptured by Bernini in 1679. The third chapel is painted by Pinturicchio (1513), and the fourth has an interesting bas-relief of the fifteenth century. The picture of the Virgin, on the high altar, is one of those attributed to St. Luke; the paintings on the vault of the choir are by Pinturicchio. The two marble monuments are, from their perfection of design and execution, reckoned among the best modern works. They are by Cantucci da S. Savino. In the chapel following is an "Assumption" by Annibale Carracci; the side pictures are by Caravaggio. The last chapel but one in the small nave is the Chigi chapel, and is one of the most celebrated in Rome. Raphael gave the designs for the dome, the paintings of the frieze, and the altar picture. This latter was begun by Del Piombo and finished by Salviati. The statue of Daniel is by Bernini. The front of the altar and the statues of Jonah and Elijah were done by Lorenzetto (1541), from designs by Raphael. Outside this chapel is the monument of Princess Odescalchi Chigi (1771), by Paolo Posi. The stained windows of the choir belong to the fourteenth century, and in the sacristy and the vestibule are monuments also of the fourteenth century and of the fifteenth. Luther resided in the convent attached to this church when he was in Rome. There is a legend that a large walnut tree grew on the site of Nero's tomb in whose branches innumerable crows had their home, and that they devastated all that part of Rome. An appeal was made to the Virgin, who declared that the crows were demons who kept watch over the ashes of Nero, and ordered the tree to be cut down and burned, the ashes being scattered to the air, and that, on the spot, a church should be built to her honor. This was accomplished, and the crows no more troubled the Eternal City. The gardens of Lucullus were on the Monte Pincio. The view of the terraced hillside from the Piazza del Popolo is one of the most impressive in Rome. The Hawthornes left Rome in 1859; and the death of Mrs. Browning in June of 1861 left the little circle of the Roman winters irreparably broken. "Returning to Rome," wrote Story to Charles Eliot Norton, "I have not one single intimate ... no one with whom I can walk any of the higher ranges of art and philosophy." Mr. Story had modelled the busts of both Mr. and Mrs. Browning during their sojourns in Rome; in 1853 Harriet Hosmer had made the cast of the "clasped hands" of the poets, the model having since been cast in bronze; Mr. Page had, as already noted, painted a portrait of Robert Browning; and Mr. Leighton (afterward Sir Frederick) had made a beautiful portrait sketch of Mrs. Browning. In later years all these memorials, with other paintings or plastic sketches of the wedded poets, were grouped in Mr. Barrett Browning's palace in Venice. At this time Mr. Story had completed his "Cleopatra," which Hawthorne had embalmed in literary mention in "The Marble Faun;" and beside his "Judith," "Sappho," and other lesser works, he had achieved one of his finest successes in the "Libyan Sibyl." Both the "Cleopatra" and the "Sibyl" became famous. Whether they would produce so strong an effect at the present stage of twentieth-century life is a problem, but one that need not press for solution. Mr. Story was singularly fortunate in certain conditions that grouped themselves about his life and combined to establish his fame. These conditions, of course, were largely the outer reflection of inner qualities, as our conditions are apt to be; still, the "lack of favoring gales" not infrequently foredooms some gallant bark to a disastrous course. "Man is his own star.... * * * * * Our acts, our angels, are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still," it is true; yet has not Edith Thomas embodied something of that overruling destiny that every thoughtful observer must discern in life in these lines?-- "You may blame the wind or no, But it ever hath been so-- Something bravest of its kind Leads a frustrate life and blind, For the lack of favoring gales Blowing blithe on other sails." Only occasionally have we "... the time, and the place, And the loved one all together." Mr. Story's nature was eminently sympathetic with the other arts; he was himself almost as much a literary man as he was a sculptor; he was the friend and companion of literary men, and to the fact that art in the middle years of the nineteenth century was far more a literary topic than a matter of critical scrutiny, Mr. Story owed an incalculable degree of his fame. He was an extremely interesting figure with his social grace, his liberal culture, and his versatile gifts. His life was centred in choice and refined associations. If not dowered with lofty and immortal original genius, he had a singular combination of talent, of fastidious taste, and of the intellectual appreciation that enabled him to select interesting ideal subjects to portray in the plastic art. These appealed to the special interest of his literary friends and were widely discussed in the press and periodicals of the day. It is a _bonmot_ of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr. Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embodiment he might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story declined appreciably, year by year, falling away from his own standard; haunted to the point of obsession by visions of mournful female figures, generally seated, wrapped in gloom. It seems strange," this critic continues, "that so active a mind should dream of nothing but brooding, sinister souls, of bodies bowed in grief, or tense with rage. Never once, apparently, did there come to him a vision of buoyancy and grace; of a beauty that one could love; of good cheer and joy of very living; always these unwholesome creatures born of that belated Byronic romanticism." This criticism, while it has as little appreciation of Mr. Story's exquisite culture and of the taste and refinement of his art as the general rush of the motor car and telephonic conversational life of the first decade of the twentieth century has of the thoughtful, the poetic, the leisurely atmosphere of Mr. Story's time, is yet not without a keen flashlight of truth. Painting had its reactionary crisis from the pre-Raphaelite ideals and the _intransigeants_ have had their own conflicts in which they survived, or disappeared, according to the degree of artistic vitality within. Sculpture and literature must also meet the series of tests to which the onward progress of life persists in subjecting them, and those who are submerged and perish can only encourage the survivors as did the Greeks, as sung by Theocritus:-- "A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost, Weathered the gale." "As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment; but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding significance of his work--or the lack of it--as to whether this fame is perpetuated. That of Mr. Story does not hold within itself all the qualities that insure the appreciation of the present day. It is, as the critic of the hour expresses himself, "too literary,"--too largely a question of classic titles which appealed to the mid-nineteenth-century authors whose judgment of art the twentieth century finds particularly amusing. Henry James has somewhere held up to ridicule the early Beacon Hill Boston for its impassioned devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of Flaxman's art. But the work of Story will survive all transient variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth, grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has life, it has significance. The criticism of the immediate hour is not necessarily infallible because it is contemporary. What does William Watson say? "A deft musician does the breeze become Whenever an Æolian harp it finds; Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb Unto the most musicianly of winds." It is an irretrievable loss if, in the passion for the _vita nuova_, a generation, or a century, shall substitute for the Æolian harp the mere hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy of the hour. In another of his keenly critical quatrains William Watson embodies this signal truth:-- "His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet, And whoso will may trample on his rhymes. Should Time let die a song that's pure and sweet, The singer's loss were more than matched by Time's." Art is progressive, and the present is always the "heir of all the ages" preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best use of its rich inheritance. There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle,--Lowell, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning,--friends who, according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story. Browning wrote to the London _Times_ an article on Mr. Story's work, in which he conjured up most of the superlative phrases of commendation that the limits of the English language allow to praise his work, none of whose marshalled force was too poor to do him reverence. The versatile gifts of Story's personality drew around him friends whose influence was potent and, indeed, authoritative in their time. Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent aid and inspiration; and thus, that "Man is his own star," is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre and with lofty ideals "Leads a frustrate life and blind, For the lack of favoring gales Blowing blithe on other sails." Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth. With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his poem--one far too little known--the "Io Victis":-- "I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,-- The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife; Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame, But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart, * * * * * Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes burned in ashes away, From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood at the dying of day With the wreck of their life all around them...." In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life,--as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:-- "... I stand on the field of defeat, In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and dying, and there * * * * * Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, 'They only the victory win Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within; Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high; Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight,--if need be, to die.'" Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature. For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story's literary work--in his contributions of essays and poems to the _Atlantic Monthly_; in his published works, the "Roba di Roma," "Conversations in a Studio," his collected "Poems," and others--gave him a not transitory rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in art. Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the Seven-hilled City,--Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story, though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:-- "Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy, Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys." [Illustration: "THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES" Elihu Vedder _Page 92_] If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the æsthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight; the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that meet outside space and time and question each other's identity; the dead that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral, through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert,--it is these that are the realm of Vedder's art, and what has the normal world of portrait and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a class, an order, of its own, and considered as being--Vedderesque? It seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?-- "The Muse can knit What is past, what is done, With the web that's just begun." How can he find the design to phrase his thought--this painter of ideas? "Can blaze be done in cochineal, Or noon in mazarin?" Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul's native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the Cumæan Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply--the art of Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art, any parallel to these works. One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the artist might reply:-- "I am seeker of the stone, Living gem of Solomon. But what is land, or what is wave, To me, who only jewels crave? * * * * * I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing; Stand not, pause not in my going." In the rich, weird realm of Omar Khayyam's Persian poem, the Rubaiyat, Mr. Vedder found the opportunity of his life for translating its thought into strange, mystic symbolism. Never were artist and poet so blended in one as in Vedder's wonderful illustrations for this poem. It has nothing in common with what we ordinarily call an illustrated work. It is a great treasure of art for all the ages. It is a very fount of inspiration for painter and poet. An exquisite sonnet suggested by "The Angel of the Darker Cup" is the following by Louise Chandler Moulton:-- "She bends her lovely head to taste thy draught, O thou stern Angel of the Darker Cup! With thee to-night in the dim shades to sup, Where all they be who from that cup have quaffed. She had been glad in her own loveliness, and laughed At Life's strong enemies who lie in wait; Had kept with golden youth her queenly state, All unafraid of Sorrow's threat'ning shaft. "Then human Grief found out her human heart, And she was fain to go where pain is dumb; So Thou wert welcome, Angel dread to see, And she fares onward with thee, willingly, To dwell where no man loves, no lovers part,-- Thus Grief that is, makes welcome Death to come." The sonnet, the stanza, and the pictorial interpretation all form one beautiful trio in poetic and graphic art. Writing of Mr. Vedder, Mr. W. C. Brownell speaks of the personal force in a picture and says that with Vedder this personal force is imagination,--"the imagination of a man whose natural expression is pictorial, but who is a man as well as a painter; who has lived as well as painted, who has speculated, pondered, and felt much.... It is this," he continues, "that places Vedder in the front rank of the imaginative painters of the day." Of Mr. Vedder's painting called "The Enemy Sowing Tares," Mr. Brownell writes:-- "... Here you note a dozen phases of significance. The theme is unconventional; the man has become the archenemy; the night is weird and awe-inspiring; the tares represent the foe of the church--money; they are sown at the foot of the cross--the symbol of the church.... Mr. Vedder has not passed his life in Rome for nothing. His attitude is in harmony with the spirit of the Sistine and the Stanze." One of the interesting and mystical works of Vedder is "The Soul between Doubt and Faith,"--three heads, that of the Soul hooded and draped, looking before her with eyes that seem to discern things not seen by mortals; the sinister face of Doubt at the left, the serene, inspiring countenance of Faith at the right. It is a magical picture to have before one with its profoundly significant message. The works of Mr. Vedder will grow more priceless as the years pass by. They are pictures for the ages. In Mr. Ezekiel, another American artist whose almost lifelong home has been in Rome, is a sculptor whose touch and technique have won recognition. In a recumbent figure of Christ is seen one of the best examples of his art. It is pervaded by the classic influences in which he has lived. The studios of Mr. Ezekiel, in the ruins of the old Baths of Caracalla, are very picturesque and his salon, with its music, its wealth of books including many rare and beautiful copies, and its old pictures and bric-a-brac, is one of the fascinating interiors of the Eternal City. The visitor who is privileged to see the Story studios in the Via San Martino finds Mr. Waldo Story occupying these spacious rooms where the flash of a fountain in the court, a view of the garden, green-walled by vines, with flowers and shrubs and broken statues, make the place alluring to dreamer and poet. In these rooms may be seen many of the elder Story's finest statues in cast or marble, the "Libyan Sibyl," "Nemesis," "Sappho," the "Christ," "Into the Silent Land," and others, with many portrait busts, among which are those of Browning, Shelley, Keats, Theodore Parker, Mrs. Browning, Marchesa Peruzzi de Medici (Edith Story), John Lothrop Motley, one of Story's nearer friends, and Lord Houghton. In the work of Mr. Waldo Story one admirable portrait bust is of Cecil Rhodes. A decorative work, a fountain for the Rothschild country estate in England, is charmingly designed as a Galatea (in bronze), standing in a marble shell that is drawn by Nereids and attended by Cupids. The happy blending of marble and bronze gives to this work a pleasing variety of color. Another decorative design is that of "Nymphs Drinking at the Fountain of Love." These studios are among the most interesting in Rome. It was in 1868 that Franklin Simmons, then a young artist from Maine, turned to Rome as his artistic Mecca. Since then the Eternal City has always been his home, but his frequent and prolonged sojourns in America have kept him closely in touch with its national life. Mr. Simmons is the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable quality of extended relation which relegates his work to the realm of the universal and, therefore, to the immortality of art, rather than restricting it to the temporal locality. Louis Gorse observes that it is not the absence of faults that constitutes a masterpiece, but that it is flame, it is life, it is emotion, it is sincerity. Under the touch of Mr. Simmons the personal accent speaks; to his creative power flame and life respond, and to no sculptor is the truth so admirably stated by M. Gorse more applicable. Mr. Simmons has been singularly fortunate in a wide American recognition, having received a liberal share of the more important commissions for great public works of sculpture. The splendid statue, _al fresco_, of the poet Longfellow for his native city, Portland, was appropriately the work of Mr. Simmons as a native of the same state; the portrait statues of General Grant, Gov. William King, Roger Williams, and Francis H. Pierrepont, all in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington; the portrait busts of Grant, Sheridan, Porter, Hooker, Thomas, and other heroes of the Civil War; the colossal group of the Naval Monument at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington,--are all among the works of Mr. Simmons. Like all artists who, like the poet, are born and not made, Mr. Simmons gave evidence of his artistic bent in his early childhood. After graduating from Bates College he modelled a bust of its president, and a little later, going to Washington (in the winter of 1865-66), many of the noted men of the time gave him sittings, and in a series of portrait busts his genius impressed itself by its dignity of conception and an unusual power of sympathetic interpretation. He modelled the bust of Grant while he was the General's guest in camp, taking advantage of whatever spare minutes General Grant could give for sittings in the midst of his pressing responsibilities; and it is perhaps due to this unusually intimate intercourse with the great hero, and the _rapport_, not difficult of establishment, between two men whose natures were akin in a certain noble sincerity and lofty devotion to the purest ideals, that Mr. Simmons owes the power with which he has absolutely interpreted the essential characteristics of General Grant in that immortal portrait statue in the Capitol. Washington is, indeed, the place to especially study the earlier work of Franklin Simmons. An important one is the Logan memorial,--an equestrian statue which is considered the finest work in sculpture in the capital, and which is the only statue in the United States in which both the group and the pedestal are of bronze. The visitor in Washington who should be ignorant of the relative rank of the great men commemorated by the equestrian memorial monuments of the city might be justified in believing that General Logan was the most important man of his time, if he judged from the relative greatness of his statue. When Congress decided upon this group, Mr. Simmons was requested to prepare a model. This proving eminently acceptable, Mr. Simmons found himself, quite to his own surprise, fairly launched on this arduous work, involving years of intense concentration and labor. For this monumental work was to be not merely that of the brave and gallant military leader,--a single idea embodied, as in those of Generals Scott, Sheridan, Thomas, and others,--but it was to be a permanent interpretation of the soldier-statesman, mounted on his battle-horse; it was to be, in the comprehensive grasp of Mr. Simmons, the vital representation of the complex life and individuality of General Logan and, even more, it must reflect and suggest the complex spirit of his age. In this martial figure was thus embodied a manifold and mysterious relation, as one of the potent leaders and directive powers in an age of tumultuous activities; an age of strife and carnage, whose goal was peace; of adverse conditions and reactions, whose manifest outcome was yet prosperity and national greatness and splendid moral triumph. All these must be suggested in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the artist's work; and no sculptor who was not also an American--not merely by ancestry and activity, but one in mind and heart only; one who was an intense patriot and identified with national ideas--could ever have produced such a work as that of the Logan monument. So unrivalled does it stand, unique among all the equestrian art of this country, that it enchants the art student and lover with its indefinable spell. When this colossal work was cast in bronze, in Rome, the event was considered important. The king and the Royal family visited the studio of Mr. Simmons to see the great group, and so powerfully did its excellence appeal to King Umberto that he knighted Mr. Simmons, making him Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy. Nor was Mr. Simmons the prophet who was not without honor save in his own country, for his _alma mater_ gave him the degree of M.A. in 1867; Colby College honored him with the Master's degree in 1885, and in 1888 Bowdoin bestowed upon this eminent Maine artist the same degree. In 1892 Mr. Simmons married the Baroness von Jeinsen, a brilliant and beautiful woman who, though a lady of foreign title, was an American by birth. An accomplished musician, a critical lover of art, and the most delightful of hostesses and friends, Mrs. Simmons drew around her a remarkable circle of charming people and made their home in the Palazzo Tamagno a notable centre of social life. No woman in the American colony of the Seven-hilled City was ever more beloved; and it was frequently noted by guests at her weekly receptions that Mrs. Simmons was as solicitous for the enjoyment of the most unknown stranger as for those of rank and title who frequented her house. Her grace and loveliness were fully equalled by her graciousness and that charm of personality peculiarly her own. Her death in Rome, on Christmas of 1905, left a vacant place, indeed, in many a home which had been gladdened by her radiant presence. One of the most beautiful works of Mr. Simmons is a portrait of his wife in bas-relief, representing her standing just at the opening of parted curtains, as if she were about to step behind and vanish. It is a very poetic conception. A bust of Mrs. Simmons, also, in his studio, is fairly a speaking likeness of this beautiful and distinguished woman. It is over her grave in the Protestant cemetery that Mr. Simmons has placed one of his noblest ideal statues, "The Angel of the Resurrection,"--a memorial monument that is one of the art features of Rome to the visitor in the Eternal City. [Illustration: "GRIEF AND HISTORY," DETAIL FROM NAVAL MONUMENT, WASHINGTON Franklin Simmons _Page 105_] The brilliant and impressive Naval Monument, or Monument of Peace, as it is known in Washington, placed at the foot of Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, is eloquent with the power of heroic suggestion that Mr. Simmons has imparted to it. The work breathes that exaltation of final triumph that follows temporary defeat. Those who died that the nation might live, are seen in the perpetual illumination of immortality. Not only has Mr. Simmons here perpetuated the suffering, the sacrifices of the Civil War, but that sublime and eternal truth of victory after defeat, of peace and serene exaltation after conflict, and the triumph of life after death, are all immortally embodied in this group crowned with those impressive and haunting figures, "Grief" and "History," which are considered as among the most classically beautiful and significant in the range of modern sculpture. In the early winter of 1907 Mr. Simmons was invited by the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Hon. Whitelaw Reid, to send for Dorchester House, London, three busts of distinguished Americans,--those of Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice Chase, and Hon. James G. Blaine, which Mr. Reid, in visiting the Roman studios of Mr. Simmons, had seen and greatly admired. The Ambassador observed that he "would like a few Americans, as well as so many Roman Emperors," about him. These portrait busts all reveal an amazing force and mastery of work. The fine sculptural effect of the Hamilton and the wonderful blending of subtle delicacy of touch and vigor of treatment with which the nobility of character is expressed, mark this bust as something exceptional in portrait art. It has a matchless dignity and serene poise. The bust of Chief Justice Chase is a faithful and speaking reproduction of the very presence of its subject, instinct with vitality; and the fire and force and brilliancy of the bust of Hon. James G. Blaine fairly sweeps the visitor off his feet. The modelling is done with an apparent instantaneousness of power that is the highest realization of creative art. It is the magnetic Blaine, the impassioned and eloquent statesman, that rises before the gazer. Mr. Simmons has long been a commanding figure in plastic art. No American sculptor abroad has, perhaps, received so many important public commissions as have been given to him. He has created nearly a score of memorial groups; he has modelled over one hundred portrait busts and statues. His industry has kept step with his genius. The latest success of Mr. Simmons in the line of monumental art is the statue (in bronze) of Alexander Hamilton, which was unveiled at Paterson, N. J., in May of 1907. The splendidly poised figure, the dignity, the serene strength and yet the intense energy of the expression and of the entire pose are a revelation in the art of the portrait statue. It is not, however, true that Mr. Simmons has ever resigned himself to the necessity of producing portrait and memorial sculpture exclusively. In the realm of the purely ideal Mr. Simmons finds his most felicitous field for creative work. A bas-relief entitled "The Genius of Progress Leading the Nations," with all its splendid fire and action, the _motif_ being that of the spirits Life and Light beating down and driving out the spirits of darkness and evil; "The Angel of the Resurrection," with its glad, triumphant assertion of the power of the immortal life; the poetry and sacredness of maternity as typified in the "Mother of Moses;" the statues of the "Galatea" and the "Medusa," and other ideal creations, indicate "the vision and the faculty divine" of Mr. Simmons. To a very great degree his art is that which the French describe as the grand manner, and to this is added a spiritual quality, a power of radiating the intellectual purpose, the profounder thought and the aspiration of the subject represented. [Illustration: "MOTHER OF MOSES" Franklin Simmons _Page 108_] One of the most charming of these ideal works is a statue of "Penelope," represented seated in the chair, her rich robe falling in graceful folds, and the little Greek fillet binding her hair. The face bears a meditative expression, into which has entered a hint of pathos and wistfulness in the dawning wonder as to whether, after all, Ulysses will return. The classic beauty of the pose; the exquisite modelling of the bust and arms and hands, every curve and contour so ideally lovely; the distinction of the figure in its noble and refined patrician elegance, are combined to render this work one that well deserves immortality in art, and to rank as a masterpiece in modern sculpture. [Illustration: "THE GENIUS OF PROGRESS LEADING THE NATIONS" Franklin Simmons _Page 107_] Another of his ideal figures, "The Promised Land," is a work of great spiritual exaltation and beauty. An Israelite woman has just arrived at the point when before her vision gleams the "Promised Land"; the face tells its own story of all she has passed through,--the trials, the sadness, the obstacles to be overcome; but now she sees the fulfilment of her hopes and dreams. It is a most interesting creation, and one in which is portrayed the artist's spiritual insight and susceptibility to poetic exaltation. To one visitor to Mr. Simmons's studio this statue suggested the following lines:-- Fair on her sight it gleams,--the Promised Land! The rose of dawn sifts through the azure air, And all her weariness and toil and care Vanish, as if from her some tender hand Lifted the burden, and transformed the hour To this undreamed-of sense of joy and power! The rapture and the ecstasy divine Are deep realities that only wait Their hour to dawn, nor ever rise too late To draw the soul to its immortal shrine. O Sculptor! thy great gift has shaped this clay, To image the profoundest truth, and stand As witness of the spirit power that may Achieve the vision of the Promised Land! [Illustration: "VALLEY FORGE" Franklin Simmons _Page 110_] In a statuette in bronze called "Valley Forge," Mr. Simmons has fairly incarnated the entire spirit of the Revolutionary period in that mysterious way recognized only in its result; all that unparalleled epoch of tragic intensity and sublime triumph lives again in this work. The fidelity to a lofty ideal which essentially characterizes Mr. Simmons is as unswerving as that of Merlin, who followed "The Gleam." "Great the Master And sweet the Magic When over the valley In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam." This American sculptor who, in his early youth, sought the artistic atmosphere of Rome as the environment most stimulating to his dawning power, who accepted with unfailing courage the incidental privations of art life in a foreign land more renowned for beauty than for comfort, who "... never turned his back, but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break," has expressed his message in many purely ideal works,--the message that the true artist must always give to the world and that leads humanity to the crowning truth of life, that of the ceaseless progress of the soul in its immortality. For the brief and significant assertion of the apostle condenses the most profound truth of life when he says:-- "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." In these words are imaged the supreme purpose of all the experiences of the life on earth; and to the artist whose works bear this lofty message of the triumph of spirituality, his reward shall appear, not in the praise of men, but in the effect on character that his efforts have aided to exalt; in the train of nobler influences that his work shall perpetually inspire and create. Mr. Simmons has always found Rome potent in fascination. One may not want to go to St. Peter's every day, but one knows it is there, and there is some inexplicable satisfaction in being where it is possible to easily enter this impressive interior. One may not go near the Forum for a month, or even a season, but the knowledge that one may find it and the wonderful Palatine Hill any hour of any day is a perpetual delight. The Vatican galleries, with their great masterpieces; the Sistine Chapel, the stately, splendid impressiveness of San Giovanni Laterano; the wanderings in Villa Borghese, and the picturesque climbing of the Spanish steps, even all the inconveniences and deprivations, become a part of the story of Rome which the artist absorbs and loves. The studios of Mr. Simmons in the Via San Nicolo da Tolentino are a centre of artistic resort, and his personal life is one of distinction amid the picturesque beauty and enchantment of the Eternal City. For many years (until the death of Mrs. Simmons in 1905) the sculptor and his wife had their home in the beautiful Palazzo Tamagno in the Via Agostino Depretis, where one of those spacious apartments of twenty to thirty rooms, only to be found in a Roman palace, was made by them a brilliant centre of social life. Mrs. Simmons was herself a musical artist, with impassioned devotion to music; and her rare personal charm and distinction of presence drew around her a most interesting circle. Her receptions were for many years a noted feature of Roman society. The social life in Rome is very brilliant, interesting, and fascinating. The sight-seeing is a kind of attendant atmosphere,--the perpetual environment offering, but not intruding itself. People come to Rome for reasons quite disconnected with the Golden House of Nero or the latest archæological discoveries in the Forum. The present, rather than the past, calls to them, and the present, too, is resplendent and alluring. Of the foreign painters in Rome, Charles Walter Stetson, whose work recalls the glory of the old Italian masters, is especially distinguished for his genius as a colorist. No visitor in Rome can afford to miss the studio of one of the most imaginative of modern artists. A wonderful picture still in process is a genre work with several figures, called "Music." An idyllic scene of a festa amid the ilex trees--with the Italian sky and the golden sunshine pervading a luminous atmosphere, while the joyous abandon of the dancers appeals to all who love Italy--is one of the many beautiful pictorial scenes of Mr. Stetson which enchant the eye and haunt the imagination. Another picture is called "Beggars,"--a name that illy suggests its splendor. There is the façade of a church to which a long flight of steps leads up, a procession of cardinals and friars in their rich robes, while at one side the groups of beggars shrink into the darkness. It is an impressive commentary upon life. For a long period, through the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, Rome held her place as the world centre of modern artistic activity. Great works of poetic and ideal sculpture elevated the general public taste to a high degree of appreciation. The standards were not ingeniously adjusted to mere spectacular methods whose sole appeal was to the crude fancy of possible patrons. Art held her absolute and inviolate ideals, and the spirit of her votaries might well have been interpreted in Mrs. Browning's words:-- "I, who love my art, Would never wish it lower to suit my stature." The tone of public appreciation is raised to a high quality only when the artist refuses to sell his soul for a mess of pottage. He may, to be sure, need the pottage, but the price is too great. Rather will he find his attitude expressed in these wonderful lines:-- "I can live At least my soul's life without alms from men. And if it be in heaven instead of earth, Let heaven look to it--I am not afraid." All art that has within itself true vitality must ever be the leader and the creator of the popular taste; only when it falls into decadence does it become the servile follower. It is a serious question as to the degree in which the art of to-day keeps faith with the eternal ideals. The great expositions of the past quarter of a century, while they have contributed immeasurably to the popularization of art and to the familiarization of the public with the work of individual painters and sculptors, have yet, in many ways, been a demoralizing influence in their insidious temptation to produce pictures or plastic art calculated to arrest immediate attention, thus putting a premium on the spectacular, the sensational, on that which makes the most immediate and direct appeal to the senses. The work becomes fairly a personal document wrought with perhaps an almost amazing finesse, but utterly failing in power to inspire joyous sensibility to beauty or to impart to the gazer that glow of radiant energy which lofty art invariably communicates to all who respond to its infinite exaltation. All great art is inspired by religious ideals. Painting and sculpture give to these a presence. Under their creative power are these ideals manifested. To embody them in living form becomes the absolute responsibility of the artist. In Greece all the fortunate conditions to produce great art were curiously combined and pre-eminently supported by the conjunction of events and by the prevailing sentiment of the time. The artist drew his inspiration from the most exalted conception of life embodied in gods rather than in men. Art, too, was an affair of the state. It was the supreme interest and held national importance. The temple was erected to form an inclosure for the statue, rather than that the statue was created as an adornment for the temple. The greatest gifts were consecrated to the service of art, and under these stimulating influences it is little wonder that artistic creation achieved that vital potency which has thrilled all succeeding centuries and has communicated to them something of the divine air of that remote period. With the Renaissance in Italy art culminated in the immortal work of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In the Sistine Chapel, where that sublime grouping of prophets and sibyls speaks of the very miracle of art in their impassioned fire and glow; where the figures, the pose, the draperies are so grandly noble and infused with dignity and presence,--the very atmosphere is vocal with the language of the spirit and the expressions of religious reverence. These marvellous shapes of grandeur and sublime intimations carry the soul into a conscious communion with the divine. In these stupendous works Michael Angelo has given to all the ages the message of the highest exaltation of art. In the technique, in the marvellous dignity of the sentiment, in the depth of the feeling involved, in the grace and power of the composition, these works embody the artistic possibilities of painting. Are such works as those of Canova and Thorwaldsen no longer created? Can it be that art is no longer of national importance? In our own country vast appropriations are made for internal improvements of all kinds, while art that kindles and re-enforces life is almost ignored. Our government--the government of the richest country in the world--appropriated $200,000 for a memorial monument to General Grant to be placed in Washington, while Italy--whose resources are so slender in comparison--appropriates seven million dollars--thirty-five times the amount--for her great monument to Victor Emmanuel which is now being erected in Rome to stand near the Capitol and the Palace of the Quirinale. Great art has always been closely associated with great devotion to religious ideals. The artist was the servant of the Lord, and it was his supreme purpose to embody the aspirations of the age and render his works a full and complete symbol of those true realities of life which have their being in the spiritual universe rather than in the changing temporal world of the outer universe. The so-called realism of the day is based on a false interpretation. "The things that are seen are temporal, while the things that are not seen are eternal." True realism is in spiritual qualities, not in physical attributes. True realism is found in such works as Canova's sublime group, where the figures of Religion and of Death forever impress all who stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"--in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia." Again, another fatal rock on which art must inevitably make shipwreck is the theory that it is good to perpetuate ugliness, in either painting or in sculpture. The permanent reality of life is beauty. So far as any person or object departs from this enduring reality, so far it is the result of distortion and deformity, and these, being the temporary, the accidental, the deficient, should not be perpetuated in ideal creation. It is an Apollo who embodies the permanent ideal of manhood--not a cripple or a hunchback. Still further: art should not only refuse to embody the defective, which is a mere negative; it should not only give form to the utmost perfection it beholds in nature or in humanity, but beyond this the responsibility is upon the artist to penetrate into loftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist is, by virtue of his high calling, a co-worker with God. An English wit has declared that life copies art rather than that art copies life. In this he expresses a truth rather than a merely clever epigram. It is the artist's business to lead, not to follow. Only as he leads does he fulfil his divinely appointed destiny. "I maintain that life is not a form of energy," writes Sir Oliver Lodge; "that it is not included in our present physical categories; that its explanation is still to be sought. And it appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence, which interacts with this material frame of things, and while here exerts guidance and control on the energy which already here exists; for although they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though they merely utilize available energy like any other machine, live things are able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and special paths, so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life have no connection with the province of art? On the contrary. Truly does Balzac exclaim: "Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity, and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of the divine thought. Shall such an artist degrade his power by portraying ugliness--the mere defects of negations and distortions? Shall he degrade life by calling these the realities? [Illustration: "LA PIETA," ST. PETER'S, ROME Michael Angelo _Page 117_] The painter or sculptor who holds that it is as truly art to represent distortion and repulsiveness as it is to represent beauty is as false to his high calling as would be the poet who should insist that doggerel and mere commonplace truisms expressed in rhyme are poetry. Compare, for example, two statues, Cecioni's "_La Madre_," in which a woman's utter lack of personal attraction is so complete as to make her fairly repulsive to the gazer, and the "Mother of Moses," by Franklin Simmons, in which the mystic beauty, the very ideal of maternity, is embodied. Which of these statues is calculated to uplift and to exalt all who come near? This marvellously beautiful creation of Mr. Simmons shows a woman of exquisite delicacy and loveliness sitting, slightly bending forward, holding her baby to her breast. The modelling of the draped figure with the bare arms and neck revealing the tender curves, the yielding delicacy of the flesh and that inscrutable light upon the beautiful countenance, whose expression suggests that she is looking far into the future of the infant whom she holds in her arms, are a wonderful portrayal of the mystery and the sacredness of motherhood. The one statue degrades maternity; the other ennobles and exalts. The one embodies a pernicious and a false ideal; the other embodies the ideal that must appeal to all that is noble and divine in human life, and it thus ministers to moral progress by its contribution to the elevation of the social tone. For indeed, life follows art. It is art that exerts this powerful influence upon life which it may lead to loftier heights or drag down to the moral abyss. The artist is not merely the portrayer of existing types; he is the inspirer of those ideal types which human life should recognize as its pattern, its model to be followed and ultimately achieved. The world needs ideal and poetic art to minister to the attainment of the true social life and to the full and complete expression of man himself. Do not the visions of Fra Angelico and Botticelli still inspire the artist of to-day with the absolute realization of all the deep significance of the past? "Is there never a retroscope mirror, In the realms and corners of space, That can give us a glimpse of the battle, And the soldiers face to face?" Religion and art are inseparably united. In its true significance religion takes precedence of all else in that its influence is felt in every department and in every direction and expression of man's activity. It is the inexhaustible fountain of that lofty energy which communicates itself to every channel that carries inspiration to life and to art. Religion is the influence that redeems the mere shallow, surface presentation,--the petty trick to capture popularity, and holds art true to its real purpose. The glory of the mediæval art of Italy owed its greatness to religion. Cimabue and Giotto were directly inspired by that spring of a diviner life given to Italy and later to the world of that "sweet saint," Francis of Assisi. In an age of cruelty and terror he brought the new message that man is dear to God; that the soul is ceaselessly joyful; that man, created in the divine image, is a part of the divine life, and that only when he lives in this response and recognition does he truly live at all. In this restatement of the truth that Jesus came to proclaim, St. Francis opened the way for a revival of art, and opened the gates of that infinite and divine energy which has immortally recorded itself for all ages in the "Divina Comedia" of Dante. The irresistible wave of power which resulted from that liberating of thought, feeling, and emotion by the work of St. Francis expressed itself in the sublimest poem of all the ages, and in that glorious triumph of art that is still the treasure and the source of artistic inspiration. It is only when the world is lifted out of the limitations of the material by a period of great art that humanity is brought into close and inspiring relation with the living Christ. FOOTNOTES: [1] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. _Men and women make the world, As head and heart make human life._ MRS. BROWNING. * * * * * _Alas, our memories may retrace Each circumstance of time and place; Season and scene come back again, And outward things unchanged remain; The rest we cannot reinstate, Ourselves we cannot re-create, Nor set our souls to the same key Of the remembered harmony._ LONGFELLOW. _And as, after the lapse of a thousand years, you stand upon that hallowed spot, the yellow Tiber flowing sluggishly beneath you, the ruins of the Eternal City all around you speaking of fallen greatness, the mighty Basilica of St. Peter rising before you like some modern tower of Babel that would monopolize the road to heaven, the eye rests upon the figure of the Archangel sheathing his glittering sword upon the summit of the Castle of St. Angelo, and the heart asks, Why should that be a legend? Why should that be a projection of a morbid and devout imagination? Why should it not have been the clairvoyance of supernatural ecstasy opening the world of spirits? It was no unreality when the angel of God, with his sword drawn in his hand, withstood the prophet Balaam. It was no morbid imagination when the angel of God smote with the edge of the sword the first-born of the land of Egypt. It was no imposture when the shining hosts of the army of the Almighty smote the Assyrians. It was no deception when Gabriel, the King's messenger from the court of heaven, was sent to comfort Daniel by the river Hiddekel; or when he announced to the maiden, whom all generations have called blessed, that she was to be the mother of the Divine Redeemer.... The written Word from first to last is full of the holy angels. It begins with angels, it ends with angels._ THE VENERABLE ARCHDEACON WILBERFORCE, Westminster Abbey. II SOCIAL LIFE IN THE ETERNAL CITY And others came,--Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions and Veiled Destinies! SHELLEY. In what ethereal dances! By what eternal streams! POE. Social life in Rome is no misnomer. From the most stately and beautiful ceremonials of balls at the court of the Quirinale, in ducal palaces, or at the embassies; of dinners whose every detail suggests stage pictures in their magnificence, to the simple afternoon tea, where conversation and music enchant the hours; the morning call _en tête-à-tête_, and the morning stroll, or the late afternoon drive,--a season in Rome prefigures itself, by the necromancy of retrospective vision, as a resplendent panorama of pictorial scenes. There rise before one those mornings, all gold and azure, of loitering over the stone parapet on Monte Pincio, gazing down on the city in her most alluring mood. The new bridge that is to connect the Pincio with the Villa Borghese is a picturesque feature in its unfinished state; but the vision traverses the deep ravine and revels in the scene of the Borghese grounds carpeted with flowers. Its picturesque slopes under the great trees, with a view of Michael Angelo's dome in the near distance, are the resort of morning strollers, who find that lovely picture of Charles Walter Stetson's--a stretch of landscape under the ilex trees, the scarlet gowns of the divinity students giving vivid accents of color here and there--fairly reproduced in nature before their vision. One should never be in haste as the bewildering beauty of the Roman spring weaves its emerald fantasies on grass and trees, and touches into magical bloom the scarlet poppies that flame over all the meadows, and caress roses and hyacinths and lilies of the valley into delicate bloom and floating fragrance until the Eternal City is no more Rome, but Arcady, instead--one should never be in haste to toss his penny into the _Fontane de Trevi_. Yet in another way it may work for him an immediate spell that defies all other necromancy. Judiciously thrown in, on the very eve of departure, it is the conjurer that insures his return; but at any time prior to this it may even weave the irresistible enchantment that falls upon him and may prevent his leaving at all. Nor can he summon up the moral courage to regret even the missing of all other engagements, and the failure to keep faith with his plans. For in the May days Rome falls upon him anew, like a revelation, and he is ready to confess that he has never seen her who sees her not in her springtime loveliness. The Italian winter by no means lives up to its reputation. It is not the chill of any one special day that discourages one from any further effort to continue in this vale of tears, but the cold that has, apparently, the chill and dampness and cold of all those two thousand and two hundred and sixty winters that have gone before which concentrate themselves in the atmosphere. One could presumably endure with some degree of courage, if not equanimity, the chill in the air of any _one_ winter; but when all the chill and cold that has ever existed in more than the two thousand winters of the past concentrates itself in the winter, say, of 1906-7, why, patience ceases to be a virtue although one that the sojourner in Rome is particularly called upon to practise if he fares forth to visit churches and galleries in the winter. Torrents of rain pour down, rivalling the cloud-bursts of Arizona. Virgil's cave of the winds apparently lets loose its sharpest blasts. Tramontana and sirocco alternate, and each is more unendurable than the other. The encircling mountains are white with snow. The streets are a sea of mud, for they are paved with small stones, and except in the new Villa Ludovisi quarter and along the Via Nazionale and a few other of the newer thoroughfares there are no sidewalks, the foot passengers (in all old Rome) pressing close to the wall to avoid the dangerously near proximity of carts and cabs. This rough pavement makes all driving hard and walking difficult. The Roman lady, indeed, does not walk; and the visitors who cannot forego the joy of daily promenades enter into the feelings of that nation which is said to take its pleasures sadly. But spring works a transformation scene. The air is filled with the most transparent shining haze; the sky lacks little of that intense, melting blue that characterizes the ineffable beauty of the skies in Arizona; and ruins and fragments and strange relics--ghosts of the historic past--are all enshrined in trailing green and riotous blossoms. To drive on the terraced roads of Monte Mario with all Rome and the emerald-green Campagna before one; through the romantic "Lovers' Lane," walled in by roses and myrtle; to enjoy the local life, full of gayety and brilliancy, is to know Rome in her most gracious aspects. One goes for strolls in the old Colonna Gardens, where still remain the ruins of the Temple of the Sun and of the Baths of Constantine. The terraces offer lovely views over the city. The old palace is occupied by the present Prince Colonna, and it is not unfrequently the scene of most elaborate and gorgeous receptions where the traditional Roman splendor is to be found. A series of arched bridges over the narrow street of the Via della Pilotta connect the Gardens with the Colonna Palace in the Piazza San Apostoli. Very fine old sarcophagi are half buried in trailing vines on the slope of the hill, dark with magnificent cypress trees. The Colonna Gardens are a very dream of the past, in their ruins of old temples, their shattered statues, their strange old tablets and inscriptions, and their grand view of the Capitol. In one's retrospective vision of a Roman season all the inconveniences and discomforts of the winter disappear, leaving only the beauty and the enjoyment to be "developed," as the photographer would say, on the sensitive plate of memory. No one really knows Rome until he has watched the transcendent loveliness of spring investing every nook and corner of the Eternal City. The picturesque Spanish steps are a very garden of fragrance, the lower steps of the terraced flight being taken possession of by the flower venders who display their wares,--masses of white lilac, flame-colored roses, rose and purple hyacinths and baskets of violets and carnations. Did all this fragrance and beauty send up its incense to Keats as he lay in the house adjoining, with the musical plash of Bernini's fountain under his window? It is pleasant to know that by the appreciation of American and English authors, the movement effectively directed by Robert Underwood Johnson, this house consecrated to a poet's memory has been purchased to be a permanent memorial to Keats and to Shelley. A library of their works will be arranged in it; and portraits, busts, and all mementos that can be collected of these poets will render this memorial one of the beautiful features of Rome. From the flower venders and the circulating libraries in the Piazza di Spagna that allure one in the morning, from the fascinating glitter of the little Via Condotti which is, in its way, the rue de la Paix of Rome, one leisurely climbs the steps to where the great obelisk looms up in front of the Convent Church of the Trinità di Monti and on, across the Piazza di Trinità, toward the Pincian, one wanders along the brow of the hill surmounted by the low stone parapet. The view is a dream of beauty. Over the valley lies Monte Mario, crowned with the Villa Madama, silhouetted against the blue Roman sky; and the commanding dome of St. Peter's, the splendid new white marble buildings of the Law Courts, the domes of other churches, all make up a picturesque panorama, while on the Janiculum the great equestrian statue of Garibaldi can be descried. Strolling on, one turns into the gardens of the Villa Medici, the French Academy of Art, in which the present director, the great Carolus Duran, is domiciled and in which twenty-four students--of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture--are maintained at the expense of the French government for several years, the twenty four being chosen from those who have given signal proof of their ability. The Villa Medici has, perhaps, a more beautiful site than any other building in Rome. Facing the west, with the Janiculum and Monte Mario forever before it, while below lies the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza del Popolo, and all the changing splendors of the sunset sky as a perpetual picture gallery, the situation is, indeed, magnificent. It is still conceivable, however, that Monsieur Carolus Duran must have many quarters of an hour when he longs for the brilliancy and the movement and the stimulus of his Paris. The gardens of the Villa Medici are large, but they are laid out with narrow paths bordered with box, forming a wall as impervious as if of stone, and dark and damp by the shade of foliage. These walks are paved with gravel, and are always damp. These formal rectangles and alleys are utterly shut in, so that in any one part one can see only the two dense green walls of box that inclose him and the glimpse of sky overhead,--not precisely a cheering promenade. This is the Italian idea of a garden. Much broken sculpture, weather-stained and defective, is placed all along the way, and the perpetual Roman fountain is always gushing somewhere. [Illustration: VILLA MEDICI, ROME _Page 134_] Another phase of the Roman season may rise before one in the stately beauty of any old historic palace, where the hostess, all grace and sweetness, receives her guests in the apartment in which Galileo had been confined when imprisoned in Rome. The approach to this _piano nobile_ was up a flight of easily graded marble stairs, where in frequent niches stood old statues. The large windows in the corridor on the landing were curtained with pale yellow, thus creating a golden light to fall on the old sculptured marbles. One salon was decorated with Flaxman's drawings on the wall, in their classical outlines. From a steep, dark stone stairway, down which one descended (at the imminent risk of a broken neck in the darkness and from the irregular stairs rudely carved in the stone), one emerged on a landing, where a little door opened into the balcony of the chapel, a curious, gloomy place, with tombs and altar and shrine, and some very poor old paintings. One's progress to it recalled the lines from Poe's "Ulalume":-- "By a route, obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only." Then, sitting in one of the richly decorated salons at afternoon tea in this same old palace one day, while an accomplished harpist was discoursing delicate music from its vibrating chords, flights of birds kept passing a window, making a scene like that of a Wagner opera. The groups present, largely of the Roman nobility, the titled aristocracy, resembling so closely some of the old portraits in the palazzo that it was easy to recognize that they were all one people, descendants of the same race. Many of the guests looked, indeed, as if they had stepped from out the sumptuously carved frames on the wall. At these pretty festas one meets much of the resident Roman world. The guests assembled seem to be speaking in all the romance languages. There are Russian and Spanish as well as Italian, French, German, and English at these alluring teas. All the salons of the spacious apartments are thrown open, and the men in their picturesque court dress or military costume, and the women and girls in dainty gowns, make up an alluring scene. The salons are richly furnished and abound in works of art, old pictures, inlaid cabinets, carvings, rich vases, busts, and statuettes. The library, with its wealth of books; the music room; the salon for dancing; the supper room, and the quiet rooms where groups gather before the blazing open fires, grateful in these lofty rooms whose temperature suggests the frozen circles of Dante,--all make up a delightful picture. One meets the most varying individualities. A Russian lady of title may confide her conviction that her country is ruined, and that she never desires to return to it. Italy is the country that attracts not only political refugees from other European countries, but many who are out of sympathy with conditions elsewhere and who find the cosmopolitan society and the varied interests of this land of sunshine their most enjoyable environment. One pleasant feature of a Roman winter is that of the usual course of lectures given by Professor Lanciani. The celebrated archæologist is a man of special personal charm, and his conversation, as well as his public lectures, is full of interest and value. The lectures are given under the auspices of the Società Archeologica, and a special subject recently discussed was the celebration to be held in 1911 in Rome. One project for this celebration includes the plan to lay out a carriage road around the Forum and the Palatine, and also around the Baths of Titus and of Caracalla, extending the drive to all those places included between the Appian and the Latin Way, the Villa Celimontana and the Circus Maximus. Professor Lanciani discussed the artistic history of Rome and the different appearances the city took on in different periods; the regulation plan drawn up by Julius Cæsar and accepted and carried out by Augustus, by which one-fifth of the total area of the city was reserved for public parks. In the third century of the empire the city was inclosed by parks and crossed from end to end by delightful portico gardens, where valuable works of art were collected. During the period of the Renaissance there were the famous villas and the Cesarini Park on the slopes of the Esquiline, and after regretting the many unnecessary acts of vandalism committed since 1870 in Rome, Professor Lanciani suggested that a complete reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla should be made, to serve in 1911 as the Exhibition Building. He believed no artistic difficulties would present themselves, as in the fifteenth century different architects took plaster casts of the decorations of the statues and of every detail of the Baths. The archæological exhibition would be arranged in the two large halls, another hall would be for concerts, another for lectures, the others for different congresses to be held. In this way Rome would inaugurate for 1911 the Mediæval Museum in Castel Sant'Angelo, the mediæval collections in the Torre degli Anguillara, and the grand archæological exhibition in the reconstructed Baths of Caracalla. Italian women are by no means behind the age in their organizations to aid in social progress. The most important one in Italy is that of the leading women of the nobility and aristocracy, called "The Society for Women's Work," which holds annual meetings, over which Lady Aberdeen, the president of the International Council, and the Contessa Spalletti, the president of the National Council of Italy, preside. Many of the prominent women of the Italian nobility are taking active part in the larger outlook for women; and in this movement Margherita, _la Regina Madre_, leads the way, supported by a large following of the titled nobility. "Margherita holds the hearts of the people," remarked Cora, Contessa di Brazzá Savorgnan, at a brilliant little dinner one night, and no expression could more admirably represent the feeling of the nation toward the Queen Mother. Queen Elena as the reigning sovereign has, of course, her exclusive royal prerogatives, and she has youth and initiative and precedence; but Margherita is a most attractive woman, with learning and accomplishments galore, and she has an art of conversation that allures and fascinates visiting foreigners of learning and wit, as well as of rank. Roman society is not large numerically, and the same people are constantly meeting and consolidating their many points of contact and interest. Social life in these Italian cities is the supreme occupation of the residents, and one must concede that in proportion as one meets the same people constantly does society gain in dramatic interest. With each person who is in any sense an individual the play of life begins. It gains in dramatic sequence as it proceeds. The Eternal City is a wonderful scenic setting for the human drama. Local gossip suggests perceptible rivalry between the stately palace of the King and the pink palace on the hill, in which Margherita holds her state with not less ceremony than that observed at the Court of the Quirinale. It is a beautiful thing for a country to have in it a woman of high position, of leisure and of culture, who is so admirably fitted to be the friend of the people as is Margherita. She is a connoisseur in art; she has a most intelligent interest in science; she is a critical lover of literature; she is a wise and judicious and deeply sympathetic leader in all philanthropic work and purposes. One can hardly visit painter or poet or artist in any line, or school, institute, or association, but that he hears of the personal sympathy and encouragement bestowed by this noble and beautiful Italian Queen,--the _Regina Madre_. Practically there are, indeed, two courts in Rome; that of the Palazzo Margherita seeming to quite rival that held at the Palazzo Quirinale. The palace of the Queen Mother is an imposing three-story structure of pink-hued marble, with beautiful gardens and terraces, and adjoining it, in the palace grounds, is a marble villa, used for the entertainment of royal guests. This palace has been the residence of Margherita when in Rome since the tragic death of King Umberto, in 1900. It is in the Ludovisi quarter, and stands on the very site of the Gardens of Sallust. The Queen Mother receives noted visitors constantly, and entertains visiting royalties and members of the aristocracy. No great man of science, literature, and art visits Rome without seeking a presentation to the liberal-minded and accomplished _Regina Madre_, who is one of the most winning and attractive of all the royal women of Europe. It has become quite a feature in introducing young girls to present them first in private audience to Margherita, and then later to Queen Elena at the Court of the Quirinale. Surely no girl could be given a lovelier idea of womanhood than that embodied in the Dowager Queen. When the poet Carducci died in the early months of 1907, Margherita sent beautiful messages of consolation to his family, and, later, to his home city of Bologna she sent the following letter:-- "I announce that I make a free gift to the city of Bologna of the house where Giosuè Carducci passed the last years of his life, and the library he collected there. "Bologna, that showed such affectionate hospitality for Giosuè Carducci for so many years, and surrounded him with so much devotion, will know, I feel sure, how to carefully preserve this remembrance of the greatest poet of modern Italy. MARGHERITA." The Syndic replied in a letter hardly less fine in its expression of Bologna's appreciation, and with assurances that the name of the first Queen of Italy will in future be forever associated with Italy's greatest modern poet. The Regio Palazzo del Quirinale is near the Capitol, in the older part of the city, and only a small part of this is shown to visitors when the King and Queen are in residence. The Sala Regia may be seen, the chapel in which are preserved a large number of the wreaths and the addresses sent from all parts of the civilized world on the occasion of the death of Victor Emmanuel II, and a suite of reception rooms, the throne room with many historic portraits, the Sala des Ambassadeurs, and the audience chamber, containing Thorwaldsen's "Triumphal Procession of Alexander the Great," a gift from Napoleon I. In the small chapel of the Annunciation is an altar piece by Guido Reni. To artists the Queen Mother is most generously kind. One of the younger Italian sculptors, Turillo Sindoni, Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy, whose latest creation is a very beautiful statue of St. Agnes, has his studios in the Via del Babuino, and to especially favored visitors he sometimes exhibits a beautiful letter that he received from Margherita, who purchased two of his statues. With the letter expressing her warm appreciation of his art was an exquisite gift of jewelled sleeve-links. Notwithstanding the fascinating lectures of Professor Lanciani and the valuable and interesting work in the Forum that is being accomplished under the efficient directorship of Commendatore Boni, yet all the roads that traditionally lead to Rome do not converge to the palace on the Palatine. Modern Rome is only mildly archæological, and while it takes occasional recognition of the ancient monuments, and drives to the crypt of old St. Agnes, to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and may manage a descent into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, it is far more actively interested in its dancing and dining and driving. As a scenic background for festivities Rome is a success, and as one comes into social touch with the titled nobility, and the resident life, by birth or adoption, one finds a city of infinite human interest and picturesque possibilities. Between the "Whites" (the loyal followers of the Palazzo Quirinale and the King) and the "Blacks" (the devoted followers of the Palazzo Vaticano and the Pope) a great gulf is fixed over which no one may cross. Pope Pius X is wonderfully accessible, considering the great responsibilities and duties he has on him, and his generous goodness, his gracious tact and the beauty of his spirit endear him to all, Catholic or Protestant alike, for every one recognizes in him the Christian gentleman, whose ideals of gentleness and inspiring helpfulness impress themselves on all who are so fortunate as to meet him. The most impressive ceremonial receptions of the "Blacks" are those given at the Spanish Embassy in the Piazza di Spagna. At the Embassy or in the private palace of any Roman noble which a Cardinal honors by accepting an invitation, he is received according to a most picturesque old Roman custom. At the foot of the stairs two servants bearing lighted torches meet his Eminence, and, making a profound obeisance, escort him to the portals of the grand reception salon and await, in the corridor, his return. On his departure they escort him in the same way down the staircase. In the College of Cardinals and among the many interesting individualities of the Vatican, the most marked figure is that of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Merry del Val. He occupies the Borgia apartments, which are hung with tapestry and ornamented with the most unique and valuable articles _de vertu_,--wonderful vases, inlaid cabinets, old tapestries, paintings, statues, busts, and ivories. These Borgia apartments are one of the most interesting features of the Palazzo Vaticano, and may be seen now and then by special permission when the Cardinal secretary is out, or when he may be pleased to retire into his more private salons in the apartment while the others are shown. Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val is an impressive personality, whose life seems strangely determined by destiny. His father was an _attaché_ of the Spanish embassy to the Court of St. James when the future Cardinal was born in 1865. In 1904, at the early age of thirty-nine, he was advanced from the soutane violet of the bishop to the mantelletta scarlet of the cardinal, and after the accession of the present Pope, Pius X, he was appointed to the highest office in the Vatican, that of Secretary of State, the Pope paying him the high tribute because of his "devotion to work, his capability and absolute self-negation." Cardinal Merry del Val has had a wonderful training of experience and circumstances. At the early age of twenty-two he was a member of the papal embassy commissioned to the jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. He was also appointed a member of the embassy from the Vatican to attend the funeral of Emperor William I; and at the jubilee of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, Cardinal (then Bishop) Merry del Val was the sole and accredited representative of the Holy See, as he was also at the coronation of King Edward. The Spanish Cardinal is the special trusted counsellor of the royal family of Spain. In Rome, Cardinal Merry del Val is an impressive figure. He is always attended by his _gentiluomo_, who is gorgeously arrayed in knee breeches, military hat and sword. This gentleman in waiting walks behind him on a promenade, sits in his carriage and stands near him in all religious ceremonies. His equipage is well known in the Eternal City,--a stately black carriage drawn by two massive black horses with luxurious flowing manes. It is freely prophesied in Rome that the Cardinal secretary is destined to yet exchange the mantelletta scarlet for the zucchetta white, when Pius X shall have gone the way of all his predecessors in the papal chair. He is the Cardinal especially favored by Austria and Spain. Although the conflict with France was at first ascribed to Cardinal Merry del Val, he has of late been completely exonerated from blame, even by the French prelates and clergy. Cardinal Merry del Val represents the most advanced and progressive thought of the day. He is an enthusiastic admirer of Marconi and the marvels of wireless telegraphy; he is an advocate of telephonic service, electric motors, electric lights, and of phonographs and typewriters for the Vatican service. He is a great linguist, speaking English, French, and German as well as Spanish, which is his native tongue, and Italian, which has become second nature. He is a good Greek scholar and a profound Latin scholar, and he speaks the ancient Latin with the fluency and the force of the modern languages. He is, indeed, a remarkable twentieth-century personality and one who has apparently a very interesting life yet to come in his future. At the Villa Pamphilia Doria, built by a former Prince Doria, the largest villa in the Roman environs and the finest now remaining, the Cardinal enjoys his game of golf, of which he is very fond. The Doria family rendered the villa magnificent in every respect. Besides the spacious avenues, woods, fountains, a lake, and cascades, are various edifices, among which is one in the form of a triumphal arch, decorated with ancient statues; the casino of the villa in which are preserved some ancient marbles and several pictures; the beautiful circular chapel, adorned with eight columns of marble and other stately ornaments. There is a monument erected by the present Prince Doria to the memory of the French soldiers who were killed there during the siege of 1849. From the terrace of the palace there is a magnificent view of the environs of Rome, as far as the sea. In consequence of excavations, some columbaria, sepulchres, inscriptions, and other relics have been found, which have attracted much attention from archæologists. It is near these grounds that the "Arcadians" still hold their _al fresco_ meetings. The society dates back to 1690, and the first _custos_ (whose duty was to open and close the meetings) was Crescimbeni. The "Arcadians" organized themselves to protest against the degeneracy of Italian poetry that marked the seventeenth century. To keep their meetings a secret from the populace the "Arcadians" held their meetings in an open garden on the slope below San Pietro in Montorio,--a terrace still known as "Bosco Parrasio degli Arcadi." One of the enchanting views in Rome is from the Piazza San Giovanni. One looks far away past the Coliseum in its ruined grandeur and the _casa_ where Lucrezia Borgia lived, and in the near distance is the colossal pile of San Giovanni di Laterano, its beautiful and impressive façade crowned with the statues of the apostles silhouetted against the western sky. In the piazza formed by the church, the museums, and the Baptistery of San Giovanni and the Scala Santa is one of the most remarkable obelisks in Rome, ninety-nine feet in height, formed of red granite and carved with hieroglyphics. This shaft is placed on a pedestal which makes it in all some 115 feet in height. It was placed in 1568 by Sixtus V. The museums of the San Giovanni are the "Museo Sacro" and the "Museo Profano,"--the latter founded by Pope Gregory XVI, and very rich in sculptures and mosaics. The "Museo Sacro" was founded by Pio Nono, and is rich in the antiquities of the Christian era. Within San Giovanni the visitor finds himself in a vast interior divided by columns of verd-antique into three aisles, each of which is as wide as, and far longer than, the interior of an ordinary church. Statues fill the niches, and the chapels and confessionals are all beautifully decorated. The Corsini Chapel is the richest and was executed by order of Clement XII, in honor of St. Andrew Corsini, who is represented in a rich mosaic painting copied from Guido. Two sculptured figures, "Innocence" and "Penitence," stand before the altar, and above is a relief depicting St. Andrew protecting the Florentine army at the battle of Anghiari. The tomb of Pope Clement XII (who himself belonged to the Corsini family and who was an uncle of Cardinal Corsini) is in a niche between two columns of porphyry, and there is a bronze statue of the Pope. On the opposite side is a statue of Cardinal Corsini, and in the crypt below are tombs of the Corsini family. On the altar--always lighted--is a "Pieta" by Bernini, of which the face of the Christ is very beautiful. Near the centre of the Basilica is a rich tabernacle of precious stones, defined by four columns of _verde antico_, and it is said that the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul are preserved here. The table upon which Christ celebrated the Last Supper is placed here, above the altar of the Holy Sacrament, a sacred relic that thrills the visitors. In one chapel is a curious and grotesque group of sculpture,--a skeleton holding up a medallion portrait, while an angel with outstretched wings hovers over it. San Giovanni has the reputation of being absolutely the coldest church in all Rome, which--it is needless to remark--means a great deal, for they all in winter have the temperature of the arctic regions. In all these great churches there is never any heat; no apparatus for heating has ever been introduced, and the twentieth century finds them just as cold as they were in the centuries of a thousand years ago. This colossal Basilica is considered the most important church in the world, as it is the cathedral of the Pontiff. It was founded in the third century by Constantine, destroyed by fire in 1308, and rebuilt by Pope Clement V, and every succeeding Pope has added to it. The façade is of travertine, with four gigantic columns and six pilasters, and the cornice is decorated with colossal figures of Jesus and a number of the saints. There are five balconies, the middle one being always used for papal benedictions. In the portico is the colossal statue of Constantine the Great. Within the columns are of _verde antico_; the ceiling was designed by Michael Angelo; the interior is very rich in sculpture, and there are some fine paintings and the chapels are most beautiful, one of them containing a tabernacle comprised wholly of precious stones. Above the altar of the Holy Sacrament the table upon which Christ celebrated the Last Supper with the disciples is preserved. It is wonderful to look upon this most sacred and significant relic. It is in this church that the tomb of Leo XIII has been constructed by the eminent Italian sculptor, Tadolini, opposite the tomb of Innocent III. The work was completed in the spring of 1907, the design being a life-size portrait statue of the Pope with two figures, one on either side, representing the church and the workman-pilgrim, forming part of the group. This is one of the most memorable monuments of all Rome, and the tomb of the great Leo XIII will form a new shrine for Christian pilgrimage. Included in the group of structures that form the great Basilica of San Giovanni is the Scala Santa, which offers a strange picture whenever one approaches it. These twenty-eight marble steps that belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem are said to have been once trodden by Jesus and may be ascended only on one's knees. At no hour of the day can one visit the Scala Santa without finding the most motley and incongruous throng thus ascending, pausing on each step for meditation and prayer. These stairs were transported from Jerusalem to Rome under the auspices of St. Helena, the Empress, about 326 A.D., and in 1589 they were placed by Pope Sixtus V in this portico built for them with a chapel at the top of the stairs called the "Sancta Sanctorum," formerly the private chapel of the Popes. In this sanctuary is preserved a wonderful portrait of the Saviour, painted on wood, which is said to have been partly the work of St. Luke but finished by unseen hands. The legend runs that St. Luke prepared to undertake the work by three days' fasting and prayer, and that, having drawn it in outline, the painting was done by angelic ministry, the colors being filled in by invisible hands. In ancient times--the custom being abolished by Pius V in 1566--this picture was borne through Rome on the Feast of the Assumption and the bearer halted with it in the Forum, when the "Kyrie Eleison" would be chanted by hundreds of voices. Myth and legend invest every turn and footfall of the Eternal City, and there are few that are not founded on what the church has always called supernatural manifestations, but which the new age is learning to recognize as occurrences under natural law. The story of Luther's ascent of the Scala Santa is thus told:-- "Brother Martin Luther went to accomplish the ascent of the Scala Santa--the Holy Staircase--which once, they say, formed part of Pilate's house. He slowly mounted step after step of the hard stone, worn into hollows by the knees of penitents and pilgrims. Patiently he crept halfway up the staircase, when he suddenly stood erect, lifted his face heavenward, and in another moment turned and walked slowly down again. "He said that as he was toiling up a voice as if from heaven spoke to him and said, 'The just shall live by faith.' He awoke as if from a nightmare, restored to himself. He dared not creep up another step; but rising from his knees he stood upright like a man suddenly loosed from bonds and fetters, and with the firm step of a free man he descended the staircase and walked from the place." The entire legendary as well as sacred history is almost made up of instances of the interpenetration of the two worlds; the response of those in the spiritual world to the needs of those in the natural world. Pope Paschal recorded that he fell asleep in his chair at St. Peter's (somewhere about 8.20 A.M.) with a prayer on his lips that he might find the burial place of St. Cecilia, and in his dream she appeared to him and showed him the spot where her body lay, in the catacombs of Calixtus. The next day he went to the spot and found all as had been revealed to him. The miraculous preservation of St. Agnes is familiar to all students of legendary art. Throughout all Rome, shrine and niche and sculpture, picture, monument, arch and column, speak perpetually of some interposition of unseen forces with events and circumstances in this part of life. The Eternal City in its rich and poetic symbolism is one great object lesson of the interblending of the two worlds, the natural and the spiritual. The first stage regarding all this marvellous panorama was entire and unquestioning acceptance; the succeeding stage was doubt, disbelief; the third, into which we are now entering, is that of an enlightened understanding and a growing knowledge and grasp of the laws under which these special interpositions and interventions occur. For that "according to thy faith be it unto thee," is as true now in the twentieth century as it was in the first. The one central truth that is the very foundation of all religious philosophy is the continuity of life and the persistence of intercourse and communion, spirit to spirit, across the gulf we call death. The evidences of this truth have been always in the world. The earliest records of the Bible are replete with them. The gospels of the New Testament record an unbroken succession of occurrences and of testimony to this interpenetration of life in the Unseen with that in the Seen. Secular history is full of its narrations of instances of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and of communications in a variety of ways; and the sacred and legendary art of Rome, largely founded on story and myth and legend, when seen in the light of latter-day science is judged anew, and the literal truth of much that has before been considered purely legendary is revealed and realized. One reads new meanings into Rome when testing it by this consciousness. It is a city of spiritual symbolism. It is a great object lesson extending over all the centuries. Making due allowance for the distortion and exaggeration of ages of testimony, there yet remains a residuum indisputable. The Past and the Present both teem with record and incident and experience proving that life is twofold, even now and here; that all the motives and acts of the life which we see are variously incited, modified, strengthened, or annulled by those in the realm of the Unseen. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO VILLA PAMPHILIA-DORIA, ROME _Page 159_] The intelligent recognition of this truth changes the entire conduct of life. It entirely alters the point of view. It extends the horizon line infinitely. Instead of conceiving of life as a whole, as comprised between the cradle and the grave, it will be regarded in its larger and truer scope as a series of experiences and achievements, infinite in length and in their possibilities and unbroken by the change we call death. This will impart to humanity a new motor spring in that greater hope which puts man in a working mood, which makes him believe in the value of that which he undertakes, which encourages him to press on amid all difficulties and against all obstacles. Increasing hope, all activity is proportionately increased. It was an event of incalculable importance to the progress of humanity when the swift communication by cable was established between America and Europe. It is one of infinitely greater importance to establish the truth and enlarge the possibility of direct communication with the world of higher forces and larger attainment and scope than our own. This communication exists and has always existed, but it has been regarded as myth and legend and phenomenon rather than as a fact of nature whose laws were to be ascertained and understood. It must be made clear as an absolute scientific demonstration that the change of form by the process we call death does not put an end to intelligent and rational intercourse, but that, indeed, instead of setting up a barrier, it removes barriers and renders mutual comprehension far clearer and more direct than before. This realization alters the entire perspective of life, and is the new Glad Tidings of great joy. It is something of all this that the Eternal City suggests to one as he makes his pilgrimages to shrine and cloister and chapel and Basilica. The mighty Past is eloquent with a thousand voices, and they blend into a choral harmony of promise and prophecy for the nobler future of humanity. At the foot of the Scala Santa, on either side, are statues of Christ and Judas, and of Christ and Pilate, very interesting groups by Jacometti, and there is also a kneeling statue of Pio Nono. The statue of Judas is considered one of the most notable of the late modern Italian sculpture. The Rome of to-day is in strange contrast even to the city that Page and Hawthorne knew, in the comparatively recent past; and the Rome of the ancients is traced only in the churches and the ruins. It is a _mot_ that one hears every language spoken in Rome, except the Italian! So largely has the Seven-hilled City become the pleasure ground of foreign residents. The contrast between the ordinary breakfast-table talk in Rome and in--Boston, for instance, or Washington, is amusing. In the Puritan capital it usually includes the topic of weather predictions and the news in the morning paper, with whatever other of local or personal matters of interest. In Washington, where the very actors and the events that make the nation's history are fairly before one's eyes, the breakfast-table conversation is apt to turn on matters that have not yet got into the papers,--the evening session of the previous night, perhaps, when too long prolonged under the vast dome to admit of its having been noted in the morning press. But in Rome the breakfast-table talk is apt to be of the new excavations just taken from the bed of the Tiber; the question as to whether the head of St. Paul could have touched (at the tragic scene of his execution) at three places so far apart as the tri-fontanes; or a discussion of the marvellous freshness of the mosaics in the interior of the Palace of the Cæsars; or, again, of the last night's balls or dinners, and matters most frankly _mondaine_, and of contemporary life. The American Embassy, whose location depends on the individual choice of the Ambassador of the time, is now in the old Palazzo del Drago on the corner of the Via Venti Settembre and the Via delle Quattro Fontane. The street floor, like all the old palaces, is not used for living purposes. The portiere, the guards, the corridors, and approaches to the staircases monopolize this space. The piano nobile is the residence of the beautiful and lovely Principessa d'Antuni, the youthful widow of the Principe who was himself a grandson of Marie Christine, the Queen of Spain. The young Princess who was married to him at the age of seventeen, ten years ago, is left with three little children, of whom the only daughter bears the name of her great-grandmother, the Spanish Queen. Perfectly at home in all the romance languages, an accomplished musician, a thinker, a scholar, a student, a lovely figure in life, a beautiful and sympathetic friend is the Princess d'Antuni. She is "of a simplicity," as they say in Italy, investing the dignity of her rank with indescribable grace and sweetness. The two long flights of stairs that lead up to the secundo piano in the Palazzo del Drago--the floor occupied by the American Embassy--have at least a hundred steps to each staircase, yet so broad and easy of ascent as hardly to fatigue one. These flights are carpeted in glowing red, while along the wall are niches in each of which stands an old statue, making the ascent of the guest seem a classic progress. The Palazzo del Drago has an elevator, but elevator service in Rome is a thing apart, something considered quite too good for human nature's daily food, and the slight power is far too little to permit any number of people to be accommodated, so on any ceremonial occasion the elevator is closed and the guests walk up the two long flights. The total lack of any mastery of mechanical conditions in Italy is very curious. The grand ball given at the American Embassy just before Ash Wednesday in the winter of 1907 was a very pretty affair. Up the rose-red carpeted stairs the guests walked, the statues looking silently on, but apparently there was no Galatea to step down from her niche and join the happy throng. In the antechamber each guest was asked to write his name in the large autograph books kept for that purpose, and then, passing on, was received by the Ambassador and Ambassadress in the first of the splendid series of salons thrown open for the occasion. At this time it was Mr. and Mrs. Henry White who represented the United States, and won the hearts of all Rome as well, and assisted by their charming daughter, Miss Muriel White, they made this ball an affair to leave its lovely pictures in memory. The scenic setting of an old Roman palace captivates the stranger. It may not impress him as especially comfortable, but it is certainly picturesque, and who would not prefer--at least for the "one night only" of the traditional _prima donna_ announcements--the pictorially picturesque and magnificent to the merely comfortable? The lofty ceilings, painted by artists who have long since vanished from mortal sight, make it impossible to attain the temperature that the American regards as essential to his terrestrial well-being, and as the only sources of heat were the open fireplaces the guests hovered around these and their radii of comfortable warmth were limited. In one salon there was one especially beautiful effect of a great jar of white lilacs placed before a vast mirror at sufficient distance to give the mirror reflection an individuality as a thing apart, and the effect was that of a very garden of paradise. The music was fascinating, the decorations all in good taste, and the occasion was most brilliant,--_très charmante_ indeed. The American ambassadress was ablaze with her famous diamonds, her corsage being literally covered with them, and her coiffure adorned with a coronet, but the temperature soon forced the ambassadress to partially eclipse her splendor with the little ermine shoulder cape that is an indispensable article for evening dress in Rome. The temperature does not admit the possibility of _décolleté_ gowns without some protection, when these resplendent glittering robes that seem woven of the stars are worn. Among the more distinguished guests, aside from the _corps diplomatique_ and the titled nobility of Rome and visiting foreigners, were M. Carolus Duran, the celebrated portrait artist of Paris, and among other interesting people were Miss Elise Emmons of Leamington, England, a grand-niece of Charlotte Cushman. M. Carolus Duran was very magnificent, his breast covered with jewelled orders and decorations from the various societies, academies, and governments that have honored him. He is a short man and has grown quite stout, but he carries himself with inimitable grace and dignity, and in his luminous eyes one still surprises that far-away look which Sargent so wonderfully caught in his portrait of the great French artist, painted in his earlier life. The number of spacious salons with their easy-chairs and sofas enabled all guests who desired to ensconce themselves luxuriously to do so, and watch the glittering scene. The supper room and the salon for dancing were not more alluring than the salons wherein one could study this brilliant throng of diplomates, titled nobility, distinguished artists, social celebrities, and those who were, in various ways, each _persona grata_ in Rome. Among those at this particular festivity were the American novelist, Frank Hamilton Spearman, with Mrs. Spearman. In late American fiction Mr. Spearman has made for himself a distinctive place as the novelist whose artistic eye has discerned the romance in the new phases of life created by the extensive systems of mountain railroading, and the great irrigation schemes of the far West, which have not only opened up new territory, but have called into evidence new combinations of the qualities most potent in human life,--love, sacrifice, heroism, devotion to duty, and tragedy and comedy as well. In his novels, "The Daughter of a Magnate" and "Whispering Smith," in such vivid and delightful short stories as "The Ghost at Point of Rocks," which appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_ for August of 1907, Mr. Spearman has dramatized the pathos, the wit, the vast and marvellous spirit of enterprise, the desolation of isolated regions, the all-pervading potency and one may almost say intimacy of modern life made possible by the Arabian Nights' dream of wireless telegraphy, "soaring" cars, long-distance telephoning, and lightning express train service in cars that climb the mountains beyond the clouds, or dash through tunnels with ten thousand feet of mountains above them. Mr. Spearman is the novelist _par excellence_ of this intense _vie modernité_. On Washington's Birthday, again, the stately salons of the American Embassy in the old Palazzo del Drago were well filled from four to six with an assemblage which expressed its patriotism and devotion to Washington by appearing in its most faultless raiment and in an apparent appreciation of the refreshment tables, from which cake and ices, tea and various other delicacies, were served. The informal weekly receptions at the Embassy are always delightful, and the dinners and ceremonial entertainments are given with that faultless grace which characterizes the American ambassadress. The American consulate is always a charming centre in Rome, and in the present residence of Consul-General and Mrs. De Castro, who have domiciled themselves on a lofty floor of a palace in the Via Venti Settembre, commanding beautiful views that make a picture of every window, the consulate is one of the favorite social centres for Americans and other nationalities as well, who enjoy the charming welcome of Mrs. De Castro. Professor and Mrs. Jesse Benedict Carter, in their lovely home in the Via Gregoriana, add another to the pleasant American centres in the Eternal City, Professor Carter having succeeded Professor Norton as the principal of the American Classical School. Mrs. Elihu Vedder, assisted by her accomplished daughter, Miss Anita Vedder, has a pretty fashion of receiving weekly in Mr. Vedder's studio in the Via Flaminia, and these Saturday receptions at the Vedders' are a feature of social life in Rome which are greatly sought. The distinguished artist reserves these afternoons for leisurely conversation, and pictures and sketches are enjoyed the more that they may be enjoyed in the presence of their creator. Miss Vedder has called to life again the almost lost art of tapestry, and her productions of wonderful beauty are considered as among the most desirable in modern decorative art. Among these tapestries are "The Lover's Song," "Salome Dancing before Herod," "The Annunciation," "The Legend of the Unicorn," "The Lovers' Picnic," and "The Lovers." The tapestries were painted in Rome and in the Vedder villa, _Torre Quattro Venti_ on Capri, where the artist and his wife and daughter pass their summers. The established English Church has two chapels in Rome, one the Holy Trinity, of which Rev. Dr. Baldwin is the rector, and the other English chapel in Via del Babuino has for its chaplain Rev. Dr. Nutcombe Oxenham, whose ministry is one of the most helpful factors in Rome. Dr. and Mrs. Oxenham occupy a charming apartment in the Piazza del Popolo, the most picturesque piazza in Rome, with the terraced Pincion hillside crowned by the Villa di Medici on one side, and the "twin churches" on another; and the beautiful salon of Mrs. Oxenham, with its wealth of books and classic engravings and gems of pictures, is one of the homelike interiors in Rome. Mr. and Mrs. Oxenham receive on Wednesdays, and an hour with them and their guests is always a privileged one. The work of this church, largely through the active co-operation of Mrs. Oxenham, extends into wide charities which are without discrimination as to sect or race,--the only consideration being the human need to be met in the name of Him whose care and love are for each and all. Among the delightful hostesses of Rome is the American wife of Cavaliere Cortesi, an Italian man of letters, and in their apartment, in one of the notable palaces in the Corso, some of the most brilliant musicals and receptions are given, the "All'Illustrissima Signora" being assisted in the informal serving of tea by the two little fairy daughters, Annunziata and Elizabetta, whose childish loveliness lingers with the _habitués_ of this pleasant home. In the Palazzo Senni, in the old part of Rome, looking out on Castel San Angelo and the Ponte d'Angelo, across to the dome of St. Peter's, the Listers had their home; and though Mrs. Lister, one of the most distinguished English ladies of Rome, has gone on into the fairer world beyond, her daughter, Miss Roma Lister, sustains the charming hospitalities for which her mother was famous. Her salons on the piano nobile of the palace are rich in souvenirs and rare objects of art. Mrs. Lister, who was of a noted English house, was evidently a favorite with Queen Victoria and the royal family; and her marriage gifts included two drawings by the Queen, both autographed, and a crayon portrait of the Empress Frederick with autographic inscription to Mrs. Lister. Another personal gift was a portrait of Cardinal Newman, with his autograph. A bust of Lady Paget of Florence, the widow of Sir Augustus Paget, formerly the English Ambassador to Italy, is another of the interesting treasures which include, indeed, gifts and offerings from a large number of those eminent in state, in art, in literature, or in the church. The gracious hospitality of Miss Lister is dispensed to groups of cosmopolitan guests, and her dinners and other entertainments are among the most brilliant in Rome. The Eternal City is not as hospitable to various phases of modern thought as is Florence, in which Theosophy, Christian Science, and psychic investigation flourish with rapidly increasing ardor; but Rome has a Theosophical Society, among whose leaders is the Baroness Rosenkrans, the mother of the distinguished young Danish novelist, and the aunt of Miss Roma Lister. The society has its rooms in the very heart of old Rome, and holds weekly meetings, often with an English lecturer as the speaker of the hour. A Theosophical library, in both English and Italian, is easily accessible, and the meetings are conducted in either language as it chances at the time. The accession of Annie Besant to the presidency of the Theosophical Society, succeeding Colonel Olcott, whose death occurred early in 1907, was most satisfactory to the Roman members. Mrs. Besant is one of the most remarkable women of the day. She is in no sense allied with any fads or freaks; she is essentially a woman of scholarship and poise, of genuine grasp of significant thought and of brilliant eloquence. Theosophy, rightly interpreted, is in no sense antagonistic, but, rather, supplemental to Christianity. It offers the intellectual explanation--the details, so to speak--of the great spiritual truths of the Bible. Rome seems fairly on its way to become an English-speaking city, so numerous are the Americans and English who throng to Rome in the winter. There are now at least a dozen large new hotels on the scale of the best modern hotels in New York and Paris, beside the multitude of the older ones which are comfortable and retain all their popularity; yet this increase in accommodation does not equal the increase in demand. In February the tide of travel sets in toward Rome, and from that date until after Easter every nook and niche are filled to overflowing. The demand for apartments in Rome is greater than the supply, although the city is being constantly extended and new buildings are rapidly being erected. It would seem as if, with the present increasingly large number of Americans and English, it might be an admirable financial enterprise for capitalists to come and build comfortable modern apartment hotels. There seems to be no adequate reason why, in this age, people should be compelled to live in these gloomy, dreary, cold, old stone palaces, without elevator service and with no adequate heating, lighting, and running-water facilities. There would seem to be no conceivable reason why these conveniences should not be at hand in Rome as well as in New York. As for the climate, with warm houses to live in, it would be charmingly comfortable, for the deadly cold is not in the temperature out of doors, but only in the interiors. One is warm in the sunshine in the streets, when he is fairly frozen in the house. Mentioning this, however, with wonder that some enterprising American did not begin such building operations, a friend who has lived for sixteen years in Rome replied that the Italians would never permit it; that no foreigner is allowed to come in here and initiate business operations. And the Italians continue building after the old and clumsy fashion of five hundred years ago. Italy has a curiously pervasive and general suspicion of any latter-day comfort. The new apartment houses of from four to seven stories are largely without any elevator; if there is one it usually only ascends about halfway, and it is so clumsy and slow in its methods, so poorly supported by power, that half the time it does not run at all. The streets of Rome are paved with rough stones; the sidewalks are very narrow; the lighting is inadequate. Bathrooms are rare and insufficient in number, and all interior lighting and heating arrangements lack much that is desirable according to American ideas of comfort. Still the Eternal City is so impressive in and of itself that sunshine or storm, comfort or the reverse, can hardly affect one's intensity of joy and wonder and mysterious, unanalyzable rapture in it. The twentieth-century Rome is a very different affair from the Rome on which Hawthorne entered one dark, cold, stormy winter night more than half a century ago. In the best modern hotels one may be as comfortable as he likes, with all the fascinations of life added besides. No wonder that Rome is one of the great winter centres, with some of the most interesting people in the world always to be found under the spell of its enchantment. The Rome of to-day is a curious mixture of ruins and of modern buildings which are neither modern nor mediæval in their structure, but many of which combine the most picturesque features of the latter with the latest beauty of French and American architectural art. The classic buildings are now largely in unpleasant surroundings; as, for instance, the Pantheon, which is surrounded by a fish market, with unspeakable odors and other repulsive features. "But the portico, with its sixteen Corinthian columns, is forever majestic; the interior, a vast circular cell surmounted by a dome through which alone it is lighted, there being no windows in the walls, is massive and grim, but the magical illumination, the eye constantly revealing the sky above, gives it wonderful beauty. Over the outer portals is the inscription of its erection by Agrippa twenty-seven years before Christ, so it has stood for nearly two thousand years. Colossal statues of Augustus and Agrippa fill niches. In diameter the interior of the Pantheon is one hundred and thirty-two feet, and it is the same in height, which insures the singularly harmonious proportions. The tribune of the High-Altar is cut in the thickness of the wall in the form of a semicircle, and is ornamented, like the door, with four pilasters and two columns of violet marble. The six chapels are also cut in the wall and ornamented by two columns and two pilasters. The columns and the pilasters support the beautiful cornice of white marble; the frieze is of porphyry, and goes round the whole temple. Above this order there is a species of attic with fourteen niches, and the great cornice from which rises the majestic dome. Eight other niches are between the chapels, and these are also with a pediment supported by two Corinthian columns. They are now converted into altars. In this temple are buried several artists, among whom are Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, Baldassare Peruzzi, and Annibale Carracci. Raphael is buried beneath the base of the statue called la Madonna del Sasso, sculptured by Lorenzetti. This church is, however, without paintings or sculptures of much interest. Victor Emmanuel was entombed here on the 20th of January, 1878, and King Umberto on the 9th of August, 1900." One of the imposing ceremonies of Rome is that always celebrated in the Pantheon on March 14, in memory of King Umberto Primo. A grand catafalque, surmounted by the royal crown, and surrounded by tall candelabra with wax candles, is erected in the centre of the temple, draped with black velvet and gold lace, and lighted with electric lamps. The mass is for a chorus of voices only. All the civil and military authorities, the state dignitaries, and the _corps diplomatique_ to the court of Italy are present. The troops, in full dress uniform, file in the Piazza of the Collegio Romano, Via Piè di Marmo, and the Piazza della Minerva, enclosing thus a large square in the Piazza del Pantheon. The spectacle is one of the most imposing of all Roman ceremonies. The King, and Queen Elena, and the Dowager Queen Margherita, accompanied by their respective civil and military households, assist at the requiem mass celebrated in the Pantheon, and at a commemoration service, on the same day, in the Royal Chapel of the Sudario, where also assemble the ladies and gentlemen of the Order of the Annunziata. On the same morning the feast of St. Gregory, Pope and Doctor of the church, is celebrated at his church on the Cælian Hill. He was born of a noble family, and was Prefect of Rome in 573. Pope Pelagius II made him regionary deacon of Rome, and sent him as legate to Constantinople in 578, where he remained till the death of Pelagius, when he was elected Pope (590). He introduced the Gregorian chant. His first great act was to send St. Augustine to convert the Saxons of England to the Christian faith. An inscription in the Church of San Gregorio Magno states that St. Augustine was educated in the abbey which was erected on the site of the present church by Gregory, and that many early archbishops of York and Canterbury were also educated there. It was on the steps of this church that Augustine and his forty monks took leave of Gregory, when setting out for England. He died in 604, after a pontificate of thirteen years and six months. He was buried in the portico of the Vatican Basilica, and his body lies under the altar dedicated to him in this same church. His church, on the Cælian Hill, was built on the site of the monastery founded by him. In the chapel of the triclinium, near the church, the table on which he served the poor is shown. Near the church also is seen his cell, where his marble chair and one of his arms are exhibited. During the Lenten season of 1907 one of the privileges of Rome was to hear the sermons of Monsignor Vaughn, in the English Catholic Church of San Silvestre. Monsignor Vaughn is the private chaplain of the Pope. His discourses attracted increasing throngs of both Catholic and Protestant hearers. This celebrated prelate is a brother of the late English Cardinal. He is a man of great distinction of presence, of beautiful voice and fascination of manner. One discourse had for its theme the joys of the life that is to come. The spiritual body, he said, has many qualities not pertaining to the physical body. It is immured from all disease and accidents; it is subtle and can pass through any substance which is (apparently) solid to us, as, for instance, when Jesus appeared in the midst of his disciples, "the doors being shut." It is not a clog on the soul, continued Monsignor Vaughn; the spiritual body is the vehicle of the soul and can waft its way through the air; it can walk the air as the physical body walks the earth. It is not--as is the physical body--the prison of the soul, but the companion of the soul. This is all a very enlightened presentation of spiritual truth, and it is little wonder that such preaching attracts large congregations. Holy Week in Rome bears little resemblance now to that of the past. The Pope is not visible in any of the ceremonials in any of the churches; and the impressiveness of former Catholic ceremonials is greatly lessened. Indeed, with the passing of the temporal power of the Pope, the picturesqueness of Rome largely vanished. Not, assuredly, from any lack of reverence for the colossal cathedral of St. Peter's is that Basilica a resort for Sunday afternoons; it suggests a social reunion, where every one goes, listens as he will to the music of the Papal choir in the Chapel of the Sacrament, and strolls about the vast interior where the promenade of the multitude does not yet disturb in the least the vesper service in the chapel. Here one meets everybody; the general news of the day is exchanged; greeting and salutation and pleasant little conversational interludes mark the afternoon, while the sun sinks behind the splendid pile of the Palazzo Vaticano, and the golden light through the window of the tribune fades into dusk. Can one ever lose out of memory the indescribable charm of this leisurely sauntering, in social enjoyment, in the wonderful interior of St. Peter's? In the way of the regulation sight-seeing the visitor to Rome compasses most of his duty in this respect on his initial sojourn and goes the rounds that no one ever need dream of repeating. Once for all the visitor to Rome goes down into the Catacombs; makes his appallingly hard journey over Castel San Angelo, into its cells and dungeons, and to the colossal salon in which is Hadrian's tomb; once for a lifetime he climbs St. Peter's dome; drives out to old St. Agnes and descends into the crypt; visits the Church of the Capucines and beholds the ghastly spectacle of the monks' skulls; drives in the Appian Way; visits the Palace of the Cæsars, the Baths of Caracalla--a mass of ruins; the Forum; the Temples of Vesta and Isis; the Coliseum, and the classic old Pantheon. These form a kind of skeleton for the regulation sight-seeing of the Eternal City; things which, once done, are checked off with the feeling that the entire duty of the tourist has been fulfilled, and that, henceforth in Rome, there is laid up for him the crown of enjoyment, if not rejoicing; that he may go again and again to study the marvellous treasures of the Vatican galleries, the masterpieces of art in the Raphael stanze in the Vatican, the interesting pictures and sculpture in the many rich churches and galleries. The deadly chill of most of these galleries and churches in the winter is beyond words to describe. It is as if the gloom and chill and darkness of a thousand centuries were there concentrated. One of the regulation places for the devout sight-seer, who feels responsible to his conscience for improving his privileges, is the Museo Nazionale, or the Tiberine Museum, a large proportion of whose treasures have been excavated in making the new embankments of the Tiber. It is located on the site of the Baths of Diocletian, the great ruins of which surround it in the most uncanny way. Built around a large court, the salons of the museum are entered from the inner cloisters. In the centre of the court is a fountain, and around it are antique fragments of statues, columns, and statuettes found in many places. The famous Ludovisi collection of antique statuary is now permanently placed in this museum,--a collection that includes the "Ludovisi Mars;" "Hercules," with a cornucopia; the "Hermes of Theseus," the "Discobolus Hermes;" the "Venus of Gnidus" as copied by Praxiteles; the "Dying Medusa;" the "Ludovisi Juno," which Winckelmann declares to be the finest head of Juno extant, a Greek work of the fourth century; a "Cupid and Psyche;" the two "Muses of Astronomy" and of "Epic Poetry," "Urania and Calliope;" "an Antoninus;" the largest sarcophagus known; a "Tragic Mask" (colossal) in rosso antico; a bust of "Marcus Aurelius" in bronze, and many other priceless works. The splendor of scenic setting for art in the magnificent salons of the Casino Borghese has never been surpassed. They are, perhaps, the most impressive of any Roman interior, with lofty, splendidly decorated ceilings and walls, where recess and niche hold priceless sculptures. The splendor of these salons, indeed, quite exceeds description. In the principal one is a group on one wall--a colossal relief--representing Marcus Curtius plunging into the gulf in the Forum. There are busts of the twelve Cæsars; there are busts of all the Roman Emperors, with alabaster draperies, placed on pedestals of red granite. There are Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne;" Canova's celebrated statue of Princess Pauline Borghese (the sister of Napoleon I); Bernini's "David" and "Æneas and Anchises;" Thorwaldsen's "Faun;" "Diana," "Isis," "Juno," and many other celebrated classic statues. All the great paintings which were formerly in the Palazzo Borghese--over six hundred in all--are now in this casino. The great work in this collection is Raphael's "Entombment of Christ," painted in his twenty-fourth year. Titian's "Divine and Human Love;" Raphael's portrait of "Cæsar Borgia;" Correggio's "Danaë;" Domenichino's "Cumæan Sibyl" and "Diana;" Peruzzi's "Venus Leaving the Bath;" Van Dyck's "Crucifixion;" Titian's "Venus and Cupid;" and "Annunciation," by Paul Veronese; Vasari's "Lucrezia Borgia;" Botticelli's "Holy Family and Angels;" Van Dyck's "Entombment;" Carlo Dolce's "Mater Dolorosa," and Sassoferrato's "Three Ages of Man" are among the great masterpieces in this museum. The Villa Borghese (by which is meant the park) is some three miles in extent, and was laid out some two hundred years ago by Cardinal Borghese. As recently as 1902 it was purchased by the government for three million francs, and its official name is now "Villa Comunale Umberto Primo." These grounds contain fountains, antique statues, tablets, small temples and many inscriptions, with statues of Æsculapius and Apollo, and an Egyptian gateway. They are open all day to every one freely and are one of the great attractions of Rome. The great palaces of Rome are of later date than those of Florence. There are some eighty principal ones, of which the Palazzos Veneziano, Farnese, Doria, Barberini, Colonna, and the Rospigliosi (containing Guido's famous "Aurora") are the most important. The Farnesina Palace contains some of the most interesting pictures in Rome, and the traditions of the residence of Agostino Chigi, during the pontificate of Leo X, are still found in Rome,--traditions of the lavish magnificence of the entertainments given here to the Pope and the Cardinals. The Monte Pincio is the famous drive of Roman society, and the promenade around the brow of the hill offers one of the most enchanting views of the world. Near the Trinità di Monti stands the historic Villa Medici, the French Academy of which the great Carolus Duran is now the director. The view across the valley in which lies the Piazza di Spagna, the river to St. Peter's, from the Villa Medici, is one of the finest in Rome. The architecture of the garden façade is attributed to Michael Angelo. These gardens have a circuit of more than a mile, laid out in the formal rectangles and densely bordered walks of the Italian custom. All manner of old fragments of sculpture are scattered through them,--a torso, a broken bust, a ruined statue, an old and partly broken fountain,--and entablatures and reliefs are seen in the walls on every hand. No sound of the city ever penetrates into this dense foliage which secludes the gardens of the famous Villa Medici. One of the features of Roman life is the fashionable drive on Monte Pincio in the late afternoons. An hour or two before sunset the terrace of the Piazza Trinità di Monti begins to be thronged with pedestrians, who lean over the marble balustrade, gazing at the incomparable pictured panorama where the vast dome of St. Peter's, the dense pines of the Villa Pamphilia-Doria on the Janiculum, and the dark cypress groves on Monte Mario loom up against the golden western sky. Compared with the extensive parks of modern cities the Monte Pincio would prefigure itself as a drive for fairies alone. It comprises a few acres only, thickly decorated with trees and shrubbery, with a casino for the orchestra that plays every afternoon, and a circular carriage drive so limited in extent that the same carriage comes in view every few minutes. The Eternal City has had so many birthdays that one would fancy them to have become negligible; but it was announced on April 21 of 1907 that the date was a special anniversary, and she took on aspects of festivity. The municipal palaces and museums were hung with tapestries, flags were flying from the Capitol, the municipal guards were all in full dress uniform and the municipal orchestra played in the Piazza Colonna. The historic bell began ringing at eight in the morning in peals that were well calculated to call the Cæsars from their tombs and which might, indeed, have been mistaken for the final trumpet calls of Gabriel. But the Romans take their pleasures rather sadly and sternly,--not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,--so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did not inspire gayety. When the Republic of Rome was established (on Feb. 9, 1849) a provisional government was appointed. In March of that year Mazzini proposed that the assembly should appoint a Committee of War, and it was decided to send troops to Piedmont. Later a triumvirate, consisting of Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini, was formed, but disaster was near. In April the French troops landed at Cività Vecchia, and the Italians prepared to defend their country from the control of Louis Napoleon. Mazzini is said to have been "the life and the soul" of this defence. But the Republic was doomed, and when it had fallen the Pope returned, only under the protection of the French. But the French Empire, too, was doomed to fall; and when Garibaldi transferred his successes to Victor Emmanuel, the monarchy was consolidated by the union of Rome with Italy, and the present "Via Venti Settembre" in Rome--the street named to commemorate that 20th of September, 1870, on which the Italian troops entered the city and the Papal reign ended--perpetuates the story of those eventful days. "Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi have been designated, along with Mazzini, as the founders of the modern Italy," said Dr. William Clarke, "but a broad line divides Mazzini from the others." Dr. Clarke sees between Cavour and Mazzini "the everlasting conflict between the idealist and the man of the world. The former," he continues, "stands by the intellect and the conscience; the latter by the limitations of actual fact and the practical difficulties of the case," and Dr. Clarke notes further:-- "It was pre-eminently Mazzini who gave to Italy the breath of a new life, who taught her people constancy in devotion to an ideal good. Prophets are rarely successful in their own day, and so it has been with the prophet of modern Italy. The making of Italy has not proceeded in the way he hoped it would; for the Italians, who are an eminently subtle and diplomatic people, have apparently thought it best to bend to the hard facts by which they have been surrounded. But if, as Emerson teaches, facts are fluid to thought, we may believe that the ideas of Mazzini will yet prevail in the nation of his birth, and that he may yet be regarded as the spiritual father of the future Italian commonwealth. For of him, if of any modern man, we may say that he 'Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, And did not dream it was a dream.'" [Illustration: STATUE OF CHRIST, ANCIENT CHURCH OF SAN MARTINA, ROME _From the Artist's Original Cast_ Albert Bertel Thorwaldsen _Page 193_] Between the period of the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849 and the consummation of United Italy in 1870 the years were rich to the artist, whatever they may have been to philosopher and patriot. The way for the painter and the sculptor seems to have been a flowery and a pictorial one,--a very _via buona fortuna_, through a golden, artistic atmosphere. The perpetual excursions may lead the serious spectator to wonder where working hours come in, but, at all events, those days are rich in color. Friends grouped together by the unerring law of elective affinities loitered in galleries and churches. San Martina, near the Mamertine prisons, was a point of interest because of Thorwaldsen's bequest to it of the original cast of his beautiful statue of "Christ" which is in Copenhagen. This is, perhaps, the finest work ever conceived by the Danish sculptor, and is one that no visitor of to-day can behold unmoved. Both Canova and Bernini are also represented in this church,--the former by a statue of "Religion" and the latter by a bust of Pietro da Cortona. Beneath the present Church of San Martina is the ancient one containing the shrine of the martyr, under a superb bronze altar. Of this church, Mrs. Jameson says in her "Sacred and Legendary Art":-- "At the foot of the Capitoline Hill, on the left hand as we descend from the Ara Coeli into the Forum, there stood in very ancient times a small chapel, dedicated to St. Martina, a Roman virgin. The veneration paid to her was of very early date, and the Roman people were accustomed to assemble there on the first day of the year. This observance was, however, confined to the people, and was not very general till 1634, an era which connects her in rather an interesting manner with the history of art. In this year, as they were about to repair her chapel, they discovered, walled into the foundations, a sarcophagus of terra cotta, in which was the body of a young female, whose severed head reposed in a separate casket. These remains were very naturally supposed to be those of the saint who had been so long venerated on that spot. The discovery was hailed with the utmost exultation, not by the people only, but by those who led the minds and consciences of the people. The Pope himself, Urban VIII, composed hymns in her praise; and Cardinal Francesco Barberini undertook to rebuild her church." The painter, Pietro da Cortona, entered into this feeling and at his own expense built the chapel and painted for its altar piece the picture representing the saint in triumph, while the temple in which she has gone to sacrifice falls in ruins from a raging tempest. In any stray ramble in Rome the sojourner might chance, at any moment, upon obelisk, a pedestal or inscription linked with the great names of the historic past. Hawthorne has recorded how, by mere chance, he turned from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinale and was thus lured on to an obelisk and a fountain on the pedestal of which on one side was the inscription, "Opus Phidias," and on the other, "Opus Praxiteles," and he exclaims:-- "What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance--at a street corner as it were--on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority," he continues, "on which these statues (Castor and Pollux I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be." While the Papal ceremonies are neither so frequent nor so magnificent as in former days, still any hotel guest in Rome is liable, any morning, on coming down to the _salle-à-manger_ for coffee, to find every woman (who is taking her Rome seriously) arrayed in a black robe with a black lace veil on her head. One would fancy they were all a procession of nuns, about to retire from the world into the strict seclusion of the cloister. But it is nothing so momentous. It is only that every lady, with the devotion to spectacles which every visitor in Rome feels, as a matter of course, has secured the pink ticket entitling her to admission to the Vatican Palace to see the "passage" of the Pope, as he makes his way, attended by the Cardinals of the Sacred College, to the Sistine Chapel where his Holiness "creates" new Cardinals. Although rumored that the spectacle will be a gorgeous one, that the Pope will be carried aloft preceded by the silver trumpeters and attended by the Cardinals and the ambassadors and other dignitaries in the full dress of their ceremonial costumes and their orders, the reality is less impressive. Some feminine enthusiasts fare forth at the heroic hour of eight, although the procession is not announced to pass until a quarter after ten (which in Italy should be translated as a quarter after eleven, at the earliest, if not after twelve, which would be the more probable), in order to secure good standing room. For everybody is to stand--of course, comfort being a thing conspicuous only by its absence in Italy! Those of us too well aware by the experiences of previous visits to Italy that no Italian function was ever on time, from the starting of a railway train to the crowning of a king, only betake ourselves to the glories of the Palazzo Vaticano at the hour named, and we have then--as one's prophetic soul or his commonplace memory warned him--to wait more than an hour wedged into a dense crowd of all nationalities, none of whom seem at this particular juncture, at least, to be at all overburdened with good manners. And what went they out for to seek? Instead of an impressive spectacle--a thing to remember for a lifetime--one merely sees Pius X walking, surrounded by his Cardinals in a group,--not a procession,--he alone in the centre with his mitre on his head,--the whole scene hardly lasting over a minute, and as his Holiness is not as tall as most of his Cardinals, he is almost hidden from view. It had been rumored that the Pope was to be borne aloft in the Papal chair, preceded by the traditional white fan and the silver trumpets; but the present Pope is temperamentally inclined to minimize all the ceremonials investing his sacred office. Yet there is always a thrill in entering the Vatican. To ascend that splendid _Scala Regia_ designed by Bernini, with one of the most ingeniously treated perspective effects to be found, it may be, in the entire world; to cross this _Scala_ with its interesting frescoes by Salviati and others; to see at near range the picturesque Swiss Guard,--surely any pretext to enjoy such a morning is easily accepted of whatever occurrence one may grasp in order to obtain the hour. One curious feature of the past is to-day equally in evidence in Rome. Strolling at any time into the Church of San Agostino one beholds a curious spectacle. It is in this church that is placed the beautiful bronze statue of the Virgin and Child by Sansovino. It is approached by a platform on which is placed a stool that enables one to mount and thus reach the foot of the statue, which is kissed and the wish of the devotee is offered. This Madonna is believed to have the power to grant each wish and prayer; to heal the sick; restore the blind, the deaf, and the lame; to grant immunity from loss or illness; to grant success and prosperity. The poor Madonna must have her hands full with these avalanches of petitions, but she sits calmly in state and, if the striking testimony of votive offerings can be credited, she is most amiable in granting the prayers of her devotees. For she is hung with priceless jewels; necklaces, brooches, bracelets, diamond and ruby and sapphire rings on her fingers, she is a blaze of splendor. Around this statue there is a perpetual crowd, whatever hour of day one chances to wander in, and from prince to beggar the bronze foot is kissed, as each waits his turn to mount the stool and prefer his secret wish. The walls of the church are covered with the votive offerings to the Madonna for her aid,--rich jewels, orders, tablets,--offerings of all kinds. In this church is entombed the body of Santa Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, placed in an urn of verd-antique, in a special chapel beautifully decorated. After preferring one's secret wish to the Virgin one must wander on to the Fontane de Trevi and throw his penny into the water to insure his return to Rome, and then he may rest, _mens conscia recti_! Although Holy Week in Rome has less ceremonial observance in these latter days than those of the impressive scenes so vividly portrayed by Mme. de Staël in "Corinne," it still attracts a multitude of visitors and offers much to touch and thrill the life of the spirit, quite irrespective as to whether the visitor be of the Catholic or Protestant faith. In the great essentials of Christianity, all followers of Christ unite. The Pope does not now take part in public services on Easter, and that scene of the Pontifical blessing from the balcony of St. Peter's given to the multitude below who throng the piazza remains only in memory and in record. But the stately and solemn services of Good Friday in the vast and grand interior of St. Peter's are an experience to linger forever in memory. The three hours' service--the chanting of the Miserere--was a scene to impress the imagination. This service is held in the late afternoon of Good Friday, in the tribune of St. Peter's, the extreme end of the church where the vast window of yellow glass gives a perpetually golden light. The chair believed to have been that of St. Peter's is here placed, enclosed in ivory and supported by statues of four Fathers of the church, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanasius, from a design of Bernini. In the tribune is the tomb of Urban VIII (who was Matteo Barberini), of which the redundant decoration tells the story that it is also Bernini's work. Opposite this tomb is that of Paul III, by della Porta, under the supervision of Michael Angelo, it is said, and the beauty and dignity of the bronze figure of the aged Pope, in the act of giving the benediction, quite confirm this tradition. On a tablet in the wall of the tribune are engraved the names of all the bishops and prelates who, in 1854, accepted the belief of the Immaculate Conception,--this tablet being placed by the order of Pio Nono. In this tribune on the late afternoon of the Good Friday of 1907 the seats were filled with worshippers to listen to the three hours' chant of the Miserere. Princes and peasants sat side by side, and an immense throng who could not find seats stood, often wandering away in the dim distances of the cathedral and ever and again returning. The high altar, where Canova's beautiful figure of the kneeling Pope always enchains the visitor, was, as usual, surrounded. The lights burned--these perpetual lamps--and the moving throng went and came. The scene grew mystic, dream-like, as the solemn music floated on the air. The Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, on the left of the cathedral, was made into the sepulchre that day, and anything more beautiful than the myriad altar lights and the flowers could not be imagined. At the altar black-robed nuns were kneeling, and all over the chapel, kneeling on the floor, were people of all grades and ranks of life, from the duchess and princess to the beggar woman with a ragged shawl on her shoulders and her baby in her arms. St. Peter's was nearly filled all that day with people, not crowded, but apparently thronged in almost every part. The altar in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament was one mass of deep red roses. The chapel was completely darkened, but the blaze of myriads of tall candles illuminated the roses and the black-robed nuns and the black-robed devotees. It was a scene never to be forgotten. Even in the latter-day Rome, historic names are not wanting. One of these, the Princess Christina Bonaparte, _née_ Ruspoli, died in 1907 in her Roman villa in Via Venti Settembre. She was the widow of Prince Napoleon Charles Bonaparte and a cousin of the Empress Eugénie. With her husband in Paris until 1870, she fled (whilst her husband was fighting at Metz) as soon as the Commune was proclaimed. The princess was considered a beautiful woman and her portrait had been painted by Ernest Hébert, but it was lost when the Palace of the Tuileries was destroyed in 1870. With this princess dies the name of the Bonaparte family. Her daughters, Donna Maria Gotti-Bonaparte and Princess Maria della Moskowa, were often with her in Rome. The Palazzo Bonaparte is very near Porta Pia. Although called a palace, it is simply a plain house of some five stories, with narrow halls and stone staircases, no elevator, no electric lights. The princess occupied the first floor, while the apartments above were let to various families. With the exception of the royal palaces there are few in which suites are not obtainable for residence by any one who desires them. [Illustration: CASTEL SAN ANGELO AND ST. PETER'S, ROME _Page 204_] It was at a pleasant _déjeûner_ one spring day in Rome that the project was launched, that we should go motoring that afternoon to Frascati, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Lago di Nemi, and all that wonderful region. We were lunching with a friend who had a charming apartment in one of the sumptuous old palaces of Rome, where, in a niche on the marble staircase, the statue of Cæsar Augustus stood,--a copy of the famous statue in the Capitoline,--where lofty, decorated ceilings, old paintings and sculptures adorned the rooms, and where from the windows we looked out on the tragedy-haunted Castel San Angelo, with the dome of San Pietro in the background. Our friend who invited us to fly in his motor had brought his touring car over from America. The one note of new luxury now is for travellers to journey with their touring cars. In a year or two more it will be airships or soaring machines. On this wonderful May afternoon, all azure and gold, we started off in the great, luxurious touring car which was arranged even to carry two trunks, with a safe in it for the deposit of valuables, a hamper for refreshments, and, indeed, almost every conceivable convenience. On we flew through Rome, past the great Basilica of San Maria Maggiore; past the wonderful pile of San Giovanni Laterano, with the colossal statues of the apostles surmounting the façade; through the Porta San Giovanni into the narrow, walled lane leading out on the Campagna; on, on, to the Alban hills. We flew past olive orchards and vineyards, and the vast green pasture lands of the Campagna whose vivid green was ablaze with scarlet poppies. Far away to the west there was a white shining line--the line of the sea. At Frascati we stopped at the Villa Torlonia, the country place of the ducal family, whose grand Roman palazzo is in the Bocca di Leone in the old part of Rome. The Torlonia have an only daughter, Donna Teresa, whose _débutante_ ball a year ago is said to have been the most magnificent entertainment in Rome for fifty years. A writer, in a recent article on the nobility of Rome, said of this family:-- "The Torlonia figure repeatedly in the novels of Thackeray, who was never tired of portraying them. They have been most useful citizens, and since the days of the old army contractor, who founded the house, have augmented the family wealth by judicious investments, especially in connection with the draining and reclaiming of the marsh lands that abound in the former Papal States. They have contracted matrimonial alliances with the Colonna, with the Borghese, the Belmonte, the Doria, and the Sforza." The Villa Torlonia at Frascati is a very large estate with extensive gardens, terraces, and a cascade of three falls on the hillside, which is turned on (the water) at pleasure. The house, however, is a shabby-looking affair, a two or three story, rambling, yellow structure, which, at Newport, would not be considered too good for the gardener. After the usual fashion of the Italians who seldom travel, the Torlonia, wealthy as they are, simply remove from their palace in Rome to their villa at Frascati instead of travelling to Switzerland, Germany, or elsewhere in the summer. The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland were the guests of the Torlonia that day, the entire party enjoying themselves _al fresco_, and the beautiful cascade pouring down within the near distance. These outlying towns, Frascati, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, and Lago di Nemi, the picturesque group in the Alban Mountains, are some sixteen to eighteen miles from Rome. These Alban hills rise like an island from the vast plain of the Campagna, the highest point being some three thousand feet above sea level. They are covered with villages and castles and villas, and have in all a population of some fifty thousand. The region is volcanic, and the beautiful Lago di Nemi and Lago di Albano were the craters of extinct volcanoes. All this region was the haunt of Cicero, Virgil, and Livy. At Tusculum, near Frascati, are the remains of Cicero's villa, and also of an ancient theatre hewn out of solid rock. The view to the west toward Rome is most beautiful. The dome of St. Peter's crowns the Eternal City; and the Campagna--a sea of green--is as infinite in sight as is the Mediterranean. There are splendid villas and estates in these Alban hills that belong to the Roman nobility, and here the Pope has his summer palace. "The Alban Mount is also full of historical and legendary interest," says a writer on the country around Rome. "The Latin tribe, one of the constituent elements of the Roman people, had here its seat. Upon the highest peak of the range was the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, where all the tribes of Latin blood, the Romans included, met every year to worship; and where the victorious generals of the Republic repaired to offer praises and acknowledgments. In these mountain glens undoubtedly most of that ballad literature of Rome, the loss of which Macaulay so eloquently laments and so successfully restores, had its origin. Nor need the scholar be reminded that this is the scene of the most original and vigorous portions of the Æneid of Virgil; nor how the genius of the poet, which rather languidly recounts the traditions borrowed from Greece, wakes to new life, when he feels his feet upon his own soil and deals with Latin names and Latin legends." The Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati is celebrated for its fantastic waterworks in elaborate fountains and cascades. In the gardens a statue of Pan with a pipe of reeds and one of a satyr with a trumpet are made to play (both the pipe and the trumpet) by water. The hydraulic engineer must have found in Frascati his earthly paradise, for he commanded the water to leap into foam and spray in the air, to rush down marble terraces, and to form itself into obelisks of liquid silver. At Grotto Ferrata is a vast monastery of monks of the Order of Basilio (Greek), a monastery so colossal as to be mistaken for a fortress. The chapel has frescoes by Domenichino. At Castel Gandolfo is the summer Papal palace, that has not been occupied by a Pope since the overthrowing of the temporal power in 1870. It has a beautiful and commanding view toward Rome. It was built by Urban VIII. All the magic of Italy is in this picturesque excursion. In the vast grounds of the Villa Barberini are the ruins of the ancient palace and gardens of Domitian. On one hillside is a broken wall; a long avenue of ilex trees reveals here and there fragments of mosaic pavement. Crumbling niches hold fragments of statues. The hill itself is still pierced with the long tunnels driven through it by Domitian that he might pass unseen,--presumably safe from his enemies,--from the palace to the gardens. From the parapet, Rome is seen across the shining Campagna and the dome of Michael Angelo gleams against the blue Italian sky. "The wreck is beautiful," writes Mrs. Humphry Ward, in "Eleanor," of this romantic spot; "for it is masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shine golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, runs a low marble conduit that held the sweetest, liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grow beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path the grass is purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little farther, from the same grass, there shoots up, in happy neglect, tall camellia trees, ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again the famous stone-pines of the villa climb into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte." One could wander all day in the strange ruins of the old Barberini grounds, and in the vast spaces of the gardens and through the Villa Doria. The beauty of the avenue of ilex trees through which we flew from Castel Gandolfo to Lago di Nemi surpasses description. This lake, some four miles in circumference, lies in a crater hollow, with precipitous hills surrounding it, the water so clear that the ancients called it the "Mirror of Diana." In it was constructed an artificial island in the design of a Roman state barge. Over the long viaduct at Ariccia we flew; everywhere in the little town people, donkeys--an almost indistinguishable mass--filled the narrow streets; and thus on to Genzano and the Lago di Nemi, with its fabled fleet at the bottom. The Chigi woods, that fill the deep ravine under the great viaduct at Ariccia, were in the most brilliant emerald green. Past these forests lay the vast stretch of the Pontine Marshes; and turning toward Rome again, the splendor of the sunset flamed in the sky. One could but recall Mrs. Humphry Ward's vivid picture of a storm seen over this part of the Campagna:-- "The sunset was rushing to its height through every possible phase of violence and splendor. From the Mediterranean, storm clouds were rising fast to the assault and conquest of the upper sky, which still above the hills shone blue and tranquil. But the northwest wind and the sea were leagued against it. They sent out threatening fingers and long spinning veils of cloud across it--skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes again--in long spaces resting on the sea--the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange massing and curving of the clouds. Between their blackness and the deep purple of the Campagna rose the city--pale phantom--upholding one great dome, and one only, to view of night and the world. Round and above and behind, beneath the long flat arch of the storm, glowed a furnace of scarlet light. The buildings of the city were faint specks within its fierce intensity, dimly visible through a sea of fire. St. Peter's alone, without visible foundation or support, had consistence, form, identity; and between the city and the hills, waves of blue and purple shade, forerunners of the night, stole over the Campagna towards the higher ground. But the hills themselves were still shining, still clad in rose and amethyst, caught in gentler repetition from the wildness of the west. Pale rose even the olive gardens; rose the rich brown fallows, the emerging farms; while drawn across the Campagna from north to south, as though some mighty brush had just laid it there for sheer lust of color, sheer joy in the mating it with the rose,--one long strip of sharpest, purest green." The Villa Falconieri, in Frascati, which was built by Cardinal Ruffini, with the old ilex tree preserved in the portals, has recently been purchased by the Emperor of Germany, who proposes to transform it into an Academy for the accommodation of German students in Rome. These national academies draw their corresponding numbers of students from the nations thus represented, and contribute to the cosmopolitan aspects of Rome. The American Academy in Rome is now being transferred from the Ludovisi quarter to a large and convenient building outside Porta Pia. Perhaps the eminently social quality of Roman life may be indirectly due to the lack of library privileges which is a conspicuous defect in Rome. The Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele, under the courteous administration of Commendatore Conte Guili, has, it is true, a collection of over half a million volumes and thousands of very rare and valuable manuscripts. It has a large public reading room, and books are loaned on the signature of any embassy or consulate; yet this library, while offering peculiar advantages to theological and other special students and readers, does not afford any extended privileges to the general reader of modern English and American publications. It is located in a grim and forbidding old stone palace, approached by an obscure lane from the Corso, where, as there is no sidewalk, the pedestrian shares the narrow, dark, cold, stone-paved little street with carts, donkeys, peasants, and beggars. The great monument to King Victor Emmanuel, of mingled architecture and sculpture, a colossal structure of white marble with arches and pillars forming beautiful colonnades, the capital of each column heavily carved, and the sculpture, which is being done by a number of artists, will be of the most artistic and beautiful order. This memorial will occupy an entire block, and it is located very near the Capitol. All the old buildings in the vicinity will be torn down to give a fine vista for this transcendently noble and sumptuous memorial. The directors of this work aim to have it completed and ready to be unveiled in 1911, the jubilee year of Italy's resurrection as a united country. Encircled by the old Aurelian wall and near the great pyramid that marks the tomb of Caius Cestius, who died 12 B.C., lies the Protestant cemetery of Rome, full of bloom and fragrance and beauty, under the dark, solemn cypress trees that stand like ever-watchful sentinels. When Keats was buried here (in 1820), Shelley wrote of "the romantic and lovely cemetery ... under the pyramid of Caius Cestius, and the mossy walls and towers now mouldering and desolate which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered even in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death," he added, "to think of being buried in so sweet a place." [Illustration: PORTA SAN PAOLA, PYRAMID OF CAIUS CESTIUS, ROME _Page 216_] In the old cemetery (immediately adjoining the pyramid and separated from the new one by a wall) is the grave of Keats (who died in 1821) with its unique inscription, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Beside it is that of his friend, Joseph Severn, who died in 1829, and near these the grave of John Bell, the famous writer on surgery and anatomy. In the new or more modern cemetery the visitor lingers by the graves of Shelley and his friend, Trelawney; August Goethe (the son of the poet); of William and Mary Howitt, who died in 1879 and 1888. Not merely, however, do the names of Keats and Shelley allure the visitor to poetic meditations; but here lie the earthly forms of many a poet, painter, and sculptor of our own country, with their wives and children, who have sought in the Eternal City the atmosphere for art and who, enamoured by the loveliness of Rome, continued there for all their remaining years. These graves, these sculptured memorials, are eloquent with the joys, the sorrows, the achievements and the failures, the success and the defeat, of the artistic life in a foreign land. Many of these memorial sculptures are the work of the husband or the father, into which is inseparably joined the personal tenderness to the artist's skill. Especially noticeable are the graves of the wives of three American sculptors,--William Wetmore Story, Richard S. Greenough, and Franklin Simmons. Each of these is marked by a memorial sculpture created by the husband, and the three different conceptions of these sculptors are interesting to contrast. That of Mr. Story is of an angel with outspread wings, kneeling, her head bowed in the utter despair and desolation of hopeless sorrow. The figure has the greatest delicacy of beauty and refinement and tenderness; but it is the grief that has no support of faith, the grief that has no vision of divine consolation. On the memorial monument is simply the name, Emelyn Story, born in Boston, 1820, died in Rome in 1898, and the note that it is the last work of W. W. Story, in memory of his beloved wife. Here, also, is Mr. Story buried, his name and dates of birth and death (1819-1901) alone being inscribed. At the tomb of Sarah B. Greenough, the wife of Richard S. Greenough, the monument is designed to represent Psyche escaping from the bondage of mortality. This Psyche is emerging from her garments and she holds in her hand a lamp. On this is the inscription: "Her loss was that as of a keystone to an arch." Mrs. Greenough was a very accomplished musician, and she had the unique honor of having been made a member of the "Arcadians." The memorial sculpture over the grave of Mrs. Franklin Simmons is, as elsewhere noted, the work of her husband, a figure called "The Angel of the Resurrection." The angel is represented as a male figure (Gabriel) holding in the left hand a golden trumpet while the right is outstretched. His wings are spread, his face partly turned to the right. The form is partially draped and in every detail is instinct with a complete harmony; every fold of the drapery, every curve of the body, and the lofty and triumphant expression of the face in its ineffable glory of achievement proclaim the triumph of immortality. It stands on a pedestal that gives it, from the base of the pedestal to the tip of the outstretched wings, a height of some twenty-one feet. This monument, seen against a background of dark cypress trees, speaks the word of positive and complete faith in the divine promise of eternal life. "Then life is--to wake, not sleep, Rise and not rest, but press From earth's level where blindly creep Things perfected, more or less, In the heaven's height--far and steep." The visitor lingers over the grave of that interesting painter, J. Rollin Tilton, whose landscapes from Egypt and Italian scenes were so vivid and picturesque. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, born in Boston in 1815, came to Rome to die in 1882. Very near the tomb of William Wetmore and Emelyn Story is that of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Over the graves of William and Mary Howitt is the inscription: "Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me." On the wall just back of the new tomb erected over the ashes of Shelley by Onslow Ford in 1891 is a memorial tablet placed to Frederick W. H. Myers, bearing this inscription:-- "This tablet is placed to the memory of Frederick William Henry Myers, born at Keswick, Cumberland, Feb. 6, 1843; died in Rome, Jan. 17, 1901. 'He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him long life ever and forever.'" Over the grave of John Addington Symonds, whose best monument is in his admirable History of the Renaissance in Italy, is a Latin inscription written by Professor Jowett of Oxford, and a stanza from the Greek of Cleanthes, translated by Mr. Symonds as follows:-- "Lead thou, our God, law, reason, motion, life; All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow; Lead me, for I will follow without strife, Or, if I strive, still more I blindly follow." John Addington Symonds, who certainly ranks as the most gifted interpreter of Italy, in her art, her legends and associations, and her landscape loveliness, died in the Rome he so loved in 1893. His wife was ill in Venice, but his daughter, Margaret,--his inseparable companion and his helper in his work,--was with him. It is Miss Symonds who prefaced a memorial volume to her father with the exquisite lines:-- "O Love; we two shall go no longer To lands of summer beyond the sea." Near the graves of Keats and of his friend, Joseph Severn, are those of Augustus William Hare and John Gibson, the sculptor, who died in 1868. Some ten years before Hawthorne, meeting Gibson at a dinner given by T. Buchanan Read, wrote of him that it was whispered about the table that he had been in Rome for forty-two years and that he had a quiet, self-contained aspect as of one who had spent a calm life among his clay and marble. Dwight Benton, an American painter and writer, who was for some time in the diplomatic service and whose home had been in Rome for more than a quarter of a century, lies buried here. For many years he was the editor of _The Roman World_, which still sustains the interesting character that marked it during his editorship. Of his work in art a friend wrote:-- "In painting, as in literature, Dwight Benton took his inspiration from nature. His paintings of Italian scenery are true and faithful representations of its character and atmospheric effects. His tramps on the Roman Campagna were long and often tiring, but he worked with all an artist's enthusiasm, unmindful of cold, rain, and even hunger. He would delight, as all true artists, in an old convent, a tree, a tower, a cross, which he would reproduce with a peculiar and striking perfection of tone and color. In his paintings of Keats's and Shelley's tombs, not only are the slabs and marble there, but there, also, in all their naturalness, are the stately pines and cypresses above, with the sunshine and shadows alternating between them, and in the background the turreted top of St. Paul's Gateway, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, all lending effect and picturesqueness to the whole." The present King of Italy purchased one of Mr. Benton's paintings, called "Giornata di tristezza." While art abounds in Rome, less can be said for literature. There is a large and admirable selected Italian library in connection with the Collegio Romano; but while these books circulate, under certain conditions, to visitors, and the courtesy of the librarian and his staff is generously kind, the location and the Italian methods render it a matter of some difficulty to avail one's self of its resources. In the Piazza di Spagna there are two circulating libraries, but although one of these claims twenty-five thousand volumes, the majority are of mediocre fiction and almost none, if any, of the important modern works are to be found here. The visitor who is a subscriber to this library passes into a small, dark room, where one window looking on the street hardly does more than make the darkness visible, and he must take the catalogue to the window and stand in order to decipher the list, which is hardly, indeed, worth the trouble, as there are very few volumes of any pretension to importance in the collection, and of late years no additions, apparently, have ever been made. The other circulating library, while far preferable, is still in crowded rooms and the assortment is limited. The visitor in Rome who cares for reading matter looks forward with delight to Florence, with its noble circulating library, to which access is so easy and whose conduct in all ways is so convenient and grateful to the guest. In Rome, however, one finds his romance embodied in life and his history written in the streets and in the marvellous structures. His poetry is in her art, her ruins, her magical loveliness of hillside vistas, her infinite views over the Campagna, her sapphire skies, and her luminous, golden atmosphere. "_Here Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles, And yonder, bluest of the isles, Calm Capri waits Her sapphire gates, Beguiling to her bright estates._" "_Oh, Signor! thine the amber hand, And mine the distant sea Obedient to the least command Thine eyes impose on me._" III DAY-DREAMS IN NAPLES, AMALFI, AND CAPRI "With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Where summer sings but never dies." Naples is the paradise of excursions. It is set in the heart of incomparable loveliness. Over its sapphire sea one sails away--to the Fortunate Isles, or some others equally alluring. Its heights and adjacent mountains offer views that one might well cross the ocean to enjoy. Its atmosphere is full of classic interest; of song, and story, and legend, and romance; of history, too, which in its tragic and exciting episodes is not less vivid in color and in strange studies of human life than is any romance. Naples is the city of fascination. Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply--fascinating. There is the common life of the streets and the populace continually _en scène_; the people who are at home on the sunny side in winter, or the shady side in summer; there is the social life of the nobility, which is brilliant and vivacious. The excursions, of which Naples is the centre, are the chief interest to travellers, and these, while possible in winter, are far more enjoyable in the early spring. Still even in midwinter the days are sunny, and while the air is crisp and cool, it is not cold. The grass is as green as in June; but the foliage and flowers are more or less withered. Naples has the high and the lower town, the former the more desirable, and the fine hotels perched on the terraces, with the view all over the Bay of Naples, Capri, Sorrento, and Vesuvius, offer a vista hardly to be duplicated in the entire world. The lower town has its fine hotels on the water's edge, with a beautiful view over the bay, less enchanting than when seen from above. The Bay of Naples is enclosed in two semicircular arms that extend far out at sea, the southern reaching nearly to Capri, while near the termination of the northern, "Fair Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles." Far out at sea the sun shines dazzlingly on the blue Mediterranean. The landscape is full of those curious formations that are always inherent in volcanic regions. The region surrounding Naples is abrupt, picturesque, with the same irregular outline of hills that characterizes the elevations in the Tonto basin in Arizona. The vegetation is of the tropical type. The cactus is common, although it grows to no such monstrous heights as in Arizona. Orange and lemon groves prevail as far as the eye can see. On every height towns and villages crown the crests and sweep in winding terraces around the hillsides. Olive orchards abound. Castles and ruins gleam white in the sunshine on the ledge of rocky precipices. The curved shores shine like broken lines of silver, with deep indentations at Naples and at Castellammare. Between these two points rises Vesuvius, the thin blue smoke constantly curling from the summit that, since the eruption of 1906, has lost much of its elevation. In many places there is hardly the width of a roadway between the low mountains and the coast, but the cliffs are tropically luxurious in vegetation. Everywhere the habitations of the people crowd the space. From the monasteries and the castles that crown the heights, both distant and near to the clustered villages of the plain and those clinging to the hillsides, the scene is one unending panorama of human life. For Naples is only the focussing point of these densely populated regions of Southern Italy. The city stretches along the coast on both sides her semicircular bay; but the terraced hills, the stretches of land beyond, and every peak and valley are thickly sown with human habitations. Its commanding heights, two of which rise in the middle of the town, and its beautiful mirrored expanse of water give to it the most unparalleled variety and beauty of landscape loveliness. "What words can analyze," says George S. Hillard, "the parts and details of this matchless panorama, or unravel that magic web of beauty into which palaces, villas, forests, gardens, vineyards, the mountains, and the sea are woven? What pen can paint the soft curves, the gentle undulations, the flowing outlines, the craggy steeps, and the far-seen heights, which, in their combination, are so full of grace and, at the same time, expression? Words here are imperfect instruments, and must yield their place to the pencil and the graver. But no canvas can reproduce the light and color which play round this enchanting region. No skill can catch the changing hues of the distant mountains, the star-points of the playing waves, the films of purple and green which spread themselves over the calm waters, the sunsets of gold and orange, and the aerial veils of rose and amethyst which drop upon the hills from the skies of morning and evening. The author of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to have described Naples, when he speaks of 'the pride of the height, the clear firmament, the beauty of heaven, with his glorious show.' 'See Naples and then die,' is a well-known Italian saying; but it should read, 'See Naples and then live.' One glance at such a scene stamps upon the memory an image which, forever after, gives a new value to life." [Illustration: CASTEL SANT'ELMO, NAPLES _Page 231_] Naples gives to the visitor the impression of being a city without a past. If she has a history, it is not written in her streets. She is poetic and picturesque, not historic. The heights of Capodimonte and Sant'Elmo divide her into unequal parts, and there is the old Naples which only the antiquarian or the political economist would wish to see, and the new and modern city which is such a miracle of beauty that one longs to stay forever, and fails to wonder that the siren sought these shores. Naples has either been very much misrepresented as to its prevailing manners and customs, or else it has changed within the past decade, for, as a rule, the gentle courtesy and kindness of the people are especially appealing. Augustus often sojourned in Naples, and it was an especially poetic haunt of Virgil, whose tomb is here. Although the poverty and the primitive life of the great masses of the people have been widely discussed, it is yet true that Naples has a very charming social life, and that the University is a centre of learning and culture. One of the oldest universities in Europe, it has a faculty of over one hundred and twenty professors and more than five thousand students. A large and valuable library, and a mineralogical collection which specialists from all over the world come to study, are among the treasures of this University, which was founded in the early part of the thirteenth century by Emperor Frederick William II. There is now in process of erection a new group of buildings which will embody the latest laboratory and library and other privileges. Archæology is, naturally, a special feature of the University of Naples, and the proximity to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and to the wonderful Pompeian collection in the Museum of Naples affords peculiar and unrivalled advantages to students. A bust of Thomas Aquinas, during his life a lecturer at this University, is one of the interesting treasures. The Archives of the Kingdom of Naples attract many a scholar and savant to this city. There are in this collection (which is kept in the monastery adjoining the Church of San Severino) over forty thousand Greek manuscripts, some of which date back to the year 700. The Naples Museum is the great repository of all Pompeian art, and it is rich in sculpture; but it is badly arranged and the vast series of galleries and the long flights of stairs make any study of its work so fatiguing that a visit to it might rank as one of the seven labors of Hercules. In the royal museum of the Palazzo di Capodimonte, which is located on the beautiful height bearing that name, there are some pictures that are well worth visiting, not because they are particularly good art, but because of the interest attaching to the subjects. This gallery is largely the work of modern Neapolitan artists. Here is the celebrated picture of Michael Angelo bending over the dead body of Vittoria Colonna, kissing only her hand, and haunted by the after-regret that he did not kiss her forehead. Virginia Lebrun has here portraits of Maria Theresa and of the Duchess of Parma; there is one canvas (by Celentano) showing Benvenuto Cellini at the Castel Sant'Angelo; a scene depicting the death of Cæsar and a few others of some degree of interest. Curiously, Naples has never produced great art. Salvator Rosa was, to be sure, a Neapolitan, but his is almost the only name that has made itself immortal in the art of this city. Domenico Morelli, who has recently died, made himself felt as an original painter with certain claims that arrested attention. He is not a draughtsman, but he is a colorist of passionate intensity; he has original power and, more than all, he has a curious endowment of what may be called artistic clairvoyance. Transporting himself by the magic of thought to places on which his eye never rested, he yet sees as in vision their special characteristics. In one of his most important works, the motive of which is the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, he has painted the desert with a startling reality. Here is a great plain, the stony, parched Judean plain, with the very feeling of its desolation pervading the atmosphere. The Royal Chapel in Naples was decorated by Morelli, the ceiling painted with an "Assumption of the Virgin," which stands alone in all the interpretations of this theme; not by virtue of superior artistic excellence,--on the contrary its art does not make a strong appeal,--but by its originality of treatment. The "Salve Regina" and the "Da Scala d'Oro" are among the more interesting works of this artist, whose recent death has removed a figure of exceptional character in modern art, one who had, pre-eminently, the courage of his convictions. Some few years ago Morelli's "Temptation of St. Anthony" was exhibited in both Paris and Florence, and was generally condemned, perhaps because not wholly understood. The form of the temptation was supposed to be the shapes taken by a morbid and diseased imagination; but while as a psychological conception it was not without value, it was yet far from attractive as a work of art. The finest conception, perhaps, ever depicted of the temptation of St. Anthony--a subject that has haunted many an artist--is that painted by the late Carl Guthers of Washington, a lofty and gifted spirit whose too brief stay on earth ended in the early months of 1907. In this picture the temptation of the saint appears as a vision of all that is purest and sweetest in life,--wife, children, home; it was from all this peace and loveliness that St. Anthony turned, sacrificing personal happiness to the duty of consecrated service to his Master, in the exquisite conception of Mr. Guthers. Edoardo Dalbano is the typical leader of the Neapolitan school of painting of the present day, and his fascinating picture, called the "Isle of Sirens," representing the sirens singing in the sunlit Bay of Naples, might well be held as the keynote to all this enchanting region. Surely, if the sirens sing not in those blue waters, it were useless to search elsewhere for them. Buono is an artist of the Neapolitan shores, who paints its fisher-folk; Brancaccio catches the very spirit and animated atmosphere of the street scenes of Naples; Campriani and Pratello are landscapists of note; Esposito, too, despite his Spanish name, is a Neapolitan marine painter whose work is often most arresting in its power to catch the flickering sunshine over blue water that bathes the rocks rising out of the sea,--these isles of the sirens from which float the melodies that enchanted Odysseus. The traveller may be surprised to find that in size Naples ranks fourth on the European Continent,--Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, only, exceeding it. Naples should be, not only a port, a pleasure haunt, and a paradise for excursions, but one of the great cities of the world in commercial and in social importance. It has one of the finest natural harbors of the world; it has a beautiful and attractive adjoining country in which to extend, indefinitely, its residence and trade districts; it has the most enchanting fairyland of views that ever were seen this side the ethereal world; it has an atmosphere of song and story and a climate that is far from being objectionable. Naples is seldom the possessor of a higher temperature in summer than is New York or Boston; the winters are mild, and they offer weeks of sunny loveliness when Rome is swept by the icy tramontana from the snow-clad Alban hills. Naples offers, too, exceedingly good facilities for living; the groups of excellent hotels, both on the terraces and on the water's edge in the lower town and along the Villa Nazionale, offer every comfort, and the politeness and courtesy of the Neapolitans, as a rule, are among the alluring features of this enchanting city. What shall be said of one hotel, especially, perched on the cliffs, to which one ascends by an elevator, finding it the most luxurious fairyland that imagination can conjure? Leaving the street one walks through a marble tunnel lighted with electricity, wondering if he is, indeed, in the grotto of the Muses. Entering a "lift" truly American in its comfort and speed, he is wafted up the heights and steps out in--is it paradise? Here is a large salon entirely of glass with an incomparable view all over the gleaming bay, with Capri and Sorrento shining fair on the opposite sides and Vesuvius, a purple peak, in the near distance. The great city of Naples lies spread out below, with its interior heights of Capodimonte and others. It is a view for which alone one might well sail the four thousand miles of sea from the American shores. Through open French windows one may step out on the terrace. If it is cold he may still enjoy this sublimely wonderful view behind the glass walls that reveal all its beauty and protect him from wind or chill. Elsewhere adjoining salons stretch away, where sunshine, music, reading matter, and dainty writing-desks allure the guest and create for him, indeed, an earthly paradise. Of the drive on the Strada Nuova di Posilipo, skirting the coast while following the winding rise of the hill, with the sumptuous villas and gardens on one side and the blue sea on the other,--what words can suggest its charm? On a jutting promontory on the ruins of the Palazzo di Donna Ana are seen the palace whose convenient location made it possible for the royal hosts to throw their guests into the sea whenever they became tiresome, an accommodation that the modern hostess might, at times, appreciate. On this road, winding up the Posilipo, is the villa where Garibaldi passed the last winter of his life and which is marked by a tablet. And everywhere and at every turn are the beautiful views, commanding Bagnoli, Camaldoli, Ischia, Baia and Procida, Capri, Nisida and the Neapolitan waters. The hill slopes are overgrown with myrtles and orange trees and roses. Here and there a defile is filled with a vineyard under careful culture. In the presence of all this marvel of nature's loveliness the visitor hardly remembers the historic interest; yet it was on the little island of Nisida that Brutus and Cassius concocted the conspiracy against Cæsar. The vast Phlegræan Plain before the eye is invested with Hellenic traditions and is the region of many scenes in the poems of Virgil and Homer. In the years of the first and second centuries this plain was dotted with the rich villas of the Roman aristocracy. Here, too, lay the celebrated Lacus Avernus, a volcanic lake which the ancients regarded as the entrance to Avernus itself. Truly it required little imagination to see here the approach to the infernal regions. The air was so poisonous that no bird could fly over the lake and live. Virgil's scene of the descent of Æneas, guided by the sibyl, into the infernal depths is laid here; and near this lake are resorts of the latter-day tourist, known as the "Sibyl's Grotto," the "Grotto della Pace," the "Bagni di Sibyl," and the "Inferno." [Illustration: ANCIENT TEMPLE, BAIÆ _Page 241_] Baia, on the coast, was the Newport of Rome in the days of Augustus, Hadrian, Cicero, and Nero. It was then the most magnificent summer watering-place known to the world. The glory of the Roman Empire was reflected in the glory of Baia. In one of the Epistles of Horace a Roman noble is made to say: "Nothing in the world can be compared with the lovely bay of Baia." Some five hundred years ago this region became so malarial that no one could dwell in it. Fragments and ruins still remain of the imposing baths and villas of the Roman occupancy. An old crater called the Capo Miseno is described by Virgil as the burial place of Misenus:-- "_At pius Æneas ingenti mole sepulcrum Inponit, suaque arma viro remumque tubamque Monte sub aereo, qui nunc Misenus ab illo Dicitur aeternumque tenet per saecula nomen._" Cumæ was the most ancient Greek colony of Italy on the coast, and the last survivors of the Tarquinii died here. This is the most classic of all these legendary coast towns near Naples, as it was here that the Cumæan Sibyl dwelt with the mysterious sibylline leaves,--the books that were carried to Rome. A colossal Acropolis was once here, fragments of whose walls are now standing; and the rocky foundation is honeycombed with secret passages and openings. It is here that Virgil's "Grotto of the Sibyl" is supposed to have stood,--the grotto "whence resound as many voices, the oracles of the prophetess." The journey from Naples to Herculaneum is easily made by electric train cars within an hour, and while there is not much to see it is still an excursion well worth making. Dr. de Petra, of the chair of Archæology in the University of Naples, and formerly the Director of the National Museum, is warmly in favor of the proposed excavation of this buried city, as is Professor Spinazzola of the San Martino museum, who believes that Italy may well become one vast museum of antiquities. "As the theatre of Herculaneum is actually at present a subterranean excavation," he observed, "why not excavate in a similar way the entire city underneath modern Resina? In this way a perfectly unique underground museum would be formed, which would have the merit of leaving magnificent Roman art treasures exactly in their proper places in the villas. Such a work ought to be perfectly practicable, with the resources of modern engineering, and would certainly be unique in the world. "There would be no need to build a special museum for the objects discovered. Not only would this money be saved, but I feel convinced that so many visitors would be attracted as to more than pay for the maintenance. A subterraneous Herculaneum--surely a perfectly unique place of pilgrimage, just as it was nearly two thousand years ago--might be lighted by electric arc lights. I feel certain it would attract sight-seers from the ends of the world. At the same time work might go on in the open parts of the city. "Pompeii was more of an industrial town, while Herculaneum was a favorite resort of the Roman patricians, who did not bring their treasures with them from their northern homes, but had them executed by Greek artists in the south." Under the mighty floods of _lava d'acqua_ that buried Herculaneum doubtless lie temples, a splendid forum, magnificent villas, and most valuable art and literary treasures. In the eighteenth century excavations brought to light rare bronzes, mosaics, and papyri. The famous equestrian statue of Balbo, in the Naples Museum, was excavated from Herculaneum. Professor Lanciani and Commendatore Boni of Rome--the latter the present director of the Forum, succeeding Lanciani--believe that some of the richest art of ancient times may be found in Herculaneum; as does Professor Dall'Osso, inspector of excavations at Pompeii. Herculaneum is held to have been founded by Hercules when he landed at Campania, returning from Iberia, some three hundred years B.C., and it was in 63 A.D. that it was destroyed. Of this cataclysm Pliny, the Younger, wrote:-- "The sea seemed to roll back on itself by the convulsions of the earth. On the other side hung a black and dreadful cloud, bursting with fiery and serpentine vapors. Naught was heard in the darkness but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the frenzied cries of men calling for children, for wives, for parents,--all lifting hands to the gods, praying and wishing for death." Dr. Charles Waldstein of Cambridge University, the eminent archæologist, whose efforts toward initiating the excavation of Herculaneum were a notable event of 1906, thus writes of this buried city:-- "It is important to bear in mind that naturally all the best works in the Museum of Naples, especially the bronzes, came from Herculaneum and not from Pompeii. "What is most striking is the marvellous preservation of these works. This fact of itself ought to counteract the strange but widespread misapprehension that, while Pompeii was covered with cinders and ashes, Herculaneum was covered with lava, and that the hardness of that material made excavation difficult, if not impossible. All geologists and archæologists are agreed that no lava issued from the eruption of 79 A.D. Herculaneum was covered by a torrent of mud consisting of ashes and cinders mixed with water. The mass which covers it, so far from being less favorable to the preservation of objects, is much more favorable than that which covers Pompeii. Pompeii was partially covered with hot ashes and pumice stones, which burnt or damaged the works of art. As it was not wholly covered, moreover, the inhabitants returned and dug up some of their greatest treasures. Herculaneum, on the other hand, had its actual life, arrested at the highest point, securely preserved from depredation, to a depth of eighty feet, by a material which preserved intact the most delicate specimens which have come down to us in a state so perfect as to be really remarkable. "The most important of these delicate objects are manuscripts, of which that one villa produced 1750. The state of preservation is illustrated by one specimen, giving two pages from the works of the philosopher Philademus. Unfortunately, the possessor of the villa was a specialist, a student of Epicurean philosophy. While his taste in art was fortunately so catholic, his taste in literature was narrowed down by his special bent. Piso was the friend and protector of the philosopher Philo. Already sixty-five copies of that author's works have been found among the papyri. "Yet the city of Herculaneum contained many such villas, and herein it differed from Pompeii. Pompeii was a commonplace provincial town devoted exclusively to commerce; it was not the resort of wealthy and cultured Romans. It was essentially illiterate. No manuscript can be proved to have been found there. It is true a wax tablet with writing has been found; yet this contains--receipts of auctions. Herculaneum, on the other hand, was the favorite resort of wealthy Romans, who built beautiful villas there as in our times people from modern Rome settle for the summer at Sorrento and Castellammare." The present descent into the theatre of Herculaneum is made by a flight of more than a hundred steps, slippery and cold, in total darkness save for the candle that is carried by the guide, and the visitor sees only the stone seats of the amphitheatre and the stage with the two vacant niches, the statues that filled each being now placed in the Museum in Naples. The journey of thirteen miles from Naples to Pompeii is through a succession of densely populated villages that seem to be an integral part of Naples itself, for there is no line of demarcation. Portici, Torre del Greco, Torre dell'Annunziata, and others all blend with each other and with Naples. However familiar one has become with the literature of Pompeii, with both archæological descriptions and imaginative interpretations in romance, and however familiar with its aspects he may have become from replicas in art museums, and from pictures, one can yet hardly approach this silent, phantom city without being thrilled by its deep significance. At a distance of a few miles over the gently undulating plain rises Vesuvius; one gazes on the paths where the rivers of molten fire must have rolled down. George S. Hillard, visiting Pompeii in 1853, thus described a house which the visitors of to-day study and admire:-- "The finest house we saw within the walls is one which had been discovered and laid bare about four months previous to the date of our visit, called the house of the Suonatrice, from a painting of a female playing on a pipe, at the entrance. This house was deemed of such peculiar interest that it was under the charge of a special custode, and was only to be seen on payment of an extra fee. It was not of large size, but had evidently been occupied by a person of ample fortune and exquisite taste. The paintings on the walls were numerous, and in the most perfect preservation. In the rear was a minute garden not more than twenty or thirty feet square, with a fairy fountain in the centre; around which were several small statues of children and animals, of white marble, wrought with considerable skill. The whole thing had a very curious effect, like the tasteful baby-house of a grown-up child. Everything in this house was in the most wonderful preservation. The metal pipes which distributed the water, and the cocks by which it was let off, looked perfectly suited for use. Nothing at Pompeii seemed so real as this house, and nowhere else were the embellishments so numerous and so costly. "Pompeii, though a Roman city in its political relations, was everywhere strongly marked with the impress of the Greek mind. It stood on the northern edge of that part of Italy which, from the number of Grecian colonies it contained, was called Magna Græcia,--a region of enchanting beauty, in which the genius of Greece attained its most luxurious development. It has been conjectured that Pompeii had an unusually large proportion of men of property, who had been drawn there by the charms of its situation and climate, and that it thus extended a liberal patronage to Greek architects, painters, and sculptors. At any rate, the spirit of Greece still lives and breathes in its ashes. Its temples, as restored by modern architects, are Greek. Its works in marble and bronze claim a place in that cyclus of art of which the metopes of the Parthenon are the highest point of excellence. The pictures that embellish the walls, the unzoned nymphs, the bounding Bacchantes, the grotesque Fauns, the playful arabesques, all are informed with the airy and creative spirit of Greek art. "The ruins of Pompeii are not merely an open-air museum of curiosities, but they have great value in the illustration they offer to Roman history and Roman literature. The antiquarian of our times studies the great realm of the past with incomparable advantage, by the help of the torch here lighted." From Pompeii to Castellammare, the beautiful seaside summer resort of the Neapolitans, "a lover of nature could hardly find a spot of more varied attractions. Before him spreads the unrivalled bay,--dotted with sails and unfolding a broad canvas, on which the most glowing colors and the most vivid lights are dashed,--a mirror in which the crimson and gold of morning, the blue of noon, and the orange and yellow-green of sunset behold a livelier image of themselves,--a gentle and tideless sea, whose waves break upon the shore like caresses, and never like angry blows. Should he ever become weary of waves and languish for woods, he has only to turn his back upon the sea and climb the hills for an hour or two, and he will find himself in the depth of sylvan and mountain solitudes,--in a region of vines, running streams, deep-shadowed valleys, and broad-armed oaks,--where he will hear the ringdove coo, and see the sensitive hare dart across the forest aisles. A great city is within an hour's reach; and the shadow of Vesuvius hangs over the landscape, keeping the imagination awake by touches of mystery and terror." The road to Sorrento, on a cliff a hundred feet or more above the sea, with mountains on the other side, towering up hundreds of feet high; a road cut in many places out of the solid rock, supported by galleries and viaducts from below,--a road that crosses deep gorges and chasms, always with the iridescent colors of the sea below,--and from Sorrento to Amalfi again, only, if possible, even more wonderful,--is there in the world any drive that can rival this picturesque and sublime route? Of it George Eliot wrote:-- "It is an unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the sea below; and Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a romantic site for a city that once made itself famous in the world." Sorrento, with its memories and associations of Tasso, seems a place in which one cares only to sit on the balcony of the hotel overhanging the sea and watch the magic spectacle of a panorama unrivalled in all the beauty of the world. Flowers grow in riotous profusion; the fairy sail of a flitting boat is caught in the deepening dusk; the dark outline of Vesuvius is seen against the horizon; and orange orchards gleam against gray walls. Here Tasso was born, in 1544, fit haunt for a poet, with tangles of gay blossoms and the aerial line of mountain peaks. A low parapet borders the precipice, and over it one leans in the air heavy with perfume of locust blossoms. Has the lovely town anything beside sunsets and stars and poets' dreams? Who could ask for more? To La Cava,--to Amalfi,--still all a dream world! "O summer day, beside the joyous sea! O summer day so wonderful and white, So full of gladness and so full of pain!" How Amalfi sets itself to song and music! Who can enter it without hearing in the air Longfellow's beautiful lines?-- "Sweet the memory is to me Of a land beyond the sea, Where the waves and mountains meet, Where, amid her mulberry-trees, Sits Amalfi in the heat, Bathing ever her white feet In the tideless summer seas. * * * * * 'Tis a stairway, not a street, That ascends the deep ravine, Where the torrent leaps between Rocky walls that almost meet. * * * * * This is an enchanted land! Round the headlands, far away, Sweeps the blue Salernian bay With its sickle of white sand; Further still and furthermost On the dim discovered coast, Pæstum with its ruins lies, And its roses all in bloom." If ever a region was dropped out of paradise designed, solely, for a poet's day-dreams, it is Amalfi, and the even more beautiful Ravello just above. One fancies that it must have been in the mystic loveliness of this eyrie that the poet lost himself in a day-dream while Jupiter was dividing all the goods of the world. When he reproached the god for not saving a portion for him, Jupiter replied that all the goods were gone, it was true, but that his heaven was always open to the poet. The ancient Amalfi, the city of activities and merchandise, is gone. "Where are now the freighted barks From the marts of east and west? Where the knights in iron sarks Journeying to the Holy Land, Glove of steel upon the hand, Cross of crimson on the breast? Where the pomp of camp and court? Where the pilgrims with their prayers? Where the merchants with their wares? * * * * * Vanished like a fleet of cloud, Like a passing trumpet-blast, Are those splendors of the past, And the commerce and the crowd! Fathoms deep beneath the seas Lie the ancient warves and quays, Swallowed by the engulfing waves." It is impossible to realize that Amalfi was once a flourishing city of Oriental trade. One looks in vain for any trace of ruin or shrine that still suggests the ancient splendors of activity. The strata of the past, so visible in other mediæval cities, are not apparent here. The great cathedral is a most interesting study in the art of architecture,--its exquisite arcades, its delicate, lofty campanile glittering in the sun. The green-roofed cupola is a distinctive feature, and up the many flights of stairs the old Capuccini convent lies,--the unique, romantic hotel where the cells of the monks are now the rooms of the perpetual procession of guests. Does the wraith of Cardinal Capuano, who founded this convent, still wander in midnight hours through the dim cloisters? Does he still keep watch by the body of St. Andrew, the apostle, which he is said to have found and brought to the cathedral where the saint lies, as a saint should lie, gloriously entombed. St. Andrew was the patron saint of Amalfi, but at his death his body was carried from Patras to the Bosphorus, where it was placed in a church in Constantinople. The legend runs that Cardinal Capuano, being in Constantinople, entered the Church of the Holy Apostles to pray, and knowing that the body of the saint was in that city, he besought the heavenly powers to guide him to it. Rising from his devotions he was approached by an aged priest, who announced to the Cardinal that the object of his search was in that very church in which he was praying for guidance; and, aided by unseen powers, he was able to recover it and convey it to Amalfi. All Italian towns that respect themselves offer the allurement of an entombed saint and if, occasionally, the same identical saint does duty for more than one city, who is to decide the local genuineness of the claim? Nothing in all Italy is so curious as is this town of staircases instead of streets; of houses perched on the angles of impossible eyries suggesting that, as the Venetians go about in gondolas, so the Amalfians must have airships, or the wings of Icarus, with which to circle in air from their dwellings to the beach. The precipitous gorges and dark ravines have on their crests low parapets of stone walls over which the visitor lingers and leans watching the bluest of seas lying fair under the bluest of skies. The main road,--there is only one,--descending from the hill to the water's edge, makes its progress through a tunnel. The old Amalfi, with its palaces, its arches and colonnades, lies under the sea. Just as the Pensione Caterina with its rose walks and terraces slipped into the sea in December of 1899, when two guests and several fishermen lost their lives, so the ancient Amalfi fell, its cliffs swallowed up in the waters below. "Hidden from all mortal eyes, Deep the sunken city lies; Silent streets and vacant halls, Ruined roofs and towers and walls; Even cities have their graves!" When, on a May evening, the white moonlight falls in cascades of silver sheen over terraces and sea, with Amalfi all alabaster and pearl like a dream city in the ethereal air; when the stars hang low in the skies and the fairy lights of the fishermen's boats twinkle far out at sea; when the summer silence is suddenly thrilled by the melody of Neapolitan songs on the air, as if it were a veritable _chant d'amour_ of sirens,--then does one believe in the buried city. These rich baritone voices are surely those of some singers of the buried ages. They are floating across the centuries since Amalfi had its pride and place among the great centres of activity. Atrani, Amalfi's twin city, lies in the adjoining defile of the mountains which arch above them. The strange old houses are all dazzlingly white, transfigured under the moon to an unearthly loveliness. The tragedy of the ruin of Amalfi is related by Petrarca, who was then living in Naples. It was in 1343 that a terrible cataclysm--an earthquake accompanied by a tempest--caused the destruction and the submergence of the city in the sea. The believers in astrology will find their faith re-enforced by the fact that a bishop, who was also an astrologist, had read in the stars that in December of 1343 a terrible disaster would occur on the Naples coast. It arrived on schedule time. Petrarca, writing of it to Giovanni Colonna, states that in consequence of the prediction of the bishop, the people were in a condition of wild terror, endeavoring to repent of their sins and aspiring to a purer moral life. In this tide of religious emotion, ordinary occupations were neglected. On the very day of the calamity people were crowding the churches and kneeling in prayer. At night, after the people were in bed, the shock came. The sunset had been fair, the evening quiet, and the people were reassured. But they were awakened from sleep by the violence of falling walls and the terror of the tempest. Petrarcha was lodging in a convent, and he heard the monks calling to one another as they rushed from cell to cell. They hastily gathered crosses and sacred relics in their hands, and, preceded by the prior, sought the chapel, where they passed the night in prayer while the tempest raged outside. The sea broke against the rocks with a fury that seemed to tear the very foundations of the earth. The thunder pealed, and mingled with it were the shrieks of the frightened populace. The rain fell in torrents, deluging the city as if the sea itself were pouring on it. When the morning came the darkness still continued. In the harbor broken ships crashed helplessly together. The sands were strewn with mutilated dead bodies. Between Capri and the shore the sea ran mountains high. Amalfi was completely destroyed, and has never regained her prestige. The cathedral at Ravello has traces of the rich art it once enshrined, and the rose gardens of the Palazzo Rufolo might enchant Hafiz himself. The terrace on the very crest of the mountain commands one of the wonderful views of the world. The cloistered colonnades of this old Saracenic palace reveal views even to the plains of Pæstum. There are rare mosaics and fragments of bronzes and marbles yet remaining. The noble Greek ruins at Pæstum--the three temples--stand in all the majesty of utter desolation. They are overgrown with flowers, however, and they stand "dewy in the light of the rising dawn-star." "The shrine is ruined now, and far away To east and west stretch olive groves, whose shade, Even at the height of summer noon, is gray. * * * * * "Yet this was once a hero's temple, crowned With myrtle boughs by lovers, and with palm By wrestlers, resonant with sweetest sound Of flute and fife in summer evening's calm, And odorous with incense all the year, With nard and spice and galbanum and balm." The detour to Pæstum is full of significance. The massive columns of the temples stand like giants of the ages. "It is difficult," writes John Addington Symonds, "not to return again and again to the beauty of coloring at Pæstum. Lying basking in the sun on a flat slab of stone, and gazing eastward, we overlook a foreground of dappled light and shadow; then come two stationary columns built, it seems, of solid gold, where the sunbeams strike along their russet surface. Between them lies the landscape, a medley first of brakefern and asphodel and feathering acanthus and blue spikes; while beyond and above is a glimpse of mountains, purple almost to indigo with cloud shadows, and flecked with snow." The sail from Amalfi to Pæstum is one incomparable in loveliness. The sunshine is all lurid gold. The faint, transparent blue haze fills all the defiles of the mountains; the cliffs disclose yawning caverns where vast clusters of stalactites hang; and as the boat floats toward Capri from the Sorrento promontory its rocky headlands rise and flame into purple and rose against the glowing sky. Across the Bay of Naples rises the great city. It stands in some subtle way reminding one of the scene where one "... rowing hard against the stream, Saw distant gates of Eden gleam." Capri is the idyllic island of prismatic light and shade, of gay and joyous life. Here Tiberius had his summer palace, and it was from these shores that he sent the historic letter which revolutionized the life of Sejanus. The letter--_verbosa et grandis epistola_--is still vivid in the historic associations of Rome. Capri is one of the favorite resorts both for winter and summer. Its former modest prices are now greatly increased, like all the latter-day expenses of Italy; but its beauty is perennial, and the artist and poet can still command there a seclusion almost impossible to secure elsewhere in Italy. The distinguished artist, Elihu Vedder of Rome, has a country house on Capri, and another well-known artist, Charles Caryl Coleman, makes this island his home. There are days--sometimes several days in succession--that the sea is high and the boats cannot run between Naples, Sorrento, and Capri; and the enforced seclusion is still the seclusion of the poet's dream. For he shares it with Mithras, the "unconquered god of the sun," whose cult influenced all the monarchs of Europe and who holds his court in the Grotto de Matrimonia. Into this grotto one descends by a flight of nearly two hundred feet; he strolls among the ruins of the villa of Tiberius, where the very air is still vital and vocal with those strange and tragic chapters of Roman life. The Emperor Augustus first founded here palaces and aqueducts. Tiberius, who retired to Capri in the year 27 A.D., had his architects build twelve villas, in honor of the gods, the largest of these being for Jupiter and known as the Villa Jovis. In 31 A.D. occurred that dramatic episode in Roman history, the fall of Sejanus, and six years later Tiberius died. The vast white marble baths he had built for him are now submerged on the coast, and boats glide over the spot where they stood. The Villa Jovis stood on a cliff seven hundred feet above the sea, and the traditions of the barbarities and atrocities that took place there still haunt the island. The natives apparently regard them as a certain title to fame, but the wise tourists persistently ignore horrors; life is made for joy, sweetness, and charm; it is far wiser to think on these things. And there is charm and joy to spare on lovely Capri. "Sea-mists are frequent in the early summer mornings, swathing the cliffs of Capri and brooding on the smooth water till the day wind rises," says John Addington Symonds. "Then they disappear like magic, rolling in smoke-wreaths from the surface of the sea, condensing into clouds and climbing the hills like Oceanides in quest of Prometheus, or taking their station on the watch towers of the world as in the chorus of the Nephelai. Such a morning may be chosen for the _giro_ of the island. The Blue Grotto loses nothing of its beauty, but rather gains by contrast, when passing from dense fog you find yourself transported to a world of wavering subaqueous sheen. It is only through the very topmost arch that a boat can glide into this cavern; the arch itself spreads downward through the water so that all the light is transmitted from beneath and colored by the sea. Outside the magic world of pantomime there is nothing to equal these effects of blue and silver.... Numberless are the caves at Capri. The so-called Green Grotto has the beauty of moss agate in its liquid floor; the Red Grotto shows a warmer chord of color; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone, tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones of blue or green from the still deeps beneath.... After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the loggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in front, beautiful by reason of the long fine line descending from Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level, and then gliding up to join the highlands of the north. Now sun and moon begin to mingle: waning and waxing splendors. The cliffs above our heads are still blushing like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, the touch of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and the horizon glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night that Ferdinand of Aragon fled from his capital before the French, with eyes turned ever to the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned from his galley's stern, that melancholy psalm, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain,' and seeing Naples dwindle to a white blot on the purple shore?" The roses of Capri would form a chapter alone. What walks there are where the air is all fragrance of acacia and rose and orange blossoms! Cascades of roses in riotous luxuriance festoon the old gray stone walls; the pale pink of the early dawn or of a shell by the seashore, the amber of the Banskeia rose, the great golden masses of the Maréchal Niel, their faint yellow gleaming against the deep green leaves of myrtle and frond. The intense glowing scarlet of the gladiolus flames from rocks and roadside, and rosemary and the purple stars of hyacinths garland the ways, until one feels like journeying only in his singing robes. The deep, solemn green of stone pines forms canopies under the sapphire skies, and through their trunks one gazes on the sapphire sea. Is Capri the isle of Epipsychidion? "Is there now any one that knows What a world of mystery lies deep down in the heart of a rose?" One walks among these rose-lined lanes, hearing in the very air that exquisite lyric by Louise Chandler Moulton:-- "Roses that briefly live, Joy is your dower; Blest be the Fates that give One perfect hour. And, though too soon you die, In your dust glows Something the passer-by Knows was a Rose." Monte Cassino is one of the most interesting inland points in Southern Italy,--the monastery lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea. Dante alludes to this in his Paradiso (XXII, XXXVII), and in the prose translation made by that eminent Dantean scholar, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, this assurance of Beatrice to Dante is thus rendered:-- "That mountain on whose slope Cassino is, was of old frequented on its summit by the deluded and ill-disposed people, and I am he who first carried up thither the name of Him who brought to earth the truth which so high exalts us; and such grace shone upon me that I drew away the surrounding villages from the impious worship which seduced the world. Those other fires were all contemplative men, kindled by that heat which brings to birth holy flowers and fruits. Here is Macarius, here is Romuald, here are my brothers, who within the cloisters fixed their feet, and held a steadfast heart. And I to him, 'The affection which thou displayest in speaking with me, and the good semblance which I see and note in all your ardors, have so expanded my confidence as the sun does the rose, when she becomes open so much as she has power to be. Therefore I pray thee, and do thou, father, assure me if I have power to receive so much grace, that I may see thee with uncovered shape.' Whereon he, 'Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where are fulfilled all others and my own. There perfect, mature, and whole is every desire; in that alone is every part there where it always was: for it is not in space, and hath not poles; and our stairway reaches up to it, wherefore thus from thy sight it conceals itself. Far up as there the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch its topmost part when it appeared to him so laden with Angels. But now no one lifts his feet from earth to ascend it; and my rule is remaining as waste of paper. The walls, which used to be an abbey, have become caves; and the cowls are sacks full of bad meal. But heavy usury is not gathered in so greatly against the pleasure of God, as that fruit which makes the heart of monks so foolish. For whatsoever the Church guards is all for the folk that ask it in God's name, not for one's kindred, or for another more vile. The flesh of mortals is so soft that a good beginning suffices not below from the springing of the oak to the forming of the acorn. Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayers and with fasting, and Francis in humility his convent; and if thou lookest at the source of each, and then lookest again whither it has run, thou wilt see dark made of the white. Truly, Jordan turned back, and the sea fleeing when God willed, were more marvellous to behold than succor here." Dante adds that the company "like a whirlwind gathered itself upward," and that "the sweet lady urged me behind them, with only a sign, up over that stairway; so did her virtue overcome my nature. But never here below, where one mounts and descends naturally, was there motion so rapid that it could be compared unto my wing." The time was when Dante and Beatrice met, and he "was standing as one who within himself represses the point of his desire, and attempts not to ask, he so fears the too-much." And then he heard: "If thou couldst see, as I do, the charity which burns among us thy thoughts would be expressed. But that thou through waiting mayst not delay thy high end, I will make answer to thee, even to the thought concerning which thou art so regardful." The vast monastery of Monte Cassino, lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea, has one of the most magnificent locations in all Italy. This monastery was founded (in 529 A.D.) by St. Benedict, on the site of an ancient temple to Apollo. Dante alludes to this also in the Paradiso (Canto XX, 11). As seen from below this monastery has the appearance of a vast castle, or fortress. Its location is one of the most magnificent in all Italy. The old entrance was a curious passage cut through solid rock and it is still used for princes and cardinals--no lesser dignitaries being allowed to pass through it--and within the past thirty years a new entrance has been constructed. In the passageway of the mediæval entrance St. Benedict is said to have had his cell, and of recent years the German Benedictines, believing they had located the original cell, had it located, restored, and decorated with Egyptian frescoes. Several of the courts of this convent are connected by beautiful arcades with lofty arches, and adorned with statues, among which are those of St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica. Still farther up the hill, upon the monastery, stands the church which is built on the site of the ancient one that was erected by St. Benedict himself--this present edifice dating back to 1637. Above the portals there is a long inscription in Latin relating the history of the monastery and the church. These portals are solid bronze, beautifully carved, with inlaid tablets of silver on which are inscribed a list of all the treasures of the abbey in the year 1006. The church is very rich in interior decoration of mosaics, rare marbles, and wonderful monumental memorials. Either side of the high altar are monuments to the Prince of Mignano (Guidone Fieramosca) and also to Piero de Medico. Both St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica, are entombed under the high altar, which is one of the most elaborately sculptured in all the churches of Italy. Among the pictorial decorations of this church are a series of fresco paintings by Luca Giordano, painted in the seventeenth century, representing the miracles wrought by St. Benedict. In the refectory is the "Miracle of the Loaves," by Bassano; and in the chapel below are paintings by Mazzaroppi and Marco da Siena. Nothing can exceed the richness and beauty of the carvings of the choir stalls. These were executed in the seventeenth century by Coliccio. The library of this monastery is renowned all over Europe--indeed, it is famous all over the world--for its preservation of ancient manuscripts done by the monks. These are carefully treasured in the archives. Among them is the record of a vision that came to the monk Alferic, in the twelfth century, on which it is believed that Dante founded his immortal "Divina Commedia;" there is also a fourteenth-century edition of Dante with margined notes; and the Commentary of Origen (on the Epistle to the Romans), dating back to the sixteenth century; there is the complete series of Papal bulls that were sent to the monastery of Monte Cassino from the eleventh century to the present time, many of them being richly illuminated and decorated with curiously elaborate seals. There is an autograph letter of the Sultan Mohammed II to Pope Nicholas IV, with the Pope's reply,--the theme of the correspondence being the Pope's threat of war. The imperial Mohammed seems to have been in terror of this, and in his epistle he expresses his willingness, and, indeed, his intention, to be converted as soon as he shall visit Rome! Apparently the Holy Father of that day laid little stress on the sincerity of this offer on the part of the Sultan. Here, too, is a wonderful correspondence between Don Erasmo Gattola, the historian of the abbey, and a great number of the celebrated men of his time; and there are hundreds of other letters, manuscripts, and documents relating to kings, nobles, emperors, and many of the nobility of the age. In this monastery there is a most interesting collection of relics, in bronze, silver, gold, and _rosso antico_. The library proper contains some eleven thousand volumes, dating back to the very dawn of the discovery of the art of printing. Mr. Longfellow, whose poet's pen has pictured so many of the Italian landscapes and ancient monuments, thus set Monte Cassino to music, picturing the entire landscape of the Terra di Lavoro region:-- "The Land of Labor and the Land of Rest, Where mediæval towns are white on all The hillsides, and where every mountain's crest Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall. * * * * * "There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town, Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light Still hovers o'er his birthplace like the crown Of splendor seen o'er cities in the night. "Doubled the splendor is, that in its streets The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played, And dreamed perhaps the dreams that he repeats In ponderous folios for scholastics made. "And there, uplifted, like a passing cloud That pauses on a mountain summit high, Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud And venerable walls against the sky. "Well I remember how on foot I climbed The stony pathway leading to its gate; Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed, Below, the darkening town grew desolate. * * * * * "The silence of the place was like a sleep, So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread Was a reverberation from the deep Recesses of the ages that are dead. "For, more than thirteen centuries ago, Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome, A youth disgusted with its vice and woe, Sought in these mountain solitudes a home. "He founded here his Convent and his Rule Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer; The pen became a clarion, and his school Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air. * * * * * "From the high window, I beheld the scene On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,-- The mountains and the valley in the sheen Of the bright sun,--and stood as one amazed. * * * * * "The conflict of the Present and the Past, The ideal and the actual in our life, As on a field of battle held me fast, Where this world and the next world were at strife." The monastery of Monte Cassino entertains, as its guests, for dinner or for a night, all gentlemen who visit it; but there is an alms box on the ancient gate into which the guest is supposed to place whatever contribution he pleases for the poor of the place. The Italian government, in 1866, declared this monastery to be a "Monumento Nazionale," and it is now a famous ecclesiastical school with some two hundred students and a resplendent faculty of fifty learned monks under the direction of the Abbot. Some of the most celebrated prelates in Europe have been educated at Monte Cassino. Quite near Monte Cassino, as Longfellow depicts in his lines, is Monte Aquino, a picturesque hillside where the "Doctor Angelicus," Thomas Aquinas, was born (in 1224), the son of Count Landulf, in the Castel Roccasecca. He was educated in the monastery, and one finds himself recalling here these lines of Thomas William Parsons, entitled "Turning from Darwin to Thomas Aquinas:"-- "Unless in thought with thee I often live, Angelic doctor! life seems poor to me. What are these bounties, if they only be Such boon as farmers to their servants give? That I am fed, and that mine oxen thrive, That my lambs fatten, that mine hours are free-- These ask my nightly thanks on bended knee; And I do thank Him who hath blest my hive, And made content my herd, my flock, my bee. But, Father! nobler things I ask from Thee. Fishes have sunshine, worms have everything! Are we but apes? Oh! give me, God, to know I am death's master; not a scaffolding, But a true temple where Christ's word could grow." It was at Aquinum, too, at the foot of Monte Aquino, Juvenal was born. Near the peaks of Monte Cassino and Monte Aquino is that of Monte Cairo, five thousand five hundred feet high, from whose summit one of the finest views of all southern Europe is attained. The Gulf of Gaeta, the valley of San Germano, the wild and romantic mountain region of the Abruzzi and a view, too, of the blue sea are in the panorama, bathed in the opalescent, gleaming lights that often invest the Italian landscape with jewelled splendor. "I ask myself, Is this a dream? Will it all vanish into air? Is there a land of such supreme And perfect beauty, anywhere?" It might have been in this pictured dream-region that Hercules came to rest. "When Heracles, the twelve great labors done, To Calpe came, and there his journey stayed, He raised two pillars toward the evening sun, And carved them by a goddess' subtle aid. Upon their shafts were sacred legends traced, And round the twain a serpent cincture placed: 'T was at this bound the primal world stood still, And of Atlantis dreamed, with baffled will." But still in unmeasured space, still beyond and afar and unattained, still lost in the unpenetrated realms of the poet's fancy,-- "Atlantis lies beyond the pillars yet!" _"Here Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles."_ * * * * * _High o'er the sea-surge and the sands, Like a great galleon wrecked and cast Ashore by storms, thy Castle stands A mouldering landmark of the Past._ _Upon its terrace-walk, I see A phantom gliding to and fro; It is Colonna,--it is she Who lived and loved so long ago._ LONGFELLOW. _We are the only two that, face to face, Do know each other, as God doth know us both. --O fearless friendship, that held nothing back! O absolute trust, that yielded every key, And flung each curtain up, and drew me on To enter the white temple of thy soul, So vast, so cold, so waste!--and give thee sense Of living warmth, of throbbing tenderness, Of soft dependencies! O faith that made Thee free to seek the spot where my dead hopes Have sepulture, and read above the crypt Deep graven, the tearful legend of my life! There, gloomed with the memorials of my past, Thou once for all didst learn what man accepts Lothly--(how should he else?)--that never woman, Fashioned a woman,--heart, brain, body, soul,-- Ever twice loved._ "_Vittoria Colonna to Michael Angelo._" MARGARET J. PRESTON. IV A PAGE DE CONTI FROM ISCHIA "Unto my buried lord I give myself." * * * * * Michael Angelo! A man that all men honor, and the model That all should follow; one who works and prays, For work is prayer, and consecrates his life To the sublime ideal of his art Till art and life are one. LONGFELLOW, from "_Michael Angelo; A Fragment_." In that poetic sail along the Italian coast between Naples and Genoa the voyager feels that it is "On no earthly sea with transient roar" that his bark is floating; that "Unto no earthly airs he trims his sail," as he flits along this coast when violet waves dash against a brilliant background of sky. Ischia reveals herself through the blue, transparent air, gleaming with opalescent lights, quivering, fading and flaming again as the afterglow in the east rivals in its coloring the sunset splendors of the west. Is there in the air a faint, lingering echo of the _chant d'amour_ of sirens on the rocky shores? Is Parthenope still to be descried? Gazing upon Ischia there is a rush of romantic impressions as if one were transported into ideal regions of song, before this impression begins to resolve itself into definite remembrance of fact and incident. Surely some exquisite associations in the past had enchanted this island in memory and invested it with the magic light that never was on sea or land. Traditions of beauty; of the lives of scholar and savant and princes of the church; of a court of nobility enriched and adorned by prelate and by poet; traditions, too, of a woman's consecration to an immortal love and the solace of grief by poetic genius and exalted friendships,--all these seem to cling about Ischia in a vague, atmospheric way till memory, still groping backward in the twilight of the richly historic past, suddenly crystallized into recognition that it was Ischia which was the home of Vittoria Colonna, the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance. Lines, long since read, arose like an incantation; and like bars of music, each note of which vibrated in the air, came this fragment of one of her songs:-- "If in these rude and artless songs of mine I never take the file in hand, nor try With curious care and nice, fastidious eye To deck and polish each uncultured line, 'T is that it makes small merit of my name To merit praise.... * * * * * But it must be that heaven's own gracious gift Which, with its breath, divine, inspires my soul, Strikes forth these sparks unbidden by my will." [Illustration: ISCHIA, FROM THE SEA _Page 282_] Vittoria Colonna was called the most beautiful and gifted woman of her time in all Italy. Her life of nearly sixty years (1490-1547) lay entirely in that period when the apathy of ten centuries was broken, when the darkness fled before the dawning of a glorious day. New methods of thought, revised taste in poetry, new discoveries of science, a nobler progress in criticism, great discoveries, and a lofty and unprecedented freedom of conviction marked the century between 1450 and 1550, stamping it as the marvellous time which we know as the Renaissance, "that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound æsthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type." It was peculiarly fitting that Italy should take the initiative in inaugurating this _vita nuova_. Italy had a language and literature and art. Dante had delivered his solemn message and Petrarca his impassioned song. Boccaccio had taught the gospel of gladness. Who shall analyze the secret springs of their inspiration and reveal to what degree Ovid and Horace and Virgil influenced the later literature? A new solar system was established by Copernicus. America was discovered. Science entered on her definite and ceaseless progress, and religion and art became significant forces in human life. Printing had been invented and the compass discovered. Into this time of new forces, when everything was throbbing and pulsating with life, was Vittoria Colonna born into social prestige and splendor. Her father, Fabrizio Colonna, and her mother, Agnesina di Montefeltro, a daughter of the Duke of Urbino, were then domiciled in the castle of Marino, on the Lago d'Albano, a magnificent palace some twelve miles from Rome, in which the Duke d'Amalfi (the father of Fabrizio Colonna) lived, and which is still standing, filled with memorials and relics of historic interest. Urbino, the seat of the Montefeltro, is renowned as having been the birthplace of Raphael, who "Only drank the precious wine of youth," but who "... lives immortal in the hearts of men, ... and the world is fairer That he lived in it." The Colonna date back to the eleventh century, and they gave many princes and cardinals to the country. At the close of the thirteenth century they were arrayed against Boniface VIII, the Pope, who accused them of crime, while they disputed the validity of his election to the holy office. In retaliation, the Pope excommunicated the entire family, anathematized them as heretics and declared their estates forfeited to the church. The Colonna, far from being intimidated, commanded three hundred armed horsemen, attacked the papal palace, which they plundered, and made him a prisoner,--an incident referred to by Dante in the "Inferno." The Colonna and the Orsini were also at warfare, and when a member of the former family was elevated to the papacy under the name of Martin V, they despoiled property of the Orsini. Gay excursionists to-day, who fly over the Campagna in their twentieth-century touring cars to the lovely towns of the Alban hills, may look down from Castel Gandolfo on the gloomy, mediæval little town of Marino, part way up a steep hillside, whose summit is crowned by the castle once belonging to the Colonna and in which Vittoria passed her early childhood. "Nothing," in his "Roba di Roma," says Story, "can be more rich and varied than this magnificent amphitheatre of the Campagna of Rome, ... sometimes drear, mysterious, and melancholy in desolate stretches; sometimes rolling like an inland sea whose waves have suddenly become green with grass, golden with grain, and gracious with myriads of wild flowers, where scarlet poppies blaze and pink daisies cover vast meadows and vines shroud the picturesque ruins of antique villas, aqueducts, and tombs, or drop from mediæval towers and fortresses." Flying in the swift motor-car of the time toward the Alban hills, Marino may be easily reached in less than an hour from the Porta San Giovanni, and in the near distance Monte Albani, rising into the cone of Monte Cavi, is a picture before the eye, while on the lower slopes gleam the white villages of Albani, Marino, Castel Gandolfo, and Frascati, with the campanile of a cathedral, a fortress-like ruin, or gardens and olive orchards clambering up the heights. The Papal town of Rocca di Papa crowns one summit where once Tarquin's temple to Jupiter stood and on whose ruins now gleam afar in the Italian sunshine the white walls of the Passionist convent of Monte Cavi, built by Cardinal York. From this height Juno gazed upon the great conflict of contending armies, if Virgil's topography be entitled to authority. And here, through a defile in the hills, one may look toward Naples, "and then rising abruptly with sheer limestone cliffs and crevasses, where transparent purple shadows sleep all day long, towers the grand range of the Sabine mountains, whose lofty peaks surround the Campagna to the east and north like a curved amphitheatre.... Again, skirting the Pontine Marshes on the east, are the Volscian mountains, closing up the Campagna at Terracina, where they overhang the road and affront the sea with their great barrier. Following along the Sabine hills, you will see at intervals the towns of Palestrina and Tivoli, where the Anio tumbles in foam, and other little mountain towns nestled here and there among the soft airy hollows, or perched on the cliffs." In this landscape there are three ruined villages--Colonna, Gallicano, and Zagarda--perched on their respective hills. The castle of the Colonna family is now restored and modernized to a degree that leaves little trace of that former stately grandeur which is transmuted into modern convenience and comfort. In this scene of romantic beauty, with the vista of beauty almost incomparable in any inland view in Italy, Vittoria passed her infancy, until, at the age of four, her childhood was transplanted to fairy Ischia. In all this chain of Alban towns, including Marino, Viterbo, Ariccia, and Rocca di Papa, the great family of the Colonna owned extensive estates, each crowning some height, while the defiles between were filled, then as now, with the foam and blossom of riotous greenery. Then, as now, across the mystic Campagna, the dome of St. Peter's silhouetted itself against a golden background of western sky. One needs not to have had privileged access to the sibylline leaves of the Cumæan soothsayer to recognize that Vittoria Colonna was born under the star of destiny. Her horoscope seemed to be inextricably entwined with that of Italy; and the events which created and determined the conditions of her life and its panoramic series of circumstances were the events of Italy and of Europe as well--in political aspects and in the influence on general progress, brought to bear by strong and prominent individualities whose gifts, genius, or force dominated the movements of the day. To her father's change of political allegiance, from the French to the Spanish side, in the war raging between those countries in 1494, Vittoria owed all her life in Ischia; and her marriage, and all that resulted from her becoming a member of the d'Avalos family, was due to this espousal of a new political faith on the part of Fabrizio Colonna. To the fact that in 1425 the war with France again broke out was due the loss of her husband and the conditions that consecrated her life to poetry, to learning, and that made possible the beautiful and sympathetic friendship between herself and Michael Angelo. Her life presents the most forcible illustration of the overruling power on human life and destiny. It was the political change of faith on the part of Fabrizio Colonna that initiated an unforeseen and undreamed-of drama of life for his infant daughter, the first act of which included the command of the King of Naples that the little Vittoria should be betrothed to Francesco d'Avalos, the son of Alphonso, Marchese di Pescara, of Ischia, one of the nobles who stood nearest to the king in those troubled days. Francesco was born in the castle on Ischia in 1489, and was one year older than Vittoria. Fabrizio exchanged his castle at Marino for one in Naples, which city made him the Grand Constable. The d'Avalos castle in Ischia had at this time for its chatelaine the Duchessa di Francavilla, who is said by some authorities to have been the elder sister and by others to have been the aunt of Francesco. Donna Constanza d'Avalos, later the Duchessa di Francavilla, had been made the Castellana of the island for her courage in refusing to capitulate to the French troops when, after the death of her father, she was left in sole charge of the d'Avalos estates, and Emperor Charles V elevated her rank to that of Principessa. The Duchessa was one of the most remarkable women of the day. She was a classical scholar, and herself a writer, the author of a book entitled "_Degli Infortuni e Travagli del Mondo_." To the care of this learned and brilliant woman, a great lady in the social life of the time, the care of the little Vittoria was committed, and she studied and played and grew up with Francesco, her future husband. The d'Avalos family ranked among the highest nobility of the Court of Naples, and the Principessa reigned as a queen of letters and society in her island kingdom. It was under her care that the two children, Francesco and Vittoria, pursued their studies together and acquired every grace of scholarship and accomplishment of society. The circles which the Duchessa drew around her included many gentlewomen from Sicily and from Naples; and "the life at Castel d'Ischia was synonymous with everything glorious and elegant," recorded Visconti, "and its fame has been immortalized." Although Francesco (the future Marchese di Pescara) was born in Italian dominions, yet the d'Avalos family were of Spanish ancestry and traditions. The musical Castilian was the language of the household. The race ideals of Spain--the poetic, the impassioned, the joy in color and movement--pervaded the very atmosphere of Castel d'Ischia. Vittoria's earliest girlhood revealed her exceptional beauty and charm, and gave evidence that the gods loved her and had dowered her with their immortal gifts and genius, which flowered, under the sympathetic guidance and stimulus of such a woman as the Principessa (the Duchessa di Francavilla) and the society she drew around her, as the orange and the myrtle flower under the southern sunshine. The literature of biography presents no chapter that can rival this in the idyllic beauty of the lives of those two children on the lovely island in the violet sea. The perpetual conflicts that were waged in both Rome and Naples awakened no echoes in this romantic and isolated spot, whose atmosphere was that of the peace of scholarly pursuits and lofty thought that is found where the arts and the muses hold their sway. But in 1496 came the tragedy of the death of the young king and queen of Naples; four years later Rome celebrated a jubilee in which Naples took part, sending a splendid procession as escort to the famous Madonna that was carried from Naples to Rome and back, working miracles, it is said, on both journeys, as a Madonna should. A year later Frederick of Naples and the queen, and two of the king's sisters,--ladies of high nobility,--came as guests to the castle in Ischia,--royal exiles seeking shelter. Five years later the new king and queen were welcomed with gorgeous parade and acclamation. A pier was thrown out over one hundred feet into the sea; on this a tent of gold was erected, and all the nobility of Naples, in the richest costumes of velvet and jewels, thronged to meet the royal guests. Over the sunlit Bay of Naples resounded the thunder of the guns in military salute and the cheers of the people. Among the distinguished nobility present, Costanza, Duchessa and Principessa di Francavilla, was a marked figure with her young charge, Vittoria Colonna, at her side. She made a deep reverence and kissed the hand of the king as he passed, as did many of the ladies of highest rank, and at the fête of that evening Vittoria's beauty charmed all eyes. Although it was well understood that she had been betrothed since childhood to Francesco d'Avalos, yet many princes and nobles sued for her hand and were refused by her father, who was at this time established magnificently in Naples. Pope Julius II refused the pleadings of two dukes, both of whom wished to seek Vittoria in marriage, as he considered the love of the young girl for her betrothed a matter to be held sacred. Three years later, when Vittoria was nineteen and Francesco twenty, their marriage was celebrated in Castel d'Ischia with the richest state and beauty of ceremonial observance. A few months previous to this time she had returned to her father's country home in the family castle at Marino, whither both Fabrizio and Agnese Colonna accompanied their daughter. When the time appointed for her bridal came, Vittoria was escorted to Ischia by princes, and dukes, and ladies of honor, and the marriage gifts to the bride included a chain of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, linked with gold; a writing desk of solid gold; wonderful bracelets; costumes of velvets, and brocades and rich embroideries, and a portion of fourteen thousand ducats. [Illustration: LA ROCCA, ISCHIA _Page 294_] "The noted pair had not their equals in Italy at this time," writes a contemporary historian. "Their life in Naples was all magnificence and festivity, and when they desired to exchange it for the country they left Naples for Pietralba on Monte Emo, where they assembled pleasant parties of ladies and gentlemen. Much time was passed in their beloved Ischia, where the Duchessa, as Castellana, was obliged to receive much company. And here were found the flower of chivalry and the men most noted in letters.... They listened to the poets Sanazzaro, il Rota, and Bernardo Tasso; or they heard the admirable discourses on letters of Musefico, il Giovio, and il Minturno. It was an agreeable school for the youthful minds of Vittoria and Pescara. Thus passed in great happiness the first three years of their married life." It is not strange that to the young Marchesa di Pescara, Ischia had become an enchanted island. The scene of her happy childhood, of her studies, of her first efforts in lyric art, of her stately and resplendent bridal; the home, too, of her early married life,--it is little wonder that in after years she translated into song its scenic loveliness and the thoughts and visions it had inspired. Again, the ever-recurring war came on, and in the spring of 1512 the King of Naples conferred the doubtful privilege on the Marchesa di Pescara of serving as the royal representative. It is said that Vittoria personally superintended her young husband's outfit,--in horses, attendants, armor, and other details belonging to a gentleman of rank. Her father and her uncle, Prospero Colonna, were also among the military who led Italian troops. In the terrible battle of Ravenna (which was fought on the Easter Sunday, April 11, of 1512), Pescara was wounded, taken prisoner, and carried to the fortress of Porta Gobbia. A messenger was sent to Ischia, where Vittoria lived between her books and the orange groves; and the twentieth-century cynic of 1907 will smile at the form in which she expressed her sorrow,--that of a poem of some forty stanzas, which began:-- "_Eccelso Mio Signor! Questa ti scrivo Per te narrar tra quante dubbie voglie, Fra quanti aspri martir, dogliosa io vivo!_" A translation of this lyric epistle, made in prose, gives it more fully as follows:-- "Eccelso Mio Signor: I write this to thee to tell thee amid what bitter anxieties I live.... I believed that so many prayers and tears, and love without measure, would not have been displeasing to God.... Thy great valor has shone as in a Hector or an Achilles." In this letter Vittoria tells him that when the messenger reached her, she was lying on a point of the island ("_I_, in the _body_, my _mind_ always with _thee_," she says), and that the whole atmosphere had been to her that day "like a cavern of black fog," and that "the marine gods seemed to say to Ischia, 'To-day, Vittoria, thou shalt hear of disgrace from the confines: thou now in health and honor, thou shalt be turned to grief; but thy father and husband are saved, though taken prisoners.'" This presentiment she related to her husband's aunt, the Duchessa Francavilla, the Castellana of Ischia, who begged her not to think of it and said, "It would be strange for such a force to be conquered." Just after this conversation between the youthful Marchesa and the Duchessa, the messenger arrived. The psychic science of to-day would see in this occurrence a striking instance of telepathy. In her poetic epistle to her husband, Vittoria also says:-- "A wife ought to follow her husband at home and abroad; if he suffers trouble, she suffers; if he is happy, she is; if he dies, she dies. What happens to one happens to both; equals in life, they are equals in death. His fate is her fate." These letters--in keeping with the times--were, on both sides, expressed in literary rather than in personal form. Pescara, from his captivity, wrote to her a "Dialogue on Love,"--a manuscript for which Visconti notes that he has searched in vain. The Marchesa di Pescara went from Ischia to Naples, after learning of the misfortunes that had overtaken her husband, in order that she might be able constantly to receive direct communication regarding his fate. A few months later the Marchese returned, making the day "brilliant with joy" to Vittoria, but after a year of happiness he was again called to service, and the Marchesa returned to her beloved Ischia. She gave herself to the study of the ancient classics; she wrote poems, and "considered no time of value but so spent," says Rota. The age was one of a general revival of learning. Royalty, the Pope, the princes and nobility were all giving themselves with ardor to this higher culture. Under Dante the Italian language assumed new perfection. This period was to Vittoria one of intense stimulus, and it must have had a formative influence on her gifts and her mental power. Having no children, she adopted a young cousin of her husband, the Marchese del Vasto, to educate and to be the heir of their estates. In 1515, Pescara again returned and the entire island of Ischia was "aflame with bonfires, and the borders of the beautiful shore bright and warm with lights," in honor of the event. Of this event, Vittoria wrote:-- "... My beloved returns to us ... his countenance radiant with piety to God, with deeds born of inward faith." At a magnificent wedding festival in the d'Avalos family about this time, it is recorded that the Marchesa di Pescara "wore a robe of brocaded crimson velvet, with large branches of beaten gold wrought on it, with a headdress of wrought gold and a girdle of beaten gold around her waist." When the coronation of Charles V was to be celebrated at Aix-la-Chapelle the Marchese di Pescara was appointed ambassador to represent the House of Aragon on this brilliant occasion, when the new emperor was to be invested with the crown and the sceptre of Charlemagne. Charles had decided to journey by sea and to visit Henry VIII on the way, an arrangement of which Cardinal Wolsey was aware, although he had kept Henry in ignorance of it, according to those curious mental processes of his mind where his young monarch was concerned. Shakespeare, in the play of "King Henry VIII," describes the meeting of the two kings, which occurred at Canterbury, "at a grand jubilee in honor of the shrine of Thomas à Becket." One historian thus describes this scene:-- "The two handsome young sovereigns rode into Canterbury under the same canopy, the great Cardinal riding directly in front of them, and on the right and left were the proud nobles of Spain and England, among whom was Pescara. The kings alighted from their horses at the west door of the cathedral and together paid their devotions before that rich shrine blazing with jewels. They humbly knelt on the steps worn by the knees of tens of thousands of pilgrims." On the return to Naples of the Marchese di Pescara he told the story of his regal journey to an assemblage of nobles in the Church of Santa Maria di Monte Oliveto, and he then joined the Marchesa in Rome, where she had gone to visit her family and to pay her devotions to Leo X, who had just created Pompeo Colonna a cardinal. Pope Leo aspired to draw around him a court distinguished for its culture and brilliancy in both art and literature. In this court the Marchesa di Pescara shone resplendent. "She was at the height of her beauty, and her charms were sung by the poets of the day," says a contemporary. A year later Leo X died, succeeded by Adrian (who had been tutor to Charles V), to the intense and bitter disappointment of Cardinal Wolsey, who had made the widest--and wiliest--efforts to gratify his own ambition of reigning in the Papal chair. Again the war between France and Italy, that which seemed to be a perpetually smouldering feud, and the Marchese di Pescara, again summoned to battle, was wounded at Pavia. For some time he lay between life and death at Milan, and a messenger was sent to beg Vittoria to come to him. She set out on this journey, leaving Naples in great haste; but on reaching Viterbo another messenger met her with the tidings of the death of the Marchese, which had occurred on Nov. 25, 1525. Overcome with grief, Vittoria was carried back to Rome and for the solace of entire seclusion she sought the cloistered silence of the convent of San Silvestre, which lay at the foot of the Monte Cavallo in Rome, almost adjoining the gardens of the Colonna palace. To the Marchese di Pescara, who had the military rank of general, was given a funeral of great pomp and splendor in Milan, and his body was brought to the famous Naples church of Santa Domenica Maggiore, where it was entombed with the princes and nobles of his house. Before the death of the Marchese there had been a political plot to join the Papal, Venetian, and Milanese forces and rescue Italy from the Emperor's rule, and the Pope himself had sent a messenger to Pescara asking him to unite with the league. The Marchese, Spanish by ancestry and by sympathies, used this knowledge to frustrate the Italian designs and to warn Spain. The Italian historians have execrated him for this act, which they regard as that of a traitor. Vittoria, however, did not take this view apparently, as in a letter to her husband she wrote:-- "Titles and kingdoms do not add to true honor.... I do not desire to be the wife of a king, but I glory in being the wife of that great general who shows his bravery in war and, still more, by magnanimity in peace, surpasses the greatest kings." The inducement of the throne of Naples had been held out to Marchese di Pescara. He evidently regarded this in the nature of a dishonorable bribe, and it is this view which the Marchesa plainly shared. After his death her first impulse was to take the vows of a cloistered nun. The Pope himself intervened to dissuade her, and she consented to enter, only temporarily, the convent of San Silvestre on the Monte Cavallo. In the will of the Marchese di Pescara there was a clause directing that anything in his estate unlawfully acquired should be restored to the owner; and under this, Vittoria gave back to the monastery of Monte Cassino the Monte San Magno that had formerly been its property. From the cloistered shades of the convent Vittoria removed to the family castle of the Colonna at Marino, where, on the shore of this beautiful lake (which was the scenery of Virgil's Æneid), she passed some months, engaged in writing sonnets. Of one of these a translation runs in part:-- "I write solely to assuage my inward grief, which destroys in my heart the light of this world's sun; and not to add light to _mio bel sole_, to his glorified spirit. It is fit that other tongues should preserve his great name from oblivion." In another, perhaps her most perfect sonnet, she beseeches the winds to convey to her beloved the message she sends:-- "_Ch'io di lui sempre pensi; o pianga, o parli_,"--That I always think of him, or weep for him, or speak of him. Again, a year later, Vittoria returned to lovely Ischia, which, as one writer has described, "rises out of the blue billows of the Mediterranean like giant towers. The immense blocks of stone are heaped one upon another, in such a supernatural manner as to give a coloring to the legend, that beneath them, in those vast volcanic caverns, dwells the giant Tifeo." The castle where the Duchessa Francavilla and the Marchesa Pescara lived is built on a towering mass of rock joined to the island by a causeway. The castle includes the palace, a church, and other buildings for the family and their guests and dependants. For some three years the Marchesa did not again leave Ischia. In the mean time volumes of her poems were published. She received the acclamation of all the writers of her time. The crown of immortelles, often laid but on a tomb, was continually pressed upon her brow. She was the most famous woman of her time. Her beauty, her genius, her noble majesty of character impressed the contemporary world. Her days were filled with correspondence with the most distinguished men of the day. Ariosto, Castiglione, Ludovico Dolce, Cardinal Bembo, Cardinal Contarini, and Paolo Giovio were among her nearer circle of friends. [Illustration: CASTELLO DI ALFONSO, ISCHIA _Page 306_] Stormy times fell upon Italy, in all of which the Colonna family bore prominent part, and all of which affected the life of Vittoria Colonna in many ways. Her biography, if written with fulness and accuracy, would be largely a history of the Italy of that time, for her life seemed always inseparably united with great events. In the year 1530 (Clement VII being the Pope) a full Papal pardon had been extended to all the Colonna, and their castles and estates had also been restored to them. For years past Rome had been in a state of conflict. Benvenuto Cellini, who had watched the terrible scenes from Castel San Angelo where he was immured, has described the terrors. The Eternal City, whose population under Leo X had been 90,000, was now--in 1530--reduced to half that number. Palaces and temples had been the scenes of riot and destruction, yet to this very lawlessness of the time the Roman galleries of the present owe their ancient statues, which were uncovered by these assaults. The Coliseum was left in the ruined state in which it is now seen, and by the sale of the stones taken from it the Palazzo Barberini was erected. Vittoria, coming again to Rome and revisiting its classic greatness, exclaimed that happy were they who lived in times so full of grandeur; to which the poet Molza gallantly replied that they were less happy, as they had not known her! Everywhere was she received with the highest honors. She made a tour, visiting Bagni di Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara, where she was the guest of the Duca and Duchessa Ercole in the ducal palace. The Duchessa was the Princesse Renée, the daughter of Louis XII of France, and an ardent friend of Calvin, who visited her in Ferrara. It was to this visit that Longfellow refers in his poem entitled "Michael Angelo," when he pictures Vittoria as sitting for her portrait to the artist and conversing with her friend Giulia, the Duchess of Trajetto, Michael Angelo begs them to resume the conversation interrupted by his entrance, and Vittoria says:-- "Well, first, then, of Duke Ercole, a man Cold in his manners, and reserved and silent, And yet magnificent in all his ways." To which the Duchessa replies:-- "How could the daughter of a king of France Wed such a duke?" MICHAEL ANGELO. "The men that women marry, And why they marry them, will always be A marvel and a mystery to the world." VITTORIA. "And then the Duchess,--how shall I describe her, Or tell the merits of that happy nature Which pleases most when least it thinks of pleasing? Not beautiful, perhaps, in form and feature, Yet with an inward beauty, that shines through Each look and attitude and word and gesture; A kindly grace of manner and behavior, A something in her presence and her ways That makes her beautiful beyond the reach Of mere external beauty; and in heart So noble and devoted to the truth, And so in sympathy with all who strive After the higher life." JULIA. "She draws me to her As much as her Duke Ercole repels me." VITTORIA. "Then the devout and honorable women That grace her court, and make it good to be there; Francesca Bucyronia, the true-hearted, Lavinia della Rovere and the Orsini, The Magdalena and the Cherubina, And Anne de Parthenai, who sings so sweetly; All lovely women, full of noble thoughts And aspirations after noble things. * * * * * With these ladies Was a young girl, Olympia Morata, Daughter of Fulvio, the learned scholar, Famous in all the universities: A marvellous child, who at the spinning-wheel, And in the daily round of household cares, Hath learned both Greek and Latin; and is now A favorite of the Duchess and companion Of Princess Anne. This beautiful young Sappho Sometimes recited to us Grecian odes That she had written, with a voice whose sadness Thrilled and o'ermastered me, and made me look Into the future time, and ask myself What destiny will be hers." JULIA. "And what poets Were there to sing you madrigals, and praise Olympia's eyes?" ... VITTORIA. "None; for great Ariosto is no more." * * * * * JULIA. "He spake of you." VITTORIA. "And of yourself, no less, And of our master, Michael Angelo." MICHAEL ANGELO. "Of me?" VITTORIA. "Have you forgotten that he calls you Michael, less man than angel, and divine? You are ungrateful." MICHAEL ANGELO. "A mere play on words." The Duca and Duchessa of Ferrara invited the most distinguished persons in Venice and Bologna and Lombardy to meet their honored guest. Bishop Ghiberto of Verona besought her to visit that city. Vittoria accepted and was for some time the Bishop's guest in his palace, and she took great interest in the historic city. With the Bishop she visited the ancient Duomo, which in 1160 had been restored by Pope Urban II, and reconsecrated. It was a strong desire of the Marchesa at this time to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; but the journey was then so perilous and so long--none too easy, indeed, at the present time--that she was dissuaded from the attempt. Verona, to do her honor, had a medal struck bearing her portrait. The group of great artists--Titian, Tintoretto, and Giorgione in Venice; Fra Angelico, Bartolommeo, and others of that day--were creating their wonderful works which Vittoria must have seen and enjoyed during this tour. Raphael, whose death had occurred in 1520, Vittoria had, doubtless, known; but whether it was she who was the original of the Muse in his great picture of "Parnassus," as is alleged, is not fully established. [Illustration: DETAIL FROM "PARNASSUS," RAPHAEL STANZE, PALAZZO VATICANO, ROME Raphael Sanzio _Page 311_] "Unto my buried lord I give myself," wrote Vittoria Colonna in one of the sonnets to her husband's memory, and this line is the keynote to her entire life, both as woman and poet. It was no translation of her life into another key, no reckoning by stars that flashed from different skies, when there fell upon her the baptism and crown of that immortal friendship with Michael Angelo. The Marchesa di Pescara returned to Rome, from this notable tour in Northern Italy, in 1538. She was received with the honors that her fame inspired. Michael Angelo was then deeply absorbed in painting his "Last Judgment," in the Capella Sistina. "Every one in Rome took an interest in the progress of this magnificent fresco, from the Pope (who continually visited the artist) down to the humblest of the people. We may imagine Vittoria standing by the great painter to view his sublime work; but Michael Angelo did not require the patronage, even of a Colonna, and it is possible that Vittoria herself first sought out his friendship." In the Casa Buonarroti, in Florence, hangs that exquisite picture painted of Italy's greatest woman poet, in her early youth; and in its rare and precious collection of manuscripts are the letters of Vittoria to the poet and sculptor. Her influence is said to have produced a great change in his religious views, influencing his mind to a more lofty and more spiritual comprehension of the divine laws that govern the universe. Condivi, in referring to this chapter in their lives, has said:-- "In particular he was most deeply attached to the Marchesa di Pescara, of whose divine spirit he was enamoured, and he was beloved by her in return with much affection." It was about 1535 when Michael Angelo left Florence for Rome, appointed by the Pope, Paul III, as the chief architect, sculptor, and painter of the Vatican. He was enrolled in the Pontifical household, and he at once began his work in the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Symonds believes that he must have been engaged upon the "Last Judgment" through 1536, 1537. The great artist was not without a keen wit of his own as well; for on receipt of a letter from Pietro Aretino, from Venice, in September of 1537, with praises of his work that Michael Angelo deemed extravagant, he replied that while he rejoiced in Aretino's commendation, he also grieved; "as having finished a large part of the fresco," he said, "I cannot realize your conception which is so complete that if the Day of Judgment had come and you had been present and seen it with your eyes, your words could not have described it better." Vittoria Colonna now passed some years between Rome and Orvieto, that picturesque town with its magnificent cathedral rich in mediæval art, where she lived in the convent of St. Paolo d'Orvieto. She varied this residence by remaining at times in the convent of San Caterina di Viterbo, in that city. In Rome she had lived both at the convent of Santa Anna and also at the Palazzo Cesarini, which was the home of members of the Colonna family. A sonnet of Michael Angelo's written to Vittoria reflects the feeling that she inspired in him:-- "Da che concetto ha l'arte intera e diva La forma e gli atti d'alcun, poi di quello D'umil materia un semplice modello È 'l primo parto che da quel deriva. Ma nel secondo poi di pietra viva S'adempion le promesse del martello; E sì rinasce tal concetto e bello, Che ma' non è chi suo eterno prescriva. Simil, di me model, nacqu'io da prima; Di me model, per cosa più perfetta Da voi rinascer poi, donna alta e degna. Se 'l poco accresce, 'l mio superchio lima Vostra pietà; qual penitenzia aspetta Mio fiero ardor, se mi gastiga e insegna?" Of this sonnet the following beautiful translation is made by John Addington Symonds:-- "When divine Art conceives a form and face, She bids the craftsman for his first essay To shape a simple model in mere clay: This is the earliest birth of Art's embrace. From the live marble in the second place His mallet brings into the light of day A thing so beautiful that who can say When time shall conquer that immortal grace? Thus my own model I was born to be-- The model of that nobler self, whereto Schooled by your pity, lady, I shall grow. Each overplus and each deficiency You will make good. What penance then is due For my fierce heat, chastened and taught by you?" The correspondence between Vittoria and Michael Angelo was undated, and all that now remains is fragmentary. The great artist, writing to his nephew, Sionardo, in 1554, says:-- "Messer Giovan Francisco Fattucci asked me about a month ago if I possessed any writings of the marchioness. I have a little book bound in parchment which she gave me some ten years ago. It has one hundred and three sonnets, not counting another forty she afterward sent on paper from Viterbo. I had these bound into the same book, and at that time I used to lend them about to many persons so that they are all of them now in print. In addition to these poems I have many letters which she wrote from Orvieto and Viterbo. These, then, are the writings I possess of the marchioness." In Rome, 1545, Michael Angelo thus writes to Vittoria:-- "I desired, lady, before I accepted the things which your ladyship has often expressed the will to give me--I desired to produce something for you with my own hand in order to be as little as possible unworthy of this kindness. I have now come to recognize that the grace of God is not to be bought, and that to keep it waiting is a grievous sin. Therefore I acknowledge my error and willingly accept your favors. When I possess them--not, indeed, because I shall have them in my house, but for that I myself shall dwell in them--the place will seem to encircle me with paradise. For which felicity I shall remain ever more obliged to your ladyship than I am already, if that is possible. "The bearer of this letter will be Urbino, who lives in my service. Your ladyship may inform him when you would like me to come and see the head you promised to show me." With this letter Michael Angelo sent to Vittoria a sonnet which, in the translation made by John Addington Symonds, is as follows:-- "Seeking at least to be not all unfit For thy sublime and boundless courtesy, My lowly thoughts at first were fain to try What they could yield for grace so infinite. But now I know my unassisted wit Is all too weak to make me soar so high, For pardon, lady, for this fault I cry, And wiser still I grow remembering it. Yea, will I see what folly 't were to think That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven, Could e'er be paid by work so frail as mine! To nothingness my art and talent sink; He fails who from his mental stores hath given A thousandfold to match one gift divine." As a gift to Vittoria Colonna, Michael Angelo designed an episode from the Passion of our Lord, which Condivi describes as "a naked Christ at the moment when, taken from the cross, our Lord would have fallen at the feet of His most holy mother if two angels did not support Him in their arms. She sits below the cross with a face full of tears and sorrow, lifting both her widespread arms to heaven while on the stem of the tree above is written this legend: '_Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa._' The cross is of the same kind as that which was carried by the White Friars at the time of the plague of 1348, and afterward deposited in the Church of Santa Croce at Florence." In presenting this cross to her he wrote:-- "Lady Marchioness, being myself in Rome, I thought it hardly fitting to give the Crucified Christ to Messer Tommaso, and to make him an intermediary between your ladyship and me, especially because it has been my earnest wish to perform more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know love needs no taskmaster, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seemed to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about, in order to effect a thing that was not looked for, my purpose has been spoiled. He sins who faith like this so soon forgets." [Illustration: VITTORIA COLONNA, GALLERIA BUONARROTI, FLORENCE _Page 312_] In reply Vittoria Colonna wrote:-- "Unique Master Angelo and my most singular friend: I have received your letter and examined the crucifix which truly hath crucified in my memory every other picture I ever saw. Nowhere could one find another figure of our Lord so well executed, so living, and so exquisitely finished. I cannot express in words how subtly and marvellously it is designed. Wherefore I am resolved to take the work as coming from no other hand but yours.... I have examined it minutely in full light and by the lens and mirror, and never saw anything more perfect." She added:-- "... Your works forcibly stimulate the judgment of all who would look at them. My study of them made me speak of adding goodness to things perfect in themselves, and I have seen now that 'all is possible to him who believes.' I had the greatest faith in God that He would bestow upon you supernatural grace for the making of this Christ. When I came to examine it I found it so marvellous that it surpasses all my expectations. Wherefore, emboldened by your miracles I conceived a great desire for that which I now see marvellously accomplished: I mean that the design is in all parts perfect and consummate. I tell you that I am pleased that the angel on the right hand is by far the fairer, since Michael will place you, with all angels, upon the right hand of the Lord some day. Meanwhile I do not know how else to serve you, than by making orisons to this sweet Christ, whom you have drawn so well and exquisitely, and praying you to hold me yours to command as yours in all and for all." Again Vittoria wrote to him:-- "I beg you to let me have the crucifix a short while in my keeping, even though it be unfinished. I want to show it to some gentlemen who have come from the most reverend, the Cardinal of Mantua. If you are not working will you not come at your leisure to-day and talk with me?" It is an interesting fact to the visitor in the Rome of to-day that the convent of San Silvestre where Vittoria Colonna lived was attached to the church of San Silvestre in Capite, now used as the English-speaking Catholic church in the Eternal City. The wing which was formerly the convent (founded in 1318) is now converted into the central post office. It was in the sacristy of San Silvestre, decorated with frescoes by Domenichino, that a memorable meeting and conversation took place, one Sunday afternoon in those far-away days of nearly five hundred years ago, between Michael Angelo and Francesco d'Ollanda, a Spanish miniature artist,--the meeting brought about by Vittoria Colonna. The Spanish artist was a worshipper of Michael Angelo, who "awakened such a feeling of love," that if d'Ollanda met him in the street "the stars would come out in the sky," he says, "before I would let him go again." This fervent worship was hardly enjoyed by its object, who avoided the Spanish enthusiast. One Sunday, however, d'Ollanda had gone to San Silvestre finding there Tolomei, to whom he was also devoted, and Vittoria Colonna, both of whom had gone to hear the celebrated Fra Ambrosia of Siena expound the Epistles of St. Paul. The Marchesa di Pescara observed that she felt sure their Spanish friend would far rather hear Michael Angelo discuss painting than to hear Fra Ambrosia on the wisdom of St. Paul. Summoning an attendant she directed him to find Michael Angelo and tell him how cool and delightful was the church that morning and to beg him to join Messer Tolomei and herself; but to make no mention of the presence of d'Ollanda. Her woman's tact and her faultless courtesy were successful in procuring this inestimable privilege for the Spanish painter. Michael Angelo came, and began the conversation--which was a monologue, rather, as all three of the friends wished only to listen to the master--by defending artists from the charge of eccentric and difficult methods. With somewhat startling candor Michael Angelo proceeded:-- "I dare affirm that any artist who tries to satisfy the better vulgar rather than men of his own craft will never become a superior talent. For my part, I am bound to confess that even his Holiness wearies and annoys me by begging for too much of my company. I am most anxious to serve him, ... but I think I can do so better by studying at home than by dancing attendance on my legs in his reception room." Another meeting of this little group was appointed for the next Sunday in the Colonna gardens behind the convent, under the shadow of the laurel trees in the air fragrant with roses and orange blossoms, where they sat with Rome spread out like a picture at their feet. That beautiful terrace of the Colonna gardens, to which the visitor in Rome to-day always makes his pilgrimage, with the ruined statues and the broken marble flights of steps, is the scene of this meeting of Vittoria Colonna, Michael Angelo, and Francesco d'Ollanda. On this second occasion the sculptor asserted his belief that while all things are worthy the artist's attention, the real test of his art is in the representation of the human form. He extolled the art of design. He emphasized the essential nature of nobleness in the artist, and added:-- "In order to represent in some degree the adored image of our Lord, it is not enough that a master should be great and able. I maintain that he must also be a man of good conduct and morals, if possible a saint, in order that the Holy Ghost may rain down inspiration on his understanding." Of the relative degree of swiftness in work Michael Angelo said:-- "We must regard it as a special gift from God to be able to do that in a few hours which other men can only perform in many days of labor. But should this rapidity cause a man to fail in his best realization it would be better to proceed slowly. No artist should allow his eagerness to hinder him from the supreme end of art--perfection." Mr. Longfellow, in his unfinished dramatic poem, "Michael Angelo" (to which reference has already been made), has one scene laid in the convent chapel of San Silvestre, in which these passages occur:-- VITTORIA. "Here let us rest awhile, until the crowd Has left the church. I have already sent For Michael Angelo to join us here." MESSER CLAUDIO. "After Fra Bernardino's wise discourse On the Pauline Epistles, certainly Some words of Michael Angelo on Art Were not amiss, to bring us back to earth." * * * * * MICHAEL ANGELO, _at the door_. "How like a Saint or Goddess she appears! Diana or Madonna, which I know not, In attitude and aspect formed to be At once the artist's worship and despair!" VITTORIA. "Welcome, Maestro. We were waiting for you." MICHAEL ANGELO. "I met your messenger upon the way. And hastened hither." VITTORIA. "It is kind of you To come to us, who linger here like gossips Wasting the afternoon in idle talk. These are all friends of mine and friends of yours." MICHAEL ANGELO. "If friends of yours, then are they friends of mine. Pardon me, gentlemen. But when I entered I saw but the Marchesa." Vittoria tells the master that the Pope has granted her permission to build a convent, and Michael Angelo replies:-- "Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow.... ... Yet he beholds Far nobler works who looks upon the ruins Of temples in the Forum here in Rome. If God should give me power in my old age To build for Him a temple half as grand As those were in their glory, I should count My age more excellent than youth itself, And all that I have hitherto accomplished As only vanity." To which Vittoria responds:-- "I understand you. Art is the gift of God, and must be used Unto His glory. That in art is highest Which aims at this." The poet, with his characteristically delicate divination, has entered into the inner spirit of these two immortal friends. Walter Pater, writing of Michael Angelo, truly says:-- "Michael Angelo is always pressing forward from the outward beauty--_il bel del fuor che agli occhi piace_--to apprehend the unseen beauty; _trascenda nella forma universale_--that abstract form of beauty about which the Platonists reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding flesh." Again we find Pater saying:-- "Though it is quite possible that Michael Angelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year 1542, when Michael Angelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent Neo-Catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful and princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpse of them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon, discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, but still more the writings of St. Paul, already following the ways and tasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outward things is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when he visited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in preparation for it, are now in Oxford.... In many ways no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michael Angelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth; Beatrice is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of figured work inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michael Angelo's poems frost and fire are almost the only images--the refining fire of the goldsmith; once or twice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock which it afterwards consumes." Visconti notes that among Italian poets, Vittoria Colonna was the first to make religion a subject of poetic treatment, and the first to introduce nature's ministry to man into poetry. Rota, her Italian biographer, states that she died in February of 1547, in the Palazzo Cesarini. This palace is in Genzano, on Lago di Nemi, and has been one of the Colonna estates; but from Visconti and other authorities it is evident that she died in Rome, either in the convent of Santa Anna or in the palace of Cesarini, the husband of her kinswoman, Giulio Colonna, which must have been near the convent in Trastevere, the old portion of Rome across the Tiber. Visconti records that on the last evening of her life when Michael Angelo was beside her, she said: "I die. Help me to repeat my last prayer. I do not now remember the words." He clasped her hand and repeated it to her, while her own lips moved, she gazed intently on him, smiled and passed away. This translation has been made of Vittoria Colonna's last prayer:-- "Grant, I beseech Thee, O Lord, that I may ever worship Thee with such humility of mind as becometh my lowliness and such elevation of mind as Thy loftiness demandeth.... I entreat, O Most Holy Father, that Thy most living flame may so urge me forward that, not being hindered by any mortal imperfections, I may happily and safely again return to Thee." It is recorded by an authority that her body, "enclosed in a casket of cypress wood, lined with embroidered velvet," was placed in the chapel of Santa Anna which has since been destroyed. Visconti says: "She desired, with Christian humility, to be buried in the manner in which the sisters were buried when they died. And, as I suppose, her body was placed in the common sepulchre of the nuns of Santa Anna." Grimm declares that he cannot discover the place of her burial, and Visconti declares that her tomb remains unknown. But it is apparently a fact that the body of Vittoria Colonna is entombed in the sacristy of Santa Domenica Maggiore in Naples, the sarcophagus containing it resting by the side of the one containing the body of her husband, Francesco d'Avalos, Marchese of Pescara. This church is one of the finest in Naples, with twenty-seven chapels and twelve altars, and it is here that nearly all the great nobles of the kingdom of Naples are entombed. Here is the tomb of the learned Thomas Aquinas and here is shown, in relief, the miracle of the crucifix by Tommaso de Stefani, which--as the legend runs--thus addressed the learned doctor:-- "_Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma; quam ergo mercedem recipies?_" To which he replied: "_Non aliam nisi te._" It is in the sacristy in which lie all the Princes of the House of Aragon that the sarcophagi of the Marchese and the Marchesa di Pescara are placed side by side in the high gallery near the ceiling. The altar has a fine Annunciation ascribed to Andrea da Salerno. The ceiling (whose coloring is as fresh and vivid as if painted yesterday) is by Solimena. Around the walls near the ceiling are two balconies or galleries, filled with very large wooden sarcophagi, whose scarlet velvet covers have faded into yellow browns with pink shades, many of which are tattered and are falling to pieces. The casket containing the body of Fernando Francesco d'Avalos, Marchese of Pescara (the husband of Vittoria Colonna), has on it an inscription by Ariosto; and his portrait (showing in profile a young face with blonde hair and a full reddish brown beard) and a banner, also, is suspended above the casket. That containing the body of the Marchesa, his wife (Vittoria Colonna), has an aperture at the top where the wood is worn away and the embalmed form, partly crumbled, may be seen. This seems strange to the verge of fantasy, but it is, apparently, true. The writer of this volume visited the Church of Santa Domenica Maggiore in Naples in December of 1906, and was assured by the sacristan that this sarcophagus contains the body of the Marchesa. Inquiries were then made of other prelates and of the Archbishop, who gave the same assurance. Later, learned archæologists in Rome were appealed to, regarding this assertion made in Naples, and the consensus of opinion obtained declares their assertion true. Professor Lanciani has himself publicly expressed this conviction. Still, it remains a curious question as to when this sarcophagus was placed in the sacristy, for the date goes back into long-buried centuries. Adjoining Santa Domenica Maggiore is the monastery in which Thomas Aquinas lived and lectured (in 1272), and the cell of the great doctor of philosophy is now made into a chapel. His lectures called together men of the highest rank and learning and were attended by the king and the members of the royal family. The entire locality of this church is replete with historic association. The most distinguished of the nobility of Naples have, for centuries, held their chapels in this church, and in these are many notable examples of Renaissance sculpture. The Accadémia des Arcades of Rome, founded in the seventeenth century to do honor to lyric art, celebrated the placing of a bust of Vittoria Colonna in a gallery of the Capitoline, in May of 1865, by a resplendent poetic festa. According to the gentle, leisurely customs of the land, where it is always afternoon and time has no value, thirty-two poets read their songs, written in Latin or in Italian, for this occasion, which were published in a sumptuous volume to be preserved in the archives of the Arcadians, who take themselves more seriously than the world outside quite realizes. This bust of Vittoria Colonna was the gift of the Duca and Duchessa of Torlonia of that period. It was crowned with laurel, as that of Petrarca had been, and the government took official recognition of the event. Goethe was made a member of this Accadémia that regarded itself as reflecting the glories of the Golden Age of Greece, and which was a century old at the time of his visit to Italy. "No stranger of any consequence was readily permitted to leave Rome without being invited to join this body," he recorded, and he wrote a humorous description of the formalities of his initiation. Mrs. Horatio Greenough was honored by being made a member of this Accadémia in recognition of her musical accomplishments, and the record of it is placed on the memorial marble over her grave in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Every year, on Tasso's birthday (April 25), the Accadémia holds a festa in a little amphitheatre near "Tasso's oak," on the Janiculum, at which his bust is crowned with laurel. The gardens in which the seventeenth-century Arcadians disported themselves are now known among the Romans as _il Bosco Parrasio degli Arcadi_. Throughout Italy the fame of Vittoria Colonna only deepens with every succeeding century. Her nobility of character, her lofty spirituality of life, fitly crowned and perfected her intellectual force and brilliant gifts. Although from the customs of the time the Marchesa lived much in convents, she never, in any sense, save that of her fervent piety, lived the conventual life. Her noble gifts linked her always to the larger activities, and her gifts and rank invested her with certain demands and responsibilities that she could not evade. She was one of the messengers of life, and her place as a brilliant and distinguished figure in the contemporary world was one that the line of destiny, which pervades all circumstances and which, in her case, was so marked, absolutely constrained her to fill. She had that supreme gift of the lofty nature, the power of personal influence. Her exquisite courtesy and graciousness of manner, her simple dignity and unaffected sincerity, her delicacy of divination and her power of tender sympathy and liberal comprehension all combined to make her the ideal companion, counsellor, and friend, as well as the celebrity of letters and lyric art. No poet has more exquisitely touched the friendship between Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo than has Margaret J. Preston, in a poem supposed to be addressed to the sculptor by Vittoria, in which occur the lines:-- "We twain--one lingering on the violet verge, And one with eyes raised to the twilight peaks-- Shall meet in the morn again. * * * * * ... Supremest truth I gave; Quick comprehension of thine unsaid thought, Reverence, whose crystal sheen was never blurred By faintest film of over-breathing doubt; ... helpfulness Such as thou hadst not known of womanly hands; And sympathies so urgent, they made bold To press their way where never mortal yet Entrance had gained,--even to thy soul." This is the _Page de Conti_ that one reads in the air as he sails past Ischia on the violet sea; and the _chant d'amour_ of the sirens catches the echo of lines far down the centuries:-- "I understood not, when the angel stooped, Whispering, 'Live on! for yet one joyless soul, Void of true faith in human happiness, Waits to be won by thee, from unbelief.' "Now, all is clear. For _thy_ sake I am glad I waited. Not that some far age may say,-- '_God's benison on her, since she was the friend Of Michael Angelo!_'" _So sometimes comes to soul and sense The feeling which is evidence That very near about us lies The realm of spiritual mysteries. The sphere of the supernal powers Impinges on this world of ours. The low and dark horizon lifts, To light the scenic terror shifts; The breath of a diviner air Blows down the answer of a prayer:-- That all our sorrow, pain, and doubt A great compassion clasps about, And law and goodness, love and force, Are wedded fast beyond divorce. Then duty leaves to love its task, The beggar Self forgets to ask; With smile of trust and folded hands, The passive soul in waiting stands To feel, as flowers the sun and dew, The One true Life its own renew._ WHITTIER. "_For Thou only art holy. Thou only art the Lord. Thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the Glory of God the Father._" _Sometimes in heaven-sent dreams I do behold A city with its turrets high in air, Its gates that gleam with jewels strange and rare, And streets that glow with burning of red gold; And happy souls, through blessedness grown bold, Thrill with their praises all the radiant air, And God himself is light, and shineth there On glories tongue of man hath never told._ _And in my dreams I thither march, nor stay To heed earth's voices, howsoe'er they call, Or proffers of the joys of this brief day, On which so soon the sunset shadows fall; I see the Gleaming Gates, and toward them press-- What though my path lead through the Wilderness?_ LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. V VOICES OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI Oh, Italy! thy strength, thy power, thy crown Lie in the life that in Assisi stirs The heart, with impulse of self-sacrifice; Where still St. Francis gathers weary souls In his great love, which reaches out to all. ... His blessing falls In clear sweet tones: "_Benedicat tibi Convertat vultum suum ad te et Det Pacem!_" Hushed and holy silence breathes About the wanderer who lifts his heart To catch the echo of that voice of love. CELIA RICHMOND. The mystic pilgrimage to Assisi, the "Seraphic City," prefigures itself almost as a journey to the Mount of Vision. "Any line of truth that leads us above materialism," says Dr. Wilberforce, Venerable Archdeacon of Westminster Abbey, "that forces us to think, that encourages the imagination to pierce the world's cobwebs, that forces us to remember that we are enwrapped by the supernatural, is helpful and stimulating. A human life lived only in the seen and felt, with no sense of the invisible, is a fatally impoverished life, a poor, blind, wingless life, but to believe that ever around us is a whole world full of spiritual beings; that this life, with its burdens, is but the shadow which precedes the reality; that here we are but God's children at school, is an invigorating conviction, full of hope, productive of patience and fruitful in self-control." To an age imprisoned in the fear of God the "sweet saint," Francis, brought the message of the love of God. To an age crushed under the abuses of religion as an organization of feudal bishops and ecclesiastics, St. Francis brought the message of hope and of joy. He revealed to his age the absolute reality of the spiritual world that surrounds us. He was born into a time when there existed on the one hand, poverty and misery; on the other, selfish and debasing self-indulgence of wealth and its corresponding oppression of the poor. The Church itself was a power for conquest and greed. Its kingdom was of this world. St. Bernard and others had nobly aimed to effect a reform and had illustrated by their own lives the beautiful example of simplicity and unselfishness, but their work failed in effectiveness and permanent impress. "Oh, beauty of holiness! Of self-forgetfulness, of lowliness." Not only in beauty, but in power does it stand. St. Francis brought to the sad and problematic conditions of his time that resistless energy of infinite patience, of a self-control based on insight into the divine relationships of life, and of unfailing fidelity to his high purpose. Through good report or through evil report he kept the faith, and pressed onward to the high calling of God. The twelfth and the thirteenth centuries had been a period of religious unrest and chaos. As Archdeacon Wilberforce has so impressively said in the words quoted from him, a life lived with no sense of the invisible is blind and impoverished. The movement initiated by St. Francis proclaimed anew the divine grace and love. "Tokens are dead if the things live not. The light everlasting Unto the blind is not, but is born of the eye that has vision." Something not unlike this trend of thought must drift through the mind of every one who journeys through the lovely Umbrian country to Assisi, one of those picturesquely beautiful hill towns of Italy whose romantic situation impresses the visitor. Seen from a little distance, one could hardly imagine how it could be reached unless he were the fortunate possessor of an airship. The entire region is most picturesque in character. Journeying from Rome to Assisi there is a constant ascent from the Campagna to the Apennines, and the road passes through wild defile and valley with amethyst peaks shining fair against the sky, with precipitous rocks, and the dense growth of oak and pine trees. In some places the valley is so narrow that the hills, on either side, rise almost within touch of the hand from the car window. The hill towns are frequent, and the apex of these towns is invariably crowned with a castle, a cathedral, or a ruin, and around it, circling in terraces, is built the town. The charm largely vanishes when fairly in these circling roads, for on either side are high walls, so that one's view is completely bounded by them; but from the summit and from the upper floors of the houses the most beautiful views are obtained. The Umbrian region, in which are located Perugia, Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Spoleto, Terni, Narni, and others, is simply the gem region of all Italy. The Umbrians are the most ancient of the Italian people, and Assisi claims to have been founded eight hundred and sixty-five years before the founding of Rome. It was the scene of constant warfare, and the streets are all underlaid by subterranean passages, in which the inhabitants could disappear from their enemies. To this ancient Umbrian city, from which went out the life and light that carried wonderful currents of vitality and illumination to all Italy and into almost all parts of the world, one comes as to a special and a sacred pilgrimage. For this mediæval town, perched on the top of a rocky hill, is the birthplace of St. Francis, the founder of the Franciscan order; in it were the scenes of his early life, and here, in 1226, at the age of forty-four years, he died. The convent-church of San Francesco, built to his memory in 1230; the lower church, completed at that date, while the upper was finished in 1253; the magnificent Cathedral of Santa Maria Degli Angeli, completed in 1640; the Church of Santa Chiara and the Duomo, are the points of interest. [Illustration: SAN FRANCESCAN CONVENT-CHURCH, ASSISI _Page 346_] The purple Apennines, on one spur of which Assisi is built, are a picturesque feature of lovely Umbria. The old houses of Assisi rise white in the sunshine. The ancient walls still surround the city, and its towers stand as they stood before the eyes of St. Francis, almost seven centuries ago. The peak of Mt. Subasio, a neighboring peak of the Apennines, looms above the colossal rock that crowns the hill around whose top Assisi clusters in winding terraces. The massive pile of the Francescan church and monastery--the two churches, one above the other--forms an architectural group whose imposing aspect arrests the eye of every traveller for miles around. The pointed arches of the cloisters and the square campanile contrast rather than blend in an effective and harmonious manner and resemble military fortifications rather than an edifice of the church. The old walls still surround Assisi, and the houses all rise white under the blue Italian sky. The narrow streets, hardly wide enough for one carriage to pass another, are so intricate in their curves as they climb the steep hill, that it requires a faith hardly less than the traditional degree said to move mountains to lead the visitor to suppose that he will ever emerge from one that he has entered. Many of the houses along these curious thoroughfares have no windows, the only light and air coming through the open door. The bells from the campanile of the Francescan convent-church, from the Duomo and from the Church of Santa Chiara ring every quarter of an hour; and this constant clash of bells is almost the only sound that breaks the silence of the mediæval town, which lends itself to visions and to dreams. On the very air is stamped the impress of St. Francis. His personality, his teachings, his faith pervaded the atmosphere in a way that no one could believe until he had himself entered into the experience. In narration it cannot but seem like a pleasing and half-poetic fancy; but the lingerer in this shrine of religion and art will realize that the actual personality of the man who trod these streets nearly seven hundred years ago is strangely before him. Canon Knox Little, in a series of lectures on St. Francis of Assisi delivered in the Ladye Chapel of Worcester Cathedral a few years since, says of the panorama of the town:-- "The scene which from Assisi presented itself daily to his youthful eyes must have had, did have, as we know, a lasting effect upon his mind. From thence the eye surveys a noble coronet of stately mountains. You look from Radicofani, above Trena, to Monte Catria, famous as the scene of some of Dante's saddest times of solitude, and ever is the eye satisfied with the grace and grandeur of the curves of mountain outline, and the changing hues of an incomparable sky. There are rivers and cities and lakes,--from Thrasymene, just hidden by a line of crests, to the Paglia and Tiber beneath, where Orvieto crowns its severe and lonely rock. With the changing lights and shadows always beautiful in the vivid spring or burning summer, tender-tinted autumn or clear and sparkling winter, with the bright and pure and buoyant atmosphere always giving life and vigor, what spot on earth more fitted as the birthplace of the saint who was, above all things, bright and tender and strong?" Assisi was an important town in the twelfth century when Francis, the son of Pietro Bernardone di Mercanti, wandered over its hills, and after severe fasting and prayer communed with God. Born in the midst of the constant warfare between Assisi and Perugia, he was first a soldier. He was captured and thrown into prison, and it was a remarkable dream, or vision, that came to him before he was set free, that determined his life of consecration. Tradition invested his birth with legends, one of which is, that in his infancy an aged man came to the door and begged to be permitted to take the child in his arms, prophesying that he was destined to accomplish a great work. Pietro Bernardone was a wealthy merchant of Assisi. Pica, the mother of Francis, is said to have been of noble origin and of a deeply religious nature. The early youth of Francis was given to games, festivals, and pleasures that degenerated into dissipation, but the mother continually affirmed her assurance that, if it pleased God, her son would become a Christian. In this atmosphere was nurtured "the sweet-souled saint of mediæval Italy," who is described as a figure of magical power, whose ardent temperament and mystic loveliness attracted to him all men. There is also a legend that Pica went to pray at the Portiuncula and that, for seven years, she prayed for a son. Her prayer was answered in the coming of the infant who was to be the great saint of all the ages. Francis, in his childhood, also knelt and prayed at this shrine. In the year 1211, when Francis was twenty-nine years of age and had entered on his ministry, this chapel was given to him, "and no sooner had they come to live here," it is said, "than the Lord multiplied their number from day to day." At one time he had gone to his devotions in great depression of spirits, "when, suddenly, an unspeakable ecstasy filled his breast. 'Be comforted, my dearest,' he said, 'and rejoice in the Lord, and let us not be sad that we are few; for it has been shown to me by God that you shall increase to a great multitude and shall go on increasing to the end of the world. I see a multitude of men coming to me from every quarter--French, Spaniards, Germans, English--each in their different tongues encouraging the others.'" At a distance of perhaps a mile and a half from Assisi, down in the valley near the railroad station, four holy pilgrims founded a shrine in the fourth century. Later, on this site, St. Benedict erected a tiny chapel, called "St. Maria della Portiuncula" (St. Mary of the Little Patron), and once, when praying in the chapel, Benedict had a vision of a vast crowd of people kneeling in ecstasy, chanting hymns of praise, while outside greater multitudes waited to kneel before the shrine, and he took this to mean that a great saint would one day be honored there. So the legends, still conversationally told in Assisi, run on and are locally current. Undoubtedly the dwellers in this curious old town, whose streets have hardly one level spot but climb up and down the steep hillside, realize that their saint is their title to fame and their revenue as well; yet through all the tales there breathes a certain sincerity and simplicity of worship. The little dark primitive shops teem with relics, which make, it is true, a great draft on imagination, and by what miracle modern photography has contrived to present the saint of Assisi in various impressive attitudes and groups it would be as well not to inquire too closely. It is a part of the philosophy of travel to take the goods the gods provide, and the blending of amused tolerance and unsuspected depths of reverential devotion by which the visitor will find himself moved, while in Assisi, can hardly be described. For, surely, here "... there trod The whitest of the saints of God," and Catholic or Protestant, one equally enters into the beauty of his memory. The double and triple arches of the convent church enclose cloistered walls continually filled with visitors. No shrine in Italy holds such mysterious power. Simplicity and joy were the two keynotes of the life taught by St. Francis. "Poverty," he asserted, "is the happy state of life in which men are set free from the trammels of conventionalism, and can breathe the pure air of God's love. The richest inward life is enjoyed when life is poorest outwardly. Be poor," he continued, "try a new principle; be careless of having and getting; try _being_, for a change. Our life in the world ought to be such that any one on meeting us should be constrained to praise the heavenly Father. Be not an occasion of wrath to any one," he often said, "but by your gentleness may all be led to press onward to good works." The supreme aim of Francis was that of service to humanity. He gave himself with impassioned fervor to this one work. For him there were no ideals of cloistered seclusion or of devotion to learning and art, but the ideal alone to uplift humanity. It was literally and simply, indeed, the Christ ideal. Of the "Rule" made, one of his biographers says:-- "Amid all these encouragements the Rule was made. It consists, like other monastic rules, of the three great vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, differing only in so far that the poverty ordained by Francis was absolute. In other rules, though the individual was allowed to possess nothing, the community had often rich possessions, and there was no reason why the monks should not fare sumptuously and secure to themselves many earthly enjoyments, notwithstanding their individual destitution and their vow. But among the Brothers Minor there was not to be so much as a provision secured for the merest daily necessities. Day by day they were to live by God's providence, eating what was given to them, taking no thought how they were to be fed, or wherewithal clothed; 'neither gold nor silver in your purses;' not even the scrip to collect fragments in--as if God could not provide for every returning necessity. There had been monasteries in Italy for centuries, and the Benedictines were already a great and flourishing community; but this absolute renunciation of all things struck a certain chill to the hearts of all who heard of it, except the devoted band who had no will but that of Francis. His friend, the Bishop of Assisi, was one of those who stumbled at this novel and wonderful self-devotion. 'Your life, without a possession in the world, seems to me most hard and terrible,' said the compassionate prelate. 'My lord,' said Francis, 'if we had possessions, arms and protection would be necessary to us.' There was a force in this response which perhaps we can scarcely realize, but the Assisan bishop, who knew something of the temper of the lords of Umbria, and knew how lonely were the brethren dwelling on the church lands--the little plot (Portiuncula) a whole half league from the city gates--understood and perceived the justice of the reply. "Another grand distinction of the Rule drawn up by Francis was the occupation it prescribed to its members. They were not to shut themselves up, or to care first for their own salvation. They were to preach--this was their special work; they were to proclaim repentance and the remission of sins; they were to be heralds of God to the world, and proclaim the coming of His kingdom. It is not possible to suppose that when he thus began to organize the mind of Francis did not make a survey of the establishments already in existence--the convents bound by the same three great vows, where life at this moment was going on so placidly, with flocks and herds and vineyards to supply the communities, and studious monks in their retirement, safe from all secular anxieties, fostering all the arts in their beginning, and carrying on the traditions of learning; while all around them the great unquiet, violent world heaved and struggled, yet within the convent walls there was leisure and peace. Blessed peace and leisure it was often, let us allow, preserving for us the germs of many good things we now enjoy, and raising little centres of safety and charity and brotherly kindness through the country in which they were placed. But such quiet was not in the nature of Francis. So far as we can make out, he had thought little of himself--even of his own soul to be saved--all his life. The trouble on his mind had been what to do, how sufficiently to work for God and to help men. His fellow creatures were dear to him; he gave them his cloak from his shoulders many a day, and the morsel from his own lips, and would have given them the heart from his bosom had that been possible." These are the "voices" that still echo in the air of Assisi. In the suburbs is still shown the spot where the chapel of St. Damian stood up a rocky path on the hillside in an olive grove. It was here that the scene of the miracle of the crucifix is laid. Before the altar Francis knelt, praying: "Great and Glorious Father, and thou, Lord Jesus, I pray ye, shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind. May I in all things act in accordance with thy holy will." It is recorded that while he thus knelt in deep prayer, he was unable to turn his eyes from the cross, conscious that something marvellous was taking place. The image of the Saviour assumed life; the eyes turned attentively on him; a voice spoke accepting his service and he felt at once endowed with the most marvellous tide of vitality, of joy, and of exhilaration. At this moment he entered on that life whose impress is left on the ages. Of the character and the peculiar quality of its influence Mrs. Oliphant well says:-- "It is not always possible to follow with our sympathy that literal, childlike rendering of every incident in the life of the Master, which sometimes looks fantastical and often unmeaning. He was a man of his time, and could live only under the conditions which that time allowed. He made visible to a literal, practical, unquestioning age the undeniable and astounding fact that the highest of all beings chose a life of poverty, hardship, and humbleness; that He chose submission instead of resistance, love instead of oppression, peace and forgiveness instead of revenge and war. Christ had died in their hearts, as said the legend of that Christmas at Greccia; and, as in one of the bold and artless pictures just then beginning to yield to a more refined and subtle art, Francis set forth before the world the image of his Master. The Son of man was lifted up, as on another cross, before the eyes of Umbria, before all Italy, warlike and wily, priest and baron, peasant and Pope. In this world Francis knew nothing, acknowledged nothing, cared for nothing save Christ and Him crucified--except, indeed, Christ's world, the universe redeemed, the souls to be saved, the poor to be comforted, the friends to be cherished, the singing birds and bubbling fountains, the fair earth and the sweet sky. Courteous, tender, and gentle as any paladin, sweet-tongued and harmonious as any poet, liberal as any prince, was the barefooted beggar and herald of God. We ask no visionary reverence for the Stigmata, no wondering belief in any miracle. As he stood, he was as great a miracle as any then existing under God's abundant, miraculous heavens; more wonderful than are the day and night, the sun and the dew; only less wonderful than that great Love which saves the world, and which it was his aim and destiny to reflect and show forth." That mystic union to which all the ages attest, the union that may, at any moment, be formed between the soul and God, that mystery which the church calls conversion and which finds its perfect interpretation in the words of St. Paul, when he said, that if any man be in Christ he is a new creation, had been accomplished in the life of Francis. He realized the fulness of the knowledge of God's will; he longed only for wisdom and for spiritual understanding. Nor is this experience one to be relegated to the realm of miracle. It is simply entering into the supreme completeness of life. It is not alone St. Paul, but every man, who may truly say, "I can do all things through Christ, who strengtheneth me." Nor does this experience, when translated aright into daily life and action, require any abnormal form of expression. It does not, in its truest significance, mean a life apart from the ordinary duties, but rather it means that these duties shall be fulfilled in the larger and nobler way. The exceptional man may be called to be the standard bearer; to renounce all domestic ties and give his service to the world; but such a life as this differs only in degree from that which in the ordinary home and social relations finds ample means for its best expression. The persistent aim after perfection should be the keynote of every life. No one should be satisfied to hold as his supreme ideal any lesser standard of ultimate achievement than is involved in the divine command, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." This is the soul's ideal, whatever ages and eternities it may require for it to recognize this trackless path. St. Francis recognized joy as a factor of the nobler life. "It was his constant effort," writes one biographer, "that there should be bright looks and cheerful tones about him. To one of his brethren, who had the habit of walking about sadly with his head drooping, he said,--it is evident, with a spark of the impatience natural to his own vivacious spirit,--'You may surely repent of your sins, my brother, without showing your grief so openly. Let your sorrow be between God and you: pray to Him to pardon you by His mercy, and to restore to your soul the joy of His salvation. But before me and the others be always cheerful, for it does not become a servant of God to have an air of melancholy and a face full of trouble.'" An incident in the early life of St. Francis, which had determining significance, was his meeting with Dominic. The story is told "that Dominic, praying in a church in Rome, saw, in a vision, our Lord rise from the right hand of the Father in wrath, wearied at last with the contradiction of sinners, with a terrible aspect and three lances in his hand, each one of which was to destroy from the face of the earth a distinct class of offenders. But while the dreamer gazed at this awful spectacle, the Virgin Mother arose and pleaded for the world, declaring that she had two faithful servants whom she was about to send into it to bring sinners to the feet of the Saviour; one of these was Dominic himself, the other was a poor man, meanly clad, whom he had never seen before. This vision came to the devout Spaniard, according to the legend, during the night, which he spent, as he was wont, in a church, in prayer. Next morning, while he mused on the dream which had been sent to him, his eye fell all at once upon a stranger in a brown tunic, of aspect as humble and modest as his garb, coming into the same church to pray. Dominic at once ran to him, fell on his neck, and, saluting him with a kiss, cried, 'Thou art my companion: thy work and mine is the same. If we stand by each other, nothing can prevail against us.'" No magic mirror, however, revealed to Francis the wonderful panorama of his future. No sibyl turned the leaves of the records yet to unfold. "He was preparing himself for a life of penitence rather than a life of activity," in the opinion of Paul Sabatier, and he had dreamed no dream of becoming a religious founder. He was so entirely without any personal ambition, save that of being obedient to the Heavenly Vision, that this absolute consecration of purpose enabled the divine power to work through him without obstruction. He became a very perfect instrument, so to speak, in the divine hand. After repairing the little chapel called the Portiuncula, on the level ground at the foot of the hill, some two miles from Assisi, his plan was to there pass his time in meditation and prayer. But the legend runs that on the feast of St. Mathias (February 24), in the winter of 1209, a Benedictine monk was celebrating mass and on his turning to read, "Wherever ye go preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand," Francis was profoundly and peculiarly impressed, and he exclaimed: "This is what I desire, O Father; from this day forth I set myself to put this command in practice." He felt that Jesus himself had spoken to him through the priest. Love and sacrifice became to him the supreme ideals, and in this moment, in that poor and bare little chapel, was inaugurated one of the greatest and most far-reaching religious movements of the entire world. "Not always as the whirlwind's rush On Horeb's mount of fear, Not always as the burning bush To Midian's shepherd seer, Not as the awful voice which came To Israel's prophet bards, Nor as the tongues of cloven flame, Nor gift of fearful words,-- "Not always thus with outward sign Of fire or voice from Heaven The message of a truth divine, The call of God is given!" That great ministry of St. Francis, whose influence pervades all time,--that lies between the opening years of the thirteenth and the opening years of the twentieth centuries,--was initiated the next morning in Assisi, when Francis preached for the first time. He spoke simply, emphasizing the truths he had learned to realize through his own experience: the absolute duty of following after perfection; the importance of realizing the shortness of life and the need of repentance. The first disciple of Francis was a wealthy resident of Assisi, named Bernardo. He was impressed with the conviction that he should distribute his possessions and unite with Francis in all his aims and work. Without definite organization, others joined them. They passed that spring and summer going up and down the country, sometimes assisting the harvesters and haymakers, and everywhere entering into the common life of the people. The Bishop of Assisi, however, remonstrated with Francis, saying that to him it seemed very harsh and unwise to try to live without owning anything. To which Francis replied that he did not desire temporal possessions, as these required arms for their defence and were an obstacle to the love of God and one's neighbor. It has remained for later years to discern the still truer significance of the teachings of Jesus, that neither possessions nor the lack of possessions form the real test, but the use which is made of them. As spiritual insight is developed it is more and more clearly realized that the quality of the life lived is the sole matter of importance, and not the conditions that surround it. The brotherhood increased. The abbot of the Benedictines on Monte Subasio ceded to Francis and his order the little chapel called the Portiuncula, now enclosed within the vast and magnificent church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. M. Paul Sabatier, in his admirable biography of St. Francis, points out clearly that the founder of the Franciscans contemplated a laboring and not a mendicant order. During the decade 1211 to 1221, which Francis and his followers passed at the Portiuncula, a portion of the time was constantly passed in industrial pursuits. "With all his gentleness, Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity toward the idle," says Sabatier, "and he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused to work." Although Francis espoused poverty, declaring that she was his bride, he was unfalteringly loyal to the ideals of honest industry and integrity. [Illustration: ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI, THE DUOMO, ASSISI Giovanni Dupré _Page 366_] The mystic legends of the life of their saint that abound in Assisi are touched with poetic romance in that a companion figure is always seen by his side, that of Santa Chiara. Not more inseparable in popular thought are Dante and Beatrice, or Petrarca and Laura, than are Francis and Clara. Their statues stand side by side in the Duomo; they are represented together by both painter and sculptor in the churches of Santa Chiara and Santa Maria degli Angeli in the old hill town. Chiara was the daughter of a noble family, and as a girl of sixteen, coming under the influence of Francis from hearing one of his sermons, she, too, became one of his followers and left her father's palace in Assisi to take the vows of perpetual and voluntary poverty at the altar of the Portiuncula. Followed by two women, she passed swiftly through the town in the dead of the night, and through dark woods, her hurrying figure seeming like some spirit driven by winds towards an unknown future. One thing alone was clear before her--that she was nearing the abode of Francis Bernardone whose preaching at San Giorgio only a month before had thrilled her, inspiring her in this strange way to seek the life he had described in fiery words. Just as she came in sight of the Portiuncula the chanting of the brethren, which had reached her in the wood, suddenly ceased, and they came out with lighted torches in expectation of her coming. Swiftly and without a word she passed in to attend the midnight mass which Francis was to serve, and the scene is thus described:-- "The ceremony was simple, wherein lies the charm of all things Franciscan. The service over and the last blessing given, St. Francis led Clare toward the altar, and with his own hands cut off her long, fair hair and unclasped the jewels from her neck. But a few minutes more and a daughter of the proud house of Scifi stood clothed in the brown habit of the order, the black veil of religion falling about her shoulders, lovelier far in this nun-like severity than she had been when decked out in all her former luxury of silken gowns and precious gems. "It was arranged that Clare was to go afterward to the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo, near Bastia, about an hour's walk farther on in the plain. So when the final vows had been taken, St. Francis took her by the hand and they passed out of the chapel together just as dawn was breaking, while the brethren returned to their cells gazing half sadly, as they passed, at the coils of golden hair and the little heap of jewels which still lay upon the altar cloth." Clara founded a convent and lived as its abbess, and the great church of Santa Chiara is built on the site of this convent. She was born in Assisi in 1194, and died in 1253, surviving Francis by twenty-seven years. Her father was the Count Favorini Scifi, and he had destined his daughter--who had great beauty--to a rich and brilliant marriage. He violently opposed her choice of the religious life, but no earthly power, she declared, should sever her from it. The beauty of the lifelong friendship between Francis and Clara is thus touched upon by Mrs. Oliphant:-- "It was one of those tender and touching friendships which are to the student of history like green spots in the desert; and which gave to the man and the woman thus voluntarily separated from all the joys of life a certain human consolation in the midst of their hardships. They can have seen each other but seldom, for it was one of the express stipulations of the Franciscan Rule that the friars should refrain from all society with women, and have only the most sparing and reserved intercourse even with their sisters in religion. And Francis was no priest, nor had he the privilege of hearing confession and directing the spiritual life of his daughter in the faith. But he sent to her to ask enlightenment from her prayers, when any difficulty was in his way. He went to see her when he was in trouble; especially once on his way to Rieti to have an operation performed on his eyes. Once the two friends ate together at a sacramental meal, the pledge and almost the conclusion on earth of that tenderest, most disinterested, and unworldly love which existed between them. That he was sure of her sympathy in all things, of her prayers and spiritual aid, whatsoever he might be doing, wheresoever he might be, no doubt was sweet to Francis in all his labors and trials. As he walked many a weary day past that church of St. Damian, every stone of which was familiar to him, and many laid with his own hands, must not his heart have warmed at thought of the sister within, safe from all conflict with the world, upon whose fellow-feeling he could rely absolutely as man can rely only on woman? The world has jeered at the possibility of such friendships from its earliest age; and yet they have always existed,--one of the most exquisite and delicate of earthly ties. Gazing back into that far distance over the graves, not only of those two friends, but of a hundred succeeding generations, a tear of grateful sympathy comes into the student's eye. He is glad to believe that, all those years, Francis could see in his comings and goings the cloister of Clara; and that this sacred gleam of human fellowship,--love purified of all self-seeking,--tender, visionary, celestial affection, sweetened their solitary lives." Legends innumerable, attesting supernormal manifestations regarding Francis, sprang up and have been perpetuated through the ages. One is as follows:-- "Hardly more than three years from the moment when the pale penitent was hooted through Assisi amid the derisive shouts of the people, and driven with blows and curses into confinement in his own father's house, we find that it has already become his custom on Sunday to preach in the cathedral; and that, from his little convent at the Portiuncula, Francis has risen into influence in the whole country, which no doubt by this time was full of stories of his visit to Rome and intercourse with the Pope, and all the miraculous dreams and parables with which that intercourse was attended. Already the mind of the people, so slow to adopt, but so ready to become habituated to, anything novel, had used itself to the sight of the brethren in their brown gowns, and, leaping from one extreme to the other, instead of madmen, learned to consider them saints. The air about the little cloister began to breathe of miracles,--miracles which must have been a matter of common report among the contemporaries of the saint, for Celano wrote within three years of Francis's death. Once, when their leader was absent, a sudden wonder startled the brethren. It was midnight between Saturday and Sunday, and Francis, who had gone to preach at Assisi, was at the moment praying in the canon's garden. A chariot of fire, all radiant and shining, suddenly entered the house, awaking those who lay asleep, and moving to wonder and awe those who watched, or labored, or prayed. It was the heart and thoughts of their leader returning to them in the midst of his prayer, which were figured by this appearance." When Francis died a pathetic scene is thus described:-- "All the clergy of Assisi, chanting solemn hymns, came out to meet the bier, and thus they climbed the hill to the birthplace of the saint, the city of his toils and tears and blessing. When they came to St. Damian an affecting pause was made. Clara within, with all her maidens, waited the last visit of their father and friend. Slowly the triumphant crowd defiled into the church of the nuns, hushing, let us hope, their songs of joy, their transports of gratulations, out of respect to the grief which dwelt there, and could scarcely, by all the arguments of family pride, or the excitement of this universal triumph, be brought to rejoice. The bier was set down within the chancel, the coffin opened, and opened also was the little window through which the nuns received the sacrament on ordinary occasions. To this little opening the pale group of nuns, ten of them, with Clara at their head, came marching silently, with tears and suppressed cries. Clara herself, even in face of that multitude, could not restrain her grief. 'Father, father, what will become of us?' she cried out; 'who will care for us now, or console us in our troubles?' 'Virgin modesty,' says Celano, stopped her lamentations, and with a miserable attempt at thanksgiving, reminding herself that the angels were rejoicing at his coming, and all was gladness on his arrival in the city of God, the woman who had been his closest friend in this world, whose sympathy he had sought so often, kissed the pale hands--'splendid hands,' says Celano, in his enthusiasm, 'adorned with precious gems and shining pearls'--and disappeared from the little window with her tears into the dim convent behind, where nobody could reprove her sorrow." The personality of Chiara comes down to us through the ages invested with untold charm. It is said that when she was dying there came "a long procession of white-robed virgins, led by the Queen of Heaven, whose head was crowned with a diadem of shining gold, each of the celestial visitors stooped to kiss Chiara as her soul passed to its home." During all the life of Francis, whenever any new movement or work was to be undertaken, he invariably sent to ask the counsel and the prayers of Chiara. The miraculous preservation of the body of Santa Chiara is one of the articles of faith in Assisi. In 1850--six hundred years after her death--a tomb believed to be hers was found and opened in the presence of a distinguished group of ecclesiastics, among whom was Cardinal Pecci, later Pope Leo XIII. In this tomb a form is said to have been found, and it has been placed in a reliquary of alabaster and Carrara marble especially constructed for it. This sanctuary is placed in the church of Santa Chiara, in the crypt, behind a glass screen, where candles are kept perpetually burning. Lina Gordon Duff, writing the history of Assisi, says of this curious spectacle:-- "As pilgrims stand before a grating in the dimly lighted crypt, the gentle rustle of a nun's dress is heard; slowly invisible hands draw the curtain aside, and the body of Santa Chiara is seen lying in a glass case upon a satin bed, her face clearly outlined against her black and white veils, whilst her brown habit is drawn in straight folds about her body. She clasps the book of her Rule in one hand, and in the other holds a lily with small diamonds shining on the streamers." [Illustration: SANTA CHIARA, THE DUOMO, ASSISI Amalia Dupré _Page 375_] In all these churches--the great convent church, upper and lower, of the Franciscans elaborately adorned with frescoes by Cimabue and by Giotto; in the ancient Duomo; in Santa Chiara and in Santa Maria degli Angeli--statues of the two saints, Francis and Chiara, are placed side by side. She shares all the exaltation of his memory and the fulness of his fame. The strange problem of the stigmata has, perhaps, never been absolutely solved. Canon Knox Little says that as to the miracles of St. Francis generally speaking, there is no intrinsic improbability; that "his holy life, his constant communion with God, the abundant blessings with which it pleased God to mark his ministry, all point in the same direction." Latter-day revelations of psychic science disclose contemporary facts of the power of mental influence on the physical form that are, in many instances, hardly less wonderful than this alleged miracle of St. Francis. Whether the story is accepted literally or only in a figurative sense does not affect the transcendent power of his influence. His entire life and work illustrate the beauty of holiness. "Art in its widest sense gained a marvellous impulse from his work and effort," says Canon Knox Little. The French and Provençal literature and the schools of Byzantine art preceded the life of Francis; but his influence imparted a powerful wave of sympathetic and vital insight and awakened a world of new sensibilities of feeling. Indeed, it is a proverb of Italy, "Without Francis, no Dante." Certainly the life of Francis was the inspiration of the early Italian art. Cimabue and Giotto drew from the inspiration of that unique and lovely life the pictorial conceptions that have made Assisi the cradle of Italian painting. The great works of Giotto are in the lower church of the Franciscan monastery. One of these frescoes represents chastity as a maiden kneeling in a shrine, while angels bring to her branches of palm. Obedience is depicted as placing a yoke upon the bowed figure of a priest, while St. Francis, attended by two angels, looks on; Poverty, whom Francis declared to be his bride, is pictured as accompanied by Hope and Charity, who give her in marriage to St. Francis, the union being blessed by Christ, while the heavenly Father and throngs of angels gaze through the clouds on this nuptial scene. The fresco called Gloriosus Franciscus is perhaps the crowning work of Giotto. Francis is seen in a beatitude of glory, with a richly decorated banner bearing the cross and seven stars floating above his head and bands of angels in the air surrounding him. Canon Knox Little, alluding to these interesting works of Giotto, says that "even in their faded glories they give an immense interest to the lower church of Assisi. No one can look at them now unmoved, or wander on the hillside to the west of the little city, with the rugged rocks above one's head, and beneath one's feet the rich carpets of cyclamen, and before one's eyes long dreamy stretches of the landscape of Umbria, without being touched by the feeling of that beautiful and loving life devoted to God and man and nature, in utter truth, which therefore left such an impress on Christian art." The Madonna and saints painted by Cimabue are faded almost to the point of obliteration, yet there still lingers about them a certain grace and charm. The visitor to this Franciscan monastery church realizes that he is beholding the art which was the very pledge and prophecy of the Renaissance, and he realizes, too, that the Renaissance itself was the outgrowth of the new vitality communicated to the world by the life and character of St. Francis. He gave to the world the realization of the living Christ; he taught that religion was in action, not in theology. He liberated the spirit; and when this colossal church was being built (1228-53) the artists who had felt the new thrill of life opened by his teaching hastened to Assisi to express their appreciation by their pictorial work on its walls. The qualities of spiritual life--faith, sacrifice, sympathy, and love--began, for the first time, to be interpreted into artistic expression. The tomb of St. Francis is in the crypt of the church. The stone sarcophagus containing his body was discovered in 1818, and then placed here in a little chamber especially prepared, surrounded by an iron latticework with candles perpetually burning. From the sacristy of the lower church, stairs ascend to the upper, with its beautiful nave and transept with a high altar, and the choir stalls. While the lower church with its great arches is always dark, the upper is flooded with light from vast windows. There is a series of frescoed panels on either side, accredited to pupils of Giotto, full of forcible action and a glow of color. But the upper church, while it is magnificent, lacks somewhat of that mystic atmosphere one is so swiftly conscious of in the gloom and mystery of the lower church. Stretching behind the churches, along the crest of the high hill, is the colossal monastery itself, with that double row of arches and colonnades that makes it so conspicuous a feature of all the Umbrian valley. Formerly hundreds of monks dwelt here; but the Italian government suppressed this monastery in 1866, and since that time it has been used as a school for boys. The ancient Duomo, whose façade is of the twelfth century, has three exquisite rose windows, and on either side, as one approaches the high altar, stand the statues of St. Francis and of Santa Chiara. In the little piazza in front of the church is a bronze copy of Dupré's famous statue of St. Francis. The colossal church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, with its magnificent dome, is a contrast, indeed, to the primitive little Portiuncula where Francis knelt in prayer, and which is now preserved in the centre of this vast cathedral,--the rude structure encased in marble, and decorated, above the entrance, with a picture by Overbeck, whose motive is St. Francis as he stands, hushed and reverent, listening to the voice that tells him to embrace poverty. There is a fine Perugino in the church, representing the Saviour. The cell in which St. Francis died, enclosed in the little chapel which St. Bonaventura built over it, is preserved in this great cathedral. "And who was he that opened that door in heaven?" questions Canon Knox Little in reference to St. Francis. "Who was he that gave that fresh life and thought? Who but the man who had brought down in his own person the living Christ into his century, who had taught men again the love of God, and then the love of man and the love of nature; who had lifted the people out of their misery and degradation, and awakened the church out of its stiffness and worldliness; it was he, too, who inspired, who may at most be said to have created, Italian art,--the great St. Francis! Such are the deep, such are the penetrating, such are the far-reaching effects of sanctity. If a soul is, by divine grace, given wholly to God, it is impossible for us to say to what heights it may attain, or what good, in every region of human effort, it may do." [Illustration: BAIÆ AND ISCHIA, FROM CAMALDOLI _Page 382_] Perugia, the neighboring city only fifteen miles from Assisi, is the metropolis of all this Umbrian region. Like Assisi, it is a "hill town," built on an acropolis of rock, its foundations laid by the Etruscans more than three thousand years before the Christian era, and its atmosphere is freighted with the records of artists and scholars. The Perugians were the forerunners. They held the secret of artifice in metals and gems; they were architects and sculptors. The only traces of their painting that have come down to us are their works on sarcophagi, on vases or funeral urns,--traces that indicate their gifts for line and form. It was about 310 B.C. that all Umbria became a Roman province. The colossal porta of Augustus--a gateway apparently designed for the Cyclops--still retains its inscription, "Augustus Perusia." The imperishable impress of the great Roman conqueror is still seen in many places. Perugia was a firm citadel, as is attested by the fact that Totila and his army of Goths spent seven years in besieging it. The centuries from the thirteenth to the fifteenth inclusive, when it was under the sway of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, were years of tragic violence. Even the cathedral became the scene of riot, and its interior was entirely washed with wine, and it was reconsecrated before it could be again used for holy offices. The little piazza in front of the cathedral, now dreaming in the sun, has been the scene of strange and contrasting crises of life. Strife and warfare have desolated it; the footsteps of Bernardino of Siena have consecrated it, as he passed within the great portals to preach the gospel of peace. He was one of the most potent of the Francescan disciples, and Bernardino (born of the noble family of the Albizzeschi, in 1380, in Siena, the year after St. Catherine's death) for forty years wandered over Italy, preaching peace and repentance. Vespasiano da Bisticci, a contemporary historian, records that Bernardino "converted and changed the minds and spirits of men marvellously and had a wondrous power in persuading men to lay aside their mortal hatreds." Bernardino died at the age of sixty-four in Aquila, and the towns in which he had faithfully carried on his apostolic work placed the sacred sign of the divine name (I.H.S.) upon their gates and palaces, in his memory. In the Sienese gallery is a portrait of San Bernardino by Sano, painted in 1460, representing the saint as the champion of the Holy Name, with the inscription, "I have manifested Thy name to men." In one of his impressive and wonderful sermons San Bernardino said:-- "There still remain many places for us to make. Ah! for the love of God, love one another. Alas! see you not that, if you love the destruction one of the other you are ruining your very selves? Ah! put this thing right for the love of God. Love one another! What I have done to make peace among you and to make you like brothers, I have done with that zeal I should wish my own soul to receive. I have done it all to the glory of God. And let no one think that I have set myself to do anything at any person's request. I am only moved by the bidding of God for His honor and glory." Opposite the Duomo of Perugia, on the other side of the piazza, is the Palazzo Municipio, with a Gothic façade, a beautiful example of thirteenth-century architecture. Here also is the colossal fountain with three basins, decorated with pictorial designs from the Bible by Niccolo Pisano and Arnolfo of Florence, and in the shadow of this fountain St. Dominic, St. Francis, and St. Bernardino often met and held converse. Perugia easily reads her title clear to artistic immortality in having been the home of Perugino, the master of Raphael. Here he lived for several years working with Pinturicchio in the frescoes that adorn the Collegio del Cambio, now held as a priceless treasure hall of art. They still glow with rich coloring,--the Christ seen on the Mount of Transfiguration; the Mother and Child with the adoring magi; and the chariot of the dawn driven by Apollo a century before Guido painted his "Aurora" in the Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome. From the parapets of Perugia are views of supreme poetic beauty. The play of light and color on the picturesque hills and mountains of the Umbrian country; the gray-green gleam of olive orchards and the silver threads of winding streams; the towers and ruins and castles of a dozen towns and villages that crown the slopes, and the violet shadows of deepening twilight, with Assisi bathed in a splendor of rose and gold,--all combine to make this an ever-changing panorama for the poet and painter. No journey in Italy is quite like that to the lovely Umbrian valley and its Jerusalem, Assisi, the shrine which, with the single exception of Rome, is the special place of pilgrimage for the entire religious world. Perugia offers the charm of art, and attracts the visitor, also, by an exceptional degree of modern comfort and convenience; but Assisi is the shrine before which he kneels, where the footsteps of saints who have knelt in prayer make holy ground, and where he realizes anew the consecration of faith and sacrifice. The very air is filled with divine messages, and in lowly listening he will hear, again, those wonderful and thrilling words of St. Francis:-- "By the holy love which is in God I pray all to put aside every obstacle, every care, every anxiety, that they may be able to consecrate themselves entirely to serve, love, and honor the Lord God, with a pure heart and a sincere purpose, which is what He asks above all things." _White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of clouds uplifting In air their unsubstantial masonry._ LONGFELLOW. _Fair as the palace builded for Aladdin, Yonder St. Mark uplifts its sculptured splendor-- Intricate fretwork, Byzantine mosaic, Color on color, column upon column, Barbaric, wonderful, a thing to kneel to! Over the portal stand the four gilt horses, Gilt hoof in air, and wide distended nostril, Fiery, untamed, as in the days of Nero. Skyward, a cloud of domes and spires and crosses; Earthward, black shadows flung from jutting stonework. High over all the slender Campanile Quivers, and seems a falling shaft of silver._ THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. _As one who parts from Life's familiar shore, Looks his last look in long-beloved eyes, And sees in their dear depths new meanings rise And strange light shine he never knew before; As then he fain would snatch from Death his hand And linger still, if haply he may see A little more of this Soul's mystery Which year by year he seemed to understand; So, Venice, when thy wondrous beauty grew Dim in the clouds which clothed the wintry sea I saw thou wert more beauteous than I knew, And long to turn and be again with thee. But what I could not then I trust to see In that next life which we call memory._ PHILLIPS BROOKS.[2] FOOTNOTES: [2] From "Life of Phillips Brooks," by kind permission of Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co. VI THE GLORY OF A VENETIAN JUNE I have been between Heaven and Earth since our arrival at Venice. The Heaven of it is ineffable--never had I touched the skirts of so celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water up between all that gorgeous color and carving, the enchanting silence, the music, the gondolas,--I mix it all up together, and maintain that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, no second Venice in the world. MRS. BROWNING, in the June of 1850. The first glimpse of enchanted Venice, as her towers and marble palaces rise wraith-like from the sea, is an experience that can never fade from memory. Like a mirage, like a vision invoked by some incantation or magician's spell, the scene prefigures itself, bringing a thrill of some vague and undefined memory, as if a breath floated by,-- "An odor from Dreamland sent, That makes the ghost seem nigh me, Of a splendor that came and went; Of a life lived somewhere,--I know not In what diviner sphere,-- Of memories that stay not and go not," which eludes all translation into words. Nor does the spell dissolve and vanish when put to the test of one's actual sojourn in the Dream City. It is an experience outside the boundaries of the ordinary day and daylight world, as if one were caught up into the ethereal realm to find a city "... of gliding and wide-wayed silence With room in the streets for the soul." The sense of remoteness from common life could hardly be greater if one were suddenly swept away to some far star, blazing in the firmament; or if Charon had rowed him over the mystic river and he had entered the abodes of life on the plane beyond. Even the hotel becomes an enchanted palace whose salons, luxuriously decorated, open by long windows on marble balconies overhanging the Grand Canal. Dainty little tables piled with current reading matter, in French, English, and Italian, stand around; the writing-desks are sumptuous, filled with every convenience of stationery; and the matutinal coffee and rolls are served the guest in any idyllic niche wherein he chooses to ensconce himself, regardless of the regulation _salle-à-manger_. One looks across the Grand Canal to the beautiful Church of Santa Maria della Salute. The water plashes against the marble steps as gondolas glide past; the blue sky of Italy reflects itself in the waters below, until one feels as if he were floating in the air between sea and sky. In the heart of the city, with throngs of people moving to and fro, all is yet silence, save the cry of the gondolier, the confused echo of voices from the people who pass, and here and there the faint call of a bird. No whir and rush of electric cars and motors; no click of the horses' feet on the asphalt pavement--no pavement, indeed, and no horses, no twentieth-century rush of life. It is Venice, it is June, and the two combine to make an illuminated chapter. To live in Venice is like being domesticated in the heart of an opal. How wonderful it is to drift--a sky above and a sky below--on still waters at sunset, with the Dream City mirrored in the depths, every shade of gold and rose and amber mirrored back,--the very atmosphere a sea of color, recalling to one Ruskin's words that "none of us appreciate the nobleness and the sacredness of color. Of all God's gifts to man," he continues, "color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. Color is the sacred and saving element." If the enthusiasm in these words savor of exaggeration, Venice is the place that will lure one to forgetfulness of it. One is simply conscious of being steeped in color and revelling in a strange loveliness. One no longer marvels at the glory of Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. They but interpreted on canvas the shining reality. A charming writer on Venice has well said:-- "The aspects of Venice are as various, as manifold, as the hues held in solution upon her waters beneath a sirocco sky. There is a perpetual miracle of change; one day is not like another, one hour varies from the next; there is no stable outline such as one finds among the mountains, no permanent vista, as in a view across a plain. The two great constituents of the Venetian landscape, the sea and the sky, are precisely the two features in nature which undergo most incessant change. The cloud-wreaths of this evening's sunset will never be repeated again; the bold and buttressed piles of those cloud-mountains will never be built again just so for us; the grain of orange and crimson that stains the water before our prow, we cannot be sure that we shall look upon its like again.... One day is less like another in Venice than anywhere else. The revolution of the seasons will repeat certain effects; spring will chill the waters to a cold, hard green; summer will spread its breadth of golden light on palace front and water way; autumn will come with its pearly-gray sirocco days, and sunsets flaming a sombre death; the stars of a cloudless winter night, the whole vast dome of heaven, will be reflected in the mirror of the still lagoon. But in spite of this general order of the seasons, one day is less like another in Venice than anywhere else; the lagoon wears a different aspect each morning when you rise, the sky offers a varied composition of cloud each evening as the sun sets. Words cannot describe Venice, nor brush portray her ever-fleeting, ever-varying charm. Venice is to be felt, not reproduced; to live there is to live a poem, to be daily surfeited with a wealth of beauty enough to madden an artist to despair." It was in the autumn of 1882 that the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks, later Bishop of Massachusetts, visited Venice and wrote of San Marco:-- "Strange how there is nothing like St. Mark's in Venice, nothing of the same kind as the great church. It would have seemed as if, standing here for so many centuries, and always profoundly loved and honored, it would almost of necessity have influenced the minds of the generations of architects, and shown its power in their works. But there seems to be no sign of any such influence. It stands alone." Dr. Brooks noted that Venice had "two aspects, one sensuous and self-indulgent, the other lofty, spiritual, and even severe. Both aspects," he continues, "are in its history and both are also in its art. Titian often represents the former. The loftier, nobler Tintoretto gives us the second. There is something in his greatest pictures, as, for instance, in the Crucifixion, at St. Rocco, which no other artist approaches. The lordly composition gives us an impression of intellectual grasp and vigor. The foreground group of prostrate women is full of a tenderness. The rich pearly light, which floods the centre, glows with a solemn picturesqueness, and the great Christ, who hangs like a benediction over the whole, is vocal with a piety which no other picture in the world displays. And the Presentation of the Virgin, in Santa Maria dell'Orto, is the consummate presentation of that beautiful subject, its beauty not lost in its majesty." Of other pictures Dr. Brooks said:-- "In the Academia there is the sunshine of three hundred years ago. Paris Bordone's glowing picture of the Fisherman who brings the Ring of St. Mark to the Doge, burned like a ray of sunlight on the wall. Carpaccio's delightful story of St. Ursula brought the old false standards of other days back to one's mind, but brought them back lustrous with the splendor of summers that seemed forever passed, but are perpetually here. Tintoretto's Adam and Eve was, as it always is, the most delightful picture in the gallery, and Pordenone's great St. Augustine seemed a very presence in the vast illuminated room." Tennyson loved best, of all the pictures in Venice, a Bellini,--a beautiful work, in the Church of Il Redentore; and he was deeply impressed by the "Presentation of the Virgin," from Tintoretto, in the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto. "He was fascinated by St. Mark's," writes the poet's son, "by the Doge's Palace and the Piazza, and by the blaze of color in water and sky. He climbed the Campanile, and walked to the library where he could scarcely tear himself away from the Grimani Breviary." Venice, though not containing any single gallery comparable with the Pitti and the Uffizi, is still singularly rich in treasures of art, and rich in legend and story. The school of encrusted architecture is nowhere so wonderfully represented as here, and it is only in this architecture that a perfect scheme of color decoration is possible. In all the world there is no such example of encrusted architecture as that revealed in St. Mark's. It is a gleaming mass of gold, opal, ruby, and pearl; with alabaster pillars carved in designs of palm and pomegranate and lily; with legions of sculptured angels looking down; with altars of gold ablaze with scarlet flowers and snowy lilies, while clouds of mystic incense fill the air. One most impressive place is the baptistery, where is the tomb of St. Mark and also that of the Doge Andrea Dandolo, who died at the age of forty-six, having been chosen Doge ten years before. His tomb is under a window in the baptistery, and the design is that of his statue in bronze, lying on a couch, while two angels at the head and the feet hold back the curtains. The sarcophagus that is said to contain the body of St. Mark is of the richest description, encrusted with gold and jewels on polished ebony and marble. There is a legend that after St. Mark had seen the people of Aguilia well grounded in religion he was called to Rome by St. Peter; but before setting off he took with him in a boat the holy Bishop Hennagoras and sailed to the marshes of Venice. The boat was driven by wind to a small island called Rialto, on which were some houses, and St. Mark was suddenly snatched into ecstasy and heard the voice of an angel saying, "Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest." There is also a legend that in the great conflagration which destroyed Venice in 976 A.D., the body of St. Mark was lost and no one knew where to find it. Then the pious Doge and the people gave themselves to fasting and prayer, and assembled in the church, asking that the place be revealed them. It was on the 25th of June that the assemblage took place. Suddenly one of the pillars of the church trembled, and opened to disclose the sarcophagus,--a chest of bronze. The legend goes on to say that St. Mark stretched his hand out through the side and that a noble, Dolfini by name, drew a gold ring off the finger. The place where this miracle is said to have been wrought is now marked by the Altar of the Cross. Ruskin declares that "a complete understanding of the sanctity of color is the key to European art." Nowhere is this sanctity of color so felt as at San Marco. The church is like the temple of the New Jerusalem. The origin of Venice is steeped in sacred history. It is pre-eminently the city founded in religious enthusiasm. The chronicles of De Monici, written in 421, give this passage: "God, who punishes the sins of men by war, sorrow, and whose ways are past finding out, willing both to save the innocent blood, and that a great power, beneficial to the whole world, should arise in a place strange beyond belief, moved the chief men of the cities of the Venetian province both in memory of the past, and in dread of future distress, to establish states upon the nearer islands of the Adriatic, to which, in the last extremity, they might retreat for refuge.... They laid the foundation of the new city under good auspices on the island of the Rialto, the highest and nearest to the mouth of the Brenta, on March 25, 471." The first Doge of Venice was Paolo Lucio Anafesto, elected by the tribunal of commonalty, tribunals, and clergy, at Heraclea, in 697. The period of the subjection of the ecclesiastical to the ducal and patrician powers followed. The "Council of Ten" was established in 1335, and the last Doge elected was Lodovico Manin in 1789, who exclaimed, "_Tolè questo: no la doperò più_," as the French Revolution destroyed the Republic of Venice. The finest example of Renaissance architecture in Venice is that of the _Libreria Vecchia_, the work of Jacobo Sansovino, completed in the sixteenth century. Never were the creations of poet and philosopher more fittingly enshrined. The rich Doric frieze, the Ionic columns, the stately balustrade, with statues and obelisks, the resplendent richness of ornamentation, offer a majesty and beauty seldom found even in the best classical architecture of Europe. On the ceiling of one sala is a picture by Titian representing "Wisdom" as a woman, reclining on a cloud, her right hand outstretched to take a book that Genius is offering her. There are two beautiful caryatides by Vittoria and rich mural work by Battista Franco and De Moro. Petrarca, returning from his wanderings in 1362, pleaded with the Senate of Venezia to give him a house, in return for which he offered the inheritance of his library. This was the nucleus of the fine collection which since 1812 has been included in the Palace of the Doges. In it are some magnificent works by Paolo Veronese, one portrait by Tintoretto, and others by Salviati and Telotti. The Doge's Palace is a treasure house of history. One enters the Porta della Carta, which dates back to 1638, erected by Bartolomeo Buon. The portal is very rich in sculpture, and among the reliefs is a heroic one of Francesco Foscari, kneeling before the lion at St. Mark's. One recalls his tragic fate and passes on. Perhaps, _en passant_, one may say that his pilgrimage through Venice and Florence is so constantly in the scenes of tragedy that he is prone to sink almost into utter sadness, even, rather than seriousness. The air is full of ghosts. One feels the oppression of all the life that has there been lived, all the tragedies that have been enacted in these scenes. In Renaissance nothing more wonderful in Europe can be found than the court of the Palace of the Doges. Antonio Rizzo began the east façade of the building in 1480, and it was continued by Lombardo, and completed by Scarpagnino. "Words cannot be found to praise the beauty of these sculptures," says Salvatico, "as well as of the single ornaments of the walls and of the ogres which have been carved so delicately and richly that they cannot be excelled by the Roman antique friezes." By the golden staircase one goes to the council chambers,--the hall of the Senate, the Council of Ten, and the Council of Three. In the great council chamber is that most celebrated mural painting in the world, "The Glory of Venice," by Paolo Veronese, which covers the ceiling. In a frieze are the portraits of seventy-six of the Doges, but in one space is a black tablet only, with the inscription: "This in place of M. F., who was executed for his crimes." The "Sala del Maggior Consiglio" (hall of the grand council) is very rich in paintings. Above the throne is Tintoretto's "The Glory of Paradise," and the walls are covered with battle pieces and symbolic and allegorical paintings. There is "Venice Crowned by Fame," by Paolo Veronese, "Doge Niccolò da Ponte Presenting the Senate and Envoys of Conquered Cities to Venice," by Tintoretto; "Venice Crowned by the Goddess of Victory," by Palma Giovane, and many another of the richest and most wonderful beauty. Descending into the prisons and dungeons brings one into a vivid realization of the grim history of which these were the scenes. The Bridge of Sighs has two covered passages, one for the political and one for the criminal prisoners. Here is shown a narrow ledge on which the condemned man stood, with a slanting stone passageway before him, which, when the guillotine had done its swift and deadly work, conveyed the crimson flood into the dark waters of the canal below, while the body was thrown in the water on the other side. There are the "Chambers of Lead," where prisoners were confined, intensely hot in the summer, and as intensely cold in the winter. Many of these dark, close, narrow cells--in which the one article of furniture allowed was the wooden slanting rack, that served as a bed--still remain. In many of these are inscriptions that were written by the prisoners. One reads (in translation): "May God protect me against him whom I trust; I will protect myself against him whom I do not trust." The murderer, Giovanni M. Borni, wrote in his cell: "G. M. B. was confined very unjustly in this prison; if God does not help it will be the last desolation of a poor, numerous, and honest family." All visitors to these gloomy dungeons recall the lines of Byron:-- "I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand." The piazza of St. Mark's is a distinctive feature, even in all Europe. It is not large; it is surrounded on three sides with shops, which are merely glittering bazaars of jewels and bric-a-brac; the sidewalk is blockaded with cafés _al fresco_, the ground is half covered with the dense flocks of white doves, but here all lingers and loiters. The façade of St. Mark's fills one end--a mass of gleaming color. At one corner is the tall clock tower (Torre dell'Orologio) in the Renaissance style of 1400, crowned with the gilded lion of St. Mark. On the festa days three figures, the Three Wise Men, preceded by an angel, come forth on the tower and bow before the Madonna, in a niche above,--a very ingenious piece of mechanism. With its rich architecture and sculptures and masses of color, the piazza of San Marco is really an open-air hall, where all the town congregates from morning till midnight. To study the art of the Venetian school is a work of months, and one that would richly repay the student. The churches and galleries of Venice give a truly unique opportunity. In the Church of San Sebastiano lies Paolo Veronese, the church in which he painted his celebrated frescoes, now transformed into a temple for himself. Here one finds his "Coronation of the Virgin," "The Virgin in the Gloria," "Adoration of the Magi," "Martyrdom of San Sebastian," and many others. In the Scuola di San Rocco are the great works of Tintoretto, "St. Magdalene in the Wilderness," the "Visitation," and the "Murder of the Innocents." In the San Maria dei Frari is the tomb of Titian,--an exquisite grouping of sculpture in Carrara marble, erected in 1878-80 by the command of the Emperor of Austria, the work of Zandomenighi. In this church is Titian's most famous painting, the "Madonna of the Pessaro," the work of which is probably, too, the greatest in all Venetian art. The Hall of Heaven is shown, supported by colossal columns. St. Peter, Francis, and Antoninus are commending the Pessaro family to the Virgin, who is enthroned on high. The beauty of line, the splendor of color, and the marvellous composition render this immortal masterpiece something whose sight marks an epoch in life. Canova's tomb in San Maria dei Frari is a wonderful thing. It is a pyramid of purest marble, with a door opening for the sarcophagus, above which is a portrait of Canova in relief, and on either side the door angels and symbolic figures are sculptured. The Church of Santa Maria della Salute, to which one is always returning, is a wonderful example of artistic architecture, as its snowy towers and dome seem to rise out of the water and float in the air. The fall of the Campanile in 1904 was regarded as a calamity by all the civilized world. For a thousand years it had stood at the side of St. Mark's; but the disaster aroused the attention of experts to the condition of the great cathedral itself, and it was found that the vast area of over fifty thousand square feet of matchless mosaic needed restoration in order that they should be preserved. The Palazzo Rezzonico, which dates to Clement XIII, usually known as the "Browning Palace," has been for many years one of the special interests to the visitor in Venice. In the early months of 1907 it passed out of the hands of Robert Barrett Browning, who had purchased it in 1888, and had held it sacredly, with its poetic and personal associations, since the death of his father, the poet, in 1889. To Mr. Barrett Browning is due the grateful appreciation of a multitude of tourists for his generous and never-failing courtesy in permitting them the privilege of visiting this palace in which his father had passed many months of enjoyment. It was from this residence that the poet Browning wrote, in October of 1880, to a friend:-- "Every morning at six I see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting which everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view; the still, gray lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of San Giorgio in deep shadow and the clouds in a long purple rock behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently; so my day begins." Later, of his son's palace, Mr. Browning wrote:-- "Have I told you that there is a chapel which he has restored in honor of his mother--putting up there the inscription by Tommaseo,[3] now above Casa Guidi in Florence?" In this palace Mr. Browning wrote some of his later poems, and it may well be that it was when he was clad in his singing robes that he perhaps most deeply felt the ineffable charm of Venice:-- "For the stars help me, and the sea bears part; The very night is clinging Closer to Venice' streets to leave one space Above me...." It was from these lofty salons in the Browning Palace that the poet passed to the "life more abundant" on that December day of 1889, on the very day that his last volume, "Asolando," was published and also the last volume of Tennyson's. Regarding these Mr. Gladstone said, in a letter to Lord Tennyson: "The death of Browning on the day of the appearance of your volume, and we hear of one of his own, is a touching event." From the time of Mrs. Browning's death in Florence (in June of 1861) Mr. Browning never felt that he could see Italy again, until the autumn of 1878, when he, with his sister, Miss Sarianna Browning, came to Venice by way of the Italian lakes and Verona. At this time they only remained for a fortnight, domiciled in the old Palazzo Brandolin-Rota, which was transformed into the Albergo dell'Universo. This palace was on the Grand Canal below the Accadémia, and here he returned through two or three subsequent years. Mr. Browning became very fond of Venice, and he explored its winding ways and gardens and knew it, not merely from the gondola view, but from the point of view of the curious little dark and narrow byways, the bridges, and the piazzas. It was in 1880 that Mr. Browning first met, through the kind offices of Mr. Story, a most charming and notable American lady, Mrs. Arthur Bronson (Katherine DeKay), who had domiciled herself in Casa Alvisi, an old palace on the Grand Canal opposite the Church of Santa Maria della Salute. She was a woman of very interesting personality, and had drawn about her a circle including many of the most distinguished people of her time, authors, artists, poets, and notable figures in the social world. She was eminently _simpatica_ and her lovely impulses of generous kindness were rendered possible to translate into the world of the actual by the freedom which a large fortune confers on its possessor. Between Mrs. Bronson and Mr. Browning there sprang up one of those rare and beautiful friendships that lasted during his lifetime, and to her appreciation and many courtesies he owed much of the happiness of his later years. In the autumn of 1880 Mrs. Bronson made Mr. Browning and his sister her guests, placing at their disposal a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati--a palace adjoining her own--and each night they dined and passed the evening with her, with music and conversation to enchant the hours. After Mr. Browning's death, Mrs. Bronson was the friend whom all pilgrims to his shrine in Venice felt it a special privilege to meet and to hear speak of him. In her palace was a large easy-chair, with a ribbon tied across the arms, in which Browning was accustomed to sit, and which was held sacred to him. Mrs. Bronson was an accomplished linguist, and the _habitués_ of her salon represented many nationalities. Among these was the Princess Montenegro, the mother of the present Queen of Italy. It is little wonder that the Browning Palace was for so many years a focus for all who revered and loved the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the marble court, roofed only by the blue Venetian sky, stood Mr. Barrett Browning's statue of "Dryope" in bronze, on its marble pedestal,--a beautiful conception of the Dryope of Keats,--the dweller in forest solitudes whom the Hamadryads transformed into a poplar. Here a fountain makes music all day long, and the court is also adorned in summer by great Venetian jars of pink hydrangeas in full bloom. The grand staircase, with its carved balustrade and the wide landing where a rose window decorates the wall, leads to the lofty salons which were yet as homelike as they were artistic during the residence of the Brownings. Mr. Story's bust of Mrs. Browning, other portrait busts of both the poets, sculptured by their artist son, and by others, and other memorials abound. In the library were gathered many interesting volumes, autographed from their authors, and many rare and choice editions, among which was one of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in a sumptuous volume whose artistic beauty found a fitting setting to Mrs. Browning's immortal sonnets. Among other volumes were a collection of signed "Etchings" by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema; presentation copies from Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey De Vere, Walter Savage Landor, and many another known to fame; and a copy, also, of a study of Mrs. Browning's poetry[4] by an American writer. There is one memento over which the visitor always smiled--a souvenir of a London evening in 1855 when the Brownings had invited Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother and Lord Madox Brown to meet Tennyson and listen to his reading of his new poem, "Maud," then still unpublished. During the reading Rossetti drew a caricature representing Tennyson with his hair standing on end, his eyes glowering and his hand theatrically extended, as he held a manuscript inscribed, "I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood." A reproduction of John Singer Sargent's painting, "The Gypsy Dance," bore the inscription, "To _mon ami_, Browning." From the library is a niche, decorated in gold, with memorial entablatures to the memory of Mrs. Browning. On the outer wall of the palace is an inscription that runs:-- "Robert Browning died in this house 12th December, 1889. "Open my heart and you will see Graven inside it 'Italy.'" There is a sadness in the fact that this palace, consecrated to the memory of the immortal poets, husband and wife, has passed into the hands of strangers; but that is a part of the play in a world in which we have no continuing city. In the spring of 1905, Miss Sarianna Browning died in the home of her nephew, near Florence, and her body was buried in the new Protestant cemetery in that city; the old one, where all that was mortal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning was laid to rest, being now closed. Mr. Barrett Browning, in his Tuscan villa, is again dwelling near Florence, his native city, which must forever hold to him its atmosphere of consecrated beauty as the beloved home of his mother,--the noblest and greatest of all woman poets. The centenary of Carlo Goldoni was celebrated in Venice in the spring of 1907 by the publication of all his works and a monograph on his life; an exhibition of personal relics; the presentation of one of his dramas set to music by Baldassare Galuppi, the great Venetian composer of his time, and by a procession to lay a wreath of laurel on his monument in the Campo San Bartolommeo. The drama given, entitled the "Buranello," was the last work of the author, and it was presented in the theatre Goldoni. The Municipal Council of Venice voted the sum of fifty thousand lire for the _édition de luxe_, which consists of twenty volumes, in octavo. In each volume is a different portrait of Goldoni, facsimile of manuscripts, and the reproduction of literary curiosities. The monograph of Goldoni was issued by the press of the Venetian Institute of Graphic Art in a limited number of copies. It contains more than three hundred printed pages and a series of very interesting illustrations. Among these are the reproductions of ancient engravings which are most rare (such as the view of the Grimani Theatre at San Giovanni Crisostomo, a famous theatre existing in the days of the Venetian republic, but now demolished), frontispieces of destroyed editions, and other personal memorials. The revival of the splendid work of the famous artist was one of the attractions of the festa of celebration. The art exhibition of Venice in this spring of 1907 was very picturesque. One special salon was allotted to the artists of Great Britain, and there was a fine loan collection of the portraits of English noblemen painted by Mr. Sargent. This salon was decorated with panels by Frank Brangwyn. Venice forever remains a dream, a mirage, an enchantment. Has it a recognized social life, with "seasons" that come and go? Has it trade, commerce, traffic? Has it any existence save on the artist's canvas, in the poet's vision? Has it a resident population to whom it is a home, and not the pilgrimage of passionate pilgrims? There are those who find this Venice of all the year round a society of stately nobles whose ancestral claims are identified with the history of the city and who are at home in its palaces and gondolas, but of this resident life the visitor is less aware than of that in any other city in Italy. For him it remains forever in his memory as the crowning glory of June evenings when the full, golden moon hangs over towers and walls, when gondolas freighted with Venetian singers loom up out of the shadows and fill the air with melody that echoes as in dreams, and that vanishes--one knows not when or where. Mr. Howells, in his delightful "Venetian Days," has interpreted much of that life that the tourist never recognizes, that eludes his sight; and the Dream City still, to the visitor who comes and goes, shrouds itself in myth and mystery. One of the poetic visions of Venice is that given in Robert Underwood Johnson's "Browning at Asolo" (inscribed to Mrs. Arthur Bronson), of which the opening stanzas run:-- "This is the loggia Browning loved, High on the flank of the friendly town; These are the hills that his keen eye roved, The green like a cataract leaping down To the plain that his pen gave new renown. "There to the West what a range of blue!-- The very background Titian drew To his peerless Loves. O tranquil scene! Who than thy poet fondlier knew The peaks and the shore and the lore between? "See! yonder's his Venice--the valiant Spire, Highest one of the perfect three, Guarding the others: the Palace choir, The Temple flashing with opal fire-- Bubble and foam of the sunlit sea." Edgar Fawcett, always enchanted with his Venetian days, pictures the northern lagoon, some six miles from Venice, as "a revel of pastoral greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it with mingled awe and amusement," he continues. "Some of its mosaics, representing martyrs being devoured by flames and evidently enjoying themselves a great deal during this mortuary process, challenge the disrespectful smile. But others are vested with a rude yet sacred poetry, and certain semi-Oriental marble sculptures, adjacent to the altar, would make an infidel feel like crossing himself for the crime of having yielded to a humorous twinge. This duomo dates far back beyond the Middle Ages, and so does the small Church of Santa Fosca, only a step away. What renders Torcello so individual among all the islands and islets of the lagoon, I should say, is her continual contrast between the ever-recurrent idyllicism of open meadows or wilding clusters of simple rustic thickets, and the enormous antiquity of these two hoary ecclesiastic fanes. History is in the air, and you feel that the very daisies you crush underfoot, the very copses from which you pluck a scented spray, have their delicate rustic ancestries, dating back to Attila, who is said once to have brought his destructive presence where now such sweet solemnity of desertion and quietude unmolestedly rules." History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream, and his poetic dream is of the ethereal realm. The wonderful music that floats over the "silver trail" of still waters; the mystic silences; the resplendence of color,--all, indeed, weave themselves into an incantation of the gods; it is the ineffable loveliness of Paradise where the rose of morning glows "and the June is always June," and it is no more earth, but a celestial atmosphere,--this glory of June in Venice. FOOTNOTES: [3] This inscription and a description in detail of all the memorials of Elizabeth Barrett Browning are given in full in a volume entitled "A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. [4] "A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Little, Brown, & Co. _Dear Italy! The sound of thy soft name Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope. Mine, for the moment, height and sweep and slope That once were mine. Supreme is still the aim To flee the cold and gray Of our December day, And rest where thy clear spirit burns with unconsuming flame._ _Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold Man in communion with the antique days, And summon him from prosy greed to ways Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold; How thou dost hold him near And whisper in his ear Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring haze!_ ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON. _Great ideas create great peoples. Let your life be the living summary of one sole organic idea. Enlarge the horizon of the peoples. Liberate their conscience from the materialism by which it is weighed down. Set a vast mission before them. Rebaptize them._ MAZZINI. _All parts array for the progress of souls: all religion, all solid things, arts, governments,--all that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any globe, falls into niches and comes before the procession of Souls along the grand roads of the universe.... Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance._ WALT WHITMAN. VII THE MAGIC LAND More than five hundred years have passed over the country of Dante since the death of his mortal part--years of glory and of shame, of genius and intolerable mediocrity, of turbulent liberty and mortal servitude; but the name of Dante has remained, and the severe image of the poet still rules the destinies of Italian generations, now an encouragement and now a reproach. The splendor of no other genius has been able to eclipse or dim the grandeur of Dante; never has there been a darkness so profound that it could conceal this star of promise from Italian eyes; neither the profanations of tyrants and Jesuits, nor the violations of foreign invaders, have been able to efface it. "_Sanctum Poetæ nomen quod nunquam barbaries violavit._" MAZZINI. The true life of Italy is not read in any record of contemporary facts or statistics. Mazzini once said of Dante, in an essay on the immortal poet, that "the life, the true life of Dante does not lie in the series of the material facts of his existence. The life of Dante consists in the sufferings and aspirations of his soul; in its dominant impulses; in the ceaseless development of the idea which was at once his guide, inspiration, and consolation; in his belief as a man and as an Italian." The real life of Italy is, by analogy, to be read in that atmosphere of aspiration and of noble purpose which characterizes the nation rather than in the material facts of its general progress at the present time. As a country Italy is young. It is still less than forty years since her unity was declared, and to merge the large number of separate States into one harmonious whole is a task requiring the evolutionary progress of time; for a nation, like a university, cannot be a matter of instantaneous creation. It must germinate and grow. The country that, previous to so comparatively a recent date as the year 1870, was, in the phrasing of Prince Metternich, "a geographical expression," can hardly be judged by present national standards after an existence of only thirty-seven years, although it need be said in no spirit of apology; for Italy is advancing in scientific development, in manufactures, and in the problems involved in civil and hydraulic engineering to a notable degree in the northern part. Milan and Naples are separated by far more than geographical distance. In modern progress Milan is divided by centuries from all Southern Italy. Between Italy and the United States the _entente cordiale_ is not merely that of diplomatic and ceremonial courtesy, but of an exceptional degree of mutually sympathetic comprehensions. In noble ambitions and lofty purposes Americans and Italians are closely akin. In zeal for contemporary scientific progress, in an intense susceptibility to the glories of art, and in hospitality to all that makes for progress, both nations meet in mutual recognition. Of no people is it more deeply true than of Americans that "each man has two countries: his own and Italy." The average traveller sees this fair land with a breadth and thoroughness seldom called into requisition elsewhere. In England he is usually content with London, the tour of the cathedral towns and the lake region of the poets. France is summed up to him in Paris and in the chateaux of outlying districts. But Italy beguiles the traveller into every lonely foot-trail in the mountains; to every "piazza grande" of lonely hamlets, isolated on a rocky hillside; to every "fortezza" that crowns a mountain summit. The unexplored byways of Italy are magnetic in their fascination, and one special source of congratulation on the part of those fortunate tourists who travel with their own motor car is that they are thus enabled to penetrate into untrodden byways in Italy in a manner impossible to those who must depend entirely on the regulation railroad service. All lovers of Italy are devoted to these original tours of private exploration. A recent trip to Saracinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made by Mrs. Stetson (Grace Ellery Channing) with her husband, and in a descriptive record of the little journey into an unfrequented mountain region this paragraph occurs:-- "Roused by 'an awful rose of dawn' which turned every solemn slope to strange amber and amethyst, we left that rocky eyrie next day, returning by way of Anticoli--beloved of artists. And if the ascent had qualified us for Alpine climbers, the descent qualified us as members of the Italian cavalry corps. Pictures of officers riding down the face of cliffs will never impress us again; we know now it is the very simplest of 'stunts.' Our way down was diversified by the tinkling of thousands of sheep-bells, by the far too close proximity of bulls to Maria's crimson headdress, which nothing in the world would induce her to remove, and by sundry meetings with relations, long-unseen friends, and strangers, from whom we culled the whole register of deaths, births, marriages, and happenings for a month past. At last, beside a little bridge near the railroad station, Leonardo addressed his ten-thousandth adjuration to Beppino, whose poor little legs trembled under him. It was no longer, 'Ah, sacred one!--don't you see Anticoli!'--or 'the rock,' or whatever it might be; now he said, 'Ah, sacred one!--don't you comprehend?--the Signora descends'--and Beppino looked distinctly pleased. "Here we demanded the reckoning, skilfully evaded hitherto. "'Well--a franc for each beast,--and half a franc for the room,--the rest was nothing--a _sciocchezza_.' "A franc apiece!--half a franc!--were _we_ brigands that we should do this thing?" This typical picture of idyllic days in Italy, enjoyed in the impromptu excursion and trip, reveals the delicacy of feeling and the sunny kindness that characterize the _contadini_ and which imparts to any social contact with them a grace and sweetness peculiar to Italian life. There are parts of Italy where it is still the Middle Ages and no hint of the twentieth century has yet penetrated. The modern spirit has almost taken possession of Rome; it is largely in evidence in Florence and even Venice, and it dominates Milan; but in most of the "hill towns" and in the little hamlets and lonely haunts where a house is perhaps improvised out of the primeval rock, the prevailing life is still mediæval, and only awakens on festa days into any semblance of activity. Somewhere, away up in the hills, several miles from Pegli,--on the Mediterranean coast near Genoa,--is one of these sequestered little hill towns called _Acqua Sacra_. The name is obvious, indeed, for the sound of the "sacred water" fills the air, falling from every hillside and from the fountain of the _acqua sacra_ by the church. Pilgrims come from miles around to drink of these waters. Each house in this remote little hamlet is of solid stone, resembling a fortress on a small scale, and the houses cling to the hillsides like mosses to a rock. Though far up in the mountains, the hills rise around the hamlet like city walls, as if the life of all the world were kept outside. The unforeseen visit to these remote hamlets, suddenly chancing upon some small centre of happy and half-idyllic life, is one of the charms of tourist travel in this land of ineffable loveliness. [Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREEK THEATRE, TAORMINA, SICILY _Page 429_] The approach to Italy, by whatever direction, by land or by sea, one enters, is one of magical beauty. Whether one enters from the Mediterranean or from the Adriatic, or by means of the Mont Cenis, the Simplon, or the St. Gothard pass, through the sublime mountain wall, each gateway is marvellous in attraction. Approaching from the seas that completely surround Italy except on one side, the almost undreamed-of splendor of Naples, Genoa, and Venice, as seen from off the shore, exceeds all power of painter or poet to reproduce. The precipitous coast of Sicily; the picturesque city of Palermo; the wonderful ruins of the Greek theatre on the heights in Taormina,--all enchant the tourist. To anchor off Naples, in the beautiful bay, serves the purpose of an hotel out at sea. It is like living in Venice--only more so! By the little rowboats one may go, at any moment, to Naples, and it is more delightful than passing the days in the city itself. For at night as one strolls or sits on deck what a picture is before the eye! All Naples, on her semicircular shores, with her terraced heights rising above, defined in a blaze of electric lights! Genoa, _la Superba_, is still more magnificent when seen from the sea; and Venice, rising dream-enchanted, completes the wonders of the approach by water. As the new Italy has not yet achieved any homogeneous unity, Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan differ in their characteristics to such a degree that no general interpretation of the residents of any one would appropriately describe those of another. Paris and Vienna hardly differ as much as do Milan and Rome; and Venice, Florence, and Rome, each rich in art treasures, have little else in common. Certain characteristics of each of the large cities reveal themselves prominently, even to a superficial observer. Milan, as has been said, is a centre of activity, as Florence is of culture and accomplishments. Florence has the largest and the most choice circulating library in all Italy and one that ranks among the best on the Continent. Her galleries are treasure stores of art, and her social life is unsurpassed--one might almost say unrivalled--in its fine quality. Music, philosophic culture, learning in all lines of research characterize Florentine society. Education has always been regarded in Florence as a matter of prime importance, and when the government grant of funds is insufficient the sum is made up by private contributions, so that the _Scuola del Popolo_ gives free instruction, yearly, to eighteen hundred pupils, in every branch of technical and art education. This fact alone offers its own explanation of that general intelligence of the people which so impresses the visitor in Florence. But this is a municipal rather than national fact. Every special development in any direction in Italy will always be found to be the characteristic of the city or locality, not of the country as a whole; and thus the unity of Italy is still a political expression rather than a political fact. It is a theory which is not yet developed into an experience. Italy is in the making. Practically, she is the youngest of countries, with less than forty years of experimental attempt at _national_ life behind her. Not until 1919 will she have attained the first half century of her united life. Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,--all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary record or of prophecy; and that this is a traditional attitude in this city of the Cæsars is not a fact by any means unknown; but the situation is complicated by the third party--the Socialists--who, by allying themselves with either, would easily turn the scales and command the situation. If they were ardent Catholics and were advocates of the Papal supremacy, the temporal power of the Pope would be restored in less time almost than could be recorded, and Pius X would be in residence in the Palazzo Quirinale rather than Victor Emanuele III. But this great modern uprising in Italy--a movement that is gathering force and numbers so rapidly that no one can venture to prophesy results even in the comparatively immediate future--this great modern movement is neither for church nor state. The Socialist uprising is very strong in Milan and through Northern Italy. It is much in evidence in the Umbrian region--in Foligno, Spoleto, Nervi, and those towns; and from Frascati to Genzano and in the Lake Nemi chain of villages--Rocca di Papa, Castel Gandolpho, Ariccia, Albano--these villages within some fifteen miles of Rome. In these there is a veritable stronghold of Socialism, where its purposes and policy are entrenched. Yet when one alludes to its policy, the term is rather too definite. If it had a settled and well-formulated policy on which all its adherents were in absolute accord they would carry all before them. But Socialism is still a very elastic term and covers, if not a multitude of sins, at least a multitude of ideas and ideals. There is now a rumor that the situation is forcing the absolutely inconceivable union of church and state--of the Vatican and the Quirinale--that they may thus withstand their common foe. A more amazing and extraordinary turn of affairs could not be imagined; and if the rumor (which is now becoming more coherent in Rome) should prove to be the forerunner of any truth, the situation will be one of the most amazing in all history. [Illustration: PONTE VECCHIO, FLORENCE _Page 430_] Epoch-making events in the course of progress are always preceded by circumstances that form to them a natural approach and chain of causation. They are the results of which the causes stretch backward in the past. One of the things that has an incalculably determining influence on the present situation is that of the character of the present Pope. His Holiness, Pius X, brings to the Papacy an entirely new element. He is no ascetic or exclusive ecclesiastic; he is no diplomat or intriguant, but rather a simple, kindly man, of a simplicity totally unprecedented in the annals of the Palazzo Vaticano. Instead of clinging with unswerving intensity of devotion to the idea of the restoration of the temporal power of the church, Pope Pius X would not be disinclined to the uniting of church and state as in England; the Vatican to remain, like the See of Canterbury, the acknowledged head of the spiritual power, while the Quirinale remained the head of the government to which the church should give its political adherence, the Quirinale in return giving to the Vatican its religious adherence. Perhaps it is not too much to say that something not unlike this might easily become--if it is not already--the dream of Pius X. But in the mean time there is another factor with which to reckon, and that is the present Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val. He it is who really holds the mystic key of St. Peter's. He is a diplomatist, an ecclesiastic, an embodiment of all that is severe and archaic in authority. The Pope is by no means able to set his course by his own watch-lights. The College of Cardinals surrounds him, and the College of Cardinals is practically one Cardinal, the keen scholar and the all determining Cardinal Merry del Val, whose personality dominates the court of the Vatican. This remarkable prelate represents the most advanced and progressive thought of the day in many ways,--as has been noted in preceding pages,--but as a Jesuit he is unalterably devoted to what he considers the only ideal,--the restoration of the temporal power of the Pope. Spain revealed her attitude when King Alphonso asked of all the monarchs of Europe that the name of each should be borne by his infant son, the heir-apparent; and for Italy he asked the name of the Pope and not of the King, thus recognizing Pius X rather than Victor Emmanuel III as the head of the nation. That the Socialists have very logical and serious grounds for complaint is true. That their leader, Signor Enrico Ferri, an Italian journalist and a Senator, is one of the most able men in Italy since the time of Cavour is equally undeniable. The Socialists are fortunate, too, in other leading men. Turati, the editor of the _Critica Sociale_, Pantaleoni, Colajanni, and others are absolutely the hope of Italy at the present time in the struggle for better conditions. For the conditions of life in Italy, as regards taxation, the problems of transit, the government restrictions on agricultural production and on manufactures, are absolutely intolerable and should not be endured for a day. The taxation is so exorbitant that it is a marvel Italy is not depopulated. On land the tax rate is from thirty to fifty per cent; the income tax is not merely, as one would suppose, levied on a legitimate income derived from a man's possessions, but is levied on salaries, ranging from ten to twenty per cent of these, and also, not content with this unheard-of extortion, the tax is levied on the nature and source of his salary, and even the smallest wage is thus subject to an income tax. Again, there is a most absurd tax on salt, which, like sugar and tobacco, is held as a government monopoly. No poor person living on the seacoast in Italy is allowed to take even a pail of water from the sea to his house, as the government assumes that, by evaporation, it might yield a few grains of salt. The tax on sugar effectually checks an industry that might be made most profitable, that of putting up fruit in jams, jellies, and compote, and renders the price of these commodities absurdly high. Again, when taxes are paid the process is even worse than the unjust and exorbitant tax itself. No one is allowed to send a check or postal order; no tax gatherer calls at the home or the office. Each person must go himself or send a personal representative to a given place between certain hours. Here stand a long procession, each person in town going up, filling out pages of written formalities; talking of each item and discussing it according to the national custom, until the office hours are over for that day, and often not one-fourth of the persons waiting have been served. All then must take their chances the next day, and perhaps even a third or a fourth day,--a loss of time and energy that in no other country would be tolerated for a moment. But time has not yet any recognizable value in Italy. Every enterprise and manufacture is taxed in Italy, and as the returns of these are inevitably revealed so that no evasion is possible, and as the exactions of the government consume nearly all the profits, the result is that all business enterprises are discouraged and that Italy swarms with a great idle population, while nearly all articles and supplies are imported from other countries, with the payment of enormous duties, making their cost far greater, proportionately, than their value. There are great tracts of country in Southern Italy suitable for tobacco raising, but (as it is one of the government monopolies) people are forbidden to raise it; and in private gardens only three plants are permitted. Again, all industries are crippled, if not paralyzed, by the tax at the frontier, and also by the tax at every gate of every city. At every _porta_ in Rome are stationed government officers who scrutinize every box, basket, and package; and all fruit, eggs, garden stuff, milk, and commodities of every kind are taxed as they are brought inside the walls. The railroads of Italy are, at present, very poor in all facilities of transit. Within a year the Italian government has "taken over" these roads and better conditions are promised, which are, alas! not yet in sight. There are many "counts" to the indictment against the Italian railroads which are only suitable to adorn the very lowest circles of the Inferno described by Dante. They are uncleanly; the roadbeds are so rough that the miserably built compartments jolt and jostle over the tracks; the seats are so high that the feet can hardly touch the floor, and the facilities for light and air are as badly managed as is possible to conceive. As is well known, these are divided into first, second, and third class, these compartments all being in the same train, and between the first and second there is little difference save that of price. Curiously, the price of even second-class travelling in Italy is over half a cent a mile higher than that of the splendid trains in America, with their swift time, their smooth roadbeds, their admirable conveniences in every way. Again, no luggage is carried free, and the prices asked for it are extortionate beyond words. One may check all his impedimenta from San Francisco to New York without extra charge; but in going from Rome to Naples, or from Florence to Genoa to sail, the same luggage will cost from six to eight dollars to convey it to the steamer. Again, these railroads pay their employés so poorly that only the most inefficient service can be retained at all; only those persons who are the absolute prisoners of poverty will consent to accept such meagrely paid service. The Italian government consists, like that of most countries, of an upper and lower house, the Senate and the House of Deputies. But the former is rather a matter of miscellaneous honors than one of political initiative. There is no limit to the number of Senators; they are created by being named by the King, and the office is for life. If a man attracts the favorable notice of the King,--because he is a good artist, engineer, archæologist, chemist, or financier,--presto, he is liable to be made a Senator. Canova, the celebrated sculptor, was made a Senator because, indeed, he was a great artist! There is one condition, however, that a Senator must be one who pays annually not less than three thousand lire in taxes. The Senators receive no salary, and their times of meeting are uncertain and no man's presence is obligatory. The House of Deputies has five hundred and eight members, all of whom must be Italian subjects over thirty years of age. They have no salary, but are given the entire freedom of the realm in all transit on railroads and steamers. The Chamber of Deputies is largely made up of professional men, and it is little wonder that the Socialists are demanding an entire reform in the government of the country. There was never in any country more defective conditions than now prevail in Italy. The very fact that the young King is an estimable gentleman, who is personally not in the least to blame for the prevailing status of unfortunate conditions, is in one way an added misfortune, as the personal loyalty he justly inspires militates by so much against the revolution in government which is so deeply a necessity of Italy before her better and more prosperous life can begin. It is now a country of stagnation. All Southern and Central Italy simply lives off its tourists; and every year prices and fees and extortion in general from the visitors to Italy become greater. Senator Enrico Ferri, the leader of Socialism in Italy, was born in 1856 in Mantua. He had a university education, was admitted to the bar, and in 1881 was called to the chair of penal law in the University of Bologna. The Senator is a scientific Socialist,--a man of the most exceptional gifts and qualities, and the author of a noted work, entitled "Criminal Sociology," which is translated into several languages. Senators Ferri and Lombroso are special friends and also co-workers. On taking his seat in the University of Bologna, Professor Ferri delivered a lecture, entitled "New Horizons in Penal Law," which was a most impressive effort. In it he said:-- "It was in this inaugural discourse that I affirmed the existence of the positivist school of criminal law, and assigned to it these two fundamental rules: First, while the classical schools of criminal law have always studied the crime and neglected the criminal, the object of the positivist school was, in the first place, to study the criminal, so that, instead of the crime being regarded merely as a juridical fact, it must be studied with the aid of biology, of psychology, and of criminal statistics as a natural and social fact, transforming the old criminal law into a criminal sociology. Secondly, while the classical schools, since Beccaria and Howard, have fulfilled the historic mission of decreasing the punishments as a reaction from the severity of the mediæval laws, the object of the positivist school is to decrease the offence by investigating its natural and social causes in order to apply social remedies more efficacious and more humane than the penal counteraction, always slow in its effects, especially in its cellular system, which I have called one of the aberrations of the nineteenth century." Such is the man to whom it is no extravagance to allude as one of the present leaders of progress in Italy. He is in the early prime of mature life; he is a man of education, culture, great original gifts, and of sympathies with humanity as wise and judicious as they are liberal and all-embracing. Scientific Socialism tolerates no lawlessness, no violence, nor does it, like the so-called Christian Socialism, attempt to graft impossible conditions on society. It regards the laws of economics, and it is practicable and possible as well as considerate and just. And the great inspirer, proclaimer, and leader of scientific Socialism is Enrico Ferri. Italy not only inspires the enthusiasm of the lover of beauty in nature and art, she inspires a vital and abiding interest in all that shall make for her true progress, and she inspires, as well, absolute faith in her ultimate future. At present her monarchy is among the most liberal and progressive of Europe. King Victor Emmanuel is a man of integrity, of intelligence, and of devotion to the best interests of his country as he understands these interests to be. If they might be better served by a more democratic form of government, it is hardly to be asked or expected that such a view should present itself to an hereditary monarch. Among the most liberal element there are not wanting men who believe that for the immediate future the present form of government is the most feasible. In their conviction Italy is by no means prepared to be a republic. The masses of the people are uneducated; and a great work, requiring time, must be effected in the popularization of intelligence and of instruction, before democratic government could be adopted. Yet there is no faltering in the outlook on a glorious future. The noble words of Mazzini still ring in the Italian air: "Walk in faith, and fear not. Believe, and you will conquer." By way of enforcing his convictions Mazzini said:-- "Upon a day in the sixteenth century, at Rome, some men bearing the title of _Inquisitors_, who assumed to derive wisdom and authority from God himself, were assembled to decree the immobility of the earth. A prisoner stood before them. His brow was illumined by genius. He had outstripped time and mankind, and revealed the secret of a world. "It was Galileo. "The old man shook his bold and venerable head. His soul revolted against the absurd violence of those who sought to force him to deny the truths revealed to him by God. But his pristine energy was worn down by long suffering and sorrow; the monkish menace crushed him. He strove to submit. He raised his hand, he too, to declare the immobility of the earth. But as he raised his hand, he raised his weary eyes to that heaven they had searched throughout long nights to read thereon one line of the universal law; they encountered a ray of that sun which he so well knew motionless amid the moving spheres. Remorse entered his heart: an involuntary cry burst from the believer's soul: _Eppur si muove!_ and yet it moves. "Three centuries have passed away. Inquisitors,--inquisition,--absurd theses imposed by force,--all these have disappeared. Naught remains but the well-established movement of the earth, and the sublime cry of Galileo floating above the ages. "Child of Humanity, raise thy brow to the sun of God, and read upon the heavens: _It moves._ Faith and action! The future is ours." "Poetry," added Mazzini, "will teach the young the nobleness of sacrifice, of constancy, and silence; of feeling one's self alone without despairing, in an existence of suffering unknown or misunderstood; in long years of bitterness, wounds, and delusion, endured without murmur or lament; it will teach them to have faith in things to come, and to labor unceasingly to hasten their coming, even though without hope of living to witness their triumph;" and his final word in this great invocation to the new potencies of the opening future is an exhortation to believe in all greatness and goodness. "Faith," he said, "which is intellect, energy, and love, will put an end to the discords existing in a society which has neither church nor leaders; which invokes a new world, but forgets to ask its secret, its Word, from God." In universal education must lie the first national aid to the development of Italy. "_L'anima del gran mondo è l'allegria._" As Florence is pre-eminently the city of culture, so is Milan of activities. Her keynote is _modernité_. The visitor is at once impressed by her energy, her enterprise, and her commercial prosperity. Milan has the best municipal facilities and conveniences in all Italy. The electric lighting of streets, public buildings, and residences, the street transit, the arrangement and conduct of shops and all industrial matters, are in such contrast to any other city in Italy as to lead the sojourner to ask himself whether he can still be on the southern side of the Alpine range. In the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele Milan has the most wonderful structure in all Europe. This arcade was built in 1865, and under the magnificent glass dome it includes nearly one hundred of the most attractive and well-stocked shops, bazaars, and establishments. The dome is decorated with frescoes and caryatides, and with the statues of numbers of eminent men, among whom are Dante, Raphael, Savonarola, and Cavour. The offices and banks in Milan are centres of incessant energy. For all this stress of activity the visitor does not, however, forget the art features; the visit to the antique Church of St. Ambrosio; to the old convent where Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated fresco, "The Last Supper," is to be seen, though so faded that it is now difficult to discern all the figures. Nor does he fail to climb the wonderful cathedral that lifts its airy grace, as if about to float upward in the skies. Every flight of the steps, in the ascent, brings one to a new vision of beauty. On the roof of this cathedral one wanders as in a very forest of sculpture. Its scheme of decoration includes more than two thousand statues, two of which are by Canova. From the summit, when the air is clear, there are beautiful views of the Alps. To the savant and scholar the Ambrosian library in Milan is one of the special treasures of Europe. It contains some of the most rare and valuable manuscripts in the entire world,--some of Virgil's with annotations from Petrarcha; a manuscript of Dante's; drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and other interesting matters of which no other copies exist. The Magic Land is seen under its most bewitching spell in the region of the Italian lakes. The palace of Isola Bella; the charming gardens; the lake of Como, green-walled in hills whose luxuriant foliage and bloom form a framework for the white villas that cluster on their terraced slopes,--all form a very fairyland of ethereal, rose-embowered beauty. At night the lakes are a strange, unreal world of silver lights and shadows. The completion of the Simplon tunnel has opened between Italy and Paris a route not only offering swifter facilities for transit, but adding another to the regions of beauty. This route has also still further increased the commercial importance of Milan, the portal and metropolis of Northern Italy. Milan has become the national centre of all scientific and technical pursuits, and it is fairly the Mecca for young men of Central and Southern Italy who are entering into the professions, or into civil and electrical engineering and other of the technical arts and industries. Bologna, with her historic University, with the long covered arcades of the streets, the fountain, which is the work of Giovanni di Bologna, and the gallery where many of Guido's best works are placed, has its individual interest for the tourist; and Verona, Pavia, Modena, Parma, and Turin all repay a visit from the leisurely saunterer in Italy. Pisa offers to the visitor four interesting architectural monuments in the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, all of which are unique. The cathedral has unique designs in its black and white marbles that render it almost as much an object of artistic study as is the cathedral in Siena. The view from the summit of the Leaning Tower reveals the Mediterranean six miles in the distance, gleaming like a sea of silver. The Campo Santo dates from the thirteenth century, when the earth of which it is composed was brought (in 1228) from the holy places in Jerusalem, conveyed to the city (then a seaport) by fifty galleys sent out by the Republic of Pisa. The interior walls of the Campo Santo are covered with fresco paintings by Orcagna which are one of the artistic spectacles of the country in their extravagant portrayal of theological beliefs, so realistically presented in their dramatic scenes from Paradise and from Hades, as to leave nothing to the imagination. The fantasies in this emblematic sculpture of memorial monuments over a period of seven hundred years can be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa,--a strange and often a most grotesque medley. Genoa is well named La Superba. Her thoroughfares are streets of palaces. Her terraced gardens and villas, reached by the subterranean funicular street railway, are regions of unique and incomparable beauty, with the blue Mediterranean at their feet. Genoa is the paradise for walking. The streets are largely inaccessible to carriages, but the admirable street electric railway penetrates every locality. It passes in dark tunnels under the hills, reappears on the high terraces, and climbs every height. From the crest of one of these Corsica can often be seen. All the hill-slopes are a dream of pictorial grandeur, with their terraces, their palaces, their sculpture, fountains, and flowers. On the summit of almost every hill there is a fortress, and often ramparts which are silhouetted, in dark masses, against the sky. Orange groves abound on the terraces, often showing the golden fruit, buds, and blossoms all at the same time. Genoa is fairly a metropolis of sculpture. The great families have themselves perpetuated in portrait statues rather than in painted portraits. In one of the grand ducal palaces in the Via Balbi the visitor may see, not only the life-size statues and the busts of the family ancestry, but one group comprising nine figures, where three generations are represented, in both sitting and standing poses, ingeniously combined. The churches of Genoa are among the richest in Europe. That of the Annunziata, the special monument of the Lomellini family, glitters and gleams with its gold ceilings and rich frescoes. The cathedral has the special allurement of the emerald dish which King Solomon received as a gift from the Queen of Sheba. The little "street of the jewellers" is an alluring place,--so narrow that one can almost stand in the centre of the road and touch the shop windows on either hand, and these windows dazzle the eye with their fascinating glitter of gold and silver filigree work and their rich jewels. [Illustration: CAMPO SANTO, GENOA _Page 453_] Beyond all other curious excursions that even a Magic Land can offer is that to the Campo Santo of Genoa. A cloistered promenade encloses a square, and above are terraced colonnades, each and all revealing statues, and monuments, and groups of sculpture whose varied beauty, oddity, or bizarre effects are a curious study. Some memorials--as one of an angel with outstretched wings; another of a flight of angels bearing the soul away; another combining the figure of Christ with the cross, and angels hovering near--are full of beauty. Others are a marvel of ingenious and incongruous combination. One of the latter represents the man whose memory it commemorates as lying on his bed in his last illness; the physician stands by, his fingers on the patient's pulse; on the opposite side a maid is approaching with a dish holding some article of food, and near the physician are grouped the wife, with a little child clinging to her skirts; the son, holding his hat with both hands and looking down on it, and the daughter, a young girl, with her eyes raised to heaven. Each of these figures is in life size; the bed is reproduced in marble, with the pillows and all the coverings in the most absolute realism, and the entire effect is so startling in its bizarre aspect that one could hardly believe in its existence until by personal observation he had verified so singular a monument. Yet there is beauty and symbolic loveliness, too, in many of the memorial sculptures of this Campo Santo, and turning away from this cemetery in which lies the body of the noble Mazzini, one hears on the air the refrain of his words on Dante:-- "It appeared to him of more importance to hasten to accomplish his mission upon earth, than to meditate upon the inevitable hour which marks for all men the beginning of a new task. And if at times he speaks of weariness of life, it is only because he sees evil more and more triumphant in the places where his mission was appointed. He concerned himself, not about the length or the shortness of life, but about the end for which life was given; for he felt God in life, and knew the creative virtue there is in action." Eighty thousand people followed Mazzini to his tomb, and his name lives in the Italy of to-day as one to be associated with that of Dante as prophet and inspirer. The enchantment of approaching Genoa from the sea at night is an experience to remain as one of the pictorial treasures of memory. The magnificent _lanterna_, the lighthouse with its revolving light, that can be seen for fifty miles out from the coast; the brilliant illumination defining the _fortezza_ on the summit of one hill; the curving lights of the terraced residential district and the illumination of the very forest of shipping clustered in the bay,--all combine into a scene not easily effaced from the memories of foreign scenes. It is only in close relations with Italian literature that Italy can be adequately enjoyed and that the sojourner may enter into sympathetic associations with contemporary Italian life. Dr. Richard Garnett believes that the literature of Italy "is a less exhaustive manifestation than elsewhere of the intellect of the nation," and that "the best energies of the country are employed in artistic production. It is, indeed, remarkable," he continues, "that out of the nine Italians most brilliantly conspicuous in the first rank of genius and achievement,--Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Galileo, Napoleon,--only one should have been a man of letters." Contemporary Italian literature follows the trend of the day in reflecting the life of the people. The novels of Fogazzaro, the poems of Carducci, the biography and history written by Villari, to say nothing of several other writers who, while not approaching these authors, have still a definite place in the literature of the present, offer illumination on the outer scenery of life, and offer interpretation of the life itself. Art has declined; literature has advanced in Italy, even within the past decade. The law of progress is as inevitable as is the law of gravitation. "Onward the chariot of the Unvarying moves; Nor day divulges him nor night conceals; Thou hear'st the echo of unreturning hooves, And thunder of irrevocable wheels." The future of Italy inspires faith in the renewal of its noblest ideals of achievement. Its ineffable beauty is a heritage of joy to every visitor who comes under the indescribable spell of its attraction and finds that, in all the panorama of foreign life which haunts his memory, it is Italy which shines resplendent as the Magic Land! INDEX Accademia des Arcades, Rome, 334. Accadémia di San Luca, oldest art school, 44; location of, 45; galleries of, 46, 47, 48. Acqua Sacra, 428. Akers, Paul, in Rome, 10; early death of, 53; work of, 54, 55; quoted, 56; Hawthorne's estimate of, 57. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, quoted, 387. Allen, Elizabeth Akers, quoted, 53. Amalfi, 253-257; destruction of, 258, 259. Ambrosian library, Milan, 449. American Academy, Rome, 214. American Embassy, Rome, location of, 153; ball at, 164-167; receptions at, 169. Anderson, Hendrick Christian, in Rome, 10. Angelo, Michael, work of, 22, 23, 312; message of, 117; friendship with Vittoria Colonna, 290; Longfellow's poem on, 308-310; art of, 313, 314; quoted, 314, 316, 317, 318, 323; gift to Vittoria Colonna, 318; meeting with Francesco d'Ollanda, 322, 323, 324; Walter Pater's estimate of, 327, 328, 329. Annunziata Cathedral, Genoa, 452. Aquinas, Thomas, birthplace of, 276; tomb of, 331; monastery of, 333. Aquinum, 277. "Arcadians," meetings of, 150. Ariosto, 306. Art, as leader of popular taste, 115; inspired by religious ideals, 116; Renaissance in, 117; national importance of, 117; ignored, 118; relation to ugliness, 119; falseness of, 121; influence on life, 122; united with religion, 123. Assisi, pilgrimage to, 341, 344; founding of, 345; points of interest in, 345, 346; Canon Knox Little's description of, 348; as a shrine, 385. Assisi, Bishop of, 354, 364. Assisi, St. Francis of, 123, 124; message of, 342; birthplace of, 345; impress of, 347; parents of, 348, 349; early life of, 350; legends regarding, 351; quoted, 352, 354, 356; supreme aim of, 353; Rule of, 353, 354; prayer of, 356; character of, 357; incident in early life of, 360; first ministry of, 363; first disciple of, 364; at the Portiuncula, 365; friendship with Clara, 365, 367, 368; legends regarding, 370; death of, 372; miracles of, 375; tomb of, 378. Bagot, Richard, in Rome, 11, 13. Baia, 241. Baldwin, Rev. Dr., in Rome, 10, 171. Ball, Thomas, work of, 52. Balzac, quoted, 120. Barberini, Cardinal, 72. Baths of Caracalla, 139. Baths of Diocletian, 184. Bell, John, grave of, 216. Bembo, Cardinal, 306. Benedictines, 354, 365. Benton, Dwight, grave of, 221; estimate of, 221. Bernardino of Siena, 382, 383; quoted, 383. Bernini, Lorenzo, work of, 22. Besant, Mrs. Annie, 174. Biblioteca Sarti, 48. "Blacks," 145, 146. Bologna, 450. Bonaparte, Princess Christina, death of, 203. Boni, Commendatore, opinion of, 244. Boni, Giovanni M., 403. Bronson, Mrs. Arthur, 409, 410. Brooks, Rev. Phillips, in Rome, 15; quoted, 16, 39, 388, 394, 395. Brownell, W. C., quoted, 96. Browning, Elizabeth B., in Rome, 11; quoted, 60, 114, 125, 389; death of, 80, 408; meeting with Mrs. Bronson, 410, 411. Browning Palace, 406, 410, 411, 412, 413. Browning, Robert, quoted, 3, 407, 408; in Rome, 11, 70; in Venice, 406; death of, 408. Browning, Miss Sarianna, 408, 413. Buono, 236. Byron, Lord, in Rome, 22; quoted, 22, 403. Campagna, 73, 205. Campanile, fall of, 406. Campo Verano, 76. Campo Santo of Pisa, 450, 451, 453. Campidoglio, buildings on, 25. Campriani, 237. Canova, in Rome, 7; his genius, 33; masterpiece of, 42; realism of, 118. Capella Sistina, 27. Capo Miseno, 241. Capri, island of, 262, 263, 264; roses of, 266. Capuano, Cardinal, legends of, 256. Capuccini, convent of, 255. Carducci, 143. Carter, Professor Jesse Benedict, in Rome, 169. Carter, Mrs. Jesse Benedict, 34, 37, 169. Casa Buonarroti, 312. Casino Borghese, 185. Castel d'Ischia, 292, 293, 294. Castellammare, 250. Castle Gandolfo, 286. Castiglione, 306. Cecioni's "La Madre," 121. Cestius, Caius, tomb of, 215. Channing, Grace Ellery, 10, 91. Chapel of Holy Sacrament, 202. Chateaubriand, in Rome, 21; quoted, 21. Cicero's villa, remains of, 207. Cimabue, 376, 378. Cole, Thomas, in Rome, 9. Coleman, Charles Caryl, home of, 263. College of Cardinals, 435. Colonna, Fabrizio, 290. Colonna family, 285, 288, 289, 306, 307. Colonna palace and gardens, 131. Colonna, Vittoria, home of, 282; quoted, 283, 303; parents of, 285; early childhood of, 286, 288; horoscope of, 289; destiny of, 290; betrothal of, 290; marriage of, 294, 295; early married life of, 295, 296; quoted, 297, 298, 300, 303, 305, 319, 320, 321; in Pope Leo's court, 302; her husband's death, 302; removal of, 304; fame of, 306; return to Rome of, 307; Longfellow's picture of, 308, 309, 310, 325, 326, 327; travels of, 308, 311; her influence with Michael Angelo, 313; life in Rome and Orvieto, 314; receives letters and sonnet from Michael Angelo, 317; receives present from Michael Angelo, 318; arranges meeting of Michael Angelo and Francesco d'Ollanda, 322, 323, 324; Walter Pater's comments on, 328; death of, 329; last prayer of, 330; burial of, 331; tomb of, 332; bust of, 334; fame of, 335, 336; Margaret J. Preston's poem on, 337. Condivi, quoted, 313. Contarini, Cardinal, 306. Corsini chapel, 152. Crawford, Marion, in Rome, 11, 13. Crawford, Thomas, in Rome, 49; career of, 51; poem on, 52. Crow, Hon. Wayman, 61. Cumæ, 241. Cumæan Sibyl, 242. da Bisticci, Vespasiano, 383. Dalbano, Edoardo, 236. Dana, Richard Henry, 219. Dante, quoted, 267-270; Mazzini's estimate of, 454. d'Avalos, Donna Constanza, 291. d'Avalos, Francesco, 290, 294, 295. De Castro, Consul General, in Rome, 169. Decline of art, 31. d'Ollanda, Francesco, 322-324. del Val, Cardinal Merry, 146-149, 435. del Vasto, Marchese, 299. De Monici, chronicles of, 398. de Staël, Mme., in Rome, 11, 22. Dietsch, C. Percival, in Rome, 10. di Francavilla, Duchess, 291-293. di Mercanti, Pica, 349, 350. di Mercanti, Pietro Bernardone, 348, 349. di Pescara, Marchesa, 296, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 306, 311, 312, 322, 331, 332, 335. di Pescara, Marchese, 292, 296, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 331, 332. Doges, Palace of, 400-403. Dolce, Ludovico, 306. Don Erasmo Gattola, 273. Duca de Torlonia, family of, 205. Duff, Lina Gordon, quoted, 374. Dupaty, quoted, 16. Duran, M. Carolus, in Rome, 166, 167. Elena, Queen, 140, 142, 179. Eliot, George, quoted, 252. Emerson, Mary Moody, letters to, 12. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, in Rome, 12; quoted, 85. Emmons, Miss Elise, in Rome, 167. Esposito, 237. Ezekiel, Moses, in Rome, 10; studios of, 97. Fawcett, Edgar, quoted, 417. Ferrara, Duca and Duchessa of, 311. Ferri, Signor Enrico, 436, 442; quoted, 442. Festus, quoted, 30. Field, Kate, in Rome, 12. Florence, culture of, 430, 431. Fra Ambrosia, 322. Franciscan, 367. Frascati, visited, 205. Galileo, in Rome, 139, 445. Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, 448. Garibaldi, villa of, 239. Garnett, Dr. Richard, quoted, 456. Genoa, 430; features of, 451; as a metropolis of sculpture, 452; churches of, 452; enchantment of, 455. Ghiberto, Bishop, 311. Gibson, John, in Rome, 10, 36; quoted, 34, 37, 59; grave of, 221. Giotto, 376, 377, 379. Giovio, Paolo, 306. Gladstone, in Rome, 11. Goethe, in Rome, 11, 20; quoted, 20. Goethe, August, grave of, 216. Goldoni, Carlo, centenary of, 413; memorial of, 414. Good Friday, service in Rome, 200, 201. Greenough, Horatio, in Rome, 10; work of, 49; death, 50. Greenough, Mrs. Horatio, 335. Greenough, Richard, in Rome, 10, 58; grave of, 217. Greenough, Sarah B., tomb of, 218. Grotto de Matrimonia, 263. Grotto Ferrata, 209. Guili, Commendatore Conte, 214. Guthers, Carl, work of, 236. Hare, Augustus William, grave of, 221. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, quoted, 45, 57, 67, 195. Healy, Mr., in Rome, 19. Herculaneum, 242; excavations in, 244; Professor Spinazzola on, 242, 243; destruction of, 244; theatre in, 247. Hillard, George Stillman, in Rome, 12; quoted, 23, 24, 51, 230, 248. Holy Week, in Rome, 200. Hosmer, Harriet, in Rome, 10, 59, 60, 61; work of, 62. Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley, in Rome, 12. Howe, Julia Ward, in Rome, 12. Howells, William Dean, in Rome, 13, 416. Howitt, William and Mary, graves of, 216. Hugo, Victor, 41. Ischia, 281; romantic impressions of, 282; home of Vittoria Colonna, 282; the d'Avalos castle in, 291; as an enchanted island, 296; Vittoria's return to, 299, 305. Italy, land of romance and song, 6; Mazzini's opinion of, 65; true life of, 423; as a youthful country, 424; relation with United States, 425; traveller in, 425; picture of idyllic days in, 427; approach to, 429; cities of, 429, 430; in the making, 431; politics of, 432; Socialistic uprising in, 433; taxation in, 436-438; railroads in, 439, 440; government of, 440, 441; future of, 444, 457; lakes of, 449; contemporary literature of, 456. James, Henry, in Rome, 11, 13. Jameson, Mrs., in Rome, 67; quoted, 193. Johnson, Robert Underwood, quoted, 416, 421. Juvenal, birthplace of, 277. Keats, in Rome, 11, 132; memorial, 133; grave of, 216. Kemble, Adelaide, in Rome, 68. Kemble, Fanny, in Rome, 68. Keynote of life, 359. Khayyam, Omar, quoted, 1, 94. Lacus Avernus, 240. Lanciani, Professor, lectures by, 138, 139; opinion of, 244, 333. Leaning Tower of Pisa, 450. Libraries of Rome, 214, 223. Lister, Mrs., in Rome, 172. Liszt, Abbé, in Rome, 18, 19. Little, Canon Knox, quoted, 347, 348, 376, 377, 380. Lodge, Sir Oliver, quoted, 120. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, in Rome, 12; quoted, 16, 17, 125, 253, 274, 279, 281, 308, 309, 310, 325, 327, 387. Longfellow, Rev. Samuel, quoted, 18. Lowell, James Russell, in Rome, 12. Ludovisi collection, 185. Luther, in Rome, 80; ascent of the Scala Santa, 156. Margherita, Queen Mother, 140, 141; palace of, 142; quoted, 143; relations with artists, 144; at requiem mass, 179. Marino, 286, 287. Mazzini, 191, 192; quoted, 64, 422, 423, 444, 446; works of, 190, 191; estimate of, 191; tomb of, 454. Mead, Larkin G., in Rome, 10; work of, 53. Mediæval Museum of Rome, 139. Meredith, Owen, quoted, 2. Metella, Cecilia, tomb of, 145. Milan, activity of, 430, 447; structures of, 448; Ambrosian library of, 449; as scientific centre, 450. Mills, Clark, in Rome, 10. Milton, in Rome, 11, 19. Misenus, burial place of, 241. Monte Aquino, 276. Monte Cairo, 277. Monte Cassino, 304. Monte Catria, 348. Monte Mario, 21, 133. Monte Pincio, 188. Monte San Mano, 304. Morelli, Domenico, work of, 234, 235. Moulton, Louise Chandler, in Rome, 13; quoted, 13, 14, 95, 267, 340. Myers, Frederick W. H., memorial tablet to, 220. Naples, described, 227-231; University of, 232; Museum, 233; natural attractions of, 237; hotels of, 238; Bay of, 265. Nardi, Monsignore, in Rome, 18. Nero's tomb, 78, 80. Nisida, island of, 240. Norton, Charles Eliot, quoted, 267. Obelisk in Piazza del Popolo, 77. Oldest art school, 44. Oliphant, Mrs., quoted, 357, 368. Orvieto, 314. Osso, Professor Dall', opinion of, 244. Oxenham, Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Nutcombe, in Rome, 171. Pæstum, 260, 261. Page de Conti, 337. Page, William, in Rome, 66. Palatine Hill, 13, 112. Palazzo Barberini, 72, 90. Palazzo Bernini, 32. Palazzo Bonaparte, 203. Palazzo Brandolin-Rota, 409. Palazzo Cesarini, 314, 329. Palazzo del Drago, 163, 164. Palazzo di Capodimonte, 233. Palazzo di Donna Ana, 239. Palazzo Margherita, 142. Palazzo Municipio, 384. Palazzo Quirinale, 142, 143, 432. Palazzo Rezzonico, 406. Palazzo Senni, 172. Palazzo Tamagno, 104. Palazzo Vaticano, 27. Pantheon, 177; ceremonies at, 179. Papal supremacy, 432. Parsons, Thomas William, quoted, 52, 276. Pater, Walter, quoted, 327, 328. Perugia, town of, 381-384. Perugino, 384. Petrarcha, 258, 259, 400. Phlegræan Plain, 240. Piazza Barberini, 18. Piazza del Popolo, 76, 80, 134. Piazza di Spagna, 70, 133, 146. Piazza di Trinità, 133. Piazza San Giovanni, 151. Pietro da Cortona, work of, 194. Pisa, architectural monuments of, 450. Pistolesi, quoted, 43. Pliny, the Younger, quoted, 244. Poe, quoted, 136. Pompeii, 243, 245, 248. Pope Adrian, 302. Pope Clement XII, tomb of, 152. Pope Julius II, 23, 27, 28. Pope Leo XII, 302. Pope Leo XIII, tomb of, 154. Pope Paschal, dream of, 157. Pope Paul III, 313. Pope Pio Nono, 64, 75. Pope Pius X, 145, 147; "passage" of, 196, 197; ceremonial receptions of, 146; residence of, 432; character of, 434; dream of, 435. Portiuncula, 365, 366. Posilipo, 239. Powers, Hiram, in Rome, 10; America's first sculptor, 49; work, 50. Pratello, 237. Preston, Margaret J., quoted, 280, 337. Principessa d'Antuni, 163, 164. Quattro Fontane, Via delle, 72. Raphael, work of, 22, 46, 47, 79; genius of, 26; masterpieces of, 27; Franklin Simmons, opinion of, 29; inspiration of, 30; decline of art after, 31. Ravello, Cathedral at, 260. Ravenna, battle of, 296. Read, Thomas Buchanan, in Rome, 67. Realism, kinds of, 118. _Regina Madre_, 140, 142. Regio Palazzo del Quirinale, 143, 144. Reid, Hon. Whitelaw, 105. Reinhart, William, in Rome, 10. Religion united with art, 123. Renaissance in Italy, 117. Richmond, Celia, 341. Rocca di Papa, 287. Rogers, Randolph, in Rome, 10; early death of, 53. Roman environment, 93. Rome, features of, 1; as artistic centre, 6, 10, 114; under Pontifical régime, 8; Longfellow's love for, 16; Goethe's impressions of, 20; work of Michael Angelo and Raphael in, 22; oldest art school of, 44; latter-day artists in, 49; Brownings in, 67; social life in, 113, 127; new bridge of, 128; in May, 129; in winter, 129, 130; in spring, 130, 132; festas in, 136; discussed by Professor Lanciani, 138; society in, 140, 141, 170; two courts of, 142; modern features of, 145; enchanting views in, 151; poetic symbolism in, 158-160; of the present day, breakfast-table talk in, 162; American Embassy in, 163; elevator service in, 164; American consulate in, 169; delightful hostesses in, 171, 172; attitude toward modern thought in, 173; Theosophical Society of, 173, 174; demand for apartments in, 175; sight-seeing in, 183; great palaces in, 187; famous drive of, 188; birthday celebrations of, 189; Republic of, 190; rich years to artists in, 192, 193; Papal ceremonies in, 195; curious spectacle in, 198; Holy Week in, 200; Good Friday service in, 200, 201; motoring from, 204, 205; outlying towns of, 207; American Academy in, 214; libraries of, 214; Protestant cemetery of, 215; literature of, 223; modern spirit in, 428. Rosa, Salvator, 234. Rosenkrans, Baroness, 173. Rota, 329. Ruskin, in Rome, 12; quoted, 398. Sabatier, Paul, quoted, 362, 365. Sallust, Gardens of, 140. Salvatico, quoted, 401. San Agostino, church of, 198. San Caterina di Viterbo, 314. San Francesco, church of, 345. San Giovanni, 153. San Marco, 394. San Maria della Pace, 27. San Maria dei Frari, 405. San Silvestre, 32. Sansovino, Jacob, work of, 399. Santa Anna, convent of, 314. Santa Chiara (Clara), 365; takes vows, 366, 367; founds convent, 368; family history of, 368; friendship with St. Francis of Assisi, 368; at death of Francis, 372; personality of, 373; preservation of body of, 374. Santa Domenica Maggiore, church of, 303, 331, 333. Santa Maria Degli Angeli, 345, 365, 380. Santa Maria del Popolo, 78-80. Santa Maria della Salute, 405. Santa Monica, tomb of, 199. Scala di Spagna, 72. Scala Santa, 155; Luther's ascent of, 156. Scifi, Count Favorini, 368. Scott, Sir Walter, in Rome, 20. Sejanus, fall of, 263. Sermoneta, Duke of, in Rome, 18. Severn, Joseph, grave of, 216. Shelley, in Rome, 22; memorial, 133; quoted, 215; grave of, 216. Simmons, Franklin, in Rome, 10, 15, 91, 98; quoted, 29; works of, 98-112; early life, 100; degrees conferred upon, 103; marriage of, 103; latest success of, 107; studios of, 112; realism of, 119; beautiful creation of, 121; grave of, 217. Simmons, Mrs. Franklin, in Rome, 104; death of, 112; estimate of, 112; grave of, 218. Sindoni, Turillo, 144. Sistine Chapel, art in, 177. Sorrento, 251, 252. Spearman, Frank Hamilton, in Rome, 167; work of, 168. Spinazzola, Professor, quoted, 242, 243. St. Ambrosio, church of, 448. St. Andrew, 256. St. Benedict, work of, 270, 271; tomb of, 272; chapel of, 350. St. Damian, chapel of, 356. St. Gaudens, Augustus, in Rome, 10. St. Gregory, feast of, 180. St. Maria della Portiuncula, 351. St. Mark's, Venice, 396, 397, 404. St. Mark, tomb of, 397; legend regarding, 397. St. Paola d'Orvieto, 314. Stebbins, Emma, in Rome, 58. Stetson, Charles Walker, in Rome, 10, 91; work of, 113. Stetson, Mrs. Charles Walker, in Rome, 11; quoted, 426. Stillman, Mr., quoted, 39. Story, Julian, in Rome, 91; studio of, 97. Story, Waldo, in Rome, 91; studio of, 97; works of, 98. Story, William Wetmore, in Rome, 10; first visit to Italy of, 62; in Florence, 65; quoted, 70, 80, 89, 90, 286; in Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 71; works of, 81-86; estimate of, 82-90; literary work of, 90; grave of, 217. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, in Rome, 11. Strada Nuova di Posilipo, 239. Symonds, John Addington, grave of, 220; estimate of, 220; quoted, 261, 264, 315, 316. Tasso, 252, 253, 335. Tennyson's choice of pictures in Venice, 395. Thackeray, in Rome, 69. Theocritus, quoted, 85. Theosophical Society of Rome, 173. Thomas, Edith, quoted, 82. Thompson, Launt, in Rome, 10. Thorwaldsen, in Rome, 7, 10; quoted, 35; realism of, 119. Tiberius, summer palace of, 262; baths of, 263. Tilton, J. Rollin, in Rome, 10; grave of, 219. Titian, tomb of, 405. Torlonia, Duca and Duchessa of, 334. Trelawney, grave of, 216. Trinità di Monti, church of, 133. Tusculum, 207. Umberto, King, 142. Umbrians, 345. Urbino, 285. Vanderlyn, in Rome, 10. Vaughn, Monsignor, 181. Vatican, galleries of, 112. Vatican palace, 196, 198. Vedder, Anita, in Rome, 171. Vedder, Elihu, in Rome, 10; art of, 91-95; appreciation of, 96; works of, 96, 97; country house of, 262. Vedder, Mrs. Elihu, in Rome, 170. Venice, first glimpses of, 389; Grand Canal of, 390; in June, 391; color and loveliness of, 392; art of, 395, 396; origin of, 398; first Doge of, 399; Renaissance architecture in, 399; Doge's Palace, 400-404; art in, 404; fall of Campanile in, 406; Browning Palace in, 408-413; centenary of Carlo Goldoni celebrated in, 413, 414; art exhibition in, 415; June evening in, 416; as a poet's dream, 418. Vernet, Horace, in Rome, 10. Verona, 311. Veronese, Paolo, 404. Vesuvius, 229. Via Bonella, 45. Victor Emmanuel III, 118, 215, 432, 444. Villa Aldobrandini, 208. Villa Barberini, 209. Villa Borghese, 14, 187. Villa Doria, 211. Villa Falconieri, 213. Villa Jovis, 263. Villa Medici, 4, 134. Villa Nazionale, 238. Villa Pamphilia Doria, 149. Villa Torlonia, 206. Virgil, quoted, 241; grotto of, 242. Visconti, 329, 330. Vittorio Emanuele, 214. Waldstein, Dr. Charles, quoted, 245. Ward, Mrs. Humphry, quoted, 210, 212. Watson, William, quoted, 9, 25, 86, 87. Wellman, Walter, 9. West, Benjamin, in Rome, 10. White, Mr. and Mrs. Henry, in Rome, 165. "Whites," 145. Whitman, Walt, quoted, 422. Whitney, Anne, in Rome, 10, 58. Whittier, quoted, 339. Wilberforce, Rev. Basil, quoted, 125, 341. Woolson, Constance Fenimore, tomb of, 219. Zuccaro, Federigo, 44. WORKS BY LILIAN WHITING THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL. First, Second, and Third Series. 3 vols. 16mo. $1.00 per vol. Decorated cloth, $1.25 per vol. Cannot help being uplifting and inspiring.--_New Church Messenger._ AFTER HER DEATH, 16mo. $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. 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The following corrections were made to the original text: Page xii: Vittoria Colonna, Galleria Buonarotti, Florence Vittoria Colonna, Galleria Buonarroti, Florence Page 6: artistic centre of the ninteenth century and artistic centre of the nineteenth century and Page 19: on the wall of the _casa_ in the Via delle Quattre Fontane on the wall of the _casa_ in the Via delle Quattro Fontane page 26: the Palazzo Sentoriale and the Palazzo dei Conservatore. the Palazzo Senatoriale and the Palazzo dei Conservatori. page 27: the Stanza della Incendio and the Sala di Constantino. the Stanza dell'Incendio and the Sala di Constantino. page 32: winds on the Pont San Angelo, and in the vast winds on the Ponte San Angelo, and in the vast page 32: the Music Nazionale--is the group of "Pluto the Museo Nazionale--is the group of "Pluto page 55: during hs stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of during his stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of page 72: The Via delle Quatre Fontane, on which the The Via delle Quattro Fontane, on which the page 138: given under the auspices of the Societa Archeologica, given under the auspices of the Società Archeologica, page 148: _gentilinomo_, who is gorgeously arrayed in knee _gentiluomo_, who is gorgeously arrayed in knee page 161: Jacomletti, and there is also a kneeling statue Jacometti, and there is also a kneeling statue page 163: and the Via dell Quattro Fontane. The and the Via delle Quattro Fontane. The page 163: for living purposes. The portere, the guards, for living purposes. The portiere, the guards, page 170: and in the Vedder villa, _Torre Quatro Venti_ and in the Vedder villa, _Torre Quattro Venti_ page 171: the American wife of Caviliere Cortesi, an the American wife of Cavaliere Cortesi, an page 178: Peruzzi, and Annibale Caracci. Raphael is Peruzzi, and Annibale Carracci. Raphael is page 185: that includes the "Ludovisi Mars;" Hercules," that includes the "Ludovisi Mars;" "Hercules," page 200: he may rest, _mens conscia recta_! he may rest, _mens conscia recti_! page 205: whose grand Roman palazzo is in the Boca di whose grand Roman palazzo is in the Bocca di page 213: The Villa Falconicri, in Frascati, which was The Villa Falconieri, in Frascati, which was page 234: Benvenuto Cellini at the Castel Sant Angelo; Benvenuto Cellini at the Castel Sant'Angelo; page 237: of the street scenes of Naples; Camprani and of the street scenes of Naples; Campriani and page 244: Forum, succeding Lanciani--believe that some Forum, succeeding Lanciani--believe that some page 244: equestrian statue of Bulbi, in the Naples Museum, equestrian statue of Balbo, in the Naples Museum, page 260: The cathedral at Revello has traces of the The cathedral at Ravello has traces of the page 260: of the Palazzo Rufelo might enchant Hafiz himself. of the Palazzo Rufolo might enchant Hafiz himself. page 272: Mignano (Ginodone Trieramosca) and also to Mignano (Guidone Fieramosca) and also to page 272: are a series of fresco paintings by Luca Gindano, are a series of fresco paintings by Luca Giordano, page 272: by Mazzarappi and Marco da Siena. Nothing by Mazzaroppi and Marco da Siena. Nothing page 274: Terre di Lavorno region:-- Terra di Lavoro region:-- page 276: to be a "Monumento Nazionali," and it is now to be a "Monumento Nazionale," and it is now page 286: in the "Inferno." The Colonna and the Orsino in the "Inferno." The Colonna and the Orsini page 286: look down from Castel Gondolfo on the gloomy, look down from Castel Gandolfo on the gloomy, page 287: Marino, Castel Gondolfo, and Frascati, with Marino, Castel Gandolfo, and Frascati, with page 295: for the country they left Naples for Pietzalba for the country they left Naples for Pietralba page 295: Musefico, il Givoio, and il Minturo. It was an Musefico, il Giovio, and il Minturno. It was an page 297: Per te narrar tre quante dubbie voglie, Per te narrar tra quante dubbie voglie, page 297: Fra quanti aspri martir, degliosa io vivo!_" Fra quanti aspri martir, dogliosa io vivo!_" page 304: San Mano that had formerly been its property. San Magno that had formerly been its property. page 305: world's sun; and not to add light to _mio vel solo_, world's sun; and not to add light to _mio bel sole_, page 332: "_Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma; quam ergo mercedem recipris?_" "_Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma; quam ergo mercedem recipies?_" page 380: Bonaventuri built over it, is preserved in this Bonaventura built over it, is preserved in this page 385: the Palazzo Rospigliosa in Rome. the Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome. page 399: Anopeste, elected by the tribunal of commonalty, Anafesto, elected by the tribunal of commonalty, page 400: mural work by Battesta Franco and De Moro. mural work by Battista Franco and De Moro. page 400: One enters the Porta delta Carta, which One enters the Porta della Carta, which page 405: Peter, Maucis, and Antoninus are commending Peter, Francis, and Antoninus are commending page 426: Saricinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made Saracinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made page 436: too, in other leading men. Zurati, the too, in other leading men. Turati, the page 452: in Europe. That of the Annunziati, the in Europe. That of the Annunziata, the page 461: Annunziati Cathedral, Genoa, 452. Annunziata Cathedral, Genoa, 452. page 462: Camprani, 237. Campriani, 237. page 463: del Vall, Cardinal Merry, 146-149, 435. del Val, Cardinal Merry, 146-149, 435. page 466: Ossi, Professor Dall, opinion of, 244. Osso, Professor Dall', opinion of, 244. page 467: Quatre Fontane, Via delle, 72. Quattro Fontane, Via delle, 72. page 467: Revello, Cathedral at, 260. Ravello, Cathedral at, 260. page 470: Villa Falconicri, 213. Villa Falconieri, 213. On page 235: "Da Scala d'Oro" should be "La Scala d'Oro" or "Madonna della Scala d'Oro". * * * * * 
40394	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. This book uses the ~ over occasional letters to represent scribal abbreviations. This is indicated as (for example) p[~r]b. _BY THE SAME AUTHOR._ Historical and Architectural Sketches; CHIEFLY ITALIAN. ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR. BEING A _Companion Volume to 'Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice.'_ Crown 8vo. 10_s._ 6_d._ "A historian is not always an antiquary, even less frequently is an antiquary a historian; by combining the two characters, he thereby redeems his historical writings from the dangers of shallowness and inaccuracy, and his antiquarianism from pedantry and dryness.... From the information afforded by the essays themselves, we may gather much which should heighten the enjoyment of visits to the inexhaustible architectural treasures of the Italian Peninsula."--_The Times._ "For these essays we have only words of unqualified praise; they are full of valuable information, and are delightfully interesting." --_Westminster Review._ "Full of valuable teachings and suggestions to all who are ready to profit by them."--_Academy._ "Those who know Italy will retrace their steps with delight in Mr. Freeman's company, and find him a most interesting guide and instructor, not merely in the architectural, but in the history of the various Italian towns that he deals with.... One of the most interesting features of the volume are the illustrations, twenty-two in number, from the author's own pencil."--_Examiner._ MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON, W.C. WORKS BY E. A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D. HISTORY OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FROM THE FOUNDATION of the ACHAIAN LEAGUE TO THE DISRUPTION of the UNITED STATES. Vol. I. General Introduction.--History of the Greek Federations. 8vo. 21_s._ HISTORY OF THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF WELLS, as illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of the Old Foundation. Crown 8vo. 3_s._ 6_d._ OLD ENGLISH HISTORY. With Five Coloured Maps. _New Edition, Revised._ Extra fcap. 8vo. 6_s._ HISTORICAL ESSAYS. _Third Edition._ 8vo. 10_s._ 6_d._ CONTENTS:--The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History--The Continuity of English History--The Relations between the Crown of England and Scotland--St. Thomas of Canterbury and his Biographers, &c. HISTORICAL ESSAYS. _Second Series. Second Edition_, with additional Essays. 8vo. 10_s._ 6_d._ CONTENTS:--Ancient Greece and Mediæval Italy--Mr. Gladstone's Homer and the Homeric Ages--The Historians of Athens--The Athenian Democracy--Alexander the Great--Greece during the Macedonian Period--Mommsen's History of Rome--Lucius Cornelius Sulla--The Flavian Cæsars, &c. HISTORICAL ESSAYS. _Third Series._ 8vo. 12_s._ CONTENTS:--First Impressions of Rome--The Illyrian Emperors and their Land--Augusta Treverorum--The Goths at Ravenna--Race and Language--The Byzantine Empire--First Impressions of Athens--Mediæval and Modern Greece--The Southern Slaves--Sicilian Cycles--The Normans at Palermo. THE GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES. _Third Edition._ Crown 8vo. 5_s._ THE HISTORY AND CONQUESTS OF THE SARACENS. Six Lectures. _Third Edition_, with New Preface. Crown 8vo. 3_s._ 6_d._ THE OTTOMAN POWER IN EUROPE: its Nature, its Growth, and its Decline. With Coloured Maps. Crown 8vo. 7_s._ 6_d._ GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. _New Edition._ Enlarged, with Maps, &c. 18mo. 3_s._ 6_d._ (Vol. I. of Historical Course for Schools.) COMPARATIVE POLITICS. Lectures at the Royal Institution. To which is added "The Unity of History." 8vo. 14_s._ MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON, W.C. SKETCHES FROM THE SUBJECT AND NEIGHBOUR LANDS OF VENICE. [Illustration: PERISTYLE AND CATHEDRAL TOWER, SPALATO.] SKETCHES FROM THE SUBJECT AND NEIGHBOUR LANDS OF VENICE. BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D., HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1881. [_All Rights reserved._] PREFACE. This volume is designed as a companion and sequel to my former volume called "Architectural and Historical Sketches, chiefly Italian." Its general plan is the same. But more of the papers in the present volume appear for the first time than was the case with the earlier one, and most of those which are reprinted have been more largely changed in reprinting than those which appeared in the former book. This could hardly be otherwise with the pieces relating to the lands east of the Hadriatic, where I have had to work in remarks made during later journeys, and where great events have happened since I first saw those lands. The papers are chiefly the results of three journeys. The first, in the autumn of 1875, took in Dalmatia and Istria, with Trieste and Aquileia. At that time the revolt of Herzegovina had just begun, and Ragusa was crowded with refugees. Some of the papers contained references to the state of things at the moment, and those references I saw no reason to alter. But I may as well say that the time of my first visit to the South-Slavonic lands was not chosen with reference to any political or military object. The journey was planned before the revolt began; it was in fact the accomplishment of a thirty years' yearning after the architectural wonders of Spalato, which till that year I had been unable to gratify. If that visit taught me some things with regard to our own times as well as to earlier times, it is not, I think, either wonderful or blameworthy. In 1877 I visited Dalmatia for the second time, and Greece for the first. I should be well pleased some day to put together some out of many papers on the more distant Greek lands. In this volume I have brought in those on Corfu only, as that island forms an essential part of my present subject. In the present year 1881 I again visited Dalmatia and some parts of Istria and Albania, as also a large part of Italy. This has enabled me to add some papers on the Venetian possessions both in northern and southern Italy, as also one on the Dalmatian island of Curzola, which on former visits I had seen only in passing. The papers headed "Treviso," "Gorizia," "Spalato revisited," "Trani," "Otranto," "Corfu to Durazzo," and "Antivari," are all due to this last journey, and have never been in print before. That on "Curzola" appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for September 1881. Those headed "Udine and Cividale," "Aquileia," "Trieste to Spalato," "Spalato to Cattaro," "A trudge to Trebinje," appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1875. The rest appeared in the _Saturday Review_ in 1875 and 1876. But many of them have been so much altered that they can hardly be called mere reprints; they are rather recastings, with large additions, omissions, and changes, such as the light of second and third visits seemed to call for. I made none of these journeys alone, and I have much for which to thank the companions with whom I made them. In 1877 I was with the Earl of Morley and Mr. J. F. F. Horner. And I must not forget to mention that it was Lord Morley who at once read and explained the inscription in the basilica of Parenzo, when Mr. Horner and I had seen that Mr. Neale's explanation was nonsense, but had not yet hit upon anything better for ourselves. In a great part of my two later journeys I had the companionship of Mr. Arthur Evans, my friend of 1877, my son-in-law of 1881. How much I owe to his knowledge of South-Slavonic matters, words would fail me to tell. I had seen Dalmatia for the first time, and I had begun to write about it, before I knew him and, I believe, before he had published anything; otherwise I should almost feel myself an intruder in a province which he has made his own. One out of many points I may specially mention. It was Mr. Evans who found and explained the two missing capitals from the palace at Ragusa, which are at once so remarkable in themselves and which throw so much light on the history of the building. The illustrations to my former volume met with some severe criticism. But I am bound to say that of that severe criticism I agreed to every word. Only I thought that the critics would perhaps have been less severe if they had seen my original drawings themselves. The illustrations to the present volume have been made by a new process, partly, as before, from my own sketches, but partly also from photographs. I trust that they will be found less unsatisfactory than those that went before them. As there are in these papers a good many historical references, some of them to rather out-of-the-way matters, but matters which could not always be explained at length in the text, I have drawn up a chronological table of the chief events in the history of the lands and cities of which I have had to speak. I need hardly say that this volume, though I hope it may be useful to travellers on the spot, is not strictly a guide-book. But a good guide-book to Istria and Dalmatia is much needed. I am not joking when I say that the best guide to those parts is still the account written by the Emperor Constantino Porphyrogenitus more than nine hundred years back. But it is surely high time that there should be another. The attempts made in one or two of Murray's Handbooks are very poor. Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Dalmatia and Montenegro," published more than thirty years ago, is an admirable book, and one to which I owe a very deep debt of gratitude. It first taught me what there was to see in the East-Hadriatic lands. But it is over-big for a guide-book. Mr. Neale's book contains some information, and, even in its ecclesiastical grotesqueness, it is sometimes instructive as well as amusing. But we can hardly take as our guide one who leaves out the Ragusan palace and who, when at Spalato, does not think of Diocletian. It would be in itself well if Gsel-fels, the prince of guide-book-makers, would do for Dalmatia as he has done for Sicily; but one would rather see it done in our own tongue. SOMERLEAZE, WELLS, _September 20th, 1881_. CONTENTS. THE LOMBARD AUSTRIA:-- PAGE TREVISO 3 UDINE AND CIVIDALE 24 GORIZIA 41 AQUILEIA 52 TRIESTE 70 TRIESTE TO SPALATO:-- TRIESTE TO SPALATO 85 PARENZO 97 POLA 109 ZARA 121 SPALATO AND ITS NEIGHBOURS:-- SPALATO 137 SPALATO REVISITED 149 SALONA 156 TRAÜ 175 SPALATO TO CATTARO:-- SPALATO TO CATTARO 189 CURZOLA 200 RAGUSA 218 RAGUSAN ARCHITECTURE 240 A TRUDGE TO TREBINJE 260 CATTARO 271 VENICE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE NORMANS:-- TRANI 287 OTRANTO 313 FIRST GLIMPSES OF HELLAS 332 CORFU AND ITS NAMES 343 CORFU AND ITS HISTORY 353 CORFU TO DURAZZO 365 ANTIVARI 381 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PERISTYLE AND CATHEDRAL TOWER, SPALATO _Frontispiece_ PORTA GEMINA, POLA 113 TOWER OF SAINT MARY'S, ZARA 132 SAINT VITUS, ZARA, AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, CATTARO 133 THE TOWER, SPALATO 145 CATHEDRAL, TRAÜ 182 SAINT JOHN BAPTIST, TRAÜ 185 TOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA 242 PALACE, RAGUSA 245 DOGANA, RAGUSA 253 CABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA 255 CATHEDRAL, TRANI 299 CATHEDRAL, TRANI, INSIDE 305 CHURCHES AT CORFU 358 SAINT JASON AND SAINT SOSIPATROS, CORFU, INSIDE 363 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. B.C. Foundation of Korkyra _c._ 734 Foundation of Epidamnos _c._ 627 War between Corinth and Korkyra about Epidamnos 435 Colonization of Pharos and Issa 385 Korkyra held by Agathoklês 300 Korkyra held by Pyrrhos 287 First Roman war with Illyria, time of Queen Teuta and Demetrios of Pharos 229 Korkyra, Epidamnos, and Apollonia become allies of Rome 229 Second Illyrian War 219 Foundation of Aquileia 181 First Roman Conquest of Illyria 168 First mention of Tragyrion (Traü) 158 First Dalmatian War 156 Salona the head of Dalmatia 117 Roman Conquest of Istria 107 Foundation of Forum Julii _c._ 45 Colony of Tergeste fortified by Augustus 32 Foundation of Pietas Julia _c._ 30 A.D. Final conquest of Dalmatia 6 Martyrdom of Saint Caius 296? Diocletian retires to Salona 305 Crispus put to death at Pola 326 First church of Aquileia built by Fortunatian _c._ 347 Gallus put to death at Pola 354 Aquileia destroyed by Attila 452 Dalmatia under Marcellian 454-468 Dalmatia under Odoacer _c._ 480 Dalmatia under Theodoric 488 The Emperor Glycerius Bishop of Salona 474 Nepos killed near Salona 480 Salona recovered to the Empire 535 Building of the church of Parenzo 535-543 Belisarius sails from Salona 544 Narses sails from Salona 552 Schism in the church of Aquileia 557 Beginning of the Patriarchate of Grado 606 Lombard conquest of Italy begins 568 Slavonic settlements under Heraclius _c._ 620 Salona destroyed by the Avars 639 Inland Dalmatia under Charles the Great; the coast cities left to the Eastern Empire 806 The church of Pola built by Bishop Handegis 857 Cattaro taken by the Saracens 867 Saracen siege of Ragusa 867 First Venetian conquest of Dalmatia 997 Poppo Patriarch of Aquileia; rebuilding of the church 1019-1042 First authentic mention of Gorizia 1051 Croatian kingdom of Dalmatia 1062 Foundation of Saint Nicolas at Traü 1064 Corfu conquered by Robert Wiscard 1081 Corfu recovered by the Empire 1085 Exploits of the English exiles at Durazzo 1086 Magyar kingdom of Dalmatia 1102 The tower of Saint Mary's at Zara built by Coloman of Hungary 1105 Beginning of the Counts of Gorizia 1120 Corfu held by Roger of Sicily 1147-1150 Dalmatia restored to the Eastern Empire 1171 Corfu conquered by William the Good 1186 Corfu, Durazzo, etc., held by Margarito as a kingdom dependent on Sicily 1186 Richard the First at Ragusa 1192 Taking of Zara by the Crusaders 1202 Venetian Counts at Ragusa 1204 Corfu and Durazzo first occupied by Venice 1206 Building of Traü cathedral 1215-1321 Corfu and Durazzo recovered by Michael of Epeiros 1216 Durazzo recovered by the Empire 1259 Corfu and Durazzo ceded to Manfred 1268 Consecration of Saint Anastasia at Zara 1285 Durazzo under Servia 1322 Durazzo restored to the Kings of Naples 1322 Pola submits to Venice 1331 Neapolitan duchy of Durazzo 1333-1360 Treviso first occupied by Venice 1338 Building of the Archbishop's castle at Salona 1347 Treviso besieged by Lewis of Hungary 1356 Dalmatia ceded to Lewis of Hungary 1358 Durazzo the capital of an Albanian kingdom 1358-1392 Complete independence of Ragusa 1359 Markquard, Patriarch of Aquileia; recasting of the church 1365-1381 Gradual advance of Venice in Dalmatia 1378-1444 Treviso ceded to Leopold of Austria 1381 Trieste commends itself to Austria 1381 Final acquisition of Corfu by Venice 1386 Venetian occupation of Argos 1388 Treviso restored to Venice 1388 Second Venetian acquisition of Durazzo 1392 Building of the palace at Ragusa 1388-1435 Butrinto and Parga commend themselves to Venice 1407 Consecration of Saint Chrysogonos at Zara 1407 Sebenico annexed by Venice 1412 Building of the cathedral at Sebenico 1415-1555 Cattaro becomes Venetian 1419 Traü annexed by Venice 1420 Curzola finally submits to Venice 1420 Dominions of the Patriarch of Aquileia annexed by Venice 1420 Udine annexed by Venice 1420 Lesina occupied by Venice 1424 The city of Aquileia left to the Patriarchs 1451 Argos ceded by Venice 1463 Fluctuations between Venice and the Turk in Dalmatia 1465-1718 Date of the cloister at Badia 1477 Otranto taken by the Turks 1480 Otranto recovered by Alfonso 1481 Veglia annexed by Venice 1481 Monopoli stormed by the Venetians 1495 Trani, Otranto, and other cities pledged to Venice by Ferdinand of Naples 1496 Durazzo and Butrinto lost by Venice 1500 Gorizia annexed to Austria by Maximilian 1500 Treviso besieged by Maximilian 1508 Trani, etc., recovered by Ferdinand of Aragon 1509 Building of the Dogana at Ragusa 1520 Trani, etc., recovered by Venice 1528 Trani, etc., restored to Charles the Fifth 1530 Aquileia annexed to Austria 1544 Mark Anthony de Dominis Archbishop of Spalato 1622 Building of the gate at Curzola 1643 The great earthquake at Ragusa 1667 Prevesa won and Butrinto recovered by Venice 1685-1699 The Emperor Leopold repairs the castle of Gorizia 1660 Athens taken by Morosini 1687 Abolition of the patriarchate of Aquileia; Udine and Gorizia become metropolitan sees 1751 Peace of Campo Formio; fall of Venice: Venetia, Istria, and Dalmatia, except Ragusa, occupied by Austria 1797-8 The Ionian Islands and the Venetian outposts ceded to France 1797 Septinsular Republic under Ottoman overlordship 1798 Prevesa stormed by Ali of Jôannina 1798 Venetia, Istria, Trieste, and Dalmatia ceded to the French kingdom of Italy; Dalmatia partly occupied 1805 The Republic of Ragusa suppressed by Buonaparte 1808 Various points occupied by England 1810-1814 Cattaro delivered from France by England and Montenegro; Cattaro, capital of Montenegro 1813 Dalmatia recovered by Austria, Ragusa also occupied by Austria for the first time 1814 Venetia, Istria, and Trieste recovered by Austria 1814 English occupation of Curzola 1813-1815 The Ionian Islands under British protection 1815 Surrender of Parga to the Turk 1819 Liberation of Venice and recovery by Austria 1848-9 The Ionian Islands added to free Greece 1864 Final liberation of Venetia 1866 Austrian attempt to infringe the liberties of the Bocchesi; defeat of the Austrians 1869 Beginning of the war in Herzegovina 1875 Servian and Montenegrin war; recovery of Antivari, Dulcigno, and Spizza by Montenegro 1876-7 Congress of Berlin; Dulcigno restored to the Turk; Spizza taken by Austria; Antivari left to Montenegro; the Turk "invited" to cede Epeiros to free Greece 1878 The liberation of Epeiros decreed the second time 1880 Dulcigno recovered for Montenegro 1880 Liberation of Thessaly, but not of Epeiros 1881 THE LOMBARD AUSTRIA. TREVISO. 1881. The north-eastern corner of Italy is one of those parts of the world which have gone through the most remarkable changes. That it has often changed its political masters is only common to it with the rest of Italy, and with many other lands as well. The physical changes too which the soil and its waters have gone through are remarkable, but they are not unparalleled. The Po may perhaps be reckoned as the frontier stream of the region towards the south, and the many paths by which the Po has found its way into the Hadriatic need not be dwelled on. We are more concerned with rivers further to the north-east. The Isonzo no longer represents the course of the ancient Sontius; the Natisone no longer flows by fallen Aquileia. The changes of the coast-line which have made what is left of Aquileia inland have their counterparts at Pisa and at Ravenna. In the range of historical geography, the most curious feature is the way in which certain political names have kept on an abiding life in this region, though with singular changes of meaning. The land has constantly been either Venetian or Austrian; sometimes it has been Venetian and Austrian at once. But it has been Venetian and Austrian in various meanings. It was Venetian long before the name of Venice was heard of in its present sense; it was Austrian long before the name of Austria was heard of in its present sense. The land of the old Veneti bore the Venetian name ages before the city of Venice was in being, and it keeps it now that Venice has ceased to be a political power. Venetian then the land has ever been in one sense, while a large part of it was for some centuries Venetian in another sense, in the days when so many of its cities bowed to Saint Mark and his commonwealth as its rulers. Austrian the land was in the old geographical sense, when it formed the Lombard _Austria_--the eastern half, the _Eastrice_--that form would, we suspect, come nearer to Lombard speech than _Oesterreich_--of the Lombard realm. But if the Lombard realm had its Austria and its Neustria, so also had the Frankish realm. Wherever a land could be easily divided into east and west, there was an _Austria_, and its negative a _Neustria_. Lombardy then had its Austria, and its _Austria_ was found in the old and the new Venetian land. No one perhaps ever spoke of the Karlings as the House of Austria, or of their Empire as the dominions of the House of Austria. And yet the name would not have been out of place. Their dominion marked the predominance of the eastern part of the Frankish realm--its _Oesterreich_, its _Austrasia_, its _Austria_--over the Neustrian power of the earlier dynasty. The Lombard Austria became part of the dominions of those who were before all things lords of the Frankish Austria. And in later times, when the Lombard and the Frankish Austria were both forgotten, when the name clave only to a third Austria, the more modern Austria of Germany--the Eastern mark called into being to guard Germany from the Magyar--the Venetian land has more than once become Austrian in another sense; some of it in that sense remains Austrian still. Dukes of the most modern Austria--plain dukes who were satisfied with being dukes--archdukes who were Emperors by lawful election--archdukes who have had a strange fancy for calling themselves Emperors of their archduchy--have all of them at various times borne rule over the whole or part of the older Austria of Lombardy. To-day the north-eastern corner of Italy, land of Venetia, the once Lombard Austria, is parted asunder by an artificial boundary between the dominions of the Italian King and the lord of the later Austria. And, what a passing traveller might not easily find out, in this old Venetian land, in both parts of it, alike under modern Italian and under modern Austrian rule, besides the Latin speech which everywhere meets the eye and the ear, the speech of Slavonic settlers still lingers. Settlers they are in the Venetian land, no less than its Roman or its German masters. It is hard to say who the old Veneti were, perhaps nearer akin to the Albanians than to any other European people. At all events there is no reason for thinking that they were Slaves. The presence of a Slavonic speech in this region is a fruit of the same migration which made the land beyond Hadria Slavonic. But to hear the Slavonic and the Italian tongues side by side is so familiar a phænomenon under modern Austrian rule, that its appearance at Aquileia or Gorizia may with some minds seem to give the land a specially Austrian character, and may help to shut out the remembrance that at Aquileia and Gorizia we are within the ancient kingdom of Italy. Nay it may be a new and strange thing to many to hear that, even within the bounds of the modern kingdom of Italy, there are districts where, though Italian is the cultivated tongue, yet Slave is the common peasant speech. But besides physical changes, changes of name, changes of inhabitants, we are perhaps yet more deeply struck with the fluctuations in the history of the cities of this region. In this matter, throughout the Venetian land, the first do indeed become last and the last first. No city in this region has kept on that enduring life through all changes which has belonged to many cities in other parts of Europe. We do not here find the Roman walls, or the walls yet earlier than Roman days, fencing in dwelling-places of man which have been continuously inhabited, which have sometimes been continuously flourishing, through all times of which history has anything to tell us. We need not take our examples from Rome or Athens or Argos or the Phoenician Gades. It is enough to look to one or two of the capitals of modern Europe. At the beginning of the fifth century, London and Paris, not yet indeed capitals of kingdoms, were already in being, and had been in being for some centuries. But far above either ranked the great city of north-eastern Italy, then one of the foremost cities of the world, the ancient colony of Aquileia, keeper of one of the great lines of approach towards Italy and Rome. No one city had then taken the name of the Venetian land; no wanderers from the mainland had as yet settled down like sea-fowl, as Cassiodorus puts it, on the islands of the lagoons. By the end of the fifth century both London and Paris had passed from Roman rule to the rule of Teutonic conquerors. London, we may conceive, was still inhabited; at all events its walls stood ready to receive a fresh colony before long. Paris had received one of those momentary lifts of which she went through several before her final exaltation; the city which had been favoured by Roman Julian was favoured also by Frankish Chlodwig. But Aquileia had felt the full fury of invaders who came, not to occupy or to settle, but simply to destroy. As a city, as a bulwark of Italy, she had passed away for ever. But out of her fall several cities had, in the course of that century, risen to increased greatness, and the greatest of all had come into being. The city was born which, simply as a city, as a city bearing rule over distant lands, must rank as the one historic peer of Rome. Not yet Queen of the Hadriatic, not yet the chosen sanctuary of Saint Mark, not yet enthroned on her own Rialto, the settlement which was to grow into Venice had already made its small beginnings. But the fall of Aquileia, the rise of Venice, are only the greatest examples of a general law. A nearer neighbour of Aquileia at once profited by her overthrow; Grado, on her own coast, almost at her own gates, sprang up as her rival; but the greatness of Grado has passed away only less thoroughly than the greatness of Aquileia. So the Venetian Forum Julii gave way to its more modern neighbour Udine. It lost the name which it had given to the land around it. Its shortened form _Friuli_ lived on as one of the names of the surrounding district, but Forum Julii itself was forgotten under the vaguer description of _Cividale_. Gorizia has been for ages the head of a principality; in later times it has been the head of an ecclesiastical province. But Gorizia is absolutely unknown till the beginning of the eleventh century, and it does not seem even to have supplanted any earlier city. It is thus a marked peculiarity of this district that the chief towns, with Venice itself at their head, have not lived on continuously as chief towns from Roman or earlier times. West of Venice the rule does not apply. Padua and Verona are old enough for the warmest lover of antiquity, and Vicenza, going back at least to the second century B.C., must be allowed to be of a respectable age. That the chief cities of a district should date from early mediæval, and not from Roman times, is a feature which at once suggests analogies with our own island. Both in Venetia and in Britain we are struck with the prevalence of places which arose after the fall of the elder Roman power, in opposition to most parts of Italy and Gaul, where nearly every town can trace back to Roman days or earlier. But the likeness cannot be carried out in detail. In the district which we have just marked out it is absolutely the greatest cities--one of them so great as to be put out of all comparison with the others--which are of this comparatively recent date. In England, though the great mass of the local centres are places of English foundation and bearing English names, yet the greatest and most historic cities still carry the marks of Roman origin about them. Some Roman cities in Britain passed utterly away; others lived on, or soon came to life again, in the forms of York, London, and Winchester. But in Venetia it is the cities which answer to York and London which have lost their greatness, though they have not utterly passed away. This last fact is one of the characteristics of the district; the fallen cities have simply fallen from their greatness; they have not ceased to be dwelling-places of man. Aquileia and Forum Julii have ceased for ages to be what Aquileia and Forum Julii once were, but they have not become as Silchester, or even as Salona. Of the position of all these places there is no manner of doubt. They are there to speak for themselves; even Julium Carnacum, whose site has had to be looked for, still abides, though those who have reached it describe it as a small village. Aquileia under its old name, Forum Julii under its new name, are still inhabited, they still hold the rank of towns; but while they still abide, the rule that the first should become last and the last first is carried out among them. As ancient Aquileia was far greater than ancient Forum Julii, so modern Aquileia, though it keeps its name, is now far less than modern Cividale, from which the name of Forum Julii has passed away. Aquileia then, once the greatest city of all, is the city that has come nearest to being altogether wiped out of being. Venice, afterwards the greatest of all, is the city which may most truly be said to have been called out of nothing in after-times. Among the other cities the change has been rather a change of relation and proportion, than a case of absolute birth and death. Cividale is still there, though it is but a poor representative of Forum Julii. Udine has taken its place. But Udine, though its importance belongs wholly to mediæval times, was not strictly a mediæval creation. It is just possible to prove the existence of _Vedinum_ in Roman days, though it is only its existence which can be proved; it plays no part whatever in early history. The case is slightly different with another neighbouring city, the Roman Tarvisium, whose name gradually changed to _Treviso_. Tarvisium was of more account than Vedinum, but it first comes into notice in the wars of Belisarius, and its position as an important city playing a part in Italian history dates only from the days of the Lombard League. And its general history is one in which the shifting nomenclature of the district may be read with almost grotesque accuracy. It has not only been, like its neighbours, Venetian and Austrian in two widely different senses--it has not only been Venetian in the old geographical sense, and Venetian in the sense of being subject to the commonwealth of Venice--it has not only been Austrian in the old Lombard sense, and Austrian in the sense of being subject to the Dukes of the German Austria--but it has also shifted backwards and forwards between the rule of the Serene Republic and the rule of the Austrian Dukes, in a way to which it would not be easy to find a parallel even among the old revolutions of its neighbours. * * * * * Treviso and its district, the march which bears its name, was the first possession of Venice on the true mainland of Italy, as distinguished from that mere fringe of coast along the lagoons which may be more truly counted as part of her dominion by sea. That Treviso lay near to Venice was a truth which came home to Venetian minds at a very early stage of Venetian history. Even in the eleventh century, the earliest authentic chronicler of Venice, that John whose work will be found in the seventh volume of Pertz, speaks with some significance, even when recording events of the time of Charles the Great, of "quædam civitas non procul a Venetia, nomine Tarvisium." When strictly Italian history begins, Treviso runs through the ordinary course of a Lombard city; it takes its share in resistance to the imperial power, it falls into the hands of tyrants of the house of Romano and of the house of Scala. Along with Padua, it is the city which is fullest of memories of the terrible Eccelinò. Won by the Republic in 1338 from its lord Mastino della Scala, the special strangeness of its fortunes begins. The modern House of Austria was already in being; but its Dukes had not yet grown into Emperors, one only had grown into an acknowledged King. They had not won for themselves the crowns of Bohemia or Hungary, though, by the opposite process, one Bohemian king, the mighty Ottocar, had counted Austria in the long list of his conquered lands. But presently Treviso becomes the centre of events in which Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Empire, all play their parts. It is perhaps not wonderful when the maritime republic, mistress of the Trevisan march, vainly seeks to obtain the confirmation of her right from the overlord of Treviso though not of Venice, Charles of Bohemia, King of the Romans and future Emperor. But the old times when Huns, Avars, Magyars, barbarians of every kind, poured into this devoted corner of Italy, seem to have come back, when in 1356 we find Treviso besieged by a Hungarian king. But the Hungarian king is no longer an outside barbarian; he is a prince of the house of Anjou and Paris. If Lewis the Great besieged Treviso, it was not in the character of a new Attila or Arpad; he attacked the now Venetian city as part of the war which he so successfully waged against the Republic in her Dalmatian lands. Not thirty years later we find the Doge Andrew Contarini, with more wisdom perhaps than the more famous Foscari of the next age, considering that to Venice the sea was greater than the land, and therefore commending her new conquest on the mainland to Duke Leopold of Austria. The words of the chronicler Andrew Dandolo are worth remembering. They express the truest policy of the Republic, from which she ought never to have gone astray. "Ducalis excellentia prudentissima, meditatione considerans proprium Venetorum esse mare colere, terramque postergare; hinc enim divitiis et honoribus abundat, inde sæpe sibi proveniunt scandala et errores." But Leopold, he who fell at Sempach, had not the same passion for dominion south of the Alps as some of his successors. He wisely sold Treviso to the lord of Padua, Francesco Carrara, from whom, after a moment of doubt whether the prize would not pass to the tyrant of Milan, the Republic won it back after eight years' separation. Henceforward Treviso shared the fate of the other Venetian possessions which gradually gathered on each side of her. Having had for a moment its share of Austrian dominion in the fourteenth century, Treviso was able, in the wars of the sixteenth century, to withstand the same power in a new shape, the power of Maximilian, Austrian Archduke and Roman King. In later times nothing distinguishes the city from the common course by which Treviso and her neighbours became Austrian, French, and Austrian again, till, by the happiest change of all, they became members of a free and united Italy. * * * * * In the aspect of the city itself, the Roman Tarvisium has left but small signs of its former being. All that we see is the Treviso of mediæval and later times. The walls, the bell-towers, the slenderer tower of the municipal palace, the arcaded streets, the houses too, though they are not rich in the more elaborate forms of Italian domestic art, have all the genuine character of a mediæval Italian town. Not placed in any striking position, not a hill-city, not in any strictness a river-city, but a city of the plain looking towards the distant mountains--not adorned by any building of conspicuous splendour--Treviso is still far from being void of objects which deserve study. As we look on the city, either from the lofty walk into which so large a part of its walls have been turned, or else from the neighbourhood of its railway station, its aspect, without rivalling that of the great cities of Italy, is far from unsatisfactory. But the character of the city differs widely in the two views. From the station the ecclesiastical element prevails. The main object in the view from this side is the Dominican church of Saint Nicolas, one of those vast brick friars' churches so characteristic of Italy, and to which the praise of a certain stateliness cannot be denied. Saint Nicolas, with its great bell-tower, groups well with the smaller church and smaller tower of a neighbouring Benedictine house. In short, the towers of Treviso form its leading feature, and that, though several of the greatest, above all the huge campanile designed for the cathedral church, have never been finished. In the view from the railway Saint Nicolas' tower is dominant; the tall slender tower of the municipal palace, loftier, we suspect, in positive height, fails to balance it. In the other view, from the wall on the other side, the municipal tower is the leading object, which it certainly would not have been if the bell-tower of the _duomo_ had ever been carried up. There is a great friars' church on this side too, the desecrated church of Saint Francis; but, though a large building with marked outline, it does not stand out at all so conspicuously as its Dominican rival on the other side. The _duomo_ itself, with its eccentric cupolas, goes for less in the general view than either. On the whole, the aspect of Treviso is very characteristically Italian; it would be yet more so if it sent up its one great campanile to mark its site from afar. Still, even as it is, this city of the Lombard Austria proclaims itself as one of the same group as those cities further to the west which we look down on side by side from the castle-hill of Brescia. Treviso, so near a neighbour of Venice, the earliest of her subject cities of the mainland, does not fail to proclaim the relation between the subject and the ruling commonwealth in the usual fashion. The winged lion, the ensign which we are to follow along so many shores, appears on not a few points of her defences. Over the gate of Saint Thomas the badge of the Evangelist appears in special size and majesty, accompanied, it would seem, by several younger members of his family whose wings have not yet had time to grow. And Treviso too in some sort calls up the memory of its mistress in the abundance of streams, canals, and bridges. It has at least more right than some of the towns to which the guide-books give the name, to be called a little Venice. But the contrast is indeed great between the still waters of the lagoons and the rushing torrents which pass under the walls and turn the mills of Treviso. Venice, in short, though her name has been rather freely scattered about hither and thither, remains without likeness or miniature among either subjects, rivals, or strangers. The heart of an Italian city is to be looked for in its town-house and the open space before it. It is characteristic of the mistress of Treviso that her palace, the palace of her rulers, not of her people, stands somewhat aside from the great centre of Venetian life. The church of the patron saint who had become identified with the commonwealth takes in some sort the place which in more democratic states belongs to the home of the commonwealth itself. Technically indeed Saint Mark's is itself part of the palace; it answers to Saint Stephen's at Westminster, not to Saint Peter's; but nowhere else among commonwealths does the chapel of the palace in this sort surpass or rival the palace itself. The less famous Saint Liberalis, patron of the city and diocese of Tarvisium, does not venture, after the manner of the Evangelist, thus to supplant Tarvisium itself. The commonwealth fully proclaims its being in the group of municipal buildings which surround the irregular space which forms the municipal centre of the city. One alone of these, at once in some sort the oldest and the newest, calls for special notice. The former _palazzo della Signoria_, now the palace, the centre, in the new arrangement of things, not only of the city of Treviso but of the whole province of which it is the head, has been clearly renewed, perhaps rebuilt. But it keeps the true character of a Lombard building of the kind, the simpler and truer forms which were in vogue before the Venetian Gothic set in. It marks the true position of that style that, though we cannot help admiring many of its buildings when we look at them, we find it a relief when we come to something earlier and more real. The buildings of which Venice set the type are very rich, very elegant; but we feel that, after all, England, France, Germany, could all do better in the way of windows, and that Italy left to herself could do better in the way of columns and arches. Old or new, rebuilt or simply repaired, there is nothing very wonderful in the municipal palace of Treviso; but in either case it is pleasing as an example of the genuine native style of Italy. It has arcades below, groups of round-headed windows above, and the tower looks over the palace with the more effect, because it is not parallel to it. The arcades of the palace, continued in the form of the arcades of the streets, are a feature of Treviso, as of all other southern cities that were built by rational men in rational times, and were designed, unlike Venice and Curzola, for the passage of carriages and horses. At Treviso we have arcades of all kinds, all shapes, all dates, some rude enough, some really elegant, but all of them better than the portentous folly which has offered up modern Rome and modern Athens as helpless victims to whatever powers may be conceived to preside over heat, dust, and their consequences. Treviso is not a first-class Italian city; it is hardly one of the second class; but it is pleasant to thread one's way through the arcades, to try to spell out the geography of the streams that are crossed by many bridges; it is pleasant to mount here and there on the wall, to look down on the broad foss below, and across it on the rich plain with its wall of mountains in the distance. In the ecclesiastical department what there is of any value above ground belongs mainly to the friars. The interest of the _duomo_, as a building, lies wholly in its crypt, a grand and spacious one, certainly not later than the twelfth century. It may be that some of the smaller marble shafts which support its vault had already done duty in some earlier building, and there is no doubt as to the classical date of a fragment of a large fluted column which in this same crypt serves the purpose of a well. The church above has been mercilessly Jesuited; yet, as it keeps more than one cupola, those cupolas give it a certain dignity; the stamp of Constantinople and Venice, of Périgueux and Angoulême, is hard wholly to wipe out. Otherwise a few tombs and a fine piece of mediæval gilded wood-carving are about all that the church of Treviso has to show. The great Dominican church has been more lucky. The guide-book of Gsel-fels, commonly the best of guide-books, but which cuts Treviso a little short, rather sets one against it by saying that it has been wholly modernized within. Repaired and freshened up it certainly has been; but it can hardly be said to have been modernized; the old lines seem not to have been tampered with. And there is something far from lacking in dignity in the effect of its vast interior, even though its style be the corrupt Gothic of Italy. One merit is that the arches which spring from the huge pillars, though wide, are not sprawling--not like those which those who do not dare to think for themselves are called on to admire in the nave of the Florentine _duomo_. Unlike the work of Arnolfo, the Dominican church of Treviso does not look one inch shorter or lower than it is. It has too the interest of much contemporary painting and other ornamental work. The smaller Benedictine church hard by, whose bell-tower groups so well with Saint Nicolas, employs in that bell-tower a trefoil arch, a strange form to spring from mid-wall shafts. Within there is not much to look at, beyond a tablet setting forth the glories of the Benedictine order, how many emperors, empresses, kings, queens, popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and so forth, belonged to it. Dukes, marquesses, counts, and knights, were unnumbered. It is a strange thought that to that countless band Bec added the full manhood and long monastic life of Herlwin, that Saint Peter of Shrewsbury and Saint Werburh of Chester had severally the privilege of enrolling Earl Roger and Earl Hugh, each for a few days only, as members of the brotherhood of Benedict and Anselm. The other friars' church, that of Saint Francis, has been less lucky than its Dominican rival. Desecrated and partitioned, its inside is now inaccessible; the outside promises well for a church of its own type. Yet how feeble after all are the very best of these Italian buildings which forsook their own native forms for a hopeless attempt to reproduce the forms of other lands. We are always told that Italian Gothic cannot be Northern Gothic, because Italy is not like Northern lands. True enough; but what that argument proves is that Italy should have kept to her own natural Romanesque, the true fruit of her own soil, and should never have meddled with forms which could not be transplanted in their purity. The great fact of Italian architectural history is that the native style never was thoroughly driven out, but that, alongside of the sham Gothic, true Romanesque lived on to lose itself in the earlier and better kind of _Renaissance_. The open arcades of streets and houses, and the bell-towers of the churches, largely remain really Romanesque in style at all dates. For the working out of the same law in greater buildings we must make our way south-eastward. The chronicler of the eleventh century hinted that Treviso was near to Venice, and the men of the fourteenth century acted on the hint. But the wise Doge, who a generation later told his people to stick to the sea and leave the land behind, knew better where the true subject and neighbour lands of Venice lay. We cannot fully obey him as yet, as we have still points on the Italian mainland to visit. But we may still keep the true goal of our pilgrimage before our eyes, and we may remember that the lands which were most truly near to Venice were those lands, subject and hostile, to which the path lay by her own element. The lessons of which we begin to get a glimpse at Treviso we shall not learn in their fulness till we have reached the other side of Hadria. UDINE AND CIVIDALE. 1875--1881. Ought the antiquarian traveller who has taken up his quarters at Udine and has thence made an expedition to Cividale to counsel his fellow-inquirers to follow his example in so doing or not? The answer to this question may be well made largely to depend on the state of the weather. It would be dangerous to say, from an experience of two visits only, that at Udine and Cividale it always either rains or has very lately rained; but those are the only two conditions in which we can speak of those places from personal knowledge. Now it is wonderful how a heavy rain damps the zeal of the most inquiring spirit, especially if he be carrying on his inquiries by himself. If he has companions, a good deal of wet may be shaken off by the process of talking and laughing at the common bad luck. If he be alone, every drop sticks; he has nothing to do but to grumble, and he has nobody to listen to his grumblings but himself. The land may be beautiful, but its beauties are half hid; the buildings may have the most taking outlines, but it is impossible to make a drawing of them. Even interiors lose their cheerfulness; the general gloom makes half their details invisible; and his own depression of spirit makes the inquirer less able than usual to understand and appreciate what he can see. Udine and Cividale on a fine day are something quite unlike Udine and Cividale in the rain. But even in this more cheerful state of things, when the rain has to be spoken of in the past tense, it may happen that the past puts serious difficulties in the way of the enjoyment of the present. Cividale is undoubtedly more pleasant and more profitable to see when the rain is past than when the rain is actually falling. But then, to judge from our two experiences, Cividale is easier to get at while the rain is actually falling than when it has ceased to fall. What in the one state of things is the half-dry _ghiara_ of an Alpine stream becomes a flood covering the road for no small distance, and suggesting, to all but the most zealous, the thought of turning back. It is only those for whom the attractions of the spot which once was the Forum Julii are strong indeed, who will pluck up heart to go on when their carriage has sometimes to be helped on by men who are used to wade through the flood, or else is forced to leave what should have been the high road for a narrow and difficult path across the fields. It is well to record these things, that those who stay at home may be put in mind that, even in perfectly civilized lands, topographical knowledge is not always to be got without going to some little trouble in the search after it. We have seen Udine and Cividale wet, and we have seen them dry, but then it was when they had been wet only a very short time before. We are tempted to think that we might understand them better at some time when the rainfall was neither of the present nor of the very recent past. One thing however is certain, that, wet or dry, not many Englishmen make the experiment of trying to find out what this corner of Italy may have to show. Not an English name, save that of one specially famous and adventurous traveller, was to be seen in the visitors' book, either in Albergo dell' Italia at Udine or in the Museum at Cividale. The true traveller is always in a doubtful state of mind when he finds a place of interest neglected by his own countrymen. On the one hand he is personally relieved, as being set free from the gabble of English tourists at _tables d'hôte_ and the like. But how far ought he to proclaim to the world the merits of the place which he has found out for himself? How can he draw the line, so as to lead travellers to come, without holding out the least inducement to mere tourists? But perhaps the danger is not great; tourists will go only where it is the fashion to go, and the historical traveller must not think of himself more highly than he ought to think or fancy that it is for such as he to create a fashion. * * * * * We will suppose then that our traveller has started from Treviso, and has reached the frontier town of Italy in the modern sense of the name. We have seen that the existence of the place in Roman times under the name of Vedinum can be proved and no more. The importance and history of Udine, _Utinum_, are wholly mediæval. It takes the place of Forum Julii as the capital of Friuli the district which keeps the name which has passed away from the city. It is one of the eccentricities of nomenclature that the other Forum Julii in southern Gaul has kept its name, but in the still more corrupted shape of _Fréjus_. The new head of the Venetian borderland--Venetia in the older sense--went through the usual course of the neighbouring cities with one feature peculiar to itself. Not a patriarchal see, Udine was a patriarchal capital, the capital of the patriarchs of Aquileia in that temporal character which for a long while made the bishops of the forsaken city the chief princes of that corner of Italy. Like Treviso, but somewhat later, Udine had to undergo a Hungarian siege, when the Magyar crown had passed by marriage from the house of Anjou to the house of Luxemburg. But we may mark how the different powers which had something to do with the lands with which we are concerned are already beginning to gather from the same hands. Lewis, the enemy of Treviso in 1356, purely western in origin, was purely eastern in power--King of Hungary and of the lands round about Hungary, King of Poland by a personal union. Siegmund, the enemy of Udine in 1411, was already King of Hungary, Margrave of Brandenburg also, in days when, as Hungary had nothing to do with Austria, so Brandenburg had nothing to do with Prussia. He was already chosen but not crowned King of the Romans; he was to be, before he had done, King of Bohemia, reformer of the Church, and Emperor, last crowned Emperor not of the Austrian house. Presently the city passed away from the rule of the patriarchs, but it could hardly be said to pass from a spiritual to a temporal lord when it came under the direct superiority of the Evangelist and his Lion. In the war of the League of Cambray it passed for a moment into the hands of an Austrian Archduke, but one who wore the crown of Aachen, and bore the titles of Rome without her crown. The first momentary master saw from the German Austria that Udine was Maximilian, King of Germany and Emperor-elect. In the eighteenth century the patriarchs of Aquileia had become harmless indeed, so harmless that their dignity could be altogether swept away, and their immediate province divided between the two new archbishoprics of Udine and Gorizia. Thus Udine, having once been the temporal seat of an ecclesiastical prince of the highest rank, came, as a subject city, to hold the highest ecclesiastical rank short of that which was swept away to make room for its elevation. * * * * * Udine is one of those places which keep fortifications of what we may call the intermediate period, what, in this part of the world, is specially the Venetian period. Such walls stand removed alike from those which, even when not Roman in date, closely follow the Roman type of defences, and from fortifications of the purely modern kind. The walls of Udine are well preserved and defended with ditches, and, as they fence in a large space and as there is comparatively little suburb, they form a prominent feature in the aspect of the town. Within the town, towering over every other object, is the castle or citadel, as unpicturesque a military structure as can be conceived, but perched on a huge mound, like so many of the castles of our own land. Here is work for Mr. Clark. Is the mound natural or artificial? Tradition says that it was thrown up by Attila, that he might stand on it and see the burning of Aquileia. Legendary as such a tale is on the face of it, it may perhaps be taken as some traditional witness to the artificial nature of the mound. It would be dangerous to say anything more positively without minute knowledge both of the geology and of the præ-historic antiquities of Venetia; but analogy always suggests that such mounds are artificial, or at least largely improved by art. Anyhow there the mound is, an earthwork which, if artificial it be, the Lady of the Mercians herself need not have been ashamed of. Some of the guide-books call Udine "a miniature Venice;" it is not easy to see why. There are some canals and bridges in Udine, but so there are in Milan, Amiens, and countless other towns. There is even a Rialto; but one hardly sees how it came by its name. The true "piccola Venezia" is far away in Dalmatia, floating on its islands in the bay of Salona. The point of likeness to Venice is probably found in the civic palace and the two neighbouring columns. But these last are only the usual badges of Venetian rule, and the palace, though it may suggest the dwelling of the Doges, has no more likeness to it than is shared by many other buildings of the same kind in Italy. But, like or unlike to Venice, there is no doubt, even on a rainy day, that the palace of Udine is a building of no small merit; on a fine day it might perhaps make us say that it was worth going to Udine to see it. It is, of course, far smaller than the Doges' palace; and if it lacks the wonderful intermediate story of the Venetian building, it also lacks the ugly story above it. The point of likeness, if any, lies in the arcades, with their columns of true Italian type, slenderer than those at Venice, and using the pointed arch in the outer and the round arch in the inner range. But the columns at Udine are not a mere range like those at Venice. They stand row behind row, almost like the columns of a crypt, and they supply a profitable study in their floriated capitals. The pillared space forms the market-place of the city, and a busy place it is at the times of buying and selling, filled with the characteristic merchandise of the district, the golden balls of silk, for whose presence the Venetian land may thank the adventurous monks of Justinian's day. Some of the columns, and a large part of the rest of the building, had been renewed between 1875 and 1881. Between those years the palace had been nearly destroyed by fire. Here was a case of necessary restoration. No rational person could have been better pleased, either if the palace had been left in ruins or if it had been repaired in some incongruous fashion. In such a case as this, the new work is as much in its place as the old, and the new work at Udine is as worthy as any new work is ever likely to be to stand side by side with the old. At Udine again, as in many other places, the thought cannot fail to strike us how thoroughly these grand public palaces of Italy do but set before us, on a grand scale and in a more ornamented style, a kind of building of which a humble variety is familiar enough among ourselves. Many an English market-town has an open market-house with arches, with a room above for the administration of justice or any other public purpose. Enlarge and enrich a building of this kind, and we come by easy steps to the palace of Udine and to the palace of Venice. The civic palace is the only building of any great architectural value in Udine. The metropolitan church contains little that is attractive for antiquity or for beauty of the higher kind. But the interior, though of mixed and corrupt style, is not without a certain stateliness, and its huge octagonal tower would have been a grand object if its upper stages had been carried up in a manner worthy of its basement. The streets are largely arcaded; and if the arcades of Udine supply less detail than those of some other Italian cities, any arcade is better than none. Udine can at least hold its head higher than modern Bari, modern Athens, modern Rome. Still at best Udine in itself holds but a secondary place among Italian cities, and its main historic interest consists in the way in which the utterly obscure _Vedinum_ contrived to supplant both Aquileia and Forum Julii. As things now are, Forum Julii, dwindled to Cividale, has become a kind of appendage to Udine, and we must make our way thither from what is now the greater city. * * * * * Let us here put on record the memories of an actual journey, as strengthened and corrected by a later one made under more favourable circumstances. The accounts in the common guide-books are so meagre, and it is so impossible to get any topographical books in Udine, that our inquirer sets out, it must be confessed, with the vaguest notions of what he is going to see. Gsel-fels was not in those days, and, now that he has come into being, he has treated the lands at the head of the Hadriatic a good deal less fully than he has done most other parts of Italy. The traveller then is promised a store of Roman remains by one guide-book, and an early Romanesque church by another. He knows that the greatness of Forum Julii has gone elsewhere, and he is perhaps led to the belief that he is going to see a fallen city, perhaps another Aquileia, perhaps even another Salona. One thing is clear, even in the rain--namely, that the natural surroundings of Forum Julii are of the noblest kind. The grand position of the place itself he will not find out till later; but the mist half hides, half brings out, the fact that Udine lies near, and Cividale lies nearer, to the great range of the Julian Alps. Here and there their outlines can be made out; here and there a snowy peak shows itself for a moment in the further distance. A fertile plain with a mountain barrier, with broad and rushing rivers to water it--it was clearly a goodly land in which the old Veneti had fixed themselves, and in which Rome fixed the Forum of Julius as a colony and garrison to keep their land in obedience. A long and flat road, but with the mountains ever in front, leads on by several villages with their bell-towers, over what, according to the accidents of weather, may be either a half-dry _ghiara_ or a deep flood, till the traveller reaches the place which was Forum Julii, and which is Cividale. Here he finds himself--a little to his amazement--in a living town, with walls and gates and towers, with streets and houses and churches, none of them certainly of the Julian æra. The town is not very large; it is not a local capital like Udine; still it is a town, not a village among ruins and fragments like Aquileia and Salona. But it is plain that Cividale has not forgotten what she once was; the traveller is set down at the _Grande Albergo al Friuli_, and the _albergo_ stands in the _Piazza Giulio Cesare_. He remembers the like name at Rimini, and he begins to cherish hopes that the treasures of Rimini may have their like at Cividale. In utter ignorance of what the place may really contain, he seeks for a bookseller's shop, hoping that some guide-book or plan of some kind may still be found. The bookseller is soon found, but his shop contains nothing of the least profit to an inquirer into the remains of Forum Julii. But the traveller hears that there is a museum; that promises something: besides the treasures which the museum itself may contain, such a place commonly implies an intelligent keeper, who sometimes proves to be a scholar of a high order. But he takes a wrong turn; no great harm however, as he thereby learns sooner than he otherwise would have learned the noble natural site of Cividale, planted on the rocky banks of the rushing stream of the Natisone. He sees two or three unpromising churches, and looks into the chief of them, a building of strange and mixed style, but not without a certain stateliness of general effect. He sees the _Via Cornelio Gallo_, which promises something, and the _Via del Tempio_, which promises more. Visions of Nîmes, Vienne, and Pola rise before him; he follows the track, but he finds nothing in the least savouring of Jupiter or Diana, and he learns afterwards that the _Tempio_ from which the street is called is the great church, known, it seems, in a special way, as _Templum Maximum_. Still the museum is not reached; but a second inquiry, a second journey to quite another end of the town, leads to it. The museum is examined; it contains a considerable stock of objects of the usual kind, fragments of architecture and sculpture, which witness to the former greatness of Forum Julii. More remarkable are the specimens of Lombard workmanship, in various forms of armour and ornament, to say nothing of the actual tomb of the Lombard Duke Gisulf. At the museum he is put under the friendly guidance of a kindly priest, by whose care many matters are cleared up. Roman remains, strictly so called, there are none to see. There have been diggings, and the walls have been traced out, but all has been covered up again; outside the museum there is nothing in the pagan line left. But of Romanesque work the remains, though neither large nor many, are of high interest. Buried in an Ursuline nunnery, of which the good father opens the door, is a small Romanesque church of most singular design, built, so he tells us, in 764, but which, if so, must have received some further enrichment in the twelfth century. The sculptures in the western wall are surely of the later date; but the shell, parts of which in their coupled Corinthian columns strongly call to mind some of the ancient churches of Rome, may well be of the earlier date, of the last days of the Lombard kingdom. Here at last something of no small value has been lighted on. As a matter of architecture, this church is by far the best thing in Cividale. Indeed, as a matter of architecture strictly so called, it is the only thing of any importance. But let the other churches be gone through again, perhaps only with that relief of the mind which follows the discovery of an intelligible clue, yet more when old memories are revived and strengthened by a second visit, and, though they are of no great value as buildings, they are found to be of no small interest in other ways. The _Templum Maximum_ indeed, late and corrupt as is its style, is not without a certain grandeur of internal effect, and it contains more than one object which calls up historic memories. There is the chair which cannot in strictness be called patriarchal, but which was doubtless used by patriarchs when the spiritual shepherds of Aquileia fled from their wasted home to the safer shelter of Forum Julii, and ruled its chief church as provosts. There too on the altar we may see the silver image work of the twelfth century, the gift of one of the two patriarchs who bore the name of Peregrinus. And there too is a wonderful object, the indoor baptistery--for it is more than a font--repaired two years after Charles the Great had added the style of King of the Lombards to his Frankish kingship and his Roman patriciate. We may then believe that, in the columns and round arches of its octagon, we see work of the date when the land of Forum Julii was still the Austria of an independent Lombard realm. Other objects of early days are to be found in even the less promising churches, specially an altar, rich with the goldsmith's craft, which suggests, though it does not rival, the altar of Saint Ambrose at Milan. But first among the treasures of Cividale must rank the precious volume which is still guarded in the treasury of the great church. This is an ancient book of the gospels, now of three gospels only, for some zealous Venetian, eager for the honour of Saint Mark, deemed that the pages which contained his writings were out of place anywhere except in the Evangelist's own city. The highest historical value of the book consists in the crowds of signatures scattered through its margin, signatures of persons great and small, known and unknown, from the days of the Lombard princes to the Empress-Queen of the last age and the Bourbon pretender of the present. When we have grasped the fact that the popular speech of the surrounding district is Slavonic, we are less surprised than we otherwise might be to find that a large proportion of the signatures come from eastern Europe. Among them are a crowd of signatures from Bulgaria, headed by Michael their king. It is for palæographers to judge of the date by the writing. And palæographers say that, of the ancient names, none are earlier than the end of the eighth century or later than the end of the tenth. Otherwise we might have been driven to see in this Michael nothing greater than a fourteenth century king of an already divided Bulgaria. But the great Simeon of an earlier day left a son Michael, a monk, who left his monastery to strive vainly for his father's crown. Yet, if the witness of wise men as to the dates of the writing may be trusted, it must be either the signature of this Michael or else an utter forgery. But the unenlightened in such matters asks how the signatures of men of so many lands and ages got there. Did those whose names were written--for of course few, if any, would write them themselves--come to the book, or did the book go to them? The earlier signatures at least are said to be the names of reconciled enemies who took the holy book to witness that their enmities were laid aside. This we can neither affirm nor deny, but it surely cannot apply to all the signatures in the book. The treasury contains other ancient books, and other objects which are well worth notice, but this strange and precious relic is the chiefest of them all. Altogether then there turns out to be a good deal to see on the site which once was Forum Julii. What is to be seen is perhaps not exactly of the kind which the traveller may have fancied in his dreams. He can hardly have come expecting to find a stately mediæval or modern city. He may have come expecting to find the walls of a Roman city sheltering here and there either Roman fragments or modern cottages. He will find neither of these; but he will find a town whose natural position is far more striking than could have been looked for in the approach from Udine, and whose chief merit is that it shelters here and there, in corners where they have to be sought for, several objects, neither Roman nor mediæval, but of the darker, and therefore most instructive, period which lies between the two. GORIZIA. 1881. At Udine and at Cividale we are still in Italy in every sense which that name has borne since the days of Augustus Cæsar. But the fact which may have startled us at the last stage of our course, the fact that a Slavonic tongue is to be heard within the borders of both the old and the new Italian kingdom, may suggest the thought that we are drawing near to parts of the world which are in some respects different from Treviso and the lands to the west of it. We are about to pass from the subject lands of Venice to the neighbour lands. We shall presently reach the borders which modern diplomacy has decreed for the Italian kingdom, seemingly because they were the borders of the territory of the Venetian commonwealth on the mainland. Venice, as Venice, has passed away, but it is strange to see how one of the most artificial of her boundaries survives. The present arrangements of the European map seem to lay down as the rule on this frontier that nothing that was not Venetian can be Italian. The rule is purely negative; no weight at all is given to the converse doctrine that whatever was Venetian should be Italian. Nor is it necessary to plead for any such doctrine, a doctrine which nationality and geography, as well as practical possibility, would all decline to support. Still it is hard to see why the negative doctrine should be so strictly pressed, and why Italian lands should be forced to remain under a foreign dominion, simply because they never came under the dominion of Venice. If any argument grounded in this way on facts which have long since ceased to have a meaning were urged on the Italian side, it would be at once scouted as pedantic and antiquarian. But it would seem that even pedantry and antiquarianism are welcomed when they tell on behalf of the other side. For surely it is the height of pedantry and antiquarianism to argue that, because a land was never numbered among the subject provinces of Venice, it therefore may not be numbered among the equal members of a free Italian kingdom. It is certainly hard to find any other reason, except that the advance of Venice stopped at a certain point, to account for the fact that the dominions of a foreign prince come so awkwardly near to Verona, for the fact that Trent and Roveredo look to Vienna and not to Rome. Such are our thoughts on one line of journey; on our present course the same question suggests itself again. We pass a frontier where it is not at first sight easy to see why any frontier should be there. We journey from Udine to Gorizia, still keeping within the old Lombard Austria, but between Udine and Gorizia lies Cormons, and after Cormons we find ourselves in a new Austria. We speak with geographical accuracy. We might not say, as some would, that we were in Austria if we were at Cattaro or at Tzernovitz, but in the land which we have now entered, we are, not indeed in the archduchy of Austria, but within the circle of Austria according to the arrangements of Maximilian. And in truth we do soon mark a change. We soon come to feel more distinctly than before that we are in a land where more tongues than one are spoken. We may have found out that round about Cividale all is not Italian in speech; but the Slavonic tongue of those parts is modest and retiring. It does not thrust itself into print or show itself flauntingly on doors or windows. But when we pass the border, when we are in the land which is Austrian both in the oldest and the newest sense, the presence of a twofold, even of a three-fold, speech makes itself very clear. At Cividale, if Slavonic was to be heard, it was at least not to be seen. In the city which we next reach, Italian and Slavonic are both to be seen openly, and a third tongue is to be seen alongside of them. Are we to seek here for the justification of the frontier which struck us as artificial and needless? Is the fact that the Slavonic tongue is spoken in or close by the city which we next reach a proof that that city ought to remain outside the Italian kingdom? If so, the argument might be thought to prove too much; it might be thought to prove that Cividale ought not to be counted to Italy any more than its neighbour. But any one who took up this line of argument would hardly be led by it to approval of things as they are. The Panslavist who should go the length of arguing that neither Gorizia nor Cividale ought to look to Rome as its head would hardly argue that either of them ought to look to Vienna. We have written the name _Gorizia_; but we have written it with fear and trembling. For we have now reached a city where we have three names to choose from. Shall we say _Görz_, _Gorizia_, or _Gorici_? All three names will be found carefully displayed side by side in public notices. One is tempted, by the analogy of a crowd of Slavonic names in other places, to suggest _Goritaz_ instead of any of them. But _Gorici_ is the Slavonic form as by law established, and to that rule both natives and visitors may do well to bow. In any case there is little doubt that on this spot of many names we have reached a place which, though Italian in geography, though for ages German in allegiance, was in truth Slavonic in origin. A charter of Otto the Third speaks of "una villa quæ Sclavonica lingua vocatur Gorizia." This is the earliest certain mention of the place. There is indeed a document which tells us how in the year 949 Bishop John of Trieste was borne down by many troubles, and how one source of his troubles was a heavy debt to David the Jew of Gorizia. But wise men reject the document which asserts this piece of episcopal mismanagement. And the way in which the place is spoken of in the eleventh century does not sound as if it could have been a spot whose wealth could have drawn Jews thither in the tenth. In any case the Slavonic _villa_ grew into a town and a county of the Empire, and late in the fifteenth century the Counts of Gorizia became the same persons as the Archdukes of Austria. But long after the beginning of that union, the distinction between Austria and Gorizia was still strongly drawn. How much Gorizia still thought of itself, how much its prince still thought of himself in his local character, is made plain by the most prominent feature of the chief building of the place. Over the gateway of the castle is an inscription recording repairs done in the year 1660 by the reigning Count Leopold. That Count bore higher titles, and he does not fail to record them on the stone; but they are recorded in an almost incidental way. Letters boldly cut, letters which catch the eye at some distance, proclaim that the work was done by LEOPOLDUS COMES GORITIÆ. Go near, and you may literally read between the lines, in smaller letters and abbreviated words, that this Count Leopold happened to be also Emperor of the Romans, King of Germany, Hungary, and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, and--in his own eyes at least--Duke of Burgundy. But here at Gorizia he reigned and built directly as Count of Gorizia, and he proclaimed himself primarily by his local title. In an inscription such things could be done; heraldry hardly admitted of any such ingenious devices. The bird of Cæsar must bear the hereditary shield of the prince who has been chosen to the imperial office, and on that hereditary shield the bearings of the Gorizian county cannot displace those of duchies and kingdoms. While therefore the legend proclaims the doer of the repairs of 1660 as before all things a hereditary local count, the shield proclaims him as before all things a Roman Emperor-elect. Yet one may believe that most of those who pass under the imperial bird over the gateway deem him all one with his bastard likeness over the tobacco-shops. Some may even fail to see that, among the many hereditary bearings of the elective Cæsar, the lion of the Austrian duchy keeps his proper place. That lion is so apt to pass out of sight, men are so ready to cry "Austria" when they see the eagle of Rome, so little ready to cry "Austria" when they see Austria's own bearing, that it may be kind to point out one place where his form and his occasional destiny may best be studied. The true Austrian beast is plainly to be seen on the walls of the _Schlachtkapelle_ near Sempach, and his presence there is explained by the legend, thrilling to the federal and democratic mind, "Das Panier von Oestreich ist gefangen, und ist nach Uri gekommen." The eagle of Rome over the gateway, in a place where in these regions we look almost mechanically for the lion of Saint Mark, reminds us yet again that we have passed from the subject into the neighbour lands of Venice. And various inscriptions, public and private, bring no less clearly home to our minds that we are in a land of more than one tongue. Of the three names of the town, that by which we have hitherto spoken of it, that which it bears in the earliest trustworthy charter, that which differs by one letter only from its more ordinary Latin shape as seen over the gate, is also the name which the traveller will most frequently hear in its streets and will see universally written over its shops. As far as one can see at a glance, German is at _Görz_ the tongue of hôtels, _cafés_, public departments of all kinds. Italian is the tongue of the citizens of _Gorizia_ whose shops are sheltered by its street arcades. Slavonic, we conceive, will some day be the tongue of the little children who, in all the joy of a state of nature, as naked as any other mammals, creep, as merrily though more slowly than the lizards, over the grass and stones of the castle-hill of _Gorici_. Anyhow Gorizia is, like Palermo of old, the city of the threefold tongue. But the place itself is, considering its history, a little disappointing. Nothing indeed is lacking in the way of position. Mountains on all sides, except where the rich plain of the swift Isonzo stretches away to the sea, fence in the city, without hemming it close in as in a prison. One hill is crowned by the castle, whence we look out on another crowned by the long white line of the Franciscan convent, suggesting memories of the banished king who was the last to receive the consecrating oil of Rheims. Houses, churches, villages, are thickly scattered over the plain and the hill sides. The vines and the mulberry-trees, the food of the silkworm whose endless cocoons choke up the market-place, witness to the richness of the land. But there is a strange lack of buildings of any importance in this capital of an ancient county, this resort which boasts itself as the "Nizza Austriaca," the "Oesterreichische Nizza"--in such formulæ the third tongue of the spot is not called into play. A Nizza without any Mediterranean may seem as strange as the Rialto which we saw at Udine without any Grand Canal. But Gorizia as a modern town is not striking. Its best features are the old arcades in some of its streets and markets. Such arcades must be bad indeed to be wholly unsatisfactory, and some of those at Gorizia are very fairly done. But there is no grand church, no grand municipal palace; the castle itself is not what on such a site it ought to be. The castle is the kernel of the whole place. Gorizia is not a hill-town, nor can we call it a river-town. There is the castle on the hill, and the town seems to have gathered at its foot. The castle soars so commandingly over the country round that we wish here, as at Udine, that there was something better to soar than the ugly barrack which forms its uppermost stage. There are indeed better things within Count Leopold's gateway. The outer court is laid out in streets, and contains several houses with architectural features. One, bearing date 1475, with respectable columns and round arches below, and with windows of the Venetian type above, might pass for a very humble following, not of the palaces of Venice or Udine, but of the far nobler pile which is in store for us at Ragusa. A small church too strikes us, with its windows projecting like oriels, one of them indeed rising from the ground. This last, when we enter, proves to be the smallest of side-chapels set on this fashion. In some cities such a small eccentricity would hardly deserve any notice; but at Gorizia we learn to become thankful for rather small mercies. In the lower town what little interest there is gathers round the pieces of street arcades; the churches go for next to nothing. Yet Gorizia ranks as an ecclesiastical metropolis, and it has its metropolitan church no less than Canterbury or Lyons. Nor is this merely one of those arrangements of the present century which have stripped Mainz and Trier of their immemorial dignity, and which have given us archbishops of such unexpected places as Munich and Freiburg-im-Breisgau. The style of Archbishop of Gorizia is at least several generations older than the style of Emperor of Austria. The church of Gorizia rose to metropolitan rank, at the same time as the church of Udine, when the patriarchate of Aquileia came to an end, and its province was divided between the two new metropolitans thus called into being. But the seat of the modern primacy is hardly worthy of a simple bishopric. There is nothing in the building of any antiquity but a choir, German rather than Italian, and of no great antiquity either. The rest of the church is of a gaudy _Renaissance_; yet it deserves some notice from the boldness of its construction. It is designed, within and without, of two stories: that is, the upper gallery is an essential part of the building. The principle is the same as in Saint Agnes and Saint Laurence at Rome, and as in German churches like the Great Minster at Zürich; but the feeling is quite different. Still, if a church is to be built in a _Renaissance_ style and to receive two sets of worshippers, one over the heads of the other, it must be allowed that the object is thoroughly attained in the metropolitan church of Gorizia, and its architect is entitled to the credit of having successfully grappled with the problem immediately set before him. Gorizia then can hardly claim, on the ground either of its history or its buildings, to rank among cities of the first, or even of the second class. Its natural position far surpasses all that has been done in it, and all that has been built in it. But there is no spot on which men have lived for eight or nine hundred years which does not teach us something, and Gorizia has its lessons as well as other places. It would hardly be worth making a journey thither from any distant point to see Gorizia only; but the place should be seen by any one whose course takes him through the lands at the head of the Hadriatic. Udine, Cividale, and Gorizia are places which have in some sort partitioned among them the position of fallen Aquileia. From the children, we might perhaps say the rebellious children, we must go on to the ancient mother. AQUILEIA. 1875--1881. We have already, in our course through the lands at the head of the Hadriatic, had need constantly to refer to the fallen city which once was the acknowledged head of those lands, the city whose fame began as a great Roman colony, the bulwark of Italy at her north-eastern corner, and which lived on, after the fall of its first greatness, in the character of the nominal head alike of a considerable temporal power and of an ecclesiastical power whose position and history were altogether unique. We have noticed that, while the cities of this region rise and fall, still even those which fall are not wholly swept away. Aquileia has always lived, though, since the days of Attila, the life of the actual city of Aquileia has been a very feeble one indeed. But though Aquileia, as a city, practically perished in the fifth century, yet it continued till the eighteenth to give its name to a power of some kind. Its temporal position passed to Forum Julii, and Udine succeeded to the position alike of Forum Julii and of Aquileia. But the patriarchs grew into temporal princes, and their style continued to be taken from Aquileia, and not from Forum Julii or Udine. On the ecclesiastical side, the patriarchal title itself arose out of a theological and a local schism. And, while the bishops of Aquileia thus rose to the same nominal rank as those of Constantinople and Alexandria, they had, as the result of the same chain of events, to see--at least, if they had gone on living at Aquileia they would have seen--a rival power of the same rank spring up, at their own gates, in the form of the patriarchs of Grado. This last was surely the greatest anomaly in all ecclesiastical geography. He who is not familiar with the Italian ecclesiastical map may be surprised to find Fiesole a separate bishopric from Florence. Even he who is familiar with such matters may still be surprised to find Monreale a separate archbishopric from Palermo. But even this last real anomaly seems a small matter, compared with the arrangement which placed one patriarch at Aquileia itself, and another almost within a stone's throw at Aquileia's port of Grado. At every step we have lighted on something to suggest the thought of the ancient capital of the Venetian borderland; we have now to look at what is left of the fallen city itself. Setting aside the actual seats of Imperial power, Rome Old and New, Milan, Trier, and Ravenna, few cities stand out more conspicuously than Aquileia both in general and in ecclesiastical history. The stronghold by which Rome first secured her power over the borderland of Illyria and Cisalpine Gaul--the city which grew under the fostering hand of Augustus into one of the great cities of the Empire--the city whose overthrow by Attila was one of the causes of the birth of Venice--might have claimed for itself no mean place in history, even if it had never become one of the special seats of ecclesiastical rule and ecclesiastical controversy. To see such a city sunk to a mean village, to trace out the remains of its ancient greatness and splendour, is indeed a worthy work for the historical traveller. But how shall the traveller find his way to Aquileia? Let us confess to a certain degree of pious fraud in our notices of Treviso, Udine, and Gorizia. We have, for the general purposes of the series, conceived the traveller as starting from Venice, while in truth those notices contained the impressions of journeys made the other way, with Trieste as their starting-point. The mask must be thrown off, if only because the journey to Aquileia always calls up the memory of an earlier visit to Aquileia when it was also from Trieste that another traveller set forth. We have before us a record of travel from Trieste to Aquileia, in which the pilgrim, finding himself on the road "in a capital barouche behind two excellent horses," tells us that "the idea of thus visiting a church city, which seemed a mere existence of the past, had something so singular and inappropriate as to seem an ecclesiastical joke. When at the octroi," he continues, "our driver gave out his destination, the whole arrangement produced the same effect in my mind as if Saint Augustine had asked me to have a bottle of soda-water, or Saint Jerome to procure for him a third-class ticket." Without professing altogether to throw ourselves into enthusiasm of this kind, the ecclesiastical history of the city, its long line of patriarchs, schismatical and orthodox, is of itself enough to give Aquileia a high place among the cities of the earth. But why Aquileia should be called "a church city" as if it were Wells or Lichfield or Saint David's, cities to which that name would very well apply--why going thither should seem an "ecclesiastical joke"--why Saint Augustine, if he were still on earth, should be debarred from the use of soda-water--why Saint Jerome should be condemned to a third-class ticket, while his modern admirer goes in a capital barouche behind two excellent horses--all these are mysteries into which it would not do for the profane to peer too narrowly. But the traveller from whom we quote was one in whose mind the first sight of Spalato called up no memory of Diocletian, but who wandered off from the organizer of the Roman power to an ecclesiastical squabble in which the British Solomon was a chief actor. We quote his own words. As he first saw the mighty bell-tower, he asks, "What were our thoughts? What but of poor Mark Antony de Dominis?" Our ecclesiastical traveller who went straight from Trieste to Aquileia in the barouche with the excellent horses made his pilgrimage before the railway was opened. As it is, the more modern inquirer is more likely to take the train to Monfalcone--perhaps humbly, like Saint Jerome, by the third class, perhaps otherwise, according to circumstances. He will pass through a land of specially stony hills coming down near to the sea, but leaving ever and anon, in the most utter contrast, green marshy places between the stones and the water. Some may find an interest in passing by Miramar, the dwelling of the Maximilian who perished in Mexico; some may prefer to speculate about Antenor, and to wonder where he found the nine mouths of Timavus. But it is still possible to go by the same path as our predecessor, and that antiquated course has something to be said for it. The road from Trieste to Aquileia is, for some while at least, not rich in specially striking objects, but it passes over lofty ground whence the traveller will better understand the geography of the Hadriatic, and will come in for some glimpses of the inland parts of this region of many tongues. For here it is not quite enough to say that native Italian and Slave and official German all meet side by side. We are not far off from the march-land of two forms of the Slavonic speech; the tongue of Rome too is represented at no great distance by another of its children, distinct from the more classic speech of Italy. We remember that the Vlach, the Rouman, the Latin-speaking remnant of the East, has settled or has lingered at not very distant points. We are tempted to fancy--wrongly, it may be--that some of them must almost come within the distant landscape. One thing is certain; bearers far more strange of the Roman name, though no speakers of the Roman tongue, are there in special abundance. Those whom sixteenth century Acts of Parliament spoke of as "outlandish persons calling themselves Egyptians," though they certainly now at least no more call themselves Egyptians than Englishmen ever called themselves Saxons, are there as a distinct element in the land. The traveller who comes on the right day may come in for a gipsy fair at Duino; he may hear philologers whose studies have lain that way talking to them in their own branch of the common Aryan tongue. He himself meanwhile, driven to look at their outsides only, perhaps thinks that after all gipsies do not look so very different from other ragged people. Certainly if he chances to be making his way, as it is possible that he may be, from Dalmatia and Montenegro, he will miss, both among the gipsies and the other inhabitants of the land, the picturesque costumes to which he has become used further south. Duino itself, a very small haven, but which once believed that it could rival Trieste, will, to the antiquary at least, be more interesting than its gipsy visitors. A castle on rocks, overhanging the sea--a castle, so to speak, in two parts, one of which contains a tower which claims a Roman date, while the other is said to have sheltered Dante--will reward the traveller who still keeps to the barouche and the horses on his journey to the "church city," instead of making use of the swifter means which modern skill has provided for him. * * * * * At last, by whichever road he goes, the traveller finds himself at the little town of Monfalcone, and there he who comes by the railway must now look for the capital barouche and the excellent horses, or such substitutes for them as Monfalcone can supply. A small castle frowns on the hill above the station, but the town contains nothing but an utterly worthless _duomo_ and some street arcades, to remind us once more that, if we are under the political rule of the Apostolic King, we are on soil which is Italian in history and in architecture. After a railway journey which has mainly skirted the sea, perhaps even after a journey over the hills during a great part of which we have looked down on the sea, we are a little surprised at finding that the road which leads us to what once was a great haven takes us wholly inland. We pass through a flat and richly cultivated country, broken here and there by a village with its campanile, till two Corinthian columns catch the eye in front of a modern building, which otherwise might be passed by without notice. Those two columns, standing forsaken, away from their fellows, mark that we have reached Monastero; in the days before Attila we should have reached Aquileia. We are now within the circuit of the ancient colony. But mediæval Aquileia was shut up within far narrower limits; modern Aquileia is shut up within narrower limits still. Within the courtyard of the building which is fronted by the two columns, we find a large collection, a kind of outdoor museum, of scraps of architecture and sculpture, the fragments of the great city that once was. We go on, and gradually our approach to the centre is marked by further fragments of columns lying here and there, as at Rome or Ravenna. A little farther, and we are in modern Aquileia, "città Aquileia," as it still proudly calls itself in the official description, which, as usual, proclaims to the traveller the name of the place where he is, and in what administrative division of the "Imperial and Royal" dominions he finds himself. Of the village into which the ancient colony has shrunk up we must allow that the main existing interest is ecclesiastical. So far as Aquileia is a city at all, it is now a "church city." The patriarchal church, with its tall but certainly not beautiful campanile, soars above all. But, if it soars above all, it still is not all. Here and there a fragment of a column, or an inscription built into the wall, reminds us of what Aquileia once was. One ingenious man has even built himself an outhouse wholly out of such scraps, here a capital, there a bit of sculpture, there inscriptions of various dates, with letters of the best and of the worst kinds of Roman lettering. Queer and confused as the collection is, the bits out of which it is put together are at least safe, which they would not be if they were left lying about in the streets. Another more regularly assorted collection will be found in the local museum, which has the advantage of containing several plans, showing the extent of the city in earlier times. At last we approach the church, now, and doubtless for many ages past, the one great object in Aquileia. In front of it a single shattered column marks the place of the ancient forum. To climb the tower is the best way of studying the geography of Aquileia, just as to climb the tower of Saint Apollinaris is the best way of studying the geography of Ravenna. In both cases the first feeling that comes upon the mind is that the sea has become a distant object. Now the eye ranges over a wide flat, and the sea, which once brought greatness to Aquileia, is far away. A map of Aquileia in the fifteenth century is to be had, and it is wise to take it to the top of the tower. There we may trace out the churches, gates, and other buildings, which have perished since the date of the map, remembering always that the Aquileia of the fifteenth century was the merest fragment of the vast city of earlier times. A good deal of the town wall of the mediæval date may still be traced. It runs near to the east end of the church, acting, as at Exeter and Chichester, as the wall at once of the town and of the ecclesiastical precinct. The church itself, the patriarchal basilica of Aquileia, is a study indeed, though the first feeling on seeing it either within or without is likely to be one of disappointment. We do not expect outline, strictly so called, in an Italian church; when we come in for any grouping of towers, such as we see at Saint Abbondio at Como and at more wonderful Vercelli, we accept with thankfulness the boon which we had not looked for. So we do not complain that the basilica of Aquileia, with its vast length and its lofty tower, is still, as judged by a northern eye, somewhat shapeless. But in such a place we might have expected to find a front such as those which form the glory of Pisa and Lucca, such a tower as may be found at Pisa and Lucca and at a crowd of places of less renown. We enter the church, and we find ourselves in a vast and stately basilica; but one feature in its architecture at once amazes us. There are the long rows of columns with which we have become familiar at Pisa and Lucca, at Rome and Ravenna; but all the main arches are pointed. And the pointed arches are not, as at Palermo and indeed at Pisa also, trophies of the vanquished Saracen; their details at once show that they are actual mediæval work. We search the history, for which no great book-learning is needed, as inscriptions on the walls and floor supply the most important facts. The church was twice recast, once early in the eleventh century, and again in the fourteenth. The pointed work in the main building is of course due to this last change; the crypt, with its heavy columns and rude capitals, looks like work of the eleventh century, though it has been assigned to the fifth, and though doubtless materials of that date have been used up again. And in the upper church also, the columns of the elder building have, as so often happens, lived through all repairs. Their capitals for the most part are mediæval imitations of classical forms rather than actual relics of the days before Attila. But two among them, one in each transept, still keep shattered Corinthian capitals of the very finest work. The fittings of the church are largely of _Renaissance_ date, but the patriarchal throne remains, and there are one or two fragments of columns and the like put to new uses. On the north side of the nave is a singular building, known as the _sacrario_, of which it is not easy to guess the original purpose. It is a round building supporting a miniature colonnade with a conical roof above, so that it looks more like a model of a baptistery than anything else. Those who see Cividale before Aquileia may be reminded of the baptistery within the _Templum Maximum_. But the Forojulian work is larger than the Aquileian, and we can hardly fancy that this last was really designed to be used for baptism; at all events there is a notable baptistery elsewhere. In the basilica of Aquileia we have three marked dates, but we may call it on the whole a church of the eleventh century, keeping portions of a church of the fourth, and itself largely recast in the fourteenth. Thus, setting aside later changes, the existing church shows portions of work a thousand years apart, and spans nearly the whole of Aquileian history. When the rich capitals of the transepts were carved, the days of persecution were still of recent memory; when pointed arches were set on the ancient columns, the temporal power of the patriarchate was within a century of its fall. The first church of Aquileia is assigned to the bishop Fortunatian, who succeeded in 347, the last prelate who held Aquileia as a simple bishopric without metropolitan rank. The builder and consecrator of the present church--for present we may call it, though it shows less detail of his work than of either earlier or later times--was Poppo or Wolfgang, patriarch from 1019 to 1042, a man famous in local history as the chief founder of the temporal power of the patriarchate. His influence was great with the Emperors Henry the Second and Conrad the Second; he accompanied the latter prince to his Roman coronation, and must therefore have stood face to face with our own Cnut. The name of this magnificent prelate suggests his namesake, who at the very same moment filled the metropolitan throne of Trier, and was engaged in the same work of transforming a great church of an older day. If we compare Trier and Aquileia, we see how men's minds are worked on by local circumstances and local associations. Poppo of Aquileia and Poppo of Trier were alike German prelates, but one was working in Germany and the other in Italy. The northern Poppo therefore gave the remodelled church of Trier a German character, while the remodelled church of Aquileia remained, under the hands of the southern Poppo, a church thoroughly Italian. We may even say that the essential character of the building was not changed, even by the still later remodelling which brought in the pointed arches; these were the work of Markquard of Randeck, who was translated from Augsburg to the patriarchal see in 1365, and who held it till 1381. He brought in the received constructive form of his day, but he did not by bringing in pointed arches turn the building into Italian Gothic. The church of Markquard remained within and without a true basilica, keeping the general effect of the church of Poppo, perhaps even of the church of Fortunatian. The walls of the church moreover show inscriptions of much later date, recording work done in the church of Aquileia in the days of Apostolic sovereigns of our own time. The newest of all, which was not there in 1875, but which was there in 1881, bears the name of the prince who has ceased to be lord of Forum Julii, but who still remains lord of Aquileia. But the basilica itself is not all. A succession of buildings join on to the west: first a _loggia_, then a plain vaulted building, called, but without much likelihood, an older church, which leads to the ruined baptistery. The old map shows this last with a high roof or cupola, and then the range from the western baptistery to the great eastern apse must have been striking indeed. Fragments of every kind, columns, capitals, bits of entablature, lie around; and to the south of the church stand up two great pillars, the object of which it is for some local antiquary to explain. The old map shows that they stood just within the court of the patriarchal palace, which was then a ruin, and which has now utterly vanished. They are not of classical work; they are not columns in the strict sense; they are simply built up of stones, like the pillars of Gloucester or Tewkesbury. Standing side by side, they remind us of the columns which in towns which were subject to Venice commonly bear the badges of the dominion of Saint Mark. But can we look for such badges at Aquileia? The lands of the patriarchate, in by far the greater part of their extent, did indeed pass from the patriarch to the Evangelist. But had the Evangelist ever such a settled possession of the city itself as to make it likely that columns should be set up at Aquileia as well as at Udine? The treaty which confirmed Venice in the possession of the patriarchal state left the patriarchal city to its own bishop and prince. Was the winged lion ever set up, and then taken down again? The old map which represents Aquileia in the fifteenth century shows that, as the pillars carry nothing now, so they carried nothing then. Again, would Venetian taste have allowed such clumsy substitutes for columns as these? And, if they had been meant as badges of dominion, would they not have stood in the forum rather than in the court of the Patriarch's palace? We are far from having exhausted even the existing antiquities of Aquileia, further still from exhausted its long and varied history. Within the bounds of the fallen city pleasant walks may be taken, which here and there bring us among memories of the past. Here is a fine street pavement brought to light, here a fragment of a theatre. But men do not dig at Aquileia with the same vigour with which they dig at Silchester and at Solunto. The difference between the diggings at the beginning and the end of a term of six years is less than it should be. But we have perhaps done enough to point out the claims of so wonderful a spot on those who look on travelling as something more than a way either of killing time or of conforming to fashion. Aquileia has a character of its own; it is not a ruined or buried city; nor is it altogether like Trier or Ravenna, which, though fallen from their ancient greatness, are cities still. In the general feeling of the spot it has more in common with such a place as Saint David's in our own island, that thorough "church city," where a great minster and its ecclesiastical establishment still live on amid surrounding desolation. But there is no reason to believe that Saint David's, as a town, was ever greater than it is now. Still Saint David's keeps its bishopric, it keeps its chapter; at Aquileia the patriarch with his fifty canons are altogether things of the past. We must seek for their surviving fragments at Udine and Gorizia. Aquileia then, as regards its present state, has really fallen lower than Saint David's. But then at Aquileia we see at every step, what could never at any time have been seen at Saint David's, the signs of the days when it ranked among the great cities of the earth. Aquileia, in short, is unique. We turn away from it with the feeling that we have seen one of the most remarkable spots that Europe can show us. It may be that our horses, excellent or otherwise, take us back to Monfalcone, and that from Monfalcone the train takes us back to Trieste. In theory, it must be remembered, we have not been at Trieste at all; we are going thither from Venice, by way of Treviso, Udine, Gorizia, and Aquileia. In going thither, we shall outstrip the strict boundary of the Lombard Austria, though we shall keep within the Italy of Augustus and the Italy of Charles the Great. On the other hand, in matter of fact it may be that, as we have come by the older mode of going from Trieste to Aquileia, we go on to make our way by the same mode from Aquileia to Gorizia. In favourable states of the astronomical world, we may even be lighted on our way by a newly-risen comet. We follow the precedent of our forefathers: "Isti mirant stellam." Such a phænomenon must, according to all ancient belief, imply the coming of some great shaking among the powers of the world. In such a frame of mind, the gazer may be excused if he dreams that the portent may be sent to show that the boundary which parts Aquileia and Gorizia from Udine and Treviso need not be eternal. TRIESTE. 1875--1877--1881. We have already learned, at Gorizia and at Aquileia, that, whether in real travel or on the map, the subject lands of Venice cannot be kept apart from those neighbour lands which were not her subjects. The Queen of the Hadriatic could at no time boast of the possession of the whole Hadriatic coast; could she now be called up again to her old life, to her old dominion, she would feel very sensibly that she had only a divided rule over her own sea. She would find her peer in a city, a haven, all claim to dominion over which she had formally resigned more than four hundred years before her fall. Facing her from the other side of her own watery kingdom, she would see a city too far off to be an eyesore, but quite near enough to be a rival. She is fronted by a city which hardly comes within the old Venetian land, though it comes within the bounds of the old Italian kingdom, a city which for five hundred years has been parted from Venetian or Italian rule, emphatically a city of the present, which has swallowed up no small share of the wealth and prosperity of the city of the past. _Tergeste_, Trieste, stands forth as a rival of Venice, which has, in a low practical view of things, outstripped her. Italian zeal naturally cries for the recovery of a great city, once part of the old Italian kingdom, and whose speech is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian to this day. But, cry of _Italia Irredenta_, however far it may go, he must not go so far as this. Trieste, a cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic shore, cannot be called Italian in the same sense as the lands and towns so near Verona which yearn to be as Verona is. Let Trieste be the rival, even the eyesore, of Venice, still Southern Germany must have a mouth. We might indeed be better pleased to see Trieste a free city, the southern fellow of Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg; but it must not be forgotten that the Archduke of Austria and Lord of Trieste reigns at Trieste by a far better right than that by which he reigns at Cattaro and Spizza. The present people of Trieste did not choose him, but the people of Trieste five hundred years back did choose the forefather of his great-grandmother. Compared with the grounds on which kingdoms, duchies, counties, and lordships, are commonly held in that neighbourhood, such a claim as this must be allowed to be respectable indeed. The great haven of Trieste may almost at pleasure be quoted as either confirming or contradicting the rule that it is not in the great commercial cities of Europe that we are to look for the choicest or the most plentiful remains of antiquity. Sometimes the cities themselves are of modern foundation; in other cases the cities themselves, as habitations of men and seats of commerce, are of the hoariest antiquity, but the remains of their early days have perished through their very prosperity. Massalia, with her long history, with her double wreath of freedom, the city which withstood Cæsar and which withstood Charles of Anjou, is bare of monuments of her early days. She has been the victim of her abiding good fortune. We can look down from the height on the Phôkaian harbour; but for actual memorials of the men who fled from the Persian, of the men who defied the Roman and the Angevin, we might look as well at Liverpool or at Havre. Genoa, Venice herself, are hardly real exceptions; they were indeed commercial cities, but they were ruling cities also, and, as ruling cities, they reared monuments which could hardly pass away. What are we to say to the modern rival of Venice, the upstart rebel, one is tempted to say, against the supremacy of the Hadriatic Queen? Trieste, at the head of her gulf, with the hills looking down to her haven, with the snowy mountains which seem to guard the approach from the other side of her inland sea, with her harbour full of the ships of every nation, her streets echoing with every tongue, is she to be reckoned as an example of the rule or an exception to it? No city at first sight seems more thoroughly modern; old town and new, wide streets and narrow, we search them in vain for any of those vestiges of past times which in some cities meet us at every step. Compare Trieste with Ancona; we miss the arch of Trajan on the haven; we miss the cupola of Saint Cyriacus soaring in triumph above the triumphal monument of the heathen. We pass through the stately streets of the newer town, we thread the steep ascents which lead us to the older town above, and we nowhere light on any of those little scraps of ornamental architecture, a window, a doorway, a column, which meet us at every step in so many of the cities of Italy. Yet the monumental wealth of Trieste is all but equal to the monumental wealth of Ancona. At Ancona we have the cathedral church and the triumphal arch; so we have at Trieste; though at Trieste we have nothing to set against the grand front of the lower and smaller church of Ancona. But at Ancona arch and _duomo_ both stand out before all eyes; at Trieste both have to be looked for. The church of Saint Justus at Trieste crowns the hill as well as the church of Saint Cyriacus at Ancona; but it does not in the same way proclaim its presence. The castle, with its ugly modern fortifications, rises again above the church; and the _duomo_ of Trieste, with its shapeless outline and its low, heavy, unsightly campanile, does not catch the eyes like the Greek cross and cupola of Ancona. Again at Trieste the arch could never, in its best days, have been a rival to the arch at Ancona; and now either we have to hunt it out by an effort, or else it comes upon us suddenly, standing, as it does, at the head of a mean street on the ascent to the upper town. Of a truth it cannot compete with Ancona or with Rimini, with Orange or with Aosta. But the _duomo_, utterly unsightly as it is in a general view, puts on quite a new character when we first see the remains of pagan times imprisoned in the lower stage of the heavy campanile, still more so when we take our first glance of its wonderful interior. At the first glimpse we see that here there is a mystery to be unravelled; and as we gradually find the clue to the marvellous changes which it has undergone, we feel that outside show is not everything, and that, in point both of antiquity and of interest, though not of actual beauty, the double basilica of Trieste may claim no mean place among buildings of its own type. Even after the glories of Rome and Ravenna, the Tergestine church may be studied with no small pleasure and profit, as an example of a kind of transformation of which neither Rome nor Ravenna can supply another example. * * * * * Whatever was the first origin of Tergeste, whoever, among the varied and perplexing inhabitants of this corner of the Hadriatic coast, were the first to pitch on the spot for a dwelling-place of man, it is plain that it ranks among the cities which have grown up out of hill-forts. Trieste in this affords a marked contrast to Marseilles, as it supplies a marked analogy to Cumæ and Ancona. The site of the Phôkaian settlement marks a distinct advance in civilization. The _castellieri_, the primitive forts, in the neighbouring land of Istria, were, according to Captain Burton, often made into places of Roman occupation, and something of the same kind may have been the case with Tergeste itself. The position of the cathedral church, occupying the site of the capitol of the Roman colony, shows of itself that Tergeste was thoroughly a hill-city. It has spread itself downwards, like so many others, though this time, not into the plain, but towards the sea. Standing on the border-land of Italy and Illyria, its destiny has been in some things the same as that of its neighbours, in others peculiar to itself. It must not be forgotten that, setting aside the coast cities, the land in which Trieste stands has for ages been a Slavonic land, except so far as it is also partly a Rouman land. How far the Italian and the Rouman elements may have been originally the same, is a puzzling question on which it would be dangerous to enter here. But one thing is certain, that, if the present inhabitants of the Tergestine city had obeyed the call of Garibaldi, "Men of Trieste, to your mountains," they would have found Slavonic possessors claiming those mountains by the strongest of all titles. For we have now distinctly passed the national border. We have come to the lands where the body is Slavonic, where the Italian element, greater or smaller, is at most only a fringe along the coast. Tergeste with the neighbouring lands formed part of the dominion of Theodoric and of the recovered Empire of Justinian; but it never came under the rule of the Lombard. Its allegiance to the lords of Constantinople and Ravenna, lords whose abiding power in this region is shown in the foundation of the Istrian Justinopolis, lasted unshaken till the Frank conquest, when Tergeste became part of the Italian kingdom of the Karlings. From that time to the fourteenth century, its history is the common history of an Italian city. It is sometimes a free commonwealth, sometimes subject to, or claimed by, the Patriarch of Aquileia or to the Serene Republic itself. By the treaty of Turin in 1381, the independence of the commonwealth of Trieste was formally acknowledged by all the contending powers. The next year the liberated city took the seemingly strange step of submitting itself to the lordship of a foreign prince. Leopold, Duke of Austria, he who died at Sempach, he to whom Venice resigned Treviso, was received by a solemn act as Lord of Trieste, and that lordship passed on to the Dukes, Archdukes, Kings, and Emperors of his house, and from them to their Lotharingian successors. Thus, unlike Treviso and Udine, Trieste has been Austrian in one sense only. Never forming a part of the Austria of Lombardy, it has had a far more abiding connexion with the Austria of Germany. The lordship which Trieste acknowledged was of course at first only an overlordship, and the Council and Commons of the city still continued to act as a separate commonwealth. But an union of this kind is one of those fatal partnerships between the stronger and the weaker which can lead only to bondage. Trieste has ever since remained Austrian in allegiance, save during the chaos of the days of the elder Buonaparte. Those days are commemorated by an inscription on the _duomo_, which tells of the expulsion of the French from the castle by an allied force, whose name of "Austro-Angli" might almost suggest some unrecorded tribe in our own island. * * * * * It is certainly hard to conceive a building more uninviting without than the cathedral church of Saint Justus. But Sokratês was not to be judged by his outside, neither is the _duomo_ of Trieste. A broad and almost shapeless west front is flanked by a low, heavy tower, not standing detached as a campanile, as it should stand in Italy, not worked into the church as it would be worked in England or Germany, but standing forward in a kind of Scotch fashion, like Dunkeld. The only architectural feature seems to be a large wheel window, which it would be unfair to compare to that of Saint Zeno. But the next moment will show, built in at the angle of the church and the tower, a noble fluted column with its half-defaced Corinthian capital, which is enough to show what has been. We are carried back to Rome, to Saint Mary _in Cosmedin_ and Saint Nicolas _in Carcere_, as we trace out in the lower stage of the tower the remains of the temple of Jupiter which has given way to the church of Justus. Imbedded in its walls are pilasters, columns, and their basement, showing that Jupiter of Tergeste must have lifted his pillared portico above the sea as proudly as Aphroditê of the Doric Ankón. Fragments of entablatures, trophies, sepulchral monuments, are built up in the wall. The western doorway of the church is made out of a huge tomb of the Barbii--a _gens_ which we do not elsewhere remember--deliberately cut in two, and set up the wrong way. The building or rebuilding of the tower in 1337 is commemorated by an inscription in letters of that date--"Gothic" letters, as some call them--out of a mutilated part of which the earlier Tergestine antiquaries spelled out that the tower was rebuilt, in 556, after a destruction by the Goths. As the letters ..LVM.. were enough to create the new saint Philumena, the letters ..OT... could easily be filled up into "a Gothis eversa"--quite evidence enough to lead a zealous Italian to lay the destroying deeds of his own forefathers on the Gothic preservers of the works of the elder day. As soon as we pass the doorway with the heads of the Barbii on either side, we forget the wrongs alike of Jupiter and of the Goths. The wonderful interior of the double basilica opens upon us. The first feeling is simply puzzledom. A nave of vast width seems to be flanked by two ranges of columns on either side, columns varying even more than is usual in their height and in the width of the arches which they support. When we look within the two lateral ranges, we are not surprised to find each ending in an apse with a noble mosaic; we are surprised to find the southern range interrupted by a cupola. This last phænomenon will help us to the explanation of the whole mystery. The church is in fact two churches thrown into one. When they were distinct, they must have stood even nearer than the old and new minsters at Winchester; indeed a plan in a local work shows, with every probability, their walls as actually touching in one point. The northern church was a basilica of the ordinary type, made up of columns--some of them of very fine marble--put together, as usual, without much regard to uniformity. All bear Corinthian capitals of different varieties, and all carry the Ravenna stilt in a rude form without the cross. The wall rose high above the arcade, and was pierced with a range of narrow clerestory windows, but with nothing else to relieve its blankness. This church the Tergestine antiquaries attribute, but, as far as we can see, without any direct evidence, to the reign of Theodosius. The southern church is, in its original parts, the same in style as the northern, but it is much smaller and, in its plan at least, thoroughly Byzantine. It was a small cross church, with a central cupola, and its north transept seems to have touched the south aisle of its northern neighbour. It is perhaps on the strength of the plan that the church is assigned to the reign of Justinian. But there is nothing Byzantine in the details; where the original capitals remain, they are of the same somewhat rude Corinthian character as those in the northern church; they have the same stilt, and under the cupola there is even a bit or two of entablature built up again. But the building went through much greater changes than the northern church did in the work of throwing the two into one whole. The date of this change seems to be fixed by a consecration recorded in the local annals in 1262. The south aisle of the northern church, the north aisle and north transept of the southern one, were pulled down, and the space which they had covered was roofed in to form the nave of the united building, while the two earlier basilicas sank into the position of its aisles. In the northern church this involved no change beyond the disappearance of the south aisle and the blocking of its clerestory; the smaller church to the south had to suffer far more. It had to be raised and lengthened; a quadrangular pier on the south side marks the original length, and the increase of height of course destroys the proper effect of the cupola. Then, as the cupola of course rested on columns with wider arches, its northern arch was filled up with two smaller arches and an inserted column, so as to make something like a continuous range. Still, late in the thirteenth century, they again used up the old marble columns; but they now used a flat capital, by which the additions of this time may be distinguished from the genuine basilican work. Probably no church anywhere has undergone a more singular change than this. It is puzzling indeed at first sight; but, when the key is once caught, the signs of each alteration are so easily seen. The other ancient relic at Trieste is the small triumphal arch. On one side it keeps its Corinthian pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in a house. The arch is in a certain sense double; but the two are close together and touch in the keystone. The Roman date of this arch cannot be doubted; but legends connect it both with Charles the Great and with Richard of Poitou and of England, a prince about whom Tergestine fancy has been very busy. The popular name of the arch is _Arco Riccardo_. Such, beside some fragments in the museum, are all the remains that the antiquary will find in Trieste; not much in point of number, but, in the case of the _duomo_ at least, of surpassing interest in their own way. But the true merit of Trieste is not in anything that it has in itself, its church, its arch, its noble site. Placed there at the head of the gulf, on the borders of two great portions of the Empire, it leads to the land which produced that line of famous Illyrian Emperors who for a while checked the advance of our own race in the world's history, and it leads specially to the chosen home of the greatest among them. The chief glory of Trieste, after all, is that it is the way to Spalato. TRIESTE TO SPALATO. TRIESTE TO SPALATO. 1875. Given such weather as suits fair-weather sailors, there can hardly be any enjoyment more thoroughly unmixed than a sail along the coast of Dalmatia. First of all, there is a freshness about everything. Here is a portion of land which is thoroughly unhackneyed; the coasts, the islands, the channels, of Dalmatia are as yet uninvaded by the British tourist. No Cook's ticket can be taken for Spalato; no hotel coupon would be of the slightest use at Sebenico. The land is whatever its long and strange history, old and new, has made it. It has gone through many changes and it has put on many shapes, but it has escaped the fate of being changed into a "playground of Europe." The narrow strip of land on the eastern side of the Hadriatic on which the name of Dalmatia has settled down has a history which is strikingly analogous to its scenery. A coast for the most part barren and rocky, but with its barrenness and rockiness diversified by a series of noble havens, is fenced off by a range of mountains from a boundless inland region. Each of these havens, with the cities which from early days have sprung up on each, has always been an isolated centre of civilization in a backward land. As a rule, broken only during a few centuries of the universal sway of Rome, the coast and the inland country have been the possession, by no means always of different nations, but most commonly of different governments. On the coast the rule of the Venetian has been succeeded by the rule of the Austrian, while in the inland region the rule of native Slavonic princes has been succeeded by the rule of the Turk. Yet the Slave, though an earlier settler than the Turk or the Venetian, was himself only a settler in comparatively recent times. Native Illyrians, Greek colonists, Roman colonists, the rule of the Goth from Ravenna, the rule of the Eastern Roman from Constantinople, had all to take their turn before the land put on its present character of a more or less Italianized fringe on a Slavonic body, of a narrow rim of Christendom hemming in the north-eastern conquests of the once advancing and now receding Mussulman. So it is with Dalmatian history. As the cultivation and civilization of the land lies in patches, as harbours and cities alternate with barren hills, so Dalmatia has played a part in history only by fits and starts. This fitful kind of history goes on from the days of Greek colonies and Illyrian piracy to the last war between Italy and Austria. But of continuous history, steadily influencing the course of the world's progress, Dalmatia has none to show. Salona plays its part in the wars both of Cæsar and of Belisarius; Zara reminds us of the fourth crusade; the whole history of Ragusa claims a high place among the histories of independent and isolated cities; Lissa recalls the memory of two times of warfare within our own century. But if there was any time when Dalmatia really influenced the history of the world, it was when Dalmatia had no national being, when it was merely a province of an universal dominion along with Britain and Egypt. Of the great Emperors of the third century, who called the Roman power into new life and checked the ever-advancing wave of Teutonic invasion, many came from the Illyrian lands, several came from the actual Dalmatian coast. And the most famous among them--Docles, Diocletian, Jovius--not only came forth from Dalmatia to rule the world, but went back to Dalmatia to seek rest when weary of the toil of ruling it. But in our immediate point of view we must never forget that our course now lies wholly, not only by subject lands of Venice, but by lands where Venice appears in her highest character as the bulwark of Christendom against the misbeliever. The shores and cities by which we pass, were subject to the Serene Republic, but subjection to the Serene Republic was their only chance of escaping subjection to the Ottoman Sultan. Every town, every fortress, almost every point of ground along this whole coast, has been fought for, most of them have been won and lost, over and over again, in the long crusade which Venice waged, if for herself, yet for Europe also. Her rule was an alien rule, but it was still European and Christian; it shut out the rule of the barbarian. It was a rule better and worse in different times and places, but it had always the merit of shutting out a worse rule than itself, which was ever ready to take its place. Whenever we see the winged lion keeping guard, the thought should rise that he kept guard over spots which he alone kept for Christendom, which he alone saved from barbarian bondage. * * * * * The visitor to Dalmatia may be conceived as setting forth from the harbour of Trieste--from Trieste with its houses climbing up to the church and castle on the hill, with the background of mountains growing in the far distance into snowy Alps. From the Dalmatian coast itself no snowy Alps are seen; but the whole land is only a mountain slope, and the cities are cities on a smaller scale than Trieste, and which seldom run so high as Trieste does up the hill-side. But we must not forget that, even at Trieste, Dalmatia is still a distant land. There is the Istrian peninsula to be skirted, the peninsula whose coast was so long counted among the subject lands of Venice, while the inland region, under the rule of counts of Gorizia and dukes of Austria, counted only among the neighbours of the Republic. The Istrian coast, largely flat, is marked here and there by small towns standing well on high points over the sea, or seen more faintly in the more distant inland region. But we know that inland Istria is a hilly land, and, even from the sea, the mountain wall may still be seen skirting the horizon. Darkness has come on by the time we reach the harbour of Pola, once Pietas Julia, now the chief station of the infant navy of Austria. But the darkness is not so great but that the dim outline of the vast amphitheatre can be seen, and the arrangements of the Austrian Lloyd's steamers allow time enough to go on shore and take in the general effect both of the amphitheatre and the other buildings of Pola. We here get our first impression of the Venetian towns beyond the Hadriatic, all of which seem to attempt in some sort to reproduce their mistress, so far as Venice can be reproduced where there are no canals and therefore no gondolas. But all have the same narrow, paved streets, the same little squares, and, if the passage of horses and wheels is not so utterly unknown as it is at Venice, their presence is, to say the least, rare. The lion of Saint Mark is to be seen everywhere else; by daylight therefore he is to be seen at Pola also. But the Lloyd's arrangements condemn Pola, in the early part of October at least, to be seen only by dim glimpses, while Zara has an ample measure of daylight. Let no one however blame a time-table which will bring him into Spalato with the setting sun, and will allow him to take his first glance of Diocletian's palace by the rising moon. In the night we pass by several islands, but none are of any historic importance. Veglia lies out of our path, or we might muse on the evil deeds of the last independent Count, at least as they were reported by his Venetian enemies, who were eager to get possession of his island. The tale will be found in Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Dalmatia and Montenegro," a book which no traveller in these lands should be without. The next morning's light shows us genuine Dalmatia, its coast at this stage marked by the barren hills coming down to the sea and the range of higher mountains further inland. We skirt among endless islands, most of which seem barren and uninhabited; we pass along the channel of Zara, and come to anchor off the city itself, standing on its peninsula crowned with its walls--Venetian and later--and with the towers of its churches rising above them. Here a stay of several hours allows a pretty full examination of our first Dalmatian city--a city however more Italian and far less thoroughly Dalmatian than other cities to which our further course will lead us. There is time to visit the _duomo_ and the smaller churches--to mark the two surviving Roman columns--to thread the narrow streets, with their occasional scraps of Venetian architecture--to stroll by the harbour, under the gateways marked by the lion of Saint Mark, one of which so oddly proves to be really a Roman gate with a Venetian casing. We may even, if we so think good, climb the mound which, though crowned by a not attractive Chinese pagoda, nevertheless supplies the best view of Zara and her two seas. The _Albergo al Cappello_--the sign of the Hat--supplies food certainly not worse than an Italian town of the same class would set before a passing traveller. The meal done, to sit out of doors in a _café_ is nothing new to any one who has crossed the straits, not of Zara but of Calais; but it is a new feeling to do so in the narrow streets of a Dalmatian town, and to add the further luxury of maraschino drunk in its native land. Night is now passed on board, and Zara is left by sunrise. Islands and hills again succeed on either side, till we enter a narrow strait and find ourselves in a noble harbour with a town in front, lying, like most Dalmatian towns except Zara, at the foot of the mountains. We are in the haven of Sebenico, but the haven of Sebenico is by no means the whole of the inlet, which runs much further inland in the shape of a narrow creek. We land, and give such time as is allowed us to a sight of the little hill-side city. Shall we give Sebenico the last place among the cities which we stay and examine in detail, or the first place among the lesser cities to which we give such time as we can in passing by? We are driven to this last course, not forgetting, if we are minded to turn away from history and art to look for a while on a striking natural object, that it is from Sebenico that we may best make our way to the great waterfall of Kerka. And, as far as those who have made no special study of Alpine matters may speak, the falls of Kerka, rushing down in a company of torrents side by side, look as if they had a right to take a high place among the falls at least of the old world. But Sebenico is not simply the way to Kerka; there is something to see in Sebenico itself. It is a hill city, but it is emphatically not a hill-top city, but a hill-side city. We climb up through the inhabited town to the castle, and when we reach the castle, we are far from having reached the hill top. And to those who make Sebenico their second halting-place on the strictly Dalmatian coast it will have a special interest. Much smaller than Zara, it is far more thoroughly Dalmatian; costume is more marked, and its position gives it that peculiar air of quaintness which is shared by all places where narrow streets run up a steep hill. And those streets moreover are rich with architectural features, graceful windows and the like, which witness to the influence of the ruling city. And there is something not a little taking in the small _piazza_ of Sebenico--the arcaded _loggia_ on the one side, the cathedral on the other, with its mixed but stately architecture, its waggon-roof of stone standing out boldly without either buttress or external roof. Mr. Neale, whom, as he does not rule Sebenico to be a "church city," we may now quote seriously, holds that the cathedral of Sebenico is "in an exclusively architectural view the most interesting church in Dalmatia." He adds that "in truth it is one of the noblest, most striking, most simple, most Christian of churches." This is high praise, especially when bestowed by Mr. Neale on a church which was consecrated so lately as 1555. But there is no denying that, strangely confused as is its style, the church of Sebenico is, both inside and out, not only a most remarkable, but a thoroughly effective building. The internal proportions are noble; the height is great; the columns, though their arches are pointed, might have stood in any basilica at Rome or Ravenna; the barrel vaulting carries us away to Saint Sernin at Toulouse and to the Conqueror's Tower. The details are a strange mixture of late Gothic and _Renaissance_, very rich and somehow very effective. It is not exactly like that class of French churches of which Saint Eustache at Paris is the grandest example, where a thoroughly mediæval outline is carried out with _Renaissance_ detail. At Sebenico we see side by side, a bit in one style and a bit in the other, and yet the two contrive to harmonize. We go down again to the haven; we mark a few classical capitals preserved, as we here preserve ammonites and pieces of rock-work; we start again to make the second portion of our second day's voyage, and to reach the most marked and memorable spot in our whole course. After Sebenico the coast is for a while almost free from islands. Presently we pass along among a few small ones, and Lissa, famous for piracies two thousand years back and for more regular warfare in our own century and in our own day, shows itself in the distance. Our course has by this time turned nearly due east. We pass by Bua, hardly conscious that it is an island. We pass by the mouth of the bay which Bua guards, hardly conscious of the depth of the inlet into which it leads, or that two cities--Traü and fallen Salona--are washed by its waters. For the child of Salona, the great object of a Dalmatian voyage, is coming within sight far away. The mighty campanile of Spalato rises, kindled with the last rays of sunlight; presently the cupola of the metropolitan church, the long line of the palace wall, the buildings of what is plainly no inconsiderable city, stand out against their mountain background. The sun has gone down behind the western headland, but we can get our first glimpse of the city, its arcades and tower and temples, by that moonlight which is as good at Spalato as at Melrose. We have been in the home of Diocletian, and we go back to our ship, for the next day to bring us to the one city along these shores which the might of Venice could never bring into subjection. * * * * * In such a voyage as this many points necessarily escape notice, and the great objects of study are well reserved for the return journey. In all travelling for instruction's sake, it is a point specially to be insisted on that every place should, whenever it is possible, be seen twice. Nothing fixes a thing so well in the memory as going through the process of recollection. And, in such a voyage as this, it is no bad way to go at once to the furthest point, to see on the way so much of the several points as the arrangements of the steamers allow, and to stop a longer time at the important places coming back. In this way a general notion of Dalmatia and its cities is gained first of all--a notion which may be enlarged and corrected by more minute examination of the chief places, and of course, foremost among them, of Spalato itself. But Spalato, though the great object of a Dalmatian voyage, is by no means its final object. When we have reached Spalato, we have not yet gone through half our course. Before we can come back to study its wonders more worthily, we have to spend a day in the archipelago of larger islands, nearly each of which, unlike their northern fellows, has some old historical memory. We have for part of another day to sail along that still narrower strip of Christendom which fences off Ragusa from the Mussulman, to thread our way through the lovely Bocche of Cattaro, till we reach the furthest of Dalmatian cities, with the path to unconquered Montenegro over our heads. PARENZO. 1875. Parenzo, the ancient colony of Parentium, is likely to be, for many travellers in Istria and Dalmatia, their first point of stoppage after leaving Trieste. To such travellers it will be the beginning of the dominion of Venice in spots lying wholly beyond the Hadriatic, the first glimpse of the long series of lands and cities, from Istria to Cyprus, which once "looked to the winged lion's marble piles," and where the winged lion still abides in stone to keep up the memory of his old dominion. The short voyage is a lovely one. Looking back, there is Trieste on her hill-side, with her suburbs and detached houses spreading far away in both directions, and backed by the vast semicircle of the Julian Alps, with the snowy peaks of their higher summits soaring above all. The northern part of the Istrian peninsula, as we see it from the sea, has a strikingly rich and picturesque look, which is lost as we follow the coast towards the south. The small Istrian towns, each one of which has its civil and ecclesiastical history, jut out, each one on its own smaller peninsula; and in this part of the voyage the spaces between them are not lacking in signs of human dwelling and cultivation. Capo d'Istria, once Justinopolis, lies in its gulf to the left, to remind us that we have passed into the dominions of the Cæsars of the East. Forwards, Pirano stands on its headland, its _duomo_ rising above the water on arcades built up to save it from the further effects of the stripping process which is so clearly seen along the coast. The castle, with its many towers capped with their Scala battlements, rises over town and church, with a picturesqueness not common in Italian buildings. The church, on the other hand, is as far from picturesque as most Italian churches are without, and the detached campanile is simply, like many other Istrian bell-towers, a miniature of the great tower of the ruling city. But neither Capo d'Istria nor Pirano is so likely to cause the traveller bound for Dalmatia to halt as the other and more famous peninsular town of Parenzo. Long before Parenzo is reached, the Istrian shore has lost its beauty, though the Istrian hills, now and then capped by a hill-side town, and the higher mountains beyond them, tell us something of the character of the inland scenery. At last the Parentine headland is reached; the temples which crowned it are no longer to be seen, but the campanile of the famous _duomo_, with its Veronese spire, and one or two smaller towers, have taken their place as the prominent objects of the little city. On the side which would otherwise be open to the Hadriatic, the isle of Saint Nicolas shuts in the haven guarded by a round Venetian tower. The other side of the peninsula is washed by the mouth--here we must not say the estuary--of a stream yellow as Tiber, which comes rushing down by a small waterfall from the high ground where the Parentine peninsula joins the mainland. On this peninsula stood the older _municipium_ of Parentium, and the colony, some say the Julian Colony of Augustus, others the Ulpian Colony of Trajan. The zeal of Dr. Kandler, the great master of Istrian antiquities, made out the position of the forum, patrician and plebeian, of the capitol, the theatre, and the temples. The traveller will probably need a guide even to the temples, though one of them keeps the greater part of its stylobate, and the other one has two broken fluted columns left. A single inscribed stone in the ancient forum he can hardly fail to see; but the truth is that the Roman remains of Parentium are such as concern only immediate inquirers into local Parentine history. At Pola it is otherwise; there the Roman remains stand out as the great object, utterly overshadowing the buildings of later times; but at Parenzo the main interest, as it is not mediæval so neither is it pagan Roman. As at Ravenna, so at Parenzo, the real charm is to be found in the traces which it keeps of the great transitional ages when Roman and Teuton stood side by side. Against the many objects of Ravenna Parenzo has only to set its one. It has no palace, no kingly tomb--though the thought cannot fail to suggest itself that it was from Istrian soil that the mighty stone was brought which once covered the resting-place of Theodoric. Parenzo has but a single church of moment, but that church is one which would hold no mean place even among the glories of Ravenna. The capitol of Parentium has given way to the episcopal precinct, and the temple of the capitoline god has given way to the great basilica of Saint Maurus, the building which now gives Parenzo its chief claim to the study of those for whom the days of the struggle of Goth and Roman have a special charm. * * * * * As to the date of the church of Parenzo there seems little doubt. It is a basilica of the reign of Justinian, which has been preserved with remarkably little change, and which will hardly find, out of Rome and Ravenna, any building of its own class to surpass it. With the buildings of Ravenna it stands in immediate connexion, being actually contemporary with the work both at Saint Vital and at Saint Apollinaris in Classe. Its foundation is a little later, as the church of Parenzo seems to have been begun after the reconquest of Italy and Istria by Belisarius, while both Saint Vital and Saint Apollinaris, though finished under the rule of the Emperor, were begun under the rule of the Goth. There are points at Parenzo which connect it with both the contemporary churches of Ravenna. The pure basilican form, the shape of the apse, hexagonal without, though round within, are common to Parenzo and Classis; the capitals too have throughout the Ravenna stilt above them; but of the capitals themselves many take that specially Byzantine shape which at Ravenna is found only in Saint Vital. That the founder was a Bishop Euphrasius is shown by his monogram on many of the stilts, by the great mosaic of the apse, in which he appears holding the church in his hand as founder, and by the inscription on the disused tabernacle, which is engraved in Mr. Neale's book on Dalmatia and Istria. At Parenzo, as at Sebenico, Mr. Neale was in a serious mood; but, though he copied the inscription rightly or nearly so, he misunderstood it in the strangest fashion, and thereby led himself into much needless puzzledom. Euphrasius, according to Dr. Kandler, having been before a decurion of the town, became the first bishop in 524, when the Istrian bishoprics were founded under Theodoric. The church would seem to have been built between 535 and 543. The inscription runs thus:-- Famul[us] . D[e]i . Eufrasius . Antis[tes] . temporib[us] . suis . ag[ens] an[num] . xi. hunc. loc[um] . fondamen[tis] . D[e]o . jobant[e] . s[an]c[t]e . æc[c]l[esie] Catholec[e] . cond[idit]. The church was therefore begun in the eleventh year of the episcopate of Euphrasius; that is, in 535. Dr. Kandler prints, unluckily only in an Italian translation, a document of 543, the sixteenth year of Justinian, who appears with his usual titles, in which Euphrasius makes regulations for the Chapter, and speaks of the church as something already in being. Mr. Neale quotes from Coletti, the editor of Ughelli's _Italia Sacra_, part of a document in Latin which is obviously the same, but which is assigned to 796, the sixteenth year of Constantine the Sixth. The difference is strange; but the date of the document does not directly affect the date of the church, and, whatever be the date of either, Mr. Neale needlessly perplexed himself with the inscription. He says that the inscription commemorates a certain Pope John, and wonders that Euphrasius, who took part in the Aquileian schism about the Three Chapters--the Three Chapters which readers of Gibbon will remember--should record the name of a Pope with whom he was not in communion. But this difficulty is got rid of by the simple fact that there is nothing about any Pope John in the inscription. Mr. Neale strangely read the two words DO . IOBANT .--the words are carefully marked off by stops--that is, in the barbarous spelling of the inscription, DEO IVVANTE, into the four words "Domino Johanne Beatissimo Antistite." We therefore need not, in fixing the date of the church of Parenzo, trouble ourselves about any Popes. There can be no doubt that it is the work of Euphrasius, and that Euphrasius was one of those who opposed Rome about the Three Chapters. In any case, the _duomo_ of Parenzo has the interest which attaches to any church built while our own forefathers were still worshipping Woden; and we may safely add that it has the further interest of being built by a prelate who threw off all allegiance to the see of Rome. The church is indeed a noble one, and its long arcades preserve to us one of the most speaking examples of the forms of a great basilica. Every arch deserves careful study, because at Parenzo the capitals seem not to have been the spoil of earlier buildings, but to have been made for the church itself. Some still cleave to the general Corinthian type, though without any slavish copying of classical models. Animal forms are freely introduced; bulls, swans, and other creatures, are made to do duty as volutes; and when bulls and swans are set on that work, we may be sure that the Imperial bird is not left idle. Others altogether forsake the earlier types; it perhaps became a church built in the dominions of Justinian while Saint Sophia was actually rising, that some of its capitals should adopt the square Byzantine form enwreathed with its basket-work of foliage. But all, whatever may be their form in other ways, carry the Ravenna stilt, marked, in some cases at least, with the monogram of the founder Euphrasius. Happily the love of red rags which is so rampant on either side of Parenzo, at Trieste and at Zara, seems not to have spread to Parenzo itself, and the whole of this noble series of capitals may be studied with ease. The upper part, including the arches, has been more or less Jesuited within and without, but enough remains to make out the original arrangements. The soffits on the north side are ornamented like those in the basilica of Theodoric, a style of ornament identical with that of so many Roman roofs; above was a simple round-headed clerestory, and outside are the same slight beginnings of ornamental arcades which are to be seen at Saint Apollinaris in Classe. The apse, with its happily untouched windows and its grand mosaic, also carries us across to Ravenna. Besides the founder Euphrasius, we see the likeness of the Archdeacon Claudius and his son, a younger Euphrasius, besides Saint Maurus the patron and other saintly personages. Below is a rich ornament, but which surely must be of somewhat later date, formed largely of the actual shells of mother-of-pearl. The Bishop's throne is in its place; and, as at Ravenna and in the great Roman basilicas, mass is celebrated by the priest standing behind the altar with his face westward. Such was doubtless the usage of the days of Euphrasius, and in such an old-world place as Parenzo it still goes on. But if, in this matter, Parenzo clings to a very ancient use, we may doubt whether, at Parenzo or anywhere else, the men who made these great apses and covered them with these splendid mosaics designed them to be, as they so often are, half hidden by the _baldacchini_ which cover the high altar. Even in Saint Ambrose at Milan, where the apse is so high above the altar and where apse and _baldacchino_ are of the same date, we feel that the view of the east end is in some measure interfered with. Much more is this the case at Parenzo, where the apse is lower and the _baldacchino_ more lofty. But the Parenzo _baldacchino_, dating from 1277, is a noble work of its kind, and it is wonderful how little change the course of seven hundred years has made in some of its details as compared with those of the great arcades. The pointed arch is used, and the Ravenna stilt is absent; but the capitals, with their animal volutes, are almost the same as some of those of Euphrasius. Between the date of Euphrasius and the date of the _baldacchino_ we hear of more than one consecration, one of which, in 961, is said to have followed a destroying Slavonic inroad; but it is clear that any works done then must have been works of mere repair, not of rebuilding. No one can doubt that the columns and their capitals are the work of Euphrasius, and by diligently peeping round among the mass of buildings by which the church is encumbered, the original design may be seen outside as well as in. But the church of Parenzo is not merely a basilica; it has all the further accompaniments of an Italian episcopal church. West of the church stands the atrium, with the windows of the west front and the remains of mosaic enrichment rising above it. An arcade of three on each side surrounds the court, a court certainly far smaller than that of Saint Ambrose. Two columns with Byzantine capitals stand on each side; the rest are ancient, but those of the west side are a repair of the present king, or by whatever title it is that the King of Dalmatia and Lord of Trieste reigns on the intermediate Istrian shore. To the west of the atrium is the roofless baptistery, to the west of that the not remarkable campanile. We have thus reached the extreme west of this great pile of building, which, after all--such is the difference of scale between the churches of northern and southern Europe--reaches only the measure of one of our smallest minsters or greatest parish churches. The basilica of Parenzo, with all its accompaniments, measures, according to Mr. Neale's plan, only about 240 feet in length. But, if we have traced out those accompaniments towards the west, we have not yet done with those towards the east. A modern quasi-transept has been thrown out on each side, of which the northern one strangely forms the usual choir, much as in St. Peter's at Rome. These additions have columns with Byzantine capitals, like those in the atrium, copied from the old ones. But beyond this choir, and connected with the original church, is a low vaulted building of the plainest round-arched work, called, as usual, the "old church," the "pagan temple," and what not, which leads again into two chapels, the furthest having an eastern apse. Now these chapels have a mosaic pavement, and it is most remarkable that, below the pavement of the church, is a pavement some feet lower, which evidently belongs to some earlier building, and which is on the same level as the pavement of these chapels. It is therefore quite possible that we have here some remains of a building, perhaps a church, earlier than the time of Euphrasius. Between Constantine and Justinian there was time enough for a church to be built at Parentium and for Euphrasius to think it needful to rebuild it. Lastly, among the canonical buildings on the south side of the church is one, said to have been a tithe barn, with a grand range of Romanesque coupled windows, bearing date 1250. They remind us somewhat of the so-called John of Gaunt's stables, the real Saint Mary's Guild, at Lincoln. In short, so long as any traces are left of the style once common to all Western Europe, England and Italy are ever reminding us of one another. Such is the church of Parenzo, and at Parenzo the church is the main thing. As we pass away, and catch the last traces of the church of Euphrasius rising above the little peninsular city, our thoughts fly back to the other side of the Hadriatic, and it seems as if the men who came to fetch the great stone from Istria to Ravenna had left one of the noblest basilicas of their own city behind them on the Istrian shore. POLA. 1875--1881. After Parenzo the most obvious stopping-place on the Istrian shore will be Pola; and at Pola the main objects of interest for the historical student will be classed in an order of merit exactly opposite to those which he has seen at Parenzo. At Parenzo the main attraction is the great basilica, none the less attractive as being a monument of early opposition to the claims of the Roman see. Beside this ecclesiastical treasure the remains of the Parentine colony are felt to be quite secondary. At Pola things are the other way; the monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica, though not without a certain special interest, comes long after them. The character of the place is fixed by the first sight of it; we see the present and we see the more distant past; the Austrian navy is to be seen, and the amphitheatre is to be seen. But intermediate times have little to show; if the duomo strikes the eye at all, it strikes it only by the extreme ugliness of its outside, nor is there anything very taking, nothing like the picturesque castle of Pirano, in the works which occupy the site of the colonial capitol. The _duomo_ should not be forgotten; even the church of Saint Francis is worth a glance; but it is in the remains of the Roman colony, in the amphitheatre, the arches, the temples, the fragments preserved in that temple which serves, as at Nîmes, for a museum, that the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies. There is no need to go into the mythical history of the place. Tales about Thracians and Argonauts need not be seriously discussed at this time of day. Nor can there be any need to show that the name Pola is not a contraction of Pietas Julia. Save for the slight accidental likeness of letters, so to say is about as reasonable as to say that London is a corruption of Augusta, or Jerusalem of Ælia. In all these cases the older, native, familiar, name outlived the later, foreign, official, name. When we have thoroughly cleared up the origin of the Illyrians and the old Veneti, we may know something of the earliest inhabitants of Pola, and possibly of the origin of its name. But the known history of Pola begins with the Roman conquest of Istria in 178 B.C. The town became a Roman colony and a flourishing seat of commerce. Its action on the republican side in the civil war brought on it the vengeance of the second Cæsar. But the destroyer became the restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of its greatness, far surpassed the extent either of the elder or the younger Pola. Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of the Carolingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or strengthened. But in the history of their dynasty the name of the city chiefly stands out as the chosen place for the execution of princes whom it was convenient to put out of the way. Here Crispus died at the bidding of Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius. Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants. In the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the same character which has come back to it in our own times; it was there that Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and less prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy. But, after the break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of mediæval Pola is but a history of decline. It was, in the geography of Dante, the furthest city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its own neighbourhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante sang. Tossed to and fro between the temporal and spiritual lords who claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the dissensions of aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens, Pola found rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of Saint Mark in 1331. Since then, till its new birth in our own times, Pola has been a falling city. Like the other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to Austria, from Austria to France, from France to Austria again. It is under its newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh life, and the haven whence Belisarius sailed forth has again become a haven in more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united Austrian and Hungarian realm. [Illustration: PORTA GEMINA, POLA.] That haven is indeed a noble one. Few sights are more striking than to see the huge mass of the amphitheatre at Pola seeming to rise at once out of the land-locked sea. As Pola is seen now, the amphitheatre is the one monument of its older days which strikes the eye in the general view, and which divides attention with signs that show how heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its new career. But in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which befitted its rank as a colony of Rome. The amphitheatre of course stood without the walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope of the hill which was crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern fortress rises above the Franciscan church. Parts of the Roman wall still stand; one of its gates is left; another has left a neighbour and a memory. At the north side of the capitol stands the _Porta Gemina_, leading from it to the amphitheatre. The outer gateway remains, a double gate-way, as its name implies, with three Corinthian half-columns between and on each side of the two arches. But here steps in a singular architectural peculiarity, one which reminds us that we are on the road to Spalato, and which already points to the arcades of Diocletian. The columns support an entablature with its frieze and cornice, but the architrave is wanting. Does not this show a lurking sign of what was coming, a lurking feeling that the arch itself was the true architrave? Be this as it may, there it stands, sinning, like so many other ancient works, against pedantic rules, but perhaps thereby winning its place in the great series of architectural strivings which the palace of Spalato shows us the crowning-point. The other arch, which is commonly known as _Porta Aurea_ or _Porta Aurata_, conforms more nearly to ordinary rules. Here we have the arch with the coupled Corinthian columns on each side of it, supporting, as usual, their bit of broken entablature, and leaving room for a spandril filled in much the same fashion as in the arch of Severus at Rome. Compared with other arches of the same kind, this arch of Pola may certainly claim to rank amongst the most graceful of its class. With Trajan's arch at Ancona it can hardly be compared. That tallest and slenderest of monumental arches palpably stands on the haven to be looked at; while the arch of Pola, like its fellows at Rimini and Aosta, and like the arch of Drusus at Rome, is a real thoroughfare, which the citizens of Pietas Julia must have been in the daily habit of passing under. And, as compared with the arches of Rimini and Aosta, its design is perhaps the most pleasing of the three. Its proportions are better designed; the coupled columns on each side are more graceful than either the single columns at Rimini or the pair of columns which at Aosta are placed so much further apart. The idolater of minute rules will not be offended, as at Aosta, with Doric triglyphs placed over Corinthian capitals, and the lover of consistent design will not regret the absence of the sham pediment of Rimini. But it must be borne in mind that the arch of Pola did not originally stand alone, and that its usual name of _Porta Aurea_ is a misnomer. It was built close against the _golden gate_ of the city, whose name it has usurped. But it is, in truth, the family arch of the Sergii, raised in honour of one of that house by his wife Salvia Postuma. As such, it has a special interest in the local history of Pola. Ages afterwards, as late as the thirteenth century, Sergii appear again at Pola, as one of the chief families by whose dissensions the commonwealth was torn in pieces. If there is authentic evidence to connect these latter Sergii with the Sergii of the arch, and these again with the great Patrician _gens_ which played such a part in the history of the Roman commonwealth, here would indeed be a pedigree before which that of the house of Paris itself might stand abashed. A curious dialogue of the year 1600 is printed by Dr. Kandler in his little book, _Cenni al Forrestiere che visita Pola_, which, with a later little book, _Pola und seine nächste Umgebung_, by A. Gareis, form together a very sufficient guide for the visitor to Pola. From this evidence it is plain that, as late as the end of the sixteenth century, the ancient buildings of Pola were in a far more perfect state than they are now. Even late in the next century, in the days of Spon and Wheler, a great deal was standing that is no longer there. Wheler's view represents the city surrounded with walls, and with at least one gate. The amphitheatre stands without the wall; the arch of the Sergii stands within it; but the theatre must have utterly vanished, because in the references to the plan its name is given to the amphitheatre. And it must have been before this time that the amphitheatre had begun to be mutilated in order to supply materials for the fortress on the capitoline hill. Indeed it is even said that there was at one time a scheme for carrying off the amphitheatre bodily to Venice and setting it up on the Lido. This scheme, never carried out, almost beats one which actually was carried out, when the people of Jersey gave a _cromlech_ as a mark of respect to a popular governor, by whom it was carried off and set up in his grounds in England. Of the two temples in the forum, that which is said to have been dedicated to Diana is utterly masked by the process which turned it into the palace of the Venetian governor. A decent Venetian arcade has supplanted its portico; but some of the original details can be made out on the other sides. But the temple of Augustus, the restorer of Pietas Julia, with its portico of unfluted Corinthian columns, still fittingly remains almost untouched. Fragments and remains of all dates are gathered together within and without the temple, and new stores are constantly brought to light in digging the foundations for the buildings of the growing town. But the chief wonder of Pola, after all, is its amphitheatre. Travellers are sometimes apt to complain, and that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheatres are very like one another. At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as the amphitheatre there has several marked peculiarities of its own. We do not pretend to expound all its details scientifically; but this we may say, that those who dispute--if the dispute still goes on--about various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will do well to go and look for some further lights in the amphitheatre of Pola. The outer range, which is wonderfully perfect, while the inner arrangements are fearfully ruined, consists, on the side towards the town, of two rows of arches, with a third story with square-headed openings above them. But the main peculiarity in the outside is to be found in four tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and Nîmes, signs of Saracenic occupation, but clearly parts of the original design. Many conjectures have been made about them; they look as if they were means of approach to the upper part of the building; but it is wisest not to be positive. But the main peculiarity of this amphitheatre is that it lies on the slope of a hill, which thus supplied a natural basement for the seats on one side only. But this same position swallowed up the lower arcade on this side, and it hindered the usual works underneath the seats from being carried into this part of the building. In the other part the traces of the underground arrangements are very clear, especially those which seem to have been meant for the _naumachiæ_. These we specially recommend to any disputants about the underground works of the Flavian amphitheatre. The Roman antiquities of Pola are thus its chief attraction, and they are enough to give Pietas Julia a high place among Roman colonies. But the ecclesiastical side of the city must not be wholly forgotten. The _duomo_, if a small matter after that of Parenzo, if absolutely unsightly as seen from without, is not without its importance. It may briefly be described as a church of the fifteenth century, built on the lines of an ancient basilica, some parts of whose materials have been used up again. There is, we believe, no kind of doubt as to the date, and we do not see why Mr. Neale should have wondered at Murray's Handbook for assigning the building to the time to which it really belongs. No one could surely have placed a church with pointed arches, and with capitals of the kind so common in Venetian buildings, more than a century or two earlier. There is indeed an inscription built into the south wall which has a special interest from another point of view, but which, one would have thought, could hardly have led any one to mistake the date of the existing church. It records the building of the church by Bishop Handegis in 857, "Regnante Ludowico Imperatore Augusto in Italia." The minute accuracy of the phrase--"the Emperor Lewis being King in Italy"--is in itself something amazing; and this inscription shares the interest which attaches to any memorial of that gallant prince, the most truly Roman Emperor of his line. And it is something to mark that the stonecutter doubted between "L_o_dowico" and "L_u_dowico," and wrote both letters, one over the other. But the inscription of course refers to a reconstruction some hundred years earlier than the time when the church took its present shape. Yet these basilican churches were so constantly reconstructed over and over again, and largely out of the same materials, that the building of the fifteenth century may very well reproduce the general effect, both of the building of the eighth and of the far earlier church, parts of which have lived on through both recastings. The ten arches on each side of the Polan basilica are all pointed, but the width of the arches differs. Some of them are only just pointed, and it is only in the most eastern pair of arches that the pointed form comes out at all prominently. For here the arches are the narrowest of the series, and the columns the slightest, that on the south side being banded. The arch of triumph, which is round, looks very much as if it had been preserved from the earlier church; and such is clearly the case with two columns and one capital, whose classical Corinthian foliage stands in marked contrast with the Venetian imitations on each side of it. The church, on the whole, though not striking after such a marvel as Parenzo, is really one of high interest, as an example of the way in which the general effect of an early building was sometimes reproduced at a very late time. Still at Pola, among such wealth of earlier remains, it is quite secondary, and its beauties are, even more than is usual in churches of its type, altogether confined to the inside. The campanile is modern and worthless, and the outside of the church itself is disfigured, after the usual fashion of Italian ugliness, with stable-windows and the like. Yet even they are better than the red rags of Trieste and Zara within. Such is Pola, another step on the road to the birthplace of true grace and harmony in the building art. Yet, among the straits and islands of the Dalmatian coast, there is more than one spot at which the traveller bound for Spalato must stop. The first and most famous one is the city where Venetians and Crusaders once stopped with such deadly effect on that voyage which was to have led them to Jerusalem, but which did lead them only to New Rome. After the glimpses of Istria taken at Parenzo and Pola, the first glimpse, not of Dalmatia itself, but of the half-Italian cities which fringe its coast, may well be taken at Zara. ZARA. 1875--1877--1881. The name of Zara is familiar to every one who has read the history of the Fourth Crusade, and its fate in the Fourth Crusade is undoubtedly the one point in its history which makes Zara stand out prominently before the eyes of the world. Of all the possessions of Venice along this coast, it is the one whose connexion with Venice is stamped for ever on the pages of universal history. Those who know nothing else of Zara, who perhaps know nothing at all of the other cities, at least know that, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the possession of Zara was claimed by Venice, and that the claim of Venice was made good by the help of warriors of the Cross who thus turned aside from their course, not for the last time, to wield their arms against a Christian city. It is as Zara that the city is famous, because it is as Zara that its name appears in the pages of the great English teller of the tale. And perhaps those who may casually light on some mention of the city by any of its earlier names may not at once recognize Zara under the form either of _Jadera_ or of _Diadora_. One is curious to know how a city which under the first Augustus became a Roman colony by the name of _Jadera_ had, in the time of his orthodox successors in the tenth century, changed its name into anything with such a heathenish sound as _Diadora_. Yet such was its name in the days of Constantine Porphyrogenitus; and the Imperial historian does not make matters much clearer when he tells us that the true Roman name of the city was "Jam erat," implying that the city so called was older than Rome. Let us quote him in his own Greek, if only to show how oddly his Latin words look in their Greek dress. [Greek: To kastron tôn Diadôrôn kaleitai tê Rhômaiôn dialektô iam erat, hoper hermêneuetai aparti êton; dêlonoti hote hê Rhômê ektisthê, proektismenon ên to toiouton kastron. esti de to kastron mega; hê de koinê synêtheia kalei auto Diadôra.] Yet the name of the colony of Augustus lived on through these strange changes and stranger etymologies, and even in the narrative of the Crusade it appears as _Jadres_ in the text of Villehardouin. The history of the city in the intermediate ages is the usual history of the towns on the Dalmatian coast. They all for a while keep on their formal allegiance to the Eastern Empire, sometimes being really its subjects, sometimes being practically independent, sometimes tributary to the neighbouring Slaves. Still, under all changes, they clave to the character of Roman cities, just as they still remain seats of Italian influence in a Slavonic land. Then came a second time of confusion, in which Zara and her sister cities are tossed to and fro between another set of contending disputants. The Eastern Empire hardly keeps even a nominal claim to the Dalmatian towns; the Slavonic settlements have grown into regular kingdoms; Hungary on one side, Venice on the other, are claiming the dominion of the Dalmatian coast. The history of Zara now consists of conquests and reconquests between the Republic of Saint Mark and the Hungarian and Croatian kings. The one moment when Zara stands out in general history is the famous time when one of the Venetian reconquests was made by the combined arms of the Republic and the Frank Crusaders. The tale is a strange episode in a greater episode--the episode of the conquest of the New Rome by the united powers which first tried their 'prentice hand on Zara. But the siege, as described by the Marshal of Champagne and the many writers who have followed him, is not easy to understand, except by those who have either seen the place itself or have maps before them such as are not easily to be had. Like so many other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, Zara stands on a narrow peninsula, lying east and west. It has on its north side an inlet of the sea, which forms its harbour; to the south is the main sea, or, more strictly, the channel of Zara lying between the Dalmatian coast and the barren islands which at this point lie off it. Villehardouin describes the port as being guarded by a chain, which was broken by the galleys of the Crusaders. They presently landed on the opposite coast, so as to have the haven between them and the town ("et descendirent à terre, si que di porz fu entr' aus et la ville"). That is to say, they landed on the mainland north of the haven. The Frank army then besieged the city by land--that is, from the isthmus on the east, and perhaps also from the shore of the haven; while the Venetians, though their ships anchored in the haven ("le port ou les nés estoient"), made their assault on the side of the open sea ("devers la mer"). On the spot, or in reading the narrative of Villehardouin by the light of remembrance of the spot, the description becomes perfectly clear. Zara still keeps its peninsular site, and the traveller, as he draws near, still marks the fortifications, old and new, the many towers, no one of which so predominates over its fellows as to make itself the chief object in the view. Either however the modern Venetian and Austrian fortifications of Zara are less formidable, in appearance at least, than those which the Crusaders found there, or else they seemed more terrible to those who had actually to undertake the business of attacking them. Villehardouin had never seen such high walls and towers, nor, though he had just come from Venice, could he conceive a city fairer or more rich. The pilgrims were amazed at the sight, and wondered how they could ever become masters of such a place, unless God specially put it into their hands. The modern traveller, as he draws nearer, soon sees the signs of the success which the pilgrims so little hoped for. He sees the badge of Venetian rule over the water-gate, and most likely he little suspects that the outer arch, of manifest Venetian date, masks a plain Roman arch which is to be seen on the inner side. There is another large Venetian gate towards the inlet; and the traveller who at Zara first lands on Dalmatian ground will find on landing much to remind him that Dalmatian ground once was Venetian ground. The streets are narrow and paved; they are not quite as narrow as in Venice, nor is the passage of horses and all that horses draw so absolutely unknown as it is in Venice. Still the subject city comes near enough to its mistress to remind us under whose dominion Zara stayed for so many ages. And the traveller who begins his Dalmatian studies at Zara will perhaps think Dalmatia is not so strange and out-of-the-way a land as he had fancied before going thither. He may be tempted to look on Zara simply as an Italian town, and to say that an Italian town east of the Hadriatic is not very unlike an Italian town on the other side. This feeling, not wholly true even at Zara, will become more and more untrue as the traveller makes his way further along the coast. Each town, as he goes on, will become less Italian and more Slavonic. In street architecture Zara certainly stands behind some of the other Dalmatian towns. We see fewer of those windows of Venetian and Veronese type which in some places meet us in almost every house. The Roman remains are not very extensive. We have said that Jadera still keeps a Roman arch under a Venetian mask. That arch keeps its pilasters and its inscription, but the statues which, according to that inscription, once crowned it, have given way to another inscription of Venetian times. Besides the _Porta Marina_, two other visible memorials of earlier days still exist in the form of two ancient columns standing solitary, one near the church of Saint Simeon, presently to be spoken of, the other in the herb-market between the _duomo_ and the haven. But the main interest of Zara, apart from its general and special history, and apart from the feeling of freshness in treading a land so famous and so little known, is undoubtedly to be found in its ecclesiastical buildings. The churches of Zara are certainly very much such churches as might be looked for in any Italian city of the same size. But they specially remind us of Lucca. The cathedral, now metropolitan, church of Saint Anastasia, has had its west front engraved in more than one book, from Sir Gardner Wilkinson downwards; it is a pity that local art has not been stirred up to produce some better memorial of this and the other buildings of Zara than the wretched little photographs which are all that is to be had on the spot. But perhaps not much in the way of art is to be looked for in a city where, as at Trieste and Ancona and Rome herself, it seems to be looked on as adding beauty to the inside of a church to swathe marble columns and Corinthian capitals in ugly wrappings of red cloth. This at least seems to be an innovation since the days of the Imperial topographer. Constantine speaks of the church of Saint Anastasia as being of oblong, that is, basilican, shape--[Greek: dromikos] is his Greek word--with columns of green and white marble, enriched with much ancient woodwork, and having a tesselated pavement, which the Emperor, or those from whom he drew his report of Zara, looked on as wonderful. It is very likely that some of the columns which in the tenth century were clearly allowed to stand naked and to be seen have been used up again in the present church. This was built in the thirteenth century, after the destruction wrought in the Frank and Venetian capture, and it is said to have been consecrated in 1285. It is, on the whole, a witness to the way in which the Romanesque style so long stood its ground, though here and there is a touch of the coming pseudo-Gothic, and, what is far more interesting to note, here and there is a touch of the Romanesque forms of the lands beyond the Alps. The church is, in its architectural arrangements, a great and simple basilica; but, as might be expected from its date, it shows somewhat of that more elaborate way of treating exteriors which had grown up at Pisa and Lucca. The west front has surface arcades broken in upon by two wheel windows, the lower arcade with round, the upper with pointed, arches. Along the north aisle runs an open gallery, which, oddly enough, is not carried round the apse. The narrow windows below it are round in the eastern part, trefoiled in the western, showing a change of design as the work went on. Near the east end stands the unfinished campanile; a stage or two of good Romanesque design is all that is finished. The one perfect ancient tower in Zara is not that of the _duomo_. On entering the church, we at once feel how much the building has suffered from puzzling and disfiguring modern changes. But this is not all; the general effect of the inside has been greatly altered by a change which we cannot bring ourselves wholly to condemn. The choir is lifted up above the crypt as at Saint Zeno and Saint Ambrose; the stone chair still remains in the apse; but the object which chiefly strikes the eye is one which is hardly in harmony with these. The choir is fitted up with a range of splendid _cinque cento_ stalls--reminding one of King's College chapel or of Wimborne as it once was--placed in the position usual in Western churches. This last feature, grand in itself, takes away from the perfection of the basilican design, and carries us away into Northern lands. Of the church which preceded the Venetian rebuilding, the church described by Constantine, little remains above ground, allowing of course for the great likelihood that the columns were used up again. There is nothing to which one is even tempted to give an early date, except some small and plain buildings clinging on to the north side of the choir, and containing the tomb of an early bishop. But in the crypt, though it has unluckily lost two of its ranges of columns, two rows, together with those of the apse, are left, columns with finished bases but with capitals which are perfectly rude, but whose shape would allow them to be carved into the most elaborate Byzantine forms. The main arcades of the church form a range of ten bays or five pair of arches, showing a most singular collection of shapes which are not often seen together. Some are simple Corinthian; in others Corinthian columns are clustered--after the example of Vespasian's temple at Brescia; others have twisted fluting; one pair has a section, differing in the two opposite columns, which might pass for genuine Northern work; while--here in Dalmatia in the thirteenth century--not a few shafts are crowned with our familiar Norman cushion capital. Yet the effect of the whole range would be undoubtedly fine, if we were only allowed to see it. The hideous red rags have covered even the four columns of the _baldacchino_, columns fluted and channelled in various ways and supporting pointed arches. They have also diligently swathed the floriated cornice above the arcade; in short, wherever there is any fine work, Jaderan taste seems at once to hide it; but nothing hides the clerestory with its stable windows or the flat plastered ceiling which crowns all. The triforium has an air of Jesuitry; but it seems to be genuine, only more or less plastered; six small arches, with channelled square piers, which would not look out of place at Rome, at Autun, or at Deerhurst, stand over each pair of arches. With all its original inconsistencies and its later changes, the _duomo_ of Zara, if it were only stripped of its swaddling-clothes, would be no contemptible specimen of its own style. [Illustration: TOWER OF ST. MARY'S ZARA.] But Saint Anastasia is not the only, it is hardly the most interesting, church in Zara. Saint Chrysogonos, monk and martyr, was held in reverence at Diadora in the days of Constantine, where his tomb and his holy chain were to be seen. Perhaps they are to be seen still; certainly his name is still preserved in an admirable church of the same general Lucchese type as the _duomo_, but which surpasses it in the exquisite grace of the three apses at its east end, after the best models of the type common to Italy and Germany. Within, the arrangement of the triapsidal basilica is perfect; the range of columns is, as is so often found, interrupted by two pairs of more massive piers, making groups of three, two, and two arches. It is almost startling to find that the date of the consecration of this exquisite Romanesque church is as late as 1407; but the fact is only one example out of many of the way in which in some districts, in Dalmatia above all, the true style of the land stood its ground. In Dalmatia the Italian pseudo-Gothic, common in houses, is but little seen in churches at any time. Another church, Saint Simeon, called after the Prophet of _Nunc dimittis_, boasts of its gorgeous shrine borne aloft behind the high altar, the gift of Elizabeth of Bosnia, the wife of Lewis the Great. The church itself is of the same basilican type as the other, but in less good preservation. Saint Mary's, a church of nuns, is itself of a rather good kind of _Renaissance_, but its chief merit is that it keeps the only finished ancient tower in Zara, a noble campanile of the best Italian type, thick with midwall shafts, which every Englishman will feel to be the true kinsman of our own towers at Lincoln and Oxford. Its date is known; it is the work of King Coloman of Hungary, in 1105. But, after all, the most interesting architectural work in Zara is one which, as far as we have seen, is not noticed in any English book, but which was described by the Imperial pen in the tenth century, and which has in our own days been more fully illustrated in the excellent work of Eitelberger on the Dalmatian buildings. Close by Saint Anastasia there stood in the days of Constantine, and there still stands, a round church, lately desecrated, now simply disused, which was then called by the name of the Trinity ([Greek: heteros naos plêsion autou eilêmatikos, hê hagia Trias]), but which now bears that of Saint Donatus. Its dome and the tower of Saint Mary's are the two objects which first catch the eye in the general view of Zara. Tradition, as usual, calls the building a pagan temple, in this case of Juno; but it has in no way the look of a temple, nor does the Emperor who describes it with some minuteness give any hint of its having been such. Yet it is plain that, if it was not itself a pagan building, the spoils of pagan buildings contributed to its materials. Formed of two arcaded stages, the whole pile rises to a vast height, and the height of the lower stage alone is very considerable. The arches of the round rest on heavy rectangular piers of truly Roman strength, save only two vast columns with splendid Composite capitals--which mark the approach to the triapsidal east end. This building, lately cleared from the disfigurements and partition of its profane use, forms one of the noblest round churches to be found; the so-called house of Juno at Zara is almost a rival of the so-called house of Jupiter at Spalato. The upper stage is of the same general type as the lower, having again two columns left free and uninjured, but not rivalling the splendour of those which are in bondage below. Zara had lately another desecrated church of extreme interest, but of quite another type from Saint Donatus. This was the little church of Saint Vitus, a perfect example of the genuine Byzantine arrangement on a very small scale. The ground-plan was square; four arms, square-ended without, quasi-apsidal within, bore up the cupola on perfectly plain square-edged piers. Between our first and second visits to Zara, between 1875 and 1877, this charming little piece of Byzantine work was swept away to make a smart shop-front. It was a recompense no more than was due to find on our third visit that the round church had been cleared out. [Illustration: SAINT VITUS, ZARA, AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, CATTARO.] * * * * * Such is Zara, a city in which, as at Parenzo, the ecclesiastical element distinctly prevails, as contrasted with the mainly pagan interest of Pola. Such is equally the case in our next Dalmatian city also. But the main interest of Sebenico is of a different kind from that of any of its fellows. We go there to study a church, but, as we have seen, a church which has little in common with other churches in Dalmatia or anywhere else. At Zara, at Spalato, at Ragusa, we study buildings which all in some sort hang together. At Sebenico we stop our course to study something which stands altogether aloof from all. SPALATO AND ITS NEIGHBOURS. SPALATO. 1875. The main object and centre of all historical and architectural inquiries on the Dalmatian coast is of course the home of Diocletian, the still abiding palace of Spalato. From a local point of view, it is the spot which the greatest of the long line of renowned Illyrian Emperors chose as his resting-place from the toils of warfare and government, and where he reared the vastest and noblest dwelling that ever arose at the bidding of a single man. From an oecumenical point of view, Spalato is yet more. If it does not rank with Rome, Old and New, with Ravenna and with Trier, it is because it never was, like them, an actual seat of empire. But it not the less marks a stage, and one of the greatest stages, in the history of the Empire. On his own Dalmatian soil, Docles of Salona, Diocletian of Rome, was the man who had won fame for his own land, and who, on the throne of the world, did not forget his provincial birthplace. In the sight of Rome and of the world Jovius Augustus was more than this. Alike in the history of politics and in the history of art, he has left his mark on all time that has come after him, and it is on his own Spalato that his mark has been most deeply stamped. The polity of Rome and the architecture of Rome alike received a new life at his hands. In each alike he cast away shams and pretences, and made the true construction of the fabric stand out before men's eyes. Master of the Roman world, if not King, yet more than King, he let the true nature of his power be seen, and, first among the Cæsars, arrayed himself with the outward pomp of sovereignty. In a smaller man we might have deemed the change a mark of weakness, a sign of childish delight in gewgaws, titles, and trappings. Such could hardly have been the motive in the man who, when he deemed that his work was done, could cast away both the form and the substance of power, and could so steadily withstand all temptations to take them up again. It was simply that the change was fully wrought; that the chief magistrate of the commonwealth had gradually changed into the sovereign of the Empire; that Imperator, Cæsar, and Augustus, once titles lowlier than that of King, had now become, as they have ever since remained, titles far loftier. The change was wrought, and all that Diocletian did was to announce the fact of the change to the world. So again, now that the Roman city had grown into the Roman world, a hill by the Tiber had long ceased to be a fit dwelling-place for rulers who had to keep back hostile inroads from the Rhine and the Euphrates. This fact too Diocletian announced to the world. He planted his Augusti and his Cæsars on spots better suited for defence against the German and the Persian than the spot which had been chosen for defence against the Sabine and the Etruscan. Jupiter of the Capitol and his representatives on earth were to be equally at home in every corner of their dominions. Nor is it wonderful if, with such aims before him, he deemed that a faith which taught that Jupiter of the Capitol was a thing of naught was a faith which it became his votary to root out from all the lands that bowed to Jove and to Jovius. What if his work in some sort failed? what if his system of fourfold rule broke up before his own eyes--if his Bithynian capital soon gave way to the wiser choice of a successor, if the faith which he persecuted became, almost on the morrow, the faith of his Empire? Still his work did not wholly fail. He taught that Empire was more than kingship, a lesson never forgotten by those who, for fifteen hundred years after him, wore the diadem of Diocletian rather than of Augustus. In some sort he founded the Roman Empire. What Constantine did was at once to undo and to complete his work by making that Empire Holy. Such a man, if not actually a creator, yet so pre-eminently one who moulded the creations of others into new shapes, might well take to himself a name from the supreme deity of his creed, the deity of whom he loved to be deemed the special votary. The conception which had grown up in the mind, and had been carried out by the hand, of the peasant of Salona might well entitle him to his proud surname. Nor did the organizing hand of Jovius confine its sphere to the polity of the Empire only. He built himself an house, and, above all builders, he might boast himself of the house that he had builded. Fast by his own birthplace--a meaner soul might have chosen some distant spot--Diocletian reared the palace which marks a still greater epoch in Roman art than his political changes mark in Roman polity. On the inmost shore of one of the lake-like inlets of the Hadriatic, an inlet guarded almost from sight by the great island of Bua at its mouth, lay his own Salona, now desolate, then one of the great cities of the Roman world. But it was not in the city, it was not close under its walls, that Diocletian fixed his home. An isthmus between the bay of Salona and the outer sea cuts off a peninsula, which again throws out two horns into the water to form the harbour which has for ages supplanted Salona. There, not on any hill-top, but on a level spot by the coast, with the sea in front, with a background of more distant mountains, and with one peaked hill rising between the two seas like a watch-tower, did Diocletian build the house to which he withdrew when he deemed that his work of empire was over. And in building that house, he won for himself, or for the nameless genius whom he set at work, a place in the history of art worthy to rank alongside of Iktinos of Athens and Anthemios of Byzantium, of William of Durham and of Hugh of Lincoln. And now the birthplace of Jovius is forsaken, but his house still abides, and abides in a shape marvellously little shorn of its ancient greatness. The name which it still bears comes straight from the name of the elder home of the Cæsars. The fates of the two spots have been in a strange way the converse of one another. By the banks of the Tiber the city of Romulus became the house of a single man; by the shores of the Hadriatic the house of a single man became a city. The Palatine hill became the _Palatium_ of the Cæsars, and _Palatium_ was the name which was borne by the house of Cæsar by the Dalmatian shore. The house became a city; but its name still clave to it, and the house of Jovius still, at least in the mouths of its own inhabitants, keeps its name in the slightly altered form of Spálato. He placed his home in a goodly land, on a spot whose first sight is striking at any moment; but special indeed is the good luck of him who for the first time draws near to Spalato at the hour of sunset. It is a moment to be marked in a life, as we round the island headland, one of the stony Dalmatian hills rising bleak and barren from the sea, and catch the first glimpse of the city, the tall bell-tower, the proud rampart of mountains which forms its background. But the sight is more spirit-stirring still if we come on that sight at the very moment when--in sight of the home of the great persecutor we may use the language of mythology--the sun-god has just sunk into its golden cup. The sinking sun seems no unfit symbol, as we look on the spot where the lord of the world withdrew to seek for rest after his toils. Another moment, the headland is rounded; its top is kindled like Vesuvius in the last rays of the sunlight; the lesser light is kindled before the greater has wholly failed us, and, by the light of sun and moon together, we can trace out the long line of the sea-front of the palace which became a city. No nobler site could surely have been found within the bounds of the Empire of the two Augusti and their Cæsars. The sea in front, the mountains behind, the headlands, the bays, the islands scattered around, might indeed have formed a realm from which the prince who had there fixed his home would have been unwise to go forth again to wrestle with the storms of the world which lay beyond its borders. The mountains have drawn nearer to the shore; the islands have gathered round the entrance of the haven, as if to shut out all but the noble bay and its immediate surroundings, as if to fence in a dominion worthy of Jovius himself. We land with the moon lighting up the water, with the stars above us, the northern wain shining on the Hadriatic, as if, while Diocletian was seeking rest by Salona, the star of Constantine was rising over York and Trier. Dimly rising above us we see, disfigured indeed, but not destroyed, the pillared front of the palace, reminding us of the Tabularium of Rome's own Capitol. We pass under gloomy arches, through dark passages, and presently we find ourselves in the centre of palace and city, between those two renowned rows of arches which mark the greatest of all epochs in the history of the building art. We think how the man who re-organized the Empire of Rome was also the man who first put harmony and consistency into the architecture of Rome. We think that, if it was in truth the crown of Diocletian which passed to every Cæsar from the first Constantius to the last Francis, it was no less in the pile which rose into being at his word that the germ was planted which grew into Pisa and Durham, into Westminster and Saint Ouen's. There is light enough to mark the columns put for the first time to their true Roman use, and to think how strange was the fate which called up on this spot the happy arrangement which had entered the brain of no earlier artist--the arrangement which, but a few years later, was to be applied to another use in the basilica of the Lateran and in Saint Paul without the walls. Yes, it is in the court of the persecutor, the man who boasted that he had wiped out the Christian superstition from the world, that we see the noblest forestalling of the long arcades of the Christian basilica. It is with thoughts like these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us where every outline is clear and every detail is invisible, that we tread for the first time the Court of Jovius--the columns with their arches on either side of us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock the art of those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel upon earth. Nowhere within the compass of the Roman world do we find ourselves more distinctly in the presence of one of the great minds of the world's history; we see that, alike in politics and in art, Diocletian breathed a living soul into a lifeless body. In the bitter irony of the triumphant faith, his mausoleum has become a church, his temple has become a baptistery, the great bell-tower rises proudly over his own work; his immediate dwelling-place is broken down and crowded with paltry houses; but the sea-front and the Golden Gate are still there amid all disfigurements, and the great peristyle stands almost unhurt, to remind us of the greatest advance that a single mind ever made in the progress of the building art. [Illustration: THE TOWER, SPALATO.] At the present time the city into which the house of Diocletian has grown is the largest and most growing town of the Dalmatian coast. It has had to yield both spiritual and temporal precedence to Zara, but, both in actual population and all that forms the life of a city, Spalato greatly surpasses Zara and all its other neighbours. The youngest of the Dalmatian towns, which could boast neither of any mythical origin nor of any Imperial foundation, the city which, as it were, became a city by mere chance, has outstripped the colonies of Epidauros, of Corinth, and of Rome. The palace of Diocletian had but one occupant; after the founder no Emperor had dwelled in it, unless we hold that this was the villa near Salona where the deposed Emperor Nepos was slain, during the patriciate of Odoacer. The forsaken palace seems, while still almost new, to have become a cloth factory, where women worked, and which therefore appears in the Notitia as a Gynæcium. But when Salona was overthrown, the palace stood ready to afford shelter to those who were driven from their homes. The palace, in the widest sense of the word--for of course its vast circuit took in quarters for soldiers and officials of various kinds, as well as the rooms actually occupied by the Emperor--stood ready to become a city. It was a _chester_ ready made, with its four streets, its four gates, all but that towards the sea flanked with octagonal towers, and with four greater square towers at the corners. To this day the circuit of the walls is nearly perfect; and the space contained within them must be as large as that contained within some of the oldest _chesters_ in our own island. The walls, the towers, the gates, are those of a city rather than of a house. Two of the gates, though their towers are gone, are nearly perfect: the _porta aurea_, with its graceful ornament; the _porta ferrea_ in its stern plainness, strangely crowned with its small campanile of later days perched on its top. Within the walls, besides the splendid buildings which still remain, besides the broken-down walls and chambers which formed the immediate dwelling-place of the founder, the main streets were lined with massive arcades, large parts of which still remain. Diocletian, in short, in building a house, had built a city. In the days of Constantine Porphyrogenitus it was a [Greek: kastron]--Greek and English had by his day alike borrowed the Latin name; but it was a [Greek: kastron] which Diocletian had built as his own house, and within which was his hall and palace. In his day the city bore the name of Aspalathon, which he explains to mean [Greek: palation mikron]. When the palace had thus become a common habitation of men, it is not wonderful that all the more private buildings whose use had passed away were broken down, disfigured, and put to mean uses. The work of building over the site must have gone on from that day to this. The view in Wheler shows several parts of the enclosure occupied by ruins which are now covered with houses. The real wonder is that so much has been spared and has survived to our own days. And we are rather surprised to find Constantine saying that in his time the greater part had been destroyed. For the parts which must always have been the stateliest remain still. The great open court, the peristyle, with its arcades, have become the public piazza of the town; the mausoleum on one side of it and the temple on the other were preserved and put to Christian uses. We say the mausoleum, for we fully accept the suggestion made by Professor Glavinich, the curator of the museum of Spalato, that the present _duomo_, traditionally called the temple of Jupiter, was not a temple, but a mausoleum. These must have been the great public buildings of the palace, and, with the addition of the bell-tower, they remain the chief public buildings of the modern city. But, though the ancient square of the palace remains wonderfully perfect, the modern city, with its Venetian defences, its Venetian and later buildings, has spread itself far beyond the walls of Diocletian. But those walls have made the history of Spalato, and it is the great buildings which stand within them that give Spalato its special place in the history of architecture. In the face of them we hardly stop to think of the remains of Venetian or even of earlier times. Yet both within and without the palace walls, scraps of Venetian work may be found which would attract the eye on any other spot, and hard by the north-western tower of Diocletian there remains a small desecrated church of the Byzantine type, which out of Spalato might be set down as a treasure. But, as we stand beneath the arcades of Jovius, things which would elsewhere be treasures seem as nothing. They, and the other buildings which stand in artistic connexion with them, form an epoch in the history of art, apart from the general history and general impression of the city which they have at once created and made famous. SPALATO REVISITED. 1877--1881. I thought it right to reprint the foregoing sketch of Spalato, the record of my first visit there in 1875, exactly as it was first written, with the change of two or three words only. It seemed worth while to keep the first impressions of such a place as they were set down at once after the first sight of it. Instead therefore of recasting this piece, as I have done several of the others, I will mention a few points on which later visits and further reading might have led to some change in what I first wrote nearly on the spot. Another paper of a strictly architectural character, headed "Diocletian's Place in Architectural History," has been reprinted in the third series of my Historical Essays, as an appendix to the essay headed "The Illyrian Emperors and their Land." First, with regard to the name of the place itself. I seem, when I wrote my paper of first impressions, to have had no doubt as to the received derivation from _Palatium_. That derivation is wonderfully tempting, and it enables one to make an epigrammatic contrast between the _Palatium_ of Rome and the _Palatium_ of Spalato, between the city which became a house and the house which became a city. But the fact remains the same, whatever may be the name. The city did become a house, and the house did become a city, whether the two were called by the same name or not. And I am now convinced, chiefly by Mr. Arthur Evans, that the name of Spalato has nothing to do with _Palatium_. I began to doubt rather early, as I did not see how the =s= could have got into the name; in a Greek name the origin of the =s= would have been plain enough, but it seemed to have no place in a Latin name. And I was staggered by the form _Aspalato_ found as early as the Notitia Imperii. Nothing goes for less than the etymologies of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and anyhow it is hard to see how [Greek: Aspalathon], the form which he uses, could mean [Greek: mikron palation]. But, as I had nothing better to propose, I thought it better, when I wrote the fuller paper which appears in the Historical Essays, to say nothing about the matter either way. I need not stop to dispute against the intrusive r in the vulgar form _Spalatro_, as both Sir Gardner Wilkinson and Mr. Neale have done that before me. But it is wonderful to see how early it got in. It is as old as the Ravenna Geographer, who has three forms--_Spalathon_, _Spalathron_, and _Spalatrum_. I need hardly say that the _r_ is unknown in the country, unless perhaps now and then in the mouth of some one who thinks it fine. So one has known people in England destroy etymology, by sounding _Waltham_ as if it had a _thorn_, and _Bosham_ with the sound of the German _sch_. I am now fully convinced that the name has nothing to do with _Palatium_. It is plain that the oldest form that we can find is _Aspalathum_, and I am inclined to accept the view of Mr. Evans, who connects the name with _Aspalathus_, or perhaps with [Greek: asphaltos]. But I must not venture myself in any quarter which savours of botany or geology. With the newer lights which I have made use of in Historical Essays, I think I should no longer speak of Diocletian as "the great persecutor." Galerius ought in fairness to take that name off his shoulders. Mr. A. J. Mason has certainly proved thus much; and it is a great comfort to think so in visiting Spalato. Nor should I have spoken of him as a native of Salona. He was of Doclea, Dioclea, however we are to spell it, within the present bounds of Tzernagora. Those who at various times have spoken of Saint Alban as "protomartyr _Anglorum_," and of King Lucius as becoming "a _Swiss_ bishop," might also speak of Diocletian as a Montenegrin. I was doubtless right in saying that no Emperor, strictly so called, inhabited the Palace after Diocletian. In strictness indeed no Emperor ever inhabited it at all, as Diocletian had ceased to be Emperor when he went there. But I think that, at the time of my first visit, I had not fully taken in the story of Nepos and his father Count Marcellian. One is strongly tempted to think that, when Nepos was killed "haud longe a Salonis, sua in villa," the place meant is the palace of Spalato. On the other hand, we have the earlier entry in the Notitia, which certainly looks as if the palace had already become a kind of Imperial factory. But Nepos would hardly live in the same style as Jovius, and the palace is quite big enough to lodge the deposed Emperor and the work-women at the same time. On the special importance of Spalato in the history of architecture I have spoken in several places, specially in the paper in my Historical Essays to which I have already referred. My main position is that, in the palace at Spalato, after a series of approaches, many of which may be seen in the building itself, Diocletian or his architect hit on the happy device of making the arch spring directly from the capital of the column. To merely classical critics this seems to mark the depth of degradation into which art had fallen in Diocletian's day. To me it seems to be the greatest step ever taken, the beginning of all later forms of consistent arched architecture, Romanesque, Gothic, or any other. The importance of the step is of course the same whoever took it; and if the same feature can be shown in any building earlier than Spalato, we must transfer our praises from, the designer of Spalato to the designer of that building. Spalato would in that case lose something of its strictly architectural interest; but that would be all. But, as far as I know, no such rival has appeared. If the same form really was used in the baths of Diocletian at Rome, that would not be a rival building, but a case of the same mind working in the same way in two places. And to establish an earlier use of the form, it would be needful to show that it was deliberately employed in some considerable building. There is nothing commoner in the history of architecture than the casual and isolated appearance of some form, which the designer had not so much chosen as stumbled on, long before the time when it really came into use. I put in this caution, because I know that there is a kind of feeble approach to the arrangement at Spalato in one or two buildings at Pompeii. And, great as was the advance at Spalato, it had, like many other cases of advance, its weak side. The Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital were both of them shifts to relieve, as it were, the light abacus of the Corinthian capital from the weight which the arch laid upon it. The heavy abacus of Pisa and Lucca was a better escape from this difficulty. Again, the lightness of the columns used at Spalato and in the basilicas which followed its model forbade the use of the vault, and condemned the roofs of the basilicas to be among their poorest features. In the peristyle itself of course no roof was needed, though to an eye used to Rome and Ravenna it has so much the air of an unroofed basilica that it is really hard to believe that it was always open. But, though the basilican arrangement forbade the use of the vault, yet the step taken at Spalato was not without its effect on later vaulted buildings. When the vault came in again, as in the heavier forms of the German Romanesque, men had learned that the arch and its pier, whether that pier was a light column or a massive piece of wall, were enough for all artistic purposes, without bringing in, as in the classical Roman, purely ornamental features from a style which followed another system of construction. I came to my belief in the architectural importance of Spalato thirty years before I saw the building itself, and, now that repeated visits have made the peristyle of Diocletian as familiar to me as Wells cathedral, I admire and approve just as much, though of course I cannot undertake to be quite as enthusiastic now as I was on the evening when I first saw it. When I was last at Spalato, a process was going on which always makes one tremble. The peristyle and the inside of the mausoleum were surrounded by scaffoldings. As for the mausoleum, it was perhaps a mistake ever to make it into a church; but, as it has been made into a church, the additions and changes which were needed for that purpose have become part of the history, and ought not to be meddled with. It must always have been nearly the smallest, and quite the darkest, metropolitan church in Christendom; but that it is so is part of the wonder of the place. And, if some of the details were restored in plaster at the time of a certain famous royal visit, it seems hardly worth while to knock them away, with the chance of knocking away some of the genuine stone along with them. That royal visit is commemorated in a tablet at the end of the peristyle, which professes great loyalty to a personage described as "Franciscus Primus, Austriæ Imperator et Dalmatiæ Rex." The man so labelled in Diocletian's own house had been the last successor to Diocletian's empire. In the changes which are being made in the peristyle, it is said that this tablet was first taken down as being modern, and then set up again, because official loyalty overrode all considerations of what was old and what was new. But some care should be taken in removing what is modern in such a place as Spalato. It is very well to get rid of some mean excrescences; but, where the arches have been filled up by Venetian buildings of respectable work, it would seem to be a great mistake to open them, to say nothing of the chance that such opening may endanger the columns and arches themselves. Though built up, they are not so blocked as to hinder a full study of their details. Indeed the building up, both of the arches of the peristyle and of the heavier arches in the other parts of the palace, is really a part of the history which should be preserved. It marks the distinctive character of Spalato as the house which became a city. That city, as it now stands, stretches, I need hardly say again, a long way beyond the bounds of the ancient house. Yet one cannot conceive Spalato without Diocletian's palace. It is something much more than the chief object and ornament of Spalato, as this or that building is the chief object and ornament of any other city. It is more than the castle or monastery round which a city has often grown. It is not merely that, but for the existence of the palace, the city would never have come into being; the palace still is the city in a sense in which we could hardly use those words of any other building elsewhere. Yet there are things to see at Spalato besides the palace. The museum is eminently a thing to see; but then it is within the palace, and moreover, though it is locally placed at Spalato, it belongs historically to Salona. There is a good deal of pretty Venetian work scattered up and down, both within the walls of Diocletian and without them. The piazza just outside the gate of iron, where the traveller will most likely seek his breakfast, his coffee, and his maraschino, would have some attractions in itself, if it did not lie just outside the gate of iron. The eye naturally turns to the gate, and to the little campanile perched on it; otherwise it might very fairly rest on the Venetian _loggia_, with its columns and their wide--yet not sprawling--pointed arches. It might rest none the less because the building so strongly suggests that class of English town-halls or market-houses of which I said something when speaking of Udine. The octagonal tower too, and the remains of the Venetian fortifications generally, are worth a glance. The difficulty is, in the home of Jovius, to give even a glance to anything but the works of Jovius. The mausoleum, now the once metropolitan church, and the temple, now the baptistery, have both of them become churches by accident. Besides these, the first impression is that Spalato has little to show in the ecclesiastical line. And further examination will not take away that impression as to quantity, though it will modify it somewhat as to quality. The little desecrated church which in 1875 I saw just within the palace walls, embodied in military buildings, I could not find in 1881. I was told that it had been burned, and there certainly was a burned building thereabouts; but I did not feel quite sure that I had hit upon the right site, and whether the church that I was looking for might not still be there, imprisoned in some of the queer devices of Austrian occupation. But in 1881 I and my companion lighted by way of recompense on one most curious building which neither of us had seen in earlier visits. This is the little church of Saint Nicolas in the suburb on the slope of the hill. It is very small, of a rude kind of Byzantine type, with four of the very strangest columns I ever saw. Save that they have a mighty _entasis_, they really have more of an Egyptian cut than anything Greek, Roman, Gothic, or any of the forms to which Aryan eyes are used. The Franciscan church at the foot of the hill, with its cloister, would be worth a glance for its own sake; and it is worth much more than a glance on account of the precious sarcophagus which the cloister shelters. But this, like the objects in the museum, is an outlying fragment of Salona, to be talked of there. To the modern church on the other side of the city it would be only kindness to shut our eyes. But we cannot help looking at it; it aims at the style of the place, and clearly fancies itself to be Romanesque, if not Roman. We look at its tower, and we look back to the mighty campanile within the walls. Somehow the fourteenth century could adapt itself to the fourth; but the nineteenth cannot adapt itself to the fourteenth. Yet it is something for Spalato to say that it contains the noblest and the most ignoble of all towers that do profess and call themselves Romanesque. Eitelberger has well hit off the character of the three chief Dalmatian cities in three pithy epithets. Zara is _bureaukratisch_; Spalato is _bürgerlich_; Ragusa is _alt-aristokratisch_. The burghers seem to make more progress than either the foreign officials or the native patricians. Both better quarters and better dinners can be had at Spalato in 1881 than were to be had there in 1875. In 1881 we can walk on shore, while in 1877 boats were needed. And in 1881 the railway--a wonder in Dalmatia--was ready to carry us to Salona or even to Sebenico, but not to Traü. On the other hand in some other respects, if not Spalato, at least its foreign rulers, seem to advance backwards, if they advance at all. Those who dwell under the shadow of Apostolic Majesty are used to the daily suppression of such newspapers as venture to proclaim inconvenient truths. At Spalato that Apostolic and constitutional power has gone a step further by suppressing the municipality. With us, when a Stewart king suppressed an ancient corporation, he at least set up another of a new Stewart fashion. But at Spalato the _podestà_--the _potestas_ still lingers in Dalmatia, while in Italy only syndics are tolerated--and the other elders of the city seem to have become altogether things of the past, no less than Jovius and his Empire. SALONA. 1875--1877--1881. The strictly classical student will perhaps be offended if any one, on reading the name at the head of this article, should ask him where the place is, and how its name is to be pronounced. Salona, he will answer, is in Dalmatia, and how can there be more than one way of sounding the _omega_ in the second syllable? And so far he will be right. The Salona of which we speak is in Dalmatia, and, as its most usual Greek forms are [Greek: Salôna] and [Greek: Salônai], there can be no doubt as to the rights of that particular _omega_. But those who have gone a little deeper into the geography of south-eastern Europe will know that, besides the Dalmatian Salona, there is another within the Greek kingdom, which has taken the place of the Lokrian Amphissa. As we write the names of the two, we make no difference between them, and we fear that most Englishmen will make as little difference in sounding the two names as in writing them. Yet, as Boughton in Northamptonshire and Boughton in Kent are, by those who have local knowledge, sounded in two different ways, so it is with the Lokrian and the Dalmatian Salona. [Greek: Sálona] and [Greek: Salôna] differ to the eye; and, among those with whom Greek is a living tongue, they differ to the ear also. But it is not with the Lokrian Sálona, but with the Dalmatian Salóna, that we are here concerned. We need not disturb the feelings of the late Bishop Monk, whose one notion of accentual reading was that those who follow it must "make some strange false quantities." The classical purist may make the _omega_ in the Dalmatian Salóna as long as he pleases. Only, if he pronounces the Lokrian Sálona in the same fashion, he will wound the ears of those to whom the chief notion of (so-called) quantitative reading is that those who follow it must make some strange false accents. At Salona we are in one of the subject lands of Venice, but we cannot say that we are in one of her subject cities. For Salona, as a city, had passed away before the Serene Republic bore rule on these coasts, in truth before the Serene Republic was, while the lagoons still sheltered only those few settlers whom the minister of Theodoric likened to waterfowl on their nests. As a city, it passed away as few cities have passed away. Others indeed have perished more thoroughly; of some the very sites have been lost; but there is no city whose name survives which has left so little trace of what it was in the time of its greatness. For it is not like those cities whose very name and memory have perished, which are wholly ruined or buried, which have no modern representatives, or whose modern representatives bear wholly different names. Salona is still an existing name, marked on at least the local map; but, instead of the head of Dalmatia, one of the great cities of the Roman Empire, a city which was said to have reached half the size and population of the New Rome itself, we find only a few scattered houses, which hardly deserve the name of a village. By the side of modern Salona, modern Aquileia looks flourishing, and modern Forum Julii might pass for a great city. For Aquileia is not wholly dead as long as the patriarchal basilica still stands, if only to discharge the functions of a village church. But at Salona the traveller hardly notices whether there be any church in use or not. Of modern objects the one which is most likely to catch his eye is the building which at least proclaims, in the name of "Caffè Diocleziano," that Salona in her fall has not forgotten the man who commonly passes for her greatest son, who, according to some, was her second founder, and who, in any case, was her most renowned neighbour. By a strange piece of good luck, the citizen and sovereign of Salona who came back to spend his last days in his own land had reared at no great distance from her the house which, when Salona fell, stood ready to receive her inhabitants, and to take her place as a new city. There is a marked difference between the position of the older and that of the newer city. Spalato stands indeed on a bay, but it is a bay which, in that region of channels and islands, may pass for the open sea. Salona lay at the innermost point of the deep gulf which bears her own name, the gulf which forms one side of the peninsula on which Spalato stands, and which is shielded from the main sea by the island of Bua. It is curious to compare the real geography with the way in which the land and sea are laid down in the Peutinger Table, where Bua seems nearer to the coast of Italy than it is to Salona. Sir Gardner Wilkinson appositely quotes the lines of Lucan:-- "Qua maris Hadriaci longas ferit unda Salonas, Et tepidum in molles Zephyros excurrit Iader." _Longæ_ certainly well expresses the way in which the city must have spread itself along the mouth of the river, and the northern side of the bay. And, more than this, the idea of length must have been deeply impressed on Salona by the long walls which, as we shall presently see, yoked the city to something or other beyond her own immediate defences. Salona, like most of the older cities, was not at all like one of our square _chesters_ which rose up at once out of some military necessity. The Dalmatian capital had grown up bit by bit, and its walls formed a circuit almost as irregular as that of Rome herself. The site was a striking one. As we set forth from the comparatively flourishing daughter to visit the fallen mother, the road from Spalato leads us over a slight hill, from the descent of which we look on the bay with its background of mountains, a view which brings before us two strongly contrasted sites of human habitation. In advance of the mountain range stands the stronghold of Clissa, so famous in later wars--a stronghold most tempting in a distant view, but utterly disappearing when we come near to it. The seat of the Uscocs has nothing to show but its site and an ugly fortress; yet the hill is well worth going up, for the site and the view from it, a most instructive geographical prospect over mainland, sea, and islands. We turn to our Imperial guide, and we find that [Greek: Kleisa] was so called because it kept the key of the passage over the mountains. It was the [Greek: Kleisoura], so called [Greek: dia to synkleiein tous dierchomenous ekeithen]. He has to tell us how it was taken by invaders, whom he speaks of as the Slaves who were called Avars ([Greek: Slaboi, hoi kai Abaroi kaloumenoi]). The ethnological confusion is like that of another self-styled Imperial personage, who thought that he could get at a Tartar by scratching a Russian. But in both cases the confusion is instructive, as pointing to the way in which Slavonic and Turanian nations were mixed up together, as allies and as enemies, in the history of these lands. Far below, on the bosom of the bay, a group of small islands are covered by a small village, which seems to float on the water, and which well deserves its name of _Piccola Venezia_. Between the height and the sea lay Salona, on a slight elevation gently sloping down to the water; here, as so often on the Dalmatian coast, it needs somewhat of an effort to believe that the water is the sea. To the right of the road, we see the ruins of the aqueduct which brought water to the house of Diocletian--an aqueduct lately repaired, and again set to discharge its ancient duties. Ancient fragments of one kind or another begin to line the road; an ancient bridge presently leads us across the main stream of the Giadro, Lucan's Iader, which we might rather have looked for at Zara. We mark to the right the marshy ground divided by the many channels of the river; we pass by a square castle with turreted corners, in which a mediæval archbishop tried to reproduce the wonder of his own city; and we at last find ourselves close by one of the gates of Salona, ready to begin our examination of the fallen city in due order. The city distinctly consists of two parts. A large suburb has at some time or another been taken in within the walls of the city. This is plain, because part of a cross wall with a gate still remains, which must have divided the space contained within the outer walls into two. This wall runs in a direction which, without professing to be mathematically correct, we may call north and south. That is, it runs from the hills down towards the bay or the river. Now, which was the elder part of the two? that to the east or that to the west? In other words, which represents the præ-Roman city, and which represents its enlargement in Roman times? By putting the question in this shape, we do not mean to imply that any part of the existing walls is of earlier than Roman date. The Roman city would arise on the site of the earlier settlement, and, as it grew and as its circuit was found too narrow, it would itself be further enlarged. The cross wall with the gate in it must of course have been at some time external; it marks the extent of the city at the time when it was built; but in which way has the enlargement taken place? It used to be thought that the eastern, the most inland division, was the elder, and that the city was extended to the west. And it certainly at first sight looks in favour of this view that, in the extreme north-west corner, an amphitheatre has clearly been worked into the wall, exactly in the same way in which the _Amphitheatrum Castrense_ at Rome is worked into the wall of Aurelian. How so keen an observer as Sir Gardner Wilkinson could have doubted about this building being an amphitheatre, still more how his doubts ended in his positively deciding that it was not, seems really wonderful. It has all the unmistakeable features of an amphitheatre, and we can only suppose that a good deal has been brought to light since Sir Gardner Wilkinson's visit, and that what is seen now was not so clearly to be seen then. As amphitheatres were commonly without the walls, this certainly looks as if the eastern part were the old city, and as if those who enlarged it to the west had made use of the amphitheatre in drawing out their new line of fortification, exactly as Aurelian in the like case made use of amphitheatre, aqueducts, anything that came conveniently in his way. But, on the other hand, Professor Glavinivc, whom we have already referred to when speaking of Spalato, and whose keener observation has come usefully in the wake of the praiseworthy researches of Dr. Carrara, has pointed out with unanswerable force that the gate has two towers on its eastern side, showing that that side was external, and that therefore the western part must be the older and the eastern the addition. This is evidence which it is impossible to get over. Clearly then the space to the west of it was once the whole city, and the far greater space to the east once lay beyond the walls. The gate must have been a grand one; but unluckily its arches have perished. There was a central opening, along which the wheel-tracks may still be traced, and a passage for foot-passengers on each side. The large rectangular blocks of limestone of which it is built have been encrusted in a singular way with some natural formation, which might almost be mistaken either for plaster or for some peculiarity of the stone itself. In the northern wall of the eastern part is an inscription commemorating the building or repair of the wall in the time of the Antonines. This by itself would not be conclusive; for the wall might very well have been rebuilt in their day and the city might have been enlarged to the west in a still later time. But the position of the gate is decisive, and the position of the amphitheatre is a difficulty that can easily be got over. If, besides the great enlargement to the east, we also suppose an enlargement to the west which would take the amphitheatre within the city walls, this will be quite enough. We may rule then that the Illyrian city, the earlier Roman city, stood to the west of the cross wall, and that it was enlarged at some time earlier than the reigns of the Antonines by taking in an eastern suburb larger than the original town. The walls of both parts may be traced through a large part of their extent. The outer gate to the east was flanked by octagonal towers, and both a square and an octagon tower may be traced near the north-east corner. But the most remarkable thing about the walls of Salona is that, besides the walls of the city itself, there are long walls, like those of Athens and Megara, reaching from the western side of the city for a mile and more nearly along the present road to Traü. They have not been traced to the end; but there can be no doubt that they were built to make long Salona yet longer by joining the town to some further point of the coast. Nothing is more natural; the water of the bay by Salona itself is very shallow; when the city became one of the great maritime stations of the world, it was an obvious undertaking to plant a dock at some point of the coast where the water was deeper. And to one who comes to Salona almost fresh from the hill-cities of central Italy, from the strongholds of Volscians, Hernicans, and Old-Latins, from Cora and Signia and Alatrium, it becomes matter of unfeigned surprise to find Dalmatian antiquaries speaking of these walls as "Cyclopean." The name "Cyclopean," though as old as Euripides, is as dangerous as "Pelasgian" or "Druid;" but, if it means anything, it must mean the first form of wall-building, the irregular stones heaped together, such as we see in the oldest work at Cora and Signia. Here we have nothing of the kind. The blocks are very large, and the outer surface is not smooth; but all of them are carefully cut to a rectangular shape, and they are laid with great regularity. There seems no kind of temptation to attribute them to any date earlier than the Roman conquest of Illyricum. The style of building is simply that which is made natural by the kind of stone. And the same kind of construction, though with smaller blocks, is that which prevails throughout the walls of Salona, except where later repairs have clearly been made. This has happened with the outer wall to the west, where some earlier fragments have even been built in. Otherwise, by far the greater part of the walls, towers, and gates of Salona, not forgetting a gate which has been made out in the long walls themselves, all belong to one general style of masonry. * * * * * Within the walls of Salona the general effect is somewhat strange. The city is pierced by the road from Spalato to Traü; in these later times it has been further pierced by the railway--strange object in Dalmatia, strangest of all at Salona--which starts from Spalato, but which does not find its way to Traü. The greater part of the space is still covered with vineyards and olive-trees; systematic digging would bring a vast deal to light; but a good deal positively has been made out already. The amphitheatre has been already spoken of; the road cuts through the theatre. But, as becomes the history of the city, the greater part of the discoveries belong to Christian times, to the days when the bishopric of Salona was a post great enough to be employed to break the fall of deposed emperors. But we may doubt whether the head church of Salona, the church which held the episcopal chair of Glycerius, has yet been brought to light. Near the north-western corner of the eastern division of the city the foundation of a Christian baptistery has been uncovered. The site of the baptistery, according to all rule, must be near to the site of the great church of the city. Now the baptistery stands near the wall; is it fanciful to think that at Salona, as well as at Rome, it was not thought prudent in the earliest days of the establishment of Christianity to build churches in the more central and prominent parts of the city? The baptistery of Salona keeps--the great basilica must therefore have kept--under the shadow of the wall of the extended city, exactly as the Lateran basilica and baptistery do at Rome. Of the baptistery it is easy to study the plan, as the foundations and the bases of the columns, both of the building itself and the portico in front of it, are plainly to be seen. Many of their splendid capitals are preserved among the rich treasures of the museum at Spalato. These are of a Composite variety, in which the part of the volute is played by griffins, while the lower part of the capital is rich with foliage of a Byzantine type. West of the baptistery, but hardly placed in any relation to it, are the remains of a small church, which seems to have been a square, with columns to the east and an apse to the north. Whatever this building was, it surely can never have been the great church of Salona. That must have been a basilica of the first class; and we may hope that future diggings may bring that to light also. But outside the city to the north, successive diggings have made precious discoveries in the way of Christian burying-places and churches. Since the last researches have been made, it is perfectly clear that here, outside the walls, like the basilicas of the apostles at Rome, there stood a church of considerable size, that it had supplanted a smaller predecessor, and that it had another smaller neighbour hard by. It is now easy--but it is only very lately that it has become easy--to see nearly the whole outline of a church measuring--speaking roughly--about 120 feet long. It ranged therefore with the smaller rather than the larger basilicas of Rome. It had two rows of large columns, which, from their nearness to one another, look as if they had supported an entablature rather than arches, with a transept, with the arch of triumph opening into it, and the apse beyond, to the east. There are also, in front of the arch of triumph, foundations which look most temptingly like those of _cancelli_, like those of Saint Clement's at Rome, but which seem too narrow for such a purpose. It is also plain, from the base of a smaller column at a lower level, that this comparatively large church was built on the remains of an earlier one. And this is borne out by the discovery of pavements at more than one level, which supported sarcophagi, which are still to be seen, and of which an inscription shows that the lowest level was of the time of Theodosius the Second and Valentinian the Third. This thrusts on the building of the upper and greater church to a later time, surely not earlier than the reign of Justinian. It must therefore have still been almost in its freshness when the last blow fell on Salona. And at such a time we can better take in the full force of the inscription which stood over the west door: "Dominus noster propitius esto reipublicæ Romanæ." The church, it should be noted, has been, at some time or other before it was quite swept away, patched up or applied to some other use. A later wall runs across the western face of the transept. An endless field for guessing is hereby opened; but it is more prudent not to enter upon it. Another smaller ruined church stands close by, with its apse pointing to the north. This and the eastern part of the larger church are filled with sarcophagi of all kinds and sizes, reminding us of the newly-opened basilica of Saint Petronilla by the Appian Way. Among these is the tomb of an early _Chorepiscopus_. A crowd of architectural fragments are scattered around, among which one splendid Corinthian capital bears witness to the magnificence of the upper church. But the real wealth of Salona, both sepulchral and architectural, is not to be looked for in Salona itself, but in the museum at Spalato. There are a crowd of superb tombs, pagan and Christian, and the splendid capitals from the baptistery. There are stores of inscriptions, Latin and Greek, which would make the place where they are preserved a place of no small interest, even if that place were not Spalato. But one sarcophagus of pagan date still stays in its place, a little way beyond the city, because, being hewn in the limestone rock, it could not be taken away. This is that which is described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, which has some of the exploits of Hêraklês carved on its one face, and which has been so oddly changed in modern times into the altar of the canonized Pope Saint Caius. For he, like the Emperor under whom he suffered, passes for a native of Salona. And a no less precious sarcophagus of Christian days is preserved in the cloister of the Franciscan church at Spalato. This represents the crossing of the Red Sea. The Pharaoh looks very much as if he were in a Roman triumphal chariot, trampling a genius or two of the waters under his wheels. His warriors follow, looking, according to the eyes with which we look at them, like Romans in military dress or like Albanians in the immemorial fustanella. The Aryan mind is offended at seeing men of another continent clothed in such a very European garb; it is for Egyptologers to say whether the sculpture is correct. The sea is very narrow; it swallows up the Egyptian chariots with great force, and the rescued Hebrews stand on the other side, Miriam just about to begin her hymn of victory. The subject of the sculpture is obvious; but it seems that nobody understood it till it was expounded by an exalted lady at that royal visit of 1818 which at Spalato is commemorated oftener than enough. The expounder was the wife of the man who had once been the last successor of Diocletian and Augustus; whether his queen had any claim to rank either as a successor of Prisca and Livia or as the doubtful mother-in-law of a conqueror from Ajaccio, we have not looked in any pedigree-book to find out. One would really have thought that the loosing of the knot was so easy that it might have been unravelled by the hand of a subject; but a book which we have before us by a local antiquary goes off into raptures at the surprising keenness of Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic eyes. The chapel of Saint Caius, with its heathenish altar, brings our thoughts back to the long walls below it, the walls which yoked the ancient Salona to the deeper sea. It must not be forgotten that, in the days of its greatness, Salona was one of the chief ports of the Hadriatic, the greatest on its own side of it. After shifting to and fro from one port to another, that position has come back, if not to Salona itself, yet to its modern representative. If we distinguish the Hadriatic from the Gulf of Trieste, Spalato is undoubtedly its chief port; but the smallness of Spalato, as compared with the greatness of ancient Salona, is a speaking historical lesson. We see the difference between the place in Europe which is held by the Illyrian lands now and the place which they held in the days of the Roman peace. Then Salona was one of the chief cities of the Roman world, placed on one of the most central sites in the Roman world, the chief port of one of the great divisions of the Empire, and one of the main highways between its eastern and western halves. Such could be the position of a Dalmatian city when Dalmatia had a civilized mainland to the back of it. Salona therefore kept up its position as long as the Empire still kept any strength on its Illyrian frontier. It played its part in both the civil wars. Cæsar himself enlarges on the strength of the city--"oppidum et loci natura et colle munitum." In after-times it was a special object of the regard of its own great citizen, who took up his abode so near to its neighbourhood. According to Constantino Porphyrogenitus, Salona was pretty well rebuilt by Diocletian. Its importance went on in the time of transition, as is witnessed by the growth of its ecclesiastical buildings, and by the high position held by its bishopric. Like the rest of the neighbouring lands, it passed under the dominion, first of Odoacer and then of Theodoric, and it was the first place which was won back to the Empire in the wars of Justinian. Lost again and won back again, it appears throughout those wars as the chief point of embarcation for the Imperial armies on their voyages to Italy. This was the last century of its greatness; in the next century the modern history of Illyria begins. The Slaves were moving, and the Avars were moving with them. Salona fell into the hands of these last barbarians; it was ruined and pillaged, and sank to the state in which it has remained till our own time. Since the seventh century Salona has ceased to rank among the cities of the earth, but the house which had been raised by its greatest citizen stood ready hard by to supply a shelter to some at least of its homeless inhabitants. Things were wholly turned about on the bay of Salona and on the neighbouring peninsula. Down to the days of Heraclius, Salona had been a great city, with the vastest house that one man ever reared standing useless in its neighbourhood. From his day onwards the house grew into a city, and the city became a petty village, where, of all the places along that historic coast, the traveller finds least to disturb him in the pious contemplation of ruins. The only danger is that his meditations may be broken in upon by sellers of coins and scraps of all ages, dates, and values. Coins at Salona hardly need the process once known at the Mercian Dorchester as "going a-Cæsaring." Cæsars seem to be picked up from under and off the ground with much less trouble than hunting for truffles. And even he who is no professed numismatist or collector of gems will be pleased to give a few _soldi_, perhaps even for a very clear image and superscription of "Constantinus Junior Nob[ilissimus] C[æsar]," much more for any image and superscription of Jovius himself. It may have neither rarity nor value in the eyes of the numismatically learned; but it is something to carry away from Salona itself the head of the foremost local worthy in Salona's long annals. TRAÜ. 1875--1877--1881. The visitor to Spalato and Salona should, if possible, not fail to pay a visit to Traü. To most readers the very name will doubtless be strange. Yet Tragurium is an old city, a city old enough to be named by Polybios, to say nothing of later Greek and Latin writers. As in countless other cases, many readers may have passed by the name without any notice at all; others may have turned to the map, and, having once found Tragurium, may have presently forgotten that Tragurium was anywhere recorded. The case may be different with those who carry on their studies so far as to have dealings with the Imperial topographer. In his pages the name of the city has got lengthened into [Greek: Tetrangourion], and we are told that it was so called [Greek: dia to einai auto mikron dikên angouriou]. We are not ashamed to confess that the word [Greek: angouriou] gave us no meaning whatever, and that we had to turn to our dictionary to find that [Greek: angourion] means a water-melon. But where the point of likeness is between the town of Traü and a water-melon, and why the name should have been lengthened, so as to suggest, if anything, the notion of four water-melons, we are as much in the dark as before. Those therefore who have made acquaintance with the city in the shape of [Greek: Tetrangourion] will have a chance of keeping it in their minds. But with those who light only either on Tragurium or on Traü, it will most likely happen as most commonly happens with places which play no great part in general history. The name passes away as a mere name, till something happens to clothe it with a special meaning. Salona the parent and Spalato the child are names which never can become meaningless to any one who has a decent knowledge of the history of the world. But the name of Tragurium, Traü, will probably always be purely meaningless, save to those whom anything may have led to take a special interest in Dalmatian matters. Tragurium has a history--no place is without one--but its history is purely local and Dalmatian. As far as one can venture to judge, the great course of human affairs would have been much the same if Tragurium had never become a city. But there it stands, and, as it stands, its position, its buildings, even its local history, combine to give it no small interest. They make it no contemptible appendage even to the famous spots in its immediate neighbourhood. Whatever was its origin, Tragurium became a Roman town, and it was one of those places on the Dalmatian coast which so long and steadily clave to their allegiance to the Eastern Cæsars. As the Byzantine power declined, the town was disputed between the Kings of Hungary and the commonwealth of Venice, and once at least it is said to have felt the hand of Saracen plunderers. By each of the Christian powers by which it was disputed it was won and lost more than once, till it finally became Venetian in 1420. Perhaps the point of greatest interest in these dates is that Traü was a Hungarian possession at the time of the building of its cathedral church in the thirteenth century. It is said to have points of likeness to other great Hungarian churches of the same date. The approach to Traü is a speaking commentary on the state of things in days when no one but the lord of a private fortress could be safe anywhere except within a walled town. The road from Spalato to Traü goes through Salona, through the heart of the ruined city, as does the railway which the traveller may use for part of his journey. The railway turns off; the road keeps on alongside of the bay, with the water on one side and the mountains on the other. This road passes through the district of the _castelli_, forts with surrounding villages, which various lords, spiritual and temporal, held of the Serene Republic by a feudal tenure. Things were under the oligarchy of Venice as they were under the democracy of Athens. A private fortress within either city was unheard of; neither Demos nor the Council of Ten would for a moment have endured the existence of such towers as we still see at Rome and at Bologna. But in the outlying possessions of either commonwealth greater licence was allowed. Alkibiadês had his private forts in the Thracian Chersonêsos, and a string of Venetian nobles and subjects of the Republic were allowed to have their private forts along the shores of the bay of Salona. The points which they occupied still remain as small towns and villages, some of them with their little havens on the lake-like sea, where the traveller whom the railway has forsaken may haply light on a small steamer to take him on. But none of those among the _castelli_ which we can ourselves speak of from our own knowledge possess any architectural interest. When at last we reach Traü, we see further how needful it was, even in the case of a walled city, to plant it in the position best suited for defence. Traü, now at least, belongs to the class of island cities. At the point where the large island of Bua comes nearest to the mainland, a small island lies between it and the shore, leaving only a narrow channel on each side, spanned in each case by a bridge. But the language of the Emperor who likens the city to a water-melon might suggest the idea that the site was once, not insular, but peninsular. Constantine places his [Greek: Tetrangourion] on a small island, but the small island has a neck like a bridge which joins it to the mainland ([Greek: mikron esti nêsion en tê thalassê, echon kai trachêlon heôs tês gês stenôtaton dikên gephyriou, en hô dierchontai hoi katoikountes es to auto kastron]). This somewhat contradictory way of speaking sounds as if, as in the case of some other peninsular cities, a narrow isthmus had been cut through. In the Peutinger Table too, "Ragurio" is made distinctly peninsular. Now at least the likeness of a bridge is exchanged for the reality; the island is an island, and on this island is built the main part of the city of Traü. A small part only spreads itself on to Bua, where it begins to climb the hills, though it goes up only a very little way, by paths almost as rugged as though they were in Montenegro. This outlying part, which contains two churches, may pass as a suburb, a _Peraia_; for Bua may reckon as a mainland when compared with the neighbouring islet, and the real mainland of Dalmatia seems to have been carefully avoided by the builders of Tragurium. The view in Wheler would give no one any idea of the size of Bua, any more than the Peutinger Table would give any idea of its position. But Wheler's view well brings out the relative positions of mainland, islet, and island, and it shows how strongly Traü was fortified in his day. Such a site as this was a valuable one in days when security was the main object; but it hardly tends to prosperity in modern times, and Tragurium must be reckoned among the cities whose day is past. While Spalato is putting on the likeness of a busy modern town, Traü has nothing to show but its ancient memories. Traü, as we now see it, is indeed an old-world place. Even the new-made railway, which has appeared long since our first visit, and which startles the quiet of Salona and some of the _castelli_, keeps away from the city of the four water-melons. Strangers come but seldom, and they are remembered when they do come; a visitor showing himself again after some years is greeted in friendly guise as "one of the three Englishmen with red beards." And the city looks like one of the ends of the world. Owing to the peculiar position of Traü, the fashion of narrow streets, common to all the Dalmatian towns, is here carried to an extreme point. Indeed the crooked alleys through which the visitor has to thread his way, and the dark arches and vaults under which he has to pass, give the place a Turkish rather than a Venetian look. The explorer of Traü might almost fancy himself at Trebinje. One wonders how the Tragurians manage to live; it is only on the quay and in the open place by the cathedral that there seems room to breathe. Yet, uninviting as the streets of Traü are in their general effect, they are far from being void of objects of interest. As elsewhere in Dalmatia, we ever and anon light on ornamental doorways and windows. In Traü some of these show better forms than those of the familiar Venetian Gothic; one or two windows are in style, whatever they may be in date, genuine Romanesque. Of the Venetian defences some considerable portions remain; close by the water, at the south-western point of the smaller island, is a castle bearing the badge of Saint Mark, whose chief feature is a tower of irregular octagonal shape, singularly and ingeniously vaulted within. Of civic buildings the chief is the Venetian _loggia_, now dirty and uncared for. But it still keeps at its east end what at first sight seems like an altar, dedicated, not to the Evangelist but to his lion, but which really marks the judgment-seat of the representative of the Republic in Traü. The building was repaired over and over again, the last renovation dating early in the seventeenth century; but it keeps a colonnade, which, whenever it was put together, was put together out of materials of far earlier date. Some of the capitals seem to be late; but there is one of true Corinthian form, which seems closely akin to those in Diocletian's peristyle; another capital is covered with rich foliage of a type rather Byzantine than classical. And on either side of the _loggia_, forming a strange contrast to one another, one of them utterly hidden from view, the other proclaiming itself as the main ornament of the town, stand the two most important ecclesiastical buildings of Traü. [Illustration: CATHEDRAL, TRAÜ.] The chief architectural ornament of the city is undoubtedly the formerly cathedral, now only collegiate, church. This is a work of the thirteenth century, with a stately bell-tower of the fourteenth or fifteenth. But the tower of Traü is no detached campanile, such as we have seen at Zara and Spalato. It forms part of the building; it occupies its north-western corner, and was designed to be one of a pair, after the usage of more northern lands. The inscription on the southern doorway gives 1215 as its date; one on the great western doorway names 1240, and adds the name of Raduanus as its artist. Looked at from the outside, the work is of the best and most finished kind of Italian Romanesque; and we have here, what is by no means uncommon in Dalmatia, an example of the late retention of the forms of that admirable style. The tower palpably belongs to a later date, as it shows the distinct forms of the Venetian Gothic, though, as usual in Dalmatia, in a not unpleasing form. Eitelberger quotes an inscription which gives the date as 1321, while in his text he speaks of it as 1421, just after the Venetian capture of the town. And the course of Dalmatian architecture is so capricious, forms are found at dates when one would so little have looked for them, that we really cannot undertake to decide between the two. The inside of the church is striking, with its round arches resting on massive square piers of German rather than Italian character, and with its clerestory and vault, in which the round and pointed arch are struggling for the mastery. By a freak almost more unaccountable than the red rags of Zara, the piers have very lately been taught to discharge the perhaps useful, but rather incongruous, function of a catalogue of the bishops of Traü, bishops whose succession has come to an end. The pulpit, the stalls, and other fittings, are also striking in many ways, and the triapsidal east end shows us a rather simple Romanesque style in all its purity. But the glory of Traü is at the other end. The stately portico veils the still more stately western doorway, in which, if the purity of the architectural style is somewhat forsaken, we forgive it for the richness and variety of its sculpture. The scriptural scenes in the tympanum, the animal forms, the statues of Adam and Eve, the crouching turbaned figures, the strange blending together of sculpture and architectural forms, make together a wonderful whole, none the less wonderful because it is clear that everything is not exactly in its right place, but that there has been a change or removal of some kind at some time. The details of this splendid doorway, and of the church in general, must be studied in the elaborate memoir of Eitelberger, which, with its illustrations, goes further than most memoirs of the kind to make the building really intelligible at a distance. The turbaned figures are far older than the appearance of the Ottoman in the neighbourhood of Traü, or indeed in any part of Europe. Are they Saracens whose forms record the memories of some returning Crusader? Or are we to believe that the Morlacchi used the turban as their head-dress before the Ottoman came? But the _duomo_ is not all that Traü has to show in the way of churches. On the other side of the Venetian loggia stands, hidden among other buildings, a church which is in its way of equal interest with its greater neighbour, which certainly shows us a purer form of Romanesque. This is the little desecrated church of Saint Martin, now called Saint Barbara, one of those domical buildings on a small scale of which we have seen other varieties at Zara and at Spalato. Its height and the tall stilts on its columns would, if the building were cleared out, make it one of the most striking instances of its style and scale. Nearer to the water, south-east from the cathedral, is another small Romanesque church, almost as striking without as Saint Barbara is within. This is the small church of Saint John Baptist, which, except that it has a square east end, might pass for an almost typical Romanesque church on a small scale. Nearly opposite to Saint Barbara is the most striking house in Traü, with an open galleried court; and not very far off, hidden in the narrow streets, is the Benedictine monastery of Saint Nicolas, the foundation of the local saint John Orsini in 1064. The points to be noticed are not in the church but in the adjoining buildings. There, besides some pretty Venetian windows and doorways, is an arcade which looks as if it were of genuine Romanesque date, though perhaps hardly so old as the saint himself. A walk outside the walls in the direction of the Venetian castle leads to other churches, one of which, attached to a house of Dominican nuns, surprises the visitor, like the ruined chapel of the Gaetani by the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, by its almost English look. A few hours may well be spent in examining the antiquities of this strange little island city, and in taking in the varied views of land and sea which are to be had alike from the lofty bell-tower and from the higher ground on Bua. The journey back again shows us objects which have become familiar to us, but which are now seen in a reverse order. We mark the ever shifting outlines of the hills, the islands and the bay which they surround, the ruins of fallen Salona, Clissa on its peak, the stream of Giadro, the aqueduct of Diocletian, till we again mount and descend the little hill on the neck of the isthmus, and find ourselves once more under the shadow of the palace-walls of Spalato and of the bell-tower which soars so proudly over them. [Illustration: SAINT JOHN BAPTIST, TRAÜ.] SPALATO TO CATTARO. SPALATO TO CATTARO. 1875. [I have not thought it needful to strike out of this paper a few allusions to the times when it was written, the early days of the revolt in Herzegovina with which the war of 1875-1878 began.] As Spalato must be looked on as the great object of a Dalmatian voyage, it may also be looked on as its centre. After Spalato the coast scenery changes its character in a marked way. Hitherto hills, comparatively low and utterly barren, come down straight to the sea, while the higher mountains are seen only farther inland. From this point the great mountains themselves come nearer to the water. We are thus reminded of the change in the political boundary, how from this point the Hadriatic territory of Austria and of Christendom becomes narrower and narrower, till we reach the stage when the old dominion of Ragusa becomes a mere fringe between the sea and the Turk, fenced in from the former land of Saint Mark by the two points at either end where the less dangerous infidel was allowed to spread himself to the actual sea-board. But as the mountains come nearer to the sea, a fringe of cultivation, narrower or wider, now spreads itself between them and the water. Small towns and villages, detached houses, land tilled with the vine and the olive, now skirt the bases of the mountains, in marked contrast to the mere stony hills of the earlier part of the voyage. The islands too among whose narrow channels we have to make our way change their character also. After Spalato, instead of mere uninhabited rocks, we come to islands of greater size, some of them thirty or forty miles long, islands several of which have a distinct place in history, islands containing towns and cities, and which are still seats of industry and cultivation. These are the islands which give such a marked character to the map of this part of the Hadriatic, and they form the most marked feature in the fourth day's voyage of the course from Trieste to Cattaro. The endless islands which we have seen along the northern part of the Dalmatian shore, bare and uninhabited rocks as many of them are, are without history. Some of the Croatian islands indeed have somewhat of a history; but with these we are not dealing; the barren archipelago of Zara could never have had any tale to tell. First we pass through the channel which divides the mainland from the large island of Brazza, distinguished at a glance by its solid shape from its endless long and narrow fellows. Dreary and rocky as it seems, it is the most populous and industrious of the group, and at one point of its coast, San Pietro, the steamer makes a short halt. So it does at the picturesque little port of Almissa on the mainland, a nest of houses and trees at the mountain's foot, standing so invitingly as to make the traveller wish for a longer sojourn. Then comes Makarska, where we are allowed a short glimpse of the little hill-side town, smaller and more Dalmatian than any that we have yet seen. Presently we plunge into the full intricacies of the Dalmatian seas. We pass through the narrow channel which parts the mainland from the eastern promontory of the long, slender island of Lesina--the _awl_. Here we come within old Hellenic memories. We are now within the full range of Greek colonization, though of Greek colonization only in its latest stage. Issa, now Lissa, Black Korkyra, now Curzola, amongst the islands, and Epidauros on the mainland, were all of them undoubted Greek settlements. But Issa and Pharos, the only ones to which we can fix a positive date, were colonized only in the first half of the fourth century, and Dionysios of Syracuse had a hand in their colonization. Lesina is Pharos, the ancient colony of the Ægæan Paros, whose name still lives on Slavonic lips in the shape of _Far_ or _Hvar_. It plays a considerable part in the history of Polybios, as the island of that Dêmêtrios whose crooked policy formed an important element in the affairs of mankind in the days when Greek and Roman history began to flow together into one stream. These islands form one of the highways by which Rome advanced to the possession of Illyricum, Macedonia, and Greece. But we see neither the ancient nor the modern city, neither Pharos nor Lesina; we merely skirt the island to find ourselves in the channel of Narenta. That name suggests yet another pirate power, later than that of Tenta and Dêmêtrios, that power of the old Pagania against which Venice, in her early days, had to wage so hard a struggle. We seem to be pressing on between the mainland and a long, slender, mountainous island; but our course suddenly turns; the seeming island is no other than the long peninsula of Sabioncello, a peninsula not Venetian but Ragusan. We get merely a glimpse down the gulf, at the end of which Turkish Klek once divided the possessions of the two maritime commonwealths, and still, nominally at least, breaks the continuity of Austrian dominion. But, if the peninsula was Ragusan, a narrow channel only parts it from an island which was a chief seat of the power of the rival city. We skirt the western horn of Sabioncello, and another turn leads us through the channel--narrower than any through which we have passed--which divides it from Curzola, Black Korkyra of old. We stop for a little while off the island capital, the fortress of Curzola, which was to the declining navy of Venice what Pola now is to the rising navy of Austria. This channel passed, we come to the last of the great islands. For miles and miles we skirt the Ragusan island of Meleda, long, slender, with its endless hills of no great height standing up like the teeth of a saw--a true sierra in miniature. Here volumes of scriptural controversy are open to us. As we are not tossed up and down in Hadria, but are floating along as on a lake or a river, we muse on the claims which all local and some independent authorities have set up for Illyrian Meleda, as against Phoenician Malta, to be the true seat of the shipwreck of Saint Paul. But Meleda can have its claims admitted only on the condition of being shut out from Hellenic fellowship, even though its barbarians were of a mood which led them to show no little kindness to strangers. It is hard also to understand how those who were making their way from Meleda to any point of Italy could have any possible business at Syracuse. At all events, with Meleda the island history ends, though the island scenery does not end as yet. Several islands, smaller than these more famous ones, but not so small as they look on the map, fringe the coast till we enter the haven of Gravosa, the port of modern Ragusa, with its thickly wooded shores, a marked contrast to the bleakness and barrenness of so many other points of the Dalmatian coast. Ragusa, the city of argosies, the commonwealth which so long was the rival of Venice and which never stooped to be her subject, so thoroughly suggests maritime enterprise by her very name, that we are surprised to find that Ragusa herself has ceased to be a port of any moment. Her mighty walls, her castles, her more distant forts, still rise out of the sea, and the mightier wall of mountains just behind her still fence off her land, as the narrowest rim of Christendom, from the land of the infidel beyond. All this is as it was; modern military art has added to the defences of Ragusa, but it has not taken away her elder bulwarks. But her haven is now of the very smallest, and admits only vessels of the smallest size. The modern haven is at Gravosa, and the road which Sir Gardner Wilkinson describes as so well kept, but as useless because no carriages went upon it, is still as good and more useful. At this moment Ragusa bears the honourable character of a city of refuge for the unhappy ones who seek shelter under the government of a civilized state from the barbarian rule beyond the mountains. Her suburbs are crowded with women and children flying from the seat of war, for whom the charity both of the state and of private persons is doing much, but whose sufferings--as one who has seen them can bear witness--cry for the sympathy and help of all who have hearts and who have not invested in Turkish bonds. As we pass by and look on the city--no city surely fronts the sea more proudly than Ragusa--as we turn round to the island of La Croma, lying off what was Ragusa's harbour, the island which suggests the names of Richard of Poitou and of Maximilian of Mexico--the scene is so peaceful and lovely, the warlike defences look such mere things of the past, that it is hard indeed to believe that, just beyond the mountain barrier, warfare is going on in its bitterest and yet its noblest form--the struggle of an oppressed people to cast off the yoke of ages. This form of speech may grate somewhat on the received phrases of Western diplomacy; but, however we might be bound to write in England, in Dalmatia--so close to the facts--we may be allowed to write as all men in Dalmatia think and speak. We pass La Croma, and our time among the islands is over; no other that can be called more than a mere rock meets us between Ragusa and Cattaro. At last we enter the loveliest of inlets of the sea, the _Bocche di Cattaro_. A narrow strait leads us between points of land which were once Ragusan on the west and Venetian to the east, into the winding gulf, girded by mountains, and now for nearly its whole extent fringed by towns, villages, houses, cultivation in every form--a land where the sublimity of the rugged mountain has come into close partnership with the loveliness of the smiling dwelling-places of man. As we pass through the strait, a piece of barren mountain to the left marks the second piece of territory where the Turk was allowed to isolate the two commonwealths, and where, in name, his dominion still reaches to the shore of the lovely gulf. We pass on, as on the smoothest of lakes, round mountain headlands, with their rich fringe of life, by towns and villages, many of which have their own local history both in earlier and later times, till we reach the most distant of Dalmatian cities, Cattaro at the innermost point of her own unrivalled _Bocche_. Hemmed in between the mountains and the sea--though it seems almost strange to apply the word sea to the gentle waters of her harbour--with the mountains again rising on the other side, Cattaro seems indeed to be the end of its own world. Yet in the days of Venetian greatness, Cattaro was far indeed from being the last point of the dominion of Saint Mark. Climb the heights above the city, and the eye stretches far away along the Albanian coast, a coast along which many a city and island once bowed to the winged lion, till in fancy we track our course, as by stepping stones along the sea, to distant Crete and to more distant Cyprus. Cattaro, the end of the outward journey, will also be the beginning of the journey back again. The little town, with its narrow paved streets, its little piazze, still keeps up the same Venetian tradition as elsewhere. And the walls of the fortress climbing far up the mountain show how firm was the grasp of the ruling city over its subjects. But at Cattaro and throughout the Bocche another feature strikes us which we do not see either at Spalato or at Ragusa. The churches do not all belong to one denomination; the Eastern, the Orthodox, Church, holds its own in this corner of Venetian or Austrian rule at least as firmly as its Latin rival. The fact is, what is forced upon our notice at every step, that, the further we go along this coast, the Italian element dies out and the Slavonic element grows. It is so in language, in dress, in everything. Zara, Spalato, Ragusa, Cattaro, each city is less and less Italian according to its geographical position. The inland country is, of course, Slave throughout. But at Cattaro the Slave element distinctly predominates, even in the town; Italian can hardly be said to be more than the best known among foreign languages. The pistol and yataghan worn in the belt, a general costume essentially the same as that of the Montenegrin, has gradually been growing upon us; here in Cattaro it is the rule, almost more than the rule. In short, the Bocchese, the Montenegrin, the Turkish rayah of Herzegovina, really differ in nothing but the difference of their political destinies. They are members of the same immediate family, whose fortunes have led them in three different directions. Now the religious tendency of the south-eastern Slaves, as is only natural from their geographical position, has always been towards the Eastern Church rather than the Western, towards the New Rome rather than towards the Old. Here, where the Slavonic element is so distinctly the stronger, the religious developement has taken its natural course, and the Orthodox population in Cattaro and all the coasts thereof is always a large minority, and in some places it actually outnumbers the Latins. We have professed to give only the impressions of the outward voyage, though our account may have here and there been influenced by later impressions drawn from fuller observation on the way back. But the way back, and the fuller knowledge gained in its course, only brings out more strongly the intense charm of Dalmatian coast and mountain scenery, fitly united with the deep historic interest of cities which, though they seem to form a world apart by themselves, have played their part in the world's history none the less. No one can visit Dalmatia once without a wish that his first visit may not be his last; no one can take a glimpse of any of her cities without the desire that the glimpse may be only the forerunner of more perfect knowledge. CURZOLA. 1881. We part from Spalato; by the time that we have made two or three voyages in these seas, we shall find that there are several ways of reaching and parting from Spalato. We speak of course of ways by sea; by land there is but one way, and that way leads only to and from places at no great distance, and it does not lead to or from any place in the direction in which we are now bent. By sea the steamer takes two courses. One keeps along the mainland, that which allows a glimpse of the little towns of Almissa and Makarska, both nestling by the water's edge at the mountain's foot. Of these Almissa at least has an historical interest. Here Saint Mark was no direct sovereign; his lion, if we rightly remember, is nowhere to be seen, a distinction which, along this whole line of coast, Almissa alone shares with greater Ragusa. Was it a commonwealth by itself, cradled on the channel of Brazza like Gersau on the Lake of the Four Cantons? Or was it the haven of the inland commonwealth of Polizza, which, like Gersau and a crowd of other commonwealths, perished at the hands of their newborn French sister for the unpardonable crime of being old? But far more interesting is the other route of the steamers, that which leads us among the greater islands. Here, as soon as we pass Spalato, as soon as we pass the greatest monument of the dominion of Rome, we presently find ourselves in a manner within the borders of Hellas. We pass between Brazza and Solta, we skirt Lesina and think once more of its old Parian memories. We look out on Lissa, where the Hellenic name lives on with slighter change, but we are more inclined to dwell on those later memories which have made its name an unlucky one in our own day, a far luckier one in the days of our grandfathers. At last we make our first halt for study where a narrow strait divides the mainland, itself all but an island, from another ancient seat of Greek settlement, the once renowned isle of Curzola. Curzola--such is its familiar Italian form--is the ancient Black Korkyra, and on Slavonic lips it still keeps the elder name in the shape of _Kerker_. But the sight of [Greek: hê melaina Korkyra] suggests a question of the same kind as that which the visitor is driven to ask on his first sight of Montenegro. How does a mass of white limestone come to be called the Black Mountain? Curzola can hardly be called a mass of white limestone; but the first glance shows nothing specially black about it, nothing to make us choose this epithet rather than any other to distinguish this Hadriatic Korkyra from the more famous Korkyra to the south. That some distinguishing epithet is needed is shown by the fact that, not so very long ago, a special correspondent of the _Times_ took the whole history of Corfu and transferred it bodily to Curzola. The reason given for the name is the same in Curzola and in Montenegro. The blackness both of the island and of the mountain is the blackness of the woods with which they are covered. True the traveller from Cattaro to Tzetinje sees no woods, black or otherwise; but he is told that the name comes from thick woods on the other side of the principality. So he is told that Black Korkyra was called from its thick woods, its distinctive feature as compared with the many bare islands in its neighbourhood. But no black woods are now to be seen in that part of the island which the traveller is most likely to see anything of. There were such, he is told; but they have been cut down on this side, while on the other side they still flourish. As things are now, Curzola is certainly less bare than most of its fellows; but the impression which it gives us is, of the two, rather that of a green island than of a black one. It is not green in the sense of rich verdure, but such trees as show themselves give it a look rather green than black. At any rate, the island looks both low and well-covered, as compared with the lofty and rocky mountains of the opposite peninsula of Sabioncello. The two are at one point, and that a point close by the town of Curzola, separated by a very narrow strait. And the nearness of the two formed no inconsiderable part of their history. There was a time when Curzola must have been, before all things, a standing menace to Sabioncello, and to the state of which Sabioncello formed an outpost. Sabioncello, the long, narrow, stony peninsula, all backbone and nothing else, formed part of the dominions of the commonwealth of Ragusa. Curzola was for three centuries and a half a stronghold of that other commonwealth which Ragusa so dreaded that she preferred the Turk as her neighbour. Nowhere does the winged lion meet us more often or more prominently than on the towers and over the gates of Curzola. And no wonder; for Curzola was the choice seat of Venetian power in these waters, her strong arsenal, the place for the building of her galleys. If Aigina was the eyesore of Peiraieus, Curzola must have been yet more truly the eyesore of Sabioncello. It is only of what must have been the special eyesore of its Ragusan neighbours, of the fortified town of Curzola and of a few points in its near neighbourhood, that we can now speak. Curzola is one of the larger Dalmatian islands; and it is an island of some zoological interest. It is one of the few spots in Europe where the jackal still lingers. Perhaps there is no other, but, as we have heard rumours of like phænomenon in Epeiros, a decided negative is dangerous. We believe that, according to the best scientific opinion, "lingered" is the right word. The jackal is not an importation from anywhere else into Curzola; he is an old inhabitant of Europe, who has kept his ground in Curzola after he has been driven out of other places. But he who gives such time as the steamer allows him in the island to the antiquities of the town of Curzola need cherish no hope or fear of meeting jackals. He might as soon expect to meet with a horse. For, true child of Venice, Curzola knows neither horse nor carriage. Horses and carriages are not prominent features in any of the Dalmatian towns; but they may be seen here and there. They are faintly tolerated within the walls of Ragusa, and we have certainly seen a cart in the streets of Zara. But at Curzola they are as impossible as at Venice itself, though not for the same reason. Curzola does not float upon the waters; it soars above them. The Knidian emigrants chose the site of their town in the true spirit of Greek colonists. It is such another site as the Sicilian Naxos, as the Epidauros of the Hadriatic, as Zara too and Parenzo, though Zara and Parenzo can lay no claim to a Greek foundation. The town occupies a peninsula, which is joined to the main body of the island by a narrow isthmus. The positive elevation is slight, but the slope close to the water on each side is steep. From the narrow ridge where stands the once cathedral church, the streets run down on each side, narrow and steep, for the most part ascended by steps. The horses of the wave are the only steeds for the men of Black Korkyra, and those steeds they have at all times managed with much skill. The seafaring habits of the people take off in some measure from the picturesque effect of the place. There is much less to be seen, among men at least, of local costume at Curzola than at other Dalmatian towns. We miss the Morlacchian turbans which become familiar at Spalato; we miss the Montenegrin coats of the brave _Bocchesi_, which fill the streets of Cattaro, not without a meaning. Seafaring folk are apt to wear the dress of their calling rather than that of their race, and the island city cannot be made such a centre for a large rural population as the cities on the mainland. But, if the men to be seen at Curzola are less picturesque than the men to be seen at Spalato or Ragusa, their dwellings make up for the lack. Curzola is a perfect specimen of a Venetian town. It is singular how utterly everything earlier than the final Venetian occupation of 1420 has passed away. The Greek colonist has left no sign of himself but the site. Of Roman, of earlier mediæval, times there is nothing to be seen beyond an inscription or two, one of which, a fragment worked into the pavement of one of the steep streets, records the connexion which once was between Curzola and Hungary. With præ-Venetian inscriptions we may class one which is post-Venetian, and which records another form of foreign dominion, one which may be classed with that of Lewis the Great as at least better than those which went between them. From 1813 to 1815--a time memorable at Curzola as well as at Cattaro--the island was under English rule, and the time of English rule was looked on as a time of freedom, compared with French rule before or with Austrian rule both before and after. It is not only that an official inscription speaks of the island as "libertate fruens" at the moment when the connexion was severed; we believe that we are justified in saying that those two years live in Black-Korkyraian memory as the one time for many ages when the people of Black Korkyra were let alone. The formerly cathedral church is the only building in the town of Curzola which suggests any thought that it can be older than 1420. Documentary evidence, we believe, is scanty, and contains no mention of the church earlier than the thirteenth century. In England we should at first sight be tempted to assign the internal arcades to the latter days of the twelfth; but the long retention of earlier forms which is so characteristic of the architecture of this whole region makes it quite possible that they may be no earlier than the Venetian times to which we must certainly attribute the west front. Setting aside a later addition to the north, which is no improvement, this little _duomo_ consists of a nave and aisles of five bays, ending in three round apses. Five bays we say, though on the north side there are only four arches; for the tower occupies one at the west end. The inner arcades and the west doorway are worthy of real study, as contributions to the stock of what is at any rate singular in architecture; indeed a more honourable word might fairly be used. The arcades consist of plain pointed arches rising from columns with richly carved capitals, and, like so many columns of all ages in this region, with tongues of foliage at their bases. Above is a small triforium, a pair of round arches over each bay; above that is a clerestory of windows which within seem to be square, but which outside are found to be broad pointed lancets with their heads cut off. In England or France such a composition as this would certainly, at the first sight of its general effect, be set down as belonging to the time of transition between Romanesque and Gothic, to the days of Richard of Poitou and Philip Augustus. And the proportions are just as good as they would be in England or France; there is not a trace of that love of ungainly sprawling arches which ruins half the so-called Gothic churches of Italy. But, when we look at the capitals, we begin to doubt. They are singularly rich and fine; but they are not rich and fine according to any received pattern. They are eminently not classical; they have nothing more than that faint Corinthian stamp which no floriated capital seems able quite to throw away; they do not come anything like so near to the original model as the capitals at Canterbury, at Sens, or even at Lisieux. But neither do they approach to any of the received Romanesque or Byzantine types, nor have they a trace of the freedom which belongs to the English foliage of days only a little later. They are more like, though still not very much like, our foliage of the fourteenth century; there is a massiveness about them, a kind of cleaving to the shape of the block, which after all has something Byzantine about it. Those on the north side have figures wrought among the foliage; the four responds have the four evangelistic symbols. Here then we cannot fail to find the lion of Saint Mark, but we find him only in his place as one of a company of four. Would the devotion of the Most Serene Republic have allowed its patron anywhere so lowly a place as this to occupy? Otherwise the character of the capitals, which extends to the small shafts in the triforium, might tempt us to assign a far later date to these columns and arches than their general effect would suggest. But at all events they are thoroughly mediæval; there is not the faintest trace of _Renaissance_ about them. Outside the church, the usual mixed character of the district comes out more strongly. The addition to the north, and the tower worked in instead of standing detached, go far to spoil what would otherwise be a simple and well-proportioned Italian front. Both the round window--of course there is a round window--and the great doorway are worthy of notice. The window is not a mere wheel; the diverging lines run off into real tracery, such as we might see in either England or France. The doorway is a curious example of the way in which for a long time in these regions, the square head, the round arch, and the pointed arch, were for some purposes used almost indifferently. The tradition of the square-headed doorway with the arched tympanum over it never died out. We may believe that the mighty gateways and doorways of Diocletian's palace set the general model for all ages. But when the pointed arch came in, the tympanum might be as well pointed as round. Sometimes the pointed tympanum crowns a thoroughly round-headed doorway, and is itself crowned with a square spandril, looking wonderfully like a piece of English Perpendicular. In the west doorway at Curzola things do not go quite to such lengths as this; but they go a good way. The square doorway is crowned by a pointed tympanum, containing the figure of a bishop; over that again is a kind of canopy. This is formed of a round arch, springing from a pair of lions supported on projections such as those which are constantly used, specially at Curzola, for the support of balconies. The lions which in many places would have supported the columns of the doorway seem, though wingless, to have flown up to this higher post. For here the doorway has nothing to be called columns, nothing but small shafts, twisted and otherwise, continued in the mouldings of the arch. The cornice under the low gable is very rich; the tower is of no great account, except the parapet, and the octagon and cupola which crown it, a rich and graceful piece of work of that better kind of _Renaissance_ which we claim as really Romanesque. In the general view of the town from the sea this tower counts for more than it does when we come close up to it in the nearest approach to a _piazza_ which Curzola can boast. It is the crown of the whole mass of buildings rising from the water. At Curzola the fortifications are far more to the taste of the antiquary than they are at Ragusa; they fence things round at the bottom, instead of hiding everything from the top. We may shut our eyes to a modern fort or two on the hills; the walls of the town itself, where they are left, are picturesque mediæval walls broken by round towers, on some of which the winged lion does not fail to show himself. He presides again over a _loggia_ by the seashore, one of those buildings with nondescript columns, which may be of any date, which most likely are of very late date, but which, because they are simply straightforward and sensible, are pleasing, whatever may be their date. Here they simply support a wooden roof, without either arch or entablature. And while we are seated under the lion in the _loggia_, we may look down at another lion in a sculptured fragment by the shore, in company with a female half-figure, something of the nature of a siren, Nereid, or mermaid, who seems an odd yoke-fellow for the Evangelist. He seems more in his natural place over the gate by which we shall most likely enter the town, a gate of 1643, itself square-headed, but with pointed vaulting within. Its inscriptions do not fail to commemorate the Trojan Antênor as founder of Black Korkyra, along with a more modern ruler, the Venetian John-Baptist Grimani. To the right hand, curiosity is raised by a series of inscriptions which have been carefully scratched out. About them there are many guesses and many traditions. One cannot help thinking that the deed was more likely to be done by the French than by the Austrian intruder. To scratch out an inscription is a foolish and barbarous act; but it implies an understanding of its meaning and a misapplied kind of vigour, which, of the two stolen eagles, was more likely to flourish under the single-headed one. The double-headed pretender, by the way, though he is seen rather too often in these parts, is seldom wrought in such lasting materials as Saint Mark's lion. So, when the good time comes, the stolen badge of Empire may, at Curzola as at Venice and Verona, pass away and be no more seen, without any destruction of monuments, old or new. We are now fairly in the town. The best way to see Curzola thoroughly is for the traveller to make his way how he will to the ridge of the peninsula, and then systematically to visit the steep and narrow streets, going in regular order down one and up another. There is not one which does not contain some bit of domestic architecture which is well worth looking at. But he should first walk along the ridge itself from the gate by the isthmus to the point where the ground begins to slope to the sea opposite Sabioncello. Hard by the gate is the town-hall, _Obcina_, as it is now marked in the native speech. The mixed style--most likely of the seventeenth century--of these parts comes out here in its fulness. Columns and round arches which would satisfy any reasonable Romanesque ideal, support square windows which are relieved from ugliness by a slight moulding, the dentel--akin to our Romanesque billet--which is seen everywhere. But in a projecting building, which is clearly of a piece with the rest, columns with nondescript capitals support pointed arches. Opposite to the town-hall is one of the smaller churches, most of which are of but little importance. This one bears the name of Saint Michael, and is said to have formerly been dedicated to Orthodox worship. It shows however no sign of such use, unless we are to count the presence of a little cupola over the altar. We pass along the ridge, by a house where the projection for balconies, so abundant everywhere, puts on a specially artistic shape, being wrought into various forms, human and animal. Opposite the cathedral the houses display some characteristic forms of the local style, and we get more fully familiar with them, as we plunge into the steep streets, following the regular order which has been already prescribed. Some graceful scrap meets us at every step; the pity is that the streets are so narrow that it needs some straining of the neck to see those windows which are set at all high in the walls. For it is chiefly windows which we light upon: very little care seems to have been bestowed on the doorways. A square or segmental-headed doorway, with no attempt at ornament, was thought quite enough for a house for whose windows the finest work of the style was not deemed too good. Indeed the contrasts are so odd that, in the finest house in Curzola, in one of the streets leading down eastward from the cathedral, a central story for which _magnificent_ would not be too strong a word is placed between these simple doorways below and no less simple square-headed windows above. This is one of the few houses in Curzola where the windows are double or triple divided by shafts. Most of the windows are of a single light, with a pointed, an ogee, or even a round head, but always, we think, with the eminently Venetian trefoil, and with the jambs treated as a kind of pilaster. With windows of this kind the town of Curzola is thick-set in every quarter. We may be sure that there is nothing older than the Venetian occupation, and that most of the houses are of quite late date, of the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century. The Venetian style clave to mediæval forms of window long after the _Renaissance_ had fully set in in everything else. And for an obvious reason; whatever attractions the _Renaissance_ might have from any other point of view, in the matter of windows at least it hopelessly failed. In the streets of Curzola therefore we meet with an endless store of windows, but with little else. Yet here and there there are other details. The visitor will certainly be sent to see a door-knocker in a house in one of the streets on the western slope. There Daniel between two lions is represented in fine bronze work. And some Venetian effigies, which would doubtless prove something for local history, may be seen in the same court. Of the houses in Curzola not a few are roofless; not a few have their rich windows blocked; not a few stand open for the visitor to see their simple inside arrangements. The town can still make some show on a day of festival; but it is plain that the wealth and life of Curzola passed away when it ceased to be the arsenal of Venice. And poverty has one incidental advantage; it lets things fall to ruin, but it does not improve or restore. Two monasteries may be seen within an easy distance of the town. That of Saint Nicolas, approached by a short walk along the shore to the north-west, makes rather an imposing feature in the general view from the sea; but it is disappointing when we come near. Yet it illustrates some of the local tendencies; a very late building, as it clearly is, it still keeps some traces of earlier ideas. Two equal bodies, each with a pointed barrel-vault, might remind us of some districts of our own island, and, with nothing else that can be called mediæval detail, the round window does not fail to appear. The other monastery, best known as the _Badia_, once a house of Benedictines, afterwards of Franciscans, stands on a separate island, approached by a pleasant sail. The church has not much more to show than the other; but it too illustrates the prevalent mixture of styles which comes out very instructively in the cloister. This bears date 1477, as appears from an inscription over one of its doors. But this doorway is flat-headed and has lost all mediæval character, while the cloister itself is a graceful design with columns and trefoil arches, which in other lands one would attribute to a much earlier date. The library contains some early printed books and some Greek manuscripts, none seemingly of any great intrinsic value. A manuscript of Dionysios Periêgêtês is described as the property of the Korkyraian Nicolas and his friends. ([Greek: Nikolaou Kerkyraiou kai tôn philôn.]) Nicolas had a surname, but unluckily it has passed away from our memory and from our notes. But the local description which he has given of himself makes us ask, Did the book come from Corfu, or did any citizen of Black Korkyra think it had a learned look so to describe himself? On the staircase of the little inn at Curzola still hangs a print of the taking of the arsenal of Venice by the patriots of 1848. Strange that no Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic official has taken away so speaking a memorial of a deed which those who commemorate it would doubtless be glad to follow. RAGUSA. 1875--1877--1881. The voyage onward from Curzola will lead, as its next natural stopping-place, to Ragusa. At Curzola, or before he reaches Curzola, the traveller will have made acquaintance with what was once the territory of the Ragusan commonwealth, in the shape of the long peninsula of Sabioncello. He will have seen how all the winged lions of Curzola look out so threateningly towards the narrow tongue of land which bowed to Saint Blaise and not to Saint Mark. He will pass by Meleda, that one among the larger islands which obeyed Ragusan and not Venetian rule. After Meleda the islands cease to be the most important features in the geography or in the prospect. They end, so far as they give any character to the scene, in the group which lies off the mouth of the inlet of Gravosa and Ombla, the ordinary path to Ragusa. But he who would really take in the peculiar position of Ragusa will do well to pass by the city on his outward voyage, to go on to Cattaro, and to take Ragusa on the way back. The wisdom of so doing springs directly out of the history of the city. The haven, which is said--and we have no better derivation to suggest--to have given its name to _argosies_, could certainly not give shelter to a modern argosy. Nothing but smaller craft now make their way to Ragusa herself; steamers and everything else stop at the port of Gravosa. It has been only quite lately, long since the earlier visits which gave birth to the present sketches, that Ragusan enterprise has so far again awakened as to send a single steamer at long intervals from the true Ragusan haven to Trieste. He therefore who visits Ragusa on his outward voyage has to land at Gravosa and to make his way to Ragusa by land. He thus loses the first sight of the city from the sea which he has had at Zara and Spalato, and which at Ragusa is, setting special associations aside, even more striking than at Zara and Spalato. Before he sees Ragusa from the water, as Ragusa was made to be seen, he has already made acquaintance with the city in a more prosaic fashion. He will not indeed have had his temper soured by the inconveniences which Sir Gardner Wilkinson had to put up with more than thirty years ago. There is no more delay at the gate of Ragusa, there is no more difficulty in finding a carriage to take the traveller from Gravosa to Ragusa, than there is in the most frequented regions of the West. Still, in such a case, the traveller sees Ragusa for the first time from the land, and Ragusa of all places ought to be seen for the first time from the sea. Seen in this way, the general effect of Ragusa is certainly more striking than that of any other Dalmatian city; and it is so in some measure because the effect of Ragusa, whether looked at with the bodily eye or seen in the pages of its history, is above all things a general effect. There is not, as there is at Zara and at Spalato, any particular moment in the history of the city, any particular object in the city itself, which stands out prominently above all others. We draw near to Zara, and say, "There is the city that was stormed by the Crusaders," and, though we find much at Zara to awaken interest on other grounds, the crusading siege still remains the first thing. We draw near to Spalato; we see the palace and the campanile, and round the palace and the campanile everything gathers. We draw near to Ragusa; the eye is struck by no such prominent object; the memory seizes on no such prominent fact. But there is Ragusa; there is the one spot along that whole coast from the Croatian border to Cape Tainaros itself, which never came under the dominion either of the Venetian or of the Turk. Ragusa will be found at different times standing in something like a tributary or dependent relation to both those powers, but it never was actually incorporated with the dominions of either. In this Ragusa stands alone among the cities of the whole coast, Dalmatian, Albanian, and Greek. Among all the endless confusions and fluctuations of power in those regions, Ragusa stands alone as having ever kept its place, always as a separate, commonly as an independent, commonwealth. It lived on from the break-up of the Byzantine power on those coasts till the day when the elder Buonaparte, in the mere caprice of tyranny, without provocation of any kind, declared one day that the Republic of Ragusa had ceased to exist. This is the history of Ragusa, a history whose general effect is as striking as any history can be. It is a history too which, if we dig into its minute details, is full of exciting incidents, but not of incidents which, like the one incident in the history of Zara, stand out in the general history of Europe. There is, to be sure, one incident in Ragusan history which may claim some attention at the hands of Englishmen, and ought to claim more at the hands of Poitevins. Count Richard of Poitou, who was also by a kind of accident King of England, and who in the course of his reign paid England two very short visits, paid also a visit to Ragusa which was perhaps still shorter. But this again is an incident of mere curiosity. The homeward voyage and captivity of Richard had some effect on the general affairs of the world; his special visit to Ragusa affected only the local affairs of Ragusa. Ragusan history then may either be taken in at a glance, and a most striking glance it is; or else it may be studied with the minute zeal of a local antiquary. There is no intermediate point from which it can be looked at. In the general history of Europe Ragusa stands out, as the city itself stands out to the eye of the traveller, as that one among the famous cities of the Dalmatian and Albanian coast where the Lion of Saint Mark is not to be seen. As is the history, so is the general effect. As we sail past Ragusa, as we look at the city from any of the several points which the voyage opens to us, we say at once, Here is one of the most striking sights of our whole voyage; but we cannot at once point our finger to any one specially striking object. There are good campaniles, but there is nothing very special about them; there are castles and towers in abundance, but each by itself on any other site would be passed by without any special remark. What does call for special remark and special admiration is the city itself, at once rising from the sea and fenced in from the sea by its lofty walls. It is the shore, with its rocks and its small inlets, each rock seized on as the site of a fortress. It is the background of hills, forming themselves a natural rampart, but with the artificial defences carried up and along them to their very crest. Here we are not tempted, as we are tempted at some points of our voyage, to forget that our voyage is one by sea, and to fancy that we are floating gently on some Swiss or Italian lake. Ragusa does not stand on a deep inlet like Cattaro, on a bay like Spalato, on a peninsula like Zara, fenced in by islands on one side and by the opposite shore of its haven on the other. Ragusa does indeed stand on a peninsula, but it is a peninsula of quite another kind; a peninsula of hills and rocks and inlets, offering a bold front to the full force of the open sea. One island indeed, La Croma, lies like a guard-ship anchored in front of the city, but we feel that La Croma is strictly an island of the sea. The islands of the more northern coast form as it were a wall to shelter the coast itself. And such a function seems specially to be laid upon the small islands which lie off the mouth of Ragusa's modern haven at Gravosa. Covered indeed as they are with modern fortifications, it is not merely in a figure that it is laid upon them. But La Croma fills no such function. The city of argosies boldly fronts the sea on which her argosies were to sail, and fiercely do the waves of that sea sometimes dash upon her rocks. Ragusa seems the type of a city which has to struggle with the element on which her life is cast, while Venice is the type of a city which has, in the sense of her own yearly ceremony, brought that element wholly under her dominion. As we look up from the sea to the mountains, we feel yet more strongly how purely Ragusa was a city of the sea. Venice was an inland power on that Italian land off which she herself lay anchored. She might pass for an inland power even on the Ragusan side of the Hadriatic. The Dalmatian territory of Venice looks on the map like a narrow strip; but, compared with the Ragusan coast, the Venetian coast has a wide Venetian mainland to the back of it. But Ragusa lies at the foot of the mountains, and the crest of the mountains was her boundary. She has always sat on a little ledge of civilization, for four centuries on a little ledge of Christendom, with a measureless background of barbarism behind her. Those hills, the slopes of which begin in the streets of the city, once fenced in a ledge of Hellenic land from the native barbarians of Illyricum. Then they fenced in a ledge of Roman land from the Slavonic invader. Lastly, when we first looked on them, when we first crossed them, they still fenced in a ledge of Christian land from the dominion of the Infidel. And the newest arrangements of diplomacy make it still not wholly impossible to use the language which we used then. The Archduke of Austria and King of Dalmatia is immediate sovereign of Ragusa and her ancient territory; when we cross the line between Ragusa and Herzegovina, he rules only in the character familiar to some even of his Imperial forefathers, that of the man of the Turk. The Christian prince simply "administers;" it is the Infidel Sultan who is still held to reign. To form such a boundary as this has been no mean calling for the heights which look down upon Ragusa. It is well to climb those heights, best of all to climb them by the road which so lately led, which we might almost say still leads, from civilization to barbarism, from Christendom to Islam, and to look down on the city nestling between the sea and the mountains. The view is of the same kind as the view of the city from the sea. Rocks, inlets, walls, and towers, come out in new and varied groupings, but there is still no one prominent object. La Croma indeed, with its fallen monastery--its fortress is not seen--now comes in as a prominent object. But it shows by its very prominence the difference between this part of the Dalmatian coast, with its one island, all but invisible on the map, lying close to the shore, and the two archipelagos, one of small and obscure, one of great and historic islands, which the voyager has already passed by. It would thus be well if we could look on Ragusa both from the sea and from the mountains before we approach the city by the one possible to reach it, by the road which leads from its port of Gravosa. This last is a picturesque haven of thoroughly Dalmatian character, lying on a smooth inlet with a small fertile fringe between the water and the mountains. The road, rising and falling, looking out on both the mountains and the sea, leads along among villas and chapels which gradually grow into a suburb till we reach the gate. Here we see not a few ruined houses, houses which have remained ruined for nearly seventy years, houses whose ruin was wrought by Montenegrin hands in the days when Ragusa was an unwilling possession of France and Montenegro a valued ally of England. But, before we reach the gate, we see what there was not in the time of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, carriages standing for hire, carriages no very long drive in which will take us over the late borders of Christendom. In that suburb too the traveller will most likely take up his quarters--quarters, it may be, looking down straight on the rocks and waves. And there, when war was raging at no great distance, and when Ragusa was the special centre of the purveyors of news, he was sure to hear both the latest truths and the latest fables. But he is still outside the city. No city brings better home to us than Ragusa the Eastern hyperbole of cities great and fenced up to heaven. We must leave the military architect to discuss their military merits or demerits. To the non-professional observer they seem to belong to that type of fortification, between mediæval and modern, which in these lands we naturally call Venetian, inapplicable as that name is at Ragusa. But they have clearly been strengthened and extended in more modern times. The city lies in a kind of hollow between the lower slopes of the mountain on one side, and a ridge which lies between the mountain and the sea, and which thus adds greatly to the appearance of the fortifications as seen from the sea. The one main street of Ragusa, the _Stradone_, thus lies in a valley with narrow streets running down towards it on both sides. Indeed, before the great earthquake of 1667 which destroyed so much of old Ragusa, part at least of this wide street was covered with water as a canal. It is so pent in with buildings that we hardly feel how near we are to the sea; yet the small port, the true port of Ragusa, is very near at hand. The two ends of the Stradone are guarded by gates, which lead up--for the ascent is considerable--to the outer gates at either end, still strong and still guarded, reminding us that we are in what is still really a border city. And over those gates we see, not the winged lion for which we have learned to look almost instinctively everywhere on these coasts, but the figure of Saint Blaise, _San Biagio_, the patron of Ragusa, whose relics form some of the choicest treasures in the rich hoard of her once metropolitan church. We pass under the saintly effigy, and we find that within the walls the general aspect of the city is comparatively modern. Most of the buildings, the metropolitan church among them, were rebuilt after a great earthquake in 1667. Such remains however of old Ragusa as are still left are of such surpassing interest in the history of architecture that we must keep them for a more special examination. * * * * * The history of Ragusa, as we have already said, is of a kind which must either be taken in at a glance or else dealt with in the minutest detail. All Dalmatian history for a good many centuries wants a more thorough sifting than has ever been brought to bear upon it. It wants it all the more because it is so closely connected with early Venetian history, than which no history is more utterly untrustworthy. But we may safely gather that Ragusa had its origin in the destruction of the Greek city of Epidauros, now _Ragusa Vecchia_. The old Epidaurian colony fell, like Salona, before the barbarians. Its inhabitants had no ready-made city to flee to, but they founded a city on the rocks which became Raousion or Ragusa. Whether any part of the Ragusan peninsula had ever become a dwelling-place of men at any earlier time it is needless to inquire. It is enough that Ragusa now became a city. As to the name of the city, our Imperial guide helps us to one of his strange etymologies. With him Epidauros has sunk into [Greek: Pitaura]--the _t_ seems to have supplanted the _d_ at a much earlier time--and the city on the rocks which its exiles founded was first called from its site [Greek: Lausion], which by vulgar use ([Greek: hê koinê synêtheia, hê pollakis metaphtheirousa ta onomata tê enallagê tôn grammatôn]) became [Greek: Rhaousion]. He tells us that, [Greek: epei epanô tôn krêmnôn histatai legetai de Rhômaisti ho krêmnos lau, eklêthêsan ek toutou Lausaioi, êgoun hoi kathezomenoi eis ton krêmnon]. What tongue is meant by [Greek: Rhômaisti]? It is only because the strange form [Greek: lau] seems to come one degree nearer to [Greek: laas anaidês] than to anything in Latin, that it dawns on us that it means Greek. But, under whatever name, the city on the rocks, small at first, strengthened by refugees from Salona, grew and prospered, and remained one of the outlying Roman or Greek posts which in the days of Constantine, as now, fringed the already barbarian land. For some centuries after the time of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the history of Ragusa defies abridgement. It is one web of intricate complications between the Emperors of the East and West, the Republic of Venice, the Kings of Hungary, Dalmatia, and Bosnia. Somewhat later the story begins to be more intelligible, when the actors get pretty well reduced to Venice, the Turk, and the Empire in a new form, that of Charles the Fifth. The republic of Ragusa contrived, which must surely have needed a good deal of skill, to keep on good terms at once with Charles and his son Philip and with their Turkish enemies. Yet Ragusa, though never incorporated by anything earlier than the dominion of Buonaparte, stood at different times in a kind of dependent relation both to Venice and to the Turk. At an earlier time the commonwealth for a short time received a Venetian Count. He was doubtless only meant to be like a foreign _podestà_, but Venice was a very dangerous place for Ragusa to bring a _podestà_ from. In her later days Ragusa must be looked on as being under the protection of the Porte; but it was a protection which in no way interfered with her full internal freedom--such freedom at least as is consistent with the rule of an oligarchy. The geography of Dalmatia keeps to this day a curious memorial of the feeling which made Ragusa dread the Turk less than she dreaded Venice. To this day the Dalmatian kingdom does not extend continuously along the Dalmatian coast. At two points territory which till late changes was nominally Turkish, which is still only "administered," not "governed," by its actual ruler, comes down to the Hadriatic coast. These are at Klek, at the bottom of the gulf formed by the long Ragusan peninsula of Sabioncello, and at Sutorina on the _Bocche_ di Cattaro. These two points mark the two ends of the narrow strip of coast which formed the territory of Ragusa. Rather than have a common frontier with Venice at either end, Ragusa willingly allowed the dominions of the Infidel to come down to her own sea on either side of her. At last all dread from Venice passed away, but only because Saint Mark gave way to a more dangerous neighbour. The base conspiracy of Campoformio gave Venetian Dalmatia to an Austrian master, and the strips of Turkish territory which had once sheltered Ragusa from the Venetian now for a while sheltered her from the Austrian. Then the dividers of the spoil quarrelled; the master of France took to himself what France had betrayed to Austria. Presently he disliked the small oasis of independence, and added Ragusa to the dominion which was presently to take in Rome and Lübeck. Lastly, when the days of confusion were over, and order came back to the world, order at Ragusa took the form of a new foreign master. The Austrian, who had reigned for a moment at Zara and Cattaro, but who had never reigned at Ragusa, put forth his hand to filch Ragusa as he has since filched Spizza. The motive need not be asked. The pleasure of seizing the goods of a weaker neighbour is doubtless enough in either case. One point in the history of Ragusa which needs a more thorough explanation than it has yet found is the fact that the Roman or Greek city, founded by men who had escaped from barbarian invaders--who must surely have been largely Slavonic--has become so pre-eminently a Slavonic city. There is no Italian party at Ragusa. Not that the city is strongly Panslavonic; the memory of local freedom has survived through both forms of foreign rule. The Ragusan aristocracy is Slavonic, and the Slavonic language holds quite another position at Ragusa from what it holds, for example, at Spalato. There all that claims to be literature and cultivation is Italian; at Ragusa, though Italian is familiarly spoken, the native literature and cultivation is distinctly Slave. The difference is marked in the very names of the two cities. Spalato is in Slavonic _Spljet_, a mere corruption of the corrupt Latin name. But Ragusa, on Slavonic lips--that is on the lips of its own citizens speaking their own language--is _Dubrovnik_, a perfectly independent Slavonic name. It may be the name of some Slavonic suburb or neighbouring settlement--like the _Wendisches Dorf_ at Lüneburg--but at all events it is no corruption, no translation, of Latin _Ragusa_ or of Constantine's _Raousion_. * * * * * As for King Richard, the Ragusan story is that he built the cathedral which was destroyed in 1667. It is said that he vowed to build a church on the island of La Croma, and that this purpose was changed into building one in the city instead of the former cathedral, while the commonwealth of Ragusa built a church on the island. La Croma thus becomes connected with the memory of two princes who died of thrusting themselves in matters which did not concern them. Richard, Count and King, might have lived longer if he had not quarrelled with his vassal at Limoges; Maximilian, Archduke and self-styled Emperor, was perfectly safe at La Croma, but when he took up the trade of a party-leader in Mexico, he could hardly look for anything but a Mexican party-leader's end. Of the monastery which formed his dwelling-place the great church is so utterly desecrated and spoiled that hardly anything can be made out. But a good deal remains of the cloister, and at a little distance stand the ruins of a beautiful little triapsidal basilica, which surely, all save a few additions, belongs to the age of the Lion-hearted King. Indeed we should be tempted to fix on this, rather than any other church of Ragusa or its island, as the work of Richard himself. It looks greatly as if a Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine had had a hand in it. A single wide body, with three apses opening into it, is not a Dalmatian idea, as it is not an English idea. But something like it might easily be found in Richard's own land of southern Gaul. That Richard did come to Ragusa and to La Croma seems plain from the narrative in Roger of Howden. He hired a ship at Corfu expressly to take him to Ragusa. He landed "prope _Gazere_ apud Ragusam." _Gazere_ suggests Jadera or Zara, but "Gazere apud Ragusam" can hardly fail to mean La Croma. "_Gazere_" is the Arabic name for _island_--the same which appears in _Algesiras_--one of the Eastern words which passed into the _lingua franca_ of the Crusaders. After all, Ragusa gives more interest to Richard than any that it takes from him. Born and twice crowned in England, he had little else to do with England than to squeeze money out of it. It mattered little to Englishmen--or to Normans either--whether their Poitevin lord was astounding the world at Acre, at Chaluz, or at La Croma. * * * * * Two other rather longer excursions than that to La Croma may be profitably made from Ragusa. There is, first of all, the short voyage to the site of the city which Ragusa supplanted, the Dalmatian Epidauros, now known by the odd name of _Ragusa Vecchia_. Beyond a few inscriptions, there is really next to nothing to be seen of the ancient city besides its site; but the site is well worthy of study. It is thoroughly the site for a Greek colony, and it has much in common with the more famous site of Korkyra and Epidamnos. The city occupied a peninsula, sheltered on the one hand by the mainland, on the other by another promontory, forming the outer horn of a small bay. In this position the town had the sea on every side; it had a double harbour, and was at the same time thoroughly sheltered on both sides. Such a site was the perfection of Greek colonial ideas. We have now got far away indeed from the earliest type of city--the hill-fort which dreads the sea, and which finds the need of the haven, and of the long walls to join the haven to the city, only in later times. The highest point of the promontory, the akropolis--if we can use that name in a city of such late date--is now forsaken, crowned only by a burying-ground and sepulchral church. The view is a noble one, looking out on the mainland and the sea, with the neighbouring island crowned by a forsaken monastery, and directly in front Ragusa herself on her rocks, with the beginnings of the Dalmatian archipelago rising in the distance. The modern town, which is hardly more than a village, with two or three churches and a small amount of fortification, covers the isthmus and the lower ground of the promontory. Such is all that is left of the northern city of Asklêpios, the city which played its part alike in the wars of Cæsar and in the wars of Belisarius, which in the great revolution that followed the Slavonic inroads perished to give birth to the more abiding city from which it has strangely borrowed its later name. That Ragusa Vecchia has so little to show is no ground for despising it or passing it by; the very lack of remains in some sort adds to the interest of the spot. The voyage from New to Old Ragusa is not a long one. A shorter land journey on the same side of the city will lead to the sea-side village of Breno, which will not supply the traveller with anything in the antiquarian line, but which will reward him with a good deal of Dalmatian mountain and land scenery, especially with a waterfall, though one not quite on the scale of Kerka. And, to those who peer pryingly into all corners, the little inn of the place will suggest some memories of very modern history. That piece of history it has been the interest of exalted personages to keep unknown, and their efforts have been crowned with a remarkable degree of success. As the inn at Curzola contains picture memories of an unsuccessful struggle for freedom in 1848, so the inn at Breno contains picture memories of a more successful struggle waged twenty-one years later in the same cause and against the same enemy. When in 1869 the present ruler of Austria and Dalmatia strove, in defiance of every chartered right and every royal promise, to trample under foot the ancient rights of the freemen of the Bocche di Cattaro, the troops of the foreign intruder were driven back in ignominious defeat by the brave men of the mountains, and the master who had sent them was forced to renew the promises which he had striven to break. People still chatter about the mythical exploits of Tell, but hardly any one has heard of this little piece of successful resistance to oppression done only twelve years back. The deed is not forgotten by the neighbours of those who did it, and in the inn at Breno rude pictures may be seen showing the victorious Bocchese driving the troops of the stranger down those heights which at Vienna or at Budapest it seemed so easy a matter to bring into bondage. Strange to say, the pictures which record this Slavonic triumph have the legend beneath them in the High-Dutch tongue. Stranger still, it is the eye only and not the ear by which any knowledge of the matter is to be picked up. The wary native, even when spoken to in his own tongue, will not enlarge on the subjects of those pictures to a man in Western garb. It is perhaps not without reason if a stranger in Western garb is suspected in those parts to be a spy of the enemy. If the voyage from New to Old Ragusa is not a long one, the sail on the other side of the city up the river's mouth to Ombla is shorter still. Its starting-point will be, not Ragusa itself but its port of Gravosa. Here the main object is scenery; but several houses, one at least of which will deserve some further mention, a nearly forsaken monastery with a good bell-tower and a not ungraceful church, and one or two living or forsaken chapels may be taken in, and they help us to complete some inferences as to the architecture of the district. But our business at this moment is mainly with the basin which lies at the foot of the limestone rock. The hills of Greece and Dalmatia constantly suggest, to one who knows the West of England, the kindred, though far lowlier, hills of Mendip. As the gorge under the akropolis of Mykênê at once suggests the gorge of Cheddar, so the basin of the Trebenitza at Ombla suggests, though the scale is larger, the basin of the Axe at Wookey Hole. The river runs out from the bottom of the rocks, and, to those who have been adventurous enough to cross the heights and to make their way through the desolate land of Herzegovina--the very land of limestone in all forms--as far as Trebinje, the river that reappears at Ombla is an old friend. There seems no doubt that it is the Trebenitza which, after hiding itself in a _katabothra_, comes out again to light in the Ombla basin. The journey to Trebinje itself is in its own nature less exciting now than it was in 1875. What it was when the drive thither from Ragusa enabled the traveller to say that he had been into "Turkey," and that he had seen a little of a land in a state of warfare, may perhaps be worth some separate mention. At present it is reported that Trebinje is cleaner than it was then, that it has been adorned with a _Rudolfsplatz_, and that justice is there administered to its Slavonic folk, Christian and Mussulman, in the tongue of which _Rudolfsplatz_ is a specimen. It would therefore seem that the direct rule of the stranger is at least better than his "administration." At Ragusa men are allowed to speak their own tongue in which they were born. RAGUSAN ARCHITECTURE. 1875--1877--1881. We have spoken in a former article of the general aspect and the historical position of the city and commonwealth of Ragusa, her hills, her walls, her havens, her union of freedom from the lion of Saint Mark with half dependence on the crescent of Mahomet. But this ancient and isolated city has yet something more to tell of. There are several of the municipal and domestic buildings of the fallen republic, buildings which, as far as we know, have never been described or illustrated in detail in any English work, and of which no worthy representation can be found on the spot. In the work of Eitelberger much will be found; but for the ordinary English student there is no help at all. Yet, on the strength of these buildings, Ragusa may really claim a place among those cities which stand foremost in the history of architectural progress. And this fact is the more remarkable, and the more to be insisted on, because of the seemingly general belief that there is little or nothing to see at Ragusa in the way of architecture. But the truth is that far more of the old city escaped the earthquake of 1667 than would be thought at first sight. Because the cathedral is later, because the general aspect of the main street is later, the idea is suggested that nothing is left but the municipal palace. That alone would be a most important exception, but it is by no means the only one. If the traveller leaves the main street and turns up the narrow alleys which run from it up the hills on either side, alleys many of them which, at present at least, lead to nothing, he will find many scraps of domestic architecture which must belong to times earlier than the great blow of the seventeenth century. Signs of that blow are seen in many places in the form of scraps of detail of various kinds irregularly built up in the wall; but there are a great number of pointed doorways still in their places which no man can think are later than 1667. Some of these are simply pointed; others combine the pointed arch with the tympanum, sometimes with both the tympanum and the spandril. There is also a not unpleasing type of _Renaissance_ doorway, a lintel resting on two pilasters with floriated capitals, which one can hardly believe are due to a time so late as the days after the earthquake. At all events, if they are later than the earthquake, they only go to strengthen the general position which we have to lay down, namely the way in which early forms lived on at Ragusa to an amazingly late date. This same examination of the narrow streets will also bring to light a few, but only a few, windows of the Venetian Gothic. The strength of Ragusa, as far as scraps of this kind are concerned, undoubtedly lies in its doorways. [Illustration: TOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA.] In the churches too there is more left than the mere scraps which are built up again. Parts at least of the tall towers--neither of them detached--of the Franciscan and Dominican churches, the former in the main street, the latter near the eastern gate, are also earlier. In the former the line of junction between the older tower and the ugly church which has been built up against it is clearly to be seen. The upper stage of this tower, and the small cupola which crowns it, _may_ be later than the earthquake; but if so, they have caught the spirit of earlier work in an unusual degree, and all the lower part is in a form of Italian Gothic less unpleasing than usual. Both this tower and that of the Dominican church show how long the general type of the earliest Romanesque campaniles went on. Save in the small cupola, this tower has the perfect air, and almost the details, of a tower of the eleventh century: three ranges of windows with mid-wall shafts rise over one another; only they are grouped under containing arches in what in England we should call a Norman fashion. But, as this tower forms part of a Dominican monastery, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and its smaller details also cannot belong to any earlier date. Yet the general effect of this tower, even more than of the other, is that of a tower of the Primitive type. The Dominican church also keeps some details of Italian Gothic which must be older than the earthquake, and the cloister is one of the best specimens of that style. Its groupings of tracery under round arches, the poverty of design in the tracery itself, strike us as weak, if our thoughts go back to Salisbury or to Zürich; but the general effect is good, and the cloister--as distinguished from the buildings above it--may almost be called beautiful. Of more importance in the history of Ragusan architecture is the Franciscan cloister. Being Franciscan, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and it may well be much later. But it is essentially Romanesque in style. The general effect of the tall shafts which support its narrow round arches differs indeed a good deal from the general effect of the more massive Romanesque cloisters to which we are used elsewhere. But it is essentially one with them in style, and it is one of the many witnesses to the way in which at Ragusa early forms were kept in use till a late time. But the architectural glory of Ragusa is certainly not to be looked for among its churches. The most truly instructive work that Ragusa has to show in any of its ecclesiastical buildings does not show itself at first sight, and its full significance is not likely to be understood till the civic and domestic buildings of the city and its suburbs have been well studied. When this has been done, it will be easily seen that certain arches and capitals in the subordinate buildings of the Dominican church have their part in the history of Ragusan art; but the great civic buildings must be seen and mastered first. Of these two of the highest interest escaped the common overthrow. They both show the Italian Gothic in its best shape; but they also show something else which is of far higher value. They show that peculiar form of _Renaissance_ which can hardly be called _Renaissance_ in any bad sense, which is in truth a last outburst of Romanesque, a living child of classical forms, not a dead imitation of them. Examples of this kind often meet us in Italy; we see something of it in the north side of the great _piazza_ at Venice as compared with the southern side; but the Ragusan examples go beyond anything that we know of elsewhere. Give the palace of Ragusa--the palace, not of a Doge, but of a Rector--the same size, the same position, as the building which answers to it at Venice, and we should soon see that the city which so long held her own against Venice in other ways could hold her own in art also. The Venetian arcade cannot for a moment be compared to the Ragusan; the main front of the Ragusan building has escaped the addition of the ugly upper story which disfigures the Venetian. As wholes, of course no one can compare the two in general effect. Saint Blaise must yield to Saint Mark. But set Saint Blaise's palace on Saint Mark's site; carry out his arcade to the same boundless extent, and there is little doubt which would be the grander pile. The Venetian building overwhelms by its general effect; the Ragusan building will better stand the test of minute study. [Illustration: PALACE, RAGUSA.] The palace of the Ragusan commonwealth was begun in 1388, and finished in 1435, in the reign, as an inscription takes care to announce, of the Emperor Siegmund. What name shall we give to the style of this most remarkable building, at all events to the style of its admirable arcade? Here are six arches--why did not the architect carry on the design through the whole length of the building?--which show what, as late as the fifteenth century, a round-arched style could still do when it followed its natural promptings, instead of either binding itself by slavish precedents or striving after a helpless imitation of foreign forms. Never mind the date; here is Romanesque in all its truth and beauty; here, in the land which gave Rome so many of her greatest Cæsars, the arcade of Ragusa may worthily end the series which began with the arcades of Spalato. Siegmund, the last but one to wear the crown of Diocletian in the Eternal City, has his name not quite unworthily engraved on a building less removed in style than a distance of more than eleven centuries would have led us to expect from the everlasting house of Jovius. Does some pedantic Vitruvian brand the columns as too short? The architect has grasped the truth that, as the arch takes the place of the entablature, the height of the arch may fairly be taken out of the height of the column. Does he blame the massive abaci? They are wrought to bear the greater immediate weight which the arch brings upon the capital, and they avoid such shifts as the Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital. Does he blame the capitals, which certainly do not follow the exact pattern of any Vitruvian order? Let us answer boldly, Why should art be put in fetters? A Corinthian capital is a beautiful form; but why should the hand of man be kept back from devising other beautiful forms? The Ragusan architect has ventured to cover some of his capitals with foliage which does not obey any pedantic rule; in others he has ventured--like the artists of the noble capitals which may still be seen in the Capitol and in Caracalla's baths--to bring in the forms of animal and of human, as well as of vegetable, life. In one point his taste seems slightly to have failed him; on some of the capitals the winged figures with which they are wrought savour a little of the vulgar _Renaissance_. But who shall blame the capital long ago engraved and commented on by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in which however a neighbouring inscription shows that tradition was right in seeing the form of Asklêpios, and not that of a mere mortal alchemist, though tradition was certainly wrong in believing that Asklêpios had been brought ready made from his old home at Epidauros? And the capitals bear arches worthy of them, round arches with mouldings and ornaments, which thoroughly fit their shape, though, like the capitals, they do not servilely follow any prescribed rule. Altogether this arcade only makes us wish for more, for a longer range from the same hand. Compare it with the vulgar Italian work of the two neighbouring churches. Pisa and Durham might have stretched out the right hand of fellowship to Romanesque Ragusa before the earthquake; they would have held it back from Jesuited Ragusa after it. The rest of the front cannot be called worthy of this admirable arcade. The windows behind the arcade are of the worse, those above it are of the better, kind of Italian Gothic. These last in fact are about as good as Italian Gothic can be. They are well proportioned two-light windows with Geometrical tracery, and in the general effect they really agree better than could have been looked for with the admirable arches below. Still they are Italian Gothic, and at Ragusa we should not welcome the loveliest form of tracery that Carlisle or Selby could give us. A Pisan arcade, pierced for light wherever light was wanted, would have been the right thing for the columns and arches to bear aloft. He who duly admires the arcade will do well to shut his eyes as he turns round the corner by the west front of the cathedral; but let him go inside, and the court, if not altogether worthy of the outer arcade, is no contemptible specimen of the same style. It contains one or two monuments of Ragusan worthies. The figure of Roland, which lay there neglected when we first saw Ragusa, has since been set up again in the open _piazza_. And, strange to say in these lands, it ventures to proclaim itself as having been set up, as it might have been in the old time, by the free act of the _commune_ of Ragusa, without any of those cringing references to a foreign power which are commonly found expedient under foreign rule. The court is entered by a side door with two ancient knockers, one of them a worthy fellow of the great one at Durham or of that which we saw more lately at Curzola. But its chief interest comes from its strictly architectural forms, and from the comparison of them with those which are made use of on the outside. The court is very small, and it is surrounded on all sides, save that which is filled by the grand staircase, by an arcade of two, supporting a second upper range. The composition is thus better than that of the front itself, as there are two harmonious stages in the same style, without any intrusion of foreign elements, like the pointed windows in the front; but the arcades themselves, though very good and simple, do not carry out the wonderful boldness and originality of the outer range. Columns with tongues to their base with flowered capitals, showing a remembrance, but not a servile remembrance, of Corinthian models, support round arches. Over these is the upper range of two round arches over each one below, resting on coupled shafts, the arrangement which, from the so-called tomb of Saint Constantia, has spread to so many Romanesque cloisters and to so many works of the Saracen. Were this range open, instead of being foolishly glazed, this design of two stages of a true Romanesque, simpler, but perhaps more classical, than the outer arcade, would form a design thoroughly harmonious and satisfactory. Now when we come to examine this inner court more minutely, we shall find that it is certainly of later date than the outer arcade, and that it supplanted earlier work which formed part of the same design as the outer arcade. It is impossible to believe that the court is later than the great earthquake; but 1667 was not the only year in which Ragusa underwent visitations of that kind; and it is an allowable guess that a rebuilding took place after an earlier earthquake in the beginning of the sixteenth century. That some change took place at some time is certain. There are preparations for spanning arches at one point of the outer wall of the court, which could never have agreed with the position of the present columns. And we have a most interesting piece of documentary evidence which carries us further. In a manuscript account of the building of the palace, it is mentioned that at the entrance were two columns, on the capital of one of which was carved the Judgement of Solomon, while the other showed the Rector of Ragusa sitting to administer justice after the model of Solomon. Now this cannot refer to the outer arcade, where none of the capitals show those subjects. Still less is there anything like it in the arcade of the court, nor can there have been since the present arrangement was made. But the description is no freak of the imagination; both capitals are in being; one of them is still within the palace. The capital showing the Rector in his chair dispensing justice to his fellow-citizens is built in at a corner in the upper story of the court. And a capital of exactly the same style, and with the Judgement of Solomon carved on one face of it, may still be seen in the garden of a house outside the city of which we shall have presently to speak. It is thus perfectly plain that the inner court was rebuilt at some time later than the days of Siegmund, and that this rebuilding displaced an inner design more in harmony with the outer arcade, and of which these two capitals formed a part. To our mind this palace, to which Sir Gardner Wilkinson hardly does justice, and of which Mr. Neale takes no notice at all, really deserves no small place in the history of Romanesque art. It shows how late the genuine tradition lingered on, and what vigorous offshoots the old style could throw off, even when it might be thought to be dead. One or two capitals show that the Ragusan architect knew of the actual _Renaissance_. But it was only in that one detail that he went astray. In everything else he started from sound principles, and from them vigorously developed for himself. And the fruit of his work was a building which thoroughly satisfies every requirement of criticism, and on which the eye gazes with ever increased delight, as one of the fairest triumphs of human skill within the range of the builder's art. But the palace must not be spoken of as if it stood altogether alone among the buildings of the city. There is another civic building, which, though it does not reach the full perfection of its great neighbour, must also be treated as a true fruit, in some sort a more remarkable fruit, of the same spirit which called its greater neighbour into being. This is the building which acted at once in the characters of mint and custom-house, the second character being set forth by its name wrought in nails on the great door. This building stands just where the main street and the _piazza_ join, close by the arch leading to the town-gate. Here we have an arcade of five, the columns of which are crowned with capitals, Composite in their general shape, but not slavishly following technical precedents, nor all of them exactly alike. They have a heavy abacus, which, as well as the soffit of the round arch, is enriched with flowered work. One or two of them are none the better for being new chiselled in modern times. Here is something which is quite unlike Northern Romanesque, but which still is absolutely identical with it in principle. The column and the round arch are there in their purity, and the enrichment is of a kind which we instinctively feel is in place at Ragusa, though it would be out of place at Caen or Mainz or Durham. Whatever the date may be, the thing is thoroughly good, incomparably better than either the Italian Gothic or the cosmopolite Jesuit style. Above the arcade are windows with the usual Venetian attempt at tracery, a large square window between two with ogee arches; above is a stage with square windows, which we may hope is a later addition. The merits of the three stages lessen as they get higher. Yet from the date, when we come to find it out, it seems not impossible that the arcade and both the stages above it may really be of the same date. In the inner court there are no such discordant elements as there are without, though the forms of different styles are quite as much mingled. Octagonal piers support round arches; pointed doorways with thoroughly Ragusan tympana open into the chamber behind them. On this arcade rests another, with round arches on the short sides of the court, and pointed arches on the long sides, rising from columns and square piers alternately. Above is a range which might as well be away. Square windows, round Ragusan windows, might well be endured; but _Renaissance_ shields and _Renaissance_ angels show that the infection had begun. Now this beautiful piece of Romanesque work--we give it that name in defiance of dates--was finished in 1520, when the world on the southern side of the Alps was, for the most part, running after the dreariest forms of the mere revived Italian. This amazingly late date makes this building even more wonderful than the palace, though it certainly is not its rival in beauty. The arcades, good as they are, cannot be compared to those of the palace, and the Venetian work above is still more inferior. Still, the later the date, the more honour to the architect who designed such a work at such a time. And the later the date, the more likely that he built his arcade according to the promptings of his own genius, and added the two ranges of windows in deference to the two rival fashions of his time. [Illustration: DOGANA, RAGUSA.] The arcade of this building, taken alone without reference to the windows above, is the last link in a chain which shows that the preservation of good architectural ideas at so late a time is no mere accident. Indeed, if we pass from public buildings within the city to private buildings outside of it, we shall begin to doubt whether the _dogana_ is the last chain, and whether there are not still later buildings which are fairly entitled to the Romanesque name. The best of the houses of the Ragusan patricians are to be found, not within the city, but by the port at Gravosa, and further on on the way to Ombla. Several of those, while their other features are Venetian Gothic, or even later still, have--commonly in their upper _loggie_--a column or two supporting a round arch, which are certainly not vulgar _Renaissance_, and which keep on the sound tradition of the palace and the _dogana_. The finest of these is the house of the Counts Caboga, known as Batahovina, on the coast on the way to Ombla. Here, as in the palace, as in the _dogana_, an arcade of this late local Romanesque supports an upper story of Venetian Gothic, very inferior and most likely much later than that in either of the civic buildings. It has however at each end an open _loggia_ matching the arcade below. The columns, plain and with twisted flutes--distant kinsfolk of Waltham, Durham, Dunfermline, and Lindisfarn--have capitals such as we might look for in much earlier Romanesque. [Illustration: CABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA.] This, we may note by the way, is the house in whose garden the column from the palace, wrought with the Judgement of Solomon, still lies hid. Indeed we might go further away from the palace than the _loggie_ of the houses. At Ragusa art extends itself to objects which might have been thought hardly capable of artistic treatment. Stone is common, and it is used for all manner of purposes. Among other things stone vine-props are common. In not a few cases these take the form of columns, slenderer doubtless than the rules of classical proportion, realizing the description of Cassiodorus about the tall columns like reeds, the lofty buildings propped as it were on the shafts of spears. Sometimes the columns are fluted or twisted; in a great many cases they have real capitals, with various forms according to taste. It often happens that a row of such columns, whether on a house-top or in a vineyard, really becomes an architectural object, a genuine colonnade. Here the style, the construction at least, is Greek rather than Romanesque; but the principle is the same. A good and rational artistic form is kept in use, and is applied to a purpose for which it is fitted. All these examples, the palace, the _dogana_, the houses, the remains in the Dominican church, we might almost say the vine-props, look one way. All point to the existence of a Ragusan style, to an unbroken Romanesque tradition, which could not wholly withstand the inroads of the _pseudo_-Gothic of Italy, but which could at least keep its place alongside of the intruder. All help us to see how instructive must have been the course of architectural developement at Ragusa, and how much has been lost to the history of art by the destruction of so many of the buildings of the city in the great earthquake. It is easy to see that for a long time the struggle between the genuine Romanesque tradition, the Italian Gothic, and the new ideas of the _Renaissance_, must have been very hard. How long real Romanesque went on, bringing in new developements of its own, but remaining still as truly Romanesque by unbroken succession as anything at Pisa or Durham, is shown by the noble arches of the palace, and the still later _dogana_. The slight touch of _Renaissance_ in some of the capitals of the palace in no sort takes away from the general purity of the style. Still over these noble arcades are windows of Venetian Gothic, and one of the most characteristic features of the Ragusan streets are the flat-headed doorways. But these, alternating as they do with pointed ones, help to make out our case. On the other hand, it is equally plain that in some cases the _Renaissance_ came in early. A little chapel by the basin at Ombla, bearing date 1480, is in a confirmed _Renaissance_ style, and looks more like 1580. Yet of true _Renaissance_ there is very little. One large house in the city, older than the earthquake, stands quite alone as the kind of thing which might easily have been built in Italy or copied in England. But at Ragusa, in the near neighbourhood of several native doorways of different shapes, of many native vine-props, of several native wells--for wells too take an artistic style and copy the form of a capital--the regular trim Palladian building looks strangely out of place. Even in the _Stradone_, where in the houses there is little architecture of any kind, a touch of ancient effect is kept in the form of the shops, with their arches and stone dressers, thoroughly after the mediæval pattern. And some architectural features never died out. The round window with tracery goes on long after every other feature of Romanesque or Gothic is forgotten. It is to be seen in endless little chapels of very late date in the city and suburbs, sometimes standing apart, sometimes attached to private houses. The plain conclusion from all this is that at Ragusa the use of the round arch for the chief arcades never went out of use; that it always remained as a constructive feature, passing from Romanesque to _Renaissance_, if fully developed _Renaissance_ can at Ragusa be said to exist at all, without any intermediate Gothic stage, and continuing to invent and adopt any kind of ornament which suited its constructive form. In windows and doorways, on the other hand, the forms of the Italian Gothic came in and stood their ground till a very late date. In most cases we wish the Venetian features away; in the upper story of the palace they may be endured; but conceive palace, _dogana_, Caboga house, with smaller arcades and windows to match the great constructive arches. Such buildings as these, now so few, make us sigh over the effects of the great earthquake, and over the treasures of art which it must have swallowed up. If Ragusa, in her earlier day, contained a series of churches to match her civic arcades, she might claim, in strictly artistic interest, to stand alongside of Rome, Ravenna, Pisa, and Lucca. Her churches of the fifteenth century must have been worthy to rank with anything from the fourth century to the twelfth. One longs to be able to study the Ragusan style in more than these few examples. It is not indeed absolutely peculiar either to Ragusa or to Dalmatia. Many buildings in Italy and Sicily show a good native Romanesque tradition, holding its own against the sham Gothic, and showing a good fight against the _Renaissance_. Not a few arcades, not a few cloisters, of this kind may be found here and there. But it would be hard to light on another such group of buildings as the palace, the _dogana_, and their fellows. In any case the Dalmatian coast may hold its head high among the artistic regions of the world. It is no small matter that the harmonious and consistent use of the arch and column should have begun at Spalato, and that identically the same constructive form should still be found, eleven ages later, putting forth fresh and genuine shapes of beauty at Ragusa. A TRUDGE TO TREBINJE. 1875. [This paper, as giving the impressions of a first visit to the soil of Herzegovina, during an early stage of the war, has been reprinted, with the change of a few words, as it was first written.] The first step which any man takes beyond the bounds of Christendom can hardly fail to mark a kind of epoch in his life. And the epoch becomes more memorable when the first step is taken into an actual "seat of war," where the old strife between Christian and Moslem is still going on with all the bitterness of crusading days. In Europe it is now in one quarter only that such a step can be made by land with somewhat less of formality than is often needed in passing from one Christian state to another. It is now only in the great south-eastern peninsula that the frontier of the Turk marches upon the dominions of any Christian power; and, now that Russia and the Turk are no longer immediate neighbours, the powers on which his frontier marches are, with one exception, states which have been more or less fully liberated from his real or asserted dominion. That exception is to be found in the Hadriatic dominions of Austria; and certainly no more striking contrast can be imagined than that which strikes the traveller as he passes on this side from Christian to Moslem dominion. Let us suppose him to be at Ragusa, with his ears full of tales from the seat of war, all of which cannot be true, but all of which may possibly be false. The insurgents have burned a Turkish village. No; it was a Christian village, and the Turks burned it. The Turks have murdered seven Roman Catholics. The Turks have murdered seventy Roman Catholics--a difference this last which may throw light on some cases of disputed numbers in various parts of history. The Turks have threatened Austrian subjects. Austrian subjects have attacked the Turks. An Italian has had his head cut off by the Turks just beyond the frontier. A Turkish soldier has been found lying dead in the road a little further on. These two last stories come on the authority of men who have seen the bodies, so that we have got within the bounds of credible testimony. Meanwhile the one thing about which there is no doubt is the presence and the wretchedness of the unhappy Herzegovinese women and children whose homes have been destroyed either by friends or by enemies, and who are seeking such shelter as public and private charity can give in hospitable Ragusa. All these things kindle a certain desire to get at least a glimpse of the land where something is certainly going on, though it may not be easy to know exactly what. Between Ragusa and Trebinje there is just now no actual fighting; the road is reported to be perfectly safe; only it is advisable to get a passport _visé_ by the Turkish consul. The passports are _visé_, but, so far for the credit of the Turks, it must be added that, though duly carried, they were never asked for. The party, four in number--three English and one Russian--presently set forth from Ragusa. It is now as easy to get a carriage at Ragusa as in any other European town. So our party sets out behind two of the small but strong and sure-footed horses of the country, to get a glimpse of what, to two at least of their number, were the hitherto unknown lands of Paynimrie. As long as we are on Austrian territory there is nothing to fear or to complain of but those evils which no kings or laws can cure. The day was rainy--so rainy that a word was once or twice murmured in favour of turning back; but it was deemed faint-hearted to turn again in an undertaking which had been once begun. On the Austrian side the rain was certainly to be regretted, as damping the charm of the glorious prospect from the zigzag road which winds up from Ragusa to the frontier point of Drino. Ragusa, nestling among hills and forts and castles, the isle of La Croma keeping guard over the haven which has ceased to be a haven, the wide Hadriatic stretching to the horizon, form a picture surpassed by but few pictures even in the glorious scenery of the Dalmatian coast. On the other side, it was perhaps no great harm if the rain made the savage land between Drino and Trebinje seem more savage still. At the top of the height the Austrian guard-house is reached, a guard-house which the line of the frontier causes to be overlooked by a Turkish fort above it. The guardians of the borders of Christendom look wild enough in their local dress; but the wildness is all outside, though one certainly does not envy them their watch on so dreary a spot. Hard by is the place where the Italian lost his head; but the Italian was openly in the ranks of the insurgents; so, though the thought is a little thrilling, our present travellers feel no real danger for their heads. The frontier is now passed; we are in the land where the Asiatic and Mahometan invader still holds European and Christian nations in bondage. We see no immediate sign of his presence. The Turkish guard-house is at some distance from the Austrian, in order to watch the pass on the other side, where the road begins to go down towards Trebinje, as the Austrian guards the road immediately up from Ragusa. But, if as yet we see not the Turk, we feel his presence in another way. In one point at least we have suddenly changed from civilization to barbarism. The excellently kept Austrian road at once stops--that is to say, its excellent keeping stops; the road goes on, only it is no longer mended in Austrian but in Turkish fashion--a fashion of which the dullest English highway board would perhaps be ashamed. We presently begin to see something cf the land of Herzegovina, or at least of that part of it which lies between Ragusa and Trebinje. It may be most simply described as a continuous mass of limestone. The town lies in a plain surrounded by hills, and it would be untrue to say that that plain is altogether without trees or without cultivation. Close to the town tobacco grows freely, and before we reach the town, as we draw near to the river Trebenitza, the dominion of utter barrenness has come to an end. But the first general impression of the land is one of utter barrenness, and for a great part of our course, long after we have come down into the lower ground, this first general impression remains literally true. It is not like a mountain valley or a mountain coast, with a fringe of inhabited and cultivated land at the foot of the heights. All is barren; all is stone; stone which, if it serves no other human purpose, might at least be used to make the road better. That road, in all its Turkish wretchedness, goes on and on, through masses of limestone of every size, from the mountains which form the natural wall of Trebinje down to lumps which nature has broken nearly small enough for the purposes of MacAdam. Through the greater part of the route not a house is to be seen; there are one or two near the frontier; there is hardly another till we draw near to the town, when we pass a small village or two, of which more anon. Through the greater part of the route not a living being is to be seen. In such a wilderness we might at least have looked for birds of prey; but no flight of vultures, no solitary eagle, shows itself. As for man, he seems absent also, save for one great exception, which exception gives the journey to Trebinje its marked character, and which brings thoroughly home to us that we are passing through a seat of war. It will be remembered that, early in the war, the insurgents were attacking the town of Trebinje, and, among later rumours, were tales of renewed attacks in that quarter. But at the time of our travellers' journey the road was perfectly open, and no actual fighting was going on in the neighbourhood. Trebinje however was on the watch: the plain before the town was full of tents, and, long before the town or the tents were within sight, the sight of actual campaigners gave a keen feeling of what was going on. Flour is to be had in the stony land only by seeking it within the Austrian frontier, and to the Austrian frontier accordingly the packhorses go, with a strong convoy of Turkish soldiers to guard them. Twice therefore in the course of their journey, going and coming back, did our travellers fall in with the Turkish troops on their way to and from the land of food. For men who had never before seen anything of actual warfare there was something striking in the first sight of soldiers, not neat and trim as for some day of parade, but ragged, dirty, and weather-stained with the actual work of war. And there was something more striking still in the thought that these were the old enemies of Europe and of Christendom, the representatives of the men who stormed the gates of the New Rome and who overthrew the chivalry of Burgundy and Poland at Nikopolis and at Varna. But the Turk in a half-European uniform has lost both his picturesqueness and his terrors, and the best troops in Europe would be seen to no great advantage on such a day and on such a march. And perhaps Turkish soldiers, like all other men and things, look differently according to the eyes with which they are looked at. Some eyes noticed them as being, under all their disadvantages, well-made and powerful-looking men. Other eyes looked with less pleasure on the countenances of the barbarians who were brought to spread havoc over Christian lands. All however agreed that, as the armed votaries of the Prophet passed before them, the unmistakeable features of the Æthiop were not lacking among the many varieties of countenance which they displayed. But the Paynim force, though it did no actual deed of arms before the eyes of our party, did something more than simply march along the road. The realities of warfare came out more vividly when, at every fitting point, skirmishers were thrown off to occupy each of the peaked hills and other prominent points which line the road like so many watchtowers. The armed force went and came back that day without any need for actually using their arms. Insurgent attacks on the convoys are a marked feature of the present war; but our travellers had not the opportunity of seeing such a skirmish. Still before long they did see one most speaking sign of war and its horrors. By the banks of the Trebenitza a burned village first came in sight. The sight gives a kind of turn to the whole man; still a burned village is not quite so ugly in reality as it sounds in name. The stone walls of the houses are standing; it is only the roofs that are burned off. But who burned the village, and why? He would be a very rash man who should venture to say, without the personal witness of those who burned it, or saw it burned. Was it a Christian village burned by Turks? Was it a Turkish village burned by Christians? Was it a Christian village burned by the insurgents because its inhabitants refused to join in the insurrection? Was it a Christian village burned by its own inhabitants rather than leave anything to fall into the hands of the Turks? If rumour is to be trusted, cases of all these four kinds have happened in the course of the war. All that can be said is that the village has a church and shows no signs of a mosque, and that, while the houses were burned, the church was not. The burned village lay near a point of the river which it is usually possible to ford in a carriage. This time however, the Trebenitza--a river which, like so many Greek rivers, loses itself in a _katabothra_--was far too full to be crossed in this way, and our travellers had to leave their carriage and horses and get to Trebinje as they could. After some scrambling over stones, a boat was found, which strongly suggested those legends of Charon which are far from having died out of the memory of the Christians of the East. A primitive punt it was, with much water in it, which Charon slowly ladled out with a weapon which suggested the notion of a gigantic spoon. Charon himself was a ragged object enough, but, as became his craft, he seemed master of many tongues. We may guess that his native speech would be Slave, but one of the company recognized some of his talk for Turkish, and the demand for the two oboli of old was translated into the strange phrase of "dieci groschen." To our travellers the words suggested was the expiring coinage of the German Empire; they did not then take it how widely the _groat_ had spread its name in the south-eastern lands. At first hearing, the name sounded strange on the banks of the Trebenitza; but in the absence of literal _groats_ or _groschen_, the currency of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was found in practice to do just as well. Then our four pilgrims crossed and crossed again, the second time with much gladness of heart, as for a while things looked as if no means of getting back again were forthcoming, and it was not every one of the party that had a heart stout enough even to think of trying to swim or wade. Charon's second appearance was therefore hailed with special pleasure. From the crossing-place to Trebinje itself our travellers had to trudge as they could along a fearfully rough Turkish path--not rougher though than some Dalmatian and Montenegrin paths--till they reached the town itself, which this delay gave them but little time to examine. The suburbs stretched along the hillside; below, the tents of the Turkish troops were pitched on one side; the Mahometan burial-ground lay on the other. After so much time and pains had been spent in getting to Trebinje, a glimpse of Trebinje itself was all that was to be had. But even a glimpse of Eastern life was something, particularly a glimpse of Eastern life where Eastern life should not be, in a land which once was European. It is the rule of the Turk, it is the effect of his four hundred years of oppression, which makes Trebinje to differ alike from Tzetinje and from Cattaro. The dark, dingy, narrow, streets, the dim arches and vaults, the bazaar, with the Turk--more truly the renegade Slave--squatting in his shop, the gate with its Arabic inscription, the mosques with their minarets contrasting with the church with its disused campanile, all come home to us with a feeling not only of mere strangeness, but of something which is where it ought not to be. It is with a feeling of relief that, after our second trudge, our second voyage, our second meeting with the convoy, we reach the heights, we pass the guard-houses, and find ourselves again in Christendom. Presently Ragusa comes within sight; we are in no mood to discuss the respective merits of the fallen aristocratic commonwealths and of the rule of the Apostolic King. King or Doge or Rector, we may be thankful for the rule of any of them, so as it be not the rule of the Sultan. The difference between four hundred years of civilized government and four hundred years of barbarian tyranny has made the difference between Ragusa and Trebinje. CATTARO. 1875. [I have left this paper, with a few needful corrections, as it was published in March 1876. Since then, it must be remembered, much has changed, especially in the way of boundaries--to say nothing of a carriage-way to Tzetinje. Neither Cattaro nor Budua is any longer either the end of Christendom or the end of the Dalmatian kingdom of the Austrian. That kingdom has been enlarged by the harbour of Spizza, won from the Turk by Montenegrin valour and won from the Montenegrin by Austrian diplomacy. But Christendom must now be looked on as enlarged by the whole Montenegrin sea-coast, a form of words which I could not have used either in 1875 or in 1877. Of this sea-coast I shall have something to say in another paper.] The end of a purely Dalmatian pilgrimage will be Cattaro. He who goes further along the coast will pass into lands that have a history, past and present, which is wholly distinct from that of the coast which he has hitherto traced from Zara--we might say from Capo d'Istria--onwards. We have not reached the end of the old Venetian dominion--for that we must carry on our voyage to Crete and Cyprus. But we have reached the end of the nearly continuous Venetian dominion--the end of the coast which, save at two small points, was either Venetian or Ragusan--the end of that territory of the two maritime commonwealths which they kept down to their fall in modern times, and in which they have been succeeded by the modern Dalmatian kingdom. After Cattaro and the small district of Budua beyond it, the Venetian territory did indeed once go on continuously as far as Epidamnos, Dyrrhachion, or Durazzo, while, down to the fall of the Republic, it went on, in the form of scattered outposts, much farther. But, for a long time past, Venice had held beyond Budua only islands and outlying points; and most of these, except the seven so-called Ionian Islands and a few memorable points on the neighbouring mainland, had passed away from her before her fall. Cattaro is the last city of the present Austrian dominion; it is, till we reach the frontier of the modern Greek kingdom, the last city of Christendom. The next point at which the steamer stops will land the traveller on what is now Turkish ground. But the distinction is older than that; he will now change from a Slavonic mainland with a half-Italian fringe on its coast to an Albanian, that is an Old-Illyrian, land, with a few points here and there which once came under Italian influences. It is not at an arbitrary point that the dominion in which the Apostolic King has succeeded the Serene Republic comes to an end. With Cattaro then the Dalmatian journey and the series of Dalmatian cities will naturally end. Cattaro is commonly said to have been the Ascrivium or Askrourion of Pliny and Ptolemy, one of the Roman towns which Pliny places after Epidauros--that Epidauros which was the parent of Ragusa--towards the south-east. And, as it is placed between Rhizinion and Butua, which must be Risano and Budua, one can hardly doubt that the identification is right. But though Ascrivium is described as a town of Roman citizens, it has not, like some of its neighbours, any history in purely Roman times. It first comes into notice in the pages of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and it will therefore give us for the last time the privilege of studying topography in company with an Emperor. In his pages the city bears a name which is evidently the same as the name which it bears still, but which the august geographer seizes on as the subject of one of his wonderful bits of etymology. Cattaro with him is Dekatera, and we read: [Greek: hoti to kastron tôn Dekaterôn hermêneuetai tê Rhômaiôn dialektô estenômenon kai peplêgmenon.] We are again driven to ask, Which is the dialect of the Romans? What word either of Greek or of Latin can the Emperor have got hold of? At the same time he had got a fair notion of the general position of Cattaro, though he runs off into bits of exaggeration which remind us of Giraldus' description of Llanthony. The city stands at the end of an inlet of the sea fifteen or twenty miles long, and it has mountains around it so high that it is only in fair summer weather that the sun can be seen; in winter Dekatera never enjoys his presence. There certainly is no place where it is harder to believe that the smooth waters of the narrow, lake-like inlet, with mountains on each side which it seems as if one could put out one's hand and touch, are really part of the same sea which dashes against the rocks of Ragusa. They end in a meadow-like coast which makes one think of Bourget or Trasimenus rather than of Hadria. The Dalmatian voyage is well ended by the sail along the _Bocche_, the loveliest piece of inland sea which can be conceived, and whose shores are as rich in curious bits of political history as they are in scenes of surpassing natural beauty. The general history of the district consists in the usual tossing to and fro between the various powers which have at different times been strong in the neighbourhood. Cattaro--[Greek: ta katô Dekatera]--was in the reign of Basil the Macedonian besieged and taken by Saracens, who presently went on unsuccessfully to besiege Ragusa. And, as under Byzantine rule it was taken by Saracens, so under Venetian rule it was more than once besieged by Turks. In the intermediate stages we get the usual alternations of independence and of subjection to all the neighbouring powers in turn, till in 1419 Cattaro finally became Venetian. At the fall of the Republic it became part of the Austrian share of the spoil. When the spoilers quarrelled, it fell to France. When England, Russia, and Montenegro were allies, the city joined the land of which it naturally forms the head, and Cattaro became the Montenegrin haven and capital. When France was no longer dangerous, and the powers of Europe came together to part out other men's goods, Austria calmly asked for Cattaro back again, and easily got it. To this day the land keeps many signs of the endless changes which it has undergone. We enter the mouth of the gulf, where, eighty years ago, the land was Ragusan on the left hand and Venetian on the right. But Ragusa and Venice between them did not occupy the whole shore of the _Bocche_; neither at this day does the whole of it belong to that Dalmatian kingdom which has taken the place of both the old republics. We soon reach the further of the two points where Ragusan jealousy preferred an infidel to a Christian neighbour. At Sutorina the Turkish territory nominally comes down to the sea; nominally we say, for if the soil belongs to the Sultan, the road, the most important thing upon it, belongs to the Dalmatian King. And if the Turk comes down to the _Bocche_ at this end, at the other end the Montenegrin, if he does not come down to the water, at least looks down upon it. In this furthest corner of Dalmatia political elements, old and new, come in which do not show themselves at Zara and Spalato. In short, on the _Bocche_ we have really got into another region, national and religious, from the nearer parts of the country. We have hitherto spoken of an Italian fringe on a Slavonic mainland; we might be tempted to speak of Italian cities with a surrounding Slavonic country. On the shores of the _Bocche_ we may drop those forms of speech. We can hardly say that here there is so much as an Italian fringe. We feel at last we have reached the land which is thoroughly Slavonic. The _Bocchesi_ at once proclaim themselves as the near kinsmen of the unconquered race above them, from whom indeed they differ only in the accidents of their political history. For all purposes but those of war and government, Cattaro is more truly the capital of Montenegro than Tzetinje. In one sense indeed Cattaro is more Italian than Ragusa. All Ragusa, though it has an Italian varnish, is Slavonic at heart. At Cattaro it would be truer to speak of a Slavonic majority and an Italian minority. And along these coasts, together with this distinct predominance of the Slavonic nationality, we come also, if not to the predominance, at all events to the greatly increased prominence, of that form of Christianity to which the Eastern Slave naturally tends. Elsewhere in Dalmatia, as we have on the Slavonic body a narrow fringe of Italian speech, art, and manners, so we have a narrow fringe of the religion of the Old Rome skirting a body belonging to the New. Here, along with the Slavonic nationality, the religion of Eastern Christendom makes itself distinctly seen. In the city of Cattaro the Orthodox Church is still in a minority, but it is a minority not far short of a majority. Outside its walls, the Orthodox outnumber the Catholics. In short, when we reach Cattaro, we have very little temptation to fancy ourselves in Italy or in any part of Western Christendom. We not only know, but feel, that we are on the Byzantine side of the Hadriatic; that we have, in fact, made our way into Eastern Europe. And East and West, Slave and Italian, New Rome and Old, might well struggle for the possession of the land and of the water through which we pass from Ragusa to our final goal at Cattaro. The strait leads us into a gulf; another narrow strait leads us into an inner gulf; and on an inlet again branching out of that inner gulf lies the furthest of Dalmatian cities. The lower city, Cattaro itself, [Greek: ta katô Dekatera], seems to lie so quietly, so peacefully, as if in a world of its own from which nothing beyond the shores of its own _Bocche_ could enter, that we are tempted to forget, not only that the spot has been the scene of so many revolutions through so many ages, but that it is even now a border city, a city on the marchland of contending powers, creeds, and races. But, if we once look up to the mountains, we see signs both of the past and of the present, which may remind us of the true nature and history of the land in which we are. In some of the other smaller Dalmatian towns, and at other points along the coast, we see castles perched on mountain peaks or ledges at a height which seems almost frightful; but the castle of Cattaro and the walls leading up to it, walls which seem to leap from point to point of the almost perpendicular hill, form surely the most striking of all the mountain fortresses of the land. The castle is perhaps all the more striking, nestling as it does among the rocks, than if it actually stood, like some others, on a peak or crest of the mountain. One thinks of Alexander's Aornos, and indeed the name of Aornos might be given to any of these Dalmatian heights. The lack of birds, great and small, especially the lack of the eagles and vultures that one sees in other mountain lands, is a distinct feature in the aspect of the Dalmatian hills and of their immediate borders, Montenegrin and Turkish. But, while the castle stands as if no human power could reach it, much less fight against it, there are other signs of more modern date which remind us that there are points higher still where no one can complain that the art of fighting has been unknown in any age. Up the mountain, during part of its course skirting the castle walls, climbs the winding road--the staircase rather--which leads from Cattaro to Tzetinje. On it climbs, up and up, till it is lost in the higher peaks; long before the traveller reaches the frontier line which divides Dalmatia and Montenegro, long before he reaches the ridge to which he looks up from Cattaro and its gulf, he has begun to look down, not only on the gulf and the city, but on the mountain castle itself, as something lying far below his feet. From below, Cattaro seems like the end of the world. As we climb the mountain paths, we soon find that it is but a border post on the frontier of a vast world beyond it, a world in whose past history Cattaro has had some share, a world whose history is not yet over. * * * * * The city of Cattaro itself is small, standing on a narrow ledge between the gulf and the base of the mountain. It carries the features of the Dalmatian cities to what any one who has not seen Traü will call their extreme point. But, though the streets of Cattaro are narrow, yet they are civilized and airy-looking compared with those of Traü, and the little paved squares, as so often along this coast, suggest the memory of the ruling city. The memory of Venice is again called up by the graceful little scraps of its characteristic architecture which catch the eye ever and anon among the houses of Cattaro. The landing-place, the _marina_, the space between the coast and the Venetian wall, where we pass for the last time under the winged lion over the gate, has put on the air of a _boulevard_. But the forms and costume of _Bocchesi_ and Montenegrins, the men of the gulf, with their arms in their girdles, no less than the men of the Black Mountain, banish all thought that we are anywhere but where we really are, at one of the border points of Christian and civilized Europe. If in the sons of the mountains we see the men who have in all ages held out against the invading Turk, we see in their brethren of the coast the men who, but a few years back, brought Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic Majesty to its knees. The same thought is brought home to us in another form. The antiquities of Cattaro are mainly ecclesiastical, and among them the Orthodox church, standing well in one of the open places, claims a rank second only to the _duomo_. Here some may see for the first time the ecclesiastical arrangements of Eastern Christendom; and those who do not wish to see a church thrown wide open from end to end, those who would cleave alike to the rood-beam of Lübeck, the _jubé_ of Albi, and the _cancelli_ of Saint Clement, to the old screen which once was at Wimborne and to the new screen which now is at Lichfield, may be startled at the first sight of the Eastern _eikonostasis_ blocking off apse and altar utterly from sight. The arrangements of the Eastern Church may indeed be seen in places much nearer than Cattaro, at Trieste, at Wiesbaden, in London itself; but in all these places the Eastern Church is an exotic, standing as a stranger on Western ground. At Cattaro the Orthodox Church is on its own ground, standing side by side on equal terms with its Latin rival, pointing to lands where the _Filioque_ is unknown and where the Bishop of the Old Rome has ever been deemed an intruder. The building itself is a small Byzantine church, less Byzantine in fact in its outline than the small churches of the Byzantine type at Zara, Spalato, and Traü. The single dome rises, not from the intersection of a Greek cross, but from the middle of a single body, and, resting as it does on pointed arches, it suggests the thought of Périgueux and Angoulême. But this arrangement, which is shared by a neighbouring Latin church, is well known throughout the East. The Latin _duomo_, which has been minutely described by Mr. Neale, is of quite another type, and is by no means Dalmatian in its general look. A modern west front with two western towers does not go for much; but it reminds us that a design of the same kind was begun at Traü in better times. The inside is quite unlike anything of later Italian work. It seems like a cross between a basilica and an Aquitanian church. It is small, but the inside is lofty and solemn. The body of the church, not counting the apses and the western portico, has seven narrow arches, the six eastern ones grouped in pairs forming, as in so many German examples, three bays only in the vaulting. The principal pillars are rectangular with flat pilasters; the intermediate piers are Corinthian columns with a heavy Lucchese abacus, enriched with more mouldings than is usual at Lucca. As there is no triforium, and only a blank clerestory, the whole effect comes from the tall columns and their narrow arches, the last offshoots of Spalato that we have to record. For the ecclesiologist proper there is a prodigious _baldacchino_, and a grand display of metal-work behind the high altar. A good deal too, as Mr. Neale has shown, may be gleaned from the inscriptions and records. The traveller whose objects are of a more general kind turns away from this border church of Christendom as the last stage of a pilgrimage unsurpassed either for natural beauty or for historic interest. And, as he looks up at the mountain which rises almost close above the east end of the _duomo_ of Cattaro, and thinks of the land and the men to which the path over that mountain leads, he feels that, on this frontier at least, the spirit still lives which led English warriors to the side of Manuel Komnênos, and which steeled the heart of the last Constantine to die in the breach for the Roman name and the faith of Christendom. VENICE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE NORMANS. TRANI. 1881. The solemn yearly marriage between the Venetian commonwealth and the Hadriatic sea had much more effect on the eastern shore of that sea than on the western. On the eastern side of the long gulf there are few points which have not at some time or other "looked to the winged lion's marble piles," and for many ages a long and nearly continuous dominion looked steadily to that quarter. On the western shore Venice never established any lasting dominion very far from her own lagoons. Ravenna was the furthest point on that side which she held for any considerable time, and at Ravenna we are hardly clear of the delta of the Po. In the northern region of Italy her power struck inland, till at last, defying the precepts of the wise Doge who could not keep even Treviso, she held an unbroken dominion from Bergamo to Cividale. That she kept that dominion down to her fall, that that dominion could live through the fearful trial of the League of Cambray, may perhaps show that Venice, after all, was not so unfitted to become a land-power as she seems at first sight, and as Andrew Contarini deemed her in the fourteenth century. Yet one might have thought that the occupation of this or that point along the long coast from Ravenna to the heel of the boot would have better suited her policy than the lordship over Bergamo and Brescia. And one might have thought too that, amid the endless changes that went on among the small commonwealths and tyrannies of that region, it would have been easier for the Republic to establish its dominion there than to establish it over great cities like Padua and Verona. Yet Venice did not establish even a temporary dominion along these coasts till she was already a great land power in Lombardy and Venetia. And then the few outlying points which she held for a while lay, not among the small towns of the marches, but within the solid kingdom which the Norman had made, and which had passed from him to kings from Swabia, from Anjou, and from Aragon. It is this last thought which gives the short Venetian occupation of certain cities within what the Italians called _the Kingdom_ a higher interest in itself, and withal a certain connexion in idea with more lasting possessions of the commonwealth elsewhere. At Trani and at Otranto, no less than in Corfu and at Durazzo, the Venetian was treading in the footsteps of the Norman. Only, on the eastern side of Hadria the Republic won firm and long possession of places where the Norman had been seen only for a moment; on the western side, the Republic held only for a moment places which the Norman had firmly grasped, and which he handed on to his successors of other races. And, if we pass on from the Norman himself to those successors, we shall find the connexion between the Venetian dominion on the eastern and the western side of the gulf become yet stronger. The Venetian occupation of Neapolitan towns within the actual Neapolitan kingdom seems less strange, if we look on it as a continuation of the process by which many points on the eastern coast had passed to and fro between the Republic and the Kings of Sicily and afterwards of Naples. The connexion between Sicily and southern Italy on the one hand and the coasts and islands of western Greece on the other, is as old as the days of the Greek colonies, perhaps as old as the days of Homer. The singer of the Odyssey seems to know of Sikels in Epeiros; but, if his Sikels were in Italy, we only get the same connexion in another shape. A crowd of rulers from one side and from the other have ruled on both sides of the lower waters of Hadria. Agathoklês, Pyrrhos, Robert Wiscard, King Roger, William the Good, strove alike either to add Epeiros and Korkyra to a Sicilian dominion or to add Sicily to a dominion which already took in Epeiros and Korkyra. So did Manfred; so did Charles of Anjou. And after the division of the Sicilian kingdom, the kings of the continental realm held a considerable dominion on the Greek side of the sea. And that dominion largely consisted of places which had been Venetian and which were to become Venetian again. To go no further into detail, if we remember that Corfu and Durazzo were held by Norman Dukes and Kings of Apulia and Sicily--that they were afterwards possessions of Venice--that they were possessions of the Angevin kings at Naples, and then possessions of Venice again--it may perhaps seem less wonderful to find the Republic at a later time occupying outposts on the coasts of the Neapolitan kingdom itself. It was not till the last years of the fifteenth century, when so many of her Greek and Albanian possessions had passed away, that the Republic appeared as a ruler on the coasts of Apulia and of that land of Otranto, the heel of the boot, from which the name of Calabria had long before wandered to the toe. It was in 1495, when Charles of France went into southern Italy to receive for himself a kingdom and to return,--only to return without the kingdom,--that the Venetians, as allies of his rival Ferdinand, took the town of Monopoli by storm, and one or two smaller places by capitulation. What they took they kept, and in the next year their ally pledged to them other cities, among them Trani, Brindisi, Otranto, and Taranto, in return for help in men and money. These cities were thus won by Venice as the ally of the Aragonese King against the French. But at a later time, when France and Aragon were allied against Venice, the Aragonese King of the Sicilies, a more famous Ferdinand than the first, took them as his share in 1509. We cannot wonder at this; no king, or commonwealth either, can be pleased to see a string of precious coast towns in the hands of a foreign power. Again in 1528 Venice is allied with France against Aragon and Naples, and Aragon and Naples are now only two of the endless kingdoms of Charles of Austria. For a moment the lost cities are again Venetian. Two years later, as part of the great pageant of Bologna, they passed back from the rule of Saint Mark to the last prince who ever wore the crown of Rome. So short an occupation cannot be expected to have left any marked impress on the cities which Venice thus held for a few years at a late time as isolated outposts. These Apulian towns are not Venetian in the same sense in which the Istrian and Dalmatian towns are. In those regions, even the cities which were merely neighbours and not subjects of Venice may be called Venetian in an artistic sense; they were in some sort members of a body of which Venice was the chief. Here we see next to nothing which recalls Venice in any way. The difference is most likely owing, not so much in the late date at which these towns became Venetian possessions, as to the shortness of time by which they were held, and to the precarious tenure by which the Republic held them. As far as mere dates go, Cattaro and Trani were won by Venice within the same century. But, as we have seen, the architectural features which give the Dalmatian towns their Venetian character belong to the most part to times even later than the occupation of Trani. Men must have gone on building at Cattaro in the Venetian fashion for fully a century and a half after Trani was again lost by Venice. There are few Venetian memorials to be seen in these towns; and if the winged lion ever appeared over their gates, he has been carefully thrust aside by kings and emperors. More truly perhaps, kings and emperors rebuilt the walls of these towns after the Venetian power had passed away. Still the occupation of these towns forms part of Venetian history, and they may be visited so as to bring them within the range of Venetian geography. Brindisi is the natural starting point for Corfu and the Albanian coast, and Brindisi is one of the towns which Venice thus held for a season. The two opposite coasts are thus brought into direct connexion. The lands which owned, first the Norman and the Angevin, and then the Venetian, as their masters, may thus naturally become part of a single journey. We may have passed through the hilly lands, we may have seen the hill-cities, of central Italy; we may have gone through lands too far from the sea to suggest any memories of Venice, but which are full of the memories of the Norman and the Swabian. We find ourselves in the great Apulian plain, the great sheep-feeding plain so memorable in the wars of Anjou and Aragon, and we tarry to visit some of the cities of the Apulian coast. The contrast indeed is great between the land in which we are and either the land from which we have come, or the land whither we are going. Bari, Trani, and their fellows, planted on the low coast where the great plain joins the sea, are indeed unlike, either the Latin and Volscian towns on their hill-tops, or the Dalmatian towns nestling between the sea and the mountains. The greatest of these towns, the greatest at least in its present state, never came under Venetian rule. Bari, the city which it needed the strength of both Empires to win from the Saracen, is said to have been defended by a Venetian fleet early in the eleventh century, when Venetian fleets still sailed at the bidding of the Eastern Emperor. Further than this, we can find few or no points of connexion between Venice and these cities, till their first occupation at the end of the fifteenth century. But that short occupation brings them within our range. We are passing, it may be, from Benevento to fishy Bari, as two stages of the "iter ad Brundisium." Thence we may go on, in the wake of so many travellers and conquerors, to those lands beyond the sea where the Lords of one-fourth and one-eighth of the Empire of Romania, and the Norman lords of Apulia and Sicily, the conquerors of Corfu and Albania, were alike at home. Between Benevento and Bari the eye is caught by the great tower of Trani. Such a city cannot be passed by; or, if we are driven to pass it by, we must go back to get something more than a glimpse of it. And Trani is one of the towns pledged to Venice by Ferdinand of Naples. In the midst of cities whose chief memories later than old Imperial times carry us back to the Norman and Swabian days of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, we find ourselves suddenly plunged into the Venetian history of the end of the fifteenth. * * * * * Trani then will be our introduction to the group of towns with which we are at present concerned. At the present moment, it is undoubtedly the foremost among them; but it is hard to call up any distinct memory of its history till we reach the times which made it for a moment a Venetian possession. Trani, like other places, doubtless has its history known to local inquirers; but the more general inquirer will very seldom light upon its name. It is hard to find any sure sign of its being in Roman times, but it must be the "Tirhennium quæ et Trana" of the geographer Guido. Let us take such a common-place test as looking through the indices to several volumes of Muratori and Pertz till the task becomes wearisome. Such a task will show us the name of Trani here and there, but only here and there. We do by searching find it mentioned in the days of King Roger and in the days of the Emperor Lothar, but it is only by searching that we find it. The name of Trani does not stand out without searching, like so many of the cities even of southern Italy. Yet Trani is no inconsiderable place; it is an archæpiscopal see with a noble metropolitan church; and in our own day, though much smaller than its neighbour Bari, it seems to share in the present prosperity of which the signs at Bari are unmistakeable. The visitor to Trani will find much to see there, but he will not find the stamp of Venice on the city. Trani, like its fellows, had received its distinctive character long before it had to do with Venice, and that character was not one that was at all marked by Venetian influences. The city is not without Venetian monuments; the memory of its Venetian days is not forgotten even in its modern street nomenclature. There is a _Piazza Gradenigo_, and an inscription near one of the later churches records the name of Giuliano Gradenigo as the Venetian governor of Trani in 1503, and as having had a hand in its building. The castle might be suspected of containing work of the days of the Republic; but a threatening man of the sword forbids any study of its walls even with a distant spy-glass; not however till the chief inscription has been read, and has been found to belong to days later than those of Venetian rule. There is no knowing what may not happen to places when they have once fallen into the hands of soldiers; to the civilian mind it might seem that, when a king writes up an inscription to record his buildings, he wishes that inscription to be read of all men for all time. It is hard too to see how an antiquary's spy-glass can do anything to help prisoners confined within massive walls to break forth, as Italian--at least Sicilian--prisoners sometimes know how to break forth. The metropolitan church of Trani is happily not in military hands; neither are the streets and lanes of the city, the houses, the smaller churches, the arcades by the haven, the buildings of the town in general. All these may therefore be studied without let or hindrance; civil officials, even cloistered nuns, see no danger to Church or State if the stranger draws the outside of a window or copies an inscription on an outer wall. But though we may find at Trani bits of work which might have stood in Venice, it is only as they might have stood in any other city of Italy. There is nothing in Trani, besides the memorial of Gradenigo, which brings the Serene Republic specially before the mind. The great church, the glory of Trani, bears the impress of that mixed style of art which is characteristic of Norman rule in Apulia, but which is quite different from anything to be found in Norman Sicily. It has some points in common with its neighbours at Bitonto and Bari, and some points very distinctive of itself. It is undoubtedly one of the noblest churches of its own class. If we were to call it one of the noblest churches of Christendom, the phrase would be misleading, because, to an English ear at least, it would suggest the thought of something on a much greater scale, something more nearly approaching the boundless length of an English minster or the boundless height of a French one. In southern Italy bishops and archbishops were so thick upon the ground that even a metropolitan church was not likely to reach, in point of mere size, to the measure of a second-class cathedral or conventual church in England or even in Normandy. But mere size is not everything, and, as an example of a particular form of Romanesque, as an example of difficulties ably grappled with and thoroughly overcome, the church of Trani might almost claim to rank beside the church of Pisa and the church of Durham. And higher praise than that no building can have. [Illustration: CATHEDRAL, TRANI.] Fully to take in the effect of this grand church, it will be well not to hurry towards it on reaching the city. Go straight from the railway-station towards another bell-tower, not to that of the _duomo_. That course will lead to the so-called _villa_ or public garden. The suppressed Dominican convent close by its gate has no attractive feature except its tower, one of the usual Italian type, only with pointed arches. But the grounds of the _villa_, raised on the ancient walls of the monastic precinct, look down at once on the waves of Hadria. In the northern view we look out on lands and hills beyond the water; but no man must dream that the eastern peninsula of Europe is to be seen from Trani. We look out only over the gulf of Manfredonia--the name of the Hohenstaufen king is as it were stamped upon the waters--to the Italian peninsula of Mount Garganus. Hence, on our way to the metropolitan church, we pass by the basin which forms the haven of Trani, a basin which reminds us of the _cala_ which is all that is left of the many waters of Palermo. The distant view clearly brings out its main outline; above all, it brings out those arrangements of the eastern end which form the most characteristic feature. We see the tall tower at the south-west corner; we see the line of the clerestory with its small round-headed windows; above all, we see--so unlike anything in Northern architecture--the tall transept seeming to soar far above the rest of the church, with the three apses, strangely narrow and lofty, treated simply, as it would seem, as appendages to the transept itself. Those who have not seen Bitonto and Bari will not guess how great a danger these soaring apses have escaped. The Norman of Apulia did not, like the native Italian, deal in detached bell-towers; he clave to the use of his native land which made the tower or towers an integral part of the church. But he seems to have specially chosen a place for them which is German rather than Norman, and then to have treated them in a way which is neither German, Norman, nor Italian. At Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari, a pair of towers flanks the east end. In Italy it might be safer to say the apse end; but we think that in all these cases the apse end is the east end or nearly so. Such pairs of eastern towers are common in Germany; but there the great apse projects between them. At Bari and Bitonto the whole apsidal arrangement is masked by a flat wall. The towers rise above the side apses; the great central apse is hidden by the wall carried in front of it. We thus get at the east end a flat front, like a west front; we lose the curves of the apses, and with them the arcades and grouped windows which form so marked a feature in the ordinary Romanesque of Germany and Italy. A single window, of larger size than Romanesque taste commonly allows, marks the place of the high altar. And this window is adorned with shafts and mouldings of special richness, and with animal figures above and below the shafts. Now here at Trani, though all the apses stand out, yet a like arrangement is followed. The central apse has only a single window of the same enriched type; the side apses have also only a single window each, but of a much plainer kind. Thus much, without taking in every detail, we can mark in our distant view; we can mark too somewhat of the unusually rich and heavy cornice of the transept, and the upper part of the transept front, the wheel window and the two rich coupled windows beneath it. We can mark too the arrangements of the great square tower, crowned with its small octagonal finish; and even here we can see that, with all its majesty of outline, it is far from ranking in the first class of Italian bell-towers. Its composition lacks boldness and simplicity, while it has nothing remarkable in the way of ornament. Saint Zeno among the simpler towers, Spalato among the more elaborate, stand indeed unrivalled. But the cathedral tower of Trani, when closely examined, is less satisfactory than its own majestic neighbour at Bari. It is not merely that the pointed arch, always out of place in an Italian bell-tower, is used in the upper stages. The pointed arch is used with better effect, both far away in the noble tower of Velletri, and close by at Trani itself, in the far humbler tower of the Dominican church. The fault lies in this, that the windows, instead of being spread over the whole face of each stage, are gathered together in the centre of each, while two of them have rather awkward pointed canopies over the groups of windows. Still, seen from far or near, it is a grand and majestic tower, though its faults, which catch the eye at a distance, become more distinct as we draw nearer. The road by which we approach the _duomo_ will give us no view of it from the west, and, till we come quite near to the church, we shall hardly see how closely it overhangs the sea. We take our course by the harbour, for part of the way is under heavy and dark arcades which remind us of Genoa. Presently, before we reach the great church, we come across the east end of a smaller one, with which we shall afterwards become better acquainted from its western side. At this end it seems to be called _Purgatorio_; at the other end we shall find that its true name is _Ogni Santi_--All Hallows. Here there is no transept; still the three apses may pass for a miniature of those in the metropolitan church; there is the same single large and elaborate window in the mid apse, the same smaller single windows in the side apses. We go landwards for a short way, and we presently find ourselves on a terrace overlooking the sea, close under the east end of the _duomo_. We now better take in both the grandeur and the singularity of the building whose general effect we have studied from a distance. We take in some fresh features, as the tall blank arcades along the walls, a feature shared by Trani with Bari, and we guess that the extraordinary height of the apses must be owing to the presence of a lofty under-church. We see signs too at the east end which seem to show that at some time or other there was a design for some other form of east end, inconsistent with the present design. The visitor will now perhaps be tempted to go at once within, though he ought in strictness to pass under the tower in order to finish his outside survey at the west end. It is curious to see how the same feeling which prevails in the east end prevails in the west front also. Here we have no continuous arcades like Pisa, Lucca, and Zara--happily we have no sham gables like the great one at Lucca; we have again the single great window with the small ones on each side. Only here the mid window has over it a rich wheel, the favourite form of the country, a form which the apsidal east end would not allow. And it is treated in exactly the same way, with the same kind of surrounding ornaments, as the single-light windows. This west front, as it now stands, has a rather bare look; the windows have too much the air of being cut through the wall without any artistic design, and there is too great a gap between the windows and the west doorway with its flanking arcades below. But this last fault at least is not to be charged on the original design, which clearly took in a projecting portico. We may doubt however whether the portico could have been high enough to have much dignity, and we shall find this feature far more skilfully treated in the other smaller church of which we have already spoken. And here we must confess that it is possible to make two visits to Trani, and each time to make a somewhat careful examination of its great church, and yet to miss--not at all to forget to look for, but to fail to find--the bronze doors which form one of the wonders of Trani. This may seem incredible at a distance; it will be found on the spot not to be wonderful. We will not describe the doors at second-hand; we will rather hasten within to gaze on the surpassing grandeur of an interior, which, as an example of architectural design, may, as we have already hinted, rank beside the church by the Arno and the church by the Wear, beside the Conqueror's abbey at Caen and King Roger's chapel at Palermo. We say King Roger's chapel advisedly; for the palace chapel of Palermo, were every scrap of its gorgeous mosaics whitewashed over, would still rank, simply as an architectural design, among the most successful in the world. And the chapel of Palermo has points which at once suggest comparison and contrast with the great church of Trani. We see the traces of the Saracen in both; but at Palermo the building itself is thoroughly Saracenic, at Trani the Saracen contributes only one element among others. In Sicily, where the Saracen was thoroughly at home, the Norman kings simply built their churches and palaces in the received style of the island, a style of which the pointed arch was a main feature. In southern Italy, where the Saracen was only an occasional visitor, a style arose in which elements from Normandy itself--elements, that is, perhaps brought first of all from northern Italy--are mixed with other elements to be found on the spot, Italian, Saracenic, and Byzantine. The churches of Bari, Bitonto, and Trani, all show this mixture in different shapes. One feature of it is to take the detached Italian bell-tower, and to make it, Norman fashion, part of the church itself. In such cases the general character of the tower is kept, but Norman touches are often brought into the details; for instance, the common Norman coupled window, such as we are used to in Normandy and England, often displaces the oecumenical _mid-wall_ shaft which the older England shared with Italy. Thus here at Trani, the tower joins the church, though it is not made so completely part of its substance as it is at Bari and Bitonto. The inside of the church shows us another form of the same tendency. The Norman in Apulia could hardly fail to adopt the columnar forms of the land in which he was settled; but he could not bring himself to give up the threefold division of height and the bold triforium of his own land. An upper floor was not unknown in Italy, as we see in more than one of the Roman churches, as in Saint Agnes, Saint Laurence, and the church known as _Quattro Coronati_, to say nothing of Modena and Pisa, and _Sta. Maria della Pieve_ at Arezzo. But in some of these cases the arrangement is widely different from the genuine Norman triforium, and the threefold division certainly cannot be called characteristically Italian, any more than characteristically Greek. But it is characteristically Norman; and when we find it systematically appearing in churches built under Norman rule, we must set it down as a result of special Norman taste. At Trani each of the seven arches of the nave has a triplet of round arches over it, and a single clerestory window above that. The Norman in his own land would have made more of the clerestory; he would have drawn a string underneath it to part it off from the triforium; he would have carried up shafts to the roof to mark the division into bays. But the triforium itself, as it stands at Trani, might have been set up at Caen or Bayeux, with only the smallest changes in detail. But where in Normandy, where in England, where, we may add, in Sicily, is there anything at all like the arcades which in the church of Trani support this all but thoroughly Norman triforium? These have no fellow at Bitonto; they have hardly a fellow at Bari. In those cities the Norman adopted the columnar arcades of the basilica, while in Sicily the Saracen still at his bidding placed the pointed arch on the Roman column. At Trani too we see the work, or at least the influence, of the Saracen; but it takes quite another form. The pointed arch would have been out of place; in Normandy and England it is ever a mark of the coming Gothic, and there is certainly no sign of coming Gothic at Trani. But the coupling of two columns with their capitals under a single abacus--sometimes rather a bit of entablature--to form the support of an arch, is a well-known Saracenic feature. Not that it was any Saracen invention. In architecture, as in everything else, the Saracen was, as regards the main forms, only a pupil of Rome, Old and New; but, exactly like the Norman, he knew how to develope and to throw a new character into the forms which he borrowed. The coupled columns may truly be called a Saracenic feature, though the Saracen must have learned it in the first instance from such buildings as the sepulchral church known as Saint Constantia at Rome. We may fairly see a Saracenic influence in a crowd of Christian examples where this form is used in cloisters and other smaller buildings where the arches and columns are of no great size. It is even not uncommon in strictly Norman buildings in positions where the shafts are merely part of the decorative construction, and do not actually support the weight of the building. It was a bolder risk to take a pair of such columns, and bid them bear up the real weight of the three stages of what we may fairly call a Norman minster. [Illustration: CATHEDRAL, TRANI, INSIDE.] But the daring attempt is thoroughly successful; there is not, what we might well have looked for, any feeling of weakness; the twin columns yoked together to bear all that would have been laid on the massive round piers of England or their square fellows of Germany, seem fully equal to their work. It may be that the appearance of strength is partly owing to the use of real half-columns, and not mere slender vaulting-shafts, to support the roofs of the aisles. But the slender shaft comes in with good effect to support both the arch between the nave and the transept, and the arch between the transept and the great apse. The lofty transept is wholly an Italian idea; but the general idea of these two tall arches is thoroughly Norman. In looking at such a church as this, so widely different from any of the many forms with which we are already familiar, there is always a certain doubt as to our own feelings. We admire; as to that there is no doubt. But how far is that admiration the result of mere wonder at something which in any case is strange and striking? how far is it a really intelligent approval of beauty or artistic skill? Both feelings, we may be pretty sure, come in; but it is not easy to say which is the leading one, till we are better acquainted with the building than we are likely to become in an ordinary journey. It is familiarity which is the real test. It is the building which we admire as much the thousandth time as the first which really approves itself to our critical judgement. We have not seen Trani for the thousandth time; but we did what we could; we were so struck with a first visit to Trani that, at the cost of some disturbance of travelling arrangements, we went there again, and we certainly did not admire it less the second time than the first. And, whatever may be the exact relation of the two feelings of mere wonder and of strictly critical approval, it is certain that a third feeling comes in by no means small a measure. This is a kind of feeling of historic fitness. The church of Trani is the kind of church which ought to have been built by Normans building on Apulian ground, with Greek and Saracen skill at their disposal. But at Trani, as commonly in these Apulian churches, it is not enough to look at the building from above ground. The great height of the apses will have already suggested that there is a lower building of no small size; and so we find it, conspicuously tall and stately, even in this land of tall and stately under-churches--crypt is a word hardly worthy of them. The under-church at Trani shows us a forest of tall columns, some of them fluted, with a vast variety of capitals of foliage. A few only can be called classical; some have the punched ornament characteristic of Ravenna. A good many of the bases have leaves at the corners, a fashion which in England is commonly a mark of the thirteenth century, but which in Sicily and Dalmatia goes on at least till the seventeenth. * * * * * But the metropolitan church is not all that Trani has to show. In some of the buildings which we pass by in its narrow streets, we see some good windows of the style which it is most easy to call Venetian, though it might be rash hastily to refer them to the days of Venetian occupation. And there are other windows seemingly of earlier date, certainly of earlier character, which bear about them signs of the genuine Norman impress. But the strength of Trani, even setting aside the great church, lies in its ecclesiastical buildings; the best pieces even of domestic work are found in one of the monasteries. Two smaller churches deserve notice; one of them deserves special notice. This is the church of All Saints, of which we saw the east end on our way to the great minster, and on whose west end we shall most likely light as we come away from it. That west end is covered by a portico, or rather something more than a portico, as it contains a double row of arches. The front to the street forms part of a long and picturesque range of building, of which the actual arcade consists of four arches. One only of these is pointed, and that is the only one which rests on a column, the others being supported by square piers. But beyond this outer range, the vaulted approach to the church displays a grand series of columns and half-columns, with capitals of various forms. One is of extraordinary grandeur, with the volutes formed of crowned angels; the forms of the man and the eagle, either of them good for a volute, are here pressed into partnership. Within, the church is a small but graceful basilica, which, notwithstanding some disfigurements in 1853 which are boastfully recorded, pretty well keeps its ancient character, its columns with their capitals of foliage. He who visits Trani will doubtless also visit Bari, and such an one will do well both to compare the great church of Trani with the two great churches of Bari, and to compare and contrast this smaller building with the smaller church at Bari, that of Saint Gregory. Besides this little basilica, Trani possesses, not in one of its narrow streets, but in its widest _piazza_, a church, now of Saint Francis, but which, among many disfigurements, still keeps the form of the Greek cross within, and some Romanesque fragments without. Here, as also at Bari and at Bitonto, oriental influences--something we mean more oriental than Greeks or even than Sicilian Saracens--may be seen in the pierced tracery with which some of the windows are filled. In these cases this kind of work suggests a mosque; with other details, it might have carried our thoughts far away, to the great towers of the West of England. * * * * * Among the other members of this group of cities we might have expected to find Brindisi, so famous as a haven of the voyager in Roman days, and no less famous in our own, fill a high, if not the highest, place among its fellows. And Brindisi has its points of interest also, one of them of an almost unique interest. Over the haven rises a commemorative column--its fellow has left only its pedestal--which records, not the dominion of Saint Mark, but the restoration of the city by the Protospatharius Lupus. Is this he whose name has been rightly or wrongly added to certain annals of Bari? Anyhow there the column stands, one of the few direct memorials of Byzantine rule in Italy. There is the round church also, the mosaic in the otherwise worthless cathedral, and one or two fragments of domestic work. The lie of the city and its haven is truly a sight to be studied; we see that in whatever language it is that _Brentesion_ means a stag's horn, the name was not unfittingly given to the antler-like fiords of this little inland sea. We trace out too the walls of Charles the Fifth, and we see how Brindisi has shrunk up since his day. But we are perhaps tempted to do injustice to Brindisi, to hurry over its monuments, when we are driven to choose between Brindisi and the greater attractions of the furthest city of our group, in some sort the furthest city of Europe. We pass by Lecce, which lies outside our group, as between Trani and Brindisi we have been driven to pass Monopoli, the spot which saw the first beginnings of the short Venetian rule in these parts. Everything cannot be seen, and we shall hardly regret sacrificing something to hasten to a spot which may well call itself the end of the world, and which forms the most fitting link between the central and the eastern peninsulas of Europe. OTRANTO. 1881. Hydrous, Hydruntum, Otranto, has as good a claim as a city can well have to be looked on as the end of the world. It is very nearly the physical end of the world in that part of the world with which it has most concern. When we have reached Otranto, we can go no further by any common means of going. It may pass for the south-eastern point of the peninsula of Italy: it is the point where that central peninsula comes nearest to the peninsula which lies beyond it. It is the point where Western and Eastern Europe are parted by the smallest amount of sea. It has therefore been in all times one of the main points of communication between Eastern and Western Europe. The old Hydrous appears as a Greek colony, placed, as one of the old geographers happily puts it, on the mouth either of the Hadriatic or of the Ionian sea. Hydruntum appears in Roman days as a rival route to Brundisium for those who wish to pass from Italy into Greece. A city so placed naturally plays its part in the wars of Belisarius and in the wars of Roger. Held by the Eastern Emperors as long as they held anything west of the Hadriatic, it passed, when the Norman came, into the hands of Apulian Dukes and Sicilian Kings, and it remained part of the continental Sicilian kingdom, save for the two moments in its history which bring it within our immediate range. Otranto is the one city of Western Europe in which the Turk has really reigned, though happily for a moment only. It is one of the cities in this corner of Italy which formed, for a somewhat longer time, outlying posts of Venetian dominion; and it is a spot where the memory of the Turk and the memory of the Venetian are mingled together in a strange, an unusual, and a shameful way. In most of the other spots which have seen the presence of the Turk and the Venetian, the commonwealth which was the temple-keeper of the Evangelist shows itself only in its nobler calling, as "Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite." At Otranto, Venice appears in a character which is more commonly taken by the Most Christian King. Before Francis and Lewis had conspired with the barbarian against their Christian rivals, the Serene Republic had already stirred him up to make havoc of a Christian city. At Otranto then we finish our journey by land, and from Otranto, as Otranto is now, we have no means of continuing it by sea. We cannot sail straight, as men did in old times, either to Corfu or to Aulona. To make our way from the central to the south-eastern peninsula, we have to make the "iter ad Brundisium" back again from the other side. It is the natural consequence of being at the end of the world, that when we reach the point which holds that place, we have to go back again. And when we find ourselves at Otranto, the fact that we are at the end of the world, that we have reached the end, not only of our actual journey, but of any possible journey of the same kind, is forcibly set before us as a kind of symbol. We have come to an end, to a very marked end, of the great railway system of central Europe. From any place within that system we can find our way to Otranto by the power of steam. Beyond Otranto that power can take us no further; indeed we have so nearly reached the heel of the boot that there is not much further to go by the help of any other power. We are at the end of Italy, at the end, that is, of the central peninsula of Europe, in a sense in which we are not even at more distant Reggio. For Reggio is before all things the way to Sicily, and Sicily we must allow to be geographically an appendage to Italy, strongly as we must assert the right of that great island to be looked on historically in quite another light. And that at Otranto we have distinctly reached the end of something is clearly set forth by the arrangements of the railway station itself. The rails come to an end; the buildings of the station are placed, not at the side of the line, but straight across it, a speaking sign that we can go no further, and that the thought of taking us further has not entered the most speculative mind. At Otranto then we have come to the end of one of the great divisions of the European world; it is therefore a fitting point to form a main point of connexion between that division and another. Otranto and its neighbourhood are the only points of the central peninsula from which we can, as a matter of ordinary course, look across into the eastern peninsula. We say as a matter of ordinary course. There are Albanian or Dalmatian heights from which it is said that, in unusually favourable weather, the Garganian peninsula may be descried; so it may be that the Garganian peninsula is favoured back again with occasional glimpses of south-eastern Europe. But a stay of even a few hours at Otranto shows that there south-eastern Europe comes within the gazer's ordinary ken. It is easy to see that it does not so much need good weather to show it as bad weather to hinder it from being shown. Before we reach Otranto, while we are still on the railway, the mountains of Albania rise clearly before our eyes; from the hill of Otranto itself they rise more clearly still. And even to those to whom those heights are no unfamiliar objects from nearer points of view, it is a thrilling and a saddening thought, when we look forth for the first time from a land of which every inch belongs to the free and Christian world, and gaze on the once kindred land that has passed away from freedom and from Christendom. From the soil of free Italy we look on shores which are still left under the barbarian yoke, shores where so many whose fathers were sharers in the European and Christian heritage have fallen away to the creed of the barbarian and to all that that creed brings with it. On the other hand, it is said that there are more favourable moments when it is possible to look from free Italy into free Greece. It is said that, sometimes perhaps Corfu itself, more certainly the smaller islands which lie off it to the west, may be seen from the hill of Otranto. If so, we look out from that one spot of the central peninsula, from that one spot of the general western world, where the Turk can be said to have really ruled, for however short a time, and not simply to have harried. And we look out on that one among the many islands which gird the eastern peninsula, which has gone through many changes and has bowed to many masters, but where alone the Turk has never ruled as a master, but has shown himself only as a momentary besieger. The Turk then was never lord of Corfu; he was for a while, though only for a very little while, lord of Otranto. The winged lion floated over Corfu while the crescent floated for a season over Otranto. It was therefore perhaps not wholly unfitting that, for another somewhat longer season, the winged lion should float over Corfu and Otranto together. But it was not in his nobler character that the winged lion floated over Otranto. It would have been a worthy exploit indeed, if the arms of Venice, by that time a great Italian power, had driven out the Turk from his first lodgement on Italian soil. But instead of Venice driving the Turk out of Otranto, it was the common belief of the time that it was Venetian intrigue which had let him in. Nay more, if there was any truth in other suspicions of the time, the good old prayer of our forefathers, which prayed for deliverance from "Pope and Turk," might well have been put up by the people of Otranto and all Apulia in the year 1480. Not only the commonwealth of Venice, but the Holy Father himself, Pope Sixtus the Fourth, was believed to be an accomplice in the intrigues which enabled the infidel to establish himself on the shores of Italy. A time came, almost within our own day, when Pope and Turk were really leagued together, and when the Latin Bishop of the Old Rome owed his restoration to his seat to the joint help of the Mussulman Sultan of Constantinople and the Orthodox Tzar of Moscow. But in the fifteenth century we need hardly expect even such a Pope as Sixtus of deliberately bringing the Turk into Italy. His own interests both as priest and as prince were too directly threatened. But it is hard to acquit the Venetian commonwealth, under the dogeship of Giovanni Mocenigo, of risking the lasting interests of all Christendom, and of their own Eastern dominion as part of it, to serve the momentary calls of a petty Italian policy. We even read that Venetian envoys worked on the mind of the Sultan by the argument that it was the part of the new lord of Constantinople to assert his claim to all that the older lords of Constantinople had held east of the Hadriatic. No argument could be more self-destructive in Venetian mouths. If the Turk had inherited the rights of Eastern Cæsar in the Western lands, how cruelly was Venice defrauding him of a large part of the rights of the Eastern Cæsar in his own Eastern lands. * * * * * The conquest of Otranto was the last of the conquests of him who rightly stands out in Ottoman history as pre-eminently the Conqueror. The second Mahomet, he who completed the conquest of Christian Asia by the taking of Trebizond, who crowned the work of Ottoman conquest in Europe by the taking of Constantinople, who by the taking of Euboia dealt the heaviest blow to the Venetian power in the Ægæan, who brought under his power, as a gleaning after the vintage, the Frank lordship of Attica and the Greek lordship of Peloponnêsos, in his last days stretched forth his hand to vex Western Europe as he had so long vexed Eastern Europe and what was left of Christian Asia. He was in truth attacking both at the same time; he won Otranto almost at the moment when he was beaten back from Rhodes. Each scene of his warfare illustrates the nature of the Ottoman power at that moment, how it was by the hands of her own apostate sons that Christendom was brought into bondage. Against Rhodes the infidel host was led by a Greek, against Otranto by an Albanian, both renegades or sons of renegades. And under the first Ferdinand of Aragon such was the state of things in the land which had once been ruled by good King William that soldiers of the Neapolitan King were willing to pass into the service of the Turk. Nay, the inhabitants in general seemed ready to believe the Turk's promises and to accept his dominion as likely to be milder than that of their own stranger king. The invader was his own worst enemy. A contemporary writer witnesses that the prisoners taken by Achmet _Break-Tooth_--such is said to be the meaning of his surname _Giédek_--pointed out to him that by his cruelties at Otranto he was losing for his master a province which otherwise might have been won with little effort. But happily things took another turn. Otranto was in the Western world what Kallipolis--the Kallipolis of the Thracian Chersonêsos--had been in the Eastern. It was the first foothold of the barbarian, the gate by which he seemed likely to open his way to the possession of the central peninsula of Europe, as he had by the gate of Kallipolis opened his way to the possession of the eastern peninsula. Otranto was the last of the conquests of the great Conqueror; what if he had been longer-lived? what if the second Bajazet had deserved the name of Thunderbolt like the first? Would the threat of the first Sultan have been carried out, and would the Turk have fed his horse on the high altar of Saint Peter's? The eastern peninsula fell by internal division, and the central peninsula, as his very entrance into it shows, was fully as divided as the eastern. The French conquests presently showed how little prepared Italy was to withstand a vigorous attack, and Mahomet the Conqueror would have been another kind of enemy from Charles the Eighth. But all such dangers were warded off. The Turk still showed himself once and again in northern Italy, but only as a momentary plunderer. Otranto remained his only conquest on Italian ground, and that a conquest held for thirteen months only. Alfonso, who bears so unfavourable a character from other sides, must be at least allowed the merit of winning back the lost city for his father's realm. Otranto, and Otranto alone of Italian cities, belongs to, and heads, the list on which we inscribe the names of Buda and Belgrade and Athens and Sofia, on which it may now inscribe the names of Arta and Larissa, but from which hapless Jôannina and twice-forsaken Parga are still for a while shut out. It was not therefore till the Turk had been driven out, not until southern Italy had been more thoroughly but not much more lastingly overrun by the armies of France, that Otranto passed for a while under the rule of Venice. The Serene Republic hardly deserved to rule in a city which she had so lately betrayed; the place seems never to have recovered from the frightful blow of the Turkish capture. The town now shows no sign either of the short Venetian occupation or of the shorter Turkish occupation. From the side of military history, this last fact is to be regretted. We must remember that in that day the Ottomans, pressing and hiring into their service the best skill of Europe, were in advance of all other people in all warlike arts. So Guiccardini remarks that the Turks, during their short occupation of Otranto, strengthened the city with works of a kind hitherto unknown in Italy, and which, as he seems to hint, Italian engineers would have done well to copy, but did not. The present fortifications date from the time of Charles the Fifth. Their extent shows at once how far the Otranto of his day had shrunk up within the bounds of the ancient city, and how far again modern Otranto has shrunk up within the walls of the Emperor. It is said that, before the Turkish capture, Otranto numbered twenty-two thousand inhabitants; it has now hardly above a tenth part of that number. As the military importance of the place has passed away, military precautions seemed to have passed away with it; the castle stands free and open; no sentinel hinders the traveller from wandering as he will within its walls. But the traveller will gain little by such wanderings except the look-out over land and sea. The town stands close upon the sea, on a small height with a valley between it and the railway station. It is entered by a gateway of late date, but of some dignity; but it is not much that the frowning entrance leads to. The visitor soon finds that Otranto, which gave its name of old to the surrounding land, which still ranks as a metropolitan city, has sunk to little more than a village. It seems to have had no share in the revived prosperity of the other towns along this coast. Its one object of any importance is the metropolitan church, and this is at once the only monument of the ancient greatness of the place, and also in a strange way the chief memorial of its momentary bondage to the barbarian. * * * * * In order thoroughly to take in the position of the great church of Otranto in its second character, as a memorial of bondage and deliverance, it may be well to pass it by for a moment and to go first to the castle, and look out on one of the points of view which it commands. Any local guide will be able to show the traveller the Hill of the Martyrs. It stands at no great distance beyond the town, and is held to mark the site of a pagan temple. There the Turks, after their capture of the city, did as they have done in later times. Some eight or nine hundred of the people of Otranto were massacred. Their bodies lay unburied so long as the Turk kept possession; on the recovery of the city, the bodies of the martyrs, as they were now deemed, were gathered together, and a special chapel was added to the metropolitan church to receive them. There they may still be seen, piled together in cases, with inscriptions telling the story. There are skulls, legs, arms, bones of every part of the human body, some still showing the dents of barbarian weapons, some with barbarian weapons still cleaving to them. There we look on them, ghastly witnesses that, neither in their days nor in ours, is the Æthiopian at all disposed to change his skin or the leopard his spots. What the Turk did at Otranto he has done at Batak; he may, if the freak seizes him, do the like at Jôannina. Only the deeds of Otranto were at least done by the Turk as a mere outside barbarian; he was not licensed to do them by the united voice of Europe. It is only in these latest times that the Turk has been fully authorized, under all the sanctions of so-called international right, to renew at pleasure the deeds of Otranto and of Batak in lands to which Europe has twice promised freedom. The martyrs of 1480, their sufferings, their honours, have made so deep an impression on the mind of Otranto that the metropolitan basilica has popularly lost its name of _Annunziata_, and is more commonly spoken of as the church of the martyrs. But the great church of Otranto, the church of the prelate whose style runs as "archiepiscopus Hydrutinus et primas Salentinorum," is a building of deep interest on other grounds. Like so many Italian churches, it is not very attractive without, nor is there anything specially to tarry over in its bell-tower. But even outside we may mark one or two signs of the restoration which the church underwent after its deliverance from the Turk. The west window is of that date, one of those rose-windows to which Italian, and still more Dalmatian, taste clave so long, even when all other mediæval fashions had vanished away. Of the same date is the north door, showing, like the great doors at Benevento, the Primate of the Salentines attended by the bishops and chief abbots of his province. As we go within, our first feeling is one of wonder that so much should have lived through the infidel storm and occupation. But, according to the usual practice of Mussulman conquerors, the head church of the city was turned into a mosque; there was therefore, after the first moment of havoc had passed by, no temptation on the part of the new occupants to damage the essential features of a building which had become a temple of their own worship. It is therefore not wonderful that the main features of the basilica are still there, either untouched or most skilfully restored. Seven arches rise from columns, perhaps of classical date, with capitals, mostly of different kinds of foliage, but one of which brings in human figures, after the type which was so well set in Caracalla's baths. But a more interesting study is supplied by the great crypt, or rather under-church. At Otranto, as in some of its neighbours, the craftsmen who worked below clearly allowed themselves a freer choice of forms in the carving of capitals than they ventured on above ground. The vault of the under-church rests on ranges of slender columns, with heavy abaci and with an amazing variety in the capitals. None perhaps can be called classical; but very few are simply grotesque. The few that are so are found--one does not quite see the reason of the distinction--among the half-columns against the walls. Most of them show various forms of foliage and animal figures; the old law that almost any kind of man, beast, or bird, can be pressed to serve as the volute at the corner of a capital is here most fully carried out. But the further law, that that duty is most worthily discharged by the imperial eagle, can be nowhere better studied than in the Hydrantine under-church. In some capitals again, especially in the columns of the apses, the bird of Cæsar is perched as it were on Byzantine basket-work, clearly showing which Augustus it was to whom the Salentine Primate bowed as his temporal lord. Other capitals again are much simpler, but also savouring of the East; the plain square block has mere carving on the surface. Then, of the columns themselves, some are plain, some are fluted, some are themselves carved out with various patterns. In short a rich and wonderful variety reigns in every feature of the under-church of Otranto. Our comparison of the columns and capitals has carried us underground; but the really distinctive feature of the basilica of Otranto is above. Other churches of southern Italy have wonderful crypts; none, we may feel sure, has so wonderful a pavement. And here we do wonder that the Turks did not do incomparably more mischief than they did do. Some mischief they did; but the archbishops and canons of Otranto seem--perhaps unavoidably--to have done a great deal more by destroying or covering the rich pavement to make room for the furniture of the church. It would surely be hard to find another example of a pavement whose design is spread over the whole ground-floor of a great church. The pictures are in mosaic, rough mosaic certainly, of the second half of the twelfth century, when Otranto formed part of the Sicilian realm, and when that realm was ruled by William the Bad. Luckily inscriptions in the pavement itself have preserved to us the exact date, and the names of the giver and the artist. One tells us in leonine rimes: "Ex Ionathi donis per dexteram Pantaleonis Hoc opus insigne est superans impendia digne." Another stoops to prose: "Humilis servus Ionathas Hydruntinus archieps. jussit hoc [~o]p fieri per manus Pantaleonis p[~r]b. Anno ab Incarnatione Dn[~i] Nr[~i] Ihu. Xr[~i] MCLXV indictione XIV, regnante Dn[~o] nostro W. Rege Magnif." The design of the priest Pantaleon, wrought at the bidding of Archbishop Jonathan in the last year of the first William, is of a most extensive and varied kind. Scriptural scenes and persons, figures which seem purely fanciful, the favourite subject of the signs of the zodiac, all find their place. We meet also with one or two heroes of earlier and later times whom we should hardly have looked for. The main design starts, not far from the west end, with a tree rising from the backs of two elephants. The huge earth-shaking beast, the Lucanian ox, is, it must be remembered, a favourite in southern Italy; he finds a marked place among the sculptures of the great churches of Bari. The tree--one is tempted to see in it the mystic ash of Northern mythology--sends its vast trunk along the central line of the nave, throwing forth its branches, and what we may call their fruit, on either side. Here are strange beasts which may pass either for the fancies of the herald or for the discoveries of the palæontologist; but in the lion with four bodies and a single head we must surely look for a symbolical meaning of some kind. He is balanced, to be sure, by other strange forms, in which two or three heads rise from a single body. Here are figures with musical instruments, here a huntress aiming at a stag; and in the midst of all this, not very far from the west end, we find the figure of "Alexander Rex." To the left we have Noah, making ready to build the ark--the story begins at the beginning, like the building of the Norman fleet in the Bayeux Tapestry. Four figures are cutting down trees, and the patriarch himself is sawing up the wood, with a saw of the type still used in the country. The centre of the pavement is occupied by the zodiac; each month has its befitting work assigned to it according to the latitude of Otranto. Thus June cuts the corn. July threshes it, neither with a modern machine, nor with the feet of primitive oxen, but with the flail which many of us will remember in our youth. August, with his feet in the wine-press, gathers the grapes. December carries a boar, as if for the Yule feast of Queen Philippa's scholars. Each month has its celestial sign attached; but it would seem that the priest Pantaleon was in a hurry in putting together his kalendar, and that he put each of the signs a month in advance. Beyond the zodiac, near the entrance of the choir, and partly covered by its furniture, is a figure, which startles us with the legend "Arturus Rex." If we were to have Alexander and Arthur, why not the rest of the nine worthies? If only a selection, why are the Hebrews defrauded of their representative?--unless indeed Samson, who appears in the form of a mutilated figure, not far from the left of Arthur, has taken the place of the more familiar Joshua, David, and Judas. Here is a witness to the early spread of the Arthurian legends; here, in 1165, within the Sicilian kingdom, the legendary British hero receives a place of honour, alongside of the Macedonian. Nor is this our only witness to the currency in these regions of the tales which had been not so long before spread abroad by Walter Map. By this time, or not long after, the name of Arthur had already found a local habitation on Ætna itself. Among other scriptural pieces in different parts, we find of course Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel; there is Jonah too, far to the east; and in the eastern part of the north aisle, the imagination of Jonathan or Pantaleon has forestalled somewhat of the Dantesque conception of the _Inferno_. "Satanas" is vividly drawn, riding on a serpent, and other figures armed with serpents are doing their terrible work in the train of the "duke of that dark place." The whole work is strictly mosaic, and the design, though everywhere rude, is carried out with wonderful spirit. We may indeed rejoice that the hoofs of Turkish horses and the improvements of modern canons have left so much of a work which, even if it stood by itself, it would be worth while going to the end of railways at Otranto to see. * * * * * Such is now the one city in which the Turk ever ruled on our side of Hadria. In earlier times we might have passed straight from Otranto to the lands where he still rules, or to the island where he never ruled. But now he who looks out for Otranto on the heights of Albania, and whose objects call him to the nearer neighbourhood of those heights, must go back to Brindisi to find his way to reach them. FIRST GLIMPSES OF HELLAS. 1875--1881. In our present journey we draw near to the eastern peninsula, to the Hellenic parts of that peninsula, by way of the great island--great as compared with the mass of Greek islands, though small as compared with Sicily or Britain--which keeps guard, as a strictly Hellenic outpost, over a mainland which was and is less purely Hellenic. From Brindisi we sail to Corfu, the elder Korkyra, as distinguished from the black isle of the same name off the Dalmatian shore. In so sailing, we specially feel ourselves to be sailing in the wake of the conquerors who made Corfu an appendage to the Sicilian realm; we are passing between spots on either side which have known both a Norman and Venetian master. But it may be that we may have already drawn near to Greece by another path. It is easy to prolong the voyage which took us from Trieste to Spalato, from Spalato to Cattaro, by a third stage which will take us from Cattaro to Corfu. In this case we may have already studied the Albanian coast, and that with no small pleasure and profit. We may have marked a point not long after we had left Dalmatia behind us, and that where a line may well be drawn. There is a geographical change in the direction of the coast, from the shore of Dalmatia, with its islands and inland seas, its coast-line stretching away to the south-east, to the nearly direct southern line of the shore of Albania. In modern political geography we pass from the dominion of Austria to the dominion of the Turk. In the map of an earlier day, we pass from the all but wholly continuous dominion of the two commonwealths of Venice and Ragusa. In modern ethnology we pass from the Slave under a certain amount of Italian influence to the Albanian under a certain, though smaller, amount of influence, Italian or Greek, according to his local position and his religious creed. In modern religious geography we pass from a land which is wholly Christian, but where the Eastern form of Christianity, though still in the minority, makes itself more deeply felt at every step, to a land where Islam and the two great ancient forms of Christianity are all found side by side. In the geography of earlier times this point marks the frontier of a land intermediate between the barbaric land to the north, with only a few Greek colonies scattered here and there, and the purely Greek lands, the "continuous Hellas," to the south. We find on this western shore of the south-eastern peninsula the same feature which is characteristic of so large a part of the Ægæan and Euxine coasts, both of the south-eastern peninsula itself and of the neighbouring land of Asia. The great mainland is barbarian; the islands and a fringe of sea-coast are Greek. As we draw nearer to the boundary of Greece proper, the Hellenic element is strengthened. Thesprotians, Molossians, Chaonians, were at least capable of becoming Greeks. Epeiros, [Greek: Êpeiros], _terra firma_, once the vague name of an undefined barbarian region, became the name of a Greek federal commonwealth with definite boundaries. And the character of a barbarian land, fringed with European settlements and looking out on European islands, did not wholly pass away till almost our own day. A few still living men may remember the storming of Prevesa; many can remember the cession--some might call it the betrayal--of Parga. It was only when Parga was yielded to the Turk that this ancient feature of the Illyrian and Epeirot lands passed away. What Corinth had once been Venice was. Corinth first studded that coast with outposts of the civilized world. Venice held those outposts, sadly lessened in number, down to her fall. And the men of Parga deemed, though they were mistaken in the thought, that to the mission of Corinth and Venice England had succeeded. From whichever side our traveller draws near to Corfu, he comes from lands where Greek influence and Greek colonization spread in ancient times, but from which the Greek elements have been gradually driven out, partly by the barbarism of the East, partly by the rival civilization of the West. Whether we come from Otranto and Brindisi or from the Illyrian Pharos and the Illyrian Korkyra, we are coming from lands which once were Greek. But Otranto and Brindisi, Pharos and Black Korkyra, even Epidamnos and Apollonia, were scattered outposts of Greek life among barbarian neighbours; as the traveller draws near to the elder Korkyra, he finds himself for the first time within the bounds of "continuous Hellas." He may have seen in other lands greater and more speaking monuments of old Hellenic life than any that the island has to show him; he may have seen the lonely hill of Kymê, the hardly less lonely temples of Poseidônia; but those were Greece in Italy; now for the first time he sees Greece itself. Whatever we may say of the mainland to the left, there can be no doubt, either now or in ancient times, of the Hellenic character of the island to the right. There are the small attendant isles; there are the great peaks of Korkyra--not the lowlier peaks which gave city and island their later name--but the far mightier mountains which catch the eye as we approach the great island from the north. That island at least is Hellas--less purely Hellenic, it may be, than some other lands and islands, but still Hellenic, part of the immediate Hellenic world of both ancient and modern days. It was and is the most distant part of the immediate Hellenic world; but it forms an integral part of it. The land which we see is Hellenic in a sense in which not even Sicily, not even the Great Hellas of Southern Italy, much less then the Dalmatian archipelago, ever became Hellenic. From the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra, it is not merely a land fringed by Hellenic colonies; it is a Hellenic island, the dominion of a single Hellenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually Hellenic or so thoroughly hellenized that no one thought of calling their Hellenic position in question. Modern policy has restored it to its old position by making it an integral portion of the modern Greek kingdom. And, if in some things it is less purely Greek than the rest of that kingdom, what is the cause? It is because, if Corfu may be thought for a while to have ceased to be part of Greece, it never ceased to be part of Christendom. It was for ages under alien dominion, but it never was under the dominion of the Turk. The Venetian could to some extent modify and assimilate his Greek subjects; the Turk could modify or assimilate none but actual renegades. And, after all, the main influence has been the other way. If Italian became the fashionable speech, even for men of Greek descent, men on the other hand whose names distinctly show their Italian descent have cast in their lot with their own country rather than with the country of their forefathers. Shallow critics have mocked because men with Venetian names have been strong political assertors of Greek nationality. They might as well mock whenever a man of Norman descent shows himself a patriotic Englishman. They might as well hint that Presidents and Ministers of France and Spain, who have borne names which proclaim their Irish origin, were bound or likely to follow an Irish policy rather than a French or a Spanish one. The first aspect, indeed every aspect, of the island of Corfu and the neighbouring coast of Epeiros is deeply instructive. The island and the mainland come so close together that, till the eye has got well used to the outline of particular mountains, it is not easy to tell how much is island and how much mainland. A statesman of the last generation twice told the House of Lords that Corfu lay within a mile of the coast of Thessaly. We cannot say, without looking carefully to the scale on the map, how many miles Corfu lies from the coast of Thessaly, any more than we can say offhand how many miles Anglesey lies from the coast of Norfolk. It is a more practical fact that some parts of Corfu lie very near indeed to the coast of Epeiros, though not quite so near as Anglesey lies to the coast of Caernarvonshire. The channel must surely be everywhere more than a mile in width; certainly it could nowhere be bridged, as in the case of Anglesey, or in the cases of Euboia and nearer Leukas. Both coasts are irregular, both coasts are mountainous, and the mountains on both sides fuse into one general mass. Above all, prominent from many points, soars the famous range where, with a singular disregard of later geography, "Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains." Snow of course is in these lands to be had only at a much higher level than the snow-line of the Alps, so that the couch of Arethousa stands out yet more conspicuously over the neighbouring heights than it might have done in a more northern region. The inhabitants of Corfu are fond of pointing to the contrast between the well-wooded hills and valleys of their own fertile island and the bare, almost uninhabited, land which lies opposite to them. And of course they do not fail to point the inevitable moral. As in most such cases, there is truth in the boast, but truth that needs some qualifications. Corfu, through all its changes of masters, has always been under governments which were civilized according to the standard of their own times. It has fared accordingly. Epeiros has been handed over to a barbarian master, and it has also been largely colonized by the least advanced of European races. Besides having the Turk as a ruler, it has had the Albanian, Christian and Mussulman, as a settler. In Corfu the Albanian is a frequent visitor; his sheepskin and _fustanella_ may be constantly seen in the streets of Corfu; but he has not--unless possibly in the shape of refugees from Parga--formed any distinct element in her population. It is only in the nature of things that Greeks under successive Venetian, French, and English rule should do more for their land than Albanians under Turkish rule. But we may doubt whether any people under any government could have made the land opposite to Corfu like Corfu itself. Had the mainland shared the successive destinies of the island, it would doubtless have been far better off than it has been. But it could hardly have been as the island. One point of advantage for the island was the mere fact that it was an island. In all but the highest states of civilization, this is an advantage beyond words; and the ancient colonists fully understood the fact. Still it is a striking contrast to pass across the narrow sea from Corfu to what was Butrinto. Buthrotum, the mythical city of the Trojan Helenos, has a more real being as a Roman colony, and as one of those outposts on the mainland in which Venice succeeded the Neapolitan Kings, and which she kept down to her own fall. Butrinto was once a city no less than Corfu; to Virgil's eyes it was the reproduction of Troy itself. Now we cross from the busy streets and harbour of Corfu to utter desolation at Butrinto. The desolation is greater in one way than any that Helenos or any other primitive settler could have found, because it is that form of desolation which consists in traces of what has been. We enter the mouth of the river, with rich trees and pasturage between its banks and the rugged mountains; we mark ruins of fortresses and buildings on either side, till we come to the ruined castle at the mouth of the lake. The lake is a carefully preserved fishery, and permission is needed to enter it. A few dirty-looking men assemble at the door of a tumble-down building standing against the ruined castle. But among them are personages of some local importance. One is the lessee of the fishery, whose good will is of special importance. There is also a Turkish officer of some kind--more likely a Mussulman Albanian than an Ottoman--with his small and not threatening following. There are one or two native Christians; and it brings the varied ethnology of the land more deeply home to learn that they are neither Greeks nor Albanians, but that they belong to the scattered race of the Vlachs, the Latin-speaking people of the East, whose greatest settlement, far away from Butrinto, has now grown into an European kingdom. It is well to be reminded at such a moment that the Rouman principality, though the greatest, is only one among many, and that the latest, of the settlements of this scattered people. And it brings home the fact to us when we see here, in a land where Greek and Albanian--that is, Hellên and Illyrian--are both at home, the third of the great primitive races of the peninsula, the widely spread Thracian kin, the people of Sitalkês and Kersobleptês, so far away from the land in which alone political geography acknowledges them. One feeling however the group, so small, but differing so widely in race and creed, seem all to share very deeply. This is a devout reverence for the image of George King of the Greeks, when graven on a five- (new) drachma piece, and held up in the hand of one of the representatives of Corfu in the Greek Parliament. We remember the ancient power of much smaller coins--[Greek: hôs mega dynasthon pantachou tô dy' obolô]--and we begin to doubt whether a smaller sum might not have done the work as well. Anyhow his Hellenic Majesty's countenance, in this attractive shape, acts as a talisman on all, private and official, Christian and Mussulman; it buys off all questions or searchings of any kind, and wins free access to the beautiful scenery of the lake, full licence to poke about among what little there is to poke about in the shattered castle. The thought cannot help coming into the mind that those who so greatly respect the image and superscription of King George would have no very violent dislike to become his subjects. Still it is not without a certain feeling of having escaped out of the mouth of the lion that we cross once more over the channel, and find ourselves at the hospitable door of a Greek gentleman of Koloura. CORFU AND ITS NAMES. 1875. The great argument to establish the fact of a long-abiding Slavonic occupation in Greece has always been the changes in local nomenclature, the actual Slavonic names and the Greek names which have displaced older Greek names. The former class speak for themselves; the latter class are held to have been given during the process of Greek reconquest. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that there is a large amount of truth in this doctrine, if only it is kept in moderation, and is not pressed to the extreme conclusions of Fallmerayer. But it is important to note that the change from one Greek name to another has taken place also in cases when there has been no foreign settlement, no reconquest, no violent change of any kind. One of the greatest of Greek islands has lost one Greek name and has taken another, without the operation of any of the causes which are said to have brought about the change of nomenclature in Peloponnêsos. Crete and Euboia, we may say in passing, seem to have changed their names, when in truth they have not; but Korkyra really has changed its name. It had, for all purposes, become Corfu--in some spelling or other--till the modern revival--unwisely, we must venture to think--brought back, not the true local _Korkyra_ ([Greek: Korkyra]), but the Attic and Byzantine _Kerkyra_ ([Greek: Kerkyra]). City and island alike are now again [Greek: Kerkyra]; or rather we cannot say that the city is again [Greek: Kerkyra], as the modern city never was [Greek: Kerkyra] at all, nor even [Greek: Korkyra]. The modern town of Corfu--in its best Greek form [Greek: Koryphô]--stands on a different site from the ancient town of Korkyra, and there can be little doubt that the change of name is connected with the change of site. The legendary history of the island goes up, we need not say, to the Homeric tales. That Korkyra was the Homeric Scheriê was an accepted article of faith as early as the days of Thucydides. His casual phrase goes for more than any direct statement. He connects the naval greatness of the Korkyraians of his day with the seafaring fame of the mythical Phaiakians ([Greek: nautikô poly proechein estin hote epairomenoi kai kata tên tôn Phaiakôn proenoikêsin tês Kerkyras kleos echontôn ta peri tas naus]). Nearly a thousand years later Prokopios is equally believing, though he goes into some doubts and speculations as to the position of the isle of Kalypsô. His way of describing the island should be noticed. With him the island is the Phaiakian land, which is now called _Korkyra_ ([Greek: hê Phaiakôn chôra, hê nyn Kerkyra epikaleitai]). Against this description we may fairly balance that of Nikêtas ([Greek: hê Kerkyraiôn akra, hê nyn epikeklêtai Koryphô]), with whom the promontory of the Kerkyraians is now called _Koryphô_. The two answer to each other. To talk of [Greek: Kerkyraiôn akra] was as much an archaism in the eleventh century as to talk of [Greek: Phaiakôn chôra] was in the sixth. The everyday name of the island in the days of Prokopios was still [Greek: Korkyra] or [Greek: Kerkyra]. In the days of Nikêtas it was already [Greek: Koryphô]. We put the two phrases of Prokopios and Nikêtas together, because they are turned out as it were from the same mould. But there is no doubt that the change of name had happened a good while before Nikêtas, and there is some reason to believe that it was the result of causes which are set forth in the narrative of Prokopios. The earliest mention of Corfu by its present name seems to be that in Liudprand, who calls it "Coriphus" in the plural, the Greek [Greek: Koryphous]. The change therefore happened between the sixth century and the tenth, the change doubtless of site no less than the change of name. And no time seems more likely for either than the time which followed the wasting expedition of Totilas which Prokopios records. Then doubtless it was that the old city, if it did not at once perish, at least began to decay; a new site began to be occupied; a new town arose, and that new town took a new name from its most remarkable physical feature, the [Greek: koryphô], the two peaks crowned by the citadel, which form the most striking feature in the entrance to the harbour of modern Corfu. One argument alone need be mentioned the other way, and that is one which perhaps is not likely to present itself to any one out of Corfu itself. The local writer Quirini quotes a single line as from Dionysios Periêgêtês, which runs thus:-- [Greek: keinên nyn Korphyn nautai diephêmixanto.] Dionysios is a writer of uncertain date; but he may safely be set down as older than Prokopios. If then he used the later name, and used it in a form more modern than the [Greek: Koryphô] of Nikêtas, the whole argument would be set aside, and the name of Corfu would be carried back to a much earlier time. But where Quirini got his verse is by no means clear. We have looked in more than one edition of Dionysios, and no such verse can we find. The only mention of Korkyra is in a verse which runs thus:-- [Greek: kai liparê Kerkyra, philon pedon Alkinooio.] Nor does the commentator Eustathios say one word as to the change of name. We can only conceive that the line must have been added as a gloss in some copy, printed or manuscript, which was consulted by Quirini. We will assume then that, as far as the island is concerned, Korkyra and Corfu--in its various spellings--are two successive names, one of which supplanted the other, while, as far as the city is concerned, they are strictly the names of two distinct though neighbouring cities, one of which fell as the other rose. And now the question comes, Is the island of Korkyra the Scheriê of Homer? Is his description of Scheriê and the city of Alkinoos meant for the description of Korkyra or any part of it, whether the historical city or any other? We must remember that the general witness of antiquity in favour of Korkyra being Scheriê loses a good deal of its weight when we consider that the ancient writers felt bound to place Scheriê somewhere, while no such necessity is laid upon us. Bearing this in mind, the plain case seems to be that it is far more likely that Scheriê was nowhere at all. In dealing with Scheriê and its inhabitants, we are not dealing with an entry in the Catalogue of the Iliad, the Domesday of the Mykênaian empire; we are simply dealing with a piece of the romantic geography of the Odyssey. Everything about the Phaiakians and their land reads as if the whole thing was as purely a play of the imagination as the Kyklôpes and the Laistrygones. It is indeed quite possible that, even in describing purely imaginary lands, a poet may bring in his remembrance of real places, just as the features of a real person may be reproduced in the picture of an imaginary event. The poet, in painting Scheriê, may have brought in bits of local description from Korkyra or from any other place. But that is all. As we read the story, it seems quite as reasonable to look on the map for Nephelokokkygia as to look on the map for Scheriê. The thinkers of the days of Thucydides or of some time before Thucydides, deeming themselves bound to place Scheriê somewhere, fixed it at Korkyra. The reason doubtless was that the Phaiakians are spoken of as the most distant of mankind, far away from any others, and that Korkyra really was for a long time the most distant of Greek settlements in this region. When Korkyra was once ruled to be Scheriê, the process of identification naturally went on. Spots received Homeric names. Alkinoos had his grove and his harbour in the historical Korkyra. All this is the common course of legend, and proves nothing for either geography or history. Yet the tale of Scheriê, of Alkinoos, Arêtê, and the charming Nausikaa, is not simply one of the loveliest of tales. Scheriê knew the use of wheeled carriages; therefore Scheriê had roads. Alkinoos, the head king, was chief over twelve lesser kings. Here we get real history, though history neither personal nor local. Scheriê itself may safely be looked for in the moon; but the roads of Scheriê and the _Bretwalda_ of Scheriê have their place in the early history of institutions. Other names of the island are spoken of, as Drepanê and Makris, descriptive names which perhaps never were in real use, and which, if they were, were supplanted by the historical name of Korkyra. We must again repeat that _Korkyra_, not _Kerkyra_, is the genuine local name. It is the spelling on the coins of the country; it is the spelling of the Latin writers, who would get the name from the island itself; it is the spelling of Strabo. But it is equally plain that in Greece generally the spelling [Greek: Kerkyra] prevailed. It is so in Herodotus and the Attic writers; it is so in Polybios; it is so in the Byzantine writers, who of course affect Attic forms. It must never be forgotten that, from the time of Polybios, perhaps from an earlier time than his, down to the present moment, written Greek has been one thing, and spoken Greek another. Polybios wrote [Greek: Kerkyra], while its own people called it [Greek: Korkyra], just as he wrote [Greek: Êlis], while its own people called it [Greek: Walis]. The difference has been thought to have its origin in some joke or sarcasm--some play on [Greek: kerkos, kerkouros], and the like. But the literary form may just as likely be simply a tempting softening of the local form. One point only is to be insisted on, that the syllable [Greek: Kor] in [Greek: Korkyra], and the syllable [Greek: Kor] in [Greek: Koryphô], have nothing to do with one another. The latter name is no corruption of the elder; it is a genuine case of one Greek name supplanting another--perhaps rather a case of a Greek name, after so many ages, supplanting a name which the first Greek colonists may have borrowed from earlier barbarian inhabitants. In this case the change implies no change of inhabitants, no change of language. It is a change within the Greek language itself, which can be fully accounted for by historical causes. It therefore teaches that changes of name, such as the Slavonic theory insists on in Peloponnêsos, though they do often arise from new settlements and reconquests, do also come about in other ways. It is for the mythologist to find out whether Homer had Korkyra in his eye when he described the mythic Scheriê. This, be it again noted, is a perfectly reasonable subject for inquiry, and in no way implies any historical belief in the legend. It is simply like asking whether the real Glastonbury at all suggested the mythic Avalon. History begins to deal with Korkyra in the eighth century B.C., when the settlement of the Corinthian Chersikratês added the island to the Greek world. From that day onward the island has a long and eventful story, reaching down to our own times. But, before that story begins, the historian may fairly ask of the ethnologist what evidence, what hints of any kind, there are as to the people whom the Corinthian colonists found settled in the island. It is not likely that they found so promising a site wholly uninhabited. Some branch of the great Illyrian race, the race which is still so near to the island, and which still supplies it, if not with inhabitants, at least with constant visitors, may well be supposed to have made their way into so tempting an island. The harbours of Corfu would surely attract the seafaring Liburnians. We are then brought to the common conditions of a Greek colony, planted, as usual, among pre-existing barbarian inhabitants, and, as Mr. Grote has so strongly enforced, sure to receive a dash of barbarian blood among some classes of its members. The _dêmos_ of Korkyra may well have been far from being of pure Hellenic descent--a fact which, if it be so, may go far to explain the wide difference between the _dêmos_ of Korkyra and the _dêmos_ of Athens. Since the time of the Corinthian settlement, the island has undergone endless conquests and changes of masters, each of which has doubtless brought with it a fresh infusion into the blood of its inhabitants. But since the time of Chersikratês there has been nothing like extirpation, displacement, or resettlement. Korkyra has ever since been an Hellenic land, though a succession of foreign occupations may have marred the purity of its Hellenism. And one point at once distinguishes it from all the neighbouring lands. Among all the changes of masters which Korkyra or Corfu has undergone, they have always been European masters. It is the one land in those parts that has never seen the Turk as more than a momentary invader, to be speedily beaten back by European prowess. So much for the origin and the name of the greatest of the group which in modern geography has come by the strange name of the Ionian Islands. The only sense in which that name has any meaning is if it be taken as meaning the Islands of the Ionian Sea. It ought to be needless to remind any one that the word in that sense has nothing whatever to do with the real Ionians, with the Ionic dialect or the Ionic order. It certainly has an odd effect when one hears the people of Doric Korkyra spoken of as "Ionians;" and we have even seen the whole group of islands spoken of as "Ionia," to the great wrong of Chios, Samos, Ephesos, and others of the famous Ionian twelve. But having said so much about names, we must in another paper say something of the long series of revolutions which mark the history of Korkyra under its two names, and of their effect on its present state. CORFU AND ITS HISTORY. 1875. We have already spoken of the singular change of name which has befallen the most famous and important, though not the largest in superficial extent, of the group known as the Ionian Islands. The change of name, as we hold, followed naturally on the change of site of the city. The new city took a new name, and the island has always followed the name of the city. The old city and the new both occupy neighbouring points in a system of small peninsulas and havens, which form the middle of the eastern coast of the long and irregularly-shaped island of Korkyra. There, to the south of the present town, connected with it by a favourite walk of the inhabitants of Corfu, a long and broad peninsula stretches boldly into the sea. Both from land and from sea, it chiefly strikes the eye as a wooded mass, thickly covered with the aged olive-trees which form so marked a feature in the scenery of the island. A few houses skirt the base, growing on the land side into the suburb of Kastrades, which may pass for a kind of connecting link between the old and the new city. And from the midst of the wood, on the side nearest to the modern town, stands out the villa of the King of the Greeks, the chief modern dwelling on the site of ancient Korkyra. This peninsular hill, still known as Palaiopolis, was the site of the old Corinthian city whose name is so familiar to every reader of Thucydides. On either side of it lies one of its two forsaken harbours. Between the old and the new city lies the so-called harbour of Alkinoos; beyond the peninsula, stretching far inland, lies the old Hyllaic harbour, bearing the name of one of the three tribes which seem to have been essential to the being of a Dorian commonwealth. But the physical features of the country have greatly changed since Chersikratês led thither his band of settlers twenty-six centuries back. It is plain that both harbours once came much further inland than they do now, that they covered a great deal of the low ground at the foot of the peninsular hill. The question indeed presents itself, whether the two did not once meet, whether the peninsula was not once an island, whether the original colony did not occupy a site standing to the mainland of Korkyra in exactly the same relation in which the original insular Syracuse, the sister Corinthian colony, stood to the mainland of Sicily. The physical aspect of the country certainly strongly suggests the belief. And though Thucydides does not directly speak of the city as insular, though his words do not at all suggest that it was so, yet we do not know that there is anything in his narrative which directly shuts out the idea. Anyhow, the great change which has happened is plain when we see how utterly the great Hyllaic haven has lost the character of a haven. It is now called a lake, and exists only for purposes of fishing. We may believe that these physical changes had a great deal to do with the removal of the city to another site, with the change from Korkyra to Corfu. The description which Thucydides gives of the great sedition brings out a fact which we should at first sight hardly have expected, the fact that the aristocratic quarter of Korkyra was on the lower ground by the harbour, while the upper part of the town was occupied by the _dêmos_. To one who thinks of Rome, Athens, and ancient cities generally, this seems strange. But arguments from the most ancient class of cities do not fully apply to cities of the colonial class. These, where commerce was so great an object, were no longer, as a rule, placed on heights; convenient access from the sea was a main point, and we can therefore understand that the ground by the coast would be first settled, and would remain the dwelling-place of the old citizens, the forefathers of the oligarchs of the great sedition. There on the lower ground was the _agora_, where the Epidamnian exiles craved for help, and pointed to the tombs of their forefathers. The impression of the scene becomes more lively when we see not far off an actual ancient tomb remaining in its place, though it could hardly have been the tomb of the forefather of any Epidamnian. This is the tomb of Menekratês of Oianthê, honoured in this way by the people of Korkyra on account of his friendship for their city, a plain round tomb with one of those archaic inscriptions in which Korkyra is rich. Archaic indeed it is, written from right to left, in characters which mere familiarity with the Greek of printed books or of later inscriptions will not enable any one to read off with much ease. It formed doubtless only one of a range of tombs, doubtless outside the city, but visible from the _agora_. An orator in the Roman forum could not have pointed to the tombs of forefathers by the Appian Way. The position of the quarter of the oligarchs by the modern suburb of Kastrades seems perfectly clear from Thucydides. The _dêmos_ took refuge in the upper part of the city and held the Hyllaic harbour; the other party held the _agora_, where most of them dwelled, and the harbour near it and towards the continent ([Greek: hoi de tên te agoran katelabon, houper hoi polloi ôkoun autôn, kai ton limena ton pros autê kai pros tên êpeiron êpeiron]). This district marks out the haven by Kastrades, looking out on the Albanian mountains, as distinguished from the Hyllaic haven shut in by the hills of Korkyra itself. But where was the Hêraion, the temple of Hêrê, which plays a part in more than one of the Thucydidean narratives? and where was the island opposite to the Hêraion--[Greek: pros to Hêraion]--and the isle of Ptychia, both of which appear in his history? The answer to the former question seems to turn on another. Was the present citadel, the true [Greek: Koryphô], itself always an island, as it is now? The present channel is artificial--that is to say, it is made artificial by fortifications--but it may after all have been a natural channel improved by art. And that is the belief of some of the best Corfiote antiquaries. If so, this may well be the [Greek: nêsos pros to Hêraion], and Ptychia may be the isle of Vido beyond. The Hêraion would thus stand on the north side of the old Korkyra, looking towards the modern city; it would stand in the oligarchic quarter on the low ground near the _agora_. It was therefore neither of the two temples of which traces remain. One, of which the walls can be traced out nearly throughout, and of which a single broken Doric column is standing, overlooks the open sea towards Epeiros. Another on the other side overlooked the Hyllaic harbour. This in course of time became a church, a now ruined church, but which keeps large parts of its Hellenic walls and some windows of beautiful Byzantine brickwork. It seems hardly possible in any case that the Hêraion could have been at quite the further end of the peninsula, and that the island [Greek: pros to Hêraion] could be either of the small islands, each containing a church, which keep the entrance of the Hyllaic harbour. Such then was old Korkyra, the colony of Chersikratês, the Korkyra which figures in the tale of Periandros, the Korkyra which played such a doubtful part in the Persian War, which gained so fearful a name in the Peloponnesian War, and which, within two generations, had so thoroughly recovered itself that in the days of Timotheos it struck both friends and enemies by its wealth and flourishing state. It is the Korkyra of Pyrrhos and Agathoklês, the Korkyra which formed one of the first stepping-stones for the Roman to make his way to the Hellenic continent, the Korkyra whose history goes on till the wasting inroad of Totilas. Then, as we hold, ancient Korkyra on its peninsula began to give way to Koryphô (Corfu) on another peninsula or island, that to which the two peaks which form its most marked feature gave its name. * * * * * [Illustration: CHURCHES AT CORFU.] This last is the Corfu whose fate seems to have been to become the possession of every power which has ruled in that quarter of the world, with one exception. For fourteen hundred years the history of the island is the history of endless changes of masters. We see it first a nominal ally, then a direct possession, of Rome and of Constantinople; we then see it formed into a separate Byzantine principality, conquered by the Norman lord of Sicily, again a possession of the Empire, then a momentary possession of Venice, again a possession of the Sicilian kingdom under its Angevin kings, till at last it came back to Venetian rule, and abode for four hundred years under the Lion of Saint Mark. Then it became part of that first strange Septinsular Republic of which the Tzar was to be the protector and the Sultan the overlord. Then it was a possession of France; then a member of the second Septinsular Republic under the hardly disguised sovereignty of England; now at last it is the most distant, but one of the most valuable, of the provinces of the modern Greek kingdom. But Corfu has never for a moment been under the direct rule of the Turk. The proudest memory in the later history of the island is the defeat of the Turks in 1716. Peloponnêsos, the conquest of Morosini, had again been lost, and the Turk deemed that he might again carry his conquests into the Western seas. The city was besieged by land and sea; the two fleets, Christian and infidel, stretched across the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, the left wing of the Turkish fleet resting strangely enough on Venetian Butrinto, while the ships of Venice and her allies stretched from Vido to the Albanian shore. The statue of Schulemberg, set up as an unparalleled honour in his lifetime, adorns the esplanade of the city which he saved. Unless we count the Turkish acquisition of the Venetian points on the mainland, which, though done under the cover of a treaty, took at Prevesa at least the form of an actual conquest, this was the last great attempt of the Turk to extend his dominion by altogether fresh conquests at the expense of any Christian power. Korkyra thus gave way to Corfu, and the endless fortifications of Corfu of every date were largely built out of the remains of Korkyra which supplied so convenient a quarry. None but an accomplished military engineer could attempt to give an account of the remains of all the fortifications, Venetian and English, dismantled, ruined, or altogether blown up. But the kingdom of which Corfu now forms a part still keeps the insular citadel, the outline of the two peaks being sadly disfigured by the needs of modern military defence. Of the modern city there is but little to say. As becomes a city which was so long a Venetian possession, the older part of it has much of the character of an Italian town. It is rich in street arcades; but they present but few architectural features, and we find none of those various forms of ornamental window, so common, not only in Venice and Verona, but in Spalato, Cattaro, and Traü. The churches in the modern city are architecturally worthless. They are interesting so far as they will give to many their first impression of Orthodox arrangement and Orthodox ritual. The few ecclesiastical antiquities of the place belong to the elder city. The suburb of the lower slope of the hill contains three churches, all of them small, but each of which has an interest of its own. Of one, known as [Greek: hê Panagia tôn blachernôn], we have already spoken; another, known specially as Our Lady of _Oldbury_ ([Greek: hê Panagia palaiopoleôs]), is unattractive enough from any point from which the spectator is likely to see it. Its form is by courtesy called basilican; but, if so, it is like the basilica of Trier, without columns or arches. Within it is a dreary building enough, but it presents one object of interest in a side-altar, a Latin intrusion into the Orthodox fabric. But the west end is one of the most memorable things to be found in Corfu or anywhere else. Two columns, not of the usual early Doric of the island, but with floriated capitals, though not exactly Corinthian, are built into the wall with a piece of their entablature. On this is graven a Christian inscription, which is given in an inaccurate shape by Mustoxidi (_Delle cose Corciresi_, p. 405), who has further improved the spelling. The spelling is in truth after the manner of Liudprand and the modern shoe-makers of Corfu, and is therefore instructive. At the top come the words of the Psalmist; "This is the gate of the Lord; the _writeous_ shall enter into it":--[Greek: hautê hê pylê tou Kyriou, dikeoi eiseleusontai en autê.] Below come four hexameters:-- [Greek: pistin echôn basilian emôn meneôn sunerithon, soi makar hypsimedon tond' hieron ektisa naon, Hellênôn temenê kai bômous exalapaxas, cheiros ap' outidanês Iobianos edôken anakti.] Who was this Jovianus? Clearly a Christian as zealous as his Imperial namesake; for he cannot be the Emperor himself, as some have thought. He thought it glory and not shame to destroy the works of the Gentiles--the [Greek: Hellênes]--and to turn them to the service of the royal faith. But are we to take the "royal faith" in the same sense as the "royal law" of the New Testament? or does it mean the "royal faith," as being set up under some orthodox Emperor, when the orthodoxy of Emperors was still a new thing? Anyhow the plunderer of Gentile temples and altars could not keep himself from something of the Gentile in the ring and the language of his verses. And had he made use of his spoil to rear a basilica like those of Constantine and Theodoric, we should, from a wider view than that of the mere classical antiquary, have but little right to blame him. The rest of the columns, besides the two that are left, would have well relieved the bareness of his interior; better still would it have been if Saint Peter _ad Vincula_ had found a rival in two arcades formed out of the Doric columns whose fragments lie about at Corfu, almost as Corinthian and Composite fragments lie about at Rome. The third church, that which professes to be the oldest in the island, that which bears the name of the alleged apostles of the island, the Jasôn and Sosipatros of the New Testament, is a more successful work. Brought to its present form about the twelfth century by the priest Stephen, as is recorded in two inscriptions on its west front, it is, allowing for some modern disfigurements, an admirable specimen of a small Byzantine church. It will remind him who comes by way of Dalmatia of old friends at Zara, Spalato, and Traü; but it has the advantage over them of somewhat greater size, and of standing free and detached, so that the outline of its cross, its single central cupola and its three apses, may be well seen. This church, like most in the neighbourhood, has a bell-gable--[Greek: kôdônostasion]--with arches for three bells, of a type which seems to be found of all ages from genuine Byzantine to late _Renaissance_. [Illustration: SAINT JASON AND SAINT SOSIPATROS, CORFU.] To go back to earlier times, the museum of Corfu contains an inscription, [Greek: boustrophêdon] inscription, rivalling that of Menekratês in its archaism, attached to a Doric capital, of far later workmanship, one would have thought, than the inscription. The building art had clearly outstripped the writing art. The military cemetery contains some beautiful Greek sepulchral sculptures from various quarters, not all Korkyraian. And at some distance from the city, near the shore of Benizza--a name of Slavonic sound--is a Roman ruin with mosaics and hypocaust, whose bricks we think Mr. Parker would rule to be not older than Diocletian. In Corfu such a monument seems at first sight to be out of place. For Hellenic remains, for Venetian remains, we naturally look; still it is well to have something of an intermediate day, something to remind us of the long ages which passed between the revolutions recorded by Polybios and the revolutions recorded by Nikêtas. CORFU TO DURAZZO. 1881. We start again from Corfu, and this time our course is northward. A survey of Greece as Greece would lead us southward and eastward. So would even a complete survey of the subject lands of Venice. For that we must go on to the rest of the western islands, to not a few points in the Ægæan, to the greater islands of Euboia and Crete, to Saint Mark's own realm of Cyprus, which the Evangelist so strangely inherited from his daughter and her son. Not a few points of Peloponnêsos for some ages, all Peloponnêsos for a few years, Athens itself for a moment, comes within the same range. We might write the history of Argos from the Venetian point of view, a point of view which would shut out the history of Mykênê, and would look on Tiryns only as _Palai-Nauplia_, the precursor of Napoli di Romania. But no man could journey through Greece itself with Venice in this way in his thoughts. Far older, far nobler, memories would press upon him at every moment. The mediæval history of Greece is a subject which deserves far more attention than it commonly gets, and in that history Venice plays a prominent part. But it is hard, in a Greek journey, to make the mediæval history primary, and even in the mediæval history Venice is only one element among others. A large part of Greece fairly comes under the head of the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice; but we cannot bring ourselves to make that the chief aspect in which we look at them. It is otherwise with the Dalmatian and Albanian possessions of the Republic. There, though other points of view are possible, yet the special Venetian point of view is one which may be both easily and fairly taken. So too with Corfu; thoroughly Greek as the island is, it still lies on the very verge of continuous Greece. In its history and geography it is closely connected with the more northern possessions of the Republic; its Venetian side is at least as important as any other side; we can without an effort bring ourselves to treat it in a way in which we could hardly bring ourselves to treat Argos. We can then fairly take Corfu into our special Venetian survey; but we can hardly venture to carry that survey further. The rest of Greece, though it has its Venetian side, though it is important that its Venetian side should not be forgotten, can never be looked on in this way as an appendage to the Hadriatic commonwealth. We cannot go through the earliest homes of European civilization and freedom, and keep our mind mainly fixed even on the days when Rome had made them members of her Empire, and when their influence had gone far to make the later power of Rome at least as much Greek as Roman. Still less can we go through them with our mind mainly fixed on the days when so large part of Greece had passed under the rule of a city which was in truth a revolted member of the Empire which it helped to split in pieces. We start then again from Corfu, with our faces turned towards our old haunts among the Illyrian coasts and islands. In so doing, we pass for a while out of the Christian and civilized world, to skirt along the coasts where Europe is still in bondage to Asia. The wrong is an old one, as old as the days when Herodotus put on record how Greek cities for the first time passed under the rule of a barbarian master. From his day, from times long before his day, from the days of Agamemnôn, perhaps from the days of the brave men who lived before him, the same long strife has been going on, the same "eternal Eastern question" has been awaiting its "solution." And nowhere does that abiding struggle come more fully home to us than in the lands where the Eastern question has become a Western question. The Greek cities whose bondage to the barbarian was recorded by Herodotus were Greek cities on barbarian ground. They were outposts of Europe on the soil of Asia; they were spots in winning which the Asiatic might deem that he was winning back his own. And after all, the barbarian whose conquest of the Greek cities of Asia marks one important stage in this long strife, was a barbarian of another kind from the barbarians whom European lands have in later times been driven to receive as masters. Croesus worshipped the Gods of Greece, and Greek poets sang his praises. It may even be that the Lydian, like the Persian who succeeded him, was not a barbarian at all in the strictest sense, but that there was some measure of kindred, however distant, between him and his European subjects. It is another kind of master, another kind of bondage, which has fallen to the lot of the lands along whose coast we are now sailing. Here we do indeed see the West in bondage to the East, we do indeed see Europe on her own soil bowed down beneath the yoke of Asia. We pass by coasts which look to the setting sun no less than our own island, but which the Asiatic intruder still holds beneath the yoke,--over some of which he has pressed the yoke for the first time within the memory of living men. On these coasts at least we think of Venice only in her nobler character. Here indeed every island, every headland, which owned her rule, was something saved from the grasp of the enemy; it was indeed a brand plucked from the burning. As we sail northward, we leave spots behind us, memorable in past times, memorable some of them in our own day. We leave behind us Prevesa, where, till almost within our own century, Saint Mark still held his own, hard by the City of Victory of the first Emperor. We remember how Prevesa was torn away from Christendom by the arms of Ali of Jôannina, and how within the last three years freedom has been twice promised to her but never given. We leave behind us more famous Parga, where, within the lifetime of many of us, stout hearts could still maintain their freedom, in the teeth alike of barbarian force and of European diplomacy--Parga, whose banished sons bore with them the bones of their fathers rather than leave them to be trampled on by the feet of the misbelievers. There must be men still living who had their share in that famous exodus, and who have lived to see Europe first decree that their land should be again set free, and then thrust it back again beneath the yoke. We leave behind us Butrinto, happier at least in this, that there no promise of later days has been broken. There we have passed the point beyond which assembled Europe ruled that even the dreams of freedom might go no further. And as we sail between the home of freedom and the house of bondage, our thoughts overleap the mountain wall. They fly to the heights where Souli, birth-place of Botzarês, is left to the foes against whom it so long and so stoutly strove. They fly to Jôannina, so long the home of light and comparative freedom amid surrounding darkness and bondage, but which now, instead of receiving the twice-promised deliverance, is again thrust back into bondage for a while. We pass on by the High Thunderpeaks, fencing in the land of Chimara, famous in the wars of Ali. We double the promontory of Glôssa, and find ourselves in the deep bay of Aulôn, Aulona, Valona, with the town itself high on its hill, guarding the entrance to the gulf from the other side. Here is a true hill-city, unlike Korkyra, unlike even Buthrotum; but while Korkyra and Buthrotum, each on its shore, has each its history, Aulôn on its height has none. We pass by the mouths of the great Illyrian rivers, by Aoos and Apsos, and we leave between them the place where once stood Apollonia, another of the paths by which Rome made her way into the Eastern world. At last we find ourselves in another bay, wider, but not so deep as the bay of Aulôn. Here we look out on what remains of a city whose earlier name dwells in the memory of every reader of the greatest of Greek historians, a city whose later name, famous through a long series of revolutions, ought to be ever fresh in the minds of Englishmen, as having become by a strange destiny the scene of one stage of the same struggle as Senlac and York and Ely. The city on which we look was, under its elder name of Epidamnos, that famous colony of Korkyra which gave an occasion for the Peloponnesian war. Under its later name of Dyrrhachion or Durazzo it beheld Englishmen and Normans meet in arms, when Englishmen driven from their homes had found a shelter and an honourable calling in the service of the Eastern Cæsar. The city on which we gaze, though it is only by a figure that we can be said to gaze on the original Epidamnos, is one of those cities which, without ever holding any great place themselves, without being widely ruling cities, without exercising any direct influence on the course of the world's history, have given occasion for the greatest events through their relations to cities and powers greater than themselves. Under none of its names was Epidamnos the peer of Corinth in the elder state of things, or of Venice in the later. Yet events of no small moment came of the relations between Epidamnos and Corinth, of the relations between Durazzo and Venice. Greater events still came of the relations between Dyrrhachion and Rome. The three names, though of course the third is a simple corruption of the second, are convenient to mark three periods in the history of the place, just as one of the great Sicilian cities is conveniently spoken of at three stages of its life as Akragas, Agrigentum, and Girgenti. When and how the name changed from Epidamnos to Dyrrhachion is not clear, nor are the reasons given for the change satisfactory. In practice, Epidamnos is its old Greek name, Dyrrhachion its Roman, Durazzo its mediæval name. But the name Dyrrhachion can be Roman only in usage; the word itself is palpably Greek. In strictness it seems that Epidamnos was the name of the city, and Dyrrhachion the name of the peninsula on which the city was built. The change then has some analogy with the process by which the tribal names in northern Gaul have displaced the elder names of their chief cities, or with the change among ourselves by which Kingston-on-Hull, as it is still always called in formal writings, is in common speech always spoken of as "Hull." Anyhow, under Roman rule, the name of Dyrrhachion altogether displaced Epidamnos. The new name gradually came to be mispelled or Latinized into _Durachium_ and _Duracium_, and, in that state, it supplied the material for more than one play upon words. When Robert Wiscard came against it, he said that the city might indeed be _Duracium_, but that he was a _dour_ man (_durus_) and knew how to _endure_ (_durare_). The Norman made his way by this path into the Eastern lands, as the Roman had done before him; but as his course was quicker, his stay was shorter. Epidamnos, along with Apollônia and Korkyra, were the first possessions of Rome east of the Hadriatic. They were possessions of the ruling city where dominion was for a long time disguised under the name of alliance. But, under whatever name, Rome, Old and New, held them till the Norman came. But the Norman did not hold them till the Venetian came. In a few years after the coming of Robert Wiscard, Durazzo and Corfu were again cities of the Eastern Empire. Amidst all the revolutions which this little peninsula has gone through, one law seems to hold. Under all its names, it has had in a marked way what we may call a colonial life, in the modern sense of the word _colonial_. It has ever been an outpost of some other power, of whatever power has been strongest in those seas, and it has been an outpost ever threatened by the elder races of the mainland. Herein comes one of the differences between this Albanian coast and the Dalmatian coast further north. The Roman Peace took in all; but in the days before and after the Roman Peace, the settlements of Corinth, Venice, or any other colonizing and civilizing power, along the coast of which Durazzo was the centre, were merely scattered outposts. There never was that continuous fringe of a higher culture, Italian or Greek, which spread along the whole coast further north. As a colony, an isolated colony, Epidamnos or Durazzo was always exposed to the attacks of barbarian neighbours. And in this land the barbarian neighbours have always been the same. The old Illyrian, the Albanian, the Arnaout, the Skipetar--call him by whichever name we will--has here lived on through all changes. He has indeed a right to look on Greek, Roman, Norman, Angevin, Servian, Venetian, and Ottoman, as alike intruders within his own immemorial land. It was danger from the Illyrian that led to the disputes which open the history of Thucydides, when Corinth and Korkyra fought over their common colony. It was danger from the Illyrian which drove Epidamnos into the arms of Rome. It was the Illyrian under his new name who in the fourteenth century for a moment made Durazzo the head of a national state, the capital of a short-lived kingdom of Albania. Twice conquered by the Normans of Apulia and Sicily, twice by their Angevin successors, granted as part of a vassal kingdom by the Norman and as a vassal duchy by the Angevin, twice won by the Venetian commonwealth, held by the despots of Epeiros, by the restored Emperors of Constantinople, by the kings of Servia, by the native kings of Albania, no city has had a more varied succession of foreign masters; but, save in the days of the old Epidamnian commonwealth and in the days of the momentary Albanian kingdom, it has always had a foreign master of some kind. But in the endless succession of strangers which this memorable spot has seen, as masters, as invaders, as defenders, it is the Englishman and the Venetian who can look with most satisfaction on their share in its long history. Englishmen had the honour of guarding the spot for the Eastern Cæsar; Venice had the honour of being the last Christian champion to guard it against the Ottoman Sultan. * * * * * We stand then gazing from our ship on what is left of the city which Robert Wiscard crossed the sea to conquer, which Alexios came with his motley host to defend, and to find that in all that host the men whom he could best trust were the English exiles. There, as in their own island, the English axe and the Norman lance clashed together; there the stout axemen alone stayed to die, while the other soldiers of the Eastern Rome, the Greek, the Turk, and the Slave, all turned to fly around their Emperor. We look out, and we long to know the site of the church of Saint Michael, which our countrymen so stoutly guarded, till the Normans, Norman-like, took to their favourite weapon of fire. But may we confess to the weakness of looking at all these things only from the deck of the steamer? Perhaps there are some who may be forgiven if they shrink from thrusting themselves alone, with no native or experienced guide, into the jaws of the present masters of Durazzo. They may be the more forgiven when those who have the care of their vessel and its temporary inhabitants utter warnings against any but the most stout-hearted trusting themselves to the boats which form the only means of reaching the Dyrrhachian peninsula. Strengthened in weakness by such counsels, there seems a kind of magnanimity in the resolution to abide in the ship, to say that we have landed at free Corfu, that we shall land at recovered Antivari, but that we will not betweenwhiles set foot on any soil where the Turk still reigns. And the time of distant gazing is not wasted. Without risking ourselves either on Turkish ground or on the rough waves of the Epidamnian bay, a fair general view of the city may be had from the steamer. The wide curve of the bay has for the most part a flat shore, with a background of mountains in the distant landscape. Towards the north-west corner, a promontory of a good height, backed by a comb-like range of peaks, rises at once from the water. This is the peninsula of Dyrrhachion, once crowned by the Epidamnian city. The modern town is seen on a small part of the tower slope of the hill. The walls can be traced through the greater part of their circuit; a huge round bastion by the sea, more than one tower, round and square, teach us that Durazzo has been strongly fortified. If we may eke out our own distant impressions by the help of an old print showing what Durazzo was in times past, we see that it was fortified indeed. We can recognize in the picture most of the towers which we have seen with our own eyes, and there is shown also another tower far greater, a huge square tower of many stages, which no imagination of the artist can have devised out of anything which now comes into the sea-view of the city. But that view enables us to trace out a few buildings within the wall. We mark the distinctive symbols of the two stranger forms of worship, from the East and from the West, which have, each in its turn, supplanted or dominated the native Church. The Latin church, with its conspicuous bell-tower, carries on the traditions of Angevin and Venetian rule; the mosque, with its more conspicuous minaret, speaks of the more abiding dominion of the representative of the False Prophet. The native church meanwhile lurks significantly unseen in the general view. Our teacher on board our ship assures us that Durazzo is not without an Orthodox place of worship; but he cannot point out its whereabouts. And it may be that it is no common anniversary on which we look out on the land which has passed into bondage. Looked at by the evening light of the twenty-ninth day of May, the group of buildings at Durazzo, alike by what is present to the eye and by what is absent, brings to the mind the fate of a greater city than Durazzo was in its proudest day. It makes us muse how, after four hundred and eight and twenty years, we have still to repeat the Psalmist's words: "O God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones." Durazzo has not indeed, like some other cities under the yoke, sunk to a heap of stones; but it is easy to see how the Turkish town has shrunk up within the Venetian walls, and again how narrow must be the circuit of Venetian Durazzo compared with the Epidamnos of the days of Thucydides, or even with the Dyrrhachion beneath whose walls our banished kinsmen so well maintained the cause of the Eastern Augustus. For the church that they so stoutly defended we need not say that it is vain to look in such a Pisgah view of the city as is all that we can take. But to the left of the present wall, where the hill soars, one stage upon another, far above the height of Durazzo that now is, we must surely place the site of the akropolis of the old Korkyraian settlers. Such a post, looking over the wide bay and commanding its mouth, would be just what would commend itself to the Greek colonists for the site of their new stronghold, while the lower city would naturally be spread over the more sheltered ground which holds all that is left of Durazzo under the rule of the Turk. Pausanias indeed implies that there had been a change of site before his time, that the Dyrrhachion of his day did not stand on exactly the same ground as the elder Epidamnos. No doubt the loftier site was the older; men came down from the hill-top as they did at Athens and Corinth. Thus much the passing stranger can see of this historic spot, even without setting his foot on the soil which the barbarian has torn away from Christendom. His course will bear him on to the place of his next halt, to the spot which, only a few months back, was the last soil which Christendom had won back from the barbarian. Since then, if another land has been denied the promised freedom, in a third the boon has been actually bestowed. And we may comfort ourselves by thinking that, while the shame of what is left undone belongs to others, the praise of what is done belongs to our own land only. We may comfort ourselves too by further thinking that right and freedom are powers which have an awkward way, when they have taken the inch, of going on to take the ell. The wise men whose wisdom consists in living politically from hand to mouth, are again crying out against "re-opening the Eastern question." In sailing along the shores, in scanning their history in past and present times, we feel how deep a truth was casually uttered in the shallow sneer which called that question "eternal." We feel how vain is the dream of those who think that this or that half-measure has solved it. As we gaze on enslaved Durazzo, with free Greece behind us, with free Montenegro before us--as we run swiftly in our thoughts over the long history of the spot--as we specially call up the deeds of our own countrymen on the shore on which we look--we feel that something indeed has been done, but that there is yet much more to do. Before us, behind us, are lands to which England, and England only, has given freedom. A day must come when, what England has done for Corfu, for Arta, and for Dulcigno, she must do for Jôannina and for Durazzo. ANTIVARI. 1881. We wind up our course with one more of the once subject cities of Venice, one where we can hardly say that we are any longer following in Norman footsteps, but whose history stands apart from the history of Dalmatia and Istria, while it has much in common with our last halting place. But here the main interest belongs to our own day. It is with new and strange feelings that we look out on a land which, when we last passed by it, was still clutched tight in the grasp of the barbarian, but to which we can now give the new and thrilling name of the sea-coast of Tzernagora. And yet it is with mingled feelings that we gaze. We rejoice in the victories, in the extension, of the unconquered principality, the land which has shown itself a surer "bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite" than Hungary or Poland, or even Venice, ever proved. We rejoice that the warriors of the mountain, long shut in by force and fraud, have again, with their own right hands, cut their way to their own sea. And yet we feel that, though the sea to which they have cut their way is truly their own sea, their own ancient heritage, yet the coast and the havens which they have won are not the coast and the havens which they should have won. If all had their own, Dulcigno, Antivari, and the ewe lamb which the rich man stole at Spizza, would be the havens of the free Albanian, while the free Slave would have his outlet to the Hadriatic waters at his own Cattaro and at Ragusa too. In such an ideal state of things, the present lord of Cattaro and Ragusa might reign peaceably and harmlessly in the duchy of his grandmothers, happy in deliverance from the curses of those whom he now keeps back from union with the brethren whom they love and with the one prince whom they acknowledge. The Montenegrin, in short, kept back by wrong from winning his way to the sea by peaceful union with those who yearn for his presence, has been driven to win his way to the sea by the conquest of lands which were once the heritage of his race, but from which his race has now passed away. Forbidden to be the deliverer of the Slave, he has been forced to be the conqueror of the Albanian. The Albanian Mussulman himself has practically gained by being conquered; still, as we said, if every one had his own, arrangements would be different. The blame indeed lies, not with the people who extend their borders when to extend their border is a matter of national life, but with those who, not in the interest of any people, nation, or language, but in the private interest of their own family estate, sit by to hinder them from extending their borders in the right way. We rejoice then as we look for the first time on the sea-coast of Montenegro; but we mourn that the sea-coast of Montenegro lies where it does and not elsewhere. We mourn too that the enlargement of Christendom, the falling back of Islam, has been bought only by the destruction of an ancient and beautiful city from which the memorials at least of Christendom had not wholly passed away. Antibaris, Antivari, in the tongues of the land, _Bar_ and _Tivari_, is perhaps rather to be understood as meaning "the Bari on the other side" than "the city opposite Bari." But there is no doubt that its name contains, in one way or another, a reference to the more famous Bari, "Barium piscosum," on the other side of the Hadriatic. And Antivari is the opposite to Bari in a sense which was certainly not meant; no two sites can well be more unlike one another than the sites of Bari and of Antivari. The Apulian Bari lies low on a flat shore, with not so much as a background of hills; the Albanian Bari crowns a height, with a wall of more soaring heights on each side of it. The Apulian Bari had no chance of occupying such a position as this; the marked difference between the two coasts of the Hadriatic forbade it. But the site of Antivari is hardly less unlike most of the other sites on its own coast. Zara, Salona and its successor Spalato, Epidauros and its successor Ragusa, Cattaro, Durazzo, and a crowd of others of lesser name, are none of them placed on heights. Some of them nestle immediately at the foot of the mountain; some have thrown out their defences, older or newer, some way up the side of the mountain; in none is the city itself perched high on the hills. For a parallel to Antivari on this coast we have to go back to the mountain citadel of Aulona. The position and the name of Antivari seem to point to a state of things differing both from the days of the Greek and Roman foundations, and from the days of the cities which arose to shelter their fugitives in the day of overthrow. Long Salona stood low on the shore; the house of Jovius stood low on the shore also; it did not come into the head of the founders of either to plant city or palace on the height of Clissa. When Antivari arose, it would seem that men had gone back to that earlier state of things which planted the oldest Argos, even the oldest Corinth, on mountain peaks some way from their own coasts. The inaccessible height had again come to be looked on as a source of strength. Antivari may take its place alongside of the mediæval Syra, the Latin town covering its own peaked hill--a _mons acutus_, a Montacute, by the shore--while the oldest and the newest Hermoupolis lies on the shore at its feet. The town does not even look down at once on the haven; it has to be reached in a manner sideways from the haven. It is true indeed that the sea has gone back, that the plain at the foot of the mountains between the town and the shore was smaller than it now is, even in times not far removed from our own. But Antivari was never as Cattaro; it always stood on a height, with some greater or less extent of level ground between the town and its own haven. The city thus placed has gone through its full share of the revolutions of the eastern coasts of the Hadriatic. Once a commonwealth under the protection of the Servian kings and tzars, it came late under Venetian rule. But it remained under that rule down to a later time than any other of the possessions of the Republic on this coast, save those which came within the actual Dalmatian border and those detached points further to the south which have a history of their own in common with the so-called Ionian Islands. It was for a while in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, what Budua was for so long afterwards, the furthest point of the continuous rule of Saint Mark, a city which remained part of Christendom after Durazzo and Skodra had passed into the hands of the infidel. In earlier times, when Antivari had a separate being, its tendency was rather to a connexion with Ragusa than with Venice. Ragusa, though the nearer of the rivals, was the weaker, the less likely to change alliance or protection into dominion. Antivari too, like most other city-commonwealths, had its patricians and plebeians, its disputes between the privileged and the non-privileged order. As the justice of either side at home was distrusted, it was agreed that the decision of some classes of causes should be referred to the courts of Ragusa. Such a settlement, though taking another and more dangerous form, is the same in principle as the favourite Italian custom of choosing a foreign _podestà_, as the earlier usage by which cities which had won their independence in all other points were still willing to receive a criminal judge of the Emperor's naming. In all these cases alike, the stranger is looked on as more likely than the native to deal out even-handed justice amid the disputes and rivalries of persons and parties. Though Antivari stands on a hill, it does not crown any such height as those of Cortona or Akrokorinthos, nor does it call for any such journey as that which leads to the spot which masters of the high-polite style will now doubtless call its "metropolis" at Tzetinje. It stands on an advanced point among the mountains, one easily commanded from higher points, as was soon found in the siege of 1877. A road of no astonishing steepness leads us up to the town--or more strictly to its ruins. We look down on a church in the valley, whose air proclaims it as belonging to the Orthodox communion; and that church seems to be the only untouched building within sight. It is not till we get within the walls that we take in the full measure of the destruction which has been wrought; but the first glance shows that Antivari has suffered not a little from the warfare of our own times. The walls and towers are there; but we see that they fence in only roofless buildings; the mosques, with their minarets, several of them shattered, remind us that we are drawing near to a city which has been won for Christendom from Islam, as a nearer view reminds us that it is a city which had before been won for Islam from Christendom. We halt at a small _café_ outside the walls, where we receive a friendly greeting from the representatives of Montenegrin authority in the new conquest. Here too is the club and reading-room of Antivari, supplied with newspapers in the Slavonic, Italian, and Turkish tongues; the really prevailing speech of the district, the immemorial Skipetar or Albanian, hardly boasts of a representative in the press. Here too are gathered a few fragments from the ruins, a few capitals, sculptures, and inscriptions, all or most of Venetian times. Among them is the winged lion himself, and the epitaph of a local dignitary who bears the very English-sounding title of "justitia pacis." Even among ourselves embodied righteousness sometimes takes the same abstract form, instead of the more mortal and fleshly "justitiarius." A slight descent and a steep ascent leads us through a rebuilt suburb, which now forms the only part of Antivari which serves as a dwelling-place of man. A line of shops, or rather booths, supplies the needs of the neighbouring people, among whom Christians and Mussulmans, Slaves and Albanians, seem pretty equally mingled. A Montenegrin sentinel, whose national coat must once have been whiter than it now is, guards the gate, a Venetian gate where inscriptions in the Arabic character record the dominion of the late masters of Antivari. We enter, we gaze around, we climb a tower for a better view, and we look on a scene of havoc which is startling to men of peaceful lives, and which, one would think, must be unusual even in the experience of men of the sword. We believe that we are speaking the truth when we say that every building within the enclosed space has become uninhabitable; certainly not one seemed to be inhabited. This destruction is indeed not wholly the immediate result of the siege. A powder-magazine was afterwards struck by lightning, and its explosion destroyed whatever the siege had spared. But the havoc wrought by the siege itself must have been fearful. Antivari is as strictly a collection of ruins, and of nothing but ruins, as Ninfa at the foot of the Volscian hills, looking up at the mighty walls of Norba. But Ninfa was simply forsaken some ages back. Its inhabitants fled from an unhealthy site, and left their houses, churches, and military defences, to crumble away. But at Antivari we see the work of destruction in our own day, almost at the present moment. Four years back, the traveller passing along the Albanian coast was shown where Antivari, then an inhabited town, nestled among its rocks. The war was then raging inland; the Montenegrin was then defending his own heights against Turkish invasion; he had not yet come down to win back a fragment of his ancient coast from one of the two intruders who kept him from it. The traveller comes again; this time he does not only look from afar, but examines on the spot with his own eyes. But he finds only the shattered fragments of what four years before was a city of men. And, small as Antivari must have been even in its most flourishing times, it is no mean city that it must have been. It must be remembered that Antivari, though it was a Mussulman town under Turkish rule, was never in any strict sense a Turkish town. Its history is that of Albania generally, as it is the history of large classes of men in Bosnia. Antivari was easily won by the Turk, and it remained in the hands of its old inhabitants, Christian Albanians and Venetian settlers. Gradually, for the sake of their temporal interests, they conformed outwardly to the religion of their conquerors, and so passed from the subject to the ruling order. At first, this was a mere outward conformity for worldly ends; men still hoped that some chance of warfare would bring back the rule of Saint Mark. If so, they were ready to return to the faith which they still secretly held. But the happy revolution never came; new generations sprang up with whom Islam was an hereditary creed, and Antivari became a Mussulman city. But it never became a Turkish city. The descendants of the once Christian inhabitants lived on in their fathers' houses, and worshipped in the same temples as their fathers, though they were now turned to the use of another faith. Each church had a minaret added, and it became a mosque. In most cases of Mahometan conquest, the conquerors took the head church of the city as a trophy of their own faith, but left the subject Christians in possession of one or more of the lesser churches. So, in this same region, it was at Durazzo; so it was at Trebinje; in both there was a church, or more than one, within the walls. Here at Antivari, as the inhabitants gradually embraced Islam, all the churches became mosques; and thus, for the very reason that there was less of violent disturbance than in most cases of Turkish conquest, Antivari, while never becoming Turkish, became more strictly Mussulman than most cities under Turkish rule. The churches, or rather their ruins, still stand, examples of the usual churches of the country, none of them remarkable for size or antiquity or architectural splendour; but still essentially churches, with their fabrics untouched, save only the inevitable addition of the minaret. Some of them even keep memorials of their earlier use of which one would have expected Mussulman zeal to wipe out every trace as monuments of idolatry. Intruding Turks or Saracens would doubtless have done so; but the Mahometan descendants of the Christian citizens of Antivari still felt a tenderness for the works of their forefathers. Even pictures of Christian subjects have been spared. In one case especially, in a church which does not seem ever to have been a mosque, but, as having perhaps been a private chapel, to have formed part of a private house, among other kindred pictures, the baptism of our Lord in Jordan is still almost as clear as when the painter first traced it on the wall. Old ancestral memories, perhaps the vague feeling that after all a day of change might come--the feeling which led Bosnian beys, while holding their Christian countrymen in bondage, to keep Christian patents of nobility and even concealed objects of Christian worship--were clearly stronger in Antivari than any strict regard to the Mussulman law. And as it was with the churches, so it was with the houses. Antivari never became, like Trebinje, a tumble-down Eastern town, nor, like Butrinto, a collection of beggarly huts, not fit to be called a town at all. It was a small, but well-built city, after the pattern of the other cities on the eastern coast of the Hadriatic. There was clearly no moment of general havoc; the Mussulman lived on in the house of his Christian father. Some of those houses must have been still almost new when their owners embraced the faith of their conquerors. At every step we see among the shattered houses some pretty scrap, door or window, of the style which we commonly call Venetian; we see some too which belong to the confirmed _Renaissance_, and which can hardly be older than the sixteenth century. One stately building indeed seems to have perished. An old print of Antivari, in a book called _Viaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli_, a book without date but which has an air of the sixteenth century, shows what is plainly meant for a municipal palace, after the same general type as the bigger one at Venice and the more beautiful one at Ragusa. It has arcades below and windows above. Still as we tread, even in their state of ruin, the streets, the little _piazze_, of what once was Antivari, we see that the city perched on its Albanian height must have been no unworthy fellow of its neighbours on the Dalmatian shore. It is sad that the enlargement of Europe and of Christendom, the winning back of their ancient coast by the valiant warriors of the Black Mountain, should have been bought only at such a price as the destruction of this interesting and really beautiful little city. The loss, it may be feared, cannot be repaired. A gently working hand might possibly set up again the ruined houses and churches nearly as they once were. Or it might at first sight seem a more obvious work to forsake the ruined hill-town, and to build another by the haven, a new Montenegrin Cattaro, to make up as far as may be for the city by the _Bocche_ so cruelly torn away from its free brethren. But either scheme seems to be forbidden by the growing unhealthiness of the spot. The place has been for some while getting more and more fever-stricken, and the disease has now--seemingly since the siege--spread upwards to the hill-town itself. It is for medical knowledge to judge whether, as is said to be the case in some parts of the Roman _Campagna_, sudden colonization, the settlement of a large number of new inhabitants at once, could do anything to check the evil. Failing this chance, it would seem as if Antivari was doomed utterly to perish. A new Montenegrin town and haven may arise, but not on the site of the ancient town and haven of the eastern Bari. On whom rests the blame? Surely not on the conquerors, whose warfare was waged in the noblest cause for which man can fight, for their faith, their freedom, their national life, the extension of freedom and national life to their brethren under the yoke. Nor can we say that it rests with the men who fought against them, who, from their own side, were fighting for faith and freedom and national life fully as much. It rather rests with the dangerous neighbour of both, whose very existence is founded on the trampling down of freedom and national life among all its neighbours. It rests with the power which takes care to strike no blows itself, but which knows how to suck no small advantage from the blows which are struck by others on either side. The ruin of Antivari is in truth the work, though the indirect work, of the power hard by, the power which was not ashamed to stretch forth its hand for such a spoil as Spizza, the hard-won earnings of its poor neighbour. The guilt of ruined Antivari rests with those who drove its conquerors to conquest in the wrong place by hindering them from peaceful advance in the right place. It rests with those who stirred up its defenders to a hopeless resistance by promises which never were fulfilled. When we see how in 1878 Montenegro was allowed to keep possession of ruined and almost worthless Antivari, but was forced to give up its other comparatively flourishing conquests of Spizza and Dulcigno, we better understand how the rule of doing as one would be done by is looked on in the council-chamber of an Apostolic King. And we see too, with some comfort, how England, as one of her first national acts when England found herself once more under English leadership, knew how to step in, with vigour and with patience, to undo at least one part of the wrong which had been done. THE END. LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 
7373	----	THE PATH TO ROME By Hilaire Belloc '... AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE' PRAISE OF THIS BOOK To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book, and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit), greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing. If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut. Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul.' Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and I walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow; and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one. For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify--to wit: Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of _so-and-so--o--polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there together. And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis. And having read them and discovered first, that it was the custom of my contemporaries to belaud themselves in this prolegomenaical ritual (some saying in a few words that they supplied a want, others boasting in a hundred that they were too grand to do any such thing, but most of them baritoning their apologies and chanting their excuses till one knew that their pride was toppling over)--since, I say, it seemed a necessity to extol one's work, I wrote simply on the lintel of my diary, _Praise of this Book,_ so as to end the matter at a blow. But whether there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, for I am riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a mouth of iron. Now there is another thing book writers do in their Prefaces, which is to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one ever heard, and to say 'my thanks are due to such and such' all in a litany, as though any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this believe me it is but on account of the multitude and splendour of those who have attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it are copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must also mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads, the Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe very hearty thanks to Apollo. Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious of their style, thinking (not saying)-- 'True, I used "and which" on page 47, but Martha Brown the stylist gave me leave;' or: 'What if I do end a sentence with a preposition? I always follow the rules of Mr Twist in his "'Tis Thus 'Twas Spoke", Odd's Body an' I do not!' Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book writers) that they think style power, and yet never say as much in their Prefaces. Come, let me do so... Where are you? Let me marshal you, my regiments of words! Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are but a parable for the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the world? Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering fellows! First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no man; fresh, young, hearty, and for the most part very long-limbed, though some few short and strong. There also are the Misprints to confuse the enemy at his onrush. Then see upon the flank a company of picked Ambiguities covering what shall be a feint by the squadron of Anachronisms led by old Anachronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and a great murderer of fools. But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand Egotisms shining in their armour and roaring for battle. They care for no one. They stormed Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of Good-Manners, who died of fear without a wound; so they drank his wine and are to-day as strong as lions and as careless (saving only their Captain, Monologue, who is lantern-jawed). Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and Dithyramb that killed Punctuation in open fight; Parenthesis the giant and champion of the host, and Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write but is very handy with his sword; and Metathesis and Hendiadys, two Greeks. And last come the noble Gallicisms prancing about on their light horses: cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere sight of them and are overcome without a blow. Come then my hearties, my lads, my indefatigable repetitions, seize you each his own trumpet that hangs at his side and blow the charge; we shall soon drive them all before us headlong, howling down together to the Picrocholian Sea. So! That was an interlude. Forget the clamour. But there is another matter; written as yet in no other Preface: peculiar to this book. For without rhyme or reason, pictures of an uncertain kind stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why? _Because it has become so cheap to photograph on zinc._ In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all. He did well. Then either there were no pictures in his book, or (if there were any) they were done by some other man that loved him not a groat and would not have walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy for a man to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any fool may do it and be none the worse--many others shall follow. This is the first. Before you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man march through Europe dragging an artist on a cord? God forbid! Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy is worse than the disease. Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim may for the future draw (if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow hills beyond a grove of trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across in order to enliven his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his loneliness that enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he never saw, with as much freedom as you readers so very continually see what you never draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage. The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes. Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another. Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan. When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûté'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true breeding soil of Revelation. For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary habitation. 'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the manifestly false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended', and in the south by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France by the words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, _'Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte'._ By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other Demagogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor--but this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor. There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie. And certainly men who know that the mere truth would be distasteful or tedious commonly have recourse to metaphor, and so do those false men who desire to acquire a subtle and unjust influence over their fellows, and chief among them, the Proverb-Maker. For though his name is lost in the great space of time that has passed since he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm--in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, '_The longest way round is the shortest way home_'), a startling miser (as, _'A penny saved is a penny earned'_), one ignorant of largesse and human charity (as, '_Waste not, want not_'), and a shocking boor in the point of honour (as, _'Hard words break no bones'_--he never fought, I see, but with a cudgel). But he had just that touch of slinking humour which the peasants have, and there is in all he said that exasperating quality for which we have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our clothes, causing us continually to pause and swear. For he mixes up unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is perpetually letting the cat out of the bag and exposing our tricks, putting a colour to our actions, disturbing us with our own memory, indecently revealing corners of the soul. He is like those men who say one unpleasant and rude thing about a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal and false action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and it is perhaps for this abominable logicality of his and for his malicious cunning that I chiefly hate him: and since he himself evidently hated the human race, he must not complain if he is hated in return. Take, for instance, this phrase that set me writing, _'Ce nest que le premier pas qui coûte'_. It is false. Much after a beginning is difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the first _step_ a man never so much as remembers it; if there is difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly, pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse luck) that he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that phrase. It worries one of set purpose. It is as though one had a voice inside one saying: 'I know you, you will never begin anything. Look at what you might have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are intolerably lazy--and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind, you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the _Evening Yankee_ taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c., &c.--and so forth. So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning breeds discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind, caught, as it were, by one finger. For all things (you will notice) are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand. _Omne Trinum_: they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in their ending. Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of the Grand Climacteric. LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric? AUCTOR. I have no time to tell you, for it would lead us into a discussion on Astrology, and then perhaps to a question of physical science, and then you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps denounce me to the authorities. I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you. But perhaps you have been reading little brown books on Evolution, and you don't believe in Catastrophes, or Climaxes, or Definitions? Eh? Tell me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn, and have you doubts on the points of needles? Can the sun be said truly to rise or set, and is there any exact meaning in the phrase, 'Done to a turn' as applied to omelettes? You know there is; and so also you must believe in Categories, and you must admit differences of kind as well as of degree, and you must accept exact definition and believe in all that your fathers did, that were wiser men than you, as is easily proved if you will but imagine yourself for but one moment introduced into the presence of your ancestors, and ask yourself which would look the fool. Especially must you believe in moments and their importance, and avoid with the utmost care the Comparative Method and the argument of the Slowly Accumulating Heap. I hear that some scientists are already beginning to admit the reality of Birth and Death--let but some brave few make an act of Faith in the Grand Climacteric and all shall yet be well. Well, as I was saying, this Difficulty of Beginning is but one of three, and is Inexplicable, and is in the Nature of Things, and it is very especially noticeable in the Art of Letters. There is in every book the Difficulty of Beginning, the Difficulty of the Turning-Point (which is the Grand Climacteric of a Book)-- LECTOR. What is that in a Book? AUCTOR. Why, it is the point where the reader has caught on, enters into the Book and desires to continue reading it. LECTOR. It comes earlier in some books than in others. AUCTOR. As you say... And finally there is the Difficulty of Ending. LECTOR. I do not see how there can be any difficulty in ending a book. AUCTOR. That shows very clearly that you have never written one, for there is nothing so hard in the writing of a book--no, not even the choice of the Dedication--as is the ending of it. On this account only the great Poets, who are above custom and can snap their divine fingers at forms, are not at the pains of devising careful endings. Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well be in the middle of a passage; Hesiod, I know not how; and Mr Bailey, the New Voice from Eurasia, does not end at all, but is still going on. Panurge told me that his great work on Conchology would never have been finished had it not been for the Bookseller that threatened law; and as it is, the last sentence has no verb in it. There is always something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up the splice neatly at the edges. On this account there are regular models for ending a book or a Poem, as there are for beginning one; but, for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found. I knew a man once who always wrote the end of a book first, when his mind was fresh, and so worked gradually back to the introductory chapter, which (he said) was ever a kind of summary, and could not be properly dealt with till a man knew all about his subject. He said this was a sovran way to write History. But it seems to me that this is pure extravagance, for it would lead one at last to beginning at the bottom of the last page, like the Hebrew Bible, and (if it were fully carried out) to writing one's sentences backwards till one had a style like the London School of Poets: a very horrible conclusion. However, I am not concerned here with the ending of a book, but with its beginning; and I say that the beginning of any literary thing is hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And I say more than this--I say that an interminable discussion of the difficulty of beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy subterfuge at the best. In the name of all decent, common, and homely things, why not begin and have done with it? It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up alongside the Moselle. For it was by the valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrimage, since, by a happy accident, the valley of the Upper Moselle runs straight towards Rome, though it takes you but a short part of the way. What a good opening it makes for a direct pilgrimage can be seen from this little map, where the dotted line points exactly to Rome. There are two bends which take one a little out of one's way, and these bends I attempted to avoid, but in general, the valley, about a hundred miles from Toul to the source, is an evident gate for any one walking from this part of Lorraine into Italy. And this map is also useful to show what route I followed for my first three days past Epinal and Remiremont up to the source of the river, and up over the great hill, the Ballon d'Alsace. I show the river valley like a trench, and the hills above it shaded, till the mountainous upper part, the Vosges, is put in black. I chose the decline of the day for setting out, because of the great heat a little before noon and four hours after it. Remembering this, I planned to walk at night and in the mornings and evenings, but how this design turned out you shall hear in a moment. I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along my road leaving the town, when I thought I would stop and rest a little and make sure that I had started propitiously and that I was really on my way to Rome; so I halted by a wall and looked back at the city and the forts, and drew what I saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken a firm hold of my mind in boyhood, and that will remain in it as long as it can make pictures for itself out of the past. I think this must be true of all conscripts with regard to the garrison in which they have served, for the mind is so fresh at twenty-one and the life so new to every recruit as he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all the worries of life, that the surroundings of the place bite into him and take root, as one's school does or one's first home. And I had been especially fortunate since I had been with the gunners (notoriously the best kind of men) and not in a big place but in a little town, very old and silent, with more soldiers in its surrounding circle than there were men, women, and children within its useless ramparts. It is known to be very beautiful, and though I had not heard of this reputation, I saw it to be so at once when I was first marched in, on a November dawn, up to the height of the artillery barracks. I remembered seeing then the great hills surrounding it on every side, hiding their menace and protection of guns, and in the south and east the silent valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, and the town below the road standing in an island or ring of tall trees. All this, I say, I had permanently remembered, and I had determined, whenever I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this place my starting-point, and as I stopped here and looked back, a little way outside the gates, I took in again the scene that recalled so much laughter and heavy work and servitude and pride of arms. I was looking straight at the great fort of St Michel, which is the strongest thing on the frontier, and which is the key to the circle of forts that make up this entrenched camp. One could see little or nothing of its batteries, only its hundreds of feet of steep brushwood above the vineyards, and at the summit a stunted wood purposely planted. Next to it on the left, of equal height, was the hog back of the Cote Barine, hiding a battery. Between the Cote Barine and my road and wall, I saw the rising ground and the familiar Barracks that are called (I know not why) the Barracks of Justice, but ought more properly to be called the Barracks of petty tyrannies and good fellowship, in order to show the philosophers that these two things are the life of armies; for of all the virtues practised in that old compulsory home of mine Justice came second at least if not third, while Discipline and Comradeship went first; and the more I think of it the more I am convinced that of all the suffering youth that was being there annealed and forged into soldiery none can have suffered like the lawyers. On the right the high trees that stand outside the ramparts of the town went dwindling in perspective like a palisade, and above them, here and there, was a roof showing the top of the towers of the Cathedral or of St Gengoult. All this I saw looking backwards, and, when I had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round again and took the road. I had, in a small bag or pocket slung over my shoulder, a large piece of bread, half a pound of smoked ham, a sketch-book, two Nationalist papers, and a quart of the wine of Brule--which is the most famous wine in the neighbourhood of the garrison, yet very cheap. And Brule is a very good omen for men that are battered about and given to despairing, since it is only called Brule on account of its having been burnt so often by Romans, Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans, Flemings, Huns perhaps, and generally all those who in the last few thousand years have taken a short cut at their enemies over the neck of the Cote Barine. So you would imagine it to be a tumble-down, weak, wretched, and disappearing place; but, so far from this, it is a rich and proud village, growing, as I have said, better wine than any in the garrison. Though Toul stands in a great cup or ring of hills, very high and with steep slopes, and guns on all of them, and all these hills grow wine, none is so good as Brule wine. And this reminds me of a thing that happened in the Manoeuvres of 1891, _quorum pars magna_; for there were two divisions employed in that glorious and fatiguing great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate, a hundred and fifty-six--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the eighth--I wonder where you all are now? I suppose I shall not see you again; but you were the best companions in the world, my friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one, and the worst, having on my Livret the note 'conducteur mediocre'. But that is neither here nor there; the story is as follows, and the moral is that the commercial mind is illogical. When we had gone some way, clattering through the dust, and were well on on the Commercy road, there was a short halt, and during this halt there passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went on wheels. You talk of the Great Tun of Heidelburg, or of those monstrous Vats that stand in cool sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels in the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built _in situ_ and meant to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a face of determination, as though he were at war with his kind, and he kept on calling to his oxen, 'Han', and 'Hu', in the tones of a sullen challenge, as he went creaking past. Then the soldiers began calling out to him singly, 'Where are you off to, Father, with that battery?' and 'Why carry cold water to Commercy? They have only too much as it is;' and 'What have you got in the little barrelkin, the barrellet, the cantiniere's brandy-flask, the gourd, the firkin?' He stopped his oxen fiercely and turned round to us and said: 'I will tell you what I have here. I have so many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made myself, and which I know to be the best wine there is, and I am taking it about to see if I cannot tame and break these proud fellows who are for ever beating down prices and mocking me. It is worth eight 'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight sols the litre; what do I say? it is worth a Louis a cup: but I will sell it at the price I name, and not a penny less. But whenever I come to a village the innkeeper begins bargaining and chaffering and offering six sols and seven sols, and I answer, "Eight sols, take it or leave it", and when he seems for haggling again I get up and drive away. I know the worth of my wine, and I will not be beaten down though I have to go out of Lorraine into the Barrois to sell it.' So when we caught him up again, as we did shortly after on the road, a sergeant cried as we passed, 'I will give you seven, seven and a quarter, seven and a half', and we went on laughing and forgot all about him. For many days we marched from this place to that place, and fired and played a confused game in the hot sun till the train of sick horses was a mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as so many posts; and at last, one evening, we came to a place called Heiltz le Maurupt, which was like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as Angels; it is just where the Champagne begins. When we had groomed and watered our horses, and the stable guard had been set, and we had all an hour or so's leisure to stroll about in the cool darkness before sleeping in the barns, we had a sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for what should come up the village street but that monstrous Barrel, and we could see by its movements that it was still quite full. We gathered round the peasant, and told him how grieved we were at his ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the people of the Barrois were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such a song. He took his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by, and there he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger than sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood from which tyrants and martyrs are carved. Then suddenly he changed and became eloquent: 'Oh, the good wine! If only it were known and tasted!... Here, give me a cup, and I will ask some of you to taste it, then at least I shall have it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine I have carried more than a hundred miles, and everywhere it has been refused!' There was one guttering candle on a little stool. The roof of the shed was lost up in the great height of darkness; behind, in the darkness, the oxen champed away steadily in the manger. The light from the candle flame lit his face strongly from beneath and marked it with dark shadows. It flickered on the circle of our faces as we pressed round, and it came slantwise and waned and disappeared in the immense length of the Barrel. He stood near the tap with his brows knit as upon some very important task, and all we, gunners and drivers of the battery, began unhooking our mugs and passing them to him. There were nearly a hundred, and he filled them all; not in jollity, but like a man offering up a solemn sacrifice. We also, entering into his mood, passed our mugs continually, thanking him in a low tone and keeping in the main silent. A few linesmen lounged at the door; he asked for their cups and filled them. He bade them fetch as many of their comrades as cared to come; and very soon there was a circulating crowd of men all getting wine of Brule and murmuring their congratulations, and he was willing enough to go on giving, but we stopped when we saw fit and the scene ended. I cannot tell what prodigious measure of wine he gave away to us all that night, but when he struck the roof of the cask it already sounded hollow. And when we had made a collection which he had refused, he went to sleep by his oxen, and we to our straw in other barns. Next day we started before dawn, and I never saw him again. This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men love is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to be hard on the rich. I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I walked the long evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its deeps infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys could eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the place where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of lake. Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to reminiscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings. This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies up on the right between the steep and the water, and just where the hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields, half ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the road which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I took from this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose that introduces night. It was all consonant with what the peasants were about: the return from labour, the bleating folds, and the lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the upper valley to the spring of the hills. In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of memory, have discovered that their darkness has conquered. The peasants sat outside their houses in the twilight accepting the cool air; every one spoke to me as I marched through, and I answered them all, nor was there in any of their salutations the omission of good fellowship or of the name of God. Saving with one man, who was a sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me in an accent that was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I told him I had to go up into the forest to take advantage of the night, since the days were so warm for walking. As I left the last house of the village I was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night would pass. With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below, but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. The kingdoms that have no walls, and are built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the night hardened. Had I had companions, still we would only have spoken in a whisper, and in that dungeon of trees even my own self would not raise its voice within me. It was full night when I had reached a vague clearing in the woods, right up on the height of that flat hill. This clearing was called 'The Fountain of Magdalen'. I was so far relieved by the broader sky of the open field that I could wait and rest a little, and there, at last, separate from men, I thought of a thousand things. The air was full of midsummer, and its mixture of exaltation and fear cut me off from ordinary living. I now understood why our religion has made sacred this season of the year; why we have, a little later, the night of St John, the fires in the villages, and the old perception of fairies dancing in the rings of the summer grass. A general communion of all things conspires at this crisis of summer against us reasoning men that should live in the daylight, and something fantastic possesses those who are foolish enough to watch upon such nights. So I, watching, was cut off. There were huge, vague summits, all wooded, peering above the field I sat in, but they merged into a confused horizon. I was on a high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with the immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. I saw the stars, and remembered how I had looked up at them on just such a night when I was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The woods before and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was enchased here in the clearing, thinking of all things. Then a little wind passed over the vast forests of Lorraine. It seemed to wake an indefinite sly life proper to this seclusion, a life to which I was strange, and which thought me an invader. Yet I heard nothing. There were no adders in the long grass, nor any frogs in that dry square of land, nor crickets on the high part of the hill; but I knew that little creatures in league with every nocturnal influence, enemies of the sun, occupied the air and the land about me; nor will I deny that I felt a rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in happy dawns and to sleep in the night, and everything in that short and sacred darkness multiplied my attentiveness and my illusion. Perhaps the instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come back to us out of the ages unawares during such experiments. At any rate the night oppressed and exalted me. Then I suddenly attributed such exaltation to the need of food. 'If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by day and walking by night,' I thought, 'at least one must arrange night meals to suit it.' I therefore, with my mind still full of the forest, sat down and lit a match and peered into my sack, taking out therefrom bread and ham and chocolate and Brûlé wine. For seat and table there was a heathery bank still full of the warmth and savour of the last daylight, for companions these great inimical influences of the night which I had met and dreaded, and for occasion or excuse there was hunger. Of the Many that debate what shall be done with travellers, it was the best and kindest Spirit that prompted me to this salutary act. For as I drank the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I felt more and more that I had a right to the road; the stars became familiar and the woods a plaything. It is quite clear that the body must be recognized and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and drink can do so much to make a man. On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe, and began singing, and heard, to my inexpressible joy, some way down the road, the sound of other voices. They were singing that old song of the French infantry which dates from Louis XIV, and is called 'Auprès de ma blonde'. I answered their chorus, so that, by the time we met under the wood, we were already acquainted. They told me they had had a forty-eight hours' leave into Nancy, the four of them, and had to be in by roll-call at a place called Villey the Dry. I remembered it after all those years. It is a village perched on the brow of one of these high hills above the river, and it found itself one day surrounded by earthworks, and a great fort raised just above the church. Then, before they knew where they were, they learnt that (1) no one could go in or out between sunset and sunrise without leave of the officer in command; (2) that from being a village they had become the 'buildings situate within Fort No. 18'; (3) that they were to be deluged with soldiers; and (4) that they were liable to evacuate their tenements on mobilization. They had become a fort unwittingly as they slept, and all their streets were blocked with ramparts. A hard fate; but they should not have built their village just on the brow of a round hill. They did this in the old days, when men used stone instead of iron, because the top of a hill was a good place to hold against enemies; and so now, these 73,426 years after, they find the same advantage catching them again to their hurt. And so things go the round. Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my four brothers were going. It was miles off, and they had to be in by sunrise, so I offered them a pull of my wine, which, to my great joy, they refused, and we parted courteously. Then I found the road beginning to fall, and knew that I had crossed the hills. As the forest ended and the sloping fields began, a dim moon came up late in the east in the bank of fog that masked the river. So by a sloping road, now free from the woods, and at the mouth of a fine untenanted valley under the moon, I came down again to the Moselle, having saved a great elbow by this excursion over the high land. As I swung round the bend of the hills downwards and looked up the sloping dell, I remembered that these heathery hollows were called 'vallons' by the people of Lorraine, and this set me singing the song of the hunters, 'Entends tu dans nos vallons, le Chasseur sonner du clairon,' which I sang loudly till I reached the river bank, and lost the exhilaration of the hills. I had now come some twelve miles from my starting-place, and it was midnight. The plain, the level road (which often rose a little), and the dank air of the river began to oppress me with fatigue. I was not disturbed by this, for I had intended to break these nights of marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the comfort of cities--especially in the false hopes that one got by reading books--I had imagined that it was a light matter to sleep in the open. Indeed, I had often so slept when I had been compelled to it in Manoeuvres, but I had forgotten how essential was a rug of some kind, and what a difference a fire and comradeship could make. Thinking over it all, feeling my tiredness, and shivering a little in the chill under the moon and the clear sky, I was very ready to capitulate and to sleep in bed like a Christian at the next opportunity. But there is some influence in vows or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All false calculations must be paid for, and I found, as you will see, that having said I would sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in spite of all my second thoughts. I passed one village and then another in which everything was dark, and in which I could waken nothing but dogs, who thought me an enemy, till at last I saw a great belt of light in the fog above the Moselle. Here there was a kind of town or large settlement where there were ironworks, and where, as I thought, there would be houses open, even after midnight. I first found the old town, where just two men were awake at some cooking work or other. I found them by a chink of light streaming through their door; but they gave me no hope, only advising me to go across the river and try in the new town where the forges and the ironworks were. 'There,' they said, 'I should certainly find a bed.' I crossed the bridge, being now much too weary to notice anything, even the shadowy hills, and the first thing I found was a lot of waggons that belonged to a caravan or fair. Here some men were awake, but when I suggested that they should let me sleep in their little houses on wheels, they told me it was never done; that it was all they could do to pack in themselves; that they had no straw; that they were guarded by dogs; and generally gave me to understand (though without violence or unpoliteness) that I looked as though I were the man to steal their lions and tigers. They told me, however, that without doubt I should find something open in the centre of the workmen's quarter, where the great electric lamps now made a glare over the factory. I trudged on unwillingly, and at the very last house of this detestable industrial slavery, a high house with a gable, I saw a window wide open, and a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony. I called to him at once, and asked him to let me a bed. He put to me all the questions he could think of. Why was I there? Where had I come from? Where (if I was honest) had I intended to sleep? How came I at such an hour on foot? and other examinations. I thought a little what excuse to give him, and then, determining that I was too tired to make up anything plausible, I told him the full truth; that I had meant to sleep rough, but had been overcome by fatigue, and that I had walked from Toul, starting at evening. I conjured him by our common Faith to let me in. He told me that it was impossible, as he had but one room in which he and his family slept, and assured me he had asked all these questions out of sympathy and charity alone. Then he wished me good-night, honestly and kindly, and went in. By this time I was very much put out, and began to be angry. These straggling French towns give no opportunity for a shelter. I saw that I should have to get out beyond the market gardens, and that it might be a mile or two before I found any rest. A clock struck one. I looked up and saw it was from the belfry of one of those new chapels which the monks are building everywhere, nor did I forget to curse the monks in my heart for building them. I cursed also those who started smelting works in the Moselle valley; those who gave false advice to travellers; those who kept lions and tigers in caravans, and for a small sum I would have cursed the whole human race, when I saw that my bile had hurried me out of the street well into the countryside, and that above me, on a bank, was a patch of orchard and a lane leading up to it. Into this I turned, and, finding a good deal of dry hay lying under the trees, I soon made myself an excellent bed, first building a little mattress, and then piling on hay as warm as a blanket. I did not lie awake (as when I planned my pilgrimage I had promised myself I would do), looking at the sky through the branches of trees, but I slept at once without dreaming, and woke up to find it was broad daylight, and the sun ready to rise. Then, stiff and but little rested by two hours of exhaustion, I took up my staff and my sack and regained the road. I should very much like to know what those who have an answer to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for some hours--I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be plagued to look up technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast, coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the day? The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue) lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight. I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this, nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_ As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes. The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal that fed from it. The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate slopes bounding it on either side. Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty miles--from Toul; that it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me wrecked all these early hours. As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns, a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that best of all Christian associations - a large village. I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it. There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book, after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention, and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair, and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely this is the habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches, and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own. What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise-- ... Son beau corps est en terre Son âme en Paradis. Tu ris? Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergère, Ris, ma Bergère, tu ris. That was the way they set to work in England before the Puritans came, when men were not afraid to steal verses from one another, and when no one imagined that he could live by letters, but when every poet took a patron, or begged or robbed the churches. So much for the poets. Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digressing), is a long street of houses all built together as animals build their communities. They are all very old, but the people have worked hard since the Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them very rich. I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say, was in disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor, cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of morning -- that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old wood; which is the true breath of morning, because it is the scent that all the human race worth calling human first meets when it rises, and is the association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the world alive: but not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of all in the minds of journalists, who know nothing of morning save that it is a time of jaded emptiness when you have just done prophesying (for the hundredth time) the approaching end of the world, when the floors are beginning to tremble with machinery, and when, in a weary kind of way, one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually a short one. To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for you are in civilization again. But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The first thing I saw as I came into the street and noted how the level sun stood in a haze beyond, and how it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which came at and passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself forward. In the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going out mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are. Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very old man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where I could find coffee and bread at that hour; but he shook his head mournfully and wished me good-morning in a strong accent, for he was deaf and probably thought I was begging. So I went on still more despondent till I came to a really merry man of about middle age who was going to the fields, singing, with a very large rake over his shoulder. When I had asked him the same question he stared at me a little and said of course coffee and bread could be had at the baker's, and when I asked him how I should know the baker's he was still more surprised at my ignorance, and said, 'By the smoke coming from the large chimney.' This I saw rising a short way off on my right, so I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and offered me bread. It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such excellent citizens and good men. For while it is admitted in every country I was ever in that cobblers are argumentative and atheists (I except the cobbler under Plinlimmon, concerning whom would to heaven I had the space to tell you all here, for he knows the legends of the mountain), while it is public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that millers are cheats (we say in Sussex that every honest miller has a large tuft of hair on the palm of his hand), yet--with every trade in the world having some bad quality attached to it--bakers alone are exempt, and every one takes it for granted that they are sterling: indeed, there are some societies in which, no matter how gloomy and churlish the conversation may have become, you have but to mention bakers for voices to brighten suddenly and for a good influence to pervade every one. I say this is known for a fact, but not usually explained; the explanation is, that bakers are always up early in the morning and can watch the dawn, and that in this occupation they live in lonely contemplation enjoying the early hours. So it was with this baker of mine in Flavigny, who was a boy. When he heard that I had served at Toul he was delighted beyond measure; he told me of a brother of his that had been in the same regiment, and he assured me that he was himself going into the artillery by special enlistment, having got his father's leave. You know very little if you think I missed the opportunity of making the guns seem terrible and glorious in his eyes. I told him stories enough to waken a sentry of reserve, and if it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I would have woven in a few anecdotes of active service, and described great shells bursting under my horses and the teams shot down, and the gunners all the while impassive; but as I saw I should not be believed I did not speak of such things, but confined myself to what he would see and hear when he joined. Meanwhile the good warm food and the rising morning had done two things; they had put much more vigour into me than I had had when I slunk in half-an-hour before, but at the same time (and this is a thing that often comes with food and with rest) they had made me feel the fatigue of so long a night. I rose up, therefore, determined to find some place where I could sleep. I asked this friend of mine how much there was to pay, and he said 'fourpence'. Then we exchanged ritual salutations, and I took the road. I did not leave the town or village without noticing one extraordinary thing at the far end of it, which was that, whereas most places in France are proud of their town-hall and make a great show of it, here in Flavigny they had taken a great house and written over it ÉCOLE COMMUNALE in great letters, and then they had written over a kind of lean-to or out-house of this big place the words 'Hôtel de ville' in very small letters, so small that I had a doubt for a moment if the citizens here were good republicans--a treasonable thought on all this frontier. Then, a mile onward, I saw the road cross the canal and run parallel to it. I saw the canal run another mile or so under a fine bank of deep woods. I saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was gathering strength, I went, with slumber overpowering me and my feet turning heavy beneath me, along the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on the moss under these delightful trees. Forgetful of the penalty that such an early repose would bring, and of the great heat that was to follow at midday, I quickly became part of the life of that forest and fell asleep. When I awoke it was full eight o'clock, and the sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches of my trees like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the strength of the sun. Now I saw clearly how difficult it was to turn night into day, for I found myself condemned either to waste many hours that ought to be consumed on my pilgrimage, or else to march on under the extreme heat; and when I had drunk what was left of my Brule wine (which then seemed delicious), and had eaten a piece of bread, I stiffly jolted down the bank and regained the highway. In the first village I came to I found that Mass was over, and this justly annoyed me; for what is a pilgrimage in which a man cannot hear Mass every morning? Of all the things I have read about St Louis which make me wish I had known him to speak to, nothing seems to me more delightful than his habit of getting Mass daily whenever he marched down south, but why this should be so delightful I cannot tell. Of course there is a grace and influence belonging to such a custom, but it is not of that I am speaking but of the pleasing sensation of order and accomplishment which attaches to a day one has opened by Mass; a purely temporal, and, for all I know, what the monks back at the ironworks would have called a carnal feeling, but a source of continual comfort to me. Let them go their way and let me go mine. This comfort I ascribe to four causes (just above you will find it written that I could not tell why this should be so, but what of that?), and these causes are: 1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great benefit to the body and give it tone. 2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth) to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and judgement. 3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness which both working in one's self and received from others is the true source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world. 4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should do a little work with his hands. Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing, were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by force. Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship. From these considerations it is easy to understand how put out I was to find Mass over on this first morning of my pilgrimage. And I went along the burning road in a very ill-humour till I saw upon my right, beyond a low wall and in a kind of park, a house that seemed built on some artificial raised ground surrounded by a wall, but this may have been an illusion, the house being really only very tall. At any rate I drew it, and in the village just beyond it I learnt something curious about the man that owned it. For I had gone into a house to take a third meal of bread and wine and to replenish my bottle when the old woman of the house, who was a kindly person, told me she had just then no wine. 'But,' said she, 'Mr So and So that lives in the big house sells it to any one who cares to buy even in the smallest quantities, and you will see his shed standing by the side of the road.' Everything happened just as she had said. I came to the big shed by the park wall, and there was a kind of counter made of boards, and several big tuns and two men: one in an apron serving, and the other in a little box or compartment writing. I was somewhat timid to ask for so little as a quart, but the apron man in the most businesslike way filled my bottle at a tap and asked for fourpence. He was willing to talk, and told me many things: of good years in wine, of the nature of their trade, of the influence of the moon on brewing, of the importance of spigots, and what not; but when I tried to get out of him whether the owner were an eccentric private gentleman or a merchant that had the sense to earn little pennies as well as large ones, I could not make him understand my meaning; for his idea of rank was utterly different from mine and took no account of idleness and luxury and daftness, but was based entirely upon money and clothes. Moreover we were both of us Republicans, so the matter was of no great moment. Courteously saluting ourselves we parted, he remaining to sell wine and I hobbling to Rome, now a little painfully and my sack the heavier by a quart of wine, which, as you probably know, weighs almost exactly two pounds and a half. It was by this time close upon eleven, and I had long reached the stage when some kinds of men begin talking of Dogged Determination, Bull-dog pluck, the stubborn spirit of the Island race and so forth, but when those who can boast a little of the sacred French blood are in a mood of set despair (both kinds march on, and the mobility of either infantry is much the same), I say I had long got to this point of exhaustion when it occurred to me that I should need an excellent and thorough meal at midday. But on looking at my map I found that there was nothing nearer than this town of Charmes that was marked on the milestones, and that was the first place I should come to in the department of the Vosges. It would take much too long to describe the dodges that weary men and stiff have recourse to when they are at the close of a difficult task: how they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they count numbers, how they begin to solve problems in mental arithmetic: I tried them all. Then I thought of a new one, which is really excellent, and which I recommend to the whole world. It is to vary the road, suddenly taking now the fields, now the river, but only occasionally the turnpike. This last lap was very well suited for such a method. The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow. First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus; nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other. The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'. Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried, have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names, as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel, that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list, would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names. He feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk of Paris. But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They say the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those who know them speak for it. I at least know that in the west of the Cotentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered the just epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High Town under the Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which are to-day exactly what their name describes them. If you doubt that England has such descriptive names, consider the great Truth that at one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with experience and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the Wold.' Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what its forgotten son found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great commercial traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in Charmes I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I drew; but as I have lost the drawing, let it go. When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat was more terrible than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more intolerable. My head hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly thoughts, which were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look out anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I had definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket. You must know that if you yield to entertaining a temptation, there is the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A theologian told me this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or Belphegor, or whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see his face from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars that Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would pay for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its first foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all the sacks that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the smallest size) that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to the ceiling, filling the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust that night to rub his gums with. Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men to repose--and for my part I believe him to be rather an Aeon than a Devil: that is, a good-natured fellow working on his own account neither good nor ill--whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's mood, for I never yet knew a man determined to be lazy that had not ample opportunity afforded him, though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were too insignificant to sell singly. A man can always find a chance for doing nothing as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the world allows, and so to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell, and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ran through it in a little ravine; the undergrowth was thick beneath its birches, and just beyond, on the plain that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a field. I went into it contentedly and slept till evening my third sleep; then, refreshed by the cool wind that went before the twilight, I rose and took the road again, but I knew I could not go far. I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the heat had gone, yet my dead slumber had raised a thousand evils. I had stiffened to lameness, and had fallen into the mood when a man desires companionship and the talk of travellers rather than the open plain. But (unless I went backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere to rest in for a long time to come. The next considerable village was Thayon, which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the big hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile. But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then my left knee oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly subject to material laws, for when I came to Épinal next day I went into a shop which, whatever it was to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, where I bought a bottle of some stuff called 'balm', and rubbing myself with it was instantly cured.) Then I looked down from the bridge across the plain, and saw, a long way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory village of Thayon, and reached it at last, not without noticing that the people were standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little children noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told me it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a modern industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting out green branches to welcome the Procession and the Sacrament and the Priest. Comforted by this evident refutation of the sad nonsense I had read in Cities from the pen of intellectuals--nonsense I had known to be nonsense, but that had none the less tarnished my mind--I happily entered the inn, ate and drank, praised God, and lay down to sleep in a great bed. I mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing the ordinary things, and not attempting impossibilities, such as marching by night, nor following out any other vanities of this world. Then, having cast away all theories of how a pilgrimage should be conducted, and broken five or six vows, I slept steadily till the middle of the morning. I had covered fifty miles in twenty-five hours, and if you imagine this to be but two miles an hour, you must have a very mathematical mind, and know little of the realities of living. I woke and threw my shutters open to the bright morning and the masterful sun, took my coffee, and set out once more towards Epinal, the stronghold a few miles away--delighted to see that my shadow was so short and the road so hot to the feet and eyes. For I said, 'This at least proves that I am doing like all the world, and walking during the day.' It was but a couple of hours to the great garrison. In a little time I passed a battery. Then a captain went by on a horse, with his orderly behind him. Where the deep lock stands by the roadside--the only suggestion of coolness--I first heard the bugles; then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste and folly. There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of the Gauls, an island city. For the rivers of France are full of long, habitable islands, and these were once the rallying-places of clans. Then there are the forts which are placed on high hills round the town and make it even stronger than Toul; for Epinal stands just where the hills begin to be very high. Again, it is the capital of a mountain district, and this character always does something peculiar and impressive to a town. You may watch its effect in Grenoble, in little Aubusson, and, rather less, in Geneva. For in such towns three quite different kinds of men meet. First there are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders and think themselves much grander and more civilized; these are the burgesses. Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from the hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets. Lastly, there are the travellers, who come there to enjoy the mountains and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these love the hill-men and think they understand them, and they despise the plain-men for being so middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men: but in truth this third class, being outsiders, are equally hated and despised by both the others, and there is a combination against them and they are exploited. And there are many other things in which Épinal is wonderful, but in nothing is it more wonderful than in its great church. I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine and the rich men from Flanders and the House of Luxemburg and the rest, going to Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it has attempted to worship in stone. Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older, I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers, northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof, the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for bells. Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle. Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his wanderings. The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and different in this astonishing building. I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples--there was no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on the contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as-- 'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse... Come now, darken the edge of that pillar... I fear you have made the tower a little confused,' and so forth. I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave me three instead, and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a little child. Indeed the people of Épinal, not taking me for a traveller but simply for a wandering poor man, were very genial to me, and the best good they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an apothecary's shop as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the apothecary-- 'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I have to walk far; perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me something that will.' 'There is nothing easier,' he said; 'I have here a specific for the very thing you complain of.' With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the label of which was printed in great letters, 'BALM'. 'You have but to rub your knee strongly and long with this ointment of mine,' he said, 'and you will be cured.' Nor did he mention any special form of words to be repeated as one did it. Everything happened just as he had said. When I was some little way above the town I sat down on a low wall and rubbed my knee strongly and long with this balm, and the pain instantly disappeared. Then, with a heart renewed by this prodigy, I took the road again and began walking very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome. The Moselle above fipinal takes a bend outwards, and it seemed to me that a much shorter way to the next village (which is called Archettes, or 'the very little arches', because there are no arches there) would be right over the hill round which the river curved. This error came from following private judgement and not heeding tradition, here represented by the highroad which closely follows the river. For though a straight tunnel to Archettes would have saved distance, yet a climb over that high hill and through the pathless wood on its summit was folly. I went at first over wide, sloping fields, and some hundred feet above the valley I crossed a little canal. It was made on a very good system, and I recommend it to the riparian owners of the Upper Wye, which needs it. They take the water from the Moselle (which is here broad and torrential and falls in steps, running over a stony bed with little swirls and rapids), and they lead it along at an even gradient, averaging, as it were, the uneven descent of the river. In this way they have a continuous stream running through fields that would otherwise be bare and dry, but that are thus nourished into excellent pastures. Above these fields the forest went up steeply. I had not pushed two hundred yards into its gloom and confusion when I discovered that I had lost my way. It was necessary to take the only guide I had and to go straight upwards wherever the line of greatest inclination seemed to lie, for that at least would take me to a summit and probably to a view of the valley; whereas if I tried to make for the shoulder of the hill (which had been my first intention) I might have wandered about till nightfall. It was an old man in a valley called the Curicante in Colorado that taught me this, if one lost one's way going _upwards_ to make at once along the steepest line, but if one lost it going _downwards_, to listen for water and reach it and follow it. I wish I had space to tell all about this old man, who gave me hospitality out there. He was from New England and was lonely, and had brought out at great expense a musical box to cheer him. Of this he was very proud, and though it only played four silly hymn tunes, yet, as he and I listened to it, heavy tears came into his eyes and light tears into mine, because these tunes reminded him of his home. But I have no time to do more than mention him, and must return to my forest. I climbed, then, over slippery pine needles and under the charged air of those trees, which was full of dim, slanting light from the afternoon sun, till, nearly at the summit, I came upon a clearing which I at once recognized as a military road, leading to what we used to call a 'false battery', that is, a dug-out with embrasures into which guns could be placed but in which no guns were. For ever since the French managed to produce a really mobile heavy gun they have constructed any amount of such auxiliary works between the permanent forts. These need no fixed guns to be emplaced, since the French can use now one such parapet, now another, as occasion serves, and the advantage is that your guns are never useless, but can always be brought round where they are needed, and that thus six guns will do more work than twenty used to do. This false battery was on the brow of the hill, and when I reached it I looked down the slope, over the brushwood that hid the wire entanglements, and there was the whole valley of the Moselle at my feet. As this was the first really great height, so this was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining sun and noting all I saw. Archettes, just below; the flat valley with the river winding from side to side; the straight rows of poplar trees; the dark pines on the hills, and the rounded mountains rising farther and higher into the distance until the last I saw, far off to the south-east, must have been the Ballon d'Alsace at the sources of the Moselle--the hill that marked the first full stage in my journey and that overlooked Switzerland. Indeed, this is the peculiar virtue of walking to a far place, and especially of walking there in a straight line, that one gets these visions of the world from hill-tops. When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road. The view here from the Hill of Archettes, the view from the Ballon d'Alsace, from Glovelier Hill, from the Weissenstein, from the Brienzer Grat, from the Grimsel, from above Bellinzona, from the Principessa, from Tizzano, from the ridge of the Apennines, from the Wall of Siena, from San Quirico, from Radicofani, from San Lorenzo, from Montefiascone, from above Viterbo, from Roncigleone, and at last from that lift in the Via Cassia, whence one suddenly perceives the City. They unroll themselves all in their order till I can see Europe, and Rome shining at the end. But you who go in railways are necessarily shut up in long valleys and even sometimes by the walls of the earth. Even those who bicycle or drive see these sights but rarely and with no consecution, since roads also avoid climbing save where they are forced to it, as over certain passes. It is only by following the straight line onwards that any one can pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture of the way he has been. So much for views. I clambered down the hill to Archettes and saw, almost the first house, a swinging board 'At the sign of the Trout of the Vosges', and as it was now evening I turned in there to dine. Two things I noticed at once when I sat down to meat. First, that the people seated at that inn table were of the middle-class of society, and secondly, that I, though of their rank, was an impediment to their enjoyment. For to sleep in woods, to march some seventy miles, the latter part in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding down an earthy steep into the road, stamps a man with all that this kind of people least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to be above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which marks the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who take what is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue. I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces. They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious living. Heaven keep us all from great riches--I mean from very great riches. Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness, order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit, with conventions, and they are quite right. I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues, but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this book. So I thought of how I should put myself right with these people. I saw that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet: that I was an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the frontier into Germany in the guise of a labourer: that my doctor forbade me to shave--or any other such rhodomontade): I saw, I say, that by venturing upon any such excuses I might unwittingly offend some other unknown canon of theirs deeper and more sacred than their rule on clothes; it had happened to me before now to do this in the course of explanations. So I took another method, and said, as I sat down-- 'Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have had a most unfortunate adventure in the hills, losing my way and being compelled to sleep out all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is essential that I should reach my luggage (which is at Remiremont) before midnight.' I took great care to pay for my glass of white wine before dinner with a bank-note, and I showed my sketches to my neighbour to make an impression. I also talked of foreign politics, of the countries I had seen, of England especially, with such minute exactitude that their disgust was soon turned to admiration. The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous to a degree, and at every point attempting to overreach her guests, who, as regularly as she attacked, countered with astonishing dexterity. Thus she would say: 'Perhaps the joint would taste better if it were carved on the table; or do the gentlemen prefer it carved aside?' To which a banker opposite me said in a deep voice: 'We prefer, madam, to have it carved aside.' Or she would put her head in and say: 'I can recommend our excellent beer. It is really preferable to this local wine.' And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with decision: 'Madame, we find your wine excellent. It could not be bettered.' Nor could she get round them on a single point, and I pitied her so much that I bought bread and wine off her to console her, and I let her overcharge me, and went out into the afterglow with her benediction, followed also by the farewells of the middle-class, who were now taking their coffee at little tables outside the house. I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The night darkened. I reached Remiremont at midnight, and feeling very wakeful I pushed on up the valley under great woods of pines; and at last, diverging up a little path, I settled on a clump of trees sheltered and, as I thought, warm, and lay down there to sleep till morning; but, on the contrary, I lay awake a full hour in the fragrance and on the level carpet of the pine needles looking up through the dark branches at the waning moon, which had just risen, and thinking of how suitable were pine-trees for a man to sleep under. 'The beech,' I thought, 'is a good tree to sleep under, for nothing will grow there, and there is always dry beech-mast; the yew would be good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all, pine-trees are the best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep under would be the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing that, though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint stars, I awoke shivering with cold. In sleep there is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed; for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature, to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange frailties of sleep I have noticed cold. Here was a warm place under the pines where I could rest in great comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a covering for the beasts underground that love an even heat--the best of floors for a tired man. Even the slight wind that blew under the waning moon was warm, and the stars were languid and not brilliant, as though everything were full of summer, and I knew that the night would be short; a midsummer night; and I had lived half of it before attempting repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank grass, drenched with dew, and made my way across the road to the bank of the river. By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east. For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance. The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and motionless, emphasizing the east beyond. The river was white and dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases, clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most distant edges of all caught the morning. At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving, and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence, the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the neighbouring sources of the river. I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream, mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow. There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers (however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road. So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of the hills. Then again there were present here and there on the spurs lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said, here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what they lack in multitudinous life. I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the cleft' (for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock, glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot, Mall, and the Patch.' But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man who poured me out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the sun was well up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of the mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the village. 'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above Rupt.' 'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?' 'That is its name,' he answered. And he was quite right, for when I looked at my map, there it was printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it would be if this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and Kent 'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear, relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again. All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. It is bound in on every side from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as though they had been planted to please the eye. Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at last become--I mean special ways of building and a separate state of living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always the makers of provinces--so they bring extreme youth back to one, and these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood. It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees. There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning, and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how at last they reached the sea. But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and, as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I cried out profanely, 'Devil take me! It is Corpus Christi, and my third day out. It would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass at last.' For my first day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood beyond Mass-time, and my second (if you remember) I had slept in a bed. But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved that I was not too late. So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low and short--they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and began as follows: 'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?' 'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It flourishes.' 'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?' He said there were seven. 'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--' 'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the children. The servants are Christians.' 'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?' 'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.' When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the following remarkable phrase-- 'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.' I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends. I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean. Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite step from one province and people to another. I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced me--for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army arrested upon a downward march -- seemed something unusual and gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple. Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of the first trees, rain was falling. The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far above me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed. Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward through their immovable host in some such catching of the breath as men have when they walk at night straining for a sound, and I felt myself to be continually in a hidden companionship. When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees aligned as I had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, stretching shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the mountain--a great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though the tall trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met at my feet. For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men. To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls, who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saône and are vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic. Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from visions. Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled, lit from beneath with evening. I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I addressed myself. It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner, until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'. Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous italics-- Quand ce coq chantera Ici crédit l'on fera. Which means-- When you hear him crowing Then's the time for owing. Till that day--Pay. While I was still wondering at this epitome of the French people, and was attempting to combine the French military tradition with the French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also delighting in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little leathern bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back all her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world, and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue. She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic-- (she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But as I was saying--) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be with friends. She was moreover not exactly of- what shall I say? the words Celtic and Latin mean nothing-- not of those who delight in a delicate manner; and her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly-- 'What do you want?' 'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver coin. 'I must lie down at once.' Then I added, 'Can you make omelettes?' Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not dwell on-- LECTOR. You do nothing but dwell. AUCTOR. It is the essence of lonely travel; and if you have come to this book for literature you have come to the wrong booth and counter. As I was saying: it is a curious thing that some people (or races) jump from one subject to another naturally, as some animals (I mean the noble deer) go by bounds. While there are other races (or individuals--heaven forgive me, I am no ethnologist) who think you a criminal or a lunatic unless you carefully plod along from step to step like a hippopotamus out of water. When, therefore, I asked this family-drilling, house-managing, mountain-living woman whether she could make omelettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on mine, and said in what was the corpse of French with a German ghost in it, 'The bed is a franc.' 'Motherkin,' I answered, 'what I mean is that I would sleep until I wake, for I have come a prodigious distance and have last slept in the woods. But when I wake I shall need food, for which,' I added, pulling out yet another coin, 'I will pay whatever your charge may be; for a more delightful house I have rarely met with. I know most people do not sleep before sunset, but I am particularly tired and broken.' She showed me my bed then much more kindly, and when I woke, which was long after dusk, she gave me in the living room of the hut eggs beaten up with ham, and I ate brown bread and said grace. Then (my wine was not yet finished, but it is an abominable thing to drink your own wine in another person's house) I asked whether I could have something to drink. 'What you like,' she said. 'What have you?' said I. 'Beer,' said she. 'Anything else?' said I. 'No,' said she. 'Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.' I drank this with delight, paid all my bill (which was that of a labourer), and said good-night to them. In good-nights they had a ceremony; for they all rose together and curtsied. Upon my soul I believe such people to be the salt of the earth. I bowed with real contrition, for at several moments I had believed myself better than they. Then I went to my bed and they to theirs. The wind howled outside; my boots were stiff like wood and I could hardly take them off; my feet were so martyrized that I doubted if I could walk at all on the morrow. Nevertheless I was so wrapped round with the repose of this family's virtues that I fell asleep at once. Next day the sun was rising in angry glory over the very distant hills of Germany, his new light running between the pinnacles of the clouds as the commands of a conqueror might come trumpeted down the defiles of mountains, when I fearlessly forced my boots on to my feet and left their doors. The morning outside came living and sharp after the gale--almost chilly. Under a scattered but clearing sky I first limped, then, as my blood warmed, strode down the path that led between the trees of the farther vale and was soon following a stream that leaped from one fall to another till it should lead me to the main road, to Belfort, to the Jura, to the Swiss whom I had never known, and at last to Italy. But before I call up the recollection of that hidden valley, I must describe with a map the curious features of the road that lay before me into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit of that knot of hills which rise up from every side to form the Ballon d'Alsace, and make an abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, southward and eastward, was a great plain with the fortress of Belfort in the midst of it. This plain is called by soldiers 'the Gap of Belfort', and is the only break in the hill frontier that covers France all the way from the Mediterranean to Flanders. On the farther side of this plain ran the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland, and just before you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on fold of high limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel, with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond their last abrupt escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar. Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I stood, right across that plain of Belfort, right across the ridges of the Jura, and cut the plain of the Aar a few miles to the west of a town called Solothurn or Soleure, which stands upon that river. It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but one could average it closely enough by following the high road down the mountain through Belfort to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut--so far one was a little to the west of the direct line. From Portrut, by picking one's way through forests, up steep banks, over open downs, along mule paths, and so forth, one could cross the first ridge called the 'Terrible Hill', and so reach the profound gorge of the river Doubs, and a town called St Ursanne. From St Ursanne, by following a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and tracking through a wood, one could get straight over the second ridge to Glovelier. From Glovelier a highroad took one through a gap to Undervelier and on to a town called Moutier or Munster. Then from Munster, the road, still following more or less the line to Rome but now somewhat to the east of it, went on southward till an abrupt turn in it forced one to leave it. Then there was another rough climb by a difficult path up over the last ridge, called the Weissenstein, and from its high edge and summit it was but a straight fall of a mile or two on to Soleure. So much my map told me, and this mixture of roads and paths and rock climbs that I had planned out, I exactly followed, so as to march on as directly as possible towards Rome, which was my goal. For if I had not so planned it, but had followed the highroads, I should have been compelled to zig-zag enormously for days, since these ridges of the Jura are but little broken, and the roads do not rise above the crests, but follow the parallel valleys, taking advantage only here and there of the rare gaps to pass from one to another. Here is a sketch of the way I went, where my track is a white line, and the round spots in it are the towns and villages whose names are written at the side. In this sketch the plains and low valleys are marked dark, and the crests of the mountains left white. The shading is lighter according to the height, and the contour lines (which are very far from accurate) represent, I suppose, about a thousand feet between each, or perhaps a little more; and as for the distance, from the Ballon d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days' march on a flat road, but over mountains and up rocks it was all but three, and even that was very good going. My first stage was across the plain of Belfort, and I had determined to sleep that night in Switzerland. I wandered down the mountain. A little secret path, one of many, saved me the long windings of the road. It followed down the central hollow of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All the way for miles the water tumbled in fall after fall over a hundred steps of rock, and its noise mixed with the freshness of the air, and its splashing weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A little rain that fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired with content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and grasses, and find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a narrow floor between the hills. Here there were the first houses of men; and, from one, smoke was already going up thinly into the morning. The air was very pure and cold; it was made more nourishing and human by the presence and noise of the waters, by the shining wet grasses and the beaded leaves all through that umbrageous valley. The shreds of clouds which, high above the calm, ran swiftly in the upper air, fed it also with soft rains from time to time as fine as dew; and through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight. When I had enjoyed the descent through this place for but a few miles, everything changed. The road in front ran straight and bordered--it led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there with hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was Giromagny. Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up and hear Mass; and I did so, but my attention at the holy office was distracted by the enormous number of priests that I found in the church, and I have wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a little place like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar, and nearly one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses going on, beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people at Mass so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and continual little bells. I am still wondering. Giromagny is no place for relics or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a holy look about it, and all these priests-- LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and-- AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel. For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these priests--- LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming. AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me, I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you, and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road, and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums. It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the guns and the tramp of Épinal. I had left Épinal and counted the miles and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an army, the ungarnished gaps between. As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song. I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written up the words, Wine; shut or open. As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine divided into shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said-- 'Is this what you call open wine?' 'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?' That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of the God. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said-- 'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.' This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body, and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine. I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself-- 'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.' So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack, and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town. As I passed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling. In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made in any other fashion. There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour. The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually. For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting all round it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds, and the heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean by men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should not be competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's beehive, nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of the ownership of the concentrated means of production? And they shake their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it first and see. Then they fly into a rage. When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels, experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world)--when, I say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on falling. In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry, therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine. To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with two very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders to challenge once and then to fire. Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of a growing tree. This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt, and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line. Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I went down the road. Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain, and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles, because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a wide turnpike. Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses-- _Ave Crux Spes Unica._ I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I looked backward along the road I had come. There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even the high hills. Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages. The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my fourth day. The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky, and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills. Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of sunset reflected in stagnant waters. The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence of the waste waters and of the birds of evening. I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind. With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover, there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome. But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all. As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth drinking after I had passed the frontier. I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait. So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and said-- 'Am I in Switzerland?' A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together in varying accents: 'Yes.' 'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.' This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the Commercial Traveller from Marseilles. He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large, his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions); then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the memory of such a revelation. For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black; slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small, black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet lightning does over the glow of midnight in June. That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls. It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic. I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the changeless form of Europe under me like a rock. When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this: 'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so many years and so many yards,...' &c., and so forth... exactly like a mill. I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man. He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper. It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when, with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France, and I was fairly in a strange country. The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there, steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm. I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything. Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees. I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow Water'. I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the forest was over, I saw an excellent sight. There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the German cities. LECTOR. How 'German'? AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely, without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me. LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French! AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless, they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pass through but a narrow wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy, they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort. The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing. As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine. I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But, oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous, introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god? Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little attendant gods by name that will come to the festival. What a wine! I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a providence for pilgrims.' So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and went up on my way to Rome. Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments. But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than death, and which all have feared? I also told him that armies fighting in a just cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God. He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind. What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by matches. But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers, you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities' and your 'laws'. LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics? AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave... Well, then, I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill', or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep, long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long way westward, seeking for a pass or neck in the chain, but I determined to find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this curious indication. They said-- 'Go you up this muddy track that has been made athwart the woods and over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had cut their trunks higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the summit easily. From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a very deep and dark ravine.' I thanked them, and soon found that they had told me right. There, unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the intervening fields of grass, was the run of the timber. When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked behind me to take my last view of the north. I saw just before me a high isolated rock; between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite plain of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me, and compelled me to record it. 'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will describe in a moment. Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long, that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would care to ride. I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and men building. Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out, and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home. This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or village. It was St Ursanne. The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way, others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say-- LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of a window? AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town, a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say-- 'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and have a _round top to them'?_ Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate pictures the sunlit things outside your home. Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see washing below). When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to bow down to windows! May he live in a place without windows for a while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up the high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to me of windows! Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a little tiny town, and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses, people, and speech. It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue of the saint with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the market-place. But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness. The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or two above, is of that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found in such valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, and thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they come to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut across the intervening bend. Here is the shape of this valley with the high hills round it and in its core, which will show better than description what I mean. The little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I came down on it from the heights above. In the map the small white 'A' shows where the railway bridge was, and in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the depth and the light is for the heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees when one is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when one first catches the river beneath one. I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to get through the Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of Porrentruy, and by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they probably came round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a straight path to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the river bend I was bound to take it. Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the top of the river bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary ravine--awful, deep, and narrow--and this was crossed, I could see, by a very high railway bridge. Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the long descent into the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the steep climb up the other side, I made in my folly for the station which stood just where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high bridge. I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might do it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, and considering how charming was the loose habit of small uncentralized societies, I went merrily on to the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping from sleeper to sleeper. But it was not to be so simple. The powers of the air, that hate to have their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began. I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards when I was seized with terror. I have much to say further on in this book concerning terror: the panic that haunts high places and the spell of many angry men. This horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our modern scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories', and is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable fascination of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded it as something impure and devilish, unworthy of a Christian. Fear I think, indeed, to be in the nature of things, and it is as much part of my experience to be afraid of the sea or of an untried horse as it is to eat and sleep; but terror, which is a sudden madness and paralysis of the soul, that I say is from hell, and not to be played with or considered or put in pictures or described in stories. All this I say to preface what happened, and especially to point out how terror is in the nature of a possession and is unreasonable. For in the crossing of this bridge there was nothing in itself perilous. The sleepers lay very close together--I doubt if a man could have slipped between them; but, I know not how many hundred feet below, was the flashing of the torrent, and it turned my brain. For the only parapet there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and low down, running from one spare iron upright to another. These rather emphasized than encouraged my mood. And still as I resolutely put one foot in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I could bear. I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. Words and phrases began repeating themselves in my head as they will under a strain: so I know at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller makes a kind of litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries. Perhaps at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and the fall-- At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one candle to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went well, and this candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung up in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be, but peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely old. Well, then, having made this vow I still went on, with panic aiding me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within a few feet of the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away. Then my resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from sleeper to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond. I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the little horrible strip between heaven and hell--the perspective of its rails. I was made ill by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men cross and recross it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me! There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont Terrible, and it lies to a yard upon the straight line--_quid dicam_--the segment of the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome. The high bank or hillside before me was that which ends the gorge of the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My way ran by a rather ill-made lane and passed a village. Then it was my business to make straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as there was wood upon this, it looked an easy matter. But when I came to it, it was not easy. The wood grew in loose rocks and the slope was much too steep for anything but hands and knees, and far too soft and broken for true climbing. And no wonder this ridge seemed a wall for steepness and difficulty, since it was the watershed between the Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did not know this at the time. It must have taken me close on an hour before I had covered the last thousand feet or so that brought me to the top of the ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, was a road. Where could such a road lead, and why did it follow right along the highest edge of the mountains? The Jura with their unique parallels provide twenty such problems. Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly perpendicular to my true route, and I had but to press on my straight line. So I crossed it, saw for a last time through the trees the gorge of the Doubs, and then got upon a path which led down through a field more or less in the direction of my pilgrimage. Here the country was so broken that one could make out but little of its general features, but of course, on the whole, I was following down yet another southern slope, the southern slope of the _third_ chain of the Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also many stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all before me. The open down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform commanded the wide and fading valley below. It was a very glad surprise to see this sight suddenly unrolled as I stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had hitherto been either lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a true vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there were corn lands and no rocks. The mountains on either side did not rise so high as three thousand feet. Though of limestone they were rounded in form, and the slanting sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left the sky) took them full and warm. The valley remaining wide and fruitful went on out eastward till the hills became mixed up with brume and distance. As I did not know its name I called it after the village immediately below me for which I was making; and I still remember it as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth ridges of the Jura. Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I was much too tired by the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to draw definitely or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down over the smooth field. There is something that distinguishes the rugged from the gracious in landscape, and in our Europe this something corresponds to the use and presence of men, especially in mountainous places. For men's habits and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the base of the hills, making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already passed. The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only become by thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of the earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring, caught in a stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees. Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar. On my right was a deep little dale with children playing in it--and this' I afterwards learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word, but they spell it _cwm_; it is their mountain way. Well, as I was saying, everything surrounding me was domestic and grateful, and I was therefore in a mood for charity and companionship when I came down the last dip and entered Glovelier. But Glovelier is a place of no excellence whatever, and if the thought did not seem extravagant I should be for putting it to the sword and burning it all down. For just as I was going along full of kindly thoughts, and had turned into the sign of (I think it was) the 'Sun' to drink wine and leave them my benediction-- LECTOR. Why your benediction? AUCTOR. Who else can give benedictions if people cannot when they are on pilgrimage? Learn that there are three avenues by which blessing can be bestowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it. (1) There is the good man, whose goodness makes him of himself a giver of blessings. His power is not conferred or of office, but is _inhaerens persona_; part of the stuff of his mind. This kind can confer the solemn benediction, or _Benedictio major_, if they choose; but besides this their every kind thought, word, or action is a _Benedictio generalise_ and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and irritable gestures may be called _Benedictiones minores vel incerti_. I believe I am within the definitions. I avoid heresy. All this is sound theology. I do not smell of the faggot. And this kind of Benedictory Power is the fount or type or natural origin, as it were, of all others. (2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the exercise of his office-- LECTOR. For Heaven's sake-- AUCTOR. Who began it? You protested my power to give benediction, and I must now prove it at length; otherwise I should fall under the accusation of lesser Simony--that is, the false assumption of particular powers. Well, then, there is the Official who _ex officio_, and when he makes it quite clear that it is _qua sponsus_ and not _sicut ut ipse_, can give formal benediction. This power belongs certainly to all Bishops, mitred Abbots, and Archimandrates; to Patriarchs of course, and _a fortiori_ to the Pope. In Rome they will have it that Monsignores also can so bless, and I have heard it debated whether or no the same were not true in some rustic way of parish priests. However this may be, all their power proceeds, not from themselves, but from the accumulation of goodness left as a deposit by the multitudes of exceptionally good men who have lived in times past, and who have now no use for it. (3) Thirdly--and this is my point--any one, good or bad, official or non-official, who is for the moment engaged in an _opusfaustum_ can act certainly as a conductor or medium, and the influence of what he is touching or doing passes to you from him. This is admitted by every one who worships trees, wells, and stones; and indeed it stands to reason, for it is but a branch of the well-known _'Sanctificatio ex loco, opere, tactu vel conditione.'_ I will admit that this power is but vague, slight, tenuous, and dissipatory, still there it is: though of course its poor effect is to that of the _Benedictio major_ what a cat's-paw in the Solent is to a north-east snorter on Lindsey Deeps. I am sorry to have been at such length, but it is necessary to have these things thrashed out once for all. So now you see how I, being on pilgrimage, could give a kind of little creeping blessing to the people on the way, though, as St Louis said to the Hascisch-eaters, _'May it be a long time before you can kiss my bones.'_ So I entered the 'Sun' inn and saw there a woman sewing, a great dull-faced man like an ox, and a youth writing down figures in a little book. I said-- 'Good morning, madam, and sirs, and the company. Could you give me a little red wine?' Not a head moved. True I was very dirty and tired, and they may have thought me a beggar, to whom, like good sensible Christians who had no nonsense about them, they would rather have given a handsome kick than a cup of cold water. However, I think it was not only my poverty but a native churlishness which bound their bovine souls in that valley. I sat down at a very clean table. I notice that those whom the Devil has made his own are always spick and span, just as firemen who have to go into great furnaces have to keep all their gear highly polished. I sat down at it, and said again, still gently-- 'It is, indeed, a fine country this of yours. Could you give me a little red wine?' Then the ox-faced man who had his back turned to me, and was the worst of the lot, said sulkily, not to me, but to the woman-- 'He wants wine.' The woman as sulkily said to me, not looking me in the eyes-- 'How much will you pay?' I said, 'Bring the wine. Set it here. See me drink it. Charge me your due.' I found that this brutal way of speaking was just what was needed for the kine and cattle of this pen. She skipped off to a cupboard, and set wine before me, and a glass. I drank quite quietly till I had had enough, and asked what there was to pay. She said 'Threepence,' and I said 'Too much,' as I paid it. At this the ox-faced man grunted and frowned, and I was afraid; but hiding my fear I walked out boldly and slowly, and made a noise with my stick upon the floor of the hall without. Neither did I bid them farewell. But I made a sign at the house as I left it. Whether it suffered from this as did the house at Dorchester which the man in the boat caused to wither in one night, is more than I can tell. The road led straight across the valley and approached the further wall of hills. These I saw were pierced by one of the curious gaps which are peculiar to limestone ranges. Water cuts them, and a torrent ran through this one also. The road through it, gap though it was, went up steeply, and the further valley was evidently higher than the one I was leaving. It was already evening as I entered this narrow ravine; the sun only caught the tops of the rock-walls. My fatigue was very great, and my walking painful to an extreme, when, having come to a place where the gorge was narrowest and where the two sides were like the posts of a giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the Jura stood up beyond me in the further valley, a vast shadow, I sat down wearily and drew what not even my exhaustion could render unremarkable. While I was occupied sketching the slabs of limestone, I heard wheels coming up behind me, and a boy in a waggon stopped and hailed me. What the boy wanted to know was whether I would take a lift, and this he said in such curious French that I shuddered to think how far I had pierced into the heart of the hills, and how soon I might come to quite strange people. I was greatly tempted to get into his cart, but though I had broken so many of my vows one remained yet whole and sound, which was that I would ride upon no wheeled thing. Remembering this, therefore, and considering that the Faith is rich in interpretation, I clung on to the waggon in such a manner that it did all my work for me, and yet could not be said to be actually carrying me. _Distinguo_. The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. The spirit and intention are for the major morality, and concern Natural Religion, but when upon a point of ritual or of dedication or special worship a man talks to you of the Spirit and Intention, and complains of the dryness of the Word, look at him askance. He is not far removed from Heresy. I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and I made up this rule for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he should never drink what has been made and sold since the Reformation--I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead--if he could get it--liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, and all went well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes. His prose clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a republican, when one fatal day--it was the feast of the eleven thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider the needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men--I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round a table with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant above, the host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my back being turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from him he used these words-- 'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that matters;' and I saw that all was over, for he had abandoned definition, and was plunged back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion. What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why, he had to take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and become a spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word he might by this time have been a happy man. Remembering him and pondering upon the advantage of strict rule, I hung on to my cart, taking care to let my feet still feel the road, and so passed through the high limestone gates of the gorge, and was in the fourth valley of the Jura, with the fifth ridge standing up black and huge before me against the last of the daylight. There were as yet no stars. There, in this silent place, was the little village of Undervelier, and I thanked the boy, withdrew from his cart, and painfully approached the inn, where I asked the woman if she could give me something to eat, and she said that she could in about an hour, using, however, with regard to what it was I was to have, words which I did not understand. For the French had become quite barbaric, and I was now indeed lost in one of the inner places of the world. A cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar; and the best cost a penny. One of these, therefore, I bought, and then I went out smoking it into the village square, and, finding a low wall, leaned over it and contemplated the glorious clear green water tumbling and roaring along beneath it on the other side; for a little river ran through the village. As I leaned there resting and communing I noticed how their church, close at hand, was built along the low banks of the torrent. I admired the luxuriance of the grass these waters fed, and the generous arch of the trees beside it. The graves seemed set in a natural place of rest and home, and just beyond this churchyard was that marriage of hewn stone and water which is the source of so peculiar a satisfaction; for the church tower was built boldly right out into the stream and the current went eddying round it. But why it is that strong human building when it dips into water should thus affect the mind I cannot say, only I know that it is an emotion apart to see our device and structure where it is most enduring come up against and challenge that element which we cannot conquer, and which has always in it something of danger for men. It is therefore well to put strong mouldings on to piers and quays, and to make an architecture of them, and so it was a splendid thought of the Romans to build their villas right out to sea; so they say does Venice enthrall one, but where I have most noticed this thing is at the Mont St Michel--only one must take care to shut one's eyes or sleep during all the low tide. As I was watching that stream against those old stones, my cigar being now half smoked, a bell began tolling, and it seemed as if the whole village were pouring into the church. At this I was very much surprised, not having been used at any time of my life to the unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in places where some sham religion or other glozed over our tragedies and excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women, and children of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new sight, and so I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top of the wall and went in with them. I then saw that what they were at was vespers. All the village sang, knowing the psalms very well, and I noticed that their Latin was nearer German than French; but what was most pleasing of all was to hear from all the men and women together that very noble good-night and salutation to God which begins-- _Te, lucis ante terminum._ My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act, and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain, and I remembered Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me altogether that attitude of difficulty and combat which, for us others, is always associated with the Faith. The cities dwindled in my imagination, and I took less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them into the clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered the nature of Belief. Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back and see our home. What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again... But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions. And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us. And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only with his fellows. And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the duty of that wrestling. But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no keener joy known to man. I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes upon the ground... There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired. The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things. By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, _Haec fuit, Haec almae janua sacra domus._ Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes. It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith. They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like _'possible exception'?_ AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine. You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the _cliché_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not because you naturally write odd prose--contrariwise, left to yourself you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done, and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they dictate to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word. Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I had my way-- LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this. AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have made myself clear. Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, I forgave them, because they were such good people, and after a short and bitter night I went out in the morning before the sun rose and took the Moutier road. The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase seems familiar--was more or less like an H. That is, there were two high parallel ranges bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps a thousand feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread or coffee, which was a folly. When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier. He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as I descended. And my first verse was-- Heretics all, whoever you be, In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea, You never shall have good words from me. _Caritas non conturbat me._ If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats. I sang it to a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the occasion. I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how pleasant were my friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second verse, which I sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew deeper, sending back echoes-- But Catholic men that live upon wine Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine; Wherever I travel I find it so, _Benedicamus Domino._ There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a catholic work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity, and a great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I made up this third verse and sang it to suit-- On childing women that are forlorn, And men that sweat in nothing but scorn: That is on all that ever were born, _Miserere Domine._ Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is just what Heretics least like to be reminded of, I ended thus-- To my poor self on my deathbed, And all my dear companions dead, Because of the love that I bore them, _Dona Eis Requiem._ I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there, for I also wrote in the spirit of the rest a verse of Mea Culpa and Confession of Sin, but I shall not print it here. So my song over and the woods now left behind, I passed up a dusty piece of road into Moutier, a detestable town, all whitewashed and orderly, down under the hills. I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and somewhat warm, and I had walked ten miles, and that over a high ridge; and I had written a canticle and sung it--- and all that without a sup or a bite. I therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, and then going a little way out of the town I crossed a stream off the road, climbed a knoll, and, lying under a tree, I slept. I awoke and took the road. The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics; it stirred me in no way. It was bare in the sunlight, had fields on either side; and in the fields stood houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking mortal men. There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them myself) who treat of common things, and their admirers tell us that these men raise the things of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their disgusting minds. Everyday life! As _La Croix_ said in a famous leading article: _'La Presse?'_ POOH!' I know that everyday life. It goes with sandals and pictures of lean ugly people all just like one another in browny photographs on the wall, and these pictures are called, one 'The House of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet again a third, 'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift about uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or Pietas. LECTOR. Then-- AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts, they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their souls. LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things? AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this road from Moutier. LECTOR. By all means. AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty! LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood! AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night. LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman. AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction. LECTOR. Yes, indeed. AUCTOR. Indeed, yes. LECTOR. I cannot go on like this. AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to pad out their work. So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or sing a song, and to that I pledge myself. By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all? Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money, for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this-- There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written. What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear! LECTOR. Let us be getting on. AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things. After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap in the hills and-- LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess? AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not? LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a duchess? AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one startling moment. Do you follow? Is it not art? I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to stray dogs. When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very humbly and contritely said-- 'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.' The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the drawing-room, said-- 'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet observe!' With that he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed. 'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray you never lay upon me again.' His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark catches me. As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn. Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein. So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine. A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw' after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily. Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to repentance or to shame. Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put myself out of her power. The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge. Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side, the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way. It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe and look about me. It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing appeared above them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand afterwards firm in our minds. There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision. What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I am inventing the words, you know nothing of men. I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond. I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God. For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon. There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away, they stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my breath. I had seen them. So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two high, they were become something different from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed. To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love one finds that _this_ can belong to _me._ Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to interpret them for others. These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man. Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I felt. This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down. Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I draw it, and put it in my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun? My jest drags down such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in my beginning that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except figures, which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for mathematical figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in this promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was blown away by the wind and lost--- if anything ever is lost. So I put down here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw, which is about as much like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that same song sung by an army on the march. And I am consoled by remembering that if I could draw infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not going to waste any more time discussing why I put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a little bit of paper. I have made it small for the purpose; but remember that the paper should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with the shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a memory of the picture. It was all full of this, as a man is full of music just after hearing it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led towards the great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down it by a kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone cliffs were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar. I was an hour or more going down the enormous face of the Jura, which is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and contains but few such breaks by which men can pick their way. It was when I was about half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me. And yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the Alps and their much greater sublimity. This vastness, even of these limestone mountains, took me especially at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather precipitous, lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could cling. I was still very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills; nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky. Then at last I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the mountains, and there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly by the afternoon heat of those low places, I went on more slowly towards Soleure. Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded by great trees, built of wood, and standing apart. To each of them almost was a little water-wheel, run by the spring which came down out of the ravine. The water-wheel in most cases worked a simple little machine for sawing planks, but in other cases it seemed used for some purpose inside the house, which I could not divine; perhaps for spinning. All this place was full of working, and the men sang and spoke at their work in German, which I could not understand. I did indeed find one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who knew a little French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to teach me German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates of the old town and then I left him. It is thus, you will see, that for my next four days or five, which were passed among the German-speaking Swiss, I was utterly alone. This book must not go on for ever; therefore I cannot say very much about Soleure, although there is a great deal to be said about it. It is distinguished by an impression of unity, and of civic life, which I had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though men talk of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never find it, save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have seen the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris. Here also in Switzerland. As I had seen it at St Ursanne, so I found it now at Soleure. There were huge gates flanking the town, and there was that evening a continual noise of rifles, at which the Swiss are for ever practising. Over the church, however, I saw something terribly seventeenth century, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters upon its front. Well, dining there of the best they had to give me (for this was another milestone in my pilgrimage), I became foolishly refreshed and valiant, and instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man would have done, I determined, though it was now nearly dark, to push on upon the road to Burgdorf. I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here magnificently broad and strong, and has bastions jutting out into it in a very bold fashion. I saw the last colourless light of evening making its waters seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks; I felt the beginnings of fatigue, and half regretted my determination. But as it is quite certain that one should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I do not know how many miles, till I reached some cross roads and an inn. This inn was very poor, and the people had never heard in their lives, apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be able to talk German, which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat there ordering beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would have me their butt, and even as it was found something monstrous in me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with them (for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller by railways. I suppose this place was more untouched, as the phrase goes, that is, more living, more intense, and more powerful to affect others, whenever it may be called to do so, than are even the dear villages of Sussex that lie under my downs. For those are haunted by a nearly cosmopolitan class of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and what not to come and stay with them, and who read the paper, and from time to time address their village folk upon matters of politics. But here, in this broad plain by the banks of the Emmen, they knew of nothing but themselves and the Church which is the common bond of Europe, and they were in the right way. Hence it was doubly hard on me that they should think me such a stranger. When I had become a little morose at their perpetual laughter, I asked for a bed, and the landlady, a woman of some talent, showed me on her fingers that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a franc. I determined upon the best, and was given indeed a very pleasant room, having in it the statue of a saint, and full of a country air. But I had done too much in this night march, as you will presently learn, for my next day was a day without salt, and in it appreciation left me. And this breakdown of appreciation was due to what I did not know at the time to be fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner exhaustion. When I awoke next morning it was as it always is: no one was awake, and I had the field to myself, to slip out as I chose. I looked out of the window into the dawn. The race had made its own surroundings. These people who suffocated with laughter at the idea of one's knowing no German, had produced, as it were, a German picture by the mere influence of years and years of similar thoughts. Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low down. I saw an apple-tree against the grey light. The tangled grass in the little garden, the dog-kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had seen in those German pictures which they put into books for children, and which are drawn in thick black lines: nor did I see any reason why tame faces should not appear in that framework. I expected the light lank hair and the heavy unlifting step of the people whose only emotions are in music. But it was too early for any one to be about, and my German garden, _si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,_ had to suffice me for an impression of the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed profoundly. All that day was destined to be covered, so far as my spirit was concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men who travel, I had never felt before. The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales. It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men. Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open. Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon, the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the Weissenstein. Seven depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the gap of Belfort, the gorge of the Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of Moutier, and now this plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 miles. It was no wonder that on this eighth day I was oppressed and that all the light long I drank no good wine, met no one to remember well, nor sang any songs. All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty, and I was sustained only by my knowledge that the vast mountains (which had disappeared) would be part of my life very soon if I still went on steadily towards Rome. The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and I there went to a railway station, and outside of it drank coffee and ate bread. I also bought old newspapers in French, and looked at everything wearily and with sad eyes. There was nothing to draw. How can a man draw pain in the foot and knee? And that was all there was remarkable at that moment. I watched a train come in. It was full of tourists, who (it may have been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common and worthless people, and sad into the bargain. It was going to Interlaken; and I felt a languid contempt for people who went to Interlaken instead of driving right across the great hills to Rome. After an hour, or so of this melancholy dawdling, I put a map before me on a little marble table, ordered some more coffee, and blew into my tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of coming to a necessary decision. I had (for the first time since I had left Lorraine) the choice of two roads; and why this was so the following map will make clear. Here you see that there is no possibility of following the straight way to Rome, but that one must go a few miles east or west of it. From Burgundy one has to strike a point on the sources of the Emmen, and Burgdorf is on the Emmen. Therefore one might follow the Emmen all the way up. But it seemed that the road climbed up above a gorge that way, whereas by the other (which is just as straight) the road is good (it seemed) and fairly level. So I chose this latter Eastern way, which, at the bifurcation, takes one up a tributary of the Emmen, then over a rise to the Upper Emmen again. Do you want it made plainer than that? I should think not. And, tell me--what can it profit you to know these geographical details? Believe me, I write them down for my own gratification, not yours. I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was ordinary, the colours common; men, animals, and trees indifferent. Something had stopped working. Our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it, even if we can cover thirty miles day after day (as I can), or bend a peony in one's hand as could Frocot, the driver in my piece--a man you never knew--or write bad verse very rapidly as can so many moderns. I say our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it as though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a kind of present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should thank God for his reason, as did the madman in the Story of the Rose, who thanked God that he at least was sane though all the rest of the world had recently lost their reason. Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which comes from time to time over the mind is a very sad thing, but it can be made of great use to us if we will draw from it the lesson that we ourselves are nothing. Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps in these moments our minds repose... Anyhow, a day without salt. You understand that under (or in) these circumstances-- When I was at Oxford there was a great and terrible debate that shook the Empire, and that intensely exercised the men whom we send out to govern the Empire, and which, therefore, must have had its effect upon the Empire, as to whether one should say 'under these circumstances' or 'in these circumstances'; nor did I settle matters by calling a conclave and suggesting _Quae quum ita sint_ as a common formula, because a new debate arose upon when you should say _sint_ and when you should say _sunt,_ and they all wrangled like kittens in a basket. Until there rose a deep-voiced man from an outlying college, who said, 'For my part I will say that under these circumstances, or in these circumstances, or in spite of these circumstances, or hovering playfully above these circumstances, or-- I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, in the Chevron, and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and Pedants displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable and Pedants irreparable; indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools of the world!' But by this time he was alone, and thus was this great question never properly decided. Under these circumstances, then (or in these circumstances), it would profit you but little if I were to attempt the description of the Valley of the Emmen, of the first foot-hills of the Alps, and of the very uninteresting valley which runs on from Langnau. I had best employ my time in telling the story of the Hungry Student. LECTOR. And if you are so worn-out and bereft of all emotions, how can you tell a story? AUCTOR. These two conditions permit me. First, that I am writing some time after, and that I have recovered; secondly, that the story is not mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist newspaper which had served me so long to wrap up my bread and bacon in my haversack. This is the story, and I will tell it you. Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of time. Here am I no farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have already admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of a man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither you nor me any great harm. On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going to give you any kind of description of this intolerable day's march. If you want some kind of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little châlets which were beginning and make what you can of them. LECTOR. Where are they? AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here. They were overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road leaves the valley and makes over a little pass for a place called Schangnau. But though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact incident and the truth--a thing that I would swear to in the court of justice, or quite willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it to me; or even take as historical if I found it in a modern English history of the Anglo-Saxon Church--though, I repeat, it is a thing actually lived, yet I will tell it you. It was at the very end of the road, and when an enormous weariness had begun to add some kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving a cart very rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but he said to me some words in German which I did not understand. We were at that moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road, and the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while he went in and drank. How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses' heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery, purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of course, expected him to bring in his own hands. Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord, and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen that you find there. Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour. Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I held this horse. I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as you may imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling, gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the road again with my face towards Rome. I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end. Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing-- Can fix the high elusive hour And stand in things divine. And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills. So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round in a ring and singing songs. The sight so cheered me that I determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers, beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was an inn between me and that vast barrier. The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out, but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous. There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle terribly. The road stopped being a road, and became like a Californian trail. I approached enormous gates in the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow. The mist rolled over them, hiding their summits and making them seem infinitely lifted up and reaching endlessly into the thick sky; the straight, tenuous lines of the rain made them seem narrower still. Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man driving two cows, and said to him the word, 'Guest-house?' to which he said 'Yaw!' and pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the precipice and right in the gates I speak of. So I went there over an old bridge, and found a wooden house and went in. It was a house which one entered without ceremony. The door was open, and one walked straight into a great room. There sat three men playing at cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, and Latin, but they did not understand me, and what seemed remarkable in an hotel (for it was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house understood me--neither the servants nor any one; but the servants did not laugh at me as had the poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood round me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at trains. Then they brought me food, and as I did not know the names of the different kinds of food, I had to eat what they chose; and the angel of that valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, however, the word Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it consciously and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next morning at dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table, and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood the Brienzer Grat. To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back at the little map on page 105. You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever of it was possible had to be done, and among the possible things was clambering over the high ridge of the Brienzer Grat instead of going round like a coward by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it, however, needs must I should have to take a pass called the Grimsel Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that way. It was with such a determination that I had come here to the upper waters of the Emmen, and stood now on a moist morning in the basin where that stream rises, at the foot of the mountain range that divided me from the lake. The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It is quite straight; its summits are, of course, of different heights, but from below they seem even, like a ridge: and, indeed, the whole mountain is more like a ridge than any other I have seen. At one end is a peak called the 'Red Horn', the other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and wherever you should cut it you would get a section like this, for it is as steep as anything can be short of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it, though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to kill a man--I saw several of three or four hundred feet. It is about five or six thousand feet high, and it stands right up and along the northern shore of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent. Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and grew steeper as one rose, took up the first few hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere dampness ran in among the under moss, and such very small hidden flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit of moisture. The rain was now indistinguishable from a mist, and indeed I had come so near to the level belt of cloud, that already its gloom was exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge one's progress. Now and then a higher mass of rock, a peak on the ridge, would show clear through a corridor of cloud and be hidden again; also at times I would stand hesitating before a sharp wall or slab, and wait for a shifting of the fog to make sure of the best way round. I struck what might have been a loose path or perhaps only a gully; lost it again and found it again. In one place I climbed up a jagged surface for fifty feet, only to find when it cleared that it was no part of the general ascent, but a mere obstacle which might have been outflanked. At another time I stopped for a good quarter of an hour at an edge that might have been an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that turned out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not much longer than my body. So I went upwards always, drenched and doubting, and not sure of the height I had reached at any time. At last I came to a place where a smooth stone lay between two pillared monoliths, as though it had been put there for a bench. Though all around me was dense mist, yet I could see above me the vague shape of a summit looming quite near. So I said to myself-- 'I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter and clearer, for I must now be within two or three hundred feet of the top of the ridge, and as anything at all may be on the other side, I had best go carefully and knowing my way.' So I sat down facing the way I had to go and looking upwards, till perhaps a movement of the air might show me against a clear sky the line of the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that remained to do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where I judged that sky line to lie, lest I should miss some sudden gleam revealing it; and as I sat there I grew mournful and began to consider the folly of climbing this great height on an empty stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts without some such refreshment before starting. Indeed, my fasting, and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded the sun. Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge. Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that prodigious hollow, lay the little lake. My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz. Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of something never changing throughout eternity--yet dead--was a threat to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice, frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height. There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their sublimity. I was afraid. Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger. A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down, down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags the mind after it, and I could not bear to begin the descent. However I reasoned with myself. I said to myself that a man should only be afraid of real dangers. That nightmare was not for the daylight. That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then choosing a gully where water sometimes ran, but now dry, I warily began to descend, using my staff and leaning well backwards. There was this disturbing thing about the gully, that it went in steps, and before each step one saw the sky just a yard or two ahead: one lost the comforting sight of earth. One knew of course that it would only be a little drop, and that the slope would begin again, but it disturbed one. And it is a trial to drop or clamber down, say fourteen or fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no flat foothold but that eternal steep beginning again. And this outline in which I have somewhat, but not much, exaggerated the slope, will show what I mean. The dotted line is the line of vision just as one got to a 'step'. The little figure is AUCTOR. LECTOR is up in the air looking at him. Observe the perspective of the lake below, but make no comments. I went very slowly. When I was about half-way down and had come to a place where a shoulder of heaped rock stood on my left and where little parallel ledges led up to it, having grown accustomed to the descent and easier in my mind, I sat down on a slab and drew imperfectly the things I saw: the lake below me, the first forests clinging to the foot of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow, and the clouds that had now begun to gather round them and that altogether hid the last third of their enormous height. Then I saw a steamer on the lake. I felt in touch with men. The slope grew easier. I snapped my fingers at the great devils that haunt high mountains. I sniffed the gross and comfortable air of the lower valleys, I entered the belt of wood and was soon going quite a pace through the trees, for I had found a path, and was now able to sing. So I did. At last I saw through the trunks, but a few hundred feet below me, the highroad that skirts the lake. I left the path and scrambled straight down to it. I came to a wall which I climbed, and found myself in somebody's garden. Crossing this and admiring its wealth and order (I was careful not to walk on the lawns), I opened a little private gate and came on to the road, and from there to Brienz was but a short way along a fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the gentle lake on my right hand not five yards away, and with delightful trees upon my left, caressing and sometimes even covering me with their shade. I was therefore dry, ready and contented when I entered by mid morning the curious town of Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and contented; dry in my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature. But as I entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I had done it, though several people there could talk French. The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps', because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps. Take the Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between. Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this wonderful point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, and the Reuss all begin, and it is here that the simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns into the confused jumble of the Alps to the east. When you are high up on either wall you can catch the plan of all this, but to avoid a confused description and to help you to follow the marvellous, Hannibalian and never-before-attempted charge and march which I made, and which, alas! ended only in a glorious defeat--to help you to picture faintly to yourselves the mirific and horripilant adventure whereby I nearly achieved superhuman success in spite of all the powers of the air, I append a little map which is rough but clear and plain, and which I beg you to study closely, for it will make it easy for you to understand what next happened in my pilgrimage. The dark strips are the deep cloven valleys, the shaded belt is that higher land which is yet passable by any ordinary man. The part left white you may take to be the very high fields of ice and snow with great peaks which an ordinary man must regard as impassable, unless, indeed, he can wait for his weather and take guides and go on as a tourist instead of a pilgrim. You will observe that I have marked five clefts or valleys. A is that of the _Aar,_ and the little white patch at the beginning is the lake of Brienz. B is that of the _Reuss._ C is that of the _Rhone;_ and all these three are _north_ of the great watershed or main chain, and all three are full of German-speaking people. On the other hand, D is the valley of the _Toccia,_ E of the _Maggia,_ and F of the _Ticino._ All these three are _south_ of the great watershed, and are inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to Milan and so to Rome. The straight line to Rome is marked on my map by a dotted line ending in an arrow, and you will see that it was just my luck that it should cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where all the rivers spring. The problem was how to negotiate a passage from the valley of the Aar to one of the three Italian valleys, without departing too far from my straight line. To explain my track I must give the names of all the high passes between the valleys. That between A and C is called the _Grimsel;_ that between B and C the _Furka._ That between D and C is the _Gries_ Pass, that between F and C the _Nufenen,_ and that between E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map; indeed it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble over very high peaks, and it is called the Crystalline Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my map, you see a high passage between B and F. This is the famous St Gothard. The straightest way of all was (1) over the _Grimsel,_ then, the moment I got into the valley of the Rhone (2), up out of it again over the _Nufenen,_ then the moment I was down into the valley of the _Ticino_ (F), up out of it again (3) over the Crystalline to the valley of the _Maggia_ (E). Once in the Maggia valley (the top of it is called the _Val Bavona),_ it is a straight path for the lakes and Rome. There were also these advantages: that I should be in a place very rarely visited--all the guide-books are doubtful on it; that I should be going quite straight; that I should be accomplishing a feat, viz. the crossing of those high passes one after the other (and you must remember that over the Nufenen there is no road at all). But every one I asked told me that thus early in the year (it was not the middle of June) I could not hope to scramble over the Crystalline. No one (they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and snow and cold mist and verglas, and the precipices were smooth--a man would never get across; so it was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass if I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined on the Gries Pass. I said to myself: 'I will go on over the Grimsel, and once in the valley of the Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy.' For the Gries Pass, though not quite in the straight line, had this advantage, that once over it you are really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as Catullus, yet politically they count as part of Switzerland; and therefore if you enter Italy thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that country, but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by degrees, which is a pity. For good things should come suddenly, like the demise of that wicked man, Mr _(deleted by the censor),_ who had oppressed the poor for some forty years, when he was shot dead from behind a hedge, and died in about the time it takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him. Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn. The task of that afternoon was more than I could properly undertake, nor did I fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven. It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day, but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles. For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the silence. It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has given them a chance of living in awe and worship. For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and beastliness. If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.' Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag. All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me leave to keep off them. Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist, and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen, and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad, jaded tourists that had come in by a train. Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by, roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes. I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on. My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I walked. Very soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for miles. Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first, saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep here.' There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said, 'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me, and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It was not yet dark. By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late. The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much farther. To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed, told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left me to sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned. But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was full of terrors. Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous to me, and I to them. Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the next man whom the hills might send them. The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice, which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on account of the mist. Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of the cliff. There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist. It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks were solid snow. Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and thousands of feet below. LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing? AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the valleys. There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was, one saw it all. And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have never been able to understand--- namely, that if you draw a plan or section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand--yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and that they can produce that effect is related to another thing--the way in which they exaggerate their own steepness. For instance, those noble hills, my downs in Sussex, when you are upon them overlooking the weald, from Chanctonbury say, feel like this--or even lower. Indeed, it is impossible to give them truly, so insignificant are they; if the stretch of the Weald were made nearly a yard long, Chanctonbury would not, in proportion, be more than a fifth of an inch high! And yet, from the top of Chanctonbury, how one seems to overlook it and possess it all! Well, so it was here from the Grimsel when I overlooked the springs of the Rhone. In true proportion the valley I gazed into and over must have been somewhat like this-- It felt for all the world as deep and utterly below me as this other-- Moreover, where there was no mist, the air was so surprisingly clear that I could see everything clean and sharp wherever I turned my eyes. The mountains forbade any very far horizons to the view, and all that I could see was as neat and vivid as those coloured photographs they sell with bright green grass and bright white snow, and blue glaciers like precious stones. I scrambled down the mountain, for here, on the south side of the pass, there was no snow or ice, and it was quite easy to leave the road and take the old path cutting off the zig-zags. As the air got heavier, I became hungry, and at the very end of my descent, two hundred feet or so above the young Rhone, I saw a great hotel. I went round to their front door and asked them whether I could eat, and at what price. 'Four francs,' they said. 'What!' said I, 'four francs for a meal! Come, let me eat in the kitchen, and charge me one.' But they became rude and obstinate, being used only to deal with rich people, so I cursed them, and went down the road. But I was very hungry. The road falls quite steeply, and the Rhone, which it accompanies in that valley, leaps in little falls. On a bridge I passed a sad Englishman reading a book, and a little lower down, two American women in a carriage, and after that a priest (it was lucky I did not see him first. Anyhow, I touched iron at once, to wit, a key in my pocket), and after that a child minding a goat. Altogether I felt myself in the world again, and as I was on a good road, all down hill, I thought myself capable of pushing on to the next village. But my hunger was really excessive, my right boot almost gone, and my left boot nothing to exhibit or boast of, when I came to a point where at last one looked down the Rhone valley for miles. It is like a straight trench, and at intervals there are little villages, built of most filthy chalets, the said chalets raised on great stones. There are pine-trees up, up on either slope, into the clouds, and beyond the clouds I could not see. I left on my left a village called 'Between the Waters'. I passed through another called 'Ehringen', but it has no inn. At last, two miles farther, faint from lack of food, I got into Ulrichen, a village a little larger than the rest, and the place where I believed one should start to go either over the Gries or Nufenen Pass. In Ulrichen was a warm, wooden, deep-eaved, frousty, comfortable, ramshackle, dark, anyhow kind of a little inn called 'The Bear'. And entering, I saw one of the women whom god loves. She was of middle age, very honest and simple in the face, kindly and good. She was messing about with cooking and stuff, and she came up to me stooping a little, her eyes wide and innocent, and a great spoon in her hand. Her face was extremely broad and flat, and I have never seen eyes set so far apart. Her whole gait, manner, and accent proved her to be extremely good, and on the straight road to heaven. I saluted her in the French tongue. She answered me in the same, but very broken and rustic, for her natural speech was a kind of mountain German. She spoke very slowly, and had a nice soft voice, and she did what only good people do, I mean, looked you in the eyes as she spoke to you. Beware of shifty-eyed people. It is not only nervousness, it is also a kind of wickedness. Such people come to no good. I have three of them now in my mind as I write. One is a Professor. And, by the way, would you like to know why universities suffer from this curse of nervous disease? Why the great personages stammer or have St Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you. It is the punishment of their _intellectual pride,_ than which no sin is more offensive to the angels. What! here are we with the jolly world of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function? Away with such foolery. LECTOR. When shall we get on to... AUCTOR. Wait a moment. I say, away with such foolery. Note that pedants lose all proportion. They never can keep sane in a discussion. They will go wild on matters they are wholly unable to judge, such as Armenian Religion or the Politics of Paris or what not. Never do they use one of those three phrases which keep a man steady and balance his mind, I mean the words (1) _After all it is not my business_. (2) Tut! tut! You don't say so! and (3) _Credo in Unum Deum Patrem Omnipotentem, Factorem omnium visibilium atque invisibilium;_ in which last there is a power of synthesis that can jam all their analytical dust-heap into such a fine, tight, and compact body as would make them stare to see. I understand that they need six months' holiday a year. Had I my way they should take twelve, and an extra day on leap years. LECTOR. Pray, pray return to the woman at the inn. AUCTOR. I will, and by this road: to say that on the day of Judgement, when St Michael weighs souls in his scales, and the wicked are led off by the Devil with a great rope, as you may see them over the main porch of Notre Dame (I will heave a stone after them myself I hope), all the souls of the pedants together will not weigh as heavy and sound as the one soul of this good woman at the inn. She put food before me and wine. The wine was good, but in the food was some fearful herb or other I had never tasted before--a pure spice or scent, and a nasty one. One could taste nothing else, and it was revolting; but I ate it for her sake. Then, very much refreshed, I rose, seized my great staff, shook myself and said, 'Now it is about noon, and I am off for the frontier.' At this she made a most fearful clamour, saying that it was madness, and imploring me not to think of it, and running out fetched from the stable a tall, sad, pale-eyed man who saluted me profoundly and told me that he knew more of the mountains than any one for miles. And this by asking many afterwards I found out to be true. He said that he had crossed the Nufenen and the Gries whenever they could be crossed since he was a child, and that if I attempted it that day I should sleep that night in Paradise. The clouds on the mountain, the soft snow recently fallen, the rain that now occupied the valleys, the glacier on the Gries, and the pathless snow in the mist on the Nufenen would make it sheer suicide for him, an experienced guide, and for me a worse madness. Also he spoke of my boots and wondered at my poor coat and trousers, and threatened me with intolerable cold. It seems that the books I had read at home, when they said that the Nufenen had no snow on it, spoke of a later season of the year; it was all snow now, and soft snow, and hidden by a full mist in such a day from the first third of the ascent. As for the Gries, there was a glacier on the top which needed some kind of clearness in the weather. Hearing all this I said I would remain--but it was with a heavy heart. Already I felt a shadow of defeat over me. The loss of time was a thorn. I was already short of cash, and my next money was Milan. My return to England was fixed for a certain date, and stronger than either of these motives against delay was a burning restlessness that always takes men when they are on the way to great adventures. I made him promise to wake me next morning at three o'clock, and, short of a tempest, to try and get me across the Gries. As for the Nufenen and Crystalline passes which I had desired to attempt, and which were (as I have said) the straight line to Rome, he said (and he was right), that let alone the impassability of the Nufenen just then, to climb the Crystal Mountain in that season would be as easy as flying to the moon. Now, to cross the Nufenen alone, would simply land me in the upper valley of the Ticino, and take me a great bend out of my way by Bellinzona. Hence my bargain that at least he should show me over the Gries Pass, and this he said, if man could do it, he would do the next day; and I, sending my boots to be cobbled (and thereby breaking another vow), crept up to bed, and all afternoon read the school-books of the children. They were in French, from lower down the valley, and very Genevese and heretical for so devout a household. But the Genevese civilization is the standard for these people, and they combat the Calvinism of it with missions, and have statues in their rooms, not to speak of holy water stoups. The rain beat on my window, the clouds came lower still down the mountain. Then (as is finely written in the Song of Roland), 'the day passed and the night came, and I slept.' But with the coming of the small hours, and with my waking, prepare yourselves for the most extraordinary and terrible adventure that befell me out of all the marvels and perils of this pilgrimage, the most momentous and the most worthy of perpetual record, I think, of all that has ever happened since the beginning of the world. At three o'clock the guide knocked at my door, and I rose and came out to him. We drank coffee and ate bread. We put into our sacks ham and bread, and he white wine and I brandy. Then we set out. The rain had dropped to a drizzle, and there was no wind. The sky was obscured for the most part, but here and there was a star. The hills hung awfully above us in the night as we crossed the spongy valley. A little wooden bridge took us over the young Rhone, here only a stream, and we followed a path up into the tributary ravine which leads to the Nufenen and the Gries. In a mile or two it was a little lighter, and this was as well, for some weeks before a great avalanche had fallen, and we had to cross it gingerly. Beneath the wide cap of frozen snow ran a torrent roaring. I remembered Colorado, and how I had crossed the Arkansaw on such a bridge as a boy. We went on in the uneasy dawn. The woods began to show, and there was a cross where a man had slipped from above that very April and been killed. Then, most ominous and disturbing, the drizzle changed to a rain, and the guide shook his head and said it would be snowing higher up. We went on, and it grew lighter. Before it was really day (or else the weather confused and darkened the sky), we crossed a good bridge, built long ago, and we halted at a shed where the cattle lie in the late summer when the snow is melted. There we rested a moment. But on leaving its shelter we noticed many disquieting things. The place was a hollow, the end of the ravine--a bowl, as it were; one way out of which is the Nufenen, and the other the Gries. Here it is in a sketch map. The heights are marked lighter and lighter, from black in the valleys to white in the impassable mountains. E is where we stood, in a great cup or basin, having just come up the ravine B. C is the Italian valley of the Tosa, and the neck between it and E is the Gries. D is the valley of the Ticino, and the neck between E and it is the Nufenen. A is the Crystal Mountain. You may take the necks or passes to be about 8000, and the mountains 10,000 or 11,000 feet above the sea. We noticed, I say, many disquieting things. First, all, that bowl or cup below the passes was a carpet of snow, save where patches of black water showed, and all the passes and mountains, from top to bottom, were covered with very thick snow; the deep surface of it soft and fresh fallen. Secondly, the rain had turned into snow. It was falling thickly all around. Nowhere have I more perceived the immediate presence of great Death. Thirdly, it was far colder, and we felt the beginning of a wind. Fourthly, the clouds had come quite low down. The guide said it could not be done, but I said we must attempt it. I was eager, and had not yet felt the awful grip of the cold. We left the Nufenen on our left, a hopeless steep of new snow buried in fog, and we attacked the Gries. For half-an-hour we plunged on through snow above our knees, and my thin cotton clothes were soaked. So far the guide knew we were more or less on the path, and he went on and I panted after him. Neither of us spoke, but occasionally he looked back to make sure I had not dropped out. The snow began to fall more thickly, and the wind had risen somewhat. I was afraid of another protest from the guide, but he stuck to it well, and I after him, continually plunging through soft snow and making yard after yard upwards. The snow fell more thickly and the wind still rose. We came to a place which is, in the warm season, an alp; that is, a slope of grass, very steep but not terrifying; having here and there sharp little precipices of rock breaking it into steps, but by no means (in summer) a matter to make one draw back. Now, however, when everything was still Arctic it was a very different matter. A sheer steep of snow whose downward plunge ran into the driving storm and was lost, whose head was lost in the same mass of thick cloud above, a slope somewhat hollowed and bent inwards, had to be crossed if we were to go any farther; and I was terrified, for I knew nothing of climbing. The guide said there was little danger, only if one slipped one might slide down to safety, or one might (much less probably) get over rocks and be killed. I was chattering a little with cold; but as he did not propose a return, I followed him. The surface was alternately slabs of frozen snow and patches of soft new snow. In the first he cut steps, in the second we plunged, and once I went right in and a mass of snow broke off beneath me and went careering down the slope. He showed me how to hold my staff backwards as he did his alpenstock, and use it as a kind of brake in case I slipped. We had been about twenty minutes crawling over that wall of snow and ice; and it was more and more apparent that we were in for danger. Before we had quite reached the far side, the wind was blowing a very full gale and roared past our ears. The surface snow was whirring furiously like dust before it: past our faces and against them drove the snow-flakes, cutting the air: not falling, but making straight darts and streaks. They seemed like the form of the whistling wind; they blinded us. The rocks on the far side of the slope, rocks which had been our goal when we set out to cross it, had long ago disappeared in the increasing rush of the blizzard. Suddenly as we were still painfully moving on, stooping against the mad wind, these rocks loomed up over as large as houses, and we saw them through the swarming snow-flakes as great hulls are seen through a fog at sea. The guide crouched under the lee of the nearest; I came up close to him and he put his hands to my ear and shouted to me that nothing further could be done--he had so to shout because in among the rocks the hurricane made a roaring sound, swamping the voice. I asked how far we were from the summit. He said he did not know where we were exactly, but that we could not be more than 800 feet from it. I was but that from Italy and I would not admit defeat. I offered him all I had in money to go on, but it was folly in me, because if I had had enough to tempt him and if he had yielded we should both have died. Luckily it was but a little sum. He shook his head. He would not go on, he broke out, for all the money there was in the world. He shouted me to eat and drink, and so we both did. Then I understood his wisdom, for in a little while the cold began to seize me in my thin clothes. My hands were numb, my face already gave me intolerable pain, and my legs suffered and felt heavy. I learnt another thing (which had I been used to mountains I should have known), that it was not a simple thing to return. The guide was hesitating whether to stay in this rough shelter, or to face the chances of the descent. This terror had not crossed my mind, and I thought as little of it as I could, needing my courage, and being near to breaking down from the intensity of the cold. It seems that in a _tourmente_ (for by that excellent name do the mountain people call such a storm) it is always a matter of doubt whether to halt or go back. If you go back through it and lose your way, you are done for. If you halt in some shelter, it may go on for two or three days, and then there is an end of you. After a little he decided for a return, but he told me honestly what the chances were, and my suffering from cold mercifully mitigated my fear. But even in that moment, I felt in a confused but very conscious way that I was defeated. I had crossed so many great hills and rivers, and pressed so well on my undeviating arrow-line to Rome, and I had charged this one great barrier manfully where the straight path of my pilgrimage crossed the Alps--and I had failed! Even in that fearful cold I felt it, and it ran through my doubt of return like another and deeper current of pain. Italy was there, just above, right to my hand. A lifting of a cloud, a little respite, and every downward step would have been towards the sunlight. As it was, I was being driven back northward, in retreat and ashamed. The Alps had conquered me. Let us always after this combat their immensity and their will, and always hate the inhuman guards that hold the gates of Italy, and the powers that lie in wait for men on those high places. But now I know that Italy will always stand apart. She is cut off by no ordinary wall, and Death has all his army on her frontiers. Well, we returned. Twice the guide rubbed my hands with brandy, and once I had to halt and recover for a moment, failing and losing my hold. Believe it or not, the deep footsteps of our ascent were already quite lost and covered by the new snow since our halt, and even had they been visible, the guide would not have retraced them. He did what I did not at first understand, but what I soon saw to be wise. He took a steep slant downward over the face of the snow-slope, and though such a pitch of descent a little unnerved me, it was well in the end. For when we had gone down perhaps 900 feet, or a thousand, in perpendicular distance, even I, half numb and fainting, could feel that the storm was less violent. Another two hundred, and the flakes could be seen not driving in flashes past, but separately falling. Then in some few minutes we could see the slope for a very long way downwards quite clearly; then, soon after, we saw far below us the place where the mountain-side merged easily into the plain of that cup or basin whence we had started. When we saw this, the guide said to me, 'Hold your stick thus, if you are strong enough, and let yourself slide.' I could just hold it, in spite of the cold. Life was returning to me with intolerable pain. We shot down the slope almost as quickly as falling, but it was evidently safe to do so, as the end was clearly visible, and had no break or rock in it. So we reached the plain below, and entered the little shed, and thence looking up, we saw the storm above us; but no one could have told it for what it was. Here, below, was silence, and the terror and raging above seemed only a great trembling cloud occupying the mountain. Then we set our faces down the ravine by which we had come up, and so came down to where the snow changed to rain. When we got right down into the valley of the Rhone, we found it all roofed with cloud, and the higher trees were white with snow, making a line like a tide mark on the slopes of the hills. I re-entered 'The Bear', silent and angered, and not accepting the humiliation of that failure. Then, having eaten, I determined in equal silence to take the road like any other fool; to cross the Furka by a fine highroad, like any tourist, and to cross the St Gothard by another fine highroad, as millions had done before me, and not to look heaven in the face again till I was back after my long detour, on the straight road again for Rome. But to think of it! I who had all that planned out, and had so nearly done it! I who had cut a path across Europe like a shaft, and seen so many strange places!--now to have to recite all the litany of the vulgar; Bellinzona, Lugano, and this and that, which any railway travelling fellow can tell you. Not till Como should I feel a man again... Indeed it is a bitter thing to have to give up one's sword. I had not the money to wait; my defeat had lowered me in purse as well as in heart. I started off to enter by the ordinary gates--not Italy even, but a half-Italy, the canton of the Ticino. It was very hard. This book is not a tragedy, and I will not write at any length of such pain. That same day, in the latter half of it, I went sullenly over the Furka; exactly as easy a thing as going up St James' Street and down Piccadilly. I found the same storm on its summit, but on a highroad it was a different affair. I took no short cuts. I drank at all the inns--at the base, half-way up, near the top, and at the top. I told them, as the snow beat past, how I had attacked and all but conquered the Gries that wild morning, and they took me for a liar; so I became silent even within my own mind. I looked sullenly at the white ground all the way. And when on the far side I had got low enough to be rid of the snow and wind and to be in the dripping rain again, I welcomed the rain, and let it soothe like a sodden friend my sodden uncongenial mind. I will not write of Hospenthal. It has an old tower, and the road to it is straight and hideous. Much I cared for the old tower! The people of the inn (which I chose at random) cannot have loved me much. I will not write of the St Gothard. Get it out of a guide-book. I rose when I felt inclined; I was delighted to find it still raining. A dense mist above the rain gave me still greater pleasure. I had started quite at my leisure late in the day, and I did the thing stolidly, and my heart was like a dully-heated mass of coal or iron because I was acknowledging defeat. You who have never taken a straight line and held it, nor seen strange men and remote places, you do not know what it is to have to go round by the common way. Only in the afternoon, and on those little zig-zags which are sharper than any other in the Alps (perhaps the road is older), something changed. A warm air stirred the dense mist which had mercifully cut me off from anything but the mere road and from the contemplation of hackneyed sights. A hint or memory of gracious things ran in the slight breeze, the wreaths of fog would lift a little for a few yards, and in their clearings I thought to approach a softer and more desirable world. I was soothed as though with caresses and when I began to see somewhat farther and felt a vigour and fulness in the outline of the Trees, I said to myself suddenly-- 'I know what it is! It is the South, and a great part of my blood. They may call it Switzerland still, but I know now that I am in Italy, and this is the gate of Italy lying in groves.' Then and on till evening I reconciled myself with misfortune, and when I heard again at Airolo the speech of civilized men, and saw the strong Latin eyes and straight forms of the Race after all those days of fog and frost and German speech and the north, my eyes filled with tears and I was as glad as a man come home again, and I could have kissed the ground. The wine of Airolo and its songs, how greatly they refreshed me! To see men with answering eyes and to find a salute returned; the noise of careless mouths talking all together; the group at cards, and the laughter that is proper to mankind; the straight carriage of the women, and in all the people something erect and noble as though indeed they possessed the earth. I made a meal there, talking to all my companions left and right in a new speech of my own, which was made up, as it were, of the essence of all the Latin tongues, saying-- _'Ha! Si jo a traversa li montagna no erat facile! Nenni! II san Gottardo? Nil est! pooh! poco! Ma hesterna jo ha voulu traversar in Val Bavona, e credi non ritornar, namfredo, fredo erat in alto! La tourmente ma prise...'_ And so forth, explaining all fully with gestures, exaggerating, emphasizing, and acting the whole matter, so that they understood me without much error. But I found it more difficult to understand them, because they had a regular formed language with terminations and special words. It went to my heart to offer them no wine, but a thought was in me of which you shall soon hear more. My money was running low, and the chief anxiety of a civilized man was spreading over my mind like the shadow of a cloud over a field of corn in summer. They gave me a number of 'good-nights', and at parting I could not forbear from boasting that I was a pilgrim on my way to Rome. This they repeated one to another, and one man told me that the next good halting-place was a town called Faido, three hours down the road. He held up three fingers to explain, and that was the last intercourse I had with the Airolans, for at once I took the road. I glanced up the dark ravine which I should have descended had I crossed the Nufenen. I thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the great wall that held the west; and in one place where a rift (you have just seen its picture) led up to the summits of the hills I was half tempted to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning to attempt a crossing. But I had accepted my fate on the Gries and the falling road also held me, and so I continued my way. Everything was pleasing in this new valley under the sunlight that still came strongly from behind the enormous mountains; everything also was new, and I was evidently now in a country of a special kind. The slopes were populous, I had come to the great mother of fruits and men, and I was soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the rivers that glide by them. Church towers also repeated the same shapes up and up the wooded hills until the villages stopped at the line of the higher slopes and at the patches of snow. The houses were square and coloured; they were graced with arbours, and there seemed to be all around nothing but what was reasonable and secure, and especially no rich or poor. I noticed all these things on the one side and the other till, not two hours from Airolo, I came to a step in the valley. For the valley of the Ticino is made up of distinct levels, each of which might have held a lake once for the way it is enclosed: and each level ends in high rocks with a gorge between them. Down this gorge the river tumbles in falls and rapids and the road picks its way down steeply, all banked and cut, and sometimes has to cross from side to side by a bridge, while the railway above one overcomes the sharp descent by running round into the heart of the hills through circular tunnels and coming out again far below the cavern where it plunged in. Then when all three--the river, the road, and the railway--- have got over the great step, a new level of the valley opens. This is the way the road comes into the south, and as I passed down to the lower valley, though it was darkening into evening, something melted out of the mountain air, there was content and warmth in the growing things, and I found it was a place for vineyards. So, before it was yet dark, I came into Faido, and there I slept, having at last, after so many adventures, crossed the threshold and occupied Italy. Next day before sunrise I went out, and all the valley was adorned and tremulous with the films of morning. Now all of you who have hitherto followed the story of this great journey, put out of your minds the Alps and the passes and the snows--postpone even for a moment the influence of the happy dawn and of that South into which I had entered, and consider only this truth, that I found myself just out of Faido on this blessed date of God with eight francs and forty centimes for my viaticum and temporal provision wherewith to accomplish the good work of my pilgrimage. Now when you consider that coffee and bread was twopence and a penny for the maid, you may say without lying that I had left behind me the escarpment of the Alps and stood upon the downward slopes of the first Italian stream and at the summit of the entry road with _eight francs ten centimes_ in my pocket--my body hearty and my spirit light, for the arriving sun shot glory into the sky. The air was keen, and a fresh day came radiant over the high eastern walls of the valley. And what of that? Why, one might make many things of it. For instance, eight francs and ten centimes is a very good day's wages; it is a lot to spend in cab fares but little for a _coupé._ It is a heavy price for Burgundy but a song for Tokay. It is eighty miles third-class and more; it is thirty or less first-class; it is a flash in a train _de luxe,_ and a mere fleabite as a bribe to a journalist. It would be enormous to give it to an apostle begging at a church door, but nothing to spend on luncheon. Properly spent I can imagine it saving five or six souls, but I cannot believe that so paltry a sum would damn half an one. Then, again, it would be a nice thing to sing about. Thus, if one were a modern fool one might write a dirge with 'Huit francs et dix centimes' all chanted on one low sad note, and coming in between brackets for a 'motif, and with a lot about autumn and Death--which last, Death that is, people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the tune of 'Madame la Marquise'-- _'Huit francs et dix centimes, Tra la la, la la la.'_ Or one might put it rhetorically, fiercely, stoically, finely, republicanly into the Heroics of the Great School. Thus-- HERNANI _(with indignation)... dans ces efforts sublimes_'Qu'avez vous à offrir?_' RUY BLAS _(simply) Huit francs et dix centimes!_ Or finally (for this kind of thing cannot go on for ever), one might curl one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings, strike up a Ballad with the refrain-- _Car j'ai toujours huit francs et dix centimes!_ a jocular, sub-sardonic, a triumphant refrain! But all this is by the way; the point is, why was the eight francs and ten centimes of such importance just there and then? For this reason, that I could get no more money before Milan; and I think a little reflection will show you what a meaning lies in that phrase. Milan was nearer ninety miles than eighty miles off. By the strict road it was over ninety. And so I was forced to consider and to be anxious, for how would this money hold out? There was nothing for it but forced marches, and little prospect of luxuries. But could it be done? I thought it could, and I reasoned this way. 'It is true I need a good deal of food, and that if a man is to cover great distances he must keep fit. It is also true that many men have done more on less. On the other hand, they were men who were not pressed for time--I am; and I do not know the habits of the country. Ninety miles is three good days; two very heavy days. Indeed, whether it can be done at all in two is doubtful. But it can be done in two days, two nights, and half the third day. So if I plan it thus I shall achieve it; namely, to march say forty-five miles or more to-day, and to sleep rough at the end of it. My food may cost me altogether three francs. I march the next day twenty-five to thirty, my food costing me another three francs. Then with the remaining two francs and ten centimes I will take a bed at the end of the day, and coffee and bread next morning, and will march the remaining twenty miles or less (as they may be) into Milan with a copper or two in my pocket. Then in Milan, having obtained my money, I will eat.' So I planned with very careful and exact precision, but many accidents and unexpected things, diverting my plans, lay in wait for me among the hills. And to cut a long story short, as the old sailor said to the young fool-- LECTOR. What did the old sailor say to the young fool? AUCTOR. Why, the old sailor was teaching the young fool his compass, and he said--- 'Here we go from north, making round by west, and then by south round by east again to north. There are thirty-two points of the compass, namely, first these four, N., W., S., and E., and these are halved, making four more, viz., NW., S W., SE., and NE. I trust I make myself clear,' said the old sailor. 'That makes eight divisions, as we call them. So look smart and follow. Each of these eight is divided into two symbolically and symmetrically divided parts, as is most evident in the nomenclature of the same,' said the old sailor. 'Thus between N. and NE. is NNE., between NE. and E. is ENE., between E. and SE. is...' 'I see,' said the young fool. The old sailor, frowning at him, continued-- 'Smart you there. Heels together, and note you well. Each of these sixteen divisions is separated quite reasonably and precisely into two. Thus between N. and NNE. we get N. by E.,' said the old sailor; 'and between NNE. and NE. we get NE. by E., and between NE. and ENE. we get NE. by E.,' said the old sailor; 'and between ENE. and E. we get E. by N., and then between E. and ESE. we get...' But here he noticed something dangerous in the young fool's eyes, and having read all his life Admiral Griles' 'Notes on Discipline', and knowing that discipline is a subtle bond depending 'not on force but on an attitude of the mind,' he continued-- 'And so TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT we come round to the north again.' Then he added, 'It is customary also to divide each of these points into quarters. Thus NNE. 3/4 E. signifies...' But at this point the young fool, whose hands were clasped behind him and concealed a marlin-spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so rounded off this fascinating tale. Well then, to cut a long story short, I had to make forced marches. With eight francs and ten centimes, and nearer ninety than eighty-five miles before the next relief, it was necessary to plan and then to urge on heroically. Said I to myself, 'The thing can be done quite easily. What is ninety miles? Two long days! Who cannot live on four francs a day? Why, lots of men do it on two francs a day.' But my guardian angel said to me, 'You are an ass! Ninety miles is a great deal more than twice forty-five. Besides which' (said he) 'a great effort needs largeness and ease. Men who live on two francs a day or less are not men who attempt to march forty-five miles a day. Indeed, my friend, you are pushing it very close.' 'Well,' thought I, 'at least in such a glorious air, with such Hills all about one, and such a race, one can come to no great harm.' But I knew within me that Latins are hard where money is concerned, and I feared for my strength. I was determined to push forward and to live on little. I filled my lungs and put on the spirit of an attempt and swung down the valley. Alas! I may not linger on that charge, for if I did I should not give you any measure of its determination and rapidity. Many little places passed me off the road on the flanks of that valley, and mostly to the left. While the morning was yet young, I came to the packed little town of Bodio, and passed the eight franc limit by taking coffee, brandy, and bread. There also were a gentleman and a lady in a carriage who wondered where I was going, and I told them (in French) 'to Rome'. It was nine in the morning when I came to Biasca. The sun was glorious, and not yet warm: it was too early for a meal. They gave me a little cold meat and bread and wine, and seven francs stood out dry above the falling tide of my money. Here at Biasca the valley took on a different aspect. It became wider and more of a countryside; the vast hills, receding, took on an appearance of less familiar majesty, and because the trend of the Ticino turned southerly some miles ahead the whole place seemed enclosed from the world. One would have said that a high mountain before me closed it in and rendered it unique and unknown, had not a wide cleft in the east argued another pass over the hills, and reminded me that there were various routes over the crest of the Alps. Indeed, this hackneyed approach to Italy which I had dreaded and despised and accepted only after a defeat was very marvellous, and this valley of the Ticino ought to stand apart and be a commonwealth of its own like Andorra or the Gresivaudan: the noble garden of the Isere within the first gates of the Dauphine. I was fatigued, and my senses lost acuteness. Still I noticed with delight the new character of the miles I pursued. A low hill just before me, jutting out apparently from the high western mountains, forbade me to see beyond it. The plain was alluvial, while copses and wood and many cultivated fields now found room where, higher up, had been nothing but the bed of a torrent with bare banks and strips of grass immediately above them; it was a place worthy of a special name and of being one lordship and a countryside. Still I went on towards that near boundary of the mountain spur and towards the point where the river rounded it, the great barrier hill before me still seeming to shut in the valley. It was noon, or thereabouts, the heat was increasing (I did not feel it greatly, for I had eaten and drunk next to nothing), when, coming round the point, there opened out before me the great fan of the lower valley and the widening and fruitful plain through which the Ticino rolls in a full river to reach Lake Major, which is its sea. Weary as I was, the vision of this sudden expansion roused me and made me forget everything except the sight before me. The valley turned well southward as it broadened. The Alps spread out on either side like great arms welcoming the southern day; the wholesome and familiar haze that should accompany summer dimmed the more distant mountains of the lakes and turned them amethystine, and something of repose and of distance was added to the landscape; something I had not seen for many days. There was room in that air and space for dreams and for many living men, for towns perhaps on the slopes, for the boats of happy men upon the waters, and everywhere for crowded and contented living. History might be in all this, and I remembered it was the entry and introduction of many armies. Singing therefore a song of Charlemagne, I swung on in a good effort to where, right under the sun, what seemed a wall and two towers on a sharp little hillock set in the bosom of the valley showed me Bellinzona. Within the central street of that city, and on its shaded side, I sank down upon a bench before the curtained door of a drinking booth and boasted that I had covered in that morning my twenty-five miles. The woman of the place came out to greet me, and asked me a question. I did not catch it (for it was in a foreign language), but guessing her to mean that I should take something, I asked for vermouth, and seeing before me a strange door built of red stone, I drew it as I sipped my glass and the woman talked to me all the while in a language I could not understand. And as I drew I became so interested that I forgot my poverty and offered her husband a glass, and then gave another to a lounging man that had watched me at work, and so from less than seven francs my money fell to six exactly, and my pencil fell from my hand, and I became afraid. 'I have done a foolish thing,' said I to myself, 'and have endangered the success of my endeavour. Nevertheless, that cannot now be remedied, and I must eat; and as eating is best where one has friends I will ask a meal of this woman.' Now had they understood French I could have bargained and chosen; as it was I had to take what they were taking, and so I sat with them as they all came out and ate together at the little table. They had soup and flesh, wine and bread, and as we ate we talked, not understanding each other, and laughing heartily at our mutual ignorance. And they charged me a franc, which brought my six francs down to five. But I, knowing my subtle duty to the world, put down twopence more, as I would have done anywhere else, for a _pour boire;_ and so with four francs and eighty centimes left, and with much less than a third of my task accomplished I rose, now drowsy with the food and wine, and saluting them, took the road once more. But as I left Bellinzona there was a task before me which was to bring my poverty to the test; for you must know that my map was a bad one, and on a very small scale, and the road from Bellinzona to Lugano has a crook in it, and it was essential to find a short cut. So I thought to myself, 'I will try to see a good map as cheaply as possible,' and I slunk off to the right into a kind of main square, and there I found a proud stationer's shop, such as would deal with rich men only, or tourists of the coarser and less humble kind. I entered with some assurance, and said in French-- 'Sir, I wish to know the hills between here and Lugano, but I am too poor to buy a map. If you will let me look at one for a few moments, I will pay you what you think fit.' The wicked stationer became like a devil for pride, and glaring at me, said-- 'Look! Look for yourself. I do not take pence. I sell maps; I do not hire them!' Then I thought, 'Shall I take a favour from such a man?' But I yielded, and did. I went up to the wall and studied a large map for some moments. Then as I left, I said to him-- 'Sir, I shall always hold in remembrance the day on which you did me this signal kindness; nor shall I forget your courtesy and goodwill.' And what do you think he did at that? Why, he burst into twenty smiles, and bowed and seemed beatified, and said: 'Whatever I can do for my customers and for visitors to this town, I shall always be delighted to do. Pray, sir, will you not look at other maps for a moment?' Now, why did he say this and grin happily like a gargoyle appeased? Did something in my accent suggest wealth? or was he naturally kindly? I do not know; but of this I am sure, one should never hate human beings merely on a first, nor on a tenth, impression. Who knows? This map-seller of Bellinzona may have been a good man; anyhow, I left him as rich as I had found him, and remembering that the true key to a forced march is to break the twenty-four hours into three pieces, and now feeling the extreme heat, I went out along the burning straight road until I found a border of grass and a hedge, and there, in spite of the dust and the continually passing carts, I lay at full length in the shade and fell into the sleep of men against whom there is no reckoning. Just as I forgot the world I heard a clock strike two. I slept for hours beneath that hedge, and when I woke the air was no longer a trembling furnace, but everything about me was wrapped round as in a cloak of southern afternoon, and was still. The sun had fallen midway, and shone in steady glory through a haze that overhung Lake Major, and the wide luxuriant estuary of the vale. There lay before me a long straight road for miles at the base of high hills; then, far off, this road seemed to end at the foot of a mountain called, I believe, Ash Mount or Cinder Hill. But my imperfect map told me that here it went sharp round to the left, choosing a pass, and then at an angle went down its way to Lugano. Now Lugano was not fifteen miles as the crow flies from where I stood, and I determined to cut off that angle by climbing the high hills just above me. They were wooded only on their slopes; their crest and much of their sides were a down-land of parched grass, with rocks appearing here and there. At the first divergent lane I made off eastward from the road and began to climb. In under the chestnut trees the lane became a number of vague beaten paths; I followed straight upwards. Here and there were little houses standing hidden in leaves, and soon I crossed the railway, and at last above the trees I saw the sight of all the Bellinzona valley to the north; and turning my eyes I saw it broaden out between its walls to where the lake lay very bright, in spite of the slight mist, and this mist gave the lake distances, and the mountains round about it were transfigured and seemed part of the mere light. The Italian lakes have that in them and their air which removes them from common living. Their beauty is not the beauty which each of us sees for himself in the world; it is rather the beauty of a special creation; the expression of some mind. To eyes innocent, and first freshly noting our great temporal inheritance--1 mean to the eyes of a boy and girl just entered upon the estate of this glorious earth, and thinking themselves immortal, this shrine of Europe might remain for ever in the memory; an enchanted experience, in which the single sense of sight had almost touched the boundary of music. They would remember these lakes as the central emotion of their youth. To mean men also who, in spite of years and of a full foreknowledge of death, yet attempt nothing but the satisfaction of sense, and pride themselves upon the taste and fineness with which they achieve this satisfaction, the Italian lakes would seem a place for habitation, and there such a man might build his house contentedly. But to ordinary Christians I am sure there is something unnatural in this beauty of theirs, and they find in it either a paradise only to be won by a much longer road to a bait and veil of sorcery, behind which lies great peril. Now, for all we know, beauty beyond the world may not really bear this double aspect; but to us on earth--if we are ordinary men--beauty of this kind has something evil. Have you not read in books how men when they see even divine visions are terrified? So as I looked at Lake Major in its halo I also was afraid, and I was glad to cross the ridge and crest of the hill and to shut out that picture framed all round with glory. But on the other side of the hill I found, to my great disgust, not as I had hoped, a fine slope down leading to Lugano, but a second interior valley and another range just opposite me. I had not the patience to climb this so I followed down the marshy land at the foot of it, passed round the end of the hill and came upon the railway, which had tunnelled under the range I had crossed. I followed the railway for a little while and at last crossed it, penetrated through a thick brushwood, forded a nasty little stream, and found myself again on the main road, wishing heartily I had never left it. It was still at least seven miles to Lugano, and though all the way was downhill, yet fatigue threatened me. These short cuts over marshy land and through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, and I was just wondering whether, although it was already evening, I dared not rest a while, when there appeared at a turn in the road a little pink house with a yard all shaded over by a vast tree; there was also a trellis making a roof over a plain bench and table, and on the trellis grew vines. 'Into such houses,' I thought, 'the gods walk when they come down and talk with men, and such houses are the scenes of adventures. I will go in and rest.' So I walked straight into the courtyard and found there a shrivelled brown-faced man with kindly eyes, who was singing a song to himself. He could talk a little French, a little English, and his own Italian language. He had been to America and to Paris; he was full of memories; and when I had listened to these and asked for food and drink, and said I was extremely poor and would have to bargain, he made a kind of litany of 'I will not cheat you; I am an honest man; I also am poor,' and so forth. Nevertheless I argued about every item--the bread, the sausage, and the beer. Seeing that I was in necessity, he charged me about three times their value, but I beat him down to double, and lower than that he would not go. Then we sat down together at the table and ate and drank and talked of far countries; and he would interject remarks on his honesty compared with the wickedness of his neighbours, and I parried with illustrations of my poverty and need, pulling out the four francs odd that remained to me, and jingling them sorrowfully in my hand. 'With these,' I said, 'I must reach Milan.' Then I left him, and as I went down the road a slight breeze came on, and brought with it the coolness of evening. At last the falling plateau reached an edge, many little lights glittered below me, and I sat on a stone and looked down at the town of Lugano. It was nearly dark. The mountains all around had lost their mouldings, and were marked in flat silhouettes against the sky. The new lake which had just appeared below me was bright as water is at dusk, and far away in the north and east the high Alps still stood up and received the large glow of evening. Everything else was full of the coming night, and a few stars shone. Up from She town came the distant noise of music; otherwise there was no sound. I could have rested there a long time, letting my tired body lapse into the advancing darkness, and catching in my spirit the inspiration of the silence--had it not been for hunger. I knew by experience that when it is very late one cannot be served in the eating-houses of poor men, and I had not the money or any other. So I rose and shambled down the steep road into the town, and there I found a square with arcades, and in the south-eastern corner of this square just such a little tavern as I required. Entering, therefore, and taking off my hat very low, I said in French to a man who was sitting there with friends, and who was the master, 'Sir, what is the least price at which you can give me a meal?' He said, 'What do you want?' I answered, 'Soup, meat, vegetables, bread, and a little wine.' He counted on his fingers, while all his friends stared respectfully at him and me. He then gave orders, and a very young and beautiful girl set before me as excellent a meal as I had eaten for days on days, and he charged me but a franc and a half. He gave me also coffee and a little cheese, and I, feeling hearty, gave threepence over for the service, and they all very genially wished me a good-night; but their wishes were of no value to me, for the night was terrible. I had gone over forty miles; how much over I did not know. I should have slept at Lugano, but my lightening purse forbade me. I thought, 'I will push on and on; after all, I have already slept, and so broken the back of the day. I will push on till I am at the end of my tether, then I will find a wood and sleep.' Within four miles my strength abandoned me. I was not even so far down the lake as to have lost the sound of the band at Lugano floating up the still water, when I was under an imperative necessity for repose. It was perhaps ten o'clock, and the sky was open and glorious with stars. I climbed up a bank on my right, and searching for a place to lie found one under a tree near a great telegraph pole. Here was a little parched grass, and one could lie there and see the lake and wait for sleep. It was a benediction to stretch out all supported by the dry earth, with my little side-bag for pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed and fell asleep. For a little while I slept dreamlessly. Just so much of my living self remained as can know, without understanding, the air around. It is the life of trees. That under-part, the barely conscious base of nature which trees and sleeping men are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasurable calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. And in its very stuff there is a complete and changeless joy. This is surely what the great mind meant when it said to the Athenian judges that death must not be dreaded since no experience in life was so pleasurable as a deep sleep; for being wise and seeing the intercommunion of things, he could not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a lapse into that under-part of which I speak. For there are gods also below the earth. But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed me, increasing life, and therefore bringing pain. I dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily, then violently, with another man. More and more he pressed me, and at last in my dream there were clearly spoken words, and he said to me, 'You must be wrong, because you are so cold; if you were right you would not be so cold.' And this argument seemed quite reasonable to me in my foolish dream, and I muttered to him, 'You are right, I must be in the wrong. It is very cold...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up. It was indeed cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in some subtler influence of the air. I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in some despair. Certainly I could not sleep again without a covering cloth, and it was now past midnight, nor did I know of any house, whether if I took the road I should find one in a mile, or in two, or in five. And, note you, I was utterly exhausted. That enormous march from Faido, though it had been wisely broken by the siesta at Bellinzona, needed more than a few cold hours under trees, and I thought of the three poor francs in my pocket, and of the thirty-eight miles remaining to Milan. The stars were beyond the middle of their slow turning, and I watched them, splendid and in order, for sympathy, as I also regularly, but slowly and painfully, dragged myself along my appointed road. But in a very short time a great, tall, square, white house stood right on the roadway, and to my intense joy I saw a light in one of its higher windows. Standing therefore beneath, I cried at the top of my voice, 'Hola!' five or six times. A woman put her head out of the window into the fresh night, and said, 'You cannot sleep here; we have no rooms,' then she remained looking out of her window and ready to analyse the difficulties of the moment; a good-natured woman and fat. In a moment another window at the same level, but farther from me, opened, and a man leaned out, just as those alternate figures come in and out of the toys that tell the weather. 'It is impossible,' said the man; 'we have no rooms.' Then they talked a great deal together, while I shouted, _'Quid vis? Non e possibile dormire in la foresta! e troppo fredo! Vis ne me assassinare? Veni de Lugano--e piu--non e possibile ritornare!'_ and so forth. They answered in strophe and antistrophe, sometimes together in full chorus, and again in semichorus, and with variations, that it was impossible. Then a light showed in the chinks of their great door; the lock grated, and it opened. A third person, a tall youth, stood in the hall. I went forward into the breach and occupied the hall. He blinked at me above a candle, and murmured, as a man apologizing 'It is not possible.' Whatever I have in common with these southerners made me understand that I had won, so I smiled at him and nodded; he also smiled, and at once beckoned to me. He led me upstairs, and showed me a charming bed in a clean room, where there was a portrait of the Pope, looking cunning; the charge for that delightful and human place was sixpence, and as I said good-night to the youth, the man and woman from above said good-night also. And this was my first introduction to the most permanent feature in the Italian character. The good people! When I woke and rose I was the first to be up and out. It was high morning. The sun was not yet quite over the eastern mountains, but I had slept, though so shortly yet at great ease, and the world seemed new and full of a merry mind. The sky was coloured like that high metal work which you may see in the studios of Paris; there was gold in it fading into bronze, and above, the bronze softened to silver. A little morning breeze, courageous and steady, blew down the lake and provoked the water to glad ripples, and there was nothing that did not move and take pleasure in the day. The Lake of Lugano is of a complicated shape, and has many arms. It is at this point very narrow indeed, and shallow too; a mole, pierced at either end with low arches, has here been thrown across it, and by this mole the railway and the road pass over to the eastern shore. I turned in this long causeway and noticed the northern view. On the farther shore was an old village and some pleasure-houses of rich men on the shore; the boats also were beginning to go about the water. These boats were strange, unlike other boats; they were covered with hoods, and looked like floating waggons. This was to shield the rowers from the sun. Far off a man was sailing with a little brown sprit-sail. It was morning, and all the world was alive. Coffee in the village left me two francs and two pennies. I still thought the thing could be done, so invigorating and deceiving are the early hours, and coming farther down the road to an old and beautiful courtyard on the left, I drew it, and hearing a bell at hand I saw a tumble-down church with trees before it, and went in to Mass; and though it was a little low village Mass, yet the priest had three acolytes to serve it, and (true and gracious mark of a Catholic country!) these boys were restless and distracted at their office. You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a portent. One of the acolytes had half his head clean shaved! A most extraordinary sight! I could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily wished I had an Omen-book with me to tell me what it might mean. When there were oracles on earth, before Pan died, this sight would have been of the utmost use. For I should have consulted the oracle woman for a Lira--at Biasca for instance, or in the lonely woods of the Cinder Mountain; and, after a lot of incense and hesitation, and wrestling with the god, the oracle would have accepted Apollo and, staring like one entranced, she would have chanted verses which, though ambiguous, would at least have been a guide. Thus: _Matutinus adest ubi Vesper, et accipiens te Saepe recusatum voces intelligit hospes Rusticus ignotas notas, ac flumina tellus Occupat--In sancto tum, tum, stans Aede caveto Tonsuram Hirsuti Capitis, via namque pedestrem Ferrea praeveniens cursum, peregrine, laborem Pro pietate tuâ inceptum frustratur, amore Antiqui Ritus alto sub Numine Romae._ LECTOR. What Hoggish great Participles! AUCTOR. Well, well, you see it was but a rustic oracle at 9 3/4 d. the revelation, and even that is supposing silver at par. Let us translate it for the vulgar: When early morning seems but eve And they that still refuse receive: When speech unknown men understand; And floods are crossed upon dry land. Within the Sacred Walls beware The Shaven Head that boasts of Hair, For when the road attains the rail The Pilgrim's great attempt shall fail. Of course such an oracle might very easily have made me fear too much. The 'shaven head' I should have taken for a priest, especially if it was to be met with 'in a temple'--it might have prevented me entering a church, which would have been deplorable. Then I might have taken it to mean that I should never have reached Rome, which would have been a monstrous weight upon my mind. Still, as things unfolded themselves, the oracle would have become plainer and plainer, and I felt the lack of it greatly. For, I repeat, I had certainly received an omen. The road now neared the end of the lake, and the town called Capo di Lago, or 'Lake-head', lay off to my right. I saw also that in a very little while I should abruptly find the plains. A low hill some five miles ahead of me was the last roll of the mountains, and just above me stood the last high crest, a precipitous peak of bare rock, up which there ran a cog-railway to some hotel or other. I passed through an old town under the now rising heat; I passed a cemetery in the Italian manner, with marble figures like common living men. The road turned to the left, and I was fairly on the shoulder of the last glacis. I stood on the Alps at their southern bank, and before me was Lombardy. Also in this ending of the Swiss canton one was more evidently in Italy than ever. A village perched upon a rock, deep woods and a ravine below it, its houses and its church, all betrayed the full Italian spirit. The frontier town was Chiasso. I hesitated with reverence before touching the sacred soil which I had taken so long to reach, and I longed to be able to drink its health; but though I had gone, I suppose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, I would not stop; for I remembered the two francs, and my former certitude of reaching Milan was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of midday would soon be on me, I had yet nearly thirty miles to go, and my bad night began to oppress me. I crossed the frontier, which is here an imaginary line. Two slovenly customs-house men asked me if I had anything dutiable on me. I said No, and it was evident enough, for in my little sack or pocket was nothing but a piece of bread. If they had applied the American test, and searched me for money, then indeed they could have turned me back, and I should have been forced to go into the fields a quarter of a mile or so and come into their country by a path instead of a highroad. This necessity was spared me. I climbed slowly up the long slope that hides Como, then I came down upon that lovely city and saw its frame of hills and its lake below me. These things are not like things seen by the eyes. I say it again, they are like what one feels when music is played. I entered Como between ten and eleven faint for food, and then a new interest came to fill my mind with memories of this great adventure. The lake was in flood, and all the town was water. Como dry must be interesting enough; Como flooded is a marvel. What else is Venice? And here is a Venice at the foot of high mountains, and _all_ in the water, no streets or squares; a fine even depth of three feet and a half or so for navigators, much what you have in the Spitway in London River at low spring tides. There were a few boats about, but the traffic and pleasure of Como was passing along planks laid on trestles over the water here and there like bridges; and for those who were in haste, and could afford it (such as take cabs in London), there were wheelbarrows, coster carts, and what not, pulled about by men for hire; and it was a sight to remember all one's life to see the rich men of Como squatting on these carts and barrows, and being pulled about over the water by the poor men of Como, being, indeed, an epitome of all modern sociology and economics and religion and organized charity and strenuousness and liberalism and sophistry generally. For my part I was determined to explore this curious town in the water, and I especially desired to see it on the lake side, because there one would get the best impression of its being really an aquatic town; so I went northward, as I was directed, and came quite unexpectedly upon the astonishing cathedral. It seemed built of polished marble, and it was in every way so exquisite in proportion, so delicate in sculpture, and so triumphant in attitude, that I thought to myself-- 'No wonder men praise Italy if this first Italian town has such a building as this.' But, as you will learn later, many of the things praised are ugly, and are praised only by certain followers of charlatans. So I went on till I got to the lake, and there I found a little port about as big as a dining-room (for the Italian lakes play at being little seas. They have little ports, little lighthouses, little fleets for war, and little custom-houses, and little storms and little lines of steamers. Indeed, if one wanted to give a rich child a perfect model or toy, one could not give him anything better than an Italian lake), and when I had long gazed at the town, standing, as it seemed, right in the lake, I felt giddy, and said to myself, 'This is the lack of food,' for I had eaten nothing but my coffee and bread eleven miles before, at dawn. So I pulled out my two francs, and going into a little shop, I bought bread, sausage, and a very little wine for fourpence, and with one franc eighty left I stood in the street eating and wondering what my next step should be. It seemed on the map perhaps twenty-five, perhaps twenty-six miles to Milan. It was now nearly noon, and as hot as could be. I might, if I held out, cover the distance in eight or nine hours, but I did not see myself walking in the middle heat on the plain of Lombardy, and even if I had been able I should only have got into Milan at dark or later, when the post office (with my money in it) would be shut; and where could I sleep, for my one franc eighty would be gone? A man covering these distances must have one good meal a day or he falls ill. I could beg, but there was the risk of being arrested, and that means an indefinite waste of time, perhaps several days; and time, that had defeated me at the Gries, threatened me here again. I had nothing to sell or to pawn, and I had no friends. The Consul I would not attempt; I knew too much of such things as Consuls when poor and dirty men try them. Besides which, there was no Consul I pondered. I went into the cool of the cathedral to sit in its fine darkness and think better. I sat before a shrine where candles were burning, put up for their private intentions by the faithful. Of many, two had nearly burnt out. I watched them in their slow race for extinction when a thought took me. 'I will,' said I to myself, 'use these candles for an ordeal or heavenly judgement. The left hand one shall be for attempting the road at the risk of illness or very dangerous failure; the right hand one shall stand for my going by rail till I come to that point on the railway where one franc eighty will take me, and thence walking into Milan:--and heaven defend the right.' They were a long time going out, and they fell evenly. At last the right hand one shot up the long flame that precedes the death of candles; the contest took on interest, and even excitement, when, just as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it went out without guess or warning, like a second-rate person leaving this world for another. The right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as though in triumph, outlived its colleague just the moment to enjoy glory, and then in its turn went fluttering down the dark way from which they say there is no return. None may protest against the voice of the Gods. I went straight to the nearest railway station (for there are two), and putting down one franc eighty, asked in French for a ticket to whatever station that sum would reach down the line. The ticket came out marked Milan, and I admitted the miracle and confessed the finger of Providence. There was no change, and as I got into the train I had become that rarest and ultimate kind of traveller, the man without any money whatsoever-- without passport, without letters, without food or wine; it would be interesting to see what would follow if the train broke down. I had marched 378 miles and some three furlongs, or thereabouts. Thus did I break--but by a direct command--the last and dearest of my vows, and as the train rumbled off, I took luxury in the rolling wheels. I thought of that other medieval and papistical pilgrim hobbling along rather than 'take advantage of any wheeled thing', and I laughed at him. Now if Moroso-Malodoroso or any other Non-Aryan, Antichristian, over-inductive, statistical, brittle-minded man and scientist, sees anything remarkable in one self laughing at another self, let me tell him and all such for their wide-eyed edification and astonishment that I knew a man once that had fifty-six selves (there would have been fifty-seven, but for the poet in him that died young)--he could evolve them at will, and they were very useful to lend to the parish priest when he wished to make up a respectable Procession on Holy-days. And I knew another man that could make himself so tall as to look over the heads of the scientists as a pine-tree looks over grasses, and again so small as to discern very clearly the thick coating or dust of wicked pride that covers them up in a fine impenetrable coat. So much for the moderns. The train rolled on. I noticed Lombardy out of the windows. It is flat. I listened to the talk of the crowded peasants in the train. I did not understand it. I twice leaned out to see if Milan were not standing up before me out of the plain, but I saw nothing. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke suddenly it was because we were in the terminus of that noble great town, which I then set out to traverse in search of my necessary money and sustenance. It was yet but early in the afternoon. What a magnificent city is Milan! The great houses are all of stone, and stand regular and in order, along wide straight streets. There are swift cars, drawn by electricity, for such as can afford them. Men are brisk and alert even in the summer heats, and there are shops of a very good kind, though a trifle showy. There are many newspapers to help the Milanese to be better men and to cultivate charity and humility; there are banks full of paper money; there are soldiers, good pavements, and all that man requires to fulfil him, soul and body; cafés, arcades, mutoscopes, and every sign of the perfect state. And the whole centres in a splendid open square, in the midst of which is the cathedral, which is justly the most renowned in the world. My pilgrimage is to Rome, my business is with lonely places, hills, and the recollection of the spirit. It would be waste to describe at length this mighty capital. The mists and the woods, the snows and the interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was ashamed. I sat outside a café, opposite the cathedral, watching its pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt by sitting there in his fine great café, unkempt, in such clothes, like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends. I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and he was kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that drink with me. He talked French quite easily, as it seems do all such men in the principal towns of north Italy. Still, the broad day shamed me, and only when darkness came did I feel at ease. I wandered in the streets till I saw a small eating shop, and there I took a good meal. But when one is living the life of the poor, one sees how hard are the great cities. Everything was dearer, and worse, than in the simple countrysides. The innkeeper and his wife were kindly, but their eyes showed that they had often to suspect men. They gave me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to pay before going upstairs to it. The walls were mildewed, the place ramshackle and evil, the rickety bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and that night I was oppressed with the vision of poverty. Dirt and clamour and inhuman conditions surrounded me. Yet the people meant well. With the first light I got up quietly, glad to find the street again and the air. I stood in the crypt of the cathedral to hear the Ambrosian Mass, and it was (as I had expected) like any other, save for a kind of second _lavabo_ before the Elevation. To read the distorted stupidity of the north one might have imagined that in the Ambrosian ritual the priest put a _non_ before the _credo,_ and _nec's_ at each clause of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the _kyrie;_ but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, and the northern historians are either liars or ignorant men. And I know three that are both together. Then I set out down the long street that leads south out of Milan, and was soon in the dull and sordid suburb of the Piacenzan way. The sky was grey, the air chilly, and in a little while--alas!--it rained. Lombardy is an alluvial plain. That is the pretty way of putting it. The truth is more vivid if you say that Lombardy is as flat as a marsh, and that it is made up of mud. Of course this mud dries when the sun shines on it, but mud it is and mud it will remain; and that day, as the rain began falling, mud it rapidly revealed itself to be; and the more did it seem to be mud when one saw how the moistening soil showed cracks from the last day's heat. Lombardy has no forests, but any amount of groups of trees; moreover (what is very remarkable), it is all cultivated in fields more or less square. These fields have ditches round them, full of mud and water running slowly, and some of them are themselves under water in order to cultivate rice. All these fields have a few trees bordering them, apart from the standing clumps; but these trees are not very high. There are no open views in Lombardy, and Lombardy is all the same. Irregular large farmsteads stand at random all up and down the country; no square mile of Lombardy is empty. There are many, many little villages; many straggling small towns about seven to eight miles apart, and a great number of large towns from thirty to fifty miles apart. Indeed, this very road to Piacenza, which the rain now covered with a veil of despair, was among the longest stretches between any two large towns, although it was less than fifty miles. On the map, before coming to this desolate place, there seemed a straighter and a better way to Rome than this great road. There is a river called the Lambro, which comes east of Milan and cuts the Piacenzan road at a place called Melegnano. It seemed to lead straight down to a point on the Po, a little above Piacenza. This stream one could follow (so it seemed), and when it joined the Po get a boat or ferry, and see on the other side the famous Trebbia, where Hannibal conquered and Joubert fell, and so make straight on for the Apennine. Since it is always said in books that Lombardy is a furnace in summer, and that whole great armies have died of the heat there, this river bank would make a fine refuge. Clear and delicious water, more limpid than glass, would reflect and echo the restless poplars, and would make tolerable or even pleasing the excessive summer. Not so. It was a northern mind judging by northern things that came to this conclusion. There is not in all Lombardy a clear stream, but every river and brook is rolling mud. In the rain, not heat, but a damp and penetrating chill was the danger. There is no walking on the banks of the rivers; they are cliffs of crumbling soil, jumbled anyhow. Man may, as Pinkerton (Sir Jonas Pinkerton) writes, be master of his fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour. Nevertheless, though it was apparent that I should have to follow the main road for a while, I determined to make at last to the right of it, and to pass through a place called 'Old Lodi', for I reasoned thus: 'Lodi is the famous town. How much more interesting must Old Lodi be which is the mothertown of Lodi?' Also, Old Lodi brought me back again on the straight line to Rome, and I foolishly thought it might be possible to hear there of some straight path down the Lambro (for that river still possessed me somewhat). Therefore, after hours and hours of trudging miserably along the wide highway in the wretched and searching rain, after splashing through tortuous Melegnano, and not even stopping to wonder if it was the place of the battle, after noting in despair the impossible Lambro, I came, caring for nothing, to the place where a secondary road branches off to the right over a level crossing and makes for Lodi Vecchio. It was not nearly midday, but I had walked perhaps fifteen miles, and had only rested once in a miserable Trattoria. In less than three miles I came to that unkempt and lengthy village, founded upon dirt and living in misery, and through the quiet, cold, persistent rain I splashed up the main street. I passed wretched, shivering dogs and mournful fowls that took a poor refuge against walls; passed a sad horse that hung its head in the wet and stood waiting for a master, till at last I reached the open square where the church stood, then I knew that I had seen all Old Lodi had to offer me. So, going into an eating-house, or inn, opposite the church, I found a girl and her mother serving, and I saluted them, but there was no fire, and my heart sank to the level of that room, which was, I am sure, no more than fifty-four degrees. Why should the less gracious part of a pilgrimage be specially remembered? In life were remember joy best--that is what makes us sad by contrast; pain somewhat, especially if it is acute; but dulness never. And a book--which has it in its own power to choose and to emphasize--has no business to record dulness. What did I at Lodi Vecchio? I ate; I dried my clothes before a tepid stove in a kitchen. I tried to make myself understood by the girl and her mother. I sat at a window and drew the ugly church on principle. Oh, the vile sketch! Worthy of that Lombard plain, which they had told me was so full of wonderful things. I gave up all hope of by-roads, and I determined to push back obliquely to the highway again--obliquely in order to save time! Nepios! These 'by-roads' of the map turned out in real life to be all manner of abominable tracks. Some few were metalled, some were cart-ruts merely, some were open lanes of rank grass; and along most there went a horrible ditch, and in many fields the standing water proclaimed desolation. IN so far as I can be said to have had a way at all, I lost it. I could not ask my way because my only ultimate goal was Piacenza, and that was far off. I did not know the name of any place between. Two or three groups of houses I passed, and sometimes church towers glimmered through the rain. I passed a larger and wider road than the rest, but obviously not my road; I pressed on and passed another; and by this time, having ploughed up Lombardy for some four hours, I was utterly lost. I no longer felt the north, and, for all I knew, I might be going backwards. The only certain thing was that I was somewhere in the belt between the highroad and the Lambro, and that was little enough to know at the close of such a day. Grown desperate, I clamoured within my mind for a miracle; and it was not long before I saw a little bent man sitting on a crazy cart and going ahead of me at a pace much slower than a walk--the pace of a horse crawling. I caught him up, and, doubting much whether he would understand a word, I said to him repeatedly-- _'La granda via? La via a Piacenza?'_ He shook his head as though to indicate that this filthy lane was not the road. Just as I had despaired of learning anything, he pointed with his arm away to the right, perpendicularly to the road we were on, and nodded. He moved his hand up and down. I had been going north! On getting this sign I did not wait for a cross road, but jumped the little ditch and pushed through long grass, across further ditches, along the side of patches of growing corn, heedless of the huge weight on my boots and of the oozing ground, till I saw against the rainy sky a line of telegraph poles. For the first time since they were made the sight of them gave a man joy. There was a long stagnant pond full of reeds between me and the railroad; but, as I outflanked it, I came upon a road that crossed the railway at a level and led me into the great Piacenzan way. Almost immediately appeared a village. It was a hole called Secugnano, and there I entered a house where a bush hanging above the door promised entertainment, and an old hobbling woman gave me food and drink and a bed. The night had fallen, and upon the roof above me I could hear the steady rain. The next morning--Heaven preserve the world from evil!--it was still raining. LECTOR. It does not seem to me that this part of your book is very entertaining. AUCTOR. I know that; but what am I to do? LECTOR. Why, what was the next point in the pilgrimage that was even tolerably noteworthy? AUCTOR. I suppose the Bridge of Boats. LECTOR. And how far on was that? AUCTOR. About fourteen miles, more or less... I passed through a town with a name as long as my arm, and I suppose the Bridge of Boats must have been nine miles on after that. LECTOR. And it rained all the time, and there was mud? AUCTOR. Precisely. LECTOR. Well, then, let us skip it and tell stories. AUCTOR. With all my heart. And since you are such a good judge of literary poignancy, do you begin. LECTOR. I will, and I draw my inspiration from your style. Once upon a time there was a man who was born in Croydon, and whose name was Charles Amieson Blake. He went to Rugby at twelve and left it at seventeen. He fell in love twice and then went to Cambridge till he was twenty-three. Having left Cambridge he fell in love more mildly, and was put by his father into a government office, where he began at _180_ pounds a year. At thirty-five he was earning 500 pounds a year, and perquisites made 750 pounds a year. He met a pleasant lady and fell in love quite a little compared with the other times. She had 250 pounds a year. That made _1000_ pounds a year. They married and had three children--Richard, Amy, and Cornelia. He rose to a high government position, was knighted, retired at sixty-three, and died at sixty-seven. He is buried at Kensal Green... AUCTOR. Thank you, Lector, that is a very good story. It is simple and full of plain human touches. You know how to deal with the facts of everyday life... It requires a master-hand. Tell me, Lector, had this man any adventures? LECTOR. None that I know of. AUCTOR. Had he opinions? LECTOR. Yes. I forgot to tell you he was a Unionist. He spoke two foreign languages badly. He often went abroad to Assisi, Florence, and Boulogne... He left 7,623 pounds 6s. 8d., and a house and garden at Sutton. His wife lives there still. AUCTOR. Oh! LECTOR. It is the human story... the daily task! AUCTOR. Very true, my dear Lector... the common lot... Now let me tell my story. It is about the Hole that could not be Filled Up. LECTOR. Oh no! Auctor, no! That is the oldest story in the-- AUCTOR. Patience, dear Lector, patience! I will tell it well. Besides which I promise you it shall never be told again. I will copyright it. Well, once there was a Learned Man who had a bargain with the Devil that he should warn the Devil's emissaries of all the good deeds done around him so that they could be upset, and he in turn was to have all those pleasant things of this life which the Devil's allies usually get, to wit a Comfortable Home, Self-Respect, good health, 'enough money for one's rank', and generally what is called 'a happy useful life'--_till_ midnight of All-Hallowe'en in the last year of the nineteenth century. So this Learned Man did all he was required, and daily would inform the messenger imps of the good being done or prepared in the neighbourhood, and they would upset it; so that the place he lived in from a nice country town became a great Centre of Industry, full of wealth and desirable family mansions and street property, and was called in hell 'Depot B' (Depot A you may guess at). But at last toward the 15th of October 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his shoes and to dread the judgement; for, you see, he had not the comfortable ignorance of his kind, and was compelled to believe in the Devil willy-nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes. So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the Devil, and the day before All-Hallowe'en he cut a very small round hole in the floor of his study, just near the fireplace, right through down to the cellar. Then he got a number of things that do great harm (newspapers, legal documents, unpaid bills, and so forth) and made ready for action. Next morning when the little imps came for orders as usual, after prayers, he took them down into the cellar, and pointing out the hole in the ceiling, he said to them: 'My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It communicates, I believe, with the chapel; but I cannot find the exit. All I know is, that some pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do good, slips into it every day whatever he thinks may be a cause of evil in the neighbourhood, hoping thus to destroy it' (in proof of which statement he showed them a scattered heap of newspapers on the floor of the cellar beneath the hole). 'And the best thing you can do,' he added, 'is to stay here and take them away as far as they come down and put them back into circulation again. Tut! tut!' he added, picking up a moneylender's threatening letter to a widow, 'it is astonishing how these people interfere with the most sacred rights! Here is a letter actually stolen from the post! Pray see that it is delivered.' So he left the little imps at work, and fed them from above with all manner of evil-doing things, which they as promptly drew into the cellar, and at intervals flew away with, to put them into circulation again. That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil came to fetch the Learned Man, and found him seated at his fine great desk, writing. The Learned Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and offered him a chair by the fire, just near the little round hole. 'Pray don't move,' said the Devil; 'I came early on purpose not to disturb you.' 'You are very good,' replied the Learned Man. 'The fact is, I have to finish my report on Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the Bull Ring--it is making some progress. But their condition is heart-breaking, my dear sir; heart-breaking!' 'I can well believe it,' said the Devil sadly and solemnly, leaning back in his chair, and pressing his hands together like a roof. 'The poor in our great towns, Sir Charles' (for the Learned Man had been made a Baronet), 'the condition, I say, of the--Don't I feel a draught?' he added abruptly. For the Devil can't bear draughts. 'Why,' said the Learned Man, as though ashamed, 'just near your chair there _is_ a little hole that I have done my best to fill up, but somehow it seemed impossible to fill it... I don't know...' The Devil hates excuses, and is above all practical, so he just whipped the soul of a lawyer out of his side-pocket, tied a knot in it to stiffen it, and shoved it into the hole. 'There!' said the Devil contentedly; 'if you had taken a piece of rag, or what not, you might yourself... Hulloa!...' He looked down and saw the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious draught coming up again. He wondered a little, and then muttered: 'It's a pity I have on my best things. I never dare crease them, and I have nothing in my pockets to speak of, otherwise I might have brought something bigger.' He felt in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a pedant, crumpled him carefully into a ball, and stuffed him hard into the hole, so that he suffered agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully. The soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from below, then drawn slowly down, and finally shot off out of sight. 'This is a most extraordinary thing!' said the Devil. 'It is the draught. It is very strong between the joists,' ventured the Learned Man. 'Fiddle-sticks ends!' shouted the Devil. 'It is a trick! But I've never been caught yet, and I never will be.' He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his followers poured in through the windows with mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal decisions, declarations of war, charters to universities, patents for medicines, naturalization orders, shares in gold mines, specifications, prospectuses, water companies' reports, publishers' agreements, letters patent, freedoms of cities, and, in a word, all that the Devil controls in the way of hole-stopping rubbish; and the Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole like a madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little imps below (who had summoned a number of their kind to their aid also) pulled it through and carted it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed the floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals of fire, and the sweat ran down his face, and he breathed hard, and pushed every imaginable thing he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his documents and parchments looked like streaks and flashes. But the loyal little imps, not to be beaten, drew them through into the cellar as fast as machinery, and whirled them to their assistants; and all the poor lost souls who had been pressed into the service were groaning that their one holiday in the year was being filched from them, when, just as the process was going on so fast that it roared like a printing-machine in full blast, the clock in the hall struck twelve. The Devil suddenly stopped and stood up. 'Out of my house,' said the Learned Man; 'out of my house! I've had enough of you, and I've no time for fiddle-faddle! It's past twelve, and I've won!' The Devil, though still panting, smiled a diabolical smile, and pulling out his repeater (which he had taken as a perquisite from the body of a member of Parliament), said, 'I suppose you keep Greenwich time?' 'Certainly!' said Sir Charles. 'Well,' said the Devil, 'so much the worse for you to live in Suffolk. You're four minutes fast, so I'll trouble you to come along with me; and I warn you that any words you now say may be used against...' At this point the Learned Man's patron saint, who thought things had gone far enough, materialized himself and coughed gently. They both looked round, and there was St Charles sitting in the easy chair. 'So far,' murmured the Saint to the Devil suavely, 'so far from being four minutes too early, you are exactly a year too late.' On saying this, the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his hands, twiddled his thumbs slowly round and round, and gazed in a fatherly way at the Devil. 'What do you mean?' shouted the Devil. 'What I say,' said St Charles calmly; '1900 is not the last year of the nineteenth century; it is the first year of the twentieth.' 'Oh!' sneered the Devil, 'are you an anti-vaccinationist as well? Now, look here' (and he began counting on his fingers); 'supposing in the year 1 B.C....' 'I never argue,' said St Charles. 'Well, all I know is,' answered the Devil with some heat, 'that in this matter as in most others, thank the Lord, I have on my side all the historians and all the scientists, all the universities, all the...' 'And I,' interrupted St Charles, waving his hand like a gentleman (he is a Borromeo), 'I have the Pope!' At this the Devil gave a great howl, and disappeared in a clap of thunder, and was never seen again till his recent appearance at Brighton. So the Learned Man was saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more muscular he passed a knotty time. You do not see the river Po till you are close to it. Then, a little crook in the road being passed, you come between high trees, and straight out before you, level with you, runs the road into and over a very wide mass of tumbling water. It does not look like a bridge, it looks like a quay. It does not rise; it has all the appearance of being a strip of road shaved off and floated on the water. All this is because it passes over boats, as do some bridges over the Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and certainly at Kiel--for I once sat at the end of that and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a memory which later made me understand (1) why they can be out-marched by Latins; (2) why they impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the governing class in Germany take care to avoid common service; (4) why there is no promotion from the ranks; and (5) why their artillery is too rigid and not quick enough. It also showed me something intimate and fundamental about the Germans which Tacitus never understood and which all our historians miss--they are _of necessity_ histrionic. Note I do not say it is a vice of theirs. It is a necessity of theirs, an appetite. They must see themselves on a stage. Whether they do things well or ill, whether it is their excellent army with its ridiculous parade, or their eighteenth-century _sans-soucis_ with avenues and surprises, or their national legends with gods in wigs and strong men in tights, they _must_ be play-actors to be happy and therefore to be efficient; and if I were Lord of Germany, and desired to lead my nation and to be loved by them, I should put great golden feathers on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, spout monologues in public, organize wide cavalry charges at reviews, and move through life generally to the crashing of an orchestra. For by doing this even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled in stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could become a hero, and do his nation good.) LECTOR. What is all this? AUCTOR. It is a parenthesis. LECTOR. It is good to know the names of the strange things one meets with on one's travels. AUCTOR. So I return to where I branched off, and tell you that the river Po is here crossed by a bridge of boats. It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is even a trifle uncomfortable to be so near the rush of the water on the trembling pontoons. And on that day its speed and turbulence were emphasized by the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on the water showed the rapidity of the current, and the silence of its fall framed and enhanced the swirl of the great river. Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza--a step through mud and rain. On my right was that plain where Barbarossa received, and was glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century; there the renaissance of our Europe saw the future glorious for the first time since the twilight of Rome, and being full of morning they imagined a new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at Roncaglia, I think in spring, and I wish I had been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain they say is beautiful and generous, but in summer I know by experience that it is cold, brutish, and wet. And so in Piacenza it rained and there was mud, till I came to a hotel called the Moor's Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it I discovered a curious thing: the Italians live in palaces: I might have known it. They are the impoverished heirs of a great time; its garments cling to them, but their rooms are too large for the modern penury. I found these men eating in a great corridor, in a hall, as they might do in a palace. I found high, painted ceilings and many things of marble, a vast kitchen, and all the apparatus of the great houses--at the service of a handful of contented, unknown men. So in England, when we have worked out our full fate, happier but poorer men will sit in the faded country-houses (a community, or an inn, or impoverished squires), and rough food will be eaten under mouldering great pictures, and there will be offices or granaries in the galleries of our castles; and where Lord Saxonthorpe (whose real name is Hauptstein) now plans our policy, common Englishmen will return to the simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon winter evenings. For Italy also once gathered by artifice the wealth that was not of her making. He was a good man, the innkeeper of this palace. He warmed me at his fire in his enormous kitchen, and I drank Malaga to the health of the cooks. I ate of their food, I bought a bottle of a new kind of sweet wine called 'Vino Dolce', and--I took the road. LECTOR. And did you see nothing of Piacenza? AUCTOR. Nothing, Lector; it was raining, and there was mud. I stood in front of the cathedral on my way out, and watched it rain. It rained all along the broad and splendid Emilian Way. I had promised myself great visions of the Roman soldiery passing up that eternal road; it still was stamped with the imperial mark, but the rain washed out its interest, and left me cold. The Apennines also, rising abruptly from the plain, were to have given me revelations at sunset; they gave me none. Their foothills appeared continually on my right, they themselves were veiled. And all these miles of road fade into the confused memory of that intolerable plain. The night at Firenzuola, the morning (the second morning of this visitation) still cold, still heartless, and sodden with the abominable weather, shall form no part of this book. Things grand and simple of their nature are possessed, as you know, of a very subtle flavour. The larger music, the more majestic lengths of verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal spirit, and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere light, _that_ needs for its recognition so serene an air of abstraction and of content as makes its pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and causes us to recall it like a descent of the gods. For who, having noise around him, can strike the table with pleasure at reading the Misanthrope, or in mere thirst or in fatigue praise Chinon wine? Who does not need for either of these perfect things Recollection, a variety of according conditions, and a certain easy Plenitude of the Mind? So it is with the majesty of Plains, and with the haunting power of their imperial roads. All you that have had your souls touched at the innermost, and have attempted to release yourselves in verse and have written trash--(and who know it)--be comforted. You shall have satisfaction at last, and you shall attain fame in some other fashion--perhaps in private theatricals or perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a prevision of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled--but you must not expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining. All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine moment--- it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should seek it. All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 'the long splice' which makes a cut rope seem what it was before; it is even stronger than before, and can pass through a block. There will descend upon you a blessed hour when you will be convinced as by a miracle, and you will suddenly understand the _redintegratio amoris (amoris redintegratio,_ a Latin phrase). But this hour you will not receive in the rain on the Emilian Way. Here then, next day, just outside a town called Borgo, past the middle of morning, the rain ceased. Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining road, the sky was still fast and leaden, when, in a distaste for their towns, I skirted the place by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and sitting upon a low wall, I looked up at the Apennines, which were now plain above me, and thought over my approaching passage through those hills. But here I must make clear by a map the mass of mountains which I was about to attempt, and in which I forded so many rivers, met so many strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable sights, was imprisoned, starved, frozen, haunted, delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed in Tuscany--in a word, where I had the most extraordinary and unheard-of adventures that ever diversified the life of man. The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not quite through Piacenza, but within a mile or two of that city. Then it runs across the first folds of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the Emilian Way. It was not possible to follow this part of the line exactly, for there was no kind of track. But by following the Emilian Way for several miles (as I had done), and by leaving it at the right moment, it was possible to strike the straight line again near a village called Medesano. Now on the far side of the Apennines, beyond their main crest, there happens, most providentially, to be a river called the Serchio, whose valley is fairly straight and points down directly to Rome. To follow this valley would be practically to follow the line to Rome, and it struck the Tuscan plain not far from Lucca. But to get from the Emilian Way over the eastern slope of the Apennines' main ridge and crest, to where the Serchio rises on the western side, is a very difficult matter. The few roads across the Apennines cut my track at right angles, and were therefore useless. In order to strike the watershed at the sources of the Serchio it was necessary to go obliquely across a torrent and four rivers (the Taro, the Parma, the Enza, and the Secchia), and to climb the four spurs that divided them; crossing each nearer to the principal chain as I advanced until, after the Secchia, the next climb would be that of the central crest itself, on the far side of which I should find the Serchio valley. Perhaps in places roads might correspond to this track. Certainly the bulk of it would be mule-paths or rough gullies--how much I could not tell. The only way I could work it with my wretched map was to note the names of towns' or hamlets more or less on the line, and to pick my way from one to another. I wrote them down as follows: Fornovo, Calestano, Tizzano, Colagna--the last at the foot of the final pass. The distance to that pass as the crow flies was only a little more than thirty miles. So exceedingly difficult was the task that it took me over two days. Till I reached Fornovo beyond the Taro, I was not really in the hills. By country roads, picking my way, I made that afternoon for Medesano. The lanes were tortuous; they crossed continual streams that ran from the hills above, full and foaming after the rain, and frothing with the waste of the mountains. I had not gone two miles when the sky broke; not four when a new warmth began to steal over the air and a sense of summer to appear in the earth about me. With the greatest rapidity the unusual weather that had accompanied me from Milan was changing into the normal brilliancy of the south; but it was too late for the sun to tell, though he shone from time to time through clouds that were now moving eastwards more perceptibly and shredding as they moved. Quite tired and desiring food, keen also for rest after those dispiriting days, I stopped, before reaching Medesano, at an inn where three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for the next day, it was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise before dawn if I was to save the heat. I entered. The room within was of red wood. It had two tables, a little counter with a vast array of bottles, a woman behind the counter, and a small, nervous man in a strange hat serving. And all the little place was filled and crammed with a crowd of perhaps twenty men, gesticulating, shouting, laughing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explaining to another the virtues of his knife; and all were already amply satisfied with wine. For in this part men do not own, but are paid wages, so that they waste the little they have. I saluted the company, and walking up to the counter was about to call for wine. They had all become silent, when one man asked me a question in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted to say so, when another asked the same question; then six or seven--and there was a hubbub. And out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising all the time. To this day I do not know what it meant, but I thought (and think) it meant 'He is a Venetian,' or 'He is the Venetian.' Something in my broken language had made them think this, and evidently the Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or was) gravely unpopular here. Why, I cannot tell. Perhaps the Venetians were blacklegs. But evidently a Venetian, or the whole Venetian nation, had recently done them a wrong. At any rate one very dark-haired man put his face close up to mine, unlipped his teeth, and began a great noise of cursing and threatening, and this so angered me that it overmastered my fear, which had till then been considerable. I remembered also a rule which a wise man once told me for guidance, and it is this: 'God disposes of victory, but, as the world is made, when men smile, smile; when men laugh, laugh; when men hit, hit; when men shout, shout; and when men curse, curse you also, my son, and in doubt let them always take the first move.' I say my fear had been considerable, especially of the man with the knife, but I got too angry to remember it, and advancing my face also to this insulter's I shouted, _'Dio Ladro! Dios di mi alma! Sanguinamento! Nombre di Dios! Che? Che vole? Non sono da Venezia io! Sono de Francia! Je m'en fiche da vestra Venezia! Non se vede che non parlar vestra lingua? Che sono forestiere?'_ and so forth. At this they evidently divided into two parties, and all began raging amongst themselves, and some at me, while the others argued louder and louder that there was an error. The little innkeeper caught my arm over the counter, and I turned round sharply, thinking he was doing me a wrong, but I saw him nodding and winking at me, and he was on my side. This was probably because he was responsible if anything happened, and he alone could not fly from the police. He made them a speech which, for all I know, may have been to the effect that he had known and loved me from childhood, or may have been that he knew me for one Jacques of Turin, or may have been any other lie. Whatever lie it was, it appeased them. Their anger went down to a murmur, just like soda-water settling down into a glass. I stood wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too much of one article. I took food, but I saw that in this parish it was safer to sleep out of doors than in; so in the falling evening, but not yet sunset, I wandered on, not at a pace but looking for shelter, and I found at last just what I wanted: a little shed, with dried ferns (as it seemed) strewed in a corner, a few old sacks, and a broken piece of machinery--though this last was of no use to me. I thought: 'It will be safe here, for I shall rise before day, and the owner, if there is one, will not disturb me.' The air was fairly warm. The place quite dry. The open side looked westward and a little south. The sun had now set behind the Apennines, and there was a deep effulgence in the sky. I drank a little wine, lit a pipe, and watched the west in silence. Whatever was left of the great pall from which all that rain had fallen, now was banked up on the further side of heaven in toppling great clouds that caught the full glow of evening. The great clouds stood up in heaven, separate, like persons; and no wind blew; but everything was full of evening. I worshipped them so far as it is permitted to worship inanimate things. They domed into the pure light of the higher air, inviolable. They seemed halted in the presence of a commanding majesty who ranked them all in order. This vision filled me with a large calm which a travelled man may find on coming to his home, or a learner in the communion of wise men. Repose, certitude, and, as it were, a premonition of glory occupied my spirit. Before it was yet quite dark I had made a bed out of the dry bracken, covered myself with the sacks and cloths, and very soon I fell asleep, still thinking of the shapes of clouds and of the power of God. Next morning it was as I had thought. Going out before it was fully light, a dense mist all around and a clear sky showed what the day was to be. As I reached Medesano the sun rose, and in half-an-hour the air was instinct with heat; within an hour it was blinding. An early Mass in the church below the village prepared my day, but as I took coffee afterwards in a little inn, and asked about crossing the Taro to Fornovo--my first point--to my astonishment they shook their heads. The Taro was impassable. Why could it not be crossed? My very broken language made it difficult for me to understand. They talked _oframi,_ which I thought meant oars; but _rami,_ had I known it, meant the separate branches or streams whereby these torrential rivers of Italy flow through their arid beds. I drew a boat and asked if one could not cross in that (for I was a northerner, and my idea of a river was a river with banks and water in between), but they laughed and said 'No.' Then I made the motion of swimming. They said it was impossible, and one man hung his head to indicate drowning. It was serious. They said to-morrow, or rather next day, one might do it. Finally, a boy that stood by said he remembered a man who knew the river better than any one, and he, if any one could, would get me across. So I took the boy with me up the road, and as we went I saw, parallel to the road, a wide plain of dazzling rocks and sand, and beyond it, shining and silhouetted like an Arab village, the group of houses that was Fornovo. This plain was their sort of river in these hills. The boy said that sometimes it was full and a mile wide, sometimes it dwindled into dirty pools. Now, as I looked, a few thin streams seemed to wind through it, and I could not understand the danger. After a mile or two we came to a spot in the road where a patch of brushwood only separated us from the river-bed. Here the boy bade me wait, and asked a group of peasants whether the guide was in; they said they thought so, and some went up into the hillside with the boy to fetch him, others remained with me, looking at the river-bed and at Fornovo beyond, shaking their heads, and saying it had not been done for days. But I did not understand whether the rain-freshet had passed and was draining away, or whether it had not yet come down from beyond, and I waited for the guide. They brought him at last down from his hut among the hills. He came with great strides, a kindly-looking man, extremely tall and thin, and with very pale eyes. He smiled. They pointed me out to him, and we struck the bargain by holding up three fingers each for three lira, and nodding. Then he grasped his long staff and I mine, we bade farewell to the party, and together we went in silence through thick brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. The stones of it glared like the sands of Africa; Fornovo baked under the sun all white and black; between us was this broad plain of parched shingle and rocks that could, in a night, become one enormous river, or dwindle to a chain of stagnant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams wandered in the expanse, and again they seemed so easy to cross that again I wondered at the need of a guide. We came to the edge of the first, and I climbed on the guide's back. He went bare-legged into the stream deeper and deeper till my feet, though held up high, just touched the water; then laboriously he climbed the further shore, and I got down upon dry land. It had been but twenty yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had seen, as we crossed, what a torrent this first little stream was, and I now knew the difficulty and understood the warnings of the inn. The second branch was impassable. We followed it up for nearly a mile to where 'an island' (that is, a mass of high land that must have been an island in flood-time, and that had on it an old brown village) stood above the white bed of the river. Just at this 'island' my guide found a ford. And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains. You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This you lob gently into mid-stream. _How,_ it is impossible to describe, but when you do it it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I practised it throughout my journey in these wilds. Having found a ford then, he again took me on his shoulders, but, in mid-stream, the water being up to his breast, his foot slipped on a stone (all the bed beneath was rolling and churning in the torrent), and in a moment we had both fallen. He pulled me up straight by his side, and then indeed, overwhelmed in the rush of water, it was easy to understand how the Taro could drown men, and why the peasants dreaded these little ribbons of water. The current rushed and foamed past me, coming nearly to my neck; and it was icy cold. One had to lean against it, and the water so took away one's weight that at any moment one might have slipped and been carried away. The guide, a much taller man (indeed he was six foot three or so), supported me, holding my arm: and again in a moment we reached dry land. After that adventure there was no need for carrying. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth branches were easily fordable. The seventh was broad and deep, and I found it a heavy matter; nor should I have waded it but for my guide, for the water bore against me like a man wrestling, and it was as cold as Acheron, the river of the dead. Then on the further shore, and warning him (in Lingua Franca) of his peril, I gave him his wage, and he smiled and thanked me, and went back, choosing his plans at leisure. Thus did I cross the river Taro; a danger for men. Where I landed was a poor man sunning himself. He rose and walked with me to Fornovo. He knew the guide. 'He is a good man,' he said to me of this friend. 'He is as good as a little piece of bread.' 'E vero,' I answered; 'e San Cristophero.' This pleased the peasant; and indeed it was true. For the guide's business was exactly that of St Christopher, except that the Saint took no money, and lived, I suppose, on air. And so to Fornovo; and the heat blinded and confused, and the air was alive with flies. But the sun dried me at once, and I pressed up the road because I needed food. After I had eaten in this old town I was preparing to make for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot, and what was most pleasing was one devil who with great joy was carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But now we are too wise to believe in such follies, and when we die we take our wealth with us; in the ninth century they had no way of doing this, for no system of credit yet obtained. Then leaving the main road which runs to Pontremoli and at last to Spezzia, my lane climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by little, to be even a lane. It became from time to time the bed of a stream, then nothing, then a lane again, and at last, at the head of the glen, I confessed to having lost it; but I noted a great rock or peak above me for a landmark, and I said to myself-- 'No matter. The wall of this glen before me is obviously the ridge of the spur; the rock must be left to the north, and I have but to cross the ridge by its guidance.' By this time, however, the heat overcame me, and, as it was already afternoon, and as I had used so much of the preceding night for my journey, I remembered the wise custom of hot countries and lay down to sleep. I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air was cooler. I climbed the side of the glen at random, and on the summit I found, to my disgust, a road. What road could it be? To this day I do not know. Perhaps I had missed my way and struck the main highway again. Perhaps (it is often so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. At any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge my direction. It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 feet above the Taro. There, before me, stood the high strange rock that I had watched from below; all around it and below me was the glen or cup of bare hills, slabs, and slopes of sand and stone calcined in the sun, and, beyond these near things, all the plain of Lombardy was at my feet. It was this which made it worth while to have toiled up that steep wall, and even to have lost my way--to see a hundred miles of the great flat stretched out before me: all the kingdoms of the world. Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds on the far northern horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps. Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of days before: over how many, many miles of road! The rare, white peaks and edges could not deceive me; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me from that vast distance the memory of my passage, when their snows had seemed interminable and their height so monstrous; their cold such a cloak of death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and I saw them for the last time. All this I drew. Then finding a post directing me to a side road for Calestano, I followed it down and down into the valley beyond; and up the walls of this second valley as the evening fell I heard the noise of the water running, as the Taro had run, a net of torrents from the melting snows far off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding (as those of the Taro had wound) through a floor of dry shingle and rock; but when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet above the bed of the river, and when, full of evening, I had scrambled down through trees to the brink of the water, I found I should have to repeat what I had done that morning and to ford these streams. For there was no track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain side. Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed. But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base flattery, and a very tardy meal. It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and extend to them my commiseration. What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show under examination... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do you know of active living and of adventure? It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a little cafe, that my adventure befell me. In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking man and two official-looking people with white caps dining at another table. I had taken no notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking and thinking in the little cafe, which was bright and full of people, I noticed a first danger-signal when I was told sullenly that 'they had no bed; they thought I could get none in the town': then, suddenly, these two men in white caps came in, and they arrested me with as much ease as you or I would hold a horse. A moment later there came in two magnificent fellows, gendarmes, with swords and cocked hats, and moustaches _a l'Abd el Kader,_ as we used to say in the old days; these four, the two gendarmes and two policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs and began cross-questioning me in Italian, a language in which I was not proficient. I so far understood them as to know that they were asking for my papers. 'Niente!' said I, and poured out on the table a card-case, a sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a scrap of French newspaper, an old _Secolo,_ a needle, some thread, and a flute--but no passport. They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira; that is, not quite three pounds. They examined the sketch-book critically, as behoved southerners who are mostly of an artistic bent: but they found no passport. They questioned me again, and as I picked about for words to reply, the smaller (the policeman, a man with a face like a fox) shouted that he had heard me speaking Italian _currently_ in the inn, and that my hesitation was a blind. This lie so annoyed me that I said angrily in French (which I made as southern as possible to suit them): 'You lie: and you can be punished for such lies, since you are an official.' For though the police are the same in all countries, and will swear black is white, and destroy men for a song, yet where there is a _droit administratif-_ that is, where the Revolution has made things tolerable--you are much surer of punishing your policeman, and he is much less able to do you a damage than in England or America; for he counts as an official and is under a more public discipline and responsibility if he exceeds his powers. Then I added, speaking distinctly, 'I can speak French and Latin. Have you a priest in Calestano, and does he know Latin?' This was a fine touch. They winced, and parried it by saying that the Sindaco knew French. Then they led me away to their barracks while they fetched the Sindaco, and so I was imprisoned. But not for long. Very soon I was again following up the street, and we came to the house of the Sindaco or Mayor. There he was, an old man with white hair, God bless him, playing cards with his son and daughter. To him therefore, as understanding French, I was bidden address myself. I told him in clear and exact idiom that his policemen were fools, that his town was a rabbit-warren, and his prison the only cleanly thing in it; that half-a-dozen telegrams to places I could indicate would show where I had passed; that I was a common tourist, not even an artist (as my sketch-book showed), and that my cards gave my exact address and description. But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, understood me not in the least, and it seemed a wicked thing in me to expose him in his old age, so I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common to all languages, and one he had just caught from my lips. 'Tourist-e?' he said. I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It was as simple as that; and to this day, I suppose, he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He did me a service, and I am willing to believe that in his youth he smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of Voltaire, but I fear to-day he would have a poor time with Anatole France. What a contrast was there between the hour when I had gone out of the cafe a prisoner and that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to another that I was a tourist and had seventy-three lira on my person! The landlady smiled and bowed: she had before refused me a bed! The men at the tables made me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly! Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side. It is the custom of many, when they get over a ridge, to begin singing. Nor did I fail, early as was the hour, to sing in passing this the second of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an open throat everything that I could remember in praise of joy; and I did not spare the choruses of my songs, being even at pains to imitate (when they were double) the various voices of either part. Now, so much of the Englishman was in me that, coming round a corner of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I was ashamed. For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel-Nuovo; in the far haze the plain of Parma; and Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge straight before me. He also would tell me the name in Italian of the things to hand--my boots, my staff, my hat; and I told him their names in French, all of which he was eager to learn. We talked of the way people here tilled and owned ground, of the dangers in the hills, and of the happiness of lonely men. But if you ask how we understood each other, I will explain the matter to you. In Italy, in the Apennines of the north, there seem to be three strata of language. In the valleys the Italian was pure, resonant, and foreign to me. There dwell the townsmen, and they deal down river with the plains. Half-way up (as at Frangi, at Beduzzo, at Tizzano) I began to understand them. They have the nasal 'n'; they clip their words. On the summits, at last, they speak like northerners, and I was easily understood, for they said not _'vino' _but _'vin';_ not _'duo'_ but _'du'_, and so forth. They are the Gauls of the hills. I told them so, and they were very pleased. Then I and my peasant parted, but as one should never leave a man without giving him something to show by way of token on the Day of Judgement, I gave this man a little picture of Milan, and bade him keep it for my sake. So he went his way, and I mine, and the last thing he said to me was about a _'molinar'_, but I did not know what that meant. When I had taken a cut down the mountain, and discovered a highroad at the bottom, I saw that the river before me needed fording, like all the rest; and as my map showed me there was no bridge for many miles down, I cast about to cross directly, if possible on some man's shoulders. I met an old woman with a heap of grass on her back; I pointed to the river, and said (in Lingua Franca) that I wished to cross. She again used that word _'molinar',_ and I had an inkling that it meant 'miller'. I said to myself-- 'Where there is a miller there is a mill. For _Ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia._ Where there is a mill there is water; a mill must have motive power:' (a) I must get near the stream; (b) I must look out for the noise and aspect of a mill. I therefore (thanking the grass-bearing woman) went right over the fields till I saw a great, slow mill-wheel against a house, and a sad man standing looking at it as though it were the Procession of God's Providence. He was thinking of many things. I tapped him on the shoulder (whereat he started) and spoke the great word of that valley, _'molinar'_. It opened all the gates of his soul. He smiled at me like a man grown young again, and, beckoning me to follow, led radiantly up the sluice to where it drew from the river. Here three men were at work digging a better entry for the water. One was an old, happy man in spectacles, the second a young man with stilts in his hands, the third was very tall and narrow; his face was sad, and he was of the kind that endure all things and conquer. I said '_Molinar_?'' I had found him. To the man who had brought me I gave 50 c., and so innocent and good are these people that he said _'Pourquoi?'_ or words like it, and I said it was necessary. Then I said to the molinar, _'Quanta?'_ and he, holding up a tall finger, said '_Una Lira'._ The young man leapt on to his stilts, the molinar stooped down and I got upon his shoulders, and we all attempted the many streams of the river Parma, in which I think I should by myself have drowned. I say advisedly--'I should have been drowned.' These upper rivers of the hills run high and low according to storms and to the melting of the snows. The river of Parma (for this torrent at last fed Parma) was higher than the rest. Even the molinar, the god of that valley, had to pick his way carefully, and the young man on stilts had to go before, much higher than mortal men, and up above the water. I could see him as he went, and I could see that, to tell the truth, there was a ford--a rare thing in upper waters, because in the torrent-sources of rivers either the upper waters run over changeless rocks or else over gravel and sand. Now if they run over rocks they have their isolated shallow places, which any man may find, and their deep--evident by the still and mysterious surface, where fish go round and round in the hollows; but no true ford continuous from side to side. So it is in Scotland. And if they run over gravel and sand, then with every storm or 'spate' they shift and change. But here by some accident there ran--perhaps a shelf or rock, perhaps a ruin of a Roman bridge--something at least that was deep enough and solid enough to be a true ford--and that we followed. The molinar--even the molinar--was careful of his way. Twice he waited, waist high, while the man on stilts before us suddenly lost ground and plunged to his feet. Once, crossing a small branch (for the river here, like all these rivers, runs in many arms over the dry gravel), it seemed there was no foothold and we had to cast up and down. Whenever we found dry land, I came off the molinar's back to rest him, and when he took the water again I mounted again. So we passed the many streams, and stood at last on the Tizzanian side. Then I gave a lira to the molinar, and to his companion on stilts 50 c., who said, 'What is this for?' and I said, 'You also helped.' The molinar then, with gesticulations and expression of the eyes, gave me to understand that for this 50 c. the stilt-man would take me up to Tizzano on the high ridge and show me the path up the ridge; so the stilt-man turned to me and said, _'Andiamo' _which means _'Allons'. _But when the Italians say _'Andiamo' _they are less harsh than the northern French who say _'Allans'; _for the northern French have three troubles in the blood. They are fighters; they will for ever be seeking the perfect state, and they love furiously. Hence they ferment twice over, like wine subjected to movement and breeding acidity. Therefore is it that when they say _'Allons'_ it is harsher than _'Andiamo'._ My Italian said to me genially, _'Andiamo_'. The Catholic Church makes men. By which I do not mean boasters and swaggerers, nor bullies nor ignorant fools, who, finding themselves comfortable, think that their comfort will be a boon to others, and attempt (with singular unsuccess) to force it on the world; but men, human beings, different from the beasts, capable of firmness and discipline and recognition; accepting death; tenacious. Of her effects the most gracious is the character of the Irish and of these Italians. Of such also some day she may make soldiers. Have you ever noticed that all the Catholic Church does is thought beautiful and lovable until she comes out into the open, and then suddenly she is found by her enemies (which are the seven capital sins, and the four sins calling to heaven for vengeance) to be hateful and grinding? So it is; and it is the fine irony of her present renovation that those who were for ever belauding her pictures, and her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things dead, they are the most angered by her appearance on this modern field all armed, just as she was, with works and art and songs, sometimes superlative, often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art or songs, as she has always been. She lays her foundations in something other, which something other our moderns hate. Yet out of that something other came the art and song of the Middle Ages. And what art or songs have you? She is Europe and all our past. She is returning. _Andiamo._ LECTOR. But Mr _(deleted by the Censor)_ does not think so? AUCTOR. I last saw him supping at the Savoy. _Andiamo._ We went up the hill together over a burnt land, but shaded with trees. It was very hot. I could scarcely continue, so fast did my companion go, and so much did the heat oppress me. We passed a fountain at which oxen drank, and there I supped up cool water from the spout, but he wagged his finger before his face to tell me that this was an error under a hot sun. We went on and met two men driving cattle up the path between the trees. These I soon found to be talking of prices and markets with my guide. For it was market-day. As we came up at last on to the little town--a little, little town like a nest, and all surrounded with walls, and a castle in it and a church--we found a thousand beasts all lowing and answering each other along the highroad, and on into the market square through the gate. There my guide led me into a large room, where a great many peasants were eating soup with macaroni in it, and some few, meat. But I was too exhausted to eat meat, so I supped up my broth and then began diapephradizing on my fingers to show the great innkeeper what I wanted. I first pulled up the macaroni out of the dish, and said, _Fromagio, Pommodoro,_ by which I meant cheese--tomato. He then said he knew what I meant, and brought me that spaghetti so treated, which is a dish for a king, a cosmopolitan traitor, an oppressor of the poor, a usurer, or any other rich man, but there is no spaghetti in the place to which such men go, whereas these peasants will continue to enjoy it in heaven. I then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what was left out of the neck (by way of sign), and putting it down said, _'Tale, tantum, vino rosso.'_ My guide also said many things which probably meant that I was a rich man, who threw his money about by the sixpence. So the innkeeper went through a door and brought back a bottle all corked and sealed, and said on his fingers, and with his mouth and eyes, 'THIS KIND OF WINE IS SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL.' Only in the foolish cities do men think it a fine thing to appear careless of money. So I, very narrowly watching him out of half-closed eyes, held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said, _'Cinquante?'_ meaning 'Dare you ask fivepence?' At which he and all the peasants around, even including my guide, laughed aloud as at an excellent joke, and said, _'Cinquante, Ho! ho!'_ and dug each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of Tizzano Val Parmense said in Italian a number of things which meant that I could but be joking, and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to prove that it had changed hands: a registration fee: a matter of record; at a lira it was pure charity. Then I said, _'Soixante Dix?'_ which meant nothing to him, so I held up seven fingers; he waved his hand about genially, and said that as I was evidently a good fellow, a traveller, and as anyhow he was practically giving me the wine, he would make it ninepence; it was hardly worth his while to stretch out his hand for so little money. So then I pulled out 80 c. in coppers, and said, _'Tutto',_ which means 'all'. Then he put the bottle before me, took the money, and an immense clamour rose from all those who had been watching the scene, and they applauded it as a ratified bargain. And this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these hills when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted wolves, and bargained with clubs only. So this being settled, and I eager for the wine, wished it to be opened, especially to stand drink to my guide. The innkeeper was in another room. The guide was too courteous to ask for a corkscrew, and I did not know the Italian for a corkscrew. I pointed to the cork, but all I got out of my guide was a remark that the wine was very good. Then I made the emblem and sign of a corkscrew in my sketch-book with a pencil, but he pretended not to understand--such was his breeding. Then I imitated the mode, sound, and gesture of a corkscrew entering a cork, and an old man next to me said '_Tira-buchon'--_a common French word as familiar as the woods of Marly! It was brought. The bottle was opened and we all drank together. As I rose to go out of Tizzano Val Parmense my guide said to me, _'Se chiama Tira-Buchon perche E' lira il buchon'_ And I said to him, _'Dominus Vobiscum'_ and left him to his hills. I took the road downwards from the ridge into the next dip and valley, but after a mile or so in the great heat (it was now one o'clock) I was exhausted. So I went up to a little wooded bank, and lay there in the shade sketching Tizzano Val Parmense, where it stood not much above me, and then I lay down and slept for an hour and smoked a pipe and thought of many things. From the ridge on which Tizzano stands, which is the third of these Apennine spurs, to the next, the fourth, is but a little way; one looks across from one to the other. Nevertheless it is a difficult piece of walking, because in the middle of the valley another ridge, almost as high as the principal spurs, runs down, and this has to be climbed at its lowest part before one can get down to the torrent of the Enza, where it runs with a hollow noise in the depths of the mountains. So the whole valley looks confused, and it appears, and is, laborious. Very high up above in a mass of trees stood the first of those many ruined towers and castles in which the Apennines abound, and of which Canossa, far off and indistinguishable in the haze, was the chief example. It was called 'The Tower of Rugino'. Beyond the deep trench of the Enza, poised as it seemed on its southern bank (but really much further off, in the Secchia valley), stood that strange high rock of Castel-Nuovo, which the peasant had shown me that morning and which was the landmark of this attempt. It seemed made rather by man than by nature, so square and exact was it and so cut off from the other hills. It was not till the later afternoon, when the air was already full of the golden dust that comes before the fall of the evening, that I stood above the Enza and saw it running thousands of feet below. Here I halted for a moment irresolute, and looked at the confusion of the hills. It had been my intention to make a straight line for Collagna, but I could not tell where Collagna lay save that it was somewhere behind the high mountain that was now darkening against the sky. Moreover, the Enza (as I could see down, down from where I stood) was not fordable. It did not run in streams but in one full current, and was a true river. All the scene was wild. I had come close to the central ridge of the Apennines. It stood above me but five or six clear miles away, and on its slopes there were patches and fields of snow which were beginning to glimmer in the diminishing light. Four peasants sat on the edge of the road. They were preparing to go to their quiet homesteads, and they were gathering their scythes together, for they had been mowing in a field. Coming up to these, I asked them how I might reach Collagna. They told me that I could not go straight, as I had wished, on account of the impassable river, but that if I went down the steep directly below me I should find a bridge; that thence a path went up the opposite ridge to where a hamlet, called Ceregio (which they showed me beyond the valley), stood in trees on the crest, and once there (they said) I could be further directed. I understood all their speech except one fatal word. I thought they told me that Ceregio was _half_ the way to Collagna; and what that error cost me you shall hear. They drank my wine, I ate their bread, and we parted: they to go to their accustomed place, and I to cross this unknown valley. But when I had left these grave and kindly men, the echo of their voices remained with me; the deep valley of the Enza seemed lonely, and as I went lower and lower down towards the noise of the river I lost the sun. The Enza was flooded. A rough bridge, made of stout logs resting on trunks of trees that were lashed together like tripods and supported a long plank, was afforded to cross it. But in the high water it did not quite reach to the hither bank. I rolled great stones into the water and made a short causeway, and so, somewhat perilously, I attained the farther shore, and went up, up by a little precipitous path till I reached the hamlet of Ceregio standing on its hill, blessed and secluded; for no road leads in or out of it, but only mule-paths. The houses were all grouped together round a church; it was dim between them; but several men driving oxen took me to a house that was perhaps the inn, though there was no sign; and there in a twilight room we all sat down together like Christians in perfect harmony, and the woman of the house served us. Now when, after this communion, I asked the way to Collagna, they must have thought me foolish, and have wondered why I did not pass the night with them, for they knew how far off Collagna was. But I (by the error in language of which I have told you) believed it to be but a short way off. It was in reality ten miles. The oldest of my companions said he would put me on the way. We went together in the half light by a lane that followed the crest of the hill, and we passed a charming thing, a little white sculpture in relief, set up for a shrine and representing the Annunciation; and as we passed it we both smiled. Then in a few hundred yards we passed another that was the Visitation, and they were gracious and beautiful to a degree, and I saw that they stood for the five joyful mysteries. Then he had to leave me, and he said, pointing to the little shrine: 'When you come to the fifth of these the path divides. Take that to the left, and follow it round the hollow of the mountain: it will become a lane. This lane crosses a stream and passes near a tower. When you have reached the tower it joins a great highroad, and that is the road to Collagna.' And when he indicated the shrines he smiled, as though in apology for them, and I saw that we were of the same religion. Then (since people who will not meet again should give each other presents mutually) I gave him the best of my two pipes, a new pipe with letters carved on it, which he took to be the initials of my name, and he on his part gave me a hedge-rose which he had plucked and had been holding in his fingers. And I continued the path alone. Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting men.... And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may do something for our poor old universities. Already, when I heard all these directions, they seemed to argue a longer road than I had expected. It proved interminable. It was now fully dark; the night was very cold from the height of the hills; a dense dew began to fall upon the ground, and the sky was full of stars. For hours I went on slowly down the lane that ran round the hollow of the wooded mountain, wondering why I did not reach the stream he spoke of. It was midnight when I came to the level, and yet I heard no water, and did not yet see the tower against the sky. Extreme fatigue made it impossible, as I thought, to proceed farther, when I saw a light in a window, and went to it quickly and stood beneath it. A woman from the window called me _Caro mio,_ which was gracious, but she would not let me sleep even in the straw of the barn. I hobbled on in despair of the night, for the necessity of sleep was weighing me down after four high hills climbed that day, and after the rough ways and the heat and the continual marching. I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine they had told me of. This high bridge was new, and had been built of fine stone, yet it was broken and ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. I stepped back from it in fear. The clambering down to the stream and up again through the briars to regain the road broke me yet more, and when, on the hill beyond, I saw the tower faintly darker against the dark sky, I went up doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it where it stood (it was on the highest ground overlooking the Secchia valley), I sat down on a stone beside it and waited for the morning. The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight, would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert place--added something of doom. The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther. What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale of grave things? I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful, colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul or around it, when even the stars fail. And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning, and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing. But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm to the movement of my mind. I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields, deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road, that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin, transparent cloud may cover an evil moon. Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to things; the trees recovered their shape, life, and trembling; here and there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany), the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a gesture of victory. My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the east. There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun. The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to immediate sleep. I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of prayer--and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of adoration--this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most complete and glorious. Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then (leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way. For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the hill, there opened gradually before me a silent and profound vale, hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed by a high bank beneath and between two peaks. This bank I knew could be nothing else than the central ridge of the Apennines, the watershed, the boundary of Tuscany, and the end of all the main part of my journey. Beyond, the valleys would open on to the Tuscan Plain, and at the southern limit of that, Siena was my mark; from Siena to Rome an eager man, if he is sound, may march in three long days. Nor was that calculation all. The satisfaction of the last lap, of the home run, went with the word Tuscany in my mind; these cities were the approaches and introduction of the end. When I had slept out the heat, I followed the woods upward through the afternoon. They stood tangled and huge, and the mosses under them were thick and silent, because in this last belt of the mountains height and coolness reproduced the north. A charcoal burner was making his furnace; after that for the last miles there was no sound. Even the floor of the vale was a depth of grass, and no torrent ran in it but only a little hidden stream, leafy like our streams at home. At last the steep bank, a wall at the end of the valley, rose immediately above me. It was very steep and bare, desolate with the many stumps of trees that had been cut down; but all its edge and fringe against the sky was the line of a deep forest. After its laborious hundreds of feet, when the forest that crowned it evenly was reached, the Apennines were conquered, the last great range was passed, and there stood no barrier between this high crest and Rome. The hither side of that bank, I say, had been denuded of its trees; the roots of secular chestnuts stood like graves above the dry steep, and had marked my last arduous climb. Now, at the summit, the highest part was a line of cool forest, and the late afternoon mingled with the sanctity of trees. A genial dampness pervaded the earth beneath; grasses grew, and there were living creatures in the shade. Nor was this tenanted wood all the welcome I received on my entry into Tuscany. Already I heard the noise of falling waters upon every side, where the Serchio sprang from twenty sources on the southern slope, and leapt down between mosses, and quarrelled, and overcame great smooth dark rocks in busy falls. Indeed, it was like my own country in the north, and a man might say to himself--'After so much journeying, perhaps I am in the Enchanted Wood, and may find at last the fairy Melisaunde.' A glade opened, and, the trees no longer hiding it, I looked down the vale, which was the gate of Tuscany. There--high, jagged, rapt into the sky--stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them revelations. Their height was evident from the faint mist and grey of their hues; their outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of accident and poise. It was as though these high walls of Carrara, the western boundary of the valley, had been shaped expressly for man, in order to exalt him with unexpected and fantastic shapes, and to expand his dull life with a permanent surprise. For a long time I gazed at these great hills. Then, more silent in the mind through their influence, I went down past the speech and companionship of the springs of the Serchio, and the chestnut trees were redolent of evening all round. Down the bank to where the streams met in one, down the river, across its gaping, ruinous bridge (which some one, generations ago, had built for the rare travellers--there were then no main roads across the Apennine, and perhaps this rude pass was in favour); down still more gently through the narrow upper valley I went between the chestnut trees, and calm went with me for a companion: and the love of men and the expectation of good seemed natural to all that had been made in this blessed place. Of Borda, where the peasants directed me, there is no need to speak, till crossing the Serchio once more, this time on a trestle bridge of wood, I passed by a wider path through the groves, and entered the dear village of Sillano, which looks right into the pure west. And the peaks are guardians all about it: the elder brothers of this remote and secluded valley. An inn received me: a great kitchen full of men and women talking, a supper preparing, a great fire, meat smoking and drying in the ingle-nook, a vast timbered roof going up into darkness: there I was courteously received, but no one understood my language. Seeing there a young priest, I said to him-- _'Pater, habeo linguam latinam, sed non habeo linguam Italicam. Visne mi dare traductionem in istam linguam Toscanam non nullorum verborum?'_ To this he replied, _'Libenter,'_ and the people revered us both. Thus he told me the name for a knife was _cultello;_ for a room, _camera par domire;_ for 'what is it called?' _'come si chiama?';_ for 'what is the road to?' _'quella e la via a...?'_ and other phrases wherein, no doubt, I am wrong; but I only learnt by ear. Then he said to me something I did not understand, and I answered, _'Pol-Hercle!'_ at which he seemed pleased enough. Then, to make conversation, I said, _'Diaconus es?'_ And he answered me, mildly and gravely, _'Presbyter sum.'_ And a little while after he left for his house, but I went out on to the balcony, where men and women were talking in subdued tones. There, alone, I sat and watched the night coming up into these Tuscan hills. The first moon since that waning in Lorraine--(how many nights ago, how many marches!)--hung in the sky, a full crescent, growing into brightness and glory as she assumed her reign. The one star of the west called out his silent companions in their order; the mountains merged into a fainter confusion; heaven and the infinite air became the natural seat of any spirit that watched this spell. The fire-flies darted in the depths of vineyards and of trees below; then the noise of the grasshoppers brought back suddenly the gardens of home, and whatever benediction surrounds our childhood. Some promise of eternal pleasures and of rest deserved haunted the village of Sillano. In very early youth the soul can still remember its immortal habitation, and clouds and the edges of hills are of another kind from ours, and every scent and colour has a savour of Paradise. What that quality may be no language can tell, nor have men made any words, no, nor any music, to recall it--only in a transient way and elusive the recollection of what youth was, and purity, flashes on us in phrases of the poets, and is gone before we can fix it in our minds--oh! my friends, if we could but recall it! Whatever those sounds may be that are beyond our sounds, and whatever are those keen lives which remain alive there under memory--whatever is Youth--Youth came up that valley at evening, borne upon a southern air. If we deserve or attain beatitude, such things shall at last be our settled state; and their now sudden influence upon the soul in short ecstasies is the proof that they stand outside time, and are not subject to decay. This, then, was the blessing of Sillano, and here was perhaps the highest moment of those seven hundred miles--or more. Do not therefore be astonished, reader, if I now press on much more hurriedly to Rome, for the goal is almost between my hands, and the chief moment has been enjoyed, until I shall see the City. Now I cry out and deplore me that this next sixty miles of way, but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped at last in the ancient and famous town of Siena, whence comes that kind of common brown paint wherewith men, however wicked, can produce (if they have but the art) very surprising effects of depth in painting: for so I read of it in a book by a fool, at six shillings, and even that was part of a series: but if you wish to know anything further of the matter, go you and read it, for I will do nothing of the kind. Oh to be free for strange voyages even for a little while! I am tired of the road; and so are you, and small blame to you. Your fathers also tired of the treadmill, and mine of the conquering marches of the Republic. Heaven bless you all! But I say that if it were not for the incredulity and doubt and agnostico-schismatical hesitation, and very cumbersome air of questioning-and-peering-about, which is the bane of our moderns, very certainly I should now go on to tell of giants as big as cedars, living in mountains of precious stones, and drawn to battle by dragons in cars of gold; or of towns where the customs of men were remote and unexpected; of countries not yet visited, and of the gods returning. For though it is permissible, and a pleasant thing (as Bacon says), to mix a little falsehood with one's truth (so St Louis mixed water with his wine, and so does Sir John Growl mix vinegar with his, unless I am greatly mistaken, for if not, how does he give it that taste at his dinners? eh? There, I think, is a question that would puzzle him!) yet is it much more delectable, and far worthier of the immortal spirit of man to soar into the empyrean of pure lying--that is, to lay the bridle on the neck of Pegasus and let him go forward, while in the saddle meanwhile one sits well back, grips with the knee, takes the race, and on the energy of that steed visits the wheeling stars. This much, then, is worth telling of the valley of the Serchio, that it is narrow, garrulous with water brawling, wooded densely, and contained by fantastic mountains. That it has a splendid name, like the clashing of cymbals--Garfagnana; that it leads to the Tuscan plain, and that it is over a day's march long. Also, it is an oven. Never since the early liars first cooked eggs in the sand was there such heat, and it was made hotter by the consciousness of folly, than which there is no more heating thing; for I think that not old Championnet himself, with his Division of Iron, that fought one to three and crushed the aged enormities of the oppressors as we would crush an empty egg, and that found the summer a good time for fighting in Naples, I say that he himself would not have marched men up the Garfagnana in such a sun. Folly planned it, Pride held to it, and the devils lent their climate. Garfagnana! Garfagnana! to have such a pleasant name, and to be what you are! Not that there were not old towers on the steep woods of the Apennine, nor glimpses of the higher peaks; towns also: one castle surrounded by a fringe of humble roofs--there were all these things. But it was an oven. So imagine me, after having passed chapels built into rocks, and things most curious, but the whole under the strain of an intolerable sun, coming, something after midday, to a place called Castel-Nuovo, the first town, for Campogiamo is hardly a town. At Castel-Nuovo I sat upon a bridge and thought, not what good men think (there came into my memory no historical stuff; for all I know, Liberty never went by that valley in arms); no appreciation of beauty filled me; I was indifferent to all save the intolerable heat, when I suddenly recognized the enormous number of bridges that bespattered the town. 'This is an odd thing,' I mused. 'Here is a little worriment of a town up in the hills, and what a powerful lot of bridges!' I cared not a fig for the thousand things I had been told to expect in Tuscany; everything is in a mind, and as they were not in my mind they did not exist. But the bridges, they indeed were worthy of admiration! Here was a horrible little place on a torrent bank. One bridge was reasonable for by it went the road leading south to Lucca and to Rome; it was common honour to let men escape. But as I sat on that main bridge I counted seven others; indeed there must have been a worship of a bridge-god some time or other to account for such a necklace of bridges in such a neglected borough. You may say (I am off hard on the road to Borgo, drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: _e.g._ Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil that will hinder the building of bridges; _cf. _the Porphyry Bridge in the Malay cosmogony; Amershickel, Brueckengebildung im kult-Historischer. Passenmayer; Durât, _Le pont antique, étude sur les origines Toscanes;_ Mr Dacre's _The Command of Bridges in Warfare; Bridges and Empire,_ by Captain Hole, U.S.A. You may say all this; I shall not reply. If the heat has hindered me from saying a word of the fine open valley on the left, of the little railway and of the last of the hills, do you suppose it will permit me to discuss the sanctity of bridges? If it did, I think there is a little question on 'why should habit turn sacred?' which would somewhat confound and pose you, and pose also, for that matter, every pedant that ever went blind and crook-backed over books, or took ivory for horn. And there is an end of it. Argue it with whom you will. It is evening, and I am at Borgo (for if many towns are called Castel-Nuovo so are many called Borgo in Italy), and I desire to be free of interruption while I eat and sleep and reflect upon the error of that march in that heat, spoiling nearly thirty miles of road, losing so many great and pleasurable emotions, all for haste and from a neglect of the Italian night. And as I ate, and before I slept, I thought of that annotated Guide Book which is cried out for by all Europe, and which shall tell blunt truths. Look you out _'Garfagnana, district of, Valley of Serchio'_ in the index. You will be referred to p. 267. Turn to p. 267. You will find there the phrase-- 'One can walk from the pretty little village of Sillano, nestling in its chestnut groves, to the flourishing town of Borgo on the new Bagni railway in a day.' You will find a mark [1] after that phrase. It refers to a footnote. Glance (or look) at the bottom of the page and you will find: [1] But if one does one is a fool. So I slept late and uneasily the insufficient sleep of men who have suffered, and in that uneasy sleep I discovered this great truth: that if in a southern summer you do not rest in the day the night will seem intolerably warm, but that, if you rest in the day, you will find coolness and energy at evening. The next morning with daylight I continued the road to Lucca, and of that also I will say nothing. LECTOR. Why on earth did you write this book? AUCTOR. For my amusement. LECTOR. And why do you suppose I got it? AUCTOR. I cannot conceive... however, I will give up this much, to tell you that at Decimo the mystery of cypress trees first came into my adventure and pilgrimage: of cypress trees which henceforward were to mark my Tuscan road. And I will tell you that there also I came across a thing peculiar (I suppose) to the region of Lucca, for I saw it there as at Decimo, and also some miles beyond. I mean fine mournful towers built thus: In the first storey one arch, in the second two, in the third three, and so on: a very noble way of building. And I will tell you something more. I will tell you something no one has yet heard. To wit, why this place is called Decimo, and why just below it is another little spot called Sexta. LECTOR.... AUCTOR. I know what you are going to say! Do not say it. You are going to say: 'It is because they were at the sixth and tenth milestones from Lucca on the Roman road.' Heaven help these scientists! Did you suppose that I thought it was called Decimo because the people had ten toes? Tell me, why is not every place ten miles out of a Roman town called by such a name? Eh? You are dumb. You cannot answer. Like most moderns you have entirely missed the point. We all know that there was a Roman town at Lucca, because it was called Luca, and if there had been no Roman town the modern town would not be spelt with two _c's._ All Roman towns had milestones beyond them. But why did _this_ tenth milestone from _this_ Roman town keep its name? LECTOR. I am indifferent. AUCTOR. I will tell you. Up in the tangle of the Carrara mountains, overhanging the Garfagnana, was a wild tribe, whose name I forget (unless it were the Bruttii), but which troubled the Romans not a little, defeating them horribly, and keeping the legionaries in some anxiety for years. So when the soldiers marched out north from Luca about six miles, they could halt and smile at each other, and say 'At _Sextant..._ that's all right. All safe so far!' and therefore only a little village grew up at this little rest and emotion. But as they got nearer the gates of the hills they began to be visibly perturbed, and they would say: 'The eighth mile! cheer up!' Then 'The ninth mile! Sanctissima Madonna! Have you seen anything moving on the heights?' But when they got to the _tenth_ milestone, which stands before the very jaws of the defile, then indeed they said with terrible emphasis, _'Ad Decimam!'_ And there was no restraining them: they would camp and entrench, or die in the venture: for they were Romans and stern fellows, and loved a good square camp and a ditch, and sentries and a clear moon, and plenty of sharp stakes, and all the panoply of war. That is the origin of Decimo. For all my early start, the intolerable heat had again taken the ascendant before I had fairly entered the plain. Then, it being yet but morning, I entered from the north the town of Lucca, which is the neatest, the regularest, the exactest, the most fly-in-amber little town in the world, with its uncrowded streets, its absurd fortifications, and its contented silent houses--all like a family at ease and at rest under its high sun. It is as sharp and trim as its own map, and that map is as clear as a geometrical problem. Everything in Lucca is good. I went with a short shadow, creeping when I could on the eastern side of the street to save the sunlight; then I came to the main square, and immediately on my left was the Albergo di Something-or-other, a fine great hotel, but most unfortunately right facing the blazing sky. I had to stop outside it to count my money. I counted it wrong and entered. There I saw the master, who talked French. 'Can you in an hour,' said I, 'give me a meal to my order, then a bed, though it is early day?' This absurd question I made less absurd by explaining to him my purpose. How I was walking to Rome and how, being northern, I was unaccustomed to such heat; how, therefore, I had missed sleep, and would find it necessary in future to walk mainly by night. For I had now determined to fill the last few marches up in darkness, and to sleep out the strong hours of the sun. All this he understood; I ordered such a meal as men give to beloved friends returned from wars. I ordered a wine I had known long ago in the valley of the Saône in the old time of peace before ever the Greek came to the land. While they cooked it I went to their cool and splendid cathedral to follow a late Mass. Then I came home and ate their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose. All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done; after he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened Bramimonde. So I slept deeply all day long; and, outside, the glare made a silence upon the closed shutters, save that little insects darted in the outer air. When I woke it was evening. So well had they used me that I paid what they asked, and, not knowing what money remained over, I left their town by the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the road. My way lay under the flank of that mountain whereby the Luccans cannot see Pisa, or the Pisans cannot see Lucca--it is all one to me, I shall not live in either town, God willing; and if they are so eager to squint at one another, in Heaven's name, cannot they be at the pains to walk round the end of the hill? It is this laziness which is the ruin of many; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to cross the plain of Arno in one night, and reach by morning the mouth and gate of that valley of the Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief city of the world, and the Popes' residence--as, indeed, it plainly is to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual, geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical. For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio--the hot, droughty, and baking Garfagnana--lead down pointing straight to Rome; and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up directly towards Rome? I say, nowhere in the world is such a coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever. Here again you fall into errors as you read, ever expecting something new; for of that night's march there is nothing to tell, save that it was cool, full of mist, and an easy matter after the royal entertainment and sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies Lucca. The villages were silent, the moon soon left the sky, and the stars could not show through the fog, which deepened in the hours after midnight. A map I had bought in Lucca made the difficulties of the first part of the road (though there were many cross-ways) easy enough; and the second part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain sailing, till--having crossed the main line and having, at last, very weary, come up to the branch railway at a slant from the west and north, I crossed that also under the full light--I stood fairly in the Elsa valley and on the highroad which follows the railway straight to Siena. That long march, I say, had been easy enough in the coolness and in the dark; but I saw nothing; my interior thoughts alone would have afforded matter for this part; but of these if you have not had enough in near six hundred miles of travel, you are a stouter fellow than I took you for. Though it was midsummer, the light had come quickly. Long after sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared. It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable, bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms. Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and nourished many trees--- but the deep grass of the north was wanting. For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly; then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep. When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the feeling. The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I had slept but an hour. Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond. I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross, then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond. I counted the pence and the silver--there was three francs and a little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man, the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond. I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post-office of Siena; the banks of Siena, and the money changers at their counters changing money at the rate of change. 'If one man,' thought I, 'may take five per cent discount on a sum of money in the exchange, may not another man take discount off a walk of over seven hundred miles? May he not cut off it, as his due, twenty-five miserable little miles in the train?' Sleep coming over me after my meal increased the temptation. Alas! how true is the great phrase of Averroes (or it may be Boa-ed-din: anyhow, the Arabic escapes me, but the meaning is plain enough), that when one has once fallen, it is easy to fall again (saving always heavy falls from cliffs and high towers, for after these there is no more falling).... Examine the horse's knees before you buy him; take no ticket-of-leave man into your house for charity; touch no prospectus that has founders' shares, and do not play with firearms or knives and never go near the water till you know how to swim. Oh! blessed wisdom of the ages! sole patrimony of the poor! The road lay white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond. If the people of Milo did well to put up a statue in gold to the man that invented wheels, so should we also put one up in Portland stone or plaster to the man that invented rails, whose property it is not only to increase the speed and ease of travel, but also to bring on slumber as can no drug: not even poppies gathered under a waning moon. The rails have a rhythm of slight falls and rises... they make a loud roar like a perpetual torrent; they cover up the mind with a veil. Once only, when a number of men were shouting 'POGGI-BON-SI,' like a war-cry to the clank of bronze, did I open my eyes sleepily to see a hill, a castle wall, many cypresses, and a strange tower bulging out at the top (such towers I learned were the feature of Tuscany). Then in a moment, as it seemed, I awoke in the station of Siena, where the railway ends and goes no farther. It was still only morning; but the glare was beyond bearing as I passed through the enormous gate of the town, a gate pierced in high and stupendous walls that are here guarded by lions. In the narrow main street there was full shade, and it was made cooler by the contrast of the blaze on the higher storeys of the northern side. The wonders of Siena kept sleep a moment from my mind. I saw their great square where a tower of vast height marks the guildhall. I heard Mass in a chapel of their cathedral: a chapel all frescoed, and built, as it were, out of doors, and right below the altar-end or choir. I noted how the city stood like a queen of hills dominating all Tuscany: above the Elsa northward, southward above the province round Mount Amiato. And this great mountain I saw also hazily far off on the horizon. I suffered the vulgarities of the main street all in English and American, like a show. I took my money and changed it; then, having so passed not a full hour, and oppressed by weariness, I said to myself: 'After all, my business is not with cities, and already I have seen far off the great hill whence one can see far off the hills that overhang Rome.' With this in my mind I wandered out for a quiet place, and found it in a desolate green to the north of the city, near a huge, old red-brick church like a barn. A deep shadow beneath it invited me in spite of the scant and dusty grass, and in this country no one disturbs the wanderer. There, lying down, I slept without dreams till evening. AUCTOR. Turn to page 94. LECTOR. I have it. It is not easy to watch the book in two places at once; but pray continue. AUCTOR. Note the words from the eighth to the tenth lines. LECTOR. Why? AUCTOR. They will make what follows seem less abrupt. Once there was a man dining by himself at the Cafe Anglais, in the days when people went there. It was a full night, and he sat alone at a small table, when there entered a very big man in a large fur coat. The big man looked round annoyed, because there was no room, and the first man very courteously offered him a seat at his little table. They sat down and ate and talked of several things; among others, of Bureaucracy. The first maintained that Bureaucracy was the curse of France. 'Men are governed by it like sheep. The administrator, however humble, is a despot; most people will even run forward to meet him halfway, like the servile dogs they are,' said he. 'No,' answered the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'I should say men were governed just by the ordinary human sense of authority. I have no theories. I say they recognize authority and obey it. Whether it is bureaucratic or not is merely a question of form.' At this moment there came in a tall, rather stiff Englishman. He also was put out at finding no room. The two men saw the manager approach him; a few words were passed, and a card; then the manager suddenly smiled, bowed, smirked, and finally went up to the table and begged that the Duke of Sussex might be allowed to share it. The Duke hoped he did not incommode these gentlemen. They assured him that, on the contrary, they esteemed his presence a favour. 'It is our prerogative,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'to be the host Paris entertaining her Guest.' They would take no denial; they insisted on the Duke's dining with them, and they told him what they had just been discussing. The Duke listened to their theories with some _morgue,_ much _spleen,_ and no little _phlegm,_ but with _perfect courtesy,_ and then, towards the coffee, told them in fluent French with a strong accent, his own opinion. (He had had eight excellent courses; Yquem with his fish, the best Chambertin during the dinner, and a glass of wonderful champagne with his dessert.) He spoke as follows, with a slight and rather hard smile: 'My opinion may seem to you impertinent, but I believe nothing more subtly and powerfully affects men than the aristocratic feeling. Do not misunderstand me,' he added, seeing that they would protest; 'it is not my own experience alone that guides me. All history bears witness to the same truth.' The simple-minded Frenchmen put down this infatuation to the Duke's early training, little knowing that our English men of rank are the simplest fellows in the world, and are quite indifferent to their titles save in business matters. The Frenchmen paid the bill, and they all three went on to the Boulevard. 'Now,' said the first man to his two companions, 'I will give you a practical example of what I meant when I said that Bureaucracy governed mankind.' He went up to the wall of the Credit Lyonnais, put the forefinger of either hand against it, about twenty-five centimetres apart, and at a level of about a foot above his eyes. Holding his fingers thus he gazed at them, shifting them slightly from time to time and moving his glance from one to the other rapidly. A crowd gathered. In a few moments a pleasant elderly, short, and rather fat gentleman in the crowd came forward, and, taking off his hat, asked if he could do anything for him. 'Why,' said our friend, 'the fact is I am an engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without my Double Refractor.' 'Do not let that trouble you,' said the short, stout stranger; 'I will be delighted to keep the place exactly marked while you run for your instrument.' The crowd was now swelled to a considerable size; it blocked up the pavement, and was swelled every moment by the arrival of the curious. The little fat elderly man put his fingers exactly where the other's had been, effecting the exchange with a sharp gesture; and each watched intently to see that it was right to within a millimetre. The attitude was constrained. The elderly man smiled, and begged the engineer not to be alarmed. So they left him with his two forefingers well above his head, precisely twenty-five centimetres apart, and pressing their tips against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. Then the three friends slipped out of the crowd and pursued their way. 'Let us go to the theatre,' said the experimenter, 'and when we come back I warrant you will agree with my remarks on Bureaucracy.' They went to hear the admirable marble lines of Corneille. For three hours they were absorbed by the classics, and, when they returned, a crowd, now enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, stopping the traffic and filled with a noise like the sea. Policemen were attacking it with the utmost energy, but still it grew and eddied; and in the centre--a little respectful space kept empty around him--still stretched the poor little fat elderly man, a pitiable sight. His knees were bent, his head wagged and drooped with extreme fatigue, he was the colour of old blotting-paper; but still he kept the tips of his two forefingers exactly twenty-five centimetres apart, well above his head, and pressed against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. 'You will not match that with your aristocratic sentiment!' said the author of the scene in pardonable triumph. 'I am not so sure,' answered the Duke of Sussex. He pulled out his watch. 'It is midnight,' he said, 'and I must be off; but let me tell you before we part that you have paid for a most expensive dinner, and have behaved all night with an extravagant deference under the impression that I was the Duke of Sussex. As a fact my name is Jerks, and I am a commercial traveller in the linseed oil line; and I wish you the best of good evenings.' 'Wait a moment,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat; 'my theory of the Simple Human Sense of Authority still holds. I am a detective officer, and you will both be good enough to follow me to the police station.' And so they did, and the Engineer was fined fifty francs in correctional, and the Duke of Sussex was imprisoned for ten days, with interdiction of domicile for six months; the first indeed under the Prefectorial Decree of the 18th of November 1843, but the second under the law of the 12th germinal of the year VIII. In this way I have got over between twenty and thirty miles of road which were tramped in the dark, and the description of which would have plagued you worse than a swarm of hornets. Oh, blessed interlude! no struggling moon, no mist, no long-winded passages upon the genial earth, no the sense of the night, no marvels of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees--just a short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen over the detestable parched hillocks of this downward way. No, no, Lector! Do not blame me that Tuscany should have passed beneath me unnoticed, as the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in full sail. Blame all those days of marching; hundreds upon hundreds of miles that exhausted the powers of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry sky of Etruria, that compelled most of my way to be taken at night. Blame St Augustine, who misled me in his Confessions by talking like an African of 'the icy shores of Italy'; or blame Rome, that now more and more drew me to Herself as She approached from six to five, from five to four, from four to three--now She was but _three_ days off. The third sun after that I now saw rising would shine upon the City. I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but it was useless. After an hour I abandoned it. It was not so much the sun, though that was intemperate and deadly; it was rather the inhuman aspect of the earth which made me despair. It was as though the soil had been left imperfect and rough after some cataclysm; it reminded me of those bad lands in the west of America, where the desert has no form, and where the crumbling and ashy look of things is more abhorrent than their mere desolation. As soon march through evil dreams! The north is the place for men. Eden was there; and the four rivers of Paradise are the Seine, the Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are grasses there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an unnoticed pleasure. The waters brim up to the edges of the fields. But for this bare Tuscany I was never made. How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely how much farther San Quirico, the neighbouring town, might be. The imperfect map I had bought at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. I was content to wait for evening, and then to go on till I found it. An hour or so in the shade of a row of parched and dusty bushes I lay and ate and drank my wine, and smoked, and then all day I slept, and woke a while, and slept again more deeply. But how people sleep and wake, if you do not yet know it after so much of this book you never will. It was perhaps five o'clock, or rather more, when I rose unhappily and took up the ceaseless road. Even the goodness of the Italian nature seemed parched up in those dry hollows. At an inn where I ate they shouted at me, thinking in that way to make me understand; and their voices were as harsh as the grating of metal against stone. A mile farther I crossed a lonely line of railway; then my map told me where I was, and I went wearily up an indefinite slope under the declining sun, and thought it outrageous that only when the light had gone was there any tolerable air in this country. Soon the walls of San Quirico, partly ruinous, stood above the fields (for the smallest places here have walls); as I entered its gate the sun set, and as though the cool, coming suddenly, had a magic in it, everything turned kinder. A church that could wake interest stood at the entry of the town; it had stone lions on its steps, and the pillars were so carved as to resemble knotted ropes. There for the first time I saw in procession one of those confraternities which in Italy bury the dead; they had long and dreadful hoods over their heads, with slits for the eyes. I spoke to the people of San Quirico, and they to me. They were upstanding, and very fine and noble in the lines of the face. On their walls is set a marble tablet, on which it is registered that the people of Tuscany, being asked whether they would have their hereditary Duke or the House of Savoy, voted for the latter by such and such a great majority; and this kind of tablet I afterwards found was common to all these small towns. Then passing down their long street I came, at the farther gate, to a great sight, which the twilight still permitted me to receive in its entirety. For San Quirico is built on the edge of a kind of swell in the land, and here where I stood one looked over the next great wave; for the shape of the view was, on a vast scale, just what one sees from a lonely boat looking forward over a following sea. The trough of the wave was a shallow purple valley, its arid quality hidden by the kindly glimmer of evening; few trees stood in it to break its sweep, and its irregularities and mouldings were just those of a sweep of water after a gale. The crest of the wave beyond was seventeen miles away. It had, as have also such crests at sea, one highest, toppling peak in its long line, and this, against the clear sky, one could see to be marked by buildings. These buildings were the ruined castle and walls of Radicofani, and it lay straight on my way to Rome. It is a strange thing, arresting northern eyes, to see towns thus built on summits up into the sky, and this height seemed the more fantastic because it was framed. A row of cypress trees stood on either side of the road where it fell from San Quirico, and, exactly between these, this high crest, a long way off, was set as though by design. With more heart in me, and tempted by such an outline as one might be by the prospect of adventure, I set out to cross the great bare run of the valley. As I went, the mountain of Amiato came more and more nearly abreast of me in the west; in its foothills near me were ravines and unexpected rocks; upon one of them hung a village. I watched its church and one tall cypress next it, as they stood black against the last of daylight. Then for miles I went on the dusty way, and crossed by old bridges watercourses in which stood nothing but green pools; and the night deepened. It was when I had crossed the greater part of the obscure plain, at its lowest dip and not far from the climb up to Radicofani, that I saw lights shining in a large farmhouse, and though it was my business to walk by night, yet I needed companionship, so I went in. There in a very large room, floored with brick and lit by one candle, were two fine old peasants, with faces like apostles, playing a game of cards. There also was a woman playing with a strong boy child, that could not yet talk: and the child ran up to me. Nothing could persuade the master of the house but that I was a very poor man who needed sleep, and so good and generous was this old man that my protests seemed to him nothing but the excuses and shame of poverty. He asked me where I was going. I said, 'To Rome.' He came out with a lantern to the stable, and showed me there a manger full of hay, indicating that I might sleep in it... His candle flashed upon the great silent oxen standing in rows; their enormous horns, three times the length of what we know in England, filled me with wonder... Well! (may it count to me as gain!), rather than seem to offend him I lay down in that manger, though I had no more desire to sleep than has the flittermouse in our Sussex gloamings; also I was careful to offer no money, for that is brutality. When he had left me I took the opportunity for a little rest, and lay on my back in the hay wide-awake and staring at darkness. The great oxen champed and champed their food with a regular sound; I remembered the steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I considered in the darkness the noble aspect of these beasts as I had seen them in the lantern light, and I determined when I got to Rome to buy two such horns, and to bring them to England and have them mounted for drinking horns--great drinking horns, a yard deep--and to get an engraver to engrave a motto for each. On the first I would have-- King Alfred was in Wantage born He drank out of a ram's horn. Here is a better man than he, Who drinks deeper, as you see. Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up their hearts and no longer be oppressed with humility. But on the second I determined for a rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round camp fires in the year 888 or thereabouts; so, the imagination fairly set going and taking wood-cock's flight, snipe-fashion, zigzag and devil-may-care- for-the-rules, this seemed to suit me-- _Salve, cornu cornuum! Cornutorum vis Boûm. Munus excellent Deûm! Gregis o praesidium! Sitis desiderium! Dignum cornuum cornu Romae memor salve tu! Tibi cornuum cornuto--_ LECTOR. That means nothing. AUCTOR. Shut up! _Tibi cornuum cornuto Tibi clamo, te saluto Salve cornu cornuum! Fortunatam da Domunt!_ And after this cogitation and musing I got up quietly, so as not to offend the peasant: and I crept out, and so upwards on to the crest of the hill. But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared the summit, it was already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and softened the scene with distant woods. Between it and this height ran a vague river-bed as dry as the stones of a salt beach. The sun rose as I passed under the ruined walls of the castle. In the little town itself, early as was the hour, many people were stirring. One gave me good-morning--a man of singular character, for here, in the very peep of day, he was sitting on a doorstep, idle, lazy and contented, as though it was full noon. Another was yoking oxen; a third going out singing to work in the fields. I did not linger in this crow's nest, but going out by the low and aged southern gate, another deeper valley, even drier and more dead than the last, appeared under the rising sun. It was enough to make one despair! And when I thought of the day's sleep in that wilderness, of the next night's toil through it-- LECTOR. What about the Brigand of Radicofani of whom you spoke in Lorraine, and of whom I am waiting to hear? AUCTOR. What about him? Why, he was captured long ago, and has since died of old age. I am surprised at your interrupting me with such questions. Pray ask for no more tales till we get to the really absorbing story of the Hungry Student. Well, as I was saying, I was in some despair at the sight of that valley, which had to be crossed before I could reach the town of Acquapendente, or Hanging-water, which I knew to lie somewhere on the hills beyond. The sun was conquering me, and I was looking hopelessly for a place to sleep, when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, his head on the shady side. The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft sacks for a bed) I very soon was pleasantly asleep. We lay side by side for hour after hour, and the day rose on to noon; the sun beat upon our feet, but our heads were in the shade and we slept heavily a good and honest sleep: he thinking that he was alone, but I knowing that I was in company (a far preferable thing), and I was right and he was wrong. And the heat grew, and sleep came out of that hot sun more surely than it does out of the night air in the north. But no dreams wander under the noon. From time to time one or the other of us would open our eyes drowsily and wonder, but sleep was heavy on us both, and our minds were sunk in calm like old hulls in the dark depths of the sea where there are no storms. We neither of us really woke until, at the bottom of the hill which rises into Acquapendente, the oxen stopped. This halt woke us up; first me and then my companion. He looked at me a moment and laughed. He seemed to have thought all this while that I was some country friend of his who had taken a lift; and I, for my part, had made more or less certain that he was a good fellow who would do me no harm. I was right, and he was wrong. I knew not what offering to make him to compensate him for this trouble which his heavy oxen had taken. After some thought I brought a cigar out of my pocket, which he smoked with extreme pleasure. The oxen meanwhile had been urged up the slow hill, and it was in this way that we reached the famous town of Acquapendente. But why it should be called famous is more than I can understand. It may be that in one of those narrow streets there is a picture or a church, or one of those things which so attract unbelieving men. To the pilgrim it is simply a group of houses. Into one of these I went, and, upon my soul, I have nothing to say of it except that they furnished me with food. I do not pretend to have counted the flies, though they were numerous; and, even had I done so, what interest would the number have, save to the statisticians? Now as these are patient men and foolish, I heartily recommend them to go and count the flies for themselves. Leaving this meal then, this town and this people (which were all of a humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this time) the night had become my day and the day my night. I found a stream running very sluggish between tall trees, and this sight sufficiently reminded me of my own country to permit repose. Lying down there I slept till the end of the day, or rather to that same time of evening which had now become my usual waking hour... And now tell me, Lector, shall I leave out altogether, or shall I give you some description of, the next few miles to San Lorenzo? LECTOR. Why, if I were you I would put the matter shortly and simply, for it is the business of one describing a pilgrimage or any other matter not to puff himself up with vain conceit, nor to be always picking about for picturesque situations, but to set down plainly and shortly what he has seen and heard, describing the whole matter. AUCTOR. But remember, Lector, that the artist is known not only by what he puts in but by what he leaves out. LECTOR. That is all very well for the artist, but you have no business to meddle with such people. AUCTOR. How then would you write such a book if you had the writing of it? LECTOR. I would not introduce myself at all; I would not tell stories at random, nor go in for long descriptions of emotions, which I am sure other men have felt as well as I. I would be careful to visit those things my readers had already heard of (AUCTOR. The pictures! the remarkable pictures! All that is meant by culture! The brown photographs! Oh! Lector, indeed I have done you a wrong!), and I would certainly not have the bad taste to say anything upon religion. Above all, I would be terse. AUCTOR. I see. You would not pile words one on the other, qualifying, exaggerating, conditioning, superlativing, diminishing, connecting, amplifying, condensing, mouthing, and glorifying the mere sound: you would be terse. You should be known for your self-restraint. There should be no verbosity in your style (God forbid!), still less pomposity, animosity, curiosity, or ferocity; you would have it neat, exact, and scholarly, and, above all, chiselled to the nail. A fig (say you), the pip of a fig, for the rambling style. You would be led into no hilarity, charity, vulgarity, or barbarity. Eh! my jolly Lector? You would simply say what you had to say? LECTOR. Precisely; I would say a plain thing in a plain way. AUCTOR. So you think one can say a plain thing in a plain way? You think that words mean nothing more than themselves, and that you can talk without ellipsis, and that customary phrases have not their connotations? You think that, do you? Listen then to the tale of Mr Benjamin Franklin Hard, a kindly merchant of Cincinnati, O., who had no particular religion, but who had accumulated a fortune of six hundred thousand dollars, and who had a horror of breaking the Sabbath. He was not 'a kind husband and a good father,' for he was unmarried; nor had he any children. But he was all that those words connote. This man Hard at the age of fifty-four retired from business, and determined to treat himself to a visit to Europe. He had not been in Europe five weeks before he ran bang up against the Catholic Church. He was never more surprised in his life. I do not mean that I have exactly weighed all his surprises all his life through. I mean that he was very much surprised indeed--and that is all that these words connote. He studied the Catholic Church with extreme interest. He watched High Mass at several places (hoping it might be different). He thought it was what it was not, and then, contrariwise, he thought it was not what it was. He talked to poor Catholics, rich Catholics, middle-class Catholics, and elusive, wellborn, penniless, neatly dressed, successful Catholics; also to pompous, vain Catholics; humble, uncertain Catholics; sneaking, pad-footed Catholics; healthy, howling, combative Catholics; doubtful, shoulder-shrugging, but devout Catholics; fixed, crabbed, and dangerous Catholics; easy, jovial, and shone-upon-by-the-heavenly-light Catholics; subtle Catholics; strange Catholics, and _(quod tibi manifeste absurdum videtur)_ intellectual, _pince-nez,_ jejune, twisted, analytical, yellow, cranky, and introspective Catholics: in fine, he talked to all Catholics. And when I say 'all Catholics' I do not mean that he talked to every individual Catholic, but that he got a good, integrative grip of the Church militant, which is all that the words connote. Well, this man Hard got to know, among others, a certain good priest that loved a good bottle of wine, a fine deep dish of_ poulet à la casserole, _and a kind of egg done with cream in a little platter; and eating such things, this priest said to him one day: 'Mr Hard, what you want is to read some books on Catholicism.' And Hard, who was on the point of being received into the Church as the final solution of human difficulties, thought it would be a very good thing to instruct his mind before baptism. So he gave the priest a note to a bookseller whom an American friend had told him of; and this American friend had said: 'You will find Mr Fingle (for such was the bookseller's name) a hard-headed, honest, business man. He can say a _plain thing in a plain way.'_ 'Here,' said Mr Hard to the priest, 'is ten pounds. Send it to this bookseller Fingle and he shall choose books on Catholicism to that amount, and you shall receive them, and I will come and read them here with you.' So the priest sent the money, and in four days the books came, and Mr Hard and the priest opened the package, and these were the books inside: _Auricular Confession:_ a History. By a Brand Saved from the Burning. _Isabella; or, The Little Female Jesuit._ By 'Hephzibah'. _Elisha MacNab:_ a Tale of the French Huguenots. _England and Rome._ By the Rev. Ebenezer Catchpole of Emmanuel, Birmingham. _Nuns and Nunneries._ By 'Ruth', with a Preface by Miss Carran, lately rescued from a Canadian Convent. _History of the Inquisition._ By Llorente. _The Beast with Seven Heads; or, the Apocalyptical Warning._ _No Truce with the Vatican._ _The True Cause of Irish Disaffection._ _Decline of the Latin Nations._ _Anglo-Saxons the Chosen Race,_ and their connexion with the Ten Lost Tribes: with a map. Finally, a very large book at the bottom of the case called _Giant Pope._ And it was no use asking for the money back or protesting. Mr Fingle was an honest, straightforward man, who said a plain thing in a plain way. They had left him to choose a suitable collection of books on Catholicism, and he had chosen the best he knew. And thus did Mr Hard (who has recently given a hideous font to the new Catholic church at Bismarckville) learn the importance of estimating what words connote. LECTOR. But all that does not excuse an intolerable prolixity? AUCTOR. Neither did I say it did, dear Lector. My object was merely to get you to San Lorenzo where I bought that wine, and where, going out of the gate on the south, I saw suddenly the wide lake of Bolsena all below. It is a great sheet like a sea; but as one knows one is on a high plateau, and as there is but a short dip down to it; as it is round and has all about it a rim of low even hills, therefore one knows it for an old and gigantic crater now full of pure water; and there are islands in it and palaces on the islands. Indeed it was an impression of silence and recollection, for the water lay all upturned to heaven, and, in the sky above me, the moon at her quarter hung still pale in the daylight, waiting for glory. I sat on the coping of a wall, drank a little of my wine, ate a little bread and sausage; but still song demanded some outlet in the cool evening, and companionship was more of an appetite in me than landscape. Please God, I had become southern and took beauty for granted. Anyhow, seeing a little two-wheeled cart come through the gate, harnessed to a ramshackle little pony, bony and hard, and driven by a little, brown, smiling, and contented old fellow with black hair, I made a sign to him and he stopped. This time there was no temptation of the devil; if anything the advance was from my side. I was determined to ride, and I sprang up beside the driver. We raced down the hill, clattering and banging and rattling like a piece of ordnance, and he, my brother, unasked began to sing. I sang in turn. He sang of Italy, I of four countries: America, France, England, and Ireland. I could not understand his songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and _salami_ and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of ill-ease--I mean the forgetfulness of money. That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath none like it since the Etruscans here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph. It broke my vow to pieces; there was not a shadow of excuse for this use of wheels: it was done openly and wantonly in the face of the wide sky for pleasure. And what is there else but pleasure, and to what else does beauty move on? Not I hope to contemplation! A hideous oriental trick! No, but to loud notes and comradeship and the riot of galloping, and laughter ringing through old trees. Who would change (says Aristippus of Pslinthon) the moon and all the stars for so much wine as can be held in the cup of a bottle upturned? The honest man! And in his time (note you) they did not make the devilish deep and fraudulent bottoms they do now that cheat you of half your liquor. Moreover if I broke my vows (which is a serious matter), and if I neglected to contemplate the heavens (for which neglect I will confess to no one, not even to a postulate sub-deacon; it is no sin; it is a healthy omission), if (I say) I did this, I did what peasants do. And what is more, by drinking wine and eating pig we proved ourselves no Mohammedans; and on such as he is sure of, St Peter looks with a kindly eye. Now, just at the very entry to Bolsena, when we had followed the lovely lake some time, my driver halted and began to turn up a lane to a farm or villa; so I, bidding him good-night, crossed a field and stood silent by the lake and watched for a long time the water breaking on a tiny shore, and the pretty miniatures of waves. I stood there till the stars came out and the moon shone fully; then I went towards Bolsena under its high gate which showed in the darkness, and under its castle on the rock. There, in a large room which was not quite an inn, a woman of great age and dignity served me with fried fish from the lake, and the men gathered round me and attempted to tell me of the road to Rome, while I in exchange made out to them as much by gestures as by broken words the crossing of the Alps and the Apennines. Then, after my meal, one of the men told me I needed sleep; that there were no rooms in that house (as I said, it was not an inn), but that across the way he would show me one he had for hire. I tried to say that my plan was to walk by night. They all assured me he would charge me a reasonable sum. I insisted that the day was too hot for walking. They told me, did these Etruscans, that I need fear no extortion from so honest a man. Certainly it is not easy to make everybody understand everything, and I had had experience already up in the mountains, days before, of how important it is not to be misunderstood when one is wandering in a foreign country, poor and ill-clad. I therefore accepted the offer, and, what was really very much to my regret, I paid the money he demanded. I even so far fell in with the spirit of the thing as to sleep a certain number of hours (for after all, my sleep that day in the cart had been very broken, and instead of resting throughout the whole of the heat I had taken a meal at Acquapendente). But I woke up not long after midnight--perhaps between one and two o'clock--and went out along the borders of the lake. The moon had set; I wish I could have seen her hanging at the quarter in the clear sky of that high crater, dipping into the rim of its inland sea. It was perceptibly cold. I went on the road quite slowly, till it began to climb, and when the day broke I found myself in a sunken lane leading up to the town of Montefiascone. The town lay on its hill in the pale but growing light. A great dome gave it dignity, and a castle overlooked the lake. It was built upon the very edge and lip of the volcano-cup commanding either side. I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not knowing what might be beyond, when, at the crest, there shone before me in the sunrise one of those unexpected and united landscapes which are among the glories of Italy. They have changed the very mind in a hundred northern painters, when men travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and again, the set views of plains like gardens, surrounded by sharp mountain-land and framed. The road did not pass through the town; the grand though crumbling gate of entry lay up a short straight way to the right, and below, where the road continued down the slope, was a level of some eight miles full of trees diminishing in distance. At its further side an ample mountain, wooded, of gentle flattened outline, but high and majestic, barred the way to Rome. It was yet another of those volcanoes, fruitful after death, which are the mark of Latium: and it held hidden, as did that larger and more confused one on the rim of which I stood, a lake in its silent crater. But that lake, as I was to find, was far smaller than the glittering sea of Bolsena, whose shores now lay behind me. The distance and the hill that bounded it should in that climate have stood clear in the pure air, but it was yet so early that a thin haze hung over the earth, and the sun had not yet controlled it: it was even chilly. I could not catch the towers of Viterbo, though I knew them to stand at the foot of the far mountain. I went down the road, and in half-an-hour or so was engaged upon the straight line crossing the plain. I wondered a little how the road would lie with regard to the town, and looked at my map for guidance, but it told me little. It was too general, taking in all central Italy, and even large places were marked only by small circles. When I approached Viterbo I first saw an astonishing wall, perpendicular to my road, untouched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It stood up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming much higher than it should; its hundred feet or so were exaggerated by the severity of its stones and by their sheer fall. For they had no ornament whatever, and few marks of decay, though many of age. Tall towers, exactly square and equally bare of carving or machicolation, stood at intervals along this forbidding defence and flanked its curtain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a huge castle, but the wall of a city, for at a corner it went sharp round to contain the town, and through one uneven place I saw houses. Many men were walking in the roads alongside these walls, and there were gates pierced in them whereby the citizens went in and out of the city as bees go in and out of the little opening in a hive. But my main road to Rome did not go through Viterbo, it ran alongside of the eastern wall, and I debated a little with myself whether I would go in or no. It was out of my way, and I had not entered Montefiascone for that reason. On the other hand, Viterbo was a famous place. It is all very well to neglect Florence and Pisa because they are some miles off the straight way, but Viterbo right under one's hand it is a pity to miss. Then I needed wine and food for the later day in the mountain. Yet, again, it was getting hot. It was past eight, the mist had long ago receded, and I feared delay. So I mused on the white road under the tall towers and dead walls of Viterbo, and ruminated on an unimportant thing. Then curiosity did what reason could not do, and I entered by a gate. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all shaded by the great houses, and still full of the cold of the night. The noise of fountains echoed in them, and the high voices of women and the cries of sellers. Every house had in it something fantastic and peculiar; humanity had twined into this place like a natural growth, and the separate thoughts of men, both those that were alive there and those dead before them, had decorated it all. There were courtyards with blinding whites of sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow; and there were many carvings and paintings over doors. I had come into a great living place after the loneliness of the road. There, in the first wide street I could find, I bought sausage and bread and a great bottle of wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it by the same gate and took the road. For a long while yet I continued under the walls, noting in one place a thing peculiar to the Middle Ages, I mean the apse of a church built right into the wall as the old Cathedral of St Stephen's was in Paris. These, I suppose, enemies respected if they could; for I have noticed also that in castles the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the wall. So be it. Your fathers and mine were there in the fighting, but we do not know their names, and I trust and hope yours spared the altars as carefully as mine did. The road began to climb the hill, and though the heat increased--for in Italy long before nine it is glaring noon to us northerners (and that reminds me: your fathers and mine, to whom allusion has been made above {as they say in the dull history books--[LECTOR. How many more interior brackets are we to have? Is this algebra? AUCTOR. You yourself, Lector, are responsible for the worst.]} your fathers and mine coming down into this country to fight, as was their annual custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when you think that they could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff, and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do not even know their names.)--Where was I? LECTOR. You were at the uninteresting remark that the heat was increasing. AUCTOR. Precisely. I remember. Well, the heat was increasing, but it seemed far more bearable than it had been in the earlier places; in the oven of the Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with the first slopes of the mountain a forest of great chestnut trees appeared, and it was so cool under these that there was even moss, as though I were back again in my own country where there are full rivers in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the completion of home. Also the height may have begun to tell on the air, but not much, for when the forest was behind me, and when I had come to a bare heath sloping more gently upwards--a glacis in front of the topmost bulwark of the round mountain--- I was oppressed with thirst, and though it was not too hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinieri passed me singing, and we recognized as we saluted each other that the mountain was full of songs), yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and shade. And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a woman in the shade sewing, and an old man. Also a bench and a table, and a tree over it. There I sat down and drank white wine and water many times. The woman charged me a halfpenny, and the old man would not talk. He did not take his old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine; but I should dearly have liked to have talked to him in Lingua Franca, and to have heard him on the story of his mountain: where it was haunted, by what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be abroad. Such as it was, there it was. I left them, and shall perhaps never see them again. The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never reached. A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow on the right. Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep: after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied. I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn of our saved and happy world. At its hither end a hill, that had once been a cone in the crater, stood out all covered with a dense wood. It was the Hill of Venus. There was no temple, nor no sacrifice, nor no ritual for the Divinity, save this solemn attitude of perennial silence; but under the influence which still remained and gave the place its savour, it was impossible to believe that the gods were dead. There were no men in that hollow; nor was there any memory of men, save of men dead these thousands of years. There was no life of visible things. The mind released itself and was in touch with whatever survives of conquered but immortal Spirits. Thus ready for worship, and in a mood of adoration; filled also with the genius which inhabits its native place and is too subtle or too pure to suffer the effect of time, I passed down the ridge-way of the mountain rim, and came to the edge overlooking that arena whereon was first fought out and decided the chief destiny of the world. For all below was the Campagna. Names that are at the origin of things attached to every cleft and distant rock beyond the spreading level, or sanctified the gleams of rivers. There below me was Veii; beyond, in the Wall of the Apennines, only just escaped from clouds, was Tibur that dignified the ravine at the edge of their rising; that crest to the right was Tusculum, and far to the south, but clear, on a mountain answering my own, was the mother of the City, Alba Longa. The Tiber, a dense, brown fog rolling over and concealing it, was the god of the wide plain. There and at that moment I should have seen the City. I stood up on the bank and shaded my eyes, straining to catch the dome at least in the sunlight; but I could not, for Rome was hidden by the low Sabinian hills. Soracte I saw there--Soracte, of which I had read as a boy. It stood up like an acropolis, but it was a citadel for no city. It stood alone, like that soul which once haunted its recesses and prophesied the conquering advent of the northern kings. I saw the fields where the tribes had lived that were the first enemies of the imperfect state, before it gave its name to the fortunes of the Latin race. Dark Etruria lay behind me, forgotten in the backward of my march: a furnace and a riddle out of which religion came to the Romans--a place that has left no language. But below me, sunlit and easy (as it seemed in the cooler air of that summit), was the arena upon which were first fought out the chief destinies of the world. And I still looked down upon it, wondering. Was it in so small a space that all the legends of one's childhood were acted? Was the defence of the bridge against so neighbouring and petty an alliance? Were they peasants of a group of huts that handed down the great inheritance of discipline, and made an iron channel whereby, even to us, the antique virtues could descend as a living memory? It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one landscape comprised all the first generations of the history of Rome. The stones we admire, the large spirit of the last expression came from that rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has, are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire. 'Upon this arena,' I still said to myself, 'were first fought out the chief destinies of the world'; and so, played upon by an unending theme, I ate and drank in a reverie, still wondering, and then lay down beneath the shade of a little tree that stood alone upon that edge of a new world. And wondering, I fell asleep under the morning sun. But this sleep was not like the earlier oblivions that had refreshed my ceaseless journey, for I still dreamt as I slept of what I was to see, and visions of action without thought--pageants and mysteries--surrounded my spirit; and across the darkness of a mind remote from the senses there passed whatever is wrapped up in the great name of Rome. When I woke the evening had come. A haze had gathered upon the plain. The road fell into Ronciglione, and dreams surrounded it upon every side. For the energy of the body those hours of rest had made a fresh and enduring vigour; for the soul no rest was needed. It had attained, at least for the next hour, a vigour that demanded only the physical capacity of endurance; an eagerness worthy of such great occasions found a marching vigour for its servant. In Ronciglione I saw the things that Turner drew; I mean the rocks from which a river springs, and houses all massed together, giving the steep a kind of crown. This also accompanied that picture, the soft light which mourns the sun and lends half-colours to the world. It was cool, and the opportunity beckoned. I ate and drank, asking every one questions of Rome, and I passed under their great gate and pursued the road to the plain. In the mist, as it rose, there rose also a passion to achieve. All the night long, mile after mile, I hurried along the Cassian Way. For five days I had slept through the heat, and the southern night had become my daytime; and though the mist was dense, and though the moon, now past her quarter, only made a vague place in heaven, yet expectation and fancy took more than the place of sight. In this fog I felt with every step of the night march the approach to the goal. Long past the place I had marked as a halt, long past Sette Vene, a light blurred upon the white wreaths of vapour; distant songs and the noise of men feasting ended what had been for many, many hours--for more than twenty miles of pressing forward--an exaltation worthy of the influence that bred it. Then came on me again, after the full march, a necessity for food and for repose. But these things, which have been the matter of so much in this book, now seemed subservient only to the reaching of an end; they were left aside in the mind. It was an inn with trellis outside making an arbour. In the yard before it many peasants sat at table; their beasts and waggons stood in the roadway, though, at this late hour, men were feeding some and housing others. Within, fifty men or more were making a meal or a carousal. What feast or what necessity of travel made them keep the night alive I neither knew nor asked; but passing almost unobserved amongst them between the long tables, I took my place at the end, and the master served me with good food and wine. As I ate the clamour of the peasants sounded about me, and I mixed with the energy of numbers. With a little difficulty I made the master understand that I wished to sleep till dawn. He led me out to a small granary (for the house was full), and showed me where I should sleep in the scented hay. He would take no money for such a lodging, and left me after showing me how the door latched and unfastened; and out of so many men, he was the last man whom I thanked for a service until I passed the gates of Rome. Above the soft bed which the hay made, a square window, unglazed, gave upon the southern night; the mist hardly drifted in or past it, so still was the air. I watched it for a while drowsily; then sleep again fell on me. But as I slept, Rome, Rome still beckoned me, and I woke in a struggling light as though at a voice calling, and slipping out I could not but go on to the end. The small square paving of the Via Cassia, all even like a palace floor, rang under my steps. The parched banks and strips of dry fields showed through the fog (for its dampness did not cure the arid soil of the Campagna). The sun rose and the vapour lifted. Then, indeed, I peered through the thick air--but still I could see nothing of my goal, only confused folds of brown earth and burnt-up grasses, and farther off rare and un-northern trees. I passed an old tower of the Middle Ages that was eaten away at its base by time or the quarrying of men; I passed a divergent way on the right where a wooden sign said 'The Triumphal Way', and I wondered whether it could be the road where ritual had once ordained that triumphs should go. It seemed lonely and lost, and divorced from any approach to sacred hills. The road fell into a hollow where soldiers were manoeuvring. Even these could not arrest an attention that was fixed upon the approaching revelation. The road climbed a little slope where a branch went off to the left, and where there was a house and an arbour under vines. It was now warm day; trees of great height stood shading the sun; the place had taken on an appearance of wealth and care. The mist had gone before I reached the summit of the rise. There, from the summit, between the high villa walls on either side--at my very feet I saw the City. And now all you people whatsoever that are presently reading, may have read, or shall in the future read, this my many-sided but now-ending book; all you also that in the mysterious designs of Providence may not be fated to read it for some very long time to come; you then I say, entire, englobed, and universal race of men both in gross and regardant, not only living and seeing the sunlight, but dead also under the earth; shades, or to come in procession afterwards out of the dark places into the day for a little, swarms of you, an army without end; all you black and white, red, yellow and brown, men, women, children and poets--all of you, wherever you are now, or have been, or shall be in your myriads and deka myriads and hendeka myriads, the time has come when I must bid you farewell-- _Ludisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti; Tempus abire tibi est...._ Only Lector I keep by me for a very little while longer with a special purpose, but even he must soon leave me; for all good things come to an end, and this book is coming to an end--has come to an end. The leaves fall, and they are renewed; the sun sets on the Vexin hills, but he rises again over the woods of Marly. Human companionship once broken can never be restored, and you and I shall not meet or understand each other again. It is so of all the poor links whereby we try to bridge the impassable gulf between soul and soul. Oh! we spin something, I know, but it is very gossamer, thin and strained, and even if it does not snap time will at last dissolve it. Indeed, there is a song on it which you should know, and which runs-- [Bar of music] So my little human race, both you that have read this book and you that have not, good-bye in charity. I loved you all as I wrote. Did you all love me as much as I have loved you, by the black stone of Rennes I should be rich by now. Indeed, indeed, I have loved you all! You, the workers, all puffed up and dyspeptic and ready for the asylums; and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones; you, the strong silent men, who have heads quite empty, like gourds; and you also, the frivolous, useless men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day long. Even you, that, having begun to read this book, could get no further than page 47, and especially you who have read it manfully in spite of the flesh, I love you all, and give you here and now my final, complete, full, absolving, and comfortable benediction. To tell the truth, I have noticed one little fault about you. I will not call it fatuous, inane, and exasperating vanity or self- absorption; I will put it in the form of a parable. Sit you round attentively and listen, dispersing yourselves all in order, and do not crowd or jostle. Once, before we humans became the good and self-respecting people we are, the Padre Eterno was sitting in heaven with St Michael beside him, and He watched the abyss from His great throne, and saw shining in the void one far point of light amid some seventeen million others, and He said: 'What is that?' And St Michael answered: 'That is the Earth,' for he felt some pride in it. 'The Earth?' said the Padre Eterno, a little puzzled... 'The Earth? ...?... I do not remember very exactly...' 'Why,' answered St Michael, with as much reverence as his annoyance could command, 'surely you must recollect the Earth and all the pother there was in heaven when it was first suggested to create it, and all about Lucifer--' 'Ah!' said the Padre Eterno, thinking twice, 'yes. It is attached to Sirius, and--' 'No, no,' said St Michael, quite visibly put out. 'It is the Earth. The Earth which has that changing moon and the thing called the sea.' 'Of course, of course,' answered the Padre Eterno quickly, 'I said Sirius by a slip of the tongue. Dear me! So that is the Earth! Well, well! It is years ago now... Michael, what are those little things swarming up and down all over it?' 'Those,' said St Michael, 'are Men.' 'Men?' said the Padre Eterno, 'Men... I know the word as well as any one, but somehow the connexion escapes me. Men...' and He mused. St Michael, with perfect self-restraint, said a few things a trifle staccato, defining Man, his dual destiny, his hope of heaven, and all the great business in which he himself had fought hard. But from a fine military tradition, he said nothing of his actions, nor even of his shrine in Normandy, of which he is naturally extremely proud: and well he may be. What a hill! 'I really beg your pardon,' said the Padre Eterno, when he saw the importance attached to these little creatures. 'I am sure they are worthy of the very fullest attention, and' (he added, for he was sorry to have offended) 'how sensible they seem, Michael! There they go, buying and selling, and sailing, driving, and wiving, and riding, and dancing, and singing, and the rest of it; indeed, they are most practical, business-like, and satisfactory little beings. But I notice one odd thing. Here and there are some not doing as the rest, or attending to their business, but throwing themselves into all manner of attitudes, making the most extraordinary sounds, and clothing themselves in the quaintest of garments. What is the meaning of that?' 'Sire!' cried St Michael, in a voice that shook the architraves of heaven, 'they are worshipping You!' 'Oh! they are worshipping _me!_ Well, that is the most sensible thing I have heard of them yet, and I altogether commend them. _Continuez,'_ said the Padre Eterno, _'continuez!'_ And since then all has been well with the world; at least where _Us continuent._ And so, carissimi, multitudes, all of you good-bye; the day has long dawned on the Via Cassia, this dense mist has risen, the city is before me, and I am on the threshold of a great experience; I would rather be alone. Good-bye my readers; good-bye the world. At the foot of the hill I prepared to enter the city, and I lifted up my heart. There was an open space; a tramway: a tram upon it about to be drawn by two lean and tired horses whom in the heat many flies disturbed. There was dust on everything around. A bridge was immediately in front. It was adorned with statues in soft stone, half-eaten away, but still gesticulating in corruption, after the manner of the seventeenth century. Beneath the bridge there tumbled and swelled and ran fast a great confusion of yellow water: it was the Tiber. Far on the right were white barracks of huge and of hideous appearance; over these the Dome of St Peter's rose and looked like something newly built. It was of a delicate blue, but made a metallic contrast against the sky. Then (along a road perfectly straight and bounded by factories, mean houses and distempered walls: a road littered with many scraps of paper, bones, dirt, and refuse) I went on for several hundred yards, having the old wall of Rome before me all this time, till I came right under it at last; and with the hesitation that befits all great actions I entered, putting the right foot first lest I should bring further misfortune upon that capital of all our fortunes. And so the journey ended. It was the Gate of the Poplar--not of the People. (Ho, Pedant! Did you think I missed you, hiding and lurking there?) Many churches were to hand; I took the most immediate, which stood just within the wall and was called Our Lady of the People--(not 'of the Poplar'. Another fall for the learned! Professor, things go ill with you to-day!). Inside were many fine pictures, not in the niminy-piminy manner, but strong, full-coloured, and just. To my chagrin, Mass was ending. I approached a priest and said to him: _'Pater, quando vel a quella hora e la prossimma Missa?'_ _'Ad nonas,'_ said he. _'Pol! Hercle!'_ (thought I), 'I have yet twenty minutes to wait! Well, as a pilgrimage cannot be said to be over till the first Mass is heard in Rome, I have twenty minutes to add to my book.' So, passing an Egyptian obelisk which the great Augustus had nobly dedicated to the Sun, I entered.... LECTOR. But do you intend to tell us nothing of Rome? AUCTOR. Nothing, dear Lector. LECTOR. Tell me at least one thing; did you see the Coliseum? AUCTOR.... I entered a cafe at the right hand of a very long, straight street, called for bread, coffee, and brandy, and contemplating my books and worshipping my staff that had been friends of mine so long, and friends like all true friends inanimate, I spent the few minutes remaining to my happy, common, unshriven, exterior, and natural life, in writing down this LOUD AND FINAL SONG DITHYRAMBIC EPITHALAMIUM OR THRENODY In these boots, and with this staff Two hundred leaguers and a half-- (That means, two and a half hundred leagues. You follow? Not two hundred and one half league.... Well--) Two hundred leaguers and a half Walked I, went I, paced I, tripped I, Marched I, held I, skelped I, slipped I, Pushed I, panted, swung and dashed I; Picked I, forded, swam and splashed I, Strolled I, climbed I, crawled and scrambled, Dropped and dipped I, ranged and rambled; Plodded I, hobbled I, trudged and tramped I, And in lonely spinnies camped I, And in haunted pinewoods slept I, Lingered, loitered, limped and crept I, Clambered, halted, stepped and leapt I; Slowly sauntered, roundly strode I, _And_... (Oh! Patron saints and Angels That protect the four evangels! And you Prophets vel majores Vel incerti, vel minores, Virgines ac confessores Chief of whose peculiar glories Est in Aula Regis stare Atque orare et exorare Et clamare et conclamare Clamantes cum clamoribus Pro nobis peccatoribus.) _Let me not conceal it... Rode I. _ (For who but critics could complain Of 'riding' in a railway train?) _Across the valleys and the high-land, With all the world on either hand. Drinking when I had a mind to, Singing when I felt inclined to; Nor ever turned my face to home Till I had slaked my heart at Rome._ THE END AGAIN LECTOR. But this is dogg-- AUCTOR. Not a word! FINIS 
7879	----	PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FRANCE. Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858.--On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold. There were already many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward; and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we almost came to a dead lock with some of them. At the station we found several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us, sitting round the fire of the waiting-room. Since I came to England there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the atmosphere. We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne. A foot-warmer (a long, flat tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we could only glance at the green fields--immortally green, whatever winter can do against them--and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the ice forming on its borders. It was the first cold weather of a very mild season. The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes; and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more. At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J----- reported as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer in which we were to embark. But the air was so wintry, that I had no heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J----- on the beach; so we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel generally communicates to the craft that navigate it. At about one o'clock we went on board, and were soon under steam, at a rate that quickly showed a long line of the white cliffs of Albion behind us. It is a very dusky white, by the by, and the cliffs themselves do not seem, at a distance, to be of imposing height, and have too even an outline to be picturesque. As we increased our distance from England, the French coast came more and more distinctly in sight, with a low, wavy outline, not very well worth looking at, except because it was the coast of France. Indeed, I looked at it but little; for the wind was bleak and boisterous, and I went down into the cabin, where I found the fire very comfortable, and several people were stretched on sofas in a state of placid wretchedness. . . . I have never suffered from sea-sickness, but had been somewhat apprehensive of this rough strait between England and France, which seems to have more potency over people's stomachs than ten times the extent of sea in other quarters. Our passage was of two hours, at the end of which we landed on French soil, and found ourselves immediately in the clutches of the custom-house officers, who, however, merely made a momentary examination of my passport, and allowed us to pass without opening even one of our carpet-bags. The great bulk of our luggage had been registered through to Paris, for examination after our arrival there. We left Boulogne in about an hour after our arrival, when it was already a darkening twilight. The weather had grown colder than ever, since our arrival in sunny France, and the night was now setting in, wickedly black and dreary. The frost hardened upon the carriage windows in such thickness that I could scarcely scratch a peep-hole through it; but, from such glimpses as I could catch, the aspect of the country seemed pretty much to resemble the December aspect of my dear native land,--broad, bare, brown fields, with streaks of snow at the foot of ridges, and along fences, or in the furrows of ploughed soil. There was ice wherever there happened to be water to form it. We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless; and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey than this, my first advance into French territory. My impression of France will always be that it is an Arctic region. At any season of the year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees. In the dusk they resembled poplar-trees. Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . It gives a taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or understand. Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a handsome salon, as chill as a tomb. They made a little bit of a wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room. In the morning we sallied forth to see the cathedral. The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway, affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes. It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English cathedrals. It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals. We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under glass. In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional,--a little oaken structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and speak, through the open-work of the priest's closet. Monuments, mural and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in the chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture, fencing in the Holy of Holies, where the High Altar stands. There is not much painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful rose-windows, however, that looked antique; and the great eastern window which, I think, is modern. The pavement has, probably, never been renewed, as one piece of work, since the structure was erected, and is foot-worn by the successive generations, though still in excellent repair. I saw one of the small, square stones in it, bearing the date of 1597, and no doubt there are a thousand older ones. It was gratifying to find the cathedral in such good condition, without any traces of recent repair; and it is perhaps a mark of difference between French and English character, that the Revolution in the former country, though all religious worship disappears before it, does not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical monuments, as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter. I did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image, in the whole cathedral. But, probably, the very rage of the English fanatics against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows at them, were symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French were capable of. These last did not care enough about their Saviour to beat down his crucified image; and they preserved the works of sacred art, for the sake only of what beauty there was in them. While we were in the cathedral, we saw several persons kneeling at their devotions on the steps of the chancel and elsewhere. One dipped his fingers in the holy water at the entrance: by the by, I looked into the stone basin that held it, and saw it full of ice. Could not all that sanctity at least keep it thawed? Priests--jolly, fat, mean-looking fellows, in white robes--went hither and thither, but did not interrupt or accost us. There were other peculiarities, which I suppose I shall see more of in my visits to other churches, but now we were all glad to make our stay as brief as possible, the atmosphere of the cathedral being so bleak, and its stone pavement so icy cold beneath our feet. We returned to the hotel, and the chambermaid brought me a book, in which she asked me to inscribe my name, age, profession, country, destination, and the authorization under which I travelled. After the freedom of an English hotel, so much greater than even that of an American one, where they make you disclose your name, this is not so pleasant. We left Amiens at half past one; and I can tell as little of the country between that place and Paris, as between Boulogne and Amiens. The windows of our railway carriage were already frosted with French breath when we got into it, and the ice grew thicker and thicker continually. I tried, at various times, to rub a peep-hole through, as before; but the ice immediately shot its crystallized tracery over it again; and, indeed, there was little or nothing to make it worth while to look out, so bleak was the scene. Now and then a chateau, too far off for its characteristics to be discerned; now and then a church, with a tall gray tower, and a little peak atop; here and there a village or a town, which we could not well see. At sunset there was just that clear, cold, wintry sky which I remember so well in America, but have never seen in England. At five we reached Paris, and were suffered to take a carriage to the hotel de Louvre, without any examination of the little luggage we had with us. Arriving, we took a suite of apartments, and the waiter immediately lighted a wax candle in each separate room. We might have dined at the table d'hote, but preferred the restaurant connected with and within the hotel. All the dishes were very delicate, and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints, shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery, for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for men's moral and spiritual nature than French. In the former case, you know that you are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your appetite. This last, however, it requires a good deal of perseverance to accomplish. In the cathedral at Amiens there were printed lists of acts of devotion posted on the columns, such as prayers at the shrines of certain saints, whereby plenary indulgences might be gained. It is to be observed, however, that all these external forms were necessarily accompanied with true penitence and religious devotion. Hotel de Louvre, January 8th.--It was so fearfully cold this morning that I really felt little or no curiosity to see the city. . . . Until after one o'clock, therefore, I knew nothing of Paris except the lights which I had seen beneath our window the evening before, far, far downward, in the narrow Rue St. Honore, and the rumble of the wheels, which continued later than I was awake to hear it, and began again before dawn. I could see, too, tall houses, that seemed to be occupied in every story, and that had windows on the steep roofs. One of these houses is six stories high. This Rue St. Honore is one of the old streets in Paris, and is that in which Henry IV. was assassinated; but it has not, in this part of it, the aspect of antiquity. After one o'clock we all went out and walked along the Rue de Rivoli. . . . We are here, right in the midst of Paris, and close to whatever is best known to those who hear or read about it,--the Louvre being across the street, the Palais Royal but a little way off, the Tuileries joining to the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde just beyond, verging on which is the Champs Elysees. We looked about us for a suitable place to dine, and soon found the Restaurant des Echelles, where we entered at a venture, and were courteously received. It has a handsomely furnished saloon, much set off with gilding and mirrors; and appears to be frequented by English and Americans; its carte, a bound volume, being printed in English as well as French. . . . It was now nearly four o'clock, and too late to visit the galleries of the Louvre, or to do anything else but walk a little way along the street. The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise: such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch, wrought in memory of some grand event. The light stone or stucco, wholly untarnished by smoke and soot, puts London to the blush, if a blush could be seen on its dingy face; but, indeed, London is not to be mentioned, nor compared even, with Paris. I never knew what a palace was till I had a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuileries; never had my idea of a city been gratified till I trod these stately streets. The life of the scene, too, is infinitely more picturesque than that of London, with its monstrous throng of grave faces and black coats; whereas, here, you see soldiers and priests, policemen in cocked hats, Zonaves with turbans, long mantles, and bronzed, half-Moorish faces; and a great many people whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to look at, and fancy them villanous. Truly, I have no sympathies towards the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt and mingle with mine. But they do grand and beautiful things in the architectural way; and I am grateful for it. The Place de la Concorde is a most splendid square, large enough for a nation to erect trophies in of all its triumphs; and on one side of it is the Tuileries, on the opposite side the Champs Elysees, and, on a third, the Seine, adown which we saw large cakes of ice floating, beneath the arches of a bridge. The Champs Elysees, so far as I saw it, had not a grassy soil beneath its trees, but the bare earth, white and dusty. The very dust, if I saw nothing else, would assure me that I was out of England. We had time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,-- new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold. A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay for. We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the Louvre. I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,-- the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and, farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy, and multiplied everything forever. The picture-rooms are not so brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint pictures of their own. From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution. The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin cloak. There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics, Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair. I must let it all go. These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink. Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called. He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was. We, who look back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his rise out of obscurity. They never, perhaps, took the reality of his career fairly into their minds, before it was over. The present Emperor, I believe, has already been as long in possession of the supreme power as his uncle was. I should like to see him, and may, perhaps, do--so, as he is our neighbor, across the way. This morning Miss ------, the celebrated astronomical lady, called. She had brought a letter of introduction to me, while consul; and her purpose now was to see if we could take her as one of our party to Rome, whither she likewise is bound. We readily consented, for she seems to be a simple, strong, healthy-humored woman, who will not fling herself as a burden on our shoulders; and my only wonder is that a person evidently so able to take care of herself should wish to have an escort. We issued forth at about eleven, and went down the Rue St. Honore, which is narrow, and has houses of five or six stories on either side, between which run the streets like a gully in a rock. One face of our hotel borders and looks on this street. After going a good way, we came to an intersection with another street, the name of which I forget; but, at this point, Ravaillac sprang at the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his dagger into him. As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and more thronged, and with a meaner class of people. The houses still were high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow, crowded, and rambling street. Thence we turned into the Rue St. Denis, which is one of the oldest streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man that he should walk straight. Through some other indirections we at last found the Rue Bergere, down which I went with J----- in quest of Hottinguer et Co., the bankers, while the rest of us went along the Boulevards, towards the Church of the Madeleine. . . . This business accomplished, J----- and I threaded our way back, and overtook the rest of the party, still a good distance from the Madeleine. I know not why the Boulevards are called so. They are a succession of broad walks through broad streets, and were much thronged with people, most of whom appeared to be bent more on pleasure than business. The sun, long before this, had come out brightly, and gave us the first genial and comfortable sensations which we have had in Paris. Approaching the Madeleine, we found it a most beautiful church, that might have been adapted from Heathenism to Catholicism; for on each side there is a range of magnificent pillars, unequalled, except by those of the Parthenon. A mourning-coach, arrayed in black and silver, was drawn up at the steps, and the front of the church was hung with black cloth, which covered the whole entrance. However, seeing the people going in, we entered along with them. Glorious and gorgeous is the Madeleine. The entrance to the nave is beneath a most stately arch; and three arches of equal height open from the nave to the side aisles; and at the end of the nave is another great arch, rising, with a vaulted half-dome, over the high altar. The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church, it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture; and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the Magdalen smiling down upon angels and archangels, some of whom are kneeling, and shadowing themselves with their heavy marble wings. There is no such thing as making my page glow with the most distant idea of the magnificence of this church, in its details and in its whole. It was founded a hundred or two hundred years ago; then Bonaparte contemplated transforming it into a Temple of Victory, or building it anew as one. The restored Bourbons remade it into a church; but it still has a heathenish look, and will never lose it. When we entered we saw a crowd of people, all pressing forward towards the high altar, before which burned a hundred wax lights, some of which were six or seven feet high; and, altogether, they shone like a galaxy of stars. In the middle of the nave, moreover, there was another galaxy of wax candles burning around an immense pall of black velvet, embroidered with silver, which seemed to cover, not only a coffin, but a sarcophagus, or something still more huge. The organ was rumbling forth a deep, lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing out of the gloom. The church, between the arches, along the nave, and round the altar, was hung with broad expanses of black cloth; and all the priests had their sacred vestments covered with black. They looked exceedingly well; I never saw anything half so well got up on the stage. Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way that I liked to see. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe and glory. Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed, and very glad when it was over. What struck me as singular, the person who performed the part usually performed by a verger, keeping order among the audience, wore a gold-embroidered scarf, a cocked hat, and, I believe, a sword, and had the air of a military man. Before the close of the service a contribution-box--or, rather, a black velvet bag--was handed about by this military verger; and I gave J----- a franc to put in, though I did not in the least know for what. Issuing from the church, we inquired of two or three persons who was the distinguished defunct at whose obsequies we had been assisting, for we had some hope that it might be Rachel, who died last week, and is still above ground. But it proved to be only a Madame Mentel, or some such name, whom nobody had ever before heard of. I forgot to say that her coffin was taken from beneath the illuminated pall, and carried out of the church before us. When we left the Madeleine we took our way to the Place de la Concorde, and thence through the Elysian Fields (which, I suppose, are the French idea of heaven) to Bonaparte's triumphal arch. The Champs Elysees may look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season,--the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has declined to do so. There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity. As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance, looking huge and massive, though still a long way off. It was not, however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its airy sweep. At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity; nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it. There is a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it. On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal, and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit. The shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories. It has a very rich effect. At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way. Hotel de Louvre, January 10th.--We had purposed going to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the Louvre. . . . . Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,-- that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it in the finished painting. No doubt the painters themselves had often a happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best. To an artist, the collection must be most deeply interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome. In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures, some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small scale. I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair. I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of view, as he. Most of our great men are of a character that I find it impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of sympathy upon them. Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and uncommon human nature in him. Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat observing the crowd of Sunday visitors. They were generally of a lower class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms, and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved. I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it. A blue coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform. Some had short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms. The policemen, distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked military, wearing cocked hats and swords. There were many women of the middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent, in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen, young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a woman. The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads, accompanied by women. I did not much like any of the French faces, and yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English. The women are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained expression that supplies the place of beauty. I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last longer than my capacity for receiving them. As our time in Paris, however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement floor. Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups, interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets, busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which consummate art has transmuted into precious stones. Not that I really did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few world-renowned statues in Italy. I was even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by the value of the sculptures themselves. The galleries, I should judge, have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system,--the adornments being yet by no means completed,--for besides the floor and wall-casings of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened. It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think the English have given really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them with no gorgeous fittings up. By this time poor J----- (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone,--not one stone, but a thousand. We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel. In my opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. It is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops! We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right. . . . Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. There was a map,--a hemisphere of the world,--which his father had drawn for this poor boy; very neatly done, too. The sword of Louis XVI., a magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of Henry IV.'s sword. But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these things. What a collection it is, including Charlemagne's sword and sceptre, and the last Dauphin's little toy cannon, and so much between the two! Hotel de Louvre, January 11th.--This was another chill, raw day, characterized by a spitefulness of atmosphere which I do not remember ever to have experienced in my own dear country. We meant to have visited the Hotel des Invalides, but J----- and I walked to the Tivoli, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and to the Place de Beaujou, and to the residence of the American minister, where I wished to arrange about my passport. After speaking with the Secretary of Legation, we were ushered into the minister's private room, where he received me with great kindness. Mr. ------ is an old gentleman with a white head, and a large, florid face, which has an expression of amiability, not unmingled with a certain dignity. He did not rise from his arm-chair to greet me,--a lack of ceremony which I imputed to the gout, feeling it impossible that he should have willingly failed in courtesy to one of his twenty-five million sovereigns. In response to some remark of mine about the shabby way in which our government treats its officials pecuniarily, he gave a detailed account of his own troubles on that score; then expressed a hope that I had made a good thing out of my consulate, and inquired whether I had received a hint to resign; to which I replied that, for various reasons, I had resigned of my own accord, and before Mr. Buchanan's inauguration. We agreed, however, in disapproving the system of periodical change in our foreign officials; and I remarked that a consul or an ambassador ought to be a citizen both of his native country and of the one in which he resided; and that his possibility of beneficent influence depended largely on his being so. Apropos to which Mr. ------ said that he had once asked a diplomatic friend of long experience, what was the first duty of a minister. "To love his own country, and to watch over its interests," answered the diplomatist. "And his second duty?" asked Mr. ------. "To love and to promote the interests of the country to which he is accredited," said his friend. This is a very Christian and sensible view of the matter; but it can scarcely have happened once in our whole diplomatic history, that a minister can have had time to overcome his first rude and ignorant prejudice against the country of his mission; and if there were any suspicion of his having done so, it would be held abundantly sufficient ground for his recall. I like Mr. ------, a good-hearted, sensible old man. J----- and I returned along the Champs Elysees, and, crossing the Seine, kept on our way by the river's brink, looking at the titles of books on the long lines of stalls that extend between the bridges. Novels, fairy-tales, dream books, treatises of behavior and etiquette, collections of bon-mots and of songs, were interspersed with volumes in the old style of calf and gilt binding, the works of the classics of French literature. A good many persons, of the poor classes, and of those apparently well to do, stopped transitorily to look at these books. On the other side of the street was a range of tall edifices with shops beneath, and the quick stir of French life hurrying, and babbling, and swarming along the sidewalk. We passed two or three bridges, occurring at short intervals, and at last we recrossed the Seine by a bridge which oversteps the river, from a point near the National Institute, and reaches the other side, not far from the Louvre. . . . Though the day was so disagreeable, we thought it best not to lose the remainder of it, and therefore set out to visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We took a fiacre in the Place de Carousel, and drove to the door. On entering, we found the interior miserably shut off from view by the stagings erected for the purpose of repairs. Penetrating from the nave towards the chancel, an official personage signified to us that we must first purchase a ticket for each grown person, at the price of half a franc each. This expenditure admitted us into the sacristy, where we were taken in charge by a guide, who came down upon us with an avalanche or cataract of French, descriptive of a great many treasures reposited in this chapel. I understood hardly more than one word in ten, but gathered doubtfully that a bullet which was shown us was the one that killed the late Archbishop of Paris, on the floor of the cathedral. [But this was a mistake. It was the archbishop who was killed in the insurrection of 1848. Two joints of his backbone were also shown.] Also, that some gorgeously embroidered vestments, which he drew forth, had been used at the coronation of Napoleon I. There were two large, full-length portraits hanging aloft in the sacristy, and a gold or silver gilt, or, at all events, gilt image of the Virgin, as large as life, standing on a pedestal. The guide had much to say about these, but, understanding him so imperfectly, I have nothing to record. The guide's supervision of us seemed not to extend beyond this sacristy, on quitting which he gave us permission to go where we pleased, only intimating a hope that we would not forget him; so I gave him half a franc, though thereby violating an inhibition on the printed ticket of entrance. We had been much disappointed at first by the apparently narrow limits of the interior of this famous church; but now, as we made our way round the choir, gazing into chapel after chapel, each with its painted window, its crucifix, its pictures, its confessional, and afterwards came back into the nave, where arch rises above arch to the lofty roof, we came to the conclusion that it was very sumptuous. It is the greatest of pities that its grandeur and solemnity should just now be so infinitely marred by the workmen's boards, timber, and ladders occupying the whole centre of the edifice, and screening all its best effects. It seems to have been already most richly ornamented, its roof being painted, and the capitals of the pillars gilded, and their shafts illuminated in fresco; and no doubt it will shine out gorgeously when all the repairs and adornments shall be completed. Even now it gave to my actual sight what I have often tried to imagine in my visits to the English cathedrals,-- the pristine glory of those edifices, when they stood glowing with gold and picture, fresh from the architects' and adorners' hands. The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower on the earth's broad bosom. When we emerged from the cathedral, we found it beginning to rain or snow, or both; and, as we had dismissed our fiacre at the door, and could find no other, we were at a loss what to do. We stood a few moments on the steps of the Hotel Dieu, looking up at the front of Notre Dame, with its twin towers, and its three deep-pointed arches, piercing through a great thickness of stone, and throwing a cavern-like gloom around these entrances. The front is very rich. Though so huge, and all of gray stone, it is carved and fretted with statues and innumerable devices, as cunningly as any ivory casket in which relics are kept; but its size did not so much impress me. . . . Hotel de Louvre, January 12th.--This has been a bright day as regards weather; but I have done little or nothing worth recording. After breakfast, I set out in quest of the consul, and found him up a court, at 51 Rue Caumartin, in an office rather smaller, I think, than mine at Liverpool; but, to say the truth, a little better furnished. I was received in the outer apartment by an elderly, brisk-looking man, in whose air, respectful and subservient, and yet with a kind of authority in it, I recognized the vice-consul. He introduced me to Mr. ------, who sat writing in an inner room; a very gentlemanly, courteous, cool man of the world, whom I should take to be an excellent person for consul at Paris. He tells me that he has resided here some years, although his occupancy of the consulate dates only from November last. Consulting him respecting my passport, he gave me what appear good reasons why I should get all the necessary vises here; for example, that the vise of a minister carries more weight than that of a consul; and especially that an Austrian consul will never vise a passport unless he sees his minister's name upon it. Mr. ------ has travelled much in Italy, and ought to be able to give me sound advice. His opinion was, that at this season of the year I had better go by steamer to Civita Veechia, instead of landing at Leghorn, and thence journeying to Rome. On this point I shall decide when the time comes. As I left the office the vice-consul informed me that there was a charge of five francs and some sous for the consul's vise, a tax which surprised me,--the whole business of passports having been taken from consuls before I quitted office, and the consular fee having been annulled even earlier. However, no doubt Mr. ------ had a fair claim to my five francs; but, really, it is not half so pleasant to pay a consular fee as it used to be to receive it. Afterwards I walked to Notre Dame, the rich front of which I viewed with more attention than yesterday. There are whole histories, carved in stone figures, within the vaulted arches of the three entrances in this west front, and twelve apostles in a row above, and as much other sculpture as would take a month to see. We then walked quite round it, but I had no sense of immensity from it, not even that of great height, as from many of the cathedrals in England. It stands very near the Seine; indeed, if I mistake not, it is on an island formed by two branches of the river. Behind it, is what seems to be a small public ground (or garden, if a space entirely denuded of grass or other green thing, except a few trees, can be called so), with benches, and a monument in the midst. This quarter of the city looks old, and appears to be inhabited by poor people, and to be busied about small and petty affairs; the most picturesque business that I saw being that of the old woman who sells crucifixes of pearl and of wood at the cathedral door. We bought two of these yesterday. I must again speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day. My ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as that of Paris. It is difficult to imagine where so much filth can come from. After dinner I walked through the gardens of the Tuileries; but as dusk was coming on, and as I was afraid of being shut up within the iron railing, I did not have time to examine them particularly. There are wide, intersecting walks, fountains, broad basins, and many statues; but almost the whole surface of the gardens is barren earth, instead of the verdure that would beautify an English pleasure-ground of this sort. In the summer it has doubtless an agreeable shade; but at this season the naked branches look meagre, and sprout from slender trunks. Like the trees in the Champs Elysees, those, I presume, in the gardens of the Tuileries need renewing every few years. The same is true of the human race,--families becoming extinct after a generation or two of residence in Paris. Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root. I am quite tired of Paris, and long for a home more than ever. MARSEILLES. Hotel d'Angleterre, January 15th.--On Tuesday morning, (12th) we took our departure from the Hotel de Louvre. It is a most excellent and perfectly ordered hotel, and I have not seen a more magnificent hall, in any palace, than the dining-saloon, with its profuse gilding, and its ceiling, painted in compartments; so that when the chandeliers are all alight, it looks a fit place for princes to banquet in, and not very fit for the few Americans whom I saw scattered at its long tables. By the by, as we drove to the railway, we passed through the public square, where the Bastille formerly stood; and in the centre of it now stands a column, surmounted by a golden figure of Mercury (I think), which seems to be just on the point of casting itself from a gilt ball into the air. This statue is so buoyant, that the spectator feels quite willing to trust it to the viewless element, being as sure that it would be borne up as that a bird would fly. Our first day's journey was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same landscape was all that we saw, whenever we rubbed away the congelation of our breath from the carriage windows. Thus we rode on, all day long, from eleven o'clock, with hardly a five minutes' stop, till long after dark, when we came to Dijon, where there was a halt of twenty-five minutes for dinner. Then we set forth again, and rumbled forward, through cold and darkness without, until we reached Lyons at about ten o'clock. We left our luggage at the railway station, and took an omnibus for the Hotel de Provence, which we chose at a venture, among a score of other hotels. As this hotel was a little off the direct route of the omnibus, the driver set us down at the corner of a street, and pointed to some lights, which he said designated the Hotel do Provence; and thither we proceeded, all seven of us, taking along a few carpet-bags and shawls, our equipage for the night. The porter of the hotel met us near its doorway, and ushered us through an arch, into the inner quadrangle, and then up some old and worn steps,--very broad, and appearing to be the principal staircase. At the first landing-place, an old woman and a waiter or two received us; and we went up two or three more flights of the same broad and worn stone staircases. What we could see of the house looked very old, and had the musty odor with which I first became acquainted at Chester. After ascending to the proper level, we were conducted along a corridor, paved with octagonal earthen tiles; on one side were windows, looking into the courtyard, on the other doors opening into the sleeping-chambers. The corridor was of immense length, and seemed still to lengthen itself before us, as the glimmer of our conductor's candle went farther and farther into the obscurity. Our own chamber was at a vast distance along this passage; those of the rest of the party were on the hither side; but all this immense suite of rooms appeared to communicate by doors from one to another, like the chambers through which the reader wanders at midnight, in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. And they were really splendid rooms, though of an old fashion, lofty, spacious, with floors of oak or other wood, inlaid in squares and crosses, and waxed till they were slippery, but without carpets. Our own sleeping-room had a deep fireplace, in which we ordered a fire, and asked if there were not some saloon already warmed, where we could get a cup of tea. Hereupon the waiter led us back along the endless corridor, and down the old stone staircases, and out into the quadrangle, and journeyed with us along an exterior arcade, and finally threw open the door of the salle a manger, which proved to be a room of lofty height, with a vaulted roof, a stone floor, and interior spaciousness sufficient for a baronial hall, the whole bearing the same aspect of times gone by, that characterized the rest of the house. There were two or three tables covered with white cloth, and we sat down at one of them and had our tea. Finally we wended back to our sleeping-rooms,--a considerable journey, so endless seemed the ancient hotel. I should like to know its history. The fire made our great chamber look comfortable, and the fireplace threw out the heat better than the little square hole over which we cowered in our saloon at the Hotel de Louvre. . . . In the morning we began our preparations for starting at ten. Issuing into the corridor, I found a soldier of the line, pacing to and fro there as sentinel. Another was posted in another corridor, into which I wandered by mistake; another stood in the inner court-yard, and another at the porte-cochere. They were not there the night before, and I know not whence nor why they came, unless that some officer of rank may have taken up his quarters at the hotel. Miss M------ says she heard at Paris, that a considerable number of troops had recently been drawn together at Lyons, in consequence of symptoms of disaffection that have recently shown themselves here. Before breakfast I went out to catch a momentary glimpse of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that very spot. The square was surrounded by stately buildings, but had what seemed to be barracks for soldiers,--at any rate, mean little huts, deforming its ample space; and a soldier was on guard before the statue of Louis le Grand. It was a cold, misty morning, and a fog lay throughout the area, so that I could scarcely see from one side of it to the other. Returning towards our hotel, I saw that it had an immense front, along which ran, in gigantic letters, its title,-- HOTEL DE PROVENCE ET DES AMBASSADEURS. The excellence of the hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to eat or drink. We left it, after a poor breakfast, and went to the railway station. Looking at the mountainous heap of our luggage the night before, we had missed a great carpet-bag; and we now found that Miss M------'s trunk had been substituted for it, and, there being the proper number of packages as registered, it was impossible to convince the officials that anything was wrong. We, of course, began to generalize forthwith, and pronounce the incident to be characteristic of French morality. They love a certain system and external correctness, but do not trouble themselves to be deeply in the right; and Miss M------ suggested that there used to be parallel cases in the French Revolution, when, so long as the assigned number were sent out of prison to be guillotined, the jailer did not much care whether they were the persons designated by the tribunal or not. At all events, we could get no satisfaction about the carpet-bag, and shall very probably be compelled to leave Marseilles without it. This day's ride was through a far more picturesque country than that we saw yesterday. Heights began to rise imminent above our way, with sometimes a ruined castle wall upon them; on our left, the rail-track kept close to the hills; on the other side there was the level bottom of a valley, with heights descending upon it a mile or a few miles away. Farther off we could see blue hills, shouldering high above the intermediate ones, and themselves worthy to be called mountains. These hills arranged themselves in beautiful groups, affording openings between them, and vistas of what lay beyond, and gorges which I suppose held a great deal of romantic scenery. By and by a river made its appearance, flowing swiftly in the same direction that we were travelling,--a beautiful and cleanly river, with white pebbly shores, and itself of a peculiar blue. It rushed along very fast, sometimes whitening over shallow descents, and even in its calmer intervals its surface was all covered with whirls and eddies, indicating that it dashed onward in haste. I do not now know the name of this river, but have set it down as the "arrowy Rhone." It kept us company a long while, and I think we did not part with it as long as daylight remained. I have seldom seen hill-scenery that struck me more than some that we saw to-day, and the old feudal towers and old villages at their feet; and the old churches, with spires shaped just like extinguishers, gave it an interest accumulating from many centuries past. Still going southward, the vineyards began to border our track, together with what I at first took to be orchards, but soon found were plantations of olive-trees, which grow to a much larger size than I supposed, and look almost exactly like very crabbed and eccentric apple-trees. Neither they nor the vineyards add anything to the picturesqueness of the landscape. On the whole, I should have been delighted with all this scenery if it had not looked so bleak, barren, brown, and bare; so like the wintry New England before the snow has fallen. It was very cold, too; ice along the borders of streams, even among the vineyards and olives. The houses are of rather a different shape here than, farther northward, their roofs being not nearly so sloping. They are almost invariably covered with white plaster; the farm-houses have their outbuildings in connection with the dwelling,--the whole surrounding three sides of a quadrangle. We travelled far into the night, swallowed a cold and hasty dinner at Avignon, and reached Marseilles sorely wearied, at about eleven o'clock. We took a cab to the Hotel d'Angleterre (two cabs, to be quite accurate), and find it a very poor place. To go back a little, as the sun went down, we looked out of the window of our railway carriage, and saw a sky that reminded us of what we used to see day after day in America, and what we have not seen since; and, after sunset, the horizon burned and glowed with rich crimson and orange lustre, looking at once warm and cold. After it grew dark, the stars brightened, and Miss M------ from her window pointed out some of the planets to the children, she being as familiar with them as a gardener with his flowers. They were as bright as diamonds. We had a wretched breakfast, and J----- and I then went to the railway station to see about our luggage. On our walk back we went astray, passing by a triumphal arch, erected by the Marseillais, in honor of Louis Napoleon; but we inquired our way of old women and soldiers, who were very kind and courteous,--especially the latter,--and were directed aright. We came to a large, oblong, public place, set with trees, but devoid of grass, like all public places in France. In the middle of it was a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, stretching forth his hands in the attitude of addressing the people or of throwing a benediction over them. It was some archbishop, who had distinguished himself by his humanity and devotedness during the plague of 1720. At the moment of our arrival the piazza was quite thronged with people, who seemed to be talking amongst themselves with considerable earnestness, although without any actual excitement. They were smoking cigars; and we judged that they were only loitering here for the sake of the sunshine, having no fires at home, and nothing to do. Some looked like gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the lazzaroni of this Southern city,--men with cloth caps, like the classic liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats. There were one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no families of gentility resident here. Returning to the hotel, we found the rest of the party ready to go out; so we all issued forth in a body, and inquired our way to the telegraph-office, in order to send my message about the carpet-bag. In a street through which we had to pass (and which seemed to be the Exchange, or its precincts), there was a crowd even denser, yes, much denser, than that which we saw in the square of the archbishop's statue; and each man was talking to his neighbor in a vivid, animated way, as if business were very brisk to-day. At the telegraph-office, we discovered the cause that had brought out these many people. There had been attempts on the Emperor's life,-- unsuccessful, as they seem fated to be, though some mischief was done to those near him. I rather think the good people of Marseilles were glad of the attempt, as an item of news and gossip, and did not very greatly care whether it were successful or no. It seemed to have roused their vivacity rather than their interest. The only account I have seen of it was in the brief public despatch from the Syndic (or whatever he be) of Paris to the chief authority of Marseilles, which was printed and posted in various conspicuous places. The only chance of knowing the truth with any fulness of detail would be to come across an English paper. We have had a banner hoisted half-mast in front of our hotel to-day as a token, the head-waiter tells me, of sympathy and sorrow for the General and other persons who were slain by this treasonable attempt. J----- and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays, having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who basked in it. Whenever I passed into the shade, immediately from too warm I became too cold. The sunshine was like hot air; the shade, like the touch of cold steel,--sharp, hard, yet exhilarating. From the broad street of the quays, narrow, thread-like lanes pierced up between the edifices, calling themselves streets, yet so narrow, that a person in the middle could almost touch the houses on either hand. They ascended steeply, bordered on each side by long, contiguous walls of high houses, and from the time of their first being built, could never have had a gleam of sunshine in them,--always in shadow, always unutterably nasty, and often pestiferous. The nastiness which I saw in Marseilles exceeds my heretofore experience. There is dirt in the hotel, and everywhere else; and it evidently troubles nobody,--no more than if all the people were pigs in a pigsty. . . . Passing by all this sweep of quays, J----- and I ascended to an elevated walk, overlooking the harbor, and far beyond it; for here we had our first view of the Mediterranean, blue as heaven, and bright with sunshine. It was a bay, widening forth into the open deep, and bordered with heights, and bold, picturesque headlands, some of which had either fortresses or convents on them. Several boats and one brig were under sail, making their way towards the port. I have never seen a finer sea-view. Behind the town, there seemed to be a mountainous landscape, imperfectly visible, in consequence of the intervening edifices. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Steamer Calabrese, January 17th.--If I had remained at Marseilles, I might have found many peculiarities and characteristics of that Southern city to notice; but I fear that these will not be recorded if I leave them till I touch the soil of Italy. Indeed, I doubt whether there be anything really worth recording in the little distinctions between one nation and another; at any rate, after the first novelty is over, new things seem equally commonplace with the old. There is but one little interval when the mind is in such a state that it can catch the fleeting aroma of a new scene. And it is always so much pleasanter to enjoy this delicious newness than to attempt arresting it, that it requires great force of will to insist with one's self upon sitting down to write. I can do nothing with Marseilles, especially here on the Mediterranean, long after nightfall, and when the steamer is pitching in a pretty lively way. (Later.)--I walked out with J----- yesterday morning, and reached the outskirts of the city, whence we could see the bold and picturesque heights that surround Marseilles as with a semicircular wall. They rise into peaks, and the town, being on their lower slope, descends from them towards the sea with a gradual sweep. Adown the streets that descend these declivities come little rivulets, running along over the pavement, close to the sidewalks, as over a pebbly bed; and though they look vastly like kennels, I saw women washing linen in these streams, and others dipping up the water for household purposes. The women appear very much in public at Marseilles. In the squares and places you see half a dozen of them together, sitting in a social circle on the bottoms of upturned baskets, knitting, talking, and enjoying the public sunshine, as if it were their own household fire. Not one in a thousand of them, probably, ever has a household fire for the purpose of keeping themselves warm, but only to do their little cookery; and when there is sunshine they take advantage of it, and in the short season of rain and frost they shrug their shoulders, put on what warm garments they have, and get through the winter somewhat as grasshoppers and butterflies do,--being summer insects like then. This certainly is a very keen and cutting air, sharp as a razor, and I saw ice along the borders of the little rivulets almost at noonday. To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of death itself. I do not like the climate. There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip. I never before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people. In Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble from the lips of every individual. A great many interesting scenes take place in these squares. From the window of our hotel (which looked into the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than the prescribed limit. While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and they took their departure. I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice, and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver. But really this pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best chance of keeping myself in an equable state. ROME. 37 Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, January 24th.--We left Marseilles in the Neapolitan steamer Calabrese, as noticed above, a week ago this morning. There was no fault to be found with the steamer, which was very clean and comfortable, contrary to what we had understood beforehand; except for the coolness of the air (and I know not that this was greater than that of the Atlantic in July), our voyage would have been very pleasant; but for myself, I enjoyed nothing, having a cold upon me, or a low fever, or something else that took the light and warmth out of everything. I went to bed immediately after my last record, and was rocked to sleep pleasantly enough by the billows of the Mediterranean; and, coming on deck about sunrise next morning, found the steamer approaching Genoa. We saw the city, lying at the foot of a range of hills, and stretching a little way up their slopes, the hills sweeping round it in the segment of a circle, and looking like an island rising abruptly out of the sea; for no connection with the mainland was visible on either side. There was snow scattered on their summits and streaking their sides a good way down. They looked bold, and barren, and brown, except where the snow whitened them. The city did not impress me with much expectation of size or splendor. Shortly after coming into the port our whole party landed, and we found ourselves at once in the midst of a crowd of cab-drivers, hotel-runnets, and coin missionaires, who assaulted us with a volley of French, Italian, and broken English, which beat pitilessly about our ears; for really it seemed as if all the dictionaries in the world had been torn to pieces, and blown around us by a hurricane. Such a pother! We took a commissionaire, a respectable-looking man, in a cloak, who said his name was Salvator Rosa; and he engaged to show us whatever was interesting in Genoa. In the first place, he took us through narrow streets to an old church, the name of which I have forgotten, and, indeed, its peculiar features; but I know that I found it pre-eminently magnificent,--its whole interior being incased in polished marble, of various kinds and colors, its ceiling painted, and its chapels adorned with pictures. However, this church was dazzled out of sight by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, to which we were afterwards conducted, whose exterior front is covered with alternate slabs of black and white marble, which were brought, either in whole or in part, from Jerusalem. Within, there was a prodigious richness of precious marbles, and a pillar, if I mistake not, from Solomon's Temple; and a picture of the Virgin by St. Luke; and others (rather more intrinsically valuable, I imagine), by old masters, set in superb marble frames, within the arches of the chapels. I used to try to imagine how the English cathedrals must have looked in their primeval glory, before the Reformation, and before the whitewash of Cromwell's time had overlaid their marble pillars; but I never imagined anything at all approaching what my eyes now beheld: this sheen of polished and variegated marble covering every inch of its walls; this glow of brilliant frescos all over the roof, and up within the domes; these beautiful pictures by great masters, painted for the places which they now occupied, and making an actual portion of the edifice; this wealth of silver, gold, and gems, that adorned the shrines of the saints, before which wax candles burned, and were kept burning, I suppose, from year's end to year's end; in short, there is no imagining nor remembering a hundredth part of the rich details. And even the cathedral (though I give it up as indescribable) was nothing at all in comparison with a church to which the commissionaire afterwards led us; a church that had been built four or five hundred years ago, by a pirate, in expiation of his sins, and out of the profit of his rapine. This last edifice, in its interior, absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures; its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the consequent immensity. At any rate, nobody who has not seen a church like this can imagine what a gorgeous religion it was that reared it. In the cathedral, and in all the churches, we saw priests and many persons kneeling at their devotions; and our Salvator Rosa, whenever we passed a chapel or shrine, failed not to touch the pavement with one knee, crossing himself the while; and once, when a priest was going through some form of devotion, he stopped a few moments to share in it. He conducted us, too, to the Balbi Palace, the stateliest and most sumptuous residence, but not more so than another which he afterwards showed us, nor perhaps than many others which exist in Genoa, THE SUPERB. The painted ceilings in these palaces are a glorious adornment; the walls of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of splendor which I never gained from anything else. The floors, laid in mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon. In the royal palace, many of the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware; but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw. I say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them. My receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject. I do not know a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long after the appetite was satiated. All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets, we were wretchedly cold. The commissionaire took us to a sort of pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven different views of the city, from as many stations. One of the objects pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by Charles Dickens. Looking down from the elevated part of the pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still lower down, there was ice and snow. Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner awaited us, after our return on board the boat. We set sail for Leghorn before dark, and I retired early, feeling still more ill from my cold than the night before. The next morning we were in the crowded port of Leghorn. We all went ashore, with some idea of taking the rail for Pisa, which is within an hour's distance, and might have been seen in time for our departure with the steamer. But a necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over surrounding graves. We went into a Jewish synagogue,--the interior cased in marbles, and surrounded with galleries, resting upon arches above arches. There were lights burning at the altar, and it looked very like a Christian church; but it was dirty, and had an odor not of sanctity. In Leghorn, as everywhere else, we were chilled to the heart, except when the sunshine fell directly upon us; and we returned to the steamer with a feeling as if we were getting back to our home; for this life of wandering makes a three days' residence in one place seem like home. We found several new passengers on board, and among others a monk, in a long brown frock of woollen cloth, with an immense cape, and a little black covering over his tonsure. He was a tall figure, with a gray beard, and might have walked, just as he stood, out of a picture by one of the old masters. This holy person addressed me very affably in Italian; but we found it impossible to hold much conversation. The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, not yet sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars, and as we walked the deck, Miss M------ showed the children the constellations, and told their names. J----- made a slight mistake as to one of them, pointing it out to me as "O'Brien's belt!" Elba was presently in view, and we might have seen many other interesting points, had it not been for our steamer's practice of resting by day, and only pursuing its voyage by night. The next morning we found ourselves in the harbor of Civita Vecchia, and, going ashore with our luggage, went through a blind turmoil with custom-house officers, inspectors of passports, soldiers, and vetturino people. My wife and I strayed a little through Civita Vecchia, and found its streets narrow, like clefts in a rock (which seems to be the fashion of Italian towns), and smelling nastily. I had made a bargain with a vetturino to send us to Rome in a carriage, with four horses, in eight hours; and as soon as the custom-house and passport people would let us, we started, lumbering slowly along with our mountain of luggage. We had heard rumors of robberies lately committed on this route; especially of a Nova Scotia bishop, who was detained on the road an hour and a half, and utterly pillaged; and certainly there was not a single mile of the dreary and desolate country over which we passed, where we might not have been robbed and murdered with impunity. Now and then, at long distances, we came to a structure that was either a prison, a tavern, or a barn, but did not look very much like either, being strongly built of stone, with iron-grated windows, and of ancient and rusty aspect. We kept along by the seashore a great part of the way, and stopped to feed our horses at a village, the wretched street of which stands close along the shore of the Mediterranean, its loose, dark sand being made nasty by the vicinity. The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth,-- reaching Rome not much before midnight. I perpetrated unheard-of briberies on the custom-house officers at the gates, and was permitted to pass through and establish myself at Spillman's Hotel, the only one where we could gain admittance, and where we have been half frozen ever since. And this is sunny Italy, and genial Rome! Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, February 3d.--We have been in Rome a fortnight to-day, or rather at eleven o'clock to-night; and I have seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere. Our impressions were very unfortunate, arriving at midnight, half frozen in the wintry rain, and being received into a cold and cheerless hotel, where we shivered during two or three days; meanwhile seeking lodgings among the sunless, dreary alleys which are called streets in Rome. One cold, bright day after another has pierced me to the heart, and cut me in twain as with a sword, keen and sharp, and poisoned at point and edge. I did not think that cold weather could have made me so very miserable. Having caught a feverish influenza, I was really glad of being muffled up comfortably in the fever heat. The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of malignity. After a day or two we settled ourselves in a suite of ten rooms, comprehending one flat, or what is called the second piano of this house. The rooms, thus far, have been very uncomfortable, it being impossible to warm them by means of the deep, old-fashioned, inartificial fireplaces, unless we had the great logs of a New England forest to burn in them; so I have sat in my corner by the fireside with more clothes on than I ever wore before, and my thickest great-coat over all. In the middle of the day I generally venture out for an hour or two, but have only once been warm enough even in the sunshine, and out of the sun never at any time. I understand now the force of that story of Diogenes when he asked the Conqueror, as the only favor he could do him, to stand out of his sunshine, there being such a difference in these Southern climes of Europe between sun and shade. If my wits had not been too much congealed, and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight. It would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been depicted. But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it; and soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come, and perhaps reconcile me to Rome against my will. Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly, mean-looking whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about them; French soldiers, monks, and priests of every degree; a shabby population, smoking bad cigars,--these would have been some of the points of my description. Of course there are better and truer things to be said. . . . It would be idle for me to attempt any sketches of these famous sites and edifices,--St. Peter's, for example,--which have been described by a thousand people, though none of them have ever given me an idea of what sort of place Rome is. . . . The Coliseum was very much what I had preconceived it, though I was not prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit on the verge of the open space. . . . The French soldiers, who keep guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent opportunity to secure the welfare of their souls. February 7th.--I cannot get fairly into the current of my journal since we arrived, and already I perceive that the nice peculiarities of Roman life are passing from my notice before I have recorded them. It is a very great pity. During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour or two, through the narrow, stony streets, that look worse than the worst backside lanes of any other city; indescribably ugly and disagreeable they are, . . . . without sidewalks, but provided with a line of larger square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is somewhat less uneasy walking. . . . Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets, --though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than another,--we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line with the other houses, but distinguished by its architectural windows, iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty court-yard, or perhaps of a clean, ornamented one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain, and a statue in the vista; though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable, and may, perhaps, really be one. The lower regions of palaces come to strange uses in Rome. . . . In the basement story of the Barberini Palace a regiment of French soldiers (or soldiers of some kind [we find them to be retainers of the Barberini family, not French]) seems to be quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above. Be it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above. I vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street. It is also to be said that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic piece of sculpture into a great stone basin. These fountains are often of immense size and most elaborate design. . . . There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental. If an antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that were laid above twenty centuries ago. It is strange how our ideas of what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older remains. But, indeed, old things are not so beautiful in this dry climate and clear atmosphere as in moist England. . . . Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in its decay than even it was in its primal strength. If we ever build such noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousand years, in the United States; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth. The Corso, and perhaps some other streets, does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to sidewalk. But palace after palace stands along almost its whole extent,--not, however, that they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should. The enclosed courts were perhaps the only parts of these edifices which the founders cared to enrich architecturally. I think Linlithgow Palace, of which I saw the ruins during my last tour in Scotland, was built, by an architect who had studied these Roman palaces. There was never any idea of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all implicated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries and long suites of rooms. I have not yet fairly begun the sight-seeing of Rome. I have been four or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleasure, because there is such a delightful, summerlike warmth the moment we pass beneath the heavy, padded leather curtains that protect the entrances. It is almost impossible not to believe that this genial temperature is the result of furnace-heat, but, really, it is the warmth of last summer, which will be included within those massive walls, and in that vast immensity of space, till, six months hence, this winter's chill will just have made its way thither. It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in one of the papal tombs. I become, I think, more sensible of the size of St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it. It is not, as one expects, so big as all out of doors, nor is its dome so immense as that of the firmament. It looked queer, however, the other day, to see a little ragged boy, the very least of human things, going round and kneeling at shrine after shrine, and a group of children standing on tiptoe to reach the vase of holy water. . . . On coming out of St. Peter's at my last visit, I saw a great sheet of ice around the fountain on the right hand, and some little Romans awkwardly sliding on it. I, too, took a slide, just for the sake of doing what I never thought to do in Rome. This inclement weather, I should suppose, must make the whole city very miserable; for the native Romans, I am told, never keep any fire, except for culinary purposes, even in the severest winter. They flee from their cheerless houses into the open air, and bring their firesides along with them in the shape of small earthen vases, or pipkins, with a handle by which they carry them up and down the streets, and so warm at least their hands with the lighted charcoal. I have had glimpses through open doorways into interiors, and saw them as dismal as tombs. Wherever I pass my summers, let me spend my winters in a cold country. We went yesterday to the Pantheon. . . . When I first came to Rome, I felt embarrassed and unwilling to pass, with my heresy, between a devotee and his saint; for they often shoot their prayers at a shrine almost quite across the church. But there seems to be no violation of etiquette in so doing. A woman begged of us in the Pantheon, and accused my wife of impiety for not giving her an alms. . . . People of very decent appearance are often unexpectedly converted into beggars as you approach them; but in general they take a "No" at once. February 9th.--For three or four days it has been cloudy and rainy, which is the greater pity, as this should be the gayest and merriest part of the Carnival. I go out but little,--yesterday only as far as Pakenham's and Hooker's bank in the Piazza de' Spagna, where I read Galignani and the American papers. At last, after seeing in England more of my fellow-compatriots than ever before, I really am disjoined from my country. To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . As the clouds still threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for refuge. Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of the nave, supports the monument to the Stuart family, where two winged figures, with inverted torches, stand on either side of a marble door, which is closed forever. It is an impressive monument, for you feel as if the last of the race had passed through that door. Emerging from the church, I saw a French sergeant drilling his men in the piazza. These French soldiers are prominent objects everywhere about the city, and make up more of its sight and sound than anything else that lives. They stroll about individually; they pace as sentinels in all the public places; and they march up and down in squads, companies, and battalions, always with a very great din of drum, fife, and trumpet; ten times the proportion of music that the same number of men would require elsewhere; and it reverberates with ten times the noise, between the high edifices of these lanes, that it could make in broader streets. Nevertheless, I have no quarrel with the French soldiers; they are fresh, healthy, smart, honest-looking young fellows enough, in blue coats and red trousers; . . . . and, at all events, they serve as an efficient police, making Rome as safe as London; whereas, without them, it would very likely be a den of banditti. On my way home I saw a few tokens of the Carnival, which is now in full progress; though, as it was only about one o'clock, its frolics had not commenced for the day. . . . I question whether the Romans themselves take any great interest in the Carnival. The balconies along the Corso were almost entirely taken by English and Americans, or other foreigners. As I approached the bridge of St. Angelo, I saw several persons engaged, as I thought, in fishing in the Tiber, with very strong lines; but on drawing nearer I found that they were trying to hook up the branches, and twigs, and other drift-wood, which the recent rains might have swept into the river. There was a little heap of what looked chiefly like willow twigs, the poor result of their labor. The hook was a knot of wood, with the lopped-off branches projecting in three or four prongs. The Tiber has always the hue of a mud-puddle; but now, after a heavy rain which has washed the clay into it, it looks like pease-soup. It is a broad and rapid stream, eddying along as if it were in haste to disgorge its impurities into the sea. On the left side, where the city mostly is situated, the buildings hang directly over the stream; on the other, where stand the Castle of St. Angelo and the Church of St. Peter, the town does not press so imminent upon the shore. The banks are clayey, and look as if the river had been digging them away for ages; but I believe its bed is higher than of yore. February 10th.--I went out to-day, and, going along the Via Felice and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, came unawares to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the summit of the Esquiline Hill. I entered it, without in the least knowing what church it was, and found myself in a broad and noble nave, both very simple and very grand. There was a long row of Ionic columns of marble, twenty or thereabouts on each side, supporting a flat roof. There were vaulted side aisles, and, at the farther end, a bronze canopy over the high altar; and all along the length of the side aisles were shrines with pictures, sculpture, and burning lamps; the whole church, too, was lined with marble: the roof was gilded; and yet the general effect of severe and noble simplicity triumphed over all the ornament. I should have taken it for a Roman temple, retaining nearly its pristine aspect; but Murray tells us that it was founded A. D. 342 by Pope Liberius, on the spot precisely marked out by a miraculous fall of snow, in the month of August, and it has undergone many alterations since his time. But it is very fine, and gives the beholder the idea of vastness, which seems harder to attain than anything else. On the right hand, approaching the high altar, there is a chapel, separated from the rest of the church by an iron paling; and, being admitted into it with another party, I found it most elaborately magnificent. But one magnificence outshone another, and made itself the brightest conceivable for the moment. However, this chapel was as rich as the most precious marble could make it, in pillars and pilasters, and broad, polished slabs, covering the whole walls (except where there were splendid and glowing frescos; or where some monumental statuary or bas-relief, or mosaic picture filled up an arched niche). Its architecture was a dome, resting on four great arches; and in size it would alone have been a church. In the centre of the mosaic pavement there was a flight of steps, down which we went, and saw a group in marble, representing the nativity of Christ, which, judging by the unction with which our guide talked about it, must have been of peculiar sanctity. I hate to leave this chapel and church, without being able to say any one thing that may reflect a portion of their beauty, or of the feeling which they excite. Kneeling against many of the pillars there were persons in prayer, and I stepped softly, fearing lest my tread on the marble pavement should disturb them,--a needless precaution, however, for nobody seems to expect it, nor to be disturbed by the lack of it. The situation of the church, I should suppose, is the loftiest in Rome: it has a fountain at one end, and a column at the other; but I did not pay particular attention to either, nor to the exterior of the church itself. On my return, I turned aside from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinalis, and was led by it into the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. The street through which I passed was broader, cleanlier, and statelier than most streets in Rome, and bordered by palaces; and the piazza had noble edifices around it, and a fountain, an obelisk, and two nude statues in the centre. The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite, into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the statues were colossal,--two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery steed. On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the other, OPUS PRAXITELIS. What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance,--at a street corner, as it were,--on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority on which these statues (Castor and Pollux, I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be. On one side of the piazza is the Pontifical Palace; but, not being aware of this at the time, I did not look particularly at the edifice. I came home by way of the Corso, which seemed a little enlivened by Carnival time; though, as it was not yet two o'clock, the fun had not begun for the day. The rain throws a dreary damper on the festivities. February 13th.--Day before yesterday we took J----- and R----- in a carriage, and went to see the Carnival, by driving up and down the Corso. It was as ugly a day, as respects weather, as has befallen us since we came to Rome,--cloudy, with an indecisive wet, which finally settled into a rain; and people say that such is generally the weather in Carnival time. There is very little to be said about the spectacle. Sunshine would have improved it, no doubt; but a person must have very broad sunshine within himself to be joyous on such shallow provocation. The street, at all events, would have looked rather brilliant under a sunny sky, the balconies being hung with bright-colored draperies, which were also flung out of some of the windows. . . . Soon I had my first experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my face. . . . Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the face were a protection for both sexes,--not a needless one, for I received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears. It seems to be a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English) not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies. We had one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T------ was there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a handful of lime. Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums. Possibly we may not have received our fair share of these last salutes, for J----- had on a black mask, which made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti that we might otherwise have escaped. A good many bouquets were flung at our little R-----, and at us generally. . . . This was what is called masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the great majority of people appeared without them. . . . Two fantastic figures, with enormous heads, set round with frizzly hair, came and grinned into our carriage, and J----- tore out a handful of hair (which proved to be sea-weed) from one of their heads, rather to the discomposure of the owner, who muttered his indignation in Italian. . . . On comparing notes with J----- and R-----, indeed with U---- too, I find that they all enjoyed the Carnival much more than I did. Only the young ought to write descriptions of such scenes. My cold criticism chills the life out of it. February 14th.--Friday, 12th, was a sunny day, the first that we had had for some time; and my wife and I went forth to see sights as well as to make some calls that had long been due. We went first to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which I have already mentioned, and, on our return, we went to the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, and saw those admirable ancient statues of Castor and Pollux, which seem to me sons of the morning, and full of life and strength. The atmosphere, in such a length of time, has covered the marble surface of these statues with a gray rust, that envelops both the men and horses as with a garment; besides which, there are strange discolorations, such as patches of white moss on the elbows, and reddish streaks down the sides; but the glory of form overcomes all these defects of color. It is pleasant to observe how familiar some little birds are with these colossal statues,--hopping about on their heads and over their huge fists, and very likely they have nests in their ears or among their hair. We called at the Barberini Palace, where William Story has established himself and family for the next seven years, or more, on the third piano, in apartments that afford a very fine outlook over Rome, and have the sun in them through most of the day. Mrs. S---- invited us to her fancy ball, but we declined. On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of his lions on the monument in St. Peter's. Afterwards we made two or three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston. He has very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe. . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra. William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him last, a very young man. His perplexing variety of talents and accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something very good. He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her; a very type of virginity and simplicity. The statue of Cleopatra, now only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject, and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with adequate skill. He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names. By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has put all possible characteristics of her time and nation and of her own individuality, asked, "Have you baptized your statue yet?" as if the sculptor were waiting till his statue were finished before he chose the subject of it,--as, indeed, I should think many sculptors do. Another remarked of a statue of Hero, who is seeking Leander by torchlight, and in momentary expectation of finding his drowned body, "Is not the face a little sad?" Another time a whole party of Americans filed into his studio, and ranged themselves round his father's statue, and, after much silent examination, the spokesman of the party inquired, "Well, sir, what is this intended to represent?" William Story, in telling these little anecdotes, gave the Yankee twang to perfection. . . . The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw. In the outer room of his studio a stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work, transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a wonderful degree of expression in the face. It is not quite pleasant to think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely mechanical people. It is generally only the finishing touches that are given by his own chisel. Yesterday, being another bright day, we went to the basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the basilica next in rank to St. Peter's, and has the precedence of it as regards certain sacred privileges. It stands on a most noble site, on the outskirts of the city, commanding a view of the Sabine and Alban hills, blue in the distance, and some of them hoary with sunny snow. The ruins of the Claudian aqueduct are close at hand. The church is connected with the Lateran palace and museum, so that the whole is one edifice; but the facade of the church distinguishes it, and is very lofty and grand,--more so, it seems to me, than that of St. Peter's. Under the portico is an old statue of Constantine, representing him as a very stout and sturdy personage. The inside of the church disappointed me, though no doubt I should have been wonderstruck had I seen it a month ago. We went into one of the chapels, which was very rich in colored marbles; and, going down a winding staircase, found ourselves among the tombs and sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble Pieta very beautifully sculptured. On the other side of the church we looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded, but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder tint which time bestows on sculpture. The tombs and statues appeared like shapes and images of new-fallen snow. The most interesting thing which we saw in this church (and, admitting its authenticity, there can scarcely be a more interesting one anywhere) was the table at which the Last Supper was eaten. It is preserved in a corridor, on one side of the tribune or chancel, and is shown by torchlight suspended upon the wall beneath a covering of glass. Only the top of the table is shown, presenting a broad, flat surface of wood, evidently very old, and showing traces of dry-rot in one or two places. There are nails in it, and the attendant said that it had formerly been covered with bronze. As well as I can remember, it may be five or six feet square, and I suppose would accommodate twelve persons, though not if they reclined in the Roman fashion, nor if they sat as they do in Leonardo da Vinci's picture. It would be very delightful to believe in this table. There are several other sacred relics preserved in the church; for instance, the staircase of Pilate's house up which Jesus went, and the porphyry slab on which the soldiers cast lots for his garments. These, however, we did not see. There are very glowing frescos on portions of the walls; but, there being much whitewash instead of incrusted marble, it has not the pleasant aspect which one's eye learns to demand in Roman churches. There is a good deal of statuary along the columns of the nave, and in the monuments of the side aisles. In reference to the interior splendor of Roman churches, I must say that I think it a pity that painted windows are exclusively a Gothic ornament; for the elaborate ornamentation of these interiors puts the ordinary daylight out of countenance, so that a window with only the white sunshine coming through it, or even with a glimpse of the blue Italian sky, looks like a portion left unfinished, and therefore a blotch in the rich wall. It is like the one spot in Aladdin's palace which he left for the king, his father-in-law, to finish, after his fairy architects had exhausted their magnificence on the rest; and the sun, like the king, fails in the effort. It has what is called a porta santa, which we saw walled up, in front of the church, one side of the main entrance. I know not what gives it its sanctity, but it appears to be opened by the pope on a year of jubilee, once every quarter of a century. After our return . . . . I took R----- along the Pincian Hill, and finally, after witnessing what of the Carnival could be seen in the Piazza del Popolo from that safe height, we went down into the Corso, and some little distance along it. Except for the sunshine, the scene was much the same as I have already described; perhaps fewer confetti and more bouquets. Some Americans and English are said to have been brought before the police authorities, and fined for throwing lime. It is remarkable that the jollity, such as it is, of the Carnival, does not extend an inch beyond the line of the Corso; there it flows along in a narrow stream, while in the nearest street we see nothing but the ordinary Roman gravity. February 15th.--Yesterday was a bright day, but I did not go out till the afternoon, when I took an hour's walk along the Pincian, stopping a good while to look at the old beggar who, for many years past, has occupied one of the platforms of the flight of steps leading from the Piazza de' Spagna to the Triniti de' Monti. Hillard commemorates him in his book. He is an unlovely object, moving about on his hands and knees, principally by aid of his hands, which are fortified with a sort of wooden shoes; while his poor, wasted lower shanks stick up in the air behind him, loosely vibrating as he progresses. He is gray, old, ragged, a pitiable sight, but seems very active in his own fashion, and bestirs himself on the approach of his visitors with the alacrity of a spider when a fly touches the remote circumference of his web. While I looked down at him he received alms from three persons, one of whom was a young woman of the lower orders; the other two were gentlemen, probably either English or American. I could not quite make out the principle on which he let some people pass without molestation, while he shuffled from one end of the platform to the other to intercept an occasional individual. He is not persistent in his demands, nor, indeed, is this a usual fault among Italian beggars. A shake of the head will stop him when wriggling towards you from a distance. I fancy he reaps a pretty fair harvest, and no doubt leads as contented and as interesting a life as most people, sitting there all day on those sunny steps, looking at the world, and making his profit out of it. It must be pretty much such an occupation as fishing, in its effect upon the hopes and apprehensions; and probably he suffers no more from the many refusals he meets with than the angler does, when he sees a fish smell at his bait and swim away. One success pays for a hundred disappointments, and the game is all the better for not being entirely in his own favor. Walking onward, I found the Pincian thronged with promenaders, as also with carriages, which drove round the verge of the gardens in an unbroken ring. To-day has been very rainy. I went out in the forenoon, and took a sitting for my bust in one of a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Canova. It was large, high, and dreary from the want of a carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor's studio has not the picturesque charm of that of a painter, where there is color, warmth, and cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the glow of some picture, which is resting against the wall. . . . I was asked not to look at the bust at the close of the sitting, and, of course, I obeyed; though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking strangely in that guise of clay. . . . It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon artists. There is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model, and ideas may be made sensible objects at home as well as here. I think it is the peculiar mode of life that attracts, and its freedom from the inthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome offers; and, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another's works, yet they keep each other warm by the presence of so many of them. The Carnival still continues, though I hardly see how it can have withstood such a damper as this rainy day. There were several people-- three, I think--killed in the Corso on Saturday; some accounts say that they were run over by the horses in the race; others, that they were ridden down by the dragoons in clearing the course. After leaving Canova's studio, I stepped into the church of San Luigi de' Francesi, in the Via di Ripetta. It was built, I believe, by Catherine de' Medici, and is under the protection of the French government, and a most shamefully dirty place of worship, the beautiful marble columns looking dingy, for the want of loving and pious care. There are many tombs and monuments of French people, both of the past and present,-- artists, soldiers, priests, and others, who have died in Rome. It was so dusky within the church that I could hardly distinguish the pictures in the chapels and over the altar, nor did I know that there were any worth looking for. Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and oil-paintings by Guido and others. I found it peculiarly touching to read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I was even less akin to them than they to Italy. Still, there was a sort of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here. February 17th.--Yesterday morning was perfectly sunny, and we went out betimes to see churches; going first to the Capuchins', close by the Piazza Barberini. ["The Marble Faun" takes up this description of the church and of the dead monk, which we really saw, just as recounted, even to the sudden stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, as we looked at him.-- ED.] We next went to the Trinita de' Monti, which stands at the head of the steps, leading, in several flights, from the Piazza de' Spagna. It is now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into the church. This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead. Unlike the Capuchins', which was filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, this church was most exquisitely neat, as women alone would have thought it worth while to keep it. It is not a very splendid church, not rich in gorgeous marbles, but pleasant to be in, if it were only for the sake of its godly purity. There was only one person in the nave; a young girl, who sat perfectly still, with her face towards the altar, as long as we stayed. Between the nave and the rest of the church there is a high iron railing, and on the other side of it were two kneeling figures in black, so motionless that I at first thought them statues; but they proved to be two nuns at their devotions; and others of the sisterhood came by and by and joined them. Nuns, at least these nuns, who are French, and probably ladies of refinement, having the education of young girls in charge, are far pleasanter objects to see and think about than monks; the odor of sanctity, in the latter, not being an agreeable fragrance. But these holy sisters, with their black crape and white muslin, looked really pure and unspotted from the world. On the iron railing above mentioned was the representation of a golden heart, pierced with arrows; for these are nuns of the Sacred Heart. In the various chapels there are several paintings in fresco, some by Daniele da Volterra; and one of them, the "Descent from the Cross," has been pronounced the third greatest picture in the world. I never should have had the slightest suspicion that it was a great picture at all, so worn and faded it looks, and so hard, so difficult to be seen, and so undelightful when one does see it. From the Trinita we went to the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church built on a spot where Nero is said to have been buried, and which was afterwards made horrible by devilish phantoms. It now being past twelve, and all the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other famous men, which are to be seen here. I remember dimly the magnificent chapel of the Chigi family, and little else, for we stayed but a short time; and went next to the sculptor's studio, where I had another sitting for my bust. After I had been moulded for about an hour, we turned homeward; but my wife concluded to hire a balcony for this last afternoon and evening of the Carnival, and she took possession of it, while I went home to send to her Miss S------ and the two elder children. For my part, I took R-----, and walked, by way of the Pincian, to the Piazza del Popolo, and thence along the Corso, where, by this time, the warfare of bouquets and confetti raged pretty fiercely. The sky being blue and the sun bright, the scene looked much gayer and brisker than I had before found it; and I can conceive of its being rather agreeable than otherwise, up to the age of twenty. We got several volleys of confetti. R----- received a bouquet and a sugar-plum, and I a resounding hit from something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower. Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch of it, without very widely departing from truth. February 19th.--Day before yesterday, pretty early, we went to St. Peter's, expecting to see the pope cast ashes on the heads of the cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday. On arriving, however, we found no more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, we went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican, seeking for the chapel. We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of the palace; there is an entrance from some point near the front of the church, but this we did not find. The papal guards, in the strangest antique and antic costume that was ever seen,--a party-colored dress, striped with blue, red, and yellow, white and black, with a doublet and ruff, and trunk-breeches, and armed with halberds,--were on duty at the gateways, but suffered us to pass without question. Finally, we reached a large court, where some cardinals' red equipages and other carriages were drawn up, but were still at a loss as to the whereabouts of the chapel. At last an attendant kindly showed us the proper door, and led us up flights of stairs, along passages and galleries, and through halls, till at last we came to a spacious and lofty apartment adorned with frescos; this was the Sala Regia, and the antechamber to the Sistine Chapel. The attendant, meanwhile, had informed us that my wife could not be admitted to the chapel in her bonnet, and that I myself could not enter at all, for lack of a dress-coat; so my wife took off her bonnet, and, covering her head with her black lace veil, was readily let in, while I remained in the Sala Regia, with several other gentlemen, who found themselves in the same predicament as I was. There was a wonderful variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me, comprising garbs that have been elsewhere laid aside for at least three centuries,--the broad, plaited, double ruff, and black velvet cloak, doublet, trunk-breeches, and sword of Queen Elizabeth's time,--the papal guard, in their striped and party-colored dress as before described, looking not a little like harlequins; other soldiers in helmets and jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests; attendants in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; gentlemen, some in black dress-coats and pantaloons, others in wide-awake hats and tweed overcoats; and a few ladies in the prescribed costume of black; so that, in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball. By and by, the cardinals began to arrive, and added their splendid purple robes and red hats to make the picture still more brilliant. They were old men, one or two very aged and infirm, and generally men of bulk and substance, with heavy faces, fleshy about the chin. Their red hats, trimmed with gold-lace, are a beautiful piece of finery, and are identical in shape with the black, loosely cocked beavers worn by the Catholic ecclesiastics generally. Wolsey's hat, which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition, might have been made on the same block, but apparently was never cocked, as the fashion now is. The attendants changed the upper portions of their master's attire, and put a little cap of scarlet cloth on each of their heads, after which the cardinals, one by one, or two by two, as they happened to arrive, went into the chapel, with a page behind each holding up his purple train. In the mean while, within the chapel, we heard singing and chanting; and whenever the voluminous curtains that hung before the entrance were slightly drawn apart, we outsiders glanced through, but could see only a mass of people, and beyond them still another chapel, divided from the hither one by a screen. When almost everybody had gone in, there was a stir among the guards and attendants, and a door opened, apparently communicating with the inner apartments of the Vatican. Through this door came, not the pope, as I had partly expected, but a bulky old lady in black, with a red face, who bowed towards the spectators with an aspect of dignified complaisance as she passed towards the entrance of the chapel. I took off my hat, unlike certain English gentlemen who stood nearer, and found that I had not done amiss, for it was the Queen of Spain. There was nothing else to be seen; so I went back through the antechambers (which are noble halls, richly frescoed on the walls and ceilings), endeavoring to get out through the same passages that had let me in. I had already tried to descend what I now supposed to be the Scala Santa, but had been turned back by a sentinel. After wandering to and fro a good while, I at last found myself in a long, long gallery, on each side of which were innumerable inscriptions, in Greek and Latin, on slabs of marble, built into the walls; and classic altars and tablets were ranged along, from end to end. At the extremity was a closed iron grating, from which I was retreating; but a French gentleman accosted me, with the information that the custode would admit me, if I chose, and would accompany me through the sculpture department of the Vatican. I acceded, and thus took my first view of those innumerable art-treasures, passing from one object to another, at an easy pace, pausing hardly a moment anywhere, and dismissing even the Apollo, and the Laocoon, and the Torso of Hercules, in the space of half a dozen breaths. I was well enough content to do so, in order to get a general idea of the contents of the galleries, before settling down upon individual objects. Most of the world-famous sculptures presented themselves to my eye with a kind of familiarity, through the copies and casts which I had seen; but I found the originals more different than I anticipated. The Apollo, for instance, has a face which I have never seen in any cast or copy. I must confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its windows,--more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious vases, and two seat sarcophagi,--than with the statuary. Thus I went round the whole, and was dismissed through the grated barrier into the gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made my way out of the palace. . . . Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way; after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo. The first observation which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum, and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun. It must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples. The second observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how to express it. But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well to your steps. . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the merit of the sculptures aloft. . . . After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I allude. Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short, they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not in the least troubled by the proximity. It must be that their sense of the beautiful is stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and that it observes only what is fit to gratify it. To-day, which was bright and cool, my wife and I set forth immediately after breakfast, in search of the Baths of Diocletian, and the church of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. We went too far along the Via di Porta Pia, and after passing by two or three convents, and their high garden walls, and the villa Bonaparte on one side, and the villa Torlonia on the other, at last issued through the city gate. Before us, far away, were the Alban hills, the loftiest of which was absolutely silvered with snow and sunshine, and set in the bluest and brightest of skies. We now retraced our steps to the Fountain of the Termini, where is a ponderous heap of stone, representing Moses striking the rock; a colossal figure, not without a certain enormous might and dignity, though rather too evidently looking his awfullest. This statue was the death of its sculptor, whose heart was broken on account of the ridicule it excited. There are many more absurd aquatic devices in Rome, however, and few better. We turned into the Piazza de' Termini, the entrance of which is at this fountain; and after some inquiry of the French soldiers, a numerous detachment of whom appear to be quartered in the vicinity, we found our way to the portal of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. The exterior of this church has no pretensions to beauty or majesty, or, indeed, to architectural merit of any kind, or to any architecture whatever; for it looks like a confused pile of ruined brickwork, with a facade resembling half the inner curve of a large oven. No one would imagine that there was a church under that enormous heap of ancient rubbish. But the door admits you into a circular vestibule, once an apartment of Diocletian's Baths, but now a portion of the nave of the church, and surrounded with monumental busts; and thence you pass into what was the central hall; now, with little change, except of detail and ornament, transformed into the body of the church. This space is so lofty, broad, and airy, that the soul forthwith swells out and magnifies itself, for the sake of filling it. It was Michael Angelo who contrived this miracle; and I feel even more grateful to him for rescuing such a noble interior from destruction, than if he had originally built it himself. In the ceiling above, you see the metal fixtures whereon the old Romans hung their lamps; and there are eight gigantic pillars of Egyptian granite, standing as they stood of yore. There is a grand simplicity about the church, more satisfactory than elaborate ornament; but the present pope has paved and adorned one of the large chapels of the transept in very beautiful style, and the pavement of the central part is likewise laid in rich marbles. In the choir there are several pictures, one of which was veiled, as celebrated pictures frequently are in churches. A person, who seemed to be at his devotions, withdrew the veil for us, and we saw a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino, originally, I believe, painted in fresco in St. Peter's, but since transferred to canvas, and removed hither. Its place at St. Peter's is supplied by a mosaic copy. I was a good deal impressed by this picture,--the dying saint, amid the sorrow of those who loved him, and the fury of his enemies, looking upward, where a company of angels, and Jesus with them, are waiting to welcome him and crown him; and I felt what an influence pictures might have upon the devotional part of our nature. The nailmarks in the hands and feet of Jesus, ineffaceable, even after he had passed into bliss and glory, touched my heart with a sense of his love for us. I think this really a great picture. We walked round the church, looking at other paintings and frescos, but saw no others that greatly interested us. In the vestibule there are monuments to Carlo Maratti and Salvator Rosa, and there is a statue of St. Bruno, by Houdon, which is pronounced to be very fine. I thought it good, but scarcely worthy of vast admiration. Houdon was the sculptor of the first statue of Washington, and of the bust, whence, I suppose, all subsequent statues have been, and will be, mainly modelled. After emerging from the church, I looked back with wonder at the stack of shapeless old brickwork that hid the splendid interior. I must go there again, and breathe freely in that noble space. February 20th.--This morning, after breakfast, I walked across the city, making a pretty straight course to the Pantheon, and thence to the bridge of St. Angelo, and to St. Peter's. It had been my purpose to go to the Fontana Paolina; but, finding that the distance was too great, and being weighed down with a Roman lassitude, I concluded to go into St. Peter's. Here I looked at Michael Angelo's Pieta, a representation of the dead Christ, in his mother's lap. Then I strolled round the great church, and find that it continues to grow upon me both in magnitude and beauty, by comparison with the many interiors of sacred edifices which I have lately seen. At times, a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening beyond arch, and I am surprised into admiration. I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way; not when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks suddenly through a vista, among a crowd of other thoughts. Passing near the confessional for foreigners to-day, I saw a Spaniard, who had just come out of the one devoted to his native tongue, taking leave of his confessor, with an affectionate reverence, which--as well as the benign dignity of the good father--it was good to behold. . . . I returned home early, in order to go with my wife to the Barberini Palace at two o'clock. We entered through the gateway, through the Via delle Quattro Fontane, passing one or two sentinels; for there is apparently a regiment of dragoons quartered on the ground-floor of the palace; and I stumbled upon a room containing their saddles, the other day, when seeking for Mr. Story's staircase. The entrance to the picture-gallery is by a door on the right hand, affording us a sight of a beautiful spiral staircase, which goes circling upward from the very basement to the very summit of the palace, with a perfectly easy ascent, yet confining its sweep within a moderate compass. We looked up through the interior of the spiral, as through a tube, from the bottom to the top. The pictures are contained in three contiguous rooms of the lower piano, and are few in number, comprising barely half a dozen which I should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way. One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest, most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it were, by the motion of their hands and fingers. It is a very queer, as well as a very remarkable picture. But we passed hastily by this, and almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous,--Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci. These were found in the last of the three rooms, and as regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything; for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else. . . . It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, nor could do it, again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted "better than he knew." I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for, no doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it. Close beside Beatrice Cenci hangs the Fornarina. . . . While we were looking at these works Miss M------ unexpectedly joined us, and we went, all three together, to the Rospigliosi Palace, in the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. A porter, in cocked hat, and with a staff of office, admitted us into a spacious court before the palace, and directed us to a garden on one side, raised as much as twenty feet above the level on which we stood. The gardener opened the gate for us, and we ascended a beautiful stone staircase, with a carved balustrade, bearing many marks of time and weather. Reaching the garden-level, we found it laid out in walks, bordered with box and ornamental shrubbery, amid which were lemon-trees, and one large old exotic from some distant clime. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by a stone balustrade, like that of the staircase, was a fish-pond, into which several jets of water were continually spouting; and on pedestals, that made part of the balusters, stood eight marble statues of Apollo, Cupid, nymphs, and other such sunny and beautiful people of classic mythology. There had been many more of these statues, but the rest had disappeared, and those which remained had suffered grievous damage, here to a nose, there to a hand or foot, and often a fracture of the body, very imperfectly mended. There was a pleasant sunshine in the garden, and a springlike, or rather a genial, autumnal atmosphere, though elsewhere it was a day of poisonous Roman chill. At the end of the garden, which was of no great extent, was an edifice, bordering on the piazza, called the Casino, which, I presume, means a garden-house. The front is richly ornamented with bas-reliefs, and statues in niches; as if it were a place for pleasure and enjoyment, and therefore ought to be beautiful. As we approached it, the door swung open, and we went into a large room on the ground-floor, and, looking up to the ceiling, beheld Guido's Aurora. The picture is as fresh and brilliant as if he had painted it with the morning sunshine which it represents. It could not be more lustrous in its lines, if he had given it the last touch an hour ago. Three or four artists were copying it at that instant, and positively their colors did not look brighter, though a great deal newer than his. The alacrity and movement, briskness and morning stir and glow, of the picture are wonderful. It seems impossible to catch its glory in a copy. Several artists, as I said, were making the attempt, and we saw two other attempted copies leaning against the wall, but it was easy to detect failure in just essential points. My memory, I believe, will be somewhat enlivened by this picture hereafter: not that I remember it very distinctly even now; but bright things leave a sheen and glimmer in the mind, like Christian's tremulous glimpse of the Celestial City. In two other rooms of the Casino we saw pictures by Domenichino, Rubens, and other famous painters, which I do not mean to speak of, because I cared really little or nothing about them. Returning into the garden, the sunny warmth of which was most grateful after the chill air and cold pavement of the Casino, we walked round the laguna, examining the statues, and looking down at some little fishes that swarmed at the stone margin of the pool. There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family: one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's bosom. The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors, which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face. An old painter very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna, with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be literally copied. Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St. Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits. I have long ago exhausted all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other. Its shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome, both of which are magnificently frescoed. Around the base of the larger dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white marble. The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall, forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make even more gorgeous than the main body of the church. They contain beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare, and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery gem as big as a turkey's egg. The pavement of the church was one star of various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I believe, the tomb of the founder. I have not seen, nor expect to see, anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home. I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome. He seems quite a man of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities. February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo, intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would probably result. I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch. Two other persons likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I stayed, and at last seemed to give it up. The banks and vicinity of the river are very bare and uninviting, as I then saw them; no shade, no verdure,--a rough, neglected aspect, and a peculiar shabbiness about the few houses that were visible. Farther down the stream the dome of St. Peter's showed itself on the other side, seeming to stand on the outskirts of the city. I walked along the banks, with some expectation of finding a ferry, by which I might cross the river; but my course was soon interrupted by the wall, and I turned up a lane that led me straight back again to the Porta del Popolo. I stopped a moment, however, to see some young men pitching quoits, which they appeared to do with a good deal of skill. I went along the Via di Ripetta, and through other streets, stepping into two or three churches, one of which was the Pantheon. . . . There are, I think, seven deep, pillared recesses around the circumference of it, each of which becomes a sufficiently capacious chapel; and alternately with these chapels there is a marble structure, like the architecture of a doorway, beneath which is the shrine of a saint; so that the whole circle of the Pantheon is filled up with the seven chapels and seven shrines. A number of persons were sitting or kneeling around; others came in while I was there, dipping their fingers in the holy water, and bending the knee, as they passed the shrines and chapels, until they reached the one which, apparently, they had selected as the particular altar for their devotions. Everybody seemed so devout, and in a frame of mind so suited to the day and place, that it really made me feel a little awkward not to be able to kneel down along with them. Unlike the worshippers in our own churches, each individual here seems to do his own individual acts of devotion, and I cannot but think it better so than to make an effort for united prayer as we do. It is my opinion that a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive in people's hearts by the Catholic mode of worship. Soon leaving the Pantheon, a few minutes' walk towards the Corso brought me to the Church of St. Ignazio, which belongs to the College of the Jesuits. It is spacious and of beautiful architecture, but not strikingly distinguished, in the latter particular, from many others; a wide and lofty nave, supported upon marble columns, between which arches open into the side aisles, and at the junction of the nave and transept a dome, resting on four great arches. The church seemed to be purposely somewhat darkened, so that I could not well see the details of the ornamentation, except the frescos on the ceiling of the nave, which were very brilliant, and done in so effectual a style, that I really could not satisfy myself that some of the figures did not actually protrude from the ceiling,--in short, that they were not colored bas-reliefs, instead of frescos. No words can express the beautiful effect, in an upholstery point of view, of this kind of decoration. Here, as at the Pantheon, there were many persons sitting silent, kneeling, or passing from shrine to shrine. I reached home at about twelve, and, at one, set out again, with my wife, towards St. Peter's, where we meant to stay till after vespers. We walked across the city, and through the Piazza de Navona, where we stopped to look at one of Bernini's absurd fountains, of which the water makes but the smallest part,--a little squirt or two amid a prodigious fuss of gods and monsters. Thence we passed by the poor, battered-down torso of Pasquin, and came, by devious ways, to the bridge of St. Angelo; the streets bearing pretty much their weekday aspect, many of the shops open, the market-stalls doing their usual business, and the people brisk and gay, though not indecorously so. I suppose there was hardly a man or woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing which--the prayers, I mean--it would be absurd to predicate of London, New York, or any Protestant city. In however adulterated a guise, the Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure as if it came from better cisterns, or from the original fountain-head. Arriving at St. Peter's shortly after two, we walked round the whole church, looking at all the pictures and most of the monuments, . . . . and paused longest before Guido's "Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer." This is surely one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the human conceptions that are imbued most deeply with the celestial. . . . We then sat down in one of the aisles and awaited the beginning of vespers, which we supposed would take place at half past three. Four o'clock came, however, and no vespers; and as our dinner-hour is five, . . . . we at last cane away without hearing the vesper hymn. February 23d.--Yesterday, at noon, we set out for the Capitol, and after going up the acclivity (not from the Forum, but from the opposite direction), stopped to look at the statues of Castor and Pollux, which, with other sculptures, look down the ascent. Castor and his brother seem to me to have heads disproportionately large, and are not so striking, in any respect, as such great images ought to be. But we heartily admired the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, . . . . and looked at a fountain, principally composed, I think, of figures representing the Nile and the Tiber, who loll upon their elbows and preside over the gushing water; and between them, against the facade of the Senator's Palace, there is a statue of Minerva, with a petticoat of red porphyry. Having taken note of these objects, we went to the museum, in an edifice on our left, entering the piazza, and here, in the vestibule, we found various old statues and relics. Ascending the stairs, we passed through a long gallery, and, turning to our left, examined somewhat more carefully a suite of rooms running parallel with it. The first of these contained busts of the Caesars and their kindred, from the epoch of the mightiest Julius downward; eighty-three, I believe, in all. I had seen a bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum, and was surprised at its thin and withered aspect; but this head is of a very ugly old man indeed,--wrinkled, puckered, shrunken, lacking breadth and substance; careworn, grim, as if he had fought hard with life, and had suffered in the conflict; a man of schemes, and of eager effort to bring his schemes to pass. His profile is by no means good, advancing from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, and retreating, at about the same angle, from the latter point to the bottom of his chin, which seems to be thrust forcibly down into his meagre neck,--not that he pokes his head forward, however, for it is particularly erect. The head of Augustus is very beautiful, and appears to be that of a meditative, philosophic man, saddened with the sense that it is not very much worth while to be at the summit of human greatness after all. It is a sorrowful thing to trace the decay of civilization through this series of busts, and to observe how the artistic skill, so requisite at first, went on declining through the dreary dynasty of the Caesars, till at length the master of the world could not get his head carved in better style than the figure-head of a ship. In the next room there were better statues than we had yet seen; but in the last room of the range we found the "Dying Gladiator," of which I had already caught a glimpse in passing by the open door. It had made all the other treasures of the gallery tedious in my eagerness to come to that. I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other block of stone. Like all works of the highest excellence, however, it makes great demands upon the spectator. He must make a generous gift of his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface. It suggests far more than it shows. I looked long at this statue, and little at anything else, though, among other famous works, a statue of Antinous was in the same room. I was glad when we left the museum, which, by the by, was piercingly chill, as if the multitude of statues radiated cold out of their marble substance. We might have gone to see the pictures in the Palace of the Conservatori, and S-----, whose receptivity is unlimited and forever fresh, would willingly have done so; but I objected, and we went towards the Forum. I had noticed, two or three times, an inscription over a mean-looking door in this neighborhood, stating that here was the entrance to the prison of the holy apostles Peter and Paul; and we soon found the spot, not far from the Forum, with two wretched frescos of the apostles above the inscription. We knocked at the door without effect; but a lame beggar, who sat at another door of the same house (which looked exceedingly like a liquor-shop), desired us to follow him, and began to ascend to the Capitol, by the causeway leading from the Forum. A little way upward we met a woman, to whom the beggar delivered us over, and she led us into a church or chapel door, and pointed to a long flight of steps, which descended through twilight into utter darkness. She called to somebody in the lower regions, and then went away, leaving us to get down this mysterious staircase by ourselves. Down we went, farther and farther from the daylight, and found ourselves, anon, in a dark chamber or cell, the shape or boundaries of which we could not make out, though it seemed to be of stone, and black and dungeon-like. Indistinctly, and from a still farther depth in the earth, we heard voices,--one voice, at least,--apparently not addressing ourselves, but some other persons; and soon, directly beneath our feet, we saw a glimmering of light through a round, iron-grated hole in the bottom of the dungeon. In a few moments the glimmer and the voice came up through this hole, and the light disappeared, and it and the voice came glimmering and babbling up a flight of stone stairs, of which we had not hitherto been aware. It was the custode, with a party of visitors, to whom he had been showing St. Peter's dungeon. Each visitor was provided with a wax taper, and the custode gave one to each of us, bidding us wait a moment while he conducted the other party to the upper air. During his absence we examined the cell, as well as our dim lights would permit, and soon found an indentation in the wall, with an iron grate put over it for protection, and an inscription above informing us that the Apostle Peter had here left the imprint of his visage; and, in truth, there is a profile there,--forehead, nose, mouth, and chin,--plainly to be seen, an intaglio in the solid rock. We touched it with the tips of our fingers, as well as saw it with our eyes. The custode soon returned, and led us down the darksome steps, chattering in Italian all the time. It is not a very long descent to the lower cell, the roof of which is so low that I believe I could have reached it with my hand. We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness. Here Jugurtha starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and, methinks, there cannot be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering. In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath. It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,-- the stones of which it is constructed being as black as midnight. The custode showed us a stone post, at the side of the cell, with the hole in the top of it, into which, he said, St. Peter's chain had been fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer. The miracle was perhaps the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the dungeon oozy with wet. However, it is best to be as simple and childlike as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether or no he ever was in the prison at all, still the belief of a thousand years and more gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions. The custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us drank a sip; and, what is very remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome. I suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its qualities according to the faith of those who drink it. The staircase descending into the lower dungeon is comparatively modern, there having been no entrance of old, except through the small circular opening in the roof. In the upper cell the custode showed us an ancient flight of stairs, now built into the wall, which used to lead from the Capitol. The whole precincts are now consecrated, and I believe the upper portion, perhaps both upper and lower, are a shrine or a chapel. I now left S------ in the Forum, and went to call on Mr. J. P. K------ at the Hotel d'Europe. I found him just returned from a drive,--a gentleman of about sixty, or more, with gray hair, a pleasant, intellectual face, and penetrating, but not unkindly eyes. He moved infirmly, being on the recovery from an illness. We went up to his saloon together, and had a talk,--or, rather, he had it nearly all to himself,--and particularly sensible talk, too, and full of the results of learning and experience. In the first place, he settled the whole Kansas difficulty; then he made havoc of St. Peter, who came very shabbily out of his hands, as regarded his early character in the Church, and his claims to the position he now holds in it. Mr. K------ also gave a curious illustration, from something that happened to himself, of the little dependence that can be placed on tradition purporting to be ancient, and I capped his story by telling him how the site of my town-pump, so plainly indicated in the sketch itself, has already been mistaken in the city council and in the public prints. February 24th.--Yesterday I crossed the Ponte Sisto, and took a short ramble on the other side of the river; and it rather surprised me to discover, pretty nearly opposite the Capitoline Hill, a quay, at which several schooners and barks, of two or three hundred tons' burden, were moored. There was also a steamer, armed with a large gun and two brass swivels on her forecastle, and I know not what artillery besides. Probably she may have been a revenue-cutter. Returning I crossed the river by way of the island of St. Bartholomew over two bridges. The island is densely covered with buildings, and is a separate small fragment of the city. It was a tradition of the ancient Romans that it was formed by the aggregation of soil and rubbish brought down by the river, and accumulating round the nucleus of some sunken baskets. On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so from being closely linked in, indeed, identified with the shops, habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome. The most striking portion was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of San Gregorio. All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and dreary. . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen. The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England. By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I supposed would lead to one of the city gates. It was a lonely path: on my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a thousand years. On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me, grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.]. The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up gateway. From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes. Reaching the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I entered the Campagna. Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had fancied myself already beyond the walls. As the afternoon was getting advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs round the exterior of the city wall. It was very dreary and solitary,-- not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other. It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over. The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were plastered up with brick or stone. I passed one or two walled-up gateways (by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of the wall. Immediately after this I came to the gate of San Giovanni, just within which is the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and there I was glad to rest myself upon a bench before proceeding homeward. There was a French sentinel at this gateway, as at all the others; for the Gauls have always been a pest to Rome, and now gall her worse than ever. I observed, too, that an official, in citizen's dress, stood there also, and appeared to exercise a supervision over some carts with country produce, that were entering just then. February 25th.--We went this forenoon to the Palazzo Borghese, which is situated on a street that runs at right angles with the Corso, and very near the latter. Most of the palaces in Rome, and the Borghese among them, were built somewhere about the sixteenth century; this in 1590, I believe. It is an immense edifice, standing round the four sides of a quadrangle; and though the suite of rooms comprising the picture-gallery forms an almost interminable vista, they occupy only a part of the ground-floor of one side. We enter from the street into a large court, surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series of arches above. The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat central part of the vault. The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, and seemingly as durable. The whole has a kind of splendid shabbiness thrown over it, like a slight coating of rust; the furniture, at least the damask chairs, being a good deal worn, though there are marble and mosaic tables, which may serve to adorn another palace when this one crumbles away with age. One beautiful hall, with a ceiling more richly gilded than the rest, is panelled all round with large looking-glasses, on which are painted pictures, both landscapes and human figures, in oils; so that the effect is somewhat as if you saw these objects represented in the mirrors. These glasses must be of old date, perhaps coeval with the first building of the palace; for they are so much dimmed, that one's own figure appears indistinct in them, and more difficult to be traced than the pictures which cover them half over. It was very comfortless,-- indeed, I suppose nobody ever thought of being comfortable there, since the house was built,--but especially uncomfortable on a chill, damp day like this. My fingers were quite numb before I got half-way through the suite of apartments, in spite of a brazier of charcoal which was smouldering into ashes in two or three of the rooms. There was not, so far as I remember, a single fireplace in the suite. A considerable number of visitors--not many, however--were there; and a good many artists; and three or four ladies among them were making copies of the more celebrated pictures, and in all or in most cases missing the especial points that made their celebrity and value. The Prince Borghese certainly demeans himself like a kind and liberal gentleman, in throwing open this invaluable collection to the public to see, and for artists to carry away with them, and diffuse all over the world, so far as their own power and skill will permit. It is open every day of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, without any irksome restriction or supervision; and the fee, which custom requires the visitor to pay to the custode, has the good effect of making us feel that we are not intruders, nor received in an exactly eleemosynary way. The thing could not be better managed. The collection is one of the most celebrated in the world, and contains between eight and nine hundred pictures, many of which are esteemed masterpieces. I think I was not in a frame for admiration to-day, nor could achieve that free and generous surrender of myself which I have already said is essential to the proper estimate of anything excellent. Besides, how is it possible to give one's soul, or any considerable part of it, to a single picture, seen for the first time, among a thousand others, all of which set forth their own claims in an equally good light? Furthermore, there is an external weariness, and sense of a thousand-fold sameness to be overcome, before we can begin to enjoy a gallery of the old Italian masters. . . . I remember but one painter, Francia, who seems really to have approached this awful class of subjects (Christs and Madonnas) in a fitting spirit; his pictures are very singular and awkward, if you look at them with merely an external eye, but they are full of the beauty of holiness, and evidently wrought out as acts of devotion, with the deepest sincerity; and are veritable prayers upon canvas. . . . I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others,--men of flesh and blood, and warm fists, and human hearts. As compared with them, these mighty Italian masters seem men of polished steel; not human, nor addressing themselves so much to human sympathies, as to a formed, intellectual taste. March 1st.--To-day began very unfavorably; but we ventured out at about eleven o'clock, intending to visit the gallery of the Colonna Palace. Finding it closed, however, on account of the illness of the custode, we determined to go to the picture-gallery of the Capitol; and, on our way thither, we stepped into Il Gesu, the grand and rich church of the Jesuits, where we found a priest in white, preaching a sermon, with vast earnestness of action and variety of tones, insomuch that I fancied sometimes that two priests were in the agony of sermonizing at once. He had a pretty large and seemingly attentive audience clustered round him from the entrance of the church, half-way down the nave; while in the chapels of the transepts and in the remoter distances were persons occupied with their own individual devotion. We sat down near the chapel of St. Ignazio, which is adorned with a picture over the altar, and with marble sculptures of the Trinity aloft, and of angels fluttering at the sides. What I particularly noted (for the angels were not very real personages, being neither earthly nor celestial) was the great ball of lapis lazuli, the biggest in the world, at the feet of the First Person in the Trinity. The church is a splendid one, lined with a great variety of precious marbles, . . . . but partly, perhaps, owing to the dusky light, as well as to the want of cleanliness, there was a dingy effect upon the whole. We made but a very short stay, our New England breeding causing us to feel shy of moving about the church in sermon time. It rained when we reached the Capitol, and, as the museum was not yet open, we went into the Palace of the Conservators, on the opposite side of the piazza. Around the inner court of the ground-floor, partly under two opposite arcades, and partly under the sky, are several statues and other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome to set down. We inquired of two or three French soldiers the way into the picture-gallery; but it is our experience that French soldiers in Rome never know anything of what is around them, not even the name of the palace or public place over which they stand guard; and though invariably civil, you might as well put a question to a statue of an old Roman as to one of them. While we stood under the loggia, however, looking at the rain plashing into the court, a soldier of the Papal Guard kindly directed us up the staircase, and even took pains to go with us to the very entrance of the picture-rooms. Thank Heaven, there are but two of them, and not many pictures which one cares to look at very long. Italian galleries are at a disadvantage as compared with English ones, inasmuch as the pictures are not nearly such splendid articles of upholstery; though, very likely, having undergone less cleaning and varnishing, they may retain more perfectly the finer touches of the masters. Nevertheless, I miss the mellow glow, the rich and mild external lustre, and even the brilliant frames of the pictures I have seen in England. You feel that they have had loving care taken of them; even if spoiled, it is because they have been valued so much. But these pictures in Italian galleries look rusty and lustreless, as far as the exterior is concerned; and, really, the splendor of the painting, as a production of intellect and feeling, has a good deal of difficulty in shining through such clouds. There is a picture at the Capitol, the "Rape of Europa," by Paul Veronese, that would glow with wonderful brilliancy if it were set in a magnificent frame, and covered with a sunshine of varnish; and it is a kind of picture that would not be desecrated, as some deeper and holier ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be bestowed on it. It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded and shabby plight,--this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work. There is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild, ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new sentiment. Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo, an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man of power. A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim masterpieces. When they were painted life was not what it is now, and the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . It depresses the spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid desperation, to the end. On our way down the staircase we saw several noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum. It seems to me, however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it, being marble, than if it were merely canvas. My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining again. I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the Coliseum. About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially those of the Palace of the Caesars, responded to this martial uproar of the barbarians. There seemed to be no cause for it; but the drummers beat, and the trumpeters blew, as long as I was within hearing. I walked along the Appian Way as far as the Baths of Caracalla. The Palace of the Caesars, which I have never yet explored, appears to be crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose whatever, except the mere delight of annihilating a noble piece of work. There is something in the impulse with which one sympathizes; though I am afraid the destroyers were not sufficiently aware of the mischief they did to enjoy it fully. Probably, too, the early Christians were impelled by religious zeal to destroy the pagan temples, before the happy thought occurred of converting them into churches. March 3d.--This morning was U----'s birthday, and we celebrated it by taking a barouche, and driving (the whole family) out on the Appian Way as far as the tomb of Cecilia Metella. For the first time since we came to Rome, the weather was really warm,--a kind of heat producing languor and disinclination to active movement, though still a little breeze which was stirring threw an occasional coolness over us, and made us distrust the almost sultry atmosphere. I cannot think the Roman climate healthy in any of its moods that I have experienced. Close on the other side of the road are the ruins of a Gothic chapel, little more than a few bare walls and painted windows, and some other fragmentary structures which we did not particularly examine. U---- and I clambered through a gap in the wall, extending from the basement of the tomb, and thus, getting into the field beyond, went quite round the mausoleum and the remains of the castle connected with it. The latter, though still high and stalwart, showed few or no architectural features of interest, being built, I think, principally of large bricks, and not to be compared to English ruins as a beautiful or venerable object. A little way beyond Cecilia Metella's tomb, the road still shows a specimen of the ancient Roman pavement, composed of broad, flat flagstones, a good deal cracked and worn, but sound enough, probably, to outlast the little cubes which make the other portions of the road so uncomfortable. We turned back from this point and soon re-entered the gate of St. Sebastian, which is flanked by two small towers, and just within which is the old triumphal arch of Drusus,--a sturdy construction, much dilapidated as regards its architectural beauty, but rendered far more picturesque than it could have been in its best days by a crown of verdure on its head. Probably so much of the dust of the highway has risen in clouds and settled there, that sufficient soil for shrubbery to root itself has thus been collected, by small annual contributions, in the course of two thousand years. A little farther towards the city we turned aside from the Appian Way, and came to the site of some ancient Columbaria, close by what seemed to partake of the character of a villa and a farm-house. A man came out of the house and unlocked a door in a low building, apparently quite modern; but on entering we found ourselves looking into a large, square chamber, sunk entirely beneath the surface of the ground. A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in each row. Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium. Each semicircular niche was about a foot in its semidiameter. In the centre of this subterranean chamber was a solid square column, or pier, rising to the roof, and containing other niches of the same pattern, besides one that was high and deep, rising to the height of a man from the floor on each of the four sides. In every one of the semicircular niches were two round holes covered with an earthen plate, and in each hole were ashes and little fragments of bones,--the ashes and bones of the dead, whose names were inscribed in Roman capitals on marble slabs inlaid into the wall over each individual niche. Very likely the great ones in the central pier had contained statues, or busts, or large urns; indeed, I remember that some such things were there, as well as bas-reliefs in the walls; but hardly more than the general aspect of this strange place remains in my mind. It was the Columbarium of the connections or dependants of the Caesars; and the impression left on me was, that this mode of disposing of the dead was infinitely preferable to any which has been adopted since that day. The handful or two of dry dust and bits of dry bones in each of the small round holes had nothing disgusting in them, and they are no drier now than they were when first deposited there. I would rather have my ashes scattered over the soil to help the growth of the grass and daisies; but still I should not murmur much at having them decently pigeon-holed in a Roman tomb. After ascending out of this chamber of the dead, we looked down into another similar one, containing the ashes of Pompey's household, which was discovered only a very few years ago. Its arrangement was the same as that first described, except that it had no central pier with a passage round it, as the former had. While we were down in the first chamber the proprietor of the spot--a half-gentlemanly and very affable kind of person--came to us, and explained the arrangements of the Columbarium, though, indeed, we understood them better by their own aspect than by his explanation. The whole soil around his dwelling is elevated much above the level of the road, and it is probable that, if he chose to excavate, he might bring to light many more sepulchral chambers, and find his profit in them too, by disposing of the urns and busts. What struck me as much as anything was the neatness of these subterranean apartments, which were quite as fit to sleep in as most of those occupied by living Romans; and, having undergone no wear and tear, they were in as good condition as on the day they were built. In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows on each side, besides those on the middle pier. All difficulty in finding space for the dead would be obviated by returning to the ancient fashion of reducing them to ashes,--the only objection, though a very serious one, being the quantity of fuel that it would require. But perhaps future chemists may discover some better means of consuming or dissolving this troublesome mortality of ours. We got into the carriage again, and, driving farther towards the city, came to the tomb of the Scipios, of the exterior of which I retain no very definite idea. It was close upon the Appian Way, however, though separated from it by a high fence, and accessible through a gateway, leading into a court. I think the tomb is wholly subterranean, and that the ground above it is covered with the buildings of a farm-house; but of this I cannot be certain, as we were led immediately into a dark, underground passage, by an elderly peasant, of a cheerful and affable demeanor. As soon as he had brought us into the twilight of the tomb, he lighted a long wax taper for each of us, and led us groping into blacker and blacker darkness. Even little R----- followed courageously in the procession, which looked very picturesque as we glanced backward or forward, and beheld a twinkling line of seven lights, glimmering faintly on our faces, and showing nothing beyond. The passages and niches of the tomb seem to have been hewn and hollowed out of the rock, not built by any art of masonry; but the walls were very dark, almost black, and our tapers so dim that I could not gain a sufficient breadth of view to ascertain what kind of place it was. It was very dark, indeed; the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky could not be darker. The rough-hewn roof was within touch, and sometimes we had to stoop to avoid hitting our heads; it was covered with damps, which collected and fell upon us in occasional drops. The passages, besides being narrow, were so irregular and crooked, that, after going a little way, it would have been impossible to return upon our steps without the help of the guide; and we appeared to be taking quite an extensive ramble underground, though in reality I suppose the tomb includes no great space. At several turns of our dismal way, the guide pointed to inscriptions in Roman capitals, commemorating various members of the Scipio family who were buried here; among them, a son of Scipio Africanus, who himself had his death and burial in a foreign land. All these inscriptions, however, are copies,--the originals, which were really found here, having been removed to the Vatican. Whether any bones and ashes have been left, or whether any were found, I do not know. It is not, at all events, a particularly interesting spot, being such shapeless blackness, and a mere dark hole, requiring a stronger illumination than that of our tapers to distinguish it from any other cellar. I did, at one place, see a sort of frieze, rather roughly sculptured; and, as we returned towards the twilight of the entrance-passage, I discerned a large spider, who fled hastily away from our tapers,--the solitary living inhabitant of the tomb of the Scipios. One visit that we made, and I think it was before entering the city gates, I forgot to mention. It was to an old edifice, formerly called the Temple of Bacchus, but now supposed to have been the Temple of Virtue and Honor. The interior consists of a vaulted hall, which was converted from its pagan consecration into a church or chapel, by the early Christians; and the ancient marble pillars of the temple may still be seen built in with the brick and stucco of the later occupants. There is an altar, and other tokens of a Catholic church, and high towards the ceiling, there are some frescos of saints or angels, very curious specimens of mediaeval, and earlier than mediaeval art. Nevertheless, the place impressed me as still rather pagan than Christian. What is most remarkable about this spot or this vicinity lies in the fact that the Fountain of Egeria was formerly supposed to be close at hand; indeed, the custode of the chapel still claims the spot as the identical one consecrated by the legend. There is a dark grove of trees, not far from the door of the temple; but Murray, a highly essential nuisance on such excursions as this, throws such overwhelming doubt, or rather incredulity, upon the site, that I seized upon it as a pretext for not going thither. In fact, my small capacity for sight-seeing was already more than satisfied. On account of ------ I am sorry that we did not see the grotto, for her enthusiasm is as fresh as the waters of Egeria's well can be, and she has poetical faith enough to light her cheerfully through all these mists of incredulity. Our visits to sepulchral places ended with Scipio's tomb, whence we returned to our dwelling, and Miss M------ came to dine with us. March 10th.--On Saturday last, a very rainy day, we went to the Sciarra Palace, and took U---- with us. It is on the Corso, nearly opposite to the Piazza Colonna. It has (Heaven be praised!) but four rooms of pictures, among which, however, are several very celebrated ones. Only a few of these remain in my memory,--Raphael's "Violin Player," which I am willing to accept as a good picture; and Leonardo da Vinci's "Vanity and Modesty," which also I can bring up before my mind's eye, and find it very beautiful, although one of the faces has an affected smile, which I have since seen on another picture by the same artist, Joanna of Aragon. The most striking picture in the collection, I think, is Titian's "Bella Donna,"--the only one of Titian's works that I have yet seen which makes an impression on me corresponding with his fame. It is a very splendid and very scornful lady, as beautiful and as scornful as Gainsborough's Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type. There were two Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy. All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long while since they were cleaned or varnished. The light was so scanty, too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the palace, that scarcely anything could be fairly made out. [I cannot refrain from observing here, that Mr. Hawthorne's inexorable demand for perfection in all things leads him to complain of grimy pictures and tarnished frames and faded frescos, distressing beyond measure to eyes that never failed to see everything before him with the keenest apprehension. The usual careless observation of people both of the good and the imperfect is much more comfortable in this imperfect world. But the insight which Mr. Hawthorne possessed was only equalled by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived, from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not, therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy him, or rather alone not give him actual pain. It may give an idea of this exquisite nicety of feeling to mention, that one day he took in his fingers a half-bloomed rose, without blemish, and, smiling with an infinite joy, remarked, "This is perfect. On earth a flower only can be perfect."--ED.] The palace is about two hundred and fifty years old, and looks as if it had never been a very cheerful place; most shabbily and scantily furnished, moreover, and as chill as any cellar. There is a small balcony, looking down on the Corso, which probably has often been filled with a merry little family party, in the carnivals of days long past. It has faded frescos, and tarnished gilding, and green blinds, and a few damask chairs still remain in it. On Monday we all went to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, and saw as much of the sculpture as we could in the three hours during which the public are admissible. There were a few things which I really enjoyed, and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art, and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvedere as something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again. I felt the Laocoon very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free from dust. A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it full of soup. Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the most splendid in Rome. The entrance is from the Corso into a court, surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and ornamental shrubbery in the centre. The apartments containing pictures and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very little. I am of opinion that good pictures are quite as rare as good poets; and I do not see why we should pique ourselves on admiring any but the very best. One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of men, from generation to generation, till its colors fade or blacken out of sight, and its canvas rots away; the rest should be put in garrets, or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are shelved when their little day is over. Nevertheless, there was one long gallery containing many pictures that I should be glad to see again under more favorable circumstances, that is, separately, and where I might contemplate them quite undisturbed, reclining in an easy-chair. At one end of the long vista of this gallery is a bust of the present Prince Doria, a smooth, sharp-nosed, rather handsome young man, and at the other end his princess, an English lady of the Talbot family, apparently a blonde, with a simple and sweet expression. There is a noble and striking portrait of the old Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, by Sebastian del Piombo, and some other portraits and busts of the family. In the whole immense range of rooms I saw but a single fireplace, and that so deep in the wall that no amount of blaze would raise the atmosphere of the room ten degrees. If the builder of the palace, or any of his successors, have committed crimes worthy of Tophet, it would be a still worse punishment for him to wander perpetually through this suite of rooms on the cold floors of polished brick tiles or marble or mosaic, growing a little chiller and chiller through every moment of eternity,-- or, at least, till the palace crumbles down upon him. Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze up at the dark old pictures,--the ugly ghosts of what may once have been beautiful. I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape. There were two or three landscapes of Claude in this palace, which I doubt not would have been exquisite if they had been in the condition of those in the British National Gallery; but here they looked most forlorn, and even their sunshine was sunless. The merits of historical painting may be quite independent of the attributes that give pleasure, and a superficial ugliness may even heighten the effect; but not so of landscapes. Via Porta, Palazzo Larazani, March 11th.--To-day we called at Mr. Thompson's studio, and . . . . he had on the easel a little picture of St. Peter released from prison by the angel, which I saw once before. It is very beautiful indeed, and deeply and spiritually conceived, and I wish I could afford to have it finished for myself. I looked again, too, at his Georgian slave, and admired it as much as at first view; so very warm and rich it is, so sensuously beautiful, and with an expression of higher life and feeling within. I do not think there is a better painter than Mr. Thompson living,--among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful, and religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and, taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those. In painting, as in literature, I suspect there is something in the productions of the day that takes the fancy more than the works of any past age,--not greater merit, nor nearly so great, but better suited to this very present time. After leaving him, we went to the Piazza de' Termini, near the Baths of Diocletian, and found our way with some difficulty to Crawford's studio. It occupies several great rooms, connected with the offices of the Villa Negroni; and all these rooms were full of plaster casts and a few works in marble,--principally portions of his huge Washington monument, which he left unfinished at his death. Close by the door at which we entered stood a gigantic figure of Mason, in bag-wig, and the coat, waistcoat, breeches, and knee and shoe buckles of the last century, the enlargement of these unheroic matters to far more than heroic size having a very odd effect. There was a figure of Jefferson on the same scale; another of Patrick Henry, besides a horse's head, and other portions of the equestrian group which is to cover the summit of the monument. In one of the rooms was a model of the monument itself, on a scale, I should think, of about an inch to afoot. It did not impress me as having grown out of any great and genuine idea in the artist's mind, but as being merely an ingenious contrivance enough. There were also casts of statues that seemed to be intended for some other monument referring to Revolutionary times and personages; and with these were intermixed some ideal statues or groups,--a naked boy playing marbles, very beautiful; a girl with flowers; the cast of his Orpheus, of which I long ago saw the marble statue; Adam and Eve; Flora,--all with a good deal of merit, no doubt, but not a single one that justifies Crawford's reputation, or that satisfies me of his genius. They are but commonplaces in marble and plaster, such as we should not tolerate on a printed page. He seems to have been a respectable man, highly respectable, but no more, although those who knew him seem to have rated him much higher. It is said that he exclaimed, not very long before his death, that he had fifteen years of good work still in him; and he appears to have considered all his life and labor, heretofore, as only preparatory to the great things that he was to achieve hereafter. I should say, on the contrary, that he was a man who had done his best, and had done it early; for his Orpheus is quite as good as anything else we saw in his studio. People were at work chiselling several statues in marble from the plaster models,--a very interesting process, and which I should think a doubtful and hazardous one; but the artists say that there is no risk of mischief, and that the model is sure to be accurately repeated in the marble. These persons, who do what is considered the mechanical part of the business, are often themselves sculptors, and of higher reputation than those who employ them. It is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster. There is almost as much difference as between flesh and spirit. The floor of one of the rooms was burdened with immense packages, containing parts of the Washington monument, ready to be forwarded to its destination. When finished, and set up, it will probably make a very splendid appearance, by its height, its mass, its skilful execution; and will produce a moral effect through its images of illustrious men, and the associations that connect it with our Revolutionary history; but I do not think it will owe much to artistic force of thought or depth of feeling. It is certainly, in one sense, a very foolish and illogical piece of work,--Washington, mounted on an uneasy steed, on a very narrow space, aloft in the air, whence a single step of the horse backward, forward, or on either side, must precipitate him; and several of his contemporaries standing beneath him, not looking up to wonder at his predicament, but each intent on manifesting his own personality to the world around. They have nothing to do with one another, nor with Washington, nor with any great purpose which all are to work out together. March 14th.--On Friday evening I dined at Mr. T. B. Read's, the poet and artist, with a party composed of painters and sculptors,--the only exceptions being the American banker and an American tourist who has given Mr. Read a commission. Next to me at table sat Mr. Gibson, the English sculptor, who, I suppose, stands foremost in his profession at this day. He must be quite an old man now, for it was whispered about the table that he is known to have been in Rome forty-two years ago, and he himself spoke to me of spending thirty-seven years here, before he once returned home. I should hardly take him to be sixty, however, his hair being more dark than gray, his forehead unwrinkled, his features unwithered, his eye undimmed, though his beard is somewhat venerable. . . . He has a quiet, self-contained aspect, and, being a bachelor, has doubtless spent a calm life among his clay and marble, meddling little with the world, and entangling himself with no cares beyond his studio. He did not talk a great deal; but enough to show that he is still an Englishman in many sturdy traits, though his accent has something foreign about it. His conversation was chiefly about India, and other topics of the day, together with a few reminiscences of people in Liverpool, where he once resided. There was a kind of simplicity both in his manner and matter, and nothing very remarkable in the latter. . . . The gist of what he said (upon art) was condemnatory of the Pre-Raphaelite modern school of painters, of whom he seemed to spare none, and of their works nothing; though he allowed that the old Pre-Raphaelites had some exquisite merits, which the moderns entirely omit in their imitations. In his own art, he said the aim should be to find out the principles on which the Greek sculptors wrought, and to do the work of this day on those principles and in their spirit; a fair doctrine enough, I should think, but which Mr. Gibson can scarcely be said to practise. . . . The difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and himself is deep and genuine, they being literalists and realists, in a certain sense, and he a pagan idealist. Methinks they have hold of the best end of the matter. March 18th.--To-day, it being very bright and mild, we set out, at noon, for an expedition to the Temple of Vesta, though I did not feel much inclined for walking, having been ill and feverish for two or three days past with a cold, which keeps renewing itself faster than I can get rid of it. We kept along on this side of the Corso, and crossed the Forum, skirting along the Capitoline Hill, and thence towards the Circus Maximus. On our way, looking down a cross street, we saw a heavy arch, and, on examination, made it out to be the Arch of Janus Quadrifrons, standing in the Forum Boarium. Its base is now considerably below the level of the surrounding soil, and there is a church or basilica close by, and some mean edifices looking down upon it. There is something satisfactory in this arch, from the immense solidity of its structure. It gives the idea, in the first place, of a solid mass constructed of huge blocks of marble, which time can never wear away, nor earthquakes shake down; and then this solid mass is penetrated by two arched passages, meeting in the centre. There are empty niches, three in a row, and, I think, two rows on each face; but there seems to have been very little effort to make it a beautiful object. On the top is some brickwork, the remains of a mediaeval fortress built by the Frangipanis, looking very frail and temporary being brought thus in contact with the antique strength of the arch. A few yards off, across the street, and close beside the basilica, is what appears to be an ancient portal, with carved bas-reliefs, and an inscription which I could not make out. Some Romans were lying dormant in the sun, on the steps of the basilica; indeed, now that the sun is getting warmer, they seem to take advantage of every quiet nook to bask in, and perhaps to go to sleep. We had gone but a little way from the arch, and across the Circus Maximus, when we saw the Temple of Vesta before us, on the hank of the Tiber, which, however, we could not see behind it. It is a most perfectly preserved Roman ruin, and very beautiful, though so small that, in a suitable locality, one would take it rather for a garden-house than an ancient temple. A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn and a little battered, though but one of them broken, surround the solid structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the pillars, the whole covered by a modern roof which looks like wood, and disgraces and deforms the elegant little building. This roof resembles, as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian order, and when they were new and the marble snow-white and sharply carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome; but so small an edifice does not appear well as a ruin. Within view of it, and, indeed, a very little way off, is the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, which likewise retains its antique form in better preservation than we generally find a Roman ruin, although the Ionic pillars are now built up with blocks of stone and patches of brickwork, the whole constituting a church which is fixed against the side of a tall edifice, the nature of which I do not know. I forgot to say that we gained admittance into the Temple of Vesta, and found the interior a plain cylinder of marble, about ten paces across, and fitted up as a chapel, where the Virgin takes the place of Vesta. In very close vicinity we came upon the Ponto Rotto, the old Pons Emilius which was broken down long ago, and has recently been pieced out by connecting a suspension bridge with the old piers. We crossed by this bridge, paying a toll of a baioccho each, and stopped in the midst of the river to look at the Temple of Vesta, which shows well, right on the brink of the Tiber. We fancied, too, that we could discern, a little farther down the river, the ruined and almost submerged piers of the Sublician bridge, which Horatius Cocles defended. The Tiber here whirls rapidly along, and Horatius must have had a perilous swim for his life, and the enemy a fair mark at his head with their arrows. I think this is the most picturesque part of the Tiber in its passage through Rome. After crossing the bridge, we kept along the right bank of the river, through the dirty and hard-hearted streets of Trastevere (which have in no respect the advantage over those of hither Rome), till we reached St. Peter's. We saw a family sitting before their door on the pavement in the narrow and sunny street, engaged in their domestic avocations,--the old woman spinning with a wheel. I suppose the people now begin to live out of doors. We entered beneath the colonnade of St. Peter's and immediately became sensible of an evil odor,--the bad odor of our fallen nature, which there is no escaping in any nook of Rome. . . . Between the pillars of the colonnade, however, we had the pleasant spectacle of the two fountains, sending up their lily-shaped gush, with rainbows shining in their falling spray. Parties of French soldiers, as usual, were undergoing their drill in the piazza. When we entered the church, the long, dusty sunbeams were falling aslantwise through the dome and through the chancel behind it. . . . March 23d.--On the 21st we all went to the Coliseum, and enjoyed ourselves there in the bright, warm sun,--so bright and warm that we were glad to get into the shadow of the walls and under the arches, though, after all, there was the freshness of March in the breeze that stirred now and then. J----- and baby found some beautiful flowers growing round about the Coliseum; and far up towards the top of the walls we saw tufts of yellow wall-flowers and a great deal of green grass growing along the ridges between the arches. The general aspect of the place, however, is somewhat bare, and does not compare favorably with an English ruin both on account of the lack of ivy and because the material is chiefly brick, the stone and marble having been stolen away by popes and cardinals to build their palaces. While we sat within the circle, many people, of both sexes, passed through, kissing the iron cross which stands in the centre, thereby gaining an indulgence of seven years, I believe. In front of several churches I have seen an inscription in Latin, "INDULGENTIA PLENARIA ET PERPETUA PRO CUNCTIS MORTUIS ET VIVIS"; than which, it seems to me, nothing more could be asked or desired. The terms of this great boon are not mentioned. Leaving the Coliseum, we went and sat down in the vicinity of the Arch of Constantine, and J----- and R----- went in quest of lizards. J----- soon caught a large one with two tails; one, a sort of afterthought, or appendix, or corollary to the original tail, and growing out from it instead of from the body of the lizard. These reptiles are very abundant, and J----- has already brought home several, which make their escape and appear occasionally darting to and fro on the carpet. Since we have been here, J----- has taken up various pursuits in turn. First he voted himself to gathering snail-shells, of which there are many sorts; afterwards he had a fever for marbles, pieces of which he found on the banks of the Tiber, just on the edge of its muddy waters, and in the Palace of the Caesars, the Baths of Caracalla, and indeed wherever else his fancy led him; verde antique, rosso antico, porphyry, giallo antico, serpentine, sometimes fragments of bas-reliefs and mouldings, bits of mosaic, still firmly stuck together, on which the foot of a Caesar had perhaps once trodden; pieces of Roman glass, with the iridescence glowing on them; and all such things, of which the soil of Rome is full. It would not be difficult, from the spoil of his boyish rambles, to furnish what would be looked upon as a curious and valuable museum in America. Yesterday we went to the sculpture-galleries of the Vatican. I think I enjoy these noble galleries and their contents and beautiful arrangement better than anything else in the way of art, and often I seem to have a deep feeling of something wonderful in what I look at. The Laocoon on this visit impressed me not less than before; it is such a type of human beings, struggling with an inextricable trouble, and entangled in a complication which they cannot free themselves from by their own efforts, and out of which Heaven alone can help them. It was a most powerful mind, and one capable of reducing a complex idea to unity, that imagined this group. I looked at Canova's Perseus, and thought it exceedingly beautiful, but, found myself less and less contented after a moment or two, though I could not tell why. Afterwards, looking at the Apollo, the recollection of the Perseus disgusted me, and yet really I cannot explain how one is better than the other. I was interested in looking at the busts of the Triumvirs, Antony, Augustus, and Lepidus. The first two are men of intellect, evidently, though they do not recommend themselves to one's affections by their physiognomy; but Lepidus has the strangest, most commonplace countenance that can be imagined,--small-featured, weak, such a face as you meet anywhere in a man of no mark, but are amazed to find in one of the three foremost men of the world. I suppose that it is these weak and shallow men, when chance raises them above their proper sphere, who commit enormous crimes without any such restraint as stronger men would feel, and without any retribution in the depth of their conscience. These old Roman busts, of which there are so many in the Vatican, have often a most lifelike aspect, a striking individuality. One recognizes them as faithful portraits, just as certainly as if the living originals were standing beside them. The arrangement of the hair and beard too, in many cases, is just what we see now, the fashions of two thousand years ago having come round again. March 25th.--On Tuesday we went to breakfast at William Story's in the Palazzo Barberini. We had a very pleasant time. He is one of the most agreeable men I know in society. He showed us a note from Thackeray, an invitation to dinner, written in hieroglyphics, with great fun and pictorial merit. He spoke of an expansion of the story of Blue Beard, which he himself had either written or thought of writing, in which the contents of the several chambers which Fatima opened, before arriving at the fatal one, were to be described. This idea has haunted my mind ever since, and if it had but been my own I am pretty sure that it would develop itself into something very rich. I mean to press William Story to work it out. The chamber of Blue Beard, too (and this was a part of his suggestion), might be so handled as to become powerfully interesting. Were I to take up the story I would create an interest by suggesting a secret in the first chamber, which would develop itself more and more in every successive hall of the great palace, and lead the wife irresistibly to the chamber of horrors. After breakfast, we went to the Barberini Library, passing through the vast hall, which occupies the central part of the palace. It is the most splendid domestic hall I have seen, eighty feet in length at least, and of proportionate breadth and height; and the vaulted ceiling is entirely covered, to its utmost edge and remotest corners, with a brilliant painting in fresco, looking like a whole heaven of angelic people descending towards the floor. The effect is indescribably gorgeous. On one side stands a Baldacchino, or canopy of state, draped with scarlet cloth, and fringed with gold embroidery; the scarlet indicating that the palace is inhabited by a cardinal. Green would be appropriate to a prince. In point of fact, the Palazzo Barberini is inhabited by a cardinal, a prince, and a duke, all belonging to the Barberini family, and each having his separate portion of the palace, while their servants have a common territory and meeting-ground in this noble hall. After admiring it for a few minutes, we made our exit by a door on the opposite side, and went up the spiral staircase of marble to the library, where we were received by an ecclesiastic, who belongs to the Barberini household, and, I believe, was born in it. He is a gentle, refined, quiet-looking man, as well he may be, having spent all his life among these books, where few people intrude, and few cares can come. He showed us a very old Bible in parchment, a specimen of the earliest printing, beautifully ornamented with pictures, and some monkish illuminations of indescribable delicacy and elaboration. No artist could afford to produce such work, if the life that he thus lavished on one sheet of parchment had any value to him, either for what could be done or enjoyed in it. There are about eight thousand volumes in this library, and, judging by their outward aspect, the collection must be curious and valuable; but having another engagement, we could spend only a little time here. We had a hasty glance, however, of some poems of Tasso, in his own autograph. We then went to the Palazzo Galitzin, where dwell the Misses Weston, with whom we lunched, and where we met a French abbe, an agreeable man, and an antiquarian, under whose auspices two of the ladies and ourselves took carriage for the Castle of St. Angelo. Being admitted within the external gateway, we found ourselves in the court of guard, as I presume it is called, where the French soldiers were playing with very dirty cards, or lounging about, in military idleness. They were well behaved and courteous, and when we had intimated our wish to see the interior of the castle, a soldier soon appeared, with a large unlighted torch in his hand, ready to guide us. There is an outer wall, surrounding the solid structure of Hadrian's tomb; to which there is access by one or two drawbridges; the entrance to the tomb, or castle, not being at the base, but near its central height. The ancient entrance, by which Hadrian's ashes, and those of other imperial personages, were probably brought into this tomb, has been walled up,--perhaps ever since the last emperor was buried here. We were now in a vaulted passage, both lofty and broad, which circles round the whole interior of the tomb, from the base to the summit. During many hundred years, the passage was filled with earth and rubbish, and forgotten, and it is but partly excavated, even now; although we found it a long, long and gloomy descent by torchlight to the base of the vast mausoleum. The passage was once lined and vaulted with precious marbles (which are now entirely gone), and paved with fine mosaics, portions of which still remain; and our guide lowered his flaming torch to show them to us, here and there, amid the earthy dampness over which we trod. It is strange to think what splendor and costly adornment were here wasted on the dead. After we had descended to the bottom of this passage, and again retraced our steps to the highest part, the guide took a large cannon-ball, and sent it, with his whole force, rolling down the hollow, arched way, rumbling, and reverberating, and bellowing forth long thunderous echoes, and winding up with a loud, distant crash, that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. We saw the place, near the centre of the mausoleum, and lighted from above, through an immense thickness of stone and brick, where the ashes of the emperor and his fellow-slumberers were found. It is as much as twelve centuries, very likely, since they were scattered to the winds, for the tomb has been nearly or quite that space of time a fortress; The tomb itself is merely the base and foundation of the castle, and, being so massively built, it serves just as well for the purpose as if it were a solid granite rock. The mediaeval fortress, with its antiquity of more than a thousand years, and having dark and deep dungeons of its own, is but a modern excrescence on the top of Hadrian's tomb. We now ascended towards the upper region, and were led into the vaults which used to serve as a prison, but which, if I mistake not, are situated above the ancient structure, although they seem as damp and subterranean as if they were fifty feet under the earth. We crept down to them through narrow and ugly passages, which the torchlight would not illuminate, and, stooping under a low, square entrance, we followed the guide into a small, vaulted room,--not a room, but an artificial cavern, remote from light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in a sepulchre so long! Adjacent to Beatrice's prison, but not communicating with it, was that of her step-mother; and next to the latter was one that interested me almost as much as Beatrice's,--that of Benvenuto Cellini, who was confined here, I believe, for an assassination. All these prison vaults are more horrible than can be imagined without seeing them; but there are worse places here, for the guide lifted a trap-door in one of the passages, and held his torch down into an inscrutable pit beneath our feet. It was an oubliette, a dungeon where the prisoner might be buried alive, and never come forth again, alive or dead. Groping about among these sad precincts, we saw various other things that looked very dismal; but at last emerged into the sunshine, and ascended from one platform and battlement to another, till we found ourselves right at the feet of the Archangel Michael. He has stood there in bronze for I know not how many hundred years, in the act of sheathing a (now) rusty sword, such being the attitude in which he appeared to one of the popes in a vision, in token that a pestilence which was then desolating Rome was to be stayed. There is a fine view from the lofty station over Rome and the whole adjacent country, and the abbe pointed out the site of Ardea, of Corioli, of Veii, and other places renowned in story. We were ushered, too, into the French commandant's quarters in the castle. There is a large hall, ornamented with frescos, and accessible from this a drawing-room, comfortably fitted up, and where we saw modern furniture, and a chess-board, and a fire burning clear, and other symptoms that the place had perhaps just been vacated by civilized and kindly people. But in one corner of the ceiling the abbe pointed out a ring, by which, in the times of mediaeval anarchy, when popes, cardinals, and barons were all by the ears together, a cardinal was hanged. It was not an assassination, but a legal punishment, and he was executed in the best apartment of the castle as an act of grace. The fortress is a straight-lined structure on the summit of the immense round tower of Hadrian's tomb; and to make out the idea of it we must throw in drawbridges, esplanades, piles of ancient marble balls for cannon; battlements and embrasures, lying high in the breeze and sunshine, and opening views round the whole horizon; accommodation for the soldiers; and many small beds in a large room. How much mistaken was the emperor in his expectation of a stately, solemn repose for his ashes through all the coming centuries, as long as the world should endure! Perhaps his ghost glides up and down disconsolate, in that spiral passage which goes from top to bottom of the tomb, while the barbarous Gauls plant themselves in his very mausoleum to keep the imperial city in awe. Leaving the Castle of St. Angelo, we drove, still on the same side of the Tiber, to the Villa Pamfili, which lies a short distance beyond the walls. As we passed through one of the gates (I think it was that of San Pancrazio) the abbe pointed out the spot where the Constable de Bourbon was killed while attempting to scale the walls. If we are to believe Benvenuto Cellini, it was he who shot the constable. The road to the villa is not very interesting, lying (as the roads in the vicinity of Rome often do) between very high walls, admitting not a glimpse of the surrounding country; the road itself white and dusty, with no verdant margin of grass or border of shrubbery. At the portal of the villa we found many carriages in waiting, for the Prince Doria throws open the grounds to all comers, and on a pleasant day like this they are probably sure to be thronged. We left our carriage just within the entrance, and rambled among these beautiful groves, admiring the live-oak trees, and the stone-pines, which latter are truly a majestic tree, with tall columnar stems, supporting a cloud-like density of boughs far aloft, and not a straggling branch between there and the ground. They stand in straight rows, but are now so ancient and venerable as to have lost the formal look of a plantation, and seem like a wood that might have arranged itself almost of its own will. Beneath them is a flower-strewn turf, quite free of underbrush. We found open fields and lawns, moreover, all abloom with anemones, white and rose-colored and purple and golden, and far larger than could be found out of Italy, except in hot-houses. Violets, too, were abundant and exceedingly fragrant. When we consider that all this floral exuberance occurs in the midst of March, there does not appear much ground for complaining of the Roman climate; and so long ago as the first week of February I found daisies among the grass, on the sunny side of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. At this very moment I suppose the country within twenty miles of Boston may be two feet deep with snow, and the streams solid with ice. We wandered about the grounds, and found them very beautiful indeed; nature having done much for them by an undulating variety of surface, and art having added a good many charms, which have all the better effect now that decay and neglect have thrown a natural grace over them likewise. There is an artificial ruin, so picturesque that it betrays itself; weather-beaten statues, and pieces of sculpture, scattered here and there; an artificial lake, with upgushing fountains; cascades, and broad-bosomed coves, and long, canal-like reaches, with swans taking their delight upon them. I never saw such a glorious and resplendent lustre of white as shone between the wings of two of these swans. It was really a sight to see, and not to be imagined beforehand. Angels, no doubt, have just such lustrous wings as those. English swans partake of the dinginess of the atmosphere, and their plumage has nothing at all to be compared to this; in fact, there is nothing like it in the world, unless it be the illuminated portion of a fleecy, summer cloud. While we were sauntering along beside this piece of water, we were surprised to see U---- on the other side. She had come hither with E---- S------ and her two little brothers, and with our R-----, the whole under the charge of Mrs. Story's nursery-maids. U---- and E---- crossed, not over, but beneath the water, through a grotto, and exchanged greetings with us. Then, as it was getting towards sunset and cool, we took our departure; the abbe, as we left the grounds, taking me aside to give me a glimpse of a Columbarium, which descends into the earth to about the depth to which an ordinary house might rise above it. These grounds, it is said, formed the country residence of the Emperor Galba, and he was buried here after his assassination. It is a sad thought that so much natural beauty and long refinement of picturesque culture is thrown away, the villa being uninhabitable during all the most delightful season of the year on account of malaria. There is truly a curse on Rome and all its neighborhood. On our way home we passed by the great Paolina fountain, and were assailed by many beggars during the short time we stopped to look at it. It is a very copious fountain, but not so beautiful as the Trevi, taking into view merely the water-gush of the latter. March 26th.--Yesterday, between twelve and one, our whole family went to the Villa Ludovisi, the entrance to which is at the termination of a street which passes out of the Piazza Barberini, and it is no very great distance from our own street, Via Porta Pinciana. The grounds, though very extensive, are wholly within the walls of the city, which skirt them, and comprise a part of what were formerly the gardens of Sallust. The villa is now the property of Prince Piombini, a ticket from whom procured us admission. A little within the gateway, to the right, is a casino, containing two large rooms filled with sculpture, much of which is very valuable. A colossal head of Juno, I believe, is considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also to represent Electra and Orestes. The sitting statue of Mars is very fine; so is the Arria and Paetus; so are many other busts and figures. By and by we left the casino and wandered among the grounds, threading interminable alleys of cypress, through the long vistas of which we could see here and there a statue, an urn, a pillar, a temple, or garden-house, or a bas-relief against the wall. It seems as if there must have been a time, and not so very long ago,--when it was worth while to spend money and thought upon the ornamentation of grounds in the neighborhood of Rome. That time is past, however, and the result is very melancholy; for great beauty has been produced, but it can be enjoyed in its perfection only at the peril of one's life. . . . For my part, and judging from my own experience, I suspect that the Roman atmosphere, never wholesome, is always more or less poisonous. We came to another and larger casino remote from the gateway, in which the Prince resides during two months of the year. It was now under repair, but we gained admission, as did several other visitors, and saw in the entrance-hall the Aurora of Guercino, painted in fresco on the ceiling. There is beauty in the design; but the painter certainly was most unhappy in his black shadows, and in the work before us they give the impression of a cloudy and lowering morning which is likely enough to turn to rain by and by. After viewing the fresco we mounted by a spiral staircase to a lofty terrace, and found Rome at our feet, and, far off, the Sabine and Alban mountains, some of them still capped with snow. In another direction there was a vast plain, on the horizon of which, could our eyes have reached to its verge, we might perhaps have seen the Mediterranean Sea. After enjoying the view and the warm sunshine we descended, and went in quest of the gardens of Sallust, but found no satisfactory remains of them. One of the most striking objects in the first casino was a group by Bernini,--Pluto, an outrageously masculine and strenuous figure, heavily bearded, ravishing away a little, tender Proserpine, whom he holds aloft, while his forcible gripe impresses itself into her soft virgin flesh. It is very disagreeable, but it makes one feel that Bernini was a man of great ability. There are some works in literature that bear an analogy to his works in sculpture, when great power is lavished a little outside of nature, and therefore proves to be only a fashion,--and not permanently adapted to the tastes of mankind. March 27th.--Yesterday forenoon my wife and I went to St. Peter's to see the pope pray at the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. We found a good many people in the church, but not an inconvenient number; indeed, not so many as to make any remarkable show in the great nave, nor even in front of the chapel. A detachment of the Swiss Guard, in their strange, picturesque, harlequin-like costume, were on duty before the chapel, in which the wax tapers were all lighted, and a prie-dieu was arranged near the shrine, and covered with scarlet velvet. On each side, along the breadth of the side aisle, were placed seats, covered with rich tapestry or carpeting; and some gentlemen and ladies--English, probably, or American--had comfortably deposited themselves here, but were compelled to move by the guards before the pope's entrance. His Holiness should have appeared precisely at twelve, but we waited nearly half an hour beyond that time; and it seemed to me particularly ill-mannered in the pope, who owes the courtesy of being punctual to the people, if not to St. Peter. By and by, however, there was a stir; the guard motioned to us to stand away from the benches, against the backs of which we had been leaning; the spectators in the nave looked towards the door, as if they beheld something approaching; and first, there appeared some cardinals, in scarlet skull-caps and purple robes, intermixed with some of the Noble Guard and other attendants. It was not a very formal and stately procession, but rather straggled onward, with ragged edges, the spectators standing aside to let it pass, and merely bowing, or perhaps slightly bending the knee, as good Catholics are accustomed to do when passing before the shrines of saints. Then, in the midst of the purple cardinals, all of whom were gray-haired men, appeared a stout old man, with a white skull-cap, a scarlet, gold-embroidered cape falling over his shoulders, and a white silk robe, the train of which was borne up by an attendant. He walked slowly, with a sort of dignified movement, stepping out broadly, and planting his feet (on which were red shoes) flat upon the pavement, as if he were not much accustomed to locomotion, and perhaps had known a twinge of the gout. His face was kindly and venerable, but not particularly impressive. Arriving at the scarlet-covered prie-dieu, he kneeled down and took off his white skull-cap; the cardinals also kneeled behind and on either side of him, taking off their scarlet skull-caps; while the Noble Guard remained standing, six on one side of his Holiness and six on the other. The pope bent his head upon the prie-dieu, and seemed to spend three or four minutes in prayer; then rose, and all the purple cardinals, and bishops, and priests, of whatever degree, rose behind and beside him. Next, he went to kiss St. Peter's toe; at least I believe he kissed it, but I was not near enough to be certain; and lastly, he knelt down, and directed his devotions towards the high altar. This completed the ceremonies, and his Holiness left the church by a side door, making a short passage into the Vatican. I am very glad I have seen the pope, because now he may be crossed out of the list of sights to be seen. His proximity impressed me kindly and favorably towards him, and I did not see one face among all his cardinals (in whose number, doubtless, is his successor) which I would so soon trust as that of Pio Nono. This morning I walked as far as the gate of San Paolo, and, on approaching it, I saw the gray sharp pyramid of Caius Cestius pointing upward close to the two dark-brown, battlemented Gothic towers of the gateway, each of these very different pieces of architecture looking the more picturesque for the contrast of the other. Before approaching the gateway and pyramid, I walked onward, and soon came in sight of Monte Testaccio, the artificial hill made of potsherds. There is a gate admitting into the grounds around the hill, and a road encircling its base. At a distance, the hill looks greener than any other part of the landscape, and has all the curved outlines of a natural hill, resembling in shape a headless sphinx, or Saddleback Mountain, as I used to see it from Lenox. It is of very considerable height,--two or three hundred feet at least, I should say,--and well entitled, both by its elevation and the space it covers, to be reckoned among the hills of Rome. Its base is almost entirely surrounded with small structures, which seem to be used as farm-buildings. On the summit is a large iron cross, the Church having thought it expedient to redeem these shattered pipkins from the power of paganism, as it has so many other Roman ruins. There was a pathway up the hill, but I did not choose to ascend it under the hot sun, so steeply did it clamber up. There appears to be a good depth of soil on most parts of Monte Testaccio, but on some of the sides you observe precipices, bristling with fragments of red or brown earthenware, or pieces of vases of white unglazed clay; and it is evident that this immense pile is entirely composed of broken crockery, which I should hardly have thought would have aggregated to such a heap had it all been thrown here,--urns, teacups, porcelain, or earthen,--since the beginning of the world. I walked quite round the hill, and saw, at no great distance from it, the enclosure of the Protestant burial-ground, which lies so close to the pyramid of Caius Cestius that the latter may serve as a general monument to the dead. Deferring, for the present, a visit to the cemetery, or to the interior of the pyramid, I returned to the gateway of San Paolo, and, passing through it, took a view of it from the outside of the city wall. It is itself a portion of the wall, having been built into it by the Emperor Aurelian, so that about half of it lies within and half without. The brick or red stone material of the wall being so unlike the marble of the pyramid, the latter is as distinct, and seems as insulated, as if it stood alone in the centre of a plain; and really I do not think there is a more striking architectural object in Rome. It is in perfect condition, just as little ruined or decayed as on the day when the builder put the last peak on the summit; and it ascends steeply from its base, with a point so sharp that it looks as if it would hardly afford foothold to a bird. The marble was once white, but is now covered with a gray coating like that which has gathered upon the statues of Castor and Pollux on Monte Cavallo. Not one of the great blocks is displaced, nor seems likely to be through all time to come. They rest one upon another, in straight and even lines, and present a vast smooth triangle, ascending from a base of a hundred feet, and narrowing to an apex at the height of a hundred and twenty-five, the junctures of the marble slabs being so close that, in all these twenty centuries, only a few little tufts of grass, and a trailing plant or two, have succeeded in rooting themselves into the interstices. It is good and satisfactory to see anything which, being built for an enduring monument, has endured so faithfully, and has a prospect of such an interminable futurity before it. Once, indeed, it seemed likely to be buried; for three hundred years ago it had become covered to the depth of sixteen feet, but the soil has since been dug away from its base, which is now lower than that of the road which passes through the neighboring gate of San Paolo. Midway up the pyramid, cut in the marble, is an inscription in large Roman letters, still almost as legible as when first wrought. I did not return through the Paolo gateway, but kept onward, round the exterior of the wall, till I came to the gate of San Sebastiano. It was a hot and not a very interesting walk, with only a high bare wall of brick, broken by frequent square towers, on one side of the road, and a bank and hedge or a garden wall on the other. Roman roads are most inhospitable, offering no shade, and no seat, and no pleasant views of rustic domiciles; nothing but the wheel-track of white dust, without a foot path running by its side, and seldom any grassy margin to refresh the wayfarer's feet. April 3d.--A few days ago we visited the studio of Mr. ------, an American, who seems to have a good deal of vogue as a sculptor. We found a figure of Pocahontas, which he has repeated several times; another, which he calls "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," a figure of a smiling girl playing with a cat and dog, and a schoolboy mending a pen. These two last were the only ones that gave me any pleasure, or that really had any merit; for his cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects, but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality. Nevertheless, he has a group of the Prodigal Son, possessing more merit than I should have expected from Mr. ------, the son reclining his head on his father's breast, with an expression of utter weariness, at length finding perfect rest, while the father bends his benign countenance over him, and seems to receive him calmly into himself. This group (the plaster-cast standing beside it) is now taking shape out of an immense block of marble, and will be as indestructible as the Laocoon; an idea at once awful and ludicrous, when we consider that it is at best but a respectable production. I have since been told that Mr. ------ had stolen, adopted, we will rather say, the attitude and idea of the group from one executed by a student of the French Academy, and to be seen there in plaster. (We afterwards saw it in the Medici Casino.) Mr. ------ has now been ten years in Italy, and, after all this time, he is still entirely American in everything but the most external surface of his manners; scarcely Europeanized, or much modified even in that. He is a native of ------, but had his early breeding in New York, and might, for any polish or refinement that I can discern in him, still be a country shopkeeper in the interior of New York State or New England. How strange! For one expects to find the polish, the close grain and white purity of marble, in the artist who works in that noble material; but, after all, he handles club, and, judging by the specimens I have seen here, is apt to be clay, not of the finest, himself. Mr. ------ is sensible, shrewd, keen, clever; an ingenious workman, no doubt; with tact enough, and not destitute of taste; very agreeable and lively in his conversation, talking as fast and as naturally as a brook runs, without the slightest affectation. His naturalness is, in fact, a rather striking characteristic, in view of his lack of culture, while yet his life has been concerned with idealities and a beautiful art. What degree of taste he pretends to, he seems really to possess, nor did I hear a single idea from him that struck me as otherwise than sensible. He called to see us last evening, and talked for about two hours in a very amusing and interesting style, his topics being taken from his own personal experience, and shrewdly treated. He spoke much of Greenough, whom he described as an excellent critic of art, but possessed of not the slightest inventive genius. His statue of Washington, at the Capitol, is taken precisely from the Plodian Jupiter; his Chanting Cherubs are copied in marble from two figures in a picture by Raphael. He did nothing that was original with himself To-day we took R-----, and went to see Miss ------, and as her studio seems to be mixed up with Gibson's, we had an opportunity of glancing at some of his beautiful works. We saw a Venus and a Cupid, both of them tinted; and, side by side with them, other statues identical with these, except that the marble was left in its pure whiteness. We found Miss ------ in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust as she came forward to greet us. She withdrew one hand, however, and presented it cordially to my wife (whom she already knew) and to myself, without waiting for an introduction. She had on a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man's, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet, and her face was as bright and merry, and as small of feature as a child's. It looked in one aspect youthful, and yet there was something worn in it too. There never was anything so jaunty as her movement and action; she was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. I don't quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman. Miss ------ led us into a part of the extensive studio, or collection of studios, where some of her own works were to be seen: Beatrice Cenci, which did not very greatly impress me; and a monumental design, a female figure,--wholly draped even to the stockings and shoes,--in a quiet sleep. I liked this last. There was also a Puck, doubtless full of fun; but I had hardly time to glance at it. Miss ------ evidently has good gifts in her profession, and doubtless she derives great advantage from her close association with a consummate artist like Gibson; nor yet does his influence seem to interfere with the originality of her own conceptions. In one way, at least, she can hardly fail to profit,--that is, by the opportunity of showing her works to the throngs of people who go to see Gibson's own; and these are just such people as an artist would most desire to meet, and might never see in a lifetime, if left to himself. I shook hands with this frank and pleasant little person, and took leave, not without purpose of seeing her again. Within a few days, there have been many pilgrims in Rome, who come hither to attend the ceremonies of holy week, and to perform their vows, and undergo their penances. I saw two of them near the Forum yesterday, with their pilgrim staves, in the fashion of a thousand years ago. . . . I sat down on a bench near one of the chapels, and a woman immediately came up to me to beg. I at first refused; but she knelt down by my side, and instead of praying to the saint prayed to me; and, being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious to the extent of half a paul. My wife, some time ago, came in contact with a pickpocket at the entrance of a church; and, failing in his enterprise upon her purse, he passed in, dipped his thieving fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine. Missing the purse, he said his prayers, in the hope, perhaps, that the saint would send him better luck another time. April 10th.--I have made no entries in my journal recently, being exceedingly lazy, partly from indisposition, as well as from an atmosphere that takes the vivacity out of everybody. Not much has happened or been effected. Last Sunday, which was Easter Sunday, I went with J----- to St. Peter's, where we arrived at about nine o'clock, and found a multitude of people already assembled in the church. The interior was arrayed in festal guise, there being a covering of scarlet damask over the pilasters of the nave, from base to capital, giving an effect of splendor, yet with a loss as to the apparent dimensions of the interior. A guard of soldiers occupied the nave, keeping open a wide space for the passage of a procession that was momently expected, and soon arrived. The crowd was too great to allow of my seeing it in detail; but I could perceive that there were priests, cardinals, Swiss guards, some of them with corselets on, and by and by the pope himself was borne up the nave, high over the heads of all, sitting under a canopy, crowned with his tiara. He floated slowly along, and was set down in the neighborhood of the high altar; and the procession being broken up, some of its scattered members might be seen here and there, about the church,--officials in antique Spanish dresses; Swiss guards, in polished steel breastplates; serving-men, in richly embroidered liveries; officers, in scarlet coats and military boots; priests, and divers other shapes of men; for the papal ceremonies seem to forego little or nothing that belongs to times past, while it includes everything appertaining to the present. I ought to have waited to witness the papal benediction from the balcony in front of the church; or, at least, to hear the famous silver trumpets, sounding from the dome; but J----- grew weary (to say the truth, so did I), and we went on a long walk, out of the nearest city gate, and back through the Janiculum, and, finally, homeward over the Ponto Rotto. Standing on the bridge, I saw the arch of the Cloaca Maxima, close by the Temple of Vesta, with the water rising within two or three feet of its keystone. The same evening we went to Monte Cavallo, where, from the gateway of the Pontifical Palace, we saw the illumination of St. Peter's. Mr. Akers, the sculptor, had recommended this position to us, and accompanied us thither, as the best point from which the illumination could be witnessed at a distance, without the incommodity of such a crowd as would be assembled at the Pincian. The first illumination, the silver one, as it is called, was very grand and delicate, describing the outline of the great edifice and crowning dome in light; while the day was not yet wholly departed. As ------ finally remarked, it seemed like the glorified spirit of the Church, made visible, or, as I will add, it looked as this famous and never-to-be-forgotten structure will look to the imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin: the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the background of the night of Time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it look on paper. After we had enjoyed the silver illumination a good while, and when all the daylight had given place to the constellated night, the distant outline of St. Peter's burst forth, in the twinkling of an eye, into a starry blaze, being quite the finest effect that I ever witnessed. I stayed to see it, however, only a few minutes; for I was quite ill and feverish with a cold,--which, indeed, I have seldom been free from, since my first breathing of the genial atmosphere of Rome. This pestilence kept me within doors all the next day, and prevented me from seeing the beautiful fireworks that were exhibited in the evening from the platform on the Pincian, above the Piazza del Popolo. On Thursday, I paid another visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, where I was particularly struck with a bust of Cato the Censor, who must have been the most disagreeable, stubborn, ugly-tempered, pig-headed, narrow-minded, strong-willed old Roman that ever lived. The collection of busts here and at the Vatican are most interesting, many of the individual heads being full of character, and commending themselves by intrinsic evidence as faithful portraits of the originals. These stone people have stood face to face with Caesar, and all the other emperors, and with statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, and poets of the antique world, and have been to them like their reflections in a mirror. It is the next thing to seeing the men themselves. We went afterwards into the Palace of the Conservatori, and saw, among various other interesting things, the bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, who sit beneath her dugs, with open mouths to receive the milk. On Friday, we all went to see the Pope's Palace on the Quirinal. There was a vast hall, and an interminable suite of rooms, cased with marble, floored with marble or mosaics or inlaid wood, adorned with frescos on the vaulted ceilings, and many of them lined with Gobelin tapestry; not wofully faded, like almost all that I have hitherto seen, but brilliant as pictures. Indeed, some of them so closely resembled paintings, that I could hardly believe they were not so; and the effect was even richer than that of oil-paintings. In every room there was a crucifix; but I did not see a single nook or corner where anybody could have dreamed of being comfortable. Nevertheless, as a stately and solemn residence for his Holiness, it is quite a satisfactory affair. Afterwards, we went into the Pontifical Gardens, connected with the palace. They are very extensive, and laid out in straight avenues, bordered with walls of box, as impervious as if of stone,--not less than twenty feet high, and pierced with lofty archways, cut in the living wall. Some of the avenues were overshadowed with trees, the tops of which bent over and joined one another from either side, so as to resemble a side aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Marble sculptures, much weather-stained, and generally broken-nosed, stood along these stately walks; there were many fountains gushing up into the sunshine; we likewise found a rich flower-garden, containing rare specimens of exotic flowers, and gigantic cactuses, and also an aviary, with vultures, doves, and singing birds. We did not see half the garden, but, stiff and formal as its general arrangement is, it is a beautiful place,--a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. Whatever it may be to the pope, two young lovers might find the Garden of Eden here, and never desire to stray out of its precincts. They might fancy angels standing in the long, glimmering vistas of the avenues. It would suit me well enough to have my daily walk along such straight paths, for I think them favorable to thought, which is apt to be disturbed by variety and unexpectedness. April 12th.--We all, except R-----, went to-day to the Vatican, where we found our way to the Stanze of Raphael, these being four rooms, or halls, painted with frescos. No doubt they were once very brilliant and beautiful; but they have encountered hard treatment since Raphael's time, especially when the soldiers of the Constable de Bourbon occupied these apartments, and made fires on the mosaic floors. The entire walls and ceilings are covered with pictures; but the handiwork or designs of Raphael consist of paintings on the four sides of each room, and include several works of art. The School of Athens is perhaps the most celebrated; and the longest side of the largest hall is occupied by a battle-piece, of which the Emperor Constantine is the hero, and which covers almost space enough for a real battle-field. There was a wonderful light in one of the pictures,--that of St. Peter awakened in his prison, by the angel; it really seemed to throw a radiance into the hall below. I shall not pretend, however, to have been sensible of any particular rapture at the sight of these frescos; so faded as they are, so battered by the mischances of years, insomuch that, through all the power and glory of Raphael's designs, the spectator cannot but be continually sensible that the groundwork of them is an old plaster wall. They have been scrubbed, I suppose,--brushed, at least,--a thousand times over, till the surface, brilliant or soft, as Raphael left it, must have been quite rubbed off, and with it, all the consummate finish, and everything that made them originally delightful. The sterner features remain, the skeleton of thought, but not the beauty that once clothed it. In truth, the frescos, excepting a few figures, never had the real touch of Raphael's own hand upon them, having been merely designed by him, and finished by his scholars, or by other artists. The halls themselves are specimens of antique magnificence, paved with elaborate mosaics; and wherever there is any wood-work, it is richly carved with foliage and figures. In their newness, and probably for a hundred years afterwards, there could not have been so brilliant a suite of rooms in the world. Connected with them--at any rate, not far distant--is the little Chapel of San Lorenzo, the very site of which, among the thousands of apartments of the Vatican, was long forgotten, and its existence only known by tradition. After it had been walled up, however, beyond the memory of man, there was still a rumor of some beautiful frescos by Fra Angelico, in an old chapel of Pope Nicholas V., that had strangely disappeared out of the palace, and, search at length being made, it was discovered, and entered through a window. It is a small, lofty room, quite covered over with frescos of sacred subjects, both on the walls and ceiling, a good deal faded, yet pretty distinctly preserved. It would have been no misfortune to me, if the little old chapel had remained still hidden. We next issued into the Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. I remember to have seen (indeed, we ourselves possess them) a series of very spirited and energetic engravings, old and coarse, of these frescos, the subject being the Creation, and the early Scripture history; and I really think that their translation of the pictures is better than the original. On reference to Murray, I find that little more than the designs is attributed to Raphael, the execution being by Giulio Romano and other artists. Escaping from these forlorn splendors, we went into the sculpture-gallery, where I was able to enjoy, in some small degree, two or three wonderful works of art; and had a perception that there were a thousand other wonders around me. It is as if the statues kept, for the most part, a veil about them, which they sometimes withdraw, and let their beauty gleam upon my sight; only a glimpse, or two or three glimpses, or a little space of calm enjoyment, and then I see nothing but a discolored marble image again. The Minerva Medica revealed herself to-day. I wonder whether other people are more fortunate than myself, and can invariably find their way to the inner soul of a work of art. I doubt it; they look at these things for just a minute, and pass on, without any pang of remorse, such as I feel, for quitting them so soon and so willingly. I am partly sensible that some unwritten rules of taste are making their way into my mind; that all this Greek beauty has done something towards refining me, though I am still, however, a very sturdy Goth. . . . April 15th.--Yesterday I went with J----- to the Forum, and descended into the excavations at the base of the Capitol, and on the site of the Basilica of Julia. The essential elements of old Rome are there: columns, single, or in groups of two or three, still erect, but battered and bruised at some forgotten time with infinite pains and labor; fragments of other columns lying prostrate, together with rich capitals and friezes; the bust of a colossal female statue, showing the bosom and upper part of the arms, but headless; a long, winding space of pavement, forming part of the ancient ascent to the Capitol, still as firm and solid as ever; the foundation of the Capitol itself, wonderfully massive, built of immense square blocks of stone, doubtless three thousand years old, and durable for whatever may be the lifetime of the world; the Arch of Septimius, Severus, with bas-reliefs of Eastern wars; the Column of Phocas, with the rude series of steps ascending on four sides to its pedestal; the floor of beautiful and precious marbles in the Basilica of Julia, the slabs cracked across,--the greater part of them torn up and removed, the grass and weeds growing up through the chinks of what remain; heaps of bricks, shapeless bits of granite, and other ancient rubbish, among which old men are lazily rummaging for specimens that a stranger may be induced to buy,--this being an employment that suits the indolence of a modern Roman. The level of these excavations is about fifteen feet, I should judge, below the present street, which passes through the Forum, and only a very small part of this alien surface has been removed, though there can be no doubt that it hides numerous treasures of art and monuments of history. Yet these remains do not make that impression of antiquity upon me which Gothic ruins do. Perhaps it is so because they belong to quite another system of society and epoch of time, and, in view of them, we forget all that has intervened betwixt them and us; being morally unlike and disconnected with them, and not belonging to the same train of thought; so that we look across a gulf to the Roman ages, and do not realize how wide the gulf is. Yet in that intervening valley lie Christianity, the Dark Ages, the feudal system, chivalry and romance, and a deeper life of the human race than Rome brought to the verge of the gulf. To-day we went to the Colonna Palace, where we saw some fine pictures, but, I think, no masterpieces. They did not depress and dishearten me so much as the pictures in Roman palaces usually do; for they were in remarkably good order as regards frames and varnish; indeed, I rather suspect some of them had been injured by the means adopted to preserve their beauty. The palace is now occupied by the French Ambassador, who probably looks upon the pictures as articles of furniture and household adornment, and does not choose to have squares of black and forlorn canvas upon his walls. There were a few noble portraits by Vandyke; a very striking one by Holbein, one or two by Titian, also by Guercino, and some pictures by Rubens, and other forestieri painters, which refreshed my weary eyes. But--what chiefly interested me was the magnificent and stately hall of the palace; fifty-five of my paces in length, besides a large apartment at either end, opening into it through a pillared space, as wide as the gateway of a city. The pillars are of giallo antico, and there are pilasters of the same all the way up and down the walls, forming a perspective of the richest aspect, especially as the broad cornice flames with gilding, and the spaces between the pilasters are emblazoned with heraldic achievements and emblems in gold, and there are Venetian looking-glasses, richly decorated over the surface with beautiful pictures of flowers and Cupids, through which you catch the gleam of the mirror; and two rows of splendid chandeliers extend from end to end of the hall, which, when lighted up, if ever it be lighted up, now-a-nights, must be the most brilliant interior that ever mortal eye beheld. The ceiling glows with pictures in fresco, representing scenes connected with the history of the Colonna family; and the floor is paved with beautiful marbles, polished and arranged in square and circular compartments; and each of the many windows is set in a great architectural frame of precious marble, as large as the portal of a door. The apartment at the farther end of the hall is elevated above it, and is attained by several marble steps, whence it must have been glorious in former days to have looked down upon a gorgeous throng of princes, cardinals, warriors, and ladies, in such rich attire as might be worn when the palace was built. It is singular how much freshness and brightness it still retains; and the only objects to mar the effect were some ancient statues and busts, not very good in themselves, and now made dreary of aspect by their corroded surfaces,--the result of long burial under ground. In the room at the entrance of the hall are two cabinets, each a wonder in its way,--one being adorned with precious stones; the other with ivory carvings of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, and of the frescos of Raphael's Loggie. The world has ceased to be so magnificent as it once was. Men make no such marvels nowadays. The only defect that I remember in this hall was in the marble steps that ascend to the elevated apartment at the end of it; a large piece had been broken out of one of them, leaving a rough irregular gap in the polished marble stair. It is not easy to conceive what violence can have done this, without also doing mischief to all the other splendor around it. April 16th.--We went this morning to the Academy of St. Luke (the Fine Arts Academy at Rome) in the Via Bonella, close by the Forum. We rang the bell at the house door; and after a few moments it was unlocked or unbolted by some unseen agency from above, no one making his appearance to admit us. We ascended two or three flights of stairs, and entered a hall, where was a young man, the custode, and two or three artists engaged in copying some of the pictures. The collection not being vastly large, and the pictures being in more presentable condition than usual, I enjoyed them more than I generally do; particularly a Virgin and Child by Vandyke, where two angels are singing and playing, one on a lute and the other on a violin, to remind the holy infant of the strains he used to hear in heaven. It is one of the few pictures that there is really any pleasure in looking at. There were several paintings by Titian, mostly of a voluptuous character, but not very charming; also two or more by Guido, one of which, representing Fortune, is celebrated. They did not impress me much, nor do I find myself strongly drawn towards Guido, though there is no other painter who seems to achieve things so magically and inscrutably as he sometimes does. Perhaps it requires a finer taste than mine to appreciate him; and yet I do appreciate him so far as to see that his Michael, for instance, is perfectly beautiful. . . . In the gallery, there are whole rows of portraits of members of the Academy of St. Luke, most of whom, judging by their physiognomies, were very commonplace people; a fact which makes itself visible in a portrait, however much the painter may try to flatter his sitter. Several of the pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, and other artists, now exhibited in the gallery, were formerly kept in a secret cabinet in the Capitol, being considered of a too voluptuous character for the public eye. I did not think them noticeably indecorous, as compared with a hundred other pictures that are shown and looked at without scruple;--Calypso and her nymphs, a knot of nude women by Titian, is perhaps as objectionable as any. But even Titian's flesh-tints cannot keep, and have not kept their warmth through all these centuries. The illusion and lifelikeness effervesces and exhales out of a picture as it grows old; and we go on talking of a charm that has forever vanished. From St. Luke's we went to San Pietro in Vincoli, occupying a fine position on or near the summit of the Esquiline mount. A little abortion of a man (and, by the by, there are more diminutive and ill-shapen men and women in Rome than I ever saw elsewhere, a phenomenon to be accounted for, perhaps, by their custom of wrapping the new-born infant in swaddling-clothes), this two-foot abortion hastened before us, as we drew nigh, to summon the sacristan to open the church door. It was a needless service, for which we rewarded him with two baiocchi. San Pietro is a simple and noble church, consisting of a nave divided from the side aisles by rows of columns, that once adorned some ancient temple; and its wide, unencumbered interior affords better breathing-space than most churches in Rome. The statue of Moses occupies a niche in one of the side aisles on the right, not far from the high altar. I found it grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should be. The horns, about which so much has been said, are not a very prominent feature of the statue, being merely two diminutive tips rising straight up over his forehead, neither adding to the grandeur of the head, nor detracting sensibly from it. The whole force of this statue is not to be felt in one brief visit, but I agree with an English gentleman, who, with a large party, entered the church while we were there, in thinking that Moses has "very fine features,"--a compliment for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow. Besides the Moses, the church contains some attractions of a pictorial kind, which are reposited in the sacristy, into which we passed through a side door. The most remarkable of these pictures is a face and bust of Hope, by Guido, with beautiful eyes lifted upwards; it has a grace which artists are continually trying to get into their innumerable copies, but always without success; for, indeed, though nothing is more true than the existence of this charm in the picture, yet if you try to analyze it, or even look too intently at it, it vanishes, till you look again with more trusting simplicity. Leaving the church, we wandered to the Coliseum, and to the public grounds contiguous to them, where a score and more of French drummers were beating each man his drum, without reference to any rub-a-dub but his own. This seems to be a daily or periodical practice and point of duty with them. After resting ourselves on one of the marble benches, we came slowly home, through the Basilica of Constantine, and along the shady sides of the streets and piazzas, sometimes, perforce, striking boldly through the white sunshine, which, however, was not so hot as to shrivel us up bodily. It has been a most beautiful and perfect day as regards weather, clear and bright, very warm in the sunshine, yet freshened throughout by a quiet stir in the air. Still there is something in this air malevolent, or, at least, not friendly. The Romans lie down and fall asleep in it, in any vacant part of the streets, and wherever they can find any spot sufficiently clean, and among the ruins of temples. I would not sleep in the open air for whatever my life may be worth. On our way home, sitting in one of the narrow streets, we saw an old woman spinning with a distaff; a far more ancient implement than the spinning-wheel, which the housewives of other nations have long since laid aside. April 18th.--Yesterday, at noon, the whole family of us set out on a visit to the Villa Borghese and its grounds, the entrance to which is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. After getting within the grounds, however, there is a long walk before reaching the casino, and we found the sun rather uncomfortably hot, and the road dusty and white in the sunshine; nevertheless, a footpath ran alongside of it most of the way through the grass and among the young trees. It seems to me that the trees do not put forth their leaves with nearly the same magical rapidity in this southern land at the approach of summer, as they do in more northerly countries. In these latter, having a much shorter time to develop themselves, they feel the necessity of making the most of it. But the grass, in the lawns and enclosures along which we passed, looked already fit to be mowed, and it was interspersed with many flowers. Saturday being, I believe, the only day of the week on which visitors are admitted to the casino, there were many parties in carriages, artists on foot, gentlemen on horseback, and miscellaneous people, to whom the door was opened by a custode on ringing a bell. The whole of the basement floor of the casino, comprising a suite of beautiful rooms, is filled with statuary. The entrance hall is a very splendid apartment, brightly frescoed, and paved with ancient mosaics, representing the combats with beasts and gladiators in the Coliseum, curious, though very rudely and awkwardly designed, apparently after the arts had begun to decline. Many of the specimens of sculpture displayed in these rooms are fine, but none of them, I think, possess the highest merit. An Apollo is beautiful; a group of a fighting Amazon, and her enemies trampled under her horse's feet, is very impressive; a Faun, copied from that of Praxiteles, and another, who seems to be dancing, were exceedingly pleasant to look at. I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, . . . . linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. . . . The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled. The gallery, as it is called, on the basement floor of the casino, is sixty feet in length, by perhaps a third as much in breadth, and is (after all I have seen at the Colonna Palace and elsewhere) a more magnificent hall than I imagined to be in existence. It is floored with rich marble in beautifully arranged compartments, and the walls are almost entirely eased with marble of various sorts, the prevailing kind being giallo antico, intermixed with verd antique, and I know not what else; but the splendor of the giallo antico gives the character to the room, and the large and deep niches along the walls appear to be lined with the same material. Without coming to Italy, one can have no idea of what beauty and magnificence are produced by these fittings up of polished marble. Marble to an American means nothing but white limestone. This hall, moreover, is adorned with pillars of Oriental alabaster, and wherever is a space vacant of precious and richly colored marble it is frescoed with arabesque ornaments; and over the whole is a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with picture. There never can be anything richer than the whole effect. As to the sculpture here it was not very fine, so far as I can remember, consisting chiefly of busts of the emperors in porphyry; but they served a good purpose in the upholstery way. There were also magnificent tables, each composed of one great slab of porphyry; and also vases of nero antico, and other rarest substance. It remains to be mentioned that, on this almost summer day, I was quite chilled in passing through these glorious halls; no fireplace anywhere; no possibility of comfort; and in the hot season, when their coolness might be agreeable, it would be death to inhabit them. Ascending a long winding staircase, we arrived at another suite of rooms, containing a good many not very remarkable pictures, and a few more pieces of statuary. Among the latter, is Canova's statue of Pauline, the sister of Bonaparte, who is represented with but little drapery, and in the character of Venus holding the apple in her hand. It is admirably done, and, I have no doubt, a perfect likeness; very beautiful too; but it is wonderful to see how the artificial elegance of the woman of this world makes itself perceptible in spite of whatever simplicity she could find in almost utter nakedness. The statue does not afford pleasure in the contemplation. In one of these upper rooms are some works of Bernini; two of them, Aeneas and Anchises, and David on the point of slinging a stone at Goliath, have great merit, and do not tear and rend themselves quite out of the laws and limits of marble, like his later sculpture. Here is also his Apollo overtaking Daphne, whose feet take root, whose, finger-tips sprout into twigs, and whose tender body roughens round about with bark, as he embraces her. It did not seem very wonderful to me; not so good as Hillard's description of it made me expect; and one does not enjoy these freaks in marble. We were glad to emerge from the casino into the warm sunshine; and, for my part, I made the best of my way to a large fountain, surrounded by a circular stone seat of wide sweep, and sat down in a sunny segment of the circle. Around grew a solemn company of old trees,--ilexes, I believe,-- with huge, contorted trunks and evergreen branches, . . . . deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountains, marble statues, dimly visible in recesses of foliage, great urns and vases, terminal figures, temples, --all these works of art looking as if they had stood there long enough to feel at home, and to be on friendly and familiar terms with the grass and trees. It is a most beautiful place, . . . . and the Malaria is its true master and inhabitant! April 22d.--We have been recently to the studio of Mr. Brown [now dead], the American landscape-painter, and were altogether surprised and delighted with his pictures. He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite unpolished by his many years' residence in Italy; he talks ungrammatically, and in Yankee idioms; walks with a strange, awkward gait and stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque; but wins one's confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we see an artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect and deportment. His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian scenery, and were most beautiful and true. One of them, a moonlight picture, was really magical,-- the moon shining so brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits of the picture,--and yet his sunrises and sunsets, and noontides too, were nowise inferior to this, although their excellence required somewhat longer study, to be fully appreciated. I seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer one of the latter artist's pictures,--those of the former being quite changed from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments. Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,--it's love!" In fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object, which at last rewarded him by yielding itself wholly. We have likewise been to Mr. B------'s [now dead] studio, where we saw several pretty statues and busts, and among them an Eve, with her wreath of fig-leaves lying across her poor nudity; comely in some points, but with a frightful volume of thighs and calves. I do not altogether see the necessity of ever sculpturing another nakedness. Man is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him. Also, we have seen again William Story's Cleopatra,--a work of genuine thought and energy, representing a terribly dangerous woman; quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon you like a tigress. It is delightful to escape to his creations from this universal prettiness, which seems to be the highest conception of the crowd of modern sculptors, and which they almost invariably attain. Miss Bremer called on us the other day. We find her very little changed from what she was when she came to take tea and spend an evening at our little red cottage, among the Berkshire hills, and went away so dissatisfied with my conversational performances, and so laudatory of my brow and eyes, while so severely criticising my poor mouth and chin. She is the funniest little old fairy in person whom one can imagine, with a huge nose, to which all the rest of her is but an insufficient appendage; but you feel at once that she is most gentle, kind, womanly, sympathetic, and true. She talks English fluently, in a low quiet voice, but with such an accent that it is impossible to understand her without the closest attention. This was the real cause of the failure of our Berkshire interview; for I could not guess, half the time, what she was saying, and, of course, had to take an uncertain aim with my responses. A more intrepid talker than myself would have shouted his ideas across the gulf; but, for me, there must first be a close and unembarrassed contiguity with my companion, or I cannot say one real word. I doubt whether I have ever really talked with half a dozen persons in my life, either men or women. To-day my wife and I have been at the picture and sculpture galleries of the Capitol. I rather enjoyed looking at several of the pictures, though at this moment I particularly remember only a very beautiful face of a man, one of two heads on the same canvas by Vandyke. Yes; I did look with new admiration at Paul Veronese's "Rape of Europa." It must have been, in its day, the most brilliant and rejoicing picture, the most voluptuous, the most exuberant, that ever put the sunshine to shame. The bull has all Jupiter in him, so tender and gentle, yet so passionate, that you feel it indecorous to look at him; and Europa, under her thick rich stuffs and embroideries, is all a woman. What a pity that such a picture should fade, and perplex the beholder with such splendor shining through such forlornness! We afterwards went into the sculpture-gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out, without detriment to the human interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of a young lady! I have spoken of Mr. Gibson's colored statues. It seems (at least Mr. Nichols tells me) that he stains them with tobacco juice. . . . Were he to send a Cupid to America, he need not trouble himself to stain it beforehand. April 25th.--Night before last, my wife and I took a moonlight ramble through Rome, it being a very beautiful night, warm enough for comfort, and with no perceptible dew or dampness. We set out at about nine o'clock, and, our general direction being towards the Coliseum, we soon came to the Fountain of Trevi, full on the front of which the moonlight fell, making Bernini's sculptures look stately and beautiful, though the semicircular gush and fall of the cascade, and the many jets of the water, pouring and bubbling into the great marble basin, are of far more account than Neptune and his steeds, and the rest of the figures. . . . We ascended the Capitoline Hill, and I felt a satisfaction in placing my hand on those immense blocks of stone, the remains of the ancient Capitol, which form the foundation of the present edifice, and will make a sure basis for as many edifices as posterity may choose to rear upon it, till the end of the world. It is wonderful, the solidity with which those old Romans built; one would suppose they contemplated the whole course of Time as the only limit of their individual life. This is not so strange in the days of the Republic, when, probably, they believed in the permanence of their institutions; but they still seemed to build for eternity, in the reigns of the emperors, when neither rulers nor people had any faith or moral substance, or laid any earnest grasp on life. Reaching the top of the Capitoline Hill, we ascended the steps of the portal of the Palace of the Senator, and looked down into the piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of it. The architecture that surrounds the piazza is very ineffective; and so, in my opinion, are all the other architectural works of Michael Angelo, including St. Peter's itself, of which he has made as little as could possibly be made of such a vast pile of material. He balances everything in such a way that it seems but half of itself. We soon descended into the piazza, and walked round and round the statue of Marcus Aurelius, contemplating it from every point and admiring it in all. . . . On these beautiful moonlight nights, Rome appears to keep awake and stirring, though in a quiet and decorous way. It is, in fact, the pleasantest time for promenades, and we both felt less wearied than by any promenade in the daytime, of similar extent, since our residence in Rome. In future, I mean to walk often after nightfall. Yesterday, we set out betimes, and ascended the dome of St. Peter's. The best view of the interior of the church, I think, is from the first gallery beneath the dome. The whole inside of the dome is set with mosaic-work, the separate pieces being, so far as I could see, about half an inch square. Emerging on the roof, we had a fine view of all the surrounding Rome, including the Mediterranean Sea in the remote distance. Above us still rose the whole mountain of the great dome, and it made an impression on me of greater height and size than I had yet been able to receive. The copper ball at the summit looked hardly bigger than a man could lift; and yet, a little while afterwards, U----, J-----, and I stood all together in that ball, which could have contained a dozen more along with us. The esplanade of the roof is, of course, very extensive; and along the front of it are ranged the statues which we see from below, and which, on nearer examination, prove to be roughly hewn giants. There is a small house on the roof, where, probably, the custodes of this part of the edifice reside; and there is a fountain gushing abundantly into a stone trough, that looked like an old sarcophagus. It is strange where the water comes from at such a height. The children tasted it, and pronounced it very warm and disagreeable. After taking in the prospect on all sides we rang a bell, which summoned a man, who directed us towards a door in the side of the dome, where a custode was waiting to admit us. Hitherto the ascent had been easy, along a slope without stairs, up which, I believe, people sometimes ride on donkeys. The rest of the way we mounted steep and narrow staircases, winding round within the wall, or between the two walls of the dome, and growing narrower and steeper, till, finally, there is but a perpendicular iron ladder, by means of which to climb into the copper ball. Except through small windows and peep-holes, there is no external prospect of a higher point than the roof of the church. Just beneath the ball there is a circular room capable of containing a large company, and a door which ought to give access to a gallery on the outside; but the custode informed us that this door is never opened. As I have said, U----, J-----, and I clambered into the copper ball, which we found as hot as an oven; and, after putting our hands on its top, and on the summit of St. Peter's, were glad to clamber down again. I have made some mistake, after all, in my narration. There certainly is a circular balcony at the top of the dome, for I remember walking round it, and looking, not only across the country, but downwards along the ribs of the dome; to which are attached the iron contrivances for illuminating it on Easter Sunday. . . . Before leaving the church we went to look at the mosaic copy of the "Transfiguration," because we were going to see the original in the Vatican, and wished to compare the two. Going round to the entrance of the Vatican, we went first to the manufactory of mosaics, to which we had a ticket of admission. We found it a long series of rooms, in which the mosaic artists were at work, chiefly in making some medallions of the heads of saints for the new church of St. Paul's. It was rather coarse work, and it seemed to me that the mosaic copy was somewhat stiffer and more wooden than the original, the bits of stone not flowing into color quite so freely as paint from a brush. There was no large picture now in process of being copied; but two or three artists were employed on small and delicate subjects. One had a Holy Family of Raphael in hand; and the Sibyls of Guercino and Domenichino were hanging on the wall, apparently ready to be put into mosaic. Wherever great skill and delicacy, on the artists' part were necessary, they seemed quite adequate to the occasion; but, after all, a mosaic of any celebrated picture is but a copy of a copy. The substance employed is a stone-paste, of innumerable different views, and in bits of various sizes, quantities of which were seen in cases along the whole series of rooms. We next ascended an amazing height of staircases, and walked along I know not what extent of passages, . . . . till we reached the picture-gallery of the Vatican, into which I had never been before. There are but three rooms, all lined with red velvet, on which hung about fifty pictures, each one of them, no doubt, worthy to be considered a masterpiece. In the first room were three Murillos, all so beautiful that I could have spent the day happily in looking at either of them; for, methinks, of all painters he is the tenderest and truest. I could not enjoy these pictures now, however, because in the next room, and visible through the open door, hung the "Transfiguration." Approaching it, I felt that the picture was worthy of its fame, and was far better than I could at once appreciate; admirably preserved, too, though I fully believe it must have possessed a charm when it left Raphael's hand that has now vanished forever. As church furniture and an external adornment, the mosaic copy is preferable to the original, but no copy could ever reproduce all the life and expression which we see here. Opposite to it hangs the "Communion of St. Jerome," the aged, dying saint, half torpid with death already, partaking of the sacrament, and a sunny garland of cherubs in the upper part of the picture, looking down upon him, and quite comforting the spectator with the idea that the old man needs only to be quite dead in order to flit away with them. As for the other pictures I did but glance at, and have forgotten them. The "Transfiguration" is finished with great minuteness and detail, the weeds and blades of grass in the foreground being as distinct as if they were growing in a natural soil. A partly decayed stick of wood with the bark is likewise given in close imitation of nature. The reflection of a foot of one of the apostles is seen in a pool of water at the verge of the picture. One or two heads and arms seem almost to project from the canvas. There is great lifelikeness and reality, as well as higher qualities. The face of Jesus, being so high aloft and so small in the distance, I could not well see; but I am impressed with the idea that it looks too much like human flesh and blood to be in keeping with the celestial aspect of the figure, or with the probabilities of the scene, when the divinity and immortality of the Saviour beamed from within him through the earthly features that ordinarily shaded him. As regards the composition of the picture, I am not convinced of the propriety of its being in two so distinctly separate parts,--the upper portion not thinking of the lower, and the lower portion not being aware of the higher. It symbolizes, however, the spiritual short-sightedness of mankind that, amid the trouble and grief of the lower picture, not a single individual, either of those who seek help or those who would willingly afford it, lifts his eyes to that region, one glimpse of which would set everything right. One or two of the disciples point upward, but without really knowing what abundance of help is to be had there. April 27th.--To-day we have all been with Mr. Akers to some studios of painters; first to that of Mr. Wilde, an artist originally from Boston. His pictures are principally of scenes from Venice, and are miracles of color, being as bright as if the light were transmitted through rubies and sapphires. And yet, after contemplating them awhile, we became convinced that the painter had not gone in the least beyond nature, but, on the contrary, had fallen short of brilliancies which no palette, or skill, or boldness in using color, could attain. I do not quite know whether it is best to attempt these things. They may be found in nature, no doubt, but always so tempered by what surrounds them, so put out of sight even while they seem full before our eyes, that we question the accuracy of a faithful reproduction of them on canvas. There was a picture of sunset, the whole sky of which would have outshone any gilded frame that could have been put around it. There was a most gorgeous sketch of a handful of weeds and leaves, such as may be seen strewing acres of forest-ground in an American autumn. I doubt whether any other man has ever ventured to paint a picture like either of these two, the Italian sunset or the American autumnal foliage. Mr. Wilde, who is still young, talked with genuine feeling and enthusiasm of his art, and is certainly a man of genius. We next went to the studio of an elderly Swiss artist, named Mueller, I believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature has most beautiful to show, and which she shows only to those who love her deeply and patiently. They are wonderful pictures, compressing plains, seas, and mountains, with miles and miles of distance, into the space of a foot or two, without crowding anything or leaving out a feature, and diffusing the free, blue atmosphere throughout. The works of the English watercolor artists which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition seemed to me nowise equal to these. Now, here are three artists, Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilde, and Mr. Mueller, who have smitten me with vast admiration within these few days past, while I am continually turning away disappointed from the landscapes of the most famous among the old masters, unable to find any charm or illusion in them. Yet I suppose Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa must have won their renown by real achievements. But the glory of a picture fades like that of a flower. Contiguous to Mr. Mueller's studio was that of a young German artist, not long resident in Rome, and Mr. Akers proposed that we should go in there, as a matter of kindness to the young man, who is scarcely known at all, and seldom has a visitor to look at his pictures. His studio comprised his whole establishment; for there was his little bed, with its white drapery, in a corner of the small room, and his dressing-table, with its brushes and combs, while the easel and the few sketches of Italian scenes and figures occupied the foreground. I did not like his pictures very well, but would gladly have bought them all if I could have afforded it, the artist looked so cheerful, patient, and quiet, doubtless amidst huge discouragement. He is probably stubborn of purpose, and is the sort of man who will improve with every year of his life. We could not speak his language, and were therefore spared the difficulty of paying him any compliments; but Miss Shepard said a few kind words to him in German. and seemed quite to win his heart, insomuch that he followed her with bows and smiles a long way down the staircase. It is a terrible business, this looking at pictures, whether good or bad, in the presence of the artists who paint them; it is as great a bore as to hear a poet read his own verses. It takes away all my pleasure in seeing the pictures, and even remakes me question the genuineness of the impressions which I receive from them. After this latter visit Mr. Akers conducted us to the shop of the jeweller Castellani, who is a great reproducer of ornaments in the old Roman and Etruscan fashion. These antique styles are very fashionable just now, and some of the specimens he showed us were certainly very beautiful, though I doubt whether their quaintness and old-time curiousness, as patterns of gewgaws dug out of immemorial tombs, be not their greatest charm. We saw the toilet-case of an Etruscan lady,--that is to say, a modern imitation of it,--with her rings for summer and winter, and for every day of the week, and for thumb and fingers; her ivory comb; her bracelets; and more knick-knacks than I can half remember. Splendid things of our own time were likewise shown us; a necklace of diamonds worth eighteen thousand scudi, together with emeralds and opals and great pearls. Finally we came away, and my wife and Miss Shepard were taken up by the Misses Weston, who drove with them to visit the Villa Albani. During their drive my wife happened to raise her arm, and Miss Shepard espied a little Greek cross of gold which had attached itself to the lace of her sleeve. . . . Pray heaven the jeweller may not discover his loss before we have time to restore the spoil! He is apparently so free and careless in displaying his precious wares,--putting inestimable genes and brooches great and small into the hands of strangers like ourselves, and leaving scores of them strewn on the top of his counter,--that it would seem easy enough to take a diamond or two; but I suspect there must needs be a sharp eye somewhere. Before we left the shop he requested me to honor him with my autograph in a large book that was full of the names of his visitors. This is probably a measure of precaution. April 30th.--I went yesterday to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, and looked pretty thoroughly through the busts of the illustrious men, and less particularly at those of the emperors and their relatives. I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it, and for that reason I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings. . . . We have had beautiful weather for two or three days, very warm in the sun, yet always freshened by the gentle life of a breeze, and quite cool enough the moment you pass within the limit of the shade. . . . In the morning there are few people there (on the Pincian) except the gardeners, lazily trimming the borders, or filling their watering-pots out of the marble-brimmed basin of the fountain; French soldiers, in their long mixed-blue surtouts, and wide scarlet pantaloons, chatting with here and there a nursery-maid and playing with the child in her care; and perhaps a few smokers, . . . . choosing each a marble seat or wooden bench in sunshine or shade as best suits him. In the afternoon, especially within an hour or two of sunset, the gardens are much more populous, and the seats, except when the sun falls full upon them, are hard to come by. Ladies arrive in carriages, splendidly dressed; children are abundant, much impeded in their frolics, and rendered stiff and stately by the finery which they wear; English gentlemen and Americans with their wives and families; the flower of the Roman population, too, both male and female, mostly dressed with great nicety; but a large intermixture of artists, shabbily picturesque; and other persons, not of the first stamp. A French band, comprising a great many brass instruments, by and by begins to play; and what with music, sunshine, a delightful atmosphere, flowers, grass, well-kept pathways, bordered with box-hedges, pines, cypresses, horse-chestnuts, flowering shrubs, and all manner of cultivated beauty, the scene is a very lively and agreeable one. The fine equipages that drive round and round through the carriage-paths are another noticeable item. The Roman aristocracy are magnificent in their aspect, driving abroad with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, sometimes as many as three behind and one sitting by the coachman. May 1st.--This morning, I wandered for the thousandth time through some of the narrow intricacies of Rome, stepping here and there into a church. I do not know the name of the first one, nor had it anything that in Rome could be called remarkable, though, till I came here, I was not aware that any such churches existed,--a marble pavement in variegated compartments, a series of shrines and chapels round the whole floor, each with its own adornment of sculpture and pictures, its own altar with tall wax tapers before it, some of which were burning; a great picture over the high altar, the whole interior of the church ranged round with pillars and pilasters, and lined, every inch of it, with rich yellow marble. Finally, a frescoed ceiling over the nave and transepts, and a dome rising high above the central part, and filled with frescos brought to such perspective illusion, that the edges seem to project into the air. Two or three persons are kneeling at separate shrines; there are several wooden confessionals placed against the walls, at one of which kneels a lady, confessing to a priest who sits within; the tapers are lighted at the high altar and at one of the shrines; an attendant is scrubbing the marble pavement with a broom and water, a process, I should think, seldom practised in Roman churches. By and by the lady finishes her confession, kisses the priest's hand, and sits down in one of the chairs which are placed about the floor, while the priest, in a black robe, with a short, white, loose jacket over his shoulders, disappears by a side door out of the church. I, likewise, finding nothing attractive in the pictures, take my departure. Protestantism needs a new apostle to convert it into something positive. . . . I now found my way to the Piazza Navona. It is to me the most interesting piazza in Rome; a large oblong space, surrounded with tall, shabby houses, among which there are none that seem to be palaces. The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it;--one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches. Monstrous devices in marble, I know not of what purport, are clambering about the cloven rock or burrowing beneath it; one and all of them are superfluous and impertinent, the only essential thing being the abundant supply of water in the fountain. This whole Piazza Navona is usually the scene of more business than seems to be transacted anywhere else in Rome; in some parts of it rusty iron is offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and all such rubbish; in other parts vegetables, comprising, at this season, green peas, onions, cauliflowers, radishes, artichokes, and others with which I have never made acquaintance; also, stalls or wheelbarrows containing apples, chestnuts (the meats dried and taken out of the shells), green almonds in their husks, and squash-seeds,--salted and dried in an oven,--apparently a favorite delicacy of the Romans. There are also lemons and oranges; stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber; cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece; bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome. On one side of the piazza is the Church of St. Agnes, traditionally said to stand on the site of the house where that holy maiden was exposed to infamy by the Roman soldiers, and where her modesty and innocence were saved by miracle. I went into the church, and found it very splendid, with rich marble columns, all as brilliant as if just built; a frescoed dome above; beneath, a range of chapels all round the church, ornamented not with pictures but bas-reliefs, the figures of which almost step and struggle out of the marble. They did not seem very admirable as works of art, none of them explaining themselves or attracting me long enough to study out their meaning; but, as part of the architecture of the church, they had a good effect. Out of the busy square two or three persons had stepped into this bright and calm seclusion to pray and be devout, for a little while; and, between sunrise and sunset of the bustling market-day, many doubtless snatch a moment to refresh their souls. In the Pantheon (to-day) it was pleasant looking up to the circular opening, to see the clouds flitting across it, sometimes covering it quite over, then permitting a glimpse of sky, then showing all the circle of sunny blue. Then would come the ragged edge of a cloud, brightened throughout with sunshine, passing and changing quickly,--not that the divine smile was not always the same, but continually variable through the medium of earthly influences. The great slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to the pavement, falling upon motes of dust, or a thin smoke of incense imperceptible in the shadow. Insects were playing to and fro in the beam, high up toward the opening. There is a wonderful charm in the naturalness of all this, and one might fancy a swarm of cherubs coming down through the opening and sporting in the broad ray, to gladden the faith of worshippers on the pavement beneath; or angels bearing prayers upward, or bringing down responses to them, visible with dim brightness as they pass through the pathway of heaven's radiance, even the many hues of their wings discernible by a trusting eye; though, as they pass into the shadow, they vanish like the motes. So the sunbeam would represent those rays of divine intelligence which enable us to see wonders and to know that they are natural things. Consider the effect of light and shade in a church where the windows are open and darkened with curtains that are occasionally lifted by a breeze, letting in the sunshine, which whitens a carved tombstone on the pavement of the church, disclosing, perhaps, the letters of the name and inscription, a death's-head, a crosier, or other emblem; then the curtain falls and the bright spot vanishes. May 8th.--This morning my wife and I went to breakfast with Mrs. William Story at the Barberini Palace, expecting to meet Mrs. Jameson, who has been in Rome for a month or two. We had a very pleasant breakfast, but Mrs. Jameson was not present on account of indisposition, and the only other guests were Mrs. A------ and Mrs. H------, two sensible American ladies. Mrs. Story, however, received a note from Mrs. Jameson, asking her to bring us to see her at her lodgings; so in the course of the afternoon she called on us, and took us thither in her carriage. Mrs. Jameson lives on the first piano of an old palazzo on the Via di Ripetta, nearly opposite the ferry-way across the Tiber, and affording a pleasant view of the yellow river and the green bank and fields on the other side. I had expected to see an elderly lady, but not quite so venerable a one as Mrs. Jameson proved to be; a rather short, round, and massive personage, of benign and agreeable aspect, with a sort of black skullcap on her head, beneath which appeared her hair, which seemed once to have been fair, and was now almost white. I should take her to be about seventy years old. She began to talk to us with affectionate familiarity, and was particularly kind in her manifestations towards myself, who, on my part, was equally gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was a great deal of expression in their faces and figures; and the spectator feels, moreover, that the artist must have been a devout man,--an impression which we seldom receive from modern pictures, however awfully holy the subject, or however consecrated the place they hang in. Mrs. Jameson seems to be familiar with Italy, its people and life, as well as with its picture-galleries. She is said to be rather irascible in her temper; but nothing could be sweeter than her voice, her look, and all her manifestations to-day. When we were coming away she clasped my hand in both of hers, and again expressed the pleasure of having seen me, and her gratitude to me for calling on her; nor did I refrain from responding Amen to these effusions. . . . Taking leave of Mrs. Jameson, we drove through the city, and out of the Lateran Gate; first, however, waiting a long while at Monaldini's bookstore in the Piazza de' Spagna for Mr. Story, whom we finally took up in the street, after losing nearly an hour. Just two miles beyond the gate is a space on the green campagna where, for some time past, excavations have been in progress, which thus far have resulted in the discovery of several tombs, and the old, buried, and almost forgotten church or basilica of San Stefano. It is a beautiful spot, that of the excavations, with the Alban hills in the distance, and some heavy, sunlighted clouds hanging above, or recumbent at length upon them, and behind the city and its mighty dome. The excavations are an object of great interest both to the Romans and to strangers, and there were many carriages and a great many visitors viewing the progress of the works, which are carried forward with greater energy than anything else I have seen attempted at Rome. A short time ago the ground in the vicinity was a green surface, level, except here and there a little hillock, or scarcely perceptible swell; the tomb of Cecilia Metella showing itself a mile or two distant, and other rugged ruins of great tombs rising on the plain. Now the whole site of the basilica is uncovered, and they have dug into the depths of several tombs, bringing to light precious marbles, pillars, a statue, and elaborately wrought sarcophagi; and if they were to dig into almost every other inequality that frets the surface of the campagna, I suppose the result might be the same. You cannot dig six feet downward anywhere into the soil, deep enough to hollow out a grave, without finding some precious relic of the past; only they lose somewhat of their value when you think that you can almost spurn them out of the ground with your foot. It is a very wonderful arrangement of Providence that these things should have been preserved for a long series of coming generations by that accumulation of dust and soil and grass and trees and houses over them, which will keep them safe, and cause their reappearance above ground to be gradual, so that the rest of the world's lifetime may have for one of its enjoyments the uncovering of old Rome. The tombs were accessible by long flights of steps going steeply downward, and they were thronged with so many visitors that we had to wait some little time for our own turn. In the first into which we descended we found two tombs side by side, with only a partition wall between; the outer tomb being, as is supposed, a burial-place constructed by the early Christians, while the adjoined and minor one was a work of pagan Rome about the second century after Christ. The former was much less interesting than the latter. It contained some large sarcophagi, with sculpture upon them of rather heathenish aspect; and in the centre of the front of each sarcophagus was a bust in bas-relief, the features of which had never been wrought, but were left almost blank, with only the faintest indications of a nose, for instance. It is supposed that sarcophagi were kept on hand by the sculptors, and were bought ready made, and that it was customary to work out the portrait of the deceased upon the blank face in the centre; but when there was a necessity for sudden burial, as may have been the case in the present instance, this was dispensed with. The inner tomb was found without any earth in it, just as it had been left when the last old Roman was buried there; and it being only a week or two since it was opened, there was very little intervention of persons, though much of time, between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. It is a square room, with a mosaic pavement, and is six or seven paces in length and breadth, and as much in height to the vaulted roof. The roof and upper walls are beautifully ornamented with frescos, which were very bright when first discovered, but have rapidly faded since the admission of the air, though the graceful and joyous designs, flowers and fruits and trees, are still perfectly discernible. The room must have been anything but sad and funereal; on the contrary, as cheerful a saloon, and as brilliant, if lighted up, as one could desire to feast in. It contained several marble sarcophagi, covering indeed almost the whole floor, and each of them as much as three or four feet in length, and two much longer. The longer ones I did not particularly examine, and they seemed comparatively plainer; but the smaller sarcophagi were covered with the most delicately wrought and beautiful bas-reliefs that I ever beheld; a throng of glad and lovely shapes in marble clustering thickly and chasing one another round the sides of these old stone coffins. The work was as perfect as when the sculptor gave it his last touch; and if he had wrought it to be placed in a frequented hall, to be seen and admired by continual crowds as long as the marble should endure, he could not have chiselled with better skill and care, though his work was to be shut up in the depths of a tomb forever. This seems to me the strangest thing in the world, the most alien from modern sympathies. If they had built their tombs above ground, one could understand the arrangement better; but no sooner had they adorned them so richly, and furnished them with such exquisite productions of art, than they annihilated them with darkness. It was an attempt, no doubt, to render the physical aspect of death cheerful, but there was no good sense in it. We went down also into another tomb close by, the walls of which were ornamented with medallions in stucco. These works presented a numerous series of graceful designs, wrought by the hand in the short space of (Mr. Story said it could not have been more than) five or ten minutes, while the wet plaster remained capable of being moulded; and it was marvellous to think of the fertility of the artist's fancy, and the rapidity and accuracy with which he must have given substantial existence to his ideas. These too--all of them such adornments as would have suited a festal hall--were made to be buried forthwith in eternal darkness. I saw and handled in this tomb a great thigh-bone, and measured it with my own; it was one of many such relics of the guests who were laid to sleep in these rich chambers. The sarcophagi that served them for coffins could not now be put to a more appropriate use than as wine-coolers in a modern dining-room; and it would heighten the enjoyment of a festival to look at them. We would gladly have stayed much longer; but it was drawing towards sunset, and the evening, though bright, was unusually cool, so we drove home; and on the way, Mr. Story told us of the horrible practices of the modern Romans with their dead,--how they place them in the church, where, at midnight, they are stripped of their last rag of funeral attire, put into the rudest wooden coffins, and thrown into a trench,--a half-mile, for instance, of promiscuous corpses. This is the fate of all, except those whose friends choose to pay an exorbitant sum to have them buried under the pavement of a church. The Italians have an excessive dread of corpses, and never meddle with those of their nearest and dearest relatives. They have a horror of death, too, especially of sudden death, and most particularly of apoplexy; and no wonder, as it gives no time for the last rites of the Church, and so exposes them to a fearful risk of perdition forever. On the whole, the ancient practice was, perhaps, the preferable one; but Nature has made it very difficult for us to do anything pleasant and satisfactory with a dead body. God knows best; but I wish he had so ordered it that our mortal bodies, when we have done with them, might vanish out of sight and sense, like bubbles. A person of delicacy hates to think of leaving such a burden as his decaying mortality to the disposal of his friends; but, I say again, how delightful it would be, and how helpful towards our faith in a blessed futurity, if the dying could disappear like vanishing bubbles, leaving, perhaps, a sweet fragrance diffused for a minute or two throughout the death-chamber. This would be the odor of sanctity! And if sometimes the evaporation of a sinful soul should leave an odor not so delightful, a breeze through the open windows would soon waft it quite away. Apropos of the various methods of disposing of dead bodies, William Story recalled a newspaper paragraph respecting a ring, with a stone of a new species in it, which a widower was observed to wear upon his finger. Being questioned as to what the gem was, he answered, "It is my wife." He had procured her body to be chemically resolved into this stone. I think I could make a story on this idea: the ring should be one of the widower's bridal gifts to a second wife; and, of course, it should have wondrous and terrible qualities, symbolizing all that disturbs the quiet of a second marriage,--on the husband's part, remorse for his inconstancy, and the constant comparison between the dead wife of his youth, now idealized, and the grosser reality which he had now adopted into her place; while on the new wife's finger it should give pressures, shooting pangs into her heart, jealousies of the past, and all such miserable emotions. By the by, the tombs which we looked at and entered may have been originally above ground, like that of Cecilia Metella, and a hundred others along the Appian Way; though, even in this case, the beautiful chambers must have been shut up in darkness. Had there been windows, letting in the light upon the rich frescos and exquisite sculptures, there would have been a satisfaction in thinking of the existence of so much visual beauty, though no eye had the privilege to see it. But darkness, to objects of sight, is annihilation, as long as the darkness lasts. May 9th.--Mrs. Jameson called this forenoon to ask us to go and see her this evening; . . . . so that I had to receive her alone, devolving part of the burden on Miss Shepard and the three children, all of whom I introduced to her notice. Finding that I had not been farther beyond the walls of Rome than the tomb of Cecilia Metella, she invited me to take a drive of a few miles with her this afternoon. . . . The poor lady seems to be very lame; and I am sure I was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to climb up the seventy steps of our staircase, and felt pain at seeing her go down them again. It looks fearfully like the gout, the affection being apparently in one foot. The hands, by the way, are white, and must once have been, perhaps now are, beautiful. She must have been a perfectly pretty woman in her day,--a blue or gray eyed, fair-haired beauty. I think that her hair is not white, but only flaxen in the extreme. At half past four, according to appointment, I arrived at her lodgings, and had not long to wait before her little one-horse carriage drove up to the door, and we set out, rumbling along the Via Scrofa, and through the densest part of the city, past the theatre of Marcellus, and thence along beneath the Palatine Hill, and by the Baths of Caracalla, through the gate of San Sebastiano. After emerging from the gate, we soon came to the little Church of "Domine, quo vadis?" Standing on the spot where St. Peter is said to have seen a vision of our Saviour bearing his cross, Mrs. Jameson proposed to alight; and, going in, we saw a cast from Michael Angelo's statue of the Saviour; and not far from the threshold of the church, yet perhaps in the centre of the edifice, which is extremely small, a circular stone is placed, a little raised above the pavement, and surrounded by a low wooden railing. Pointing to this stone, Mrs. Jameson showed me the prints of two feet side by side, impressed into its surface, as if a person had stopped short while pursuing his way to Rome. These, she informed me, were supposed to be the miraculous prints of the Saviour's feet; but on looking into Murray, I am mortified to find that they are merely facsimiles of the original impressions, which are treasured up among the relics of the neighboring Basilica of San Sebastiano. The marks of sculpture seemed to me, indeed, very evident in these prints, nor did they indicate such beautiful feet as should have belonged to the hearer of the best of glad tidings. Hence we drove on a little way farther, and came to the Basilica of San Sebastiano, where also we alighted, and, leaning on my arm, Mrs. Jameson went in. It is a stately and noble interior, with a spacious unencumbered nave, and a flat ceiling frescoed and gilded. In a chapel at the left of the entrance is the tomb of St. Sebastian,--a sarcophagus containing his remains, raised on high before the altar, and beneath it a recumbent statue of the saint pierced with gilded arrows. The sculpture is of the school of Bernini,--done after the design of Bernini himself, Mrs. Jameson said, and is more agreeable and in better taste than most of his works. We walked round the basilica, glancing at the pictures in the various chapels, none of which seemed to be of remarkable merit, although Mrs. Jameson pronounced rather a favorable verdict on one of St. Francis. She says that she can read a picture like the page of a book; in fact, without perhaps assuming more taste and judgment than really belong to her, it was impossible not to perceive that she gave her companion no credit for knowing one single simplest thing about art. Nor, on the whole, do I think she underrated me; the only mystery is, how she came to be so well aware of my ignorance on artistical points. In the basilica the Franciscan monks were arranging benches on the floor of the nave, and some peasant children and grown people besides were assembling, probably to undergo an examination in the catechism, and we hastened to depart, lest our presence should interfere with their arrangements. At the door a monk met us, and asked for a contribution in aid of his church, or some other religious purpose. Boys, as we drove on, ran stoutly along by the side of the chaise, begging as often as they could find breath, but were constrained finally to give up the pursuit. The great ragged bulks of the tombs along the Appian Way now hove in sight, one with a farm-house on its summit, and all of them preposterously huge and massive. At a distance, across the green campagna on our left, the Claudian aqueduct strode away over miles of space, and doubtless reached even to that circumference of blue hills which stand afar off, girdling Rome about. The tomb of Cecilia Metella came in sight a long while before we reached it, with the warm buff hue of its travertine, and the gray battlemented wall which the Caetanis erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic, though now dilapidated and much reduced in size. Mrs. Jameson had an engagement to dinner at half past six, so that we could go but a little farther along this most interesting road, the borders of which are strewn with broken marbles; fragments of capitals, and nameless rubbish that once was beautiful. Methinks the Appian Way should be the only entrance to Rome,--through an avenue of tombs. The day had been cloudy, chill, and windy, but was now grown calmer and more genial, and brightened by a very pleasant sunshine, though great dark clouds were still lumbering up the sky. We drove homeward, looking at the distant dome of St. Peter's and talking of many things,--painting, sculpture, America, England, spiritualism, and whatever else came up. She is a very sensible old lady, and sees a great deal of truth; a good woman, too, taking elevated views of matters; but I doubt whether she has the highest and finest perceptions in the world. At any rate, she pronounced a good judgment on the American sculptors now in Rome, condemning them in the mass as men with no high aims, no worthy conception of the purposes of their art, and desecrating marble by the things they wrought in it. William Story, I presume, is not to be included in this censure, as she had spoken highly of his sculpturesque faculty in our previous conversation. On my part, I suggested that the English sculptors were little or nothing better than our own, to which she acceded generally, but said that Gibson had produced works equal to the antique,--which I did not dispute, but still questioned whether the world needed Gibson, or was any the better for him. We had a great dispute about the propriety of adopting the costume of the day in modern sculpture, and I contended that either the art ought to be given up (which possibly would be the best course), or else should be used for idealizing the man of the day to himself; and that, as Nature makes us sensible of the fact when men and women are graceful, beautiful, and noble, through whatever costume they wear, so it ought to be the test of the sculptor's genius that he should do the same. Mrs. Jameson decidedly objected to buttons, breeches, and all other items of modern costume; and, indeed, they do degrade the marble, and make high sculpture utterly impossible. Then let the art perish as one that the world has done with, as it has done with many other beautiful things that belonged to an earlier time. It was long past the hour of Mrs. Jameson's dinner engagement when we drove up to her door in the Via Ripetta. I bade her farewell with much good-feeling on my own side, and, I hope, on hers, excusing myself, however, from keeping the previous engagement to spend the evening with her, for, in point of fact, we had mutually had enough of one another for the time being. I am glad to record that she expressed a very favorable opinion of our friend Mr. Thompson's pictures. May 12th.--To-day we have been to the Villa Albani, to which we had a ticket of admission through the agency of Mr. Cass (the American Minister). We set out between ten and eleven o'clock, and walked through the Via Felice, the Piazza Barberini, and a long, heavy, dusty range of streets beyond, to the Porta Salara, whence the road extends, white and sunny, between two high blank walls to the gate of the villa, which is at no great distance. We were admitted by a girl, and went first to the casino, along an aisle of overshadowing trees, the branches of which met above our heads. In the portico of the casino, which extends along its whole front, there are many busts and statues, and, among them, one of Julius Caesar, representing him at an earlier period of life than others which I have seen. His aspect is not particularly impressive; there is a lack of chin, though not so much as in the older statues and busts. Within the edifice there is a large hall, not so brilliant, perhaps, with frescos and gilding as those at the Villa Borghese, but lined with the most beautiful variety of marbles. But, in fact, each new splendor of this sort outshines the last, and unless we could pass from one to another all in the same suite, we cannot remember them well enough to compare the Borghese with the Albani, the effect being more on the fancy than on the intellect. I do not recall any of the sculpture, except a colossal bas-relief of Antinous, crowned with flowers, and holding flowers in his hand, which was found in the ruins of Hadrian's Villa. This is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoon; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Autinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture. We went up stairs and down stairs, and saw a good many beautiful things, but none, perhaps, of the very best and beautifullest; and second-rate statues, with the corroded surface of old marble that has been dozens of centuries under the ground, depress the spirits of the beholder. The bas-relief of Antinous has at least the merit of being almost as white and fresh, and quite as smooth, as if it had never been buried and dug up again. The real treasures of this villa, to the number of nearly three hundred, were removed to Paris by Napoleon, and, except the Antinous, not one of them ever came back. There are some pictures in one or two of the rooms, and among them I recollect one by Perugino, in which is a St. Michael, very devout and very beautiful; indeed, the whole picture (which is in compartments, representing the three principal points of the Saviour's history) impresses the beholder as being painted devoutly and earnestly by a religious man. In one of the rooms there is a small bronze Apollo, supposed by Winckelmann to be an original of Praxiteles; but I could not make myself in the least sensible of its merit. The rest of the things in the casino I shall pass over, as also those in the coffee-house,--an edifice which stands a hundred yards or more from the casino, with an ornamental garden, laid out in walks and flower-plats between. The coffee-house has a semicircular sweep of porch with a good many statues and busts beneath it, chiefly of distinguished Romans. In this building, as in the casino, there are curious mosaics, large vases of rare marble, and many other things worth long pauses of admiration; but I think that we were all happier when we had done with the works of art, and were at leisure to ramble about the grounds. The Villa Albani itself is an edifice separate from both the coffee-house and casino, and is not opened to strangers. It rises, palace-like, in the midst of the garden, and, it is to be hoped, has some possibility of comfort amidst its splendors.--Comfort, however, would be thrown away upon it; for besides that the site shares the curse that has fallen upon every pleasant place in the vicinity of Rome, . . . . it really has no occupant except the servants who take care of it. The Count of Castelbarco, its present proprietor, resides at Milan. The grounds are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew the path with their falling leaves. We stole a few, and feel that we have wronged our consciences in not stealing more. In one part of the grounds we saw a field actually ablaze with scarlet poppies. There are great lagunas; fountains presided over by naiads, who squirt their little jets into basins; sunny lawns; a temple, so artificially ruined that we half believed it a veritable antique; and at its base a reservoir of water, in which stone swans seemed positively to float; groves of cypress; balustrades and broad flights of stone stairs, descending to lower levels of the garden; beauty, peace, sunshine, and antique repose on every side; and far in the distance the blue hills that encircle the campagna of Rome. The day was very fine for our purpose; cheerful, but not too bright, and tempered by a breeze that seemed even a little too cool when we sat long in the shade. We enjoyed it till three o'clock. . . . At the Capitol there is a sarcophagus with a most beautiful bas-relief of the discovery of Achilles by Ulysses, in which there is even an expression of mirth on the faces of many of the spectators. And to-day at the Albani a sarcophagus was ornamented with the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis. Death strides behind every man, to be sure, at more or less distance, and, sooner or later, enters upon any event of his life; so that, in this point of view, they might each and all serve for bas-reliefs on a sarcophagus; but the Romans seem to have treated Death as lightly and playfully as they could, and tried to cover his dart with flowers, because they hated it so much. May 15th.--My wife and I went yesterday to the Sistine Chapel, it being my first visit. It is a room of noble proportions, lofty and long, though divided in the midst by a screen or partition of white marble, which rises high enough to break the effect of spacious unity. There are six arched windows on each side of the chapel, throwing down their light from the height of the walls, with as much as twenty feet of space (more I should think) between them and the floor. The entire walls and ceiling of this stately chapel are covered with paintings in fresco, except the space about ten feet in height from the floor, and that portion was intended to be adorned by tapestries from pictures by Raphael, but, the design being prevented by his premature death, the projected tapestries have no better substitute than paper-hangings. The roof, which is flat at top, and coved or vaulted at the sides, is painted in compartments by Michael Angelo, with frescos representing the whole progress of the world and of mankind from its first formation by the Almighty . . . . till after the flood. On one of the sides of the chapel are pictures by Perugino, and other old masters, of subsequent events in sacred history; and the entire wall behind the altar, a vast expanse from the ceiling to the floor, is taken up with Michael Angelo's summing up of the world's history and destinies in his "Last Judgment." There can be no doubt that while these frescos continued in their perfection, there was nothing else to be compared with the magnificent and solemn beauty of this chapel. Enough of ruined splendor still remains to convince the spectator of all that has departed; but methinks I have seen hardly anything else so forlorn and depressing as it is now, all dusky and dim, even the very lights having passed into shadows, and the shadows into utter blackness; so that it needs a sunshiny day, under the bright Italian heavens, to make the designs perceptible at all. As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility,--the Almighty moving in chaos,--the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive. In the "Last Judgment" the scene of the greater part of the picture lies in the upper sky, the blue of which glows through betwixt the groups of naked figures; and above sits Jesus, not looking in the least like the Saviour of the world, but, with uplifted arm, denouncing eternal misery on those whom he came to save. I fear I am myself among the wicked, for I found myself inevitably taking their part, and asking for at least a little pity, some few regrets, and not such a stern denunciatory spirit on the part of Him who had thought us worth dying for. Around him stand grim saints, and, far beneath, people are getting up sleepily out of their graves, not well knowing what is about to happen; many of them, however, finding themselves clutched by demons before they are half awake. It would be a very terrible picture to one who should really see Jesus, the Saviour, in that inexorable judge; but it seems to me very undesirable that he should ever be represented in that aspect, when it is so essential to our religion to believe him infinitely kinder and better towards us than we deserve. At the last day--I presume, that is, in all future days, when we see ourselves as we are--man's only inexorable judge will be himself, and the punishment of his sins will be the perception of them. In the lower corner of this great picture, at the right hand of the spectator, is a hideous figure of a damned person, girdled about with a serpent, the folds of which are carefully knotted between his thighs, so as, at all events, to give no offence to decency. This figure represents a man who suggested to Pope Paul III. that the nudities of the "Last Judgment" ought to be draped, for which offence Michael Angelo at once consigned him to hell. It shows what a debtor's prison and dungeon of private torment men would make of hell if they had the control of it. As to the nudities, if they were ever more nude than now, I should suppose, in their fresh brilliancy, they might well have startled a not very squeamish eye. The effect, such as it is, of this picture, is much injured by the high altar and its canopy, which stands close against the wall, and intercepts a considerable portion of the sprawl of nakedness with which Michael Angelo has filled his sky. However, I am not unwilling to believe, with faith beyond what I can actually see, that the greatest pictorial miracles ever yet achieved have been wrought upon the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the afternoon I went with Mr. Thompson to see what bargain could be made with vetturinos for taking myself and family to Florence. We talked with three or four, and found them asking prices of various enormity, from a hundred and fifty scudi down to little more than ninety; but Mr. Thompson says that they always begin in this way, and will probably come down to somewhere about seventy-five. Mr. Thompson took me into the Via Portoghese, and showed me an old palace, above which rose--not a very customary feature of the architecture of Rome--a tall, battlemented tower. At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin, with a lamp, and all the appendages of those numerous shrines which we see at the street-corners, and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four centuries ago, this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son and a large pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and clambered to this lofty turret, and sat there with him in his arms grinning and chattering like the Devil himself. The father was in despair, but was afraid to pursue the monkey lest he should fling down the child from the height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the tower, and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground; the father fulfilled his vow, built the shrine, and made it obligatory, on all future possessors of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed, the property has changed hands; but still there is the shrine on the giddy top of the tower, far aloft over the street, on the very spot where the monkey sat, and there burns the lamp, in memory of the father's vow. This being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extinguishment of that flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace. May 21st.--Mamma and I went, yesterday forenoon, to the Spada Palace, which we found among the intricacies of Central Rome; a dark and massive old edifice, built around a court, the fronts giving on which are adorned with statues in niches, and sculptured ornaments. A woman led us up a staircase, and ushered us into a great gloomy hall, square and lofty, and wearing a very gray and ancient aspect, its walls being painted in chiaroscuro, apparently a great many years ago. The hall was lighted by small windows, high upward from the floors, and admitting only a dusky light. The only furniture or ornament, so far as I recollect, was the colossal statue of Pompey, which stands on its pedestal at one side, certainly the sternest and severest of figures, and producing the most awful impression on the spectator. Much of the effect, no doubt, is due to the sombre obscurity of the hall, and to the loneliness in which the great naked statue stands. It is entirely nude, except for a cloak that hangs down from the left shoulder; in the left hand, it holds a globe; the right arm is extended. The whole expression is such as the statue might have assumed, if, during the tumult of Caesar's murder, it had stretched forth its marble hand, and motioned the conspirators to give over the attack, or to be quiet, now that their victim had fallen at its feet. On the left leg, about midway above the ankle, there is a dull, red stain, said to be Caesar's blood; but, of course, it is just such a red stain in the marble as may be seen on the statue of Antinous at the Capitol. I could not see any resemblance in the face of the statue to that of the bust of Pompey, shown as such at the Capitol, in which there is not the slightest moral dignity, or sign of intellectual eminence. I am glad to have seen this statue, and glad to remember it in that gray, dim, lofty hall; glad that there were no bright frescos on the walls, and that the ceiling was wrought with massive beams, and the floor paved with ancient brick. From this anteroom we passed through several saloons containing pictures, some of which were by eminent artists; the Judith of Guido, a copy of which used to weary me to death, year after year, in the Boston Athenaeum; and many portraits of Cardinals in the Spada family, and other pictures, by Guido. There were some portraits, also of the family, by Titian; some good pictures by Guercino; and many which I should have been glad to examine more at leisure; but, by and by, the custode made his appearance, and began to close the shutters, under pretence that the sunshine would injure the paintings,--an effect, I presume, not very likely to follow after two or three centuries' exposure to light, air, and whatever else might hurt them. However, the pictures seemed to be in much better condition, and more enjoyable, so far as they had merit, than those in most Roman picture-galleries; although the Spada Palace itself has a decayed and impoverished aspect, as if the family had dwindled from its former state and grandeur, and now, perhaps, smuggled itself into some out-of-the-way corner of the old edifice. If such be the case, there is something touching in their still keeping possession of Pompey's statue, which makes their house famous, and the sale of which might give them the means of building it up anew; for surely it is worth the whole sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. In the afternoon Mr. Thompson and I went, for the third or fourth time, to negotiate with vetturinos. . . . So far as I know them they are a very tricky set of people, bent on getting as much as they can, by hook or by crook, out of the unfortunate individual who falls into their hands. They begin, as I have said, by asking about twice as much as they ought to receive; and anything between this exorbitant amount and the just price is what they thank heaven for, as so much clear gain. Nevertheless, I am not quite sure that the Italians are worse than other people even in this matter. In other countries it is the custom of persons in trade to take as much as they can get from the public, fleecing one man to exactly the same extent as another; here they take what they can obtain from the individual customer. In fact, Roman tradesmen do not pretend to deny that they ask and receive different prices from different people, taxing them according to their supposed means of payment; the article supplied being the same in one case as in another. A shopkeeper looked into his books to see if we were of the class who paid two pauls, or only a paul and a half for candles; a charcoal-dealer said that seventy baiocchi was a very reasonable sum for us to pay for charcoal, and that some persons paid eighty; and Mr. Thompson, recognizing the rule, told the old vetturino that "a hundred and fifty scudi was a very proper charge for carrying a prince to Florence, but not for carrying me, who was merely a very good artist." The result is well enough; the rich man lives expensively, and pays a larger share of the profits which people of a different system of trade-morality would take equally from the poor man. The effect on the conscience of the vetturino, however, and of tradesmen of all kinds, cannot be good; their only intent being, not to do justice between man and man, but to go as deep as they can into all pockets, and to the very bottom of some. We had nearly concluded a bargain, a day or two ago, with a vetturino to take or send us to Florence, via Perugia, in eight days, for a hundred scudi; but he now drew back, under pretence of having misunderstood the terms, though, in reality, no doubt, he was in hopes of getting a better bargain from somebody else. We made an agreement with another man, whom Mr. Thompson knows and highly recommends, and immediately made it sure and legally binding by exchanging a formal written contract, in which everything is set down, even to milk, butter, bread, eggs, and coffee, which we are to have for breakfast; the vetturino being to pay every expense for himself, his horses, and his passengers, and include it within ninety-five scudi, and five crowns in addition for buon-mano. . . . . May 22d.--Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. ------ called. I never saw him but once before, and that was at the door of our little red cottage in Lenox; he sitting in a wagon with one or two of the Sedgewicks, merely exchanging a greeting with me from under the brim of his straw hat, and driving on. He presented himself now with a long white beard, such as a palmer might have worn as the growth of his long pilgrimages, a brow almost entirely bald, and what hair he has quite hoary; a forehead impending, yet not massive; dark, bushy eyebrows and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age; but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo's kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough still to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about him, and he conversed with great readiness and simplicity about his travels, and whatever other subject came up; telling us that he had been abroad five times, and was now getting a little home-sick, and had no more eagerness for sights, though his "gals" (as he called his daughter and another young lady) dragged him out to see the wonders of Rome again. His manners and whole aspect are very particularly plain, though not affectedly so; but it seems as if in the decline of life, and the security of his position, he had put off whatever artificial polish he may have heretofore had, and resumed the simpler habits and deportment of his early New England breeding. Not but what you discover, nevertheless, that he is a man of refinement, who has seen the world, and is well aware of his own place in it. He spoke with great pleasure of his recent visit to Spain. I introduced the subject of Kansas, and methought his face forthwith assumed something of the bitter keenness of the editor of a political newspaper, while speaking of the triumph of the administration over the Free-Soil opposition. I inquired whether he had seen S------, and he gave a very sad account of him as he appeared at their last meeting, which was in Paris. S------, he thought, had suffered terribly, and would never again be the man he was; he was getting fat; he talked continually of himself, and of trifles concerning himself, and seemed to have no interest for other matters; and Mr. ------ feared that the shock upon his nerves had extended to his intellect, and was irremediable. He said that S------ ought to retire from public life, but had no friend true enough to tell him so. This is about as sad as anything can be. I hate to have S------ undergo the fate of a martyr, because he was not naturally of the stuff that martyrs are made of, and it is altogether by mistake that he has thrust himself into the position of one. He was merely, though with excellent abilities, one of the best of fellows, and ought to have lived and died in good fellowship with all the world. S------ was not in the least degree excited about this or any other subject. He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own. He shook hands kindly all round, but not with any warmth of gripe; although the ease of his deportment had put us all on sociable terms with him. At seven o'clock we went by invitation to take tea with Miss Bremer. After much search, and lumbering painfully up two or three staircases in vain, and at last going about in a strange circuity, we found her in a small chamber of a large old building, situated a little way from the brow of the Tarpeian Rock. It was the tiniest and humblest domicile that I have seen in Rome, just large enough to hold her narrow bed, her tea-table, and a table covered with books,--photographs of Roman ruins, and some pages written by herself. I wonder whether she be poor. Probably so; for she told us that her expense of living here is only five pauls a day. She welcomed us, however, with the greatest cordiality and lady-like simplicity, making no allusion to the humbleness of her environment (and making us also lose sight of it, by the absence of all apology) any more than if she were receiving us in a palace. There is not a better bred woman; and yet one does not think whether she has any breeding or no. Her little bit of a round table was already spread for us with her blue earthenware teacups; and after she had got through an interview with the Swedish Minister, and dismissed him with a hearty pressure of his hand between both her own, she gave us our tea, and some bread, and a mouthful of cake. Meanwhile, as the day declined, there had been the most beautiful view over the campagna, out of one of her windows; and, from the other, looking towards St. Peter's, the broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset; not so pompous and magnificent as many that I have seen in America, but softer and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly away, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there was not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of my younger days. In the garden, beneath her window, verging upon the Tarpeian Rock, there was shrubbery and one large tree, softening the brow of the famous precipice, adown which the old Romans used to fling their traitors, or sometimes, indeed, their patriots. Miss Bremer talked plentifully in her strange manner,--good English enough for a foreigner, but so oddly intonated and accented, that it is impossible to be sure of more than one word in ten. Being so little comprehensible, it is very singular how she contrives to make her auditors so perfectly certain, as they are, that she is talking the best sense, and in the kindliest spirit. There is no better heart than hers, and not many sounder heads; and a little touch of sentiment comes delightfully in, mixed up with a quick and delicate humor and the most perfect simplicity. There is also a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her; we are sensible of a freshness and odor of the morning still in this little withered rose,--its recompense for never having been gathered and worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem. I forget mainly what we talked about,--a good deal about art, of course, although that is a subject of which Miss Bremer evidently knows nothing. Once we spoke of fleas,--insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody's business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea. . . . She talked, among other things, of the winters in Sweden, and said that she liked them, long and severe as they are; and this made me feel ashamed of dreading the winters of New England, as I did before coming from home, and do now still more, after five or six mild English Decembers. By and by, two young ladies came in,--Miss Bremen's neighbors, it seemed,--fresh from a long walk on the campagna, fresh and weary at the same time. One apparently was German, and the other French, and they brought her an offering of flowers, and chattered to her with affectionate vivacity; and, as we were about taking leave, Miss Bremer asked them to accompany her and us on a visit to the edge of the Tarpeian Rock. Before we left the room, she took a bunch of roses that were in a vase, and gave them to Miss Shepard, who told her that she should make her six sisters happy by giving one to each. Then we went down the intricate stairs, and, emerging into the garden, walked round the brow of the hill, which plunges headlong with exceeding abruptness; but, so far as I could see in the moonlight, is no longer quite a precipice. Then we re-entered the house, and went up stairs and down again, through intricate passages, till we got into the street, which was still peopled with the ragamuffins who infest and burrow in that part of Rome. We returned through an archway, and descended the broad flight of steps into the piazza of the Capitol; and from the extremity of it, just at the head of the long graded way, where Castor and Pollux and the old milestones stand, we turned to the left, and followed a somewhat winding path, till we came into the court of a palace. This court is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw the sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house. . . . On the edge of this, before we left the court, Miss Bremer bade us farewell, kissing my wife most affectionately on each cheek, . . . . and then turning towards myself, . . . . she pressed my hand, and we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart! . . . . She is a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race. I suspect, by the by, that she does not like me half so well as I do her; it is my impression that she thinks me unamiable, or that there is something or other not quite right about me. I am sorry if it be so, because such a good, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person is very apt to have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare cases, she allows them to harbor with her. To-day, and for some days past, we have been in quest of lodgings for next winter; a weary search, up interminable staircases, which seduce us upward to no successful result. It is very disheartening not to be able to place the slightest reliance on the integrity of the people we are to deal with; not to believe in any connection between their words and their purposes; to know that they are certainly telling you falsehoods, while you are not in a position to catch hold of the lie, and hold it up in their faces. This afternoon we called on Mr. and Mrs. ------ at the Hotel de l'Europe, but found only the former at home. We had a pleasant visit, but I made no observations of his character save such as I have already sufficiently recorded; and when we had been with him a little while, Mrs. Chapman, the artist's wife, Mr. Terry, and my friend, Mr. Thompson, came in. ------ received them all with the same good degree of cordiality that he did ourselves, not cold, not very warm, not annoyed, not ecstatically delighted; a man, I should suppose, not likely to have ardent individual preferences, though perhaps capable of stern individual dislikes. But I take him, at all events, to be a very upright man, and pursuing a narrow track of integrity; he is a man whom I would never forgive (as I would a thousand other men) for the slightest moral delinquency. I would not be bound to say, however, that he has not the little sin of a fretful and peevish habit; and yet perhaps I am a sinner myself for thinking so. May 23d.--This morning I breakfasted at William Story's, and met there Mr. Bryant, Mr. T------ (an English gentleman), Mr. and Mrs. Apthorp, Miss Hosmer, and one or two other ladies. Bryant was very quiet, and made no conversation audible to the general table. Mr. T------ talked of English politics and public men; the "Times" and other newspapers, English clubs and social habits generally; topics in which I could well enough bear my part of the discussion. After breakfast, and aside from the ladies, he mentioned an illustration of Lord Ellenborough's lack of administrative ability,--a proposal seriously made by his lordship in reference to the refractory Sepoys. . . . We had a very pleasant breakfast, and certainly a breakfast is much preferable to a dinner, not merely in the enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,--a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering with every breath of wind, and rearranging itself in the calm; in which case, the lady might be said to have "a habit of weeping." . . . . Apart, with William Story, he and I talked of the unluckiness of Friday, etc. I like him particularly well. . . . We have been plagued to-day with our preparations for leaving Rome to-morrow, and especially with verifying the inventory of furniture, before giving up the house to our landlord. He and his daughter have been examining every separate article, down even to the kitchen skewers, I believe, and charging us to the amount of several scudi for cracks and breakages, which very probably existed when we came into possession. It is very uncomfortable to have dealings with such a mean people (though our landlord is German),--mean in their business transactions; mean even in their beggary; for the beggars seldom ask for more than a mezzo baioccho, though they sometimes grumble when you suit your gratuity exactly to their petition. It is pleasant to record that the Italians have great faith in the honor of the English and Americans, and never hesitate to trust entire strangers, to any reasonable extent, on the strength of their being of the honest Anglo-Saxon race. This evening, U---- and I took a farewell walk in the Pincian Gardens to see the sunset; and found them crowded with people, promenading and listening to the music of the French baud. It was the feast of Whitsunday, which probably brought a greater throng than usual abroad. When the sun went down, we descended into the Piazza del Popolo, and thence into the Via Ripetta, and emerged through a gate to the shore of the Tiber, along which there is a pleasant walk beneath a grove of trees. We traversed it once and back again, looking at the rapid river, which still kept its mud-puddly aspect even in the clear twilight, and beneath the brightening moon. The great bell of St. Peter's tolled with a deep boom, a grand and solemn sound; the moon gleamed through the branches of the trees above us; and U---- spoke with somewhat alarming fervor of her love for Rome, and regret at leaving it. We shall have done the child no good office in bringing her here, if the rest of her life is to be a dream of this "city of the soul," and an unsatisfied yearning to come back to it. On the other hand, nothing elevating and refining can be really injurious, and so I hope she will always be the better for Rome, even if her life should be spent where there are no pictures, no statues, nothing but the dryness and meagreness of a New England village. JOURNEY TO FLORENCE. Civita Castellana, May 24th.--We left Rome this morning, after troubles of various kinds, and a dispute in the first place with Lalla, our female servant, and her mother. . . . Mother and daughter exploded into a livid rage, and cursed us plentifully,--wishing that we might never come to our journey's end, and that we might all break our necks or die of apoplexy,--the most awful curse that an Italian knows how to invoke upon his enemies, because it precludes the possibility of extreme unction. However, as we are heretics, and certain of damnation therefore, anyhow, it does not much matter to us; and also the anathemas may have been blown back upon those who invoked them, like the curses that were flung out from the balcony of St Peter's during Holy Week and wafted by heaven's breezes right into the faces of some priests who stood near the pope. Next we had a disagreement, with two men who brought down our luggage, and put it on the vettura; . . . . and, lastly, we were infested with beggars, who hung round the carriages with doleful petitions, till we began to move away; but the previous warfare had put me into too stern a mood for almsgiving, so that they also were doubtless inclined to curse more than to bless, and I am persuaded that we drove off under a perfect shower of anathemas. We passed through the Porta del Popolo at about eight o'clock; and after a moment's delay, while the passport was examined, began our journey along the Flaminian Way, between two such high and inhospitable walls of brick or stone as seem to shut in all the avenues to Rome. We had not gone far before we heard military music in advance of us, and saw the road blocked up with people, and then the glitter of muskets, and soon appeared the drummers, fifers, and trumpeters, and then the first battalion of a French regiment, marching into the city, with two mounted officers at their head; then appeared a second and then a third battalion, the whole seeming to make almost an army, though the number on their caps showed them all to belong to one regiment,--the 1st; then came a battery of artillery, then a detachment of horse,--these last, by the crossed keys on their helmets, being apparently papal troops. All were young, fresh, good-looking men, in excellent trim as to uniform and equipments, and marched rather as if they were setting out on a campaign than returning from it; the fact being, I believe, that they have been encamped or in barracks within a few miles of the city. Nevertheless, it reminded me of the military processions of various kinds which so often, two thousand years ago and more, entered Rome over the Flaminian Way, and over all the roads that led to the famous city,--triumphs oftenest, but sometimes the downcast train of a defeated army, like those who retreated before Hannibal. On the whole, I was not sorry to see the Gauls still pouring into Rome; but yet I begin to find that I have a strange affection for it, and so did we all,--the rest of the family in a greater degree than myself even. It is very singular, the sad embrace with which Rome takes possession of the soul. Though we intend to return in a few months, and for a longer residence than this has been, yet we felt the city pulling at our heartstrings far more than London did, where we shall probably never spend much time again. It may be because the intellect finds a home there more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the heart to stay with it, in spite of a good many things strewn all about to disgust us. The road in the earlier part of the way was not particularly picturesque,--the country undulated, but scarcely rose into hills, and was destitute of trees; there were a few shapeless ruins, too indistinct for us to make out whether they were Roman or mediaeval. Nothing struck one so much, in the forenoon, as the spectacle of a peasant-woman riding on horseback as if she were a man. The houses were few, and those of a dreary aspect, built of gray stone, and looking bare and desolate, with not the slightest promise of comfort within doors. We passed two or three locandas or inns, and finally came to the village (if village it were, for I remember no houses except our osteria) of Castel Nuovo di Porta, where we were to take a dejeuner a la fourchette, which was put upon the table between twelve and one. On this journey, according to the custom of travellers in Italy, we pay the vetturino a certain sum, and live at his expense; and this meal was the first specimen of his catering on our behalf. It consisted of a beefsteak, rather dry and hard, but not unpalatable, and a large omelette; and for beverage, two quart bottles of red wine, which, being tasted, had an agreeable acid flavor. . . . The locanda was built of stone, and had what looked like an old Roman altar in the basement-hall, and a shrine, with a lamp before it, on the staircase; and the large public saloon in which we ate had a brick floor, a ceiling with cross-beams, meagrely painted in fresco, and a scanty supply of chairs and settees. After lunch, we wandered out into a valley or ravine near the house, where we gathered some flowers, and J----- found a nest with the young birds in it, which, however, he put back into the bush whence he took it. Our afternoon drive was more picturesque and noteworthy. Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator. As we approached it nearer and nearer, it looked like the barrenest great rock that ever protruded out of the substance of the earth, with scarcely a strip or a spot of verdure upon its steep and gray declivities. The road kept trending towards the mountain, following the line of the old Flaminian Way, which we could see, at frequent intervals, close beside the modern track. It is paved with large flag-stones, laid so accurately together, that it is still, in some places, as smooth and even as the floor of a church; and everywhere the tufts of grass find it difficult to root themselves into the interstices. Its course is straighter than that of the road of to-day, which often turns aside to avoid obstacles which the ancient one surmounted. Much of it, probably, is covered with the soil and overgrowth deposited in later years; and, now and then, we could see its flag-stones partly protruding from the bank through which our road has been cut, and thus showing that the thickness of this massive pavement was more than a foot of solid stone. We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it. Passing through a town called Rignano, we found it dressed out in festivity, with festoons of foliage along both sides of the street, which ran beneath a triumphal arch, bearing an inscription in honor of a ducal personage of the Massimi family. I know no occasion for the feast, except that it is Whitsuntide. The town was thronged with peasants, in their best attire, and we met others on their way thither, particularly women and girls, with heads bare in the sunshine; but there was no tiptoe jollity, nor, indeed, any more show of festivity than I have seen in my own country at a cattle-show or muster. Really, I think, not half so much. The road still grew more and more picturesque, and now lay along ridges, at the bases of which were deep ravines and hollow valleys. Woods were not wanting; wilder forests than I have seen since leaving America, of oak-trees chiefly; and, among the green foliage, grew golden tufts of broom, making a gay and lovely combination of hues. I must not forget to mention the poppies, which burned like live coals along the wayside, and lit up the landscape, even a single one of them, with wonderful effect. At other points, we saw olive-trees, hiding their eccentricity of boughs under thick masses of foliage of a livid tint, which is caused, I believe, by their turning their reverse sides to the light and to the spectator. Vines were abundant, but were of little account in the scene. By and by we came in sight, of the high, flat table-land, on which stands Civita Castellana, and beheld, straight downward, between us and the town, a deep level valley with a river winding through it; it was the valley of the Treja. A precipice, hundreds of feet in height, falls perpendicularly upon the valley, from the site of Civita Castellana; there is an equally abrupt one, probably, on the side from which we saw it; and a modern road, skilfully constructed, goes winding down to the stream, crosses it by a narrow stone bridge, and winds upward into the town. After passing over the bridge, I alighted, with J----- and R-----, . . . . and made the ascent on foot, along walls of natural rock, in which old Etruscan tombs were hollowed out. There are likewise antique remains of masonry, whether Roman or of what earlier period, I cannot tell. At the summit of the acclivity, which brought us close to the town, our vetturino took us into the carriage again and quickly brought us to what appears to be really a good hotel, where all of us are accommodated with sleeping-chambers in a range, beneath an arcade, entirely secluded from the rest of the population of the hotel. After a splendid dinner (that is, splendid, considering that it was ordered by our hospitable vetturino), U----, Miss Shepard, J-----, and I walked out of the little town, in the opposite direction from our entrance, and crossed a bridge at the height of the table-land, instead of at its base. On either side, we had a view down into a profound gulf, with sides of precipitous rock, and heaps of foliage in its lap, through which ran the snowy track of a stream; here snowy, there dark; here hidden among the foliage, there quite revealed in the broad depths of the gulf. This was wonderfully fine. Walking on a little farther, Soracte came fully into view, starting with bold abruptness out of the middle of the country; and before we got back, the bright Italian moon was throwing a shower of silver over the scene, and making it so beautiful that it seemed miserable not to know how to put it into words; a foolish thought, however, for such scenes are an expression in themselves, and need not be translated into any feebler language. On our walk we met parties of laborers, both men and women, returning from the fields, with rakes and wooden forks over their shoulders, singing in chorus. It is very customary for women to be laboring in the fields. TO TERNI.--BORGHETTO. May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly, till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed. This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the objects that interest him. Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also, marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road. After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet. Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them; on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur, like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanctity that used to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it meritorious to do nothing for his support. Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle, he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous mountain-gorge; winding its narrow passage between high hills, the broad sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery, that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept in excellent repair. A long winding street passes through Narni, broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as its principal street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We passed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,-- walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing that need be recorded. Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to give them up. Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon, and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . We are in the Hotel delle tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists, who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had coffee, eggs, and bread and butter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner, an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, fricasseed, and a hind quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more decanters of the wine aforesaid. This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court; around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy, probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids; nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns of Italy. In the album of the hotel I find the names of more English travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think, even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber. After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets, paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low, compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we passed through it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain again, we at last inquired of a person in the principal piazza, and found our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood. FOLIGNO. May 26th.--At six o'clock this morning, we packed ourselves into our vettura, my wife and I occupying the coupe, and drove out of the city gate of Terni. There are some old towers near it, ruins of I know not what, and care as little, in the plethora of antiquities and other interesting objects. Through the arched gateway, as we approached, we had a view of one of the great hills that surround the town, looking partly bright in the early sunshine, and partly catching the shadows of the clouds that floated about the sky. Our way was now through the Vale of Terni, as I believe it is called, where we saw somewhat of the fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations; some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof, just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in short, so that nobody need be at a loss when he feels the religious sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level space that lay between; they continually thrust themselves across the passage, and appeared as if determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it, and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or grass-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate vicinity of an Italian home. At Strettura (which, as the name indicates, is a very narrow part of the valley) we added two oxen to our horses, and began to ascend the Monte Somma, which, according to Murray, is nearly four thousand feet high where we crossed it. When we came to the steepest part of the ascent, Gaetano, who exercises a pretty decided control over his passengers, allowed us to walk; and we all, with one exception, alighted, and began to climb the mountain on foot. I walked on briskly, and soon left the rest of the party behind, reaching the top of the pass in such a short time that I could not believe it, and kept onward, expecting still another height to climb. But the road began to descend, winding among the depths of the hills as heretofore; now beside the dry, gravelly bed of a departed stream, now crossing it by a bridge, and perhaps passing through some other gorge, that yet gave no decided promise of an outlet into the world beyond. A glimpse might occasionally be caught, through a gap between the hill-tops, of a company of distant mountain-peaks, pyramidal, as these hills are apt to be, and resembling the camp of an army of giants. The landscape was not altogether savage; sometimes a hillside was covered with a rich field of grain, or an orchard of olive-trees, looking not unlike puffs of smoke, from the peculiar line of their foliage; but oftener there was a vast mantle of trees and shrubbery from top to bottom, the golden tufts of the broom shining out amid the verdure, and gladdening the whole. Nothing was dismal except the houses; those were always so, whether the compact, gray lines of village hovels, with a narrow street between, or the lonely farm-house, standing far apart from the road, built of stone, with window-gaps high in the wall, empty of glass; or the half-castle, half-dwelling, of which I saw a specimen or two, with what looked like a defensive rampart, drawn around its court. I saw no look of comfort anywhere; and continually, in this wild and solitary region, I met beggars, just as if I were still in the streets of Rome. Boys and girls kept beside me, till they delivered me into the hands of others like themselves; hoary grandsires and grandmothers caught a glimpse of my approach, and tottered as fast as they could to intercept me; women came out of the cottages, with rotten cherries on a plate, entreating me to buy them for a mezzo baioccho; a man, at work on the road, left his toil to beg, and was grateful for the value of a cent; in short, I was never safe from importunity, as long as there was a house or a human being in sight. We arrived at Spoleto before noon, and while our dejeuner was being prepared, looked down from the window of the inn into the narrow street beneath, which, from the throng of people in it, I judged to be the principal one: priests, papal soldiers, women with no bonnets on their heads; peasants in breeches and mushroom hats; maids and matrons, drawing water at a fountain; idlers, smoking on a bench under the window; a talk, a bustle, but no genuine activity. After lunch we walked out to see the lions of Spoleto, and found our way up a steep and narrow street that led us to the city gate, at which, it is traditionally said, Hannibal sought to force an entrance, after the battle of Thrasymene, and was repulsed. The gateway has a double arch, on the inner one of which is a tablet, recording the above tradition as an unquestioned historical fact. From the gateway we went in search of the Duomo, or cathedral, and were kindly directed thither by an officer, who was descending into the town from the citadel, which is an old castle, now converted into a prison. The cathedral seemed small, and did not much interest us, either by the Gothic front or its modernized interior. We saw nothing else in Spoleto, but went back to the inn and resumed our journey, emerging from the city into the classic valley of the Clitumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the base of the edifice we saw the Clitumnus, so recently from its source in the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of Clitumnus, except that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh profane in the urgency of their petitions; they absolutely fall down on their knees as you approach, in the same attitude as if they were praying to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over. I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town, where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could), I saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with a crown of edifices, terminating in a church-tower; while a part of the northern side was apparently too steep for building; and a cataract of houses flowed down the western and southern slopes. There seemed to be palaces, churches, everything that a city should have; but my eyes are heavy, and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent its crumbling down, and enable it to support the platform of edifices which crowns it. May 27th.--We reached Foligno in good season yesterday afternoon. Our inn seemed ancient; and, under the same roof, on one side of the entrance, was the stable, and on the other the coach-house. The house is built round a narrow court, with a well of water at bottom, and an opening in the roof at top, whence the staircases are lighted that wind round the sides of the court, up to the highest story. Our dining-room and bedrooms were in the latter region, and were all paved with brick, and without carpets; and the characteristic of the whole was all exceeding plainness and antique clumsiness of fitting up. We found ourselves sufficiently comfortable, however; and, as has been the case throughout our journey, had a very fair and well-cooked dinner. It shows, as perhaps I have already remarked, that it is still possible to live well in Italy, at no great expense, and that the high prices charged to the forestieri at Rome and elsewhere are artificial, and ought to be abated. . . . The day had darkened since morning, and was now ominous of rain; but as soon as we were established, we sallied out to see whatever was worth looking at. A beggar-boy, with one leg, followed us, without asking for anything, apparently only for the pleasure of our company, though he kept at too great a distance for conversation, and indeed did not attempt to speak. We went first to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, and a modernized interior, stuccoed and whitewashed, looking as neat as a New England meeting-house, and very mean, after our familiarity with the gorgeous churches in other cities. There were some pictures in the chapels, but, I believe, all modern, and I do not remember a single one of them. Next we went, without any guide, to a church attached to a convent of Dominican monks, with a Gothic exterior, and two hideous pictures of Death,--the skeleton leaning on his scythe, one on each side of the door. This church, likewise, was whitewashed, but we understood that it had been originally frescoed all over, and by famous hands; but these pictures, having become much injured, they were all obliterated, as we saw,--all, that is to say, except a few specimens of the best preserved, which were spared to show the world what the whole had been. I thanked my stars that the obliteration of the rest had taken place before our visit; for if anything is dreary and calculated to make the beholder utterly miserable, it is a faded fresco, with spots of the white plaster dotted over it. Our one-legged boy had followed us into the church and stood near the door till he saw us ready to come out, when he hurried on before us, and waited a little way off to see whither we should go. We still went on at random, taking the first turn that offered itself, and soon came to another old church,--that of St. Mary within the Walls,--into which we entered, and found it whitewashed, like the other two. This was especially fortunate, for the doorkeeper informed us that, two years ago, the whole church (except, I suppose, the roof, which is of timber) had been covered with frescos by Pinturicchio, all of which had been ruthlessly obliterated, except a very few fragments. These he proceeded to show us; poor, dim ghosts of what may once have been beautiful,--now so far gone towards nothingness that I was hardly sure whether I saw a glimmering of the design or not. By the by, it was not Pinturicchio, as I have written above, but Giotto, assisted, I believe, by Cimabue, who painted these frescos. Our one-legged attendant had followed us also into this church, and again hastened out of it before us; and still we heard the dot of his crutch upon the pavement, as we passed from street to street. By and by a sickly looking man met us, and begged for "qualche cosa"; but the boy shouted to him, "Niente!" whether intimating that we would give him nothing, or that he himself had a prior claim to all our charity, I cannot tell. However, the beggar-man turned round, and likewise followed our devious course. Once or twice we missed him; but it was only because he could not walk so fast as we; for he appeared again as we emerged from the door of another church. Our one-legged friend we never missed for a moment; he kept pretty near us,--near enough to be amused by our indecision whither to go; and he seemed much delighted when it began to rain, and he saw us at a loss how to find our way back to the hotel. Nevertheless, he did not offer to guide us; but stumped on behind with a faster or slower dot of his crutch, according to our pace. I began to think that he must have been engaged as a spy upon our movements by the police who had taken away my passport at the city gate. In this way he attended us to the door of the hotel, where the beggar had already arrived. The latter again put in his doleful petition; the one-legged boy said not a word, nor seemed to expect anything, and both had to go away without so much as a mezzo baioccho out of our pockets. The multitude of beggars in Italy makes the heart as obdurate as a paving-stone. We left Foligno this morning, and, all ready for us at the door of the hotel, as we got into the carriage, were our friends, the beggar-man and the one-legged boy; the latter holding out his ragged hat, and smiling with as confident an air as if he had done us some very particular service, and were certain of being paid for it, as from contract. It was so very funny, so impudent, so utterly absurd, that I could not help giving him a trifle; but the man got nothing,--a fact that gives me a twinge or two, for he looked sickly and miserable. But where everybody begs, everybody, as a general rule, must be denied; and, besides, they act their misery so well that you are never sure of the genuine article. PERUGIA. May 25th.--As I said last night, we left Foligno betimes in the morning, which was bleak, chill, and very threatening, there being very little blue sky anywhere, and the clouds lying heavily on some of the mountain-ridges. The wind blew sharply right in U----'s face and mine, as we occupied the coupe, so that there must have been a great deal of the north in it. We drove through a wide plain--the Umbrian valley, I suppose--and soon passed the old town of Spello, just touching its skirts, and wondering how people, who had this rich and convenient plain from which to choose a site, could think of covering a huge island of rock with their dwellings,--for Spello tumbled its crooked and narrow streets down a steep descent, and cannot well have a yard of even space within its walls. It is said to contain some rare treasures of ancient pictorial art. I do not remember much that we saw on our route. The plains and the lower hillsides seemed fruitful of everything that belongs to Italy, especially the olive and the vine. As usual, there were a great many shrines, and frequently a cross by the wayside. Hitherto it had been merely a plain wooden cross; but now almost every cross was hung with various instruments, represented in wood, apparently symbols of the crucifixion of our Saviour,--the spear, the sponge, the crown of thorns, the hammer, a pair of pincers, and always St. Peter's cock, made a prominent figure, generally perched on the summit of the cross. From our first start this morning we had seen mists in various quarters, betokening that there was rain in those spots, and now it began to spatter in our own faces, although within the wide extent of our prospect we could see the sunshine falling on portions of the valley. A rainbow, too, shone out, and remained so long visible that it appeared to have made a permanent stain in the sky. By and by we reached Assisi, which is magnificently situated for pictorial purposes, with a gray castle above it, and a gray wall around it, itself on a mountain, and looking over the great plain which we had been traversing, and through which lay our onward way. We drove through the Piazza Grande to an ancient house a little beyond, where a hospitable old lady receives travellers for a consideration, without exactly keeping an inn. In the piazza we saw the beautiful front of a temple of Minerva, consisting of several marble pillars, fluted, and with rich capitals supporting a pediment. It was as fine as anything I had seen at Rome, and is now, of course, converted into a Catholic church. I ought to have said that, instead of driving straight to the old lady's, we alighted at the door of a church near the city gate, and went in to inspect some melancholy frescos, and thence clambered up a narrow street to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, old enough, but not very impressive. I really remember not a single object that we saw within, but am pretty certain that the interior had been stuccoed and whitewashed. The ecclesiastics of old time did an excellent thing in covering the interiors of their churches with brilliant frescos, thus filling the holy places with saints and angels, and almost with the presence of the Divinity. The modern ecclesiastics do the next best thing in obliterating the wretched remnants of what has had its day and done its office. These frescos might be looked upon as the symbol of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and glorified it as long as it did live; now the glory and beauty have departed from one and the other. My wife, U----, and Miss Shepard now set out with a cicerone to visit the great Franciscan convent, in the church of which are preserved some miraculous specimens, in fresco and in oils, of early Italian art; but as I had no mind to suffer any further in this way, I stayed behind with J----- and R-----, who we're equally weary of these things. After they were gone we took a ramble through the city, but were almost swept away by the violence of the wind, which struggled with me for my hat, and whirled R----- before it like a feather. The people in the public square seemed much diverted at our predicament, being, I suppose, accustomed to these rude blasts in their mountain-home. However, the wind blew in momentary gusts, and then became more placable till another fit of fury came, and passed as suddenly as before. We walked out of the same gate through which we had entered,--an ancient gate, but recently stuccoed and whitewashed, in wretched contrast to the gray, venerable wall through which it affords ingress,--and I stood gazing at the magnificent prospect of the wide valley beneath. It was so vast that there appeared to be all varieties of weather in it at the same instant; fields of sunshine, tracts of storm,--here the coming tempest, there the departing one. It was a picture of the world on a vast canvas, for there was rural life and city life within the great expanse, and the whole set in a frame of mountains,--the nearest bold and dust-net, with the rocky ledges showing through their sides, the distant ones blue and dim,--so far stretched this broad valley. When I had looked long enough,--no, not long enough, for it would take a great while to read that page,--we returned within the gate, and we clambered up, past the cathedral and into the narrow streets above it. The aspect of everything was immeasurably old; a thousand years would be but a middle age for one of those houses, built so massively with huge stones and solid arches, that I do not see how they are ever to tumble down, or to be less fit for human habitation than they are now. The streets crept between them, and beneath arched passages, and up and down steps of stone or ancient brick, for it would be altogether impossible for a carriage to ascend above the Grand Piazza, though possibly a donkey or a chairman's mule might find foothold. The city seems like a stony growth out of the hillside, or a fossilized city,--so old and singular it is, without enough life and juiciness in it to be susceptible of decay. An earthquake is the only chance of its ever being ruined, beyond its present ruin. Nothing is more strange than to think that this now dead city--dead, as regards the purposes for which men live nowadays--was, centuries ago, the seat and birthplace almost of art, the only art in which the beautiful part of the human mind then developed itself. How came that flower to grow among these wild mountains? I do not conceive, however, that the people of Assisi were ever much more enlightened or cultivated on the side of art than they are at present. The ecclesiastics were then the only patrons; and the flower grew here because there was a great ecclesiastical garden in which it was sheltered and fostered. But it is very curious to think of Assisi, a school of art within, and mountain and wilderness without. My wife and the rest of the party returned from the convent before noon, delighted with what they had seen, as I was delighted not to have seen it. We ate our dejeuner, and resumed our journey, passing beneath the great convent, after emerging from the gate opposite to that of our entrance. The edifice made a very good spectacle, being of great extent, and standing on a double row of high and narrow arches, on which it is built up from the declivity of the hill. We soon reached the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, which is a modern structure, and very spacious, built in place of one destroyed by an earthquake. It is a fine church, opening out a magnificent space in its nave and aisles; and beneath the great dome stands the small old chapel, with its rude stone walls, in which St. Francis founded his order. This chapel and the dome appear to have been the only portions of the ancient church that were not destroyed by the earthquake. The dwelling of St. Francis is said to be also preserved within the church; but we did not see it, unless it were a little dark closet into which we squeezed to see some frescos by La Spagna. It had an old wooden door, of which U---- picked off a little bit of a chip, to serve as a relic. There is a fresco in the church, on the pediment of the chapel, by Overbeck, representing the Assumption of the Virgin. It did not strike me as wonderfully fine. The other pictures, of which there were many, were modern, and of no great merit. We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----- for my companion, kept on even to the city gate,--a distance, I should think, of two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation, shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only Italy. Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains, and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil can give an idea of the scene. When God expressed himself in the landscape to mankind, he did not intend that it should be translated into any tongue save his own immediate one. J----- meanwhile, whose heart is now wholly in snail-shells, was rummaging for them among the stones and hedges by the roadside; yet, doubtless, enjoyed the prospect more than he knew. The coach lagged far behind us, and when it came up, we entered the gate, where a soldier appeared, and demanded my passport. We drove to the Grand Hotel de France, which is near the gate, and two fine little boys ran beside the carriage, well dressed and well looking enough to have been a gentleman's sons, but claiming Gaetano for their father. He is an inhabitant of Perugia, and has therefore reached his own home, though we are still little more than midway to our journey's end. Our hotel proves, thus far, to be the best that we have yet met with. We are only in the outskirts of Perugia; the bulk of the city, where the most interesting churches and the public edifices are situated, being far above us on the hill. My wife, U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- streamed forth immediately, and saw a church; but J-----, who hates them, and I remained behind; and, for my part, I added several pages to this volume of scribble. This morning was as bright as morning could be, even in Italy, and in this transparent mountain atmosphere. We at first declined the services of a cicerone, and went out in the hopes of finding our way to whatever we wished to see, by our own instincts. This proved to be a mistaken hope, however; and we wandered about the upper city, much persecuted by a shabby old man who wished to guide us; so, at last, Miss Shepard went back in quest of the cicerone at the hotel, and, meanwhile, we climbed to the summit of the hill of Perugia, and, leaning over a wall, looked forth upon a most magnificent view of mountain and valley, terminating in some peaks, lofty and dim, which surely must be the Apennines. There again a young man accosted us, offering to guide us to the Cambio or Exchange; and as this was one of the places which we especially wished to see, we accepted his services. By the by, I ought to have mentioned that we had already entered a church (San Luigi, I believe), the interior of which we found very impressive, dim with the light of stained and painted windows, insomuch that it at first seemed almost dark, and we could only see the bright twinkling of the tapers at the shrines; but, after a few minutes, we discerned the tall octagonal pillars of the nave, marble, and supporting a beautiful roof of crossed arches. The church was neither Gothic nor classic, but a mixture of both, and most likely barbarous; yet it had a grand effect in its tinted twilight, and convinced me more than ever how desirable it is that religious edifices should have painted windows. The door of the Cambio proved to be one that we had passed several times, while seeking for it, and was very near the church just mentioned, which fronts on one side of the same piazza. We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino. When the room was in its first glory, I can conceive that the world had not elsewhere to show, within so small a space, such magnificence and beauty as were then displayed here. Even now, I enjoyed (to the best of my belief, for we can never feel sure that we are not bamboozling ourselves in such matters) some real pleasure in what I saw; and especially seemed to feel, after all these ages, the old painter's devout sentiment still breathing forth from the religious pictures, the work of a hand that had so long been dust. When we had looked long at these, the old gentleman led us into a chapel, of the same size as the former room, and built in the same fashion, wainscoted likewise with old oak. The walls were also frescoed, entirely frescoed, and retained more of their original brightness than those we had already seen, although the pictures were the production of a somewhat inferior hand, a pupil of Perugino. They seemed to be very striking, however, not the less so, that one of them provoked an unseasonable smile. It was the decapitation of John the Baptist; and this holy personage was represented as still on his knees, with his hands clasped in prayer, although the executioner was already depositing the head in a charger, and the blood was spouting from the headless trunk, directly, as it were, into the face of the spectator. While we were in the outer room, the cicerone who first offered his services at the hotel had come in; so we paid our chance guide, and expected him to take his leave. It is characteristic of this idle country, however, that if you once speak to a person, or connect yourself with him by the slightest possible tie, you will hardly get rid of him by anything short of main force. He still lingered in the room, and was still there when I came away; for, having had as many pictures as I could digest, I left my wife and U---- with the cicerone, and set out on a ramble with J-----. We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened out upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely,--shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people,--one of whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which we entered last night. I ought to have mentioned, in the narrative of yesterday, that we crossed the Tiber shortly before reaching Perugia, already a broad and rapid stream, and already distinguished by the same turbid and mud-puddly quality of water that we see in it at Rome. I think it will never be so disagreeable to me hereafter, now that I find this turbidness to be its native color, and not (like that of the Thames) accruing from city sewers or any impurities of the lowlands. As I now remember, the small Chapel of Santa Maria degl' Angeli seems to have been originally the house of St. Francis. May 29th.--This morning we visited the Church of the Dominicans, where we saw some quaint pictures by Fra Angelico, with a good deal of religious sincerity in them; also a picture of St. Columba by Perugino, which unquestionably is very good. To confess the truth, I took more interest in a fair Gothic monument, in white marble, of Pope Benedict XII., representing him reclining under a canopy, while two angels draw aside the curtain, the canopy being supported by twisted columns, richly ornamented. I like this overflow and gratuity of device with which Gothic sculpture works out its designs, after seeing so much of the simplicity of classic art in marble. We then tried to find the Church of San Pietro in Martire, but without success, although every person of whom we inquired immediately attached himself or herself to us, and could hardly be got rid of by any efforts on our part. Nobody seemed to know the church we wished for, but all directed us to another Church of San Pietro, which contains nothing of interest; whereas the right church is supposed to contain a celebrated picture by Perugino. Finally, we ascended the hill and the city proper of Perugia (for our hotel is in one of the suburbs), and J----- and I set out on a ramble about the city. It was market-day, and the principal piazza, with the neighboring streets, was crowded with people. . . . The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the streets rapidly run downward on either side. J----- and I followed one of these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this ancient civilization stands. On the right of the gate there was a rude country-path, partly overgrown with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the gray city wall, at the base of which the track kept onward. We followed it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might re-enter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower. A lame beggar-man sat by the gate, and as we passed him J----- gave him two baiocchi (which he himself had begged of me to buy an orange with), and was loaded with the pauper's prayers and benedictions as we entered the city. A great many blessings can be bought for very little money anywhere in Italy; and whether they avail anything or no, it is pleasant to see that the beggars have gratitude enough to bestow them in such abundance. Of all beggars I think a little fellow, who rode beside our carriage on a stick, his bare feet scampering merrily, while he managed his steed with one hand, and held out the other for charity, howling piteously the while, amused me most. PASSIGNANO. May 29th.--We left Perugia at about three o'clock to-day, and went down a pretty steep descent; but I have no particular recollection of the road till it again began to descend, before reaching the village of Magione. We all, except my wife, walked up the long hill, while the vettura was dragged after us with the aid of a yoke of oxen. Arriving first at the village, I leaned over the wall to admire the beautiful paese ("le bel piano," as a peasant called it, who made acquaintance with me) that lay at the foot of the hill, so level, so bounded within moderate limits by a frame of hills and ridges, that it looked like a green lake. In fact, I think it was once a real lake, which made its escape from its bed, as I have known some lakes to have done in America. Passing through and beyond the village, I saw, on a height above the road, a half-ruinous tower, with great cracks running down its walls, half-way from top to bottom. Some little children had mounted the hill with us, begging all the way; they were recruited with additional members in the village; and here, beneath the ruinous tower, a madman, as it seemed, assaulted us, and ran almost under the carriage-wheels, in his earnestness to get a baioccho. Ridding ourselves of these annoyances, we drove on, and, between five and six o'clock, came in sight of the Lake of Thrasymene, obtaining our first view of it, I think, in its longest extent. There were high hills, and one mountain with its head in the clouds, visible on the farther shore, and on the horizon beyond it; but the nearer banks were long ridges, and hills of only moderate height. The declining sun threw a broad sheen of brightness over the surface of the lake, so that we could not well see it for excess of light; but had a vision of headlands and islands floating about in a flood of gold, and blue, airy heights bounding it afar. When we first drew near the lake, there was but a narrow tract, covered with vines and olives, between it and the hill that rose on the other side. As we advanced, the tract grew wider, and was very fertile, as was the hillside, with wheat-fields, and vines, and olives, especially the latter, which, symbol of peace as it is, seemed to find something congenial to it in the soil stained long ago with blood. Farther onward, the space between the lake and hill grew still narrower, the road skirting along almost close to the water-side; and when we reached the town of Passignano there was but room enough for its dirty and ugly street to stretch along the shore. I have seldom beheld a lovelier scene than that of the lake and the landscape around it; never an uglier one than that of this idle and decaying village, where we were immediately surrounded by beggars of all ages, and by men vociferously proposing to row us out upon the lake. We declined their offers of a boat, for the evening was very fresh and cool, insomuch that I should have liked an outside garment,--a temperature that I had not anticipated, so near the beginning of June, in sunny Italy. Instead of a row, we took a walk through the village, hoping to come upon the shore of the lake, in some secluded spot; but an incredible number of beggar-children, both boys and girls, but more of the latter, rushed out of every door, and went along with us, all howling their miserable petitions at the same moment. The village street is long, and our escort waxed more numerous at every step, till Miss Shepard actually counted forty of these little reprobates, and more were doubtless added afterwards. At first, no doubt, they begged in earnest hope of getting some baiocchi; but, by and by, perceiving that we had determined not to give them anything, they made a joke of the matter, and began to laugh and to babble, and turn heels over head, still keeping about us, like a swarm of flies, and now and then begging again with all their might. There were as few pretty faces as I ever saw among the same number of children; and they were as ragged and dirty little imps as any in the world, and, moreover, tainted the air with a very disagreeable odor from their rags and dirt; rugged and healthy enough, nevertheless, and sufficiently intelligent; certainly bold and persevering too; so that it is hard to say what they needed to fit them for success in life. Yet they begin as beggars, and no doubt will end so, as all their parents and grandparents do; for in our walk through the village, every old woman and many younger ones held out their hands for alms, as if they had all been famished. Yet these people kept their houses over their heads; had firesides in winter, I suppose, and food out of their little gardens every day; pigs to kill, chickens, olives, wine, and a great many things to make life comfortable. The children, desperately as they begged, looked in good bodily ease, and happy enough; but, certainly, there was a look of earnest misery in the faces of some of the old women, either genuine or exceedingly well acted. I could not bear the persecution, and went into our hotel, determining not to venture out again till our departure; at least not in the daylight. My wife and the rest of the family, however, continued their walk, and at length were relieved from their little pests by three policemen (the very images of those in Rome, in their blue, long-skirted coats, cocked chapeaux-bras, white shoulder-belts, and swords), who boxed their ears, and dispersed them. Meanwhile, they had quite driven away all sentimental effusion (of which I felt more, really, than I expected) about the Lake of Thrasymene. The inn of Passignano promised little from its outward appearance; a tall, dark old house, with a stone staircase leading us up from one sombre story to another, into a brick-paved dining-room, with our sleeping-chambers on each side. There was a fireplace of tremendous depth and height, fit to receive big forest-logs, and with a queer, double pair of ancient andirons, capable of sustaining them; and in a handful of ashes lay a small stick of olive-wood,--a specimen, I suppose, of the sort of fuel which had made the chimney black, in the course of a good many years. There must have been much shivering and misery of cold around this fireplace. However, we needed no fire now, and there was promise of good cheer in the spectacle of a man cleaning some lake-fish for our dinner, while the poor things flounced and wriggled under the knife. The dinner made its appearance, after a long while, and was most plentiful, . . . . so that, having measured our appetite in anticipation of a paucity of food, we had to make more room for such overflowing abundance. When dinner was over, it was already dusk, and before retiring I opened the window, and looked out on Lake Thrasymene, the margin of which lies just on the other side of the narrow village street. The moon was a day or two past the full, just a little clipped on the edge, but gave light enough to show the lake and its nearer shores almost as distinctly as by day; and there being a ripple on the surface of the water, it made a sheen of silver over a wide space. AREZZO. May 30th.--We started at six o'clock, and left the one ugly street of Passignano, before many of the beggars were awake. Immediately in the vicinity of the village there is very little space between the lake in front and the ridge of hills in the rear; but the plain widened as we drove onward, so that the lake was scarcely to be seen, or often quite hidden among the intervening trees, although we could still discern the summits of the mountains that rise far beyond its shores. The country was fertile, presenting, on each side of the road, vines trained on fig-trees; wheat-fields and olives, in greater abundance than any other product. On our right, with a considerable width of plain between, was the bending ridge of hills that shut in the Roman army, by its close approach to the lake at Passignano. In perhaps half all hour's drive, we reached the little bridge that throws its arch over the Sanguinetto, and alighted there. The stream has but about a yard's width of water; and its whole course, between the hills and the lake, might well have been reddened and swollen with the blood of the multitude of slain Romans. Its name put me in mind of the Bloody Brook at Deerfield, where a company of Massachusetts men were massacred by the Indians. The Sanguinetto flows over a bed of pebbles; and J----- crept under the bridge, and got one of them for a memorial, while U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- plucked some olive twigs and oak leaves, and made them into wreaths together,--symbols of victory and peace. The tower, which is traditionally named after Hannibal, is seen on a height that makes part of the line of enclosing hills. It is a large, old castle, apparently of the Middle Ages, with a square front, and a battlemented sweep of wall. The town of Torres (its name, I think), where Hannibal's main army is supposed to have lain while the Romans came through the pass, was in full view; and I could understand the plan of the battle better than any system of military operations which I have hitherto tried to fathom. Both last night and to-day, I found myself stirred more sensibly than I expected by the influences of this scene. The old battle-field is still fertile in thoughts and emotions, though it is so many ages since the blood spilt there has ceased to make the grass and flowers grow more luxuriantly. I doubt whether I should feel so much on the field of Saratoga or Monmouth; but these old classic battle-fields belong to the whole world, and each man feels as if his own forefathers fought them. Mine, by the by, if they fought them at all, must have been on the side of Hannibal; for, certainly, I sympathized with him, and exulted in the defeat of the Romans on their own soil. They excite much the same emotion of general hostility that the English do. Byron has written some very fine stanzas on the battle-field,--not so good as others that he has written on classical scenes and subjects, yet wonderfully impressing his own perception of the subject on the reader. Whenever he has to deal with a statue, a ruin, a battle-field, he pounces upon the topic like a vulture, and tears out its heart in a twinkling, so that there is nothing more to be said. If I mistake not, our passport was examined by the papal officers at the last custom-house in the pontifical territory, before we traversed the path through which the Roman army marched to its destruction. Lake Thrasymene, of which we took our last view, is not deep set among the hills, but is bordered by long ridges, with loftier mountains receding into the distance. It is not to be compared to Windermere or Loch Lomond for beauty, nor with Lake Champlain and many a smaller lake in my own country, none of which, I hope, will ever become so historically interesting as this famous spot. A few miles onward our passport was countersigned at the Tuscan custom-house, and our luggage permitted to pass without examination on payment of a fee of nine or ten pauls, besides two pauls to the porters. There appears to be no concealment on the part of the officials in thus waiving the exercise of their duty, and I rather imagine that the thing is recognized and permitted by their superiors. At all events, it is very convenient for the traveller. We saw Cortona, sitting, like so many other cities in this region, on its hill, and arrived about noon at Arezzo, which also stretches up a high hillside, and is surrounded, as they all are, by its walls or the remains of one, with a fortified gate across every entrance. I remember one little village, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Clitumnus, which we entered by one gateway, and, in the course of two minutes at the utmost, left by the opposite one, so diminutive was this walled town. Everything hereabouts bears traces of times when war was the prevalent condition, and peace only a rare gleam of sunshine. At Arezzo we have put up at the Hotel Royal, which has the appearance of a grand old house, and proves to be a tolerable inn enough. After lunch, we wandered forth to see the town, which did not greatly interest me after Perugia, being much more modern and less picturesque in its aspect. We went to the cathedral,--a Gothic edifice, but not of striking exterior. As the doors were closed, and not to be opened till three o'clock, we seated ourselves under the trees, on a high, grassy space surrounded and intersected with gravel-walks,--a public promenade, in short, near the cathedral; and after resting ourselves here we went in search of Petrarch's house, which Murray mentions as being in this neighborhood. We inquired of several people, who knew nothing about the matter; one woman misdirected us, out of mere fun, I believe, for she afterwards met us and asked how we had succeeded. But finally, through ------'s enterprise and perseverance, we found the spot, not a stone's-throw from where we had been sitting. Petrarch's house stands below the promenade which I have just mentioned, and within hearing of the reverberations between the strokes of the cathedral bell. It is two stories high, covered with a light-colored stucco, and has not the slightest appearance of antiquity, no more than many a modern and modest dwelling-house in an American city. Its only remarkable feature is a pointed arch of stone, let into the plastered wall, and forming a framework for the doorway. I set my foot on the doorsteps, ascended them, and Miss Shepard and J----- gathered some weeds or blades of grass that grew in the chinks between the steps. There is a long inscription on a slab of marble set in the front of the house, as is the fashion in Arezzo when a house has been the birthplace or residence of a distinguished man. Right opposite Petrarch's birth-house--and it must have been the well whence the water was drawn that first bathed him--is a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories. It is surrounded with a stone curb, octagonal in shape, and evidently as ancient as Boccaccio's time. It has a wooden cover, through which is a square opening, and looking down I saw my own face in the water far beneath. There is no familiar object connected with daily life so interesting as a well; and this well or old Arezzo, whence Petrarch had drunk, around which he had played in his boyhood, and which Boccaccio has made famous, really interested me more than the cathedral. It lies right under the pavement of the street, under the sunshine, without any shade of trees about it, or any grass, except a little that grows in the crevices of its stones; but the shape of its stone-work would make it a pretty object in an engraving. As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. O, certainly not; but yet I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their teakettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score. Petrarch's house is not a separate and insulated building, but stands in contiguity and connection with other houses on each side; and all, when I saw them, as well as the whole street, extending down the slope of the hill, had the bright and sunny aspect of a modern town. As the cathedral was not yet open, and as J----- and I had not so much patience as my wife, we left her and Miss Shepard, and set out to return to the hotel. We lost our way, however, and finally had to return to the cathedral, to take a fresh start; and as the door was now open we went in. We found the cathedral very stately with its great arches, and darkly magnificent with the dim rich light coming through its painted windows, some of which are reckoned the most beautiful that the whole world has to show. The hues are far more brilliant than those of any painted glass I saw in England, and a great wheel window looks like a constellation of many-colored gems. The old English glass gets so smoky and dull with dust, that its pristine beauty cannot any longer be even imagined; nor did I imagine it till I saw these Italian windows. We saw nothing of my wife and Miss Shepard; but found afterwards that they had been much annoyed by the attentions of a priest who wished to show them the cathedral, till they finally told him that they had no money with them, when he left them without another word. The attendants in churches seem to be quite as venal as most other Italians, and, for the sake of their little profit, they do not hesitate to interfere with the great purposes for which their churches were built and decorated; hanging curtains, for instance, before all the celebrated pictures, or hiding them away in the sacristy, so that they cannot be seen without a fee. Returning to the hotel, we looked out of the window, and, in the street beneath, there was a very busy scene, it being Sunday, and the whole population, apparently, being astir, promenading up and down the smooth flag-stones, which made the breadth of the street one sidewalk, or at their windows, or sitting before their doors. The vivacity of the population in these parts is very striking, after the gravity and lassitude of Rome; and the air was made cheerful with the talk and laughter of hundreds of voices. I think the women are prettier than the Roman maids and matrons, who, as I think I have said before, have chosen to be very uncomely since the rape of their ancestresses, by way of wreaking a terrible spite and revenge. I have nothing more to say of Arezzo, except that, finding the ordinary wine very bad, as black as ink, and tasting as if it had tar and vinegar in it, we called for a bottle of Monte Pulciano, and were exceedingly gladdened and mollified thereby. INCISA. We left Arezzo early on Monday morning, the sun throwing the long shadows of the trees across the road, which at first, after we had descended the hill, lay over a plain. As the morning advanced, or as we advanced, the country grew more hilly. We saw many bits of rustic life,--such as old women tending pigs or sheep by the roadside, and spinning with a distaff; women sewing under trees, or at their own doors; children leading goats, tied by the horns, while they browse; sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike, at work side by side with male laborers in the fields. The broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Tuscan straw is the customary female head-dress, and is as unbecoming as can possibly be imagined, and of little use, one would suppose, as a shelter from the sun, the brim continually blowing upward from the face. Some of the elder women wore black felt hats, likewise broad-brimmed; and the men wore felt hats also, shaped a good deal like a mushroom, with hardly any brim at all. The scenes in the villages through which we passed were very lively and characteristic, all the population seeming to be out of doors: some at the butcher's shop, others at the well; a tailor sewing in the open air, with a young priest sitting sociably beside him; children at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, spinning with the distaff at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting the pleasant morning pass in the sweet-do-nothing; all assembling in the street, as in the common room of one large household, and thus brought close together, and made familiar with one another, as they can never be in a different system of society. As usual along the road we passed multitudes of shrines, where the Virgin was painted in fresco, or sometimes represented in bas-reliefs, within niches, or under more spacious arches. It would be a good idea to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath all these wayside shrines, where the wayfarer might rest himself, and thank the Virgin for her hospitality; nor can I believe that it would offend her, any more than other incense, if he were to regale himself, even in such consecrated spots, with the fragrance of a pipe or cigar. In the wire-work screen, before many of the shrines, hung offerings of roses and other flowers, some wilted and withered, some fresh with that morning's dew, some that never bloomed and never faded,--being artificial. I wonder that they do not plant rose-trees and all kinds of fragrant and flowering shrubs under the shrines, and twine and wreathe them all around, so that the Virgin may dwell within a bower of perpetual freshness; at least put flower-pots, with living plants, into the niche. There are many things in the customs of these people that might be made very beautiful, if the sense of beauty were as much alive now as it must have been when these customs were first imagined and adopted. I must not forget, among these little descriptive items, the spectacle of women and girls bearing huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with scarlet poppies and blue flowers intermixed; the bundles sometimes so huge as almost to hide the woman's figure from head to heel, so that she looked like a locomotive mass of verdure and flowers; sometimes reaching only half-way down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung behind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest-sheaf. A Pre-Raphaelite painter--the one, for instance, who painted the heap of autumnal leaves, which we saw at the Manchester Exhibition--would find an admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, erect, and graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the miscellaneous herbage and flowers would give him all the scope he could desire for minute and various delineation of nature. The country houses which we passed had sometimes open galleries or arcades on the second story and above, where the inhabitants might perform their domestic labor in the shade and in the air. The houses were often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front. Wherever there was a pigeon-house, a flight of doves were represented as flying into the holes, doubtless for the invitation and encouragement of the real birds. Once or twice I saw a bush stuck up before the door of what seemed to be a wine-shop. If so, it is the ancient custom, so long disused in England, and alluded to in the proverb, "Good wine needs no bush." Several times we saw grass spread to dry on the road, covering half the track, and concluded it to have been cut by the roadside for the winter forage of his ass by some poor peasant, or peasant's wife, who had no grass land, except the margin of the public way. A beautiful feature of the scene to-day, as the preceding day, were the vines growing on fig-trees (?) [This interrogation-mark must mean that Mr. Hawthorne was not sure they were fig-trees.--ED.], and often wreathed in rich festoons from one tree to another, by and by to be hung with clusters of purple grapes. I suspect the vine is a pleasanter object of sight under this mode of culture than it can be in countries where it produces a more precious wine, and therefore is trained more artificially. Nothing can be more picturesque than the spectacle of an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own, clinging round its tree, imprisoning within its strong embrace the friend that supported its tender infancy, converting the tree wholly to its own selfish ends, as seemingly flexible natures are apt to do, stretching out its innumerable arms on every bough, and allowing hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. I must not yet quit this hasty sketch, without throwing in, both in the early morning, and later in the forenoon, the mist that dreamed among the hills, and which, now that I have called it mist, I feel almost more inclined to call light, being so quietly cheerful with the sunshine through it. Put in, now and then, a castle on a hilltop; a rough ravine, a smiling valley; a mountain stream, with a far wider bed than it at present needs, and a stone bridge across it, with ancient and massive arches;--and I shall say no more, except that all these particulars, and many better ones which escape me, made up a very pleasant whole. At about noon we drove into the village of Incisa, and alighted at the albergo where we were to lunch. It was a gloomy old house, as much like my idea of an Etruscan tomb as anything else that I can compare it to. We passed into a wide and lofty entrance-hall, paved with stone, and vaulted with a roof of intersecting arches, supported by heavy columns of stuccoed-brick, the whole as sombre and dingy as can well be. This entrance-hall is not merely the passageway into the inn, but is likewise the carriage-house, into which our vettura is wheeled; and it has, on one side, the stable, odorous with the litter of horses and cattle, and on the other the kitchen, and a common sitting-room. A narrow stone staircase leads from it to the dining-room, and chambers above, which are paved with brick, and adorned with rude frescos instead of paper-hangings. We look out of the windows, and step into a little iron-railed balcony, before the principal window, and observe the scene in the village street. The street is narrow, and nothing can exceed the tall, grim ugliness of the village houses, many of them four stories high, contiguous all along, and paved quite across; so that nature is as completely shut out from the precincts of this little town as from the heart of the widest city. The walls of the houses are plastered, gray, dilapidated; the windows small, some of them drearily closed with wooden shutters, others flung wide open, and with women's heads protruding, others merely frescoed, for a show of light and air. It would be a hideous street to look at in a rainy day, or when no human life pervaded it. Now it has vivacity enough to keep it cheerful. People lounge round the door of the albergo, and watch the horses as they drink from a stone trough, which is built against the wall of the house, and filled with the unseen gush of a spring. At first there is a shade entirely across the street, and all the within-doors of the village empties itself there, and keeps up a babblement that seems quite disproportioned even to the multitude of tongues that make it. So many words are not spoken in a New England village in a whole year as here in this single day. People talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and laugh at nothing as if it were all excellent joke. As the hot noon sunshine encroaches on our side of the street, it grows a little more quiet. The loungers now confine themselves to the shady margin (growing narrower and narrower) of the other side, where, directly opposite the albergo, there are two cafes and a wine-shop, "vendita di pane, vino, ed altri generi," all in a row with benches before them. The benchers joke with the women passing by, and are joked with back again. The sun still eats away the shadow inch by inch, beating down with such intensity that finally everybody disappears except a few passers-by. Doubtless the village snatches this half-hour for its siesta. There is a song, however, inside one of the cafes, with a burden in which several voices join. A girl goes through the street, sheltered under her great bundle of freshly cut grass. By and by the song ceases, and two young peasants come out of the cafe, a little affected by liquor, in their shirt-sleeves and bare feet, with their trousers tucked up. They resume their song in the street, and dance along, one's arm around his fellow's neck, his own waist grasped by the other's arm. They whirl one another quite round about, and come down upon their feet. Meeting a village maid coming quietly along, they dance up and intercept her for a moment, but give way to her sobriety of aspect. They pass on, and the shadow soon begins to spread from one side of the street, which presently fills again, and becomes once more, for its size, the noisiest place I ever knew. We had quite a tolerable dinner at this ugly inn, where many preceding travellers had written their condemnatory judgments, as well as a few their favorable ones, in pencil on the walls of the dining-room. TO FLORENCE. At setting off [from Incisa], we were surrounded by beggars as usual, the most interesting of whom were a little blind boy and his mother, who had besieged us with gentle pertinacity during our whole stay there. There was likewise a man with a maimed hand, and other hurts or deformities; also, an old woman who, I suspect, only pretended to be blind, keeping her eyes tightly squeezed together, but directing her hand very accurately where the copper shower was expected to fall. Besides these, there were a good many sturdy little rascals, vociferating in proportion as they needed nothing. It was touching, however, to see several persons--themselves beggars for aught I know--assisting to hold up the little blind boy's tremulous hand, so that he, at all events, might not lack the pittance which we had to give. Our dole was but a poor one, after all, consisting of what Roman coppers we had brought into Tuscany with us; and as we drove off, some of the boys ran shouting and whining after us in the hot sunshine, nor stopped till we reached the summit of the hill, which rises immediately from the village street. We heard Gaetano once say a good thing to a swarm of beggar-children, who were infesting us, "Are your fathers all dead?"--a proverbial expression, I suppose. The pertinacity of beggars does not, I think, excite the indignation of an Italian, as it is apt to do that of Englishmen or Americans. The Italians probably sympathize more, though they give less. Gaetano is very gentle in his modes of repelling them, and, indeed, never interferes at all, as long as there is a prospect of their getting anything. Immediately after leaving Incisa, we saw the Arno, already a considerable river, rushing between deep banks, with the greenish line of a duck-pond diffused through its water. Nevertheless, though the first impression was not altogether agreeable, we soon became reconciled to this line, and ceased to think it an indication of impurity; for, in spite of it, the river is still to a certain degree transparent, and is, at any rate, a mountain stream, and comes uncontaminated from its source. The pure, transparent brown of the New England rivers is the most beautiful color; but I am content that it should be peculiar to them. Our afternoon's drive was through scenery less striking than some which we had traversed, but still picturesque and beautiful. We saw deep valleys and ravines, with streams at the bottom; long, wooded hillsides, rising far and high, and dotted with white dwellings, well towards the summits. By and by, we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a sidelong valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills; while, far beyond, rose in the distance the blue peaks of three or four of the Apennines, just on the remote horizon. There being a haziness in the atmosphere, however, Florence was little more distinct to us than the Celestial City was to Christian and Hopeful, when they spied at it from the Delectable Mountains. Keeping steadfastly onward, we ascended a winding road, and passed a grand villa, standing very high, and surrounded with extensive grounds. It must be the residence of some great noble; and it has an avenue of poplars or aspens, very light and gay, and fit for the passage of the bridal procession, when the proprietor or his heir brings home his bride; while, in another direction from the same front of the palace, stretches an avenue or grove of cypresses, very long, and exceedingly black and dismal, like a train of gigantic mourners. I have seen few things more striking, in the way of trees, than this grove of cypresses. From this point we descended, and drove along an ugly, dusty avenue, with a high brick wall on one side or both, till we reached the gate of Florence, into which we were admitted with as little trouble as custom-house officers, soldiers, and policemen can possibly give. They did not examine our luggage, and even declined a fee, as we had already paid one at the frontier custom-house. Thank heaven, and the Grand Duke! As we hoped that the Casa del Bello had been taken for us, we drove thither in the first place, but found that the bargain had not been concluded. As the house and studio of Mr. Powers were just on the opposite side of the street, I went to it, but found him too much engrossed to see me at the moment; so I returned to the vettura, and we told Gaetano to carry us to a hotel. He established us at the Albergo della Fontana, a good and comfortable house. . . . Mr. Powers called in the evening,--a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes, which kindle as he speaks. He is gray, and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly, nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment. Through his good offices, the next day, we engaged the Casa del Bello, at a rent of fifty dollars a month, and I shall take another opportunity (my fingers and head being tired now) to write about the house, and Mr. Powers, and what appertains to him, and about the beautiful city of Florence. At present, I shall only say further, that this journey from Rome has been one of the brightest and most uncareful interludes of my life; we have all enjoyed it exceedingly, and I am happy that our children have it to look back upon. June 4th.--At our visit to Powers's studio on Tuesday, we saw a marble copy of the fisher-boy holding a shell to his ear, and the bust of Proserpine, and two or three other ideal busts; various casts of most of the ideal statues and portrait busts which he has executed. He talks very freely about his works, and is no exception to the rule that an artist is not apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother artist. He showed us a bust of Mr. Sparks by Persico,--a lifeless and thoughtless thing enough, to be sure,--and compared it with a very good one of the same gentleman by himself; but his chiefest scorn was bestowed on a wretched and ridiculous image of Mr. King, of Alabama, by Clark Mills, of which he said he had been employed to make several copies for Southern gentlemen. The consciousness of power is plainly to be seen, and the assertion of it by no means withheld, in his simple and natural character; nor does it give me an idea of vanity on his part to see and hear it. He appears to consider himself neglected by his country,--by the government of it, at least,--and talks with indignation of the byways and political intrigue which, he thinks, win the rewards that ought to be bestowed exclusively on merit. An appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars was made, some years ago, for a work of sculpture by him, to be placed in the Capitol; but the intermediate measures necessary to render it effective have been delayed; while the above-mentioned Clark Mills-- certainly the greatest bungler that ever botched a block of marble--has received an order for an equestrian statue of Washington. Not that Mr. Powers is made bitter or sour by these wrongs, as he considers them; he talks of them with the frankness of his disposition when the topic comes in his way, and is pleasant, kindly, and sunny when he has done with it. His long absence from our country has made him think worse of us than we deserve; and it is an effect of what I myself am sensible, in my shorter exile: the most piercing shriek, the wildest yell, and all the ugly sounds of popular turmoil, inseparable from the life of a republic, being a million times more audible than the peaceful hum of prosperity and content which is going on all the while. He talks of going home, but says that he has been talking of it every year since he first came to Italy; and between his pleasant life of congenial labor, and his idea of moral deterioration in America, I think it doubtful whether he ever crosses the sea again. Like most exiles of twenty years, he has lost his native country without finding another; but then it is as well to recognize the truth,--that an individual country is by no means essential to one's comfort. Powers took us into the farthest room, I believe, of his very extensive studio, and showed us a statue of Washington that has much dignity and stateliness. He expressed, however, great contempt for the coat and breeches, and masonic emblems, in which he had been required to drape the figure. What would he do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life? Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. His costume, at all events, was a part of his character, and must be dealt with by whatever sculptor undertakes to represent him. I wonder that so very sensible a man as Powers should not see the necessity of accepting drapery, and the very drapery of the day, if he will keep his art alive. It is his business to idealize the tailor's actual work. But he seems to be especially fond of nudity, none of his ideal statues, so far as I know them, having so much as a rag of clothes. His statue of California, lately finished, and as naked as Venus, seemed to me a very good work; not an actual woman, capable of exciting passion, but evidently a little out of the category of human nature. In one hand she holds a divining-rod. "She says to the emigrants," observed Powers, "'Here is the gold, if you choose to take it.'" But in her face, and in her eyes, very finely expressed, there is a look of latent mischief, rather grave than playful, yet somewhat impish or sprite-like; and, in the other hand, behind her back, she holds a bunch of thorns. Powers calls her eyes Indian. The statue is true to the present fact and history of California, and includes the age-long truth as respects the "auri sacra fames." . . . . When we had looked sufficiently at the sculpture, Powers proposed that we should now go across the street and see the Casa del Bello. We did so in a body, Powers in his dressing-gown and slippers, and his wife and daughters without assuming any street costume. The Casa del Bello is a palace of three pianos, the topmost of which is occupied by the Countess of St. George, an English lady, and two lower pianos are to be let, and we looked at both. The upper one would have suited me well enough; but the lower has a terrace, with a rustic summer-house over it, and is connected with a garden, where there are arbors and a willow-tree, and a little wilderness of shrubbery and roses, with a fountain in the midst. It has likewise an immense suite of rooms, round the four sides of a small court, spacious, lofty, with frescoed ceilings and rich hangings, and abundantly furnished with arm-chairs, sofas, marble tables, and great looking-glasses. Not that these last are a great temptation, but in our wandering life I wished to be perfectly comfortable myself, and to make my family so, for just this summer, and so I have taken the lower piano, the price being only fifty dollars per month (entirely furnished, even to silver and linen). Certainly this is something like the paradise of cheapness we were told of, and which we vainly sought in Rome. . . . To me has been assigned the pleasantest room for my study; and when I like I can overflow into the summer-house or an arbor, and sit there dreaming of a story. The weather is delightful, too warm to walk, but perfectly fit to do nothing in, in the coolness of these great rooms. Every day I shall write a little, perhaps,--and probably take a brief nap somewhere between breakfast and tea,--but go to see pictures and statues occasionally, and so assuage and mollify myself a little after that uncongenial life of the consulate, and before going back to my own hard and dusty New England. After concluding the arrangement for the Casa del Bello, we stood talking a little while with Powers and his wife and daughter before the door of the house, for they seem so far to have adopted the habits of the Florentines as to feel themselves at home on the shady side of the street. The out-of-door life and free communication with the pavement, habitual apparently among the middle classes, reminds me of the plays of Moliere and other old dramatists, in which the street or the square becomes a sort of common parlor, where most of the talk and scenic business of the people is carried on. June 5th.--For two or three mornings after breakfast I have rambled a little about the city till the shade grew narrow beneath the walls of the houses, and the heat made it uncomfortable to be in motion. To-day I went over the Ponte Carraja, and thence into and through the heart of the city, looking into several churches, in all of which I found people taking advantage of the cool breadth of these sacred interiors to refresh themselves and say their prayers. Florence at first struck me as having the aspect of a very new city in comparison with Rome; but, on closer acquaintance, I find that many of the buildings are antique and massive, though still the clear atmosphere, the bright sunshine, the light, cheerful hues of the stucco, and--as much as anything else, perhaps--the vivacious character of the human life in the streets, take away the sense of its being an ancient city. The streets are delightful to walk in after so many penitential pilgrimages as I have made over those little square, uneven blocks of the Roman pavement, which wear out the boots and torment the soul. I absolutely walk on the smooth flags of Florence for the mere pleasure of walking, and live in its atmosphere for the mere pleasure of living; and, warm as the weather is getting to be, I never feel that inclination to sink down in a heap and never stir again, which was my dull torment and misery as long as I stayed in Rome. I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here. I went to-day into the Baptistery, which stands near the Duomo, and, like that, is covered externally with slabs of black and white marble, now grown brown and yellow with age. The edifice is octagonal, and on entering, one immediately thinks of the Pantheon,--the whole space within being free from side to side, with a dome above; but it differs from the severe simplicity of the former edifice, being elaborately ornamented with marble and frescos, and lacking that great eye in the roof that looks so nobly and reverently heavenward from the Pantheon. I did little more than pass through the Baptistery, glancing at the famous bronze doors, some perfect and admirable casts of which I had already seen at the Crystal Palace. The entrance of the Duomo being just across the piazza, I went in there after leaving the Baptistery, and was struck anew--for this is the third or fourth visit--with the dim grandeur of the interior, lighted as it is almost exclusively by painted windows, which seem to me worth all the variegated marbles and rich cabinet-work of St. Peter's. The Florentine Cathedral has a spacious and lofty nave, and side aisles divided from it by pillars; but there are no chapels along the aisles, so that there is far more breadth and freedom of interior, in proportion to the actual space, than is usual in churches. It is woful to think how the vast capaciousness within St. Peter's is thrown away, and made to seem smaller than it is by every possible device, as if on purpose. The pillars and walls of this Duomo are of a uniform brownish, neutral tint; the pavement, a mosaic work of marble; the ceiling of the dome itself is covered with frescos, which, being very imperfectly lighted, it is impossible to trace out. Indeed, it is but a twilight region that is enclosed within the firmament of this great dome, which is actually larger than that of St. Peter's, though not lifted so high from the pavement. But looking at the painted windows, I little cared what dimness there might be elsewhere; for certainly the art of man has never contrived any other beauty and glory at all to be compared to this. The dome sits, as it were, upon three smaller domes,--smaller, but still great,--beneath which are three vast niches, forming the transepts of the cathedral and the tribune behind the high altar. All round these hollow, dome-covered arches or niches are high and narrow windows crowded with saints, angels, and all manner of blessed shapes, that turn the common daylight into a miracle of richness and splendor as it passes through their heavenly substance. And just beneath the swell of the great central dome is a wreath of circular windows quite round it, as brilliant as the tall and narrow ones below. It is a pity anybody should die without seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. This is "the dim, religious light" that Milton speaks of; but I doubt whether he saw these windows when he was in Italy, or any but those faded or dusty and dingy ones of the English cathedrals, else he would have illuminated that word "dim" with some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet should make it shine like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes,--bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and reverence because God himself was shining through them. I hate what I have said. All the time that I was in the cathedral the space around the high altar, which stands exactly under the dome, was occupied by priests or acolytes in white garments, chanting a religious service. After coming out, I took a view of the edifice from a corner of the street nearest to the dome, where it and the smaller domes can be seen at once. It is greatly more satisfactory than St. Peter's in any view I ever had of it,--striking in its outline, with a mystery, yet not a bewilderment, in its masses and curves and angles, and wrought out with a richness of detail that gives the eyes new arches, new galleries, new niches, new pinnacles, new beauties, great and small, to play with when wearied with the vast whole. The hue, black and white marbles, like the Baptistery, turned also yellow and brown, is greatly preferable to the buff travertine of St. Peter's. From the Duomo it is but a moderate street's length to the Piazza del Gran Duca, the principal square of Florence. It is a very interesting place, and has on one side the old Governmental Palace,--the Palazzo Vecchio,--where many scenes of historic interest have been enacted; for example, conspirators have been hanged from its windows, or precipitated from them upon the pavement of the square below. It is a pity that we cannot take as much interest in the history of these Italian Republics as in that of England, for the former is much the more picturesque and fuller of curious incident. The sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon race--in connection, too, with their moral sense--keeps them from doing a great many things that would enliven the page of history; and their events seem to come in great masses, shoved along by the agency of many persons, rather than to result from individual will and character. A hundred plots for a tragedy might be found in Florentine history for one in English. At one corner of the Palazzo Vecchio is a bronze equestrian statue of Cosmo de' Medici, the first Grand Duke, very stately and majestic; there are other marble statues--one of David, by Michael Angelo--at each side of the palace door; and entering the court I found a rich antique arcade within, surrounded by marble pillars, most elaborately carved, supporting arches that were covered with faded frescos. I went no farther, but stepped across a little space of the square to the Loggia di Lanzi, which is broad and noble, of three vast arches, at the end of which, I take it, is a part of the Palazzo Uffizi fronting on the piazza. I should call it a portico if it stood before the palace door; but it seems to have been constructed merely for itself, and as a shelter for the people from sun and rain, and to contain some fine specimens of sculpture, as well antique as of more modern times. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands here; but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace. A good many people were under these great arches; some of whom were reclining, half or quite asleep, on the marble seats that are built against the back of the loggia. A group was reading an edict of the Grand Duke, which appeared to have been just posted on a board, at the farther end of it; and I was surprised at the interest which they ventured to manifest, and the freedom with which they seemed to discuss it. A soldier was on guard, and doubtless there were spies enough to carry every word that was said to the ear of absolute authority. Glancing myself at the edict, however, I found it referred only to the furtherance of a project, got up among the citizens themselves, for bringing water into the city; and on such topics, I suppose there is freedom of discussion. June 7th.--Saturday evening we walked with U---- and J----- into the city, and looked at the exterior of the Duomo with new admiration. Since my former view of it, I have noticed--which, strangely enough, did not strike me before--that the facade is but a great, bare, ugly space, roughly plastered over, with the brickwork peeping through it in spots, and a faint, almost invisible fresco of colors upon it. This front was once nearly finished with an incrustation of black and white marble, like the rest of the edifice; but one of the city magistrates, Benedetto Uguccione, demolished it, three hundred years ago, with the idea of building it again in better style. He failed to do so, and, ever since, the magnificence of the great church has been marred by this unsightly roughness of what should have been its richest part; nor is there, I suppose, any hope that it will ever be finished now. The campanile, or bell-tower, stands within a few paces of the cathedral, but entirely disconnected from it, rising to a height of nearly three hundred feet, a square tower of light marbles, now discolored by time. It is impossible to give an idea of the richness of effect produced by its elaborate finish; the whole surface of the four sides, from top to bottom, being decorated with all manner of statuesque and architectural sculpture. It is like a toy of ivory, which some ingenious and pious monk might have spent his lifetime in adorning with scriptural designs and figures of saints; and when it was finished, seeing it so beautiful, he prayed that it might be miraculously magnified from the size of one foot to that of three hundred. This idea somewhat satisfies me, as conveying an impression how gigantesque the campanile is in its mass and height, and how minute and varied in its detail. Surely these mediaeval works have an advantage over the classic. They combine the telescope and the microscope. The city was all alive in the summer evening, and the streets humming with voices. Before the doors of the cafes were tables, at which people were taking refreshment, and it went to my heart to see a bottle of English ale, some of which was poured foaming into a glass; at least, it had exactly the amber hue and the foam of English bitter ale; but perhaps it may have been merely a Florentine imitation. As we returned home over the Arno, crossing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, we were struck by the beautiful scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its shores repeated in it, on either side, and the neighboring bridges, too, just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above,--a city of dream and shadow so close to the actual one. God has a meaning, no doubt, in putting this spiritual symbol continually beside us. Along the river, on both sides, as far as we could see, there was a row of brilliant lamps, which, in the far distance, looked like a cornice of golden light; and this also shone as brightly in the river's depths. The lilies of the evening, in the quarter where the sun had gone down, were very soft and beautiful, though not so gorgeous as thousands that I have seen in America. But I believe I must fairly confess that the Italian sky, in the daytime, is bluer and brighter than our own, and that the atmosphere has a quality of showing objects to better advantage. It is more than mere daylight; the magic of moonlight is somehow mixed up with it, although it is so transparent a medium of light. Last evening, Mr. Powers called to see us, and sat down to talk in a friendly and familiar way. I do not know a man of more facile intercourse, nor with whom one so easily gets rid of ceremony. His conversation, too, is interesting. He talked, to begin with, about Italian food, as poultry, mutton, beef, and their lack of savoriness as compared with our own; and mentioned an exquisite dish of vegetables which they prepare from squash or pumpkin blossoms; likewise another dish, which it will be well for us to remember when we get back to the Wayside, where we are overrun with acacias. It consists of the acacia-blossoms in a certain stage of their development fried in olive-oil. I shall get the receipt from Mrs. Powers, and mean to deserve well of my country by first trying it, and then making it known; only I doubt whether American lard, or even butter, will produce the dish quite so delicately as fresh Florence oil. Meanwhile, I like Powers all the better, because he does not put his life wholly into marble. We had much talk, nevertheless, on matters of sculpture, for he drank a cup of tea with us, and stayed a good while. He passed a condemnatory sentence on classic busts in general, saying that they were conventional, and not to be depended upon as trite representations of the persons. He particularly excepted none but the bust of Caracalla; and, indeed, everybody that has seen this bust must feel the justice of the exception, and so be the more inclined to accept his opinion about the rest. There are not more than half a dozen--that of Cato the Censor among the others--in regard to which I should like to ask his judgment individually. He seems to think the faculty of making a bust an extremely rare one. Canova put his own likeness into all the busts he made. Greenough could not make a good one; nor Crawford, nor Gibson. Mr. Harte, he observed,--an American sculptor, now a resident in Florence,--is the best man of the day for making busts. Of course, it is to be presumed that he excepts himself; but I would not do Powers the great injustice to imply that there is the slightest professional jealousy in his estimate of what others have done, or are now doing, in his own art. If he saw a better man than himself, he would recognize him at once, and tell the world of him; but he knows well enough that, in this line, there is no better, and probably none so good. It would not accord with the simplicity of his character to blink a fact that stands so broadly before him. We asked him what he thought, of Mr. Gibson's practice of coloring his statues, and he quietly and slyly said that he himself had made wax figures in his earlier days, but had left off making them now. In short, he objected to the practice wholly, and said that a letter of his on the subject had been published in the London "Athenaeum," and had given great offence to some of Mr. Gibson's friends. It appeared to me, however, that his arguments did not apply quite fairly to the case, for he seems to think Gibson aims at producing an illusion of life in the statue, whereas I think his object is merely to give warmth and softness to the snowy marble, and so bring it a little nearer to our hearts and sympathies. Even so far, nevertheless, I doubt whether the practice is defensible, and I was glad to see that Powers scorned, at all events, the argument drawn from the use of color by the antique sculptors, on which Gibson relies so much. It might almost be implied, from the contemptuous way in which Powers spoke of color, that he considers it an impertinence on the face of visible nature, and would rather the world had been made without it; for he said that everything in intellect or feeling can be expressed as perfectly, or more so, by the sculptor in colorless marble, as by the painter with all the resources of his palette. I asked him whether he could model the face of Beatrice Cenci from Guido's picture so as to retain the subtle expression, and he said he could, for that the expression depended entirely on the drawing, "the picture being a badly colored thing." I inquired whether he could model a blush, and he said "Yes"; and that he had once proposed to an artist to express a blush in marble, if he would express it in picture. On consideration, I believe one to be as impossible as the other; the life and reality of the blush being in its tremulousness, coming and going. It is lost in a settled red just as much as in a settled paleness, and neither the sculptor nor painter can do more than represent the circumstances of attitude and expression that accompany the blush. There was a great deal of truth in what Powers said about this matter of color, and in one of our interminable New England winters it ought to comfort us to think how little necessity there is for any hue but that of the snow. Mr. Powers, nevertheless, had brought us a bunch of beautiful roses, and seemed as capable of appreciating their delicate blush as we were. The best thing he said against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's tinted Venus. He took his leave at about eight o'clock, being to make a call on the Bryants, who are at the Hotel de New York, and also on Mrs. Browning, at Casa Guidi. END OF VOL. I. 
44212	----	Every attempt has been made to replicate the original book as printed. Some typographical errors have been corrected. A list follows the text. No attempt has been made to correct or normalize the printed accentuation or spelling of French and Italian names or words. Some illustration-markings have been moved from mid-paragraph for ease of reading. (etext transcriber's note) Italian Highways and Byways From a Motor Car _WORKS OF_ _FRANCIS MILTOUN_ _Rambles on the Riviera_ $2.50 _Rambles in Normandy_ 2.50 _Rambles in Brittany_ 2.50 _The Cathedrals and Churches of the Rhine_ 2.50 _The Cathedrals of Northern France_ 2.50 _The Cathedrals of Southern France_ 2.50 _In the Land of Mosques and Minarets_ 3.00 _Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine and the Loire Country_ 3.00 _Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces_ 3.00 _Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car_ 3.00 _The Automobilist Abroad_ _net_ 3.00 _Postage Extra_ _L. C. PAGE & COMPANY_ _New England Building, Boston, Mass._ [Illustration: In Bologna] Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car BY FRANCIS MILTOUN _O. N. I._ Author of "Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine," "Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre," "In the Land of Mosques and Minarets," etc. _With Pictures_ BY BLANCHE MCMANUS [Illustration] BOSTON L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 1909 _Copyright, 1909_ BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) _All rights reserved_ First Impression, May, 1909 Electrotyped and Printed at THE COLONIAL PRESS: C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A. [Illustration: _Contents_] CHAPTER PAGE I. THE WAY ABOUT ITALY 1 II. OF ITALIAN MEN AND MANNERS 23 III. CHIANTI AND MACARONI 41 IV. ITALIAN ROADS AND ROUTES 60 V. IN LIGURIA 81 VI. THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE 108 VII. ON TUSCAN ROADS 124 VIII. FLORENTINE BACKGROUNDS 144 IX. THE ROAD TO ROME 164 X. THE CAMPAGNA AND BEYOND 181 XI. LA BELLA NAPOLI 196 XII. THE BEAUTIFUL BAY OF NAPLES 207 XIII. ACROSS UMBRIA TO THE ADRIATIC 225 XIV. BY ADRIATIC'S SHORE 237 XV. ON THE VIA ÆMILIA 260 XVI. I VENETIA 277 XVII. THROUGH ITALIAN LAKELAND 309 XVIII. MILAN AND THE PLAINS OF LOMBARDY 333 XIX. TURIN AND THE ALPINE GATEWAYS 346 XX. FROM THE ITALIAN LAKES TO THE RIVIERA 360 INDEX 371 [Illustration: _List of_ Illustrations] PAGE IN BOLOGNA (_See page_ 266) _Frontispiece_ MAP OF ITALY _facing_ 2 ITALY IN THE XVIII CENTURY (map) 24 BARBERINO DI MUGELLO _facing_ 26 A CHIANTI SELLER _facing_ 32 A WAYSIDE TRATTORIA _facing_ 42 ROAD MAP OF NORTH ITALY _facing_ 72 ITALIAN ROAD SIGNS 77 PROFILE ROAD MAP, BOLOGNA--FLORENCE 79 PALAZZO DORIA, GENOA _facing_ 100 GENOA (map) 101 SUN DIAL, GENOA 106 RAPALLO _facing_ 110 RAPALLO AND ITS GULF (map) 111 LUCCA (arms) 122 ON A TUSCAN HIGHWAY _facing_ 124 FLORENCE AND ITS PALACES (map) 134 TORCH-HOLDERS, PALAZZO STROZZI, FLORENCE 136 PALAZZO VECCHIO, FLORENCE _facing_ 136 A LANTERN, PALAZZO STROZZI, FLORENCE 137 SAN GIMIGNANO _facing_ 138 VOLTERRA (map) 140 VILLA PALMIERI (diagram) 148 FIESOLE 150 PALAZZO DELLA SIGNORIA, SIENA _facing_ 164 ORVIETO _facing_ 168 ARMS OF VARIOUS PAPAL FAMILIES 172 CASTLE OF SANT'ANGELO, ROME _facing_ 174 PALAZZO VATICANO (diagram) 175 THE BORGIA WINDOW, ROME _facing_ 176 PAPAL ARMS OF CAESAR BORGIA 177 ARMS OF A MEDICIS PRELATE 178 VILLA MEDICI, ROME _facing_ 178 SUBIACO _facing_ 190 VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI _facing_ 192 HADRIAN'S VILLA (diagram) 194 NAPLES (diagram) 196 CASTELLO DELL'OVO, NAPLES _facing_ 202 THE BAY OF NAPLES (map) 208 ISCHIA _facing_ 212 LAVA BEDS OF VESUVIAS (map) 213 THE EXCAVATIONS OF POMPEII (diagram) 216 THE ENVIRONS OF POMPEII _facing_ 218 ASSISI (arms) 228 ASSISI: ITS WALLS, CASTLE, AND CHURCH (diagram) 229 ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL, PERUGIA _facing_ 230 PALAZZO DUCALE, URBINO _facing_ 232 BRINDISI; THE TERMINAL COLUMN OF THE APPIAN WAY 240 TRAJAN'S ARCH, ANCONA _facing_ 242 CASTEL MALATESTA, RIMINI _facing_ 244 PALAZZO DI TEODORICO, RAVENNA _facing_ 248 COLUMN TO GASTON DE FOIX, RAVENNA 249 THE MADONNA OF CHIOGGIA 252 BORGIA ARMS 254 FERRARA _facing_ 254 CASA DEL PETRARCA, ARQUA 259 BOLOGNA (diagram) 267 THE LEANING TOWERS OF BOLOGNA _facing_ 268 PARMA (arms) 272 PIACENZA (diagram) 275 PADUA (arms) 278 IN PADUA _facing_ 280 PALACES OF THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE (diagram) 289 THE SO-CALLED "HOUSE OF DESDEMONA," VENICE _facing_ 290 ASOLO 296 VICENZA (diagram) 300 VICENZA _facing_ 302 SEAL OF VERONA 304 PALLAZZO DUCAL, MANTUA 311 ON THE LAGO DI GARDA _facing_ 314 CASTLE OF BRESCIA _facing_ 316 BERGAMO _facing_ 318 THE ITALIAN LAKES (map) 319 ON THE LAGO DI COMO _facing_ 322 CADENABBIA 324 ON THE LAGO DI MAGGIORE _facing_ 326 ORTA _facing_ 330 A LOMBARD FÊTE _facing_ 334 THE ANCIENT CASTLE OF MILAN _facing_ 338 THE IRON CROWN OF LOMBARDY 345 PALAZZO MADONNA, TURIN _facing_ 346 ON THE STRADA, MONCENISIO _facing_ 350 CASTLE OF FÉNIS _facing_ 358 Italian Highways and Byways From a Motor Car CHAPTER I THE WAY ABOUT ITALY One travels in Italy chiefly in search of the picturesque, but in Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice or Milan, and in the larger towns lying between, there is, in spite of the romantic association of great names, little that appeals to one in a personal sense. One admires what Ruskin, Hare or Symonds tells one to admire, gets a smattering of the romantic history of the great families of the palaces and villas of Rome and Florence, but absorbs little or nothing of the genuine feudal traditions of the background regions away from the well-worn roads. Along the highways and byways runs the itinerary of the author and illustrator of this book, and they have thus been able to view many of the beauties and charms of the countryside which have been unknown to most travellers in Italy in these days of the modern railway. _Alla Campagna_ was our watchword as we set out to pass as many of our Italian days and nights as possible in places little celebrated in popular annals, a better way of knowing Italy than one will ever know it when viewed simply from the Vatican steps or Frascati's gardens. The palaces and villas of Rome, Florence and Venice are known to most European travellers--as they know Capri, Vesuvius or Amalfi; but of the grim castles of Ancona, of Rimini and Ravenna, and of the classic charms of Taormina or of Sarazza they know considerably less; and still less of Monte Cristo's Island, of Elba, of Otranto, and of the little hidden-away mountain towns of the Alps of Piedmont and the Val d'Aoste. The automobile, as a means of getting about, has opened up many old and half-used byways, and the automobile traveller of to-day may confidently assert that he has come to know the countryside of a beloved land as it was not even possible for his grandfathers to know it. The Italian tour may be made as a conducted tour, as an educative tour, as a mere butterfly tour (as it often has been), or as a honeymoon trip, but the reason for its making is always the same; the fact that Italy is a soft, fair, romantic land where many things have existed, and still exist, that may be found nowhere else on earth. The romance of travel and the process of gathering legends and tales of local manners and customs is in no way spoiled because of modern means of travel. Many a hitherto unexploited locality, with as worthy a monumental shrine as many more celebrated, will now become accessible, perhaps even well known. The pilgrim goes to Italy because of his devotion to religion, or to art or architecture, and, since this is the reason for his going, it is this reason, too, which has caused the making of more travel books on Italy than on all other continental countries combined. There are some who affect only "old masters" or literary shrines, others who crave palaces or villas, and yet others who haunt the roulette tables of Monte Carlo, Biarritz, or some exclusive Club in the "Eternal City." European travel is all things to all men. The pilgrims that come to Italy in increasing numbers each year are not all born and bred of artistic tastes, but the expedition soon brings a glimmer of it to the most sordid soul that ever took his amusements apart from his edification, and therein lies the secret of pleasurable travel for all classes. The automobilist should bear this in mind and not eat up the roadway through Æmilia at sixty miles an hour simply because it is possible. There are things to see en route, though none of your speeding friends have ever mentioned them. Get acquainted with them yourself and pass the information on to the next. That is what the automobile is doing for modern travel--more than the stage or the railway ever did, and more than the aeroplane ever will! One does not forget the American who went home to the "Far West" and recalled Rome as the city where he bought an alleged panama hat (made probably at Leghorn). He is no myth. One sees his like every day. He who hurried his daughter away from the dim outlined aisles of Milan's Gothic wonder to see the new electric light works and the model tramway station was one of these, but he was the better for having done a round of the cathedrals of Italy, even if he did get a hazy idea of them mixed up with his practical observations on street-lighting and transportation. Superficial Italian itineraries have been made often, and their chronicles set down. They are still being made, and chronicled, but the makers of guide books have, as yet, catered but little to the class of leisurely travellers, a class who would like to know where some of these unexploited monuments exist; where these unfamiliar histories and legends may be heard, and how they may all be arrived at, absorbed and digested. The people of the countryside, too, are usually more interesting than those of the towns. One has only to compare the Italian peasant and his picturesque life with the top-hatted and frock-coated Roman of to-day to arrive quickly to a conclusion as to which is typical of his surroundings. The Medicis, the Borgias, and the Colonnas have gone, and to find the real romantic Italian and his manner of life one has to hunt him in the small towns. The modern traveller in Italy by road will do well to recall the conditions which met the traveller of past days. The mere recollection of a few names and dates will enable the automobilist to classify his impressions on the road in a more definite and satisfying manner than if he took no cognizance of the pilgrims who have gone before. Chaucer set out ostensibly for Genoa in 1373 and incidentally met Petrarch at Padua and talked shop. A monk named Felix, from Ulm on the banks of the Danube, en route for Jerusalem, stopped off at Venice and wrote things down about it in his diary, which he called a "faithful description." Albrecht Durer visited Venice in 1505 and made friends with many there, and from Venice went to Bologna and Ferrara. An English crusading knight in the same century "took in" Italy en route to the Holy Land, entering the country via Chambéry and Aiguebelle--the most delightful gateway even to-day. Automobilists should work this itinerary out on some diagrammatic road map. Martin Luther, "with some business to transact with the Pope's Vicar," passed through Milan, Pavia, Bologna and Florence on his way to Rome, and Rabelais in 1532 followed in the train of Cardinal du Bellay, and his account of how he "saw the Pope" is interesting reading in these days when even personally-conducted tourists look forward to the same thing. Joachim du Bellay's "visions of Rome" are good poetry, but as he was partisan to his own beloved _Loire gaulois_, to the disparagement of the _Tiber latin_, their topographical worth is somewhat discounted. Sir Philip Sidney was in Padua and Venice in 1573, and he brought back a portrait of himself painted in the latter city by Paul Veronese, as tourists to-day carry away wine glasses with their initials embossed on them. The sentiment is the same, but taste was better in the old days. Rubens was at Venice in 1600, and there are those who say that Shakespeare got his local colour "on the spot." Mr. Sidney Lee says no! Back to the land, as Dante, Petrarch, even Horace and Virgil, have said. Dante the wayfarer was a mighty traveller, and so was Petrach. Horace and Virgil took their viewpoints from the Roman capital, but they penned faithful pictures which in setting and colouring have, in but few instances, changed unto this day. Dante is believed to have been in Rome when the first sentence was passed upon him, and from the Eternal City one can follow his journeyings northward by easy stages to Siena and Arezzo, to the Alps, to Padua, on the Aemilian Way, his wandering on Roman roads, his flight by sea to Marseilles, again at Verona and finally at Ravenna, the last refuge. This was an Italian itinerary worth the doing. Why should we modern travellers not take some historical personage and follow his (or her) footsteps from the cradle to the grave? To follow in the footsteps of Jeanne d'Arc, of Dante Alighieri, or of Petrarch and his Laura--though their ways were widely divergent--or of Henri IV, François I, or Charles V, would add a zest and reason for being to an automobile tour of Europe which no twenty-four hour record from London to Monte Carlo, or eighteen hours from Naples to Geneva could possibly have. There is another class of travellers who will prefer to wax solemn over the notorious journey to Italy of Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand. It was a most romantic trip, as the world knows. De Musset even had to ask his mother's consent to make it. The past mistress of eloquence appeared at once on the maternal threshold and promised to look after the young man--like a mother. De Musset's brother saw the pair off "on a misty melancholy evening," and noted amongst other dark omens, that "the coach in which the travellers took their seats was the thirteenth to leave the yard," but for the life of us we cannot share his solemnity. The travellers met Stendhal at Lyons. After supper "he was very merry, got rather drunk and danced round the table in his big topboots." In Florence they could not make up their minds whether to go to Rome or to Venice, and settled the matter by the toss of a coin. Is it possible to care much for the fortunes of two such heedless cynics? It is such itineraries as have here been outlined, the picking up of more or less indistinct trails and following them a while, that gives that peculiar charm to Italian travel. Not the dreamy, idling mood that the sentimentalists would have us adopt, but a burning feverishness that hardly allows one to linger before any individual shrine. Rather one is pushed from behind and drawn from in front to an ever unreachable goal. One never finishes his Italian travels. Once the habit is formed, it becomes a disease. We care not that Cimabue is no longer considered to be throned the painter of the celebrated Madonna in Santa Maria Novella, or that Andrea del Sarto and his wife are no longer Andrea del Sarto and his wife, so long as we can weave together a fabric which pleases us, regardless of the new criticism,--or the old, for that matter. We used to go to the places marked on our railway tickets, and "stopped off" only as the regulations allowed. Now we go where fancy wills and stop off where the vagaries of our automobile force us to. And we get more notions of Italy into our heads in six weeks than could otherwise be acquired in six months. One need not go so very far afield to get away from the conventional in Italy. Even that strip of coastline running from Menton in France to Reggio in Calabria is replete with unknown, or at least unexploited, little corners, which have a wealth of picturesque and romantic charm, and as noble and impressive architectural monuments as one may find in the peninsula. _Com è bella_, say the French honeymoon couples as they enter Italy via the Milan Express over the Simplon; _com è bella_, say one and all who have trod or ridden the highways and byways up and down and across Italy; _com è bella_ is the pæan of every one who has made the Italian round, whether they have been frequenters of the great cities and towns, or have struck out across country for themselves and found some creeper-clad ruin, or a villa in some ideally romantic situation which the makers of guide-books never heard of, or have failed to mention. All this is possible to the traveller by road in Italy, and one's only unpleasant memories are of the _buona mano_ of the brigands of hotel servants which infest the large cities and towns--about the only brigands one meets in Italy to-day. The real Italy, the old Italy, still exists, though half hidden by the wall of progress built up by young liberty-loving Italy since the days of Garibaldi; but one has to step aside and look for the old régime. It cannot always be discovered from the window of a railway carriage or a hotel omnibus, though it is often brought into much plainer view from the cushions of an automobile. "Motor Cars and the Genus Loci" was a very good title indeed for an article which recently appeared in a quarterly review. The writer ingeniously discovered--as some of the rest of us have also--the real mission of the automobile. It takes us into the heart of the life of a country instead of forcing us to travel in a prison van on iron rails. Let the tourist in Italy "do"--and "do" as thoroughly as he likes--the galleries of Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice, but let him not neglect the more appealing and far more natural uncontaminated beauties of the countryside and the smaller towns, such as Caserta, Arezzo, Lucca, Montepulciana, Barberino in Mugello and Ancona, and as many others as fit well into his itinerary from the Alps to Ætna or from Reggio to Ragusa. They lack much of the popular renown that the great centres possess, but they still have an aspect of the reality of the life of mediævalism which is difficult to trace when surrounded by all the up-to-date and supposedly necessitous things which are burying Rome's ruins deeper than they have ever yet been buried. It is difficult indeed to imagine what old Rome was like, with Frascati given over to "hunt parties" and the hotel drawing rooms replete with Hungarian orchestras. It is difficult, indeed! Italy is a vast kinetoscope of heterogeneous sights and scenes and memories and traditions such as exist on no other part of the earth's surface. Of this there is no doubt, and yet each for himself may find something new, whether it is a supposed "secret of the Vatican" or an unheard of or forgotten romance of an Italian villa. This is the _genus loci_ of Italy, the charm of Italy, the unresistible lodestone which draws tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands thither each year, from England and America. Italy is the most romantic touring ground in all the world, and, though its highways and byways are not the equal in surface of the "good roads" of France, they are, _in good weather_, considerably better than the automobilist from overseas is used to at home. At one place we found fifty kilometres of the worst road we had ever seen in Italy immediately followed by a like stretch of the best. The writer does not profess to be able to explain the anomaly. In general the roads in the mountains are better than those at low level, so one should plan his itineraries accordingly. The towns and cities of Italy are very well known to all well-read persons, but of the countryside and its manners and customs this is not so true. Modern painters have limned the outlines of San Marco at Venice and the Castle of St. Angelo at Rome, on countless canvases, and pictures of the "Grand Canal" and of "Vesuvius in Eruption" are familiar enough; but paintings of the little hill towns, the wayside shrines, the olive and orange groves, and vineyards, or a sketch of some quaint roadside albergo made whilst the automobile was temporarily held up by a tire blow out, is quite as interesting and not so common. There is many a pine-clad slope, convent-crowned hill-top and castled crag in Italy as interesting as the more famous, historic sites. To appreciate Italy one must know it from all sides and in all its moods. The hurried itinerary which comprises getting off the ship at Naples, doing the satellite resorts and "sights" which fringe Naples Bay, and so on to Rome, Florence and Venice, and thence across Switzerland, France and home is too frequently a reality. The automobilist may have a better time of it if he will but be rational; but, for the hurried flight above outlined, he should leave his automobile at home and make the trip by "train de luxe." It would be less costly and he would see quite as much of Italy--perhaps more. The leisurely automobile traveller who rolls gently in and out of hitherto unheard of little towns and villages is in another class and learns something of a beloved land and the life of the people that the hurried tourist will never suspect. The genuine vagabond traveller, even though he may be a lover of art and architecture, and knows just how bad Canova's lions really are, is quite as much concerned with the question as to why Italians drink wine red instead of white, or why the sunny Sicilian will do more quarrelling and less shovelling of dirt on a railroad or a canal job than his northern brother. It is interesting, too, to learn something--by stumbling upon it as we did--about Carrara marble, Leghorn hats and macaroni, which used to form the bulk of the cargoes of ships sailing from Italian ports to those of the United States. The Canovas, like the Botticellis, are always there--it is forbidden to export art treasures from Italy, so one can always return to confirm his suspicions--but the marble has found its competitor elsewhere, Leghorn hats are now made in far larger quantities in Philadelphia, and the macaroni sent out from Brooklyn in a month would keep all Italy from starvation for a year. The Italian picture and its framing is like no other, whether one commences with the snow-crested Alps of Piedmont and finishes with Bella Napoli and its dazzling blue, or whether he finishes with the Queen of the Adriatic and begins with Capri. It is always Italy. The same is not true of France. Provence might, at times, and in parts, be taken for Spain, Algeria or Corsica; Brittany for Ireland and Lorraine for Germany. On the contrary Piedmont, in Italy, is nothing at all like neighbouring Dauphiné or Savoie, nor is Liguria like Nice. As for the disadvantages of Italian travel, they do undoubtedly exist, as well for the automobilist as for him who travels by rail. In the first place, in spite of the picturesque charm of the Italian countryside, the roads are, as a whole, not by any means the equal of those of the rest of Europe--always, of course, excepting Spain. They are far better indeed in Algeria and Tunisia. Hotel expenses are double what they are in France for the same sort of accommodation--for the automobilist at any rate. Garage accommodation is seldom, if ever, to be found in the hotel, at least not of a satisfactory kind, and when found costs anywhere from two to three, or even five, francs a night. Gasoline and oil are held at inflated figures, though no one seems to know who gets all the profit that comes from the fourteen to eighteen francs which the Italian garage keeper or grocer or druggist takes for the usual five gallons. With this information as a forewarning the stranger automobilist in Italy will meet with no undue surprises except that bad weather, if he happens to strike a spell, will considerably affect a journey that would otherwise have proved enjoyable. The climate of Italy is far from being uniform. It is not all orange groves and palm trees. Throughout Piedmont and Lombardy snow and frost are the frequent accompaniments of winter. On the other hand the summers are hot and prolific in thunder storms. In Venetia, thanks to the influence of the Adriatic, the climate is more equable. In the centre, Tuscany has a more nearly regular climate. From Naples south, one encounters almost a North African temperature, and the south wind of the desert, the _sirocco_, here blows as it does in Algeria and Tunisia, though tempered somewhat by having crossed the Mediterranean. There are a hundred and twenty-five varieties of mosquitoes in Italy, but with most of them their singing is worse than their stinging. The Pontine Marches have long been the worst breeding places for mosquitoes known to a suffering world. The mosquitoes of this region were supposed to have been transmitters of malaria, so one day some Italian physicians caught a good round batch of them and sent them up into a little village in the Apennines whose inhabitants had never known malaria. Straightway the whole population began to shake with the ague. That settled it, the mosquito was a breeder of disease. The topography of Italy is of an extraordinary variety. The plains and wastes of Calabria are the very antitheses of that semi-circular mountain rampart of the Alps which defines the northern frontier or of the great solid mass of the Apennines in Central Italy. Italy by no means covers the vast extent of territory that the stranger at first presupposes. From the northern frontier of Lombardy to the toe of the Calabrian boot is considerable of a stretch to be sure, but for all that the actual area is quite restricted, when compared with that of other great continental powers. This is all the more reason for the automobilist to go comfortably along and not speed up at every town and village he comes to. The automobilist in Italy should make three vows before crossing the frontier. The first not to attempt to see everything; the second to review some of the things he has already seen or heard of; and the third to leave the beaten track at least once and launch out for himself and try to discover something that none of his friends have ever seen. The beaten track in Italy is not by any means an uninteresting itinerary, and there is no really unbeaten track any more. What one can do, and does, if he is imbued with the proper spirit of travel, is to cover as much little-travelled ground as his instincts prompt him. Between Florence and Rome and between Rome and Naples there is quite as much to interest even the conventional traveller as in those cities themselves, if he only knows where to look for it and knows the purport of all the remarkable and frequent historical monuments continually springing into view. Obscure villages, with good country inns where the arrival of foreigners is an event, are quite as likely to offer pleasurable sensations as those to be had at the six, eight or ten franc a day pension of the cities. The landscape motives for the artist, to be found in Italy, are the most varied of any country on earth. It is a wide range indeed from the vineyard covered hillsides of Vicenza to the more grandiose country around Bologna, to the dead-water lagoons before Venice is reached, to the rocky coasts of Calabria, or to the chestnut groves of Ætna and the Roman Campagna. The travelling American or Englishman is himself responsible for many of the inconveniences to which he is subjected in Italy. The Italian may know how to read his own class distinctions, but all Americans are alike to him. Englishmen, as a rule, know the language better and they get on better--very little. The Frenchman and the German have very little trouble. They have less false pride than we. The American who comes to Italy in an automobile represents untold wealth to the simple Italian; those who drive in two horse carriages and stop at big hotels are classed in the same category. One may scarcely buy anything in a decent shop, or enter an ambitious looking café, but that the hangers-on outside mark him for a millionaire, while, if he is so foolish as to fling handfuls of _soldi_ to an indiscriminate crowd of ragamuffins from the balcony of his hotel, he will be pestered half to death as long as he stays in the neighbourhood. And he deserves what he gets! There is a way to counteract all this but each must learn it for himself. There is no set formula. Beggars are importunate in certain places in Italy be-ridden of tourists, but after all no more so than elsewhere, and the travelling public, as much as anything else, conduces to the continued existence of the plague. If Italy had to choose between suppressing beggars or foregoing the privilege of having strangers from overseas coming to view her monuments she would very soon choose the former. If the beggars could not make a living at their little game they too would stop of their own accord. The question resolves itself into a strictly personal one. If it pleases you to throw pennies from your balcony, your carriage or your automobile to a gathered assembly of curious, do so! It is the chief means of proving, to many, that they are superior to "foreigners!" The little-travelled person does this everywhere,--on the terrace of Shepheard's at Cairo, on the boulevard café terraces at Algiers, from the deck of his ship at Port Said, from the tables even of the Café de la Paix;--so why should he not do it at Naples, at Venice, at Rome? For no reason in the world, except that it's a nuisance to other travellers, decidedly an objectionable practice to hotel, restaurant and shop keepers, and a cause of great annoyance and trouble to police and civic authorities. The following pages have been written and illustrated as a truthful record of what two indefatigable automobile travellers have seen and felt. We were dutifully ravished by the splendours of the Venetian palaces, and duly impressed by the massiveness of Sant'Angelo; but we were more pleased by far in coming unexpectedly upon the Castle of Fénis in the Valle d'Aoste, one of the finest of all feudal fortresses; or the Castle of Rimini sitting grim and sad in the Adriatic plain; or the Villa Cesarini outside of Perugia, which no one has ever reckoned as a wonder-work of architecture, but which all the same shows all of the best of Italian villa elements. Our taste has been catholic, and the impressions set forth herein are our own. Others might have preferred to admire some splendid church whilst we were speculating as to some great barbican gateway or watch tower. A saintly shrine might have for some more appeal than a hillside fortified _Rocca_; and again some convent nunnery might have a fascination that a rare old Renaissance house, now turned into a macaroni factory, or a wine press, might not. CHAPTER II OF ITALIAN MEN AND MANNERS Italian politics have ever been a game of intrigue, and of the exploiting of personal ambition. It was so in the days of the Popes; it is so in these days of premiers. The pilots of the ships of state have never had a more perilous passage to navigate than when manoeuvring in the waters of Italian politics. There is great and jealous rivalry between the cities of Italy. The Roman hates the Piedmontese and the Neapolitan and the Bolognese, and they all hate the Roman,--capital though Rome is of Church and State. [Illustration: ITALY In The XVIII Century] The Evolution of Nationality has ever been an interesting subject to the stranger in a strange land. When the national spirit at last arose Italy had reached modern times and become modern instead of mediæval. National character is born of environment, but nationalism is born only of unassailable unity, a thorough absorbing of a love of country. The inhabitant of Rouen, the ancient Norman capital, is first, last and all the time a Norman, but he is also French; and the dweller in Rome or Milan is as much an Italian as the Neapolitan, though one and all jealously put the Campagna, Piedmont, or the Kingdom of Naples before the Italian boot as a geographical division. Sometimes the same idea is carried into politics, but not often. Political warfare in Italy is mostly confined to the unquenchable prejudices existing between the Quirinal and the Vatican, a sort of _inter urban_ warfare, which has very little of the aspect of an international question, except as some new-come diplomat disturbs the existing order of things. The Italian has a fondness for the Frenchman, and the French nation. At least the Italian politician has, or professes to have, when he says to his constituency: "I wish always for happy peaceful relations with France ... but I don't forget Magenta and Solferino." The Italians of the north are the emigrating Italians, and make one of the best classes of labourers, when transplanted to a foreign soil. The steamship recruiting agents placard every little background village of Tuscany and Lombardy with the attractions of New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Buenos Ayres, and a hundred or so _lire_ paid into the agent's coffers does the rest. Calabria and Sicily are less productive. The sunny Sicilian always wants to take his gaudily-painted farm cart with him, and as there is no economic place for such a useless thing in America, he contents himself with a twenty-hour sea voyage to Tunisia where he can easily get back home again with his cart, if he doesn't like it. Every Italian peasant, man, woman and child, knows America. You may not pass the night at Barberino di Mugello, may not stop for a glass of wine at the _Osteria_ on the Futa Pass, or for a repast at some classically named _borgo_ on the Voie Æmilia but that you will set up longings in the heart of the natives who stand around in shoals and gaze at your automobile. They all have relatives in America, in New York, New Orleans or Cripple Creek, or perhaps Brazil or the Argentine, and, since money comes regularly once or twice a year, and since thousands of touring Americans climb about the rocks at Capri or drive fire-spouting automobiles up through the Casentino, they know the new world as a land of dollars, and dream of the day when they will be able to pick them up in the streets paved with gold. That is a fairy-tale of America that still lives in Italy. [Illustration: Barberino di Mugello] Besides emigrating to foreign lands, the Italian peasant moves about his own country to an astonishing extent, often working in the country in summer, and in the towns the rest of the time as a labourer, or artisan. The typical Italian of the poorer class is of course the peasant of the countryside, for it is a notable fact that the labourer of the cities is as likely to be of one nationality as another. Different sections of Italy have each their distinct classes of country folk. There are landowners, tenants, others who work their land on shares, mere labourers and again simple farming folk who hire others to aid them in their work. The _braccianti_, or farm labourers, are worthy fellows and seemingly as intelligent workers as their class elsewhere. In Calabria they are probably less accomplished than in the region of the great areas of worked land in central Italy and the valley of the Po. The _mezzadria_ system of working land on shares is found all over Italy. On a certain prearranged basis of working, the landlord and tenant divide the produce of the farm. There are, accordingly, no starving Italians, a living seemingly being assured the worker in the soil. In Ireland where it is rental pure and simple, and foreclosure and eviction if the rent is not promptly paid, the reverse is the case. Landlordism of even the paternal kind--if there is such a thing--is bad, but co-operation between landlord and tenant seems to work well in Italy. It probably would elsewhere. The average Italian small farm, or _podere_, worked only by the family, is a very unambitious affair, but it produces a livelihood. The house is nothing of the vine-clad Kent or Surrey order, and the principal apartment is the kitchen. One or two bedrooms complete its appointments, with a stone terrace in front of the door as it sits cosily backed up against some pleasant hillside. There are few gimcracks and dust-harbouring rubbish within, and what simple furniture there is is clean--above all the bed-linen. The stable is a building apart, and there is usually some sort of an out-house devoted to wine-pressing and the like. A kitchen garden and an orchard are near by, and farther afield the larger area of workable land. A thousand or twelve hundred lire a year of ready money passing through the hands of the head of the family will keep father, mother and two children going, besides which there is the "living," the major part of the eatables and drinkables coming off the property itself. The Italians are as cleanly in their mode of life as the people of any other nation in similar walks. Let us not be prejudiced against the Italian, but make some allowance for surrounding conditions. In the twelfth century in Italy the grossness and uncleanliness were incredible, and the manners laid down for behaviour at table make us thankful that we have forks, pocket-handkerchiefs, soap and other blessings! But then, where were we in the twelfth century! No branch of Italian farming is carried on on a very magnificent scale. In America the harvests are worked with mechanical reapers; in England it is done with sickle and flail or out of date patterns of American machines, but in Italy the peasant still works with the agricultural implements of Bible times, and works as hard to raise and harvest one bushel of wheat as a Kansas farmer does to grow, harvest and market six. The American farmer has become a financier; the Italian is still in the bread-winning stage. Five hundred labourers in Dakota, of all nationalities under the sun, be it remarked, on the Dalrymple farm, cut more wheat than any five thousand peasants in Europe. The peasant of Europe is chiefly in the stage of begging the Lord for his daily bread, but as soon as he gets out west in America, he buys store things, automatic pianos and automobile buggies. No wonder he emigrates! The Italian peasant doesn't live so badly as many think, though true it is that meat is rare enough on his table. He eats something more than a greasy rag and an olive, as the well-fed Briton would have us believe; and something more than macaroni, as the American fondly thinks. For one thing, he has his eternal _minestra_, a good, thick soup of many things which Anglo-Saxons would hardly know how to turn into as wholesome and nourishing a broth; meat of any kind, always what the French call _pate d'Italie_, and herbs of the field. The macaroni, the olives, the cheese and the wine--always the wine--come after. Not bad that; considerably better than corned beef and pie, and far, far better than boiled mutton and cauliflower as a steady diet! Britons and Americans should wake up and learn something about gastronomy. The general expenses of middle-class domestic town life in Italy are lower than in most other countries, and the necessities for outlay are smaller. The Italian, even comfortably off in the working class, is less inclined to spend money on luxurious trivialities than most of us. He prefers to save or invest his surplus. One takes central Italy as typical because, if it is not the most prosperous, considered from an industrial point of view, it is still the region endowed with the greatest natural wealth. By this is meant that the conditions of life are there the easiest and most comfortable. A middle class town family with an income of six or seven thousand lire spends very little on rent to begin with; pretence based upon the size of the front door knob cuts no figure in the Italian code of pride. This family will live in a flat, not in a _villini_ as separate town houses are called. One sixth of the family income will go for rent, and though the apartment may be bare and grim and lack actual luxury it will possess amplitude, ten or twelve rooms, and be near the centre of the town. This applies in the smaller cities of from twenty to fifty thousand inhabitants. With very little modification the same will apply in Rome or Naples, and, with perhaps none at all, at Florence. The all important servant question would seem to be more easily solved in Italy than elsewhere, but it is commonly the custom to treat Italian servants as one of the family--so far as certain intimacies and affections go--though, perhaps this of itself has some unanticipated objections. The Italian servants have the reputation of becoming like feudal retainers; that is, they "stay on the job," and from eight to twenty-five lire a month pays their wages. In reality they become almost personal or body servants, for in few Italian cities, and certainly not in Italian towns, are they obliged to occupy themselves with the slogging work of the London slavey, or the New York chore-woman. An Italian servant, be she young or old, however, has a seeming disregard for a uniform or badge of servitude, and is often rather sloppy in appearance. She is, for that, all the more picturesque since, if untidy, she is not apt to be loathsomely dirty in her apparel or her manner of working. [Illustration: A Chianti Seller] The Italian of all ranks is content with two meals a day, as indeed we all ought to be. The continental morning coffee and roll, or more likely a sweet cake, is universal here, though sometimes the roll is omitted. Lunch is comparatively a light meal, and dinner at six or seven is simply an amplified lunch. The chianti of Tuscany is the usual wine drunk at all meals, or a substitute for it less good, though all red wine in Italy seems to be good, cheap and pure. Adulteration is apparently too costly a process. Wine and biscuits take the place of afternoon tea--and with advantage. The wine commonly used _en famille_ is seldom bought at more than 1.50 lira the flagon of two and a half litres, and can be had for half that price. Sugar and salt are heavily taxed, and though that may be a small matter with regard to salt it is something of an item with sugar. Wood is almost entirely the fuel for cooking and heating, and the latter is very inefficient coming often from simple braziers or _scaldini_ filled with embers and set about where they are supposed to do the most good. If one does not expire from the cold before the last spark has departed from the already dying embers when they are brought in, he orders another and keeps it warm by enveloping it as much as possible with his person. Italian heating arrangements are certainly more economical than those in Britain, but are even less efficient, as most of the caloric value of wood and coal goes up the chimney with the smoke. The American system of steam heat--on the "_chauffage centrale_" plan--will some day strike Europe, and then the householder will buy his heat on the water, gas and electric light plan. Till then southern Europe will freeze in winter. In Rome and Florence it is a very difficult proceeding to be able to control enough heat--by any means whatever--to properly warm an apartment in winter. If the apartment has no chimney, and many haven't in the living rooms, one perforce falls back again on the classic _scaldini_ placed in the middle of the room and fired up with charcoal. Then you huddle around it like Indians in a wigwam and, if you don't take a short route into eternity by asphyxiation, your extremities ultimately begin to warm up; when they begin to get chilly again you recommence the firing up. This is more than difficult; it is inconvenient and annoying. The manners and customs of the Italians of the great cities differ greatly from those of the towns and villages, and those of the Romans differ greatly from those of the inhabitants of Milan, Turin or Genoa. The Roman, for instance, hates rain--and he has his share of it too--and accordingly is more often seen with an umbrella than without one. Brigands are supposedly the only Italians who don't own an umbrella, though why the distinction is so apparent a mere dweller beyond the frontier cannot answer. In Rome, in Naples, and in all the cities and large towns of Italy, the population rises early, but they don't get down to business as speedily as they might. The Italian has not, however, a prejudice against new ideas, and the Italian cities and large towns are certainly very much up-to-date. Italians are at heart democrats, and rank and title have little effect upon them. The Italian government still gives scant consideration to savings banks, but legalizes, authorizes and sometimes backs up lotteries. At all times it controls them. This is one of the inconsistencies of the tunes played by the political machine in modern Italy. Anglo-Saxons may bribe and graft; but they do not countenance lotteries, which are the greatest thieving institutions ever invented by the ingenuity of man, in that they _do_ rob the _poor_. It is the _poor_ almost entirely who support them. The rich have bridge, baccarat, Monte Carlo and the Stock Exchange. It may be bad for the public, this legalized gambling, but all gambling is bad, and certainly state-controlled lotteries are no worse than licensed or unlicensed pool-rooms and bucket shops, winked-at dice-throwing in bar rooms, or crap games on every corner. The Italian administration received the enormous total of 74,400,000 lire for lottery tickets in 1906, and of this sum 35,000,000 lire were returned in prizes, and 6,500,000 went for expenses. A fine net profit of 33,000,000 lire, all of which, save what stuck to the fingers of the bureaucracy in passing through, went to reduce taxation which would otherwise be levied. The Italian plays the lottery with the enthusiastic excitement of a too shallow and too confident brain. Various combinations of figures seem possible of success to the Italian who at the weekend puts some bauble in pawn with the hope that something will come his way. After the drawing, before the Sunday dawns, he is quite another person, considerably less confident of anything to happen in the future, and as downcast as a sunny Italian can be. This passion for drawing lots is something born in him; even if lotteries were not legalized, he would still play _lotto_ in secret, for in enthusiasm for games of chance, he rivals the Spaniard. But Italy is not the country of illiterates that the stranger presupposes. Campania is the province where one finds the largest number of lettered, and Basilicate the least. Military service begins and is compulsory for all male Italians at the age of twenty. It lasts for nineteen years, of which three only are in active service. The next five or six in the reserve, the next three or four in the Militia and the next seven in the "territorial" Militia, or landguard. Conscription also applies to the naval service for the term of twelve years. The military element, which one meets all over Italy, is astonishingly resplendent in colours and plentiful in numbers. At most, among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of officers of all ranks, there can hardly be more than a few score of privates. It is either this or the officers keep continually on the move in order to create an illusion of numbers! Class distinctions, in all military grades, and in all lands, are very marked, but in Italy the obeisance of a private before the slightest loose end of gold braid is very marked. The Italian private doesn't seem to mark distinctions among the official world beyond the sight of gold braid. A steamboat captain, or a hall porter in some palatial hotel would quite stun him. The Italian gendarmes are a picturesque and resplendent detail of every gathering of folk in city, town or village. On a _festa_ they shine more grandly than at other times, and the privilege of being arrested by such a gorgeous policeman must be accounted as something of a social distinction. The holding up of an automobilist by one of these gentry is an affair which is regulated with as much pomp and circumstance as the crowning of a king. The writer knows!! Just how far the Italian's criminal instincts are more developed than those of other races and climes has no place here, but is it not fair to suppose that the half a million of Italians--mostly of the lower classes--who form a part of the population of cosmopolitan New York are of a baser instinct than any half million living together on the peninsula? Probably they are; the Italian on his native shore does not strike us as a very villainous individual. But he is usually a lively person; there is nothing calm and sedentary about him; though he has neither the grace of the Gascon, the joy of the Kelt, or the pretence of the Provençal, he does not seem wicked or criminal, and those who habitually carry dirks and daggers and play in Black Hand dramas live for the most part across the seas. The Italian secret societies are supposed hot beds of crime, and many of them certainly exist, though they do not practise their rites in the full limelight of publicity as they do in America. The Neapolitan Camarra is the best organized of all the Italian secret societies. It is divided, military-like, into companies, and is recruited, also in military fashion, to make up for those who have died or been "replaced." The origin of secret societies will probably never be known. Italy was badly prepared to gather the fruits to be derived from the French Revolution, and it is possible that then the activity of the Carbonari, Italy's most popular secret society, began. The Mafia is more ancient and has a direct ancestry for nearly a thousand years. A hundred and twenty-five years ago the seed of secret dissatisfaction had already been spread for years through Italy. The names of the societies were many. Some of them were called the Protectori Republicani, the Adelfi, the Spilla Nera, the Fortezza, the Speranza, the Fratelli, and a dozen other names. On the surface the code of the Carbonari reads fairly enough, but there is nothing to show that any attempt was made to stamp out perhaps the most generally honoured of the traditions of Naples--that of homicide. The long political blight of the centuries, the curse of feudalism, the rottenness of ignorance and superstition, had eaten out nearly every vestige of political and self-respecting spirit. After the restoration of the Bourbons the influences of the secret societies in Southern Italy were manifested by the large increase of murders. CHAPTER III CHIANTI AND MACARONI _A Chapter for Travellers by Road or Rail_ The hotels of Italy are dear or not, according to whether one patronizes a certain class of establishment. At Trouville, at Aix-les-Bains in France, at Cernobbio in the Italian Lake region, or on the Quai Parthenope at Naples, there is little difference in price or quality, and the cuisine is always French. The automobilist who demands garage accommodation as well will not always find it in the big city hotel in Italy. He may patronize the F. I. A. T. Garages in Rome, Naples, Genoa, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin and Padua and find the best of accommodation and fair prices. For a demonstration of this he may compare what he gets and what he pays for it at Pisa--where a F. I. A. T. garage is wanting--and note the difference. The real Italian hotel, outside the great centres, has less of a clientèle of snobs and _malades imaginaires_ than one finds in France--in the Pyrenees or on the Riviera, or in Switzerland among the Alps, and accordingly there is always accommodation to be found that is in a class between the resplendent gold-lace and silver-gilt establishments of the resorts and working-men's lodging houses. True there is the same class of establishment existing in the smaller cities in France, but the small towns of France are not yet as much "travelled" by strangers as are those of Italy, and hence the difference to be remarked. The real Italian hotels, not the tourist establishments, will cater for one at about one half the price demanded by even the second order of tourist hotels, and the Italian landlord shows no disrespect towards a client who would know his price beforehand--and he will usually make it favourable at the first demand, for fear you will "shop around" and finally go elsewhere. [Illustration: A Wayside Trattoria] The automobile here, as everywhere, tends to elevate prices, but much depends on the individual attitude of the traveller. A convincing air of independence and knowledge on the part of the automobilist, _as he arrives_, will speedily put him en rapport with the Italian landlord. Look as wise as possible and always ask the price beforehand--even while your motor is still chugging away. That never fails to bring things to a just and proper relation. It is at Florence, and in the environs of Naples, of all the great tourist centres, that one finds the best fare at the most favourable prices, but certainly at Rome and Venice, in the great hotels, it is far less attractive and a great deal dearer, delightful though it may be to sojourn in a palace of other days. The Italian wayside inns, or _trattoria_, are not all bad; neither are they all good. The average is better than it has usually been given the credit of being, and the automobile is doing much here, as in France, towards a general improvement. A dozen automobiles, with a score or more of people aboard, may come and go in a day to a little inn in some picturesque framing on a main road, say that between Siena and Rome via Orvieto, or to Finale Marina or Varazze in Liguria, to one carriage and pair with two persons and a driver. Accordingly, this means increased prosperity for the inn-holder, and he would be a dull wit indeed if he didn't see it. He does see it in France, with a very clear vision; in Italy, with a point of view very little dimmed; in Switzerland, when the governmental authorities will let him; and in England, when the country boniface comes anywhere near to being the intelligent person that his continental compeer finds himself. This is truth, plain, unvarnished truth, just as the writer has found it. Others may have their own ideas about the subject, but this is the record of one man's experiences, and presumably of some others. The chief disadvantages of the hotel of the small Italian town are its often crowded and incomplete accessories, and its proximity to a stable of braying donkeys, bellowing cows, or an industrious blacksmith who begins before sun-up to pound out the same metallic ring that his confrères do all over the world. There is nothing especially Italian about a blacksmith's shop in Italy. All blacksmith interiors are the same whether painted by "Old Crome," Eastman Johnson or Jean François Millet. The idiosyncrasies of the inns of the small Italian towns do not necessarily preclude their offering good wholesome fare to the traveller, and this in spite of the fact that not every one likes his salad with garlic in liberal doses or his macaroni smothered in oil. Each, however, is better than steak smothered in onions or potatoes fried in lard; any "hygienist" will tell you that. The trouble with most foreigners in Italy, when they begin to talk about the rancid oil and other strange tasting native products, is that they have not previously known the real thing. Olive oil, real olive oil, tastes like--well, like olive oil. The other kinds, those we are mostly used to elsewhere, taste like cotton seed or peanut oil, which is probably what they are. One need not blame the Italian for this, though when he himself eats of it, or gives it you to eat, it is the genuine article. You may eat it or not, according as you may like it or not, but the Italian isn't trying to poison you or work off anything on your stomach half so bad as the rancid bacon one sometimes gets in Germany or the kippers of two seasons ago that appear all over England in the small towns. As before intimated, the chief trouble with the small hotels in Italy is their deficiencies, but the Touring Club Italiano in Italy, like the Touring Club de France in France, is doing heroic work in educating the country inn-keeper. Why should not some similar institution do the same thing in England and America? How many American country hotels, in towns of three or five thousand people, in say Georgia or Missouri, would get up, for the chance traveller who dropped in on them unexpectedly, a satisfactory meal? Not many, the writer fancies. There is, all over Europe, a desire on the part of the small or large hotel keeper to furnish meals out of hours, and often at no increase in price. The automobilist appreciates this, and has come to learn in Italy that the old Italian proverb "_chi tardi arriva mal alloggia_" is entirely a myth of the guide books of a couple of generations ago. A cold bird, a dish of macaroni, a salad and a flask of wine will try no inn-keeper's capabilities, even with no notice beforehand. The Italian would seemingly prefer to serve meals in this fashion than at the _tavola rotonda_, which is the Italian's way of referring to a _table d'hôte_. If you have doubts as to your Italian Boniface treating you right as to price (after you have eaten of his fare) arrange things beforehand a _prezzo fisso_ and you will be safe. As for wine, the cheapest is often as good as the best in the small towns, and is commonly included in the _prezzo fisso_, or should be. It's for you to see that you get it on that basis of reckoning. The _padrona_ of an Italian country inn is very democratic; he believes in equality and fraternity, and whether you come in a sixty-horse Mercédès or on donkey-back he sits you down in a room with a mixed crew of his countrymen and pays no more attention to you than if you were one of them. That is, he doesn't exploit you as does the Swiss, he doesn't overcharge you, and he doesn't try to tempt your palate with poor imitation of the bacon and eggs of old England, or the tenderloins of America. He gives you simply the fare of the country and lets it go at that. Of Italian inns, it may be truly said the day has passed when the traveller wished he was a horse in order that he might eat their food; oats being good everywhere. The fare of the great Italian cities, at least that of the hotels frequented by tourists, has very little that is _national_ about it. To find these one has to go elsewhere, to the small Italian hotels in the large towns, along with the priests and the soldiers, or keep to the byways. The _polenta_, or corn-meal bread, and the _companatico_, sardines, anchovies or herrings which are worked over into a paste and spread on it butter-wise, is everywhere found, and it is good. No _osteria_ or _trattoria_ by the roadside, but will give you this on short order if you do not seek anything more substantial. The _minestra_, or cabbage soup--it may not be cabbage at all, but it looks it--a sort of "_omnium gatherum_" soup--is warming and filling. _Polenta_, _companatico_, _minestra_ and a salad, with _fromaggio_ to wind up with, and red wine to drink, ought not to cost more than a lira, or a lira and a half at the most wherever found. You won't want to continue the same fare for dinner the same day, perhaps, but it works well for luncheon. Pay no charges for attendance. No one does anyway, but tourists of convention. Let the _buono mano_ to the waiter who serves you be the sole largess that you distribute, save to the man-of-all-work who brings you water for the thirsty maw of your automobile, or to the amiable, sunshiny individual who lugs your baggage up and down to and from your room. This is quite enough, heaven knows, according to our democratic ideas. At any rate, pay only those who serve you, in Italy, as elsewhere, and don't merely tip to impress the waiter with your importance. He won't see it that way. The Italian _albergo_, or hotel of the small town, is apt to be poorly and meanly furnished, even in what may be called "public rooms," though, indeed, there are frequently no public rooms in many more or less pretentious Italian inns. If there ever is a salon or reception room it is furnished scantily with a rough, uncomfortable sofa covered with a gunny sack, a small square of fibre carpeting (if indeed it has any covering whatever to its chilly tile or stone floor), and a few rush covered chairs. Usually there is no chimney, but there is always a stuffy lambrequined curtain at each window, almost obliterating any rays of light which may filter feebly through. In general the average reception room of any Italian albergo (except those great joint-stock affairs of the large cities which adopt the word hotel) is an uncomfortable and unwholesome apartment. One regrets to say this but it is so. Beds in Italian hotels are often "queer," but they are surprisingly and comfortably clean, considering their antiquity. Every one who has observed the Italian in his home, in Italy or in some stranger land, even in a crowded New York tenement, knows that the Italian sets great store by his sleeping arrangements and their proper care. It is an ever-to-be-praised and emulated fact that the common people of continental Europe are more frequently "luxurious" with regard to their beds and bed linen than is commonly supposed. They may eat off of an oilcloth (which by some vague conjecture they call "American cloth") covered table, may dip their fingers deep in the _polenta_ and throw bones on the tile or brick floor to the dogs and cats edging about their feet, but the _draps_ of their beds are real, rough old linen, not the ninety-nine-cent-store kind of the complete house-furnishing establishments. The tiled floor of the average Italian house, and of the kitchens and dining room of many an Italian inn, is the ever at hand receptacle of much refuse food that elsewhere is relegated to the garbage barrel. Between meals, and bright and early in the morning, everything is flushed out with as generous a supply of water as is used by the Dutch _housvrou_ in washing down the front steps. Result: the microbes don't rest behind, as they do on our own carpeted dining rooms, a despicable custom which is "growing" with the hotel keepers of England and America. Another idol shattered! What you don't find in the small Italian hotels are baths, nor in many large ones either. When you do find a _baignoir_ in Europe (except those of the very latest fashion) it is a poor, shallow affair with a plug that pulls up to let the water out, but with no means of getting it in except to pour it in from buckets. This is a fault, sure enough, and it's not the American's idea of a bath tub at all, though it seems to suit well enough the Englishman en tour. France is, undoubtedly, the land of good cooks _par excellence_, but the Italian of all ranks is more of a gourmet than he is usually accounted. There may be some of his tribe that live on bread and cheese, but if he isn't outrageously poor he usually eats well, devotes much time to the preparing and cooking of his meals, and considerably more to the eating of them. The Italian's cooking utensils are many and varied and above all picturesque, and his table ware invariably well conditioned and cleanly. Let this opinion (one man's only, again let it be remembered) be recorded as a protest against the universally condemned _dirty_ Italian, who _supposedly_ eats cats and dogs, as the Chinaman _supposedly_ eats rats and mice. We are not above reproach ourselves; we eat mushrooms, frog legs and some other things besides which are certainly not cleanly or healthful. More than one Italian inn owes its present day prosperity to the travel by road which frequently stops before its doors. Twenty-five years ago, indeed much less, the _vetturino_ deposited his load of sentimental travellers, accompanied perhaps by a courier, at many a miserable wayside _osteria_, which fell far short of what it should be. To-day this has all changed for the better. Tourists of all nationalities and all ranks make Italy their playground to-day, as indeed they have for generations. There is no diminution in their numbers. English minor dignitaries of the church jostle Pa and Ma and the girls from the Far West, and Germans, fiercely and wondrously clad, peer around corners and across lagoons with field glasses of a size and power suited to a Polar Expedition. Everybody is "doing" everything, as though their very lives depended upon their absorbing as much as possible of local colour, and that as speedily as possible. It will all be down in the bill, and they mean to have what they are paying for. This is one phase of Italian travel that is unlovely, but it is the phase that one sees in the great tourist hotels and in the chief tourist cities, not elsewhere. To best know Italian fare as also Italian manners and customs, one must avoid the restaurants and trattoria asterisked by Baedeker and search others out for himself; they will most likely be as good, much cheaper, more characteristic of the country and one will not be eternally pestered to eat beefsteak, ham and saurkraut, or to drink _paleale_ or whiskey. Instead, he will get macaroni in all shapes and sizes, and tomato sauce and cheese over everything, to say nothing of rice, artichokes and onions now and again, and oil, of the olive brand, in nearly every _plat_. If you don't like these things, of course, there is no need going where they are. Stick to the beefsteak and _paleale_ then! Romantic, sentimental Italy is disappearing, the Italians are becoming practical and matter of fact; it is only those with memories of Browning, Byron, Shelley, Leopold Robert and Boeklin that would have Italy sentimental anyway. Maximilien Mission, a Protestant refugee from France in 1688, had something to say of the inns at Venice, which is interesting reading to-day. He says:--"There are some good inns at Venice; the 'Louvre,' the 'White Lyon,' the 'Arms of France;' the first entertains you for eight livres (lire) per day, the other two somewhat cheaper, but you must always remember to bargain for everything that you have. A gondola costs something less than a livre (lire) an hour, or for a superior looking craft seven or eight livres a day." This is about the price of the Venetian water craft when hired to-day, two centuries and more after. The hotel prices too are about what one pays to-day in the smaller inns of the cities and in those of the towns. All over Italy, even on the shores of the Bay of Naples, crowded as they are with tourists of all nationalities and all ranks, one finds isolated little Italian inns, backed up against a hillside or crowning some rocky promontory, where one may live in peace and plenitude for six or seven francs a day. And one is not condemned to eating only the national macaroni either. Frankly, the Neapolitan restaurateur often scruples as much to put macaroni before his stranger guests as does the Bavarian inn-keeper to offer sausage at each repast. Some of us regret that this is so, but since macaroni in some form or other can always be had in Italy, and sausages in Germany, for the asking, no great inconvenience is caused. Macaroni is the national dish of Italy, and very good it is too, though by no means does one have to live off it as many suppose. Notwithstanding, macaroni goes with Italy, as do crackers with cheese. There are more shapes and sizes of macaroni than there are beggars in Naples. The long, hollow pipe stem, known as Neapolitan, and the vermicelli, which isn't hollow, but is as long as a shoe string, are the leading varieties. Tiny grains, stars, letters of the alphabet and extraordinary animals that never came out of any ark are also fashioned out of the same _pasta_, or again you get it in sheets as big as a good sized handkerchief, or in piping of a diameter of an inch, or more. The Romans kneaded their flour by means of a stone cylinder called a _maccaro_. The name macaroni is supposed to have been derived from this origin. Naples is the centre of the macaroni industry, but it is made all over the world. That made in Brooklyn would be as good as that made in Naples if it was made of Russian wheat instead of that from Dakota. As it is now made it is decidedly inferior to the Italian variety. By contrast, that made in Tunis is as good as the Naples variety. Russian wheat again! A macaroni factory looks, from the outside, like a place devoted to making rope. Inside it feels like an inferno. It doesn't pay to get too well acquainted with the process of making macaroni. The flour paste is run out of little tubes, or rolled out by big rollers, or cut out by little dies, thus taking its desired forms. The long, stringy macaroni is taken outside and hung up to dry like clothes on a line, except that it is hung on poles. The workmen are lightly and innocently clad, and the workshops themselves are kept at as high a temperature as the stoke-room of a liner. Whether this is really necessary or not, the writer does not know, but he feels sure that some genius will, some day, evolve a process which will do away with hand labour in the making of macaroni. It will be mixed by machinery, baked by electricity and loaded up on cars and steamships by the same power. The street macaroni merchants of Naples sell the long ropy kind to all comers, and at a very small price one can get a "filling" meal. You get it served on a dish, but without knives, forks or chop sticks. You eat it with your fingers and your mouth. The meat is tough in Italy, often enough. There is no doubt about that. But it is usually a great deal better than it is given credit for being. The day is past, if it ever existed, when the Anglo-Saxon traveller was forced to quit Italy "because he could not live without good meat." This was the classic complaint of the innocents abroad of other days, whether they hailed from Kensington or Kalamazoo. They should never have left those superlatively excellent places. The food and Mazzini were the sole topics of travel talk once, but to-day it is more a question of whether one can get his railway connection at some hitherto unheard of little junction, or whether the road via this river valley or that mountain pass is as good as the main road. These are the things that really matter to the traveller, not whether he has got to sleep in a four poster in a bedroom with a tile or marble floor, or eat macaroni and ravioli when he might have--if he were at home--his beloved "ham" and blood-red beefsteaks. The Italian waiter is usually a sunny, confiding person, something after the style of the negro, and, like his dark-skinned brother, often incompetent beyond a certain point. You like him for what he is though, almost as good a thing in his line as the French garçon, in that he is obliging and a great deal better than the mutton-chopped, bewhiskered nonentity who shuffles about behind your chair in England with his expectant palm forever outstretched. The Italian _camerière_, or waiter, takes a pride in his profession--as far as he knows it, and quite loses sight of its commercial possibilities in the technicalities of his craft, and his seeming desire only to please. _Subito momento_ is his ever ready phrase, though often it seems as though he might have replied _never_. Seated in some roadside or seashore _trattoria_ one pounds on the bare table for the _camerière_, orders another "Torino," pays his reckoning and is off again. Nothing extraordinarily amusing has happened the while, but the mere lolling about on a terrace of a café overlooking the lapping Mediterranean waves at one's feet is one of the things that one comes to Italy for, and one is content for the nonce never to recur to palazzos, villas, cathedrals, or picture galleries. There have been too many travellers in past times--and they exist to-day--who do not seek to fill the gaps between a round of churches and art galleries, save to rush back to some palace hotel and eat the same kind of a dinner that they would in London, Paris or New York--a little worse cooked and served to be sure. It's the country and its people that impress one most in a land not his own. Why do so many omit these "attractions?" The _buona mano_ is everywhere in evidence in Italy, but the Italian himself seems to understand how to handle the question better than strangers. The Italian guest at a hotel is fairly lavish with the quantity of his tips, but each is minute, and for a small service he pays a small fee. We who like to impress the waiter--for we all do, though we fancy we don't--will often pay as much to a waiter for bringing us a drink as the price of the drink. Not so the Italian; and that's the difference. Ten per cent, on the bill at a hotel is always a lavish fee, and five would be ample, though now and again the head waiter may look askance at his share. Follow the Italian's own system then, give everybody who serves you something, however little, and give to those only, and then their little jealousies between each other will take the odium off you--if you really care what a waiter thinks about you anyway, which of course you shouldn't. These little disbursements are everywhere present in Italy. One pays a franc to enter a museum, a picture gallery or a great library, and one tips his cabman as he does elsewhere, and a dozen francs spent in riding about on Venetian gondolas for a day incurs the implied liability for another two francs as well. CHAPTER IV ITALIAN ROADS AND ROUTES The cordiality of the Italian for the stranger within his gates is undeniable, but the automobilist would appreciate this more if the Latin would keep his great highways (a tradition left by the Romans of old, the finest road-builders the world has ever known) in better condition. Italy, next to France, is an ideal touring ground for the automobilist. The Italian population everywhere seems to understand the tourist and his general wants and, above all, his motive for coming thither, and whether one journeys by the railway, by automobile or by the more humble bicycle, he finds a genial reception everywhere, though coupled with it is always an abounding curiosity which is at times annoying. The native is lenient with you and painstaking to the extreme if you do not speak his language, and will struggle with lean scraps of English, French and German in his effort to understand your wants. Admirably surveyed and usually very well graded, some of the most important of the north and south thoroughfares in Italy have been lately so sadly neglected that the briefest spell of bad weather makes them all but impassable. There is one stretch between Bologna and Imola of thirty-two kilometres, straightaway and perfectly flat. It is a good road or a bad road, according as one sees it after six weeks of good weather or after a ten days' rainy spell. It is at once the best and worst of its kind, but it is badly kept up and for that reason may be taken as a representative Italian road. The mountain roads up back of the lake region and over the Alpine passes, in time of snow and ice and rain--if they are not actually buried under--are thoroughly good roads. They are built on different lines. Road-building is a national affair in Italy as it is in France, but the central power does not ramify its forces in all directions as it does across the border. There is only one kind of road-building worth taking into consideration, and that is national road-building. It is not enough that Massachusetts should build good roads and have them degenerate into mere wagon tracks when they get to the State border, or that the good roads of Middlesex should become mere sloughs as soon as they come within the domain of the London County Council. Italy is slack and incompetent with regard to her road-building, but England and America are considerably worse at the present writing. Entering Italy by the Riviera gateway one leaves the good roads of France behind him at Menton and, between Grimaldi, where he passes the Italian dogana and its formalities, and Ventimiglia, or at least San Remo, twenty-five kilometres away, punctures his tires one, three or five times over a kilometre stretch of unrolled stone bristling with flints, whereas in France a side path would have been left on which the automobilist might pass comfortably. It isn't the Italian's inability to handle the good roads question as successfully as the French; it is his woefully incompetent, careless, unthinking way of doing things. This is not saying that good roads do not exist in Italy. Far from it. But the good road in Italy suddenly descends into a bad road for a dozen kilometres and as abruptly becomes a good road again, and this without apparent reason. Lack of unity of purpose on the part of individual road-building bodies is what does it. Road-building throughout Italy never rose to the height that it did in France. The Romans were great exploiters beyond the frontiers and often left things at home to shuffle along as best they might whilst their greatest energies were spent abroad. One well defined Roman road of antiquity (aside from the tracings of the great trunk lines like the Appian or Æmilian Ways) is well known to all automobilists entering Naples via Posilippo. It runs through a tunnel, alongside a hooting, puffing tram and loose-wheeled iron-tired carts all in a deafening uproar. This marvellous tunnelled road by the sea, with glimpses of daylight now and then, but mostly as dark as the cavern through which flowed the Styx, is the legitimate successor of an engineering work of the time of Augustus. In Nero's reign, Seneca, the historian, wrote of it as a narrow, gloomy pass, and mediæval superstition claimed it as the work of necromancy, since the hand of man never could have achieved it. The foundation of the roadway is well authenticated by history however. In 1442 Alphonso I, the Spaniard, widened and heightened the gallery, and Don Pedro of Toledo a century later paved it with good solid blocks of granite which were renewed again by Charles III in 1754. Here is a good road that has endured for centuries. We should do as well to-day. There are, of course, countless other short lengths of highway, coming down from historic times, left in Italy, but the Roman _viae_ with which we have become familiar in the classical geographies and histories of our schooldays are now replaced by modern thoroughfares which, however, in many cases, follow, or frequently cut in on, the old itineraries. Of these old Roman Ways that most readily traced, and of the greatest possible interest to the automobilist who would do something a little different from what his fellows have done, is the Via Æmilia. With Bologna as its central station, the ancient Via Æmilia, begun by the Consul Marcus Æmilius Lepidus, continues towards Cisalpine Gaul the Via Flamina leading out from Rome. It is a delightfully varied itinerary that one covers in following up this old Roman road from Placentia (Piacenza) to Ariminum (Rimini), and should indeed be followed leisurely from end to end if one would experience something of the spirit of olden times, which one can hardly do if travelling by schedule and stopping only at the places lettered large on the maps. The following are the ancient and modern place-names on this itinerary: Placentia (Piacenza) Florentia (Firenzuola) Fidentia (Borgo S. Donnino) Parma (Parma) Tannetum (Taneto) Regium Lepidi (Reggio) Mutina (Modena) Forum Gallorum (near Castel Franco) Bononia (Bologna) Claterna (Quaderna) Forum Cornelii (Imola) Faventia (Faenza) Forum Livii (Forli) Forum Populii (Forlimpopoli) Caesena (Cesena) Ad Confluentes (near Savignamo) Ariminum (Rimini) Connecting with the Via Æmilia another important Roman road ran from the valley of the Casentino across the Apennines to Piacenza. It was the route traced by a part of the itinerary of Dante in the "Divina Commedia," and as such it is a historic highway with which the least sentimentally inclined might be glad to make acquaintance. Another itinerary, perhaps better known to the automobilist, is that which follows the Ligurian coast from Nice to Spezia, continuing thence to Rome by the Via Aurelia. This coast road of Liguria passed through Nice to Luna on the Gulf of Spezia, the towns en route being as follows:-- Varium fl. The Var (river) Nicæ Nice Cemenelium Cimiez, back of Nice Portus Herculis Monoeci Monaco Albium Intermelium Ventimiglia Albium Ingaunum Albenga Vada Sabbata Vado, near Savona Genua Genoa Portus Delphini Portofino Tigullia Tregesco, near Sestri Segesta Sestri Portus Veneris Porto Venere Portus Erici Lerici The chief of these great Roman roadways of old whose itineraries can be traced to-day are: Via Æmilia The most celebrated of N. Italy Via Æmilia-Scauri Built long after the original Via Æmelia Via Ameria From Rome to Amelia Via Appia Of which the main trunk line ran from Rome to Capua Via Aquilla Via Ardentina Via Aurelia From Rome to Pisa Via Cassia Via Flaminia The Great North Road of the Romans Via Latina One of the most ancient of Roman roads Via Laurentia Via Ostiensis From Rome to Ostia Via Salaria Leading from Rome through the valley of the Tiber Via Valeria From the Tiber to the Adriatic at Ancona These ancient Roman roads were at their best in Campania and Etruria. Campania was traversed by the Appian Way, the greatest highway of the Romans, though indeed its original construction by Appius Claudius only extended to Capua. The great highroads proceeding from Rome crossed Etruria almost to the full extent; the Via Aurelia, from Rome to Pisa and Luna; the Via Cassia and the Via Clodia. The great Roman roads were marked with division stones or bornes every thousand paces, practically a kilometre and a half, a little more than our own mile. These mile-stones of Roman times, many of which are still above ground (_milliarii lapides_), were sometimes round and sometimes square, and were entirely bare of capitals, being mere stone posts usually standing on a squared base of a somewhat larger area. A graven inscription bore in Latin the name of the Consul or Emperor under whom each stone was set up and a numerical indication as well. Caius Gracchus, away back in the second century before Christ, was the inventor of these aids to travel. The automobilist appreciates the development of this accessory next to good roads themselves, and if he stops to think a minute he will see that the old Romans were the inventors of many things which he fondly thinks are modern. The automobilist in Italy has, it will be inferred, cause to regret the absence of the fine roads of France once and again, and he will regret it whenever he wallows into a six inch deep rut and finds himself not able to pull up or out, whilst the drivers of ten yoke ox-teams, drawing a block of Carrara marble as big as a house, call down the imprecations of all the saints in the calendar on his head. It's not the automobilist's fault, such an occurrence, nor the ox-driver's either; but for fifty kilometres after leaving Spezia, and until Lucca and Livorno are reached, this is what may happen every half hour, and you have no recourse except to accept the situation with fortitude and revile the administration for allowing a roadway to wear down to such a state, or for not providing a parallel thoroughfare so as to divide the different classes of traffic. There is no such disgracefully used and kept highway in Europe as this stretch between Spezia and Lucca, and one must of necessity pass over it going from Genoa to Pisa unless he strikes inland through the mountainous country just beyond Spezia, by the Strada di Reggio for a détour of a hundred kilometres or more, coming back to the sea level road at Lucca. Throughout the peninsula the inland roads are better as to surface than those by the coast, though by no means are they more attractive to the tourist by road. This is best exemplified by a comparison of the inland and shore roads, each of them more or less direct, between Florence and Rome. The great Strada di grande Communicazione from Florence to Rome (something less than three hundred kilometres all told, a mere mouthful for a modern automobile) runs straight through the heart of old Siena, entering the city by the Porta Camollia and leaving by the Porta Romana, two kilometres of treacherous, narrow thoroughfare, though readily enough traced because it is in a bee-line. The details are here given as being typical of what the automobilist may expect to find in the smaller Italian cities. There are, in Italy, none of those unexpected right-angle turns that one comes upon so often in French towns, at least not so many of them, and there are no cork-screw thoroughfares though many have the "rainbow curve," to borrow Mark Twain's expression. On through Chiusi, Orvieto and Viterbo runs the highroad direct to the gates of Rome, for the most part a fair road, but rising and falling from one level to another in trying fashion to one who would set a steady pace. It is with respect to the grades on Italian roads, too, that one remarks a falling off from French standards. North of Florence, in the valley of the Mugello, we, having left the well-worn roads in search of something out of the common, found a bit of seventeen per cent. grade. This was negotiated readily enough, since it was of brief extent, but another rise of twenty-five per cent. (it looked forty-five from the cushions of a low-hung car) followed and on this we could do nothing. Fortunately there was a way around, as there usually is in Europe, so nothing was lost but time, and we benefited by the acquisition of some knowledge concerning various things which we did not before possess. And we were content, for that was what we came for anyway. From Florence south, by the less direct road via Arezzo, Perugia and Terni, there is another surprisingly sudden rise but likewise brief. It is on this same road that one remarks from a great distance the towers of Spoleto piercing the sky at a seemingly enormous height, while the background mountain road over the Passo della Somma rises six hundred and thirty metres and tries the courage of every automobilist passing this way. To achieve many of these Italian hill-towns one does not often rise abruptly but rather almost imperceptibly, but here, in ten kilometres, say half a dozen miles, the Strada di grande Communicazione rises a thousand feet, and that is considerable for a road supposedly laid out by military strategists. As a contrast to these hilly, switch-back roads running inland from the north to the south may be compared that running from Rome to Naples, not the route usually followed via Vallombrosa and Frosinone, but that via Velletri, Terracina and Gaeta. Here the highroad is nearly flat, though truth to tell of none too good surface, all the way to Naples. Practically it is as good a road as that which runs inland and offers to any who choose to pass that way certain delights that most other travellers in Italy know not of. At Cisterna di Roma, forty-eight kilometres from Rome, one is in the midst of the Pontine Marshes it is true, and it is also more or less of a marvel that a decent road could have been built here at all. From this point of view it is interesting to the automobilist who has a hobby of studying the road-building systems of the countries through which he travels. Of the Pontine Marshes themselves it is certain that they are not salubrious, and malaria is most prevalent near them. Appius Claudius, in 312 B. C., tried to drain the marsh and so did Cæsar, Augustus and Theodoric after him, and the Popes Boniface VIII, Martinus V and Sixtus V, but the morass is still there in spite of the fact that a company calling itself Ufficio della Bonificazione delle Paludi Pontine is to-day working continuously at the same problem. Putting these various classes of Italian roads aside for the moment there remains but one other variety to consider, that of the mountain roads of the high Alpine valleys and those crossing the Oberland and, further east, those in communication with the Austrian Tyrol. On the west these converge on Milan and Turin via the region of the lakes and the valleys of Aosta and Susa, and in the centre and east give communication from Brescia, Verona and Venice with West Germany and Austria. [Illustration: Road Map of North Italy] These are the best planned and best kept roads in Italy, take them by and large. The most celebrated are those leading from Turin into France; via Susa and the Col du Mont Genevre to Briançon, and via Mont Cenis to Modane and Grenoble; via the Val d'Aosta and the Petit Saint Bernard to Albertville in France, or via the Grand Saint Bernard to Switzerland. Just north of the Lago di Maggiore, accessible either from Como or from Milan direct via Arona, is the famous road over the Simplon Pass, at an elevation of 2,008 metres above the sea. By this road, the best road in all Italy, without question, one enters or leaves the kingdom by the gateway of Domodossola. On entering Italy by this route one passes the last rock-cut gallery near Crevola and, by a high-built viaduct, thirty metres or more above the bed of the river, it crosses the Diveria. Soon the vineyards and all the signs of the insect life of the southland meet the eye. Italy has at last been reached, no more eternal snow and ice, no more peaked rooftops, the whole region now flattens out into the Lombard plain. Domodossola has all the ear-marks of the Italian's manner of life and building of houses, albeit that the town itself has no splendid monuments. Another entrance to the Italian lake region through the mountain barrier beyond is by the road over the San Bernardino Pass and Bellinzona. The San Bernardino Pass is not to be confounded with those of the Grand and Petit Saint Bernard. The present roadway dates from 1822, when it was built by the engineer Pocobelle, at the joint expense of the Sardinian and Grisons governments. Its chief object was to connect Genoa and Turin directly with Switzerland and west Germany. The pass crosses the Rheinwald at a height of 2,063 metres. This passage across the Alps was known to the ancient Romans, and down to the fifteenth century it was known as the Vogelberg. A mission brother, Bernardino of Siena, preaching the gospel in the high valleys, erected a chapel here which gave the pass the name which it bears to-day. In part the road tunnels through the hillsides, in part runs along a shelf beside the precipice, and here and there crosses a mountain torrent by some massive bridge of masonry. Like most of the mountain roads leading into Italy from Switzerland and Germany the southern slope descends more abruptly than that on the north. The coach driver may trot his horses down hill, though, so well has the descent been engineered, and the automobilist may rush things with considerably more safety here than on the better known routes. Another celebrated gateway into Italy is that over the Splugen Pass from Coire (in Italian nomenclature: Colmo dell'Orso). It was completed by the Austrian government in 1823 to compete with the new-made road a few kilometres to the west over the Bernardino which favoured Switzerland and Germany and took no consideration whatever of the interests of Austria. The summit of the Splugen Pass is 2,117 metres above sea-level and on a narrow ridge near by runs for six kilometres the boundary between Switzerland and Italy. Entering Italy by the Splugen Pass one finds the _dogana_ a dull, ugly group of buildings just below the first series of facets which drop down from the crest. It is as lonesome and gloomy a place of residence as one can possibly conceive as existing on the earth's surface. One forgets entirely that it is very nearly the heart of civilized Europe; there is nothing within view to suggest it in the least, not a scrap of vegetation, not a silvery streak of water, not a habitation even that might not be as appropriately set upon a shelf of rock by the side of Hecla. The French army under Maréchal Macdonald crossed the pass in 1800 when but a mere trail existed, but with a loss of a hundred men and as many horses. Of late years the passage of the Col has been rendered the easier by the cutting of two long galleries. Another engineering work of note is met a little farther on in the Gorge of San Giacomo, a work completed by Carlo Donegani in the reign of the Emperor Francis II, and, just beyond, the boiling torrent of the Liro is spanned by a daring bridge of masonry. Road signs in Italy are not as good or as frequent as one finds in France, but where they exist they are at least serviceable. The Roman milestone of old has ceased to serve its purpose, though solitary examples still exist, and their place is taken by the governmental "bornes" and the placards posted at the initiation of the Touring Club and various automobile organizations in certain parts, particularly in the north. The signboards of the Touring Club Italiano are distinctly good as far as they go, but they are infrequent. All hotels and garages affiliated with the club hang out a characteristic and ever welcome sign, and there one is sure of finding the best welcome and the best accommodations for man and his modern beast of burden, the mechanical horses of iron and bronze harnessed to his luxurious tonneau or limousine. [Illustration: Italian Road Signs] With regard to road maps for Italy there exist certain governmental maps like those of the Ordnance Survey in England or of the État Major in France, but they are practically useless for the automobilist, and are only interesting from a topographic sense. Taride, the French map publisher, issues a cheap series of Italian road maps, covering the entire peninsula in three sheets printed in three colours, with main roads marked plainly in red. They are easily read and clear and have the advantage of being cheap, the three sheets costing but a franc each, but one suspects that they were not composed entirely from first hand, well-authenticated, recent sources of information. Little discrepancies such as just where a railway crosses a road, etc., etc., are frequently to be noted. This is perhaps a small matter, but the genuine vagabond tourist, whether he is plodding along on foot or rolling smoothly on his five inch pneumatics, likes to know his exact whereabouts at every step of the way. On the whole the Italian "Taride" maps are fairly satisfactory, and they are much more easily read than the more elaborate series in fifty-six sheets on a scale of 1-1,250,000 issued by the Touring Club Italiano, or the thirty-five sheets of the Carta Stradale d'Italia Sistema Becherel-Marieni, which by reason of the number of sheets alone are in no way as convenient as the three sheet map. The Becherel-Marieni maps are, however, beautifully printed and have a system of marking localities where one finds supplies of gasoline, a mechanician or a garage which is very useful to the automobilist, besides giving warning of all hills and, with some attempt at precision, also marking the good, mediocre and bad roads. This is important but, as the writer has so often found that a good road of yesterday has become a bad road of to-day, and will be perhaps a worse one to-morrow, he realizes that the fluctuating quality of Italian roads prevents any genius of a map-maker from doing his best. These maps in seven colours are perhaps the best works of their kind in Italy, at least ranking with the Touring Club maps, and completely cover the country, whereas the other series is not as yet wholly complete. [Illustration: Profile Road Map, Bologna--Florence] Membership in the great Touring Club Italiano is almost a necessity for one who would enjoy his Italian tour to the full. The "Annuario," giving information as to hotels and garages and miniature plans of all the cities and principal towns--presented gratis to members--is all but indispensable, while the three pocket volumes entitled Strade di Grande Communicazione, with the kilometric distances between all Italian places except the merest hamlets and the profile elevations (miniature maps, hundreds of them) of the great highways are a boon and a blessing to one who would know the easiest and least hilly road between two points. The accompanying diagram explains this better than words. CHAPTER V IN LIGURIA The most ravishingly beautiful entrance into Italy is by the road along the Mediterranean shore. The French Riviera and its gilded pleasures, its great hotels, its _chic_ resorts and its entrancing combination of seascape and landscape are known to all classes of travellers, but at Menton, almost on the frontier, one is within arm's reach of things Italian, where life is less feverish, in strong contrast to the French atmosphere which envelops everything to the west of the great white triangle painted on the cliff above the Pont Saint Louis and marking the boundary between the two great Latin countries. The "Route Internationale," leading from France to Italy, crosses a deep ravine by the Pont Saint Louis with the railway running close beside. Not so very long ago there was a unity of speech and manners among the inhabitants of Menton and the neighbouring Italian towns of Grimaldi, Mortola and Ventimiglia, but little by little the Ravine of Saint Louis has become a hostile frontier, where the custom house officials of France and Italy regard each other, if not as enemies, at least as aliens. The two peoples are, however, of the same race and have the same historic traditions. It was just here, on passing the frontier, that we asked a deep-eyed, sun-burnt young girl of eighteen or twenty if she was an Italian, thinking perhaps she might be a Niçoise, who, among the world's beautiful women, occupy a very high place. She replied in French-Italian: "Oui, aussi bien Venitienne!" This was strange, for most Venetians, since Titian set the style for them, have been blondes. A château of the Grimaldi family crowns the porphyry height just to the eastward of the Italian frontier, and below is the Italian _Dogana_, where the automobilist and other travellers by road go through the formalities made necessary by governmental red tape. Red tape is all right in the right place, but it should be cut off in proper lengths, so that officials need not be obliged to quibble over a few soldi while individuals lose a dozen francs or more in valuable time. This matter of customs formalities at Grimaldi is only an incident. The automobilist's troubles really commence at a little shack in Menton, on French soil, just before the Pont Saint Louis is crossed. Here he has his "passavant" made out, an official taking a lot of valuable time to decide whether the cushions of your automobile are red, orange or brown. You stick out for orange because they were that colour when you bought the outfit, but the representative of the law sticks out too--he for red. The result is, you compromise on brown, and hope that the other customs guardian on duty at the frontier post by which you will enter France again will be blessed with the same sense of colour-blindness as was his fellow of Menton. Once this formality gone through--and you pay only two sous for the documents--you have no trouble getting back into France again by whichever frontier town you pass. There are no duties to pay and no disputes, so really one cannot complain. It is for his benefit anyway that the "passavant" describing the peculiarities of automobile is issued. At the Grimaldi _Dogana_ on entering Italy you are made to pay duty on what little gasoline you may have in your tanks, even for as little as a litre. Presumably you pass your machine through the Italian customs with one of the "triptyches" issued by any of the great automobile clubs or touring associations, as otherwise you have to put down gold, and a thousand or fifteen hundred francs in gold one does not usually carry around loose in his pocket. We passed through readily enough, but a poor non-French, non-Italian speaking American who followed in our wheel-tracks had not made his preparations beforehand, and French banknotes didn't look good enough to the Italian customs official, and a day was lost accordingly while the poor unfortunate rolled back down hill to Menton and sought to turn the notes into gold. The banks having just closed he was not able to do this as readily as he thought he might, and it was well on after sunrise that he followed our trail--and never caught up with us all the way to Grosetto. Mortola is the first town of note that one passes on entering Italian soil, but beyond its aspect, so alien to that of the small town in France, it is not worthy of remark. Ventimiglia comes next, where the traveller by rail goes through equally annoying customs formalities to those experienced by the traveller by road at Grimaldi. These are not apt to be so costly, as the customs officials take him at his word, graciously chalk his luggage and pass him on. The Guardie-Finanze, or customs officer, of Italy is a genteel looking young person with a bowler hat, topped with a feather cockade. He is even as gay and picturesque as the "carabinieri reales," though he is a mere plebeian among the noblesse of soldierdom. The Vintimille of the French, or the Ventimiglia of the Italians, was the ancient Intemilium of the Romans. To-day, on the left bank of the Roja, is a new city made up of the attributes of a great railway and frontier station and a numerous assemblage of alberghi, hotels, restaurants and the like. Ventimiglia is not unlovely, neither is it lovely in a picturesque romantic sense. Its site is charming, on the banks of the tumbling Roja at the base of the Alps of Piedmont, just where they plunge, from a height of a thousand or twelve hundred metres, down into the lapping Mediterranean waves. Ventimiglia is, practically, the frontier town of Piedmont, and it was fought for by all the warring houses of these parts in the middle ages. The Genoese held it for a time, then the Counts of Provence and the Duke of Savoy. It was a game of give-and-take all round, and in the mêlée most of the town's mediæval monuments have disappeared. Across the Nervia, to the north, is Monte Appio, one of the chief spurs of the Maritime Alps in Italy. On a jutting crag of rock, in plain view from the town below, is an ancient Roman _castellum_. Two fragmentary towers alone remain, and as a ruin, even, it is beneath consideration. One only notices it in passing and recalls the more magnificent Tower of Augustus at La Turbie, high above Monte Carlo's rock, and still in plain view of Ventimiglia--with a good glass. A fine relic of the Dorias--that great family of great Genoese--is still to be seen in picturesque ruin at Dolce Acqua, a few miles further up the valley of the torrent. Bordighera is the first of the Italian Riviera winter stations for invalids. That describes it perfectly. Its surroundings are delightful enough, but there is little that is attractive about the place itself. The automobilist will have no trouble finding his way through the town if he keeps straight on but drives carefully and avoids the invalids and baby carriages. It was a sailor of Bordighera who gave the order to "wet the ropes"--an old seafaring trick, known the world over--when the obelisk on the Piazza san Pietro at Rome, erected by Sixte-Quint, was tottering on its base. In return for the service he asked the favour of the Pope that his native town should have the honour of supplying the churches of Rome with their greenery on Palm Sunday. The supplying of palm branches and the exploiting of semi-invalids are the chief industries of Bordighera. San Remo is very like Bordighera, except that it is an improvement on it. The quarter where the great hotels are found looks like all towns of its class, but the old town with its narrow canyon-like streets, its buttressed roofs and walls, still breathes of the mediæval spirit. It is as crowded a quarter, where dwell men, women and children,--seemingly children mostly,--as can be found east of Grand, Canal or Hester Streets, in down-town New York. The automobile tourist will not care much for San Remo unless he is hungry, in which case the Hotel de Paris will cater for him a little better than any other of the town's resort hotels. The road continues close beside the sea, as it has since Fréjus in the Var was passed, sweeping around bold promontories on a shelf of rock, tunnelling through some mountain spur, dipping down to sea-level here and rising three or five hundred metres ten kilometres further on. This delightfully disposed road by the sea may well be reviled by the automobilist because of the fact that every half dozen kilometres or so it crosses the railway at the same level. These level crossings are about as dangerous as the American variety; in a way more so. They are barred simply by a great swinging tree-trunk, which, of all things, swings outwards and across the road when not in use. Even when closed this bar is so placed that an automobile at speed could well enough slip beneath it, and the passengers who were not thrown out and killed by this operation surely would be by the train which would probably come along before they could pick themselves up. These railway barriers are almost always closed, whether a train is due or not, and it is commonly said that they are only opened for the automobilist on the payment of a few soldi. This, the writer knows to be calumny. It is conceivable that the circumstance has been met with, and it is conceivable that, in many more instances, stranger automobilists have scattered coin in their wake which led to the development of the practice, but all the same one need not, should not, in fact, countenance any such practice of blackmail. The mere fact that these obstructions are there is enough of a penance for the automobilist, who in ten hours of running will certainly lose one or two hours waiting for the gates to be opened. These Italian coast line vistas are quite the most savagely beautiful of any along the Mediterranean. We rave over the strip dominated by La Turbie and Monte Carlo's rock, and over the Corniche d'Or of the Estérel in France, but really there is nothing quite so primitive and unspoiled in its beauty as this less-known itinerary. The background mountains rise, grim, behind, and beneath. At the bottom of the cliff, a hundred metres below the road on which you ride, break the soapy waves of the sea. Gulls circle about uttering their shrill cries, an eagle soars above, and far below a fisherman pushes lazily at his oar in the conventional stand-up Mediterranean fashion, or a red-brown latteen-rigged fishing boat darts in or out of some half-hidden bay or _calanque_. The whole poetic ensemble is hard to beat, and yet this part of the average Italian journey is usually rolled off in express trains, with never a stop between the frontier and Genoa, most of the time passing through the fifty rock-cut tunnels which allow the railway access to these parts. To see this wonderful strip of coast line at its best it must be seen from the highroad. At Arma, as the road runs along at the water's very edge, is an old square donjon tower, reminding one of those great keeps of England and of Foulque's Nerra in Normandy. Its history is lost in oblivion, but it is a landmark to be noted. Porto Maurizio is the very ideal of a small Mediterranean sea-port. It is a hill-top town too, in that it crowns a promontory jutting seawards, forming a sheltering harbour for its busy coming and going of small-fry shipping. Olive oil and a sweet white wine, like that of Cyprus, grown on the hillsides roundabout, form the chief of the merchandise sent out from the little port; but the whole town bears a prosperous well-kept air that makes one regret that it had not a battery of "sights," in order that one might linger a while in so pleasant a place. Porto Maurizio's church is a remarkably vast and handsome building. Oneglia, the birthplace of the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, lies just beyond. Wine in skins, hung up on rafters to mellow, seems to be Oneglia's substitute for wine cellars, but otherwise the hurried traveller at Oneglia remarks nothing but that it is a "resort" with big hotels and big gardens and many guests lolling about killing time. The older part of the town, with the wine skins, is decidedly the most interesting feature. At Marina-Andora is the ruin of an old castle with a ghostly legend to it to add an attraction it might not otherwise have. A Papal Nuncio was one day murdered here within its walls and "in extremis" the prelate called down curses upon the surrounding country, praying that it might wither and dry up. It must have been an efficacious imprecation as the country roundabout looks like a desert waste. Not an olive nor an orange grove is in sight and only a few scrubby vineyards dot the landscape. At the Capo delle Melle, a dozen kilometres beyond, it all changes and the land blossoms again, though truth to tell both the wine and olive products have the reputation of falling off in quality as one goes further east. Alassio is a now well-developed Italian seaside resort. The Italians and the Germans fill it to overflowing at all seasons of the year, and prices are mounting skywards with a rapidity which would do credit to Monte Carlo itself. There is a considerable fishing and coastwise trade at Alassio which along the quais endows it with a certain picturesqueness, and the chief hotel is quartered in a seventeenth century palazzo, formerly belonging to the Marchese Durante. Alassio took its name from Alassia, a daughter of Otho the Great, who, fleeing from the paternal roof, came here with her lover long years ago. This was the beginning of the development of Alassio as a Mediterranean resort. And the Germans have been coming in increasing numbers ever since. Off shore is the isle of Gallinaria. It has a circular tower on it, and a legend goes with it that the name of the island is derived from a species of hens and chickens which were bred here. The connection seems a little vague, but for the sake of variation, it is here given. Here and there as the road winds along the coast some vine-clad ruin of a castle tower is passed, and the background foot-hills of the Alps are peopled with toy villages and towns like Switzerland itself. Albenga is primarily a great big overgrown coast town of to-day, but was formerly the ancient metropolis of a minor political division of Liguria, and the one time ally of Carthage. Evidences of this fallen pride of place are not wanting in Albenga to-day. There are innumerable great brick and stone towers, now often built into some surrounding structure. Three may be remarked as landmarks of the town's great civic and military glory of the past: the Torre de Marchese Malespina, the Torre dei Guelfi, and another, unnamed, built up into the present Casa del Commune. Albenga is not a resort, since it has the reputation of being an unhealthful place, but probably this is not so as there is no particular squalidness to be noticed, save that incident to the workaday affairs of factories, workshops and shipping. The inhabitants of the neighbouring towns profess to recognize the native of Albenga at a glance when they hail him with the remark: "Hai faccia di Albenga."--"You have the Albenga face." This is probably local jealousy only, and is not really contempt. A short way out from Albenga is the Ponte Lungo, an old Roman bridge of the time of the Emperor Honorius. Savona, the largest place between the frontier and Genoa, is still fifty kilometres to the eastward, but midway between it and Albenga is Finale Marina, a town of one main street, two enormous painted churches, an imposing fortification wall, a palm-planted promenade and a municipal palace bearing, over its portal, the arms of a visiting Spanish monarch who ruled here temporarily in the fifteenth century. The Castello Gavone, on a hillside above the town and back from the coast, is a ruin, but its picturesque outer walls, with diamond-cut stone facets, like those of the great round tower of Milan or of Tantallon Castle in Scotland, are quite remarkable. Finale Marina's Albergo Grimaldi is housed in an old château of some noble of the days when the town was the capital of a Marquisate. Not much changed is the old château, except to put new wine in the old bottles and new linen on the antique beds. To be sure there are electric push-buttons in the chambers, but as they are useless they can hardly be taken into consideration. The Albergo Grimaldi has scant accommodation for automobiles. Three might range themselves along the wall in the lower corridor, and would indeed be well enough housed, though in no sense is there the least semblance of a garage. You pay nothing additional for this, and that's something in Italy where automobiles--in the small towns--are still regarded as mechanical curiosities and their occupants as fanatics with more money than good sense. The Italian country population is by no means hostile to the automobilist, but their good nature, even, is often exasperating. Finale Marina is the best stopping place between Menton and Genoa if one is travelling by road, and would avoid the resorts. Noli, just beyond the Capo di Noli, is an unimportant small town; nevertheless it is the proud possessor of a collection of ruined walls and towers which would be a pride to any mediæval "borgo." Noli, like Albenga, was once the chief town of a little political division; but to-day it is a complete nonentity. In bright sunshine, from the road winding over the Capo di Noli, one may see the smoke of Genoa's chimneys and shipping rising, cloud-like, on the horizon far away to the eastward, and may even descry that classic landmark, the great lighthouse called "La Lanterna" at the end of the mole jutting out between San Pier d'Arena and Genoa. A castle-crowned rocky islet, the Isola dei Bergeggi, lies close off shore beneath the Capo di Vado, itself crowned with a seventeenth century fortress cut out of the very rock. Still following the rocky coastline, one draws slowly up on Savona. Savona is backed up by olive gardens and pine-clad hills, while above, away from the coast, roll the first foot-hills of the Apennines, their nearby slopes and crests dotted, here and there, with some grim fortress of to-day or a watch tower of mediæval times. The Alps are now dwindling into the Apennines, but the change is hardly perceptible. Above the roofs and chimneys of the town itself rises an old tower of masonry on which is perched a colossal madonna, a venerated shrine of the Ligurian sailor-folk. It bears an inscription which seems to scan equally well in school-book Latin or colloquial Italian. "In mare irato, in subita procella Invoco te, nostra benigna stella." Mago, the Carthaginian, made Savona a refuge after his sack of Genoa. The Genoese, in turn, came along and blocked up the port out of sheer jealousy, lest it might become a commercial rival of Genoa itself. The bay of Savona is delightful, even Wordsworth, who mostly sang of lakes and larks, remarked it, though in no way is it superior in beauty to a score of other indentations in the Mediterranean coastline from Marseilles around to Naples. The automobilist will best remember Savona for its exceedingly bad exits and entrances, and the clean and unencumbered streets in the town itself. Here are great wide park-like thoroughfares flagged with flat smooth stones which are a dream to the automobilist. There never were such superbly laid paving blocks as one finds in Savona. As one leaves Savona he actually begins to sense the smoke and activities of Genoa in his nostrils, albeit they are a good fifty kilometres away as yet; around a half a dozen jutting barrier capes, and across innumerable railway tracks. Varazze is not a stopping point on many travellers' Italian journeyings and, to state it frankly, perhaps, for the majority, it is not worth visiting. It is a sort of overflow Sunday resort for the people of Genoa, in that each of its two hotels have dining accommodation for a hundred people or more. Aside from this it is endowed with a certain quaint picturesqueness. It has a palm-tree-lined quay which borders a string of ship-building yards where the wooden walls of Genoa's commerce-carrying craft were formerly built in large numbers, and where, to-day, a remnant of this industry is still carried on. Great long-horned white oxen haul timber through the crooked streets and along the quays, and there is ever a smell of tar and the sound of sawing and hammering. An artist with pen or brush will like Varazze better than any other class of traveller. The automobilist will have all he can manage in dodging the ox teams and their great trundling loads of timber. There is a fragment of a ruined castle near by on the outskirts of the town, and farther away, back in the hills, is a monastery called "Il Deserto," and properly enough named it is. It was founded by a lady of the Pallavicini family who as a recompense--it is to be presumed--insisted on being represented in the painted altar-piece as the Madonna, though clad in mediæval Genoese dress. What vanity! Cogoletto, practically a Genoese suburb, claims to be the birth place of Columbus. Perhaps indeed it is so, as his father Dominico was known to be a property owner near Genoa. Savona, Oneglia and Genoa itself all have memories of the family, so the discoverer was of Ligurian parentage without doubt. "Sestri-Ponente! Cornigliano-Ligure! San Pier d'Arena!" (with its Villa Serra and its Babylonian-like gardens) cry out the railway employees at each stop of the Genoa-bound train; and the same names roll up on the automobilist's road map with a like persistency. Each class of traveller wonders why Genoa is not reached more quickly, and the automobilist, for the last dozen kilometres, has been cursed with a most exasperating, always-in-the-way tramway, with innumerable carts, badly paved roads and much mud. The approaches to almost all great cities are equally vile; Genoa is no exception and the traffic in the city--and in all the built up suburbs--_keeps to the left_, a local custom which is inexplicable since in the open country it goes to the right. Voltri is a long drawn-out, uninteresting, waterside town with more chimneys belching smoke and cinders in strong contrast to the pine-clad background hills, in which nestle the suburban villas of the Doria, the Galliera and the Brignole families of other days. Pegli is but a continuation of Voltri, Genoa La Superba is still a dozen kilometres away. Pegli is a resort of some importance and its chief attraction is the Villa Pallavicini, with a labyrinth of grottoes, subterranean lakes, cement moulded rocks, Chinese pagodas and the like. It is not lovely, but is commonly reckoned a sight worth stopping off to see. The Italians call this hodge podge "a ferocity of invention." The phrase is worthy of perpetuation. The Palazzo Pallavicini was the suburban residence of the banker of the Court of Rome, but he was a sort of renegade financier, for he went off to England with the churchly funds and became an English country gentleman, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His "past" was known, for some poet-historian of the time branded him with the following couplet:-- "Sir Horatio Palvasene, Who robbed the Pope to pay the Queen." The Villa Doria at Pegli was a work of Canzio built for one of the richest merchants of Genoa in the days of Charles V. It was, like its contemporaries, a gorgeous establishment, but in popular fancy it enjoys not a whit of the enthusiasm bestowed upon the stagy, tricky bric-à-brac and stucco Villa Pallavicini. The entrance to "Genoa la Superba" by road from the west is a sorry spectacle, a grim, crowded thoroughfare decidedly workaday and none too cleanly. From San Pier d'Arena one comes immediately within the confines of Genoa itself, just after circling the western port and passing the sky-piercing "La Lanterna," one of the most ancient lighthouses extant, dating from 1547. [Illustration: _Palazzo Doria, Genoa_] Genoa is neglected or ignored by most travellers and searchers after the picturesque in Italy. This is a mistake, for Genoa's park of Acquasola, the gardens of the Villa Rosazza and of the Villa de Negroni, and the terraces of the Palazzo Doria offer as enchanting a series of panoramas as those of Rome or Florence, and quite different, in that they have always the vista of the blue Mediterranean as a background. [Illustration: Map Genoa] Genoa is a bizarre combination of the old and the new, of the mountain and the plain, of great docks and wharves, and of streets of stairs rising almost vertically. The general effect of Genoa is as if everything in it had been piled one on top of another until finally it had to spread out at the base. Enormous caserns fringe the heights and great barracks line the wharves, while in between, and here, there and everywhere, are great and venerable palaces and churches of marble, many of them built in layers of black and white stone, indicating that they were built by the commune in mediæval days, or by one of the four great families of Doria, Grimaldi, Spinola or Fieschi, the only ones who had the privilege of using it. Genoa's labyrinth of twisting, climbing streets and alleys are all but impracticable for wheeled traffic, and, for that reason, strangers, who do not walk "en tour" as much as they ought, save in the corridors of picture galleries and the aisles of churches, know not Genoa save its main arteries--nor ever will, unless they change their tactics. The automobile is only useful in Genoa in getting in and out of town, and even that is accomplished with fear and trembling by the most cold-blooded chauffeur that ever lived. What with the vile roads, the magnificent distances and the ceaseless irresponsible traffic of carts and drays, tramways and what not, Genoa is indeed, of all other cities on earth, in need of a boulevard for the new traffic. To get to your hotel at the further end of the town as you make your entrance by the road circling the base of "La Lanterna," can only be likened to a trip down Broadway in New York at four o'clock in the afternoon. That would not be pleasure; neither is getting in and out of Genoa at any time between five in the morning and seven at night. To what degenerate depths these great palaces of the Genoa of other days have fallen only the curious and inquisitive are likely to know. One into which we penetrated--looking for something which wasn't there--was a veritable hive of industry, and as cosmopolitan as Babylon. It was near the Bourse and one entered marble halls by a marble staircase, flanked by a marble balustrade and finished off with newel posts supported by marble lions. The great entrance hall was surrounded by a colonnade of svelt marble columns, and in the centre ascended a monumental marble staircase. Two marble fountains played in an inner courtyard, which was paved with marble flags, and a statue, also marble, in a niche faced the great doorway. On the first floor were more marble columns and a frescoed vaulting. From the corridors opened a battery of doors into offices of all sorts of industrial enterprises, from one given to exploiting a new combustible to another which was financing a rubber plantation in Abyssinia. A chestnut-roaster was perambulating the corridors with his stock in trade, furnace all alight, and a brown-robed monk was begging his daily bread. On the next floor, up another marble staircase, were still other business offices,--shipping firms, wine-factors and one Guiseppe Bellini, representing an American factory, whose output of agricultural machinery is found in all four quarters of the globe. Breakfast foods were there, too, and there was a big lithograph of a Fall River Line Steamer on the walls. A whole city of merchants and agents were cloistered here in the five stories of this one-time ducal abode. Up under the roof was a photographer and an artist's studio, where a long-haired Italian (Signor something or other, the sign read) painted the bluest of blue sky pictures, and the most fiery Vesuvian eruptions, to sell to tourists through the medium of the hotel porters of the town below. Thus it was that an antique shrine of gallantry and romance had become the temple of twentieth century commerce. The noble arms, with a heraldic angel still to be seen over the entrance doorway, count for nothing to-day, but exist as a vivid reminder of a glorious past. In 1500 the palace was the shrine of an artistic nobility; to-day it is a temple of chicanery. The new part of Genoa imitates Milan, as Milan imitates Paris. The galleries or arcades of Milan, Genoa and Naples, full of shops, cafés and restaurants, would be admirable institutions in a more northerly clime, where the sun is less strong and rain more frequent. Here their glass roofs radiate an insufferable heat, which only in the coldest and most intemperate months is at all bearable. Nevertheless these arcades are an amusing and characteristic feature of the large Italian cities. Hotels in Genoa for the automobilist are of all ranks and at all prices. Bertolini's has garage accommodation for twenty-five automobiles, and charges two francs and a half to four francs a night for the accommodation, which is dear or not accordingly as you may feel. The Albergo Unione, on the Palazzo Campetto, has no garage (you will have to seek out the F. I. A. T. garage a mile or more away), but you get something that is thoroughly Italian and very well appointed too, at most reasonable prices. The Genoese suburban villas are a part of Genoa itself, in that they were built and inhabited by nobles of the city. [Illustration: Sun Dial, Genoa] To the east of Genoa, at Albaro, is a collection of villas which comes upon one as a great surprise. In reality they are suburban palaces, with here and there more modest villas, and again mere modest dwellings. All are surrounded with hedges of aloes, vines, olive and orange groves, and the effect is of the country. In the Villa del Paradiso Lord Byron was once a guest. Its loggia was a favourite lounging place, and the whole aspect of the villa and its grounds is as paradisal as one has any right to expect to find on earth. The Villa Cambiaso was built in 1557 by Alessi from designs, it is commonly said, of the great Michael Angelo. The ancient Sardinian Palazzo Imperiali is also here, and is popularly known as the Albero d'Oro. A dozen miles to the east the gardens of the Villa de Franchi extend down, stair by stair, and fountain by fountain, to the Mediterranean rocks. The villa is a typical terrace-house, long, and almost dwarfish on the front, where the "piano nobile" is also the ground floor; but on the side facing the sea it is a story higher, and of stately proportions, and is flanked by widely extending wings. It is the typical Ligurian coast villa, one of a species which has set the copy for many other seacoast villas and grounds. CHAPTER VI THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE The gorgeous panorama of coast scenery continues east of Genoa as it has obtained for some three hundred kilometres to the west. In fact the road through Nervi and Recco is finer, if anything, and more hilly, though less precipitous, than that portion immediately to the westward of Genoa. Between Genoa and Spezia the railway passes through fifty tunnels. The traveller by the high road has decidedly the best of it, but there are always those level crossings to take into consideration though fewer of them. Nervi is a place of German hotels, much beer and an unaccommodating tram line. The Grand Hotel gives access to the gardens of the villa of the Marchese Gropollo, and this of itself is an attraction that Nervi's other rather tawdry inns lack. Recco is an attractive and populous town, but has no monuments of note. The highroad here climbs up the mountain of Portofino where the promontory joins the mainland, and drops down the other side to Rapallo, Santa Margherita, Cervara and Portofino. High up on the mountain cape is the Monastery of San Fruttoso, a picturesque and solitary conventual establishment in whose chapel are many tombs of the Dorias, all with good Gothic sculptures. In the convent of Cervara, en route to the village of Portofino on the east side of the cape, François I, just after he lost "all save honour" at the battle of Pavia, was imprisoned previous to his voyage to Spain in the galleys which were to carry him a captive to the domain of Charles Quint. The roads along here are quite the best of the whole extent of the eastern and western Italian Rivieras. They are encumbered with a new class of traffic not met with further west. Up over the mountain of Portofino winds the road in genuine mountain fashion though beautifully graded and kept. At almost any turning one is likely to meet a great lumbering char-a-banc crowded with tourists, with five, six or eight horses caparisoned like a circus pageant, with bells around their necks, pheasants' feathers bobbing in their top-knots, and a lusty Ligurian on the hindermost seat blowing a coaching horn for all he is worth. This is the Italian and German pleasure seeker's way of amusing himself. He likes it, the rest of us don't! Santa Margherita is now a full-blown resort with great hotels, bathing-machines and all the usual attributes of a place of its class. Lace-making and coral-fishing are the occupations of the inhabitants who do not live off of exploiting the tourists. Both products are made here (and in Belgium and Birmingham) in the imitation varieties, so one had best beware. If one doesn't speak Italian, German will answer in all these resorts of the Levantine Riviera, quite as well as French or English. The "Tea-Shop" and "American Bar" signs here give way to those of "Munich" and "Pilsner." The village of Portofino itself is delightful; a quaint little fishing port surrounded by tree-clad hills running to the water's edge. There is a Hôtel Splendide, once a villa of the accepted Ligurian order, and a less pretentious, more characteristic, Albergo Delfino lower down on the quay. The arms of the little port are a spouting dolphin as befits its seafaring aspect, so the Albergo Delfino certainly ought to have the preference for this reason if no other. [Illustration: Rapallo] On the cliff road running around the promontory from Portofino to Rapallo are a half a dozen more or less modern villas of questionable architecture, but of imposing proportions, and one and all delightfully disposed. [Illustration: Map Rapallo and its Gulf] The Villa Pagana is the property of the Marchese Spinola, and the Castel Paraggi, the property of a gentleman prosaically named Brown, is theatrically and delightfully disposed, though bizarre in form. Rapallo, at the head of the bay, is a continuation of what has gone before. There are great hotels and pensions, and many of them. Its campaniles and church towers set off the framing of Rapallo delightfully. The Hôtel de l'Europe has more than once been the abode of Queen Margherita of Italy, and most of the notables who pass this way. The hotel curiously enough seems none the worse for it; it is good, reasonable in price and conveniently situated on the quay, overlooking a picturesque granite tower built up from a foundation sunk in the waters of the Mediterranean. The Corsair Dragutte, a buccaneer of romantic days, came along and plundered these Ligurian towns as often as he felt like it. Frequently they paid no attention to his visits, save to give up what blackmail and tribute he demanded; but Rapallo built this tower as a sort of watch tower or fortress. It is an admirable example of a sentinel watch tower, and might well be classed as a diminutive fortress-château. From Rapallo to Chiavari the coast road winds and rises and falls with wonderful variety between villa gardens and vineyards. On the slopes above are dotted tiny dwellings, and church towers point skywards in most unexpected places. The chief architectural attributes of Chiavari are its arcaded house fronts, a queer blend of round and pointed arches, and columns of all orders. The effect is undeniably good. The town was one of the most important in the old Genoese Republic, save the capital itself. The towers scattered here and there through the town and in the neighbourhood are all feudal relics, albeit they are fragmentary. The Castle which the native points out with pride is neither very magnificent nor very elegant, but is indicative of the style of building of the feudal time in these parts. Decidedly the best things of Chiavari are its house fronts, and some crazy old streets running back from the main thoroughfares. There are some slate quarries in the neighbourhood and a ten foot slab, larger than the top of a billiard table, can be cut if occasion requires. The church of San Salvatore near Lavagna, where the quarries are, was founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1243. Lavagna, near by, has a Palazzo Rosso, in that it is built of a reddish stone, though that is not its official name. It was an appanage of the Fieschi family, who owned to Popes, Cardinals and soldiers in the gallant days of the Genoese Republic. Sestri-Levante, a half a dozen kilometres beyond Chiavari, is the last of the Riviera resorts. It is a mere strip of villa and hotel-lined roadway with a delightful water front and a charming and idyllic background. Spezia is reached only by climbing a lengthy mountain road up over the Pass of the Bracco; sixty kilometres in all from Sestri to Spezia. The highroad now leaves the coast to wind around inland over the lower slopes of the Apennines. The railway itself follows the shore. It is a finely graded road with entrancing far-away vistas of the sea, the distant snow-capped summits of the mountains to the north and, off southward, the more gently rising Tuscan hills. After having climbed some twenty-one hundred feet above the sea, the highroad runs down through the valley of the Vara, until finally at Spezia, Italy's great marine arsenal, one comes again to the Mediterranean shore. Just before Spezia is reached, snuggled close in a little bay, is Vernazza--where the wine comes from, at least, the wine the praises of which were sung by Boccaccio "as the paragon of wines." Wine is still a product of the region, but its quality may not be what it once was. Spezia is a snug, conservative and exclusive military and naval town. The gold-lace and blue-cloth individuals of the "service" dominate everything, even to the waiters in the hotels and cafés. No one else has a show. The Hotel Croix de Malte (with a French name be it observed) is the chic hotel of Spezia, with prices on a corresponding scale, and no garage. The Albergo Italia, equally well situated, a typical Italian house of its class, is more modest in its prices and better as to its food. It has no garage either, but under the circumstances, that of itself is no drawback. Across the street, in a vacant store, you may lodge your automobile for two francs a night, or for one franc if you tell the ambitious and obliging little man who runs it that he demands too much. He is really the best thing we found in Spezia. We had run out of gasoline in entering the city, the long run down hill flattened out into a plain just before the town was reached, but he accommodatingly sent out a five gallon tin ("original package" goods from Philadelphia) and would take no increase in price for his trouble. Such a thing in the automobile line ought to be encouraged. We pay "through the nose," as the French say, often enough as it is. Spezia's suburban villas are a natural outcome of its environment, but they are all modern and have, none of them, the flavour of historic romanticism about them. An ancient castle tower on the hills above Spezia is about the only feudal ruin near by. The viper, the device of the Viscontis, is still graven above its entrance door to recall the fact that the device of the Milanese nobles was a viper, and that their natures, too, took after that of the unlovely thing. The Viper of Milan and the Viscontis is a worthy cage companion to the hedgehog of François I. Spezia's gulf is all that Spezia is not; romantic, lovely and varied. It was described in ancient times by Strabo, the geographer, and by Persius. Little of its topographical surroundings or climatic attributes have changed since that day. The road down the coast from Spezia is marked on the maps as perfectly flat, but within a dozen kilometres, before Arcola is reached, is as stiff a couple of hair-pin turns as one will remember ever having come across suddenly in his travels. They are not formidable hills, perhaps, but they are surprising, and since one has to drop down again immediately to sea level they seem entirely unnecessary. The river Magra which enters the sea just east of Spezia divided the Genoese territory from that of Tuscany. "Macra che per cammin corto Lo Gonovese parta dal Toscano." --_Dante_, "Paradisio." Sarzana is not a tourist point, but the traveller by road will not be in a hurry to pass it by. It has, curiously enough, an Albergo della Nuova York, built on the fortification walls of feudal days. It is not for this, though, that one lingers at Sarzana. The Bonapartes were originally descended from Sarzana ancestry. It was proven by contemporary documents that a certain Buonaparte, a notary, lived here in 1264. Supposedly, it was this limb of the law who became the chief of the Corsican family. The old feudal castle of Sarzana, with its round tower, its moat and its later Renaissance gateway is the very ideal of mouldy mediævalism. From Sarzana, it is, figuratively speaking, but a step to Carrara and Massa, the centres of the marble industry. Of all the materials the artist requires, none is so much sought after as the pure white marble of Carrara. The sculptured marble of Carrara goes out into the world from thousands of ateliers to thousands of resting places but it all comes from this great white mountainside in the Apennines which has made the region famous and rich. This little Tuscan town of Carrara owes its all to its, seemingly, inexhaustible stores of milk-white, fine-grained marbles. More especially is the marble of Carrara in demand for statuary; but in all the finer forms of carven stone it finds its place supreme. Men and beasts, oxen, horses and mules, and carts of all shapes and sizes, make the vicinity of Carrara the centre of an uproar that would be maddening if one had to live in it; but it is all very interesting to the stranger, and speaks more loudly than words of the importance of the great industry of the neighbourhood. All around are great heaps--mountains almost--of broken, splintered marble; the débris merely of the great blocks which have, in times past, been quarried and sent to all quarters of the earth. The quarries of Carrara have been worked ever since the Roman epoch, and the tufted hillsides round about have been burrowed to their bowels in taking out this untold wealth which, without exaggeration, has been as great as that of many mines of gold. Quite twenty per cent. of the population work at the industry, and five hundred men are actually engaged in hewing out and slicing off the great blocks. Ten thousand, at least, find their livelihood dependent upon the industry, and two hundred thousand tons is a normal annual output; in price, valued at from 150 to 1,500 francs the cubic metre. At Massa one joins the main road again running south by the shore. One never hears of the conventional tourist stopping at Massa; but we found the Hotel Massa and its dinner in the garden worth the taking and agreed that the Château, in base rococo style, (now the public administrative buildings), a curiosity worth seeing. Massa has a Napoleonic memory hanging over it, too, in that it was once the residence of the Little Corporal's sister. Massa's Castello, high above all else in the town, is grim, lofty and spectacular though to be viewed only from without. Massa is worth making a note of, even by the hurried traveller. Since leaving Sarzana the high road has become worse and worse, until in the vicinity of Carrara and Massa it is almost indescribably bad. There is no such stretch of bad road in Europe as this awful fifty kilometres, for it continues all the way to Lucca and Livorno. The vast amount of traffic drawn by ten head of oxen at a time is what does it of course, and as there is no way around one has to go through it, though it's a heart-breaking job to one that cares anything for his automobile. Pietrasanta, eight kilometres farther on, was, for us, an undiscovered beauty spot and historic shrine; at least, none of us had ever heard of it till we passed the portals. Now we know that the walls, through which we passed, were the same that the blood-thirsty, battling Lorenzo di Medici besieged in 1482; and that the ancient bronze font in the Baptistery was the work of Donatello. We were glad that Massa and Pietrasanta were counted in, as they should be by everyone passing this way, even though they did take up half a day's time--all on account of the awful road--part of which time, however, you are eating that excellent lunch in the garden of the Hotel Massa. That time will not be lost anyway, one must eat somewhere. Eight kilometres beyond Massa is Viareggio, an unlovely, incipient seaside resort for dwellers in the Tuscan towns; but a historic spot nevertheless, and interesting from that viewpoint at any rate. Viareggio has no villas or palaces of note, and its chief associations for the traveller lie in its memories of Shelley and Ouida, the Marquise de la Ramée. There is a monument, erected to Shelley in 1894, commemorating the fact that he was drowned here, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and his body consumed by fire, on the shore. It was in the village of Massarosa, near Viareggio, that that much-abused and very abusive old lady, Ouida, the Marquis de la Ramée, died in January, 1908. Since 1877 she had made Italy her home, and for years she had lived here alone, not in poverty or misery, for she had a "civil pension" which was more than sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. She died miserable and alone however. Ouida was a more real, more charitable person than she was given credit for being. She didn't like the English, and Americans she liked still less, but she loved the Italians. Whose business was it then if she chose to live among them, with her unkempt and unwholesome-looking dogs and her slatternly maid-of-all-work? Ouida, as she herself said, did not hate humanity; she hated society; and she had more courage than some of the rest of us in that she would have nothing to do with it. The vineyards lying back of Viareggio may not be the most luxuriant in Italy, but they blossom abundantly enough. Lucca is thirty-five kilometres from Viareggio and the road still bad--on to Livorno, turning to the right instead of the left at Viareggio, it is worse. Lucca has a right to its claim as one of the most ancient cities of Tuscany, for it is one of the least up-to-date of Italian cities. When Florence was still sunk in its marsh Lucca was already old, and filled with a commercial importance which to-day finds its echo in the distribution of the Lucca olive oil of trade which one may buy at Vancouver, Johannesburg or Rio. Indeed the label on the bottle of olive oil is the only reminiscence many have of Lucca. [Illustration: LUCCA] The decadence came to Lucca in due time and it degenerated sadly, about its last magnificent ray being that shot out when Napoleon gave the city to his sister Eliza Bacciochi, with the title of Princess of Lucca. She was a real benefactress to the country, but with the fall of Napoleon all his satellites were snuffed out, too, and then the benign influences of the Princess Eliza were forgotten and ignored. Southwest from Lucca, with Pisa lying between, is the great port of Leghorn, whence are shipped the marbles of Carrara, the oil of Lucca, the wines of Chianti and the Leghorn hats and braids of all Tuscany. These four things keep Livorno going. Leghorn is as modern as Lucca is antiquated and is the most cosmopolitan of all Italian cities. When Philip III expelled the Moors from Spain Cosmo II, Duke of Livorno, invited two thousand of them to come to his Dukedom. Montesquieu remarked upon this conglomerate population, and approved of it apparently, as he called the founding and populating of the city the master work of the Medici dynasty. CHAPTER VII ON TUSCAN ROADS The valley of the Arno, as the river flows through the heart of Tuscany from its source high in the hills just south of Monte Falterona, is the most romantic region in all Italy. It is the borderland between the south and the north, and, as it was a battle-ground between Guelph and Ghibellines, so too is it the common ground where the blood of the northerner and southerner mingles to-day. As great rivers go, the Arno is neither grand nor magnificent, but, though its proportions are not great, its banks are lined with historic and artistic ruins, from the old fortress at Marina di Pisa to Poppi, the ancient capital of the Casentino, perched so quaintly upon its river-washed rock. Pisa, Leghorn and Lucca are a triumvirate of Tuscan towns which should be viewed and considered collectively. One should not be included in an itinerary without the others, though indeed they have little in common, save the memories of the past. [Illustration: ON A TUSCAN HIGHWAY Blanche McManus 1908] Pisa is another of these dead cities of Europe, like Bruges, Leyden, and Rothenburg. Once ardent and lively in every activity of life, its population now has sunk into a state of lethargy. Industry and commerce, and the men who should busy themselves therewith, are in the background, hidden behind a barrier of bureaucracy. Pisa, a town of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, has a tribunal of nine civil judges, a criminal court presided over by sixty-three more, and a "roll" of more than half a hundred notaries. Then there is a service of Domains, of Registry and of Public Debt; besides an array of functionaries in charge of seminaries, orphan asylums, schools and colleges. All these belong to the state. Pisa, sitting distant and proud on the banks of the Arno, enjoys a softer climate than most of the coast cities or interior towns of central Italy. The Tyrrhenian Sea is but a gulf of the Mediterranean, but just where it bathes the shore about the mouth of the Arno, it has a higher temperature than most northern Mediterranean waters. Pisa is more of a sanitarium than it is a gay watering place however. The city is, in fact, like its celebrated leaning tower, half tottering on the brink of its grave. Commerce and industry are far from active and its streets are half deserted; many of them are literally grass-grown and all the others are paved with great flat clean-swept flags, a delight for the automobilist, whose chief experience of pavements has been in France and Belgium. The entrance to Pisa by road from the north is one of the most pleasing of that of any Italian city. For the last half dozen kilometres the road steadily improves until it becomes one of the best as it circles around that wonderful triumvirate of architectural splendours, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the tottering Torre. The group is one of the scenic surprises of Italy, and the automobilist has decidedly the best opportunity of experiencing the emotions it awakes, for he does not have to come out from town (for the monuments are some ways from the centre) to see it. It is the first impression that the traveller by road gets of Pisa and of its architectural wonders, as he draws suddenly upon it from the slough-like road through which he has literally ploughed his way for many kilometres. And it is an impression he will never forget. All along the banks of the Arno, as it flows through Pisa, are dotted here and there palaces of Renaissance days. One is now a dependence of a hotel; another has been appropriated by the post office; others are turned into banks and offices; but there are still some as well ordered and livable as in their best days. The Palazzo Agostini on the Lung' Arno, its façade ornamented with terra cotta medallions, is now a part of the Hotel Nettuno which, as well as any other of Pisa's hotels, cares for the automobilist in a satisfactory manner. Its garage accommodations are abominably confined, and to get in and out one takes a considerable risk of damaging his mud-guards, otherwise they are satisfactory, though one pays two francs a night for them, which one should not be obliged to do. Here is another point where France is superior to Italy as an automobile touring ground. Pisa and its palaces are a delight from every point of view, though indeed none of the edifices are very grand, or even luxurious. They strike a middle course however, and are indicative of the solid comfort and content in which their original owners must have lived at Pisa in latter Renaissance times. Pisa's Campo Santo is the most famous example of graveyard design and building in all the world. It is calm and dignified, but stupendous and startling in its immensity. From Pisa to Florence by road, following the valley of the Arno, one passes through the typical Tuscan countryside, although the hill-country lies either to one side or the other. It is the accessible route however, and the one usually claimed by the local garage and hotel keepers to be one of the best of Italian roads. It is and it isn't; it all depends upon the time of the year, the fact that the road may recently have been repaired or not, and the state of the weather. We went over it in a rain which had been falling steadily for three days and found it very bad, though unquestionably it would have been much more comfortable going in dry weather. It is the approved route between the two cities however, and unless one is going directly down the coast to Rome, via Grosseto, Pisa is the best place from which to commence the inland détour. Cascina, a dozen kilometres away, was the scene of a sanguinary defeat of the Pisans by the Florentines on the feast of San Vittorio in 1364, and each year the event is celebrated by the inhabitants. It seems singular that a people should seek to perpetuate the memory of a defeat, but perhaps the original inhabitants sympathized with Florence rather than with Pisa. Pontedera is a big country town at the juncture of the Era and the Arno. It has no monuments and no history worth remarking, but is indicative of the prosperity of the country round about. Pontedera has no hotel with garage accommodations, and if you get caught in a thunder storm, as we did, you will have to grin and bear it and plug along. San Miniato de Tedeschi rises on its hill top a few kilometres farther on in an imposing manner. It is the most conspicuous thing in the landscape for a wide radius. Francesco Sforza was born here, and Frederic II made it the seat of the Imperial vicarage. San Miniato is a hill town of the very first rank, and like others of the same class--Fiesole, Colle and Volterra--(though its hill-top site may have nothing to do with this) it had the privilege of conferring nobility on plebeians. The Grand Duke of Tuscany in the nineteenth century accordingly made "an English gentleman of Hebrew extraction"--so history reads--the Marquis of San Miniato. At any rate it was probably as good a title as is usually conferred on any one, and served its soi-disant owner well enough for a crest for his note paper or automobile door. One wonders what the gentleman took for his motto. History does not say. Empoli is a thriving town, engaged principally in killing fowls and sending them to the Florence market, plaiting straw to be made into hats, and covering chianti bottles with the same material. The Ghibellines would have made Empoli their capital in 1260, after their meeting or "parliament" here. It was proposed too, that Florence should be razed. One man only, Farinata degli Uberti, opposed it. "Never," said he, "will I consent that our beloved city, which our enemies have spared, shall be destroyed or insulted by our own hands." The old palace in which the Ghibelline parliament met still stands on the Piazza del Mercato. No automobilist who "happens" on Empoli will ever want to see it again, on account of the indignities which will be heaped on his automobile, though the Albergo Guippone, run by a mother and son in most competent, but astonishing, fashion, is the real thing. The food and cooking are extraordinarily good, and the house itself new and cleanly. You eat at a big round table, with a great long-necked bottle of chianti swung on a balance in the centre. It must hold at least two gallons, and, without the well-sweep arrangement for pouring out its contents, you would go dry. The wine served is as good as the rest of the fare offered. The fault with Empoli's hotel is that there is no garage and the proprietors recommend no one as competent to house your automobile, saying you can take your choice of any one of a half a dozen renters of _stallagio_ near by. They are all bad doubtless; but the one we tried, who permitted us to put the automobile in an uncovered dirty hole with horses, donkeys and pigs, took--yes, took, that's the word--two lire for the service! If you do go to Empoli keep away from this ignorant, unprogressive individual. North of Empoli, on the direct road from Lucca to Florence, are Pistoja and Prato. Pistoja is one of the daintiest of Tuscan cities, but not many of the habitués of Florence know it, at least not as they know Pisa or Siena. Its past is closely intermingled with Florentine and Italian history, and indeed has been most interesting. Practically it is a little mountain city, though lying quite at the base of the Apennines, just before they flatten out into the seashore plain. Its country people, in town for a market-day, are chiefly people of the hills, shepherds and the like, but their speech is Tuscan, the purest speech of Italy, the nearest that is left us to the speech of Boccaccio's day. Pistoja's old walls and ramparts are not the least of its crumbling glories. They are a relic of the Medicis and the arms and crests of this family are still seen carved over several of the entrance gates. One has only to glance upward as he drives his automobile noisily through some mediæval gateway to have memories of the days when cavalcades of lords and ladies passed over the same road on horseback or in state coaches. All is primitive and unworldly at Pistoja, but there is no ruinous decay, though here and there a transformed or rebuilt palace has been turned into some institution or even a workshop. Prato, a near neighbour of Pistoja on the road to Florence, is also a fine relic of an old walled Tuscan town. Aside from this its specialty is churches, which are numerous, curious and beautiful, but except for the opportunity for viewing them the lover of the romantic and picturesque will not want to linger long within the city. Between Empoli and Florence is seen at a distance the Villa Ambrogiana; a transformation by Ferdinand I of an old castle of the Ardinghelli; its towers and pinnacles still well preserved, but the whole forming a hybrid, uncouth structure. Further on at Montelupo there is a castle, now in ruins, built and fortified by the Florentines in 1203. It owes its name, Montelupo, to the adoption of the word _lupo_, wolf, by the Florentines when they sought to destroy a neighbouring clan called the Capraja (_capra_, goat). Signa is reached after crossing the Arno for the first time. The city walls, towers and pinnacles, with their battlements and machicolations, are still as they were when the Florentines caused them to be erected to guard the high road leading to their city. Suburban sights, in the shape of modern villas, market gardens and what not, announce the approach to Florence, which is entered by a broad straight road, the Strada Pisana, running beneath the Porta S. Frediano. Instinctively one asks for the Lung' Arno that he may get his bearings, and then straightway makes for his hotel or pension. [Illustration: FLORENCE and its PALACES] Hotels for the automobilist in Florence are numerous. The Automobile Club de France vouches for the Palace Hotel, where you pay two francs and a half for garage, and for the Grand Hotel de la Ville with no garage. The writer prefers the Hotel Helvetia, or better yet the Hotel Porta Rossa, a genuine Italian _albergo_, patronized only by such strangers as come upon it unawares. It is very good, reasonable in price, and you may put your automobile in the _remissa_, which houses the hotel omnibus, for a franc a night. It is convenient to have your automobile close at hand instead of at the F. I. A. T. garage a mile or more away, and the hotel itself is most central, directly to the rear of the Strozzi Palace. "What sort of city is this Florence?" asked Boniface VIII, amazed at the splendour of the Florentine procession sent to Rome to honour his jubilee. No one was found ready with an answer, but at last a Cardinal timidly remarked, "Your Holiness, the City of Florence is a good city." "Nonsense," replied the Pope, "she is far away the greatest of all cities! She feeds, clothes and governs us all.... She and her people are the fifth element of the universe." One comes to Florence for pictures and palaces, and, for as long or short a time as fancy suggests, the automobile and the chauffeur, if you have one, take a needed repose. Your automobile safely housed, your chauffeur will most likely be found, when wanted, at the Reininghaus on the Piazza Vittorio-Emanuel drinking German beer and reading "Puck" or "Judge" or "Punch" or "Le Rire." This is a café with more foreign papers, one thinks, than any other on earth. [Illustration: TORCH-HOLDERS PALAZZO STROZZI] [Illustration: A LANTERN PALAZZO STROZZI] [Illustration: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence] Down through the heart of Tuscany, and through the Chianti district, runs the highroad from Florence to Rome, via Siena. It is a delightful itinerary, whether made by road or rail, and, whether one's motive is the admiration and contemplation of art or architecture, or the sampling of the chianti, en route, the journey through the Tuscan Apennines will ever remain as a most fragrant memory. It is a lovely country of vineyards and wheatfields, intermingled, and, here and there, clumps of mulberry trees, and always great yoked oxen and _contadini_ working, walking or sleeping. These, indeed, are the general characteristics of all the countryside of central Italy, but here they are superlatively idyllic. The simple life must be very nearly at its best here, for the almost unalterable fare of bread and cheese and wine, which the peasants, by the roadside, seem always to be munching and drinking, is not conducive to grossness of thought or action. From Florence to Rome there are three principal roads favoured by automobilists: that via Siena and Grosseto, 332 kilometres; via Siena, Orvieto and Viterbo, 325 kilometres; and via Arezzo, Perugia and Terni, 308 kilometres. They are all equally interesting, but the latter two are hilly throughout and the former, in rainy weather, is apt to be bad as to surface. The towers of Tuscany might well be made the interesting subject of an entire book. Some of them, existing to-day, date from the Etruscans, many centuries before Christ, and Dionysius wrote that the Etruscans were called Tyrrhene or Turreno because they inhabited towers, or strong places--_Typeie_. In the twelfth century, local laws, throughout Tuscany, reduced all towers to a height of fifty _braccia_. Pisa, Siena and Florence in the past had several hundred towers, but Volterra and San Gimignano in the Val d'Elsa are the only remarkable collections still grouped after the original manner. "San Gimignano delle belle Torri" is a classic phrase and has inspired many chapters in books and many magazine articles. [Illustration: _San Gimignano_] Massimo d'Azeglio, whose opinions most people who write books on Italy exploit as their own, said, with reason, that San Gimignano was as extraordinary a relic of the past as Pompeii. Of all the fifty odd towers of the city, none is more imposing than that of the Palazzo Publico, rising up above the very apartment, where, in the thirteenth century, Dante was received when he was sent from Florence to parley with the Guelphs of San Gimignano. San Gimignano's Palazzo del Commune dates from 1298, but its tower was an afterthought, built a century later. This tower of the Palazzo del Commune is, perhaps, the best preserved of all the "belle torri" of the city. [Illustration: VOLTERRA] San Gimignano and Volterra are much alike, though the latter's strong point lies more in its fortification walls. Volterra and its Etruscan lore and pottery have ever been a source of pride among Italian antiquarians. The Etruscans of old must have been passionately fond of pottery, for, so plentifully were the environs of Volterra strewn with broken pitchers, that one suspects that each square yard must have contained a well. Some one called the Etruscans lunatics, who were shut up in Volterra and allowed to pursue their craze for pottery in peace; but they were harmless lunatics, who devoted themselves to the arts of peace, rather than those of war. The alabaster bric-à-brac trade and traffic still exists, and provides a livelihood for a large part of the population of the city; but thousands of Tuscans, many of them from Volterra, doubtless, have deserted their former arts for the pleasure of dragging a hand organ from street to street, in London and New York, and gathering soldi by ministering to the pleasures of the populace. It is easy for the superior person to sneer at the hand organ, as he sneers, by the way, at the phonograph and the pianola, but dull alleys and mean streets are brightened by the music of the itinerant Italian. "It is a vision of the moyen-age," wrote Paul Bourget when he first saw Volterra's Etruscan walls. High up on its rocky plateau sits Volterra, protected by its walls and gorges and ravines, in almost impregnable fashion. With this incentive no automobilist north or southbound should omit San Gimignano or Volterra from his itinerary. They are but a few kilometres off the main road, from Poggibonzi via Val d'Elsa between Siena and Florence. On a height overlooking Volterra, just over the Romitorio, and almost within sight of San Gimignano's towers, Campanello, the celebrated brigand, was captured, a quarter of a century ago. He had quartered himself upon an unsuspecting, though unwilling, peasant, as was the fashion with brigands of the time, and, through a "faux pas," offended a youth who was in love with one of his host's daughters. This was his undoing. The youth informed the local authorities; and Campanello led away himself by the blind passion of love, fell precipitately into the trap which the injured youth had helped to set. Thus ended another brigand's tale, which in these days are growing fewer and fewer. One has to go to Corsica or Sardinia to experience the sensation of being held up, or to the Paris boulevards where _apaches_ still reign, or to the east end of London. Going south from Florence by this road the automobilist has simply to ask his way via the "Strada per Siena;" after Siena it is the "Strada per Roma;" and so on from one great town to another. In finding one's way out of town the plan is simple, easily remembered and efficient; there are no false and confusing directions such as one frequently gets in France. You are either on the Via This or That which ultimately leads to the Strada of the same name, or you are not. Start right and you can't miss the road in Italy. Among all the secondary cities of Italy, none equals Siena in romantic appeal. Its site is most picturesque, its climate is salubrious, and it has an entirely mediæval stamp so far as the arrangement of its palaces is concerned. Siena possesses something unique in church architecture, as might be expected of a city which once contained sixty places of worship, a special patois, and women of surpassing beauty. More than by anything else, Siena is brought to mind by the recollection of that Saint Catherine, who, according to Pope Pius II, made all who approached her better for her presence. The railway and its appurtenances, automobiles and their belongings, the electric light and the telegraph, are almost the only signs of modernity in Siena to-day. The rest is of the middle ages, and the chief characters who stand out to-day are not the political personages of our time; but Bianca Capello and Marie de Medici and Charles V, who of all other aliens is best remembered of Siena, because of the Holbein reproduction of his face and figure which he presented to its citizens. CHAPTER VIII FLORENTINE BACKGROUNDS The hills and valleys around Florence offer delightful promenades by road to the automobilist as well as to those who have not the means at hand of going so far afield. A commercial enterprise is exploiting them by means of a great _char-a-banc_, or "sightseeing" automobile, which detracts from the sentiments and emotions which might otherwise be evoked, and at the same time annoys the driver of a private automobile, for the reason that this public conveyance often crowds him on a narrow road and prevents his passing. However, this is better than being obstructed, as in former days, by a string of forty lazy cabs and their drivers. The round to Fiesole, San Miniato, Vallombrosa, and on through the Casentino of romantic memory is delightful and may be made in a day or a week, as one's fancy dictates. The new road from Florence to Fiesole, that is the road made in the mid-nineteenth century, was not a piece of jobbery or graft, but was paid for by patents of nobility given by the municipality of Fiesole to those who furnished the means. This was in the days when a Grand Duke ruled Tuscany and monarchical institutions found favour. Fiesole had its Libro d'Oro, and inscribed thereon as noble any individual who would pay the required price. From fifteen hundred lire upward was the price for which marquises, counts and barons were created in Florence's patrician suburb. Coming out from Florence by another gateway, through the Porta San Gallo, runs the Fiesole highway. A landmark, which can be readily pointed out by anyone, is the villa once possessed by Walter Savage Landor and inhabited by him for nearly thirty years. Here the famous men of letters of the middle years of the last century visited him. Here he revelled amid memories of Boccaccio and wrote the Pentameron. There is talk of buying the place and consecrating it to his memory. All the way from Florence to Fiesole the roads are lined with typical Florentine villas and country houses. The Villa at Poggio Cajano was built by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who employed Giuliano da San Gallo as his architect. In 1587 Francesco I died within its walls, and the profligate Bianca Capello, whose history had best stay buried, also died here on the following day. Their brother Ferdinand was responsible for their taking off, as they had already prepared to put him out of the way by the administration of a dose of poison. He stood over them, with dagger drawn, and made them eat their own poisoned viands. The Villa Petraja was a strong-hold of the Brunelleschi family which defended itself ably against the Pisans and the marauders of Sir John Hawkwood in 1364, when that rollicking rascal sold his services to the enemies of Florence. The old tower of the castle, as it then was, still remains, but the major portion of the present structure dates from quite modern times. The Villa Medici in Careggi was built by Cosimo Pater from the designs of Michelozzi, and though no longer royal it is to-day practically unchanged in general outline. It, too, was one of the favourite residences of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the conclaves of the famous Platonic Academy were held here on the seventh of November, the anniversary of the date of the birth and death of Plato. Here died both Cosimo and Lorenzo, the latter on the eighth of April, 1492, just after his celebrated interview with Savonarola. The Orsi family came into possession of the villa later on, then "an English gentleman" and then a certain Signor Segré. Between Careggi and Fiesole, and on towards Vallombrosa, the villas and palatial country houses of the Florentines are scattered as thickly as the leaves of the famous vale itself. The Villa Salviati is a fine sixteenth century work with a blood-red memory of the middle ages, at one time the property of the singer Mario, remembered by a former generation. The Villa Rinuccini has its grounds laid out in the style of an English formal garden, and the Villa Guadagni was once the home of the historian, Bartolommeo della Scala. Of all the Florentine suburban villas none has a tithe of the popular romantic interest possessed by the Villa Palmieri. The Villa Palmieri is best seen from its approach by the highroad, up hill, from Florence. At the right of the iron gate, the _cancello_, runs the old road to Fiesole. Upward still the road runs, through the _cancello_, through a wind-break of trees and around to the north façade by which one enters. The entire south side of the house is in the form of a loggia, with a great wide terrace in front, below which is the sloping garden with its palm trees and azaleas. [Illustration: VILLA PALMIERI] The Villa Palmieri and its gardens are somewhat the worse for stress of time; and the wind and the hot sun have burned up the shrubs and trees since the days when Zocchi the draughtsman made that series of formal drawings of Italian gardens, that of the Villa Palmieri among the number, which are so useful to the compilers of books on Italian villas and gardens. Fiesole sits proudly on its height a thousand feet above the level of the sea. The following anonymous lines--"newspaper verse" they may be contemptuously described by some--make as admirable a pen picture of the little town as it were possible to reproduce. "A little town on a far off hill-- (Fiesole, Fiesole!) Mossy walls that defy Time's will, Olive groves in the sun a-thrill Thickets of roses where thrushes trill Winds that quiver and then are still-- Fiesole, Fiesole!" Fiesole forms an irregular ground plan, rising and falling on the unequal ground upon which it is built. The long and almost unbroken line of Cyclopean walls towards the north is the portion which has suffered least from time or violence. The huge stones of which the Etruscan wall is composed are somewhat irregular in shape and unequal in size, seldom assuming a polygonal form. This Cyclopean construction varies with the geological nature of the rock employed. In all the Etruscan and Pelasgic towns it is found that, when sandstone was used, the form of the stones has been that of the parallelopipedon or nearly so, as at Fiesole and Cortona; whereas, when limestone was the subjacent rock, the polygonal construction alone is found, as at Cosa and Segni. This same observation will be found to apply to every part of the world, and in a marked degree to the Cyclopean constructions of Greece and Asia Minor, and even to the far-distant edifices raised by the Peruvian Incas. Sometimes the pieces of rock are dovetailed into each other; others stand joint above joint; but, however placed, the face, or outward front, is perfectly smooth. No projection, or work advancing beyond the line of the wall, appears in the remains of the original structure. [Illustration: FIESOLE] Fiesole is a built-up fabric in all its parts; its foundation is architecture, and its churches, palaces and villas are mere protuberances extending out from a concrete whole. Fiesole is one of the most remarkably built towns above ground. Fiesole's great charm lies in its surrounding and ingredient elements; in the palaces and villas of the hilltops always in plain view, and in its massive construction of walls, rather than in its specific monuments, though indeed its Duomo possesses a crudity and rudeness of constructive and decorative elements which marks it as a distinct, if barbarous, Romanesque style. The views from Fiesole's height are peculiarly fine. On the north is the valley of the Mugello, and just below is the Villa of Scipione Ammirato, the Florentine historian. Towards the south, the view commands the central Val d'Arno, from its eastern extremity to the gorge of the Gonfolina, by which it communicates with the Val d'Arno di Sotto, with Florence as the main object in the rich landscape below. The following is a mediæval point of view as conceived by a Renaissance historian. He wrote it of Lorenzo the Magnificent, but the emotions it describes may as well become the possession of plebeian travellers of to-day. "Lorenzo ever retained a predilection for his country house just below Fiesole, and the terrace still remains which was his favourite walk. Pleasant gardens and walks bordered by cypresses add to the beauty of the spot, from which a splendid view of Florence encircled by its amphitheatre of mountains is obtained." "In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence, on the steep slopes of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment." This is the twentieth century, but those of mood and mind may experience the same as did Lorenzo di Medici four hundred years ago. The hills and vales, the Arno and the City of the Lily, with its domes and towers, have little changed during the many passing years. Out from Florence by the Porta alla Croce runs the road to Vallombrosa, which may be reached also from Fiesole without entering Florence by taking the road leading over the Ponte a Mensola. Just beyond Pontassieve, some twenty kilometres distant, the road to Vallombrosa leaves the Arezzo highway and plunges boldly into the heart of the Apennines. Of Vallombrosa Lamartine said: "Abbey monumental, the Grande Chartreuse of Italy built on the summit of the Apennines behind a rocky rampart, protected by precipices at every turn, by torrents of rushing water and by dark, dank forests of fir-pines." The description is good to-day, and, while the ways of access are many, including even a _funiculaire_ from Pontassieve to Vallombrosa, to approach the sainted pile in the true and reverend spirit of the pilgrim one should make his way by the winding mountain road--even if he has to walk. Indeed, walking is the way to do it; the horses hereabouts are more inert than vigorous; they mislead one; they start out bravely, but, if they don't fall by the wayside, they come home limping. But for the fact that the road uphill to Vallombrosa is none too good as to surface and the turns are many and sharp, it is accessible enough by automobile. Various granges, hermitages and convent walls are passed en route. At Sant'Ellero was a Benedictine nunnery belonging to the monks of Vallombrosa in the thirteenth century, and in its donjon tower--a queer adjunct for a nunnery by the way--a band of fleeing Ghibellines were besieged by a horde of Guelphs in 1267. Domini and Saltino mark various stages in the ascent from the valley. Up to this latter point indeed one may come by the _funiculaire_, but that is not the true pilgrim way. Up to within a couple of kilometres of the summit chestnuts, oaks, and beech are seen, justifying Milton's simile, the accuracy of which has been called in question on the ground that the forest consisted entirely of fir. "Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades, High overarch'd, embower." Four miles beyond Paterno, after passing through a fine forest of pines, the traveller arrives at the Santuario of Vallombrosa: "Cosi fu nominata una badia, Ricca e bella ne men religiosa E cortese a chiunque vi venia." --_Orl. Fur. can. 22, st. 36._ Among the remarkable men who have been monks of Vallombrosa, was Guido Aretino, who was a member of this house when he first became known as a writer upon music (about A. D. 1020). After having visited Rome twice, upon the invitation of two succeeding popes, he was prevailed upon by the abbot of a monastery at Ferrara to settle there. Some writers have ascribed to this Guido the invention of counterpoint, which is scarcely less absurd than ascribing the invention of a language to any individual. However, it is pretty certain that he was the first person to use, or to recommend the use of "lines" and "spaces" for musical notation. High above the convent of Vallombrosa itself rises Il Paradisino (1,036 metres) with a small hermitage, while Monte Secchieta is higher still, 1,447 metres. Vallombrosa, its convent and its hermitages are in the midst of solitude, as indeed a retreat, pious or otherwise, should be. If only some of us who are more worldly than a monk would go into a retreat occasionally and commune with solitude awhile, what a clarifying of ideas one would experience! Back of Vallombrosa and the Paradisino the upper valley of the Arno circles around through Arezzo, Bibbiena and Poppi and rises just under the brow of Monte Falterona which, in its very uppermost reaches, forms a part of the Casentino. From Pontassieve where one branches off for Vallombrosa one may descend on Arezzo either by Poppi-Bibbiena or Montevarchi, say seventy kilometres either way. The Casentino and the Valley of the Arno form one of the most romantically unspoiled tracts in Italy, although modern civilization is crowding in on all sides. The memories of Saint Francis, La Verna, Saint Romuald the Camaldoli and Dante and the great array of Renaissance splendours of its towns and villages, will live for ever. Here took place some of the severest conflicts in the civil wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and in numerous ruins of castles and hill-forts are retained memorials of the many struggles. Just where the Arno traverses the plain of Campaldino was the scene of a celebrated battle on the 11th of June, 1289. The Aretines, who formed the chief portion of the Ghibelline party, were routed with a loss of 1,700 men killed, and 2,000 taken prisoners. Among the former was the celebrated Guglielmino Ubertini, Bishop of Arezzo, who fell fighting desperately in the thickest of the fray, having rallied his troops upon the bridge at Poppi, half a mile further on. Dante was present at this battle, being then twenty-four years old, and serving in the Guelph cavalry. The Casentino is the most opulent district in all the region of the Apennines. Six centuries ago the Counts Palatine of Tuscany held it; then came the Popes, and then Dante and his followers. The chronicles of the Casentino are most fascinating reading, particularly those concerned with the Counts of Guidi. Guidoguerra IV, Count Palatine of Tuscany in the early thirteenth century, was a sort of Robin Hood, except that he was not an outlaw. He made a road near the home of the monks of Camaldoli, and intruded armed men into their solitude, "and worse still, play actors and women," where all women had been forbidden: moreover, he had all the oxen of the monks driven off. He played pranks on the minstrels and buffoons who came to his palace. One minstrel, named Malanotte, he compelled to spend a bad night on the rooftop in the snow; another, Maldecorpo, had to lie and sizzle between two fires; while a third, Abbas, he tonsured by pulling out his hair. Literally translated Casentino means "the valley enclosed." It is a most romantic region, and the praises of its mountain walls and chestnut woods have been sung by all sojourners there, ever since Dante set the fashion. The life of the peasant of the Casentino to-day is much the same as in Dante's time, and his pleasures and sorrows are expressed in much the same manner as of old. Strange folksongs and dances, strange dramas of courtship, and strange religious ceremonies all find place here in this unspoiled little forest tract between Florence and Arezzo; along whose silent paths one may wander for hours and come across no one but a few contented charcoal-burners who know nothing beyond their own woods. On the lower levels, the highway leading from Florence to Perugia and Foligno rolls along, as silent as it was in mediæval times. It is by no means a dull monotonous road, though containing fewer historic places than the road by Siena or Viterbo. It is an alternative route from north to south; and the most direct one into the heart of Umbria. On arriving from Florence by the highroad one passes through the long main street of Montevarchi, threading his way carefully to avoid, if possible, the dogs and ducks which run riot everywhere. A great fertile plain stretches out on each side of the Arno, the railway sounding the only modern note to be heard, save the honk! honk! (the French say _coin_, _coin_, which is better) of an occasional passing automobile. Up and down the hills ox teams plough furrows as straight as on the level, and the general view is pastoral until one strikes the forests neighbouring upon Arezzo, eighty kilometres from Florence. Here all is savage and primeval. Here was many a brigand's haunt in the old days, but the Government has wiped out the roving banditti; and to-day the greatest discomfort which would result from a hold-up would be a demand for a cigar, or a box of matches. At Palazzaccio, a mere hamlet en route, was the hiding place of the once notorious brigand Spadolino; a sort of stage hero, who affected to rob the rich for the benefit of the poor--a kind of socialism which was never successful. Robin Hood tried it, so did Macaire, Gaspard de Besse and Robert le Diable and they all came to timely capture. Spadolino one day stopped a carriage near Palazzaccio, cut the throats of its occupants and gave their gold to a poor miller, Giacomo by name, who wanted ninety _francesconi_ to pay his rent. This was the last cunning trick of Spadolino, for he was soon captured and hung at the Porta Santa Croce at Florence, as a warning to his kind. Not every hurried traveller who flies by express train from Florence to Rome puts foot to earth and makes acquaintance with Arezzo. The automobilist does better, he stops here, for one reason or another, and he sees things and learns things hitherto unknown to him. Arezzo should not be omitted from the itinerary of any pilgrim to Italy. It was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation, and made peace with Rome in 310 A. D. and for ever remained its ally. The Flaminian Way, built by the Consul Flaminius in 187 B. C., between Aretium (Arezzo) and Bononia (Bologna), is still traceable in the neighbourhood. Petrarch is Arezzo's deity, and his birthplace is to be found to-day on the Via del Orto. On the occasion of the great fête given in 1904 in honour of the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, the municipality made this place a historic monument. Vasari, who as a biographer has been very useful to makers of books on art, was also born at Arezzo in 1512. His house is a landmark. Local guides miscall it a palace, but in reality it is a very humble edifice; not at all palatial. The Palazzo Pretoria at Arezzo has one of the most bizarre façades extant, albeit its decorative and cypher panels add no great architectural beauty. Arezzo's cathedral is about the saddest, ugliest religious edifice in Italy. Within is the tomb of Pope Gregory X. Poppi and Bibbiena are the two chief towns of the upper valley. Each is blissfully unaware of the world that has gone before, and has little in common with the life of to-day, save such intimacy as is brought by the railroad train, as it screeches along in the valley between them half a dozen times a day. Poppi sits on a high table rock, its feet washed by the flowing Arno. The town itself is dead or sleeping; but most of its houses are frankly modern, in that they are well kept and freshly painted or whitewashed. The only old building in Poppi, not in ruins, is its castle, occupying the highest part of the rock; a place of some strength before the use of heavy guns. It was built by Lapo in 1230, and bears a family resemblance to the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The court-yard contains some curious architecture, and a staircase celebrated for the skill shown in its construction. It resembles that in the Bargello at Florence, and leads to a chapel containing frescoes which, according to Vasari, are by Spinello Aretino. Poppi is a good point from which to explore the western slopes of Vallombrosa or Monte Secchieta. The landlord and the local guides will lead one up through the celebrated groves at a fixed price "tutto compreso," and, if you are liberal with your tip, will open a bottle of "vino santo" for you. Could hospitality and fair dealing go further? Bibbiena, the native town of Francesco Berni, and of the Cardinal Bibbiena, who was the patron of Raphael, has many of the characteristics of Poppi, in point of site and surroundings. It is the point of departure for the convent of La Verna, built by St. Francis of Assisi in 1215; situated high on a shoulder of rugged rock. The highest point of the mountain, on which it stands, is called La Penna, the "rock" or "divide" between the valleys of the Arno and the Tiber. To the eastward are seen Umbria and the mountains of Perugia; on the west, the valley of the Casentino and the chain of the Prato Magno; to the northward is the source of the Arno, and to the northeast, that of the Tiber. To the east, just where the Casentino, by means of the cross road connecting with the Via Æmilia, held its line of communication with the Adriatic, is the Romagna, a district where feudal strife and warfare were rampant throughout the middle ages. From its story it would seem as though the region never had a tranquil moment. The chain of little towns of the Romagna is full of souvenirs of the days when seigneuries were carved out of pontifical lands by the sword of some rebel who flaunted the temporal power of the church. These were strictly personal properties, and their owners owed territorial allegiance to the Pope no more than they did to the descendants of the Emperors. Rex Romanorum as a doctrine was dead for ever. Guelph and Ghibelline held these little seigneuries, turn by turn, and from the Adriatic to the Gulf of Spezia there was almost constant warfare, sometimes petty, sometimes great. It was warfare, too, between families, between people of the same race, the most bloody, disastrous and sad of all warfare. CHAPTER IX THE ROAD TO ROME Siena, crowning its precipitous hillside, stands, to-day, unchanged from what it was in the days of the Triumvirate. Church tower and castle wall jut out into a vague mystery of silhouetted outline, whether viewed by daylight or moonlight. The great gates of the ramparts still guard the approach on all sides, and the Porta Camollia of to-day is the same through which the sons of Remus entered when fleeing from their scheming Uncle, Romulus. Siena's Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is a landmark. Dante called it "a great square where men live gloriously free," though then it was simply _the_ Piazza; and the picture is true to-day, in a different sense. In former days it was a bloody "mis-en-scène" for intrigue and jealousy; but, to-day, simply the centre of the life and movement of a prosperous, thriving, though less romantic city of thirty thousand souls. [Illustration: _Palazzo della Signoria, Siena_] This great Piazza is rounded off by a halo of magnificent feudal palaces, whose very names are romantic. All about Siena's squares and street corners are innumerable gurgling, spouting fountains, many of them artistically and monumentally beautiful, and a few even dating from the glorious days of old. Dante sang of Siena's famous fountains which, in truth, form a galaxy of artistic accessories of life hardly to be equalled in any other city of Siena's class. Leaving that "noble extravagance in marble," Siena's Cathedral, and its churches quite apart, the city ranks as one of the most interesting tourist points of Italy. Siena has still left a relic of mediævalism in the revival of its ancient horse racing festa, when its great Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is built up and barricaded like a circus of Roman times. Chariot races, gladiatorial combats and bull fights, all had their partisans among municipalities, but Siena's choice was horse racing. And each year, "Il Palio," on July the 2nd and on August the 16th, becomes a great popular amusement of the Sienese. It is most interesting, and still picturesquely mediæval in costuming and setting; and is a civic function and fête a great deal more artistically done--as goes without saying--than the Guy Fawkes celebrations of London, or the fourth of July "horribles" in America. For the thoroughly genuine and artistic pageant Anglo Saxons have to go to Italy. There is nothing to be learned from the Mardi-Gras celebrations of Paris nor the carnivals of the Cote d'Azur. Some one has said that Siena sits on the border land between idyllic Tuscany and the great central Italian plain. Literally this is so. It marks the distinction between the grave and the gay so far as manners and customs and conditions of life go. On the north are the charming, smiling hills and vales, bright with villas, groves and vines; whilst to the south, towards Rome and the Campagna, all is of an austerity of present day fact and past tradition. Indeed, the landscape would be stern and repellent, were it not picturesquely savage. Straight runs the highroad to Rome via Viterbo, or makes a détour via Montepulciano and Orvieto. At Asinalunga, Garibaldi was arrested by government spies, by the order of the monarch to whom he had presented the sovereignty of Naples. Such is official ingratitude, ofttimes! The town itself is unworthy of remark, save for that incident of history. By the direct road the mountains of Orvieto and Montepulciano rise grimly to the left. The towns bearing the same names are charming enough from the artistic point of view, but are not usually reckoned tourist sights. Montepulciano is commonly thought of slight interest, but it is the very ideal of an unspoiled mediæval town, with a half dozen palazzo façades, which might make the name and fame of some modern scene painter if he would copy them. Chiusi, on the direct road, lies embedded in a circle of hills and surrounded by orange groves. It is nothing more nor less than a glorified graveyard, but is unique in its class. Lars Porsena of Clusium comes down to us as a memory of school-time days, and for that reason, if no other, we consider it our duty to visit the Etruscan tombs of Clusium, the modern Chiusi. There are three distinct tiers, or shelves, of these ancient tombs, and interesting enough they are to all, but only the antiquary will have any real passion for them, so most of us are glad enough to spin our way by road another fifty odd kilometres to Orvieto. Four kilometres of a precipitous hill climb leads from the lower road up into Orvieto, zig-zagging all the way. It is the same bit of roadway up which the Popes fled in the middle ages when hard pressed by their enemies. Clement VII, one of the unhappy Medici, fled here after the sinning Connétable Bourbon attempted the sacking of Rome; and a sheltering stronghold he found it. This Papal city of refuge is, to-day, a more or less squalid place, with here and there a note of something more splendid. On the whole Orvieto's charm is not so much in the grandeur of its monuments as in their character. The cathedral is reckoned one of the great Gothic shrines of Italy, and that, indeed, is the chief reason for most of the tourist travel. The few mediæval palaces that Orvieto possesses are very splendid, though they, one and all, suffer from their cramped surroundings. [Illustration: _Orvieto_] The Hotel Belle Arti, to-day, with a garage for automobiles, was the ancient Palazzo Bisenzi. It had a reputation among travellers, of a decade or a generation ago, of being a broken-down palace and a worse hotel. If one wants to dwell in marble halls and sleep where royal heads have slept, one can do all this, at Orvieto, for eight or nine lire a day. One enters Viterbo, forty-seven kilometres from Orvieto, by the highroad to Rome. The little town preserves much of its mediæval characteristics to-day, though, indeed, it is a progressive, busy place, of something like twenty thousand souls, most of whom, appear to be engaged in the wine industry. On the Piazza Fontana is a magnificent Gothic fountain dating from the thirteenth century, and the Municipio, on the Piazza del Plebiscito, is of a contemporary period, with a fine fountained court-yard. In the environs of Viterbo is a splendid palace, built by Vignola for the Cardinal Farnese, nephew of the Pope Paul III. In form it was a great square mass with its angles reinforced by square towers, with a circular court within, surrounded by an arcade by which one entered the various apartments. It was, perhaps, the most originally conceived work of its particular epoch of Renaissance times; and all the master minds and hands of the builders of the day seem to have had more or less to do with it. These Italians of the Renaissance were inventors of nothing; but their daring and ingenuity in combining ideas taken, bodily, from those of antiquity, made more successful and happy combinations than those of the architects of to-day, who build theatres after the models of Venetian palaces, and add a Moorish minaret; or railway stations on the plan of the Parthenon, and put a campanile in the middle, like the chimney of a blast furnace. The Italian campanile was a bell-tower, to be sure, but it had nothing in common with the minaret of the east, nor the church spire of the Gothic builder in northern climes. From Siena the coast road to Rome, practically the same distance as the inland route, is one of surprising contrast. It approaches the coast at Grosseto, seventy kilometres from Siena, and thence, all the way to Rome, skirts the lapping waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Off shore is Elba, with its Napoleonic memories, and the Island of Monte Cristo which is considered usually a myth, but which exists in the real to-day, as it did when Dumas romanced (sic) about it. A long pull of a hundred kilometres over a flat country, half land, half water, brings one to Civita-Vecchia, eighty kilometres from the Eternal City itself. Civita-Vecchia is a watering-place without historical interest, where the Romans come to make a seaside holiday. Hotels of all ranks are here, and garage accommodations as well. The Italian mail boats for Sardinia leave daily, if one is inclined to make a side trip to that land of brigandage and the evil-eye, which are reputed a little worse than the Corsican or Sicilian varieties. One enters the heart of Rome by the Porta Cavalleggeri and crosses the Ponte S. Angelo to get his bearings. The hotels of Rome are like those of Florence. One must hunt his abiding place out for himself, according to his likes and dislikes. The Grand-Hotel and the Hotel de la Minerve are vouched for by the Touring Club, and the former has garage accommodation. At either of these modern establishments you get the fare of Paris, Vienna, London and New York, and very little that is Italian. You may even bathe in porcelain tubs installed by a London plumber and drink cocktails mixed by an expert from Broadway. This makes one long for the days when a former generation ate in a famous eating house which stood at the southeast corner of the Square Saint Eustace. It was the resort of artists and men of letters and the _plats_ that it served were famous the world over. The Romans' pride in Rome is as conventional as it is ancient. They promptly took sides when the "Italians" entered their beloved city in 1870. The priests, the higher prelates, and the papal nobility were "for the Pope," but the great middle class, the common people, were for the "Italians." Traditions die hard in Rome, and many an old resident will tell tales to-day of the blessings of a Papal Government, which formerly forbade the discussion of religion or politics in public places, and "contaminating" books and newspapers were stopped at the _frontier_. Even a non-smoker was considered a protestor against the Papacy, because to smoke was to be a supporter of the Papal Government's revenue from the tobacco trade. [Illustration: BARBERINI COLONNA ORSINI BORGIA MEDICIS ARMS OF VARIOUS PAPAL FAMILIES CONTI PAMFILI ALDOBRANDINI FARNESE] Rome without the _forestieri_, or strangers, would lose considerable of its present day prosperity. Rome exploits strangers; there is no doubt about that; that is almost its sole industry. As Henri Taine said: "Rome is nothing but a shop which sells bric-à-brac." He might have added: "with a branch establishment which furnishes food and lodging." The Roman population, as Roman, is now entirely absorbed by "the Italian." No more are the _contadini_, the peasants of the Campagna, or the bearded mountaineers of the Sabine hills, different from their brothers of Tuscany or Lombardy; their physiognomies have become the same. The monks and seminarists and priests and prelates are still there, but only by sufferance, like ourselves. They are no more Romans than are we. Tourists in knickerbockers, awe-struck before the art treasures of the Vatican, and cassocked priests on pilgrimage are everywhere in the city of the Cæsars and the Popes. The venerable Bede was half right only in his prophecy. "While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls--the world!" Rome is still there, and many of its monuments, fragmentary though they be. The difference in the grade (ground level) of modern Rome, as compared with that of antiquity, a difference of from sixty to seventy feet, may still be expected to give up finds to the industrious pick and shovel properly and intelligently handled. The archæological stratum is estimated as nine miles square. Rome is a much worked-over field, but the desecrations of the middle ages were hardly less disastrous to its "antiquities" than the new municipality's transformations. Some day the seven hills will be levelled, and boulevards and public gardens laid out and trees planted in the Forum; then where will be the Rome of the Cæsars? "Rome, Unhappy City!" some one has said, and truly; not for its past, but for its present. Whatever the fascination of Rome may be it is not born of first impressions; the new quarters are painfully new and the streets are unpicturesque and the Tiber is dirty, muddy and ill-smelling. Byron in his day thought differently, for he sang: "the most living crystal that was e'er." Should he come back again he would sing another song. These elements find their proper places in the city's ensemble after a time, but at first they are a disappointment. [Illustration: _Castle of Sant'Angelo, Rome_] Next to Saint Peter's, the Vatican and the Colosseum, the Castle of Sant'Angelo is Rome's most popular monument. It has been a fortress for a thousand years. For a thousand years a guard has been posted at its gateway. [Illustration: PALAZZO VATICANO] The ruin of men which has passed within its walls is too lengthy a chronicle to recount here. Lorenzo Colonna, of all others, shed his blood most nobly. Because he would not say "Long live the Orsini," he was led to the block, a new block ready made for this special purpose, and having delivered himself in Latin of the words: "Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit," gave up his life in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, "on the last day of June when the people of Rome were celebrating the festivity of the decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle." This was four centuries and more ago, but the circling walls and the dull, damp corridors of the Castel Sant'Angelo still echo the terror and suffering which formerly went on within them. It is the very epitome of the character of the structure. Its architecture and its history are in grim accord. Within the great round tower of Sant'Angelo was imprisoned the unnatural Catherine Sforza while the Borgias were besieging her city. The Castel of Sant'Angelo and the bridge of the same name are so called in honour of an Angel who descended before Saint Gregory the Great and saved Rome from a pest which threatened to decimate it. Close to the bridge of Sant'Angelo, just opposite Nona's Tower, once stood the "Lion Inn," kept by the lovely Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Cæsar, Gandia and Lucrezia Borgia. She was an inn-keeper of repute, according to history, and her career was most momentus. The automobilist wonders if this inn were not a purveyor of good cheer as satisfactory as the great establishments with French, English and German names which cater for tourists to-day. [Illustration: _The Borgia Window, Rome_] The Villa Medici just within the walls, and the Villa Borghese just without, form a group which tourists usually _do_ as a morning's sight seeing. They do too much! Anyway one doesn't need to take his automobile from its garage for the excursion, so these classic villas are only mentioned here. [Illustration: Papal Arms of Caesar Borgia] To describe and illustrate the Villa Medici one must have the magic pen of a Virgil and the palette of a Poussin and a Claude Lorrain. In antiquity the site was known as the Collis Hortorum, the Hillside of Gardens. Lucullus, Prince of Voluptuousness, and Messaline, the Empress of debauch, there celebrated their fêtes of luxury and passion, and it became in time even a picnic ground for holiday making Romans. [Illustration: Arms of a Medicis Prelate] The Villa Medici was originally built for Cardinal Ricci in 1540, but by the end of the century had come into the hands of Cardinal Alessandro di Medici. The Tuscan Grand Dukes owned it a century or so later on, and it was finally sold to the French to house the academy of arts founded at Rome by Louis XV. [Illustration: _Villa Medici, Rome_] It is useless for a modern writer to attempt to describe the quiet charm of the surroundings of the Villa Borghese, the nearest of the great country houses to the centre of Rome. Many have tried to do so, but few have succeeded. Better far that one should point the way thither, make a personal observation or two and then onward to Tivoli, Albano or Frascati. One word on the Forum ere leaving. Not even the most restless automobilist neglects a stroll about the Forum, no matter how often he may have been here before, though its palaces of antiquity have little more than their outline foundations to tell their story to-day. Commendatore Boni, who has charge of the excavations, brought to light recently a curiously inscribed stone tablet, which, owing to the archaic Latin it contained, he found it impossible to read. A number of learned Latinists and archæologists soon gathered about him. This is what they read: QUE STAELA VI A DEGLIA SINI While some declared that "_que_" was an enclitic conjunction, and that therefore the inscription must be incomplete, others asserted that the word was an abbreviation of "_queo_," and that the inscription might be read: "I am able to gaze upon the star without pain." While the dispute was on, a peasant of the Campagna passed by. He approached and asked the reason of the crowd. He was told, and gazing at the inscription for several minutes he read slowly: "Questa e la via degli asini" ("This is the way of asses."). And the Latinists, the archæologists, and the other savants crept quietly away, while the Commendatore in good, modern Tuscan made some remarks unprintable and untranslatable. CHAPTER X THE CAMPAGNA AND BEYOND The environs of Rome--those parts not given over to fox-hunting and horse-racing, importations which have been absorbed by the latter day Roman from the _forestieri_--still retain most of their characteristics of historic times. The Campagna is still the Campagna; the Alban Hills are still classic ground, and Tivoli and Frascati--in spite of the modernisms which have, here and there, crept in--are still the romantic Tivoli and Frascati of the ages long gone by. The surrounding hills of Rome are, really, what give it its charm. The city is strong in contrast from every aspect, modernity nudging and crowding antiquity. Rome itself is not lovely, only superbly and majestically overpowering in its complexity. The Rome of romantic times went as far afield as Otricoli, Ostia, Tivoli and Albano, and, on the east, these outposts were further encircled by a girdle of villas, gardens and vineyards too numerous to plot on any map that was ever made. Such is the charm of Rome; not its ruined temples, fountains and statues alone; nor yet its great churches and palaces, and above all not the view of the Colosseum lit up by coloured fires, but Rome the city and the Campagna. There is no question that the Roman Campagna is a sad, dreary land without a parallel in the well populated centres of Europe. Said Chateaubriand: "It possesses a silence and solitude so vast that even the echoes of the tumults of the past enacted upon its soil are lost in the very expansiveness of the flat marshy plain." Balzac too wrote in the same vein: "Imagine something of the desolation of the country of Tyre and Babylon and you will have a picture of the sadness and lonesomeness of this vast, wide, thinly populated region." The similes of Balzac and of Chateaubriand hold good to-day. Long horned cattle and crows are the chief living things--and mosquitoes. One can't forget the mosquitoes. Here and there a jagged stump of a pier of a Roman aqueduct pushes up through the herb-grown soil, perhaps even an arch or two, or three or five; but hardly a tangible remembrance of the work of the hand of man is left to-day, to indicate the myriads of comers and goers who once passed over its famous Appian Way. The Appian Way is still there, loose ended fragments joined up here and there with a modern roadway which has become its successor, and there is a very appreciable traffic, such as it is, on the main lines of roadway north and south; but east and west and round about, save for a few squalid huts and droves of cattle, sheep and goats, a wayside inn, a fountain beneath a cypress and a few sleepy, dusty hamlets and villages, there is nothing to indicate a progressive modern existence. All is as dead and dull as it was when Rome first decayed. Out from Rome, a couple of leagues on the Via Campagna, on the right bank of the Tiber, one comes to the sad relic of La Magliana, the hunting lodge of the Renaissance Popes. The evolution of the name of this country house comes from a corruption of the patronymic of the original owners of the land, the family of Manlian, who were farmers in 390 B. C. The road out from Rome, by the crumbling Circus Maxentius, the lone fragments of Aqueduct, and the moss-grown tomb of Cecilia Metellag, runs for a dozen kilometres at a dead level, to rise in the next dozen or so to a height of four hundred and sixty odd metres just beyond Albano, when it descends and then rises again to Velletri ultimately to flatten out and continue along practically at sea-level all the way to Cassino, a hundred and ninety kilometres from Rome. The classification given to this road by the Touring Club Italiano is "mediocre e polveroso," and one need not be a deep student of the language to evolve its meaning. A little farther away, but still within sight of the Eternal City, just before coming to Albano, is Castel Gandolfo, a Papal stronghold since the middle ages. Urban VIII built a Papal palace here, and the seigniorial château, since transformed into a convent, was a sort of summer habitation of the Popes. The status of the little city of two thousand souls is peculiar. It enjoys extra-territorial rights which were granted to the papal powers by the new order of things which came into being in 1871. A zone of loveliness surrounds the site which overlooks, on one side, the dazzling little Albano Lake and, on the other, stretches off across the Campagna to the shores of the Mediterranean. Just beyond Castel Gandolfo is Albano, still showing vestiges of the city of Domitian, which, in turn, was built upon the ruins of that of Pompey. Albano's fortifications rank as the most perfect examples of their class in all Italy. They tell a story of many epochs; they are all massive, and are largely built in rough polygonal masonry. Towers, turrets and temples are all here at Albano. Still the town is not ranked as one of the tourist sights. The Albano Lake is another one of those mysterious bodies of water without source or outlet. It occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, so some day it may disappear as quickly as it came. Concerning its origin the following local legend is here related: "Where the lake now lies there stood once a great city. Here, when Jesus Christ came to Italy, he begged alms. None took compassion on Him but an old woman who gave Him some meal. He then bade her leave the city: she obeyed; the city instantly sank and the lake rose in its place." This legend is probably founded on some vague recollection or tradition of the fall of the city of Veii, which was so flourishing a state at the time of the foundation of Rome, and possessed so many attractions, that it became a question whether Rome itself should not be abandoned for Veii. The lake of Albano is intimately connected with the siege of Veii and no place has more vivid memories of ancient Roman history. Here, overlooking the lake, once rose Alba Longa, the mother city of Rome, built by Ascanius, the son of Æneas, who named it after the white sow which gave birth to the prodigious number of thirty young. On the shore of the lake, opposite Albano, is Rocca di Papa. The convent of the Passionist Fathers at Rocca di Papa, (the city itself being the one-time residence of the Anti-pope John) was built by Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts, of materials taken from an ancient temple on the shores of Lake Albano. Rocca di Papa is a most picturesque little hilltop village. Its sugar-loaf cone is crowned with an old castle of the Colonnas which remained their possession until 1487, when the Orsini in their turn took possession. Frascati, on the Via Tusculum, about opposite Castel Gandolfo, as this historic roadway parallels that of Claudius Appius, was Rome's patrician suburb, and to-day is the resort of nine-tenths of the excursionists out from Rome for a day or an afternoon. Frascati, the villa suburb, and Tivoli alike depend upon their sylvan charms to set off the beauties of their palaces and villas. It was ever the custom among the princely Italian families--the Farnese, the Borghese, and the Medici--to lavish their wealth on the laying out of the grounds quite as much as on the building of their palaces. Frascati's villas and palaces cannot be catalogued here. One and all are the outgrowth of an ancient Roman pleasure house of the ninth century, and followed after as a natural course of events, the chief attraction of the place being the wild-wood site (_frasche_), really a country faubourg of Rome itself. The Popes and Cardinals favoured the spot for their country houses, and the nobles followed in their train. The chief of Frascati's architectural glories are the Villa Conti, its fountains and its gardens; the Villa Aldobrandini of the Cardinal of that name, the nephew of Pope Clement VIII; and the Villa Tusculana, or Villa Ruffinella, of the sixteenth century, but afterwards the property of Lucien Bonaparte and the scene of one of Washington Irving's little known sketches, "The Adventure of an Artist." The Villa Falconieri at Frascati, built by the Cardinal Ruffini in the sixteenth century, formerly belonged to a long line of Counts and Cardinals, but the hand of the German, which is grasping everything in sight, in all quarters of the globe, that other people by lack of foresight do not seem to care for, has acquired it as a home for "convalescent" German artists. Perhaps the omnific German Emperor seeks to rival the functions of the Villa Medici with his Villa Falconieri. He calls it a hospital, but it has studios, lecture rooms and what not. What it all means no one seems to know. Minor villas are found dotted all over Frascati's hills, with charming vistas opening out here and there in surprising manner. Not all are magnificently grand, few are superlatively excellent according to the highest æsthetic standards, but all are of the satisfying, gratifying quality that the layman will ever accept as something better than his own conceptions would lead up to. That is the chief pleasure of contemplation, after all. Above Frascati itself lies Tusculum, founded, says tradition, by a son of Ulysses, the birthplace of Cato and a one time residence of Cicero. This would seem enough fame for any small town hardly important enough to have its name marked on the map, and certainly not noted down in many of the itineraries for automobile tourists which cross Italy in every direction. More than this, Tusculum has the ruins of an ancient castle, one day belonging to a race of fire-eating, quarrelsome counts who leagued themselves with any one who had a cause, just or unjust, for which to fight. Fighting was their trade, but Frederic I in 1167 beat them at their own game and razed their castle and its town of allies huddled about its walls. That is why Tusculum has not become a tourist resort to-day, but the ruin is still there and one can imagine a different destiny had fate, or a stronger hand, had full sway. From Albano, another cross road, via Velletri to Valmontone, leads in twenty odd kilometres to Palestrina, whence one may continue his way to Subiaco and thence to Tivoli and enter Rome again via the Porta San Lorenzo, having made a round of perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometres of as varied a stretch of Italian roadway as could possibly be found. The gamut of scenic and architectural joys runs all the way from those of the sea level Campagna and its monumental remains to the verdure and romance of the Alban and Sabine Hills and the splendours of the memories of the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli. Lying well back from the Alban hills is Palestrina, the greatest stronghold of the Colonnas and where a branch of the family still maintains a country house. The cradle of this great family, which gave so many popes to Rome, and an inspiration and a divinity to Michelangelo, was a village near Palestrina. It had a Corinthian column rising in its _piazza_ and from it the Colonna took their family arms. It is found on all documents relating to their history; on tapestries, furniture and medals in many museums and in many wood carvings in old Roman churches. Palestrina, too, has memories of Michelangelo. The treasures of masterpieces left by him are scattered all over Italy to keep fresh the memory of his name and fame. Subiaco should be made a stopping place on every automobilist's itinerary out from Rome. Some wit has said that any one living in a place ending with o was bound to be unhappy. He had in mind one or two sad romances of Subiaco, though for all that one can hardly see what the letters of its name have got to do with it. Subiaco has for long been the haunt of artists and others in search of the picturesque, but not the general run of tourists. [Illustration: _Subiaco_] Subiaco is still primitive in most things, and this in spite of the fact that a railway has been built through it in recent years. In feudal times the town could hardly have been more primitive than now, in fact the only thing that ever woke it from lethargy was a little game of warfare, sometimes with disaster for the inhabitants and sometimes for the other side. The castle of the ruling baron sat high upon the height. What is left of it is there to-day, but its capture has been made easier with the march of progress. Down from the castle walls slopes the town, its happy, unprogressive people as somnolent as of yore. Subiaco is one of the most accessible and conveniently situated hill towns of Italy, if any would seek it out. Nero first exploited Subiaco when he built a villa here, as he did in other likely spots round about. Nero built up and he burned down and he fiddled all the while. He was decidedly a capricious character. History or legend says that Nero's cup of cheer was struck from his hand by lightning one day when he was drinking the wine of Subiaco here at his hillside villa. He escaped miraculously, but he got a good scare, though it is not recorded that he signed the pledge! Subiaco's humble inn, "The Partridge," is typical of its class throughout Italy. It is in no sense a very comfortably installed establishment, but it is better, far better, than the same class of inn in England and America, and above all its cooking is better. A fowl and a salad and a bottle of wine and some gorgonzola are just a little better at "La Pernice" than the writer remembers to have eaten elsewhere under similar conditions. Tourists now come by dozens by road and rail to Subiaco--with a preponderance of arrivals by road--whereas a few years ago only a few venturesome artists and other lovers of the open knew its charms. Some day of course this charm will be gone, but it is still lingering on and, if you do not put on too great a pretense, you will get the same good cheer at five francs a day at "The Partridge" whether you arrive in a Mercédès or come as the artist does, white umbrella and canvases slung across your back. The proprietor of "La Pernice" has not as yet succumbed to exploiting his clients. From Subiaco back to Rome via Tivoli is seventy kilometres and all down hill. One can have no complete idea of Roman life without an acquaintance with the villas and palaces of Frascati and Tivoli. Tivoli was the summer resort of the old Romans. Mecenate, Horace, Catullus and Hadrian built villas there and enjoyed it, though in a later day it was reviled thus: [Illustration: _Villa d'Este, Tivoli_] Tivoli di mal conforto--O piove, o tira vento, o suona a morto! Tivoli may be said to have received its boom under the Roman nobles of the Augustan age who came here and set the fashion of the place as a country residence. Things prospered beyond expectations, it would seem, land agents being modest in those days, and by the time of Hadrian reached their luxurious climax. Pope Pius II founded Tivoli's citadel on the site of an already ruined amphitheatre in 1460. The Villa d'Este at Tivoli, built by the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este in 1549, is usually considered the most typical suburban villa in Italy. The house itself is an enormous pile, on one side being three stories higher than on the other. It is a terrace house in every sense of the word. Statuary, originally dug up from Hadrian's villa, once embellished the house and grounds to a greater extent than now, but under the régime of late years many of these pieces have disappeared. Where? The palace itself is comparatively a modest, dignified though extensive structure, the views from its higher terraces stretching out far over the distant _campagna_. Hadrian's Villa, with its magnificent grounds, occupies an area of vast extent. According to Spartian, Hadrian, in the second century B. C., built this marvel of architecture and landscape gardening according to a fond and luxurious fancy which would have been inconceivable by any other who lived at his time. All its great extent of buildings have suffered the stress of time, and some even have entirely disappeared, as a considerable part of the later monuments of Tivoli were built up from their stones. Many of its art treasures were removed to distant points, many found their ways into public and private museums, and many have even been transported to foreign lands. The Italian government has now stopped all this by purchasing the site and making of it a national monument. [Illustration: HADRIAN'S VILLA] With Hadrian's Villa is connected a sad remembrance. Piranesi, that accomplished and erratic draughtsman whose etchings and drawings of Roman monuments have delighted an admiring world, died as a result of overwork in connection with a series of measured drawings he was making of this great memorial of Rome's globe-trotting Emperor. CHAPTER XI LA BELLA NAPOLI [Illustration: Naples (diagram)] South from Rome the highroad to Naples, and on down into Calabria, at first follows the old Appian Way, built by Appius Claudius in 312 B. C. It is a historic highway if there ever was one, from its commencement at Rome's ancient Porta Capuana (now the Porta San Sebastiano) to Capua. As historic ground it has been excavated and the soil turned over many, many times until it would seem as though nothing would be left to discover. Enough has been found and piled up by the roadside to make the thoroughfare a continuous "sight" for many kilometres. Great churches, tombs, vineyards, cypress-wind-breaks and the arches of the Claudian aqueducts line its length, and if the automobilist is so minded he can easily put in a day doing the first twenty kilometres. Velletri, thirty-six kilometres from Rome, is the first town of importance after passing Albano, practically suburban Rome. Cisterna di Roma, a dozen kilometres further on, is a typical hill top town overlooking the Pontine Marshes below. Terracina, on the coast, sixty-two kilometres beyond Velletri, is the border town between the north and the south, practically the limit between the extent of the Papal power and that of the kingdom of Naples. Terracina sits at sea-level, and in all probability it is none too healthy an abode, though ten thousand souls call it home and seem content. It has a sea-view that would make the reputation of a resort, and the French and Italian Touring Clubs recommend the Hotel Royal, while the local druggist sells gasoline and oil to automobile tourists at fair rates--for Italy. At Formia one may turn off the direct road and in half a dozen kilometres come to the coast again at Gaeta. The road from Formia runs through a picture paradise, and an unspoilt one, considering it from the artist's point of view. Little more shall be said, though indeed it is not as at Sorrento or Capri, but quite as good in its way, and the Albergo della Quercia, at Formia, is not as yet overrun with a clientèle of any sort. This is an artists' sketching ground that is some day going to be exploited by some one; perhaps by the artist who made the pictures of this book. Who knows? Over another fragment of the Appian Way the highroad now continues towards Naples via Capua. At Capua the road plunges immediately into a maze of narrow streets and one's only assurance of being able to find his exit from the town is by employing a gamin to sit on the running board and shout _destra_ or _sinistra_ at each turning until the open country is again reached at the dividing of the roads leading to Caserta and Naples respectively. The highroad from Capua into Naples covers thirty kilometres of as good, or bad, roadway as is usually found on entering a great city where the numerous manifest industries serve to furnish a traffic movement which is not conducive to the upkeep of good roads. It is a good road, though, in parts, but the nearer you get to "la bella Napoli" the worse it becomes, as bad, almost, as the roads in and out of Marseilles or Genoa, and they are about the worst that exist for automobilists to revile. By either Averso or Caserta one enters Naples by the rift in the hills lying back of the observatory, and finally by the tram-lined Strada Forvia, always descending, until practically at sea-level one finds a garage close beside the Hotel Royal et des Étrangers and lodges himself in that excellent hostelry. This is one way of doing it; there are of course others. The man that first said "_Vedi Napoli e poi mori!_" didn't know what he was talking about. No one will want to die after seeing Naples. He will want to live the longer and come again, if not for Naples itself then for its surroundings, for Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento, Capri, Amalfi, Vesuvius and Ischia. Naples itself will be a good place at which to leave one's extra luggage and to use as a mail address. The history of Naples is vast, and its present and historic past is most interesting, but for all that Naples without its environs would be as naught. The local proverb of old: "When Salerno has its port Naples will be mort (dead)," has no reason for being any more, for Naples' future as a Mediterranean seaport is assured by the indefatigable German who has recently made it a port of call for a half a dozen lines of German steamers. Britain may rule the waves, but the German is fast absorbing the profitable end of the carrying trade. Naples is a crowded, uncomfortable city, for within a circumference of scarce sixteen kilometres is huddled a population of considerably more than half a million souls. Naples' chief charms are its site, and its magnificently scenic background, not its monuments or its people. "The lazzaroni," remarked Montesquieu of the Neapolitan "won't-works," "pass their time in the middle of the street." This observation was made many, many years ago, but it is equally true to-day. Naples is not the only Italian city where one sees men live without apparent means of existence, but it is here most to be remarked. On the quays and on the promenades you see men and women without work, and apparently without ambition to look for it save to exploit strangers. On the steps of the churches you see men and women without legs, arms or eyes, and infants _sans chemises_, and they, too, live by the same idle occupation of asking for alms. Everywhere at Naples, before your hotel, crowded around your carriage or automobile, or paddling around in boats just over your steamer's side, are hoards of beggars of all sorts and conditions of poverty and probity. The beggar population of Naples is doubtless of no greater proportions than in Genoa, or even Rome, but it is more in evidence and more insistent. There are singing beggars, lame, halt and blind beggars, whining beggars, swimming beggars, diving beggars, flower-selling beggars and just plain _beggars_. Give to one and you will have to give to all--or stand the consequences, which may be serious or not according to circumstances. Don't disburse sterilized charity, then, but keep hard-hearted. Naples' chief sights for the tourists are its museum, its great domed galleries and their cafés and restaurants, its Castello dell'Ovo and the Castel del Carmine. The Castello dell'Ovo is out in the sea, at the end of a tiny bridge or breakwater, running from the Pizzofalcone, one of the slopes of the background hills of Naples running down to sea-level. As a fortress the Castello dell'Ovo is outranked to-day by the least efficient in any land, but one of the Spanish Viceroys, in 1532, Don Pedro of Toledo, thought it a stronghold of prime importance, due entirely to its oval shape, which it preserves unto to-day. It is unique, in form at any rate. Charles VIII of France, on his memorable Italian journeyings--when he discovered (sic) the Renaissance architecture of Italy and brought it back home with him--dismantled the castle and left it in its now barrack-like condition, shorn of any great distinction save the oval shape of its donjon. One is bound to remark this noble monument as it is from its quay that one embarks on the cranky, little, wobbling steamboat which bears one to Capri. Lucullus, who had some reputation as a good liver, once had a villa here on the very quay which surrounds the Castello. Opposite the Villa del Popolo (near the Porta del Carmine), the People's Park as we should call it, is a vast, forbidding, unlovely structure. [Illustration: _Castello dell'Ovo, Naples_] It was built in 1484 by Ferdinand I, but during Masaniello's little disturbance it became a stronghold of the people. To-day it serves as a barracks--and of course as a military prison; all nondescript buildings in Italy may be safely classed as military prisons, though indeed the Italian soldiery do not look an unruly lot. It is well to recall here that Masaniello, who gave his name to an opera as well as being a patriot of the most rabid, though revolutionary, type, failed of his ambition and died through sheer inability to keep awake and sufficiently free from anxiety to carry out his plans. Masaniello lost his head toward the end and got untrustworthy, but this was far from justifying either his murder or the infamous treatment of his body immediately after death by the very mob that the day before had adored him. His headless trunk was dragged for several hours through the mud, and was flung at nightfall, like the body of a mad dog, into the city ditch. Next day, through a revulsion of feeling, he was canonized! His corpse was picked out of the ditch, arrayed in royal robes, and buried magnificently in the cathedral. His fisherman's dress was rent into shreds to be preserved by the crowd as relics; the door of his hut was pulled off its hinges by a mob of women, and cut into small pieces to be carved into images and made into caskets; while the very ground he had walked on was collected in small phials and sold for its weight in gold to be worn next the heart as an amulet. The "Villas" of Naples are often mere _maisons bourgeoises_ of modern date. Many of them might well be in Brixton so far as their architectural charms go. Over in the Posilippo quarter, a delightful situation indeed, are innumerable flat-topped, whitewashed villas, so-called, entirely unlovely, all things considered. One of these, the Villa Rendel, was once inhabited by Garibaldi, as a tablet on its wall announces. Garibaldi and the part that he and his red shirt played are not yet forgotten. Apropos of this there is a famous lawsuit still in the Italian courts, wherein the Garibaldian Colonel Cornacci, in accord with Ricciotti Garibaldi, son of the general, makes the following claim against the Italian government: I. All the "_tresor_" (gold and silver) of the house of Bourbon. II. Eleven millions of ducats taken from the Garibaldian government at Naples. III. The Bourbon museum now incorporated with the National Museum. IV. The Palace of Caserta and its park. V. The Palace Farnese at Rome. VI. The Palace and Villa Farnese at Caprarola at Naples. VII. Two Villas at Naples, Capodimonte and La Favorita. This is the balance sheet discrepancy resulting from the war of 1860 which the Garibaldian heirs claim is theirs by rights. It's a mere bagatelle of course! One wonders why the Italian government don't settle it at once and be done with it! Naples is the birth-place of Polichinelle, as Paris is of Pierrot, two figures of fancy which will never die out in literature or art, a tender expression of sentiment quite worthy of being kept alive. The Neapolitan, en fête, is quite the equal in gayety and irresponsibility of the inhabitant of Seville or Montmartre. The processionings of any big Italian town are a thing which, once seen, will always be remembered. At Naples they seem a bit more gorgeous and spontaneous in their gayety than elsewhere, with rugs and banners floating in the air from every balcony, and flowers falling from every hand. It is every man's carnival, the celebration at Naples. Leading out to the west, back of Posilippo, is the Strada di Piedigrotta, which is continued as the Grotto Nuovo di Posilipo, and through which runs a tramway, all kinds of animal-drawn wheeled traffic, and automobiles with open exhausts. All this comports little with the fact that the ancient tunnelled road along here was one of the marvels of engineering in the time of Augustus and that it led to Virgil's tomb. This supposed tomb of Virgil is questioned by archæologists, but that doesn't much matter for the rest of us. We know that Virgil himself has said that it was here that he composed the "Georgics" and the "Æneid," and it might well have been his last resting-place too. "Addio, mia bella Napoli! Addio!" CHAPTER XII THE BEAUTIFUL BAY OF NAPLES "See Naples and die" is all very well for a sentiment, but when we first saw it, many years ago, it was under a grim, grey sky, and its shore front was washed by a milky-green fury of a sea. Fortunately it is not always thus; indeed it is seldom so. On that occasion Vesuvius was invisible, and Posilippo in dim relief. What a contrast to things as they usually are! Still, Naples and its Bay are no phenomenal wonders. Suppress the point of view, the focus of Virgil, of Horace, of Tiberius and of Nero, and the view of "Alger la Blanche," or of Marseilles and its headlands, is quite as beautiful. And the Bay of Naples is not so beautifully blue either; the Bai de la Ciotat in Maritime Province is often the same colour, and has a nearby range of jutting, jagged, foam-lashed promontories that are all that Capri is--all but the grotto. [Illustration: THE BAY OF NAPLES] The Bay of Naples has its moods, and there are times when its blueness is more apparent than at others; in short there are times when it looks more beautiful than at others, and then one is apt to think its charms superlative. The praises of the ravishing beauty of the Bay of Naples have been sung by the poets and told in prose ever since the art of writing travel impressions has been known, but though the half may not have been told it were futile to reiterate what one may see for himself if he will only come and look. "A piece of heaven fallen to earth," Sannazar has said, and certainly no one can hope to describe it with more glowing praise. For the artist the whole Neapolitan coastline, and background as well, is a riot of rainbow colouring such as can hardly be found elsewhere except in the Orient. It is not only that the Bay of Naples is blue, but the greys and drabs of the ash and cinders of Vesuvius seem to accentuate all the brilliant reds and yellows and greens of the foliage and housetops, not forgetting the shipping of the little ports and the costuming of land-lubbers and sailor-men, and of course the women. The Italian women, young or old, are possessed of about the loveliest colouring of any of the fair women of the twentieth century portrait gallery. The environs of Naples have two plagues which, when they rise in their wrath, can scarcely be avoided. One is the sirocco, that dry, stiff wind which blows along the Mediterranean coast in summer, coming from the African shore and the desert beyond, and the much worse, or at least more dreaded, _aria cattiva_, which is supposed to blow the sulphurous gases and cinders of Vesuvius down the population's throats, and does to a certain extent. Out beyond Posilippo, which itself is properly enough bound up with the life of Naples, lies Pouzzoles. The excursion is usually made in half a day by carriage, and automobilists have been known to do it in half an hour. The former method is preferable, though the automobilist is free from the rapacious Neapolitan cab driver and that's a good deal in favour of the new locomotion. If only automobilists as a class wouldn't be in such a hurry! Pouzzoles has no splendid palaces but it has the remains of a former temple of Augustus in the shape of twelve magnificent Corinthian columns, built into the Cathedral of Saint Procule, and some remains of another shrine dedicated to Serapis. There are also the ruins of Cicero's villa at Baies, a little further on. Mont Gauro, where the "rough Falernian" wine, whose praises were sung by Walter de Mapes, comes from, shelters the little village on one side and Mont Nuovo on the other, this last a mountain or hillock of perhaps a hundred and fifty metres in height, which grew up in a night as a result of a sixteenth century earthquake. The Lake of Averno is nearby, a tiny body of water whose name and fame are celebrated afar, but which as a lake, properly considered, hardly ranks in size with the average mill-pond. With a depth of some thirty odd metres and a circumference of three kilometres its charms were sufficient to attract Hannibal thither to sacrifice to Pluto, and Virgil there laid the "Descent into Purgatory." Agrippa, with an indomitable energy and the help of twenty thousand slaves, made it into a port great enough to shelter the Roman fleet. At Baies there is a magnificent feudal work in the form of a fortress-château of Pedro of Toledo (1538). At the tiny port of Torregaveta, just beyond, one takes ship for Procida and Ischia, two islands often neglected in making the round of Naples Bay. Procida, off shore three or four kilometres, and with a length of about the same, has a population of fifteen thousand, most of whom rent boats to visitors. Competition here being fierce, prices are reasonable--anything you like to pay, provided you can clinch the bargain beforehand. Ischia is twice the size of Procida, twice the distance from the mainland and has twice the population of the latter. One might say, too, that it is twice as interesting. It is a vast pyramid of rock dominated by a château-fort dating from 1450. It looks almost unreal in its impressiveness, and since it is of volcanic growth the island may some day disappear as suddenly as it came. Such is the fear of most of the population. A quick round south from Naples can be made by following the itinerary below. It can be done in a day or a week, but in the former case one must be content with a cinematographic reminiscence. Naples--Portici 4.8 Kilometres Resina--Herculaneum 6.3 " Torre del Greco 9.4 " Torre Anunziata 16.6 " Castellamare 24.5 " Sorrento 42.9 " Meta--Positano 59.8 " Amalfi 70.1 " Salerno 94.7 " Naples 144.6 " [Illustration: _Ischia_] [Illustration: LAVA BEDS OF VESUVIUS] Some one has said that Vesuvius was a vicious boil on the neck of Naples. There is not much sentiment in the expression and little delicacy, but there is much truth in it. Still, if it were not for Vesuvius much of the charm and character of the Bay of Naples and its _cadre_ would be gone for ever. All around the base of the great cone are a flock of little half-baked, lava-burned villages, as sad as an Esquimaux settlement in the great lone land. This is the way they strike one as places to live in, though the artist folk find them picturesque enough, it is true, and a poet of the Dante type would probably get as much inspiration here as did Alighieri from the Inferno. It has been remarked before now that Italy is a birdless land. The Renaissance poets sang differently, but judging from the country immediately neighbouring upon Vesuvius, and Calabria to the southward, one is inclined to join forces with the first mentioned authority. Not even a carrion crow could make a living in some parts of southern Italy. So desolate and lone is this sparsely populated region towards the south that it is about the only part of Italy where one may hope to encounter the brigand of romance and fiction. The thing is not unheard of to-day, but what brigands are left are presumably kidnappers for political purposes who wreak their vengeance on some official. The stranger tourist goes free. He is only robbed by the hotel keepers and their employees who think more of _buona mano_ than anything else. A recent account (1907), in an Italian journal, tells of the adventures of the master of ceremonies at Victor Emmanuel's court who was captured by bandits and imprisoned in a cave in that _terra incognita_ back of Vesuvius away from the coast. Newspaper accounts are often at variance with the facts, but these made thrilling reading. One account said that the kidnappers tore out the Marquis's teeth, one by one, in order to force him to write a letter asking for ransom. As he still refused, lights were held to the soles of his naked feet. The Marquis was lured from Naples to the neighbourhood of a grotto in the direction of Vesuvius, where he was seized by the brigand's confederates. "I was seized unexpectedly from behind," said the Marquis in his version, "and after a sharp struggle with my unseen assailants was carried down into the grotto with Herculanean force and tightly bound. "Then, liberating my right arm, the brigands fetched a lamp and writing materials, covering their faces with masks. Threatening me with instant death, the chief forced me to write a letter to my friends demanding that money be sent me forthwith. At the same time he took from me all my valuables and then disappeared, leaving me a prisoner with a guard before the entrance of my cave." The adventure ended harmlessly enough, and whether it was all a dream or not of course nobody but the Marquis knows. At any rate it has quite a mediæval ring to it. [Illustration: THE EXCAVATIONS OF POMPEII] Pompeii is remarkable, but it is disappointing. All that is of real interest has been removed to the Naples museum. Without its Forum and its magnificent temples and Vesuvius as a _toile de fond_ Pompeii would be a dreary place indeed to any but an archæologist. It is a waste of time to view any restored historic monument where modern house painters have refurbished the old half-obliterated frescoes. The famous Cave Canem, too, the only mosaic that remains intact, has been twice removed from its original emplacement. Yes, Pompeii is a disappointment! It is too much of a show-place! The most notable observation to be made with regard to the admirable architectural details of Pompeii is that they are all on a diminutive scale. The colonnade of the Forum, for instance, could never be carried out on the magnificent scale of the Roman Forum, and indeed, when modern architects have attempted to reproduce the façade of a tiny pagan temple, as in the Église de la Madeleine, or the Palais Bourbon at Paris, they have failed miserably. The rival claims of the Hotel Suisse and the Hotel Diomede at Pompeii (to say nothing of that of the Albergo del Sol opposite the entrance to the Amphitheatre) make it difficult for the stranger to decide upon which to bestow his patronage. The artists go to the Albergo del Sol, which is rough and uncomfortable enough from many points of view, and the tourists of convention go to one of the other two, where they are "exploited" a bit but get more attention. At any one of these hotels one can hire a horse to climb up the cone of Vesuvius, if one thinks he would like such rude sport, and prices are anything he will pay, about five or six francs, though it costs another two francs for a guide and another two francs for the ragamuffin who follows after and holds the horses while you explore the crater. If the latter was blacking boots in New York, even for a padrone, at five cents a shine, he would make more money and be counted out of the robber class. As it is he is a rank impostor and needless--provided you have the courage to refuse his services. The contrast between Herculaneum and Pompeii is notable. Herculaneum was buried under thirty metres of liquid lava, but Pompeii was buried only roof-high under cinders. Herculaneum will some day be uncovered to the extent of Pompeii, and then it is probable the world will have new marvels at which to wonder. The rewards from the excavation of Herculaneum may well be commensurate with the toil. It was an infinitely more important place than Pompeii, which was only a little country town without libraries or particularly wealthy inhabitants. Herculaneum, on the other hand, was the summer resort of wealthy Romans, who spent their lives in adorning their beautiful villas with the choicest work of Greek art. Pliny said that they had a mania for collecting Greek silver and other works of art, and at prices that would even make the wealthiest art connoisseurs of to-day pause for thought. Agrippina, among others, had her villa here. Herculaneum remains intact and undespoiled, as it was more than eighteen centuries ago. [Illustration: _The Environs of Pompeii_ STABIAE · SARNVS-FLV · SVRRENTVM · CAPREÆ · PORTVS POMPEIANA] From Pompeii to Sorrento via Castellamare is twenty-five kilometres. Sorrento is, in summer, a bathing place for such of the Neapolitan high-life population as are not able to get far away from home. One properly enough attaches no importance whatever to the gay life of the boulevards, the cafés and the restaurants of Naples. It is the same thing as at Rome, Paris and London over again with all its silly flaneries, but here at Sorrento, or across the peninsula at Amalfi, life is less feverish and one may stroll about or indeed live free and tranquil from care in hotels, less luxurious no doubt than those of the Quai Parthenope, but offering a sufficient degree of comfort to make them agreeable to the most exacting. The real winter birds of passage only alight here for a period of three or four weeks in January or February. After that it is delightful, except for the short period when it is given up to the crowd of tourists which invariably comes at Easter. Sorrento is the great centre for all the charming region bordering upon the southern shore of the Bay of Naples. It is at once the city and the country. Its hotels are delightfully disposed amid flowering gardens or on a terrace overlooking the escarpments of the rock-bound coast. Six or seven francs a day, or eight or ten, according to the class of establishment one patronizes, and one finds the best of simple fare and comfort. Eight days or a fortnight one may roam about the neighbourhood at Sorrento, from Sant Agatha on a nearby height to Sejano Castellamare, Positano, Amalfi and finally Capri. There is hardly such a range of charming little towns and townlets to be found elsewhere in all the world. Except for its restricted little business quarter the houses and villas of Sorrento are disposed on the best of "garden city" plans. Again a plague on a beauty spot must be admitted: mosquitoes will all but devour you here between mid-August and the end of October. The only safe-guard is to paint yourself with iodine, but the cure is as bad as the complaint. The traveller in Italy learns of course to beware of coral, of white, pink and milky coloured coral. We had been afraid to even look at such ever since we had seen it being made by the ton in Belgium--and good looking "coral" it was. Once the artist bought a string of the real thing at Tabarka in Tunisia, and once a friend who was with us on the Riviera di Ponente bought a necklet of what was called coral, at an outrageous price, of a wily boatman. It all went up in smoke (accompanied by a vile smell) ultimately, though fortunately it was not on the owner's neck at the time. It was an injudicious mixture of gun-cotton, nitroglycerine or what not. It wasn't coral; that was evident. Now, when we walk out at Sorrento, no Graziella, her shoulders scintillating with ropes of coral, beguiles us into buying any of her family heirlooms. To sum up: the coral which is sold to tourists is often false; that which is fished up before your eyes from the sea is always so. Beware of the coral of Sorrento or Capri. The trip to Capri is of course included in every one's itinerary in these parts, and for that reason it is not omitted here, though indeed the famous grotto over which the sentimentally inclined so love to rave has little more charm than the same thing represented on the stage. This at any rate is one man's opinion. It is most conveniently reached by boat from Sorrento. The famous retreat of Augustus and the scene of the debauches of Tiberius will ever have an attraction for the globe-trotter, even though its romance is mostly fictitious. One may gather any opinions he chooses, and, provided he gathers them on the spot and makes them up out of his own imaginings, he will be content with Capri's grotto; only he mustn't take the guide-books too seriously. The Blue Grotto's goddess is Amphitrite, and if any one catches a glimpse of her traditional scanty draperies swishing around a corner, let him not be misguided into following her into her retreat. If he does the sea is guaranteed to rise and close the orifice so that he may not get out again as soon as he might wish. In that case one must wait till the wind, which has veered suddenly from east to west, comes about again and blows from the south. Without bringing Amphitrite into the matter at all it sometimes happens that visitors entering the grotto for a pleasant half hour may be obliged to stay there two, three or even five days. The boatmen-guides, providing for such emergencies, carry with them a certain quantity of _biscotti_ with which to sustain their victims. As for fresh water it trickles through into the grotto in several places in a sufficient quantity to allay any apprehensions as to dying of thirst. One might well blame the Capri guides for not calling the visitor's attention to these things. But if one is reproached he simply answers: "_Ma che_! _eccelenza_, if we should call attention to this thing, half the would-be visitors would balk at the first step, and that would be bad for our business." Alexandre Dumas tells of how on a visit to Capri in 1835 the fisherman was pointed out to him who had ten years earlier re-discovered the Blue Grotto of Augustus' time, whilst searching for mussels among the rocks. He went at once to the authorities on the island and told them of his discovery and asked for the privilege of exploiting visitors. This discoverer of a new underground world was able by means of graft, or other means, to put the thing through and lived in ease ever after, through his ability to levy a toll on other guides to whom he farmed out his privilege. Quite the best of Capri is above ground, the isle itself, set like a gem in the waters of the Mediterranean. The very natural symphonic colouring of the rocks and hillsides and rooftops of its houses, and indeed the costuming of its very people, make it very beautiful. For Amalfi, Salerno and Pæstum the automobilist must retrace his way from Sorrento to Castellamare, when, in thirty kilometres, he may gain Amalfi, and, in another twenty-five, Salerno. Pæstum and its temples, to many the chief things of interest in Italy, the land of noble monuments, lie forty kilometres away from Salerno. The automobilist, to add this to his excursion out from Naples, is debarred from making the round in a day, even if he would. It is worth doing however; that goes without saying, though the attempt is not made here of purveying guide-book or historical information. If you don't know anything about Pæstum, or care anything about it, then leave it out and get back to Naples as quickly as you can, and so on out of the country at the same rate of speed. CHAPTER XIII ACROSS UMBRIA TO THE ADRIATIC The mountain district of Umbria, a country of clear outlines against pale blue skies, is one of the most charming in the peninsula though not the most grandly scenic. The highway from Rome to Ancona, across Umbria, follows the itinerary of one of the most ancient of Roman roads, the Via Valeria. The railway, too, follows almost in the same track, though each leaves the Imperial City, itself, by the great trunk line via Salaria and the Valley of the Tiber. Terni is the great junction from which radiate various other lines of communication to all parts of the kingdom. Terni is, practically, the geographical centre of Italy. It is a bustling manufacturing town and, supposedly, the Interamna where Tacitus was born. From Terni one reaches Naples, via Avezzano in 257 kilometres; Rome, via Civita Castellana in 94 kilometres; Florence via Perugia and Arezzo in 256 kilometres and Ancona, on the shores of the Adriatic, via Foligno in 209 kilometres. All of these roads run the gamut from high to low levels and, though in no sense to be classed as mountain roads, are sufficiently trying to even a modern automobile to be classed as difficult. The Cascades of Terni used to be one of the stock sights of tourists, a generation ago, but, truth to tell, they are not remarkable natural beauties, and, indeed, are too apparently artificial to be admired. Moreover one is too much "exploited" in the neighbourhood to enjoy his visit. It costs half a lira to enter by this gate, and to leave by that road; to cross this bridge, or descend into that cavern; and troops of children beg soldi of you at every turn. The thing is not worth doing. Spoleto, twenty-six kilometres away, is somewhat more interesting. It is famous for the fine relics, which still exist, of its more magnificent days, when, 242 B. C., it was named Spoletium. The towers of Spoleto, like those of San Gimignano and Volterra, are its chief glory; civic, secular and churchly towers, all blending into one hazy mass of grim, militant power. The Franciscan convent, on the uppermost height, seems to guard all the towers below, as a shepherd guards his flock, or a mother hen her chickens. In 1499 the equivocal, enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia came to inhabit the castle of Spoleto. The fair but unholy Lucrezia was a wandering, restless being who liked apparently to be continually on the move. Here, in the fortress of Spoleto, Lucrezia Borgia, coming straight from the Vatican, held for a brief year the seals of the state in her frail hands, her father at the time being governor. The aspect of this grim fortress-château, grim but livable, as one knows from the historical accounts, is to-day, so far as outlines are concerned, just as it was five centuries ago. It is grandiose, severe and majestic, and is dominant in all the landscape round about, not even its mountain background dwarfing its proportions. The military defence was that portion lying lowest down in the valley, while the residence of the governor was in the upper portion. One reads the history of three distinct epochs in its architecture, the Gothic of the fifteenth century, that of the sixteenth, and the later interpolated Renaissance decorations. Through Foligno and Assisi runs the road to Perugia. Assisi is a much visited shrine, but Foligno is remembered by most of those who have travelled that way only as a grimy railway junction. [Illustration: ASSISI] Assisi, the little Umbrian hill town, is deservedly the popular shrine that it is. Assisi is a religious shrine, but its skyline silhouette is more like that which properly belongs to a warlike stronghold. The city of St. Francis is loved by men of all creeds who recall the story of the holy man who, with poverty as a garment, trod his long way, singing, talking to the birds and succouring all who were sore or heavy laden. Immense antiquity is suggested by everything round about, from the tombs of the Etruscan Necropolis, dating from 150 B.C., down to the triple-storied convent church of San Francesco of 1230 and the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli of 1509. [Illustration: ASSISI ITS WALLS CASTLE & CHURCH] The now secularized convent and its triple church have all the characteristics of a mediæval fortress when viewed from afar. The town itself owes most, if not all, of its fame to its beloved San Francesco. His birthplace has disappeared and its site occupied by the Chiesa Nuova, but a part of it has been built into the church, making it another shrine of the holy man who did so much good to his fellows during his life, and to his native town in these late days by bringing tens, nay, even hundreds, of thousands of tourists thither to spend their money on local guides, cabmen and inn-keepers. A sordid point of view some may think. But is it? What would Assisi be without the tourists? Still wooing the Lady Poverty, there's no doubt about that. What would Venice be without the tourists? Not what it is to-day. No indeed. It is dead and dull enough even now at certain seasons. It would become so for all time without the strangers. Perugia is the big town of Umbria. To-day it boasts of twenty odd thousand souls, but in the days when it struggled against papal control it was even more populous. Its history is one long drawn out tale of revolt and submission in turn, from the days when it first submitted to the Romans in 310 B. C. until it threw its fate in with that of the other states of Victor Emmanuel in 1860. If ever a city was blood-baptized that honour is Perugia's. It has not a crooked old street nor gate nor fountain nor piazza or palazzo but what is gory with bloody memories. Perugia was a dominant mediæval influence all through the neighbourhood and levied tribute on all her vassal cities and towns. Foligno's walls and ramparts had fallen and the people of Perugia came and carted off the stone for their own needs; Arezzo stripped her churches and palaces to provide the marbles for Perugia's cathedral. [Illustration: _Architectural Detail, Perugia_] Perugia's oxen are famous in literature and art, but they have almost become a memory, though an occasional one may be seen standing in the market place or a yoke working in the nearby fields. Electric cars haul passengers and freight about the city at a death-dealing pace, and the ox as a beast of burden is out-distanced and out-classed. The ancient civilization is represented at Perugia by a remarkable series of old fortification walls, still admirably conserved, a kilometre or more from the centre of town, a necropolis of ten chambers, and an antique Roman arch of Augustus. Perugia's lode star for travellers has ever been the fact that it was the centre of the school of Umbrian painters. This is not saying that it has no architecture worth mentioning, for the reverse is the case. Out from Perugia by the Porta di Elce, on the Cortona road, one passes a couple of imposing edifices. One, from a distance, looks grandly romantic and mediæval, but is only a base modern reproduction in cement and timber--and for all the writer knows, steel beams as well--of an ancient feudal castle. The other is less grand, less luxurious possibly, but is the very ideal of an Italian country house, habitable to-day, but surrounded with all the romantic flavour of mediævalism. It is still called the Villa of the Cardinal by virtue of the fact that Cardinal Fulvio della Corgna built it in 1580. Locally, it is also known as the Villa Umberto, and it belongs to, and is inhabited by, the family of Commendatore Ferdinando Cesaroni. Architecturally, perhaps, the villa is not a great work, but it is marvellously satisfying to the eye by reason of its disposition and its outlook. Gubbio, thirty-nine kilometres away by road, is not readily accessible by rail from Perugia, though on the direct line from Arezzo, Ancona and Foligno. The automobilist may reach Gubbio from Perugia in less time than the rail-tied traveller may check his baggage and take his place in the train. Not many include Gubbio in their Italian tours. Its Etruscan lore and relics have been made the subject of volumes, but little has been done to set forth its charms for the Italian pilgrim who would seek to get away from the herding crowds of the great cities and towns. [Illustration: _Palazzo Ducale, Urbino_] Gubbio's ducal palace is moss grown and weedy, so far as its rooftop and courtyard are concerned, but it is a very warm and lively old fabric nevertheless, and those that love historic old shrines will find much here that they will often not discover in a well restored, highly furbished monument kept frankly as a show-place for throngs of trippers who cannot tell old bronze from new copper, or wrought iron from _font_. The hurly-burly of twentieth century life has not yet reached Gubbio, and that is why it presents itself to the visitor within its walls in such agreeable fashion. Off in the Marches, sixty-five kilometres from Gubbio, is the little town of Urbino. It has a Palazzo Ducale most remarkable in its architecture and its emplacement. It was begun in 1648 by Frederigo di Montefeltro, on the site of a former palace of a century before. The apartments within are not merely the halls of a museum, but are remarkably interesting and livable mediæval apartments, and to-day are much as they were in the days of the gallant dukes, one of whom, Guidobaldo II, was a poet himself and a patron of letters who gave his protection to the last Italian poet whose fame was European--Torquato Tasso. Urbino, too, was the birthplace of him whom we know familiarly as Raphael, though curiously enough the local museum contains but a single example of his work, and that a drawing of "Moses in the Bulrushes." Urbino's chief "sight," though it is not beautiful in itself, is the birthplace of Raphael, situated in a little street running off from near the ducal palace, a street which mounts heavenward so steeply that it was formerly called the Via del Monte. The authorities, in an effort to keep up with popular taste, have recently changed the name to Via Raffaello. It is a mean, simple and grim looking little house, not at all beautiful according to palatial standards. On the 6th of April, 1483, its fame began, but pilgrims have only in recent years come to bow down before it. Nevertheless popes and prelates and princes came here to sit to the "painter of Urbino" and have left an added distinction to the house. Muzio Oddi, the celebrated architect and mathematician, caused to be graven the following on its façade:-- "Ludet in humanis divina potentia rebus Et saepe in parvis claudre magna solet." A tablet marks the house plainly. It will not be possible to miss it. Urbino sits high above the surrounding valley, twelve or fifteen hundred feet above sea level. A coach of doubtful antiquity formerly made the same journey as that covered by the railway and deposited its mixed freight of travellers and inhabitants in one of the most splendid of the Renaissance cities of Italy. Now, the automobile brings many more tourists than ever before came by coach, or railway even, and accordingly Urbino will undoubtedly become better known. The court of Urbino in the sixteenth century was one of the most refined and learned of the courts of Italy, and therefore of the world. Coryat in his "Crudities," of the seventeenth century, remarks a difference between English and Italian manners. "I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels; neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat." Is it that the fork came to earth as a seventeenth century Italian innovation? Urbino's Albergo Italia merits the sign of the crossed knife and fork, the Automobile Club's endorsement of good food. One of the classic figures of mediæval Urbino was Oddantonio, of the great house of Montefeltro, who, succeeding to the dukedom at the age of fifteen, fell under the ill control of the brilliant, but corrupt, Sigismondo Malatesta, of Rimini. Thirty five kilometres east of Urbino lies the blue Adriatic, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Italian seas. The descent from four hundred metres at Urbino to sea level is gradual and easy, but it is a steady fall that is bound to be remarked by travellers by road, with the sea in sight for the major part of the way. One comes to the Adriatic shore at Pesaro, midway on the coast between Ravenna and Ancona. North and south, from the Venetian boundary to the rocky, sparse-populated shores of Calabria, flanking upon the Ionian sea, is a wonderland of little-travelled highroad, all of it a historic itinerary, though indeed the road is none of the best. To the jaded traveller, tired of stock sights and scenes, the covering of this coast road from Venice to Brindisi would be a journey worth the making, but it should not be done hurriedly. CHAPTER XIV BY ADRIATIC'S SHORE The Italian shore of the Adriatic is a terra incognita to most travellers in Italy, save those who take ship for the east at Brindisi, and even they arrive from Calais, Paris or Ostende by express train without break of journey en route. The following table gives the kilometric distances of this shore road by the Adriatic, through the coast towns from Otranto in Pouilles to Chioggia in Venetia. The itinerary has, perhaps, never been made in its entirety by any stranger automobilist, but the writer has seen enough to make him want to cover its entire length. Population Kilometres Otranto 22,266 0 Lecce 2,333 40.4 Brindisi 16,719 80 Monopoli 7,620 151 Bari 58,266 193.3 Barletta 31,194 248.2 Manfredonia 8,324 330 Foggia 14,067 368.4 Here the road leaves the coast but joins again at Ortona. Isernia 7,687 526.7 Ortona 6,366 673.5 Pescara 2,612 694.3 Ancona 28,577 849.7 Pesaro 12,547 909.7 Rimini 10,838 945.3 Ravenna 18,571 995.3 Ferrara 28,814 1,068.7 Chioggia 20,381 1,160.5 The above are the cold figures as worked out from the Road Books, Maps and Profiles of the Touring Club Italiano. The whole forms a rather lengthy itinerary but, in part, it is within the power of every automobilist in Italy to make, as he crosses Umbria from Rome to the Adriatic, by including that portion of the route between Ancona and Chioggia. This cuts the distance to the more reasonable figure of a little more than three hundred kilometres. Taranto, Otranto and Bari are mere place names for which most do not even know where to look on the map. Conditions of life were not easy or luxurious here in the outposts of the western empire, and the influx of alien Greek and Turk and Jew has ever tended to change the Italian colouring to one almost Oriental in tone and brilliance. Brindisi has usually been considered a mere way station on the traveller's itinerary, where he changes train for boat. But it is more than that. It was the ancient Brentesion of the Greeks, indeed it was the gateway of all intercourse between the peninsula and the Greece of the mainland and the islands of Ægina. Virgil died here on his return from Greece in 19 B.C., and for that reason alone it at once takes rank as one of the world's great literary shrines. But who ever heard of a literary pilgrim coming here! Brindisi's Castello, built by Ferdinand II and Charles V, still overlooks the harbour and, though it performs no more the functions of a fortress, it is an imposing and admirable mediæval monument. Near the harbour is a svelt Greek column with a highly sculptured capital and an inscription to the memory of a Byzantine ruler who built up the city anew in the tenth century, after it had fallen prey to the Saracens. This column, too, supposedly marks the termination of the Appian Way, which started from Rome's Forum and wandered across the Campagna and on to this eastern outpost. [Illustration: Brindisi; The Terminal Column of the Appian Way] Bari, like Brindisi, was an ancient seaport. Horace sang its praises, or rather the praises of its fish, as did Petrarch of the carp at Vaucluse, and the town was one of the most ancient bishoprics in Italy. From the tenth to the fourteenth century the fate of the town was ever in the balance, changing its allegiance from one seigneur to another, who, for the moment, happened to be the more masterful. In the fourteenth century it became an independent Duchy, and in 1558 was united with the kingdom of Naples. Bari's Castello was built in 1160 and, like that at Brindisi, is of that grim militant aspect which bespeaks, if not deeds of romance, at least those of valour. In the Piazza Mercanto is a great bronze lion wearing an exaggerated dog-collar on which is inscribed the "Custos Justitiæ," the heraldic motto and device of the city. Manfredonia, Termoli, Ortona and Pescara are all of them charming Adriatic towns, each and all possessed of vivid reminders of the days of the corsairs, adventurers and pirate Saracen hordes. Their battlemented walls and castles still exist in the real, and little of twentieth century progress has, as yet, made its mark upon them. Mythology, history and romance have here combined. Ancona is not included in every one's Italian itinerary. This is the more to be regretted in that it is very accessible, not only by road but by rail from Ravenna or Perugia, or by sea, in eight or ten hours, from Venice. The city of fifty thousand inhabitants, with a Ghetto of six thousand Jews, is beautifully situated on an amphitheatre of hills overlooking the Adriatic. The mole which encloses its harbour supports two triumphal arches, making a sort of monumental water-gate unequalled by anything similar in all the world. One of these arches was erected by the Roman Senate in 122, to the honour of Trajan, and the other in honour of Pope Clement XII in 1740. Trajan undoubtedly deserved the honour. It was he who was the first to hold that "it was better a thousand guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned." When he appointed Subarranus Captain of the Guard, he presented him, according to custom, with a drawn sword, saying, as he handed it, these memorable words: "_Pro me, si merear, in me_" ("Use this sword for me: If I deserve it, against me"). It is good to know that men like these may have memorial arches as well as mere cut-throat conquerors. [Illustration: _Trajan's Arch, Ancona_] Every student of Italian architecture knows Piranesi's drawing of the famous Trajan arch at Ancona. It was more truthful than many of his drawings of Roman antiquities, and might indeed have been made in these latter years, for little is changed on Ancona's seafront. There is at Ancona a memory of Filippo Lippi, a monkish draughtsman of great ability, a contemporary of the better known Fra Angelico. Once he set out on the blue waters of the Adriatic, from the very steps below the Arch of Trajan where the waves lap to-day, for a little sail. Like many people who make excursions in boats, he was unskilful, and worse, for, drifting out to sea, he was in due time picked up by a Barbary pirate and next put foot on shore in Africa. He drew the pirate chief's portrait on the wall of his prison, and in spite of the interdiction of the Koran, the Moor was pleased and gave the Fra his liberty forthwith, taking him back to within sight of Trajan's arch, when he was precipitately put over side and made to swim ashore, the pirate returning from whence he came. Senegallia, between Ancona and Pesaro, was an appanage of the Dukes of Urbino. It is an enchanting, unworldly little town, even to-day, its great protecting walls pierced by six gateways, the same through which a whole hierarchy of conquerors passed in the long ago. It is a place of dreams, if one is given to that sort of thing. The Mediæval Palazzo Communal is still in evidence, and the little creek-like harbour is full of wobbly little boats with painted masts and sails, all most quaint. Behind are the gentle slopes of vine-clad hills shutting out the western world beyond. Pesaro, the ancient Pisaurum, is the capital of the united provinces of Pesaro and Urbino. The Malatesta, the Sforza and the Rovere families all ruled its destinies in their time, and the little capital came to be a literary and art centre which, in a small way, rivalled its more opulent compeers. Pesaro's ducal palace is, in a way, a monument to the Queen Lucrezia Borgia, as is the rude fortress of the walls a memory of Giovanni Sforza, her first husband. At the age of twenty-six, Giovanni married the daughter of Alessandro Borgia, who was but thirteen, and brought his bride forthwith, blessed with the Papal benediction, to this bijou of a palace where fêtes and merrymakings of a most prodigal sort went on for many nights and days. [Illustration: _Castel Malatesta, Rimini_] Back to the coast and one comes to Rimini, the southern terminus of the Via Æmilia. Rimini's Arco d'Augusto was erected as a memorial to the great Augustus in 27 B. C. The Ponte d'Augusto, too, is a monument of the times, which date back nearly nineteen centuries. It was begun in the last year of the life of Augustus. The Palazzo del Comune contains the municipal picture-gallery, and before it stands a bronze statue of Pope Paul V, but the greatest interest lies in the contemplation of the now ruined and dilapidated Castel Malatesta. Its walls are grim and sturdy still, but it is nothing but a hollow mockery of a castle to-day, as it has been relegated to use as a prison and stripped of all its luxurious belongings of the days of the Malatesta. The family arms in cut stone still appear above the portal. The chief figure of Rimini's old time portrait gallery was the famous Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, a man of exquisite taste, a patron of the arts, a sincere lover of beauty. From Rimini to Ravenna, still within sight of the Adriatic's waves, is some fifty kilometres by road or rail, through a low, marshy, unwholesome-looking region, half aquatic, half terrestrial. La Pineta, or the Pine Forest, the same whose praises were sung by Dante, Boccaccio, Dryden and Byron, and which supplied the timber for the Venetian ships of the Republic's heyday is in full view from Ravenna's walls. Boccaccio made the Pineta the scene of his singular tale, "Nostagio degli Onesti"; the incidents of which, ending in the amorous conversion of the ladies of Ravenna, have been made familiar to the English reader by Dryden's adoption of them in his "Theodore and Honoria." "Where the last Cæsarean fortress stood, Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground." Ravenna sits grim and proud in the very midst of wide, flat, marshy plains across which straight arrow-like roads roll out seemingly interminable kilometres to the joy of the automobilist and the despair of the traveller with a hired hack. The region between Ravenna and the sea is literally half land, half water, marshes partitioned off by canals and pools stretching away in every direction. It is lone and strange, but it is not sad and above all is most impressive. Turn out of any of Ravenna's great gates and the aspect is invariably the same. Great ox-carts, peasants in the fields and, far away, the brown sails of the Adriatic fishing boats are the only punctuating notes of a landscape which is anything but gay and lively. It is as Holland under a mediæval sun, for mostly the sun shines brilliantly here, which it does not in the Low Countries. Ravenna was the ancient capital of the Occidental Roman Empire, but to-day, in its marshy site, the city is in anything but the proud estate it once occupied. The aspect of the whole city is as weird and strange as that of its site. It is of far too great an area for the few thousand pallid mortals who live there. It has ever been a theatre of crime, disaster and disappointment, but its very walls and gateways echo a mysterious and penetrating charm. It possesses, even to-day, though more or less in fragments it is true, many structures dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, though of its old Palace of the Cæsars but a few crumbled stones remain. Ravenna is the home of the classic typical Christian architecture which went out broadcast through Europe in the middle ages. The Palace of Theodoric hardly exists as a ruin, but some poor ugly stone piers are commonly granted the dignity of once having belonged to it, as well as an ancient wall of brick. Theodoric's tomb is in La Rotonda, a kilometre or more from Ravenna in the midst of a vineyard. The earliest portrait in Ravenna's great gallery of notables is that of Theodoric, an art-loving ruler, an enlightened administrator, with simple, devout ideas, and a habit of nightly vigils. Ravenna was to him a world, a rich golden world, polished yet primitive. Aside from its magnificent churches, Ravenna's monuments are not many or great. There is Theodoric's Palace before mentioned, the Archiepiscopal Palace, a restored work of the sixteenth century, and the Palazzo Governativo built in the eighteenth century, with many splendid fragments--columns and the like--of an earlier period incorporated therein. On the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele are two great granite columns, erected in 1484 by the Venetians, and some fragments of a colonnade or loggia which may be a part of the Hall of Justice of Theodoric's time. [Illustration: _Palazzo di Teodorico, Ravenna_] [Illustration: Column to Gaston de Foix, Ravenna] The tomb of Dante is near the church of San Francesco. It is an uncouth shrine which covers the poet's remains, but it ranks high among those of its class from more sincere motives than those which usually induce one to rave over more pompous and more splendid charms. "_Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar_," sang Byron. Northward from Ravenna, but in roundabout fashion whether one goes by road or rail is Comacchio. Comacchio is four kilometres from the Adriatic and forty-four from Ferrara. Ariosto called the inhabitants:-- ".... _gente desiosa Che il mar si turbi e sieno i venti atroci_," but this need not deter the seeker after new sensations from going there to see them catch eels on a wholesale plan, and handle them afterwards in a manner of cleanliness and with a rapidity which is truly marvellous. They are caught by wholesale, and a _tagliatore_ armed with a useful-looking hatchet called a _manarino_ chops them into pieces called _morelli_. After this the eels are cooked on a great open-fire spit and finally packed in boiling oil, like the little fishes of the Breton coast, and ultimately sold and served as _hors d'oeuvres_ in Italian restaurants the world over. North of Comacchio on the shore of a Venetian lagoon is Chioggia. Chioggia has no great architectural or historical monuments, but is as paintable as Venice itself; indeed, it is a little brother to Venice, but lacking its splendour and great palaces. Its quay-side Madonna is venerated by all the fishing folk round about. Venice early conquered Chioggia and in turn the Genoese came along and took it from their rival in 1379, though the Venetians within the year got it back again. With such a fate ever hanging over it, Chioggia had not great encouragement to build great palaces and so its inhabitants turned to fishing and have always kept at it. Unless one is crossing direct from Florence to Venice, by the Futa Pass and Bologna, Ferrara, as a stopping place on one's Italian itinerary, is best reached from Ravenna. The road is flat, generally well-conditioned and covers a matter of seventy kilometres, mostly within sight of the sea or lagoons, more like Holland even than the country through which one has recently passed. [Illustration: _The Madonna of Chioggia_] Of all the romantic Renaissance shrines of Italy none have a more potent attraction than Ferrara. The Ferrara of the Middle Ages, like the Ferrara of to-day, is a paradox. No Italian State of similar power and magnificence ever exerted such disproportionate influence upon mediæval Italy; no city in United Italy in which are so combined the fascinating treasures of the past and modern political and industrial enterprise is so ignored by the casual traveller. Once the strongest post on the frontier of the Papal States, the seat of the House of Este, the abiding place of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, and the final marital home of Lucrezia Borgia, the golden period of its sixteenth century magnificence has sunk into an isolation unheeded by contingent development, and its inhabitants have shrunken to a bare third of their former numbers. The ducal family of Este lived the life of the times to the limit of their powers. They, one and all, inherited a taste for crimes of various shades, just as they inherited the love of art. Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, had no profound moral sense in spite of his finer instincts, and was so "liberal minded" that he shocked Bayard, the "_chevalier sans peur et sans reproche_," into crossing himself "more than ten times" as an antidote, when he first came into the ducal presence. [Illustration: _From a frieze in the Palazzo, at Ferrara_] Ferrara's castello or castel vecchio, which is better known as its ducal château, is a remarkable specimen of military architecture. On Saint Michael's Day, 1385, its first stones were put in place by Bartolina di Novara, and the ardour of the workmen was so great that at the end of sixteen months the work was completed as it is to-day, with its towers, its doubly thick walls, and all its brutal force. [Illustration: _Ferrara_] A fosse surrounds the edifice, and two gateways only give access to the interior. Under Alphonso I certain embellishments were added to the old castle, bringing it up to the times in luxurious decorative details and the like. The rude feudal castle now became virtually a residential château. The crenelated battlements were transformed into mere parapets, the _chemins de ronde_ into terraces and hanging gardens. Pictures and frescoes were at this time added liberally, and, though to-day many of these have been dispersed to the four corners of Europe, enough remain to indicate the importance of these new embellishments. The cachots or dungeon cells still exist, and are regarded--by the guardian--as one of the chief "sights." Some others may think differently. The house of Ariosto is one of Ferrara's most popular attractions, though indeed it is not remarkable architecturally. Ariosto was one of the brilliant figures of the Ferrara court, but his house was modest and bare, as is remarked by a tablet which it bore in the poet's time, and on which was carved in Latin: "My house is small but was built for my own convenience and entirely with my own money." How many householders of to-day can say the same? In the hospital in the southern quarter of the town is still to be seen the prison cell commonly assigned to Tasso. On the walls are scribbled the names of Lord Byron and Casimir Delavigne and Lamartine's verses on Tasso, and over the door runs the inscription-- +---------------------------------------------+ | "INGRESSO ALLA PRIGIONE DI TORQUATO TASSO." | +---------------------------------------------+ For seven years and more Tasso lived within these four narrow walls. "Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets Whose symmetry was not for solitude, There seems as 'twere a curse upon the seats Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood Of Este.... * * * * * And Tasso is their glory and their shame." "_Childe Harold._" Closely bound with Ferrara and the fortunes of the family of Este is the town of that name midway between Ferrara and Padua at the foot of the Euganean Hills. The ancestral residence of the family of Este is here, but in a more or less ruinous state to-day. The "Rocca" or Castle of Este was erected in 1343 by Ulbertino Carrara, and repaired by the Scaligers during their temporary possession of it. It is a noble dungeon tower, with frowning embrasures and battlements, and stands at least upon the site of the original fortress. Alberto Azzo (born 996) was the more immediate founder of the house here on the death of the Emperor Henry III. The ancestry of Alberto may be traced in history to Bonifazio, Duke or Marquis of Tuscany, in 811. Poetry carries it much higher. The magician, in the vision of the enchanted shield, enables Rinaldo to behold Caius Attius as his remote ancestor:-- "Mostragli Caio allor, ch'a strane genti Va prima in preda il gia inclinato Impero, Prendere il fren de' popoli volenti, E farsi d'Este il Principe primiero; E a lui ricoverarsi i men potenti Vicini, a cui Rettor facea mestiero, Poscia, quando ripassi il varco noto, A gli inviti d'Honorio il fero Goto." --_Orlando Furioso._ Guelph, Duke of Bavaria (succeeded 1071), from whom all the branches of the House of Brunswick are descended, was the son of Alberto Azzo, Marquis of Este, by his first wife, Cunegunda, a princess of the Suabian line. Fulco I, Marquis of Italy and Lord of Este, the son of Alberto Azzo by his second wife, Garisenda, daughter of Herbert, Count of Maine, was the founder of the Italian branch from which the Dukes of Ferrara and Modena descended, the male line of which became extinct at the end of the last century. The Duke of Modena, who was deposed in the mid-nineteenth century, represented the house of Este in the female line,--his grandmother, Maria Beatrix, having been the last descendant of the Italian branch. Este continued in the possession of the descendants of Alberto until 1294, when it fell an easy conquest to the Carraras. Successively a dependency of Padua and of the Verona Scaligers, it passed to Venice in 1405, retaining its local government and municipal institutions. Near Este is Arqua, where Petrarch died in 1374. It has been a literary shrine since 1650, for a chronicler of that time remarks it as one of the things to come to Italy to see. The house is still to be seen, and the sarcophagus containing his remains and an inscription beginning-- "_Frigida Francisci lopis hic tegit ossa Petrarce_" is before the tiny church of this little frequented and little exploited village. [Illustration: Casa del Petrarca, Arqua] CHAPTER XV ON THE VIA ÆMILIA The Via Æmilia of antiquity is a wonder to-day, or would be if it were kept in a little better repair. As it is, it is as good a road as any "good road" in Italy, and straight as an arrow, as it runs boldly from the Adriatic at Rimini to Piacenza, through the ancient States of Bologna, Modena and Parma. No automobilist who ever rolls off its length of 262 kilometres will class it as inferior to any other Italian road of its class. The following categorical mention of the cities and towns on this great Roman way presents their varied charms in a sufficient number, surely, to make the hurried north or southbound traveller think it worth while to zigzag about a bit, in going from Florence to Venice, in order to visit them all. The first place of note after leaving Rimini is Cesana--"She whose flank is washed by Savio's wave," Dante wrote. Cesana is full of reminders of the profligate Cæsar Borgia. The library of Cesana was famous in mediæval times and held its head high among the city's other glories. Above all was the famous Rocca of Cesana, a fortress château of great strength in days when feudal lords needed a warren into which they might run and hide at every league. The Palazzo Publico is a square, sturdy, none too lovely building with some notable pictures within, and a statue of Pius VII, who was a native of the place. In the stirring times of the pontificate of Gregorius XI, the Avignon Pope sent a cut-throat Cardinal into Italy at the head of a band of soldiery who entered and pillaged Cesana in 1377. His cry at the head of his troops was ever: "Blood! more blood! Kill! Kill! Kill!" A nice sort of a man for a Cardinal Prince of the Church! The highroad between Cesana and Rimini passes through the valley of the Rubicon. Mule tracks, sloping hills and olive groves are the chief characteristics of this vale, the spot where Cæsar apocryphally crossed the Rubicon. Historians up to Montesquieu's time seemed to take it for granted, but latterly it has been denied. Forli and Imola were the principal towns of Romagna, the patrimony of Catherine Sforza and Girolamo Riario, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. When the new married pair first came to their little State from Rome the Renaissance was at its height, and the ambitious bride sought, so far as possible, to surround herself with its splendours. Their reign in the east was not happy; Girolamo proved a tyrant, and was promptly assassinated by his followers, leaving Catherine and her five children completely in the power of his murderers, who made her give up her claims to her little kingdom. She consented, or pretended to consent. She conspired with the Governor of the fortress, Tommaso Feo, and appeared on its ramparts dressed as a warrior. She refused to surrender, and when it was recalled that she had left her children behind as hostages she cruelly replied: "In time I shall have others." Catherine Sforza was a bloodthirsty vixen, surely. Forli was Catherine Sforza's own city, and her defence of it against the Borgias was one of the celebrated sieges of history. She held out two years, and then only gave in because she was betrayed. Her very reason of warring with the Borgias reflects greatly on her credit. She refused simply to allow her son to marry the aging Lucrezia; "not so much on account of her age," said Catherine, "as her morals." Princely marriages are often carried out on different lines to-day. Almost within sight of Forli is Faënza, a city which was under the domination of the Manfredi when Cæsar Borgia took it into his head to move against it. A young prince by the name of Astor III, but eighteen years of age, beloved by all for his amiability, grace and youth, held its future in his hands. When the key of Faënza, Brisighella, fell to the Borgia's captain of artillery in the early days of November in 1500, the emperor-like Cæsar himself came forward and took command. He offered life to the dwellers within the walls if they would surrender, but they would have none of it, for, as the Borgia wrote in a letter to the Duc d'Urbino, dated from "the pontifical camp before Faënza," a "dramatic defence was made by the citizens of the town." This "dramatic defence" was such that it compelled Borgia and his papal soldiers to go into winter quarters. The struggle was the longest that Borgia had yet undertaken in his campaigns, and the women of Faënza, as did Catherine Sforza at Forli, covered themselves with glory. A daughter of a soldier of the garrison, Diamante Jovelli, put herself at the head of a band of Amazons who took entire charge of the commissariat, the handling of the munitions of war, and served as sentinels, repairing the walls even when breached--rough work for women. "The women of Faënza have saved the honour of Italy," wrote Isabella d'Este in 1501 to her husband, the Duke of Mantua, and Cæsar Borgia himself committed himself to paper with the following words: "Would that I had an entire army of the women of Faënza." The city fell in due time, and the crafty Cæsar honoured the gallant Manfredi, "crowned with the laurels of valour and misfortune," by allowing him "a guard of honour and all his proper dignities." Later the Borgia repented of his generosity, and sent the young and gallant prince to Rome, and imprisoned him in the Castle of Sant'Angelo for a year. Faënza is a very ancient town, and less populous to-day than it was fifty years ago, when also it was less populous than it was five hundred years ago. Imola, the seventh place of importance on the Æmilian itinerary counting from Rimini, was the ancient Forum Cornelii, but by Charlemagne's time it had already become known by its present name. In the middle ages Imola's geographical position, midway between Bologna and Romagna, made it an important acquisition in the contests for power. It was successfully held by many different chiefs, and was united to the States of the Church under Julius II. As one of the stations on the Æmilian Way, it was a place of some importance; it is mentioned by Cicero, and by Martial:-- "Si veneris unde requiret, Æmiliæ dices de regione viæ. Si quibus in terris, qua simus in urbe rogabit, Corneli referas me, licet, esse Foro." The fortress château of Imola was almost identical in form with that of Forli, quadrilateral with four great towers at the angles, and a crenelated battlement at the skyline. Cæsar Borgia brought this fortress to ignoble surrender in 1499, but since the fortress was then quite independent of the city he had still another task before him before the inhabitants actually came within his powers. A fortnight after the capture of the fortress the city itself fell. Imola was a part of the marriage _dot_ of Catherine Sforza, who confided its defence to Dionigi di Naldo while she busied herself at Forli, where she reigned as widow and inheritor of Riario Sforza. On towards Bologna one passes Castel San Pietro, a thirteenth century fortified town still sleeping its dull time away since no war or rumours of war give it concern. Quaderna, even less progressive and important to-day than its neighbour, was the important station of Claternum in the days when traffic on the great Æmilian way was greater than now. Bologna's towers and domes loom large on the horizon as one draws up on this great capital from any direction. Bologna, because of its easy access, is one of the popular tourist points of Italy, and for that reason it is omitted from nobody's itinerary, though most hurried travellers remember the _mortadella_ better than they do the cathedral, which in truth is nothing very fine so far as architectural masterpieces go. The roads in and out of Bologna are quite the best to be found neighbouring upon a large city in Italy. They shall not be described further, the mere statement that this is so should be taken as sufficient praise. The streets within the gates too, though paved, are splendidly straight and smooth, though encumbered at one or two awkward corners with tram tracks. The visitor to Bologna may take his ease at the Hotel Brun, quite the most _distinguished_ hotel in all Italy, not even excepting Daniellis or the Grand at Venice, each of them a palazzo of long ago. [Illustration: BOLOGNA (diagram)] The Hotel Brun is a red brick palace of imposing presence, with a delightful courtyard where you may stable your automobile along side of those of most of the touring nobility of Europe at a cost of two and a half francs a night. The hotel in spite of this is excellent in every way. Bologna is surrounded by a city wall pierced by twelve gateways and thus well preserves its mediæval effect in spite of its theatres, cafés and restaurants, which are decidedly modern and unlovely. Bologna when it was conquered by the Gauls took the name of Bononia. Under Charlemagne it became a free city and had for its device the equivalent of the word Liberty. Bologna, the ancient city, proud in the middle ages and independent always, has ever been the cradle of disturbing factions, a revolutionary precursor of new ideas, and has been sold and sold again by first one Judas and then another. Bologna is, taking its history, its present day prosperity and its still existing mediæval monuments into consideration, the most impressive and imposing of all the secondary cities of Italy, indeed in many of the things that impress the traveller it is ahead, far ahead, of Florence. Paul Van Herle, a fifteenth century Dutchman, first called the city _Bologna la Grassa_ because of the opulency of the good things of the table which might be had here. Its wines and its grapes are superlative, and its _mortadella_, or Bologna sausage, is, to many, a delicacy without an equal. [Illustration: _The Leaning Towers of Bologna_] Bologna seems to have a specialty of leaning towers, though the school histories and geographies always use that of Pisa to illustrate those architectural curiosities. Their histories are very romantic, and the mere fact that they are out of perpendicular takes nothing away from their charm. The two leaning brick towers of Bologna's Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, the Torri Asinelli and the Torri Gorisenda, the first nearly a hundred metres in height and the latter about half that height, are two of the most remarkable structures ever erected by the hand of man. The Asinelli tower was built in 1109, and its neighbour, which never achieved its completion, in the following year. From Bologna to Modena is thirty-two kilometres and midway is Castel Franco or Forte Urbano, as it is variously known. It was formerly the Forum Gallorum of the Romans and still has its _castel_ little changed from what it was in the days when Urban VIII built it. Modena is mostly confounded by hurried travellers with Modane, though the latter is merely a railway junction where one is tumbled out in the middle of the night to make his peace with railway and customs officials. Modena's Palazzo Ducale, now the Palazzo Reale, was and is a vast, gaudy construction, not lovely but overpowering with a certain crude grandeur. A military school has now turned it to practical use. It never could have been good for much else. A picture gallery and Cæsar d'Este's famous library are quartered in the Albergo Arti, built by the Duke Francesco III in the seventeenth century. The library _Biblioteca Estense_ was brought from Ferrara in 1598 by Cæsar d'Este on his expulsion by Clement VIII. It contained 100,000 volumes and 3,000 MSS. Three of the most learned men in Italy during the last century--Zaccaria, Tiraboschi and Muratori--were its librarians. Amongst the treasures were a gospel of the third century, a Dante with miniature of the fourteenth century, a collection of several hundred Provençal poems, etc. Modena was the birthplace of Mary of Modena, the fascinating princess who became the Italian Queen of the English people, the consort of James II. She was an Italian Princess of the house of Este. Her mother was the Duchess Laura of Modena, daughter of Count Martinozzi and Margaret Mazarini, cousin of the great Cardinal Mazarin, and she was married, under his auspices, at the Chapel Royal of Compiègne, in 1655, by proxy, to Alfonso d'Este, hereditary Prince, and afterwards Duke Alfonso IV of Modena. When Lord Peterborough, the envoy of the Duke of York, was shown the portrait of the Princess Mary he saw "a young Creature about Fourteen years of Age; but such a light of Beauty, such Characters of Ingenuity and Goodness as it surprised him, and fixt upon his Phancy that he had found his Mistress, and the Fortune of England." He made every effort to meet her personally, but in vain; so he was introduced, "by means such as might seem accidental," to the Abbé Rizzini, who was employed at Paris to negotiate the interests of the House of Este. This man attributed "many excellencies to Mary of Modena, yet he endeavoured to make them useless" to them by saying that she and her mother wished that she might take the veil. It was later learned that obstacles were put in the Duke of York's way until he announced his willingness to become a Roman Catholic. Reggio in Æmilia, passed on the road to Parma, is a snug little town, supposedly the birthplace of Ariosto. A house so marked compels popular admiration, but again it is possible that he was born within the citadel, since razed. [Illustration: PARMA] The Duchies of Parma and Modena counted little in the political balance in their day, but the fêtes and spectacles of their courts were frequently brilliant. The Duchy of Parma and of Piacenza was created in 1545 by the Pope Paul III for his son Pietro Farnese. Little of Parma's mediæval character remains to-day. The town is said to have been called Parma from its similarity to the form of a shield. But the torrent Parma, which runs through the city, crossed by three bridges, besides the railway bridge, most probably gave its name to the city which arose upon the banks. When the city was under the authority of the Popes it was represented by a female figure sitting on a pile of shields, and holding a figure of Victory, with the inscription of _Parma aurea_. Let the heraldic students figure out any solution of the incident that they please, or are able. The Via Æmilia divides the city, by means of the Strada Mæstra, into two very nearly equal parts. Parma, like Modena and Lucca, has changed its fortification walls into boulevards, called "Stradone," which are the favourite rendezvous for Parmesan high society when it goes out for a stroll. Near Parma is Canossa, the site of an old fortified town, one day of considerable importance, but now decayed beyond hope. Here the Emperor Henry IV, bareheaded and barefooted, supplicated Pope Gregory V in 1077, an incident of history not yet forgotten by the annalists of church and state. Soon after leaving Parma the Roman road crosses the river Taro, the boundary frontier which shut off the Gaulish from the Ligurian tribes. The Brothers of the Bridge here built a great work of masonry in 1170, obtaining money for the expense of the work by begging from the travellers passing to and fro on the Æmilian Way. In time this old bridge was carried away, and for centuries a ferry boat served the purpose, until, in fact, the present structure came into being. Borgo San Donino, some twenty kilometres beyond the Taro, marks the shrine of San Donino, a soldier in the army of Maximilian who became a Christian and refused to worship as commanded by his Emperor. For this he was put to death on this spot, and for ever after Borgo San Donino has been one of the most frequented places of pilgrimage in Italy. Fiorenzuola, still on the Via Æmilia, a dozen kilometres farther on, has still an old tower to which hang fragments of an enormous chain by which criminals once were bound and swung aloft. All through this fertile, abundant region through which runs the famous Roman Road are numerous little _borgos_, or villages, bearing names famous in the history of Italy and its contemporary minor states. Piacenza was founded by the Gauls and was afterwards by the Romans named Placentia. It has ever prospered, though its career has been fraught more than once with danger of extinction. By the tenth century its great trading fair was famous throughout Europe. [Illustration: PIACENZA] Piacenza is full of palaces, statues and monuments which merit the consideration of all serious minded persons, but the automobilist who has made the last fifty kilometres of the Via Æmilia in the rain--and how much it does rain in Italy only one who has travelled there by road for weeks really appreciates--is first concerned as to where he may lay his head and house his car free from harm. The Grand Hotel San Marco answers his needs well enough and has the endorsement of the Touring Club de France as well as that of the Italian Touring Club, but it is ridiculous that one is obliged to pay in a smug little Italian town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants five francs a night for housing his automobile. Piacenza is on the direct road to the Italian Lakes via Milan, from which it is distant seventy kilometres. CHAPTER XVI IN VENETIA The mainland background of Venice, in its most comprehensive sense the region lying north of the Po and south and west of the Austrian frontier, is not a much-travelled region by any class of tourists in Italy. The traveller by rail usually comes up from Bologna and Florence and, with a stop at Padua, makes for Venice forthwith and leaves for the Italian lake region, stopping en route at Verona. The automobilist too often does the thing even more precipitately, by taking Padua and Verona flying, or at least while he is stopping to replenish the inner man or the inner claims of his automobile. Certain readers of this book who may perhaps have done the thing a little more thoroughly may claim that this is an exaggeration, and so far as it applies to their particular case it may be, but the writer honestly believes that it fits astonishingly well with the majority of Italian itineraries in these parts. He bases this on the fact that he has seen tourists in droves in Padua and Verona, and he has not seen one in Este, Monselice, Battaglia, or even in Vicenza, Treviso, Asolo or Udine. [Illustration: PADUA] Verona, Vicenza and Padua were the capitals of three of the eight ancient provinces of Venezia. Padua is built in the midst of a vast plain which merits being called Italian-Flanders. In everything but climate it is like a section of the Low Countries, and the city, with its domes and towers, looms up over the low-lying plain, faint and ghostly from afar, like a mirage of the desert. Canals and fortress walls enclose the city even to-day, and the nearer one approaches, until one actually sees it from within the walls, the less and less Padua becomes like Italy. The greatest interest of Padua centres undoubtedly in its church of Sant'Antonio, dedicated to the pious companion of Francis of Assisi; after that the University which numbered among its masters Erasmus, Mantius and Galileo, and among its students Dante, Tasso and Petrarch. Padua is intimately associated with the name of Petrarch by reason of his having been a student here. Petrarch died before Chaucer's time, but the Florentine's fame had gone afield and from the "Clerk's Tale" one recalls the following: "Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete, Highte this clerk, whose rethorike sweet Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye." Padua in spite of its low lying situation is monumental at every turn. They had courage, the old builders, to plant great buildings down in the morass, and faith to believe they would last as long as they have. On Padua's great Piazzas--there are three of them, one leading out of the other--rise the chief civic buildings of mediæval times. The Loggia del Consiglio is an astonishingly ample Renaissance work of an early period, access to its great hall being by a monumental exterior stairway. An ancient column, with a San Marco lion is immediately in front. The Palazzo Capitano, with its sky piercing clock tower of the fourteenth century, was formerly the residence of the Venetian Governor, and the Palazzo della Ragione, known as Il Salone, contains one of the vastest single roofed apartments known. There is a long unobstructed corridor in the mosque of Saint Sophia at Constantinople which holds the record in its line, but the Salone of Padua, built in 1420, is pre-eminent in superficial area. The ancient Palace of the Carrera, tyrants of Padua, is one of the things that burn themselves in the mind from the sheer inability of one to overlook them. When one sees the colossal frescoes of the Entrance Hall one repeats unconsciously the dictum of Victor Hugo over Madame Dorval--the beautiful Madame Dorval: _Je ne veux pas mourir_. It is the fashion to quote Dante and Byron and Shelley in Italy, but a little of Alfred de Musset is a cheerful relief. Here are some of his lines on Padua: [Illustration: In Padua] "Padoue est un fort bel endroit Où de très-grands docteurs en droit On fait merveille; Mais j'aime mieux la polenta Qu'on mange aux bords de la Brenta Sous un treille." The Albergo Fanti-Stella d'Oro at Padua is all sufficient as a tourist hotel, but lacks a good deal of what a hotel for automobilists should be. There is accommodation for one's automobile in the coach house, but it evidently is a separately owned concern, for when you come to take your auto out you will be followed like a thief when you try to explain that you prefer to pay the garage charges when you pay your hotel bill. You may eat _à la carte_ in the hotel restaurant at any hour, and you may have a room across the way in the annex, a better room and for a smaller price than you can have at the Albergo itself. Altogether this opera bouffe hotel is neither bad nor good, and most confusing as to its personnel and their conduct. They need to have a "Who's Who," printed in German, French and English to put into the hands of each guest on arrival. The automobilist has not yet reached Venice. The nearest that he may come to it is to Mestre, where he may garage his automobile in any one of half a dozen palatial establishments especially devoted to the purpose. Mestre, of absolutely no rank whatever as a city of art or architecture or sights for the tourist, has more automobile garages than any other city in Italy. The splendour of Venice is undeniable, whether one takes note of its unique architecture or of its remarkable site. Men with courage to build gilded and marble palaces on a half submerged chain of isles scarce above the level of the sea do not live to-day. How well these early builders planned is evinced by the fact that Venice the magnificent exists to-day as it always has existed--all but the Campanile. The fall of this shows what may happen some day to the rest of this regal city. When? No one knows. Men conquered the morass in the first instance. Can they hold it in subjection into eternity? Venice with all its gorgeousness is just the least bit _triste_. Not a tree worthy of the name, not a garden or a farm yard, not a cart or a horse--and not an automobile is to be found within its purlieus. One is as if in prison. A watery barrier surrounds one on every side. The sea, always the sea, mostly mirror-like or gently lapping its waves at your very feet--and black gondolas everywhere. Yes, Venice is gorgeous, if you like, but how sad it is also! The greatness of Venice dates from the time of the fourth crusade and the taking of Constantinople. It was then that the Venetian ships became the chief carriers between the east and the west; its vessels exported the surplus wealth of the Lombard plain, and brought in return not only the timber and stone of Istria and Dalmatia, but the manufactured wares of Christian Constantinople, wines of the Greek isles, and the Oriental silks, carpets, and spices of Mohammedan Egypt, Arabia and Bagdad. There used to be an old time saying at Venice that if the Isthmus of Suez were pierced with a canal the glory of Venice would once more shine on the commercial world as well as shed its radiance over those who live in the sphere of art. The Suez Canal has come, but prophets are not infallible, and the present maritime glory of the Adriatic lies with Trieste and Fiume, with Venice a shadowy fifth or sixth in the whole of Italy. It is an historic fact that may well be repeated here, that Venice, more than any other city of Italy, has ever been noted for its passion for amusements and unconventional pleasures. "For quite half of the year," said Montesquieu, "everybody wears a masque; manners are very free and the passion for gaming immense." A more vivid description of all this Venetian disregard for convention may be found in the memoirs of the Venetian adventurer Casanova. The visitor to Venice must seek out for himself the things that interest him, with the aid of his guide-book, his hotel porter or his gondolier. Not all its splendours can be pointed out here; the record of the author and artist is a personal record; others if they will may choose a different itinerary. The greatest fascination of all in Venice is undoubtedly the gondola, though the motor boat is pushing it hard for a place, and there be those matter-of-fact hurried tourists who prefer the practicality of the latter to the simplicity and romance of the former. The gondola still reigns however, and probably always will. It's an asset for drawing tourists as potent as the lions or horses of San Marco or the pigeons of the Piazzas. The Venetian cannot step without his door without taking a gondola, for his promenade on the Grand Canal, to cross to the Lido, or to go to church when he marries and when he dies. The gondola is as much a part of the daily life of the Venetian as is the street car or the omnibus elsewhere. Though it doesn't look it, the gondola is the most manageable craft propelled by man. It snakes in and out of crooked waterways and comes to a landing with far less fuss than anything ever pushed by steam or gasoline. All the same they are not as swift, though their pace is astonishing when one considers their bulk and weight. It has been the fashion to laud the sweet idealism of the gondola and all that appertains thereto, not forgetting the gondolier, but when one has heard that backwater sailor's cajoleries and cadences beneath his window for most of the long night one's views in the morning will be considerably modified. "Cousin of my dog!" the gondolier will call his gondola, "Owl!" "Idiot!" "Sheriff of the Devil!" "Silly Ass!" "Miscreant of Rhodes!" and "Bag of Bones." Such epithets shouted full and strong, if only to an inanimate gondola, will take a good deal of idealism out of nature. With the Venetian palaces and churches and canals rank in popular interest its great piazzas. The importance of these great open spaces in the daily life of the people of the island city cannot be overestimated. Gaiety, noise and life are the characteristics of each, whether one is at San Marco or on the Rialto. Gastronomical delights in Italy are largely of one's own choosing. At Venice, where, of Italian cities, the tourist is most largely catered to, one may fare well or ill. It's a great experience to sit at one of the little tables at Florian's, or at the Aurora on the opposite side of the Piazza of San Marco, and leisurely enjoy the spectacle spread out before one. At any time of the day or night it is the most burning, feverish spot in all the Venetian archipelago, though at midday, it is true, the sun-baked Piazza is deserted, even by the pigeons. In the afternoon, as the shadows lengthen, and a slim suspicion of a sea-breeze wafts in from the lagunes, it is fairyland, peopled, if not with fairyfolk, at least with as conglomerate a horde as may be seen in Europe. As a performance the piece were almost worthy of its setting; it is a burlesque and a comedy of manners in one. If only you are "out of season," when the English and Americans and Germans are still by their own firesides, and the cast of characters is made up of the peoples of the south and east, the comedy is all the more amusing, and you sip its charms as you sip your coffee and forget that such a personage as Baedeker ever existed. Usually tourists come to the Piazza, after they have done the surrounding stock sights, to buy two soldi-worth of maize and feed the pigeons. They would do better to watch the passing show from the vantage point of a little table at Florian's. Besides its treasures of art and architecture, one of the sights of Venice is Florian's, celebrated for a hundred and fifty years. The specialty of Florian's is the _sabaion doro_, made with the yellow of an egg and a small glass of Malaga. It is not bad, but it is a ladies' drink, for it is sweet. The _sorbets_, the café turc' and the vanilla chocolates of the establishment, with the aforementioned golden concoction, have placed it in the very front rank among establishments of its class. It remains open, or did a few years ago, all night. At five o'clock each morning, as the daylight gun went off from the fortress of the Lido, Florian's put up its shutters, only to open just before midday. The names of the great who have gathered within the walls of this famous café, and left memories behind them, would fill a long roster. Chateaubriand, Manzoni, Byron, Cimarosa, Canova, Léopold-Robert, Alfred de Musset, Balzac and others, many, many others. And many have left behind written souvenirs of their visit. One thing the stranger to Venice will remark, and that is that here, as much as in any other place in Italy, one is pestered nearly to distraction with the little "extras" of their hotel bills, of the too-importunate guides, of door-openers and door shutters, of guardians of all ranks, of men and boys who call your gondola for you, and of mendicant ragamuffins by profession, or merely because occasion offered and you looked like an "easy mark." It is the one blight on Venice. The modest inns of other days have given way to the demands of a more exacting clientèle, but those who would follow Alfred de Musset and George Sand from the Palace of the Doges to the Hotel Danieli will have no trouble in getting a lodging in that hostelry. Or they may prefer to follow the footsteps of Chateaubriand (who in truth was anticipating a rendezvous with the Duchesse de Berry) to the neighbouring Hotel de l'Europe. [Illustration: PALACES _of the GRAND CANAL_ VENICE] Venice's Grand Canal is naturally the chief delight of the visiting stranger. The Canalazzo is from fifty to seventy metres wide with a length of three kilometres. A hundred and fifty or more palaces line its banks, most of them bearing famous names of history. Shopkeepers and manufacturers of various sorts occupy many of them, but they are still capable of staggering any otherwise blasé curiosity-seekers. The accompanying map with these palaces plainly marked should serve its purpose better than quires of printed pages. Shakespeare's "Jew of Venice" was no myth, whatever the shadowy existence of Juliet and Desdemona may have been. Venice in the middle ages had its Ghetto (a word which in Hebrew means "cut off" or "shut off") where the Jews herded together and wore scarlet mantles in public that they might be known and recognized by faith and profession. The principal character of "The Merchant of Venice" was a very real entity, and Shakespeare, believing the saying of Tacitus, wrote him down truthfully as a man scrupulously faithful to his engagements, charitable to others of his race, but filled with an invincible hatred towards all other men. [Illustration: _The So-called "House of Desdemona," Venice_] Another Venetian type, not wholly disappeared to-day, is that of the Venetian blonde of Titian, Veronese and Giorgione, a type of feminine beauty unknown elsewhere. Italians are commonly brunettes, and indeed perhaps the Venetians were of the same _teint_ one day. In the Library of San Marco is a parchment of Cæsar Vecelli, a Cousin of Titian, coming from the collections of the patrician Nani. It describes how there were built at Venice many house tops with sun parlours or _terrazi_. To these _terrazi_ the women of the city of the Doges, who would bleach their hair by natural means, would repair and let the sun do its work. Casanova, too, remarked the feminine beauties of the Queen of the Adriatic. He said of one of them: "I am content indeed to find so beautiful a creature. I do not conceive how so ravishing a creature could have lived so long in Venice without having married ere now." As night draws down, the scene at Venice changes manifestly from what it was in the garish sunlight of day. It becomes softer and more fairylike. Across the Piazzetta the rosy flush still glints from the tower of the island San Giorgio, though in the immediate neighbourhood day has practically blackened into night. A sunset gun sounds from seaward and here and there lights twinkle out when, in the magic of a very short twilight, another scene is set, a more wonderful, more fairylike scene than before, with a coming and going of firefly gondolas and boats, a streaming of arcs and incandescents on shore, and in the midst of it all a brass band arrives in front of San Marco and begins to bray ragtime waltzes and serenades. The note may be a false one, but it reiterates the fact that one may sit before his table at Florian's all through the livelong day and night and see and hear the whole gamut of joyousness played as it is nowhere else. The townfolk, the strangers from the hotels, and sailor folk from the Lido and the Guiadecca all mingle in a seemingly inextricable maze. These last are the most picturesque note as to costuming and colouring in all Venice to-day. The fishermen of the Guiadecca, swarthy hued and scarlet-capped, and with heavy hoops of gold hanging from their ears, stroll about the piazza as is their right, mingling with tourists and the "real Venetians." All move about in lively measure like an operatic chorus, but with a much more graceful and less conscious gait. Night on the Piazza or the Piazzetta is not the least of Venice's charms. The background hills bordering upon the Venetian plain are a very interesting corner of northern Italy. Throughout this region souvenirs are not wanting of the glorious days of the Venetian Republic. For her own protection Venice conquered the surrounding mainland as she was laying the foundations of the island metropolis. Treviso fell to her permanently in 1339, and Udine in 1420, as did later many other towns to the south. From this time forth the lion of San Marco reared its head from its pedestal in the market place of each of these allied towns. Some five thousand square miles of Dalmatia came to Venice at this time and thenceforth her position was assured. Venice was occupied by the French in 1797 when Napoleon overthrew the Republic. It was the first time the city had ever been occupied by an enemy. It was given to Austria by a succeeding treaty, but later in 1805 was made over definitely to Italy. Treviso, on the highroad from Venice to Vienna, is a great overgrown burg which lives chiefly in the historic past of the days when first it became a bishop's see and was known as Trovisium, the capital of the province of the same name. A story is current of Treviso that once the people, to celebrate one of the infrequent intervals of peace, had summoned all the neighbouring populations to a splendid festival. Among other amusements they had provided a mimic castle of wood, adorned in the most sumptuous manner. Within this castle were stationed the twelve most beautiful ladies of Padua, with their attendant maidens, loaded down with all kinds of flowers and fruits. The chosen youths of the neighbouring cities advanced in bands to attack the fortress defended by such a garrison. The ladies made a long and vigorous defence. But finally a band of Venetians pressed forward through the rain of projectiles, breached the walls, and planted on them the banner of San Marco. The youth of Padua, inflamed at this sight, pressed forward in turn to force their way inside the fortifications. The two bands were crushed together in the breach; angry words arose; from words both parties came to blows; the Paduans proved the stronger and in the struggle seized on the banner of San Marco and tore it to shreds. With difficulty the Trevisans restored order and drove both parties out of the town. The Venetians flew to arms to demand satisfaction for the outrage to their flag. The Government of Padua refused it. Hence a war between the two cities, in which the Paduans were worsted. From Treviso to Belluno, and thence by the Ampesso Pass, is one of the gateways leading from the Italian plain into Austria. Feltre, en route, has a fine old "Rocca," or castle, with a square donjon tower. En route to Belluno one should, if he comes this way at all, branch off to Asolo. Among the many hundreds of visitors to Venice who formerly climbed to the top of the Campanile of San Marco in order to enjoy the wonderful panorama of the Venetian plain and mountains which it affords, few, probably, recall the distant little city of Asolo which the guide pointed out to them, unless, indeed, they happen to be familiar with Robert Browning's poems, in which case they will, perhaps, wish to make a pilgrimage out into these background hills the poet loved so well: "My Asolo," as he called it in the introduction to the last volume of his poems, "Asolando," written during his stay there in 1889. A trip among the Asolan Hills will well repay not only the lover of poetry, but also the artist and the ordinary traveller with a liking for quiet, picturesque spots off the ordinary beaten track. [Illustration: ASOLO] The Albergo Asolo, in the main street, offers clean and characteristic accommodation with charges to correspond. One turns off to Asolo from Cornuda, a station on the Belluno line, or by road from the same place. The imposing ruined Rocca is well worthy of a visit for the sake of the extensive view obtainable from the hill on which it stands. On a clear day the towers of Venice can be seen without a glass, and on every side the view is remarkably fine. To the north, beyond the nearer range of mountains, are visible several peaks in the Primiero group of Dolomites--the Sasso del Mur, Sagron, and others. Another good point of view is the belfry tower of the old Castello which was the residence of Queen Cornaro, the deposed Queen of Cyprus, whose gay court made the name of Asolo famous at the end of the fifteenth century. From Treviso the road to Udine passes Conegliano, with a fine castle of imposing proportions and a Triumphal Arch erected in the nineteenth century to the Emperor of Austria. Pordenone, ten kilometres farther on, is the old Portus Naonis of the Romans. This is almost its sole claim to fame, except that "Il Pordenone," a celebrated fifteenth century artist, was born here. Codroipo, actually a place of no importance to-day, takes its name from the crossing of two celebrated Roman roads of antiquity. Codroipo, by a vague etymological sequence, is supposed to have the same meaning as carrefour in French, i.e. _quadrivium_. At Campo Formico, just before Udine is reached, Bonaparte and the Emperor of Austria signed the treaty, in October, 1797, by which Venice was so shamefully sacrificed by the French general to Austria. It was one of the deepest blots in the political history of Napoleon. The mean house in which this disastrous treaty was concluded is still pointed out. It was in the Villa Passarino, near Udine, that this infamous treaty saw the light. Its gardens to-day are of the mixed formal and landscape variety, and great renown belongs to it because of the prominence of the Manins, its early owners. Borghetti restored the fabric in 1763, and it remains to-day a far more satisfactory structure to look at than many which are architecturally entitled to rank on a higher plane. Cypress and oak form the greater part of the verdure of the gardens. Udine, of the picturesque name, is a city of twenty thousand inhabitants, once the capital of Friuli, and still surrounded by its ancient walls. In the centre is the castle, now a prison, built in 1517 by Giovanni Fontana on the height chosen by Attila to view the burning of Aquileja. Udine presents many features of resemblance in its buildings to the mother city, to whose rule it was so long subjected: it has its grand square, its Palazzo Publico, (1457)--a fine Gothic building on pointed arches instead of the Doge's palace--the two columns, the winged lion of San Marco, and a campanile with two figures to strike the hours. Udine is indeed a little Venice, all but the canals and quays and the Adriatic's waves. South of Udine, on the marshy shore of the same series of lagoons which surround Venice itself, is Aquileja. Aquileja was in ancient times one of the most important provincial cities of Rome, and one of the chief bulwarks of Italy. Augustus often resided here, and its population was then estimated at 100,000. It was taken by Attila in 452, and reduced to ashes by that ferocious barbarian. It contains at present about 1,500 inhabitants, and even they have a hard time clinging to the shreds of life left them by a climate that is pestilential and damp. From Venice and Treviso the Strada di Grande Communicazione runs to Vicenza and Verona, the former 63 kilometres from Treviso and the latter 50 kilometres farther on. At Vicenza the highroad is joined by another trunk-line from Padua, 32 kilometres to the southwest. All of these roads are practically flat and are good roads in good weather and bad roads--O! how bad!--in bad weather. [Illustration: VICENZA] Few strangers stop off at Vicenza, on the line from Verona to Venice. Vicenza, then, is not lettered large in the guide books, and has only appeared of late in the public prints because of being the home of the romancer, Antonio Fogazzora. This makes it a literary shrine at all events, so we stopped to look it over. It was more than this; we first saw Vicenza by moonlight, and its silhouettes and shadows were as grimly ancient as if seen in a dream. Daylight discovered other charms. There were warm, lovable old Renaissance house fronts everywhere, with overhanging tiled roofs and advanced grilled balconies; and there was the Piazza dei Signori and its surrounding houses, almost entirely the work of the architect Palladio. The Municipio itself was not a dead, dull thing in drab stone, but with a warm red tower, brought entire, it is said, from Venice, along with two columns of the façade which are borne aloft on two sculptured lions. Vicenza, the neglected tourist point, was offering much, and we were glad we came. Vicenza, more than any other of the little frequented tourist cities of Italy, may be counted as _the_ city of palaces. They are of two non-contemporary styles, the Venetian semi-gothic of a good era, and Palladio's classical copies, also good of their kind, particularly so when seen here in their natural environment. In the Corso is a curious monumental structure called the Casa di Palladio, built it is said by the great architect for his own use. He had need for it as his work here was great and long in completion. It is something more than a mere architect's office or bureau; it is in fact a palace. One of the most curious buildings in the city, and certainly one of the most remarkable with which the name of Palladio is connected, is the Teatro Olimpico. Contrary to the architect's manner of working, the edifice has no façade, being entirely surrounded by houses. It was begun in 1580, but in consequence of his death almost immediately afterwards it was completed by his son, Scilla. The scenery, which is fixed, represents the side of a species of piazza, from which diverge streets of real elevation, but diminishing in size as they recede in the perspective. A great effect of distance is obtained, especially in the middle avenue. Daylight, however, by which a traveller usually sees it, is injurious to the effect. Palladio's architectural ideas went abroad even to England and many a "stately home" in Britain to-day is a more or less faithful copy of a Vicenza sixteenth century palazzo. [Illustration: _Vicenza_] The Rotonda Capra, now in ruins, so well known as Palladio's villa, was copied by Lord Burlington and planted squat down on the banks of the Thames at Chiswick. It loses considerably by transportation; it were decidedly more effective at the base of Monte Berico in Venezia. Palladio himself is buried in the local Campo Santo. His grave should become an art lover's shrine, but no one has ever been known to worship at it. Between Vicenza and Verona runs a charming highway, strewn with villas of a highly interesting if not superlatively grand architectural order. A dozen or fifteen kilometres from Vicenza are the two castles of Montecchio, the strongholds of the family of the name celebrated by Shakespere as one of the rivals of the Capulets. At the Bridge of Arcole is an obelisk in commemoration of the battle when Napoleon went against the Austrians after his check at Caldiero. Soave, a little further on, is an old walled town as mediæval in its looks and doings as it was when its great gates and towers and its castle fortress on the height were built six centuries ago. Verona is reached in thirty kilometres and has a sentimental, romantic interest beyond that possessed by any of the secondary cities of Italy. It has not the great wealth of notable architectural splendours of many other places, but what there is is superlatively grand, the structures surrounding the Piazza Erbe and the Piazza dei Signori, for instance; the old Ponte di Castel Vecchio; the great Roman Arena; and even the Albergo all'Accademia, where one is remarkably well cared for in a fine old mediæval palace with a monumental gateway, and an iron and carved stone well in the courtyard. [Illustration: _Seal of Verona_] The glory and sentiment which overshadowed the Verona of another day have passed, and now the noise of electric trams and the hoot of automobile horns awaken the echoes in the same thoroughfares where one day trampled the feet of warring hosts. "The glory of the Scaliger has passed, The Capuletti and Montague are naught:" Instead we have the modern note sounding over all, and, if it is true that the "fair Juliet sleeps in old Verona's town" hers must be a disturbed sleep. The romance of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague was real enough; that is, there was a real romance of the sort, and there were real Capulets and Montagues. Just where the scene of this particular romance was laid one is not so sure. The "House of Juliet" at Verona, one of the stock sights of the guide books, is of more than doubtful authenticity. Certainly, to begin with, it does not comport in the least with the dignified marble palace and its halls with which the stage-carpenter has built up the settings of Shakespere's drama or Gounod's opera. Perhaps they embroidered too much. Of course they did! In 1905 the "Juliet House" was in danger of collapsing. As it is nothing more than a picturesque old house, such as northern Italy abounds in, perhaps it would not have mattered much had it fallen. It is no more Juliet's house than Juliet's tomb is the tomb of Juliet. This indeed has latterly been adjudged a mere water-trough. No house, it is asserted, in Verona to-day can be declared with certainty as the house of a Montague or a Capulet. Henry James points the moral of all this in "The Custodians," and whether we can always make head and tail out of his dialogues or not, his judgments are always sound. In Verona the very gutters are of white marble. Balustrades, window-sills and hitching posts are all of white or coloured marbles. Verona is luxurious, if not magnificent, and its architecture is marvellously interesting and beautiful, though frequently rising to no great rank. The great Roman Arena, so admirably preserved, is surrounded by the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The contrast between yesterday and to-day at Verona is everywhere to be remarked. Its old Arena and the Visconti gateway seen by moonlight look as ancient as anything on earth, but the cafés with their tables set out right across the Piazza, with a band playing on a temporary platform, set up on trestles in the middle, and electric trams swishing around the corner, are as modern as Earl's Court or Coney Island, without however many of their drawbacks. Verona is a city of marble and coloured stone, of terraces and cypresses and all the Italian accessories which stagecraft has borrowed for its Shakesperean settings. The cypresses planted around the outskirts of Verona are said to be the oldest in Europe, but that is doubtful. They are, some of them, perhaps four hundred years old, but on the shores of the Etang de Berre, in old Provence, is a group of these same trees, less lean, greater of girth and denser of foliage. Surely these must have five hundred years to their credit according to Verona standards. Verona is one of the cities of celebrated art where the authorities control one's desire to dig about with a view to discovering buried antiquities, even in one's own cellar or garden; much less may one sell an old chimney pot or urn. Recently a Signor and Signora Castello, who owned an ancient house in Via del Seminario, sold the magnificent red marble portals and two balconies without permission from the Government. They were fined two thousand five hundred lire each, and ordered to replace the objects of art. After a long chase the Verona police discovered the articles in a warehouse where they had been temporarily deposited previous to shipping them abroad. The balconies are of the same epoch as the famous one said to have been the scene of the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. "American collectors keep off" is the sign the Verona police would probably put up if they dared. CHAPTER XVII THROUGH ITALIAN LAKELAND The lake region of the north is perhaps the most romantic in all Italy; certainly its memories have much appeal to the sentimentally inclined. Indeed the tourists are so passionately fond of the Italian lakeland that they leave it no "close" season, but are everywhere to be remarked, from Peschiera on the east to Orta on the west. Seemingly they are all honeymoon couples and seek seclusion, and are therefore less offensive than the general run of conducted parties which now "do" the Italian round for a ten pound note from London, or the same thing from New York for a couple of hundred dollars. It is the fashion to revile the automobilist as a hurried traveller, but he at least gets a sniff of the countryside en route which the others do not. Coming from the east through Verona, the traveller by road might do worse than make a detour of a hundred kilometres out and back to Mantua. Mantua, on the banks of the Mincio, sits like a water-surrounded town of the Low Countries. Mantua, above all, is a place of war, one of the strongest in North Italy, forming with Verona, Legnago and Peschiera the famous "Quadrilatera." Mantua has at least a tenth part of its population made up of Jews. It sits partly surrounded by an artificial lake formed by the Mincio, and the marsh land to the south can be flooded, if it is deemed advisable, in case of siege. A great walled enclosure, a series of fortified dykes, and a collection of detached forts roundabout, put Mantua in a class quite by itself. It is a melancholy, unlovely place from an æsthetic standpoint, but picturesque in a certain crude way. The ancient Palazzo Gonzague of the Dukes of Mantua, now known as the Corte Reale, is one of the most ambitious edifices of its class in Italy. The view of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua, with the rising background of roofs, towers and domes, as seen from the further end of the cobble-stone paved bridge over the Mincio, is delightful. Artists do not like it as a general rule because of the ugly straight line of the bridge, and the "camera fiend" makes a hopeless mess of it, unless he seeks an hour or more for a "point of view;" but for all that the scene is as quaint and beautiful a composition as one can get of unspoiled mediævalism in these progressive times, when usually telegraph poles and tram cars project themselves into focus whether or no. There is nothing of the kind here. [Illustration: PALAZZO DUCAL MANTUA] The road from Mantua to Cremona, following the banks of the Mincio, still preserves its Virgilian aspect. _Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ._ From this one infers that it is a bad road, and in truth it is very bad; automobilists will not like it. Cremona's tower is seen from afar, like the sailors' beacon from the sea. It is one of the most hardy and the most renowned Gothic towers of Italy and has a height approximating a hundred and twenty odd metres, say a little less than four hundred feet. Neighbouring upon this great Torrazo is the Palazzo Gonfaloneri, dating from 1292. These two monuments, together with the magnificent Romanesque Lombard Cathedral of the twelfth century, and the Casa Stradivari--where he who gave his name to a violin lived--are Mantua's chief "things to see." If the traveller can include Mantua in his itinerary, which truth to tell is not easy without doubling on one's tracks, he should do so. Travellers coming westward from Venice and passing Verona, hastening to the Italian and Swiss lakes, usually give that region lying between Verona and Como little heed. Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice and then Switzerland and the Rhine is still too often the itinerary of hurried papas and fond mamas. Even if the automobilist does not drop down on Mantua and Cremona he should take things leisurely through the lake region and stop en route as often as fancy wills. The Lago di Garda is the most easterly of the Italian Lakes and the largest. It is of great depth, 350 metres or more, is sixty odd kilometres in length, and in places a third as wide. It is a product of the rivers and torrents flowing down from the mountains of the Italian Tyrol. The sudden storms which frequently come up to ruffle its bosom were celebrated by some lines of Virgil and his example has been followed by every other traveller ever caught in one of these storms. "_Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens_" sang the bard, and the words still echo down through time. Peschiera and Desenzano are the principal ports at the southern end of the lake, and each in its way is trying to be a "resort." The environs are charming and the towns themselves interesting enough, though chiefly from the point of view of the artist. The seeker after the gaieties and pleasures of the great watering places will find nothing of the sort here. Between Peschiera and Desenzano juts out the promontory of Sermione. A village is entered by a drawbridge and a mediæval gate on the south. On the opposite side is a fortified wall that separates it from the northerly portion of the island, and through which opens the only gate in that direction. The old castle, in the form of a quadrangle, with a high square tower, was entered on the north by a drawbridge. This entrance is still well preserved, as well as its small port or _darsena_, surrounded by crenelated battlements; but the principal entrance is now on the side of the village, by a gate over which are shields bearing the arms of the Scaligers. It is one of the most imposingly militant of all the castles of north Italy. Only that of Fénis in the Val d'Aoste is more so. Riva, at the Austrian end of the lake of Garda, has its drawbacks but it occupies a wonderful site nevertheless. While Northern Tyrol is still wrapped in the white mantle of winter's snow, and winter sports of every description furnish great amusement for old and young, the lovely Lake of Garda is already beginning to show signs of spring. All along the lake the great "_stanzoni_," or lemon-houses for sheltering the lemon trees in winter, are, even in January, often filled with blossoms. [Illustration: _On the Lago di Garda_] The best time to visit Riva is from February to June, and from the middle of August to the end of October, but Riva at all times will be a surprise and a delight to those who do not mind a _régime_ table d'hôte, as the doctors have it, and the fact that everybody round about appears to be a semi-invalid. To Brescia from the foot of the Lake of Garda is a matter of twenty odd kilometres, through a greatly varied nearby landscape, set off here and there by vistas of the azure of the distant lake, the Alps of Tyrol and the nearer Bergamese mountains. "_Bologna la Grassa_" and "_Brescia Armata_" are two nick-names by which the respective cities are known up and down Italy. Brescia, like most Italian towns, is built on a hill top and is castle-crowned as becomes a mediæval burg. Brescia's castle is an exceptionally strongly fortified feudal monument. _Brescia Armata_ took its name from the fact that it was ever armed against its enemies, which in the good old days every Italian city was or it was of no account whatever. Brescia's enemies could never have made much headway when attacking this hill-top fortress, and must have contented themselves with sacking the cities of the surrounding plain. To-day firearms in great quantities are made here, and thus the city is still entitled to be called _Brescia Armata_. Brescia's market place is more thickly covered with great, squat, mushroom umbrellas than that of any other city of its size in Italy. Brescia is dear to the French because of its wraith of a mediæval castle, once so vigorously defended by the Chevalier Bayard, that famous knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. A bastioned wall surrounds the gay little Lombard city in the genuine romance fashion, albeit there is to-day very little romance in Brescia, which lives mostly by the exploitation of its textile and metal industries. Brescia housefronts are as gaily decorated as those of Nuremberg, many of them at least. It is a remarkable feature of Brescia's domestic architecture. The castle or citadel itself was built by the Viscontis in the fourteenth century on the summit of a hill overlooking the town. The Venetians strengthened it and again the Austrians. General Haynau bombarded the low-lying city round about in barbarous fashion, so much so that the memory of it caused him to be chased from London some years later, when he was sent there as Ambassador. [Illustration: _Castle of Brescia_] The men of Brescia seem to have a passion for wearing a great Capucin shoulder cloak, which looks very Spanish. It is most picturesque, and is one of the characteristic things seen in all Brescia's public places, _caffés_ and restaurants, and is worn by all those classes whom a discerning traveller once described as men who work hard at doing nothing, for Brescia's street corners are never vacant and her _caffés_ never empty. Between Brescia and Bergamo is the Lake of Iseo; the fourth in size of the north Italian lakes. The vegetation of its shores is purely Italian and vineyards and olive groves abound. A fringe of old castle towers, of walls, palaces and villas surround it, all blended together with a historic web and woof of mediævalism and romance. From Brescia to Bergamo runs one of the best national highroads in Italy. The automobilist will appreciate this and will want to push on to the end. He would do better to break it midway and drop down on the road to Martinengo, a detour of twenty kilometres only, passing the great Castle of Malpaga built by the celebrated Bartolommeo Colleoni, an edifice which gives a more complete idea of unspoiled, unrestored residence of a mediæval Italian nobleman than any other extant. Bergamo is a strange combination of the new and the old. The upper and lower towns--for it is built on a rise of the Bergamon Alps--have nothing in common with each other. In the lower town there are great hotels, shops, and even a vast factory which turns out a celebrated make of automobiles. In the upper town there are market-men and women, with chickens, vegetables and fruit to sell, all spread out under an imposing array of great mushroom umbrellas only second to those of the market place at Brescia. Bergamo's chief architectural monuments are its churches, but its ancient Broletto, or castle, of not very pure Gothic, but with a most original façade, is worth them all put together in its appeal to one with an eye for the picturesque. Its tower is a remarkably firm, solid and yet withal graceful sentinel of dignity and power. [Illustration: _Bergamo_] Bergamo's great fair of Saint Alexander, held every year in August, was once the rival of those great trading fairs of Leipzig and Beaucaire. Of late it is of less importance, but holds somewhat to its ancient traditions. Certainly it filled the Albergo Capello d'Oro to such an extent that it was doubtful for a time if we could find a place. A sight of our mud-covered automobile and of our generally bedraggled appearance--for it had rained again, though that of itself is nothing remarkable in Italy, and we had "mud-larked it" for the last fifty kilometres,--caused somebody's conscience to smite him and find us shelter. [Illustration: Map The Italian Lakes] Beyond Bergamo one enters the classic Italian Lake region, that which has usually been seen through a honeymoon perspective, a honeymoon that is long-lasting, as it invariably is in Italy as some of us know. All through this lakeland of north Italy is an unbroken succession of charms which certainly, from the sentimental and romantic point, has no equal in Italy, or out of it in the same area. The whole battery of little cities, towns, and townlets which surround Lakes Como, Varese, Lugano and Maggiore are delightful from all points. Theirs is a unique variety of charm which comports with the tranquil mood, not at all the same as that possessed by the average scorching automobilist who reads as he runs, and wishes to eat and drink and absorb his romantic and historic lore in the same up-to-date fashion. Not that the region is unsuited to automobile travel. Not at all, the roads thereabouts are quite the best in Italy, and the towns themselves picturesquely charming, if often lacking in ruined monuments of mediævalism of the first rank. All of it is historic ground, and filled with echoes of fact and fancy which still reverberate from its hills and through its vales. Not all of these lake-side towns can be catalogued here, no more than are all included in the average itinerary, but from Lecco, at the southern end of the Lecco arm of the Lago di Como, to Orta on the Lago d'Orta will be found myriads of scenic surprises, dotted here and there with quaint waterside towns, the lakes themselves being punctuated with great white winged barques, with here and there the not unpicturesque coil of smoke belching into the clear sky from a cranky, fussy little steamboat. One most often approaches the lake district from the east, via Lecco on the eastern arm of Lake Como, or as it is locally called the Lago di Lecco. Lecco itself is of no importance. Its site is its all-in-all, but that is delightful. Between Lecco and Milan the highway crosses the Adda by a magnificent bridge of ten arches built by Azzo Visconti in 1335. Very few of the works of the old bridge-builders bear so ancient a date as this. From Lecco to Monza the highroad skirts the Brianza, as the last Alpine foot-hills are called before the mountains flatten out into the Lombard Plain. At Arcore is the villa of the Adda family with a modern chapel. One can go north from Lecco to Bellaggio by steamer, when he will arrive in the very heart of lakeland, or he may go directly west by the highroad to Como and take his point of departure from there. The Lake of Como was the Lacus Larius of the Romans and the Lari Maxime of Virgil. It is a hundred and ninety metres above sea level and among all other of the Swiss and Italian lakes holds the palm for the beauty of its surroundings. At Nesso is the Villa Pliniana, built in 1570. It is not named for Pliny, but because of a nearby spring mentioned in his writings. Pliny's villa was actually at Lenno, in a dull gloomy site and he properly enough called the villa Tragedia. Como, the city, is ancient, for the younger Pliny, who was born in the ancient _municipium_ of Comum, asserts that it was then a "flourishing state." It does not enter actively into history, however, after the fall of the Roman Empire, until 1107, when it became an independent city. It remained a republic for two centuries and then it fell under the dominion of the Visconti since which time its fate has ever been bound up with that of Milan. The Broletto or municipal palace is curiously built of black and white marble courses, patched here and there with red. It is interesting, but bizarre, and of no recognized architectural style save that it is a reminder of the taste of the people of the Lombard Republics with respect to their civic architecture in the thirteenth century. Como's Duomo is, on the contrary, a celebrated and remarkably beautiful structure. The distinction made between the taste in ecclesiastical and civic architecture of the time can but be remarked. [Illustration: _On the Lago di Como_] The military architecture of Como, as indicated by the gates in its old city wall, was of a high order. The Porta della Torre, the chief of the gates remaining, and leading out to the Milan road, rises five stories in air. The Palazzo Giovio is now the local museum. Paolo Giovio built the crudely ornate edifice, and began the collection of antiquities and relics which it now contains. Above Como, but outside the city, rises a curious lofty tower called the Bardello. It may have been built as one of the defences of the Lombard Kings, or it may not, but at any rate there is no doubt that it witnessed the rise and fall of the Milanese dynasties from the first. Como, one of the first cities to assert its independence, was the first to lose it. Prisoners of state were put into iron cages and stowed away in the Bardello--like animals or birds in a live stock show. They were all tagged and numbered and were fed at infrequent, uncertain hours. Not many lived out their terms; mostly they died, some of hunger, some eaten up by vermin and more than one by having dashed their brains out on the iron bars of their cages. All about Como are little lake settlements peopled with villas and hotels where many a mediæval and modern romance has been lived in the real. It is all very delightful, but in truth all is stagey. [Illustration: Cadenabbia] At Cadenabbia is the Villa Carlotta, named for Charlotte the Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen. Its structural elements build up into something imposing, if not in the best of taste, and its gardens are of the conventionally artificial kind which look as though they might be part of a stage setting. Bellaggio, on the eastern shore of the lake, is a place of large hotels, no history of remark, and the site of the villa Serbelloni, with which the proprietor of one of the hotels seems to have some special arrangement, in that he passes visitors to and fro from his establishment to the villa in genuine showman fashion. Beyond its site, which is entrancingly lovely, it has no appeal whatever from either the architectural or the landscape gardening point of view. Mennagio, Belluno and Varenna are in the same category and are tourist show places only. Gravadona is different in that it has two remarkably beautiful churches, which can be omitted from no consideration of Italian church architecture, and the Palazzo de Pero, built in 1586 for Cardinal Gallio which, with its four angle-towers, is more like a fortress than a prelate's residence. Near Gravadona is the outline of an ancient highway known as the Strada Regina. Supposedly it was made centuries and centuries ago by Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards, and must be one of the oldest roads in existence. The Lago di Lugano is the most irregular of all the Italian Lakes. In part it lies in Lombardy and in part within the Swiss canton of Ticino. Its scenery is quite distinct from that of the other Italian lakes, not more beautiful perhaps, but less prolifically surrounded by that sub-tropical verdure which is characteristic of Garda and Como. In the northeasterly portion, around Porlezza, the precipitous outlines of the mountains round about lend an almost savage aspect. Lugano itself is very near the Swiss border but is thoroughly Italian, with deep arcaded streets, and here and there a Renaissance façade such as can be found nowhere out of Italy. The Lago di Varese is the smallest of all the lakes. In the neighbourhood is produced a great deal of silk, and a species of easily worked marble or alabaster called Marmo Majolica. Varese itself, while not destitute of monuments of architectural worth, is more noticeably a place of modern villas, most of which are occupied by wealthy Milanese. [Illustration: _On the Lago di Maggiore_] From Varese to Laveno on the Lago di Maggiore is a matter of fifty kilometres, and here one comes to the most famous, if not the most beautiful, of all the lakes. The whole range of towns circling this daintily environed lake have an almost inexpressible charm, and its islands--the Borromean Islands--are superlatively beautiful. Baveno, on the mainland, and its villas, modern though they are, is a charming place, and Stresa, a little further to the south, is even more delightfully disposed. All about the Italian lakeland are the modern villa residences of distinguished Milanese, Turinese and Genoese families. Arona is at the southern end of the lake. Above this town is a colossal statue of San Carlo Borromeo, the head, hands and feet being cast in bronze, the remainder being fabricated of beaten copper. The famous Borromean Islands in the Lago di Maggiore number four: Isola Bella, Isola Madre, Isola San Giovanni and Isola dei Piscatori, of which the three former belong to the Borromean family, whilst the latter is divided among small proprietors. The vast Palazzo of Isola Bella was a conception of an ancestor of the present family in 1671. The great fabric, with its terraces, gardens and grottoes, is an exotic thing of the first importance. It is idyllically picturesque, but withal inartistic from many points of view. The contrast of all this semi-tropical luxuriousness with its snow-capped Alpine background is not its least remarkable feature. It has been called "fairylike," "a caprice of grandiose ideas," and "enchanted," and these words describe it well enough. It looks unreal, as if one saw it in a dream. Certainly its wonderful panoramic background and foreground are not equalled elsewhere and no garden carpet of formal flowerbeds ever made so beautifully disposed a platform on which to stand and marvel. The architect of it all made no allowance apparently for the natural setting, but overloaded his immediate foreground with all things that suggested themselves to his imaginative mind. Somehow or other he didn't spoil things as much as he might have done. The setting is theatrical and so are the accessories; all is splendidly spectacular, and, since this is its classification, no one can cavil. What other effect could be produced where ten staired terraces tumble down one on another in a veritable cascade simply as a decorative accessory to a monumental edifice and not as a thing of utility? On Isola Madre is another vast structure surrounded by tropical and semi-tropical trees, flowers and shrubs. A chapel contains many of the tombs of the Borromeo family. The Isola dei Piscatori is the artists' paradise of these parts. It lacks the "prettiness" of the other islands but gains in "character" as artists call that picturesqueness which often is unsuspected and unseen by the masses. Going back to history, here is what happened once on the Isola Bella: It is a warm June night. The mauve summits of the Simplon and the _reflets_ of the mirrored lake throw back a penetrating shimmer to the view. Coming from Baveno, and holding straight its course for Isola Bella, is a gently moving bark. It is the year 1800, and on the stern seat of the boat sits the First Consul, who was once the Little Corporal and afterwards became Napoleon I. The French army had freed the Alps, some days before. Over the passes of Mont Cenis, of the Simplon, of Saint Bernard, and Saint Gothard they had come, soon to form in battle line on the plains of Piedmont. Moncey was at the gates of Milan, Lannes held the passage of the Po. The First Consul, arriving on the shores of the Lago di Maggiore, decided to pass the night in the Castle of Isola Bella, alone on this enchanting isle, with his thoughts and his plans. Bonaparte jumped first from the boat as it grated on the sands and was received by a grotesquely attired major-domo, in the name of the Counts of Borromeo, the sovereign princes of this tiny archipelago. In the seigneurial chamber, of which the furniture comprised a great four poster dating from the time of the Medicis, a massive round table, its top laid in mosaic, some chairs and a terrestrial globe, Napoleon shook off the dust of travel forthwith: but he did not seek repose. On the mosaic table-top Napoleon unfolded a great map of Italy, and with forehead in his hands gazed attentively at its tracings, soliloquizing thus: "Yes, Italy is reconquered already; the Austrian army cannot escape me. Fifteen days will suffice to efface the disasters of two years. The Austrian army is already in retreat; its rear guard has become its advance guard. The tricolour of France will yet float on the shores of the Adriatic. I shall march on Rome. I will chase the hateful Bourbons from the Kingdom of Naples for ever. Europe will tremble at the echo of my footsteps." [Illustration: _Orta_] Finally the twilight faded; back of the mountains of Lugano shone a brilliant star. Napoleon thought it his star of destiny. To the wide open window came the First Consul for a breath of the sweet night air. It acted like champagne. He turned back into the room; he kicked over the terrestrial globe of the Borromeo; he threw the map of Italy to the floor. "What is Italy!" he cried, "a mere nothing! Bah! it's hardly worth the conquering. Certainly not worth more than a few weeks. But I will leave the memory of my name behind. And then--and then Saint Jean d'Acre, the Orient, the Indies. _Allons_, we will follow the route of Tamerlane! Poland will come to life again, Moscow, St. Petersburg ..." and then he dreamed. And that is what passed one night in the Palazzo Borromeo a little more than a hundred years ago. From the shores of the Lago di Maggiore to Orta, on the lake of that name, is a short dozen kilometres from either Arona or Baveno. At Orta the traveller may take his ease at an humble inn and from its broad balcony overhanging the lake enjoy emotions which he will not experience at every halting place. Orta's Municipio, or Town hall, dominating its tiny Piazza is unspeakably lovely though indeed it is a hybrid blend of the architecture of Germany and Italy. It might as well be in Nuremberg, in Bavaria or Barberino in Tuscany for all it looks like anything else in Piedmont. Out in the lake glitters--glitters is the word--Isola San Giulio, its graceful campanile and ancient stone buildings hung with crimson creepers and mirrored in the clear blue depths. About this island there hangs a legend. The story goes that no one could be found ready to ferry the apostle Julius across to the chosen site of his mission in the year 1500. According to popular rumour the isle was haunted by dragons and venomous reptiles that none dared face. Not to be deterred from his purpose, the holy man spread his cloak upon the water, and floated quickly and quietly across. Nor did the miracle end here, for, as with St. Patrick of Ireland, the unclean monsters, acknowledging his power, retired to a far-away mountain, leaving the saint unmolested to carry on his labours, which were continued after his death by faithful friends. This is the story as it is told on the spot. The island was held as an outpost against invasions for many years, and for long witnessed the hopeless struggles of a brave woman, Villa, wife of King Berenger of Lombardy, who was besieged there by the Emperor Otho the Great. CHAPTER XVIII MILAN AND THE PLAINS OF LOMBARDY The great artichoke of Lombardy, whose petals have fallen one by one before its enemies of Piedmont, is now much circumscribed in area compared with its former estate. From Como to Mantua and from Brescia to Pavia, in short the district of Milan as it is locally known to-day, is the only political entity which has been preserved intact. Tortona, Novara, Alessandria and Asti have become alienated entirely, and for most travellers Milan is Lombardy and Lombardy is Milan. To-day the dividing line in the minds of most is decidedly vague. Lombardy is the region of all Italy most prolific in signs of modernity and prosperity, and, with Torino, Milan shares the honour of being the centre of automobilism in Italy. The roads here, take them all in all, are of the best, though not always well conditioned. That from Milan to Como can be very, very good and six months later degenerate into something equally as bad. The roads of these parts have an enormous traffic over them and it is for this reason, as much as anything, that their maintenance is difficult and variable. For the greater part they are all at a general level, except of course in entering or leaving certain cities and towns of the hills and on the direct roads leading to the mountain passes back of Torino, or the roads crossing the lake region and entering Switzerland or the Oberland. Lombardy in times past, and to-day to some extent, possessed a dialect or patois quite distinct from the Franco-Italian mélange of Piedmont, or the pure Italian of Tuscany. The Lombard, more than all other dialects of Italy, has a decided German flavour which, considering that the Lombard crown was worn by a German head, is not remarkable. In time--after the Guelph-Ghibelline feud--Lombardy was divided into many distinct camps which in turn became recognized principalities. The Viscontis ruled the territory for the most part up to 1447, when the condottière Francesco Sforza developed that despotism which brought infamy on his head and State, a condition of affairs which the Pope described as conducive to the greatest possible horrors. [Illustration: A Lombard Fête] Lombardy has ever been considered the real paradise and land of riches of all Italy, and even now, in a certain luxuriousness of attitude towards life, it lives up to its repudiation of the days of the dominating Visconti and Sforza. Milan is to-day the luxurious capital of Lombardy, as was Pavia in the past. At one time, be it recalled, Milan was a Duchy in its own right. Years of despotism at the hands of a man of genius made Milan a great city and the intellectual capital of Italy. Milanese art and architecture of the fifteenth century reached a great height. It was then, too, that the Milanese metal workers became celebrated, and it was a real distinction for a knight to be clad in the armour of Milan. "Well was he armed from head to heel In mail and plate of Milan steel." Milan has a history of the past, but paradoxically Milan is entirely modern, for it struggled to its death against Pavia, the city of five hundred and twenty-five towers, and was born again as it now is. One should enter Milan in as happy a mood as did Evelyn who "passynge by Lodi came to a grete citty famous for a cheese little short of the best Parmesan." It was a queer mood to have as one was coming under Milan's spell, and the sculptured and Gothic glories of the Cathedral, as it stands in completion to-day, are quite likely to add to, rather than detract from, any preconceived idea of the glories of the city and its treasures. Milan is one of the most princely cities of Europe, and lies in the centre of a region flowing with milk and honey. In Evelyn's time it had a hundred churches, seventy monasteries and forty thousand inhabitants. To-day its churches and monasteries are not so many, but it has a population of half a million souls. The comment of the usual tourist is invariably: "There is so little to see in Milan." Well, perhaps so! It depends upon how hard you look for it. Milan is a very progressive up-to-date sort of city, but its storied past has been most momentous, and historic monuments are by no means wanting. Milan is modern in its general aspect, it is true, and has little for the unexpert in antiquarian lore, but all the same it has three magic lode stones; its luxuriously flamboyant Gothic Duomo; its Ambrosian Library and its Palace of arts and sciences, La Brera. Tourists may forget the two latter and what they contain, but they will not forget the former, nor the Arch of Triumph built as a guide post by Napoleon on his march across Europe, or the Galleria Victor-Emmanuel, "as wide as a street and as tall as a Cathedral," a great arcade with shops, cafés, restaurants and the like. There is the Scala opera house, too, which ranks high among its kind. Milan's "eighth wonder of the world," its great Cathedral, is the chef d'oeuvre of the guide books. Details of its magnitude and splendours are there duly set forth. Milan's Cathedral has long sheltered a dubious statue of St. Bartholomew, and tourists have so long raved over it that the authorities have caused to be graven on its base: "I am not the work of Praxiteles but of Marcus Agrates." Now the throngs cease to admire, and late experts condemn the work utterly. Such is the follow-my-leader idea in art likes and dislikes! And such is the ephemeral nature of an artist's reputation! The Palazzo Reale occupies the site of the Palazzo di Corte of the Visconti and the Sforza of the fourteenth century, "one of the finest palaces of its time," it is recorded. The Palazzo of to-day is a poor, mean thing architecturally, although the residence of the King to-day when he visits Milan. The Archiepiscopal Palace of the sixteenth century is perhaps the finest domestic establishment of its class and epoch in Milan. Milan's Castello, the ancient castle of Milan, was the ancient ducal castle, built by Galeazzo Visconti II in 1358, to keep the Milanese in subjection. It was demolished after his death, but rebuilt with increased strength by Gian Galeazzo. On the death of the Duke Filippo Maria, the Milanese rose (1447), and, having proclaimed the "Aurea respublica Ambrosiana," destroyed the castle. It was rebuilt (1452) by Francesco Sforza, "for the ornament (he said) of the city and its safety against enemies." This building, completed in 1476, is the one now standing. In the interior is a keep, where the dukes often resided. Philip II added extensive modern fortifications, and caused to be pulled down all the neighbouring towers which overlooked them. The castle was taken by the French in 1796, and again in 1800, when Napoleon ordered the fortifications to be razed. It has since been converted into a barrack. Of the round towers at the angles, those towards the north have been replaced by modern brick ones, while the two towards the city, formed of massive granite blocks, remain. During the vice-royalty of Eugene Beauharnais, a Doric gateway of granite, with a portico, or line of arches, now filled up, on each side, and in the same style, was erected on the northwest side; between each arch is a medallion containing the bas-relief portrait of some illustrious Italian military commander. [Illustration: _The Ancient Castle of Milan_] The Napoleonic arch, the Arco della Pace, is a remarkably interesting civic monument, a reproduction of a temporary affair first built of wood and canvas in 1806. Now it stands, a comparatively modern work to be sure, but of splendid design and proportions, built of white marble, and elaborately decorated with sculptures all at the expense of Napoleon, who, on his march of migratory conquest, deigned to devote 200,000 francs to the purpose. Milan's hotels are of all sorts and conditions, but with a decided tendency towards the good, as is fitting in so opulent a country. Bertolini's Hotel Europe takes a high rank, at corresponding charges, as for instance four francs for a "box" for your automobile. The Touring Club Italiano endorses the Albergo del Cervo, where you pay nothing for garage and may eat as bountifully as you will of things Italian, real Italian, at from two to three francs a meal. One of the most amusing things to do in Milan is to lunch or dine in one of the great glass covered galleries near the cathedral, and one feasts well indeed for the matter of four francs, with another couple of francs for a bottle of Asti. These great restaurants of the galleries may lack a certain aspect of the next-to-the-soil Italian restaurants, but they do show a phase of another class of Italian life and here "Young Italy" may be seen taking his midday meal and ordering English or German beer or Scotch or American whiskey. He shuns the Italian items on the bill of fare and orders only exotics. You on the contrary will do the reverse. Pavia, thirty odd kilometres south of Milan, was ever a rival of the greater city of to-day. Pavia is a tourist point, but only because it is on the direct road from Milan. Pavia was the Lombard capital from 572 to 774. Its old walls and ramparts remain, in part, to-day and the whole aspect of the town is one of a certain mediævalism which comports little with the modernity of its neighbour, Milan, which has so far outgrown its little brother. Pavia's Certosa, on the road from Milan to Pavia, is its chief architectural splendour. Of that there is no doubt. It is the most gorgeously endowed and most splendid monastery in all the world, founded in 1396 by one of the Visconti as an atonement to his conscience for having murdered his uncle and father-in-law. A Venetian, Bernardo da Venezia, was probably the architect of the Certosa, and brick work and superimposed marble slabs and tablets all combine in an elegance which marks the Certosa of Pavia as characteristic of the most distinctive Lombard manner of building of its epoch. Within the city itself still stands the grim Castello, built on the site of the palace of the Lombard kings. The present building, however, was begun in 1460 and completed in 1469. It formed an ample quadrangle, flanked by four towers, two of which alone remain. The inner court was surrounded by a double cloister, or loggia; in the upper one the arches were filled in by the most delicate tracery in brickwork. The whole was crowned by beautiful forked battlements. In the towers were deposited the treasures of literature and art which Gian Galeazzo had collected:--ancient armour; upwards of 1,000 MSS., which Petrarch had assisted in selecting; and many natural curiosities. All these Visconti collections were carried to France in 1499 by Louis XII and nothing was left but the bare walls. One side of the palace or castle was demolished during the siege by Lautrec in 1527; but in other respects it continued perfect, though deserted, till 1796, when it was again put into a state of defence by the French. They took off the roof and covered the vaultings with earth; and when the rains came on in autumn, the weight broke down the vaultings, and ruined a great part of the edifice. It has since been fitted up as a military barracks. The great ruined gateway, once entered by a drawbridge crossing the fosse, is still the most imposing single detail, and the great quadrangle, with its fourteenth century arcades and windows, "a medley of Gothic and Bramantesque," is striking, although the marble and terra-cotta ornaments are much dilapidated. François I's famous mot: "all is lost save honour," uttered after the eventful battle of Pavia, will go down with that other remark of his: "Oh, God, but thou hast made me pay dear for my crown," as the two most apropos sayings of Renaissance times. One has to look carefully "under the walls of Pavia," to-day for any historical evidence of the fatal day of François I when he lost his "all, save honour." Du Bellay has painted the picture so well that in spite of the fact that four hundred years have rolled by, it seems unlikely that even the most superficial traveller should not find some historic stones upon which to build his suppositions. Pavia's great University flowered in 1362, and owes much to the generous impulses of Galeas II, who founded its chairs of civic and canonical law, medicine, physics and logic. Galeas II was a great educator, but he was versatile, for he invented a system of torture which would keep a political prisoner alive for forty days and yet kill him at the end of forty-one. If one returns to Milan via the Bridge of Lodi he will have made a hundred kilometre round of classic Lombard scenery. It possesses no elements of topographic grandeur but is rich and prosperous looking, and replete with historic memory, every kilometre of it. Lodi has evolved its name from the ancient Laus of the Romans, another evidence of the oblique transformation of Latin into the modern dialect. The men of Lodi were ever rivals of the Milanese, but it is to Napoleon's celebrated engagement at the Bridge of Lodi that it owes its fame in the popular mind. Above Lodi, the River Adda circles and boils away in a sort of whirlpool rapid, which Leonardo da Vinci, setting his palette and brushes aside, set about to control by a dam and a series of sluices. How well he succeeded may be imagined by recalling the fact that the Italian Edison Company in recent years availed themselves of the foundation of his plan in their successful attempt to turn running water into electricity. The panorama to the north of Milan is grandiose in every particular. On the horizon the Alpine chain lies clear-cut against the sky, the Viso, Grand Paradise, Mont Blanc, Splugen and other peaks descending in one slope after another, one foothill after another, until all opens out into the great plain of Lombardy. North of Milan, towards Como and the Alpine background, is Monza. Lady Morgan called Monza dreary and silent, but her judgments were not always sound; she depended too much upon moods and hers were many. Monza's Broletto was built by Frederick Barbarossa, or it was a part of a palace built by that monarch. Italian Gothic of an unmistakable local cast is its style and the effect is heightened by the _ringhiera_ between the windows of the south side. In Monza's Cathedral--an antique interior with a Gothic exterior, by the way--is the celebrated Iron Crown of Lombardy with which the German Emperors of Lombardy were crowned. Charles V, Napoleon and Ferdinand I also made use of the same historic bauble which is not of much splendour. It costs a five franc fee to see it, and the sight is not worth the price of admission. [Illustration: THE IRON CROWN OF LOMBARDY] From Milan to Domodossola, leaving Italy via the Simplon Pass, is 177 kilometres, or, via Bellinzona and the Splugen, 207 kilometres with mediocre roads until the lake region is reached, when they improve decidedly, being of the very best as they ascend the mountain valleys. CHAPTER XIX TURIN AND THE ALPINE GATEWAYS The mountains of Piedmont are of the same variety as those of Switzerland and Savoy. They form the highland background to Turin which gives it its magnificent and incomparable framing. Turin, or Torino, was the old capital of the Duchy of Savoy, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia, up to 1864, and to-day is the chief city of Piedmont. Turin is laid out in great rectangular blocks, with long straight streets, and it is brilliant and beautiful as modern cities go, but there is not much that is romantic about it, save an occasional historical memory perpetuated by some public monument. [Illustration: _Palazzo Madonna, Turin_] Turin at the time of the founding of the kingdom of Sardinia, which included also the domain of the house of Savoy, contained but 75,000 inhabitants. Said Montesquieu, who visited it in 1728: "It is the most beautiful city in the world." De Brosseo, a few years later, declared it to be "the finest city in Italy, by the proper alignment of its streets, the regularity of its buildings, and the beauty of its squares." From this point of view the same holds true to-day, but it is not sympathetic and winsome in the least, and it is not for the contemplation of straight streets, square, box-like buildings or formal public garden plots that one comes to Italy. Turin's monumental memories are by no means non-existent or unclassed, but they are almost overpowered by the modern note which rings so loudly in one's ears and flashes so vividly in one's eyes. Of them all the Palazzo Madonna has the greatest appeal. It was originally a thirteenth century construction of the Montferrats, but was added to at various times until well along in the eighteenth century, when it became the palace of Madonna Reale, the widow of Charles Emmanuel II. All its value from an architectural point of view is in its exterior aspect, but its trim twelve-sided towers have a real distinction that a heavier, more clumsy donjon often lacks. The Palazzo Carignano is a fanciful invention of an architect, Guarni by name, who in 1680 had no very clear idea as to what a consistent and pleasing architectural conception should be. This palace's sole reason to be remembered is that it was the residence of King Carlo-Alberto. To-day Guarni's original façade has been covered by a non-contemporary colonnade, with columns and statues of a certain impressive presence, which would be considered handsome if it were some degrees finer in workmanship, for the conception was certainly on becoming general lines. The Palazzo Valentino, built in 1633 by Christine of France, the daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medici, and wife of Vittorio Amedeo II, is now devoted to the usages of an educational institution. It is on the classic French chateau order and is as out of place in Italy as the Italian Renaissance architecture is in England. On the Piazza Castello rises Turin's old castle of the fourteenth century, built of brick, and, though moss-grown, it is hardly a ruin. The Palazzo Reale, built in 1678 on the north side of the Piazza, is severe and simple as to exterior, but luxurious enough within by reason of the collections which it houses. In the armory of Turin's royal palace is the full suit of armour worn by Duke Emanuele-Filiberto on the occasion of the battle of St. Quentin, and made by his own hand. He was an armourer, a silversmith and a worker in fine metals beyond compare. In peace he was a craftsman without an equal; in war he was the same kind of a fighter. Another armour suit is of gigantic proportions. Who its owner was history and the catalogue fail to state. The breast-plate bears a ducal coronet and the letter F. The suit contains enough metal to armour plate a small battle ship. For the more sentimentally inclined there is a cabinet of delicately fashioned stilettos, which we have always fondly believed were the national arms of Italy. These particular stilettos were taken from fair ladies after they had made away with their lovers when they came to be a nuisance. Fickle women! Turin is one of the many places on the map of Europe famous for a specialty in the eating line. This time it is chocolate. Let not any one think that all chocolate comes from Aiguebelle or Royat. The bread of Turin, "_grissini_," is also in a class by itself. It is made in long sticks about the diameter of a pipe stem, and you eat yards of it with your _minestra_ and between courses. The puppet show or marionette theatres of Turin have ever been famous, indeed the _fantoccini_ theatre had its origin in Piedmont. The buffon Gianduja was of Piedmontese birth, as was Arlequino of Bergamo. Around Turin are various suburban neighbourhoods with historic memories and some palace and villa remains which might well be noted. The Vigna della Regina, or the Queen's Vineyard, is the name given to a once royal residence, now a girls' school. The house was built in 1650 by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy. Another one of the nearby sights, not usually "taken in," is the natural garden (an undefiled landscape garden) arranged in the sixteenth century by the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto. King Carlo Felice had a country house called the Castello d'Aglie to the north of the city. It is remarkable for nothing but the pure air of the neighbourhood, and that abounds everywhere in these parts. [Illustration: On the Strada, Moncenisio] At Rivoli, a few kilometres out on the Mont Cenis road, is a clumsily built, half finished mass of buildings, planned by Vittorio Amedeo II. in the eighteenth century as a royal residence to which he some day might return if he ever got tired of playing abdicator. He occupied it surely enough, in due course, but as a prisoner, not as a ruler. He was a well-meaning monarch, and through him the house of Savoy obtained Sardinia, but he made awful blunders at times, or at least one, for ultimately he landed in prison where he died in 1732. Six leagues from Turin is the little garrison town of Pinerolo. A heap of stones on the mountain marks the site of a chateau where were once imprisoned the man of the Iron Mask, Lauzun, the political prisoner of history, and Fouquet, the money-grabbing minister of Louis XIV. Lauzun and his personal history make interesting reading for one versed in things Italian and French. He made a famous _mot_ when being transported to his mountain prison. He was requested from time to time to descend from his carriage, whenever by chance it had got stuck in the mud or wedged between offending rocks. With much apology he was begged to descend. "Oh! this is nothing; these little misfortunes of travel are nothing of moment compared to the object of my journey." Other prisoners may have put things similarly, but hardly with the same grace of diction. Let no automobilist, on leaving Turin, come out by way of Pinerolo unless he is prepared for a detour of a hundred kilometres, a rise of 2,000 metres and a drop down again to 1,300 metres at Cesana Tarinese, where he strikes the main road over the Col de Mont Cenis to Modane in France, or via the Col de Mont Genevre to Briançon. The direct road from Turin is via Rivoli and Suse. Not every traveller in Italy knows the half-hidden out-of-the-way Val d'Aoste, the obvious gateway from Turin to the north via the Col du Saint Bernard. Travellers by rail rush through via the Simplon or Mont Cenis and know not the delights and joys which possess the traveller by road as he plunges into the heart of the Alps through the gateway of the Val d'Aoste. The Val d'Aoste, less than a hundred kilometres, all counted, has more scenic and architectural surprises than any similar strip in Europe, but it is not a _piste_ to be raced over by the scorching automobilist at sixty miles an hour. On the contrary it can not be done with satisfaction in less than a day, even by the most blasé of tourists. The railway also ascends the valley as far as Aoste, and one may cross over by coach into France or Switzerland by either the Col du Petit Saint Bernard or the Col du Grand Saint Bernard. It is worth doing! The whole Val d'Aoste is one great reminder of feudal days and feudal ways. Curiously enough, too, in this part of Piedmont the aspect is as much French as Italian, and so too is the speech of the people. At Courmayer, for instance, the street and shop signs are all in French, and _'om_ the diminutive of _homme_ replaces the Italian _uomo_; _cheur_ stands for _coeur_ and _sita_ for _cité_ and _citta_. This patois is universal through the upper valleys, and if one has any familiarity with the patois of Provence it will not be found so very strange. French, however, is very commonly understood throughout Piedmont, more so than elsewhere in north Italy, where, for a fact, a German will find his way about much more readily than a Frenchman. One blemish lies all over the Val d'Aoste. It was greatly to be remarked by travellers of two or three generations ago and is still in evidence if one looks for it, though actually it is decreasing. Large numbers of the population are of the afflicted class known as _Cretins_, and many more suffer from _goitre_. It is claimed that these diseases come from a squalid filthiness, but the lie is given to this theory by the fact that there is no apparent filthiness. The diseases are evidently hereditary, and at some time anterior to their appearance here they were already known elsewhere. They are then results of an extraneous condition of affairs imported and developed here in this smiling valley through the heedlessness of some one. There are certain neighbourhoods, as at Courmayer and Ivrea, where they do not exist at all, but in other localities, and for a radius of ten kilometres roundabout, they are most prevalent. The southern gateway to the Val d'Aoste is the snug little mountain of Ivrea, 50 kilometres from Turin. The cheese and butter of the Italian Alps, known throughout the European market as Beurre de Milan, is mostly produced in this neighbourhood, and the ten thousand souls who live here draw almost their entire livelihood from these products. Ivrea has an old Castle of imposing, though somewhat degenerate, presence. It has been badly disfigured in the restorations of later years, but two of its numerous brick towers of old still retain their crenelated battlements. The place itself is of great antiquity, and Strabon has put it on record that 3,600 of the inhabitants of the Val d'Aoste were once sold en bloc in the streets of Ivrea by Terentius Varro, their captor. The Val d'Aoste, from Ivrea to Courmayer, about one hundred kilometres, will some day come to its own as a popular touring ground, but that time is not yet. When the time comes any who will may know all the delights of Switzerland's high valleys without suffering from the manifest drawback of overexploitation. One doesn't necessarily want to drink beer before every waterfall or listen to a yoedel in every cavern. What is more to the point is that one may here find simple, unobtrusive attention on the part of hotel keepers and that at a price in keeping with the surroundings. This you get in the Val d'Aoste and throughout the Alps of Piedmont, Dauphiny and Savoy. Up high in the Val d'Aoste lies a battery of little Alpine townlets scarce known even by name, though possessed of a momentous history and often of architectural monuments marvellously imposing in their grandeur and beauty. Near Pont Saint Martin, high above the torrent of the Doire, is the picturesque feudal castle of Montalto, a name famous in Italian annals of the middle ages. Over the river Lys, at Pont Saint Martin, there is a Roman bridge; a modern iron one crosses it side by side, but the advantages, from an æsthetic and utilitarian view-point, as well, are all in favour of the former. A ruined castle crowns the height above Pont Saint Martin and a few kilometres below, at Donnas, is an ancient Roman mile stone still bearing the uneffaced inscription XXXII M. P. This whole region abounds in Napoleonic souvenirs. Fort Bard, the key to the valley, garrisoned by only eight hundred Austrians, gave Bonaparte a check which he almost despaired of overcoming. The Little Corporal's ingenuity pulled him through, however. He sent out a patrol which laid the streets of the little village below the fort with straw and his army passed unobserved in the night as if slippered with felt. But for this, the Battle of Marengo, one of the most brilliant of French feats of arms, might never have been fought. Bard, the fort and the village, is now ignored by the high road which, by a cut-off, avoids the steep climb in and out of the place. Unheard of by most travellers in Italy, and entirely unknown to others, Verrex in the Val d'Aoste possesses a ravishing architectural surprise in the shape of a feudal castle on a hillside overlooking the town. It is of the square keep, or donjon, variety, and played an important part in the warlike times of the past. The chateau of Issogne near by, built by the Prior Geor. Challant, less of a castle and more of a country house, is an admirable fifteenth century domestic establishment still habitable, and inhabited, to-day. All up and down the valley are relics of the engineering skill of the great Roman road and bridge builders. The road over Mont Jovet, a sheer cut down into the roof of a mountain, was theirs; so were the bridges at Chatillon and Pont Saint Martin, and another at Salassiens. At the Pont d'Ael is a Roman aqueduct. Chatillon, like Verrex, is not marked in big letters on many maps, but it belongs in every architect lover's Italian itinerary. Its two bridges of olden time are veritable wonder works. Its chateau Ussel, a ruin of the fourteenth century, is still glorious under its coat of mail of moss and ivy, while the Castle of Count Christian d'Entréves is of the kind seen by most people only in picture books. At Fénis is a magnificent feudal battlemented castle with donjon tower, a _chemin ronde_ and a barbican so awe-inspiring as to seem unreal. With Verrex and Issogne, near by, Fénis completes a trio of chateaux-forts built by the overlords of the name of Challant who possessed feudal rights throughout all the Val d'Aoste. Aimon de Challant built the castle of Fénis in 1330. Virtually it was, and is, a regular fortress, with as complete a system of defence as ever princely stronghold had. At once a sumptuous seigneurial residence and a seemingly impregnable fortress, it is one of the most remarkable works of its class above ground. Aoste is a little Italian mountain town far more French than Italian from many points of view. It is of great antiquity and was the Augusta Prætoria of various Roman itineraries. Like most Roman cities Aoste was laid out on the rectangular parallelogram plan, an aspect which it still retains. Aoste's triumphal arch, its city gate and walls, and its ancient towers all lend a quaint aspect of mediævalism which the twentieth century--so far as it has gone--has entirely failed to contaminate. For lovers of English church history it will be a pleasure to recall that Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, was born at Aoste. Another churchly memory at Aoste is a tablet inscribed with the particulars of the flight of Calvin from his refuge here in 1541. [Illustration: _Castle of Fénis_] Saint Bernard, who has given his name to two neighbouring mountain passes and to a breed of dogs, was Archbishop of Aoste in his time. His perilous journeys in crossing the Alps, going and coming to and from his missions of good, led to his founding the celebrated hospice on the nearby mountain pass which bears his name. The convent of the Great St. Bernard is the highest habited point in Europe. From Aoste to the Hospice of the Grand Saint Bernard is twenty-six kilometres, with a rise of nearly 2,000 metres and a fall of a like amount to Martigny in Switzerland. The percentage of rise is considerably greater than the route leading into France by the Little Saint Bernard, which falls short of the former by three hundred metres, but the road is rather better. By far the easiest route from Turin into France is via the Col de Mont Cenis to Modane; but a modern automobile will not quarrel seriously with any of these save one or two short, ugly bits of from fifteen to seventeen per cent. They are pretty stiff; there's no doubt about that, and with a motor whose horse power is enfeebled by the rarefied atmosphere at these elevations the driver is likely to meet with some surprises. CHAPTER XX FROM THE ITALIAN LAKES TO THE RIVIERA There is one delightful crossing of Italy which is not often made either by the automobilist or the traveller by rail. We found it a delightful itinerary, though in no respect did it leave the beaten track of well worn roads; simply it was a hitherto unthought of combination of highroads and byroads which led from Como, on the shores of its mountain lake, to Nice, the head centre of the Riviera, just across the Italian border in France, entering that land of good cooks and good roads (better cooks and better roads than are found in Italy, please remember) via the Col de Tende and the Custom House of San Dalmazzo. The itinerary covers a length of 365 kilometres and all of it is over passably good roads, the crossing of the frontier and the Lower Alps at the Col de Tende being at a lower level than any other of the Franco-Italian mountain passes, although we encountered snow on the heights even in the month of May. This route is a pleasant variation from the usual entrance and exit from Italy which the automobilist coming from the south generally makes via one of the high Alpine valleys. If one is bound Parisward the itinerary is lengthened by perhaps five hundred kilometres, but if one has not entered Italy by the Cote d'Azur and the Riviera gateway the thing is decidedly worth the doing. Como itself is the head centre for this part of the lake region, but we used it only as a "pointe de départ." Cernobbio is far and away the best idling place on the Lago di Como and is getting to be the rival of Aix-les-Bains in France, already the most frequently visited automobile centre in Europe. From Cernobbio to Como, swinging around the foot of the lake, is but a short six kilometres, and from the latter place the Milan road leaves by the old barbican gate and winds upwards steadily for a dozen kilometres, crossing the railway line a half a dozen times before Milan is reached. The detour to Monza was made between Como and Milan, a lengthening of the direct route by perhaps a dozen kilometres, and the Strada Militaire, which joins with the Bergamo-Milan road, was followed into the Lombard capital through the Porto Orientale. The direct road, the post road from Como, enters the city by the Porta Nuova. There seems to be nothing to choose between the two routes, save that to-day one may be good and the other bad as to surface and six months later the reverse be the case. On entering Milan one circles around the Foro Bonaparte and leaves the city by the Porta Magenta for Turin. Magenta, twenty-five kilometres; Novara, forty-six kilometres; so runs the itinerary, and all of it at the dead level of from 120 to 150 metres above the sea. We were stoned at Novara and promptly made a complaint to the authorities through the medium of the proprietor of the Hotel de la Ville, where we had a most gorgeous repast for the rather high price of five francs a head. It was worth it, though, in spite of the fact that we garaged the automobile in the dining room where we ate. We got satisfaction, too, for the stoning by the sight of half a dozen small boys being hauled up to the justice, accompanied by their frightened parents. The outcome we are not aware of, but doubtless the hotel proprietor insisted that his clients should not be driven out of town in this manner, and, though probably no serious punishment was inflicted, somebody undoubtedly got a well-needed fright. The road still continues towards Turin perfectly flat for a matter of a hundred kilometres beyond Novara, the glistening mountain background drawing closer and closer until one realizes to the full just why Turin and Milan are such splendid cities, an effect produced as much by their incomparable sites as by their fine modern buildings, their great avenues and boulevards, and their historic traditions. This borderland between Lombardy and Piedmont forms the very flower of present day Italy. The diarist Evelyn remarked all this in a more appreciative manner than any writer before or since. He wrote: "We dined at Marignano near Milan, a _grette cittie_ famous for a cheese a little short of the best Parmeggiano, where we met half a dozen suspicious cavaliers who yet did us no harm. Then passing through a continuous garden we went on with exceeding pleasure, for this is the Paradise of Lombardy, the highways as even and straight as a cord, the fields to a vast extent planted with fruit, and vines climbing every tree planted at equal distances one from the other; likewise there is an abundance of mulberry trees and much corn." To arrive on the Riviera from Turin one leaves the roads leading to the high Alpine valleys behind. Directly north from Turin runs the highroad which ultimately debouches into the Val d'Aosta and the Saint Bernard Passes; to the west, those leading through Pinerolo and the Col de Sestrières and Susa and the Cols of Mont Genèvre and Mont Cenis. Just out of Turin on the road to Cuneo (which is perhaps more often called by its French name, Coni, for you are now heading straight for the frontier, a matter of but a half a hundred kilometres beyond) is Moncalieri, the possessor of a royal chateau where was born, in 1904, Prince Humbert of Piedmont, the present heir to the Italian throne. When Italy's present Queen Helena sojourned here after the birth of her son she took her promenades abroad _en automobile_ and so came to be a partisan of the new form of locomotion as already had the dowager Queen before her. The latter may properly enough be called the automobiling monarch of Europe for she is heard of to-day at Aix-les-Bains, to-morrow at Paris or Trouville and the week after at Pallanza or Cadennabia, and in turn in Spain, at Marienbad, Ostend, Biarritz or Nice, and she always travels by road, and at a good pace, too. This up-to-date queen's predilection for the automobile in preference to the state coach of other days or the plebeian railway has doubtless had much to do with the development of the automobile industry in Italy. It has, too, made the gateway into Italy from the Riviera over the Col de Tende the good mountain road that it is. Those who pass this way--and it's the only way worth considering from the South of France to the Italian Lakes--will have cause to bless Italy's automobiling queen. The chiefs of state of Italy, France and Germany know how to encourage automobilism and all that pertains thereto better than those of Republican America or Monarchial Britain. Carignano, twelve kilometres beyond Moncalieri, is famous for its silk industry and its beautiful women. We saw nothing of the former, but the latter certainly merit the encomium which has been bestowed upon them ever since the Chevalier Bayard remarked the _gentilezza_ and beauty of the widow Bianca Montferrat, and fought for her in a tournament centuries ago. Carmagnola, a half a dozen kilometres off the direct road, just beyond Carignano, takes much the same rank as the latter place. Neither are tourist points to the slightest degree, but each is delightfully unworldly and give one glimpses of native life that one may find only in the untravelled _hinterland_ of a well known country. The peasant folk of Carmagnola are as picturesque and gay in their costume and manner of life as one can possibly expect to see in these days when manners and customs are changing before the new order of things. Here is the home of the celebrated Dance of the Carmagnole, a gyrating, whirling, dervish-like fury of a dance which makes a peasant girl of the country look more charming than ever as she swishes and swirls her yards of gold or silver neck beads in a most dazzling fashion. The French Revolution borrowed the "Carmagnole" for its own unspeakable orgies, by what right no one knows, for there is nothing outré about it when seen in its native land. Possibly some alien Savoyards, who may have joined their forces with the Marseilles Batallion, may have brought it to France with their light luggage--proverbially light, for the Savoyard has the reputation of always travelling with a bundle on a stick. Would that we touring automobilists could, or would, travel lighter than we do! Racconigi, a half a dozen kilometres farther on, has another royal chateau, and, passing Saluzza, through the arch erected in memory of the marriage of Victor Amedeo and Christine of France, one arrives at Cuneo in thirty kilometres more. From Carmagnola to Cuneo direct, by Savigliano, is practically the same distance, but the other route is perhaps the more picturesque. At Cuneo one has attained an elevation of some five hundred and thirty-five metres above sea level, the rise thence to the Col de Tende being eight hundred metres more, that is to say the pass is crossed at an elevation not exceeding 1,300 metres. Cuneo's Albergo Barra di Ferro (a new name to us for a hotel) accommodates one for the price of five francs a day and upwards, and gives a discount of ten per cent. to members of the Touring Club Italiano. These prices will certainly not disturb any one who can afford to supply a prodigal automobile with tires at the present high prices. We climbed up from Cuneo to the Col, a matter of thirty-three kilometres of a very easy rise, in something less than a couple of hours, the last six kilometres, the steepest portion, averaging but a five per cent. grade. On leaving Cuneo the road ascends very gradually, running along the valley of the Vermagnana to the foot of the Col where it begins to mount in earnest. Below is the great plain of Piedmont watered by the Po and its tributary rivers, while above rises the mass of the Maritime Alps, with Mount Viso as its crowning peak, nearly four thousand metres high. It is a veritable Alpine road but not at all difficult of ascent. About midway on the height one remarks the attempt to cut a tunnel and thereby shorten the route, an attempt which was abandoned long years ago. From the crest, the Col itself, one gets a view ranging from Mont Viso to Mont Rosa in the north and on the south even to the blue waters of the Mediterranean. For fully a third of the year, and often nearer half, the Col de Tende is cursed with bad weather and is often impassable for wheeled traffic in spite of the fact of its comparatively low elevation. The wind storms here are very violent. From Tende the road winds down into the low French levels, and in this portion takes rank as one of the earliest of Alpine roads, it having been built by Carlo Emanuele I in 1591. Down through the valley of the Torrent of the Roya glides the mountain road and, passing San Dalmazzo and numerous rock villages, a distinct feature of these parts, in sixteen kilometres reaches Breil, the first place of note on French territory. We had our "triptych" signed at the Italian dogana fifteen kilometres beyond the brow of the mountain, at San Dalmazzo di Tenda, crossing on to French soil three kilometres farther on. The French douane is at Breil, at the sixty-sixth kilometre stone beyond Cuneo, and at an elevation of less than three hundred metres above the sea. Here we delayed long enough to have the douaniers check off the number of the motor, the colour of the body work, the colour of the cushions and numerous other incidentals in order that the French government might not be mulcted a sou. "Everything in order. Allons! partez;" said the gold braided official, and again we were in France. At Breil the road divides, one portion, following still the valley of the Roya, slopes down to Ventimiglia in twenty kilometres, the other, in forty kilometres, arriving at Nice via the valley of the Paillon. It is not all down hill after Breil for, before Sospel is reached, seventeen kilometres away, one crosses another mountain crest by a fairly steep ascent and again, after Sospel, it rises to the Col di Braus--this time over the best of French roads--to an elevation of over one thousand metres. From Sospel a spur road leads direct to Menton but the Grande Route leads straight on to Nice, shortly after to blend in with the old Route d'Italie, linking up Paris with the Italian-Mediterranean frontier, a straight away "good road," the dream of the automobilist, for a matter of 1,086 kilometres. THE END. Index Abbey at Vallombrosa, 153 Acquasola, Park of, 101 Ad Confluentis, 65 Adda (Family of), 321 Adelphi, The (Secret Society), 39 Adriatic Sea, 16, 67, 163, 236, 237, 260, 283 Æmilia, 4, 271 Ætna, 11, 19 Agrippa, 211 Aiguebell, 6, 349 Albergo (See also Hotel), 48, 49 All'Accademia, 304 Arti, 270 Asolo, 295 Barra di Ferro, 367 Capello d'Oro, 318 del Cervo, 339 Delfino, 110 della Nuova York, 117 della Quercia, 198 del Sol, 217 Fanti-Stella d'Oro, 281 Grimaldi, 94 Guippone, 130 Italia, 115 Italia (at Urbino), 235 Unione, 105 Alassio, 91, 92 Alba Longa, 186 Alban Hills, 181, 189 Albano, 179, 181, 184, 185, 189, 197 Albano Lake, 184, 185, 186 Albaro, 106 Albenga, 66, 92, 93, 95 Albero d'Oro (See Palazzo Imperiali) Albium Ingaunum, 66 Intermelium, 66 Alessandria, 333 Algeria, 15, 17 Alps, 7, 12, 17 Alps of Piedmont, 2, 15, 85 Amalfi, 2, 212, 219, 220, 224 Ambrosian Library, 336 Amelia, 66 Ampesso Pass, 294 Ancona, 2, 11, 67, 225, 226, 236, 238, 242, 243 Aosta, Valley of, 72 Aoste, 352, 358, 359 Apennines, The, 17, 65, 96, 117 Appian Way (See Via Appia) Aquileja, 299 Arch of Triumph, 336 Arco d'Augusto, 245 Arcola, 116 Arcore, 321 Aretino, Guido, 155 Aretium, 160 Arezzo, 7, 11, 70, 138, 153, 156, 159, 160, 161, 231 Ariminum, 64, 65 Ariosto, 253, 255, 271 Arma, 90 Arno, The (River), 124, 125, 127, 159, 160, 163 Arno, Valley of the, 124, 156 Arona, 73, 327, 332 Asinalunga, 166 Asolo, 295, 297 Assisi, 228, 230 Asti, 333 Augustus, Tower of, 86 Averso, 199 Avezzano, 225, 226 Azeglio, Massimo d', 139 Bacciochi, Eliza (Princess of Lucca), 123 Baies, 211 Baptistery, The, of Pisa, 126 Barberino di Mugello, 11, 26 Bargello, at Florence, 162 Bari, 237, 238, 241 Barletta, 238 Basilicate, Province of, 36 Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, 229 Baveno, 327 Bay of Naples, 13, 54, 207, 209, 211, 213, 220 Bellagio, 321, 325 Bellay, Cardinal du Joachim, 6 Bellinzona, 345 Belluno, 294, 295, 325 Bergamo, 317, 318, 319, 350 Bernadino, 75 Bertolini, 105 Biarritz, 3 Bibbiena, 156, 161, 162 "Blue Grotto," 223 Bologna, 6, 19, 61, 65, 160, 251, 265-269, 277 Bononia, 65, 160, 268 Bordighera, 86, 87 Borghese, Family of, 187 Borgia (Family of), 5, 176, 227, 244, 253, 261, 262, 263, 264 Borgo San Donino, 65, 274 Borromean Islands, 327 Botticelli, 14 Bourbons, 40 Breil, 369 Brescia, 72, 315, 317, 318, 333 Brescia Armata, 315, 316 Briançon, 73 Bridge of Arcole, 303 Brindisi, 236, 237, 239, 241 Brisighella, 263 Broletto of Bergamo, 318 Brunelleschi, Family of, 146 Brunswick, Family of, 257 Buonaparte, a notary, 117 Cadenabbia, 325 Caesena, 65 Calabria, 10, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27, 196, 214 Campagna, 19, 166, 173, 180, 181, 182, 184, 189 Campaldino, Plain of, 156 Campanello (Brigand) 141, 142 Campania, Province, 36, 67 Campanile, The, 282 Campanile of San Marco, 295 Campo Formico, 298 Campo Santo of Pisa, 127 Canalazzo at Venice, 288 Canossa, 273 Canova, 14 Capo delle Melle, 91 Capodimonte, 205 Capo di Noli, 95 Capo di Vado, 95 Capri, 2, 15, 26, 198, 202, 207, 220, 221, 222, 223 Capua, 66, 197, 198 Carbonari, The, 39 Careggi, 146, 147 Carignano, 365, 366 Carmagnola, 366 Carrara, 117, 119 Casa del Commune, 93 Casa di Palladio, 301 Casa Stradivari, 312 Casentino, 26, 65, 124, 144, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163 Caserta, 11, 198, 199 Castellamare, 212, 219, 224 Cassino, 184 Cascades of Terni, 226 Cascina, 128 Castles Castel del Carmine, 201 Castel Franco, 65, 269 Castel Gandolfo, 185, 186 Castel Malatesta, 245 Castel Paraggi, 111 Castello dell'Ovo, 201, 202 Castello Gavone, 94 Castello of Ferrara, 254 Castello of Massa, 119 Castle of Fénis, 21 Castle of Malpaga, 318 Castle of Rimini, 21 Castle of Sant Angelo, 13, 174 176, 264 Cathedral of Saint Procule, 210 Cemenelium, 66 Cernobbio, 41, 361 Certosa at Pavia, 340, 341 Cervara, 109 Cesana, 260, 261 Cesana Tarinese, 352 Cesena, 65 Chambéry, 6 Chatillon, 357 Chaucer, 5, 279 Chiavari, 112, 113 Chioggia, 237, 238, 251 Chiusi, 70, 167 Church of Sant'Antonio, 279 Cimabue, 9 Cimiez, 66 Circus Maxentius, 183 Cisalpine Gaul, 64 Cisterna di Roma, 71, 197 Civita Castellana, 225 Civita-Vecchi, 170 Claterna, 65 Clusium, Tombs of, 167 Codroipo, 297 Cogoletto, 98 Coire, 75 Col de Sestrières, 364 de Tend, 360, 365, 367, 368 du Grand St. Bernard, 73, 352, 364 du Mont Genevre, 73, 364 du Petit Saint Bernard, 73, 352, 364 Mont Cenis, 364 Colosseum (Rome), 174 Colmo dell'Orso, 75 Colonna, Family of, 5, 189, 190 Comacchio, 250, 251 Communicazione, Strada di grande, 69, 71 Como, 73, 322, 323, 326, 333, 360, 361 Conegliano, 297 Convent of the Great St. Bernard, 359 Cornudo, 295 Corte Reale, 310 Cortona, 149 Cosa, 149 Cote d'Azur, 361 Courmayer, 353, 354 Cremona, 311, 312 Crevola, 73 Cuneo, 364, 367, 368, 369 Dalmatia, 293 Dante, 7, 156, 157, 158, 164, 165, 248, 260, 270, 279, 280 Del Sarto, Andrea, 9 Desenzano, 313 Diveria, 73 Dogana (Custom House), 62 Dolce Acqua, 86 Domini, 154 Domodossola, 73, 345 Donatello, 120 Donegani, Carlo, 76 Donnas, 356 Doria, Andrea, 90, 102, 109 Duomo of Como, 322 of Fiesole, 151 of Milan, 336 of Pisa, 126 Durer, Albrecht, 6 Elba, 2 Empoli, 130, 131, 132 Este (Family of), 253, 256, 258, 264, 270, 271 Este, Village of, 256, 258 Etruria, 67 Faenza, 65 Faënza, 263, 264 Farnese, Family of, 187 Faventia, 65 Felix, 6 Feltre, 294 Fénis, 357 Ferrara, 6, 238, 251, 253-256 Fidentia, 65 Fieschi (Family of), 102, 113 Fiesole, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151-153 F. I. A. F. (Garages), 41, 105 Finale Marina, 43, 93-95 Fiorenzuola, 274 Firenzuola, 65 Fiume, 283 Florian's, 286, 287, 292 Florence, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 13, 18, 31, 41, 43, 69, 70, 101, 122, 128, 132, 133, 135, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 158, 159, 160, 171, 226, 250, 251, 260, 268, 277, 312 Florentia, 65 Foggia, 238 Forli, 65, 262, 263 Foligno, 158, 226, 228, 230 Forlimpopoli, 65 Formia, 198 Forte Urbano, 269 Fortezza, The (Secret Society), 39 Forum Cornelii, 65, 264 Forum Gallorum, 65, 269 Forum Livii, 65 Forum Populii, 65 Fractelli, The (Secret Society), 39 Frascati, 2, 12, 179, 181, 186, 187, 188, 192 Frosinone, 71 Futa Pass, 26, 251 Gaeta, 71, 198 Galleria Victor-Emmanuel, 337 Gallinaria, Isle of, 92 Garda, 326 Garibaldi, 166, 204 Geneva, 8 Genna, 66 Genoa, 5, 34, 41, 66, 69, 74, 89, 93, 95-99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 201 Gonfolina, Gorge of, 152 Grenoble, 73 Grimaldi, 62, 82, 83, 84 Grand Hotel (Nervi), 108 Grand-Hotel (Rome), 171 Grand Hotel San Marco, 275 Grand Hotel (Venice), 267 Grand Saint Bernard (See Col du Grand St. Bernard) Gravadona, 325 Grimaldi, Family of, 102 Gropollo, Marchese, 108 Grosseto, 128, 138, 169 Grotto Nuovo di Posilipo, 206 Guardie-Finanze (Custom officer), 85 Gubbio, 232 Guiadecca, 292 Guidi, Counts of, 157 Gulf of Spezia, 66 Hotel Belle Arti, 168 Brun, 267 Croix de Malte, 114 Danielli, 267, 288 de la Minerve, 171 de la Ville (Florence), 135 de la Ville (Novana), 362 de l'Europe (Rampallo), 111 de l'Europe (Venice), 288 Diomede, 217 Europe (Milan), 339 Helvetia, 135 Massa, 119 Palace, 133 Porta Rossa, 135 Royal, 197 Royal et des Étrangers, 199 Splendide, 110 Suisse, 217 Herculaneum, 212, 218, 219 Il Deserto, 98 Il Paradisino (Mountain), 155 Il Salone, 280 Imola, 61, 65, 262, 264, 265 Intemillium, 85 Ionian Sea, 236 Ischia, 211, 212 Isernia, 238 Isola dei Bergeggi, 95 Issogne, 357 Ivrea, 354 La Brera at Milan, 336 La Favorita, 205 Lago di Como, 320, 321, 361 Lago di Garda, 313, 314, 315 Lago di Lugano, 320, 326 Lago di Maggiore, 73, 320, 326, 329, 331 Lago d'Orta, 320 Lago di Varese, 326 Lake of Averno, 211 Lake of Iseo, 317 Lake Varese, 320 "La Lanterna," 95, 103 La Magliana, 183 La Pineta, 246 Lavagua, 113 Laveno, 326 La Verna, Convent of, 162 Lecce, 237 Lecco, 320, 321 Leghorn, 4, 15, 123 Legnago, 310 Lido, The, 292 Liguria, 15, 43, 65, 66, 92, 96, 107 Lion Inn, 176 Liro, The, 76 Livorno, 68, 119, 121, 123 Livorno, Duke of, 123 Lodi, 343 Lombardy, 16, 17, 25, 73, 173, 332-335, 362, 363 Lorenzo the Magnificent, 145, 146, 152 Lotto, 36 Lucca, 11, 68, 69, 119, 121, 122, 123, 273 Lugano, 326 Luna, 66, 67 Luther, Martin, 6 Mafia, The (Secret Society), 39 Magenta, 362 Magra (the River), 116 Malatesta (Family of), 245 Manfredonia, 238, 241 Mantua, 310, 311, 312, 333 Marina-Andora, 91 Marina di Pisa, 124 Martinengo, 317 Masaniello, 203 Massa, 117, 119 Massarosa, 121 Medici (Family of), 5, 120, 123, 132, 168, 187, 348 Mediterranean Sea, 17, 184 Mennagio, 325 Menton, 10, 81, 82, 83, 84, 95 Mestre, 281, 282 Meta, 212 Milan, 1, 4, 6, 34, 41, 72, 73, 105, 276, 321, 322, 333, 335-340, 343, 344, 345, 361, 362, 363 Milan Express, 10 Minestra, 30 Modane, 73, 269, 359 Modena, 65, 269, 270 Monaco, 66 Monopoli, 237 Mont Cenis, 73, 350, 352 Mont Appio, 86 Monte Berico, 303 Monte Carlo, 3 Monte Cristo's Island, 2 Monte Falterona, 124, 156 Montelupo, 133 Montepulciana, 11, 166, 167 Monte Secchieta, 155, 162 Montevarchi, 156, 159 Mont Gauro, 211 Mont Nuovo, 211 Monza, 321, 344, 361 Mortola, 82, 84 Mugello, Valley of, 70, 151 Musset, Alfred de, 8, 280, 287, 288 Mutina, 65 Naples, 1, 8, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21, 31, 34, 41, 43, 55, 63, 71, 105, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 207, 210, 212, 213, 219, 224, 225, 312 Neapolitan Camarra, The (Secret Society), 38 Nervi, 108 Nervia, The, 86 Nesso, 321 Nicæ, 66 Nice, 65, 66, 370 Noli, 95 Nona's Tower, 176 Novara, 333, 362, 363 Oneglia, 90, 98 Orta, 309, 320, 331 Ortona, 238, 241 Otranto, 2, 237 Orvieto, 70, 138, 166, 167, 168 Osteria, 26 Ostia, 66, 181 Otricoli, 181 Ouida, Marquise de la Ramée, 120, 121 Padua, 5, 6, 7, 41, 278-281, 294 Pæstum, 224 Palace of the Caesars, 247 Palace of the Carrera, 280 Palace of Caserta, 205 Palace of the Doges, 288 Palace Farnese, 205 Palace of Theodoric, 247 Palazzaccio, 159, 160 Palazza Publico (Cesana), 261 Palazzos (See also Palaces) Agostini, 127 Bisenzi, 168 Campetto, 105 Capitano, 280 Carignano, 347 Communal, 244 Del Comune, 139, 245 Dorio, 101 Ducale, 270, 310 Gonfaloneri, 312 Gonzague, 310 Imperali, 107 Isola Bella, 327 Pretoria, 161 Publico, 139 Reale (Milan), 337 Reale (Modena), 270 Reale (Turin), 348 Rosso, 113 Valentino, 348 Vecchio, 162 Palestrina, 189, 190 Parma, 65 Parma, Duchy of, 272, 273 Passo della Somma, 71 Pater, Cosimo, 146 Paterno, 154 Pavia, 6, 333, 335, 340, 342, 343 Pegli, 99 Perugia, 21, 70, 138, 158, 162, 226, 228, 230, 231 Pesaro, 244 Pescara, 238, 241 Peschiera, 309, 310, 313 Petit Saint Bernard (See Col du Petit Saint Bernard) Petrarch, 5, 160, 258, 279, 341 Piacenza, 64, 65, 260, 272, 274, 275, 276 Piazzas Castello, 348 Dei Signori, 301, 304 Del Mercato, 130 Del Plebiscito, 169 Di Porta Ravegnana, 269 Erbe, 304 Fontana, 169 Mercanto, 241 San Marco, 286 San Pietro, 87 Vittorio Emanuel (Florence), 136 Vittorio Emanuele (Ravenna), 248 Vittorio Emanuele (Siena), 164, 165 Vittorio Emanuele (Verona), 306 Piedmont, 15, 16, 346, 350, 353, 355, 363 Pietrasanta, 119 Pinerola, 351, 364 Pisa, 41, 66, 67, 69, 125-128 Pistoja, 131, 132 Placentia, 64, 65, 274 Pliny, 321, 322 Poggibonzi, 141 Pompeii, 216, 217, 218 Pompey, 185 Pontassieve, 153, 156 Ponte a Mensola, 153 Ponte d'Augusto, 245 Pontedera, 129 Ponte di Castel Vecchio, 304 Ponte Lungo, 93 Ponte S. Angelo, 171 Pontine Marches (See Pontine Marshes) Pontine Marshes, 17, 72, 197 Pont Saint Louis, 81, 83 Pont Saint Martin, 355-357 Pouzzoles, 210 Poppi, 124, 156, 157, 161, 162 Poppi-Bibbiena, 156 Pordenone, 297 Porlezza, 326 Porta alla Croce, 153 Camollia, 69, 164 Capuana, 196 Cavalleggeri, 171 della Torre, 323 di Elce, 231 Romana, 69 San Lorenzo, 189 San Gallo, 145 San Sebastiano, 197 Santa Croce, 160 S. Frediano, 133 Portici, 212 Portofino, 66, 109, 110, 111 Porto Maurizio, 90 Porto Venere, 66 Portus Erici, 66 Portus Delphini, 66 Portus Herculis Monoeci, 66 Portus Veneris, 66 Posilippo, 63, 204, 206, 207, 210 Prato, 131, 132 Procida, 211, 212 Protectori Republicana (Secret Society), 39 Quaderna, 65 Quai Parthenope, 41 Rabelais, 6 Racconigi, 367 Ragusa, 11 Rapallo, 109, 111, 112 Raphael, 234 Ravenna, 2, 7, 236, 238, 245-248, 250, 251 Ravine of St. Louis, 82 Recco, 108 Reggio, 10, 11, 65, 271 Reggio, Strada de, 69 Regium Lepidi, 65 Reininghaus, The, 136 Resina, 212 Rheinwald, The, 74 Rimini, 2, 64, 65, 238, 245, 260, 261, 264 Riva, 314, 315 Riviera di Levante, 108 Rivoli, 350 Rocca di Papa, 186 Rocca of Cesana, 261 Roja, The, 85 Romagna, The, 163, 265 Roman Arena, 304, 306 Roman Forum, 179, 217 Rome, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 18, 21, 31, 34, 41, 43, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 101, 138, 160, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 192, 197, 201, 225, 238, 312 Rotonda Capra, 302 "Route Internationale," 81 Royat, 349 Rubens, 7 Sabine Hills, 189 Saint Peter's, 174 Salerno, 213, 224 Saltino, 154 Saluzza, 367 San Dalmazzo, 360, 369 Sardinia, 170 Sand, Georges, 8, 288 San Francesco, Church of, 229, 248 San Fruttoso, Monastery of, 109 San Gallo, Giuliano da (architect), 145 San Giacomo, Gorge of, 76 San Gimignano, 139, 141 San Giorgio, 291 San Marco, 13, 284, 286, 287, 291-293 San Miniato de Tedeschi, 129, 144 San Pier d'Arena, 95 San Salvatore, Church of, 113 San Remo, 62, 87 Santa Margherita, 109, 110 Santa Maria Novella, 9 Sant'Angelo, 21 Sant'Ellero, 154 Santuario of Vallombrosa, 154 Sarazza, 2 Sarzana, 117, 119 Savigliano, 367 Savignamo, 65 Savona, 66, 93, 95-98 Scaldini, 33, 34 Segni, 149 Senegallia, 244 Sermione, 313 Sestri, 66 Sestri-Levante, 113 Sicily, 25 Sidney, Sir Philip, 6 Siena, 7, 11, 43, 69, 138, 141-143, 158, 164-166, 170 Signa, 133 Simplon Pass, 10, 73, 345, 352 Soave, 303 Somma, Passo della, 71 Sorrento, 198, 212, 219-222, 224 Sospel, 370 Speranza, The, 39 Spezia, 65, 68, 108, 114-116 Spezia, Gulf of, 66, 116, 163 Spilla Nera, The (Secret Society), 39 Spinola, Family of, 102 Splugen Pass, 75 Spoleto, 71, 226 St. Francis of Assisi, 162, 279 Strada di grande Communicazione, 71, 299 Strada di Piedigrotta, 206 Forvia, 199 Militaire, 361 Piasana, 133 per Roma, 142 Regina, 325 per Siena, 142 Strozzi Palace, 135 Stresa, 327 Subiaco, 189, 190, 191, 192 Susa, Valley of, 72, 73 Taneto, 65 Taormina, 2 Taride (Maps), 77, 78 Taro River, 273, 274 Tasso, Torquato, 233, 253, 256 Taunetum, 65 Termoli, 241 Terni, 70, 138, 225 Terracina, 71, 197 Tiber, Valley of, 67 Tigullia, 66 Tivoli, 179, 181, 189, 192, 193, 194 Torre Anunziata, 212 Torre dei Guelfi, 93 Torre del Greco, 212 Torre de Marchese Malespina, 93 Torregaveta, 211 Torre, The, of Pisa, 126 Torri Asinelli, 269 Torri Gorisenda, 269 Tortona, 333 Touring Club Italiano, 78, 80 Towers of Tuscany, 138 Trattoria (Italian Wayside Inn), 43, 47, 52 Trajan, 242 Tregesco, 66 Treviso, 293, 294, 297, 299 Trieste, 283 Tunisia, 16, 17, 26 Turin, 34, 41, 72-74, 346-352, 359, 362-364 Tuscany, 16, 25, 122, 124, 334 Tusculum, 188, 189 Tyrrhenian Sea, 120, 125, 170 Ubertini, Guglielmino (Bishop of Arezzo), 157 Udine, 293, 297-299 Ulm, 6 Umbria, 162, 225, 238 Urbino, 233-235 Vada Sabbata, 66 Vado, 66 Val d'Aoste, 2, 21, 73, 314, 352-357, 364 (See also Valley of) Val d'Elsa, 139, 141 Val d'Arno, 152 Val d'Arno di Sotto, 152 Valley of Aosta, 72 Valley of Susa, 72 Valley of the Tiber, 225 Vallombrosa, 71, 144, 147, 153-156, 162 Valmontone, 189 Var, The (River), 66 Varazze, 43, 97, 98 Varenna, 325 Varese, 326 Varium fl., 66 Vatican, The, 173, 174, 227 Veii, 186 Venetia, 16 Venice, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 21, 41, 43, 53, 72, 230, 236, 251, 258, 260, 277, 281-284, 286, 288, 290, 292-298, 299, 312 Ventimiglia, 66, 82, 86, 369 Velletri, 71, 184, 189, 197 Vernazza, 114 Verona, 7, 72, 300, 303, 305-310, 312 Veronese, Paul, 7 Verrex, 356, 357 Vesuvius, 2 Via Æmilia, 7, 63-66, 163, 245, 260, 266, 273-275 Æmilia-Scauri, 66 Ameria, 66 Appia, 66, 67, 183, 196, 198, 239 Acquilla, 66 Ardentina, 66 Aurelia, 65-67 Campagna, 183 Cassia, 66, 67 Clodia, 67 del Orto, 160 Flamina, 64 (See also via Flaminia) Flaminia, 66, 160 Latina, 66 Laurentia, 66 Ostiensis, 66 Salaria, 66, 67 Tusculum, 186 Valeria, 67, 225 Viareggio, 120, 121 Vicenza, 19, 300, 301, 303 Vigna della Regina, 350 Villas Aldobrandini, 187 Ambrogiana, 132 Borghese, 176, 179 Cambria, 107 of the Cardinal, 232 Cesarini, 2 of Cicero at Baies, 210 Conti, 187 Doria, 100, 101 d'Este, 193 Falconieri, 187, 188 de Franchi, 107 Guadagui, 147 of Hadrian, 189, 193, 194 Medici, 146, 176, 178, 188 Negroni, 101 Pagana, 111 del Paradiso, 106 del Popolo, 202 Paladio, 302 Pallavicini, 99 Palmieri, 147, 148 Passarino, 298 Pagana, 111 Petraja, 146 Pliniana, 321 at Poggio Cajano, 145 Rendel, 204 Rinuccini, 147 Rosazza, 101 Ruffinella, 187 Salviate, 147 Scipione Ammirato, 151 Tusculana, 187 Villini, 31 Vintimille (See Ventimiglia), 85 Virgil, 206, 211, 239 Viterbo, 70, 138, 158, 166, 168, 169 Vogelberg, 74 Voie Æmilia, 26 Volterra, 139, 140, 141 Voltri, 99 Zocchi, the draughtsman, 148 * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: Britanny=> Brittany {pg 15} dignataries=> dignitaries {pg 52} Via Æmelia-Scauri=> Via Æmilia-Scauri {pg 66} It architecture=> Its architecture {pg 176} made way with their lovers=> made away with their lovers {pg 349} Briancon=> Briançon {pg 352} Chambery, 6=> Chambéry, 6 {pg index} Castle of Fenis, 21=> Castle of Fénis, 21 {index} Nicae=> Nicæ {index} Paestum, 224=> Pæstum, 224 {index} 
7380	----	ALONE BY NORMAN DOUGLAS AUTHOR OF "SOUTH WIND," "THEY WENT," "TOGETHER," ETC. TO HIS FRIEND EDWARD HUTTON WHO PRINTED SOME OF THESE TRIVIALITIES IN THAT "ANGLO-ITALIAN REVIEW" WHICH DESERVED A BETTER FATE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION MENTONE LEVANTO SIENA PISA VIAREGGIO (February) VIAREGGIO (May) ROME OLEVANO VALMONTONE SANT' AGATA, SORRENTO ROME SORIANO ALATRI Introduction What ages ago it seems, that "Great War"! And what enthusiasts we were! What visionaries, to imagine that in such an hour of emergency a man might discover himself to be fitted for some work of national utility without that preliminary wire-pulling which was essential in humdrum times of peace! How we lingered in long queues, and stamped up and down, and sat about crowded, stuffy halls, waiting, only waiting, to be asked to do something for our country by any little guttersnipe who happened to have been jockeyed into the requisite position of authority! What innocents.... I have memories of several afternoons spent at a pleasant place near St. James's Park station, whither I went in search of patriotic employment. It was called, I think, Board of Trade Labour Emergency Bureau (or something equally lucid and concise), and professed to find work for everybody. Here, in a fixed number of rooms, sat an uncertain number of chubby young gentlemen, all of whom seemed to be of military age, or possibly below it; the Emergency Bureau was then plainly--for it may have changed later on--a hastily improvised shelter for privileged sucklings, a kind of nursery on advanced Montessori methods. Well, that was not my concern. One must trust the Government to know its own business. During my second or third visit to this hygienic and well-lighted establishment I was introduced, most fortunately, into the sanctuary of Mr. R----, whose name was familiar to me. Was he not his brother's brother? He was. A real stroke of luck! Mr. R----, a pink little thing, laid down the pen he had snatched up as I entered the room, and began gazing at me quizzically through enormous tortoise-shell-rimmed goggles, after the fashion of a precocious infant who tries to look like daddy. What might he do for me? I explained. We had a short talk, during which various forms were conscientiously filled up as to my qualifications, such as they were. Of course, there was nothing doing just then; but one never knows, does one? Would I mind calling again? Would I mind? I should think not. I should like nothing better. It did one good to be in contact with this youthful optimist and listen to his blithe and pleasing prattle; he was so hopeful, so philosophic, so cheery; his whole nature seemed to exhale the golden words: "Never say die." And no wonder. He ought to have been at the front, but some guardian angel in the haute finance had dumped him into this soft and safe job: it was enough to make anybody cheerful. One should be cautious, none the less, how one criticises the action of the authorities. May be they kept him at the Emergency Bureau for the express purpose of infusing confidence, by his bright manner, into the minds of despondent patriots like myself, and of keeping the flag flying in a general way--a task for which he, a German Jew, was pre-eminently fitted. Be that as it may, his consolatory tactics certainly succeeded in my case, and I went home quite infected with his rosy cheeks and words. Yet, on the occasion of my next visit a week or two later, there was still nothing doing--not just then, though one never knows, does one? "Tried the War Office?" he added airily. I had. Who hadn't? The War Office was a nightmare in those early days. It resembled Liverpool Street station on the evening of a rainless Bank Holiday. The only clear memory I carried away--and even this may have been due to some hallucination--was that of a voice shouting at me through the rabble: "Can you fly?" Such was my confusion that I believe I answered in the negative, thereby losing, probably, a lucrative billet as Chaplain to the Forces or veterinary surgeon in the Church Lads' Brigade. Things might have been different had my distinguished cousin still been on the spot; I, too, might have been accommodated with a big desk and small work after the manner of the genial Mr. R----. He died in harness, unfortunately, soon after the outbreak of war. I said to my young friend: "Everybody tells one to try the War Office--I don't know why. Of course I tried it. I wish I had a shilling for every hour I wasted in that lunatic asylum." "Ah!" he replied. "I feel sure a good many men would like to be paid at that rate. Anyhow, trust me. We'll fix you up, sooner or later. (He kept his word.) Why not have a whack at the F.O., meanwhile?" "Because I have already had a whack at it." I then possessed, indeed, in reply to an application on my part, a holograph of twelve pages in the elegant calligraphy of H.M. Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the same gentleman who was viciously attacked by the Pankhurst section for his supposed pro-Germanism. It conveyed no grain of hope. Other Government Departments, he opined, might well be depleted at this moment; the Foreign Office was in exactly the reverse position. It overflowed with diplomatic and consular officials returned, perforce, from belligerent countries, and now in search of occupation. Was it not natural, was it not right, to give the preference to them? One was really at a loss to know what to do with all those people. He had tried, hitherto in vain, to find some kind of job for his own brother. A straightforward, convincing statement. Acting on the hint, I visited the Education Office, notoriously overstaffed since Tudor days; it might now be emptier; clerical work might be obtained there in substitution of some youngster who had been induced to join the colours. I poked my nose into countless recesses, and finally unearthed my man. They were full up, said Mr. F----. Full up? Full up. Then, after some further conversation as to my capacities, he thought he might find me employment as teacher of science in the country, to replace somebody or other. The notion was distasteful to me. I am not averse to learning from the young; I only once tried to teach them--at a ragged school, long since pulled down, near Ladbroke Grove, where I soon discovered that my little pupils knew a great deal more than I did, more, indeed, than was good for body or soul. Still, this was a tangible, definite offer of unremunerative but at the same time semi-pseudo-patriotic work, not to be sneezed at. An idea occurred to me. "Supposing I stick it out and give satisfaction, shall I be able to interchange later into this department? I am more fitted for office duties. In fact, I have had a certain experience of them." "No chance of that," he replied. "It is the German system. Their schoolmasters are sometimes taken to do administrative work at head-quarters, and vice versâ. Our English rule is: Once a teacher, always a teacher." Here was a deadlock. For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart, Mr. F---- adding, by way of letting me down gently: "Tried the War Office?" I had. If the War Office was too lively, this place was too slumberous by half. A cobwebby, Rip-van-Winkle-ish atmosphere brooded about those passages and chambers. One could not help thinking that a little "German system" might work wonders here. And this is merely one of several similar sites I explored, and endeavoured to exploit, for patriotic purposes; I am here only jotting down a few of the more important of those that occur to me. And, oh! for the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage--British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their absence; they were otherwise engaged, in the field, the colonies, the engine-room. I can only remember one single exception to this rule, this type; it was the head of the Censorship Department. For of course I offered my services there, climbing up that decent red-carpeted stairway, and glad to find myself among respectable surroundings after all the unseemly holes I had lately wallowed in. I sent up a card which, to my surprise, caused me to be ushered forthwith into the presence of the Chief, who may have heard of my existence from some mutual friend. Here, at all events, was a man with a face worth looking at, a man who had done notable things in his day. What a relief, moreover, to be able to talk to a gentleman for a change! I wished I could have had him to myself for five minutes; there were one or two things one would have liked to learn from him. Unfortunately he was surrounded, as such people are, by half a dozen of the characteristic masks. For the rest, His ex-Excellency seemed to be ineffably bored with his new functions. "What on earth brings you here?" he began in a fascinatingly absent-minded style, as if he had known me all my life, and with an inimitable nasal drawl. "This is a rotten job, my dear sir. Rotten! I cannot recommend it. Not your style at all, I should say." "But, my dear Sir F----, I am not applying for your job. Something subordinate, I mean. Anything, anything." "What? Down there, cutting up newspapers at twenty-two shillings a week? No, no. Let's have your address, and we will communicate with you when we find something worth your while. By the way, have you tried the War Office?" I had. And it stands to reason that I tried the Munitions more than once. It was my rare good fortune--luck pursued me on these patriotic expeditions--to come face to face, at the Munitions, with the fons et origo; the deputy fountain-head, that is to say; a very peculiar private-secretary-in-chief for that department. He was a perpendicular, iron-grey personality, if I remember rightly, who smelt of some indifferent hair-wash and lost no time in giving you to understand that he was preternaturally busy. Did I know anything about machinery? Nothing to speak of, I replied. As co-manager and proprietor of some cotton mills employing several hundred hands for spinning and weaving, I naturally learnt how to handle a fair number of machines--sufficiently well, at all events, to start and stop them and tell the girls how to avoid being scalped or having their arms torn out whenever I happened to be passing that way. This life also gave me some experience, useful perhaps at the Munitions, in dealing with factory-hands---- That was not the kind of machinery he meant. Did I know anything about banking? Nothing at all. "You are like everybody else," he replied with a weary sigh, as much as to say: How am I going to run the British Empire with a collection of imbeciles like this? "We have several thousands of applicants like yourself," he went on. "But I will put your name down. Come again." "You are very kind." "Do call again," he added, in his best private-secretary manner. I called again a couple of weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things--one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours--once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was one? "I called about a fortnight ago. You have my name down." "Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I remember you! A mechanic, aren't you?" "No. And you asked me if I understood banking, and I said I didn't." "What a pity. Now if you knew about banking----" Nothing, evidently, had been done about my application, nor, for that matter, about those thousands of others. We were being played with. I began to feel grumpy. It was a lovely afternoon, and I remembered, with regret, that I had thrown over an engagement to go for a walk with a friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being patriotic. I observed: "Your department seems to require only bankers and mechanics. Would it not be well to advertise the fact and save trouble and time to those thousands of applicants who, you say, are in the same predicament as myself? I came here to do national work of some general kind." "So I gather. And if you understood banking----" "If I did, I should be a banker at my time of life--don't you see?--and lending money to you people, and giving you good advice, instead of asking you for employment. Isn't that fairly obvious? As a matter of fact, my acquaintance with banking is limited to a knowledge of how to draw cheques, and even that useful accomplishment is fast fading from my memory, under the stress of the times." Being a Welshman--so I presume, from his name--he condescended to smile faintly, but not for long; his salary was too high. As for myself, I refrained from saying a few harsher things I was minded to say; indeed, I made myself so vastly agreeable, after my own private recipe, that he was quite touched. He remarked: "I think I had better put your name down, although we have thousands of applicants, you know. Call again, won't you?" For which I humbly thanked him, instead of saying, as I ought to have done: "You go to blazes. The public is a pack of idiots to run after people who merely keep them loitering about while they feather their own nests. We are out to lick the Germans, and yours is not the way to do it." Did I understand banking? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted bankers. Well, there was my friend M----, renowned in the City as a genius for banking; he could have saved them untold thousands of pounds. They would have none of him. They sent him into the trenches, where he was duly shot. How easy it is for a disappointed place-seeker to jibe and rail against the powers that be, especially when he is not in full possession of the data! For all I know, they may have discovered my friend M---- to be a dangerous character, and have been only too glad to remove him out of society without unnecessary fuss, in an outwardly honourable fashion, with a view to saving his poor but respectable parents the humiliating experience of a criminal trial and possible execution in the family. If I understood banking ... why did they want bankers at this institution? Ah, it was not my business to probe into such mysteries of administration. To my limited intelligence it would seem that the mere fact of a man applying at the Munitions was primâ facie evidence that banking was not one of his accomplishments. It seemed to me, furthermore, that there was no end to such "ifs"--patriotic or otherwise. If I were a woman, for instance, I would promptly aid the cause by jumping into a nurse's outfit, telling improper stories to the Tommies, and getting myself photographed for the Press every morning. But I am only a man. If I were a high-class trumpeter, I could qualify for a job in one of the Allied Armies or, failing that, on Judgment Day. But I can only strum the piano. And if the moon were made of green cheese, we might all try to get hold of a slice of it, mightn't we?... Such was my pigheadedness, my boyish zeal, my belief in human nature or perverse sense of duty, that I actually broke my vow and returned to that ridiculous establishment. Yes, I "called again," flattering myself with the conjecture that, even if they had not yet obtained a requisite amount of bankers and mechanics, and even if persons of my particular aptitudes were still a drug in the market, there might nevertheless be room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic--an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted--one out of how many! This time I saw Mr. W----. Though I had never met him in the flesh, I once enjoyed the privilege of perusing a manuscript from his pen--a story about a girl in Kew Gardens. A nice-looking young Hebrew was Mr. W----. He had made himself indispensable, somehow or other, to the Minister, and would doubtless by this time have been pitchforked into some permanent and prominent job, but for that unfortunate name of his, with its strong Teutonic flavour. This, by the way, was about the eighth official of his tribe, and of his age, I had come across in the course of my recent peregrinations. How did they get there? Tell me, who can. Far be it from me to disparage the race of Israel. I have gained the conviction--firm-fixed, now, as the Polar Star--that the Hebrew is as good a man as the Christian. Yet one would like to know their method, their technique, in this instance. How was the thing done? How did they manage it, these young Jews, all healthy-looking and of military age--how did they contrive to keep out of the Army? Was there some secret society which protected them? Or were they all so preposterously clever that the Old Country would straightway evaporate into thin air unless they sat in some comfortable office, while our own youngsters were being blown to pieces out yonder? Mr. W----, I regret to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence, doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner towards me was freezingly non-committal--worthy of the best Anglo-Saxon traditions. Had I come a little earlier, he avowed, he might perhaps have been able to squeeze me into one of his departments--thus spake this infant: "One of my departments." As it was, he feared there was nothing doing; nothing whatsoever; not just then. Tried the War Office? I had. I even visited, though only twice, an offshoot of that establishment in Victoria Street near the Army and Navy Stores, where candidates for the position of translator--quasi-confidential work and passable pay, five pounds a week--were interviewed. On the second occasion, after waiting in an ante-room full of bearded and be-spectacled monsters such as haunt the British Museum Library, I was summoned before a board of reverend elders, who put me through a catechism, drowsy but prolonged, as to my qualifications and antecedents. It was a systematic affair. Could I decipher German manuscripts? Let them show me their toughest one, I said. No! It was merely a pro forma question; they had enough German translators on the staff. So the interrogation went on. They were going to make sure of their man, in whom, I must say, they took little interest save when they learnt that he had passed a Civil Service examination in Russian and another in International Law. At that moment--though I may be mistaken--they seemed to prick up their ears. Not long afterwards I was allowed to depart, with the assurance that I might hear further. Their inquiries into my attainments and references must have given satisfaction, for in the fulness of time a missive arrived to the effect that, assuming me to be a competent Turkish scholar, they would be glad to see me again with a view to a certain vacancy. Turkish--a language I had not mentioned to them, a language of which I never possessed more than fifty words, every one of them forgotten long years ago. "How very War Office," I thought. These good people were mixing up Turkish and Russian--a natural error, when one comes to think of it, for, though the respective tongues might not be absolutely identical, yet the countries themselves were sufficiently close together to account for a little slip like this. Was it a slip? Who knows? It is so easy to criticise when one is not fully informed about things. They may have suggested my acting as Turkish translator for reasons of their own--reasons which I cannot fathom, but which need not therefore be bad ones. Chagrined office-hunters like myself are prone to be bitter. In an emergency of this magnitude a citizen should hesitate before he finds fault with the wisdom of those whom the nation has chosen to steer it through troubled waters. No carping! You only hamper the Government. The general public should learn to keep a civil tongue in its head. Theirs but to do and die. None the less, it was about this time that I began to experience certain moments of despondency, and occasionally let a whole day slip by without endeavouring to be of use to The Cause--moments when, instead of asking myself, "What have I done for my country?" I asked, "What has my country done for me?"--moments when I envied the hotel night-porters, taxi-drivers, and red-nosed old women selling flowers in Piccadilly Circus who had something more sensible to do than to bother their heads about trying to be patriotic, and getting snubbed for their pains. Yet, with characteristic infatuation for hopeless ventures, I persevered. Another "whack" at the F.O. leading to another holograph, two more whacks at the Censorship, interpreter jobs, hospital jobs, God knows what--I persevered, and might for the next three years have been kicking my heels, like any other patriot, in the corridor of some dingy Government office at the mercy of a pack of tuppenny counter-jumpers, but for a God-sent little accident, the result of sheer boredom, which counselled a trip to the sunny Mediterranean. Fortune was nearer to me, at that supreme moment, than she had ever yet been. For on the day prior to my departure I received a communication from the Board of Trade Labour, etc., etc., whose methods of work, it was now apparent, were as expeditious as its own name was brief. That hopeful Mr. R----, that bubbling young optimist who had so conscientiously written down a number of my qualifications, such as they were--he was keeping his promise after months, and months, and months. Never say die. The dear little fellow! What job had he captured for me? An offer to work in a factory at Gretna Green, wages to commence at 17s. 6d. per week. H'm. The remuneration was not on a princely scale, but I like to think that it included the free use of the lavatory, if there happened to be one on the premises. So luck pursued me to the end, though it never quite caught me up. For bags were packed, and tickets taken. And therefore: "What did you do in the Great War, grandpapa?" "I loafed, my boy." "That was naughty, grandpapa." "Naughty, but nice...." ALONE Mentone Italiam petimus.... Discovered, in a local library--a genuine old maid's library: full of the trashiest novels--those two volumes of sketches by J. A. Symonds, and forthwith set to comparing the Mentone of his day with that of ours. What a transformation! The efforts of Dr. James Henry Bennet and friends, aided and abetted by the railway, have converted the idyllic fishing village into--something different. So vanishes another fair spot from earth. And I knew it. Yet some demon has deposited me on these shores, where life is spent in a round of trivialities. One fact suffices. Symonds, driving over from Nice, at last found himself at the door of "the inn." The inn.... Are there any inns left at Mentone? À propos of inns, here is a suggestive state of affairs. At the present moment, twenty-two of the principal hotels and pensions of Mentone are closed, because owned or controlled or managed by Germans. Does not this speak rather loudly in favour of Teuton enterprise? Where, in a German town of 18,000 inhabitants, will you find twenty-two such establishments in the hands of Frenchmen? The statistical mood is upon me. I wander either among the tombs of that cemetery overhead, studying sepulchral inscriptions and drawing deductions, from what is therein stated regarding the age, nationality and other circumstances of the deceased, as to the relative number of consumptives here interred. Sixty per cent, shall we say? Or else, in the streets of the town, I catch myself endeavouring--hitherto without success--to count up the number of grocers' shops. They are far in excess of what is needful. Now, why? Well, your tailor or hatter or hosier--he makes a certain fixed profit on each article he sells, and he does not sell them at every moment of the day. The other, quite apart from small advantages to be gained owing to the ever-shifting prices of his wares, is ceaselessly engaged in dispensing trifles, on each of which he makes a small gain. The grocery business commends itself warmly to the French genius for garnering halfpennies. Nowhere on earth, I fancy, will you see butter more meticulously weighed than here. Buy a ton of it, and they will replace on their counter a fragment of the weight and size of a postage stamp, rather than let the balance descend on your side. And so the days, the weeks, have passed. Will one ever again escape from Mentone? It may well be colder in Italy, but anything is preferable to this inane Riviera existence.... I am not prone to recommend restaurants, or to discommend them, for the simple reason that, if they have proved bad, I smile to think of other men being poisoned and robbed as well as myself; as to the good ones--why, only a fool would reveal their whereabouts. Since, however, I hope so to order my remaining days of life as never to be obliged to return to these gimcrack regions, there is no inducement for withholding the name of the Merle Blanc at Monte Carlo, a quite unpretentious place of entertainment that well deserves its name--white blackbirds being rather scarcer here than elsewhere. The food is excellent--it has a cachet of its own; the wine more than merely good. And this is surprising, for the local mixtures (either Italian stuff which is dumped down in shiploads at Nice, Marseille, Cette, etc., or else the poor though sometimes aromatic product of the Var) are not gratifying to the palate. One imbibes them, none the less, in preference to anything else, as it is a peculiarity of what goes under the name of wine hereabouts that the more you pay for it, the worse it tastes. If you adventure into the Olympic spheres of Chateau Lafite and so forth, you may put your trust in God, or in a blue pill. Chateau Cassis would be a good name for these finer vintages, seeing that the harmless black currant enters largely into their composition, though not in sufficient quantity to render them wholly innocuous. Which suggests a little problem for the oenophilist. What difference of soil or exposure or climate or treatment can explain the fact that Mentone is utterly deficient in anything drinkable of native origin, whereas Ventimiglia, a stone's throw eastwards, can boast of its San Biagio, Rossese, Latte, Dolceacqua and other noble growths, the like of which are not to be found along the whole length of the French Riviera? Having pastured the inner man, to his complete satisfaction, at the hospitable Merle Blanc, our traveller will do well to pasture his eyes on the plants in the Casino gardens. Whoever wants to see flowers and trees on their best behaviour, must come to Monte Carlo, where the spick-and-span Riviera note is at its highest development. Not a leaf is out of place; they have evidently been groomed and tubbed and manicured from the hour of their birth. And yet--is it possible? Lurking among all this modern splendour of vegetation, as though ashamed to show their faces, may be discerned a few lowly olive trees. Well may they skulk! For these are the Todas and Veddahs, the aboriginals of Monte Carlo, who peopled its sunny slopes in long-forgotten days of rustic life--once lords of the soil, now pariahs. What are they doing here? And how comes it that the eyesore has not yet been detected and uprooted by those keen-sighted authorities that perform such wonders in making the visitor feel at home, and hush up with miraculous dexterity everything in the nature of a public scandal? In exemplification whereof, let me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought, and therewith swallowed surreptitiously her last tabloid of the panacea. Not unobserved, however; for straightway two elegant gentlemen--they might have been Russian princes--pounced upon her and led her to that underground operating-room where a kindly physician is in perennial attendance. He brushed aside her explanations. "It would be a thousand pities for so charming a lady to poison herself. But since you wish to take that step, why choose the Casino which has a reputation to keep up? Are there not hotels----" "I tell you it was only aspirin." "Alas, we are sufficiently familiar with that tale! Now, Madam, let us not lose a moment! It is a question of life and death." "Aspirin, I tell you----" "Kindly submit, or the three of us will be obliged to employ force." The stomach-pump was produced. It is the drawback of all sea-side places that half the landscape is unavailable for purposes of human locomotion, being covered by useless water. Mentone is more unfortunate than most of them, for its Hinterland is so cloven and contorted that unless you keep on the main roads, or content yourself with short but pleasant strolls, you will soon find all progress barred by some natural obstruction. And one really cannot walk along the esplanade all day long, though it is worth while, once in a lifetime, continuing that promenade as far as Cap Martin, if only in memory of the inspiration which Symonds drew therefrom. Who, he asks--who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cape St. Martin? Anybody can, nowadays. The place is encrusted with smug villas of parvenus (wherein we include the Empress Eugénie), to say nothing of that preposterous hotel at the very point, which disfigures the country for leagues around. On other occasions you may find your way towards evening up to Gorbio and stay for supper, provided you do not mind being cheated. Or wander further afield, over Sospel to Breil by the old path--note the lavender: they make a passable perfume of it--or else to Moulinet (famous for bad food and a mastodontic breed of mosquitoes) and thence along the stream--note the bushes of wild box--and over a wooded ridge to the breezy heights of Peira Cava, there to dream away the daylight under the pines. These are summer rambles. At present the snow lies deep. One of my favourite excursions has been up the so-called Berceau, the cradle-shaped hill which dominates Mentone on the east. I was there to-day for a solitary luncheon, resting awhile in the timbered saddle between the peaks. The summit is only about five minutes' walk from this delectable grove, but its view inland is partially intercepted by a higher ridge. From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine). Somewhere in this gulley was killed the last wolf of these regions; so a grey-haired local Nimrod told me. He had wrought much mischief in his time. That is to say, he was not killed, but accidentally drowned--drowned in one of those artificial reservoirs which are periodically filled and drawn off for irrigating the gardens lower down; an ignoble death, for a wolf! A goat lay drowned beside him. The event, he reckoned, must have taken place half a century ago. Since then, the wolf has never been seen. This afternoon, however, I preferred to repose in that shady dell, while a flock of goldcrests were investigating the branches overhead and two buzzards cruised, in dreamy spirals, about the sunny sky of midday; to repose; to indulge my genius and review the situation; to profit, in short, by that sense of aloofness peculiar to such aerial spots, which tempts the mind to set its house in order. What are we doing, in these empty regions? Why not wander hence? That cursed traveller's gift of sitting still; of remaining stationary, no matter where, until one is actually pushed away! And yet, how enjoyable this land might be, were it inhabited by any race save one whose thousand little meannesses, public and private, are calculated to drain away a man's last ounce of self-respect! Not many are the glad memories I shall carry from Mentone. I can think of no more than two. There is my landlady, to begin with, who spies out every detail of my daily life; of decent birth and richer than Croesus, but inflamed with a peevish penuriousness which no amount of plain speaking on my part will correct. Never a day passes that she does not permit herself some jocular observation anent my spendthrift habits. The following is an example of our matutinal converse: "I fear, Monsieur, you omitted to put out the light in a certain place last night. It was burning when I returned home." "Certainly not, Madame. I have been nicely brought up. I never visit places at night. You ought to be familiar with my habits after all this time." "True. Then it must have been some one else. Ah, these electricians' bills!" Or this: "Monsieur, Monsieur! The English Consul called yesterday with his little dog at about five o'clock. He waited in your room, but you never came back." "Five o'clock? I was at the baths." "I have heard of that establishment. What do they charge for a hot bath?" "Three francs----" "Bon Dieu!" "--if you take an abonnement. Otherwise, it may well be more." "And so you go there. Why then--why must you also wash in the morning and splash water on my floor? It may have to be polished after your departure. Would you mind asking the Consul, by the way, not to sit on the bed? It weakens the springs." Or this: "Might I beg you, Monsieur, to tread more lightly on the carpet in your room? I bought it only nine years ago, and it already shows signs of wear." "Nine years--that old rag? It must have survived by a miracle." "I do not ask you to avoid using it. I only beg you will tread as lightly as possible." "Carpets are meant to be worn out." "You would express yourself less forcibly, if you had to pay for them." "Let us say then: carpets are meant to be trodden on." "Lightly." "I am not a fairy, Madame." "I wish you were, Monsieur." Thrice already, in a burst of confidence, has she told me the story of an egg--an egg which rankles in the memory. Some years ago, it seems, she went to a certain shop (naming it)--a shop she has avoided ever since--to buy an egg; and paid the full price--yes, the full price--of a fresh egg. That particular egg was not fresh. So far from fresh was it, that she experienced considerable difficulty in swallowing it. A memorable episode occurred about a fortnight ago. I was greeted towards 8 a.m. with moanings in the passage, where Madame tottered around, her entire head swathed in a bundle of nondescript woollen wraps, out of which there peered one steely, vulturesque eye. She looked more than ever like an animated fungus. Her teeth--her teeth! The pain was past enduring. The whole jaw, rather; all the teeth at one and the same time; they were unaccountably loose and felt, moreover, three inches longer than they ought to feel. Never had she suffered such agony--never in all her life. What could it be? It was easy to diagnose periostitis, and prescribe tincture of iodine. "That will cost about a franc," she observed. "Very likely." "I think I'll wait." Next day the pain was worse instead of better. She would give anything to obtain relief--anything! "Anything?" I inquired. "Then you had better have a morphia injection. I have had numbers of them, for the same trouble. The pain will vanish like magic. There is my friend Dr. Théophile Fornari----" "I know all about him. He demands five francs a visit, even from poor people like myself." "You really cannot expect a busy practitioner to come here and climb your seventy-two stairs for much less than five francs." "I think I'll wait. Anyhow, I am not wasting money on food just now, and that is a consolation." Now periostitis can hardly be called an amusing complaint, and I would have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth. Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out of all other landladies!... My second joyful memory centres round another thing of beauty--a spiky agave (miscalled aloe) of monstrous dimensions which may be seen in the garden of a certain hill-side hotel. Many are the growths of this kind which I have admired in various lands; none can vaunt as proud and harmonious a development as this one. You would say it had been cast in some dull blue metal. The glaucous wonder stands by itself, a prodigy of good style, more pleasing to the eye than all that painfully generated tropicality of Mr. Hanbury's Mortola paradise. It is flawless. Vainly have I teased my fancy, endeavouring to discover the slightest defect in shape or hue. Firm-seated on the turf, in exultant pose, with a pallid virginal bloom upon those mighty writhing leaves, this plant has drawn me like a magnet, day after day, to drink deep draughts of contentment from its exquisite lines. For the rest, the whole agave family thrives at Mentone; the ferox is particularly well represented; one misses, among others, that delightful medio-picta variety, of which I have noticed only a few indifferent specimens. [1] It is the same with the yuccas; they flourish here, though one kind, again, is conspicuous by its absence-- the Atkinsi (some such name, for it is long since I planted my last yucca) with drooping leaves of golden-purple. You will be surprised at the number of agaves in flower here. The reason is, that they are liable to be moved about for ornamental purposes when they want to be at rest; the plant, more sensitive and fastidious than it looks, is outraged by this forceful perambulation and, in an access of premature senility, or suicidal mania, or sheer despair, gives birth to its only flower--herald of death. The fatal climax could be delayed if gardeners, in transplanting, would at least take the trouble to set them in their old accustomed exposure so far as the cardinal points are concerned. But your professional gardener knows everything; it is useless for an amateur to offer him advice; worse than useless, of course, to ask him for it. Indeed, the flowers, even the wild ones, might almost reconcile one to a life on the Riviera. Almost.... I recall a comely plant, for instance, seven feet high at the end of June, though now slumbering underground, in the Chemin de Saint Jacques--there, where the steps begin---- Almost.... And here my afternoon musings, up yonder, took on a more acrid complexion. I remembered a recent talk with one of the teachers at the local college who lamented that his pupils displayed a singular dullness in their essays; never, in his long career at different schools, had he met with boys more destitute of originality. What could be expected, we both agreed? Mentone was of recent growth--the old settlement, Mentone of Symonds, proclaims its existence only by a ceaseless and infernal clanging of bells, rivalling Malta--no history, no character, no tradition--a mushroom town inhabited by shopkeepers and hôteliers who are there for the sole purpose of plucking foreigners: how should a youngster's imagination be nurtured in this atmosphere of savourless modernism? Then I asked myself: who comes to these regions, now that invalids have learnt the drawbacks of their climate? Decayed Muscovites, Englishmen such as you will vainly seek in England, and their painted women-folk with stony, Medusa-like gambling eyes, a Turk or two, Jews and cosmopolitan sharks and sharpers, flamboyant Americans, Brazilian, Peruvian, Chilian, Bolivian rastaqueros with names that read like a nightmare (see "List of Arrivals" in New York Herald)--the whole exotic riff-raff enlivened and perfumed by a copious sprinkling of horizontales. And I let my glance wander along that ancient Roman road which led from Italy to Arles and can still be traced, here and there; I took in the section from Genoa to Marseille, an enormous stretch of country, and wondered: what has this coast ever produced in the way of thought or action, of great men or great women? There is Doria at Genoa, and Gaby Deslys at Marseille; that may well exhaust the list. Ah, and half-way through, a couple of generals, born at Nice. It is really an instructive phenomenon, and one that should appeal to students of Buckle--this relative dearth of every form of human genius in one of the most favoured regions of the globe. Here, for unexplained reasons, the Italian loses his better qualities; so does the Frenchman. Are the natives descended from those mysterious Ligurians? Their reputation was none of the best; they were more prompt, says Crinagoras, in devising evil than good. That Mentone man, to be sure, whose remains you may study at Monaco and elsewhere, was a fine fellow, without a doubt. He lived rather long ago. Even he, by the way, was a tourist on these shores. And were the air of Mentone not unpropitious to the composition of anything save a kind of literary omelette soufflée, one might like to expatiate on Sergi's remarkable book, and devise thereto an incongruous footnote dealing with the African origin of sundry Greek gods, and another one referring to the extinction of these splendid races of men; how they came to perish so utterly, and what might be said in favour of that novel theory of the influence of an ice-age on the germplasm producing mutations--new races which breed true ... enough! Let us remain at the Riviera level. In the little museum under those cliffs by the sea, where the Grimaldi caves are, I found myself lately together with a young French couple, newly married. The little bride was vastly interested in the attendant's explanations of the habits of those remote folk, but, as I could plainly see, growing more and more distrustful of his statements as to what happened all those hundreds of thousands of years ago. "And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear--the competitor, one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant with a stone." "Elephants?" she queried. "Did elephants scramble about these precipices and ravines? I should like to have seen that." "Pardon me, Madame. He probably killed them down there," and his arm swept over the blue Mediterranean, lying at our feet. "Do you mean to say that elephants paddled across from Algiers in order to be assassinated by your old skeleton? I should like to have seen that." "Pardon me, Madame. The Mediterranean did not exist in those days." The suggestion that this boundless sea should ever have been dry land, and in the time of her own ancestors, was too much for the young lady. She smiled politely, and soon I heard her whispering to her husband: "I had him there, eh? Quel farceur!" "Yes. You caught him nicely, I must say. But one must not be too hard on these poor devils. They have got to earn their bread somehow." This will never do. Italiam petimus.... Levanto I have loafed into Levanto, on the recommendation of an Irish friend who, it would seem, had reasons of his own for sending me there. "Try Levanto," he said. "A little place below Genoa. Nice, kindly people. And sunshine all the time. Hotel Nazionale. Yes, yes! The food is all right. Quite all right. Now please do not let us start that subject----" We started it none the less, and at the end of the discussion he added: "You must go and see Mitchell there. I often stayed with him. Such a good fellow! And very popular in the place. He built an aqueduct for the peasants--that kind of man. Mind you look him up. He will be bitterly disappointed if you don't call. So make a note of it, won't you? By the way, he's dead. Died last year. I quite forgot." "Dead, is he? What a pity." "Yes; and what a nuisance. I promised to send him down some things by the next man I came across. You would have been that man. I know you do not carry much luggage, but you could have taken one or two trifles at least. He wanted a respectable English telescope, I remember, to see the stars with--a bit of an astronomer, you know. Chutney, too--devilish fond of chutney, the old boy was; quite a gastro-maniac. What a nuisance! Now he will be thinking I forgot all about it. And he needed a clothes-press; I was on no account to forget that clothes-press. Rather fussy about his trousers, he was. And a type-writer; just an ordinary one. But I doubt whether you could have managed a type-writer." "Easily. And a bee-hive or two. You know how I like carrying little parcels about for other people's friends. What a nuisance! Now I shall have to travel with my bags half empty." "Don't blame me, my dear fellow. I did not tell him to die, did I?".... It must have been about midnight as the train steamed into Levanto station. Snow was falling; you could hear the moan of the sea hard by; an icy wind blew down from the mountains. Sunshine all the time! Everybody scurried off the platform. A venerable porter, after looking in dubious fashion at my two handbags, declared he would return in a few moments to transport them to the hotel, and therewith vanished round the corner. The train moved on. Lamps were extinguished. Time passed. I strode up and down in the semi-darkness, trying to keep warm and determined, whatever happened, not to carry those wretched bags myself, when suddenly a figure rose out of the gloom--a military figure of youthful aspect and diminutive size, armed to the teeth. "A cold night," I ventured. "Do you know, Sir, that you are in the war-zone--the zona di difesa?" He began to fumble at his rifle in ominous fashion. Nice, kindly people! I said: "It is hard to die so young. And I particularly dislike the looks of that bayonet, which is half a yard longer than it need be. But if you want to shoot me, go ahead. Do it now. It is too cold to argue." "Your papers! Ha, a foreigner. Hotel Nazionale? Very good. To-morrow morning you will report yourself to the captain of the carbineers. After that, to the municipality. Thereupon you will take the afternoon train to Spezia. When you have been examined by the police inspector at the station you will be accompanied, if he sees fit, to head-quarters in order that your passport may be investigated. From there you will proceed to the Prefecture for certain other formalities which will be explained to you. Perhaps--who knows?--they will allow you to return to Levanto." "How can you expect me to remember all that?" Then I added: "You are a Sicilian, I take it. And from Catania." He was rather surprised. Sicilians, because they learn good Italian at their schools, think themselves indistinguishable from other men. Yes; he explained. He was from a certain place in the Catania part of the country, on the slopes of Etna. I happened to know a good deal of that place from an old she-cook of mine who was born there and never wearied of telling me about it. To his still greater surprise, therefore, I proceeded to discourse learnedly about that region, extolling its natural beauties and healthy climate, reminding him that it was the birthplace of a man celebrated in antiquity (was it Diodorus Siculus?) and hinting, none too vaguely, that he would doubtless live up to the traditions of so celebrated a spot. Straightway his manner changed. There is nothing these folks love more than to hear from foreign lips some praise of their native town or village. He waxed communicative and even friendly; his eyes began to sparkle with animation, and there we might have stood conversing till sunrise had I not felt that glacial wind searching my garments, chilling my humanity and arresting all generous impulses. Rather abruptly I bade farewell to the cheery little reptile and snatched up my bags to go to the hotel, which he said was only five minutes' walk from there. Things turned out exactly as he had predicted. Arrived at Spezia, however, I found an unpleasant surprise awaiting me. The officer in command, who was as civil as the majority of such be-medalled jackasses, suggested that one single day would be quite sufficient for me to see the sights of Levanto; I could then proceed to Pisa or anywhere else outside his priceless "zone of defence." I pleaded vigorously for more time. After all, we were allies, were we not? Finally, a sojourn of seven days was granted for reasons of health. Only seven days: how tiresome! From the paper which gave me this authorisation and contained a full account of my personal appearance I learnt, among other less flattering details, that my complexion was held to be "natural." It was a drop of sweetness in the bitter cup. No butter for breakfast. The landlord, on being summoned, avowed that to serve crude butter on his premises involved a flagrant breach of war-time regulations. The condiment could not be used save for kitchen purposes, and then only on certain days of the week; he was liable to heavy penalties if it became known that one of his guests.... However, since he assumed me to be a prudent person, he would undertake to supply a due allowance to-morrow and thenceforward, though never in the public dining-room; never, never in the dining-room! That is the charm of Italy, I said to myself. These folks are reasonable and gifted with imagination. They make laws to shadow forth an ideal state of things and to display their good intentions towards the community at large; laws which have no sting for the exceptional type of man who can evade them--the sage, the millionaire, and the "friend of the family." Never in the dining-room. Why, of course not. Catch me breakfasting in any dining-room. Was it possible? There, at luncheon in the dining-room, while devouring those miserable macaroni made with war-time flour, I beheld an over-tall young Florentine lieutenant shamelessly engulfing huge slices of what looked uncommonly like genuine butter, a miniature mountain of which stood on a platter before him, and overtopped all the other viands. I could hardly believe my eyes. How about those regulations? Pointing to this golden hillock, I inquired softly: "From the cow?" "From the cow." "Whom does one bribe?" He enjoyed a special dispensation, he declared--he need not bribe. Returned from Albania with shattered health, he had been sent hither to recuperate. He required not only butter, but meat on meatless days, as well as a great deal of rest; he was badly run down.... And eggs, raw eggs, drinking eggs; ten a day, he vows, is his minimum. Enviable convalescent! The afternoon being clear and balmy, he took me for a walk, smoking cigarettes innumerable. We wandered up to that old convent picturesquely perched against the slope of the hill and down again, across the rivulet, to the inevitable castle-ruin overhanging the sea. Like all places along this shore, Levanto lies in a kind of amphitheatre, at a spot where one or more streams, descending from the mountains, discharge themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England--at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that village--I forget its name--which was evidently the old port of the district in pre-Seaton days. Local antiquarians will have attacked these problems long ago. The sea may have receded. A glance from this castle-height at the panorama bathed in that mellow sunshine made me regret more than ever the enforced brevity of my stay at Levanto. Seven days, for reasons of health: only seven days! Those mysterious glades opening into the hill-sides, the green patches of culture interspersed with cypresses and pines, dainty villas nestling in gardens, snow-covered mountains and blue sea--above all, the presence of running water, dear to those who have lived in waterless lands--why, one could spend a life-time in a place like this! The lieutenant spoke of Florence, his native city. He would be there again before long, in order to present himself to the medical authorities and be weighed and pounded for the hundredth time. He hoped they would then let him stay there. He was tired to death of Levanto and its solitude. How pleasant to bid farewell to this "melancholy" sea which was supposed to be good for his complaints. He asked: "Do you know why Florentines, coming home from abroad, always rejoice to see that wonderful dome of theirs rising up from the plain?" "Why?" "Can't you guess?" "Let me see. It is sure to be something not quite proper. H'm.... The tower of Giotto, for example, has certain asperities, angularities, anfractuosities----" "You are no Englishman whatever!" he laughed. "Now try that joke on the next Florentine you meet.... There was a German here," he went on, "who loved Levanto. The hotel people have told me all about him. He began writing a book to prove that there was a different walk to be taken in this neighbourhood for every single day of the year." "How German. And then?" "The war came. He cleared out. The natives were sorry. This whole coast seems to be saturated with Teutons--of a respectable class, apparently. They made themselves popular, they bought houses, drank wine, and joked with the countrymen." "What do you make of them?" I inquired. "I am a Tuscan," he began (meaning: I am above race-prejudices; I can view these things with olympic detachment). "I think the German says to himself: we want a world-empire, like those damned English. How did they get it? By piracy. Two can play at that game, though it may be a little more difficult now than formerly. Of course," he added, "we have a certain sprinkling of humanitarians even here; the kind of man, I mean, who stands aside in fervent prayer while his daughter is being ravished by the Bulgars, and then comes forward with some amateurish attempt at First Aid, and probably makes a mess of it. But Italians as a whole--well, we are lovers of violent and disreputable methods; it is our heritage from mediaeval times. The only thing that annoys the ordinary native of the country is, if his own son happens to get killed." "I know. That makes him very angry." "It makes him angry not with the Germans who are responsible for the war, but with his own government which is responsible for conscripting the boys. Ah, what a stupid subject of conversation! And how God would laugh, if he had any sense of humour! Suppose we go down to the beach and lie on the sand. I need rest: I am very dilapidated." "You look thin, I must say." "Typhoid, and malaria, and pleurisy--it is a respectable combination. Thin? I am the merest framework, and so transparent that you can see clean through my stomach. Perhaps you would rather not try? Count my ribs, then." "Count your ribs? That, my dear Lieutenant, is an occupation for a rainy afternoon. Judging by your length, there must be a good many of them...." "We should be kind to our young soldiers," said the Major to whom I was relating, after dinner, the story of our afternoon promenade. A burly personage is the Major, with hooked nose and black moustache and twinkling eyes--retired, now, from a service in the course of which he has seen many parts of the world; a fluent raconteur, moreover, who keeps us in fits of laughter with naughty stories and imitations of local dialects. "We must be nice with them, and always offer them cigarettes. What say you, Mr. Lieutenant?" "Yes, sir. Offer them cigarettes and everything else you possess. The dear fellows! They seldom have the heart to refuse." "Seldom," echoes the judge. That is our party; the judge, major, lieutenant and myself. We dine together and afterwards sit in that side room while the fat little host bustles about, doing nearly all the work of the war-diminished establishment himself. Presently the first two rise and indulge in a lively game of cards, amid vigorous thumpings of the table and cursings at the ways of Providence which always contrives to ruin the best hands. I order another litre of wine. The lieutenant, to keep me company, engulfs half a dozen eggs. He tells me about Albanian women. I tell him about Indian women. We thrash the matter out, pursuing this or that aspect into its remotest ramifications, and finally come to the conclusion that I, at the earliest opportunity, must emigrate to Albania, and he to India. As for the judge, he was born under the pale rays of Saturn. He has attached himself to my heart. Never did I think to care so much about a magistrate, and he a Genoese. There are some men, a few men, very few, about whom one craves to be precise. Viewed through the mist of months, I behold a corpulent and almost grotesque figure of thirty-five or thereabouts; blue-eyed, fair-haired but nearly bald, clean-shaven, bespectacled. So purblind has he grown with poring over contracts and precedents that his movements are pathologically awkward--embryonic, one might say; his unwieldy gestures and contortions remind one of a seal on shore. The eyes being of small use, he must touch with his hands. Those hands are the most distinctive feature of his person; they are full of expression; tenderly groping hands, that hesitate and fumble in wistful fashion like the feelers of some sensitive creature of night. There is trouble, too, in that obese and sluggish body; trouble to which the unhealthy complexion testifies. He may drink only milk, because wine, which he dearly loves--"and such good wine, here at Levanto"--it always deranges the action of some vital organ inside. The face is not unlike that of Thackeray. A man of keen understanding who can argue the legs off a cow when duly roused, he seems far too good for a small place like this, where, by the way, he is a newcomer. Maybe his infinite myopia condemns him to relative seclusion and obscurity. He has a European grip of things; of politics and literature and finance. Needless to say, I have discovered his cloven hoof; I make it my business to discover such things; one may (or may not) respect people for their virtues, one loves them only for their faults. It is a singular tinge of mysticism and credulity which runs through his nature. Can it be the commercial Genoese, the gambling instinct? For he is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand--they are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner in heaven or earth. Often, listening to this lawyer's acute talk and watching his uncouth but sympathetic face, I ask myself a question, a very obvious question hereabouts: How could you cause him to swerve from the path of duty? How predispose him in your favour? Sacks of gold would be unavailing: that is certain. He would wave them aside, not in righteous Anglo-Saxon indignation, but with a smile of tolerance at human weakness. To simulate clerical leanings? He is too sharp; he would probably be vexed, not at your attempt to deceive, but at the implication that you took him for a fool. A good tip on the stock exchange? It might go a little way, if artfully tendered. Perhaps an apt and unexpected quotation from the pages of some obsolete jurist--the intellectual method of approach; for there is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. In any case, it would be a desperate venture to override the conscience of such a man. May I never have to try! His stern principles must often cause him suffering, needless suffering. He is for ever at the mercy of some categorical imperative. This may be the reason why I feel drawn to him. Such persons exercise a strange attraction upon those who, convinced of the eternal fluidity of all mundane affairs, and how that our most sacred institutions are merely conventionalities of time and place, conform to only one rule of life--to be guided by no principles whatever. They miss so much, those others. They miss it so pathetically. One sees them staggering gravewards under a load of self-imposed burdens. A lamentable spectacle, when one thinks of it. Why bear a cross? Is it pleasant? Is it pretty? He also has taken me for walks, but they are too slow and too short for my taste. Every twenty yards or so he must stand still to "admire the view"--that is, to puff and pant. "What it is," he then exclaims, "to be an old man in youth, through no fault of one's own. How many are healthy, and yet vicious to the core!" I inquire: "Are you suggesting that there may be a connection between sound health and what society, in its latest fit of peevish self-maceration, is pleased to call viciousness?" "That is a captious question," he replies. "A man of my constitution, unfit for pleasures of the body, is prone to judge severely. Let me try to be fair. I will go so far as to say that to certain natures self-indulgence appears to be necessary as--as sunshine to flowers." Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily-fraught is that word; weighted with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence--it is what the ancients blithely called "indulging one's genius." Self-indulgence! How debased an expression, nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us.... Glancing through a glass window not far from the hotel, I was fortunate enough to espy a young girl seated in a sewing shop. She is decidedly pretty and not altogether unaware of the fact, though still a child. We have entered upon an elaborate, classical flirtation. With all the artfulness of her years she is using me to practise on, as a dummy, for future occasions when she shall have grown a little bigger and more admired; she has already picked up one or two good notions. I pretend to be unaware of this fact. I treat her as if she were grown up, and profess to feel that she has really cast a charm--a state of affairs which, if true, would greatly amuse her. And so she has, up to a point. Impossible not to sense the joy which radiates from her smile and person. That is all, so far. It is an orthodox entertainment, merely a joke. God knows what might happen, under given circumstances. Some of a man's most terrible experiences--volcanic cataclysms that ravaged the landscape and left a trail of bitter ashes in their rear--were begun as a joke. You can say so many things in a joking way, you can do so many things in a joking way--especially in Northern countries, where it is easy to joke unseen. Meanwhile, with Ninetta, I discourse sweet nothings in my choicest idiom which has grown rather rusty in England. Italian is a flowery language whose rhetorical turns and phrases require constant exercise to keep them in smooth working order. No; that is not correct. It is not the vocabulary which deteriorates. Words are ever at command. What one learns to forget in England is the simplicity to use them; to utter, with an air of deep conviction, a string of what we should call the merest platitudes. It sometimes takes your breath away--the things you have to say because these folks are so enamoured of rhetoric and will not be happy without it. An English girl of her social standing--I lay stress upon the standing, for it prescribes the conduct--an English girl would never listen to such outpourings with this obvious air of approbation; maybe she would ask where you had been drinking; in every case, your chances would be seriously diminished. She prefers an impromptu frontal attack, a system which is fatal to success in this country. The affair, here, must be a siege. It must move onward by those gradual and inevitable steps ordained of old in the unwritten code of love; no lingering by the wayside, no premature haste. It must march to its end with the measured stateliness of a quadrille. Passion, well-restrained passion, should be written on every line of your countenance. Otherwise you are liable to be dubbed a savage. I know what it is to be called a "Scotch bear," and only because I trembled too much, or too little--I forget which--on a certain occasion. I have heard those skilled in amatory matters say that the novice will do well to confine his attentions to young girls, avoiding married women or widows. They, the older ones, are a bad school--too prone to pardon infractions of the code, too indulgent towards foreigners and males in general. The girls are not so easily pleased; in fact (entre nous) they are often the devil to propitiate. There is something remorseless about them. They put you on your mettle. They keep you dangling. Quick-witted and accustomed to all the niceties of love-badinage, they listen to every word you have to say, pondering its possibly veiled signification. Thus far and no further, they seem to imply. Yet each hour brings you nearer the goal, if--if you obey the code. Weigh well your conduct during the preliminary stage; remember you are dealing with a professional in the finer shades of meaning. Presumption, awkwardness, imprudence; these are the three cardinal sins, and the greatest of these is imprudence. Be humble; be prepared. Her best time for conversation, Ninetta tells me, is after luncheon, when she is generally alone for a little while. At that hour therefore I appear with a shirt or something that requires a button--would she mind? The hotel people are so dreadfully understaffed just now--this war!--and one really cannot live without shirts, can one? Would she mind very much? Or perhaps in the evening ... is she more free in the evening? Alas, no; never in the evenings; never for a single moment; never save on religious festivals, one of which, she suddenly remembers, will take place in a week or so. This is innocent coquetry and perhaps said to test my self-restraint, which is equal to the occasion. An impatient admirer might exclaim---- "Ah, let us meet, then!" --language which would be permissible after four meetings, and appropriate after six; not after two. With submissive delicacy I reply hoping that the may shine brightly, that she may have all the joy she deserves and give her friends all the pleasure they desire. One of them, assuredly, would be pained in his heart not to see her on that evening. Could she guess who it is? Let her try to discover him tonight, when she is just closing her eyes to sleep, all alone, and thinking about things---- There I leave it, for the present. Unless a miracle occurs, I fear I will have quitted Levanto before that festival comes round. True, they have played the fool with me--how often! Yet, such is my interest in religious ceremonies, that I am frankly annoyed at the prospect of missing that evening. One would like to be able to stroll about the beach with her, or up to the old castle, instead of sitting in that formal little shop. Such enterprises are impossible. To be seen together for five minutes in any public place might injure her reputation. It is the drawback of her sex, in this country. I am sorry. For though she hides it as best she can, striving to impress me with the immensity of her worldly experiences, there is an unsophisticated freshness in her outlook. The surface has not been scored over. So it is, with the young. From them you may learn what their elders, having forgotten it, can nevermore teach you. New horizons unroll themselves; you are treading untrodden ground. Talk to a simple creature, farmer or fisherman--well, there is always that touch of common humanity, that sense of eternal needs, to fashion a link of conversation. From a professional--lawyer, doctor, engineer--you may pick up some pungent trifle which yields food for thought; it is never amiss to hearken to a specialist. But the ordinary man of the street, the ordinary man or woman of society, of the world--what can they tell you about art or music or life or religion, about tailors and golf and exhaust-pipes and furniture--what on earth can they tell you that you have not heard already? A mere grinding-out of commonplaces! How often one has covered the same field! They cannot even put their knowledge, such as it is, into an attractive shape or play variations on the theme; it is patter; they have said the same thing, in the same language, for years and years; you have listened to the same thing from other lips, in the same language, for years and years. How one knows it all beforehand--every note in that barrel-organ of echoes! One leaves them feeling like an old, old man, vowing one will never again submit to such a process of demoralization, and understanding, better than ever, the justification of monarchies and tyrannies: these creatures are born to act and think and believe as others tell them. You may be drawn to one or the other, detecting an unusual kindliness of nature or some endearing trick; for the most part, one studies them with a kind of medical interest. How comes it that this man, respectably equipped by birth, has grown so warped and atrophied, an animated bundle of deficiencies? Life is the cause--life, the onward march of years. It has a cramping effect; it closes the pores, intensifying one line of activity at the expense of all the others; often enough it encrusts the individual with a kind of shell, a veneer of something akin to hypocrisy. Your ordinary adult is an egoist in matters of the affections; a specialist in his own insignificant pursuit; a dull dog. Dimly aware of these defects, he confines himself to generalities or, grown confidential, tells you of his little fads, his little love-affairs--such ordinary ones! Like those millions of his fellows, he has been transformed into a screw, a bolt, a nut, in the machine. He is standardised. A man who has tried to remain a mere citizen of the world and refused to squeeze himself into the narrow methods and aspirations of any epoch or country, will discover that children correspond unconsciously to his multifarious interests. They are not standardised. They are more generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to pure ideas, more impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested. The stock may be rudimentary, but the outlook is spacious; it is the passionless outlook of the sage. A child is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations. How refreshing to converse with folks who have no bile to vent, no axe to grind, no prejudices to air; who are pagans to the core; who, uninitiated into the false value of externals, never fail to size you up from a more spiritual point of view than do their elders; who are not oozing politics and sexuality, nor afflicted with some stupid ailment or other which prevents them doing this and that. To be in contact with physical health--it would alone suffice to render their society a dear delight, quite apart from the fact that if you are wise and humble you may tiptoe yourself, by inches, into fairyland. That scarlet sash of hers set me thinking--thinking of the comparative rarity of the colour red as an ingredient of the Italian panorama. The natives seem to avoid it in their clothing, save among certain costumes of the centre and south. You see little red in the internal decorations of the houses--in their wallpapers, the coloured tiles underfoot, the tapestries, table-services and carpets, though a certain fondness for pink is manifest, and not only in Levanto. There is a gulf between pink and red. It is essentially a land of blue and its derivatives--cool, intellectual tints. The azure sea follows you far inland with its gleams. Look landwards from the water--purple Apennines are ever in sight. And up yonder, among the hills, you will rarely escape from celestial hues. Speaking of these mountains in a general way, they are bare masses whose coloration trembles between misty blue and mauve according to distance, light, and hour of day. As building-stone, the rock imparts a grey-blue tint to the walls. The very flowers are blue; it is a peculiarity of limestone formation, hitherto unexplained, to foster blooms of this colour. Those olive-coloured slopes are of a glaucous tone. Or wander through the streets of any town and examine the pottery whether ancient or modern--sure index of national taste. Greens galore, and blues and bilious yellows; seldom will you see warmer shades. And if you do, it is probably Oriental or Siculo-Arabic work, or their imitations. One does not ask for wash-hand basins of sang-de-boeuf. One wonders, merely, whether this avoidance of sanguine tints in the works of man be an instinctive paraphrase of surrounding nature, or due to some cause lying deep down in the roots of Italian temperament. I am aware that the materials for producing crimson are not common in the peninsula. If they liked the colour, the materials would be forthcoming. The Spaniards, a different race, sombre and sensuous, are not averse to red. Nor are the Greeks. Russians have a veritable cult of it; their word for "beautiful" means red. It is therefore not a matter of climate. In Italy, those rare splashes of scarlet--the flaming horse-cloths of Florence, a ruddy sail that flecks the sea, some procession of ruby-tinted priests--they come as a shock, a shock of delight. Cross the Mediterranean, and you will find emotional hues predominating; the land is aglow with red, the very shadows suffused with it. Or go further east.... Meanwhile, Attilio hovers discreetly near the hotel-entrance, ready to convey me to Jericho. He is a small mason-boy to whom I contrived to be useful in the matter of an armful of obstreperous bricks which refused to remain balanced on his shoulder. Forthwith, learning that I was a stranger unfamiliar with Levanto, he conceived the project of abandoning his regular work and becoming my guide, philosopher and friend. "Drop your job for the sake of a few days?" I inquired. "You'll get the sack, my boy." Not so, he thought. He was far too serviceable to those people. They would welcome him with open arms whenever--if ever--he cared to return to them. Was not the mason-in-chief a cousin of his? Everything could be arranged, without a doubt. And so it was. He knows the country; every nook of the hills and sea-shore. A pleasanter companion could not be found; observant and tranquil, tinged with a gravity beyond his years--a gravity due to certain family troubles--and with uncommon sweetness of disposition. He has evidently been brought up with sisters. We went one day up the valley to a village, I forget its name, that sits on a hill-top above the spot where two streams unite; the last part of the way is a steep climb under olives. Here we suddenly took leave of spring and encountered a bank of wintry snow. It forced us to take refuge in the shop of a tobacconist who provided some liquid and other refreshment. Would I might meet him again, that genial person: I never shall! We conversed in English, a language he had acquired in the course of many peregrinations about the globe (he used to be a seaman), and great was Attilio's astonishment on hearing a man whom he knew from infancy now talking to me in words absolutely incomprehensible. He asked: "You two--do you really understand each other?" On our homeward march he pointed to some spot, barely discernible among the hills on our left. That was where he lived. His mother would be honoured to see me. We might walk on to Monterosso afterwards. Couldn't I manage it? To be sure I could. And the very next day. But the place seemed a long way off and the country absolutely wild. I said: "You will have to carry a basket of food." "Better than bricks which grow heavier every minute. Your basket, I daresay, will be pretty light towards evening." The name of his natal village, a mere hamlet, has slipped my memory. I only know that we moved at daybreak up the valley behind Levanto and presently turned to our right past a small mill of some kind; olives, then chestnuts, accompanied the path which grew steeper every moment, and was soon ankle-deep in slush from the melted snow. This was his daily walk, he explained. An hour and a half down, in the chill twilight of dawn; two hours' trudge home, always up hill, dead tired, through mud and mire, in pitch darkness, often with snow and rain. "Do you wonder," he added, "at my preferring to be with you?" "I wonder at my fortune, which gave me such a charming friend. I am not always so lucky." "Luck--it is the devil. We have had no news from my father in America for two years. No remittances ever come from him. He may be dead, for all we know. Our land lies half untilled; we cannot pay for the hire of day labourers. We live from hand to mouth; my mother is not strong; I earn what I can; one of my sisters is obliged to work at Levanto. Think what that means, for us! Perhaps that is why you call me thoughtful. I am the oldest male in the family; I must conduct myself accordingly. Everything depends on me. It is enough to make anyone thoughtful. My mother will tell you about it." She doubtless did, though I gleaned not so much as the drift of her speech. The mortal has yet to be born who can master all the dialects of Italy; this one seemed to bear the same relation to the Tuscan tongue which that of the Basses-Pyrenées bears to French--it was practically another language. Listening to her, I caught glimpses, now and then, of familiar Mediterranean sounds; like lamps shining through a fog, they were quickly swallowed up in the murk. Unlike her offspring, she had never been to school. That accounted for it. A gentle woman, frail in health and manifestly wise; the look of the house, of the children, bore witness to her sagacity. Understanding me as little as I understood her, our conversation finally lapsed into a series of smiles, which Attilio interpreted as best he could. She insisted upon producing some apples and a bottle of wine, and I was interested to notice that she poured out to her various male offspring, down to the tiniest tot, but drank not a drop herself, nor gave any to her big daughters. "She is sorry they will not let you stay at Levanto." "Carrara lies just beyond the war-zone. I want to visit the marble-mines when the weather grows a little warmer, and perhaps write something about them. Ask her whether you can join me there for a week or so, if I send the money. Make her say yes." She said yes. With a companion like this, to reflect my moods and act as buffer between myself and the world, I felt I could do anything. Already I saw myself exploring those regions, interviewing directors as to methods of work and output, poking my nose into municipal archives and libraries to learn the history of those various quarries of marble, plain and coloured; tracking the footsteps of Michael Angelo at Seravezza and Pietrasanta and re-discovering that old road of his and the inscription he left on the rock; speculating why the Romans, who ransacked the furthermost corners of the earth for tinted stones, knew so little of the treasures here buried; why the Florentines were long content to use that grey bigio, when the lordly black portovenere, [2] with its golden streaks, was lying at their very doors.... The gods willed otherwise. Then, leaving that hospitable dame, we strolled forth along a winding road--a good road, once more--ever upwards, under the bare chestnuts. At last the watershed was reached and we began a zigzag descent towards the harbour of Monterosso, meeting not a soul by the way. Snow lay on these uplands; it began to fall softly. As the luncheon hour had arrived we took refuge in a small hut of stone and there opened the heavy basket which gave forth all that heart could desire--among other things, a large fiasco of strong white wine which we drank to the dregs. It made us both delightfully tipsy. So passed an hour of glad confidences in that abandoned shelter with the snowflakes drifting in upon us--one of those hours that sweeten life and compensate for months of dreary harassment. A long descent, past some church or convent famous as a place of pilgrimage, led to the strand of Monterosso where the waves were sparkling in tepid sunshine. Then up again, by a steep incline, to a signal station perched high above the sea. Attilio wished to salute a soldier-relative working here. I remained discreetly in the background; it would never do for a foreigner to be seen prying into Marconi establishments in this confounded "zone of defense." Another hour by meandering woodland paths brought us to where, from the summit of a hill, we looked down upon Levanto, smiling merrily in its conch-shaped basin.... All this cloudless afternoon we conversed in a flowery dell under the pine trees, with the blue sea at our feet. It was a different climate from yesterday; so warm, so balmy. Impossible to conceive of snow! I thought I had definitely bidden farewell to winter. Trains, an endless succession of trains, were rumbling through the bowels of the mountain underneath, many of them filled with French soldiers bound for Salonika. They have been going southward ever since my arrival at Levanto. Attilio was more pensive than usual; the prospect of returning to his bricks was plainly irksome. Why not join for a change, I suggested, one of yonder timber-felling parties? He knew all about it. The pay is too poor. They are cutting the pines all along this coast and dragging them to the water, where they are sawn into planks and despatched to the battle-front. It seemed a pity to Attilio; at this rate, he thought, there would soon be none left, and how then would we be able to linger in the shade and take our pleasure on some future day? "Have no fear of that," I said. "And yet--would you believe it? Many years ago these hills, as far as you can see to right and left and behind, were bare like the inside of your hand. Then somebody looked at the landscape and said: 'What a shame to make so little use of these hundreds of miles of waste soil. Let us try an experiment with a new kind of pine tree which I think will prosper among the rocks. One of these days people may be glad of them.'" "Well?" "You see what has happened. Right up to Genoa, and down below Levanto--nothing but pines. You Italians ought to be grateful to that man. The value of the timber which is now being felled along this stretch of coast cannot be less than a thousand francs an hour. That is what you would have to pay, if you wanted to buy it. Twelve thousand francs a day; perhaps twice as much." "Twelve thousand francs a day!" "And do you know who planted the trees? It was a Scotsman." "A Scozzese. What kind of animal is that?" "A person who thinks ahead." "Then my mother is a Scotsman." I glanced from the sea into his face; there was something of the same calm depth in both, the same sunny composure. What is it, this limpid state of the mind? What do we call this alloy of profundity and frankness? We call it intelligence. I would like to meet that man or woman who can make Attilio say something foolish. He does not know what it is to feel shy. Serenely objective, he discards those subterfuges which are the usual safeguard of youth or inexperience--the evasions, reservations and prevarications that defend the shallow, the weak, the self-conscious. His candour rises above them. He feels instinctively that these things are pitfalls. "Have you no sweetheart, Attilio?" "Certainly I have. But it is not a man's affair. We are only children, you understand--siamo ancora piccoli." "Did you ever give her a kiss?" "Never. Not a single one." I relight my pipe, and then inquire: "Why not give her a kiss?" "People would call me a disrespectful boy." "Nobody, surely, need be any the wiser?" "She is not like you and me." A pause.... "Not like us? How so?" "She would tell her sister." "What of it?" "The sister would tell her mother, who would say unpleasant things to mine. And perhaps to other folks. Then the fat would be in the fire. And that is why." Another pause.... "What would your mother say to you?" "She would say: 'You are the oldest male; you should conduct yourself accordingly. What is this lack of judgment I hear about?'" "I begin to understand." Siena Driven from the Paradise of Levanto, I landed not on earth but--with one jump--in Hell. The Turks figure forth a Hell of ice and snow; this is my present abode; its name is Siena. Every one knows that this town lies on a hill, on three hills; the inference that it would be cold in January was fairly obvious; how cold, nobody could have guessed. The sun is invisible. Streets are deep in snow. Icicles hang from the windows. Worst of all, the hotels are unheated. Those English, you know,--they refuse to supply us with coal.... Could this be the city where I was once nearly roasted to death? It is an effort to recall that glistening month of the Palio festival, a month I spent at a genuine pension for a set purpose, namely, to write a study on the habits of "The Pension-cats of Europe"--those legions of elderly English spinsters who lead crepuscular lives in continental boarding-houses. I tore it up, I remember; it was unfair. These ladies have a perfect right to do as they please and, for that matter, are not nearly as ridiculous as many married couples that live outside boarding-houses. But when Siena grew intolerable--a stark, ill-provisioned place; you will look in vain for a respectable grocer or butcher; the wine leaves much to be desired; indeed, it has all the drawbacks of Florence and none of its advantages--why, then we fled into Mr. Edward Hutton's Unknown Tuscany. There, at Abbadia San Salvatore (though the summit of Mount Amiata did not come up to expectation) we at last felt cool again, wandering amid venerable chestnuts and wondrously tinted volcanic blocks, mountain-fragments, full of miniature glens and moisture and fernery--a green twilight, a landscape made for fairies.... Was this the same Siena from which we once escaped to get cool? Muffled up to the ears, with three waistcoats on, I move in and out of doors, endeavouring to discover whether there be any appreciable difference in temperature between the external air and that of my bedroom. There cannot be much to choose between them. They say I am the only foreigner now in Siena. That, at least, is a distinction, a record. Furthermore, no matches, not even of the sulphur variety, were procurable in any of the shops for the space of three days; that also, I imagine, cannot yet have occurred within the memory of living man. While stamping round the great Square yesterday to keep my feet warm, a Florentine addressed me; a commercial gentleman, it would seem. He disapproved of this square--it was not regular in shape, it was not even level. What a piazza! Such was his patriotism that he actually went on to say unfriendly things about the tower. Who ever thought of building a tower at the bottom of a hill? It was good enough, he dared say, for Siena. Oh, yes; doubtless it satisfied their artistic notions, such as they were. This tower being one of my favourites, I felt called upon to undertake its defence. Recollecting all I had ever heard or read to its credit, citing authorities neither of us had ever dreamt of--improvising lustily, in short, as I warmed to my work--I concluded by proving it to be one of the seven wonders of the world. He said: "Now really! One would think you had been born in this miserable hole. You know what we Florentines say: Siena Di tre cose è piena: Torri, campane, E figli di putane." "I admit that Siena is deficient in certain points," I replied. "That wonderful dome of yours, for example--there is nothing like it here." "No, indeed. Ah, that cupola! Ah, Brunelleschi--che genio!" "I perceive you are a true Florentine. Could you perhaps tell me why Florentines, coming home from abroad, always rejoice to see it rising out of the plain?" "Some enemy has been talking to you...." A little red-haired boy from Lucca, carrying for sale a trayful of those detestable plaster-casts, then accosted me. Who bought such abominations, I inquired? Nobody. Business was bad. Bad? I could well believe it. Having for the first time in my life nothing better to do, I did my duty. I purchased the entire collection of these horrors, on the understanding that he should forthwith convey them in my presence to the desolate public garden, where they were set up, one after the other, on the edge of a bench and shattered to fragments with our snow-balls. Thus perished, not without laughter and in a good cause, three archangels, two Dantés, a nondescript lady with brocade garments and a delectable amorino whose counterpart, the sole survivor, was reserved for a better fate--being carried home and presented as a gift to my chambermaid. She was polite enough to call it a beautiful work of art. I was polite enough not to contradict her. Both of us know better.... This young girl has no illusions (few Tuscans have) and yet a great charm. Her lover is at the front. There is little for her to do, the hotel being practically empty. There is nothing whatever for me to do, in these Arctic latitudes. Bored to death, both of us, we confabulate together huddled in shawls and greatcoats, each holding a charcoal pan to keep the fingers from being frostbitten. I say to myself: "You will never find a maidservant of this type in Rome, so sprightly of tongue, distinguished in manner and spotless in person--never!" The same with her words. The phrases trip out of her mouth, immaculate, each in full dress. Seldom does she make an original remark, but she says ordinary things in a tone of intense conviction and invests them with an appetizing savour. Wherein lies that peculiar salt of Tuscan speech? In its emphasis, its air of finality. They are emphatic, rather than profound. Their deepest utterances, if you look below the surface, are generally found to be variants of one of those ancestral saws or proverbs wherewith the country is saturated. Theirs is a crusted charm. A hard and glittering sanity, a kind of ageless enamel, is what confronts us in their temperament. There are not many deviations from this Tuscan standard. Close by, in Umbria, you will find a softer type. One can be passably warm in bed. Here I lie for long, long hours, endeavouring to generate the spark of energy which will propel me from this inhospitable mountain. Here I lie and study an old travel-book. I mean to press it to the last drop. One seldom presses books out, nowadays. The mania for scraps of one kind or another, the general cheapening of printed matter, seem to have dulled that faculty and given us a scattered state of mind. We browse dispersedly, in goatish fashion, instead of nibbling down to the root like that more conscientious quadruped whose name, if I mentioned it, would degrade the metaphor. Devouring so much, so hastily, so irreverentially, how shall a man establish close contact with the mind of him who writes, and impregnate himself with his peculiar outlook to such an extent as to be able to take on, if only momentarily, a colouring different from his own? It is a task requiring submissiveness and leisure. And yet, what could be more interesting than really to observe things and men from the angle of another individual, to install oneself within his mentality and make it one's habitation? To sit in his bones--what glimpses of unexplored regions! Were a man to know what his fellow truly thinks; could he feel in his own body those impulses which drive the other to his idiomatic acts and words--what an insight he would gain! Morally, it might well amount to "tout comprendre, c'est ne rien pardonner"; but who troubles about pardoning or condemning? Intellectually, it would be a feast. Thus immersed into an alien personality, a man would feel as though he lived two lives, and possessed two characters at the same time. One's own life, prolonged to an age, could never afford such unexpected revelations. The thing can be done, up to a point, with patient humility; for everybody writes himself down more or less, though not everybody is worth the trouble of deciphering. I purpose to apply this method; to squeeze the juice, the life-blood, out of what some would call a rather dry Scotch traveller. I read his book in England for the first time two years ago, and have brought it here with a view to further dissection. Would I had known of its existence five years earlier! Strange to say, despite my deplorable bookishness (vide Press) this was not the case; I could never ascertain either the author's name or the title of his volume, though I had heard about him, rather vaguely, long before that time. It was Dr. Dohrn of the Naples Aquarium who said to me in those days: "Going to the South? Whatever you do, don't forget to read that book by an old Scotch clergyman. He ran all over the country with a top-hat and an umbrella, copying inscriptions. He was just your style: perfectly crazy." Flattered at the notion of being likened to a Scottish divine, I made all kinds of inquiries--in vain. I abandoned hope of unearthing the top-hatted antiquarian and had indeed concluded him to be a myth, when a friend supplied me with what may be absurdly familiar to less bookish people: "The Nooks and By-ways of Italy." By Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D. Liverpool, 1868. A glance sufficed to prove that this Ramage belonged to the brotherhood of David Urquhart, Mure of Caldwell, and the rest of them. Where are they gone, those candid inquirers, so full of gentlemanly curiosity, so informative and yet shrewdly human; so practical--think of Urquhart's Turkish Baths--though stuffed with whimsicality and abstractions? Where is the spirit that gave them birth? One grows attached to these "Nooks and By-ways." An honest book, richly thoughtful, and abounding in kindly twinkles. Now, regarding the top-hat. I find no mention of it in these letters. For letters they are; letters extracted from a diary which was written on his return from Italy in 1828 from "very full notes made from day to day during my journey." 1828: that date is important. It was in 1828, therefore, when the events occurred which he relates, and he allowed an interval of forty years to elapse ere making them public. The umbrella on the other hand is always cropping up. It pervades the volume like a Leitmotif. It is "a most invaluable article" for protecting the head against the sun's rays; so constantly is it used that after a single month's wear we find it already in "a sad state of dilapidation." Still, he clings to it. As a defence against brigands it might prove useful, and on one occasion, indeed, he seizes it in his hand "prepared to show fight." This happened, be it remembered, in 1828. Vainly one conjectures what the mountain folk of South Italy thought of such a phenomenon. Even now, if they saw you carrying an umbrella about in the sunshine, they would cross themselves and perhaps pray for your recovery--perhaps not. Yet Ramage was not mad at all. He was only more individualistic and centrifugal than many people. Having formed by bitter experience a sensible theory--to wit, that sunstroke is unpleasant and can be avoided by the use of an umbrella--he is not above putting it into practice. Let others think and do as they please! For the rest, his general appearance was quite in keeping. How delightful he must have looked! Why have we no such types nowadays? Wearing a "white merino frock-coat, nankeen trowsers, a large-brimmed straw hat, and white shoes," he must have been a fairly conspicuous object in the landscape. That hat alone will have alarmed the peasantry who to this day and hour wear nothing but felt on their heads. And note the predominance of the colour white in his attire; it was popular, at that period, with English travellers. Such men, however, were unknown in most of the regions which Ramage explored. The colour must have inspired feelings akin to awe in the minds of the natives, for white is their bête noire. They have a rooted aversion to it and never employ it in their clothing, because it suggests to their fancy the idea of bloodlessness--of anaemia and death. If you want to make one of them ill over his dinner, wear a white waistcoat. Accordingly, it is not surprising that he sometimes finds himself "an object of curiosity." An English Vice-Consul, at one place, was "quite alarmed at my appearance." Elsewhere he meets a band of peasant-women who "took fright at my appearance and scampered off in the utmost confusion." And what happened at Taranto? By the time of his arrival in that town his clothes were already in such a state that "they would scarcely fit an Irish beggar." Umbrella in hand--he is careful to apprise us of this detail--and soaked moreover from head to foot after an immersion in the river Tara, he entered the public square, which was full of inhabitants, and soon found himself the centre of a large crowd. Looking, he says, like a drowned rat, his appearance caused "great amazement." "What is the matter? Who is he?" they asked. The muleteer explained that he was an Englishman, and "that immediately seemed to satisfy them." Of course it did. People in those times were prepared for anything on the part of an Englishman, who was a far more self-assertive and self-confident creature than nowadays. Thus arrayed in snowy hue, like the lilies of the field, he perambulates during the hot season the wildest parts of South Italy, strangely unprejudiced, heedless of bugs and brigands--a real danger in 1828: did he not find the large place Rossano actually blocked by them?--sleeping in stables and execrable inns, viewing sites of antiquity and natural beauty, interrogating everybody about everything and, in general, "satisfying his curiosity." That curiosity took a great deal to satisfy. It is a positive relief to come upon a sentence in this book, a sentence unique, which betrays a relaxing or waning of this terrible curiosity. "It requires a strong mania for antiquities to persevere examining such remains as Alife furnishes, and I was soon satisfied with what I had seen." Nor did he climb to the summit of Mount Vulture, as he would have done if the view had not been obscured by a haze. His chief concern could not be better summed up than in the sub-title he has chosen for this volume: Wanderings in search of ancient remains and modern superstitions. To any one who knows the country it appears astonishing how much he contrived to see, and in how brief a space of time. He accomplished wonders. For it was no mean task he had proposed to himself, namely, "to visit every spot in Italy which classic writers had rendered famous." To visit every spot--what a Gargantuan undertaking! None but a quite young man could have conceived such a project, and even Ramage, with all his good health and zest, might have spent half a lifetime over the business but for his habit of breathless hustle, which leaves the reader panting behind. He is always on the move. He reminds one of Mr. Phineas Fogg in that old tale. The moment he has "satisfied his curiosity" there is no holding him; off he goes; the smiles of the girls whom he adores, the entreaties of some gentle scholar who fain would keep him as guest for the night--they are vain; he is tired to death, but "time is precious" and he "tears himself away from his intelligent host" and scampers into the wilderness once more, as if the Furies were at his heels. He thinks nothing of rushing from Catanzaro to Cotrone, from Manduria to Brindisi, in a single day--at a time when there was hardly a respectable road in the country. Up to the final paragraph of the book he is "hurrying" because time is "fast running out." This sense of fateful hustle--this, and the umbrella--they impart quite a peculiar flavour to his pages. One would like to learn more about so lovable a type--for such he was, unquestionably; one would like to know, above all things, why his descriptions of other parts of Italy have never been printed. Was the enterprise interrupted by his death? He tells us that the diaries of his tours through the central and northern regions were written; that he visited "every celebrated spot in Umbria and Etruria" and wandered "as far as the valley of the Po." Where are these notes? Those on Etruria, especially, would make good reading at this distance of time, when even Dennis has acquired an old-world aroma. The Dictionary of National Biography might tell us something about him, but that handy little volume is not here; moreover, it has a knack of telling you everything about people save what you ought to know. So, for example, I had occasion not long ago to look up the account of Charles Waterton the naturalist. [3] He did good work in his line, but nothing is more peculiar to the man than his waywardness. It was impossible for him to do anything after the manner of other folks. In all his words and actions he was a freak, a curiosity, the prince of eccentrics. Yet this, the essence of the man, the fundamental trait of his character which shines out of every page of his writing and every detail of his daily life--this, the feature by which he was known to his fellows and ought to be known to posterity--it is intelligible from that account only if you read between the lines. Is that the way to write "biography"? Fortunately he has written himself down; so has Ramage; and it is instructive to compare the wayside reflections of these two contemporaries as they rove about the ruins of Italy; the first, ardent Catholic, his horizon close-bounded by what the good fathers of Stonyhurst had seen fit to teach him; the other, less complacent, all alive indeed with Calvinistic disputatiousness and ready to embark upon bold speculations anent the origin of heathen gods and their modern representatives in the Church of Rome; amiable scholars and gentlemen, both of them; yet neither venturing to draw those plain conclusions which the "classic remains of paganism" would have forced upon anybody else--upon anybody, that is, who lacked their initial warp, whose mind had not been twisted in youth or divided, rather, into watertight compartments. A long sentence.... Pisa After a glacial journey--those English! They will not even give us coal for steam-heating--I arrived here. It is warmer, appreciably warmer. Yet I leave to-morrow or next day. The streets of the town, the distant beach of San Rossore and its pine trees--they are fraught with sad memories; memories of an autumn month in the early nineties. A city of ghosts.... The old hotel had put on a new face; freshly decorated, it wears none the less a poverty-stricken air. My dinner was bad and insufficient. One grows sick of those vile maccheroni made with war-time flour. The place is full of rigid officers taking themselves seriously. Odd, how a uniform can fill a simpleton with self-importance. What does Bacon say? I forget. Something apposite--something about the connection between military costumes and vanity. For the worst of this career is that it is liable to transform even a sensible man into a fool. I never see these sinister-clanking marionettes without feelings of distrust. They are the outward symbol of an atavistic striving: the modern infâme. We have been dying for sometime past from over-legislation. Now we are caught in the noose. A bureaucracy is bad enough. A bureaucracy can at least be bribed. Militarism dries up even that little fount of the imagination. Another twenty years of this, and we may be living in caves again; they came near it, at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Such a cataclysm as ours may account for the extinction of the great Cro-Magnon civilization--as fine a race, physically, as has yet appeared on earth; they too may have been afflicted with the plague of nationalism, unless, as is quite likely, that horrid work was accomplished by a microbe of some kind.... In the hour of evening, under a wintry sky amid whose darkly massed vapours a young moon is peering down upon this maddened world, I wander alone through deserted roadways towards that old solitary brick-tower. Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid mud--irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a flood. There is dreary monotony in all Italian rivers, once they have reached the plain. They are livelier in their upper reaches. At Florence--where those citron-tinted houses are mirrored in the stream--you may study the Arno in all its ever-changing moods. Seldom is its colour quite the same. The hue of café-au-lait in full spate, it shifts at other times between apple-green and jade, between celadon and chrysolite and eau-de-Nil. In the weariness of summer the tints are prone to fade altogether out of the waves. They grow bleached, devitalized; they are spent, withering away like grass that has lain in the sun. [4] Yet with every thunder-storm on yonder hills the colour-sprite leaps back into the waters. Your Florentine of the humbler sort loves to dawdle along the bank on a bright afternoon, watching the play of the river and drawing a kind of philosophic contentment out of its cool aquatic humours. Presently he reaches that bridge--the jewellers' bridge. He thinks he must buy a ring. Be sure the stone will reflect his Arno in one of its moods. I will wager he selects a translucent chrysoprase set in silver, a cheap and stubborn gem whose frigidly uncompromising hue appeals in mysterious fashion to his own temperament. Whoever suffers from insomnia will find himself puzzling at night over questions which have no particular concern for him at other times. And one seems to be more wide awake, during those moments, than by day. Yet the promptings of the brain, which then appear so lucid, so novel and convincing, will seldom bear examination in the light of the sun. To test the truth of this, one has only to jot down one's thoughts at the time, and peruse them after breakfast. How trite they read, those brilliant imaginings! For reasons which I cannot fathom, I pondered last night upon the subject of heredity; a subject that had a certain fascination for me in my biological days. The lacunae of science! We weigh the distant stars and count up their ingredients. Yet here is a phenomenon which lies under our very hand and to which is devoted the most passionate study: what have we learnt of its laws? Be that as it may, there occurred to me last night a new idea. It consisted in putting together two facts which have struck me separately on many occasions, but never conjointly. Taken together, I said to myself, and granted that both are correct, they may help to elucidate a dark problem of national psychology. The first one I state rather tentatively, having hardly sufficient material to go upon. It is this. You will find it more common in Italy than in England for the male offspring of a family to resemble the father and the female the mother. I cannot suggest a reason for this. I have observed the fact--that is all. Let me say, in parenthesis, that it is well to confine oneself to adults in such researches. Childhood and youth is a period of changing lights and half-tones and temperamental interplay. Characteristics of body and mind are held, as it were, in solution. We think a child takes after its mother because of this or that feature. If we wait for twenty-five years, we see the true state of affairs; the hair has grown dark like the father's, the nose, the most telling item of the face, has also approximated to his type, likewise the character--in fact the offspring is clearly built on paternal lines. And vice-versa. To study children for these purposes would be waste of time. The second observation I regard as axiomatic. It is this. You will nowhere find an adult offspring which reproduces in any marked degree the physical features of one parent displaying in any marked degree the mental features of the other. That man whose external build and complexion is entirely modelled upon that of his hard materialistic father and who yet possesses all the artistic idealism of his maternal parent--such creatures do not exist in nature, though you may encounter them as often as you please in the pages of novelists. Let me insert another parenthesis to observe that I am speaking of the broad mass, the average, in a general way. For it stands to reason that the offspring may be vaguely intermediate between two parents, may resemble one or both in certain particulars and not in others, may hark back to ancestral types or bear no appreciable likeness to any one discoverable. It is a theme admitting of endless combinations and permutations. Or again, in reference to the first proposition, it would be easy for any traveller in this country to point out, for example, a woman who portrays the qualities of her father in the clearest manner. I know a dozen such cases. Hundreds of them would not make them otherwise than what I think they are--rarer here than in England. Granting that both these propositions are correct, what should we expect to find? That in Italy the male type of character and temperament is more constant, more intimately associated with the male type of feature; and the same with the female. In other words, that the categories into which their men and women fall are fewer and more clearly defined, by reason of the fact that their mental and moral sex-characteristics are more closely correlated with their physical sex-characteristics. That the Englishman, on the other hand, male or female, does not fall so easily into categories; he is complex and difficult to "place," the psychological sex-boundaries being more hazily demarcated. There is iridescence and ambiguity here, whereas Italians of either sex, once the rainbow period of youth is over, are relatively unambiguous; easily "placed." Is this what we find? I think so. Speculations.... I never pass through Pisa without calling to mind certain rat-hunts in company with J. O. M., who was carried out of the train at this very station, dead, because he refused to follow my advice. He was my neighbour at one time; he lived near the river Mole in relative seclusion; coursing rats with Dandie Dinmonts was the only form of exercise which entailed no strain on his weakened constitution. How he loved it! This O---- was a man of mystery and violence, who threw himself into every kind of human activity with superhuman, Satanic, zest; traveller, sportsman, financier, mining expert, lover of wine and women, of books and prints; one of the founders, I believe, of the Rhodesia Company; faultlessly dressed, infernally rich and, when he chose--which was fairly often--preposterously brutal. Neither manner nor face were winning. He was swarthy almost to blackness, quite un-English in looks, with rather long hair, a most menacing moustache and the fiercest eyes imaginable; a king of the gipsies, so far as features went. Something sinister hung about his personality. A predatory type, unquestionably; never so happy as when pitting his wits or strength against others, tracking down this or that--by choice, living creatures. He had taken life by the throat, and excesses of various kinds having shattered his frame, there was an end, for the time being, of deer-stalking and tigers; it was a tame period of rat-hunts with those terriers whose murderous energies were a pis aller, yielding a sort of vicarious pleasure. The neighbourhood was depopulated of such beasts, purchased at fancy prices; when a sufficient quantity (say, half a hundred) had been collected together, I used to receive a telegram containing the single word "rats." Then the pony was saddled, and I rode down for the grand field day. We once gave the hugest of these destroyed rodents, I remember, to an amiable old sow, a friend of the family. What was she going to do? She ate it, as you would eat a pear. She engulfed the corpse methodically, beginning at the head, working her way through breast and entrails while her chops dripped with gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some little trouble to masticate, on account of its length and tenuity. Altogether, decidedly good sport.... Then O---- disappeared from my ken. Years went by. Improving health, in the course of time, tempted him back into his former habits; he built himself a shooting lodge in the Alps. We were neighbours again, having no ridge worth mentioning save the Schadona pass between us. I joined him once or twice--chamois, instead of rats. This place was constructed on a pretentious scale, and he must have paid fantastic sums for the transport of material to that remote region (you could watch the chamois from the very windows) and for the rights over all the country round about. [5] O---- told me that the superstitious Catholic peasants raised every kind of difficulty and objection to his life there; it was a regular conspiracy. I suggested a more friendly demeanour, especially towards their priests. That was not his way. He merely said: "I'll be even with them. Mark my words.".... There followed another long interval, during which he vanished completely. Then, one April afternoon on the Posilipo, a sailor climbed up with a note from him. The Consul-General said I lived here. If so, would I come to Bertolini's hotel at once? He was seriously ill. Neighbours once more! I left then and there, and was appalled at the change in him. His skin was drawn tight as parchment over a face the colour of earth, there was no flesh on his hands, the voice was gone, though fire still gleamed viciously in the hollows of his eyes. That raven-black hair was streaked with grey and longer than ever, which gave him an incongruously devout appearance. He had taken pitiful pains to look fresh and appetizing. So we sat down to dinner on Bertolini's terrace, in the light of a full moon. O---- ate nothing whatever. He arrived from Egypt some time ago, on his way to England. The doctor had forbidden further travelling or any other exertion on account of various internal complications; among other things, his heart, he told me, was as large as a child's head. "I hope you can stand this food," he whispered, or rather croaked. "For God's sake, order anything you fancy. As for me, I can't even eat like you people. Asses' milk is what I get, and slops. Done for, this time. I'm a dying man; anybody can see that. A dying man----" "Something," I said, "is happening to that moon." It was in eclipse. Half the bright surface had been ominously obscured since we took our seats. O---- scowled at the satellite, and went on: "But I won't be carried out of this dirty hole (Bertolini's)--not feet first. Would you mind my gasping another day or two at your place? Rolfe has told me about it." We moved him, with infinite trouble. The journey woke his dormant capacities for invective. He cursed at the way they jolted him about; he cursed himself into a collapse that day, and we thought it was all over. Then he rallied, and became more abusive than before. Nothing was right. Stairs being forbidden, the whole lower floor of the house was placed at his disposal; the establishment was dislocated, convulsed; and still he swore. He swore at me for the better part of a week; at the servants, and even at the good doctor Malbranc, who came every morning in a specially hired steam-launch to make that examination which always ended in his saying to me: "You must humour him. Heart-patients are apt to be irritable." Irritable was a mild term for this particular patient. His appetite, meanwhile, began to improve. It was soon evident that my cook had not the common sense to prepare his invalid dishes; a second one was engaged. Then, my gardener and sailor-boy being manifest idiots, it became necessary to procure an extra porter to fetch the numberless odd things he needed from town every day, and every hour of the day. I wrote to the messenger people to send the most capable lad on their books; we would engage him by the week, at twice his ordinary pay. He arrived; a limp and lean nonentity, with a face like a boiled codfish. This miserable youth promptly became the object of O----'s bitterest execration. I soon learnt to dread those conferences, those terrific scenes which I was forced to witness in my capacity of interpreter. O---- revelled in them with exceeding gusto. He used to gird his loins for the effort of vituperation; I think he regarded the performance as a legitimate kind of exercise--his last remaining one. As soon as the boy returned from town and presented himself with his purchases, O---- would glare at him for two or three minutes with such virulence, such concentration of hatred and loathing, such a blaze of malignity in his black eyes, that one fully expected to see the victim wither away; all this in dead silence. Then he would address me in his usual whisper, quite calmly, as though referring to the weather: "Would you mind telling that double-distilled abortion that if he goes on making such a face I shall have to shoot him. Tell him, will you; there's a good fellow." And I had to "humour" him. "The gentleman"--I would say--"begs you will try to assume another expression of countenance," or words to that effect; whereto he would tearfully reply something about the will of God and the workmanship of his father and mother, honest folks, both of them. I was then obliged to add gravely: "You had better try, all the same, or he may shoot you. He has a revolver in his pocket, and a shooting licence from your government." This generally led to the production of a most ghastly smile, calculated to convey an ingratiating impression. "Look at him," O---- would continue. "He is almost too good to be shot. And now let's see. What does he call these things? Ask him, will you?" "Asparagus." "Tell him that when I order asparagus I mean asparagus and not walking-sticks. Tell him that if he brings me such objects again, I'll ram the whole bundle up--down his throat. What does he expect me to do with them, eh? You might ask him, will you? And, God! what's this? Tell him (accellerando) that when I send a prescription to be made up at the Royal Pharmacy----" "He explained about that. He went to the other place because he wanted to hurry up." "To hurry up? Tell him to hurry up and get to blazes. Oh, tell him----" "You'll curse yourself into another collapse, at this rate." To the doctor's intense surprise, he lingered on; he actually grew stronger. Although never seeming to gain an ounce in weight, he could eat a formidable breakfast and used to insist, to my horror and shame, in importing his own wine, which he accused my German maid Bertha of drinking on the sly. Callers cheered him up--Rolfe the Consul, Dr. Dohrn of the Aquarium, and old Marquis Valiante, that perfect botanist--all of them dead now! After a month and a half of painful experiences, we at last learnt to handle him. The household machinery worked smoothly. A final and excruciating interview ended in the dismissal of the errand-boy, and I personally selected another one--a pretty little rascal to whom he took a great fancy, over-tipping him scandalously. He needed absolute rest; he got it; and I think was fairly happy or at least tranquil (when not writhing in agony) at the end of that period. I can still see him in the sunny garden, his clothes hanging about an emaciated body--a skeleton in a deck-chair, a death's head among the roses. Humiliated in this inactivity, he used to lie dumb for long hours, watching the butterflies or gazing wistfully towards those distant southern mountains which I proposed to visit later in the season. Once a spark of that old throttling instinct flared up. It was when a kestrel dashed overhead, bearing in its talons a captured lizard whose tail fluttered in the air: the poor beast never made a faster journey in its life. "Ha!" said O----. "That's sport." At other times he related, always in that hoarse whisper, anecdotes of his life, a life of reckless adventure, of fortunes made and fortunes lost; or spoke of his old passion for art and books. He seemed to have known, at one time or another, every artist and connoisseur on either side of the Atlantic; he told me it had cost about £10,000 to acquire his unique knowledge and taste in the matter of mezzotints, and that he was concerned about the fate of his "Daphnis and Chloe" collection which contained, he said, a copy of every edition in every language--all except the unique Elizabethan version in the Huth library (now British Museum). I happened to have one of the few modern reprints of that stupid and ungainly book: would he accept it? Not likely! He was after originals. One day he suddenly announced: "I am leaving you my small library of erotic literature, five or six hundred pieces, worth a couple of thousand, I should say. Some wonderful old French stuff, and as many Rops as you like, and Persian and Chinese things--I can see you gloating over them! Don't thank me. And now I'm off to England." "To England?" The doctor peremptorily forbade the journey; if he must go, let him wait another couple of weeks and gain some more strength. But O---- was obdurate; buoyed up, I imagine, with the prospect of movement and of causing some little trouble at home. As the weather had grown unusually hot, I booked at his own suggestion a luxurious cabin on a home-bound liner and engaged a valet for the journey. On my handing him the tickets, he said he had just changed his mind; he would travel overland; there were some copper mines in Etruria of which he was director; he meant to have a look at them en route and "give those people Hell" for something or other. I tried to dissuade him, and all in vain. Finally I said: "You'll die, if you travel by land in this heat." So he did. They carried him out of the train in the early days of June, here at Pisa, feet first.... I never learnt the fate of that library of erotic literature. But his will contained one singular provision: the body was to be cremated and its ashes scattered among the hills of his Alpine property. This was his idea of "being even" with the superstitious peasantry, who would thenceforward never have ventured out of doors after dark, for fear of encountering his ghost. He would harass them eternally! It was no bad notion of revenge. A sandy-haired gentleman came from Austria to Italy to convey this handful of potential horrors to the mountains, but the customs officials at Ala refused to allow it to enter the country and it ultimately came to rest in England. Another queer thing happened. Since his arrival from Egypt, O---- had never been able to make up his mind to pay any of his innumerable bills; the creditors, aware of the man's wealth and position, not pressing for a settlement. I rather think that this procrastination, this reluctance to disburse ready money, is a symptom of his particular state of ill-health; I have observed it with several heart-patients (and others as well); however that may be, it became a source of real vexation to me, for hardly was the news of his death made public before I began to be deluged with outstanding accounts from every quarter--tradespeople, hotel keepers, professional men, etc. I finally sent the documents with a pressing note to his representatives who, after some demur, paid up, English-fashion, in full. Then a noteworthy change came over the faces of men. Everybody beamed upon me in the streets, and there arrived multitudinous little gifts at my house--choice wines, tie-pins, game, cigars, ebony walking-sticks, confectionery, baskets of red mullets, old prints, Capodimonte ware, candied fruits, amber mouthpieces, maraschino--all from donors who plainly desired to remain anonymous. Such things were dropped from the clouds, so to speak, on my doorstep: an enigmatic but not unpleasant state of affairs. Gradually it dawned upon me, it was forced upon me, that I had worked a miracle. These good people, thinking that their demands upon O----'s executors would be cut down, Italian-fashion, by at least fifty per cent, had anticipated that eventuality by demanding twice or thrice as much as was really due to them. And they got it! No wonder men smiled, when the benefactor of the human race walked abroad. Viareggio (February) Viareggio, dead at this season, is a rowdy place in summer; not rowdy, however, after the fashion of Margate. There is a suggestive difference between the two. The upper classes in both towns are of course irreproachable in externals--it is their uniformity of behaviour throughout the world which makes them so uninteresting from a spectacular point of view. A place does not receive its tone from them (save possibly Bournemouth) but from their inferiors; and here, in this matter of public decorum, the comparison is to the credit of Italy. It is beside the point to say that the one lies relatively remote, while the other is convenient for cheap trips from a capital. Set Viareggio down at the very gate of Rome and fill it with the scum of Trastevere: the difference would still be there. It might be more noisy than Margate. It would certainly be less blatant. As for myself, I hate Viareggio at all seasons, and nothing would have brought me here but the prospect of visiting the neighbouring Carrara mines with Attilio to whom I have written, enclosing a postcard for reply. For this is a modern town built on a plain of mud and sand, a town of heartrending monotony, the least picturesque of all cities in the peninsula, the least Italian. It has not even a central piazza! You may conjure up visions of Holland and detect something of an old-world aroma, if you stroll about the canal and harbour where sails are now flapping furiously in the north wind; you may look up to the snow-covered peaks and imagine yourself in Switzerland, and then thank God you are not there; of Italy I perceive little or nothing. The people are birds of prey; a shallow and rapacious brood who fleece visitors during those summer weeks and live on the proceeds for the rest of the year. There is no commerce to liven them up and make them smilingly polite; no historical tradition to give them self-respect; no agriculture worth mentioning (the soil is too poor)--in other words, no peasantry to replenish the gaps in city life and infuse an element of decency and depth. An inordinate amount of singing and whistling goes on all day long. Is it not a sign of empty-headedness? I would like the opinion of schoolmasters on this point, whether, among the children committed to their charge, the habitual whistlers be not the dullest of wit. And so five days have passed. A pension proving uninhabitable, and most of the better-class hotels being closed for the winter, I threw myself upon the mercy of an octroi official who stood guarding a forlorn gate somewhere in the wilderness. He has sent me to a villa bearing the name of a certain lady and situated in a street called after a certain politician. He has done well. A kindlier dame than my hostess could nowhere be found. She hails from the province of the Marche and has no high opinion of this town, where she only lives on account of her husband, a retired something-or-other who owns the house. Although convulsed with grief, both of them, at the moment of my arrival--a favourite kitten had just been run over--they at once set about making me comfortable in a room with exposure due south. The flooring is of cement: the usual Viareggio custom. Bricks are cold, stone is cold, tiles are cold; but cement! It freezes your marrow through double carpets. For meals I go to the "Assassino" or the Vittoria hotel; the fare is better at the first, the company at the other.... The large dining-room at the "Vittoria" is not in use just now. We take our meals in two smaller rooms adjoining each other, one of which leads into the kitchen where privileged guests may talk secrets with the cook and poke their noses into saucepans. At a table by herself sits the little signorina who controls the establishment, wide awake, pale of complexion, slightly hump-backed, close-fisted as the devil though sufficiently vulnerable to a bluff masculine protest. Our waiter is noteworthy in his line. He is that exceptional being, an Italian snob; he can talk of nothing but dukes and princes, Bourbons by choice, because he once served at a banquet given by some tuppenny Parma royalties round the corner. The food would be endurable, save for those vile war-time maccheroni. The wine is of doubtful origin. Doubtful, at least, to the uninitiated who smacks his lips and wonders vaguely where he has tasted the stuff before. The concoction has so many flavours--a veritable Proteus! I know it well, though its father and mother would be hard to identify. It was born on the banks of the Tiber and goes by the name of ripa: ask any Roman. Certain cheap and heady products of the south--Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Apulia, Ischia--have contributed their share to its composition; Tiber-water is the one and constant ingredient. This ripa is exported by the ton to wine-less centres like Genoa and there drunk under any name you please. A few butts have doubtless been dropped overboard at Viareggio for the poisoning of its ten thousand summer visitors. Quite a jolly crowd of folk assembles here every evening. There is, of course, the ubiquitous retired major; also some amusing gentlemen who run up and down between this place and Lucca on mysterious errands connected, I fancy, with oil; as well as a dissipated young marquis sent hither from Rimini by the ridiculously old-fashioned father to expiate his sins--his gambling debts, his multifarious and costly love-adventures, and the manslaughter of a carpenter whom he ran over in his car. [6] My favourite is a fat creature with a glorious fleshy face, the face of some Neronian parvenu--a memorable face, full of the brutal prosperity of Trimalchio's Banquet. He told me, yesterday, a long story about a local saint in one of their villages--a saint of yesterday who, curing diseases and performing various other miracles, began to think himself, as their manner is, God Almighty, or something to that effect. The police shot him as a revolutionary, because he had gathered a few adherents. "Rather an extreme measure," I suggested. "It is. Not that I love the saints. But I love the police still less." "Like every good Italian." "Like every good Italian...." News from Attilio. He cannot come. Both mother and sister are ill. He delayed writing in the hopes of their getting better; he wanted to join me, but they are always "auguale"--the same; in short, he must stay at home, as appears from the following plaintive and rather puzzling postcard, the address of which I had providentially written myself: Caro G. N. Dorcola ho ricevuto la sua cara lettera e son cozi contento da sentire le sue notizzie io non posso venire perche mia madre e amalata e mia sorella Enrica era tardato ascirvere perche mi credevo che tesano mellio ma invece sono sempre auguale perche volevo venire ci mando dici mille baci e una setta dimano addio al Signior D. Dor. But for the fact that, counting on a fortnight's trip to Carrara, I have asked for certain printed matter to be forwarded here from England, I would jump into the next train for anywhere. Running along the sea on either side of Viareggio is a noble forest of stone pines where the wind is scarce felt, though you may hear it sighing overhead among the crowns. This is the place for a promenade at all hours of the day. Children climb the trunks to fetch down a few remaining cones or break off dried branches as fuel. A sportsman told me that several of them lose their lives every year at this adventure. What was he doing here, with a gun? Waiting for a hare, he said. They always wait for hares. There are none! Then a poor thin woman, dressed in black and gathering the prickly stalks of gorse for firewood, began to converse with me, reasonably enough at first. All of a sudden her language changed into a burning torrent of insanity, with wild gesticulations. She was the Queen of the country, she avowed, the rightful Queen, and they had robbed her of all her children, every one of them, and all her jewels. I agreed--what else could one do? Being in the combustible stage, she went over the argument again and again, her eyes fiercely flashing. Nothing could stop the flow of her words. I was right glad when another woman came to my rescue and pushed her along, as you would a calf, saying: "You go home now, it's getting dark, run along!--yes, yes! you're the Queen right enough--she was in the asylum, Sir, for three months and then they let her out, the fools--of course you are, everybody knows that! But you really mustn't annoy this gentleman any more--her husband and son were both killed in the war, that's what started it--we'll fetch them tomorrow at the palace, all those things, and the children, only don't talk so much--they thought she was cured, but just hark at her!--va bene, it's all yours, only get along--she'll be back there in a day or two, won't she?--really, you are chattering much too much, for a Queen; va bene, va bene, va bene--" A sad little incident, under the pines.... A fortnight has elapsed. I refuse to budge from Viareggio, having discovered the village of Corsanico on the heights yonder and, in that village, a family altogether to my liking. How one stumbles upon delightful folks! Set me down in furthest Cathay and I will undertake to find, soon afterwards, some person with whom I am quite prepared to spend the remaining years of life. The driving-road to Corsanico is a never-ending affair. Deep in mire, it meanders perversely about the plain; meanders more than ever, but of necessity, once the foot of the hills is reached. I soon gave it up in favour of the steam-tram to Cammaiore which deposits you at a station whose name I forget, whence you may ascend to Corsanico through a village called, I think, Momio. That route, also, was promptly abandoned when the path along the canal was revealed to me. This waterway runs in an almost straight line from Viareggio to the base of that particular hill on whose summit lies my village. It is a monotonous walk at this season; the rich marsh vegetation slumbers in the ooze underground, waiting for a breath of summer. At last you cross that big road and strike the limestone rock. Here is no intermediate region, no undulating ground, between the upland and the plain. They converge abruptly upon each other, as might have been expected, seeing that these hills used to be the old sea-board and this green level, in olden days, the Mediterranean. Three different tracks, leading steeply upward through olives and pines and chestnuts from where the canal ends, will bring you to Corsanico. I know them all. I could find my way in darkest midnight. Days have passed; days of delight. I climb up in the morning and descend at nightfall, my mind well stored with recollections of pleasant talk and smiling faces. A large place, this Corsanico, straggling about the hill-top with scattered farms and gardens; to reach the tobacconist--near whose house, by the way, you obtain an unexpected glimpse into the valley of Cammaiore--is something of an excursion. As a rule we repose, after luncheon, on a certain wooded knoll. We are high up; seven or eight hundred feet above the canal. The blue Tyrrhenian is dotted with steamers and sailing boats, and yonder lies Viareggio in its belt of forest; far away, to the left, you discern the tower of Pisa. A placid lake between the two, wood-engirdled, is now famous as being the spot selected by the great Maestro Puccini to spend a summer month in much-advertised seclusion. I am learning the name of every locality in the plain, of every peak among the mountains at our back. "And that little ridge of stone," says my companion, "--do you see it, jutting into the fields down there? It has a queer name. We call it La Sirena." La Sirena.... It is good to live in a land where such memories cling to old rocks. By what a chance has the name survived to haunt this inland crag, defying geological changes, outlasting the generations of men, their creeds and tongues and races! How it takes one back--back into hoary antiquity, into another landscape altogether! One thinks of those Greek mariners coasting past this promontory, and pouring libations to the Siren into an ocean on whose untrampled floor the countryman now sows his rice and turnips. Paganisme immortel, es-tu mort? On le dit. Mais Pan, tout bas, s'en moque, et la Sirène en rit. They are still here, both sea and Siren; they have only agreed to separate for a while. The ocean shines out yonder in all its luminous splendour of old. And the Siren, too, can be found by those to whom the gods are kind. My Siren dwells at Corsanico. Viareggio (May) Those Sirens! They have called me back, after nearly three months in Florence, to that village on the hill-top. Nothing but smiles up there. And never was Corsanico more charming, all drenched in sunlight and pranked out with fresh green. On this fourteenth of May, I said to myself, I am wont to attend a certain yearly festival far away, and there enjoy myself prodigiously. Yet--can it be possible?--I am even happier here. Seldom does the event surpass one's hopes. Later than usual, long after sunset, under olives already heavy-laden, through patches of high-standing corn and beans, across the little brook, past that familiar and solitary farmhouse, I descended to the canal, in full content. Another golden moment of life! Strong exhalations rose up from the swampy soil, that teemed and steamed under the hot breath of spring; the pond-like water, once so bare, was smothered under a riot of monstrous marsh-plants and loud with the music of love-sick frogs. Stars were reflected on its surface. Star-gazing, my Star? Would I were Heaven, to gaze on thee with many eyes. Such was my mood, a Hellenic mood, a mood summed up in that one word [Greek: tetelestai]--not to be taken, however, in the sense of "all's over." Quite the reverse! Did Shelley ever walk in like humour along this canal? I doubt it. He lacked the master-key. An evangelist of a kind, he was streaked, for all his paganism, with the craze of world-improvement. One day he escaped from his chains into those mountains and there beheld a certain Witch--only to be called back to mortality by a domestic and critic-bitten lady. He tried to translate the Symposium. He never tried to live it.... I have now interposed a day of rest. My welcome in the villa situated in the street called after a certain politician was that of the Prodigal Son. There was a look bordering on affection in the landlady's eyes. She knew I would come back, once the weather was warmer. She would now give me a cool room, instead of that old one facing south. Those much-abused cement floors--they were not so inconvenient, were they, at this season? The honey for breakfast? Assuredly; the very same. And there was a tailor she had discovered in the interval, cheaper and better than that other one, if anything required attention. And thus, having lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London charwomen--having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to remember, at the hands of these pickpockets and hags and harpies and drunken sluts--I am now rewarded by the services of something at the other end of the human scale. Impossible to say too much of this good dame's solicitude for me. Her main object in life seems to be to save my money and make me comfortable. "Don't get your shoes soled there!" she told me two days ago. "That man is from Viareggio. I know a better place. Let me see to it. I will say they are my husband's, and you will pay less and get better work." With a kind of motherly instinct she forestalls my every wish, and at the end of a few days had already known my habits better than one of those London sharks and furies would have known them at the end of a century.... My thoughts go back to her of Florence, whom I have just left. Equally efficient, she represented quite a different type. She was not of the familiar kind, but rather grave and formal, with spectacles, dyed hair and an upright carriage. She never mothered me; she conversed, and gave me the impression of being in the presence of a grande dame. Such, I used to say to myself, while listening to her well-turned periods enlivened with steely glints of humour--such were the feelings of those who conversed with Madame de Maintenon; such and not otherwise. It would be difficult to conceive her saying anything equivocal or vulgar. Yet she must have been a naughty little girl not long ago. She never dreams that I know what I do know: that she is mistress of a high police functionary and greatly in favour with his set--a most useful landlady, in short, for a virtuous young bachelor like myself. On learning this fact, I made it my business to study her weaknesses and soon discovered that she was fond of a particular brand of Chianti. A flask of this vintage was promptly secured; then, dissatisfied with its materialistic aspect, I caused it to be garlanded with a wreath of violets and despatched it to her private apartment by the prettiest child I could pick up in the street. That is the way to touch their hearts. The offering was repeated at convenient intervals. A little item in the newspaper led to some talk, one morning, about the war. I found she shared the view common to many others, that this is an "interested" war. Society has organized itself on new lines, lines which work against peace. There are so many persons "interested" in keeping up the present state of affairs, people who now make more money than they ever made before. Everybody has a finger in the pie. The soldier in the field, the chief person concerned, is voiceless and of no account when compared with this army of civilians, every one of whom would lose, if the war came to an end. They will fight like demons, to keep the fun going. What else should they do? Their income is at stake. A man's heart is in his purse. I asked: "Supposing, Madame, you desired to end the war, how would you set about it?" Whereupon a delightfully Tuscan idea occurred to her. "I think I would abolish this Red-Cross nonsense. It makes things too pleasant. It would bring the troops to their senses and cause them to march home and say: Basta! We have had enough." "Don't you find the Germans a little prepotenti?" "Prepotenti: yes. By all means let us break their heads. And then, caro Lei, let us learn to imitate them...." That afternoon, I remember, being wondrously fine and myself in such mellow mood that I would have shared my last crust with some shipwrecked archduchess and almost forgiven mine enemies, though not until I had hit them back--I strolled about the Cascine. They have done something to make this place attractive; just then, at all events, the shortcomings were unobserved amid the burst of green things overhead and underfoot. Originally it must have been an unpromising stretch of land, running, as it does, in a dead level along the Arno. Yet there is earth and water; and a good deal can be done with such materials to diversify the surface. More might have been accomplished here. For in the matter of hill and dale and lake, and variety of vegetation, the Cascine are not remarkable. One calls to mind what has been attained at Kew Gardens in an identical situation, and with far less sunshine for the landscape gardener to play with. One thinks of a certain town in Germany where, on a plain as flat as a billiard table, they actually reared a mountain, now covered with houses and timber, for the disport of the citizens. To think that I used to skate over the meadows where that mountain now stands! There was no horse-racing in the Cascine that afternoon; nothing but the usual football. The pastime is well worth a glance, if only for the sake of sympathizing with the poor referee. Several hundred opprobrious epithets are hurled at his head in the course of a single game, and play is often suspended while somebody or other hotly disputes his decision and refuses to be guided any longer by his perverse interpretation of the rules. And whoever wishes to know whence those plastic artists of old Florence drew their inspiration need only come here. Figures of consummate grace and strength, and clothed, moreover, in a costume which leaves little to the imagination. Those shorts fully deserve their name. They are shortness itself, and their brevity is only equalled by their tightness. One wonders how they can squeeze themselves into such an outfit or, that feat accomplished, play in it with any sense of comfort. Play they do, and furiously, despite the heat. Watching the game and mindful of that morning's discourse with Madame de Maintenon, a sudden wave of Anglo-Saxon feeling swept over me. I grew strangely warlike, and began to snort with indignation. What were all these young fellows doing here? Big chaps of eighteen and twenty! Half of them ought to be in the trenches, damn it, instead of fooling about with a ball. It would have been instructive to learn the true ideas of the rising generation in regard to the political outlook; to single out one of the younger spectators and make him talk. But these better-class lads cluster together at the approach of a stranger, and one does not want to start a public discussion with half a dozen of them. My chance came from another direction. It was half-time and a certain player limped out of the field and sat down on the grass. I was beside him before his friends had time to come up. A superb specimen, all dewy with perspiration. "Any damage?" Nothing much, he gasped. A man on the other side had just caught him with the full swing of his fist under the ribs. It hurt confoundedly. "Hardly fair play," I commented. "It was cleverly done." "Ah, well," I said, warming to my English character, "you may get harder knocks in the trenches. I suppose you are nearly due?" Not for a year or so, he replied. And even then ... of course, he was quite eligible as to physique ... it was really rather awkward ... but as to serving in the army ... there were other jobs going. ... Was anything more precious than life?... Could anything replace his life to him?... To die at his age.... "It would certainly be a pity from an artistic point of view. But if everybody thought like that, where would the Isonzo line be?" If everybody thought as he did, there would be no Isonzo line at all. German influence in Italy--why not? They had been there before; it was no dark page in Italian history. Was his own government so admirable that one should regret its disappearance? A pack of knaves and cutthroats. Patriotism--a phrase; auto-intoxication. They say one thing and mean another. The English too. Yes, the English too. Purely mercenary motives, for all their noble talk. It is always entertaining to see ourselves as others see us. I had the presence of mind to interject some anti-British remark, which produced the desired effect. "Now they howl about the sufferings of Belgium, because their money-bags are threatened. They fight for poor Belgium. They did not fight for France in 1870, or for Denmark or Poland or Armenia. Trade was not threatened. There was no profit in view. Profit! And they won't even supply us with coal----" Always that coal. It is clear as daylight. England has failed in her duty--her duty being to supply everybody with coal, ships, money, cannons and anything else, at the purchaser's valuation. He made a few more statements of this nature, and I think he enjoyed his little fling at that, for him, relatively speaking, since the war began, rara avis, a genuine Englishman (Teutonic construction); I certainly relished it. Then I asked: "Where did you learn this? About Armenia, I mean, and Poland?" "From my father. He was University Professor and Deputy in Parliament. One also picks up a little something at school. Don't you agree with me?" "Not altogether. You seem to forget that a nation cannot indulge in those freaks of humanitarianism which may possibly befit an individual. A certain heroic dreamer told men to give all they had to the poor. You, if you like, may adopt this idealistic attitude. You may do generous actions such as your country cannot afford to do, since a nation which abandons the line of expediency is on the high road to suicide. If I have a bilious attack, by all means come and console me; if Poland has a bilious attack, there is no reason why England should step in as dry-nurse; there may be every reason, indeed, why England should stand aloof. Now in Belgium, as you say, money is involved. Money, in this national sense, means well-being; and well-being, in this national sense, is one of the few things worth fighting for. However, I am only throwing out one or two suggestions. On some other day, I would like to discuss the matter with you point by point--some other day, that is, when you are not playing football and have just a few clothes on. I am now at a disadvantage. You could never get me to impugn your statements courageously--not in that costume. It would be like haggling with Apollo Belvedere. Why do you wear those baby things?" "We are all wearing them, this season." "So I perceive. How do you get into them?" "Very slowly." "Are they elastic?" "I wish they were.".... Four minutes' talk. It gave me an insight. He was an intellectualist. As such, he admired brute force but refused to employ it. He was civilized. Like many products of civilization, he was unaware of its blessings and unconcerned in its fate. Is it not a feature peculiar to civilization that it thinks of everything save war? That is why they are uprooted, these flowerings, each in its turn. My father told me; often one hears that remark, even from adults. As if a father could not be a fool like anybody else! That a child should have hard-and-fast opinions--it is engaging. Children are egocentric. A fellow of this size ought to be less positive. These refined youths are fastidious about their clothes. They would not dream of buying a ready-made suit, however well-fitting. They are content to take their opinions second-hand. Unlike ours, they are seldom alone; they lack those stretches of solitude during which they might wrestle with themselves and do a little thinking on their own account. When not with their family, they are always among companions, being far more sociable and fond of herding together than their English representatives. They talk more; they think less; they seem to do each other's thinking, which takes away all hesitation and gives them a precocious air of maturity. If this decorative lad engages in some profession like medicine or engineering there is hope for him, even as others of his age rectify their perspective by contact with crude facts--groceries and calicoes and carburettors and so forth. Otherwise, his doom is sealed. He remains a doctrinaire. This country is full of them. And then--the sterilizing influence of pavements. Even when summer comes round, they all flock in a mass to some rowdy place like this Viareggio or Ancona where, however pleasant the bathing, spiritual life is yet shallower than at home. What says Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.? "Their country life consists merely in breathing a different air, though in nothing else does it differ from the life they live in town." He notices things, does Ramage; and might, indeed, have elaborated this argument. The average Italian townsman seems to have lost all sense for the beauty of rural existence; he is incurious about it; dislodge him from the pavement--no easy task--and he gasps like a fish out of water. Squares and cafés--they stimulate his fancy; the doings and opinions of fellow-creatures--thence alone he derives inspiration. What is the result? A considerable surface polish, but also another quality which I should call dewlessness. Often glittering like a diamond, he is every bit as dewless. His materialistic and supercilious outlook results, I think, from contempt or nescience of nature; you will notice the trait still more at Venice, whose inhabitants seldom forsake their congested mud-flat. Depth of character and ideality and humour--such things require a rustic landscape for their nurture. These citizens are arid, for lack of dew; unquestionably more so than their English representatives. POSTSCRIPT.--The pavements of Florence, by the way, have an objectionable quality. Their stone is too soft. They wear down rapidly and an army of masons is employed in levelling them straight again all the year round. And yet they sometimes use this very sandstone, instead of marble, for mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new ones, which flake away rapidly--exfoliate or crack, according to the direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn blocks in their shady caverns for a certain length of time, as do the Parisians of to-day, in order to allow for the slow discharge and evaporation of liquid; whereas now the material, saturated with moisture, is torn from its damp and cool quarries and set in the blazing sunshine. At the Bourse, for instance,--quite a modern structure--the columns already begin to show fissures. [7] Amply content with Viareggio, because the Siren dwells so near, I stroll forth. The town is awake. Hotels are open. Bathing is beginning. Summer has dawned upon the land. I am not in the city mood, three months in Florence having abated my interest in humanity. Past a line of booths and pensions I wander in the direction of that pinery which year by year is creeping further into the waves, and driving the sea back from its old shore. There is peace in this green domain; all is hushed, and yet pervaded by the mysterious melody of things that stir in May-time. Here are no sombre patches, as under oak or beech; only a tremulous interlacing of light and shade. A peculiarly attractive bole not far from the sea, gleaming rosy in the sunshine, tempts me to recline at its foot. This insomnia, this fiend of the darkness--the only way to counteract his mischief is by guile; by snatching a brief oblivion in the hours of day, when the demon is far afield, tormenting pious Aethiopians at the Antipodes. How well one rests at such moments of self-created night, merged into the warm earth! The extreme quietude of my present room, after Florentine street-noises, may have contributed to this restlessness. Also, perhaps, the excitement of Corsanico. But chiefly, the dream--that recurrent dream. Everybody, I suppose, is subject to recurrent dreams of some kind. My present one is of a painful or at least sad nature; it returns approximately every three months and never varies by a hair's breadth. I am in a distant town where I lived many years back, and where each stone is familiar to me. I have come to look for a friend--one who, as a matter of fact, died long ago. My sleeping self refuses to admit this fact; once embarked on the dream-voyage, I hold him to be still alive. Glad at the prospect of meeting my friend again, I traverse cheerfully those well-known squares in the direction of his home.... Where is it, that house; where has it gone? I cannot find it. Ages seem to pass while I trample up and down, in ever-increasing harassment of mind, along interminable rows of buildings and canals; that door, that well-remembered door--vanished! All search is vain. I shall never meet him: him whom I came so far to see. The dismal truth, once established, fills me with an intensity of suffering such as only night-visions can inspire. There is no reason for feeling so strongly; it is the way of dreams! At this point I wake up, thoroughly exhausted, and say to myself: "Why seek his house? Is he not dead?" This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time. There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of flying, for instance--it fades away with manhood. I once indulged in a correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, [8] and would like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore, which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What is human life but a never-ending palimpsest? So I pondered, when my musings under that pine tree were interrupted by the arrival on the scene of a young snake. I cannot say with any degree of truthfulness which of us two was more surprised at the encounter. I picked him up, as I always do when they give me a chance, and began to make myself agreeable to him. He had those pretty juvenile markings which disappear with maturity. Snakes of this kind, when they become full-sized, are nearly always of a uniform shade, generally black. And when they are very, very old, they begin to grow ears and seek out solitary places. What is the origin of this belief? I have come across it all over the country. If you wish to go to any remote or inaccessible spot, be sure some peasant will say: "Ah! There you find the serpent with ears." These snakes are not easy to catch with the hand, living as they do among stones and brushwood, and gliding off rapidly once their suspicions are aroused. This one, I should say, was bent on some youthful voyage of discovery or amorous exploit; he walked into the trap from inexperience. As a rule, your best chance for securing them is when they bask on the top of some bush or hedge in relative unconcern, knowing they are hard to detect in such places. They climb into these aerial situations after the lizards, which go there after the insects, which go there after the flowers, which go there after the sunshine, struggling upwards through the thick undergrowth. You must have a quick eye and ready hand to grasp them by the tail ere they have time to lash themselves round some stem where, once anchored, they will allow themselves to be pulled in pieces rather than yield to your efforts. If you fail to seize them, they trickle earthward through the tangle like a thread of running water. He belonged to that common Italian kind which has no English name--Germans call them Zornnatter, in allusion to their choleric disposition. Most of them are quite ready to snap at the least provocation; maybe they find it pays, as it does with other folks, to assume the offensive and be first in the field, demanding your place in the sun with an air of wrathful determination. Some of the big fellows can draw blood with their teeth. Yet the jawbones are weak and one can force them asunder without much difficulty; whereas the bite of a full-grown emerald lizard, for instance, will provide quite a novel sensation. The mouth closes on you like a steel trap, tightly compressing the flesh and often refusing to relax its hold. In such cases, try a puff of tobacco. It works! Two puffs will daze them; a fragment of a cigar, laid in the mouth, stretches them out dead. And this is the beast which, they say, will gulp down prussic acid as if it were treacle. But snakes vary in temperament as we do, and some of these Zamenis serpents are as gentle and amiable as their cousin the Aesculap snake. My friend of this afternoon could not be induced to bite. Perhaps he was naturally mild, perhaps drowsy from his winter sleep or ignorant of the ways of the world; perhaps he had not yet shed his milk teeth. I am disposed to think that he forgot about biting because I made a favourable impression on him from the first. He crawled up my arm. It was pleasantly warm, but a little too dark; soon he emerged again and glanced around, relieved to discover that the world was still in its old place. He was not clever at learning tricks. I tried to make him stand on his head, but he refused to stiffen out. Snakes have not much sense of humour. Lizards are far more companionable. During two consecutive summers I had a close friendship with a wall-lizard who spent in my society certain of his leisure moments--which were not many, for he always had an astonishing number of other things on hand. He was a full-grown male, bejewelled with blue spots. A fierce fighter was Alfonso (such was his name), and conspicuous for a most impressive manner of stamping his front foot when impatient. Concerning his other virtues I know little, for I learnt no details of his private life save what I saw with my eyes, and they were not always worthy of imitation. He was a polygamist, or worse; obsessed, moreover, by a deplorable habit of biting off the tails of his own or other people's children. He went even further. For sometimes, without a word of warning, he would pounce upon some innocent youngster and carry him in his powerful jaws far away, over the wall, right out of my sight. What happened yonder I cannot guess. It was probably a little old-fashioned cannibalism. Though my meals in those days were all out of doors, his attendance at dinner-time was rather uncertain; I suspect he retired early in order to spend the night, like other polygamists, in prayer and fasting. At the hours of breakfast and luncheon--he knew them as well as I did--he was generally free, and then quite monopolized my company, climbing up my leg on to the table, eating out of my hand, sipping sugar-water out of his own private bowl and, in fact, doing everything I suggested. I did not suggest impossibilities. A friendship should never be strained to breaking-point. Had I cared to risk such a calamity, I might have taught him to play skittles.... For the rest, it is not very amusing to be either a lizard or a snake in Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are quite a number of ways of making lizards feel at home. With snakes the procedure is simple. They are killed; treated to that self-same system to which they used to treat us in our arboreal days when the glassy eye of the serpent, gleaming through the branches, will have caused our fur to stand on end with horror. No beast provokes human hatred like that old coiling serpent. Long and cruel must have been his reign for the memory to have lingered--how many years? Let us say, in order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of the past, a daylight ghost. And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal soul--a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums. There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind--that of Shelley. Maybe the spot where they burnt his body can still be pointed out. I have forgotten all I ever read on that subject. An Italian enthusiast, the librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence, garnered certain information from ancient fishermen of Viareggio in regard to this occurrence and set it down in a little book, a book with white covers which I possessed during my Shelley period. They have erected a memorial to the English poet in one of the public squares here. The features of the bust do not strike me as remarkably etherial, but the inscription is a good specimen of Italian adapted to lapidary uses--it avoids those insipid verbal terminations which weaken the language and sometimes render it almost ridiculous. Smollet lies yonder, at Livorno; and Ouida hard by, at Bagni di Lucca. She died in one of these same featureless streets of Viareggio, alone, half blind, and in poverty.... I know Suffolk, that ripe old county of hers, with its pink villages nestling among drowsy elms and cornfields; I know their "Spread Eagles" and "Angels" and "White Horses" and other taverns suggestive--sure sign of antiquity--of zoological gardens; I know their goodly ale and old brown sherries. Her birthplace, despite those venerable green mounds, is comparatively dull--I would not care to live at Bury; give me Lavenham or Melford or some place of that kind. While looking one day at the house where she was born, I was sorely tempted to crave permission to view the interior, but refrained; something of her own dislike of prying and meddlesomeness came over me. Thence down to that commemorative fountain among the drooping trees. The good animals for whose comfort it was built would have had some difficulty in slaking their thirst just then, its basin being chocked up with decayed leaves. We corresponded for a good while and I still possess her letters somewhere; I see in memory that large and bold handwriting, often only two words to a line, on the high-class slate-coloured paper. The sums she spent on writing materials! It was one of her many ladylike traits. I tried to induce her to stay with me in South Italy. She made three conditions: to be allowed to bring her dogs, to have a hot bath every day, and two litres of cream. Everything could be managed except the cream, which was unprocurable. Later on, while living in the Tyrolese mountains, I renewed the invitation; that third condition could now be fulfilled as easily as the other two. She was unwell, she replied, and could not move out of the house, having been poisoned by a cook. So we never met, though she wrote me much about herself and about "Helianthus," which was printed after her death. In return, I dedicated to her a book of short stories; they were published, thank God, under a pseudonym, and eight copies were sold. She is now out of date. Why, yes. Those guardsmen who drenched their beards in scent and breakfasted off caviare and chocolate and sparkling Moselle--they certainly seem fantastic. They really were fantastic. They did drench their beards in scent. The language and habits of these martial heroes are authenticated in the records of their day; glance, for instance, into back numbers of Punch. The fact is, we were all rather ludicrous formerly. The characters of Dickens, to say nothing of Cruikshank's pictures of them: can such beings ever have walked the earth? If her novels are somewhat faded, the same cannot be said of her letters and articles and critiques. To our rising generation of authors--the youngsters, I mean; those who have not yet sold themselves to the devil--I should say: read these things of Ouida's. Read them attentively, not for their matter, which is always of interest, nor yet for their vibrant and lucid style, which often rivals that of Huxley. Read them for their tone, their temper; for that pervasive good breeding, that shining honesty, that capacity of scorn. These are qualities which our present age lacks, and needs; they are conspicuous in Ouida. Abhorrence of meanness was her dominant trait. She was intelligent, fearless; as ready to praise without stint as to voice the warmest womanly indignation. She was courageous not only in matters of literature; courageous, and how right! Is it not satisfactory to be right, when others are wrong? How right about the Japanese, about Feminism and Conscription and German brutalitarianism! How she puts her finger on the spot when discussing Marion Crawford and D'Annunzio! Those local politicians--how she hits them off! Hers was a sure touch. Do we not all now agree with what she wrote at the time of Queen Victoria and Joseph Chamberlain? When she remarks of Tolstoy, in an age which adored him (I am quoting from memory), that "his morality and monogamy are against nature and common sense," adding that he is dangerous, because he is an "educated Christ"--out of date? When she says that the world is ruled by two enemies of all beauty, commerce and militarism--out of date? When she dismisses Oscar Wilde as a cabotin and yet thinks that the law should not have meddled with him--is not that the man and the situation in a nutshell? No wonder straightforward sentiments like these do not appeal to our age of neutral tints and compromise, to our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood-temperature is invariably two degrees below the normal. Ouida's critical and social opinions are infernally out of date--quite inconveniently modern, in fact. There is the milk of humanity in them, glowing conviction and sincerity; they are written from a standpoint altogether too European, too womanly, too personally-poignant for present-day needs; and in a language, moreover, whose picturesque and vigorous independence comes as a positive shock after the colourless Grub-street brand of to-day. They come as a shock, these writings, because in the brief interval since they were published our view of life and letters has shifted. A swarm of mystics and pragmatists has replaced the lonely giants of Ouida's era. It is an epoch of closed pores, of constriction. The novel has changed. Pick up the average one and ask yourself whether this crafty and malodorous sex-problem be not a deliberately commercial speculation--a frenzied attempt to "sell" by scandalizing our unscandalizable, because hermaphroditic, middle classes? Ouida was not one of these professional hacks, but a personality of refined instincts who wrote, when she cared to write at all, to please her equals; a rationalistic anti-vulgarian; a woman of wide horizons who fought for generous issues and despised all shams; the last, almost the last, of lady-authors. What has such a genial creature in common with our anaemic and woolly generation? "The Massarenes" may have faults, but how many of our actual woman-scribes, for all their monkey-tricks of cleverness, could have written it? The haunting charm of "In Maremma": why ask our public to taste such stuff? You might as well invite a bilious nut-fooder to a Lord Mayor's banquet. The mention of banquets reminds me that she was blamed for preferring the society of duchesses and diplomats to that of the Florentine literati, as if there were something reprehensible in Ouida's fondness for decent food and amusing talk when she could have revelled in Ceylon tea and dough-nuts and listened to babble concerning Quattro-Cento glazes in any of the fifty squabbling art-coteries of that City of Misunderstandings. It was one of her several failings, chiefest among them being this: that she had no reverence for money. She was unable to hoard--an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form--a slur on society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such literature a "degrading form of vanity" and refused the offer. She preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little trifles--in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax. All through life she made no attempt to hide her woman's nature, her preference for male over female company; she was even guilty of saying that disease serves the world better than war, because it kills more women than men. Out of date, with a vengeance! There recurs to me a sentence in a printed letter written by a celebrated novelist of the artificial school, a sentence I wish I could forget, describing Ouida as "a little terrible and finally pathetic grotesque." Does not a phrase like this reveal, even better than his own romances, the essentially non-human fibre of the writer's mind? Whether this derivative intellectualist spiderishly spinning his own plots and phrases and calling Ouida a "grotesque"--whether this echo ever tried to grasp the bearing of her essays on Shelley or Blind Guides or Alma Veniesia or The Quality of Mercy--tried to sense her burning words of pity for those that suffer, her hatred of hypocrisy and oppression and betrayal of friendship, her so righteous pleadings, coined out of the heart's red blood, for all that makes life worthy to be lived? He may have tried. He never could succeed. He lacked the sympathy, the sex. He lacked the sex. Ah, well--Schwamm drueber, as the Norwegians say. Ouida, for all her femininity, was more than this feline and gelatinous New Englander. Rome The railway station at Rome has put on a new face. Blown to the winds is that old dignity and sense of leisure. Bustle everywhere; soldiers in line, officers strutting about; feverish scurryings for tickets. A young baggage employé, who allowed me to effect a change of raiment in the inner recesses of his department, alone seemed to keep up the traditions of former days. He was unruffled and polite; he told me, incidentally, that he came from ----. That was odd, I said; I had often met persons born at ----, and never yet encountered one who was not civil beyond the common measure. His native place must be worthy of a visit. "It is," he replied. "There are also certain fountains...." That restaurant, for example--one of those few for which a man in olden days of peace would desert his own tavern in the town--how changed! The fare has deteriorated beyond recognition. Where are those succulent joints and ragouts, the aromatic wine, the snow-white macaroni, the cafe-au-lait with genuine butter and genuine honey? War-time! Conversed awhile with an Englishman at my side, who was gleefully devouring lumps of a particular something which I would not have liked to touch with tongs. "I don't care what I eat," he remarked. So it seemed. I don't care what I eat: what a confession to make! Is it not the same as saying, I don't care whether I am dirty or clean? When others tell me this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself. It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good taste in viands has been painfully acquired; it is a sacred trust. Beware of gross feeders. They are a menace to their fellow-creatures. Will they not act, on occasion, even as they feed? Assuredly they will. Everybody acts as he feeds. Then lingered on the departure platform, comparing its tone with that of similar places in England. A mournful little crowd is collected here. Conscripts, untidy-looking fellows, are leaving--perhaps for ever. They climb into those tightly packed carriages, loaded down with parcels and endless recommendations. Some of the groups are cheerful over their farewells, though the English note of deliberate jocularity is absent. The older people are resigned; in the features of the middle generation, the parents, you may read a certain grimness and hostility to fate; they are the potential mourners. The weeping note predominates among the sisters and children, who give themselves away pretty freely. An infectious thing, this shedding of tears. One little girl, loth to part from that big brother, contrived by her wailing to break down the reserve of the entire family.... It rains persistently in soft, warm showers. Rome is mirthless. There arises, before my mind's eye, the vision of a sweet old lady friend who said to me, in years gone by: "When next you go to Rome, please let me know if it is still raining there." It was here that she celebrated her honeymoon--an event which must have taken place in the 'sixties or thereabouts. She is dead now. So is her husband, the prince of moralizers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become. Doubtless he expired with some edifying platitude on his lips and is deblatterating them at this very moment in Heaven, where the folks may well be seasoned to that kind of talk. Let us be charitable, now that he is gone! To have lived so long with a person of this incurable respectability would have soured any ordinary woman's temper. Hers it refined; it made her into something akin to an angel. He was her cross; she bore him meekly and not, I like to think, without extracting a kind of sly, dry fun out of the horrible creature. A past master in the art of gentle domestic nagging, he made everybody miserable as long as he lived, and I would give something for an official assurance that he is now miserable himself. He was a worm; a good man in the worse sense of the word. It was the contrast--the contrast between his gentle clothing and ungentle heart, which moved my spleen. What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty; a brood that has never yet been called by its proper name. Victorians? Why, not altogether. The mischief has its roots further back. Addison, for example, is a fair specimen. Why say unkind things about a dead man? He cannot answer back. Upon my word, I am rather glad to think he cannot. The last thing I ever wish to hear again is that voice of his. And what a face: gorgonizing in its assumption of virtue! Now the whole species is dying out, and none too soon. Graft abstract principles of conduct upon natures devoid of sympathy and you produce a monster; a sanctimonious fish; the coldest beast that ever infested the earth. This man's affinities were with Robespierre and Torquemada--both of them actuated by the purest intentions and without a grain of self-interest: pillars of integrity. What floods of tears would have been spared to mankind, had they only been a little corrupt! How corrupt a person of principles? He lacks the vulgar yet divine gift of imagination. That is what these Victorians lacked. They would never have subscribed to this palpable truth: that justice is too good for some men, and not good enough for the rest. They cultivated the Cato or Brutus tone; they strove to be stern old Romans--Romans of the sour and imperfect Republic; for the Empire, that golden blossom, was to them a period of luxury and debauch. Nero--most reprehensible! It was not Nero, however, but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a spoon. I wish I had it here, that book which everybody ought to read, that book by George Ives on the History of Penal Methods--it would help me to say a few more polite things. The villainies of the virtuous: who shall recount them? I can picture this vastly offensive old man acting as judge on that occasion and then, his "duties towards society" accomplished, being driven home in his brougham to thank Providence for one of those succulent luncheons, the enjoyment of which he invariably managed to ruin for every one except himself. God rest his soul, the unspeakable phenomenon! He ought to have throttled himself at his mother's breast. Only a woman imbued with ultra-terrestrial notions of humour could have tolerated such an infliction. Anybody else would have poisoned him in the name of Christian charity and common sense, and earned the gratitude of generations yet unborn. Well, well! R.I.P.... On returning to Rome after a considerable absence--a year or so--a few things have to be done for the sake of auld lang syne ere one may again feel at home. Rites must be performed. I am to take my fill of memories and conjure up certain bitter-sweet phantoms of the past. Meals must be taken in definite restaurants; a certain church must be entered; a sip of water taken from a fountain--from one, and one only (no easy task, this, for most of the fountains of Rome are so constructed that, however abundant their flow, a man may die of thirst ere obtaining a mouthful); I must linger awhile at the very end, the dirty end, of the horrible Via Principe Amedeo and, again, at a corner near the Portico d'Ottavia; perambulate the Protestant cemetery, Monte Mario, and a few quite uninteresting modern sites; the Acqua Acetosa, a stupid place, may on no account be forgotten, nor yet that bridge on the Via Nomentana--not the celebrated bridge but another one, miles away in the Campagna, the dreariest of little bridges, in the dreariest of landscapes. Why? It has been hallowed by the tread of certain feet. Thus, by a kind of sacred procedure, I immerge myself into those old stones and recreate my peculiar Roman mood. It is rather ridiculous. Tradition wills it. To-day came the turn of the Protestant cemetery. I have a view of this place, taken about the 'seventies--I wish I could reproduce it here, to show how this spot has been ruined. A woman who looks after the enclosure was in a fairly communicative mood; we had a few minutes' talk, among the tombs. What a jumble of names and nationalities, by the way! What a mixed assemblage lies here, in this foreign earth! One would like to write down all their names, shake them in a bag, pick out fifty at random and compose their biographies. It would be a curious cosmopolitan document. They have now a dog, the woman tells me, a ferocious dog who roams among the tombs, since several brass plates have been wrenched off by marauders. At night? I inquire. At night. At night.... Slowly, warily, I introduce the subject of fiammelle. It is not a popular theme. No! She has heard of such things, but never seen them; she never comes here at night, God forbid! What are fiammelle? Little flames, will-o'-the-wisps which hover about the graves at such hours, chiefly in the hot months or after autumn rains. It is a well-authenticated apparition; the scientist Bessel saw one; so did Casanova, here at Rome. He describes it as a pyramidal flame raised about four feet from the ground which seemed to accompany him as he walked along. He saw the same thing later, at Cesena near Bologna. There was some correspondence on the subject (started by Dr. Herbert Snow) in the Observer of December 1915 and January 1916. Many are the graveyards I visited in this country and in others with a view to "satisfying my curiosity," as old Ramage would say, on this point, and all in vain. My usual luck! The fiammelle, on that particular evening, were coy--they were never working. They are said to be frequently observed at Scanno in the Abruzzi province, and the young secretary of the municipality there, Mr. L. O., will tell you of our periodical midnight visits to the local cemetery. Or go to Licenza and ask for my intelligent friend the schoolmaster. What he does not know about fiammelle is not worth knowing. Did he not, one night, have a veritable fight with a legion of them which the wind blew from the graveyard into his face? Did he not return home trembling all over and pale as death?... Here reposes, among many old friends, the idealist Malwida von Meysenbug; that sculptured medallion is sufficient to proclaim her whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and roses in view of the Forum, to listen to the blackbirds, or the siskins in that pine tree. She was of the same type, the same ethical parentage, as the late Mathilde Blind, a woman of benignant and refined enthusiasm, full of charity to the poor and, in those later days, almost shadowy--remote from earth. She had saturated herself with Rome, for whose name she professed a tremulous affection untainted by worldly considerations such as mine; she loved its "persistent spiritual life"; it was her haven of rest. So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome. What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a starting-point--establish herself, so to speak, within this or that nebular hypothesis--and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand twists and turnings, you were finally deposited. A friend of ours--some American--had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. [9] Nietzsche was also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists and biologists. I did not pause to consider why he hated them so ardently; I merely noted, more in sorrow than in anger, this fact which seemed to vitiate his whole outlook--as indeed it does. Now I know the reason. Like all preacher-poets, he is anthropocentric. To his way of thinking the human mind is so highly organized, so different from that of beasts, that not all the proofs of ethnology and physiology would ever induce him to accept the ape-ancestry of man. This monkey-business is too irksome and humiliating to be true; he waives it aside, with a sneer at the disgusting arguments of those Englishmen. That is what happens to men who think that "the spirit alone lives; the life of the spirit alone is true life." A philosopher weighs the value of evidence; he makes it his business, before discoursing of the origin of human intellect, to learn a little something of its focus, the brain; a little comparative anatomy. These men are not philosophers. Metaphysicians are poets gone wrong. Schopenhauer invents a "genius of the race"--there you have his cloven hoof, the pathetic fallacy, the poet's heritage. There are things in Schopenhauer which make one blush for philosophy. The day may dawn when this man will be read not for what he says, but for how he says it; he being one of the few of his race who can write in their own language. Impossible, of course, not to hit upon a good thing now and then, if you brood as much as he did. So I remember one passage wherein he adumbrates the theory of "Recognition Marks" propounded later by A. R. Wallace, who, when I drew his attention to it, wrote that he thought it a most interesting anticipation. [10] He must have stumbled upon it by accident, during one of his excursions into the inane. And what of that jovial red-bearded personage who scorned honest work and yet contrived to dress so well? Everyone liked him, despite his borrowing propensities. He was so infernally pleasant, and always on the spot. He had a lovely varnish of culture; it was more than varnish; it was a veneer, a patina, an enamel: weather-proof stuff. He could talk most plausibly--art, music, society gossip--everything you please; everything except scandal. No bitter word was known to pass his lips. He sympathized with all our little weaknesses; he was too blissfully contented to think ill of others; he took it for granted that everybody, like himself, found the world a good place to inhabit. That, I believe, was the secret of his success. He had a divine intuition for discovering the soft spots of his neighbours and utilizing the knowledge, in a frank and gentlemanly fashion, for his own advantage. It was he who invented a saying which I have since encountered more than once: "Never run after an omnibus or a woman. There will be another one round in a minute." And also this: "Never borrow from a man who really expects to be paid back. You may lose a friend." What lady is he now living on? "A good-looking fellow like me--why should I work? Tell me that. Especially with so many rich ladies in the world aching for somebody to relieve them of their spare cash?" "The wealthy woman," he once told me, after I had begun to know him more intimately, "is a great danger to society. She is so corruptible! People make her spend money on all kinds of empty and even harmful projects. Think of the mischief that is done, in politics alone, by the money of these women. Think of all the religious fads that spring up and are kept going in a state of prosperity because some woman or other has not been instructed as to the proper use of her cheque-book. I foresee a positive decline ahead of us, if this state of affairs is allowed to go on. We must club together, we reasonable men, and put an end to the scandal. These women need trimmers; an army of trimmers. I have done a good deal of trimming in my day. Of course it involves some trouble and a close degree of intimacy, now and then. But a sensible man will always know where to draw the line." "Where do you draw it?" "At marriage." Whether he ever dared to tap the venerable Malwida for a loan? Likely enough. He often played with her feelings in a delicate style, and his astuteness in such matters was only surpassed by his shamelessness. He was capable of borrowing a fiver from the Pope--or at least of attempting the feat; of pocketing some hungry widow's last mite and therewith purchasing a cigarette before her eyes. All these sums he took as his due, by right of conquest. Whether he ever "stung" Malwida? I should have liked to see the idealist's face when confronted in that cheery off-hand manner with the question whether she happened to have five hundred francs to spare. "No? Whatever does it matter, my dear Madame de Meysenbug? Perhaps I shall be more fortunate another day. But pray don't put yourself out for an extravagant rascal like myself. I am always spending money--can't live without it, can one?--and sometimes, though you might not believe it, on quite worthy objects. There is a poor family I would like to take you to see one day; the father was cut to pieces in some wretched agricultural machine, the mother is dying in a hospital for consumption, and the six little children, all shivering under one blanket--well, never mind! One does what one can, in a small way. That was an interesting lecture, wasn't it, on Friday? He made a fine point in what he said about the relation of the Ego to the Cosmos. All the same, I thought he was a little hard on Fichte. But then, you know, I always felt a sort of tenderness for Fichte. And did you notice that the room was absolutely packed? I doubt whether that would have been the case in any other European capital. This must be the secret charm of Rome, don't you think so? This is what draws one to the Eternal City and keeps one here and makes one love the place in spite of a few trivial annoyances--this sense of persistent spiritual life." The various sums derived from ladies were regarded merely as adventitious income. I found out towards the end of our acquaintance, when I really began to understand his "method," that he had a second source of revenue, far smaller but luckily "fixed." It was drawn from the other sex, from that endless procession of men passing through Rome and intent upon its antiquities. Rome, he explained, was the very place for him. "This is what keeps me here and makes me love the place in spite of a few trivial annoyances--this persistent coming and going of tourists. Everybody on the move, all the time! A man must be daft if he cannot talk a little archaeology or something and make twenty new friends a year among such a jolly crowd of people. They are so grateful for having things explained to them. Another lot next year! And there are really good fellows among them; fellows, mind you, with brains; fellows with money. From each of those twenty he can borrow, say, ten pounds; what is that to a rich stranger who comes here for a month or so with the express purpose of getting rid of his money? Of course I am only talking about the medium rich; one need never apply to the very rich--they are always too poor. Well, that makes about two hundred a year. It's not much, but, thank God, it's safe as a house and it supplements the ladies. Women are so distressingly precarious, you know. You cannot count on a woman unless you have her actually under your thumb. Under your thumb, my boy; under your thumb. Don't ever forget it." I have never forgotten it. Where is he now? Is he dead? A gulf intervenes between that period and this. What has become of him? You might as well ask me about his contemporary, the Piccadilly goat. I have no idea what became of the Piccadilly goat, though I know pretty well what would become of him, were he alive at this moment. Mutton-chops. [11] Yet I can make a guess at what is happening to my red-haired friend. He is not dead, but sleepeth. He is being lovingly tended, in a crapulous old age, by one of the hundred ladies he victimized. He takes it as a matter of course. I can hear him chuckling dreamily, as she smooths his pillow for him. He will die in her arms unrepentant, and leave her to pay for the funeral. "Work!" he once said. "To Hell with work. The man who talks to me about work is my enemy." One sunny morning during this period there occurred a thunderous explosion which shattered my windows and many others in Rome. A gunpowder magazine had blown up, somewhere in the Campagna; the concussion of air was so mighty that it broke glass, they said, even at Frascati. We drove out later to view the site. It resembled a miniature volcano. There I left the party and wandered alone into one of those tortuous stream-beds that intersect the plain, searching for a certain kind of crystal which may be found in such places, washed out of the soil by wintry torrents. I specialized in minerals in those days--minerals and girls. Dangerous and unprofitable studies! Even at that tender age I seem to have dimly discerned what I now know for certain: that dangerous and unprofitable objects are alone worth pursuing. The taste for minerals died out later, though I clung to it half-heartedly for a long while, Dr. Johnston-Lavis, Professor Knop and others fanning the dying embers. One day, all of a sudden, it was gone. I found myself riding somewhere in Asiatic Turkey past a precipice streaked in alternate veins of purest red and yellow jasper, with chalcedony in between: a discovery which in former days would have made me half delirious with joy. It left me cold. I did not even dismount to examine the site. "Farewell to stones" I thought.... Often we lingered by the Fontana Trevi to watch the children disporting themselves in the water and diving for pennies--a pretty scene which has now been banished from the politer regions of Rome (the town has grown painfully proper). There, at the foot of that weedy and vacuous and yet charming old Neptune--how perfectly he suits his age!--there, if you look, you will see certain gigantic leaves sculptured into the rock. I once overheard a German she-tourist saying to her companion, as she pointed to these things: "Ist doch sonderbar, wie das Wasser so die Pflanzen versteinert." She thought they were natural plants petrified by the water's action. What happened yesterday was equally surprising. We were sitting at the Arch of Constantine and I was telling my friend about the Coliseum hard by and how, not long ago, it was a thicket of trees and flowers, looking less like a ruin than some wooded mountain. Now the Coliseum is surely one of the most famous structures in the world. Even they who have never been to the spot would recognize it from those myriad reproductions--especially, one would think, an Italian. Nevertheless, while thus discoursing, a man came up to us, a well-dressed man, who politely inquired: "Could you tell me the name of this castello?" I am glad to think that some account of the rich and singular flora of the Coliseum has been preserved by Deakin and Sebastiani, and possibly by others. I could round their efforts by describing the fauna of the Coliseum. The fauna of the Coliseum--especially after 11 p.m.--would make a readable book; readable but hardly printable. These little local studies are not without charm. Somebody, one day, may be induced to tell us about the fauna of Trafalgar Square. He should begin with a description of the horse standing on three legs and gazing inanely out of those human eyes after the fashion of its classic prototype; then pass on to the lions beloved of our good Richard Jefferies which look like puppy-dogs modelled in cotton-wool (why did the sculptor not take a few lessons in lions from the sand-artist on Yarmouth beach?), and conclude by dwelling as charitably as possible on the human fauna--that droll little man, barely discernible, perched on the summit of his lead pencil.... There was a slight earthquake at sunrise. I felt nothing.... And, appropriately enough, I encountered this afternoon M. M., that most charming of persons, who, like Shelley and others, has discovered Italy to be a "paradise of exiles." His friends may guess whom I mean when I say that M. M. is connoisseur of earthquakes social and financial; his existence has been punctuated by them to such an extent that he no longer counts events from dates in the ordinary calendar, from birthdays or Christmas or Easter, but from such and such a disaster affecting himself. Each has left him seemingly more mellow than the last. Just then, however, he was in pensive mood, his face all puckered into wrinkles as he glanced upon the tawny flood rolling beneath that old bridge. There he stood, leaning over the parapet, all by himself. He turned his countenance aside on seeing me, to escape detection, but I drew nigh none the less. "Go away," he said. "Don't disturb me just now. I am watching the little fishes. Life is so complicated! Let us pray. I have begun a new novel and a new love-affair." "God prosper both!" I replied, and began to move off. "Thanks. But supposing the publisher always objects to your choicest paragraphs?" "I am not altogether surprised, if they are anything like what you once read to me out of your unexpurgated 'House of the Seven Harlots.' Why not try another firm? They might be more accommodating. Try mine." He shook his head dubiously. "They are all alike. It is with publishers as with wives: one always wants somebody else's. And when you have them, where's the difference? Ah, let us pray. These little fishes have none of our troubles." I inquired about the new romance. At first he refused to disclose anything. Then he told me it was to be entitled "With Christ at Harvard," and that it promised some rather novel situations. I shall look forward to its appearance. What good things one could relate of M. M., but for the risk of incurring his wrath! It is a thousand pities, I often tell him, that he is still alive; I am yearning to write his biography, and cannot afford to wait for his dissolution. "When I am dead," he always says. "By that time, my dear M., I shall be in the same fix myself." "Try to survive. You may find it worth your while, when you come to look into my papers. You don't know half. And I may be taking that little sleeping-draught of mine any one of these days...." [12] Mused long that night, and not without a certain envy, on the lot of M. M. and other earthquake-connoisseurs--or rather on the lot of that true philosopher, if he exists, who, far from being damaged by such convulsions, distils therefrom subtle matter of mirth, I have only known one single man--it happened to be a woman, an Austrian--who approached this ideal of splendid isolation. She lived her own life, serenely happy, refusing to acquiesce in the delusions and conventionalities of the crowd; she had ceased to trouble herself about neighbours, save as a source of quiet amusement; a state of affairs which had been brought about by a succession of benevolent earthquakes that refined and clarified her outlook. Such disasters, obviously, have their uses. They knock down obsolete rubbish and enable a man to start building anew. The most sensitive recluse cannot help being a member of society. As such, he unavoidably gathers about him a host of mere acquaintances, good folks who waste his time dulling the edge of his wit and infecting him with their orthodoxy. Then comes the cataclysm. He loses, let us say, all his money, or makes a third appearance in the divorce courts. He can then at last (so one of them expressed it to me) "revise his visiting-list," an operation which more than counterbalances any damage from earthquakes. For these same good folks are vanished, the scandal having scattered them to the winds. He begins to breathe again, and employ his hours to better purpose. If he loses both money and reputation he must feel, I should think, as though treading on air. The last fools gone! And no sage lacks friends. Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is. Then ask yourself whether it be worth while paying any attention to what he thinks of you. Life is too short, and death the end of all things. Life must be lived, not endured. Were the day twice as long as it is, a man might find it diverting to probe down into that unsatisfactory fellow-creature and try to reach some common root of feeling other than those physiological needs which we share with every beast of earth. Diverting; hardly profitable. It would be like looking for a flea in a haystack, or a joke in the Bible. They can perhaps be found; at the expense of how much trouble! Therefore the sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds. He scorns to make proselytes among his fellows: they are not worth it. He has better things to do. While others nurse their griefs, he nurses his joy. He endeavours to find himself at no matter what cost, and to be true to that self when found--a worthy and ample occupation for a life-time. The happiness-of-the-greatest-number, of those who pasture on delusions: what dreamer is responsible for this eunuchry? Mill, was it? Bentham, more likely. As if the greatest number were not necessarily the least-intelligent! As if their happiness were not necessarily incompatible with that of the sage! Why foster it? He is a poor philosopher, who cuts his own throat. Away with their ghosts; de-spiritualize yourself; what you cannot find on earth is not worth seeking. That charming M. M., I fear, will never compass this clarity of vision, this perfect de-spiritualization and contempt of illusions. He will never remain curious, to his dying day, in things terrestrial and in nothing else. From a Jewish-American father he has inherited that all too common taint of psychasthenia (miscalled neurasthenia); he confesses, moreover,--like other men of strong carnal proclivities--to certain immaterial needs and aspirations after "the beyond." Not one of these earthquake-specialists, in fact, but has his Achilles heel: a mental crotchet or physical imperfection to mar the worldly perspective. Not one of them, at close of life, will sit beside some open window in view of a fair landscape and call up memories of certain moments which no cataclysms have taken from him; not one will lay them in the balance and note how they outweigh, in their tiny grains of gold, the dross of an age of other men's lives. Not one of them! They will be preoccupied, for the most part, with unseasonable little concerns. Pleasant folk, none the less. And sufficiently abundant in Italy. Altogether, the Englishman here is as often an intenser being than the home product. Alien surroundings awaken fresh and unexpected notes in his nature. His fibres seem to lie more exposed; you have glimpses into the man's anatomy. There is something hostile in this sunlight to the hazy or spongy quality which saturates the domestic Anglo-Saxon, blurring the sharpness of his moral outline. No doubt you will also meet with dull persons; Rome is full of them, but, the type being easier to detect among a foreign environment, there is still less difficulty in evading them.... Thus I should have had no compunction, some nights ago, in making myself highly objectionable to Mr. P. G. who has turned up here on some mission connected with the war--so he says, and it may well be true; no compunction whatever, had that gentleman been in his ordinary social state. Mr. P. G., the acme of British propriety, inhabiting a house, a mansion, on the breezy heights of north London, was on that occasion decidedly drunk. "Indulging in a jag," he would probably have called it. He tottered into a place where I happened to be sitting, having lost his friends, he declared; and soon began pouring into my ear, after the confidential manner of a drunkard, a flood of low talk, which if I attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest paragraphs." It was highly instructive--the contrast between that impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state. I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of what he said--just a few shreds; they would have seen a new light on dear daddy. In vino veritas. Ever avid of experimentum in some corpore vili and determined to reach the bed-rock of his gross mentality, I plied him vigorously with drink, and was rewarded. It was rich sport, unmasking this Philistine and thanking God, meanwhile, that I was not like unto him. We are all lost sheep; and none the worse for that. Yet whoso is liable, however drunk, to make an exhibition of himself after the peculiar fashion of Mr. P. G., should realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with his character and take drastic measures of reform--measures which would include, among others, a total abstention from alcohol. Old Aristotle, long ago, laboured to define wherein consisted the trait known as gentlemanliness; others will have puzzled since his day, for we have bedaubed ourselves with so thick a coating of manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well, here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That was my procedure with P. G. Esquire. I listened to his outpouring of inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to understand why some folk are rightly afraid of exposing, under the influence of drink, the bête humaine which lurks below their skin of decency. His language would have terrified many people. Me it rejoiced. I would not have missed that entertainment for worlds. He finally wanted to have a fight, because I refused to accompany him to a certain place of delights, the address of which--I might have given him a far better one--had been scrawled on the back of a crumpled envelope by some cabman. Unable to stand on his legs, what could he hope to do there? Olevano I have loafed into Olevano. A thousand feet below my window, and far away, lies the gap between the Alban and Volscian hills; veiled in mists, the Pontine marches extend beyond, and further still--discernible only to the eye of faith--the Tyrrhenian. The profile of these Alban craters is of inimitable grace. It recalls Etna, as viewed from Taormina. How the mountain cleaves to earth, how reluctantly it quits the plain before swerving aloft in that noble line! Velletri's ramparts, twenty miles distant, are firmly planted on its lower slope. Standing out against the sky, they can be seen at all hours of the day, whereas the dusky palace of Valmontone, midmost on the green plain and rock-like in its proportions, fades out of sight after midday. Hard by, on your right, are the craggy heights of Capranica. Tradition has it that Michael Angelo was in exile up there, after doing something rather risky. What had he done? He crucified his model, desirous, like a true artist, to observe and reproduce faithfully in marble the muscular contractions and facial agony of such a sufferer. To crucify a man: this was going almost too far, even for the Pope of that period, who seems to have been an unusually sensitive pontiff--or perhaps the victim was a particular friend of his. However that may be, he waxed wroth and banished the conscientious sculptor in disgrace to this lonely mountain village, there to expiate his sins, for a day or two.... One sleeps badly here. Those nightingales--they are worse than the tram-cars in town. They begin earlier. They make more noise. Surely there is a time for everything? Will certain birds never learn to sing at reasonable hours? A word as to these nightingales. One of them elects to warble, in deplorably full-throated ease, immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion; an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise. I use that word "noise" deliberately. For it is not music--not until your ears are grown accustomed to it. I know a little something about music, having studied the art with considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of familiarity during that incarnation. Perhaps I am the only person now alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when I come to indite my musical memoirs. I have written a sonata in four movements, opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine service to a crowded congregation. Furthermore I performed, not at my own suggestion, his insipid Valse Caprice to the great Antoine Rubinstein, who was kind enough to observe: "Yes, yes. Quite good. But I rather doubt whether you could yet risk playing that in a concert." And in the matter of sheer noise I am also something of an expert, having once, as an infant prodigy, broken five notes in a single masterly rendering of Liszt's polonaise in E Major--I think it is E Major--whereupon my teacher, himself a pupil of Liszt, genially remarked: "Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected to know the difference between sound and noise. As such, I have no hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the stillness with the crash of Judgment Day. And every night the same scare. It causes me to start up, bathed in sudden perspiration, out of my first, and best, and often only sleep, with the familiar feeling that something awful is happening. Windows seem to rattle, plaster drops from the ceiling--an earthquake? Lord, no. Nothing so trivial. Nothing so brief. It is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five hours' entertainment. Let it not be supposed that the song of these southerners bears any resemblance to that of an English nightingale. I could stand a hatful of English nightingales in my bedroom; they would lull me to sleep with their anaemic whispers. You might as well compare the voice of an Italian costermonger, the crowing of a cock, the braying of a local donkey, with their representatives in the north--those thin trickles of sound, shadowy as the squeakings of ghosts. Something will have to be done about those nightingales unless I am to find my way into a sanatorium. For hardly is this bird started on its work before five or six others begin to shout in emulation--a little further off, I am glad to say, but still near enough to be inconvenient; still near enough to be reached by a brick from this window----A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight.... Meanwhile one can snatch a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon. A delectable path, for example, runs up behind the cemetery, bordered by butterfly orchids and lithospermum and aristolochia and other plants worthy of better names; it winds aloft, under shady chestnuts, with views on either side. Here one can sit and smoke and converse with some rare countryman passing by; here one can dream, forgetful of nightingales--soothed, rather, by the mellifluous note of the oriole among the green branches overhead and the piping, agreeably remote, of some wryneck in the olives down yonder. The birds are having a quiet time, for the first time in their lives; sportsmen are all at the front. I kicked up a partridge along this track two days ago. Those wrynecks, by the way, are abundant but hard to see. They sit close, relying on their protective colour. And it is the same with the tree-creepers. I have heard Englishmen say there are no tree-creepers in Italy. The olive groves are well stocked with them (there are numbers even in the Borghese Gardens in Rome), but you must remain immovable as a rock in order to see them; for they are yet shyer, more silent, more fond of interposing the tree-trunk between yourself and them, than those at home. Mouse-like in hue, in movement and voice--a strange case of analogous variation.... As to this Scalambra, this mountain whose bleak grey summit overtops everything near Olevano, I could soon bear the sight of it no longer. It seemed to shut out the world; one must up and glance over the edge, to see what is happening on the other side. I looked for a guide and porter, for somebody more solid than Giulio, who is almost an infant; none could be found. Men are growing scarce as the Dodo hereabouts, on account of the war. So Giulio came, though he had never made the ascent. Now common sense, to say nothing of a glance at the map, would suggest the proper method of approach: by the village of Serrano, the Saint Michael hermitage, and so up. Scouting this plan, I attacked the mountain about half-way between that village and Rojate. I cannot recommend my route. It was wearisome to the last degree and absolutely shadeless save for a small piece of jungle clothing a gulley, hung with myriads of caterpillars and not worth mentioning as an incident in that long walk. No excitement--not the faintest chance, so far as I could see, of breaking one's neck, and uphill all the time over limestone. One never seems to get any nearer. This Scalambra, I soon discovered, is one of those artful mountains which defend their summits by thrusting out escarpments with valleys in between; you are kept at arm's length, as it were, by this arrangement of the rock, which is invisible at a distance. And when at last you set foot on the real ridge and climb laboriously to what seems to be the top--lo! there is another peak a little further off, obviously a few feet higher. Up you go, only to discover a third, perhaps a few inches higher still. Alpine climbers know these tricks. We reached the goal none the less and there lay, panting and gasping; while an eagle, a solitary eagle with tattered wings, floated overhead in the cloudless sky. The descent to Rojate under that blazing sun was bad enough. My flask had been drained to the dregs long ago, and the Scalambra, true to its limestone tradition, had not supplied even a drop of water. Arriving at the village at about two in the afternoon, we found it deserted; everybody enjoying their Sunday nap. Rojate is a dirty hole. The water was plainly not to be trusted; it might contain typhoid germs, and I was responsible for Giulio's health; wine would be safer, we agreed. There, in a little shop near the church--a dark and cool place, the first shade we had entered for many hours--we drank without ever growing less thirsty. We felt like cinders, so hot, so porous, that the liquid seemed not only to find its way into the legitimate receptacle but to be obliged to percolate, by some occult process of capillarity, the remotest regions of the body. As time went on, the inhabitants dropped in after their slumbers and kept us company. We told our adventures, drank to the health of the Allies one by one and several times over; and it was not until we had risen to our feet and passed once more into the sunshine of the square that we suddenly felt different from what we thought we felt. The first indication was conveyed by Giulio, who called upon the populace of Rojate, there assembled, to bear solemn witness to the fact that I was his one and only friend, and that he would nevermore abandon me--a sentiment in which I stoutly concurred. (A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous blind.) Other symptoms followed. His hat, for example, which had hitherto behaved in exemplary fashion, now refused to remain steadily balanced on his head; it took some first-class gymnastics to prevent it from falling to the ground. In fact, while I confined myself to the minor part of Silenus--my native role--this youngster gave a noteworthy representation of the Drunken Faun.... Now I see no harm in appreciating wine up to a certain point, and am consoled to observe that Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D., was of the same way of thinking. He says so himself, and there is no reason for doubting his word. He frankly admits, for instance, that he enjoys the stuff called moscato "with great zest." He samples the Falernian vintage and pronounces it to be "particularly good, and not degenerated." Arrived at Cutro, he is not averse to reviving his spirits with "a pretty fair modicum of wine." He also lets slip--significant detail--the fact that Dr. Henderson was one of his friends, and that he travelled about with him. You may judge a man by the company he keeps. Who was this Dr. Henderson? He was the author of "The History of Ancient Wines." Old Henderson, I should say, could be trusted to know something of local vintages. And so far good. At Licenza, however, Ramage tells us that he "got glorious on the wine of Horace's Sabine farm." I do not know what he means by this expression, which seems to be purposely ambiguous; in any case, it does not sound very nice. At another place, again, he and his entertainer consumed some excellent liquor "in considerable quantity"--so he avows; adding that "it was long past midnight ere we closed our bacchanalian orgies, and he (the host) ended by stating that he was happy to have made my acquaintance." Note the lame and colourless close of that sentence: he ended by stating. One always ends that way after bacchanalian orgies, though one does not always gloss over the escapade with such disingenuous language. We can guess what really took place. It was something like what happened at Rojate. Did not the curly-haired Giulio end by "stating" something to the same effect? I cannot make up my mind whether to be pleased with this particular trait in friend Ramage's character. For let it never be forgotten that our traveller was a young man at the time. He says so himself, and there is no reason for doubting his word. Was he acting as beseemed his years? I am not more straight-laced than many people, yet I confess it always gives me a kind of twinge to see a young man yielding to intemperance of any kind. There is something incongruous in the spectacle, if not actually repellent. Rightly or wrongly, one is apt to associate that time of life with stern resolve. A young man, it appears to me, should hold himself well in hand. Youth has so much to spare! Youth can afford to be virtuous. With such stores of joy looming ahead, it should be a period of ideals, of self-restraint and self-discipline, of earnestness of purpose. How well the Greek Anthology praises "Temperance, the nurse of Youth!" The divine Plato lays it down that youngsters should not touch wine at all, since it is not right to heap fire on fire. He adds that older men like ourselves may indulge therein as an ally against the austerity of their years--agreeing, therefore, with Theophrastus who likewise recommends it for the "natural moroseness" of age. Observe in this connection what happened to Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D., at Trebisacce. Here was a poor old coastguard who had been taken prisoner by the Corsairs thirty years earlier, carried to Algiers, and afterwards ransomed. Having "nothing better to do" (says our author) "I confess I furnished him with somewhat more wine than was exactly consistent with propriety"; with so liberal a quantity, indeed, that the coastguard became quite "obstreperous in his mirth"; whereupon Ramage hops on his mule and leaves him to his fate. Here, then, we have a young fellow deliberately leading an old man astray. And why? Because he has "nothing better to do." [13] It is not remarkably edifying. True, he afterwards makes a kind of apology for "causing my brother to sin by over-indulgence...." But if we close our eyes to the fact that Ramage, when he gave way to these excesses, was a young man and ought to have known better, what an agreeable companion we find him! He never rails at anything. Had I been subjected to half the annoyances he endured, my curses would have been loud and long. Under such provocation, Ramage contents himself with reproving his tormentors in rounded phrases of oratio obliqua which savour strongly of those Latin classics he knew so well. What he says of the countryfolk is not only polite but true, that their virtues are their own, while their vices have been fostered by the abuses of tyranny. "Whatever fault one may find with this people for their superstition and ignorance, there is a loveableness in their character which I am not utilitarian enough in my philosophy to resist." This comes of travelling off the beaten track and with an open mind; it comes of direct contact. When one remembers that he wrote in 1828 and was derived from a bigoted stock, his religious tolerance is refreshing--astonishing. He studies the observances of the poorer classes with sympathetic eye and finds that they are "pious to a degree to which I am afraid we must grant that we have no pretensions." That custom of suspending votive offerings in churches he does not think "worthy of being altogether condemned or ridiculed. The feeling is the same that induces us, on recovery from severe illness, to give thanks to Almighty God, either publicly in church or privately in our closets." How many Calvinists of to-day would write like this? We could do with more of these sensible and humane reflections, but unfortunately he is generally too "pressed for time" to indulge in them. That mania of hustling through the country.... One morning he finds himself at Foggia, with the intention of visiting Mons Garganus. First of all he must "satisfy his curiosity" about Arpi; it is ten miles there and back. Leaving Foggia for the second time he proceeds twenty miles to Manfredonia, and inspects not only this town, but the site of old Sipontum. Then he sails to the village of Mattinata, and later to Vieste, the furthermost point of the promontory. About six miles to the north are the presumable ruins of Merinum; he insists upon going there, but the boatmen strike work; regretfully he returns to Manfredonia, arriving at 11 p.m., and having covered on this day some sixty or seventy miles. What does he do at Manfredonia? He sleeps for three hours--and then a new hustle begins, in pitch darkness. Another day he wakes up at Sorrento and thinks he will visit the Siren Islets. He crosses the ridge and descends to the sea on the other side, to the so-called Scaricatojo--quite a respectable walk, as any one can find out for himself. Hence he sails to the larger of the islets, climbs to the summit and makes some excavations, in the course of which he observes what I thought I was the first to discover--the substructures of a noble Roman villa; he also scrambles into King Robert's tower. Then to the next islet, and up it; then to the third, and up it. After that, he is tempted to visit the headland of Minerva; he goes there, and satisfies his curiosity. He must now hence to Capri. He sails across, and after a little refreshment, walks to the so-called Villa of Jupiter at the easterly apex of the island. He then rows round the southern shore and is taken with the idea of a trip to Misenum, twenty miles or so distant. Arrived there, he climbs to the summit of the cape and lingers a while--it is pleasant to find him lingering--to examine something or other. Then he "rushes" down to the boat and bids them row to Pozzuoli, where he arrives (and no wonder) long after sunset. A good day's hustle.... The ladies made a great impression on his sensitive mind; yet not even they were allowed to interfere with his plans. At Strongoli the "sparkling eyes of the younger sister" proved the most attractive object in the place. He was strongly urged to remain a while and rest from his fatigues. But no; there were many reasons why he should press forward. He therefore presses forward. At another place, too, he was waited upon by his entertainer's three daughters, the youngest of whom was one of the most entrancing girls he had ever met with--in fact, it was well that his time was limited, else "I verily believe I should have committed all kinds of follies." That is Ramage. He parts from his host with "unfeigned regret"--but--parts. His time is always limited. Bit for that craze of pressing forward, what fun he could have had! Stroll to that grove of oaks crowning a hill-top above the Serpentaro stream. It has often been described, often painted. It is a corner of Latium in perfect preservation; a glamorous place; in the warm dusk of southern twilight--when all those tiresome children are at last asleep--it calls up suggestions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here is a specimen of the landscape as it used to be. You may encounter during your wanderings similar fragments of woodland, saved by their inaccessibility from the invading axe. "Hands off the Oak!" cries an old Greek poet. The Germans, realizing its picturesque value, bought this parcel of land and saved the trees from destruction. It was well done. Within, they have cut certain letterings upon the rock which violate the sylvan sanctity of the place--Germans will do these things; there is no stopping them; it is part of their crudely expansive temperament--certain letterings, among other and major horrors, anent the "Law of the Ever-beautiful" (how truly Teutonic!)--lines, that is, signed by the poet Victor von Scheffel, and dated 2 May, 1897. Scheffel was a kindly and erudite old toper, who toped himself into Elysium via countless quarts of Affenthaler. I used to read his things; the far-famed Ekkehardt furnishing an occasion for a visit to the Hohentwiel mountain in search of that golden-tinted natrolite mineral, which was duly found (I specialized in zeolites during that period). Now what was Scheffel doing at this Serpentaro in 1897? For I attended his funeral, which took place in the 'eighties. Can it be that his son, a scraggy youth in those days, inherited not only the father's name but his poetic mantle? Was it he who perpetrated those sententious lines? I like to think so. That "law of the ever-beautiful" does not smack of the old man, unless he was more disguised than usual, and having a little fun with his pedantic countrymen.... Climb hence--it is not far--to the village of Civitella, now called Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean" defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon this impervious stuff and allows the liquid to escape into the open. An unclean place is Bellegra, and loud, like all these Sabine villages, with the confused crying of little children. That multiple wail of misery will ring in your ear for days afterwards. They are more neglected by their mothers than ever, since women now have all the men's work in the fields to do. They are hungrier than ever, on account of the war which has imposed real hardships on these agricultural folk; hardships that seize them by the throat and make them sit down, with folded hands, in dumb despair: so I have seen them. How many of these unhappy babies will grow to maturity? Death-rate must anyhow be high hereabouts, for nothing is done in the way of hygiene. In the company of one who knows, I perambulated the cemetery of Olevano and was astonished at the frequency of tombstones erected to the young. "Consumption," my friend told me. They scorn prophylactics. I should not care to send growing children into these villages, despite their "fine air." Here, at Bellegra, the air must be fine indeed in winter; too fine for my taste. It lies high, exposed to every blast of Heaven, and with noble views in all directions. Rest awhile, on your homeward march, at the small bridge near Olevano where the road takes a turn. A few hundred yards up the glen on your left is a fountain whose waters are renowned for their purity; the bridge itself is not a favourite spot after sunset; it is haunted by a most malignant spectre. That adds considerably, in my eyes, to the charm of the place. Besides, here stands an elder tree now in full flower. What recollections does that scent evoke! What hints of summer, after rain! A venerable tree, old as the hills; that last syllable tells its tale--you may read it in the Sanscrit. A man-loving tree; seldom one sees an elder by itself, away from human habitations, in the jungle. I have done so; but in that particular jungle, buried beneath the soil, were the ruins of old houses. When did it begin to attach itself to the works of man, to walls and buildings? And why? Does it derive peculiar sustenance from the lime of the masonry? I think not, for it grows in lands where lime is rare, and in the shadow of log-huts. It seeks shelter from the wind for its frail stalks and leaves, that shrivel wondrously when the plant is set in exposed situations. The Sabine mountains are full of elders. They use the berries to colour the wine. A German writer, R. Voss, wove their fragrance into a kind of Leit-motif for one of his local novels. I met him once by accident, and am not anxious to meet him again. A sacerdotal and flabbily pompous old man--straightway my opinion of his books, never very high, fell to zero, and has there remained. He knew these regions well, and doubtless sojourned at one time or another at yonder caravanserai-hotel, abandoned of late, but then filled with a crowd of noisy enthusiasts who have since been sacrificed to the war-god. Doubtless he drank wine with them on that terrace overlooking the brown houses of Olevano, though I question whether he then paid as much as they are now charging me; doubtless he rejoiced to see that stately array of white lilies fronting the landscape, though I question whether he derived more pleasure from them than I do.... While at Bellegra, this afternoon, I gazed landwards to where, in the Abruzzi region, the peaks are still shrouded in snow. How are they doing our there, at Scanno? Is that driving-road at last finished? Can the "River Danube" still be heard flowing underground in the little cave of Saint Martin? Are the thistles of violet and red and blue and gold and silver as gorgeous as ever? [14] And those legions of butterflies--do they still hover among the sunny patches in the narrow vale leading to Mount Terrata? And Frattura, that strange place--what has happened to Frattura? Built on a fracture, on the rubble of that shattered mountain which produced the lake lower down, it has probably crumbled away in the last earthquake. Well I remember Frattura! It was where the wolf ate the donkey, and where we, in our turn, often refreshed ourselves in the dim hovel of Ferdinando--never with greater zest than on the hot downward march from Mount Genzana. Whether those small purple gentians are still to be found on its summit? And the emerald lizard on the lower slopes? Whether the eagles still breed on the neighbouring Montagna di Preccia? They may well be tired of having their nest plundered year after year. What foreigner has older and pleasanter memories of Scanno? I would like to meet that man, and compare notes. And so, glancing over the hills from Bellegra, I sent my thoughts into those Abruzzi mountains, and registered a vow to revisit Scanno--if only in order to traverse once more by moonlight, for the sake of auld lang syne, the devious paths to Roccaraso, or linger in that moist nook by the lake-side where stood the Scanno of olden days (the Betifuli, if such it was, of the Pelignians), where the apples grow, where the sly dabchick plays among the reeds, and where, one evening, I listened to something that might have been said much sooner. Acque Vive.... I kept my vow. Our bill at Scanno for wine alone was 189 francs, and for beer 92 francs; figures which look more formidable than they are and which I cite only to prove that we--for of course I was not alone--enjoyed ourselves fairly well during those eighteen days. By the way, what does Baedeker mean by speaking of the "excellent wines" of Scanno, where not a drop is grown? He might have said the same of Aberdeen. The season was too late for the thistles, too late for the little coppers and fritillaries and queens of Spain and commas and all the rest of that fluttering tribe in the narrow vale leading to Terrata, though wood-pigeons were still cooing there. Scanno has been spared by the earthquake which laid low so many other places; it has prospered; prospered too much for my taste, since those rich smoky tints, especially of the vaulted interiors, are now disappearing under an invasion of iron beams and white plaster. The golden duskiness of Scanno, heightened as it was by the gleaming copper vessels borne on every young girl's head, will soon be a thing of the past. Young trees along the road-side--well-chosen trees: limes, maples, willows, elms, chestnuts, ashes--are likewise doing well and promise pretty effects of variegated foliage in a few years' time; so are the plantations of pines in the higher regions of the Genzana. In this matter of afforestation, Scanno continues its system of draconic severity. It is worth while, in a country which used to suffer so much from reckless grazing of goats on the hill-sides, and the furious floods of water. The Sagittario stream is hemmed in by a cunning device of stones contained within bags of strong wire; it was introduced many years ago by an engineer from Modena. And if you care to ascend the torrents, you will find they have been scientifically dammed by the administration, whereas the peasant, when they overflow and ruin his crops, contents himself with damning them in quite an amateurish fashion. Which reminds me that I picked up during this visit, and have added to my collection, a new term of abuse to be addressed to your father-in-law: Porcaccio d'un cagnaccio! Novel effects, you perceive, obtained by a mere intensification of colour. As to Frattura--yes, it is shattered. Vainly we tried to identify Ferdinando's abode among all that debris. The old man himself escaped the cataclysm, and now sells his wares in one of the miserable wooden shanties erected lower down. The mellow hermit at St. Egidio, of whom more on p. 171, has died; his place is taken by a worthless vagabond. Saint Domenico and his serpents, the lonely mead of Jovana (? Jovis fanum), that bell in the church-tower of Villalago which bears the problematical date of 600 A.D.--they are all in their former places. Mount Velino still glitters over the landscape, for those who climb high enough to see it. The cliff-swallows are there, and dippers skim the water as of old. Women, in their unhygienic costume, still carry those immense loads of wood on their heads, though payment is considerably higher than the three half-pence a day which it used to be. Enough of Scanno! Whoever wishes to leave the place on foot and by an unconventional route, may go to Sora via Pescasseroli. Adventurous souls will scramble over the Terrata massif, leaving the summit well on their right, and descend on its further side; others may wander up the Valle dei Prati and then, bending to the right along the so-called Via del Campo, mount upwards past a thronged alp of sheep, over the watershed, and down through charming valleys of beechen timber. A noble walk, and one that compares favourably with many Abruzzi excursions. What deserts they often are, these stretches of arid limestone, voiceless and waterless, with the raven's croak for your only company! I am glad to have seen Pescasseroli, where we arrived at about 9 a.m. For the rest, it is only one of many such places that have been brought to a state of degradation by the earthquake, the present war, and governmental neglect. Not an ounce of bread was procurable for money, or even as a gift. The ordinary needs of life--cigars, matches, maccheroni and so forth: there were none of them. An epidemic of the gapes, infecting the entire race of local hens, had caused the disappearance of every egg from the market. And all those other countless things which a family requires for its maintenance--soap and cloth and earthenware and kitchen utensils and oils--they have become rarities; the natives are learning to subsist without them; relapsing into a kind of barbarism. So they sit among the cracked tenements; resentful, or dumbly apathetic. "We have been forgotten," said one of them. The priests inculcate submission to the will of God. What else should they teach? But men will outgrow these doctrines of patience when suffering is too acute or too prolonged. "Anything is better than this," they say. Thus it comes about that these ruined regions are a goodly soil for the sowing of subversive opinions; the land reeks of ill-digested socialism. We found a "restaurant" where we lunched off a tin of antediluvian Spanish sardines, some mouldy sweet biscuits, and black wine. (A distinction is made in these parts between black and red wine; the former is the Apulian variety, the other from Sulmona.) During this repast, we were treated to several bear-stories. For there are bears at Pescasseroli, and nowhere else in Italy; even as there are chamois nearby, between Opi and Villetta Barrea, among the crags of the Camosciara, which perpetuates their name. One of those present assured us that the bear is a good beast; he will eat a man, of course, but if he meets a little boy, he contents himself with throwing stones at him--just to teach him good manners. Certain old bears are as big as a donkey. They have been seen driving into their cave a flock of twenty-five sheep, like any shepherd. It is no rare thing to encounter in the woods a bear with a goat slung over his shoulder; he must breakfast, like anybody else. One of these gentlemen told us that the bears, not long ago, were a source of considerable profit to the peasantry round about. It was in this wise. Their numbers had been reduced, it seems, to a single pair and the species was threatened with extinction, when, somehow or other, this state of affairs became known to the King who, alarmed at the disappearance from his realm of a venerable and autochtonous quadruped, the largest European beast of prey, conceived the happy idea of converting the whole region into a Royal Preserve. On pain of death, no bear was to be molested or even laughed at; any damage they might do would be compensated out of the Royal Purse. For a week or so after this enactment, nothing was heard of the bears. Then, one morning, the conscientious Minister of the Royal Household presented himself at the palace, with a large sheaf of documents under his arm. "What have we here?" inquired the King. "Attestations relating to the bears of Pescasseroli, Your Majesty. They seem to be thriving." "Ah! That is nice of them. They are multiplying once more, thanks to Our Royal protection. We thought they would." "Multiplying indeed, Sire. Here are testimonials, sworn before the local syndic, showing that they have devoured 18 head of cattle and 43 sheep." "In that short time? Is it possible? Well, well! The damage must be paid. And yet We never knew the bears could propagate so fast. Maybe our Italian variety is peculiarly vigorous in such matters." "Seems so, Your Majesty. Very prolific." A week or so passed and, once more, His Excellency was announced. The King observed: "You are not looking quite yourself this morning, my good Minister. Would it be indiscreet to inquire the cause? No family or parliamentary worries, We trust?" "Your Majesty is very kind! No. It is the bears of Pescasseroli. They have eaten 75 head of cattle, 93 sheep, and 114 goats. Ah--and 18 horses. Here are the claims for damages, notarially attested." "We must pay. But if only somebody could teach the dear creatures to breed a little more reasonably!" "I cannot but think, Sire, that the peasants are abusing Your Majesty's----" "May We never live to hear anything against Our faithful and well-beloved Abruzzi folk!" Nearly a month elapsed before the Minister again presented himself. This time he looked really haggard and careworn, and was bowed down under an enormous bundle of papers. The King glanced up from that writing-desk where, like all other sovereigns, he had been working steadily since 4.30 a.m., and at once remarked, with that sympathetic intuition for which he is famous among crowned heads: "We think We know. The bears." Your Majesty is never wrong. They have devoured 126 cows and calves and bullocks, 418 sheep and goats, 62 mules, 37 horses, and 96 donkeys. Also 55 shepherd dogs and 827 chickens. Here are the claims." "Dear, dear, dear. This will never do. If it is a question of going to ruin, We prefer that it should be the bears rather than Ourselves. We must withdraw Our Royal protection, after settling up these last items. What say you, my good Minister?" "Your Majesty is always right. A private individual may indulge in the pastime of breeding bears to the verge of personal bankruptcy. Ruling sovereigns will be guided by juster and more complex considerations." And from that moment, added our gentlemanly informant, there began a wonderful shrinkage in the numbers of the bears. Within a day or two, they were again reduced to a single couple. Gladly would I have listened to more of these tales but, having by far the worst of the day's walk still before us, we left the stricken regions about midday and soon began an interminable ascent, all through woods, to the shrine of Madonna di Tranquillo. Hereabouts is the watershed, whence you may see, far below, the tower of Campoli Apennino. That village was passed in due course, and Sora lay before us, after a thirteen hours' march.... That same night in Sora--it may have been 2 a.m.--some demon drew nigh to my bedside and whispered in my ear: "What are you doing here, at Sora? Why not revisit Alatri? (I had been there already in June.) Just another little promenade! Up, sluggard, while the night-air is cool!" I obeyed the summons and turned to rouse my slumbering companion, to whom I announced my inspiration. His remarks, on that occasion, were well worth listening to. Next evening found us at Alatri. Now whoever, after walking from Scanno over Pescasseroli to Sora in one day, and on the next, in the blazing heat of early autumn, from Sora over Isola Liri and Veroli to Alatri--touching in two days the soil of three Italian provinces: Aquila, Caserta, and Rome--whoever, after doing this, and inspecting the convent of Casamari en route, feels inclined for a similar promenade on the third day: let him rest assured of my profound respect. Calm, sunny days at Olevano. And tranquil nights, for some time past. The nightingale has been inspired to move a little up country, into another bush. Its rivals have likewise retired further off, and their melodramatic trills sound quite pleasant at this distance. So tin cans have their uses, even when empty. Certain building operations may have been interrupted. I apologise, though I will not promise not to repeat the offence. They can move their nests; I cannot move this house. Bless their souls! I would not hurt a hair on their dear little heads, but one must really have a few hours' sleep, somehow or other. A single night's repose is more precious to me than a myriad birds or quadrupeds or bipeds; my ideas on the sacred nature of sleep being perfectly Oriental. That Black Hole of Calcutta was an infamous business. And yet, while nowise approving the tyrant's action, I can thoroughly understand his instructions on the subject of slumber. Not every one at Olevano is so callous. Waiting the other day at the bifurcation of the roads for the arrival of the station motor-car--the social event of the place--I noticed two children bringing up to a bigger one the nest of a chaffinch, artfully frosted over with silver lichen from some olive, and containing a naked brood which sprawled pathetically within. Wasn't it pretty, they asked? "Very pretty," he replied. "Now you will take it straight back where you found it. Go ahead. I am coming with you." And he marched them off. I am glad to put this incident on record. It is the second of its kind which I have observed in this country, the first being when a fisherman climbed up a bad piece of rock to replace a nest--idle undertaking--which some boys had dislodged with stones. At a short distance from the scene sat the mother-bird in pensive mood, her head cocked on one side. What did she think of the benevolent enthusiast?... Olevano is said to have been discovered by the Germans. I am sceptical on this point, having never yet found a place that was discovered by them. An English eccentric or two is sure to have lived and died here all by himself; though doubtless, once on the spot, they did their best to popularise and vulgarise it. In this matter, as in art or science or every department of life, a German requires forerunners. He must follow footsteps. He gleans; picks the brains of other people, profits by their mistakes and improves on their ideas. I know nothing of the social history of Olevano--of its origin, so far as foreigners are concerned. It is the easiest and the flimsiest thing in the world to invent; there are so many analogies! The first foreign resident of Olevano was a retired Anglo-Indian army officer with unblemished record, Major Frederick Potter. He came across the place on a trip from Rome, and took a fancy to it. Decent climate. Passable food. You could pick up a woodcock or two. He was accustomed to solitude anyhow, all his old friends being dead or buried, or scattered about the world. He had tried England for a couple of years and discovered that people there did not like being ordered about as they should be; they seemed to mind it less, at Olevano. He had always been something of a pioneer, and the mere fact of being the first "white man" in the place gave him a kind of fondness for it. It was he, then, who discovered Olevano--Freddy Potter. We can see him living alone, wiry and whiskered and cantankerous, glorying in his solitude up to the fateful day when, to his infinite annoyance, a fellow-countryman turns up--Mr. Augustus Browne of London. Mr. Browne is a blameless personality who, enjoying indifferent health, brings an equally blameless old housekeeper with him. He is not a sportsman like Potter, but indulges in a pretty taste for landscape painting, with elaborate flowers and butterflies worked into the foreground. So they live, each in jealous seclusion, drinking tea at fixed hours, importing groceries from England, dressing for dinner, avoiding contact with the "natives" and, of course, pretending to be unaware of one another's existence. As time goes on, their mutual distrust grows stronger. The Major has never forgiven that cockney for invading Olevano, his private domain, while Browne finds no words to express his disgust at Potter, who presumably calls himself a Briton and yet smokes those filthy cheroots in public (this was years and years ago). Why is the fellow skulking here, all by himself? Some hanky-panky with regimental money; every one knows how India plays the devil with a man's sense of right and wrong. And Potter is not long in making up his mind that this civilian has bolted to Olevano for reasons which will not bear investigation and is living in retirement, ten to one, under an assumed name. Browne! He really might have picked out a better one, while he was about it. That water-colour business--a blind, a red herring; the so-called lady companion---- The natives, meanwhile, observe with amazement the mutual conduct of two compatriots. They are known, far and wide, as "the madmen" till some bright spirit makes the discovery that they are not madmen at all, but only homicides hiding from justice; whereupon contempt is changed to grudging admiration. Browne dies, after many years. His lady packs up and departs. The old Major's delight at being once more alone is of short duration; he falls ill and is entombed, his last days being embittered by the arrival of a party of German tourists who declare they have "discovered" this wonderful new spot, and threaten to bring more Teutons in their rear to participate in its joys. They come, singly and in batches, and soon make Olevano uninhabitable to men of the Potter and Browne type. They keep the taverns open all night, sing boisterous choruses, kiss each other in the street "as if they were in their bedrooms," organise picnics in the woods, sketch old women sitting in old doorways, start a Verschoenerungsverein and indulge in a number of other antics which, from the local point of view, are held to be either coarse or childish. The natives, after watching their doings with critical interest, presently pronounce a verdict--a verdict to which the brightest spirits of the place give their assent--a verdict which, by the way, I have myself heard uttered. "Those Englishmen"--thus it runs--"were at least assassins. These people are merely fools." POSTSCRIPT--One thing has occurred of late which would hardly have happened were the Germans still in occupation of Olevano. At the central piazza is a fountain where the cattle drink and where, formerly, you could rest and glance down upon the country lying below--upon a piece of green landscape peering in upon the street. This little view was like a window, it gave an aerial charm to the place. They have now blocked it up with an ugly house. The beauty of the site is gone. It is surprising that local municipalities; however stupid, however corrupt, should not be aware of the damage done to their own interests when they permit such outrages. The Germans--were any of them still here--would doubtless have interfered en masse and stopped the building. Something should be done about these reviewers. There has followed me hither a bundle of press notices of a recent book of mine. They are favourable. I ought to be delighted. I happen to be annoyed. What takes place in this absurd book? The three unities are preserved. A respectable but rather drab individual, a bishop, whose tastes and moods are fashioned to reflect those of the average drab reader, arrives at a new place and is described as being, among other things, peculiarly sensitive on the subject of women. He cannot bear flippant allusions to the sex. He has preserved a childlike faith in their purity, their sacred mission on earth, their refining influence upon the race. His friends call him old-fashioned and quixotic on this point. A true woman, he declares, can do no wrong. And this same man, towards the end of the book, watches how the truest woman in the place, the one whom he admires more than all the rest, his own cousin and a mother, calmly throws her legitimate husband over a cliff. He realises that he is "face to face with an atrocious and carefully planned murder." Such, however, has been the transformation of his mind during a twelve days' sojourn that he understands the crime, he pardons it, he approves it. Can this wholesale change of attitude be brought about without a plot? Yet many of these reviewers discover no such thing in the book. "It possesses not the faintest shadow of a plot," says one of the most reputable of them. This annoys me. I see no reason why a book should have a plot. In regard to this one, it would be nearer the truth to say that it is nothing but plot from beginning to end. How to make murder palatable to a bishop: that is the plot. How? You must unconventionalise him, and instil into his mind the seeds of doubt and revolt. You must shatter his old notions of what is right. It is the only way to achieve this result, and I would defy the critic to point to a single incident or character or conversation in the book which does not further the object in view. The good bishop soon finds himself among new influences; his sensations, his intellect, are assailed from within and without. Figures such as those in chapters 11, 19 and 35; the endless dialogue in the boat; the even more tedious happenings in the local law-court; the very externals--relaxing wind and fantastic landscape and volcanic phenomena--the jovial immoderation of everything and everybody: they foster a sense of violence and insecurity; they all tend to make the soil receptive to new ideas. If that was your plot, the reviewer might say, you have hidden it rather successfully. I have certainly done my best to hide it. For although the personalities of the villain and his legal spouse crop up periodically, with ominous insistence, from the first chapter onwards, they are always swallowed up again. The reason is given in the penultimate chapter, where the critic might have found a résumé of my intentions and the key to this plot--to wit, that a murder under those particular circumstances is not only justifiable and commendable but--insignificant. Quite insignificant! Not worth troubling about. Hundreds of decent and honest folk are being destroyed every day; nobody cares tuppence; "one dirty blackmailer more or less--what does it matter to anybody"? There are so many more interesting things on earth. That is why the bishop--i.e. the reader--here discovers the crime to be a "contemptible little episode," and decides to "relegate it into the category of unimportant events." He was glad that the whole affair had remained in the background, so to speak, of his local experiences. It seemed appropriate. In the background: it seemed appropriate. That is the heart, the core, of the plot. And that is why all those other happenings find themselves pushed into the foreground. I know full well that this is not the way to write an orthodox English novel. For if you hide your plot, how shall the critic be expected to see it? You must serve it on a tray; you must (to vary the simile) hit the nail on the head and ask him to be so good as to superintend the operation. That is the way to rejoice the cockles of his heart. He can then compare you to someone else who has also hit the nail on the head and with whose writings he happens to be familiar. You have a flavour of Dostoievsky minus the Dickens taint; you remind him of Flaubert or Walter Scott or somebody equally obscure; in short, you are in a condition to be labelled--a word, and a thing, which comes perilously near to libelling. If, to this description, he adds a short summary of your effort, he has done his duty. What more can he do? He must not praise overmuch, for that might displease some of his own literary friends. He must not blame overmuch, else how shall his paper survive? It lives on the advertisements of publishers and--say those persons, perhaps wisely--"if you ill-treat our authors, there's an end to our custom." Commercialism.... Which applies far less to literary criticism than to other kinds. Of most of the critics of music and art the best one can say is that there are hearty fellows among them who, with the requisite training, might one day become fit for their work. England is the home of the amateur in matters intellectual, the specialist in things material. No bootmaker would allow an unpractised beginner to hack his leather about in a jejune attempt to construct a pair of shoes. The other commodity, being less valuable than cowhide, may be entrusted to the hands of any 'prentice who cares to enliven our periodicals with his playful hieroglyphics. Criticism in England--snakes in Iceland. [15] All alone, for a wonder, I climbed up to the sanctuary of St. Michael above Serrone, that solitary white speck visible from afar on the upper slopes of Mount Scalambra. It is a respectable walk, and would have been inconveniently warm but for the fact that I rose with the nightingales, reaching my destination at the very moment when the sun peered over the ridge of the mountain at its back. A delicious ramble in the dewy shade of morning, with ten minutes' rest on a wall at Serrone, talking to an old woman who wore those ponderous red ornaments designed, I suppose, to imitate coral. I had hoped to meet at this hermitage some amiable and garrulous anchorite who would share my breakfast. It is the ideal place for such a life, and many are the mountain solitaries of this species I have known in Italy (mostly retired shepherds). There was he of Scanno--dead, I doubt not, by this time--that simple-hearted venerable with whom I whiled away the long evenings at the shrine of Sant' Egidio, gazing over the placid lake below, or up stream, at the dusky houses of Scanno theatrically ranged against their hill-side. I became his friend, once and for ever, after finding a wooden snuff-box he had lost--his only snuff-box; it lay at the edge of the path among thick shrubs, and he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw it again. One of my many strokes of luck! Once I found a purse-- The little structure here was barred and deserted. I had no company save a couple of ravens who, after assuring themselves, with that infernal cunning of theirs, that I carried no gun, became as friendly as could be expected of such solemn fowls. They are always in pairs--incurably monogamous; whereas the carrion crow, for reasons of its own, has a fondness for living in trios. This ménage à trois may have subtle advantages and seems to be a step in the direction of the truly social habits of the rook; it enables them to fight with more success against their enemies, the hawks, and fosters, likewise, a certain lightheartedness which the sententious raven lacks. No one who has watched the aerial antics of a triplet of carrion crows can deny them a sense of fun. After an hour's contemplation of the beauties of nature I descended once more through that ilex grove to Serrone. And now it began to grow decidedly warm. The wide depression between this village and Olevano used to be timbered and is still known as la selva or la foresta. Vines now occupy the whole ground. If they had only left a few trees by the wayside! Walking along, I encountered a sportsman who said he was on the look-out for a hare. Always that hare! They might as well lie in wait for the Great Auk. Not long ago, an old visionary informed me that he had killed a hare beside the Ponte Milvio at Rome. Hares at Ponte Milvio! They reminded me of those partridges in Belgrave Square. In my younger days there was not a general in the British army who had not (1) shot partridges in Belgrave Square and (2) been the chosen lover of Queen Isabella of Spain.... Up to the castle, in the afternoon, for a final chat. We sit under the vine near the entrance of that decayed stronghold, while babies and hens scramble about the exposed rock; he talks, as usual, about the war. He can talk of nothing else. No wonder. One son is maimed for life; the other has been killed outright, and it looks as if no amount of ironmongery (medals, etc.) would ever atone for the loss. This happy land is full of affliction. Mourning everywhere, and hardships and bitterness and ruined homes. Vineyards are untilled, olives unpruned, for lack of labourers. It will take years to bring the soil back into its old state of productivity. One is pained to see decent folk suffering for a cause they fail to understand, for something that happens beyond their ken, something dim and distant--unintelligible to them as that Libyan expedition. None the less, he tells me, there is not a single deserter in Olevano. An old warrior-brood, these men of Latium.... Thence onward and upward, towards evening by that familiar path, for a second farewell visit to Giulio's farm. It is a happy homestead, an abode of peace, with ample rooms and a vine-wreathed terrace that overlooks the smiling valley to the south. A mighty bush of rosemary stands at the door. The mother is within, cooking the evening meal for her man and the elder boys who work in the fields so long as a shred of daylight flits about the sky. The little ones are already half asleep, tired with a long day's playing in the sunshine. Here is my favourite, Alberto, an adorable cherub and the pickle of the family. I can see at a glance that he has been up to mischief. Alberto is incorrigible. No amount of paternal treatment will do him any good. He hammers nails into tables and into himself, he tumbles down from trees, he throws stones at the girls and cuts himself with knives and saws; he breaks things and loses things, and chases the hens about--disobeys all the time. Every day there is some fresh disaster and fresh chastisement. Two weeks ago he was all but run over by the big station motor--pulled out from the wheels in the nick of time; that scar across his forehead will remain for life, a memento of childish naughtiness. Alberto understands me thoroughly. He is glad to see me. But a certain formality must be gone through; every time we meet there is a moment of shy distrust, while the ice has to be broken afresh--he must assure himself that I have not changed since our last encounter. Everything, apparently, is in order to-night, for he curls up comfortably on my knee and is soon fast asleep, all his little tragedies forgotten. "It appears you like children," says the mother. "I like this one, because he is never out of trouble. He reminds me of myself. I shall steal him one of these days, and carry him off to Rome. From there we will walk on foot to Brindisi, along an old track called the Via Appia. It will require two of three years, for I mean to stop a day, or perhaps a week, at every single tavern along the road. Then I will write a book about it; a book to make myself laugh with, when I am grown too old for walking." "Giulio is big enough." "I'll wait." No chance of undertaking such a trip in these times of war, when a foreigner is liable to be arrested at every moment. Besides, how far would one get, with Giulio? Nevermore to Brindisi! As far as Terracina; possibly even to Formia. There, at Formia, we would remain for the rest of our natural lives, if the wine at the Albergo della Quercia is anything like what it used to be; there, at Formia, we would pitch our tent, enacting every day, or perhaps twice a day, our celebrated Faun-and-Silenus entertainment for the diversion of the populace. I have not forgotten Giulio's besetting sin. How nearly he made me exceed the measure of sobriety at Rojate!... Night descends. I wander homewards. Under the trees of the driving-road fireflies are dancing; countrymen return in picturesque groups, with mules and children, from their work far afield; that little owl, the aluco, sits in the foliage overhead, repeating forever its plaintive note. The lights of Artena begin to twinkle. This Artena, they say, had such a sorry reputation for crime and brigandage that the authorities at one time earnestly considered the proposition of razing it to the ground. Then they changed their minds. It seemed more convenient to have evil-doers all collected into one place than scattered about the country. To judge by the brightness of the lamps at this distance of twelve miles, the brigands have evidently spared no expense in the matter of street-illumination. And now the lights of Segni station are visible, down in the malarious valley, where the train passes from Rome to Naples. Every night I have beheld them from my window; every night they tinged my thoughts with a soft sadness, driving them backwards, northwards--creating a link between present and past. Now, for the last time, I see them and recall those four journeys along that road; four, out of at least a hundred; only four, but in what rare company! Valmontone Back to Valmontone. At Zagarolo, where you touch the Rome-Naples line, I found there was no train to this place for several hours. A merchant of straw hats from Tuscany, a pert little fellow, was in the same predicament; he also had some business to transact at Valmontone. How get there? No conveyance being procurable on account of some local fair or festival, we decided to walk. A tiresome march, in the glow of morning. The hatter, after complaining more or less articulately for an hour, was reduced to groans and almost tears; his waxed moustache began to droop; he vowed he was not accustomed to this kind of exercise. Would I object to carrying his bundle of hats for him? I objected so vigorously that he forthwith gave up all hope. But I allowed him to rest now and then by the wayside. I also offered him, gratis, the use of a handful of my choicest Tuscan blasphemies, [16] for which he was much obliged. Most of them were unfamiliar to him. He had been brought up by his mother, he explained. They seemed to make his burden lighter. Despite wondrous stretches of golden broom, this is rather a cheerless country, poorly cultivated, and still bearing the traces of mediaeval savagery and insecurity. It looks unsettled. One would like to sit down here and let the centuries roll by, watching the tramp of Roman legions and Papal mercenaries and all that succession of proud banners which have floated down this ancient Via Labiena. That rock-like structure, visible in the morning hours from Olevano, is a monstrous palace containing, among other things, a training school for carbineers. Attached thereto is a church whose interior has an unusual shape, the usual smell, and a tablet commemorating a visit from Pius IX. There is a beautiful open space up here, with wide views over the surrounding country. It gives food for thought. What an ideal spot, one says, for the populace to frequent on the evenings of these sultry days! It is empty at that hour, utterly deserted. Now why do they prefer to jostle each other in the narrow, squalid and stuffy lane lower down? One would like to know the reason for this preference. I enquired, and was told that the upper place was not sufficiently well-lighted. The explanation is not wholly convincing, for they have the lighting arrangements in their own hands, and could easily afford the outlay. It may be that they like to remain close to the shops and to each other's doors for conversational purposes, since it is a fact that, socially speaking, the more restricted the area, the more expansive one grows. We broaden out, in proportion as the environment contracts. A psychological reason.... I leaned in the bright sunshine over the parapet of this terrace, looking at Artena near-by. It resembled, now, a cluster of brown grapes clinging to the hillside. An elderly man, clean-shaven, with scarred and sallow face, drew nigh and, perceiving the direction of my glance, remarked gravely: "Artena." "Artena," I repeated. He extracted half a toscano cigar from his waistcoat pocket, and began to smoke with great gusto. A man of means, I concluded, to be able to smoke at this hour of an ordinary week-day. He was warmly dressed, with flowing brown tie and opulent vest and corduroy trousers. His feet were encased in rough riding-boots. Some peasant proprietor, very likely, who rode his own horses. Was he going to tell me anything of interest about Artena? Presumably not. He said never another word, but continued to smile at me rather wearily. I tried to enliven the conversation by pointing to a different spot on the hills and observing: "Segni." "Segni," he agreed. His cigar had gone out, as toscanos are apt to do. He applied a match, and suddenly remarked: "Velletri." "Velletri." We were not making much progress. A good many sites were visible from here, and at this rate of enumeration the sun might well set on our labours. "How about all those deserters?" I inquired. There was a fair number of them, he said. Young fellows from other provinces who find their way hither across country, God knows how. It was a good soil for deserters--brushwood, deep gullies, lonely stretches of land, and, above all, la tradizione. The tradition, he explained, of that ill-famed forest of Velletri, now extirpated. The deserters were nearly all children--the latest conscripts; a grown man seldom deserts, not because he would not like to do so, but because he has more "judgment" and can weigh the risks. The roads were patrolled by police. A few murders had taken place; yes, just a few murders; one or two stupid people who resented their demands for money or food-- He broke off with another weary smile. "You have had malaria," I suggested. "Often." The fact was patent, not only from his sallow face, but from the peculiar manner.... They brought in a deserter that very afternoon. He lay groaning at the bottom of a cab, having broken his leg in jumping down from somewhere. The rest of the conveyance was filled to overflowing with carbineers. A Sicilian, they said. The whole populace followed the vehicle uphill, reverently, as though attending a funeral. "He is little," said a woman, referring either to his size or his age. An hour later there was a discussion anent the episode in the fashionable café of Valmontone. A citizen, a well-dressed man, possibly a notary, put the case for United Italy, for intervention against Germany, for military discipline and the shooting of cowardly deserters, into a few phrases so clear, so convincing, that there was a general burst of approval. Then another man said: "I hate those Sicilians; I have good personal reasons for hating them. But no Sicilian fears death. If they are not brilliant soldiers, they certainly make first-class assassins, which is only another branch of the same business. This boy deserts not because he is afraid of death, but because he still owes a debt. He feels he ought to do something to repay his parents who nursed him when he was a child, and not be sacrificed to that kidnapping camorra of blackguards out yonder"--and he pointed with his thumb, spitting contemptuously the while, in the direction of Rome. Nobody had any comment to make on this speech. Not a word of protest was raised. The man was entitled to an opinion like everybody else, and might even have obtained his share of approval had the victim been a native. He was only a Sicilian--an outsider. What is one to say of this patriarchal, or parochial, attitude? The enlargement of Italy's boundaries--Albania, Cyrenaica, Asia Minor and so forth--is an ideal that few Italians bother their heads about. They are not sufficiently dense--not yet. [17] To found a world-empire like the British or Roman calls for a certain bullet-headed crassness. One has only to look at the Germans, who have been trying to do so for some time past. That collecting mania.... One single boy who collects postage stamps can infect his whole school with the complaint, and make them all jealous of his fine specimens. England has been collecting, for many centuries, islands and suchlike; she is paying the penalty of her acquisitive mania. She has infected others with the craze and cannot help incurring their envy, seeing that they are now equally acquisitive, but less fortunate. All the good specimens are gone! That Pergola tavern deserves its name, the courtyard being overhung with green vines and swelling clusters of grapes. The host is a canny old boy, up to any joke and any devilry, I should say. He had already taken a fancy to me on my first visit, for I cured his daughter Vanda of a raging toothache by the application of glycerine and carbolic acid. We went into his cellar, a dim tunnel excavated out of the soft tufa, from whose darkest and chilliest recesses he drew forth a bottle of excellent wine--it might have lain on a glacier, so cold it was. How thoughtful of Providence to deposit this volcanic stuff within a stone's-throw of your dining-table! Nobody need ice his wine at the Pergola. After a capital repast I sallied forth late at night and walked, striving to resemble a rich English tourist who has lost his way, along the lonely road to Artena, in order to be assassinated by the deserters or, failing that, to hear at least what these fellows have got to say for themselves. My usual luck! Not a deserter was in sight. Of my sleeping accommodation with certain old ladies, of what happened to their little dog and of other matters trivial to the verge of inanity, I may discourse upon the occasion of some later visit to Valmontone. For this, the second, was by no means the last. Meanwhile, we proceed southwards. Sant' Agata, Sorrento Siren-Land revisited.... A delightful stroll, yesterday, with a wild youngster from the village of Torco--what joy to listen to analphabetics for a change: they are indubitably the salt of the earth--down that well-worn track to Crapolla, only to learn that my friend Garibaldi, the ancient fisherman, the genius loci, has died in the interval; thence by boat to the lonely beach of Recomone (sadly noting, as we passed, that the rock-doves at the Grotto delle Palumbe are now all extirpated), where, for the sake of old memories, I indulged in a bathe and then came across an object rare in these regions, a fragment of grey Egyptian granite, relic of some pagan temple and doubtless washed up here in a wintry gale; thence, for a little light refreshment, to Nerano; thence to that ill-famed "House of the Spirits" where my Siren-Land was begun in the company of one who feared no spirits--victim, already, of this cursed war, but then a laughter-loving child--and down to the bay and promontory of Ierate, there to make the unwelcome discovery that certain hideous quarrying operations on the neighbouring hill have utterly ruined the charm of this once secluded site; thence laboriously upwards, past that line of venerable goat-caves, to the summit of Mount San Costanzo. Nothing has changed. The bay of Naples lay at my feet as of old, flooded in sunshine. There is a small outdoor cistern here. Peering into its darkness through an aperture in the roof, I noticed that there was water at the bottom; out of the water projected a stone; on the stone, a prisoner for life, sat the most disconsolate lizard imaginable. It must have tumbled through the chink, during some scuffle with a companion, into this humid cell, swum for refuge to that islet and there remained, feeding on the gnats which live in such places. I observed that its tail had grown to an inordinate length--from disuse, very likely; from lack of the usual abrasion against shrubs and stones. An unenviable fate for one of these restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to a few inches of land amid a desolation of black water. It took my thoughts back to what I saw two days ago while climbing in the torrid hour of noon up that shadeless path where the vanilla-scented orchids grow--the path which runs from Sant' Elia past the shattered Natural Arch to Fontanella. Here, at the hottest turning of the road, sat a woman in great distress. Beside her was a pink pig she had been commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower down. She said she knew about it, but the pig--the pig refused to move! It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's respite, for an hour or more; nothing would induce it to proceed a step further; it had plainly made up its mind to find shelter here from the burning rays, or die. And of shelter there was none. What would not this pig (I now thought) have given to be transported into the lizard's cool aquatic paradise; and the lizard, into that scorching sunlight!... It was not to muse upon the miseries of the animal creation that I have revisited these shores. I came to puzzle once more over the site of that far-famed Athene temple which gave its name to the whole promontory. Now, after again traversing the ground with infinite pleasure, I fail to find any reason for changing what I wrote years ago in a certain pamphlet which some scholar, glancing through these pages and anxious to explore for himself a spot of such celebrity in ancient days, is so little likely to see that he may not be sorry if I here recapitulate its arguments. Others will be well advised to pass over what follows. Let me begin by saying that the temple, in every probability, stood at the Punta Campanella facing Capri, the actual headland of the Sorrentine peninsula, where--apart from every other kind of evidence--you may pick up to this day small terra-cotta figures of Athene, made presumably to be carried away as keepsakes by visitors to the shrine. Now for alternative suggestions. Strabo tells us that the temple was placed on the akron of the promontory; that is, the summit of Mount San Costanzo where we are now standing. (He elsewhere describes it as being "on the straits.") This summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the fields below. It is incredible that no vestige of a structure like the Athene temple should remain on a spot of this kind, so favourably situated as regards immunity from depredations, owing to its isolated and exalted position. The rock-surface around the summit has not undergone that artificial levelling which an edifice of this importance would necessitate; the terrace is of mediaeval construction, as can be seen by its supporting walls. No doubt the venerable Christian sanctuary there has been frequently repaired and modified; on the terrace-level to the south can be seen the foundations of an earlier chapel, and the slopes are littered with broken bricks, Sorrentine tufa, and old battuto floors. But there is no trace of antique workmanship or material, nor has the rocky path leading up to the shrine been demarcated with chisel-cuts in the ancient fashion. The sister-summit of La Croce is equally unproductive of classical relics. We must therefore conclude that Strabo was mistaken. And why not? His accounts of many parts of the Roman world are surprisingly accurate, but, according to Professor Pais, "of Italy Strabo seems to have known merely the road which leads from Brindisi to Rome, the road between Rome and Naples and Pozzuoli, and the coast of Etruria between Rome and Populonia." If so, he probably saw no more of the district than can be seen from Naples. He attributes the foundation of this Athene temple to Odysseus: statements of such a kind make one wonder whether the earlier portions of his lost history were more critical than other old treatises which have survived. So much for Strabo. Seduced by a modern name, which means nothing more or less than "a temple"--strong evidence, surely--I was inclined to locate the Athene shrine at a spot called Ierate (marked also as Ieranto on some maps, and popularly pronounced Ghiérate the Greek aspirate still surviving) which lies a mile or more eastwards of the Punta Campanella and faces south. "Hieron," I thought: that settles it. You may guess I was not a little proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient building actually did stand there--on the southern slope, namely, of the miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay. Here I found fragments of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous Sorrentine ware--Surrentina bibis?--pavements of opus signinum, as well as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road between Termini and Punta Campanella. (How came this stone here? Did the old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No road could pass there now; deforestation has denuded the mountain-side of its soil, laying bare the grey rock--a condition at which its mediaeval name of Mons Canutarius already hints.) Well, a more careful examination of the site has convinced me that I was wrong. No temple of this magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa--one of the many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire. So much for myself. PEUTINGER'S CHART Showing ancient road rounding the headland and terminating at "Templum Minervae." None the less--and this is a really curious point--an inspection of Peutinger's Tables seems to bear out my original theory of a temple at Ierate. For the structure is therein marked not at the Punta Campanella but, approximately, at Ierate itself, facing south, with the road from Stabiae over Surrentum rounding the promontory and terminating at the temple's threshold. Capri and the Punta Campanella are plainly drawn, though not designated by name. Much as I should like my first speculation to be proved correct on the evidence of this old chart of A.D. 226, I fear both of us are mistaken. So much for Peutinger's Tables. Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He says that the "three-peaked rock" which Eratosthenes describes as separating the gulfs of Cumae and Paestum (that is, of Naples and Salerno) is Mount San Costanzo. I do not understand Beloch falling into this error, for the old geographer uses the term skopelos, which is never applied to a mountain of this size, but to cliffs projecting upon the sea. Moreover, the landmark is there to this day. I have not the slightest doubt that Eratosthenes meant the pinnacle of Ierate, which is three-peaked in a remarkably, and even absurdly, conspicuous manner, both when viewed from the sea and from the land (from the chapel of S. M. della Neve, for instance). Now this projecting cliff of three peaks--they are called, respectively, Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short--is not the actual boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from certain points it might well be mistaken for it. The ancients had no charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and, coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the turning-point into the gulf of Naples. So it looks when viewed from the S.E. of Capri; so also from the Siren islets--a veritable headland. So much for Beloch and Eratosthenes. To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary between the two gulfs. The shrine of Athene lay doubtless at Campanella, whose crag is of sufficient altitude to justify Roman poets like Statius in their descriptions of its lofty site. So great a number of old writers concur in this opinion--Donnorso, Persico, Giannettasio, Mazzella, Anastasio, Capaccio--that their testimony would alone be overwhelming, had these men been a little more careful as to what they called a "temple." Capasso, the acutest modern scholar of these regions, places it "in the neighbourhood of the Punta Campanella." Professor Pais, in 1900, wrote a paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa (1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used it), and be applicable, therefore, to the Punta Campanella. Rome Here we are. That mysterious nocturnal incident peculiar to Rome has already occurred--sure sign that the nights are growing sultry. It happens about six times in the course of every year, during the hot season. You may read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.; jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police, run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely adds, never learn the most elementary rules of decency? If I have not had the curiosity to inquire at one of these establishments what has been the result of the medical examination, it is because I will wager my last shirt that the invalid's health leaves nothing to be desired. The genesis of the affair, I take it, is this. He is in bed, suffering from the heat. Sleep refuses to come. He has already passed half the night in agony, tossing on his couch during those leaden hours when not a breath of air is astir. In any other town he would submit to the torture, knowing it to be irremediable. But Rome is the city of fountains. It is they who are responsible for this sad lapse. Their sound is clear by day; after midnight, when the traffic has died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window--hears it perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the picture of that familiar fountain; he remembers its moistened rim and basin all alive with jolly turmoil; he sees the miniature cataracts tumbling down in streaks of glad confusion, till the longing grows too strong to be controlled. The thing must be done. Next day he finds a handful of old donkeys solemnly inquiring into his state of mind.... I can sympathise with that state of mind, having often undergone the same purgatory. My room at present happens to be fairly cool; it looks north, and the fountain down below, audible at this moment, has not yet tempted me to any breach of decorum. Night is quiet here, save for the squeakings of some strange animals in the upper regions of the neighbouring Pantheon; they squeak night and day, and one would take them to be bats, were it not that bats are supposed to be on the wing after sunset. There are no mosquitoes in Rome--none worth talking about. It is well. For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m.--a habit more destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of theirs. No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well. It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation--and thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private." I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life would at last be worth living.... Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed. They are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement, with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels--in a process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth, that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting. True. But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do. Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning paper and in it pours--the oracle of the press, that manufactory of synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column, after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the Press Club. He has been told what to say--yesterday, for instance, it was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena--he has been "doped" by the editor, who gets the tip--and out he goes! unless he take it--from the owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus, and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do. It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country. It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make my plans for loafing through the day. Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans, the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of sunshine. There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza sole"--Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome, which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question nowadays. You must do as the Romans do--walk slowly and use the tram whenever possible. That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at the restaurant across the water. Its proprietor is something of a brigand; so am I, at a pinch. It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond cut diamond." Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to tickle up a walrus. Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed, both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on sunburn--a darker problem than it seems to be. [20] These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to the ruddiest of copper--not excluding that strange marbled complexion concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold and apricot and café au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come later--not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy" after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when the true origin of malaria was unknown. A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient putrefaction." A murderous flood.... That hoary, trickling structure--that fountain which has forgotten to be a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards, from its venerable lips--that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung by ancient ilexes: where shall a more reposeful spot be found? Doubly delicious, after the turmoil and glistening sheen by the river-bank. For the foliage of the oaks and sycamores is such that it creates a kind of twilight, and all around lies the tranquillity of noon. Here, on the encircling stone bench, you may idle through the sultry hours conversing with some favourite disciple while the cows trample up to drink amid moist gurglings and tail-swishings. They gaze at you with gentle eyes, they blow their sweet breath upon your cheek, and move sedately onward. The Villa Borghese can be hushed, at such times, in a kind of enchantment. "You never told me why you come to Italy." "In order," I reply, "to enjoy places like this." "But listen. Surely you have fountains in your own country?" "None quite so golden-green." "Ah, it wants cleaning, doesn't it?" "Lord, no!" I say; but only to myself. One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it. Aloud I remark:-- "Let me try to set forth, however droll it may sound, the point of view of a certain class of people, supposing they exist, who might think that this particular fountain ought never to be cleaned"--and there ensued a discussion, lasting about half an hour, in the course of which I elaborated, artfully and progressively, my own thesis, and forged, in the teeth of some lively opposition, what struck me as a convincing argument in favour of leaving the fountain alone. "Then that is why you come to Italy. On account of a certain fountain, which ought never to be cleaned." "I said on account of places like this. And I ought to have added, on account of moments such as these." "Are those your two reasons?" "Those are my two reasons." "Then you have thought about it before?" "Often." One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it. "But listen. Surely it is sometimes two o'clock in the afternoon, in your country?" "I used that word moment in a pregnant sense," I reply. "Pregnant: when something is concealed or enclosed within. What is enclosed within this moment? Our friendly conversation." "But listen. Surely folks can converse in your country?" "They can talk." "I begin to understand why you come here. It is that difference, which is new to me, between conversing and talking. Is the difference worth the long journey?" "Not to everybody, I daresay." "Why to you?" "Why to me? I must think about it." One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it. "What is there to think about? You said you had thought about it already.... Perhaps there are other reasons?" "There may be." "There may be?" "There must be. Are you satisfied?" "Ought I to be satisfied before I have learnt them?" "I find you rather fatiguing this afternoon. Did you hear about that murder in Trastevere last night and how the police----" "But listen. Surely you can answer a simple question. Why do you come to Italy...?" Why does one come here? A periodical visit to this country seems an ordinary and almost automatic proceeding--a part of one's regular routine, as natural as going to the barber or to church. Why seek for reasons? They are so hard to find. One tracks them to their lair and lo! there is another one lurking in the background, a reason for a reason. The craving to be in contact with beauty and antiquity, the desire for self-expression, for physical well-being under that drenching sunshine, which while it lasts, one curses lustily; above all, the pleasure of memory and reconstruction at a distance. Yes; herein lies, methinks, the secret; the reason for the reason. Reconstruction at a distance.... For a haze of oblivion is formed by lapse of time and space; a kindly haze which obliterates the thousand fretting annoyances wherewith the traveller's path in every country is bestrewn. He forgets them; forgets that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic islets--those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember, to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go there as a tourist--only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among them. What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu! Rome is not only the most engaging capital in Europe, it is unusually heterogeneous in regard to population. The average Parisian will assure you that his family has lived in that town from time immemorial. It is different here. There are few Romans discoverable in Rome, save across the Tiber. Talk to whom you please, you will soon find that either he or his parents are immigrants. The place is filled with hordes of employees--many thousands of them, high and low, from every corner of the provinces; the commoner sort, too, the waiters, carpenters, plasterers, masons, painters, coachmen, all the railway folk--they are hardly ever natives. Your Roman of the lower classes does not relish labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula. There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris. And over all hovers a gentle weariness. The city has undergone orgies of bloodshed and terror. Think only, without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago, moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria; that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to come. And the scorching Campagna beyond the walls, that forbidden land in whose embrace the city lies gasping, flame-encircled, like the scorpion in the tale.... A well-known scholar, surveying Rome with the mind's eye, is so impressed with its "eternal" character that he cannot imagine this site having ever been occupied otherwise than by a city. To him it seems inevitable that these walls must always have stood where now they stand--must have risen, he suggests, out of the earth, unaided by human hands. Yet somebody laid the foundation-stones, once upon a time; somebody who lived under conditions quite different from those that supervened. For who--not five thousand, but, say, five hundred years ago--who would have thought of building a town on a spot like this? None but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river--a dangerous river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place--every drawback, or nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and poison. Human ingenuity has obviated them so effectually, so triumphantly that, were green pastures not needful to me as light and air, I, for one, would nevermore stray beyond those ancient portals.... The country visits you here. It comes in the wake of that evening breeze which creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great void--a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; quite a local speciality, for the phenomenon could never occur if the surrounding regions were covered with suburbs or tilth or woodland--were aught save what they are: a desert whose vegetation of coarse herbage is in the act of withering. The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast is at an end. I am glad never to have discovered anyone, native or foreign, who has been aware of the existence of this nocturnal emanation; glad because it corroborates a theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye--how atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. The French are civilised and, if we may judge by old engravings (what else are we to take as guide, seeing that the skull affords some criterion as to shape but not size of nose?) they certainly seem to accentuate this organ in proportion as they neglect its use. Parisians, it strikes me, are running to nose; they wax more rat-like every day. Here is a little problem for anthropologists. There may be something, after all, in the condition of Paris life which fosters the development of this peeky, rodential countenance. Perfumery, and what it implies? There are scent-shops galore in the fashionable boulevards, whereas I defy you to show me a single stationer. Maupassant knew them fairly well, and one thinks of that story of his:-- "Le parfum de Monsieur?" "La verveine...." [22] Speaking of the French, I climbed those ninety odd stairs the other day to announce my arrival in Italy to my friend Mrs. N., who, being vastly busy at that moment and on no account to be disturbed, least of all by a male, sent word to say that I might wait on the terrace or in that microscopic but well-equipped library of hers. I chose the latter, and there browsed upon "Emaux et Camées" and the "Fleurs du Mal" which happened, as was meet and proper, to lie beside each other. Strange reading, at this distance of time. These, I thought--these are the things which used to give us something of a thrill. If they no longer provide that sensation, it may well be that we have absorbed their spirit so thoroughly into our system that we forget whence we drew it. They have become part of ourselves. Even now, one cannot help admiring Gautier's precision of imagery, his gift of being quaint and yet lucid as a diamond; one pictures those crocodiles fainting in the heat, and notes, too, whence the author of the "Sphinx" drew his hard, glittering, mineralogical flavour. The verse is not so much easy as facile. And not all the grace of internals can atone for external monotony. That trick--that full stop at the end of nearly every fourth line--it impairs the charm of the music and renders its flow jerky; coming, as it does, like an ever-repeated blow, it grows wearisome to the ear, and finally abhorrent. Baudelaire, in form, is more cunning and variegated. He can also delve down to deeps which the other never essayed to fathom. "Fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous"--a line which, in my friend's copy of the book, had been marked on the margin with a derisive exclamation-point. (It gave me food for thought, that exclamation-point.) But, as to substance, he contains too many nebulosities and abstractions for my taste; a veritable mist of them, out of which emerges--what? The figure of one woman. Reading these "Fleurs du Mal" we realise, not for the first time, that there is something to be said in favour of libertinage for a poet. We do not need Petrarca, much less the Love-Letters of a Violinist--no, we do not need those Love-Letters at all--to prove that a master can draw sweet strains from communion with one mistress, from a lute with one string; a formidable array of songsters, on the other hand, will demonstrate how much fuller and richer the melody grows when the instrument is provided with the requisite five, the desirable fifty. Monogamous habits have been many a bard's undoing. Twenty years' devotion to that stupid and spiteful old cat of a semi-negress! They make one conscious of the gulf between the logic of the emotions and that other one--that logic of the intellect which ought to shape our actions. Here was Baudelaire, a man of ruthless self-analysis. Did he never see himself as others saw him? Did he never say: "You are making a fool of yourself"? Be sure he did. You are making a fool of yourself: are not those the words I ought to have uttered when, standing in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo--the sunny centre: so it had been inexorably arranged--I used to wait and wait, with eyes glued to the clock hard by, in the slender shadow of that obelisque which crawled reluctantly, like the finger of fate, over the burning stones? And I crawled with it, more than content. Days of infatuation! I never pass that way now without thanking God for a misspent youth. Why not make a fool of yourself? It is good fun while it lasts; it yields mellow mirth for later years, and are not our fellow-creatures, those solemn buffoons, ten times more ridiculous? Where is the use of experience, if it does not make you laugh? The Logic of the Intellect--what next! If any one had treated me to such tomfoolery while standing there, petrified into a pillar of fidelity in that creeping shadow, I should have replied gravely: "The Logic of the Intellect, my dear Sir, is incompatible with situations like mine. It was not invented for so stupendous a crisis. I am waiting for my negress--can't you understand?--and she is already seven minutes late...." A flaming morning, forestaste of things to come. I find myself, after an early visit to the hospital where things are doing well, glancing down, towards midday, into Trajan's Forum, as one looks into some torrid bear-pit. Broken columns glitter in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on this classic soil; cats of every colour and every age--quite young ones among them; all, one would say, at the last gasp of life. This pit, this crater of flame, is their "Home for the Dying." Once down here, nothing matters any more. They are safe at last from their old enemies, from dogs and carriages and boys. Waiting for death, they move about in a stupid and dazed manner. Sunlight streams down upon their bodies. One would think they preferred to expire in the shade of some pillar or slab. Apparently not. Apparently it is all the same. It matters nothing where one dies. There is one immediately below me, a moth-eaten desiccated tortoiseshell; its eyes are closed and a red tongue hangs out of the mouth. I drop a small pebble. It wakes up and regards me stoically for a moment. Nothing more. These cats have lost their all--their self-respect. Grace and ardour, sleekness of coat and buoyancy of limbs are gone out of them. Tails are knotted with hunger and neglect; bones protrude through the skin. So they strew the ground in discomposed, un-catlike attitudes, while the sun burns through their parched anatomy. Do they remember their kittenish pranks, those moonlight ecstasies on housetops, that morsel snatched from a fishmonger's barrow and borne through the crowded traffic in a series of delirious leaps? Who can tell! They are not even bored with themselves. Their fur is in patches. They are alive when they ought to be dead. Nobody knows it better than they do. They are too ill, too far gone, to feel any sense of shame at their present degradation. Nothing matters! What would Baudelaire, that friend of cats, have said to this macabre exhibition? Yonder is an old one, giving milk to the phantom of a kitten. The parent takes no interest in the proceedings; she lies prone, her head on the ground. Her eyes have a stony look. Is she dead? Possibly. Her own kitten? Who cares! Her neighbour, once white but now earth-coloured, rises stiffly as though dubious whether the joints are still in working order. What does she think of doing? It would seem she has formed no plan. She walks up to the mother, peers intently into her face, then sits apart on her haunches and begins gazing at the sun. Presently she rises anew and proceeds five or six paces for no imaginable reason--collapses; falls, quite abruptly, on her side. There she lies, flat, like a playing-card. A sinister aimlessness pervades the actions of those that move at all. The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine. They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. One eye has been lost in some long-forgotten encounter. Now they walk over him, kittens and all, and tread about his head, as if he were a hillock of earth, while his claws twitch resentfully with rage or pain. Too ill to rise! Most of them are thus stretched out blankly, in a faint. Are they suffering? Hungry or thirsty? [23] I believe they are past troubling about such things. It is time to die. They know it.... "L'albergo dei gatti," says a cheery voice at my side--some countryman, who has also discovered Trajan's Forum to be one of the sights of Rome. "The cats' hotel. But," he adds, "I see no restaurant attached to it." That reminds me: luncheon-time. Via Flaminia--what a place for luncheon! True; but this is one of the few restaurants in Rome where, nowadays, a man is not in danger of being simultaneously robbed, starved, and poisoned. Things have come to a pretty pass. This starvation-fare may suit a saint and turn his thoughts heavenwards. Mine it turns in the other direction. Here, at all events, the food is straightforward. Our hostess, a slow elderly woman, is omnipresent; one realises that every dish has been submitted to her personal inspection. A primeval creature; heaviness personified. She moves in fateful fashion, like the hand of a clock. The crack of doom will not avail to accelerate that relentless deliberation. She reminds me of a cousin of mine famous for his imperturbable calm who, when his long curls once caught fire from being too near a candle, sleepily remarked to a terrified wife: "I think you might try to blow it out." But where shall a man still find those edible maccheroni--those that were made in the Golden Age out of pre-war-time flour? Such things are called trifles.... Give me the trifles of life, and keep the rest. A man's health depends on trifles; and happiness on health. Moreover, I have been yearning for them for the last five months. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.... There are none in Rome. Can they be found anywhere else? Mrs. Nichol: she might know. She has the gift of knowing about things one would never expect her to know. If only one could meet her by accident in the street! For at such times she is gay and altogether at your disposal. She is up to any sport, out of doors. To break upon her seclusion at home is an undertaking reserved for great occasions. The fact is, we are rather afraid of Mrs. Nichol. The incidents of what she describes as a tiresome life have taught her the value of masculine frankness--ultra-masculine, I call it. She is too frank for subterfuge of any kind. When at home, for instance, she is never "not at home." She will always see you. She will not detain you long, if you happen to be de trop. This, I persuade myself, is a great occasion--my health and happiness.... Besides, I am her oldest friend in this part of the world; was I not on the spot when she elected, for reasons which nobody has yet fathomed, to make Rome her domicile? Have I not more than once been useful to her, nay, indispensable? I therefore climb, not without trepidation, those ninety-three stairs to the very summit of the old palace, and presently find myself ushered into the familiar twilight. Nothing has changed since I was here some little time ago to announce my arrival in Italy (solemn occasion), when I had to amuse myself for an hour or so with Baudelaire in the library, Mrs. Nichol being engaged upon "house-accounts." This time, as I enter the studio, she is playing cards with a pretty handmaiden, amid peals of laughter. She often plays cards. She is puffing at a cigarette in a long mouthpiece which keeps the smoke out of her olive-complexioned face and which she holds firm-fixed between her teeth, in a corner of the mouth, after the perky fashion of a schoolboy. I have interrupted a game, and at once begin to feel de trop under a glance from those smouldering grey eyes. "It is not a trifle. It is a matter of life and death. Will you please listen for half a minute? Then I will evaporate, and you can go on with your ridiculous cards. The fact is, I am being assassinated by inches. Do you know of a place where a man can get eatable macaroni nowadays? The old kind, I mean, made out of pre-war-time flour...." She lays her hand on the cards as though to suspend the game, and asks the girl in Italian: "What was the name of that place?" "That place----" "Oh, stupid! Where I stayed with Miranda last September. Where I tore my skirt on the rock. Where I said something nice about the white macaroni?" "Soriano in Cimino." "Soriano," echoes the mistress in a cloud of smoke. "There is a tram from here every morning. They can put you up." A pause follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit--not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at self-realisation, spent a few years as the wife of a high French official, ere marrying, that is, the late lamented Nichol--another unsuccessful venture. Now why did she marry all these people (for I fancy there was yet an earlier alliance of some kind)? A whim, a freak? Or did they plague her into it? If so, I suspect they lived and died to repent their manly persistence. She could grind any ordinary male to powder. And why has she now flitted here, building herself this aerial bower above the old roofs of Rome? Is she in search of happiness? I doubt whether she will find it. She possesses that fatal craving--the craving for disinterested affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and therefore desirable above all else--desirable, and how seldom attained! The pause continues. I make a little movement, to attract notice. She looks up, but only her eyes reply. "Now, my good fellow," they seem to say, "are you blind?" That is the drawback of Mrs. Nichol. Phenomenally absent-minded, she always knows at a given moment exactly what she wants to do. And she never wants to do more than one thing at a time. It is most unwomanly of her. Any other person of her sex would have left a game of cards for the sake of an attractive visitor like myself. Or, for that matter, an ordinary lady would have played cards, given complicated orders to dressmakers and servants, and entertained half a dozen men at the same time. Mrs. Nichol cannot do these things. That hand, that rather sunburnt little hand without a single ring on it, has not moved from the table. No, I am not blind. It is quite evident that she wants to play cards; only that, and nothing more. I withdraw, stealthily. Not downstairs. I go to linger awhile on the broad terrace where jessamine grows in Gargantuan tubs; there I pace up and down, admiring the cupolas and towers of Rome that gleam orange-tawny against the blue background of distant hills. How much of its peculiar flavour a town will draw--not from artistic monuments but from the mere character of building materials! How many variations on one theme! This mellow Roman travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns, wood-towns--how they differ in mood from one another!... Here I pace up and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound. Harsh at close quarters, they weave themselves into a mirthful symphony up here. From that studio, too, comes a lively din--the laughter has begun again. Mrs. Nichol is having a good time. It will be followed, I daresay, by a period of acute depression. I shall probably be consulted with masonic frankness about some little tragedy of the emotions which is no concern of mine. She can be wondrously engaging at such times--like a child that has got into trouble and takes you into its confidence. One of these days I must write a character-sketch of Mrs. Nichol. She foreshadows a type--represents it, very possibly--a type which will grow commoner from day to day. She dreams of a Republic of women, vestals or otherwise, wherefrom all men are to be excluded unless they possess qualifications of a rather unusual nature. I think she would like to draft a set of rules and regulations for that community. She could be trusted, I fancy, to make them sufficiently stringent. I think I understand, now, why a certain line in her copy of Baudelaire was marked with that derisive exclamation-point on the margin: "Fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous." "Fuyez?" it seemed to say. "Why 'fuyez'?" Fulfil it! Soriano Amid clouds of dust you are whirled to Soriano, through the desert Campagna and past Mount Soracte, in a business-like tramway--different from that miserable Olevano affair which, being narrow gauge, can go but slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an iridescent bubble suspended in the sky. This region is unfamiliar to me. Soriano lies on the slope of an immense old volcano and conveys at first glance a somewhat ragged and sombre impression. It was an unpleasantly warm day, but those macaroni--they atoned for everything. So exquisite were they that I forthwith vowed to return to Soriano, for their sake alone, ere the year should end. (I kept my vow.) The right kind at last, of lily-like candour and unmistakably authentic, having been purchased in large quantities at the outbreak of hostilities by the provident hostess, who must have anticipated a rise in price, a deterioration in quality, or both, as the result of war. How came Mrs. Nichol to discover their whereabouts? That is her affair. I know not how she has managed, in so brief a space of time, to collect such a variety of useful local information. I can only testify that on her arrival in Rome she knew no more about the language and place than the proverbial babe unborn, and that nowadays, when anybody is faced with a conundrum like mine, one always hears the words: "Try Mrs. Nichol." And how many women, by the way, would have made a note of the particular quality of those macaroni? One in a hundred? These are temperamental matters.... We also--for of course I took a friend with me, a well-preserved old gentleman of thirty-two, whose downward career from a brilliant youth into hopeless mediocrity has been watched, by both of us, with philosophic unconcern--we also consumed a tender chicken, a salad containing olive oil and not the usual motor-car lubricant, an omelette made with genuine butter, and various other items which we enjoyed prodigiously, eating, one would think, not only for the seven lean years just past but for seven--yea, seventy times seven--lean years to come. So great a success was this open-air meal that my companion, a case-hardened Roman, was obliged to confess: "It seems one fares better in the province than at home. You could not get such bread in Rome, not if you offered fifty francs a pound." As for myself, I had lost all interest in the bread by this time, but grown fairly intimate with the wine, a rosy muscatel, faintly sparkling--very young, but not altogether innocent. There were flies, however, and dogs, and children. We ought to have remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise a rarity nowadays. It is a real shame--what is happening to Strega at this moment. It has grown so popular that the country is flooded with imitations. There must be fifty firms manufacturing shams of various degrees of goodness and badness; I have met their travellers in the most unexpected places. They reproduce the colour of Strega, its minty flavour --everything, in short, except the essential: its peculiar strength of aroma and of alcohol. They can afford to sell this poison at half the price of the original, and your artful restaurateur keeps an old bottle or two of the real product which he fills up, when empty, out of some hidden but never-failing barrel of the fraudulent mixture round the corner, charging you, of course, the full price of true Strega. If you complain, he proudly points to the bottle, the cork, the label: all authentic! No wonder foreigners, on tasting these concoctions, vow they will never touch Strega again.... We had a prolonged argument, over the coffee, about this Strega adulteration, during which I tried to make my friend comprehend how I thought the grievance ought to be remedied. How? By an injunction. That was the way to redress these wrongs. You obtain an injunction, I said, such as the French Chartreuse people obtained against the manufacturers of the Italian "Certosa," which was thereafter obliged to change its name to "Val D'Emma." More than once I endeavoured to set forth, in language intelligible to his understanding, what an injunction signified; more than once I explained how well-advised the Strega Company would be to take this course. In vain! He always missed my point. He always brought in some personal element, whereas I, as usual, confined myself to general lines, to the principle of the thing. Italians are sometimes unfathomably obtuse. "But what is an injunction?" he repeated. "If you were a little younger, there might be some hope for you. I would then try to explain it again, for the fiftieth time. Instead of that, what do you say to taking a nap?" "Ah! You have eaten too much." "Not at all. But please to note that I am tired of explaining things to people who refuse to understand." "No doubt, no doubt. Yes. A little sleep might freshen you up." "And perhaps inspire you with another subject of conversation." In the little hotel there were no rooms available just then wherein we might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber, part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of this plant, was soon snoring--another senile trait--snoring in a rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes, and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen, all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other birds--how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's stint--victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis---- And all those slaughtered beasts--those chamois, first and foremost, sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new environments--they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of life. And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts to the country and wild things. Social reasons too--a certain weariness of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing--for the killing alone would pass--invoke specially manufactured systems of ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such folk? That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which tries to see things as they are. For the pursuit brought one into relations not only with interesting birds and beasts, but with men. There was Mr. H. of the Linnean Society, whose waxed moustache curled round upon itself like an ammonite. A great writer of books was Mr. H., and a great collector of them. He collected, among other things, a rare monograph belonging to me and dealing with the former distribution of the beaver in Bavaria (we were both absorbed in beavers). Nothing I could do or say would induce him to disgorge it again; he had always lent it to a friend, who was just on the point of returning it, etc. etc. Bitterly grieved, I not only forgave him, but put him into communication with my friend Dr. Girtanner of St. Gallen, another beaver--and marmot--specialist. It stimulated his love of Swiss zoology to such an extent that he straightway borrowed a still rarer pamphlet of mine, J. J. Tschudi's "Schweizer Echsen," which I likewise never saw again. What an innocent one was! Where is now the man who will induce me to lend him such books? In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum, an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys, whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young, [24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews) of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six would have been enough," he said--a remark which struck me as rather unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins, dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a pin-tail duck. He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity--from a grimy old naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study, into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds (I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets, arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped. There were large grounds belonging to this estate, fields and woodlands once green, then blackened with soot, and now cut up into allotments and built over. Here, ever since men could remember--certainly since the place had come into the possession of the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Edward T.--a kingfisher had dwelt by a little streamlet of artificial origin which supported a few withered minnows and sticklebacks and dace. This kingfisher was one of the sights of the domain. Visitors were taken to see it. The bird, though sometimes coy, was generally on view. Nevertheless it was an extremely prudent old kingfisher; to my infinite annoyance, I never succeeded in destroying it. Nor did I even find its nest, an additional source of grief. Lancashire naturalists may be interested to know that this bird was still on the spot in the 'eighties (I have the exact date somewhere [25])--surely a noteworthy state of affairs, so near the heart of a smoky town like Manchester. Later on I learnt to slay kingfishers--the first victim falling to my gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible; once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry, now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones--the grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree, that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch---- At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir. My friend awoke, refreshed. He rubbed his eyes, and looked round. "I remember!" he began, sitting up. "I remember everything. Are you feeling better? I hope so. Yes. Exactly. Where were we? An injunction--what did you say?" At it again! "I said it was the drawback of old people that they never know when they have had enough of an argument." "But what is an injunction?" "How many more times do you wish me to make that clear? Shall I begin all over again? Have it your way! When you go into Court and ask the judge to do something to prevent a man from doing something he wants to do when you do not want him to do it. Like that, more or less." "So I gather. But I confess I do not see why a man should not do something he wants to do just because you want him not to do it. You might as well go into Court and ask the judge to do something to make a man do something he does not want to do just because you want him to do it." "Ah, but he must not, in this case. Good Lord, have I not explained that a thousand times already? You always miss my point. It is illegal, don't you understand? Illegal, illegal." "Anybody can say that. It would be a very natural thing to say, under the circumstances. I should say it myself! Now just take my advice. You go and tell your brother----" "My brother? It is not my brother. You are quite beside the point. Why introduce this personal element? It is the Strega Company. Strega, a liqueur. I am talking about a commercial concern obtaining an injunction. Burroughs and Wellcome--they got injunctions on the same grounds. I know a great deal of such things, though I don't talk about them all day long as other people would, if they possessed half my knowledge. A company, don't you see? An injunction. A liqueur. Please to note that I am talking about a company, a company. Have I now made myself clear, or how many more times----" "One would think he was at least your brother, from the way you take his part. Let us say he is a friend, then; some never-to-be-mentioned friend who is interested in a shady liqueur business and now wants to make a judge do something to make a man do something----" "Wrong again! To prevent a man doing something----" "--Wants to do something to make a judge do something to prevent a man doing something he wants to do because he does not want him to do it. Is that right? Very well. You tell your friend that no Italian judge is going to do dirty work of that kind for nothing." "Dirty work. God Almighty! I don't want any judge to do dirty work----" "No doubt, no doubt. I am quite convinced you don't. But your priceless friend does. Come now! Why not be open about it?" "Open about what?" "It is positively humiliating for me to be treated like this, after all the years we have known each other. I wish you would try to cultivate the virtue of frankness. You are far too secretive. Something will really have to be done about it." "A company, a company." "A company consists of a certain number of human beings. Why make mysteries about one of them? It may happen to the best of mankind to be mixed up----" "Mixed up----" "You are going to be disagreeable about my choice of words. Have it your way! We all know you think you can talk better Italian than the Pope. My own father, I was going to say, has been involved in some pretty dirty work in the course of his professional career----" "No doubt, no doubt." "And please to note that he is as good a man as any brother of yours." "You always miss my point." "Now try to be truthful, for once in your life. Out with it!" "A liqueur." "Is that all? Sleep does not seem to have sharpened your wits to any great extent." "I was not asleep. I was thinking about eggs. A company." "A company? You are waking up. Anything else?" "An injunction...." A distinguished writer some years ago started a crusade in favour of pure English. He wished to counteract those influences which are forever at work debasing the standard of language; whether, as he seemed to think, that standard should be inalterably fixed, is yet another question. For in literature as in conversation there is a "pure English" for every moment of history; that of our childhood is different from to-day's; and to adopt the tongue of the Bible or Shakespeare, because it happens to be pure, looks like setting back the hands of the clock. Men would surely be dull dogs if their phraseology, whether written or spoken, were to remain stagnant and unchangeable. We think well of Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms; why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on! Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be it. Were there no bad ones, there would be no good ones, and I see no reason why men should desire to live in a Golden Age of literature, save in so far as that millennium might coincide with a Golden Age of living. I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their origin is academic laziness. Certain it is that every language worthy of the name should be in a state of perennial flux, ready and avid to assimilate new elements and be battered about as we ourselves are--is there anything more charming than a thoroughly defective verb?--fresh particles creeping into its vocabulary from all quarters, while others are silently discarded. There is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth? Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things. Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or put on new faces! I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express. What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back, with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad, or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent. My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader.... Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects. Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion. Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect. Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of the skull--a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance. One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair attached to contorted limbs--they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish. They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over---- Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare phenomenon--life, and individuality, after death. They are more noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the bodies of their dear friends and relatives.... Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who, during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm. Here is the antidote to mummified Incas. Alatri What brought me to Alatri? Memories of a conversation, by Tiber banks, with Fausto, who was born here and vaunted it to be the fairest city on earth. Rome was quite a passable place, but as to Alatri---- "You never saw such walls in all your life. They are not walls. They are precipices. And our water is colder than the Acqua Marcia." "Walls and water say little to me. But if the town produces other citizens like yourself----" "It does indeed! I am the least of the sons of Alatri." "Then it must be worthy of a visit...." In the hottest hour of the afternoon they deposited me outside the city gate at some new hotel--I forget its name--to which I promptly took an unreasoning dislike. There was a fine view upon the mountains from the window of the room assigned to me, but nothing could atone for that lack of individuality which seemed to exhale from the establishment and its proprietors. It looked as though I were to be a cypher here. Half an hour was as much as I could endure. Issuing forth despite the heat, I captured a young fellow and bade him carry my bags whithersoever he pleased. He took me to the Albergo della---- The Albergo della----is a shy and retiring hostelry, invisible as such to the naked eye, since it bears no sign of being a place of public entertainment at all. Here was individuality, and to spare. Mine host is an improvement even upon him of the Pergola at Valmontone; a man after my own heart, with merry eyes, drooping white moustache and a lordly nose--a nose of the right kind, a flame-tinted structure which must have cost years of patient labour to bring to its present state of blossoming. That nose! I felt as though I could dwell for ever beneath its shadow. The fare, however, is not up to the standard of the "Garibaldi" inn at Frosinone which I have just left. Now Frosinone is no tourist resort. It is rather a dull little place; I am never likely to go there again, and have therefore no reason for keeping to myself its "Garibaldi" hotel which leaves little to be desired, even under these distressful war-conditions. It set me thinking--thinking that there are not many townlets of this size in rural England which can boast of inns comparable to the "Garibaldi" in point of cleanliness, polite attention, varied and good food, reasonable prices. Not many; perhaps very few. One remembers a fair number of the other kind, however; that kind where the fare is monotonous and badly cooked, the attendance supercilious or inefficient, and where you have to walk across a cold room at night--refinement of torture--in order to turn out the electric light ere going to bed. That infamy is alone enough to condemn these establishments, one and all. Yes! And the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns, always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a kind of river-bed where you remain fixed fast, while that monstrous feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin. Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is fit for a Christian to sleep in.... The days are growing hot. A little tract of woodland surrounded by white walls and attached to the convent on the neighbouring hill is a pleasant spot to while away the afternoon hours. You can have it to yourself. I have all Alatri to myself; a state of affairs which is not without its disadvantages, for, being the only foreigner here, one is naturally watched and regarded with suspicion. And it would be even worse in less civilised places, where one could count for certain on trouble with some conscientious official. So one remains on the beaten track, although my reputation here as non-Austrian (nobody bothers about the Germans) is fairly well established since that memorable debate, in the local cafe, with a bootmaker who, having spent three years in America, testified publicly that I spoke English almost as well as he did. The little newsboy of the place, who is a universal favourite, seeing that his father, a lithographer, is serving a stiff sentence for forgery--he brings me every day with the morning's paper the latest gossip concerning myself. "Mr. So-and-so still says you are a spy. It is sheer malice." "I know. Did you tell him he might----?" "I did. He was very angry. I also told him the remark you made about his mother." "Tell him again, to-morrow." It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half rude. In October--and we are now at midsummer--there occurred a little adventure which shows the risks one may run at a time like this. I was in Rome, walking homewards at about eleven at night along the still crowded Corso and thinking, as I went along, of my impending journey northwards for which the passport was already viséd, when there met me a florid individual accompanied by two military officers. We stared at one another. His face was familiar to me, though I knew not where I had seen it. Then he introduced himself. He was a director of the Banca d'ltalia. And was I not the gentleman who had recently been to Orvinio? I remembered. "The last time I was there," I said, "was about a month ago. I fancy we had some conversation in the motor up from Mandela." "That is so. And now, however disagreeable it may be, I feel myself obliged to perform a patriotic duty. This is war-time. I would ask you to be so good as to accompany us to the nearest police-station." "Which is not far off," I replied. "There is one up the next street on our right." We walked there, all four of us, without saying another word. "What have I been doing?" I wondered. Then we climbed upstairs. Here, at a well-lighted table in a rather stuffy room, sat a delegato or commissario--I forget which--surrounded, despite the lateness of the hour, by one or two subordinates. He was of middle age, and not prepossessing. He looked as if he could make himself unpleasant, though his face was not of that actively vicious--or actively stupid: the terms are interconvertible--kind. While scanning his countenance, during those few moments, sundry thoughts flitted through my mind. These then, I said to myself--these are the functionaries, whether executive or administrative, whether Italian or English or Chinese, whom a man is supposed to respect. Who are they? God knows. Nine-tenths of them are in a place where they have no business to be: so much is certain. And what are they doing, these swarms of parasites? Justifying their salaries by inventing fresh regulations and meddlesome bye-laws, and making themselves objectionable all round. Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty, even as the first military duty is said to be the reverse of it. We catch ourselves talking of the "lesson of history." Why not take that lesson to heart? Reverence of the mandarin destroyed the fair life of old China, which was overturned by the Tartars not because Chinamen were too weak or depraved, but because they were the opposite: too moral, too law-abiding, too strong in their sense of right. They paid for their virtue with the extinction of their wonderful culture. They ought to have known better; they ought to have rated morality at its true worth, since it was the profoundest Chinaman himself who said that virtue is merely etiquette--or something to that effect. I found myself studying the delegato's physiognomy. What could one do with such a composite face? It is a question which often confronts me when I see such types. It confronted me then, in a flash. How make it more presentable, more imposing? By what alterations? Shaving that moustache? No; his countenance could not carry the loss; it would forfeit what little air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard, an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and valets of European royalties. He took down the names and addresses of all four of us, and it was then that I missed my chance. I ought to have spoken first instead of allowing this luscious director to begin as follows:-- "The foreign gentleman here was at Orvinio about a month ago. He admits it himself and I can corroborate the fact, as I was there at the same time. Orvinio is a small country place in the corner of Umbria. There is a mountain in the neighbourhood, remote and very high--altissima! It is called Mount Muretta and occupies a commanding situation. For reasons which I will leave you, Signer Commissario, to investigate, this gentleman climbed up that mountain and was observed, on the very summit, making calculations and taking measurements with instruments." Now why did I climb up that wretched Muretta? For an all-sufficient reason: it was a mountain. There is no eminence in the land, from Etna and the Gran Sasso downwards, whose appeal I can resist. A bare wall-like patch on the summit (whence presumably the name) visible from below and promising a lively scramble up the rock, was an additional inducement. Precipices are not so frequent at Orvinio that one can afford to pass them by, although this one, as a matter of fact, proved to be a mighty tame affair. There was yet another object to my trip. I desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio, bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta." (There is not a vestige of a castle left. But I found one brick in the jungle which covers, on the further side of the summit, a vast rock-slide dating, I should say, from early mediaeval days, under whose ruins the fastness may lie buried.) Reasons enough for visiting Muretta. As to taking measurements--well, a man is naturally accused of a good many things in the course of half a century. Nobody has yet gone so far as to call me a mathematician. These "calculations and instruments" were a local mirage; as pretty an instance of the mythopoeic faculty as one could hope to find in our degenerate days, when gods no longer walk the earth. [27] The official seemed to be impressed with the fact that my accuser was director of a bank. He inquired what I had to say. This was a puzzle. They had sprung the thing on me rather suddenly. One likes to have notice of such questions. Tell the truth? I am often tempted to do so; it saves so much trouble! But truth-telling is a matter of longitude, and the further east one goes, the more one learns to hold in check that unnatural propensity. (Mankind has a natural love of the lie itself. Bacon.) Which means nothing more than that one will do well to take account of national psychology. An English functionary, athlete or mountaineer, might have glimpsed the state of affairs. But to climb in war-time, without any object save that of exercising one's limbs and verifying a questionable legend, a high and remote mountain--Muretta happens to be neither the one nor the other--would have seemed to an Italian an incredible proceeding. I thought it better to assume the role of accuser in my turn: an Oriental trick. "This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot. What has he told us? That while at Orvinio he knew a foreigner who climbed a high mountain to make calculations with instruments. What does this admirable citizen do with regard to such a suspicious character? He does nothing. Is there not a barrack-full of carbineers at the entrance of the place ready to arrest such people? But our patriotic gentleman allows the spy to walk away, to climb fifty other mountains and take five thousand other measurements, all of which have by this time safely reached Berlin and Vienna. That, Signor Commissario, is not our English notion of patriotism. I shall certainly make it my business to write and congratulate the Banca d'Italia on possessing such a good Italian as director. I shall also suggest that his talents would be more worthily employed at the Banca--" (naming a notoriously pro-German establishment). A poor speech; but it gave me the satisfaction of seeing the fellow grow purple with fury and so picturesquely indignant that he soon reached the spluttering stage. In fact, there was nothing to be done with him. The delegato suggested that inasmuch as he had said his say and deposited his address, he was at liberty to depart, whenever so disposed. They went--he and his friends. The other was looking serious--as serious as such a face could be made to look. He must not be allowed to think, I decided, for once an official begins to think he is liable to grow conscientious and then--why, any disaster might happen, the least of them being that I should remain in custody pending investigations. In how many more countries was I going to be arrested for one crime or another? This joke had lost its novelty a good many years ago. "A pernicious person," I began, "--you have but to look at him. And now he has invited me here in order to make a patriotic impression on his friends, those poor little devils in uniform (a safe remark, since no love is lost hereabouts between police and military). Such silly talk about measurements! It should be nipped in the bud. Here you have an intelligent young subordinate, if I mistake not. Let him drive home with me at my expense; we will go through all papers and search for instruments and bring everything that savours of suspicion back to this office, together with my passport which I never carry on my person. This, meanwhile, is my carta di soggiorno." The document was in order. Still he hesitated. I thought of those miserable three days' grace which were all that the French consulate had accorded me. If the man grew conscientious, I might remain stranded in Rome, and all that passport trouble must begin again. And to tell him of this dilemma would make him more distrustful than ever. I went on hastily to admit that my request might not be regular, but how natural! Were we not allies? Was it not my duty to clear myself of such an imputation at the earliest moment and to spare no efforts to that end? I felt sure he could sympathise with the state of my mind, etc. etc. Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable. The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military service. We drove away and, on reaching our destination, I insisted, despite his polite remonstrances, on turning everything upside down. We made hay of the apartment, but discovered nothing more treasonable than some rather dry biscuits and a bottle of indifferent Marsala. "And now I must really be going," he said. "Half-past one! He will be surprised at my long absence." "I am coming with you. I promised him the passport." "Don't dream of it. To-morrow, to-morrow. You will have no trouble with him. You can bring the passport, but he will not look at it. Yes; ten o'clock, or eleven, or midday." So it happened. The passport was waived aside by the official, a little detail which, I must say, struck me as more remarkable than anything else. He did not even unfold it. "E stato un' equivoco," was all he condescended to say, still without a smile. There had been a misunderstanding. The incident was closed. Things might have gone differently in the country. I would either have been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet--an inquiry without which no Latin dossier is complete. POSTSCRIPT.--Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio? And how many of these myriad public guardians scattered all over the country ever come into contact with a criminal, or even have the luck to witness a street accident? And would the taxpayer not profit by a reduction in their numbers? And whether legal proceedings of every kind would not tend to diminish? There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome; fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace. Seldom do they meddle with local concerns--far from it! They live in sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics on a judge of the high court--which calls for a different technique. Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third man you meet--an official, of course, of some kind--with a revolver strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of common sense--of realising that local institutions often work with less friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation of which the carbineers are an example. Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses five gateways--five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition, it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four gateways! For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning, to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal, those blocks--what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad modern "Via Romana"--a goat-track, nowadays.... These Alatri remains are wonderful--more so than many of the sites which old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him "hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again says nothing whatever.... I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a philosophy of life. And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes. Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit. His equipment in the interpretation of these stones and of all else he picked up in the way of lore and legend was of the proper kind. Boundless curiosity, first of all. And then, an adequate apparatus of learning. He knew his classics--knew them so well that he could always put his finger on those particular passages of theirs which bore upon a point of interest. We may doubtless be able to supply some apt quotation from Virgil or Martial. It is quite a different thing remembering, and collating, references in. Aelian or Pliny or Aristotle or Ptolemy. And wide awake, withal; not easily imposed upon. He is not of the kind to swallow the tales of the then fashionable cicerone's. He has critical dissertations on sites like Cannae and the Bandusian Fountain and Caudine Forks; and when, at Nola, they opened in his presence a sepulchre containing some of those painted Greek vases for which the place is famous, he promptly suspects it to be a "sepulchre prepared for strangers," and instead of buying the vases allows them to remain where they are "for more simple or less suspicious travellers." On the way to Cape Leuca he passes certain mounds whose origin he believes to be artificial and the work of a prehistoric race. I fancy his conjecture has proved correct. On page 258, speaking of an Oscan inscription, he mentions Mommsen, which shows that he kept himself up to date in such researches.... Of course it would be impossible to feel any real fondness for Ramage before one has discovered his failings and his limitations. Well, he seems to have taken Pratilli seriously. I like this. A young fellow who, in 1828, could have guessed Pratilli to have been the arch-forger he was--such a young fellow would be a freak of learning. He says little of the great writers of his age; that, too, is a weakness of youth whose imagination lingers willingly in the past or future, but not in the present. The Hohenstauffen period does not attract him. He rides close to the magnificent Castel del Monte but fails to visit the site; he inspects the castle of Lucera and says never a word about Frederick II or his Saracens. At Lecce, renowned for its baroque buildings, he finds "nothing to interest a stranger, except, perhaps, the church of Santa Croce, which is not a bad specimen of architectural design." True, the beauty of baroque had not been discovered in his day. What pleases me less is that there occurs hardly any mention of wild animals in these pages, and that he seems to enjoy natural scenery in proportion as it reminds him of some passage in one of those poets whom he is so fond of quoting. This love of poetic extracts and citations is a mark of his period. It must have got the upper hand of him in course of time, for we find, from the title-page of these "Nooks and Byways," that he was the author of "Beautiful Thoughts from Greek authors; Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian authors, etc."; [29] indeed, the publication of this particular book, as late as 1868, seems to have been an afterthought. How greatly one would prefer a few more "Nooks and By-ways" to all these Beautiful Thoughts! He must have been at home again, in some bleak Caledonian retreat, when the poetic flowers were gathered. If only he had lingered longer among the classic remains of the south, instead of rushing through them like an express train. That mania of "pressing forward"; that fatal gift of hustle.... His body flits hither and thither, but his mind remains observant, assimilative. It is only on reading this book carefully that one realises how full of information it is. Ay, he notices things, does Ramage--non-antiquarian things as well. He always has time to look around him. It is his charm. An intelligent interest in the facts of daily life should be one of the equipments of the touring scholar, seeing that the present affords a key to the past. Ramage has that gift, and his zest never degenerates into the fussiness of many modern travellers. He can talk of sausages and silkworms, and forestry and agriculture and sheep-grazing, and how they catch porcupines and cure warts and manufacture manna; he knows about the evil eye and witches and the fata morgana and the tarantula spider, about figs in ancient and modern times and the fig-pecker bird--that bird you eat bones and all, the focetola or beccafico (garden warbler). In fact, he has multifarious interests and seems to have known several languages besides the classics. He can hit off a thing neatly, as, when contrasting our sepulchral epitaphs with those of olden days, he says that the key-note of ours is Hope, and of theirs, Peace; or "wherever we find a river in this country (Calabria) we are sure to discover that it is a source of danger and not of profit." He knew these southern torrents and river-beds! He garners information about the Jewish and Albanian colonies of South Italy; he studies Romaic "under one of the few Greeks who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea (Maratea, by the way, has a Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as they did at Marathon itself). A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation, with the Jesuits. That is as it should be. Extremes can always respect one another. The Jesuits, I doubt not, learnt as much from Ramage as he from them.... I wish I had encountered this book earlier. It would have been useful to me when writing my own pages on the country it describes. I am always finding myself in accord with the author's opinions, even in trivial matters such as the hopeless inadequacy of an Italian breakfast. He was personally acquainted with several men whose names I have mentioned--Capialbi, Zicari, Masci; he saw the Purple Codex at Rossano; in fact, there are numberless points on which I could have quoted him with profit. And even at an earlier time; for I once claimed to have discovered the ruins of a Roman palace on the larger of the Siren islets (the Galli, opposite Positano)--now I find him forestalling me by nearly a century. It is often thus, with archaeological discoveries. He saw, near Cotrone, that island of the enchantress Calypso which has disappeared since his day, and would have sailed there but for the fact that no boat was procurable. I forget whether Swinburne, who landed here, found any prehistoric remains on the spot; I should doubt it. On another Mediterranean island, that of Ponza, I myself detected the relics of what would formerly have been described as the residence of that second Homeric witch, Circe. [30] The mention of discoveries reminds me that I have already, of course, discovered my ideal family at Alatri. Two ideal families.... One of them dwells in what ought to be called the "Conca d'Oro," that luxuriant tract of land beyond the monastery where the waters flow--that verdant dale which supplies Alatri, perched on its stony hill, with fruit and vegetables of every kind. The man is a market-gardener with wife and children, a humble serf, Eumaeus-like, steeped in the rich philosophy of earth and cloud and sunshine. I bring him a cigar in the cool of the evening and we smoke on the threshold of his two-roomed abode, or wander about those tiny patches of culture, geometrically disposed, where he guides the water with cunning hand athwart the roots of cabbages and salads. He is not prone to talk of his misfortunes; intuitive civility has taught him to avoid troubling a stranger with personal concerns. The mother is more communicative; she suffers more acutely. They are hopelessly poor, she tells me, and in debt; unlucky, moreover, in their offspring. Two boys had already died. There are only two left. "And this one here is in a bad way. He has grown too ill to work. He can only mope about the place. Nothing stays in his stomach--nothing; not milk, not an egg. Everything is rejected. The Alatri doctor treated him for stomach trouble; so did he of Frosinone. It has done no good. Now there is no more money for doctors. It is hard to see your children dying before your eyes. Look at him! Just like those two others." I looked at him. "You sent him into the plains last summer?" I ventured. "To Cisterna. One must make a little money, or starve." "And you expect to keep your children alive if you send them to Cisterna?" I was astonished that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria. I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, and the good doctor Salatino of the Via Torino--a Calabrian who knows something about malaria--wrote out a treatment for this neglected case, no part of which, I fear, has been observed. Such is the fatalism of the country-folk that if drugs and injections do not work like magic they are quietly discarded. This youth may well have gone the way of "those other two"--who, by the by, were also sent into the Pontine Marshes--since you cannot reject your food for ever, and grow more anaemic every day, without producing some such result.) Meanwhile my friendly offer caused so great a joy in the mother's heart that I became quite embarrassed. She likened me, among other things, to her favourite Saint. All comparisons being odious, I turned the conversation by asking: "And that last one?" "Here," she said, pushing open the door of the inner room. He lay on the couch fast asleep, in a glorious tangle of limbs, the picture of radiant boyhood. "This one, I think, has never been to Cisterna." "No. He goes into the mountains with the woodcutters every morning an hour before sunrise. It is up beyond Collepardo--seven hours' labour, and seven hours' march there and back. The rest of the time he sleeps like a log...." Children from these hill-places often accompany their parents into the plains to work; more commonly they go in droves of any number under the charge of some local man. They are part of that immense army of hirelings which descends annually, from the uplands of Tuscany to the very toe of Italy, into these low-lying regions, hardly an inch of which is fever-free. I do not know even approximately the numbers of these migratory swarms of all ages and both sexes; let us say, to be on the safe side, a quarter of a million. They herd down there, in the broiling heat of summer and autumn, under conditions which are not all that could be desired. [31] Were they housed in marble palaces and served on platters of gold, the risk would not be diminished by a hair. How many return infected? I have no idea. It cannot be less than sixty per cent. How many of these perish? Perhaps five per cent. A few thousand annual deaths are not worth talking about. What concerns the country--and what the country, indeed, has taken seriously in hand--is this impoverishment of its best blood; this devitalising action of malaria upon unnumbered multitudes of healthy men, women, and children who do not altogether succumb to its attacks. I sometimes recognise them on the platform of Rome station--family parties whom I have met in their country villages, now bound for Maccarese or one of those infernal holes in the Campagna, there to earn a little extra money with hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they return to their mountains later on.... And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a book.... Into half a book; for here--at Alatri, and now--midsummer, I mean to terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant. Half a book: I perceive it clearly. These pages might be rounded by another hundred or two. The design is too large for one volume; it reminds me of those tweed suits we used to buy long ago whose pattern was so "loud" that it "took two men to show it off." Which proves how a few months' self-beguilement by the wayside of a beaten track can become the subject of disquisitions without end. Maybe the very aimlessness of such loiterings conduces to a like method of narrative. Maybe the tone of the time fosters a reminiscential and intimately personal mood, by driving a man for refuge into the only place where peace can still be found--into himself. What is the use of appealing in objective fashion to the intelligence of a world gone crazy? Say your say. Go your way. Let them rave! We shall all be pro-German again to-morrow. [32] Half a book: it strikes me, on reflection, as curiously appropriate. To produce something incomplete and imperfect, a torso of a kind--is it not symbolical of the moment? Is not this an age of torso's? We are manufacturing them every hour by the score. How many good fellows are now crawling about mutilated, converted into torso's? There is room for a book on the same lines.... I glance through what has been written and detect therein an occasional note of exacerbation and disharmony which amuses me, knowing, as I do, its transitory nature. Dirty work, touching dirt. One cannot read for three consecutive years of nothing but poison-gas and blood and explosives without engendering a corresponding mood--a mood which expresses itself in every one according to whether he thinks individually or nationally; whether he cultivates an impartial conscience or surrenders to that of the crowd. For the man and his race are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect. How many things a race can do which its component members, taken separately, would blush to imitate! Our masses are now fighting for commercial supremacy. The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense: "One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these, and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed herd." It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull downwards--stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect.... Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites might have been explored during that period! Adventures and discoveries might have fallen to my lot, and been duly noted down. As it is, nothing happened, and nothing was noted down. I have only a diary of dates to go upon, out of which, with the help of memory and imagination, have been extracted these pages. For generally, delving down into memory, a man can bring up at least one clear-cut fragment, something still fervid and flashing, a remembered voice or glimpse of landscape which helps to unveil the main features of a scenario already relegated to the lumber-room. And this detail will unravel the next; the scattered elements jostle each other into place, as in the final disentangling of some complicated fugue. Such things will do for a skeleton. Imagination will kindly provide flesh and blood, life, movement. Imagination--why not? One suppresses much; why not add a little? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy has been so sternly banned of late from travellers' tales that I am growing tender-hearted towards the poor old dame; quite chivalrous, in fact--especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself unable to dispense with her services. Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. We cannot lay claim to a truthful state of mind. In this respect the eighteenth century, for all its foppery, was ahead of ours. What is the basic note of Horace Walpole's iridescent worldliness--what about veracity? How one yearns, nowadays, for that spacious and playful outlook of his; or, better still, for some altogether Golden Age where everybody is corrupt and delightful and has nothing whatever to do, and does it well.... My second ideal family at Alatri lives along a side path which diverges off the main road to Ferentino. They are peasant proprietors, more wealthy and civilised than those others, but lacking their terrestrial pathos. They live among their own vines and fruit-trees on the hillside. The female parent, a massive matron, would certainly never send those winsome children into the Pontine Marshes, not for a single day, not for their weight in gold. The father is quite an uncommon creature. I look at him and ask myself; where have I seen that face before, so classic and sinewy and versatile? I have seen it on Greek vases, and among the sailors of the Cyclades and on the Bosphorus. It is a non-Latin face, with sparkling eyes, brown hair, rounded forehead and crisply curling beard; a legendary face. How came Odysseus to Alatri? Not far from this homestead where I have spent sundry pleasant hours there is a fountain gushing out of a hollow. In olden days it would have been hung with votive offerings to the nymphs, and rightly. One appreciates this nature-cult in a dry land. I have worshipped at many such shrines where the water bounds forth, a living joy, out of the rocky cleft--unlike those sluggish springs of the North that ooze regretfully upwards, as though ready to slink home again unless they were kicked from behind, and then trickle along, with barely perceptible movement, amid weeds and slime. Now this particular fountain (I think it is called acqua santa), while nowise remarkable as regards natural beauty, is renowned for curing every disease. It is not an ordinary rill; it has medicinal properties. Hither those two little demons, the younger children, conducted me all unsuspecting two days ago, desirous that I should taste the far-famed spring. "Try it," they said. I refused at first, since water of every kind has a knack of disagreeing with my weak digestion. As for them, they gulped down tumblers of it, being manifestly inured to what I afterwards discovered to be its catastrophic effects. "Look at us drinking it," they went on. "Ah, how good! Delicious! It is like Fiuggi, only better." "Am I an invalid, to drink Fiuggi water?" "It is not quite the same as Fiuggi. (True. I was soon wishing it had been.) How many men would pay dearly for your privilege! Never let it be said that you went away thirsting from this blessed spot." "I am not thirsty just now. Not at all thirsty, thank you." "We have seen you drink without being thirsty. Just one glass," they pleaded. "It will make you live a hundred years." "No. Let us talk about something else." "No? Then what shall we tell our mother? That we brought you here, and that you were afraid of a little mouthful of acqua santa? We thought you had more courage. We thought you could strangle a lion." "Something will happen," I said, as I drained that glass. Nothing happened for a few hours. Two days' rest is working wonders.... I profit by the occasion of this slight indisposition to glance backwards--and forwards. I am here, at Alatri, on the 22 June: so much is beyond contestation. A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I remember the hot walk to Palombara! August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza. Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral--aloft under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing would induce me to set down here. July 26: La Rocca. What happened at La Rocca? October 2: Florence. What happened at Florence? A good deal, during those noteworthy twelve hours! Some memories have grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct, for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream out of which there emerges nothing save the figure of the local tobacconist, a ruddy type with the face of a Roman farmer, who took me to booze with him, in broad patriarchal style, every night at a different friend's house. Those nights at Montecelio! The mosquitoes! The heat! Could this be the place which was famous in Pliny's day for its grove of beeches? How I used to envy the old Montecelians their climate! July 23: Saracinesca. What happened? I recollect the view over the sweltering Campagna from the dizzy castle-ruin, in whose garden I see myself nibbling a black cherry, the very last of the season, plucked from a tree which grows beside the wall whereon I sat. That suffices: it gives a key to the situation. I can now conjure up the gaunt and sombre houses of this thick-clustering stronghold; the Rembrandtesque shadows, the streets devoid of men, the picture of some martial hero in a cavern-like recess where I sought shelter from the heat, a black crucifix planted in the soil below the entrance of the village--my picture of Saracinesca is complete, in outline. July 31: Subiaco. Precisely! A week later, then, I walk thirty-two chilometres along the shadeless high road, an insane thing to do, to Subiaco and back. There, in the restaurant Aniene, when all the luncheon-guests have departed for their noonday nap, the cook of the establishment, one of those glorious old Roman he-cooks, comes up to my table. Did I like the boiled trout? Rather flabby, I reply. A little tasteless. Let him try, next time, some white vinegar in the water and a bay-leaf or two. He pricks up his ears: we are gens du metier. I invite him to sit down and inquire: how about a bottle of Cesanese, now that we are alone? An excellent idea! And he, in his turn, will permit himself to offer me certain strawberries from his own private store. "Strawberries?" I ask. "Who ever heard of strawberries in Central Italy on the 31 July? Why, I devoured the last cherry a week ago, and it was only alive because it grew above the clouds." These, he explains mysteriously, are special strawberries, brought down from near the snow-line by a special goat-boy. They are not for the guests, but "only for myself." Strawberries are always worth paying for; they are mildly purging, they go well with the wine. And what a wonderful scent they have! "You remind me of a certain Lucullo," I said, "who was also nice about strawberries. In fact, he made a fine art of eating and drinking." "Your Lucullo, we may take it, was a Roman?" "Romano di Roma." Thus conversing with this rare old ruffian, I forget my intention of leaving a card on Saint Scolastica. She has waited for me so long. She can wait a little longer.... August 9: Villa Lante. August 12: Ferento. What happened at Ferento? Now what happened at Ferento? Let me try to reconstruct that morning's visit. I have clear memories of the walk from Viterbo--it would be eighteen chilometres there and back, they told me. I had slept well in my quaint little room with the water rushing under the window, and breakfasted in receptive and responsive mood. I recall that trudge along the highway and how I stepped across patches of sunlight from the shade of one regularly planted tree into that of another. The twelfth of August.... It set me thinking of heathery moorlands and grouse, and of those legions of flies that settle on one's nose just as one pulls the trigger. It all seemed dim and distant here, on this parching road, among southern fields. I was beginning to be lost in a muse as to what these boreal flies might do with themselves during the long winter months while all the old women of the place are knitting Shetland underwear when, suddenly, a little tune came into my ears--a wistful intermezzo of Brahms. It seemed to spring out of the hot earth. Such a natural song, elvishly coaxing! Would I ever play it again? Neither that, nor any other. It turned my thoughts, as I went along, to Brahms and led me to understand why no man, who cares only for his fellow-creatures, will ever relish that music. It is an alien tongue, full of deeps and rippling shallows uncomprehended of those who know nothing of lonely places; full of thrills and silences such as are not encountered among the habitations of men. It echoes the multitudinous voice of nature, and distils the smiles and tears of things non-human. This man listened, all alone; he overheard things to which other ears are deaf--things terrible and sweet; the sigh of some wet Naiad by a reedy lake, the pleadings and furies of the genii--of those that whisper in woodlands and caverns by the sea, and ride wailing on thunder-laden clouds, and rock with ripe laughter in sunny wildernesses. Brahms is the test. Whoso dreads solitude will likewise dread his elemental humour. It kept me company, this melodious and endearing fairy, till where a path, diverging to the right, led up to the ruins already visible. There the ethereal comrade took flight, scared, maybe, because my senses took on a grossly mundane complexion--it is a way they have, thank God--became absorbed, that is, in the contemplation of certain blackberries wherewith the hedge was loaded. I thought: the tons of blackberries that fall to earth in Italy, unheeded! And not even a Scotsman knows what blackberries are, until he has tasted these. I am no gourmet of such wild things; I rather agree with Goethe when he says: "How berries taste, you must ask children." But I can sympathise with the predilections of others, having certain predilections of my own. Once, at a miserable place in North Ireland, region of bad whisky and porter, they brought me at dinner some wine of which they knew nothing--they had got it from a shipwreck or some local sale. I am rather fond of hock. And this particular bottle bore on its label the magic imprint of a falcon sitting on a hilltop. Connoisseurs will know that falcon. They will understand how it came about that I remained in the inn till the last bottle of nectar was cracked. What a shame to leave a drop for anybody else! Once again, on a bicycle trip from Paris to the Mediterranean, I came upon a broad, smiling meadow somewhere in the Auvergne, thickly besprinkled with mushrooms. There was a village hard by. In that village I remained till the meadow was close cropped. Half a ton of mushrooms--gone. Some people are rather fond of mushrooms. And that is the right spirit: to leave nothing but a tabula rasa for those that come after. It hurt me to think that anybody else should have a single one of those particular mushrooms. Let them find new ones, in another field; not in mine. Now what would your amateur of blackberries do in Italy? From the fate which nearly overtook me he might save himself by specialising; by dividing the many local varieties into two main classes and devoting his whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found on Elba--small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their portentous clusters--swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught with chilly mountain dews. No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an unfair division of labour--so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else--seeing that every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four months--he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense, devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear--browsing aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock and jungle--grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more--the last, the very last, of their race--dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would be a merrier place.... Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare--brown earth, brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones. Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble would not occur there. I seek for coloured ones and find not the smallest fragment; nothing but white. Ergo, the place was relatively insignificant; else the reds and yellows would also be discoverable. I observe incidentally--quite incidentally!--that the architecture corroborates my theory; so do the guide-books, no doubt, if there are any. Now I know, furthermore, the origin of that small slab of verde antico which had puzzled me, mixed up, as it was, among the mosaics of quite modern marbles in that church whither I had been conducted by a local antiquarian to admire a certain fresco recently laid bare, and some rather crude daubs by Romanelli. Out again, into the path that overlooks the steep ravine. Here I find, resting in the shadow of the wall, an aged shepherd and his flock and a shaggy, murderous-looking dog of the Campagna breed that shows his teeth and growls incessantly, glaring at me as if I were a wolf. "Barone" is the brute's name. I had intended to clamber down and see whether the rock-surface bears any traces of human workmanship; the rock-surface, I now decide, may take care of itself. It has waited for me so long. It can wait a little longer. "Does that beast of yours eat Christians?" "He? He is a perfect capo di c----. That is his trick, to prevent people from kicking him. They think he can bite." I produce half a cigar which he crushes up into his black clay pipe. "Yours is not a bad life." "One lives. But I had better times in Zurich." He had stayed there awhile, working in some factory. He praised its food, its beer, its conveniences. Zurich: incongruous image! Straightway I was transported from this harmonious desolation of Ferento; I lost sight of yonder clump of withering thistles--thistles of recent growth; you could sit, you could stand, in their shade--and found myself glancing over a leaden lake and wandering about streets full of ill-dressed and ungracious folk; escaping thence further afield, into featureless hills encrusted with smug, tawdry villas and drinking-booths smothered under noisome horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct! Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity? So this old man had been there. And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness"--some such phrase. [33] It is apt. Zurich: fearsome town! Its ugliness is of the active kind; it grips you by the throat and sits on your chest like a nightmare. I looked at the old fellow. He was sound; he had escaped the contagion. Those others, those many hundred thousand others in Switzerland and America--they can nevermore shake off the horrible dead ordinariness of that life among machines. Future generations will hardly recognise the Italian race from our descriptions. A new type is being formed, cold and loveless, with all the divinity drained out of them. Having a long walk before me and being due home for luncheon, I rose to depart, and in so doing bestowed a vigorous kick upon Barone, in order to test the truth of his master's theory. It worked. The glowering and snarling ceased. He was a good dog--almost human. I think, with a few more kicks, he might have grown quite friendly. Along that hot road the spectre of Zurich pursued me, in all its starkness. A land without atmosphere, and deficient in every element of the picturesque, whether of man or nature. Four harsh, dominant tones, which never overlap or intermingle: blue sky, white snow, black fir-woods, green fields, and, if you insist upon having a fifth, then take--yes, take and keep--that theatrical pink Alpenglühen which is turned on at fixed hours for the delectation of gaping tourists, like a tap of strontium light or the display of electric fluid at Schaffhausen Falls. "Did you observe the illumination of the Falls, sir, last night?" "How can one avoid seeing the beastly thing?" "Ah! Then we must add two francs to the bill." Many are the schools of art that have grown up in England and elsewhere and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only on condensed milk tins. These folks can write. My taste in lyrics may be peculiar, but I used to love my Leuthold--I wish I had him here at this moment; the bold strokes of Keller, the miniature work, the cameo-like touches, of C. F. Meyer--they can write! They would doubtless paint, were there anything to paint. Holbein: did the landscape of Switzerland seduce him? And Boecklin? He fled out of its welter of raw materialism. Even his Swiss landscapes are mediterraneanized. Boecklin---- And here, as the name formulated itself, that little sprite of Brahms, that intermezzo, once more leapt to my side out of the parched fields. I imagine it came less for my sake than for the companionship of Boecklin. They were comrades in the spirit; they understood. What one had heard, the other beheld--shapes of mystery, that peer out of forest gloom and the blue hush of midday and out of glassy waters--shapes that shudder and laugh. No doubt you may detect a difference between Boecklin's creations and those of classic days; it is as if the light of his dreamings had filtered through some medium, some stained-glass window in a Gothic church which distorted their outlines and rendered them somewhat more grotesque. It is the hand of time. The world has aged. Yet the shapes are young; they do but change their clothes and follow the fashion in externals. They laugh as of old. How they laugh! No mortal can laugh so heartily. No mortal has such good cause. Theirs is not the serene mirth of Olympian spheres; it sounds demoniac, from the midway region. What are they laughing at, these cheerful monsters? At the greatest jest in the universe. At us.... That lake of Conterano--the accent is on the ante-penultima--it looked appetising on the map, all alone out there. It attracted me strongly. I pictured a placid expanse, an eye of blue, sleepily embowered among wooded glens and throwing upward the gleam of its calm waters. Lakes are so rare in Italy. During the whole of this summer I saw only one other, fringed with the common English reed--two, rather, lying side by side, one turbid and the other clear, and filling up two of those curious circular depressions in the limestone. I rode past them on the watershed behind Cineto Romano. These were sweet water. Of sulphur lakelets I also saw two. Sitting on a stone into which the coldness of midnight had entered (Alatri lies at a good elevation) I awaited my companion in the dusk of dawn. Soon enough, I knew, we should both be roasted. This half-hour's shivering before sunrise in the square of Alatri, and listening to the plash of the fountain, is one of those memories of the town which are graven most clearly in my mind. I could point out, to-day, the very spot whereon I sat. We wandered along the Ferentino road to begin with, profiting by some short cuts through chestnut woods; turned to the right, ever ascending, behind that strange village of Fumone, aloft on its symmetrical hill; thence by a mule-track onward. Many were the halts by the way. A decayed roadside chapel with faded frescoes--a shepherd who played us some melodies on his pipe--those wondrous red lilies, now in their prime, glowing like lamps among the dark green undergrowth--the gateway of a farmhouse being repaired--a reservoir of water full of newts--a fascinating old woman who told us something about something--the distant view upon the singular peak of Mount Cacume, they all gave us occasion for lingering. Why not loaf and loiter in June? The days are so endless! At last, through a gap in the landscape, we saw the lake at our feet, simmering in the noonday beams--an everyday sheet of water, brown in colour, with muddy banks and seemingly not a scrap of shade within miles; one of those lakes which, by their periodical rising and sinking, give so much trouble that there is talk, equally periodical, of draining them off altogether. This one, they say, shifts continually and sometimes reaches so low a level that rich crops are planted in its oozy bed. Here are countless frogs, and fish--tench; also a boat that belongs to the man who rents the fishing. A sad accident happened lately with his boat. A party of youngsters came for an outing and two boys jumped into the tub, rowed out, and capsized it with their pranks. They were both drowned--a painful and piteous death--a death which I have tried, by accident, and can nowise recommend. They fished them out later from their slimy couch, and found that they had clasped one another so tightly in their mortal agony that it was deemed impious ever to unloosen that embrace. So they were laid to rest, locked in each other's arms. While my companion told me these things we had plodded further and further along this flat and inhospitable shore, and grown more and more taciturn. We were hungry and thirsty and hot, for one feels the onslaught of these first heats more acutely than the parching drought of August. Things looked bad. The luncheon hour was long past, and our spirits began to droop. All my mellowness took flight; I grew snappy and monosyllabic. Was there no shade? Yonder ... that dusky patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet, after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within, voiceless, and cool as a cavern. Be sure that he who planted these hazels on the bleak hillside was no common son of earth, but some wise and inspired mortal. My blessings on his head! May his shadow never grow less! Or, if that wish be already past fulfilment, may he dwell in Elysium attended by a thousand ministering angels, every one of them selected by himself; may he rejoice in their caresses for evermore. Naught was amiss. All conspired to make the occasion memorable. I look back upon our sojourn among those verdant hazels and see that it was good--one of those moments which are never granted knowingly by jealous fate. So dense was the leafage in the greenest heart of the grove that not a shred of sunlight, not a particle as large as a sixpence, could penetrate to earth. We were drowned in shade; screened from the flaming world outside; secure--without a care. We envied neither God nor man. I thought of certain of my fellow-creatures. I often think of them. What were they now doing? Taking themselves seriously and rushing about, as usual, haggard and careworn--like those sagacious ants that scurry hither and thither, and stare into each other's faces with a kind of desperate imbecility, when some sportive schoolboy has kicked their ridiculous nest into the air and upset all their solemn little calculations. As for ourselves, we took our ease. We ate and drank, we slumbered awhile, then joked and frolicked for five hours on end, or possibly six. [34] I kept no count of what was said nor how the time flew by. I only know that when at last we emerged from our ambrosial shelter the muscles of my stomach had grown sore from the strain of laughter, and Arcturus was twinkling overhead. THE END INDEX Abbadé, author Abbadia San Salvatore Abruzzi, limestone deserts Acqua Acetosa, Rome Acqua santa, mineral fountain, its appalling effects Acque Vive, old Scanno Addison, J. Afforestation at Scanno Agave, plant; dislikes change of scene Alatri; its nameless tavern; citadel; ideal families at Alban volcanoes Alpenglühen, an abomination Amiata, mountain Anagni Analphabetics, their charm Anastasio, F. Aniene, river Anthology, Greek Anticoli Apennines, their general coloration Argos Aristotle Arno river, its colour-moods Artena Athene (Minerva), promontory and temple Attilio, a sagacious youngster Bacon, misquoted Baedeker, on wine of Scanno Banca d'ltalia, its soi-disant director makes a fool of himself "Barone," an almost human dog Bathing in Tiber Baudelaire, C. Bears of Pescasseroli, rapid breeders Beds in England, neolithic features of Belgrave Square, its legendary partridges Bellegra, village Beloch, J. Bennet, Dr. J. H. Bentham, J. Berceau, mountain Bessel, F. W. Betifuli, ancient Scanno Bigio, marble Birds, their conservative habits Blackberries in Italy Blasphemies, as a pick-me-up Blind, Mathilde Blue, basic note of Italian landscape Board of Trade Labour Emergency Bureau, its lightning methods Boecklin, A. Borghese Gardens Bournemouth Bowles, Dr. R. Brachycephalism, menace to humanity Brahms, J., his inspiration Breil Brewster, H. B. Buckle, H. T. Building materials, of Florence, impart peculiar character to towns Bunbury, E. H., quoted Butter, French method of weighing, Italian regulations regarding Cacume, mountain Calypso, her island Cammaiore Camosciara, mountain Campagna of Rome Campanella, headland Campoli Apennino Capaccio, G. C. Cap Martin (Mentone), a vulgarized spot Capasso, B. Capranica Capri Carbineers, good men and questionable institution Carrara Carrion crows, relatively gay fowls Casamari convent Casanova, J. Cascine Gardens Cats in Rome, their distressful condition Cement floors, a detestable invention Cemetery of Mentone of Rome; Scanno; Olevano Censorship Department, gratifying interview at Cervesato, A. Chamois Chaucer Children, good company neglected in war-time China, fatal morality of pre-Tartar period Ciminian forest Cineto Romano Circe, nymph Cisterna, a death-trap Civilization, its characteristic Civitella Coal-supply, a sore subject in Italy Coliseum, flora and fauna of Collepardo Conscience, national versus individual Consumption on Riviera; at Olevano Conterano, lake Corsanico Corsi, F. Crapolla, sea-cove Crinagoras, poet Critics, spleenfully criticized Cro-Magnon racev Cross, futility of bearing a Darwin Deakin, botanist Dennis, G. Deserters at Valmontone Deslys, Gaby Dewlessness, a peculiarity of Italian townsmen Dialects of Italy Dictionary of National Biography Diodorus Siculus Dohrn, Dr. A. Donnorso, V. Doria, A. Dreams, recurrent; of flying Drowning accidents Drunkenness, not everybody's affair Eagles Education Office, a "Sleepy Hollow" Edwards, Tam, naturalist Elba Elder tree, a venerable growth England, to be visited as a tourist English language, should remain in flux Englishmen, change in race-characters; contrasted with Italians; influence of new surroundings on Enthusiasm, unrewarded Eratosthenes Eugénie, Empress Experience, its uses Faces, possibilities of improving Ferentino Ferento, ruined city Filangieri, di Candida, R. Flies, a curse Florence, its river; Cascine Gardens; pavements; local blasphemies; revisited Fontanella, village Food in war-time Football worth watching Fountains in Rome; responsible for shocking behaviour; in Villa Borghese France, its one irremediable drawback Frattura, village Frosinone, "Garibaldi" hotel; visited by Ramage Fumone Functionaries, social parasites Gambling instinct, correlated with religion Gardeners, professional, imbeciles Gargiulli, O. Gautier, T. Germans, at Mentone; at Levanto; save oaks of Olevano; must follow footsteps Ghosts, mankind surrounded by, in; away with them Giannettasio, N. P.v Girtanner, Dr. A., beaver-specialist Giulio, a young reprobate Goethe, quoted Golden Ages of literature Gorbio Grant Duff, M. E. Greek words, surviving Grimaldi caves, incident at Grocery business, appeals to Frenchmen Gross feeders, beware of Grotta delle Palumbe Guardie regie, official loafers Gunther, Dr. A. H., Mr., an ardent book-lover Hares in Italy Hebrews of military age, their enviable immunity from conscription Henderson, Dr., an old tippler Heredity, speculations on Hermits in Italy Hippocrates Hohentwiel, mountain Homer Horace Housemaid, a noteworthy Hutton, E. Ierate, locality Imagination, needful to travel-literature, Imperialism in Italy Individual, contrasted with race Insomnia Intelligence, its two ingredients Isola Liri Italians, evolution of new type Italy, reasons for visiting; over-policed Ives, G. J. O. M., a memorable type Jefferies, R. Johnson, S. Johnston-Lavis, H. J. Jovana, meadow Keller, G. Kew Gardens King of Italy, protects bears Kingfisher, a wary old one Kneeling boy, statue Knop, Professor Lachner, V. Ladbroke Grove, its enlightened children Landlady, of Mentone; the London variety; she of Viareggio; of Florence Lante, Villa La Croce, mountain La Rocca, village Lawrence, D. H. Laws, raison d'etre of Italian Leuthold, H. Levanto, arrival at; situation; company at hotel; the local magistrate; stroll to Monterosso Licenza Ligurians, their bad character Lizard, making a friend of; a disconsolate one Love affairs, Italian, how to conduct Lucian Lucretilis, mountain Lyme Regis Macaroni, war-time substitutes; the right kind Maccarese, village Machinery, cult of; depraves Italian character Madonna della Neve, chapel Madonna di Tranquillo, wayside shrine Malaria Mandela Marbles Mathew, Rev. Maudsley, H. Maupassant Mazzella, S. Megara Mentone, recent transformation of; landscape; vegetation; produces dull schoolboys; prehistoric man of Merle blanc, a meritorious establishment Metaphysicians, atrophied poets Meyer, C. F. Meysenbug, Malwida von Michael Angelo; gets into trouble Migration of labourers, annual Mill, J. S. Militarism, the modern infáme Milvain Bridge Mineralogy Momio, village Monogamous habits, bad for songsters Mons Canutarius Montalto, cliff Monte-Carlo, its well-groomed flowers; lamentable episode at Casino Montecelio Monterosso Mortella, cliff Mortola, village Mosquitoes in Rome Moulinet Mummies, Peruvian Munitions Office, develops a craving for bankers Mure of Caldwell, traveller Muretta, mountain Museum, Kircher; delle Terme Music Mythopoeic faculty, example of Neighbours, an over-rated class Nerano Newspaper reading, to be discouraged Nice Nietzsche, his blind spot Nightingales, too much of a good thing; cease from troubling Ninetta, an attractive maiden Nose, degeneration of Odysseus at Alatri Office-hunters, should respect their betters Olevano, its nightingales; oak grove at; first English resident at Opi, town Ornithology Orte, town Orvinio Ouida, her writings and character Paestum, roses of Pais, Prof. E. Palombaro Pantheon Patriotism, chilled Pavements, life on Peira Cava Perfumes, react on physiognomy Persico, G. B. Pescasseroli; its bears Peutinger Table Philosophers, contradistinguished from metaphysicians Piccadilly Goat Pietrasanta Pig, in distress Pines, at Levanto; at Viareggio Pisa in war-time Plaster-casts, how to dispose of Plato Pliny Pollius Felix Pontine Marshes Ponza island, megalithic ruin on Portovenere, marble Potter, Major Frederick, discovers Olevano Pottery, index of national taste Powder magazine, explosion of Preccia, mountain Prehistoric races, possible reasons for their extinction Press, the daily, its disastrous functions "Prison, The," a Socratic dialogue Race ideals, contrasted with individual Ramage, Craufurd Tait, a centrifugal Scotsman, his book and umbrella; mania for hurrying; other travels of; compared with Waterton; on Italian country life; gets drunk; makes formal profession of sobriety; his tolerance; sensitive to female charms; still hustling; his humanistic outlook; little failings; other publications; zest for knowledge; at Licenza Rat-hunts Ravens, their conjugal fidelity Reading, to be done with reverence Recomone, inlet Red colour, unfashionable in Italy; in favour with other races Rhetoric, necessary to success in courtship Rhodian marble Ripa, a liquid poison Rivers, Italian Riviera, French, its inanity; typical visitors to; lack of native genius Roccaraso Rojate Rolfe, Neville Romanelli, painter Romans and British, their world dominion; unimaginative people Rome, changed aspect of railway station; protestant cemetery; explosion near; its fountains; tramcar nuisance; shadelessness; disadvantages of site; evening breeze; neglected cats; bad food; its building stone; unpleasant experience at; dearth of apartments Rubinstein, A. Sagittario, stream Saint Domenico Saint-Jacques, chemin de Saint-Louis, bridge Saint Martin, his cave Saint Michael, hermitage Salatino, Dr. Salis-Marschlins, U. von San Costanzo, mountain and chapel San Remo San Rossore Sant' Egidio, hermitage Sant' Elia, farm Saracinesca, village Scalambra, mountain Scanno, cemetery at; memories of; revisited Schadona pass Scheffel, V. von Schopenhauer; anticipates "recognition marks" Scolastica, Saint Seaton Sebastiani, A. Segni Self-indulgence, a debased expression Sergi, Prof. G. Serpentaro, oak grove Serpents, with ears; human hatred of Serrano, village Serravezza Shelley, an evangelist; at Viareggio; recommends caverns to his readers, but lives comfortably himself Sicilians Siena, in winter; a Florentine's opinion of Sirena, survival of name Siren islets (Galli); ruin on Sirocco in Rome Sitting still, the true traveller's gift Sleep, its sacred nature Smollett Snakes Snow, Dr. H. Sora Soracte, mountain Soriano; its pleasant tavern Sospel Spezia Spy-mania in Italy Stabiae (Castellamare) Statius Strabo Strega liqueur, horribly adulterated; how to stop the scandal Subiaco, strawberries at Sunburn, pretty effects of Surrentum Swinburne, H. Switzerland, its manifold beauties Symonds, J. A. Taxidermy, study of Telephone, an abomination Termini, village Terrata, mountain Theophrastus Tiber Tiryns, citadel Torco, village Trafalgar Square, its fauna Trajan's Forum Tramcars, an abomination Tree-creeper, bird Trevi Fountain Trifles, importance of Truth-telling, a matter of longitude; not in vogue to-day Tuscan speech, its peculiar savour Urquehart, D. Valiante, Marquis Valmontone; its upper terrace; capture of a deserter at, Pergola, tavern Velino, mountain Velletri Venice Ventimiglia, wine of Verde antico, marble Veroli Via Appia; Flaminia; Labiena; Nomentana Viareggio, an objectionable place; its Vittoria hotel; pine woods Victorians, their perverse sense of duty Villalago Villetta Barrea Viterbo Voss, R. Wallace, A. R. Walpole, Horace War, the present, local opinions concerning; repercussion on thoughtful non-combatants; effects on agriculture War Office, pandemonium; confuses Turkish and Russian Waterton, C., a freak Whistling, denotes mental vacuity White, colour, unpopular in South Italy Will-o'-the-wisp Wine, red and black Wolf, at Mentone; at Frattura Wryneck, bird Young, J. Youth, should be temperate Yucca, plant Zagarola "Zone of defense," drawbacks of Zurich, its attractions * * * * * * * * * * * 1. There exists a fine one, but you must go to San Remo to see it. 2. Discovered, according to Corsi, in 1547, and not to be confounded with the yet more beautiful black and yellow Rhodian marble of the ancients. 3. See North American Review, September, 1913. Ramage's Calabrian tour of 1828, by the way, was an extremely risky undertaking. The few travellers who then penetrated into this country kept to the main roads and never moved without a military escort. One of them actually hired a brigand as a protection. 4. Sometimes at this season there is not the smallest trickle in the stream-bed--mere disconnected pools to show where the river was, and will be. Then you may walk across it, even in Florence. Grant Duff says he has seen the Arno "blue." So have I: a hepatic blue. 5. It afterwards passed into the hands of the German Crown Prince. 6. He was afterwards imprisoned for this, and has since died. 7. I am told the Florentines at no period adopted the method of the Parisians, and that I am also wrong in saying that the older monuments are in better condition than the new ones. We live and learn. 8. The late Henry Maudsley. He says, in one of his letters, "... I am writing without due consideration of the interesting point. But this possible explanation occurs to me: children are active motor machines, always restless and moving when not asleep. When asleep, the motor tendencies, being not quite passive, translate themselves into the dreaming consciousness of motion, pleasant or painful, according to bodily states pleasing or disturbing. As the muscles are almost passive in sleep, the outlet is into dreaming activity--into dreams of flying when bodily states are pleasant, into falling down precipices, etc., when they are out of sorts. This is quite a hasty reflection...." 9. "The Prison. A Dialogue." By H. B. Brewster. (Williams and Norgate, 1891.) 10. Parkstone, Dorset. July 19, 1894. "Many thanks for your reference to Schopenhauer's remarks on Recognition Marks, which I thought I was the first to fully point out. It is a most interesting anticipation. I do not read German, but from what I have heard of his works he was the last man I should have expected to make such an acute suggestion in Natural History." 11. Written during the U-boat scare and food-restrictions. 12. Fecit! He poisoned himself with hydrocyanic acid on the 4th November, 1920. 13. This is the same gentleman who informs us, on page 166, "I have lived, however, very temperately, avoiding much wine." We learn from the Dictionary of National Biography that he was born in 1803; he must therefore have been twenty-five years old when he bemused the coastguard. Only twenty-five; and already at this stage. We are further told that he was tutor to somebody's son. Unhappy child! 14. Not all of them are true thistles. Abbadé's Guide to the Abruzzi (1903) enumerates 1476 plants from this region. 15. Manifestly unfair, all this. For the rest, the critic, in speaking of a plot, may have meant what young ladies call by that name--a love intrigue, in which case he is to be blamed solely for misuse of a good word. I am consoled by the New York Dial calling my plot "rightly filmy." Nobody could have expressed it better. 16. Three spring months, at Florence, had been spent in making a scientific collection of local imprecations--abusive, vituperative or profane expletives; swear-words, in short--enriched with elaborate commentary. I would gladly print this little study in folk-lore as an appendix to the present volume, were it fit for publication. 17. Since this was written, the gospel of imperialism has made considerable progress in the peninsula. 18. This is a survival of the Greek kakkabos. Gargiuli and others have garnered Hellenic derivations among the place-names here, and to their list may be added that of the rock on which stood the villa of Pollius Felix; it is now known as Punta Calcarella, but used to be called Petrapoli; pure Greek: Pollio's rock. There is still a mine of such material to be exploited by all who care to study the vernacular. The giant euphorbia, for instance, common on these hills, is locally known as "totomaglie"; pure Greek again: tithymalos. 19. Query: whether there be no connection between brachycephalism and this modern deification of machinery? 20. Robert L. Bowles, M.D. "Sunburn on the Alps" (Alpine Journal, November, 1888) and "The Influence of Light on the Skin" (British Journal of Dermatology, No. 105, Vol. 9). 21. It has now been cleaned--with inevitable results. 22. Maupassant himself was partial to scents. See his valet's diary. 23. Since this was written (1917) the condition of these beasts has improved. Somebody now feeds them--which could hardly have been expected during those stressful times of war, when bread barely sufficed for the human population. They are also fewer in numbers. Their owners, I fancy, can afford to keep them at home once more. 24. This is my last (7 July, 1894) and somewhat mysterious letter from the old fellow. "The question you ask is one of great ornithological importance and I believe has never been worked out, but I am absolutely afraid to ask any questions in the British Museum, as they jump at an idea and cut the ground from under the original man's feet. This I regret to say is my experience. I have been asked what does it matter who makes the discovery? I reply, 'Render unto Caesar, etc.' If you are going to work it out, keep it dark. The British Museum have not the necessary specimens--in this country I believe it is not known how the change takes place. I tried some years ago to work it out with live specimens, but failed because I could not get young birds. Now in answer to your question, my belief is that the young bird moults into the winter plumages direct and that this is changed into the full plumage in spring either by a spring moult or by a shedding of the tips of the feathers. This is private because it is theoretical, and for your private use to verify...." Of the Finland seal, by the way, Dr. Günther wrote: "The skin differs in nothing from that of Phoca foetida. In the skull I observe that the nasal bones are conspicuously narrower than in typical specimens from the northern coasts. There is also a remarkable thinness of bone, a want of osseous substance; but it is impossible to say whether this is due to altered physical conditions or should be accounted for by the youth of the specimen, or whether it is an individual peculiarity." 25. Winter 1882-1883; possibly later. 26. The centre of this usage, so far as Europe is concerned, seems to have been the Caucasus. 27. I have been there since, and vainly endeavoured to track the legend to its lair. Its only possible foundation is that I possessed the ordinary tourists' map of the district. 28. Add to all the other varieties, now, the countless legions of the guardie regie, which threaten to absorb the entire youth of Italy. At this moment there is a distressing dearth of housing accommodation all over the peninsula; in Rome alone, they say, apartments are needed for 10,000 practically homeless persons, and a mathematician may calculate the number of houses required to contain them. How shall they ever be built, if all the potential builders are loafing about in uniforms at the public expense? 29. Some of these Beautiful Thoughts went through more than one edition. 30. From an old article: "I was pleased to observe on Ponza the relics of a great pre-Roman civilization. Above the town, where the cemetery now stands, is a likely site for a citadel, and on examining it from the sea I noticed, sure enough, a few blocks of prehistoric structure of the so-called Cyclopean type underneath a corner of the cemetery wall. There is a portion in better preservation between the 'Baths of Pilate' and the harbour, where a little path winds up from the sea. The blocks are joined without mortar, and some of them are over a metre in length. This megalithic wall may be taken to be contemporaneous with similar works of defence found in various parts of Italy, but I believe its existence on Ponza has not yet been recorded. Livy says that Volscians inhabited the island till they were supplanted by the Romans, and a tradition preserved by Strabo and Virgil locates here the palace of the enchantress Circe, who transformed the companions of Ulysses into bristly swine...." Some one may have anticipated me here again, as did Salis-Marschlins in the eighteenth century with those roses of Passtum whose disappearance Ramage, like every one else, laments--those roses which I thought I was the first to re-discover. They grow on the spot in considerable quantities, though one needs good eyes to see them. They are not flourishing as of yore, being dwarfs not more than a few inches in height. One which I carried away and kept three years in a pot and six more in the earth grew to a length of about sixteen feet, and is probably alive at this moment, I never saw a flower. 31. For the abject condition of these slaves (such they are) see Chapter VII of The Roman Campagna by Arnaldo Cervesato. 32. Written in 1917. 33. D.H. Lawrence: Twilight in Italy. 34. The title Alone strikes me, on reflection, as rather an inapt one for this volume. Let it stand! 
7880	----	PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FLORENCE (Continued). June 8th.--I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. The entrance is from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other. The gallery is in the upper story of the palace, and in the vestibule are some busts of the princes and cardinals of the Medici family,--none of them beautiful, one or two so ugly as to be ludicrous, especially one who is all but buried in his own wig. I at first travelled slowly through the whole extent of this long, long gallery, which occupies the entire length of the palace on both sides of the court, and is full of sculpture and pictures. The latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage; but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting began to be an art. Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who ought to interest me a great deal more than they do. Occasionally to-day I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there. Once more I deem it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of appealing to the religious sentiment. I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and some of the great men of Rome. There is a bust of Pompey the Great, bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of countenance. I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the hall of the Spada Palace. These, I presume, are the busts which Mr. Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional. He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces might. The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an individual and faithful portrait than any other in the series. All the busts of Caracalla--of which I have seen many--give the same evidence of their truth; and I should like to know what it was in this abominable emperor that made him insist upon having his actual likeness perpetuated, with all the ugliness of its animal and moral character. I rather respect him for it, and still more the sculptor, whose hand, methinks, must have trembled as he wrought the bust. Generally these wicked old fellows, and their wicked wives and daughters, are not so hideous as we might expect. Messalina, for instance, has small and pretty features, though with rather a sensual development of the lower part of the face. The busts, it seemed to me, are usually superior as works of art to those in the Capitol, and either better preserved or more thoroughly restored. The bust of Nero might almost be called handsome here, though bearing his likeness unmistakably. I wish some competent person would undertake to analyze and develop his character, and how and by what necessity--with all his elegant tastes, his love of the beautiful, his artist nature--he grew to be such a monster. Nero has never yet had justice done him, nor have any of the wicked emperors; not that I suppose them to have been any less monstrous than history represents them; but there must surely have been something in their position and circumstances to render the terrible moral disease which seized upon them so generally almost inevitable. A wise and profound man, tender and reverent of the human soul, and capable of appreciating it in its height and depth, has a great field here for the exercise of his powers. It has struck me, in reading the history of the Italian republics, that many of the tyrants, who sprung up after the destruction of their liberties, resembled the worst of the Roman emperors. The subject of Nero and his brethren has often perplexed me with vain desires to come at the truth. There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along the gallery,--Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns,--with the general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them at a glance. The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus de' Medici, I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes. My European experience has extinguished many such. I was pretty well contented, therefore, not to find the famous statue in the whole of my long journey from end to end of the gallery, which terminates on the opposite side of the court from that where it commences. The ceiling, by the by, through the entire length, is covered with frescos, and the floor paved with a composition of stone smooth and polished like marble. The final piece of sculpture, at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very fine. I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty and terrible repose--a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble-- that I had felt in the original. Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them. I remember an unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago. The pictures I did little more than glance at, till I had almost completed again the circuit of the gallery, through this series of parallel rooms, and then I came upon a collection of French and Dutch and Flemish masters, all of which interested me more than the Italian generally. There was a beautiful picture by Claude, almost as good as those in the British National Gallery, and very like in subject; the sun near the horizon, of course, and throwing its line of light over the ripple of water, with ships at the strand, and one or two palaces of stately architecture on the shore. Landscapes by Rembrandt; fat Graces and other plump nudities by Rubens; brass pans and earthen pots and herrings by Terriers and other Dutchmen; none by Gerard Douw, I think, but several by Mieris; all of which were like bread and beef and ale, after having been fed too long on made dishes. This is really a wonderful collection of pictures; and from first, to last--from Giotto to the men of yesterday--they are in admirable condition, and may be appreciated for all the merit that they ever possessed. I could not quite believe that I was not to find the Venus de' Medici; and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. At last, when I had come from among the Dutchmen, I believe, and was looking at some works of Italian artists, chiefly Florentines, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room. It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape, and hung with red damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite round, beneath an octagonal dome. The Venus stands somewhat aside from the centre of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or two from her pedestal in front, and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The line of the marble is just so much mellowed by time, as to do for her all that Gibson tries, or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began. She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the marble. Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments, her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck. Furthermore, there have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts of her person. But on account of the skill with which the statue has been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible, all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been reunited. She is just as whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor. I am glad to have seen this Venus, and to have found her so tender and so chaste. On the wall of the room, and to be taken in at the same glance, is a painted Venus by Titian, reclining on a couch, naked and lustful. The room of the Venus seems to be the treasure-place of the whole Uffizi Palace, containing more pictures by famous masters than are to be found in all the rest of the gallery. There were several by Raphael, and the room was crowded with the easels of artists. I did not look half enough at anything, but merely took a preliminary taste, as a prophecy of enjoyment to come. As we were at dinner to-day, at half past three, there was a ring at the door, and a minute after our servant brought a card. It was Mr. Robert Browning's, and on it was written in pencil an invitation for us to go to see them this evening. He had left the card and gone away; but very soon the bell rang again, and he had come back, having forgotten to give his address. This time he came in; and he shook hands with all of us, children and grown people, and was very vivacious and agreeable. He looked younger and even handsomer than when I saw him in London, two years ago, and his gray hairs seemed fewer than those that had then strayed into his youthful head. He talked a wonderful quantity in a little time, and told us--among other things that we should never have dreamed of--that Italian people will not cheat you, if you construe them generously, and put them upon their honor. Mr. Browning was very kind and warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing us; and, on our part, we were all very glad to meet him. He must be an exceedingly likable man. . . . They are to leave Florence very soon, and are going to Normandy, I think he said, for the rest of the summer. The Venus de' Medici has a dimple in her chin. June 9th.--We went last evening, at eight o'clock, to see the Brownings; and, after some search and inquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior, which, if I remember, Browning has celebrated in song; at all events, Mrs. Browning has called one of her poems "Casa Guidi Windows." The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace, we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the anteroom to greet us, as did his little boy, Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile, and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's. He is nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age. I should not quite like to be the father of such a boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he cannot fail to inspire. I wonder what is to become of him,--whether he will ever grow to be a man,--whether it is desirable that he should. His parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in. He was born in Florence, and prides himself on being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were native of another planet. Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness. We were not the only guests. Mr. and Mrs. E------, Americans, recently from the East, and on intimate terms with the Brownings, arrived after us; also Miss F. H------, an English literary lady, whom I have met several times in Liverpool; and lastly came the white head and palmer-like beard of Mr. ------ with his daughter. Mr. Browning was very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person, logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk. Mr. ------, as usual, was homely and plain of manner, with an old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning. I doubt, however, whether he has any high appreciation either of her poetry or her husband's, and it is my impression that they care as little about his. We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel. Mr. ------ appeared not to have made up his mind on the matter, but told a story of a successful communication between Cooper the novelist and his sister, who had been dead fifty years. Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic; while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation. I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions. Mrs. Browning's health does not permit late hours, so we began to take heave at about ten o'clock. I heard her ask Mr. ------ if he did not mean to revisit Europe, and heard him answer, not uncheerfully, taking hold of his white hair, "It is getting rather too late in the evening now." If any old age can be cheerful, I should think his might be; so good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright, too, we may say. His life has been like the days that end in pleasant sunsets. He has a great loss, however, or what ought to be a great loss,--soon to be encountered in the death of his wife, who, I think, can hardly live to reach America. He is not eminently an affectionate man. I take him to be one who cannot get closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sensibly as he gladly would; and, in consequence of that deficiency, the world lacks substance to him. It is partly the result, perhaps, of his not having sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature. His poetry shows it, and his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least. Little Pennini, during the evening, sometimes helped the guests to cake and strawberries; joined in the conversation, when he had anything to say, or sat down upon a couch to enjoy his own meditations. He has long curling hair, and has not yet emerged from his frock and short hose. It is funny to think of putting him into trousers. His likeness to his mother is strange to behold. June 10th.--My wife and I went to the Pitti Palace to-day; and first entered a court where, yesterday, she had seen a carpet of flowers, arranged for some great ceremony. It must have been a most beautiful sight, the pavement of the court being entirely covered by them, in a regular pattern of brilliant lines, so as really to be a living mosaic. This morning, however, the court had nothing but its usual stones, and the show of yesterday seemed so much the more inestimable as having been so evanescent. Around the walls of the court there were still some pieces of splendid tapestry which had made part of yesterday's magnificence. We went up the staircase, of regally broad and easy ascent, and made application to be admitted to see the grand-ducal apartments. An attendant accordingly took the keys, and ushered us first into a great hall with a vaulted ceiling, and then through a series of noble rooms, with rich frescos above and mosaic floors, hung with damask, adorned with gilded chandeliers, and glowing, in short, with more gorgeousness than I could have imagined beforehand, or can now remember. In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes,--each cabinet worth a lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it. Many of the rooms were covered with arras, of landscapes, hunting-scenes, mythological subjects, or historical scenes, equal to pictures in truth of representation, and possessing an indescribable richness that makes them preferable as a mere adornment of princely halls and chambers. Some of the rooms, as I have said, were laid in mosaic of stone and marble, otherwise in lovely patterns of various woods; others were covered with carpets, delightful to tread upon, and glowing like the living floor of flowers which my wife saw yesterday. There were tables, too, of Florentine mosaic, the mere materials of which--lapis lazuli, malachite, pearl, and a hundred other precious things--were worth a fortune, and made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the manufacturer. I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and soft,--this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material. I have seen a very dazzling effect produced in the principal cabin of an American clipper-ship quite opposed to this in taste. After making the circuit of the grand-ducal apartments, we went into a door in the left wing of the palace, and ascended a narrow flight of stairs,--several tortuous flights indeed,--to the picture-gallery. It fills a great many stately halls, which themselves are well worth a visit for the architecture and frescos; only these matters become commonplace after travelling through a mile or two of them. The collection of pictures--as well for their number as for the celebrity and excellence of many of them--is the most interesting that I have seen, and I do not yet feel in a condition, nor perhaps ever shall, to speak of a single one. It gladdened my very heart to find that they were not darkened out of sight, nor apparently at all injured by time, but were well kept and varnished, brilliantly framed, and, no doubt, restored by skilful touches if any of them needed it. The artists and amateurs may say what they like; for my part, I know no drearier feeling than that inspired by a ruined picture,--ruined, that is, by time, damp, or rough treatment,--and I would a thousand times rather an artist should do his best towards reviving it, than have it left in such a condition. I do not believe, however, that these pictures have been sacrilegiously interfered with; at all events, I saw in the masterpieces no touch but what seemed worthy of the master-hand. The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola." I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty, though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before. An artist was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile, yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing the beautiful. But how does this accord with what I have been saying only a minute ago? How then can the decayed picture of a great master ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand? Doubtless it never can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations likewise. I saw the "Three Fates" of Michael Angelo, which were also being copied, as were many other of the best pictures. Miss Fanny Howorth, whom I met in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola," application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists who aspire to copy it. Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy than if they had nothing to do with us. I remember seeing an etching of this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible, stern, passionless severity, neither loving us nor hating us, that characterizes these ugly old women. If they were angry, or had the least spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable. They are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a belief in fate such a cold torture to the human soul. God give me the sure belief in his Providence! In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I cannot always "keep the heights I gain," however, and after admiring and being moved by a picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as little moved as if it were a tavern-sign. It is pretty much the same with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo, which I described so rapturously a few days ago. I looked at them again the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the eastern end. It is a pity they are so narrow. England has many a great chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth. From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment. They seem to consist partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was only a narrow margin of shade. I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles. June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely, it makes me more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical embodiment. I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. I observed to-day that the eyes of the statue are slightly hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and intelligence. She is a miracle. The sculptor must have wrought religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was working through his hands. I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the perception of it grows upon one. If at any time I become less sensible of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue. I looked at many of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood for enjoying them. It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the coldness and insensibility of our less genial moods. After leaving the Uffizi Palace, . . . . I went into the Museum of Natural History, near the Pitti Palace. It is a very good collection of almost everything that Nature has made,--or exquisite copies of what she has made,--stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of the human frame. It is good to have the wholeness and summed-up beauty of woman in the memory, when looking at the details of her system as here displayed; for these last, to the natural eye, are by no means beautiful. But they are what belong only to our mortality. The beauty that makes them invisible is our immortal type, which we shall take away with us. Under glass cases, there were some singular and horribly truthful representations, in small wax figures, of a time of pestilence; the hasty burial, or tossing into one common sepulchre, of discolored corpses,--a very ugly piece of work, indeed. I think Murray says that these things were made for the Grand Duke Cosmo; and if so, they do him no credit, indicating something dark and morbid in his character. June 13th.--We called at the Powers's yesterday morning to leave R----- there for an hour or two to play with the children; and it being not yet quite time for the Pitti Palace, we stopped into the studio. Soon Mr. Powers made his appearance, in his dressing-gown and slippers and sculptor's cap, smoking a cigar. . . . He was very cordial and pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up. There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici in the rooms, which he said were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the mould taken from the statue. He then gave us a quite unexpected but most interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by reference to the points which he criticised. The figure, he seemed to allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his own Greek Slave or Eva; but the face, he began with saying, was that of an idiot. Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued, "It is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici did not know what he was about?" Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a half-worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it. The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin around them. In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defence--and even that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view. But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity. After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to nature with which these are modelled. I freely acknowledge the fact; there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus de' Medici. A light--the light of a soul proper to each individual character--seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes. Still insisting upon the eye, and hitting the poor Venus another and another and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb,--the biggest, by far, that ever I saw in mortal head,--and made us see and confess that there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and Proserpine. To say the truth, their marble eyes have life, and, placing yourself in the proper position towards them, you can meet their glances, and feel them mingle with your own. Powers is a great man, and also a tender and delicate one, massive and rude of surface as he looks; and it is rather absurd to feel how he impressed his auditor, for the time being, with his own evident idea that nobody else is worthy to touch marble. Mr. B------ told me that Powers has had many difficulties on professional grounds, as I understood him, and with his brother artists. No wonder! He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills. He has a bust of the reigning Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who sat to him for it. The bust is that of a noble-looking lady; and Powers remarked that royal personages have a certain look that distinguishes them from other people, and is seen in individuals of no lower rank. They all have it; the Queen of England and Prince Albert have it; and so likewise has every other Royalty, although the possession of this kingly look implies nothing whatever as respects kingly and commanding qualities. He said that none of our public men, whatever authority they may have held, or for whatever length of time, possess this look, but he added afterwards that Washington had it. Commanders of armies sometimes have it, but not in the degree that royal personages do. It is, as well as I could make out Powers's idea, a certain coldness of demeanor, and especially of eye, that surrounds them with an atmosphere through which the electricity of human brotherhood cannot pass. From their youth upward they are taught to feel themselves apart from the rest of mankind, and this manner becomes a second nature to them in consequence, and as a safeguard to their conventional dignity. They put themselves under glass, as it were (the illustration is my own), so that, though you see them, and see them looking no more noble and dignified than other mortals, nor so much so as many, still they keep themselves within a sort of sanctity, and repel you by an invisible barrier. Even if they invite you with a show of warmth and hospitality, you cannot get through. I, too, recognize this look in the portraits of Washington; in him, a mild, benevolent coldness and apartness, but indicating that formality which seems to have been deeper in him than in any other mortal, and which built up an actual fortification between himself and human sympathy. I wish, for once, Washington could come out of his envelopment and show us what his real dimensions were. Among other models of statues heretofore made, Powers showed us one of Melancholy, or rather of Contemplation, from Milton's "Penseroso"; a female figure with uplifted face and rapt look, "communing with the skies." It is very fine, and goes deeply into Milton's thought; but, as far as the outward form and action are concerned, I remember seeing a rude engraving in my childhood that probably suggested the idea. It was prefixed to a cheap American edition of Milton's poems, and was probably as familiar to Powers as to myself. It is very remarkable how difficult it seems to be to strike out a new attitude in sculpture; a new group, or a new single figure. One piece of sculpture Powers exhibited, however, which was very exquisite, and such as I never saw before. Opening a desk, he took out something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle of the soft skin being lovingly recorded. "The critics condemn minute representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a microscope and see if it injures the general effect." Nature herself never made a prettier or truer little hand. It was the hand of his daughter,--"Luly's hand," Powers called it,--the same that gave my own such a frank and friendly grasp when I first met "Luly." The sculptor made it only for himself and his wife, but so many people, he said, had insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the world. At sixty years, Luly ought to have her hand sculptured again, and give it to her grandchildren with the baby's hand of five months old. The baby-hand that had done nothing, and felt only its mother's kiss; the old lady's hand that had exchanged the love-pressure, worn the marriage-ring, closed dead eyes,--done a lifetime's work, in short. The sentiment is rather obvious, but true nevertheless. Before we went away, Powers took us into a room apart--apparently the secretest room he had--and showed us some tools and machinery, all of his own contrivance and invention. "You see I am a bit of a Yankee," he observed. This machinery is chiefly to facilitate the process of modelling his works, for--except in portrait-busts--he makes no clay model as other sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent possession. He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for making these files and for punching holes through iron, and he demonstrated its efficiency by punching a hole through an iron bar, with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds, by the mere application of a part of his own weight. These inventions, he says, are his amusement, and the bent of his nature towards sculpture must indeed have been strong, to counteract, in an American, such a capacity for the contrivance of steam-engines. . . . I had no idea of filling so many pages of this journal with the sayings and characteristics of Mr. Powers, but the man and his talk are fresh, original, and full of bone and muscle, and I enjoy him much. We now proceeded to the Pitti Palace, and spent several hours pleasantly in its saloons of pictures. I never enjoyed pictures anywhere else as I do in Florence. There is an admirable Judith in this gallery by Allori; a face of great beauty and depth, and her hand clutches the head of Holofernes by the hair in a way that startles the spectator. There are two peasant Madonnas by Murillo; simple women, yet with a thoughtful sense of some high mystery connected with the baby in their arms. Raphael grows upon me; several other famous painters--Guido, for instance--are fading out of my mind. Salvator Rosa has two really wonderful landscapes, looking from the shore seaward; and Rubens too, likewise on a large scale, of mountain and plain. It is very idle and foolish to talk of pictures; yet, after poring over them and into them, it seems a pity to let all the thought excited by them pass into nothingness. The copyists of pictures are very numerous, both in the Pitti and Uffizi galleries; and, unlike sculptors, they appear to be on the best of terms with one another, chatting sociably, exchanging friendly criticism, and giving their opinions as to the best mode of attaining the desired effects. Perhaps, as mere copyists, they escape the jealousy that might spring up between rival painters attempting to develop original ideas. Miss Howorth says that the business of copying pictures, especially those of Raphael, is a regular profession, and she thinks it exceedingly obstructive to the progress or existence of a modern school of painting, there being a regular demand and sure sale for all copies of the old masters, at prices proportioned to their merit; whereas the effort to be original insures nothing, except long neglect, at the beginning of a career, and probably ultimate failure, and the necessity of becoming a copyist at last. Some artists employ themselves from youth to age in nothing else but the copying of one single and selfsame picture by Raphael, and grow at last to be perfectly mechanical, making, I suppose, the same identical stroke of the brush in fifty successive pictures. The weather is very hot now,--hotter in the sunshine, I think, than a midsummer day usually is in America, but with rather a greater possibility of being comfortable in the shade. The nights, too, are warm, and the bats fly forth at dusk, and the fireflies quite light up the green depths of our little garden. The atmosphere, or something else, causes a sort of alacrity in my mind and an affluence of ideas, such as they are; but it does not thereby make me the happier. I feel an impulse to be at work, but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key. I need monotony too, an eventless exterior life, before I can live in the world within. June 15th.--Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici after Powers's attack upon her face. Some of the defects he attributed to her I could not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line with the upper lip. The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids, that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow. I cannot help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect. Whatever rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face,--more so, perhaps, than if all rules had been obeyed. I wish Powers would do his best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable) with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with the sentiment of the form. We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures that impressed me; but among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a former one. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before. It is the sign, I presume, of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Douw, and other old Dutch wizards, who painted such brass pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen pots that they will surely hold water; and who spent weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvas into a perfect microscopic illusion of some homely scene. For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the "Transfiguration" in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible space of human life could suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the "Transfiguration" with such touches as Gerard Douw's. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom, and grapes have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years. Often, in these pictures, there is a bird's-nest, every straw perfectly represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small speckled eggs, that seem as if they might be yet warm. These pretty miracles have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter-of-fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration. Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the "Nativity," it is not amiss to look at, a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a bumblebee burying himself in a flower. It is another token of imperfect taste, no doubt, that queer pictures and absurd pictures remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the score. There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I shall not forget. Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by Bardone,--a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament, who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had been carving a goose. What could possibly have stirred up this pudding of a woman (unless it were a pudding-stick) to do such a deed! I looked with much pleasure at an ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of revelation, whenever it comes. This morning, immediately after breakfast, I walked into the city, meaning to make myself better acquainted with its appearance, and to go into its various churches; but it soon grew so hot, that I turned homeward again. The interior of the Duomo was deliciously cool, to be sure,--cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine; but an old woman began to persecute me, so that I came away. A male beggar drove me out of another church; and I took refuge in the street, where the beggar and I would have been two cinders together, if we had stood long enough on the sunny sidewalk. After my five summers' experience of England, I may have forgotten what hot weather is; but it does appear to me that an American summer is not so fervent as this. Besides the direct rays, the white pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza. The narrow streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a selvage of shade, almost always. I do not know what becomes of the street-merchants at the noontide of these hot days. They form a numerous class in Florence, displaying their wares--linen or cotton cloth, threads, combs, and all manner of haberdashery--on movable counters that are borne about on wheels. In the shady morning, you see a whole side of a street in a piazza occupied by them, all offering their merchandise at full cry. They dodge as they can from shade to shade; but at last the sunshine floods the whole space, and they seem to have melted away, leaving not a rag of themselves or what they dealt in. Cherries are very abundant now, and have been so ever since we came here, in the markets and all about the streets. They are of various kinds, some exceedingly large, insomuch that it is almost necessary to disregard the old proverb about making two bites of a cherry. Fresh figs are already spoken of, though I have seen none; but I saw some peaches this morning, looking as if they might be ripe. June 16th.--Mr. and Mrs. Powers called to see us last evening. Mr. Powers, as usual, was full of talk, and gave utterance to a good many instructive and entertaining ideas. As one instance of the little influence the religion of the Italians has upon their morals, he told a story of one of his servants, who desired leave to set up a small shrine of the Virgin in their room--a cheap print, or bas-relief, or image, such as are sold everywhere at the shops --and to burn a lamp before it; she engaging, of course, to supply the oil at her own expense. By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures to ascertain where the oil came from. It turned out that the servant had all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft. His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait statues in the modern costume. I find that he does not approve either of nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington --by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it. He himself did so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel Webster. I suggested that though this costume might not appear ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create, to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day. It might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never actual, but always graceful and noble. Besides, Webster, for example, had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public. I scarcely think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary. At any rate, I know that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I had seen him in any of the above-mentioned dresses, than either in his swallow-tailed coat or frock. Talking of a taste for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of ability and cultivation. I have had this perception myself. A genuine love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have distinguished men capable of every social crime, and to have formed a fine and hard enamel over their characters. Perhaps it is because such tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, when highly developed, imply a great remove from natural simplicity. This morning I went with U---- to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue. I saw a little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can hardly bear to look at. The cabinet of gems happened to be open for the admission of a privileged party, and we likewise went in and saw a brilliant collection of goldsmiths' work, among which, no doubt, were specimens from such hands as Benvenuto Cellini. Little busts with diamond eyes; boxes of gems; cups carved out of precious material; crystal vases, beautifully chased and engraved, and sparkling with jewels; great pearls, in the midst of rubies; opals, rich with all manner of lovely lights. I remember Benvenuto Cellini, in his memoirs, speaks of manufacturing such playthings as these. I observed another characteristic of the summer streets of Florence to-day; tables, movable to and fro, on wheels, and set out with cool iced drinks and cordials. June 17th.--My wife and I went, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and, on our way thither, went into the Duomo, where we found a deliciously cool twilight, through which shone the mild gleam of the painted windows. I cannot but think it a pity that St. Peter's is not lighted by such windows as these, although I by no means saw the glory in them now that I have spoken of in a record of my former visit. We found out the monument of Giotto, a tablet, and portrait in bas-relief, on the wall, near the entrance of the cathedral, on the right hand; also a representation, in fresco, of a knight on horseback, the memorial of one John Rawkwood, close by the door, to the left. The priests were chanting a service of some kind or other in the choir, terribly inharmonious, and out of tune. . . . On reaching the Academy, the soldier or policeman at the entrance directed us into the large hall, the walls of which were covered on both sides with pictures, arranged as nearly as possible in a progressive series, with reference to the date of the painters; so that here the origin and procession of the art may be traced through the course of, at least, two hundred years. Giotto, Cimabue, and others of unfamiliar names to me, are among the earliest; and, except as curiosities, I should never desire to look once at them, nor think of looking twice. They seem to have been executed with great care and conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament, anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action, and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings, are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt, for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries. Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads, and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them, apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art. Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce. There is a Crucifixion by him in this gallery, which made me partly feel as if I were a far-off spectator,--no, I did not mean a Crucifixion, but a picture of Christ dead, lying, with a calm, sweet face, on his mother's knees ["a Pieta"]. The most inadequate and utterly absurd picture here, or in any other gallery, is a head of the Eternal Father, by Carlo Dolce; it looks like a feeble saint, on the eve of martyrdom, and very doubtful how he shall be able to bear it; very finely and prettily painted, nevertheless. After getting through the principal gallery we went into a smaller room, in which are contained a great many small specimens of the old Tuscan artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure. These pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold. The wood is much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks quite as much like the Devil. In one of Fra Angelico's pictures,--a representation of the Last Judgment,--he has tried his saintly hand at making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways. Above sits Jesus, with the throng of blessed saints around him, and a flow of tender and powerful love in his own face, that ought to suffice to redeem all the damned, and convert the very fiends, and quench the fires of hell. At any rate, Fra Angelico had a higher conception of his Saviour than Michael Angelo. June 19th.--This forenoon we have been to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which stands on the site of an ancient basilica, and was itself built more than four centuries ago. The facade is still an ugly height of rough brickwork, as is the case with the Duomo, and, I think, some other churches in Florence; the design of giving them an elaborate and beautiful finish having been delayed from cycle to cycle, till at length the day for spending mines of wealth on churches is gone by. The interior had a nave with a flat roof, divided from the side aisles by Corinthian pillars, and, at the farther end, a raised space around the high altar. The pavement is a mosaic of squares of black and white marble, the squares meeting one another cornerwise; the pillars, pilasters, and other architectural material is dark brown or grayish stone; and the general effect is very sombre, especially as the church is somewhat dimly lighted, and as the shrines along the aisles, and the statues, and the monuments of whatever kind, look dingy with time and neglect. The nave is thickly set with wooden seats, brown and worn. What pictures there are, in the shrines and chapels, are dark and faded. On the whole, the edifice has a shabby aspect. On each side of the high altar, elevated on four pillars of beautiful marble, is what looks like a great sarcophagus of bronze. They are, in fact, pulpits, and are ornamented with mediaeval bas-reliefs, representing scenes in the life of our Saviour. Murray says that the resting-place of the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, who so managed his wealth as to get the posthumous title of "father of his country," and to make his posterity its reigning princes,--is in front of the high altar, marked by red and green porphyry and marble, inlaid into the pavement. We looked, but could not see it there. There were worshippers at some of the shrines, and persons sitting here and there along the nave, and in the aisles, rapt in devotional thought, doubtless, and sheltering themselves here from the white sunshine of the piazzas. In the vicinity of the choir and the high altar, workmen were busy repairing the church, or perhaps only making arrangements for celebrating the great festival of St. John. On the left hand of the choir is what is called the old sacristy, with the peculiarities or notabilities of which I am not acquainted. On the right hand is the new sacristy, otherwise called the Capella dei Depositi, or Chapel of the Buried, built by Michael Angelo, to contain two monuments of the Medici family. The interior is of somewhat severe and classic architecture, the walls and pilasters being of dark stone, and surmounted by a dome, beneath which is a row of windows, quite round the building, throwing their light down far beneath, upon niches of white marble. These niches are ranged entirely around the chapel, and might have sufficed to contain more than all the Medici monuments that the world would ever care to have. Only two of these niches are filled, however. In one of them sits Giuliano de' Medici, sculptured by Michael Angelo,--a figure of dignity, which would perhaps be very striking in any other presence than that of the statue which occupies the corresponding niche. At the feet of Giuliano recline two allegorical statues, Day and Night, whose meaning there I do not know, and perhaps Michael Angelo knew as little. As the great sculptor's statues are apt to do, they fling their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom. Below the corresponding niche, on the opposite side of the chapel, recline two similar statues, representing Morning and Evening, sufficiently like Day and Night to be their brother and sister; all, in truth, having sprung from the same father. . . . But the statue that sits above these two latter allegories, Morning and Evening, is like no other that ever came from a sculptor's hand. It is the one work worthy of Michael Angelo's reputation, and grand enough to vindicate for him all the genius that the world gave him credit for. And yet it seems a simple thing enough to think of or to execute; merely a sitting figure, the face partly overshadowed by a helmet, one hand supporting the chin, the other resting on the thigh. But after looking at it a little while the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble statue; it comes to life, and you see that the princely figure is brooding over some great design, which, when he has arranged in his own mind, the world will be fain to execute for him. No such grandeur and majesty has elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle; the deep repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk. The face, when one gazes earnestly into it, beneath the shadow of its helmet, is seen to be calmly sombre; a mood which, I think, is generally that of the rulers of mankind, except in moments of vivid action. This statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of drapery; for there is nothing nude in this statue but the face and hands. The vest is the costume of Michael Angelo's century. This is what I always thought a sculptor of true genius should be able to do,--to show the man of whatever epoch, nobly and heroically, through the costume which he might actually have worn. The statue sits within a square niche of white marble, and completely fills it. It seems to me a pity that it should be thus confined. At the Crystal Palace, if I remember, the effect is improved by a free surrounding space. Its naturalness is as if it came out of the marble of its own accord, with all its grandeur hanging heavily about it, and sat down there beneath its weight. I cannot describe it. It is like trying to stop the ghost of Hamlet's father, by crossing spears before it. Communicating with the sacristy is the Medicean Chapel, which was built more than two centuries ago, for the reception of the Holy Sepulchre; arrangements having been made about that time to steal this most sacred relic from the Turks. The design failing, the chapel was converted by Cosmo II. into a place of sepulture for the princes of his family. It is a very grand and solemn edifice, octagonal in shape, with a lofty dome, within which is a series of brilliant frescos, painted not more than thirty years ago. These pictures are the only portion of the adornment of the chapel which interferes with the sombre beauty of the general effect; for though the walls are incrusted, from pavement to dome, with marbles of inestimable cost, and it is a Florentine mosaic on a grander scale than was ever executed elsewhere, the result is not gaudy, as in many of the Roman chapels, but a dark and melancholy richness. The architecture strikes me as extremely fine; each alternate side of the octagon being an arch, rising as high as the cornice of the lofty dome, and forming the frame of a vast niche. All the dead princes, no doubt, according to the general design, were to have been honored with statues within this stately mausoleum; but only two--those of Ferdinand I. and Cosmo II.--seem to have been placed here. They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad of it; and as for the statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea, which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears. In the piazza adjoining the church is a statue of the first Cosmo, the old banker, in Roman costume, seated, and looking like a man fit to hold authority. No, I mistake; the statue is of John de' Medici, the father of Cosmo, and himself no banker, but a soldier. June 21st.--Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains. The site of the garden is a very uneven surface, and the paths go upward and downward, and ascend, at their ultimate point, to a base of what appears to be a fortress, commanding the city. A good many of the Florentines were rambling about the gardens, like ourselves: little parties of school-boys; fathers and mothers, with their youthful progeny; young men in couples, looking closely into every female face; lovers, with a maid or two attendant on the young lady. All appeared to enjoy themselves, especially the children, dancing on the esplanades, or rolling down the slopes of the hills; and the loving pairs, whom it was rather embarrassing to come upon unexpectedly, sitting together on the stone seat of an arbor, with clasped hands, a passionate solemnity in the young man's face, and a downcast pleasure in the lady's. Policemen, in cocked hats and epaulets, cross-belts, and swords, were scattered about the grounds, but interfered with nobody, though they seemed to keep an eye on all. A sentinel stood in the hot sunshine, looking down over the garden from the ramparts of the fortress. For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or any other minister of authority; though I remember, in America, I had an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against law. This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as an American must, included within the delegated authority of his own servants. There is a sheet of water somewhere in the Boboli Gardens, inhabited by swans; but this we did not see. We found a smaller pond, however, set in marble, and surrounded by a parapet, and alive with a multitude of fish. There were minnows by the thousand, and a good many gold-fish; and J-----, who had brought some bread to feed the swans, threw in handfuls of crumbs for the benefit of these finny people. They seemed to be accustomed to such courtesies on the part of visitors; and immediately the surface of the water was blackened, at the spot where each crumb fell, with shoals of minnows, thrusting one another even above the surface in their eagerness to snatch it. Within the depths of the pond, the yellowish-green water--its hue being precisely that of the Arno-- would be reddened duskily with the larger bulk of two or three gold-fishes, who finally poked their great snouts up among the minnows, but generally missed the crumb. Beneath the circular margin of the pond, there are little arches, into the shelter of which the fish retire, when the noonday sun burns straight down into their dark waters. We went on through the garden-paths, shadowed quite across by the high walls of box, and reached an esplanade, whence we had a good view of Florence, with the bare brown ridges on the northern side of the Arno, and glimpses of the river itself, flowing like a street, between two rows of palaces. A great way off, too, we saw some of the cloud-like peaks of the Apennines, and, above them, the clouds into which the sun was descending, looking quite as substantial as the distant mountains. The city did not present a particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high, cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a martin-box, on a pole. There were other domes and towers and spires, and here and there the distinct shape of an edifice; but the general picture was of a contiguity of red earthen roofs, filling a not very broad or extensive valley, among dry and ridgy hills, with a river-gleam lightening up the landscape a little. U---- took out her pencil and tablets, and began to sketch the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in doing which, she immediately became an object of curiosity to some little boys and larger people, who failed not, under such pretences as taking a grasshopper off her dress, or no pretence at all, to come and look over her shoulder. There is a kind of familiarity among these Florentines, which is not meant to be discourteous, and ought to be taken in good part. We continued to ramble through the gardens, in quest of a good spot from which to see the sunset, and at length found a stone bench, on the slope of a hill, whence the entire cloud and sun scenery was fully presented to us. At the foot of the hill were statues, and among them a Pegasus, with wings outspread; and, a little beyond, the garden-front of the Pitti Palace, which looks a little less like a state-prison here, than as it fronts the street. Girls and children, and young men and old, were taking their pleasure in our neighborhood; and, just before us, a lady stood talking with her maid. By and by, we discovered her to be Miss Howorth. There was a misty light, streaming down on the hither side of the ridge of hills, that was rather peculiar; but the most remarkable thing was the shape into which the clouds gathered themselves, after the disappearance of the sun. It was like a tree, with a broad and heavy mass of foliage, spreading high upward on the sky, and a dark and well-defined trunk, which rooted itself on the verge of the horizon. This morning we went to the Pitti Palace. The air was very sultry, and the pavements, already heated with the sun, made the space between the buildings seem like a close room. The earth, I think, is too much stoned out of the streets of an Italian city,--paved, like those of Florence, quite across, with broad flagstones, to the line where the stones of the houses on each side are piled up. Thunder rumbled over our heads, however, and the clouds were so dark that we scarcely hoped to reach the palace without feeling the first drops of the shower. The air still darkened and darkened, so that by the time we arrived at the suite of picture-rooms the pictures seemed all to be changed to Rembrandts; the shadows as black as midnight, with only some highly illuminated portions gleaming out. The obscurity of the atmosphere made us sensible how splendid is the adornment of these saloons. For the gilded cornices shone out, as did the gilding of the arches and wreathed circles that divide the ceiling into compartments, within which the frescos are painted, and whence the figures looked dimly down, like gods out of a mysterious sky. The white marble sculptures also gleamed from their height, where winged cupids or cherubs gambolled aloft in bas-reliefs; or allegoric shapes reclined along the cornices, hardly noticed, when the daylight comes brightly into the window. On the walls, all the rich picture-frames glimmered in gold, as did the framework of the chairs, and the heavy gilded pedestals of the marble, alabaster, and mosaic tables. These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished, richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask. It was useless to try to see the pictures. All the artists engaged in copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a prodigious cloud of dust. It hid the opposite side of the street, and was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses, higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself. The thunder muttered and grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off. At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's "Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body. The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own. This Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms, and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. She a penitent! She would shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that clustering hair. . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing old man. I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them--she who holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart. The third sister looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the second, meanwhile cutting the thread with a pair of shears. Michael Angelo, if I may presume to say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give each a different one, but did not see precisely how, inasmuch as all the fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose. It is a very impressive group. But, as regards the interpretation of this, or of any other profound picture, there are likely to be as many interpretations as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares, through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work. It is so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and, often, opposite things. June 27th.--I have had a heavy cold and fever almost throughout the past week, and have thereby lost the great Florentine festivity, the Feast of St. John, which took place on Thursday last, with the fireworks and illuminations the evening before, and the races and court ceremonies on the day itself. However, unless it were more characteristic and peculiar than the Carnival, I have not missed anything very valuable. Mr. Powers called to see me one evening, and poured out, as usual, a stream of talk, both racy and oracular in its character. Speaking of human eyes, he observed that they did not depend for their expression upon color, nor upon any light of the soul beaming through them, nor any glow of the eyeball, nor upon anything but the form and action of the surrounding muscles. He illustrates it by saying, that if the eye of a wolf, or of whatever fiercest animal, could be placed in another setting, it would be found capable of the utmost gentleness of expression. "You yourself," said he, "have a very bright and sharp look sometimes; but it is not in the eye itself." His own eyes, as I could have sworn, were glowing all the time he spoke; and, remembering how many times I have seemed to see eyes glow, and blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and soften; and how all poetry is illuminated with the light of ladies' eyes; and how many people have been smitten by the lightning of an eye, whether in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all this subtlest and keenest fire is illusive, not even phosphorescent, and that any other jelly in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye. Nevertheless, he must be right; of course he must, and I am rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. Where should the light come from? Has a man a flame inside of his head? Does his spirit manifest itself in the semblance of flame? The moment we think of it, the absurdity becomes evident. I am not quite sure, however, that the outer surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence of this kind. I asked Powers what he thought of Michael Angelo's statue of Lorenzo de' Medici. He allowed that its effect was very grand and mysterious; but added that it owed this to a trick,--the effect being produced by the arrangement of the hood, as he called it, or helmet, which throws the upper part of the face into shadow. The niche in which it sits has, I suppose, its part to perform in throwing a still deeper shadow. It is very possible that Michael Angelo may have calculated upon this effect of sombre shadow, and legitimately, I think; but it really is not worthy of Mr. Powers to say that the whole effect of this mighty statue depends, not on the positive efforts of Michael Angelo's chisel, but on the absence of light in a space of a few inches. He wrought the whole statue in harmony with that small part of it which he leaves to the spectator's imagination, and if he had erred at any point, the miracle would have been a failure; so that, working in marble, he has positively reached a degree of excellence above the capability of marble, sculpturing his highest touches upon air and duskiness. Mr. Powers gave some amusing anecdotes of his early life, when he was a clerk in a store in Cincinnati. There was a museum opposite, the proprietor of which had a peculiar physiognomy that struck Powers, insomuch that he felt impelled to make continual caricatures of it. He used to draw them upon the door of the museum, and became so familiar with the face, that he could draw them in the dark; so that, every morning, here was this absurd profile of himself, greeting the museum-man when he came to open his establishment. Often, too, it would reappear within an hour after it was rubbed out. The man was infinitely annoyed, and made all possible efforts to discover the unknown artist, but in vain; and finally concluded, I suppose, that the likeness broke out upon the door of its own accord, like the nettle-rash. Some years afterwards, the proprietor of the museum engaged Powers himself as an assistant; and one day Powers asked him if he remembered this mysterious profile. "Yes," said he, "did you know who drew them?" Powers took a piece of chalk, and touched off the very profile again, before the man's eyes. "Ah," said he, "if I had known it at the time, I would have broken every bone in your body!" Before he began to work in marble, Powers had greater practice and success in making wax figures, and he produced a work of this kind called "The Infernal Regions," which he seemed to imply had been very famous. He said he once wrought a face in wax which was life itself, having made the eyes on purpose for it, and put in every hair in the eyebrows individually, and finished the whole with similar minuteness; so that, within the distance of a foot or two, it was impossible to tell that the face did not live. I have hardly ever before felt an impulse to write down a man's conversation as I do that of Mr. Powers. The chief reason is, probably, that it is so possible to do it, his ideas being square, solid, and tangible, and therefore readily grasped and retained. He is a very instructive man, and sweeps one's empty and dead notions out of the way with exceeding vigor; but when you have his ultimate thought and perception, you feel inclined to think and see a little further for yourself. He sees too clearly what is within his range to be aware of any region of mystery beyond. Probably, however, this latter remark does him injustice. I like the man, and am always glad to encounter the mill-stream of his talk. . . . Yesterday he met me in the street (dressed in his linen blouse and slippers, with a little bit of a sculptor's cap on the side of his head), and gave utterance to a theory of colds, and a dissertation on the bad effects of draughts, whether of cold air or hot, and the dangers of transfusing blood from the veins of one living subject to those of another. On the last topic, he remarked that, if a single particle of air found its way into the veins, along with the transfused blood, it caused convulsions and inevitable death; otherwise the process might be of excellent effect. Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls. The situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond, from the balcony of the drawing-room. By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr. Trollope, Mr. Boott and his young daughter, and two or three other gentlemen. . . . Browning was very genial and full of life, as usual, but his conversation has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch, even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it. He spoke most rapturously of a portrait of Mrs. Browning, which an Italian artist is painting for the wife of an American gentleman, as a present from her husband. The success was already perfect, although there had been only two sittings as yet, and both on the same day; and in this relation, Mr. Browning remarked that P------, the American artist, had had no less than seventy-three sittings of him for a portrait. In the result, every hair and speck of him was represented; yet, as I inferred from what he did not say, this accumulation of minute truths did not, after all, amount to the true whole. I do not remember much else that Browning said, except a playful abuse of a little King Charles spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden's lap-dog, whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his behalf. Browning's nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child. He must be an amiable man. I should like him much, and should make him like me, if opportunities were favorable. I conversed principally with Mr. Trollope, the son, I believe, of the Mrs. Trollope to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we are ever likely to repay. Mr. Trollope is a very sensible and cultivated man, and, I suspect, an author: at least, there is a literary man of repute of this name, though I have never read his works. He has resided in Italy eighteen years. It seems a pity to do this. It needs the native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go back to the realities of my own. We had a pleasant cup of tea, and took a moonlight view of Florence from the balcony. . . . June 28th.--Yesterday afternoon, J----- and I went to a horse-race, which took place in the Corso and contiguous line of streets, in further celebration of the Feast of St. John. A crowd of people was already collected, all along the line of the proposed race, as early as six o'clock; and there were a great many carriages driving amid the throng, open barouches mostly, in which the beauty and gentility of Florence were freely displayed. It was a repetition of the scene in the Corso at Rome, at Carnival time, without the masks, the fun, and the confetti. The Grand Duke and Duchess and the Court likewise made their appearance in as many as seven or eight coaches-and-six, each with a coachman, three footmen, and a postilion in the royal livery, and attended by a troop of horsemen in scarlet coats and cocked hats. I did not particularly notice the Grand Duke himself; but, in the carriage behind him, there sat only a lady, who favored the people along the street with a constant succession of bows, repeated at such short intervals, and so quickly, as to be little more than nods; therefore not particularly graceful or majestic. Having the good fortune, to be favored with one of these nods, I lifted my hat in response, and may therefore claim a bowing acquaintance with the Grand Duchess. She is a Bourbon of the Naples family, and was a pale, handsome woman, of princely aspect enough. The crowd evinced no enthusiasm, nor the slightest feeling of any kind, in acknowledgment of the presence of their rulers; and, indeed, I think I never saw a crowd so well behaved; that is, with so few salient points, so little ebullition, so absolutely tame, as the Florentine one. After all, and much contrary to my expectations, an American crowd has incomparably more life than any other; and, meeting on any casual occasion, it will talk, laugh, roar, and be diversified with a thousand characteristic incidents and gleams and shadows, that you see nothing of here. The people seems to have no part even in its own gatherings. It comes together merely as a mass of spectators, and must not so much as amuse itself by any activity of mind. The race, which was the attraction that drew us all together, turned out a very pitiful affair. When we had waited till nearly dusk, the street being thronged quite across, insomuch that it seemed impossible that it should be cleared as a race-course, there came suddenly from every throat a quick, sharp exclamation, combining into a general shout. Immediately the crowd pressed back on each side of the street; a moment afterwards, there was a rapid pattering of hoofs over the earth with which the pavement was strewn, and I saw the head and back of a horse rushing past. A few seconds more, and another horse followed; and at another little interval, a third. This was all that we had waited for; all that I saw, or anybody else, except those who stood on the utmost verge of the course, at the risk of being trampled down and killed. Two men were killed in this way on Thursday, and certainly human life was never spent for a poorer object. The spectators at the windows, to be sure, having the horses in sight for a longer time, might get a little more enjoyment out of the affair. By the by, the most picturesque aspect of the scene was the life given to it by the many faces, some of them fair ones, that looked out from window and balcony, all along the curving line of lofty palaces and edifices, between which the race-course lay; and from nearly every window, and over every balcony, was flung a silken texture, or cloth of brilliant line, or piece of tapestry or carpet, or whatever adornment of the kind could be had, so as to dress up the street in gala attire. But, the Feast of St. John, like the Carnival, is but a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death of centuries. It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to keep its holidays alive. I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none that I recognized as such, on this occasion. All the people were respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests were scattered abundantly among the throng. On my way home, I saw the Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a representation this Sunday evening. It shocked my New England prejudices a little. Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great monumental deposit of Florentine worthies. The piazza before it is a wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago, by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own immediate will in execution. The piazza has not much appearance of antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on. The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if with the purpose of doing something. The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and five hundred feet. There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams, lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars. The octagon seems to be a favorite shape in Florence. These pillars were clad in yellow and scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John. The aisles, on each side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the clere-story. It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly through a religious medium. The many-hued saints and angels lose their mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see all the better without their help. The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures are sculptured in bas-relief. In both of the side aisles there are saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record names as illustrious as any in the world. As you enter, the first monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient burial-site of his family. The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above. Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love, the honor which his country owed him. Her own monument is in one of the chapels of the transept. Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think, was constructed not many years after his death. The rest of the monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael Morghen and of Galileo. The tomb of the latter is over against that of Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you enter the church. It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person, nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear of heart. All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long enough, and they turn out to be the very same. All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing, gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt, except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them. They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel, where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now ghastly decorations. While she was gone I threw my eyes about the church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an impressive edifice. Any little Norman church in England would impress me as much, and more. There is something, I do not know what, but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach. Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace. On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now converted into a prison. It is an immense square edifice of dark stone, with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner. Two stone lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by; and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly, and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners' cells. It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten, like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth century. When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise, although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently modernizing everything. But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high, such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new. Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable consecration. It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art. The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga. It was built by the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago, and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind him. It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither to adorn the palace of the Medici. In the most prominent place was a Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old Cosino and his deeds and wisdom. This mansion gives the visitor a stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it in both these particulars. Still, we cannot but be conscious that it must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality, as the hand fills a glove. It has been found spacious enough, since Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been guests in this house. After being the family mansion of the Medici for nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public offices and societies. After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the region above the basement. Here the palace is cut up and portioned off into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks, inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears. We were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli. They were in pretty good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between the two artists. The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct. We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size, with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be perfectly happy. At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could make it out. Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere. On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded. Opposite, across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he. The house is distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices. June 30th.--Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of people and grandees whom it brought together. I took my stand in the vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at than from the street-corners whence I saw it before. The vista of the street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the show. The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads, leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed up and down, until the signal for the race was given. Equipages, too, were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be seen. Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted. Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman, and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before. The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign. This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of. Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio. July 2d.--We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown. . . . We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen. The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella. There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.] July 4th 1858.--Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned. This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits. After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women. When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy. . . . Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it. . . . We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colors in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it. We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, . . . . and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honor paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanized into false life, they do harm instead of good. . . . . The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescos, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague. . . . At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a grayish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime. It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . . In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird. July 8th.--On the 6th we went to the Church of the Annunziata, which stands in the piazza of the same name. On the corner of the Via dei Servi is the palace which I suppose to be the one that Browning makes the scene of his poem, "The Statue and the Bust," and the statue of Duke Ferdinand sits stately on horseback, with his face turned towards the window, where the lady ought to appear. Neither she nor the bust, however, was visible, at least not to my eyes. The church occupies one side of the piazza, and in front of it, as likewise on the two adjoining sides of the square, there are pillared arcades, constructed by Brunelleschi or his scholars. After passing through these arches, and still before entering the church itself, you come to an ancient cloister, which is now quite enclosed in glass as a means of preserving some frescos of Andrea del Sarto and others, which are considered valuable. Passing the threshold of the church, we were quite dazzled by the splendor that shone upon us from the ceiling of the nave, the great parallelograms of which, viewed from one end, look as if richly embossed all over with gold. The whole interior, indeed, has an effect of brightness and magnificence, the walls being covered mostly with light-colored marble, into which are inlaid compartments of rarer and richer marbles. The pillars and pilasters, too, are of variegated marbles, with Corinthian capitals, that shine just as brightly as if they were of solid gold, so faithfully have they been gilded and burnished. The pavement is formed of squares of black and white marble. There are no side aisles, but ranges of chapels, with communication from one to another, stand round the whole extent of the nave and choir; all of marble, all decorated with pictures, statues, busts, and mural monuments; all worth, separately, a day's inspection. The high altar is of great beauty and richness, . . . . and also the tomb of John of Bologna in a chapel at the remotest extremity of the church. In this chapel there are some bas-reliefs by him, and also a large crucifix, with a marble Christ upon it. I think there has been no better sculptor since the days of Phidias. . . . The church was founded by seven gentlemen of Florence, who formed themselves into a religious order called "Servants of Mary." Many miraculous cures were wrought here; and the church, in consequence, was so thickly hung with votive offerings of legs, arms, and other things in wax, that they used to tumble upon people's heads, so that finally they were all cleared out as rubbish. The church is still, I should imagine, looked upon as a place of peculiar sanctity; for while we were there it had an unusual number of kneeling worshippers, and persons were passing from shrine to shrine all round the nave and choir, praying awhile at each, and thus performing a pilgrimage at little cost of time and labor. One old gentleman, I observed, carried a cushion or pad, just big enough for one knee, on which he carefully adjusted his genuflexions before each altar. An old woman in the choir prayed alternately to us and to the saints, with most success, I hope, in her petitions to the latter, though certainly her prayers to ourselves seemed the more fervent of the two. When we had gone entirely round the church, we came at last to the chapel of the Annunziata, which stands on the floor of the nave, on the left hand as we enter. It is a very beautiful piece of architecture,--a sort of canopy of marble, supported upon pillars; and its magnificence within, in marble and silver, and all manner of holy decoration, is quite indescribable. It was built four hundred years ago, by Pietro de' Medici, and has probably been growing richer ever since. The altar is entirely of silver, richly embossed. As many people were kneeling on the steps before it as could find room, and most of them, when they finished their prayers, ascended the steps, kissed over and over again the margin of the silver altar, laid their foreheads upon it, and then deposited an offering in a box placed upon the altar's top. From the dulness of the chink in the only case when I heard it, I judged it to be a small copper coin. In the inner part of this chapel is preserved a miraculous picture of the "Santissima Annunziata," painted by angels, and held in such holy repute that forty thousand dollars have lately been expended in providing a new crown for the sacred personage represented. The picture is now veiled behind a curtain; and as it is a fresco, and is not considered to do much credit to the angelic artists, I was well contented not to see it. We found a side door of the church admitting us into the great cloister, which has a walk of intersecting arches round its four sides, paved with flat tombstones, and broad enough for six people to walk abreast. On the walls, in the semicircles of each successive arch, are frescos representing incidents in the lives of the seven founders of the church, and all the lower part of the wall is incrusted with marble inscriptions to the memory of the dead, and mostly of persons who have died not very long ago. The space enclosed by the cloistered walk, usually made cheerful by green grass, has a pavement of tombstones laid in regular ranges. In the centre is a stone octagonal structure, which at first I supposed to be the tomb of some deceased mediaeval personage; but, on approaching, I found it a well, with its bucket hanging within the curb, and looking as if it were in constant use. The surface of the water lay deep beneath the deepest dust of the dead people, and thence threw up its picture of the sky; but I think it would not be a moderate thirst that would induce me to drink of that well. On leaving the church we bought a little gilt crucifix. . . . On Sunday evening I paid a short visit to Mr. Powers, and, as usual, was entertained and instructed with his conversation. It did not, indeed, turn upon artistical subjects; but the artistic is only one side of his character, and, I think, not the principal side. He might have achieved valuable success as an engineer and mechanician. He gave a dissertation on flying-machines, evidently from his own experience, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to fly by means of steam or any other motive-power now known to man. No force hitherto attained would suffice to lift the engine which generated it. He appeared to anticipate that flying will be a future mode of locomotion, but not till the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied. Another topic discussed was a cure for complaints of the chest by the inhalation of nitric acid; and he produced his own apparatus for that purpose, being merely a tube inserted into a bottle containing a small quantity of the acid, just enough to produce the gas for inhalation. He told me, too, a remedy for burns accidentally discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet. It prevents all pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air. He evidently has a great tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and self-reliance that such persons require. It is very singular that there should be an ideal vein in a man of this character. This morning he called to see me, with intelligence of the failure of the new attempt to lay the electric cable between England and America; and here, too, it appears the misfortune might have been avoided if a plan of his own for laying the cable had been adopted. He explained his process, and made it seem as practicable as to put up a bell-wire. I do not remember how or why (but appositely) he repeated some verses, from a pretty little ballad about fairies, that had struck his fancy, and he wound up his talk with some acute observations on the characters of General Jackson and other public men. He told an anecdote, illustrating the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary system generally. Powers witnessed the scene himself. He thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to other persons. Men who have known Jackson intimately, and in great affairs, would not agree as to this intellectual and argumentative deficiency, though they would fully allow the intuitive faculty. I have heard General Pierce tell a striking instance of Jackson's power of presenting his own view of a subject with irresistible force to the mind of the auditor. President Buchanan has likewise expressed to me as high admiration of Jackson as I ever heard one man award to another. Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool. Speaking of Jackson, and remembering Raphael's picture of Pope Julius II., the best portrait in the whole world, and excellent in all its repetitions, I wish it had been possible for Raphael to paint General Jackson! Referring again to General Jackson's intuitions, and to Powers's idea that he was unable to render a reason to himself or others for what he chose to do, I should have thought that this very probably might have been the case, were there not such strong evidence to the contrary. The highest, or perhaps any high administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is a revelation of the very thing to be done, and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly that very likely it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism on his own poem. The English overlook this in their scheme of government, which requires that the members of the national executive should be orators, and the readiest and most fluent orators that can be found. The very fact (on which they are selected) that they are men of words makes it improbable that they are likewise men of deeds. And it is only tradition and old custom, founded on an obsolete state of things, that assigns any value to parliamentary oratory. The world has done with it, except as an intellectual pastime. The speeches have no effect till they are converted into newspaper paragraphs; and they had better be composed as such, in the first place, and oratory reserved for churches, courts of law, and public dinner-tables. July 10th.--My wife and I went yesterday forenoon to see the Church of San Marco, with which is connected a convent of Dominicans. . . . The interior is not less than three or four hundred years old, and is in the classic style, with a flat ceiling, gilded, and a lofty arch, supported by pillars, between the nave and choir. There are no side aisles, but ranges of shrines on both sides of the nave, each beneath its own pair of pillars and pediments. The pavement is of brick, with here and there a marble tombstone inlaid. It is not a magnificent church; but looks dingy with time and apparent neglect, though rendered sufficiently interesting by statues of mediaeval date by John of Bologna and other old sculptors, and by monumental busts and bas-reliefs: also, there is a wooden crucifix by Giotto, with ancient gilding on it; and a painting of Christ, which was considered a wonderful work in its day. Each shrine, or most of them, at any rate, had its dark old picture, and there is a very old and hideous mosaic of the Virgin and two saints, which I looked at very slightly, with the purpose of immediately forgetting it. Savonarola, the reforming monk, was a brother of this convent, and was torn from its shelter, to be subsequently hanged and burnt in the Grand Ducal Piazza. A large chapel in the left transept is of the Salviati family, dedicated to St. Anthony, and decorated with several statues of saints, and with some old frescos. When we had more than sufficiently examined these, the custode proposed to show us some frescos of Fra Angelico, and conducted us into a large cloister, under the arches of which, and beneath a covering of glass, he pointed to a picture of St. Dominic kneeling at the Cross. There are two or three others by the angelic friar in different parts of the cloister, and a regular series, filling up all the arches, by various artists. Its four-sided, cloistered walk surrounds a square, open to the sky as usual, and paved with gray stones that have no inscriptions, but probably are laid over graves. Its walls, however, are incrusted, and the walk itself is paved with monumental inscriptions on marble, none of which, so far as I observed, were of ancient date. Either the fashion of thus commemorating the dead is not ancient in Florence, or the old tombstones have been removed to make room for new ones. I do not know where the monks themselves have their burial-place; perhaps in an inner cloister, which we did not see. All the inscriptions here, I believe, were in memory of persons not connected with the convent. A door in the wall of the cloister admitted us into the chapter-house, its interior moderately spacious, with a roof formed by intersecting arches. Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life. The cross of the Saviour and those of the thieves were painted against a dark red sky; the figures upon them were lean and attenuated, evidently the vague conceptions of a man who had never seen a naked figure. Beneath, was a multitude of people, most of whom were saints who had lived and been martyred long after the Crucifixion; and some of these had wounds from which gilded rays shone forth, as if the inner glory and blessedness of the holy men blazed through them. It is a very ugly picture, and its ugliness is not that of strength and vigor, but of weakness and incompetency. Fra Angelico should have confined himself to miniature heads, in which his delicacy of touch and minute labor often produce an excellent effect. The custode informed us that there were more frescos of this pious artist in the interior of the convent, into which I might be allowed admittance, but not my wife. I declined seeing them, and heartily thanked heaven for my escape. Returning through the church, we stopped to look at a shrine on the right of the entrance, where several wax candles were lighted, and the steps of which were crowded with worshippers. It was evidently a spot of special sanctity, and, approaching the steps, we saw, behind a gilded framework of stars and protected by glass, a wooden image of the Saviour, naked, covered with spots of blood, crowned with thorns, and expressing all the human wretchedness that the carver's skill could represent. The whole shrine, within the glass, was hung with offerings, as well of silver and gold as of tinsel and trumpery, and the body of Christ glistened with gold chains and ornaments, and with watches of silver and gold, some of which appeared to be of very old manufacture, and others might be new. Amid all this glitter the face of pain and grief looked forth, not a whit comforted. While we stood there, a woman, who had been praying, arose from her knees and laid an offering of a single flower upon the shrine. The corresponding arch, on the opposite side of the entrance, contained a wax-work within a large glass case, representing the Nativity. I do not remember how the Blessed Infant looked, but the Virgin was gorgeously dressed in silks, satins, and gauzes, with spangles and ornaments of all kinds, and, I believe, brooches of real diamonds on her bosom. Her attire, judging from its freshness and newness of glitter, might have been put on that very morning. July 13th.--We went for the second time, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and I looked pretty thoroughly at the Pre-Raphaelite pictures, few of which are really worth looking at nowadays. Cimabue and Giotto might certainly be dismissed, henceforth and forever, without any detriment to the cause of good art. There is what seems to me a better picture than either of these has produced, by Bonamico Buffalmacco, an artist of about their date or not long after. The first real picture in the series is the "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile da Fabriano, a really splendid work in all senses, with noble and beautiful figures in it, and a crowd of personages, managed with great skill. Three pictures by Perugino are the only other ones I cared to look at. In one of these, the face of the Virgin who holds the dead Christ on her knees has a deeper expression of woe than can ever have been painted since. After Perugino the pictures cease to be interesting; the art came forward with rapid strides, but the painters and their productions do not take nearly so much hold of the spectator as before. They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue,--in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures. I looked again, and for a good while, at Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art. It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a mouth that has fallen open through very weakness. He holds one hand on his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance in his heavy task of ruling the universe. You might fancy such a being falling on his knees before a strong-willed man, and beseeching him to take the reins of omnipotence out of his hands. No wonder that wrong gets the better of right, and that good and ill are confounded, if the Supreme Head were as here depicted; for I never saw, and nobody else ever saw, so perfect a representation of a person burdened with a task infinitely above his strength. If Carlo Dolce had been wicked enough to know what he was doing, the picture would have been most blasphemous,--a satire, in the very person of the Almighty, against all incompetent rulers, and against the rickety machine and crazy action of the universe. Heaven forgive me for such thoughts as this picture has suggested! It must be added that the great original defect in the character as here represented is an easy good-nature. I wonder what Michael Angelo would have said to this painting. In the large, enclosed court connected with the Academy there are a number of statues, bas-reliefs, and casts, and what was especially interesting, the vague and rude commencement of a statue of St. Matthew by Michael Angelo. The conceptions of this great sculptor were so godlike that he seems to have been discontented at not likewise possessing the godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and half uncovered again. July 16th.--We went yesterday forenoon to see the Bargello. I do not know anything more picturesque in Florence than the great interior court of this ancient Palace of the Podesta, with the lofty height of the edifice looking down into the enclosed space, dark and stern, and the armorial bearings of a long succession of magistrates carved in stone upon the walls, a garland, as it were, of these Gothic devices extending quite round the court. The best feature of the whole is the broad stone staircase, with its heavy balustrade, ascending externally from the court to the iron-grated door in the second story. We passed the sentinels under the lofty archway that communicates with the street, and went up the stairs without being questioned or impeded. At the iron-grated door, however, we were met by two officials in uniform, who courteously informed us that there was nothing to be exhibited in the Bargello except an old chapel containing some frescos by Giotto, and that these could only be seen by making a previous appointment with the custode, he not being constantly on hand. I was not sorry to escape the frescos, though one of them is a portrait of Dante. We next went to the Church of the Badia, which is built in the form of a Greek cross, with a flat roof embossed and once splendid with now tarnished gold. The pavement is of brick, and the walls of dark stone, similar to that of the interior of the cathedral (pietra serena), and there being, according to Florentine custom, but little light, the effect was sombre, though the cool gloomy dusk was refreshing after the hot turmoil and dazzle of the adjacent street. Here we found three or four Gothic tombs, with figures of the deceased persons stretched in marble slumber upon them. There were likewise a picture or two, which it was impossible to see; indeed, I have hardly ever met with a picture in a church that was not utterly wasted and thrown away in the deep shadows of the chapel it was meant to adorn. If there is the remotest chance of its being seen, the sacristan hangs a curtain before it for the sake of his fee for withdrawing it. In the chapel of the Bianco family we saw (if it could be called seeing) what is considered the finest oil-painting of Fra Filippo Lippi. It was evidently hung with reference to a lofty window on the other side of the church, whence sufficient light might fall upon it to show a picture so vividly painted as this is, and as most of Fra Filippo Lippi's are. The window was curtained, however, and the chapel so dusky that I could make out nothing. Several persons came in to say their prayers during the little time that we remained in the church, and as we came out we passed a good woman who sat knitting in the coolness of the vestibule, which was lined with mural tombstones. Probably she spends the day thus, keeping up the little industry of her fingers, slipping into the church to pray whenever a devotional impulse swells into her heart, and asking an alms as often as she sees a person of charitable aspect. From the church we went to the Uffizi gallery, and reinspected the greater part of it pretty faithfully. We had the good fortune, too, again to get admittance into the cabinet of bronzes, where we admired anew the wonderful airiness of John of Bologna's Mercury, which, as I now observed, rests on nothing substantial, but on the breath of a zephyr beneath him. We also saw a bronze bust of one of the Medici by Benvenuto Cellini, and a thousand other things the curiosity of which is overlaid by their multitude. The Roman eagle, which I have recorded to be about the size of a blackbird, I now saw to be as large as a pigeon. On our way towards the door of the gallery, at our departure, we saw the cabinet of gems open, and again feasted our eyes with its concentrated brilliancies and magnificences. Among them were two crystal cups, with engraved devices, and covers of enamelled gold, wrought by Benvenuto Cellini, and wonderfully beautiful. But it is idle to mention one or two things, when all are so beautiful and curious; idle, too, because language is not burnished gold, with here and there a brighter word flashing like a diamond; and therefore no amount of talk will give the slightest idea of one of these elaborate handiworks. July 27th.--I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance [The Marble Faun.--ED.], which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties. Yesterday I spent a good deal of time in watching the setting out of a wedding party from our door; the bride being the daughter of an English lady, the Countess of ------. After all, there was nothing very characteristic. The bridegroom is a young man of English birth, son of the Countess of St. G------, who inhabits the third piano of this Casa del Bello. The very curious part of the spectacle was the swarm of beggars who haunted the street all day; the most wretched mob conceivable, chiefly women, with a few blind people, and some old men and boys. Among these the bridal party distributed their beneficence in the shape of some handfuls of copper, with here and there a half-paul intermixed; whereupon the whole wretched mob flung themselves in a heap upon the pavement, struggling, lighting, tumbling one over another, and then looking up to the windows with petitionary gestures for more and more, and still for more. Doubtless, they had need enough, for they looked thin, sickly, ill-fed, and the women ugly to the last degree. The wedding party had a breakfast above stairs, which lasted till four o'clock, and then the bridegroom took his bride in a barouche and pair, which was already crammed with his own luggage and hers. . . . He was a well-looking young man enough, in a uniform of French gray with silver epaulets; more agreeable in aspect than his bride, who, I think, will have the upper hand in their domestic life. I observed that, on getting into the barouche, he sat down on her dress, as he could not well help doing, and received a slight reprimand in consequence. After their departure, the wedding guests took their leave; the most noteworthy person being the Pope's Nuncio (the young man being son of the Pope's Chamberlain, and one of the Grand Duke's Noble Guard), an ecclesiastical personage in purple stockings, attended by two priests, all of whom got into a coach, the driver and footmen of which wore gold-laced cocked hats and other splendors. To-day I paid a short visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. I looked long at a Madonna of Raphael's, the one which is usually kept in the Grand Duke's private apartments, only brought into the public gallery for the purpose of being copied. It is the holiest of all Raphael's Madonnas, with a great reserve in the expression, a sense of being apart, and yet with the utmost tenderness and sweetness; although she drops her eyelids before her like a veil, as it were, and has a primness of eternal virginity about the mouth. It is one of Raphael's earlier works, when he mixed more religious sentiment with his paint than afterwards. Perugino's pictures give the impression of greater sincerity and earnestness than Raphael's, though the genius of Raphael often gave him miraculous vision. July 28th.--Last evening we went to the Powers's, and sat with them on the terrace, at the top of the house, till nearly ten o'clock. It was a delightful, calm, summer evening, and we were elevated far above all the adjacent roofs, and had a prospect of the greater part of Florence and its towers, and the surrounding hills, while directly beneath us rose the trees of a garden, and they hardly sent their summits higher than we sat. At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the ancient fashion, without any roof. We could see the upper part of the proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the surrounding houses. As it was, we heard the music and the applause, and now and then an actor's stentorian tones, when we chose to listen. Mrs. P------ and my wife, U---- and Master Bob, sat in a group together, and chatted in one corner of our aerial drawing-room, while Mr. Powers and myself leaned against the parapet, and talked of innumerable things. When the clocks struck the hour, or the bells rang from the steeples, as they are continually doing, I spoke of the sweetness of the Florence bells, the tones of some of them being as if the bell were full of liquid melody, and shed it through the air on being upturned. I had supposed, in my lack of musical ear, that the bells of the Campanile were the sweetest; but Mr. Powers says that there is a defect in their tone, and that the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio is the most melodious he ever heard. Then he spoke of his having been a manufacturer of organs, or, at least, of reeds for organs, at one period of his life. I wonder what he has not been! He told me of an invention of his in the musical line, a jewsharp with two tongues; and by and by he produced it for my inspection. It was carefully kept in a little wooden case, and was very neatly and elaborately constructed, with screws to tighten it, and a silver centre-piece between the two tongues. Evidently a great deal of thought had been bestowed on this little harp; but Mr. Powers told me that it was an utter failure, because the tongues were apt to interfere and jar with one another, although the strain of music was very sweet and melodious-- as he proved, by playing on it a little--when everything went right. It was a youthful production, and he said that its failure had been a great disappointment to him at the time; whereupon I congratulated him that his failures had been in small matters, and his successes in great ones. We talked, furthermore, about instinct and reason, and whether the brute creation have souls, and, if they have none, how justice is to be done them for their sufferings here; and Mr. Powers came finally to the conclusion that brutes suffer only in appearance, and that God enjoys for them all that they seem to enjoy, and that man is the only intelligent and sentient being. We reasoned high about other states of being; and I suggested the possibility that there might be beings inhabiting this earth, contemporaneously with us, and close beside us, but of whose existence and whereabout we could have no perception, nor they of ours, because we are endowed with different sets of senses; for certainly it was in God's power to create beings who should communicate with nature by innumerable other senses than those few which we possess. Mr. Powers gave hospitable reception to this idea, and said that it had occurred to himself; and he has evidently thought much and earnestly about such matters; but is apt to let his idea crystallize into a theory, before he can have sufficient data for it. He is a Swedenborgian in faith. The moon had risen behind the trees, while we were talking, and Powers intimated his idea that beings analogous to men--men in everything except the modifications necessary to adapt them to their physical circumstances--inhabited the planets, and peopled them with beautiful shapes. Each planet, however, must have its own standard of the beautiful, I suppose; and probably his sculptor's eye would not see much to admire in the proportions of an inhabitant of Saturn. The atmosphere of Florence, at least when we ascend a little way into it, suggests planetary speculations. Galileo found it so, and Mr. Powers and I pervaded the whole universe; but finally crept down his garret-stairs, and parted, with a friendly pressure of the hand. VILLA MONTANTO. MONTE BENI. August 2d.--We had grown weary of the heat of Florence within the walls, . . . . there being little opportunity for air and exercise except within the precincts of our little garden, which, also, we feared might breed malaria, or something akin to it. We have therefore taken this suburban villa for the two next months, and, yesterday morning, we all came out hither. J----- had preceded us with B. P------. The villa is on a hill called Bellosguardo, about a mile beyond the Porta Romana. Less than half an hour's walk brought us, who were on foot, to the iron gate of our villa, which we found shut and locked. We shouted to be let in, and while waiting for somebody to appear, there was a good opportunity to contemplate the external aspect of the villa. After we had waited a few minutes, J----- came racing down to the gate, laughing heartily, and said that Bob and he had been in the house, but had come out, shutting the door behind them; and as the door closed with a springlock, they could not get in again. Now as the key of the outer gate as well as that of the house itself was in the pocket of J-----'s coat, left inside, we were shut out of our own castle, and compelled to carry on a siege against it, without much likelihood of taking it, although the garrison was willing to surrender. But B. P------ called in the assistance of the contadini who cultivate the ground, and live in the farm-house close by; and one of them got into a window by means of a ladder, so that the keys were got, the gates opened, and we finally admitted. Before examining any other part of the house, we climbed to the top of the tower, which, indeed, is not very high, in proportion to its massive square. Very probably, its original height was abbreviated, in compliance with the law that lowered so many of the fortified towers of noblemen within the walls of Florence. . . . The stairs were not of stone, built in with the original mass of the tower, as in English castles, but of now decayed wood, which shook beneath us, and grew more and more crazy as we ascended. It will not be many years before the height of the tower becomes unattainable. . . . Near at hand, in the vicinity of the city, we saw the convent of Monte Olivetto, and other structures that looked like convents, being built round an enclosed square; also numerous white villas, many of which had towers, like that we were standing upon, square and massive, some of them battlemented on the summit, and others apparently modernized for domestic purposes. Among them U---- pointed out Galileo's tower, whither she made an excursion the other day. It looked lower than our own, but seemed to stand on a higher elevation. We also saw the duke's villa, the Poggio, with a long avenue of cypresses leading from it, as if a funeral were going forth. And having wasted thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that it lacked only water to be a very fine one. It is strange what a difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to life wherever it is visible. The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder (at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a really delightful landscape should. The vine, too, being cultivated in so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility, which is the poetical notion of a vineyard. The olive-orchards have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the Val d' Arno. By and by mamma's carriage came along the dusty road, and passed through the iron gateway, which we had left open for her reception. We shouted down to her and R-----, and they waved their handkerchiefs upward to us; and, on my way down, I met R----- and the servant coming up through the ghostly rooms. The rest of the day we spent mostly in exploring the premises. The house itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us have a suite of rooms individually. I have established myself on the ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks, parrots, vines, and sunflowers below. I know not how many more saloons, anterooms, and sleeping-chambers there are on this same basement story, besides an equal number over them, and a great subterranean establishment. I saw some immense jars there, which I suppose were intended to hold oil; and iron kettles, for what purpose I cannot tell. There is also a chapel in the house, but it is locked up, and we cannot yet with certainty find the door of it, nor even, in this great wilderness of a house, decide absolutely what space the holy precincts occupy. Adjoining U----'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that looks like a bit of red sealing-wax. If I had found him anywhere else I should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him to have some religious signification. In the servants' room a crucifix hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that their occupants were to be heretics. The lower floor of the house is tolerably furnished, and looks cheerful with its frescos, although the bare pavements in every room give an impression of discomfort. But carpets are universally taken up in Italy during summer-time. It must have been an immense family that could have ever filled such a house with life. We go on voyages of discovery, and when in quest of any particular point, are likely enough to fetch up at some other. This morning I had difficulty in finding my way again to the top of the tower. One of the most peculiar rooms is constructed close to the tower, under the roof of the main building, but with no external walls on two sides! It is thus left open to the air, I presume for the sake of coolness. A parapet runs round the exposed sides for the sake of security. Some of the palaces in Florence have such open loggias in their upper stories, and I saw others on our journey hither, after arriving in Tuscany. The grounds immediately around the house are laid out in gravel-walks, and ornamented with shrubbery, and with what ought to be a grassy lawn; but the Italian sun is quite as little favorable to beauty of that kind as our own. I have enjoyed the luxury, however, almost for the first time since I left my hill-top at the Wayside, of flinging myself at full length on the ground without any fear of catching cold. Moist England would punish a man soundly for taking such liberties with her greensward. A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country. The possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction. The rural laborers, so far as I have observed, go about in their shirt-sleeves, and look very much like tanned and sunburnt Yankees. Last night it was really a work of time and toil to go about making our defensive preparations for the night; first closing the iron gate, then the ponderous and complicated fastenings of the house door, then the separate barricadoes of each iron-barred window on the lower floor, with a somewhat slighter arrangement above. There are bolts and shutters, however, for every window in the house, and I suppose it would not be amiss to put them all in use. Our garrison is so small that we must depend more upon the strength of our fortifications than upon our own active efforts in case of an attack. In England, in an insulated country house, we should need all these bolts and bars, and Italy is not thought to be the safer country of the two. It deserves to be recorded that the Count Montanto, a nobleman, and seemingly a man of property, should deem it worth while to let his country seat, and reside during the hot months in his palace in the city, for the consideration of a comparatively small sum a month. He seems to contemplate returning hither for the autumn and winter, when the situation must be very windy and bleak, and the cold death-like in these great halls; and then, it is to be supposed, he will let his palace in town. The Count, through the agency of his son, bargained very stiffly for, and finally obtained, three dollars in addition to the sum which we at first offered him. This indicates that even a little money is still a matter of great moment in Italy. Signor del Bello, who, I believe, is also a nobleman, haggled with us about some cracked crockery at our late residence, and finally demanded and received fifty cents in compensation. But this poor gentleman has been a spendthrift, and now acts as the agent of another. August 3d.--Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with his family. He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for sculpture, which would employ him during next winter. He told me, what I was glad to hear, that his sketches of Italian life, intended for the "Atlantic Monthly," and supposed to be lost, have been recovered. Speaking of the superstitiousness of the Italians, he said that they universally believe in the influence of the evil eye. The evil influence is supposed not to be dependent on the will of the possessor of the evil eye; on the contrary, the persons to whom he wishes well are the very ones to suffer by it. It is oftener found in monks than in any other class of people; and on meeting a monk, and encountering his eye, an Italian usually makes a defensive sign by putting both hands behind him, with the forefingers and little fingers extended, although it is a controverted point whether it be not more efficacious to extend the hand with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person. It is considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day. The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism. The Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets. Pio Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people, is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has been seen in the ruin of all schemes for the public good so soon as they are favored by him. When the pillar in the Piazza de' Spagna, commemorative of his dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was to be erected, the people of Rome refused to be present, or to have anything to do with it, unless the pope promised to abstain from interference. His Holiness did promise, but so far broke his word as to be present one day while it was being erected, and on that day a man was killed. A little while ago there was a Lord Clifford, an English Catholic nobleman, residing in Italy, and, happening to come to Rome, he sent his compliments to Pio Nono, and requested the favor of an interview. The pope, as it happened, was indisposed, or for some reason could not see his lordship, but very kindly sent him his blessing. Those who knew of it shook their heads, and intimated that it would go ill with his lordship now that he had been blessed by Pio Nono, and the very next day poor Lord Clifford was dead! His Holiness had better construe the scriptural injunction literally, and take to blessing his enemies. I walked into town with J------ this morning, and, meeting a monk in the Via Furnace, I thought it no more than reasonable, as the good father fixed his eyes on me, to provide against the worst by putting both hands behind me, with the forefingers and little fingers stuck out. In speaking of the little oratory connected with U----'s chamber, I forgot to mention the most remarkable object in it. It is a skull, the size of life (or death). . . . This part of the house must be very old, probably coeval with the tower. The ceiling of U----'s apartment is vaulted with intersecting arches; and adjoining it is a very large saloon, likewise with a vaulted and groined ceiling, and having a cushioned divan running all round the walls. The windows of these rooms look out on the Val d' Arno. The apartment above this saloon is of the same size, and hung with engraved portraits, printed on large sheets by the score and hundred together, and enclosed in wooden frames. They comprise the whole series of Roman emperors, the succession of popes, the kings of Europe, the doges of Venice, and the sultans of Turkey. The engravings bear different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at Rome. August 4th.--We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset. In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold its course near the bases of the hills. I now observe that the line of trees which marks its current divides the valley into two pretty equal parts, and the river runs nearly east and west. . . . At last, when it was growing dark, we went down, groping our way over the shaky staircases, and peeping into each dark chamber as we passed. I gratified J----- exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall. Reaching the bottom, I went into the great saloon, and stood at a window watching the lights twinkle forth, near and far, in the valley, and listening to the convent bells that sounded from Monte Olivetto, and more remotely still. The stars came out, and the constellation of the Dipper hung exactly over the Val d' Arno, pointing to the North Star above the hills on my right. August 12th.--We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden, to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many years in Florence. He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets and emperors. He lives in an old house, formerly a residence of the Knights Templars, hanging over the Arno, just as you come upon the Ponte Vecchio; and, going up a dark staircase and knocking at a door on one side of the landing-place, we were received by Mr. Kirkup. He had had notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant to take him by the hand. He is rather low of stature, with a pale, shrivelled face, and hair and beard perfectly white, and the hair of a particularly soft and silken texture. He has a high, thin nose, of the English aristocratic type; his eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and the eyebrows are arched above them, so that he seems all the time to be seeing something that strikes him with surprise. I judged him to be a little crack-brained, chiefly on the strength of this expression. His whole make is delicate, his hands white and small, and his appearance and manners those of a gentleman, with rather more embroidery of courtesy than belongs to an Englishman. He appeared to be very nervous, tremulous, indeed, to his fingers' ends, without being in any degree disturbed or embarrassed by our presence. Finally, he is very deaf; an infirmity that quite took away my pleasure in the interview, because it is impossible to say anything worth while when one is compelled to raise one's voice above its ordinary level. He ushered us through two or three large rooms, dark, dusty, hung with antique-looking pictures, and lined with bookcases containing, I doubt not, a very curious library. Indeed, he directed my attention to one case, and said that he had collected those works, in former days, merely for the sake of laughing at them. They were books of magic and occult sciences. What he seemed really to value, however, were some manuscript copies of Dante, of which he showed us two: one, a folio on parchment, beautifully written in German text, the letters as clear and accurately cut as printed type; the other a small volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said, to be carried in a capacious mediaeval sleeve. This also was on vellum, and as elegantly executed as the larger one; but the larger had beautiful illuminations, the vermilion and gold of which looked as brilliant now as they did five centuries ago. Both of these books were written early in the fourteenth century. Mr. Kirkup has also a plaster cast of Dante's face, which he believes to be the original one taken from his face after death; and he has likewise his own accurate tracing from Giotto's fresco of Dante in the chapel of the Bargello. This fresco was discovered through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the tracing is particularly valuable, because the original has been almost destroyed by rough usage in drawing out a nail that had been driven into the eye. It represents the profile of a youthful but melancholy face, and has the general outline of Dante's features in other portraits. Dante has held frequent communications with Mr. Kirkup through a medium, the poet being described by the medium as wearing the same dress seen in the youthful portrait, but as hearing more resemblance to the cast taken from his dead face than to the picture from his youthful one. There was a very good picture of Savonarola in one of the rooms, and many other portraits, paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, and others the work of Mr. Kirkup himself. He has the torn fragment of an exquisite drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a portfolio of other curious drawings. And besides books and works of art, he has no end of antique knick-knackeries, none of which we had any time to look at; among others some instruments with which nuns used to torture themselves in their convents by way of penance. But the greatest curiosity of all, and no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old, who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went. She was the brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine. The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr. Kirkup showed us on the wall. I never saw a more beautiful and striking face claiming to be a real one. She was a Florentine, of low birth, and she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium. He showed us a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned. The necromancer set a great value upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his heart, and now considers it absolutely his own. At any rate, it is a happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it. The child inherits her mother's gift of communication with the spiritual world, so that the conjurer can still talk with Regina through the baby which she left, and not only with her, but with Dante, and any other great spirit that may choose to visit him. It is a very strange story, and this child might be put at once into a romance, with all her history and environment; the ancient Knight Templar palace, with the Arno flowing under the iron-barred windows, and the Ponte Vecchio, covered with its jewellers' shops, close at hand; the dark, lofty chambers with faded frescos on the ceilings, black pictures hanging on the walls, old books on the shelves, and hundreds of musty antiquities, emitting an odor of past centuries; the shrivelled, white-bearded old man, thinking all the time of ghosts, and looking into the child's eyes to seek them; and the child herself, springing so freshly out of the soil, so pretty, so intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate save the conjurer and a kitten. It is a Persian kitten, and lay asleep in a window; but when I touched it, it started up at once in as gamesome a mood as the child herself. The child looks pale, and no wonder, seldom or never stirring out of that old palace, or away from the river atmosphere. Miss Blagden advised Mr. Kirkup to go with her to the seaside or into the country, and he did not deny that it might do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's sluggishness and dislike of change. I think he will not live a great while, for he seems very frail. When he dies the little girl will inherit what property he may leave. A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in charge. She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized by a great deal of briskness throughout the interview. He expressed himself delighted to have met one (whose books he had read), and said that the day would be a memorable one to him,--which I did not in the least believe. Mr. Kirkup is an intimate friend of Trelawny, author of "Adventures of a Younger Son," and, long ago, the latter promised him that, if he ever came into possession of the family estate, he would divide it with him. Trelawny did really succeed to the estate, and lost no time in forwarding to his friend the legal documents, entitling him to half of the property. But Mr. Kirkup declined the gift, as he himself was not destitute, and Trelawny had a brother. There were two pictures of Trelawny in the saloons, one a slight sketch on the wall, the other a half-length portrait in a Turkish dress; both handsome, but indicating no very amiable character. It is not easy to forgive Trelawny for uncovering dead Byron's limbs, and telling that terrible story about them,--equally disgraceful to himself, be it truth or a lie. It seems that Regina had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,--the idea that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she has found. Her name is Imogen. The small manuscript copy of Dante which he showed me was written by a Florentine gentleman of the fourteenth century, one of whose ancestors the poet had met and talked with in Paradise. August 19th.--Here is a good Italian incident, which I find in Valery. Andrea del Castagno was a painter in Florence in the fifteenth century; and he had a friend, likewise a painter, Domenico of Venice. The latter had the secret of painting in oils, and yielded to Castagno's entreaties to impart it to him. Desirous of being the sole possessor of this great secret, Castagno waited only the night to assassinate Domenico, who so little suspected his treachery, that he besought those who found him bleeding and dying to take him to his friend Castagno, that he might die in his arms. The murderer lived to be seventy-four years old, and his crime was never suspected till he himself revealed it on his death-bed. Domenico did actually die in Castagno's arms. The death scene would have been a good one for the latter to paint in oils. September 1st.--Few things journalizable have happened during the last month, because Florence and the neighborhood have lost their novelty; and furthermore, I usually spend the whole day at home, having been engaged in planning and sketching out a romance. I have now done with this for the present, and mean to employ the rest of the time we stay here chiefly in revisiting the galleries, and seeing what remains to be seen in Florence. Last Saturday, August 28th, we went to take tea at Miss Blagden's, who has a weekly reception on that evening. We found Mr. Powers there, and by and by Mr. Boott and Mr. Trollope came in. Miss ------ has lately been exercising her faculties as a spiritual writing-medium; and, the conversation turning on that subject, Mr. Powers related some things that he had witnessed through the agency of Mr. Home, who had held a session or two at his house. He described the apparition of two mysterious hands from beneath a table round which the party were seated. These hands purported to belong to the aunt of the Countess Cotterel, who was present, and were a pair of thin, delicate, aged, lady-like hands and arms, appearing at the edge of the table, and terminating at the elbow in a sort of white mist. One of the hands took up a fan and began to use it. The countess then said, "Fan yourself as you used to do, dear aunt"; and forthwith the hands waved the fan back and forth in a peculiar manner, which the countess recognized as the manner of her dead aunt. The spirit was then requested to fan each member of the party; and accordingly, each separate individual round the table was fanned in turn, and felt the breeze sensibly upon his face. Finally, the hands sank beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure that they did not melt into the air. During this apparition, Mr. Home sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr. Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the party had retired. Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time invisible. He told of many of the wonders, which seem to have as much right to be set down as facts as anything else that depends on human testimony. For example, Mr. K------, one of the party, gave a sudden start and exclamation. He had felt on his knee a certain token, which could have been given him only by a friend, long ago in his grave. Mr. Powers inquired what was the last thing that had been given as a present to a deceased child; and suddenly both he and his wife felt a prick as of some sharp instrument, on their knees. The present had been a penknife. I have forgotten other incidents quite as striking as these; but, with the exception of the spirit-hands, they seemed to be akin to those that have been produced by mesmerism, returning the inquirer's thoughts and veiled recollections to himself, as answers to his queries. The hands are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon. Of course, they are not portions of a dead body, nor any other kind of substance; they are impressions on the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot tell. Even admitting their appearance,--and certainly I do admit it as freely and fully as if I had seen them myself,--there is no need of supposing them to come from the world of departed spirits. Powers seems to put entire faith in the verity of spiritual communications, while acknowledging the difficulty of identifying spirits as being what they pretend to be. He is a Swedenborgian, and so far prepared to put faith in many of these phenomena. As for Home, Powers gives a decided opinion that he is a knave, but thinks him so organized, nevertheless, as to be a particularly good medium for spiritual communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest myself in them. They are facts to my understanding, which, it might have been anticipated, would have been the last to acknowledge them; but they seem not to be facts to my intuitions and deeper perceptions. My inner soul does not in the least admit them; there is a mistake somewhere. So idle and empty do I feel these stories to be, that I hesitated long whether or no to give up a few pages of this not very important journal to the record of them. We have had written communications through Miss ------ with several spirits; my wife's father, mother, two brothers, and a sister, who died long ago, in infancy; a certain Mary Hall, who announces herself as the guardian spirit of Miss ------; and, queerest of all, a Mary Runnel, who seems to be a wandering spirit, having relations with nobody, but thrusts her finger into everybody's affairs. My wife's mother is the principal communicant; she expresses strong affection, and rejoices at the opportunity of conversing with her daughter. She often says very pretty things; for instance, in a dissertation upon heavenly music; but there is a lack of substance in her talk, a want of gripe, a delusive show, a sentimental surface, with no bottom beneath it. The same sort of thing has struck me in all the poetry and prose that I have read from spiritual sources. I should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity and warmth. In the communications between my wife and her mother, I cannot help thinking that (Miss ------ being unconsciously in a mesmeric state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's mind. . . . We have tried the spirits by various test questions, on every one of which they have failed egregiously. Here, however, the aforesaid Mary Runnel comes into play. The other spirits have told us that the veracity of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every mistake or falsehood. They have avowed themselves responsible for all statements signed by themselves, and have thereby brought themselves into more than one inextricable dilemma; but it is very funny, where a response or a matter of fact has not been thus certified, how invariably Mary Runnel is made to assume the discredit of it, on its turning out to be false. It is the most ingenious arrangement that could possibly have been contrived; and somehow or other, the pranks of this lying spirit give a reality to the conversations which the more respectable ghosts quite fail in imparting. The whole matter seems to me a sort of dreaming awake. It resembles a dream, in that the whole material is, from the first, in the dreamer's mind, though concealed at various depths below the surface; the dead appear alive, as they always do in dreams; unexpected combinations occur, as continually in dreams; the mind speaks through the various persons of the drama, and sometimes astonishes itself with its own wit, wisdom, and eloquence, as often in dreams; but, in both cases, the intellectual manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend. There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the pigheadedness both of metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena, so far as to make them the subject of investigation. In writing the communications, Miss ------ holds the pencil rather loosely between her fingers; it moves rapidly, and with equal facility whether she fixes her eyes on the paper or not. The handwriting has far more freedom than her own. At the conclusion of a sentence, the pencil lays itself down. She sometimes has a perception of each word before it is written; at other times, she is quite unconscious what is to come next. Her integrity is absolutely indubitable, and she herself totally disbelieves in the spiritual authenticity of what is communicated through her medium. September 3d.--We walked into Florence yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a gray, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but, not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares. We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which with its contents is now familiar to us, except the room containing drawings; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de' Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of colored crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discolored with age, creased, soiled; but yet you are magnetized by the hand of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design, in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work; whereas the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches. None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favored the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil-marks. There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own. It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed. We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue forever new and immortally young. Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the Church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marble canopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something. . . . The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigor, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewelry, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi; crockery ware; toys, books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head; not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar. We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit,--where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below,--I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented. Returning homewards, we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long-bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches,--in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummy-like, of the color of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, not a very delightful relic; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries; they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system. . . . After dinner I climbed the tower. . . . Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of Or San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare. As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red color, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of maskers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the Deity with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the color of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his lifelikeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure. September 7th.--I walked into town yesterday morning, by way of the Porta San Frediano. The gate of a city might be a good locality for a chapter in a novel, or for a little sketch by itself, whether by painter or writer. The great arch of the gateway, piercing through the depth and height of the massive masonry beneath the battlemented summit; the shadow brooding below, in the immense thickness of the wall and beyond it, the vista of the street, sunny and swarming with life; outside of the gate, a throng of carts, laden with fruits, vegetables, small flat barrels of wine, waiting to be examined by the custom-house officers; carriages too, and foot-passengers entering, and others swarming outward. Under the shadowy arch are the offices of the police and customs, and probably the guard-room of the soldiers, all hollowed out in the mass of the gateway. Civil officers loll on chairs in the shade, perhaps with an awning over their heads. Where the sun falls aslantwise under the arch a sentinel, with musket and bayonet, paces to and fro in the entrance, and other soldiers lounge close by. The life of the city seems to be compressed and made more intense by this barrier; and on passing within it you do not breathe quite so freely, yet are sensible of an enjoyment in the close elbowing throng, the clamor of high voices from side to side of the street, and the million of petty sights, actions, traffics, and personalities, all so squeezed together as to become a great whole. The street by which I entered led me to the Carraja Bridge; crossing which, I kept straight onward till I came to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Doubtless, it looks just the same as when Boccaccio's party stood in a cluster on its broad steps arranging their excursion to the villa. Thence I went to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which I entered by the side door, and found the organ sounding and a religious ceremony going forward. It is a church of sombre aspect, with its gray walls and pillars, but was decked out for some festivity with hangings of scarlet damask and gold. I sat awhile to rest myself, and then pursued my way to the Duomo. I entered, and looked at Sir John Hawkwood's painted effigy, and at several busts and statues, and at the windows of the chapel surrounding the dome, through which the sunshine glowed, white in the outer air, but a hundred-hued splendor within. I tried to bring up the scene of Lorenzo de' Medici's attempted assassination, but with no great success; and after listening a little while to the chanting of the priests and acolytes, I went to the Bank. It is in a palace of which Raphael was the architect, in the Piazza Gran Duca. I next went, as a matter of course, to the Uffizi gallery, and, in the first place, to the Tribune, where the Venus de' Medici deigned to reveal herself rather more satisfactorily than at my last visit. . . . I looked into all the rooms, bronzes, drawings, and gem-room; a volume might easily be written upon either subject. The contents of the gem-room especially require to be looked at separately in order to convince one's self of their minute magnificences; for, among so many, the eye slips from one to another with only a vague outward sense that here are whole shelves full of little miracles, both of nature's material and man's workmanship. Greater [larger] things can be reasonably well appreciated with a less scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. It is a troublesome process when there are a thousand such objects to be seen. I stood at an open window in the transverse corridor, and looked down upon the Arno, and across at the range of edifices that impend over it on the opposite side. The river, I should judge, may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards wide in its course between the Ponte alle Grazie and the Ponte Vecchio; that is, the width between strand and strand is at least so much. The river, however, leaves a broad margin of mud and gravel on its right bank, on which water-weeds grow pretty abundantly, and creep even into the stream. On my first arrival in Florence I thought the goose-pond green of the water rather agreeable than otherwise; but its hue is now that of unadulterated mud, as yellow as the Tiber itself, yet not impressing me as being enriched with city sewerage like that other famous river. From the Ponte alle Grazie downward, half-way towards the Ponte Vecchio, there is an island of gravel, and the channel on each side is so shallow as to allow the passage of men and horses wading not overleg. I have seen fishermen wading the main channel from side to side, their feet sinking into the dark mud, and thus discoloring the yellow water with a black track visible, step by step, through its shallowness. But still the Arno is a mountain stream, and liable to be tetchy and turbulent like all its kindred, and no doubt it often finds its borders of hewn stone not too far apart for its convenience. Along the right shore, beneath the Uffizi and the adjacent buildings, there is a broad paved way, with a parapet; on the opposite shore the edifices are built directly upon the river's edge, and impend over the water, supported upon arches and machicolations, as I think that peculiar arrangement of buttressing arcades is called. The houses are picturesquely various in height, from two or three stories to seven; picturesque in hue likewise,--pea-green, yellow, white, and of aged discoloration,--but all with green blinds; picturesque also in the courts and galleries that look upon the river, and in the wide arches that open beneath, intended perhaps to afford a haven for the household boat. Nets were suspended before one or two of the houses, as if the inhabitants were in the habit of fishing out of window. As a general effect, the houses, though often palatial in size and height, have a shabby, neglected aspect, and are jumbled too closely together. Behind their range the city swells upward in a hillside, which rises to a great height above, forming, I believe, a part of the Boboli Gardens. I returned homewards over the Ponte Vecchio, which is a continuous street of ancient houses, except over the central arch, so that a stranger might easily cross the river without knowing it. In these small, old houses there is a community of goldsmiths, who set out their glass cases, and hang their windows with rings, bracelets, necklaces, strings of pearl, ornaments of malachite and coral, and especially with Florentine mosaics; watches, too, and snuff-boxes of old fashion or new; offerings for shrines also, such as silver hearts pierced with swords; an infinity of pretty things, the manufacture of which is continually going on in the little back-room of each little shop. This gewgaw business has been established on the Ponte Vecchio for centuries, although, long since, it was an art of far higher pretensions than now. Benvenuto Cellini had his workshop here, probably in one of these selfsame little nooks. It would have been a ticklish affair to be Benvenuto's fellow-workman within such narrow limits. Going out of the Porta Romana, I walked for some distance along the city wall, and then, turning to the left, toiled up the hill of Bellosguardo, through narrow zigzag lanes between high walls of stone or plastered brick, where the sun had the fairest chance to frizzle me. There were scattered villas and houses, here and there concentrating into a little bit of a street, paved with flag-stones from side to side, as in the city, and shadowed quite across its narrowness by the height of the houses. Mostly, however, the way was inhospitably sunny, and shut out by the high wall from every glimpse of a view, except in one spot, where Florence spread itself before my eyes, with every tower, dome, and spire which it contains. A little way farther on my own gray tower rose before me, the most welcome object that I had seen in the course of the day. September 10th.--I went into town again yesterday, by way of the Porta San Frediano, and observed that this gate (like the other gates of Florence, as far as I have observed) is a tall, square structure of stone or brick, or both, rising high above the adjacent wall, and having a range of open loggie in the upper story. The arch externally is about half the height of the structure. Inside, towards the town, it rises nearly to the roof. On each side of the arch there is much room for offices, apartments, storehouses, or whatever else. On the outside of the gate, along the base, are those iron rings and sockets for torches, which are said to be the distinguishing symbol of illustrious houses. As contrasted with the vista of the narrow, swarming street through the arch from without, the view from the inside might be presented with a glimpse of the free blue sky. I strolled a little about Florence, and went into two or three churches; into that of the Annunziata for one. I have already described this church, with its general magnificence, and it was more magnificent than ever to-day, being hung with scarlet silk and gold-embroidery. A great many people were at their devotions, thronging principally around the Virgin's shrine. I was struck now with the many bas-reliefs and busts in the costume of their respective ages, and seemingly with great accuracy of portraiture, in the passage leading from the front of the church into the cloisters. The marble was not at all abashed nor degraded by being made to assume the guise of the mediaeval furred robe, or the close-fitting tunic with elaborate ruff, or the breastplate and gorget, or the flowing wig, or whatever the actual costume might be; and one is sensible of a rectitude and reality in the affair, and respects the dead people for not putting themselves into an eternal masquerade. The dress of the present day will look equally respectable in one or two hundred years. The Fair is still going on, and one of its principal centres is before this church, in the Piazza of the Annunziata. Cloth is the chief commodity offered for sale, and none of the finest; coarse, unbleached linen and cotton prints for country-people's wear, together with yarn, stockings, and here and there an assortment of bright-colored ribbons. Playthings, of a very rude fashion, were also displayed; likewise books in Italian and French; and a great deal of iron-work. Both here and in Rome they have this odd custom of offering rusty iron implements for sale, spread out on the pavements. There was a good deal of tinware, too, glittering in the sunshine, especially around the pedestal of the bronze statue of Duke Ferdinand, who curbs his horse and looks down upon the bustling piazza in a very stately way. . . . The people attending the fair had mostly a rustic appearance; sunburnt faces, thin frames; no beauty, no bloom, no joyousness of young or old; an anxious aspect, as if life were no easy or holiday matter with them; but I should take them to be of a kindly nature, and reasonably honest. Except the broad-brimmed Tuscan hats of the women, there was no peculiarity of costume. At a careless glance I could very well have mistaken most of the men for Yankees; as for the women, there is very little resemblance between them and ours,--the old being absolutely hideous, and the young ones very seldom pretty. It was a very dull crowd. They do not generate any warmth among themselves by contiguity; they have no pervading sentiment, such as is continually breaking out in rough merriment from an American crowd; they have nothing to do with one another; they are not a crowd, considered as one mass, but a collection of individuals. A despotic government has perhaps destroyed their principle of cohesion, and crumbled them to atoms. Italian crowds are noted for their civility; possibly they deserve credit for native courtesy and gentleness; possibly, on the other hand, the crowd has not spirit and self-consciousness enough to be rampant. I wonder whether they will ever hold another parliament in the Piazza of Santa Croce! I paid a visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. There is too large an intermixture of Andrea del Sarto's pictures in this gallery; everywhere you see them, cold, proper, and uncriticisable, looking so much like first-rate excellence, that you inevitably quarrel with your own taste for not admiring them. . . . It was one of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, and of a class intermediate between gentility and labor. Is there such a rural class in Italy? I saw a respectable-looking man feeling awkward and uncomfortable in a new and glossy pair of pantaloons not yet bent and creased to his natural movement. Nothing pleased me better to-day than some amber cups, in one of the cabinets of curiosities. They are richly wrought, and the material is as if the artist had compressed a great deal of sunshine together, and when sufficiently solidified had moulded these cups out of it and let them harden. This simile was suggested by ------. Leaving the palace, I entered the Boboli Gardens, and wandered up and down a good deal of its uneven surface, through broad, well-kept edges of box, sprouting loftily, trimmed smoothly, and strewn between with cleanly gravel; skirting along plantations of aged trees, throwing a deep shadow within their precincts; passing many statues, not of the finest art, yet approaching so near it, as to serve just as good a purpose for garden ornament; coming now and then to the borders of a fishpool, or a pond, where stately swans circumnavigated an island of flowers;--all very fine and very wearisome. I have never enjoyed this garden; perhaps because it suggests dress-coats, and such elegant formalities. September 11th.--We have heard a good deal of spirit matters of late, especially of wonderful incidents that attended Mr. Home's visit to Florence, two or three years ago. Mrs. Powers told a very marvellous thing; how that when Mr. Home was holding a seance in her house, and several persons present, a great scratching was heard in a neighboring closet. She addressed the spirit, and requested it not to disturb the company then, as they were busy with other affairs, promising to converse with it on a future occasion. On a subsequent night, accordingly, the scratching was renewed, with the utmost violence; and in reply to Mrs. Powers's questions, the spirit assured her that it was not one, but legion, being the ghosts of twenty-seven monks, who were miserable and without hope! The house now occupied by Powers was formerly a convent, and I suppose these were the spirits of all the wicked monks that had ever inhabited it; at least, I hope that there were not such a number of damnable sinners extant at any one time. These ghostly fathers must have been very improper persons in their lifetime, judging by the indecorousness of their behavior even after death, and in such dreadful circumstances; for they pulled Mrs. Powers's skirts so hard as to break the gathers. . . . It was not ascertained that they desired to have anything done for their eternal welfare, or that their situation was capable of amendment anyhow; but, being exhorted to refrain from further disturbance, they took their departure, after making the sign of the cross on the breast of each person present. This was very singular in such reprobates, who, by their own confession, had forfeited all claim to be benefited by that holy symbol: it curiously suggests that the forms of religion may still be kept up in purgatory and hell itself. The sign was made in a way that conveyed the sense of something devilish and spiteful; the perpendicular line of the cross being drawn gently enough, but the transverse one sharply and violently, so as to leave a painful impression. Perhaps the monks meant this to express their contempt and hatred for heretics; and how queer, that this antipathy should survive their own damnation! But I cannot help hoping that the case of these poor devils may not be so desperate as they think. They cannot be wholly lost, because their desire for communication with mortals shows that they need sympathy, therefore are not altogether hardened, therefore, with loving treatment, may be restored. A great many other wonders took place within the knowledge and experience of Mrs. P------. She saw, not one pair of hands only, but many. The head of one of her dead children, a little boy, was laid in her lap, not in ghastly fashion, as a head out of the coffin and the grave, but just as the living child might have laid it on his mother's knees. It was invisible, by the by, and she recognized it by the features and the character of the hair, through the sense of touch. Little hands grasped hers. In short, these soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them, and judge the others too cheap to be written down. Christ spoke the truth surely, in saying that men would not believe, "though one rose from the dead." In my own case, the fact makes absolutely no impression. I regret such confirmation of truth as this. Within a mile of our villa stands the Villa Columbaria, a large house, built round a square court. Like Mr. Powers's residence, it was formerly a convent. It is inhabited by Major Gregorie, an old soldier of Waterloo and various other fights, and his family consists of Mrs. ------, the widow of one of the Major's friends, and her two daughters. We have become acquainted with the family, and Mrs. ------, the married daughter, has lent us a written statement of her experiences with a ghost, who has haunted the Villa Columbaria for many years back. He had made Mrs. ------ aware of his presence in her room by a sensation of extreme cold, as if a wintry breeze were blowing over her; also by a rustling of the bed-curtains; and, at such times, she had a certain consciousness, as she says, that she was not ALONE. Through Mr. Home's agency, the ghost was enabled to explain himself, and declared that he was a monk, named Giannane, who died a very long time ago in Mrs. ------'s present bedchamber. He was a murderer, and had been in a restless and miserable state ever since his death, wandering up and down the house, but especially haunting his own death-chamber and a staircase that communicated with the chapel of the villa. All the interviews with this lost spirit were attended with a sensation of severe cold, which was felt by every one present. He made his communications by means of table-rapping, and by the movements of chairs and other articles, which often assumed an angry character. The poor old fellow does not seem to have known exactly what he wanted with Mrs. ------, but promised to refrain from disturbing her any more, on condition that she would pray that he might find some repose. He had previously declined having any masses said for his soul. Rest, rest, rest, appears to be the continual craving of unhappy spirits; they do not venture to ask for positive bliss: perhaps, in their utter weariness, would rather forego the trouble of active enjoyment, but pray only for rest. The cold atmosphere around this monk suggests new ideas as to the climate of Hades. If all the afore-mentioned twenty-seven monks had a similar one, the combined temperature must have been that of a polar winter. Mrs. ------ saw, at one time, the fingers of her monk, long, yellow, and skinny; these fingers grasped the hands of individuals of the party, with a cold, clammy, and horrible touch. After the departure of this ghost other seances were held in her bedchamber, at which good and holy spirits manifested themselves, and behaved in a very comfortable and encouraging way. It was their benevolent purpose, apparently, to purify her apartments from all traces of the evil spirit, and to reconcile her to what had been so long the haunt of this miserable monk, by filling it with happy and sacred associations, in which, as Mrs. ------ intimates, they entirely succeeded. These stories remind me of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. . . . September 17th.--We walked yesterday to Florence, and visited the church of St. Lorenzo, where we saw, for the second time, the famous Medici statues of Michael Angelo. I found myself not in a very appreciative state, and, being a stone myself, the statue of Lorenzo was at first little more to me than another stone; but it was beginning to assume life, and would have impressed me as it did before if I had gazed long enough. There was a better light upon the face, under the helmet, than at my former visit, although still the features were enough overshadowed to produce that mystery on which, according to Mr. Powers, the effect of the statue depends. I observe that the costume of the figure, instead of being mediaeval, as I believe I have stated, is Roman; but, be it what it may, the grand and simple character of the figure imbues the robes with its individual propriety. I still think it the greatest miracle ever wrought in marble. We crossed the church and entered a cloister on the opposite side, in quest of the Laurentian Library. Ascending a staircase we found an old man blowing the bellows of the organ, which was in full blast in the church; nevertheless he found time to direct us to the library door. We entered a lofty vestibule, of ancient aspect and stately architecture, and thence were admitted into the library itself; a long and wide gallery or hall, lighted by a row of windows on which were painted the arms of the Medici. The ceiling was inlaid with dark wood, in an elaborate pattern, which was exactly repeated in terra-cotta on the pavement beneath our feet. Long desks, much like the old-fashioned ones in schools, were ranged on each side of the mid aisle, in a series from end to end, with seats for the convenience of students; and on these desks were rare manuscripts, carefully preserved under glass; and books, fastened to the desks by iron chains, as the custom of studious antiquity used to be. Along the centre of the hall, between the two ranges of desks, were tables and chairs, at which two or three scholarly persons were seated, diligently consulting volumes in manuscript or old type. It was a very quiet place, imbued with a cloistered sanctity, and remote from all street-cries and rumble of the city,--odorous of old literature,--a spot where the commonest ideas ought not to be expressed in less than Latin. The librarian--or custode he ought rather to be termed, for he was a man not above the fee of a paul--now presented himself, and showed us some of the literary curiosities; a vellum manuscript of the Bible, with a splendid illumination by Ghirlandaio, covering two folio pages, and just as brilliant in its color as if finished yesterday. Other illuminated manuscripts--or at least separate pages of them, for the volumes were kept under glass, and not to be turned over--were shown us, very magnificent, but not to be compared with this of Ghirlandaio. Looking at such treasures I could almost say that we have left behind us more splendor than we have kept alive to our own age. We publish beautiful editions of books, to be sure, and thousands of people enjoy them; but in ancient times the expense that we spread thinly over a thousand volumes was all compressed into one, and it became a great jewel of a book, a heavy folio, worth its weight in gold. Then, what a spiritual charm it gives to a book to feel that every letter has been individually wrought, and the pictures glow for that individual page alone! Certainly the ancient reader had a luxury which the modern one lacks. I was surprised, moreover, to see the clearness and accuracy of the chirography. Print does not surpass it in these respects. The custode showed us an ancient manuscript of the Decameron; likewise, a volume containing the portraits of Petrarch and of Laura, each covering the whole of a vellum page, and very finely done. They are authentic portraits, no doubt, and Laura is depicted as a fair-haired beauty, with a very satisfactory amount of loveliness. We saw some choice old editions of books in a small separate room; but as these were all ranged in shut bookcases, and as each volume, moreover, was in a separate cover or modern binding, this exhibition did us very little good. By the by, there is a conceit struggling blindly in my mind about Petrarch and Laura, suggested by those two lifelike portraits, which have been sleeping cheek to cheek through all these centuries. But I cannot lay hold of it. September 21st.--Yesterday morning the Val d' Arno was entirely filled with a thick fog, which extended even up to our windows, and concealed objects within a very short distance. It began to dissipate itself betimes, however, and was the forerunner of an unusually bright and warm day. We set out after breakfast and walked into town, where we looked at mosaic brooches. These are very pretty little bits of manufacture; but there seems to have been no infusion of fresh fancy into the work, and the specimens present little variety. It is the characteristic commodity of the place; the central mart and manufacturing locality being on the Ponte Vecchio, from end to end of which they are displayed in cases; but there are other mosaic shops scattered about the town. The principal devices are roses,--pink, yellow, or white,--jasmines, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, orange blossoms, and others, single or in sprigs, or twined into wreaths; parrots, too, and other birds of gay plumage,-- often exquisitely done, and sometimes with precious materials, such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and still rarer gems. Bracelets, with several different, yet relative designs, are often very beautiful. We find, at different shops, a great inequality of prices for mosaics that seemed to be of much the same quality. We went to the Uffizi gallery, and found it much thronged with the middle and lower classes of Italians; and the English, too, seemed more numerous than I have lately seen them. Perhaps the tourists have just arrived here, starting at the close of the London season. We were amused with a pair of Englishmen who went through the gallery; one of them criticising the pictures and statues audibly, for the benefit of his companion. The critic I should take to be a country squire, and wholly untravelled; a tall, well-built, rather rough, but gentlemanly man enough; his friend, a small personage, exquisitely neat in dress, and of artificial deportment, every attitude and gesture appearing to have been practised before a glass. Being but a small pattern of a man, physically and intellectually, he had thought it worth while to finish himself off with the elaborateness of a Florentine mosaic; and the result was something like a dancing-master, though without the exuberant embroidery of such persons. Indeed, he was a very quiet little man, and, though so thoroughly made up, there was something particularly green, fresh, and simple in him. Both these Englishmen were elderly, and the smaller one had perfectly white hair, glossy and silken. It did not make him in the least venerable, however, but took his own character of neatness and prettiness. He carried his well-brushed and glossy hat in his hand in such a way as not to ruffle its surface; and I wish I could put into one word or one sentence the pettiness, the minikinfinical effect of this little man; his self-consciousness so lifelong, that, in some sort, he forgot himself even in the midst of it; his propriety, his cleanliness and unruffledness; his prettiness and nicety of manifestation, like a bird hopping daintily about. His companion, as I said, was of a completely different type; a tall, gray-haired man, with the rough English face, a little tinted with port wine; careless, natural manner, betokening a man of position in his own neighborhood; a loud voice, not vulgar, nor outraging the rules of society, but betraying a character incapable of much refinement. He talked continually in his progress through the gallery, and audibly enough for us to catch almost everything he said, at many yards' distance. His remarks and criticisms, addressed to his small friend, were so entertaining, that we strolled behind him for the sake of being benefited by them; and I think he soon became aware of this, and addressed himself to us as well as to his more immediate friend. Nobody but an Englishman, it seems to me, has just this kind of vanity,--a feeling mixed up with scorn and good-nature; self-complacency on his own merits, and as an Englishman; pride at being in foreign parts; contempt for everybody around him; a rough kindliness towards people in general. I liked the man, and should be glad to know him better. As for his criticism, I am sorry to remember only one. It was upon the picture of the Nativity, by Correggio, in the Tribune, where the mother is kneeling before the Child, and adoring it in an awful rapture, because she sees the eternal God in its baby face and figure. The Englishman was highly delighted with this picture, and began to gesticulate, as if dandling a baby, and to make a chirruping sound. It was to him merely a representation of a mother fondling her infant. He then said, "If I could have my choice of the pictures and statues in the Tribune, I would take this picture, and that one yonder" (it was a good enough Enthronement of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto) "and the Dancing Faun, and let the rest go." A delightful man; I love that wholesome coarseness of mind and heart, which no education nor opportunity can polish out of the genuine Englishman; a coarseness without vulgarity. When a Yankee is coarse, he is pretty sure to be vulgar too. The two critics seemed to be considering whether it were practicable to go from the Uffizi to the Pitti gallery; but "it confuses one," remarked the little man, "to see more than one gallery in a day." (I should think so,--the Pitti Palace tumbling into his small receptacle on the top of the Uffizi.) "It does so," responded the big man, with heavy emphasis. September 23d.--The vintage has been going on in our podere for about a week, and I saw a part of the process of making wine, under one of our back windows. It was on a very small scale, the grapes being thrown into a barrel, and crushed with a sort of pestle; and as each estate seems to make its own wine, there are probably no very extensive and elaborate appliances in general use for the manufacture. The cider-making of New England is far more picturesque; the great heap of golden or rosy apples under the trees, and the cider-mill worked by a circumgyratory horse, and all agush with sweet juice. Indeed, nothing connected with the grape-culture and the vintage here has been picturesque, except the large inverted pyramids in which the clusters hang; those great bunches, white or purple, really satisfy my idea both as to aspect and taste. We can buy a large basketful for less than a paul; and they are the only things that one can never devour too much of--and there is no enough short of a little too much without subsequent repentance. It is a shame to turn such delicious juice into such sour wine as they make in Tuscany. I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial,-- the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel. It took me altogether by surprise; for I remembered the nectareousness of the new cider which I used to sip through a straw in my boyhood, and I never doubted that this would be as dulcet, but finer and more ethereal; as much more delectable, in short, as these grapes are better than puckery cider apples. Positively, I never tasted anything so detestable, such a sour and bitter juice, still lukewarm with fermentation; it was a wail of woe, squeezed out of the wine-press of tribulation, and the more a man drinks of such, the sorrier he will be. Besides grapes, we have had figs, and I have now learned to be very fond of them. When they first began to appear, two months ago, they had scarcely any sweetness, and tasted very like a decaying squash: this was an early variety, with purple skins. There are many kinds of figs, the best being green-skinned, growing yellower as they ripen; and the riper they are, the more the sweetness within them intensifies, till they resemble dried figs in everything, except that they retain the fresh fruit-flavor; rich, luscious, yet not palling. We have had pears, too, some of them very tolerable; and peaches, which look magnificently, as regards size and downy blush, but, have seldom much more taste than a cucumber. A succession of fruits has followed us, ever since our arrival in Florence:--first, and for a long time, abundance of cherries; then apricots, which lasted many weeks, till we were weary of them; then plums, pears, and finally figs, peaches, and grapes. Except the figs and grapes, a New England summer and autumn would give us better fruit than any we have found in Italy. Italy beats us I think in mosquitoes; they are horribly pungent little satanic particles. They possess strange intelligence, and exquisite acuteness of sight and smell,--prodigious audacity and courage to match it, insomuch that they venture on the most hazardous attacks, and get safe off. One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and sting me far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are bigger than American mosquitoes; and if you crush them, after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific bloodspot. It is a sort of suicide--at least, a shedding of one's own blood--to kill them; but it gratifies the old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a more disagreeable way. The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects, and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows. September 25th.--U---- and I walked to town yesterday morning, and went to the Uffizi gallery. It is not a pleasant thought that we are so soon to give up this gallery, with little prospect (none, or hardly any, on my part) of ever seeing it again. It interests me and all of us far more than the gallery of the Pitti Palace, wherefore I know not, for the latter is the richer of the two in admirable pictures. Perhaps it is the picturesque variety of the Uffizi--the combination of painting, sculpture, gems, and bronzes--that makes the charm. The Tribune, too, is the richest room in all the world; a heart that draws all hearts to it. The Dutch pictures, moreover, give a homely, human interest to the Uffizi; and I really think that the frequency of Andrea del Santo's productions at the Pitti Palace--looking so very like masterpieces, yet lacking the soul of art and nature--have much to do with the weariness that comes from better acquaintance with the latter gallery. The splendor of the gilded and frescoed saloons is perhaps another bore; but, after all, my memory will often tread there as long as I live. What shall we do in America? Speaking of Dutch pictures, I was much struck yesterday, as frequently before, with a small picture by Teniers the elder. It seems to be a pawnbroker in the midst of his pledges; old earthen jugs, flasks, a brass kettle, old books, and a huge pile of worn-out and broken rubbish, which he is examining. These things are represented with vast fidelity, yet with bold and free touches, unlike the minute, microscopic work of other Dutch masters; and a wonderful picturesqueness is wrought out of these humble materials, and even the figure and head of the pawnbroker have a strange grandeur. We spent no very long time at the Uffizi, and afterwards crossed the Ponte alle Grazie, and went to the convent of San Miniato, which stands on a hill outside of the Porta San Gallo. A paved pathway, along which stand crosses marking stations at which pilgrims are to kneel and pray, goes steeply to the hill-top, where, in the first place, is a smaller church and convent than those of San Miniato. The latter are seen at a short distance to the right, the convent being a large, square battlemented mass, adjoining which is the church, showing a front of aged white marble, streaked with black, and having an old stone tower behind. I have seen no other convent or monastery that so well corresponds with my idea of what such structures were. The sacred precincts are enclosed by a high wall, gray, ancient, and luxuriously ivy-grown, and lofty and strong enough for the rampart of a fortress. We went through the gateway and entered the church, which we found in much disarray, and masons at work upon the pavement. The tribune is elevated considerably above the nave, and accessible by marble staircases; there are great arches and a chapel, with curious monuments in the Gothic style, and ancient carvings and mosaic works, and, in short, a dim, dusty, and venerable interior, well worth studying in detail. . . . The view of Florence from the church door is very fine, and seems to include every tower, dome, or whatever object emerges out of the general mass. September 28th.--I went to the Pitti Palace yesterday, and to the Uffizi to-day, paying them probably my last visit, yet cherishing an unreasonable doubt whether I may not see them again. At all events, I have seen them enough for the present, even what is best of them; and, at the same time, with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever, I experience an utter weariness of Raphael's old canvas, and of the time-yellowed marble of the Venus de' Medici. When the material embodiment presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture. I threw my farewell glance at the Venus de' Medici to-day with strange insensibility. The nights are wonderfully beautiful now. When the moon was at the full, a few nights ago, its light was an absolute glory, such as I seem only to have dreamed of heretofore, and that only in my younger days. At its rising I have fancied that the orb of the moon has a kind of purple brightness, and that this tinge is communicated to its radiance until it has climbed high aloft and sheds a flood of white over hill and valley. Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still bright; and it makes the Val d' Arno with its surrounding hills, and its soft mist in the distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of heaven. And the morning is quite as beautiful in its own way. This mist, of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of actual sense and makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the valley,--as if the valley itself were dreaming, and met you half-way in your own dream. If the mist were to be withdrawn, I believe the whole beauty of the valley would go with it. Until pretty late in the morning, we have the comet streaming through the sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. It keeps brightening from night to night, and I should think must blaze fiercely enough to cast a shadow by and by. I know not whether it be in the vicinity of Galileo's tower, and in the influence of his spirit, but I have hardly ever watched the stars with such interest as now. September 29th.--Last evening I met Mr. Powers at Miss Blagden's, and he talked about his treatment, by our government in reference, to an appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars made by Congress for a statue by him. Its payment and the purchase of the statue were left at the option of the President, and he conceived himself wronged because the affair was never concluded. . . . As for the President, he knows nothing of art, and probably acted in the matter by the advice of the director of public works. No doubt a sculptor gets commissions as everybody gets public employment and emolument of whatever kind from our government, not by merit or fitness, but by political influence skilfully applied. As Powers himself observed, the ruins of our Capitol are not likely to afford sculptures equal to those which Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon, if this be the system under which they are produced. . . . I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a republic; but we have the meanest government and the shabbiest, and--if truly represented by it--we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in history. And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greenough's Washington. There is something false and affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best. There was also at Miss Blagden's, among other company, Mr. ------, an artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home, the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter was in these parts. Mr. ------ says that Home is unquestionably a knave, but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps if he were of a firmer and healthier moral make, if his character were sufficiently sound and dense to be capable of steadfast principle, he would not have possessed the impressibility that fits him for the so-called spiritual influences. Mr. ------ says that Louis Napoleon is literally one of the most skilful jugglers in the world, and that probably the interest he has taken in Mr. Home was caused partly by a wish to acquire his art. This morning Mr. Powers invited me to go with him to the Grand Duke's new foundry, to see the bronze statue of Webster which has just been cast from his model. It is the second cast of the statue, the first having been shipped some months ago on board of a vessel which was lost; and, as Powers observed, the statue now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in the vicinity of the telegraphic cable. We were received with much courtesy and emphasis by the director of the foundry, and conducted into a large room walled with bare, new brick, where the statue was standing in front of the extinct furnace: a majestic Webster indeed, eight feet high, and looking even more colossal than that. The likeness seemed to me perfect, and, like a sensible man, Powers' has dressed him in his natural costume, such as I have seen Webster have on while making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting in Concord,--dress-coat buttoned pretty closely across the breast, pantaloons and boots,--everything finished even to a seam and a stitch. Not an inch of the statue but is Webster; even his coat-tails are imbued with the man, and this true artist has succeeded in showing him through the broadcloth as nature showed him. He has felt that a man's actual clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the grasp of his left, thus symbolizing him as the preserver of the Union. There is an expression of quiet, solid, massive strength in the whole figure; a deep, pervading energy, in which any exaggeration of gesture would lessen and lower the effect. He looks really like a pillar of the state. The face is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither was Webster altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out, even when he fell somewhat short of its promise; and if his eyes had not been in such deep caverns their fire would not have looked so bright. Powers made me observe how the surface of the statue was wrought to a sort of roughness instead of being smoothed, as is the practice of other artists. He said that this had cost him great pains, and certainly it has an excellent effect. The statue is to go to Boston, and I hope will be placed in the open air, for it is too mighty to be kept under any roof that now exists in America. . . . After seeing this, the director showed us some very curious and exquisite specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such sprays. There were likewise a pair of hands, taken actually from life, clasped together as they were, and they looked like parts of a man who had been changed suddenly from flesh to brass. They were worn and rough and unhandsome hands, and so very real, with all their veins and the pores of the skin, that it was shocking to look at them. A bronze leaf, cast also from the life, was as curious and more beautiful. Taking leave of Powers, I went hither and thither about Florence, seeing for the last time things that I have seen many times before: the market, for instance, blocking up a line of narrow streets with fruit-stalls, and obstreperous dealers crying their peaches, their green lemons, their figs, their delicious grapes, their mushrooms, their pomegranates, their radishes, their lettuces. They use one vegetable here which I have not known so used elsewhere; that is, very young pumpkins or squashes, of the size of apples, and to be cooked by boiling. They are not to my taste, but the people here like unripe things,--unripe fruit, unripe chickens, unripe lamb. This market is the noisiest and swarmiest centre of noisy and swarming Florence, and I always like to pass through it on that account. I went also to Santa Croce, and it seemed to me to present a longer vista and broader space than almost any other church, perhaps because the pillars between the nave and aisles are not so massive as to obstruct the view. I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave it. Then I came homeward, and lost my way, and wandered far off through the white sunshine, and the scanty shade of the vineyard walls, and the olive-trees that here and there branched over them. At last I saw our own gray battlements at a distance, on one side, quite out of the direction in which I was travelling, so was compelled to the grievous mortification of retracing a great many of my weary footsteps. It was a very hot day. This evening I have been on the towertop star-gazing, and looking at the comet, which waves along the sky like an immense feather of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere, caused by the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which sleep and dream above that portion of the valley, as well as the rest of it. I saw dimly, or fancied I saw, the hill of Fiesole on the other side of Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing thence to the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died. From time to time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath to come down into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look heavenward from an old tower-top in such a soft calm evening as this. Yet I am not loath to go away; impatient rather; for, taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life. . . . I forgot to mention that Powers showed me, in his studio, the model of the statue of America, which he wished the government to buy. It has great merit, and embodies the ideal of youth, freedom, progress, and whatever we consider as distinctive of our country's character and destiny. It is a female figure, vigorous, beautiful, planting its foot lightly on a broken chain, and pointing upward. The face has a high look of intelligence and lofty feeling; the form, nude to the middle, has all the charms of womanhood, and is thus warmed and redeemed out of the cold allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing, however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I criticise, and was sorry to see the huge package in which the finished marble lies bundled up, ready to be sent to our country,--which does not call for it. Mr. Powers and his two daughters called to take leave of us, and at parting I expressed a hope of seeing him in America. He said that it would make him very unhappy to believe that he should never return thither; but it seems to me that he has no such definite purpose of return as would be certain to bring itself to pass. It makes a very unsatisfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments; or, if we do go back, we find that life has shifted whatever of reality it had to the country where we deemed ourselves only living temporarily; and so between two stools we come to the ground, and make ourselves a part of one or the other country only by laying our bones in its soil. It is particularly a pity in Powers's case, because he is so very American in character, and the only convenience for him of his Italian residence is, that here he can supply himself with marble, and with workmen to chisel it according to his designs. SIENA. October 2d.--Yesterday morning, at six o'clock, we left our ancient tower, and threw a parting glance--and a rather sad one--over the misty Val d' Arno. This summer will look like a happy one in our children's retrospect, and also, no doubt, in the years that remain to ourselves; and, in truth, I have found it a peaceful and not uncheerful one. It was not a pleasant morning, and Monte Morello, looking down on Florence, had on its cap, betokening foul weather, according to the proverb. Crossing the suspension-bridge, we reached the Leopoldo railway without entering the city. By some mistake,--or perhaps because nobody ever travels by first-class carriages in Tuscany,--we found we had received second-class tickets, and were put into a long, crowded carriage, full of priests, military men, commercial travellers, and other respectable people, facing one another lengthwise along the carriage, and many of them smoking cigars. They were all perfectly civil, and I think I must own that the manners of this second-class would compare favorably with those of an American first-class one. At Empoli, about an hour after we started, we had to change carriages, the main train proceeding to Leghorn. . . . My observations along the road were very scanty: a hilly country, with several old towns seated on the most elevated hill-tops, as is common throughout Tuscany, or sometimes a fortress with a town on the plain at its base; or, once or twice, the towers and battlements of a mediaeval castle, commanding the pass below it. Near Florence the country was fertile in the vine and olive, and looked as unpicturesque as that sort of fertility usually makes it; not but what I have come to think better of the tint of the olive-leaf than when I first saw it. In the latter part of our journey I remember a wild stream, of a greenish hue, but transparent, rushing along over a rough bed, and before reaching Siena we rumbled into a long tunnel, and emerged from it near the city. . . . We drove up hill and down (for the surface of Siena seems to be nothing but an irregularity) through narrow old streets, and were set down at the Aquila Nera, a grim-looking albergo near the centre of the town. Mrs. S------ had already taken rooms for us there, and to these we were now ushered up the highway of a dingy stone staircase, and into a small, brick-paved parlor. The house seemed endlessly old, and all the glimpses that we caught of Siena out of window seemed more ancient still. Almost within arm's reach, across a narrow street, a tall palace of gray, time-worn stone clambered skyward, with arched windows, and square windows, and large windows and small, scattered up and down its side. It is the Palazzo Tolomei, and looks immensely venerable. From the windows of our bedrooms we looked into a broader street, though still not very wide, and into a small piazza, the most conspicuous object in which was a column, hearing on its top a bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. This symbol is repeated in other parts of the city, and scours to indicate that the Sienese people pride themselves in a Roman origin. In another direction, over the tops of the houses, we saw a very high tower, with battlements projecting around its summit, so that it was a fortress in the air; and this I have since found to be the Palazzo Publico. It was pleasant, looking downward into the little old piazza and narrow streets, to see the swarm of life on the pavement, the life of to-day just as new as if it had never been lived before; the citizens, the priests, the soldiers, the mules and asses with their panniers, the diligence lumbering along, with a postilion in a faded crimson coat bobbing up and down on the off-horse. Such a bustling scene, vociferous, too, with various street-cries, is wonderfully set off by the gray antiquity of the town, and makes the town look older than if it were a solitude. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Story came, and accompanied us to look for lodgings. They also drove us about the city in their carriage, and showed us the outside of the Palazzo Publico, and of the cathedral and other remarkable edifices. The aspect of Siena is far more picturesque than that of any other town in Italy, so far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano, and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as climb Alpine heights; old stone balconies on the palace fronts; old arched doorways, and windows set in frames of Gothic architecture; arcades, resembling canopies of stone, with quaintly sculptured statues in the richly wrought Gothic niches of each pillar;--everything massive and lofty, yet minutely interesting when you look at it stone by stone. The Florentines, and the Romans too, have obliterated, as far as they could, all the interest of their mediaeval structures by covering them with stucco, so that they have quite lost their character, and affect the spectator with no reverential idea of age. Here the city is all overwritten with black-letter, and the glad Italian sun makes the effect so much the stronger. We took a lodging, and afterwards J----- and I rambled about, and went into the cathedral for a moment, and strayed also into the Piazza del Campo, the great public square of Siena. I am not in the mood for further description of public places now, so shall say a word or two about the old palace in which we have established ourselves. We have the second piano, and dwell amid faded grandeur, having for our saloon what seems to have been a ball-room. It is ornamented with a great fresco in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, and others covering the sides of the apartment, and surrounded with arabesque frameworks, where Cupids gambol and chase one another. The subjects of the frescos I cannot make out, not that they are faded like Giotto's, for they are as fresh as roses, and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand. Our whole accommodation is in similar style,--spacious, magnificent, and mouldy. In the evening Miss S------ and I drove to the railway, and on the arrival of the train from Florence we watched with much eagerness the unlading of the luggage-van. At last the whole of our ten trunks and tin bandbox were produced, and finally my leather bag, in which was my journal and a manuscript book containing my sketch of a romance. It gladdened my very heart to see it, and I shall think the better of Tuscan promptitude and accuracy for so quickly bringing it back to me. (It was left behind, under one of the rail-carriage seats.) We find all the public officials, whether of railway, police, or custom-house, extremely courteous and pleasant to encounter; they seem willing to take trouble and reluctant to give it, and it is really a gratification to find that such civil people will sometimes oblige you by taking a paul or two aside. October 3d.--I took several strolls about the city yesterday, and find it scarcely extensive enough to get lost in; and if we go far from the centre we soon come to silent streets, with only here and there an individual; and the inhabitants stare from their doors and windows at the stranger, and turn round to look at him after he has passed. The interest of the old town would soon be exhausted for the traveller, but I can conceive that a thoughtful and shy man might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness. I should prefer it to Florence as a residence, but it would be terrible without an independent life in one's own mind. U---- and I walked out in the afternoon, and went into the Piazza del Campo, the principal place of the city, and a very noble and peculiar one. It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has not the mass of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but is more striking. It has a long battlemented front, the central part of which rises eminent above the rest, in a great square bulk, which is likewise crowned with battlements. This is much more picturesque than the one great block of stone into which the Palazzo Vecchio is consolidated. At one extremity of this long front of the Palazzo Publico rises a tower, shooting up its shaft high, high into the air, and bulging out there into a battlemented fortress, within which the tower, slenderer than before, climbs to a still higher region. I do not know whether the summit of the tower is higher or so high as that of the Palazzo Vecchio; but the length of the shaft, free of the edifice, is much greater, and so produces the more elevating effect. The whole front of the Palazzo Publico is exceedingly venerable, with arched windows, Gothic carvings, and all the old-time ornaments that betoken it to have stood a great while, and the gray strength that will hold it up at least as much longer. At one end of the facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch, supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a statue of mediaeval sculpture. The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena. In the morning it was thronged with booths and stalls, especially of fruit and vegetable dealers; but as in Florence, they melted away in the sunshine, gradually withdrawing themselves into the shadow thrown from the Palazzo Publico. On the side opposite the palace is an antique fountain of marble, ornamented with two statues and a series of bas-reliefs; and it was so much admired in its day that its sculptor received the name "Del Fonte." I am loath to leave the piazza and palace without finding some word or two to suggest their antique majesty, in the sunshine and the shadow; and how fit it seemed, notwithstanding their venerableness, that there should be a busy crowd filling up the great, hollow amphitheatre, and crying their fruit and little merchandises, so that all the curved line of stately old edifices helped to reverberate the noise. The life of to-day, within the shell of a time past, is wonderfully fascinating. Another point to which a stranger's footsteps are drawn by a kind of magnetism, so that he will be apt to find himself there as often as he strolls out of his hotel, is the cathedral. It stands in the highest part of the city, and almost every street runs into some other street which meanders hitherward. On our way thither, U---- and I came to a beautiful front of black and white marble, in somewhat the same style as the cathedral; in fact, it was the baptistery, and should have made a part of it, according to the original design, which contemplated a structure of vastly greater extent than this actual one. We entered the baptistery, and found the interior small, but very rich in its clustered columns and intersecting arches, and its frescos, pictures, statues, and ornaments. Moreover, a father and mother had brought their baby to be baptized, and the poor little thing, in its gay swaddling-clothes, looked just like what I have seen in old pictures, and a good deal like an Indian pappoose. It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again. We now went round to the facade of the cathedral. . . . It is of black and white marble, with, I believe, an intermixture of red and other colors; but time has toned them down, so that white, black, and red do not contrast so strongly with one another as they may have done five hundred years ago. The architecture is generally of the pointed Gothic style, but there are likewise carved arches over the doors and windows, and a variety which does not produce the effect of confusion,--a magnificent eccentricity, an exuberant imagination flowering out in stone. On high, in the great peak of the front, and throwing its colored radiance into the nave within, there is a round window of immense circumference, the painted figures in which we can see dimly from the outside. But what I wish to express, and never can, is the multitudinous richness of the ornamentation of the front: the arches within arches, sculptured inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints, some making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scores of busts, that look like faces of ancient people gazing down out of the cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions,--the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever. But my description seems like knocking off the noses of some of the busts, the fingers and toes of the statues, the projecting points of the architecture, jumbling them all up together, and flinging them down upon the page. This gives no idea of the truth, nor, least of all, can it shadow forth that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars, and sanctifying the entire space of ground over which this cathedral-front flings its shadow, or on which it reflects the sun. A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture. We went in and walked about; but I mean to go again before sketching the interior in my poor water-colors. October 4th.--On looking again at the Palazzo Publico, I see that the pillared portal which I have spoken of does not cover an entrance to the palace, but is a chapel, with an altar, and frescos above it. Bouquets of fresh flowers are on the altar, and a lamp burns, in all the daylight, before the crucifix. The chapel is quite unenclosed, except by an openwork balustrade of marble, on which the carving looks very ancient. Nothing could be more convenient for the devotions of the crowd in the piazza, and no doubt the daily prayers offered at the shrine might be numbered by the thousand,--brief, but I hope earnest,--like those glimpses I used to catch at the blue sky, revealing so much in an instant, while I was toiling at Brook Farm. Another picturesque thing about the Palazzo Publico is a great stone balcony quaintly wrought, about midway in the front and high aloft, with two arched windows opening into it. After another glimpse at the cathedral, too, I realize how utterly I have failed in conveying the idea of its elaborate ornament, its twisted and clustered pillars, and numberless devices of sculpture; nor did I mention the venerable statues that stand all round the summit of the edifice, relieved against the sky,--the highest of all being one of the Saviour, on the topmost peak of the front; nor the tall tower that ascends from one side of the building, and is built of layers of black and white marble piled one upon another in regular succession; nor the dome that swells upward close beside this tower. Had the cathedral been constructed on the plan and dimensions at first contemplated, it would have been incomparably majestic; the finished portion, grand as it is, being only what was intended for a transept. One of the walls of what was to have been the nave is still standing, and looks like a ruin, though, I believe, it has been turned to account as the wall of a palace, the space of the never-completed nave being now a court or street. The whole family of us were kindly taken out yesterday, to dine and spend the day at the Villa Belvedere with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Story. The vicinity of Siena is much more agreeable than that of Florence, being cooler, breezier, with more foliage and shrubbery both near at hand and in the distance; and the prospect, Mr. Story told us, embraces a diameter of about a hundred miles between hills north and south. The Villa Belvedere was built and owned by an Englishman now deceased, who has left it to his butler, and its lawns and shrubbery have something English in their character, and there was almost a dampness in the grass, which really pleased me in this parched Italy. Within the house the walls are hung with fine old-fashioned engravings from the pictures of Gainsborough, West, and other English painters. The Englishman, though he had chosen to live and die in Italy, had evidently brought his native tastes and peculiarities along with him. Mr. Story thinks of buying this villa: I do not know but I might be tempted to buy it myself if Siena were a practicable residence for the entire year; but the winter here, with the bleak mountain-winds of a hundred miles round about blustering against it, must be terribly disagreeable. We spent a very pleasant day, turning over books or talking on the lawn, whence we could behold scenes picturesque afar, and rich vineyard glimpses near at hand. Mr. Story is the most variously accomplished and brilliant person, the fullest of social life and fire, whom I ever met; and without seeming to make an effort, he kept us amused and entertained the whole day long; not wearisomely entertained neither, as we should have been if he had not let his fountain play naturally. Still, though he bubbled and brimmed over with fun, he left the impression on me that . . . . there is a pain and care, bred, it may be, out of the very richness of his gifts and abundance of his outward prosperity. Rich, in the prime of life, . . . . and children budding and blossoming around him as fairly as his heart could wish, with sparkling talents,--so many, that if he choose to neglect or fling away one, or two, or three, he would still have enough left to shine with,--who should be happy if not he? . . . . Towards sunset we all walked out into the podere, pausing a little while to look down into a well that stands on the verge of the lawn. Within the spacious circle of its stone curb was an abundant growth of maidenhair, forming a perfect wreath of thickly clustering leaves quite round, and trailing its tendrils downward to the water which gleamed beneath. It was a very pretty sight. Mr. Story bent over the well and uttered deep, musical tones, which were reverberated from the hollow depths with wonderful effect, as if a spirit dwelt within there, and (unlike the spirits that speak through mediums) sent him back responses even profounder and more melodious than the tones that awakened them. Such a responsive well as this might have been taken for an oracle in old days. We went along paths that led from one vineyard to another, and which might have led us for miles across the country. The grapes had been partly gathered, but still there were many purple or white clusters hanging heavily on the vines. We passed cottage doors, and saw groups of contadini and contadine in their festal attire, and they saluted us graciously; but it was observable that one of the men generally lingered on our track to see that no grapes were stolen, for there were a good many young people and children in our train, not only our own, but some from a neighboring villa. These Italian peasants are a kindly race, but, I doubt, not very hospitable of grape or fig. There was a beautiful sunset, and by the time we reached the house again the comet was already visible amid the unextinguished glow of daylight. A Mr. and Mrs. B------, Scotch people from the next villa, had come to see the Storys, and we sat till tea-time reading, talking, William Story drawing caricatures for his children's amusement and ours, and all of us sometimes getting up to look at the comet, which blazed brighter and brighter till it went down into the mists of the horizon. Among the caricatures was one of a Presidential candidate, evidently a man of very malleable principles, and likely to succeed. Late in the evening (too late for little Rosebud) we drove homeward. The streets of old Siena looked very grim at night, and it seemed like gazing into caverns to glimpse down some of the side streets as we passed, with a light burning dimly at the end of them. It was after ten when we reached home, and climbed up our gloomy staircase, lighted by the glimmer of some wax moccoli which I had in my pocket. October 5th.--I have been two or three times into the cathedral; . . . . the whole interior is of marble, in alternate lines of black and white, each layer being about eight inches in width and extending horizontally. It looks very curiously, and might remind the spectator of a stuff with horizontal stripes. Nevertheless, the effect is exceedingly rich, these alternate lines stretching away along the walls and round the clustered pillars, seen aloft, and through the arches; everywhere, this inlay of black and white. Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches;--it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning. I can find no way of expressing its effect on me, so quaint and venerable as I feel this cathedral to be in its immensity of striped waistcoat, now dingy with five centuries of wear. I ought not to say anything that might detract from the grandeur and sanctity of the blessed edifice, for these attributes are really uninjured by any of the Gothic oddities which I have hinted at. We went this morning to the Institute of the Fine Arts, which is interesting as containing a series of the works of the Sienese painters from a date earlier than that of Cimabue. There is a dispute, I believe, between Florence and Siena as to which city may claim the credit of having originated the modern art of painting. The Florentines put forward Cimabue as the first artist, but as the Sienese produce a picture, by Guido da Siena, dated before the birth of Cimabue, the victory is decidedly with them. As to pictorial merit, to my taste there is none in either of these old painters, nor in any of their successors for a long time afterwards. At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed. There is often, too, a minute care bestowed on the faces in the pictures, and sometimes a very strong expression, stronger than modern artists get, and it is very strange how they attained this merit while they were so inconceivably rude in other respects. It is remarkable that all the early faces of the Madonna are especially stupid, and all of the same type, a sort of face such as one might carve on a pumpkin, representing a heavy, sulky, phlegmatic woman, with a long and low arch of the nose. This same dull face continues to be assigned to the Madonna, even when the countenances of the surrounding saints and angels are characterized with power and beauty, so that I think there must have been some portrait of this sacred personage reckoned authentic, which the early painters followed and religiously repeated. At last we came to a picture by Sodoma, the most illustrious representative of the Sienese school. It was a fresco; Christ bound to the pillar, after having been scourged. I do believe that painting has never done anything better, so far as expression is concerned, than this figure. In all these generations since it was painted it must have softened thousands of hearts, drawn down rivers of tears, been more effectual than a million of sermons. Really, it is a thing to stand and weep at. No other painter has done anything that can deserve to be compared to this. There are some other pictures by Sodoma, among them a Judith, very noble and admirable, and full of a profound sorrow for the deed which she has felt it her mission to do. Aquila Nera, October 7th.--Our lodgings in Siena had been taken only for five days, as they were already engaged after that period; so yesterday we returned to our old quarters at the Black Eagle. In the forenoon J----- and I went out of one of the gates (the road from it leads to Florence) and had a pleasant country walk. Our way wound downward, round the hill on which Siena stands, and gave us views of the Duomo and its campanile, seemingly pretty near, after we had walked long enough to be quite remote from them. Sitting awhile on the parapet of a bridge, I saw a laborer chopping the branches off a poplar-tree which he had felled; and, when it was trimmed, he took up the large trunk on one of his shoulders and carried it off, seemingly with ease. He did not look like a particularly robust man; but I have never seen such an herculean feat attempted by an Englishman or American. It has frequently struck me that the Italians are able to put forth a great deal of strength in such insulated efforts as this; but I have been told that they are less capable of continued endurance and hardship than our own race. I do not know why it should be so, except that I presume their food is less strong than ours. There was no other remarkable incident in our walk, which lay chiefly through gorges of the hills, winding beneath high cliffs of the brown Siena earth, with many pretty scenes of rural landscape; vineyards everywhere, and olive-trees; a mill on its little stream, over which there was an old stone bridge, with a graceful arch; farm-houses; a villa or two; subterranean passages, passing from the roadside through the high banks into the vineyards. At last we turned aside into a road which led us pretty directly to another gate of the city, and climbed steeply upward among tanneries, where the young men went about with their well-shaped legs bare, their trousers being tucked up till they were strictly breeches and nothing else. The campanile stood high above us; and by and by, and very soon, indeed, the steep ascent of the street brought us into the neighborhood of the Piazza del Campo, and of our own hotel. . . . From about twelve o'clock till one, I sat at my chamber window watching the specimens of human life as displayed in the Piazza Tolomei. [Here follow several pages of moving objects.] . . . . Of course, a multitude of other people passed by, but the curiousness of the catalogue is the prevalence of the martial and religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but have a sufficient breadth of shoulder; in complexion, similar to Americans; bearded, universally. The vehicle used for driving is a little gig without a top; but these are seldom seen, and still less frequently a cab or other carriages. The gait of the people has not the energy of business or decided purpose. Everybody appears to lounge, and to have time for a moment's chat, and a disposition to rest, reason or none. After dinner I walked out of another gate of the city, and wandered among some pleasant country lanes, bordered with hedges, and wearing an English aspect; at least, I could fancy so. The vicinity of Siena is delightful to walk about in; there being a verdant outlook, a wide prospect of purple mountains, though no such level valley as the Val d' Arno; and the city stands so high that its towers and domes are seen more picturesquely from many points than those of Florence can be. Neither is the pedestrian so cruelly shut into narrow lanes, between high stone-walls, over which he cannot get a glimpse of landscape. As I walked by the hedges yesterday I could have fancied that the olive-trunks were those of apple-trees, and that I was in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy. But the great white villas and the farm-houses were unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, or that I should wish to see again, though proper enough to Italy. October 9th.--Thursday forenoon, 8th, we went to see the Palazzo Publico. There are some fine old halls and chapels, adorned with ancient frescos and pictures, of which I remember a picture of the Virgin by Sodoma, very beautiful, and other fine pictures by the same master. The architecture of these old rooms is grand, the roofs being supported by ponderous arches, which are covered with frescos, still magnificent, though faded, darkened, and defaced. We likewise saw an antique casket of wood, enriched with gilding, which had once contained an arm of John the Baptist,--so the custode told us. One of the halls was hung with the portraits of eight popes and nearly forty cardinals, who were natives of Siena. I have done hardly any other sight-seeing except a daily visit to the cathedral, which I admire and love the more the oftener I go thither. Its striped peculiarity ceases entirely to interfere with the grandeur and venerable beauty of its impression; and I am never weary of gazing through the vista of its arches, and noting continually something that I had not seen before in its exuberant adornment. The pavement alone is inexhaustible, being covered all over with figures of life-size or larger, which look like immense engravings of Gothic or Scriptural scenes. There is Absalom hanging by his hair, and Joab slaying him with a spear. There is Samson belaboring the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. There are armed knights in the tumult of battle, all wrought with wonderful expression. The figures are in white marble, inlaid with darker stone, and the shading is effected by means of engraved lines in the marble, filled in with black. It would be possible, perhaps, to print impressions from some of these vast plates, for the process of cutting the lines was an exact anticipation of the modern art of engraving. However, the same thing was done--and I suppose at about the same period--on monumental brasses, and I have seen impressions or rubbings from those for sale in the old English churches. Yesterday morning, in the cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week perhaps. I know not how long she had been confessing when I first observed her, but nearly an hour passed before the priest came suddenly from the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning I watched another woman, and she too was very long about it, and I could see the face of the priest behind the curtain of the confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed straw hat was lying. She seemed to be a country woman, with a simple, matronly face, which was solemnized and softened with the comfort that she had obtained by disburdening herself of the soil of worldly frailties and receiving absolution. An old woman, who haunts the cathedral, whispered to her, and she went and knelt down where a procession of priests were to pass, and then the old lady begged a cruzia of me, and got a half-paul. It almost invariably happens, in church or cathedral, that beggars address their prayers to the heretic visitor, and probably with more unction than to the Virgin or saints. However, I have nothing to say against the sincerity of this people's devotion. They give all the proof of it that a mere spectator can estimate. Last evening we all went out to see the comet, which then reached its climax of lustre. It was like a lofty plume of fire, and grew very brilliant as the night darkened. October 10th.--This morning, too, we went to the cathedral, and sat long listening to the music of the organ and voices, and witnessing rites and ceremonies which are far older than even the ancient edifice where they were exhibited. A good many people were present, sitting, kneeling, or walking about,--a freedom that contrasts very agreeably with the grim formalities of English churches and our own meeting-houses. Many persons were in their best attire; but others came in, with unabashed simplicity, in their old garments of labor, sunburnt women from their toil among the vines and olives. One old peasant I noticed with his withered shanks in breeches and blue yarn stockings. The people of whatever class are wonderfully tolerant of heretics, never manifesting any displeasure or annoyance, though they must see that we are drawn thither by curiosity alone, and merely pry while they pray. I heartily wish the priests were better men, and that human nature, divinely influenced, could be depended upon for a constant supply and succession of good and pure ministers, their religion has so many admirable points. And then it is a sad pity that this noble and beautiful cathedral should be a mere fossil shell, out of which the life has died long ago. But for many a year yet to come the tapers will burn before the high altar, the Host will be elevated, the incense diffuse its fragrance, the confessionals be open to receive the penitents. I saw a father entering with two little bits of boys, just big enough to toddle along, holding his hand on either side. The father dipped his fingers into the marble font of holy water,--which, on its pedestals, was two or three times as high as those small Christians, --and wetted a hand of each, and taught them how to cross themselves. When they come to be men it will be impossible to convince those children that there is no efficacy in holy water, without plucking up all religious faith and sentiment by the roots. Generally, I suspect, when people throw off the faith they were born in, the best soil of their hearts is apt to cling to its roots. Raised several feet above the pavement, against every clustered pillar along the nave of the cathedral, is placed a statue of Gothic sculpture. In various places are sitting statues of popes of Sienese nativity, all of whom, I believe, have a hand raised in the act of blessing. Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, --something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. In the pavement, yesterday, I noticed the gravestone of a person who fell six centuries ago in the battle of Monte Aperto, and was buried here by public decree as a meed of valor. This afternoon I took a walk out of one of the city gates, and found the country about Siena as beautiful in this direction as in all others. I came to a little stream flowing over into a pebbly bed, and collecting itself into pools, with a scanty rivulet between. Its glen was deep, and was crossed by a bridge of several lofty and narrow arches like those of a Roman aqueduct. It is a modern structure, however. Farther on, as I wound round along the base of a hill which fell down upon the road by precipitous cliffs of brown earth, I saw a gray, ruined wall on the summit, surrounded with cypress-trees. This tree is very frequent about Siena, and the scenery is made soft and beautiful by a variety of other trees and shrubbery, without which these hills and gorges would have scarcely a charm. The road was thronged with country people, mostly women and children, who had been spending the feast-day in Siena; and parties of boys were chasing one another through the fields, pretty much as boys do in New England of a Sunday, but the Sienese lads had not the sense of Sabbath-breaking like our boys. Sunday with these people is like any other feast-day, and consecrated cheerful enjoyment. So much religious observance, as regards outward forms, is diffused through the whole week that they have no need to intensify the Sabbath except by making it gladden the other days. Returning through the same gate by which I had come out, I ascended into the city by a long and steep street, which was paved with bricks set edgewise. This pavement is common in many of the streets, which, being too steep for horses and carriages, are meant only to sustain the lighter tread of mules and asses. The more level streets are paved with broad, smooth flag-stones, like those of Florence,--a fashion which I heartily regret to change for the little penitential blocks of Rome. The walls of Siena in their present state, and so far as I have seen them, are chiefly brick; but there are intermingled fragments of ancient stone-work, and I wonder why the latter does not prevail more largely. The Romans, however,--and Siena had Roman characteristics,--always liked to build of brick, a taste that has made their ruins (now that the marble slabs are torn off) much less grand than they ought to have been. I am grateful to the old Sienese for having used stone so largely in their domestic architecture, and thereby rendered their city so grimly picturesque, with its black palaces frowning upon one another from arched windows, across narrow streets, to the height of six stories, like opposite ranks of tall men looking sternly into one another's eyes. October 11th.--Again I went to the cathedral this morning, and spent an hour listening to the music and looking through the orderly intricacies of the arches, where many vistas open away among the columns of the choir. There are five clustered columns on each side of the nave; then under the dome there are two more arches, not in a straight line, but forming the segment of a circle; and beyond the circle of the dome there are four more arches, extending to the extremity of the chancel. I should have said, instead of "clustered columns" as above, that there are five arches along the nave supported by columns. This cathedral has certainly bewitched me, to write about it so much, effecting nothing with my pains. I should judge the width of each arch to be about twenty feet, and the thickness of each clustered pillar is eight; or ten more, and the length of the entire building may be between two and three hundred feet; not very large, certainly, but it makes an impression of grandeur independent of size. . . . I never shall succeed even in reminding myself of the venerable magnificence of this minster, with its arches, its columns, its cornice of popes' heads, its great wheel windows, its manifold ornament, all combining in one vast effect, though many men have labored individually, and through a long course of time, to produce this multifarious handiwork and headwork. I now took a walk out of the city. A road turned immediately to the left as I emerged from the city, and soon proved to be a rustic lane leading past several villas and farm-houses. It was a very pleasant walk, with vineyards and olive-orchards on each side, and now and then glimpses of the towers and sombre heaped-up palaces of Siena, and now a rural seclusion again; for the hills rise and the valleys fall like the swell and subsidence of the sea after a gale, so that Siena may be quite hidden within a quarter of a mile of its wall, or may be visible, I doubt not, twenty miles away. It is a fine old town, with every promise of health and vigor in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet unquestionably, we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions,--if England, especially, were a democracy,--we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State. October 12th.--And again we went to the cathedral this forenoon, and the whole family, except myself, sketched portions of it. Even Rosebud stood gravely sketching some of the inlaid figures of the pavement. As for me, I can but try to preserve some memorial of this beautiful edifice in ill-fitting words that never hit the mark. This morning visit was not my final one, for I went again after dinner and walked quite round the whole interior. I think I have not yet mentioned the rich carvings of the old oaken seats round the choir, and the curious mosaic of lighter and darker woods, by which figures and landscapes are skilfully represented on the backs of some of the stalls. The process seems to be the same as the inlaying and engraving of the pavement, the material in one case being marble, in the other wood. The only other thing that I particularly noticed was, that in the fonts of holy water at the front entrance, marble fish are sculptured in the depths of the basin, and eels and shellfish crawling round the brim. Have I spoken of the sumptuous carving of the capitals of the columns? At any rate I have left a thousand beauties without a word. Here I drop the subject. As I took my parting glance the cathedral had a gleam of golden sunshine in its far depths, and it seemed to widen and deepen itself, as if to convince me of my error in saying, yesterday, that it is not very large. I wonder how I could say it. After taking leave of the cathedral, I found my way out of another of the city gates, and soon turned aside into a green lane. . . . Soon the lane passed through a hamlet consisting of a few farm-houses, the shabbiest and dreariest that can be conceived, ancient, and ugly, and dilapidated, with iron-grated windows below, and heavy wooden shutters on the windows above,--high, ruinous walls shutting in the courts, and ponderous gates, one of which was off its hinges. The farm-yards were perfect pictures of disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story. All these houses were specimens of a rude antiquity, built of brick and stone, with the marks of arched doors and windows where a subsequent generation had shut up the lights, or the accesses which the original builders had opened. Humble as these dwellings are,--though large and high compared with rural residences in other countries,--they may very probably date back to the times when Siena was a warlike republic, and when every house in its neighborhood had need to be a fortress. I suppose, however, prowling banditti were the only enemies against whom a defence would be attempted. What lives must now be lived there,--in beastly ignorance, mental sluggishness, hard toil for little profit, filth, and a horrible discomfort of fleas; for if the palaces of Italy are overrun with these pests, what must the country hovels be! . . . . We are now all ready for a start to-morrow. RADICOFANI. October 13th.--We arranged to begin our journey at six. . . . It was a chill, lowering morning, and the rain blew a little in our faces before we had gone far, but did not continue long. The country soon lost the pleasant aspect which it wears immediately about Siena, and grew very barren and dreary. Then it changed again for the better, the road leading us through a fertility of vines and olives, after which the dreary and barren hills came back again, and formed our prospect throughout most of the day. We stopped for our dejeuner a la fourchette at a little old town called San Quirico, which we entered through a ruined gateway, the town being entirely surrounded by its ancient wall. This wall is far more picturesque than that of Siena, being lofty and built of stone, with a machicolation of arches running quite round its top, like a cornice. It has little more than a single street, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, narrow, paved with flag-stones in the Florentine fashion, and lined with two rows of tall, rusty stone houses, without a gap between them from end to end. The cafes were numerous in relation to the size of the town, and there were two taverns,--our own, the Eagle, being doubtless the best, and having three arched entrances in its front. Of these, the middle one led to the guests' apartments, the one on the right to the barn, and that on the left to the stable, so that, as is usual in Italian inns, the whole establishment was under one roof. We were shown into a brick-paved room on the first floor, adorned with a funny fresco of Aurora on the ceiling, and with some colored prints, both religious and profane. . . . As we drove into the town we noticed a Gothic church with two doors of peculiar architecture, and while our dejeuner was being prepared we went to see it. The interior had little that was remarkable, for it had been repaired early in the last century, and spoilt of course; but an old triptych is still hanging in a chapel beside the high altar. It is painted on wood, and dates back beyond the invention of oil-painting, and represents the Virgin and some saints and angels. Neither is the exterior of the church particularly interesting, with the exception of the carving and ornaments of two of the doors. Both of them have round arches, deep and curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ancient, and the material a red freestone. After lunch, J----- and I took a walk out of the gate of the town opposite to that of our entrance. There were no soldiers on guard, as at city gates of more importance; nor do I think that there is really any gate to shut, but the massive stone gateway still stands entire over the empty arch. Looking back after we had passed through, I observed that the lofty upper story is converted into a dove-cot, and that pumpkins were put to ripen in some open chambers at one side. We passed near the base of a tall, square tower, which is said to be of Roman origin. The little town is in the midst of a barren region, but its immediate neighborhood is fertile, and an olive-orchard, venerable of aspect, lay on the other side of the pleasant lane with its English hedges, and olive-trees grew likewise along the base of the city wall. The arched machicolations, which I have before mentioned, were here and there interrupted by a house which was built upon the old wall or incorporated into it; and from the windows of one of then I saw ears of Indian corn hung out to ripen in the sun, and somebody was winnowing grain at a little door that opened through the wall. It was very pleasant to see the ancient warlike rampart thus overcome with rustic peace. The ruined gateway is partly overgrown with ivy. Returning to our inn, along the street, we saw ------ sketching one of the doors of the Gothic church, in the midst of a crowd of the good people of San Quirico, who made no scruple to look over her shoulder, pressing so closely as hardly to allow her elbow-room. I must own that I was too cowardly to come forward and take my share of this public notice, so I turned away to the inn and there awaited her coming. Indeed, she has seldom attempted to sketch without finding herself the nucleus of a throng. VITERBO. The Black Eagle, October 14th.--Perhaps I had something more to say of San Quirico, but I shall merely add that there is a stately old palace of the Piccolomini close to the church above described. It is built in the style of the Roman palaces, and looked almost large enough to be one of them. Nevertheless, the basement story, or part of it, seems to be used as a barn and stable, for I saw a yoke of oxen in the entrance. I cannot but mention a most wretched team of vettura-horses which stopped at the door of our albergo: poor, lean, downcast creatures, with deep furrows between their ribs; nothing but skin and bone, in short, and not even so much skin as they should have had, for it was partially worn off from their backs. The harness was fastened with ropes, the traces and reins were ropes; the carriage was old and shabby, and out of this miserable equipage there alighted an ancient gentleman and lady, whom our waiter affirmed to be the Prefect of Florence and his wife. We left San Quirico at two o'clock, and followed an ascending road till we got into the region above the clouds; the landscape was very wide, but very dreary and barren, and grew more and more so till we began to climb the mountain of Radicofani, the peak of which had been blackening itself on the horizon almost the whole day. When we had come into a pretty high region we were assailed by a real mountain tempest of wind, rain, and hail, which pelted down upon us in good earnest, and cooled the air a little below comfort. As we toiled up the mountain its upper region presented a very striking aspect, looking as if a precipice had been smoothed and squared for the purpose of rendering the old castle on its summit more inaccessible than it was by nature. This is the castle of the robber-knight, Ghino di Tacco, whom Boccaccio introduces into the Decameron. A freebooter of those days must have set a higher value on such a rock as this than if it had been one mass of diamond, for no art of mediaeval warfare could endanger him in such a fortress. Drawing yet nearer, we found the hillside immediately above us strewn with thousands upon thousands of great fragments of stone. It looked as if some great ruin had taken place there, only it was too vast a ruin to have been the dismemberment and dissolution of anything made by man. We could now see the castle on the height pretty distinctly. It seemed to impend over the precipice; and close to the base of the latter we saw the street of a town on as strange and inconvenient a foundation as ever one was built upon. I suppose the inhabitants of the village were dependants of the old knight of the castle; his brotherhood of robbers, as they married and had families, settled there under the shelter of the eagle's nest. But the singularity is, how a community of people have contrived to live and perpetuate themselves so far out of the reach of the world's help, and seemingly with no means of assisting in the world's labor. I cannot imagine how they employ themselves except in begging, and even that branch of industry appears to be left to the old women and the children. No house was ever built in this immediate neighborhood for any such natural purpose as induces people to build them on other sites. Even our hotel, at which we now arrived, could not be said to be a natural growth of the soil; it had originally been a whim of one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany,--a hunting-palace,--intended for habitation only during a few weeks of the year. Of all dreary hotels I ever alighted at, methinks this is the most so; but on first arriving I merely followed the waiter to look at our rooms, across stone-paved basement-halls dismal as Etruscan tombs; up dim staircases, and along shivering corridors, all of stone, stone, stone, nothing but cold stone. After glancing at these pleasant accommodations, my wife and I, with J-----, set out to ascend the hill and visit the town of Radicofani. It is not more than a quarter of a mile above our hotel, and is accessible by a good piece of road, though very steep. As we approached the town, we were assailed by some little beggars; but this is the case all through Italy, in city or solitude, and I think the mendicants of Radicofani are fewer than its proportion. We had not got far towards the village, when, looking back over the scene of many miles that lay stretched beneath us, we saw a heavy shower apparently travelling straight towards us over hill and dale. It seemed inevitable that it should soon be upon us, so I persuaded my wife to return to the hotel; but J----- and I kept onward, being determined to see Radicofani with or without a drenching. We soon entered the street; the blackest, ugliest, rudest old street, I do believe, that ever human life incrusted itself with. The first portion of it is the overbrimming of the town in generations subsequent to that in which it was surrounded by a wall; but after going a little way we came to a high, square tower planted right across the way, with an arched gateway in its basement story, so that it looked like a great short-legged giant striding over the street of Radicofani. Within the gateway is the proper and original town, though indeed the portion outside of the gate is as densely populated, as ugly, and as ancient, as that within. The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city's street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably gossips with everybody, being everybody's blood relation, as they cannot fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up together within the narrow walls for many hundred years. They looked round briskly at J----- and me, but were courteous, as Italians always are, and made way for us to pass through the throng, as we kept on still ascending the steep street. It took us but a few minutes to reach the still steeper and winding pathway which climbs towards the old castle. After ascending above the village, the path, though still paved, becomes very rough, as if the hoofs of Ghino di Tacco's robber cavalry had displaced the stones and they had never been readjusted. On every side, too, except where the path just finds space enough, there is an enormous rubbish of huge stones, which seems to have fallen from the precipice above, or else to have rained down out of the sky. We kept on, and by and by reached what seemed to have been a lower outwork of the castle on the top; there was the massive old arch of a gateway, and a great deal of ruin of man's work, beside the large stones that here, as elsewhere, were scattered so abundantly. Within the wall and gateway just mentioned, however, there was a kind of farm-house, adapted, I suppose, out of the old ruin, and I noticed some ears of Indian corn hanging out of a window. There were also a few stacks of hay, but no signs of human or animal life; and it is utterly inexplicable to me, where these products of the soil could have come from, for certainly they never grew amid that barrenness. We had not yet reached Ghino's castle, and, being now beneath it, we had to bend our heads far backward to see it rising up against the clear sky while we were now in twilight. The path upward looked terribly steep and rough, and if we had climbed it we should probably have broken our necks in descending again into the lower obscurity. We therefore stopped here, much against J-----'s will, and went back as we came, still wondering at the strange situation of Radicofani; for its aspect is as if it had stepped off the top of the cliff and lodged at its base, though still in danger of sliding farther down the hillside. Emerging from the compact, grimy life of its street, we saw that the shower had swept by, or probably had expended itself in a region beneath us, for we were above the scope of many of the showery clouds that haunt a hill-country. There was a very bright star visible, I remember, and we saw the new moon, now a third towards the full, for the first time this evening. The air was cold and bracing. But I am excessively sleepy, so will not describe our great dreary hotel, where a blast howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how sleepy I am. SETTE VENE. October 15th.--We left Radicofani long before sunrise, and I saw that ceremony take place from the coupe of the vettura for the first time in a long while. A sunset is the better sight of the two. I have always suspected it, and have been strengthened in the idea whenever I have had an opportunity of comparison. Our departure from Radicofani was most dreary, except that we were very glad to get away; but, the cold discomfort of dressing in a chill bedroom by candlelight, and our uncertain wandering through the immense hotel with a dim taper in search of the breakfast-room, and our poor breakfast of eggs, Italian bread, and coffee,--all these things made me wish that people were created with roots like trees, so they could not befool themselves with wandering about. However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew. At Ponte Centino my passport was examined, and I was invited into an office where sat the papal custom-house officer, a thin, subtle-looking, keen-eyed, sallow personage, of aspect very suitable to be the agent of a government of priests. I communicated to him my wish to pass the custom-house without giving the officers the trouble of examining my luggage. He inquired whether I had any dutiable articles, and wrote for my signature a declaration in the negative; and then he lifted a sand-box, beneath which was a little heap of silver coins. On this delicate hint I asked what was the usual fee, and was told that fifteen pauls was the proper sum. I presume it was entirely an illegal charge, and that he had no right to pass any luggage without examination; but the thing is winked at by the authorities, and no money is better spent for the traveller's convenience than these fifteen pauls. There was a papal military officer in the room, and he, I believe, cheated me in the change of a Napoleon, as his share of the spoil. At the door a soldier met me with my passport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house--a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place--appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented. This whole set of men seem to be as corrupt as official people can possibly be; and yet I hardly know whether to stigmatize them as corrupt, because it is not their individual delinquency, but the operation of a regular system. Their superiors know what men they are, and calculate upon their getting a living by just these means. And, indeed, the custom-house and passport regulations, as they exist in Italy, would be intolerable if there were not this facility of evading them at little cost. Such laws are good for nothing but to be broken. We now began to ascend again, and the country grew fertile and picturesque. We passed many mules and donkeys, laden with a sort of deep firkin on each side of the saddle, and these were heaped up with grapes, both purple and white. We bought some, and got what we should have thought an abundance at small price, only we used to get twice as many at Montanto for the same money. However, a Roman paul bought us three or four pounds even here. We still ascended, and came soon to the gateway of the town of Acquapendente, which stands on a height that seems to descend by natural terraces to the valley below. . . . French soldiers, in their bluish-gray coats and scarlet trousers, were on duty at the gate, and one of them took my passport and the vetturino's, and we then drove into the town to wait till they should be vised. We saw but one street, narrow, with tall, rusty, aged houses, built of stone, evil smelling; in short, a kind of place that would be intolerably dismal in cloudy England, and cannot be called cheerful even under the sun of Italy. . . . Priests passed, and burly friars, one of whom was carrying a wine-barrel on his head. Little carts, laden with firkins of grapes, and donkeys with the same genial burden, brushed passed our vettura, finding scarce room enough in the narrow street. All the idlers of Acquapendente--and they were many--assembled to gaze at us, but not discourteously. Indeed, I never saw an idle curiosity exercised in such a pleasant way as by the country-people of Italy. It almost deserves to be called a kindly interest and sympathy, instead of a hard and cold curiosity, like that of our own people, and it is displayed with such simplicity that it is evident no offence is intended. By and by the vetturino brought his passport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, passing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria. The new town, which I suppose is hundreds of years old, with all its novelty shows strikingly the difference between places that grow up and shape out their streets of their own accord, as it were, and one that is built on a settled plan of malice aforethought. This little rural village has gates of classic architecture, a spacious piazza, and a great breadth of straight and rectangular streets, with houses of uniform style, airy and wholesome looking to a degree seldom seen on the Continent. Nevertheless, I must say that the town looked hatefully dull and ridiculously prim, and, of the two, I had rather spend my life in Radicofani. We drove through it, from gate to gate, without stopping, and soon came to the brow of a hill, whence we beheld, right beneath us, the beautiful lake of Bolsena; not exactly at our feet, however, for a portion of level ground lay between, haunted by the pestilence which has depopulated all these shores, and made the lake and its neighborhood a solitude. It looked very beautiful, nevertheless, with a sheen of a silver mid a gray like that of steel as the wind blew and the sun shone over it; and, judging by my own feelings, I should really have thought that the breeze from its surface was bracing and healthy. Descending the hill, we passed the ruins of the old town of San Lorenzo, of which the prim village on the hill-top may be considered the daughter. There is certainly no resemblance between parent and child, the former being situated on a sort of precipitous bluff, where there could have been no room for piazzas and spacious streets, nor accessibility except by mules, donkeys, goats, and people of Alpine habits. There was an ivy-covered tower on the top of the bluff, and some arched cavern mouths that looked as if they opened into the great darkness. These were the entrances to Etruscan tombs, for the town on top had been originally Etruscan, and the inhabitants had buried themselves in the heart of the precipitous bluffs after spending their lives on its summit. Reaching the plain, we drove several miles along the shore of the lake, and found the soil fertile and generally well cultivated, especially with the vine, though there were tracks apparently too marshy to be put to any agricultural purpose. We met now and then a flock of sheep, watched by sallow-looking and spiritless men and boys, who, we took it for granted, would soon perish of malaria, though, I presume, they never spend their nights in the immediate vicinity of the lake. I should like to inquire whether animals suffer from the bad qualities of the air. The lake is not nearly so beautiful on a nearer view as it is from the hill above, there being no rocky margin, nor bright, sandy beach, but everywhere this interval of level ground, and often swampy marsh, betwixt the water and the hill. At a considerable distance from the shore we saw two islands, one of which is memorable as having been the scene of an empress's murder, but I cannot stop to fill my journal with historical reminiscences. We kept onward to the town of Bolsena, which stands nearly a mile from the lake, and on a site higher than the level margin, yet not so much so, I should apprehend, as to free it from danger of malaria. We stopped at an albergo outside of the wall of the town, and before dinner had time to see a good deal of the neighborhood. The first aspect of the town was very striking, with a vista into its street through the open gateway, and high above it an old, gray, square-built castle, with three towers visible at the angles, one of them battlemented, one taller than the rest, and one partially ruined. Outside of the town-gate there were some fragments of Etruscan ruin, capitals of pillars and altars with inscriptions; these we glanced at, and then made our entrance through the gate. There it was again,--the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened street of piled-up houses which we have so often seen; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, grape-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, peaches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a fertile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which nature tries to heap into their hands. It seems strange that they can never grasp it. We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner,--the Via di Castello,--and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend. The street--a strange name for such an avenue--clambered upward in the oddest fashion, passing under arches, scrambling up steps, so that it was more like a long irregular pair of stairs than anything that Christians call a street; and so large a part of it was under arches that we scarcely seemed to be out of doors. At last U----, who was in advance, emerged into the upper air, and cried out that we had ascended to an upper town, and a larger one than that beneath. It really seemed like coming up out of the earth into the midst of the town, when we found ourselves so unexpectedly in upper Bolsena. We were in a little nook, surrounded by old edifices, and called the Piazza del Orologio, on account of a clock that was apparent somewhere. The castle was close by, and from its platform there was a splendid view of the lake and all the near hill-country. The castle itself is still in good condition, and apparently as strong as ever it was as respects the exterior walls; but within there seemed to be neither floor nor chamber, nothing but the empty shell of the dateless old fortress. The stones at the base and lower part of the building were so massive that I should think the Etrurians must have laid them; and then perhaps the Romans built a little higher, and the mediaeval people raised the battlements and towers. But we did not look long at the castle, our attention being drawn to the singular aspect of the town itself, which--to speak first of its most prominent characteristic--is the very filthiest place, I do believe, that was ever inhabited by man. Defilement was everywhere; in the piazza, in nooks and corners, strewing the miserable lanes from side to side, the refuse of every day, and of accumulated ages. I wonder whether the ancient Romans were as dirty a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them; for there seems to have been something in the places that have been inhabited by Romans, or made famous in their history, and in the monuments of every kind that they have raised, that puts people in mind of their very earthliness, and incites them to defile therewith whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal arch may fall in their way. I think it must be an hereditary trait, probably weakened and robbed of a little of its horror by the influence of milder ages; and I am much afraid that Caesar trod narrower and fouler ways in his path to power than those of modern Rome, or even of this disgusting town of Bolsena. I cannot imagine anything worse than these, however. Rotten vegetables thrown everywhere about, musty straw, standing puddles, running rivulets of dissolved nastiness,--these matters were a relief amid viler objects. The town was full of great black hogs wallowing before every door, and they grunted at us with a kind of courtesy and affability as if the town were theirs, and it was their part to be hospitable to strangers. Many donkeys likewise accosted us with braying; children, growing more uncleanly every day they lived, pestered us with begging; men stared askance at us as they lounged in corners, and women endangered us with slops which they were flinging from doorways into the street. No decent words can describe, no admissible image can give an idea of this noisome place. And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not live a beautiful and jolly life. I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site, including, I suppose, the space occupied by the lower city, which looks as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange confusion of black and ugly houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, that might have adorned a palace. . . . The streets are the narrowest I have seen anywhere,--of no more width, indeed, than may suffice for the passage of a donkey with his panniers. They wind in and out in strange confusion, and hardly look like streets at all, but, nevertheless, have names printed on the corners, just as if they were stately avenues. After looking about us awhile and drawing half-breaths so as to take in the less quantity of gaseous pollution, we went back to the castle, and descended by a path winding downward from it into the plain outside of the town-gate. It was now dinner-time, . . . . and we had, in the first place, some fish from the pestiferous lake; not, I am sorry to say, the famous stewed eels which, Dante says, killed Pope Martin, but some trout. . . . By the by, the meal was not dinner, but our midday colazione. After despatching it, we again wandered forth and strolled round the outside of the lower town, which, with the upper one, made as picturesque a combination as could be desired. The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of massive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. ------ sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch. They are a lovable people, these Italians, as I find from almost all with whom we come in contact; they have great and little faults, and no great virtues that I know of; but still are sweet, amiable, pleasant to encounter, save when they beg, or when you have to bargain with them. We left Bolsena and drove to Viterbo, passing the gate of the picturesque town of Montefiascone, over the wall of which I saw spires and towers, and the dome of a cathedral. I was sorry not to taste, in its own town, the celebrated est, which was the death-draught of the jolly prelate. At Viterbo, however, I called for some wine of Montefiascone, and had a little straw-covered flask, which the waiter assured us was the genuine est-wine. It was of golden color, and very delicate, somewhat resembling still champagne, but finer, and requiring a calmer pause to appreciate its subtle delight. Its good qualities, however, are so evanescent, that the finer flavor became almost imperceptible before we finished the flask. Viterbo is a large, disagreeable town, built at the foot of a mountain, the peak of which is seen through the vista of some of the narrow streets. There are more fountains in Viterbo than I have seen in any other city of its size, and many of them of very good design. Around most of them there were wine-hogsheads, waiting their turn to be cleansed and rinsed, before receiving the wine of the present vintage. Passing a doorway, J----- saw some men treading out the grapes in a great vat with their naked feet. Among the beggars here, the loudest and most vociferous was a crippled postilion, wearing his uniform jacket, green, faced with red; and he seemed to consider himself entitled still to get his living from travellers, as having been disabled in the way of his profession. I recognized his claim, and was rewarded with a courteous and grateful bow at our departure. . . . To beggars--after my much experience both in England and Italy--I give very little, though I am not certain that it would not often be real beneficence in the latter country. There being little or no provision for poverty and age, the poor must often suffer. Nothing can be more earnest than their entreaties for aid; nothing seemingly more genuine than their gratitude when they receive it. They return you the value of their alms in prayers, and say, "God will accompany you." Many of them have a professional whine, and a certain doleful twist of the neck and turn of the head, which hardens my heart against them at once. A painter might find numerous models among them, if canvas had not already been more than sufficiently covered with their style of the picturesque. There is a certain brick-dust colored cloak worn in Viterbo, not exclusively by beggars, which, when ragged enough, is exceedingly artistic. ROME. 68 Piazza Poli, October 17th.--We left Viterbo on the 15th, and proceeded, through Monterosi, to Sette Verse. There was nothing interesting at Sette Verse, except an old Roman bridge, of a single arch, which had kept its sweep, composed of one row of stones, unbroken for two or more thousand years, and looked just as strong as ever, though gray with age, and fringed with plants that found it hard to fix themselves in its close crevices. The next day we drove along the Cassian Way towards Rome. It was a most delightful morning, a genial atmosphere; the more so, I suppose, because this was the Campagna, the region of pestilence and death. I had a quiet, gentle, comfortable pleasure, as if, after many wanderings, I was drawing near Rome, for, now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart, as I think even London, or even little Concord itself, or old sleepy Salem, never did and never will. Besides, we are to stay here six months, and we had now a house all prepared to receive us; so that this present approach, in the noontide of a genial day, was most unlike our first one, when we crept towards Rome through the wintry midnight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary, and not knowing whither to betake ourselves. Ah! that was a dismal tine! One thing, however, that disturbed even my present equanimity a little was the necessity of meeting the custom-house at the Porta del Popolo; but my past experience warranted me in believing that even these ogres might be mollified by the magic touch of a scudo; and so it proved. We should have escaped any examination at all, the officer whispered me, if his superior had not happened to be present; but, as the case stood, they took down only one trunk from the top of the vettura, just lifted the lid, closed it again, and gave us permission to proceed. So we came to 68 Piazza Poli, and found ourselves at once at home, in such a comfortable, cosey little house, as I did not think existed in Rome. I ought to say a word about our vetturino, Constantino Bacci, an excellent and most favorable specimen of his class; for his magnificent conduct, his liberality, and all the good qualities that ought to be imperial, S----- called him the Emperor. He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino's inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair's-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price. Finally, I think the tears had risen almost to his eyelids when we parted with him. Our friends, the Thompsons, through whose kindness we procured this house, called to see us soon after our arrival. In the afternoon, I walked with Rosebud to the Medici Gardens, and on our way thither, we espied our former servant, Lalla, who flung so many and such bitter curses after us, on our departure from Rome, sitting at her father's fruit-stall. Thank God, they have not taken effect. After going to the Medici, we went to the Pincian Gardens, and looked over into the Borghese grounds, which, methought, were more beautiful than ever. The same was true of the sky, and of every object beneath it; and as we came homeward along the Corso, I wondered at the stateliness and palatial magnificence of that noble street. Once, I remember, I thought it narrow, and far unworthy of its fame. In the way of costume, the men in goat-skin breeches, whom we met on the Campagna, were very striking, and looked like Satyrs. October 21st.--. . . . I have been twice to St. Peter's, and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a visionary splendor and magnificence. I also went to the Museum of the Capitol; and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them. Yesterday we went to the Corsini Palace, which we had not visited before. It stands in the Trastevere, in the Longara, and is a stately palace, with a grand staircase, leading to the first floor, where is situated the range of picture-rooms. There were a good many fine pictures, but none of them have made a memorable impression on my mind, except a portrait by Vandyke, of a man in point-lace, very grand and very real. The room in which this picture hung had many other portraits by Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and other famous painters, and was wonderfully rich in this department. In another, there was a portrait of Pope Julius II., by Raphael, somewhat differing from those at the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries in Florence, and those I have seen in England and Paris; thinner, paler, perhaps older, more severely intellectual, but at least, as high a work of art as those. The palace has some handsome old furniture, and gilded chairs, covered with leather cases, possibly relics of Queen Christina's time, who died here. I know not but the most curious object was a curule chair of marble, sculptured all out of one piece, and adorned with bas-reliefs. It is supposed to be Etruscan. It has a circular back, sweeping round, so as to afford sufficient rests for the elbows; and, sitting down in it, I discovered that modern ingenuity has not made much real improvement on this chair of three or four thousand years ago. But some chairs are easier for the moment, yet soon betray you, and grow the more irksome. We strolled along Longara, and found the piazza of St. Peter's full of French soldiers at their drill. . . . We went quite round the interior of the church, and perceiving the pavement loose and broken near the altar where Guido's Archangel is placed, we picked up some bits of rosso antico and gray marble, to be set in brooches, as relics. We have the snuggest little set of apartments in Rome, seven rooms, including an antechamber; and though the stairs are exceedingly narrow, there is really a carpet on them,--a civilized comfort, of which the proudest palaces in the Eternal City cannot boast. The stairs are very steep, however, and I should not wonder if some of us broke our noses down them. Narrowness of space within doors strikes us all rather ludicrously, yet not unpleasantly, after being accustomed to the wastes and deserts of the Montanto Villa. It is well thus to be put in training for the over-snugness of our cottage in Concord. Our windows here look out on a small and rather quiet piazza, with an immense palace on the left hand, and a smaller yet statelier one on the right, and just round the corner of the street, leading out of our piazza, is the Fountain of Trevi, of which I can hear the plash in the evening, when other sounds are hushed. Looking over what I have said of Sodoma's "Christ Bound," at Sierra, I see that I have omitted to notice what seems to me one of its most striking characteristics,--its loneliness. You feel as if the Saviour were deserted, both in heaven and earth; the despair is in him which made him say, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still Divine, and Sodoma almost seems to have reconciled the impossibilities of combining an omnipresent divinity with a suffering and outraged humanity. But this is one of the cases in which the spectator's imagination completes what the artist merely hints at. Mr. ------, the sculptor, called to see us, the other evening, and quite paid Powers off for all his trenchant criticisms on his brother artists. He will not allow Powers to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art, although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the Greek Slave and the Fisher-Boy very ingeniously. The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Apollino in the Tribune of the Uzi; and the former is made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the Greek Slave, limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together,--a head to one purchaser, an arm or a foot to another, a hand to a third. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb by a happy accident or special providence. (The illustration was my own, and adopted by Mr. ------.) Yet Mr. ------ seems to acknowledge that he did succeed. I repeat these things only as another instance how invariably every sculptor uses his chisel and mallet to smash and deface the marble-work of every other. I never heard Powers speak of Mr. ------, but can partly imagine what he would have said. Mr. ------ spoke of Powers's disappointment about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress, and said that he was altogether to blame, inasmuch as he attempted to sell to the nation for that sum a statue which, to Mr. ------'s certain knowledge, he had already offered to private persons for a fifth part of it. I have not implicit faith in Mr. ------'s veracity, and doubt not Powers acted fairly in his own eyes. October 23d.--I am afraid I have caught one of the colds which the Roman air continually affected me with last winter; at any rate, a sirocco has taken the life out of me, and I have no spirit to do anything. This morning I took a walk, however, out of the Porta Maggiore, and looked at the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, just outside of the gate,--a very singular ruin covered with symbols of the man's trade in stone-work, and with bas-reliefs along the cornice, representing people at work, making bread. An inscription states that the ashes of his wife are likewise reposited there, in a bread-basket. The mausoleum is perhaps twenty feet long, in its largest extent, and of equal height; and if good bakers were as scarce in ancient Rome as in the modern city, I do not wonder that they were thought worthy of stately monuments. None of the modern ones deserve any better tomb than a pile of their own sour loaves. I walked onward a good distance beyond the gate alongside of the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, which, in this portion of it, seems to have had little repair, and to have needed little, since it was built. It looks like a long procession, striding across the Campagna towards the city, and entering the gate, over one of its arches, within the gate, I saw two or three slender jets of water spurting from the crevices; this aqueduct being still in use to bring the Acqua Felice into Rome. Returning within the walls, I walked along their inner base, to the Church of St. John Lateran, into which I went, and sat down to rest myself, being languid and weary, and hot with the sun, though afraid to trust the coolness of the shade. I hate the Roman atmosphere; indeed, all my pleasure in getting back--all my home-feeling--has already evaporated, and what now impresses me, as before, is the languor of Rome,--its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a weight of death. Quitting St. John Lateran, I went astray, as I do nine times out of ten in these Roman intricacies, and at last, seeing the Coliseum in the vista of a street, I betook myself thither to get a fresh start. Its round of stones looked vast and dreary, but not particularly impressive. The interior was quite deserted; except that a Roman, of respectable appearance, was making a pilgrimage at the altars, kneeling and saying a prayer at each one. Outside of the Coliseum, a neat-looking little boy came and begged of me; and I gave him a baiocco, rather because he seemed to need it so little than for any other reason. I observed that he immediately afterwards went and spoke to a well-dressed man, and supposed that the child was likewise begging of him. I watched the little boy, however, and saw that, in two or three other instances, after begging of other individuals, he still returned to this well-dressed man; the fact being, no doubt, that the latter was fishing for baiocci through the medium of his child,--throwing the poor little fellow out as a bait, while he himself retained his independent respectability. He had probably come out for a whole day's sport; for, by and by, he went between the arches of the Coliseum, followed by the child, and taking with him what looked like a bottle of wine, wrapped in a handkerchief. November 2d.--The weather lately would have suited one's ideal of an English November, except that there have been no fogs; but of ugly, hopeless clouds, chill, shivering winds, drizzle, and now and then pouring rain, much more than enough. An English coal-fire, if we could see its honest face within doors, would compensate for all the unamiableness of the outside atmosphere; but we might ask for the sunshine of the New Jerusalem, with as much hope of getting it. It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U---- has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S----- sketched the ruins. . . . [During four months of the illness of his daughter, Mr. Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal.--ED.] February 27th, 1859.--For many days past, there have been tokens of the coming Carnival in the Corso and the adjacent streets; for example, in the shops, by the display of masks of wire, pasteboard, silk, or cloth, some of beautiful features, others hideous, fantastic, currish, asinine, huge-nosed, or otherwise monstrous; some intended to cover the whole face, others concealing only the upper part, also white dominos, or robes bedizened with gold-lace and theatric splendors, displayed at the windows of mercers or flaunting before the doors. Yesterday, U---- and I came along the Corso, between one and two o'clock, after a walk, and found all these symptoms of impending merriment multiplied and intensified; . . . . rows of chairs, set out along the sidewalks, elevated a foot or two by means of planks; great baskets, full of confetti, for sale in the nooks and recesses of the streets; bouquets of all qualities and prices. The Corso was becoming pretty well thronged with people; but, until two o'clock, nobody dared to fling as much as a rosebud or a handful of sugar-plums. There was a sort of holiday expression, however, on almost everybody's face, such as I have not hitherto seen in Rome, or in any part of Italy; a smile gleaming out, an aurora of mirth, which probably will not be very exuberant in its noontide. The day was so sunny and bright that it made this opening scene far more cheerful than any day of the last year's carnival. As we threaded our way through the Corso, U---- kept wishing she could plunge into the fun and uproar as J----- would, and for my own part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and as riotously as any urchin there. But my black hat and grave talma would have been too good a mark for the combatants, . . . . so we went home before a shot was fired. . . . March 7th.--I, as well as the rest of the family, have followed up the Carnival pretty faithfully, and enjoyed it as well, or rather better than could have been expected; principally in the street, as a more looker-on,--which does not let one into the mystery of the fun,--and twice from a balcony, where I threw confetti, and partly understood why the young people like it so much. Certainly, there cannot well be a more picturesque spectacle in human life, than that stately, palatial avenue of the Corso, the more picturesque because so narrow, all hung with carpets and Gobelin tapestry, and the whole palace-heights alive with faces; and all the capacity of the street thronged with the most fantastic figures that either the fancies of folks alive at this day are able to contrive, or that live traditionally from year to year. . . . The Prince of Wales has fought manfully through the Carnival with confetti and bouquets, and U---- received several bouquets from him, on Saturday, as her carriage moved along. March 8th.--I went with U---- to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I enjoyed it a good deal, and assisted in so far as to pelt all the people in cylinder hats with handfuls of confetti. The scene opens with a long array of cavalry, who ride through the Corso, preceded by a large band, playing loudly on their brazen instruments. . . . There were some splendid dresses, particularly contadina costumes of scarlet and gold, which seem to be actually the festal attire of that class of people, and must needs be so expensive that one must serve for a lifetime, if indeed it be not an inheritance. . . . March 9th.--I was, yesterday, an hour or so among the people on the sidewalks of the Corso, just on the edges of the fun. They appeared to be in a decorous, good-natured mood, neither entering into the merriment, nor harshly repelling; and when groups of maskers overflowed among them, they received their jokes in good part. Many women of the lower class were in the crowd of bystanders; generally broad and sturdy figures, clad evidently in their best attire, and wearing a good many ornaments; such as gold or coral beads and necklaces, combs of silver or gold, heavy ear-rings, curiously wrought brooches, perhaps cameos or mosaics, though I think they prefer purely metallic work to these. One ornament very common among them is a large bodkin, which they stick through their hair. It is usually of silver, but sometimes it looks like steel, and is made in the shape of a sword,--a long Spanish thrusting sword, for example. Dr. Franco told us a story of a woman of Trastevere, who was addressed rudely at the Carnival by a gentleman; she warned him to desist, but as he still persisted, she drew the bodkin from her hair, and stabbed him to the heart. By and by I went to Mr. Motley's balcony, and looked down on the closing scenes of the Carnival. Methought the merry-makers labored harder to be mirthful, and yet were somewhat tired of their eight play-days; and their dresses looked a little shabby, rumpled, and draggled; but the lack of sunshine--which we have had on all the preceding days--may have produced this effect. The wheels of some of the carriages were wreathed round and spoked with green foliage, making a very pretty and fanciful appearance, as did likewise the harnesses of the horses, which were trimmed with roses. The pervading noise and uproar of human voices is one of the most effective points of the matter; but the scene is quite indescribable, and its effect not to be conceived without both witnessing and taking part in it. If you merely look at it, it depresses you; if you take even the slightest share in it, you become aware that it has a fascination, and you no longer wonder that the young people, at least, take such delight in plunging into this mad river of fun that goes roaring between the narrow limits of the Corso. As twilight came on, the moccoli commenced, and as it grew darker the whole street twinkled with lights, which would have been innumerable if every torch-bearer had not been surrounded by a host of enemies, who tried to extinguish his poor little twinkle. It was a pity to lose so much splendor as there might have been; but yet there was a kind of symbolism in the thought that every one of those thousands of twinkling lights was in charge of somebody, who was striving with all his might to keep it alive. Not merely the street-way, but all the balconies and hundreds of windows were lit up with these little torches; so that it seemed as if the stars had crumbled into glittering fragments, and rained down upon the Corso, some of them lodging upon the palace-fronts, some falling on the ground. Besides this, there were gas-lights burning with a white flame; but this illumination was not half so interesting as that of the torches, which indicated human struggle. All this time there were myriad voices shouting, "SENZA MOCCOLO!" and mingling into one long roar. We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against one another's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts; but after a while we grew tired, and so did the crowd, apparently; for the lights vanished, one after another, till the gas-lights--which at first were an unimportant part of the illumination--shone quietly out, overpowering the scattered twinkles of the moccoli. They were what the fixed stars are to the transitory splendors of human life. Mr. Motley tells me, that it was formerly the custom to have a mock funeral of harlequin, who was supposed to die at the close of the Carnival, during which he had reigned supreme, and all the people, or as many as chose, bore torches at his burial. But this being considered an indecorous mockery of Popish funereal customs, the present frolic of the moccoli was instituted,--in some sort, growing out of it. All last night, or as much of it as I was awake, there was a noise of song and of late revellers in the streets; but to-day we have waked up in the sad and sober season of Lent. It is worthy of remark, that all the jollity of the Carnival is a genuine ebullition of spirit, without the aid of wine or strong drink. March 11th.--Yesterday we went to the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, the entrance to which is alongside of the Appian Way, within sight of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. We descended not a very great way under ground, by a broad flight of stone steps, and, lighting some wax tapers, with which we had provided ourselves, we followed the guide through a great many intricate passages, which mostly were just wide enough for me to touch the wall on each side, while keeping my elbows close to my body; and as to height, they were from seven to ten feet, and sometimes a good deal higher It was rather picturesque, when we saw the long line of our tapers, for another large party had joined us, twinkling along the dark passage, and it was interesting to think of the former inhabitants of these caverns. . . . In one or two places there was the round mark in the stone or plaster, where a bottle had been deposited. This was said to have been the token of a martyr's burial-place, and to have contained his blood. After leaving the Catacomb, we drove onward to Cecilia Metella's tomb, which we entered and inspected. Within the immensely massive circular substance of the tomb was a round, vacant space, and this interior vacancy was open at the top, and had nothing but some fallen stones and a heap of earth at the bottom. On our way home we entered the Church of "Domine, quo vadis," and looked at the old fragment of the Appian Way, where our Saviour met St. Peter, and left the impression of his feet in one of the Roman paving-stones. The stone has been removed, and there is now only a fac-simile engraved in a block of marble, occupying the place where Jesus stood. It is a great pity they had not left the original stone; for then all its brother-stones in the pavement would have seemed to confirm the truth of the legend. While we were at dinner, a gentleman called and was shown into the parlor. We supposed it to be Mr. May; but soon his voice grew familiar, and my wife was sure it was General Pierce, so I left the table, and found it to be really he. I was rejoiced to see him, though a little saddened to see the marks of care and coming age, in many a whitening hair, and many a furrow, and, still more, in something that seemed to have passed away out of him, without leaving any trace. His voice, sometimes, sounded strange and old, though generally it was what it used to be. He was evidently glad to see me, glad to see my wife, glad to see the children, though there was something melancholy in his tone, when he remarked what a stout boy J----- had grown. Poor fellow! he has neither son nor daughter to keep his heart warm. This morning I have been with him to St. Peter's, and elsewhere about the city, and find him less changed than he seemed to be last night; not at all changed in heart and affections. We talked freely about all matters that came up; among the rest, about the project--recognizable by many tokens--for bringing him again forward as a candidate for the Presidency next year. He appears to be firmly resolved not again to present himself to the country, and is content to let his one administration stand, and to be judged by the public and posterity on the merits of that. No doubt he is perfectly sincere; no doubt, too, he would again be a candidate, if a pretty unanimous voice of the party should demand it. I retain all my faith in his administrative faculty, and should be glad, for his sake, to have it fully rccognized; but the probabilities, as far as I can see, do not indicate for him another Presidential term. March 15th.--This morning I went with my wife and Miss Hoar to Miss Hosmer's studio, to see her statue of Zenobia. We found her in her premises, springing about with a bird-like action. She has a lofty room, with a skylight window; it was pretty well warmed with a stove, and there was a small orange-tree in a pot, with the oranges growing on it, and two or three flower-shrubs in bloom. She herself looked prettily, with her jaunty little velvet cap on the side of her head, whence came clustering out, her short brown curls; her face full of pleasant life and quick expression; and though somewhat worn with thought and struggle, handsome and spirited. She told us that "her wig was growing as gray as a rat." There were but very few things in the room; two or three plaster busts, a headless cast of a plaster statue, and a cast of the Minerva Medica, which perhaps she had been studying as a help towards the design of her Zenobia; for, at any rate, I seemed to discern a resemblance or analogy between the two. Zenobia stood in the centre of the room, as yet unfinished in the clay, but a very noble and remarkable statue indeed, full of dignity and beauty. It is wonderful that so brisk a woman could have achieved a work so quietly impressive; and there is something in Zenobia's air that conveys the idea of music, uproar, and a great throng all about her; whilst she walks in the midst of it, self-sustained, and kept in a sort of sanctity by her native pride. The idea of motion is attained with great success; you not only perceive that she is walking, but know at just what tranquil pace she steps, amid the music of the triumph. The drapery is very fine and full; she is decked with ornaments; but the chains of her captivity hang from wrist to wrist; and her deportment--indicating a soul so much above her misfortune, yet not insensible to the weight of it--makes these chains a richer decoration than all her other jewels. I know not whether there be some magic in the present imperfect finish of the statue, or in the material of clay, as being a better medium of expression than even marble; but certainly I have seldom been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture. Miss Hosmer showed us photographs of her Puck--which I have seen in the marble--and likewise of the Will-o'-the-Wisp, both very pretty and fanciful. It indicates much variety of power, that Zenobia should be the sister of these, which would seem the more natural offspring of her quick and vivid character. But Zenobia is a high, heroic ode. . . . . On my way up the Via Babuino, I met General Pierce. We have taken two or three walks together, and stray among the Roman ruins, and old scenes of history, talking of matters in which he is personally concerned, yet which are as historic as anything around us. He is singularly little changed; the more I see him, the more I get him back, just such as he was in our youth. This morning, his face, air, and smile were so wonderfully like himself of old, that at least thirty years are annihilated. Zenobia's manacles serve as bracelets; a very ingenious and suggestive idea. March 18th.--I went to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol yesterday, and saw, among other things, the Venus in her secret cabinet. This was my second view of her: the first time, I greatly admired her; now, she made no very favorable impression. There are twenty Venuses whom I like as well, or better. On the whole, she is a heavy, clumsy, unintellectual, and commonplace figure; at all events, not in good looks to-day. Marble beauties seem to suffer the same occasional eclipses as those of flesh and blood. We looked at the Faun, the Dying Gladiator, and other famous sculptures; but nothing had a glory round it, perhaps because the sirocco was blowing. These halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and depressing effect upon me, very different from those of the Vatican. I know not why, except that the rooms of the Capitol have a dingy, shabby, and neglected look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less magnificent than at the Vatican. The corroded and discolored surfaces of the statues take away from the impression of immortal youth, and turn Apollo [The Lycian Apollo] himself into an old stone; unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from within. March 23d.--I am wearing away listlessly these last precious days of my abode in Rome. U----'s illness is disheartening, and by confining ------, it takes away the energy and enterprise that were the spring of all our movements. I am weary of Rome, without having seen and known it as I ought, and I shall be glad to get away from it, though no doubt there will be many yearnings to return hereafter, and many regrets that I did not make better use of the opportunities within my grasp. Still, I have been in Rome long enough to be imbued with its atmosphere, and this is the essential condition of knowing a place; for such knowledge does not consist in having seen every particular object it contains. In the state of mind in which I now stand towards Rome, there is very little advantage to be gained by staying here longer. And yet I had a pleasant stroll enough yesterday afternoon, all by myself, from the Corso down past the Church of St. Andrea della Valle,-- the site where Caesar was murdered,--and thence to the Farnese Palace, the noble court of which I entered; thence to the Piazza Cenci, where I looked at one or two ugly old palaces, and fixed on one of them as the residence of Beatrice's father; then past the Temple of Vesta, and skirting along the Tiler, and beneath the Aventine, till I somewhat unexpectedly came in sight of the gray pyramid of Caius Cestius. I went out of the city gate, and leaned on the parapet that encloses the pyramid, advancing its high, unbroken slope and peak, where the great blocks of marble still fit almost as closely to one another as when they were first laid; though, indeed, there are crevices just large enough for plants to root themselves, and flaunt and trail over the face of this great tomb; only a little verdure, however, over a vast space of marble, still white in spots, but pervadingly turned gray by two thousand years' action of the atmosphere. Thence I came home by the Caelian, and sat down on an ancient flight of steps under one of the arches of the Coliseum, into which the sunshine fell sidelong. It was a delightful afternoon, not precisely like any weather that I have known elsewhere; certainly never in America, where it is always too cold or too hot. It, resembles summer more than anything which we New-Englanders recognize in our idea of spring, but there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, gentle, that does not belong to summer, and that thrilled and tickled my heart with a feeling partly sensuous, partly spiritual. I go to the Bank and read Galignani and the American newspapers; thence I stroll to the Pincian or to the Medici Gardens; I see a good deal of General Pierce, and we talk over his Presidential life, which, I now really think, he has no latent desire nor purpose to renew. Yet he seems to have enjoyed it while it lasted, and certainly he was in his element as an administrative man; not far-seeing, not possessed of vast stores of political wisdom in advance of his occasions, but endowed with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful, and his Cabinet recognized it as such; for though they were men of great ability, he was evidently the master-mind among them. None of them were particularly his personal friends when he selected them; they all loved him when they parted; and he showed me a letter, signed by all, in which they expressed their feelings of respect and attachment at the close of his administration. There was a noble frankness on his part, that kept the atmosphere always clear among them, and in reference to this characteristic Governor Marcy told him that the years during which he had been connected with his Cabinet had been the happiest of his life. Speaking of Caleb Cushing, he told me that the unreliability, the fickleness, which is usually attributed to him, is an actual characteristic, but that it is intellectual, not moral. He has such comprehensiveness, such mental variety and activity, that, if left to himself, he cannot keep fast hold of one view of things, and so cannot, without external help, be a consistent man. He needs the influence of a more single and stable judgment to keep him from divergency, and, on this condition, he is a most inestimable coadjutor. As regards learning and ability, he has no superior. Pierce spoke the other day of the idea among some of his friends that his life had been planned, from a very early period, with a view to the station which he ultimately reached. He smiled at the notion, said that it was inconsistent with his natural character, and that it implied foresight and dexterity beyond what any mortal is endowed with. I think so too; but nevertheless, I was long and long ago aware that he cherished a very high ambition, and that, though he might not anticipate the highest things, he cared very little about inferior objects. Then as to plans, I do not think that he had any definite ones; but there was in him a subtle faculty, a real instinct, that taught him what was good for him,--that is to say, promotive of his political success,--and made him inevitably do it. He had a magic touch, that arranged matters with a delicate potency, which he himself hardly recognized; and he wrought through other minds so that neither he nor they always knew when and how far they were under his influence. Before his nomination for the Presidency I had a sense that it was coming, and it never seemed to me an accident. He is a most singular character; so frank, so true, so immediate, so subtle, so simple, so complicated. I passed by the tower in the Via Portoghese to-day, and observed that the nearest shop appears to be for the sale of cotton or linen cloth. . . . The upper window of the tower was half open; of course, like all or almost all other Roman windows, it is divided vertically, and each half swings back on hinges. . . . Last week a fritter-establishment was opened in our piazza. It was a wooden booth erected in the open square, and covered with canvas painted red, which looked as if it had withstood much rain and sunshine. In front were three great boughs of laurel, not so much for shade, I think, as ornament. There were two men, and their apparatus for business was a sort of stove, or charcoal furnace, and a frying-pan to place over it; they had an armful or two of dry sticks, some flour, and I suppose oil, and this seemed to be all. It was Friday, and Lent besides, and possibly there was some other peculiar propriety in the consumption of fritters just then. At all events, their fire burned merrily from morning till night, and pretty late into the evening, and they had a fine run of custom; the commodity being simply dough, cut into squares or rhomboids, and thrown into the boiling oil, which quickly turned them to a light brown color. I sent J----- to buy some, and, tasting one, it resembled an unspeakably bad doughnut, without any sweetening. In fact, it was sour, for the Romans like their bread, and all their preparations of flour, in a state of acetous fermentation, which serves them instead of salt or other condiment. This fritter-shop had grown up in a night, like Aladdin's palace, and vanished as suddenly; for after standing through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it was gone on Monday morning, and a charcoal-strewn place on the pavement where the furnace had been was the only memorial of it. It was curious to observe how immediately it became a lounging-place for idle people, who stood and talked all day with the fritter-friers, just as they might at any old shop in the basement, of a palace, or between the half-buried pillars of the Temple of Minerva, which had been familiar to them and their remote grandfathers. April 14th.--Yesterday afternoon I drove with Mr. and Mrs. Story and Mr. Wilde to see a statue of Venus, which has just been discovered, outside of the Porta Portese, on the other side of the Tiber. A little distance beyond the gate we came to the entrance of a vineyard, with a wheel-track through the midst of it; and, following this, we soon came to a hillside, in which an excavation had been made with the purpose of building a grotto for keeping and storing wine. They had dug down into what seemed to be an ancient bathroom, or some structure of that kind, the excavation being square and cellar-like, and built round with old subterranean walls of brick and stone. Within this hollow space the statue had been found, and it was now standing against one of the walls, covered with a coarse cloth, or a canvas bag. This being removed, there appeared a headless marble figure, earth-stained, of course, and with a slightly corroded surface, but wonderfully delicate and beautiful, the shape, size, and attitude, apparently, of the Venus de' Medici, but, as we all thought, more beautiful than that. It is supposed to be the original, from which the Venus de' Medici was copied. Both arms were broken off, but the greater part of both, and nearly the whole of one hand, had been found, and these being adjusted to the figure, they took the well-known position before the bosom and the middle, as if the fragmentary woman retained her instinct of modesty to the last. There were the marks on the bosom and thigh where the fingers had touched; whereas in the Venus de' Medici, if I remember rightly, the fingers are sculptured quite free of the person. The man who showed the statue now lifted from a corner a round block of marble, which had been lying there among other fragments, and this he placed upon the shattered neck of the Venus; and behold, it was her head and face, perfect, all but the nose! Even in spite of this mutilation, it seemed immediately to light up and vivify the entire figure; and, whatever I may heretofore have written about the countenance of the Venus de' Medici, I here record my belief that that head has been wrongfully foisted upon the statue; at all events, it is unspeakably inferior to this newly discovered one. This face has a breadth and front which are strangely deficient in the other. The eyes are well opened, most unlike the buttonhole lids of the Venus de' Medici; the whole head is so much larger as to entirely obviate the criticism that has always been made on the diminutive head of the De' Medici statue. If it had but a nose! They ought to sift every handful of earth that has been thrown out of the excavation, for the nose and the missing hand and fingers must needs be there; and, if they were found, the effect would be like the reappearance of a divinity upon earth. Mutilated as we saw her, it was strangely interesting to be present at the moment, as it were, when she had just risen from her long burial, and was shedding the unquenchable lustre around her which no eye had seen for twenty or more centuries. The earth still clung about her; her beautiful lips were full of it, till Mr. Story took a thin chip of wood and cleared it away from between them. The proprietor of the vineyard stood by; a man with the most purple face and hugest and reddest nose that I ever beheld in my life. It must have taken innumerable hogsheads of his thin vintage to empurple his face in this manner. He chuckled much over the statue, and, I suppose, counts upon making his fortune by it. He is now awaiting a bid from the Papal government, which, I believe, has the right of pre-emption whenever any relics of ancient art are discovered. If the statue could but be smuggled out of Italy, it might command almost any price. There is not, I think, any name of a sculptor on the pedestal, as on that of the Venus de' Medici. A dolphin is sculptured on the pillar against which she leans. The statue is of Greek marble. It was first found about eight days ago, but has been offered for inspection only a day or two, and already the visitors come in throngs, and the beggars gather about the entrance of the vineyard. A wine shop, too, seems to have been opened on the premises for the accommodation of this great concourse, and we saw a row of German artists sitting at a long table in the open air, each with a glass of thin wine and something to eat before him; for the Germans refresh nature ten times to other persons once. How the whole world might be peopled with antique beauty if the Romans would only dig! April 19th.--General Pierce leaves Rome this morning for Venice, by way of Ancona, and taking the steamer thence to Trieste. I had hoped to make the journey along with him; but U----'s terrible illness has made it necessary for us to continue here another mouth, and we are thankful that this seems now to be the extent of our misfortune. Never having had any trouble before that pierced into my very vitals, I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend; but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did the good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of his ministrations in these dark days. Thank God, the thing we dreaded did not come to pass. Pierce is wonderfully little changed. Indeed, now that he has won and enjoyed--if there were any enjoyment in it--the highest success that public life could give him, he seems more like what he was in his early youth than at any subsequent period. He is evidently happier than I have ever known him since our college days; satisfied with what he has been, and with the position in the country that remains to him, after filling such an office. Amid all his former successes,--early as they came, and great as they were,--I always perceived that something gnawed within him, and kept him forever restless and miserable. Nothing he won was worth the winning, except as a step gained toward the summit. I cannot tell how early he began to look towards the Presidency; but I believe he would have died an unhappy man without it. And yet what infinite chances there seemed to be against his attaining it! When I look at it in one way, it strikes me as absolutely miraculous; in another, it came like an event that I had all along expected. It was due to his wonderful tact, which is of so subtle a character that he himself is but partially sensible of it. I have found in him, here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by his experience of life. We hold just the same relation to each other as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together still the same dear friends as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other as friend for friend. May 15th.--Yesterday afternoon we went to the Barberini picture-gallery to take a farewell look at the Beatrice Cenci, which I have twice visited before since our return from Florence. I attempted a description of it at my first visit, more than a year ago, but the picture is quite indescribable and unaccountable in its effect, for if you attempt to analyze it you can never succeed in getting at the secret of its fascination. Its peculiar expression eludes a straightforward glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls upon it casually, as it were, and without thinking to discover anything, as if the picture had a life and consciousness of its own, and were resolved not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, though it wears the full expression of it when it imagines itself unseen. I think no other such magical effect can ever have been wrought by pencil. I looked close into its eyes, with a determination to see all that there was in them, and could see nothing that might not have been in any young girl's eyes; and yet, a moment afterwards, there was the expression--seen aside, and vanishing in a moment--of a being unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing at me out of a remote and inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no sympathy could reach her. The mouth is beyond measure touching; the lips apart, looking as innocent as a baby's after it has been crying. The picture never can be copied. Guido himself could not have done it over again. The copyists get all sorts of expression, gay, as well as grievous; some copies have a coquettish air, a half-backward glance, thrown alluring at the spectator, but nobody ever did catch, or ever will, the vanishing charm of that sorrow. I hated to leave the picture, and yet was glad when I had taken my last glimpse, because it so perplexed and troubled me not to be able to get hold of its secret. Thence we went to the Church of the Capuchins, and saw Guido's Archangel. I have been several times to this church, but never saw the picture before, though I am familiar with the mosaic copy at St. Peter's, and had supposed the latter to be an equivalent representation of the original. It is nearly or quite so as respects the general effect; but there is a beauty in the archangel's face that immeasurably surpasses the copy,--the expression of heavenly severity, and a degree of pain, trouble, or disgust, at being brought in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it. There is something finical in the copy, which I do not find in the original. The sandalled feet are here those of an angel; in the mosaic they are those of a celestial coxcomb, treading daintily, as if he were afraid they would be soiled by the touch of Lucifer. After looking at the Archangel we went down under the church, guided by a fleshy monk, and saw the famous cemetery, where the dead monks of many centuries back have been laid to sleep in sacred earth from Jerusalem. . . . FRANCE. Hotel des Colonies, Marseilles, May 29th, Saturday.--Wednesday was the day fixed for our departure from Rome, and after breakfast I walked to the Pincian, and saw the garden and the city, and the Borghese grounds, and St. Peter's in an earlier sunlight than ever before. Methought they never looked so beautiful, nor the sky so bright and blue. I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar. I seem to know it better than my birthplace, and to have known it longer; and though I have been very miserable there, and languid with the effects of the atmosphere, and disgusted with a thousand things in its daily life, still I cannot say I hate it, perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments, I desire never to set eyes on it again. . . . . . . . We traversed again that same weary and dreary tract of country which we passed over in a winter afternoon and night on our first arrival in Rome. It is as desolate a country as can well be imagined, but about midway of our journey we came to the sea-shore, and kept very near it during the rest of the way. The sight and fragrance of it were exceedingly refreshing after so long an interval, and U---- revived visibly as we rushed along, while J----- chuckled and contorted himself with ineffable delight. We reached Civita Vecchia in three or four hours, and were there subjected to various troubles. . . . All the while Miss S------ and I were bothering about the passport, the rest of the family sat in the sun on the quay, with all kinds of bustle and confusion around them; a very trying experience to U---- after the long seclusion and quiet of her sick-chamber. But she did not seem to suffer from it, and we finally reached the steamer in good condition and spirits. . . . I slept wretchedly in my short and narrow berth, more especially as there was an old gentleman who snored as if he were sounding a charge; it was terribly hot too, and I rose before four o'clock, and was on deck amply in time to watch the distant approach of sunrise. We arrived at Leghorn pretty early, and might have gone ashore and spent the day. Indeed, we had been recommended by Dr. Franco, and had fully purposed to spend a week or ten days there, in expectation of benefit to U----'s health from the sea air and sea bathing, because he thought her still too feeble to make the whole voyage to Marseilles at a stretch. But she showed herself so strong that we thought she would get as much good from our three days' voyage as from the days by the sea-shore. Moreover, . . . . we all of us still felt the languor of the Roman atmosphere, and dreaded the hubbub and crazy confusion of landing at an Italian port. . . . So we lay in the harbor all day without stirring from the steamer. . . . It would have been pleasant, however, to have gone to Pisa, fifteen miles off, and seen the leaning tower; but, for my part, I have arrived at that point where it is somewhat pleasanter to sit quietly in any spot whatever than to see whatever grandest or most beautiful thing. At least this was my mood in the harbor of Leghorn. From the deck of the steamer there were many things visible that might have been interesting to describe: the boats of peculiar rig, and covered with awning; the crowded shipping; the disembarkation of horses from the French cavalry, which were lowered from steamers into gondolas or lighters, and hung motionless, like the sign of the Golden Fleece, during the transit, only kicking a little when their feet happened to graze the vessel's side. One horse plunged overboard, and narrowly escaped drowning. There was likewise a disembarkation of French soldiers in a train of boats, which rowed shoreward with sound of trumpet. The French are concentrating a considerable number of troops at this point. Our steamer was detained by order of the French government to take on board despatches; so that, instead of sailing at dusk, as is customary, we lay in the harbor till seven of the next morning. A number of young Sardinian officers, in green uniform, came on board, and a pale and picturesque-looking Italian, and other worthies of less note,--English, American, and of all races,--among them a Turk with a little boy in Christian dress; also a Greek gentleman with his young bride. At the appointed time we weighed anchor for Genoa, and had a beautiful day on the Mediterranean, and for the first time in my life I saw the real dark blue of the sea. I do not remember noticing it on my outward voyage to Italy. It is the most beautiful hue that can be imagined, like a liquid sky; and it retains its lustrous blue directly under the side of the ship, where the water of the mid-Atlantic looks greenish. . . . We reached Genoa at seven in the afternoon. . . . Genoa looks most picturesquely from the sea, at the foot of a sheltering semicircle of lofty hills; and as we lay in the harbor we saw, among other interesting objects, the great Doria Palace, with its gardens, and the cathedral, and a heap and sweep of stately edifices, with the mountains looking down upon he city, and crowned with fortresses. The variety of hue in the houses, white, green, pink, and orange, was very remarkable. It would have been well to go ashore here for an hour or two and see the streets, --having already seen the palaces, churches, and public buildings at our former visit,--and buy a few specimens of Genoa goldsmiths' work; but I preferred the steamer's deck, so the evening passed pleasantly away; the two lighthouses at the entrance of the port kindled up their fires, and at nine o'clock the evening gun thundered from the fortress, and was reverberated from the heights. We sailed away at eleven, and I was roused from my first sleep by the snortings and hissings of the vessel as she got under way. At Genoa we took on board some more passengers, an English nobleman with his lady being of the number. These were Lord and Lady J------, and before the end of our voyage his lordship talked to me of a translation of Tasso in which he is engaged, and a stanza or two of which he repeated to me. I really liked the lines, and liked too the simplicity and frankness with which he spoke of it to me a stranger, and the way be seemed to separate his egotism from the idea which he evidently had that he is going to make an excellent translation. I sincerely hope it may be so. He began it without any idea of publishing it, or of ever bringing it to a conclusion, but merely as a solace and occupation while in great trouble during an illness of his wife, but he has gradually come to find it the most absorbing occupation he ever undertook; and as Mr. Gladstone and other high authorities give him warm encouragement, he now means to translate the entire poem, and to publish it with beautiful illustrations, and two years hence the world may expect to see it. I do not quite perceive how such a man as this--a man of frank, warm, simple, kindly nature, but surely not of a poetical temperament, or very refined, or highly cultivated--should make a good version of Tasso's poems; but perhaps the dead poet's soul may take possession of this healthy organization, and wholly turn him to its own purposes. The latter part of our voyage to-day lay close along the coast of France, which was hilly and picturesque, and as we approached Marseilles was very bold and striking. We steered among rocky islands, rising abruptly out of the sea, mere naked crags, without a trace of verdure upon them, and with the surf breaking at their feet. They were unusual specimens of what hills would look like without the soil, that is to them what flesh is to a skeleton. Their shapes were often wonderfully fine, and the great headlands thrust themselves out, and took such lines of light and shade that it seemed like sailing through a picture. In the course of the afternoon a squall came up and blackened the sky all over in a twinkling; our vessel pitched and tossed, and a brig a little way from us had her sails blown about in wild fashion. The blue of the sea turned as black as night, and soon the rain began to spatter down upon us, and continued to sprinkle and drizzle a considerable time after the wind had subsided. It was quite calm and pleasant when we entered the harbor of Marseilles, which lies at the foot of very fair hills, and is set among great cliffs of stone. I did not attend much to this, however, being in dread of the difficulty of landing and passing through the custom-house with our twelve or fourteen trunks and numberless carpet-bags. The trouble vanished into thin air, nevertheless, as we approached it, for not a single trunk or bag was opened, and, moreover, our luggage and ourselves were not only landed, but the greater part of it conveyed to the railway without any expense. Long live Louis Napoleon, say I. We established ourselves at the Hotel des Colonies, and then Mss S------, J-----, and I drove hither and thither about Marseilles, making arrangements for our journey to Avignon, where we mean to go to-day. We might have avoided a good deal of this annoyance; but travellers, like other people, are continually getting their experience just a little too late. It was after nine before we got back to the hotel and took our tea in peace. AVIGNON. Hotel de l'Europe, June 1st.--I remember nothing very special to record about Marseilles; though it was really like passing from death into life, to find ourselves in busy, cheerful, effervescing France, after living so long between asleep and awake in sluggish Italy. Marseilles is a very interesting and entertaining town, with its bold surrounding heights, its wide streets,--so they seemed to us after the Roman alleys,--its squares, shady with trees, its diversified population of sailors, citizens, Orientals, and what not; but I have no spirit for description any longer; being tired of seeing things, and still more of telling myself about them. Only a young traveller can have patience to write his travels. The newest things, nowadays, have a familiarity to my eyes; whereas in their lost sense of novelty lies the charm and power of description. On Monday (30th May), though it began with heavy rain, we set early about our preparations for departure, . . . . and, at about three, we left the Hotel des Colonies. It is a very comfortable hotel, though expensive. The Restaurant connected with it occupies the enclosed court-yard and the arcades around it; and it was a good amusement to look down from the surrounding gallery, communicating with our apartments, and see the fashion and manner of French eating, all the time going forward. In sunny weather a great awning is spread over the whole court, across from the upper stories of the house. There is a grass-plat in the middle, and a very spacious and airy dining-saloon is thus formed. Our railroad carriage was comfortable, and we found in it, besides two other Frenchwomen, two nuns. They were very devout, and sedulously read their little books of devotion, repeated prayers under their breath, kissed the crucifixes which hung at their girdles, and told a string of beads, which they passed from one to the other. So much were they occupied with these duties, that they scarcely looked at the scenery along the road, though, probably, it is very rare for them to see anything outside of their convent walls. They never failed to mutter a prayer and kiss the crucifix whenever we plunged into a tunnel. If they glanced at their fellow-passengers, it was shyly and askance, with their lips in motion all the time, like children afraid to let their eyes wander from their lesson-book. One of them, however, took occasion to pull down R-----'s dress, which, in her frisky movements about the carriage, had got out of place, too high for the nun's sense of decorum. Neither of them was at all pretty, nor was the black stuff dress and white muslin cap in the least becoming, neither were their features of an intelligent or high-bred stamp. Their manners, however, or such little glimpses as I could get of them, were unexceptionable; and when I drew a curtain to protect one of them from the sun, she made me a very courteous gesture of thanks. We had some very good views both of sea and hills; and a part of our way lay along the banks of the Rhone. . . . By the by, at the station at Marseilles I bought the two volumes of the "Livre des Merveilles," by a certain author of my acquaintance, translated into French, and printed and illustrated in very pretty style. Miss S------ also bought them, and, in answer to her inquiry for other works by the same author, the bookseller observed that "she did not think Monsieur Nathaniel had published anything else." The Christian name deems to be the most important one in France, and still more especially in Italy. We arrived at Avignon, Hotel de l'Europe, in the dusk of the evening. . . . The lassitude of Rome still clings to us, and I, at least, feel no spring of life or activity, whether at morn or eve. In the morning we found ourselves very pleasantly situated as regards lodgings. The gallery of our suite of rooms looks down as usual into an enclosed court, three sides of which are formed by the stone house and its two wings, and the third by a high wall, with a gateway of iron between two lofty stone pillars, which, for their capitals, have great stone vases, with grass growing in them, and hanging over the brim. There is a large plane-tree in one corner of the court, and creeping plants clamber up trellises; and there are pots of flowers and bird-cages, all of which give a very fresh and cheerful aspect to the enclosure. The court is paved with small round stones; the omnibus belonging to the hotel, and all the carriages of guests drive into it; and the wide arch of the stable-door opens under the central part of the house. Nevertheless, the scene is not in all respects that of a stable-yard; for gentlemen and ladies come from the salle a manger and other rooms, and stand talking in the court, or occupy chairs and seats there; children play about; the hostess or her daughter often appears and talks with her guests or servants; dogs lounge, and, in short, the court might well enough be taken for the one scene of a classic play. The hotel seems to be of the first class, though such would not be indicated, either in England or America, by thus mixing up the stable with the lodgings. I have taken two or three rambles about the town, and have climbed a high rock which dominates over it, and gives a most extensive view from the broad table-land of its summit. The old church of Avignon --as old as the times of its popes, and older--stands close beside this mighty and massive crag. We went into it, and found it a dark old place, with broad, interior arches, and a singularly shaped dome; a venerable Gothic and Grecian porch, with ancient frescos in its arched spaces; some dusky pictures within; an ancient chair of stone, formerly occupied by the popes, and much else that would have been exceedingly interesting before I went to Rome. But Rome takes the charm out of an inferior antiquity, as well as the life out of human beings. This forenoon J----- and I have crossed the Rhone by a bridge, just the other side of one of the city gates, which is near our hotel. We walked along the riverside, and saw the ruins of an ancient bridge, which ends abruptly in the midst of the stream; two or three arches still making tremendous strides across, while the others have long ago been crumbled away by the rush of the rapid river. The bridge was originally founded by St. Benezet, who received a Divine order to undertake the work, while yet a shepherd-boy, with only three sous in his pocket; and he proved the authenticity of the mission by taking an immense stone on his shoulder, and laying it for the foundation. There is still an ancient chapel midway on the bridge, and I believe St. Benezet lies buried there, in the midst of his dilapidated work. The bridge now used is considerably lower down the stream. It is a wooden suspension-bridge, broader than the ancient one, and doubtless more than supplies its place; else, unquestionably, St. Benezet would think it necessary to repair his own. The view from the inner side of this ruined structure, grass-grown and weedy, and leading to such a precipitous plunge into the swift river, is very picturesque, in connection with the gray town and above it, the great, massive bulk of the cliff, the towers of the church, and of a vast old edifice, shapeless, ugly, and venerable, which the popes built and occupied as their palace, many centuries ago. . . . After dinner we all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U---- an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply soft as this great beast. Its master seems very fond and proud of it; and, great favorite as the cat is, she does not take airs upon herself, but is gently shy and timid in her demonstrations. We ascended the great Rocher above the palace of the popes, and on our way looked into the old church, which was so dim in the decline of day that we could not see within the dusky arches, through which the chapels communicated with the nave. Thence we pursued our way up the farther ascent, and, standing on the edge of the precipice,--protected by a parapet of stone, and in other places by an iron railing,--we could look down upon the road that winds its dusky track far below, and at the river Rhone, which eddies close beside it. This is indeed a massive and lofty cliff, and it tumbles down so precipitously that I could readily have flung myself from the bank, and alighted on my head in the middle of the river. The Rhone passes so near its base that I threw stones a good way into its current. We talked with a man of Avignon, who leaned over the parapet near by, and he was very kind in explaining the points of view, and told us that the river, which winds and doubles upon itself so as to look like at least two rivers, is really the Rhone alone. The Durance joins with it within a few miles below Avignon, but is here invisible. Hotel de l'Europe, June 2d.--This morning we went again to the Duomo of the popes; and this time we allowed the custode, or sacristan, to show us the curiosities of it. He led us into a chapel apart, and showed us the old Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII., where the recumbent statue of the pope lies beneath one of those beautiful and venerable canopies of stone which look at once so light and so solemn. I know not how many hundred years old it is, but everything of Gothic origin has a faculty of conveying the idea of age; whereas classic forms seem to have nothing to do with time, and so lose the kind of impressiveness that arises from suggestions of decay and the past. In the sacristy the guide opened a cupboard that contained the jewels and sacred treasures of the church, and showed a most exquisite figure of Christ in ivory, represented as on a cross of ebony; and it was executed with wonderful truth and force of expression, and with great beauty likewise. I do not see what a full-length marble statue could have had that was lacking in this little ivory figure of hardly more than a foot high. It is about two centuries old, by an unknown artist. There is another famous ivory statuette in Avignon which seems to be more celebrated than this, but can hardly be superior. I shall gladly look at it if it comes in my way. Next to this, the prettiest thing the man showed us was a circle of emeralds, in one of the holy implements; and then he exhibited a little bit or a pope's skull; also a great old crozier, that looked as if made chiefly of silver, and partly gilt; but I saw where the plating of silver was worn away, and betrayed the copper of its actual substance. There were two or three pictures in the sacristy, by ancient and modern French artists, very unlike the productions of the Italian masters, but not without a beauty of their own. Leaving the sacristy, we returned into the church, where U---- and J----- began to draw the pope's old stone chair. There is a beast, or perhaps more than one, grotesquely sculptured upon it; the seat is high and square, the back low and pointed, and it offers no enticing promise to a weary man. The interior of the church is massively picturesque, with its vaulted roof, and a stone gallery, heavily ornamented, running along each side of the nave. Each arch of the nave gives admittance to a chapel, in all of which there are pictures, and sculptures in most of them. One of these chapels is of the time of Charlemagne, and has a vaulted roof of admirable architecture, covered with frescos of modern date and little merit. In an adjacent chapel is the stone monument of Pope Benedict, whose statue reposes on it, like many which I have seen in the cathedral of York and other old English churches. In another part we saw a monument, consisting of a plain slab supported on pillars; it is said to be of a Roman or very early Christian epoch. In another chapel was a figure of Christ in wax, I believe, and clothed in real drapery; a very ugly object. Also, a figure reposing under a slab, which strikes the spectator with the idea that it is really a dead person enveloped in a shroud. There are windows of painted glass in some of the chapels; and the gloom of the dimly lighted interior, especially beneath the broad, low arches, is very impressive. While we were there some women assembled at one of the altars, and went through their acts of devotion without the help of a priest; one and another of them alternately repeating prayers, to which the rest responded. The murmur of their voices took a musical tone, which was reverberated by the vaulted arches. U---- and I now came out; and, under the porch, we found an old woman selling rosaries, little religious books, and other holy things. We bought two little medals of the Immaculate Virgin, one purporting to be of silver, the other of gold; but as both together cost only two or three sous, the genuineness of the material may well be doubted. We sat down on the steps, of a crucifix which is placed in front of the church, and the children began to draw the porch, of which I hardly know whether to call the architecture classic or Gothic (as I said before); at all events it has a venerable aspect, and there are frescos within its arches by Simone Memmi. . . . The popes' palace is contiguous to the church, and just below it, on the hillside. It is now occupied as barracks by some regiments of soldiers, a number of whom were lounging before the entrance; but we passed the sentinel without being challenged, and addressed ourselves to the concierge, who readily assented to our request to be shown through the edifice. A French gentleman and lady, likewise, came with similar purpose, and went the rounds along with us. The palace is such a confused heap and conglomeration of buildings, that it is impossible to get within any sort of a regular description. It is a huge, shapeless mass of architecture; and if it ever had any pretence to a plan, it has lost it in the modern alterations. For instance, an immense and lofty chapel, or rather church, has had two floors, one above the other, laid at different stages of its height; and the upper one of these floors, which extends just where the arches of the vaulted root begin to spring from the pillars, is ranged round with the beds of one of the regiments of soldiers. They are small iron bedsteads, each with its narrow mattress, and covered with a dark blanket. On some of them lay or lounged a soldier; other soldiers were cleaning their accoutrements; elsewhere we saw parties of them playing cards. So it was wherever we went among those large, dingy, gloomy halls and chambers, which, no doubt, were once stately and sumptuous, with pictures, with tapestry, and all sorts of adornment that the Middle Ages knew how to use. The windows threw a sombre light through embrasures at least two feet thick. There were staircases of magnificent breadth. We were shown into two small chapels, in different parts of the building, both containing the remains of old frescos wofully defaced. In one of them was a light, spiral staircase of iron, built in the centre of the room as a means of contemplating the frescos, which were said to be the work of our old friend Giotto. . . . Finally, we climbed a long, long, narrow stair, built in the thickness of the wall, and thus gained access to the top of one of the towers, whence we saw the noblest landscapes, mountains, plains, and the Rhone, broad and bright, winding hither and thither, as if it had lost its way. Beneath our feet was the gray, ugly old palace, and its many courts, just as void of system and as inconceivable as when we were burrowing through its bewildering passages. No end of historical romances might be made out of this castle of the popes; and there ought to be a ghost in every room, and droves of them in some of the rooms; for there have been murders here in the gross and in detail, as well hundreds of years ago, as no longer back than the French Revolution, when there was a great massacre in one of the courts. Traces of this bloody business were visible in actual stains on the wall only a few years ago. Returning to the room of the concierge, who, being a little stiff with age, had sent an attendant round with us, instead of accompanying us in person, he showed us a picture of Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes, who was once a prisoner here. On a table, beneath the picture, stood a little vase of earthenware containing some silver coin. We took it as a hint, in the customary style of French elegance, that a fee should be deposited here, instead of being put into the hand of the concierge; so the French gentleman deposited half a franc, and I, in my magnificence, twice as much. Hotel de l'Europe, June 6th.--We are still here. . . . I have been daily to the Rocher des Dons, and have grown familiar with the old church on its declivity. I think I might become attached to it by seeing it often. A sombre old interior, with its heavy arches, and its roof vaulted like the top of a trunk; its stone gallery, with ponderous adornments, running round three sides. I observe that it is a daily custom of the old women to say their prayers in concert, sometimes making a pilgrimage, as it were, from chapel to chapel. The voice of one of them is heard running through the series of petitions, and at intervals the voices of the others join and swell into a chorus, so that it is like a river connecting a series of lakes; or, not to use so gigantic a simile, the one voice is like a thread, on which the beads of a rosary are strung. One day two priests came and sat down beside these prayerful women, and joined in their petitions. I am inclined to hope that there is something genuine in the devotion of these old women. The view from the top of the Rocker des Dons (a contraction of Dominis) grows upon me, and is truly magnificent; a vast mountain-girdled plain, illuminated by the far windings and reaches of the Rhone. The river is here almost as turbid as the Tiber itself; but, I remember, in the upper part of its course the waters are beautifully transparent. A powerful rush is indicated by the swirls and eddies of its broad surface. Yesterday was a race day at Avignon, and apparently almost the whole population and a great many strangers streamed out of the city gate nearest our hotel, on their way to the race-course. There were many noticeable figures that might come well into a French picture or description; but only one remains in my memory,--a young man with a wooden leg, setting off for the course--a walk of several miles, I believe--with prodigious courage and alacrity, flourishing his wooden leg with an air and grace that seemed to render it positively flexible. The crowd returned towards sunset, and almost all night long, the streets and the whole air of the old town were full of song and merriment. There was a ball in a temporary structure, covered with an awning, in the Place d'Horloge, and a showman has erected his tent and spread forth his great painted canvases, announcing an anaconda and a sea-tiger to be seen. J----- paid four sous for admittance, and found that the sea-tiger was nothing but a large seal, and the anaconda altogether a myth. I have rambled a good deal about the town. Its streets are crooked and perplexing, and paved with round pebbles for the most part, which afford more uncomfortable pedestrianism than the pavement of Rome itself. It is an ancient-looking place, with some large old mansions, but few that are individually impressive; though here and there one sees an antique entrance, a corner tower, or other bit of antiquity, that throws a venerable effect over the gray commonplace of past centuries. The town is not overclean, and often there is a kennel of unhappy odor. There appear to have been many more churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded by a wall; and that of Avignon--though it has no delightful promenade on its top, as the wall of Chester has--is the more perfectly preserved in its mediaeval form, and the more picturesque of the two. J----- and I have once or twice walked nearly round it, commencing from the gate of Ouelle, which is very near our hotel. From this point it stretches for a considerable distance along by the river, and here there is a broad promenade, with trees, and blocks of stone for seats; on one side "the arrowy Rhone," generally carrying a cooling breeze along with it; on the other, the gray wall, with its battlements and machicolations, impending over what was once the moat, but which is now full of careless and untrained shrubbery. At intervals there are round towers swelling out from the wall, and rising a little above it. After about half a mile along the river-side the wall turns at nearly right angles, and still there is a wide road, a shaded walk, a boulevard; and at short distances are cafes, with their little round tables before the door, or small shady nooks of shrubbery. So numerous are these retreats and pleasaunces that I do not see how the little old town can support them all, especially as there are a great many cafes within the walls. I do not remember seeing any soldiers on guard at the numerous city gates, but there is an office in the side of each gate for levying the octroi, and old women are sometimes on guard there. This morning, after breakfast, J----- and I crossed the suspension-bridge close by the gate nearest our hotel, and walked to the ancient town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. The first bridge leads to an island, from the farther side of which another very long one, with a timber foundation, accomplishes the passage of the other branch of the Rhone. There was a good breeze on the river, but after crossing it we found the rest of the walk excessively hot. This town of Villeneuve is of very ancient origin, and owes its existence, it is said, to the famous holiness of a female saint, which gathered round her abode and burial-place a great many habitations of people who reverenced her. She was the daughter of the King of Saragossa, and I presume she chose this site because it was so rocky and desolate. Afterwards it had a long mediaeval history; and in the time of the Avignon popes, the cardinals, regretful of their abandoned Roman villas, built pleasure-houses here, so that the town was called Villa Nueva. After they had done their best, it must have seemed to these poor cardinals but a rude and sad exchange for the Borghese, the Albani, the Pamfili Doria, and those other perfectest results of man's luxurious art. And probably the tradition of the Roman villas had really been kept alive, and extant examples of them all the way downward from the times of the empire. But this Villeneuve is the stoniest, roughest town that can be imagined. There are a few large old houses, to be sure, but built on a line with shabby village dwellings and barns, and so presenting little but samples of magnificent shabbiness. Perhaps I might have found traces of old splendor if I had sought for them; but, not having the history of the place in my mind, I passed through its scrambling streets without imagining that Princes of the Church had once made their abode here. The inhabitants now are peasants, or chiefly such; though, for aught I know, some of the French noblesse may burrow in these palaces that look so like hovels. A large church, with a massive tower, stands near the centre of the town; and, of course, I did not fail to enter its arched door,--a pointed arch, with many frames and mouldings, one within another. An old woman was at her devotions, and several others came in and knelt during my stay there. It was quite an interesting interior; a long nave, with six pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. There was an old stone seat, also, of some former pope or prelate. The church was dim enough to cause the lamps in the shrines to become points of vivid light, and, looking from end to end, it was a long, venerable, tarnished, Old World vista, not at all tampered with by modern taste. We now went on our way through the village, and, emerging from a gate, went clambering towards the castle of St. Andre, which stands, perhaps, a quarter of a mile beyond it. This castle was built by Philip le Bel, as a restraint to the people of Avignon in extending their power on this side of the Rhone. We happened not to take the most direct way, and so approached the castle on the farther side and were obliged to go nearly round the hill on which it stands, before striking into the path which leads to its gate. It crowns a very bold and difficult hill, directly above the Rhone, opposite to Avignon,--which is so far off that objects are not minutely distinguishable,--and looking down upon the long, straggling town of Villeneuve. It must have been a place of mighty strength, in its day. Its ramparts seem still almost entire, as looked upon from without, and when, at length, we climbed the rough, rocky pathway to the entrance, we found the two vast round towers, with their battlemented summits and arched gateway between them, just as perfect as they could have been five hundred or more years ago. Some external defences are now, however, in a state of ruin; and there are only the remains of a tower, that once arose between the two round towers, and was apparently much more elevated than they. A little in front of the gate was a monumental cross of stone; and in the arch, between the two round towers, were two little boys at play; and an old woman soon showed herself, but took no notice of us. Casting our eyes within the gateway, we saw what looked a rough village street, betwixt old houses built ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the only persons visible were the children aforesaid, and one or two old women bearing bundles of twigs on their backs. They showed no curiosity respecting us, and though the wide space included within the castle-rampart seemed almost full of habitations ruinous or otherwise, I never found such a solitude in any ruin before. It contrasts very favorably in this particular with English castles, where, though you do not find rustic villages within the warlike enclosure, there is always a padlocked gate, always a guide, and generally half a dozen idle tourists. But here was only antiquity, with merely the natural growth of fungous human life upon it. We went to the end of the castle court and sat down, for lack of other shade, among some inhospitable nettles that grew close to the wall. Close by us was a great gap in the ramparts,--it may have been a breach which was once stormed through; and it now afforded us an airy and sunny glimpse of distant hills. . . . J----- sketched part of the broken wall, which, by the by, did not seem to me nearly so thick as the walls of English castles. Then we returned through the gate, and I stopped, rather impatiently, under the hot sun, while J----- drew the outline of the two round towers. This done, we resumed our way homeward, after drinking from a very deep well close by the square tower of Philip le Bel. Thence we went melting through the sunshine, which beat upward as pitilessly from the white road as it blazed downwards from the sky. . . . GENEVA. Hotel d'Angleterre, June 11th.--We left Avignon on Tuesday, 7th, and took the rail to Valence, where we arrived between four and five, and put up at the Hotel de la Poste, an ancient house, with dirty floors and dirt generally, but otherwise comfortable enough. . . . Valence is a stately old town, full of tall houses and irregular streets. We found a cathedral there, not very large, but with a high and venerable interior, a nave supported by tall pillars, from the height of which spring arches. This loftiness is characteristic of French churches, as distinguished from those of Italy. . . . We likewise saw, close by the cathedral, a large monument with four arched entrances meeting beneath a vaulted roof; but, on inquiry of an old priest and other persons, we could get no account of it, except that it was a tomb, and of unknown antiquity. The architecture seemed classic, and yet it had some Gothic peculiarities, and it was a reverend and beautiful object. Had I written up my journal while the town was fresh in my remembrance, I might have found much to describe; but a succession of other objects have obliterated most of the impressions I have received here. Our railway ride to Valence was intolerably hot. I have felt nothing like it since leaving America, and that is so long ago that the terrible discomfort was just as good as new. . . . We left Valence at four, and came that afternoon to Lyons, still along the Rhone. Either the waters of this river assume a transparency in winter which they lose in summer, or I was mistaken in thinking them transparent on our former journey. They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful in the quality of their waters as the clear, brown rivers of New England. The scenery along this part of the Rhone, as we have found all the way from Marseilles, is very fine and impressive; old villages, rocky cliffs, castellated steeps, quaint chateaux, and a thousand other interesting objects. We arrived at Lyons at five o'clock, and went to the Hotel de l'Univers, to which we had been recommended by our good hostess at Avignon. The day had become showery, but J----- and I strolled about a little before nightfall, and saw the general characteristics of the place. Lyons is a city of very stately aspect, hardly inferior to Paris; for it has regular streets of lofty houses, and immense squares planted with trees, and adorned with statues and fountains. New edifices of great splendor are in process of erection; and on the opposite side of the Rhone, where the site rises steep and high, there are structures of older date, that have an exceedingly picturesque effect, looking down upon the narrow town. The next morning I went out with J----- in quest of my bankers, and of the American Consul; and as I had forgotten the directions of the waiter of the hotel, I of course went astray, and saw a good deal more of Lyons than I intended. In my wanderings I crossed the Rhone, and found myself in a portion of the city evidently much older than that with which I had previously made acquaintance; narrow, crooked, irregular, and rudely paved streets, full of dingy business and bustle,--the city, in short, as it existed a century ago, and how much earlier I know not. Above rises that lofty elevation of ground which I before noticed; and the glimpses of its stately old buildings through the openings of the street were very picturesque. Unless it be Edinburgh, I have not seen any other city that has such striking features. Altogether unawares, immediately after crossing the bridge, we came upon the cathedral; and the grand, time-blackened Gothic front, with its deeply arched entrances, seemed to me as good as anything I ever saw,--unexpectedly more impressive than all the ruins of Rome. I could but merely glance at its interior; so that its noble height and venerable space, filled with the dim, consecrated light of pictured windows, recur to me as a vision. And it did me good to enjoy the awfulness and sanctity of Gothic architecture again, after so long shivering in classic porticos. . . . We now recrossed the river. . . . The Frank methods and arrangements in matters of business seem to be excellent, so far as effecting the proposed object is concerned; but there is such an inexorable succession of steel-wrought forms, that life is not long enough for so much accuracy. The stranger, too, goes blindfold through all these processes, not knowing what is to turn up next, till, when quite in despair, he suddenly finds his business mysteriously accomplished. . . . We left Lyons at four o'clock, taking the railway for Geneva. The scenery was very striking throughout the journey; but I allowed the hills, deep valleys, high impending cliffs, and whatever else I saw along the road, to pass from me without an ink-blot. We reached Geneva at nearly ten o'clock. . . . It is situated partly on low, flat ground, bordering the lake, and behind this level space it rises by steep, painfully paved streets, some of which can hardly be accessible by wheeled carriages. The prosperity of the town is indicated by a good many new and splendid edifices, for commercial and other purposes, in the vicinity of the lake; but intermixed with these there are many quaint buildings of a stern gray color, and in a style of architecture that I prefer a thousand times to the monotony of Italian streets. Immensely high, red roofs, with windows in them, produce an effect that delights me. They are as ugly, perhaps, as can well be conceived, but very striking and individual. At each corner of these ancient houses frequently is a tower, the roof of which rises in a square pyramidal form, or, if the tower be round, in a round pyramidal form. Arched passages, gloomy and grimy, pass from one street to another. The lower town creeps with busy life, and swarms like an ant-hill; but if you climb the half-precipitous streets, you find yourself among ancient and stately mansions, high roofed, with a strange aspect of grandeur about them, looking as if they might still be tenanted by such old magnates as dwelt in them centuries ago. There is also a cathedral, the older portion exceedingly fine; but it has been adorned at some modern epoch with a Grecian portico,--good in itself, but absurdly out of keeping with the edifice which it prefaces. This being a Protestant country, the doors were all shut,--an inhospitality that made me half a Catholic. It is funny enough that a stranger generally profits by all that is worst for the inhabitants of the country where he himself is merely a visitor. Despotism makes things all the pleasanter for the stranger. Catholicism lends itself admirably to his purposes. There are public gardens (one, at least) in Geneva. . . . Nothing struck me so much, I think, as the color of the Rhone, as it flows under the bridges in the lower town. It is absolutely miraculous, and, beautiful as it is, suggests the idea that the tubs of a thousand dyers have emptied their liquid indigo into the stream. When once you have conquered and thrust out this idea, it is an inexpressible delight to look down into this intense, brightly transparent blue, that hurries beneath you with the speed of a race-horse. The shops of Geneva are very tempting to a traveller, being full of such little knick-knacks as he would be glad to carry away in memory of the place: wonderful carvings in wood and ivory, done with exquisite taste and skill; jewelry that seems very cheap, but is doubtless dear enough, if you estimate it by the solid gold that goes into its manufacture; watches, above all things else, for a third or a quarter of the price that one pays in England, looking just as well, too, and probably performing the whole of a watch's duty as uncriticisably. The Swiss people are frugal and inexpensive in their own habits, I believe, plain and simple, and careless of ornament; but they seem to reckon on other people's spending a great deal of money for gewgaws. We bought some of their wooden trumpery, and likewise a watch for U----. . . . Next to watches, jewelry, and wood-carving, I should say that cigars were one of the principal articles of commerce in Geneva. Cigar-shops present themselves at every step or two, and at a reasonable rate, there being no duties, I believe, on imported goods. There was no examination of our trunks on arrival, nor any questions asked on that score. VILLENEUVE. Hotel de Byron, June 12th.--Yesterday afternoon we left Geneva by a steamer, starting from the quay at only a short distance from our hotel. The forenoon had been showery; but the suit now came out very pleasantly, although there were still clouds and mist enough to give infinite variety to the mountain scenery. At the commencement of our voyage the scenery of the lake was not incomparably superior to that of other lakes on which I have sailed, as Lake Windermere, for instance, or Loch Lomond, or our own Lake Champlain. It certainly grew more grand and beautiful, however, till at length I felt that I had never seen anything worthy to be put beside it. The southern shore has the grandest scenery; the great hills on that side appearing close to the water's edge, and after descending, with headlong slope, directly from their rocky and snow-streaked summits down into the blue water. Our course lay nearer to the northern shore, and all our stopping-places were on that side. The first was Coppet, where Madame de Stael or her father, or both, were either born or resided or died, I know not which, and care very little. It is a picturesque village, with an old church, and old, high-roofed, red-tiled houses, the whole looking as if nothing in it had been changed for many, many years. All these villages, at several of which we stopped momentarily, look delightfully unmodified by recent fashions. There is the church, with its tower crowned by a pyramidal roof, like an extinguisher; then the chateau of the former lord, half castle and half dwelling-house, with a round tower at each corner, pyramid topped; then, perhaps, the ancient town-house or Hotel de Ville, in an open paved square; and perhaps the largest mansion in the whole village will have been turned into a modern inn, but retaining all its venerable characteristics of high, steep sloping roof, and antiquated windows. Scatter a delightful shade of trees among the houses, throw in a time-worn monument of one kind or another, swell out the delicious blue of the lake in front, and the delicious green of the sunny hillside sloping up and around this closely congregated neighborhood of old, comfortable houses, and I do not know what more I can add to this sketch. Often there was an insulated house or cottage, embowered in shade, and each seeming like the one only spot in the wide world where two people that had good consciences and loved each other could spend a happy life. Half-ruined towers, old historic castles, these, too, we saw. And all the while, on the other side of the lake, were the high hills, sometimes dim, sometimes black, sometimes green, with gray precipices of stone, and often snow-patches, right above the warm sunny lake whereon we were sailing. We passed Lausanne, which stands upward, on the slope of the hill, the tower of its cathedral forming a conspicuous object. We mean to visit this to-morrow; so I may pretermit further mention of it here. We passed Vevay and Clarens, which, methought, was particularly picturesque; for now the hills had approached close to the water on the northern side also, and steep heights rose directly above the little gray church and village; and especially I remember a rocky cliff which ascends into a rounded pyramid, insulated from all other peaks and ridges. But if I could perform the absolute impossibility of getting one single outline of the scene into words, there would be all the color wanting, the light, the haze, which spiritualizes it, and moreover makes a thousand and a thousand scenes out of that single one. Clarens, however, has still another interest for me; for I found myself more affected by it, as the scene of the love of St. Preux and Julie, than I have often been by scenes of poetry and romance. I read Rousseau's romance with great sympathy, when I was hardly more than a boy; ten years ago, or thereabouts, I tried to read it again without success; but I think, from my feeling of yesterday, that it still retains its hold upon my imagination. Farther onward, we saw a white, ancient-looking group of towers, beneath a mountain, which was so high, and rushed so precipitately down upon this pile of building as quite to dwarf it; besides which, its dingy whiteness had not a very picturesque effect. Nevertheless, this was the Castle of Chillon. It appears to sit right upon the water, and does not rise very loftily above it. I was disappointed in its aspect, having imagined this famous castle as situated upon a rock, a hundred, or, for aught I know, a thousand feet above the surface of the lake; but it is quite as impressive a fact--supposing it to be true--that the water is eight hundred feet deep at its base. By this time, the mountains had taken the beautiful lake into their deepest heart; they girdled it quite round with their grandeur and beauty, and, being able to do no more for it, they here withheld it from extending any farther; and here our voyage came to an end. I have never beheld any scene so exquisite; nor do I ask of heaven to show me any lovelier or nobler one, but only to give me such depth and breadth of sympathy with nature, that I may worthily enjoy this. It is beauty more than enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this be earth, what must heaven be! It was nearly eight o'clock when we arrived; and then we had a walk of at least a mile to the Hotel Byron. . . . I forgot to mention that in the latter part of our voyage there was a shower in some part of the sky, and though none of it fell upon us, we had the benefit of those gentle tears in a rainbow, which arched itself across the lake from mountain to mountain, so that our track lay directly under this triumphal arch. We took it as a good omen, nor were we discouraged, though, after the rainbow had vanished, a few sprinkles of the shower came down. We found the Hotel Byron very grand indeed, and a good one too. There was a beautiful moonlight on the lake and hills, but we contented ourselves with looking out of our lofty window, whence, likewise, we had a sidelong glance at the white battlements of Chillon, not more than a mile off, on the water's edge. The castle is wofully in need of a pedestal. If its site were elevated to a height equal to its own, it would make a far better appearance. As it now is, it looks, to speak profanely of what poetry has consecrated, when seen from the water, or along the shore of the lake, very like an old whitewashed factory or mill. This morning I walked to the Castle of Chillon with J-----, who sketches everything he sees, from a wildflower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains. The morning had sunshine thinly scattered through it; but, nevertheless, there was a continual sprinkle, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and then again amounting to a decided drizzle. The road, which is built along on a little elevation above the lake shore, led us past the Castle of Chillon; and we took a side-path, which passes still nearer the castle gate. The castle stands on an isthmus of gravel, permanently connecting it with the mainland. A wooden bridge, covered with a roof, passes from the shore to the arched entrance; and beneath this shelter, which has wooden walls as well as roof and floor, we saw a soldier or gendarme who seemed to act as warder. As it sprinkled rather more freely than at first, I thought of appealing to his hospitality for shelter from the rain, but concluded to pass on. The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance, and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of "Chillon's snow-white battlements." There is a lofty external wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been [altered], nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there. We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss gendarme might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of gloomy Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut, and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard's prison, and the scene of Byron's poem. The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, gray, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard's pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth or gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years, with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column, and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard's pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron's delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard's story, he did not know to which column he was chained. Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy's kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats of arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post, contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke's private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess's window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water. The last thing that the guide showed us was a trapdoor, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air. The guide told us that it used to be the practice to bring prisoners hither, under pretence of committing them to a dungeon, and make them go down the three steps and that fourth fatal one, and they would never more be heard of; but at the bottom of the pit there would be a dead body, and in due time a mouldy skeleton, which would rattle beneath the body of the next prisoner that fell. I do not believe that it was anything more than a secret dungeon for state prisoners whom it was out of the question either to set at liberty or bring to public trial. The depth of the pit was about forty-five feet. Gazing intently down, I saw a faint gleam of light at the bottom, apparently coming from some other aperture than the trap-door over which we were bending, so that it must have been contemplated to supply it with light and air in such degree as to support human life. U---- declared she saw a skeleton at the bottom; Miss S------ thought she saw a hand, but I saw only the dim gleam of light. There are two or three courts in the castle, but of no great size. We were now led across one of them, and dismissed out of the arched entrance by which we had come in. We found the gendarme still keeping watch on his roofed drawbridge, and as there was the same gentle shower that had been effusing itself all the morning, we availed ourselves of the shelter, more especially as there were some curiosities to examine. These consisted chiefly of wood-carvings,--such as little figures in the national costume, boxes with wreaths of foliage upon them, paper knives, the chamois goat, admirably well represented. We at first hesitated to make any advances towards trade with the gendarme because it was Sunday, and we fancied there might be a Calvinistic scruple on his part about turning a penny on the Sabbath; but from the little I know of the Swiss character, I suppose they would be as ready as any other men to sell, not only such matters, but even their own souls, or any smaller--or shall we say greater--thing on Sunday or at any other time. So we began to ask the prices of the articles, and met with no difficulty in purchasing a salad spoon and fork, with pretty bas-reliefs carved on the handles, and a napkin-ring. For Rosebud's and our amusement, the gendarme now set a musical-box a-going; and as it played a pasteboard figure of a dentist began to pull the tooth of a pasteboard patient, lifting the wretched simulacrum entirely from the ground, and keeping him in this horrible torture for half an hour. Meanwhile, mamma, Miss Shepard, U----, and J----- sat down all in a row on a bench and sketched the mountains; and as the shower did not cease, though the sun most of the time shone brightly, they were kept actual prisoners of Chillon much longer than we wished to stay. We took advantage of the first cessation,--though still the drops came dimpling into the water that rippled against the pebbles beneath the bridge,--of the first partial cessation of the shower, to escape, and returned towards the hotel, with this kindliest of summer rains falling upon us most of the way In the afternoon the rain entirely ceased, and the weather grew delightfully radiant, and warmer than could well be borne in the sunshine. U---- and I walked to the village of Villeneuve, --a mile from the hotel,--and found a very commonplace little old town of one or two streets, standing on a level, and as uninteresting as if there were not a hill within a hundred miles. It is strange what prosaic lines men thrust in amid the poetry of nature. . . . Hotel de l'Angleterre, Geneva, June 14th.--Yesterday morning was very fine, and we had a pretty early breakfast at Hotel Byron, preparatory to leaving it. This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home. We were glad to get away, and took the steamer on our return voyage, in excellent spirits. Apparently it had been a cold night in the upper regions, for a great deal more snow was visible on some of the mountains than we had before observed; especially a mountain called "Diableries" presented a silver summit, and broad sheets and fields of snow. Nothing ever can have been more beautiful than those groups of mighty hills as we saw them then, with the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow-patches and crests, all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds tumbling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofty valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones, that we hardly knew whether we were sojourning in the material or spiritual world. It was like sailing through the sky, moreover, to be borne along on such water as that of Lake Leman,--the bluest, brightest, and profoundest element, the most radiant eye that the dull earth ever opened to see heaven withal. I am writing nonsense, but it is because no sense within my mind will answer the purpose. Some of these mountains, that looked at no such mighty distance, were at least forty or fifty miles off, and appeared as if they were near neighbors and friends of other mountains, from which they were really still farther removed. The relations into which distant points are brought, in a view of mountain scenery, symbolize the truth which we can never judge within our partial scope of vision, of the relations which we bear to our fellow-creatures and human circumstances. These mighty mountains think that they have nothing to do with one another, each seems itself its own centre, and existing for itself alone; and yet to an eye that can take them all in, they are evidently portions of one grand and beautiful idea, which could not be consummated without the lowest and the loftiest of them. I do not express this satisfactorily, but have a genuine meaning in it nevertheless. We passed again by Chillon, and gazed at it as long as it was distinctly visible, though the water view does no justice to its real picturesqueness, there being no towers nor projections on the side towards the lake, nothing but a wall of dingy white, with an indentation that looks something like a gateway. About an hour and a half brought us to Ouchy, the point where passengers land to take the omnibus to Lausanne. The ascent from Ouchy to Lausanne is a mile and a half, which it took the omnibus nearly half an hour to accomplish. We left our shawls and carpet-bags in the salle a manger of the Hotel Faucon, and set forth to find the cathedral, the pinnacled tower of which is visible for a long distance up and down the lake. Prominent as it is, however, it is by no means very easy to find it while rambling through the intricate streets and declivities of the town itself, for Lausanne is the town, I should fancy, in all the world the most difficult to go directly from one point to another. It is built on the declivity of a hill, adown which run several valleys or ravines, and over these the contiguity of houses extends, so that the communication is kept up by means of steep streets and sometimes long weary stairs, which must be surmounted and descended again in accomplishing a very moderate distance. In some inscrutable way we at last arrived at the cathedral, which stands on a higher site than any other in Lausanne. It has a very venerable exterior, with all the Gothic grandeur which arched mullioned windows, deep portals, buttresses, towers, and pinnacles, gray with a thousand years, can give to architecture. After waiting awhile we obtained entrance by means of an old woman, who acted the part of sacristan, and was then showing the church to some other visitors. The interior disappointed us; not but what it was very beautiful, but I think the excellent repair that it was in, and the Puritanic neatness with which it is kept, does much towards effacing the majesty and mystery that belong to an old church. Every inch of every wall and column, and all the mouldings and tracery, and every scrap of grotesque carving, had been washed with a drab mixture. There were likewise seats all up and down the nave, made of pine wood, and looking very new and neat, just such seats as I shall see in a hundred meeting-houses (if ever I go into so many) in America. Whatever might be the reason, the stately nave, with its high-groined roof, the clustered columns and lofty pillars, the intersecting arches of the side-aisles, the choir, the armorial and knightly tombs that surround what was once the high altar, all produced far less effect than I could have thought beforehand. As it happened, we had more ample time and freedom to inspect this cathedral than any other that we have visited, for the old woman consented to go away and leave us there, locking the door behind her. The others, except Rosebud, sat down to sketch such portions as struck their fancy; and for myself, I looked at the monuments, of which some, being those of old knights, ladies, bishops, and a king, were curious from their antiquity; and others are interesting as bearing memorials of English people, who have died at Lausanne in comparatively recent years. Then I went up into the pulpit, and tried, without success, to get into the stone gallery that runs all round the nave; and I explored my way into various side apartments of the cathedral, which I found fitted up with seats for Sabbath schools, perhaps, or possibly for meetings of elders of the Church. I opened the great Bible of the church, and found it to be a French version, printed at Lille some fifty years ago. There was also a liturgy, adapted, probably, to the Lutheran form of worship. In one of the side apartments I found a strong box, heavily clamped with iron, and having a contrivance, like the hopper of a mill, by which money could be turned into the top, while a double lock prevented its being abstracted again. This was to receive the avails of contributions made in the church; and there were likewise boxes, stuck on the ends of long poles, wherewith the deacons could go round among the worshippers, conveniently extending the begging-box to the remotest curmudgeon among them all. From the arrangement of the seats in the nave, and the labels pasted or painted on them, I judged that the women sat on one side and the men on the other, and the seats for various orders of magistrates, and for ecclesiastical and collegiate people, were likewise marked out. I soon grew weary of these investigations, and so did Rosebud and J-----, who essayed to amuse themselves with running races together over the horizontal tombstones in the pavement of the choir, treading remorselessly over the noseless effigies of old dignitaries, who never expected to be so irreverently treated. I put a stop to their sport, and banished them to different parts of the cathedral; and by and by, the old woman appeared again, and released us from durance. . . . While waiting for our dejeuner, we saw the people dining at the regular table d'hote of the hotel, and the idea was strongly borne in upon me, that the professional mystery of a male waiter is a very unmanly one. It is so absurd to see the solemn attentiveness with which they stand behind the chairs, the earnestness of their watch for any crisis that may demand their interposition, the gravity of their manner in performing some little office that the guest might better do for himself, their decorous and soft steps; in short, as I sat and gazed at them, they seemed to me not real men, but creatures with a clerical aspect, engendered out of a very artificial state of society. When they are waiting on myself, they do not appear so absurd; it is necessary to stand apart in order to see them properly. We left Lausanne--which was to us a tedious and weary place--before four o'clock. I should have liked well enough to see the house of Gibbon, and the garden in which he walked, after finishing "The Decline and Fall"; but it could not be done without some trouble and inquiry, and as the house did not come to see me, I determined not to go and see the house. There was, indeed, a mansion of somewhat antique respectability, near our hotel, having a garden and a shaded terrace behind it, which would have answered accurately enough to the idea of Gibbon's residence. Perhaps it was so; far more probably not. Our former voyages had been taken in the Hirondelle; we now, after broiling for some time in the sunshine by the lakeside, got on board of the Aigle, No. 2. There were a good many passengers, the larger proportion of whom seemed to be English and American, and among the latter a large party of talkative ladies, old and young. The voyage was pleasant while we were protected from the sun by the awning overhead, but became scarcely agreeable when the sun had descended so low as to shine in our faces or on our backs. We looked earnestly for Mont Blanc, which ought to have been visible during a large part of our course; but the clouds gathered themselves hopelessly over the portion of the sky where the great mountain lifted his white peak; and we did not see it, and probably never shall. As to the meaner mountains, there were enough of them, and beautiful enough; but we were a little weary, and feverish with the heat. . . . I think I had a head-ache, though it is so unusual a complaint with me, that I hardly know it when it comes. We were none of us sorry, therefore, when the Eagle brought us to the quay of Geneva, only a short distance from our hotel. . . . To-day I wrote to Mr. Wilding, requesting him to secure passages for us from Liverpool on the 15th of next month, or 1st of August. It makes my heart thrill, half pleasantly, half otherwise; so much nearer does this step seem to bring that home whence I have now been absent six years, and which, when I see it again, may turn out to be not my home any longer. I likewise wrote to Bennoch, though I know not his present address; but I should deeply grieve to leave England without seeing him. He and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to bid farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time; rather foolishly perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long. HAVRE. Hotel Wheeler, June 22d.--We arrived at this hotel last evening from Paris, and find ourselves on the borders of the Petit Quay Notre Dame, with steamers and boats right under our windows, and all sorts of dock-business going on briskly. There are barrels, bales, and crates of goods; there are old iron cannon for posts; in short, all that belongs to the Wapping of a great seaport. . . . The American partialities of the guests [of this hotel] are consulted by the decorations of the parlor, in which hang two lithographs and colored views of New York, from Brooklyn and from Weehawken. The fashion of the house is a sort of nondescript mixture of Frank, English, and American, and is not disagreeable to us after our weary experience of Continental life. The abundance of the food is very acceptable in comparison with the meagreness of French and Italian meals; and last evening we supped nobly on cold roast beef and ham, set generously before us, in the mass, instead of being doled out in slices few and thin. The waiter has a kindly sort of manner, and resembles the steward of a vessel rather than a landsman; and, in short, everything here has undergone a change, which might admit of very effective description. I may now as well give up all attempts at journalizing. So I shall say nothing of our journey across France from Geneva. . . . To-night, we shall take our departure in a steamer for Southampton, whence we shall go to London; thence, in a week or two, to Liverpool; thence to Boston and Concord, there to enjoy--if enjoyment it prove--a little rest and a sense that we are at home. [More than four months were now taken up in writing "The Marble Faun," in great part at the seaside town of Redcar, Yorkshire, Mr. Hawthorne having concluded to remain another year in England, chiefly to accomplish that romance. In Redcar, where he remained till September or October, he wrote no journal, but only the book. He then went to Leamington, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in March, and there is a little journalizing soon after leaving Redcar.--ED.] ENGLAND. Leamington, November 14th, 1859.--J---- and I walked to Lillington the other day. Its little church was undergoing renovation when we were here two years ago, and now seems to be quite renewed, with the exception of its square, gray, battlemented tower, which has still the aspect of unadulterated antiquity. On Saturday J----- and I walked to Warwick by the old road, passing over the bridge of the Avon, within view of the castle. It is as fine a piece of English scenery as exists anywhere,-- the quiet little river, shadowed with drooping trees, and, in its vista, the gray towers and long line of windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline; ancient strength, a little softened by decay. . . . The town of Warwick, I think, has been considerably modernized since I first saw it. The whole of the central portion of the principal street now looks modern, with its stuccoed or brick fronts of houses, and, in many cases, handsome shop windows. Leicester Hospital and its adjoining chapel still look venerably antique; and so does a gateway that half bestrides the street. Beyond these two points on either side it has a much older aspect. The modern signs heighten the antique impression. February 5th, 1860.--Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch are staying for a little while at Mr. B------'s at Coventry, and Mr. B------ called upon us the other day, with Mr. Bennoch, and invited us to go and see the lions of Coventry; so yesterday U---- and I went. It was not my first visit, therefore I have little or nothing to record, unless it were to describe a ribbon-factory into which Mr. B------ took us. But I have no comprehension of machinery, and have only a confused recollection of an edifice of four or five stories, on each floor of which were rows of huge machines, all busy with their iron hands and joints in turning out delicate ribbons. It was very curious and unintelligible to me to observe how they caused different colored patterns to appear, and even flowers to blossom, on the plain surface of a ribbon. Some of the designs were pretty, and I was told that one manufacturer pays 500 pounds annually to French artists (or artisans, for I do not know whether they have a connection with higher art) merely for new patterns of ribbons. The English find it impossible to supply themselves with tasteful productions of this sort merely from the resources of English fancy. If an Englishman possessed the artistic faculty to the degree requisite to produce such things, he would doubtless think himself a great artist, and scorn to devote himself to these humble purposes. Every Frenchman is probably more of an artist than one Englishman in a thousand. We ascended to the very roof of the factory, and gazed thence over smoky Coventry, which is now a town of very considerable size, and rapidly on the increase. The three famous spires rise out of the midst, that of St. Michael being the tallest and very beautiful. Had the day been clear, we should have had a wide view on all sides; for Warwickshire is well laid out for distant prospects, if you can only gain a little elevation from which to see them. Descending from the roof, we next went to see Trinity Church, which has just come through an entire process of renovation, whereby much of its pristine beauty has doubtless been restored; but its venerable awfulness is greatly impaired. We went into three churches, and found that they had all been subjected to the same process. It would be nonsense to regret it, because the very existence of these old edifices is involved in their being renewed; but it certainly does deprive them of a great part of their charm, and puts one in mind of wigs, padding, and all such devices for giving decrepitude the aspect of youth. In the pavement of the nave and aisles there are worn tombstones, with defaced inscriptions, and discolored marbles affixed against the wall; monuments, too, where a mediaeval man and wife sleep side by side on a marble slab; and other tombs so old that the inscriptions are quite gone. Over an arch, in one of the churches, there was a fresco, so old, dark, faded, and blackened, that I found it impossible to make out a single figure or the slightest hint of the design. On the whole, after seeing the churches of Italy, I was not greatly impressed with these attempts to renew the ancient beauty of old English minsters; it would be better to preserve as sedulously as possible their aspect of decay, in which consists the principal charm. . . . On our way to Mr. B------'s house, we looked into the quadrangle of a charity-school and old men's hospital, and afterwards stepped into a large Roman Catholic church, erected within these few years past, and closely imitating the mediaeval architecture and arrangements. It is strange what a plaything, a trifle, an unserious affair, this imitative spirit makes of a huge, ponderous edifice, which if it had really been built five hundred years ago would have been worthy of all respect. I think the time must soon come when this sort of thing will be held in utmost scorn, until the lapse of time shall give it a claim to respect. But, methinks, we had better strike out any kind of architecture, so it be our own, however wretched, than thus tread back upon the past. Mr. B------ now conducted us to his residence, which stands a little beyond the outskirts of the city, on the declivity of a hill, and in so windy a spot that, as he assured me, the very plants are blown out of the ground. He pointed to two maimed trees whose tops were blown off by a gale two or three years since; but the foliage still covers their shortened summits in summer, so that he does not think it desirable to cut them down. In America, a man of Mr. B------'s property would take upon himself the state and dignity of a millionaire. It is a blessed thing in England, that money gives a man no pretensions to rank, and does not bring the responsibilities of a great position. We found three or four gentlemen to meet us at dinner,--a Mr. D------ and a Mr. B------, an author, having written a book called "The Philosophy of Necessity," and is acquainted with Emerson, who spent two or three days at his house when last in England. He was very kindly appreciative of my own productions, as was also his wife, next to whom I sat at dinner. She talked to me about the author of "Adam Bede," whom she has known intimately all her life. . . . Miss Evans (who wrote "Adam Bede") was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B------ spoke of her with great affection and respect. . . . Mr. B------, our host, is an extremely sensible man; and it is remarkable how many sensible men there are in England,--men who have read and thought, and can develop very good ideas, not exactly original, yet so much the product of their own minds that they can fairly call them their own. February 18th.--. . . . This present month has been somewhat less dismal than the preceding ones; there have been some sunny and breezy days when there was life in the air, affording something like enjoyment in a walk, especially when the ground was frozen. It is agreeable to see the fields still green through a partial covering of snow; the trunks and branches of the leafless trees, moreover, have a verdant aspect, very unlike that of American trees in winter, for they are covered with a delicate green moss, which is not so observable in summer. Often, too, there is a twine of green ivy up and down the trunk. The other day, as J----- and I were walking to Whitnash, an elm was felled right across our path, and I was much struck by this verdant coating of moss over all its surface,--the moss plants too minute to be seen individually, but making the whole tree green. It has a pleasant effect here, where it is the natural aspect of trees in general; but in America a mossy tree-trunk is not a pleasant object, because it is associated with damp, low, unwholesome situations. The lack of foliage gives many new peeps and vistas, hereabouts, which I never saw in summer. March 17th.--J----- and I walked to Warwick yesterday forenoon, and went into St. Mary's Church, to see the Beauchamp chapel. . . . On one side of it were some worn steps ascending to a confessional, where the priest used to sit, while the penitent, in the body of the church, poured his sins through a perforated auricle into this unseen receptacle. The sexton showed us, too, a very old chest which had been found in the burial vault, with some ancient armor stored away in it. Three or four helmets of rusty iron, one of them barred, the last with visors, and all intolerably weighty, were ranged in a row. What heads those must have been that could bear such massiveness! On one of the helmets was a wooden crest--some bird or other--that of itself weighed several pounds. . . . April 23d.--We have been here several weeks. . . . Had I seen Bath earlier in my English life, I might have written many pages about it, for it is really a picturesque and interesting city. It is completely sheltered in the lap of hills, the sides of the valley rising steep and high from the level spot on which it stands, and through which runs the muddy little stream of the Avon. The older part of the town is on the level, and the more modern growth--the growth of more than a hundred years--climbs higher and higher up the hillside, till the upper streets are very airy and lofty. The houses are built almost entirely of Bath stone, which in time loses its original buff color, and is darkened by age and coal-smoke into a dusky gray; but still the city looks clean and pure as compared with most other English towns. In its architecture, it has somewhat of a Parisian aspect, the houses having roofs rising steep from their high fronts, which are often adorned with pillars, pilasters, and other good devices, so that you see it to be a town built with some general idea of beauty, and not for business. There are Circuses, Crescents, Terraces, Parades, and all such fine names as we have become familiar with at Leamington, and other watering-places. The declivity of most of the streets keeps them remarkably clean, and they are paved in a very comfortable way, with large blocks of stone, so that the middle of the street is generally practicable to walk upon, although the sidewalks leave no temptation so to do, being of generous width. In many alleys, and round about the abbey and other edifices, the pavement is of square flags, like those of Florence, and as smooth as a palace floor. On the whole, I suppose there is no place in England where a retired man, with a moderate income, could live so tolerably as at Bath; it being almost a city in size and social advantages; quite so, indeed, if eighty thousand people make a city,--and yet having no annoyance of business nor spirit of worldly struggle. All modes of enjoyment that English people like may be had here; and even the climate is said to be milder than elsewhere in England. How this may be, I know not; but we have rain or passing showers almost every day since we arrived, and I suspect the surrounding hills are just about of that inconvenient height, that keeps catching clouds, and compelling them to squeeze out their moisture upon the included valley. The air, however, certainly is preferable to that of Leamington. . . . There are no antiquities except the abbey, which has not the interest of many other English churches and cathedrals. In the midst of the old part of the town stands the house which was formerly Beau Nash's residence, but which is now part of the establishment of an ale-merchant. The edifice is a tall, but rather mean-looking, stone building, with the entrance from a little side court, which is so cumbered with empty beer-barrels as hardly to afford a passage. The doorway has some architectural pretensions, being pillared and with some sculptured devices--whether lions or winged heraldic monstrosities I forget--on the pediment. Within, there is a small entry, not large enough to be termed a hall, and a staircase, with carved balustrade, ascending by angular turns and square landing-places. For a long course of years, ending a little more than a century ago, princes, nobles, and all the great and beautiful people of old times, used to go up that staircase, to pay their respects to the King of Bath. On the side of the house there is a marble slab inserted, recording that here he resided, and that here he died in 1767, between eighty and ninety years of age. My first acquaintance with him was in Smollett's "Roderick Random," and I have met him in a hundred other novels. His marble statue is in a niche at one end of the great pump-room, in wig, square-skirted coat, flapped waistcoat, and all the queer costume of the period, still looking ghost-like upon the scene where he used to be an autocrat. Marble is not a good material for Beau Nash, however; or, if so, it requires color to set him off adequately. . . . It is usual in Bath to see the old sign of the checker-board on the doorposts of taverns. It was originally a token that the game might be played there, and is now merely a tavern-sign. LONDON. 31 Hertford Street, Mayfair, May 16th, 1860.--I came hither from Bath on the 14th, and am staying with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Motley. I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England. I dined with the Motleys at Lord Dufferin's, on Monday evening, and there met, among a few other notable people, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, a dark, comely woman, who doubtless was once most charming, and still has charms, at above fifty years of age. In fact, I should not have taken her to be greatly above thirty, though she seems to use no art to make herself look younger, and talks about her time of life, without any squeamishness. Her voice is very agreeable, having a sort of muffled quality, which is excellent in woman. She is of a very cheerful temperament, and so has borne a great many troubles without being destroyed by them. But I can get no color into my sketch, so shall leave it here. London, May 17th. [From a letter.]--Affairs succeed each other so fast, that I have really forgotten what I did yesterday. I remember seeing my dear friend, Henry Bright, and listening to him, as we strolled in the Park, and along the Strand. To-day I met at breakfast Mr. Field Talfourd, who promises to send you the photograph of his portrait of Mr. Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again. At lunch, we had Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, and Mr. Sterling (author of the "Cloister Life of Charles V."), with whom we are to dine on Sunday. You would be stricken dumb, to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. A German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have assented! subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure. The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do. I have had time to see Bennoch only once. [This closes the European Journal. After Mr. Hawthorne's return to America, he published "Our Old Home," and began a new romance, of which two chapters appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But the breaking out of the war stopped all imaginative work with him, and all journalizing, until 1862, when he went to Maine for a little excursion, and began another journal, from which I take one paragraph, giving a slight note of his state of mind at an interesting period of his country's history. --ED.] West Gouldsborough, August 15th, 1862.--It is a week ago, Saturday, since J----- and I reached this place, . . . . Mr. Barney S. Hill's. At Hallowell, and subsequently all along the route, the country was astir with volunteers, and the war is all that seems to be alive, and even that doubtfully so. Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,-- bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model. The whole talk of the bar-rooms and every other place of intercourse was about enlisting and the war, this being the very crisis of trial, when the voluntary system is drawing to an end, and the draft almost immediately to commence. END OF VOL. II. 
7881	----	PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FRANCE. Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858.--On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold. There were already many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward; and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we almost came to a dead lock with some of them. At the station we found several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us, sitting round the fire of the waiting-room. Since I came to England there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the atmosphere. We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne. A foot-warmer (a long, flat tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we could only glance at the green fields--immortally green, whatever winter can do against them--and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the ice forming on its borders. It was the first cold weather of a very mild season. The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes; and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more. At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J----- reported as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer in which we were to embark. But the air was so wintry, that I had no heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J----- on the beach; so we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel generally communicates to the craft that navigate it. At about one o'clock we went on board, and were soon under steam, at a rate that quickly showed a long line of the white cliffs of Albion behind us. It is a very dusky white, by the by, and the cliffs themselves do not seem, at a distance, to be of imposing height, and have too even an outline to be picturesque. As we increased our distance from England, the French coast came more and more distinctly in sight, with a low, wavy outline, not very well worth looking at, except because it was the coast of France. Indeed, I looked at it but little; for the wind was bleak and boisterous, and I went down into the cabin, where I found the fire very comfortable, and several people were stretched on sofas in a state of placid wretchedness. . . . . I have never suffered from sea-sickness, but had been somewhat apprehensive of this rough strait between England and France, which seems to have more potency over people's stomachs than ten times the extent of sea in other quarters. Our passage was of two hours, at the end of which we landed on French soil, and found ourselves immediately in the clutches of the custom-house officers, who, however, merely made a momentary examination of my passport, and allowed us to pass without opening even one of our carpet-bags. The great bulk of our luggage had been registered through to Paris, for examination after our arrival there. We left Boulogne in about an hour after our arrival, when it was already a darkening twilight. The weather had grown colder than ever, since our arrival in sunny France, and the night was now setting in, wickedly black and dreary. The frost hardened upon the carriage windows in such thickness that I could scarcely scratch a peep-hole through it; but, from such glimpses as I could catch, the aspect of the country seemed pretty much to resemble the December aspect of my dear native land,--broad, bare, brown fields, with streaks of snow at the foot of ridges, and along fences, or in the furrows of ploughed soil. There was ice wherever there happened to be water to form it. We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless; and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey than this, my first advance into French territory. My impression of France will always be that it is an Arctic region. At any season of the year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees. In the dusk they resembled poplar-trees. Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . . It gives a taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or understand. Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a handsome salon, as chill as a tomb. They made a little bit of a wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room. In the morning we sallied forth to see the cathedral. The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway, affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes. It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English cathedrals. It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals. We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under glass. In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional,--a little oaken structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and speak, through the open-work of the priest's closet. Monuments, mural and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in the chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture, fencing in the Holy of Holies, where the High Altar stands. There is not much painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful rose-windows, however, that looked antique; and the great eastern window which, I think, is modern. The pavement has, probably, never been renewed, as one piece of work, since the structure was erected, and is foot-worn by the successive generations, though still in excellent repair. I saw one of the small, square stones in it, bearing the date of 1597, and no doubt there are a thousand older ones. It was gratifying to find the cathedral in such good condition, without any traces of recent repair; and it is perhaps a mark of difference between French and English character, that the Revolution in the former country, though all religious worship disappears before it, does not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical monuments, as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter. I did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image, in the whole cathedral. But, probably, the very rage of the English fanatics against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows at them, were symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French were capable of. These last did not care enough about their Saviour to beat down his crucified image; and they preserved the works of sacred art, for the sake only of what beauty there was in them. While we were in the cathedral, we saw several persons kneeling at their devotions on the steps of the chancel and elsewhere. One dipped his fingers in the holy water at the entrance: by the by, I looked into the stone basin that held it, and saw it full of ice. Could not all that sanctity at least keep it thawed? Priests--jolly, fat, mean-looking fellows, in white robes--went hither and thither, but did not interrupt or accost us. There were other peculiarities, which I suppose I shall see more of in my visits to other churches, but now we were all glad to make our stay as brief as possible, the atmosphere of the cathedral being so bleak, and its stone pavement so icy cold beneath our feet. We returned to the hotel, and the chambermaid brought me a book, in which she asked me to inscribe my name, age, profession, country, destination, and the authorization under which I travelled. After the freedom of an English hotel, so much greater than even that of an American one, where they make you disclose your name, this is not so pleasant. We left Amiens at half past one; and I can tell as little of the country between that place and Paris, as between Boulogne and Amiens. The windows of our railway carriage were already frosted with French breath when we got into it, and the ice grew thicker and thicker continually. I tried, at various times, to rub a peep-hole through, as before; but the ice immediately shot its crystallized tracery over it again; and, indeed, there was little or nothing to make it worth while to look out, so bleak was the scene. Now and then a chateau, too far off for its characteristics to be discerned; now and then a church, with a tall gray tower, and a little peak atop; here and there a village or a town, which we could not well see. At sunset there was just that clear, cold, wintry sky which I remember so well in America, but have never seen in England. At five we reached Paris, and were suffered to take a carriage to the hotel de Louvre, without any examination of the little luggage we had with us. Arriving, we took a suite of apartments, and the waiter immediately lighted a wax candle in each separate room. We might have dined at the table d'hote, but preferred the restaurant connected with and within the hotel. All the dishes were very delicate, and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints, shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery, for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for men's moral and spiritual nature than French. In the former case, you know that you are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your appetite. This last, however, it requires a good deal of perseverance to accomplish. In the cathedral at Amiens there were printed lists of acts of devotion posted on the columns, such as prayers at the shrines of certain saints, whereby plenary indulgences might be gained. It is to be observed, however, that all these external forms were necessarily accompanied with true penitence and religious devotion. Hotel de Louvre, January 8th.--It was so fearfully cold this morning that I really felt little or no curiosity to see the city. . . . . Until after one o'clock, therefore, I knew nothing of Paris except the lights which I had seen beneath our window the evening before, far, far downward, in the narrow Rue St. Honore, and the rumble of the wheels, which continued later than I was awake to hear it, and began again before dawn. I could see, too, tall houses, that seemed to be occupied in every story, and that had windows on the steep roofs. One of these houses is six stories high. This Rue St. Honore is one of the old streets in Paris, and is that in which Henry IV. was assassinated; but it has not, in this part of it, the aspect of antiquity. After one o'clock we all went out and walked along the Rue de Rivoli. . . . . We are here, right in the midst of Paris, and close to whatever is best known to those who hear or read about it,--the Louvre being across the street, the Palais Royal but a little way off, the Tuileries joining to the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde just beyond, verging on which is the Champs Elysees. We looked about us for a suitable place to dine, and soon found the Restaurant des Echelles, where we entered at a venture, and were courteously received. It has a handsomely furnished saloon, much set off with gilding and mirrors; and appears to be frequented by English and Americans; its carte, a bound volume, being printed in English as well as French. . . . . It was now nearly four o'clock, and too late to visit the galleries of the Louvre, or to do anything else but walk a little way along the street. The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise: such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch, wrought in memory of some grand event. The light stone or stucco, wholly untarnished by smoke and soot, puts London to the blush, if a blush could be seen on its dingy face; but, indeed, London is not to be mentioned, nor compared even, with Paris. I never knew what a palace was till I had a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuileries; never had my idea of a city been gratified till I trod these stately streets. The life of the scene, too, is infinitely more picturesque than that of London, with its monstrous throng of grave faces and black coats; whereas, here, you see soldiers and priests, policemen in cocked hats, Zonaves with turbans, long mantles, and bronzed, half-Moorish faces; and a great many people whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to look at, and fancy them villanous. Truly, I have no sympathies towards the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt and mingle with mine. But they do grand and beautiful things in the architectural way; and I am grateful for it. The Place de la Concorde is a most splendid square, large enough for a nation to erect trophies in of all its triumphs; and on one side of it is the Tuileries, on the opposite side the Champs Elysees, and, on a third, the Seine, adown which we saw large cakes of ice floating, beneath the arches of a bridge. The Champs Elysees, so far as I saw it, had not a grassy soil beneath its trees, but the bare earth, white and dusty. The very dust, if I saw nothing else, would assure me that I was out of England. We had time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,-- new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold. A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay for. We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the Louvre. I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,-- the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and, farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy, and multiplied everything forever. The picture-rooms are not so brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint pictures of their own. From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution. The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin cloak. There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics, Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair. I must let it all go. These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink. Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called. He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was. We, who look back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his rise out of obscurity. They never, perhaps, took the reality of his career fairly into their minds, before it was over. The present Emperor, I believe, has already been as long in possession of the supreme power as his uncle was. I should like to see him, and may, perhaps, do--so, as he is our neighbor, across the way. This morning Miss ------, the celebrated astronomical lady, called. She had brought a letter of introduction to me, while consul; and her purpose now was to see if we could take her as one of our party to Rome, whither she likewise is bound. We readily consented, for she seems to be a simple, strong, healthy-humored woman, who will not fling herself as a burden on our shoulders; and my only wonder is that a person evidently so able to take care of herself should wish to have an escort. We issued forth at about eleven, and went down the Rue St. Honore, which is narrow, and has houses of five or six stories on either side, between which run the streets like a gully in a rock. One face of our hotel borders and looks on this street. After going a good way, we came to an intersection with another street, the name of which I forget; but, at this point, Ravaillac sprang at the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his dagger into him. As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and more thronged, and with a meaner class of people. The houses still were high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow, crowded, and rambling street. Thence we turned into the Rue St. Denis, which is one of the oldest streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man that he should walk straight. Through some other indirections we at last found the Rue Bergere, down which I went with J----- in quest of Hottinguer et Co., the bankers, while the rest of us went along the Boulevards, towards the Church of the Madeleine. . . . . This business accomplished, J----- and I threaded our way back, and overtook the rest of the party, still a good distance from the Madeleine. I know not why the Boulevards are called so. They are a succession of broad walks through broad streets, and were much thronged with people, most of whom appeared to be bent more on pleasure than business. The sun, long before this, had come out brightly, and gave us the first genial and comfortable sensations which we have had in Paris. Approaching the Madeleine, we found it a most beautiful church, that might have been adapted from Heathenism to Catholicism; for on each side there is a range of magnificent pillars, unequalled, except by those of the Parthenon. A mourning-coach, arrayed in black and silver, was drawn up at the steps, and the front of the church was hung with black cloth, which covered the whole entrance. However, seeing the people going in, we entered along with them. Glorious and gorgeous is the Madeleine. The entrance to the nave is beneath a most stately arch; and three arches of equal height open from the nave to the side aisles; and at the end of the nave is another great arch, rising, with a vaulted half-dome, over the high altar. The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church, it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture; and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the Magdalen smiling down upon angels and archangels, some of whom are kneeling, and shadowing themselves with their heavy marble wings. There is no such thing as making my page glow with the most distant idea of the magnificence of this church, in its details and in its whole. It was founded a hundred or two hundred years ago; then Bonaparte contemplated transforming it into a Temple of Victory, or building it anew as one. The restored Bourbons remade it into a church; but it still has a heathenish look, and will never lose it. When we entered we saw a crowd of people, all pressing forward towards the high altar, before which burned a hundred wax lights, some of which were six or seven feet high; and, altogether, they shone like a galaxy of stars. In the middle of the nave, moreover, there was another galaxy of wax candles burning around an immense pall of black velvet, embroidered with silver, which seemed to cover, not only a coffin, but a sarcophagus, or something still more huge. The organ was rumbling forth a deep, lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing out of the gloom. The church, between the arches, along the nave, and round the altar, was hung with broad expanses of black cloth; and all the priests had their sacred vestments covered with black. They looked exceedingly well; I never saw anything half so well got up on the stage. Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way that I liked to see. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe and glory. Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed, and very glad when it was over. What struck me as singular, the person who performed the part usually performed by a verger, keeping order among the audience, wore a gold-embroidered scarf, a cocked hat, and, I believe, a sword, and had the air of a military man. Before the close of the service a contribution-box--or, rather, a black velvet bag--was handed about by this military verger; and I gave J----- a franc to put in, though I did not in the least know for what. Issuing from the church, we inquired of two or three persons who was the distinguished defunct at whose obsequies we had been assisting, for we had some hope that it might be Rachel, who died last week, and is still above ground. But it proved to be only a Madame Mentel, or some such name, whom nobody had ever before heard of. I forgot to say that her coffin was taken from beneath the illuminated pall, and carried out of the church before us. When we left the Madeleine we took our way to the Place de la Concorde, and thence through the Elysian Fields (which, I suppose, are the French idea of heaven) to Bonaparte's triumphal arch. The Champs Elysees may look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season,--the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has declined to do so. There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity. As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance, looking huge and massive, though still a long way off. It was not, however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its airy sweep. At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity; nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it. There is a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it. On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal, and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit. The shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories. It has a very rich effect. At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way. Hotel de Louvre, January 10th.--We had purposed going to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the Louvre. . . . . . Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,-- that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it in the finished painting. No doubt the painters themselves had often a happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best. To an artist, the collection must be most deeply interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome. In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures, some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small scale. I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair. I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of view, as he. Most of our great men are of a character that I find it impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of sympathy upon them. Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and uncommon human nature in him. Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat observing the crowd of Sunday visitors. They were generally of a lower class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms, and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved. I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it. A blue coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform. Some had short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms. The policemen, distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked military, wearing cocked hats and swords. There were many women of the middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent, in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen, young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a woman. The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads, accompanied by women. I did not much like any of the French faces, and yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English. The women are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained expression that supplies the place of beauty. I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last longer than my capacity for receiving them. As our time in Paris, however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement floor. Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups, interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets, busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which consummate art has transmuted into precious stones. Not that I really did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few world-renowned statues in Italy. I was even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by the value of the sculptures themselves. The galleries, I should judge, have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system,--the adornments being yet by no means completed,--for besides the floor and wall-casings of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened. It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think the English have given really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them with no gorgeous fittings up. By this time poor J----- (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone,--not one stone, but a thousand. We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel. In my opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. It is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops! We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right. . . . . Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. There was a map,--a hemisphere of the world,--which his father had drawn for this poor boy; very neatly done, too. The sword of Louis XVI., a magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of Henry IV.'s sword. But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these things. What a collection it is, including Charlemagne's sword and sceptre, and the last Dauphin's little toy cannon, and so much between the two! Hotel de Louvre, January 11th.--This was another chill, raw day, characterized by a spitefulness of atmosphere which I do not remember ever to have experienced in my own dear country. We meant to have visited the Hotel des Invalides, but J----- and I walked to the Tivoli, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and to the Place de Beaujou, and to the residence of the American minister, where I wished to arrange about my passport. After speaking with the Secretary of Legation, we were ushered into the minister's private room, where he received me with great kindness. Mr. ------ is an old gentleman with a white head, and a large, florid face, which has an expression of amiability, not unmingled with a certain dignity. He did not rise from his arm-chair to greet me,--a lack of ceremony which I imputed to the gout, feeling it impossible that he should have willingly failed in courtesy to one of his twenty-five million sovereigns. In response to some remark of mine about the shabby way in which our government treats its officials pecuniarily, he gave a detailed account of his own troubles on that score; then expressed a hope that I had made a good thing out of my consulate, and inquired whether I had received a hint to resign; to which I replied that, for various reasons, I had resigned of my own accord, and before Mr. Buchanan's inauguration. We agreed, however, in disapproving the system of periodical change in our foreign officials; and I remarked that a consul or an ambassador ought to be a citizen both of his native country and of the one in which he resided; and that his possibility of beneficent influence depended largely on his being so. Apropos to which Mr. ------ said that he had once asked a diplomatic friend of long experience, what was the first duty of a minister. "To love his own country, and to watch over its interests," answered the diplomatist. "And his second duty?" asked Mr. ------. "To love and to promote the interests of the country to which he is accredited," said his friend. This is a very Christian and sensible view of the matter; but it can scarcely have happened once in our whole diplomatic history, that a minister can have had time to overcome his first rude and ignorant prejudice against the country of his mission; and if there were any suspicion of his having done so, it would be held abundantly sufficient ground for his recall. I like Mr. ------, a good-hearted, sensible old man. J----- and I returned along the Champs Elysees, and, crossing the Seine, kept on our way by the river's brink, looking at the titles of books on the long lines of stalls that extend between the bridges. Novels, fairy-tales, dream books, treatises of behavior and etiquette, collections of bon-mots and of songs, were interspersed with volumes in the old style of calf and gilt binding, the works of the classics of French literature. A good many persons, of the poor classes, and of those apparently well to do, stopped transitorily to look at these books. On the other side of the street was a range of tall edifices with shops beneath, and the quick stir of French life hurrying, and babbling, and swarming along the sidewalk. We passed two or three bridges, occurring at short intervals, and at last we recrossed the Seine by a bridge which oversteps the river, from a point near the National Institute, and reaches the other side, not far from the Louvre. . . . . Though the day was so disagreeable, we thought it best not to lose the remainder of it, and therefore set out to visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We took a fiacre in the Place de Carousel, and drove to the door. On entering, we found the interior miserably shut off from view by the stagings erected for the purpose of repairs. Penetrating from the nave towards the chancel, an official personage signified to us that we must first purchase a ticket for each grown person, at the price of half a franc each. This expenditure admitted us into the sacristy, where we were taken in charge by a guide, who came down upon us with an avalanche or cataract of French, descriptive of a great many treasures reposited in this chapel. I understood hardly more than one word in ten, but gathered doubtfully that a bullet which was shown us was the one that killed the late Archbishop of Paris, on the floor of the cathedral. [But this was a mistake. It was the archbishop who was killed in the insurrection of 1848. Two joints of his backbone were also shown.] Also, that some gorgeously embroidered vestments, which he drew forth, had been used at the coronation of Napoleon I. There were two large, full-length portraits hanging aloft in the sacristy, and a gold or silver gilt, or, at all events, gilt image of the Virgin, as large as life, standing on a pedestal. The guide had much to say about these, but, understanding him so imperfectly, I have nothing to record. The guide's supervision of us seemed not to extend beyond this sacristy, on quitting which he gave us permission to go where we pleased, only intimating a hope that we would not forget him; so I gave him half a franc, though thereby violating an inhibition on the printed ticket of entrance. We had been much disappointed at first by the apparently narrow limits of the interior of this famous church; but now, as we made our way round the choir, gazing into chapel after chapel, each with its painted window, its crucifix, its pictures, its confessional, and afterwards came back into the nave, where arch rises above arch to the lofty roof, we came to the conclusion that it was very sumptuous. It is the greatest of pities that its grandeur and solemnity should just now be so infinitely marred by the workmen's boards, timber, and ladders occupying the whole centre of the edifice, and screening all its best effects. It seems to have been already most richly ornamented, its roof being painted, and the capitals of the pillars gilded, and their shafts illuminated in fresco; and no doubt it will shine out gorgeously when all the repairs and adornments shall be completed. Even now it gave to my actual sight what I have often tried to imagine in my visits to the English cathedrals,-- the pristine glory of those edifices, when they stood glowing with gold and picture, fresh from the architects' and adorners' hands. The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower on the earth's broad bosom. When we emerged from the cathedral, we found it beginning to rain or snow, or both; and, as we had dismissed our fiacre at the door, and could find no other, we were at a loss what to do. We stood a few moments on the steps of the Hotel Dieu, looking up at the front of Notre Dame, with its twin towers, and its three deep-pointed arches, piercing through a great thickness of stone, and throwing a cavern-like gloom around these entrances. The front is very rich. Though so huge, and all of gray stone, it is carved and fretted with statues and innumerable devices, as cunningly as any ivory casket in which relics are kept; but its size did not so much impress me. . . . . Hotel de Louvre, January 12th.--This has been a bright day as regards weather; but I have done little or nothing worth recording. After breakfast, I set out in quest of the consul, and found him up a court, at 51 Rue Caumartin, in an office rather smaller, I think, than mine at Liverpool; but, to say the truth, a little better furnished. I was received in the outer apartment by an elderly, brisk-looking man, in whose air, respectful and subservient, and yet with a kind of authority in it, I recognized the vice-consul. He introduced me to Mr. ------, who sat writing in an inner room; a very gentlemanly, courteous, cool man of the world, whom I should take to be an excellent person for consul at Paris. He tells me that he has resided here some years, although his occupancy of the consulate dates only from November last. Consulting him respecting my passport, he gave me what appear good reasons why I should get all the necessary vises here; for example, that the vise of a minister carries more weight than that of a consul; and especially that an Austrian consul will never vise a passport unless he sees his minister's name upon it. Mr. ------ has travelled much in Italy, and ought to be able to give me sound advice. His opinion was, that at this season of the year I had better go by steamer to Civita Veechia, instead of landing at Leghorn, and thence journeying to Rome. On this point I shall decide when the time comes. As I left the office the vice-consul informed me that there was a charge of five francs and some sous for the consul's vise, a tax which surprised me,--the whole business of passports having been taken from consuls before I quitted office, and the consular fee having been annulled even earlier. However, no doubt Mr. ------ had a fair claim to my five francs; but, really, it is not half so pleasant to pay a consular fee as it used to be to receive it. Afterwards I walked to Notre Dame, the rich front of which I viewed with more attention than yesterday. There are whole histories, carved in stone figures, within the vaulted arches of the three entrances in this west front, and twelve apostles in a row above, and as much other sculpture as would take a month to see. We then walked quite round it, but I had no sense of immensity from it, not even that of great height, as from many of the cathedrals in England. It stands very near the Seine; indeed, if I mistake not, it is on an island formed by two branches of the river. Behind it, is what seems to be a small public ground (or garden, if a space entirely denuded of grass or other green thing, except a few trees, can be called so), with benches, and a monument in the midst. This quarter of the city looks old, and appears to be inhabited by poor people, and to be busied about small and petty affairs; the most picturesque business that I saw being that of the old woman who sells crucifixes of pearl and of wood at the cathedral door. We bought two of these yesterday. I must again speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day. My ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as that of Paris. It is difficult to imagine where so much filth can come from. After dinner I walked through the gardens of the Tuileries; but as dusk was coming on, and as I was afraid of being shut up within the iron railing, I did not have time to examine them particularly. There are wide, intersecting walks, fountains, broad basins, and many statues; but almost the whole surface of the gardens is barren earth, instead of the verdure that would beautify an English pleasure-ground of this sort. In the summer it has doubtless an agreeable shade; but at this season the naked branches look meagre, and sprout from slender trunks. Like the trees in the Champs Elysees, those, I presume, in the gardens of the Tuileries need renewing every few years. The same is true of the human race,--families becoming extinct after a generation or two of residence in Paris. Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root. I am quite tired of Paris, and long for a home more than ever. MARSEILLES. Hotel d'Angleterre, January 15th.--On Tuesday morning, (12th) we took our departure from the Hotel de Louvre. It is a most excellent and perfectly ordered hotel, and I have not seen a more magnificent hall, in any palace, than the dining-saloon, with its profuse gilding, and its ceiling, painted in compartments; so that when the chandeliers are all alight, it looks a fit place for princes to banquet in, and not very fit for the few Americans whom I saw scattered at its long tables. By the by, as we drove to the railway, we passed through the public square, where the Bastille formerly stood; and in the centre of it now stands a column, surmounted by a golden figure of Mercury (I think), which seems to be just on the point of casting itself from a gilt ball into the air. This statue is so buoyant, that the spectator feels quite willing to trust it to the viewless element, being as sure that it would be borne up as that a bird would fly. Our first day's journey was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same landscape was all that we saw, whenever we rubbed away the congelation of our breath from the carriage windows. Thus we rode on, all day long, from eleven o'clock, with hardly a five minutes' stop, till long after dark, when we came to Dijon, where there was a halt of twenty-five minutes for dinner. Then we set forth again, and rumbled forward, through cold and darkness without, until we reached Lyons at about ten o'clock. We left our luggage at the railway station, and took an omnibus for the Hotel de Provence, which we chose at a venture, among a score of other hotels. As this hotel was a little off the direct route of the omnibus, the driver set us down at the corner of a street, and pointed to some lights, which he said designated the Hotel do Provence; and thither we proceeded, all seven of us, taking along a few carpet-bags and shawls, our equipage for the night. The porter of the hotel met us near its doorway, and ushered us through an arch, into the inner quadrangle, and then up some old and worn steps,--very broad, and appearing to be the principal staircase. At the first landing-place, an old woman and a waiter or two received us; and we went up two or three more flights of the same broad and worn stone staircases. What we could see of the house looked very old, and had the musty odor with which I first became acquainted at Chester. After ascending to the proper level, we were conducted along a corridor, paved with octagonal earthen tiles; on one side were windows, looking into the courtyard, on the other doors opening into the sleeping-chambers. The corridor was of immense length, and seemed still to lengthen itself before us, as the glimmer of our conductor's candle went farther and farther into the obscurity. Our own chamber was at a vast distance along this passage; those of the rest of the party were on the hither side; but all this immense suite of rooms appeared to communicate by doors from one to another, like the chambers through which the reader wanders at midnight, in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. And they were really splendid rooms, though of an old fashion, lofty, spacious, with floors of oak or other wood, inlaid in squares and crosses, and waxed till they were slippery, but without carpets. Our own sleeping-room had a deep fireplace, in which we ordered a fire, and asked if there were not some saloon already warmed, where we could get a cup of tea. Hereupon the waiter led us back along the endless corridor, and down the old stone staircases, and out into the quadrangle, and journeyed with us along an exterior arcade, and finally threw open the door of the salle a manger, which proved to be a room of lofty height, with a vaulted roof, a stone floor, and interior spaciousness sufficient for a baronial hall, the whole bearing the same aspect of times gone by, that characterized the rest of the house. There were two or three tables covered with white cloth, and we sat down at one of them and had our tea. Finally we wended back to our sleeping-rooms,--a considerable journey, so endless seemed the ancient hotel. I should like to know its history. The fire made our great chamber look comfortable, and the fireplace threw out the heat better than the little square hole over which we cowered in our saloon at the Hotel de Louvre. . . . . In the morning we began our preparations for starting at ten. Issuing into the corridor, I found a soldier of the line, pacing to and fro there as sentinel. Another was posted in another corridor, into which I wandered by mistake; another stood in the inner court-yard, and another at the porte-cochere. They were not there the night before, and I know not whence nor why they came, unless that some officer of rank may have taken up his quarters at the hotel. Miss M------ says she heard at Paris, that a considerable number of troops had recently been drawn together at Lyons, in consequence of symptoms of disaffection that have recently shown themselves here. Before breakfast I went out to catch a momentary glimpse of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that very spot. The square was surrounded by stately buildings, but had what seemed to be barracks for soldiers,--at any rate, mean little huts, deforming its ample space; and a soldier was on guard before the statue of Louis le Grand. It was a cold, misty morning, and a fog lay throughout the area, so that I could scarcely see from one side of it to the other. Returning towards our hotel, I saw that it had an immense front, along which ran, in gigantic letters, its title,-- HOTEL DE PROVENCE ET DES AMBASSADEURS. The excellence of the hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to eat or drink. We left it, after a poor breakfast, and went to the railway station. Looking at the mountainous heap of our luggage the night before, we had missed a great carpet-bag; and we now found that Miss M------'s trunk had been substituted for it, and, there being the proper number of packages as registered, it was impossible to convince the officials that anything was wrong. We, of course, began to generalize forthwith, and pronounce the incident to be characteristic of French morality. They love a certain system and external correctness, but do not trouble themselves to be deeply in the right; and Miss M------ suggested that there used to be parallel cases in the French Revolution, when, so long as the assigned number were sent out of prison to be guillotined, the jailer did not much care whether they were the persons designated by the tribunal or not. At all events, we could get no satisfaction about the carpet-bag, and shall very probably be compelled to leave Marseilles without it. This day's ride was through a far more picturesque country than that we saw yesterday. Heights began to rise imminent above our way, with sometimes a ruined castle wall upon them; on our left, the rail-track kept close to the hills; on the other side there was the level bottom of a valley, with heights descending upon it a mile or a few miles away. Farther off we could see blue hills, shouldering high above the intermediate ones, and themselves worthy to be called mountains. These hills arranged themselves in beautiful groups, affording openings between them, and vistas of what lay beyond, and gorges which I suppose held a great deal of romantic scenery. By and by a river made its appearance, flowing swiftly in the same direction that we were travelling,--a beautiful and cleanly river, with white pebbly shores, and itself of a peculiar blue. It rushed along very fast, sometimes whitening over shallow descents, and even in its calmer intervals its surface was all covered with whirls and eddies, indicating that it dashed onward in haste. I do not now know the name of this river, but have set it down as the "arrowy Rhone." It kept us company a long while, and I think we did not part with it as long as daylight remained. I have seldom seen hill-scenery that struck me more than some that we saw to-day, and the old feudal towers and old villages at their feet; and the old churches, with spires shaped just like extinguishers, gave it an interest accumulating from many centuries past. Still going southward, the vineyards began to border our track, together with what I at first took to be orchards, but soon found were plantations of olive-trees, which grow to a much larger size than I supposed, and look almost exactly like very crabbed and eccentric apple-trees. Neither they nor the vineyards add anything to the picturesqueness of the landscape. On the whole, I should have been delighted with all this scenery if it had not looked so bleak, barren, brown, and bare; so like the wintry New England before the snow has fallen. It was very cold, too; ice along the borders of streams, even among the vineyards and olives. The houses are of rather a different shape here than, farther northward, their roofs being not nearly so sloping. They are almost invariably covered with white plaster; the farm-houses have their outbuildings in connection with the dwelling,--the whole surrounding three sides of a quadrangle. We travelled far into the night, swallowed a cold and hasty dinner at Avignon, and reached Marseilles sorely wearied, at about eleven o'clock. We took a cab to the Hotel d'Angleterre (two cabs, to be quite accurate), and find it a very poor place. To go back a little, as the sun went down, we looked out of the window of our railway carriage, and saw a sky that reminded us of what we used to see day after day in America, and what we have not seen since; and, after sunset, the horizon burned and glowed with rich crimson and orange lustre, looking at once warm and cold. After it grew dark, the stars brightened, and Miss M------ from her window pointed out some of the planets to the children, she being as familiar with them as a gardener with his flowers. They were as bright as diamonds. We had a wretched breakfast, and J----- and I then went to the railway station to see about our luggage. On our walk back we went astray, passing by a triumphal arch, erected by the Marseillais, in honor of Louis Napoleon; but we inquired our way of old women and soldiers, who were very kind and courteous,--especially the latter,--and were directed aright. We came to a large, oblong, public place, set with trees, but devoid of grass, like all public places in France. In the middle of it was a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, stretching forth his hands in the attitude of addressing the people or of throwing a benediction over them. It was some archbishop, who had distinguished himself by his humanity and devotedness during the plague of 1720. At the moment of our arrival the piazza was quite thronged with people, who seemed to be talking amongst themselves with considerable earnestness, although without any actual excitement. They were smoking cigars; and we judged that they were only loitering here for the sake of the sunshine, having no fires at home, and nothing to do. Some looked like gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the lazzaroni of this Southern city,--men with cloth caps, like the classic liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats. There were one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no families of gentility resident here. Returning to the hotel, we found the rest of the party ready to go out; so we all issued forth in a body, and inquired our way to the telegraph-office, in order to send my message about the carpet-bag. In a street through which we had to pass (and which seemed to be the Exchange, or its precincts), there was a crowd even denser, yes, much denser, than that which we saw in the square of the archbishop's statue; and each man was talking to his neighbor in a vivid, animated way, as if business were very brisk to-day. At the telegraph-office, we discovered the cause that had brought out these many people. There had been attempts on the Emperor's life,-- unsuccessful, as they seem fated to be, though some mischief was done to those near him. I rather think the good people of Marseilles were glad of the attempt, as an item of news and gossip, and did not very greatly care whether it were successful or no. It seemed to have roused their vivacity rather than their interest. The only account I have seen of it was in the brief public despatch from the Syndic (or whatever he be) of Paris to the chief authority of Marseilles, which was printed and posted in various conspicuous places. The only chance of knowing the truth with any fulness of detail would be to come across an English paper. We have had a banner hoisted half-mast in front of our hotel to-day as a token, the head-waiter tells me, of sympathy and sorrow for the General and other persons who were slain by this treasonable attempt. J----- and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays, having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who basked in it. Whenever I passed into the shade, immediately from too warm I became too cold. The sunshine was like hot air; the shade, like the touch of cold steel,--sharp, hard, yet exhilarating. From the broad street of the quays, narrow, thread-like lanes pierced up between the edifices, calling themselves streets, yet so narrow, that a person in the middle could almost touch the houses on either hand. They ascended steeply, bordered on each side by long, contiguous walls of high houses, and from the time of their first being built, could never have had a gleam of sunshine in them,--always in shadow, always unutterably nasty, and often pestiferous. The nastiness which I saw in Marseilles exceeds my heretofore experience. There is dirt in the hotel, and everywhere else; and it evidently troubles nobody,--no more than if all the people were pigs in a pigsty. . . . . Passing by all this sweep of quays, J----- and I ascended to an elevated walk, overlooking the harbor, and far beyond it; for here we had our first view of the Mediterranean, blue as heaven, and bright with sunshine. It was a bay, widening forth into the open deep, and bordered with heights, and bold, picturesque headlands, some of which had either fortresses or convents on them. Several boats and one brig were under sail, making their way towards the port. I have never seen a finer sea-view. Behind the town, there seemed to be a mountainous landscape, imperfectly visible, in consequence of the intervening edifices. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Steamer Calabrese, January 17th.--If I had remained at Marseilles, I might have found many peculiarities and characteristics of that Southern city to notice; but I fear that these will not be recorded if I leave them till I touch the soil of Italy. Indeed, I doubt whether there be anything really worth recording in the little distinctions between one nation and another; at any rate, after the first novelty is over, new things seem equally commonplace with the old. There is but one little interval when the mind is in such a state that it can catch the fleeting aroma of a new scene. And it is always so much pleasanter to enjoy this delicious newness than to attempt arresting it, that it requires great force of will to insist with one's self upon sitting down to write. I can do nothing with Marseilles, especially here on the Mediterranean, long after nightfall, and when the steamer is pitching in a pretty lively way. (Later.)--I walked out with J----- yesterday morning, and reached the outskirts of the city, whence we could see the bold and picturesque heights that surround Marseilles as with a semicircular wall. They rise into peaks, and the town, being on their lower slope, descends from them towards the sea with a gradual sweep. Adown the streets that descend these declivities come little rivulets, running along over the pavement, close to the sidewalks, as over a pebbly bed; and though they look vastly like kennels, I saw women washing linen in these streams, and others dipping up the water for household purposes. The women appear very much in public at Marseilles. In the squares and places you see half a dozen of them together, sitting in a social circle on the bottoms of upturned baskets, knitting, talking, and enjoying the public sunshine, as if it were their own household fire. Not one in a thousand of them, probably, ever has a household fire for the purpose of keeping themselves warm, but only to do their little cookery; and when there is sunshine they take advantage of it, and in the short season of rain and frost they shrug their shoulders, put on what warm garments they have, and get through the winter somewhat as grasshoppers and butterflies do,--being summer insects like then. This certainly is a very keen and cutting air, sharp as a razor, and I saw ice along the borders of the little rivulets almost at noonday. To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of death itself. I do not like the climate. There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip. I never before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people. In Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble from the lips of every individual. A great many interesting scenes take place in these squares. From the window of our hotel (which looked into the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than the prescribed limit. While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and they took their departure. I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice, and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver. But really this pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best chance of keeping myself in an equable state. ROME. 37 Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, January 24th.--We left Marseilles in the Neapolitan steamer Calabrese, as noticed above, a week ago this morning. There was no fault to be found with the steamer, which was very clean and comfortable, contrary to what we had understood beforehand; except for the coolness of the air (and I know not that this was greater than that of the Atlantic in July), our voyage would have been very pleasant; but for myself, I enjoyed nothing, having a cold upon me, or a low fever, or something else that took the light and warmth out of everything. I went to bed immediately after my last record, and was rocked to sleep pleasantly enough by the billows of the Mediterranean; and, coming on deck about sunrise next morning, found the steamer approaching Genoa. We saw the city, lying at the foot of a range of hills, and stretching a little way up their slopes, the hills sweeping round it in the segment of a circle, and looking like an island rising abruptly out of the sea; for no connection with the mainland was visible on either side. There was snow scattered on their summits and streaking their sides a good way down. They looked bold, and barren, and brown, except where the snow whitened them. The city did not impress me with much expectation of size or splendor. Shortly after coming into the port our whole party landed, and we found ourselves at once in the midst of a crowd of cab-drivers, hotel-runnets, and coin missionaires, who assaulted us with a volley of French, Italian, and broken English, which beat pitilessly about our ears; for really it seemed as if all the dictionaries in the world had been torn to pieces, and blown around us by a hurricane. Such a pother! We took a commissionaire, a respectable-looking man, in a cloak, who said his name was Salvator Rosa; and he engaged to show us whatever was interesting in Genoa. In the first place, he took us through narrow streets to an old church, the name of which I have forgotten, and, indeed, its peculiar features; but I know that I found it pre-eminently magnificent,--its whole interior being incased in polished marble, of various kinds and colors, its ceiling painted, and its chapels adorned with pictures. However, this church was dazzled out of sight by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, to which we were afterwards conducted, whose exterior front is covered with alternate slabs of black and white marble, which were brought, either in whole or in part, from Jerusalem. Within, there was a prodigious richness of precious marbles, and a pillar, if I mistake not, from Solomon's Temple; and a picture of the Virgin by St. Luke; and others (rather more intrinsically valuable, I imagine), by old masters, set in superb marble frames, within the arches of the chapels. I used to try to imagine how the English cathedrals must have looked in their primeval glory, before the Reformation, and before the whitewash of Cromwell's time had overlaid their marble pillars; but I never imagined anything at all approaching what my eyes now beheld: this sheen of polished and variegated marble covering every inch of its walls; this glow of brilliant frescos all over the roof, and up within the domes; these beautiful pictures by great masters, painted for the places which they now occupied, and making an actual portion of the edifice; this wealth of silver, gold, and gems, that adorned the shrines of the saints, before which wax candles burned, and were kept burning, I suppose, from year's end to year's end; in short, there is no imagining nor remembering a hundredth part of the rich details. And even the cathedral (though I give it up as indescribable) was nothing at all in comparison with a church to which the commissionaire afterwards led us; a church that had been built four or five hundred years ago, by a pirate, in expiation of his sins, and out of the profit of his rapine. This last edifice, in its interior, absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures; its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the consequent immensity. At any rate, nobody who has not seen a church like this can imagine what a gorgeous religion it was that reared it. In the cathedral, and in all the churches, we saw priests and many persons kneeling at their devotions; and our Salvator Rosa, whenever we passed a chapel or shrine, failed not to touch the pavement with one knee, crossing himself the while; and once, when a priest was going through some form of devotion, he stopped a few moments to share in it. He conducted us, too, to the Balbi Palace, the stateliest and most sumptuous residence, but not more so than another which he afterwards showed us, nor perhaps than many others which exist in Genoa, THE SUPERB. The painted ceilings in these palaces are a glorious adornment; the walls of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of splendor which I never gained from anything else. The floors, laid in mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon. In the royal palace, many of the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware; but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw. I say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them. My receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject. I do not know a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long after the appetite was satiated. All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets, we were wretchedly cold. The commissionaire took us to a sort of pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven different views of the city, from as many stations. One of the objects pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by Charles Dickens. Looking down from the elevated part of the pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still lower down, there was ice and snow. Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner awaited us, after our return on board the boat. We set sail for Leghorn before dark, and I retired early, feeling still more ill from my cold than the night before. The next morning we were in the crowded port of Leghorn. We all went ashore, with some idea of taking the rail for Pisa, which is within an hour's distance, and might have been seen in time for our departure with the steamer. But a necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over surrounding graves. We went into a Jewish synagogue,--the interior cased in marbles, and surrounded with galleries, resting upon arches above arches. There were lights burning at the altar, and it looked very like a Christian church; but it was dirty, and had an odor not of sanctity. In Leghorn, as everywhere else, we were chilled to the heart, except when the sunshine fell directly upon us; and we returned to the steamer with a feeling as if we were getting back to our home; for this life of wandering makes a three days' residence in one place seem like home. We found several new passengers on board, and among others a monk, in a long brown frock of woollen cloth, with an immense cape, and a little black covering over his tonsure. He was a tall figure, with a gray beard, and might have walked, just as he stood, out of a picture by one of the old masters. This holy person addressed me very affably in Italian; but we found it impossible to hold much conversation. The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, not yet sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars, and as we walked the deck, Miss M------ showed the children the constellations, and told their names. J----- made a slight mistake as to one of them, pointing it out to me as "O'Brien's belt!" Elba was presently in view, and we might have seen many other interesting points, had it not been for our steamer's practice of resting by day, and only pursuing its voyage by night. The next morning we found ourselves in the harbor of Civita Vecchia, and, going ashore with our luggage, went through a blind turmoil with custom-house officers, inspectors of passports, soldiers, and vetturino people. My wife and I strayed a little through Civita Vecchia, and found its streets narrow, like clefts in a rock (which seems to be the fashion of Italian towns), and smelling nastily. I had made a bargain with a vetturino to send us to Rome in a carriage, with four horses, in eight hours; and as soon as the custom-house and passport people would let us, we started, lumbering slowly along with our mountain of luggage. We had heard rumors of robberies lately committed on this route; especially of a Nova Scotia bishop, who was detained on the road an hour and a half, and utterly pillaged; and certainly there was not a single mile of the dreary and desolate country over which we passed, where we might not have been robbed and murdered with impunity. Now and then, at long distances, we came to a structure that was either a prison, a tavern, or a barn, but did not look very much like either, being strongly built of stone, with iron-grated windows, and of ancient and rusty aspect. We kept along by the seashore a great part of the way, and stopped to feed our horses at a village, the wretched street of which stands close along the shore of the Mediterranean, its loose, dark sand being made nasty by the vicinity. The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth,-- reaching Rome not much before midnight. I perpetrated unheard-of briberies on the custom-house officers at the gates, and was permitted to pass through and establish myself at Spillman's Hotel, the only one where we could gain admittance, and where we have been half frozen ever since. And this is sunny Italy, and genial Rome! Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, February 3d.--We have been in Rome a fortnight to-day, or rather at eleven o'clock to-night; and I have seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere. Our impressions were very unfortunate, arriving at midnight, half frozen in the wintry rain, and being received into a cold and cheerless hotel, where we shivered during two or three days; meanwhile seeking lodgings among the sunless, dreary alleys which are called streets in Rome. One cold, bright day after another has pierced me to the heart, and cut me in twain as with a sword, keen and sharp, and poisoned at point and edge. I did not think that cold weather could have made me so very miserable. Having caught a feverish influenza, I was really glad of being muffled up comfortably in the fever heat. The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of malignity. After a day or two we settled ourselves in a suite of ten rooms, comprehending one flat, or what is called the second piano of this house. The rooms, thus far, have been very uncomfortable, it being impossible to warm them by means of the deep, old-fashioned, inartificial fireplaces, unless we had the great logs of a New England forest to burn in them; so I have sat in my corner by the fireside with more clothes on than I ever wore before, and my thickest great-coat over all. In the middle of the day I generally venture out for an hour or two, but have only once been warm enough even in the sunshine, and out of the sun never at any time. I understand now the force of that story of Diogenes when he asked the Conqueror, as the only favor he could do him, to stand out of his sunshine, there being such a difference in these Southern climes of Europe between sun and shade. If my wits had not been too much congealed, and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight. It would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been depicted. But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it; and soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come, and perhaps reconcile me to Rome against my will. Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly, mean-looking whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about them; French soldiers, monks, and priests of every degree; a shabby population, smoking bad cigars,--these would have been some of the points of my description. Of course there are better and truer things to be said. . . . . It would be idle for me to attempt any sketches of these famous sites and edifices,--St. Peter's, for example,--which have been described by a thousand people, though none of them have ever given me an idea of what sort of place Rome is. . . . . The Coliseum was very much what I had preconceived it, though I was not prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit on the verge of the open space. . . . . The French soldiers, who keep guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent opportunity to secure the welfare of their souls. February 7th.--I cannot get fairly into the current of my journal since we arrived, and already I perceive that the nice peculiarities of Roman life are passing from my notice before I have recorded them. It is a very great pity. During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour or two, through the narrow, stony streets, that look worse than the worst backside lanes of any other city; indescribably ugly and disagreeable they are, . . . . without sidewalks, but provided with a line of larger square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is somewhat less uneasy walking. . . . . Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets, --though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than another,--we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line with the other houses, but distinguished by its architectural windows, iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty court-yard, or perhaps of a clean, ornamented one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain, and a statue in the vista; though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable, and may, perhaps, really be one. The lower regions of palaces come to strange uses in Rome. . . . . In the basement story of the Barberini Palace a regiment of French soldiers (or soldiers of some kind [we find them to be retainers of the Barberini family, not French]) seems to be quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above. Be it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above. I vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street. It is also to be said that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic piece of sculpture into a great stone basin. These fountains are often of immense size and most elaborate design. . . . . There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental. If an antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that were laid above twenty centuries ago. It is strange how our ideas of what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older remains. But, indeed, old things are not so beautiful in this dry climate and clear atmosphere as in moist England. . . . . Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in its decay than even it was in its primal strength. If we ever build such noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousand years, in the United States; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth. The Corso, and perhaps some other streets, does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to sidewalk. But palace after palace stands along almost its whole extent,--not, however, that they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should. The enclosed courts were perhaps the only parts of these edifices which the founders cared to enrich architecturally. I think Linlithgow Palace, of which I saw the ruins during my last tour in Scotland, was built, by an architect who had studied these Roman palaces. There was never any idea of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all implicated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries and long suites of rooms. I have not yet fairly begun the sight-seeing of Rome. I have been four or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleasure, because there is such a delightful, summerlike warmth the moment we pass beneath the heavy, padded leather curtains that protect the entrances. It is almost impossible not to believe that this genial temperature is the result of furnace-heat, but, really, it is the warmth of last summer, which will be included within those massive walls, and in that vast immensity of space, till, six months hence, this winter's chill will just have made its way thither. It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in one of the papal tombs. I become, I think, more sensible of the size of St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it. It is not, as one expects, so big as all out of doors, nor is its dome so immense as that of the firmament. It looked queer, however, the other day, to see a little ragged boy, the very least of human things, going round and kneeling at shrine after shrine, and a group of children standing on tiptoe to reach the vase of holy water. . . . . On coming out of St. Peter's at my last visit, I saw a great sheet of ice around the fountain on the right hand, and some little Romans awkwardly sliding on it. I, too, took a slide, just for the sake of doing what I never thought to do in Rome. This inclement weather, I should suppose, must make the whole city very miserable; for the native Romans, I am told, never keep any fire, except for culinary purposes, even in the severest winter. They flee from their cheerless houses into the open air, and bring their firesides along with them in the shape of small earthen vases, or pipkins, with a handle by which they carry them up and down the streets, and so warm at least their hands with the lighted charcoal. I have had glimpses through open doorways into interiors, and saw them as dismal as tombs. Wherever I pass my summers, let me spend my winters in a cold country. We went yesterday to the Pantheon. . . . . When I first came to Rome, I felt embarrassed and unwilling to pass, with my heresy, between a devotee and his saint; for they often shoot their prayers at a shrine almost quite across the church. But there seems to be no violation of etiquette in so doing. A woman begged of us in the Pantheon, and accused my wife of impiety for not giving her an alms. . . . . People of very decent appearance are often unexpectedly converted into beggars as you approach them; but in general they take a "No" at once. February 9th.--For three or four days it has been cloudy and rainy, which is the greater pity, as this should be the gayest and merriest part of the Carnival. I go out but little,--yesterday only as far as Pakenham's and Hooker's bank in the Piazza de' Spagna, where I read Galignani and the American papers. At last, after seeing in England more of my fellow-compatriots than ever before, I really am disjoined from my country. To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . . As the clouds still threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for refuge. Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of the nave, supports the monument to the Stuart family, where two winged figures, with inverted torches, stand on either side of a marble door, which is closed forever. It is an impressive monument, for you feel as if the last of the race had passed through that door. Emerging from the church, I saw a French sergeant drilling his men in the piazza. These French soldiers are prominent objects everywhere about the city, and make up more of its sight and sound than anything else that lives. They stroll about individually; they pace as sentinels in all the public places; and they march up and down in squads, companies, and battalions, always with a very great din of drum, fife, and trumpet; ten times the proportion of music that the same number of men would require elsewhere; and it reverberates with ten times the noise, between the high edifices of these lanes, that it could make in broader streets. Nevertheless, I have no quarrel with the French soldiers; they are fresh, healthy, smart, honest-looking young fellows enough, in blue coats and red trousers; . . . . and, at all events, they serve as an efficient police, making Rome as safe as London; whereas, without them, it would very likely be a den of banditti. On my way home I saw a few tokens of the Carnival, which is now in full progress; though, as it was only about one o'clock, its frolics had not commenced for the day. . . . . I question whether the Romans themselves take any great interest in the Carnival. The balconies along the Corso were almost entirely taken by English and Americans, or other foreigners. As I approached the bridge of St. Angelo, I saw several persons engaged, as I thought, in fishing in the Tiber, with very strong lines; but on drawing nearer I found that they were trying to hook up the branches, and twigs, and other drift-wood, which the recent rains might have swept into the river. There was a little heap of what looked chiefly like willow twigs, the poor result of their labor. The hook was a knot of wood, with the lopped-off branches projecting in three or four prongs. The Tiber has always the hue of a mud-puddle; but now, after a heavy rain which has washed the clay into it, it looks like pease-soup. It is a broad and rapid stream, eddying along as if it were in haste to disgorge its impurities into the sea. On the left side, where the city mostly is situated, the buildings hang directly over the stream; on the other, where stand the Castle of St. Angelo and the Church of St. Peter, the town does not press so imminent upon the shore. The banks are clayey, and look as if the river had been digging them away for ages; but I believe its bed is higher than of yore. February 10th.--I went out to-day, and, going along the Via Felice and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, came unawares to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the summit of the Esquiline Hill. I entered it, without in the least knowing what church it was, and found myself in a broad and noble nave, both very simple and very grand. There was a long row of Ionic columns of marble, twenty or thereabouts on each side, supporting a flat roof. There were vaulted side aisles, and, at the farther end, a bronze canopy over the high altar; and all along the length of the side aisles were shrines with pictures, sculpture, and burning lamps; the whole church, too, was lined with marble: the roof was gilded; and yet the general effect of severe and noble simplicity triumphed over all the ornament. I should have taken it for a Roman temple, retaining nearly its pristine aspect; but Murray tells us that it was founded A. D. 342 by Pope Liberius, on the spot precisely marked out by a miraculous fall of snow, in the month of August, and it has undergone many alterations since his time. But it is very fine, and gives the beholder the idea of vastness, which seems harder to attain than anything else. On the right hand, approaching the high altar, there is a chapel, separated from the rest of the church by an iron paling; and, being admitted into it with another party, I found it most elaborately magnificent. But one magnificence outshone another, and made itself the brightest conceivable for the moment. However, this chapel was as rich as the most precious marble could make it, in pillars and pilasters, and broad, polished slabs, covering the whole walls (except where there were splendid and glowing frescos; or where some monumental statuary or bas-relief, or mosaic picture filled up an arched niche). Its architecture was a dome, resting on four great arches; and in size it would alone have been a church. In the centre of the mosaic pavement there was a flight of steps, down which we went, and saw a group in marble, representing the nativity of Christ, which, judging by the unction with which our guide talked about it, must have been of peculiar sanctity. I hate to leave this chapel and church, without being able to say any one thing that may reflect a portion of their beauty, or of the feeling which they excite. Kneeling against many of the pillars there were persons in prayer, and I stepped softly, fearing lest my tread on the marble pavement should disturb them,--a needless precaution, however, for nobody seems to expect it, nor to be disturbed by the lack of it. The situation of the church, I should suppose, is the loftiest in Rome: it has a fountain at one end, and a column at the other; but I did not pay particular attention to either, nor to the exterior of the church itself. On my return, I turned aside from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinalis, and was led by it into the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. The street through which I passed was broader, cleanlier, and statelier than most streets in Rome, and bordered by palaces; and the piazza had noble edifices around it, and a fountain, an obelisk, and two nude statues in the centre. The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite, into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the statues were colossal,--two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery steed. On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the other, OPUS PRAXITELIS. What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance,--at a street corner, as it were,--on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority on which these statues (Castor and Pollux, I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be. On one side of the piazza is the Pontifical Palace; but, not being aware of this at the time, I did not look particularly at the edifice. I came home by way of the Corso, which seemed a little enlivened by Carnival time; though, as it was not yet two o'clock, the fun had not begun for the day. The rain throws a dreary damper on the festivities. February 13th.--Day before yesterday we took J----- and R----- in a carriage, and went to see the Carnival, by driving up and down the Corso. It was as ugly a day, as respects weather, as has befallen us since we came to Rome,--cloudy, with an indecisive wet, which finally settled into a rain; and people say that such is generally the weather in Carnival time. There is very little to be said about the spectacle. Sunshine would have improved it, no doubt; but a person must have very broad sunshine within himself to be joyous on such shallow provocation. The street, at all events, would have looked rather brilliant under a sunny sky, the balconies being hung with bright-colored draperies, which were also flung out of some of the windows. . . . . Soon I had my first experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my face. . . . . Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the face were a protection for both sexes,--not a needless one, for I received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears. It seems to be a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English) not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies. We had one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T------ was there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a handful of lime. Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums. Possibly we may not have received our fair share of these last salutes, for J----- had on a black mask, which made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti that we might otherwise have escaped. A good many bouquets were flung at our little R-----, and at us generally. . . . . This was what is called masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the great majority of people appeared without them. . . . . Two fantastic figures, with enormous heads, set round with frizzly hair, came and grinned into our carriage, and J----- tore out a handful of hair (which proved to be sea-weed) from one of their heads, rather to the discomposure of the owner, who muttered his indignation in Italian. . . . . On comparing notes with J----- and R-----, indeed with U---- too, I find that they all enjoyed the Carnival much more than I did. Only the young ought to write descriptions of such scenes. My cold criticism chills the life out of it. February 14th.--Friday, 12th, was a sunny day, the first that we had had for some time; and my wife and I went forth to see sights as well as to make some calls that had long been due. We went first to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which I have already mentioned, and, on our return, we went to the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, and saw those admirable ancient statues of Castor and Pollux, which seem to me sons of the morning, and full of life and strength. The atmosphere, in such a length of time, has covered the marble surface of these statues with a gray rust, that envelops both the men and horses as with a garment; besides which, there are strange discolorations, such as patches of white moss on the elbows, and reddish streaks down the sides; but the glory of form overcomes all these defects of color. It is pleasant to observe how familiar some little birds are with these colossal statues,--hopping about on their heads and over their huge fists, and very likely they have nests in their ears or among their hair. We called at the Barberini Palace, where William Story has established himself and family for the next seven years, or more, on the third piano, in apartments that afford a very fine outlook over Rome, and have the sun in them through most of the day. Mrs. S---- invited us to her fancy ball, but we declined. On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of his lions on the monument in St. Peter's. Afterwards we made two or three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston. He has very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe. . . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra. William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him last, a very young man. His perplexing variety of talents and accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something very good. He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her; a very type of virginity and simplicity. The statue of Cleopatra, now only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject, and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with adequate skill. He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names. By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has put all possible characteristics of her time and nation and of her own individuality, asked, "Have you baptized your statue yet?" as if the sculptor were waiting till his statue were finished before he chose the subject of it,--as, indeed, I should think many sculptors do. Another remarked of a statue of Hero, who is seeking Leander by torchlight, and in momentary expectation of finding his drowned body, "Is not the face a little sad?" Another time a whole party of Americans filed into his studio, and ranged themselves round his father's statue, and, after much silent examination, the spokesman of the party inquired, "Well, sir, what is this intended to represent?" William Story, in telling these little anecdotes, gave the Yankee twang to perfection. . . . . The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw. In the outer room of his studio a stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work, transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a wonderful degree of expression in the face. It is not quite pleasant to think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely mechanical people. It is generally only the finishing touches that are given by his own chisel. Yesterday, being another bright day, we went to the basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the basilica next in rank to St. Peter's, and has the precedence of it as regards certain sacred privileges. It stands on a most noble site, on the outskirts of the city, commanding a view of the Sabine and Alban hills, blue in the distance, and some of them hoary with sunny snow. The ruins of the Claudian aqueduct are close at hand. The church is connected with the Lateran palace and museum, so that the whole is one edifice; but the facade of the church distinguishes it, and is very lofty and grand,--more so, it seems to me, than that of St. Peter's. Under the portico is an old statue of Constantine, representing him as a very stout and sturdy personage. The inside of the church disappointed me, though no doubt I should have been wonderstruck had I seen it a month ago. We went into one of the chapels, which was very rich in colored marbles; and, going down a winding staircase, found ourselves among the tombs and sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble Pieta very beautifully sculptured. On the other side of the church we looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded, but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder tint which time bestows on sculpture. The tombs and statues appeared like shapes and images of new-fallen snow. The most interesting thing which we saw in this church (and, admitting its authenticity, there can scarcely be a more interesting one anywhere) was the table at which the Last Supper was eaten. It is preserved in a corridor, on one side of the tribune or chancel, and is shown by torchlight suspended upon the wall beneath a covering of glass. Only the top of the table is shown, presenting a broad, flat surface of wood, evidently very old, and showing traces of dry-rot in one or two places. There are nails in it, and the attendant said that it had formerly been covered with bronze. As well as I can remember, it may be five or six feet square, and I suppose would accommodate twelve persons, though not if they reclined in the Roman fashion, nor if they sat as they do in Leonardo da Vinci's picture. It would be very delightful to believe in this table. There are several other sacred relics preserved in the church; for instance, the staircase of Pilate's house up which Jesus went, and the porphyry slab on which the soldiers cast lots for his garments. These, however, we did not see. There are very glowing frescos on portions of the walls; but, there being much whitewash instead of incrusted marble, it has not the pleasant aspect which one's eye learns to demand in Roman churches. There is a good deal of statuary along the columns of the nave, and in the monuments of the side aisles. In reference to the interior splendor of Roman churches, I must say that I think it a pity that painted windows are exclusively a Gothic ornament; for the elaborate ornamentation of these interiors puts the ordinary daylight out of countenance, so that a window with only the white sunshine coming through it, or even with a glimpse of the blue Italian sky, looks like a portion left unfinished, and therefore a blotch in the rich wall. It is like the one spot in Aladdin's palace which he left for the king, his father-in-law, to finish, after his fairy architects had exhausted their magnificence on the rest; and the sun, like the king, fails in the effort. It has what is called a porta santa, which we saw walled up, in front of the church, one side of the main entrance. I know not what gives it its sanctity, but it appears to be opened by the pope on a year of jubilee, once every quarter of a century. After our return . . . . . I took R----- along the Pincian Hill, and finally, after witnessing what of the Carnival could be seen in the Piazza del Popolo from that safe height, we went down into the Corso, and some little distance along it. Except for the sunshine, the scene was much the same as I have already described; perhaps fewer confetti and more bouquets. Some Americans and English are said to have been brought before the police authorities, and fined for throwing lime. It is remarkable that the jollity, such as it is, of the Carnival, does not extend an inch beyond the line of the Corso; there it flows along in a narrow stream, while in the nearest street we see nothing but the ordinary Roman gravity. February 15th.--Yesterday was a bright day, but I did not go out till the afternoon, when I took an hour's walk along the Pincian, stopping a good while to look at the old beggar who, for many years past, has occupied one of the platforms of the flight of steps leading from the Piazza de' Spagna to the Triniti de' Monti. Hillard commemorates him in his book. He is an unlovely object, moving about on his hands and knees, principally by aid of his hands, which are fortified with a sort of wooden shoes; while his poor, wasted lower shanks stick up in the air behind him, loosely vibrating as he progresses. He is gray, old, ragged, a pitiable sight, but seems very active in his own fashion, and bestirs himself on the approach of his visitors with the alacrity of a spider when a fly touches the remote circumference of his web. While I looked down at him he received alms from three persons, one of whom was a young woman of the lower orders; the other two were gentlemen, probably either English or American. I could not quite make out the principle on which he let some people pass without molestation, while he shuffled from one end of the platform to the other to intercept an occasional individual. He is not persistent in his demands, nor, indeed, is this a usual fault among Italian beggars. A shake of the head will stop him when wriggling towards you from a distance. I fancy he reaps a pretty fair harvest, and no doubt leads as contented and as interesting a life as most people, sitting there all day on those sunny steps, looking at the world, and making his profit out of it. It must be pretty much such an occupation as fishing, in its effect upon the hopes and apprehensions; and probably he suffers no more from the many refusals he meets with than the angler does, when he sees a fish smell at his bait and swim away. One success pays for a hundred disappointments, and the game is all the better for not being entirely in his own favor. Walking onward, I found the Pincian thronged with promenaders, as also with carriages, which drove round the verge of the gardens in an unbroken ring. To-day has been very rainy. I went out in the forenoon, and took a sitting for my bust in one of a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Canova. It was large, high, and dreary from the want of a carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor's studio has not the picturesque charm of that of a painter, where there is color, warmth, and cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the glow of some picture, which is resting against the wall. . . . . I was asked not to look at the bust at the close of the sitting, and, of course, I obeyed; though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking strangely in that guise of clay. . . . . It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon artists. There is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model, and ideas may be made sensible objects at home as well as here. I think it is the peculiar mode of life that attracts, and its freedom from the inthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome offers; and, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another's works, yet they keep each other warm by the presence of so many of them. The Carnival still continues, though I hardly see how it can have withstood such a damper as this rainy day. There were several people-- three, I think--killed in the Corso on Saturday; some accounts say that they were run over by the horses in the race; others, that they were ridden down by the dragoons in clearing the course. After leaving Canova's studio, I stepped into the church of San Luigi de' Francesi, in the Via di Ripetta. It was built, I believe, by Catherine de' Medici, and is under the protection of the French government, and a most shamefully dirty place of worship, the beautiful marble columns looking dingy, for the want of loving and pious care. There are many tombs and monuments of French people, both of the past and present,-- artists, soldiers, priests, and others, who have died in Rome. It was so dusky within the church that I could hardly distinguish the pictures in the chapels and over the altar, nor did I know that there were any worth looking for. Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and oil-paintings by Guido and others. I found it peculiarly touching to read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I was even less akin to them than they to Italy. Still, there was a sort of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here. February 17th.--Yesterday morning was perfectly sunny, and we went out betimes to see churches; going first to the Capuchins', close by the Piazza Barberini. ["The Marble Faun" takes up this description of the church and of the dead monk, which we really saw, just as recounted, even to the sudden stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, as we looked at him.-- ED.] We next went to the Trinita de' Monti, which stands at the head of the steps, leading, in several flights, from the Piazza de' Spagna. It is now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into the church. This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead. Unlike the Capuchins', which was filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, this church was most exquisitely neat, as women alone would have thought it worth while to keep it. It is not a very splendid church, not rich in gorgeous marbles, but pleasant to be in, if it were only for the sake of its godly purity. There was only one person in the nave; a young girl, who sat perfectly still, with her face towards the altar, as long as we stayed. Between the nave and the rest of the church there is a high iron railing, and on the other side of it were two kneeling figures in black, so motionless that I at first thought them statues; but they proved to be two nuns at their devotions; and others of the sisterhood came by and by and joined them. Nuns, at least these nuns, who are French, and probably ladies of refinement, having the education of young girls in charge, are far pleasanter objects to see and think about than monks; the odor of sanctity, in the latter, not being an agreeable fragrance. But these holy sisters, with their black crape and white muslin, looked really pure and unspotted from the world. On the iron railing above mentioned was the representation of a golden heart, pierced with arrows; for these are nuns of the Sacred Heart. In the various chapels there are several paintings in fresco, some by Daniele da Volterra; and one of them, the "Descent from the Cross," has been pronounced the third greatest picture in the world. I never should have had the slightest suspicion that it was a great picture at all, so worn and faded it looks, and so hard, so difficult to be seen, and so undelightful when one does see it. From the Trinita we went to the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church built on a spot where Nero is said to have been buried, and which was afterwards made horrible by devilish phantoms. It now being past twelve, and all the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other famous men, which are to be seen here. I remember dimly the magnificent chapel of the Chigi family, and little else, for we stayed but a short time; and went next to the sculptor's studio, where I had another sitting for my bust. After I had been moulded for about an hour, we turned homeward; but my wife concluded to hire a balcony for this last afternoon and evening of the Carnival, and she took possession of it, while I went home to send to her Miss S------ and the two elder children. For my part, I took R-----, and walked, by way of the Pincian, to the Piazza del Popolo, and thence along the Corso, where, by this time, the warfare of bouquets and confetti raged pretty fiercely. The sky being blue and the sun bright, the scene looked much gayer and brisker than I had before found it; and I can conceive of its being rather agreeable than otherwise, up to the age of twenty. We got several volleys of confetti. R----- received a bouquet and a sugar-plum, and I a resounding hit from something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower. Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch of it, without very widely departing from truth. February 19th.--Day before yesterday, pretty early, we went to St. Peter's, expecting to see the pope cast ashes on the heads of the cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday. On arriving, however, we found no more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, we went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican, seeking for the chapel. We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of the palace; there is an entrance from some point near the front of the church, but this we did not find. The papal guards, in the strangest antique and antic costume that was ever seen,--a party-colored dress, striped with blue, red, and yellow, white and black, with a doublet and ruff, and trunk-breeches, and armed with halberds,--were on duty at the gateways, but suffered us to pass without question. Finally, we reached a large court, where some cardinals' red equipages and other carriages were drawn up, but were still at a loss as to the whereabouts of the chapel. At last an attendant kindly showed us the proper door, and led us up flights of stairs, along passages and galleries, and through halls, till at last we came to a spacious and lofty apartment adorned with frescos; this was the Sala Regia, and the antechamber to the Sistine Chapel. The attendant, meanwhile, had informed us that my wife could not be admitted to the chapel in her bonnet, and that I myself could not enter at all, for lack of a dress-coat; so my wife took off her bonnet, and, covering her head with her black lace veil, was readily let in, while I remained in the Sala Regia, with several other gentlemen, who found themselves in the same predicament as I was. There was a wonderful variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me, comprising garbs that have been elsewhere laid aside for at least three centuries,--the broad, plaited, double ruff, and black velvet cloak, doublet, trunk-breeches, and sword of Queen Elizabeth's time,--the papal guard, in their striped and party-colored dress as before described, looking not a little like harlequins; other soldiers in helmets and jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests; attendants in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; gentlemen, some in black dress-coats and pantaloons, others in wide-awake hats and tweed overcoats; and a few ladies in the prescribed costume of black; so that, in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball. By and by, the cardinals began to arrive, and added their splendid purple robes and red hats to make the picture still more brilliant. They were old men, one or two very aged and infirm, and generally men of bulk and substance, with heavy faces, fleshy about the chin. Their red hats, trimmed with gold-lace, are a beautiful piece of finery, and are identical in shape with the black, loosely cocked beavers worn by the Catholic ecclesiastics generally. Wolsey's hat, which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition, might have been made on the same block, but apparently was never cocked, as the fashion now is. The attendants changed the upper portions of their master's attire, and put a little cap of scarlet cloth on each of their heads, after which the cardinals, one by one, or two by two, as they happened to arrive, went into the chapel, with a page behind each holding up his purple train. In the mean while, within the chapel, we heard singing and chanting; and whenever the voluminous curtains that hung before the entrance were slightly drawn apart, we outsiders glanced through, but could see only a mass of people, and beyond them still another chapel, divided from the hither one by a screen. When almost everybody had gone in, there was a stir among the guards and attendants, and a door opened, apparently communicating with the inner apartments of the Vatican. Through this door came, not the pope, as I had partly expected, but a bulky old lady in black, with a red face, who bowed towards the spectators with an aspect of dignified complaisance as she passed towards the entrance of the chapel. I took off my hat, unlike certain English gentlemen who stood nearer, and found that I had not done amiss, for it was the Queen of Spain. There was nothing else to be seen; so I went back through the antechambers (which are noble halls, richly frescoed on the walls and ceilings), endeavoring to get out through the same passages that had let me in. I had already tried to descend what I now supposed to be the Scala Santa, but had been turned back by a sentinel. After wandering to and fro a good while, I at last found myself in a long, long gallery, on each side of which were innumerable inscriptions, in Greek and Latin, on slabs of marble, built into the walls; and classic altars and tablets were ranged along, from end to end. At the extremity was a closed iron grating, from which I was retreating; but a French gentleman accosted me, with the information that the custode would admit me, if I chose, and would accompany me through the sculpture department of the Vatican. I acceded, and thus took my first view of those innumerable art-treasures, passing from one object to another, at an easy pace, pausing hardly a moment anywhere, and dismissing even the Apollo, and the Laocoon, and the Torso of Hercules, in the space of half a dozen breaths. I was well enough content to do so, in order to get a general idea of the contents of the galleries, before settling down upon individual objects. Most of the world-famous sculptures presented themselves to my eye with a kind of familiarity, through the copies and casts which I had seen; but I found the originals more different than I anticipated. The Apollo, for instance, has a face which I have never seen in any cast or copy. I must confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its windows,--more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious vases, and two seat sarcophagi,--than with the statuary. Thus I went round the whole, and was dismissed through the grated barrier into the gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made my way out of the palace. . . . . Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way; after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo. The first observation which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum, and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun. It must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples. The second observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how to express it. But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well to your steps. . . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the merit of the sculptures aloft. . . . . After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I allude. Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short, they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not in the least troubled by the proximity. It must be that their sense of the beautiful is stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and that it observes only what is fit to gratify it. To-day, which was bright and cool, my wife and I set forth immediately after breakfast, in search of the Baths of Diocletian, and the church of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. We went too far along the Via di Porta Pia, and after passing by two or three convents, and their high garden walls, and the villa Bonaparte on one side, and the villa Torlonia on the other, at last issued through the city gate. Before us, far away, were the Alban hills, the loftiest of which was absolutely silvered with snow and sunshine, and set in the bluest and brightest of skies. We now retraced our steps to the Fountain of the Termini, where is a ponderous heap of stone, representing Moses striking the rock; a colossal figure, not without a certain enormous might and dignity, though rather too evidently looking his awfullest. This statue was the death of its sculptor, whose heart was broken on account of the ridicule it excited. There are many more absurd aquatic devices in Rome, however, and few better. We turned into the Piazza de' Termini, the entrance of which is at this fountain; and after some inquiry of the French soldiers, a numerous detachment of whom appear to be quartered in the vicinity, we found our way to the portal of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. The exterior of this church has no pretensions to beauty or majesty, or, indeed, to architectural merit of any kind, or to any architecture whatever; for it looks like a confused pile of ruined brickwork, with a facade resembling half the inner curve of a large oven. No one would imagine that there was a church under that enormous heap of ancient rubbish. But the door admits you into a circular vestibule, once an apartment of Diocletian's Baths, but now a portion of the nave of the church, and surrounded with monumental busts; and thence you pass into what was the central hall; now, with little change, except of detail and ornament, transformed into the body of the church. This space is so lofty, broad, and airy, that the soul forthwith swells out and magnifies itself, for the sake of filling it. It was Michael Angelo who contrived this miracle; and I feel even more grateful to him for rescuing such a noble interior from destruction, than if he had originally built it himself. In the ceiling above, you see the metal fixtures whereon the old Romans hung their lamps; and there are eight gigantic pillars of Egyptian granite, standing as they stood of yore. There is a grand simplicity about the church, more satisfactory than elaborate ornament; but the present pope has paved and adorned one of the large chapels of the transept in very beautiful style, and the pavement of the central part is likewise laid in rich marbles. In the choir there are several pictures, one of which was veiled, as celebrated pictures frequently are in churches. A person, who seemed to be at his devotions, withdrew the veil for us, and we saw a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino, originally, I believe, painted in fresco in St. Peter's, but since transferred to canvas, and removed hither. Its place at St. Peter's is supplied by a mosaic copy. I was a good deal impressed by this picture,--the dying saint, amid the sorrow of those who loved him, and the fury of his enemies, looking upward, where a company of angels, and Jesus with them, are waiting to welcome him and crown him; and I felt what an influence pictures might have upon the devotional part of our nature. The nailmarks in the hands and feet of Jesus, ineffaceable, even after he had passed into bliss and glory, touched my heart with a sense of his love for us. I think this really a great picture. We walked round the church, looking at other paintings and frescos, but saw no others that greatly interested us. In the vestibule there are monuments to Carlo Maratti and Salvator Rosa, and there is a statue of St. Bruno, by Houdon, which is pronounced to be very fine. I thought it good, but scarcely worthy of vast admiration. Houdon was the sculptor of the first statue of Washington, and of the bust, whence, I suppose, all subsequent statues have been, and will be, mainly modelled. After emerging from the church, I looked back with wonder at the stack of shapeless old brickwork that hid the splendid interior. I must go there again, and breathe freely in that noble space. February 20th.--This morning, after breakfast, I walked across the city, making a pretty straight course to the Pantheon, and thence to the bridge of St. Angelo, and to St. Peter's. It had been my purpose to go to the Fontana Paolina; but, finding that the distance was too great, and being weighed down with a Roman lassitude, I concluded to go into St. Peter's. Here I looked at Michael Angelo's Pieta, a representation of the dead Christ, in his mother's lap. Then I strolled round the great church, and find that it continues to grow upon me both in magnitude and beauty, by comparison with the many interiors of sacred edifices which I have lately seen. At times, a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening beyond arch, and I am surprised into admiration. I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way; not when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks suddenly through a vista, among a crowd of other thoughts. Passing near the confessional for foreigners to-day, I saw a Spaniard, who had just come out of the one devoted to his native tongue, taking leave of his confessor, with an affectionate reverence, which--as well as the benign dignity of the good father--it was good to behold. . . . . I returned home early, in order to go with my wife to the Barberini Palace at two o'clock. We entered through the gateway, through the Via delle Quattro Fontane, passing one or two sentinels; for there is apparently a regiment of dragoons quartered on the ground-floor of the palace; and I stumbled upon a room containing their saddles, the other day, when seeking for Mr. Story's staircase. The entrance to the picture-gallery is by a door on the right hand, affording us a sight of a beautiful spiral staircase, which goes circling upward from the very basement to the very summit of the palace, with a perfectly easy ascent, yet confining its sweep within a moderate compass. We looked up through the interior of the spiral, as through a tube, from the bottom to the top. The pictures are contained in three contiguous rooms of the lower piano, and are few in number, comprising barely half a dozen which I should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way. One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest, most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it were, by the motion of their hands and fingers. It is a very queer, as well as a very remarkable picture. But we passed hastily by this, and almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous,--Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci. These were found in the last of the three rooms, and as regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything; for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else. . . . . It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, nor could do it, again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted "better than he knew." I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for, no doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it. Close beside Beatrice Cenci hangs the Fornarina. . . . . While we were looking at these works Miss M------ unexpectedly joined us, and we went, all three together, to the Rospigliosi Palace, in the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. A porter, in cocked hat, and with a staff of office, admitted us into a spacious court before the palace, and directed us to a garden on one side, raised as much as twenty feet above the level on which we stood. The gardener opened the gate for us, and we ascended a beautiful stone staircase, with a carved balustrade, bearing many marks of time and weather. Reaching the garden-level, we found it laid out in walks, bordered with box and ornamental shrubbery, amid which were lemon-trees, and one large old exotic from some distant clime. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by a stone balustrade, like that of the staircase, was a fish-pond, into which several jets of water were continually spouting; and on pedestals, that made part of the balusters, stood eight marble statues of Apollo, Cupid, nymphs, and other such sunny and beautiful people of classic mythology. There had been many more of these statues, but the rest had disappeared, and those which remained had suffered grievous damage, here to a nose, there to a hand or foot, and often a fracture of the body, very imperfectly mended. There was a pleasant sunshine in the garden, and a springlike, or rather a genial, autumnal atmosphere, though elsewhere it was a day of poisonous Roman chill. At the end of the garden, which was of no great extent, was an edifice, bordering on the piazza, called the Casino, which, I presume, means a garden-house. The front is richly ornamented with bas-reliefs, and statues in niches; as if it were a place for pleasure and enjoyment, and therefore ought to be beautiful. As we approached it, the door swung open, and we went into a large room on the ground-floor, and, looking up to the ceiling, beheld Guido's Aurora. The picture is as fresh and brilliant as if he had painted it with the morning sunshine which it represents. It could not be more lustrous in its lines, if he had given it the last touch an hour ago. Three or four artists were copying it at that instant, and positively their colors did not look brighter, though a great deal newer than his. The alacrity and movement, briskness and morning stir and glow, of the picture are wonderful. It seems impossible to catch its glory in a copy. Several artists, as I said, were making the attempt, and we saw two other attempted copies leaning against the wall, but it was easy to detect failure in just essential points. My memory, I believe, will be somewhat enlivened by this picture hereafter: not that I remember it very distinctly even now; but bright things leave a sheen and glimmer in the mind, like Christian's tremulous glimpse of the Celestial City. In two other rooms of the Casino we saw pictures by Domenichino, Rubens, and other famous painters, which I do not mean to speak of, because I cared really little or nothing about them. Returning into the garden, the sunny warmth of which was most grateful after the chill air and cold pavement of the Casino, we walked round the laguna, examining the statues, and looking down at some little fishes that swarmed at the stone margin of the pool. There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family: one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's bosom. The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors, which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face. An old painter very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna, with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be literally copied. Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St. Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits. I have long ago exhausted all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other. Its shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome, both of which are magnificently frescoed. Around the base of the larger dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white marble. The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall, forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make even more gorgeous than the main body of the church. They contain beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare, and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery gem as big as a turkey's egg. The pavement of the church was one star of various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I believe, the tomb of the founder. I have not seen, nor expect to see, anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home. I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome. He seems quite a man of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities. February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo, intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would probably result. I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch. Two other persons likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I stayed, and at last seemed to give it up. The banks and vicinity of the river are very bare and uninviting, as I then saw them; no shade, no verdure,--a rough, neglected aspect, and a peculiar shabbiness about the few houses that were visible. Farther down the stream the dome of St. Peter's showed itself on the other side, seeming to stand on the outskirts of the city. I walked along the banks, with some expectation of finding a ferry, by which I might cross the river; but my course was soon interrupted by the wall, and I turned up a lane that led me straight back again to the Porta del Popolo. I stopped a moment, however, to see some young men pitching quoits, which they appeared to do with a good deal of skill. I went along the Via di Ripetta, and through other streets, stepping into two or three churches, one of which was the Pantheon. . . . . There are, I think, seven deep, pillared recesses around the circumference of it, each of which becomes a sufficiently capacious chapel; and alternately with these chapels there is a marble structure, like the architecture of a doorway, beneath which is the shrine of a saint; so that the whole circle of the Pantheon is filled up with the seven chapels and seven shrines. A number of persons were sitting or kneeling around; others came in while I was there, dipping their fingers in the holy water, and bending the knee, as they passed the shrines and chapels, until they reached the one which, apparently, they had selected as the particular altar for their devotions. Everybody seemed so devout, and in a frame of mind so suited to the day and place, that it really made me feel a little awkward not to be able to kneel down along with them. Unlike the worshippers in our own churches, each individual here seems to do his own individual acts of devotion, and I cannot but think it better so than to make an effort for united prayer as we do. It is my opinion that a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive in people's hearts by the Catholic mode of worship. Soon leaving the Pantheon, a few minutes' walk towards the Corso brought me to the Church of St. Ignazio, which belongs to the College of the Jesuits. It is spacious and of beautiful architecture, but not strikingly distinguished, in the latter particular, from many others; a wide and lofty nave, supported upon marble columns, between which arches open into the side aisles, and at the junction of the nave and transept a dome, resting on four great arches. The church seemed to be purposely somewhat darkened, so that I could not well see the details of the ornamentation, except the frescos on the ceiling of the nave, which were very brilliant, and done in so effectual a style, that I really could not satisfy myself that some of the figures did not actually protrude from the ceiling,--in short, that they were not colored bas-reliefs, instead of frescos. No words can express the beautiful effect, in an upholstery point of view, of this kind of decoration. Here, as at the Pantheon, there were many persons sitting silent, kneeling, or passing from shrine to shrine. I reached home at about twelve, and, at one, set out again, with my wife, towards St. Peter's, where we meant to stay till after vespers. We walked across the city, and through the Piazza de Navona, where we stopped to look at one of Bernini's absurd fountains, of which the water makes but the smallest part,--a little squirt or two amid a prodigious fuss of gods and monsters. Thence we passed by the poor, battered-down torso of Pasquin, and came, by devious ways, to the bridge of St. Angelo; the streets bearing pretty much their weekday aspect, many of the shops open, the market-stalls doing their usual business, and the people brisk and gay, though not indecorously so. I suppose there was hardly a man or woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing which--the prayers, I mean--it would be absurd to predicate of London, New York, or any Protestant city. In however adulterated a guise, the Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure as if it came from better cisterns, or from the original fountain-head. Arriving at St. Peter's shortly after two, we walked round the whole church, looking at all the pictures and most of the monuments, . . . . and paused longest before Guido's "Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer." This is surely one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the human conceptions that are imbued most deeply with the celestial. . . . . We then sat down in one of the aisles and awaited the beginning of vespers, which we supposed would take place at half past three. Four o'clock came, however, and no vespers; and as our dinner-hour is five, . . . . we at last cane away without hearing the vesper hymn. February 23d.--Yesterday, at noon, we set out for the Capitol, and after going up the acclivity (not from the Forum, but from the opposite direction), stopped to look at the statues of Castor and Pollux, which, with other sculptures, look down the ascent. Castor and his brother seem to me to have heads disproportionately large, and are not so striking, in any respect, as such great images ought to be. But we heartily admired the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, . . . . and looked at a fountain, principally composed, I think, of figures representing the Nile and the Tiber, who loll upon their elbows and preside over the gushing water; and between them, against the facade of the Senator's Palace, there is a statue of Minerva, with a petticoat of red porphyry. Having taken note of these objects, we went to the museum, in an edifice on our left, entering the piazza, and here, in the vestibule, we found various old statues and relics. Ascending the stairs, we passed through a long gallery, and, turning to our left, examined somewhat more carefully a suite of rooms running parallel with it. The first of these contained busts of the Caesars and their kindred, from the epoch of the mightiest Julius downward; eighty-three, I believe, in all. I had seen a bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum, and was surprised at its thin and withered aspect; but this head is of a very ugly old man indeed,--wrinkled, puckered, shrunken, lacking breadth and substance; careworn, grim, as if he had fought hard with life, and had suffered in the conflict; a man of schemes, and of eager effort to bring his schemes to pass. His profile is by no means good, advancing from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, and retreating, at about the same angle, from the latter point to the bottom of his chin, which seems to be thrust forcibly down into his meagre neck,--not that he pokes his head forward, however, for it is particularly erect. The head of Augustus is very beautiful, and appears to be that of a meditative, philosophic man, saddened with the sense that it is not very much worth while to be at the summit of human greatness after all. It is a sorrowful thing to trace the decay of civilization through this series of busts, and to observe how the artistic skill, so requisite at first, went on declining through the dreary dynasty of the Caesars, till at length the master of the world could not get his head carved in better style than the figure-head of a ship. In the next room there were better statues than we had yet seen; but in the last room of the range we found the "Dying Gladiator," of which I had already caught a glimpse in passing by the open door. It had made all the other treasures of the gallery tedious in my eagerness to come to that. I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other block of stone. Like all works of the highest excellence, however, it makes great demands upon the spectator. He must make a generous gift of his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface. It suggests far more than it shows. I looked long at this statue, and little at anything else, though, among other famous works, a statue of Antinous was in the same room. I was glad when we left the museum, which, by the by, was piercingly chill, as if the multitude of statues radiated cold out of their marble substance. We might have gone to see the pictures in the Palace of the Conservatori, and S-----, whose receptivity is unlimited and forever fresh, would willingly have done so; but I objected, and we went towards the Forum. I had noticed, two or three times, an inscription over a mean-looking door in this neighborhood, stating that here was the entrance to the prison of the holy apostles Peter and Paul; and we soon found the spot, not far from the Forum, with two wretched frescos of the apostles above the inscription. We knocked at the door without effect; but a lame beggar, who sat at another door of the same house (which looked exceedingly like a liquor-shop), desired us to follow him, and began to ascend to the Capitol, by the causeway leading from the Forum. A little way upward we met a woman, to whom the beggar delivered us over, and she led us into a church or chapel door, and pointed to a long flight of steps, which descended through twilight into utter darkness. She called to somebody in the lower regions, and then went away, leaving us to get down this mysterious staircase by ourselves. Down we went, farther and farther from the daylight, and found ourselves, anon, in a dark chamber or cell, the shape or boundaries of which we could not make out, though it seemed to be of stone, and black and dungeon-like. Indistinctly, and from a still farther depth in the earth, we heard voices,--one voice, at least,--apparently not addressing ourselves, but some other persons; and soon, directly beneath our feet, we saw a glimmering of light through a round, iron-grated hole in the bottom of the dungeon. In a few moments the glimmer and the voice came up through this hole, and the light disappeared, and it and the voice came glimmering and babbling up a flight of stone stairs, of which we had not hitherto been aware. It was the custode, with a party of visitors, to whom he had been showing St. Peter's dungeon. Each visitor was provided with a wax taper, and the custode gave one to each of us, bidding us wait a moment while he conducted the other party to the upper air. During his absence we examined the cell, as well as our dim lights would permit, and soon found an indentation in the wall, with an iron grate put over it for protection, and an inscription above informing us that the Apostle Peter had here left the imprint of his visage; and, in truth, there is a profile there,--forehead, nose, mouth, and chin,--plainly to be seen, an intaglio in the solid rock. We touched it with the tips of our fingers, as well as saw it with our eyes. The custode soon returned, and led us down the darksome steps, chattering in Italian all the time. It is not a very long descent to the lower cell, the roof of which is so low that I believe I could have reached it with my hand. We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness. Here Jugurtha starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and, methinks, there cannot be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering. In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath. It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,-- the stones of which it is constructed being as black as midnight. The custode showed us a stone post, at the side of the cell, with the hole in the top of it, into which, he said, St. Peter's chain had been fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer. The miracle was perhaps the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the dungeon oozy with wet. However, it is best to be as simple and childlike as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether or no he ever was in the prison at all, still the belief of a thousand years and more gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions. The custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us drank a sip; and, what is very remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome. I suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its qualities according to the faith of those who drink it. The staircase descending into the lower dungeon is comparatively modern, there having been no entrance of old, except through the small circular opening in the roof. In the upper cell the custode showed us an ancient flight of stairs, now built into the wall, which used to lead from the Capitol. The whole precincts are now consecrated, and I believe the upper portion, perhaps both upper and lower, are a shrine or a chapel. I now left S------ in the Forum, and went to call on Mr. J. P. K------ at the Hotel d'Europe. I found him just returned from a drive,--a gentleman of about sixty, or more, with gray hair, a pleasant, intellectual face, and penetrating, but not unkindly eyes. He moved infirmly, being on the recovery from an illness. We went up to his saloon together, and had a talk,--or, rather, he had it nearly all to himself,--and particularly sensible talk, too, and full of the results of learning and experience. In the first place, he settled the whole Kansas difficulty; then he made havoc of St. Peter, who came very shabbily out of his hands, as regarded his early character in the Church, and his claims to the position he now holds in it. Mr. K------ also gave a curious illustration, from something that happened to himself, of the little dependence that can be placed on tradition purporting to be ancient, and I capped his story by telling him how the site of my town-pump, so plainly indicated in the sketch itself, has already been mistaken in the city council and in the public prints. February 24th.--Yesterday I crossed the Ponte Sisto, and took a short ramble on the other side of the river; and it rather surprised me to discover, pretty nearly opposite the Capitoline Hill, a quay, at which several schooners and barks, of two or three hundred tons' burden, were moored. There was also a steamer, armed with a large gun and two brass swivels on her forecastle, and I know not what artillery besides. Probably she may have been a revenue-cutter. Returning I crossed the river by way of the island of St. Bartholomew over two bridges. The island is densely covered with buildings, and is a separate small fragment of the city. It was a tradition of the ancient Romans that it was formed by the aggregation of soil and rubbish brought down by the river, and accumulating round the nucleus of some sunken baskets. On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so from being closely linked in, indeed, identified with the shops, habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome. The most striking portion was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of San Gregorio. All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and dreary. . . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen. The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England. By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I supposed would lead to one of the city gates. It was a lonely path: on my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a thousand years. On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me, grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.]. The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up gateway. From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes. Reaching the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I entered the Campagna. Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had fancied myself already beyond the walls. As the afternoon was getting advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs round the exterior of the city wall. It was very dreary and solitary,-- not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other. It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over. The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were plastered up with brick or stone. I passed one or two walled-up gateways (by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of the wall. Immediately after this I came to the gate of San Giovanni, just within which is the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and there I was glad to rest myself upon a bench before proceeding homeward. There was a French sentinel at this gateway, as at all the others; for the Gauls have always been a pest to Rome, and now gall her worse than ever. I observed, too, that an official, in citizen's dress, stood there also, and appeared to exercise a supervision over some carts with country produce, that were entering just then. February 25th.--We went this forenoon to the Palazzo Borghese, which is situated on a street that runs at right angles with the Corso, and very near the latter. Most of the palaces in Rome, and the Borghese among them, were built somewhere about the sixteenth century; this in 1590, I believe. It is an immense edifice, standing round the four sides of a quadrangle; and though the suite of rooms comprising the picture-gallery forms an almost interminable vista, they occupy only a part of the ground-floor of one side. We enter from the street into a large court, surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series of arches above. The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat central part of the vault. The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, and seemingly as durable. The whole has a kind of splendid shabbiness thrown over it, like a slight coating of rust; the furniture, at least the damask chairs, being a good deal worn, though there are marble and mosaic tables, which may serve to adorn another palace when this one crumbles away with age. One beautiful hall, with a ceiling more richly gilded than the rest, is panelled all round with large looking-glasses, on which are painted pictures, both landscapes and human figures, in oils; so that the effect is somewhat as if you saw these objects represented in the mirrors. These glasses must be of old date, perhaps coeval with the first building of the palace; for they are so much dimmed, that one's own figure appears indistinct in them, and more difficult to be traced than the pictures which cover them half over. It was very comfortless,-- indeed, I suppose nobody ever thought of being comfortable there, since the house was built,--but especially uncomfortable on a chill, damp day like this. My fingers were quite numb before I got half-way through the suite of apartments, in spite of a brazier of charcoal which was smouldering into ashes in two or three of the rooms. There was not, so far as I remember, a single fireplace in the suite. A considerable number of visitors--not many, however--were there; and a good many artists; and three or four ladies among them were making copies of the more celebrated pictures, and in all or in most cases missing the especial points that made their celebrity and value. The Prince Borghese certainly demeans himself like a kind and liberal gentleman, in throwing open this invaluable collection to the public to see, and for artists to carry away with them, and diffuse all over the world, so far as their own power and skill will permit. It is open every day of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, without any irksome restriction or supervision; and the fee, which custom requires the visitor to pay to the custode, has the good effect of making us feel that we are not intruders, nor received in an exactly eleemosynary way. The thing could not be better managed. The collection is one of the most celebrated in the world, and contains between eight and nine hundred pictures, many of which are esteemed masterpieces. I think I was not in a frame for admiration to-day, nor could achieve that free and generous surrender of myself which I have already said is essential to the proper estimate of anything excellent. Besides, how is it possible to give one's soul, or any considerable part of it, to a single picture, seen for the first time, among a thousand others, all of which set forth their own claims in an equally good light? Furthermore, there is an external weariness, and sense of a thousand-fold sameness to be overcome, before we can begin to enjoy a gallery of the old Italian masters. . . . . I remember but one painter, Francia, who seems really to have approached this awful class of subjects (Christs and Madonnas) in a fitting spirit; his pictures are very singular and awkward, if you look at them with merely an external eye, but they are full of the beauty of holiness, and evidently wrought out as acts of devotion, with the deepest sincerity; and are veritable prayers upon canvas. . . . . I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others,--men of flesh and blood, and warm fists, and human hearts. As compared with them, these mighty Italian masters seem men of polished steel; not human, nor addressing themselves so much to human sympathies, as to a formed, intellectual taste. March 1st.--To-day began very unfavorably; but we ventured out at about eleven o'clock, intending to visit the gallery of the Colonna Palace. Finding it closed, however, on account of the illness of the custode, we determined to go to the picture-gallery of the Capitol; and, on our way thither, we stepped into Il Gesu, the grand and rich church of the Jesuits, where we found a priest in white, preaching a sermon, with vast earnestness of action and variety of tones, insomuch that I fancied sometimes that two priests were in the agony of sermonizing at once. He had a pretty large and seemingly attentive audience clustered round him from the entrance of the church, half-way down the nave; while in the chapels of the transepts and in the remoter distances were persons occupied with their own individual devotion. We sat down near the chapel of St. Ignazio, which is adorned with a picture over the altar, and with marble sculptures of the Trinity aloft, and of angels fluttering at the sides. What I particularly noted (for the angels were not very real personages, being neither earthly nor celestial) was the great ball of lapis lazuli, the biggest in the world, at the feet of the First Person in the Trinity. The church is a splendid one, lined with a great variety of precious marbles, . . . . but partly, perhaps, owing to the dusky light, as well as to the want of cleanliness, there was a dingy effect upon the whole. We made but a very short stay, our New England breeding causing us to feel shy of moving about the church in sermon time. It rained when we reached the Capitol, and, as the museum was not yet open, we went into the Palace of the Conservators, on the opposite side of the piazza. Around the inner court of the ground-floor, partly under two opposite arcades, and partly under the sky, are several statues and other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome to set down. We inquired of two or three French soldiers the way into the picture-gallery; but it is our experience that French soldiers in Rome never know anything of what is around them, not even the name of the palace or public place over which they stand guard; and though invariably civil, you might as well put a question to a statue of an old Roman as to one of them. While we stood under the loggia, however, looking at the rain plashing into the court, a soldier of the Papal Guard kindly directed us up the staircase, and even took pains to go with us to the very entrance of the picture-rooms. Thank Heaven, there are but two of them, and not many pictures which one cares to look at very long. Italian galleries are at a disadvantage as compared with English ones, inasmuch as the pictures are not nearly such splendid articles of upholstery; though, very likely, having undergone less cleaning and varnishing, they may retain more perfectly the finer touches of the masters. Nevertheless, I miss the mellow glow, the rich and mild external lustre, and even the brilliant frames of the pictures I have seen in England. You feel that they have had loving care taken of them; even if spoiled, it is because they have been valued so much. But these pictures in Italian galleries look rusty and lustreless, as far as the exterior is concerned; and, really, the splendor of the painting, as a production of intellect and feeling, has a good deal of difficulty in shining through such clouds. There is a picture at the Capitol, the "Rape of Europa," by Paul Veronese, that would glow with wonderful brilliancy if it were set in a magnificent frame, and covered with a sunshine of varnish; and it is a kind of picture that would not be desecrated, as some deeper and holier ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be bestowed on it. It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded and shabby plight,--this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work. There is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild, ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new sentiment. Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo, an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man of power. A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim masterpieces. When they were painted life was not what it is now, and the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . . It depresses the spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid desperation, to the end. On our way down the staircase we saw several noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum. It seems to me, however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it, being marble, than if it were merely canvas. My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining again. I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the Coliseum. About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially those of the Palace of the Caesars, responded to this martial uproar of the barbarians. There seemed to be no cause for it; but the drummers beat, and the trumpeters blew, as long as I was within hearing. I walked along the Appian Way as far as the Baths of Caracalla. The Palace of the Caesars, which I have never yet explored, appears to be crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose whatever, except the mere delight of annihilating a noble piece of work. There is something in the impulse with which one sympathizes; though I am afraid the destroyers were not sufficiently aware of the mischief they did to enjoy it fully. Probably, too, the early Christians were impelled by religious zeal to destroy the pagan temples, before the happy thought occurred of converting them into churches. March 3d.--This morning was U----'s birthday, and we celebrated it by taking a barouche, and driving (the whole family) out on the Appian Way as far as the tomb of Cecilia Metella. For the first time since we came to Rome, the weather was really warm,--a kind of heat producing languor and disinclination to active movement, though still a little breeze which was stirring threw an occasional coolness over us, and made us distrust the almost sultry atmosphere. I cannot think the Roman climate healthy in any of its moods that I have experienced. Close on the other side of the road are the ruins of a Gothic chapel, little more than a few bare walls and painted windows, and some other fragmentary structures which we did not particularly examine. U---- and I clambered through a gap in the wall, extending from the basement of the tomb, and thus, getting into the field beyond, went quite round the mausoleum and the remains of the castle connected with it. The latter, though still high and stalwart, showed few or no architectural features of interest, being built, I think, principally of large bricks, and not to be compared to English ruins as a beautiful or venerable object. A little way beyond Cecilia Metella's tomb, the road still shows a specimen of the ancient Roman pavement, composed of broad, flat flagstones, a good deal cracked and worn, but sound enough, probably, to outlast the little cubes which make the other portions of the road so uncomfortable. We turned back from this point and soon re-entered the gate of St. Sebastian, which is flanked by two small towers, and just within which is the old triumphal arch of Drusus,--a sturdy construction, much dilapidated as regards its architectural beauty, but rendered far more picturesque than it could have been in its best days by a crown of verdure on its head. Probably so much of the dust of the highway has risen in clouds and settled there, that sufficient soil for shrubbery to root itself has thus been collected, by small annual contributions, in the course of two thousand years. A little farther towards the city we turned aside from the Appian Way, and came to the site of some ancient Columbaria, close by what seemed to partake of the character of a villa and a farm-house. A man came out of the house and unlocked a door in a low building, apparently quite modern; but on entering we found ourselves looking into a large, square chamber, sunk entirely beneath the surface of the ground. A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in each row. Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium. Each semicircular niche was about a foot in its semidiameter. In the centre of this subterranean chamber was a solid square column, or pier, rising to the roof, and containing other niches of the same pattern, besides one that was high and deep, rising to the height of a man from the floor on each of the four sides. In every one of the semicircular niches were two round holes covered with an earthen plate, and in each hole were ashes and little fragments of bones,--the ashes and bones of the dead, whose names were inscribed in Roman capitals on marble slabs inlaid into the wall over each individual niche. Very likely the great ones in the central pier had contained statues, or busts, or large urns; indeed, I remember that some such things were there, as well as bas-reliefs in the walls; but hardly more than the general aspect of this strange place remains in my mind. It was the Columbarium of the connections or dependants of the Caesars; and the impression left on me was, that this mode of disposing of the dead was infinitely preferable to any which has been adopted since that day. The handful or two of dry dust and bits of dry bones in each of the small round holes had nothing disgusting in them, and they are no drier now than they were when first deposited there. I would rather have my ashes scattered over the soil to help the growth of the grass and daisies; but still I should not murmur much at having them decently pigeon-holed in a Roman tomb. After ascending out of this chamber of the dead, we looked down into another similar one, containing the ashes of Pompey's household, which was discovered only a very few years ago. Its arrangement was the same as that first described, except that it had no central pier with a passage round it, as the former had. While we were down in the first chamber the proprietor of the spot--a half-gentlemanly and very affable kind of person--came to us, and explained the arrangements of the Columbarium, though, indeed, we understood them better by their own aspect than by his explanation. The whole soil around his dwelling is elevated much above the level of the road, and it is probable that, if he chose to excavate, he might bring to light many more sepulchral chambers, and find his profit in them too, by disposing of the urns and busts. What struck me as much as anything was the neatness of these subterranean apartments, which were quite as fit to sleep in as most of those occupied by living Romans; and, having undergone no wear and tear, they were in as good condition as on the day they were built. In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows on each side, besides those on the middle pier. All difficulty in finding space for the dead would be obviated by returning to the ancient fashion of reducing them to ashes,--the only objection, though a very serious one, being the quantity of fuel that it would require. But perhaps future chemists may discover some better means of consuming or dissolving this troublesome mortality of ours. We got into the carriage again, and, driving farther towards the city, came to the tomb of the Scipios, of the exterior of which I retain no very definite idea. It was close upon the Appian Way, however, though separated from it by a high fence, and accessible through a gateway, leading into a court. I think the tomb is wholly subterranean, and that the ground above it is covered with the buildings of a farm-house; but of this I cannot be certain, as we were led immediately into a dark, underground passage, by an elderly peasant, of a cheerful and affable demeanor. As soon as he had brought us into the twilight of the tomb, he lighted a long wax taper for each of us, and led us groping into blacker and blacker darkness. Even little R----- followed courageously in the procession, which looked very picturesque as we glanced backward or forward, and beheld a twinkling line of seven lights, glimmering faintly on our faces, and showing nothing beyond. The passages and niches of the tomb seem to have been hewn and hollowed out of the rock, not built by any art of masonry; but the walls were very dark, almost black, and our tapers so dim that I could not gain a sufficient breadth of view to ascertain what kind of place it was. It was very dark, indeed; the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky could not be darker. The rough-hewn roof was within touch, and sometimes we had to stoop to avoid hitting our heads; it was covered with damps, which collected and fell upon us in occasional drops. The passages, besides being narrow, were so irregular and crooked, that, after going a little way, it would have been impossible to return upon our steps without the help of the guide; and we appeared to be taking quite an extensive ramble underground, though in reality I suppose the tomb includes no great space. At several turns of our dismal way, the guide pointed to inscriptions in Roman capitals, commemorating various members of the Scipio family who were buried here; among them, a son of Scipio Africanus, who himself had his death and burial in a foreign land. All these inscriptions, however, are copies,--the originals, which were really found here, having been removed to the Vatican. Whether any bones and ashes have been left, or whether any were found, I do not know. It is not, at all events, a particularly interesting spot, being such shapeless blackness, and a mere dark hole, requiring a stronger illumination than that of our tapers to distinguish it from any other cellar. I did, at one place, see a sort of frieze, rather roughly sculptured; and, as we returned towards the twilight of the entrance-passage, I discerned a large spider, who fled hastily away from our tapers,--the solitary living inhabitant of the tomb of the Scipios. One visit that we made, and I think it was before entering the city gates, I forgot to mention. It was to an old edifice, formerly called the Temple of Bacchus, but now supposed to have been the Temple of Virtue and Honor. The interior consists of a vaulted hall, which was converted from its pagan consecration into a church or chapel, by the early Christians; and the ancient marble pillars of the temple may still be seen built in with the brick and stucco of the later occupants. There is an altar, and other tokens of a Catholic church, and high towards the ceiling, there are some frescos of saints or angels, very curious specimens of mediaeval, and earlier than mediaeval art. Nevertheless, the place impressed me as still rather pagan than Christian. What is most remarkable about this spot or this vicinity lies in the fact that the Fountain of Egeria was formerly supposed to be close at hand; indeed, the custode of the chapel still claims the spot as the identical one consecrated by the legend. There is a dark grove of trees, not far from the door of the temple; but Murray, a highly essential nuisance on such excursions as this, throws such overwhelming doubt, or rather incredulity, upon the site, that I seized upon it as a pretext for not going thither. In fact, my small capacity for sight-seeing was already more than satisfied. On account of ------ I am sorry that we did not see the grotto, for her enthusiasm is as fresh as the waters of Egeria's well can be, and she has poetical faith enough to light her cheerfully through all these mists of incredulity. Our visits to sepulchral places ended with Scipio's tomb, whence we returned to our dwelling, and Miss M------ came to dine with us. March 10th.--On Saturday last, a very rainy day, we went to the Sciarra Palace, and took U---- with us. It is on the Corso, nearly opposite to the Piazza Colonna. It has (Heaven be praised!) but four rooms of pictures, among which, however, are several very celebrated ones. Only a few of these remain in my memory,--Raphael's "Violin Player," which I am willing to accept as a good picture; and Leonardo da Vinci's "Vanity and Modesty," which also I can bring up before my mind's eye, and find it very beautiful, although one of the faces has an affected smile, which I have since seen on another picture by the same artist, Joanna of Aragon. The most striking picture in the collection, I think, is Titian's "Bella Donna,"--the only one of Titian's works that I have yet seen which makes an impression on me corresponding with his fame. It is a very splendid and very scornful lady, as beautiful and as scornful as Gainsborough's Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type. There were two Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy. All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long while since they were cleaned or varnished. The light was so scanty, too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the palace, that scarcely anything could be fairly made out. [I cannot refrain from observing here, that Mr. Hawthorne's inexorable demand for perfection in all things leads him to complain of grimy pictures and tarnished frames and faded frescos, distressing beyond measure to eyes that never failed to see everything before him with the keenest apprehension. The usual careless observation of people both of the good and the imperfect is much more comfortable in this imperfect world. But the insight which Mr. Hawthorne possessed was only equalled by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived, from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not, therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy him, or rather alone not give him actual pain. It may give an idea of this exquisite nicety of feeling to mention, that one day he took in his fingers a half-bloomed rose, without blemish, and, smiling with an infinite joy, remarked, "This is perfect. On earth a flower only can be perfect."--ED.] The palace is about two hundred and fifty years old, and looks as if it had never been a very cheerful place; most shabbily and scantily furnished, moreover, and as chill as any cellar. There is a small balcony, looking down on the Corso, which probably has often been filled with a merry little family party, in the carnivals of days long past. It has faded frescos, and tarnished gilding, and green blinds, and a few damask chairs still remain in it. On Monday we all went to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, and saw as much of the sculpture as we could in the three hours during which the public are admissible. There were a few things which I really enjoyed, and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art, and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvedere as something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again. I felt the Laocoon very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free from dust. A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it full of soup. Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the most splendid in Rome. The entrance is from the Corso into a court, surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and ornamental shrubbery in the centre. The apartments containing pictures and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very little. I am of opinion that good pictures are quite as rare as good poets; and I do not see why we should pique ourselves on admiring any but the very best. One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of men, from generation to generation, till its colors fade or blacken out of sight, and its canvas rots away; the rest should be put in garrets, or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are shelved when their little day is over. Nevertheless, there was one long gallery containing many pictures that I should be glad to see again under more favorable circumstances, that is, separately, and where I might contemplate them quite undisturbed, reclining in an easy-chair. At one end of the long vista of this gallery is a bust of the present Prince Doria, a smooth, sharp-nosed, rather handsome young man, and at the other end his princess, an English lady of the Talbot family, apparently a blonde, with a simple and sweet expression. There is a noble and striking portrait of the old Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, by Sebastian del Piombo, and some other portraits and busts of the family. In the whole immense range of rooms I saw but a single fireplace, and that so deep in the wall that no amount of blaze would raise the atmosphere of the room ten degrees. If the builder of the palace, or any of his successors, have committed crimes worthy of Tophet, it would be a still worse punishment for him to wander perpetually through this suite of rooms on the cold floors of polished brick tiles or marble or mosaic, growing a little chiller and chiller through every moment of eternity,-- or, at least, till the palace crumbles down upon him. Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze up at the dark old pictures,--the ugly ghosts of what may once have been beautiful. I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape. There were two or three landscapes of Claude in this palace, which I doubt not would have been exquisite if they had been in the condition of those in the British National Gallery; but here they looked most forlorn, and even their sunshine was sunless. The merits of historical painting may be quite independent of the attributes that give pleasure, and a superficial ugliness may even heighten the effect; but not so of landscapes. Via Porta, Palazzo Larazani, March 11th.--To-day we called at Mr. Thompson's studio, and . . . . he had on the easel a little picture of St. Peter released from prison by the angel, which I saw once before. It is very beautiful indeed, and deeply and spiritually conceived, and I wish I could afford to have it finished for myself. I looked again, too, at his Georgian slave, and admired it as much as at first view; so very warm and rich it is, so sensuously beautiful, and with an expression of higher life and feeling within. I do not think there is a better painter than Mr. Thompson living,--among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful, and religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and, taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those. In painting, as in literature, I suspect there is something in the productions of the day that takes the fancy more than the works of any past age,--not greater merit, nor nearly so great, but better suited to this very present time. After leaving him, we went to the Piazza de' Termini, near the Baths of Diocletian, and found our way with some difficulty to Crawford's studio. It occupies several great rooms, connected with the offices of the Villa Negroni; and all these rooms were full of plaster casts and a few works in marble,--principally portions of his huge Washington monument, which he left unfinished at his death. Close by the door at which we entered stood a gigantic figure of Mason, in bag-wig, and the coat, waistcoat, breeches, and knee and shoe buckles of the last century, the enlargement of these unheroic matters to far more than heroic size having a very odd effect. There was a figure of Jefferson on the same scale; another of Patrick Henry, besides a horse's head, and other portions of the equestrian group which is to cover the summit of the monument. In one of the rooms was a model of the monument itself, on a scale, I should think, of about an inch to afoot. It did not impress me as having grown out of any great and genuine idea in the artist's mind, but as being merely an ingenious contrivance enough. There were also casts of statues that seemed to be intended for some other monument referring to Revolutionary times and personages; and with these were intermixed some ideal statues or groups,--a naked boy playing marbles, very beautiful; a girl with flowers; the cast of his Orpheus, of which I long ago saw the marble statue; Adam and Eve; Flora,--all with a good deal of merit, no doubt, but not a single one that justifies Crawford's reputation, or that satisfies me of his genius. They are but commonplaces in marble and plaster, such as we should not tolerate on a printed page. He seems to have been a respectable man, highly respectable, but no more, although those who knew him seem to have rated him much higher. It is said that he exclaimed, not very long before his death, that he had fifteen years of good work still in him; and he appears to have considered all his life and labor, heretofore, as only preparatory to the great things that he was to achieve hereafter. I should say, on the contrary, that he was a man who had done his best, and had done it early; for his Orpheus is quite as good as anything else we saw in his studio. People were at work chiselling several statues in marble from the plaster models,--a very interesting process, and which I should think a doubtful and hazardous one; but the artists say that there is no risk of mischief, and that the model is sure to be accurately repeated in the marble. These persons, who do what is considered the mechanical part of the business, are often themselves sculptors, and of higher reputation than those who employ them. It is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster. There is almost as much difference as between flesh and spirit. The floor of one of the rooms was burdened with immense packages, containing parts of the Washington monument, ready to be forwarded to its destination. When finished, and set up, it will probably make a very splendid appearance, by its height, its mass, its skilful execution; and will produce a moral effect through its images of illustrious men, and the associations that connect it with our Revolutionary history; but I do not think it will owe much to artistic force of thought or depth of feeling. It is certainly, in one sense, a very foolish and illogical piece of work,--Washington, mounted on an uneasy steed, on a very narrow space, aloft in the air, whence a single step of the horse backward, forward, or on either side, must precipitate him; and several of his contemporaries standing beneath him, not looking up to wonder at his predicament, but each intent on manifesting his own personality to the world around. They have nothing to do with one another, nor with Washington, nor with any great purpose which all are to work out together. March 14th.--On Friday evening I dined at Mr. T. B. Read's, the poet and artist, with a party composed of painters and sculptors,--the only exceptions being the American banker and an American tourist who has given Mr. Read a commission. Next to me at table sat Mr. Gibson, the English sculptor, who, I suppose, stands foremost in his profession at this day. He must be quite an old man now, for it was whispered about the table that he is known to have been in Rome forty-two years ago, and he himself spoke to me of spending thirty-seven years here, before he once returned home. I should hardly take him to be sixty, however, his hair being more dark than gray, his forehead unwrinkled, his features unwithered, his eye undimmed, though his beard is somewhat venerable. . . . . He has a quiet, self-contained aspect, and, being a bachelor, has doubtless spent a calm life among his clay and marble, meddling little with the world, and entangling himself with no cares beyond his studio. He did not talk a great deal; but enough to show that he is still an Englishman in many sturdy traits, though his accent has something foreign about it. His conversation was chiefly about India, and other topics of the day, together with a few reminiscences of people in Liverpool, where he once resided. There was a kind of simplicity both in his manner and matter, and nothing very remarkable in the latter. . . . . The gist of what he said (upon art) was condemnatory of the Pre-Raphaelite modern school of painters, of whom he seemed to spare none, and of their works nothing; though he allowed that the old Pre-Raphaelites had some exquisite merits, which the moderns entirely omit in their imitations. In his own art, he said the aim should be to find out the principles on which the Greek sculptors wrought, and to do the work of this day on those principles and in their spirit; a fair doctrine enough, I should think, but which Mr. Gibson can scarcely be said to practise. . . . . The difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and himself is deep and genuine, they being literalists and realists, in a certain sense, and he a pagan idealist. Methinks they have hold of the best end of the matter. March 18th.--To-day, it being very bright and mild, we set out, at noon, for an expedition to the Temple of Vesta, though I did not feel much inclined for walking, having been ill and feverish for two or three days past with a cold, which keeps renewing itself faster than I can get rid of it. We kept along on this side of the Corso, and crossed the Forum, skirting along the Capitoline Hill, and thence towards the Circus Maximus. On our way, looking down a cross street, we saw a heavy arch, and, on examination, made it out to be the Arch of Janus Quadrifrons, standing in the Forum Boarium. Its base is now considerably below the level of the surrounding soil, and there is a church or basilica close by, and some mean edifices looking down upon it. There is something satisfactory in this arch, from the immense solidity of its structure. It gives the idea, in the first place, of a solid mass constructed of huge blocks of marble, which time can never wear away, nor earthquakes shake down; and then this solid mass is penetrated by two arched passages, meeting in the centre. There are empty niches, three in a row, and, I think, two rows on each face; but there seems to have been very little effort to make it a beautiful object. On the top is some brickwork, the remains of a mediaeval fortress built by the Frangipanis, looking very frail and temporary being brought thus in contact with the antique strength of the arch. A few yards off, across the street, and close beside the basilica, is what appears to be an ancient portal, with carved bas-reliefs, and an inscription which I could not make out. Some Romans were lying dormant in the sun, on the steps of the basilica; indeed, now that the sun is getting warmer, they seem to take advantage of every quiet nook to bask in, and perhaps to go to sleep. We had gone but a little way from the arch, and across the Circus Maximus, when we saw the Temple of Vesta before us, on the hank of the Tiber, which, however, we could not see behind it. It is a most perfectly preserved Roman ruin, and very beautiful, though so small that, in a suitable locality, one would take it rather for a garden-house than an ancient temple. A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn and a little battered, though but one of them broken, surround the solid structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the pillars, the whole covered by a modern roof which looks like wood, and disgraces and deforms the elegant little building. This roof resembles, as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian order, and when they were new and the marble snow-white and sharply carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome; but so small an edifice does not appear well as a ruin. Within view of it, and, indeed, a very little way off, is the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, which likewise retains its antique form in better preservation than we generally find a Roman ruin, although the Ionic pillars are now built up with blocks of stone and patches of brickwork, the whole constituting a church which is fixed against the side of a tall edifice, the nature of which I do not know. I forgot to say that we gained admittance into the Temple of Vesta, and found the interior a plain cylinder of marble, about ten paces across, and fitted up as a chapel, where the Virgin takes the place of Vesta. In very close vicinity we came upon the Ponto Rotto, the old Pons Emilius which was broken down long ago, and has recently been pieced out by connecting a suspension bridge with the old piers. We crossed by this bridge, paying a toll of a baioccho each, and stopped in the midst of the river to look at the Temple of Vesta, which shows well, right on the brink of the Tiber. We fancied, too, that we could discern, a little farther down the river, the ruined and almost submerged piers of the Sublician bridge, which Horatius Cocles defended. The Tiber here whirls rapidly along, and Horatius must have had a perilous swim for his life, and the enemy a fair mark at his head with their arrows. I think this is the most picturesque part of the Tiber in its passage through Rome. After crossing the bridge, we kept along the right bank of the river, through the dirty and hard-hearted streets of Trastevere (which have in no respect the advantage over those of hither Rome), till we reached St. Peter's. We saw a family sitting before their door on the pavement in the narrow and sunny street, engaged in their domestic avocations,--the old woman spinning with a wheel. I suppose the people now begin to live out of doors. We entered beneath the colonnade of St. Peter's and immediately became sensible of an evil odor,--the bad odor of our fallen nature, which there is no escaping in any nook of Rome. . . . . Between the pillars of the colonnade, however, we had the pleasant spectacle of the two fountains, sending up their lily-shaped gush, with rainbows shining in their falling spray. Parties of French soldiers, as usual, were undergoing their drill in the piazza. When we entered the church, the long, dusty sunbeams were falling aslantwise through the dome and through the chancel behind it. . . . . March 23d.--On the 21st we all went to the Coliseum, and enjoyed ourselves there in the bright, warm sun,--so bright and warm that we were glad to get into the shadow of the walls and under the arches, though, after all, there was the freshness of March in the breeze that stirred now and then. J----- and baby found some beautiful flowers growing round about the Coliseum; and far up towards the top of the walls we saw tufts of yellow wall-flowers and a great deal of green grass growing along the ridges between the arches. The general aspect of the place, however, is somewhat bare, and does not compare favorably with an English ruin both on account of the lack of ivy and because the material is chiefly brick, the stone and marble having been stolen away by popes and cardinals to build their palaces. While we sat within the circle, many people, of both sexes, passed through, kissing the iron cross which stands in the centre, thereby gaining an indulgence of seven years, I believe. In front of several churches I have seen an inscription in Latin, "INDULGENTIA PLENARIA ET PERPETUA PRO CUNCTIS MORTUIS ET VIVIS"; than which, it seems to me, nothing more could be asked or desired. The terms of this great boon are not mentioned. Leaving the Coliseum, we went and sat down in the vicinity of the Arch of Constantine, and J----- and R----- went in quest of lizards. J----- soon caught a large one with two tails; one, a sort of afterthought, or appendix, or corollary to the original tail, and growing out from it instead of from the body of the lizard. These reptiles are very abundant, and J----- has already brought home several, which make their escape and appear occasionally darting to and fro on the carpet. Since we have been here, J----- has taken up various pursuits in turn. First he voted himself to gathering snail-shells, of which there are many sorts; afterwards he had a fever for marbles, pieces of which he found on the banks of the Tiber, just on the edge of its muddy waters, and in the Palace of the Caesars, the Baths of Caracalla, and indeed wherever else his fancy led him; verde antique, rosso antico, porphyry, giallo antico, serpentine, sometimes fragments of bas-reliefs and mouldings, bits of mosaic, still firmly stuck together, on which the foot of a Caesar had perhaps once trodden; pieces of Roman glass, with the iridescence glowing on them; and all such things, of which the soil of Rome is full. It would not be difficult, from the spoil of his boyish rambles, to furnish what would be looked upon as a curious and valuable museum in America. Yesterday we went to the sculpture-galleries of the Vatican. I think I enjoy these noble galleries and their contents and beautiful arrangement better than anything else in the way of art, and often I seem to have a deep feeling of something wonderful in what I look at. The Laocoon on this visit impressed me not less than before; it is such a type of human beings, struggling with an inextricable trouble, and entangled in a complication which they cannot free themselves from by their own efforts, and out of which Heaven alone can help them. It was a most powerful mind, and one capable of reducing a complex idea to unity, that imagined this group. I looked at Canova's Perseus, and thought it exceedingly beautiful, but, found myself less and less contented after a moment or two, though I could not tell why. Afterwards, looking at the Apollo, the recollection of the Perseus disgusted me, and yet really I cannot explain how one is better than the other. I was interested in looking at the busts of the Triumvirs, Antony, Augustus, and Lepidus. The first two are men of intellect, evidently, though they do not recommend themselves to one's affections by their physiognomy; but Lepidus has the strangest, most commonplace countenance that can be imagined,--small-featured, weak, such a face as you meet anywhere in a man of no mark, but are amazed to find in one of the three foremost men of the world. I suppose that it is these weak and shallow men, when chance raises them above their proper sphere, who commit enormous crimes without any such restraint as stronger men would feel, and without any retribution in the depth of their conscience. These old Roman busts, of which there are so many in the Vatican, have often a most lifelike aspect, a striking individuality. One recognizes them as faithful portraits, just as certainly as if the living originals were standing beside them. The arrangement of the hair and beard too, in many cases, is just what we see now, the fashions of two thousand years ago having come round again. March 25th.--On Tuesday we went to breakfast at William Story's in the Palazzo Barberini. We had a very pleasant time. He is one of the most agreeable men I know in society. He showed us a note from Thackeray, an invitation to dinner, written in hieroglyphics, with great fun and pictorial merit. He spoke of an expansion of the story of Blue Beard, which he himself had either written or thought of writing, in which the contents of the several chambers which Fatima opened, before arriving at the fatal one, were to be described. This idea has haunted my mind ever since, and if it had but been my own I am pretty sure that it would develop itself into something very rich. I mean to press William Story to work it out. The chamber of Blue Beard, too (and this was a part of his suggestion), might be so handled as to become powerfully interesting. Were I to take up the story I would create an interest by suggesting a secret in the first chamber, which would develop itself more and more in every successive hall of the great palace, and lead the wife irresistibly to the chamber of horrors. After breakfast, we went to the Barberini Library, passing through the vast hall, which occupies the central part of the palace. It is the most splendid domestic hall I have seen, eighty feet in length at least, and of proportionate breadth and height; and the vaulted ceiling is entirely covered, to its utmost edge and remotest corners, with a brilliant painting in fresco, looking like a whole heaven of angelic people descending towards the floor. The effect is indescribably gorgeous. On one side stands a Baldacchino, or canopy of state, draped with scarlet cloth, and fringed with gold embroidery; the scarlet indicating that the palace is inhabited by a cardinal. Green would be appropriate to a prince. In point of fact, the Palazzo Barberini is inhabited by a cardinal, a prince, and a duke, all belonging to the Barberini family, and each having his separate portion of the palace, while their servants have a common territory and meeting-ground in this noble hall. After admiring it for a few minutes, we made our exit by a door on the opposite side, and went up the spiral staircase of marble to the library, where we were received by an ecclesiastic, who belongs to the Barberini household, and, I believe, was born in it. He is a gentle, refined, quiet-looking man, as well he may be, having spent all his life among these books, where few people intrude, and few cares can come. He showed us a very old Bible in parchment, a specimen of the earliest printing, beautifully ornamented with pictures, and some monkish illuminations of indescribable delicacy and elaboration. No artist could afford to produce such work, if the life that he thus lavished on one sheet of parchment had any value to him, either for what could be done or enjoyed in it. There are about eight thousand volumes in this library, and, judging by their outward aspect, the collection must be curious and valuable; but having another engagement, we could spend only a little time here. We had a hasty glance, however, of some poems of Tasso, in his own autograph. We then went to the Palazzo Galitzin, where dwell the Misses Weston, with whom we lunched, and where we met a French abbe, an agreeable man, and an antiquarian, under whose auspices two of the ladies and ourselves took carriage for the Castle of St. Angelo. Being admitted within the external gateway, we found ourselves in the court of guard, as I presume it is called, where the French soldiers were playing with very dirty cards, or lounging about, in military idleness. They were well behaved and courteous, and when we had intimated our wish to see the interior of the castle, a soldier soon appeared, with a large unlighted torch in his hand, ready to guide us. There is an outer wall, surrounding the solid structure of Hadrian's tomb; to which there is access by one or two drawbridges; the entrance to the tomb, or castle, not being at the base, but near its central height. The ancient entrance, by which Hadrian's ashes, and those of other imperial personages, were probably brought into this tomb, has been walled up,--perhaps ever since the last emperor was buried here. We were now in a vaulted passage, both lofty and broad, which circles round the whole interior of the tomb, from the base to the summit. During many hundred years, the passage was filled with earth and rubbish, and forgotten, and it is but partly excavated, even now; although we found it a long, long and gloomy descent by torchlight to the base of the vast mausoleum. The passage was once lined and vaulted with precious marbles (which are now entirely gone), and paved with fine mosaics, portions of which still remain; and our guide lowered his flaming torch to show them to us, here and there, amid the earthy dampness over which we trod. It is strange to think what splendor and costly adornment were here wasted on the dead. After we had descended to the bottom of this passage, and again retraced our steps to the highest part, the guide took a large cannon-ball, and sent it, with his whole force, rolling down the hollow, arched way, rumbling, and reverberating, and bellowing forth long thunderous echoes, and winding up with a loud, distant crash, that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. We saw the place, near the centre of the mausoleum, and lighted from above, through an immense thickness of stone and brick, where the ashes of the emperor and his fellow-slumberers were found. It is as much as twelve centuries, very likely, since they were scattered to the winds, for the tomb has been nearly or quite that space of time a fortress; The tomb itself is merely the base and foundation of the castle, and, being so massively built, it serves just as well for the purpose as if it were a solid granite rock. The mediaeval fortress, with its antiquity of more than a thousand years, and having dark and deep dungeons of its own, is but a modern excrescence on the top of Hadrian's tomb. We now ascended towards the upper region, and were led into the vaults which used to serve as a prison, but which, if I mistake not, are situated above the ancient structure, although they seem as damp and subterranean as if they were fifty feet under the earth. We crept down to them through narrow and ugly passages, which the torchlight would not illuminate, and, stooping under a low, square entrance, we followed the guide into a small, vaulted room,--not a room, but an artificial cavern, remote from light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in a sepulchre so long! Adjacent to Beatrice's prison, but not communicating with it, was that of her step-mother; and next to the latter was one that interested me almost as much as Beatrice's,--that of Benvenuto Cellini, who was confined here, I believe, for an assassination. All these prison vaults are more horrible than can be imagined without seeing them; but there are worse places here, for the guide lifted a trap-door in one of the passages, and held his torch down into an inscrutable pit beneath our feet. It was an oubliette, a dungeon where the prisoner might be buried alive, and never come forth again, alive or dead. Groping about among these sad precincts, we saw various other things that looked very dismal; but at last emerged into the sunshine, and ascended from one platform and battlement to another, till we found ourselves right at the feet of the Archangel Michael. He has stood there in bronze for I know not how many hundred years, in the act of sheathing a (now) rusty sword, such being the attitude in which he appeared to one of the popes in a vision, in token that a pestilence which was then desolating Rome was to be stayed. There is a fine view from the lofty station over Rome and the whole adjacent country, and the abbe pointed out the site of Ardea, of Corioli, of Veii, and other places renowned in story. We were ushered, too, into the French commandant's quarters in the castle. There is a large hall, ornamented with frescos, and accessible from this a drawing-room, comfortably fitted up, and where we saw modern furniture, and a chess-board, and a fire burning clear, and other symptoms that the place had perhaps just been vacated by civilized and kindly people. But in one corner of the ceiling the abbe pointed out a ring, by which, in the times of mediaeval anarchy, when popes, cardinals, and barons were all by the ears together, a cardinal was hanged. It was not an assassination, but a legal punishment, and he was executed in the best apartment of the castle as an act of grace. The fortress is a straight-lined structure on the summit of the immense round tower of Hadrian's tomb; and to make out the idea of it we must throw in drawbridges, esplanades, piles of ancient marble balls for cannon; battlements and embrasures, lying high in the breeze and sunshine, and opening views round the whole horizon; accommodation for the soldiers; and many small beds in a large room. How much mistaken was the emperor in his expectation of a stately, solemn repose for his ashes through all the coming centuries, as long as the world should endure! Perhaps his ghost glides up and down disconsolate, in that spiral passage which goes from top to bottom of the tomb, while the barbarous Gauls plant themselves in his very mausoleum to keep the imperial city in awe. Leaving the Castle of St. Angelo, we drove, still on the same side of the Tiber, to the Villa Pamfili, which lies a short distance beyond the walls. As we passed through one of the gates (I think it was that of San Pancrazio) the abbe pointed out the spot where the Constable de Bourbon was killed while attempting to scale the walls. If we are to believe Benvenuto Cellini, it was he who shot the constable. The road to the villa is not very interesting, lying (as the roads in the vicinity of Rome often do) between very high walls, admitting not a glimpse of the surrounding country; the road itself white and dusty, with no verdant margin of grass or border of shrubbery. At the portal of the villa we found many carriages in waiting, for the Prince Doria throws open the grounds to all comers, and on a pleasant day like this they are probably sure to be thronged. We left our carriage just within the entrance, and rambled among these beautiful groves, admiring the live-oak trees, and the stone-pines, which latter are truly a majestic tree, with tall columnar stems, supporting a cloud-like density of boughs far aloft, and not a straggling branch between there and the ground. They stand in straight rows, but are now so ancient and venerable as to have lost the formal look of a plantation, and seem like a wood that might have arranged itself almost of its own will. Beneath them is a flower-strewn turf, quite free of underbrush. We found open fields and lawns, moreover, all abloom with anemones, white and rose-colored and purple and golden, and far larger than could be found out of Italy, except in hot-houses. Violets, too, were abundant and exceedingly fragrant. When we consider that all this floral exuberance occurs in the midst of March, there does not appear much ground for complaining of the Roman climate; and so long ago as the first week of February I found daisies among the grass, on the sunny side of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. At this very moment I suppose the country within twenty miles of Boston may be two feet deep with snow, and the streams solid with ice. We wandered about the grounds, and found them very beautiful indeed; nature having done much for them by an undulating variety of surface, and art having added a good many charms, which have all the better effect now that decay and neglect have thrown a natural grace over them likewise. There is an artificial ruin, so picturesque that it betrays itself; weather-beaten statues, and pieces of sculpture, scattered here and there; an artificial lake, with upgushing fountains; cascades, and broad-bosomed coves, and long, canal-like reaches, with swans taking their delight upon them. I never saw such a glorious and resplendent lustre of white as shone between the wings of two of these swans. It was really a sight to see, and not to be imagined beforehand. Angels, no doubt, have just such lustrous wings as those. English swans partake of the dinginess of the atmosphere, and their plumage has nothing at all to be compared to this; in fact, there is nothing like it in the world, unless it be the illuminated portion of a fleecy, summer cloud. While we were sauntering along beside this piece of water, we were surprised to see U---- on the other side. She had come hither with E---- S------ and her two little brothers, and with our R-----, the whole under the charge of Mrs. Story's nursery-maids. U---- and E---- crossed, not over, but beneath the water, through a grotto, and exchanged greetings with us. Then, as it was getting towards sunset and cool, we took our departure; the abbe, as we left the grounds, taking me aside to give me a glimpse of a Columbarium, which descends into the earth to about the depth to which an ordinary house might rise above it. These grounds, it is said, formed the country residence of the Emperor Galba, and he was buried here after his assassination. It is a sad thought that so much natural beauty and long refinement of picturesque culture is thrown away, the villa being uninhabitable during all the most delightful season of the year on account of malaria. There is truly a curse on Rome and all its neighborhood. On our way home we passed by the great Paolina fountain, and were assailed by many beggars during the short time we stopped to look at it. It is a very copious fountain, but not so beautiful as the Trevi, taking into view merely the water-gush of the latter. March 26th.--Yesterday, between twelve and one, our whole family went to the Villa Ludovisi, the entrance to which is at the termination of a street which passes out of the Piazza Barberini, and it is no very great distance from our own street, Via Porta Pinciana. The grounds, though very extensive, are wholly within the walls of the city, which skirt them, and comprise a part of what were formerly the gardens of Sallust. The villa is now the property of Prince Piombini, a ticket from whom procured us admission. A little within the gateway, to the right, is a casino, containing two large rooms filled with sculpture, much of which is very valuable. A colossal head of Juno, I believe, is considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also to represent Electra and Orestes. The sitting statue of Mars is very fine; so is the Arria and Paetus; so are many other busts and figures. By and by we left the casino and wandered among the grounds, threading interminable alleys of cypress, through the long vistas of which we could see here and there a statue, an urn, a pillar, a temple, or garden-house, or a bas-relief against the wall. It seems as if there must have been a time, and not so very long ago,--when it was worth while to spend money and thought upon the ornamentation of grounds in the neighborhood of Rome. That time is past, however, and the result is very melancholy; for great beauty has been produced, but it can be enjoyed in its perfection only at the peril of one's life. . . . . For my part, and judging from my own experience, I suspect that the Roman atmosphere, never wholesome, is always more or less poisonous. We came to another and larger casino remote from the gateway, in which the Prince resides during two months of the year. It was now under repair, but we gained admission, as did several other visitors, and saw in the entrance-hall the Aurora of Guercino, painted in fresco on the ceiling. There is beauty in the design; but the painter certainly was most unhappy in his black shadows, and in the work before us they give the impression of a cloudy and lowering morning which is likely enough to turn to rain by and by. After viewing the fresco we mounted by a spiral staircase to a lofty terrace, and found Rome at our feet, and, far off, the Sabine and Alban mountains, some of them still capped with snow. In another direction there was a vast plain, on the horizon of which, could our eyes have reached to its verge, we might perhaps have seen the Mediterranean Sea. After enjoying the view and the warm sunshine we descended, and went in quest of the gardens of Sallust, but found no satisfactory remains of them. One of the most striking objects in the first casino was a group by Bernini,--Pluto, an outrageously masculine and strenuous figure, heavily bearded, ravishing away a little, tender Proserpine, whom he holds aloft, while his forcible gripe impresses itself into her soft virgin flesh. It is very disagreeable, but it makes one feel that Bernini was a man of great ability. There are some works in literature that bear an analogy to his works in sculpture, when great power is lavished a little outside of nature, and therefore proves to be only a fashion,--and not permanently adapted to the tastes of mankind. March 27th.--Yesterday forenoon my wife and I went to St. Peter's to see the pope pray at the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. We found a good many people in the church, but not an inconvenient number; indeed, not so many as to make any remarkable show in the great nave, nor even in front of the chapel. A detachment of the Swiss Guard, in their strange, picturesque, harlequin-like costume, were on duty before the chapel, in which the wax tapers were all lighted, and a prie-dieu was arranged near the shrine, and covered with scarlet velvet. On each side, along the breadth of the side aisle, were placed seats, covered with rich tapestry or carpeting; and some gentlemen and ladies--English, probably, or American--had comfortably deposited themselves here, but were compelled to move by the guards before the pope's entrance. His Holiness should have appeared precisely at twelve, but we waited nearly half an hour beyond that time; and it seemed to me particularly ill-mannered in the pope, who owes the courtesy of being punctual to the people, if not to St. Peter. By and by, however, there was a stir; the guard motioned to us to stand away from the benches, against the backs of which we had been leaning; the spectators in the nave looked towards the door, as if they beheld something approaching; and first, there appeared some cardinals, in scarlet skull-caps and purple robes, intermixed with some of the Noble Guard and other attendants. It was not a very formal and stately procession, but rather straggled onward, with ragged edges, the spectators standing aside to let it pass, and merely bowing, or perhaps slightly bending the knee, as good Catholics are accustomed to do when passing before the shrines of saints. Then, in the midst of the purple cardinals, all of whom were gray-haired men, appeared a stout old man, with a white skull-cap, a scarlet, gold-embroidered cape falling over his shoulders, and a white silk robe, the train of which was borne up by an attendant. He walked slowly, with a sort of dignified movement, stepping out broadly, and planting his feet (on which were red shoes) flat upon the pavement, as if he were not much accustomed to locomotion, and perhaps had known a twinge of the gout. His face was kindly and venerable, but not particularly impressive. Arriving at the scarlet-covered prie-dieu, he kneeled down and took off his white skull-cap; the cardinals also kneeled behind and on either side of him, taking off their scarlet skull-caps; while the Noble Guard remained standing, six on one side of his Holiness and six on the other. The pope bent his head upon the prie-dieu, and seemed to spend three or four minutes in prayer; then rose, and all the purple cardinals, and bishops, and priests, of whatever degree, rose behind and beside him. Next, he went to kiss St. Peter's toe; at least I believe he kissed it, but I was not near enough to be certain; and lastly, he knelt down, and directed his devotions towards the high altar. This completed the ceremonies, and his Holiness left the church by a side door, making a short passage into the Vatican. I am very glad I have seen the pope, because now he may be crossed out of the list of sights to be seen. His proximity impressed me kindly and favorably towards him, and I did not see one face among all his cardinals (in whose number, doubtless, is his successor) which I would so soon trust as that of Pio Nono. This morning I walked as far as the gate of San Paolo, and, on approaching it, I saw the gray sharp pyramid of Caius Cestius pointing upward close to the two dark-brown, battlemented Gothic towers of the gateway, each of these very different pieces of architecture looking the more picturesque for the contrast of the other. Before approaching the gateway and pyramid, I walked onward, and soon came in sight of Monte Testaccio, the artificial hill made of potsherds. There is a gate admitting into the grounds around the hill, and a road encircling its base. At a distance, the hill looks greener than any other part of the landscape, and has all the curved outlines of a natural hill, resembling in shape a headless sphinx, or Saddleback Mountain, as I used to see it from Lenox. It is of very considerable height,--two or three hundred feet at least, I should say,--and well entitled, both by its elevation and the space it covers, to be reckoned among the hills of Rome. Its base is almost entirely surrounded with small structures, which seem to be used as farm-buildings. On the summit is a large iron cross, the Church having thought it expedient to redeem these shattered pipkins from the power of paganism, as it has so many other Roman ruins. There was a pathway up the hill, but I did not choose to ascend it under the hot sun, so steeply did it clamber up. There appears to be a good depth of soil on most parts of Monte Testaccio, but on some of the sides you observe precipices, bristling with fragments of red or brown earthenware, or pieces of vases of white unglazed clay; and it is evident that this immense pile is entirely composed of broken crockery, which I should hardly have thought would have aggregated to such a heap had it all been thrown here,--urns, teacups, porcelain, or earthen,--since the beginning of the world. I walked quite round the hill, and saw, at no great distance from it, the enclosure of the Protestant burial-ground, which lies so close to the pyramid of Caius Cestius that the latter may serve as a general monument to the dead. Deferring, for the present, a visit to the cemetery, or to the interior of the pyramid, I returned to the gateway of San Paolo, and, passing through it, took a view of it from the outside of the city wall. It is itself a portion of the wall, having been built into it by the Emperor Aurelian, so that about half of it lies within and half without. The brick or red stone material of the wall being so unlike the marble of the pyramid, the latter is as distinct, and seems as insulated, as if it stood alone in the centre of a plain; and really I do not think there is a more striking architectural object in Rome. It is in perfect condition, just as little ruined or decayed as on the day when the builder put the last peak on the summit; and it ascends steeply from its base, with a point so sharp that it looks as if it would hardly afford foothold to a bird. The marble was once white, but is now covered with a gray coating like that which has gathered upon the statues of Castor and Pollux on Monte Cavallo. Not one of the great blocks is displaced, nor seems likely to be through all time to come. They rest one upon another, in straight and even lines, and present a vast smooth triangle, ascending from a base of a hundred feet, and narrowing to an apex at the height of a hundred and twenty-five, the junctures of the marble slabs being so close that, in all these twenty centuries, only a few little tufts of grass, and a trailing plant or two, have succeeded in rooting themselves into the interstices. It is good and satisfactory to see anything which, being built for an enduring monument, has endured so faithfully, and has a prospect of such an interminable futurity before it. Once, indeed, it seemed likely to be buried; for three hundred years ago it had become covered to the depth of sixteen feet, but the soil has since been dug away from its base, which is now lower than that of the road which passes through the neighboring gate of San Paolo. Midway up the pyramid, cut in the marble, is an inscription in large Roman letters, still almost as legible as when first wrought. I did not return through the Paolo gateway, but kept onward, round the exterior of the wall, till I came to the gate of San Sebastiano. It was a hot and not a very interesting walk, with only a high bare wall of brick, broken by frequent square towers, on one side of the road, and a bank and hedge or a garden wall on the other. Roman roads are most inhospitable, offering no shade, and no seat, and no pleasant views of rustic domiciles; nothing but the wheel-track of white dust, without a foot path running by its side, and seldom any grassy margin to refresh the wayfarer's feet. April 3d.--A few days ago we visited the studio of Mr. ------, an American, who seems to have a good deal of vogue as a sculptor. We found a figure of Pocahontas, which he has repeated several times; another, which he calls "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," a figure of a smiling girl playing with a cat and dog, and a schoolboy mending a pen. These two last were the only ones that gave me any pleasure, or that really had any merit; for his cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects, but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality. Nevertheless, he has a group of the Prodigal Son, possessing more merit than I should have expected from Mr. ------, the son reclining his head on his father's breast, with an expression of utter weariness, at length finding perfect rest, while the father bends his benign countenance over him, and seems to receive him calmly into himself. This group (the plaster-cast standing beside it) is now taking shape out of an immense block of marble, and will be as indestructible as the Laocoon; an idea at once awful and ludicrous, when we consider that it is at best but a respectable production. I have since been told that Mr. ------ had stolen, adopted, we will rather say, the attitude and idea of the group from one executed by a student of the French Academy, and to be seen there in plaster. (We afterwards saw it in the Medici Casino.) Mr. ------ has now been ten years in Italy, and, after all this time, he is still entirely American in everything but the most external surface of his manners; scarcely Europeanized, or much modified even in that. He is a native of ------, but had his early breeding in New York, and might, for any polish or refinement that I can discern in him, still be a country shopkeeper in the interior of New York State or New England. How strange! For one expects to find the polish, the close grain and white purity of marble, in the artist who works in that noble material; but, after all, he handles club, and, judging by the specimens I have seen here, is apt to be clay, not of the finest, himself. Mr. ------ is sensible, shrewd, keen, clever; an ingenious workman, no doubt; with tact enough, and not destitute of taste; very agreeable and lively in his conversation, talking as fast and as naturally as a brook runs, without the slightest affectation. His naturalness is, in fact, a rather striking characteristic, in view of his lack of culture, while yet his life has been concerned with idealities and a beautiful art. What degree of taste he pretends to, he seems really to possess, nor did I hear a single idea from him that struck me as otherwise than sensible. He called to see us last evening, and talked for about two hours in a very amusing and interesting style, his topics being taken from his own personal experience, and shrewdly treated. He spoke much of Greenough, whom he described as an excellent critic of art, but possessed of not the slightest inventive genius. His statue of Washington, at the Capitol, is taken precisely from the Plodian Jupiter; his Chanting Cherubs are copied in marble from two figures in a picture by Raphael. He did nothing that was original with himself To-day we took R-----, and went to see Miss ------, and as her studio seems to be mixed up with Gibson's, we had an opportunity of glancing at some of his beautiful works. We saw a Venus and a Cupid, both of them tinted; and, side by side with them, other statues identical with these, except that the marble was left in its pure whiteness. We found Miss ------ in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust as she came forward to greet us. She withdrew one hand, however, and presented it cordially to my wife (whom she already knew) and to myself, without waiting for an introduction. She had on a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man's, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet, and her face was as bright and merry, and as small of feature as a child's. It looked in one aspect youthful, and yet there was something worn in it too. There never was anything so jaunty as her movement and action; she was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. I don't quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman. Miss ------ led us into a part of the extensive studio, or collection of studios, where some of her own works were to be seen: Beatrice Cenci, which did not very greatly impress me; and a monumental design, a female figure,--wholly draped even to the stockings and shoes,--in a quiet sleep. I liked this last. There was also a Puck, doubtless full of fun; but I had hardly time to glance at it. Miss ------ evidently has good gifts in her profession, and doubtless she derives great advantage from her close association with a consummate artist like Gibson; nor yet does his influence seem to interfere with the originality of her own conceptions. In one way, at least, she can hardly fail to profit,--that is, by the opportunity of showing her works to the throngs of people who go to see Gibson's own; and these are just such people as an artist would most desire to meet, and might never see in a lifetime, if left to himself. I shook hands with this frank and pleasant little person, and took leave, not without purpose of seeing her again. Within a few days, there have been many pilgrims in Rome, who come hither to attend the ceremonies of holy week, and to perform their vows, and undergo their penances. I saw two of them near the Forum yesterday, with their pilgrim staves, in the fashion of a thousand years ago. . . . . I sat down on a bench near one of the chapels, and a woman immediately came up to me to beg. I at first refused; but she knelt down by my side, and instead of praying to the saint prayed to me; and, being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious to the extent of half a paul. My wife, some time ago, came in contact with a pickpocket at the entrance of a church; and, failing in his enterprise upon her purse, he passed in, dipped his thieving fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine. Missing the purse, he said his prayers, in the hope, perhaps, that the saint would send him better luck another time. April 10th.--I have made no entries in my journal recently, being exceedingly lazy, partly from indisposition, as well as from an atmosphere that takes the vivacity out of everybody. Not much has happened or been effected. Last Sunday, which was Easter Sunday, I went with J----- to St. Peter's, where we arrived at about nine o'clock, and found a multitude of people already assembled in the church. The interior was arrayed in festal guise, there being a covering of scarlet damask over the pilasters of the nave, from base to capital, giving an effect of splendor, yet with a loss as to the apparent dimensions of the interior. A guard of soldiers occupied the nave, keeping open a wide space for the passage of a procession that was momently expected, and soon arrived. The crowd was too great to allow of my seeing it in detail; but I could perceive that there were priests, cardinals, Swiss guards, some of them with corselets on, and by and by the pope himself was borne up the nave, high over the heads of all, sitting under a canopy, crowned with his tiara. He floated slowly along, and was set down in the neighborhood of the high altar; and the procession being broken up, some of its scattered members might be seen here and there, about the church,--officials in antique Spanish dresses; Swiss guards, in polished steel breastplates; serving-men, in richly embroidered liveries; officers, in scarlet coats and military boots; priests, and divers other shapes of men; for the papal ceremonies seem to forego little or nothing that belongs to times past, while it includes everything appertaining to the present. I ought to have waited to witness the papal benediction from the balcony in front of the church; or, at least, to hear the famous silver trumpets, sounding from the dome; but J----- grew weary (to say the truth, so did I), and we went on a long walk, out of the nearest city gate, and back through the Janiculum, and, finally, homeward over the Ponto Rotto. Standing on the bridge, I saw the arch of the Cloaca Maxima, close by the Temple of Vesta, with the water rising within two or three feet of its keystone. The same evening we went to Monte Cavallo, where, from the gateway of the Pontifical Palace, we saw the illumination of St. Peter's. Mr. Akers, the sculptor, had recommended this position to us, and accompanied us thither, as the best point from which the illumination could be witnessed at a distance, without the incommodity of such a crowd as would be assembled at the Pincian. The first illumination, the silver one, as it is called, was very grand and delicate, describing the outline of the great edifice and crowning dome in light; while the day was not yet wholly departed. As ------ finally remarked, it seemed like the glorified spirit of the Church, made visible, or, as I will add, it looked as this famous and never-to-be-forgotten structure will look to the imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin: the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the background of the night of Time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it look on paper. After we had enjoyed the silver illumination a good while, and when all the daylight had given place to the constellated night, the distant outline of St. Peter's burst forth, in the twinkling of an eye, into a starry blaze, being quite the finest effect that I ever witnessed. I stayed to see it, however, only a few minutes; for I was quite ill and feverish with a cold,--which, indeed, I have seldom been free from, since my first breathing of the genial atmosphere of Rome. This pestilence kept me within doors all the next day, and prevented me from seeing the beautiful fireworks that were exhibited in the evening from the platform on the Pincian, above the Piazza del Popolo. On Thursday, I paid another visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, where I was particularly struck with a bust of Cato the Censor, who must have been the most disagreeable, stubborn, ugly-tempered, pig-headed, narrow-minded, strong-willed old Roman that ever lived. The collection of busts here and at the Vatican are most interesting, many of the individual heads being full of character, and commending themselves by intrinsic evidence as faithful portraits of the originals. These stone people have stood face to face with Caesar, and all the other emperors, and with statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, and poets of the antique world, and have been to them like their reflections in a mirror. It is the next thing to seeing the men themselves. We went afterwards into the Palace of the Conservatori, and saw, among various other interesting things, the bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, who sit beneath her dugs, with open mouths to receive the milk. On Friday, we all went to see the Pope's Palace on the Quirinal. There was a vast hall, and an interminable suite of rooms, cased with marble, floored with marble or mosaics or inlaid wood, adorned with frescos on the vaulted ceilings, and many of them lined with Gobelin tapestry; not wofully faded, like almost all that I have hitherto seen, but brilliant as pictures. Indeed, some of them so closely resembled paintings, that I could hardly believe they were not so; and the effect was even richer than that of oil-paintings. In every room there was a crucifix; but I did not see a single nook or corner where anybody could have dreamed of being comfortable. Nevertheless, as a stately and solemn residence for his Holiness, it is quite a satisfactory affair. Afterwards, we went into the Pontifical Gardens, connected with the palace. They are very extensive, and laid out in straight avenues, bordered with walls of box, as impervious as if of stone,--not less than twenty feet high, and pierced with lofty archways, cut in the living wall. Some of the avenues were overshadowed with trees, the tops of which bent over and joined one another from either side, so as to resemble a side aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Marble sculptures, much weather-stained, and generally broken-nosed, stood along these stately walks; there were many fountains gushing up into the sunshine; we likewise found a rich flower-garden, containing rare specimens of exotic flowers, and gigantic cactuses, and also an aviary, with vultures, doves, and singing birds. We did not see half the garden, but, stiff and formal as its general arrangement is, it is a beautiful place,--a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. Whatever it may be to the pope, two young lovers might find the Garden of Eden here, and never desire to stray out of its precincts. They might fancy angels standing in the long, glimmering vistas of the avenues. It would suit me well enough to have my daily walk along such straight paths, for I think them favorable to thought, which is apt to be disturbed by variety and unexpectedness. April 12th.--We all, except R-----, went to-day to the Vatican, where we found our way to the Stanze of Raphael, these being four rooms, or halls, painted with frescos. No doubt they were once very brilliant and beautiful; but they have encountered hard treatment since Raphael's time, especially when the soldiers of the Constable de Bourbon occupied these apartments, and made fires on the mosaic floors. The entire walls and ceilings are covered with pictures; but the handiwork or designs of Raphael consist of paintings on the four sides of each room, and include several works of art. The School of Athens is perhaps the most celebrated; and the longest side of the largest hall is occupied by a battle-piece, of which the Emperor Constantine is the hero, and which covers almost space enough for a real battle-field. There was a wonderful light in one of the pictures,--that of St. Peter awakened in his prison, by the angel; it really seemed to throw a radiance into the hall below. I shall not pretend, however, to have been sensible of any particular rapture at the sight of these frescos; so faded as they are, so battered by the mischances of years, insomuch that, through all the power and glory of Raphael's designs, the spectator cannot but be continually sensible that the groundwork of them is an old plaster wall. They have been scrubbed, I suppose,--brushed, at least,--a thousand times over, till the surface, brilliant or soft, as Raphael left it, must have been quite rubbed off, and with it, all the consummate finish, and everything that made them originally delightful. The sterner features remain, the skeleton of thought, but not the beauty that once clothed it. In truth, the frescos, excepting a few figures, never had the real touch of Raphael's own hand upon them, having been merely designed by him, and finished by his scholars, or by other artists. The halls themselves are specimens of antique magnificence, paved with elaborate mosaics; and wherever there is any wood-work, it is richly carved with foliage and figures. In their newness, and probably for a hundred years afterwards, there could not have been so brilliant a suite of rooms in the world. Connected with them--at any rate, not far distant--is the little Chapel of San Lorenzo, the very site of which, among the thousands of apartments of the Vatican, was long forgotten, and its existence only known by tradition. After it had been walled up, however, beyond the memory of man, there was still a rumor of some beautiful frescos by Fra Angelico, in an old chapel of Pope Nicholas V., that had strangely disappeared out of the palace, and, search at length being made, it was discovered, and entered through a window. It is a small, lofty room, quite covered over with frescos of sacred subjects, both on the walls and ceiling, a good deal faded, yet pretty distinctly preserved. It would have been no misfortune to me, if the little old chapel had remained still hidden. We next issued into the Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. I remember to have seen (indeed, we ourselves possess them) a series of very spirited and energetic engravings, old and coarse, of these frescos, the subject being the Creation, and the early Scripture history; and I really think that their translation of the pictures is better than the original. On reference to Murray, I find that little more than the designs is attributed to Raphael, the execution being by Giulio Romano and other artists. Escaping from these forlorn splendors, we went into the sculpture-gallery, where I was able to enjoy, in some small degree, two or three wonderful works of art; and had a perception that there were a thousand other wonders around me. It is as if the statues kept, for the most part, a veil about them, which they sometimes withdraw, and let their beauty gleam upon my sight; only a glimpse, or two or three glimpses, or a little space of calm enjoyment, and then I see nothing but a discolored marble image again. The Minerva Medica revealed herself to-day. I wonder whether other people are more fortunate than myself, and can invariably find their way to the inner soul of a work of art. I doubt it; they look at these things for just a minute, and pass on, without any pang of remorse, such as I feel, for quitting them so soon and so willingly. I am partly sensible that some unwritten rules of taste are making their way into my mind; that all this Greek beauty has done something towards refining me, though I am still, however, a very sturdy Goth. . . . . April 15th.--Yesterday I went with J----- to the Forum, and descended into the excavations at the base of the Capitol, and on the site of the Basilica of Julia. The essential elements of old Rome are there: columns, single, or in groups of two or three, still erect, but battered and bruised at some forgotten time with infinite pains and labor; fragments of other columns lying prostrate, together with rich capitals and friezes; the bust of a colossal female statue, showing the bosom and upper part of the arms, but headless; a long, winding space of pavement, forming part of the ancient ascent to the Capitol, still as firm and solid as ever; the foundation of the Capitol itself, wonderfully massive, built of immense square blocks of stone, doubtless three thousand years old, and durable for whatever may be the lifetime of the world; the Arch of Septimius, Severus, with bas-reliefs of Eastern wars; the Column of Phocas, with the rude series of steps ascending on four sides to its pedestal; the floor of beautiful and precious marbles in the Basilica of Julia, the slabs cracked across,--the greater part of them torn up and removed, the grass and weeds growing up through the chinks of what remain; heaps of bricks, shapeless bits of granite, and other ancient rubbish, among which old men are lazily rummaging for specimens that a stranger may be induced to buy,--this being an employment that suits the indolence of a modern Roman. The level of these excavations is about fifteen feet, I should judge, below the present street, which passes through the Forum, and only a very small part of this alien surface has been removed, though there can be no doubt that it hides numerous treasures of art and monuments of history. Yet these remains do not make that impression of antiquity upon me which Gothic ruins do. Perhaps it is so because they belong to quite another system of society and epoch of time, and, in view of them, we forget all that has intervened betwixt them and us; being morally unlike and disconnected with them, and not belonging to the same train of thought; so that we look across a gulf to the Roman ages, and do not realize how wide the gulf is. Yet in that intervening valley lie Christianity, the Dark Ages, the feudal system, chivalry and romance, and a deeper life of the human race than Rome brought to the verge of the gulf. To-day we went to the Colonna Palace, where we saw some fine pictures, but, I think, no masterpieces. They did not depress and dishearten me so much as the pictures in Roman palaces usually do; for they were in remarkably good order as regards frames and varnish; indeed, I rather suspect some of them had been injured by the means adopted to preserve their beauty. The palace is now occupied by the French Ambassador, who probably looks upon the pictures as articles of furniture and household adornment, and does not choose to have squares of black and forlorn canvas upon his walls. There were a few noble portraits by Vandyke; a very striking one by Holbein, one or two by Titian, also by Guercino, and some pictures by Rubens, and other forestieri painters, which refreshed my weary eyes. But--what chiefly interested me was the magnificent and stately hall of the palace; fifty-five of my paces in length, besides a large apartment at either end, opening into it through a pillared space, as wide as the gateway of a city. The pillars are of giallo antico, and there are pilasters of the same all the way up and down the walls, forming a perspective of the richest aspect, especially as the broad cornice flames with gilding, and the spaces between the pilasters are emblazoned with heraldic achievements and emblems in gold, and there are Venetian looking-glasses, richly decorated over the surface with beautiful pictures of flowers and Cupids, through which you catch the gleam of the mirror; and two rows of splendid chandeliers extend from end to end of the hall, which, when lighted up, if ever it be lighted up, now-a-nights, must be the most brilliant interior that ever mortal eye beheld. The ceiling glows with pictures in fresco, representing scenes connected with the history of the Colonna family; and the floor is paved with beautiful marbles, polished and arranged in square and circular compartments; and each of the many windows is set in a great architectural frame of precious marble, as large as the portal of a door. The apartment at the farther end of the hall is elevated above it, and is attained by several marble steps, whence it must have been glorious in former days to have looked down upon a gorgeous throng of princes, cardinals, warriors, and ladies, in such rich attire as might be worn when the palace was built. It is singular how much freshness and brightness it still retains; and the only objects to mar the effect were some ancient statues and busts, not very good in themselves, and now made dreary of aspect by their corroded surfaces,--the result of long burial under ground. In the room at the entrance of the hall are two cabinets, each a wonder in its way,--one being adorned with precious stones; the other with ivory carvings of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, and of the frescos of Raphael's Loggie. The world has ceased to be so magnificent as it once was. Men make no such marvels nowadays. The only defect that I remember in this hall was in the marble steps that ascend to the elevated apartment at the end of it; a large piece had been broken out of one of them, leaving a rough irregular gap in the polished marble stair. It is not easy to conceive what violence can have done this, without also doing mischief to all the other splendor around it. April 16th.--We went this morning to the Academy of St. Luke (the Fine Arts Academy at Rome) in the Via Bonella, close by the Forum. We rang the bell at the house door; and after a few moments it was unlocked or unbolted by some unseen agency from above, no one making his appearance to admit us. We ascended two or three flights of stairs, and entered a hall, where was a young man, the custode, and two or three artists engaged in copying some of the pictures. The collection not being vastly large, and the pictures being in more presentable condition than usual, I enjoyed them more than I generally do; particularly a Virgin and Child by Vandyke, where two angels are singing and playing, one on a lute and the other on a violin, to remind the holy infant of the strains he used to hear in heaven. It is one of the few pictures that there is really any pleasure in looking at. There were several paintings by Titian, mostly of a voluptuous character, but not very charming; also two or more by Guido, one of which, representing Fortune, is celebrated. They did not impress me much, nor do I find myself strongly drawn towards Guido, though there is no other painter who seems to achieve things so magically and inscrutably as he sometimes does. Perhaps it requires a finer taste than mine to appreciate him; and yet I do appreciate him so far as to see that his Michael, for instance, is perfectly beautiful. . . . . In the gallery, there are whole rows of portraits of members of the Academy of St. Luke, most of whom, judging by their physiognomies, were very commonplace people; a fact which makes itself visible in a portrait, however much the painter may try to flatter his sitter. Several of the pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, and other artists, now exhibited in the gallery, were formerly kept in a secret cabinet in the Capitol, being considered of a too voluptuous character for the public eye. I did not think them noticeably indecorous, as compared with a hundred other pictures that are shown and looked at without scruple;--Calypso and her nymphs, a knot of nude women by Titian, is perhaps as objectionable as any. But even Titian's flesh-tints cannot keep, and have not kept their warmth through all these centuries. The illusion and lifelikeness effervesces and exhales out of a picture as it grows old; and we go on talking of a charm that has forever vanished. From St. Luke's we went to San Pietro in Vincoli, occupying a fine position on or near the summit of the Esquiline mount. A little abortion of a man (and, by the by, there are more diminutive and ill-shapen men and women in Rome than I ever saw elsewhere, a phenomenon to be accounted for, perhaps, by their custom of wrapping the new-born infant in swaddling-clothes), this two-foot abortion hastened before us, as we drew nigh, to summon the sacristan to open the church door. It was a needless service, for which we rewarded him with two baiocchi. San Pietro is a simple and noble church, consisting of a nave divided from the side aisles by rows of columns, that once adorned some ancient temple; and its wide, unencumbered interior affords better breathing-space than most churches in Rome. The statue of Moses occupies a niche in one of the side aisles on the right, not far from the high altar. I found it grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should be. The horns, about which so much has been said, are not a very prominent feature of the statue, being merely two diminutive tips rising straight up over his forehead, neither adding to the grandeur of the head, nor detracting sensibly from it. The whole force of this statue is not to be felt in one brief visit, but I agree with an English gentleman, who, with a large party, entered the church while we were there, in thinking that Moses has "very fine features,"--a compliment for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow. Besides the Moses, the church contains some attractions of a pictorial kind, which are reposited in the sacristy, into which we passed through a side door. The most remarkable of these pictures is a face and bust of Hope, by Guido, with beautiful eyes lifted upwards; it has a grace which artists are continually trying to get into their innumerable copies, but always without success; for, indeed, though nothing is more true than the existence of this charm in the picture, yet if you try to analyze it, or even look too intently at it, it vanishes, till you look again with more trusting simplicity. Leaving the church, we wandered to the Coliseum, and to the public grounds contiguous to them, where a score and more of French drummers were beating each man his drum, without reference to any rub-a-dub but his own. This seems to be a daily or periodical practice and point of duty with them. After resting ourselves on one of the marble benches, we came slowly home, through the Basilica of Constantine, and along the shady sides of the streets and piazzas, sometimes, perforce, striking boldly through the white sunshine, which, however, was not so hot as to shrivel us up bodily. It has been a most beautiful and perfect day as regards weather, clear and bright, very warm in the sunshine, yet freshened throughout by a quiet stir in the air. Still there is something in this air malevolent, or, at least, not friendly. The Romans lie down and fall asleep in it, in any vacant part of the streets, and wherever they can find any spot sufficiently clean, and among the ruins of temples. I would not sleep in the open air for whatever my life may be worth. On our way home, sitting in one of the narrow streets, we saw an old woman spinning with a distaff; a far more ancient implement than the spinning-wheel, which the housewives of other nations have long since laid aside. April 18th.--Yesterday, at noon, the whole family of us set out on a visit to the Villa Borghese and its grounds, the entrance to which is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. After getting within the grounds, however, there is a long walk before reaching the casino, and we found the sun rather uncomfortably hot, and the road dusty and white in the sunshine; nevertheless, a footpath ran alongside of it most of the way through the grass and among the young trees. It seems to me that the trees do not put forth their leaves with nearly the same magical rapidity in this southern land at the approach of summer, as they do in more northerly countries. In these latter, having a much shorter time to develop themselves, they feel the necessity of making the most of it. But the grass, in the lawns and enclosures along which we passed, looked already fit to be mowed, and it was interspersed with many flowers. Saturday being, I believe, the only day of the week on which visitors are admitted to the casino, there were many parties in carriages, artists on foot, gentlemen on horseback, and miscellaneous people, to whom the door was opened by a custode on ringing a bell. The whole of the basement floor of the casino, comprising a suite of beautiful rooms, is filled with statuary. The entrance hall is a very splendid apartment, brightly frescoed, and paved with ancient mosaics, representing the combats with beasts and gladiators in the Coliseum, curious, though very rudely and awkwardly designed, apparently after the arts had begun to decline. Many of the specimens of sculpture displayed in these rooms are fine, but none of them, I think, possess the highest merit. An Apollo is beautiful; a group of a fighting Amazon, and her enemies trampled under her horse's feet, is very impressive; a Faun, copied from that of Praxiteles, and another, who seems to be dancing, were exceedingly pleasant to look at. I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, . . . . linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. . . . . The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled. The gallery, as it is called, on the basement floor of the casino, is sixty feet in length, by perhaps a third as much in breadth, and is (after all I have seen at the Colonna Palace and elsewhere) a more magnificent hall than I imagined to be in existence. It is floored with rich marble in beautifully arranged compartments, and the walls are almost entirely eased with marble of various sorts, the prevailing kind being giallo antico, intermixed with verd antique, and I know not what else; but the splendor of the giallo antico gives the character to the room, and the large and deep niches along the walls appear to be lined with the same material. Without coming to Italy, one can have no idea of what beauty and magnificence are produced by these fittings up of polished marble. Marble to an American means nothing but white limestone. This hall, moreover, is adorned with pillars of Oriental alabaster, and wherever is a space vacant of precious and richly colored marble it is frescoed with arabesque ornaments; and over the whole is a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with picture. There never can be anything richer than the whole effect. As to the sculpture here it was not very fine, so far as I can remember, consisting chiefly of busts of the emperors in porphyry; but they served a good purpose in the upholstery way. There were also magnificent tables, each composed of one great slab of porphyry; and also vases of nero antico, and other rarest substance. It remains to be mentioned that, on this almost summer day, I was quite chilled in passing through these glorious halls; no fireplace anywhere; no possibility of comfort; and in the hot season, when their coolness might be agreeable, it would be death to inhabit them. Ascending a long winding staircase, we arrived at another suite of rooms, containing a good many not very remarkable pictures, and a few more pieces of statuary. Among the latter, is Canova's statue of Pauline, the sister of Bonaparte, who is represented with but little drapery, and in the character of Venus holding the apple in her hand. It is admirably done, and, I have no doubt, a perfect likeness; very beautiful too; but it is wonderful to see how the artificial elegance of the woman of this world makes itself perceptible in spite of whatever simplicity she could find in almost utter nakedness. The statue does not afford pleasure in the contemplation. In one of these upper rooms are some works of Bernini; two of them, Aeneas and Anchises, and David on the point of slinging a stone at Goliath, have great merit, and do not tear and rend themselves quite out of the laws and limits of marble, like his later sculpture. Here is also his Apollo overtaking Daphne, whose feet take root, whose, finger-tips sprout into twigs, and whose tender body roughens round about with bark, as he embraces her. It did not seem very wonderful to me; not so good as Hillard's description of it made me expect; and one does not enjoy these freaks in marble. We were glad to emerge from the casino into the warm sunshine; and, for my part, I made the best of my way to a large fountain, surrounded by a circular stone seat of wide sweep, and sat down in a sunny segment of the circle. Around grew a solemn company of old trees,--ilexes, I believe,-- with huge, contorted trunks and evergreen branches, . . . . deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountains, marble statues, dimly visible in recesses of foliage, great urns and vases, terminal figures, temples, --all these works of art looking as if they had stood there long enough to feel at home, and to be on friendly and familiar terms with the grass and trees. It is a most beautiful place, . . . . and the Malaria is its true master and inhabitant! April 22d.--We have been recently to the studio of Mr. Brown [now dead], the American landscape-painter, and were altogether surprised and delighted with his pictures. He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite unpolished by his many years' residence in Italy; he talks ungrammatically, and in Yankee idioms; walks with a strange, awkward gait and stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque; but wins one's confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we see an artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect and deportment. His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian scenery, and were most beautiful and true. One of them, a moonlight picture, was really magical,-- the moon shining so brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits of the picture,--and yet his sunrises and sunsets, and noontides too, were nowise inferior to this, although their excellence required somewhat longer study, to be fully appreciated. I seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer one of the latter artist's pictures,--those of the former being quite changed from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments. Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,--it's love!" In fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object, which at last rewarded him by yielding itself wholly. We have likewise been to Mr. B------'s [now dead] studio, where we saw several pretty statues and busts, and among them an Eve, with her wreath of fig-leaves lying across her poor nudity; comely in some points, but with a frightful volume of thighs and calves. I do not altogether see the necessity of ever sculpturing another nakedness. Man is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him. Also, we have seen again William Story's Cleopatra,--a work of genuine thought and energy, representing a terribly dangerous woman; quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon you like a tigress. It is delightful to escape to his creations from this universal prettiness, which seems to be the highest conception of the crowd of modern sculptors, and which they almost invariably attain. Miss Bremer called on us the other day. We find her very little changed from what she was when she came to take tea and spend an evening at our little red cottage, among the Berkshire hills, and went away so dissatisfied with my conversational performances, and so laudatory of my brow and eyes, while so severely criticising my poor mouth and chin. She is the funniest little old fairy in person whom one can imagine, with a huge nose, to which all the rest of her is but an insufficient appendage; but you feel at once that she is most gentle, kind, womanly, sympathetic, and true. She talks English fluently, in a low quiet voice, but with such an accent that it is impossible to understand her without the closest attention. This was the real cause of the failure of our Berkshire interview; for I could not guess, half the time, what she was saying, and, of course, had to take an uncertain aim with my responses. A more intrepid talker than myself would have shouted his ideas across the gulf; but, for me, there must first be a close and unembarrassed contiguity with my companion, or I cannot say one real word. I doubt whether I have ever really talked with half a dozen persons in my life, either men or women. To-day my wife and I have been at the picture and sculpture galleries of the Capitol. I rather enjoyed looking at several of the pictures, though at this moment I particularly remember only a very beautiful face of a man, one of two heads on the same canvas by Vandyke. Yes; I did look with new admiration at Paul Veronese's "Rape of Europa." It must have been, in its day, the most brilliant and rejoicing picture, the most voluptuous, the most exuberant, that ever put the sunshine to shame. The bull has all Jupiter in him, so tender and gentle, yet so passionate, that you feel it indecorous to look at him; and Europa, under her thick rich stuffs and embroideries, is all a woman. What a pity that such a picture should fade, and perplex the beholder with such splendor shining through such forlornness! We afterwards went into the sculpture-gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out, without detriment to the human interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of a young lady! I have spoken of Mr. Gibson's colored statues. It seems (at least Mr. Nichols tells me) that he stains them with tobacco juice. . . . . Were he to send a Cupid to America, he need not trouble himself to stain it beforehand. April 25th.--Night before last, my wife and I took a moonlight ramble through Rome, it being a very beautiful night, warm enough for comfort, and with no perceptible dew or dampness. We set out at about nine o'clock, and, our general direction being towards the Coliseum, we soon came to the Fountain of Trevi, full on the front of which the moonlight fell, making Bernini's sculptures look stately and beautiful, though the semicircular gush and fall of the cascade, and the many jets of the water, pouring and bubbling into the great marble basin, are of far more account than Neptune and his steeds, and the rest of the figures. . . . . We ascended the Capitoline Hill, and I felt a satisfaction in placing my hand on those immense blocks of stone, the remains of the ancient Capitol, which form the foundation of the present edifice, and will make a sure basis for as many edifices as posterity may choose to rear upon it, till the end of the world. It is wonderful, the solidity with which those old Romans built; one would suppose they contemplated the whole course of Time as the only limit of their individual life. This is not so strange in the days of the Republic, when, probably, they believed in the permanence of their institutions; but they still seemed to build for eternity, in the reigns of the emperors, when neither rulers nor people had any faith or moral substance, or laid any earnest grasp on life. Reaching the top of the Capitoline Hill, we ascended the steps of the portal of the Palace of the Senator, and looked down into the piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of it. The architecture that surrounds the piazza is very ineffective; and so, in my opinion, are all the other architectural works of Michael Angelo, including St. Peter's itself, of which he has made as little as could possibly be made of such a vast pile of material. He balances everything in such a way that it seems but half of itself. We soon descended into the piazza, and walked round and round the statue of Marcus Aurelius, contemplating it from every point and admiring it in all. . . . . On these beautiful moonlight nights, Rome appears to keep awake and stirring, though in a quiet and decorous way. It is, in fact, the pleasantest time for promenades, and we both felt less wearied than by any promenade in the daytime, of similar extent, since our residence in Rome. In future, I mean to walk often after nightfall. Yesterday, we set out betimes, and ascended the dome of St. Peter's. The best view of the interior of the church, I think, is from the first gallery beneath the dome. The whole inside of the dome is set with mosaic-work, the separate pieces being, so far as I could see, about half an inch square. Emerging on the roof, we had a fine view of all the surrounding Rome, including the Mediterranean Sea in the remote distance. Above us still rose the whole mountain of the great dome, and it made an impression on me of greater height and size than I had yet been able to receive. The copper ball at the summit looked hardly bigger than a man could lift; and yet, a little while afterwards, U----, J-----, and I stood all together in that ball, which could have contained a dozen more along with us. The esplanade of the roof is, of course, very extensive; and along the front of it are ranged the statues which we see from below, and which, on nearer examination, prove to be roughly hewn giants. There is a small house on the roof, where, probably, the custodes of this part of the edifice reside; and there is a fountain gushing abundantly into a stone trough, that looked like an old sarcophagus. It is strange where the water comes from at such a height. The children tasted it, and pronounced it very warm and disagreeable. After taking in the prospect on all sides we rang a bell, which summoned a man, who directed us towards a door in the side of the dome, where a custode was waiting to admit us. Hitherto the ascent had been easy, along a slope without stairs, up which, I believe, people sometimes ride on donkeys. The rest of the way we mounted steep and narrow staircases, winding round within the wall, or between the two walls of the dome, and growing narrower and steeper, till, finally, there is but a perpendicular iron ladder, by means of which to climb into the copper ball. Except through small windows and peep-holes, there is no external prospect of a higher point than the roof of the church. Just beneath the ball there is a circular room capable of containing a large company, and a door which ought to give access to a gallery on the outside; but the custode informed us that this door is never opened. As I have said, U----, J-----, and I clambered into the copper ball, which we found as hot as an oven; and, after putting our hands on its top, and on the summit of St. Peter's, were glad to clamber down again. I have made some mistake, after all, in my narration. There certainly is a circular balcony at the top of the dome, for I remember walking round it, and looking, not only across the country, but downwards along the ribs of the dome; to which are attached the iron contrivances for illuminating it on Easter Sunday. . . . . Before leaving the church we went to look at the mosaic copy of the "Transfiguration," because we were going to see the original in the Vatican, and wished to compare the two. Going round to the entrance of the Vatican, we went first to the manufactory of mosaics, to which we had a ticket of admission. We found it a long series of rooms, in which the mosaic artists were at work, chiefly in making some medallions of the heads of saints for the new church of St. Paul's. It was rather coarse work, and it seemed to me that the mosaic copy was somewhat stiffer and more wooden than the original, the bits of stone not flowing into color quite so freely as paint from a brush. There was no large picture now in process of being copied; but two or three artists were employed on small and delicate subjects. One had a Holy Family of Raphael in hand; and the Sibyls of Guercino and Domenichino were hanging on the wall, apparently ready to be put into mosaic. Wherever great skill and delicacy, on the artists' part were necessary, they seemed quite adequate to the occasion; but, after all, a mosaic of any celebrated picture is but a copy of a copy. The substance employed is a stone-paste, of innumerable different views, and in bits of various sizes, quantities of which were seen in cases along the whole series of rooms. We next ascended an amazing height of staircases, and walked along I know not what extent of passages, . . . . till we reached the picture-gallery of the Vatican, into which I had never been before. There are but three rooms, all lined with red velvet, on which hung about fifty pictures, each one of them, no doubt, worthy to be considered a masterpiece. In the first room were three Murillos, all so beautiful that I could have spent the day happily in looking at either of them; for, methinks, of all painters he is the tenderest and truest. I could not enjoy these pictures now, however, because in the next room, and visible through the open door, hung the "Transfiguration." Approaching it, I felt that the picture was worthy of its fame, and was far better than I could at once appreciate; admirably preserved, too, though I fully believe it must have possessed a charm when it left Raphael's hand that has now vanished forever. As church furniture and an external adornment, the mosaic copy is preferable to the original, but no copy could ever reproduce all the life and expression which we see here. Opposite to it hangs the "Communion of St. Jerome," the aged, dying saint, half torpid with death already, partaking of the sacrament, and a sunny garland of cherubs in the upper part of the picture, looking down upon him, and quite comforting the spectator with the idea that the old man needs only to be quite dead in order to flit away with them. As for the other pictures I did but glance at, and have forgotten them. The "Transfiguration" is finished with great minuteness and detail, the weeds and blades of grass in the foreground being as distinct as if they were growing in a natural soil. A partly decayed stick of wood with the bark is likewise given in close imitation of nature. The reflection of a foot of one of the apostles is seen in a pool of water at the verge of the picture. One or two heads and arms seem almost to project from the canvas. There is great lifelikeness and reality, as well as higher qualities. The face of Jesus, being so high aloft and so small in the distance, I could not well see; but I am impressed with the idea that it looks too much like human flesh and blood to be in keeping with the celestial aspect of the figure, or with the probabilities of the scene, when the divinity and immortality of the Saviour beamed from within him through the earthly features that ordinarily shaded him. As regards the composition of the picture, I am not convinced of the propriety of its being in two so distinctly separate parts,--the upper portion not thinking of the lower, and the lower portion not being aware of the higher. It symbolizes, however, the spiritual short-sightedness of mankind that, amid the trouble and grief of the lower picture, not a single individual, either of those who seek help or those who would willingly afford it, lifts his eyes to that region, one glimpse of which would set everything right. One or two of the disciples point upward, but without really knowing what abundance of help is to be had there. April 27th.--To-day we have all been with Mr. Akers to some studios of painters; first to that of Mr. Wilde, an artist originally from Boston. His pictures are principally of scenes from Venice, and are miracles of color, being as bright as if the light were transmitted through rubies and sapphires. And yet, after contemplating them awhile, we became convinced that the painter had not gone in the least beyond nature, but, on the contrary, had fallen short of brilliancies which no palette, or skill, or boldness in using color, could attain. I do not quite know whether it is best to attempt these things. They may be found in nature, no doubt, but always so tempered by what surrounds them, so put out of sight even while they seem full before our eyes, that we question the accuracy of a faithful reproduction of them on canvas. There was a picture of sunset, the whole sky of which would have outshone any gilded frame that could have been put around it. There was a most gorgeous sketch of a handful of weeds and leaves, such as may be seen strewing acres of forest-ground in an American autumn. I doubt whether any other man has ever ventured to paint a picture like either of these two, the Italian sunset or the American autumnal foliage. Mr. Wilde, who is still young, talked with genuine feeling and enthusiasm of his art, and is certainly a man of genius. We next went to the studio of an elderly Swiss artist, named Mueller, I believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature has most beautiful to show, and which she shows only to those who love her deeply and patiently. They are wonderful pictures, compressing plains, seas, and mountains, with miles and miles of distance, into the space of a foot or two, without crowding anything or leaving out a feature, and diffusing the free, blue atmosphere throughout. The works of the English watercolor artists which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition seemed to me nowise equal to these. Now, here are three artists, Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilde, and Mr. Mueller, who have smitten me with vast admiration within these few days past, while I am continually turning away disappointed from the landscapes of the most famous among the old masters, unable to find any charm or illusion in them. Yet I suppose Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa must have won their renown by real achievements. But the glory of a picture fades like that of a flower. Contiguous to Mr. Mueller's studio was that of a young German artist, not long resident in Rome, and Mr. Akers proposed that we should go in there, as a matter of kindness to the young man, who is scarcely known at all, and seldom has a visitor to look at his pictures. His studio comprised his whole establishment; for there was his little bed, with its white drapery, in a corner of the small room, and his dressing-table, with its brushes and combs, while the easel and the few sketches of Italian scenes and figures occupied the foreground. I did not like his pictures very well, but would gladly have bought them all if I could have afforded it, the artist looked so cheerful, patient, and quiet, doubtless amidst huge discouragement. He is probably stubborn of purpose, and is the sort of man who will improve with every year of his life. We could not speak his language, and were therefore spared the difficulty of paying him any compliments; but Miss Shepard said a few kind words to him in German. and seemed quite to win his heart, insomuch that he followed her with bows and smiles a long way down the staircase. It is a terrible business, this looking at pictures, whether good or bad, in the presence of the artists who paint them; it is as great a bore as to hear a poet read his own verses. It takes away all my pleasure in seeing the pictures, and even remakes me question the genuineness of the impressions which I receive from them. After this latter visit Mr. Akers conducted us to the shop of the jeweller Castellani, who is a great reproducer of ornaments in the old Roman and Etruscan fashion. These antique styles are very fashionable just now, and some of the specimens he showed us were certainly very beautiful, though I doubt whether their quaintness and old-time curiousness, as patterns of gewgaws dug out of immemorial tombs, be not their greatest charm. We saw the toilet-case of an Etruscan lady,--that is to say, a modern imitation of it,--with her rings for summer and winter, and for every day of the week, and for thumb and fingers; her ivory comb; her bracelets; and more knick-knacks than I can half remember. Splendid things of our own time were likewise shown us; a necklace of diamonds worth eighteen thousand scudi, together with emeralds and opals and great pearls. Finally we came away, and my wife and Miss Shepard were taken up by the Misses Weston, who drove with them to visit the Villa Albani. During their drive my wife happened to raise her arm, and Miss Shepard espied a little Greek cross of gold which had attached itself to the lace of her sleeve. . . . . Pray heaven the jeweller may not discover his loss before we have time to restore the spoil! He is apparently so free and careless in displaying his precious wares,--putting inestimable genes and brooches great and small into the hands of strangers like ourselves, and leaving scores of them strewn on the top of his counter,--that it would seem easy enough to take a diamond or two; but I suspect there must needs be a sharp eye somewhere. Before we left the shop he requested me to honor him with my autograph in a large book that was full of the names of his visitors. This is probably a measure of precaution. April 30th.--I went yesterday to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, and looked pretty thoroughly through the busts of the illustrious men, and less particularly at those of the emperors and their relatives. I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it, and for that reason I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings. . . . . We have had beautiful weather for two or three days, very warm in the sun, yet always freshened by the gentle life of a breeze, and quite cool enough the moment you pass within the limit of the shade. . . . . In the morning there are few people there (on the Pincian) except the gardeners, lazily trimming the borders, or filling their watering-pots out of the marble-brimmed basin of the fountain; French soldiers, in their long mixed-blue surtouts, and wide scarlet pantaloons, chatting with here and there a nursery-maid and playing with the child in her care; and perhaps a few smokers, . . . . choosing each a marble seat or wooden bench in sunshine or shade as best suits him. In the afternoon, especially within an hour or two of sunset, the gardens are much more populous, and the seats, except when the sun falls full upon them, are hard to come by. Ladies arrive in carriages, splendidly dressed; children are abundant, much impeded in their frolics, and rendered stiff and stately by the finery which they wear; English gentlemen and Americans with their wives and families; the flower of the Roman population, too, both male and female, mostly dressed with great nicety; but a large intermixture of artists, shabbily picturesque; and other persons, not of the first stamp. A French band, comprising a great many brass instruments, by and by begins to play; and what with music, sunshine, a delightful atmosphere, flowers, grass, well-kept pathways, bordered with box-hedges, pines, cypresses, horse-chestnuts, flowering shrubs, and all manner of cultivated beauty, the scene is a very lively and agreeable one. The fine equipages that drive round and round through the carriage-paths are another noticeable item. The Roman aristocracy are magnificent in their aspect, driving abroad with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, sometimes as many as three behind and one sitting by the coachman. May 1st.--This morning, I wandered for the thousandth time through some of the narrow intricacies of Rome, stepping here and there into a church. I do not know the name of the first one, nor had it anything that in Rome could be called remarkable, though, till I came here, I was not aware that any such churches existed,--a marble pavement in variegated compartments, a series of shrines and chapels round the whole floor, each with its own adornment of sculpture and pictures, its own altar with tall wax tapers before it, some of which were burning; a great picture over the high altar, the whole interior of the church ranged round with pillars and pilasters, and lined, every inch of it, with rich yellow marble. Finally, a frescoed ceiling over the nave and transepts, and a dome rising high above the central part, and filled with frescos brought to such perspective illusion, that the edges seem to project into the air. Two or three persons are kneeling at separate shrines; there are several wooden confessionals placed against the walls, at one of which kneels a lady, confessing to a priest who sits within; the tapers are lighted at the high altar and at one of the shrines; an attendant is scrubbing the marble pavement with a broom and water, a process, I should think, seldom practised in Roman churches. By and by the lady finishes her confession, kisses the priest's hand, and sits down in one of the chairs which are placed about the floor, while the priest, in a black robe, with a short, white, loose jacket over his shoulders, disappears by a side door out of the church. I, likewise, finding nothing attractive in the pictures, take my departure. Protestantism needs a new apostle to convert it into something positive. . . . . I now found my way to the Piazza Navona. It is to me the most interesting piazza in Rome; a large oblong space, surrounded with tall, shabby houses, among which there are none that seem to be palaces. The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it;--one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches. Monstrous devices in marble, I know not of what purport, are clambering about the cloven rock or burrowing beneath it; one and all of them are superfluous and impertinent, the only essential thing being the abundant supply of water in the fountain. This whole Piazza Navona is usually the scene of more business than seems to be transacted anywhere else in Rome; in some parts of it rusty iron is offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and all such rubbish; in other parts vegetables, comprising, at this season, green peas, onions, cauliflowers, radishes, artichokes, and others with which I have never made acquaintance; also, stalls or wheelbarrows containing apples, chestnuts (the meats dried and taken out of the shells), green almonds in their husks, and squash-seeds,--salted and dried in an oven,--apparently a favorite delicacy of the Romans. There are also lemons and oranges; stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber; cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece; bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome. On one side of the piazza is the Church of St. Agnes, traditionally said to stand on the site of the house where that holy maiden was exposed to infamy by the Roman soldiers, and where her modesty and innocence were saved by miracle. I went into the church, and found it very splendid, with rich marble columns, all as brilliant as if just built; a frescoed dome above; beneath, a range of chapels all round the church, ornamented not with pictures but bas-reliefs, the figures of which almost step and struggle out of the marble. They did not seem very admirable as works of art, none of them explaining themselves or attracting me long enough to study out their meaning; but, as part of the architecture of the church, they had a good effect. Out of the busy square two or three persons had stepped into this bright and calm seclusion to pray and be devout, for a little while; and, between sunrise and sunset of the bustling market-day, many doubtless snatch a moment to refresh their souls. In the Pantheon (to-day) it was pleasant looking up to the circular opening, to see the clouds flitting across it, sometimes covering it quite over, then permitting a glimpse of sky, then showing all the circle of sunny blue. Then would come the ragged edge of a cloud, brightened throughout with sunshine, passing and changing quickly,--not that the divine smile was not always the same, but continually variable through the medium of earthly influences. The great slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to the pavement, falling upon motes of dust, or a thin smoke of incense imperceptible in the shadow. Insects were playing to and fro in the beam, high up toward the opening. There is a wonderful charm in the naturalness of all this, and one might fancy a swarm of cherubs coming down through the opening and sporting in the broad ray, to gladden the faith of worshippers on the pavement beneath; or angels bearing prayers upward, or bringing down responses to them, visible with dim brightness as they pass through the pathway of heaven's radiance, even the many hues of their wings discernible by a trusting eye; though, as they pass into the shadow, they vanish like the motes. So the sunbeam would represent those rays of divine intelligence which enable us to see wonders and to know that they are natural things. Consider the effect of light and shade in a church where the windows are open and darkened with curtains that are occasionally lifted by a breeze, letting in the sunshine, which whitens a carved tombstone on the pavement of the church, disclosing, perhaps, the letters of the name and inscription, a death's-head, a crosier, or other emblem; then the curtain falls and the bright spot vanishes. May 8th.--This morning my wife and I went to breakfast with Mrs. William Story at the Barberini Palace, expecting to meet Mrs. Jameson, who has been in Rome for a month or two. We had a very pleasant breakfast, but Mrs. Jameson was not present on account of indisposition, and the only other guests were Mrs. A------ and Mrs. H------, two sensible American ladies. Mrs. Story, however, received a note from Mrs. Jameson, asking her to bring us to see her at her lodgings; so in the course of the afternoon she called on us, and took us thither in her carriage. Mrs. Jameson lives on the first piano of an old palazzo on the Via di Ripetta, nearly opposite the ferry-way across the Tiber, and affording a pleasant view of the yellow river and the green bank and fields on the other side. I had expected to see an elderly lady, but not quite so venerable a one as Mrs. Jameson proved to be; a rather short, round, and massive personage, of benign and agreeable aspect, with a sort of black skullcap on her head, beneath which appeared her hair, which seemed once to have been fair, and was now almost white. I should take her to be about seventy years old. She began to talk to us with affectionate familiarity, and was particularly kind in her manifestations towards myself, who, on my part, was equally gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was a great deal of expression in their faces and figures; and the spectator feels, moreover, that the artist must have been a devout man,--an impression which we seldom receive from modern pictures, however awfully holy the subject, or however consecrated the place they hang in. Mrs. Jameson seems to be familiar with Italy, its people and life, as well as with its picture-galleries. She is said to be rather irascible in her temper; but nothing could be sweeter than her voice, her look, and all her manifestations to-day. When we were coming away she clasped my hand in both of hers, and again expressed the pleasure of having seen me, and her gratitude to me for calling on her; nor did I refrain from responding Amen to these effusions. . . . . Taking leave of Mrs. Jameson, we drove through the city, and out of the Lateran Gate; first, however, waiting a long while at Monaldini's bookstore in the Piazza de' Spagna for Mr. Story, whom we finally took up in the street, after losing nearly an hour. Just two miles beyond the gate is a space on the green campagna where, for some time past, excavations have been in progress, which thus far have resulted in the discovery of several tombs, and the old, buried, and almost forgotten church or basilica of San Stefano. It is a beautiful spot, that of the excavations, with the Alban hills in the distance, and some heavy, sunlighted clouds hanging above, or recumbent at length upon them, and behind the city and its mighty dome. The excavations are an object of great interest both to the Romans and to strangers, and there were many carriages and a great many visitors viewing the progress of the works, which are carried forward with greater energy than anything else I have seen attempted at Rome. A short time ago the ground in the vicinity was a green surface, level, except here and there a little hillock, or scarcely perceptible swell; the tomb of Cecilia Metella showing itself a mile or two distant, and other rugged ruins of great tombs rising on the plain. Now the whole site of the basilica is uncovered, and they have dug into the depths of several tombs, bringing to light precious marbles, pillars, a statue, and elaborately wrought sarcophagi; and if they were to dig into almost every other inequality that frets the surface of the campagna, I suppose the result might be the same. You cannot dig six feet downward anywhere into the soil, deep enough to hollow out a grave, without finding some precious relic of the past; only they lose somewhat of their value when you think that you can almost spurn them out of the ground with your foot. It is a very wonderful arrangement of Providence that these things should have been preserved for a long series of coming generations by that accumulation of dust and soil and grass and trees and houses over them, which will keep them safe, and cause their reappearance above ground to be gradual, so that the rest of the world's lifetime may have for one of its enjoyments the uncovering of old Rome. The tombs were accessible by long flights of steps going steeply downward, and they were thronged with so many visitors that we had to wait some little time for our own turn. In the first into which we descended we found two tombs side by side, with only a partition wall between; the outer tomb being, as is supposed, a burial-place constructed by the early Christians, while the adjoined and minor one was a work of pagan Rome about the second century after Christ. The former was much less interesting than the latter. It contained some large sarcophagi, with sculpture upon them of rather heathenish aspect; and in the centre of the front of each sarcophagus was a bust in bas-relief, the features of which had never been wrought, but were left almost blank, with only the faintest indications of a nose, for instance. It is supposed that sarcophagi were kept on hand by the sculptors, and were bought ready made, and that it was customary to work out the portrait of the deceased upon the blank face in the centre; but when there was a necessity for sudden burial, as may have been the case in the present instance, this was dispensed with. The inner tomb was found without any earth in it, just as it had been left when the last old Roman was buried there; and it being only a week or two since it was opened, there was very little intervention of persons, though much of time, between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. It is a square room, with a mosaic pavement, and is six or seven paces in length and breadth, and as much in height to the vaulted roof. The roof and upper walls are beautifully ornamented with frescos, which were very bright when first discovered, but have rapidly faded since the admission of the air, though the graceful and joyous designs, flowers and fruits and trees, are still perfectly discernible. The room must have been anything but sad and funereal; on the contrary, as cheerful a saloon, and as brilliant, if lighted up, as one could desire to feast in. It contained several marble sarcophagi, covering indeed almost the whole floor, and each of them as much as three or four feet in length, and two much longer. The longer ones I did not particularly examine, and they seemed comparatively plainer; but the smaller sarcophagi were covered with the most delicately wrought and beautiful bas-reliefs that I ever beheld; a throng of glad and lovely shapes in marble clustering thickly and chasing one another round the sides of these old stone coffins. The work was as perfect as when the sculptor gave it his last touch; and if he had wrought it to be placed in a frequented hall, to be seen and admired by continual crowds as long as the marble should endure, he could not have chiselled with better skill and care, though his work was to be shut up in the depths of a tomb forever. This seems to me the strangest thing in the world, the most alien from modern sympathies. If they had built their tombs above ground, one could understand the arrangement better; but no sooner had they adorned them so richly, and furnished them with such exquisite productions of art, than they annihilated them with darkness. It was an attempt, no doubt, to render the physical aspect of death cheerful, but there was no good sense in it. We went down also into another tomb close by, the walls of which were ornamented with medallions in stucco. These works presented a numerous series of graceful designs, wrought by the hand in the short space of (Mr. Story said it could not have been more than) five or ten minutes, while the wet plaster remained capable of being moulded; and it was marvellous to think of the fertility of the artist's fancy, and the rapidity and accuracy with which he must have given substantial existence to his ideas. These too--all of them such adornments as would have suited a festal hall--were made to be buried forthwith in eternal darkness. I saw and handled in this tomb a great thigh-bone, and measured it with my own; it was one of many such relics of the guests who were laid to sleep in these rich chambers. The sarcophagi that served them for coffins could not now be put to a more appropriate use than as wine-coolers in a modern dining-room; and it would heighten the enjoyment of a festival to look at them. We would gladly have stayed much longer; but it was drawing towards sunset, and the evening, though bright, was unusually cool, so we drove home; and on the way, Mr. Story told us of the horrible practices of the modern Romans with their dead,--how they place them in the church, where, at midnight, they are stripped of their last rag of funeral attire, put into the rudest wooden coffins, and thrown into a trench,--a half-mile, for instance, of promiscuous corpses. This is the fate of all, except those whose friends choose to pay an exorbitant sum to have them buried under the pavement of a church. The Italians have an excessive dread of corpses, and never meddle with those of their nearest and dearest relatives. They have a horror of death, too, especially of sudden death, and most particularly of apoplexy; and no wonder, as it gives no time for the last rites of the Church, and so exposes them to a fearful risk of perdition forever. On the whole, the ancient practice was, perhaps, the preferable one; but Nature has made it very difficult for us to do anything pleasant and satisfactory with a dead body. God knows best; but I wish he had so ordered it that our mortal bodies, when we have done with them, might vanish out of sight and sense, like bubbles. A person of delicacy hates to think of leaving such a burden as his decaying mortality to the disposal of his friends; but, I say again, how delightful it would be, and how helpful towards our faith in a blessed futurity, if the dying could disappear like vanishing bubbles, leaving, perhaps, a sweet fragrance diffused for a minute or two throughout the death-chamber. This would be the odor of sanctity! And if sometimes the evaporation of a sinful soul should leave an odor not so delightful, a breeze through the open windows would soon waft it quite away. Apropos of the various methods of disposing of dead bodies, William Story recalled a newspaper paragraph respecting a ring, with a stone of a new species in it, which a widower was observed to wear upon his finger. Being questioned as to what the gem was, he answered, "It is my wife." He had procured her body to be chemically resolved into this stone. I think I could make a story on this idea: the ring should be one of the widower's bridal gifts to a second wife; and, of course, it should have wondrous and terrible qualities, symbolizing all that disturbs the quiet of a second marriage,--on the husband's part, remorse for his inconstancy, and the constant comparison between the dead wife of his youth, now idealized, and the grosser reality which he had now adopted into her place; while on the new wife's finger it should give pressures, shooting pangs into her heart, jealousies of the past, and all such miserable emotions. By the by, the tombs which we looked at and entered may have been originally above ground, like that of Cecilia Metella, and a hundred others along the Appian Way; though, even in this case, the beautiful chambers must have been shut up in darkness. Had there been windows, letting in the light upon the rich frescos and exquisite sculptures, there would have been a satisfaction in thinking of the existence of so much visual beauty, though no eye had the privilege to see it. But darkness, to objects of sight, is annihilation, as long as the darkness lasts. May 9th.--Mrs. Jameson called this forenoon to ask us to go and see her this evening; . . . . so that I had to receive her alone, devolving part of the burden on Miss Shepard and the three children, all of whom I introduced to her notice. Finding that I had not been farther beyond the walls of Rome than the tomb of Cecilia Metella, she invited me to take a drive of a few miles with her this afternoon. . . . . The poor lady seems to be very lame; and I am sure I was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to climb up the seventy steps of our staircase, and felt pain at seeing her go down them again. It looks fearfully like the gout, the affection being apparently in one foot. The hands, by the way, are white, and must once have been, perhaps now are, beautiful. She must have been a perfectly pretty woman in her day,--a blue or gray eyed, fair-haired beauty. I think that her hair is not white, but only flaxen in the extreme. At half past four, according to appointment, I arrived at her lodgings, and had not long to wait before her little one-horse carriage drove up to the door, and we set out, rumbling along the Via Scrofa, and through the densest part of the city, past the theatre of Marcellus, and thence along beneath the Palatine Hill, and by the Baths of Caracalla, through the gate of San Sebastiano. After emerging from the gate, we soon came to the little Church of "Domine, quo vadis?" Standing on the spot where St. Peter is said to have seen a vision of our Saviour bearing his cross, Mrs. Jameson proposed to alight; and, going in, we saw a cast from Michael Angelo's statue of the Saviour; and not far from the threshold of the church, yet perhaps in the centre of the edifice, which is extremely small, a circular stone is placed, a little raised above the pavement, and surrounded by a low wooden railing. Pointing to this stone, Mrs. Jameson showed me the prints of two feet side by side, impressed into its surface, as if a person had stopped short while pursuing his way to Rome. These, she informed me, were supposed to be the miraculous prints of the Saviour's feet; but on looking into Murray, I am mortified to find that they are merely facsimiles of the original impressions, which are treasured up among the relics of the neighboring Basilica of San Sebastiano. The marks of sculpture seemed to me, indeed, very evident in these prints, nor did they indicate such beautiful feet as should have belonged to the hearer of the best of glad tidings. Hence we drove on a little way farther, and came to the Basilica of San Sebastiano, where also we alighted, and, leaning on my arm, Mrs. Jameson went in. It is a stately and noble interior, with a spacious unencumbered nave, and a flat ceiling frescoed and gilded. In a chapel at the left of the entrance is the tomb of St. Sebastian,--a sarcophagus containing his remains, raised on high before the altar, and beneath it a recumbent statue of the saint pierced with gilded arrows. The sculpture is of the school of Bernini,--done after the design of Bernini himself, Mrs. Jameson said, and is more agreeable and in better taste than most of his works. We walked round the basilica, glancing at the pictures in the various chapels, none of which seemed to be of remarkable merit, although Mrs. Jameson pronounced rather a favorable verdict on one of St. Francis. She says that she can read a picture like the page of a book; in fact, without perhaps assuming more taste and judgment than really belong to her, it was impossible not to perceive that she gave her companion no credit for knowing one single simplest thing about art. Nor, on the whole, do I think she underrated me; the only mystery is, how she came to be so well aware of my ignorance on artistical points. In the basilica the Franciscan monks were arranging benches on the floor of the nave, and some peasant children and grown people besides were assembling, probably to undergo an examination in the catechism, and we hastened to depart, lest our presence should interfere with their arrangements. At the door a monk met us, and asked for a contribution in aid of his church, or some other religious purpose. Boys, as we drove on, ran stoutly along by the side of the chaise, begging as often as they could find breath, but were constrained finally to give up the pursuit. The great ragged bulks of the tombs along the Appian Way now hove in sight, one with a farm-house on its summit, and all of them preposterously huge and massive. At a distance, across the green campagna on our left, the Claudian aqueduct strode away over miles of space, and doubtless reached even to that circumference of blue hills which stand afar off, girdling Rome about. The tomb of Cecilia Metella came in sight a long while before we reached it, with the warm buff hue of its travertine, and the gray battlemented wall which the Caetanis erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic, though now dilapidated and much reduced in size. Mrs. Jameson had an engagement to dinner at half past six, so that we could go but a little farther along this most interesting road, the borders of which are strewn with broken marbles; fragments of capitals, and nameless rubbish that once was beautiful. Methinks the Appian Way should be the only entrance to Rome,--through an avenue of tombs. The day had been cloudy, chill, and windy, but was now grown calmer and more genial, and brightened by a very pleasant sunshine, though great dark clouds were still lumbering up the sky. We drove homeward, looking at the distant dome of St. Peter's and talking of many things,--painting, sculpture, America, England, spiritualism, and whatever else came up. She is a very sensible old lady, and sees a great deal of truth; a good woman, too, taking elevated views of matters; but I doubt whether she has the highest and finest perceptions in the world. At any rate, she pronounced a good judgment on the American sculptors now in Rome, condemning them in the mass as men with no high aims, no worthy conception of the purposes of their art, and desecrating marble by the things they wrought in it. William Story, I presume, is not to be included in this censure, as she had spoken highly of his sculpturesque faculty in our previous conversation. On my part, I suggested that the English sculptors were little or nothing better than our own, to which she acceded generally, but said that Gibson had produced works equal to the antique,--which I did not dispute, but still questioned whether the world needed Gibson, or was any the better for him. We had a great dispute about the propriety of adopting the costume of the day in modern sculpture, and I contended that either the art ought to be given up (which possibly would be the best course), or else should be used for idealizing the man of the day to himself; and that, as Nature makes us sensible of the fact when men and women are graceful, beautiful, and noble, through whatever costume they wear, so it ought to be the test of the sculptor's genius that he should do the same. Mrs. Jameson decidedly objected to buttons, breeches, and all other items of modern costume; and, indeed, they do degrade the marble, and make high sculpture utterly impossible. Then let the art perish as one that the world has done with, as it has done with many other beautiful things that belonged to an earlier time. It was long past the hour of Mrs. Jameson's dinner engagement when we drove up to her door in the Via Ripetta. I bade her farewell with much good-feeling on my own side, and, I hope, on hers, excusing myself, however, from keeping the previous engagement to spend the evening with her, for, in point of fact, we had mutually had enough of one another for the time being. I am glad to record that she expressed a very favorable opinion of our friend Mr. Thompson's pictures. May 12th.--To-day we have been to the Villa Albani, to which we had a ticket of admission through the agency of Mr. Cass (the American Minister). We set out between ten and eleven o'clock, and walked through the Via Felice, the Piazza Barberini, and a long, heavy, dusty range of streets beyond, to the Porta Salara, whence the road extends, white and sunny, between two high blank walls to the gate of the villa, which is at no great distance. We were admitted by a girl, and went first to the casino, along an aisle of overshadowing trees, the branches of which met above our heads. In the portico of the casino, which extends along its whole front, there are many busts and statues, and, among them, one of Julius Caesar, representing him at an earlier period of life than others which I have seen. His aspect is not particularly impressive; there is a lack of chin, though not so much as in the older statues and busts. Within the edifice there is a large hall, not so brilliant, perhaps, with frescos and gilding as those at the Villa Borghese, but lined with the most beautiful variety of marbles. But, in fact, each new splendor of this sort outshines the last, and unless we could pass from one to another all in the same suite, we cannot remember them well enough to compare the Borghese with the Albani, the effect being more on the fancy than on the intellect. I do not recall any of the sculpture, except a colossal bas-relief of Antinous, crowned with flowers, and holding flowers in his hand, which was found in the ruins of Hadrian's Villa. This is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoon; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Autinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture. We went up stairs and down stairs, and saw a good many beautiful things, but none, perhaps, of the very best and beautifullest; and second-rate statues, with the corroded surface of old marble that has been dozens of centuries under the ground, depress the spirits of the beholder. The bas-relief of Antinous has at least the merit of being almost as white and fresh, and quite as smooth, as if it had never been buried and dug up again. The real treasures of this villa, to the number of nearly three hundred, were removed to Paris by Napoleon, and, except the Antinous, not one of them ever came back. There are some pictures in one or two of the rooms, and among them I recollect one by Perugino, in which is a St. Michael, very devout and very beautiful; indeed, the whole picture (which is in compartments, representing the three principal points of the Saviour's history) impresses the beholder as being painted devoutly and earnestly by a religious man. In one of the rooms there is a small bronze Apollo, supposed by Winckelmann to be an original of Praxiteles; but I could not make myself in the least sensible of its merit. The rest of the things in the casino I shall pass over, as also those in the coffee-house,--an edifice which stands a hundred yards or more from the casino, with an ornamental garden, laid out in walks and flower-plats between. The coffee-house has a semicircular sweep of porch with a good many statues and busts beneath it, chiefly of distinguished Romans. In this building, as in the casino, there are curious mosaics, large vases of rare marble, and many other things worth long pauses of admiration; but I think that we were all happier when we had done with the works of art, and were at leisure to ramble about the grounds. The Villa Albani itself is an edifice separate from both the coffee-house and casino, and is not opened to strangers. It rises, palace-like, in the midst of the garden, and, it is to be hoped, has some possibility of comfort amidst its splendors.--Comfort, however, would be thrown away upon it; for besides that the site shares the curse that has fallen upon every pleasant place in the vicinity of Rome, . . . . it really has no occupant except the servants who take care of it. The Count of Castelbarco, its present proprietor, resides at Milan. The grounds are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew the path with their falling leaves. We stole a few, and feel that we have wronged our consciences in not stealing more. In one part of the grounds we saw a field actually ablaze with scarlet poppies. There are great lagunas; fountains presided over by naiads, who squirt their little jets into basins; sunny lawns; a temple, so artificially ruined that we half believed it a veritable antique; and at its base a reservoir of water, in which stone swans seemed positively to float; groves of cypress; balustrades and broad flights of stone stairs, descending to lower levels of the garden; beauty, peace, sunshine, and antique repose on every side; and far in the distance the blue hills that encircle the campagna of Rome. The day was very fine for our purpose; cheerful, but not too bright, and tempered by a breeze that seemed even a little too cool when we sat long in the shade. We enjoyed it till three o'clock. . . . . At the Capitol there is a sarcophagus with a most beautiful bas-relief of the discovery of Achilles by Ulysses, in which there is even an expression of mirth on the faces of many of the spectators. And to-day at the Albani a sarcophagus was ornamented with the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis. Death strides behind every man, to be sure, at more or less distance, and, sooner or later, enters upon any event of his life; so that, in this point of view, they might each and all serve for bas-reliefs on a sarcophagus; but the Romans seem to have treated Death as lightly and playfully as they could, and tried to cover his dart with flowers, because they hated it so much. May 15th.--My wife and I went yesterday to the Sistine Chapel, it being my first visit. It is a room of noble proportions, lofty and long, though divided in the midst by a screen or partition of white marble, which rises high enough to break the effect of spacious unity. There are six arched windows on each side of the chapel, throwing down their light from the height of the walls, with as much as twenty feet of space (more I should think) between them and the floor. The entire walls and ceiling of this stately chapel are covered with paintings in fresco, except the space about ten feet in height from the floor, and that portion was intended to be adorned by tapestries from pictures by Raphael, but, the design being prevented by his premature death, the projected tapestries have no better substitute than paper-hangings. The roof, which is flat at top, and coved or vaulted at the sides, is painted in compartments by Michael Angelo, with frescos representing the whole progress of the world and of mankind from its first formation by the Almighty . . . . till after the flood. On one of the sides of the chapel are pictures by Perugino, and other old masters, of subsequent events in sacred history; and the entire wall behind the altar, a vast expanse from the ceiling to the floor, is taken up with Michael Angelo's summing up of the world's history and destinies in his "Last Judgment." There can be no doubt that while these frescos continued in their perfection, there was nothing else to be compared with the magnificent and solemn beauty of this chapel. Enough of ruined splendor still remains to convince the spectator of all that has departed; but methinks I have seen hardly anything else so forlorn and depressing as it is now, all dusky and dim, even the very lights having passed into shadows, and the shadows into utter blackness; so that it needs a sunshiny day, under the bright Italian heavens, to make the designs perceptible at all. As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility,--the Almighty moving in chaos,--the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive. In the "Last Judgment" the scene of the greater part of the picture lies in the upper sky, the blue of which glows through betwixt the groups of naked figures; and above sits Jesus, not looking in the least like the Saviour of the world, but, with uplifted arm, denouncing eternal misery on those whom he came to save. I fear I am myself among the wicked, for I found myself inevitably taking their part, and asking for at least a little pity, some few regrets, and not such a stern denunciatory spirit on the part of Him who had thought us worth dying for. Around him stand grim saints, and, far beneath, people are getting up sleepily out of their graves, not well knowing what is about to happen; many of them, however, finding themselves clutched by demons before they are half awake. It would be a very terrible picture to one who should really see Jesus, the Saviour, in that inexorable judge; but it seems to me very undesirable that he should ever be represented in that aspect, when it is so essential to our religion to believe him infinitely kinder and better towards us than we deserve. At the last day--I presume, that is, in all future days, when we see ourselves as we are--man's only inexorable judge will be himself, and the punishment of his sins will be the perception of them. In the lower corner of this great picture, at the right hand of the spectator, is a hideous figure of a damned person, girdled about with a serpent, the folds of which are carefully knotted between his thighs, so as, at all events, to give no offence to decency. This figure represents a man who suggested to Pope Paul III. that the nudities of the "Last Judgment" ought to be draped, for which offence Michael Angelo at once consigned him to hell. It shows what a debtor's prison and dungeon of private torment men would make of hell if they had the control of it. As to the nudities, if they were ever more nude than now, I should suppose, in their fresh brilliancy, they might well have startled a not very squeamish eye. The effect, such as it is, of this picture, is much injured by the high altar and its canopy, which stands close against the wall, and intercepts a considerable portion of the sprawl of nakedness with which Michael Angelo has filled his sky. However, I am not unwilling to believe, with faith beyond what I can actually see, that the greatest pictorial miracles ever yet achieved have been wrought upon the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the afternoon I went with Mr. Thompson to see what bargain could be made with vetturinos for taking myself and family to Florence. We talked with three or four, and found them asking prices of various enormity, from a hundred and fifty scudi down to little more than ninety; but Mr. Thompson says that they always begin in this way, and will probably come down to somewhere about seventy-five. Mr. Thompson took me into the Via Portoghese, and showed me an old palace, above which rose--not a very customary feature of the architecture of Rome--a tall, battlemented tower. At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin, with a lamp, and all the appendages of those numerous shrines which we see at the street-corners, and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four centuries ago, this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son and a large pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and clambered to this lofty turret, and sat there with him in his arms grinning and chattering like the Devil himself. The father was in despair, but was afraid to pursue the monkey lest he should fling down the child from the height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the tower, and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground; the father fulfilled his vow, built the shrine, and made it obligatory, on all future possessors of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed, the property has changed hands; but still there is the shrine on the giddy top of the tower, far aloft over the street, on the very spot where the monkey sat, and there burns the lamp, in memory of the father's vow. This being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extinguishment of that flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace. May 21st.--Mamma and I went, yesterday forenoon, to the Spada Palace, which we found among the intricacies of Central Rome; a dark and massive old edifice, built around a court, the fronts giving on which are adorned with statues in niches, and sculptured ornaments. A woman led us up a staircase, and ushered us into a great gloomy hall, square and lofty, and wearing a very gray and ancient aspect, its walls being painted in chiaroscuro, apparently a great many years ago. The hall was lighted by small windows, high upward from the floors, and admitting only a dusky light. The only furniture or ornament, so far as I recollect, was the colossal statue of Pompey, which stands on its pedestal at one side, certainly the sternest and severest of figures, and producing the most awful impression on the spectator. Much of the effect, no doubt, is due to the sombre obscurity of the hall, and to the loneliness in which the great naked statue stands. It is entirely nude, except for a cloak that hangs down from the left shoulder; in the left hand, it holds a globe; the right arm is extended. The whole expression is such as the statue might have assumed, if, during the tumult of Caesar's murder, it had stretched forth its marble hand, and motioned the conspirators to give over the attack, or to be quiet, now that their victim had fallen at its feet. On the left leg, about midway above the ankle, there is a dull, red stain, said to be Caesar's blood; but, of course, it is just such a red stain in the marble as may be seen on the statue of Antinous at the Capitol. I could not see any resemblance in the face of the statue to that of the bust of Pompey, shown as such at the Capitol, in which there is not the slightest moral dignity, or sign of intellectual eminence. I am glad to have seen this statue, and glad to remember it in that gray, dim, lofty hall; glad that there were no bright frescos on the walls, and that the ceiling was wrought with massive beams, and the floor paved with ancient brick. From this anteroom we passed through several saloons containing pictures, some of which were by eminent artists; the Judith of Guido, a copy of which used to weary me to death, year after year, in the Boston Athenaeum; and many portraits of Cardinals in the Spada family, and other pictures, by Guido. There were some portraits, also of the family, by Titian; some good pictures by Guercino; and many which I should have been glad to examine more at leisure; but, by and by, the custode made his appearance, and began to close the shutters, under pretence that the sunshine would injure the paintings,--an effect, I presume, not very likely to follow after two or three centuries' exposure to light, air, and whatever else might hurt them. However, the pictures seemed to be in much better condition, and more enjoyable, so far as they had merit, than those in most Roman picture-galleries; although the Spada Palace itself has a decayed and impoverished aspect, as if the family had dwindled from its former state and grandeur, and now, perhaps, smuggled itself into some out-of-the-way corner of the old edifice. If such be the case, there is something touching in their still keeping possession of Pompey's statue, which makes their house famous, and the sale of which might give them the means of building it up anew; for surely it is worth the whole sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. In the afternoon Mr. Thompson and I went, for the third or fourth time, to negotiate with vetturinos. . . . . So far as I know them they are a very tricky set of people, bent on getting as much as they can, by hook or by crook, out of the unfortunate individual who falls into their hands. They begin, as I have said, by asking about twice as much as they ought to receive; and anything between this exorbitant amount and the just price is what they thank heaven for, as so much clear gain. Nevertheless, I am not quite sure that the Italians are worse than other people even in this matter. In other countries it is the custom of persons in trade to take as much as they can get from the public, fleecing one man to exactly the same extent as another; here they take what they can obtain from the individual customer. In fact, Roman tradesmen do not pretend to deny that they ask and receive different prices from different people, taxing them according to their supposed means of payment; the article supplied being the same in one case as in another. A shopkeeper looked into his books to see if we were of the class who paid two pauls, or only a paul and a half for candles; a charcoal-dealer said that seventy baiocchi was a very reasonable sum for us to pay for charcoal, and that some persons paid eighty; and Mr. Thompson, recognizing the rule, told the old vetturino that "a hundred and fifty scudi was a very proper charge for carrying a prince to Florence, but not for carrying me, who was merely a very good artist." The result is well enough; the rich man lives expensively, and pays a larger share of the profits which people of a different system of trade-morality would take equally from the poor man. The effect on the conscience of the vetturino, however, and of tradesmen of all kinds, cannot be good; their only intent being, not to do justice between man and man, but to go as deep as they can into all pockets, and to the very bottom of some. We had nearly concluded a bargain, a day or two ago, with a vetturino to take or send us to Florence, via Perugia, in eight days, for a hundred scudi; but he now drew back, under pretence of having misunderstood the terms, though, in reality, no doubt, he was in hopes of getting a better bargain from somebody else. We made an agreement with another man, whom Mr. Thompson knows and highly recommends, and immediately made it sure and legally binding by exchanging a formal written contract, in which everything is set down, even to milk, butter, bread, eggs, and coffee, which we are to have for breakfast; the vetturino being to pay every expense for himself, his horses, and his passengers, and include it within ninety-five scudi, and five crowns in addition for buon-mano. . . . . . May 22d.--Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. ------ called. I never saw him but once before, and that was at the door of our little red cottage in Lenox; he sitting in a wagon with one or two of the Sedgewicks, merely exchanging a greeting with me from under the brim of his straw hat, and driving on. He presented himself now with a long white beard, such as a palmer might have worn as the growth of his long pilgrimages, a brow almost entirely bald, and what hair he has quite hoary; a forehead impending, yet not massive; dark, bushy eyebrows and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age; but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo's kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough still to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about him, and he conversed with great readiness and simplicity about his travels, and whatever other subject came up; telling us that he had been abroad five times, and was now getting a little home-sick, and had no more eagerness for sights, though his "gals" (as he called his daughter and another young lady) dragged him out to see the wonders of Rome again. His manners and whole aspect are very particularly plain, though not affectedly so; but it seems as if in the decline of life, and the security of his position, he had put off whatever artificial polish he may have heretofore had, and resumed the simpler habits and deportment of his early New England breeding. Not but what you discover, nevertheless, that he is a man of refinement, who has seen the world, and is well aware of his own place in it. He spoke with great pleasure of his recent visit to Spain. I introduced the subject of Kansas, and methought his face forthwith assumed something of the bitter keenness of the editor of a political newspaper, while speaking of the triumph of the administration over the Free-Soil opposition. I inquired whether he had seen S------, and he gave a very sad account of him as he appeared at their last meeting, which was in Paris. S------, he thought, had suffered terribly, and would never again be the man he was; he was getting fat; he talked continually of himself, and of trifles concerning himself, and seemed to have no interest for other matters; and Mr. ------ feared that the shock upon his nerves had extended to his intellect, and was irremediable. He said that S------ ought to retire from public life, but had no friend true enough to tell him so. This is about as sad as anything can be. I hate to have S------ undergo the fate of a martyr, because he was not naturally of the stuff that martyrs are made of, and it is altogether by mistake that he has thrust himself into the position of one. He was merely, though with excellent abilities, one of the best of fellows, and ought to have lived and died in good fellowship with all the world. S------ was not in the least degree excited about this or any other subject. He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own. He shook hands kindly all round, but not with any warmth of gripe; although the ease of his deportment had put us all on sociable terms with him. At seven o'clock we went by invitation to take tea with Miss Bremer. After much search, and lumbering painfully up two or three staircases in vain, and at last going about in a strange circuity, we found her in a small chamber of a large old building, situated a little way from the brow of the Tarpeian Rock. It was the tiniest and humblest domicile that I have seen in Rome, just large enough to hold her narrow bed, her tea-table, and a table covered with books,--photographs of Roman ruins, and some pages written by herself. I wonder whether she be poor. Probably so; for she told us that her expense of living here is only five pauls a day. She welcomed us, however, with the greatest cordiality and lady-like simplicity, making no allusion to the humbleness of her environment (and making us also lose sight of it, by the absence of all apology) any more than if she were receiving us in a palace. There is not a better bred woman; and yet one does not think whether she has any breeding or no. Her little bit of a round table was already spread for us with her blue earthenware teacups; and after she had got through an interview with the Swedish Minister, and dismissed him with a hearty pressure of his hand between both her own, she gave us our tea, and some bread, and a mouthful of cake. Meanwhile, as the day declined, there had been the most beautiful view over the campagna, out of one of her windows; and, from the other, looking towards St. Peter's, the broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset; not so pompous and magnificent as many that I have seen in America, but softer and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly away, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there was not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of my younger days. In the garden, beneath her window, verging upon the Tarpeian Rock, there was shrubbery and one large tree, softening the brow of the famous precipice, adown which the old Romans used to fling their traitors, or sometimes, indeed, their patriots. Miss Bremer talked plentifully in her strange manner,--good English enough for a foreigner, but so oddly intonated and accented, that it is impossible to be sure of more than one word in ten. Being so little comprehensible, it is very singular how she contrives to make her auditors so perfectly certain, as they are, that she is talking the best sense, and in the kindliest spirit. There is no better heart than hers, and not many sounder heads; and a little touch of sentiment comes delightfully in, mixed up with a quick and delicate humor and the most perfect simplicity. There is also a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her; we are sensible of a freshness and odor of the morning still in this little withered rose,--its recompense for never having been gathered and worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem. I forget mainly what we talked about,--a good deal about art, of course, although that is a subject of which Miss Bremer evidently knows nothing. Once we spoke of fleas,--insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody's business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea. . . . . She talked, among other things, of the winters in Sweden, and said that she liked them, long and severe as they are; and this made me feel ashamed of dreading the winters of New England, as I did before coming from home, and do now still more, after five or six mild English Decembers. By and by, two young ladies came in,--Miss Bremen's neighbors, it seemed,--fresh from a long walk on the campagna, fresh and weary at the same time. One apparently was German, and the other French, and they brought her an offering of flowers, and chattered to her with affectionate vivacity; and, as we were about taking leave, Miss Bremer asked them to accompany her and us on a visit to the edge of the Tarpeian Rock. Before we left the room, she took a bunch of roses that were in a vase, and gave them to Miss Shepard, who told her that she should make her six sisters happy by giving one to each. Then we went down the intricate stairs, and, emerging into the garden, walked round the brow of the hill, which plunges headlong with exceeding abruptness; but, so far as I could see in the moonlight, is no longer quite a precipice. Then we re-entered the house, and went up stairs and down again, through intricate passages, till we got into the street, which was still peopled with the ragamuffins who infest and burrow in that part of Rome. We returned through an archway, and descended the broad flight of steps into the piazza of the Capitol; and from the extremity of it, just at the head of the long graded way, where Castor and Pollux and the old milestones stand, we turned to the left, and followed a somewhat winding path, till we came into the court of a palace. This court is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw the sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house. . . . . On the edge of this, before we left the court, Miss Bremer bade us farewell, kissing my wife most affectionately on each cheek, . . . . and then turning towards myself, . . . . she pressed my hand, and we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart! . . . . She is a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race. I suspect, by the by, that she does not like me half so well as I do her; it is my impression that she thinks me unamiable, or that there is something or other not quite right about me. I am sorry if it be so, because such a good, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person is very apt to have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare cases, she allows them to harbor with her. To-day, and for some days past, we have been in quest of lodgings for next winter; a weary search, up interminable staircases, which seduce us upward to no successful result. It is very disheartening not to be able to place the slightest reliance on the integrity of the people we are to deal with; not to believe in any connection between their words and their purposes; to know that they are certainly telling you falsehoods, while you are not in a position to catch hold of the lie, and hold it up in their faces. This afternoon we called on Mr. and Mrs. ------ at the Hotel de l'Europe, but found only the former at home. We had a pleasant visit, but I made no observations of his character save such as I have already sufficiently recorded; and when we had been with him a little while, Mrs. Chapman, the artist's wife, Mr. Terry, and my friend, Mr. Thompson, came in. ------ received them all with the same good degree of cordiality that he did ourselves, not cold, not very warm, not annoyed, not ecstatically delighted; a man, I should suppose, not likely to have ardent individual preferences, though perhaps capable of stern individual dislikes. But I take him, at all events, to be a very upright man, and pursuing a narrow track of integrity; he is a man whom I would never forgive (as I would a thousand other men) for the slightest moral delinquency. I would not be bound to say, however, that he has not the little sin of a fretful and peevish habit; and yet perhaps I am a sinner myself for thinking so. May 23d.--This morning I breakfasted at William Story's, and met there Mr. Bryant, Mr. T------ (an English gentleman), Mr. and Mrs. Apthorp, Miss Hosmer, and one or two other ladies. Bryant was very quiet, and made no conversation audible to the general table. Mr. T------ talked of English politics and public men; the "Times" and other newspapers, English clubs and social habits generally; topics in which I could well enough bear my part of the discussion. After breakfast, and aside from the ladies, he mentioned an illustration of Lord Ellenborough's lack of administrative ability,--a proposal seriously made by his lordship in reference to the refractory Sepoys. . . . . We had a very pleasant breakfast, and certainly a breakfast is much preferable to a dinner, not merely in the enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,--a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering with every breath of wind, and rearranging itself in the calm; in which case, the lady might be said to have "a habit of weeping." . . . . Apart, with William Story, he and I talked of the unluckiness of Friday, etc. I like him particularly well. . . . . We have been plagued to-day with our preparations for leaving Rome to-morrow, and especially with verifying the inventory of furniture, before giving up the house to our landlord. He and his daughter have been examining every separate article, down even to the kitchen skewers, I believe, and charging us to the amount of several scudi for cracks and breakages, which very probably existed when we came into possession. It is very uncomfortable to have dealings with such a mean people (though our landlord is German),--mean in their business transactions; mean even in their beggary; for the beggars seldom ask for more than a mezzo baioccho, though they sometimes grumble when you suit your gratuity exactly to their petition. It is pleasant to record that the Italians have great faith in the honor of the English and Americans, and never hesitate to trust entire strangers, to any reasonable extent, on the strength of their being of the honest Anglo-Saxon race. This evening, U---- and I took a farewell walk in the Pincian Gardens to see the sunset; and found them crowded with people, promenading and listening to the music of the French baud. It was the feast of Whitsunday, which probably brought a greater throng than usual abroad. When the sun went down, we descended into the Piazza del Popolo, and thence into the Via Ripetta, and emerged through a gate to the shore of the Tiber, along which there is a pleasant walk beneath a grove of trees. We traversed it once and back again, looking at the rapid river, which still kept its mud-puddly aspect even in the clear twilight, and beneath the brightening moon. The great bell of St. Peter's tolled with a deep boom, a grand and solemn sound; the moon gleamed through the branches of the trees above us; and U---- spoke with somewhat alarming fervor of her love for Rome, and regret at leaving it. We shall have done the child no good office in bringing her here, if the rest of her life is to be a dream of this "city of the soul," and an unsatisfied yearning to come back to it. On the other hand, nothing elevating and refining can be really injurious, and so I hope she will always be the better for Rome, even if her life should be spent where there are no pictures, no statues, nothing but the dryness and meagreness of a New England village. JOURNEY TO FLORENCE. Civita Castellana, May 24th.--We left Rome this morning, after troubles of various kinds, and a dispute in the first place with Lalla, our female servant, and her mother. . . . . Mother and daughter exploded into a livid rage, and cursed us plentifully,--wishing that we might never come to our journey's end, and that we might all break our necks or die of apoplexy,--the most awful curse that an Italian knows how to invoke upon his enemies, because it precludes the possibility of extreme unction. However, as we are heretics, and certain of damnation therefore, anyhow, it does not much matter to us; and also the anathemas may have been blown back upon those who invoked them, like the curses that were flung out from the balcony of St Peter's during Holy Week and wafted by heaven's breezes right into the faces of some priests who stood near the pope. Next we had a disagreement, with two men who brought down our luggage, and put it on the vettura; . . . . and, lastly, we were infested with beggars, who hung round the carriages with doleful petitions, till we began to move away; but the previous warfare had put me into too stern a mood for almsgiving, so that they also were doubtless inclined to curse more than to bless, and I am persuaded that we drove off under a perfect shower of anathemas. We passed through the Porta del Popolo at about eight o'clock; and after a moment's delay, while the passport was examined, began our journey along the Flaminian Way, between two such high and inhospitable walls of brick or stone as seem to shut in all the avenues to Rome. We had not gone far before we heard military music in advance of us, and saw the road blocked up with people, and then the glitter of muskets, and soon appeared the drummers, fifers, and trumpeters, and then the first battalion of a French regiment, marching into the city, with two mounted officers at their head; then appeared a second and then a third battalion, the whole seeming to make almost an army, though the number on their caps showed them all to belong to one regiment,--the 1st; then came a battery of artillery, then a detachment of horse,--these last, by the crossed keys on their helmets, being apparently papal troops. All were young, fresh, good-looking men, in excellent trim as to uniform and equipments, and marched rather as if they were setting out on a campaign than returning from it; the fact being, I believe, that they have been encamped or in barracks within a few miles of the city. Nevertheless, it reminded me of the military processions of various kinds which so often, two thousand years ago and more, entered Rome over the Flaminian Way, and over all the roads that led to the famous city,--triumphs oftenest, but sometimes the downcast train of a defeated army, like those who retreated before Hannibal. On the whole, I was not sorry to see the Gauls still pouring into Rome; but yet I begin to find that I have a strange affection for it, and so did we all,--the rest of the family in a greater degree than myself even. It is very singular, the sad embrace with which Rome takes possession of the soul. Though we intend to return in a few months, and for a longer residence than this has been, yet we felt the city pulling at our heartstrings far more than London did, where we shall probably never spend much time again. It may be because the intellect finds a home there more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the heart to stay with it, in spite of a good many things strewn all about to disgust us. The road in the earlier part of the way was not particularly picturesque,--the country undulated, but scarcely rose into hills, and was destitute of trees; there were a few shapeless ruins, too indistinct for us to make out whether they were Roman or mediaeval. Nothing struck one so much, in the forenoon, as the spectacle of a peasant-woman riding on horseback as if she were a man. The houses were few, and those of a dreary aspect, built of gray stone, and looking bare and desolate, with not the slightest promise of comfort within doors. We passed two or three locandas or inns, and finally came to the village (if village it were, for I remember no houses except our osteria) of Castel Nuovo di Porta, where we were to take a dejeuner a la fourchette, which was put upon the table between twelve and one. On this journey, according to the custom of travellers in Italy, we pay the vetturino a certain sum, and live at his expense; and this meal was the first specimen of his catering on our behalf. It consisted of a beefsteak, rather dry and hard, but not unpalatable, and a large omelette; and for beverage, two quart bottles of red wine, which, being tasted, had an agreeable acid flavor. . . . . The locanda was built of stone, and had what looked like an old Roman altar in the basement-hall, and a shrine, with a lamp before it, on the staircase; and the large public saloon in which we ate had a brick floor, a ceiling with cross-beams, meagrely painted in fresco, and a scanty supply of chairs and settees. After lunch, we wandered out into a valley or ravine near the house, where we gathered some flowers, and J----- found a nest with the young birds in it, which, however, he put back into the bush whence he took it. Our afternoon drive was more picturesque and noteworthy. Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator. As we approached it nearer and nearer, it looked like the barrenest great rock that ever protruded out of the substance of the earth, with scarcely a strip or a spot of verdure upon its steep and gray declivities. The road kept trending towards the mountain, following the line of the old Flaminian Way, which we could see, at frequent intervals, close beside the modern track. It is paved with large flag-stones, laid so accurately together, that it is still, in some places, as smooth and even as the floor of a church; and everywhere the tufts of grass find it difficult to root themselves into the interstices. Its course is straighter than that of the road of to-day, which often turns aside to avoid obstacles which the ancient one surmounted. Much of it, probably, is covered with the soil and overgrowth deposited in later years; and, now and then, we could see its flag-stones partly protruding from the bank through which our road has been cut, and thus showing that the thickness of this massive pavement was more than a foot of solid stone. We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it. Passing through a town called Rignano, we found it dressed out in festivity, with festoons of foliage along both sides of the street, which ran beneath a triumphal arch, bearing an inscription in honor of a ducal personage of the Massimi family. I know no occasion for the feast, except that it is Whitsuntide. The town was thronged with peasants, in their best attire, and we met others on their way thither, particularly women and girls, with heads bare in the sunshine; but there was no tiptoe jollity, nor, indeed, any more show of festivity than I have seen in my own country at a cattle-show or muster. Really, I think, not half so much. The road still grew more and more picturesque, and now lay along ridges, at the bases of which were deep ravines and hollow valleys. Woods were not wanting; wilder forests than I have seen since leaving America, of oak-trees chiefly; and, among the green foliage, grew golden tufts of broom, making a gay and lovely combination of hues. I must not forget to mention the poppies, which burned like live coals along the wayside, and lit up the landscape, even a single one of them, with wonderful effect. At other points, we saw olive-trees, hiding their eccentricity of boughs under thick masses of foliage of a livid tint, which is caused, I believe, by their turning their reverse sides to the light and to the spectator. Vines were abundant, but were of little account in the scene. By and by we came in sight, of the high, flat table-land, on which stands Civita Castellana, and beheld, straight downward, between us and the town, a deep level valley with a river winding through it; it was the valley of the Treja. A precipice, hundreds of feet in height, falls perpendicularly upon the valley, from the site of Civita Castellana; there is an equally abrupt one, probably, on the side from which we saw it; and a modern road, skilfully constructed, goes winding down to the stream, crosses it by a narrow stone bridge, and winds upward into the town. After passing over the bridge, I alighted, with J----- and R-----, . . . . and made the ascent on foot, along walls of natural rock, in which old Etruscan tombs were hollowed out. There are likewise antique remains of masonry, whether Roman or of what earlier period, I cannot tell. At the summit of the acclivity, which brought us close to the town, our vetturino took us into the carriage again and quickly brought us to what appears to be really a good hotel, where all of us are accommodated with sleeping-chambers in a range, beneath an arcade, entirely secluded from the rest of the population of the hotel. After a splendid dinner (that is, splendid, considering that it was ordered by our hospitable vetturino), U----, Miss Shepard, J-----, and I walked out of the little town, in the opposite direction from our entrance, and crossed a bridge at the height of the table-land, instead of at its base. On either side, we had a view down into a profound gulf, with sides of precipitous rock, and heaps of foliage in its lap, through which ran the snowy track of a stream; here snowy, there dark; here hidden among the foliage, there quite revealed in the broad depths of the gulf. This was wonderfully fine. Walking on a little farther, Soracte came fully into view, starting with bold abruptness out of the middle of the country; and before we got back, the bright Italian moon was throwing a shower of silver over the scene, and making it so beautiful that it seemed miserable not to know how to put it into words; a foolish thought, however, for such scenes are an expression in themselves, and need not be translated into any feebler language. On our walk we met parties of laborers, both men and women, returning from the fields, with rakes and wooden forks over their shoulders, singing in chorus. It is very customary for women to be laboring in the fields. TO TERNI.--BORGHETTO. May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly, till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed. This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the objects that interest him. Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also, marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road. After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet. Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them; on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur, like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanctity that used to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it meritorious to do nothing for his support. Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle, he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous mountain-gorge; winding its narrow passage between high hills, the broad sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery, that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept in excellent repair. A long winding street passes through Narni, broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as its principal street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We passed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,-- walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing that need be recorded. Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to give them up. Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon, and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . . We are in the Hotel delle tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists, who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had coffee, eggs, and bread and butter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner, an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, fricasseed, and a hind quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more decanters of the wine aforesaid. This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court; around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy, probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids; nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns of Italy. In the album of the hotel I find the names of more English travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think, even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber. After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets, paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low, compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we passed through it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain again, we at last inquired of a person in the principal piazza, and found our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood. FOLIGNO. May 26th.--At six o'clock this morning, we packed ourselves into our vettura, my wife and I occupying the coupe, and drove out of the city gate of Terni. There are some old towers near it, ruins of I know not what, and care as little, in the plethora of antiquities and other interesting objects. Through the arched gateway, as we approached, we had a view of one of the great hills that surround the town, looking partly bright in the early sunshine, and partly catching the shadows of the clouds that floated about the sky. Our way was now through the Vale of Terni, as I believe it is called, where we saw somewhat of the fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations; some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof, just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in short, so that nobody need be at a loss when he feels the religious sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level space that lay between; they continually thrust themselves across the passage, and appeared as if determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it, and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or grass-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate vicinity of an Italian home. At Strettura (which, as the name indicates, is a very narrow part of the valley) we added two oxen to our horses, and began to ascend the Monte Somma, which, according to Murray, is nearly four thousand feet high where we crossed it. When we came to the steepest part of the ascent, Gaetano, who exercises a pretty decided control over his passengers, allowed us to walk; and we all, with one exception, alighted, and began to climb the mountain on foot. I walked on briskly, and soon left the rest of the party behind, reaching the top of the pass in such a short time that I could not believe it, and kept onward, expecting still another height to climb. But the road began to descend, winding among the depths of the hills as heretofore; now beside the dry, gravelly bed of a departed stream, now crossing it by a bridge, and perhaps passing through some other gorge, that yet gave no decided promise of an outlet into the world beyond. A glimpse might occasionally be caught, through a gap between the hill-tops, of a company of distant mountain-peaks, pyramidal, as these hills are apt to be, and resembling the camp of an army of giants. The landscape was not altogether savage; sometimes a hillside was covered with a rich field of grain, or an orchard of olive-trees, looking not unlike puffs of smoke, from the peculiar line of their foliage; but oftener there was a vast mantle of trees and shrubbery from top to bottom, the golden tufts of the broom shining out amid the verdure, and gladdening the whole. Nothing was dismal except the houses; those were always so, whether the compact, gray lines of village hovels, with a narrow street between, or the lonely farm-house, standing far apart from the road, built of stone, with window-gaps high in the wall, empty of glass; or the half-castle, half-dwelling, of which I saw a specimen or two, with what looked like a defensive rampart, drawn around its court. I saw no look of comfort anywhere; and continually, in this wild and solitary region, I met beggars, just as if I were still in the streets of Rome. Boys and girls kept beside me, till they delivered me into the hands of others like themselves; hoary grandsires and grandmothers caught a glimpse of my approach, and tottered as fast as they could to intercept me; women came out of the cottages, with rotten cherries on a plate, entreating me to buy them for a mezzo baioccho; a man, at work on the road, left his toil to beg, and was grateful for the value of a cent; in short, I was never safe from importunity, as long as there was a house or a human being in sight. We arrived at Spoleto before noon, and while our dejeuner was being prepared, looked down from the window of the inn into the narrow street beneath, which, from the throng of people in it, I judged to be the principal one: priests, papal soldiers, women with no bonnets on their heads; peasants in breeches and mushroom hats; maids and matrons, drawing water at a fountain; idlers, smoking on a bench under the window; a talk, a bustle, but no genuine activity. After lunch we walked out to see the lions of Spoleto, and found our way up a steep and narrow street that led us to the city gate, at which, it is traditionally said, Hannibal sought to force an entrance, after the battle of Thrasymene, and was repulsed. The gateway has a double arch, on the inner one of which is a tablet, recording the above tradition as an unquestioned historical fact. From the gateway we went in search of the Duomo, or cathedral, and were kindly directed thither by an officer, who was descending into the town from the citadel, which is an old castle, now converted into a prison. The cathedral seemed small, and did not much interest us, either by the Gothic front or its modernized interior. We saw nothing else in Spoleto, but went back to the inn and resumed our journey, emerging from the city into the classic valley of the Clitumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the base of the edifice we saw the Clitumnus, so recently from its source in the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of Clitumnus, except that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh profane in the urgency of their petitions; they absolutely fall down on their knees as you approach, in the same attitude as if they were praying to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over. I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town, where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could), I saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with a crown of edifices, terminating in a church-tower; while a part of the northern side was apparently too steep for building; and a cataract of houses flowed down the western and southern slopes. There seemed to be palaces, churches, everything that a city should have; but my eyes are heavy, and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent its crumbling down, and enable it to support the platform of edifices which crowns it. May 27th.--We reached Foligno in good season yesterday afternoon. Our inn seemed ancient; and, under the same roof, on one side of the entrance, was the stable, and on the other the coach-house. The house is built round a narrow court, with a well of water at bottom, and an opening in the roof at top, whence the staircases are lighted that wind round the sides of the court, up to the highest story. Our dining-room and bedrooms were in the latter region, and were all paved with brick, and without carpets; and the characteristic of the whole was all exceeding plainness and antique clumsiness of fitting up. We found ourselves sufficiently comfortable, however; and, as has been the case throughout our journey, had a very fair and well-cooked dinner. It shows, as perhaps I have already remarked, that it is still possible to live well in Italy, at no great expense, and that the high prices charged to the forestieri at Rome and elsewhere are artificial, and ought to be abated. . . . . The day had darkened since morning, and was now ominous of rain; but as soon as we were established, we sallied out to see whatever was worth looking at. A beggar-boy, with one leg, followed us, without asking for anything, apparently only for the pleasure of our company, though he kept at too great a distance for conversation, and indeed did not attempt to speak. We went first to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, and a modernized interior, stuccoed and whitewashed, looking as neat as a New England meeting-house, and very mean, after our familiarity with the gorgeous churches in other cities. There were some pictures in the chapels, but, I believe, all modern, and I do not remember a single one of them. Next we went, without any guide, to a church attached to a convent of Dominican monks, with a Gothic exterior, and two hideous pictures of Death,--the skeleton leaning on his scythe, one on each side of the door. This church, likewise, was whitewashed, but we understood that it had been originally frescoed all over, and by famous hands; but these pictures, having become much injured, they were all obliterated, as we saw,--all, that is to say, except a few specimens of the best preserved, which were spared to show the world what the whole had been. I thanked my stars that the obliteration of the rest had taken place before our visit; for if anything is dreary and calculated to make the beholder utterly miserable, it is a faded fresco, with spots of the white plaster dotted over it. Our one-legged boy had followed us into the church and stood near the door till he saw us ready to come out, when he hurried on before us, and waited a little way off to see whither we should go. We still went on at random, taking the first turn that offered itself, and soon came to another old church,--that of St. Mary within the Walls,--into which we entered, and found it whitewashed, like the other two. This was especially fortunate, for the doorkeeper informed us that, two years ago, the whole church (except, I suppose, the roof, which is of timber) had been covered with frescos by Pinturicchio, all of which had been ruthlessly obliterated, except a very few fragments. These he proceeded to show us; poor, dim ghosts of what may once have been beautiful,--now so far gone towards nothingness that I was hardly sure whether I saw a glimmering of the design or not. By the by, it was not Pinturicchio, as I have written above, but Giotto, assisted, I believe, by Cimabue, who painted these frescos. Our one-legged attendant had followed us also into this church, and again hastened out of it before us; and still we heard the dot of his crutch upon the pavement, as we passed from street to street. By and by a sickly looking man met us, and begged for "qualche cosa"; but the boy shouted to him, "Niente!" whether intimating that we would give him nothing, or that he himself had a prior claim to all our charity, I cannot tell. However, the beggar-man turned round, and likewise followed our devious course. Once or twice we missed him; but it was only because he could not walk so fast as we; for he appeared again as we emerged from the door of another church. Our one-legged friend we never missed for a moment; he kept pretty near us,--near enough to be amused by our indecision whither to go; and he seemed much delighted when it began to rain, and he saw us at a loss how to find our way back to the hotel. Nevertheless, he did not offer to guide us; but stumped on behind with a faster or slower dot of his crutch, according to our pace. I began to think that he must have been engaged as a spy upon our movements by the police who had taken away my passport at the city gate. In this way he attended us to the door of the hotel, where the beggar had already arrived. The latter again put in his doleful petition; the one-legged boy said not a word, nor seemed to expect anything, and both had to go away without so much as a mezzo baioccho out of our pockets. The multitude of beggars in Italy makes the heart as obdurate as a paving-stone. We left Foligno this morning, and, all ready for us at the door of the hotel, as we got into the carriage, were our friends, the beggar-man and the one-legged boy; the latter holding out his ragged hat, and smiling with as confident an air as if he had done us some very particular service, and were certain of being paid for it, as from contract. It was so very funny, so impudent, so utterly absurd, that I could not help giving him a trifle; but the man got nothing,--a fact that gives me a twinge or two, for he looked sickly and miserable. But where everybody begs, everybody, as a general rule, must be denied; and, besides, they act their misery so well that you are never sure of the genuine article. PERUGIA. May 25th.--As I said last night, we left Foligno betimes in the morning, which was bleak, chill, and very threatening, there being very little blue sky anywhere, and the clouds lying heavily on some of the mountain-ridges. The wind blew sharply right in U----'s face and mine, as we occupied the coupe, so that there must have been a great deal of the north in it. We drove through a wide plain--the Umbrian valley, I suppose--and soon passed the old town of Spello, just touching its skirts, and wondering how people, who had this rich and convenient plain from which to choose a site, could think of covering a huge island of rock with their dwellings,--for Spello tumbled its crooked and narrow streets down a steep descent, and cannot well have a yard of even space within its walls. It is said to contain some rare treasures of ancient pictorial art. I do not remember much that we saw on our route. The plains and the lower hillsides seemed fruitful of everything that belongs to Italy, especially the olive and the vine. As usual, there were a great many shrines, and frequently a cross by the wayside. Hitherto it had been merely a plain wooden cross; but now almost every cross was hung with various instruments, represented in wood, apparently symbols of the crucifixion of our Saviour,--the spear, the sponge, the crown of thorns, the hammer, a pair of pincers, and always St. Peter's cock, made a prominent figure, generally perched on the summit of the cross. From our first start this morning we had seen mists in various quarters, betokening that there was rain in those spots, and now it began to spatter in our own faces, although within the wide extent of our prospect we could see the sunshine falling on portions of the valley. A rainbow, too, shone out, and remained so long visible that it appeared to have made a permanent stain in the sky. By and by we reached Assisi, which is magnificently situated for pictorial purposes, with a gray castle above it, and a gray wall around it, itself on a mountain, and looking over the great plain which we had been traversing, and through which lay our onward way. We drove through the Piazza Grande to an ancient house a little beyond, where a hospitable old lady receives travellers for a consideration, without exactly keeping an inn. In the piazza we saw the beautiful front of a temple of Minerva, consisting of several marble pillars, fluted, and with rich capitals supporting a pediment. It was as fine as anything I had seen at Rome, and is now, of course, converted into a Catholic church. I ought to have said that, instead of driving straight to the old lady's, we alighted at the door of a church near the city gate, and went in to inspect some melancholy frescos, and thence clambered up a narrow street to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, old enough, but not very impressive. I really remember not a single object that we saw within, but am pretty certain that the interior had been stuccoed and whitewashed. The ecclesiastics of old time did an excellent thing in covering the interiors of their churches with brilliant frescos, thus filling the holy places with saints and angels, and almost with the presence of the Divinity. The modern ecclesiastics do the next best thing in obliterating the wretched remnants of what has had its day and done its office. These frescos might be looked upon as the symbol of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and glorified it as long as it did live; now the glory and beauty have departed from one and the other. My wife, U----, and Miss Shepard now set out with a cicerone to visit the great Franciscan convent, in the church of which are preserved some miraculous specimens, in fresco and in oils, of early Italian art; but as I had no mind to suffer any further in this way, I stayed behind with J----- and R-----, who we're equally weary of these things. After they were gone we took a ramble through the city, but were almost swept away by the violence of the wind, which struggled with me for my hat, and whirled R----- before it like a feather. The people in the public square seemed much diverted at our predicament, being, I suppose, accustomed to these rude blasts in their mountain-home. However, the wind blew in momentary gusts, and then became more placable till another fit of fury came, and passed as suddenly as before. We walked out of the same gate through which we had entered,--an ancient gate, but recently stuccoed and whitewashed, in wretched contrast to the gray, venerable wall through which it affords ingress,--and I stood gazing at the magnificent prospect of the wide valley beneath. It was so vast that there appeared to be all varieties of weather in it at the same instant; fields of sunshine, tracts of storm,--here the coming tempest, there the departing one. It was a picture of the world on a vast canvas, for there was rural life and city life within the great expanse, and the whole set in a frame of mountains,--the nearest bold and dust-net, with the rocky ledges showing through their sides, the distant ones blue and dim,--so far stretched this broad valley. When I had looked long enough,--no, not long enough, for it would take a great while to read that page,--we returned within the gate, and we clambered up, past the cathedral and into the narrow streets above it. The aspect of everything was immeasurably old; a thousand years would be but a middle age for one of those houses, built so massively with huge stones and solid arches, that I do not see how they are ever to tumble down, or to be less fit for human habitation than they are now. The streets crept between them, and beneath arched passages, and up and down steps of stone or ancient brick, for it would be altogether impossible for a carriage to ascend above the Grand Piazza, though possibly a donkey or a chairman's mule might find foothold. The city seems like a stony growth out of the hillside, or a fossilized city,--so old and singular it is, without enough life and juiciness in it to be susceptible of decay. An earthquake is the only chance of its ever being ruined, beyond its present ruin. Nothing is more strange than to think that this now dead city--dead, as regards the purposes for which men live nowadays--was, centuries ago, the seat and birthplace almost of art, the only art in which the beautiful part of the human mind then developed itself. How came that flower to grow among these wild mountains? I do not conceive, however, that the people of Assisi were ever much more enlightened or cultivated on the side of art than they are at present. The ecclesiastics were then the only patrons; and the flower grew here because there was a great ecclesiastical garden in which it was sheltered and fostered. But it is very curious to think of Assisi, a school of art within, and mountain and wilderness without. My wife and the rest of the party returned from the convent before noon, delighted with what they had seen, as I was delighted not to have seen it. We ate our dejeuner, and resumed our journey, passing beneath the great convent, after emerging from the gate opposite to that of our entrance. The edifice made a very good spectacle, being of great extent, and standing on a double row of high and narrow arches, on which it is built up from the declivity of the hill. We soon reached the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, which is a modern structure, and very spacious, built in place of one destroyed by an earthquake. It is a fine church, opening out a magnificent space in its nave and aisles; and beneath the great dome stands the small old chapel, with its rude stone walls, in which St. Francis founded his order. This chapel and the dome appear to have been the only portions of the ancient church that were not destroyed by the earthquake. The dwelling of St. Francis is said to be also preserved within the church; but we did not see it, unless it were a little dark closet into which we squeezed to see some frescos by La Spagna. It had an old wooden door, of which U---- picked off a little bit of a chip, to serve as a relic. There is a fresco in the church, on the pediment of the chapel, by Overbeck, representing the Assumption of the Virgin. It did not strike me as wonderfully fine. The other pictures, of which there were many, were modern, and of no great merit. We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----- for my companion, kept on even to the city gate,--a distance, I should think, of two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation, shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only Italy. Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains, and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil can give an idea of the scene. When God expressed himself in the landscape to mankind, he did not intend that it should be translated into any tongue save his own immediate one. J----- meanwhile, whose heart is now wholly in snail-shells, was rummaging for them among the stones and hedges by the roadside; yet, doubtless, enjoyed the prospect more than he knew. The coach lagged far behind us, and when it came up, we entered the gate, where a soldier appeared, and demanded my passport. We drove to the Grand Hotel de France, which is near the gate, and two fine little boys ran beside the carriage, well dressed and well looking enough to have been a gentleman's sons, but claiming Gaetano for their father. He is an inhabitant of Perugia, and has therefore reached his own home, though we are still little more than midway to our journey's end. Our hotel proves, thus far, to be the best that we have yet met with. We are only in the outskirts of Perugia; the bulk of the city, where the most interesting churches and the public edifices are situated, being far above us on the hill. My wife, U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- streamed forth immediately, and saw a church; but J-----, who hates them, and I remained behind; and, for my part, I added several pages to this volume of scribble. This morning was as bright as morning could be, even in Italy, and in this transparent mountain atmosphere. We at first declined the services of a cicerone, and went out in the hopes of finding our way to whatever we wished to see, by our own instincts. This proved to be a mistaken hope, however; and we wandered about the upper city, much persecuted by a shabby old man who wished to guide us; so, at last, Miss Shepard went back in quest of the cicerone at the hotel, and, meanwhile, we climbed to the summit of the hill of Perugia, and, leaning over a wall, looked forth upon a most magnificent view of mountain and valley, terminating in some peaks, lofty and dim, which surely must be the Apennines. There again a young man accosted us, offering to guide us to the Cambio or Exchange; and as this was one of the places which we especially wished to see, we accepted his services. By the by, I ought to have mentioned that we had already entered a church (San Luigi, I believe), the interior of which we found very impressive, dim with the light of stained and painted windows, insomuch that it at first seemed almost dark, and we could only see the bright twinkling of the tapers at the shrines; but, after a few minutes, we discerned the tall octagonal pillars of the nave, marble, and supporting a beautiful roof of crossed arches. The church was neither Gothic nor classic, but a mixture of both, and most likely barbarous; yet it had a grand effect in its tinted twilight, and convinced me more than ever how desirable it is that religious edifices should have painted windows. The door of the Cambio proved to be one that we had passed several times, while seeking for it, and was very near the church just mentioned, which fronts on one side of the same piazza. We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino. When the room was in its first glory, I can conceive that the world had not elsewhere to show, within so small a space, such magnificence and beauty as were then displayed here. Even now, I enjoyed (to the best of my belief, for we can never feel sure that we are not bamboozling ourselves in such matters) some real pleasure in what I saw; and especially seemed to feel, after all these ages, the old painter's devout sentiment still breathing forth from the religious pictures, the work of a hand that had so long been dust. When we had looked long at these, the old gentleman led us into a chapel, of the same size as the former room, and built in the same fashion, wainscoted likewise with old oak. The walls were also frescoed, entirely frescoed, and retained more of their original brightness than those we had already seen, although the pictures were the production of a somewhat inferior hand, a pupil of Perugino. They seemed to be very striking, however, not the less so, that one of them provoked an unseasonable smile. It was the decapitation of John the Baptist; and this holy personage was represented as still on his knees, with his hands clasped in prayer, although the executioner was already depositing the head in a charger, and the blood was spouting from the headless trunk, directly, as it were, into the face of the spectator. While we were in the outer room, the cicerone who first offered his services at the hotel had come in; so we paid our chance guide, and expected him to take his leave. It is characteristic of this idle country, however, that if you once speak to a person, or connect yourself with him by the slightest possible tie, you will hardly get rid of him by anything short of main force. He still lingered in the room, and was still there when I came away; for, having had as many pictures as I could digest, I left my wife and U---- with the cicerone, and set out on a ramble with J-----. We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened out upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely,--shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people,--one of whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which we entered last night. I ought to have mentioned, in the narrative of yesterday, that we crossed the Tiber shortly before reaching Perugia, already a broad and rapid stream, and already distinguished by the same turbid and mud-puddly quality of water that we see in it at Rome. I think it will never be so disagreeable to me hereafter, now that I find this turbidness to be its native color, and not (like that of the Thames) accruing from city sewers or any impurities of the lowlands. As I now remember, the small Chapel of Santa Maria degl' Angeli seems to have been originally the house of St. Francis. May 29th.--This morning we visited the Church of the Dominicans, where we saw some quaint pictures by Fra Angelico, with a good deal of religious sincerity in them; also a picture of St. Columba by Perugino, which unquestionably is very good. To confess the truth, I took more interest in a fair Gothic monument, in white marble, of Pope Benedict XII., representing him reclining under a canopy, while two angels draw aside the curtain, the canopy being supported by twisted columns, richly ornamented. I like this overflow and gratuity of device with which Gothic sculpture works out its designs, after seeing so much of the simplicity of classic art in marble. We then tried to find the Church of San Pietro in Martire, but without success, although every person of whom we inquired immediately attached himself or herself to us, and could hardly be got rid of by any efforts on our part. Nobody seemed to know the church we wished for, but all directed us to another Church of San Pietro, which contains nothing of interest; whereas the right church is supposed to contain a celebrated picture by Perugino. Finally, we ascended the hill and the city proper of Perugia (for our hotel is in one of the suburbs), and J----- and I set out on a ramble about the city. It was market-day, and the principal piazza, with the neighboring streets, was crowded with people. . . . . The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the streets rapidly run downward on either side. J----- and I followed one of these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this ancient civilization stands. On the right of the gate there was a rude country-path, partly overgrown with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the gray city wall, at the base of which the track kept onward. We followed it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might re-enter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower. A lame beggar-man sat by the gate, and as we passed him J----- gave him two baiocchi (which he himself had begged of me to buy an orange with), and was loaded with the pauper's prayers and benedictions as we entered the city. A great many blessings can be bought for very little money anywhere in Italy; and whether they avail anything or no, it is pleasant to see that the beggars have gratitude enough to bestow them in such abundance. Of all beggars I think a little fellow, who rode beside our carriage on a stick, his bare feet scampering merrily, while he managed his steed with one hand, and held out the other for charity, howling piteously the while, amused me most. PASSIGNANO. May 29th.--We left Perugia at about three o'clock to-day, and went down a pretty steep descent; but I have no particular recollection of the road till it again began to descend, before reaching the village of Magione. We all, except my wife, walked up the long hill, while the vettura was dragged after us with the aid of a yoke of oxen. Arriving first at the village, I leaned over the wall to admire the beautiful paese ("le bel piano," as a peasant called it, who made acquaintance with me) that lay at the foot of the hill, so level, so bounded within moderate limits by a frame of hills and ridges, that it looked like a green lake. In fact, I think it was once a real lake, which made its escape from its bed, as I have known some lakes to have done in America. Passing through and beyond the village, I saw, on a height above the road, a half-ruinous tower, with great cracks running down its walls, half-way from top to bottom. Some little children had mounted the hill with us, begging all the way; they were recruited with additional members in the village; and here, beneath the ruinous tower, a madman, as it seemed, assaulted us, and ran almost under the carriage-wheels, in his earnestness to get a baioccho. Ridding ourselves of these annoyances, we drove on, and, between five and six o'clock, came in sight of the Lake of Thrasymene, obtaining our first view of it, I think, in its longest extent. There were high hills, and one mountain with its head in the clouds, visible on the farther shore, and on the horizon beyond it; but the nearer banks were long ridges, and hills of only moderate height. The declining sun threw a broad sheen of brightness over the surface of the lake, so that we could not well see it for excess of light; but had a vision of headlands and islands floating about in a flood of gold, and blue, airy heights bounding it afar. When we first drew near the lake, there was but a narrow tract, covered with vines and olives, between it and the hill that rose on the other side. As we advanced, the tract grew wider, and was very fertile, as was the hillside, with wheat-fields, and vines, and olives, especially the latter, which, symbol of peace as it is, seemed to find something congenial to it in the soil stained long ago with blood. Farther onward, the space between the lake and hill grew still narrower, the road skirting along almost close to the water-side; and when we reached the town of Passignano there was but room enough for its dirty and ugly street to stretch along the shore. I have seldom beheld a lovelier scene than that of the lake and the landscape around it; never an uglier one than that of this idle and decaying village, where we were immediately surrounded by beggars of all ages, and by men vociferously proposing to row us out upon the lake. We declined their offers of a boat, for the evening was very fresh and cool, insomuch that I should have liked an outside garment,--a temperature that I had not anticipated, so near the beginning of June, in sunny Italy. Instead of a row, we took a walk through the village, hoping to come upon the shore of the lake, in some secluded spot; but an incredible number of beggar-children, both boys and girls, but more of the latter, rushed out of every door, and went along with us, all howling their miserable petitions at the same moment. The village street is long, and our escort waxed more numerous at every step, till Miss Shepard actually counted forty of these little reprobates, and more were doubtless added afterwards. At first, no doubt, they begged in earnest hope of getting some baiocchi; but, by and by, perceiving that we had determined not to give them anything, they made a joke of the matter, and began to laugh and to babble, and turn heels over head, still keeping about us, like a swarm of flies, and now and then begging again with all their might. There were as few pretty faces as I ever saw among the same number of children; and they were as ragged and dirty little imps as any in the world, and, moreover, tainted the air with a very disagreeable odor from their rags and dirt; rugged and healthy enough, nevertheless, and sufficiently intelligent; certainly bold and persevering too; so that it is hard to say what they needed to fit them for success in life. Yet they begin as beggars, and no doubt will end so, as all their parents and grandparents do; for in our walk through the village, every old woman and many younger ones held out their hands for alms, as if they had all been famished. Yet these people kept their houses over their heads; had firesides in winter, I suppose, and food out of their little gardens every day; pigs to kill, chickens, olives, wine, and a great many things to make life comfortable. The children, desperately as they begged, looked in good bodily ease, and happy enough; but, certainly, there was a look of earnest misery in the faces of some of the old women, either genuine or exceedingly well acted. I could not bear the persecution, and went into our hotel, determining not to venture out again till our departure; at least not in the daylight. My wife and the rest of the family, however, continued their walk, and at length were relieved from their little pests by three policemen (the very images of those in Rome, in their blue, long-skirted coats, cocked chapeaux-bras, white shoulder-belts, and swords), who boxed their ears, and dispersed them. Meanwhile, they had quite driven away all sentimental effusion (of which I felt more, really, than I expected) about the Lake of Thrasymene. The inn of Passignano promised little from its outward appearance; a tall, dark old house, with a stone staircase leading us up from one sombre story to another, into a brick-paved dining-room, with our sleeping-chambers on each side. There was a fireplace of tremendous depth and height, fit to receive big forest-logs, and with a queer, double pair of ancient andirons, capable of sustaining them; and in a handful of ashes lay a small stick of olive-wood,--a specimen, I suppose, of the sort of fuel which had made the chimney black, in the course of a good many years. There must have been much shivering and misery of cold around this fireplace. However, we needed no fire now, and there was promise of good cheer in the spectacle of a man cleaning some lake-fish for our dinner, while the poor things flounced and wriggled under the knife. The dinner made its appearance, after a long while, and was most plentiful, . . . . so that, having measured our appetite in anticipation of a paucity of food, we had to make more room for such overflowing abundance. When dinner was over, it was already dusk, and before retiring I opened the window, and looked out on Lake Thrasymene, the margin of which lies just on the other side of the narrow village street. The moon was a day or two past the full, just a little clipped on the edge, but gave light enough to show the lake and its nearer shores almost as distinctly as by day; and there being a ripple on the surface of the water, it made a sheen of silver over a wide space. AREZZO. May 30th.--We started at six o'clock, and left the one ugly street of Passignano, before many of the beggars were awake. Immediately in the vicinity of the village there is very little space between the lake in front and the ridge of hills in the rear; but the plain widened as we drove onward, so that the lake was scarcely to be seen, or often quite hidden among the intervening trees, although we could still discern the summits of the mountains that rise far beyond its shores. The country was fertile, presenting, on each side of the road, vines trained on fig-trees; wheat-fields and olives, in greater abundance than any other product. On our right, with a considerable width of plain between, was the bending ridge of hills that shut in the Roman army, by its close approach to the lake at Passignano. In perhaps half all hour's drive, we reached the little bridge that throws its arch over the Sanguinetto, and alighted there. The stream has but about a yard's width of water; and its whole course, between the hills and the lake, might well have been reddened and swollen with the blood of the multitude of slain Romans. Its name put me in mind of the Bloody Brook at Deerfield, where a company of Massachusetts men were massacred by the Indians. The Sanguinetto flows over a bed of pebbles; and J----- crept under the bridge, and got one of them for a memorial, while U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- plucked some olive twigs and oak leaves, and made them into wreaths together,--symbols of victory and peace. The tower, which is traditionally named after Hannibal, is seen on a height that makes part of the line of enclosing hills. It is a large, old castle, apparently of the Middle Ages, with a square front, and a battlemented sweep of wall. The town of Torres (its name, I think), where Hannibal's main army is supposed to have lain while the Romans came through the pass, was in full view; and I could understand the plan of the battle better than any system of military operations which I have hitherto tried to fathom. Both last night and to-day, I found myself stirred more sensibly than I expected by the influences of this scene. The old battle-field is still fertile in thoughts and emotions, though it is so many ages since the blood spilt there has ceased to make the grass and flowers grow more luxuriantly. I doubt whether I should feel so much on the field of Saratoga or Monmouth; but these old classic battle-fields belong to the whole world, and each man feels as if his own forefathers fought them. Mine, by the by, if they fought them at all, must have been on the side of Hannibal; for, certainly, I sympathized with him, and exulted in the defeat of the Romans on their own soil. They excite much the same emotion of general hostility that the English do. Byron has written some very fine stanzas on the battle-field,--not so good as others that he has written on classical scenes and subjects, yet wonderfully impressing his own perception of the subject on the reader. Whenever he has to deal with a statue, a ruin, a battle-field, he pounces upon the topic like a vulture, and tears out its heart in a twinkling, so that there is nothing more to be said. If I mistake not, our passport was examined by the papal officers at the last custom-house in the pontifical territory, before we traversed the path through which the Roman army marched to its destruction. Lake Thrasymene, of which we took our last view, is not deep set among the hills, but is bordered by long ridges, with loftier mountains receding into the distance. It is not to be compared to Windermere or Loch Lomond for beauty, nor with Lake Champlain and many a smaller lake in my own country, none of which, I hope, will ever become so historically interesting as this famous spot. A few miles onward our passport was countersigned at the Tuscan custom-house, and our luggage permitted to pass without examination on payment of a fee of nine or ten pauls, besides two pauls to the porters. There appears to be no concealment on the part of the officials in thus waiving the exercise of their duty, and I rather imagine that the thing is recognized and permitted by their superiors. At all events, it is very convenient for the traveller. We saw Cortona, sitting, like so many other cities in this region, on its hill, and arrived about noon at Arezzo, which also stretches up a high hillside, and is surrounded, as they all are, by its walls or the remains of one, with a fortified gate across every entrance. I remember one little village, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Clitumnus, which we entered by one gateway, and, in the course of two minutes at the utmost, left by the opposite one, so diminutive was this walled town. Everything hereabouts bears traces of times when war was the prevalent condition, and peace only a rare gleam of sunshine. At Arezzo we have put up at the Hotel Royal, which has the appearance of a grand old house, and proves to be a tolerable inn enough. After lunch, we wandered forth to see the town, which did not greatly interest me after Perugia, being much more modern and less picturesque in its aspect. We went to the cathedral,--a Gothic edifice, but not of striking exterior. As the doors were closed, and not to be opened till three o'clock, we seated ourselves under the trees, on a high, grassy space surrounded and intersected with gravel-walks,--a public promenade, in short, near the cathedral; and after resting ourselves here we went in search of Petrarch's house, which Murray mentions as being in this neighborhood. We inquired of several people, who knew nothing about the matter; one woman misdirected us, out of mere fun, I believe, for she afterwards met us and asked how we had succeeded. But finally, through ------'s enterprise and perseverance, we found the spot, not a stone's-throw from where we had been sitting. Petrarch's house stands below the promenade which I have just mentioned, and within hearing of the reverberations between the strokes of the cathedral bell. It is two stories high, covered with a light-colored stucco, and has not the slightest appearance of antiquity, no more than many a modern and modest dwelling-house in an American city. Its only remarkable feature is a pointed arch of stone, let into the plastered wall, and forming a framework for the doorway. I set my foot on the doorsteps, ascended them, and Miss Shepard and J----- gathered some weeds or blades of grass that grew in the chinks between the steps. There is a long inscription on a slab of marble set in the front of the house, as is the fashion in Arezzo when a house has been the birthplace or residence of a distinguished man. Right opposite Petrarch's birth-house--and it must have been the well whence the water was drawn that first bathed him--is a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories. It is surrounded with a stone curb, octagonal in shape, and evidently as ancient as Boccaccio's time. It has a wooden cover, through which is a square opening, and looking down I saw my own face in the water far beneath. There is no familiar object connected with daily life so interesting as a well; and this well or old Arezzo, whence Petrarch had drunk, around which he had played in his boyhood, and which Boccaccio has made famous, really interested me more than the cathedral. It lies right under the pavement of the street, under the sunshine, without any shade of trees about it, or any grass, except a little that grows in the crevices of its stones; but the shape of its stone-work would make it a pretty object in an engraving. As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. O, certainly not; but yet I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their teakettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score. Petrarch's house is not a separate and insulated building, but stands in contiguity and connection with other houses on each side; and all, when I saw them, as well as the whole street, extending down the slope of the hill, had the bright and sunny aspect of a modern town. As the cathedral was not yet open, and as J----- and I had not so much patience as my wife, we left her and Miss Shepard, and set out to return to the hotel. We lost our way, however, and finally had to return to the cathedral, to take a fresh start; and as the door was now open we went in. We found the cathedral very stately with its great arches, and darkly magnificent with the dim rich light coming through its painted windows, some of which are reckoned the most beautiful that the whole world has to show. The hues are far more brilliant than those of any painted glass I saw in England, and a great wheel window looks like a constellation of many-colored gems. The old English glass gets so smoky and dull with dust, that its pristine beauty cannot any longer be even imagined; nor did I imagine it till I saw these Italian windows. We saw nothing of my wife and Miss Shepard; but found afterwards that they had been much annoyed by the attentions of a priest who wished to show them the cathedral, till they finally told him that they had no money with them, when he left them without another word. The attendants in churches seem to be quite as venal as most other Italians, and, for the sake of their little profit, they do not hesitate to interfere with the great purposes for which their churches were built and decorated; hanging curtains, for instance, before all the celebrated pictures, or hiding them away in the sacristy, so that they cannot be seen without a fee. Returning to the hotel, we looked out of the window, and, in the street beneath, there was a very busy scene, it being Sunday, and the whole population, apparently, being astir, promenading up and down the smooth flag-stones, which made the breadth of the street one sidewalk, or at their windows, or sitting before their doors. The vivacity of the population in these parts is very striking, after the gravity and lassitude of Rome; and the air was made cheerful with the talk and laughter of hundreds of voices. I think the women are prettier than the Roman maids and matrons, who, as I think I have said before, have chosen to be very uncomely since the rape of their ancestresses, by way of wreaking a terrible spite and revenge. I have nothing more to say of Arezzo, except that, finding the ordinary wine very bad, as black as ink, and tasting as if it had tar and vinegar in it, we called for a bottle of Monte Pulciano, and were exceedingly gladdened and mollified thereby. INCISA. We left Arezzo early on Monday morning, the sun throwing the long shadows of the trees across the road, which at first, after we had descended the hill, lay over a plain. As the morning advanced, or as we advanced, the country grew more hilly. We saw many bits of rustic life,--such as old women tending pigs or sheep by the roadside, and spinning with a distaff; women sewing under trees, or at their own doors; children leading goats, tied by the horns, while they browse; sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike, at work side by side with male laborers in the fields. The broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Tuscan straw is the customary female head-dress, and is as unbecoming as can possibly be imagined, and of little use, one would suppose, as a shelter from the sun, the brim continually blowing upward from the face. Some of the elder women wore black felt hats, likewise broad-brimmed; and the men wore felt hats also, shaped a good deal like a mushroom, with hardly any brim at all. The scenes in the villages through which we passed were very lively and characteristic, all the population seeming to be out of doors: some at the butcher's shop, others at the well; a tailor sewing in the open air, with a young priest sitting sociably beside him; children at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, spinning with the distaff at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting the pleasant morning pass in the sweet-do-nothing; all assembling in the street, as in the common room of one large household, and thus brought close together, and made familiar with one another, as they can never be in a different system of society. As usual along the road we passed multitudes of shrines, where the Virgin was painted in fresco, or sometimes represented in bas-reliefs, within niches, or under more spacious arches. It would be a good idea to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath all these wayside shrines, where the wayfarer might rest himself, and thank the Virgin for her hospitality; nor can I believe that it would offend her, any more than other incense, if he were to regale himself, even in such consecrated spots, with the fragrance of a pipe or cigar. In the wire-work screen, before many of the shrines, hung offerings of roses and other flowers, some wilted and withered, some fresh with that morning's dew, some that never bloomed and never faded,--being artificial. I wonder that they do not plant rose-trees and all kinds of fragrant and flowering shrubs under the shrines, and twine and wreathe them all around, so that the Virgin may dwell within a bower of perpetual freshness; at least put flower-pots, with living plants, into the niche. There are many things in the customs of these people that might be made very beautiful, if the sense of beauty were as much alive now as it must have been when these customs were first imagined and adopted. I must not forget, among these little descriptive items, the spectacle of women and girls bearing huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with scarlet poppies and blue flowers intermixed; the bundles sometimes so huge as almost to hide the woman's figure from head to heel, so that she looked like a locomotive mass of verdure and flowers; sometimes reaching only half-way down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung behind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest-sheaf. A Pre-Raphaelite painter--the one, for instance, who painted the heap of autumnal leaves, which we saw at the Manchester Exhibition--would find an admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, erect, and graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the miscellaneous herbage and flowers would give him all the scope he could desire for minute and various delineation of nature. The country houses which we passed had sometimes open galleries or arcades on the second story and above, where the inhabitants might perform their domestic labor in the shade and in the air. The houses were often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front. Wherever there was a pigeon-house, a flight of doves were represented as flying into the holes, doubtless for the invitation and encouragement of the real birds. Once or twice I saw a bush stuck up before the door of what seemed to be a wine-shop. If so, it is the ancient custom, so long disused in England, and alluded to in the proverb, "Good wine needs no bush." Several times we saw grass spread to dry on the road, covering half the track, and concluded it to have been cut by the roadside for the winter forage of his ass by some poor peasant, or peasant's wife, who had no grass land, except the margin of the public way. A beautiful feature of the scene to-day, as the preceding day, were the vines growing on fig-trees (?) [This interrogation-mark must mean that Mr. Hawthorne was not sure they were fig-trees.--ED.], and often wreathed in rich festoons from one tree to another, by and by to be hung with clusters of purple grapes. I suspect the vine is a pleasanter object of sight under this mode of culture than it can be in countries where it produces a more precious wine, and therefore is trained more artificially. Nothing can be more picturesque than the spectacle of an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own, clinging round its tree, imprisoning within its strong embrace the friend that supported its tender infancy, converting the tree wholly to its own selfish ends, as seemingly flexible natures are apt to do, stretching out its innumerable arms on every bough, and allowing hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. I must not yet quit this hasty sketch, without throwing in, both in the early morning, and later in the forenoon, the mist that dreamed among the hills, and which, now that I have called it mist, I feel almost more inclined to call light, being so quietly cheerful with the sunshine through it. Put in, now and then, a castle on a hilltop; a rough ravine, a smiling valley; a mountain stream, with a far wider bed than it at present needs, and a stone bridge across it, with ancient and massive arches;--and I shall say no more, except that all these particulars, and many better ones which escape me, made up a very pleasant whole. At about noon we drove into the village of Incisa, and alighted at the albergo where we were to lunch. It was a gloomy old house, as much like my idea of an Etruscan tomb as anything else that I can compare it to. We passed into a wide and lofty entrance-hall, paved with stone, and vaulted with a roof of intersecting arches, supported by heavy columns of stuccoed-brick, the whole as sombre and dingy as can well be. This entrance-hall is not merely the passageway into the inn, but is likewise the carriage-house, into which our vettura is wheeled; and it has, on one side, the stable, odorous with the litter of horses and cattle, and on the other the kitchen, and a common sitting-room. A narrow stone staircase leads from it to the dining-room, and chambers above, which are paved with brick, and adorned with rude frescos instead of paper-hangings. We look out of the windows, and step into a little iron-railed balcony, before the principal window, and observe the scene in the village street. The street is narrow, and nothing can exceed the tall, grim ugliness of the village houses, many of them four stories high, contiguous all along, and paved quite across; so that nature is as completely shut out from the precincts of this little town as from the heart of the widest city. The walls of the houses are plastered, gray, dilapidated; the windows small, some of them drearily closed with wooden shutters, others flung wide open, and with women's heads protruding, others merely frescoed, for a show of light and air. It would be a hideous street to look at in a rainy day, or when no human life pervaded it. Now it has vivacity enough to keep it cheerful. People lounge round the door of the albergo, and watch the horses as they drink from a stone trough, which is built against the wall of the house, and filled with the unseen gush of a spring. At first there is a shade entirely across the street, and all the within-doors of the village empties itself there, and keeps up a babblement that seems quite disproportioned even to the multitude of tongues that make it. So many words are not spoken in a New England village in a whole year as here in this single day. People talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and laugh at nothing as if it were all excellent joke. As the hot noon sunshine encroaches on our side of the street, it grows a little more quiet. The loungers now confine themselves to the shady margin (growing narrower and narrower) of the other side, where, directly opposite the albergo, there are two cafes and a wine-shop, "vendita di pane, vino, ed altri generi," all in a row with benches before them. The benchers joke with the women passing by, and are joked with back again. The sun still eats away the shadow inch by inch, beating down with such intensity that finally everybody disappears except a few passers-by. Doubtless the village snatches this half-hour for its siesta. There is a song, however, inside one of the cafes, with a burden in which several voices join. A girl goes through the street, sheltered under her great bundle of freshly cut grass. By and by the song ceases, and two young peasants come out of the cafe, a little affected by liquor, in their shirt-sleeves and bare feet, with their trousers tucked up. They resume their song in the street, and dance along, one's arm around his fellow's neck, his own waist grasped by the other's arm. They whirl one another quite round about, and come down upon their feet. Meeting a village maid coming quietly along, they dance up and intercept her for a moment, but give way to her sobriety of aspect. They pass on, and the shadow soon begins to spread from one side of the street, which presently fills again, and becomes once more, for its size, the noisiest place I ever knew. We had quite a tolerable dinner at this ugly inn, where many preceding travellers had written their condemnatory judgments, as well as a few their favorable ones, in pencil on the walls of the dining-room. TO FLORENCE. At setting off [from Incisa], we were surrounded by beggars as usual, the most interesting of whom were a little blind boy and his mother, who had besieged us with gentle pertinacity during our whole stay there. There was likewise a man with a maimed hand, and other hurts or deformities; also, an old woman who, I suspect, only pretended to be blind, keeping her eyes tightly squeezed together, but directing her hand very accurately where the copper shower was expected to fall. Besides these, there were a good many sturdy little rascals, vociferating in proportion as they needed nothing. It was touching, however, to see several persons--themselves beggars for aught I know--assisting to hold up the little blind boy's tremulous hand, so that he, at all events, might not lack the pittance which we had to give. Our dole was but a poor one, after all, consisting of what Roman coppers we had brought into Tuscany with us; and as we drove off, some of the boys ran shouting and whining after us in the hot sunshine, nor stopped till we reached the summit of the hill, which rises immediately from the village street. We heard Gaetano once say a good thing to a swarm of beggar-children, who were infesting us, "Are your fathers all dead?"--a proverbial expression, I suppose. The pertinacity of beggars does not, I think, excite the indignation of an Italian, as it is apt to do that of Englishmen or Americans. The Italians probably sympathize more, though they give less. Gaetano is very gentle in his modes of repelling them, and, indeed, never interferes at all, as long as there is a prospect of their getting anything. Immediately after leaving Incisa, we saw the Arno, already a considerable river, rushing between deep banks, with the greenish line of a duck-pond diffused through its water. Nevertheless, though the first impression was not altogether agreeable, we soon became reconciled to this line, and ceased to think it an indication of impurity; for, in spite of it, the river is still to a certain degree transparent, and is, at any rate, a mountain stream, and comes uncontaminated from its source. The pure, transparent brown of the New England rivers is the most beautiful color; but I am content that it should be peculiar to them. Our afternoon's drive was through scenery less striking than some which we had traversed, but still picturesque and beautiful. We saw deep valleys and ravines, with streams at the bottom; long, wooded hillsides, rising far and high, and dotted with white dwellings, well towards the summits. By and by, we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a sidelong valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills; while, far beyond, rose in the distance the blue peaks of three or four of the Apennines, just on the remote horizon. There being a haziness in the atmosphere, however, Florence was little more distinct to us than the Celestial City was to Christian and Hopeful, when they spied at it from the Delectable Mountains. Keeping steadfastly onward, we ascended a winding road, and passed a grand villa, standing very high, and surrounded with extensive grounds. It must be the residence of some great noble; and it has an avenue of poplars or aspens, very light and gay, and fit for the passage of the bridal procession, when the proprietor or his heir brings home his bride; while, in another direction from the same front of the palace, stretches an avenue or grove of cypresses, very long, and exceedingly black and dismal, like a train of gigantic mourners. I have seen few things more striking, in the way of trees, than this grove of cypresses. From this point we descended, and drove along an ugly, dusty avenue, with a high brick wall on one side or both, till we reached the gate of Florence, into which we were admitted with as little trouble as custom-house officers, soldiers, and policemen can possibly give. They did not examine our luggage, and even declined a fee, as we had already paid one at the frontier custom-house. Thank heaven, and the Grand Duke! As we hoped that the Casa del Bello had been taken for us, we drove thither in the first place, but found that the bargain had not been concluded. As the house and studio of Mr. Powers were just on the opposite side of the street, I went to it, but found him too much engrossed to see me at the moment; so I returned to the vettura, and we told Gaetano to carry us to a hotel. He established us at the Albergo della Fontana, a good and comfortable house. . . . . Mr. Powers called in the evening,--a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes, which kindle as he speaks. He is gray, and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly, nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment. Through his good offices, the next day, we engaged the Casa del Bello, at a rent of fifty dollars a month, and I shall take another opportunity (my fingers and head being tired now) to write about the house, and Mr. Powers, and what appertains to him, and about the beautiful city of Florence. At present, I shall only say further, that this journey from Rome has been one of the brightest and most uncareful interludes of my life; we have all enjoyed it exceedingly, and I am happy that our children have it to look back upon. June 4th.--At our visit to Powers's studio on Tuesday, we saw a marble copy of the fisher-boy holding a shell to his ear, and the bust of Proserpine, and two or three other ideal busts; various casts of most of the ideal statues and portrait busts which he has executed. He talks very freely about his works, and is no exception to the rule that an artist is not apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother artist. He showed us a bust of Mr. Sparks by Persico,--a lifeless and thoughtless thing enough, to be sure,--and compared it with a very good one of the same gentleman by himself; but his chiefest scorn was bestowed on a wretched and ridiculous image of Mr. King, of Alabama, by Clark Mills, of which he said he had been employed to make several copies for Southern gentlemen. The consciousness of power is plainly to be seen, and the assertion of it by no means withheld, in his simple and natural character; nor does it give me an idea of vanity on his part to see and hear it. He appears to consider himself neglected by his country,--by the government of it, at least,--and talks with indignation of the byways and political intrigue which, he thinks, win the rewards that ought to be bestowed exclusively on merit. An appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars was made, some years ago, for a work of sculpture by him, to be placed in the Capitol; but the intermediate measures necessary to render it effective have been delayed; while the above-mentioned Clark Mills-- certainly the greatest bungler that ever botched a block of marble--has received an order for an equestrian statue of Washington. Not that Mr. Powers is made bitter or sour by these wrongs, as he considers them; he talks of them with the frankness of his disposition when the topic comes in his way, and is pleasant, kindly, and sunny when he has done with it. His long absence from our country has made him think worse of us than we deserve; and it is an effect of what I myself am sensible, in my shorter exile: the most piercing shriek, the wildest yell, and all the ugly sounds of popular turmoil, inseparable from the life of a republic, being a million times more audible than the peaceful hum of prosperity and content which is going on all the while. He talks of going home, but says that he has been talking of it every year since he first came to Italy; and between his pleasant life of congenial labor, and his idea of moral deterioration in America, I think it doubtful whether he ever crosses the sea again. Like most exiles of twenty years, he has lost his native country without finding another; but then it is as well to recognize the truth,--that an individual country is by no means essential to one's comfort. Powers took us into the farthest room, I believe, of his very extensive studio, and showed us a statue of Washington that has much dignity and stateliness. He expressed, however, great contempt for the coat and breeches, and masonic emblems, in which he had been required to drape the figure. What would he do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life? Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. His costume, at all events, was a part of his character, and must be dealt with by whatever sculptor undertakes to represent him. I wonder that so very sensible a man as Powers should not see the necessity of accepting drapery, and the very drapery of the day, if he will keep his art alive. It is his business to idealize the tailor's actual work. But he seems to be especially fond of nudity, none of his ideal statues, so far as I know them, having so much as a rag of clothes. His statue of California, lately finished, and as naked as Venus, seemed to me a very good work; not an actual woman, capable of exciting passion, but evidently a little out of the category of human nature. In one hand she holds a divining-rod. "She says to the emigrants," observed Powers, "'Here is the gold, if you choose to take it.'" But in her face, and in her eyes, very finely expressed, there is a look of latent mischief, rather grave than playful, yet somewhat impish or sprite-like; and, in the other hand, behind her back, she holds a bunch of thorns. Powers calls her eyes Indian. The statue is true to the present fact and history of California, and includes the age-long truth as respects the "auri sacra fames." . . . . When we had looked sufficiently at the sculpture, Powers proposed that we should now go across the street and see the Casa del Bello. We did so in a body, Powers in his dressing-gown and slippers, and his wife and daughters without assuming any street costume. The Casa del Bello is a palace of three pianos, the topmost of which is occupied by the Countess of St. George, an English lady, and two lower pianos are to be let, and we looked at both. The upper one would have suited me well enough; but the lower has a terrace, with a rustic summer-house over it, and is connected with a garden, where there are arbors and a willow-tree, and a little wilderness of shrubbery and roses, with a fountain in the midst. It has likewise an immense suite of rooms, round the four sides of a small court, spacious, lofty, with frescoed ceilings and rich hangings, and abundantly furnished with arm-chairs, sofas, marble tables, and great looking-glasses. Not that these last are a great temptation, but in our wandering life I wished to be perfectly comfortable myself, and to make my family so, for just this summer, and so I have taken the lower piano, the price being only fifty dollars per month (entirely furnished, even to silver and linen). Certainly this is something like the paradise of cheapness we were told of, and which we vainly sought in Rome. . . . . To me has been assigned the pleasantest room for my study; and when I like I can overflow into the summer-house or an arbor, and sit there dreaming of a story. The weather is delightful, too warm to walk, but perfectly fit to do nothing in, in the coolness of these great rooms. Every day I shall write a little, perhaps,--and probably take a brief nap somewhere between breakfast and tea,--but go to see pictures and statues occasionally, and so assuage and mollify myself a little after that uncongenial life of the consulate, and before going back to my own hard and dusty New England. After concluding the arrangement for the Casa del Bello, we stood talking a little while with Powers and his wife and daughter before the door of the house, for they seem so far to have adopted the habits of the Florentines as to feel themselves at home on the shady side of the street. The out-of-door life and free communication with the pavement, habitual apparently among the middle classes, reminds me of the plays of Moliere and other old dramatists, in which the street or the square becomes a sort of common parlor, where most of the talk and scenic business of the people is carried on. June 5th.--For two or three mornings after breakfast I have rambled a little about the city till the shade grew narrow beneath the walls of the houses, and the heat made it uncomfortable to be in motion. To-day I went over the Ponte Carraja, and thence into and through the heart of the city, looking into several churches, in all of which I found people taking advantage of the cool breadth of these sacred interiors to refresh themselves and say their prayers. Florence at first struck me as having the aspect of a very new city in comparison with Rome; but, on closer acquaintance, I find that many of the buildings are antique and massive, though still the clear atmosphere, the bright sunshine, the light, cheerful hues of the stucco, and--as much as anything else, perhaps--the vivacious character of the human life in the streets, take away the sense of its being an ancient city. The streets are delightful to walk in after so many penitential pilgrimages as I have made over those little square, uneven blocks of the Roman pavement, which wear out the boots and torment the soul. I absolutely walk on the smooth flags of Florence for the mere pleasure of walking, and live in its atmosphere for the mere pleasure of living; and, warm as the weather is getting to be, I never feel that inclination to sink down in a heap and never stir again, which was my dull torment and misery as long as I stayed in Rome. I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here. I went to-day into the Baptistery, which stands near the Duomo, and, like that, is covered externally with slabs of black and white marble, now grown brown and yellow with age. The edifice is octagonal, and on entering, one immediately thinks of the Pantheon,--the whole space within being free from side to side, with a dome above; but it differs from the severe simplicity of the former edifice, being elaborately ornamented with marble and frescos, and lacking that great eye in the roof that looks so nobly and reverently heavenward from the Pantheon. I did little more than pass through the Baptistery, glancing at the famous bronze doors, some perfect and admirable casts of which I had already seen at the Crystal Palace. The entrance of the Duomo being just across the piazza, I went in there after leaving the Baptistery, and was struck anew--for this is the third or fourth visit--with the dim grandeur of the interior, lighted as it is almost exclusively by painted windows, which seem to me worth all the variegated marbles and rich cabinet-work of St. Peter's. The Florentine Cathedral has a spacious and lofty nave, and side aisles divided from it by pillars; but there are no chapels along the aisles, so that there is far more breadth and freedom of interior, in proportion to the actual space, than is usual in churches. It is woful to think how the vast capaciousness within St. Peter's is thrown away, and made to seem smaller than it is by every possible device, as if on purpose. The pillars and walls of this Duomo are of a uniform brownish, neutral tint; the pavement, a mosaic work of marble; the ceiling of the dome itself is covered with frescos, which, being very imperfectly lighted, it is impossible to trace out. Indeed, it is but a twilight region that is enclosed within the firmament of this great dome, which is actually larger than that of St. Peter's, though not lifted so high from the pavement. But looking at the painted windows, I little cared what dimness there might be elsewhere; for certainly the art of man has never contrived any other beauty and glory at all to be compared to this. The dome sits, as it were, upon three smaller domes,--smaller, but still great,--beneath which are three vast niches, forming the transepts of the cathedral and the tribune behind the high altar. All round these hollow, dome-covered arches or niches are high and narrow windows crowded with saints, angels, and all manner of blessed shapes, that turn the common daylight into a miracle of richness and splendor as it passes through their heavenly substance. And just beneath the swell of the great central dome is a wreath of circular windows quite round it, as brilliant as the tall and narrow ones below. It is a pity anybody should die without seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. This is "the dim, religious light" that Milton speaks of; but I doubt whether he saw these windows when he was in Italy, or any but those faded or dusty and dingy ones of the English cathedrals, else he would have illuminated that word "dim" with some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet should make it shine like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes,--bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and reverence because God himself was shining through them. I hate what I have said. All the time that I was in the cathedral the space around the high altar, which stands exactly under the dome, was occupied by priests or acolytes in white garments, chanting a religious service. After coming out, I took a view of the edifice from a corner of the street nearest to the dome, where it and the smaller domes can be seen at once. It is greatly more satisfactory than St. Peter's in any view I ever had of it,--striking in its outline, with a mystery, yet not a bewilderment, in its masses and curves and angles, and wrought out with a richness of detail that gives the eyes new arches, new galleries, new niches, new pinnacles, new beauties, great and small, to play with when wearied with the vast whole. The hue, black and white marbles, like the Baptistery, turned also yellow and brown, is greatly preferable to the buff travertine of St. Peter's. From the Duomo it is but a moderate street's length to the Piazza del Gran Duca, the principal square of Florence. It is a very interesting place, and has on one side the old Governmental Palace,--the Palazzo Vecchio,--where many scenes of historic interest have been enacted; for example, conspirators have been hanged from its windows, or precipitated from them upon the pavement of the square below. It is a pity that we cannot take as much interest in the history of these Italian Republics as in that of England, for the former is much the more picturesque and fuller of curious incident. The sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon race--in connection, too, with their moral sense--keeps them from doing a great many things that would enliven the page of history; and their events seem to come in great masses, shoved along by the agency of many persons, rather than to result from individual will and character. A hundred plots for a tragedy might be found in Florentine history for one in English. At one corner of the Palazzo Vecchio is a bronze equestrian statue of Cosmo de' Medici, the first Grand Duke, very stately and majestic; there are other marble statues--one of David, by Michael Angelo--at each side of the palace door; and entering the court I found a rich antique arcade within, surrounded by marble pillars, most elaborately carved, supporting arches that were covered with faded frescos. I went no farther, but stepped across a little space of the square to the Loggia di Lanzi, which is broad and noble, of three vast arches, at the end of which, I take it, is a part of the Palazzo Uffizi fronting on the piazza. I should call it a portico if it stood before the palace door; but it seems to have been constructed merely for itself, and as a shelter for the people from sun and rain, and to contain some fine specimens of sculpture, as well antique as of more modern times. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands here; but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace. A good many people were under these great arches; some of whom were reclining, half or quite asleep, on the marble seats that are built against the back of the loggia. A group was reading an edict of the Grand Duke, which appeared to have been just posted on a board, at the farther end of it; and I was surprised at the interest which they ventured to manifest, and the freedom with which they seemed to discuss it. A soldier was on guard, and doubtless there were spies enough to carry every word that was said to the ear of absolute authority. Glancing myself at the edict, however, I found it referred only to the furtherance of a project, got up among the citizens themselves, for bringing water into the city; and on such topics, I suppose there is freedom of discussion. June 7th.--Saturday evening we walked with U---- and J----- into the city, and looked at the exterior of the Duomo with new admiration. Since my former view of it, I have noticed--which, strangely enough, did not strike me before--that the facade is but a great, bare, ugly space, roughly plastered over, with the brickwork peeping through it in spots, and a faint, almost invisible fresco of colors upon it. This front was once nearly finished with an incrustation of black and white marble, like the rest of the edifice; but one of the city magistrates, Benedetto Uguccione, demolished it, three hundred years ago, with the idea of building it again in better style. He failed to do so, and, ever since, the magnificence of the great church has been marred by this unsightly roughness of what should have been its richest part; nor is there, I suppose, any hope that it will ever be finished now. The campanile, or bell-tower, stands within a few paces of the cathedral, but entirely disconnected from it, rising to a height of nearly three hundred feet, a square tower of light marbles, now discolored by time. It is impossible to give an idea of the richness of effect produced by its elaborate finish; the whole surface of the four sides, from top to bottom, being decorated with all manner of statuesque and architectural sculpture. It is like a toy of ivory, which some ingenious and pious monk might have spent his lifetime in adorning with scriptural designs and figures of saints; and when it was finished, seeing it so beautiful, he prayed that it might be miraculously magnified from the size of one foot to that of three hundred. This idea somewhat satisfies me, as conveying an impression how gigantesque the campanile is in its mass and height, and how minute and varied in its detail. Surely these mediaeval works have an advantage over the classic. They combine the telescope and the microscope. The city was all alive in the summer evening, and the streets humming with voices. Before the doors of the cafes were tables, at which people were taking refreshment, and it went to my heart to see a bottle of English ale, some of which was poured foaming into a glass; at least, it had exactly the amber hue and the foam of English bitter ale; but perhaps it may have been merely a Florentine imitation. As we returned home over the Arno, crossing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, we were struck by the beautiful scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its shores repeated in it, on either side, and the neighboring bridges, too, just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above,--a city of dream and shadow so close to the actual one. God has a meaning, no doubt, in putting this spiritual symbol continually beside us. Along the river, on both sides, as far as we could see, there was a row of brilliant lamps, which, in the far distance, looked like a cornice of golden light; and this also shone as brightly in the river's depths. The lilies of the evening, in the quarter where the sun had gone down, were very soft and beautiful, though not so gorgeous as thousands that I have seen in America. But I believe I must fairly confess that the Italian sky, in the daytime, is bluer and brighter than our own, and that the atmosphere has a quality of showing objects to better advantage. It is more than mere daylight; the magic of moonlight is somehow mixed up with it, although it is so transparent a medium of light. Last evening, Mr. Powers called to see us, and sat down to talk in a friendly and familiar way. I do not know a man of more facile intercourse, nor with whom one so easily gets rid of ceremony. His conversation, too, is interesting. He talked, to begin with, about Italian food, as poultry, mutton, beef, and their lack of savoriness as compared with our own; and mentioned an exquisite dish of vegetables which they prepare from squash or pumpkin blossoms; likewise another dish, which it will be well for us to remember when we get back to the Wayside, where we are overrun with acacias. It consists of the acacia-blossoms in a certain stage of their development fried in olive-oil. I shall get the receipt from Mrs. Powers, and mean to deserve well of my country by first trying it, and then making it known; only I doubt whether American lard, or even butter, will produce the dish quite so delicately as fresh Florence oil. Meanwhile, I like Powers all the better, because he does not put his life wholly into marble. We had much talk, nevertheless, on matters of sculpture, for he drank a cup of tea with us, and stayed a good while. He passed a condemnatory sentence on classic busts in general, saying that they were conventional, and not to be depended upon as trite representations of the persons. He particularly excepted none but the bust of Caracalla; and, indeed, everybody that has seen this bust must feel the justice of the exception, and so be the more inclined to accept his opinion about the rest. There are not more than half a dozen--that of Cato the Censor among the others--in regard to which I should like to ask his judgment individually. He seems to think the faculty of making a bust an extremely rare one. Canova put his own likeness into all the busts he made. Greenough could not make a good one; nor Crawford, nor Gibson. Mr. Harte, he observed,--an American sculptor, now a resident in Florence,--is the best man of the day for making busts. Of course, it is to be presumed that he excepts himself; but I would not do Powers the great injustice to imply that there is the slightest professional jealousy in his estimate of what others have done, or are now doing, in his own art. If he saw a better man than himself, he would recognize him at once, and tell the world of him; but he knows well enough that, in this line, there is no better, and probably none so good. It would not accord with the simplicity of his character to blink a fact that stands so broadly before him. We asked him what he thought, of Mr. Gibson's practice of coloring his statues, and he quietly and slyly said that he himself had made wax figures in his earlier days, but had left off making them now. In short, he objected to the practice wholly, and said that a letter of his on the subject had been published in the London "Athenaeum," and had given great offence to some of Mr. Gibson's friends. It appeared to me, however, that his arguments did not apply quite fairly to the case, for he seems to think Gibson aims at producing an illusion of life in the statue, whereas I think his object is merely to give warmth and softness to the snowy marble, and so bring it a little nearer to our hearts and sympathies. Even so far, nevertheless, I doubt whether the practice is defensible, and I was glad to see that Powers scorned, at all events, the argument drawn from the use of color by the antique sculptors, on which Gibson relies so much. It might almost be implied, from the contemptuous way in which Powers spoke of color, that he considers it an impertinence on the face of visible nature, and would rather the world had been made without it; for he said that everything in intellect or feeling can be expressed as perfectly, or more so, by the sculptor in colorless marble, as by the painter with all the resources of his palette. I asked him whether he could model the face of Beatrice Cenci from Guido's picture so as to retain the subtle expression, and he said he could, for that the expression depended entirely on the drawing, "the picture being a badly colored thing." I inquired whether he could model a blush, and he said "Yes"; and that he had once proposed to an artist to express a blush in marble, if he would express it in picture. On consideration, I believe one to be as impossible as the other; the life and reality of the blush being in its tremulousness, coming and going. It is lost in a settled red just as much as in a settled paleness, and neither the sculptor nor painter can do more than represent the circumstances of attitude and expression that accompany the blush. There was a great deal of truth in what Powers said about this matter of color, and in one of our interminable New England winters it ought to comfort us to think how little necessity there is for any hue but that of the snow. Mr. Powers, nevertheless, had brought us a bunch of beautiful roses, and seemed as capable of appreciating their delicate blush as we were. The best thing he said against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's tinted Venus. He took his leave at about eight o'clock, being to make a call on the Bryants, who are at the Hotel de New York, and also on Mrs. Browning, at Casa Guidi. END OF VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. II. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FLORENCE (Continued). June 8th.--I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. The entrance is from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other. The gallery is in the upper story of the palace, and in the vestibule are some busts of the princes and cardinals of the Medici family,--none of them beautiful, one or two so ugly as to be ludicrous, especially one who is all but buried in his own wig. I at first travelled slowly through the whole extent of this long, long gallery, which occupies the entire length of the palace on both sides of the court, and is full of sculpture and pictures. The latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage; but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting began to be an art. Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who ought to interest me a great deal more than they do. Occasionally to-day I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there. Once more I deem it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of appealing to the religious sentiment. I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and some of the great men of Rome. There is a bust of Pompey the Great, bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of countenance. I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the hall of the Spada Palace. These, I presume, are the busts which Mr. Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional. He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces might. The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an individual and faithful portrait than any other in the series. All the busts of Caracalla--of which I have seen many--give the same evidence of their truth; and I should like to know what it was in this abominable emperor that made him insist upon having his actual likeness perpetuated, with all the ugliness of its animal and moral character. I rather respect him for it, and still more the sculptor, whose hand, methinks, must have trembled as he wrought the bust. Generally these wicked old fellows, and their wicked wives and daughters, are not so hideous as we might expect. Messalina, for instance, has small and pretty features, though with rather a sensual development of the lower part of the face. The busts, it seemed to me, are usually superior as works of art to those in the Capitol, and either better preserved or more thoroughly restored. The bust of Nero might almost be called handsome here, though bearing his likeness unmistakably. I wish some competent person would undertake to analyze and develop his character, and how and by what necessity--with all his elegant tastes, his love of the beautiful, his artist nature--he grew to be such a monster. Nero has never yet had justice done him, nor have any of the wicked emperors; not that I suppose them to have been any less monstrous than history represents them; but there must surely have been something in their position and circumstances to render the terrible moral disease which seized upon them so generally almost inevitable. A wise and profound man, tender and reverent of the human soul, and capable of appreciating it in its height and depth, has a great field here for the exercise of his powers. It has struck me, in reading the history of the Italian republics, that many of the tyrants, who sprung up after the destruction of their liberties, resembled the worst of the Roman emperors. The subject of Nero and his brethren has often perplexed me with vain desires to come at the truth. There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along the gallery,--Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns,--with the general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them at a glance. The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus de' Medici, I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes. My European experience has extinguished many such. I was pretty well contented, therefore, not to find the famous statue in the whole of my long journey from end to end of the gallery, which terminates on the opposite side of the court from that where it commences. The ceiling, by the by, through the entire length, is covered with frescos, and the floor paved with a composition of stone smooth and polished like marble. The final piece of sculpture, at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very fine. I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty and terrible repose--a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble-- that I had felt in the original. Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them. I remember an unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago. The pictures I did little more than glance at, till I had almost completed again the circuit of the gallery, through this series of parallel rooms, and then I came upon a collection of French and Dutch and Flemish masters, all of which interested me more than the Italian generally. There was a beautiful picture by Claude, almost as good as those in the British National Gallery, and very like in subject; the sun near the horizon, of course, and throwing its line of light over the ripple of water, with ships at the strand, and one or two palaces of stately architecture on the shore. Landscapes by Rembrandt; fat Graces and other plump nudities by Rubens; brass pans and earthen pots and herrings by Terriers and other Dutchmen; none by Gerard Douw, I think, but several by Mieris; all of which were like bread and beef and ale, after having been fed too long on made dishes. This is really a wonderful collection of pictures; and from first, to last--from Giotto to the men of yesterday--they are in admirable condition, and may be appreciated for all the merit that they ever possessed. I could not quite believe that I was not to find the Venus de' Medici; and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. At last, when I had come from among the Dutchmen, I believe, and was looking at some works of Italian artists, chiefly Florentines, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room. It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape, and hung with red damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite round, beneath an octagonal dome. The Venus stands somewhat aside from the centre of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or two from her pedestal in front, and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The line of the marble is just so much mellowed by time, as to do for her all that Gibson tries, or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began. She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the marble. Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments, her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck. Furthermore, there have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts of her person. But on account of the skill with which the statue has been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible, all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been reunited. She is just as whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor. I am glad to have seen this Venus, and to have found her so tender and so chaste. On the wall of the room, and to be taken in at the same glance, is a painted Venus by Titian, reclining on a couch, naked and lustful. The room of the Venus seems to be the treasure-place of the whole Uffizi Palace, containing more pictures by famous masters than are to be found in all the rest of the gallery. There were several by Raphael, and the room was crowded with the easels of artists. I did not look half enough at anything, but merely took a preliminary taste, as a prophecy of enjoyment to come. As we were at dinner to-day, at half past three, there was a ring at the door, and a minute after our servant brought a card. It was Mr. Robert Browning's, and on it was written in pencil an invitation for us to go to see them this evening. He had left the card and gone away; but very soon the bell rang again, and he had come back, having forgotten to give his address. This time he came in; and he shook hands with all of us, children and grown people, and was very vivacious and agreeable. He looked younger and even handsomer than when I saw him in London, two years ago, and his gray hairs seemed fewer than those that had then strayed into his youthful head. He talked a wonderful quantity in a little time, and told us--among other things that we should never have dreamed of--that Italian people will not cheat you, if you construe them generously, and put them upon their honor. Mr. Browning was very kind and warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing us; and, on our part, we were all very glad to meet him. He must be an exceedingly likable man. . . . . They are to leave Florence very soon, and are going to Normandy, I think he said, for the rest of the summer. The Venus de' Medici has a dimple in her chin. June 9th.--We went last evening, at eight o'clock, to see the Brownings; and, after some search and inquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior, which, if I remember, Browning has celebrated in song; at all events, Mrs. Browning has called one of her poems "Casa Guidi Windows." The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace, we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the anteroom to greet us, as did his little boy, Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile, and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's. He is nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age. I should not quite like to be the father of such a boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he cannot fail to inspire. I wonder what is to become of him,--whether he will ever grow to be a man,--whether it is desirable that he should. His parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in. He was born in Florence, and prides himself on being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were native of another planet. Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness. We were not the only guests. Mr. and Mrs. E------, Americans, recently from the East, and on intimate terms with the Brownings, arrived after us; also Miss F. H------, an English literary lady, whom I have met several times in Liverpool; and lastly came the white head and palmer-like beard of Mr. ------ with his daughter. Mr. Browning was very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person, logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk. Mr. ------, as usual, was homely and plain of manner, with an old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning. I doubt, however, whether he has any high appreciation either of her poetry or her husband's, and it is my impression that they care as little about his. We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel. Mr. ------ appeared not to have made up his mind on the matter, but told a story of a successful communication between Cooper the novelist and his sister, who had been dead fifty years. Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic; while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation. I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions. Mrs. Browning's health does not permit late hours, so we began to take heave at about ten o'clock. I heard her ask Mr. ------ if he did not mean to revisit Europe, and heard him answer, not uncheerfully, taking hold of his white hair, "It is getting rather too late in the evening now." If any old age can be cheerful, I should think his might be; so good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright, too, we may say. His life has been like the days that end in pleasant sunsets. He has a great loss, however, or what ought to be a great loss,--soon to be encountered in the death of his wife, who, I think, can hardly live to reach America. He is not eminently an affectionate man. I take him to be one who cannot get closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sensibly as he gladly would; and, in consequence of that deficiency, the world lacks substance to him. It is partly the result, perhaps, of his not having sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature. His poetry shows it, and his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least. Little Pennini, during the evening, sometimes helped the guests to cake and strawberries; joined in the conversation, when he had anything to say, or sat down upon a couch to enjoy his own meditations. He has long curling hair, and has not yet emerged from his frock and short hose. It is funny to think of putting him into trousers. His likeness to his mother is strange to behold. June 10th.--My wife and I went to the Pitti Palace to-day; and first entered a court where, yesterday, she had seen a carpet of flowers, arranged for some great ceremony. It must have been a most beautiful sight, the pavement of the court being entirely covered by them, in a regular pattern of brilliant lines, so as really to be a living mosaic. This morning, however, the court had nothing but its usual stones, and the show of yesterday seemed so much the more inestimable as having been so evanescent. Around the walls of the court there were still some pieces of splendid tapestry which had made part of yesterday's magnificence. We went up the staircase, of regally broad and easy ascent, and made application to be admitted to see the grand-ducal apartments. An attendant accordingly took the keys, and ushered us first into a great hall with a vaulted ceiling, and then through a series of noble rooms, with rich frescos above and mosaic floors, hung with damask, adorned with gilded chandeliers, and glowing, in short, with more gorgeousness than I could have imagined beforehand, or can now remember. In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes,--each cabinet worth a lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it. Many of the rooms were covered with arras, of landscapes, hunting-scenes, mythological subjects, or historical scenes, equal to pictures in truth of representation, and possessing an indescribable richness that makes them preferable as a mere adornment of princely halls and chambers. Some of the rooms, as I have said, were laid in mosaic of stone and marble, otherwise in lovely patterns of various woods; others were covered with carpets, delightful to tread upon, and glowing like the living floor of flowers which my wife saw yesterday. There were tables, too, of Florentine mosaic, the mere materials of which--lapis lazuli, malachite, pearl, and a hundred other precious things--were worth a fortune, and made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the manufacturer. I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and soft,--this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material. I have seen a very dazzling effect produced in the principal cabin of an American clipper-ship quite opposed to this in taste. After making the circuit of the grand-ducal apartments, we went into a door in the left wing of the palace, and ascended a narrow flight of stairs,--several tortuous flights indeed,--to the picture-gallery. It fills a great many stately halls, which themselves are well worth a visit for the architecture and frescos; only these matters become commonplace after travelling through a mile or two of them. The collection of pictures--as well for their number as for the celebrity and excellence of many of them--is the most interesting that I have seen, and I do not yet feel in a condition, nor perhaps ever shall, to speak of a single one. It gladdened my very heart to find that they were not darkened out of sight, nor apparently at all injured by time, but were well kept and varnished, brilliantly framed, and, no doubt, restored by skilful touches if any of them needed it. The artists and amateurs may say what they like; for my part, I know no drearier feeling than that inspired by a ruined picture,--ruined, that is, by time, damp, or rough treatment,--and I would a thousand times rather an artist should do his best towards reviving it, than have it left in such a condition. I do not believe, however, that these pictures have been sacrilegiously interfered with; at all events, I saw in the masterpieces no touch but what seemed worthy of the master-hand. The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola." I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty, though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before. An artist was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile, yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing the beautiful. But how does this accord with what I have been saying only a minute ago? How then can the decayed picture of a great master ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand? Doubtless it never can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations likewise. I saw the "Three Fates" of Michael Angelo, which were also being copied, as were many other of the best pictures. Miss Fanny Howorth, whom I met in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola," application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists who aspire to copy it. Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy than if they had nothing to do with us. I remember seeing an etching of this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible, stern, passionless severity, neither loving us nor hating us, that characterizes these ugly old women. If they were angry, or had the least spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable. They are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a belief in fate such a cold torture to the human soul. God give me the sure belief in his Providence! In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I cannot always "keep the heights I gain," however, and after admiring and being moved by a picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as little moved as if it were a tavern-sign. It is pretty much the same with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo, which I described so rapturously a few days ago. I looked at them again the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the eastern end. It is a pity they are so narrow. England has many a great chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth. From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment. They seem to consist partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was only a narrow margin of shade. I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles. June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely, it makes me more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical embodiment. I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. I observed to-day that the eyes of the statue are slightly hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and intelligence. She is a miracle. The sculptor must have wrought religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was working through his hands. I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the perception of it grows upon one. If at any time I become less sensible of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue. I looked at many of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood for enjoying them. It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the coldness and insensibility of our less genial moods. After leaving the Uffizi Palace, . . . . I went into the Museum of Natural History, near the Pitti Palace. It is a very good collection of almost everything that Nature has made,--or exquisite copies of what she has made,--stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of the human frame. It is good to have the wholeness and summed-up beauty of woman in the memory, when looking at the details of her system as here displayed; for these last, to the natural eye, are by no means beautiful. But they are what belong only to our mortality. The beauty that makes them invisible is our immortal type, which we shall take away with us. Under glass cases, there were some singular and horribly truthful representations, in small wax figures, of a time of pestilence; the hasty burial, or tossing into one common sepulchre, of discolored corpses,--a very ugly piece of work, indeed. I think Murray says that these things were made for the Grand Duke Cosmo; and if so, they do him no credit, indicating something dark and morbid in his character. June 13th.--We called at the Powers's yesterday morning to leave R----- there for an hour or two to play with the children; and it being not yet quite time for the Pitti Palace, we stopped into the studio. Soon Mr. Powers made his appearance, in his dressing-gown and slippers and sculptor's cap, smoking a cigar. . . . . He was very cordial and pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up. There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici in the rooms, which he said were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the mould taken from the statue. He then gave us a quite unexpected but most interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by reference to the points which he criticised. The figure, he seemed to allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his own Greek Slave or Eva; but the face, he began with saying, was that of an idiot. Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued, "It is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici did not know what he was about?" Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a half-worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it. The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin around them. In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defence--and even that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view. But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity. After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to nature with which these are modelled. I freely acknowledge the fact; there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus de' Medici. A light--the light of a soul proper to each individual character--seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes. Still insisting upon the eye, and hitting the poor Venus another and another and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb,--the biggest, by far, that ever I saw in mortal head,--and made us see and confess that there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and Proserpine. To say the truth, their marble eyes have life, and, placing yourself in the proper position towards them, you can meet their glances, and feel them mingle with your own. Powers is a great man, and also a tender and delicate one, massive and rude of surface as he looks; and it is rather absurd to feel how he impressed his auditor, for the time being, with his own evident idea that nobody else is worthy to touch marble. Mr. B------ told me that Powers has had many difficulties on professional grounds, as I understood him, and with his brother artists. No wonder! He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills. He has a bust of the reigning Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who sat to him for it. The bust is that of a noble-looking lady; and Powers remarked that royal personages have a certain look that distinguishes them from other people, and is seen in individuals of no lower rank. They all have it; the Queen of England and Prince Albert have it; and so likewise has every other Royalty, although the possession of this kingly look implies nothing whatever as respects kingly and commanding qualities. He said that none of our public men, whatever authority they may have held, or for whatever length of time, possess this look, but he added afterwards that Washington had it. Commanders of armies sometimes have it, but not in the degree that royal personages do. It is, as well as I could make out Powers's idea, a certain coldness of demeanor, and especially of eye, that surrounds them with an atmosphere through which the electricity of human brotherhood cannot pass. From their youth upward they are taught to feel themselves apart from the rest of mankind, and this manner becomes a second nature to them in consequence, and as a safeguard to their conventional dignity. They put themselves under glass, as it were (the illustration is my own), so that, though you see them, and see them looking no more noble and dignified than other mortals, nor so much so as many, still they keep themselves within a sort of sanctity, and repel you by an invisible barrier. Even if they invite you with a show of warmth and hospitality, you cannot get through. I, too, recognize this look in the portraits of Washington; in him, a mild, benevolent coldness and apartness, but indicating that formality which seems to have been deeper in him than in any other mortal, and which built up an actual fortification between himself and human sympathy. I wish, for once, Washington could come out of his envelopment and show us what his real dimensions were. Among other models of statues heretofore made, Powers showed us one of Melancholy, or rather of Contemplation, from Milton's "Penseroso"; a female figure with uplifted face and rapt look, "communing with the skies." It is very fine, and goes deeply into Milton's thought; but, as far as the outward form and action are concerned, I remember seeing a rude engraving in my childhood that probably suggested the idea. It was prefixed to a cheap American edition of Milton's poems, and was probably as familiar to Powers as to myself. It is very remarkable how difficult it seems to be to strike out a new attitude in sculpture; a new group, or a new single figure. One piece of sculpture Powers exhibited, however, which was very exquisite, and such as I never saw before. Opening a desk, he took out something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle of the soft skin being lovingly recorded. "The critics condemn minute representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a microscope and see if it injures the general effect." Nature herself never made a prettier or truer little hand. It was the hand of his daughter,--"Luly's hand," Powers called it,--the same that gave my own such a frank and friendly grasp when I first met "Luly." The sculptor made it only for himself and his wife, but so many people, he said, had insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the world. At sixty years, Luly ought to have her hand sculptured again, and give it to her grandchildren with the baby's hand of five months old. The baby-hand that had done nothing, and felt only its mother's kiss; the old lady's hand that had exchanged the love-pressure, worn the marriage-ring, closed dead eyes,--done a lifetime's work, in short. The sentiment is rather obvious, but true nevertheless. Before we went away, Powers took us into a room apart--apparently the secretest room he had--and showed us some tools and machinery, all of his own contrivance and invention. "You see I am a bit of a Yankee," he observed. This machinery is chiefly to facilitate the process of modelling his works, for--except in portrait-busts--he makes no clay model as other sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent possession. He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for making these files and for punching holes through iron, and he demonstrated its efficiency by punching a hole through an iron bar, with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds, by the mere application of a part of his own weight. These inventions, he says, are his amusement, and the bent of his nature towards sculpture must indeed have been strong, to counteract, in an American, such a capacity for the contrivance of steam-engines. . . . . I had no idea of filling so many pages of this journal with the sayings and characteristics of Mr. Powers, but the man and his talk are fresh, original, and full of bone and muscle, and I enjoy him much. We now proceeded to the Pitti Palace, and spent several hours pleasantly in its saloons of pictures. I never enjoyed pictures anywhere else as I do in Florence. There is an admirable Judith in this gallery by Allori; a face of great beauty and depth, and her hand clutches the head of Holofernes by the hair in a way that startles the spectator. There are two peasant Madonnas by Murillo; simple women, yet with a thoughtful sense of some high mystery connected with the baby in their arms. Raphael grows upon me; several other famous painters--Guido, for instance--are fading out of my mind. Salvator Rosa has two really wonderful landscapes, looking from the shore seaward; and Rubens too, likewise on a large scale, of mountain and plain. It is very idle and foolish to talk of pictures; yet, after poring over them and into them, it seems a pity to let all the thought excited by them pass into nothingness. The copyists of pictures are very numerous, both in the Pitti and Uffizi galleries; and, unlike sculptors, they appear to be on the best of terms with one another, chatting sociably, exchanging friendly criticism, and giving their opinions as to the best mode of attaining the desired effects. Perhaps, as mere copyists, they escape the jealousy that might spring up between rival painters attempting to develop original ideas. Miss Howorth says that the business of copying pictures, especially those of Raphael, is a regular profession, and she thinks it exceedingly obstructive to the progress or existence of a modern school of painting, there being a regular demand and sure sale for all copies of the old masters, at prices proportioned to their merit; whereas the effort to be original insures nothing, except long neglect, at the beginning of a career, and probably ultimate failure, and the necessity of becoming a copyist at last. Some artists employ themselves from youth to age in nothing else but the copying of one single and selfsame picture by Raphael, and grow at last to be perfectly mechanical, making, I suppose, the same identical stroke of the brush in fifty successive pictures. The weather is very hot now,--hotter in the sunshine, I think, than a midsummer day usually is in America, but with rather a greater possibility of being comfortable in the shade. The nights, too, are warm, and the bats fly forth at dusk, and the fireflies quite light up the green depths of our little garden. The atmosphere, or something else, causes a sort of alacrity in my mind and an affluence of ideas, such as they are; but it does not thereby make me the happier. I feel an impulse to be at work, but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key. I need monotony too, an eventless exterior life, before I can live in the world within. June 15th.--Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici after Powers's attack upon her face. Some of the defects he attributed to her I could not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line with the upper lip. The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids, that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow. I cannot help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect. Whatever rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face,--more so, perhaps, than if all rules had been obeyed. I wish Powers would do his best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable) with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with the sentiment of the form. We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures that impressed me; but among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a former one. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before. It is the sign, I presume, of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Douw, and other old Dutch wizards, who painted such brass pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen pots that they will surely hold water; and who spent weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvas into a perfect microscopic illusion of some homely scene. For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the "Transfiguration" in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible space of human life could suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the "Transfiguration" with such touches as Gerard Douw's. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom, and grapes have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years. Often, in these pictures, there is a bird's-nest, every straw perfectly represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small speckled eggs, that seem as if they might be yet warm. These pretty miracles have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter-of-fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration. Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the "Nativity," it is not amiss to look at, a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a bumblebee burying himself in a flower. It is another token of imperfect taste, no doubt, that queer pictures and absurd pictures remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the score. There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I shall not forget. Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by Bardone,--a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament, who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had been carving a goose. What could possibly have stirred up this pudding of a woman (unless it were a pudding-stick) to do such a deed! I looked with much pleasure at an ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of revelation, whenever it comes. This morning, immediately after breakfast, I walked into the city, meaning to make myself better acquainted with its appearance, and to go into its various churches; but it soon grew so hot, that I turned homeward again. The interior of the Duomo was deliciously cool, to be sure,--cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine; but an old woman began to persecute me, so that I came away. A male beggar drove me out of another church; and I took refuge in the street, where the beggar and I would have been two cinders together, if we had stood long enough on the sunny sidewalk. After my five summers' experience of England, I may have forgotten what hot weather is; but it does appear to me that an American summer is not so fervent as this. Besides the direct rays, the white pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza. The narrow streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a selvage of shade, almost always. I do not know what becomes of the street-merchants at the noontide of these hot days. They form a numerous class in Florence, displaying their wares--linen or cotton cloth, threads, combs, and all manner of haberdashery--on movable counters that are borne about on wheels. In the shady morning, you see a whole side of a street in a piazza occupied by them, all offering their merchandise at full cry. They dodge as they can from shade to shade; but at last the sunshine floods the whole space, and they seem to have melted away, leaving not a rag of themselves or what they dealt in. Cherries are very abundant now, and have been so ever since we came here, in the markets and all about the streets. They are of various kinds, some exceedingly large, insomuch that it is almost necessary to disregard the old proverb about making two bites of a cherry. Fresh figs are already spoken of, though I have seen none; but I saw some peaches this morning, looking as if they might be ripe. June 16th.--Mr. and Mrs. Powers called to see us last evening. Mr. Powers, as usual, was full of talk, and gave utterance to a good many instructive and entertaining ideas. As one instance of the little influence the religion of the Italians has upon their morals, he told a story of one of his servants, who desired leave to set up a small shrine of the Virgin in their room--a cheap print, or bas-relief, or image, such as are sold everywhere at the shops --and to burn a lamp before it; she engaging, of course, to supply the oil at her own expense. By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures to ascertain where the oil came from. It turned out that the servant had all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft. His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait statues in the modern costume. I find that he does not approve either of nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington --by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it. He himself did so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel Webster. I suggested that though this costume might not appear ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create, to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day. It might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never actual, but always graceful and noble. Besides, Webster, for example, had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public. I scarcely think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary. At any rate, I know that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I had seen him in any of the above-mentioned dresses, than either in his swallow-tailed coat or frock. Talking of a taste for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of ability and cultivation. I have had this perception myself. A genuine love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have distinguished men capable of every social crime, and to have formed a fine and hard enamel over their characters. Perhaps it is because such tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, when highly developed, imply a great remove from natural simplicity. This morning I went with U---- to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue. I saw a little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can hardly bear to look at. The cabinet of gems happened to be open for the admission of a privileged party, and we likewise went in and saw a brilliant collection of goldsmiths' work, among which, no doubt, were specimens from such hands as Benvenuto Cellini. Little busts with diamond eyes; boxes of gems; cups carved out of precious material; crystal vases, beautifully chased and engraved, and sparkling with jewels; great pearls, in the midst of rubies; opals, rich with all manner of lovely lights. I remember Benvenuto Cellini, in his memoirs, speaks of manufacturing such playthings as these. I observed another characteristic of the summer streets of Florence to-day; tables, movable to and fro, on wheels, and set out with cool iced drinks and cordials. June 17th.--My wife and I went, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and, on our way thither, went into the Duomo, where we found a deliciously cool twilight, through which shone the mild gleam of the painted windows. I cannot but think it a pity that St. Peter's is not lighted by such windows as these, although I by no means saw the glory in them now that I have spoken of in a record of my former visit. We found out the monument of Giotto, a tablet, and portrait in bas-relief, on the wall, near the entrance of the cathedral, on the right hand; also a representation, in fresco, of a knight on horseback, the memorial of one John Rawkwood, close by the door, to the left. The priests were chanting a service of some kind or other in the choir, terribly inharmonious, and out of tune. . . . . On reaching the Academy, the soldier or policeman at the entrance directed us into the large hall, the walls of which were covered on both sides with pictures, arranged as nearly as possible in a progressive series, with reference to the date of the painters; so that here the origin and procession of the art may be traced through the course of, at least, two hundred years. Giotto, Cimabue, and others of unfamiliar names to me, are among the earliest; and, except as curiosities, I should never desire to look once at them, nor think of looking twice. They seem to have been executed with great care and conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament, anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action, and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings, are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt, for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries. Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads, and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them, apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art. Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce. There is a Crucifixion by him in this gallery, which made me partly feel as if I were a far-off spectator,--no, I did not mean a Crucifixion, but a picture of Christ dead, lying, with a calm, sweet face, on his mother's knees ["a Pieta"]. The most inadequate and utterly absurd picture here, or in any other gallery, is a head of the Eternal Father, by Carlo Dolce; it looks like a feeble saint, on the eve of martyrdom, and very doubtful how he shall be able to bear it; very finely and prettily painted, nevertheless. After getting through the principal gallery we went into a smaller room, in which are contained a great many small specimens of the old Tuscan artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure. These pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold. The wood is much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks quite as much like the Devil. In one of Fra Angelico's pictures,--a representation of the Last Judgment,--he has tried his saintly hand at making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways. Above sits Jesus, with the throng of blessed saints around him, and a flow of tender and powerful love in his own face, that ought to suffice to redeem all the damned, and convert the very fiends, and quench the fires of hell. At any rate, Fra Angelico had a higher conception of his Saviour than Michael Angelo. June 19th.--This forenoon we have been to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which stands on the site of an ancient basilica, and was itself built more than four centuries ago. The facade is still an ugly height of rough brickwork, as is the case with the Duomo, and, I think, some other churches in Florence; the design of giving them an elaborate and beautiful finish having been delayed from cycle to cycle, till at length the day for spending mines of wealth on churches is gone by. The interior had a nave with a flat roof, divided from the side aisles by Corinthian pillars, and, at the farther end, a raised space around the high altar. The pavement is a mosaic of squares of black and white marble, the squares meeting one another cornerwise; the pillars, pilasters, and other architectural material is dark brown or grayish stone; and the general effect is very sombre, especially as the church is somewhat dimly lighted, and as the shrines along the aisles, and the statues, and the monuments of whatever kind, look dingy with time and neglect. The nave is thickly set with wooden seats, brown and worn. What pictures there are, in the shrines and chapels, are dark and faded. On the whole, the edifice has a shabby aspect. On each side of the high altar, elevated on four pillars of beautiful marble, is what looks like a great sarcophagus of bronze. They are, in fact, pulpits, and are ornamented with mediaeval bas-reliefs, representing scenes in the life of our Saviour. Murray says that the resting-place of the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, who so managed his wealth as to get the posthumous title of "father of his country," and to make his posterity its reigning princes,--is in front of the high altar, marked by red and green porphyry and marble, inlaid into the pavement. We looked, but could not see it there. There were worshippers at some of the shrines, and persons sitting here and there along the nave, and in the aisles, rapt in devotional thought, doubtless, and sheltering themselves here from the white sunshine of the piazzas. In the vicinity of the choir and the high altar, workmen were busy repairing the church, or perhaps only making arrangements for celebrating the great festival of St. John. On the left hand of the choir is what is called the old sacristy, with the peculiarities or notabilities of which I am not acquainted. On the right hand is the new sacristy, otherwise called the Capella dei Depositi, or Chapel of the Buried, built by Michael Angelo, to contain two monuments of the Medici family. The interior is of somewhat severe and classic architecture, the walls and pilasters being of dark stone, and surmounted by a dome, beneath which is a row of windows, quite round the building, throwing their light down far beneath, upon niches of white marble. These niches are ranged entirely around the chapel, and might have sufficed to contain more than all the Medici monuments that the world would ever care to have. Only two of these niches are filled, however. In one of them sits Giuliano de' Medici, sculptured by Michael Angelo,--a figure of dignity, which would perhaps be very striking in any other presence than that of the statue which occupies the corresponding niche. At the feet of Giuliano recline two allegorical statues, Day and Night, whose meaning there I do not know, and perhaps Michael Angelo knew as little. As the great sculptor's statues are apt to do, they fling their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom. Below the corresponding niche, on the opposite side of the chapel, recline two similar statues, representing Morning and Evening, sufficiently like Day and Night to be their brother and sister; all, in truth, having sprung from the same father. . . . . But the statue that sits above these two latter allegories, Morning and Evening, is like no other that ever came from a sculptor's hand. It is the one work worthy of Michael Angelo's reputation, and grand enough to vindicate for him all the genius that the world gave him credit for. And yet it seems a simple thing enough to think of or to execute; merely a sitting figure, the face partly overshadowed by a helmet, one hand supporting the chin, the other resting on the thigh. But after looking at it a little while the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble statue; it comes to life, and you see that the princely figure is brooding over some great design, which, when he has arranged in his own mind, the world will be fain to execute for him. No such grandeur and majesty has elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle; the deep repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk. The face, when one gazes earnestly into it, beneath the shadow of its helmet, is seen to be calmly sombre; a mood which, I think, is generally that of the rulers of mankind, except in moments of vivid action. This statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of drapery; for there is nothing nude in this statue but the face and hands. The vest is the costume of Michael Angelo's century. This is what I always thought a sculptor of true genius should be able to do,--to show the man of whatever epoch, nobly and heroically, through the costume which he might actually have worn. The statue sits within a square niche of white marble, and completely fills it. It seems to me a pity that it should be thus confined. At the Crystal Palace, if I remember, the effect is improved by a free surrounding space. Its naturalness is as if it came out of the marble of its own accord, with all its grandeur hanging heavily about it, and sat down there beneath its weight. I cannot describe it. It is like trying to stop the ghost of Hamlet's father, by crossing spears before it. Communicating with the sacristy is the Medicean Chapel, which was built more than two centuries ago, for the reception of the Holy Sepulchre; arrangements having been made about that time to steal this most sacred relic from the Turks. The design failing, the chapel was converted by Cosmo II. into a place of sepulture for the princes of his family. It is a very grand and solemn edifice, octagonal in shape, with a lofty dome, within which is a series of brilliant frescos, painted not more than thirty years ago. These pictures are the only portion of the adornment of the chapel which interferes with the sombre beauty of the general effect; for though the walls are incrusted, from pavement to dome, with marbles of inestimable cost, and it is a Florentine mosaic on a grander scale than was ever executed elsewhere, the result is not gaudy, as in many of the Roman chapels, but a dark and melancholy richness. The architecture strikes me as extremely fine; each alternate side of the octagon being an arch, rising as high as the cornice of the lofty dome, and forming the frame of a vast niche. All the dead princes, no doubt, according to the general design, were to have been honored with statues within this stately mausoleum; but only two--those of Ferdinand I. and Cosmo II.--seem to have been placed here. They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad of it; and as for the statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea, which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears. In the piazza adjoining the church is a statue of the first Cosmo, the old banker, in Roman costume, seated, and looking like a man fit to hold authority. No, I mistake; the statue is of John de' Medici, the father of Cosmo, and himself no banker, but a soldier. June 21st.--Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains. The site of the garden is a very uneven surface, and the paths go upward and downward, and ascend, at their ultimate point, to a base of what appears to be a fortress, commanding the city. A good many of the Florentines were rambling about the gardens, like ourselves: little parties of school-boys; fathers and mothers, with their youthful progeny; young men in couples, looking closely into every female face; lovers, with a maid or two attendant on the young lady. All appeared to enjoy themselves, especially the children, dancing on the esplanades, or rolling down the slopes of the hills; and the loving pairs, whom it was rather embarrassing to come upon unexpectedly, sitting together on the stone seat of an arbor, with clasped hands, a passionate solemnity in the young man's face, and a downcast pleasure in the lady's. Policemen, in cocked hats and epaulets, cross-belts, and swords, were scattered about the grounds, but interfered with nobody, though they seemed to keep an eye on all. A sentinel stood in the hot sunshine, looking down over the garden from the ramparts of the fortress. For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or any other minister of authority; though I remember, in America, I had an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against law. This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as an American must, included within the delegated authority of his own servants. There is a sheet of water somewhere in the Boboli Gardens, inhabited by swans; but this we did not see. We found a smaller pond, however, set in marble, and surrounded by a parapet, and alive with a multitude of fish. There were minnows by the thousand, and a good many gold-fish; and J-----, who had brought some bread to feed the swans, threw in handfuls of crumbs for the benefit of these finny people. They seemed to be accustomed to such courtesies on the part of visitors; and immediately the surface of the water was blackened, at the spot where each crumb fell, with shoals of minnows, thrusting one another even above the surface in their eagerness to snatch it. Within the depths of the pond, the yellowish-green water--its hue being precisely that of the Arno-- would be reddened duskily with the larger bulk of two or three gold-fishes, who finally poked their great snouts up among the minnows, but generally missed the crumb. Beneath the circular margin of the pond, there are little arches, into the shelter of which the fish retire, when the noonday sun burns straight down into their dark waters. We went on through the garden-paths, shadowed quite across by the high walls of box, and reached an esplanade, whence we had a good view of Florence, with the bare brown ridges on the northern side of the Arno, and glimpses of the river itself, flowing like a street, between two rows of palaces. A great way off, too, we saw some of the cloud-like peaks of the Apennines, and, above them, the clouds into which the sun was descending, looking quite as substantial as the distant mountains. The city did not present a particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high, cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a martin-box, on a pole. There were other domes and towers and spires, and here and there the distinct shape of an edifice; but the general picture was of a contiguity of red earthen roofs, filling a not very broad or extensive valley, among dry and ridgy hills, with a river-gleam lightening up the landscape a little. U---- took out her pencil and tablets, and began to sketch the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in doing which, she immediately became an object of curiosity to some little boys and larger people, who failed not, under such pretences as taking a grasshopper off her dress, or no pretence at all, to come and look over her shoulder. There is a kind of familiarity among these Florentines, which is not meant to be discourteous, and ought to be taken in good part. We continued to ramble through the gardens, in quest of a good spot from which to see the sunset, and at length found a stone bench, on the slope of a hill, whence the entire cloud and sun scenery was fully presented to us. At the foot of the hill were statues, and among them a Pegasus, with wings outspread; and, a little beyond, the garden-front of the Pitti Palace, which looks a little less like a state-prison here, than as it fronts the street. Girls and children, and young men and old, were taking their pleasure in our neighborhood; and, just before us, a lady stood talking with her maid. By and by, we discovered her to be Miss Howorth. There was a misty light, streaming down on the hither side of the ridge of hills, that was rather peculiar; but the most remarkable thing was the shape into which the clouds gathered themselves, after the disappearance of the sun. It was like a tree, with a broad and heavy mass of foliage, spreading high upward on the sky, and a dark and well-defined trunk, which rooted itself on the verge of the horizon. This morning we went to the Pitti Palace. The air was very sultry, and the pavements, already heated with the sun, made the space between the buildings seem like a close room. The earth, I think, is too much stoned out of the streets of an Italian city,--paved, like those of Florence, quite across, with broad flagstones, to the line where the stones of the houses on each side are piled up. Thunder rumbled over our heads, however, and the clouds were so dark that we scarcely hoped to reach the palace without feeling the first drops of the shower. The air still darkened and darkened, so that by the time we arrived at the suite of picture-rooms the pictures seemed all to be changed to Rembrandts; the shadows as black as midnight, with only some highly illuminated portions gleaming out. The obscurity of the atmosphere made us sensible how splendid is the adornment of these saloons. For the gilded cornices shone out, as did the gilding of the arches and wreathed circles that divide the ceiling into compartments, within which the frescos are painted, and whence the figures looked dimly down, like gods out of a mysterious sky. The white marble sculptures also gleamed from their height, where winged cupids or cherubs gambolled aloft in bas-reliefs; or allegoric shapes reclined along the cornices, hardly noticed, when the daylight comes brightly into the window. On the walls, all the rich picture-frames glimmered in gold, as did the framework of the chairs, and the heavy gilded pedestals of the marble, alabaster, and mosaic tables. These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished, richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask. It was useless to try to see the pictures. All the artists engaged in copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a prodigious cloud of dust. It hid the opposite side of the street, and was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses, higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself. The thunder muttered and grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off. At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's "Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body. The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own. This Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms, and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. She a penitent! She would shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that clustering hair. . . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing old man. I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them--she who holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart. The third sister looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the second, meanwhile cutting the thread with a pair of shears. Michael Angelo, if I may presume to say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give each a different one, but did not see precisely how, inasmuch as all the fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose. It is a very impressive group. But, as regards the interpretation of this, or of any other profound picture, there are likely to be as many interpretations as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares, through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work. It is so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and, often, opposite things. June 27th.--I have had a heavy cold and fever almost throughout the past week, and have thereby lost the great Florentine festivity, the Feast of St. John, which took place on Thursday last, with the fireworks and illuminations the evening before, and the races and court ceremonies on the day itself. However, unless it were more characteristic and peculiar than the Carnival, I have not missed anything very valuable. Mr. Powers called to see me one evening, and poured out, as usual, a stream of talk, both racy and oracular in its character. Speaking of human eyes, he observed that they did not depend for their expression upon color, nor upon any light of the soul beaming through them, nor any glow of the eyeball, nor upon anything but the form and action of the surrounding muscles. He illustrates it by saying, that if the eye of a wolf, or of whatever fiercest animal, could be placed in another setting, it would be found capable of the utmost gentleness of expression. "You yourself," said he, "have a very bright and sharp look sometimes; but it is not in the eye itself." His own eyes, as I could have sworn, were glowing all the time he spoke; and, remembering how many times I have seemed to see eyes glow, and blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and soften; and how all poetry is illuminated with the light of ladies' eyes; and how many people have been smitten by the lightning of an eye, whether in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all this subtlest and keenest fire is illusive, not even phosphorescent, and that any other jelly in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye. Nevertheless, he must be right; of course he must, and I am rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. Where should the light come from? Has a man a flame inside of his head? Does his spirit manifest itself in the semblance of flame? The moment we think of it, the absurdity becomes evident. I am not quite sure, however, that the outer surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence of this kind. I asked Powers what he thought of Michael Angelo's statue of Lorenzo de' Medici. He allowed that its effect was very grand and mysterious; but added that it owed this to a trick,--the effect being produced by the arrangement of the hood, as he called it, or helmet, which throws the upper part of the face into shadow. The niche in which it sits has, I suppose, its part to perform in throwing a still deeper shadow. It is very possible that Michael Angelo may have calculated upon this effect of sombre shadow, and legitimately, I think; but it really is not worthy of Mr. Powers to say that the whole effect of this mighty statue depends, not on the positive efforts of Michael Angelo's chisel, but on the absence of light in a space of a few inches. He wrought the whole statue in harmony with that small part of it which he leaves to the spectator's imagination, and if he had erred at any point, the miracle would have been a failure; so that, working in marble, he has positively reached a degree of excellence above the capability of marble, sculpturing his highest touches upon air and duskiness. Mr. Powers gave some amusing anecdotes of his early life, when he was a clerk in a store in Cincinnati. There was a museum opposite, the proprietor of which had a peculiar physiognomy that struck Powers, insomuch that he felt impelled to make continual caricatures of it. He used to draw them upon the door of the museum, and became so familiar with the face, that he could draw them in the dark; so that, every morning, here was this absurd profile of himself, greeting the museum-man when he came to open his establishment. Often, too, it would reappear within an hour after it was rubbed out. The man was infinitely annoyed, and made all possible efforts to discover the unknown artist, but in vain; and finally concluded, I suppose, that the likeness broke out upon the door of its own accord, like the nettle-rash. Some years afterwards, the proprietor of the museum engaged Powers himself as an assistant; and one day Powers asked him if he remembered this mysterious profile. "Yes," said he, "did you know who drew them?" Powers took a piece of chalk, and touched off the very profile again, before the man's eyes. "Ah," said he, "if I had known it at the time, I would have broken every bone in your body!" Before he began to work in marble, Powers had greater practice and success in making wax figures, and he produced a work of this kind called "The Infernal Regions," which he seemed to imply had been very famous. He said he once wrought a face in wax which was life itself, having made the eyes on purpose for it, and put in every hair in the eyebrows individually, and finished the whole with similar minuteness; so that, within the distance of a foot or two, it was impossible to tell that the face did not live. I have hardly ever before felt an impulse to write down a man's conversation as I do that of Mr. Powers. The chief reason is, probably, that it is so possible to do it, his ideas being square, solid, and tangible, and therefore readily grasped and retained. He is a very instructive man, and sweeps one's empty and dead notions out of the way with exceeding vigor; but when you have his ultimate thought and perception, you feel inclined to think and see a little further for yourself. He sees too clearly what is within his range to be aware of any region of mystery beyond. Probably, however, this latter remark does him injustice. I like the man, and am always glad to encounter the mill-stream of his talk. . . . . Yesterday he met me in the street (dressed in his linen blouse and slippers, with a little bit of a sculptor's cap on the side of his head), and gave utterance to a theory of colds, and a dissertation on the bad effects of draughts, whether of cold air or hot, and the dangers of transfusing blood from the veins of one living subject to those of another. On the last topic, he remarked that, if a single particle of air found its way into the veins, along with the transfused blood, it caused convulsions and inevitable death; otherwise the process might be of excellent effect. Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls. The situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond, from the balcony of the drawing-room. By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr. Trollope, Mr. Boott and his young daughter, and two or three other gentlemen. . . . . Browning was very genial and full of life, as usual, but his conversation has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch, even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it. He spoke most rapturously of a portrait of Mrs. Browning, which an Italian artist is painting for the wife of an American gentleman, as a present from her husband. The success was already perfect, although there had been only two sittings as yet, and both on the same day; and in this relation, Mr. Browning remarked that P------, the American artist, had had no less than seventy-three sittings of him for a portrait. In the result, every hair and speck of him was represented; yet, as I inferred from what he did not say, this accumulation of minute truths did not, after all, amount to the true whole. I do not remember much else that Browning said, except a playful abuse of a little King Charles spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden's lap-dog, whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his behalf. Browning's nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child. He must be an amiable man. I should like him much, and should make him like me, if opportunities were favorable. I conversed principally with Mr. Trollope, the son, I believe, of the Mrs. Trollope to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we are ever likely to repay. Mr. Trollope is a very sensible and cultivated man, and, I suspect, an author: at least, there is a literary man of repute of this name, though I have never read his works. He has resided in Italy eighteen years. It seems a pity to do this. It needs the native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go back to the realities of my own. We had a pleasant cup of tea, and took a moonlight view of Florence from the balcony. . . . . June 28th.--Yesterday afternoon, J----- and I went to a horse-race, which took place in the Corso and contiguous line of streets, in further celebration of the Feast of St. John. A crowd of people was already collected, all along the line of the proposed race, as early as six o'clock; and there were a great many carriages driving amid the throng, open barouches mostly, in which the beauty and gentility of Florence were freely displayed. It was a repetition of the scene in the Corso at Rome, at Carnival time, without the masks, the fun, and the confetti. The Grand Duke and Duchess and the Court likewise made their appearance in as many as seven or eight coaches-and-six, each with a coachman, three footmen, and a postilion in the royal livery, and attended by a troop of horsemen in scarlet coats and cocked hats. I did not particularly notice the Grand Duke himself; but, in the carriage behind him, there sat only a lady, who favored the people along the street with a constant succession of bows, repeated at such short intervals, and so quickly, as to be little more than nods; therefore not particularly graceful or majestic. Having the good fortune, to be favored with one of these nods, I lifted my hat in response, and may therefore claim a bowing acquaintance with the Grand Duchess. She is a Bourbon of the Naples family, and was a pale, handsome woman, of princely aspect enough. The crowd evinced no enthusiasm, nor the slightest feeling of any kind, in acknowledgment of the presence of their rulers; and, indeed, I think I never saw a crowd so well behaved; that is, with so few salient points, so little ebullition, so absolutely tame, as the Florentine one. After all, and much contrary to my expectations, an American crowd has incomparably more life than any other; and, meeting on any casual occasion, it will talk, laugh, roar, and be diversified with a thousand characteristic incidents and gleams and shadows, that you see nothing of here. The people seems to have no part even in its own gatherings. It comes together merely as a mass of spectators, and must not so much as amuse itself by any activity of mind. The race, which was the attraction that drew us all together, turned out a very pitiful affair. When we had waited till nearly dusk, the street being thronged quite across, insomuch that it seemed impossible that it should be cleared as a race-course, there came suddenly from every throat a quick, sharp exclamation, combining into a general shout. Immediately the crowd pressed back on each side of the street; a moment afterwards, there was a rapid pattering of hoofs over the earth with which the pavement was strewn, and I saw the head and back of a horse rushing past. A few seconds more, and another horse followed; and at another little interval, a third. This was all that we had waited for; all that I saw, or anybody else, except those who stood on the utmost verge of the course, at the risk of being trampled down and killed. Two men were killed in this way on Thursday, and certainly human life was never spent for a poorer object. The spectators at the windows, to be sure, having the horses in sight for a longer time, might get a little more enjoyment out of the affair. By the by, the most picturesque aspect of the scene was the life given to it by the many faces, some of them fair ones, that looked out from window and balcony, all along the curving line of lofty palaces and edifices, between which the race-course lay; and from nearly every window, and over every balcony, was flung a silken texture, or cloth of brilliant line, or piece of tapestry or carpet, or whatever adornment of the kind could be had, so as to dress up the street in gala attire. But, the Feast of St. John, like the Carnival, is but a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death of centuries. It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to keep its holidays alive. I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none that I recognized as such, on this occasion. All the people were respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests were scattered abundantly among the throng. On my way home, I saw the Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a representation this Sunday evening. It shocked my New England prejudices a little. Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great monumental deposit of Florentine worthies. The piazza before it is a wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago, by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own immediate will in execution. The piazza has not much appearance of antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on. The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if with the purpose of doing something. The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and five hundred feet. There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams, lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars. The octagon seems to be a favorite shape in Florence. These pillars were clad in yellow and scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John. The aisles, on each side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the clere-story. It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly through a religious medium. The many-hued saints and angels lose their mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see all the better without their help. The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures are sculptured in bas-relief. In both of the side aisles there are saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record names as illustrious as any in the world. As you enter, the first monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient burial-site of his family. The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above. Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love, the honor which his country owed him. Her own monument is in one of the chapels of the transept. Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think, was constructed not many years after his death. The rest of the monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael Morghen and of Galileo. The tomb of the latter is over against that of Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you enter the church. It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person, nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear of heart. All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long enough, and they turn out to be the very same. All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing, gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt, except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them. They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel, where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now ghastly decorations. While she was gone I threw my eyes about the church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an impressive edifice. Any little Norman church in England would impress me as much, and more. There is something, I do not know what, but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach. Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace. On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now converted into a prison. It is an immense square edifice of dark stone, with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner. Two stone lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by; and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly, and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners' cells. It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten, like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth century. When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise, although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently modernizing everything. But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high, such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new. Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable consecration. It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art. The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga. It was built by the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago, and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind him. It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither to adorn the palace of the Medici. In the most prominent place was a Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old Cosino and his deeds and wisdom. This mansion gives the visitor a stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it in both these particulars. Still, we cannot but be conscious that it must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality, as the hand fills a glove. It has been found spacious enough, since Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been guests in this house. After being the family mansion of the Medici for nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public offices and societies. After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the region above the basement. Here the palace is cut up and portioned off into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks, inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears. We were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli. They were in pretty good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between the two artists. The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct. We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size, with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be perfectly happy. At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could make it out. Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere. On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded. Opposite, across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he. The house is distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices. June 30th.--Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of people and grandees whom it brought together. I took my stand in the vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at than from the street-corners whence I saw it before. The vista of the street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the show. The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads, leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed up and down, until the signal for the race was given. Equipages, too, were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be seen. Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted. Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman, and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before. The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign. This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of. Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio. July 2d.--We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown. . . . . We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen. The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella. There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.] July 4th 1858.--Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned. This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits. After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women. When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy. . . . . Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it. . . . . We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colors in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it. We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, . . . . and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honor paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanized into false life, they do harm instead of good. . . . . The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescos, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague. . . . . At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a grayish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime. It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . . . In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird. July 8th.--On the 6th we went to the Church of the Annunziata, which stands in the piazza of the same name. On the corner of the Via dei Servi is the palace which I suppose to be the one that Browning makes the scene of his poem, "The Statue and the Bust," and the statue of Duke Ferdinand sits stately on horseback, with his face turned towards the window, where the lady ought to appear. Neither she nor the bust, however, was visible, at least not to my eyes. The church occupies one side of the piazza, and in front of it, as likewise on the two adjoining sides of the square, there are pillared arcades, constructed by Brunelleschi or his scholars. After passing through these arches, and still before entering the church itself, you come to an ancient cloister, which is now quite enclosed in glass as a means of preserving some frescos of Andrea del Sarto and others, which are considered valuable. Passing the threshold of the church, we were quite dazzled by the splendor that shone upon us from the ceiling of the nave, the great parallelograms of which, viewed from one end, look as if richly embossed all over with gold. The whole interior, indeed, has an effect of brightness and magnificence, the walls being covered mostly with light-colored marble, into which are inlaid compartments of rarer and richer marbles. The pillars and pilasters, too, are of variegated marbles, with Corinthian capitals, that shine just as brightly as if they were of solid gold, so faithfully have they been gilded and burnished. The pavement is formed of squares of black and white marble. There are no side aisles, but ranges of chapels, with communication from one to another, stand round the whole extent of the nave and choir; all of marble, all decorated with pictures, statues, busts, and mural monuments; all worth, separately, a day's inspection. The high altar is of great beauty and richness, . . . . and also the tomb of John of Bologna in a chapel at the remotest extremity of the church. In this chapel there are some bas-reliefs by him, and also a large crucifix, with a marble Christ upon it. I think there has been no better sculptor since the days of Phidias. . . . . The church was founded by seven gentlemen of Florence, who formed themselves into a religious order called "Servants of Mary." Many miraculous cures were wrought here; and the church, in consequence, was so thickly hung with votive offerings of legs, arms, and other things in wax, that they used to tumble upon people's heads, so that finally they were all cleared out as rubbish. The church is still, I should imagine, looked upon as a place of peculiar sanctity; for while we were there it had an unusual number of kneeling worshippers, and persons were passing from shrine to shrine all round the nave and choir, praying awhile at each, and thus performing a pilgrimage at little cost of time and labor. One old gentleman, I observed, carried a cushion or pad, just big enough for one knee, on which he carefully adjusted his genuflexions before each altar. An old woman in the choir prayed alternately to us and to the saints, with most success, I hope, in her petitions to the latter, though certainly her prayers to ourselves seemed the more fervent of the two. When we had gone entirely round the church, we came at last to the chapel of the Annunziata, which stands on the floor of the nave, on the left hand as we enter. It is a very beautiful piece of architecture,--a sort of canopy of marble, supported upon pillars; and its magnificence within, in marble and silver, and all manner of holy decoration, is quite indescribable. It was built four hundred years ago, by Pietro de' Medici, and has probably been growing richer ever since. The altar is entirely of silver, richly embossed. As many people were kneeling on the steps before it as could find room, and most of them, when they finished their prayers, ascended the steps, kissed over and over again the margin of the silver altar, laid their foreheads upon it, and then deposited an offering in a box placed upon the altar's top. From the dulness of the chink in the only case when I heard it, I judged it to be a small copper coin. In the inner part of this chapel is preserved a miraculous picture of the "Santissima Annunziata," painted by angels, and held in such holy repute that forty thousand dollars have lately been expended in providing a new crown for the sacred personage represented. The picture is now veiled behind a curtain; and as it is a fresco, and is not considered to do much credit to the angelic artists, I was well contented not to see it. We found a side door of the church admitting us into the great cloister, which has a walk of intersecting arches round its four sides, paved with flat tombstones, and broad enough for six people to walk abreast. On the walls, in the semicircles of each successive arch, are frescos representing incidents in the lives of the seven founders of the church, and all the lower part of the wall is incrusted with marble inscriptions to the memory of the dead, and mostly of persons who have died not very long ago. The space enclosed by the cloistered walk, usually made cheerful by green grass, has a pavement of tombstones laid in regular ranges. In the centre is a stone octagonal structure, which at first I supposed to be the tomb of some deceased mediaeval personage; but, on approaching, I found it a well, with its bucket hanging within the curb, and looking as if it were in constant use. The surface of the water lay deep beneath the deepest dust of the dead people, and thence threw up its picture of the sky; but I think it would not be a moderate thirst that would induce me to drink of that well. On leaving the church we bought a little gilt crucifix. . . . . On Sunday evening I paid a short visit to Mr. Powers, and, as usual, was entertained and instructed with his conversation. It did not, indeed, turn upon artistical subjects; but the artistic is only one side of his character, and, I think, not the principal side. He might have achieved valuable success as an engineer and mechanician. He gave a dissertation on flying-machines, evidently from his own experience, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to fly by means of steam or any other motive-power now known to man. No force hitherto attained would suffice to lift the engine which generated it. He appeared to anticipate that flying will be a future mode of locomotion, but not till the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied. Another topic discussed was a cure for complaints of the chest by the inhalation of nitric acid; and he produced his own apparatus for that purpose, being merely a tube inserted into a bottle containing a small quantity of the acid, just enough to produce the gas for inhalation. He told me, too, a remedy for burns accidentally discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet. It prevents all pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air. He evidently has a great tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and self-reliance that such persons require. It is very singular that there should be an ideal vein in a man of this character. This morning he called to see me, with intelligence of the failure of the new attempt to lay the electric cable between England and America; and here, too, it appears the misfortune might have been avoided if a plan of his own for laying the cable had been adopted. He explained his process, and made it seem as practicable as to put up a bell-wire. I do not remember how or why (but appositely) he repeated some verses, from a pretty little ballad about fairies, that had struck his fancy, and he wound up his talk with some acute observations on the characters of General Jackson and other public men. He told an anecdote, illustrating the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary system generally. Powers witnessed the scene himself. He thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to other persons. Men who have known Jackson intimately, and in great affairs, would not agree as to this intellectual and argumentative deficiency, though they would fully allow the intuitive faculty. I have heard General Pierce tell a striking instance of Jackson's power of presenting his own view of a subject with irresistible force to the mind of the auditor. President Buchanan has likewise expressed to me as high admiration of Jackson as I ever heard one man award to another. Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool. Speaking of Jackson, and remembering Raphael's picture of Pope Julius II., the best portrait in the whole world, and excellent in all its repetitions, I wish it had been possible for Raphael to paint General Jackson! Referring again to General Jackson's intuitions, and to Powers's idea that he was unable to render a reason to himself or others for what he chose to do, I should have thought that this very probably might have been the case, were there not such strong evidence to the contrary. The highest, or perhaps any high administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is a revelation of the very thing to be done, and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly that very likely it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism on his own poem. The English overlook this in their scheme of government, which requires that the members of the national executive should be orators, and the readiest and most fluent orators that can be found. The very fact (on which they are selected) that they are men of words makes it improbable that they are likewise men of deeds. And it is only tradition and old custom, founded on an obsolete state of things, that assigns any value to parliamentary oratory. The world has done with it, except as an intellectual pastime. The speeches have no effect till they are converted into newspaper paragraphs; and they had better be composed as such, in the first place, and oratory reserved for churches, courts of law, and public dinner-tables. July 10th.--My wife and I went yesterday forenoon to see the Church of San Marco, with which is connected a convent of Dominicans. . . . . The interior is not less than three or four hundred years old, and is in the classic style, with a flat ceiling, gilded, and a lofty arch, supported by pillars, between the nave and choir. There are no side aisles, but ranges of shrines on both sides of the nave, each beneath its own pair of pillars and pediments. The pavement is of brick, with here and there a marble tombstone inlaid. It is not a magnificent church; but looks dingy with time and apparent neglect, though rendered sufficiently interesting by statues of mediaeval date by John of Bologna and other old sculptors, and by monumental busts and bas-reliefs: also, there is a wooden crucifix by Giotto, with ancient gilding on it; and a painting of Christ, which was considered a wonderful work in its day. Each shrine, or most of them, at any rate, had its dark old picture, and there is a very old and hideous mosaic of the Virgin and two saints, which I looked at very slightly, with the purpose of immediately forgetting it. Savonarola, the reforming monk, was a brother of this convent, and was torn from its shelter, to be subsequently hanged and burnt in the Grand Ducal Piazza. A large chapel in the left transept is of the Salviati family, dedicated to St. Anthony, and decorated with several statues of saints, and with some old frescos. When we had more than sufficiently examined these, the custode proposed to show us some frescos of Fra Angelico, and conducted us into a large cloister, under the arches of which, and beneath a covering of glass, he pointed to a picture of St. Dominic kneeling at the Cross. There are two or three others by the angelic friar in different parts of the cloister, and a regular series, filling up all the arches, by various artists. Its four-sided, cloistered walk surrounds a square, open to the sky as usual, and paved with gray stones that have no inscriptions, but probably are laid over graves. Its walls, however, are incrusted, and the walk itself is paved with monumental inscriptions on marble, none of which, so far as I observed, were of ancient date. Either the fashion of thus commemorating the dead is not ancient in Florence, or the old tombstones have been removed to make room for new ones. I do not know where the monks themselves have their burial-place; perhaps in an inner cloister, which we did not see. All the inscriptions here, I believe, were in memory of persons not connected with the convent. A door in the wall of the cloister admitted us into the chapter-house, its interior moderately spacious, with a roof formed by intersecting arches. Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life. The cross of the Saviour and those of the thieves were painted against a dark red sky; the figures upon them were lean and attenuated, evidently the vague conceptions of a man who had never seen a naked figure. Beneath, was a multitude of people, most of whom were saints who had lived and been martyred long after the Crucifixion; and some of these had wounds from which gilded rays shone forth, as if the inner glory and blessedness of the holy men blazed through them. It is a very ugly picture, and its ugliness is not that of strength and vigor, but of weakness and incompetency. Fra Angelico should have confined himself to miniature heads, in which his delicacy of touch and minute labor often produce an excellent effect. The custode informed us that there were more frescos of this pious artist in the interior of the convent, into which I might be allowed admittance, but not my wife. I declined seeing them, and heartily thanked heaven for my escape. Returning through the church, we stopped to look at a shrine on the right of the entrance, where several wax candles were lighted, and the steps of which were crowded with worshippers. It was evidently a spot of special sanctity, and, approaching the steps, we saw, behind a gilded framework of stars and protected by glass, a wooden image of the Saviour, naked, covered with spots of blood, crowned with thorns, and expressing all the human wretchedness that the carver's skill could represent. The whole shrine, within the glass, was hung with offerings, as well of silver and gold as of tinsel and trumpery, and the body of Christ glistened with gold chains and ornaments, and with watches of silver and gold, some of which appeared to be of very old manufacture, and others might be new. Amid all this glitter the face of pain and grief looked forth, not a whit comforted. While we stood there, a woman, who had been praying, arose from her knees and laid an offering of a single flower upon the shrine. The corresponding arch, on the opposite side of the entrance, contained a wax-work within a large glass case, representing the Nativity. I do not remember how the Blessed Infant looked, but the Virgin was gorgeously dressed in silks, satins, and gauzes, with spangles and ornaments of all kinds, and, I believe, brooches of real diamonds on her bosom. Her attire, judging from its freshness and newness of glitter, might have been put on that very morning. July 13th.--We went for the second time, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and I looked pretty thoroughly at the Pre-Raphaelite pictures, few of which are really worth looking at nowadays. Cimabue and Giotto might certainly be dismissed, henceforth and forever, without any detriment to the cause of good art. There is what seems to me a better picture than either of these has produced, by Bonamico Buffalmacco, an artist of about their date or not long after. The first real picture in the series is the "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile da Fabriano, a really splendid work in all senses, with noble and beautiful figures in it, and a crowd of personages, managed with great skill. Three pictures by Perugino are the only other ones I cared to look at. In one of these, the face of the Virgin who holds the dead Christ on her knees has a deeper expression of woe than can ever have been painted since. After Perugino the pictures cease to be interesting; the art came forward with rapid strides, but the painters and their productions do not take nearly so much hold of the spectator as before. They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue,--in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures. I looked again, and for a good while, at Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art. It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a mouth that has fallen open through very weakness. He holds one hand on his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance in his heavy task of ruling the universe. You might fancy such a being falling on his knees before a strong-willed man, and beseeching him to take the reins of omnipotence out of his hands. No wonder that wrong gets the better of right, and that good and ill are confounded, if the Supreme Head were as here depicted; for I never saw, and nobody else ever saw, so perfect a representation of a person burdened with a task infinitely above his strength. If Carlo Dolce had been wicked enough to know what he was doing, the picture would have been most blasphemous,--a satire, in the very person of the Almighty, against all incompetent rulers, and against the rickety machine and crazy action of the universe. Heaven forgive me for such thoughts as this picture has suggested! It must be added that the great original defect in the character as here represented is an easy good-nature. I wonder what Michael Angelo would have said to this painting. In the large, enclosed court connected with the Academy there are a number of statues, bas-reliefs, and casts, and what was especially interesting, the vague and rude commencement of a statue of St. Matthew by Michael Angelo. The conceptions of this great sculptor were so godlike that he seems to have been discontented at not likewise possessing the godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and half uncovered again. July 16th.--We went yesterday forenoon to see the Bargello. I do not know anything more picturesque in Florence than the great interior court of this ancient Palace of the Podesta, with the lofty height of the edifice looking down into the enclosed space, dark and stern, and the armorial bearings of a long succession of magistrates carved in stone upon the walls, a garland, as it were, of these Gothic devices extending quite round the court. The best feature of the whole is the broad stone staircase, with its heavy balustrade, ascending externally from the court to the iron-grated door in the second story. We passed the sentinels under the lofty archway that communicates with the street, and went up the stairs without being questioned or impeded. At the iron-grated door, however, we were met by two officials in uniform, who courteously informed us that there was nothing to be exhibited in the Bargello except an old chapel containing some frescos by Giotto, and that these could only be seen by making a previous appointment with the custode, he not being constantly on hand. I was not sorry to escape the frescos, though one of them is a portrait of Dante. We next went to the Church of the Badia, which is built in the form of a Greek cross, with a flat roof embossed and once splendid with now tarnished gold. The pavement is of brick, and the walls of dark stone, similar to that of the interior of the cathedral (pietra serena), and there being, according to Florentine custom, but little light, the effect was sombre, though the cool gloomy dusk was refreshing after the hot turmoil and dazzle of the adjacent street. Here we found three or four Gothic tombs, with figures of the deceased persons stretched in marble slumber upon them. There were likewise a picture or two, which it was impossible to see; indeed, I have hardly ever met with a picture in a church that was not utterly wasted and thrown away in the deep shadows of the chapel it was meant to adorn. If there is the remotest chance of its being seen, the sacristan hangs a curtain before it for the sake of his fee for withdrawing it. In the chapel of the Bianco family we saw (if it could be called seeing) what is considered the finest oil-painting of Fra Filippo Lippi. It was evidently hung with reference to a lofty window on the other side of the church, whence sufficient light might fall upon it to show a picture so vividly painted as this is, and as most of Fra Filippo Lippi's are. The window was curtained, however, and the chapel so dusky that I could make out nothing. Several persons came in to say their prayers during the little time that we remained in the church, and as we came out we passed a good woman who sat knitting in the coolness of the vestibule, which was lined with mural tombstones. Probably she spends the day thus, keeping up the little industry of her fingers, slipping into the church to pray whenever a devotional impulse swells into her heart, and asking an alms as often as she sees a person of charitable aspect. From the church we went to the Uffizi gallery, and reinspected the greater part of it pretty faithfully. We had the good fortune, too, again to get admittance into the cabinet of bronzes, where we admired anew the wonderful airiness of John of Bologna's Mercury, which, as I now observed, rests on nothing substantial, but on the breath of a zephyr beneath him. We also saw a bronze bust of one of the Medici by Benvenuto Cellini, and a thousand other things the curiosity of which is overlaid by their multitude. The Roman eagle, which I have recorded to be about the size of a blackbird, I now saw to be as large as a pigeon. On our way towards the door of the gallery, at our departure, we saw the cabinet of gems open, and again feasted our eyes with its concentrated brilliancies and magnificences. Among them were two crystal cups, with engraved devices, and covers of enamelled gold, wrought by Benvenuto Cellini, and wonderfully beautiful. But it is idle to mention one or two things, when all are so beautiful and curious; idle, too, because language is not burnished gold, with here and there a brighter word flashing like a diamond; and therefore no amount of talk will give the slightest idea of one of these elaborate handiworks. July 27th.--I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance [The Marble Faun.--ED.], which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties. Yesterday I spent a good deal of time in watching the setting out of a wedding party from our door; the bride being the daughter of an English lady, the Countess of ------. After all, there was nothing very characteristic. The bridegroom is a young man of English birth, son of the Countess of St. G------, who inhabits the third piano of this Casa del Bello. The very curious part of the spectacle was the swarm of beggars who haunted the street all day; the most wretched mob conceivable, chiefly women, with a few blind people, and some old men and boys. Among these the bridal party distributed their beneficence in the shape of some handfuls of copper, with here and there a half-paul intermixed; whereupon the whole wretched mob flung themselves in a heap upon the pavement, struggling, lighting, tumbling one over another, and then looking up to the windows with petitionary gestures for more and more, and still for more. Doubtless, they had need enough, for they looked thin, sickly, ill-fed, and the women ugly to the last degree. The wedding party had a breakfast above stairs, which lasted till four o'clock, and then the bridegroom took his bride in a barouche and pair, which was already crammed with his own luggage and hers. . . . . He was a well-looking young man enough, in a uniform of French gray with silver epaulets; more agreeable in aspect than his bride, who, I think, will have the upper hand in their domestic life. I observed that, on getting into the barouche, he sat down on her dress, as he could not well help doing, and received a slight reprimand in consequence. After their departure, the wedding guests took their leave; the most noteworthy person being the Pope's Nuncio (the young man being son of the Pope's Chamberlain, and one of the Grand Duke's Noble Guard), an ecclesiastical personage in purple stockings, attended by two priests, all of whom got into a coach, the driver and footmen of which wore gold-laced cocked hats and other splendors. To-day I paid a short visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. I looked long at a Madonna of Raphael's, the one which is usually kept in the Grand Duke's private apartments, only brought into the public gallery for the purpose of being copied. It is the holiest of all Raphael's Madonnas, with a great reserve in the expression, a sense of being apart, and yet with the utmost tenderness and sweetness; although she drops her eyelids before her like a veil, as it were, and has a primness of eternal virginity about the mouth. It is one of Raphael's earlier works, when he mixed more religious sentiment with his paint than afterwards. Perugino's pictures give the impression of greater sincerity and earnestness than Raphael's, though the genius of Raphael often gave him miraculous vision. July 28th.--Last evening we went to the Powers's, and sat with them on the terrace, at the top of the house, till nearly ten o'clock. It was a delightful, calm, summer evening, and we were elevated far above all the adjacent roofs, and had a prospect of the greater part of Florence and its towers, and the surrounding hills, while directly beneath us rose the trees of a garden, and they hardly sent their summits higher than we sat. At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the ancient fashion, without any roof. We could see the upper part of the proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the surrounding houses. As it was, we heard the music and the applause, and now and then an actor's stentorian tones, when we chose to listen. Mrs. P------ and my wife, U---- and Master Bob, sat in a group together, and chatted in one corner of our aerial drawing-room, while Mr. Powers and myself leaned against the parapet, and talked of innumerable things. When the clocks struck the hour, or the bells rang from the steeples, as they are continually doing, I spoke of the sweetness of the Florence bells, the tones of some of them being as if the bell were full of liquid melody, and shed it through the air on being upturned. I had supposed, in my lack of musical ear, that the bells of the Campanile were the sweetest; but Mr. Powers says that there is a defect in their tone, and that the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio is the most melodious he ever heard. Then he spoke of his having been a manufacturer of organs, or, at least, of reeds for organs, at one period of his life. I wonder what he has not been! He told me of an invention of his in the musical line, a jewsharp with two tongues; and by and by he produced it for my inspection. It was carefully kept in a little wooden case, and was very neatly and elaborately constructed, with screws to tighten it, and a silver centre-piece between the two tongues. Evidently a great deal of thought had been bestowed on this little harp; but Mr. Powers told me that it was an utter failure, because the tongues were apt to interfere and jar with one another, although the strain of music was very sweet and melodious-- as he proved, by playing on it a little--when everything went right. It was a youthful production, and he said that its failure had been a great disappointment to him at the time; whereupon I congratulated him that his failures had been in small matters, and his successes in great ones. We talked, furthermore, about instinct and reason, and whether the brute creation have souls, and, if they have none, how justice is to be done them for their sufferings here; and Mr. Powers came finally to the conclusion that brutes suffer only in appearance, and that God enjoys for them all that they seem to enjoy, and that man is the only intelligent and sentient being. We reasoned high about other states of being; and I suggested the possibility that there might be beings inhabiting this earth, contemporaneously with us, and close beside us, but of whose existence and whereabout we could have no perception, nor they of ours, because we are endowed with different sets of senses; for certainly it was in God's power to create beings who should communicate with nature by innumerable other senses than those few which we possess. Mr. Powers gave hospitable reception to this idea, and said that it had occurred to himself; and he has evidently thought much and earnestly about such matters; but is apt to let his idea crystallize into a theory, before he can have sufficient data for it. He is a Swedenborgian in faith. The moon had risen behind the trees, while we were talking, and Powers intimated his idea that beings analogous to men--men in everything except the modifications necessary to adapt them to their physical circumstances--inhabited the planets, and peopled them with beautiful shapes. Each planet, however, must have its own standard of the beautiful, I suppose; and probably his sculptor's eye would not see much to admire in the proportions of an inhabitant of Saturn. The atmosphere of Florence, at least when we ascend a little way into it, suggests planetary speculations. Galileo found it so, and Mr. Powers and I pervaded the whole universe; but finally crept down his garret-stairs, and parted, with a friendly pressure of the hand. VILLA MONTANTO. MONTE BENI. August 2d.--We had grown weary of the heat of Florence within the walls, . . . . there being little opportunity for air and exercise except within the precincts of our little garden, which, also, we feared might breed malaria, or something akin to it. We have therefore taken this suburban villa for the two next months, and, yesterday morning, we all came out hither. J----- had preceded us with B. P------. The villa is on a hill called Bellosguardo, about a mile beyond the Porta Romana. Less than half an hour's walk brought us, who were on foot, to the iron gate of our villa, which we found shut and locked. We shouted to be let in, and while waiting for somebody to appear, there was a good opportunity to contemplate the external aspect of the villa. After we had waited a few minutes, J----- came racing down to the gate, laughing heartily, and said that Bob and he had been in the house, but had come out, shutting the door behind them; and as the door closed with a springlock, they could not get in again. Now as the key of the outer gate as well as that of the house itself was in the pocket of J-----'s coat, left inside, we were shut out of our own castle, and compelled to carry on a siege against it, without much likelihood of taking it, although the garrison was willing to surrender. But B. P------ called in the assistance of the contadini who cultivate the ground, and live in the farm-house close by; and one of them got into a window by means of a ladder, so that the keys were got, the gates opened, and we finally admitted. Before examining any other part of the house, we climbed to the top of the tower, which, indeed, is not very high, in proportion to its massive square. Very probably, its original height was abbreviated, in compliance with the law that lowered so many of the fortified towers of noblemen within the walls of Florence. . . . . The stairs were not of stone, built in with the original mass of the tower, as in English castles, but of now decayed wood, which shook beneath us, and grew more and more crazy as we ascended. It will not be many years before the height of the tower becomes unattainable. . . . . Near at hand, in the vicinity of the city, we saw the convent of Monte Olivetto, and other structures that looked like convents, being built round an enclosed square; also numerous white villas, many of which had towers, like that we were standing upon, square and massive, some of them battlemented on the summit, and others apparently modernized for domestic purposes. Among them U---- pointed out Galileo's tower, whither she made an excursion the other day. It looked lower than our own, but seemed to stand on a higher elevation. We also saw the duke's villa, the Poggio, with a long avenue of cypresses leading from it, as if a funeral were going forth. And having wasted thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that it lacked only water to be a very fine one. It is strange what a difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to life wherever it is visible. The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder (at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a really delightful landscape should. The vine, too, being cultivated in so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility, which is the poetical notion of a vineyard. The olive-orchards have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the Val d' Arno. By and by mamma's carriage came along the dusty road, and passed through the iron gateway, which we had left open for her reception. We shouted down to her and R-----, and they waved their handkerchiefs upward to us; and, on my way down, I met R----- and the servant coming up through the ghostly rooms. The rest of the day we spent mostly in exploring the premises. The house itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us have a suite of rooms individually. I have established myself on the ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks, parrots, vines, and sunflowers below. I know not how many more saloons, anterooms, and sleeping-chambers there are on this same basement story, besides an equal number over them, and a great subterranean establishment. I saw some immense jars there, which I suppose were intended to hold oil; and iron kettles, for what purpose I cannot tell. There is also a chapel in the house, but it is locked up, and we cannot yet with certainty find the door of it, nor even, in this great wilderness of a house, decide absolutely what space the holy precincts occupy. Adjoining U----'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that looks like a bit of red sealing-wax. If I had found him anywhere else I should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him to have some religious signification. In the servants' room a crucifix hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that their occupants were to be heretics. The lower floor of the house is tolerably furnished, and looks cheerful with its frescos, although the bare pavements in every room give an impression of discomfort. But carpets are universally taken up in Italy during summer-time. It must have been an immense family that could have ever filled such a house with life. We go on voyages of discovery, and when in quest of any particular point, are likely enough to fetch up at some other. This morning I had difficulty in finding my way again to the top of the tower. One of the most peculiar rooms is constructed close to the tower, under the roof of the main building, but with no external walls on two sides! It is thus left open to the air, I presume for the sake of coolness. A parapet runs round the exposed sides for the sake of security. Some of the palaces in Florence have such open loggias in their upper stories, and I saw others on our journey hither, after arriving in Tuscany. The grounds immediately around the house are laid out in gravel-walks, and ornamented with shrubbery, and with what ought to be a grassy lawn; but the Italian sun is quite as little favorable to beauty of that kind as our own. I have enjoyed the luxury, however, almost for the first time since I left my hill-top at the Wayside, of flinging myself at full length on the ground without any fear of catching cold. Moist England would punish a man soundly for taking such liberties with her greensward. A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country. The possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction. The rural laborers, so far as I have observed, go about in their shirt-sleeves, and look very much like tanned and sunburnt Yankees. Last night it was really a work of time and toil to go about making our defensive preparations for the night; first closing the iron gate, then the ponderous and complicated fastenings of the house door, then the separate barricadoes of each iron-barred window on the lower floor, with a somewhat slighter arrangement above. There are bolts and shutters, however, for every window in the house, and I suppose it would not be amiss to put them all in use. Our garrison is so small that we must depend more upon the strength of our fortifications than upon our own active efforts in case of an attack. In England, in an insulated country house, we should need all these bolts and bars, and Italy is not thought to be the safer country of the two. It deserves to be recorded that the Count Montanto, a nobleman, and seemingly a man of property, should deem it worth while to let his country seat, and reside during the hot months in his palace in the city, for the consideration of a comparatively small sum a month. He seems to contemplate returning hither for the autumn and winter, when the situation must be very windy and bleak, and the cold death-like in these great halls; and then, it is to be supposed, he will let his palace in town. The Count, through the agency of his son, bargained very stiffly for, and finally obtained, three dollars in addition to the sum which we at first offered him. This indicates that even a little money is still a matter of great moment in Italy. Signor del Bello, who, I believe, is also a nobleman, haggled with us about some cracked crockery at our late residence, and finally demanded and received fifty cents in compensation. But this poor gentleman has been a spendthrift, and now acts as the agent of another. August 3d.--Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with his family. He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for sculpture, which would employ him during next winter. He told me, what I was glad to hear, that his sketches of Italian life, intended for the "Atlantic Monthly," and supposed to be lost, have been recovered. Speaking of the superstitiousness of the Italians, he said that they universally believe in the influence of the evil eye. The evil influence is supposed not to be dependent on the will of the possessor of the evil eye; on the contrary, the persons to whom he wishes well are the very ones to suffer by it. It is oftener found in monks than in any other class of people; and on meeting a monk, and encountering his eye, an Italian usually makes a defensive sign by putting both hands behind him, with the forefingers and little fingers extended, although it is a controverted point whether it be not more efficacious to extend the hand with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person. It is considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day. The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism. The Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets. Pio Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people, is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has been seen in the ruin of all schemes for the public good so soon as they are favored by him. When the pillar in the Piazza de' Spagna, commemorative of his dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was to be erected, the people of Rome refused to be present, or to have anything to do with it, unless the pope promised to abstain from interference. His Holiness did promise, but so far broke his word as to be present one day while it was being erected, and on that day a man was killed. A little while ago there was a Lord Clifford, an English Catholic nobleman, residing in Italy, and, happening to come to Rome, he sent his compliments to Pio Nono, and requested the favor of an interview. The pope, as it happened, was indisposed, or for some reason could not see his lordship, but very kindly sent him his blessing. Those who knew of it shook their heads, and intimated that it would go ill with his lordship now that he had been blessed by Pio Nono, and the very next day poor Lord Clifford was dead! His Holiness had better construe the scriptural injunction literally, and take to blessing his enemies. I walked into town with J------ this morning, and, meeting a monk in the Via Furnace, I thought it no more than reasonable, as the good father fixed his eyes on me, to provide against the worst by putting both hands behind me, with the forefingers and little fingers stuck out. In speaking of the little oratory connected with U----'s chamber, I forgot to mention the most remarkable object in it. It is a skull, the size of life (or death). . . . . This part of the house must be very old, probably coeval with the tower. The ceiling of U----'s apartment is vaulted with intersecting arches; and adjoining it is a very large saloon, likewise with a vaulted and groined ceiling, and having a cushioned divan running all round the walls. The windows of these rooms look out on the Val d' Arno. The apartment above this saloon is of the same size, and hung with engraved portraits, printed on large sheets by the score and hundred together, and enclosed in wooden frames. They comprise the whole series of Roman emperors, the succession of popes, the kings of Europe, the doges of Venice, and the sultans of Turkey. The engravings bear different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at Rome. August 4th.--We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset. In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold its course near the bases of the hills. I now observe that the line of trees which marks its current divides the valley into two pretty equal parts, and the river runs nearly east and west. . . . . At last, when it was growing dark, we went down, groping our way over the shaky staircases, and peeping into each dark chamber as we passed. I gratified J----- exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall. Reaching the bottom, I went into the great saloon, and stood at a window watching the lights twinkle forth, near and far, in the valley, and listening to the convent bells that sounded from Monte Olivetto, and more remotely still. The stars came out, and the constellation of the Dipper hung exactly over the Val d' Arno, pointing to the North Star above the hills on my right. August 12th.--We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden, to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many years in Florence. He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets and emperors. He lives in an old house, formerly a residence of the Knights Templars, hanging over the Arno, just as you come upon the Ponte Vecchio; and, going up a dark staircase and knocking at a door on one side of the landing-place, we were received by Mr. Kirkup. He had had notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant to take him by the hand. He is rather low of stature, with a pale, shrivelled face, and hair and beard perfectly white, and the hair of a particularly soft and silken texture. He has a high, thin nose, of the English aristocratic type; his eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and the eyebrows are arched above them, so that he seems all the time to be seeing something that strikes him with surprise. I judged him to be a little crack-brained, chiefly on the strength of this expression. His whole make is delicate, his hands white and small, and his appearance and manners those of a gentleman, with rather more embroidery of courtesy than belongs to an Englishman. He appeared to be very nervous, tremulous, indeed, to his fingers' ends, without being in any degree disturbed or embarrassed by our presence. Finally, he is very deaf; an infirmity that quite took away my pleasure in the interview, because it is impossible to say anything worth while when one is compelled to raise one's voice above its ordinary level. He ushered us through two or three large rooms, dark, dusty, hung with antique-looking pictures, and lined with bookcases containing, I doubt not, a very curious library. Indeed, he directed my attention to one case, and said that he had collected those works, in former days, merely for the sake of laughing at them. They were books of magic and occult sciences. What he seemed really to value, however, were some manuscript copies of Dante, of which he showed us two: one, a folio on parchment, beautifully written in German text, the letters as clear and accurately cut as printed type; the other a small volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said, to be carried in a capacious mediaeval sleeve. This also was on vellum, and as elegantly executed as the larger one; but the larger had beautiful illuminations, the vermilion and gold of which looked as brilliant now as they did five centuries ago. Both of these books were written early in the fourteenth century. Mr. Kirkup has also a plaster cast of Dante's face, which he believes to be the original one taken from his face after death; and he has likewise his own accurate tracing from Giotto's fresco of Dante in the chapel of the Bargello. This fresco was discovered through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the tracing is particularly valuable, because the original has been almost destroyed by rough usage in drawing out a nail that had been driven into the eye. It represents the profile of a youthful but melancholy face, and has the general outline of Dante's features in other portraits. Dante has held frequent communications with Mr. Kirkup through a medium, the poet being described by the medium as wearing the same dress seen in the youthful portrait, but as hearing more resemblance to the cast taken from his dead face than to the picture from his youthful one. There was a very good picture of Savonarola in one of the rooms, and many other portraits, paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, and others the work of Mr. Kirkup himself. He has the torn fragment of an exquisite drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a portfolio of other curious drawings. And besides books and works of art, he has no end of antique knick-knackeries, none of which we had any time to look at; among others some instruments with which nuns used to torture themselves in their convents by way of penance. But the greatest curiosity of all, and no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old, who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went. She was the brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine. The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr. Kirkup showed us on the wall. I never saw a more beautiful and striking face claiming to be a real one. She was a Florentine, of low birth, and she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium. He showed us a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned. The necromancer set a great value upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his heart, and now considers it absolutely his own. At any rate, it is a happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it. The child inherits her mother's gift of communication with the spiritual world, so that the conjurer can still talk with Regina through the baby which she left, and not only with her, but with Dante, and any other great spirit that may choose to visit him. It is a very strange story, and this child might be put at once into a romance, with all her history and environment; the ancient Knight Templar palace, with the Arno flowing under the iron-barred windows, and the Ponte Vecchio, covered with its jewellers' shops, close at hand; the dark, lofty chambers with faded frescos on the ceilings, black pictures hanging on the walls, old books on the shelves, and hundreds of musty antiquities, emitting an odor of past centuries; the shrivelled, white-bearded old man, thinking all the time of ghosts, and looking into the child's eyes to seek them; and the child herself, springing so freshly out of the soil, so pretty, so intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate save the conjurer and a kitten. It is a Persian kitten, and lay asleep in a window; but when I touched it, it started up at once in as gamesome a mood as the child herself. The child looks pale, and no wonder, seldom or never stirring out of that old palace, or away from the river atmosphere. Miss Blagden advised Mr. Kirkup to go with her to the seaside or into the country, and he did not deny that it might do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's sluggishness and dislike of change. I think he will not live a great while, for he seems very frail. When he dies the little girl will inherit what property he may leave. A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in charge. She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized by a great deal of briskness throughout the interview. He expressed himself delighted to have met one (whose books he had read), and said that the day would be a memorable one to him,--which I did not in the least believe. Mr. Kirkup is an intimate friend of Trelawny, author of "Adventures of a Younger Son," and, long ago, the latter promised him that, if he ever came into possession of the family estate, he would divide it with him. Trelawny did really succeed to the estate, and lost no time in forwarding to his friend the legal documents, entitling him to half of the property. But Mr. Kirkup declined the gift, as he himself was not destitute, and Trelawny had a brother. There were two pictures of Trelawny in the saloons, one a slight sketch on the wall, the other a half-length portrait in a Turkish dress; both handsome, but indicating no very amiable character. It is not easy to forgive Trelawny for uncovering dead Byron's limbs, and telling that terrible story about them,--equally disgraceful to himself, be it truth or a lie. It seems that Regina had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,--the idea that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she has found. Her name is Imogen. The small manuscript copy of Dante which he showed me was written by a Florentine gentleman of the fourteenth century, one of whose ancestors the poet had met and talked with in Paradise. August 19th.--Here is a good Italian incident, which I find in Valery. Andrea del Castagno was a painter in Florence in the fifteenth century; and he had a friend, likewise a painter, Domenico of Venice. The latter had the secret of painting in oils, and yielded to Castagno's entreaties to impart it to him. Desirous of being the sole possessor of this great secret, Castagno waited only the night to assassinate Domenico, who so little suspected his treachery, that he besought those who found him bleeding and dying to take him to his friend Castagno, that he might die in his arms. The murderer lived to be seventy-four years old, and his crime was never suspected till he himself revealed it on his death-bed. Domenico did actually die in Castagno's arms. The death scene would have been a good one for the latter to paint in oils. September 1st.--Few things journalizable have happened during the last month, because Florence and the neighborhood have lost their novelty; and furthermore, I usually spend the whole day at home, having been engaged in planning and sketching out a romance. I have now done with this for the present, and mean to employ the rest of the time we stay here chiefly in revisiting the galleries, and seeing what remains to be seen in Florence. Last Saturday, August 28th, we went to take tea at Miss Blagden's, who has a weekly reception on that evening. We found Mr. Powers there, and by and by Mr. Boott and Mr. Trollope came in. Miss ------ has lately been exercising her faculties as a spiritual writing-medium; and, the conversation turning on that subject, Mr. Powers related some things that he had witnessed through the agency of Mr. Home, who had held a session or two at his house. He described the apparition of two mysterious hands from beneath a table round which the party were seated. These hands purported to belong to the aunt of the Countess Cotterel, who was present, and were a pair of thin, delicate, aged, lady-like hands and arms, appearing at the edge of the table, and terminating at the elbow in a sort of white mist. One of the hands took up a fan and began to use it. The countess then said, "Fan yourself as you used to do, dear aunt"; and forthwith the hands waved the fan back and forth in a peculiar manner, which the countess recognized as the manner of her dead aunt. The spirit was then requested to fan each member of the party; and accordingly, each separate individual round the table was fanned in turn, and felt the breeze sensibly upon his face. Finally, the hands sank beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure that they did not melt into the air. During this apparition, Mr. Home sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr. Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the party had retired. Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time invisible. He told of many of the wonders, which seem to have as much right to be set down as facts as anything else that depends on human testimony. For example, Mr. K------, one of the party, gave a sudden start and exclamation. He had felt on his knee a certain token, which could have been given him only by a friend, long ago in his grave. Mr. Powers inquired what was the last thing that had been given as a present to a deceased child; and suddenly both he and his wife felt a prick as of some sharp instrument, on their knees. The present had been a penknife. I have forgotten other incidents quite as striking as these; but, with the exception of the spirit-hands, they seemed to be akin to those that have been produced by mesmerism, returning the inquirer's thoughts and veiled recollections to himself, as answers to his queries. The hands are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon. Of course, they are not portions of a dead body, nor any other kind of substance; they are impressions on the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot tell. Even admitting their appearance,--and certainly I do admit it as freely and fully as if I had seen them myself,--there is no need of supposing them to come from the world of departed spirits. Powers seems to put entire faith in the verity of spiritual communications, while acknowledging the difficulty of identifying spirits as being what they pretend to be. He is a Swedenborgian, and so far prepared to put faith in many of these phenomena. As for Home, Powers gives a decided opinion that he is a knave, but thinks him so organized, nevertheless, as to be a particularly good medium for spiritual communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest myself in them. They are facts to my understanding, which, it might have been anticipated, would have been the last to acknowledge them; but they seem not to be facts to my intuitions and deeper perceptions. My inner soul does not in the least admit them; there is a mistake somewhere. So idle and empty do I feel these stories to be, that I hesitated long whether or no to give up a few pages of this not very important journal to the record of them. We have had written communications through Miss ------ with several spirits; my wife's father, mother, two brothers, and a sister, who died long ago, in infancy; a certain Mary Hall, who announces herself as the guardian spirit of Miss ------; and, queerest of all, a Mary Runnel, who seems to be a wandering spirit, having relations with nobody, but thrusts her finger into everybody's affairs. My wife's mother is the principal communicant; she expresses strong affection, and rejoices at the opportunity of conversing with her daughter. She often says very pretty things; for instance, in a dissertation upon heavenly music; but there is a lack of substance in her talk, a want of gripe, a delusive show, a sentimental surface, with no bottom beneath it. The same sort of thing has struck me in all the poetry and prose that I have read from spiritual sources. I should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity and warmth. In the communications between my wife and her mother, I cannot help thinking that (Miss ------ being unconsciously in a mesmeric state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's mind. . . . . We have tried the spirits by various test questions, on every one of which they have failed egregiously. Here, however, the aforesaid Mary Runnel comes into play. The other spirits have told us that the veracity of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every mistake or falsehood. They have avowed themselves responsible for all statements signed by themselves, and have thereby brought themselves into more than one inextricable dilemma; but it is very funny, where a response or a matter of fact has not been thus certified, how invariably Mary Runnel is made to assume the discredit of it, on its turning out to be false. It is the most ingenious arrangement that could possibly have been contrived; and somehow or other, the pranks of this lying spirit give a reality to the conversations which the more respectable ghosts quite fail in imparting. The whole matter seems to me a sort of dreaming awake. It resembles a dream, in that the whole material is, from the first, in the dreamer's mind, though concealed at various depths below the surface; the dead appear alive, as they always do in dreams; unexpected combinations occur, as continually in dreams; the mind speaks through the various persons of the drama, and sometimes astonishes itself with its own wit, wisdom, and eloquence, as often in dreams; but, in both cases, the intellectual manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend. There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the pigheadedness both of metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena, so far as to make them the subject of investigation. In writing the communications, Miss ------ holds the pencil rather loosely between her fingers; it moves rapidly, and with equal facility whether she fixes her eyes on the paper or not. The handwriting has far more freedom than her own. At the conclusion of a sentence, the pencil lays itself down. She sometimes has a perception of each word before it is written; at other times, she is quite unconscious what is to come next. Her integrity is absolutely indubitable, and she herself totally disbelieves in the spiritual authenticity of what is communicated through her medium. September 3d.--We walked into Florence yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a gray, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but, not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares. We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which with its contents is now familiar to us, except the room containing drawings; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de' Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of colored crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discolored with age, creased, soiled; but yet you are magnetized by the hand of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design, in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work; whereas the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches. None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favored the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil-marks. There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own. It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed. We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue forever new and immortally young. Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the Church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marble canopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something. . . . . The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigor, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewelry, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi; crockery ware; toys, books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head; not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar. We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit,--where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below,--I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented. Returning homewards, we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long-bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches,--in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummy-like, of the color of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, not a very delightful relic; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries; they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system. . . . . After dinner I climbed the tower. . . . . Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of Or San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare. As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red color, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of maskers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the Deity with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the color of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his lifelikeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure. September 7th.--I walked into town yesterday morning, by way of the Porta San Frediano. The gate of a city might be a good locality for a chapter in a novel, or for a little sketch by itself, whether by painter or writer. The great arch of the gateway, piercing through the depth and height of the massive masonry beneath the battlemented summit; the shadow brooding below, in the immense thickness of the wall and beyond it, the vista of the street, sunny and swarming with life; outside of the gate, a throng of carts, laden with fruits, vegetables, small flat barrels of wine, waiting to be examined by the custom-house officers; carriages too, and foot-passengers entering, and others swarming outward. Under the shadowy arch are the offices of the police and customs, and probably the guard-room of the soldiers, all hollowed out in the mass of the gateway. Civil officers loll on chairs in the shade, perhaps with an awning over their heads. Where the sun falls aslantwise under the arch a sentinel, with musket and bayonet, paces to and fro in the entrance, and other soldiers lounge close by. The life of the city seems to be compressed and made more intense by this barrier; and on passing within it you do not breathe quite so freely, yet are sensible of an enjoyment in the close elbowing throng, the clamor of high voices from side to side of the street, and the million of petty sights, actions, traffics, and personalities, all so squeezed together as to become a great whole. The street by which I entered led me to the Carraja Bridge; crossing which, I kept straight onward till I came to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Doubtless, it looks just the same as when Boccaccio's party stood in a cluster on its broad steps arranging their excursion to the villa. Thence I went to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which I entered by the side door, and found the organ sounding and a religious ceremony going forward. It is a church of sombre aspect, with its gray walls and pillars, but was decked out for some festivity with hangings of scarlet damask and gold. I sat awhile to rest myself, and then pursued my way to the Duomo. I entered, and looked at Sir John Hawkwood's painted effigy, and at several busts and statues, and at the windows of the chapel surrounding the dome, through which the sunshine glowed, white in the outer air, but a hundred-hued splendor within. I tried to bring up the scene of Lorenzo de' Medici's attempted assassination, but with no great success; and after listening a little while to the chanting of the priests and acolytes, I went to the Bank. It is in a palace of which Raphael was the architect, in the Piazza Gran Duca. I next went, as a matter of course, to the Uffizi gallery, and, in the first place, to the Tribune, where the Venus de' Medici deigned to reveal herself rather more satisfactorily than at my last visit. . . . . I looked into all the rooms, bronzes, drawings, and gem-room; a volume might easily be written upon either subject. The contents of the gem-room especially require to be looked at separately in order to convince one's self of their minute magnificences; for, among so many, the eye slips from one to another with only a vague outward sense that here are whole shelves full of little miracles, both of nature's material and man's workmanship. Greater [larger] things can be reasonably well appreciated with a less scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. It is a troublesome process when there are a thousand such objects to be seen. I stood at an open window in the transverse corridor, and looked down upon the Arno, and across at the range of edifices that impend over it on the opposite side. The river, I should judge, may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards wide in its course between the Ponte alle Grazie and the Ponte Vecchio; that is, the width between strand and strand is at least so much. The river, however, leaves a broad margin of mud and gravel on its right bank, on which water-weeds grow pretty abundantly, and creep even into the stream. On my first arrival in Florence I thought the goose-pond green of the water rather agreeable than otherwise; but its hue is now that of unadulterated mud, as yellow as the Tiber itself, yet not impressing me as being enriched with city sewerage like that other famous river. From the Ponte alle Grazie downward, half-way towards the Ponte Vecchio, there is an island of gravel, and the channel on each side is so shallow as to allow the passage of men and horses wading not overleg. I have seen fishermen wading the main channel from side to side, their feet sinking into the dark mud, and thus discoloring the yellow water with a black track visible, step by step, through its shallowness. But still the Arno is a mountain stream, and liable to be tetchy and turbulent like all its kindred, and no doubt it often finds its borders of hewn stone not too far apart for its convenience. Along the right shore, beneath the Uffizi and the adjacent buildings, there is a broad paved way, with a parapet; on the opposite shore the edifices are built directly upon the river's edge, and impend over the water, supported upon arches and machicolations, as I think that peculiar arrangement of buttressing arcades is called. The houses are picturesquely various in height, from two or three stories to seven; picturesque in hue likewise,--pea-green, yellow, white, and of aged discoloration,--but all with green blinds; picturesque also in the courts and galleries that look upon the river, and in the wide arches that open beneath, intended perhaps to afford a haven for the household boat. Nets were suspended before one or two of the houses, as if the inhabitants were in the habit of fishing out of window. As a general effect, the houses, though often palatial in size and height, have a shabby, neglected aspect, and are jumbled too closely together. Behind their range the city swells upward in a hillside, which rises to a great height above, forming, I believe, a part of the Boboli Gardens. I returned homewards over the Ponte Vecchio, which is a continuous street of ancient houses, except over the central arch, so that a stranger might easily cross the river without knowing it. In these small, old houses there is a community of goldsmiths, who set out their glass cases, and hang their windows with rings, bracelets, necklaces, strings of pearl, ornaments of malachite and coral, and especially with Florentine mosaics; watches, too, and snuff-boxes of old fashion or new; offerings for shrines also, such as silver hearts pierced with swords; an infinity of pretty things, the manufacture of which is continually going on in the little back-room of each little shop. This gewgaw business has been established on the Ponte Vecchio for centuries, although, long since, it was an art of far higher pretensions than now. Benvenuto Cellini had his workshop here, probably in one of these selfsame little nooks. It would have been a ticklish affair to be Benvenuto's fellow-workman within such narrow limits. Going out of the Porta Romana, I walked for some distance along the city wall, and then, turning to the left, toiled up the hill of Bellosguardo, through narrow zigzag lanes between high walls of stone or plastered brick, where the sun had the fairest chance to frizzle me. There were scattered villas and houses, here and there concentrating into a little bit of a street, paved with flag-stones from side to side, as in the city, and shadowed quite across its narrowness by the height of the houses. Mostly, however, the way was inhospitably sunny, and shut out by the high wall from every glimpse of a view, except in one spot, where Florence spread itself before my eyes, with every tower, dome, and spire which it contains. A little way farther on my own gray tower rose before me, the most welcome object that I had seen in the course of the day. September 10th.--I went into town again yesterday, by way of the Porta San Frediano, and observed that this gate (like the other gates of Florence, as far as I have observed) is a tall, square structure of stone or brick, or both, rising high above the adjacent wall, and having a range of open loggie in the upper story. The arch externally is about half the height of the structure. Inside, towards the town, it rises nearly to the roof. On each side of the arch there is much room for offices, apartments, storehouses, or whatever else. On the outside of the gate, along the base, are those iron rings and sockets for torches, which are said to be the distinguishing symbol of illustrious houses. As contrasted with the vista of the narrow, swarming street through the arch from without, the view from the inside might be presented with a glimpse of the free blue sky. I strolled a little about Florence, and went into two or three churches; into that of the Annunziata for one. I have already described this church, with its general magnificence, and it was more magnificent than ever to-day, being hung with scarlet silk and gold-embroidery. A great many people were at their devotions, thronging principally around the Virgin's shrine. I was struck now with the many bas-reliefs and busts in the costume of their respective ages, and seemingly with great accuracy of portraiture, in the passage leading from the front of the church into the cloisters. The marble was not at all abashed nor degraded by being made to assume the guise of the mediaeval furred robe, or the close-fitting tunic with elaborate ruff, or the breastplate and gorget, or the flowing wig, or whatever the actual costume might be; and one is sensible of a rectitude and reality in the affair, and respects the dead people for not putting themselves into an eternal masquerade. The dress of the present day will look equally respectable in one or two hundred years. The Fair is still going on, and one of its principal centres is before this church, in the Piazza of the Annunziata. Cloth is the chief commodity offered for sale, and none of the finest; coarse, unbleached linen and cotton prints for country-people's wear, together with yarn, stockings, and here and there an assortment of bright-colored ribbons. Playthings, of a very rude fashion, were also displayed; likewise books in Italian and French; and a great deal of iron-work. Both here and in Rome they have this odd custom of offering rusty iron implements for sale, spread out on the pavements. There was a good deal of tinware, too, glittering in the sunshine, especially around the pedestal of the bronze statue of Duke Ferdinand, who curbs his horse and looks down upon the bustling piazza in a very stately way. . . . . The people attending the fair had mostly a rustic appearance; sunburnt faces, thin frames; no beauty, no bloom, no joyousness of young or old; an anxious aspect, as if life were no easy or holiday matter with them; but I should take them to be of a kindly nature, and reasonably honest. Except the broad-brimmed Tuscan hats of the women, there was no peculiarity of costume. At a careless glance I could very well have mistaken most of the men for Yankees; as for the women, there is very little resemblance between them and ours,--the old being absolutely hideous, and the young ones very seldom pretty. It was a very dull crowd. They do not generate any warmth among themselves by contiguity; they have no pervading sentiment, such as is continually breaking out in rough merriment from an American crowd; they have nothing to do with one another; they are not a crowd, considered as one mass, but a collection of individuals. A despotic government has perhaps destroyed their principle of cohesion, and crumbled them to atoms. Italian crowds are noted for their civility; possibly they deserve credit for native courtesy and gentleness; possibly, on the other hand, the crowd has not spirit and self-consciousness enough to be rampant. I wonder whether they will ever hold another parliament in the Piazza of Santa Croce! I paid a visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. There is too large an intermixture of Andrea del Sarto's pictures in this gallery; everywhere you see them, cold, proper, and uncriticisable, looking so much like first-rate excellence, that you inevitably quarrel with your own taste for not admiring them. . . . . It was one of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, and of a class intermediate between gentility and labor. Is there such a rural class in Italy? I saw a respectable-looking man feeling awkward and uncomfortable in a new and glossy pair of pantaloons not yet bent and creased to his natural movement. Nothing pleased me better to-day than some amber cups, in one of the cabinets of curiosities. They are richly wrought, and the material is as if the artist had compressed a great deal of sunshine together, and when sufficiently solidified had moulded these cups out of it and let them harden. This simile was suggested by ------. Leaving the palace, I entered the Boboli Gardens, and wandered up and down a good deal of its uneven surface, through broad, well-kept edges of box, sprouting loftily, trimmed smoothly, and strewn between with cleanly gravel; skirting along plantations of aged trees, throwing a deep shadow within their precincts; passing many statues, not of the finest art, yet approaching so near it, as to serve just as good a purpose for garden ornament; coming now and then to the borders of a fishpool, or a pond, where stately swans circumnavigated an island of flowers;--all very fine and very wearisome. I have never enjoyed this garden; perhaps because it suggests dress-coats, and such elegant formalities. September 11th.--We have heard a good deal of spirit matters of late, especially of wonderful incidents that attended Mr. Home's visit to Florence, two or three years ago. Mrs. Powers told a very marvellous thing; how that when Mr. Home was holding a seance in her house, and several persons present, a great scratching was heard in a neighboring closet. She addressed the spirit, and requested it not to disturb the company then, as they were busy with other affairs, promising to converse with it on a future occasion. On a subsequent night, accordingly, the scratching was renewed, with the utmost violence; and in reply to Mrs. Powers's questions, the spirit assured her that it was not one, but legion, being the ghosts of twenty-seven monks, who were miserable and without hope! The house now occupied by Powers was formerly a convent, and I suppose these were the spirits of all the wicked monks that had ever inhabited it; at least, I hope that there were not such a number of damnable sinners extant at any one time. These ghostly fathers must have been very improper persons in their lifetime, judging by the indecorousness of their behavior even after death, and in such dreadful circumstances; for they pulled Mrs. Powers's skirts so hard as to break the gathers. . . . . It was not ascertained that they desired to have anything done for their eternal welfare, or that their situation was capable of amendment anyhow; but, being exhorted to refrain from further disturbance, they took their departure, after making the sign of the cross on the breast of each person present. This was very singular in such reprobates, who, by their own confession, had forfeited all claim to be benefited by that holy symbol: it curiously suggests that the forms of religion may still be kept up in purgatory and hell itself. The sign was made in a way that conveyed the sense of something devilish and spiteful; the perpendicular line of the cross being drawn gently enough, but the transverse one sharply and violently, so as to leave a painful impression. Perhaps the monks meant this to express their contempt and hatred for heretics; and how queer, that this antipathy should survive their own damnation! But I cannot help hoping that the case of these poor devils may not be so desperate as they think. They cannot be wholly lost, because their desire for communication with mortals shows that they need sympathy, therefore are not altogether hardened, therefore, with loving treatment, may be restored. A great many other wonders took place within the knowledge and experience of Mrs. P------. She saw, not one pair of hands only, but many. The head of one of her dead children, a little boy, was laid in her lap, not in ghastly fashion, as a head out of the coffin and the grave, but just as the living child might have laid it on his mother's knees. It was invisible, by the by, and she recognized it by the features and the character of the hair, through the sense of touch. Little hands grasped hers. In short, these soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them, and judge the others too cheap to be written down. Christ spoke the truth surely, in saying that men would not believe, "though one rose from the dead." In my own case, the fact makes absolutely no impression. I regret such confirmation of truth as this. Within a mile of our villa stands the Villa Columbaria, a large house, built round a square court. Like Mr. Powers's residence, it was formerly a convent. It is inhabited by Major Gregorie, an old soldier of Waterloo and various other fights, and his family consists of Mrs. ------, the widow of one of the Major's friends, and her two daughters. We have become acquainted with the family, and Mrs. ------, the married daughter, has lent us a written statement of her experiences with a ghost, who has haunted the Villa Columbaria for many years back. He had made Mrs. ------ aware of his presence in her room by a sensation of extreme cold, as if a wintry breeze were blowing over her; also by a rustling of the bed-curtains; and, at such times, she had a certain consciousness, as she says, that she was not ALONE. Through Mr. Home's agency, the ghost was enabled to explain himself, and declared that he was a monk, named Giannane, who died a very long time ago in Mrs. ------'s present bedchamber. He was a murderer, and had been in a restless and miserable state ever since his death, wandering up and down the house, but especially haunting his own death-chamber and a staircase that communicated with the chapel of the villa. All the interviews with this lost spirit were attended with a sensation of severe cold, which was felt by every one present. He made his communications by means of table-rapping, and by the movements of chairs and other articles, which often assumed an angry character. The poor old fellow does not seem to have known exactly what he wanted with Mrs. ------, but promised to refrain from disturbing her any more, on condition that she would pray that he might find some repose. He had previously declined having any masses said for his soul. Rest, rest, rest, appears to be the continual craving of unhappy spirits; they do not venture to ask for positive bliss: perhaps, in their utter weariness, would rather forego the trouble of active enjoyment, but pray only for rest. The cold atmosphere around this monk suggests new ideas as to the climate of Hades. If all the afore-mentioned twenty-seven monks had a similar one, the combined temperature must have been that of a polar winter. Mrs. ------ saw, at one time, the fingers of her monk, long, yellow, and skinny; these fingers grasped the hands of individuals of the party, with a cold, clammy, and horrible touch. After the departure of this ghost other seances were held in her bedchamber, at which good and holy spirits manifested themselves, and behaved in a very comfortable and encouraging way. It was their benevolent purpose, apparently, to purify her apartments from all traces of the evil spirit, and to reconcile her to what had been so long the haunt of this miserable monk, by filling it with happy and sacred associations, in which, as Mrs. ------ intimates, they entirely succeeded. These stories remind me of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. . . . . September 17th.--We walked yesterday to Florence, and visited the church of St. Lorenzo, where we saw, for the second time, the famous Medici statues of Michael Angelo. I found myself not in a very appreciative state, and, being a stone myself, the statue of Lorenzo was at first little more to me than another stone; but it was beginning to assume life, and would have impressed me as it did before if I had gazed long enough. There was a better light upon the face, under the helmet, than at my former visit, although still the features were enough overshadowed to produce that mystery on which, according to Mr. Powers, the effect of the statue depends. I observe that the costume of the figure, instead of being mediaeval, as I believe I have stated, is Roman; but, be it what it may, the grand and simple character of the figure imbues the robes with its individual propriety. I still think it the greatest miracle ever wrought in marble. We crossed the church and entered a cloister on the opposite side, in quest of the Laurentian Library. Ascending a staircase we found an old man blowing the bellows of the organ, which was in full blast in the church; nevertheless he found time to direct us to the library door. We entered a lofty vestibule, of ancient aspect and stately architecture, and thence were admitted into the library itself; a long and wide gallery or hall, lighted by a row of windows on which were painted the arms of the Medici. The ceiling was inlaid with dark wood, in an elaborate pattern, which was exactly repeated in terra-cotta on the pavement beneath our feet. Long desks, much like the old-fashioned ones in schools, were ranged on each side of the mid aisle, in a series from end to end, with seats for the convenience of students; and on these desks were rare manuscripts, carefully preserved under glass; and books, fastened to the desks by iron chains, as the custom of studious antiquity used to be. Along the centre of the hall, between the two ranges of desks, were tables and chairs, at which two or three scholarly persons were seated, diligently consulting volumes in manuscript or old type. It was a very quiet place, imbued with a cloistered sanctity, and remote from all street-cries and rumble of the city,--odorous of old literature,--a spot where the commonest ideas ought not to be expressed in less than Latin. The librarian--or custode he ought rather to be termed, for he was a man not above the fee of a paul--now presented himself, and showed us some of the literary curiosities; a vellum manuscript of the Bible, with a splendid illumination by Ghirlandaio, covering two folio pages, and just as brilliant in its color as if finished yesterday. Other illuminated manuscripts--or at least separate pages of them, for the volumes were kept under glass, and not to be turned over--were shown us, very magnificent, but not to be compared with this of Ghirlandaio. Looking at such treasures I could almost say that we have left behind us more splendor than we have kept alive to our own age. We publish beautiful editions of books, to be sure, and thousands of people enjoy them; but in ancient times the expense that we spread thinly over a thousand volumes was all compressed into one, and it became a great jewel of a book, a heavy folio, worth its weight in gold. Then, what a spiritual charm it gives to a book to feel that every letter has been individually wrought, and the pictures glow for that individual page alone! Certainly the ancient reader had a luxury which the modern one lacks. I was surprised, moreover, to see the clearness and accuracy of the chirography. Print does not surpass it in these respects. The custode showed us an ancient manuscript of the Decameron; likewise, a volume containing the portraits of Petrarch and of Laura, each covering the whole of a vellum page, and very finely done. They are authentic portraits, no doubt, and Laura is depicted as a fair-haired beauty, with a very satisfactory amount of loveliness. We saw some choice old editions of books in a small separate room; but as these were all ranged in shut bookcases, and as each volume, moreover, was in a separate cover or modern binding, this exhibition did us very little good. By the by, there is a conceit struggling blindly in my mind about Petrarch and Laura, suggested by those two lifelike portraits, which have been sleeping cheek to cheek through all these centuries. But I cannot lay hold of it. September 21st.--Yesterday morning the Val d' Arno was entirely filled with a thick fog, which extended even up to our windows, and concealed objects within a very short distance. It began to dissipate itself betimes, however, and was the forerunner of an unusually bright and warm day. We set out after breakfast and walked into town, where we looked at mosaic brooches. These are very pretty little bits of manufacture; but there seems to have been no infusion of fresh fancy into the work, and the specimens present little variety. It is the characteristic commodity of the place; the central mart and manufacturing locality being on the Ponte Vecchio, from end to end of which they are displayed in cases; but there are other mosaic shops scattered about the town. The principal devices are roses,--pink, yellow, or white,--jasmines, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, orange blossoms, and others, single or in sprigs, or twined into wreaths; parrots, too, and other birds of gay plumage,-- often exquisitely done, and sometimes with precious materials, such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and still rarer gems. Bracelets, with several different, yet relative designs, are often very beautiful. We find, at different shops, a great inequality of prices for mosaics that seemed to be of much the same quality. We went to the Uffizi gallery, and found it much thronged with the middle and lower classes of Italians; and the English, too, seemed more numerous than I have lately seen them. Perhaps the tourists have just arrived here, starting at the close of the London season. We were amused with a pair of Englishmen who went through the gallery; one of them criticising the pictures and statues audibly, for the benefit of his companion. The critic I should take to be a country squire, and wholly untravelled; a tall, well-built, rather rough, but gentlemanly man enough; his friend, a small personage, exquisitely neat in dress, and of artificial deportment, every attitude and gesture appearing to have been practised before a glass. Being but a small pattern of a man, physically and intellectually, he had thought it worth while to finish himself off with the elaborateness of a Florentine mosaic; and the result was something like a dancing-master, though without the exuberant embroidery of such persons. Indeed, he was a very quiet little man, and, though so thoroughly made up, there was something particularly green, fresh, and simple in him. Both these Englishmen were elderly, and the smaller one had perfectly white hair, glossy and silken. It did not make him in the least venerable, however, but took his own character of neatness and prettiness. He carried his well-brushed and glossy hat in his hand in such a way as not to ruffle its surface; and I wish I could put into one word or one sentence the pettiness, the minikinfinical effect of this little man; his self-consciousness so lifelong, that, in some sort, he forgot himself even in the midst of it; his propriety, his cleanliness and unruffledness; his prettiness and nicety of manifestation, like a bird hopping daintily about. His companion, as I said, was of a completely different type; a tall, gray-haired man, with the rough English face, a little tinted with port wine; careless, natural manner, betokening a man of position in his own neighborhood; a loud voice, not vulgar, nor outraging the rules of society, but betraying a character incapable of much refinement. He talked continually in his progress through the gallery, and audibly enough for us to catch almost everything he said, at many yards' distance. His remarks and criticisms, addressed to his small friend, were so entertaining, that we strolled behind him for the sake of being benefited by them; and I think he soon became aware of this, and addressed himself to us as well as to his more immediate friend. Nobody but an Englishman, it seems to me, has just this kind of vanity,--a feeling mixed up with scorn and good-nature; self-complacency on his own merits, and as an Englishman; pride at being in foreign parts; contempt for everybody around him; a rough kindliness towards people in general. I liked the man, and should be glad to know him better. As for his criticism, I am sorry to remember only one. It was upon the picture of the Nativity, by Correggio, in the Tribune, where the mother is kneeling before the Child, and adoring it in an awful rapture, because she sees the eternal God in its baby face and figure. The Englishman was highly delighted with this picture, and began to gesticulate, as if dandling a baby, and to make a chirruping sound. It was to him merely a representation of a mother fondling her infant. He then said, "If I could have my choice of the pictures and statues in the Tribune, I would take this picture, and that one yonder" (it was a good enough Enthronement of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto) "and the Dancing Faun, and let the rest go." A delightful man; I love that wholesome coarseness of mind and heart, which no education nor opportunity can polish out of the genuine Englishman; a coarseness without vulgarity. When a Yankee is coarse, he is pretty sure to be vulgar too. The two critics seemed to be considering whether it were practicable to go from the Uffizi to the Pitti gallery; but "it confuses one," remarked the little man, "to see more than one gallery in a day." (I should think so,--the Pitti Palace tumbling into his small receptacle on the top of the Uffizi.) "It does so," responded the big man, with heavy emphasis. September 23d.--The vintage has been going on in our podere for about a week, and I saw a part of the process of making wine, under one of our back windows. It was on a very small scale, the grapes being thrown into a barrel, and crushed with a sort of pestle; and as each estate seems to make its own wine, there are probably no very extensive and elaborate appliances in general use for the manufacture. The cider-making of New England is far more picturesque; the great heap of golden or rosy apples under the trees, and the cider-mill worked by a circumgyratory horse, and all agush with sweet juice. Indeed, nothing connected with the grape-culture and the vintage here has been picturesque, except the large inverted pyramids in which the clusters hang; those great bunches, white or purple, really satisfy my idea both as to aspect and taste. We can buy a large basketful for less than a paul; and they are the only things that one can never devour too much of--and there is no enough short of a little too much without subsequent repentance. It is a shame to turn such delicious juice into such sour wine as they make in Tuscany. I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial,-- the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel. It took me altogether by surprise; for I remembered the nectareousness of the new cider which I used to sip through a straw in my boyhood, and I never doubted that this would be as dulcet, but finer and more ethereal; as much more delectable, in short, as these grapes are better than puckery cider apples. Positively, I never tasted anything so detestable, such a sour and bitter juice, still lukewarm with fermentation; it was a wail of woe, squeezed out of the wine-press of tribulation, and the more a man drinks of such, the sorrier he will be. Besides grapes, we have had figs, and I have now learned to be very fond of them. When they first began to appear, two months ago, they had scarcely any sweetness, and tasted very like a decaying squash: this was an early variety, with purple skins. There are many kinds of figs, the best being green-skinned, growing yellower as they ripen; and the riper they are, the more the sweetness within them intensifies, till they resemble dried figs in everything, except that they retain the fresh fruit-flavor; rich, luscious, yet not palling. We have had pears, too, some of them very tolerable; and peaches, which look magnificently, as regards size and downy blush, but, have seldom much more taste than a cucumber. A succession of fruits has followed us, ever since our arrival in Florence:--first, and for a long time, abundance of cherries; then apricots, which lasted many weeks, till we were weary of them; then plums, pears, and finally figs, peaches, and grapes. Except the figs and grapes, a New England summer and autumn would give us better fruit than any we have found in Italy. Italy beats us I think in mosquitoes; they are horribly pungent little satanic particles. They possess strange intelligence, and exquisite acuteness of sight and smell,--prodigious audacity and courage to match it, insomuch that they venture on the most hazardous attacks, and get safe off. One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and sting me far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are bigger than American mosquitoes; and if you crush them, after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific bloodspot. It is a sort of suicide--at least, a shedding of one's own blood--to kill them; but it gratifies the old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a more disagreeable way. The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects, and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows. September 25th.--U---- and I walked to town yesterday morning, and went to the Uffizi gallery. It is not a pleasant thought that we are so soon to give up this gallery, with little prospect (none, or hardly any, on my part) of ever seeing it again. It interests me and all of us far more than the gallery of the Pitti Palace, wherefore I know not, for the latter is the richer of the two in admirable pictures. Perhaps it is the picturesque variety of the Uffizi--the combination of painting, sculpture, gems, and bronzes--that makes the charm. The Tribune, too, is the richest room in all the world; a heart that draws all hearts to it. The Dutch pictures, moreover, give a homely, human interest to the Uffizi; and I really think that the frequency of Andrea del Santo's productions at the Pitti Palace--looking so very like masterpieces, yet lacking the soul of art and nature--have much to do with the weariness that comes from better acquaintance with the latter gallery. The splendor of the gilded and frescoed saloons is perhaps another bore; but, after all, my memory will often tread there as long as I live. What shall we do in America? Speaking of Dutch pictures, I was much struck yesterday, as frequently before, with a small picture by Teniers the elder. It seems to be a pawnbroker in the midst of his pledges; old earthen jugs, flasks, a brass kettle, old books, and a huge pile of worn-out and broken rubbish, which he is examining. These things are represented with vast fidelity, yet with bold and free touches, unlike the minute, microscopic work of other Dutch masters; and a wonderful picturesqueness is wrought out of these humble materials, and even the figure and head of the pawnbroker have a strange grandeur. We spent no very long time at the Uffizi, and afterwards crossed the Ponte alle Grazie, and went to the convent of San Miniato, which stands on a hill outside of the Porta San Gallo. A paved pathway, along which stand crosses marking stations at which pilgrims are to kneel and pray, goes steeply to the hill-top, where, in the first place, is a smaller church and convent than those of San Miniato. The latter are seen at a short distance to the right, the convent being a large, square battlemented mass, adjoining which is the church, showing a front of aged white marble, streaked with black, and having an old stone tower behind. I have seen no other convent or monastery that so well corresponds with my idea of what such structures were. The sacred precincts are enclosed by a high wall, gray, ancient, and luxuriously ivy-grown, and lofty and strong enough for the rampart of a fortress. We went through the gateway and entered the church, which we found in much disarray, and masons at work upon the pavement. The tribune is elevated considerably above the nave, and accessible by marble staircases; there are great arches and a chapel, with curious monuments in the Gothic style, and ancient carvings and mosaic works, and, in short, a dim, dusty, and venerable interior, well worth studying in detail. . . . . The view of Florence from the church door is very fine, and seems to include every tower, dome, or whatever object emerges out of the general mass. September 28th.--I went to the Pitti Palace yesterday, and to the Uffizi to-day, paying them probably my last visit, yet cherishing an unreasonable doubt whether I may not see them again. At all events, I have seen them enough for the present, even what is best of them; and, at the same time, with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever, I experience an utter weariness of Raphael's old canvas, and of the time-yellowed marble of the Venus de' Medici. When the material embodiment presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture. I threw my farewell glance at the Venus de' Medici to-day with strange insensibility. The nights are wonderfully beautiful now. When the moon was at the full, a few nights ago, its light was an absolute glory, such as I seem only to have dreamed of heretofore, and that only in my younger days. At its rising I have fancied that the orb of the moon has a kind of purple brightness, and that this tinge is communicated to its radiance until it has climbed high aloft and sheds a flood of white over hill and valley. Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still bright; and it makes the Val d' Arno with its surrounding hills, and its soft mist in the distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of heaven. And the morning is quite as beautiful in its own way. This mist, of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of actual sense and makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the valley,--as if the valley itself were dreaming, and met you half-way in your own dream. If the mist were to be withdrawn, I believe the whole beauty of the valley would go with it. Until pretty late in the morning, we have the comet streaming through the sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. It keeps brightening from night to night, and I should think must blaze fiercely enough to cast a shadow by and by. I know not whether it be in the vicinity of Galileo's tower, and in the influence of his spirit, but I have hardly ever watched the stars with such interest as now. September 29th.--Last evening I met Mr. Powers at Miss Blagden's, and he talked about his treatment, by our government in reference, to an appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars made by Congress for a statue by him. Its payment and the purchase of the statue were left at the option of the President, and he conceived himself wronged because the affair was never concluded. . . . . As for the President, he knows nothing of art, and probably acted in the matter by the advice of the director of public works. No doubt a sculptor gets commissions as everybody gets public employment and emolument of whatever kind from our government, not by merit or fitness, but by political influence skilfully applied. As Powers himself observed, the ruins of our Capitol are not likely to afford sculptures equal to those which Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon, if this be the system under which they are produced. . . . . I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a republic; but we have the meanest government and the shabbiest, and--if truly represented by it--we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in history. And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greenough's Washington. There is something false and affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best. There was also at Miss Blagden's, among other company, Mr. ------, an artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home, the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter was in these parts. Mr. ------ says that Home is unquestionably a knave, but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps if he were of a firmer and healthier moral make, if his character were sufficiently sound and dense to be capable of steadfast principle, he would not have possessed the impressibility that fits him for the so-called spiritual influences. Mr. ------ says that Louis Napoleon is literally one of the most skilful jugglers in the world, and that probably the interest he has taken in Mr. Home was caused partly by a wish to acquire his art. This morning Mr. Powers invited me to go with him to the Grand Duke's new foundry, to see the bronze statue of Webster which has just been cast from his model. It is the second cast of the statue, the first having been shipped some months ago on board of a vessel which was lost; and, as Powers observed, the statue now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in the vicinity of the telegraphic cable. We were received with much courtesy and emphasis by the director of the foundry, and conducted into a large room walled with bare, new brick, where the statue was standing in front of the extinct furnace: a majestic Webster indeed, eight feet high, and looking even more colossal than that. The likeness seemed to me perfect, and, like a sensible man, Powers' has dressed him in his natural costume, such as I have seen Webster have on while making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting in Concord,--dress-coat buttoned pretty closely across the breast, pantaloons and boots,--everything finished even to a seam and a stitch. Not an inch of the statue but is Webster; even his coat-tails are imbued with the man, and this true artist has succeeded in showing him through the broadcloth as nature showed him. He has felt that a man's actual clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the grasp of his left, thus symbolizing him as the preserver of the Union. There is an expression of quiet, solid, massive strength in the whole figure; a deep, pervading energy, in which any exaggeration of gesture would lessen and lower the effect. He looks really like a pillar of the state. The face is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither was Webster altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out, even when he fell somewhat short of its promise; and if his eyes had not been in such deep caverns their fire would not have looked so bright. Powers made me observe how the surface of the statue was wrought to a sort of roughness instead of being smoothed, as is the practice of other artists. He said that this had cost him great pains, and certainly it has an excellent effect. The statue is to go to Boston, and I hope will be placed in the open air, for it is too mighty to be kept under any roof that now exists in America. . . . . After seeing this, the director showed us some very curious and exquisite specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such sprays. There were likewise a pair of hands, taken actually from life, clasped together as they were, and they looked like parts of a man who had been changed suddenly from flesh to brass. They were worn and rough and unhandsome hands, and so very real, with all their veins and the pores of the skin, that it was shocking to look at them. A bronze leaf, cast also from the life, was as curious and more beautiful. Taking leave of Powers, I went hither and thither about Florence, seeing for the last time things that I have seen many times before: the market, for instance, blocking up a line of narrow streets with fruit-stalls, and obstreperous dealers crying their peaches, their green lemons, their figs, their delicious grapes, their mushrooms, their pomegranates, their radishes, their lettuces. They use one vegetable here which I have not known so used elsewhere; that is, very young pumpkins or squashes, of the size of apples, and to be cooked by boiling. They are not to my taste, but the people here like unripe things,--unripe fruit, unripe chickens, unripe lamb. This market is the noisiest and swarmiest centre of noisy and swarming Florence, and I always like to pass through it on that account. I went also to Santa Croce, and it seemed to me to present a longer vista and broader space than almost any other church, perhaps because the pillars between the nave and aisles are not so massive as to obstruct the view. I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave it. Then I came homeward, and lost my way, and wandered far off through the white sunshine, and the scanty shade of the vineyard walls, and the olive-trees that here and there branched over them. At last I saw our own gray battlements at a distance, on one side, quite out of the direction in which I was travelling, so was compelled to the grievous mortification of retracing a great many of my weary footsteps. It was a very hot day. This evening I have been on the towertop star-gazing, and looking at the comet, which waves along the sky like an immense feather of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere, caused by the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which sleep and dream above that portion of the valley, as well as the rest of it. I saw dimly, or fancied I saw, the hill of Fiesole on the other side of Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing thence to the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died. From time to time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath to come down into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look heavenward from an old tower-top in such a soft calm evening as this. Yet I am not loath to go away; impatient rather; for, taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life. . . . . I forgot to mention that Powers showed me, in his studio, the model of the statue of America, which he wished the government to buy. It has great merit, and embodies the ideal of youth, freedom, progress, and whatever we consider as distinctive of our country's character and destiny. It is a female figure, vigorous, beautiful, planting its foot lightly on a broken chain, and pointing upward. The face has a high look of intelligence and lofty feeling; the form, nude to the middle, has all the charms of womanhood, and is thus warmed and redeemed out of the cold allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing, however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I criticise, and was sorry to see the huge package in which the finished marble lies bundled up, ready to be sent to our country,--which does not call for it. Mr. Powers and his two daughters called to take leave of us, and at parting I expressed a hope of seeing him in America. He said that it would make him very unhappy to believe that he should never return thither; but it seems to me that he has no such definite purpose of return as would be certain to bring itself to pass. It makes a very unsatisfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments; or, if we do go back, we find that life has shifted whatever of reality it had to the country where we deemed ourselves only living temporarily; and so between two stools we come to the ground, and make ourselves a part of one or the other country only by laying our bones in its soil. It is particularly a pity in Powers's case, because he is so very American in character, and the only convenience for him of his Italian residence is, that here he can supply himself with marble, and with workmen to chisel it according to his designs. SIENA. October 2d.--Yesterday morning, at six o'clock, we left our ancient tower, and threw a parting glance--and a rather sad one--over the misty Val d' Arno. This summer will look like a happy one in our children's retrospect, and also, no doubt, in the years that remain to ourselves; and, in truth, I have found it a peaceful and not uncheerful one. It was not a pleasant morning, and Monte Morello, looking down on Florence, had on its cap, betokening foul weather, according to the proverb. Crossing the suspension-bridge, we reached the Leopoldo railway without entering the city. By some mistake,--or perhaps because nobody ever travels by first-class carriages in Tuscany,--we found we had received second-class tickets, and were put into a long, crowded carriage, full of priests, military men, commercial travellers, and other respectable people, facing one another lengthwise along the carriage, and many of them smoking cigars. They were all perfectly civil, and I think I must own that the manners of this second-class would compare favorably with those of an American first-class one. At Empoli, about an hour after we started, we had to change carriages, the main train proceeding to Leghorn. . . . . My observations along the road were very scanty: a hilly country, with several old towns seated on the most elevated hill-tops, as is common throughout Tuscany, or sometimes a fortress with a town on the plain at its base; or, once or twice, the towers and battlements of a mediaeval castle, commanding the pass below it. Near Florence the country was fertile in the vine and olive, and looked as unpicturesque as that sort of fertility usually makes it; not but what I have come to think better of the tint of the olive-leaf than when I first saw it. In the latter part of our journey I remember a wild stream, of a greenish hue, but transparent, rushing along over a rough bed, and before reaching Siena we rumbled into a long tunnel, and emerged from it near the city. . . . . We drove up hill and down (for the surface of Siena seems to be nothing but an irregularity) through narrow old streets, and were set down at the Aquila Nera, a grim-looking albergo near the centre of the town. Mrs. S------ had already taken rooms for us there, and to these we were now ushered up the highway of a dingy stone staircase, and into a small, brick-paved parlor. The house seemed endlessly old, and all the glimpses that we caught of Siena out of window seemed more ancient still. Almost within arm's reach, across a narrow street, a tall palace of gray, time-worn stone clambered skyward, with arched windows, and square windows, and large windows and small, scattered up and down its side. It is the Palazzo Tolomei, and looks immensely venerable. From the windows of our bedrooms we looked into a broader street, though still not very wide, and into a small piazza, the most conspicuous object in which was a column, hearing on its top a bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. This symbol is repeated in other parts of the city, and scours to indicate that the Sienese people pride themselves in a Roman origin. In another direction, over the tops of the houses, we saw a very high tower, with battlements projecting around its summit, so that it was a fortress in the air; and this I have since found to be the Palazzo Publico. It was pleasant, looking downward into the little old piazza and narrow streets, to see the swarm of life on the pavement, the life of to-day just as new as if it had never been lived before; the citizens, the priests, the soldiers, the mules and asses with their panniers, the diligence lumbering along, with a postilion in a faded crimson coat bobbing up and down on the off-horse. Such a bustling scene, vociferous, too, with various street-cries, is wonderfully set off by the gray antiquity of the town, and makes the town look older than if it were a solitude. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Story came, and accompanied us to look for lodgings. They also drove us about the city in their carriage, and showed us the outside of the Palazzo Publico, and of the cathedral and other remarkable edifices. The aspect of Siena is far more picturesque than that of any other town in Italy, so far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano, and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as climb Alpine heights; old stone balconies on the palace fronts; old arched doorways, and windows set in frames of Gothic architecture; arcades, resembling canopies of stone, with quaintly sculptured statues in the richly wrought Gothic niches of each pillar;--everything massive and lofty, yet minutely interesting when you look at it stone by stone. The Florentines, and the Romans too, have obliterated, as far as they could, all the interest of their mediaeval structures by covering them with stucco, so that they have quite lost their character, and affect the spectator with no reverential idea of age. Here the city is all overwritten with black-letter, and the glad Italian sun makes the effect so much the stronger. We took a lodging, and afterwards J----- and I rambled about, and went into the cathedral for a moment, and strayed also into the Piazza del Campo, the great public square of Siena. I am not in the mood for further description of public places now, so shall say a word or two about the old palace in which we have established ourselves. We have the second piano, and dwell amid faded grandeur, having for our saloon what seems to have been a ball-room. It is ornamented with a great fresco in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, and others covering the sides of the apartment, and surrounded with arabesque frameworks, where Cupids gambol and chase one another. The subjects of the frescos I cannot make out, not that they are faded like Giotto's, for they are as fresh as roses, and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand. Our whole accommodation is in similar style,--spacious, magnificent, and mouldy. In the evening Miss S------ and I drove to the railway, and on the arrival of the train from Florence we watched with much eagerness the unlading of the luggage-van. At last the whole of our ten trunks and tin bandbox were produced, and finally my leather bag, in which was my journal and a manuscript book containing my sketch of a romance. It gladdened my very heart to see it, and I shall think the better of Tuscan promptitude and accuracy for so quickly bringing it back to me. (It was left behind, under one of the rail-carriage seats.) We find all the public officials, whether of railway, police, or custom-house, extremely courteous and pleasant to encounter; they seem willing to take trouble and reluctant to give it, and it is really a gratification to find that such civil people will sometimes oblige you by taking a paul or two aside. October 3d.--I took several strolls about the city yesterday, and find it scarcely extensive enough to get lost in; and if we go far from the centre we soon come to silent streets, with only here and there an individual; and the inhabitants stare from their doors and windows at the stranger, and turn round to look at him after he has passed. The interest of the old town would soon be exhausted for the traveller, but I can conceive that a thoughtful and shy man might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness. I should prefer it to Florence as a residence, but it would be terrible without an independent life in one's own mind. U---- and I walked out in the afternoon, and went into the Piazza del Campo, the principal place of the city, and a very noble and peculiar one. It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has not the mass of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but is more striking. It has a long battlemented front, the central part of which rises eminent above the rest, in a great square bulk, which is likewise crowned with battlements. This is much more picturesque than the one great block of stone into which the Palazzo Vecchio is consolidated. At one extremity of this long front of the Palazzo Publico rises a tower, shooting up its shaft high, high into the air, and bulging out there into a battlemented fortress, within which the tower, slenderer than before, climbs to a still higher region. I do not know whether the summit of the tower is higher or so high as that of the Palazzo Vecchio; but the length of the shaft, free of the edifice, is much greater, and so produces the more elevating effect. The whole front of the Palazzo Publico is exceedingly venerable, with arched windows, Gothic carvings, and all the old-time ornaments that betoken it to have stood a great while, and the gray strength that will hold it up at least as much longer. At one end of the facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch, supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a statue of mediaeval sculpture. The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena. In the morning it was thronged with booths and stalls, especially of fruit and vegetable dealers; but as in Florence, they melted away in the sunshine, gradually withdrawing themselves into the shadow thrown from the Palazzo Publico. On the side opposite the palace is an antique fountain of marble, ornamented with two statues and a series of bas-reliefs; and it was so much admired in its day that its sculptor received the name "Del Fonte." I am loath to leave the piazza and palace without finding some word or two to suggest their antique majesty, in the sunshine and the shadow; and how fit it seemed, notwithstanding their venerableness, that there should be a busy crowd filling up the great, hollow amphitheatre, and crying their fruit and little merchandises, so that all the curved line of stately old edifices helped to reverberate the noise. The life of to-day, within the shell of a time past, is wonderfully fascinating. Another point to which a stranger's footsteps are drawn by a kind of magnetism, so that he will be apt to find himself there as often as he strolls out of his hotel, is the cathedral. It stands in the highest part of the city, and almost every street runs into some other street which meanders hitherward. On our way thither, U---- and I came to a beautiful front of black and white marble, in somewhat the same style as the cathedral; in fact, it was the baptistery, and should have made a part of it, according to the original design, which contemplated a structure of vastly greater extent than this actual one. We entered the baptistery, and found the interior small, but very rich in its clustered columns and intersecting arches, and its frescos, pictures, statues, and ornaments. Moreover, a father and mother had brought their baby to be baptized, and the poor little thing, in its gay swaddling-clothes, looked just like what I have seen in old pictures, and a good deal like an Indian pappoose. It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again. We now went round to the facade of the cathedral. . . . . It is of black and white marble, with, I believe, an intermixture of red and other colors; but time has toned them down, so that white, black, and red do not contrast so strongly with one another as they may have done five hundred years ago. The architecture is generally of the pointed Gothic style, but there are likewise carved arches over the doors and windows, and a variety which does not produce the effect of confusion,--a magnificent eccentricity, an exuberant imagination flowering out in stone. On high, in the great peak of the front, and throwing its colored radiance into the nave within, there is a round window of immense circumference, the painted figures in which we can see dimly from the outside. But what I wish to express, and never can, is the multitudinous richness of the ornamentation of the front: the arches within arches, sculptured inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints, some making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scores of busts, that look like faces of ancient people gazing down out of the cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions,--the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever. But my description seems like knocking off the noses of some of the busts, the fingers and toes of the statues, the projecting points of the architecture, jumbling them all up together, and flinging them down upon the page. This gives no idea of the truth, nor, least of all, can it shadow forth that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars, and sanctifying the entire space of ground over which this cathedral-front flings its shadow, or on which it reflects the sun. A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture. We went in and walked about; but I mean to go again before sketching the interior in my poor water-colors. October 4th.--On looking again at the Palazzo Publico, I see that the pillared portal which I have spoken of does not cover an entrance to the palace, but is a chapel, with an altar, and frescos above it. Bouquets of fresh flowers are on the altar, and a lamp burns, in all the daylight, before the crucifix. The chapel is quite unenclosed, except by an openwork balustrade of marble, on which the carving looks very ancient. Nothing could be more convenient for the devotions of the crowd in the piazza, and no doubt the daily prayers offered at the shrine might be numbered by the thousand,--brief, but I hope earnest,--like those glimpses I used to catch at the blue sky, revealing so much in an instant, while I was toiling at Brook Farm. Another picturesque thing about the Palazzo Publico is a great stone balcony quaintly wrought, about midway in the front and high aloft, with two arched windows opening into it. After another glimpse at the cathedral, too, I realize how utterly I have failed in conveying the idea of its elaborate ornament, its twisted and clustered pillars, and numberless devices of sculpture; nor did I mention the venerable statues that stand all round the summit of the edifice, relieved against the sky,--the highest of all being one of the Saviour, on the topmost peak of the front; nor the tall tower that ascends from one side of the building, and is built of layers of black and white marble piled one upon another in regular succession; nor the dome that swells upward close beside this tower. Had the cathedral been constructed on the plan and dimensions at first contemplated, it would have been incomparably majestic; the finished portion, grand as it is, being only what was intended for a transept. One of the walls of what was to have been the nave is still standing, and looks like a ruin, though, I believe, it has been turned to account as the wall of a palace, the space of the never-completed nave being now a court or street. The whole family of us were kindly taken out yesterday, to dine and spend the day at the Villa Belvedere with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Story. The vicinity of Siena is much more agreeable than that of Florence, being cooler, breezier, with more foliage and shrubbery both near at hand and in the distance; and the prospect, Mr. Story told us, embraces a diameter of about a hundred miles between hills north and south. The Villa Belvedere was built and owned by an Englishman now deceased, who has left it to his butler, and its lawns and shrubbery have something English in their character, and there was almost a dampness in the grass, which really pleased me in this parched Italy. Within the house the walls are hung with fine old-fashioned engravings from the pictures of Gainsborough, West, and other English painters. The Englishman, though he had chosen to live and die in Italy, had evidently brought his native tastes and peculiarities along with him. Mr. Story thinks of buying this villa: I do not know but I might be tempted to buy it myself if Siena were a practicable residence for the entire year; but the winter here, with the bleak mountain-winds of a hundred miles round about blustering against it, must be terribly disagreeable. We spent a very pleasant day, turning over books or talking on the lawn, whence we could behold scenes picturesque afar, and rich vineyard glimpses near at hand. Mr. Story is the most variously accomplished and brilliant person, the fullest of social life and fire, whom I ever met; and without seeming to make an effort, he kept us amused and entertained the whole day long; not wearisomely entertained neither, as we should have been if he had not let his fountain play naturally. Still, though he bubbled and brimmed over with fun, he left the impression on me that . . . . there is a pain and care, bred, it may be, out of the very richness of his gifts and abundance of his outward prosperity. Rich, in the prime of life, . . . . and children budding and blossoming around him as fairly as his heart could wish, with sparkling talents,--so many, that if he choose to neglect or fling away one, or two, or three, he would still have enough left to shine with,--who should be happy if not he? . . . . Towards sunset we all walked out into the podere, pausing a little while to look down into a well that stands on the verge of the lawn. Within the spacious circle of its stone curb was an abundant growth of maidenhair, forming a perfect wreath of thickly clustering leaves quite round, and trailing its tendrils downward to the water which gleamed beneath. It was a very pretty sight. Mr. Story bent over the well and uttered deep, musical tones, which were reverberated from the hollow depths with wonderful effect, as if a spirit dwelt within there, and (unlike the spirits that speak through mediums) sent him back responses even profounder and more melodious than the tones that awakened them. Such a responsive well as this might have been taken for an oracle in old days. We went along paths that led from one vineyard to another, and which might have led us for miles across the country. The grapes had been partly gathered, but still there were many purple or white clusters hanging heavily on the vines. We passed cottage doors, and saw groups of contadini and contadine in their festal attire, and they saluted us graciously; but it was observable that one of the men generally lingered on our track to see that no grapes were stolen, for there were a good many young people and children in our train, not only our own, but some from a neighboring villa. These Italian peasants are a kindly race, but, I doubt, not very hospitable of grape or fig. There was a beautiful sunset, and by the time we reached the house again the comet was already visible amid the unextinguished glow of daylight. A Mr. and Mrs. B------, Scotch people from the next villa, had come to see the Storys, and we sat till tea-time reading, talking, William Story drawing caricatures for his children's amusement and ours, and all of us sometimes getting up to look at the comet, which blazed brighter and brighter till it went down into the mists of the horizon. Among the caricatures was one of a Presidential candidate, evidently a man of very malleable principles, and likely to succeed. Late in the evening (too late for little Rosebud) we drove homeward. The streets of old Siena looked very grim at night, and it seemed like gazing into caverns to glimpse down some of the side streets as we passed, with a light burning dimly at the end of them. It was after ten when we reached home, and climbed up our gloomy staircase, lighted by the glimmer of some wax moccoli which I had in my pocket. October 5th.--I have been two or three times into the cathedral; . . . . the whole interior is of marble, in alternate lines of black and white, each layer being about eight inches in width and extending horizontally. It looks very curiously, and might remind the spectator of a stuff with horizontal stripes. Nevertheless, the effect is exceedingly rich, these alternate lines stretching away along the walls and round the clustered pillars, seen aloft, and through the arches; everywhere, this inlay of black and white. Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches;--it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning. I can find no way of expressing its effect on me, so quaint and venerable as I feel this cathedral to be in its immensity of striped waistcoat, now dingy with five centuries of wear. I ought not to say anything that might detract from the grandeur and sanctity of the blessed edifice, for these attributes are really uninjured by any of the Gothic oddities which I have hinted at. We went this morning to the Institute of the Fine Arts, which is interesting as containing a series of the works of the Sienese painters from a date earlier than that of Cimabue. There is a dispute, I believe, between Florence and Siena as to which city may claim the credit of having originated the modern art of painting. The Florentines put forward Cimabue as the first artist, but as the Sienese produce a picture, by Guido da Siena, dated before the birth of Cimabue, the victory is decidedly with them. As to pictorial merit, to my taste there is none in either of these old painters, nor in any of their successors for a long time afterwards. At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed. There is often, too, a minute care bestowed on the faces in the pictures, and sometimes a very strong expression, stronger than modern artists get, and it is very strange how they attained this merit while they were so inconceivably rude in other respects. It is remarkable that all the early faces of the Madonna are especially stupid, and all of the same type, a sort of face such as one might carve on a pumpkin, representing a heavy, sulky, phlegmatic woman, with a long and low arch of the nose. This same dull face continues to be assigned to the Madonna, even when the countenances of the surrounding saints and angels are characterized with power and beauty, so that I think there must have been some portrait of this sacred personage reckoned authentic, which the early painters followed and religiously repeated. At last we came to a picture by Sodoma, the most illustrious representative of the Sienese school. It was a fresco; Christ bound to the pillar, after having been scourged. I do believe that painting has never done anything better, so far as expression is concerned, than this figure. In all these generations since it was painted it must have softened thousands of hearts, drawn down rivers of tears, been more effectual than a million of sermons. Really, it is a thing to stand and weep at. No other painter has done anything that can deserve to be compared to this. There are some other pictures by Sodoma, among them a Judith, very noble and admirable, and full of a profound sorrow for the deed which she has felt it her mission to do. Aquila Nera, October 7th.--Our lodgings in Siena had been taken only for five days, as they were already engaged after that period; so yesterday we returned to our old quarters at the Black Eagle. In the forenoon J----- and I went out of one of the gates (the road from it leads to Florence) and had a pleasant country walk. Our way wound downward, round the hill on which Siena stands, and gave us views of the Duomo and its campanile, seemingly pretty near, after we had walked long enough to be quite remote from them. Sitting awhile on the parapet of a bridge, I saw a laborer chopping the branches off a poplar-tree which he had felled; and, when it was trimmed, he took up the large trunk on one of his shoulders and carried it off, seemingly with ease. He did not look like a particularly robust man; but I have never seen such an herculean feat attempted by an Englishman or American. It has frequently struck me that the Italians are able to put forth a great deal of strength in such insulated efforts as this; but I have been told that they are less capable of continued endurance and hardship than our own race. I do not know why it should be so, except that I presume their food is less strong than ours. There was no other remarkable incident in our walk, which lay chiefly through gorges of the hills, winding beneath high cliffs of the brown Siena earth, with many pretty scenes of rural landscape; vineyards everywhere, and olive-trees; a mill on its little stream, over which there was an old stone bridge, with a graceful arch; farm-houses; a villa or two; subterranean passages, passing from the roadside through the high banks into the vineyards. At last we turned aside into a road which led us pretty directly to another gate of the city, and climbed steeply upward among tanneries, where the young men went about with their well-shaped legs bare, their trousers being tucked up till they were strictly breeches and nothing else. The campanile stood high above us; and by and by, and very soon, indeed, the steep ascent of the street brought us into the neighborhood of the Piazza del Campo, and of our own hotel. . . . . From about twelve o'clock till one, I sat at my chamber window watching the specimens of human life as displayed in the Piazza Tolomei. [Here follow several pages of moving objects.] . . . . Of course, a multitude of other people passed by, but the curiousness of the catalogue is the prevalence of the martial and religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but have a sufficient breadth of shoulder; in complexion, similar to Americans; bearded, universally. The vehicle used for driving is a little gig without a top; but these are seldom seen, and still less frequently a cab or other carriages. The gait of the people has not the energy of business or decided purpose. Everybody appears to lounge, and to have time for a moment's chat, and a disposition to rest, reason or none. After dinner I walked out of another gate of the city, and wandered among some pleasant country lanes, bordered with hedges, and wearing an English aspect; at least, I could fancy so. The vicinity of Siena is delightful to walk about in; there being a verdant outlook, a wide prospect of purple mountains, though no such level valley as the Val d' Arno; and the city stands so high that its towers and domes are seen more picturesquely from many points than those of Florence can be. Neither is the pedestrian so cruelly shut into narrow lanes, between high stone-walls, over which he cannot get a glimpse of landscape. As I walked by the hedges yesterday I could have fancied that the olive-trunks were those of apple-trees, and that I was in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy. But the great white villas and the farm-houses were unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, or that I should wish to see again, though proper enough to Italy. October 9th.--Thursday forenoon, 8th, we went to see the Palazzo Publico. There are some fine old halls and chapels, adorned with ancient frescos and pictures, of which I remember a picture of the Virgin by Sodoma, very beautiful, and other fine pictures by the same master. The architecture of these old rooms is grand, the roofs being supported by ponderous arches, which are covered with frescos, still magnificent, though faded, darkened, and defaced. We likewise saw an antique casket of wood, enriched with gilding, which had once contained an arm of John the Baptist,--so the custode told us. One of the halls was hung with the portraits of eight popes and nearly forty cardinals, who were natives of Siena. I have done hardly any other sight-seeing except a daily visit to the cathedral, which I admire and love the more the oftener I go thither. Its striped peculiarity ceases entirely to interfere with the grandeur and venerable beauty of its impression; and I am never weary of gazing through the vista of its arches, and noting continually something that I had not seen before in its exuberant adornment. The pavement alone is inexhaustible, being covered all over with figures of life-size or larger, which look like immense engravings of Gothic or Scriptural scenes. There is Absalom hanging by his hair, and Joab slaying him with a spear. There is Samson belaboring the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. There are armed knights in the tumult of battle, all wrought with wonderful expression. The figures are in white marble, inlaid with darker stone, and the shading is effected by means of engraved lines in the marble, filled in with black. It would be possible, perhaps, to print impressions from some of these vast plates, for the process of cutting the lines was an exact anticipation of the modern art of engraving. However, the same thing was done--and I suppose at about the same period--on monumental brasses, and I have seen impressions or rubbings from those for sale in the old English churches. Yesterday morning, in the cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week perhaps. I know not how long she had been confessing when I first observed her, but nearly an hour passed before the priest came suddenly from the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning I watched another woman, and she too was very long about it, and I could see the face of the priest behind the curtain of the confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed straw hat was lying. She seemed to be a country woman, with a simple, matronly face, which was solemnized and softened with the comfort that she had obtained by disburdening herself of the soil of worldly frailties and receiving absolution. An old woman, who haunts the cathedral, whispered to her, and she went and knelt down where a procession of priests were to pass, and then the old lady begged a cruzia of me, and got a half-paul. It almost invariably happens, in church or cathedral, that beggars address their prayers to the heretic visitor, and probably with more unction than to the Virgin or saints. However, I have nothing to say against the sincerity of this people's devotion. They give all the proof of it that a mere spectator can estimate. Last evening we all went out to see the comet, which then reached its climax of lustre. It was like a lofty plume of fire, and grew very brilliant as the night darkened. October 10th.--This morning, too, we went to the cathedral, and sat long listening to the music of the organ and voices, and witnessing rites and ceremonies which are far older than even the ancient edifice where they were exhibited. A good many people were present, sitting, kneeling, or walking about,--a freedom that contrasts very agreeably with the grim formalities of English churches and our own meeting-houses. Many persons were in their best attire; but others came in, with unabashed simplicity, in their old garments of labor, sunburnt women from their toil among the vines and olives. One old peasant I noticed with his withered shanks in breeches and blue yarn stockings. The people of whatever class are wonderfully tolerant of heretics, never manifesting any displeasure or annoyance, though they must see that we are drawn thither by curiosity alone, and merely pry while they pray. I heartily wish the priests were better men, and that human nature, divinely influenced, could be depended upon for a constant supply and succession of good and pure ministers, their religion has so many admirable points. And then it is a sad pity that this noble and beautiful cathedral should be a mere fossil shell, out of which the life has died long ago. But for many a year yet to come the tapers will burn before the high altar, the Host will be elevated, the incense diffuse its fragrance, the confessionals be open to receive the penitents. I saw a father entering with two little bits of boys, just big enough to toddle along, holding his hand on either side. The father dipped his fingers into the marble font of holy water,--which, on its pedestals, was two or three times as high as those small Christians, --and wetted a hand of each, and taught them how to cross themselves. When they come to be men it will be impossible to convince those children that there is no efficacy in holy water, without plucking up all religious faith and sentiment by the roots. Generally, I suspect, when people throw off the faith they were born in, the best soil of their hearts is apt to cling to its roots. Raised several feet above the pavement, against every clustered pillar along the nave of the cathedral, is placed a statue of Gothic sculpture. In various places are sitting statues of popes of Sienese nativity, all of whom, I believe, have a hand raised in the act of blessing. Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, --something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. In the pavement, yesterday, I noticed the gravestone of a person who fell six centuries ago in the battle of Monte Aperto, and was buried here by public decree as a meed of valor. This afternoon I took a walk out of one of the city gates, and found the country about Siena as beautiful in this direction as in all others. I came to a little stream flowing over into a pebbly bed, and collecting itself into pools, with a scanty rivulet between. Its glen was deep, and was crossed by a bridge of several lofty and narrow arches like those of a Roman aqueduct. It is a modern structure, however. Farther on, as I wound round along the base of a hill which fell down upon the road by precipitous cliffs of brown earth, I saw a gray, ruined wall on the summit, surrounded with cypress-trees. This tree is very frequent about Siena, and the scenery is made soft and beautiful by a variety of other trees and shrubbery, without which these hills and gorges would have scarcely a charm. The road was thronged with country people, mostly women and children, who had been spending the feast-day in Siena; and parties of boys were chasing one another through the fields, pretty much as boys do in New England of a Sunday, but the Sienese lads had not the sense of Sabbath-breaking like our boys. Sunday with these people is like any other feast-day, and consecrated cheerful enjoyment. So much religious observance, as regards outward forms, is diffused through the whole week that they have no need to intensify the Sabbath except by making it gladden the other days. Returning through the same gate by which I had come out, I ascended into the city by a long and steep street, which was paved with bricks set edgewise. This pavement is common in many of the streets, which, being too steep for horses and carriages, are meant only to sustain the lighter tread of mules and asses. The more level streets are paved with broad, smooth flag-stones, like those of Florence,--a fashion which I heartily regret to change for the little penitential blocks of Rome. The walls of Siena in their present state, and so far as I have seen them, are chiefly brick; but there are intermingled fragments of ancient stone-work, and I wonder why the latter does not prevail more largely. The Romans, however,--and Siena had Roman characteristics,--always liked to build of brick, a taste that has made their ruins (now that the marble slabs are torn off) much less grand than they ought to have been. I am grateful to the old Sienese for having used stone so largely in their domestic architecture, and thereby rendered their city so grimly picturesque, with its black palaces frowning upon one another from arched windows, across narrow streets, to the height of six stories, like opposite ranks of tall men looking sternly into one another's eyes. October 11th.--Again I went to the cathedral this morning, and spent an hour listening to the music and looking through the orderly intricacies of the arches, where many vistas open away among the columns of the choir. There are five clustered columns on each side of the nave; then under the dome there are two more arches, not in a straight line, but forming the segment of a circle; and beyond the circle of the dome there are four more arches, extending to the extremity of the chancel. I should have said, instead of "clustered columns" as above, that there are five arches along the nave supported by columns. This cathedral has certainly bewitched me, to write about it so much, effecting nothing with my pains. I should judge the width of each arch to be about twenty feet, and the thickness of each clustered pillar is eight; or ten more, and the length of the entire building may be between two and three hundred feet; not very large, certainly, but it makes an impression of grandeur independent of size. . . . . I never shall succeed even in reminding myself of the venerable magnificence of this minster, with its arches, its columns, its cornice of popes' heads, its great wheel windows, its manifold ornament, all combining in one vast effect, though many men have labored individually, and through a long course of time, to produce this multifarious handiwork and headwork. I now took a walk out of the city. A road turned immediately to the left as I emerged from the city, and soon proved to be a rustic lane leading past several villas and farm-houses. It was a very pleasant walk, with vineyards and olive-orchards on each side, and now and then glimpses of the towers and sombre heaped-up palaces of Siena, and now a rural seclusion again; for the hills rise and the valleys fall like the swell and subsidence of the sea after a gale, so that Siena may be quite hidden within a quarter of a mile of its wall, or may be visible, I doubt not, twenty miles away. It is a fine old town, with every promise of health and vigor in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet unquestionably, we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions,--if England, especially, were a democracy,--we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State. October 12th.--And again we went to the cathedral this forenoon, and the whole family, except myself, sketched portions of it. Even Rosebud stood gravely sketching some of the inlaid figures of the pavement. As for me, I can but try to preserve some memorial of this beautiful edifice in ill-fitting words that never hit the mark. This morning visit was not my final one, for I went again after dinner and walked quite round the whole interior. I think I have not yet mentioned the rich carvings of the old oaken seats round the choir, and the curious mosaic of lighter and darker woods, by which figures and landscapes are skilfully represented on the backs of some of the stalls. The process seems to be the same as the inlaying and engraving of the pavement, the material in one case being marble, in the other wood. The only other thing that I particularly noticed was, that in the fonts of holy water at the front entrance, marble fish are sculptured in the depths of the basin, and eels and shellfish crawling round the brim. Have I spoken of the sumptuous carving of the capitals of the columns? At any rate I have left a thousand beauties without a word. Here I drop the subject. As I took my parting glance the cathedral had a gleam of golden sunshine in its far depths, and it seemed to widen and deepen itself, as if to convince me of my error in saying, yesterday, that it is not very large. I wonder how I could say it. After taking leave of the cathedral, I found my way out of another of the city gates, and soon turned aside into a green lane. . . . . Soon the lane passed through a hamlet consisting of a few farm-houses, the shabbiest and dreariest that can be conceived, ancient, and ugly, and dilapidated, with iron-grated windows below, and heavy wooden shutters on the windows above,--high, ruinous walls shutting in the courts, and ponderous gates, one of which was off its hinges. The farm-yards were perfect pictures of disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story. All these houses were specimens of a rude antiquity, built of brick and stone, with the marks of arched doors and windows where a subsequent generation had shut up the lights, or the accesses which the original builders had opened. Humble as these dwellings are,--though large and high compared with rural residences in other countries,--they may very probably date back to the times when Siena was a warlike republic, and when every house in its neighborhood had need to be a fortress. I suppose, however, prowling banditti were the only enemies against whom a defence would be attempted. What lives must now be lived there,--in beastly ignorance, mental sluggishness, hard toil for little profit, filth, and a horrible discomfort of fleas; for if the palaces of Italy are overrun with these pests, what must the country hovels be! . . . . We are now all ready for a start to-morrow. RADICOFANI. October 13th.--We arranged to begin our journey at six. . . . . It was a chill, lowering morning, and the rain blew a little in our faces before we had gone far, but did not continue long. The country soon lost the pleasant aspect which it wears immediately about Siena, and grew very barren and dreary. Then it changed again for the better, the road leading us through a fertility of vines and olives, after which the dreary and barren hills came back again, and formed our prospect throughout most of the day. We stopped for our dejeuner a la fourchette at a little old town called San Quirico, which we entered through a ruined gateway, the town being entirely surrounded by its ancient wall. This wall is far more picturesque than that of Siena, being lofty and built of stone, with a machicolation of arches running quite round its top, like a cornice. It has little more than a single street, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, narrow, paved with flag-stones in the Florentine fashion, and lined with two rows of tall, rusty stone houses, without a gap between them from end to end. The cafes were numerous in relation to the size of the town, and there were two taverns,--our own, the Eagle, being doubtless the best, and having three arched entrances in its front. Of these, the middle one led to the guests' apartments, the one on the right to the barn, and that on the left to the stable, so that, as is usual in Italian inns, the whole establishment was under one roof. We were shown into a brick-paved room on the first floor, adorned with a funny fresco of Aurora on the ceiling, and with some colored prints, both religious and profane. . . . . As we drove into the town we noticed a Gothic church with two doors of peculiar architecture, and while our dejeuner was being prepared we went to see it. The interior had little that was remarkable, for it had been repaired early in the last century, and spoilt of course; but an old triptych is still hanging in a chapel beside the high altar. It is painted on wood, and dates back beyond the invention of oil-painting, and represents the Virgin and some saints and angels. Neither is the exterior of the church particularly interesting, with the exception of the carving and ornaments of two of the doors. Both of them have round arches, deep and curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ancient, and the material a red freestone. After lunch, J----- and I took a walk out of the gate of the town opposite to that of our entrance. There were no soldiers on guard, as at city gates of more importance; nor do I think that there is really any gate to shut, but the massive stone gateway still stands entire over the empty arch. Looking back after we had passed through, I observed that the lofty upper story is converted into a dove-cot, and that pumpkins were put to ripen in some open chambers at one side. We passed near the base of a tall, square tower, which is said to be of Roman origin. The little town is in the midst of a barren region, but its immediate neighborhood is fertile, and an olive-orchard, venerable of aspect, lay on the other side of the pleasant lane with its English hedges, and olive-trees grew likewise along the base of the city wall. The arched machicolations, which I have before mentioned, were here and there interrupted by a house which was built upon the old wall or incorporated into it; and from the windows of one of then I saw ears of Indian corn hung out to ripen in the sun, and somebody was winnowing grain at a little door that opened through the wall. It was very pleasant to see the ancient warlike rampart thus overcome with rustic peace. The ruined gateway is partly overgrown with ivy. Returning to our inn, along the street, we saw ------ sketching one of the doors of the Gothic church, in the midst of a crowd of the good people of San Quirico, who made no scruple to look over her shoulder, pressing so closely as hardly to allow her elbow-room. I must own that I was too cowardly to come forward and take my share of this public notice, so I turned away to the inn and there awaited her coming. Indeed, she has seldom attempted to sketch without finding herself the nucleus of a throng. VITERBO. The Black Eagle, October 14th.--Perhaps I had something more to say of San Quirico, but I shall merely add that there is a stately old palace of the Piccolomini close to the church above described. It is built in the style of the Roman palaces, and looked almost large enough to be one of them. Nevertheless, the basement story, or part of it, seems to be used as a barn and stable, for I saw a yoke of oxen in the entrance. I cannot but mention a most wretched team of vettura-horses which stopped at the door of our albergo: poor, lean, downcast creatures, with deep furrows between their ribs; nothing but skin and bone, in short, and not even so much skin as they should have had, for it was partially worn off from their backs. The harness was fastened with ropes, the traces and reins were ropes; the carriage was old and shabby, and out of this miserable equipage there alighted an ancient gentleman and lady, whom our waiter affirmed to be the Prefect of Florence and his wife. We left San Quirico at two o'clock, and followed an ascending road till we got into the region above the clouds; the landscape was very wide, but very dreary and barren, and grew more and more so till we began to climb the mountain of Radicofani, the peak of which had been blackening itself on the horizon almost the whole day. When we had come into a pretty high region we were assailed by a real mountain tempest of wind, rain, and hail, which pelted down upon us in good earnest, and cooled the air a little below comfort. As we toiled up the mountain its upper region presented a very striking aspect, looking as if a precipice had been smoothed and squared for the purpose of rendering the old castle on its summit more inaccessible than it was by nature. This is the castle of the robber-knight, Ghino di Tacco, whom Boccaccio introduces into the Decameron. A freebooter of those days must have set a higher value on such a rock as this than if it had been one mass of diamond, for no art of mediaeval warfare could endanger him in such a fortress. Drawing yet nearer, we found the hillside immediately above us strewn with thousands upon thousands of great fragments of stone. It looked as if some great ruin had taken place there, only it was too vast a ruin to have been the dismemberment and dissolution of anything made by man. We could now see the castle on the height pretty distinctly. It seemed to impend over the precipice; and close to the base of the latter we saw the street of a town on as strange and inconvenient a foundation as ever one was built upon. I suppose the inhabitants of the village were dependants of the old knight of the castle; his brotherhood of robbers, as they married and had families, settled there under the shelter of the eagle's nest. But the singularity is, how a community of people have contrived to live and perpetuate themselves so far out of the reach of the world's help, and seemingly with no means of assisting in the world's labor. I cannot imagine how they employ themselves except in begging, and even that branch of industry appears to be left to the old women and the children. No house was ever built in this immediate neighborhood for any such natural purpose as induces people to build them on other sites. Even our hotel, at which we now arrived, could not be said to be a natural growth of the soil; it had originally been a whim of one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany,--a hunting-palace,--intended for habitation only during a few weeks of the year. Of all dreary hotels I ever alighted at, methinks this is the most so; but on first arriving I merely followed the waiter to look at our rooms, across stone-paved basement-halls dismal as Etruscan tombs; up dim staircases, and along shivering corridors, all of stone, stone, stone, nothing but cold stone. After glancing at these pleasant accommodations, my wife and I, with J-----, set out to ascend the hill and visit the town of Radicofani. It is not more than a quarter of a mile above our hotel, and is accessible by a good piece of road, though very steep. As we approached the town, we were assailed by some little beggars; but this is the case all through Italy, in city or solitude, and I think the mendicants of Radicofani are fewer than its proportion. We had not got far towards the village, when, looking back over the scene of many miles that lay stretched beneath us, we saw a heavy shower apparently travelling straight towards us over hill and dale. It seemed inevitable that it should soon be upon us, so I persuaded my wife to return to the hotel; but J----- and I kept onward, being determined to see Radicofani with or without a drenching. We soon entered the street; the blackest, ugliest, rudest old street, I do believe, that ever human life incrusted itself with. The first portion of it is the overbrimming of the town in generations subsequent to that in which it was surrounded by a wall; but after going a little way we came to a high, square tower planted right across the way, with an arched gateway in its basement story, so that it looked like a great short-legged giant striding over the street of Radicofani. Within the gateway is the proper and original town, though indeed the portion outside of the gate is as densely populated, as ugly, and as ancient, as that within. The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city's street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably gossips with everybody, being everybody's blood relation, as they cannot fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up together within the narrow walls for many hundred years. They looked round briskly at J----- and me, but were courteous, as Italians always are, and made way for us to pass through the throng, as we kept on still ascending the steep street. It took us but a few minutes to reach the still steeper and winding pathway which climbs towards the old castle. After ascending above the village, the path, though still paved, becomes very rough, as if the hoofs of Ghino di Tacco's robber cavalry had displaced the stones and they had never been readjusted. On every side, too, except where the path just finds space enough, there is an enormous rubbish of huge stones, which seems to have fallen from the precipice above, or else to have rained down out of the sky. We kept on, and by and by reached what seemed to have been a lower outwork of the castle on the top; there was the massive old arch of a gateway, and a great deal of ruin of man's work, beside the large stones that here, as elsewhere, were scattered so abundantly. Within the wall and gateway just mentioned, however, there was a kind of farm-house, adapted, I suppose, out of the old ruin, and I noticed some ears of Indian corn hanging out of a window. There were also a few stacks of hay, but no signs of human or animal life; and it is utterly inexplicable to me, where these products of the soil could have come from, for certainly they never grew amid that barrenness. We had not yet reached Ghino's castle, and, being now beneath it, we had to bend our heads far backward to see it rising up against the clear sky while we were now in twilight. The path upward looked terribly steep and rough, and if we had climbed it we should probably have broken our necks in descending again into the lower obscurity. We therefore stopped here, much against J-----'s will, and went back as we came, still wondering at the strange situation of Radicofani; for its aspect is as if it had stepped off the top of the cliff and lodged at its base, though still in danger of sliding farther down the hillside. Emerging from the compact, grimy life of its street, we saw that the shower had swept by, or probably had expended itself in a region beneath us, for we were above the scope of many of the showery clouds that haunt a hill-country. There was a very bright star visible, I remember, and we saw the new moon, now a third towards the full, for the first time this evening. The air was cold and bracing. But I am excessively sleepy, so will not describe our great dreary hotel, where a blast howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how sleepy I am. SETTE VENE. October 15th.--We left Radicofani long before sunrise, and I saw that ceremony take place from the coupe of the vettura for the first time in a long while. A sunset is the better sight of the two. I have always suspected it, and have been strengthened in the idea whenever I have had an opportunity of comparison. Our departure from Radicofani was most dreary, except that we were very glad to get away; but, the cold discomfort of dressing in a chill bedroom by candlelight, and our uncertain wandering through the immense hotel with a dim taper in search of the breakfast-room, and our poor breakfast of eggs, Italian bread, and coffee,--all these things made me wish that people were created with roots like trees, so they could not befool themselves with wandering about. However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew. At Ponte Centino my passport was examined, and I was invited into an office where sat the papal custom-house officer, a thin, subtle-looking, keen-eyed, sallow personage, of aspect very suitable to be the agent of a government of priests. I communicated to him my wish to pass the custom-house without giving the officers the trouble of examining my luggage. He inquired whether I had any dutiable articles, and wrote for my signature a declaration in the negative; and then he lifted a sand-box, beneath which was a little heap of silver coins. On this delicate hint I asked what was the usual fee, and was told that fifteen pauls was the proper sum. I presume it was entirely an illegal charge, and that he had no right to pass any luggage without examination; but the thing is winked at by the authorities, and no money is better spent for the traveller's convenience than these fifteen pauls. There was a papal military officer in the room, and he, I believe, cheated me in the change of a Napoleon, as his share of the spoil. At the door a soldier met me with my passport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house--a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place--appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented. This whole set of men seem to be as corrupt as official people can possibly be; and yet I hardly know whether to stigmatize them as corrupt, because it is not their individual delinquency, but the operation of a regular system. Their superiors know what men they are, and calculate upon their getting a living by just these means. And, indeed, the custom-house and passport regulations, as they exist in Italy, would be intolerable if there were not this facility of evading them at little cost. Such laws are good for nothing but to be broken. We now began to ascend again, and the country grew fertile and picturesque. We passed many mules and donkeys, laden with a sort of deep firkin on each side of the saddle, and these were heaped up with grapes, both purple and white. We bought some, and got what we should have thought an abundance at small price, only we used to get twice as many at Montanto for the same money. However, a Roman paul bought us three or four pounds even here. We still ascended, and came soon to the gateway of the town of Acquapendente, which stands on a height that seems to descend by natural terraces to the valley below. . . . . French soldiers, in their bluish-gray coats and scarlet trousers, were on duty at the gate, and one of them took my passport and the vetturino's, and we then drove into the town to wait till they should be vised. We saw but one street, narrow, with tall, rusty, aged houses, built of stone, evil smelling; in short, a kind of place that would be intolerably dismal in cloudy England, and cannot be called cheerful even under the sun of Italy. . . . . Priests passed, and burly friars, one of whom was carrying a wine-barrel on his head. Little carts, laden with firkins of grapes, and donkeys with the same genial burden, brushed passed our vettura, finding scarce room enough in the narrow street. All the idlers of Acquapendente--and they were many--assembled to gaze at us, but not discourteously. Indeed, I never saw an idle curiosity exercised in such a pleasant way as by the country-people of Italy. It almost deserves to be called a kindly interest and sympathy, instead of a hard and cold curiosity, like that of our own people, and it is displayed with such simplicity that it is evident no offence is intended. By and by the vetturino brought his passport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, passing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria. The new town, which I suppose is hundreds of years old, with all its novelty shows strikingly the difference between places that grow up and shape out their streets of their own accord, as it were, and one that is built on a settled plan of malice aforethought. This little rural village has gates of classic architecture, a spacious piazza, and a great breadth of straight and rectangular streets, with houses of uniform style, airy and wholesome looking to a degree seldom seen on the Continent. Nevertheless, I must say that the town looked hatefully dull and ridiculously prim, and, of the two, I had rather spend my life in Radicofani. We drove through it, from gate to gate, without stopping, and soon came to the brow of a hill, whence we beheld, right beneath us, the beautiful lake of Bolsena; not exactly at our feet, however, for a portion of level ground lay between, haunted by the pestilence which has depopulated all these shores, and made the lake and its neighborhood a solitude. It looked very beautiful, nevertheless, with a sheen of a silver mid a gray like that of steel as the wind blew and the sun shone over it; and, judging by my own feelings, I should really have thought that the breeze from its surface was bracing and healthy. Descending the hill, we passed the ruins of the old town of San Lorenzo, of which the prim village on the hill-top may be considered the daughter. There is certainly no resemblance between parent and child, the former being situated on a sort of precipitous bluff, where there could have been no room for piazzas and spacious streets, nor accessibility except by mules, donkeys, goats, and people of Alpine habits. There was an ivy-covered tower on the top of the bluff, and some arched cavern mouths that looked as if they opened into the great darkness. These were the entrances to Etruscan tombs, for the town on top had been originally Etruscan, and the inhabitants had buried themselves in the heart of the precipitous bluffs after spending their lives on its summit. Reaching the plain, we drove several miles along the shore of the lake, and found the soil fertile and generally well cultivated, especially with the vine, though there were tracks apparently too marshy to be put to any agricultural purpose. We met now and then a flock of sheep, watched by sallow-looking and spiritless men and boys, who, we took it for granted, would soon perish of malaria, though, I presume, they never spend their nights in the immediate vicinity of the lake. I should like to inquire whether animals suffer from the bad qualities of the air. The lake is not nearly so beautiful on a nearer view as it is from the hill above, there being no rocky margin, nor bright, sandy beach, but everywhere this interval of level ground, and often swampy marsh, betwixt the water and the hill. At a considerable distance from the shore we saw two islands, one of which is memorable as having been the scene of an empress's murder, but I cannot stop to fill my journal with historical reminiscences. We kept onward to the town of Bolsena, which stands nearly a mile from the lake, and on a site higher than the level margin, yet not so much so, I should apprehend, as to free it from danger of malaria. We stopped at an albergo outside of the wall of the town, and before dinner had time to see a good deal of the neighborhood. The first aspect of the town was very striking, with a vista into its street through the open gateway, and high above it an old, gray, square-built castle, with three towers visible at the angles, one of them battlemented, one taller than the rest, and one partially ruined. Outside of the town-gate there were some fragments of Etruscan ruin, capitals of pillars and altars with inscriptions; these we glanced at, and then made our entrance through the gate. There it was again,--the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened street of piled-up houses which we have so often seen; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, grape-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, peaches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a fertile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which nature tries to heap into their hands. It seems strange that they can never grasp it. We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner,--the Via di Castello,--and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend. The street--a strange name for such an avenue--clambered upward in the oddest fashion, passing under arches, scrambling up steps, so that it was more like a long irregular pair of stairs than anything that Christians call a street; and so large a part of it was under arches that we scarcely seemed to be out of doors. At last U----, who was in advance, emerged into the upper air, and cried out that we had ascended to an upper town, and a larger one than that beneath. It really seemed like coming up out of the earth into the midst of the town, when we found ourselves so unexpectedly in upper Bolsena. We were in a little nook, surrounded by old edifices, and called the Piazza del Orologio, on account of a clock that was apparent somewhere. The castle was close by, and from its platform there was a splendid view of the lake and all the near hill-country. The castle itself is still in good condition, and apparently as strong as ever it was as respects the exterior walls; but within there seemed to be neither floor nor chamber, nothing but the empty shell of the dateless old fortress. The stones at the base and lower part of the building were so massive that I should think the Etrurians must have laid them; and then perhaps the Romans built a little higher, and the mediaeval people raised the battlements and towers. But we did not look long at the castle, our attention being drawn to the singular aspect of the town itself, which--to speak first of its most prominent characteristic--is the very filthiest place, I do believe, that was ever inhabited by man. Defilement was everywhere; in the piazza, in nooks and corners, strewing the miserable lanes from side to side, the refuse of every day, and of accumulated ages. I wonder whether the ancient Romans were as dirty a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them; for there seems to have been something in the places that have been inhabited by Romans, or made famous in their history, and in the monuments of every kind that they have raised, that puts people in mind of their very earthliness, and incites them to defile therewith whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal arch may fall in their way. I think it must be an hereditary trait, probably weakened and robbed of a little of its horror by the influence of milder ages; and I am much afraid that Caesar trod narrower and fouler ways in his path to power than those of modern Rome, or even of this disgusting town of Bolsena. I cannot imagine anything worse than these, however. Rotten vegetables thrown everywhere about, musty straw, standing puddles, running rivulets of dissolved nastiness,--these matters were a relief amid viler objects. The town was full of great black hogs wallowing before every door, and they grunted at us with a kind of courtesy and affability as if the town were theirs, and it was their part to be hospitable to strangers. Many donkeys likewise accosted us with braying; children, growing more uncleanly every day they lived, pestered us with begging; men stared askance at us as they lounged in corners, and women endangered us with slops which they were flinging from doorways into the street. No decent words can describe, no admissible image can give an idea of this noisome place. And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not live a beautiful and jolly life. I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site, including, I suppose, the space occupied by the lower city, which looks as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange confusion of black and ugly houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, that might have adorned a palace. . . . . The streets are the narrowest I have seen anywhere,--of no more width, indeed, than may suffice for the passage of a donkey with his panniers. They wind in and out in strange confusion, and hardly look like streets at all, but, nevertheless, have names printed on the corners, just as if they were stately avenues. After looking about us awhile and drawing half-breaths so as to take in the less quantity of gaseous pollution, we went back to the castle, and descended by a path winding downward from it into the plain outside of the town-gate. It was now dinner-time, . . . . and we had, in the first place, some fish from the pestiferous lake; not, I am sorry to say, the famous stewed eels which, Dante says, killed Pope Martin, but some trout. . . . . By the by, the meal was not dinner, but our midday colazione. After despatching it, we again wandered forth and strolled round the outside of the lower town, which, with the upper one, made as picturesque a combination as could be desired. The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of massive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. ------ sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch. They are a lovable people, these Italians, as I find from almost all with whom we come in contact; they have great and little faults, and no great virtues that I know of; but still are sweet, amiable, pleasant to encounter, save when they beg, or when you have to bargain with them. We left Bolsena and drove to Viterbo, passing the gate of the picturesque town of Montefiascone, over the wall of which I saw spires and towers, and the dome of a cathedral. I was sorry not to taste, in its own town, the celebrated est, which was the death-draught of the jolly prelate. At Viterbo, however, I called for some wine of Montefiascone, and had a little straw-covered flask, which the waiter assured us was the genuine est-wine. It was of golden color, and very delicate, somewhat resembling still champagne, but finer, and requiring a calmer pause to appreciate its subtle delight. Its good qualities, however, are so evanescent, that the finer flavor became almost imperceptible before we finished the flask. Viterbo is a large, disagreeable town, built at the foot of a mountain, the peak of which is seen through the vista of some of the narrow streets. There are more fountains in Viterbo than I have seen in any other city of its size, and many of them of very good design. Around most of them there were wine-hogsheads, waiting their turn to be cleansed and rinsed, before receiving the wine of the present vintage. Passing a doorway, J----- saw some men treading out the grapes in a great vat with their naked feet. Among the beggars here, the loudest and most vociferous was a crippled postilion, wearing his uniform jacket, green, faced with red; and he seemed to consider himself entitled still to get his living from travellers, as having been disabled in the way of his profession. I recognized his claim, and was rewarded with a courteous and grateful bow at our departure. . . . . To beggars--after my much experience both in England and Italy--I give very little, though I am not certain that it would not often be real beneficence in the latter country. There being little or no provision for poverty and age, the poor must often suffer. Nothing can be more earnest than their entreaties for aid; nothing seemingly more genuine than their gratitude when they receive it. They return you the value of their alms in prayers, and say, "God will accompany you." Many of them have a professional whine, and a certain doleful twist of the neck and turn of the head, which hardens my heart against them at once. A painter might find numerous models among them, if canvas had not already been more than sufficiently covered with their style of the picturesque. There is a certain brick-dust colored cloak worn in Viterbo, not exclusively by beggars, which, when ragged enough, is exceedingly artistic. ROME. 68 Piazza Poli, October 17th.--We left Viterbo on the 15th, and proceeded, through Monterosi, to Sette Verse. There was nothing interesting at Sette Verse, except an old Roman bridge, of a single arch, which had kept its sweep, composed of one row of stones, unbroken for two or more thousand years, and looked just as strong as ever, though gray with age, and fringed with plants that found it hard to fix themselves in its close crevices. The next day we drove along the Cassian Way towards Rome. It was a most delightful morning, a genial atmosphere; the more so, I suppose, because this was the Campagna, the region of pestilence and death. I had a quiet, gentle, comfortable pleasure, as if, after many wanderings, I was drawing near Rome, for, now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart, as I think even London, or even little Concord itself, or old sleepy Salem, never did and never will. Besides, we are to stay here six months, and we had now a house all prepared to receive us; so that this present approach, in the noontide of a genial day, was most unlike our first one, when we crept towards Rome through the wintry midnight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary, and not knowing whither to betake ourselves. Ah! that was a dismal tine! One thing, however, that disturbed even my present equanimity a little was the necessity of meeting the custom-house at the Porta del Popolo; but my past experience warranted me in believing that even these ogres might be mollified by the magic touch of a scudo; and so it proved. We should have escaped any examination at all, the officer whispered me, if his superior had not happened to be present; but, as the case stood, they took down only one trunk from the top of the vettura, just lifted the lid, closed it again, and gave us permission to proceed. So we came to 68 Piazza Poli, and found ourselves at once at home, in such a comfortable, cosey little house, as I did not think existed in Rome. I ought to say a word about our vetturino, Constantino Bacci, an excellent and most favorable specimen of his class; for his magnificent conduct, his liberality, and all the good qualities that ought to be imperial, S----- called him the Emperor. He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino's inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair's-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price. Finally, I think the tears had risen almost to his eyelids when we parted with him. Our friends, the Thompsons, through whose kindness we procured this house, called to see us soon after our arrival. In the afternoon, I walked with Rosebud to the Medici Gardens, and on our way thither, we espied our former servant, Lalla, who flung so many and such bitter curses after us, on our departure from Rome, sitting at her father's fruit-stall. Thank God, they have not taken effect. After going to the Medici, we went to the Pincian Gardens, and looked over into the Borghese grounds, which, methought, were more beautiful than ever. The same was true of the sky, and of every object beneath it; and as we came homeward along the Corso, I wondered at the stateliness and palatial magnificence of that noble street. Once, I remember, I thought it narrow, and far unworthy of its fame. In the way of costume, the men in goat-skin breeches, whom we met on the Campagna, were very striking, and looked like Satyrs. October 21st.--. . . . I have been twice to St. Peter's, and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a visionary splendor and magnificence. I also went to the Museum of the Capitol; and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them. Yesterday we went to the Corsini Palace, which we had not visited before. It stands in the Trastevere, in the Longara, and is a stately palace, with a grand staircase, leading to the first floor, where is situated the range of picture-rooms. There were a good many fine pictures, but none of them have made a memorable impression on my mind, except a portrait by Vandyke, of a man in point-lace, very grand and very real. The room in which this picture hung had many other portraits by Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and other famous painters, and was wonderfully rich in this department. In another, there was a portrait of Pope Julius II., by Raphael, somewhat differing from those at the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries in Florence, and those I have seen in England and Paris; thinner, paler, perhaps older, more severely intellectual, but at least, as high a work of art as those. The palace has some handsome old furniture, and gilded chairs, covered with leather cases, possibly relics of Queen Christina's time, who died here. I know not but the most curious object was a curule chair of marble, sculptured all out of one piece, and adorned with bas-reliefs. It is supposed to be Etruscan. It has a circular back, sweeping round, so as to afford sufficient rests for the elbows; and, sitting down in it, I discovered that modern ingenuity has not made much real improvement on this chair of three or four thousand years ago. But some chairs are easier for the moment, yet soon betray you, and grow the more irksome. We strolled along Longara, and found the piazza of St. Peter's full of French soldiers at their drill. . . . . We went quite round the interior of the church, and perceiving the pavement loose and broken near the altar where Guido's Archangel is placed, we picked up some bits of rosso antico and gray marble, to be set in brooches, as relics. We have the snuggest little set of apartments in Rome, seven rooms, including an antechamber; and though the stairs are exceedingly narrow, there is really a carpet on them,--a civilized comfort, of which the proudest palaces in the Eternal City cannot boast. The stairs are very steep, however, and I should not wonder if some of us broke our noses down them. Narrowness of space within doors strikes us all rather ludicrously, yet not unpleasantly, after being accustomed to the wastes and deserts of the Montanto Villa. It is well thus to be put in training for the over-snugness of our cottage in Concord. Our windows here look out on a small and rather quiet piazza, with an immense palace on the left hand, and a smaller yet statelier one on the right, and just round the corner of the street, leading out of our piazza, is the Fountain of Trevi, of which I can hear the plash in the evening, when other sounds are hushed. Looking over what I have said of Sodoma's "Christ Bound," at Sierra, I see that I have omitted to notice what seems to me one of its most striking characteristics,--its loneliness. You feel as if the Saviour were deserted, both in heaven and earth; the despair is in him which made him say, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still Divine, and Sodoma almost seems to have reconciled the impossibilities of combining an omnipresent divinity with a suffering and outraged humanity. But this is one of the cases in which the spectator's imagination completes what the artist merely hints at. Mr. ------, the sculptor, called to see us, the other evening, and quite paid Powers off for all his trenchant criticisms on his brother artists. He will not allow Powers to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art, although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the Greek Slave and the Fisher-Boy very ingeniously. The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Apollino in the Tribune of the Uzi; and the former is made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the Greek Slave, limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together,--a head to one purchaser, an arm or a foot to another, a hand to a third. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb by a happy accident or special providence. (The illustration was my own, and adopted by Mr. ------.) Yet Mr. ------ seems to acknowledge that he did succeed. I repeat these things only as another instance how invariably every sculptor uses his chisel and mallet to smash and deface the marble-work of every other. I never heard Powers speak of Mr. ------, but can partly imagine what he would have said. Mr. ------ spoke of Powers's disappointment about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress, and said that he was altogether to blame, inasmuch as he attempted to sell to the nation for that sum a statue which, to Mr. ------'s certain knowledge, he had already offered to private persons for a fifth part of it. I have not implicit faith in Mr. ------'s veracity, and doubt not Powers acted fairly in his own eyes. October 23d.--I am afraid I have caught one of the colds which the Roman air continually affected me with last winter; at any rate, a sirocco has taken the life out of me, and I have no spirit to do anything. This morning I took a walk, however, out of the Porta Maggiore, and looked at the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, just outside of the gate,--a very singular ruin covered with symbols of the man's trade in stone-work, and with bas-reliefs along the cornice, representing people at work, making bread. An inscription states that the ashes of his wife are likewise reposited there, in a bread-basket. The mausoleum is perhaps twenty feet long, in its largest extent, and of equal height; and if good bakers were as scarce in ancient Rome as in the modern city, I do not wonder that they were thought worthy of stately monuments. None of the modern ones deserve any better tomb than a pile of their own sour loaves. I walked onward a good distance beyond the gate alongside of the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, which, in this portion of it, seems to have had little repair, and to have needed little, since it was built. It looks like a long procession, striding across the Campagna towards the city, and entering the gate, over one of its arches, within the gate, I saw two or three slender jets of water spurting from the crevices; this aqueduct being still in use to bring the Acqua Felice into Rome. Returning within the walls, I walked along their inner base, to the Church of St. John Lateran, into which I went, and sat down to rest myself, being languid and weary, and hot with the sun, though afraid to trust the coolness of the shade. I hate the Roman atmosphere; indeed, all my pleasure in getting back--all my home-feeling--has already evaporated, and what now impresses me, as before, is the languor of Rome,--its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a weight of death. Quitting St. John Lateran, I went astray, as I do nine times out of ten in these Roman intricacies, and at last, seeing the Coliseum in the vista of a street, I betook myself thither to get a fresh start. Its round of stones looked vast and dreary, but not particularly impressive. The interior was quite deserted; except that a Roman, of respectable appearance, was making a pilgrimage at the altars, kneeling and saying a prayer at each one. Outside of the Coliseum, a neat-looking little boy came and begged of me; and I gave him a baiocco, rather because he seemed to need it so little than for any other reason. I observed that he immediately afterwards went and spoke to a well-dressed man, and supposed that the child was likewise begging of him. I watched the little boy, however, and saw that, in two or three other instances, after begging of other individuals, he still returned to this well-dressed man; the fact being, no doubt, that the latter was fishing for baiocci through the medium of his child,--throwing the poor little fellow out as a bait, while he himself retained his independent respectability. He had probably come out for a whole day's sport; for, by and by, he went between the arches of the Coliseum, followed by the child, and taking with him what looked like a bottle of wine, wrapped in a handkerchief. November 2d.--The weather lately would have suited one's ideal of an English November, except that there have been no fogs; but of ugly, hopeless clouds, chill, shivering winds, drizzle, and now and then pouring rain, much more than enough. An English coal-fire, if we could see its honest face within doors, would compensate for all the unamiableness of the outside atmosphere; but we might ask for the sunshine of the New Jerusalem, with as much hope of getting it. It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U---- has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S----- sketched the ruins. . . . . [During four months of the illness of his daughter, Mr. Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal.--ED.] February 27th, 1859.--For many days past, there have been tokens of the coming Carnival in the Corso and the adjacent streets; for example, in the shops, by the display of masks of wire, pasteboard, silk, or cloth, some of beautiful features, others hideous, fantastic, currish, asinine, huge-nosed, or otherwise monstrous; some intended to cover the whole face, others concealing only the upper part, also white dominos, or robes bedizened with gold-lace and theatric splendors, displayed at the windows of mercers or flaunting before the doors. Yesterday, U---- and I came along the Corso, between one and two o'clock, after a walk, and found all these symptoms of impending merriment multiplied and intensified; . . . . rows of chairs, set out along the sidewalks, elevated a foot or two by means of planks; great baskets, full of confetti, for sale in the nooks and recesses of the streets; bouquets of all qualities and prices. The Corso was becoming pretty well thronged with people; but, until two o'clock, nobody dared to fling as much as a rosebud or a handful of sugar-plums. There was a sort of holiday expression, however, on almost everybody's face, such as I have not hitherto seen in Rome, or in any part of Italy; a smile gleaming out, an aurora of mirth, which probably will not be very exuberant in its noontide. The day was so sunny and bright that it made this opening scene far more cheerful than any day of the last year's carnival. As we threaded our way through the Corso, U---- kept wishing she could plunge into the fun and uproar as J----- would, and for my own part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and as riotously as any urchin there. But my black hat and grave talma would have been too good a mark for the combatants, . . . . so we went home before a shot was fired. . . . . March 7th.--I, as well as the rest of the family, have followed up the Carnival pretty faithfully, and enjoyed it as well, or rather better than could have been expected; principally in the street, as a more looker-on,--which does not let one into the mystery of the fun,--and twice from a balcony, where I threw confetti, and partly understood why the young people like it so much. Certainly, there cannot well be a more picturesque spectacle in human life, than that stately, palatial avenue of the Corso, the more picturesque because so narrow, all hung with carpets and Gobelin tapestry, and the whole palace-heights alive with faces; and all the capacity of the street thronged with the most fantastic figures that either the fancies of folks alive at this day are able to contrive, or that live traditionally from year to year. . . . . The Prince of Wales has fought manfully through the Carnival with confetti and bouquets, and U---- received several bouquets from him, on Saturday, as her carriage moved along. March 8th.--I went with U---- to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I enjoyed it a good deal, and assisted in so far as to pelt all the people in cylinder hats with handfuls of confetti. The scene opens with a long array of cavalry, who ride through the Corso, preceded by a large band, playing loudly on their brazen instruments. . . . . There were some splendid dresses, particularly contadina costumes of scarlet and gold, which seem to be actually the festal attire of that class of people, and must needs be so expensive that one must serve for a lifetime, if indeed it be not an inheritance. . . . . March 9th.--I was, yesterday, an hour or so among the people on the sidewalks of the Corso, just on the edges of the fun. They appeared to be in a decorous, good-natured mood, neither entering into the merriment, nor harshly repelling; and when groups of maskers overflowed among them, they received their jokes in good part. Many women of the lower class were in the crowd of bystanders; generally broad and sturdy figures, clad evidently in their best attire, and wearing a good many ornaments; such as gold or coral beads and necklaces, combs of silver or gold, heavy ear-rings, curiously wrought brooches, perhaps cameos or mosaics, though I think they prefer purely metallic work to these. One ornament very common among them is a large bodkin, which they stick through their hair. It is usually of silver, but sometimes it looks like steel, and is made in the shape of a sword,--a long Spanish thrusting sword, for example. Dr. Franco told us a story of a woman of Trastevere, who was addressed rudely at the Carnival by a gentleman; she warned him to desist, but as he still persisted, she drew the bodkin from her hair, and stabbed him to the heart. By and by I went to Mr. Motley's balcony, and looked down on the closing scenes of the Carnival. Methought the merry-makers labored harder to be mirthful, and yet were somewhat tired of their eight play-days; and their dresses looked a little shabby, rumpled, and draggled; but the lack of sunshine--which we have had on all the preceding days--may have produced this effect. The wheels of some of the carriages were wreathed round and spoked with green foliage, making a very pretty and fanciful appearance, as did likewise the harnesses of the horses, which were trimmed with roses. The pervading noise and uproar of human voices is one of the most effective points of the matter; but the scene is quite indescribable, and its effect not to be conceived without both witnessing and taking part in it. If you merely look at it, it depresses you; if you take even the slightest share in it, you become aware that it has a fascination, and you no longer wonder that the young people, at least, take such delight in plunging into this mad river of fun that goes roaring between the narrow limits of the Corso. As twilight came on, the moccoli commenced, and as it grew darker the whole street twinkled with lights, which would have been innumerable if every torch-bearer had not been surrounded by a host of enemies, who tried to extinguish his poor little twinkle. It was a pity to lose so much splendor as there might have been; but yet there was a kind of symbolism in the thought that every one of those thousands of twinkling lights was in charge of somebody, who was striving with all his might to keep it alive. Not merely the street-way, but all the balconies and hundreds of windows were lit up with these little torches; so that it seemed as if the stars had crumbled into glittering fragments, and rained down upon the Corso, some of them lodging upon the palace-fronts, some falling on the ground. Besides this, there were gas-lights burning with a white flame; but this illumination was not half so interesting as that of the torches, which indicated human struggle. All this time there were myriad voices shouting, "SENZA MOCCOLO!" and mingling into one long roar. We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against one another's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts; but after a while we grew tired, and so did the crowd, apparently; for the lights vanished, one after another, till the gas-lights--which at first were an unimportant part of the illumination--shone quietly out, overpowering the scattered twinkles of the moccoli. They were what the fixed stars are to the transitory splendors of human life. Mr. Motley tells me, that it was formerly the custom to have a mock funeral of harlequin, who was supposed to die at the close of the Carnival, during which he had reigned supreme, and all the people, or as many as chose, bore torches at his burial. But this being considered an indecorous mockery of Popish funereal customs, the present frolic of the moccoli was instituted,--in some sort, growing out of it. All last night, or as much of it as I was awake, there was a noise of song and of late revellers in the streets; but to-day we have waked up in the sad and sober season of Lent. It is worthy of remark, that all the jollity of the Carnival is a genuine ebullition of spirit, without the aid of wine or strong drink. March 11th.--Yesterday we went to the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, the entrance to which is alongside of the Appian Way, within sight of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. We descended not a very great way under ground, by a broad flight of stone steps, and, lighting some wax tapers, with which we had provided ourselves, we followed the guide through a great many intricate passages, which mostly were just wide enough for me to touch the wall on each side, while keeping my elbows close to my body; and as to height, they were from seven to ten feet, and sometimes a good deal higher It was rather picturesque, when we saw the long line of our tapers, for another large party had joined us, twinkling along the dark passage, and it was interesting to think of the former inhabitants of these caverns. . . . . In one or two places there was the round mark in the stone or plaster, where a bottle had been deposited. This was said to have been the token of a martyr's burial-place, and to have contained his blood. After leaving the Catacomb, we drove onward to Cecilia Metella's tomb, which we entered and inspected. Within the immensely massive circular substance of the tomb was a round, vacant space, and this interior vacancy was open at the top, and had nothing but some fallen stones and a heap of earth at the bottom. On our way home we entered the Church of "Domine, quo vadis," and looked at the old fragment of the Appian Way, where our Saviour met St. Peter, and left the impression of his feet in one of the Roman paving-stones. The stone has been removed, and there is now only a fac-simile engraved in a block of marble, occupying the place where Jesus stood. It is a great pity they had not left the original stone; for then all its brother-stones in the pavement would have seemed to confirm the truth of the legend. While we were at dinner, a gentleman called and was shown into the parlor. We supposed it to be Mr. May; but soon his voice grew familiar, and my wife was sure it was General Pierce, so I left the table, and found it to be really he. I was rejoiced to see him, though a little saddened to see the marks of care and coming age, in many a whitening hair, and many a furrow, and, still more, in something that seemed to have passed away out of him, without leaving any trace. His voice, sometimes, sounded strange and old, though generally it was what it used to be. He was evidently glad to see me, glad to see my wife, glad to see the children, though there was something melancholy in his tone, when he remarked what a stout boy J----- had grown. Poor fellow! he has neither son nor daughter to keep his heart warm. This morning I have been with him to St. Peter's, and elsewhere about the city, and find him less changed than he seemed to be last night; not at all changed in heart and affections. We talked freely about all matters that came up; among the rest, about the project--recognizable by many tokens--for bringing him again forward as a candidate for the Presidency next year. He appears to be firmly resolved not again to present himself to the country, and is content to let his one administration stand, and to be judged by the public and posterity on the merits of that. No doubt he is perfectly sincere; no doubt, too, he would again be a candidate, if a pretty unanimous voice of the party should demand it. I retain all my faith in his administrative faculty, and should be glad, for his sake, to have it fully rccognized; but the probabilities, as far as I can see, do not indicate for him another Presidential term. March 15th.--This morning I went with my wife and Miss Hoar to Miss Hosmer's studio, to see her statue of Zenobia. We found her in her premises, springing about with a bird-like action. She has a lofty room, with a skylight window; it was pretty well warmed with a stove, and there was a small orange-tree in a pot, with the oranges growing on it, and two or three flower-shrubs in bloom. She herself looked prettily, with her jaunty little velvet cap on the side of her head, whence came clustering out, her short brown curls; her face full of pleasant life and quick expression; and though somewhat worn with thought and struggle, handsome and spirited. She told us that "her wig was growing as gray as a rat." There were but very few things in the room; two or three plaster busts, a headless cast of a plaster statue, and a cast of the Minerva Medica, which perhaps she had been studying as a help towards the design of her Zenobia; for, at any rate, I seemed to discern a resemblance or analogy between the two. Zenobia stood in the centre of the room, as yet unfinished in the clay, but a very noble and remarkable statue indeed, full of dignity and beauty. It is wonderful that so brisk a woman could have achieved a work so quietly impressive; and there is something in Zenobia's air that conveys the idea of music, uproar, and a great throng all about her; whilst she walks in the midst of it, self-sustained, and kept in a sort of sanctity by her native pride. The idea of motion is attained with great success; you not only perceive that she is walking, but know at just what tranquil pace she steps, amid the music of the triumph. The drapery is very fine and full; she is decked with ornaments; but the chains of her captivity hang from wrist to wrist; and her deportment--indicating a soul so much above her misfortune, yet not insensible to the weight of it--makes these chains a richer decoration than all her other jewels. I know not whether there be some magic in the present imperfect finish of the statue, or in the material of clay, as being a better medium of expression than even marble; but certainly I have seldom been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture. Miss Hosmer showed us photographs of her Puck--which I have seen in the marble--and likewise of the Will-o'-the-Wisp, both very pretty and fanciful. It indicates much variety of power, that Zenobia should be the sister of these, which would seem the more natural offspring of her quick and vivid character. But Zenobia is a high, heroic ode. . . . . On my way up the Via Babuino, I met General Pierce. We have taken two or three walks together, and stray among the Roman ruins, and old scenes of history, talking of matters in which he is personally concerned, yet which are as historic as anything around us. He is singularly little changed; the more I see him, the more I get him back, just such as he was in our youth. This morning, his face, air, and smile were so wonderfully like himself of old, that at least thirty years are annihilated. Zenobia's manacles serve as bracelets; a very ingenious and suggestive idea. March 18th.--I went to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol yesterday, and saw, among other things, the Venus in her secret cabinet. This was my second view of her: the first time, I greatly admired her; now, she made no very favorable impression. There are twenty Venuses whom I like as well, or better. On the whole, she is a heavy, clumsy, unintellectual, and commonplace figure; at all events, not in good looks to-day. Marble beauties seem to suffer the same occasional eclipses as those of flesh and blood. We looked at the Faun, the Dying Gladiator, and other famous sculptures; but nothing had a glory round it, perhaps because the sirocco was blowing. These halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and depressing effect upon me, very different from those of the Vatican. I know not why, except that the rooms of the Capitol have a dingy, shabby, and neglected look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less magnificent than at the Vatican. The corroded and discolored surfaces of the statues take away from the impression of immortal youth, and turn Apollo [The Lycian Apollo] himself into an old stone; unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from within. March 23d.--I am wearing away listlessly these last precious days of my abode in Rome. U----'s illness is disheartening, and by confining ------, it takes away the energy and enterprise that were the spring of all our movements. I am weary of Rome, without having seen and known it as I ought, and I shall be glad to get away from it, though no doubt there will be many yearnings to return hereafter, and many regrets that I did not make better use of the opportunities within my grasp. Still, I have been in Rome long enough to be imbued with its atmosphere, and this is the essential condition of knowing a place; for such knowledge does not consist in having seen every particular object it contains. In the state of mind in which I now stand towards Rome, there is very little advantage to be gained by staying here longer. And yet I had a pleasant stroll enough yesterday afternoon, all by myself, from the Corso down past the Church of St. Andrea della Valle,-- the site where Caesar was murdered,--and thence to the Farnese Palace, the noble court of which I entered; thence to the Piazza Cenci, where I looked at one or two ugly old palaces, and fixed on one of them as the residence of Beatrice's father; then past the Temple of Vesta, and skirting along the Tiler, and beneath the Aventine, till I somewhat unexpectedly came in sight of the gray pyramid of Caius Cestius. I went out of the city gate, and leaned on the parapet that encloses the pyramid, advancing its high, unbroken slope and peak, where the great blocks of marble still fit almost as closely to one another as when they were first laid; though, indeed, there are crevices just large enough for plants to root themselves, and flaunt and trail over the face of this great tomb; only a little verdure, however, over a vast space of marble, still white in spots, but pervadingly turned gray by two thousand years' action of the atmosphere. Thence I came home by the Caelian, and sat down on an ancient flight of steps under one of the arches of the Coliseum, into which the sunshine fell sidelong. It was a delightful afternoon, not precisely like any weather that I have known elsewhere; certainly never in America, where it is always too cold or too hot. It, resembles summer more than anything which we New-Englanders recognize in our idea of spring, but there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, gentle, that does not belong to summer, and that thrilled and tickled my heart with a feeling partly sensuous, partly spiritual. I go to the Bank and read Galignani and the American newspapers; thence I stroll to the Pincian or to the Medici Gardens; I see a good deal of General Pierce, and we talk over his Presidential life, which, I now really think, he has no latent desire nor purpose to renew. Yet he seems to have enjoyed it while it lasted, and certainly he was in his element as an administrative man; not far-seeing, not possessed of vast stores of political wisdom in advance of his occasions, but endowed with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful, and his Cabinet recognized it as such; for though they were men of great ability, he was evidently the master-mind among them. None of them were particularly his personal friends when he selected them; they all loved him when they parted; and he showed me a letter, signed by all, in which they expressed their feelings of respect and attachment at the close of his administration. There was a noble frankness on his part, that kept the atmosphere always clear among them, and in reference to this characteristic Governor Marcy told him that the years during which he had been connected with his Cabinet had been the happiest of his life. Speaking of Caleb Cushing, he told me that the unreliability, the fickleness, which is usually attributed to him, is an actual characteristic, but that it is intellectual, not moral. He has such comprehensiveness, such mental variety and activity, that, if left to himself, he cannot keep fast hold of one view of things, and so cannot, without external help, be a consistent man. He needs the influence of a more single and stable judgment to keep him from divergency, and, on this condition, he is a most inestimable coadjutor. As regards learning and ability, he has no superior. Pierce spoke the other day of the idea among some of his friends that his life had been planned, from a very early period, with a view to the station which he ultimately reached. He smiled at the notion, said that it was inconsistent with his natural character, and that it implied foresight and dexterity beyond what any mortal is endowed with. I think so too; but nevertheless, I was long and long ago aware that he cherished a very high ambition, and that, though he might not anticipate the highest things, he cared very little about inferior objects. Then as to plans, I do not think that he had any definite ones; but there was in him a subtle faculty, a real instinct, that taught him what was good for him,--that is to say, promotive of his political success,--and made him inevitably do it. He had a magic touch, that arranged matters with a delicate potency, which he himself hardly recognized; and he wrought through other minds so that neither he nor they always knew when and how far they were under his influence. Before his nomination for the Presidency I had a sense that it was coming, and it never seemed to me an accident. He is a most singular character; so frank, so true, so immediate, so subtle, so simple, so complicated. I passed by the tower in the Via Portoghese to-day, and observed that the nearest shop appears to be for the sale of cotton or linen cloth. . . . . The upper window of the tower was half open; of course, like all or almost all other Roman windows, it is divided vertically, and each half swings back on hinges. . . . . Last week a fritter-establishment was opened in our piazza. It was a wooden booth erected in the open square, and covered with canvas painted red, which looked as if it had withstood much rain and sunshine. In front were three great boughs of laurel, not so much for shade, I think, as ornament. There were two men, and their apparatus for business was a sort of stove, or charcoal furnace, and a frying-pan to place over it; they had an armful or two of dry sticks, some flour, and I suppose oil, and this seemed to be all. It was Friday, and Lent besides, and possibly there was some other peculiar propriety in the consumption of fritters just then. At all events, their fire burned merrily from morning till night, and pretty late into the evening, and they had a fine run of custom; the commodity being simply dough, cut into squares or rhomboids, and thrown into the boiling oil, which quickly turned them to a light brown color. I sent J----- to buy some, and, tasting one, it resembled an unspeakably bad doughnut, without any sweetening. In fact, it was sour, for the Romans like their bread, and all their preparations of flour, in a state of acetous fermentation, which serves them instead of salt or other condiment. This fritter-shop had grown up in a night, like Aladdin's palace, and vanished as suddenly; for after standing through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it was gone on Monday morning, and a charcoal-strewn place on the pavement where the furnace had been was the only memorial of it. It was curious to observe how immediately it became a lounging-place for idle people, who stood and talked all day with the fritter-friers, just as they might at any old shop in the basement, of a palace, or between the half-buried pillars of the Temple of Minerva, which had been familiar to them and their remote grandfathers. April 14th.--Yesterday afternoon I drove with Mr. and Mrs. Story and Mr. Wilde to see a statue of Venus, which has just been discovered, outside of the Porta Portese, on the other side of the Tiber. A little distance beyond the gate we came to the entrance of a vineyard, with a wheel-track through the midst of it; and, following this, we soon came to a hillside, in which an excavation had been made with the purpose of building a grotto for keeping and storing wine. They had dug down into what seemed to be an ancient bathroom, or some structure of that kind, the excavation being square and cellar-like, and built round with old subterranean walls of brick and stone. Within this hollow space the statue had been found, and it was now standing against one of the walls, covered with a coarse cloth, or a canvas bag. This being removed, there appeared a headless marble figure, earth-stained, of course, and with a slightly corroded surface, but wonderfully delicate and beautiful, the shape, size, and attitude, apparently, of the Venus de' Medici, but, as we all thought, more beautiful than that. It is supposed to be the original, from which the Venus de' Medici was copied. Both arms were broken off, but the greater part of both, and nearly the whole of one hand, had been found, and these being adjusted to the figure, they took the well-known position before the bosom and the middle, as if the fragmentary woman retained her instinct of modesty to the last. There were the marks on the bosom and thigh where the fingers had touched; whereas in the Venus de' Medici, if I remember rightly, the fingers are sculptured quite free of the person. The man who showed the statue now lifted from a corner a round block of marble, which had been lying there among other fragments, and this he placed upon the shattered neck of the Venus; and behold, it was her head and face, perfect, all but the nose! Even in spite of this mutilation, it seemed immediately to light up and vivify the entire figure; and, whatever I may heretofore have written about the countenance of the Venus de' Medici, I here record my belief that that head has been wrongfully foisted upon the statue; at all events, it is unspeakably inferior to this newly discovered one. This face has a breadth and front which are strangely deficient in the other. The eyes are well opened, most unlike the buttonhole lids of the Venus de' Medici; the whole head is so much larger as to entirely obviate the criticism that has always been made on the diminutive head of the De' Medici statue. If it had but a nose! They ought to sift every handful of earth that has been thrown out of the excavation, for the nose and the missing hand and fingers must needs be there; and, if they were found, the effect would be like the reappearance of a divinity upon earth. Mutilated as we saw her, it was strangely interesting to be present at the moment, as it were, when she had just risen from her long burial, and was shedding the unquenchable lustre around her which no eye had seen for twenty or more centuries. The earth still clung about her; her beautiful lips were full of it, till Mr. Story took a thin chip of wood and cleared it away from between them. The proprietor of the vineyard stood by; a man with the most purple face and hugest and reddest nose that I ever beheld in my life. It must have taken innumerable hogsheads of his thin vintage to empurple his face in this manner. He chuckled much over the statue, and, I suppose, counts upon making his fortune by it. He is now awaiting a bid from the Papal government, which, I believe, has the right of pre-emption whenever any relics of ancient art are discovered. If the statue could but be smuggled out of Italy, it might command almost any price. There is not, I think, any name of a sculptor on the pedestal, as on that of the Venus de' Medici. A dolphin is sculptured on the pillar against which she leans. The statue is of Greek marble. It was first found about eight days ago, but has been offered for inspection only a day or two, and already the visitors come in throngs, and the beggars gather about the entrance of the vineyard. A wine shop, too, seems to have been opened on the premises for the accommodation of this great concourse, and we saw a row of German artists sitting at a long table in the open air, each with a glass of thin wine and something to eat before him; for the Germans refresh nature ten times to other persons once. How the whole world might be peopled with antique beauty if the Romans would only dig! April 19th.--General Pierce leaves Rome this morning for Venice, by way of Ancona, and taking the steamer thence to Trieste. I had hoped to make the journey along with him; but U----'s terrible illness has made it necessary for us to continue here another mouth, and we are thankful that this seems now to be the extent of our misfortune. Never having had any trouble before that pierced into my very vitals, I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend; but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did the good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of his ministrations in these dark days. Thank God, the thing we dreaded did not come to pass. Pierce is wonderfully little changed. Indeed, now that he has won and enjoyed--if there were any enjoyment in it--the highest success that public life could give him, he seems more like what he was in his early youth than at any subsequent period. He is evidently happier than I have ever known him since our college days; satisfied with what he has been, and with the position in the country that remains to him, after filling such an office. Amid all his former successes,--early as they came, and great as they were,--I always perceived that something gnawed within him, and kept him forever restless and miserable. Nothing he won was worth the winning, except as a step gained toward the summit. I cannot tell how early he began to look towards the Presidency; but I believe he would have died an unhappy man without it. And yet what infinite chances there seemed to be against his attaining it! When I look at it in one way, it strikes me as absolutely miraculous; in another, it came like an event that I had all along expected. It was due to his wonderful tact, which is of so subtle a character that he himself is but partially sensible of it. I have found in him, here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by his experience of life. We hold just the same relation to each other as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together still the same dear friends as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other as friend for friend. May 15th.--Yesterday afternoon we went to the Barberini picture-gallery to take a farewell look at the Beatrice Cenci, which I have twice visited before since our return from Florence. I attempted a description of it at my first visit, more than a year ago, but the picture is quite indescribable and unaccountable in its effect, for if you attempt to analyze it you can never succeed in getting at the secret of its fascination. Its peculiar expression eludes a straightforward glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls upon it casually, as it were, and without thinking to discover anything, as if the picture had a life and consciousness of its own, and were resolved not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, though it wears the full expression of it when it imagines itself unseen. I think no other such magical effect can ever have been wrought by pencil. I looked close into its eyes, with a determination to see all that there was in them, and could see nothing that might not have been in any young girl's eyes; and yet, a moment afterwards, there was the expression--seen aside, and vanishing in a moment--of a being unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing at me out of a remote and inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no sympathy could reach her. The mouth is beyond measure touching; the lips apart, looking as innocent as a baby's after it has been crying. The picture never can be copied. Guido himself could not have done it over again. The copyists get all sorts of expression, gay, as well as grievous; some copies have a coquettish air, a half-backward glance, thrown alluring at the spectator, but nobody ever did catch, or ever will, the vanishing charm of that sorrow. I hated to leave the picture, and yet was glad when I had taken my last glimpse, because it so perplexed and troubled me not to be able to get hold of its secret. Thence we went to the Church of the Capuchins, and saw Guido's Archangel. I have been several times to this church, but never saw the picture before, though I am familiar with the mosaic copy at St. Peter's, and had supposed the latter to be an equivalent representation of the original. It is nearly or quite so as respects the general effect; but there is a beauty in the archangel's face that immeasurably surpasses the copy,--the expression of heavenly severity, and a degree of pain, trouble, or disgust, at being brought in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it. There is something finical in the copy, which I do not find in the original. The sandalled feet are here those of an angel; in the mosaic they are those of a celestial coxcomb, treading daintily, as if he were afraid they would be soiled by the touch of Lucifer. After looking at the Archangel we went down under the church, guided by a fleshy monk, and saw the famous cemetery, where the dead monks of many centuries back have been laid to sleep in sacred earth from Jerusalem. . . . . FRANCE. Hotel des Colonies, Marseilles, May 29th, Saturday.--Wednesday was the day fixed for our departure from Rome, and after breakfast I walked to the Pincian, and saw the garden and the city, and the Borghese grounds, and St. Peter's in an earlier sunlight than ever before. Methought they never looked so beautiful, nor the sky so bright and blue. I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar. I seem to know it better than my birthplace, and to have known it longer; and though I have been very miserable there, and languid with the effects of the atmosphere, and disgusted with a thousand things in its daily life, still I cannot say I hate it, perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments, I desire never to set eyes on it again. . . . . . . . . We traversed again that same weary and dreary tract of country which we passed over in a winter afternoon and night on our first arrival in Rome. It is as desolate a country as can well be imagined, but about midway of our journey we came to the sea-shore, and kept very near it during the rest of the way. The sight and fragrance of it were exceedingly refreshing after so long an interval, and U---- revived visibly as we rushed along, while J----- chuckled and contorted himself with ineffable delight. We reached Civita Vecchia in three or four hours, and were there subjected to various troubles. . . . . All the while Miss S------ and I were bothering about the passport, the rest of the family sat in the sun on the quay, with all kinds of bustle and confusion around them; a very trying experience to U---- after the long seclusion and quiet of her sick-chamber. But she did not seem to suffer from it, and we finally reached the steamer in good condition and spirits. . . . . I slept wretchedly in my short and narrow berth, more especially as there was an old gentleman who snored as if he were sounding a charge; it was terribly hot too, and I rose before four o'clock, and was on deck amply in time to watch the distant approach of sunrise. We arrived at Leghorn pretty early, and might have gone ashore and spent the day. Indeed, we had been recommended by Dr. Franco, and had fully purposed to spend a week or ten days there, in expectation of benefit to U----'s health from the sea air and sea bathing, because he thought her still too feeble to make the whole voyage to Marseilles at a stretch. But she showed herself so strong that we thought she would get as much good from our three days' voyage as from the days by the sea-shore. Moreover, . . . . we all of us still felt the languor of the Roman atmosphere, and dreaded the hubbub and crazy confusion of landing at an Italian port. . . . . So we lay in the harbor all day without stirring from the steamer. . . . . It would have been pleasant, however, to have gone to Pisa, fifteen miles off, and seen the leaning tower; but, for my part, I have arrived at that point where it is somewhat pleasanter to sit quietly in any spot whatever than to see whatever grandest or most beautiful thing. At least this was my mood in the harbor of Leghorn. From the deck of the steamer there were many things visible that might have been interesting to describe: the boats of peculiar rig, and covered with awning; the crowded shipping; the disembarkation of horses from the French cavalry, which were lowered from steamers into gondolas or lighters, and hung motionless, like the sign of the Golden Fleece, during the transit, only kicking a little when their feet happened to graze the vessel's side. One horse plunged overboard, and narrowly escaped drowning. There was likewise a disembarkation of French soldiers in a train of boats, which rowed shoreward with sound of trumpet. The French are concentrating a considerable number of troops at this point. Our steamer was detained by order of the French government to take on board despatches; so that, instead of sailing at dusk, as is customary, we lay in the harbor till seven of the next morning. A number of young Sardinian officers, in green uniform, came on board, and a pale and picturesque-looking Italian, and other worthies of less note,--English, American, and of all races,--among them a Turk with a little boy in Christian dress; also a Greek gentleman with his young bride. At the appointed time we weighed anchor for Genoa, and had a beautiful day on the Mediterranean, and for the first time in my life I saw the real dark blue of the sea. I do not remember noticing it on my outward voyage to Italy. It is the most beautiful hue that can be imagined, like a liquid sky; and it retains its lustrous blue directly under the side of the ship, where the water of the mid-Atlantic looks greenish. . . . . We reached Genoa at seven in the afternoon. . . . . Genoa looks most picturesquely from the sea, at the foot of a sheltering semicircle of lofty hills; and as we lay in the harbor we saw, among other interesting objects, the great Doria Palace, with its gardens, and the cathedral, and a heap and sweep of stately edifices, with the mountains looking down upon he city, and crowned with fortresses. The variety of hue in the houses, white, green, pink, and orange, was very remarkable. It would have been well to go ashore here for an hour or two and see the streets, --having already seen the palaces, churches, and public buildings at our former visit,--and buy a few specimens of Genoa goldsmiths' work; but I preferred the steamer's deck, so the evening passed pleasantly away; the two lighthouses at the entrance of the port kindled up their fires, and at nine o'clock the evening gun thundered from the fortress, and was reverberated from the heights. We sailed away at eleven, and I was roused from my first sleep by the snortings and hissings of the vessel as she got under way. At Genoa we took on board some more passengers, an English nobleman with his lady being of the number. These were Lord and Lady J------, and before the end of our voyage his lordship talked to me of a translation of Tasso in which he is engaged, and a stanza or two of which he repeated to me. I really liked the lines, and liked too the simplicity and frankness with which he spoke of it to me a stranger, and the way be seemed to separate his egotism from the idea which he evidently had that he is going to make an excellent translation. I sincerely hope it may be so. He began it without any idea of publishing it, or of ever bringing it to a conclusion, but merely as a solace and occupation while in great trouble during an illness of his wife, but he has gradually come to find it the most absorbing occupation he ever undertook; and as Mr. Gladstone and other high authorities give him warm encouragement, he now means to translate the entire poem, and to publish it with beautiful illustrations, and two years hence the world may expect to see it. I do not quite perceive how such a man as this--a man of frank, warm, simple, kindly nature, but surely not of a poetical temperament, or very refined, or highly cultivated--should make a good version of Tasso's poems; but perhaps the dead poet's soul may take possession of this healthy organization, and wholly turn him to its own purposes. The latter part of our voyage to-day lay close along the coast of France, which was hilly and picturesque, and as we approached Marseilles was very bold and striking. We steered among rocky islands, rising abruptly out of the sea, mere naked crags, without a trace of verdure upon them, and with the surf breaking at their feet. They were unusual specimens of what hills would look like without the soil, that is to them what flesh is to a skeleton. Their shapes were often wonderfully fine, and the great headlands thrust themselves out, and took such lines of light and shade that it seemed like sailing through a picture. In the course of the afternoon a squall came up and blackened the sky all over in a twinkling; our vessel pitched and tossed, and a brig a little way from us had her sails blown about in wild fashion. The blue of the sea turned as black as night, and soon the rain began to spatter down upon us, and continued to sprinkle and drizzle a considerable time after the wind had subsided. It was quite calm and pleasant when we entered the harbor of Marseilles, which lies at the foot of very fair hills, and is set among great cliffs of stone. I did not attend much to this, however, being in dread of the difficulty of landing and passing through the custom-house with our twelve or fourteen trunks and numberless carpet-bags. The trouble vanished into thin air, nevertheless, as we approached it, for not a single trunk or bag was opened, and, moreover, our luggage and ourselves were not only landed, but the greater part of it conveyed to the railway without any expense. Long live Louis Napoleon, say I. We established ourselves at the Hotel des Colonies, and then Mss S------, J-----, and I drove hither and thither about Marseilles, making arrangements for our journey to Avignon, where we mean to go to-day. We might have avoided a good deal of this annoyance; but travellers, like other people, are continually getting their experience just a little too late. It was after nine before we got back to the hotel and took our tea in peace. AVIGNON. Hotel de l'Europe, June 1st.--I remember nothing very special to record about Marseilles; though it was really like passing from death into life, to find ourselves in busy, cheerful, effervescing France, after living so long between asleep and awake in sluggish Italy. Marseilles is a very interesting and entertaining town, with its bold surrounding heights, its wide streets,--so they seemed to us after the Roman alleys,--its squares, shady with trees, its diversified population of sailors, citizens, Orientals, and what not; but I have no spirit for description any longer; being tired of seeing things, and still more of telling myself about them. Only a young traveller can have patience to write his travels. The newest things, nowadays, have a familiarity to my eyes; whereas in their lost sense of novelty lies the charm and power of description. On Monday (30th May), though it began with heavy rain, we set early about our preparations for departure, . . . . and, at about three, we left the Hotel des Colonies. It is a very comfortable hotel, though expensive. The Restaurant connected with it occupies the enclosed court-yard and the arcades around it; and it was a good amusement to look down from the surrounding gallery, communicating with our apartments, and see the fashion and manner of French eating, all the time going forward. In sunny weather a great awning is spread over the whole court, across from the upper stories of the house. There is a grass-plat in the middle, and a very spacious and airy dining-saloon is thus formed. Our railroad carriage was comfortable, and we found in it, besides two other Frenchwomen, two nuns. They were very devout, and sedulously read their little books of devotion, repeated prayers under their breath, kissed the crucifixes which hung at their girdles, and told a string of beads, which they passed from one to the other. So much were they occupied with these duties, that they scarcely looked at the scenery along the road, though, probably, it is very rare for them to see anything outside of their convent walls. They never failed to mutter a prayer and kiss the crucifix whenever we plunged into a tunnel. If they glanced at their fellow-passengers, it was shyly and askance, with their lips in motion all the time, like children afraid to let their eyes wander from their lesson-book. One of them, however, took occasion to pull down R-----'s dress, which, in her frisky movements about the carriage, had got out of place, too high for the nun's sense of decorum. Neither of them was at all pretty, nor was the black stuff dress and white muslin cap in the least becoming, neither were their features of an intelligent or high-bred stamp. Their manners, however, or such little glimpses as I could get of them, were unexceptionable; and when I drew a curtain to protect one of them from the sun, she made me a very courteous gesture of thanks. We had some very good views both of sea and hills; and a part of our way lay along the banks of the Rhone. . . . . By the by, at the station at Marseilles I bought the two volumes of the "Livre des Merveilles," by a certain author of my acquaintance, translated into French, and printed and illustrated in very pretty style. Miss S------ also bought them, and, in answer to her inquiry for other works by the same author, the bookseller observed that "she did not think Monsieur Nathaniel had published anything else." The Christian name deems to be the most important one in France, and still more especially in Italy. We arrived at Avignon, Hotel de l'Europe, in the dusk of the evening. . . . . The lassitude of Rome still clings to us, and I, at least, feel no spring of life or activity, whether at morn or eve. In the morning we found ourselves very pleasantly situated as regards lodgings. The gallery of our suite of rooms looks down as usual into an enclosed court, three sides of which are formed by the stone house and its two wings, and the third by a high wall, with a gateway of iron between two lofty stone pillars, which, for their capitals, have great stone vases, with grass growing in them, and hanging over the brim. There is a large plane-tree in one corner of the court, and creeping plants clamber up trellises; and there are pots of flowers and bird-cages, all of which give a very fresh and cheerful aspect to the enclosure. The court is paved with small round stones; the omnibus belonging to the hotel, and all the carriages of guests drive into it; and the wide arch of the stable-door opens under the central part of the house. Nevertheless, the scene is not in all respects that of a stable-yard; for gentlemen and ladies come from the salle a manger and other rooms, and stand talking in the court, or occupy chairs and seats there; children play about; the hostess or her daughter often appears and talks with her guests or servants; dogs lounge, and, in short, the court might well enough be taken for the one scene of a classic play. The hotel seems to be of the first class, though such would not be indicated, either in England or America, by thus mixing up the stable with the lodgings. I have taken two or three rambles about the town, and have climbed a high rock which dominates over it, and gives a most extensive view from the broad table-land of its summit. The old church of Avignon --as old as the times of its popes, and older--stands close beside this mighty and massive crag. We went into it, and found it a dark old place, with broad, interior arches, and a singularly shaped dome; a venerable Gothic and Grecian porch, with ancient frescos in its arched spaces; some dusky pictures within; an ancient chair of stone, formerly occupied by the popes, and much else that would have been exceedingly interesting before I went to Rome. But Rome takes the charm out of an inferior antiquity, as well as the life out of human beings. This forenoon J----- and I have crossed the Rhone by a bridge, just the other side of one of the city gates, which is near our hotel. We walked along the riverside, and saw the ruins of an ancient bridge, which ends abruptly in the midst of the stream; two or three arches still making tremendous strides across, while the others have long ago been crumbled away by the rush of the rapid river. The bridge was originally founded by St. Benezet, who received a Divine order to undertake the work, while yet a shepherd-boy, with only three sous in his pocket; and he proved the authenticity of the mission by taking an immense stone on his shoulder, and laying it for the foundation. There is still an ancient chapel midway on the bridge, and I believe St. Benezet lies buried there, in the midst of his dilapidated work. The bridge now used is considerably lower down the stream. It is a wooden suspension-bridge, broader than the ancient one, and doubtless more than supplies its place; else, unquestionably, St. Benezet would think it necessary to repair his own. The view from the inner side of this ruined structure, grass-grown and weedy, and leading to such a precipitous plunge into the swift river, is very picturesque, in connection with the gray town and above it, the great, massive bulk of the cliff, the towers of the church, and of a vast old edifice, shapeless, ugly, and venerable, which the popes built and occupied as their palace, many centuries ago. . . . . After dinner we all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U---- an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply soft as this great beast. Its master seems very fond and proud of it; and, great favorite as the cat is, she does not take airs upon herself, but is gently shy and timid in her demonstrations. We ascended the great Rocher above the palace of the popes, and on our way looked into the old church, which was so dim in the decline of day that we could not see within the dusky arches, through which the chapels communicated with the nave. Thence we pursued our way up the farther ascent, and, standing on the edge of the precipice,--protected by a parapet of stone, and in other places by an iron railing,--we could look down upon the road that winds its dusky track far below, and at the river Rhone, which eddies close beside it. This is indeed a massive and lofty cliff, and it tumbles down so precipitously that I could readily have flung myself from the bank, and alighted on my head in the middle of the river. The Rhone passes so near its base that I threw stones a good way into its current. We talked with a man of Avignon, who leaned over the parapet near by, and he was very kind in explaining the points of view, and told us that the river, which winds and doubles upon itself so as to look like at least two rivers, is really the Rhone alone. The Durance joins with it within a few miles below Avignon, but is here invisible. Hotel de l'Europe, June 2d.--This morning we went again to the Duomo of the popes; and this time we allowed the custode, or sacristan, to show us the curiosities of it. He led us into a chapel apart, and showed us the old Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII., where the recumbent statue of the pope lies beneath one of those beautiful and venerable canopies of stone which look at once so light and so solemn. I know not how many hundred years old it is, but everything of Gothic origin has a faculty of conveying the idea of age; whereas classic forms seem to have nothing to do with time, and so lose the kind of impressiveness that arises from suggestions of decay and the past. In the sacristy the guide opened a cupboard that contained the jewels and sacred treasures of the church, and showed a most exquisite figure of Christ in ivory, represented as on a cross of ebony; and it was executed with wonderful truth and force of expression, and with great beauty likewise. I do not see what a full-length marble statue could have had that was lacking in this little ivory figure of hardly more than a foot high. It is about two centuries old, by an unknown artist. There is another famous ivory statuette in Avignon which seems to be more celebrated than this, but can hardly be superior. I shall gladly look at it if it comes in my way. Next to this, the prettiest thing the man showed us was a circle of emeralds, in one of the holy implements; and then he exhibited a little bit or a pope's skull; also a great old crozier, that looked as if made chiefly of silver, and partly gilt; but I saw where the plating of silver was worn away, and betrayed the copper of its actual substance. There were two or three pictures in the sacristy, by ancient and modern French artists, very unlike the productions of the Italian masters, but not without a beauty of their own. Leaving the sacristy, we returned into the church, where U---- and J----- began to draw the pope's old stone chair. There is a beast, or perhaps more than one, grotesquely sculptured upon it; the seat is high and square, the back low and pointed, and it offers no enticing promise to a weary man. The interior of the church is massively picturesque, with its vaulted roof, and a stone gallery, heavily ornamented, running along each side of the nave. Each arch of the nave gives admittance to a chapel, in all of which there are pictures, and sculptures in most of them. One of these chapels is of the time of Charlemagne, and has a vaulted roof of admirable architecture, covered with frescos of modern date and little merit. In an adjacent chapel is the stone monument of Pope Benedict, whose statue reposes on it, like many which I have seen in the cathedral of York and other old English churches. In another part we saw a monument, consisting of a plain slab supported on pillars; it is said to be of a Roman or very early Christian epoch. In another chapel was a figure of Christ in wax, I believe, and clothed in real drapery; a very ugly object. Also, a figure reposing under a slab, which strikes the spectator with the idea that it is really a dead person enveloped in a shroud. There are windows of painted glass in some of the chapels; and the gloom of the dimly lighted interior, especially beneath the broad, low arches, is very impressive. While we were there some women assembled at one of the altars, and went through their acts of devotion without the help of a priest; one and another of them alternately repeating prayers, to which the rest responded. The murmur of their voices took a musical tone, which was reverberated by the vaulted arches. U---- and I now came out; and, under the porch, we found an old woman selling rosaries, little religious books, and other holy things. We bought two little medals of the Immaculate Virgin, one purporting to be of silver, the other of gold; but as both together cost only two or three sous, the genuineness of the material may well be doubted. We sat down on the steps, of a crucifix which is placed in front of the church, and the children began to draw the porch, of which I hardly know whether to call the architecture classic or Gothic (as I said before); at all events it has a venerable aspect, and there are frescos within its arches by Simone Memmi. . . . . The popes' palace is contiguous to the church, and just below it, on the hillside. It is now occupied as barracks by some regiments of soldiers, a number of whom were lounging before the entrance; but we passed the sentinel without being challenged, and addressed ourselves to the concierge, who readily assented to our request to be shown through the edifice. A French gentleman and lady, likewise, came with similar purpose, and went the rounds along with us. The palace is such a confused heap and conglomeration of buildings, that it is impossible to get within any sort of a regular description. It is a huge, shapeless mass of architecture; and if it ever had any pretence to a plan, it has lost it in the modern alterations. For instance, an immense and lofty chapel, or rather church, has had two floors, one above the other, laid at different stages of its height; and the upper one of these floors, which extends just where the arches of the vaulted root begin to spring from the pillars, is ranged round with the beds of one of the regiments of soldiers. They are small iron bedsteads, each with its narrow mattress, and covered with a dark blanket. On some of them lay or lounged a soldier; other soldiers were cleaning their accoutrements; elsewhere we saw parties of them playing cards. So it was wherever we went among those large, dingy, gloomy halls and chambers, which, no doubt, were once stately and sumptuous, with pictures, with tapestry, and all sorts of adornment that the Middle Ages knew how to use. The windows threw a sombre light through embrasures at least two feet thick. There were staircases of magnificent breadth. We were shown into two small chapels, in different parts of the building, both containing the remains of old frescos wofully defaced. In one of them was a light, spiral staircase of iron, built in the centre of the room as a means of contemplating the frescos, which were said to be the work of our old friend Giotto. . . . . Finally, we climbed a long, long, narrow stair, built in the thickness of the wall, and thus gained access to the top of one of the towers, whence we saw the noblest landscapes, mountains, plains, and the Rhone, broad and bright, winding hither and thither, as if it had lost its way. Beneath our feet was the gray, ugly old palace, and its many courts, just as void of system and as inconceivable as when we were burrowing through its bewildering passages. No end of historical romances might be made out of this castle of the popes; and there ought to be a ghost in every room, and droves of them in some of the rooms; for there have been murders here in the gross and in detail, as well hundreds of years ago, as no longer back than the French Revolution, when there was a great massacre in one of the courts. Traces of this bloody business were visible in actual stains on the wall only a few years ago. Returning to the room of the concierge, who, being a little stiff with age, had sent an attendant round with us, instead of accompanying us in person, he showed us a picture of Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes, who was once a prisoner here. On a table, beneath the picture, stood a little vase of earthenware containing some silver coin. We took it as a hint, in the customary style of French elegance, that a fee should be deposited here, instead of being put into the hand of the concierge; so the French gentleman deposited half a franc, and I, in my magnificence, twice as much. Hotel de l'Europe, June 6th.--We are still here. . . . . I have been daily to the Rocher des Dons, and have grown familiar with the old church on its declivity. I think I might become attached to it by seeing it often. A sombre old interior, with its heavy arches, and its roof vaulted like the top of a trunk; its stone gallery, with ponderous adornments, running round three sides. I observe that it is a daily custom of the old women to say their prayers in concert, sometimes making a pilgrimage, as it were, from chapel to chapel. The voice of one of them is heard running through the series of petitions, and at intervals the voices of the others join and swell into a chorus, so that it is like a river connecting a series of lakes; or, not to use so gigantic a simile, the one voice is like a thread, on which the beads of a rosary are strung. One day two priests came and sat down beside these prayerful women, and joined in their petitions. I am inclined to hope that there is something genuine in the devotion of these old women. The view from the top of the Rocker des Dons (a contraction of Dominis) grows upon me, and is truly magnificent; a vast mountain-girdled plain, illuminated by the far windings and reaches of the Rhone. The river is here almost as turbid as the Tiber itself; but, I remember, in the upper part of its course the waters are beautifully transparent. A powerful rush is indicated by the swirls and eddies of its broad surface. Yesterday was a race day at Avignon, and apparently almost the whole population and a great many strangers streamed out of the city gate nearest our hotel, on their way to the race-course. There were many noticeable figures that might come well into a French picture or description; but only one remains in my memory,--a young man with a wooden leg, setting off for the course--a walk of several miles, I believe--with prodigious courage and alacrity, flourishing his wooden leg with an air and grace that seemed to render it positively flexible. The crowd returned towards sunset, and almost all night long, the streets and the whole air of the old town were full of song and merriment. There was a ball in a temporary structure, covered with an awning, in the Place d'Horloge, and a showman has erected his tent and spread forth his great painted canvases, announcing an anaconda and a sea-tiger to be seen. J----- paid four sous for admittance, and found that the sea-tiger was nothing but a large seal, and the anaconda altogether a myth. I have rambled a good deal about the town. Its streets are crooked and perplexing, and paved with round pebbles for the most part, which afford more uncomfortable pedestrianism than the pavement of Rome itself. It is an ancient-looking place, with some large old mansions, but few that are individually impressive; though here and there one sees an antique entrance, a corner tower, or other bit of antiquity, that throws a venerable effect over the gray commonplace of past centuries. The town is not overclean, and often there is a kennel of unhappy odor. There appear to have been many more churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded by a wall; and that of Avignon--though it has no delightful promenade on its top, as the wall of Chester has--is the more perfectly preserved in its mediaeval form, and the more picturesque of the two. J----- and I have once or twice walked nearly round it, commencing from the gate of Ouelle, which is very near our hotel. From this point it stretches for a considerable distance along by the river, and here there is a broad promenade, with trees, and blocks of stone for seats; on one side "the arrowy Rhone," generally carrying a cooling breeze along with it; on the other, the gray wall, with its battlements and machicolations, impending over what was once the moat, but which is now full of careless and untrained shrubbery. At intervals there are round towers swelling out from the wall, and rising a little above it. After about half a mile along the river-side the wall turns at nearly right angles, and still there is a wide road, a shaded walk, a boulevard; and at short distances are cafes, with their little round tables before the door, or small shady nooks of shrubbery. So numerous are these retreats and pleasaunces that I do not see how the little old town can support them all, especially as there are a great many cafes within the walls. I do not remember seeing any soldiers on guard at the numerous city gates, but there is an office in the side of each gate for levying the octroi, and old women are sometimes on guard there. This morning, after breakfast, J----- and I crossed the suspension-bridge close by the gate nearest our hotel, and walked to the ancient town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. The first bridge leads to an island, from the farther side of which another very long one, with a timber foundation, accomplishes the passage of the other branch of the Rhone. There was a good breeze on the river, but after crossing it we found the rest of the walk excessively hot. This town of Villeneuve is of very ancient origin, and owes its existence, it is said, to the famous holiness of a female saint, which gathered round her abode and burial-place a great many habitations of people who reverenced her. She was the daughter of the King of Saragossa, and I presume she chose this site because it was so rocky and desolate. Afterwards it had a long mediaeval history; and in the time of the Avignon popes, the cardinals, regretful of their abandoned Roman villas, built pleasure-houses here, so that the town was called Villa Nueva. After they had done their best, it must have seemed to these poor cardinals but a rude and sad exchange for the Borghese, the Albani, the Pamfili Doria, and those other perfectest results of man's luxurious art. And probably the tradition of the Roman villas had really been kept alive, and extant examples of them all the way downward from the times of the empire. But this Villeneuve is the stoniest, roughest town that can be imagined. There are a few large old houses, to be sure, but built on a line with shabby village dwellings and barns, and so presenting little but samples of magnificent shabbiness. Perhaps I might have found traces of old splendor if I had sought for them; but, not having the history of the place in my mind, I passed through its scrambling streets without imagining that Princes of the Church had once made their abode here. The inhabitants now are peasants, or chiefly such; though, for aught I know, some of the French noblesse may burrow in these palaces that look so like hovels. A large church, with a massive tower, stands near the centre of the town; and, of course, I did not fail to enter its arched door,--a pointed arch, with many frames and mouldings, one within another. An old woman was at her devotions, and several others came in and knelt during my stay there. It was quite an interesting interior; a long nave, with six pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. There was an old stone seat, also, of some former pope or prelate. The church was dim enough to cause the lamps in the shrines to become points of vivid light, and, looking from end to end, it was a long, venerable, tarnished, Old World vista, not at all tampered with by modern taste. We now went on our way through the village, and, emerging from a gate, went clambering towards the castle of St. Andre, which stands, perhaps, a quarter of a mile beyond it. This castle was built by Philip le Bel, as a restraint to the people of Avignon in extending their power on this side of the Rhone. We happened not to take the most direct way, and so approached the castle on the farther side and were obliged to go nearly round the hill on which it stands, before striking into the path which leads to its gate. It crowns a very bold and difficult hill, directly above the Rhone, opposite to Avignon,--which is so far off that objects are not minutely distinguishable,--and looking down upon the long, straggling town of Villeneuve. It must have been a place of mighty strength, in its day. Its ramparts seem still almost entire, as looked upon from without, and when, at length, we climbed the rough, rocky pathway to the entrance, we found the two vast round towers, with their battlemented summits and arched gateway between them, just as perfect as they could have been five hundred or more years ago. Some external defences are now, however, in a state of ruin; and there are only the remains of a tower, that once arose between the two round towers, and was apparently much more elevated than they. A little in front of the gate was a monumental cross of stone; and in the arch, between the two round towers, were two little boys at play; and an old woman soon showed herself, but took no notice of us. Casting our eyes within the gateway, we saw what looked a rough village street, betwixt old houses built ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the only persons visible were the children aforesaid, and one or two old women bearing bundles of twigs on their backs. They showed no curiosity respecting us, and though the wide space included within the castle-rampart seemed almost full of habitations ruinous or otherwise, I never found such a solitude in any ruin before. It contrasts very favorably in this particular with English castles, where, though you do not find rustic villages within the warlike enclosure, there is always a padlocked gate, always a guide, and generally half a dozen idle tourists. But here was only antiquity, with merely the natural growth of fungous human life upon it. We went to the end of the castle court and sat down, for lack of other shade, among some inhospitable nettles that grew close to the wall. Close by us was a great gap in the ramparts,--it may have been a breach which was once stormed through; and it now afforded us an airy and sunny glimpse of distant hills. . . . . J----- sketched part of the broken wall, which, by the by, did not seem to me nearly so thick as the walls of English castles. Then we returned through the gate, and I stopped, rather impatiently, under the hot sun, while J----- drew the outline of the two round towers. This done, we resumed our way homeward, after drinking from a very deep well close by the square tower of Philip le Bel. Thence we went melting through the sunshine, which beat upward as pitilessly from the white road as it blazed downwards from the sky. . . . . GENEVA. Hotel d'Angleterre, June 11th.--We left Avignon on Tuesday, 7th, and took the rail to Valence, where we arrived between four and five, and put up at the Hotel de la Poste, an ancient house, with dirty floors and dirt generally, but otherwise comfortable enough. . . . . Valence is a stately old town, full of tall houses and irregular streets. We found a cathedral there, not very large, but with a high and venerable interior, a nave supported by tall pillars, from the height of which spring arches. This loftiness is characteristic of French churches, as distinguished from those of Italy. . . . . We likewise saw, close by the cathedral, a large monument with four arched entrances meeting beneath a vaulted roof; but, on inquiry of an old priest and other persons, we could get no account of it, except that it was a tomb, and of unknown antiquity. The architecture seemed classic, and yet it had some Gothic peculiarities, and it was a reverend and beautiful object. Had I written up my journal while the town was fresh in my remembrance, I might have found much to describe; but a succession of other objects have obliterated most of the impressions I have received here. Our railway ride to Valence was intolerably hot. I have felt nothing like it since leaving America, and that is so long ago that the terrible discomfort was just as good as new. . . . . We left Valence at four, and came that afternoon to Lyons, still along the Rhone. Either the waters of this river assume a transparency in winter which they lose in summer, or I was mistaken in thinking them transparent on our former journey. They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful in the quality of their waters as the clear, brown rivers of New England. The scenery along this part of the Rhone, as we have found all the way from Marseilles, is very fine and impressive; old villages, rocky cliffs, castellated steeps, quaint chateaux, and a thousand other interesting objects. We arrived at Lyons at five o'clock, and went to the Hotel de l'Univers, to which we had been recommended by our good hostess at Avignon. The day had become showery, but J----- and I strolled about a little before nightfall, and saw the general characteristics of the place. Lyons is a city of very stately aspect, hardly inferior to Paris; for it has regular streets of lofty houses, and immense squares planted with trees, and adorned with statues and fountains. New edifices of great splendor are in process of erection; and on the opposite side of the Rhone, where the site rises steep and high, there are structures of older date, that have an exceedingly picturesque effect, looking down upon the narrow town. The next morning I went out with J----- in quest of my bankers, and of the American Consul; and as I had forgotten the directions of the waiter of the hotel, I of course went astray, and saw a good deal more of Lyons than I intended. In my wanderings I crossed the Rhone, and found myself in a portion of the city evidently much older than that with which I had previously made acquaintance; narrow, crooked, irregular, and rudely paved streets, full of dingy business and bustle,--the city, in short, as it existed a century ago, and how much earlier I know not. Above rises that lofty elevation of ground which I before noticed; and the glimpses of its stately old buildings through the openings of the street were very picturesque. Unless it be Edinburgh, I have not seen any other city that has such striking features. Altogether unawares, immediately after crossing the bridge, we came upon the cathedral; and the grand, time-blackened Gothic front, with its deeply arched entrances, seemed to me as good as anything I ever saw,--unexpectedly more impressive than all the ruins of Rome. I could but merely glance at its interior; so that its noble height and venerable space, filled with the dim, consecrated light of pictured windows, recur to me as a vision. And it did me good to enjoy the awfulness and sanctity of Gothic architecture again, after so long shivering in classic porticos. . . . . We now recrossed the river. . . . . The Frank methods and arrangements in matters of business seem to be excellent, so far as effecting the proposed object is concerned; but there is such an inexorable succession of steel-wrought forms, that life is not long enough for so much accuracy. The stranger, too, goes blindfold through all these processes, not knowing what is to turn up next, till, when quite in despair, he suddenly finds his business mysteriously accomplished. . . . . We left Lyons at four o'clock, taking the railway for Geneva. The scenery was very striking throughout the journey; but I allowed the hills, deep valleys, high impending cliffs, and whatever else I saw along the road, to pass from me without an ink-blot. We reached Geneva at nearly ten o'clock. . . . . It is situated partly on low, flat ground, bordering the lake, and behind this level space it rises by steep, painfully paved streets, some of which can hardly be accessible by wheeled carriages. The prosperity of the town is indicated by a good many new and splendid edifices, for commercial and other purposes, in the vicinity of the lake; but intermixed with these there are many quaint buildings of a stern gray color, and in a style of architecture that I prefer a thousand times to the monotony of Italian streets. Immensely high, red roofs, with windows in them, produce an effect that delights me. They are as ugly, perhaps, as can well be conceived, but very striking and individual. At each corner of these ancient houses frequently is a tower, the roof of which rises in a square pyramidal form, or, if the tower be round, in a round pyramidal form. Arched passages, gloomy and grimy, pass from one street to another. The lower town creeps with busy life, and swarms like an ant-hill; but if you climb the half-precipitous streets, you find yourself among ancient and stately mansions, high roofed, with a strange aspect of grandeur about them, looking as if they might still be tenanted by such old magnates as dwelt in them centuries ago. There is also a cathedral, the older portion exceedingly fine; but it has been adorned at some modern epoch with a Grecian portico,--good in itself, but absurdly out of keeping with the edifice which it prefaces. This being a Protestant country, the doors were all shut,--an inhospitality that made me half a Catholic. It is funny enough that a stranger generally profits by all that is worst for the inhabitants of the country where he himself is merely a visitor. Despotism makes things all the pleasanter for the stranger. Catholicism lends itself admirably to his purposes. There are public gardens (one, at least) in Geneva. . . . . Nothing struck me so much, I think, as the color of the Rhone, as it flows under the bridges in the lower town. It is absolutely miraculous, and, beautiful as it is, suggests the idea that the tubs of a thousand dyers have emptied their liquid indigo into the stream. When once you have conquered and thrust out this idea, it is an inexpressible delight to look down into this intense, brightly transparent blue, that hurries beneath you with the speed of a race-horse. The shops of Geneva are very tempting to a traveller, being full of such little knick-knacks as he would be glad to carry away in memory of the place: wonderful carvings in wood and ivory, done with exquisite taste and skill; jewelry that seems very cheap, but is doubtless dear enough, if you estimate it by the solid gold that goes into its manufacture; watches, above all things else, for a third or a quarter of the price that one pays in England, looking just as well, too, and probably performing the whole of a watch's duty as uncriticisably. The Swiss people are frugal and inexpensive in their own habits, I believe, plain and simple, and careless of ornament; but they seem to reckon on other people's spending a great deal of money for gewgaws. We bought some of their wooden trumpery, and likewise a watch for U----. . . . . Next to watches, jewelry, and wood-carving, I should say that cigars were one of the principal articles of commerce in Geneva. Cigar-shops present themselves at every step or two, and at a reasonable rate, there being no duties, I believe, on imported goods. There was no examination of our trunks on arrival, nor any questions asked on that score. VILLENEUVE. Hotel de Byron, June 12th.--Yesterday afternoon we left Geneva by a steamer, starting from the quay at only a short distance from our hotel. The forenoon had been showery; but the suit now came out very pleasantly, although there were still clouds and mist enough to give infinite variety to the mountain scenery. At the commencement of our voyage the scenery of the lake was not incomparably superior to that of other lakes on which I have sailed, as Lake Windermere, for instance, or Loch Lomond, or our own Lake Champlain. It certainly grew more grand and beautiful, however, till at length I felt that I had never seen anything worthy to be put beside it. The southern shore has the grandest scenery; the great hills on that side appearing close to the water's edge, and after descending, with headlong slope, directly from their rocky and snow-streaked summits down into the blue water. Our course lay nearer to the northern shore, and all our stopping-places were on that side. The first was Coppet, where Madame de Stael or her father, or both, were either born or resided or died, I know not which, and care very little. It is a picturesque village, with an old church, and old, high-roofed, red-tiled houses, the whole looking as if nothing in it had been changed for many, many years. All these villages, at several of which we stopped momentarily, look delightfully unmodified by recent fashions. There is the church, with its tower crowned by a pyramidal roof, like an extinguisher; then the chateau of the former lord, half castle and half dwelling-house, with a round tower at each corner, pyramid topped; then, perhaps, the ancient town-house or Hotel de Ville, in an open paved square; and perhaps the largest mansion in the whole village will have been turned into a modern inn, but retaining all its venerable characteristics of high, steep sloping roof, and antiquated windows. Scatter a delightful shade of trees among the houses, throw in a time-worn monument of one kind or another, swell out the delicious blue of the lake in front, and the delicious green of the sunny hillside sloping up and around this closely congregated neighborhood of old, comfortable houses, and I do not know what more I can add to this sketch. Often there was an insulated house or cottage, embowered in shade, and each seeming like the one only spot in the wide world where two people that had good consciences and loved each other could spend a happy life. Half-ruined towers, old historic castles, these, too, we saw. And all the while, on the other side of the lake, were the high hills, sometimes dim, sometimes black, sometimes green, with gray precipices of stone, and often snow-patches, right above the warm sunny lake whereon we were sailing. We passed Lausanne, which stands upward, on the slope of the hill, the tower of its cathedral forming a conspicuous object. We mean to visit this to-morrow; so I may pretermit further mention of it here. We passed Vevay and Clarens, which, methought, was particularly picturesque; for now the hills had approached close to the water on the northern side also, and steep heights rose directly above the little gray church and village; and especially I remember a rocky cliff which ascends into a rounded pyramid, insulated from all other peaks and ridges. But if I could perform the absolute impossibility of getting one single outline of the scene into words, there would be all the color wanting, the light, the haze, which spiritualizes it, and moreover makes a thousand and a thousand scenes out of that single one. Clarens, however, has still another interest for me; for I found myself more affected by it, as the scene of the love of St. Preux and Julie, than I have often been by scenes of poetry and romance. I read Rousseau's romance with great sympathy, when I was hardly more than a boy; ten years ago, or thereabouts, I tried to read it again without success; but I think, from my feeling of yesterday, that it still retains its hold upon my imagination. Farther onward, we saw a white, ancient-looking group of towers, beneath a mountain, which was so high, and rushed so precipitately down upon this pile of building as quite to dwarf it; besides which, its dingy whiteness had not a very picturesque effect. Nevertheless, this was the Castle of Chillon. It appears to sit right upon the water, and does not rise very loftily above it. I was disappointed in its aspect, having imagined this famous castle as situated upon a rock, a hundred, or, for aught I know, a thousand feet above the surface of the lake; but it is quite as impressive a fact--supposing it to be true--that the water is eight hundred feet deep at its base. By this time, the mountains had taken the beautiful lake into their deepest heart; they girdled it quite round with their grandeur and beauty, and, being able to do no more for it, they here withheld it from extending any farther; and here our voyage came to an end. I have never beheld any scene so exquisite; nor do I ask of heaven to show me any lovelier or nobler one, but only to give me such depth and breadth of sympathy with nature, that I may worthily enjoy this. It is beauty more than enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this be earth, what must heaven be! It was nearly eight o'clock when we arrived; and then we had a walk of at least a mile to the Hotel Byron. . . . . I forgot to mention that in the latter part of our voyage there was a shower in some part of the sky, and though none of it fell upon us, we had the benefit of those gentle tears in a rainbow, which arched itself across the lake from mountain to mountain, so that our track lay directly under this triumphal arch. We took it as a good omen, nor were we discouraged, though, after the rainbow had vanished, a few sprinkles of the shower came down. We found the Hotel Byron very grand indeed, and a good one too. There was a beautiful moonlight on the lake and hills, but we contented ourselves with looking out of our lofty window, whence, likewise, we had a sidelong glance at the white battlements of Chillon, not more than a mile off, on the water's edge. The castle is wofully in need of a pedestal. If its site were elevated to a height equal to its own, it would make a far better appearance. As it now is, it looks, to speak profanely of what poetry has consecrated, when seen from the water, or along the shore of the lake, very like an old whitewashed factory or mill. This morning I walked to the Castle of Chillon with J-----, who sketches everything he sees, from a wildflower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains. The morning had sunshine thinly scattered through it; but, nevertheless, there was a continual sprinkle, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and then again amounting to a decided drizzle. The road, which is built along on a little elevation above the lake shore, led us past the Castle of Chillon; and we took a side-path, which passes still nearer the castle gate. The castle stands on an isthmus of gravel, permanently connecting it with the mainland. A wooden bridge, covered with a roof, passes from the shore to the arched entrance; and beneath this shelter, which has wooden walls as well as roof and floor, we saw a soldier or gendarme who seemed to act as warder. As it sprinkled rather more freely than at first, I thought of appealing to his hospitality for shelter from the rain, but concluded to pass on. The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance, and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of "Chillon's snow-white battlements." There is a lofty external wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been [altered], nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there. We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss gendarme might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of gloomy Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut, and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard's prison, and the scene of Byron's poem. The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, gray, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard's pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth or gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years, with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column, and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard's pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron's delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard's story, he did not know to which column he was chained. Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy's kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats of arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post, contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke's private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess's window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water. The last thing that the guide showed us was a trapdoor, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air. The guide told us that it used to be the practice to bring prisoners hither, under pretence of committing them to a dungeon, and make them go down the three steps and that fourth fatal one, and they would never more be heard of; but at the bottom of the pit there would be a dead body, and in due time a mouldy skeleton, which would rattle beneath the body of the next prisoner that fell. I do not believe that it was anything more than a secret dungeon for state prisoners whom it was out of the question either to set at liberty or bring to public trial. The depth of the pit was about forty-five feet. Gazing intently down, I saw a faint gleam of light at the bottom, apparently coming from some other aperture than the trap-door over which we were bending, so that it must have been contemplated to supply it with light and air in such degree as to support human life. U---- declared she saw a skeleton at the bottom; Miss S------ thought she saw a hand, but I saw only the dim gleam of light. There are two or three courts in the castle, but of no great size. We were now led across one of them, and dismissed out of the arched entrance by which we had come in. We found the gendarme still keeping watch on his roofed drawbridge, and as there was the same gentle shower that had been effusing itself all the morning, we availed ourselves of the shelter, more especially as there were some curiosities to examine. These consisted chiefly of wood-carvings,--such as little figures in the national costume, boxes with wreaths of foliage upon them, paper knives, the chamois goat, admirably well represented. We at first hesitated to make any advances towards trade with the gendarme because it was Sunday, and we fancied there might be a Calvinistic scruple on his part about turning a penny on the Sabbath; but from the little I know of the Swiss character, I suppose they would be as ready as any other men to sell, not only such matters, but even their own souls, or any smaller--or shall we say greater--thing on Sunday or at any other time. So we began to ask the prices of the articles, and met with no difficulty in purchasing a salad spoon and fork, with pretty bas-reliefs carved on the handles, and a napkin-ring. For Rosebud's and our amusement, the gendarme now set a musical-box a-going; and as it played a pasteboard figure of a dentist began to pull the tooth of a pasteboard patient, lifting the wretched simulacrum entirely from the ground, and keeping him in this horrible torture for half an hour. Meanwhile, mamma, Miss Shepard, U----, and J----- sat down all in a row on a bench and sketched the mountains; and as the shower did not cease, though the sun most of the time shone brightly, they were kept actual prisoners of Chillon much longer than we wished to stay. We took advantage of the first cessation,--though still the drops came dimpling into the water that rippled against the pebbles beneath the bridge,--of the first partial cessation of the shower, to escape, and returned towards the hotel, with this kindliest of summer rains falling upon us most of the way In the afternoon the rain entirely ceased, and the weather grew delightfully radiant, and warmer than could well be borne in the sunshine. U---- and I walked to the village of Villeneuve, --a mile from the hotel,--and found a very commonplace little old town of one or two streets, standing on a level, and as uninteresting as if there were not a hill within a hundred miles. It is strange what prosaic lines men thrust in amid the poetry of nature. . . . . Hotel de l'Angleterre, Geneva, June 14th.--Yesterday morning was very fine, and we had a pretty early breakfast at Hotel Byron, preparatory to leaving it. This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home. We were glad to get away, and took the steamer on our return voyage, in excellent spirits. Apparently it had been a cold night in the upper regions, for a great deal more snow was visible on some of the mountains than we had before observed; especially a mountain called "Diableries" presented a silver summit, and broad sheets and fields of snow. Nothing ever can have been more beautiful than those groups of mighty hills as we saw them then, with the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow-patches and crests, all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds tumbling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofty valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones, that we hardly knew whether we were sojourning in the material or spiritual world. It was like sailing through the sky, moreover, to be borne along on such water as that of Lake Leman,--the bluest, brightest, and profoundest element, the most radiant eye that the dull earth ever opened to see heaven withal. I am writing nonsense, but it is because no sense within my mind will answer the purpose. Some of these mountains, that looked at no such mighty distance, were at least forty or fifty miles off, and appeared as if they were near neighbors and friends of other mountains, from which they were really still farther removed. The relations into which distant points are brought, in a view of mountain scenery, symbolize the truth which we can never judge within our partial scope of vision, of the relations which we bear to our fellow-creatures and human circumstances. These mighty mountains think that they have nothing to do with one another, each seems itself its own centre, and existing for itself alone; and yet to an eye that can take them all in, they are evidently portions of one grand and beautiful idea, which could not be consummated without the lowest and the loftiest of them. I do not express this satisfactorily, but have a genuine meaning in it nevertheless. We passed again by Chillon, and gazed at it as long as it was distinctly visible, though the water view does no justice to its real picturesqueness, there being no towers nor projections on the side towards the lake, nothing but a wall of dingy white, with an indentation that looks something like a gateway. About an hour and a half brought us to Ouchy, the point where passengers land to take the omnibus to Lausanne. The ascent from Ouchy to Lausanne is a mile and a half, which it took the omnibus nearly half an hour to accomplish. We left our shawls and carpet-bags in the salle a manger of the Hotel Faucon, and set forth to find the cathedral, the pinnacled tower of which is visible for a long distance up and down the lake. Prominent as it is, however, it is by no means very easy to find it while rambling through the intricate streets and declivities of the town itself, for Lausanne is the town, I should fancy, in all the world the most difficult to go directly from one point to another. It is built on the declivity of a hill, adown which run several valleys or ravines, and over these the contiguity of houses extends, so that the communication is kept up by means of steep streets and sometimes long weary stairs, which must be surmounted and descended again in accomplishing a very moderate distance. In some inscrutable way we at last arrived at the cathedral, which stands on a higher site than any other in Lausanne. It has a very venerable exterior, with all the Gothic grandeur which arched mullioned windows, deep portals, buttresses, towers, and pinnacles, gray with a thousand years, can give to architecture. After waiting awhile we obtained entrance by means of an old woman, who acted the part of sacristan, and was then showing the church to some other visitors. The interior disappointed us; not but what it was very beautiful, but I think the excellent repair that it was in, and the Puritanic neatness with which it is kept, does much towards effacing the majesty and mystery that belong to an old church. Every inch of every wall and column, and all the mouldings and tracery, and every scrap of grotesque carving, had been washed with a drab mixture. There were likewise seats all up and down the nave, made of pine wood, and looking very new and neat, just such seats as I shall see in a hundred meeting-houses (if ever I go into so many) in America. Whatever might be the reason, the stately nave, with its high-groined roof, the clustered columns and lofty pillars, the intersecting arches of the side-aisles, the choir, the armorial and knightly tombs that surround what was once the high altar, all produced far less effect than I could have thought beforehand. As it happened, we had more ample time and freedom to inspect this cathedral than any other that we have visited, for the old woman consented to go away and leave us there, locking the door behind her. The others, except Rosebud, sat down to sketch such portions as struck their fancy; and for myself, I looked at the monuments, of which some, being those of old knights, ladies, bishops, and a king, were curious from their antiquity; and others are interesting as bearing memorials of English people, who have died at Lausanne in comparatively recent years. Then I went up into the pulpit, and tried, without success, to get into the stone gallery that runs all round the nave; and I explored my way into various side apartments of the cathedral, which I found fitted up with seats for Sabbath schools, perhaps, or possibly for meetings of elders of the Church. I opened the great Bible of the church, and found it to be a French version, printed at Lille some fifty years ago. There was also a liturgy, adapted, probably, to the Lutheran form of worship. In one of the side apartments I found a strong box, heavily clamped with iron, and having a contrivance, like the hopper of a mill, by which money could be turned into the top, while a double lock prevented its being abstracted again. This was to receive the avails of contributions made in the church; and there were likewise boxes, stuck on the ends of long poles, wherewith the deacons could go round among the worshippers, conveniently extending the begging-box to the remotest curmudgeon among them all. From the arrangement of the seats in the nave, and the labels pasted or painted on them, I judged that the women sat on one side and the men on the other, and the seats for various orders of magistrates, and for ecclesiastical and collegiate people, were likewise marked out. I soon grew weary of these investigations, and so did Rosebud and J-----, who essayed to amuse themselves with running races together over the horizontal tombstones in the pavement of the choir, treading remorselessly over the noseless effigies of old dignitaries, who never expected to be so irreverently treated. I put a stop to their sport, and banished them to different parts of the cathedral; and by and by, the old woman appeared again, and released us from durance. . . . . While waiting for our dejeuner, we saw the people dining at the regular table d'hote of the hotel, and the idea was strongly borne in upon me, that the professional mystery of a male waiter is a very unmanly one. It is so absurd to see the solemn attentiveness with which they stand behind the chairs, the earnestness of their watch for any crisis that may demand their interposition, the gravity of their manner in performing some little office that the guest might better do for himself, their decorous and soft steps; in short, as I sat and gazed at them, they seemed to me not real men, but creatures with a clerical aspect, engendered out of a very artificial state of society. When they are waiting on myself, they do not appear so absurd; it is necessary to stand apart in order to see them properly. We left Lausanne--which was to us a tedious and weary place--before four o'clock. I should have liked well enough to see the house of Gibbon, and the garden in which he walked, after finishing "The Decline and Fall"; but it could not be done without some trouble and inquiry, and as the house did not come to see me, I determined not to go and see the house. There was, indeed, a mansion of somewhat antique respectability, near our hotel, having a garden and a shaded terrace behind it, which would have answered accurately enough to the idea of Gibbon's residence. Perhaps it was so; far more probably not. Our former voyages had been taken in the Hirondelle; we now, after broiling for some time in the sunshine by the lakeside, got on board of the Aigle, No. 2. There were a good many passengers, the larger proportion of whom seemed to be English and American, and among the latter a large party of talkative ladies, old and young. The voyage was pleasant while we were protected from the sun by the awning overhead, but became scarcely agreeable when the sun had descended so low as to shine in our faces or on our backs. We looked earnestly for Mont Blanc, which ought to have been visible during a large part of our course; but the clouds gathered themselves hopelessly over the portion of the sky where the great mountain lifted his white peak; and we did not see it, and probably never shall. As to the meaner mountains, there were enough of them, and beautiful enough; but we were a little weary, and feverish with the heat. . . . . I think I had a head-ache, though it is so unusual a complaint with me, that I hardly know it when it comes. We were none of us sorry, therefore, when the Eagle brought us to the quay of Geneva, only a short distance from our hotel. . . . . To-day I wrote to Mr. Wilding, requesting him to secure passages for us from Liverpool on the 15th of next month, or 1st of August. It makes my heart thrill, half pleasantly, half otherwise; so much nearer does this step seem to bring that home whence I have now been absent six years, and which, when I see it again, may turn out to be not my home any longer. I likewise wrote to Bennoch, though I know not his present address; but I should deeply grieve to leave England without seeing him. He and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to bid farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time; rather foolishly perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long. HAVRE. Hotel Wheeler, June 22d.--We arrived at this hotel last evening from Paris, and find ourselves on the borders of the Petit Quay Notre Dame, with steamers and boats right under our windows, and all sorts of dock-business going on briskly. There are barrels, bales, and crates of goods; there are old iron cannon for posts; in short, all that belongs to the Wapping of a great seaport. . . . . The American partialities of the guests [of this hotel] are consulted by the decorations of the parlor, in which hang two lithographs and colored views of New York, from Brooklyn and from Weehawken. The fashion of the house is a sort of nondescript mixture of Frank, English, and American, and is not disagreeable to us after our weary experience of Continental life. The abundance of the food is very acceptable in comparison with the meagreness of French and Italian meals; and last evening we supped nobly on cold roast beef and ham, set generously before us, in the mass, instead of being doled out in slices few and thin. The waiter has a kindly sort of manner, and resembles the steward of a vessel rather than a landsman; and, in short, everything here has undergone a change, which might admit of very effective description. I may now as well give up all attempts at journalizing. So I shall say nothing of our journey across France from Geneva. . . . . To-night, we shall take our departure in a steamer for Southampton, whence we shall go to London; thence, in a week or two, to Liverpool; thence to Boston and Concord, there to enjoy--if enjoyment it prove--a little rest and a sense that we are at home. [More than four months were now taken up in writing "The Marble Faun," in great part at the seaside town of Redcar, Yorkshire, Mr. Hawthorne having concluded to remain another year in England, chiefly to accomplish that romance. In Redcar, where he remained till September or October, he wrote no journal, but only the book. He then went to Leamington, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in March, and there is a little journalizing soon after leaving Redcar.--ED.] ENGLAND. Leamington, November 14th, 1859.--J---- and I walked to Lillington the other day. Its little church was undergoing renovation when we were here two years ago, and now seems to be quite renewed, with the exception of its square, gray, battlemented tower, which has still the aspect of unadulterated antiquity. On Saturday J----- and I walked to Warwick by the old road, passing over the bridge of the Avon, within view of the castle. It is as fine a piece of English scenery as exists anywhere,-- the quiet little river, shadowed with drooping trees, and, in its vista, the gray towers and long line of windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline; ancient strength, a little softened by decay. . . . . The town of Warwick, I think, has been considerably modernized since I first saw it. The whole of the central portion of the principal street now looks modern, with its stuccoed or brick fronts of houses, and, in many cases, handsome shop windows. Leicester Hospital and its adjoining chapel still look venerably antique; and so does a gateway that half bestrides the street. Beyond these two points on either side it has a much older aspect. The modern signs heighten the antique impression. February 5th, 1860.--Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch are staying for a little while at Mr. B------'s at Coventry, and Mr. B------ called upon us the other day, with Mr. Bennoch, and invited us to go and see the lions of Coventry; so yesterday U---- and I went. It was not my first visit, therefore I have little or nothing to record, unless it were to describe a ribbon-factory into which Mr. B------ took us. But I have no comprehension of machinery, and have only a confused recollection of an edifice of four or five stories, on each floor of which were rows of huge machines, all busy with their iron hands and joints in turning out delicate ribbons. It was very curious and unintelligible to me to observe how they caused different colored patterns to appear, and even flowers to blossom, on the plain surface of a ribbon. Some of the designs were pretty, and I was told that one manufacturer pays 500 pounds annually to French artists (or artisans, for I do not know whether they have a connection with higher art) merely for new patterns of ribbons. The English find it impossible to supply themselves with tasteful productions of this sort merely from the resources of English fancy. If an Englishman possessed the artistic faculty to the degree requisite to produce such things, he would doubtless think himself a great artist, and scorn to devote himself to these humble purposes. Every Frenchman is probably more of an artist than one Englishman in a thousand. We ascended to the very roof of the factory, and gazed thence over smoky Coventry, which is now a town of very considerable size, and rapidly on the increase. The three famous spires rise out of the midst, that of St. Michael being the tallest and very beautiful. Had the day been clear, we should have had a wide view on all sides; for Warwickshire is well laid out for distant prospects, if you can only gain a little elevation from which to see them. Descending from the roof, we next went to see Trinity Church, which has just come through an entire process of renovation, whereby much of its pristine beauty has doubtless been restored; but its venerable awfulness is greatly impaired. We went into three churches, and found that they had all been subjected to the same process. It would be nonsense to regret it, because the very existence of these old edifices is involved in their being renewed; but it certainly does deprive them of a great part of their charm, and puts one in mind of wigs, padding, and all such devices for giving decrepitude the aspect of youth. In the pavement of the nave and aisles there are worn tombstones, with defaced inscriptions, and discolored marbles affixed against the wall; monuments, too, where a mediaeval man and wife sleep side by side on a marble slab; and other tombs so old that the inscriptions are quite gone. Over an arch, in one of the churches, there was a fresco, so old, dark, faded, and blackened, that I found it impossible to make out a single figure or the slightest hint of the design. On the whole, after seeing the churches of Italy, I was not greatly impressed with these attempts to renew the ancient beauty of old English minsters; it would be better to preserve as sedulously as possible their aspect of decay, in which consists the principal charm. . . . . On our way to Mr. B------'s house, we looked into the quadrangle of a charity-school and old men's hospital, and afterwards stepped into a large Roman Catholic church, erected within these few years past, and closely imitating the mediaeval architecture and arrangements. It is strange what a plaything, a trifle, an unserious affair, this imitative spirit makes of a huge, ponderous edifice, which if it had really been built five hundred years ago would have been worthy of all respect. I think the time must soon come when this sort of thing will be held in utmost scorn, until the lapse of time shall give it a claim to respect. But, methinks, we had better strike out any kind of architecture, so it be our own, however wretched, than thus tread back upon the past. Mr. B------ now conducted us to his residence, which stands a little beyond the outskirts of the city, on the declivity of a hill, and in so windy a spot that, as he assured me, the very plants are blown out of the ground. He pointed to two maimed trees whose tops were blown off by a gale two or three years since; but the foliage still covers their shortened summits in summer, so that he does not think it desirable to cut them down. In America, a man of Mr. B------'s property would take upon himself the state and dignity of a millionaire. It is a blessed thing in England, that money gives a man no pretensions to rank, and does not bring the responsibilities of a great position. We found three or four gentlemen to meet us at dinner,--a Mr. D------ and a Mr. B------, an author, having written a book called "The Philosophy of Necessity," and is acquainted with Emerson, who spent two or three days at his house when last in England. He was very kindly appreciative of my own productions, as was also his wife, next to whom I sat at dinner. She talked to me about the author of "Adam Bede," whom she has known intimately all her life. . . . . Miss Evans (who wrote "Adam Bede") was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B------ spoke of her with great affection and respect. . . . . Mr. B------, our host, is an extremely sensible man; and it is remarkable how many sensible men there are in England,--men who have read and thought, and can develop very good ideas, not exactly original, yet so much the product of their own minds that they can fairly call them their own. February 18th.--. . . . This present month has been somewhat less dismal than the preceding ones; there have been some sunny and breezy days when there was life in the air, affording something like enjoyment in a walk, especially when the ground was frozen. It is agreeable to see the fields still green through a partial covering of snow; the trunks and branches of the leafless trees, moreover, have a verdant aspect, very unlike that of American trees in winter, for they are covered with a delicate green moss, which is not so observable in summer. Often, too, there is a twine of green ivy up and down the trunk. The other day, as J----- and I were walking to Whitnash, an elm was felled right across our path, and I was much struck by this verdant coating of moss over all its surface,--the moss plants too minute to be seen individually, but making the whole tree green. It has a pleasant effect here, where it is the natural aspect of trees in general; but in America a mossy tree-trunk is not a pleasant object, because it is associated with damp, low, unwholesome situations. The lack of foliage gives many new peeps and vistas, hereabouts, which I never saw in summer. March 17th.--J----- and I walked to Warwick yesterday forenoon, and went into St. Mary's Church, to see the Beauchamp chapel. . . . . On one side of it were some worn steps ascending to a confessional, where the priest used to sit, while the penitent, in the body of the church, poured his sins through a perforated auricle into this unseen receptacle. The sexton showed us, too, a very old chest which had been found in the burial vault, with some ancient armor stored away in it. Three or four helmets of rusty iron, one of them barred, the last with visors, and all intolerably weighty, were ranged in a row. What heads those must have been that could bear such massiveness! On one of the helmets was a wooden crest--some bird or other--that of itself weighed several pounds. . . . . April 23d.--We have been here several weeks. . . . . Had I seen Bath earlier in my English life, I might have written many pages about it, for it is really a picturesque and interesting city. It is completely sheltered in the lap of hills, the sides of the valley rising steep and high from the level spot on which it stands, and through which runs the muddy little stream of the Avon. The older part of the town is on the level, and the more modern growth--the growth of more than a hundred years--climbs higher and higher up the hillside, till the upper streets are very airy and lofty. The houses are built almost entirely of Bath stone, which in time loses its original buff color, and is darkened by age and coal-smoke into a dusky gray; but still the city looks clean and pure as compared with most other English towns. In its architecture, it has somewhat of a Parisian aspect, the houses having roofs rising steep from their high fronts, which are often adorned with pillars, pilasters, and other good devices, so that you see it to be a town built with some general idea of beauty, and not for business. There are Circuses, Crescents, Terraces, Parades, and all such fine names as we have become familiar with at Leamington, and other watering-places. The declivity of most of the streets keeps them remarkably clean, and they are paved in a very comfortable way, with large blocks of stone, so that the middle of the street is generally practicable to walk upon, although the sidewalks leave no temptation so to do, being of generous width. In many alleys, and round about the abbey and other edifices, the pavement is of square flags, like those of Florence, and as smooth as a palace floor. On the whole, I suppose there is no place in England where a retired man, with a moderate income, could live so tolerably as at Bath; it being almost a city in size and social advantages; quite so, indeed, if eighty thousand people make a city,--and yet having no annoyance of business nor spirit of worldly struggle. All modes of enjoyment that English people like may be had here; and even the climate is said to be milder than elsewhere in England. How this may be, I know not; but we have rain or passing showers almost every day since we arrived, and I suspect the surrounding hills are just about of that inconvenient height, that keeps catching clouds, and compelling them to squeeze out their moisture upon the included valley. The air, however, certainly is preferable to that of Leamington. . . . . There are no antiquities except the abbey, which has not the interest of many other English churches and cathedrals. In the midst of the old part of the town stands the house which was formerly Beau Nash's residence, but which is now part of the establishment of an ale-merchant. The edifice is a tall, but rather mean-looking, stone building, with the entrance from a little side court, which is so cumbered with empty beer-barrels as hardly to afford a passage. The doorway has some architectural pretensions, being pillared and with some sculptured devices--whether lions or winged heraldic monstrosities I forget--on the pediment. Within, there is a small entry, not large enough to be termed a hall, and a staircase, with carved balustrade, ascending by angular turns and square landing-places. For a long course of years, ending a little more than a century ago, princes, nobles, and all the great and beautiful people of old times, used to go up that staircase, to pay their respects to the King of Bath. On the side of the house there is a marble slab inserted, recording that here he resided, and that here he died in 1767, between eighty and ninety years of age. My first acquaintance with him was in Smollett's "Roderick Random," and I have met him in a hundred other novels. His marble statue is in a niche at one end of the great pump-room, in wig, square-skirted coat, flapped waistcoat, and all the queer costume of the period, still looking ghost-like upon the scene where he used to be an autocrat. Marble is not a good material for Beau Nash, however; or, if so, it requires color to set him off adequately. . . . . It is usual in Bath to see the old sign of the checker-board on the doorposts of taverns. It was originally a token that the game might be played there, and is now merely a tavern-sign. LONDON. 31 Hertford Street, Mayfair, May 16th, 1860.--I came hither from Bath on the 14th, and am staying with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Motley. I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England. I dined with the Motleys at Lord Dufferin's, on Monday evening, and there met, among a few other notable people, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, a dark, comely woman, who doubtless was once most charming, and still has charms, at above fifty years of age. In fact, I should not have taken her to be greatly above thirty, though she seems to use no art to make herself look younger, and talks about her time of life, without any squeamishness. Her voice is very agreeable, having a sort of muffled quality, which is excellent in woman. She is of a very cheerful temperament, and so has borne a great many troubles without being destroyed by them. But I can get no color into my sketch, so shall leave it here. London, May 17th. [From a letter.]--Affairs succeed each other so fast, that I have really forgotten what I did yesterday. I remember seeing my dear friend, Henry Bright, and listening to him, as we strolled in the Park, and along the Strand. To-day I met at breakfast Mr. Field Talfourd, who promises to send you the photograph of his portrait of Mr. Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again. At lunch, we had Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, and Mr. Sterling (author of the "Cloister Life of Charles V."), with whom we are to dine on Sunday. You would be stricken dumb, to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. A German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have assented! subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure. The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do. I have had time to see Bennoch only once. [This closes the European Journal. After Mr. Hawthorne's return to America, he published "Our Old Home," and began a new romance, of which two chapters appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But the breaking out of the war stopped all imaginative work with him, and all journalizing, until 1862, when he went to Maine for a little excursion, and began another journal, from which I take one paragraph, giving a slight note of his state of mind at an interesting period of his country's history. --ED.] West Gouldsborough, August 15th, 1862.--It is a week ago, Saturday, since J----- and I reached this place, . . . . Mr. Barney S. Hill's. At Hallowell, and subsequently all along the route, the country was astir with volunteers, and the war is all that seems to be alive, and even that doubtfully so. Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,-- bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model. The whole talk of the bar-rooms and every other place of intercourse was about enlisting and the war, this being the very crisis of trial, when the voluntary system is drawing to an end, and the draft almost immediately to commence. END OF VOL. II.